Hesse-GBGHermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943); translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Henry Holt, 1949. Also published as Magister Ludi; reprints.

Most critics and readers of Herman Hesse's last novel, The Glass Bead Game, first written in 1931 and published in 1943, praise the scope and concept of the book and the ingenious futurist setting of the province of Castalia, where scholars (all men and schoolboys) pursue classical intellectual subjects such as music, mathematics, philology, and astronomy. Their studies culminate in the syncretic exercise called the Glass Bead Game, wherein the subjects are linked symbolically, such as musical phrases, etymologies, chemical elements, astronomical configurations, mathematical proportions, and the like. Each game is the subjective creation of individual students and scholars as well as a collective pursuit in the annual game that brings the whole of Castalia to a grand tournament. The novel follows the young Joseph Knecht from student to scholar, professor to teacher, and finally to appointed master of the game as Magister Ludi.

Such is setting, context, and description, but not plot. The entirety of Castalia, the game itself, the intellectual content of the scholar's production, is never fully described but left as a premise and a given. The ancient equivalent suggests not Plato's Academy but the school of Pythagoras, not his early Semicircle but his later school of resident mathematikoi and outside pupils called akousmatics. In Pythagoras, after all, is found the effort to link all of the categories of knowledge into a grand synthesis, pursued as both pastime and discipline. At the same time, Castalia is a secular version of a traditional monastery. The inhabitants are entirely involved with scholarship and ritual, do not intersect with the world, and consider themselves self-sufficient, though they depend on others for their sustenance. This was the historical downfall of the medieval Western monasteries, and, as will be seen, the anticipated downfall of Castalia feared by Knecht.

While Hesse is at pains to describe aspects of the daily order of Castalia, the novel is starkly absent the details that explicate the personality or spirit of the place, that sensability that ought to evoke the sympathy of the outsider, in this case the reader. Indeed, while Joseph Knecht seems a reasonable hero of this abstruse world, his sense of appreciation for selected characters--Elder Brother (who has left Castalia to live as a hermit in the Bamboo Grove, where he studies Chinese, I Ching, and Chuang-tzu), Father Jacobus (historian at Mariafels monastery and occasional Vatican diplomat), and the Music Master, Joseph’s first teacher)—-nevertheless reveals a failed capacity for sympathy, an intellectualized sense of loyalty and discomfort rather than an emotion that the reader can share intimately.

Knecht's low-key loyalty is in sharp contrast to his relations with the outsider Plinio Designori, formerly a Castalia student and as an adult a worldly political climber among the wealthy and powerful classes. Like a false spirit, a gnostic double, Plinio flaunts criticism of the stifling atmosphere of Castalia only to come back as an adult to sit on its board and corrupt the vacillating Knecht just as Knecht has begun to exhaust what he believes he can accomplish in Castalia. Knecht is lured by Designer into quitting Castalia for the world. During the process of corruption, the reader hopes for a voice of warning in Knecht's simple conscience, but Hessse does not flinch. Knecht's formal resignation rings hollow to the Castalia president. We know the destiny that will follow. Believing himself ready to abandon Castalia and thrive in the outside world, Knecht is lured by Designori to leave Castalia and to become tutor to the latter's obnoxious son Tito. (The similarity to the name of Tadzio, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice equivalent, is suggestive here.) Knecht's naivety is handily exploited. That Knecht dies so soon afterwards in a feat of bravado seems a hasty finish to the meticulous handicraft of the lengthy novel, and disabuses the reader of Knecht's supposed virtues built up so laboriously by Hesse over four hundred-plus pages.

Within an atmosphere of discretion and monastic-like interpersonal relations, Hesse presents Knecht as pursuing a quiet and constructive communitarian life. But Knecht is disturbed, restless, and soon obsessed with the future of Castalia after a lengthy visit with the Benedictine monk-scholar Father Jacobus (who represents the historiographer Jacob Burkhardt (1818-1897). Father Jacobus points out the ahistorical sentiment of Castalia, the absence of a fecund culture, its scholars' neglect of the historical context of both Castalia and of the world.

