SOURCE: Durrani, Osman. “‘Cosmic Laughter’ or the Importance of Being Ironical: Reflections on the Narrator of Hermann Hesse's Glasperlenspiel.” German Life and Letters 34, no. 4 (July 1981): 398-408.

[In the following essay, Durrani reviews some of the conflicting interpretations of Das Glasperlenspiel and considers Hesse's use of irony in the novel.]

The reputation for obscurity which Das Glasperlenspiel has acquired among lay readers and professional critics alike derives to no small extent from the fact that the author's text is communicated through an intermediary narrator, who seems intent on hiding his identity behind a smoke-screen of empty verbosity. We do not know his name, his age, or the position he holds within the hierarchy of Castalia; there is no reliable information that might enable us to establish the date of his biography relative to Knecht's demise, or his motives in compiling it—does he perhaps hope to have his work accepted as the ‘official’ biography of a Magister Ludi, is it intended as a panegyric to its ‘dissident’ hero and thus as a cryptic warning to potential recruits to the Order, or is it meant to serve as the basis for yet another intricate but ultimately useless Bead Game? In view of his inscrutable character and uncertain motivation, it is not surprising that some readers of the novel have found the narrator irritating, sententious, and lacking in humour; in the words of one recent critic:¹ ‘reverentially stiff … longwinded, repetitious, humorless, preachy while struggling to be objective and modest, he is a pedant’.

Yet this narrator has his champions as well. Theodore Ziolkowski has described the tension that exists between his apparent ignorance and the problematic nature of his subject as ‘ironic’:

Since … the narrator is incapable of fully comprehending the problematic genius of his biographical subject, an ironic tension is produced between the limited perspective of the narrator and the fuller vision that he unwittingly conveys to the reader.²

In other words, the discrepancy between the story as told and the meaning as perceived by the readers should have the effect of provoking a clearer appraisal of the meaning of Knecht's life and death, the narrator's ignorance acting as an incentive to get to the heart of the matter. Clearly, this interpretation is an attractive one: Das Glasperlenspiel is by no means the first novel in which there is an ironic tension between the ‘meaning’ and the ‘significance’ of the text. However, there is one flaw in the argument, which its author would seem to have overlooked: it conflicts with the widely held opinion—to which Ziolkowski himself subscribes—that the narrator is a living proof of the efficacy of Knecht's sacrificial death, Castalia having been reformed and revitalized by the good example of Knecht's defection and its tragic outcome. Speaking about this, Ziolkowski actually defends the narrator as a representative of a ‘more balanced synthesis of life and the spirit’ and as having ‘sharply attacked’ the degenerate Castalia in which Knecht lived.³ Joseph Mileck has also contended that ‘the chronicler's better world of 2400’ confirms the narrator's assurance that Knecht's example will not be wasted on young Tito.⁴ Precisely why the uncomprehending narrator with his ‘limited perspective’ should be hailed as embodying a ‘balanced synthesis of life and the spirit’ is never explained; it is surely inadmissible to equate the ‘incapable’, ‘unwitting’ narrator with the dynamism of a revived Castalia.

A different view was recently put forward by Martin Swales, who recognizes that the ‘narrative tension of the book’ arises from the fact that the narrator's observations appear to be ‘generated by the story he has to tell’ and remain mere glimpses ‘which are not allowed to ripen into a fully articulated attitude’. Swales sees it as a merit rather than a fault that the biographer remains hard to pin down, arguing that, like Hermann Hesse himself, he develops and matures in the course of compiling his story:

The narrator, while only rarely acknowledging as much, has moved a long way from his opening remarks on the questionableness of personality. The story told in this novel is of growth, movement, change. And the narrative voice becomes an accompaniment to those processes; it grows and changes with the life it is obliged to chronicle.⁵

But even this ingenious contention remains unproven; it is, as its author concedes, ‘rarely’ acknowledged within the text. For, unlike Thomas Mann's Serenus Zeitblom, Hesse's narrator tells us nothing about the time it takes him to complete his work or of his own, personal preoccupations and insights during this period, leaving us free to speculate whether his labour took him eleven years or as many weeks; since much of the book is copied from sources, our Castalian biographer is unlikely to have spent as much time on it as Hesse did. In fact, he begins his account with a sympathetic reference to Knecht as one of the ‘truly tragic’ victims of the province (10), and ends it on much the same note; the portrayal of ‘growth and change’ on his part does not appear to have been a matter of priority for his creator.⁶

