Re-reading Hermann Hesse, part 3

I’ve been continuing my re-acquaintance with Hermann Hesse, with mixed feelings…

     The thing I learned from reading Autobiographical Writings (because, although I bought the book in 1975, I don’t appear to have read it) was just how much of what went into his fiction was thinly disguised autobiography, especially the early novels that deal with childhood and early adult life. I found it enlightening reading accounts of episodes I’d previously encountered in fiction. Hesse comes across as an acute observer, someone who reflects and thinks deeply; often, but by no means always, this is very interesting. I did find myself skimming quite a lot of this book, however; there was a lengthy and tedious account of a stay at the spa in Baden-Baden, and another about a journey to Nuremberg, where I thought, ‘who could possibly be interested in this?’ On the other hand, a piece on moving to a new house was fascinating, as was a moving tribute to his last surviving sister after her death. The final piece, his thoughts on Narziss and Goldmund, was really good, as that is my favourite of all his novels and I’m really looking forward to reading it again shortly.

     Klingsor’s Last Summer is a collection of three novellas. There is an oppressive tale of an unhappy schoolboy who has issues with his social class and religion, and is obsessed by his sense of his own sinfulness, even wickedness; his utter misery and self-torture is painful to read. In the second tale a man escapes his wife and marriage by embezzling money and disappearing to Italy; there is the fleeting exhilaration of total freedom in the existential choice he has made and carried out, but he cannot cope with the guilt. He wanders, experiences dreamlike states which verge on madness, craves extinction, rejects the possibility of love and companionship and eventually drowns himself. In the end, I’m afraid I found it all a bit too silly; a similar theme is treated far better in the earlier Knulp.

The final eponymous tale focuses on the power of inspiration to the artist, as well as the power and strength of male friendship bonds. Women are incidental and even friendship is ultimately evanescent; one should live for the moment and delight in the world.

There is a great deal about mental instability and illness in Hesse’s novels, beginning in childhood and shaping or even poisoning later life, and as I’ve discovered, there is a good deal of the writer’s own life and personality woven into these stories. So far, I feel that all of these themes have been treated rather better and more imaginatively in the earliest novels, and when he has reworked them later, they have become oppressive to the point of incomprehensibility at times.

     If The War Goes On is a collection of pieces, mostly but not all about the Great War and its effects and consequences, followed by a couple of pieces after the Second World War. One needs to remember that Hesse, though a German, lived for much of his life in Switzerland and Italy, and thus escaped much of what happened in his homeland. His humanitarianism shines through from the start; he refuses the label ‘pacifist’ though it’s hard to see exactly why. He observes the lack of rationality or sanity in people’s behaviour in wartime circumstances, and expresses a great sense of oppression by war and its implications, despite his distance from it. After 1918 there is the sense of a great tragedy having taken place, along with what now appears to be incredible naivete as he sees the potential for new beginnings after the horrors. Attempting to address the sense of despair in Germans, he urges people to turn inwards… and then, of course, it all happened again, even more horrifically. The best two pieces in the book for me were two brief tales which were basically science fiction, imagining the war still going on in 1920, and imagining the state in total control of individual lives and fates, in the manner of Zamyatin and Orwell. Worth it for those two alone…

To be continued…

Jack London: The Scarlet Plague

Another book about a plague wiping out humanity, one to add to many that I’ve already read. This is more of a novella than a novel, and shows some of the limitations of London’s writing, I think.

Set in 2073, it’s sixty years after the Scarlet Plague (also known as the Red Death) virtually eliminated the human race. The last man alive to remember it is wandering the territory of the old United States with three of his young grandsons; they are alternately quite affectionate towards the old man, then tease and play tricks on him, and are also irritated and confused by the way he speaks. This last point was one of the more interesting ideas, for the old man – in his previous existence a professor of English Literature – has a wide and varied vocabulary which contains many words the younger ones have no need for or understanding of, their entire post-apocalyptic world being far simpler than his used to be. And they have skills which he has not.

They are, however, interested in his stories of the old world and its wonders and marvels, and also how the change came about, which is the frame for the story, of course. A plague broke out; it caused a rapid death once the main symptom, a reddening of the complexion, was visible – one might last a couple of hours. Dead bodies decomposed very rapidly, aiding the spread of the germs, and it seems clear one could carry and pass on the disease before symptoms become evident. Obviously civilisation broke down very rapidly indeed in such circumstances. London was a socialist, and so he briefly has the oppressed of the world wreaking some revenge on their former masters, until they too succumb. The educated and well-off try to segregate themselves in order to survive, to no avail. It is also clear that at the time of the outbreak of the plague, the US was no longer a democracy, but an oligarchy or plutocracy.

