The Glass Bead Game
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| The Glass Bead Game | |
.jpg) First edition of Das Glasperlenspiel |
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| Author | Hermann Hesse |
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| Original title | 'Das Glasperlenspiel' |
| Translator | Richard and Clara Winston |
| Country | Switzerland |
| Language | German |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Holt, Rinehart and Winston |
| Publication date | 1943 |
| Published in English |
1969 |
| Media type | print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 558 pp |
| ISBN | N/A |
The Glass Bead Game (German: Das Glasperlenspiel) is the last work and magnum opus of the German author Hermann Hesse. Begun in 1931 and published in Switzerland in 1943, after being rejected for publication in Nazi Germany,[1] the book was mentioned in Hesse's citation for the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"Glass Bead Game" is a literal translation of the German title, but the book has also been published under the title Magister Ludi, Latin for "master of the game," which is an honorific title awarded to the book's central character. "Magister Ludi" can also be seen as a pun: lud- is a Latin stem meaning both "game" and "school."
Contents |
[edit] Plot
The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date, centuries into the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around the start of the 25th century[2]. The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys (the novel is thus a detailed exploration of education and the life of the mind), and to nurture and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive. The rules of the game are only alluded to, and are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. Essentially the game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and scholarship. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics.
The novel follows the life of a distinguished member of the order, Joseph Knecht (the surname translates as "servant" or "farm hand" but can also mean "vassal" or "knight"), as narrated by a fictional historian of the order. Hence the novel is an example of a Bildungsroman. The text, written in a scholarly biographical style, chronicles the precocious protagonist's decision to join the order, his mastery of the Game, and his advancing in the order's hierarchy, eventually being given the title Magister Ludi, reserved for the Game's finest player.[3]
However, Knecht's loyalty to the order is brought into question as he gradually comes to doubt whether the intellectually gifted have a right to withdraw from life's big problems. Knecht comes to see Castalia as a kind of ivory tower, an ethereal protected community, devoted to pure intellectual pursuits, but oblivious to the problems posed by life outside its borders. This conclusion precipitates a personal crisis, and accordingly, Knecht does the unthinkable: he resigns as Magister Ludi and asks to leave the order, ostensibly to become of value and service, in some way, to the larger culture. The heads of the order deny his request to leave, but Knecht departs Castalia anyway, initially taking a job as a tutor to his childhood friend's son. Only a few days later, he drowns in a mountain lake while attempting a swim for which he was not fit. The story ends abruptly.
The narrator breaks off before the final sections of the book, remarking that the end of the story is beyond the scope of his biography. The concluding chapter, entitled "The Legend", is reportedly from a different biography. After this final chapter, several of Knecht's "posthumous" works are then presented. The first section contains Knecht's poetry from various periods of his life. Then follow three short stories, which are presented as exercises by Knecht imagining his life had he been born in another time and place. The first tells of an pagan rainmaker named Knecht who lived "many thousands of years ago, when women ruled."[4] Eventually the shaman's powers to meditatively summon rain fail and he offers himself as a sacrifice for the good of the tribe. The second story is of Josephus, an early Christian hermit who acquires a reputation for piety but is inwardly troubled by self-loathing and seeks a confessor, only to find that same penitent had been seeking him. The final story covers the life of Dasa a cowherd who encounters a yogi in meditation in the forest, wishes to experience the same tranquility, but is asked by the yogi to fill a gourd with water. At the well, Dasa meets a beautiful woman and is led to gain and lose a kingdom, eventually realising the yogi has been teaching him how the world is illusion (Maya). All three stories cover the lives of spiritual seekers who learn the mystic traditions of their respective eras from sagacious teachers.
Originally, Hesse intended several different lives of the same person as he is reincarnated[5]. Instead, he focused on a story set in the future and placed the three shorter stories, "authored" by Knecht in The Glass Bead Game at the end of the novel.
[edit] Allusions in the novel
Many characters in the novel have names that are allusive word games. For example, Knecht's predecessor as Magister Ludi was Thomas van der Trave, a veiled reference to Thomas Mann who was born in Lübeck, situated on the Trave River. Knecht's brilliant but unstable friend Fritz Tegularius is based on Friedrich Nietzsche, while Father Jacobus is based on the historian Jakob Burckhardt.[6] The name of Carlo Ferromonte is an italianized version of the name of Hesse's nephew, Karl Isenberg, while the name of the Glass Bead Game's inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, was taken from the owner of a machine shop where Hesse once worked after dropping out of school, named Heinrich Perrot.[6]
[edit] As an example of Utopian literature
Freedman in his biography of Hesse wrote that the tensions created by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany directly contributed to the creation of the Glass Bead Game as a response to the oppressive times.[7] "The educational province of Castalia, which provided a setting for the novel, came to resemble Hesse's childhood Swabia physically while assuming more and more the function of his adopted home, neutral Switzerland, which in turn embodied his own antidote to the crises of his time. It became the "island of love" or at least an island of the spirit."[8] Freedman opined that in the Glass Bead Game "[c]ontemplation, the secrets of the Chinese I Ching and Western mathematics and music fashioned the perennial conflicts of his life into a unifying design."[9]
[edit] Central characters
- Joseph Knecht: The central character of the book. The Magister Ludi for most of the book.
- The Music Master: Knecht's spiritual mentor who, when Knecht is a child, examines him for entrance into the elite schools of Castalia.
- Plinio Designori: Knecht's antithesis in the world outside.
- Father Jacobus: Knecht's antithesis in faith.
- Elder Brother: A former Castalian and student of Chinese.
- Thomas van der Trave: Joseph Knecht's predecessor as Magister Ludi.
- Fritz Tegularius: A friend of Knecht's but a portent of what Castalians might become if they remain insular.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] Sources
- Hermann Hesse. The Glass Bead Game. Vintage Classics. ISBN 0-09-928362-X
[edit] Notes
- ^ Petri Liukkonen"Herman Hesse"
- ^ Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to The Glass Bead Game, p. xii. Owl Books. ISBN 0-8050-1246-X
- ^ Hesse, Hermann (1943). The Glass Bead Game. Owl Books. pp. 352–354. ISBN 0-8050-1246-X.
- ^ Hermann Hesse. The Glass Bead Game. Penguin. Hammondsworth 1975 p 416.
- ^ Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to The Glass Bead Game, p. xiv-xv. Picador. ISBN 0-312-27849-7
- ^ a b Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to The Glass Bead Game, p. ix. Owl Books. ISBN 0-8050-1246-X
- ^ Ralph Freedman. Hermann Hesse. Pilgrim of Crisis. Jonathan Cape. London. 1979. p 348.
- ^ Ralph Freedman. Hermann Hesse. Pilgrim of Crisis. Jonathan Cape. London. 1979. p 348.
- ^ Ralph Freedman. Hermann Hesse. Pilgrim of Crisis. Jonathan Cape. London. 1979. p 350.
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