Rebel-Seeker: Montagnola 1919–1931

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SOURCE: “Rebel-Seeker: Montagnola 1919–1931,” in Hermann Hesse: Life and Art, University of California Press, 1978, 159–72.

[In the following excerpt, Mileck examines the influences that led Hesse to write Siddhartha, which he calls “a depiction of the human condition … and a sublime statement of faith in man and life.”]

SIDDHARTHA: IDEAL POSSIBILITY

INDIA AND CHINA

Klingsors letzter Sommer marked the end of the wildest and the most prolific summer of Hesse's life. His frenzy of activity subsided when autumn set in and, before winter, he had again become withdrawn, given to reflection and to plans for his next story. Part I and much of Part II of Siddhartha were written in the winter and spring of 1920. Dissatisfied with the chapter “At the River” (Am Flusse), Hesse put the novel aside in June 1920. He did not resume work on it until the end of 1921, and did not finish it until May 1922. The book appeared that October.

Like Demian, Siddhartha was basically a cerebral experience. Sinclair's tale was a reexamination of Hesse's youth in psychoanalytical terms, and Siddhartha's was a review, and a systematization and culmination of his evolving thoughts of the immediately preceding years. Neither was an artistic rendering of immediate life but of immediate thoughts and hopes. Up to “At the River” Siddhartha was essentially a retracing of Hesse's path of experience and of thought from Demian to Klingsors letzter Sommer, in calm reflective detachment and in an idealized mythic manner. Having dealt with Siddhartha the iconoclastic thinker and ascetic (a variation on Sinclair's theme of parental and institutional emancipation), and with Siddhartha the suffering worldling (a variation on Klein's and Klingsor's theme of selfliving), having exposed his protagonist to the realm of the mind and that of the body, Hesse was at a loss for a conclusion. His vision of another Siddhartha, of one who would rise to a higher level, who would emerge a victor, an affirmer of life and all that it implied, was too dim.1 The work had to be put aside and months of hermitic living, of meditation, and of intense preoccupation with the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, and with Buddhistic Scriptures, followed. What had been a childhood attraction to India's lore, and had become a major intellectual interest in India's religions, now became a profound spiritual experience.

As a youngster, Hesse had been as much attracted to mysterious India and its exotic religions as he had been repelled by the drabness and the severity of his parental Pietism. India suggested a desirable freedom from restraint and offered plentiful food for the imagination; Pietism knew only the evil in man and was intent solely upon an uncompromising rejection of all that is of this world.2 In Gaienhofen, theosophy itself had bored Hesse, but it had also whetted his appetite for a more direct reading contact with India. This he first found in about 1905 in Franz Hartmann's translation of the Bhagavad-Gita; he then discovered Hermann Oldenburg's Buddha, Paul Deussen's Sechzig Upanishad's des Veda, and Karl E. Neumann's Gotamo Buddho's Reden.3 The ultimate oneness of all reality, an underlying assumption of each of these religions, immediately fascinated Hesse, but he failed to find the wisdom he had hoped to discover. Hesse's was essentially not a quest for enlightenment, and certainly not a passion for a religious conversion, but primarily a hope for confirmation of his own still vague philosophical presentiments, a search for a school of thought in accord with his own being and responsive to his own needs. The notion of oneness accorded with his bent of thought, and as such, he quickly embraced it. As a whole, however, India's religions proved to be too reminiscent of Pietism to be acceptable to him. Her wisdom was too rooted in asceticism, too puritanical and life-denying for Hesse's liking and his needs, and too clouded by scholasticism.4 What he sought was not to be found in India but in China.