Other critics have found it convenient to refrain from attempting a definition of the narrator in simple terms. Mark Boulby, while finding fault with him for the same, obvious reasons (he ‘lacks self-pity as he lacks self-criticism’, and ‘apparently venerates Knecht’), eventually states that his style is both ‘professorial’ and ‘self-ironizing’, and adds inconsistency to the list of his flaws.⁷

It is not difficult to see how some of these conflicting interpretations have arisen. The text is richer in ambiguities than most modern novels other than Kafka's, and it is significant that Hesse was reading the new edition of Kafka, ‘with enjoyment’, while working on it.⁸ The internal contradictions are such that the reader, burdened by having to divide his attention between the chronicler's over-stated reverence and the painful self-emancipation of his hero, is all too easily lost in a quagmire of uncertainty and equivocation. The main deficiency of our Castalian narrator would seem to lie not so much in his long-winded approach or in his preacher-like mannerisms, as in the doubtfulness of his qualifications as a biographer. His credentials are open to question on three distinct counts: he does not enjoy free access to all sources of information about his subject, he seems to share the general scepticism towards factual biography that is prevalent in the province, and he is given to making exaggerated claims, especially in support of Castalia and her institutions, which often fail to stand up to close scrutiny. The first charge is a serious one. By informing us of the existence of a ‘secret archive’ from which he himself is debarred (311), he plants a suspicion in the reader's mind that some possibly vital piece of information relevant to Knecht's story is being withheld from him. Nor is the biographer's attitude to the so-called ‘Legende’ calculated to produce confidence in his methods. Breaking off with the disturbing picture of Knecht being pursued by a spy from Hirsland, the seat of the Order's headquarters (406), he says, ‘Über das Ende dieses Lebenslaufes wird ein späterer Biograph ohne Zweifel noch manche Einzelheit feststellen und mitteilen können’ (407), again suggesting that there is more to his story than he has been able to reveal. The same is true of the formulation with which the ‘legend’ of Knecht's death is introduced (‘Wir verzichten darauf, eine eigene Darstellung von des Magisters letzten Tagen zu geben …’, loc. cit.), and the nonchalance with which he resigns himself to a speculative and probably biased account of his hero's last days is disturbing: ‘Wir übernehmen diese Legende und sind mit ihr einverstanden, einerlei, ob sie nur fromme Dichtung sei oder nicht’ (47).

We are led to believe that this ‘Castalian’ indifference to factual detail is motivated by the arguments which are advanced in the introduction: here, the ‘ideal of anonymity’ is mentioned with obvious approval (8 f.), and, while admitting that ‘Wahrheit’ and ‘Wissenschaft’ are his lodestars (8), our biographer explicitly refers to many areas of Knecht's life which he, like a true Castalian, would prefer to ignore:

Uns Heutige interessiert nicht die Pathologie noch die Familiengeschichte, nicht das Triebleben, die Verdauung und der Schlaf eines Helden; nicht einmal seine geistige Vorgeschichte, seine Erziehung durch Lieblingsstudien, Lieblingslektüre und so weiter ist uns sonderlich wichtig.

(10)

This declaration, it should be recognized, is slightly at variance with the main body of the narrative. ‘Die Pathologie’ is much in evidence in the detailed reports of the personality disorder from which Fritz Tegularius is suffering (154-156, 293-299), and also in the section devoted to Petrus (305-310). While little is known of Knecht's parents, ‘family dynamics’ come into their own as a theme when the narrator reflects on Plinio's marriage and its deleterious consequences for young Tito (354, 359). The effect that a Castalian education has on its recipients' senses is commented upon by the narrator himself (93), as well as by Plinio (‘das Triebleben ist meditativ gebändigt’—341). Even Knecht's frugal diet, which consists in the main of bread, fruit, and milk, but specifically excludes alcohol, is mentioned repeatedly (79, 81, 183). Naturally, we are told much about his education, and his reading matter is often named (‘Gelesen hat er viel und besonders deutsche Philosophen: Leibniz, Kant und die Romantiker, von denen ihn Hegel weitaus am stärksten anzog’—93) If, indeed, it was our biographer's intention to exclude all such ephemeral material from his compilation, he has manifestly failed in his task.

