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

A third aspect of Hesse's clash with the reality of everyday life and society
is his rejection of an all too rigid and conventional idea of personality (see his views
on mental insanity and schizophrenia below). In this respect, his attitude is steeped
in the scientific and cultural debate at the turn of the 20 th century, when the idea of
personality, or identity, as a fixed, immutable and determined whole, wa
s challenged, for instance, by new research in the field of psychoanalysis and
psychiatry. 27 Questions around the perception of the self are a common denominator
in the literary work of the time (see, for example, Pirandello's Uno, Nessuno e
Centomila [One, No one and One Hundred Thousand]) as well as in the fine arts and their
techniques (see the complex and fragmented perspective of Cubism). 28
The protagonists of Hesse's novels, too, are confronted with this problem: they
have to come to grips with their numerous selves and their multifaceted, and
therefore elusive, personalities (see especially Klingsors letzter Sommer, Siddhartha, and
Der Steppenwolf). Govinda, scrutinising an old Siddhartha, sees a multitude of faces
and images emanating from his friend's face:
eine lange Reihe, einen stromenden Flufi von Gesichtern, von Hunderten, von
Tausenden, welche alle kamen und vergingen, [...] und keine starb doch, jede
verwandelte sich nur, wurde stets neu geboren, bekam stets ein neues Gesicht,
ohne dafi doch zwischen einem und dem andern Gesicht Zeit gelegen ware.29
(SW 3, 470-71)
Hesse felt uncomfortable when other people expected him to conform to what
they had identified as his personality, namely the image of him they had built up and
layered in their memory. As transliterated into the fiction of 'Kurzgefasster
Lebenslauf, he resisted his friends' criticism about his budding interest in painting at
the age of forty, as they felt it was absorbing him completely: 'sie mochten gerne, dafi
man bleibt, was man war, dafi man sein Gesicht nicht andert. Aber mein Gesicht
ausgespannten Teppich meiner jugendlichsten Gliickstraume wie eine lind bewegte Musik, oder wie eine
duftende Erinnerung, oder wie der Geist einer verklarten, tiefgrundigen Jugendzeit' (ESM, SW 1, 188).
27 In 1908, Eugen Bleuler coined the term 'Schizophrenia'. As Boulby notes, '[b]y 1916, certainly, and possibly
very much earlier, Hesse was well acquainted with the works of Freud, Jung, Bleuler, and Stekel' (Boulby, 85).
28 The first phase of Cubism developed at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, while Pirandello
commenced writing Uno, nessuno e centomila in 1909, although it was only to appear between 1925 and 1926.
29 Klingsor looks into a mirror which reflects a kaleidoscope of images of himself; these fade into each other,
dissolve and reappear in a constant cycle. See section 6.4 ('the mirror').
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