The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century Literature

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Cultivating Gender: Sexual Difference, Bildung, and the Bildungsroman.

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SOURCE: Smith, John H. “Cultivating Gender: Sexual Difference, Bildung, and the Bildungsroman.Michigan Germanic Studies 13, no. 2 (fall 1987): 206-25.

[In the following essay, Smith suggests that Bildungsromane rarely end happily because they are characterized to some extent by the protagonist's unfulfilled desire in relation to a female other. The critic also maintains that Bildungsromane necessarily have a male protagonist because the genre requires that the hero have full access to (patriarchal) societal structures.]

I. ANALYSIS BEYOND GENRE

An MLA special session (New York, 1986)—“Generic Fiction or Fictional Genre?”—addressed the dilemmas confronting numerous recent studies of the Bildungsroman.1 The dilemmas arise from a fundamental, conscious or unconscious ambivalence at the heart of any study of genre, an ambivalence that redefines the “hermeneutic circle” or nominalist-realist debates in terms of a mutual dependence of definiens and definiendum: Does our definition of the genre bring it into being, or do we in fact merely describe in our definitions the contours of a real, albeit not concrete, object?2 The difficulty of this interpretive choice seems exacerbated in the case of the genre of the Bildungsroman since definitions and exempla vary considerably in the minds of authors and critics alike. There is little need here to review the by now all-too-familiar series of attempted definitions from Blanckenburg and Morgenstern through Hegel (though more on Hegel later) and Dilthey, to Thomas Mann and contemporary critics (for concise summaries, see Selbmann 9-33; Köhn 4-19). Taking the definitions and groupings of novels together, it seems to me that three phenomena have determined the literary and theoretical reception of the Bildungsroman for about one and a half centuries:

1. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister became a paradigm for the genre. Although Goethe's novel had attained this status certainly by the mid-nineteenth century, it was Dilthey who used the term to name those novels “welche die Schule des Wilhelm Meister ausmachen” (cited in Jacobs 11; Jacobs himself continues in this tradition, merely shifting the term of affiliation from “Schule” to “Brüder”). As important as Wieland's Agathon was for the development of the genre, it is generally placed in the limbo of Wilhelm Meister's “prehistory.” One of the few critics to question the gesture of holding up Wilhelm Meister as the “Stammvater” of all Bildungsromane is Tiefenbacher (13), for, he argues, this “topos,” accepted “ohne exakte wissenschaftliche Begründungen,” leaves it up to each reader to “stylize” his own arbitrary and subjective interpretation of one novel into criteria with supposedly general applicability.

2. A generic name has been used without clear enumeration of the texts that belong in its class. In Martin Swales's words, the term Bildungsroman can be used, on the one hand, to classify works “embedded in the continuity of one national literature, of one particular cultural consciousness,” and hence refers to a genre with “historical specificity,” and, on the other hand, “[to serve] in a taxonomic context … as a heuristic tool which makes possible the comparison of a number of texts which stand in no readily identifiable historical relationship to one another” (161). We find the set ranging from one (Sammons), to a limited historical tradition, to an unbounded number.

3. Ideological associations connected to an imprecise genre definition have clouded the critical discussion further. Specifically, beginning already with Blanckenburg the fusion of the hero's education and his organic growth/integration into society, which characterized the Bildungsroman, was to produce the same effect on the reader, i.e. lead reflexively to “des Lesers Bildung” (Blanckenburg cited in Jacobs 10). In the nineteenth century, moreover, Bildung functioned concretely in the new bourgeois order: “Dem besitzenden Bürgertum dient Bildung als Instrument zur Abgrenzung gegen untere Schichten, während man andererseits aus ihr eine gewisse Gleichstellung mit dem Adel ableitet” (Selbmann 6). Such ideological associations have lasting affects on our contemporary usage. Tiefenbacher points out that “die Gefahr der ideologischen Füllung und Nutzbarmachung des Begriffs” has led many critics to avoid the term “Bildungsroman”; and while he himself uses the term, he nonetheless believes that “die Suche nach exakten, d.h. möglichst formalisierbaren Bestimmungskriterien” for the genre is necessary to avoid ideology in genre study (16-17).

If I don't go into these features of the genre's reception in greater detail and if I do not take a clear stance for or against any one of these arguments, it is because I take their collective result as my starting point, namely the widespread doubt (or at least skeptical/polemical discussion) about the status of the existence of the genre as such (see also Saine, 63). Already in 1961, Martini raised many of the problems connected to isolating a clearly recognizable and definable formal genre Bildungsroman, the first and foremost problem being the term's complicated Bergriffsgeschichte (62). He encouraged studies of the genre based on content and thematics. Martin Swales agrees with Martini in stressing the necessity of replacing convenient everyday distinctions (the kinds we use, e.g., to decide what courses to teach) with scholarly and historically grounded ones. He nevertheless simultaneously insists on the inability of content-oriented approaches to serve as the basis of genre definitions and pursues instead the investigation of structural generic norms that can be clearly isolated. His interesting book did not fulfill its claims, however, as, among others, John Ellis has pointed out. Historical as well as conceptual, thematic as well as structural approaches attempt, mostly in competition with each other, to define the elusive genre. Countless essays and dissertations have the form “x-work as a Bildungsroman,” thereby at least implicitly validating the existence of generic norms which a limited set of fictional texts follow. (The most prominent recent monographs by Jacobs, Beddow, and Schrader, and essays by Schings and Steinecke, argue in different ways for the legitimacy of establishing the contours of a genre.) This kind of variety of generic expectations and definitions was what finally led Sammons in 1981 to go on his detective's search for the “missing Bildungsroman.” He came up with one novel, Wilhelm Meister, but no genre. Thus, the interpreter's dilemma, the unhappy choice between “generic fiction” and “fictional genre,” confronts us at every turn of the Bildungsroman's reception.

