Steppenwolf Read online

  It still remains to us to explain Steppenwolf's individual case, and his curious relationship to the bourgeoisie in particular, by relating these phenomena to the basic laws that govern them. Since it seems the obvious place to begin, let us take that relationship of his to things 'bourgeois' as our starting point.

  According to his own understanding Steppenwolf was a total outsider to the world of the bourgeoisie since he knew no family life and had no ambition to climb the social ladder. He felt himself to be an out-and-out loner, now an eccentric and unhealthy recluse, now an individual of potential genius, far superior to the petty average. Conscious of despising the average bourgeois, he took pride in not being one. And yet in many respects his own life was thoroughly bourgeois. He had money in the bank and gave financial support to poor relatives; he dressed casually, but respectably and modestly; he sought to remain on a good footing with the police, the taxman and suchlike authorities. Beyond this, however, an intense, secret yearning constantly attracted him to the small world of the middle classes, to respectable family houses with their neat little gardens, their spotlessly clean staircases and their totally unassuming atmosphere of orderliness and good repute. He took pleasure in his little vices and extravagances, liked to feel that he was a creature apart from the bourgeois world, an eccentric or genius, yet he never, if we can put it this way, chose to settle in any of those areas where bourgeois respectability is now non-existent. He never felt at home in the atmosphere of misfits or people prone to violent behaviour; never sought the company of criminals or social outcasts. No, the sphere he always lived in was that of respectable citizens, for he could constantly relate to their atmosphere, their customs and standards, if only in a spirit of opposition and revolt. Moreover, his own upbringing had been of a narrow, middle-class kind, and he still adhered to a whole host of ideas and stereotypical notions inculcated in him when he was growing up. In theory he hadn't the slightest objection to prostitution, but he would have been personally incapable of taking any whore seriously or actually regarding her as his equal. Those the state and society made outlaws of, political criminals, revolutionaries, persuasive demagogues, he was capable of loving as brothers, but he would have had no idea how to react to a thief, burglar or sex killer other than disapproving of them in a rather conventional bourgeois manner.

  So it was that in all he thought and did one half of his being was forever recognizing and affirming the things the other half fought against and rejected. He had grown up in a cultivated middle-class household where the social and moral proprieties were religiously observed, and deep down part of him still constantly clung to the prescribed norms of that world. This even continued to be the case long after he had established his own individual identity to a degree that would have been impossible within the confines of the bourgeoisie and had long since liberated himself from the burden of its ideals and beliefs.

  Now, what we call 'the bourgeois' is an ever-present aspect of the human condition. It is nothing more than an attempted compromise, a striving for a balanced middle ground between the countless extremes and binary opposites of human behaviour. If we take any one of these binary opposites as an example, say that of the saint and the profligate, the sense of our metaphor will be immediately apparent. It is possible for human beings to devote themselves totally to things spiritual, to aspire to something approaching the divine, the ideal of sainthood. Conversely, they may devote themselves totally to their carnal urges, the demands of their senses, investing all their energy in the pursuit of instant gratification. One of these routes leads to the saint: the martyr to things spiritual, self-surrender to God. The other leads to the profligate: the martyr to carnal urges, self-surrender to corruption of the flesh. Members of the bourgeoisie will typically try to lead a life in the temperate zone between the two. They will never surrender themselves, never devote themselves either to dissipation or to asceticism. They will never be martyrs, never acquiesce in their own destruction; on the contrary: their ideal is not self-surrender but self-preservation. Neither sanctity nor its opposite is the goal they strive for; for them absolute goals are intolerable. They do wish to serve God, but they also give Bacchus his due, and although they want to be virtuous they are not entirely averse to earthly pleasures and creature comforts. In short, they attempt to put down roots midway between two extremes, in a bland and temperate zone without strong winds and rainstorms. Their attempt succeeds too, yet at the expense of all those intense experiences and emotions that only a life devoted to absolute and extreme goals can afford. Intensity of life is only possible at the expense of self. But there is nothing members of the bourgeoisie value more highly than self, albeit only at a rudimentary stage of development. Thus, at the expense of intensity, they manage to preserve their selves and make them secure. Instead of possession by God, an easy conscience is the reward they reap; instead of desire, contentment; instead of liberty, cosiness; instead of life-threatening heat, an agreeable temperature. Members of the bourgeoisie are therefore essentially creatures weak in vital energy, timid individuals, afraid ever to abandon themselves, easy to govern. That is why they have replaced power by majority rule, replaced force by the rule of law, and replaced responsibility by the ballot box.

