When Beast Meets The Beauty

I have often wondered just how tenuous the link between man and wolf actually is.

For me, there have been several occasions when the link has been so frightening, I have spent several weeks trimming my toenails and checking my teeth for abnormal sharpness as a result. Such an episode occurred with my Uncle Roderick, a one-time corporate banker for accountancy firm Null & Void during a family get-together. While we all took to the dance floor to boogie on down to the strains of that perennial party favourite Agadoo, Roderick leapt up onto the table and plunged his face into the cake, growling brutishly through his fangs before tossing the punch bowl into my little sister’s face. The room stood agape in stunned silence. Roderick blinked twice, the wild bloodshot tinge in his eyes fading while he climbed off the table to address his family. “Very sorry about that,” he said. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure at work lately.”

From this point onward, I have been more than a little curious about the ties between man and beast. If we are to believe Hermann Hesse, then there is a little bit of the Steppenwolf in all of us. His brilliant character, created almost a century ago now, serves as the perfect metaphor for man’s beastly, self-destructive impulses. The questions this classic raises are timeless and crucial to our collective understanding of the human experience. What drives us to such extremes of isolation and fear in our lives? What pushes us so far over the age or forces us so apart from our fellow human beings that we would contemplate life’s end? More importantly, however, how do we appreciate life and live it to its fullness, given all of man’s flaws and the great sufferings some of us have to endure each and every 24 hours? This just pricks the surface of what this incredibly ambitious book deals with throughout its dense, compelling and philosophically rewarding pages.

Penned in 1927 under the title Der Steppenwolf, this benchmark of German literature is a treacherous voyage into the dark, isolated world of academic Harry Haller, a strange half-man, half-wolf creation perched on the very edge of his existence, teetering on the brink of creation with his with feverishly depressive episodes and obsession with own his end. Withdrawn from life, he believes he has no idea how to co-exist with his fellow human beings and lives out a torturous life of academic study and research, all of which seemingly leads to no real end and leaves him nothing other than profoundly miserable. We have lucidly constructed evidence of this throughout the first quarter of the text, as Hesse explains his protagonist’s relationship with great art, music and philosophy. His spiralling ennui is disturbed when he encounters the exceptionally bright Hermine, who exerts such matriarchal control of him, he is depicted as pitiful and helpless, or in her words: “You’re a baby and you need someone to look after you!”

Steppenwolf, for the remainder of its length, then revolves around the introspective thoughts of its character, presented in the form of an academic treatise, and reveals the death wish of Hermine, his female counterpart whose end is also prompted to a most intriguing effect. She acts as a liberating agent for Harry, and arranges a rendezvous for him with Maria, the object of his affection, in the promise that he will bring about her own demise. He also finds himself embroiled with the shadowy Magic Theatre, an underground organisation that no doubt German nightlife evoked most strongly of the era, which also takes a blood-curdling and rather upsetting turn towards the denouement which I will not reveal since nobody likes a book-spoiler.

The question remains, however: what would draw anyone into this disturbing world of existential woebegone and seemingly signposted self-destruction? Well, Steppenwolf can be read on a number of levels. It functions almost as an academic or indeed psychological inquiry, offering quite startling insight into a man so consumed by self-hatred that he has regressed to a state of animalistic existence. It could also be read, and I believe this to be true, as a means of Hesse communicating the inner wolf in us all. Hermann Hesse himself wrote the text while plagued with thoughts of his own end, and the text conveys such desire to break free from our social shackles when they weigh us down, and to dissociate from reality completely. The duality of the human being, as the most intelligent creation on the planet and his animal impulses, is one that we all fight whenever our minds struggle to articulate the sorrow around us. The solution is to rely on others to help us resolve the conflict started by our inner selves by harnessing the power of our outer selves, i.e. our capacity as social beings and natural empathy towards out own kind. Its universal power is therefore impossible to deny.

If nothing else, Hesse has created a compelling lead protagonist who would seem to appeal to my particular age group, namely the late adolescent young person who is fighting to make sense of the universe around him and develop his own social identity. Such isolation and thoughts are universal to everyone, which makes the book one of the most empathetic and intelligent insights into suicide and isolation ever written.

Although there is little about the material world depicted in Steppenwolf I can relate to in my parochial, cosseted little bubble on anything other than a metaphorical level, this does not diminish its power. The world depicted is one of post-WWI, pre-WWII Germany and takes place among the cultural elite of the time and is bound tightly in its melodramatic characters and this dark and vulnerable world which is presented to us. The only thing is, at one time or another, we have all been there. An unblemished classic.