Out of Many,
One:
The fragmented
self in Orlando and Steppenwolf
by Christine Hoff Kraemer
Though
popularized this century in the context of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis
and later by postmodern theorists, the concept of the disunity of the self is
hardly new. As early as the eighteenth century, Hume attacked Descartes and
others in his Treatise of Human Nature
with this scathing commentary:
There are some philosophers,
who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its
continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a
demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. . . .
Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience which is pleaded for
them; nor have we any idea of self,
after the manner it is here explained. For, from what impression could this
idea be derived? . . . It must be some one impression that gives rise to every
real idea. But self or person is not any one impression . . .
The self,
argues Hume, is at best a loose collection of impressions and experiences,
bound together by the uncertain ties of memory. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the
ideological breakdown and general cultural tumult of the period between the
First and Second World Wars provided the perfect environment for this notion to
take root in the intellectual community. Virginia Woolf’s
1928 novel Orlando and Hermann Hesse’s 1929 Steppenwolf
both present conceptions of the self that are multiple and constructed,
suggesting the malleability of identity and the powerful influence of society
upon the individual. Though the protagonists of both novels struggle with the
necessary incompleteness of the clearly defined and therefore limited self, Steppenwolf and Orlando end as hymns to intellectual and psychological liberation,
and illustrate how the individual may rid him- or herself of the bonds of a static
self-image.
The crisis in which Harry Haller
finds himself at the opening of Steppenwolf
is of a classic Freudian type – the eternal conflict between instinctual,
emotional id and conscious, rational ego. In acknowledgment of his dual nature,
Harry refers to himself as a Steppenwolf, one who “went on two legs, wore
clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless . . . was in reality a wolf of
the Steppes” (47). Harry is intensely conscious of the conflict he feels
between his two selves, to the extent that he sees them as continuously at war:
one an untameable, savage, but unhypocritical
wolf, and the other a refined, intelligent, but dissembling man. As in the
Freudian paradigm, each half perpetually struggles with the other for
dominance. The wolf drives Harry to reject the pretenses of civilization and to
follow his basest, most instinctual urges; the man, on the other hand, acts as
an apologist for the bourgeois society that Harry is both repelled by and
attracted to, and criticizes the wolf for its bestiality and single-minded
sensuality. This dichotomy (Civilization and Intellect vs. Nature and Instinct)
puts Harry in a state of unending misery. His daily life is an agony of trying
to choose between the honesty of the wolf and the sophistication of the man, to
the extent that he finds himself unable to perform even the simplest social
interactions without distress.
The learned man held me with
his friendly eye and, though I found it all ridiculous, I could not help
enjoying those crumbs of warmth and kindliness, and was lapping them up like a
starved dog. . . . And while I, Harry Haller, stood there in the street,
flattered and surprised and studiously polite and smiling into the good
fellow’s kindly, short-sighted face, there stood the other Harry, too, at my
elbow and grinned likewise. He stood there and grinned as he thought what a
funny, crazy, dishonest fellow I was to show my teeth in rage and curse the
whole world one moment, and the next, to be falling all over myself in the
eagerness of my response to the first amiable greeting of the first good honest
fellow who came my way . . . Thus stood the two Harrys,
neither playing a very pretty part, over against the worthy professor, mocking
one another, watching one another, and spitting at one another, while as always
in such predicaments, the eternal question presented itself whether all this
was simple stupidity and human frailty, a common depravity, or whether . . .
this slovenliness and two-facedness of feeling was merely a personal idiosyncrasy
of Steppenwolves. (86-7)
Harry can
give in to neither self without being abused and criticized by the other. To be
honest with his friend about his unhappiness is to ignore propriety and
etiquette, which would probably result in the loss of the good-natured
companionship that he craves; yet in concealing his despair, Harry piles on lie
after lie until the exterior he shows to the professor hardly resembles his
interior state at all. Harry heads for home in an ecstasy of self-loathing,
unable to resolve his internal conflict.