Until his own father drew his attention to Lao-Tse in 1907, and until he read Alexander Ular's translated excerpts from Tao-Te-King later that same year, and then Julius Grill's translation of Lao-Tse in 1910, Hesse had never taken any real notice of the religions of China.5 He was favorably impressed by Lao-Tse, and later in 1910 profoundly affected by Richard Wilhelm's translation of Confucius's Gespräche, the first of his series of Chinese classics in German. Hesse immediately became a passionate advocate of Chinese thought and belief. Of the many German translations of Chinese philosophy and literature that were published from 1910 to 1915, and again in the twenties and early thirties, there were few that Hesse did not read avidly and review enthusiastically. These translations did much to bolster his flagging spirits during the First World War, and they remained a source of spiritual sustenance until his death. Confucius, Lao-Tse, Dschuang Dsi, Mong Dsi, Lü Bu We, Yang Tschou, Liä Dsi, Mong Ko, and the I Ging became as much a part of Hesse's world of thought as the philosophers and religious writings of the Western world. Unlike India, China was not estranged from life, her teachings were simple and practical and not burdened by esoteric metaphysical subtleties, here life's dualities were acceptable and their poles compatible; she cultivated a wise and harmonious interplay of the spiritual and the sensual, and her thinkers suggested wisdom born of experience and tempered by humor.6 India's asceticism repelled Hesse; China's wisdom was a confirmation of himself and all he aspired to.

Hesse's progression from the severe Buddhism of India to the congenial Zen-Buddhism of Japan came relatively late in life. Until 1945, nothing in his writings suggested any acquaintance with Japanese religions and philosophies. In his Lieblingslektüre of 1945 he alludes to Zen and equates its wisdom with that of Buddha and Lao-Tse, but fails to elaborate on his remark.7 In a letter of 1947 to a young Japanese writer he reiterates his great respect to Zen, a school for both head and heart and with few equals in the Western world, but again chooses neither to account for this sentiment nor to comment upon the extent of his acquaintance with Zen.8 Hesse continued to be vague about his relationship with Zen in the introduction of his privately published pamphlet, Zen;9 he simply mentions that he had in the past read a number of articles and books about Zen. In any case Hesse's involvement with Zen did not peak until the appearance in September of 1960 of his cousin's, Wilhelm Gundert's, translation of the Bi-Yän-Lu. His preoccupation with this classic of Zen Buddhism that autumn occasioned his own Zen: a letter of congratulations and gratitude to Gundert, three poems inspired by the Bi-Yän-Lu and written in a Zen vein, and a fictitious letter ascribed to Josef Knecht and addressed to Carlo Ferromonte, in which Hesse touches lightly upon Zen and dwells on the inscrutability of the enigmatic anecdotes of the Bi-Yän-Lu. The paucity and tenor of Hesse's remarks about Japan's form of Buddhism clearly indicate that his belated discovery of Zen had no appreciable influence upon his thinking. Zen was confirmation and not new disclosure. In its emphasis upon the identity of essence and appearance, upon the uniqueness of the individual, and upon the incommunicability of enlightenment, Hesse found a Weltanschauung highly consonant with that of his Siddhartha.

It was not a temporary shift in inclination from China back to India, but an irresistible attraction to Gotama Buddha himself that persuaded Hesse to write Siddhartha. Buddhism was as questionable as ever, but Buddha the man fascinated him. He was one of history's exemplary figures, a brother to such as Christ and Socrates, and a man to be emulated. Only when his story bogged down did Hesse actually return to and steep himself in Hinduism, Brahmanism, and particularly Buddhism. What had earlier been an intellectual interest now became, in ascetic withdrawal, protracted meditation, a real spiritual encounter. Hesse's coming to grips and to terms with India in 1920 and 1921 confirmed more than altered his earlier negative appraisal of her religions. However, in his renewed grappling with Buddhism, his own view of man and life evolved and emerged sharper and clearer. The ideal human possibilities he now envisaged made it possible for him to resume Siddhartha and to write its vital last four chapters.

