Artist against Himself: Hesse's Siddhartha

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SOURCE: “Artist against Himself: Hesse's Siddhartha,” in History of Ideas Newsletter, Vol. 10, Summer, 1958, pp. 55–58.

[In the following essay, Spector comments on Hesse's belief that the communication of essential truth can take place only in a person's own experiential circumstances, and the effects of this belief on literary art.]

In Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, considered for what it has to say about the purpose of art, rests the fundamental failure of existentialist philosophy as a doctrine for the literary artist. Given the truth of Hesse's message, the artist must deem himself incapable of fulfilling the basic function of the creative writer. For at the heart of Siddhartha is the paradoxical statement that the teacher cannot teach and the student cannot learn, since communication of the essential truth is to be found solely in one's own experiential circumstances.

All the superficialities of knowledge are available to the Govindas of this world—those who are concerned not with the great secrets of life but with the falsity of salvation that comes through illusion. They may very well listen to the words of the wise men, to the Brahmins, to the Samanas, and to the Gotamas, and they may believe—as do those who listen to the novelist—that here, indeed, is the philosophy of life, but from Hesse's point of view this is no more than the art of self-deception.

What is it that we can learn from an author whose motto, derived from the Upanishads, is, “He whose reflective pure spirit sinks into Atman / Knows bliss inexpressible through words,” when the very substance of the statement is destructive of the meaning of art? In the dictum of the artist is a renunciation of the purpose of his craft. Yet for all the experience that Siddhartha goes through, he is still able to say at the very end, “knowledge can be communicated but not wisdom. One can find it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” Here is a distrust of the artist as teacher and of words as implements of truth.

Central to the difficulty of Hesse's position is the negation presented by existentialism in general, whether it seeks expression in philosophy or literature. Its failure is dialectical, and its dilemma is not unlike the logic presented by the skeptics, who maintained that real knowledge of things is impossible, thereby, at the same time, refuting the principle that they were declaring. So, too, for the existentialist. If the real meaning of things rests in the individual experience, it is useless to try to convince another by virtue of one's own discovery. No matter how profound the revelation of the mystic, it is muted by his own conviction. Whatever the philosophical difficulties of this position, they are as nothing when compared with the impossibilities that they present to an artist convinced of their validity, yet dedicated to the normal functions of his work.

Since literature rests on experience and almost pre-supposes that the totality of experience produces knowledge and wisdom, Hesse's intuitive view, divorced from past teachings—as Siddhartha must shed these to come to true knowledge—runs counter to the purpose of literature itself. The possibility of developing empathy is minimized by the constant reiteration that Siddhartha can learn only by seeking within himself. Consequently, what happens to Siddhartha, what knowledge he does gain, can only be meaningless to the reader. Just as Siddhartha must renounce the teachings of priests, ascetics, and parents, and reject the views of courtesan and merchant, the reader must repudiate the instruction of Siddhartha. If this becomes a commentary on an attitude toward literature, it denies the identification so essential between readers and characters, upon which so much of the effectiveness of a novel depends.

Perhaps the point seems labored. It may give the impression that the message of the work is being mistaken for the attitude of the artist toward his creation. No easier way to examine these possibilities exists than a simple comparison between Hesse and Joyce. Both writers concern themselves with the rhetorical device of the epiphany. Most of the stories in Dubliners, for example, provide the revalatory experience, and the theme, almost redundantly, is frustration. Yet, for Joyce, the objective of his art is purposeful. Despite the very personal meaning of his stories, they are felt and experienced by his readers. Their theme is not self-negating; their effect is not the destruction of the meaning of the work of art because of the hopelessness of the author's communication with his reader. But the acceptance of Siddhartha must convince the reader that the work itself must be disregarded, just as existentialist philosophy must disqualify itself as an explanation of the world view that it is attempting to convey.

It is not that Siddhartha finds “that the Buddha's wisdom and secret was not teachable, that it was inexpressible and incommunicable. …” It is not that all other forms of teaching—of which, after all, this was the epitome—are equally unsatisfactory. Instead, it is that the only was to real knowledge, as Hesse sees it, is inconsistent with the purposes of literature and hence with the novel itself. Oddly enough, the theory of knowledge is related to the Platonic notion of the inner voice. But what validity can there be for the artist, if this is personal and self-sufficing, if this is symbolic to the individual? The voice of the poet and novelist so stirred must fall unheeded upon listeners intent upon more than the mere illusion of truth.

In effect, the problem for Hesse is far too commonly shared by the modern idiosyncratic author. It involves more than the fragmentation of knowledge in our world, more than the individualized and personalized idiom of the coterie writer. Indeed, it suggests that the experience of the artist is so specialized, so meaningful to him and to nobody else that the very raison d'être of his expression is questionable.

At the same time Siddhartha's attitude suggests one of the more unsavory aspects of the contemporary writer. In this unwillingness to believe in the teachings of others, in this self-reliance, and in this patronizing and smug confidence of one's own superiority, there is the apparently unconscious, although no less deliberate, demeaning of the audience. Not only is one's experience impossible to express, but the lack of desire to cast such pearls to the swine removed the author from his reader, and further impedes the artist's responsibility to communicate.

Ironically enough, Siddhartha is itself a repudiation of its author's thesis. All that has been said of the novel thus far concerns the work as a philosophy of life, and, in turn, considers the relation of its point of view to a theory of the meaning of art. But Hesse's work, whatever his desire, is foremost a novel. If what it teaches is not what Hesse meant it to teach (which aim is a contradiction of his view), fortunately it does not have to be judged according to this “intentional fallacy.” Accepting Hesse's values, the reader could not identify with Siddhartha in his quest for knowledge; acknowledging the existentialist epiphany of the novel as anything more than a failure in man's noble effort to seek out the truth, the reader could only reject the significance of the work; but happily, artistic experience overcomes the dogma of philosophy and literary theory.

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