Hesse’s irony and humor are often underestimated, although there are quite a few texts in which they constitute significant poetic components. The volume
Bericht aus Normalien (Report from Normalia), for instance, contains a series of humorous prose and lyric texts by Hesse, including short stories like “Schwäbische Parodie” (Swabian Parody), “Doktor Knölges Ende” (The End of Doctor Knölge), “Ein Hermann Hesse-Abend” (An Evening with Hermann Hesse), and the poem “Der Mann von fünfzig Jahren” (The Man of Fifty Years), which seems to anticipate
Steppenwolf with its fifty-year-old protagonist. Texts like these, but also
A Guest at the Spa, bear witness to his sparkling sense of humor and (self-) irony that constitute thematic and also psychological counterparts to the darker or even depressive passages of Hesse’s works. The psychological, even physiological benefits of humor and laughter are well known: they loosen the tension of mind and soul, break though the strict structures and systems of the consciousness, reveal aspects of absurdity in the world, bring the chaotic energy of the unconscious to light, and, last but not least, cure the neurotic or depressive soul.
1See Julia Wilkins and Amy Janel Eisenbraun, “Humor theories and the physiological benefits of laughter,” Advances in Mind-Body Medicine 24, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 8–12. The formula “laughter is healthy” is a cliché that hides a deeper psychological truth—Hesse, who most probably read Jean Paul’s
School for Aesthetics, was surely aware of that. The humorist regards himself, as Jean Paul explained, as part of a world of “bedlam”: If the world itself is a bedlam, it is not worth the pain of taking it seriously. Vanity is often the reason for taking ourselves and the world too seriously, while seeking a distant position from ourselves, may result in a therapeutic benefit, a state of liberation in which distress is dissolved. Thus, laughter is not only psychologically healthy, but also psychologically and spiritually liberating. No laughing man will commit suicide.
Self-irony can be regarded as a spiritual distance from oneself. Psychologically, a certain power of the mind is needed to be capable of overcoming one’s own weakness. Narrative texts can also choose a specific type of first-person narrator who takes up an ironic distance not only to the other characters of the story (who in A Guest at the Spa are rather secondary), but also to him- or herself. Such a narrative means concomitantly allowing the “monitoring” of the world around us and, at the same time, an ironic or critical self-observation. A predilection for theorizing is thereby a distinctive feature of a narrator, as can be seen later in the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf.” The narrator in A Guest at the Spa improvises a “theological theory” (which, upon closer inspection, proves to be an economic one instead) of the guests’ resistance to becoming perfectly healthy, as this would keep them away from the comfort of a spa hotel. Subsequently, he offers a “psychological explanation” of the guests’ mental reservations against fasting and self-pity, and their preference for pleasure and comfort even to the detriment of their health. At this point the irony turns into self-irony, as the spa guest Hesse, sharing the “vanity of the scholars,” admits: he would perhaps wish eternal life for himself, but not for others, as it is not necessary, he argues, that “old, not very handsome people” live forever—which would be boring and hideous, even without sciatica and gout. In A Guest at the Spa, Jean Paul’s bedlam “turns” into a spa hotel, where sciatic or rheumatic hotel guests, prioritizing their comfort and everyday pleasures, find their satisfaction in their “failing health,” accepting their death sometime in the future, but not now, not while having coffee in the luxurious dining room.
But what might appear despicable at first glance may turn out to be ridiculous at the second one. During a boring dinner, consumed without appetite, the spa guest Hesse “meets” his alter ego, the “secret spectator”: this collision of the two perspectives results in an outburst of (inner) laughter, turning the whole scene with the sciatic guests mindlessly eating and drinking in the dining room into a ludicrous situation. This turning point in the plot also triggers a psychological shift, as the inner serenity the protagonist and narrator has achieved completely changes his attitude towards life, as well as towards sickness and everyday routine. It is at this point that the spa guest Hesse makes his first and most decisive step to overcome his depression and physical ailments. Moreover, the interior change in him does not remain hidden, but expresses itself in gestures and mimicry, directly affecting the ambience in a positive sense, so that the guests in the dining room themselves realize the ridiculousness of their situation. Finally, the spell of boredom is broken: “God, the birds and the clouds” fly through the dreary saloon above the “merry guests of God” sitting around “the colorful table of the world.”
2Hermann Hesse, Der Kurgast, SW 11:109. Joyfulness replaces the dark narrative colors of depression, and humor and laughter prevail over melancholy and desperation.
A Guest at the Spa is a story about sickness, but also about psychological and physical recovery. It shows how the human soul can find its way out from depression, even helping others (including his readers!) to do so. Although the close relation between body and soul, i.e., the reasons for psychosomatic diseases, were not widely recognized in Hesse’s time, many of his writings, including Steppenwolf, demonstrate that he was undoubtedly convinced of this psychosomatic principle. Hesse, as an early reader of Freud and Jung, clearly knew that psychological disturbances, life crises, and states of depression can cause physical ailments of the type he himself had to cope with again and again. The key to healing, he discovered, lies in the psyche itself, in the “spirit” (Geist), in mind and consciousness.