Hermann Hesse's Fictions of the Self: Autobiography and the Confessional Imagination
362
Hermann Hesse's Fictions of the Self: Autobiography and the Confessional Imagination
362Paperback
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Overview
Three introductory chapters on autobiography and Hesse set the stage for a chronological study. Then follows a penetrating analysis of the balance between biographical fact and confessional fantasy in Hesse's long career, from the failed autobiography of his first literary success, Beneath the Wheel, through the protracted midlife crisis of the grotesque Steppenwolf period, to the visionary autobiography of his magisterial fictional finale, The Glass Bead Game.
Originally published in 1988.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691606316 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #919 |
| Pages: | 362 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Hermann Hesse's Fictions of the Self
Autobiography and the Confessional Imagination
By Eugene L. Stelzig
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06750-6
CHAPTER 1
THE CONFESSIONAL IMAGINATION
Confession and the lie are one and the same. In order to be able to confess, one tells lies. — Franz Kafka
The German critic Friedrich Schlegel signaled towards the close of the eighteenth century the subjective character of much Romantic literature with the observation that "the modern poet must create all things from within himself ... each poet separately and each work from its very beginning, like a creation out of nothing." Yet the Romantic work is not necessarily a production ex nihilo; unlike "ancient poetry" it is "based entirely on a historical foundation," for it has "a true story at its source, even if variously reshaped." Much Romantic and post-Romantic literature aims for a definition of the self in historical terms, as a process of becoming. This process has been enacted in literary form since the Romantics through autobiography as well as fiction, with confessional fiction forming a prominent and problematic middle term. Modern autobiography first found its self-referential voice in the self-serving Confessions of Rousseau (1782–1789), and the self-advertising adventures of the letter "I" have held a center-stage position in much writing since 1800. Indeed, what Schlegel observed about the relationship between writers of fiction and their works seems to hold substantially true nearly two hundred years later: "What is best in the best novels is nothing but a more or less veiled confession of the author."
With the rise of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, the drive to literary confession was able to find an outlet through a variety of established forms that it could make over or adapt to meet its formal and psychological requirements. In each case a distinctive new type or subspecies was likely to emerge. As Roy Pascal has concluded, the great age of autobiography is the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth: the "search for the true self" is the new element in Rousseau's Confessions; in Goethe's Poetry and Truth it is the sense that being is becoming. For Karl Weintraub, "the full convergence of all the factors constituting this modern view of the self occurred only at the end of the eighteenth century," as manifest in Goethe's autobiography. The Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman are closely allied forms that represent Romantic refashionings of the novel and whose modern prototypes are to be found in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister volumes and The Sufferings of Young Werther, respectively. Jerome Buckley has underscored the fact that the Bildungsroman draws extensively on autobiographical material turned into fiction, as the examples of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Lawrence's Sons and Lovers — amalgams of the education and the artist novel — will attest.
And in poetry, the Romantic turn to the lyric allowed for an intense overflowing of powerful feelings, evident in the prolific lyrical production of the early Goethe and Wordsworth. The long poem in the Romantic age and beyond came readily to serve as a vehicle for the direct or veiled self-exploration of inward-gazing writers, as can be seen in such otherwise different works as Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Shelley's Alastor, Wordsworth's Prelude, Novalis's Hymns to Night, Rimbaud's Drunken Boat — all of them highly subjective ventures of the confessional imagination. Then, too, the essay, or essayistic prose — not to mention the letter, diary, and journal — could easily be put to the uses of a new-found inwardness, as in France in Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and in England in the form of the familiar or personal essay of leading men of letters like De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Lamb. Last and probably least successfully, Romantic drama could take upon itself the burden of disguised autobiography, as is apparent in different ways in Goethe's Faust, Byron's Manfred, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, mythic cosmodramas that soar beyond the limitations of the stage and in which the extended dramatic monologues tend to become the focal point of the author's fictionalized self-regard.
What these different genres that I have passed in such brief review have in common is of course the confessional impulse, and the reflection of the writer in his work that is a fundamental feature of Romantic literature. Ironically, the "confession" is frequently a fictional device, as it is, in varying degrees, in Goethe's Werther, Chateaubriand's René, Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. From the Romantic age down to the present, confession is not only a vigorous psychological impulse that informs many important works, from Rousseau's and Gibbon's autobiographies to probably even such an ostensibly scientific treatise as Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams; it is also a fairly consistent literary technique employed by canny fiction writers to achieve authenticity in the depiction of characters, and vividness and immediacy in the fabrication of scene and situation. A mode of first-person narrative, confession is a sophisticated strategy that can make for a highly effective — and affective — bond, or even identification, between audience and character, by diminishing or collapsing the fictive gap between them, so that life and art, the reader's and the speaker's experience, appear to be aligned on the same plane. In some respects it matters very little whether the confessional voice can be equated with an actual historical personage, such as the "I" of Rousseau's Confessions or Wordsworth's Prelude, or whether we are presented with the formal pretext of autobiography (as in Jane Eyre, subtitled An Autobiography), or with an imaginary confessor of one sort or another. The last is a rich first-person mine in the prose fiction of the last two hundred years, one that has produced such different works as Blicher's Journal of a Parish Clerk, Gogol's Diary of a Madman, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Dickens's Great Expectations, Constant's Adolphe, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Camus's The Stranger, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Plath's The Bell Jar, not to mention such a recent hybrid of poetry and truth as Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, which incorporates some of the historical records into the narrative. Ironically, fictitious confessions — which always purport to be "true confessions" — can be even more vivid and convincing than the veritable and verifiable sort: so art triumphs over life.