The “Treatise on the Steppenwolf”
gives us our first clues as to the true cause of Harry’s misery. Harry’s
Man-Wolf dichotomy is artificial, it states; his sense of having two selves
that are necessarily at war is a gross oversimplification of the true nature of
Harry’s inner reality.
. . . [T]o explain so
complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a
hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves,
not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two
poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between
thousands and thousands. (66)
Harry has
attempted to divide his urges, thoughts, and feelings into two types, those
that spring from raw forces of nature and those that are refined products of
civilization. Yet not every desire fits neatly into one of these two
categories, nor need every desire necessarily belong to one to the exclusion of
the other.
In the “Treatise,”
With the “man” he packs in
everything spiritual and sublimated or even cultivated to be found in himself, and with the wolf all that is instinctive, savage,
and chaotic. But things are not so simple in life as
in our thoughts, nor so rough and ready as in our poor idiotic language . . .
He assigns, we fear, whole provinces of his soul to the “man” which are a long
way from being human, and parts of his being to the wolf that long ago have
left the wolf behind. (70)
Harry Haller is very much a prisoner
of his assumptions, his misery sustained by the artificial division of his
personality and his insistence that his two halves cannot live in harmony. Woolf’s gender-shifting
Superficially,
It is unsurprising, then, that while
neither
The taste for books was an
early one. As a child he was sometimes found at
But Rustrum
el Sadi . . . had the deepest suspicion that her God
was Nature. One day, he found her in tears. Interpreting this to mean that her
God had punished her, he told her he was not surprised. He showed her the
fingers of his left hand, withered by the frost; he showed her his right foot,
crushed where a rock had fallen. This, he said, was what her God did to men.
When she said, “But so beautiful,” using the English word, he shook his head;
and when she repeated it he was angry. . . . She began to think, was Nature
beautiful or cruel . . . which meditations, since she could impart no word of
them, made her long, as she had never longed before, for pen and ink. (144-5)
This independence is rooted in
Then, some strange ecstasy
came over her. Some wild notion she had of following the birds to the rim of
the world and flinging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking
forgetfulness, while the rooks’ hoarse laughter sounded over her. She quickened
her pace; she ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the
ground. Her ankle was broken. She could not rise. But there she lay content. .
. . “I have found my mate,” she murmured. “It is the moor. I am nature’s bride
. . . I shall dream wild dreams. My hands shall wear no wedding ring . . .”
(248)
For
Though it is tempting to argue that
For she had a great variety
of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since
a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven
selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. Choosing, then, only
those selves we have found room for, Orlando may now have called on the boy who
cut the nigger’s head down; the boy who hung it up again; the boy who sat on
the hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed the Queen a bowl of rose
water; . . . or she may have wanted the woman to come to her; the Gipsy; the
Fine Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life . . . all these selves were
different and she may have called upon any one of them. (309)
The true
self, writes Woolf, is the compact of all these many
selves, all of the possible
This lesson, that
one’s personality is made up of multiple, changing, and discontinuous selves,
takes Harry the entire novel and more to learn. Writing a few decades later,
Ralph Ellison wrestles with much the same issue in Invisible Man, another novel of identity. Near the conclusion of
the novel, the narrator’s conception of self is shattered by the discovery that
one’s identity need not be compromised by its seemingly contradictory,
disharmonious parts. “Could he himself be both rind and heart?” asks the
invisible man, considering the many identities (gambler, preacher, lover, runner) of the mysterious Rinehart (498).
