Las Posiciones

Following the above exercise, the words that are specific per character per time frame were

researched, meaning I calculated which words the characters use in one time frame, but not in both others. The results can be found in Appendix C-2.

When looking at the words that are exclusive to one particular time frame, a similar pattern arises: In Siddhartha’s time frame exclusive words, growth is visible. Words that are exclusive to time frame 1 are mostly words to do with Lehre, that are all not used in time frame 2 an 3. Again, ‘liebe’ and ‘lieben’ are exclusive to his fourth time frame (their third and final conversation). These are words that are exclusive to his enlightened state. Govinda, again, shows no clear pattern, illustrating that he has no time frame specific themes or stages, this being another argument for him being static.

67 4.3.3.3. Themes

Having seen how static Govinda really seems when it comes to his vocabulary, and how his

conversations with Govinda prompt Siddhartha to speak of the themes he has yet to come to terms with, it might very well prove useful to find out how often both characters speak of each theme, and when. In order to make this visible, a line graph for each theme was created (figure 24). Each graph shows the relative use of words connected to each theme per time frame. The blue line, along with the dotted blue trend line, shows Siddhartha’s progress. The red lines are Govinda’s.

So far, I have used the word list that was created when I defined the themes in section 4.3.1.1. to do analyses like this. However, since the analysis in section 4.2.3.1. showed more words belonging to some of the themes, I added those words to this analysis for the purpose of the next query. This proves how using topic modelling alone, along with all synonyms of a word belonging to a theme, is clearly not enough to find all relevant words in a theme, which makes an analysis less precise. When it comes to larger text chunks, as was the case in the theme sections of the case study, this is not as much of a problem as it is in this case, where just short passages containing dialogues are analysed. Thus, the following words have in this case been added to my earlier list: for Lehre: ‘befragt’, ‘Übungen’, ‘Gotama’, ‘fasten’, ‘Durst’, ‘pilgerst’, ‘Samana’, ‘Brahmanenschule’, ‘Brahmane’, ‘Versenkung’ and ‘Betäubung’; for searching:’finden’, ‘Pfad’ and ‘findet’, and for time: ‘schnell’. Adding these words to the original list results in the graphs below.

68 Figure 24. Comparison of Theme Use by Govinda and Siddhartha7

When looking at the graph for Lehre it is unsurprising to see that their use of the theme goes down gradually. The second graph, portraying the use of the love theme, makes visible that both Govinda and Siddhartha use the terms attached to this theme more often by the end of their journey than they do at the start, which shows its importance to both characters. After all, they would not be able to reach their final enlightenment without it.

The third graph shows the results of the query for the theme ‘searching’. This theme being quite implicit, as was mentioned before, means that it is not a popular one in the friends’

69 vocabularies. Siddhartha uses it exactly zero times in their second dialogue. The last dialogue shows him mentioning the terms to Govinda, as this is when he lectures Govinda about his conviction that one should not search for enlightenment. Govinda does in fact speak about the theme a few times across their dialogues. However, when looking at how the word is used in these dialogues, it

becomes clear that he does not do so as a result of a philosophical conversation, which again makes it impossible to draw conclusions about the use of this particular theme.

Lastly, there is the graph showing the results for ‘time’. What is noteworthy about this particular graph is that the two lines meet each other in the last dialogue, showing how Govinda and Siddhartha end their focus on the time theme on a similar note. However, they do start off with both lines being quite far away from each other; time is barely an issue worth mentioning for Govinda in the friends’ first dialogue. In the second conversation he goes on to speak of it more often. In fact, he even does so as much as Siddhartha does. This makes it necessary once again to zoom in on the original text, from which it appears that the explanation for Govinda’s focus on the time theme stems from the following speech:

»Immer sind wir Mönche unterwegs, solange nicht Regenzeit ist, immer ziehen wir von Ort zu Ort, leben nach der Regel, verkündigen die Lehre, nehmen Almosen, ziehen weiter. Immer ist es so. Du aber, Siddhartha, wo gehst du hin?«104

Siddhartha, at this point, has just woken up in the forest, as was discussed in chapter 3, an event which has previously been interpreted as him being reborn in the cycle of Sansara. Govinda’s focus on the time theme in this instance shows that he is stuck in this cycle of doing the same thing over and over again as well. This is an interesting discovery, as Siddhartha, at this point, has just been through a similar experience albeit through his city life, and is now confronted with Govinda, who has not gone through a rebirth and sticks with his old Samana ways, rather than changing his ways like Siddhartha will do after their conversation. Thus, Siddhartha’s basis at this point is very clearly in the midst of Sansara himself. From my close reading of the novel, we already know that Siddhartha leaves Govinda feeling full of love. This underlines the difference between them: His conversation with Govinda, his basis who is in the midst of Sansara at this point still, gives Siddhartha the opportunity to work towards getting past Sansara himself.

