Marriage Pact: Selected Short Stories of Hesse

Author: (German) Hesse, translated by Zhang Peifen, Wang Kecheng, et al.
Publisher:
Publication 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 "Gelbers" 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-Nasse once precisely summarized such novels: "The atmosphere of Germany's small towns before the Second World War, its chaos and disorder, its lack of uniformity, and its not entirely harmless nature are depicted with both delicate and rigorous realism. It truly was the lush 'zoo of God' of that era. People, each in their own way, live out their unchangeable, unique destinies in this unexciting daily life, which can coexist with the ordinary happiness of an engagement, as well as with the eventual imprisonment, or even with the loss of inner balance, doubt about the meaning of life, and despair. 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 of their region. Tragedy and comedy in life flow ceaselessly, 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 also including Nihilism, whose main plot takes place in Munich—all are Hesse's recollections of his childhood, student days, and apprenticeship or boyhood life. They appear simple yet deeply moving, as his contemporary writer Tucoiski once said: "Few can write as Hesse does. He can not only depict a summer evening and a refreshing sea bath, but also the fatigue and relaxation 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 often 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, lasting until the age of thirteen or fourteen, yet they can be remembered for a lifetime." The psychological depiction of adolescents wavering between freedom and restraint in these works reveals the trajectory of the author's later important works, especially the development of the "bipolarity" theme in The Glass Bead Game. The remaining 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 many cracks in modern civilization. It elaborates on 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 the Second World War, when Hesse was still living in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, and engaged in war prisoner 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 differ in race, language, and culture, their material and spiritual needs are the same; all spiritual efforts are inherently consistent, and the goals of all spiritual workers are identical. 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, suffering immense inner torment, and once again plays the melancholic melody of the conflict between desire and reason. The difference from previous works is the tender affection for his recently deceased father woven in. Returning to peacetime after wartime work, Hesse wrote a large number of works at an astonishing speed. Klein and Wagner and Klingsohr's Last Summer were both completed in the same summer, both having a virtual spiritual autobiographical nature, and both portray the division of the same personality and the conflict between the individual and the environment through the method of complementarity between opposites or among friends. Klein and Wagner creates a dual portrait of a 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 prefers to live a life of compromise, while Wagner tends toward physical extinction. The dual Klein is the prototype of Halle's later The Waste Land Wolf. Klingsohr's Last Summer describes this bipolar phenomenon through the image of a pair of friends. Some German critics believe that the painter Klingsohr is modeled after Van Gogh, while his friend the poet Hermann is the author's ironic self-portrait. The genius painter Klingsohr would rather approach the brink of soul-destroying madness for art than live in a flat realm without peaks or depths, while the poet Hermann is content with the ordinary reality of the secular world. 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 philosophical 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 Klingsohr's Last Summer are thus 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 enthusiastic about discussing 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 had long criticized the uniformity of the modern city model in 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 Halle and the real world. On one hand, it reveals the suppression of human individuality and creativity by objective reality; on the other hand, it presents resigned self-mockery. Here applies a passage by French writer Jean-Paul Sartre when evaluating The Path to the Inner Self: "Hesse possesses all the rarest artistic qualities I value: a rare combination of beauty and depth, artistic rules and creativity. He has the ability to laugh at himself, not with sharp satire or irony, but with a joyful, detached wit." 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 the teacher's orders, and at the end, the teacher's orders are questioned and self-blame, 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 philosophical depth and a unique creative style. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. He excels in using symbolic artistic techniques to reflect the deep wounds caused by the outside world to the human heart, thereby condensing and elevating the intrinsic meaning of his works. His literary career spanned 70 years, with works covering a wide range. He deeply admired Chinese culture, especially Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi, and thus the fusion of his poetical temperament and "Eastern obsession" gives his works a touch of transcendence and detachment behind their passionate expressions. The 23 short stories selected 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.