Siddhartha: The Way Within

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SOURCE: “Siddhartha: The Way Within,” in Hermann Hesse, Twayne's World Authors Series Online, G. K. Hall & Co., 1999, pp. 1–13.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1970, Field comments on the background and social setting in which Siddhartha was written.]

I VITA ACTIVA

The first part of Siddhartha was written in the winter of 1919, at the end of that first exuberant productive year in Montagnola. Hesse has told us how the composition was borne along on a surge of creative energy which suddenly came to an end, and he was not able to complete the work until two years later:

Nearly two years ago [i.e. 1919] was my last high point … the fullest, most exuberant, most industrious and most glowing [year] of my life. … And now for almost a year and a half I have been living like a snail, slowly and thriftily. … I have produced nothing but the first part of Siddhartha and the beginning of the second which has bogged down. Instead I have painted and read and inwardly moved closer to the India of gods and idolatry. …1

One of the difficulties was no doubt the finding of a suitable conclusion, since it involved conveyance in the logic of language of something essentially beyond words, i.e., magical insight.

In a later edition, Siddhartha appeared with other stories under the title Der Weg nach Innen (The Way Within),2 and it is in fact Hesse's most introspective work, apparently glorifying the vita passiva. But Hesse's writing is characterized by pulsation between active and passive poles, and this particular polarity was to become a major theme in Das Glasperlenspiel. It is well, then, to recall that in the very years when this work of pronounced Eastern meditation and introspection was taking shape, its author was engaged in very active battles on several other fronts. With the end of the war, while physically withdrawing to an isolated mode of existence, Hesse entered the lists to work for the establishment of a healthy, peaceful outlook in which the new German democracy could flourish.

Zarathustras Wiederkehr (Zarathustra's Return, 1920) was a clarion call to the Germans—especially to the German youth—to shake off not only despair and recrimination but also the “false gods” of commercialism, nationalism, and militarism which had led the nation into the abyss of defeat. In a commentary on this work Hesse pointed out that the misunderstood and misused Nietzsche seemed “the last solitary representative of the German spirit … who had finally become anti-German in revulsion against the cultural crudity of the Wilhelmian era.”3

In the last years of the war and in the first months after its end, Hesse's essays are permeated with a new biting satire. Der Europaer (The European) of January, 1918 envisages the Europeans fighting on indefinitely with ever more refined methods of destruction, until God finds it necessary to send another flood in order to end the carnage. But as the flood mounts, the embattled European nations build higher and higher platforms from which to bombard each other:

Ensconced in towers, human heroism preserved itself with touching faithfulness to the very end. While Europe and all the world was being inundated and deluged, from the last towering steel turrets searchlights kept on glittering through the moist grayness of the perishing earth and projectiles still soared to and fro in elegant arcs from the cannons. Thus the shooting was carried on heroically to the last hour.

VII, 105

Finally, there is only one surviving European floundering in a lifejacket. After he is picked up by the patriarch and taken on board the ark, the inhabitants entertain him with their special skills. The European has nothing to offer but his vaunted Western intellect, of which he can present no evidence, and so they accept him as the joker; but many doubt his capacity to make any positive contribution to the new world. The patriarch intervenes to point out that God has looked after this, for as the sole survivor of his species he cannot reproduce himself like all the others. The next day the tip of the sacred mountain appears above the receding flood waters, heralding the new beginning on earth.

Wenn der Krieg noch zwei Jahre dauert (end of 1917) and its sequel Wenn der Krieg noch funf Jahre dauert (If the War Lasts Five More Years, 1918) project an ironic vision of a dehumanized world. A modern Rip van Winkle is discovered by the authorities. Although he brilliantly passes all medical and intelligence tests, he is lodged in an asylum because he knows nothing of the war and the strange restrictions it has imposed on life.

The months after the armistice saw the appearance of Hesse's essays “Das Reich,” “Der Weg der Liebe” (“The Way of Love”), and “Brief an einen jungen Deutschen” (“Letter to a Young German”). Early in 1919 appeared the first number of Vivos voco, a new periodical founded and edited by Hesse and Richard Woltereck. The message of the title is plain: to summon the living to build a better world. For three years, Hesse himself wrote a large number of articles and reviews. In 1922 he retire as editor but continued to contribute until 1924. His work in this journal drew a considerable number of threatening and vituperative letters, from reactionary nationalistic elements, which Hesse used with devastating effect to pillory the stand-point of the correspondents in “Hassbriefe” II, [1921–22], 235–39.

