The
wolf-man
By
Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.
Hermann Hesse rose to popularity as
a writer among university students way back in the sixties and even up to the
present in the US, Japan, India, etc. when his major works got translated into
English from the original German. He was one of the early European fictionists
who had a great interest in Oriental culture and lore. His writings showed the
unmistakable influence of Eastern ideas. His novels indicate this: Siddharta, Demian, Narcissus and Goldmund, Magister Ludi
or The Glass Bead Game. They all
dramatize the fundamental conflict in which the battlefield is the human
heart—flesh and spirit, body and soul, or the worldly versus the otherwordly
pursuits. He shares with Dostoevsky the same knack for the introspective
probing into the inner as well as the outer constitution of man. As the
internal evidence of Hesse’s novels indicate, there is no doubt about his
literary indebtedness to the Russian master. It might even be said that his
Steppenwolf is a direct progeny of the Underground Man.
Very much like his fictional
predecessor, Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf (or the wolf-man), withdraws from
society which he abhors for what he perceives to be its mediocre culture and
shallow bourgeois values. The whole structure of the novel and its
complications purposefully and artistically depict the process whereby Harry
finally understands and arrives at a knowledge of himself. Thus, the action of
the novel moves inwardly, not linearly in a horizontal fashion. We are let a
glimpse into his psyche and there behold what so troubles his spirit as he
dreams and hallucinates his way into himself.
The truth about Harry’s case is that
he is neither a saint nor a renegade. He stands midway between the extremes of
asceticism and debauchery. So much so that given the auspicious initiation, he
may yet ascend to the heights reached by immortals like Goethe or Mozart who
had transcended the dichotomies of mundane existence in a sort of elevated
universe where all of life is affirmed with the eternal Yes. However, these
immortals are marked off as eminent for having been already shorn of the sense
of the self, having lived out all its thousand habiliments.
Harry has to start with the
necessary first steps upon the path to enlightenment. Because of his classicist
temperament as an artist, he has despised popular culture or anything that
smacks of the vulgar and the worldly. He has thus shunned contact with mass
culture and lives in isolation from the stream of ordinary humanity to avoid the
contamination of philistinism. He prefers his self-absorbed preoccupation with
contemplation and communion with the Muses. This is the height of his elitist
eccentricity.
Such an activity has led him farther
away from ordinary life and in the process develops psycho mania. He feels a
sense of extreme estrangement to the point of toying with the idea of suicide.
In fact he made a vow to himself to cut his life on reaching the age of fifty
as a way of ending his ennui that eats away at his will to live. What Harry in
fact needs is a return to nature and rediscover the lost fragments of his
personality long submerged in the thick layers of his past. He really should go
back to the elemental passions which he scoffs at and undergo the bath of the
senses in order to achieve a harmonious balance between the intellect which he
overvalues and the strong passions which he blocks from running high.
Human beings are at once a creature
of intellect and a creature of the emotions. Reconciling these warring aspects
of his nature makes up the core in the process of Harry’s education. He further
needs to come to the realization that man is more than just a creature of
counterpositions. He towers above them. He must of necessity renounce the
conventional idea of the fragmentation of life into such polarities as flesh
and spirit, body and soul, etc. and know that man is actually a multivalent,
multifaceted entity consisting not just of one or two or three but a thousand
selves.
In other words, Harry must play the
game of life by becoming everyman and yet nobody in particular.
But first, the multiplicity of the
self should be recognized, accepted, and lived through—the sex life included to
make him feel human enough and not some kind of abstraction as Dostoevsky’s
Underground Man has so emphatically warned against. Obviously, the process of
integration which consists of the piecing together of the splintered little
selves and coming to terms with them must be done by going into life in all its
expressions and dimensions. Before any man can face death as Harry intended to
do, he must accept life to begin with and live it fully well. This is best
facilitated by man’s innate sense of humor or the ability to laugh, and laugh
at oneself and one’s follies. Then only may it be possible for the individual
to grow into what Abraham Maslow called a fully self-actualized human being
whose consciousness becomes pure, unqualified and all-embracing.
The root of Harry’s trouble is that
he takes himself too seriously. He has forgotten the cleansing power of
laughter. It is an affliction, a nasty form of self-deception to disdainfully
think that one is superior to other people by reason of his elevated tastes,
cultural literacy or even his individual achievements. As long as he sneers at
what he considers to be the vulgarities of the man in the street, a snob like
Harry is bound to remain alienated from ordinary reality and a question unto
himself.
Carl Jung holds that the divorce of
the intellectual from the emotional side of life leads to psychic disorder. The
most unfeeling criminals are those intellectuals who skulk in their underground
holes like spiders. Remember Raskolnikov who committed the perfect crime? So,
man’s cerebrations must be balanced by his feelings so that to think is to
feel, and to feel is to think. To live in harmony with himself and those around
him, the pedant must let the intellectual colossus that he professes to be come
to terms with the cloven emotional freak into which he has degenerated.
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