The title of Goethe's autobiography, From My Life: Poetry and Truth (1811–1833), harbors an issue that modern readers have sometimes preferred to approach in disjunctive terms: poetry or truth. Is the genre a mode of historiography, and is the story of a person's life as written by himself to be evaluated as a kind of first-person biography? Should what I am calling actual confessions be judged by or held accountable to strict standards of truthfulness? If so, then many of the famous autobiographies come off as flawed performances, displaying such lapses as prevarication, omission, distortion, self-aggrandizement, and general plea bargaining with posterity. Jean Guéhenno concludes that Rousseau may have always been sincere, but he certainly wasn't always telling the truth about himself. Wordsworth in the books of The Prelude dealing with his stay in France mentions neither his romantic liaison with Annette Vallon nor the illegitimate daughter who was its result; Goethe fails consistently to explain why a number of his youthful affairs of the heart were so abortive. Clearly these works fall short of the rigorous standards of modern history writing or biography. But — so goes the other side of the argument — the fault lies not in the works but in the misplaced expectations of the reader-critic, for autobiography is not principally or only historiography, but a literary art like poetry and fiction.
Many of the leading twentieth-century considerations of autobiography as a genre have emphasized or allowed for the play of the confessional imagination in organizing the life-story presented into a coherent literary structure. Thus the first and greatest scholar of the history of autobiography, Georg Misch, argues in his discussion of Rousseau that "an autobiography which is a great and enduring work of art cannot at bottom be untrue," even though its truth is subject to the principles of a recreative process, according to which "the contents of consciousness are not reproduced mechanically, but re-experienced, reshaped according to conditions of the present state of mind." This reconstitutive agency is Rousseau's "Phantasie" (fantasy/ imagination) — a hypothesis that also permits Misch to conceive of The Confessions as "the highest stage which the Bildungsroman has attained in Rousseau." Misch locates the agency of the autobiographer's imagination in the moment of writing, because such an artful shaping of lived experience "can only express the author's present understanding of life." The view of autobiography as an imaginative reconstruction of the past accepts as legitimate the incorporation of insights occurring at the moment of writing, which retroactively alter the significance of previously recounted experience.
A number of later students of autobiography follow Misch's lead here. In what is still the best short treatment of the problems inherent in the autobiographical venture, Georges Gusdorf stresses that it is a second reading or recomposition of experience, that the dilemma of lived versus remembered experience renders objectivity impossible, and that the true significance of the genre is to be sought "beyond the true and the false," because autobiography is not only "testimony," but also "a work of art." Hence Gusdorf's cachet for autobiography is "making, and in making, making oneself" ("faire et en faisant se faire"). While not willing to embrace the autotelic view of Gusdorf, Pascal also asserts that the autobiographer is engaged in a coherent shaping of the past, interpreting it from the standpoint of the present. To Pascal, such shaping means a necessary distortion of experience, since "the completed fact is substituted for the 'fact-in-the-making.' "
These critics make allowance for the writer's imagination in shaping the life-story, and grant autobiography the standing of a literary art, but they do not wish to identify it directly with fiction, or evaluate it according to purely aesthetic criteria, a procedure by which, as Pascal believes, autobiography necessarily falls short of the accomplishments of fiction. More recent discussants, however, take more unequivocal positions, from Alfred Kazin (himself an autobiographer), who in an essay of 1964 seems to endorse autobiographical narrative as fiction, to John Sturrock, who deplores the "formal subordination of autobiography" to the exigencies of history-writing and biography, and who suggests instead that "it would do autobiography ... a power of good to recognize how close it stands to fiction." Not surprisingly, the impact of structuralist and post-structuralist criticism has carried over into the discussion of autobiography, in order to define, delimit, or deconstruct the subjective contexts of the first-person pronoun in the linguistic functioning of autobiographical texts. Philippe Lejeune's is the most interesting recent work, with its goal to extrapolate the culture and language terms of "the autobiographical pact" and its premise that "the deep subject of autobiography is the proper name." Probably the chief danger of the post-structuralist ventures is that — with a language that is willfully opaque and jargon-ridden — they can problematize the genre to a vanishing point.