The narrator would seem to be at his most inadequate, not in his descriptions, but in his evaluations of the developments he records. This is particularly true of the seemingly cheerful optimism with which he usually presents even the most suspect of Castalia's institutions. Although he admits that only ‘ein winziger Teil’ of all ‘Doktoranden’ (themselves presumably no more than a dwindling minority within the country) are seriously interested in the Glass Bead Game (43), it is consistently spoken of as the greatest cultural achievement of all time. Remarkable examples of litotes occur in this context. Chattus Calvensis II, the author of a four-volume study, monumental in its futility, on the pronunciation of Latin in southern Italian universities at the end of the twelfth century, is coyly described as ‘etwas wunderlich’ (65), while the man who discovers an occult meaning in the musical notation used in the fifteenth century is labelled an ‘enthusiast’ (‘Schwärmer’—148). The sheer extravagance of their labours is systematically played down. If there is a single source of ironic tension in this novel, it is provided not by the biographer's limitations, but by his wilfully misleading assessments of the value of Castalian scholarship.

‘Theoretisch liesse mit diesem Instrument der ganze Weltinhalt sich im Spiele reproduzieren’, we are told (12), and ‘Beim Glasperlenspiel muss alles möglich sein, auch dass etwa eine einzelne Pflanze sich mit Herrn Linné auf lateinisch unterhält’ (148); comments such as these are curiously double-edged. While it is perhaps possible to imagine individual moves in the Game, the comic dimension of the little plant's Latin conversation with Linnaeus should not be overlooked. In effect, this eye-catching example could be said to sum up Castalia's characteristic faults: it is pretentious, futile, and unnatural. Moreover, it tells us something about Knecht's position within the Order. Like a simple plant obliged to converse in a dead tongue with the man attacked by Goethe and the Romantics alike as the rash systematizer of amorphous, sacred Nature, Knecht must himself suffer the curtailment of his own natural desires at the hands of his stern Castalian taskmasters: Zbinden, Dubois, and Alexander.

Examples such as this show that it is possible to take a positive view of the narrator's carefully chosen symbols and analogies, and to regard his gently ironical understatements as intended to help rather than to frustrate the reader in his search for the true import of the text. When he speaks of ‘die mild geübte Kontrolle der Erziehungsbehörde’ (115) shortly after informing us that the same ‘Erziehungsbehörde’ had ‘laconically’ refused to allow the 24-year-old Knecht to pay a visit to his friend Plinio (113), the reader could hardly fail to recognize that he is glossing over a blatant example of tyranny with the help of these innocent-sounding words. Time and again, our narrator uses the same method: he lavishes his transparently ironic encomium on the members of the ‘elite’ and on their political machinations. Dubois, the head of an obviously active secret service operating both inside and outside Castalia, is referred to as ‘der freundliche Herr Dubois’ (187), although we are also informed of his suspicions of Knecht, and of the fact that Dubois found it necessary to detain him for three weeks for the purpose of intensive vetting. Quite often, the narrator encourages us to take note of Castalia's shortcomings by presenting fierce criticism of its most hallowed institutions, although he is always careful to dissociate himself from such criticisms by ascribing them to persons other than himself. So the ‘Golden Book’ of the elite schools is sarcastically dubbed ‘Streberkatalog’ (56) by pupils who are constantly being reminded that they are not good enough to merit an entry in its pages; the cracks in Castalia's monumental pedagogic edifice are nicely illustrated by this passing observation. Elsewhere in the text, our biographer allows himself to express what amounts to a torrent of abuse directed against the ‘aristocratic’ clique of aspirants to high office within the elite:

Für andere wieder war dieser erlesene Kreis von Prätendenten auf die höheren Würden in der Hierarchie des Glasperlenspiels etwas Verhasstes und Verkommenes, eine Clique von hochnäsigen Nichtstuern, geistreich verspielten Genies ohne Sinn für Leben und Wirklichkeit, eine anmassende und im Grunde schmarotzerische Gesellschaft von Elegants und Strebern, deren Beruf und Lebensinhalt eine Spielerei, ein unfruchtbarer Selbstgenuss des Geistes sei.

