In his contemporaneous review of The
Glass Bead Game, Werner Vortriede suggested that, because of its length and
because of Hesse’s age, it might be considered his last will. If it is not
quite that, it certainly seems reasonable to reflect that it is a summation of
Hesse’s life and thought. The Glass Bead Game is a humanist commitment
to the vitality of everyday existence, a plea that learning and knowledge do
not become ends in themselves but are harnessed to the furtherance of human
society. Hesse describes the vision as encompassing ‘wise men and poets and
scholars harmoniously building the valued and vaulted cathedral of Mind.’ A
cathedral, then, something to be venerated, but a cathedral to enterprise,
functional, reflecting the currents of human endeavour.
The Glass Bead Game of the novel’s
title is, it initially appears, the ultimate achievement of human culture. The
novel takes place some four or five hundred years in the future, in a world
that has passed beyond what is described as the feuilletonistic age (that is,
our own current society) in which war and conflict have predominated, and in
which culture is trivialised and coarsened. The action is set in the broadly
mid-European country of Waldzell, a secular state enjoying peace and
prosperity. In particular, it focuses on Castalia, a pedagogical province where
the academic pursuit of pure knowledge has become an aesthetic discipline,
personified most significantly by the Glass Bead Game.
This, although its precise nature is
never fully explained, is a philosophical game in which glass beads are used to
demonstrate the progress of the players through the days during which a game
may take place. The goal is to find interconnectedness in the realms of arts
and knowledge – the precise mathematical notation of a Bach fugue or Chinese
influences in music and literature and so on. It calls for remarkable and
wide-ranging cultural knowledge and an ability to make and demonstrate subtle
connections. Essentially, it is an attempt to discover a grand unified theory.
Games are played according to strictly prescribed rules, and are comprehensible
only to a limited number of trained experts. These players are revered for
their erudition and remain cloistered within the community of Castalia like
medieval monks in a monastery, under the leadership of the Magister Ludi,
the Master of the game.
This pursuit of cultural perfection,
then, has become a secular religion. And in all of this, it is music which is
pre-eminent, the masterful art form from which everything else takes shape and
meaning. Thus, our first introduction to Joseph Knecht, the hero of the novel,
a young man who will rise through Castalian society to become Magister Ludi,
is as a child learning from the Music Master and showing, from this early age,
a remarkable aptitude and sympathy for music.
If all is peace and tranquility in
the post-feuilletonistic age, and if the elite of human society is free to
ruminate on the creation of aesthetic perfection through the Glass Bead Game,
one might assume that the future vision being created by Hesse is therefore one
of utopia. It is, though, far from that. Castalia is a state in decline and it
remains, moreover, largely ignorant of the fact, even denying it when
confronted with the truth in Joseph Knecht’s letter of resignation. Castalia,
then, is reduced to stasis, a state going nowhere, achieving nothing. Perhaps,
an idealist might argue, such a state of affairs is sufficient if it ensures
contentment, wealth, peace for the inhabitants, some Benthamite idyll of the
greatest good for the greatest number. But how does one judge what represents
the greatest good for the greatest number? Do we mean those people living in
the here and now? Or those to come? If what you are doing now, while creating
an environment of stately comfort for the majority, will nonetheless undoubtedly
lead to decay and downfall at some stage in the near future, can this action
still be categorised as the greatest good for the greatest number? Hesse’s
novel firmly answers in the negative.
Castalia may have overcome the
Feuilletonistic age, but to what end? It has become a dry, sterile, solipsistic
world, inward and devoted only to the glorification of art, dismissive of
history, politics or anything of practical value. This is not, surely,
something to be aspired to? And, furthermore, let us examine its approach to
the arts, because it reveals a decidely unartistic, uncreative approach.
Invention is deprecated, innovation is a foible only of the young and naive.
True art, for the Castalian, does not involve creation as we would understand
it: it is merely a form of intellectual exegesis, making connections, drawing
parallels, using one form to shed light on another. But nothing is created as a
result, only a game, mimesis. It is knowledge for the sake of knowledge, with
no end product and no aspiration. That is not art, that is not culture, that is
not the free enunciation of the human spirit. Further, this husk of creativity
is presided over by a self-selecting elite, far removed from the interference
of non-Castalians. That is nothing short of cultural despotism: Castalia, then,
is a future-world fascist state in which all creative thought is restricted and
channeled into official forms. It is a mirror of the Fascist world Hesse
inhabited while he wrote The Glass Bead Game, in which the Nazi weltanschauung
and its glorification of myth is replaced by the pointless glorification of
art: a mirror, but the reflection is equally vile.
In the novel, then, we follow Joseph
Knecht from being a frightened but hopeful child falling under the spell of the
Music Master through to his assumption of the great office of Magister Ludi,
the culmination of his aspirations. His journey is not straightforward and,
along the way, he encounters wise and able men who will greatly inform his
future career. Doubts settle in his mind. While still a young student he
confronts Plinio Designori, the son of a wealthy industrialist who, because of
his family’s standing, is being educated in Castalia. An outsider, he is highly
critical of Castalian ways and the two boys engage in lengthy philosophical
debates and finally, through their confrontations, become friends. Later,
Knecht makes a pilgrimage to visit the Elder Brother, a mystical hermit steeped
in Chinese philosophy, from whom Knecht begins to learn self-knowledge and transcendence.
On an ambassadorial trip to the Benedictine monastery in Mariafels, Knecht
encounters Father Jacobus and is confronted by the narrowness of Castalian
vision, the shortcomings of their renunciation of history as any meaningful
field of study, their insularity and consequent naïve vulnerability to the
machinations of the rude world beyond. His doubts increase.
