Steppenwolf (9 page)

We should not be amazed at the fact that a man as learned and clever as Harry is able to consider himself a ‘Steppenwolf’, that he thinks he can encapsulate his life’s richly complex design in such a simple, brutal, primitive formula. Human beings’ thinking capacity is not very highly developed, and even the most intellectual and educated of them constantly view the world and themselves – for the most part themselves! – through the distorting lenses of very naive and simplistic formulae. For it seems that all human beings are born with an absolutely compulsive need to imagine their selves as unified wholes. No matter how often and how drastically this illusion is shattered, they always manage to patch it up again. The judge who, sitting opposite a murderer and looking him in the eye, momentarily hears the murderer speaking with his own (the judge’s) voice and discovers within his own self all the emotions, capabilities and potential actions of the murderer is in the very next moment his old unified self again. Retreating swiftly into the shell of his imagined identity, he is again a judge doing his duty, and he sentences the murderer to death. And whenever it begins to dawn on specially talented and highly strung souls that they have multiple selves, when they, like every genius, see through the delusion of the unified personality and feel themselves to be multifaceted, a bundle of many selves, they only need to assert the fact for the majority to lock them up on the spot. Scientific experts called in to help will diagnose schizophrenia, thus ensuring that the rest of humanity will never have to hear a cry of truth from the mouths of these unfortunate people. But why should we go to great lengths to express self-evident truths that any thinking person should recognize, but which it is not the done thing to express? – Now, even if some human beings advance only to the point where they replace the imagined unity of the self with a broader twofold entity they are already close to being geniuses, or at any rate interesting exceptions. In actual fact, however, no self, even the most naive, is a unity. Rather, it is an extremely diverse world, a miniature firmament, a chaos of different forms, different states and stages of development, different legacies and potentialities. All individuals nevertheless endeavour to view this chaos as a unity and speak of their selves as if they were simple, firmly shaped, clearly defined phenomena. It would seem that this delusion, which is common to all human beings, even those of the highest order, is a necessity, just as essential to life as eating and breathing.

The delusion is based on a straightforward instance of transference. As a body every human being is a single entity, as a soul never. Traditionally literature too, even at its most sophisticated, operates with ostensibly whole, ostensibly unified characters. In literature as we know it so far, the genre most highly regarded by experts and connoisseurs is drama. Rightly so, for drama offers the greatest opportunity to represent the self as multiple, or might do so, if only outward appearances didn’t contradict this impression, each individual character being deceptively portrayed as a unity because he or she is inevitably encased in a unique, unified and self-contained body. This of course also explains why aesthetically naive judges value the so-called character play most highly, in which every figure appearing on stage is a quite discrete and recognizable entity. Only remotely and gradually is it beginning to dawn on some individuals that this aesthetic approach may be shoddy and superficial, that it is a mistake to apply ancient Greek concepts of beauty to our own great dramatists. Splendid though these are, they are not native to us. We have been talked into adopting them from Greek thinkers who, taking the visible body as their starting point, were the real originators of the fiction of the individual self or character. This concept is totally unknown in the literary works of ancient India. The heroes of the Indian epics are not single characters but tangled knots of character, serial incarnations. In our modern world too, some works of literature exist in which, though the author is probably scarcely conscious of the fact, an attempt is being made to portray a multiplicity of souls behind the veil of individual character depiction. Anyone wishing to appreciate this must for once resolve to view the characters in such a work not as individual entities but as parts, as facets, as different aspects of a higher unity, if you like, of the mind of the author. Anyone considering Goethe’s
Faust
in this way, for example, will make of Faust, Mephistopheles, Wagner and all the other figures a unity, a super-character. And only from this higher unity, not the individual characters, can one glean some hint of the work’s true soul. When Faust makes the pronouncement – on the tongue of every schoolteacher and apt to make philistines shudder with admiration – ‘Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast!’ he is forgetting Mephisto and a whole host of other souls that are just as much part of him. Our Steppenwolf also thinks he is bearing the burden of two souls (wolf and human being) within his breast, and that his breast is painfully constricted as a result. The fact is that the breast, the body, is always
one, yet the souls that it houses are neither two nor five but countless in number. A human being is an onion consisting of a hundred skins, a fabric composed of many threads. The Asians of old had exact knowledge of this; Buddhist Yoga invented a precise technique for exposing the personality as a delusion. But then humankind moves in all sorts of comic ways: the delusion that for a thousand years India made such great efforts to expose is the self-same delusion that the West has been at equally great pains to bolster and reinforce.

