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

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

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traces the heritage of this tradition back to Lessing, notes that writers of any time are<br />

forced to call on images if they attempt to 'transduce' music into the medium of<br />

words:<br />

[the] creation of the illusion of 'musical7 motion within a 'musical landscape'<br />

seems the most successful solution to this problem. Strangely enough, [...]<br />

prose tends to create 'space' to demonstrate musical movement, although<br />

prose as such has its own progressive (linguistic) motion in time (cf. Lessing's<br />

Laokoon). Is it conceivable, then, that prose working with the 'nonspatial'<br />

material of words must be inevitably 'unfaithful' to its own principles to be<br />

able to make musical movement more 'visible'?53 (1968,154)<br />

Rilke's 'An die Musik' (1918) offers a paradigmatic example of Scher's argument:<br />

Musik: Atem der Statuen. Vielleicht:<br />

Stille der Bilder. Du Sprache wo Sprachen<br />

enden. Du Zeit,<br />

die senkrecht steht auf der Richtung vergehender Herzen.<br />

Gefuhle zu wem? O du der Gefuhle<br />

Wandlung in was? -: in horbare Landschaft.<br />

Du Fremde: Musik. Du uns entwachsener<br />

Herzraum. Innigstes unser,<br />

das, uns iibersteigend, hinausdrangt, -<br />

heiliger Abschied:<br />

da uns das Innre umsteht<br />

als geiibteste Feme, als andre<br />

Seite der Luft:<br />

rein,<br />

riesig,<br />

nicht mehr bewohnbar. (1955-1966, 111)<br />

Pronounced similarities link this poem with Hesse's poetics and aesthetics. As in<br />

Hesse, music equals time (cf. 'Das Wesen der Musik ist Zeit' in 5.2) and is the<br />

language where words lose their power (cf. 'Sprache ohne Worte' in Chapter 2,<br />

section 4.1). The idea of transformation ('Wandlung'), especially the transmutation of<br />

the temporal into the visual ('horbare Landschaft'), is integral to Rilke's poem. As we<br />

will note in the rest of this section, two further elements point us towards Hesse's<br />

Morgenlandfahrt, where H. H. states: 'meine Gesellschaft bestand aus den Lieblingsfiguren meiner Bucher, es<br />

ritten Almansor und ParzivaF (SW 4, 547).<br />

53 Although he approaches the question from a different angle, Tom Service underlines the common temporal<br />

denominator in the concurrent exposition to a piece of music and a landscape: 'The deep connection between the<br />

experience of a piece of music and the experience of a landscape is their shared temporality' (13).<br />

157

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