Harry’s experiences in the Magic
Theater serve as a direct challenge to Freud’s strict delineation of id and ego
in favor of Jung’s more flexible system of archetypes. In the Magic Theater,
Harry is taught a kind of chess game, using fragments of his personality as
pieces. Within a few moves, it becomes clear that Harry’s identity emerges from
the interaction of these archetypal fragments, all of which are present as
potentialities in Harry’s psyche:
With the sure and silent
touch of his clever fingers he took hold of my pieces, all the old men and
young men and children and women, cheerful and sad, strong and weak, nimble and
clumsy, and swiftly arranged them on his board for a game. At once they formed
themselves into groups and families, games and battles, friendships and
enmities, making a small world. . . . The second game had an affinity with the
first, it was the same world built on the same material, but the key was
different, the time changed, the motif was differently given out and the
situations differently presented.
And in this fashion the clever architect built up one
game after another out of the figures, each of which was a bit of myself, and every game had a distinct resemblance to every
other. Each belonged recognizably to the same world and acknowledged a common
origin. Yet each was entirely new. (219-20)
Just as a
game of chess consists of a complex pattern formed from the interaction fixed
pieces with simple rules, Harry’s personality is emergent from the interaction
of archetypes. Harry cannot be reduced to any single archetype, or even to
several; the emergent theme that makes each game recognizably Harry’s is a
product of the interaction of all the pieces. Though Harry has no central,
dominant self, like
The chess game suggests a vast array
of possible roles, attitudes, and behaviors that one might take on over the
course of a lifetime, but offers no direct explanation as to why some roles
come to dominate over others, or why we change our roles over time. Perhaps the
answer lies in the origin of the roles themselves. The dynamics of the game
suggest that while the personality is constructed out of the complete set of
basic building blocks that are common to all human beings, structures less
complex than a full personality may also be created. These middle structures,
which one might call personas or roles, carry with them expectations about
behavior, appearance, and attitude, but lack the complexity and contradictions
inherent in a complete personality. Harry’s early conceptions of the Wolf and
the Man serve as good examples of this phenomenon – both manifest complicated
behaviors, but are still significantly too simple to encompass the entirety of
Harry’s personality.
Virginia Woolf
uses the word ‘self’ to describe these limited constructions, but also speaks
of a ‘true self’ that encompasses all other possible selves. These ‘selves’
might be more properly considered to be archetypal roles, personas that
Thus, for
“For nothing,” she thought,
regaining her couch on deck, and continuing the argument, “is more heavenly
than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the
spirit into such a rapture that nothing else can. So
that I’m not sure,” she continued, “that I won’t throw myself overboard, for
the mere pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket after all.” (155)
She remembered how, as a
young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and
exquisitely apparelled. “Now I shall have to pay in
my own person for those desires,” she reflected; “for women are not (judging by
my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature.” . . . And she fell to thinking what
an odd pass we have come to when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered,
lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head. (157)
“To fall from a mast-head,”
she thought, “because you see a woman’s ankles; . . . to deny a woman teaching,
lest she may laugh at you; to be the slave of the frailest chit in petticoats,
and yet to go about as if you were the Lords of creation. – Heavens!” she thought, “what fools they make of us – what fools we are!” And here it
would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes
equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she
seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared
the weaknesses of each. (158)
For a moment,
Hermine,
the mysterious and intelligent young woman who acts as Harry’s spiritual guide,
is also possessed of a certain gender ambiguity. At their second meeting, Harry
is struck by the boyishness of Hermine’s face, and
from her resemblance to his childhood friend Herman manages to guess her name.
“If you were a boy,” said I in amazement, “I should say
your name was Herman.”
“Who knows, perhaps I am one and am simply in women’s
clothing,” she said, joking. (122)
As the
dreamlike narrative develops and strange coincidences mount, it seems less and
less likely that Hermine’s flippant statement is
actually only a jest. Like
Despite her androgynous tendencies, Hermine inhabits a female body, a characteristic that
“There’s nothing you don’t know, Hermine. . . . It’s exactly
as you say. And yet you’re so entirely different from me. You have all that I
lack.”
