In this entry, I want to talk a little bit about Siddhartha, one of our extra readings (along with the Penelopiad). Don't worry; the image above is not the edition I expect you to buy. I just liked the cover, and I couldn't find an image of the edition I have.
Like Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha is a modern response to an ancient story. Set in India at the time of Buddhism's beginnings, Siddhartha tells the story of a man's search for self-actualization through Hindu mysticism, Buddhism, physical love (with Kamala), parenting, companionship, and nature. Siddhartha is contrasted with his boyhood friend, Govinda who becomes a Buddhist monk. A work written by a 20th-century European, Siddhartha also fits into our concept of world literature as a way of reading. Hesse's book complements Atwood's nicely, and this pairing is necessary because after all EN 201 is a course in world literature, not just western literature. As we will see this semester, Hinduism & Buddhism have influenced authors and readers just as classical mythology and literature *and* Christianity have. It will be interesting to read Siddhartha alongside the excerpts from the Ramayana and the Maharabhata (or even Peter Brook's video) as well as the Tale of Genji. There Murasaki often expresses a wish to become a Buddhist nun, particularly once she is in her thirties.
Yet both Hesse and Atwood are writing outside India and Ancient Greece, respectively. To what extent can either author write about these cultures? Consider, too, that Atwood is a feminist and that as a novelist, she is writing in a tradition that, for so many ways, has opposed itself to the epic. Hesse himself had been to India, but it appears from the introduction in my edition that his visit there had been very frustrating. (Keep in mind that he was writing in the early twentieth century, a time before the days of easy jet travel or even any jet travel. One might travel to the other side of the world as Hesse did or as anthropologist Margaret Mead did, but it was a long & involved process. Often a trip to another part of the world was a once-in-a-lifetime event.)
Additionally, as a questing hero, Siddhartha complements Odysseus, Job, and Gilgamesh, to name three whom we will encounter. It's true that Hesse's book is *not* an epic, even a literary version of an epic, but like Odysseus or Gilgamesh, Siddhartha is involved in a quest, and, like Job, his story is a very spiritual one. (But, as we often say with Job's story or Dante's Divine Comedy, can we say that Hesse intended Siddhartha's story to be of cosmic importance? I suspect that he felt that this story was very relevant to himself and his times--Europe after WWI, though.)
This, of course, brings up the question why each author, Hesse in particular, decided to "go outside of his culture's 'tradition.'" And this question, in turn, leads to a term called "orientalism." Scholar and critic Edward Said popularized this term in the 1970s, and, strictly speaking, it refers to 19th & 20th century British, French, and American representations of the Middle East (or what was once called "the Orient") as an exotic Other in opposition to the "normative" West. However, even though EN 201 focuses on earlier works, many written at a time when the West was *not* politically or culturally dominant, we still need to be concerned about how we read this earlier literature. After all, for example, literature occupied a different role in each culture and was defined differently. The Tale of Genji was written in Japanese, a language that, for the elite of Murasaki Shikibu's time, was a woman's language. Men read and wrote Chinese. Homer's epics began as tales told aloud to an audience. And, to return to English literature, at a time not too far from when EN 201 ends & EN 202 begins, literature included history but not novels. Novels were regarded as throwaway reading. Although the playhouse was a place where all levels of (London) society met, the manuscripts of the plays performed there were not allowed into the Bodleian Library. So it's important to recognize that as twenty-first century readers, we are reading examples of world literature differently from the way that their authors expected them to be read--or heard.
With that, I'll close. Take care.
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