Hermann Hesse published Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game, in 1943. Not a great time to be writing in German. The novel is set in a utopian future where an organization of scholars, the Order, controls an educational and intellectual establishment. That organization is a lot like the Catholic hierarchy and monastic orders of western Europe during the middle ages. Members of the Order, apparently all male, remain poor, do not marry, and devote themselves to intellectual pursuits. All knowledge converges on an ultimate truth that is articulated and manipulated by the glass bead game. It is a very Neoplatonic vision, worthy of Ficino. There is early in the novel an explicit dialectic between the ideal, the Geist, and the worldly, called Natur, as represented by Knecht's friend Plinio.
A Confederacy of Dunces, as I have shown in "Dialectic of American Humanism", is a send up parody of Ficino's Neoplatonic ideas. It also features a dialectic with worldliness.
Thesis: Contrast the dialectic between Geist and Natur in Hesse's Magister Ludi with Toole's dialectic between worldliness and "Neoplatonism in drag."