AN IDEAL REALIZED

Laced though Siddhartha is with recondite allusions to the world of Indian thought and belief, it is anything but imperative to be an Indologist to cope with the tale. To be well acquainted with Brahmanism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to know who Brahma and Prajapati are, what Atman is, and what Om, Maya, and Sansara signify, to be familiar with the life of Gotama Buddha and with his teachings, or to know the derivation and implication of the names Siddhartha, Govinda, Vasudeva, Kamala, Kamaswami, and Sakyamuni, can enhance a reader's intellectual enjoyment of the novel, but is unnecessary for a basic understanding of it, can be detractive, and may even be misleading. All this erudition is backdrop and not substance. The text itself provides whatever commentary is necessary. Hesse the obdurate iconoclast did not suddenly become a cheap proselytizer. He was not bent upon dissemination of information, nor upon an extolment of Buddhism and a disparagement of Christianity. Siddhartha was old wine in a new skin. As usual, Hesse was primarily intent upon coming to grips and to terms with himself and with life: a European immersed in Western tradition and plagued by the problems of Western man. It is from this point of view and in its close relationship, despite its Oriental setting, to all his other stories, that Siddhartha might best be approached.

A new way of life was proposed in Rosshalde, cerebrally explored in Demian, attempted to disadvantage in Klein und Wagner, and then to advantage in Klingsors letzter Sommer. What had become a passionate ideal for Hesse finally received its full expression in Siddhartha. Of all his protagonists, Siddhartha alone fully realizes this ideal: he lives himself, learns thereby to know himself, and ultimately experiences complete self-realization. However, this was not actual experience mythicized, but possibility rendered mythically, the humanly ideal depicted in a correspondingly ideal timeless manner.

Just as for Klein and Klingsor, life for Siddhartha consists primarily of two areas of experience: the world of the mind and thought, and that of the body and physical action. Klein is at home in neither realm, Klingsor lives in the intoxication of each, and Siddhartha exhausts both possibilities, and in their exhaustion, transcends them and finds himself miraculously in yet a third realm, that of the soul, that ultimate stage in being when the individual lives in complete accord with himself and with life, when he is finally able, fully and not just for chance moments, to experience the essential oneness and meaningfulness of it all. After his encounter with Buddha, and with his subsequent awakening to the realization that the incidental I of his senses (“das zufällige Ich der Sinne”) is no less he than the incidental I of his thoughts (“das zufällige Ich der Gedanken”), Siddhartha, the Brahmin once dedicated to ritual and speculation and the Samana once given to asceticism, leaves the realm of the mind behind him. With his affair with Kamala the courtesan and his partnership with Kamaswami the businessman, his revelling in wealth, power, and sloth, his consequent self-disgust, life's growing repugnance, and his attempt to commit suicide, Siddhartha leaves the realm of the flesh behind him. The last phase of his life begins with his return to the river, to Vasudeva the ferryman, and to contemplation. And with his encounter with his son and his last bout with anxious love and fearful concern, Siddhartha emerges transfigured, a wise saintly figure given to his fellow humans in love and service: a paradoxical self-transcendence through self-realization. The first stage of Siddhartha's life is given to his incidental I of thought, the second to his incidental I of the senses, and the final stage to his incidental I of the soul. And with this last stage, Siddhartha will have experienced all that is humanly possible: a balanced ideal to which Hesse himself aspired but which he was not to enjoy.

Siddhartha depicts two ideals, two exemplary approaches to life based upon two diametrically opposed philosophies of life. It is the story of two Buddhas: of Gotama Buddha, an Eastern ideal, and of Siddhartha, Hesse's own ideal, a Western possibility. Their lives take similar courses and each ultimately finds his peace, but their assessments of life, their goals in life, the adjustment of each to life, and the message each leaves behind him are distinctly different. For Buddha, the physical world and life in all its involvements are Maya, a transient, painful illusion; for Siddhartha, all this is the very stuff of treasured being. Buddha's goal is a release from the wheel of Sansara, from life, its reincarnations and its incessant suffering, and a quest for Nirvana, for oblivious extinction; Siddhartha's goal is life in all its temporal agony and bliss. Buddha's is a denial and Siddhartha's an affirmation of the self. Siddhartha's message is to stand in awe of the self and of life, to embrace both for what they are, and to live fully. Buddha's message is to get these things behind one just as quickly as possible.

