Ticino Legends of Saints and Sinners
[In the following excerpt, Stelzig discusses Siddhartha in terms of authobiography, biography, life and art, and the subjectivity evident in modern literature.]
SIDDHARTHA
Hesse began his “Indian legend”1 in the winter of 1920; the writing proceeded rapidly, and by spring, he was halfway through Part 2, when he bogged down in the “By the River” chapter. For a time it seemed that the book would be consigned to his collection of unfinished works, but after a painful hiatus of nearly two years, he tackled it anew, and by May 1922 Siddhartha was finished. What had been the obstacle? One explanation is that Hesse, like many artists, experienced a letdown after a spell of intensive work, for, as he laments in the journal he kept to fill the void of not working on the novel, after the sustained creative high of 1919, 1920 turned out to be “certainly the most unproductive [year] of [his] life.”2 Another reason for the prolonged cold spell is that in the second part of Siddhartha, Hesse was reaching, as it were, beyond his confessional shadow: “My Indian poem proceeded splendidly so long as I composed what I had experienced: the mood of the young Brahmin who seeks wisdom and who torments and mortifies himself. But when I had come to the end of Siddhartha the sufferer and ascetic, and wanted to write about Siddhartha the victor, the yea-sayer and master, I couldn't proceed any further.”3
His remedy to this dilemma was at once ingenious and simple: to try and enter imaginatively into and make his own the states of mind he wished to portray in his protagonist. He succeeded in this project to the extent that he managed to bring to a conclusion his most popular “wisdom” book. Yet the catch in his presentation of Siddhartha the “yea-sayer” is that—as with nearly all attempts to formulate religious and spiritual truths—what is intended to be most edifying turns out to be inexpressible save through clichés. As a witty passage in his 1920–1921 journal reveals, Hesse was quite aware of what might be called the Polonius dilemma of proffering words of wisdom:
There is nothing more difficult than being a father confessor or spiritual guide. When some poor person has told me his story, I can't at bottom say anything else except, “yes, that is sad, as sad as life frequently is, I know it, I too have experienced it. Seek to bear it, and if nothing at all helps, drink a bottle of wine, and if that doesn't help either, know that there is the possibility of putting a bullet in one's head.” Instead of this I seek to produce my consolatory arguments and life-wisdoms, and even if I actually know a few truths, at the instant one utters them aloud and dispenses them as medicine for an actual and immediate sorrow, they are a bit theoretical and hollow, and suddenly one seems to oneself like a priest who seeks to console his people and at the same time has the wretched feeling that he is doing something mechanical.4
Hesse's attempt to experience in some measure the spiritual development he wished to portray in the last third of Siddhartha led him consciously to re-immerse himself in a world that had been one of the donneés of his childhood—Indian religion and culture, as it had been available to him through his missionary parents and his deeply learned, Sanskrit-speaking grandfather Gundert. In the essay “My Belief” (1930), Hesse reminds us that “my father, mother, and grandfather had not only a rich and fairly thorough knowledge of Hindu forms of belief but also a sympathy, though only half admitted, for those forms. I breathed and participated in spiritual Hinduism from childhood just as much as I did in Christianity.”5 Hesse's renewed study of “the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the discourses of the Buddha” in what Mileck calls “a profound spiritual experience”6 was, however, not the only way out of the impasse of 1920–1921, for as he acknowledged, the Chinese spiritual tradition, chiefly in the form of Taoism, had a significant impact as well on the last part of Siddhartha. Finally, even if the novel's exotic setting and hagiographic style do not readily suggest it, psychoanalysis is also a powerful if invisible influence. Freedman has stressed the importance of Hesse's sessions with Jung in early 1921 in helping him to get out from under his literary paralysis, because these may have facilitated “the idea of interior space in which temporal strife is displaced by a transcendent vision.”7 And near the conclusion of his 1920–1921 journal, Hesse summarizes “the path of healing and development” that enabled him to complete Siddhartha: “next to the Asiatic teachings (Buddha, Vedanta, and Lao-Tzu)” it included as well “psychoanalysis … not as a therapeutic method … but as the essential element” of a new world view.8