“So you think,” she said
shortly, “and it’s well you should.” (123-4)
Nevertheless,
Hermine encourages Harry’s perception of her as his
opposite, referring to their relationship as that of brother and sister and
claiming that “there is something in me that answers and understands you”
(123). Though Harry does not see it yet, his conception of Hermine
as his “other self” will be necessary to the process of his learning to live.
Once he realizes that both the self he is aware of and the complementary self
he sees in Hermine are both part of him, Harry begins
to understand that the two are not mutually exclusive. With Hermine’s
help, Harry discovers that his love of fine art and his intellect do not
prevent him from appreciating jazz or enjoying the sensual pleasures of
dancing, food and lovemaking.
Hermine
represents a part of Harry’s psyche that he possesses but is not yet aware of,
suggesting that Harry’s gender identity is incidental to his physical body.
Though he perceives Hermine’s personality traits as
feminine, this is just further evidence that he has artificially categorized
them as things he is not – not spontaneous, not hedonistic, not modern, and
above all, not feminine. In fact, Harry can
be all of these things if he chooses to be, just as Hermine
can play a masculine role at will. So well does she take on a masculine
demeanor at the costume ball which serves as a lead-in to the climax of the
novel, in fact, that Harry initially again mistakes her for his childhood
friend, Herman.
And without Hermine appearing to give herself the least trouble I was
very soon in love with her. . . . It was the spell of a hermaphrodite.
. . . We took to the floor as rivals and paid court for a
while to the same girl, danced with her by turns and both tried to win her
heart. And yet it was all only a carnival, only a game between the two of us
that caught us more closely together in our own passion. (190-1)
By degrees,
Hermine has brought Harry’s unconscious selves to the
surface, to the point that when she at last puts on a masculine face, revealing
that it was himself that Harry saw in her all the time, he is doubly entranced.
Through a kind of mystical communion with another who chooses to personify the
hidden parts of his own soul, Harry has come closer to realizing the full
potential of his personality – come closer, in a sense, to being a whole
person. Hermine, though she consciously directs the
process, suggests she has benefited similarly, as when she tells Harry,
“. . . You are surprised
that I should be so unhappy when I can dance and am so sure of myself in the
superficial things of life. And I, my friend, am surprised that you are
disillusioned with life when you are at home with the very things in it that
are the deepest and most beautiful, spirit, art, and thought! . . . I am going
to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are
going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. . . .” (144)
Hermine too is reaching toward wholeness
through her contact with Harry, seeking to further develop the immature parts
of her own soul. Their mutual need pulls them strongly together with an
intuitive force that
This communion, which in Steppenwolf results from the mutual
projection of anima and animus (the woman’s repressed masculine self), also
takes place in
No sooner had the words left
her mouth than an awful suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously.
“You’re a woman, Shel!” she
cried.
“You’re a man, Orlando!” he cried. (251-2)
Orlando, it
seems, has already explored her personality to such a degree that her ‘perfect
match’ and mirror, as it were, must be one who has taken the opposite steps in
that exploration, entering the world as a woman then filling in that incomplete
world view as a man. Shelmerdine’s experience is a
complement to
The necessity of such a match
suggests that becoming a ‘whole person’ through having explored the full range
of the personality is in the strictest sense impossible. Though
That
All these things inclined
her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether Queen Victoria’s or
another’s, that each man and woman has another allotted to it for life, whom it
supports, by whom it is supported, till death do them part. It would be a
comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never
to get up again. (245)
Though this
pessimistic view of marriage is swept away in the joy of finding Shelmerdine, the effects of the Victorian era on the
usually resilient
Here Woolf seems to be commenting upon the particularly
oppressive and claustrophobic nature of the Victorian age which deprived her of
freedom in her own adolescence, much as its beats down
Harry also struggles with the spirit
of his age. Unlike Orlando, however, who with the exception of the Victorian era
changes gracefully with the times, the Steppenwolf clings desperately to the
structures of the past, fearing the loss of his constructed self. Blindly,
Harry seeks not to retain and increase his possibilities, but to limit them.
