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Hermann Hesse & "Magister Ludi" 4/16/2016 4:07:02 PM
According to an article in Wikipedia, the writer Hermann Hesse came from a cultivated family who gave him a good background for his later writing career. He suffered turbulent spells while he was growing up. Even his mother, who recognized his gifts, wrote that he was headstrong. During adolescence, he endured depression, tried to commit suicide, and spent time in an institution. In later life, of course, he enjoyed great success as a writer of poetry and fiction.
I read three of his well-known shorter novels some years ago and am now coming to the end of his great novel: "Magister Ludi" or, as it's sometimes called, "The Glass Bead Game". I'm finding it unique, original, and well worth spending time with.
It emphasizes the benefits of what we now call "spiritual" life and features one talented, sensitive man's discovery that he needs new values and that our society needs new standards to go by.
Hesse didn't didn't adhere to the novel-writing techniques that are in vogue today, and this can be an advantage. The novel is replete with pages of straight narrative. It's a chronicle, so there's no real plot, and Hesse didn't include a major female character, unusual in a significant novel. The only other landmark novel I can think of that lacks strong female input is "Moby Dick".
While "Magister Ludi" isn't hard to read, it has its own form. Most of it is the story of the life of Joseph Knecht -- a gifted man who becomes the leader of an intellectual and spiritual elite that operates several centuries in the future. The last part of the novel consists of poems and three novellas that Knecht wrote.
Hesse doesn't describe the glass bead game in detail but refers to it frequently. I take it to be an intricate puzzle that synthesizes the spiritual aspects of the world's major cultures. I suspect that readers have advanced many interpretations of the bead game. Theodore Ziolkowski, who wrote the introduction to the translation I'm reading suggests that Hesse sees weakness in the tendency of advanced technological and bureaucratic societies to form elite groups that separate themselves from common life.
Ziolkowski also suggests that the main characters of most of Hesse's novels follow a path that leads them to appreciation for spiritual values. The pattern he describes reminds me of Kierkegaard's three stages along life's way: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the spiritual.
The story he tells isn't credible but by using devices that fiction excels at, Hesse succeeds in making it convincing. Moreover, the novel intrigues the reader with the possibility of relevance to the world around us, as Joseph Knecht leaves the privileged, government-sponsored confines of Castralia to make a contribution to the wider world.
In a way, the meaning of the story is simple: secluded elites serve a purpose. For some gifted people, though, it's preferable to be out in the world, bringing benefit to their struggling contemporaries without compromising principles or natural abilities.
Hesse's own life is an example. He didn't let the withering pressure of Europe's problems during the Nazi era prevent him from composing his message and getting it out.
It's been said a few times and is worth saying again that Hesse's big masterpiece occupies a place with the novels of Thomas Mann in the probing, humane, imaginative strain in German letters that began with Goethe and hasn't come to an end.
