Beware of books bearing cool covers. (anonymous, circa 12th century)
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed. (Albert Einstein)
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinions. (Jack Kerouac)
Brentano’s Bookstore loomed over on Manhattan’s Upper East Side like an illuminated shrine. It was modern in design, clothed in sharp planes of steel and glass. The interior had the luxurious smell of wood shelves and high-end carpet. Browsing the isles of books was a joy for me. Brentano’s was not only elegant but also comprehensive. I was completely enveloped by books.
I don’t always go into a bookstore with a particular book in mind; my encounter with books has been, for the most part, the result of serendipity. All great literary works are books, however, not all books are great literary works. My experience has shown me that there are books, and then there are “books”. Some may inform and some may delight, but few transform. I have also found that transformative books are a lot like cats; you don’t select them, they select you. On one these serendipitous trips to Brentano’s I was selected by a copy of Hermann Hesse’s, Steppenwolf.
There were a number of impulses that drove me to that work. I, without embarrassment, confess that what attracted me most was its cover. It was the silhouette of a man’s head from whic
h emerged the snarling head of a wolf. The image stopped me in my tracks; I had to have that book.
I also remember passing around a number with Raggs and Silky, both honors English majors, as they discussed the work. What I remember from that conversation was that Steppenwolf “was really heavy”. Hesse’s work came up tangentially as the result of Rock Me Baby, by Steppenwolf blaring from the stereo.
At the time, I thought Steppenwolf was nothing more than a smoking rock band. I wasn’t aware that Hermann Hesse, a Nobel Prize winning author, and one who corresponded heavily with Thomas Mann and Carl Jung, published Steppenwolf in 1927. But all that was incidental; it had the coolest cover in the store.
I read it that summer. I was twenty. Although I was only able to probe the surface of the words, they made an impression on me. I imagined myself a young Harry Haller: the quintessential Outsider. Oh, yeah, I was an Outsider all right. I grew my hair long, wore faded olive-green tee shirts, ripped jeans, listened to a lot of rock, smoked pot and had a vocabulary heavily drench with the phrase “Far Out”. Oh yeah, I was one in a million.
I read the book again in my fiftieth year. This time the reading stunned me. I was not a young Harry Haller anymore; I was a middle aged Haller—the real Harry Haller! I possessed the same solitary, disenchanted soul of Haller; I walked the same bleak steppes he walked and wrestled with the same impulses.
This reading of the work was visceral; it was as if I encountered a verbal mirror. I realized that I wasn’t alone but belonged to a kindred pack of Steppenwolves, heretofore referred to as Outsiders, who also roamed the dark, empty streets of existence. Or so I thought.
What differentiated the twenty-year old reading from that of the fifty year old? Thirty years to be precise; enough time to experience failure, success, unfulfilled relationships, highs, lows, orgasms, betrayals, more highs, and isolation. Do not judge the above as solely negative or misanthropic; these experiences were the hammer and anvil required to forge a more authentic self.
In defense of the twenty-year old reader, I will say that time for me was a romantic and exciting one; it orbited around the discovery of a new book, a newly released album, the next “cool” hangout or an esoteric foreign film. However, there is no substitute for the insight that comes through age and experience.
Hesse explores a number of themes in this existential work, but for me, they all seem to gravitate toward the central theme of the
Outsider: the lone wolf, the societal outcast, the Authentic Man. The Outsider has historically been a romantic figure and this is particularly true in modern American culture.
From the gritty aplomb of a Bogart, to the defiant rebel of James Dean, to the beat nonconformity of a Kerouac, 
the Outsider hovers intransigently above the thronging masses in control of his existence, or, if not in control, then at least willing to confront it chin first. The Outsider is unique in thought, lonely in existence and, like the anchovy, either adored or despised by the masses.
As a culture, we have lost the essence of the term Outsider as presented by such thinkers as Hesse, Mann, and Kafka and Dostoyevsky. In existentialist terms, the Outsider refers to one who possesses a deep alienation of the soul. This individual doesn’t choose this condition or, in most cases, even desires it; the Outsider is condemned to be so. It is as if becoming an Outsider is the highly improbable outcome of random genetic mutations (for you materialists) or through the rare gift of divine dispensation (for you deists). Whatever the cause, it is not through conscious choice.
There are many misconceptions regarding the Outsider as, for example, that he has achieved a modicum of celebrity; that she possesses extraordinary aesthetic gifts; or that he or she could ever become acclimated to the day-to-day pulse of existence. Some have reached celebrity as those mentioned above, but just how many go undetected? Most Outsiders feel so distanced from the everyday world that the pain of confronting that truth, much less bringing it to the attentions of others, is unlikely.
Outsiders can be gifted in the arts, but it is not essential. What is essential is that the individual sees the world through a uniquely artful and aesthetic lens. It is this perception of the world as seen from its perimeter, together with a finely tuned sensibility, that is both the blessing and curse of the Outsider. The curse being the Outsider must live amid the normal, ordinary mundane world of the middle class or bourgeois. It is the inherent paradox of the Outsider that he or she simultaneously desires and rejects this world.
In his short story, Tonio Kroger, Thomas Mann presents a young adolescent, Tonio Kroger, who experiences a conflict of feelings toward the middle class (bourgeois) denizens that surround him. On the one hand, he views himself as superior to them: deeper of thought and more artistic. On the other hand, he is deeply envious of their innocence and connection.
In one sectio
n, Mann presents Tonio peering through the window of one of his classmate’s home. There he witnesses a joyful and loving family laughing heartily around a well-graced table. Tonio’s nose presses against the windowpane like a young orphan peering into a toy shop at Christmas; Tonio both hungered for that existence and despised it. As Mann states through his protagonist:
To be an artist, one has to die to everyday life.
