Hermann Hesse Writing Style

Harry Haller is handed a little book on the street at night, and the little book is about him. It calls him the Steppenwolf, walks through his self-pity with a clinician's patience, and then takes the diagnosis away again: a person holds a hundred selves rather than two, the pamphlet says, and the tidy story about the wolf inside is the cheapest one on offer. The novel is called Steppenwolf. Hesse built the review that dismantles his own title into the book, years ahead of any critic who might have written it.

That move is the architecture and not a trick in one novel. Steppenwolf reaches us through a landlady's nephew who found the lodger tiresome and kept his papers anyway. The Glass Bead Game comes from an anonymous scholar, loyal to the order that Josef Knecht walks out of, a man who keeps stopping to admit which parts of the life have already hardened into legend. In The Journey to the East the narrator sits down to write the chronicle of his journey and cannot do it, so the book you are holding is the record of a failure to produce the record. Max Frisch would build Stiller on the same principle a generation later, notebooks written in a cell with a prosecutor's afterword bolted onto the end, and both men want the apparatus for one reason: it buys permission to be devotional without being taken at your word.

He also knows what abstraction costs. Demian opens on two worlds, the lit household and the dark one outside it, which is the kind of thesis that sinks a novel inside a page. Then a boy boasts about an apple theft he made up, an older boy hears him, and the metaphysics arrives in the form of coins taken out of a house he loves. Beneath the Wheel does the same thing to ambition. Hans Giebenrath sits the Landexamen, goes up to the seminary at Maulbronn, loses his one friend, comes home with headaches no doctor can account for, and finishes in a mechanic's shop. No idea in either book gets to stay a word.

For a writer now, the useful part is the permission structure. Reflection reads as self-flattery unless somebody inside the text has already called it that, and Hesse's narrators keep calling it that about themselves, one page before the reader would have. None of this needs his vocabulary. Hand the sharpest objection to your narrator to a document, a rival, or a version of him ten years older, and let it land in the first third, where it still has room to be tested rather than merely conceded. Everything he claims afterwards costs the reader less to believe.

The pamphlet that argues with its own book

Steppenwolf carries an essay bound inside it, a printed treatise handed to Harry in the street, which reads him better than he reads himself. It works because it disagrees with its container. Mario Vargas Llosa's test for a nested story is whether the inner box and the outer box change each other or merely sit side by side, and this one takes apart the premise of the book it is sitting in, so no reader can go on taking the title at face value. Kundera later made a whole practice out of the essay that lives inside a novel and stays hypothetical instead of turning declarative. Hesse got there first, by accident, through a character too proud of his own tragedy.

The editor who did not like the author

Whoever hands you the manuscript is chosen for friction. Harry's papers reach us through the landlady's young nephew, who found his lodger difficult and says so at length before Harry gets a word. The Glass Bead Game is compiled by a believer writing about the man who resigned from the faith. The gap between the frame's opinion and the document's own account is where a reader's judgement gets somewhere to live, and it costs one page of front matter to build. Keep the framing voice short of admiration and the whole book gains a second opinion for free.

The confession with its defence attached

The admission and its excuse arrive in one breath, and the excuse is left standing. Sinclair explains why he had to take the money. Harry explains why the ordinary world he keeps coming back to is beneath him. No narrator above them clears any of it up, so the weighing falls to the reader, and doing the weighing produces the closeness that people describe as Hesse's warmth. The hard part is the quality of the excuse, because a weak one turns your narrator from a man into a case study, and the reader who was going to argue with him stops bothering.

The object that outlives its meaning

One physical thing, met three or four times, under different conditions on each occasion. The araucaria on the scrubbed landing. The ferry and the river. The hawk on the coat of arms above the Sinclair front door. What has changed between appearances is the man, while the object stands there unaltered, which makes the difference measurable rather than asserted. The hazard is the loud return, and Baxter's warning covers it exactly: a rhyme the reader can hear coming is worse than none, and Hesse crosses that line the moment somebody inside the book explains what the river means.

The teacher under a word limit

Wisdom in these books runs under a strict word limit. Vasudeva ferries, listens, and gives out almost nothing for chapters at a time, and the withholding is the technique. A character who says the theme has spent it. Keep the mentor's total speech under what the reader wants and the scenes stay hungry, which is why the ferry chapters keep their pull with no external event in them at all. This only works if the mentor visibly could speak and chooses not to, so the pressure has to be written first and then held.