Despite the Orient's strong attraction, Hesse remained a Westerner. He was too thorny an individualist to become part of any organized body of thought or belief, whether foreign or native. In his wary eclectic manner he took from Eastern philosophies and religions, just as he did from their Western counterparts, only that which he understood or felt and which had a bearing upon his own life. Hesse's long and intimate association with the Orient made him fully aware of the ultimate futility and folly of Western man's quest in the East for a panacean wisdom or faith. The Orient can help Western man solve some of his problems but cannot solve them for him. This he must do himself, and can best do within the framework of the Western world. In the West's too ready embrace of the East, and vice versa, Hesse plainly detected too much unavailing flight into the exotic half-known. This was the sentiment to which he gave expression in Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920, Chinesische Betrachtung (1921), and Besuch aus Indien (1922), and which he reiterated in his letter of 1947 to a young Japanese author, and in his foreword of May 1955 for the sixteen-volume Japanese edition of his works.10 Hesse had become convinced that a common heritage of timeless spiritual values and of basic truths about man and life were to be found behind the religious and philosophical trappings of the Orient and the Occident and that it was therefore superfluous to turn one's back upon the Western world. It was not for Western man to try to become a Buddhist or a Taoist, but to cultivate the Oriential art of meditation. The oneness, timelessness, and meaningfulness of life were most readily accessible in this mode of thought, too long neglected in the West. And therein lay Hesse's chief indebtedness to the East.

TIME AND TIMELESSNESS

In Klein und Wagner, Hesse has Klein contend that time is but a figment of the mind. The astrologer of Klingsors letzter Sommer argues that time is only a deception and can be thought away just as it has been thought up. Klein experiences timelessness and the resultant oneness of all reality in his concluding euphoric reflections upon life, and Klingsor experiences this same timelessness and oneness while painting his self-portrait. These notions, merely broached in the summer of 1919, evolve into a mystical philosophy in Siddhartha. Following his attempt to commit suicide, Siddhartha becomes progressively more intrigued by the ever-changing yet never different, the ever-flowing yet always present river. At first it only puzzles him, but then further contemplative observation of its waters persuades him to conclude that there is no such thing as time. Contemplation of the river suggests only a present, no past, and no future. The river simply is. It is not a was and not a will be. It is not first here, then there, but is everywhere simultaneously: at its source, at every point along its way, and at its mouth. Contemplating himself in the manner in which he has contemplated the water, Siddhartha realizes that his very life is a river. It, too, has its source, its course, and its point of termination: birth, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, and death. So observed, his life also suggests only a present, and as such, timelessness. To contemplate life in this manner is to concentrate on essence, on the idea Siddhartha, and not just on the ephemeral manifestation of the idea, on noumenon and not phenomenon. Nor do Siddhartha's many reincarnations suggest any past or future. Siddhartha simply is. Time or timelessness depends entirely upon what the individual in his observation concentrates upon. To concentrate upon essence is to see the all synchronically and simultaneously, and to remain unaware of time. To concentrate upon phenomena is to see the all diachronically and sequentially, and to become aware of time.

