In Jack Halberstam’s assessment, failure is a queer artform: “Failing is something queers do,” Halberstam writes, “and have always done exceptionally well.”
1Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. The “queer art of failure,” Halberstam explains, means finding alternatives to standardized conceptions of what it means to be an accomplished individual in hetero-capitalist society. In heteronormative culture, queers are bound to fail in a myriad of ways because heteronormativity stipulates what it means to be a successful person (monogamy, marriage, stability, and child-rearing, for example). Not being able to (or choosing not to) live up to those ideals as a queer individual implies failure in a sense that is unique to queerness. At the same time, Halberstam reminds us, “while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.”
2Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 3.Hesse’s queerly connoted characters (who are queer in both the sexual and the nonconforming sense) usually fail in one way or another, not just by being unable to conform to heteronormative conceptions of sexuality and identity, but also by not surviving. As we have seen in this chapter, Halberstam’s concept of the queer art of failure echoes throughout Unterm Rad. Hans dying at the end—because he is unable to synthesize his homosexual and heterosexual desires and develop a bisexual identity—can, on the one hand, be seen as a bleak description of queerness; on the other hand, while Hesse’s characters are rarely allowed to fully live out their queer desires, their social trials signify the author’s complex outlook on nonconformity and difference. I regard Hesse’s complex portrayals of queerness as accurate representations of queer history.
So, what have we learned about Hesse’s writing by interpreting it with queer theory? And have we expanded our understanding of queerness by studying Hesse’s work? This chapter has shown that approaching Hesse’s work from queer-theoretical angles expands the frame of the author’s legacy. The essay has also demonstrated that Hesse’s work includes diverse and complex portrayals of queerness. My concluding argument is that those portrayals heighten Hesse’s impact and relevance for today’s queer culture. Because of the two entwined types of queerness that I have drawn attention to here—norm-challenging sexuality and nonconformity—I encourage today’s queer communities to engage with Hesse’s work, just like it was engaged with by the Wandervogel groups in the early 1900s. In particular, Hesse’s idea of nonconformity might, for two reasons, be useful in our time: first, it could inspire queer people to continue celebrating what makes them different; and, second, it could motivate queer communities to fight back against reactionary movements in the darker days ahead.
Although Hesse’s queer characters usually fail and are crushed beneath the wheel of heteronormativity (which can be regarded a symptom of the times in which Hesse’s texts were written), they are oftentimes front and center in his narratives. The visibility of queer characters and queer characteristics makes queerness a theme in Hesse’s stories that is impossible to ignore. Hesse’s work therefore reminds us that queers are—and have always been—everywhere.