The Glass Bead Game

Imagine the ivoriest of ivory towers; a place where scholars focus on the life of the mind, with fellow scholars of like mind. No distractions from the messiness of the ‘real’ world outside. Your meals, lodgings, and basic daily needs are provided. Your task is to contemplate knowledge across the liberal arts, synthesizing new connections between different disciplines, even as this activity deepens each area of knowledge. It sounds like a veritable Eden for academics.

Such an idyllic situation could come to pass, if a rich-enough country or government decided to pour resources into setting up such an institution. Faint glimmers in the present day exist in the sciences, typically set up with private money. In olden times of patronage, monasteries sprung into being as places of both isolation and learning – sometimes even training teacher-priests.

In The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse, such a place exists some three to four hundred years from now. After a time of turmoil, the nations are in relative peace, and a scholarly class has been elevated to pursue the life of the mind. Youngsters who show promise are ushered into elite schools, and through a weeding process, the crème de la crème emerges to occupy the ivoriest tower. These intellectual-powerhouses engage in what is known as the Glass Bead Game, an abstract, mind-absorbing, activity involving the great synthesis of Knowledge with a capital K.

The novel is a biography of one such individual, a talented orphan named Joseph Knecht. Plucked from obscurity, he becomes a protégé of the elites, rising to the rank of Magister Ludi, master of the Glass Bead Game. His talent is first discovered through music, but he quickly absorbs and adapts the arts, the humanities, the sciences, into his own elite and rarefied education once given the opportunity. But weaved into his life, impinging upon it, is the outside world. He finds such glimpses annoying at first, but they begin a change in him as he gradually synthesizes what he has been taught with what he is being shielded from.

Teaching and mentorship feature prominently. In exchange for supporting its monastic existence, the ivory tower supplies teachers – purveyors of knowledge – to both elite and prosaic schools all over. Joseph finds joy in teaching, where previously he considered it a burden and a distraction to his own research. He begins to desire making a greater impact out there in the ‘real’ world. The delicacy of close-mentoring relationships is explored with Joseph as both mentee and mentor, juxtaposing the challenge when different talented individuals with very different temperaments and motives come together.

The novel explores, in a somewhat abstract way, the relationship between ‘pure’ disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches. Some ivory tower scholars focus almost exclusively on deepening their own disciplines; others are cross-disciplinary synthesizers; and there are tensions between these groups. What does it mean to be creative? What does it mean to create new knowledge? Is a synthesis of known things new knowledge? Can a vocabulary be created that spans, or even transcends, the classical disciplines? The creation of this connective-vocabulary is assumed to have taken place in some symbolic-thematic form, although the descriptions are necessarily vague in the novel. It’s hard to imagine something you can’t quite imagine; like the finite attempting to grasp the infinite.

No institution is bereft of its own internal politics. The ivory tower has its own version as those of us in academia know full well. Hesse closely explores the relationship between politics and history; not a rarefied history of events connecting abstractions but one that is ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. The elite scholars shudder at the latter, seeing it as something impure and to be avoided. But Joseph learns much from a sabbatical-like sojourn to a monastery for several years. The Roman Catholic church is still alive and well in Hesse’s future world, and having survived the travails of many centuries, it has lessons of encouragement and warning to the seemingly humanistic-atheistic bent of the latest ivory tower and its Glass Bead Game players.

There is a playfulness to the narrative in The Glass Bead Game. The ‘biographers’ of the protagonist couch their story in all seriousness, pontificating as you might expect an ivory tower secluded scholar to do. I had the strange feeling of jibing with their pronouncements in a weaving sort of way – sideways rather than head-on. The preface to the novel reminds the reader of its tongue-in-cheek nature, and I think that’s a good way to read it. The prose sounds heavy but you should read it ‘light’ and not read it over-seriously.

This is my first Hesse novel. More than eighty years after its publication, I found it an uncanny read given the present-day assault on higher education especially questioning of the value of a liberal arts education. In the novel, history looks back at an age of wars and futility, and is glad that we got past that era – which sounds eerily like our era today. Somehow civilization came around to the idea of glorifying elite education and deeming it worthy of support in The Glass Bead Game, but it doesn’t look like we’re headed in that direction – at least one that is government-supported; a private technocratic oligarchy seems a likelier bet in our world to support such endeavors. And we see an accelerated widening divide between rich-elites and the not-so-haves, with no peaceful solution, no Eden, in sight.