*Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game - the act of withdrawal. People who decide to withdraw from society, men (specifically) who remove themselves from the common preoccupation of acquiring assets, acquiring a partner, and sometimes, for the hermits, even of acquiring company. Withdrawal is everywhere in this novel.
And these are 'positive' movings-away, they are men who 'go towards' something, not men who are running away from something, so not the people who withdraw from society from discomfort or to lick a wound. On the contrary, they are the academics, in the case of this Glass Bead Game the extraordinarily gifted; or they are those capable of some religious state; or they are those (who think they are) passing through some 'door of perception' into The Real. Hesse's The Glass Bead Game writes of these three types - the rarefied intellectual; the contemplative yogi; and (less comprehensively) the monk.
The rarefied intellectual withdraws himself; he steps away from profit-and-loss, from pleasing a woman, from raising a child; he withdraws himself from distraction, and tentatively presents his skills before the challenge of understanding, of research, of exquisite music, or of this exquisite Glass Bead Game.
The contemplative yogi withdraws himself from sound touch and feeling, to achieve a stillness where he can pass through some 'door' and enter the world of 'the essential' and of 'the unchanging' (Hesse, like far too many others, distorts word-definition and talks gobbledygook when trying to describe 'The Essential', but he does grant that possibly language is not sufficient).
And lastly, the Christian Penitent withdraws himself to seek his own state of grace. To withdraw oneself and to pursue an 'intensive cultivation of the mind' or to cultivate a 'natural life'? - there's the question. Hesse raises the problems within the withdrawn life, and also the objections to it.
And, in addition to the above, 'withdrawal' of other sorts is everywhere within The Glass Bead Game. As well as his fundamental academic withdrawal, in common with his colleagues, Joseph Knecht at one time withdraws from people to avoid his destiny; at another time withdraws from the position of Magister Ludi to engage with the outside world. Bertram, the Shadow to a Magister Ludi, withdraws. The oddest withdrawal of them all is that of the Music Master. His way of taking leave of the world now that he is old, is exceptional. He virtually loses the habit of speaking; he stops visiting people and stops asking them over; gradually he stops recognising them altogether. Yet he is steeped in a gentle cheerfulness and communicates in looks and glances, in cheerful silences; he is passing through some barrier into some eternal world - he is becoming a saint.
And doesn't this idea of 'withdrawal', of a province called Castalia, colour the lasting memory of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game? Some will sneer. Some will feel 'at home', Castalia a fictional place that would have suited them well, if only it existed and if only they had been born with the intellect.
*Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game - people who sneer at academics. To spend one's life in the pursuit of pure thought, in academia, if one has those skills and the option, Or to get down and mix it with loves, the cheating vagina and the cheating cock, money-makings, wild enthusiasms for a Left or a Right politics, making children and raising more of the same - this might be the core of Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
A reader's response to The Glass Bead Game depends hugely on his response to men who are academics. It ought to be a neutral response. You'd still be sitting in a mud hut sucking your toes without academics. People who sneer at academic types, if they ever get beyond the first few pages, will not take to Hermann Hesse. Hesse loves both the academic and the non-academic, his big three novels juxtapose both types of Man, but he always leads with the academic.
*Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game - is a novel's aspiration important? Is a writer simply trying to entertain, or to thrill; is he trying to describe a life and a time; or, is he trying to unpack some timeless human predicaments? Hesse's The Glass Bead Game aspires to be something enormous.
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