If a work of art could commit a sin, it would be that of leaving those who encounter it indifferent. And perhaps the royal road to indifference is the possession of answers, answers cut-and-dried, prefabricated answers that spare someone the necessity of knowing even the questions. For to have an answer is to possess certainty, and to possess certainty is to cease growing, and to cease growing is to cease existing.

If art could be said to engage in a love affair, it would be a love affair with questions. And a question must be loved before it will surrender its secret. The degree to which someone can live without certainties or answers need not be a sign of immaturity or indecisiveness, but one of adulthood and inner strength.

Steppenwolf is a book with few answers and fewer certainties. It is too honest for that. It is in some respects like a newborn child which looks upon the world for the first time with wondering eyes, intoxicated with the delirium of initial discovery. It is in many respects an invitation to renounce the customary manner of looking at life and to refashion one’s existence after one’s deepest desires. It is in virtually every respect a voice from within which whispers: “Become who you really are!”

Every generation that confronts great literature is apt to see in it a projection of its own problems, needs, and desires. Steppenwolf is no exception. That American youth in the 1960’s saw in this novel its own rejection of middle-class values, hypocrisy and sham is natural and justified, for all of this is present, and Hesse meant to put it there.

The mesmeric power that Hesse’s novels and short stories exercised over American youth at that time can be largely explained, after all, by the quiet disdain he bore toward establishment values. Punctuating all his writings is the call to self-realization and selfhood, the necessity of becoming one’s higher self, that more authentic inner person one sensed only too well who was being stifled under the tyranny of society’s Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not be different!” Everywhere in his works the emphasis lay on the primacy and autonomy of the personal, the subjective, and the inward. Hesse’s writings had become American youth’s Holy Writ and sacred mythology that explained a generation to itself and rallied it to an exalted and clarified existence of higher aspiration.

Yet, like all mythologies, the danger arises when the myth is taken literally and interpreted as the thing-in-itself, when the symbols used to express a vision of life are not understood as symbols and metaphors pointing beyond themselves, but as the reality itself. Hesse needs to be demythologized if he is not to suffer the fate of becoming for modern readers what he regrettably became for many of the 1960’s — a cliché, a commodity, a fetish, and, ultimately, for some, a bore!

The bucolic simplicity of his poetical plot lines, the self-encapsulation of his heroic strivers after deeper authenticity, and the nostalgic intoxication of a bygone world suffusing his moodscapes should not deceive us into believing that all he has to say can be reduced to the trite escapism of “Turn on! Tune in! Drop out!”

Hesse is an artist, and if an artist can be said to “think” in a piece of fiction, it is not in words or concepts, not in closely-reasoned arguments or debate-like tactical maneuvers, but solely in images, metaphors, symbols, and visions. At times, artists themselves don’t know what it is they may want to “say.” Rather, they gropingly feel their way along some vaguely-sensed, newly emerging, and inexpressible realm of experience for which words do not yet exist.

And so they resort to symbols and metaphors, which — they hope — will suggest at least some vague silhouette that faintly approximates in some impoverished way a fraction of what hovers before their mind’s eye. The last thing they expect is that their symbols be taken at face value, as if they literally meant what they seem to be saying, and not as so many metaphorical prisms through which is refracted a higher vision these symbols convey.

To fail to understand this about art is to mistake fundamentally the artist’s intention. To fall down in adoration before those images by which artists express their vision is to commit the unpardonable sin against art — the sin of idolatry, idol worship, which takes symbols literally when they are meant to be but mere hints, aromatic fragrances of a beauteous presence which lies far beyond.

This fate has fallen like the curse of Cain upon this novel. For those readers who have taken Hesse and his novels literally, Steppenwolf has been read as a veiled initiation-rite to free-love, a bacchanalian celebration of drugs, and an open invitation to all forms of license and orgiastic violence, when in fact it is none of these.

As so often happens in life, we first act and only then set about finding rationales and pretexts that justify what we’ve done. Hesse’s novel has been prostituted to serve ends which he never intended, and become trivialized by a fashionable pop-art interpretation that has managed to cake itself upon the surface of this work, which results in a complete misreading of the author’s intention.

What are we to make, then, of this lonely, middle-aged gentleman, this wolf-of-the-steppes as he calls himself, who lives on the borderland of bourgeois society? How are we to piece together the utterly bizarre experiences he undergoes, the twilight characters who flit across his path, the somnambulistic encounters with the Immortals, Goethe and Mozart? How might we divine some semblance of coherence in this hallucinatory nightmare of the Magic Theater?

To bring some clarity into what is happening at a surface-level of this novel, let us briefly consider how the work is structured. First, we have the notebooks or memoirs left behind by a certain Harry Haller. These notebooks are, in turn, prefaced by an editor’s introduction, which seeks to explain the general background of the notebooks, their nature, value, and author. Finally, there is a mysterious third section, “The Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” which is incorporated into the body of Haller’s manuscript. These three components of the novel — the editor’s introduction, the notebooks themselves, and the “Treatise” — represent three different points of view, three separate perspectives, each with its own tone, coloration, agenda, and bias.

The introduction, written by an unnamed editor, reflects what we could call the everyday, middle-class reaction to Haller, a point of view which sees him as an eccentric, disorganized, a somewhat suspicious, yet basically sympathetic character. By and large, this is the impression that Haller might make upon the average observer. From this viewpoint, his comings and goings, his lifestyle, interests, and tastes might well appear strange. What we, in turn, must bear in mind, however, is that this editor’s viewpoint in describing Haller is just that, a viewpoint, which reveals more about the editor than it does about Haller.

Next, we have the notebooks, which illuminate Haller from within. We see Haller as he sees himself. We are therefore enabled to penetrate more deeply into this subterranean phenomenon who calls himself a “Steppenwolf.” We are presented with countless opportunities of evaluating people, circumstances, and events through Haller’s eyes. In fact, reading the notebooks, we come to realize in hindsight that many of the editor’s initial observations were shallow and devoid of insight into Haller’s character or situation. With our understanding of Haller thereby substantially enriched and given deeper hues through this subjective portrayal of himself, we need again to be cautioned that we have to do here with yet another viewpoint, which suffers from its own limited perspective, as did that of the editor’s introduction.

Finally, we have the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” which can be said to embody an ostensibly more profound perspective than the previous two, a more eternal, a more sublime, a more Olympian evaluation of Haller’s state-of-affairs. This point of view, formulated from the lofty heights of the “Immortals,” attempts to situate Haller’s particular destiny along the co-ordinates of the metaphysical.