In this period falls the separate publication of Blick ins Chaos (Glimpse into Chaos, 1920), containing the two major Dostoyevsky essays. Hesse saw in Dostoyevsky and his characters (and in Nietzsche) an intuitive anticipation of the descent into anarchy and an ensuing new morality, prefiguring the fate of Western Europe. Blick ins Chaos was instrumental in extending Hesse's fame beyond the German-speaking world. It was translated into English and reprinted, in whole or in part, in several journals. Among those impressed was T. S. Eliot, who visited Hesse and enlisted him as collaborator on his new periodical Criterion. As it turned out, only one article by Hesse appeared, entitled “New German Poetry.” Mr. Eliot upon being asked about his meeting with Hesse and why there had been no further contributions, replied in a letter of September 16, 1960:

My attention was first drawn to Hermann Hesse by my friend Sydney Schiff, who was also known as a novelist under the name Stephen Hudson [translator of Blick ins Chaos]. He gave me Blick ins Chaos to read and I was very much impressed by it. A little later—I think in 1921 or 22—I was staying for a short time in Lugano and took an opportunity of going up to visit Hermann Hesse in his mountain retreat. We had, as I remember, a very interesting conversation. He must have done most of the talking himself as my ability to understand German when spoken exceeds my ability to speak it. … I do not know why there was only one contribution by him, or whether I solicited further work, for I do remember that I was much impressed by the man and would, I suppose, have been very glad to have further contributions from him.4

In spite of his vigorous polemics on behalf of the delicate infant Weimar republic, Hesse became increasingly pessimistic about the future of democracy in Germany. In 1923 he formally dissociated himself from his fatherland by becoming a naturalized Swiss.

By 1922–23 Hesse was engaged on another front—the battle for existence. He depended on royalties from publication in Germany, and the ultimate effect of the inflationary spiral was to cut off his income entirely, since in the final weeks of the monetary crisis sums despatched from Germany became entirely worthless by the time they were received in Switzerland. For a while Hesse was helped by local friends, and he eked out a modest living by selling for 285 Swiss francs holograph copies of his fairy tale Piktors Verwandlungen (Piktor's Metamorphoses), illustrated with his Expressionistic water-color paintings (different in each copy). This tale emphasizes the motif of change and the yearning for wholeness. Having been transformed into a tree at his wish, Piktor pines away, for “one can see it every day in all creatures: If they do not possess the gift of metamorphosis, they decay in time with melancholy and atrophy, and their beauty is lost.” A beautiful girl redeems? Piktor by becoming one with the tree and restoring it to wholeness and the possibility of infinite transformations. “Piktor was no longer a bent old tree, now he sang jubilantly Piktoria, Viktoria. He was transformed. And because this time he had attained the right eternal transformation, because he had become a whole from half, from this hour he could transform himself as much as he wished.”5

This light-hearted tale reminds us, therefore, both of the financial plight of the author in the early twenties and of the themes which were uppermost in his mind at the time, for Siddhartha's quest, too, is for wholeness, oneness, and involves constant transformation.

II SIDDHARTHA'S QUEST

The opening chapter of Siddhartha presents a pair of friends, both sons of Brahmans; but Govinda is the devoted follower while Siddhartha is marked as leader. Siddhartha overcomes his father in a gentle but inflexible contest of wills reflecting Indian passive resistance. Behind this Indian mask it is easy to glimpse Hesse's self-assertion vis-a-vis his own father and the priestly path ordained for him.

Both friends abandon home, family, and caste to join the Samanas, thus becoming indigent “holy men.” For the images of life are “not worth a glance, everything deceived, everything stank, stank of falseness, everything gave an illusion of meaning and happiness and beauty, and yet everything was unacknowledged decomposition” III, 626. At this stage, the aim is an ascetic denial of life, a suppression of the ego:

One goal stood before Siddhartha: to become empty, empty of thirst, of wish, empty of dream, of pain and pleasure. To die away from himself, to be no longer I, to find peace in his emptied heart, in his de-individualized thinking to be receptive to miracles, that was his goal. If the ego was completely overcome and extinguished, if every yearning and every instinct died in his heart, then the ultimate had to awaken, the inmost essence which is no longer ego, the great secret.