The Music Master and the Elder
Brother are, in complementary ways, Knecht’s guides to spiritual peace and
understanding; Plinio Designori is his link to the real world; Thomas van der
Trave, Knecht’s predecessor as Magister Ludi, is his guide to the ways
of Castalia and the dignified performance of civic duty. By comparison Fritz
Tegularius, the wayward Nietzschean outsider, shows Knecht that there is an
alternative to the stultified, tradition-bound ways of Castalia, a
free-thinking but highly dangerous, possibly mad, approach to life and order.
While those in Castalia deprecate such activity, Knecht accepts, even
encourages it. He is of Castalia, but not wholly subsumed by it. And this sets
the template for all of his relationships, while making inevitable his eventual
renunciation of high office and retreat into real life.
Thus, Knecht stands at the centre of
a series of binaries – Castalia and the world, the Glass Bead Game and
realpolitik, secular reason and religious observance, pedagogy and pragmatic
action, teachers and students, servitude and mastery, self and others,
inwardness and outwardness, yin and yang, the vita activa and the vita
contemplativa. Castalian – and western – society tends to exaggerate these
binaries, forcing them to stand in opposition to one another. This is the way
to dogma, Hesse warns. In the case of Castalia it will lead, as Knecht comes to
realise, to its inevitable decline, divorced as it is from reality. For the
real world, brute forces – military or economic – stand isolated from the
culture that can be derived through an understanding of aesthetic beauty.
Secularity loses an element of grace, while monastic life underestimates the
importance of the human. Individuation at the expense of connection with
society leads, as with the Elder Brother, in his remote hermitage, to
meaningless isolation. Knecht, placed between these binary opposites, cognisant
of the strengths and weaknesses of each, comes to understand how a path may be
established which avoids their extremes and instead achieves a state of
harmony.
It is Father Jacobus, however, who
is the key to the novel. The knowledge which permits Knecht’s ultimate leap in
understanding is initially latent, undeveloped. It is through Father Jacobus
that Knecht truly comes to understand that the rarefied study of aesthetics and
art, divorced from realpolitik, can only end in terminal decline, while
pragmatism is the key to understanding how true harmony must be achieved by the
synthesis of the discrete worldviews offered by Castalia, the monastery, the outside
world and the searchers for self-knowledge. Without Father Jacobus, it is
likely that Knecht would have remained a successful Magister Ludi for
the rest of his days, presiding unknowingly over the decline of the
organisation he loved. Instead, he renounces his magistracy and, in so doing,
saves both Castalia and himself.
Essentially then, the novel revolves
around the need to ‘know thyself’, the continuous, often painful, always
difficult process of attaining self-awareness. This can only be achieved, Hesse
argues, through disciplined discipleship under sages who can teach the way to
enlightenment, and through consequent renunciation of all but the intellectual
pursuit of self-knowledge. It is an ascetic life, to be sure. Thus, Knecht
believes himself to be following his calling throughout his career, devoting
himself first to the Music Master, learning at the feet of the Elder Brother,
Father Jacobus, the Magister Ludi and so on, all the while progressing
seamlessly through the echelons of Castalian society. But this, he finds, is
not his destiny, this is not his road to self-awareness. On the contrary, all the
trappings of office, the strictures of rigid Castalian life, they serve only to
obscure from Knecht his true purpose. And that, he realises finally, is to
teach, to pass on the harmonious understanding of life and existence to a new
generation, to boys as yet untouched by formal learning and discipline. It is
now that Knecht finally reaches some accommodation with his own self and
reaches a degree of serenity. In the process, his demeanour changes from polite
servility into equally polite assurance. He outgrows Castalia, the Glass Bead
Game, the cloistered life of aesthetic reason.
In the end, Knecht gives up the
sterility of Castalia as, one feels from the outset, this free-thinking man
would inevitably have had to do. He does not turn, however, to the world of the
religious order in Mariafels and to the implicit suggestion of politicking that
underlies organised religion. Instead, he decides to leave for the real world
and do something useful, worthwhile, but still in keeping with his temperament,
training and background. He agrees to act at personal tutor to the troublesome
son of his old friend Designori. In this way, the main section of the novel
ends with another master-pupil relationship, this time with Knecht as the
master.
Or is he?
The novel is in five parts, of which
the first is the longest and most important. The style of this first part is a
challenge, but one which Hesse manages superbly. It is written in a
deliberately dry manner, mimicking academic prose and thus always remaining
objective and restricting itself entirely to facts. Given this approach, it is
inevitable that a certain distancing must be effected between the reader and
the protagonist and, it is true, Joseph Knecht, although evidently a good man,
does not endear himself to the reader. There is, in his asceticism, something
remote about Knecht. And yet, by the end of the Knecht section, Hesse has
managed to bring out his essential humanity to the extent that we feel
comfortable in the presence of the man. It is an impressive feat of writing.
The remainder of the novel is given
over to “writings” by Knecht himself, in which he imagines himself to be a
character from a different age and society. In this way, the novel tells four
stories relating four reincarnated lives of the same man, Joseph Knecht. In
each, what is most important to the human soul and human destiny is the
transference of knowledge, understanding and wisdom from person to person,
generation to generation. Knowledge can only come from within, but that knowledge
can only be released from without.
In truth, these latter stories have
nothing of the power of the main narrative, and there is a sense of repetition
in them, the feeling that we are being unnecessarily lectured by an author who
has already eloquently made his point. But The Glass Bead Game is an
astonishing piece of literature.
