HERMANN HESSE AND THE DIALECTICS OF TIME Salvatore C. P. ...

Hesse's approach to memory and the way in which his personal experiences are
filtered through his works is the focus of the second section (4.2). Childhood, its
allure and its representations, together with childhood memories are the focus of the
third section (4.3), followed by an analysis of forgetting as an intrinsic component of
the process of remembrance (4.4). The penultimate section (4.5) explores Hesse's
idea and use of metamorphosis as a poetic and narrative device, while the last section
(4.6) draws attention to moments of sudden awakening and understanding for
Hesse's characters.
4.1 Identity
It was only during the Enlightenment and in the Romantic period that concepts of
'memory', 'identity', and 'the past' were analysed in conjunction with each other.
John Locke is the thinker who first prompted such a view at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, followed by Hume who, elaborating on the former's
speculations, laid great emphasis on the interrelation between memory and
imagination. 5 Two immediate corollaries descend from this shift in perspective
brought about by the two philosophers: on the one hand, memory became an
indispensable instrument of investigation of the 'self, while on the other
memory [could] no longer be relied upon to be faithful and historically
accurate to the past that it records, and it therefore [became] difficult to 'know'
the past, to distinguish clearly between remembered and imagined realities.
(Whitehead, 60)
A further result of the contribution of Locke and Hume was that narrative
progressively became the medium of memory, and this consequence becomes
apparent during the Romanticism, a period in which memory assumes a crucial
position for writers:
[Romantics] gave special prominence to memory through their natural
inclination for nostalgia, a reverence for childhood as the pristine, edenic state,
5 'David Hume's account of memory in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) consciously builds on and
extends Locke, but also anticipates the work of the Romantic writers in closely allying the faculties of memory
and the imagination' (Whitehead, 59).
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