the stars. For an hour I could breathe once more 9
But this is at the end of a long day, and tomorrow he will wake up and the insight will be gone; he will read a little, have a bath ... and so on.
But on this particular evening something happens. The reader is not sure what. According to Haller, he sees a mysterious door in the wall, with the words ‘ Magic Theatre: Not for everybody ’ written over it, and a man with a sandwich board and a tray of Old Moorfs Almanacs gives him a pamphlet called A Treatise on the Steppenwolf. The treatise is printed at full length in the following pages of the novel, and it is obviously Haller ’ s own work; so it is difficult for the reader to determine when Haller is recording the truth and when he is playing a game of wish-fulfilment with himself.
The treatise is an important piece of self-analysis. It could be called C A Treatise on the Outsider ’ . As Harry reads it (or writes it) certain convictions formulate themselves, about himself and about the Outsider generally. The Outsider, Haller says, is a self-divided man; being self-divided, his chief desire is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache would be selfish.
To explain his wretchedness, Haller has divided himself into two persons: a civilized man and a wolf-man. The civilized man loves all the things of Emil Sinclair ’ s first world, order and cleanliness, poetry and music (especially Mozart); he takes lodgings always in houses with polished fire-irons and well-scrubbed tiles. His other half is a savage who loves the second world, the world of darkness; he prefers open spaces and lawlessness; if he wants a woman he feels that the proper way is to kill and rape her. For him, bourgeois civilization and all its inanities are a great joke.
The civilized man and the wolf-man live at enmity most of the time, and it would seem that Harry Haller is bound to spend his days divided by their squabbling. But sometimes, as in the tavern, they make peace, and then a strange state ensues; for Harry finds that a combination of the two makes him akin to the gods. In these moments of vision, he is no longer envious of the bourgeois who finds life so straightforward, for his own conflicts are present in the bourgeois, on a much smaller scale. He, as self-realizer, has deliberately cultivated his two opposing natures until the conflict threatens to tear him in two, because he knows that when he has achieved the secret of permanently reconciling them, he will live at a level of intensity unknown to the bourgeois. His suffering is not a mark of his inferiority, even though it may render him less fit for survival than the bourgeois; unreconciled, it is the sign of his greatness; reconciled, it is manifested as ‘ more abundant life ’ that makes the Outsider ’ s superiority over other types of men unquestionable. When the Outsider becomes aware of his strength, he is unified and happy.
Haller goes even further; the Outsider is the mainstay of the bourgeois. Without him the bourgeois could not exist. The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society ’ s spiritual dynamos. Harry Haller is one of these.
There is a yet further step in self-analysis for the Steppen-wolf: that is to recognize that he is not really divided into two simple elements, man and wolf, but has literally hundreds of conflicting I ’ s. Every thought and impulse says T. The word ‘ personality ’ hides the vagueness of the concept; it refers to no factual object, like ‘ body ’ . Human beings are not like the characters in literature, fixed, made immutable by their creator; the visible part of the
But this is at the end of a long day, and tomorrow he will wake up and the insight will be gone; he will read a little, have a bath ... and so on.
But on this particular evening something happens. The reader is not sure what. According to Haller, he sees a mysterious door in the wall, with the words ‘ Magic Theatre: Not for everybody ’ written over it, and a man with a sandwich board and a tray of Old Moorfs Almanacs gives him a pamphlet called A Treatise on the Steppenwolf. The treatise is printed at full length in the following pages of the novel, and it is obviously Haller ’ s own work; so it is difficult for the reader to determine when Haller is recording the truth and when he is playing a game of wish-fulfilment with himself.
The treatise is an important piece of self-analysis. It could be called C A Treatise on the Outsider ’ . As Harry reads it (or writes it) certain convictions formulate themselves, about himself and about the Outsider generally. The Outsider, Haller says, is a self-divided man; being self-divided, his chief desire is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache would be selfish.
To explain his wretchedness, Haller has divided himself into two persons: a civilized man and a wolf-man. The civilized man loves all the things of Emil Sinclair ’ s first world, order and cleanliness, poetry and music (especially Mozart); he takes lodgings always in houses with polished fire-irons and well-scrubbed tiles. His other half is a savage who loves the second world, the world of darkness; he prefers open spaces and lawlessness; if he wants a woman he feels that the proper way is to kill and rape her. For him, bourgeois civilization and all its inanities are a great joke.
The civilized man and the wolf-man live at enmity most of the time, and it would seem that Harry Haller is bound to spend his days divided by their squabbling. But sometimes, as in the tavern, they make peace, and then a strange state ensues; for Harry finds that a combination of the two makes him akin to the gods. In these moments of vision, he is no longer envious of the bourgeois who finds life so straightforward, for his own conflicts are present in the bourgeois, on a much smaller scale. He, as self-realizer, has deliberately cultivated his two opposing natures until the conflict threatens to tear him in two, because he knows that when he has achieved the secret of permanently reconciling them, he will live at a level of intensity unknown to the bourgeois. His suffering is not a mark of his inferiority, even though it may render him less fit for survival than the bourgeois; unreconciled, it is the sign of his greatness; reconciled, it is manifested as ‘ more abundant life ’ that makes the Outsider ’ s superiority over other types of men unquestionable. When the Outsider becomes aware of his strength, he is unified and happy.
Haller goes even further; the Outsider is the mainstay of the bourgeois. Without him the bourgeois could not exist. The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society ’ s spiritual dynamos. Harry Haller is one of these.
There is a yet further step in self-analysis for the Steppen-wolf: that is to recognize that he is not really divided into two simple elements, man and wolf, but has literally hundreds of conflicting I ’ s. Every thought and impulse says T. The word ‘ personality ’ hides the vagueness of the concept; it refers to no factual object, like ‘ body ’ . Human beings are not like the characters in literature, fixed, made immutable by their creator; the visible part of the
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