Book Review 'Steppenwolf' by Hermann Hesse (trans. Basil Creighton)

TREATISE ON THE STEPPENWOLF

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils.

There were times, my friends, that I thought I was the Steppenwolf. Then there were times I did not. But that is perfectly within the character of the thing. Hesse gives you multiplicity in spades, and keeps stepping off into further steppes...

 

It is the kind of book that would burn. It burnt in the streets out the front of Frankfurt City Hall in ’33. And it kinda burns in your hands. It’s hot, the lines simmer under you like elements. It can burn you like ice can, like European chill.

It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.

We follow Harry Haller through a range of fluctuating narrative frames. There is a kind of magic realism going on at times, but one that beautifully disrupts the page. Whether it be politics or relationships or aesthetics, everything is shined and dulled as we run a roller-coaster through the mind of Haller, one way or another.

He assigns, we fear, whole provinces of his soul to the ‘man’ which are a long way from being human, and parts of his being to the wolf that long ago have left the wolf behind.

Haller feels he is two things, both a man, and Steppenwolf (a wolf of the steppes): a social, thinking, moral (and immoral), subject; and a loner, instinctive, amoral, living-object. But his critics are already at work, both before we hear his own voice, and even later, when he reads a book about himself. He is both man, and the man-overcome.
 

There is much of Nietzsche here, of course. Harry is an intellectual, an expert on Mozart and Goethe. He was also a public opponent of the first world war (but not enough to get himself executed, he is perfectly aware) and a pacifist who was predicting a much worse war on the way if things don’t change (and this book was published in 1927) and still being pilloried in the press for his previous articles as anti-German.

Looked at with the bourgeois eye, my life had been a continuous descent from one shattering to the next that left me more remote at every step from all that was normal, permissible and healthful.

But he enters the world of feeling through a kind of gender-neutral woman called Hermine, who looks like Hermann, and old friend of his. Hesse has a way of subtly destabilising events. His magic-realism (for want of a better way of describing it) comes in waves, and you never quite know where the dial is. As he gets lost, or found, in further worlds that start with foxtrot and head swiftly toward wanton fornication, homosexuality, interracial group-sex and hard drugs, he certainly does ‘loosen up’ a bit.

 

And I suppose this was what attracted the 60s counterculture movement to pick it up as ‘a bible’ (according to the blurb on my edition); but there is just as much critique of the cross- as the mainstream here, in the story itself. The Steppenwolf is anti-cultural-as-a-culture. It moves to negate more than counter. And the result is both beautiful and disastrous, as it should be.

”I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the devil?”

Can either of them learn to live from each other? Is this even really happening? The original framing narrator has already suggested, no, it’s all preposterous, and it gets more and more so, as Pablo keeps the party drugs flowing and droppin’ da mad beatz. Certainly we descend (or ascend?) more and more into Haller’s interiority, but the realness still shifts up and back. Certainly there are savage shades of the first war futilities to come... But also innocent love revisited...

   

 It can be dark, but Hesse always wanted to stress the process of traversing the darkness that is there, the inconsistencies of living, the absurdities. If you don’t actually face them, then you are not letting the man or the wolf play. You must engage wholly in life, to live. In the end, he is determined to begin the game afresh. Why? And how? Mozart tells him:

”Humour is always gallows-humour, and it is on the gallows you are now constrained to learn it.”

And he laughs his ghastly laugh.

He wants to start again because traversing hell is the only way to hear a good joke.
\
But you need to read this book and stare into your own Steppenwolf, and stare back into yourself, staring back into you.

Book Review: 'The Possibility of an Island' by Michel Houellebecq

I thought again of Daniel ... and, for the first time, I was tempted to pity him, without, however, respecting him.

If someone would have suggested to me that the novel, as a genuine art form, was dead, that it had effectively died in the 80s sometime; or, at the very least, it had been in what amounted to a slow, wasting coma since then, and would never really emerge, and we may as well flick a switch and be done with the whole fucking thing; I would have found very little to argue agin ‘im. Now, however, I would toss him a copy of this novel.

 

If I had it on me.

Which would be unlikely.

I mean, I would have had to be standing right in front of my bookcase.

And if I had a second copy.

And I’d still want it back, I would impress upon them.

