Hermann Hesse's perennially-popular Steppenwolf begins—in its post-1961 editions—with an earnest note from the author expressing discomfort with the vogue the novel has enjoyed among young people. He urges his readers to look beyond the book's stylized ennui and romantic discontent—those eternal passions of youth—to see the larger spiritual message behind Harry Haller's crisis and redemption. Fair enough; and indeed, there is something deeply ironic about the infatuation of generations of young people with the book, not least the fact that its title became the name of a rock group, even as the book is filled with vehement protestations against modern "radio music."
Still, one can see in reading it why the book has long been a young person's novel. Here, it can almost be said, is the ur-text and template of every indie movie ever filmed. There is the over-educated intellectual protagonist with a habit of thinking his way into the most despair-inducing spiritual blind alleys; the prototype of the "manic pixie dream girl" in the form of Hermine, who takes it upon herself gratis—seemingly requesting nothing in return—to cure the gloomy protagonist's melancholia by introducing him to the free-spirited pleasures of bohemia.
In short, the novel has all the obnoxious egocentricity of the male intellectual who believes he is the first and only person to suffer, and for whom the other humans exist as props to solve his own emotional crises. It likewise suffers from all the condescension of the hipster's infatuation with the "primitive," upon whom he projects (falsely) the contentment and sensuality he feels he has denied himself hitherto through excessive cultivation—the "hang-ups" of civilization. No wonder, then, that the book became one of the touchstones of the 'Sixties counterculture! Great and justly-beloved as the novel is, it has all the frustrating qualities of the later era that embraced it.
Yet, one can also see its author's point that the book is not truly concerned with the problems of youth. To be sure, it seethes with angst—an emotion which adolescents and young adults know very well. But Hesse insists that the particular stripe of despair which the novel contemplates is one unique to middle age. The book, he writes, was "written when [he] was fifty years old and deal[s...] with the problems of that age[.]" What precisely is the nature of these problems? They could be said to have something to do with the "mid-life crisis," but it is more accurately just the prolonged crisis of adulthood, if not of all human life: the fear of having exhausted one's potentialities and having nothing further to do.
There's a quote I've seen attributed to Goethe somewhere, though I can't track down the reference: something about how we receive in adulthood what we most earnestly prayed for in childhood. Hesse here offers a similar insight: in describing Harry Haller's fate in adulthood, Hesse observes: "It happened to him as it does to all; what he strove for with the deepest and most stubborn instinct of his being fell to his lot, but more than is good for men." (Revised Creighton trans. throughout). He is speaking here, specifically, of his lifelong quest for autonomy, which he found granted in excess as an adult, as he was abandoned by respectable society and left to live the isolated existence of an urban "steppe-wolf."
Now this, surely, is the opposite of the young person's problem! To most of the truly young, life is anything but a glut of satisfactions and wish-fulfillment. It is, rather, a prolonged experience of frustration. Life has handed them nothing but a series of restraints on their will. While they may relate to Haller's sense of angst, therefore, it is generally for precisely the opposite reasons from the ones he invokes: they are still desperately seeking independence, not worried that they have found too much of precisely what they sought.
In this sense, therefore, Steppenwolf truly is not a book for the young. Hesse is right: here is a protagonist confronting challenges unique to middle age, or at least the post-twenties. One spends the first phase of one's adult life, after all, trying to figure out who one really is, and trying to gain the autonomy in which to make such a discovery of the "true self." Steppenwolf describes a man who has won this contest—who has reached middle age as the independent artist he always wished to become; and yet finds that it is a hollow victory.
What if, after all, the "true self" that one established at such cost in early adulthood actually becomes miserably confining? What if one is no longer interested in being that same self—because to simply stay what one is forever is to cease changing and therefore to cease living—but rather wishes to contain multitudes? Youth may struggle to imagine such a plight. All the young person's energies, after all, are directed toward the goal of gaining what they seek, and establishing the identity they crave. What seldom occurs to them—and is, indeed, the fruit of the latter of Blake's "two seasons"—is that they might indeed obtain all of these things and then despair of them.