As some critics and readers have pointed out, Hesse's injection of the subject of history was intended to address the thesis of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, which postulated the end of Western primacy — swallowed up by its complex technology, pessimism, and violent struggles for power — and to offer a different endgame. A whimper, not a bang, perhaps, to quote T.S. Eliot's phrase about how the world will end. Spengler's premise had left many 1920s intellectuals despairing of a wider political solution and eager to drop out of public action to pursue private aesthetics. The novel was written in 1931, at the cusp of a dangerous era for Germany, Europe, and Hesse. In short, the intellectuals had refused to learn from history and to begin working for a more just and stable society. Hesse's character Knecht fears decline and fall, and includes Castalians in his condemnation of the disdain for history. Knecht compares Castalian disdain to the attitude of the early Christian desert hermits:

But it is part of our intellectual arrogance that we confront world history, especially in modern times, in much the same spirit that the hermits and ascetics of early Christianity confronted the theatrum mundi, the great theater of the world. History seems to us an arena of instincts and fashions, of appetite, avarice, and craving for power, of blood lust, violence, destruction, and wars, of ambitious ministers, venal generals, bombarded cities, and we too easily forget that this is only one of its many aspects.

Knecht's own Castalia associate and friend Fritz Tegularius (supposed to represent Friedrich Nietzsche) views history the same way, and disdains its study. But Knecht regrets the viewpoint, regrets Castalia, and regrets his own appointment as Magister Ludi and the school of Waldzell that specialized in the Glass Bead Game:

Some naive feeling for simplicity, for wholeness and soundness, warned me against the spirit of the Waldzell Vicus Lusorum. I sensed in it a spirit of specialism and virtuosity, certainly highly cultivated, certainly richly elaborated, but nevertheless isolated from humanity and the whole of life -- a spirit that had soared too high into haughty solitariness.

But Hesse did not write an apocalyptic novel showing the destruction of peace-time and the fall of Castalia. Instead he shifted this demise directly onto his protagonist. Did Hesse believe that Castalia was doomed? Did he simply tire of the novel, the setting, the character? Was the novel cut short? Hesse writes sympathetically of the early Knecht's encounter with Elder Brother, a scholar who deliberately left Castalia and its routines to pursue life as a hermit in Bamboo Grove. Knecht remained at the Bamboo Grove for months and

learned to manipulate the yarrow stalks [of the I Ching] almost as well as his teacher. The latter spent an hour a day with him, practicing counting the sticks, imparting the grammar and symbolism of the oracular language, and drilling him in writing and memorizing the sixty-four signs. He read to Knecht from ancient commentaries, and every so often, on particularly good days, told him a story by Chuang Tzu. For the rest, the disciple learned to tend the garden, wash the brushes, and prepare the Chinese ink. He also learned to make soup and tea, gather brushwood, observe the weather, and handle the Chinese calendar.

Later, Knecht invited Elder Brother to Castalia and to his quarters as Magister Ludi, but Elder Brother had not replied.

Knecht recalled his time spent with Elder Brother. Vivid memories arose of his long-ago stay in the hut, with the rustling bamboos and yarrow stalks outside, along with other memories of freedom, leisure, student days, and the colorful paradise of youthful dreams. How this brave, crotchety hermit had contrived to withdraw and keep his freedom; how his tranquil Bamboo Grove sheltered him from the world; how deeply and strongly he lived in his neat, pedantic and wise Sinicism; in how beautifully concentrated and inviolable a way the magic spell of his life's dream enclosed him year after year and decade after decade, making a China of his garden, a temple of his hut, divinities of his fish, and a sage of himself! With a sigh, Knecht shook off this notion. He himself had gone another way, or rather been led, and what counted was to pursue his assigned way straightforwardly and faithfully, not to compare it with the ways of others.

So, in the end, alternatives to Castalia, to secular monasticism, were available to Knecht: the way of the hermit and the way of the world. He chose the latter and was destroyed by it.

Hesse added three short stories as addenda to The Glass Bead Game that feature Knecht in different historical and cultural capacities, in effect different incarnations of his protagonist. "The Rainmaker" presents a backdrop of shamanism, "The Father Confessor" features Joseph as a Christian desert hermit, and "The Indian Life" recreates a setting that could have been in the Mahabharata, though a Brahmin character is named Vasudeva, which Hesse enthusiasts would doubtless prefer had been reserved for Vasudeva, the hermit-ferryman of Siddhartha.