(141)

Nowhere does the narrator attempt to associate himself with this vilification of the leading players of the Game; he is content to ascribe it, with characteristic vagueness, to ‘other people’. Yet the mere mention of what must appear as the most abominable heresy to all self-respecting devotees of the Game is enough to sow the seeds of doubt in the reader's mind, forcing him to face up to the possibility that there is more than a grain of truth in the allegations that have been put before him. At another point in the narrative, we learn that Castalia is a haven for people who are unsuitable for life in the outside world, ‘wegen Charakterungleichheiten oder aus andern Gründen, etwa wegen körperlicher Mängel’ (64)—another formulation hardly calculated to inspire confidence in the organization. As to the absence of ambition in the province, we are again given contradictory information at different points in the book. The Music Master roundly rejects the idea that Castalia's luminaries are possessed of ambition in a worldly sense (‘Er weiss nichts vom Streben nach Geld, nach Ruhm, nach Rang, er kennt … keine Abhängigkeit vom Erfolg’—7); and yet we are soon to be told of the overwhelming importance of just such factors in the distribution of offices:

Ein Plus oder Minus an Ehrgeiz, an gutem Auftreten, an Körpergrösse oder hübscher Erscheinung, ein kleines Plus oder Minus an Charme, an Wirkung auf Jüngere oder auf die Behörden, an Liebenswürdigkeit war hier von grossem Gewicht und konnte im Wettbewerb entscheiden.

(162)

It would be impossible to determine the extent to which the Music Master is aware of Castalia's failings. He, too, voices reservations about the Game (83) and is displeased by Knecht's diplomatic work (192), but he also seems strangely unwilling to discuss his protégé's doubts about the world to which he is expected to commit himself, preferring to sweep such matters under the carpet: ‘Kritik an deinen Lehrern soll dir nicht verboten sein, doch lege ich auf sie weniger Wert’ (87).

Enough has now been said of the scepticism towards Castalia's most prized institutions which is communicated in many different ways by the chronicler's carefully chosen comments and ironic antitheses. We may safely assume that he has seen through the duplicity that exists in the province contrary to the assurances of its members. But what is his attitude to Knecht, the central figure of the biography and the overt raison d'être of his compilation? Does he admire, pity, or despise him? To answer this question, we shall have to take a closer look at his descriptive comments.

The range and variety of attitudes adopted by the narrator suggest that he cannot, in any case, be pinned down to a single position of, say, sycophantic adulation or detached objectivity. What is perhaps most striking about his account is that, for one writing many years after his subject's death, he shows a truly remarkable ability to enter into Knecht's mind and convey the minutest nuances of his emotions to us. The basic uncertainties, for example about Knecht's parents, love-affairs, and death, are in sharp contrast to the many subtle evocations of his moods and emotive responses, often on otherwise quite insignificant occasions. Although there are virtually no documents relating to his early schooldays, we are nonetheless given a clear picture of his feelings on arriving at Eschholz (‘Josef fühlte sich vom ersten Augenblick an wohl … ; kaum war eine leise Verlegenheit an ihm zu spüren, wennschon der Ältere … natürlich ein Halbgott für ihn war’—68). Again and again, the narrator's painstaking accuracy in such matters surprises us: he is able to register ‘ein beinahe listiges Lächeln’ on the part of the Music Master (74) or the mixture of ‘Ehrfurcht’ and ‘Neugierde’ with which Knecht observes the Älterer Bruder (136). Telling gestures and significant glances have somehow been handed down to him over the years (‘Der Magister zog die Brauen zusammen und hob rügend den Finger’—199), though he rarely discloses his sources, and when he does, we must wonder at his informant's ability to report his long conversations verbatim.

One cannot overlook the fact that Josef Knecht's character, as presented to us, is not always exemplary. He is slow to recognize the real reason behind his ‘mission’ to Mariafels, and when he does, he reacts with the petulance of a juvenile—not with the studied diplomacy of one who has been educated to obey: ‘Denn auf die Dauer in den diplomatischen Dienst abgeschoben zu werden, wär (sic) mir äusserst unerwünscht’ (199). In reply to this, Knecht is told that it was his talent for flattery that rendered him suitable for the delicate political missions to Mariafels:

Und nun höre: du hast eine gewisse Gabe, dich angenehm und beliebt zu machen, ein Übelwollender könnte dich beinahe einen Charmeur heissen; vermutlich hat ja auch diese Gabe die Behörde zu deiner zweimaligen Absendung ins Kloster veranlasst.

(loc. cit.)

Knecht's talent for public life remains in dispute. Like most Castalians, he is inclined to view historical and political events as ‘abstossend und uninteressant’ (159), at least until the time of his discussions with Pater Jakobus. Yet he is also, if we are to believe the narrator, a man of a ‘masterly’ disposition, a ‘Herrennatur’ with a penchant for giving orders and a desire to be obeyed, endowed with an almost sadistic desire to dominate Tegularius: ‘die Versuchung, den an Kraft, aber nicht an Liebe Schwächeren gelegentlich seine Macht fühlen zu lassen’ (161).

