Opening Passage: The book has a frame including a 'General Introduction', and some poems and short stories attributed to Joseph Knecht, but really the beginning of the work is tucked in this phrase, and begins with the beginning of Joseph Knecht's vocation:
No knowledge has come down to us of Joseph Knecht's origins. Like many other pupils of the elite schools, he either lost his parents early in childhood, or the Board of Education removed him from unfavorable home conditions and took charge of him. In any case, he was spared the conflict between elite school and home which complicates the youth of many other boys of his type, makes entry into the Order more difficult, and in some cases transforms highly gifted young people into problem personalities. (p. 47)
Summary: The feuilleton was a newspaper supplement invented by French newspapers in the nineteenth century in response to censorship laws. There would be line drawn on the page, separating part of it from the main news, usually in smaller print, and this supplementary material would be devoted to art reviews, cultural commentary, gossip, serialized fiction, epigrams, jokes, reports of scientific discoveries, and the like. What newspaper editors discovered is that censors were less interested in this material; you could get away with a lot more 'under the line', including even political commentary if you dressed it up as a review of a play or opera. It is a good example of the ingenuity of human thought. But notice also that one of the things it does is relegate all serious intellectual thought to the same status as gossip columns and horoscopes. The 'serious story' is what avoids all serious comment, which could get you into trouble; the real intellectual life occurs under the line. But putting something under the line also limits how deep it can be; everything in the feuilleton is superficial, which is why the censors don't care so much, and under the line you cannot really discuss anything in the way it deserves.
The events of The Glass Bead Game occur well into the future; the exact is indeterminate in the story, but Hesse says elsewhere that he thought of the story is occuring at the beginning of the 25th century. The people of that time look back on us and call our age the Age of the Feuilleton. From their perspective, real intellectual life in our age is something we barely know how to do; it is an age in which everything of cultural and intellectual value was forced under the line and treated as not the real thing, but a sort of lark in which you are allowed some exception to the way your real life works. This is not to say that there was no intellectual life at all, of course; but it is hard to have any real approach to intellect and culture if your intellectual life consists entirely of essays on things like Friedrich Nietzsche's relationship to women's fashion, or superficial surveys of historical topics, or crossword puzzles. (The sort of things, in other words, that are found in most newspapers and, for that matter, the internet, today.) Everything is just bits and pieces, nothing handled at depth, and amusement rather than vocation. All of this would likely be fine, if it were part of a larger intellectual and cultural ecosystem that was fundamentally based on system and depth and vocation. But when it began to be treated as the foundation of intellectual and cultural life, the result was world wars and many other terrible things.
Enter the Glass Bead Game. Originally, it was precisely that: a game played with glass beads. It was developed in the field of music as a method for improving memory and improvisation. One player would call out some muscial bit -- a bar or a motif or the like -- and the other player would respond with continuation and variation. This call-and-response then began to be tracked on a framework with glass beads (like a very complicated abacus). Eventually this game caught the attention of mathematicians, who worked out the underlying mathematical theory for the game as it worked on the glass-bead frame. This mathematical theory turned out to be remarkably generalizable, and was taken up in philology, visual arts, and so forth, and while the Glass Bead Game continued to be played, the actual glass beads eventually dropped out; instead, people used the symbolic notations developed by applying the mathematics to different fields. And because the same general set of symbolic notations could apply to music, painting, sculpture, literature, and so forth, the game, while still showing in its general structure and some of its content its musicological origins, had long since stopped being played solely in terms of music. It became a game of point and counterpoint, of theme and variation, for all the arts taken together. The Age of the Feuilleton was over. The Glass Bead Game did for art and culture what the experiment had done for science and industry, and the explosion of interest in it was an intellectual revolution on the same scale the Scientific Revolutions and the Industrial Revolutions had been.
But all things come to an end. (One of the themes of the book.) In the case of the Scientific Revolution, experimental science raised field after field with intellectual advances, but at the same time, these things grew more and more remote from the ordinary lives of people. A game that could originally be played by anyone, to great general interest and excitement, became increasingly professionalized and nonprofessionals were pushed out, sometimes just by being outcompeted but sometimes by rather more forceful gatekeeping. Experimental science still retained its centrality in education, but the gatekeeping created a line between the science and the world outside, and the world outside began more and more to see science not as a common possession of humanity but as a thing to use for its own end, as a matter of investment and return, the notion of science for the sake of science being increasingly seen as an egghead quirk of scientists that you had to indulge to the extent -- and only to the extent -- that it went along with getting something useful. Scientists on their end became much less careful about the ways in which the expenses and difficulties and problems associated with their work burdened the outside world, which fed into a vicious cycle in which the world increasingly wondered why it was paying for all of this. At the same time, the success of the experimental sciences repeatedly led people to flatten intellectual life in order to force into the (perceived) mold of this or that scientifice success; all of human intellectual life began to be treated, not scientifically, because the discoveries had never been made for such thing, but scientistically, as if the experimental models were the reality and everything else (including actual human intellectual life) was just details. The result is a sort of decline even as experimental science continued to achieve great successes.