Few survive, but enough to allow a simple tribal existence to emerge; there are perhaps a few hundred people in the whole of the former western US; nothing is known of the rest of the world. The old man is concerned for the preservation of knowledge and has buried a selection of books he thinks may be useful, but literacy has already died out… London is not very subtle; once the old man is in the flow of his narrative, the young boys fade out, no longer interrupting or mocking him.

Humanity wiped out by a plague is done far more interestingly by Mary Shelley in The Last Man, and by George Stewart in Earth Abides; it did strike me that Stewart may well have been inspired by London’s tale to write his far better novel…

The novella is available to download free from Project Gutenberg; an audiobook is available at librivox.org.

Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships

     Ever since its first publication, H G Wells’ The Time Machine has fascinated readers and writers with the notion of being able to travel to the past and the future. Various writers have played with Wells’ original idea: I once admired Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine, which managed to combine elements of the original novel with the same author’s The War of the Worlds, but last time I read it, I found it rather disappointing. Roland Wright’s A Scientific Romance is another favourite, which weaves in elements of and characters from Wells’ original story. And now, I’ve finally read Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships, which Arthur C Clarke lauds on the cover as being almost better than the original.

One of the problems with time travel is that it’s the concept that’s most interesting; secondary are the epochs a writer chooses to visit, and often the plot only comes third. Baxter is hooked on the idea that the very invention or discovery of time travel begins to alter the future as soon as the first journey takes place – link to Ray Bradbury’s ‘butterfly effect’ here – and so Wells’ traveller has set in motion multiple worlds and multiple possibilities, along with the idea that it’s therefore impossible to go return to a time one has already visited, and for it to remain the same as ‘last time’ (if you see what I mean). And this is the start of the hero’s problem, as he wishes to return to the future some 800,000 years hence, the world of the Eloi and Morlocks, and save Weena…

So, attempting to return to Weena’s world, our hero is stopped half a million years into the future in a different world where Morlocks are the future of humanity and have incredibly advanced technology; one of them becomes his time-travelling companion for the remainder of the novel. They return to a different and earlier England and meet the hero’s younger self, are transported to a version of 1938 where the Great War is still going on and both sides are using time travel to try and defeat each other, which leads to our travellers spending some time in the Palaeolothic era, where another future track is seeded by a group of colonists from 1938 who remain behind, and create an astonishing future, while destroying their home planet through global warming…

We get imagined utopias in the far future, warnings about our own present, glimpses from Wells’ other novels where he imagines warfare in the future as well as world government, and an overlap with Olaf Stapledon’s famous Last and First Men, when Baxter also tries to imagine the remote future of our species, or at least what it may become.

There is also a meta-narrative here of course, in that Baxter is not only playing with Wells’ original narrative in his novel, but of course also has all the ideas that other novelists have come up with and explored in terms of time travel available to him… There is so much crammed in here; while it’s an enjoyable yarn, at times it feels a bit ‘Boys’ Own Paper’-ish, and at others it feels almost chaotically out-of-control.

I have realised how long it is since I read Wells’ original tale and feel I ought to go back to it; I do feel that Baxter has achieved a tour-de-force here, and am tempted to agree with Arthur C Clarke’s judgement. I have always been intrigued by time travel tales. Given the choice, I’d want a brief and safe trip back to the time of Bach and Shakespeare, and maybe a visit to ancient Rome; not sure about the future… Where and when would you go?

Walter Kempowski: Homeland

     Here is an unsettling, disturbing novel, cynical in tone, and verging on black comedy at times. A German writer with roots in former East Prussia is offered an assignment to visit the region, now part of Poland, and draw up a potential tourist itinerary. He know his mother died while fleeing the region in 1945, after giving birth to him, and that his father died in a coastal defence position close by.

Kempowski juxtaposes German incomprehension with Polish truculence. Our writer researches his trip before leaving, and meets and interviews a number of those who had to flee at the end of the war. There has always been a section of the German population who have refused to accept the loss of those territories to Poland and the Soviet Union, and hope that some day they may be able to reclaim them! And there are some pretty unsavoury characters among them.

The actual trip ends up with their being on the tail of a busload of German tourists ‘doing’ the sights of cities and towns that were formerly German, so our hero’s somewhat detached cynicism is juxtaposed with more open revanchism. Even though the story is set in the 1980s, there are still reminders of the former status of the territory, and increasingly the writer’s thoughts return to his parents’ deaths in the chaos at the end of the war.