If Hesse's turn to the East in Siddhartha is a natural extension of his childhood and his family background, it was also reinforced by the Orientalism in vogue at the time he began work on the novel, and which was due in part to the popular Travel Diary of a Philosopher (1919) by Count Keyserling, whom Hesse in a review of 1920 praised as “the first European scholar and philosopher who has really understood India.”9 In his own journey to India a decade earlier Hesse had failed, as he admitted to Romain Rolland in 1923, to get beyond “the charm of the exotic” and to enter into “the world of the Indian spirit”—in fact, the only item of his miscellany, From India: Sketches of an Indian Journey (1913), that he still considers valuable is “a curious little tale [‘Robert Aghion’] which at that time (1911) gave me much pleasure.”10 In striking contrast to his earlier tourist-venture, Hesse's fictional journey to India in Siddhartha is an inward and spiritual one that largely eschews picturesque surface and exotic effects in order to explore the sinner-saint polarity within him through the geographic symbolism that Ziolkowski has definitively analyzed as “the landscape of the soul” and “the projection of inner development into the realm of space.”11
Questions as to the extent and significance of the Oriental influence on this novel, and the related issue of the Indian (Hindu and Buddhist) versus the Chinese (Taoist) components, are difficult to answer, particularly since most Western critics (myself included) simply do not have the necessary expertise to address it authoritatively, and since scholars and critics with an Oriental expertise are understandably prone to overstating the case by taking a part for the whole.12 In this regard Hesse's ample pronouncements over the years about his intentions in Siddhartha are not always helpful, for they can furnish, like the Bible, support for radically differing viewpoints and interpretations. Nevertheless, in my view the gist of these (when considered in the context of the novel) justifies the conclusion that even though the “Eastern” influence is important, the book as a whole expresses a fundamentally Western outlook. Indeed, I would suggest that one of the wonderful ironies of Siddhartha's enthusiastic reception by the American counterculture and student generation of the 1960s is that in the guise of Eastern religion these young readers were taking in, unbeknownst to them, an essentially Western creed.
Perhaps a better way to address the complex matter of the Eastern versus the Western aspects of Siddhartha is to describe it as Hesse's mid-life examination of the foundation of his religious beliefs in an undogmatic formulation of his deepest intuitions that draws on three great spiritual traditions: the Christian, the Indian, and the Chinese. Here Siddhartha points to a core experience that resists neat or easy definition. Hesse's statement in 1958 that he sought in this book “to discover what all faiths and all forms of human devoutness have in common”13 assumes a cross-cultural and transconfessional basis of religion, a premise consistent with the three-tiered scheme of humanization outlined in “My Belief” (discussed in the last part of Chapter III). The path of Siddhartha, which leads from the self-will of the second stage to the serene faith of the third, reflects Hesse's own struggles as much as his aspirations toward a higher harmony. Hesse's belief that there is a greater coherence to his career is evident in his insistence that—despite the palpable differences of style and setting—Demian and Siddhartha are “by no means contradictions, but segments of the same way”: Demian “stresses the process of individuation, the development of the personality without which no higher life is possible,” whereas Siddhartha is concerned with “the other side of our task and destiny … the overcoming of our personality and our being pervaded by God.”14
The path of Siddhartha's self-realization—which, as Ziolkowski has shown, in some respects resembles that of Demian's Sinclair15—indicates both Hesse's assimilation of as well as his critical self-distancing from the Indian element. As Hesse wrote to Stefan Zweig in a revealing statement, “it was only when … this Indian element began to be no longer important to me that it became possible for me to represent it, just as I am always able to represent only that which in actual life is taking leave of me and departing.” Even if Hesse affirms that the Indian “garb” is more than a mere “costume,”16 Siddhartha obviously bears his author's psychological features. His Sanskrit name, which is also the legendary one of the Buddha, means something like “he who has found the goal,” and is ironically appropriate, for Siddhartha can only reach his goal by rejecting the Buddha's teaching of the Eightfold Path and by attending instead to the Buddha's living example of following the voice within, which in Hesse-Siddhartha's view is what brought Gotama his enlightenment under the Bo tree. Therefore it is not surprising that Hesse the perennial Protestant also characterized his book as “the expression of [his] liberation from Indian thought” because this “very European book, despite its milieu” takes the concept of individuality “much more seriously than any Asiatic teaching.”17