Observations of this type, coupled with the report of Knecht's summary rejection of his friend on attaining the rank of ‘Magister Ludi’ (235), show that our biographer does not consistently idolize his subject, although in many of these instances the inward-looking and fundamentally illiberal regime of Castalia must be held responsible for his lapses. And this is, in fact, the central theme of the novel, which accounts for the narrator's ambivalence towards his character: not Knecht, as the majority of critics maintain, nor the Game, as has sometimes been suggested, but Castalia is the author's real interest, in relation to which the person of Josef Knecht is no more than the ‘unbeschriebene Blatt’ that Hans Castorp was when he arrived on the Magic Mountain.⁹ Like Castorp, Knecht is confused rather than enlightened by the conflicting pedagogic influences to which he is exposed—the quiet serenity of the Music Master, the cool rationality of Thomas von der Trave, Tegularius's emotionalism and Plinio's incisive castigations. Apart from these influences and his responses to them, it is difficult to isolate a specifically ‘Knechtian’ character; just as, for us at least, he has no parents and no mistresses, he does not seem to possess a fixed character: he is not born to serve, or he would not forsake his post as Castalia's Magister Ludi, nor is he born to command, or he would enjoy the power of his office. His tragedy is to have been born into a world ruled by ‘hierarchies’, in which only a total commitment to one of these two roles would ensure his survival.

Such ‘personality’ as Knecht can be said to possess is shaped by external circumstances rather than by an inherent character. At Eschholz, he is both a conscientious pupil and a defender of his classmates against the overweening authoritarianism of the school, and throughout his subsequent career he is surrounded by a similar ambiguity. The ‘Magister Ludi’ chapter provides what is perhaps the best illustration of the divisions within his character; our narrator, far from attempting to make them appear credible, seems instead to delight in the irony of the situation. The ‘Ludus sollemnis’ which eventually leads to Knecht's promotion begins disastrously for the previous Magister, who falls ill and whose death is clearly precipitated by a ruthless, Machiavellian elite (‘Der Verehrung gegen den Meister hielt die Abneigung gegen seinen “Schatten” die Waage, diesem wurden Misserfolg und Sturz gewünscht, sollte selbst der Meister mitbüssen müssen’—229). Their tactics are successful; Thomas breathes his last, and Bertram disappears while on an ‘excursion’ in the mountains (‘Und wirklich kehrte dieser Bertram von seinem Ausflug in die Berge nicht mehr zurück, und nach einer Weile wurde erzählt, er sei an einer Steilwand zu Tode gestürzt. Weiter wurde nicht darüber gesprochen’—233).

What amazes us about Knecht's attitude to the duplicity of the elite is that he takes virtualy no note of it. The dubious affair produces no more than ‘eine gewisse Enttäuschung seiner hochgespannten Erwartung’, and he is able

als frommer Teilnehmer dem geistvoll gebauten Spiele anerkennend zu folgen, die Meditationen ungestört ausschwingen zu lassen und in dankbarer Hingabe jenes allen Gästen dieser Spiele wohlbekannte Erlebnis einer Feier und eines Opfers, einer mystischen Einswerdung der Gemeinde zu Füssen des Göttlichen in sich zu vollziehen …

(222)

Again, the narrator's irony is fundamental to this episode. Having been a witness if not a party to the ritual murder of Thomas and Bertram (parallels have been drawn between this episode and the end of the ‘Regenmacher’ section),¹⁰ Knecht experiences no more than ‘Enttäuschung’; can we really believe that he is so obtuse, so insensitive to the fate of his predecessor? Is he duped by the magnificence of the ritual, ‘deren äusserer Ablauf sich dennoch in korrekter Form vollzog’ (229)? An answer is not even attempted.

Yet, while his election as Magister Ludi is still no more than a rumour, an entirely new Knecht is put before us: alert, politically aware, cold and composed (235), ready for ‘Kampf’ and ‘Bewährung’, for the ‘Gang durchs Fegefeuer’ that each new nomination requires (240). Now he seems to know exactly what is demanded of him:

Die Elite aber durfte er keinen Augenblick sich selbst überlassen, er musste sich ihr widmen, sich ihr aufdrängen und unentbehrlich machen, sie vom Wert seiner Fähigkeiten, von der Reinheit seines Willens überzeugen, musste sie erobern, um sie werben, sie gewinnen, sich mit jedem ihrer Kandidaten messen, der dazu Lust zeigte, und es war kein Mangel an solchen Kandidaten.

