Harry Haller spends most of Steppenwolf convinced he contains exactly two people: the respectable bourgeois intellectual and the lone wolf. This clean binary is his prison. The Magic Theatre — which admits entry only to those who have gone mad — dismantles it. Inside, he finds not two selves but hundreds. The question is not which one is the real Harry. The question is whether the real Harry is the whole ensemble, in its contradiction and multiplicity.
The dominant self controls the shape of the polygon. But mute any voice completely and the shape loses something — even the voices that seem most contradictory contribute to the whole. Hesse's claim: the mistake is not having multiple selves. The mistake is declaring one of them the True Self and going to war with the others.
Harry Haller is a man of fifty, a writer of some reputation, who lives in rented rooms in a German city in the 1920s. He is also, he believes, a Steppenwolf — a wolf of the steppes, a creature that does not belong in civilisation and is too civilised to belong in the wild. He is caught between the respectable bourgeois intellectual he presents to the world and the lone wolf who despises everything that self represents. He believes this binary is his tragedy. The Magic Theatre reveals it is his misconception.
The binary as a trap
Hesse was aware of the psychoanalytic literature of his time — he knew Jung, underwent analysis himself. The binary structure of Harry's self-perception — man versus wolf, civilisation versus nature, reason versus instinct — is itself the problem, not the solution. The self is not divided. It is plural. The attempt to resolve the plurality into a binary, to find the 'real' self behind the performance, is what produces the suffering. There is no real self behind the others. The selves are all real.
You are only in trouble when you want to count them. Harry, for instance, is in trouble because he wants to count his selves as two. — Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
The Magic Theatre
The Magic Theatre — admission for madmen only, not for everyone — is a labyrinth of rooms, each containing a different version of Harry's possible life. In one room he is a killer. In another he is a great lover. In another he plays chess with tiny figures that turn out to be fragments of his own personality. The Theatre is a model of the unconscious, or of the full range of the self — all the selves that Harry has suppressed or denied are given form. The Theatre doesn't judge them. It just shows them.
Hesse wrote Steppenwolf in 1927, during a period of personal crisis following a divorce and the deterioration of his mental health. The novel is partly autobiographical and partly a critique of the bourgeois intellectualism that Hesse both inhabited and despised. The tension that produces the Steppenwolf — the capacity to see clearly the limitations of a world you still participate in — is one Hesse never resolved. He was, himself, a steppenwolf. The novel is an argument that this is not a problem to be solved.
Learning to play
The resolution Hesse offers — and it is not quite a resolution — is the concept of Humor with a capital H: the capacity to hold the contradictions of the self lightly, to see them as the material of play rather than the source of suffering. Pablo, the jazz musician, has this capacity. He treats life as an improvisation — nothing is fixed, everything is available, contradictions are resources rather than problems. Harry, near the end, glimpses it. Hesse does not pretend the glimpse is enough. But it is the direction.