Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

 

 The first section of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf is is all about the Steppenwolf, aka Harry Haller, and offers, in these opening pages, a simple notion of identity: Our identity is composed of, or at least Haller believes that his identity is composed of, two battling parts: the Dionysian and the Apollonian. I'm using Nietzsche's terms, because much of this book seems to be a rehash of some of that philosopher's thought. Later this theory of a bifurcated identity is altered to say that we each have not two sides, but many. This is the book's great reveal, but the combination of a self-obsessed character and facile philosophy and psychology in the opening pages almost made me put it down before I got there.

It gets better when we get a glimpse outside Harry's head: a new character, Hermine, appears. She seems to understand Harry for what he is, and calls him out on at least some of his nonsense, while also teaching him the popular dances of the day. This is needed refreshment.

Eventually Harry attends an event at which, perhaps with the help of drugs, he perceives in a vivid and fantastic way, the many more than two sides of his character. This section is lots of fun. I seem to recall that I felt the same when I first read this book forty or fifty years ago. In those days I thought drugs were interesting and held some sort of promise (for what?), and it was precisely because this book, I believed, included as its grand finale something like an acid trip that I was eager to get to those pages. (LSD, of course, had not been synthesized at the time of this novel's publication.) In fact, I think I was so eager to get to that grand finale I skipped most of the turgid philosophy and psychology. I made a few good choices in my youth and that was one of them.

More broadly, my problem with this novel and others like them is that they seem to exist mostly as vehicles for imparting philosophy, psychology, sociology, morality, or something other than artful fiction. For me the best fiction succeeds to the extent that it is great art, not to the extent that it is great sociology, great philosophy, great moral teaching, etc. That is, I want fiction that is great because it does what only art can do.

I think I'm in a minority in this. A lot of people I know seem to enjoy art precisely to the extent that it teaches them something that they could also have learned in, say, a book by a sociologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, moralist, etc. Those people will enjoy this novel a lot more than I did.


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