Werewolf Craze Starter: The Male Ego as the Wolf that Demands Attention

“Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s iconic countercultural novel”, Steppenwolf (1927), “about the search for authenticity in an inauthentic world, in a new translation.” Hesse was a German-Swiss author, who spent three years as a bookshop apprentice before quitting, then started a clock mechanic apprenticeship. This didn’t work out, and he returned to working in a bookshop and then became an author within a year, back in 1896, decades before this mature novel was published. This Penguin edition includes a translator’s note, and afterward. This is relatively brief for a Penguin scholarly edition. There is what initially seems like a strange section called “Harry Haller’s Notebooks”. A bit into this novel, in the first-person “Editor’s Preface” the narrator refers to receiving “a haulier” from a “stranger” called Haller, and then reading seemingly info that is reported in what follows. This explains that this novel is mostly the contents of these “Notebooks” that are attributed to somebody other than the author in the byline, or Hesse. This is a standard approach for early 20th century and 19th century books, as editors frequently introduced novels as true stories about mysterious narrators who are distanced from the personality of the author.
“At first glance, Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality, he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society, and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters—accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe, and the bewitching Hermione—the misanthropic Haller undergoes a spiritual, even psychedelic, journey, and ultimately discovers a higher truth and the possibility of happiness. This blistering portrait of a man who feels himself to be half human and half wolf was the bible of the 1960s counterculture, capturing the mood of a disaffected generation. It continues to resonate as a haunting story of estrangement, redemption, and the search for one’s place in the world.”
Werewolf stories are indeed very popular today, though they have lost some of these deeper implications. The novel does not start promisingly. The narrator confesses he is “gently killing time in the only way I know how to, unworldly and withdrawn as my life is…” He describes reading, before diving into feeling “exceptional pain… exceptional worries” and “despair”. This is all very melodramatic. A few paragraphs in, there is a mention of the point of this story: “the bored, dozing half-and-half god and the slightly greying half-and-half human being singing the muted psalm—will look just as alike as twins…” This explains that the werewolf is a symbol for the god within people, as opposed to the animalistic, simple wolf. Amidst the long paragraphs there are curious phrases: “I long to do daringly stupid things: tear the wigs from the heads of a few revered idols, stand the fares of some rebellious schoolboys… seduce a little girl, or twist the neck of the odd representative of the bourgeois powers that be…” This explains why this book was counter-cultural. Then, he trots down roads. But instead of diving into just what this guy does as a wolf, he reflects on abstract ideas: “Nothing that was over and done with was a matter for regret.” This hardly pulls readers in, or allows them to focus on this narrative. The character describes himself as “mad”, and thus only deluding himself with being the “Steppenwolf… a beast that has strayed into an alien and incomprehensible world and is no longer able to find its home, the air it is used to breathing or the food it likes to eat…” There is a brief realistic line between many melodramatic abstractions: “I wolfed down a fair portion of the liver cut from the body of a slaughtered calf.” But this is not really wolfish. The narrator gets so tired of himself by the end that he “spat at the Harry in the mirror, I kicked out at him, shattering him to pieces.” I hope I am never assigned this book in any literature class, or assign it to others. It’s just an impossible read. It’s stream-of-consciousness of a guy who is entirely self-obsessed, and his wolfishness is used to convince the reader to be interested in this self as well… But it didn’t really succeed in pulling me in.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024