Curtius on Das Glasperlenspiel

Hesse, who had many ties with Basel, adopted Switzerland as his homeland. Transposed into the Utopian "Castalia," it becomes the setting of Das Glasperlenspiel.

The work has been called a novel of education. That is one of its many aspects, but it does not touch the core of the book. We can approach it more closely by asking our­ selves why Hesse picks up the theme of education again, and why he presents Joseph Knecht first as a student, then as a teacher, and finally as "magister ludi," the master of the game. Unterm Rad depicts the boy's failure in school. In Das Glasperlenspiel the delinquent pupil catches up on his schooling, as it were, and becomes a teacher himself (at a monas­ tery school, like Narcissus). Thus a theme from Hesse's early period is taken up again in his latest, changed in value from negative to positive, and "reconciled on a higher level." Not just this theme alone. All the poet's themes (among which we found conflicts but also attempts at a cure) are taken up again and treated contrapuntally in this work. The Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung des Joseph Knecht [Essay at a Description of the Life of Joseph Knecht] is the last and now definitively realized transposition and sublimation of all those personal histories in which Hesse depicted himself as Camenzind, as Giebenrath, as Sinclair, as Siddhartha, as Goldmund. All those personal histories crystallized around conflicts: conflict with the home and its pietistic atmosphere; with the school; with the middle-class world; with society in general. Finally, too, the conflict with the chosen profession —that of literature. As late as 1927 the poet notes: "As for myself, I am certain that no respectable, hard-working person would ever shake my hand again if he knew how little I value my time, how I waste my days and weeks and even months, with what childish games I fritter away my life." A fifty year-old writer who cannot stop playing games and admits it with a bad conscience. But is the play-instinct something to be ashamed of? Undetected and unanalyzed residue of a bour­geois prejudice! Play and the capacity for play is one of the most important functions of man's relation to the world. A learned historian of culture has meticulously examined Amer­ican Indian games in order to confront homo sapiens with homo ludens. Animals and men play, and so do the Gods, in India as in Hellas. Plato views man as an articulated puppet fashioned by the Gods perhaps for the sole purpose of being their plaything. What conclusion shall we draw? The play-instinct is to be affirmed. A negative converted into a positive.

To play one's own game with the deep seriousness of a child at play. The highest achievement would be—to invent a game of one's own. This the poet has succeeded in doing. He is the inventor of the glass bead game. He has learned to master it: the game of life, the game of the beads. Thus he has become in two senses of the word magister Iudi (in Latin ludus means both "game" and "school"). The glass bead game is the sym­bol for the successful completion of the school of life. The discovery of this motif determined the conception: at once inspiration and stroke of luck; the seed from which the golden blossom sprouted.

Motif and theme are two diferent things, and critics would do well to distinguish between them. The motif is what sets the fable (the "mythos" in Aristotle's Poetics) in motion and holds it together. Motif belongs to the objective side. Theme comprises everything that concerns the person's primary orientation toward the world. The thematics of a poet is the scale or register of his typical reactions to certain situations in which life places him. Theme belongs to the subjective side.

It is a psychological constant. Motif is given by inspiration, discovered, invented—all of which amounts to the same thing. He who has nothing but themes cannot attain to epic or drama. Or, for that matter, to the great lyric. Here we touch upon a law of aesthetics the best formulation of which I find in T. S. Eliot: "The only way of expressing emo­tion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." By means of the motif, the "objective correlative," the insuf­ficiencies of personal experience are overcome. The motif is an organic, autonomous structure, like a plant. It unfolds, forms nodes, branches out, puts forth leaves, buds, fruit.

Once the bead game was in existence, a whole world had to be built up around it. That could only be an imaginary world, i.e., a Utopia, or a Uchronia (Renouvier's concept). But this world had to be transferred to an era which was not too dis­tant in time from our own. For elements of our own culture must still survive in Castalia. Hence a—somewhat labored— introduction is necessary to serve as a bridge between the twenty-second and twentieth century. This allows for a cri­tique of our age, but, what is more important, it demonstrates that the glass bead game has precursors in every epoch of the European mind. This means, however, the integration of western tradition into Hesse's spiritual universe.