70 Having seen each graph individually, interesting aspects can also be found when comparing the four graphs. Firstly, Govinda starts off with a lower score for all themes than Siddhartha has. Subsequently, however, his lines take on the same shapes as Siddhartha’s have. As Siddhartha develops in how often and in what way he speaks of the various themes during their three

conversations, Govinda clearly speaks of similar themes, albeit less often. This is despite the fact that he still follows the exact same path that he followed when the two left the Brahmans, at the very start of the story. Thus, Govinda does converse with Siddhartha about the topics that are vital to enlightenment, and actively mentions words to do with each important theme, whereas he still stays on their original path of living by a Lehre. Judging from these graphs, it is Siddhartha who speaks about each theme most extensively, from which it may be deducted that he has to bring his basis with him to enlightenment, in making him speak about those themes, too. Clearly, Govinda

influences him, as could be seen from chapter 3 as well as from the graph for the time theme in this section, but these particular graphs show that Siddhartha is not the only one who is influenced by their conversations. Thus far I have argued that Govinda has an influence on Siddhartha in the way that he makes Siddhartha reflect, but apparently their conversations also make Govinda speak about the four important themes. The fact that their lines are parallel to each other show that theme wise, they are roughly going the same way.

Lastly, their opposite roles show clearly when looking at the graphs for love and Lehre. This is the only graph in which their lines cross, showing how Govinda still speaks of the term often,

whereas Siddhartha’s use drops. Incidentally, during this conversation, as can be seen from the line graphs, Govinda does not mention a single word connected to the love theme, whereas Siddhartha’s use of words connected to this theme starts growing. As was mentioned, this is also the one

conversation that leaves Siddhartha full of love. This is interesting, as apparently Siddhartha’s love is evoked by someone who feels and does the opposite to Siddhartha himself.

4.3.3.4. Sentiment Analysis

Diving further into an analysis of the dialogue Govinda and Siddhartha have together, another sentiment analysis was used. A first analysis was done in order to find out if the three dialogues might affect Siddhartha’s emotional arc. However, from this it quickly became clear that, when it comes to the use of emotionally loaded words, the dialogues do not possess an influence on the emotional vocabulary of the story in the slightest. The following plots are the result of dividing the story into four time frames and using Jockers’ syuzhet once more. Figure 25 shows that the narrative has a regular fall-rise-fall-rise pattern. Figure 26 shows how the dialogue between time frames 2 and

71 3 fits in, and makes visible that this dialogue does not affect the curve of Siddhartha’s emotional arc in the slightest.

Figure 25.

Figure 26.

A second sentiment analysis was carried out in order to find the differences in sentiment

development between Govinda and Siddhartha during their dialogues. Rather than analysing the sentiment over the narrative time, i.e. per sentence, this time Jockers’ syuzhet was used to acquire the sentiment values per time frame. I acquired these values by taking all values per sentence, and calculating the mean of all sentences per time frame. Rather than just the three main conversations,

72 all dialogues in chapters in which both Govinda and Siddhartha were present were used, to get a clearer idea of their emotional arc across the entire story. This resulted in the plot in figure 27. The dotted lines show the trend lines for each character.

Figure 27. Comparison of Govinda (red) and Siddhartha’s (blue) Emotional Valence

What is striking about this plot is how even here, on an emotional spectrum, Govinda remains fairly static. The tone of his vocabulary, even when it comes to the words he uses that have an emotional connotation, remains similar throughout the entire story. Siddhartha’s positive word use however, as became clear in the previous section, grows and grows. This shows how Govinda is a continuous presence, forming a basis. One would of course expect his arc to go up by the time he reaches enlightenment, but he only reaches enlightenment after the conversation finishes, so it makes sense that his enlightenment is not in fact reflected in figure 27.

4.4. Results

This case study has been driven by the same research question that was used for my close reading of

Siddhartha, as discussed in chapter 2. This study however was an attempt to analyse the novel using

a distant reading instead. The study has been an example of a micro-study as defined in the introduction of this thesis, in the sense that the acquired data was used to supply and enhance my original analysis with.

73 This study was divided into three parts: theme development, character development and Govinda’s role. Firstly, the use of computational methods to analyse the progression of the four main themes – love, Lehre, time and searching – has proven to be quite useful, in the sense that this analysis made it possible to properly see at what points during the story they are relevant. The most interesting result of this particular section is the negative correlation between Lehre and love that became visible as a result of the dispersion plots in figure 9. As was mentioned in chapter 2, the story is characterised by Siddhartha rejecting religious dogma as well as by the importance of

unconditional love. It was very clearly illustrated in figure 9 that this notion is reflected quite

strikingly in the vocabulary used throughout the novel: During Siddhartha’s journey, words belonging to the theme of Lehre are used increasingly less; words connected to ‘love’ however are used more and more often. Adding to that, Hesse’s chosen vocabulary proved a point in chapter 11, the

enlightenment chapter: In this chapter, not a single word connected to Lehre was used, emphasising its irrelevance when it comes to finding enlightenment.

