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

In the discussions on music in Chapters 2 and 3, attention has naturally been
drawn to the existing works of criticism that deal with the legacy of Mozart, and his
connections with the character of Pablo in Der Steppenwolf. This thesis, however, has
sought to highlight in particular the less obvious affinities between Hesse and
Wagner which are as yet unexplored by scholars, who have possibly been misled by
Hesse's bias against Wagner and the overtones of his music. Both Wagner and Hesse
express similar synaesthetic aims (see Chapter 2), the structural modernity of both
Tristan und Isolde and Der Steppenwolf lends itself to the parallel illustrated in Chapter
3, and finally, Hesse's emphasis on the transformation of time into space resonates
with the libretto of Wagner's Parsifal (Chapter 5).
As fundamental to a musician as to a writer is memory.4 It stores the past and,
not surprisingly, plays a crucial role in Hesse's oeuvre right from his early work, as
noted above in relation to Hermann Lauscher. Hesse's main characters seek to
reconnect to or come to terms with their childhood, which represents the fulcrum of
their psychological and emotional characterization. Childhood is also associated with
the Orient which, as in Die Morgenlandfahrt, is portrayed as 'the cradle of humanity',
an idealised place and the point of confluence of present, past, and future. The East
is, itself, also a fundamental pole in Hesse's dialectics, being the 'mirror' in which the
West reflects its contours and through which western civilisation is offered insights
into itself.
The Orient, indeed, influences Hesse's idea of metamorphosis. Change, which
is an inevitable consequence and measure of time, for Hesse is counterbalanced by
the voluntary and creative act of Piktor, whose transformations obliquely relate to his
name ('the painter', 'the artist') rather than being 'metonymic', as argued by
Ziolkowski and Gallagher (see Chapter 4).
Time also appears throughout Hesse's work as the foil for eternity, which is
coded in recurring images and symbols. Circularity, for instance, implicit in the
water cycle described by the river in Siddhartha and in the endless succession of
4 As noticed in the Introduction to this thesis, the temporality of memory is frequently closely linked with that of
dreams in Hesse's works, and the realm of dreams is clearly one of the possible future areas of investigation in
relation to the subject of time.
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