SOURCE: “From Demian to The Glass Bead Game: Themes and Variations,” in The Hero's Quest for the Self: An Archetypal Approach to Hesse's Demian and Other Novels, University Press of America, 1987, pp. 105–11.

[In the following excerpt, Richard examines Hesse's idea of unity in Siddhartha, and asserts that it is an intellectual construct not based on personal experience.]

In Siddhartha it is the river that serves as a symbol of the pleromatic fullness and synchronistic timelessness of the unconscious. Unlike Klein, who must actually drown himself to be reborn, Siddhartha is saved from drowning by the illumination that comes to him in the sound of the holy syllable “Om.” The “terrible emptiness in his soul” that causes him to contemplate suicide is itself a symbolic death. The sacred symbol reestablishes his contact with “all that he had forgotten, all that was divine” and fills his soul again with the fullness he soon comes to recognize in the river, just as he had previously seen his empty soul reflected from the water as “a horrible emptiness” (GS.3.682–83 [Gesammelte Schriften, collected work, 1957] ). Siddhartha's rebirth takes place in deep sleep at the foot of a tree next to the river: “What a wonderful sleep it had been! Never had a sleep so refreshed him, so renewed him, so rejuvenated him! Perhaps he had really died, had drowned and been reborn in a new form” (GS.3.684). Whereas the former Siddhartha had not been able to love, he now “loved everything; he was full of joyous love towards everything he saw” (GS.3.688). As a child again, he is ready to begin a new life, which he does with the ferryman Vasudeva.

Siddhartha recognizes that his life is timeless like the river, which is “everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, in the current, in the ocean, in the mountain, everywhere, at the same time” (GS.3.698). Not only does the man contain the child and all the experiences that have made him, but the child also contains the man and all he will become. The concept of fate contained in Demian and other novels is based on this insight: one must follow one's inner voice or fate to a predestined goal. The emptiness and despair Hesse's heroes usually experience along the way is the result either of having departed from their true paths or of having reached a transitional phase between stages of development. The solution in both cases is death, either real or symbolic, followed by a renewed attempt to advance or by rebirth into the next stage of development. Siddhartha and Govinda are not sure whether this process is cyclical or spiral, that is, whether it includes progress or not.

The cycles of an individual's life recur on a collective level and are repeated through the generations, as Siddhartha learns when his son rejects and leaves him, just as he had once left his father: “Siddhartha looked into the water, and images appeared to him in the flowing water: his father appeared lonely, mourning for his son; he himself appeared, lonely, he too bound to his distant son with bonds of longing; the son appeared, he too lonely, the boy, eagerly dashing along the burning path of his young wishes; each one aiming at his goal, each one obsessed by his goal, each one suffering. The river sang with the voice of suffering; it sang longingly; longingly it flowed toward its goal” (GS.3.719). The images in the river combine with others to form a complex web of interrelationships within a single whole, of which Siddhartha, too, is a part. Once he realizes the unity of all things, he ceases to fight against his destiny and finds the peace and wholeness he had admired in the godlike Vasudeva.

Siddhartha conveys this unitary vision to his visiting friend Govinda, not through words, however, for every word is one-sided and only expresses half the truth, but through an act of love. He tells Govinda to kiss his forehead. As his lips touch Siddhartha's forehead, Govinda experiences Siddhartha's vision: he sees hundreds and thousands of faces coming and going, yet all are Siddhartha. He sees people involved in various acts. He sees animals of all kinds and various gods:

He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships to each other, each helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving birth to it anew. Each was a desire to die, a passionate, painful confession of transitoriness. Yet none died; each was merely transformed, was continually reborn, continually received new faces, without any time existing between one face and the other—and all these forms and faces rested, flowed, begat themselves, swam along and flowed into each other, and something thin, unsubstantial, yet real was continually drawn over all of them like thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or form or mask of water, and this mask smiled, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face that he, Govinda, was just now touching with his lips.

Govinda recognizes “this smile of the mask, this smile of unity over the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneity over the thousand births and deaths” as being exactly the same as the smile of Gotama, the Buddha (GS.3.731–32). Again, the process through which Siddhartha finds or forms the symbol that mediates between thesis and antithesis, between consciousness and the unconscious, may be identified with the Jungian transcendent function.

