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The Picaro's Journey to the Confessional : The Changing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

David H. Miles
David H. Miles*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus
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Abstract

From Goethe's Wilhelm Meister through Keller's Grüner Heinrich to Rilke's Malte, the hero of the German Bildungsroman develops from unselfconscious adventurer in the outer world to compulsive explorer of the world within. This transformation in the hero—from “picaro” to “confessor”—implies a change in the concept of Bildung: the “self” no longer accumulates, but must be re-collected. Wilhelm Meister's unreflective nature aligns him directly with the picaresque hero; essentially, he does not develop. In Keller's novel the hero develops precisely by narrating his picaresque past. Through his confessional notebooks, Rilke's hero, Malte, attempts to overcome the “sickness” of his fragmented self by recollecting his childhood. This transformation of the literary hero in the nineteenth century mirrors in turn the historical rise of alienated, self-conscious man. Beyond Maire the Bildungsroman can only move on to parody, to the anti-Bildungsromane of Kafka, Mann, and Grass, in which both types of hero are parodied.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 5 , October 1974 , pp. 980 - 992
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 991 Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 206.

Note 2 in page 991 Counter-Statement (Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes, 1953), p. 31.

Note 3 in page 991 “The Poet and the City,” in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random, 1968), pp. 83–84. For a recent collection of views on character in fiction, see New Literary History, 5 (Winter 1974).

Note 4 in page 991 I am using “picaro” here in a slightly idiosyncratic sense, being less concerned with the criteria of first-person form and social satire content than with the protagonist's lack of self-consciousness and psychological development. For an excellent treatment of the more conventional view of the picaresque tradition, plus useful references, see Ulrich Wicks, “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach,” ? ML A, 89 (1974), 240–49.

Note 5 in page 991 “Odysseus' Scar,” in Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, ?. Y.: Doubleday, 1957), p. 10.

Note 6 in page 991 See Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 57–81.

Note 7 in page 991 Trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Random, 1947), p. 173.

Note 8 in page 991 Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), p. 223 (my italics).

Note 9 in page 991 This point—that Bildung in the term “Bildungsroman” refers to the education of the reader as well as of the hero (betraying the genre's origins in the pedagogical and optimistic age of the Enlightenment)—was first made by Karl Morgenstern in 1820, the first critic to employ the term “Bildungsroman.” See Lothar Kôhn, Entwicklungs-und Bildungsroman: Ein Forschungsbericht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969), p. 5. Although there are obviously Bildungs-romane in English (Tom Jones, David Copperfield, Sons and Lovers, and A Portrait of the Artist would all be good examples) and although a number of terms have been suggested as translations of Bildungsroman (educational novel, novel of education, apprenticeship novel, pedagogical novel, novel of development, novel of adolescence, even philosophical or psychological novel), no particular term for the genre has gained much currency in English criticism and therefore I shall retain the German word here. For one of the few recent discussions of the Bildungsroman in English literature, see Jerome Buckley's Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974).

Note 10 in page 991 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Aesthetik, H in Werke in zwanzig Bànden, xiv (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 220.

Note 11 in page 991 Goethe: Das Leben im Werk (Stuttgart: Gunther, 1967), pp. 463, 465. The novel's odd lack of psychological detail has also been noted by Karl Viëtor, Goethe the Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), p. 154; Hans Reiss, Goethe's Novels (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 122; and Irvin Stock, “A View of Wilhelm Master's Apprenticeship,” PMLA, 72 (1957), 99–100. Unless otherwise indicated, translations in the text are mine.

Note 12 in page 991 See, e.g., Karl Schlechta, Goethes Wilhelm Meister (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1953); Richard Friedenthal, Goethe: His Life and Times (Cleveland: World, 1965);

