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

irths and deaths, as portrayed in 'Kindheit des Zauberers', is one of Hesse's
privileged topoi; simultaneity is also, then, a topos which, for Hesse, entails the
compression of any timeline into a point where all events, past, present and future,
overlap. Both the interplay of voices in the counterpoint technique, as noted in the
context of Kurgast, and the river which, despite its flowing, appears identical every
instant and in each of its points, conjure up an idea of simultaneity. And in this
connection, the concept of unity provides Hesse with further images which elicit
timelessness: the underlying common origin of the whole of Creation; the unity of
past, present, and future; and the coalescence of the spatial and temporal, and the
visual and the auditory, in an all-embracing sensorial domain. 5
In Hesse's terms, 'Humor' and its symbols, such as 'laughter' (Lachen) and the
'smile' ('Lacheln') are suggestive of the eternal, as noted in Chapter 6. The chilling
laughter of Goethe and Mozart in Der Steppenwolf is depicted as a distinctive feature
of their immortality. The 'smile' accompanies the deaths of both Knulp and
Goldmund, underscores the state of perfection reached by Buddha, Vasudeva, and
Siddhartha, and signals the pious inclinations of Leo in Die Morgenlandfahrt as well as
the benign inclination of God towards a dying Knulp.
As observed in Chapter 1, paradoxality is one of the essential components of
Hesse's dialectical paradigm. Time seems to be abolished, to Hesse's mind, through
the temporal unfolding of music, the essence of which he describes as 'reine
Gegenwart', a dimension where past and future merge into an everlasting present.
Forgetting is crucial to the healthy workings of memory, which offers a limited
repository that constantly discards part of its contents in order to store new elements.
At certain moments of revelation, or 'epiphany', the narrating time expands far
beyond the span of the narrated time, and the eternal appears as paradoxically
compressed in or within the fleeting.
5 Hesse's strong emphasis on the concept of unity resonates with Herman Dooyeweerd's holistic notion of time.
In A new critique of theoretical thought (1953-1958), the Dutch scholar seeks to unify various pre-existing
perspectives on time, such as Bergson's psychic time and Einstein's relativistic (i.e. spatial) approach.
Dooyeweerd identifies a common denominator to all these approaches, which he calls modalities. His concept of
unity would be a point of departure for future comparison with Hesse and an element which could shed further
light onto Hesse's notion of time.
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