Hesse's autobiographical meditation on the spiritual core of all religions can also be read as his further and belated attempt at a reconciliation with his father, an idea first developed by Ball, who notes that Hesse's new closeness to his father during the latter's last years turned into admiration and love after his death in 1916.18 While Freedman qualifies Ball's terse conclusion that “in Demian the father is missing, in Siddhartha the mother” with the more balanced view that both aspects “seemed to exist side by side in Hesse's imagination as he settled into his Indian book,”19 the new ascendancy of the father world is evident in Siddhartha's series of guru and guide figures. While the novel by no means excludes the mother world, which is suggested by Kamala and the realm of the senses (Samsara), the unresolved father-son conflict of Hesse's youth is now transposed and spiritualized through a set of strategic rejections of father figures. With the possible exception of Siddhartha's confrontation with the head Samana, these are respectful partings-of-the-way without any of the overt resentment and even contempt that burden most of the father-son relationships in Hesse's writings up to Siddhartha. Now the legend of self-will is presented with a delicate but masterly touch: unlike Sinclair, who seeks repeatedly to flee back into the Eden of childhood and whose weak self continues to rely on strong guides, Siddhartha makes a definitive break at the beginning of the novel with the tradition of his family, and appreciates early in his quest that he must reject all gurus to find himself. That, incidentally, is why Govinda, Siddhartha's friend and early disciple who depends on mentors as a roadmap to salvation, is still searching at the end of the book. He may well represent, as Field has suggested, “passive Oriental acceptance,”20 but he is also the type of the perpetual follower who can never find the proper rhythm of his own life.
In the stately modulations of its lyrical and liturgical prose Siddhartha develops with synoptic clarity the stages of its hero's spiritual development from the exemplary “Brahmin's son”21 of the opening to the smiling saint of the conclusion. Hesse's paradigmatic patterning is everywhere evident: more so than any of his previous alter egos, Siddhartha—true to his name—achieves his goal; in his life's pilgrimage, the polarities of sinner/saint, mind/nature are symmetrically balanced and mediated by the unifying symbol of the river. Hesse's new maturity is also evident in the balance of objectivity and empathy with which both the roles of father and son are presented, and in the wry but pervasive humor that seems to have eluded most of his critics—this, after all, is a wisdom book in which even the River Mystical is known to laugh at an apprentice saint.
Surely the influential Augustinian model of conversion and the genre of the saint's life (with which Hesse was familiar because of his long-standing interest in the Middle Ages and Saint Francis, about whom he had written a poetic biography) must have helped him frame the hagiographic vita of Siddhartha.22 Thus what sometimes seems in Demian like a series of chaotic transformations is unfolded in Siddhartha as a coherent progression. The earlier novel's “light” and “dark” worlds are now two landscapes separated by the river, and the hero's life is both a geographic and spiritual journey that culminates in an experienced unity of self and world. However, if Hesse's saint reaches the third level of humanization, his life is also characterized by the Romantic-existential sense, to borrow Kierkegaard's title, of “stages on life's way.” The experience of “awakening,” so important later in The Glass Bead Game, depends on a periodic self-renewal symbolized by the age-old trope of the snake shedding its skin (37). The informing dynamic of Siddhartha's life, “awakening,” though marked by a feeling of utter aloneness and “icy despair” (41), differs from Klein's existential Angst, because it is a function of higher self-realization. It is a proleptic force, as Siddhartha realizes when at the end of Part 1 he decides not to return home to his father. Moreover, in this novel the diachronic succession of identity stages is countered by a synchronic perception of the atemporal totality of the self, which is in turn posited on the larger unity of the cosmos.