The Poles do not emerge unscathed either: these are the days of shortages and the People’s Republic; while the Germans cannot understand the absences and the poor quality of what they are offered, they are targets for fleecing, deception and robbery by the locals, and the regime has its points to make to these necessary – for their foreign exchange – visitors, too. Mutual dislike, distrust and incomprehension abounds. The Germans can see lots of possibilities for exploiting the locals and the area… just as they did in the past.

The writer’s final, and accidental, visit to the village where his mother died and his father was killed, is very low-key, apart from his bitter repetition of ‘All for nothing!’ (incidentally, the title of another of Kempowski’s books, on a similar theme.

My familiarity with a number of the places visited and described in the novel was also rather jarring. I had visited some of them back in the 1970s, before the final peace treaty between Poland and the Federal Republic which acknowledged the irreversible loss of those eastern territories; one of the most shocking sights to this fifteen year-old was a bulldozed and demolished German cemetery, with smashed German gravestones piled in heaps. For me this novel is a reminder of the lasting effects of war: before 1933, Poles and Germans had co-existed reasonably peacefully for centuries in this region; after 1945 there was no way Germans could remain. Ethnic cleansing took place. My grandparents had been slave labourers in this part of former Germany. I can understand that some Germans are sad that the lands of their remote ancestors are now no longer German, but supporting evil warmongers has its consequences; nothing is fair in war.

It is a dark novel, and rightly so.

Daphne Hampson: After Christianity

     Feminist theology is not part of my normal reading agenda, but I think it was Richard Holloway’s recent book that pointed me at Daphne Hampson’s very difficult and challenging read. Her approach, as one might expect, is very radical: is Christianity truthful? is it ethical? Hampson repeatedly emphasises that she does not consider herself a Christian, and at times her manner seems aggressive or angry, as well as inevitably reflecting a rationalist approach to spiritual matters which necessarily must completely exclude the notion of faith.

She structures her arguments and presents her case very clearly and logically, in the manner of a Spinoza or a Robert Barclay, which is helpful; she spends considerable time debunking the ‘specialness’ or particularity of the ‘Christ event’ as she calls it, as well as locating the significance and importance of feminist theory for the future of theology as she understands it. I repeat, it was not an easy read, although I was very glad I persevered. There is a good deal of dense psychoanalytical and structuralist theory (in the manner of Lacan and Derrida) and at times I felt we had lost sight of religion, spirituality and Christianity. However, the centuries of structuring and conditioning which all feminists are challenging must be acknowledged, and her case is cogently presented and convincing, as well as connecting with what has gone before in fields other than theology. She establishes her parameters, and then sets about demolishing. As a feminist she rejects the submissiveness required in Christianity, Judaism and Islam; her lengthy unpicking of the implications of Abraham’s agreement to sacrifice Isaac is quite shocking. She shows how the Trinitarian God as male in all three aspects sidelines, marginalises, excludes or seeks to annex women.

So much of this work is about defining the terms of the debate and unpicking implications which have been intentionally and unintentionally glossed over through the ages, and I found this very refreshing. When the actual meaning of the Creed and the Trinity are laid bare, so much does seem utterly defiant of logic and common-sense: true Christian believers will of course speak of their faith, as they have the right to do, whereas I found myself following her argument and thinking, do we actually need all/ any of this? I had thought of myself as pretty liberal in matters spiritual – deluded male that I am – until I read this eye-opening book. Her arguments about the nature of God draw much from an 18^th century German theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, of whom I’d never heard, but who is now on my ‘interested’ list. I suppose what I have really derived from this book is much matter for further reflection and contemplation, as well as what feels like a long-needed shaking-up of complacency.

But, for all her constant urging and wishing for a new, feminist, individual-centred spirituality which acknowledges one’s autonomy and the idea that God lies within, I found the concluding chapter curiously empty and unsatisfying; what is not satisfactory is very clear indeed, what must come to replace it, not so much…

Hermann Hesse, continued

    .         The recurring themes of Hermann Hesse’s writings become clearer as one works one’s way through his novels: difficulties in personal and marital relationships, close personal bonds of friendships between males, and the search for real meaning in life… so plenty to keep a reader thinking as they go.