Eric Blackall, “Sense and Nonsense in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” Deutsche Beitrage zur geistigen Uberlieferung, 5 (1965), 49–72; and Hans Eichner, “Zur Deutung von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deut-schen Hochstifts (Tubingen, 1966), pp. 165–69. Eichner, in a brilliant essay, points out that Goethe's novel is not a Bildungsroman as such, but merely features education as one of its major themes. Gunter Muller's attempt (Ge-slaltung-Umgestaltung in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren, Halle: Niemeyer, 1948) to read Wilhelm's education as organic rather than psychological (one following certain morphological patterns), although attractive, does not hold up; as Detlev Schumann has demonstrated (“Die Zeit in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deut-schen Hochstifts, Tubingen, 1968, pp. 130–65), Miiller has not read the novel carefully: not only does Miiller overlook the fact that seasonal time in the novel is totally inconsistent, but he also miscomputes the fictional time of the novel, which is not 10 years but 5 (Wilhelm progressing from age 22 to 27). Actually, however, the misty chronology of the novel, as well as its uncertain geography (see Gerhard Storz, Goethe-Vigilien, Stuttgart: Klett, 1953, pp. 80–87), both contribute to the novel's strangely fairy-tale aspect. It represents one of Goethe's “inkalkulabelsten Produk-tionen” (letter to Eckermann, 18 Jan. 1825) precisely because Goethe did not find it important to calculate the realistic structure of it.

Note 13 in page 991 “Wilhelm Meister and the Ambiguousness of Goethe,” in The Apothecary's Shop (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1957), p. 109. On this picaresque quality see also Eichner, p. 195, Reiss, p. 122, and Wolfgang Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk (Bern: Francke, 1962), p. 364.

Note 14 in page 991 J. W. von Goethe, Werke (Hamburg: Wegner, 1965). Parenthetical numbers in the text, unless another volume number is given, refer to the 7th vol., containing Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

Note 15 in page 991 Eudo C. Mason, “Goethe's Sense of Evil,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, 34 (1963–64), 32. One of the great ironies in the history of the reception of Goethe's novel (and a mute testimony to how few actually ever read it well) is that its best-known parts are undoubtedly the songs of Mignon, with their morbid longing for the past, and the guilt-ridden lays of her mad father—songs Freud has cited as exemplifying the discontents of civilization! (Despite Freud's claim to having been influenced by Goethe, we might add, it is precisely the anti-Freudians today, such as Maslow, who would be closest to Goethe, with their optimistic psychology of peak moments, growth, and self-actualization.) It is interesting to note that the notion of repressing the past to eliminate guilt lies not only at the center of Wilhelm Meister but also in Faust and in Goethe's-own Pelagianism as well (see Bk. xv of Dichtung und Wahr-heit). We might add that in Goethe's Utopia—the Pedagogical Province of the Wanderjahre— the members characteristically take vows to speak only of the present (vm, 38) and also to accompany their chores with constant singing (viii, 151), which obviously would help hinder any undue introspection.

Note 16 in page 991 It is interesting to observe here the differences from the 18th-century English Bildungsroman in which, instead of mystical emissaries from a hierarchical Bund (a tradition in German literature extending on down to such figures as the sinister Naphta in The Magic Mountain and the misty order of Castalia in The Glass Bead Game), we have such very solid citizens as Fielding's goodly Parson Adams and Schoolmaster Partridge. Thomas Mann delivers a marvelous parody of the German-style Emissary in his Felix Krull, in which Wilhelm Meister's Abbé (with his preachments on the organic nature of life) has become the roué Schimmelpreester (“Mold-Priest”) who preaches that “nature is nothing but mold and decay.” On the Bundesro-man, see Marianne Thalmann, Der Trivialroman des 18. Jahrhunderls und der romantische Roman (Berlin: Ebering, 1923).

Note 17 in page 992 A group, in fact, whose moral behavior has led to a number of outraged critical responses to the book: Enright speaks of the work's Goethean “ambiguousness” and shares D. H. Lawrence's indignation that it is a “book of peculiar immorality”; Wordsworth spoke of the novel's “inhuman sensuality”; and De Quincey found Mignon (that forerunner of Lolita) the “most unequivocal evidence of depraved taste and defective sensibility.” Friedrich von Stol-berg, a contemporary of Goethe's, took such moral offense at the book that he burned it—all except the “Confessions” chapter !

Note 18 in page 992 The German Novel (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1968), pp. 25–26.

Note 19 in page 992 Second version, 1880; page references in the text refer to Vol. i of Gottfried Keller's Werke (Salzburg: Bergland, 1958).

Note 20 in page 992 Despite the fact that Keller's novel is decidedly more realistic than is Goethe's, Heinrich's exact age is still difficult to determine at times. Very approximately, his career is as follows: at 5 Heinrich loses his father; at 13 he is expelled from school; the next 6 years he spends alternately with relatives in the country and with his mother in Zurich; at 23 or so he writes his autobiography (up to age 19) ; at 26, on his return to Zurich, his mother dies; from 28 to 48 he resumes his friendship with Judith; and after this, presumably now in his 50's, he finishes his autobiography (from 19 to 28).

