The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date,
centuries into 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,
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 for boys, and to
nurture and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive
and whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as
Waldzell. The rules of the game are only alluded to, and 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. Essentially the game is 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 translates as "servant" but can also mean
"squire". The plotline 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.
The beginning of the novel introduces the Music Master, the resident of
Castalia who recruits Knecht as a young student and who is to have the
most long-lasting and profound effect on Knecht throughout his life. At
one point, Knecht obliquely refers to the Music Master's "sainthood" as
the Master nears death in his home at Monteport. As a student, another
meaningful friendship develops with Plinio Designori, a student from a
politically influential family who is studying in Castalia as a guest.
Knecht develops many of his personal views about what larger good
Castalia can achieve through vigorous debates with Designori, who views
Castalia as an "ivory tower" with little to no impact on the outside
world.
Although educated within Castalia, Knecht's path to "Magister Ludi"
is atypical for the order, as he spends a significant portion of his
time after graduation outside the boundaries of the province. 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 within 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 which
also has profound personal impact for Knecht.
As the novel progresses, Knecht begins to question his loyalty to the
order; he gradually comes to doubt that the intellectually gifted have a
right to withdraw from life's big problems. Knecht comes to see
Castalia as a kind of ivory tower,
an ethereal protected community, devoted to pure intellectual pursuits
but oblivious to the problems posed by 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 to leave, 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, entitled "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". The stories are presented as
exercises by Knecht imagining his life had he been born in another time
and place. The first story 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 story is 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 he's 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 four lives, including that as Magister Ludi, oscillate between
extroversion (and getting married: rainmaker, Indian life) 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).
Originally, Hesse 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.
http://ludopathe.blogspot.com/2010/09/le-jeu-des-perles-de-verre.html