The chronicle that cannot be written

The Journey to the East is narrated by a man trying and failing to write the account of the journey he took, and the failure is the plot. He cannot get the league onto paper. He doubts his own membership. The servant who carried the luggage turns out to have been running everything. A book about the impossibility of its own subject sounds like a stunt, and it holds here because the narrator wants the record badly, for reasons the reader shares, so his failure lands as a loss rather than as a piece of cleverness.

The double who is one mind

He splits one person into two people and lets them meet. Narcissus and Goldmund, the scholar and the carver. Sinclair and Demian. Harry and Hermine, whose name he has to guess and reaches by way of a boyhood friend called Hermann, which happens to be the author's own first name. The compression is the point, since what would otherwise be interior monologue turns into friendship, seduction, quarrel and departure. The cost is allegory, and Hesse pays it down by giving both halves real advantages and real damage, so that the choice between them refuses to come out clean in any of the books where he tries it.

The Magic Theatre

Late in Steppenwolf, Harry goes through a door whose sign refuses admission to anyone who merely wants in, and finds a corridor of labelled doors, each one turning a version of his life into something he can walk into and play. In front of a mirror he comes apart into a crowd of figures of different ages. The pamphlet had already made the claim. Here the claim gets a floor plan. Hesse declines to restate the thesis and builds premises for it instead, which is why a reader who would have argued with the proposition follows the man down the corridor without raising a single objection.

Names that carry the argument

Josef Knecht is named with the German word for a servant, and he rises to Magister Ludi. In The Journey to the East the man carrying the luggage is the head of the order. The names run the argument underneath the plot without any sentence having to state it, and because they are ordinary words the reader tends to notice them only once the story has caught up. It works at low doses. A whole cast of speaking names collapses into a morality play, while one name stays a quiet remark that a reader can pretend not to have heard.

Lives appended to a life

The Glass Bead Game does not stop when Knecht dies. His poems follow, and after them three Lebenslaeufe, student exercises in which the same shape gets played out again in other centuries under another name. A thesis novel usually closes by proving its thesis. This one closes by running the case a few more times under changed conditions and handing the comparison to the reader. Borges worked the same seam from the other end with commentary and scholarship for books that did not exist, and the two of them found the same thing: an invented apparatus can carry a claim that a narrator would have to argue for.

Copying the serene surface and dropping the self-suspicion

The calm in Hesse is a man holding still under interrogation, and he is running the interrogation. Take that away and the sentences go slack at once, because nothing is being resisted. What looks like peace on the page is the residue of an argument the narrator has already lost once, in front of us. Writers who imitate the tone tend to produce a narrator at rest and then wonder why paragraphs that scan beautifully generate no pull at all. Put the accusation back and the same sentences tighten without a word of them changing.

Explaining the motif on its second appearance

River, bird, road: the imitator brings the image back and then tells the reader what it means now, which converts a live object into a caption. Once the meaning has been stated the third appearance has nothing left to do, and a fourth becomes decoration. Hesse slips here himself, most visibly in Siddhartha, where the lesson of the river gets spelled out in dialogue that the ferry scenes had already delivered without help. Study the araucaria instead. It goes unglossed from beginning to end, and it carries more than the river does.

Writing the seeker and forgetting the shame

Sinclair is a small boy who lies to impress a bully and then steals to stay ahead of him. Goldmund abandons people. Harry Haller is a snob about the exact life he is homesick for. Imitations tend to show up with a protagonist whose only flaw is being too sensitive for the world, which removes the engine, because a self-examination with nothing to examine has no reason to continue past the first chapter. Give yours something it would rather keep quiet about.

Importing German abstractions without their history

Geist, Seele, Erwachen, Bestimmung: these carry a weight in German that they lose in transit, because a German reader has met them in Luther, in hymns and at school long before meeting them in a novel, and Hesse is quietly banking on that history. Tip them into a language or a book without it and you get a lifestyle brochure where an inheritance should be. The answer is coverage rather than avoidance. Three pages of bread, boats and money first. Then the word once, and pick the least impressive English one that fits.