Siddhartha's “awakening” is already implicit in his dissatisfaction with the Brahminic faith of his forebears as a viable way “toward the Self, toward Atman” (6). His subsequent adolescent confrontation with his priestly father over his decision to join the wandering ascetics, the Samanas, is an ironic rescripting of the young Hesse's active and not-so-successful rebellion into a successful passive resistance (6–7). Unlike the adolescent Hesse, and like Demian, Siddhartha uses his uncanny self-control to master others. Thus the identity crisis of Hesse's youth is transformed into an amusing episode from which the son emerges victorious, but which also shows the figure of the father as compassionate and dignified. Siddhartha's subsequent rejection of the ascetic-Samana ideal as a “flight from the Self” that can be achieved with less trouble, as he explains to Govinda, by the ox-driver “asleep over his bowl of rice wine” (17), is his second step away from external authority figures and toward himself. Like his earlier departure from home, his parting with the Samanas turns on a sly assertion of his self-will, in a scene whose humor has a satiric edge when Siddhartha hypnotizes the head Samana and forces him into fawning acquiescence.
Siddhartha's subsequent encounter with the Buddha—who shares with him not only a name, but a similar vita—is the final exercise of his Eigensinn against the figure whom he recognizes instantly as the greatest of all teachers and saints (“Never had Siddhartha esteemed a man so much, never had he loved a man so much,” 28). Yet he refuses to subscribe to Gotama's doctrine, raising instead, in this subtly comic encounter, objections to the Buddhist gospel of the Eight-fold Path to Nirvana, because he knows now that the road to enlightenment simply cannot be taught: the one thing the Buddha's teachings do not contain, as Siddhartha points out like some forward sophomore, is the incommunicable secret of “what the Illustrious One himself experienced” in the hour of his illumination (34). The youthful critic then concludes his Protestant rebuff of the Buddha with the assertion that he must judge for himself, which earns him the well-deserved reprimand, “you speak cleverly, my friend. Be on your guard against too much cleverness” (35).
Siddhartha's “awakening” in the last section of Part 1 cuts specifically against the grain of the Buddha's teachings, for it is his entry into the maternal sphere of nature and the senses that marks the emergence of a radically this-worldly self. A psychoanalytic passage from the “Journal 1920–1921” throws some light on Siddhartha's sudden volte face: “All heroic demands and virtues are repressions … In fact, virtues, like talents, are a sort of dangerous if at times useful hypertrophy, like goose livers grown to abnormal size.”23 Like the later Goldmund's flight from the monastery, Siddhartha's transformation is one from the austerities of the father world to a life of pleasure whose focus is the courtesan Kamala. And like Klein's passionate transports after his meeting with Teresina, Siddhartha's “awakening” is the revelation, not of a transcendent meaning, but of one immanent in the everyday world. The lyrical meditation below may have an “Indian” cast, but its larger drift should be familiar to anyone acquainted with the epiphanic mode in English literature from Wordsworth to Joyce:
He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, strange, and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting, and in the midst of it, he, Siddhartha, the awakened one, on the way to himself. All this, all this yellow and blue, river and wood, passed for the first time across Siddhartha's eyes. It was no longer the magic of Mara, it was no more the veil of Maya, it was no longer meaningless and the chance diversities of the appearances of the world, despised by deep-thinking Brahmins, who scorned diversity, who sought unity. River was river, and if the One and Divine in Siddhartha secretly lived in blue and river, it was just the divine art and intention that there should be yellow and blue, there sky and wood—and here Siddhartha. Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
(39–40)
Siddhartha's childlike and unreflective immersion in the world of the senses on the other side of the river brings him a sexual awakening through an encounter with a teacher that is just as stylized and replete with gentle humor as his earlier confrontations with male preceptors. The poem that earns him his first kiss from Kamala throws his earlier spirit-exercises into a wonderfully ironic light:
Into her grove went the fair Kamala,
At the entrance of the grove stood the brown Samana.
