DEMIAN by Hermann Hesse

I described this book in this blog less than one year ago, as one of the landmark works of a neglected golden age of intellectual activity in the western world, the period from 1880 to and including 1920.

Hermann Hesse is best known in the Anglophone world anyway for a very different work, SIDDHARTHA. But that wasn't published until 1922, a little bit outside of the somewhat arbitrary limit of the golden age in question.  And its force may be lessened by its universality.

DEMIAN was published in 1919. Its subtitle is THE STORY OF EMIL SINCLAIR'S YOUTH and ES has the narrative voice. I am in possession both of an English and (through an accident I will not discuss) a Spanish language translation of the original German text. 

Hesse, who was born in 1877, did not pass away until 1962.  He wrote a forward to this book, again getting into character as Emil Sinclair, quite late in life, in 1960. 

The third paragraph of that forward begins this way:

"Authors, in writing novels, usually act as if they were God, and could by a broadness of perception, comprehend and present any human story as if God were telling it to Himself without veiling anything, and with all the essential details. This I cannot do...."

I find that a bit odd, because (a) he is being explicit about the issue of the narrative point of view, but (b) he is suggesting that anything other than an omniscient narrator represents a break from tradition, from the way such things are "usually" done. That is plainly false, and must have been known to be false to anyone with the literary sophistication of Hesse.  Limited narrative PoVs are quite common, whether first person (as here) or third person in form. Heck, if anything is the "usual" route it is probably limited third-person PoV, not the God's view postulated as the usual way here. 

But, no biggie. Presumably Emil Sinclair is not clear on what is "usual".