Secondly, the character development of both Siddhartha and Govinda was analysed. This analysis showed how Siddhartha’s growth is quite visibly reflected in his vocabulary. An example of this is the fact that Siddhartha’s growth manifested in an increasingly positively worded vocabulary. What is more, it also showed how Siddhartha’s use of words such as ‘mehr’ and ‘Leben’ reflects his growth as well. In the case of ‘mehr’, we have seen that Siddhartha goes from thinking in a time- centred way to him starting to understand that all is one. A similar phenomenon could be inferred from his use of ‘Leben’, which he uses initially in the context of a life in stages, but which he goes on to use in the context of life being a unity; of it being part of an endless, timeless cycle. When looking at Govinda, his presumed lack of developments was found to be reflected in his vocabulary as well. Both the notion that he has a predilection for living life by a Lehre as well as the notion that he has an insecure nature were supported by his most frequently used words. This analysis of the two

characters showed, above all, that Siddhartha’s developments are not just to be found in his actions, or in the way that the themes change over the course of the novel: They are also present on a deeper layer, namely in the vocabulary that Hesse used. This is a discovery that could not have been made as clearly and easily through a close reading alone, showing the value of the combination of close an distant reading.

Thirdly and finally, an attempt was made to answer the main question of this study: What is Govinda’s role? Here too various discoveries could be made with the aid of a distant reading. After my close reading of the text I firstly described Govinda as Siddhartha’s sidekick, who makes Siddhartha reflect on his life. In this case study it was proven with the help of computational methods that Govinda does indeed make Siddhartha reflect on his life. This was done with the help

74 of the word lists showing which words Siddhartha used in one dialogue, but does not use in the others (section 4.3.3.2.). It became visible from this that during each of these dialogues Siddhartha reflects on a theme that he still has to come to terms with, which allows him to grow. Not only that, these lists also showed that in the very end, when Siddhartha is an enlightened man, the final

conversation between the two friends then proceeds to cover all themes that not Siddhartha himself, but Govinda should still come to terms with, so that they both get to reach enlightenment in the end. This brings me back to Patnaik’s interpretation of the friends, as discussed in chapter 2. In my original interpretation I went against his claim that Govinda represents the philosophy that Siddhartha should unlearn. However, the friends’ dialogues all cause Siddhartha to speak of themes on which he should ‘unlearn’ his current stance. On first glance, this seems to speak for Patnaik’s interpretation rather than against it after all. However, Siddhartha clearly should not leave Govinda behind. It is quite the contrary: In the end, after bringing up all important themes to Govinda, Siddhartha finally pulls him with him, so that they can end their journey the way they started it: together.

The two friends coming together again in the end brings me back to my interpretation of Govinda as a part of Siddhartha’s, which is my main interpretation of the two characters. In my close reading I interpreted them as being two opposite parts of a whole. With the help of this case study I was able to support this claim. This, because Govinda proved to be quite static when it comes to his vocabulary, whereas Siddhartha’s choice of words is more dynamic and shows growth. As was mentioned above, Siddhartha speaks of different themes during each of their dialogues. Govinda however does not show any such pattern. He sticks to his Lehre, whilst Siddhartha does not. Another finding that supports this interpretation is the comparative sentiment analysis of the two friends that was shown in figure 27, in which Govinda also remains static, whereas Siddhartha’s vocabulary gets more and more positive.

Not only did I interpret Govinda and Siddhartha as opposite parts of one Self. My original interpretation also touched on Govinda being the basis of the unity that the two friends formed at the start of their journey. This theory was derived from Jung’s philosophy, in which it is described that the basis – after the unity that one is born with falls apart – remains present throughout the rest of one’s life. Indeed, as Govinda’s vocabulary does not show any developments, this supports the idea of him as a constant in Siddhartha’s life that originated from his life living by a Lehre. This interpretation was also quite clearly visualised in figure 23, where Govinda’s vocabulary is shown to be most comparable to that of the first time frame in Siddhartha’s life, that of Lehre. Clearly, when it comes to Govinda’s vocabulary, he really is a basis that Siddhartha keeps returning to.

75 Additionally, chapter 3 drew the comparison of Siddhartha to the Bhagavad Gita, in the sense that like Krishna and Arjuna, Siddhartha and Govinda need each other to be completed in the end. This point of view could also be confirmed with the help of the data generated in this chapter. After all, it was already mentioned above that the two make each other reflect on terms they need to come to terms with, as such allowing one another to reach enlightenment. This leads to what Alf Hiltebeitel called a ‘total identification’ in the end, as the two friends come together again in the