Dave's Book Blog: "Narcissus and Goldmund" by Hermann Hesse

Sculpture from wood (a pieta) in Durham cathedral

Hesse's exploration of how to reconcile the two sides of human nature: the Apollonian world of ideas and the Dionysian world of the senses.

In the mid-1300s, in middle Europe, Goldmund, an attractive golden-haired boy, is brought up in a monastery where he forms an unlikely friendship with Narcissus, an austerely intellectual scholar. Then he experiences the love of a woman. He leaves the monastery to become a vagabond, playing “the joyous, secret game of lips and limbs” (Ch 7) as he travels. He's a bit of a stud: “For love, and the game of loving, he was gifted.” (Ch 8) Then he feels the calling to become a wood-carver. Natch, he is naturally gifted at this too. But just carving wood isn't good enough for him. “For him all art and artistry were worthless unless they shone like the sun, had the might of storms in them - if they only brought pleasant, narrow happiness.” (Ch 11) He is torn between the discipline of his chosen vocation and the urge to wander and he hits the road again just as the Black Death strikes.

It's a brilliant portrait of an artist: it reminded me of My name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok though that book goes rather deeper into the technicalities; this is more about the need in some men for creative fulfilment: “Art was the fusion of two worlds, the world of the spirit and the blood, the world of the father and the mother. Rooted in the grossest senses, she could grow to the clearest abstract thoughts, or take her origin in the rarest, incorporeal world of the intellect, to end in the solidist flesh and blood ... All these legitimate, true born works of art, not jugglers' pieces but true craftsmen’s - presented this same perilous, two-faced smile.” (Ch 11)

Yes, it is a book of ideas, enthused and motivated by its attempt to explore the division between the Apollonian world of the intellect represented by Narcissus and the Dionysian world of sensuality represented by Goldmund. But the artistry of Goldmund demands, and gets, some wonderful passages of description, such as:

“Why had they never seen these anguished gills, these eyes glazed with the agony of death, these tail-fins, beating the air so wildly - or felt the bitter, desperate horror of this slithering fight against extinction, this last, unbearable transformation of lovely and mysterious fish, as a shiver ran along their dying bodies, and they lay, exhausted and limp, pitiful meals for the table of some gluttonous burgess.” (Ch 12)
“Goldmund examined all these faces. In the little maid’s, though already it was puffed and swollen, there was a look of helpless shrinking away from death. This mother's nape and hair, who had burrowed so deeply and wildly, had a kind of rage and terror, of passionate flight in them. This tousled hair would not be reconciled with death. The man's face was defiant, and set in pain: he seemed to have perished there by inches; his beard was thrust sharp into the air; a warrior, stretched upon the field. His rigid defiant sullenness was beautiful.” (Ch 13)
“Every stick and stone held some gentle memory of his boyhood, and his love impelled him to seek out each, listen again for every cloister-sound, the Sunday bells, and builds to offices, the rushing of the dark millstream between its narrow walls, green with moss, the clatter of sandals, the evening jingle of keys, as the brother-porter went his rounds for the night.” (Ch 18)

I was confused about the names of the main characters. Narcissus in the thinker and yet he has the name of the beautiful youth of Greek myth who caught site of his own reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it. Not exactly the man described as “a thinker and anatomiser” (Ch 2) “This subtle scholar, the learned, the penetrating.” (Ch 2) “dour and certain, clear and inexorable.” (Ch 3). Perhaps Hesse believes that intellectual pursuits are inherently narcissistic. Narcissus does show a significant understanding of psychology and a good degree of self-knowledge (“Mine is the nature of a scholar, and my branch of scholarship is science.”; Ch 4) which must have come from self-reflection. Goldmund, on the other hand, is given the name of an archbishop of the early Christian church: St John Chrysostom. The identity is explicit: “Once he dreamed himself his patron-saint, the Holy Christostom, the golden-tongued, whose mouth was gold, from which he uttered golden words, and the words were a swarm of little birds, rising and flying off in glittering bands.” (Ch 5) But for all his eloquence, Johnny C was a very puritanical archbishop who disapproved of theatre and sports, destroyed pagan shrines and sided with iconoclasts. So the name of each of the twin protagonists refer to characters who are their opposites! Perhaps Hesse is thinking of the yin and yang symbol in which the black has a white eye and the white is centred by a dot of black; this symbol stands for the unity that can come from opposites. “All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker - no breath could be both in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, so each was equally precious and essential." (Ch 16)

One of these key opposites is between life and death. Some might say that Goldmund represents the life force and Narcissus the death force, like Boris and Theodore in Donna Tartt's superb novel The Goldfinch. But I think that is unfair on Narziss. Certainly Goldmund the young stud represents life and Goldmund the artist represents creation but it is in the travels of Goldmund that we encounter the Black Death and it is Goldmund himself who comes to see death as a return to the mother who had abandoned him as a child: “In him death's wildest song had a different echo, a voice calling homewards into the earth, home to a mother; its sounds not harsh and white, but sweet and enticing.” (Ch 14)

And Goldmund is the one who kills. And when he faces death, there is a superb description of the pleasures of life: “He must take leave of his hands, his eyes; of thirst and hunger, food and drink, of love and lute-playing, sleep and waiting: of all. tomorrow a bird would skim through the air, and Goldmund have no eyes to watch it with, a girl stand singing at her window, and he have no ears for her song; the river would flow on and on, the dumb, shadowy fish swim with it, a wind spring up, and strip the yellow leaves to earth; there would be a moon, and glittering stars, young men would go out to dance at Christmas fairs, the first snows whiten the distant hills - and all these things would be for ever, each tree spreading out its shadow, men with joy or mirth in their living eyes, and all without him; none of it his!” (Ch 16)

It has clear resonances with other books by Hermann Hesse:

Knulp is his story of a vagrant.