After hearing about Houellebecq I had already kinda vowed that I would no longer read any more French until I could read it in French. Then a friend waves a second-hand copy of this book in English in front of my face and it’s ten bucks in Federation Square and I cave in like a Chinese coalmine...

’It was an ex-boyfriend...’ she said in English, as if to convey that it wasn’t very important.

Because, really, I wanted to know if I was going to love him like I thought I was going to love him. So, surely, those gods who still care about such things as vows, even literary vows, would cut this brother a break on this one, huh? Huh? And I do love him. In English, at least, thanks to Gavin Bowd.

It’s amusing to observe that it’s always the enemies of freedom who find themselves, at one moment or another, most in need of it.

Houellebecq has been called everything. He has been branded with the ‘ists and the ‘phobes. It’s amazing that he’s published at all, really. Maybe it’s a French thing? And you can see where socio-political ire can certainly be drawn in this novel. You just need to peruse some of the review-fodder on this site. The primary narrative focal character is white and a man and a heterosexual and ageing. And he’s brutally honest about a process of these things in the society he occupies ... and is occupied by.

To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.

And, yeah, he obsesses over his dick, as in, he would like it to work. Wow. How the fuck does this not feature in more novels with some degree of interiority of an ageing man? That’s what you should ask yourself if that’s what you’re whining about. There is something both beautiful and savage in the way in which Houellebecq plays with the sense of polemic in his fiction here, and when you read the angry people, he seems to have written these people’s rants too. They seem like his characters. You could slot them into the book in most cases, no problem at all, since he has this sense of humanity that defeats them even in their base expression. It’s cute, but terrifying too.

...this opposition between eroticism and tenderness appeared to me as it truly is: one of the worst examples of bullshit of our time, one of those that signs, definitively, the death warrant of civilization.

 And it is about civilization, and the civilised, that Houellebecq writes about. We get to read work from three different Daniels, the first of which is a stand-up ‘shock’ comic who ends up hating the sound of laughter. The other two are different versions of him from the future.

...then they grow weary, little by little, narcissistic competition takes the upper hand, and in the end they fuck even less than at the time of strong religious morality.

 

And Daniel diminishes before our eyes, but he fights, and he rages against the dying of the light. Even when he gives in, even when he goes down, he does it in a way that is completely undignified and unwholesome, which is a kind of victory, the only kind possible in Houellebecq’s world here.

It’s sad, the shipwreck of a civilization, it’s sad to see its most beautiful minds sink without a trace — one begins to feel ill at ease in life, and one ends up wanting to establish an Islamic republic.

Houellebecq plays with the sense of the individual and being a man (that is, in the specific visceral sense, not ‘masculinities’) as well as the role religion (and the sense of the religious), science (and the sense of the scientific) play and interact with consumer-capitalism. Once a fully working and well-marketed model can operate between all these realms, then humanity becomes neohumanity, and humanity is no more than a then ending whimper. And there is much about neohumanity that is already among us, the Supreme Sister, and there’s plenty of them already, the kind of new-puritanism that always runs, paradoxically, across the crass, advertising-ploy of hyper-sexualisation. Where it's all '...a question of casting aside any notion of poltical choice, the source ... of 'false but violent' passions. And in and among all this, there is Love. But not necessarily as-narrative, but as the instant, as not an island that exists firmly and resolutely there, solid, a refuge, among teeming seas; but as its possibility, the idea that such a thing can-be despite it not being able to. So that maybe the neohuman can be human?

...this had happened all the same, despite us, despite me ... we had not surrendered, to the end we had refused to collaborate and to accept a system that was designed to destroy us.

Houellebecq, for his part, does not seem to delight in the kinds of things he explores regarding humanity. He seems as much horrified by a Daniel1 as any other version. But there's a sense of pity, and a sense of hope, too; even if a sad hope. It really is frighteningly powerful stuff, and may even convince you that the sex and colour and age and sexuality of an author is not the driving force behind the work? No? Unlike for Supreme Sister...

 

The problem is, she's both right and wrong, but wrong most horribly.

Et je vais lire La possibilité d'une île un jour ... en langue française.

Book Review: 'The Sun Also Rises' by Ernest Hemingway

"We all ought to make sacrifices for literature."

But let’s start with the epigraph.