III, 626

After three years, the friends have steeled the flesh against the assaults of the senses and of the external world. But Siddhartha, finding no further progress and no ultimate goal attainable on this path, goes with Govinda in search of Gautama the Buddha, of whom each finger “spoke, breathed, exuded, gleamed truth” III, 638. But it is the living presence not the preaching which convinces. Therefore Siddhartha goes on his way, rejecting the temptation to linger among the Buddha's disciples who receive Govinda. Wandering now on his solitary way, he asks himself:

“What is it that you have been trying to learn from teachers and doctrines, and which they who taught you much nevertheless could not teach?” And he found: “It was the ego whose meaning and nature I wanted to fathom. It was the ego from which I wanted to free myself, which I wanted to overcome. But I could not overcome it, I could only deceive it. I could not flee from it, only hide from it. … I was fleeing from myself! I was seeking Atman [Sanskrit atman: breath, self, supreme spirit, universal self], I was seeking Brahma [a personification of the ultimate absolute or cosmic principle], … But in the process I was losing myself. …


I shall become acquainted with this ego, the secret of Siddhartha.”

III, 645–46

Now we see the polarity motif in operation, as Siddhartha from the ascetic pole of deadened sense perceptions awakes to the physical world: “He had to begin his life anew completely from the beginning” III, 648.

Early in the second part, Siddhartha's quest embraces the oneness that transcends al polarities:

No, this world of learning belonged to the phenomenal world and it led to no goal if one killed off the fortuitous ego of the senses only to fatten the fortuitous ego of thoughts and theories. Both were nice things, thoughts as well as instincts, but the ultimate lay beyond both; it was necessary to listen to both, to play with both, neither to despise nor overvalue both, but from both to harken to the secret voices of the inmost being.

III, 652

Siddhartha reaches the river, which is an obvious symbol of the boundary between two worlds and two ways of life. This river symbol soon assumes syncretic power, becoming also the major symbol of oneness, as its voice whispers the mystic syllable “om.”

Beyond the river, Siddhartha comes to the city and wins the courtesan Kamala who initiates him into sexual love, while he gains wealth and power in the merchants' world. His strength in love and business had been derived, however, from his years of physical and spiritual training. In the course of time, his stamina and concentration weaken. This reciprocal dependence of “nature” and “spirit” offers one of many points of comparison with Thomas Mann's treatment of the theme in The Transposed Heads. The major difference lies in Mann's hilariously ironical and satirical handling of the material, while Hesse maintains an exalted poetic tone.

Almost the opposite process takes place in Das Glasperlenspiel when Joseph Knecht finds the one-sided “spiritual” Castalian atmosphere too rarefied. In fact, Knecht's diagnosis of impending crisis stresses the necessity of embracing the polar elements of intellectuality and sensuality. Basically, the situation is similar in both works, and both protagonists in their actions stress metamorphosis.

In the last night spent with Kamala, Siddhartha realizes “how closely sensual lust is related to death” III, 677. Death is metamorphosis, as Rilke reminds us in the Sonnets to Orpheus and especially in “Wolle die Wandlung. O sei fur die Flamme begeistert” (“Will to be transformed. O show zeal for the flame”). We are prepared, then, for the next step on Siddhartha's Way as, on the next day, he leaves Kamala, his wealthy merchant patron Kamaswami, and abandons the life of the Kindermenschen (child-people).6

He wanders back through the forest to the river, which is now no longer the boundary but Rilke's central “turning point.” In the polar oscillation of Siddhartha's life, he comes to rest on the river. But his return first brings him to the verge of committing suicide. “He was filled with satiety, full of misery, full of death. There was nothing left in the world to entice him, give him pleasure or comfort … there was no aim left … but to make an end of this miserable and disgraceful life” III, 681–82. He “lets himself fall” into the river “towards death” (thus reintroducing the motif of “Klein und Wagner”). But from the depths of his soul “the holy ‘om’” resounds and he perceives the folly of his action.

He sinks into restorative sleep and on awaking finds Govinda watching over him—a temporary reversal of their roles. Siddhartha tries to explain his quest. “It is the same with me as with you. I am traveling nowhere. I am only wandering—a pilgrim. … I have had to sin, in order to be able to live again” III, 686–90.

