The Outsider (12 page)

The journal opens with an account of a typical day: he reads a little, has a bath, lounges around his room, eats; and the feeling of unfulfilment increases until towards nightfall he feels like setting fire to the house or jumping out of a window. The worst of it is that he can find no excuse for this apathy; being an artist-contemplative, he should be ideally contented with this type of life. Something is missing. But what? He goes to a tavern and ruminates as he takes his evening meal; the food and wine relax him, and suddenly the mood he has despaired of having pervades him:

A refreshing laughter rose in me It soared aloft like a
soapbubble ... and then softly burst The golden trail
was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart,
and the stars. For an hour I could breathe once more
⁹

But this is at the end of a long day, and tomorrow he will wake up and the insight will be gone; he will read a little, have a bath ... and so on.

But on this particular evening something happens. The reader is not sure what. According to Haller, he sees a mysterious door in the wall, with the words
‘
Magic Theatre: Not for everybody
’
written over it, and a man with a sandwich board and a tray of
Old Moorfs Almanacs
gives him a pamphlet called
A Treatise on the Steppenwolf.
The treatise is printed at full length in the following pages of the novel, and it is obviously Haller
’
s own work; so it is difficult for the reader to determine when Haller is recording the truth and when he is playing a game of wish-fulfilment with himself.

The treatise is an important piece of self-analysis. It could be called
^C
A Treatise on the Outsider
’
. As Harry reads it (or writes it) certain convictions formulate themselves, about himself and about the Outsider generally. The Outsider, Haller says, is a self-divided man; being self-divided, his chief desire
is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache would be selfish.

To explain his wretchedness, Haller has divided himself into two persons: a civilized man and a wolf-man. The civilized man loves all the things of Emil Sinclair
’
s first world, order and cleanliness, poetry and music (especially Mozart); he takes lodgings always in houses with polished fire-irons and well-scrubbed tiles. His other half is a savage who loves the second world, the world of darkness; he prefers open spaces and lawlessness; if he wants a woman he feels that the proper way is to kill and rape her. For him, bourgeois civilization and all its inanities are a great joke.

The civilized man and the wolf-man live at enmity most of the time, and it would seem that Harry Haller is bound to spend his days divided by their squabbling. But sometimes, as in the tavern, they make peace, and then a strange state ensues; for Harry finds that a combination of the two makes him akin to the gods. In these moments of vision, he is no longer envious of the bourgeois who finds life so straightforward, for his own conflicts are present in the bourgeois, on a much smaller scale. He, as self-realizer, has deliberately cultivated his two opposing natures until the conflict threatens to tear him in two, because he knows that when he has achieved the secret of permanently reconciling them, he will live at a level of intensity unknown to the bourgeois. His suffering is not a mark of his inferiority, even though it may render him less fit for survival than the bourgeois; unreconciled, it is the sign of his greatness; reconciled, it is manifested as
‘
more abundant life
’
that makes the Outsider
’
s superiority over other types of men unquestionable. When the Outsider becomes aware of his strength, he is unified and happy.

Haller goes even further; the Outsider is the mainstay of the bourgeois. Without him the bourgeois could not exist. The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society
’
s spiritual dynamos. Harry Haller is one of these.

There is a yet further step in self-analysis for the Steppen-wolf: that is to recognize that he is not really divided into two simple elements, man and wolf, but has literally hundreds of conflicting I
’
s. Every thought and impulse says T. The word
‘
personality
’
hides the vagueness of the concept; it refers to no factual object, like
‘
body
’
. Human beings are not like the characters in literature, fixed, made immutable by their creator; the visible part of the human being is his dead part; it is the other part, the unconditioned Will that constitutes his being. Will precedes essence. Our bourgeois civilization is based on personality. It is our chief value. A film star has
‘
personality
’
; the salesman hoping to sell his first insurance policy tries to ooze
‘
personality
’
:

The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has laboured just as hard to maintain and strengthen.
¹⁰

The treatise comes to an end with a sort of credo:

Man is not ... of fixed and enduring form. He is ... an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature ... man ... is a bourgeois compromise.
¹¹

That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a very short distance and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the monument tomorrow.
¹²

Steppenwolf knows well enough why he is unhappy and drifting, bored and tired; it is because he will not recognize his purpose and follow it with his whole being.

