The Curious Silence of a Lucky Find
Two weeks away from the olā blog felt especially long, trapped as I was in a van with people half my age who were shit-talking nonstop. When we pulled to a halt in front of the tourist shop in Hooker, OKātown motto āItās a location, not a vocationāāI didnāt even mind what I thought would amount to stretching my legs while surrounded by a sea of off-color paraphernalia.
But lo, a moment of grace, right there in the panhandle: the shop had a few shelves of used books, each for the bargain price of a quarter. And there, in among all the romances and thrillers, was a 1969 translation of Hermann Hesseās The Glass Bead Game, aka Magister Ludi. When I stepped up to the cashier, whoād just rung up about eighteen purchases of āAll My Friends Are Hookersā t-shirts, the sweet little lady didnāt want to take my money. It felt like a brief recognition between two literature lovers trying to survive their respective circuses. I handed over the change anyway.
The spell of grace continued when I found I actually could read in the van without spinning into a state of nausea. Up until I was about fourteen, I devoured book after book on family road tripsāa practice that came to a shrieking halt when car sickness became the norm of my young adolescence, forcing me to keep my eyes on the road. Tuning out my classmates was another matter, but I still got the sense of having been granted a massive boon.
Iād been meaning to read The Glass Bead Game (hereafter GBG) for years, just because I assumed it was one of those books youāre supposed to have under your belt. Iād enjoyed Hesseās Steppenwolf for the full dose of awesome weirdness I associate with lots of early twentieth-century German-language stuff, but then got disgusted with Narcissus and Goldmund. I remember very little of that latter work, only that I was convinced it upheld tired tropes about women, and self-righteous grad student that I was at the time, I probably purposefully erased it from memory, the better not to recognize any merits I might have missed. But given the fact that the world of GBG is entirely devoid of women, my younger self probably had some justification on her side.
Donāt get me wrong; the book is good so far, and Iām not going to dismiss something just because a certain gender, type, etc., isnāt ārepresented.ā All the same, itās so strange to think that an author assumedāand I donāt believe the assumption was consciousāthat Castalia, the GBGās world of students and scholars, wasnāt open to women. Or not even ānot openā; the possibility wasnāt even a possibility anyone (the characters, and maybe the author) ever considered. Apparently, readers at the time of the bookās 1943 publication didnāt think about it, and the Nobel committee that granted Hesse the literature prize in 1946 probably didnāt, either. Itās not, in other words, something Iām retroactively angry about, or for which Iād like to cancel Hesse. But it is an odd sort of thing to realize that, gross as our world still is when it comes to reigning assumptions about women, people of color, āoutsiders,ā and so forth, it was, in the recent past, totally normal to design a world in which women were completely irrelevant. Not denigrated or treated with paternalistic indulgence or whateverābut so far outside the realm of concern that they didnāt even register in that world at all, save via a nanoglimpse of a couple of giggling village girls as one of the characters passes through a town square. Iām a good way through the book, and one of the questions it raises is what the real price is of sealing yourself off from the world in the equivalent of an ivory tower, as the Castalians have always done. But even if our hero ultimately abandons this form of collective seclusion, I canāt imagine heāll ever get as far as having a conversation with, or maybe even seeing, a woman.
Iām sure thereās plenty of commentary out there about this situation, but for now, Iām letting the absence of the female half of humanity from the book remain a curiosity. After all, its appearance in the middle of a tiny town saved me from certain insanity. But man, would it be the ultimate way of closing a circle if our boy Joseph discovered self-liberation courtesy of a supremely wise hooker.