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Overview
Professor Swales concentrates on the roles of plot, characterization, and narrative commentary in novels by Wieland, Goethe, Stifter, Keller, Mann, and Hesse. By pointing out that the goal in each work is both elusive and problematic, he suggests a previously unsuspected ironic intent. His analysis adds to our awareness of the potentialities inherent in the novel.
Originally published in 1978.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691614045 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Essays in Literature , #1579 |
| Pages: | 186 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse
By Martin Swales
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06359-1
CHAPTER 1
The Bildungsroman as a Genre
Any concern with imaginative literature inevitably confronts one with the thorny problem of genre. University literature departments tend to invoke genre categories when establishing a syllabus of course offerings, yet the very currency of genre terms is deceptive, for it implies — wrongly — that critical consensus has been achieved on the question of how one should define and employ the literary genre. In fact, once the genre term is seen as more than a convenient label, theoretical confusion and uncertainty abound. In one sense, of course, the argument about the validity of genre concepts is simply a localized version of the much older philosophical debate about the relationship of the particular and the general, and for this reason it is hardly surprising that diametrically opposed positions (both nominalist and realist, as it were) continue to be maintained with equal fervor. Moreover, the debate about literary genres is compounded by additional complex issues, for example, those involving the role of individuality in literary creation, of "genius" versus "tradition," thereby further troubling the already muddied waters.
Tzvetan Todorov, in his study of the fantastic, has raised the important problems with great acuity and cogency. He points out that the concept of genre (or species) is borrowed from the natural sciences. And he insists that "there is a qualitative difference as to the meanings of the term 'genre' or 'specimen,' depending on whether they are applied to natural beings or to the works of the mind." "In the former case," he continues, "the appearance of a new example does not necessarily modify the characteristics of the species; consequently, the properties of the new example are for the most part deducible from the pattern of the species. ... The birth of a new tiger does not modify the species in its definition." But in art, "every work modifies the sum of possible works, each new example alters the species." How, then, are we to define the constantly changing artistic species?
Any attempt to analyze the process by which we understand the work of art must, in my view, employ the notion of the hermeneutic circle. This model argues that we understand any new phenomenon by moving in a circle between general and specific. Within any given text, the process of understanding is circular: we can only comprehend the meaning of one line from a poem by assigning it to its context within the overall meaning of the poem. And we can only arrive at that overall meaning by the cumulative understanding of the individual lines. The circular model of the understanding process also informs our relationship to the work in its entirety. When we read a novel, we do so (whether we realize it or not) with certain expectations in mind. These expectations, these predispositions to a certain kind of reading, help to condition, and are in their turn conditioned by, the specific work before us. Hence, our understanding of the individual text is a constant movement between generality and specificity, between notional genre and given work. Moreover, it must be stressed that genre constructs have historical validity: they are not foisted on the works after the event by eagerly taxonomic scholars and readers. Rather, the historical agency of the genre constitutes that "horizon of expectation" with reference to which each individual work is made. This is not, of course, to deny the role of individual creativity. But the specific work activates and energizes those expectations in order to debate with them, to refashion, to challenge, perhaps even to parody them. This is the "newness" — the individuality within the ongoing generality of the literary species — of which Todorov speaks. Indeed, he makes the telling point that only pulp literature fully interlocks with its genre expectation, and that this is the criterion for distinguishing creative from spurious literature: "only 'popular' literature (detective stories, serialized novels, science fiction, etc.) would approach fulfilling the requirements of genre in the sense the word has in natural science: for the notion of genre in that sense would be inapplicable to strictly literary texts."
I want to insist that the notion of generality, of genre, is indispensable to any understanding of literary texts, and that the lifeblood of any genre must be the interrelationship of general expectation and specific praxis, of theoretical corpus and its palpable, individuated (that is, modified) realization in an actual work. It is with this process, as it works in certain German novel fictions from 1767 to 1943, that I shall be concerned in this study.
The theoretical basis of my undertaking can be made clear by contrast with that adopted by Jürgen Jacobs in his study Wilhelm Meister und seine Briider: Untersuchungen zum deutschen Bildungsroman. Jacobs speaks of the Bildungsroman as an "unfulfilled genre." While one knows what Jacobs means — that the Bildungsroman operates with an implied teleology that it only imperfectly fulfills — I believe it is wrong to identify the genre itself with that teleology. In so doing, Jacobs abstracts the notion of genre from its realization in the specific literary work and makes the genre concept something extraliterary. As Monika Schrader so well puts it: "the praxis of the work of art itself — and not literary theory — must be the starting point and basis for the definition of the literary genre." I want to insist that the genre works within individual fictions in that it is a component of the expectation to which the specific novels refer and which they vivify by their creative engagement with it. The degree to which the expectation is or is not fulfilled is not the criterion for participation in the genre construct. As long as the model of the genre is intimated as a sustained and sustaining presence in the work in question, then the genre retains its validity as a structuring principle within the palpable stuff of an individual literary creation. In other words, the notion of a genre must, in my view, operate as a function of the imaginative literature written with reference to that concept; it is not a petrified, extraliterary thing. Even the nonfulfillment of consistently intimated expectation can, paradoxically, represent a validation of the genre by means of its controlled critique. The problematic of the Bildungsroman texts is the raison d'être of the genre of which they partake.
