EN 4208 SF II: Utopias and Dystopias LECTURE NOTES HERMANN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game Trans. Richard & Clara Winston, 2000. First published 1943.
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ON DYSTOPIAS/UTOPIAS |
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"Utopia is essentially in the determined negation of that which merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points at the same time to what should be." Theodor
A. Adorno [1964] from “Something’s
Missing: A Discussion between Ernest Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the
Contradictions of Utopian Longing”, in Ernest Bloch, The
Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack
Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. London and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
1988, 12. We might apply the logic of Adorno's view to Hesse's fictional world by saying that the future conceived as the context for the exemplary imaginary life of Joseph Knecht is his very personal "determinate negation" of what had become of Germany in the first three decades of the 20th century, keeping in mind two facts: that Hesse moved to and settled in Switzerland in protest, as the book blurb says, against German militarism during World War I, a position, we might add, Germany re-enacted with a vengeance in 1939. However obliquely, the book is therefore a reaction against what was happening in Europe then, a humanist's " temporary stay against confusion" (to adapt Frost's definition of poetry).
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1 NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE |
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1. Note the "apparatus" provided for the fictional autobiography. How would you characterize the narrator's fictionalized persona? quasi-scholarly? adulatory? Is there any room for the play of irony in Hesse's manipulation of this persona?
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Proposition 1
Hesse adopts the narrative persona of an assiduously scholarly biographer whose narrativizing of the reconstructed life of an exemplary individual (from the future) provides the opportunity for an idealization of the vocation of dedicated intellectual.
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2 RELATION TO CONTEMPORARY HISTORY |
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Father Jacobus: "To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.... I love ... our congregation ... one of those congregations whose purpose is to gather, educate, and reshape men's minds and souls, to make a nobility of them, not be eugenics, not by blood, but by the spirit - a nobility as capable of serving as of ruling." (156-57) [Note the reference to eugenics, and the stress on the capacity to serve. It is thus possible to treat Hesse's character as voicing a counter-position to that current in the 1930s-40s as the use by the Nazis of the myth of Aryan supremacy as the basis for genocide. On the same page, Father Jacobus alludes dismissively to the kind of "temporary success" associated with, among countless others, "The corporal who became a dictator overnight." We might read into this allusion a conflation of Napoleon and Hitler.]
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Proposition 2
The novel reacts to contemporaneous history (the entire period from 1914-the early 1940s) by offering an alternative sense of scale for human history, an alternative value structure for human values, and an alternative division of labour between the life of the intellect and the range of goal-directed human attitudes current through human history.
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3 EDUCATION |
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"When Plinio calls our teachers and Masters a priestly caste and us a pack of spoon-fed eunuchs, he is of course using coarse and exaggerated language, but there may well be some truth to what he says... For example, he contends that the Glass Bead Game is a retrogression to the Age of the Feuilleton, sheer irresponsible playing around with an alphabet into which we have broken down the languages of the different arts and sciences." (87) Do you think the novel as a whole bears out (or does not bear out) the accusation attributed to Plinio? What evidence would you use to support your viewpoint? Can it be said that Hesse is working with an antinomial position on education as offering, on the one hand, freedom from worldly strife in order to devote oneself selflessly to the cause of conserving knowledge, and on the other, conceding that the conservataion of tradition is paid for in a withdrawal from a true engagement with the world? What would be your assessment of this antinomy? Contrast the debate about studying towards building up a tradition of knowledge with the implicit criticism of this position in Robert Browning's poem "The Grammarian's Funeral".
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Proposition 3
The novel promotes a contentiously idealized notion of education as removed from the preoccupations of careers, ambition, money, competitiveness, and dedicated to the preservation and augmentation of human culture.
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4 MUSIC |
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Joseph Knecht: "Music does not consist only in those purely intellectual oscillations and figurations which we have abstracted from it. All through the ages its pleasure has primarily consisted in its sensuous character..." (80) How do you see music combine in these two functions in the Glass Bead Game?
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Proposition 4
Along the lines of the well known maxim by Walter Pater - "All art aspires to the condition of music" - Hesse apotheosizes music as the summation and emblem for the human impulse to harmonize human creativity, human capacity for refinement of pleasure, and the human desire to make sense of the world of experience as sensuous knowledge.
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5 THE GAME |
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Joseph Knecht: "Our Glass Bead Game combines all three principles: learning, veneration of the beautiful, and meditation." (299) Is it really necessary for the novel to flesh out the details of how this game is supposed to work? Does the absence of such detail affect your response to the novel as a whole? Where would place the emphasis in your reading of the life of Joseph Knecht - on the fact that he is described as the Master of a game inadequately detailed? or on his rejection of the institution represented by that game?
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Proposition 5
Hesse invents the notion of the Glass Bead Game as the focal point for reconciling the impulses to knowledge, play, creativity and the harmonizing of diversity.
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6 MEDITATION |
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The Music Master: "... meditation as a wellspring of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul." (94) How do you interpret this in light of the fact that it is the Music Master and the Elder Brother who embody this practice far more than either Joseph Knecht or the other characters in the novel? Where does meditation fit in respect of the several attacks launched by Plinio Designori on the Castilians as in danger of escapism?
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Proposition 6
Hesse's (modernist) sympathy for and openness towards alternative cultures (especially that of ancient China and India) makes him mindful of the recuperative powers of meditation, as well as other Eastern notions (such as the system of oracular knowledge enshrined in the I Ching), although the novel is careful in tackling the accusation of escapism that can be made against the culture of meditative practices.
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7 MISCELLANY |
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TECHNOLOGY The novel is striking for an ostensibly futurist setting which bypasses or elides most kinds of reference to technology. The humble radio appears twice (173, 189), and the motor car is mentioned several times (e.g. 356). This raises several questions: 1. What do we make of the elision of technology from his future? 2. How do we imagine the Game being played, in relation to technology? 3. What might we imagine the role of the web in any variation on the Game? Past/Future Is the book plausible about its future setting? What about it makes it conceivable as specifically in the future, givenhow rooted it is in historical awareness of the past and its traditions? Knecht's "writings" What do you think is accomplished by adding these to the narrative? How useful/convincing do you find them? How do they compare with the fictional writings of other fictional characters (e.g. Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago?) FREEDOM To what extent are the individuals committed to the Order free as claimed time and again in the novel (e.g. 64-5)?
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