Having experienced the timelessness and the implied oneness of the idea river and of the idea Siddhartha, Siddhartha proceeds a step further in his thinking as he gazes into the face of his dead Kamala. Lost in the contemplation of her countenance, he now experiences timelessness in the momentary manifestation of the idea. What Kamala was and is, is all simultaneously present before him. What he sees in his mind's eye leaves no suggestion of time. He feels only timelessness and the indestructibility of every life. Nothing is lost, nothing becomes a past. The moment or momentary manifestation is no longer a moment or momentary manifestation that will the next moment belong to a past, but is an eternity. The moment incorporates the past and the future. Was, in the sense of is no more, and will be, in the sense of is not yet, are meaningless. The moment is an eternity that reaches into the past and into the future and cancels both. That same night, contemplating himself as he had Kamala, Siddhartha experiences this same timelessness of his momentary self. Nothing was, all is. From the timelessness of his momentary self, Siddhartha now proceeds to the oneness of the momentary manifestation. If the individual at any one moment is all he ever was and all he ever will be, the momentary he is not only an eternity, but a oneness, not just a series of fragments in time but all of these things at all time. The momentary manifestation is therefore also the all, the idea; the momentary Siddhartha incorporates the idea Siddhartha. And with this conviction, Siddhartha finds full philosophical approbation for the life he has led, for his ample and intense living of the self. It is imperative to concentrate on and to experience the immediate self, as he has, for that self is the only, the whole, and the real self, and not just illusory and fleeting appearance, for phenomena is noumena.

In his ruminations, Siddhartha next proceeds from the self to life at large, from the oneness of the self to the oneness of life. About to leave for the city again in anxious quest of his wayward son, he imagines that the river is laughing at him. Peering into its waters, he notices his own image. It resembles his father. He recalls how he had forced his father to let him go among the Samanas, and how he had left never to return home. His father must have suffered what he was now suffering, and had probably died alone as he too was likely to do. His father's fate was also his. All appears to Siddhartha to be a comedy, a stupid repetition. When, together with Vasudeva, he again gazes into and listens intently to the river, he sees his father alone and mourning for his son, then himself alone and mourning for his son, and then his son eagerly pursuing his course of life, alone. Each is going his way, intent upon his goal, and suffering. The imagery still has no meaning for Siddhartha. All is still only an inane repetition. Continuing to peer at the river and listening even more intently to its voice, Siddhartha now sees a host of images, his father's, his own, his son's, Kamala's, Govinda's, the images of all those whom he ever knew or encountered, and all these faces blend and flow together, become a river hastening to its goal, become vapor, clouds and rain, and river again. Voices rise from the river, some in longing and suffering, and others in laughter, joy, and anger. The voices, in turn, blend and become one. All is a wondrous oneness, harmony, perfection. Repetition has finally become meaningful. Siddhartha now knows that each person is an integral part of the so-called past and the so-called future, that each person is a repetition of his ancestors and an anticipation of his successors, and that he is also a repetition of the human predicament, life become incarnate. All humans are therefore intimately related in a harmonious and glorious timeless oneness.

With this, Siddhartha has experienced timelessness in what appears to be time, and oneness in what appears to be multiplicity, on both the individual plane and that of life. According to this mystical mode of thought and feeling, any individual at any moment is all he ever was and all he ever will be, is what his forebears were and what his descendants will be, is what mankind was and will be, is a moment of eternity, a part and the whole. And with this philosophy, life loses its meaninglessness, aloneness its loneliness, transitoriness its painfulness, and death its fear. This is, of course, more religion than philosophy, more feeling than thought, and for Hesse in 1922 it was certainly more hope than actual experience or even conviction.

CONSCIOUS CRAFTSMANSHIP

Although Siddhartha traces the course of its protagonist's life from childhood to old age—unlike any of Hesse's preceding major tales—narrative continues to be minimal, and rumination, comment, description, and dialogue prevail as usual. The story is essentially a skeletal odyssey of the mind, the body, and the soul, an accounting more than a recounting, and an evolving inner more than an outer portrait. Situations, actions, and human interaction are confined to those that reflect this inner portrait, lend new dimensions to it, or occasion changes in it.