The term Bildungsroman was first used by Karl Morgenstern in the early 1820s. He defined the genre as follows:
It will justly bear the name Bildungsroman firstly and primarily on account of its thematic material, because it portrays the Bildung of the hero in its beginnings and growth to a certain stage of completeness; and also secondly because it is by virtue of this portrayal that it furthers the reader's Bildung to a much greater extent than any other kind of novel.
This first usage of the term has only recently come to light. In view of the suggestiveness of Morgenstern's comments it is surprising that the term Bildungsroman was used only infrequently until the late nineteenth century, when it was, so to speak, put on the map by Dilthey. Since then, the term has enjoyed great currency. This might lead one to conclude that the term — and with it the essential implications of the genre — only acquires resonance after the great line of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bildungsromane. But I do not believe this is so. The term may not have gained currency until late, but, as I hope to show shortly, many of the implications of the genre are commonplaces within nineteenth-century novel theory in Germany. Morgenstern may have coined the term and summarized some of its possible implications, but the kind of novel he was envisaging had been analyzed before, by the critic Friedrich von Blanckenburg in his Versuch über den Roman (Essay on the Novel) of 1774. This work of novel theory grew out of Blanckenburg's enthusiasm for a specific work of fiction, Christoph Martin Wieland's Agathon (1767), and for the way in which that individual creation is shot through with theoretical implications in that it overtly (and thematically) transforms the traditional novel genre by investing it with a new psychological and intellectual seriousness. The Bildungsroman was born in a remarkable fusion of theory and practice — and with it the German novel came of age. Moreover, as Fritz Martini has shown, Morgenstern's coinage of the term Bildungsroman is, like Blanckenburg's treatise, a theoretical response to a particular work of fiction. For Morgenstern, the work which inaugurated the modern novel in all its resonance was Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
It is because of this precise historicity of the Bildungsroman genre, expressed in a twofold interlocking of theory and practice, that I intend to use this term, despite the time-lag which afflicts the term itself, in preference to two others with which it has often been felt to be interchangeable: Erziehungsroman and Entwicklungsroman. I would suggest that the Erziehungsroman is, unlike the Bildungsroman, explicitly (and narrowly) pedagogic in the sense that it is concerned with a certain set of values to be acquired, of lessons to be learned. As I hope to show, the Bildungsroman both in theory and in practice is concerned with a much more diffuse — and therefore more general — process by which the individual grows and evolves. The word Bildung implies the generality of a culture, the clustering of values by which a man lives, rather than a specifically educational attainment. The term Entwicklungsroman is much more general, and it is one which carries less emotive and intellectual ballast than does Bildungsroman. I would take the former term to embrace any novel having one central figure whose experiences and whose changing self occupy a role of structural primacy within the fiction. Entwicklungsroman, then, is a fairly neutral indicator of a certain kind of fictive organization, whereas Bildungsroman is a genre term that has both cultural and philosophical resonance.
I want to argue that the Bildungsroman genre was born in specific historical circumstances, that is, within the Humanitätsideal of late eighteenth-century Germany. It is a novel form that is animated by a concern for the whole man unfolding organically in all his complexity and richness. Bildung becomes, then, a total growth process, a diffused Werden, or becoming, involving something more intangible than the acquirement of a finite number of lessons. Such a concern is the expression of a particular kind of bourgeois humanism, one that retains a special (albeit problematic) hold over the German imagination. The centrality of the concept Bildung, of the self-realization of the individual in his wholeness, for such figures as Goethe, Schiller, and Wilhelm von Humboldt is well known. The urgency of their concern is a measure of the anguish with which they perceived the growing threat of narrowness and specialization in the society around them. One of the most eloquent statements of that perception comes in a magnificent — and crucial — passage from Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man:
With us, too, the image of the human species is projected in magnified form into separate individuals — but as fragments ... with the result that in order to get any idea of the totality of human nature one has to go the rounds from individual to individual ... taking from this one his memory, from that one his tabulating intelligence, from yet another his mechanical skill, and piece them together into a picture of the species. With us it might almost seem as though the various faculties appear as separate in practice as they are distinguished by the psychologist in theory, and we see not merely individuals, but whole classes of men, developing but one of their potentialities, while of the rest, as in stunted plants, only vestigial traces remain.... Enjoyment has become divorced from labour, the means from the end, the effort from the reward. Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment. ... Thus little by little the concrete life of the individual is destroyed in order that the abstract idea of the whole may drag out its sorry existence.