  It is clear that these weak and timid creatures, however high their numbers, cannot sustain themselves. By virtue of their characteristics the only role they could possibly play in the world is that of a flock of sheep among free-roaming wolves. Yet although members of the bourgeoisie are the first to go to the wall in periods when very forceful natures hold power, we never witness their extinction. At times they even seem to rule the world. How is this possible? Neither their numerical strength, nor their virtue; neither what the English call their 'common sense', nor their organization would be strong enough to save them from extinction. People of their sort, whose vital energy is so sapped from the outset, cannot be kept alive by any medicine known to man. And yet the bourgeoisie survives, is strong, thrives. - Why?

  The answer is because of the lone wolves. The fact is that the vital strength of the bourgeoisie is by no means based on the characteristics of its normal members, but rather on those of the extraordinarily numerous 'outsiders', as the English call them, that it manages to bring within its embrace because its ideals are so vague and elastic. The bourgeoisie constantly has a whole host of strong, untamed characters living in its midst. Harry, our Steppenwolf, is a typical example.

  This man, whose individuality has evolved to a degree far beyond what is possible for any member of the bourgeoisie; who is familiar with both the ecstasy of meditation and the dark delights of hatred and self-hatred; who despises the law, virtue and 'common sense', is nonetheless a prisoner of the bourgeoisie, and unable to escape from it. Deposited around the hard core of the genuine bourgeoisie there are thus extensive layers of humankind; thousands of lives and minds, every one of whom has outgrown the bourgeoisie and would, it is true, be ideally suited to a life of absolute freedom. Yet every one of them, still attached to the bourgeoisie by infantile sentiment, infected to some degree by its weakened vitality, nevertheless somehow remains stuck in its ambit, is still in bondage to it, is committed to it and at its service. For the fundamental principle of the great applies in reverse to the bourgeoisie: Those who are not against us are for us!

  If in the light of this we examine the mind of the Steppenwolf, what we find is a human being destined, if only because of his high degree of individuality, to lead a non-bourgeois life. This is because all highly developed individuality eventually turns against the self, tending to work towards its destruction. We see that he is driven by strong desires in the direction of both the saint and the profligate, yet as a result of some loss of vitality or a kind of inertia has not been able to propel himself into the freedom of untamed outer space. Instead he remains under the gravitational spell of the maternal star that is the bourgeoisie. This is his cosmic location, and he is tied to it. The vast majority of intellectuals, most artist f
igures are of the same type. Only the strongest of them manage to thrust their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and enter the cosmic realm. All the others end in resignation or make compromises, despising the bourgeoisie but nonetheless belonging to it. And they end up strengthening and glorifying it because, in order to be able to go on living, they cannot help but approve of it. These numerous individuals may lack the stuff of tragedy, but they are dogged by considerable misfortune, live under an unlucky star, and their talents only flourish after a slow roasting in the furnace of that star's hell. The few who manage to tear themselves away and discover absolute freedom meet their ends in admirable fashion. They are the truly tragic ones, and their numbers are small. As for the others, however, the ones who remain tied to the bourgeoisie and often bring honour to it by dint of their talents, there is a third realm open to them, an imaginary but sovereign world: that of humour. To those restless lone wolves who, forever in torment, lack the propulsion required to break through into starry outer space and attain tragic status; who feel destined for absolute freedom yet are unable to live in it, humour can, if their spirit is tough and flexible, offer an optimistic way out. Humour always remains somehow or other bourgeois even though the true bourgeois is incapable of understanding it. In its imaginary realm, the convoluted and enigmatic ideals of every Steppenwolf can become reality. Here it is not only possible to take a positive view of the saint and the profligate at one and the same time, to bring the opposite poles into contact, but also to include the bourgeois as an object of approval. It may be perfectly possible for those possessed by God to view lawbreakers positively, and vice versa, but both groups - and all other such uncompromising types - will be quite incapable of also giving their approval to that neutral, lukewarm middle way that constitutes life for the bourgeois. Only humour - the splendid invention of those highly talented but unfortunate individuals who are frustrated in the pursuit of the highest ideals, figures bordering on the tragic - only humour (possibly the most original and brilliant of humankind's achievements) can accomplish the otherwise impossible feat of uniting all spheres of human life by bathing them in the iridescent light of its prisms. To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law but to remain above it, to have possessions 'as if not possessing', to renounce things as though it were no renunciation: - all the things asked of us in such well-loved and frequently expressed words of wisdom can only be put into practice through humour.

