Woah, weird how I haven't died. Nope, I'm still around, I've just been super busy with school. Even over my break I was really busy with schoolwork! That's no good.
Hm... life updates? Well, I got a Kindle Fire, so that's pretty sweet. I started reading The Tale of Genji but it's incredibly boring and super repetitive. Summary: Genji wants to get it. He does 95% of the time. Has an illegitimate child. Worries if anyone will figure it out, but still gets with every woman he possibly can. There. I just saved you from 700 miserable pages (I only made it to 216). Oh, also there's one part where he kidnaps an underage girl because she looks like this other lady who died or turned him down or something so, you know, that's cool too.
Anyways, I wasn't feeling Steppenwolf too much either. It's funny how Demian had such a gigantic impact on me and Hesse's other books for me are always just kind of like, "eh". (Oh, and before I explain the plot--yes, the band Steppenwolf is named after this book. They were the Peace Doves or something silly like that originally, but the story goes that Jim Morrison [of The Doors] suggested they name themselves after this book instead. And they did, obviously.)
So, the book starts out with the pretense that the whole thing is a manuscript written by Harry, the titular Steppenwolf, a wolf of the steppes--that is, he was kind of living the hermit life in the wild. And he's slowly becoming reacquainted to society, there are some intense psychological struggles... He wants to kill himself for a long time because he's in his fifties and he's just starting to feel the real aches and pangs of his old age and he thinks it would be better to just end it--actually, in the intro, Hesse said this book appealed particularly to younger (like 14-22, I assume) readers because of this idea, which means they missed the point. And he meets this woman, Hermine (who looks like a childhood friend named Herman, hm. Oh, and pair that with the fact that the main character in Demian begins an affair with Demian's mother and she is described as looking like her son. Someone find me a good queer theory essay on Hesse! I want it. I need it. Now.) who teaches him to dance and enjoy music (jazz) and modern things and romance and sex and even cocaine because it's the twenties. The book ends with a huge scene in the "magic theater" where films become real with observers becoming players and people they know as others figments in the scenes... But it falls flat and the fantasy is confusing and just kind of out of place. It's supposed to be mystical I'm sure, but it feels kind of like it came out of left field and is almost too strong, too late. I could accept some of the mysticism in, say, Journey to the East, as the whole book permeates that kind of mysticism... But not here.
Honestly, in the beginning there wasn't much I liked. Just a few quotes here and there.
So, there is the idea of course that every man has good and evil in him, an angel and a devil. I think we can agree on that. Or that many people have ideas of who/what they are, like a persona. And they want to stick to that no matter what, which is why, sometimes, people can be resistant or hide new interests or new ways of thought or what have you (in my experience). The best example I can think of is that post that went around Tumblr for a while--you know, some days I want to dress like a princess but other days I want to wear red lipstick and be a rad biker chick (or something like that). People who hadn't realized yet that you don't have to be married to a persona loved that. But people past that point just kind of said, "There's no reason why you can't do that. Do that." I personally think it's a pretty important step in growing up to realize that you don't have to married to that idea you've got in your head about that... So... Anyways... the Steppenwolf has the idea that he is just animal and man, refusing to admit, perhaps, that there's a lover in him, there's a tender side, etc: "The Steppenwolf, too, believes that he bears two souls (wolf and man) in his breast and even so finds his breast disagreeably cramped because of them. The breast and body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads" (Hesse 73). Hesse goes on in a bit that's not really worth typing all out that although the Steppenwolf feels as though these two souls are too many, the real problem is that they are really too few.
Also, if you need help with Hesse's quote, try the later Shrek version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZhAhuknUho. I'm sorry, Hesse legitimately said men were onions. You're lying to me if your first thought wasn't of Shrek either.
"That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is 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--all this the Steppenwolf, too, suspected" (Hesse 75).
"The wolf, too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers... Harry can never turn back again and become wholly wolf, and could he do so he would find that even the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a creature of manifold complexity. Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in the wolf's breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same forgetfulness as a man who sings: 'If I could be a child once more!' He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering. There is, in fact, no way back to the wolf or the child" (Hesse 77).
Anyways. Don't think I mentioned. I like these quotes because, as I'm sure I've mentioned a million times by now, I love deconstructionism. Also, rose-tinting that occurs makes me really uncomfortable, especially on the level that Hesse is talking about. (The wolf or child he refers to would of course be that idealized one-dimensional picture we have in our heads of the wolf or the child.)
"'God is good and has the span of all our days in his hands and that of every waltz and fox-trot too'" (Hesse 157).
Honestly... I don't have much to say about this book other than that. There were parts that really excited me, but a lot of it was pretty flat, or just confusing. Like I said, the end has this weird mystic feel that totally breaks away from the drab realism that permeates all but one other scene of the book (and even that's not really "mystical", it's just that Harry is so fascinated by Hermine in drag that it seems that way). The end would be cool in a book that gave hints that this strange world existed in some way, but it doesn't--so when people start shrinking into chess pieces and being given physical representations of their personalities and are suddenly immersed in the middle of the great war between man and machine with a childhood friend they haven't seen in over a decade--the reader just kind of steps back. The chess bit came first so I was kind of thinking, okay, this is kind of cool... but then all the weird stuff builds to a crescendo, and as it's building I just want to leave because it's just too much with not even the slightest hint.
Oh, and I was also disappointed by the bit of chess pieces as personality--I took it to mean, until that point on page 223, that it meant, like... Well, I don't know. There's a part of you that's a goody two-shoes, but you can be tough too. You can be a singer, an artist, an athlete, all at once, someone who is passionate about silent movies while only liking, say, Kanye West. It's possible to be all those different kinds of people. Or like how you act differently around friends, your parents, professors, etc. That's how I have described it above, too. But on page 223, the character who gives Harry the pieces says that modern science has diagnosed people who try to live their multi-personalitied lives as schizophrenics. Though having multiple facets of self can mean what I described or schizophrenic--the two things are very different, and it disappointed me that that sort of thing was what Hesse meant all along.
Hm... I really don't have much else to say. I guess I'm out of practice... (Sorry.) I wouldn't read this book again if--well, if you paid me I definitely would. ...But, on my Kindle I downloaded a lot of books we were forced to read in high school that I hated with a fiery passion to see if I still hate them. (Actually, I really liked A Streetcar Named Desire, I just hated my teacher). Early prediction: I'm still going to. That darn American lit. Oh well. I'm even going to try some of F Scott Fitzgerald's other work, so that's cool (I'll probably still hate The Great Gatsby). Anyways, I'll see you guys around! Sorry that this post was so lame!
Works Cited: Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf. Penguin: London, 2001.
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