The Glass Bead Game

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The Glass Bead Game

First edition of Das Glasperlenspiel
Author Hermann Hesse
Original title Das Glasperlenspiel
Translator Richard and Clara Winston
Country Switzerland
Language German
Genre(s) Novel
Publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Publication date 1943
Published in
English		 1969
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 558 pp
ISBN N/A
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The Glass Bead Game (German: Das Glasperlenspiel) is the last work and magnum opus of the German author Hermann Hesse. Begun in 1931 and published in Switzerland in 1943, the book was mentioned in Hesse's citation for the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature.

"Glass Bead Game" is a literal translation of the German title. The title has also been translated as Magister Ludi. "Magister Ludi", Latin for "master of the game," is the name of an honorific title awarded to the book's central character. Magister Ludi can also be seen as a pun: lud- is a Latin stem meaning both "game" and "school."

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date, centuries into the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around the start of the 25th century[1]. The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys (the novel is thus a detailed exploration of education and the life of the mind), and to nurture and play the Glass Bead Game (see below).

The novel follows the life of a distinguished member of the order, Joseph Knecht (the surname translates as "servant" or "farm hand" but can also mean "vassal" or "knight"), as narrated by a fictional historian of the order. Hence the novel is an example of a Bildungsroman. The text, written in a scholarly biographical style, chronicles the precocious protagonist's decision to join the order, his mastery of the Game, and his advancing in the order's hierarchy, eventually being given the title Magister Ludi, reserved for the Game's finest player.[2]

However, Knecht's loyalty to the order is brought into question as he gradually comes to doubt whether the intellectually gifted have a right to withdraw from life's big problems. Knecht comes to see Castalia as a kind of ivory tower, an ethereal protected community, devoted to pure intellectual pursuits, but oblivious to the problems posed by life outside its borders. This conclusion precipitates a personal crisis, and accordingly, Knecht does the unthinkable: he resigns as Magister Ludi and asks to leave the order, ostensibly to become of value and service, in some way, to the larger culture. The heads of the order deny his request to leave, but Knecht departs Castalia anyway, initially taking a job as a tutor to his childhood friend's son. Only a few days later, he drowns in a mountain lake while attempting a swim for which he was not fit. The story ends abruptly.

The narrator breaks off before the final sections of the book, remarking that the end of the story is beyond the scope of his biography. The concluding chapter, entitled "The Legend", is reportedly from a different biography. After this final chapter, several of Knecht's "posthumous" works are then presented. The first section contains Knecht's poetry from various periods of his life. Then three short stories follow. The first tells of an ancient pagan named Knecht; the second of Josephus, an early Christian hermit; and the final story covers the life of Dasa, an Indian prince who grows up as a cowherd. All three stories cover the lives of spiritual seekers who learn the mystic traditions of their respective eras from sagacious teachers. Originally, Hesse intended several different lives of the same person as he is reincarnated.[citation needed] Instead, he focused on the story set in the future and place the three shorter stories, "authored" by Knecht, at the end of the novel.

[edit] Allusions in the novel

Many characters in the novel have names that are allusive word games. For example, Knecht's predecessor as Magister Ludi was Thomas van der Trave, a veiled reference to Thomas Mann who was born in Lübeck, situated on the Trave River. Knecht's brilliant but unstable friend Fritz Tegularius is based on Friedrich Nietzsche, while Father Jacobus is based on the historian Jakob Burckhardt.[3] The name of Carlo Ferromonte is an italianized version of the name of Hesse's nephew, Karl Isenberg, while the name of the Glass Bead Game's inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, was taken from the owner of a machine shop where Hesse once worked after dropping out of school, named Heinrich Perrot.[3]

[edit] Central characters

  • Joseph Knecht: The central character of the book. The Magister Ludi for most of the book.
  • The Music Master: Knecht's spiritual mentor who, when Knecht is a child, examines him for entrance into the elite schools of Castalia.
  • Plinio Designori: Knecht's antithesis in the world outside.
  • Father Jacobus: Knecht's antithesis in faith.
  • Elder Brother: A former Castalian and student of Chinese.
  • Thomas van der Trave: Joseph Knecht's predecessor as Magister Ludi.
  • Fritz Tegularius: A friend of Knecht's but a portent of what Castalians might become if they remain insular.

[edit] Hesse's Glass Bead Game

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At the center of the monastic order lies the (fictitious) Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive. The precise rules of the game are only alluded to, and are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Suffice it to say that playing the Game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. Essentially the Game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and scholarship. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. For example, a Bach concerto may be related to a mathematical formula. One description says:

“Theoretically,” writes the Narrator Archivist, “this instrument is capable of producing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. The manuals, pedal, and stops are now fixed. Changes in their number and order and attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except in theory.” And with this statement, he reveals the limitations of the game: its elitism, its hubris, its stagnation, and its sterility. In its infancy, the Game was played with delicate glass beads, which have since been discarded as too . . . real? They connected the Game with the spiritual beads played by religious believers worldwide, as the robes, and secret language, and ceremonial trappings of the game form a mock religious experience in the time of the Narrator Archivist. Without them, the game flies into the ether without a tether to reality. In our world, prayer beads and the repetition of simple phrases serve as keys to transcendence. In Castalia, they are discarded and the key is lost. The Narrator Archivist makes no reference to the ecstatic states that might be achieved by Glass Bead Game players. The games as he describes them in Knecht’s time (the twenty-second century) and his own (the twenty-fourth century) apparently fall short of what seems the obvious goal.

The Game derives its name from the fact that it was originally played with tokens, perhaps analogous to those of an abacus or the game Go. At the time that the novel takes place, such props had become obsolete and the Game is played only with abstract, spoken formulas. At other times it is played with movement and gesture. The audience's appreciation of a good game draws on its appreciation of both music and mathematical elegance.

The Glass Bead Game also brings to mind Leibniz's notion of a universal calculus and his dream of a Mathesis universalis.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to The Glass Bead Game, p. xii. Owl Books. ISBN 0-8050-1246-X
  2. ^ Hesse, Hermann (1943). The Glass Bead Game. Owl Books, 352-354. ISBN 0-8050-1246-X. 
  3. ^ a b Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to The Glass Bead Game, p. ix. Owl Books. ISBN 0-8050-1246-X
v • d • e
Works by Hermann Hesse
Poems
Romantic Songs · One Hour After Midnight · Poems
Novels
Peter Camenzind · Beneath the Wheel · Gertrude · Rosshalde · Knulp · Demian · Klein and Wagner · Klingsor's Last Summer · Siddhartha · Kurgast · Die Nürnberger Reise · Steppenwolf · Narcissus and Goldmund · Journey to the East · Autobiographical Writings · The Glass Bead Game
Essay collections

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