The Work Between Narcissus and Goldmund
This essay discusses Narcissus and Goldmund in full, including its ending.
Goldmund’s application for an apprenticeship begins with an aesthetic theory. After years on the road, he has noticed how a body repeats its characteristic forms: a forehead can correspond to a knee, a shoulder to a hip. He has also witnessed an expression during childbirth that resembles the expression of intense pleasure. These discoveries have troubled and fascinated him without finding a use.
Then he encounters a wooden Madonna by Master Niklaus. The face seems to hold suffering transformed into happiness. His scattered perceptions suddenly acquire a destination: he wants to learn how to make something like it.
Niklaus listens, then asks what he can do with his hands.
This meeting in Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund gives the novel’s argument a practical test. Its paired protagonists can initially appear to divide the human world between them: Narcissus studies and thinks within the monastery, while Goldmund pursues desire, danger, and experience outside it. Sculpture demands capacities that this division cannot conveniently keep apart.
A feeling needs a form. A remembered face requires selection, persistence, and technical competence before anybody else can encounter it in wood. Hesse makes the workshop a place where the sensual wanderer must learn a discipline, and where his attachment to the intellectual friend can become the source of an image.
Master Niklaus is unimpressed
The master’s reply restores the scale of the undertaking:
This is a workshop, and here we work, we do not chatter; what counts here is not what someone has thought up and knows how to say, but solely what he knows how to produce with his hands. — Chapter X; translated for this essay from the cited German edition.
The speech contains a rebuke that the novel itself needs. Goldmund can speak of the unity within a body, and Hesse can make the speech eloquent, but neither accomplishment supplies the carving. Niklaus redirects attention toward an activity whose results resist a flattering description.
Hesse earns the master’s authority through the Madonna that brought Goldmund there. This is no philistine who has failed to appreciate a sensitive young man. An actual achievement authorizes his refusal to confuse a promising interpretation with an existing skill.
The apprenticeship also complicates Goldmund’s perception of him. He reveres the artist and comes to resent the respectable citizen, the commissions, money, assistants, and provision for a daughter. The judgments expose a real conflict between making necessary work and maintaining a prosperous workshop. They also expose the apprentice’s impatience with the conditions under which his admired objects get made.
Niklaus has reservations of his own. His new pupil is unreliable, prone to disappearing into pleasure and quarrels. Yet the master watches a figure develop that justifies a patience he does not extend easily. Hesse lets the unfinished work mediate their disagreement. Neither has to approve the whole person in order to acknowledge what the other can make.
For Goldmund, more than three years of artistic learning have also meant surrendering a freedom he regards as indispensable. He can still disappear for days, but he has to return to the same work. Hesse makes the cost measurable through this curtailed wandering. Artistic vocation acquires something of the binding force Goldmund associated with the monastery: a demand that outlasts his immediate pleasure. Its authority now grows from an image he wants to bring into existence. The wanderer has discovered a reason to stay that the inherited plan for his life could never give him.
This is a firmer basis for the novel’s defense of art than its occasional celebrations of inspired intensity. In his 1969 review, George Steiner recoiled from the sweetness and “rhapsodic abstractions” of Narcissus and Goldmund. The objection can stick where elevation supplies its own evidence. Niklaus’s workshop establishes another standard: a piece either develops beneath the hands or remains an attractive possibility.
A friend, a disciple, a piece of wood
The figure is Saint John, intended for a Crucifixion group. Its human source is Narcissus, the friend who helped Goldmund understand that the monastic vocation he inherited from his father did not fit him.
Hesse therefore makes the supposedly sensual life preserve its attachment to the life of thought. Goldmund has carried Narcissus with him through years in which the two have had no daily contact. Carving gives that continued attachment an object beyond private recollection.