And the Orient? Like all the main themes of the poet it is crystallized on to the new structure. The work is dedicated to the "Travelers to the East." The psychic techniques of Yoga are practiced in Castalia. India reappears in Indischer Lebenslauf [The Indian Life]. Nevertheless, the role of guide has passed to China. Castalia has a "Chinese House of Studies," it even has, as in a rococo park, a Chinese hermitage called the "Bamboo-grove." There one finds gold­ fish ponds, yarrow stalks for consulting the oracle, brushes and water-color bowls: pretty chinoiserie. But when the her­mit is invited to Waldzell, there arrives in his stead only a daintily-colored Chinese letter containing the irrefutable as­ sertion: "Movement leads to obstacles." Seneca, Thomas a Kempis, Pascal had stated something similar, if with less pre­ciosity. Thus Das Glasperlenspiel also concludes and crowns the poet's Oriental cycle. And yet the world of the East is not the essential core of the book but rather the decorative back­ ground. Its effect is "antiquarian," as Demian says of Dr.
Pistorius's Abraxas-mythology.

Das Glasperlenspiel is a western book. An ancestry is es­tablished for the bead game originating with Pythagoras and Gnosticism and continuing through Scholasticism and Hu­manism to the philosophy of Cusanus, the universal mathe­matics of Leibniz, and even to the intuitions of Novalis. Two names, however, with which only the fewest readers might be expected to be familiar, are mentioned with especial piety: Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687-1752) and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-1782), great Swabian theologians, in whom a strict belief in the Bible was united with apocalyptic doctrines, theosophy, chemistry, and Cabbala. They are in­ termediaries between Bohme, Swedenborg, and Schelling. Oetinger was pastor at Hirsau, near Calw, where Hesse was born. The prominence given these names implies the resolu­tion of the conflict with the Swabian Pietism of his home and, by the same token, a rapprochement with Christianity. This rapprochement is further evidenced by Knecht's intimacy with Pater Jacobus and the Order of St. Benedict.

Castalia, too, is an Order. So Hesse's oldest theme is drawn into the organization of the work: the theme of the monas­tery. It is most remarkable how this theme too is transformed by a newly-won freedom. As he has invented his own game, so the poet has invented his own order. Psychologically this means: he has become his own master. By his own full power he can impose the authority with which he will comply. What had, as a neurotic conflict, been a stumbling block becomes, through "anagogy," a building block. The revolt against all external authority is now recognized as the passionate search for an authority derived from his own inner law. Joseph Knecht passes through all the degrees of the Order, submitting voluntarily to its regulations. After long service, long master­ ship, he "awakens" (we recall that Goldmund was "awak­ened" by Narcissus). Knecht's inner law compels him to quit the Order. His departure takes place in the prescribed cere­monial forms. To be sure, the administration of the Order cannot approve of this step. As he is about to leave, Knecht says to himself: "If only he had been able to explain and prove to the others what seemed so clear to him: that the 'arbitrariness' of his present action was in reality service and obedience; that it was not freedom he was going toward but new, unknown, and uncanny obligations; and that he was go­ing not as a fugitive but as one who is summoned, not will­ fully but obediently, not as master but as sacrifice." So, after five decades, the boy's flight from the monastery school is re­ peated, only with its signs reversed from negative to positive;

recast and purged of all slag it has come to be understood in its deeper significance: as a level of transcendence. In this work of the poet's old age, all the previous stages of his life have become transparent to him. It was conceived on the level of "illumination."

Where is the awakened teacher of the Order summoned by his inner law? To the "world outside," the ordinary human world beyond Castalia's serene precincts. The "unknown ob­ligation" toward which he is moving is—death. But this de­ parture for the unknown, no longer of a wandering scholar but of a man who is "summoned," is the heroic setting-out of the Nordic man whom Oriental absorption does not re­strain. Final confirmation of the return to the West; Prot­estant nonconformism; Düreresque knight-errantry.

One last point! We found that in Hesse psychoanalysis and Oriental wisdom were attempts at healing neurotic conflicts. In addition, a theme to which we have barely alluded, although it runs through all the books from Peter Camenzind on—the escape into alcoholic intoxication. Das Glasperlen-spiel is the result and testimony of a self-cure, the only cure that is dignified and genuine because it proceeds from the very core of the person. Psychoanalysis, Yoga, Chinese wis­dom, were only expedients. He who has been "awakened" no longer needs them. The conflicts are resolved in a blessed new period of creativity. It is brought on by the discovery of the bead game. This functions as the center around which the person and the productivity of the poet are reorganized. The resolution of discords is the great new experience. That is why music is so important in the work. It is a symbol of euphony and concord, of rhythmically articulated spiritualization— harmony with the All.

A more precise analysis, a more searching appreciation of the rich late work I must leave to others.
1947

from the book Essays on European Literature by Ernst Robert Curtius