(244)

When he succeeds, the author again treats us to a glimpse of his true feelings about ‘this elite’:

Schliesslich war das Ziel erreicht und der Kampf gewonnen, es war eine grosse Arbeit gewesen, mit dieser Elite fertig zu werden, sie müde zu exerzieren, die Strebsamen zu zähmen, die Unentschiedenen für sich zu gewinnen, den Hochmütigen zu imponieren …

(248)

Here, too, Knecht's feelings are little more than a means to enable the author to pass comment on a despotic organization that is founded on the pretence that it is above ambition, strife, and petty rivalries. On close examination, therefore, the central character resolves himself into a mainly symbolic figure whose function within the novel is two-fold: to exemplify the dualism of life, the inherent tension between the spirit and the senses, and to enable the narrator, as the mouthpiece of the author, to mount his ironic attack on the monolithic, inflexible, and hypocritical organization which thrives on the exploitation of one side of this dualism.

From the time of his youth, Knecht is given great powers of identification with the ‘rejects’ of Castalia, with those who forsake the ideal, equating them, in a strangely positive way, with the devil himself (‘vielleicht war der scheinbare Rückfall … gar kein Fall und kein Erleiden, sondern ein Sprung und eine Tat’—73; ‘diese Abgefallenen haben trotz allem für mich etwas Imponierendes, so wie der abtrünnige Engel Luzifer etwas Grosses hat’—77). The reference to Lucifer marks a return to the Manichaean imagery of Demian, where the coexistence of good and evil is emblematically represented by the god Abraxas, and to the Steppenwolf's trenchant analysis of the duality of modern man. In Das Glasperlenspiel a similar split is discernible, although more carefully veiled. Only occasionally, for example when Alexander applies terms reminiscent of religious heresy and apostasy to Knecht's intentions, does it become clear that the members of the Order see his desire for independence as the work of the devil (‘erzählet mir die Geschichte Eures Abfalls … Sei es Beichte, sei es Rechtfertigung, sei es Anklage, ich will es anhören’—432).

Once only does the narrator attempt to provide a physical description of his subject, not in his own words but through the musings of Alexander after the final break has occurred:

Immer hatte er seit den Tagen, da er ihm Dienste geleistet, diesen Mann geliebt, und unter manchen andern Eigenschaften war es gerade auch Knechts Gang gewesen, den er gerngehabt hatte, ein bestimmter und taktfester, aber leichter, ja beinah schwebender Schritt, zwischen würdig und kindlich, zwischen priesterlich und tänzerisch, ein eigenartiger liebenswürdiger und vornehmer Schritt, der ausgezeichnet zu Knechts Gesicht und Stimme passte. Er passte nicht minder zu seiner so besonderen Art von Kastalier- und Magistertum, seiner Art von Herrentum und von Heiterkeit, welche manchmal ein wenig an die aristokratisch gemessene seines Vorgängers, des Meisters Thomas, manchmal auch an die einfache und herzgewinnende des Alt-Musikmeisters erinnerte.

(448)

The most striking thing about this description is the way in which Knecht is placed half-way between extremes: he is both bestimmt and schwebend, both priesterlich and tänzerisch, serious and serene, aristocratic and simple. Here, Knecht comes across as a figure invented to bridge the divide between these oppositional principles, represented in Castalia by the two figures of Thomas von der Trave and the Magister Musicae, whose potentially excellent qualities Knecht combines within himself. It is a synthesis too perfect to be viable, and Knecht must come to grief, as he does in ‘Belpunt’ (‘the place of the beautiful bridge’), because the world to which he belongs cannot accommodate a man unable to commit himself to either extreme. In this sense his death is, as Hesse always maintained, a sacrifice, but one that is forced upon Knecht, as it is upon the ‘Rainmaker’, rather than undertaken voluntarily.¹¹

