Pictor's Metamorphoses Read Free

1900, when he was finding his way as a writer and experimenting with the various forms offered by the German romantic tradition, Hesse was inspired principally by E. T. A. Hoffmann, whom he regarded as the “Romantic storyteller of the greatest virtuosity.” “Lulu,” an autonomous section of the early novel entitled The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher (1901), is based explicitly and in specific detail on Hoffmann’s classic fantasy The Golden Flower Pot (1813). The tale was inspired by a holiday trip that Hesse made in August of 1899 with a group of friends from Tübingen who called themselves (as in the story) the petit cénacle and whose names and sobriquets are playfully modified in the text. By means of the Hoffmannesque device of an encapsulated myth, Hesse succeeds in narrating the story of their collective infatuation with the innkeeper’s niece (named in reality Julie Hellmann) in such a manner that it occurs on two levels: a “realistic” one as well as a fantastic or higher one. Through his skillful and ironic imitation of the romantic conventions Hesse paid his greatest tribute to Hoffmann.
    Soon Hesse rejected the neoromanticism of his youth and turned to a less fanciful type of narrative after the fashion of the great nineteenth-century realists. To be sure, the impulse toward fantasy was not simply to be denied. In “Hannes,” Hesse offered a realistic depiction of a contemporary who—because his consciousness has not yet undergone the characteristically modern dissociation and who therefore still enjoys a Märchen mentality that enables him to see God in the thunderclouds and to encounter Jesus on remote rural paths—is regarded by his neighbors as a simpleton. In general, however, having to find other outlets for his fantasy, Hesse chose a form consistent with his current realism—the legend, a genre in which the supernatural was not entirely implausible because it could be attributed to the mythic consciousness that existed in remote times and places (patristic Gaza in “The Enamored Youth,” Renaissance Italy in “The Merman,” seventeenth-century Berlin in “Three Lindens,” and prehistoric jungles in “The Man of the Forests”). As we noted, however, the supernatural occurrences in the legends are regarded as an interruption of normal “reality” and not, as in the fairy tales, as self-evident. But Hesse soon found other ways of dealing with fantasy.
    Dreams always played a lively role in Hesse’s psychic life, as he tells us in the late essay “Nocturnal Games.” The ominous precognitive dream of war related in “The Dream of the Gods” (1914) is significant because it signaled the unleashing of the powers of fantasy that Hesse had sought for more than a decade to suppress. During World War I, a variety of pressures—the death of his father, the deteriorating mental health of his first wife, the responsibilities for his three young sons, the burdens of his war-relief work in Switzerland—produced in Hesse an emotional crisis so severe that, in 1916 and 1917, he sought help in psychoanalysis. It was Jungian analysis, with its emphasis on dreams and their interpretation, that enabled Hesse to recover the childlike contact with the world of fantasy that he had attempted so long to repress. Hesse recognized what he owed to the insights of depth psychology. In a review of Oskar A. Schmitz’s Fairy Tales from the Unconscious ( Märchen aus dem Unbewuβten, 1933), Hesse observed: “Finally, with the aid of a psychoanalytical method, he overcame the inhibitions that cut him off from his own fantasy and wrote these very readable fairy tales.” Hesse is speaking from personal experience because several of the fairy tales that he wrote during the war are barely disguised metaphors for the recovery of the past through psychoanalysis: notably, “Iris”