In American, Japanese, and German literature, numerous intertextual references can be identified in which Hesse’s works prove to be a subversive ingredient of social upheaval or an embodiment of the aesthetic sensitivities of an educated bourgeoisie. However, isolated texts stand out, in which patterns of thought from different novels by Hesse are integrated into new contexts. In this process it can be observed particularly clearly how, in the sweep of interpretations, the text at hand and the reference text interpret and modify each other.
“Demian Metaphysics” in Thomas Pynchon
In Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973),
1Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Picador, 1975). for example, we encounter a dense intertextual fabric in which Hesse’s novel
Demian is included as an evocative reference. The German engineer Kurt Mondaugen is characterized as “one of those German mystics who grew up reading Hesse, Stefan George, and Richard Wilhelm, ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics, he seemed to look at fuel and oxidizer as paired opposites, male and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of the combustion chamber; creation and destruction, fire and water, chemical plus and chemical minus.”
2Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 403.On the one hand, Mondaugen is criticized as someone seduced by the kind of bipolar thinking that Emil Sinclair also encounters and that makes him, Mondaugen, watch human cruelties without reacting—but on the other hand, it is precisely Kurt Mondaugen who, like Sinclair, seeks a state beyond opposites, the “informationless state of signal zero.”
3Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 404. If the metaphysics of dichotomies can, in Pynchon’s interpretation, lead to the fascist syndrome, Mondaugen simultaneously demonstrates how the overcoming of antitheses provokes new entanglements, through the non-commitment of the seemingly pure technician.
The Abraxas Cult in Sokyu Gen’yu’s Novel Das Fest des Abraxas
The novel
Aburakusasu no matsuri (2001, German
Das Fest des Abraxas, 2007, The Feast of Abraxas)
4Sokyu Gen’yu, Das Fest des Abraxas (Berlin: bebra Verlag, 2007). by the Japanese writer and Zen monk Sokyu Gen’yu already refers to Hesse’s
Demian in its title.
5In correspondence with the author, Sokyu Gen’yu confirmed that in writing Das Fest des Abraxas he was influenced by Hesse’s Demian. The mentally ill monk Jonen, who grows up in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, escapes from the consumerist society of the economic boom in the 1980s and seeks an alternative life in a Buddhist Zen monastery. Like Emil Sinclair, he tries to understand the irreconcilable facets of his ego in painting a self-portrait, hanging it on the wall and finally burning it. He also tries to split off unloved aspects, the inner “noise,” in the picture until he realizes that “the noise also belonged to his ego.”
6Gen’yu, Das Fest des Abraxas, 67. For him, the consciousness of the ego is inseparable from its endangerment. Jonen and his wife once see their multiple personalities in a kind of magical theater in a room of mirrors in their home. As Jonen experiences an ecstatic interplay of the oppositional forms of his personality especially through music, he plans a public concert in which he transcends his boundaries by singing and dancing: the feast of Abraxas. He experiences the strengthening message of Abraxas: “You are right as you are.”
7Gen’yu, Das Fest des Abraxas, 135. Hesse’s design of mystical-magical self-awareness, which became ground-breaking for the rebellious Japanese youth of the 1970s, allows Jonen to experience the opposite poles of good and evil, past and present, depression and ecstasy as simultaneities. As the Japanologist Eduard Klopfenstein puts it: “Hermann Hesse … has been read in Japan since the 1970s, as in America, as a poet of mystical self-discovery.”
8Eduard Klopfenstein, Afterword to Gen’yu, Das Fest des Abraxas (Berlin: bebra Verlag, 2007) 145. On the one hand, with the naming of abraxas as a deity who connects opposites, the Hesse allusions function as a guide to self-discovery, and on the other hand as the basis of the inner resistance of the monk Jonen, who is guided by humane values and Eastern philosophy.
Magical theater and the cult of Abraxas combine here to create a blueprint for an alternative form of existence. The novel thus meets the need of a generation disappointed and disillusioned by the economic recession, which is “inclined to pause, to ask the question of meaning once again in the era of globalization, in order to find other standards of value beyond expansion and marketability” and which thereby simulates Hermann Hesse’s patterns of thought.
9Klopfenstein, Afterword to Gen’yu, Das Fest des Abraxas, 141.However, in the new millennium “Hesse’s obvious presence in Japanese literature is waning, though this does not preclude his works from once again gaining importance as reference texts in times of crisis.”
10Klopfenstein, Afterword to Gen’yu, Das Fest des Abraxas, 141.The Magic Theater in Gerhard Roth’s novel Der Große Horizont
The Magic Theater is also a leitmotif in the novel
Der Große Horizont (The Great Horizon, 1974) by the Austrian writer Gerhard Roth.
11Gerhard Roth, Der Große Horizont (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979). After a failed marriage, the bookseller Daniel Haid flees to America to escape his memories and by extension himself. A meticulous observer, he drifts through the surreal scenery of American cities. In his “dreamlike sense of reality” he becomes a spectator and actor-like portrayer of himself: “He thought to himself that he was PLAYING himself.”
12Roth, Der Große Horizont, 14. Gradually, the boundaries between reality and unreality become blurred for him. On a stroll through the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, he is seized by the feeling of being a player in a theater: “Haid looked at everything as if it were a backdrop … Hermann Hesse called to him from inside a dark bar, which was only poorly closed off from the street by a half-drawn velvet curtain. He sat at the bar with a wrinkled, embittered face, drunk, silent, but with curious eyes.”
13Roth, Der Große Horizont, 29–30. After inviting Haid to have a drink, Hesse asks him a question concerning reality: “Do you still have a sense of time?”
14Roth, Der Große Horizont, 30. Similarly, before entering the Magic Theater, Harry Haller experiences the loss of a sense of time, which Pablo calls a necessary condition for overcoming one’s personality. When Haid realizes that instead of sitting next to Hesse, he is sitting next to an old Chinese man at the bar, his dream, which had just made him “an exclusive spectator of the Magic Theater,”
15Roth, Der Große Horizont, 31. is shattered. Like Harry Haller, Haid is not only an ego-seeker, but he also suffers, like the former, from disturbing ego-experiences: “he had always been conscious of himself with an unbearable intensity. … It was all the time the sensation of one’s own existence, a painful self-experience.”
16Roth, Der Große Horizont, 61. In this German-language novel set in the America of the 1970s, the Magic Theater is used to interpret Haid’s forays as a journey into his own inner self.
17In Roth’s novel Der Plan (The Plan, 1998), set in Japan, the Magic Theater is also present as a foil and Hesse is explicitly mentioned.