Klingsors letzter Sommer is intuitively controlled artistry at its best. Siddhartha is conscious craftsmanship at its best. In both instances form is perfectly consonant with and completely supportive of substance. The splintered structure of Klingsors letzter Sommer is in accord with its protagonist's hectic course of life. The highly symmetrical structure of Siddhartha is consonant with its protagonist's methodical staged self-realization. Actionally and situationally, the tale is a balanced tripartite, in keeping with Siddhartha's balanced progression from the realm of the mind, through that of the body, and to that of the soul. The first four chapters are given to things of the mind and are located on one side of the ferryman's river; the next four chapters are given to things of the body and are located on the other side of the river; and the last four chapters are given to the experiences of the soul and are located appropriately at the river's edge, between life's two extremes. Until the end of the fourth chapter, Siddhartha's story is an abbreviated variation of Sinclair's childhood and youth, his questioning of traditional institutions and his eventual leaving of the trodden paths of belief; his life among the child-adults (Kindermenschen) from Chapter 4 to Chapter 8, is a temporally extended variation on Klein's belated confrontation with raw life and Klingsor's passionate last summer; and his progressive illumination in the concluding chapters is a repetition in elaborate variation of Klingsor's climactic epiphany. Siddhartha leaves Sinclair behind when he embarks upon his self-living; he leaves Klein in his wake when he elects at the last moment not to commit suicide; and he goes beyond Klingsor when he himself becomes a Vasudeva, completely in accord with the self and with life, and given to his fellow humans in love and humble service. The structural symmetry of Siddhartha's life is deliberately stressed and effectively enhanced by the structural symmetry of his tale.

The substance of the novel, Hesse's equal concern with the three areas of human experience, finds appropriate expression not only in this balanced tripartite structure, but also in the very pulsation of the tale: patterned repetition resulting in a characteristic triple rhythm. Each of the three stages of Siddhartha's life, reflective of the three realms of experience, comprises an endless series of three-beat actional patterns.

As a Brahmin, Siddhartha practises ritual and contemplation, questions it all, and then leaves the world of the Brahmins behind him. As a Samana, he cultivates asceticism, questions its ultimate value, then leaves the world of the Samanas behind him. He encounters and listens to Buddha, questions his teachings, and leaves another possibility behind him. As a young Brahmin, Siddhartha takes part in discussion, in debate, and learns to meditate. He stirs happiness in the heart of his father, pride in the breast of his mother, and love in the hearts of the maidens. But neither the love of his father, nor that of his mother, nor that of Govinda can make him happy. His intellect is not satisfied, his soul is not at peace, and his heart is not stilled. Ablutions are futile, sacrifices bring no happiness, and prayer to the gods is questionable. Three Samanas chance to appear, with dusty and bleeding shoulders, scorched by the sun, and enveloped in loneliness. Siddhartha first informs Govinda, then his father, and then his mother of his intent to join the Samanas. His father responds in silent opposition, poses three questions and makes three statements, and then gives his reluctant permission. As an ascetic, Siddhartha stands silent, smarting, and parched in the seering glow of the noonday sun until he knows no thirst or pain, stands silent, wet, and cold in the rain until his body is too numb to feel and to protest, crouches silent, staring, and motionless among thorny thickets until his blood ceases to flow, the thorns to hurt, and his body to burn. He becomes a heron, a dead jackal, and is then dismembered by hyenas and picked at by vultures, becomes a skeleton, dust, and is then blown away. It takes Siddhartha three years to conclude that this asceticism is only flight from the self, from pain, and from the meaninglessness of life. Siddhartha has three opportunities to observe Buddha before their chance encounter and brief conversation. He praises Buddha's doctrine of oneness, questions his doctrine of release, then insists that he, like Buddha, must seek his own release in his own way. Buddha for his part cautions against the conflict of words and opinions, reminds Siddhartha that many may fare better for guidance, and wishes him well. This same insistent three-beat narrative rhythm characterizes Siddhartha's life as a worldling and his subsequent withdrawal and gradual enlightenment.

