The Glass Bead Game (1943)

by Herman Hesse

The Glass Bead Game is an intellectually stimulating book that changes form as you progress through it and contemplate it in retrospect. Here Hesse has created a timeless work of science fiction where the boundary of our existence is stretched not in a technological dimension but in spiritual and epistemological ones. In this well-illustrated landscape a profoundly personal telling is given of the story of the eternal soul-seeking man and his journey towards reconciliation with the higher power — be that reason, nature, God, or all three.

The story is set some hundreds of years in the future in the province of Castalia, an idyllic embodiment of Goethe’s Pedagogical Province. Castalians are raised to venerate scholarly pursuit above all else and hold no other end in mind. The province exists apart from the rest of the world in an academic haven where the seven liberal arts are studied and all “applied” arts such as science, history, and politics are eschewed. Castalia is a utopia of the mind straight out of Plato’s Republic. The men of this province form an ascetic Order of secular monks who devote their lives to this endeavor, forswearing romance, procreation, worldly pleasures, artistic creation, and any relationship with God.

One bastion of creativity remains: the eponymous Game. This Game, like most other novum in science fiction, is (artfully) hand-waved into existence as an academic exercise where the complete canon of man’s creation can be drawn upon and synthesized into some unified whole. Works from astronomy to architecture to abstract algebra to the Aeneid are distilled down to their essence, represented as symbols, and pieced together during Games to elucidate the unity of knowledge. Or something like that.

The story is presented as the biography of one Joseph Knecht. The book is composed of a rather dry and academic introduction, a faithful and unimaginative (the Castalian style) account of the life of Knecht from boyhood to death, selected poems from his student years, and Knecht’s three “Lives,” fictional vignettes of reincarnation in a different era written by Knecht as a young man.

Knecht’s biography starts out relatively straightforward. In this way it’s similar to other science fiction novels with particularly splendid worlds where some time is spent exploring that world before the story starts in earnest. Simply learning about the wonderful world of Castalia and the intriguing Game and being inspired by the intensely erudite environs provides enough stimulation and tension to allow this section to stand on its own. I found this part of the book a joy to read. A deep reverence for knowledge and love for music reverberates through its pages that infected me as a reader.

On the surface Knecht is an exemplary Castalian, excelling in each phase of life and reaching the summit of Castalian society when he is selected as the Magister Ludi (Master of the Game), the official in charge of representing and advancing the Game. Slowly, however, as we become acquainted with Knecht through his own writings and correspondences, we build an awareness that our narrator is as unreliable as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. As Humbert can only see the events of Lolita through his own infatuated and perverse eyes, Knecht’s biographer can only tell his story through the rigid intellectual framework of Castalia where speculation on the subject’s mental state is inimical to a faithful portrayal of his life. In fact, the story opens with an outright statement to that effect:

“Certainly, what nowadays we understand by personality is something quite different from what the biographers and historians of earlier times meant by it. For them, … the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal.” (pg. 12)

As we realize that our narrator cannot be trusted to provide a faithful and complete account of Knecht’s life we learn that the man we are explicitly introduced to, the ideal Castalian who effortlessly climbs the ranks of the province’s hierarchy, for whom love for province and love of Game supersede all else, is a creation of fiction.

This realization can be interpreted as the main story arc in The Glass Bead Game. Knecht’s biography ends two thirds of the way through the novel but his development as a character continues on past his death. The book is arranged such that we are presented with increasingly intimate pictures of Knecht, each new piece informing our understandings and interpretations of the prior ones.

Starting with the academic introduction, we meet the man as an abstract name fitted into the history of Castalia and of the Game. We learn of him in terms of his accomplishments and his lasting impacts on the province and its people and its favored pastime.

Then we get an arms-length account of his life. We see him in each successive stage and we come to know him as a man may know his colleagues; that is, as a black box of inputs and outputs that clearly define his interactions with his surroundings but leave his inner life a mystery.

Finally, from the poems of his student years and his three published Lives, we are granted visitation rights into the man’s head. We learn that Joseph Knecht is innately discontented with the neutered secular search for knowledge promoted within Castalia. For a while he is able to satiate his hunger for spiritual development through the Game itself. A masterfully played Glass Bead Game brushes up against the divine but remains abstract, esoteric, and mired in aesthetic concerns. The chasm between Knecht and the ideal Castalian is defined by this dissatisfaction with the Game, the most perfect culmination of knowledge and creation man has yet devised. The ideal Castalian is content with this ersatz representation of heaven on Earth and Knecht is not.

These heretical thoughts lead Knecht to renounce his post and exile himself from Castalia. In doing so he seeks not to renounce his belief in the Castalian system but to take measures to protect that system from its own decadence and the long decline of senescence that only he has the foresight to see on the horizon. Influenced by a Benedictine monk under whom he studied before becoming Magister Ludi, Knecht sees the impermanence of the Castalian system and its desperate need to stand not on the banks but in the full flow of the stream of history. Viewed against that 18-century-old Benedictine Order, Knecht understands the three-century-old Castalian society as a mere sapling that will wither and die if it does not fight vehemently for its continued existence and for the ability to continue the progression of the Glass Bead Game toward the sublime.

A prominent feature of Castalian society is meditation. The brand of meditation practiced appears to lie somewhere between the Buddhist style of the undisturbed pond and the ancient Greek practice of solitary reflection. Meditation is an integral part of the Game: players and observers are encouraged to meditate after each move is played to better internalize it.

Fitting, then, that The Glass Bead Game itself should benefit from such an approach. Under an interpretation of its separate sections as standalone pieces or as pieces that relate only in subject, the story is enjoyable enough, but it truly shines with constant recompilation of all preceding material.

Every so often I read a book after which it feels wrong to pick up a new one without sitting Shiva for it to let it diffuse into my being. The Glass Bead Game is one of those.