What happens, for instance, if one becomes the learned intellectual one always fantasized about becoming? What if one becomes the generous, humane altruist, whose career is devoted to deeds of humanity? And what if—cruel irony—no sooner does one reach this stage than the very impulses that made it desirable go dead within one? What if one finally attains the leisure and independence to write—and the muse chooses just that moment to go eternally silent? What if one finally has the time and autonomy to read—and the oracles right then stop making sense? What if one obtains the career of service and good deeds—at the very moment in which one starts to question whether these same deeds are not ultimately futile?
These, surely, are the problems of age, not of youth—they are the crisis that comes when the hour of "glory in the flower" has passed. It is likewise the mood of Coleridge's "Dejection"—the sense that one may have become what one was meant to become; one has achieved what one set out to do; and now one has outlived one's best self. One has outlasted the end of one's own story. The quest was attained, the curtain came down—but one is still there, on stage, with no further speeches to make or actions to perform.
"How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals—and now this!" writes Hesse. And later, in the same key: "I thought of my father and mother, of the sacred flame of my youth long extinct, of the thousand joys and labors and aims of my life. Nothing of them all was left me."
This is the crisis of middle age; and it is the sort of thing that leads people to suddenly become that which they never meant to be in youth. It is how those noble generous-hearted liberal intellectuals suddenly reappear on the scene as ardent warmongers or Pecksniffian critics of government welfare programs. It is how all those Romantic rebels became monarchists and all those Trotskyists became Neoconservatives. It is how a man who once dreamed of forging a family of humankind finds himself in middle age arguing to defund food stamps. It is how a journalist who once unmasked power comes in due course to worship it. It is how a once-respected environmental lawyer becomes a conspiracy theorist.
"To such worthlessness, pettiness, vileness a man can descend!" writes Gogol in Dead Souls. "So changed he can become! [...] The now ardent youth would jump back in horror if he were shown his own portrait in old age. So take with you on your way, as you pass from youth's tender years into stern, hardening manhood, take with you every humane impulse, do not leave them by the wayside, you will not pick them up later! Terrible dreadful old age looms ahead, and nothing does it give back again!" (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans.)
This, too, is the warning of Hesse's book. Of course, to know the danger is not necessarily to avoid it. Gogol himself became a reactionary in his later years. But still, one can take some steps to arm oneself against it if one knows it is coming. One can see the sad example of the RFK Jrs. or the Greenwalds or the Irving Kristols or the Hitchenses or the Coleridges or the Wordsworths and turn back—turn back, youth, and grasp those "humane impulses" tighter, for Gogol is right—age will certainly not implant new ones, and if you let them slip now, you will never find them again further down the road!
This, then, is perhaps the true sense in which Hesse's book is a good one for young people to read. Not—as is so often mistakenly believed—because it deals with youth's problems. Quite to the contrary, it is a middle-aged man's book, concerned with a middle-aged man's problems. Yet it might, for that reason, have a message to disclose to the young—since it warns of perils that lie ahead of them on their road. Beware, it cries! You may well achieve the things you seek, and in that very moment, weary of them. It is a fate you cannot now imagine, but it will come. And in that moment, you may wish to let the steppe wolf out of his kennel, and become whatever it is your conscience always spurned before.
If Hesse is right—and I think he is—that we each contain an infinity of possible selves—then the one that can triumph in middle age may be the one most feared and loathed by the generous-hearted youth. How then is one to resist? Perhaps by heeding the conclusions of Hesse's book: by accepting the imperfections of one's lot; by realizing that one's goals once attained are but an imperfect reflection of one's youthful fantasies; but that they are to be endured without swapping identities, for all that. That one can accept and appreciate the "radio music of life" while listening for the divine melodies that still play beneath its strains. That one can watch for the glory in the flower, even if it has become harder to see, rather than becoming a herbicide.
No comments:
Post a Comment