“Narcissus and Goldmund” was first published in 1930
(translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz, and published by Peter Owen,
London).
Who was Hermann Hesse? He was born in Germany in 1877 and he
died in 1963. He was a seminarist, thinker, intellectual, drinker, smoker,
gambler, poet, painter and pacifist. Above all, he was a seeker. He suffered
mental health problems. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1945.
A lot of Hesse’s life has gone into this book. At the age of
15 he was sent to Maulbronn seminary to complete his education, but he fled
after his failed suicide attempt. The story opens with a vivid description of
the entrance to Mariabronn monastery, a fictional representation of his own
Maulbronn, just thinly disguised.
It is a simple story, a parable set in medieval Germany.
Goldmund is the favourite pupil of the monk and scholar Narcissus. But Goldmund
is not the scholastic type, he is passionate, sensual and artistic. He
discovers this side of himself, when, with other boys, he creeps out of the
monastery in the night to find village girls. He is obsessed by one in
particular, and awakened to the possibilities offered by the outside world, he
leaves the monastery to search for….what?...he isn’t sure. He leads a
hedonistic life with many sexual adventures, and he becomes a sculptor. But he
gets himself into deep trouble and is sentenced to death. However, he is
finally rescued, forgiven and reconciled by Narcissus. We see how his character
develops through education and experience, and we learn something of forgiveness
and despair.
The proposer explained that he first read the book in the
sixties, a time when young people were searching for meaning and understanding
in their lives, and turning to dope, mysticism and psychedelic music. The book
enjoyed popularity then, along with the birth of a powerful and iconoclastic
popular culture. Likewise the 1920s, a period that may have shaped the young
Hesse, was a time of decadence, promiscuity and jazz. The world is quite
different now, but the book is still a great read and has wide appeal.
There are a number of themes. The dichotomy between artist
and thinker, described as Dionysian versus Apollonian after the names of the
two sons of Zeus, is a central theme in this book and in other German
literature, notably linked to Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. To some extent,
we all have this dualism within us, and so: is the novel really a metaphorical
essay about the human psyche, inspired perhaps by Hesse’s reading of Jung and
Freud?
Another theme is the mother figure. Goldmund never knew his
mother, but we learn she was a dancer (a mother to be ashamed of, he is led to
believe) and yet he seems to have a supernatural knowledge of her, and craves
for her, perhaps because he thinks he has inherited her artistic attributes. Does
she represent the Eve mother, part of the eternal story of the tortuous passage
from birth to death? Much of the book is about Goldmund’s relationships with
women, and the way his women are both a joy and an inspiration for great works
of art, for example his sculpture, the Lydia-Madonna. As Goldmund dies he
utters:
‘Without a mother one cannot love
Without a mother one cannot die’.
Certainly, the sensual love of women plays a large part of
Goldmund’s life and contrasts starkly with the monastic discipline:
‘… he learned many of the arts and ways of love, and
absorbed the experiences of many lovers, learning to see, feel, touch and smell
women in all their diversity’…'to be driven from one woman to the next so he
might learn, and practice, ever more subtly in ever greater variety and depth,
the skills of knowing and distinguishing'.
Sensual details here reminded us of the novels of D. H.
Lawrence. At this point our proposer fondly recalled the average student party
of the early 1970s, and a discussion ensued about when the swinging sixties
started and ended, and what we all read and got up to in those heady days, and
what we have become now. Yes, each one of us has a bit of Goldmund inside. But
have we lost the spirit of self-inquiry, have we given up the search?
Certainly, we were touched by Goldmund’s abrupt decline as
he grows older. There comes a time when he fails to score with women. They
still find him amusing company, but his hair is going grey and they don’t want
him anymore. Oh dear, this part was a bit too close to the bone for most of us!
Death is another theme. We have a powerful portrayal of the
Black Death, perhaps one of the most poignant and moving that has ever been
written. We were reminded by one of our group that 40-60% of the population of
Europe died. And we have plenty of murder in this book; in fact, Goldmund
himself murders twice, and there are many reflections on death:
‘…the world is full of death, squatting on every fence,
standing behind every tree, and it is useless for you to build walls and
dormitories and chapels and churches. Death looks through the window and
laughs’.
But death can be cheated through art, because art confers a
kind of immortality on its creator:
‘from the farce and death-dance of human life, something remained
and survived, works of art’… although … 'even they perish ... but they outlast
many a human lifetime'… 'it is spiritual' ... 'in this hour, Goldmund felt as if
his life had acquired a meaning..'
What had been happening to Narcissus, the scholar and mentor,
during the long period of Goldmund’s absence from the monastery? He had been
living the spotless monastic life and now he was the abbot, but he always had
been thinking of Goldmund. But even this godly man has had his moments of
self-doubt. Narcissus wonders whether man really was created to study Aristotle
and Thomas Aquinas, and whether it has been proper to shut himself away from
the maelstrom of the world and the cruel currents that had beset his friend and
pupil Goldmund. But we learn
rather little of the detail of Narcissus’s life. In the end he serves as the
mouthpiece for Hesse’s philosophy. He speaks for example of the nature of the
thinking process, the conceptual abstractions of the Apollonian versus the
mental images of the Dionysian. Also, he ponders on the contrasting nature of
men and women. For example, of women he says:
‘Nature had so created them that desire automatically bore
its own fruit, and the harvest of love was a child. In the man’s case, instead
of this simple fertility there was eternal desire’.
Some of our group considered the philosophical parts were
not so good, preferring the writer to ‘show not tell’. But Hesse saw himself as
a teacher. He turned his back on Germany as early as 1912, and went to Berne in
Switerland where he established a prisoner-of-war welfare centre. Between 1914
and 1918 he published about 20 essays criticizing the war in German-language
newspapers. He strongly opposed the rise of nationalism. He was one of the few
German intellectuals not to be swayed by the general enthusiasm for the war. He
became involved in writing after the War in order to rebuild Germany by
educating its youth. In this book, for example, written in that period, he
touches on anti-semitism, apparently anticipating, and warning against, the
rise of Nazism. He relinquished his German citizenship in 1923. In World War II
he became disillusioned, withdrew from the public and denounced the barbarity
from afar.
We agreed that this book was a good choice. It’s a serious
book and a thought-provoking story, and most of us found words of wisdom on its
pages.
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