Until Siddhartha, Hesse commonly resorted to double self-projections representing the actual and the possible. The protagonist was actuality and his bosom friend was possibility. In keeping with the three-beat pulsation of Siddhartha, Hesse now elaborated this favorite device. He continued to present the actual, but extended his previous alternative to three possibilities. Siddhartha is Hesse's fictivized ideal self, and Govinda, Buddha, and Vasudeva are possibilities in life. Govinda is the self-effacing, institution-oriented person Siddhartha should not become, Buddha represents a laudable but undesirable life-denying model, and Vasudeva an exemplary life-affirming ideal. And when Siddhartha becomes this ideal, Vasudeva leaves the scene, just as Demian vanishes when Sinclair becomes his ideal self.

This three-beat rhythm of the tale's substance, structure, and action is extended deliberately to its mechanics of expression. Sentences consist of sequences of three words, three phrases, or three clauses, and often of medleys of two or even all of these triads. Common nouns frequently appear in clusters of three, proper nouns often trail two appositives, and adjectival and adverbial attributives are often twice repeated or twice extended, as too are phrases and clauses, and these, in turn, frequently begin with the same word. Sentences are often arranged in sequences of three, linked by structural parallelism and/or by a common and emphatic introductory or internal word or phrase. And upon occasion even paragraphs are triadically bunched. Visually, this patterned mode of expression is akin to an ornate tapestry characterized by many twice-repeated motifs. Musically, it suggests a composition in predominant triple rhythms.

Just as in Klingsors letzter Sommer and in Klein und Wagner, and for that matter, just as in most of Hesse's tales, inner state, outer situation, and language are again harmonized. Situation reflects and accentuates state, and expression assumes a consonant flow and rhythm. The opening paragraph of Siddhartha is as illustrative of this studied technique as it is of Hesse's deliberate three-beat cadence. The peaceful river setting accords with the inner tranquillity of the Brahmins who live at its edge, and the slow flow and even rhythm of the language is in keeping with the slow and even flow of the river, with the Brahmin's ritualized daily flow of ablutions, incantations, sacrifices, and contemplation, and with the correspondingly controlled flow and rhythm of their inner lives. This desired flow and rhythm of language is largely achieved by Hesse's methodically patterned mode of expression. When all is relatively peaceful, the three-beat language pattern prevails. When Siddhartha becomes agitated, outer situation changes to accord with altered inner state, and language, for its part, assumes a rapid flow and hectic rhythm. At such times, Hesse's organized three-beat clusters yield to a confusion of longer and shorter patterns, and often to a profusion of individual words. When, with the chapter “Kamala,” Siddhartha leaves the relatively tranquil world of the mind for the bustling and exciting world of the senses, he is left agitated by expectancy. Outer situation and inner state accord and language becomes sympathetically vibrant. The protracted descriptive introduction to “Kamala” (the first two paragraphs of the chapter) begins with a slow but nervous and impatient two-beat rhythm, which becomes a rapid and exciting, uneven staccato of irregularly brief phrases in four- then five-beat rhythms coupled with a persistent two-beat pulsation. A tardy flow and an emphatic, methodical four-beat rhythm follows, then abruptly turns into a rough intermingling of two- and three-beat rhythms, which in turn, terminates suddenly in the original, pure two-beat rhythm, now become decidedly insistent and much more impatient with its uneven spurt of telegrammatic phrases. Both flow and rhythm of language are as tense and labile as inner state and outer situation: another instance of Hesse's conscious and sensitive craftsmanship.