The work proceeds differently from his more impulsive pleasures. He returns to it in periods of readiness and devotion; the emerging figure restores his concentration after disorder. Hesse describes the process through an arresting redistribution of agency:
Rather, it was the other, it was Narcissus, who used his artist’s hands to step out of the transience and changeability of life and present the pure image of his being. — Chapter XI; translated for this essay from the cited German edition.
Narcissus seems to act through Goldmund’s hands, turning the remembered friend into an active demand upon the sculptor. Goldmund cannot make the face mean whatever happens to suit his mood. Affection has produced a constraint: the work must become adequate to the person held in memory.
John’s identity adds a further relation. Goldmund is carving a disciple whose attentive posture can carry something of the friendship through which he himself was awakened. The image belongs to a religious commission, a remembered person, and an intimate history of learning. Hesse lets those meanings coexist within the same physical task.
The completed statue does not abolish loss. Goldmund carefully removes the last wood dust, contemplates what he has made, and feels the coming separation. The figure will remain; the activity that has given his days a center is over. Tomorrow it will no longer wait for his hands.
That change is one of the novel’s most exact observations about completion. Finishing produces an independent work and deprives the maker of an ongoing relation to it. Hesse follows admiration into unease without requiring the statue to become less beautiful. A finished object can exceed its maker’s lifetime while leaving the next morning painfully empty.
The eventual reunion with Narcissus returns the image to conversation. Goldmund tells him that he has already named him John, through the figure he carved years earlier. Narcissus’s response asks whether Goldmund had still thought of him. The large opposition between intellect and sensuality contracts into a question whose vulnerability neither man can answer with a theory alone.
The philosopher has to look
Narcissus later helps Goldmund clarify what art has offered him. Goldmund begins with duration: works survive some of the lives from which they come. His friend accepts the value of survival but presses the definition further. A saint or Madonna cannot be adequately explained as the preserved appearance of one mortal model.
Goldmund agrees:
The original image of a good work of art is not an actual, living figure, although that figure can provide the occasion for it. The original image is not flesh and blood; it is spiritual. It is an image whose home is in the artist’s soul. — Chapter XVII; translated for this essay from the cited German edition.
This exchange makes the initial division between the friends inadequate. The wanderer has found something he can describe as spiritual within the work of his senses and hands. The thinker can help name the experience because he is willing to attend to what the artist has done. Hesse makes conversation productive when it follows the work and becomes answerable to it.
The novel’s language of masculine intellect and maternal life nevertheless remains restrictive. Its symbolic arrangement often assigns experiences to one parental side before their particulars have earned the division. Goldmund’s actual apprenticeship is more various: recollection, observation, desire, self-restraint, manual learning, and a friend’s questions all contribute. The workshop gives the argument more resources than its gendered labels can contain.
Nor does the imagined reconciliation guarantee that every desired image will become a work. Goldmund carries the figure of the great mother as his most ambitious possibility, but he dies without making it. Near the end, he imagines her hands shaping him instead. The relation between maker and material has been reversed at the point where his own hands lose their power.
That unmade figure prevents the novel’s artistic promise from becoming a complete solution. Experience can remain larger than what an artist succeeds in embodying. The existence of Saint John establishes an achievement without proving that all the life surrounding it can be redeemed through another carving.
Hesse gifts this friendship a comparable incompleteness. Narcissus can help Goldmund get hold of some kind of language for his work, but he cannot occupy the life that produced it. What passes between them is more specific: a face remembered long enough to be worked into wood, and a finished object through which the thinker discovers how persistently he has been loved.
Sources
Hermann Hesse, Narziß und Goldmund: Erzählung, S. Fischer, Berlin, 1930, Project Gutenberg no. 79173. Principal passages: Chapter V on the friends’ early division; Chapters IX–XI on sculpture, the apprenticeship, and Saint John; Chapter XVII on reunion and art; Chapter XX on the unmade mother figure. English block quotations were translated for this essay from this German edition.
George Steiner, “Eastward Ho!”, The New Yorker, 1969. The response here concerns his criticism of the novel’s emotional sweetness and abstraction.
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