It is beyond dispute that the narrator's method involves purveying tantalizing glimpses of Knecht to his readers, without ever ‘fleshing out’ his figure to the extent of making him seem really alive. But whether he should be arraigned for his ‘thumping clichés’ and ‘limited vision’ is a different question.¹² As a life-long inmate of Castalia and an admirer of the legendary rebel, it is virtually essential for him to adopt a position of ironical detachment, if his biography is to be allowed to circulate within the province of whose faults he is so painfully aware. And so it is inevitable that this ‘Lebenslauf’ should partake of the laughter of the Immortals that was heard at the end of Der Steppenwolf. The ‘real’ Knecht, had he ever lived, must surely have been as different from the one here portrayed, as the ‘immortal’ Goethe of Der Steppenwolf differs from the etching in the professor's drawing-room, which successfully turns the ‘demonic’ artist into a symbol of ‘Beherrschtheit und Biederkeit’.¹³ Not for nothing does Plinio let fall the observation that ‘Er war ein viel grösserer Schelm, als seine Leute ahnten, voll Spiel, voll Witz, voll Durchtriebenheit, voll Spass am Zaubern, am Sichverstellen, am überraschenden Verschwinden und Auftauchen’ (356). The sheer impossibility of the biographer's task is by no means the least of the novel's themes.

We have seen that the narrator is a supreme master of the art of irony rather than a hamstrung pedant; his vague, euphemistic formulations are a necessary part of his technique and not a stylistic defect. The date of his subject's life and the effect of his death—questions of great interest to many critics—are immaterial; his is the immortality of Mozart and Goethe, but also of the Rainmaker, Josef Famulus, and Dasa. The impact his death may or may not have had on Tito is irrelevant to the novel as it stands, since Tito will have no further part to play in it, and Hesse did not write the continuation which some of his readers expected. In any case, only a complete reorganization of the province would do justice to Knecht's example, and this has manifestly not occurred by the narrator's time. That he should have suggested, however indirectly, that one temperamental adolescent could take on the vast bureaucracy of Castalia, is perhaps the culminating irony of the book. The ending is certaily hopeful: Knecht is liberated from the prison-house of his dualism through death, and Tito gains a supremely valuable experience; but Hesse's life-long commitment to individualism suggests that this newly gained knowledge will be more precious if it benefits the individual rather than strengthens the state. To say more than this would be to indulge in fanciful speculation, for here the narrator breaks off, leaving us to peruse the poems with their cultural pessimism and the three ‘Lebensläufe’, all of which convey a most un-Castalian message of individualism, and of which the narrator had previously remarked, in his characteristic self-effacing manner, that they were perhaps the most valuable part of the book (120).

Far from being turgid and pedantic, our biographer has shown himself to be considerably more clear-sighted than the characters whose confusions and errors he recounts, tongue-in-cheek. That he should so often have recourse to irony should not be taken to imply a lack of sympathy for the plight of his characters. It is made necessary by his somewhat delicate position in Castalia, where, like Hesse during the Nazi era, he is writing under the constant threat of exposure as a heretic or rebel. His irony is therefore an important part of his story. To ignore it and to read the book solely in the light of its teasing Latin motto, is to miss the parody and align oneself with the mechanically minded Castalians, with the enemies of poetry, imagination, and true emotion: values which Hesse defended thoughout his life.

Notes

1. Erhard Friedrichsmeyer, ‘Hagiography and Humor in Hesse's Glasperlenspiel’, Adrian Hsia (ed.), Hermann Hesse heute, Bonn 1980, p. 261.

2. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, New York 1969, p. vii.

3. The Novels of Hermann Hesse. A Study in Theme and Structure, Princeton 1965, p. 303.

4. Hermann Hesse. Life and Art, Berkeley 1978, p. 307.

5. The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, Princeton 1978, p. 138.

6. Page references are to the suhrkamp taschenbuch edition, Frankfurt 1973; add 72 to arrive at the pagination of Gesammelte Dichtungen, Frankfurt 1968, vol. 6.

7. Hermann Hesse. His Mind and Art, Ithaca 1967, pp. 276, 299.

8. Letter to Alfred Kubin, February 1935, in Volker Michels (ed.), Materialien zu Hermann Hesse: Das Glasperlenspiel, vol. 1. Frankfurt 1973, p. 109.

9. Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke, Frankfurt 1960, vol. 3, p. 55.

10. Erhard Friedrichsmeyer, ‘The Bertram Episode in Hesse's Glass Bead Game’, GR 49 (1974), 285.

11. Volker Michels, op. cit., pp. 241, 279, 291.

12. Mark Boulby, op. cit., p. 300.

13. Gesammelte Dichtungen, vol. 4, p. 266.