Marriage Pact - Selected Short Stories of Hesse: Selected Short Stories of Hesse

Author: Hesse
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: Most of Hesse's early short stories are set in his birthplace, Calw, much like Keller wrote about the people of Seldwyla, Joyce wrote about the people of Dublin, Hesse wrote about the people he called "the little world" of Calw, or "Gelbersdorfers" in the book. This collection includes six works depicting the myriad inhabitants of this microcosm, such as The Engagement, Hans Dielram's Apprenticeship, and Emil Kolb. German scholar Max H?mmerlin-Nass once accurately summarized these novels: "The pre-war German small-town atmosphere, its chaos and disorder, its not entirely harmless nature, are depicted with both delicate and rigorous realism. It truly was the lush zoo of God in those days... People, each in their own way, live out their unchangeable, unique destinies here in a life that is not overly tense. It can coexist with the ordinary happiness that ends with an engagement, as well as with the eventual imprisonment, and also with the loss of inner balance, even the despair of questioning the meaning of life. Because in this small world, people's demands for heaven and hell are no less intense or profound than their demands for the peaks and pools in their region. Tragedy and comedy in life flow endlessly, subtly, and emit various glimmers, revealing the eternal significance, dignity, and authenticity of existence. The question is whether there is a sincere writer who can track them down and understand how to shape them." Another part of the Calw stories consists of novels or essays with autobiographical elements, including seven works such as Childhood Memories, Latin School Student, The Big Butterfly, and The Big Whirlwind, perhaps even Nihilism, whose main plot takes place in Munich—all are Hesse's recollections of his childhood, student days, and apprentice or boyhood life. They appear simple yet deeply moving, as his contemporary writer Tucoiski said: "Few can write as Hesse does. He can not only depict a summer evening and a refreshing sea bath, but also the fatigue after physical exertion—perhaps not an easy feat. Yet, he can make our hearts feel hot, cool, and fatigued as well." The protagonists in these works always oscillate between natural instincts and traditional behavioral norms. Hesse once explained his fondness for writing about childhood memories: "Among all the things one encounters, only the feelings of one's youth are completely fresh and clear, and they can last until the age of thirteen, fourteen, yet be remembered for a lifetime." The psychological depiction of adolescents wavering between freedom and restraint in these works reveals the trajectory of the "bipolarity" theme in Hesse's later important works, especially in The Glass Bead Game. The other early works in this collection vary in content, showcasing the author's multifaceted talent. The Wolf recounts a true story that happened in the Uri Alps of Switzerland in 1900, where a lone wolf was chased and killed by farmers. The beauty and misfortune of this solitary beast inspired aesthetic thoughts among fellow loners. The themes raised by The Wolf later became the subject of Hesse's mid-career masterpiece The Waste Land Wolf, as well as the theme of Strange Tales of the Waste Land Wolf in this collection. The Transformation of Casanova and Robert Agion are two novels rich in legend, drawing on Italian and Indian materials that Hesse read extensively but was not deeply familiar with, yet they are written with the same delicacy and vividness as Literary Evening, equally showcasing Hesse's playful yet gentle irony and humor. The City is an allegorical essay that reveals the author's critical stance toward the cracks in modern civilization. Its Hesse's cosmology, which holds that human life should "be integrated into the order of humanity in harmony with nature and the rhythm of the universe." The European and Childhood were written during World War I, when Hesse was still living in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, and engaged in prisoner-of-war relief work. The European expresses the author's desire to explore the common ground among different ethnic groups in the world through metaphors: although humans exist in various races, languages, and cultures, their material and spiritual needs are the same; all spiritual efforts are inherently consistent, and the goals of all spiritual workers are the same. The theme of The European later evolved and developed into Hesse's important masterpiece Siddhartha several years later. Childhood returns to Calw life, telling the story of an eleven-year-old boy who steals and lies, causing him immense inner torment, and once again plays the melancholic melody of the conflict between desire and reason. The difference from previous works of this kind is the tender affection for his recently deceased father that is woven in. Returning to peacetime after wartime work in year, Hesse wrote a large number of works at an astonishing speed. Klein and Wagner and Klingsohl's Last Summer were both completed in the same summer, both having a virtual spiritual self-autobiographical nature, and both used the method of opposites or mutual to portray the division of the same personality and the conflict between the person and the environment. Klein and Wagner portrays a dual character: one is a practical individualistic self, and the other is a transcendent humanistic self. Klein's ordinary daily life is always accompanied by Wagner's spiritual level of life. Klein is fond of living a life of compromise, while Wagner is always inclined toward physical death. The dual Klein is the prototype of Haller in The Waste Land Wolf. Klingsohl's Last Summer describes this bipolar phenomenon through the image of a pair of friends. Some German critics believe that the painter Klingsohl is modeled after Van Gogh, while his friend the poet Hermann is the author's ironic self-portrait. The genius painter Klingsohl is willing to approach the brink of soul fragmentation and madness for art rather than live in a flat realm without peaks or depths, while the poet Hermann is content with the ordinary secular reality. These two works, along with Childhood, were later included in Hesse's self-selected collection titled The Path to the Inner Self, where the preface mentions how he drew on and applied ancient Chinese wisdom to transform it into Western thought. The appearance of Chinese thought in Klein and Wagner and the mention of Li Bai and Du Fu in Klingsohl's Last Summer are therefore not accidental. The last three works in this collection, Strange Cities in the South and Strange Tales of the Waste Land Wolf, were written during the Weimar Republic period, when people were discussing the German spirit before Hitler came to power. Strange Cities in the South and The City share the same theme, being sister pieces that describe the cracks in modern civilization. Hesse criticized the uniformity of the modern city model as early as the 1920s, and his keen insight is astonishing. Strange Tales of the Waste Land Wolf was written a year after the publication of The Waste Land Wolf, telling the difficult relationship between the half-man, half-wolf Haller and the real world. On one hand, it reveals the suppression of human individuality and creativity by objective reality; on the other hand, it offers resigned self-mockery. Here applies a passage by French writer Jean-Paul Sartre when he discussed The Path to the Inner Self: "Hesse possesses all the rarest artistic qualities I believe in: he so skillfully combines beauty and depth, artistic rules and creativity. He has the ability to laugh at himself, he does not use sharp sarcasm or bitter irony but maintains a playful, detached irony." Interrupted Class is the only work in this collection written after the 1930s, during Hesse's later reclusive life. It is a childhood memory of a seventy-one-year-old man. At the beginning of the story, the joy of leaving the dull classroom on a teacher's orders, and at the end, the doubt and self-blame toward the teacher's orders, all the feelings of childhood remain unchanged despite the long passage of time, and the author's natural talent is vividly portrayed. Hesse was one of the most influential novelists in 20th-century Europe and also a poet with profound intellectual depth and a unique creative style. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. He excels at using symbolic artistic techniques to reflect the deep wounds caused by the outside world to the human heart from a spiritual and psychological perspective, thereby condensing and elevating the intrinsic meaning of his works. His literary career spanned 70 years, and his works covered a wide range. He deeply admired Chinese culture, especially Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi, and therefore the fusion of his unique poetic temperament and "Oriental complex" gives his works a touch of detachment and ease beneath their passionate surface. The 23 short stories in this book are all masterpieces of the author, arranged chronologically to reflect the characteristics and styles of Hesse's early, middle, and late creative periods.