Solitude in Literary Fiction
The Journey to the East, by Hermann Hesse
The fiction works of Hesse from youthful novels to his ultimate works (The Journey to the East was published in 1932), are characterized by a protagonist
who pursues a psychological and spiritual quest. The Journey to the East presents an imaginary or
aspirational journey wherein “the East” is an imagined goal never approximated.
Given the post-World War I zeitgeist, the urgency to identify a new way of being,
spiritual as much as material, hovers over Hesse’s project,
never articulated but always a burdensome angst oppressing the characters,
never breaking through to a new project, or at least psychology or spirituality
that can transcend the gloomy atmosphere of the novel.
The journey is never finished (barely started), in part because the pilgrims or travelers have identified themselves as members of the League, a secret society of intellectuals and artists over time and geography, bound to its precepts and rules. The League is presented as the vehicle of liberation and transcendence, but it is never convincing. Hesse’s imaginary presentation is not an historical or real journey, but neither is it an ideal conveyance, ultimately it is a failed one. Perhaps that is the point though the reader wants a better proposition.
The impulse to seek wisdom in the East is not an unusual theme after the mid-nineteenth century translations of Eastern classics began to appear in the West. Images of India, the Himalayas, China, Tibet, and Persia were conjured. New voices in philosophy and thought emerged in tantalizing presence. Hesse’s prerequisite League in The Journey to the East represents an imagined equivalent of travels eastward by theosophists and esotericists into the twentieth century. Hesse subordinates the quest to the institution (the League), which follows the fate of Christianity, with the quest for wisdom largely dominated by the ecclesiastical institution and its ritual, doctrine, and hierarchy of authority.
When the protagonist drops out of the physical journey, disillusioned by its secretive habits, he is eventually summoned to discipline by the League in a Kafkaesque trial. This is, for the protagonist, not inevitable and not necessary. After all, the League is a secret society not an authoritarian governmental regime, that the protagonist should conform to the League. Hesse renounces the autonomy of the protagonist to affirm the power of the League, the institution, rather than dismissing it, banishing it altogether, as the protagonist of Hesse’s Siddhartha does, embracing no institution, no worldly authority, but only wisdom.
Thus the psychological fracas of the Journey for the protagonist is not unlike the situation of thefailed protagonist of The Glass Bead Game who quits the sheltered “league” of Castalia, the intellectual community that proposes itself an alternative to the world, only for the protagonist in that novel to be quickly and decisively consumed by the world, even unto death, nover to enjoy the requisite skills of solitude.
Hesse did not follow the advice of his own 1920 book Wandering, where he wisely notes: “The way to salvation leads ... into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace.”
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