Pagú, grafite, av Getúlio Vargas, centro, São João da Boa Vista, SP, foto
de Fabíola Borelli Romagnole, 03/ago/2017
“The Glass Bead Game (German: Das Glasperlenspiel) is the last
full-length novel of the German author Hermann Hesse. It was begun in 1931 and
published in Switzerland in 1943 after being rejected for publication in
Germany due to Hesse's anti-Fascist views.[1] A few years later, in 1946, Hesse
went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In honoring him in its Award
Ceremony Speech, the Swedish Academy said that the novel "occupies a
special position" in Hesse's work.[2]
"Glass Bead Game" is a literal translation of the German
title, but the book has also been published under the title Magister Ludi,
Latin for "Master of the Game", which is an honorific title awarded
to the book's central character. "Magister Ludi" can also be seen as a
pun: lud- is a Latin stem meaning both "game" and "school".
However, the title Magister Ludi is misleading, as it implies the book is a
straightforward bildungsroman. In reality, the book touches on many different
genres, and the bulk of the story is on one level a parody of the biography
genre.[3]
Description[edit]
The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date centuries into
the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around
the start of the 25th century.[4] The setting is a fictional province of
central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for
the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict
minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold
mission: to run boarding schools for boys, and to cultivate and play the Glass
Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a
special school within Castalia known as Waldzell. The rules of the game are
only alluded to—they are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine.
Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and
cultural history. The game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and
sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly
unrelated topics.
The novel is an example of a bildungsroman, following the life of a
distinguished member of the Castalian Order, Joseph Knecht, whose surname means
"servant" (and is cognate with the English word knight). The plot
chronicles Knecht's education as a youth, his decision to join the order, his
mastery of the Game, and his advancement in the order's hierarchy to eventually
become Magister Ludi, the executive officer of the Castalian Order's game
administrators.[5]
Plot[edit]
The beginning of the novel introduces the Music Master, the resident of
Castalia who recruits Knecht as a young student and who is to have the most
long-lasting and profound effect on Knecht throughout his life. At one point,
as the Music Master nears death in his home at Monteport, Knecht obliquely
refers to the Master's "sainthood". As a student, another meaningful
friendship develops with Plinio Designori, a student from a politically
influential family, who is studying in Castalia as a guest. Knecht develops many
of his personal views about what larger good Castalia can achieve through
vigorous debates with Designori, who views Castalia as an "ivory
tower" with little to no impact on the outside world.
Although educated within Castalia, Knecht's path to "Magister
Ludi" is atypical for the order, as he spends a significant portion of his
time after graduation outside the boundaries of the province. His first such
venture, to the Bamboo Grove, results in his learning Chinese and becoming
something of a disciple to Elder Brother, a recluse who had given up living
within Castalia. Next, as part of an assignment to foster goodwill between the
order and the Catholic Church, Knecht is sent on several "missions"
to the Benedictine monastery of Mariafels, where he befriends the historian
Father Jacobus – a relationship which also has profound personal impact for
Knecht.
As the novel progresses, Knecht begins to question his loyalty to the
order; he gradually comes to doubt that the intellectually gifted have a right
to withdraw from life's big problems. Knecht, too, comes to see Castalia as a
kind of ivory tower, an ethereal and protected community, devoted to pure
intellectual pursuits but oblivious to the problems posed by life outside its
borders. This conclusion precipitates a personal crisis, and, according to his
personal views regarding spiritual awakening, Knecht does the unthinkable: he
resigns as Magister Ludi and asks to leave the order, ostensibly to become of
value and service to the larger culture. The heads of the order deny his
request to leave, but Knecht departs Castalia anyway, initially taking a job as
a tutor to his childhood friend Designori's energetic and strong-willed son,
Tito. Only a few days later, the story ends abruptly with Knecht drowning in a
mountain lake while attempting to follow Tito on a swim for which Knecht was
unfit.
The fictional narrator leaves off before the final sections of the book,
remarking that the end of the story is beyond the scope of his biography. The
concluding chapter, entitled "The Legend", is reportedly from a
different biography. After this final chapter, several of Knecht's
"posthumous" works are then presented. The first section contains
Knecht's poetry from various periods of his life, followed by three short stories
labeled "Three Lives". The stories are presented as exercises by
Knecht imagining his life had he been born in another time and place. The first
story tells of a pagan rainmaker named Knecht who lived "many thousands of
years ago, when women ruled".[6] Eventually the shaman's powers to summon
rain fail, and he offers himself as a sacrifice for the good of the tribe. The
second story is based on the life of St Hilarion and tells of Josephus, an
early Christian hermit who acquires a reputation for piety but is inwardly
troubled by self-loathing and seeks a confessor, only to find that same
penitent had been seeking him.