The Glass Bead Game is an exploration of knowledge; one could see Narcissus being the lead character in this.

Siddhartha is a version of the story of the Buddha; Siddhartha's life has parallels with Goldmund's in that there is wandering, there is a period of sensuality, and in the end there is reconciliation.

In the end this is: “The history of a lecher and a wastrel, a homeless, faithless, vagabond of the roads; yet all that he had left of it, there in the wood, was fair and true, and full of vivid love. How strange and secret life could be, how dark and muddy flowed the stream, how clear and beautiful what remained with us!” (Ch 19)

Yes, it is a book of ideas but it also has two brilliantly complex characters, some incredible descriptions and a perfectly-paced plot that kept me turning the pages. It has made me want to go back and re-read Hesse novels that, like this one, I first read over fifty years ago. This book is worthy of the man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

Selected quotes:

“He, often enough, had felt with repulsion the longing eyes of elder men upon him, had encountered often enough with dumb rejection their proffered friendship and caresses.” (Ch 2)
“One of them saw, and one was blind, and so they went together, side by side. That the blind knew nothing of his blindness was a comfort only to himself.” (Ch 3)
“Have you not heard that one of the shortest ways to sanctity may be a life of carnal riot?” (Ch 3)
“It is not our task to come together; as little as it would be the task of sun and moon, of sea and land. We two, my friend, are sun and moon; sea and land. Our destiny is not to become one. It is to behold each other for what we are, each perceiving and honouring it in his opposite: each finding his fulfilment and completion.” (Ch 4)
“We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasances of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys -” (Ch 4)
“It was a glorious thought that there should be such love in the world, love that is all spirit and selfless joy. How different from that love in the sunny field, the drunken, reckless love of flesh and blood. And yet both were love.” (Ch 6)
“How many dreams this fair brown maid had given him, how many buds she had brought to flower, how much restless longing stirred, how much re-awakened!” (Ch 7)
“Oh, if a man could change his shape!” (Ch 7)
“He found that his freedom was very dear to him, and did not remember a single mistress so sweet he could not forget her with the next.” (Ch 8)
“Such may have been his deep Intent, that he should get to master women and love in all their thousand modes and differences, as some musicians become the masters of three or four instruments, or of many.” (Ch 8)
“You will wander through the world, and every woman you meet will love you, yet all the while you will be alone.” (Ch 8)
“As this groaning mother screamed her pain, the twisted lines of her face differed little from those he had seen in the moment of love's ecstasy, on the faces of the women he had clasped.” (Ch 9)
“Since his sight of this sweet and blessed Mother of God, Goldmund had a thing he had never known, a thing here often smiled at, or envied, in others: an aim. Yes, he had an aim, and would reach it, and so, perhaps, his whole confused existence might take on a new meaning and unity.” (Ch 9)
“I have watched many faces and shapes, and afterwards thought of them ... I have seen how always, in every shape, a certain form, a certain line, repeats itself; how a forehead seems to tally with a knee, a hip with a shoulder; and how the essence of all this is the very being and temper of the person.” (Ch 10) Later in the book, Narcissus refers to the Platonic theory of ideals.
“Goldmund was not one of those luckless artificers who, though they bear within them the highest gifts, can find no right craft by which to express them. There are many such who, seeing all the beauty of the earth, can find no way to give it forth again, and share with others what they have seen.” (Ch 11)
“He knew, not in thoughts or words, with the sure, deep knowledge of the blood, that all his ways would lead him to the mother; to lust and death. The other, the father-side of life, the intellect and will, were not his home. There dwelt Narziss.” (Ch 11)
“But art did not come as a free gift, certainly she was not to be had for the asking, she cost dear, demanding many offerings.” (Ch 11)
“Every real secret, he thought, all the true-born pictures of the mind, were like this one small secret of water. They had no form, no clear, accomplished shape, would never let themselves be perceived, save as a far-off lovely possibility: they were veiled and had many meanings.” (Ch 12)
“Dreams and the greatest works both had their mystery.” (Ch 12)
“How can I live happily here, if I know that soon it will all be past and over?” (Ch 13)
“The rich had brought the plague, the poor said, and the rich said it was the poor; while many said it was the Jews, and some the Italians, or the leeches.” (Ch 14)
“A man could live, letting his senses have free rein, sucking his fill at the breasts of Eve, his mother - and then, though he might revel and enjoy, there was no protection against her transience, and so, like a toadstool in the woods, he shimmered today in the fairest colours, tomorrow rotted, and fell to dust. Or he could set up his defences against life, lock himself into a workshop, and seek to build a monument beyond time. And then life herself must be renounced ... though he might serve eternity he withered, he lost his freedom, fullness, and joy of days. ... And yet our days only had a meaning if both these goods could be achieved, and life herself had not been cleft by the barren division of alternatives.” (Ch 16)
“When we sing we don't hinder ourselves with asking if our singing is really a wasted time. We sing, and that is all. That is how you must pray.” (Ch 18)
“Only now do I begin to perceive how many paths lead us to knowledge, that study is not our only way to it, and perhaps not the best to follow.” (Ch 19)
“You craftsmen take the most perishable of all things to your hearts, and, in their very transience and corruption, you herald the meaning of the world. You never look beyond or above it, you give yourself up to it, and yet, by your very devotion, you change it into the highest of all, till it seems the epitome of eternity.” (Ch 19)