= The_Glass_Bead

======================================================================
= The_Glass_Bead_Game =
======================================================================

Introduction
======================================================================
'The Glass Bead Game' (, ) is the last full-length novel by the German
author Hermann Hesse. It was begun in 1931 in Switzerland, where it
was published in 1943 after being rejected for publication in Germany
due to Hesse's anti-Fascist views.

"The 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", an honorific title awarded to the
book's central character. "Magister Ludi" can also be seen as a pun:
'magister' is a Latin word meaning "teacher", while 'ludus' can be
translated as either "game" or "school". But the title 'Magister Ludi'
is somewhat misleading, as it implies the book is a straightforward
bildungsroman, when, in reality, the book touches on many different
genres, and the bulk of the story is on one level a parody of the
genre of biography.

In 1946, Hesse won 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. In 2019, the novel was
nominated for the 1944 Retrospective Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Description
======================================================================
'The Glass Bead Game' takes place at an unspecified date centuries in
the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator
writing around the start of the 25th century. 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, and to cultivate and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact
nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school in
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 name of the main character in the first of “Three
Lives” at the end of the novel, called The Rain Maker, is also Knecht,
while the central character in the second of these, with the title The
Father Confessor, is Josephus Famulus, i.e. a Latin version of the
same name, “Joseph Servant”).

The plot of the novel’s main story 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.

Plot
======================================================================
The novel's beginning introduces the Music Master, the resident of
Castalia who recruits Knecht as a young student and who is to have the
longest-lasting and profoundest 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". At the
prestigious school Waldzell, Knecht develops another meaningful
friendship with Plinio Designori, a student from a politically
influential family, who is studying in Castalia as a guest. Knecht
holds vigorous debates with Designori, who views Castalia as an "ivory
tower" with little to no impact on the outside world. Knecht
disagrees and argues in favor of Castalia.

Although educated in Castalia, Knecht's path to "Magister Ludi" is
atypical for the order, as he spends much of his time after graduation
outside the province's boundaries. 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 in
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 that also
profoundly affects Knecht.

As the novel progresses, Knecht begins to question his loyalty to the
order, gradually coming 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 of 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, 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, "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". These are presented as exercises
by Knecht imagining his life had he been born in another time and
place. The first tells of a pagan rainmaker named Knecht who lived
"many thousands of years ago, when women ruled". Eventually the
shaman's powers to summon rain fail, and he offers himself as a
sacrifice for the good of the tribe. The second 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
===============
Hesse originally intended several different lives of the same person
as he is reincarnated. 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 recast
in the first person and breaking off earlier. 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, both that of 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
====================
* 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 and 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.

Castalia
======================================================================
Castalia, where most of the novel is set, is described in English
translation as the "pedagogical province". It forms part of a large
and prosperous state whose leaders are broadly but not uncritically
sympathetic to the Castalian ideal of scholarship.

Castalia is an entirely male community, whose members are or aspire to
be members of a secular order similar to monastic orders. Prospective
members are recruited in their pre-/early teens from the most
promising scholars in its host state's regular schools. One of
Castalia's roles (not explored in depth in the book) is provision of
schoolteachers to its host state. Another is the advancement of
learning, primarily in the fields of mathematics, musicology (of
Western music up to the 18th century), philology, and the history of
art. This role is entirely analytical: creativity and scientific
research appear to be dead. A third role is to cultivate and develop
the Glass Bead Game.

The game
======================================================================
The Glass Bead Game is "a kind of synthesis of human learning"

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. Although the Glass Bead Game is
described lucidly, the rules and mechanics are not explained in
detail.

The popularity of the book led to the development of a community of
game designers exploring what a playable game might be like. A
physical game called the Glass Plate Game was developed in 1976 by
Adrian Wolfe and Dunbar Aitkens, focusing on connections between the
ideas of a conversation. Online variants began to be developed in the
2010s.

Allusions
======================================================================
Many of the novel's characters have names that are allusive word
games. 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 (Latin: "roof tile maker") is based on
Friedrich Nietzsche, while Father Jacobus is based on the historian
Jakob Burckhardt. 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. 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
======================================================================
In his biography of Hesse, Freedman wrote 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. "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." According to Freedman, 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."

English translations
======================================================================
* 1949: Mervyn Savill (translated as 'Magister Ludi')
* 1969: Richard and Clara Winston

Adaptations
======================================================================
In 2010, 'The Glass Bead Game' was dramatised by Lavinia Greenlaw for
BBC Radio 4. It starred Derek Jacobi as the Biographer, Tom Ferguson
as Knecht and David Seddon as Plinio.

See also
======================================================================
*Existentialism
*Epistemology
*'Musikalisches Würfelspiel'
*Ontology
*Polysemy
*Syncretism

References
======================================================================
Notes

Bibliography

* Hermann Hesse. 'The Glass Bead Game'. Vintage Classics.

External links
======================================================================
*
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MSNiwlABbltQWA0KHH3MoIuGOOqqrX78gJPKyG95j5I/edit
The manual] of an easy to play iteration of the Glass Bead Game with
an active online community.
* [http://www.ludism.org/gbgwiki/HomePage A wiki] exploring playable
variants of the glass bead game and what an ideal glass bead game
might be.
* [http://sites.google.com/site/abimepublications/home 'The Glass Bead
Game'] Paul Pilkington's implementation focuses on the connections
between music and mathematics.
* [http://www.glassplategame.com 'The Glass Plate Game'] A playable
variant invented by Adrian Wolfe and Dunbar Aitkens in 1976. Wooden
cubes and small colored transparencies are used to map and record a
conversation on a mosaic of "idea cards" as players find and discuss
connections among ideas represented by the cards.
* 'Hermann Hesse: Das Glasperlenspiel.' Essay in German:
[http://signaturen-magazin.de/ivor-joseph-dvorecky--hermann-hesses--glasperlenspiel-.html
www.Signaturen-Magazin.de]

License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game