This is all, of course, a feuilletonistic history. But the point of it is that as Joseph Knecht, the hero of the novel, enters the picture, the same pattern of decline is occurring for the Glass Bead Game, as well. There still are Glass Bead Game enthusiasts who play it as amateurs, but they are diminishing, and they are increasingly poorly regarded by the professionals, and the professionals are mostly found in relative isolation in the elite schools in the Pedagogical Province of Castalia, paid for almost entirely by the world outside, whose attitude has begun to move from enthusiasm to tolerance, and which is increasingly inclined to see the Glass Bead Game as an ivory-tower amusement for eggheads rather than a human activity valuable for all. It is also clear that the Glass Bead Game itself is causing an intellectual stagnation; once an immense field for creativity, it is flattening everyone's view, as they see all of intellectual life, every artistic field, as just what it is in the Glass Bead Game.
Joseph Knecht is a bright boy who does extraordinarily well in school and soon catches the interest of members of the Board of Education as having a promising future in the Glass Bead Game. Because of this he is sent to the top school in Castalia, majoring in music. He first receives fame by a series of debates with a fellow student, Plinio Designori, who is from a wealthy family who send students to the Castalian schools because learning about the Glass Bead Game stuff is what cultured people do; Joseph defends the Castalian way of life in the face of Plinio's more pragmatic and merely utilitarian view. His performance in these debates is a partial contributor to his first assignment when he graduates, to go to a Benedictine monastery and teach the Glass Bead Game to their small group of Glass Bead Game enthusiasts.
It's an odd assignment. The Catholic Church is very ambiguous about the Glass Bead Game; it has itself contributed some notable players, but also has been very critical of certain aspects of it. The Benedictine monks Joseph is sent to teach are very, very amateur. Nonetheless, a Benedictine monastery always has an intellectual life, and Joseph slowly develops a friendship with Father Jacobus at the monastery; Jacobus is one of the world's foremost historians. He also has a significant influence at the Holy See, and this turns out to be the key to why Joseph has been sent to the middle of nowhere to teach a bunch of amateurs things that are, to him, very basic. The Board that governs Castalia has begun to worry about its position with respect to the outside world, and naturally wants to make allies. The Catholic Church is currently in an upswing in its diplomatic influence and is also in many ways the major institution that has the most in common with Castalia itself. Joseph's handling of the debate with Plinio had shown that he had some skill as a sort of ambassador, and thus Joseph was sent to the monastery in the hope that it would be a first step toward overcoming, or at least getting around, the Holy See's standoffish skepticism about Castalia. This ends up being a wildly successful move on the part of the Castalians, since this is precisely what happens.
The success will lead eventually to Joseph Knecht being chosen Magister Ludi, the chief teacher, so to speak, of the Glass Bead Game. This is a role he will fulfill in exemplary fashion. But he finds himself occasionally uneasy. His colleagues don't really seem to grasp the precarity of Castalia's position with respect to the outside world. He will meet up with Plinio again, and come to the conclusion that Castalia did a disservice to Plinio in many ways. His familiarity with history, learned from the Benedictine historian, leads him to worry that Castalia and the Glass Bead Game are themselves becoming increasingly feuilletonesque. He himself has a creative side, writing poetry and short stories and music, that does not sit easily with the routines of professional intellectual life in Castalia. As time goes on he finds that what really interests him is teaching the Glass Bead Game to mere beginners. All of this leads him to become the scandal of the age when, first of all the members of the Board of Education in Castalia history, he resigns.
In many ways, the Glass Bead Game itself is a more interesting character than Joseph Knecht himself. (Hesse's descriptions of it are certainly extraordinarily memorable, perfectly balanced to make it not quite clear how it works and yet perpetually intriguing at every point.) Joseph Knecht is just the point at which things come to a head. He is caught up in events over which he has relatively little control, and he becomes of interest mostly because he is both an exemplary Magister Ludi and the first person eccentric enough to understand that something is going wrong with the Game. Things could hardly have ever ended up entirely well for him; he has a personality that tends toward immersion, and failing that, immolation. But in a sense Joseph's life is itself a Glass Bead Game on a grand scale, a correlation of many cultural values across many disciplinary lines, into a unity. And in this Game he comes up with something creative. As his name, Knecht, implies, what the Glass Bead Game has begun to lose, and which needs to be reclaimed, is genuine service, the life and death of service to the world with which the Castalians are increasingly estranged.
Favorite Passage:
"Of course one should bring order into history," Jacobus thundered. "Every science is, among other things, a method of ordering, simplifying, making the indigestible digestible for the mind. We think we have recognized a few laws in history and try to apply them to our investigations of historical truth. Suppose an anatomist is dissecting a body. He does not confront wholly surprising discoveries. Rather, he finds beneath the epidermis a congeries of organs, muscles, tendons, and bones which generally conform to a pattern he has brought to his work. But if the anatomist sees nothing but his pattern, and ignores the unique, individual reality fo his object, then he is a Castalian, a Glass Bead Game player; he is using mathematics on the least appropriate object. I have no quarrel with the student of history who brings to his work a touchingly childish, innocent faith in the power of our m inds and our methods to order reality; but first and foremost he must respect the incomprehensible truth, reality, and uniqueness of events. Studying history, my friend, is no joke and no irresponsible game. To study history one must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet necessary and highly important. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one." (pp. 168-169)
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
*****
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, Richard & Clara Winston, trs., Henry Holt & Co. (New York: 1990).