As he saw the lotus flower,
Deeply he bowed.
Smiling, acknowledged Kamala,
Better, thought the young Samana,
To make sacrifices to the fair Kamala
Than to offer sacrifices to the gods.
(56)
It is characteristic of Hesse's light touch in this novel that the young man who has just abjured all teachers should now seek out a new mentor—but one who teaches not any dogma, but engages her new pupil in a protracted practicum in the Kama Sutra. And unlike many of Hesse's earlier protagonists who prove misfits in Cupid's school, from Giebenrath who almost falls down the cellar stairs at Emma's advances, to Sinclair's pallid cult of Beatrice, Siddhartha proves an apt student. In the fictions of his middle period Hesse may still stereotype sexual relationships through Romantic spectacles, but at least his confessional personas are now a far cry from the neurasthenic virgins of his early fiction—a fact that no doubt reflects his changed outlook and lifestyle after his move from Bern. Indeed, Hesse's request to a friend to return his copy of the Kama Sutra, because he “needed it very badly, as soon as possible”24 may stand as a humorous footnote to the Kamala sequence in Siddhartha.
Siddhartha's immersion in worldly pleasures can be no more than a way station, for Hesse's aim is to show that, as he wrote in 1921, “the highest toward which humans can aspire” is the most advanced degree of “harmony within the individual soul.” Hesse saw this issue in both religious and psychological terms, as evident in his gloss, “who achieves this harmony has at the same time what psychoanalysis would call the free disposability of the libido, and that of which the New Testament states, ‘everything is yours’.”25 In Siddhartha this “harmony” is more effectively conceived than it was with the Abraxas symbol of Demian, as the dialectical integration of antithetical aspects of the self. Siddhartha has learned that the road of asceticism is a dead end; now he has to learn that the same holds true for the contrary path of sense-indulgence. In the four segments from “Kamala” to “By the River,” Hesse the moralist demonstrates the old lesson, preached from many a Christian pulpit, that the pursuit of sense pleasure is in the end destructive of the very wonder and delight it first occasioned in us. Siddhartha has awakened to the innocent senses, only to lose himself in the headlong pursuit of hedonism under the combined tutelage of Kamala (kama = love) and the merchant Kamaswami (“Master of this World” = materialism). What began in naive joy ends in “By the River” in suicidal disgust and surfeit of the greedy round of pleasure. Siddhartha has succumbed to “the soul sickness of the rich” (78) and has lost “the divine voice in his own heart” (76)—something symbolized by his dream of the dead songbird, whose actual release by Kamala is a metaphor of his renewed “awakening.”
Having experienced the extremes of self-denial and self-gratification—this noble spirit, after all, does nothing half-heartedly—and discovered that each is a cul-de-sac, Siddhartha is ready for the greater synthesis adumbrated in the third part of the novel. It should not surprise us that the Hesse who in the “Journal 1920–1921” contrasted Augustine's religious with Rousseau's secular Confessions should, in his depiction of Siddhartha's turn from the corrupt pleasures of the world (Samsara) to a saintly life (symbolized by Vasudeva, the Ferryman), follow the well-known Augustinian model of a right-angle turn from sin to salvation. In fact I may not be straining too far if I discern a further parallel between Siddhartha's life and Augustine's: just as the young Augustine pursued false systems and practiced erroneous arts before finding the true faith—as a follower of the Manicheans, as a professor of rhetoric, and as a student of neo-Platonic philosophy, all of which nevertheless contributed something essential to the saint's final identity—so Siddhartha looked into three different teachings (as Brahmin, Samana, and Buddhist) that proved inappropriate to his needs but that were instrumental in shaping his final outlook. In any event, after rejecting the suicidal impulse that Klein succumbed to, Siddhartha experiences yet another “awakening” to a higher self. Now the metaphor is literalized as he wakes up from a deep and healing sleep to a new awareness synonymous with the basic message of Christianity: “he loved everything, he was full of joyous love towards everything he saw. And it seemed to him that was just why he was previously ill—because he could love nothing and nobody” (94). Cured of his self-hatred and despair, Siddhartha has become again “like a small child” (95) and is ready, like the dying Klein, to enter into the kingdom of heaven—or, to invoke the Chinese equivalent that is just as relevant to the last third of Siddhartha, into the mystery of the Tao.