He resolves to remain by this river of life and time and becomes the helper of the old ferryman Vasudeva. This figure evokes multiple associations. Apart from the Eastern attributes, which we shall examine in the next section, one is reminded of Charon and his duty to ferry the souls of the deceased across the river Styx. He represents essentially the vita passiva, but not entirely so, since he exercises a helpful function for his fellow humans. He has gained magical insight into the oneness and simultaneity of life, so that all life flows to him.

Siddhartha, however, faces one more trial when Kamala arrives to die in his arms, leaving the son born after Siddhartha's disappearance. He strives to win the boy's affection and to keep him, but the son rebels against the father, repeating more violently Siddhartha's gentler self-liberation from the paternal world effected a generation before. Gradually Siddhartha begins to understand “that with his son not peace and happiness had come to him, but suffering and worry” III, 706. He becomes again a “child-person,” losing his equanimity and serenity. After the boy's escape and the vain pursuit, Siddhartha, consoled by Vasudeva, gradually absorbs the lesson of the river:

All voices, all aims, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all good and all evil, all together made up the world. Everything together was the river of events, was the music of life. And if Siddhartha harkened … to the river … he heard all, the whole, the oneness and then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, om: perfection. … In this hour Siddhartha ceased to fight his fate, ceased to suffer.

III, 720–21

After Vasudeva's death, Siddhartha inherits the office of ferryman and absorbs the inner awareness symbolized both by his predecessor and by the river. The last chapter brings back Govinda who sees that Siddhartha has “found the Way.” But the efforts of Siddhartha to express this way in words are doomed to failure, since the “Way Within” for one individual defies formulation for another. “Knowledge can be imparted but not wisdom” III, 742. As Demian has taught us, each individual has to become himself. However, Siddhartha's efforts to communicate with Govinda provide many interesting glimpses. He asserts, for example: “Time is not real, Govinda. … And if time is not real, then the span which seems to lie between world and eternity, between torment and bliss, between good and evil is also an illusion” III, 725. And again: “Love seems, Govinda, to be the main thing” III, 729.

While the teaching of Siddhartha cannot convince Govinda, the presence and countenance of Siddhartha remind him of the sensation he felt in the presence of Gautama Buddha, and Govinda realizes that “this is a saint” III, 730. The pedagogical importance of the living example later becomes a major motif in the ending of Joseph Knecht's life in Das Glasperlenspiel.

III EAST AND WEST

Despite its brevity, Siddhartha may properly be called a Bildungsroman, sharing many features of this genre examined in Demian. But Hesse published it under the rubric “Eine indische Dichtung” (“An Indian Poetic Work”). When I visited him in Montagnola in 1957, he showed me several of the translations into Indian language and spoke with interest of the work's recent success in the subcontinent. But in fact it is an interesting compound of Eastern and Western ingredients.

We have previously discussed the Eastern influences on Hesse and his affinity for elements of Eastern thought. In Siddhartha, the Indian milieu is the more effective for its temporal distance. When we get back to legendary times, we lose the sense of differentiation and come nearer the oneness of the human race. On the other hand, the legendary epoch of Gautama the Buddha provides a more remote background for Hesse's portrayal of himself or his Eastern alter ego.

The name Siddhartha has a double function, since it is a link with Buddha, who bore the name in his secular life, and at the same time signifies “the one who has found the Way.” Vasudeva is one of the names of Krishna and suggests the meaning “he in whom all things abide and who abides in all.”7 Kamala may be associated with Kama, the Hindu god of love and desire. Kamaswami combines kama and swami, suggesting “master of the sensuous and material pleasures of life.”

Hesse's Siddhartha is not intended to portray the life of Gautama the Buddha but he used the name and many other attributes to reflect the legendary atmosphere and prefigure the pattern of his hero's transformations. Both Siddhartha and Buddha were unusual children. Buddha left his wife and son to become an ascetic, as Siddhartha leaves his beloved Kamala and his unborn son to take up the ascetic, contemplative life. Both spent time among mendicant ascetics studying yoga. Buddha spent several years meditating by a river and Siddhartha's last years are spent in ferryman's service on the river. Buddha's revelations came to him under the Bo-tree while Siddhartha arrives at his final decision under the mango tree. Under the tree Buddha had a visionary experience of all his previous existences and the interconnection of all things, and Siddhartha's final magic vision also embraces simultaneity and oneness.

