Recently Read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, there was a movement in the arts, be it music, art, or literature, to shed the more traditional forms of expression and create new structures.  Sometimes this resulted in works whose meaning and significance were shrouded in ambiguity and uncertainty.  German writer Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf is a case in point.  Written during the interwar Weimar period in the late 1920s,  Steppenwolf is a curiously constructed hodgepodge of psychological, political, and philosophical analysis focusing on the fictional character of Harry Haller, a middle-aged intellectual whose life has become that of a recluse and whose cynical view of the bourgeois society around him, with its nationalistic, pro-war fervor and its petty day-to-day concerns, has caused a personal crisis to come to a head.  This crisis is between his inherently benevolent nature and the Steppenwolf personality he has stylized to describe what his experiences have taught him and led him on as a singular entity, apart from society but passing through it just the same.  Unable to reconcile the two, as he considers his nature to be two-fold,  he is contemplating suicide as an option.  Then, he chances to meet in a bar a prostitute named Hermine (either her real name or the name he gives her) and she leads him on a convoluted path to self-discovery.  But it's a bit more complicated than that, for the author chooses to present his story in a form that belies understanding...

First, incredibly (looking back after reading the story), Hermann Hesse, in his preface to Steppenwolf that was written decades after its initial publication, decries the degree of misunderstanding that readers have come away with regarding his intended message.  Well, I say in response, if you're going to deliberately present your message in such a cryptic and cloudy format, what do you expect?  It begins with the third-person account about Haller from the viewpoint of a co-tenant who lives a conventional "bourgeois" existence and who sees Haller as rather disagreeable, with slovenly habits.  While snooping through the latter's apartment one day, he finds his personal journal and presents it in his account.  Then we progress to Haller's own words as he describes in detail, from his journal, the terribly cynical view in which he regards the world around him.  One day, as he relates, he comes across a peddler of "magic", who hands him a pamphlet, highly improbably titled "Treatise on the Steppenwolf"...which names Haller and goes into minute detail psychoanalyzing him with brutal detachment.  One of its premises is that each person, in refutation to  Haller's assumption about his own two natures, is composed of a multitude of "souls".  After presenting this "Treatise" in full, Hesse goes back to Haller's narrative and recounts his meeting with Hermine and her introduction to the other primary characters Maria and Pablo.  Initially critical of the two, Haller comes to appreciate aspects of himself that they represent, but which he has repressed.  In the context of a "magic show" with assorted fantasy experiences behind different doors that Pablo has concocted, Haller comes to more fully understand the treatise's view of the multiplicity of souls within each person, and there is much more to life than the simple and pessimistic model that he had constructed for himself, embodied within the Steppenwolf role.

It is unclear whether Hermine, Maria, and Pablo are "real" characters or just constructed aspects of Haller's own self...the story delves into the area of magical fantasy and, as such, the traditional literary notion of plot, based on some semblance of reality, breaks down.  This left me with a profound sense of dissatisfaction after I had finished reading it.  As for the message I came away with, who knows whether or not Hermann Hesse would agree?

To some, the Steppenwolf persona represents going one's own way against the flow of the world.  Combine that with the book's implied endorsement of mind-altering drugs like cocaine, opium, and hallucinations, along with abolition of restrictions on sexual behavior, and you come up with a cocktail custom-mixed for the counterculture movement of the 1960s...which may explain why a rock group in that era changed its name to Steppenwolf...