THE ROAD TO THE CASTLE
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poetry, science or any such field is stated and elaborated, through medita–
tion and in accordance with the rules of the game, to embrace other
themes, until the game throws a net of formal relations over the whole
history of culture. Joseph Knecht reaches proficiency in this game, be–
coming a Magister Ludi. The story of his life is the story of his intel–
lectual adventures which Hesse, writing in the person of a Castalian,
relates with few biographical details. The suggestion of an eventual break–
through of repressed sexuality and worldliness is faintly established at
the beginning; and though Hesse goes so far as to refer to Knecht's
secret inner life as one of
Sturm und Drang,
he remains faithful to the
Castalian tone in which one speaks only of mind, and does not exploit
the opportunity for drama. Instead of drama we are given the Bead
Game, and its marvellously happy symbolism is worked through over
and over again to present the life of the mind. Fiction is thrown away
in the process; but to say so is not a judgment on this novel, which
makes no attempts at fiction.
But the break-through comes, and at that point Hesse, who has been
writing in the tradition of Kafka (a qualification will follow), leans
on Thomas Mann. Joseph Knecht, at the top of his career, leaves
Castalia and enters the world as the tutor of the young son of his half–
Castalian friend, Plinio Designori. He meets death, as does Aschenbach,
in the form of the-young-boy-in-the-water. But here again, the dramatic
theme is not developed, and the homosexual meaning not given openly.
Here Hesse's restraint appears as disdain: as though drama were some–
how not quite nice, and ordinary psychology not pure enough, to appear
at the death of the mind.
Call this a weakness. But
Magister Ludi
has an extraordinary in–
tellectual strength and simplicity. Its greatest quality is an implicit
literary criticism, a program, as it were, for writers to follow. Apparently
acknowledging the tradition of Kafka as supreme for our time (for he
takes his initial premise of the world from the same perspective), Hesse
makes an adaptation of it that amounts to a radical transvaluation. It is
not by accident that his hero is named Joseph Knecht (Joseph
K.)
and that his world is called Castalia. But there is no difficulty in arriving
at Castalia, it is an accessible part of the world: the doors of the Castle
stand wide open.
The Castle
has been rewritten from the interior point
of view, the terror of God vanishes, and all suggestion of anything ob–
scene in the exercise of His will, anything incommensurate with man's.
A vocation exists always with reference to a world ordered by Law and
prepared to fulfill it, and though the Law is still oppressive, it is funda–
mentally rational. It can be understood, mastered; as one rises in the
