Steppenwolf - Review

Steppenwolf reads like a harsh commentary on the abstractness of intellectual life, or more specifically that aloofness all too common with intellectuals. That common spiritual pitfall where indifference is viewed as superiority, and enjoying life makes you a “pleasure-seeker” worthy of despise.

“Good God, I thought, I’m now being initiated into and expected to feel at home in a place like this, a world that is so strange and abhorrent to me, a world that until now I’ve taken such care to avoid and so profoundly despised as a world of layabouts and pleasure-seekers, this sleek, typecast world of marble-top tables, jazz music, cocottes and commercial travellers!”

In the end, laughter is the only thing that matters and lofty spiritual ideas are just that, ideas. Life is what makes life worth living, and no amount of hiding in books and philosophy will ever replace the real thing. Divinity is touched in those high arts, there is no denying that, but equally so in the entertainment of ‘commoners’ we get to experience first-hand at the climax, in the masked>“Good God, I thought, I’m now being initiated into and expected to feel at home in a place like this, a world that is so strange and abhorrent to me, a world that until now I’ve taken such care to avoid and so profoundly despised as a world of layabouts and pleasure-seekers, this sleek, typecast world of marble-top tables, jazz music, cocottes and commercial travellers!” ball.

“That night of the ball I experienced a sensation which, though familiar to any teenage girl or student, I had not known the like of in all my fifty years. I mean the thrill of a party, the exhilaration that comes from celebrating with others, the mystery of losing one’s identity in the crowd, the unio mystica of joy. I had often heard people talk about it, there wasn’t a servant girl who hadn’t experienced it, and I had frequently seen the gleam in the eyes of those describing it. My response had always been a half supecilious, half envious smile. … I was no longer myself. In the heady atmosphere of the festivities my personality had dissolved like salt in water.”

Here-in lies the problem. “I had often heard people talk about it”, yet how could a servant girl experience anything like that golden trace of divinity sometimes glimpsed deep in a verse of Goethe or a passage by Mozart?

“Suddenly, between two bars of a passage played piano by the woodwind, the door to eternity had opened up for me again. I had flown through heavens, seen God at work. I had suffered blissful pains, no longer resisting or fearing anything the world had to offer. I had affirmed everything, surrendered my heart to everything. The experience had not lasted long, perhaps a quarter of an hour, but it recurred in the dream I had that night and ever since, through all the dismal days, its secret gleam had now and again resurfaced. Occasionaly I saw it clearly for minutes, passing through my life like a golden trace of the divine, but it was almost always deeply buried under layers of filth and dust. Then it would shine forth afresh in a shower of golden sparks, apparently never to be lost again. Yet it was soon lost once more, totally.”

Don’t get me wrong, that is not to say that mindless entertainment equals art, but that art can be found in more places than one. What is of essence is rather the commitment, the striving for something higher, and the deep appreciation for beauty. Unfortunately, hiding in mediocrity is an all too common solution.

“Any human being capable of understanding Buddha, who has some idea of the heights and depths of human experience, ought not to be living in a world where ‘common sense’, democracy and middle-class culture prevail. It is only cowardice that makes him live there, and whenever he finds his confines oppressive, whenever his poky little middle-class room becomes too cramped for him, it is the ‘wolf’ he blames, refusing to acknowledge that at times the wolf is the best part of him.”

Furthermore, I am of the personal opinion that the quest for happiness can and should be scrapped for something like ‘the sharpening of experience’. Life fluctuates; good and evil, happiness and sadness, are not scales to be tipped by the self, or even mankind. What we can control is the intensity, and we find that the only thing strong enough to raise us to heaven is the suffering of hell. We let the fires of damnation cleanse us, surrender ourselves completely and know that nothing of value can ever be lost. From fire we shall be born again, free.

“To those people who have experienced the disintegration of their selves, we demonstrate that they can reassemble the pieces in a new order of their own choosing whenever they like. They are thus in a position to master the infinte variety of moves in life’s game. Just as writers create a drama from a handful of characters, we are forever able to regroup the separate pieces of our dismantled selves and thus offer them new roles to play, new excitements, situations that are constantly fresh. … This is the art of living. … In future, you yourself may play out your life’s game in this way, reshaping and enlivening it, making it richer and more complex as you wish. It’s up to you. Just as madness in a higher sense is the beginning of wisdom, scizophrenia is the beginning of all art, all fantasy.”

The main thing then, is the incompatibility with the bourgeoisie way of life. To reiterate, not in any inherent way, viewed from outside they are perfectly compatible, but rather it’s the value-system that clashes. Security, safety, “lukewarm mediocrity”, can only be laughed at. “Intensity of life is only possible at the expense of the self. … At the expense of intensity, [the bourgeoisie] manage to preserve their selves and make them secure.”

"There are quite a lot of human beings of a similar kind to Harry; many artists, in particular, are members of the species. All such people have two souls within them, two natures. Divine and devilish elements; maternal as well as paternal blood; a capacity for happiness and suffering can be found side by side and intermingled in them in just as hostile and confused a manner as were the wolf and human being in Harry.

And in their rare moments of happiness these people, whose lives are very unsettled, now and then experience something powerful and ineffably beautiful, lifting them like dazzling spray so high above the sea of suffering that the fleeting glow of their happiness can radiate outwards, touch others and enchant them. It is in such moments of elation, fleeting and precious like spray over a sea of suffering, that all those works of art have their origins in which suffering individuals have managed to rise above their personal fates to such a degree that their happiness radiates like a star. To all those viewing it, it seems like something eternal, like the happiness they themselves have been dreaming of.

All people of this kind, however their actions or works are defined, actually have no lives at all; that is to say their lives have no being, no shape. They are not heroes or artists or thinkers the way other people are judges, doctors, shoemakers or teachers. Instead, their lives are an eternal ebb and flow full off suffering; unhappy, ghastly, riven lives that are without meaning unless one is prepared to see their meaning in precisely those rare experiences, actions, thoughts and works that, rising above the chaos of such lives, suddenly shine forth."