HUMOR AS POSSIBLE SYNTHESIS OF A WORLD IN CONFLICT

Dr. Amalia Leites

Ms. Camila Dalcin

ABSTRACT: In this paper we aim to analyze the different narrator’s discourses in Herman Hesse’s
Steppenwolf, in order to understand if the plurality of narrative voices seeks to understand reality more
deeply or if there is a different reason behind it. Our theoretical starting point are the theories about the novel
such as studied by George Lukacs and Mikhail Bakhtin. Throughout this paper we argue that the novel is the
literary genre that best demonstrates the human conflicts faced with the modern age social and economical
contradictions.
KEYWORDS: Humor; Modern Novel; Steppenwolf.

Among the artistic manifestations that are characteristics of modernity, the novel is considered by
theorists as George Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin the aesthetic form that is more deeply linked to the
outside world and that deals with the condition of loss and emptiness in a more dynamic way. Georg
Lukács explains in the foreword to The Theory of the Novel that his work was written "under a
mood of permanent despair with the world situation" and demonstrates how the novel's emergence
relates to the modern age as the "epic of a world abandoned by God. " When Lukács perceives
conflict as a constitutive element of this kind of narrative, because it is the fruit of the search to fill
the existential void, he points out the 'demonic element' of the novel hero, who aspires to a totality
that is no longer possible.
We can see very clear reasons for Lukacs' despair with the Western situation, since he wrote
The Theory of the Novel between 1914 and 1915, while the world was suffering from World War I.
After the war and just over ten years later, in 1927, the writer Hermann Hesse published one of his
most famous works: Steppenwolf. German Swiss radicalized, Hesse lived the period between wars,
marked by social and economic conflicts. Europe was losing its leading position in the West and
trying to rebuild itself, which had opened space for the rise of Nazi and fascist regimes, and outside
the continent new world powers emerged: on the one hand the United States, which in a decade of
intense economic development enjoyed the technological innovations of the "Roaring Twenties";
and on the other, the Soviet Union which, after Lenin's death, was experiencing a period of both
rapid industrialization and repression and totalitarianism with the rise of Josef Stalin to power in
1924. It is in such divided historical context that Hesse’s work takes place. And the goal of this
paper is to analyze the different narrators of Steppenwolf, so that it should be possible to see if the
plurality of narrative voices also seeks to understand reality more deeply or if there is a different
reason behind it.
In Steppenwolf, we have a work divided in three parts, each with a different narrator. The
first, the "Editor's Preface", features a narrator who would have lived with the protagonist Harry
Haller for some time in a boarding house. He intends to narrate in the name of a collective, as we
can perceive by the recurrence of pronouns and verbs in the second person plural, which permeates
the entire preface and appears already from the first line: "This book contains the records left us by
a man whom,according to the expression he often used himself, we called the Steppenwolf."
(HESSE, 1969. p. 07) This collective is easily identified as the bourgeoisie, for the narrator himself
is more often called bourgeois, abstemious, and non-smoker , and establishes his position of
difference as Haller at the same time curious and pious, as if he were observing a child, ignorant of
the world. Throughout the narrative we find that the narrator tries, in the first instance, to legitimize
himself as a reliable reading guide of the following, relying on his time of living with Haller and
reporting episodes. But when the narrator ceases to merely report facts and begins to express his
opinion in the last paragraphs of the preface, in qualifying the Steppenwolf’s writings as evidence
of a "neurosis," "illness," and "anemic illness," we realize that the narrator is not, as he intended to
demonstrate previously, a "simple witness". In this passage we realize that it is for the bourgeoisie, a
collective of which he is a proud member, that the whole effort of the narrator is directed at
identifying Harry (and who resembles him) as an outsider, a stranger.
