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Currently reading:
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston
The introduction in this printing of Hesse's novel draws a distinction between the genre of Bildungsroman, exemplified by his more straightforward novellas including Siddhartha and Demian, and the genre with a more global, civilization-spanning ambition. The latter genre found itself a visionary exponent in Daniel Quinn, especially his Ishmael series and a later volume called Beyond Civilization, which treat the actual anthropological record as their subject matter. Hesse's contribution imagines a divergent line of history, in which a hierarchical realm of intelligentsia finds its prospects for peaceful existence threatened by the widening gap between its scholarly inquiries and the concerns of the wider world. The protagonist of this novel, a Master of the Glass Bead Game called Joseph Knecht, finds himself increasingly disenchanted with these esoteric studies and tries to extricate himself from the duties demanded by his office.
Hesse falls back on familiar elements of the Bildungsroman genre to portray the life of Joseph Knecht, from a first encounter with higher learning through the Music Master who comes to visit his local school, to the study of Eastern traditions in a retreat to the Bamboo Grove. Secondary characters in the novel, by contrast, are given much less room for personal development. One of these characters is Fritz Tegularius, another adept at the Glass Bead Game and one whom Joseph Knecht consults for advice on designing games and plotting his abdication of office. Here is how Hesse describes this character:
Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd. And, to our mind, this was the very reason his friend cherished him.
The word that most strikes me from the excerpt above is "indigestible". However common it might be in the original German to apply this adjective to a person, this usage in English calls to mind an image of society as a continental-scale metabolism whose inputs are individual humans and whose outputs are cultural artifacts like the Glass Bead Game. To the member of a community whose ideals include harmony and orderliness, being called "indigestible" would constitute either a reprimand (if offered in the spirit of correction) or an insult (if offered in a spirit of contempt). Knecht is applauded for being able to see past the obvious mismatch between his friend's personality and the community's ideals. Knecht demonstrates this managerial skill by finding innovative projects to which Tegularius can contribute, instead of simply allowing him to serve as a model for the Castalian scholar of some future age, when the outside world has ceased to value Castalia's unique cultural outputs.
As a model for the managerial talents with which an "indigestible" element of the community can be usefully employed, Joseph Knecht has no obvious parallel in the workplace experience of my part-time faculty colleagues. All attempts to engage our supervisor in discussions of resume-building opportunities seem to run into a brick wall of unhelpfulness, with such opportunities apparently parceled out on the basis of favoritism or insider connections. Next fall's early college course, for instance, is not being offered to any of the part-time faculty who expressed interest at the January 17 department meeting, despite the potential of such courses to enhance adjunct professors' resumes and more quickly catapult them into the ranks of full-time employed. If the department chair desires a pool of adjunct faculty who are all content with their part-time employment, the question "what would Joseph [Knecht] do?" should immediately suggest the answer of giving the "indigestibles" more growth-oriented assignments, so that they sooner become somebody else's problem and don't remain "unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd."
Joseph Knecht's treatment of Tegularius did not aim to make him "somebody else's problem" in the way we might hope of an open-minded department chair. Instead of "indigestible" Tegularius being asked to leave, it was manager Knecht who voluntarily abandoned his post in the Castalian hierarchy. The story then follows Knecht into the humble one-on-one teaching assignment he found through his outside friend Designori, and the reader is left to infer that Tegularius remains in Castalia under a supervisor with less personal history between them. Under such a supervisor, perhaps Tegularius meets the fate typical of all "indigestible" personalities, as suggested by the Japanese proverb "the protruding nail gets hammered."
At least while his friend Knecht was a Master in the Castalian hierarchy, Tegularius could avoid the fate of the "protruding nail" and remain a thorn in the side of the community, tolerated despite disharmonious manners yet admired for his sparkling wit. Once his friend and collaborator leaves the hierarchy, Tegularius cannot be assured of even this limited place in the community, let alone the prophetic role laid out in the famous epigram by George Bernard Shaw:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world.
The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress is due to the unreasonable man.
As an allegory for the weakened position of community colleges in the current long-lived economic expansion, The Glass Bead Game adds little to the straightforward analyses already present in the pundit classes. Its portrayal of the reaction that Knecht's circular letter receives from fellow Masters bears striking resemblance to the empathetic but ultimately non-committal response given by college administrators when faculty seek clarity on course cancelations or delayed pay raises. If I were forced to squeeze a lesson out of an imperfect allegory for the state of higher education today, I would take away from the novel the suggestion that agency for change might only be attained by leaving one's cloistered community and rejoining the wider world. Hesse only grants this decision to someone in the upper echelon of the hierarchy, while individual agency at all subordinate levels remains elusive. On the question of what individuals at the bottom of the pecking order might do in the face of threats to continued existence, Hesse is silent. Their places in the community are secure as long as the community itself endures, but the struggle for continuing their overall way of life plays out far above their pay grade.
Why should the decision to exit Castalia and serve as liaison to the wider world not be open to all ranks in the community? Certainly the province would feel less of a loss if one of its rank-and-file were to depart. On the other hand, the wider world might take little notice upon receiving such an emissary as the "indigestible" Tegularius, whose subsequent worldly acts are unlikely to compare with the legend of self-sacrifice that emerges from Knecht's final assignment. For the novelist's purposes, only the departure of an elite, likeable Master can adequately illustrate the seriousness of the threat faced by Castalia's increasing inscrutability to the outside world. This departure is sought cheerfully by the Master himself, rather than by angry barbarians storming the gates of the province, as a modern twist on the story of Jesus' self-sacrifice reconciling the heavenly kingdom with fallen humanity.
Its deliberate parallelism with the Christian story of atonement keeps Hesse's novel from seriously questioning the central premise behind atonement. Hesse pulls no punches in his criticism of self-righteous communities painting outsiders as lost or misguided, but his desired solution seems to be reconciliation by a singular self-sacrifice rather than a steady state of ongoing low-level conflict. The latter option is a stable equilibrium found in both interspecies and intraspecies competition. We call it a naturalistic fallacy when we try to find in the "what is" of nature a lesson on "what ought to be" in human society, as if humanity were somehow separate from nature and impervious to the selection pressures that settled on these equilibrium strategies millions of years before recorded history. Hesse does well to warn his readers against neglecting history in the pursuit of ever-more-specialized knowledge, but the scope of Hesse's history is rather limited in comparison with the deep anthropological and evolutionary record that informs modern authors like David Graeber, Daniel Quinn, and Spencer Wells. To read into The Glass Bead Game any deeper lessons for the current levels of inequality in wealth, income, and opportunity, one must subscribe to the notion that several million years of non-recorded human history are somehow irrelevant to the challenges we face to our continued existence as a species.