If we consider Steppenwolf from this point of view we can see clearly why he suffers so much from his ludicrous sense of himself as twofold. Like Faust he thinks that even two souls are too much for a single breast to contain and ought by rights to tear that breast asunder. Yet they are, on the contrary, far too few, and Harry is doing terrible violence to his poor psyche by seeking to comprehend it with the help of so primitive an image. Harry may be a highly educated human being, but he is acting like some savage, say, who is incapable of counting beyond two. Calling one bit of himself human being, another wolf, he thinks that is the end of the story and all his possibilities have been exhausted. Into the ‘human’ half he packs all intellectual or spiritual attributes, all things sublimated or cultivated that he finds in himself, and into the wolf everything instinctual, savage and chaotic. Yet in real life things are not as simplistic as in our thinking, not as crude as in the poor simpletons’ language we use, and Harry is doubly deluding himself when applying this primitive model of the wolf to his own case. We fear that whole areas of Harry’s psyche which he attributes to the ‘human being’ are by no stretch of the imagination human, while parts of his character that he assigns to the wolf have long since progressed beyond the merely wolf-like.

Like all human beings Harry thinks he knows perfectly well what human beings are, yet he most certainly doesn’t know, even though the truth dawns on him quite often in his dreams or in other states of consciousness he has difficulty in controlling. If only he could memorize these fleeting insights, could as far as possible make them his own! Of course human beings are not fixed, enduring forms – which was, despite suspicions to the contrary on the part of their leading thinkers, the ideal view of the ancient Greeks – but rather experiments, creatures in transition. They are no less than the perilously narrow bridge between nature and spirit. Their innermost destiny drives them in the direction of spirit,
towards God, while their most heartfelt yearning pulls them back towards nature, to their mother. Wavering between these two powerful poles, human beings live their lives in fear and trembling. What they understand by the term ‘human being’ at any given time is never more than a transient agreement entered into by a majority of respectable citizens. Under this convention certain extremely crude physical impulses are rejected, declared taboo; a degree of consciousness, cultured behaviour and de-bestialization is a requirement; a modicum of spirituality is not only permitted but even insisted upon. The ‘human being’ of this convention is, like all bourgeois ideals, a compromise. It is a timid and naively cunning attempt to dodge the powerful demands of both the wicked primeval mother, nature, and the irksome primeval father, spirit, and to make one’s home in the lukewarm atmosphere of the middle ground between the two. That is why conventional citizens permit and tolerate what they call ‘personalities’ yet are prepared to hand over these personalities to that Moloch, the ‘state’, and constantly to play the one off against the other. It also explains why those they declare heretics can today be burned at the stake, those deemed criminals can be hanged, only for monuments to be erected to them the day after tomorrow.