Even a cursory examination of Taoist sayings will reveal basic similarities with the religious ideas of the last part of Siddhartha. We know that Hesse's interest in the Chinese tradition and particularly the figure of Lao-Tzu dates back to at least a decade earlier, when he characterized the Tao Te Ching as a “fashionable book” in Europe for the “past fifteen years.”26 His renewed interest in Taoism may have been stimulated by his father's pamphlet (published in 1914, the year before his death) on “Lao-Tzu as a Pre-Christian Witness to the Truth.” In 1919 Hesse published in the first issue of Vivos Voco (a journal he co-edited for a short time after the war) “Tao: A Selection of the Sayings of Lao-Tzu” from a new translation of the Tao Te Ching.27 Two years later he epitomized Lao-Tzu's Tao as “the quintessence of wisdom,” and in 1922 he described Siddhartha as a work in “Indian garb that begins with Brahman and Buddha and ends with the Tao.”28 In the light of these avowals Hsia's conclusion that Vasudeva and the river are both versions of the Tao, and that, moreover, the former is also “a portrait of Lao-Tzu” seems plausible.29 The impact of Taoist ideas on the latter portion of Siddhartha is most discernible through the imprint of Lao-Tzu's model of the wise man: the belief in the complementarity of opposites based on an underlying unity, the stress on a life of extreme simplicity, the heuristic use of humor and wit, the lack of a systematic doctrine, the ideal of non-action (Wu Wei) and silence (which, like Wordsworth's “wise passiveness,” is not mere passivity), the paradox that in striving too hard for enlightenment we are blinded, and the idea that wisdom cannot be formulated.
The central meditative emblem of Siddhartha is the most apt and natural image of the river. Siddhartha's devotion to it (when he joins Vasudeva as his fellow ferryman) is based on his discovery of the age-old paradox, “the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. Who could understand, conceive this?” (102). Hesse's invocation of this long-standing trope (from Heraclitus and Confucius30 to Wordsworth's Prelude and Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River) of flux and permanence, the temporal and the timeless, shows that he is capable of varying the expressive range of his favorite metaphors: water, which in his fiction typically functions as the token of the mother world, now signifies, as Ziolkowski has shown, “the natural synthesis” of “the familiar polarity of spirit and nature.”31 It is also to Hesse's credit that once he has demonstrated Siddhartha reaching the point, under Vasudeva's silent tutelage, of being able to hear the holy Om in the many voices of the river, he resists an easy “happy end,” for Siddhartha must now suffer the trials he once imposed on his father when he left home to follow the Samanas.
