Hermann Hesse (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

255 Pages·2003·1.31 MB·English

by  Jesse Zuba

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
HERMANN HESSE
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
©2003 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.
Introduction © 2003 by Harold Bloom.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hermann Hesse / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
p. cm. -- (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0-7910-7398-X
1. Hesse, Hermann, 1877–1962--Criticism and interpretation. I.
Bloom, Harold. II. Series.
PT2617.E85 Z72154 2002
838'.91209--dc21
2002152671
Chelsea House Publishers
1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400
Broomall, PA 19008-0914
http://www.chelseahouse.com
Contributing Editor: Jesse Zuba
Cover designed by Terry Mallon
Cover photo © Bettman/CORBIS
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Hermann Hesse 3
E. R. Curtius
Introduction to Demian 19
Thomas Mann
The Novel as a Disguised Lyric 25
Ralph Freedman
The Glass Bead Game: Beyond Castalia 39
Theodore Ziolkowski
Narziss and Goldmund 79
Mark Boulby
Accepting the Universe: Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf 111
Henry Hatfield
Narziss und Goldmund: Life’s Double Melody 123
Joseph Mileck
Hesse: The Glass Bead Game(1943) 141
Martin Swales
The Aesthetics of Confession: Hermann Hesse’s CrisisPoems in the
Context of the Steppenwolf Period 155
Eugene L. Stelzig
vi CONTENTS
Hermann Hesse’s Influence: Ethics or Esthetics? 177
Siegfried Unseld
Ticino Legends of Saints and Sinners 195
Eugene L. Stelzig
Chronology 223
Contributors 227
Bibliography 229
Acknowledgments 233
Index 235
Editor’s Note
My Introduction attempts an aesthetic appreciation of Hermann Hesse’s
masterwork, The Glass Bead Game (known to some readers as its the earlier
translation into English, Magister Ludi).
The historical sequence of criticism begins with E. R. Curtius, one of
the great modern critics, in my judgement. Curtius, in a careful overview,
accurately distinguishes Hesse from Proust and Joyce, epic writers who make
new aspects of reality visible to us. Something of this status is granted by
Curtius to Narziss and Goldmund, which seems to me generous overpraise for
a beautiful book that I find as much a “transposed life history” as Demian,
Steppenwolf, Rosshaldeand so many other lyrical narratives by Hesse. The Glass
Bead Game, which I perhaps rank higher than Curtius does, seems to him
essentially another lyrical “self-cure.”
Thomas Mann, who sometimes named Hesse as an alter ego,
introduced Demian in 1948, almost a quarter-century after the book’s first
publication, affirming his permanent esteem for Hesse’s work, particularly
the introduction to The Glass Bead Game, which Mann felt was a part of
himself, and related to his own Doctor Faustus.
The biographer of Rilke, Ralph Freedman, centers upon Hesse as
lyrical novelist, akin to André Gide and Virginia Woolf, though Freedman
rightly emphasizes the intense romanticism of Hesse’s lyricism.
Theodore Ziolkowski provides a very useful interpretation of The Glass
Bead Game, exemplary in its comprehensiveness and sympathy. I find
memorable Ziolkowski’s ironic observation that the book’s “shift of
allegiance away from aestheticsm to human commitment is reflected by
artistic shortcomings in the form.”
vii
viii EDITOR’S NOTE
Narziss and Guldmund, Hesse’s other major achievement, is viewed by
Mark Boubly as a very dark parable, of Hesse’s sense of his own human
failure, as opposed to aesthetic success.
Steppenwolf, once a counter-cultural favorite, is read by Henry Hatfield
as Hesse’s own crisis, transmuting his psychoanalytic treatment (Jungian
variety) into novelistic archetypes, and arguing for a joyous acceptance of life
that (in my judgement) it cannot demonstrate.
Joseph Mileck returns us to Narziss and Goldmund, which he finds
favors Goldmund over Narziss, whose story cannot truly be told until The
Glass Bead Game, interpreted next by Martin Swales as Bildungsroman, but
one that undermines that literary tradition from within.
Hesse’s poetry is analyzed in the context of the Wordsworthian crisis-
lyric by Eugene L. Stelzig, while Hesse’s publisher, Siegfried Unseld, writes
a defense of his author’s ethical influence. In a final essay, Stelzig praises the
legendary art of Hesse’s Siddhartha.
Introduction
W
hen I was young, both Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) and
Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943) were accepted as the two
indubitable post-World War II German classics. Hesse, on the strength of
The Glass Bead Game, his final novel, joined Mann as a Nobel laureate. The
two novels seemed the last words of an older, Liberal Germany upon the
dreadful debasement of the German spirit under the Nazis.
Mann’s The Magic Mountainand Hesse’s Steppenwolfeach attracts more
readers today than Doctor Faustus and The Glass Bead Game, at least in the
United States, if not also in Germany. The ironies of both Mann and Hesse
have obscured their comedic aspects: Thomas von der Trave in The Glass
Bead Game is a parodistic portrait of Thomas Mann, while Hesse’s Fritz
Tegularius plainly parodies Friedrich Nietzsche, and his Father Jacobus is an
ironical version of Jakob Burckhardt.
Hesse had a posthumous revival in the Counter-Cultural American
Seventies, when Demian, Suddhartha, and Steppenwolf suited the Zeitgeist.
The complex allegory of The Glass Bead Game attracted far fewer readers,
though for a time Doctor Faustus had a substantial audience. Today both
books, though admirably composed, are rather neglected, and rereading
demonstrates that each remains considerably more than a Period Piece. The
dumbing-down of high culture makes the survival of either book somewhat
problematical, alas.
In some ways the Glass Bead Game, the game rather than the book,
can now be regarded as a synthesis of Western literary and musical culture
akin to the Western Canons of literature and of “classical” music. The
imaginary province of Castalia (the fountain of the Muses) is a science-
fiction projection into a non-existent cultural future. Joseph Knecht (whose
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