The final story concerns the life of Dasa, a prince wrongfully usurped
by his half brother as heir to a kingdom and disguised as a cowherd to save his
life. While working with the herdsmen as a young boy, Dasa encounters a yogi in
meditation in the forest. He wishes to experience the same tranquility as the
yogi, but is unable to stay. He later leaves the herdsmen and marries a
beautiful young woman, only to be cuckolded by his half brother (now the
Rajah). In a cold fury, he kills his half brother and finds himself once again
in the forest with the old yogi, who, through an experience of an alternate
life, guides him on the spiritual path and out of the world of illusion (Maya).
The three lives, together with that as Magister Ludi, oscillate between
extroversion (rainmaker, Indian life – both get married) and introversion
(father confessor, Magister Ludi) while developing the four basic psychic
functions of analytical psychology: sensation (rainmaker), intuition (Indian
life), feeling (father confessor), and thinking (Magister Ludi).
Earlier plans[edit]
Originally, Hesse intended several different lives of the same person as
he is reincarnated.[7] Instead, he focused on a story set in the future and
placed the three shorter stories, "authored" by Knecht in The Glass
Bead Game, at the end of the novel.
Two drafts of a fourth life were published in 1965. the second version
being recast in the first person and breaking off earlier.[8] Dated 1934, they
describe Knecht's childhood and education as a Swabian theologian. This Knecht
has been born some dozen years after the Treaty of Rijswijk in the time of
Eberhard Ludwig, and in depicting the other characters Hesse draws heavily on
actual biographies: Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. Johann Friedrich Rock, Johann
Albrecht Bengel and Nicolaus Zinzendorf make up the cast of Pietist mentors.
Knecht is heavily drawn to music however, both that of the acknowledged master
Pachelbel and the more exotic Buxtehude. The fragment breaks off as the young
contemporary of Bach happens upon an organ recital in Stuttgart.
Central characters[edit]
Joseph Knecht: The story's main character. He is the Magister Ludi for a
majority of the book.
The Music Master: Knecht's spiritual mentor who, when Knecht is a child,
examines him for entrance into the elite schools of Castalia.
Plinio Designori: Knecht's foil in the world outside.
Father Jacobus: Benedictine monk and Joseph Knecht's antithesis in
faith.
Elder Brother: A former Castalian and student of various Chinese scripts
& ideologies.
Thomas van der Trave: Joseph Knecht's predecessor as Magister Ludi.
Fritz Tegularius: A friend of Knecht's but a portent of what Castalians
might become if they remain insular.
The game[edit]
The Glass Bead Game is "a kind of synthesis of human
learning"[9] in which themes, such as a musical phrase or a philosophical
thought, are stated. As the Game progresses, associations between the themes
become deeper and more varied.[9] Although the Glass Bead Game is described
lucidly, the rules and mechanics are not explained in detail.[10]
Allusions[edit]
Many characters in the novel have names that are allusive word
games.[10] For example, Knecht's predecessor as Magister Ludi was Thomas van
der Trave, a veiled reference to Thomas Mann, who was born in Lübeck, situated
on the Trave River. Knecht's brilliant but unstable friend Fritz Tegularius is
based on Friedrich Nietzsche, while Father Jacobus is based on the historian
Jakob Burckhardt.[11] The name of Carlo Ferromonte is an italianized version of
the name of Hesse's nephew, Karl Isenberg, while the name of the Glass Bead
Game's inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, was taken from Heinrich Perrot, who
owned a machine shop where Hesse once worked after dropping out of school.[11]
The name of the pedagogic province in the story is taken from Greek legend of
the nymph Castalia, who was transformed into an inspiration-granting fountain
by the god Apollo.
As utopian literature[edit]
Freedman wrote in his biography of Hesse that the tensions caused by the
rise of the Nazi Party in Germany directly contributed to the creation of the
Glass Bead Game as a response to the oppressive times.[12] "The
educational province of Castalia, which provided a setting for the novel, came
to resemble Hesse's childhood Swabia physically while assuming more and more
the function of his adopted home, neutral Switzerland, which in turn embodied his
own antidote to the crises of his time. It became the "island of
love" or at least an island of the spirit."[12] Freedman opined that
in the Glass Bead Game "contemplation, the secrets of the Chinese I Ching
and Western mathematics and music fashioned the perennial conflicts of his life
into a unifying design."[13]”
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game
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