A similar dichotomy is found in the character of Harry Haller. As presented in the Manifesto of the Steppenwolf, Hesse states:
He (Haller) felt himself to be single and alone, whether as a queer fellow and a hermit in poor health, or as a person removed from the common run of men by the prerogative of talents that had something of genius in them . . . Besides this, he was secretly and persistently attracted to the little bourgeois world, to those quiet and respectable homes with tidy gardens, irreproachable stair-cases and their whole modest air of order and comfort.
Hesse continues: . . . the Steppenwolf (Haller) stood entirely outside the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor social ambitions.
However, in today’s media drenched culture, the Outsider has become conflated with the notion of being hip (hipster will designate one who considers him or herself to be hip). Hipness conjures up images of the social and celebratory, whereas the existence of the true Outsider is solitary and dark. And, whereas the Outsider is concerned primarily with the inner life of the soul, the hipster is centered on the external manifestation of the body.
Coming to terms with a turbulent soul is a lifetime struggle and is distinct to the individual, thereby making each Outsider unique and non-replicable. Because the nature of hip is external and material, it is easily copied. Where the two concepts merge, however, is with regard to a “separateness” from the humdrum life reflected by the bourgeois. But even here there are differences: the hipster chooses it to be so; the Outsider endures it.
For both, there remains the same disdain and contempt for those things bourgeois; however, while Outsiders can concede something solid and gratifying in the bourgeois, hipsters have no such sympathies. In fact, the greatest fear of the hipster is that he or she might, even for a moment, be associated with the middle class.
However, a not so subtle irony arises; because the hipster becomes hip by way of the external and the material, the conventions adopted by those who consider themselves hip rapidly spread through the American ethos like a Nora virus through a Chipotle Grill. As a result, the hipster instantly becomes what he or she deplores: a member of the bourgeois or middle class.
It seems a universal law that the moment something is labeled hip, it eats itself from within, like the snake that consumes its tail in the archetypal symbol of the Ouroboros. The solitary, uniqueness of Outsiders make them like snowflakes, while hipsters are like the infinite images produced by on-facing mirrors.
Some examples of the non-discriminatory, ecumenical nature of hip are tattoos (there is scarcely a man or woman i
n a Wal-Mart checkout line whose chubby ankle are without ink); piercings (more and more individuals are looking more like fishing lures) how about hair color (You dyed your hair chartreuse; so what!) and what about ripped jeans (I’m not sure one can even buy an un-ripped pair). Quintessentially hip, hipsters embody all of the above. My point here is to demonstrate that, whereas, the nature of the Outsider is internal and private; the quality of being hip resides in the external and public.
Another aspect of the hip is presented in an article from Slate titled, Crying Wolof, where author Jesse Sheidlower states the following regarding the etymology of Hip:
The origin of hip (and its partner, hep; the words are related) is, unsatisfyingly, unknown. The term first appeared at the turn of the 20th century, and quickly became widespread. Its meaning at this early point was “aware; in the know,” . . . It wasn’t until the late 1930s and early 1940s, during the jive era, that the modern senses—”sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date”—arose.
Hip, therefore, derives from such concepts as awareness, in the know, sophisticated, currently fashionable, and fully up-to-date. In other words, hip becomes the touchstone from which to separate the sophisticated from the unsophisticated, the fully up-to-date from the backward, and the elite from the bourgeois.
An analogy can be made between th
e emergence of the 20th century notion of hip and the birth of the avant-garde during the Belle Epoch of the late 19th cent. Those in the avant-garde (from the French “advanced guard”) were also in the know and sophisticated: those who could see beyond the bend in the art and literary road, those whose prescient aesthetic sensibilities lie in the new and the unusual.
One significant reason for the creation of such a neologism at this particular point in history was because of a burgeoning middle class. In the late Nineteenth Century, the middle classes in Europe, through rising disposable incomes, were able to enjoy operas, concerts, art exhibits and literary works that were once the exclusive province of the upper classes. So as to distinguish themselves from the herd of the unwashed, the elite restructured the criteria of taste thereby becoming members of an even smaller and exclusive group: the avant-garde. Yet, within the avant-garde itself, mimicked behavior of taste and dress continued to rule.
If one is an Outsider, he or she may or may not follow general trends. The reason is that she doesn’t have to. Each Outsider intuits that the source of his uniqueness lies within. Any external fashion or behavior does nothing to alter this internal Self, does nothing to connect him or her with the surrounding world.
The hipster concerns him or herself primarily with the external that includes trends in fashion, hairstyles, food, drink, choice of films and music and political ideologies to list a few. Being “on the edge” of trends has very little, if nothing, to do with the internal world of the soul.
Hipsters believe they are unique, separate from the masses, in a category all their own. Whereas, in fact, they are members of a particular tribe that worships an ephemeral set of symbols and shibboleths. If hipsters were animals, they would be sheep: the Outsider, a wolf.
If I have led the reader to believe I consider myself a member of the mysterious sect of the Outsider, I apologize. To be honest, I don’t know. What I do know is that during my life I have exhibited symptoms of both Outsider and hipster. However, as I age, I find myself becoming far more the former than the latter. In addition, regarding my earlier position on the transformative nature of certain select works of art, I will walk that back a bit as well. Great art may not transform us directly, but can serve as a catalyst providing a momentary insight into our true nature, and it is this epiphany that emboldens and empowers us to become more Authentic Selves.
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. (Colin Wilson, The Outsider)
* * * *