‘
He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self, and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death.
’
¹³
Haller knows that even when the Outsider is a universally acknowledged man of genius, it is due to
‘
his
immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarifies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the garden of Gethsemane
’
.
¹⁴

This Steppenwolf
...
has discovered that... at best he is only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony.
...
No, back to nature is a false track that leads nowhere but to suffering and despair.
...
Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple.... The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God, leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or the child, but ever further into guilt, ever deeper into human life.... Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have at the last to take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may.
^1
5

The last image of the treatise recalls an idea of Rilke
’
s: the Angel of the Duinese Elegies who, from his immense height, can see and summarize human life as a whole.

Were he already among the immortals—were he already there at the goal to which the difficult path seems to be taking him—with what amazement he would look back over all this coming and going, all the indecision and wild zigzagging of his tracks. With what a mixture of encouragement and blame, pity and joy, he would smile at this Steppenwolf.
¹⁶

The Outsider
’
s
‘
way of salvation
’
, then, is plainly implied. His moments of insight into his direction and purpose must be grasped tightly; in these moments he must formulate laws that will enable him to move towards his goal in spite of losing sight of it. It is unnecessary to add that these laws will apply not only to him, but to all men, their goal being the same as his.

The treatise throws some light on Hesse
’
s intention in
Siddhartha.
We can see now that Siddhartha revolted against the religious discipline that
‘
narrowed the world and simplified his soul
’
, but in renouncing his monk
’
s robes, he failed to
‘
take the whole world into his soul
’
; on the contrary, he merely
narrowed his soul to include a mistress and a house. The effort of
^‘
widening the sou
l’
must be controlled by a religious discipline; nothing can be achieved by ceasing to Will. All this the
‘
wretched Steppenwolf
’
knows, and would prefer not to know.

Logically, the
‘
Treatise on the Steppenwolf should be the end of the book; actually, it is within the first hundred pages. Harry has only rationalized his difficulties; he has yet to undergo experiences that will make his analysis real to him. The
Bildungsroman
is only one-third completed.

After reading the treatise, he hits rock-bottom of despair; he is exhausted and frustrated, and the treatise warns him that this is all as it should be; he decides that this is the last time he allows himself to sink so low; next time he will commit suicide before he reaches that point. The thought cheers him up, and he lies down to sleep.

The treatise is the high point of the book from the reader
’
s point of view, but Hesse still has a job to finish; he has to show us how Steppenwolf will learn to accept life again and turn away finally from the thought of cutting his throat. This comes about by a series of romantically improbable events. The man with the sandwich board has mentioned the name of a tavern; Haller goes there and meets a girl called Hermine. She takes him in hand; makes him learn ballroom-dancing and listen to modern jazz. She introduces him to the saxophone player, the sunburnt Pablo, and to the sensuously beautiful animal Maria, whom he finds in his bed when he returns home one night. Like Siddhartha, he goes through an education of the senses. In bed with Maria, he recovers his own past (as Roquentin was unable to) and finds it meaningful.

For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged the soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations. ... My life had become weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to renunciation and nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of. It had been, for all its wretchedness, a princely life. Let the little way to death be as it might—the kernel of this life of mine was noble. It came of high descent, and turne
d
, not on trifles, but on the stars...
¹⁷

This experience can be called the ultimately valid core of romanticism, stripped of its externals of stagey scenery and soft music. It has become a type of religious affirmation. Unfortunately, there can be no doubt about the difficulty of separating it from the stage scenery: the overblown language, the Hoffmannesque atmosphere. Only a few pages later, Haller admits that a part of his new
‘
life of the senses
’
is smoking opium; and there is bisexuality too. (Pablo suggests a sexual orgy for three: himself, Harry and Maria; and Maria and Hermine have Lesbian relations.)

The book culminates with a dream fantasy of a fancy-dress ball in which Harry feels the barriers between himself and other people break down, ceases to feel his separateness. He kills (or dreams he kills) Hermine, and at last finds his way to the Magic Theatre, where he sees his past in retrospect and relives innocent dreams. After this scene, he has achieved the affirmation he could not make earlier in the book:

I would sample its tortures once more and shudder once more at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more but often, the hell of my inner being. One day I would be a better hand at the game.
...
¹⁸