I read Hermann Hesse's "The Prodigy" on a recent trip to India. I hadn't visited India in almost three decades; when, eventually, I did, The Prodigy was my night-time reading companion. It seemed fated.
Hans is a young rural boy whose intellect defines him to the world beyond his own private fishing spot. Groomed for a career in the Church, he wins a scholarship, befriends a renegade, is sparked by a frisson of profound feeling and friendship never before tasted, struggles to maintain academic excellence when life in all its meaningful incoherence comes a-calling, crashes from his pedestal like so many misunderstood 'fallen' angels before him, loses his identity and value in a world that knows only to worship his intellect at the expense of his very soul, and kills himself.
Hans' life is an indictment of the West's deep well of iniquitous dichotomies. Such is the popular reading of Hesse's attitudes, his affinity with the holism of the East and the diabolism of the West well commented upon.
But broaden it out, and you have the tale of a young man on whom the world and its expectations and structures weighs down like an oversized and heavy woolen winter coat, dragging the body down and into itself, causing fissures of the soul that only death seems to assuage.
Enter: Holden Caulfield. J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye". Holden is a poster boy for superior, privileged, disaffected youth. But burning brightly is his overwhelming desire to preserve the innocence of youth. It's an impulse the world doesn't comprehend and so Holden struggles against the expectation and structure of a world that has no affinity for the likes of him.
Hans and Holden. Creations so disparate yet so similar: Hesse writes from the vantage point of a champion of holism, Salinger from the perspective that the world is a cynical and cruel place.
But for all this seeming difference, the pounding of your ribcage against the impiety of duality, against the poisoning of polyvalence, is the same whether you read "The Prodigy" or "Catcher in the Rye". Because you're reading about self and society. You're reading about yourself and your society. You're reading about the courage to stand up, to not be moulded by, to not be forced to divide against yourself within the prison of false dichotomy (Doris Lessing "The Golden Notebook").
Post-script: This blog differs in many respects from what I had drafted in my diary: not in terms of what I wanted to say, but in how to say it. In that draft I touched on society as a structural-functional behemoth, whipping the individual or the self (your preference will depend on whether you've been socialised in the East or West, since these attest to very different things) for its temerity in seeking meaning, in seeking to exist outside the structure and function that fathomed it. I think that analysis remains true, though it didn't make it into the body of my post.
Hans is a young rural boy whose intellect defines him to the world beyond his own private fishing spot. Groomed for a career in the Church, he wins a scholarship, befriends a renegade, is sparked by a frisson of profound feeling and friendship never before tasted, struggles to maintain academic excellence when life in all its meaningful incoherence comes a-calling, crashes from his pedestal like so many misunderstood 'fallen' angels before him, loses his identity and value in a world that knows only to worship his intellect at the expense of his very soul, and kills himself.
Hans' life is an indictment of the West's deep well of iniquitous dichotomies. Such is the popular reading of Hesse's attitudes, his affinity with the holism of the East and the diabolism of the West well commented upon.
But broaden it out, and you have the tale of a young man on whom the world and its expectations and structures weighs down like an oversized and heavy woolen winter coat, dragging the body down and into itself, causing fissures of the soul that only death seems to assuage.
Enter: Holden Caulfield. J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye". Holden is a poster boy for superior, privileged, disaffected youth. But burning brightly is his overwhelming desire to preserve the innocence of youth. It's an impulse the world doesn't comprehend and so Holden struggles against the expectation and structure of a world that has no affinity for the likes of him.
Hans and Holden. Creations so disparate yet so similar: Hesse writes from the vantage point of a champion of holism, Salinger from the perspective that the world is a cynical and cruel place.
But for all this seeming difference, the pounding of your ribcage against the impiety of duality, against the poisoning of polyvalence, is the same whether you read "The Prodigy" or "Catcher in the Rye". Because you're reading about self and society. You're reading about yourself and your society. You're reading about the courage to stand up, to not be moulded by, to not be forced to divide against yourself within the prison of false dichotomy (Doris Lessing "The Golden Notebook").
Post-script: This blog differs in many respects from what I had drafted in my diary: not in terms of what I wanted to say, but in how to say it. In that draft I touched on society as a structural-functional behemoth, whipping the individual or the self (your preference will depend on whether you've been socialised in the East or West, since these attest to very different things) for its temerity in seeking meaning, in seeking to exist outside the structure and function that fathomed it. I think that analysis remains true, though it didn't make it into the body of my post.
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