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I admit that my own life frequently appears to me exactly like a legend . I often see and feel the outer world connected and in harmony with my inner world in a way that I can only call magical.… Now since so-called reality plays no very important role for me, since the past often occupies me as if it were the present, and the present seems infinitely far away, for these reasons I cannot separate the future from the past as sharply as is usually done. —hermann hesse, “Life Story, Briefly Told”1 I n his literature, Hesse would both criticize and assimilate various elements of the Pietist conception of breaking the “natural man.” As self-will was not a personality trait extolled in his cultural and religious milieu, Hesse turned elsewhere to ground this ideal. Eigensinn is “a truth [Hesse] found exemplified in different ways in Eastern religion and in Jungian psychology.”2 Ultimately, however, Hesse’s narrative journey would lead him to the attempt to harmonize his own virtue of self-will with the Pietist conception of giving up the self. In the final two chapters, we will see that Hesse comes close to such an achievement, in The Journey to the East and The Glass Bead Game. Setting the stage for a narrative reconciliation of the tensions unpacked in Steppenwolf is Narcissus and Goldmund. Hesse’s completion of Narcissus and Goldmund in December of 1928 “marked the end of that turbulent decade during which Hesse was intent primarily upon coming to grips and to terms with himself.”3 The inner storms that gave birth to Steppenwolf were calmed by the more epic and serene medieval tale of the friendship between the passionate sculptor and the spiritual monastic. The composed style of Narcissus and Goldmund was undoubtedly a reflection of a newfound stability in Hesse’s life. In the winter of 1926 Hesse began seeing Ninon Dolbin, and her presence helped him achieve a measure of stability and hope for the future. The couple 173 13 Narcissus and Goldmund reconciliation married in the fall of 1931 and moved into a new home in Montagnola in the Ticino (southern Switzerland). With war looming on the horizon, Hesse’s “life assumed a slower flow and a more even rhythm. It became home-centered and revolved almost ritually around his writing, reading, correspondence, music, painting, and gardening.”4 Here, in the quiet hills of Montagnola, Hesse would complete, over a period of twelve long years, his final work, The Glass Bead Game (1943). Hesse wrote his penultimate novel, The Journey to the East, in the period between the summer of 1930 and spring of 1931. In both Narcissus and Goldmund and Journey to the East, Hesse employs the literary motifs of wandering and pilgrimage as vehicles to narrate his life’s journey. Cut off from the actualities of Catholic pilgrimage practice, the Protestant Hesse naturally turned to the metaphor of life as a pilgrimage, a metaphor and literary genre that he had previously used to great effect in Peter Camenzind and Siddhartha. Actual pilgrimage practices are often implicated in healing, and this is also true of the narrative journey Hesse undertook in Narcissus and Goldmund. The novel is one of Hesse’s least overtly autobiographical and most metaphysical works,5 but the fractious relationship between Hesse the poet and his religious heritage remains a fundamental context, the “opening chapters set in the monastery represent[ing] yet another fictional version of Hesse’s adolescent identity crisis.”6 Narcissus and Goldmund is informed by Hesse’s persistent need to revisit his flight from Maulbronn, and in so doing amplify and re-envision that exemplary event. A number of complex, interrelated motivations and desires drive the work: it is an attempt at harmonious reconciliation with his family, an exercise in self-justification, and both a tribute to and a criticism of the piety of his family, especially his father. Hesse’s early evocation of the divine nature of art would be a recurring theme of his work, though a wholesale embrace of romantic religion was always held in check by the piety Hesse associated with his family, and with figures such as St. Francis. As quickly as Hesse granted art divine status in his early Romantic works7 he questioned it in Camenzind: “Art, it seemed to me, has always been at great pains to find expression for true innate longing of the divine element in us. St. Francis expressed it in a more...

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