As should be apparent from this selective survey, the basic terms of the modern debate about autobiography are implicit in Goethe's From My Life: Poetry and Truth. The title is compactly ambiguous, for it refers simultaneously to the chief concerns of Goethe's life and to the manner in which he chooses to present them. His larger purpose, as he explains in a famous passage in Book 7 (1812), is to ground his literary productions, all of which are confessional in character, back into the overall context of his life: "all that has become known by me consists only of fragments of a greater confession, which to render complete this little book is a bold attempt." To Goethe, the twin poles of his life are not firm opposites, but provisional oppositions involved in a dialectical interplay. Here we have an acceptable model of the manifold possibilities of autobiography as a literary genre, one elastic enough to allow for the artful merger of experiential fact with the devices of fiction. Autobiographical composition is imaginative recomposition according to principles that shape the biographical matrix into a product that may, under the auspices of the literary imagination, sometimes play with the biographical données, so long as it preserves — or at its most revealing draws out into the open for the first time — the inner form and teleology of that life as it emerges in the aesthetic-psychological dimension of recollective recomposition. Nor is there any reason, as Sturrock has suggested, why the literary form of a life should be articulated chronologically, as opposed to modally or thematically — for example, De Quincey on the pains and pleasures of opium. Indeed, if one thinks about it, the literary possibilities for the nonlinear writing of one's life must be myriad. And so are, it should be added, the possibilities of the reader's reception of that life, which should not be subjected to a single or simplistic formula.
If the critics' approach should be a flexible one, the generic paradigm of autobiography should nevertheless include some limits and conditions, for despite its retrospective merging of poetry and truth there is still a fundamental sense in which the genre cannot be wholly self-sustaining or autonomous in the way that forms like tragedy, romance, or the epic can. Whereas these may be considerably clarified by historical and biographical "frames," autobiography in some respects and at some point has to be considered in relation to the writer's biography. In the case of the other forms, our ordinary human curiosity hankers for some information about the author's life and times, and nearly all criticism has traditionally supplied some of this, no matter how cursorily. Yet in the case of these modes of imaginative writing, the historical-biographical background is not a sine qua non to our appreciation of the literary foreground of particular works — otherwise "great books" would be a critical fiction. But with actual autobiographies — as opposed to confessional novels, or fictions employing "autobiography" as a formal device — there must be not only the "autobiographical pact" of Lejeune but also some warrant that the life presented is substantially aligned with the author's, or that the text and the vita have an inherent similarity, or are at least homologous. Here autobiography demands biography. The former cannot be wholly sundered from the latter, for the text of a life depends to some degree on an extratextual sanction: the author's life. Such a guarantee is not required by the other genres instanced above, although it is possible to cite particular subtypes that call for certain kinds of alignment between life and art — for example, the historical novel and realist-naturalist fiction depend on a credible fit of character and situation with the societies, classes, and periods of history in which they are set. The famous "willing suspension of disbelief" does not cover obvious mésalliances, for in reading autobiographers our will to believe is seriously compromised as soon as we sense a glaring discrepancy between the text and the life it purports to present.
These conditions do not counteract what I have described as the complementarity of poetry and truth in autobiography, at least for those who are not too literal-minded readers of the genre and who do not insist on narrow or too-strict standards of autobiographical truth and verifiable correspondence. The requirement of a homological relationship between the author's biography and autobiography does not abridge the freedom inherent in the paradigm of poetry and truth, but guarantees the conditions for the success of autobiography, for it honors both the historic and the aesthetic dimension of this hybrid genre. Nor does this proviso ignore how subjective and selective a filter memory can be, and to what extent truth is a matter of perspective. The impossibility of a truly "objective" self-description by no means constitutes an impairment or suspension of the homological requirement, but makes for the creative challenges and problem solving inherent in the autobiographical enterprise, which allows for a good deal of play and flexibility of subjective self-rendering.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hermann Hesse's Fictions of the Self by Eugene L. Stelzig. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. ix
- Abbreviations, pg. xiii
- I. The Confessional Imagination, pg. 1
- II. Life as Writing, pg. 25
- III. Self-Will, pg. 43
- IV. Autobiographical Beginnings, pg. 80
- V. Domestic Fictions, pg. 105
- Vi. Hesse's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pg. 130
- VII. Ticino Legends of Saints and Sinners, pg. 159
- VIII. Live(D) Fantasies, pg. 188
- IX. Home to the Un-Becoming Self, pg. 238
- Epilogue: Who is he?, pg. 311
- Notes, pg. 315
- Index, pg. 337