This bildungsroman was pithy and engaging. It has a mystical quality that was, by turns, magical, pompous and contradictory. I wasn’t so perturbed by the contradictions, as much of life strikes me as having this character, but I was surprised to find such spiritual sympathy juxtaposed with such ugly elitism.
Emil Sinclair, the protagonist, has a model childhood surrounded by the comforts of middle class, small town life. His parents are Christian and his life is filled with the morals and prejudices of this class. For the first part of his life, he exists in this world of being a good little boy until, around late boyhood or early adolescence, he begins to acknowledge the existence of a ‘darker’ world opposed to the ‘light’ of family prayers and well ordered domesticity. After Emil brags about an invented crime to some poorer local boys, one of them begins to blackmail him. His life descends into a puerile chaos of horrendous, imagined consequences and parental retribution. He dwells on his own morality and has thoughts that he is an evil person. All this is very well written and judiciously paced. It reminded me of many similar realisations from childhood.
This early part of the book also speaks eloquently about the strangely adult or semi-adult nature of the experiences of late childhood, which are sometimes lost to a simplified utopia of misremembered childhood bliss:
“The grown-up who has learnt to translate a part of his feelings into thoughts, misses these thoughts in the child and therefore finally denies even the experiences themselves.” (p28)
The scene is set for an arduous journey of discovery or, perhaps, a process of individuation involving a deeper understanding of the world around him and himself.
The narrative moves on when a new boy, Max Demian, arrives at school and mesmerizes the young Emil with his aloof aura and unusual habits. The two chat about the standard, Christian interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel given by the school master one day. Demian offers an alternative explanation, suggesting that perhaps Cain is not so evil after all and that his mark is in fact one of distinction that others are afraid of and therefore revile. Demian then ‘reads’ Emil’s thoughts, discovers that he is the victim of blackmail and resolves this unpleasant situation for him. Demian continues to offer Emil unorthodox life advice as Emil prepares for his confirmation. Emil is much enthralled to Demian and feels he’s an ‘apostle’ for a different path in life, away from the conformity and tradition of family and church life. This era of change is perhaps best captured by this beautiful passage:
“Every man goes through this period of crisis. For the average man it is the point in his life when the demands of his own fate are most at odds with his environment, when the way ahead is most hardly won. For many it is the only time in their lives when they experience the dying and resurrection which is our lot, during the decay and slow collapse of childhood when we are abandoned by everything we love, and suddenly feel the loneliness and deathly cold of the world around us.” (p39)
However, there’s also a sense of trepidation about following this new path of self-reflection and rejecting the world that’s offered to Emil by his parents, schoolmasters and priests. This is aphoristically expressed by another well turned phrase: “Nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to follow the path that leads to himself.” (p36)
A break with Demian occurs when Emil goes off to boarding school, where he falls into drinking and misbehaving with his schoolmates and begins to learn about sexual desire. I felt this section of the book was of a substantially lower quality than the preceding section about early childhood. Emil falls in love with a girl he sees in the park and, rather sentimentally, believes she is a representation of everything that is good and pure in the world. He withdraws from his boozing and carousing and starts to have strange dreams about a bird struggling to break out of an egg.
Miraculously, a note from Demian appears in one of his school books telling him that the bird he sees is ‘Abraxas’, an ancient God and demon (perhaps Gnostic?) who unites good and evil in one deity. The note tells him, “Whoever wants to be born must first destroy a world.” (p73) Other mysterious or miraculous events come to pass and Emil begins to feel that he is traveling along a road to a certain destination. While walking around the town where his boarding school is, Emil finds himself drawn to some organ music he hears coming from a church. He stops to listen and returns several times until eventually he starts a conversation with the organist, Pistorius, who turns out to be interested in ancient mysticism too and talks to him about Abraxas and other ancient deities. At this point in the book there are a couple of very moving passages describing the unity of all creation and history. For example:
“To the few experiences which I had so far discovered on the road to my goal was now added this new one. The consideration of such images as I have mentioned, the surrender to odd, irrational forms in nature produces in us a sense of the harmony of our inner being with the will which has been responsible for these shapes. Soon we become aware of the temptation to think of them as being our own moods, our own creations; we see the boundaries between ourselves and nature quiver and dissolve and we become acquainted with the state of mind when we are unable to decide whether the lineaments of our body result from impressions received from outside or from within us. In no other practice is it so simple to discover how creative we are and to what extent our souls participate in the continuous creation of the world. To an even greater extent it is this same indivisible divinity which is active in us and in nature so that if the outer world were destroyed each one of us would be capable of building it up again. For mountains and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature is echoed in us and originates in the soul whose being is eternity and is hidden from us but nonetheless gives itself to us for the most part in the power of love and creation.” (p85)
And later on the same page, Pistorious says to Emil:
“We always set too narrow limits on our personalities. We count as ours merely what we experience differently as individuals or recognise as being divergent. Yet we consist of the whole existence of the world, each one of us, and just as our body bears in it the various stages of our evolution back to the fish and further back still, we have in our soul everything that has ever existed in the human mind. All the gods and devils whether among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus are all within us, existing as possibilities, wishes, outlets. If the human race dwindled to one single, half-developed child that had received no education, this child would rediscover the entire course of evolution, would be able to produce gods, devils, paradise, commandments and interdictions, the whole of the Old and New Testament, everything.” (p85)
I found these passages to be amongst the most moving in the book and certainly on par with the earlier sections about escaping childhood. As such, I was excited that the book was moving in a new direction after the uninspiring section about his boarding school days. However, almost immediately after these passages that I enjoyed so much, elements of ugly elitism began to emerge. I suppose, with hindsight, these elements might have been contained in details like Demian’s ‘special’ appearance and his semi-magical qualities. It also seems like Demian selects Emil as ‘marked’ in the same way as Cain.