With all these Eastern allusions, attitudes, and legendary motifs, the reader may be lulled into accepting the work as basically Indian. However, Rudolf Pannwitz has pointed out the polar tension between East and West which underlies it:

Siddhartha is an Indian … contemporary of Buddha. He follows the ancient Indian ways but stops at each station and complements it by an opposing one, so that he reveals himself as a European … determined by the rhythm of Heraclitus. … [His European origin is further revealed] by the fact that he does not tarry in any lawful order and preordained role. Therefore for him there is no solution nor release that can satisfy him and free him from the demands of the subjective ego.8

Siddhartha recognizes the preeminence of Buddha's teaching and that he [Buddha] has found the Way. But Siddhartha cannot follow him for two reasons: first, because the European element in him prevents him from entering into anything fixed and prescribed; second, because Buddha is the redeemer not in a positive way by fulfilling, but negatively by overcoming and annihilating the world.

There is, therefore, an underlying Western Faustian quality in Siddhartha, which becomes almost explicit when Siddhartha exclaims “Immer habe ich nach Erkenntnis gedurstet” (III, 630: “I have always thirsted for cognition”), echoing Faust in his opening monologue “Dass ich erkenne was die Welt / Im Innersten zusammenhalt” (“That I may have cognition of what holds the world together in its inmost essence”). Siddhartha exclaims “I have devoted much time … O Govinda in order to learn this: that one can learn nothing,” recalling Faust's complaint “Und sehe, dass wir nichts wissen konnen / Das will mir schier das Herz verbrennen” (“And I perceive that we are not capable of attaining knowledge. This almost burns up my heart”).

If Siddhartha, therefore, has Western activist well-springs deep within him, Govinda represents passive Oriental acceptance. The two friends thus present polar contrasts which together make a whole, thereby in a sense prefiguring the theme of the quest for oneness. Basically, their positions amount to Western affirmation and Eastern negation of life. Siddhartha's final stand, however, is not clear—reminding us of the author's difficulty in bringing the novel to a conclusion.

In his last stage, Siddhartha peers with what we may call “magical insight” behind the veil of Maya to realize the illusion of individuation and to glimpse the essential oneness and simultaneity of all things, as symbolized in the river and its whispered syllable “om.” This is obviously Eastern, but in his attempt to convey his inner vision to Govinda, Siddhartha reveals two pronounced Western and Christian components: activity, experience, striving (in the Faustian tradition) and love or caritas (Franciscan in its universality). In addition, there is the element of divine grace, which has a Protestant ring; and the concept of metamorphosis seems at time closer to Western development and progress than to the Oriental eternal return through metempsychosis. All four elements can be glimpsed in the following excerpt:

All sin bears grace within it. … I have experienced in my body and soul that I was badly in need of sin. I needed lust, striving for worldly goods and vanity, and I needed the most humiliating despair … in order to learn to love the world … to love it and rejoice in being part of it. … I can love a stone, Govinda, and also a tree or a piece of bark. Those are things, and one can love things. But words I cannot love. … Love, above all, O Govinda, seems to me the chief thing. To see through the world, to explain it, to despise it may be the concern of great thinkers. But I am only concerned with being able to love the world; not to despise it and hate it and myself but to be able to regard all creatures with love and admiration and reverence.

III, 726–29

Even the paradoxical term “child-people” discloses its full significance near the end when Siddhartha has vainly pursued his son right back to the grave of Kamala:

Although he was nearing fulfillment and was enduring his last wound, it seemed to him nevertheless that these child-people were his brothers; their vanities, lusts, and silliness lost their ridiculousness for him and became understandable, became even worthy of reverence for him.

III, 715

The doctrine of love and the stress on individual experience in finding the Way suggest a Protestant element; for as Hesse observed in 1931: “The fact that my Siddhartha stresses not cognition but love, that it rejects dogma and makes experience of oneness the central point, may be felt as a tendency to return to Christianity, even to a truly Protestant faith” VII, 372.

The figure of Buddha is recalled as Siddhartha says of him “his deeds and his life are more dear to me than his preaching, the gestures of his hand more important than his opinions. Not in talking, not in thinking do I see his greatness but only in doing and living” III, 729.

This anti-intellectual tendency can hardly be categorized as Western or Eastern. It may be related, however, to the skepticism vis-a-vis Western rational and technological civilization arising out of the growing disillusionment in the postwar years. This antipathy to a technological society will reappear in Steppenwolf, but ultimately, in Das Glasperlenspiel, it will be modified in a searching analysis of what is really enduring in civilization.