In the second part of the novel, "Harry Haller's Records," we have the story of Harry Haller
narrated in the first person, with the subtitle "For Madmen Only." The restrictive phrase shows with
whom this discourse intends to dialogue, and soon we realize that such as the narrator of the
preface, this second narrator identifies with a collective - that of the "madmen". Harry presents
himself verbatim as an old and disgruntled gentleman whose absolutely boring routine depresses
him, and whose only moments of joy lie in the solitary experiences in which he enjoys the "true
culture". Such a definition of culture consists in considering as masters Mozart and Bach in music
and Goethe in literature; classifying jazz as disgusting and vulgar, and rarely reading a modern
book. Haller asserts himself as a Steppenwolf for not understanding or being understood in a world
whose ideals have failed, and values his solitude as a proof of the independence he gained. But at
the same time that Harry sees himself as a superior man, who hates the bourgeoisie and is one of the
few lovers of truth in a decadent world, his suicidal impulses and his constant reflections on human
nature demonstrate the conflict in which he lives. This part of the narrative of Harry's life about
himself, in this way, approaches (coming from an opposite extreme) the view constructed by the
narrator of the preface, because it also presents him as a man who suffers for his differences in
relation to bourgeois society .Thus the opposition between the "we" / bourgeois and the "we" /
madman is confirmed by Harry's own voice - but not only confirmed. While the narrator of the
preface sees only the escape from the norm and understands Harry's outsider position as the root of
the conflict, Harry goes deeper and acknowledges that there are also within him two opposing
forces, his human and instinctual drives, man and Wolf. This coincidence between the discourse of
the two narrators reaffirms the existence of conflict on a social level, not just psychological - as an
isolated reading of the second part could indicate. That is, the narrators are on opposite sides, but
they deal with the same problem from different perspectives.
The notes of the Steppenwolf are interrupted when he finds a booklet entitled "Treatise on
the Steppenwolf" - and a third voice introduces itself to the novel. The Treatise arrives in historical
hands through a man carrying a banner where he was summoned to an "Anarchist Evening" and a
"Magic Theater", and holds a relationship (which will be clarified only when Harry takes the word
back) with the sign affixed to a abandoned wall, that was seen by him days before. Narrated in the
third person, the Treatise begins as a typical children's story: "There was once a certain man, Harry,
called the Steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless
he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes” (HESSE, 1969,p.24)This fictional form, however, distances
itself from the content, which performs an in-depth analysis of both Harry Haller's psychology and
his relationship with the bourgeoisie. The Treatise deconstructs the basic premise of Harry's internal
conflict by claiming that the man is a fragmented, multiple being-not merely dual, as he believed
himself to be. Moreover, it reveals the way in which the strength of the bourgeoisie resides in the
outsiders as he does, and that what he calls the "man" on his part is in fact its bourgeois character -
its relation to "true culture" would be the most obvious example. Not only the booklet analyzes the
condition of these contradictions, but points to a way out – the humor. This would be the solution to
the "weak and neutral milieu called bourgeois," the only way to unite all aspects of human existence
and to aspire to salvation. However, just as the relationship between the Treaty and the Magical
Theater, which at this point in the work is not yet clarified, the indication of humor as a conciliatory
path in human existence seems incomplete and undeveloped, and its reason for being will only be
perceived when we visualize the work in its entirety.
The apex of Harry's transformation will come with the entrance at the Magic Theater, where
he experiences a human hunt, remembers all the women he loved, witnesses the symbolic
destruction of his dual personality and talks to Mozart. The absolutely fantastic experience ends not
only the episode of the Magic Theater, but the novel. Let us first note the return of the infernal
expression, now from a completely different perspective from that of the narrator of the preface.
Harry is willing and excited to go through it, and therefore in this hell passage he is no longer
associated with the suffering of isolation or with a neurosis - like that diagnosed in the first part of
the work. Harry's inner hell deals with self-knowledge, with the innumerable selves (represented by
hundreds of thousands of cards), and it is only possible for those who are willing to bet on the game
of life without fear of what they will discover .Although the word "hell" is the same in the preface
and the end of the work, its implications are completely different. Harry claims to be prepared and
enthusiastic to live it not only once, but over and over again, while the first narrator sees as hell the
simple "crazy" existence of the neighbor, and views his experiences as a condemnation. Walking
through the hell of self-knowledge, betting on the game of life: this is what Harry understood of
what was explained in theory by the Treatise and demonstrated in practice by the Magic Theater.
More interesting, though, is what he did not learn: to laugh.
The "Treatise on the Steppenwolf” had clarified that Harry, though he considered himself as
an outsider, was as bourgeois as those around him, and this revelation gave rise to a new problem -
that of solving such suffering. Considering that the outsider is not, in fact, the antithesis of the
bourgeois, since they are both inserted in the same society, the element of humor appears in the
Treatise as the only answer. This first mention of humor integrates the saint with the libertine and at
the same time with the bourgeois, and asserts that Harry's salvation would lie precisely in this
possibility, since the "we"/bourgeois versus "us"/madman conflict would be no more than an
illusion , and his suffering would be only due to the lack of courage to look into himself and to
laugh at his inner chaos.