Here there is a real autobiographical symmetry to the book's design, for if at the beginning Hesse identified with “the Brahmin's son” striking out on his own, in “The Son” (117) he identifies with the grief of Siddhartha the father—and by extension, with that of his own father—at the revolt of a headstrong child. With his depiction of “the festering wound” of Siddhartha's anxiety about his recently discovered and now prodigal son (left to him by the dying Kamala), Hesse shows suffering as a humanizing force (a “Western” and Romantic idea) as well as an instance of the cosmic rhythm of recurrence (a mystical and “Eastern” motif). We may read the poignant and ironic passage below as Hesse's confession of his belated reconciliation with a father with whom the middle-aged author is now able to sympathize:
One day, when the wound [of his son's flight] was smarting terribly, Siddhartha rowed across the river, consumed by longing, and got out of the boat with the purpose of going to town to seek his son … The river was laughing clearly and merrily at the old ferryman. Siddhartha stood still; he bent over the water in order to hear better. He saw his face reflected in the quietly moving water, and there was something in this reflection that reminded him of something he had forgotten and when he reflected on it, he remembered. His face resembled that of another person, whom he had once known and loved and even feared. It resembled the face of his father, the Brahmin. He remembered how once, as a youth, he had compelled his father to let him go and join the ascetics, how he had taken leave of him, how he had gone and never returned. Had not his father also suffered the same pain that he was now suffering for his son? Had not his father died long ago, alone, without having seen his son again? Did he not expect the same fate? Was it not a comedy, a strange and stupid thing, this repetition … of events in a fateful circle?
(131–132)
When Siddhartha first crossed this river, Vasudeva had prophesied that “everything comes back” (49). Now, as Siddhartha experiences this with a perplexed resentment of which the old ferryman is the sympathetic onlooker, Siddhartha is suddenly rewarded with an intuition of the simultaneity of all being that Hesse seeks to render in a lyric-epiphanic prose that parallels Klein's final illumination, including the metaphoric conversion of water into music as a symbol of a higher unity beyond the reach of language:
He could no longer distinguish the different voices [of the river] … They all belonged to each other … They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.
(135–136)
The mystical note developed in Klein's ecstatic drowning is now further amplified in Siddhartha's spirit-hearing of “the great song of a thousand voices” merging into “one word: Om—perfection” (136). In this religious experience of higher self-realization, Siddhartha's individual identity merges into cosmic unity: the metaphysical ground of self and world are one and the same; to reach the one is to touch the other. The icon of such a self-surrender, or unbecoming—the problematic goal of Hesse's final phase—is already introduced here in Vasudeva's “going into the unity of all things” with a radiant smile and “a form full of light” (137) that we shall encounter again in the dying Music Master of The Glass Bead Game nearly two decades later.
Obviously the final hagiographic glimpses of Vasudeva and Siddhartha are at a far remove from the fractured reality of Hesse's actual life and experience, something implicit in the shift of the concluding “Govinda” section from the point of view of the enlightened saints to that of the forever-frustrated seeker.32 After the metaphysical uplift of “Om,” the reappearance of Siddhartha's old “shadow” and friend brings the novel back down to the second level of humanization and the world of unreconciled oppositions that is Hesse's true habitat. In addition to restoring the dialectical tension between faith and despair, salvation and seeking, the episode of the final encounter between Siddhartha and Govinda recaps the basic themes of the book: seeking precludes finding, loving the world is more important than understanding it, words fail to grasp the nature of reality. Yet Hesse is able to lighten these didactic concerns with the presence of humor, as the hapless Govinda, who earlier failed to recognize Siddhartha in the man of the world (when he guarded his sleep by the river) now fails again to recognize his friend in the saint. Govinda's need for a dogmatic faith typifies the hopeless quest of this mental traveler, for as Siddhartha teases him, “you do not see many things that are under your nose” (140).
Yet despite its ironic and light touches, the sermon of the concluding chapter cannot rise above the contradictions inherent in its logic, something that makes Hesse's most popular wisdom book a problematic achievement: it aspires to communicate wisdom even as it maintains that “wisdom is not communicable” (142); it seeks truth knowing full well that “a truth can be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided” (143); it maintains that “time is not real” when the form of the novel, both as narrative and as print, is a mode of temporality. Moreover, the sentence about the unreality of time, already entertained by Klein, is reversible by the very law of the identity of opposites proclaimed in Siddhartha and elsewhere in Hesse (“in every truth the opposite is true,” 143): time, indeed, is most real, a contrary sentence already vividly dramatized as the fear of death that fuels Klingsor's Last Summer, in many ways the stylistic and thematic counter-fiction to Siddhartha.