IV STYLE AND STRUCTURE

The mood evoked by Siddhartha is that of serenity, of a poetic, exalted world on a higher plane. While serenity is dominant, an opposite undercurrent of dramatic tension reminds us of the similarly subtle effects of Adalbert Stifter's smoothly stylized poetic prose. There we encounter a similar shift from a serene outer world to the problematic inner world. This inner realm is the scene of repeated crises. The initial rebellion against the father is followed by Siddhartha's renunciation of the world to join the Samanas; they, in turn, are abandoned in order to hear Buddha. The rejection of Buddha's teaching and the consequent parting from Govinda are followed by the rejection of ascetism in favor of the sensual and material life. This, too, is abandoned, and the return to the river leads to the brink of suicide, which is followed by Kamala's arrival and death. Only after the tense battle to win his son does Siddhartha penetrate into the serene sense of cosmic unity.

In the most dramatic moments, the sedate style is slightly modified, as when Siddhartha reaches the decision to end it all:

With a distorted face he stared into the water, saw his face mirrored and spat at it. In deep fatigue he loosened one arm from the tree trunk and turned a little, in order to let himself fall vertically, in order to succumb finally. With eyes shut he plunged down to death.


Then a sound quivered from remote layers of his soul, from past epochs of his tired life. It was a word, a syllable, which he spoke without thinking, with a lilting voice, to himself, the old opening and closing word of all Brahman prayers. … When the sound “om” touched Siddhartha's ear, his benumbed mind suddenly awoke and realized the folly of his action.

III, 683

But the divergences in style here are minimal—a slightly more concise, clipped expression with stress on the verbs of action—while the features which mark the style of the whole are still present, namely a triadic pattern of sentence and paragraph structure, intensive repetition and the beginning of sentences with adverb or predicate, thus producing a chant-like rhythm: “Schon war die Welt, bunt war die Welt, seltsam und ratselhaft war die Welt!”9

The following paragraph offers a striking illustration of these stylistic features:

Langsam blute, langsam reifte in Siddhartha die Erkenntnis, das Wissen darum, was eigentlich Weisheit sei, was seines langen Suchens Ziel sei. Es war nichts als eine Bereitschaft der Seele, eine Fahigkeit, eine geheime Kunst, jeden Augenblick, mitten im Leben, den Gedanken der Einheit denken, die Einheit fuhlen und einatmen zu konnen. Langsam bluhte dies in ihm auf, strahlte ihm aus Vasudevas altem Kindergesicht wider: Harmonie, Wissen um die ewige Vollkommenheit der Welt, Lacheln, Einheit.10

The passage opens with an adverb and is constructed on a triadic pattern of three sentences: opening statement, development, and conclusion. This arrangement is especially appropriate here in summing up Siddhartha's quest and his attainment of magical insight. The repetition reinforces the three-beat rhythm.

Ziolkowski has pointed out the ubiquity of the beatific smile as the symbol of fulfillment in the novels from Siddhartha to Das Glasperlenspiel.11 At the moment preceding Vasudeva's death, this smile is transferred to Siddhartha in a mystical sharing. The style of this passage strikingly reflects the features we have discussed and which are more directly apparent in the original German text:

Hell glanzte Vasudevas Lacheln, uber all den Runzeln seines alten Antlitzes schwebte es leuchtend, wie uber all den Stimmen des Flusses das Om schwebte. Hell glanzte sein Lacheln, als er den Freund anblickte. und hell glanzte nun auch auf Siddharthas Gesicht dasselbe Lacheln auf. Seine Wunde bluhte, sein Leid strahlte, sein Ich war in die Einheit geflossen.12

Imbedded in the last sentence, however, is a double oxymoron: “His wound flourished, his pain shone radiantly.” This reminder of the theme of polarity is striking here at the moment when it is transcended by and embraced in a higher magical unity.

The inner structure of the novel is based not on the outer division into two parts; but, as Ziolkowski observes:

the book falls into three natural sections: Siddhartha's life at home, among the Samanas, and with Buddha (four chapters); his life with Kamala and among the “child-people” of the city (four chapters); and his life with Vasudeva on the river (four chapters). … Temporally and spatially the periods are delimited by Siddhartha's initial crossing of the river and by his subsequent return to it. … And the river, as the natural symbol of synthesis, is the natural border between the realms of spirit and sense in which Siddhartha attempts to live before he achieves the synthesis upon its very banks. What we have, in other words, is a projection of Siddhartha's inner development into the realm of space: the landscape of the soul.13

This is a perceptive analysis of the structure, which shows awareness of the dual symbolic function of the river as both a boundary dividing separate stages on the Way and as the unitary principle itself.