Rosshalde is a better novel than the three earlier ones I wrote about here, as there’s a real story, and development of more sympathetic characters. The painter Veraguth endures a broken relationship with his wife and she with him; for him it’s all about his hopes for his relationship with his younger child; he is completely estranged from his elder son. We also gain some insight into the source of an artist’s inspiration. The relationship with his wife is difficult, distant, tormented, the one with his boy is fantasy and wishful thinking. Into all this comes a lifelong male friend whose business is in the Far East and who urges Veraguth to give up on this miserable life and join him in the East

Strong bonds of friendship between men are more successful than marriages – what is Hesse telling us, perhaps about himself, here? Veraguth discovers a new decisiveness as he plans to leave his wife for good, but his future must be totally alone, as his young son dies horribly from meningitis before the departure to the East. Everything has disintegrated, and yet the artist looks forward to new inspiration and creativity abroad. Ultimately every human is alone, and must find and sustain her/himself from inner resources.

Knulp is a set of three short stories about a man who is a lifelong, happy and light-hearted vagabond, with friends and acquaintances wherever he goes. He seems to accept the transience of happiness. Everyone he encounters thinks that, in conventional terms he could have ‘made more’ of his life had he put his mind to it; it’s only in the last story where he is in his forties and dying of tuberculosis that we learn of his disappointment in his first love, which seems to have turned his whole life…

Again, those he is closest to are men. He returns to his hometown to die in familiar surroundings and converses with his God, finding a sense of satisfaction in his existence as it comes to an end. It’s a powerful and moving story, in which we find that Hesse has lost the somewhat lumpen dialogue of the earlier novels, and also has something clear to say: yes, everyone is ultimately alone, and yet, despite disappointments and setbacks, can live a life which has meaning and brings contentment. The road is hard, but this is all we have.

Demian is regarded as a minor masterpiece; I’m not really convinced. Here is another oppressed and miserable schoolboy, and his associate male friends and influences. In this novel, it becomes clearer to the reader, even if not to the hero, that the attraction or desire he feels towards Demian, his mentor, is sexual… For me the story was too laden-down with heavily significant dreams of a Jungian nature. Nevertheless, dreams are important in our lives, and what comes across more strongly as Hesse’s novels develop is the importance of the question of self-discovery and self-actualisation: others cannot lead you, they can only help, accompany, point out possible paths; you have to find and make that journey, which is only yours, yourself, and alone.

The novel was written in apocalyptic times – at the start of the Great War – and resolution is found, in a rather trite way, on the battlefield.

Being something of an obsessive, I have kept a log of every book I’ve read for nearly half a century; just the date I finished a book written in pencil on the last page. I note with interest that I read and then re-read all these books in 1974-75. When I get to the end of this Hesse-binge, I shall try and reflect more fully on what this all meant way back then.

Karel Čapek: R.U.R.

     I think it’s pretty well-known that the word robot comes from the Czech word for work, and was coined by Karel Čapek in his 1922 play R.U.R. (which stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots). I’ve just gone back to the play, which I first sought out in the 1980s.

Rossum originally set out to make artificial humans, but his son realised that a simplified, and more functional version would be cheaper and more profitable; soon these creations flood the world and take over almost all human tasks. The unbelieving heroine is shown as unable to tell the difference between human and robot, and then we are in the territory of, is there any real difference? Aren’t these creatures de-humanising humans by taking over their tasks? Our heroine belongs to an organisation that would give robots ‘human rights’; their creator thinks that everything will be produced so cheaply and plentifully that humans will be able to just help themselves to whatever they need…

It’s a play, and the dialogue is rather wooden. It reminds me of some of Shaw’s plays, though a kinder comparison would be with the kind of theatre Brecht was developing around the same time.

Things do not turn out as planned. Five years elapse between the first act and the remainder of the play, during which time humans have used robots as soldiers, wars are being fought everywhere, it’s clear that sometimes robots go berserk, and that they increasingly despise inefficient and useless human beings, who are gradually dying out because they have no real purpose any more. The robots set about eliminating the last of our species. Unfortunately, the papers detailing how the robots are made, are destroyed.

Only one human survives, and the robots expect him to be able to reconstruct the recipe for making more of them, as they only have a 20-year lifespan. He cannot, and strangely, the robots become more despairing as they foresee their eventual disappearance; there is some essence of humanity in the final robot prototype and the last human finds himself in the position of God in Genesis; the ending is at once blindingly obvious, very clever and also highly satirical.

The play R.U.R. is now a curiosity more than anything, I think, and yet extremely prophetic in the issues it raises and foregrounds, and it deserves revisiting in these days of AI, if only for the purpose of making us think a little more deeply and clearly about what is going on, and what we may be preparing for our futures. Military use of robotics is already, frighteningly, well under-way. Human redundancy in many areas of the workplace has already begun. Can we be sure that robots will always act in our best interests, benevolently obeying Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics? We should not be so complacent…