In good spirit
Nick Totton
MY Belief Hermann Hesse (Jonathan Cape £6.50) These selected essays and reviews are important for students of Hesse, and interesting to all of us legitimate or bastard children of European culture. But the ,question Hesse himself would ask is: is this a good book, from which we can learn to see the world more clearly and to live our lives more fruitfully ? Such unfashionable questions must, in a mediated way, lie behind all evaluation; their unfashionableness relates to the nervousness surrounding the central problematic of twentieth-century literature, one Which Hesse raises but does not confront : What is the point of writing?
Hesse is to an extraordinary extent possessed by literature. He quite unselfconsciously wears the identity of 'the poet': a Poet, a writer, is who he is, and he will brook no further demands from humanity. The poet', furthermore, is a crucial figure. The great, the real, writers, generally unknown to their own time, form 'a secret Priesthood or conspiracy, which from an anonymous hiding place directs intellectual destinies throughout the earth'. Hesse regrets the decline of status which follows from general literacy. 'Books have ceased to be mysteries, they are accessible to everyone, so it seems. From a liberal democratic Point of view, this is progress. .. from other Points of view, however, it is a devaluation and vulgarisation of the spirit'.
The spirit: a key term, in these essays of a German litterateur who 'does not believe in socialism', does not believe in political and economic realities which demand a resPonse, a recognition that within them one's own perceptions are inevitably situated. But very often, Hesse is using the old term to contain a very contemporary concept: that of a higher state of consciousness behind or beneath the social lie, the masks and muddiness of everyday life. One might translate spirit' not too artificially as 'ego-less consciousness' or 'game-free real ity' ; and find a description of the double nature of humanity in a coercive, Oedipal culture, of the Sleep-walking aspect of 'normality'—the description of the world which in Hesse appeals to the modern counter-culture that has so enthusiastically adopted him. Academics may grumble, but this rapprochement is not accidental.
Hesse very early recognised the validity and importance of Freudianism. In his analysis of human culture founded on guilt and the flight from death, in his linking of guilt With language as a deathly reversal of reality into 'simplification, systems, abstractions, and other half and whole lies', Hesse is zeroing in on the revolutionary implications of Freudian metapsychology which have only recently been disinterred by Deleuze, Lacan and others.
And yet ... Hesse was finally much closer to the Jungian revision than to Freud : much closer to an optimistic denial of any antagonism between ego and unconscious, wholly unwilling to face the unpalatable implications of the theory of sublimation. For Hesse, sublimation is about the sublime. He believes in the spiritualisation of repression, sees the forward path of the human race as being from guilt and culture to 'faith'—and more culture. Hesse will not break with bourgeois culture; hence the fundamental ambivalence of his work.
It is hard, reading these pieces, not temporarily to become a hard-line Marxist in reaction against the soft-centredness, the toothlessness, of a social critique which while perceiving alienation regards the whole politico-economic sphere as an unfortunate vulgarity, and takes as its wholly abstract goal 'the regulation of human life through the spirit'. Writing of Dostoevsky just after World War I, Hesse sees the decline of Europe—a concept of the deepest importance to him—contained in its young people's preference for Dostoevsky over Goethe. Writing of Goethe just before the Nazis took power in Germany, he talks of how `GoetheN problem was not his alone, and not that of the middle class alone, but . . . the problem of every German who was serious about the spirit of the written word'. How many outside the middle class does that include?
In a way this is petty sniping. But passages like this focus the vague but massive discontent that emerges as one reads through these charming, perceptive, intelligent yet ultimately precious essays. Early in life Hesse seems to have formed an unbreakable association between high states of consciousness and the reading and writing of books. For him, people who do not write— let alone those who do not read—are not completely real. He simply cannot connect with them.
I exaggerate somewhat here, perhaps; but there is a quite unconscious snobbery so basic to Hesse's thought as to be hard to isolate. He is writing from within high bourgeois culture while he writes against it. He is personally defeated by Nazism just as, and for just the same reasons as, the German liberal bourgeoisie is politically defeated. 'I see no way of engaging in active opposition because basically I do not believe in socialism'. And 'socialism' must be taken very widely. What follows is a kind of conservative-idealist anarchism. 'Consequently my opposition to the Third Reich is no different from my opposition to every other Reich . . . and all. rule by violence— the opposition of the individual to the mass, of quality to quantity, of the soul to matter.'
And so Hesse moves definitively to a pseudo-Taoist quietism, to the saintly wisdom which knows that it knows nothing. One of the more tenable positions, certainly, in the face of the iecalcitrance of social reality. And yet why is it so clearly a defeat? Because Hesse is a European intellectual, who cannot avoid wrestling with the problem of social praxis, of changing the world, which is central to Western culture. Hesse is political whether he likes it or not: his only way out of the apparently conflicting demands of 'spirit' and social reality which constitute bourgeois culture is to break with it by transcending it. Hesse spent his career transcending false dichotomies; this final failure of nerve can only be seen as a defeat.
But where Hesse failed, no-one has yet succeeded. Identical problems are being tackled in such current works as `L'AntiOedipe' or 'Zen and the Art . . .' The ambivalence and confusions of the essays and novels are our own : like Hesse, we find our intimations of disalienation everywhere and nowhere, we stumble through the Magic Theatre with no idea which is the exit and which the way back into illusion and repression. And one must admit the sense in which this is precisely Hesse's greatness, his ability to figure forth 'the world as it really is . . . a jungle of beautiful and terrifying, always new, completely incomprehensible mysteries'. How can we find a language to distinguish the reactionary from the revolutionary in such a statement?
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