Repetition, which permeates the style in the form of recurring words, phrases, and sentences, leads structurally to the use of leitmotifs, many of which we have mentioned, such as the river symbol and the beatific smile. Among others, one may mention the bird (carried over from Demian), which occurs in a dream and exists as Kamala's pet. It becomes symbolic, however, in the phrase “Dead was the bird in his heart” III, 681.

In addition to leitmotifs, parallelisms also reinforce the unity of the work. Siddhartha's initial break with his father is paralleled by the situation between himself and his son. Buddha smiles and preaches the Way to Govinda and Siddhartha. At the end, it is Siddhartha who attempts to preach or explain his Way to Govinda. Again it is not the words but the smile, the face, and the hands which convince.

Such a style has obviously little to do with realism. Hesse deprecated the tendency in our age to attribute excessive importance to “so-called reality” in the shape of physical events and things, especially of a technological nature.14 Freedman has used the term “lyrical novel” for works such as this, and of all of Hesse's works Siddhartha fits this description best.15 Siddhartha's quest transcends “reality,” and the narrative manner is intended to carry the reader into an elevated, poetic, legendary, or “magical” world. In fact, in unity of style, structure, and meaning Siddhartha represents Hesse's highest achievement.

In spite of the Western ingredients, it must be admitted that Siddhartha's third and final stage stresses Eastern passivity and introspection. But this was Siddhartha's Way, not Govinda's nor anyone else's. It was not Hesse's Way either, or at least not his final station; and the most characteristic leitmotif in the work is that of “Erwachen” (awakening) to a new beginning.

Hesse's next major work, Der Steppenwolf, offers a complete contrast, replacing serenity by stridency, placing the individual problem in a social context and stressing the contrast between the “inner” and “outer” worlds for grotesque and humorous effect.

Notes

  1. Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920 (Zurich, 1960), p. 32.

  2. Der Weg nach Innen (Berlin, 1931).

  3. Vivos voco, I (1919–20), 72–73.

  4. Printed as note 7 in my article “Hermann Hesse as Critic of English and American Literature,” Monatshefte, LIII (1961), 147–58.

  5. Piktors Verwandlungen, Faksimile-Ausgabe (Frankfurt, 1954).

  6. “Child-people” is a paradoxical term, as Boulby points out: “Their childlikeness both is and is not that spoken of in the New Testament; theirs is the sphere of reality, with which the magical reality can never coincide” p. 141.

  7. Siddhartha, ed. T. C. Dunham and A. S. Wensinger, New York, Macmillan, 1962, p. 181. This is an excellent text edition with glossary of Eastern terms.

  8. Rudolf Pannwitz, Hermann Hesses West-ostliche Dichtung (Frankfurt, 1957), p 13.

  9. III, 647: Beautiful was the world, many-colored was the world, strange and enigmatic was the world.

  10. III, 716: Slowly bloomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the insight, the knowledge of the real nature of wisdom, the goal of his long quest. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, a capacity, a mysterious ability at any moment in the midst of life to be able to think the thought of oneness, to feel and breathe in oneness. Slowly this bloomed in him, radiated back to him from Vasudeva's old, childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal fulfillment of the world, smiling serenity, oneness.

  11. Op. cit., pp. 170–77.

  12. III, 721: Brightly gleamed Vasudeva's smile, over all the wrinkles of his age countenance it hovered radiantly, just as over all the voices of the river om hovered Brightly gleamed his smile, as he looked at his friend, and brightly gleamed now on Siddhartha's face, too, the same smile. His wound flourished, his pain shone radiantly, his ego had flowed into the oneness.

  13. Op. cit., pp. 160–61.

  14. Cf. e.g. “Kurzgefasster Lebenslauf” G.S., IV, 469–89.

  15. Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide and Virginia Woolf (Princeton, 1963).

Hesse's works are cited from the collected edition wherever possible: Gesammelte Schriften (G.S.), 7 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1958). Parenthetical references in the text give volume and page. I have used my own translations throughout.

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