It begins with a famous verbal quote from Gertrude Stein; but, according to Hemingway’s notebooks, it was first said by a garage mechanic to Stein as “c’est un generation perdu” regarding those that were around 22 to 30 at the time. "No one wants them. They are no good. They were spoiled." He meant the first war, and both Jake and Brett have been spoiled by it in different ways. They have both been remade, and Brett has been talked about as being Hemingway’s take on ‘the new woman’ as the first wave of feminism started to recede back into the sea..

She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes.

And Jake, ‘...a foreigner, an Englishman,’ (any foreigner was an Englishman), ‘have given more than your life.’ He is no longer a man, physically, in that sexual sense, and that’s easy to dismiss if you are a woman, I observe, after the few titters of laughter you get when you mention it to one ... and that Jake has already made you aware of are coming. To another man, putting himself in his place, he has given more than his life. And Hemingway knew these men (post-men?) from his ambulance service in world war one. He should be the hero. But instead, he sits outside of things, and there is something terrible in his relationship with the highly sexed world around him, and the damaged New Woman. There’s a deep-seated mutual antagonism that runs along the over-narrative., that the damned most desire company, and in each other they recognise the same level of damnation, or, alternatively, being lost.

 

At one point they are even looked on as pimp and whore, and Jake understands the vision almost instinctively. Does he run to Madrid because he loves her? He is lost without her, certainly, but just as much for the hate of it as the love. He can live with his burden while he’s in the light, while he is distracted. But the dark, the moment of being most alone, most lost as just a he trying to hold on to being something, this is where the depth of the human turmoil lies. And Brett, does she reject the more ‘old woman’ life she’s offered with love and stability because she’s a champion of ‘new woman-ness’? No, it’s for the same reason.

"I know," said the Count. "That is the secret. You must get to know the values."

In the second part of the epigraph, we get a chunk of Ecclesiastes, this atheist’s favourite book of the Bible. Human life is cyclic, just as the rest of nature is cyclic. So you die, so what? You aren’t really much anyway. The sun also rises, and it goes down. Get over yourself. And this can be a useful platform for those with faith in God, for they can springboard joyfully from their Faith into their oneness with God that is more than just them-self. But for the post-Nietzschian? The sun also rising even though you’ve had your balls blown off is something to cut through the night and bury itself in your demand for a soul.



Where are the values?

In the introduction to my edition, Colm Tóibίn writes this about Hemingway’s style:

...and make the sentences and the paragraphs he wrote ostensibly simple, filled with repetitions and odd variations, charged with a sort of hidden electricity, filled with an emotion which the reader could not easily find in the words themselves, emotion that seemed to live in the space between words, or in the sudden endings of certain paragraphs.

Hemingway once said that the hero of the novel is the land. And here, just briefly, he demonstrates both that, and the above ideas from Tóibίn:

...and we were going way up close along a hillside, with a valley below and hills stretched off back toward the sea. You couldn’t see the sea. It was too far away. You could see only hills and more hills, and you knew where the sea was.

And from the land emerges the fiesta, a period of ‘no consequences’ where Jake expresses the idea that the values, once again, are in flux. But through all this is a motif of pure consequence: the bullfight. Men could face the bull briefly in the corrida, but then there were the bullfighters, who would face them to life or death.

Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off.

Hemingway’s love for bullfighting has been well-documented, of course; as has the growing tide of western opinion against it, but this only further cements it in as ‘the wonderful nightmare’ and how it works for the story. When Romero, the bullfighter, tells Brett that the bulls are his best friends, she responds:

"You kill your friends?" she asked."Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don’t kill me."

Nobody really learns anything. Nobody really progresses. There are no epiphanies. But still, the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose. Hemingway doesn’t manufacture some kind of false novel-esque buffet for you. He wants you to face the bull of it. ...but maybe, something has happened anyway. Brett has decided to not be a bitch and ruin children. Jake has realised how crap life would have been with her even if he had genitals. But then again ... she probably still will be, and he still has to face another night...

 

"Oh, don’t go to hell," I said. "Stick around. We’re just starting lunch."

Book Review: 'A Clockwork Orange' by Anthony Burgess

”It might not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good.”