The basic pattern of Siddhartha's development is analogous to Sinclair's, though his starting point is more advanced and the nature of his quest more elevated and spiritual. He has achieved a balance between the two worlds in him, the father's and mother's, but he is restricted in his development by conventions and the inertia of the status quo. He must go his own way and allow his own destiny to unfold. Under the guidance of holy men he leads an ascetic and spiritual life, until he realizes that he cannot learn about himself from others. One is transformed by the teachings and doctrines of others into a mirror of those teachings. Siddhartha therefore rejects his teachers, as Sinclair does Pistorius, in order to become an individual and find the self he had been fleeing.

At this point he sheds his youth, as a snake sheds its old skin, and becomes a new person. He sees the world as if for the first time and finds it beautiful and strange: “Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green; sky flowed and river, woods stared and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and magical; and in the midst of it, he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the way to himself” (GS.3.647). The yellow and blue he sees are the colors of Sinclair's heraldic sparrow hawk, the colors symbolizing consciousness and the unconscious. The addition here of green, the synthesis of yellow and blue, anticipates the union of these opposites in the transcendent function of the self. This unity is also implied by the “flowing sky and river.” Whereas Siddhartha had been taught to dismiss the world and the self as illusions, he now discovers the reality, even divinity, that is in all things: “Meaning and being were not hidden somewhere behind things; they were in them, in everything” (GS.3.647).

The reborn Siddhartha contemplates returning to his father, but realizes that he cannot return home. He experiences the same icy chill of loneliness and despair that Sinclair does when he leaves home and that the hero of “The Difficult Path” does on the mountain peak. Hesse had to leave his hero at this critical point beyond which he himself was not yet able to proceed. He realized, “not for the first time, of course, but more forcefully than ever, that it is absurd to want to write something one has not experienced. In that long pause during which I had abandoned Siddhartha, I had to catch up on a bit of ascetic and meditative life before I could once again really feel at home in the world of the Indian spirit, which had been sacred and congenial to me from the time of my youth.”¹

Renewed contact and long conversations with his cousin Wilhelm Gundert, a professor and missionary to Tokyo, is presumed to have been decisive in helping Hesse end this most uncreative period of his life, but his analysis with Jung was surely even more important. The second part of Siddhartha actually contains less of the spiritual world of India than does the first part, in which Siddhartha lives with the Samanas and listens to Gotama, the Buddha.² The change in emphasis between parts from the spiritual to the sensual is anticipated in a dream: when Govinda asks why he left him, Siddhartha embraces and kisses him, but Govinda has become a woman, “and out of the woman's gown swelled a full breast at which Siddhartha lay and drank; sweet and strong tasted the milk from this breast. It tasted of woman and man, of sun and forest, of animal and flower, of every fruit, of every pleasure. It made him intoxicated and unconscious” (GS.3.652). Reminiscent of Sinclair's painted images, this dream anticipates a change in development, in this case the enantiodromian reversal that is initiated by Siddhartha's meeting with the courtesan Kamala. Not until he has learned all he can from the life of the senses is he ready to leave everything behind and experience the rebirth with which this discussion began.

There is no indication in Hesse's subsequent works that he had actually experienced the unitary state of consciousness he describes in Siddhartha. On the contrary, he begins Guest at a Spa (Kurgast) by identifying knowledge of the antinomies and bipolarity as the “wisdom of age,” and he introduces himself as a “solitary man from the family of the schizophrenics” (GS.4.9–10). The critical polarity is again the familiar opposition between nature and spirit: “all the motions of natural life are transitory and beautiful,” he informs us, “but the spirit (Geist) is imperishable and boring. At this moment I reject it and do not regard the spirit as eternal life but as eternal death, as rigidity, infertility, and formlessness that can only become form and life by giving up its immortality. … the spirit must become body and soul in order to be able to live” (GS.4.31).

Hesse's defense of unity as a concept, a belief, an ideal, rather than as something empirical, supports the assumption that the conclusion of Siddhartha is an intellectual construct not based on experience: “Indeed, I believe in nothing in the world as deeply and no other idea is as sacred to me as that of unity, the idea that everything in the world is a divine unity and that all suffering, all evil only consists in the fact that we individuals no longer perceive ourselves to be inseparable parts of the whole, that the ego takes itself too seriously” (GS.4.63; emphasis added). The individual has the possibility, through either knowledge or grace, to abandon the ego or, in Jung's terminology, to dissolve the persona and merge with the unity Hesse equates with God or the Mother, the unity we have found to be identical in some instances with the collective unconscious and in others with the totality represented by the Jungian self as the imago Dei and complexio oppositorum, i.e., as a synthesis of consciousness and the unconscious. In Hesse's view, mergence with this unity is death; separation from it, rebirth. He can therefore refer to the promising possibility of his death as a sick patient and to his rebirth as a cured one.

