Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

  The delusion is based on a straightforward instance of transference. As a body every human being is a single entity, as a soul never. Traditionally literature too, even at its most sophisticated, operates with ostensibly whole, ostensibly unified characters. In literature as we know it so far, the genre most highly regarded by experts and connoisseurs is drama. Rightly so, for drama offers the greatest opportunity to represent the self as multiple, or might do so, if only outward appearances didn't contradict this impression, each individual character being deceptively portrayed as a unity because he or she is inevitably encased in a unique, unified and self-contained body. This of course also explains why aesthetically naive judges value the so-called character play most highly, in which every figure appearing on stage is a quite discrete and recognizable entity. Only remotely and gradually is it beginning to dawn on some individuals that this aesthetic approach may be shoddy and superficial, that it is a mistake to apply ancient Greek concepts of beauty to our own great dramatists. Splendid though these are, they are not native to us. We have been talked into adopting them from Greek thinkers who, taking the visible body as their starting point, were the real originators of the fiction of the individual self or character. This concept is totally unknown in the literary works of ancient India. The heroes of the Indian epics are not single characters but tangled knots of character, serial incarnations. In our modern world too, some works of literature exist in which, though the author is probably scarcely conscious of the fact, an attempt is being made to portray a multiplicity of souls behind the veil of individual character depiction. Anyone wishing to appreciate this must for once resolve to view the characters in such a work not as individual entities but as parts, as facets, as different aspects of a higher unity, if you like, of the mind of the author. Anyone considering Goethe's Faust in this way, for example, will make of Faust, Mephistopheles, Wagner and all the other figures a unity, a super-character. And only from this higher unity, not the individual characters, can one glean some hint of the work's true soul. When Faust makes the pronouncement - on the tongue of every schoolteacher and apt to make philistines shudder with admiration - 'Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast!' he is forgetting Mephisto and a whole host of other souls that are just as much part of him. Our Steppenwolf also thinks he is bearing the burden of two souls (wolf and human being) within his breast, and that his breast is painfully constricted as a result. The fact is that the breast, the body, is always one, yet the souls that it houses are neither two nor five but countless in number. A human being is an onion consisting of a hundred skins, a fabric composed of many threads. The Asians of old had exact knowledge of this; Buddhist Yoga invented a precise technique for exposing the personality as a delusion. But then humankind moves in all sorts of comic ways: the delusion that for a thousand years India made such great efforts to expose is the self-same delusion that the West has been at equally great pains to bolster and reinforce.

  If we consider Steppenwolf from this point of view we can see clearly why he suffers so much from his ludicrous sense of himself as twofold. Like Faust he thinks that even two souls are too much for a single breast to contain and ought by rights to tear that breast asunder. Yet they are, on the contrary, far too few, and Harry is doing terrible violence to his poor psyche by seeking to comprehend it with the help of so primitive an image. Harry may be a highly educated human being, but he is acting like some savage, say, who is incapable of counting beyond two. Calling one bit of himself human being, another wolf, he thinks that is the end of the story and all his possibilities have been exhausted. Into the 'human' half he packs all intellectual or spiritual attributes, all things sublimated or cultivated that he finds in himself, and into the wolf everything instinctual, savage and chaotic. Yet in real life things are not as simplistic as in our thinking, not as crude as in the poor simpletons' language we use, and Harry is doubly deluding himself when applying this primitive model of the wolf to his own case. We fear that whole areas of Harry's psyche which he attributes to the 'human being' are by no stretch of the imagination human, while parts of his character that he assigns to the wolf have long since progressed beyond the merely wolf-like.