  And if Steppenwolf, who shows signs of being capable of and blessed with the gift of humour, should in the torrid chaos of his private hell one day manage to concoct and distil this magic potion then he would be saved. In many respects, he still lacks what it takes for this to happen. However, the possibility, the hope is there. Anyone who likes him and has his welfare at heart will want him to find salvation in this way. In doing so he would of course remain forever confined to the bourgeois sphere, but his suffering would be bearable, indeed would become fruitful. His love-hate relationship with the world of the bourgeois would cease to be sentimental, and what he regards as the disgrace of being tied to that world would no longer constantly torment him.

  To succeed in this, or in the end perhaps even be capable of venturing the great leap into outer space, such a Steppenwolf would need for once to be confronted with himself, would have to look into the chaos of his own psyche and become totally self-aware. Then his questionable existence would be revealed to him as something utterly inalterable. It would be impossible for him in future again and again to escape the hell of his basic instincts by indulging in the consolations of sentimental philosophizing, or in turn to seek refuge from these in the blind frenzy of his wolfish appetites. The human being and the wolf would be compelled to recognize each other without the distorting masks of emotion, to look each other nakedly in the eye. They would then either explode and go their separate ways for ever, Steppenwolf thus ceasing to exist, or, in the rising light of humour, they would enter into a marriage of convenience.

  One day, perhaps, Harry will be given this latter opportunity. One day, perhaps, he will learn to know himself, whether by coming into possession of one of our little mirrors, or by encountering the Immortals, or perhaps by finding in one of our magic theatres what he needs to liberate himself from his badly troubled state of mind. A thousand opportunities of this sort are waiting for him. Because of the plight he is in they are irresistibly drawn to him. The atmosphere that all such outsiders on the fringes of the bourgeoisie live and breathe is full of magic opportunities of this kind. It takes very little for lightning to strike.

  And even if he never gets to read this sketch of his inner biography Steppenwolf is well aware of all these things. He senses what his place is in the structure of the universe; deep down he is no stranger to the Immortals; he is dimly aware of - and fears - the possibility of a confrontation with his own self. And though he knows the mirror he so desperately needs to look into exists, the thought of looking into it fills him with mortal dread.

  There is still one last fiction, one fundamental delusion that needs to be laid to rest before we bring our study to a close. All 'explanations', all psychological analysis, all attempts at understanding are reliant upon theories, myths, falsehoods for support. And where possible no respectable author ought to round off his portrayal without exposing such falsehoods. If I say 'above' or 'below' it is in itself an assertion that calls for explanation because an above and a below only exist as objects of abstract thought. The world itself is ignorant of any above or below.

  Thus, to come straight to the point, 'Steppenwolf' is a fiction too. If Harry feels himself to be a hybrid of wolf and human being, thinks he consists of two hostile and conflicting entities, that is merely a simplification, a myth. Harry is nothing of the kind. If when attempting to consider and interpret him as an actual hybrid, as a Steppenwolf, we appeared to adopt the tale he himself tells and believes in, we were resorting to deceit in the hope of making ourselves more easily understood. What now follows is an attempt to put things straight.

  The division into wolf and human being, body and mind or spirit, by means of which Harry tries to make his destiny more comprehensible to himself, is a very crude simplification. It does violence to reality in favour of a plausible but false explanation of the contradictions that this human being discovers in himself and which seem to him to be the source of his not inconsiderable suffering. Harry finds a 'human being' in himself, that is to say, a world of ideas, feelings, culture, domesticated and sublimated nature. Besides this he also finds a 'wolf', that is to say, a dark world of instincts, savagery, cruelty, nature unsublimated and raw. Yet despite this ostensibly clear division of his being into two mutually hostile spheres he has time and again experienced happy moments when the wolf and the human being got on well together for a while. Were Harry to attempt at every single moment of his life, in everything he did and felt, to determine the part played by the human being and that played by the wolf, he would immediately be in a fix. All his fine theory of the wolf would go to pieces, for there are absolutely no human beings, even primitive Negroes, even idiots, who are so pleasingly simple that their characters can be explained as the sum of only two or three principal elements. And to attempt to explain someone as subtly complex as Harry, of all people, by naively splitting him into wolf and human being is too childish for words. Harry is not made up of two characters, but of hundreds, of thousands. His life, like that of every human being, does not oscillate between two poles only - say between the body and the mind or spirit, between the saint and the profligate - but between thousands, between innumerable polar opposites.

  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.