Ben Winch's Reviews > The Journey to the East

This is an anomaly in Hesse’s oeuvre – a personal piece in which he risks alienating his wider audience, and yet in another sense his most universal work. It’s true, I say this having had few successes in recommending it, yet so far no-one I’ve given it to has disliked it, even if it has left them frustrated or puzzled or underwhelmed. The crux of it is, it’s the story of a failure. An inevitable failure, I would say, but as Hesse himself says early in the piece, “the seemingly impossible must continually be attempted”. What, then, is the seemingly impossible attempt made here? It’s twofold: the telling of an untellable story, the making of an impossible journey. That the narrator fails in the telling should not surprise us; he warns us of this inevitability from the story’s start. That he has failed in his journey – though he himself, at first, is unaware of it – is also unsurprising, given that the journey’s goal is spiritual enlightenment, the absolute, a realm denied to humans except in glimpses.

So. I feel keenly the irony of my reviewing this book as I sit in this far-from-perfect setting and write this. Like H.H., the narrator of The Journey..., I am depressed, self-pitying, unable to grasp with the greatest effort what once came so naturally, and sitting in the courtyard of a small-town cafe while children scream, dogs bark and a table of people unfurl punchline after punchline at the next table, laughing uproariously. Like H.H., I am also without music, having left my i-Pod at home through some oversight, and back home are three children not my own, two of whom, I’ll wager, are screaming, shouting and brawling as I write this… And then there’s this book – this brief book in which I’ve sought my own balm for twenty years or more, having read it five, maybe six times since I first found it in a secondhand store in Adelaide in my late teens.

The book! It’s personal. Hesse had tried something like this before, with Steppenwolf, when he submitted to his publishers a collection of ultra-personal poems which he intended to accompany the novel, but these were deemed too indulgent, too angry, too obscure for a wider readership, and were held back to be published separately in a limited edition. So with The Journey..., I guess Hesse put his foot down, determined to speak from his heart with as little translation as possible. And the result, to the casual reader, can admittedly be baffling. But even to the teenage me, it wasn’t alienating. Just read over the references that make no sense. The important part – the universal part – is the story of faith gained, lost and gained again. And the failure is just a part of the cycle. The two characters – H.H. and Leo – are mirror images, two parts of a whole, at least symbolically, and Leo’s apparent desertion (later revealed to be anything but) is the point at which faith becomes despair. H.H., despairing, self-absorbed; Leo, faithful, selfless. H.H., author, mortal; Leo, character, immortal. Read this way, the ending is uplifting, not a fade-to-grey. And the story is a dream-picture of sleep and awakening.

Ugh, I’m aware that as a review this makes about as much sense as The Journey... makes as a novel. Novel? I don’t even know if it is a novel. Novella, maybe. And a novella in which you won’t find a three-dimensional character or more than one or two niceties of plot: writer and ex-journeyer attempts and fails to write the story of a failed journey, but in the process reveals the truth about that failure. Like all of Hesse’s stories, it’s a story of self-discovery. Like Steppenwolf (whose narrator, Harry Haller, is another H.H.), it’s also a fairly naked and often despairing self-portrait. Yet it takes us one step beyond that despair and self-absorption – takes us to the brink of its demise, once and for all, in Hesse’s fiction. And in showing an awakening from the inside out it achieves something difficult and valuable and profound.

And besides, it’s beautiful. Unique. Magical. All things my teenage self understood perfectly, even as he struggled with the rest of it. If what you value in fiction – and in Hesse – is instinctive striving after enlightenment, it’s for you. That hallucination at the end of Siddhartha – that’s what I love in Hesse, and it’s in its most potent form here. A classic.