In the final pages another character, Pablo, declares that he expects Harry to find in the
theater great motives of laughter, since teaching him to laugh would be the aim of all that
performance, and he classifies the Magical Theater as a "school of humor," which would begin only
when the person ceased to lead- take it seriously. However, the following experiences relate mainly
to death, war and torture, culminating in the murder of one of Harry’s girls friend, Herminia,
perpetrated by the protagonist and of which he suffers terrible repentance. Faced with this apparent
contradiction between the comic purpose and the tragic actions, it is the figure of Mozart who,
laughing "terribly ironic", ends up guiding Harry through the theater rooms and reveals the
importance of laughter and humor, mocking the sufferings and disturbances of Harry’s existence.
Attention is drawn to the repetition of the expression "patibular humor", also present in the passage
quoted above. By uniting the idea of humor with the idea of death in the image of the gallows
(structure where execution is carried out by hanging), Mozart is mocking the psychology of Harry,
marked by seriousness and suicidal impulses, by reaffirming the need to learn to laugh even in the
moment of death. We observe that, in the Steppenwolf, humor is not only associated with laughter
in a comic perspective, but rather with an ironic perspective, as can be perceived by Mozart's
speech. Thus, we have humor in two ways: as irony and laughter - the latter seen by the narrator of
the Treatise as the only element capable of connecting all aspects of human existence, being the
"most genuine and genial product of humanity". In an attempt to understand and give meaning to
these perceptions, we again recall Lukacs and his Theory of the Novel, written more than ten years
before Hesse's masterpiece.
In dealing with the historical and philosophical significance of this type of narrative, Lukacs
highlights the content of irony as "the highest possible freedom in a world without god," for it
would imply in conceiving the demonic present in the subject as a constitutive part of its essence,
since god is absent. In Lukács' view, the demonic is the desire, the search for totality, and therefore,
origin of the conflict and the contradiction between man and the world. In this contradiction, the
supreme irony of the novel resides - according to the Greek origin of the word, irony means
"interrogation" and was known in the Hellenic universe as one of the methods of Socrates used to
clarify and undo the delusions of the interlocutor.
Structured on three different perspectives, the Steppenwolf presents the conflict not only in
its content but also in its form. The first narrative voice of the publisher who can only see his
bourgeois values, confirmed by witnessing to Harry's suffering, contrasts with Harry's own second
narrative voice that seeks happiness out of bourgeois society. If we accept the authority and wisdom
of the third narrator, the one from the Treatise, as regards the reading he performs (both of Harry
and of society), we can affirm that it is only with the addition of this third narrative voice that the
extremes touch and we visualize the synthesis of the conflict between the worldview of the first and
the second narrator. The discourse of the Treatise and the experiences of the Magical Theater can be
understood as what Bakhtin has called the "experimental and provocative argument", characteristic
of Menippean Satire, since both point to humor as the only possible synthesis in the game of forces
between the "we"/bourgeois and the "we" / mad, inserting the existence’s magical and ludic
dimension as the necessary contrast so that the individual does not lose his humanity in the
bourgeois world to which he is destined to remain.
It is through the narrator of the Treatise that the work acquires another dimension, in which
it is possible to glimpse a deeper level of understanding about the representation of the world here
present. If we did not take this voice into account, what we would have would be merely the
explication of opposites: a first-person narration presented by an editor who does not share the same
principles as the protagonist. The Treatise is the key piece that makes the novel work, because the
strength of the ideas expressed by its narrator is so great that it is felt throughout the work,
resonating in the speeches of Hermínia and Pablo and in the experiences of the Magical Theater. In
analyzing not only Harry but the entire humanity, the Treatise makes the work acquire a
philosophical dimension that is related to the interwar context in which it was produced. What can
be inferred, since the novel situates humor as the possible alternative, is that if conflict is inevitable
both psychologically and socially, the – paradoxical - solution that remains for man is to face the
chaos and laugh at his own condition, and this would be the only possible way to maintain his
sanity.
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