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A friend recently wrote that he would be interested in my thinking about Steppenwolf in light of recent mass and/or school shootings, as exemplified by the horrific Michigan high school killings. I had to do some brooding about this; it really “put me through the changes,” as another old friend used to say. I hadn’t been thinking of Steppenwolf in this way. Regarding violence, Steppenwolf is problematic. It depicts strong suicidal ideation, and then very realistically describ

Last week, I said, “Although it masquerades as one, this (Steppenwolf) is not a realist novel that attempts to show “life as it really is.” Steppenwolf is a story of supernatural events.” There was a lot of uproar about this, many audience members wanted to know more about my thinking in making such a dramatic statement. Well. A realist novel is “A type of novel that places a strong emphasis on the truthful representation of the actual in fiction. Generally, the realist is a

– Don Juan, in Carlos Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan No coincidence, no story - an ancient Chinese saying. Two mutually exclusive statements, best beloved. However, Don Juan was talking about real life, and the ancient Chinese, about story or fiction. Let’s tease this out. Essentially, coincidence is the coming together of two events. ... Coincidence is often what gives fiction its chance to mean something. When two things come together, improbably or not, a spark is s

Last week, we talked about how the first section of Steppenwolf—after the preface—describes Harry Haller’s painful existence. He is glum, dysphoric; he believes his personality is divided into two parts, permanently at war with each other. This is classic storytelling in the western canon; a story begins with a showing of the protagonist’s conflicted condition just prior to an inciting incident that sets off a process of change. Aristotle would be proud. In Steppenwolf, this

Harry Haller’s purported journal begins with a description of his day—written in past tense, something we must return to later. He is, to put it mildly, rather glum. He describes suffering from physical pain, a headache, gout, all of which he attributes to old age—he is forty-seven. He writes of his anger at mediocrity, his desire to smash order, disrupt complacency. This has a very contemporary feel, and one can see how Tim Leary and later rebels would like this. He lives in

This week, a new book, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, first published in 1927. I am using a Picador edition published in 1963 which features a revised version of the 1929 translation from German to English. So there. Hermann Hesse enjoyed a renaissance in the late 1960s and early 70s, sparked, I believe, by interest in his novel about the Buddha, Siddhartha. However, Steppenwolf was not just swept along on Siddhartha’s coattails. No. Viewed as a counterculture tale, its depicti