The fiction works of Hesse are characterized by a protagonist who pursues a psychological and spiritual quest. The Journey to the East presents an imaginary or aspirational journey wherein “the East” is an imagined goal never approximated. But the journey is never finished, in part, because the pilgrims or travelers have identified themselves as members of the League, a secret society of intellectuals and artists over time and geography, bound to its precepts and rules. Thus, Hesse’s imaginary presentation is not an historical or real journey, but neither is it an ideal conveyance, ultimately a failed one.
The impulse to seek wisdom in the East is not an unusual theme after the mid-nineteenth century translations of Eastern classics began to appear in the West. Images of India, China, Tibet, and Persia were conjured, and new voices in philosophy and thought. But Hesse’s prerequisite League in The Journey to the East represents an imagined equivalent of travels eastward by theosophists and esotericists into the twentieth century. Hesse subordinates the quest to the institution (the League) which follows the fate Christianity wherein the quest for wisdom was largely suborned to the ecclesiastical institution and its ritual, doctrine, and hierarchy of authority.
When the protagonist drops out of the physical journey, disillusioned by its secretive habits, he eventually is summoned to discipline by the League in a Kafkaesque trial. This is, for the protagonist, not inevitablenand necessary, for the League is a secret society not a governmental regime, but the protagonist conforms to the League. Hesse renounces the autonomy of the protagonist to affirm the power of the League rather than dismissing it, banishing it, as the protagonist of Hesse’s Siddharta does, embracing not institution, not authority, not the world, but wisdom. Thus the psychological fracus of the Journey protagonist is not unlike the failed protagonist of The Glass Bead Game who quit is the sheltered “league” of Castalia,the intellectual community that proposes itself an alternative to the world, only to be quickly and decisively consumed by the world, even unto death.
Hesse did not follow the advice from his 1920 book Wandering, where he wisely notes: “The way to salvation leads … into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace.”