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

means' (6). 12 It is not surprising, therefore, that, in a letter of 1938 to Herbert Steiner,
Hesse justifies his stylistic, even orthographic choices, on the basis of the musicality
of a single word:
wenn ein Autor einmal das Wort »anderer« geschrieben hat, darf ihn das nicht
dazu verpflichten, auf der nachsten Seite auf das Wort »andrer« zu verzichten,
blofi weil das »konsequent« ist. Zwischen beiden Wortern ist ein rhythmischer
Unterschied, und wenn auch der Autor die Motive, warum er das einemal so,
das andremal so schreibt, nicht immer klarlegen kann, so tut er es eben doch
aus einem kunstlerischen, einem Bediirfnis nach Differenzierung im
Ausdruck. (Musik, 174)
The attention to the sonority and synaesthetic qualities of his language is not
however limited to his literary beginnings but persists throughout Hesse's career, as
witnessed by the opening lines of the poem 'Nachts im April notiert' (Musik, 218),
composed a few months before his death in 1962, lines which illustrate effectively
how Hesse's creative process deploys images, sounds and words simultaneously:
O dafi es Farben gibt:
Blau, Gelb, Weifi, Rot und Grim!
O dafi es Tone gibt:
Sopran, Bafi, Horn, Oboe!
O dafi es Sprache gibt:
Vokabeln, Verse, Reime
The assimilation of elements from different sensory domains, especially the visual
and aural is a constant feature of Hesse's writing; the interplay of these elements,
however, intensifies and reaches its pinnacle during the years of his artistic maturity,
the period extending from the end of World War I and the publication of Nurnberger
Reise (1927). 13
In Klingsors letzter Sommer (1920), the protagonist '[sieht] Tone, [hort] Farben'
(Kli, 594) and Klingsor's self-portrait is described as 'ein Farbenkonzert, ein
wunderbar gestimmter, trotz aller Buntheit still und edel wirkender Teppich' (Kli,
12 Commenting on the short story 'Robert Aghion' (1913), Boulby stresses the importance of sounds for Hesse's
early style: 'the music of his language is more important to him than its plasticity' (71). The critic also adds that
the 'pursuit of synaesthesia [and] oxymoron' (71) is one of the pronounced differences between Hesse and
Gottfried Keller, who was a source of inspiration for Hesse.
13 The rationale behind this categorization will be illustrated in Chapter 3, section 1.
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