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

Modernist distance from the norms of Realist writing and its bourgeois
readership that his novel [Steppenwolfl seems at first to open up. (94)
In tune with Stewards observation, Hesse, who must have been conscious of the
limitations of his art on a formal level, regarded himself as a traditional writer who
rarely tries his hands at experimenting with new forms, as the following excerpt
from a letter of 1949 illustrates:
Ich bin, glaube ich, iiberhaupt immer als Literat ein Traditionalist gewesen,
mit wenigen Ausnahmen war ich mit einer iiberkommenen Form, einer
gangbaren Machart, einem Schema zufrieden, es lag mir nie daran, formal
Neues zu bringen, Avantgardist und «Wegbereiter» zu sein. (GS VII, 683)
It is however interesting that, despite the formal limitations of Hesse's fiction, which
betrays a predominantly nineteenth-century approach, where 'the reader is [...]
asked to respond as to a traditional narrative contract, to "believe" an authoritative
narrative voice7 (Stewart, 93), Hesse's work still enjoys wide currency among readers
and great attention from critics almost fifty years after his death. Without the
ambition of giving an exhausting picture of his fortunes through the years or the
intention of extending the discussion to all the factors that contribute to the modern
appeal of his work, it is worth singling out a facet of his style that accounts for the
singularity of Hesse's case. Magris, who like Stewart expresses reservations about the
'modernity' of Hesse, identifies an aspect of his artistry which compensates for the
lack of narrative irony and, indeed, appears as its necessary counterpart:
Hesse expresses his poetic truths with unequivocal and direct clarity,
something that has meant that his work has been confined within the literary
tradition of the nineteenth century, and prevented him from transcending, on
a formal and linguistic level, the nineteenth-century psychological self, a
transcendence that he in fact portrays, thematically. It is in this aspect of his
artistry that both the great appeal and the limitations of Hesse's work rest.68
(1977, XXI; my translation).
The clear-cut perspective projected by Hesse's works, the intensively passionate and
idealist impetus of his heroes, and the often uncompromising exploration of their
68 The premise of Magris' statement reads: 'Despite everything, Hesse's work lacks irony: while irony is present
in the narrative, the kaleidoscopic irony that touches human illusions and forms of life, there is no irony directed
back at itself, at its playing with forms, or at the message the author seeks thereby to convey' (ibid.).
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