While I do not think the choice between “generic fiction” or “fictional genre” has been decided or is unworthy of further discussion, I propose to shift the grounds of investigation. My goal will be to exploit (or at least to begin exploiting) the historical and conceptual richness of the term “Bildung” not so much in order to come up with a definition of Bildungsroman or criteria of in-/exclusion in the class of Bildungsromane but rather to develop an abstract analytical tool applicable to an indefinitely large array of texts. The size of the array in principle, i.e. the precise horizon of the genre, is of less interest to me that the mode of analysis which, of course, is likely to work with some texts better than others. (The person who developed or uses a hammer does not have to worry about the class of “hammerable things.” The inventor tends to come up with a new product that will have some obvious applications, some obvious nonapplications, and a whole assortment of situations in between that are left up to trial, error, and dispute depending largely on the users' interests.) My approach will take into account much of the reception of this genre even as it strives to avoid methods that have led us into interpretive aporias. Although an historico-conceptual analysis is not new to the study of the Bildungsroman, both my specific gender study based on Hegel and Lacan, and my nominalist approach that first defines Bildung and then interprets novels through this “grid of observations” (one of Foucault's images for discursive structures, 26) do shed new light on a series of works. My “nominalism” leads me to view the issue whether or not a given work is in “reality” a Bildungsroman as less important than the interpretive results of seeing how Bildung, as I shall define it, is narrativized in certain works. Furthermore, the significance of Wilhelm Meister for me will lie not in its exemplary character for other Bildungsromane but in the way it exemplifies my analysis of Bildung. Membership in the class of Bildungsromane, I would argue, is literally and figuratively open to interpretation. Finally, the ideology involved in the Begriffsgeschichte of Bildung should by no means speak against the use of this concept but, rather, will make it particularly useful in discussing the way powerful narratives describe and reinforce the structure, namely “bourgeois partiarchy,” that inscribes gender roles—writes them for us—in modern culture.

II. HEGEL'S WORLD OF BILDUNG.

I have chosen as the historical point of departure for my discussion of Bildung Hegel's analyses of the concept in the Phänomenologie des Geistes. While Hegel does appear in most discussions of the Bildungsroman, it is usually his Ästhetik that is quoted. The conflict that Hegel emphasizes in the Ästhetik and that receives little more than brief mention in most secondary works is that “zwischen der Poesie des Herzens und der entgegenstehenden Prosa der Verhältnisse,” i.e. the general conflict between inner and outer worlds, individual and social environment (Hegel, Ästhetik 3:392-3; Selbmann 15-17; Jacobs 18-20). Of particular note is his biting description of the “generic fiction” in which the hero goes through his “apprenticeship” only to get his girl in the end:

Denn das Ende solcher Lehrjahre besteht darin, daß sich das Subjekt die ¨Horner abläuft, mit seinem Wünschen und Meinen sich in die bestehenden Verhältnisse und die Vernünftigkeit derselben hineinbildet, in die Verkettung der Welt eintritt und in ihr sich einen angemessenen Standpunkt erwirbt. Mag einer auch noch soviel sich mit der Welt herumgezankt haben, umhergeschoben worden sein, zuletzt bekommt er meistens doch sein Mädchen und irgendeine Stellung, heiratet und wird ein Philister so gut wie die anderen auch; die Frau steht der Haushaltung vor, Kinder bleiben nicht aus, das angebetete Weib, das erst die Einzige, ein Engel war, nimmt sich ungefähr ebenso aus wie alle anderen, das Amt gibt Arbeit und Verdrießlichkeiten, die Ehe Hauskreuz, und so ist der ganze Katzenjammer der übrigen da.

(Hegel Ästhetik 2:220)

I quote this passage at length so that we can return to it at the end of this essay, for by passing through a more complex analysis of the gender and representational structures of Bildung we can read Hegel's description as an appropriate, even if humourous characterization.