  Like all human beings Harry thinks he knows perfectly well what human beings are, yet he most certainly doesn't know, even though the truth dawns on him quite often in his dreams or in other states of consciousness he has difficulty in controlling. If only he could memorize these fleeting insights, could as far as possible make them his own! Of course human beings are not fixed, enduring forms - which was, despite suspicions to the contrary on the part of their leading thinkers, the ideal view of the ancient Greeks - but rather experiments, creatures in transition. They are no less than the perilously narrow bridge between nature and spirit. Their innermost destiny drives them in the direction of spirit, towards God, while their most heartfelt yearning pulls them back towards nature, to their mother. Wavering between these two powerful poles, human beings live their lives in fear and trembling. What they understand by the term 'human being' at any given time is never more than a transient agreement entered into by a majority of respectable citizens. Under this convention certain extremely crude physical impulses are rejected, declared taboo; a degree of consciousness, cultured behaviour and de-bestialization is a requirement; a modicum of spirituality is not only permitted but even insisted upon. The 'human being' of this convention is, like all bourgeois ideals, a compromise. It is a timid and naively cunning attempt to dodge the powerful demands of both the wicked primeval mother, nature, and the irksome primeval father, spirit, and to make one's home in the lukewarm atmosphere of the middle ground between the two. That is why conventional citizens permit and tolerate what they call 'personalities' yet are prepared to hand over these personalities to that Moloch, the 'state', and constantly to play the one off against the other. It also explains why those they declare heretics can today be burned at the stake, those deemed criminals can be hanged, only for monuments to be erected to them the day after tomorrow.

  'Human beings' are not already created entities but ideal figures that spirit demands we should strive to become, remote possibilities that are both longed for and feared. The road leading to them can only ever be covered in very short stages, accompanied by terrible experiences of torment and ecstasy. And those advancing along it are precisely the rare individuals for whom the scaffold is made ready today, the monument in their honour tomorrow. All these truths Steppenwolf is dimly aware of. However, what he calls 'human being' in himself, as opposed to 'wolf', is for the most part nothing more than that mediocre 'human being' of respectable bourgeois convention. Harry does instinctively sense which road to take to become a true human being, the road that leads to the Immortals; indeed now and then he hesitantly advances a tiny bit of the way along it, paying the price in terms of intense suffering and painful isolation. Yet in the depths of his being he is afraid to face the highest of all challenges posed by spirit: that of striving to become fully human, and venturing along the sole narrow road leading to immortality. He senses only too clearly that this route leads to even greater suffering, to the life of an outcast, to the ultimate sacrifice, perhaps to the scaffold. And for this reason, even though the prize that beckons at the end of the road is immortality, he is unwilling to suffer all these ills, to die all these deaths. Though he is much more aware than the average bourgeois of what becoming truly human entails, he still closes his eyes to the truth, refusing to acknowledge that clinging desperately to the notion of self, desperately wanting not to die, is the surest route to eternal death. On the other hand, the ability to die, to slough off one's skin like a snake, to commit oneself to incessant self-transformation is what leads the way to immortality. If Harry worships his favourites among the Immortals, for example Mozart, it is because he is still seeing him through bourgeois eyes, tending to explain the composer's consummate art, just as a schoolmaster would, in terms of highly specialized talent. He thus ignores Mozart's commitment, his
willingness to suffer, his indifference to all bourgeois ideals, and his ability to endure the kind of extreme isolation that transforms the bourgeois atmosphere surrounding those suffering in the process of becoming fully human into the much thinner, ice-cold air of the cosmos. This is the isolation of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  Still, our Steppenwolf has at least discovered a Faustian duality within himself, has found out that no unified soul inhabits the single entity that is his body and that at best he is just starting out on a long pilgrimage towards such an ideal inner harmony. He would like either to become wholly human by conquering the wolf in himself, or conversely to renounce his human side in order at least to live an integrated, undivided life as a wolf. He has presumably never observed a real wolf closely, otherwise he might have seen that animals too have no such things as unified souls; that the beautiful, taut frames of their bodies house a whole variety of aspirations and states of mind; that wolves suffer too, having dark depths within them. Oh no, human beings are always desperately mistaken and bound to suffer when they try to get 'back to nature'. Harry can never fully become a wolf again, and if he did he would realize that even wolves are not simple and primitive creatures but complex and many-sided. Wolves also have two and more than two souls in their wolves' breasts, and anyone desiring to be a wolf is guilty of the same kind of forgetfulness as the man who sings 'What bliss still to be a child!'1 The likeable but sentimental chap with his song about the blissfully happy child would also like to get back to nature, to his innocent origins, but he has totally forgotten that children are by no means blissfully happy. Rather, they are capable of many conflicts, a host of contradictory moods, suffering of all kinds.

