HERMANN HESSE AND THE DIALECTICS OF TIME Salvatore C. P. ...
HERMANN HESSE AND THE DIALECTICS OF TIME Salvatore C. P. ... 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seem to stem from his merits: those (prevalently formal) aspects of his oeuvre, which to a contemporary reader appear outdated and bound to the nineteenth century, are the inevitable premise and counterpart of the relevance and modernity of its content which, to date, has stood the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). 195
concludes that what might seem a shortcoming is in fact the inevitable counterpart of one of the most compelling facets of Hesse and his protagonists: morality. 196
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- Page 169 and 170: und die Worte waren kleine schwarme
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- Page 175 and 176: of experience may be arbitrary and
- Page 177 and 178: identified by Ziolkoski (see Chapte
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- Page 181 and 182: however, the dualism of 'ideal' and
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concludes that what might seem a shortcoming is in fact the inevitable counterpart of<br />
one of the most compelling facets of Hesse and his protagonists: morality.<br />
196
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