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

inner self ultimately call for an authoritative narrator and determine the lack of ironic
interplay between the different narrative levels. Hesse's characters express a modern
consciousness of the blurred boundaries between good and evil, they are aware of
the multifaceted and elusive riddle of their personality, yet this awareness does not
deter them from action or from taking a moral stand, they are not like Musil's
protagonist 'ohne Eigenschaften', they do not relinquish their quest for truth and
identity although, like Existentialists, they acknowledge the absurdity of life. As a
direct consequence of this approach, irony cannot be all-pervasive, and the
humorous handling of the material must be restricted Hesse's 'Humor7, like
Nietzsche's, betrays an adamant seriousness (see note 6 above).69 As observed in
connection with the discrepancy between Hesse's great international renown and the
more limited fortune of his work in Germany or the cleavage between the opinions of
his readership and the criticism of scholars (see preliminary section of Chapter 1), the
dichotomy between Hesse's form, often heavily influenced by the past, and his
message, the actuality of which captures the present and points to the future, appears
as a further aspect of his dialectical framework and one of its inevitable paradoxes.
Ironically, Hesse's shortcomings seem to stem from his merits: those (prevalently
formal) aspects of his oeuvre, which to a contemporary reader appear outdated and
bound to the nineteenth century, are the inevitable premise and counterpart of the
relevance and modernity of its content which, to date, has stood the test of time.
This chapter highlights the connections between the dialectics of 'Humor' and
temporality in Hesse's theoretical framework. Hesse's 'Humor' or 'Galgenhumor' is
indeed expression of the dualism between ideal and reality which, in turn, resonates
with the concept of Romantic irony and the tension between time and eternity. In
Hesse's works, the cleavage between ideal and real self often surfaces in the form of
self-irony and, on a formal level, is concomitant with the emergence of the themes of
the mirror and the double. In Der Steppenolf, the contrast between sublime and
mundane 'Humor', ideal and reality, transcendence and immanence, is symbolically
overcome through the common identity of Pablo and Mozart. The close of the
chapter questions Hesse's literary merits in the light of the lack of narrative irony, as
employed by Thomas Mann and a large number of Modernist authors, and
69 Commenting on the modernity of the Steppenwolf, Midgley observes: 'it [Der SteppenwolJ] captures that sense
of cultural crisis that was prevalent in Germany after the First World War. [...] And on the other hand it
expresses that awareness of personality as something disunited and disparate, which is an important strand in the
Modernist revolt against traditional methods of narrative representation' (12).
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