  There is no way back at all, either to the wolf or the child. Things do not begin in innocence and simplicity; all created beings, even the ostensibly simplest, are already guilty, already full of contradictions. Cast into the muddy stream of becoming they can never, never hope to swim back up against the current. The road to innocence, to the state before creation, to God, doesn't run backwards, either to the wolf or the child, but forwards, further and further into guilt, deeper and deeper into the experience of becoming fully human. Nor is suicide, poor Steppenwolf, a serious solution to your problem. You will just have to go down the longer, more onerous, more difficult road to becoming truly human. You will frequently have to multiply your two selves, make your already complex nature a great deal more complicated. Instead of making your world more confined and your soul simpler you are going to have to include more and more world, ultimately the entire world in your soul as it painfully expands, until one day, perhaps, you reach the end and find rest. This, in so far as they succeeded in the venture, is the path taken by Buddha, by all great human beings, some knowingly, others unconsciously. Every birth entails separation from the cosmos, enclosure within limits, isolation from God, painful self-renewal. Returning to the cosmos, overcoming the painful experience of individuation, achieving God-like status: all these entail an expansion of the soul to the point where it is once again able to contain the whole cosmos within itself.

  We are not now talking about human beings as educationalists, economists and statisticians understand them. We are not concerned with the millions of them that roam our streets. They are just like so many grains of sand or the spray from waves breaking on the shore. Whether there are a few million more of them, or fewer, is unimportant. They are mere material, nothing more. No, we are talking about human beings in the ideal sense of the term, about the goal reached at the end of a long process of becoming fully human, about sovereign human beings, about the Immortals. Genius is not as rare a phenomenon as often seems to us the case, although it is of course not as common as histories of literature or the world, not to mention newspapers, would have us believe. Harry the Steppenwolf would, it seems to us, be blessed with sufficient genius to venture along the road to becoming fully human instead of pitying himself whenever he encounters the slightest difficulty and, as an excuse, falling back on the stupid notion of himself as Steppenwolf.

  The fact that individuals of such potential can fall back on Steppenwolf imagery and cliches like 'two souls, alas' is just as surprising and depressing as the cowardly affection they often have for things bourgeois. Any human being capable of understanding Buddha, who has some idea of the heights and depths of human experience, ought not to be living in a world where 'common sense', democracy and middle-class culture prevail. It is only cowardice that makes him live there, and whenever he finds his confines oppressive, whenever his poky little middle-class room becomes too cramped for him, it is the 'wolf' he blames, refusing to acknowledge that at times the wolf is the best part of him. 'Wolf' is the name he gives to all the wild elements in himself. He feels them to be wicked, dangerous, apt to frighten the life out of respectable citizens, yet - despite thinking himself a highly sensitive artist - he cannot see that apart from the wolf, behind the wolf, there are a lot more creatures living inside him. Nor is every creature with sharp teeth a wolf. Harry is home to the fox, the dragon, the tiger, the ape, and the bird of paradise too. He can't understand that by sticking to his fairy-tale of the wolf he has turned his whole world, this Eden full of creatures lovely and terrifying, great and small, strong and gentle, into an oppressive prison house. In much the same way, the pseudo 'human being' of bourgeois convention is suppressing and shackling the true human being within him.

  Just imagine a garden with hundreds of different trees, thousands of different flowers, hundreds of different fruits and herbs. Now, if the only botanical distinction the gardener knows is that between edible things and weeds, he will not know what to do with nine tenths of his garden. He will uproot the most enchanting flowers, fell the finest trees, or at any rate detest and frown upon them. This is just what Steppenwolf is doing with the thousand blooms in his soul. He is totally ignoring anything that doesn't come under the heading of 'human being' or 'wolf'. And there is no end to the things he counts as 'human'! All things cowardly, vain, stupid and mean are classed as 'human' if only because they are not exactly wolf-like, just as all strong and noble qualities are attributed to the 'wolf' simply because Harry hasn't yet managed to master them.