‘Human beings’ are not already created entities but ideal figures that spirit demands we should strive to become, remote possibilities that are both longed for and feared. The road leading to them can only ever be covered in very short stages, accompanied by terrible experiences of torment and ecstasy. And those advancing along it are precisely the rare individuals for whom the scaffold is made ready today, the monument in their honour tomorrow. All these truths Steppenwolf is dimly aware of. However, what he calls ‘human being’ in himself, as opposed to ‘wolf’, is for the most part nothing more than that mediocre ‘human being’ of respectable bourgeois convention. Harry does instinctively sense which road to take to become a true human being, the road that leads to the Immortals; indeed now and then he hesitantly advances a tiny bit of the way along it, paying the price in terms of intense suffering and painful isolation. Yet in the depths of his being he is afraid to face the highest of all challenges posed by spirit: that of striving to become fully human, and venturing along the sole narrow road leading to immortality. He senses only too clearly that this route leads to even greater suffering, to the life of an outcast, to the ultimate sacrifice,
perhaps to the scaffold. And for this reason, even though the prize that beckons at the end of the road is immortality, he is unwilling to suffer all these ills, to die all these deaths. Though he is much more aware than the average bourgeois of what becoming truly human entails, he still closes his eyes to the truth, refusing to acknowledge that clinging desperately to the notion of self, desperately wanting not to die, is the surest route to eternal death. On the other hand, the ability to die, to slough off one’s skin like a snake, to commit oneself to incessant self-transformation is what leads the way to immortality. If Harry worships his favourites among the Immortals, for example Mozart, it is because he is still seeing him through bourgeois eyes, tending to explain the composer’s consummate art, just as a schoolmaster would, in terms of highly specialized talent. He thus ignores Mozart’s commitment, his willingness to suffer, his indifference to all bourgeois ideals, and his ability to endure the kind of extreme isolation that transforms the bourgeois atmosphere surrounding those suffering in the process of becoming fully human into the much thinner, ice-cold air of the cosmos. This is the isolation of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Still, our Steppenwolf has at least discovered a Faustian duality within himself, has found out that no unified soul inhabits the single entity that is his body and that at best he is just starting out on a long pilgrimage towards such an ideal inner harmony. He would like either to become wholly human by conquering the wolf in himself, or conversely to renounce his human side in order at least to live an integrated, undivided life as a wolf. He has presumably never observed a real wolf closely, otherwise he might have seen that animals too have no such things as unified souls; that the beautiful, taut frames of their bodies house a whole variety of aspirations and states of mind; that wolves suffer too, having dark depths within them. Oh no, human beings are always desperately mistaken and bound to suffer when they try to get ‘back to nature’. Harry can never fully become a wolf again, and if he did he would realize that even wolves are not simple and primitive creatures but complex and many-sided. Wolves also have two and more than two souls in their wolves’ breasts, and anyone desiring to be a wolf is guilty of the same kind of forgetfulness as the man who sings ‘What bliss still to be a child!’
¹
The likeable but sentimental chap with his song about
the blissfully happy child would also like to get back to nature, to his innocent origins, but he has totally forgotten that children are by no means blissfully happy. Rather, they are capable of many conflicts, a host of contradictory moods, suffering of all kinds.

There is no way back at all, either to the wolf or the child. Things do not begin in innocence and simplicity; all created beings, even the ostensibly simplest, are already guilty, already full of contradictions. Cast into the muddy stream of becoming they can never, never hope to swim back up against the current. The road to innocence, to the state before creation, to God, doesn’t run backwards, either to the wolf or the child, but forwards, further and further into guilt, deeper and deeper into the experience of becoming fully human. Nor is suicide, poor Steppenwolf, a serious solution to your problem. You will just have to go down the longer, more onerous, more difficult road to becoming truly human. You will frequently have to multiply your two selves, make your already complex nature a great deal more complicated. Instead of making your world more confined and your soul simpler you are going to have to include more and more world, ultimately the entire world in your soul as it painfully expands, until one day, perhaps, you reach the end and find rest. This, in so far as they succeeded in the venture, is the path taken by Buddha, by all great human beings, some knowingly, others unconsciously. Every birth entails separation from the cosmos, enclosure within limits, isolation from God, painful self-renewal. Returning to the cosmos, overcoming the painful experience of individuation, achieving God-like status: all these entail an expansion of the soul to the point where it is once again able to contain the whole cosmos within itself.