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

correlative' of childhood in Hesse. 14 Mentions of the violin (its sound, a violin case, or
violin lessons) that Hesse learnt in his childhood serve a similar purpose and are
dispersed throughout Hesse's literary output, from his early fiction up to Die
Morgenlandfahrt.
Since Romanticism, then, we are aware of the contribution of memory in
shaping individuals7 identity and the possible 'distortions' brought about by
imagination (see 4.1.). Elaborating on his experience in a concentration camp in 'The
Memory of the Offence' (first chapter of The drowned and the saved), Primo Levi
stresses that frequently narrated memories, like stories in an oral tradition, move
away from the original at every retelling:
it is also true that a memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a
story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience,
crystallised, perfect, adorned, which installs itself in the place of the raw
memory and grows at its expense. (11-12)
If memory in general cannot be regarded as a faithful record of one's identity,
childhood memories raise even more problematic questions. As Freud stresses in
connection with a patient affected by a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (the
case of the 'Rattenman'):
man [mufi] sich vor allem daran erinnern, dafi die »Kindheitserinnerungen«
der Menschen erst in einem spateren Alter (meist zur Zeit der Pubertat)
festgestellt und dabei einem komplizierten Umarbeitungsprozefi unterzogen
werden, welcher der Sagenbildung eines Volkes iiber seine Urgeschichte
durchaus analog ist. (1909, 27-28)
Hesse celebrates childhood almost unreservedly throughout his works, it was
clearly a vital, formative period of his life, and his accounts of his own childhood are
often more reminiscent of fairytales; in the epigraph of 'Kurzgefasster Lebenslauf, he
states that his autobiographical sketches are 'in marchenhafter und halb
humoristischer Form' (SW 12, 46). Childhood refracted through his words appears as
an ideal moment of purity and innocence his characters turn to when they seek
14 In 'Hamlet and his problems', T. S. Eliot defines an objective correlative as 'a set of objects, a situation, a
chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked' (1920, pp. 85-86).
15 The protagonist and narrator of this novel is a violinist.
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