This is the third time I have read this book, the first as a teenager, around Alex’s age; and the around fifteen years between the readings since. Each time I've experienced the story differently; each time, My Friend and Humble Narrator seems to have told me a different kind of story. But always ... a human story. And always, a warning

.  

  A 1964 pre-movie cover with a pre-movie take on Alex & droogs, thanks to Luke's collection.

Kubrick’s vision for the story looms ever-large; and it’s almost impossible to see Alex and his droogs in any other way. Or hear them in any other way.

“I have heard of A Clockwork Orange. I have not read it but I have heard of it.”

But you can, if you can allow the Nadsat tongue to penetrate you, the lingual in-out-in-out, and feel the inner music of it in the exposition. A sentence like this a good example:

It was very cally and vonny, with one bulb in the ceiling with fly-dirt like obscuring its bit of light, and there were early rabbiters slurping away at chai and horrible-looking sausages and slices of kleb which they like wolfed, going wolf wolf wolf and then creeching for more.

There’s the rescue from Kubrick: Burgess giving his narrator his gulliver to place the scene in yours. Kubrick has style, but he doesn't have this. Alex use of the word ‘like’ as a filler in his language is something I hadn't noticed much before. And he will even use ‘like and like’ on occasion, with filler followed by simile.

“Yarbles,” I said, like snarling like a doggie. “Bolshy great yarblockos to thee and thine.”

And there is a movement in the way he speaks to us throughout the tale, from the less intimate and conspiratorial while he is with his pack of droogs, until we, the readers, kind of replace them ... and are then replaced ourselves:

“There was never any trust,” I said, bitter, wiping off the krovvy with my rooker. “I was always on my oddy knocky.”

... until the very final chapter, when we again become droogs, of a nostalgic sort. So what’s it all about? What’s it going to be then, eh?

 

It’s fine to say it’s about good and evil, that’s a starting point, and about choice, and how choice/free will interplays with being human: our capacity for choice. And Burgess’s Catholicism, lapsed or otherwise, plays a role in his vision. Alex capacity for choice, at the start of each Part, and at the start of Part 3 Chapter 7, are all limited in varying ways, based on a whole range of social concerns. That he chooses to do evil, and that this is bad for society as a whole, Alex is in touch with, he understands that ‘...you can’t run a country with every chelloveck comporting himself in my manner of the night.’

But what I do I do because I like to do.

A kind of rollicking ongoing self-explosion of id never quite brought to ground? Can we trust him? Of course, nay. The Prison Chaplain very briefly touches on some of the extrapolations of the idea of imposed goodness, the clockwork orange. He wonders if a man who chooses to do bad (sin) is in some way better than the man who does good (is righteous) but does it without choice. Since Free Will must be part of God’s plan, to remove it would be more of the Devil than to be devilish. Then he tries to get around the situation be asking if it is okay to be deprived of choice if THAT is your choice. No choice can be honestly made without understanding the ramifications of course.

 

But it is, of course, his relationship with the State that is the most affecting one. Alex takes his tolchocks from the State in his stride, more or less. He understands the Prison Warden’s eye-for-an-eye position better than the Chaplain’s; and both better than the Minister of the Inferior or the Interior’s. But F. Alexander, the writer of the A Clockwork Orange inside our A Clockwork Orange, understands the State’s position all to well.

“The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life.”

And this is just as contemporary now as it was then, but with different dynamics in play. Yes, most of us don’t want Alex and his like wandering the streets at will, and if good could be imposed upon them, making them not-as-human, we’d easily fall back on the idea that they’re not human anyway. They’re animals. They’re beasts. They’re thugs, rapists, killers, we’d creech. And we’d be there, in the auditorium, watching the results, and guffing and smecking with the best and worst of them. But what may not be allowed to us, some day, in order to stop ‘rioting and breaking the State’s Peace’? But what might be done?

“I am everyone’s friend,” I said. “Except to my enemies.”
“All who do me wrong,” I said, “are my enemies.”

The State’s biggest problem with an Alex, with his self service, narcissism and socio-pathology hiding under a thin veneer of good manners, smiles and false-friendship is that it too closely resembles its own. Alex is much worse to the State than a criminal, a wrong-doer; or even a rival party group, like F. Alexander ... Alex is a competitor.