Note 21 in page 992 On this curiously transcendental dimension of the German Bildungsheldin —a tradition I have described as that of the “transfigured heroine”—see my study Hof-mannsthal's Novel ‘Andreas’: Memory and Self (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 149–50.

Note 22 in page 992 Lukâcs, “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.” in Deutsche Literatur in zwei Jahrhunderten, Vol. vu of Werke (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1964), p. 405.

Note 23 in page 992 The aristocratic elitism of Wilhelm Meister —cultural and social as well as economic—has been overlooked by a number of critics, including Lukâcs, who attempted to read the novel as presenting an egalitarian “nullity” of class relationships in the light of “humanistic ideals” (Deutsche Literatur, p. 73; the essay was originally written in 1936). Friedrich Engels had read the novel more closely, as is clear from his review of Karl Griin's book on Goethe, in which he condemns Grun for similar specious radicalizations of the novel's contents (Marx and Engels, Uber Kunst und Literatur, i, Vienna: Europa, 1968, 481, 471). Lukâcs, in his later essay on Keller (1939), revised his stance, and spoke of the “utopian elite” of Goethe's novel (Deutsche Literatur, p. 398).

Note 24 in page 992 Kohn, for instance, in his comprehensive Forschungs-bericht, does not include Malte. However, Werner Welzig, Der deutsche Roman im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart : Kroner, 1970), pp. 17–21, does mention it in his chapter on the Entwicklungsroman.

Note 25 in page 992 Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, in Rilke's Samtliche Werke, vi (Frankfurt: Insel, 1966). My translations are based in part on those of M. D. Herter Norton, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (New York: Norton, 1964).

Note 26 in page 992 Pascal, pp. 28–29; J. P. Stern, Re-Interpretations (New York: Basic, 1964), p. 10.

Note 27 in page 992 See Theodore Ziolkowski, Dimensions of the Modern Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 31; Ziolkowski's entire chapter on Malte is excellent.

Note 28 in page 992 A similar historical shift could also be demonstrated in the English and French traditions of the Bildungsroman, from Tom Jones to A Portrait of the Artist, and from Emile to La Nausée.

Note 29 in page 992 Proust (New York: Grove, 1931), p. 4.

Note 30 in page 992 An insight Freud was to exploit brilliantly in psychoanalysis, both in his intuition that the psychoanalytic “confession” could be liberating and in his notion that unrepressed man is essentially creative.

Note 31 in page 992 Harry Levin, James Joyce (Norfolk, Conn. : New Directions, 1960), p. 41.

Note 32 in page 992 Goethe's own comment, reported by Chancellor von Muller, 17 Sept. 1823, in which Goethe contrasts the landscape of his own novel with the much richer ones of Sir Walter Scott.

Note 33 in page 992 Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Garden City, ?. Y. : Doubleday, 1961), pp. 361–94.

Note 34 in page 992 This rise of the modern hero of consciousness has been described by a number of phrases which have passed into the common critical language by now : Erich Heller speaks of a metaphysical “journey of the artist into the interior” of the self; J. Hillis Miller of a theological “disappearance of God”; Colin Wilson, in a sense both literary and sociological, of a rise of the “outsider” figure in modern fiction.

Note 35 in page 992 Mann, “The Making of the Magic Mountain,” in The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York : Random, 1955), p. 726; Goethe (vu, 307–08).

Note 36 in page 992 Reiss, p. 122; Ludwig Kahn, Literatur und Glaubens-krise (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), pp. 8–12, 46–48.

Note 37 in page 992 On Hyperion's growth through reflection and writing, see Lawrence Ryan, Holderlins Hyperion (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965), pp. 227–28.

Note 38 in page 992 On the fate of the Bildungsroman in the 20th century see Jurgen Scharfschwerdt, Thomas Mann und der deutsche Bildungsroman (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967).

Note 39 in page 992 Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1952), p. 223.

Note 40 in page 992 Gunter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1960), pp. 120–21.

Note 41 in page 992 For a more detailed account of the fortunes of the Bildungsroman at the hands of Kafka and Grass, see my article, “Kafka's Hapless Pilgrims and Grass's Scurrilous Dwarf: Notes on Representative Figures in the Anti-Bildungsroman,” Monatshefte, 65 (1973), 341–50.