Such concerns were not confined to the great artists. One must also stress that many of the implications of the Bildungsroman have their roots not simply in specifically cultural concerns of the last decades of the eighteenth century, but also in a much broader complex of intellectual currents. Dilthey, in his essay The Eighteenth Century and the Historical World, stressed the importance of historicism for the eighteenth century. On one level, this historicism is the espousal of a universal principle in that it upholds a powerful teleological force as the motive power of universal history; on another level (with, say, Herder), it involves a recognition of the specificity of historical change, a realization that the growth and evolution of man are interlocked with quite particular social and geographical circumstances. These two strands within historicism are, Dilthey argued, a potent legacy to the nineteenth century. They also, as we shall see, find their way into the Bildungsroman. Indeed, for much nineteenth-century German thinking, history is the vital domain in which idea and empirical reality, spirit and the contingencies of given social context, interact. The tensions in German historiography from Dilthey onward have been well documented by Carlo Antoni in his important study, From History to Sociology. The conflict between the principles of materialistic relativism and of metaphysical self-realization, between, to shift the concepts but not the ground of the debate, Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the mind, that is, the humanities), is a vital issue in the intellectual life of nineteenth-century Germany, and it is one whose roots extend back to the age in which the Bildungsroman was born. The Bildungsroman, like any novel, is concerned with the history of its hero. This history is enacted within the finite realm of social practicality, and it also partakes of the infinite realm of his inwardness, of his human potentiality. Immanuel Kant, in his Ideas for General History in a Cosmopolitan Sense (1784), sketched for his readers the general process by which man, in fulfilling his nature, obeys that teleology which is embedded in the species to which he belongs. Kant insisted that the species eventually "works its way up to the condition in which all seeds which nature has planted can be fully developed, and the human species can fulfill its destiny on earth." Here one senses a general, programmatic statement of that Bildung whose operation in the life of one individual the Bildungsroman seeks to document. In a fascinating aside Kant at one point asks whether he is truly offering history, given that he is, by definition, talking of that which has not yet been realized: "It is admittedly a surprising, and to all appearances wayward, undertaking to attempt the composition of a history according to some idea of how the world ought to evolve if it is to be in accord with certain rational goals. It would seem that such an intention could only produce a novel." It is indeed at the intersection of story (history) and mind (idea) that the Bildungsroman will generate its characteristic import, one which evolves out of an artistically controlled, and frequently unresolved, tension.
The finest discussion of these issues in terms specific to novel fiction is to be found in Blanckenburg's Essay onthe Novel. His theory emerges as the recognition of a specific literary achievement, the first edition of Wieland's Agathon. Blanckenburg's criticism derives its cogency from the fact that Wieland's fiction is overtly also a work of novel theory. Agathon engages the reader again and again in a debate about the nature of novel fictions — and about their applicability to the case which this novel puts before us. Indeed, it is because Agathon is a novel which takes issue with conventional norms of novel writing that it is for Blanckenburg a serious artistic achievement. What Wieland repudiates by implication is the romance which so long-windedly fuses love story and adventure novel: a pair of constant lovers is separated at the beginning of the novel, then go through all manner of episodic adventures, only to be reunited at the end. For Blanckenburg, Wieland's signal achievement resides in his ability to get inside a character, to portray the complex stuff of human potential which, in interaction with the outside world, yields the palpable process of living and changing. Because Wieland's novel shows this process, this Werden, it confers artistic — and human — dignity and cohesion on that sequence of adventures through which the hero passes. Moreover, it is this process in all its complexity that matters, on which narrative time, energy, and interest is expended, and not the celebration of any goal which can thereby be attained. Blanckenburg senses the profound resonance of Agathon, a resonance which one can gauge from the following entry in Johann Georg Sulzer's General Theory of the Fine Arts (Leipzig, 1773-1775). There is, significantly, no entry under novel, only the following gloss on the adjective novelistic: "Thus one describes whatever in content, tone, or expression bears the characteristics which prevailed in earlier novels — such as fondness for adventures, stiltedness in actions, events, feelings. The natural is more or less the exact opposite of the novelistic." If, then, the German novel comes of age with Agathon, it does so by breaking with, or, more accurately, by reshaping and deepening, past norms and by demonstrating an intense and sustained concern for the growth of an individual in all his experiential complexity and potentiality. It would seem, then, that it is precisely this interest in the inner life and processes of the individual which confers poetic seriousness on what was hitherto an improbable narrative of colorful episodic events.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse by Martin Swales. Copyright © 1978 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
- Introduction, pg. 1
- I. The Bildungsroman as a Genre, pg. 9
- II. Wieland: Agathon (1767), pg. 38
- III. Goethe: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-1796), pg. 57
- IV. Stifter: Indian Summer (1857), pg. 74
- V. Keller: Green Henry (1879-1880), pg. 86
- VI. Mann: The Magic Mountain (1924), pg. 105
- VII. Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943), pg. 129
- VIII. Conclusion, pg. 146
- Excursus: The Bildungsroman as a Taxonomic Genre, pg. 161
- Index, pg. 169