  It is time for us to take leave of Harry and allow him to continue his journey on his own. Just suppose he were already in the realm of the Immortals, had already reached what seems to be the goal of his arduous quest. How amazed he would be to observe Steppenwolf's wild meandering, as he zigzags here and there, unable to make up his mind as to the best course to take. How he would smile at him - both encouragingly and reproachfully, with compassion as well as amusement.

  Steppenwolf

  When I had finished reading it occurred to me that a few weeks ago during the night I had once written out a rather strange poem, also on the subject of Steppenwolf. I searched for it among the jumble of paper that took up the whole of my desk, found it and read:

  Steppenwolf is on the prowl,

  the world is covered in snow.

  Up in a birch I spot an owl,

  but no hare is in sight and no roe.

  On tender hinds I love to prey,

  the nicest things in wood or heath.

  If only one would come my way,

  I'd grasp her with my claws and teeth.

  I'd treat my sweetheart really well:

  Give her thighs a good deep bite,

  of her bright red blood I'd drink my fill,

  then howl all alone through the night.

  A hare would be better than nothing -

  of a night their warm flesh tastes so sweet -

  but sadly I seem to be lacking

  all that once made my life such a treat.

  The hairs on my tail are now grey,

  my eyesight's no longer so clear.

  It's years since my wife passed away,

  now I prowl, and my dreams are of deer,

  or sometimes of hares as well

  when, hearing the winter wind blowr />
  and slaking my thirst with the snow,

  I haul my poor soul down to hell.

  Now I had two portraits of myself to hand, one a self-portrait in crude rhyming doggerel, sad and anxious just like me, the other cool and, it would seem, highly objective, the work of someone uninvolved, picturing me from the outside and from above. Whoever wrote it knew more than I myself did, yet in some senses also less. And both these portraits together, my melancholy, halting words in the poem and the clever study by some unknown hand, caused me pain. Both of them were right, both painted an unvarnished picture of my desperate existence, both clearly revealed just how intolerable and unsustainable a state I was in. This Steppenwolf had to die, he had to put an end to his detestable existence by his own hand. Either that, or he must undergo the deadly flames of further self-scrutiny till melting point, then transform himself, tear off his mask and enter upon a new stage of self-development. Alas, I was no stranger to this process. I knew it of old; I had already experienced it several times, always in periods of extreme despair. In the course of this deeply disturbing experience my then self had on each occasion been shattered in fragments; each time profound forces had shaken and destroyed it; each time I had been deserted by and lost a cherished and particularly dear part of myself. In one such instance, as well as my worldly wealth, I had lost my reputation as a respectable citizen, and had to learn to live without the esteem of those who previously had raised their hats to me. A second time my family life had collapsed overnight. My wife, falling mentally ill, had driven me out of house and comfortable home; love and trust had suddenly turned into hatred and mortal combat; the neighbours watched me go with a mixture of sympathy and disdain. That had been the beginning of my progressive isolation. And once more, after a period of years, cruelly hard years when I had been able, in strict isolation and by means of harsh self-discipline, to construct a new life based on ascetic and spiritual ideals and to regain a certain degree of calm and sovereign control, this rebuilt existence, dedicated to exercises in abstract thought and strictly regulated meditation, had also collapsed, having all at once lost its noble and lofty purpose. Something launched me on mad, strenuous journeys around the world again, leading to new suffering and new guilt in abundance. And each time, before tearing off one of my masks and witnessing the collapse of one of my ideals, I had experienced the same dreadful emptiness and silence, the same sense of being caught in a mesh, isolated, without human contact, the same empty and barren hell, bereft of love and hope, that I was now obliged to go through once again.