Siddhartha is less a story than a depiction of the human condition and of the humanly ideal, and a sublime statement of faith in man and life. For his timeless concern and timeless avowal, Hesse deliberately and appropriately chose a mythic mode of narration: timeless matter in a timeless manner. Form was again consciously used to accentuate substance. Rather than the contemporary Western world, he favored a less time-bound Oriental world of a remote past. And even this removed setting is rendered more conceptual than actual. It is permitted no distinguishing geography, landscapes are evoked and not depicted, and interiors are accorded little more than simple reference. This timeless everywhere is fittingly peopled by humans more archetypal than actual, by figures almost void of any physical or psychological dimensions. Siddhartha's father is everyman's stern father, and his mother is everyman's loving mother; Kamala is the traditional enticing courtesan who relents, and Kamaswami, the traditional hard-nosed and harried businessman; the Samanas are the disillusioned ascetics of life, and the child-adults, its naïve indulgers; Govinda is the intimate friend and the seeker of comfort in institutions and dogma, Vasudeva is the saintly one, Buddha is the enlightened teacher, and Siddhartha is the iconoclastic self-seeker who achieves his goal. The representatives of human possibility are involved in formalized interaction, engage in ritualized dialogue, and their lives trace archetypal courses. Patterned narration and description, impersonalized dialogue, verbal and syntactic simplicity, and archaic imagery make for a priestly flow of elemental Scriptural language, a language rendered as timeless as the universally typical setting, personae, and action.

To recapitulate: timeless substance (the human condition) found consonant expression in timeless setting, characters, lives, and language; the tripartite nature of this substance (the mind, body, and the soul) found accordant rhythmic expression in triadic structure, action, and phraseology; and this harmonizing of substance and form was extended to a harmonizing of inner state, outer situation, and mode of expression. This is Hesse's conscious artistry in its extreme and at its best.

Notes

  1. See “Aus einem Tagebuch des Jahres 1920,” Corona, 3 (1932), 193.

  2. “I absorbed and experienced spiritual India from childhood on just as I did Christianity. … India's world of religion and poetry was certainly far more enticing than this constrained Christianity, these saccharine poems, and these prevalently tedious pastors and preachers. Here no closeness oppressed me. … I was able to let India's first messages to me sink in without resistance, and these had a lifelong effect.” “Mein Glaube” (1931), Gesammelte Schriften (1957), Vol. 7, pp. 371–372.

  3. Hartmann (Berlin, 3rd ed., 1903), Oldenburg (Berlin, 1881), Deussen (Leipzig, 1897), Neumann (Leipzig, 3 vols., 1896–1902).

  4. See Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur (Zürich: W. Classen, 1946), pp. 59, 61.

  5. For Johannes Hesse's views on the religions of India and China, see his: Guter Rat für Leidende aus den altisraelitischen Psalter (Basler Missionsbuchhandlung, 1909), 128 pp.; and Lao-tsze, ein vorchristlicher Wahrheitszeuge (Basler Missions-Studien, 1914), 64 pp. Alexander Ular, Die Bahn und der rechte Weg des Lao Tse (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1903); Julius Grill, Lao Tszes Buch vom höchsten Wesen und vom höchsten Gut (Tübingen, 1910).

  6. “If India had attained things lofty and stirring in its monkish renunciation of the world, then old China had achieved things no less wondrous in its cultivation of a spirituality for which the body and the mind, religion and the everyday world do not represent hostile but friendly opposites, and both come into their own. If the ascetic wisdom of India was youthfully puritanical in the radicality of its demands, then the wisdom of China was that of a man experienced, sagacious, and not unacquainted with humor, a man not disenchanted by experience and not made frivolous by sagacity.” Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur (1946), pp. 61–62.

  7. Gesammelte Schriften (1957), Vol. 7, p. 420.

  8. “An einen jungen Kollegen in Japan” (1947), Gesammelte Schriften (1957), Vol. 7, p. 462.

  9. (St. Gallen: Tschudy Verlag, 1961), 35 pp.

  10. Eigensinn (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), p. 139; Gesammelte Schriften (1957), Vol. 3, pp. 857–858, Vol. 7, pp. 268, 462–463; Zenshū (Tōkyō: Mikasa Shobō, 1957–1959), Vol. 1, pp. 5–6.

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