Thus, his knee-jerk reaction to anything he construes as modern is
automatically negative. Its art, he decrees, is shallow; its obsession with
gadgetry is grotesque; its pleasures are vapid and ephemeral. To put the things
it values on a similar level with the art he loves would be to denigrate and
insult that art’s great beauty. He reacts to inward horror at Hermine’s suggestion that he buy a gramophone, thinking to
himself:
I could not picture the
detested instrument in my study among my books, and I was by no means
reconciled to the dancing either. It had been in my mind that I might try how
it went for a while, though I was convinced that I was too old and stiff and
would never learn now. . . As an old and fastidious connoisseur of music, I
could feel my gorge rising against the gramophone and jazz and modern dance
music. (131-2)
Again,
Harry’s mind is full of ‘cannot’s and ‘never’s. He sees himself as too old to dance, and a man
whose tastes are far too refined for jazz. Harry, however, is merely limiting
his possibilities, as yet unable to understand that one does not attempt to
enjoy jazz in the same way that one enjoys Mozart. The modern, sensual
aesthetic, teaches Hermine, is no more or no less
valuable than the high art that Harry so enjoys, but merely different. Pablo, the
beautiful Latin saxophonist, tries to demonstrate the same:
“. . . Mozart, perhaps, will
still be played in a hundred years and
There is a
place in creation, implies Pablo, for every type of music under the sun; though
some pieces will endure and others will not, all are good and valuable in their
way to the people who love them. The parallel to Harry’s own life is clear:
there is a place in his being for every type of experience and every type of
self, each to be enjoyed for its singular beauties and gifts. By hanging on so
desperately to the past, Harry is depriving himself of the pleasures of the
present, and adding to his misery by unnecessarily viewing the modern era as a
fall from a state of enlightenment.
Freed from the Victorian age,
Steppenwolf
and Orlando paint two very
different pictures of how individuals deal with rapid cultural change and its
effect on self and identity. For the most part Orlando, whose self-image only
loosely revolves around nature and literature, changes easily with her times
and circumstances, taking on and discarding roles as Harry might change
clothes. Harry, however, must be painfully taught that his self is not the
clearly defined, fixed dichotomy that he imagined. His dependence on an overly
simplistic and inaccurate mental system leaves him miserable, inflexible, and
bitter towards a modern world which he neither participates in nor understands.
Only when Harry begins to accept the strategy that
Taken together, these two novels
offer excellent advice for the individual attempting to cope with the rapid
changes of a world at the start of the twenty-first century. Communications
technology has exploded, allowing computer users across the world from each
other to transmit information in the blink of an eye. The Internet, which once
belonged solely to universities, governmental organizations and a few intrepid
hackers, is now increasingly the home of businesses, social and political
groups, and every adolescent who can click a mouse button.
As
psychologist Sherry Turkle argues in Life on the Screen, social life on the
Internet is providing real-life applications of postmodern theories that
previously seemed entirely abstract. Users are able to maintain multiple
personas online and take on social roles other than their own (with gender
switching being among the most common experiments). Though exploration of
undeveloped parts of the personality is accomplished through the supernatural
in Orlando and Steppenwolf, the youth of today are exploring these same realms
with readily available communications technology. In this frightening and
exciting time of social and technological transition, many fear that the
ability to adopt alternative personas on the Internet encourages escapist
tendencies and retards real-world social skills. As both Harry and Orlando
demonstrate, however, this game of personas and roles can also be a tool for
liberation and personal growth. As hysteria concerning the supposed dangers of
the Internet continues to circulate through the mainstream media, it is
essential that we recognize and study the social and psychological
ramifications of a wired society. The flexible, fragmented, liberated
identities that Woolf and Hesse
could only imagine are already, for those who seek them, a reality.
Works Cited
Ellison,
Ralph. Invisible
Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature.
Jung, C.G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
Copyright
(c) 2002 by Christine Hoff Kraemer