True, the concluding transformational sequence of the river, the parable of the stone, and Siddhartha's farewell kiss to Govinda is an impressive stylistic experiment in suggesting the greater unity of being. Asserting that time is not real, however, is ultimately only a verbal solution to the existential dilemma of our being irremediably in time, something Siddhartha had earlier recognized “by the river”: “He had died and a new Siddhartha had awakened from his sleep. He also would grow old and die. Siddhartha was transitory, all forms were transitory” (100). To extrapolate from the perception of eternal transitoriness and flux (what Goethe in the title of a famous poem calls “Permanence in Change”) that temporality is an illusion is not a logical move but requires a metaphysical leap of faith. Hesse was willing to take the plunge with a poetic prose that invokes cosmic plenitude and omnipresence through the rapid accumulation of myriad “flowing forms … of simultaneousness” in Siddhartha's “mask-like” smile of enlightenment (151). Seen in this light, the paean of presence of Siddhartha's closing pages is Hesse's attempted escape, with an Eastern and metaphysical fiction, from the ecce homo of the Klingsor confession and the existential dilemma of our being in time and history that we Westerners have been painfully afflicted with since at least the eighteenth century and the rise of Romanticism.
Notes
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AB, 45, letter of April 6, 1953.
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“Journal 1920–1921,” AS, 130.
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“Journal 1920–1921,” 119.
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“Journal 1920–1921,” 129–130.
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MB, 177.
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MB, 176; Mileck, 160.
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Freedman, 225. As Freedman notes (224), we know next to nothing “about the content of these sessions,” save that Hesse found them very trying.
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AS, 146.
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MATSID1, 112. See also Ziolkowski, 146–147.
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GB II, 56, letter of April 6, 1923.
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Ziolkowski, 161.
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For such specialized yet illuminating readings of Siddhartha in terms of its Indian and Chinese elements respectively, see Adrian Hsia, Hermann Hesse und China: Darstellungen, Materialen, und Interpretationen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 237–248; and Vridhagiri Ganeshan, “Siddhartha und Indien,” MATSID2, 225–254.
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GW, vol. 11, 50.
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GB II, 48, letter of February 3, 1923.
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Ziolkowski, 153.
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GB II, 52, 55, letters of February 10 and March 12, 1923.
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GB II, 96, letter of June 18, 1925.
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Ball, 147–151.
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Ball, 151; Freedman, 217.
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Field, 81.
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Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Hilda Rosner (New York: Bantam, 1971), 3. Subsequent citations of the novel are of this edition and translation and will appear in the text.
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Cf., Boulby has emphasized that “Siddhartha discloses finally and unmistakably the significance of hagiography, of the saintly vita, as a formal conditioning factor in Hesse's work,” 152.
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AS, 137.
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MATSID1, 98, letter of February 23, 1920.
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GB I, 468, letter of March 23, 1921.
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MB, 385–386.
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Freedman, 217, MATSID1, 86–91.
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GB I, 480 (letter of November 11, 1921); MATSID1, 152, letter of February 1922.
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Hsia, Hesse und China, 240, 246.
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Hsia cites the Confucian saying, “thus like this river everything flows on day and night without cease” (Hesse und China, 244).
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Ziolkowski, 166–167. Hans Jürg Lüthi's claim that the river represents the mother world that is otherwise absent in the novel (Hermann Hesse: Natur und Geist [cited in Chapter IV, note 20], 68) misses the mark twice, because the mother world is symbolized not by the river but by Kamala and the world of the senses.
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Boulby has drawn attention to the “very interesting … change of [authorial] standpoint” (157) in the last chapter.
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From Demian to The Glass Bead Game: Themes and Variations
Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha as Divine Comedy