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

The emphasis on the mimetic aspects led, as a consequence, to an intensified interest
in recounting the minutiae of everyday life and, coupled with this interest, a
penchant for everything that was passing and transitory:
Just as modern artists found value in the trivial, so they became fascinated
with the fleeting. Doubtful of immortality, they turned against it and
cherished mortality; afraid of death, they worshiped life. Since they could
endow nothing else with permanence, they began, paradoxically, to attribute
it to whatever is most ephemeral, to value things because they are evanescent.
(Beja, 50)
Epiphany, viewed as a sudden moment of understanding, is a literary device
indicative of the strong interest authors of this period took in the 'fleeting7 . 10 Unlike
modernist writers, Hesse did not indulge in the description of the smallest details of
everyday life, yet he shared their interest in the ephemeral. This attention is not only
mirrored in the presence of epiphanies in his oeuvre (see Chapter 4, section 6) but
permeates his creative process at large. The fleeting is inflected as the evanescence of
beauty, '[d]as Schone zieht einen Teil seines Zaubers aus der Verganglichkeit7 (Musik,
108), and appears in the form of an imperative to capture the fugacity of artistic
inspiration in 'Eine Arbeitsnacht7 (1928): 'jetzt oder nie mufi das Material gefafit und
in die Form gebracht werden, sonst ist es zu spat7 (SW 12,124)." In Der Steppenwolf,
Hermine and life in general are described as 'stets nur Augenblick 7 (SW 4,110), and a
single bar of music condenses and discloses the secret of the 'Immortals7 to Haller:
ich [hatte] manche Male und erst noch ganz vor kurzem mich den
Unsterblichen nah genug gefuhlt [...], um in einem Takt alter Musik die ganze
kuhle, helle, hart lachelnde Weisheit der Unsterblichen mitzukosten. (SW 4,
71)
The attention to caducity has an important corollary and a crucial point for our
discussion: the pairing of the 'fleeting 7 with 'eternity 7 in the elaborations and works
of this period, as apparent, for example, in the discourse on memory and epiphany.
10 Ziolkowski considers 'epiphany' as a reliable barometer of a new attitude in literature: 'In the epiphany the
protagonist perceives the essence of things that lies hidden behind their empirical reality, and as such the
epiphany is another symptom of the modern turn away from realism toward a new mysticism' (1965, 172-73).
11 The idea of beauty as inextricably perishable echoes throughout his works and correspondence: 'Schonheit', it
reads in Kurgast, '[ist] nur im Verganglichen mOglich' (SW 12, 116).
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