Poetics of Meditation

One could easily dismiss Siddhartha for Hesse’s writing style. Unlike Joyce’s Ulysses, the prose is never labored or performed, yet always belies the burden of fledgling ascetic Siddhartha’s yearning after spiritual enlightenment. Passages such as “I was willing to dismember my ego and tear it apart…but I myself was lost in the process” (36) and “One can get love by begging…but one cannot steal it” read like a sacred text, aphorisms gleaned from a life of searching (52).

We cannot pinpoint any Western darkness in Siddhartha’s dark night of the soul. In Beloved, communicating the incommunicable, only makes horror two-dimensional (Paul D's tobacco tin heart), but Hesse pares down his language to communicate, as Eastern languages such as Chinese do, the essential nature of the signified object. While wild, untamed sense experiences elude Germanic grammar’s harsh confines, Siddhartha’s dream about Govinda, limited to just over one hundred words, triumphs.

 Hesse creates a narrow brook and pours his words into it, flowing like the river the hero and his ferryman ponder upon waking. The vision is organized systematically, moving subject-verb-object, describing little because the “kiss” and the “breast” are everything a spiritual kiss and breast could be. The Govinda-cum-maiden’s breast milk “tasted of woman and man, of sun and woods, of creature and flower, of every fruit, of every pleasure…[leaving] him drunk and senseless” (46). Lyrical yet never florid, Hesse’s poetry is substantial and never delves into Beloved's awkward, jarring slam verse or Márquez’s sumptuous descriptions of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Like the Buddha, he adopts the Eastern mode, asking his readers to internalize and reflect on the work, coloring it themselves. Simplicity is the action.