Steppenwolf and You

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

I read this book a quarter of a century ago, soon after I began serious reading.  I think I picked it up at the used book store in Davis, CA, but it may have been at a library book sale.  The appeal was obvious: Great Book with the same name as a rock band.  So, it must be good, right?

I have a vivid memory of being terribly disappointed with the book.  There is this guy who is a werewolf, the Steppenwolf, see, and he knows he is a werewolf, and he starts meeting people, and there is this constant threat that the werewolf will take over and do some violence, but then the werewolf guy goes to some bizarre theater thing and some bizarre things happen there and then he talks to a strange guy named Pablo and then Mozart shows up and then the novel ends.  What kind of werewolf book is that?

By the way, that plot description above is not actually a plot description of the novel Hesse wrote.  It is the description of the novel my mid-20s-self read. 

I reread the book.  Wow.  My mid-20s-self sure didn’t know anything.  It isn’t surprising that he read this book so poorly; his education—and let’s be clear, he had a bachelor’s degree by this point—had left him so woefully uneducated that there was no way he was ever going to make sense of Steppenwolf, the novel that Hesse actually wrote.  Even a love of the band of the same name left him woefully unprepared to have any hope of understanding anything at all in that novel that Hesse wrote. 

(I have often told my bookish students who enjoy a long conversation about books that they would have had utter disdain for me if they had met me when I was in college—I knew nothing compared to what my bookish students know.)

So what about the novel Steppenwolf that Hesse wrote…you know the one that doesn’t have a werewolf or even a hint of a werewolf, the one in which the Magic Theater isn’t really all that strange?

It is actually a good book—maybe even a Great Book.  As an exploration of the human psyche, it is quite thought-provoking.  The book was littered with passages which made me wonder, “Is that true?”  The mind is a strange place, after all.  Our hero, Harry Haller, thinks of himself as being of two minds—the coldly rational human self and the wild wolfish self.  The human half must keep the wolfish half at bay. So far, so conventional. 

Except, Harry is living in a world (early 20^th century) where the norms of Civilization which help keep man civilized, help keep the wolf at bay, are breaking down.  How does a man whose life is ordered to keep his beast under control manage in a world in which everything, from the dance halls to the music to the women, are conspiring to release man’s inner beast?  At this point, the novel was starting to intrigue me—after all the early 21^st century is even farther down the path of civilizational decline than was the early 20^th century.

Then, a funny thing happen on the way to the novel I was expecting.  The book begins a sustained argument that Harry is wrong to think of himself as being divided into two parts.  He isn’t two parts at all; his parts are legion.  Crafting this multiplicity of parts into a cohesive whole is the fundamental challenge of becoming human.  Take all the parts of you that make up who you are and combine them in this way and you are one person, but combine those same parts in a different way and you are someone else entirely. 

So, how do you craft a self?  Can you craft a self?  And even more interestingly, can you craft a self which is different than the one you have already crafted?  Is there a way to take all the constituent parts which make up You and shuffle them up and come up with a different person?  The book is wildly optimistic on this.  I am much more skeptical.

Can I readjust my personality?  I don’t see how.  And more interestingly, I don’t see why I would want to do so.  After all, if I readjusted my personality, am I still me?  Is my immortal soul intricately bound up with, say, my Myers-Briggs personality type?