These elements of the book suddenly seemed to gain much greater importance. For example, Pistorius says to Emil, ‘You do not think of all bipeds who walk along the street as human beings merely because they walk upright and carry their young nine months!’ (p86) – which I found to have a vomit-inducing sense of superiority. I also felt it was a glaring contradiction to some of what immediately preceded it, about all possibilities existing within everyone and all history being contained within any single individual.
My confusion increased further when Pistorius goes on to say: ‘There is no reality beyond what we have inside us. That is why most people live such unreal lives; they take pictures outside themselves for real ones and fail to express their own world.’ (p91) If everything external is, in fact, internal because there is no reality beyond the internal, then how is it possible for ‘external’ things to have any greater or lesser ‘reality’ than internal ones? I found it all a bit muddled up and the only explanation offered seems to be something along the lines of - everyone else is an idiot and we’re so very special that we’re the only ones who can understand the true nature of the world. Bleh! The pompous self-congratulation goes still further when Pistorious announces, ‘The way of the majority is easy, ours is hard’ (p91). By this point, I was enjoying the book considerably less and growing a little sick of the pontification and ‘We’re so special and clever’ onanism. Things improved a bit when Emil has what I would consider a more determinist and universalist epiphany about that nature of existence:
“At this point I felt the truth burning within me like a sharp flame, that there was some role for everybody but it was not one which he himself could choose, re-cast and regulate to his own likening. There was but one duty for a grown man; it was to seek the way to himself, to become resolute within, to grope his way forward wherever that might lead him. The discovery shook me profoundly; it was the fruit of this experience. I had often toyed with pictures of the future, dreamed of roles which might be assigned to me - as a poet, maybe, or prophet or painter or kindred vocation. All that was futile. I was not there to write poetry, to preach or paint; neither I nor any other man was there for that purpose. They were only incidental things. There was only one true vocation for everybody - to find the way to himself. He might end as poet, lunatic, prophet or criminal - that was not his affair; ultimately it was of no account. His affair was to discover his own destiny, not something of his own choosing, and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Anything else was merely a half-life, an attempt at evasion, an escape into the ideals of the masses, complacency and fear of his inner soul. The new picture rose before me, sacred and awe-inspiring, a hundred times glimpsed, possibly often expressed and now experienced for the first time. I was an experiment on the part of nature, a ‘throw’ into the unknown, perhaps for some new purpose, perhaps for nothing and my only vocation was to allow this ‘throw’ to work itself out in my innermost being, feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!” (p103)
Later, there comes a split between Emil and Pistorius where the latter gives a speech about why he can’t follow Emil’s path:
“But I must always have things around me that I find beautiful and sacred - organ music and mystery, symbol and myth. I need those and cannot renounce them. That is my weakness. For often enough, Sinclair, I know that I ought not to have desires of this kind, that they are luxury and weakness. It would be larger-minded and juster if I put myself quite unreservedly at the disposal of fate. But that I cannot do; it is the only really difficult thing there is. I have often dreamed of doing so; but I cannot; I am afraid. I am not capable of standing so naked and alone; I am a poor weak dog who needs warmth and food and likes the comfort of having his fellow creatures near him. The man who really wants nothing beyond his destiny no longer has his neighbours beside him; he stands quite alone and has nothing but the cold world around him. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. There have been martyrs who let themselves be nailed to the cross without a murmur, but even these were not heroes, were not ‘freed’ for even they wanted something that was homely and familiar to them - they had models, they had ideals. But the man who follows his destiny is allowed neither models nor ideals; nothing cherished or comforting! And yet this is the path one must follow. People like you and me are truly lonely but we still have each other; we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of putting up resistance, of desiring the unusual. But one must cast aside that too if one wishes to go the whole way. One may not be revolutionary, an example or a martyr either. It is beyond imagining.” (p104)
I enjoyed this section too, even though I might not totally agree with all of it. Hesse seems to be advocating a completely disconnected and uninterested approach to life as the highest of highs. The character of Pistorius can’t follow Emil to these heights and castigates himself for his ‘weakness’. I’m not sure it’s as black and white as Hesse wants to make out. He seems very taken with a high asceticism or extreme spiritual hermitism, which could be argued to be lacking the great value that people derive from social interaction, relationships and love of others. After this, the book descended into high farce. In spite of all this chat about rejecting everything and living ‘quite alone with nothing but the cold world around’, Emil proceeds to go in search of Demian, find him and enters into an elitist society for super, extra special people overseen by Demian and his mum! For me, it was beyond absurd that this could be the end of the book. It reminded me of an X Men movie, but I’m pretty sure I remember those being a good deal more internally consistent. The fact that Emil can be so high-falutin about rejecting society to allow his life to be governed by fate and be so dismissive of those who need to exist within a society only to then enter into his own comfortable little elitist club is an absurdity that beggars belief!
The self-congratulation reaches fever pitch when Demian says to Emil inside their special compound for truly amazing people, ‘What nature wants of man is written in a few individuals, in you, in me. It was written in Christ, it was written in Nietzche’ (p111)!!!! ‘Oh fuck off the lot of you,’ I thought. How could anyone write such supercilious drivel having written so articulately about the nature of existence in the preceding pages? I felt like throwing the book out the window! The extra special group of truly extraordinary people go on to predict the beginning of the First World War through dreams and visions. Of course they would, wouldn’t they?
I really enjoyed the beginning of this book and a few of the ideas and passages that emerge later on before it descends into an ugly elitist fantasy. I would probably recommend it on the strength of the better passages, and to see what someone else makes of the absolutely absurd ending! However, I remember enjoying ‘Siddhartha’ and ‘Steppenwolf’ by the same author a lot more as they deal with some similar themes without such a repulsive and self-defeating ending!
