Thursday, May 29, 2014

For Madmen Only


Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

I read this book a quarter of a century ago, soon after I began serious reading.  I think I picked it up at the used book store in Davis (Bogey’s Books!  I have no idea if it still exists), but it may have been at a library book sale.  The appeal was obvious: Great Book with the same name as a rock band.  So, it must be good, right?  I have a vivid memory of being terribly disappointed with the book.  There is this guy who is a werewolf, the Steppenwolf, see, and he knows he is a werewolf, and he starts meeting people, and there is this constant threat that the werewolf will take over and do some violence, but then the werewolf guy goes to some bizarre theater thing and some bizarre things happen there and then he talks to a strange guy named Pablo and Mozart shows up and the novel ends.  What kind of werewolf book is that?

By the way, that plot description above is not actually a plot description of the novel Hesse wrote.  It is the description of the novel my mid-20s self read. 

I just reread the book for the first time.  Wow.  My mid-20s self sure didn’t know anything.  It isn’t surprising that he read this book so poorly; his education—and let’s be clear, he had a bachelor’s degree by this point—had left him so woefully uneducated that there was no way he was ever going to make sense of Steppenwolf, the novel that Hesse actually wrote.  Even a love of the band of the same name left him woefully unprepared to have any hope of understanding anything at all in that novel that Hesse wrote.  (I have often told my bookish students who enjoy a long conversation about books that they would have had utter disdain for me if they had met me when I was in college—I knew nothing compared to what my bookish students know.)

So what about the novel Steppenwolf that Hesse wrote…you know the one that doesn’t have a werewolf or even a hint of a werewolf, the one in which the Magic Theater isn’t really all that strange?

It is actually a good book—maybe even a Great Book.  As an exploration of the human psyche, it is quite thought-provoking.  The book was littered with passages which made me wonder, “Is that true?”  The mind is a strange place, after all.  Our hero, Harry Haller, thinks of himself as being of two minds—the coldly rational human self and the wild wolfish self.  The human half must keep the wolfish half at bay. So far, so conventional.  Except Harry is living in a world (early 20th century) where the norms of Civilization which help keep man civilized, help keep the wolf at bay, are breaking down.  How does a man whose life is ordered to keep his beast under control manage in a world in which everything, from the dance halls to the music to the women, are conspiring to release man’s inner beast?  At this point, the novel was starting to intrigue me—after all the early 21st century is even farther down the path of civilizational decline than was the early 20th century.

Then, a funny thing happen on the way to the novel I was expecting.  The book begins a sustained argument that Harry is wrong to think of himself as being divided into two parts.  He isn’t two parts at all; his parts are legion.  And crafting this multiplicity of parts into a cohesive whole is the fundamental challenge of becoming human.  Take all the parts of you that make up who you are and combine them in this way and you are one person, but combine those same parts in a different way and you are someone else entirely.  So, how do you craft a self?  Can you craft a self?  And even more interestingly, can you craft a self different than the one you have already crafted?  Is there a way to take all the constituent parts which make up You and shuffle them up and come up with a different person?  The book is wildly optimistic on this.  I am much more skeptical.

I have a friend who is a psychologist and of late he has become enamored with the Myers-Briggs personality test.  I am beginning, rapidly beginning, to share his fascination.  It began when he stared sending me things about my type.  Now I have known my Myers-Briggs type for some time, but I had never read more than the quick paragraph description of it—the quick paragraph was accurate to be sure.  But, then he started sending me longer, more detailed discussions of it, including such things as “How others see people of this type” and “What causes stress for people of this type” and in thing after thing, I was stunned to discover how man of the things which I thought were just my annoying idiosyncrasies are actually standard in people with my Myers-Briggs classification.  Then he started ending along thing about Janet’s type and wow, do they describe my wife.  The clincher came this morning.  He sent along some things about Clara’s type—I have never understood my youngest daughter as well as I suddenly do.  It nails her external behavior; it was startling to realize what is beneath the external behavior.  The interesting part—all three of us have different Myers-Briggs types, but all three of them are rare types.  All three of us thought we were a bit odd.  All three of us now realize we share those oddities with a small part of the population.

So, back to Hesse, can I readjust my personality?  I don’t see how.  And more interestingly, I don’t see why I would want to do so.  After all, if I readjusted my personality, am I still me?  Is my immortal soul intricately bound up with my Myers-Briggs personality? 

In answer to the inevitable question: INTJ. 

And in answer to the other, less inevitable question (does that make it an evitable question?), I liked this song the best.

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