We must not lose sight of the never extinguishing possibility that his condition will change, that his being will be converted to a new denominator. … If we view the patient Hesse with shaking of heads and consider him ready for death (reif zum Untergang), let it not be forgotten that we cannot believe in departure in the sense of destruction, but only in the sense of transformation, for the foundation and matrix of all our ideas, hence also of our psychology, is the belief in God, in unity—and unity can constantly be restored, even in the most desperate case, by means of grace or knowledge. There is no sick person who could not become well and enter life again through a single step, even though it be the step through death.

(GS.4.87–88)

Hesse was convinced by the time he wrote Guest at a Spa that only such figures as Jesus, Buddha, and some saints ever achieved a true and lasting state of unity and selfhood. For the rest of mankind, entering a unitary state is a brief occurrence that accompanies periodic renewal and rebirth. If he were not constantly aware of this unity as an indestructible balance or compensation to which he can return when necessary, Hesse confesses, he would not have the courage to exercise the critical, analytical faculties that separate him from it. “The more I expose myself and dare to proceed on the one side, the more relentlessly I criticize, the more flexible I am in yielding to my moods,” he writes, “the more brightly shines the light of reconciliation on the other side. If it were not for this infinite, constantly fluctuating compensation, where would I get the courage to say a single word, to pass judgment, to feel and express love or hate, and to live a single hour?” (GS.4.87). He derives similar satisfaction from his relationship to the two poles of his being and from the possibility of oscillating between them:

My relationship to the so-called ‘intellect’ (Geist), for example, is exactly the same as that to eating and drinking. Sometimes there is nothing in the world that attracts me so strongly and seems so indispensable to me as intellect, as the possibility of abstraction, of logic, of ideas. Then again, when I'm full of that and need and desire the opposite, all intellect nauseates me like spoiled food. I know from experience that this behavior is considered to be arbitrary, unprincipled, even illicit, but I've never been able to understand why. For just as I must perpetually change between eating and fasting, sleeping and waking, I must also constantly oscillate between naturalness and intellectuality, between experience and Platonism, between order and revolution, between Catholicism and the spirit of reformation.

(GS.4.100)

Guest at a Spa concludes with the important and often quoted statement as to how he would treat the two poles if he were a musician:

If I were a musician, I could easily write a two-part melody, a melody that would consist of two lines, of a double series of notes and tones that would answer each other, but that in any case would stand in the most intimate and lively interplay and reciprocal relationship in every moment and at every point in the series. And everyone who knows how to read music could read my double melody, could for every tone always see and hear the opposing tone, the brother, the enemy, the antipode.

He tries to achieve the same effect with words, but always without success. If anything gives his works tension and forcefulness, it is the intense effort to accomplish the impossible. “I want to find an expression for this duality; I want to write chapters and sentences in which melody and countermelody would be visible simultaneously, in which every variety would always be accompanied by unity, every jest by seriousness. For life exists for me only in the fluctuation between poles, in the back and forth between both the supporting pillars of the world.” “This is my dilemma,” he says in conclusion. “Much can be said about it, but it cannot be solved. I will never succeed in bending the two poles together, in writing down the two-part song of life's melody. Nevertheless, I will follow the dark command from inside me and will have to make the attempt again and again. This is the spring that drives my little clock” (GS.4.113–115).

Notes

1. Quoted by Siegfried Unseld in Hermann Hesse: Eine Werkgeschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 89.

2. Hesse pointed out in a letter to the critic Rudolf Schmid that Siddhartha is a “very European book, despite its milieu,” and that it is based far more on the individual and takes the individual far more seriously than any Asian doctrine does. He would even go so far as to say that “Siddhartha is the expression of my liberation from Indian thought.” (Quoted in Unseld, Hermann Hesse: Eine Werkgeschichte, p. 88.) Elsewhere he wrote: “I wanted to present in my Indian legend only those inner developments and states I had really known and really experienced myself” (Ibid., p. 90), which points more to recent events, including his analysis, than to the life he supposedly had to “catch up on” and renew.