When the Min takes his photo op. and discusses F. Alexander’s actions against Alex (and his motivations may have been personal or political ... that doesn’t matter one bit, of course), he starts by saying to Alex that he knew something, then says he thought he knew it, throwing doubt on what we know to be truth. Then Alex says:

“What you mean,” I said, “is that he was told.”
“He had this idea,” said the Min.

We’re left with stories and ideas. And a world where Alex lives, and the State lives; but while Alex may shift and shudder through a maturity many would argue he does not deserve, and ill-fits him, and is unlikely to happen anyway, the State will prepare its people to better except the trade off between a quiet life and becoming clockworked. It’s happening now. Maybe not exactly like Burgess imagined, O my brothers. But viddy it dobby, viddy it all bolshy horrowshow.

A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers.

Book Review: 'Rabbit, Run' by John Updike

This review is for the first novel of the omnibus edition 'Rabbit Omnibus: Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich'. (Also, I discovered an interesting typo in the Pascal epigraph in this edition. Mine has 'harness of heart' instead of 'hardness' which has a completely different spin to it.)

’Proverbs, proverbs, they’re so true,’ Jimmie sings, strumming his Mouseguitar, ‘proverbs tell us what to do; proverbs help us all to bee—better—Mouse-ke-teers.’

Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is not a good Mousketeer. Once he was, when he was adulated for his relatively strong high-school-level basketball skills. There was certainty in heroism. He was strong and tall and handsome and ... first rate. There was a role and rewards. It was easy to be in, and still be truthful. External circumstances were easy to live with.

 

But, it did not carry on into burgeoning adulthood. Rabbit become normal. He becomes second-rate. External circumstances are harder, and concessions must be made to stick with them.

’Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably ... misery follows their disobedience.’

He disobeys. And misery follows. But people make concessions for him, every concession; and you’ll hear many a reader rattle on about his selfishness and his narcissism, and these things are true, up to a point; but, paradoxically, he remains a hero through his demand that life be truthful, and the rejection, in the end, of the constant, needful lies of ‘rightness’ as his coach would have it. He has said that ‘we’ make them, not Rabbit, not himself, but the big awful crushing ‘we’.

"What else do you like about me?"
"... you haven’t given up. In you’re stupid way you’re still fighting."

And that’s what Rabbit runs from. Not successfully. Not well. Not to some great reward for his efforts; but his misery is his, and there is a happiness in that. What is the ‘right thing to do’ and what makes of us ‘a monster’ and how these things intersect is played with masterfully. When Rabbit does ‘the right thing’ at one point, the pivotal ‘bad thing’ could be said to happen as a result. Or not.

’Who cares? That’s the thing. Who cares what you feel?’

’I don’t know,’ he says again.

Updike has Ruth emphasise what not you. It’s not really even personal. It’s complete. He abandons due to his abandonment. He lets go of that which refuses to cling. He runs because he knows he has to get away to remain real, while knowing that there’s no escape. There’s nothing else there, nowhere to run to, but maybe the act of running is enough. Maybe that’s it. He certainly doesn’t know. It’s an illusion too, the spur to run. In the end, it’s an illusion that trips him. But he knows it is. And yet, something internal happens. Something that maybe can trip Pascal.

This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own accord and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of the sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: he runs. Runs.

 

Something also needs to be said about Updike and his brilliance in this novel, which is heartbreakingly fantastic. Americans in particular seem to despise him, when any other country would honour him to bits. I’m convinced that haters of his work are literary-cripples, either born that way or gender-politically-handicapped; and I’m beginning to think there is only a cure for the former of the two. There’s a sickness involved in it that is much wider than his oeuvre. But, maybe, ‘...the rigidity of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.’ Or they’re just after the easy and effortless one-star-review hack not too many people will complain about. When you read his actual work, all these things sort of melt into like so many wicked witches of whichever direction you’re looking He’s not James Joyce (so don’t blame him for his style) but he might be called an American-lite version. Or Joyce translated into American, from the Irish-in-English. His shifts through stream-of-consciousness are more vivid and less real at the same time, but maybe more real for it?

Wonderful, women, from such hungry to such amiable fat; he wants the heat his groin gave given back in gentle ebb, Best bedfriend, fucked woman. Bowl bellies.

Keep running. Running. Even if it’s just on the inside.