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

of time and the intrinsic difficulty of its definition, it pursues an indirect approach. 18
Indeed, the way Hesse's characters relate to their memories, for example their mixed
feelings towards their past, often offer more important insights into the character's
appreciation of time than do their dialogues. Hesse's use of the literary device of
'epiphany' is at times more revealing of his attitude towards time than are his direct
statements on the subject. His descriptions of timeless music and his idea of humour
as a feature of immortality can achieve a much more vigorous poetic formulation
than any of his direct pronouncements on eternity.
The exploration of temporality will therefore draw on five interconnected
themes, five inflections of time within Hesse's works: music, memory,
metamorphosis, eternity, and humour. These themes, which share the same
elusiveness of time it is equally difficult to pin down and describe their essence as
well as the psychological responses they trigger might seem completely unrelated,
at first glance. However they all point to time, as this thesis shall show, and interlock,
to a greater or lesser degree, in Hesse's literary production. First and foremost, tempo
and rhythm are primary elements of music which, like writing, unfolds through
time; and time, in turn, participates in the very essence of music as noted by Hesse:
'das Wesen der Musik [ist] Zeit' (Letter of c. 1940; Musik, 177). Scholars (Valentin,
Diirr, Ziolkowski, Moritz, Karalaschwili), biographers (Freedman, Limberg), and
Hesse himself, have repeatedly stressed the importance of music in his life and work,
as Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 will illustrate.
Chapter 4 focuses on memory first and then on metamorphosis. 19 Memory,
which is inconceivable without the concepts of past and present, acts as a bridge to
the childhood of many of Hesse's characters and, in a perspective redolent of
Rousseau's theories, Hesse identifies the ability to reconnect to childhood as being
the true gift of a poet: 'es ist den Dichtern gegeben, dafi sie sich mehr als andere
18 Although we all tend to have an instinctive, empirical knowledge of what time is, it is difficult to come up
with an exhaustive definition. In Confessiones (c. 397 A.D.), Saint Augustine gives a measure of the elusiveness
of the subject in his well-known answer to the question of what time is: 'Provided that no one asks me, I know.
If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know' (Book XI, 230).
19 The emergence of 'epiphanies' in Hesse's work will be discussed at the end of the chapter (section 6) as a link
with the discourse on the fleeting at the beginning of Chapter 5.