Jacobs is the only critic I know who has addressed Hegel's fuller discussion of Bildung in the Phenomenology, but Jacobs' excursus has the goal of showing that Hegel's work fits his (Jacobs') generic norm, rather than of abstracting an analytical tool from Hegel (Jacobs 100-105). Hegel's Phenomenology becomes for Jacobs “in mehrfacher Hinsicht [ein] philosophisches Pendant zur literarischen Gattung des Bildungsromans” (105). I turn to Hegel, however, in order to abstract a tool of analysis that will allow me to call certain works “Bildungsromane” if they can be fruitfully interpreted by means of narrative patterns that can be derived from Hegelian Bildung. I choose Hegel over others not primarily because of historical affiliations (though in a vague sense to be made more precise I would agree with Jacobs that the genre of the Bildungsroman grew “aus dem Geist des bürgerlichen Idealismus” [105]). Rather, I agree with Gadamer that “Hegel worked out what Bildung is better than anyone else” (“In der Tat hat Hegel, was Bildung ist, am schärfsten herausgearbeitet” [9]) and I consider contemporary reworkings of Hegel's understanding of Bildung particularly useful for a broader narratology.

Hegel introduces the notion of Bildung three times in the course of the Phenomenology, each time highlighting a different facet of the concept. First, in the Vorrede, he speaks of the unfolding of the book to follow as a process of “Bildung” and refers to his “Wissenschaft” as the “history of the Spirit's Bildung” or the “bildende Bewegung” of the Spirit (31-40). What I find crucial about these references is the fact that they have been so widely (mis)interpreted in strictly organic terms—an interpretation encouraged by the growth metaphors in the vicinity of, though not directly related to, these passages—whereas the concept of Bildung that Hegel is employing is much more closely linked to the rhetorico-hermeneutic pedagogy of Humanism and Neohumanism. While I cannot demonstrate this in detail here, I think it can be convincingly argued that the movement of the Spirit through its different “form(ul)ations” parallels a traditional institutio oratoria, a training of the individual to master various modes of discourse.3 Hegel explicitly compares the development and formation of the Spirit to the way an individual mind,

welcher eine höhere Wissenschaft vornimmt, die Vorbereitungskenntnisse, die er längst innehat, um sich ihren Inhalt gegenwärtig zu machen, durchgeht; er ruft die Erinnerung derselben zurück … Der Einzelne muß auch dem Inhalte nach die Bildungsstufen des allgemeinen Geistes druchlaufen, aber als vom Geiste schon abgelegte Gestalten, als Stufen eines Wegs, der ausgearbeitet und geebnet ist; so sehen wir in Ansehung der Kenntnisse das, was in früheren Zeitaltern den reifen Geist der Männer beschäftigte, zu Kenntnissen, Übungen und selbst Spielen des Knabenalters herabgesunken und werden in dem pädagogischen Fortschreiten die wie im Schattenrisse nachgezeichnete Geschichte der Bildung der Welt erkennen.

(32)

If we keep in mind that the Preface was written after the completion of the entire work, then we can assume that this rhetorico-pedagogical conception, rather than an organic-morphological one, both characterizes and, in philosophical, “wissenschaftlicher” form, summarizes the uses of Bildung within the entire Phenomenology.

The second discussion in the Phenomonelogy relevant to any analysis of Bildung occurs in the early chapter on “Self-consciousness” dealing with the famous “master-slave” dialectic. While the term “Bildung” does not appear here, the verb “(sich) bilden” is central to the dialectic that reveals how self-consciousness develops in a socially codified struggle between individuals. Put in shamefully reductive terms, the dialectic unfolds as follows: conscious beings confront each other; each has needs that demand satisfaction; the one (“master”) has power over the other (“slave”) and grants him life in return for labor that satisfies his fundamental needs. However, since both are conscious beings and not just animals, each has beyond physical needs a stronger desire to be recognized and desired by the other. Ironically, since the master does not do anything but live off the labor of the slave, it is only the slave who can see his desire fulfilled. His desire is fulfilled, namely, because he is constantly engaged in working and transforming his world, in seeing himself reflected in externalized forms of himself (the products of his labor and speech), and in receiving the recognition of the master who is superior. This process that leads by means of the slave's self-alienation to the recognition and desire of the Other and thus to a split self-consciousness and the fulfillment of the self's desire, is the process of “sich bilden.” The two spheres in which this takes place are work and language since the master-slave struggle can only unfold within a social structure that encodes human activity, thereby giving it significance and opening up the possibility of recognition and (the fulfillment of) desire (see Adorno for a discussion of how these spheres can be linked).

Finally, Hegel's third discussion of Bildung confirms the view that he considered Bildung a socio-rhetorical and not an (exclusively) organic process. A later chapter in the Phenomenology, entitled “The Self-Alienated Spirit. Bildung,” deals with a modern stage of society in which individuals are isolated atoms, divorced from the community or polis, aware of the constructedness of their social sphere. Bildung is the only means for the individual to attain “validity and reality” (Gelten und Wirklichkeit [364]). In particular, Bildung is defined as the process whereby the individual alienates himself from himself—as does the “slave” or a young orator—in order to master and reinternalize the artificial forms that make up his apparently “other” world. “But this alienation,” Hegel writes, “occurs only in language” (376). Thus, though Hegel is often mistakenly understood as espousing an organic model of human development, it is clear that Bildung means the individual's ability to speak and thus invert all the rhetorical forms and formulations that are society. The “gebildete” individual comes to speak a “Sprache der Zerrissenheit,” “diese absolute und allgemeine Verkehrung,” “eine Rede dieser sich selbst klaren Verwirrung” because the individual in the modern world recognizes that his “identity” resides in his ability to adopt roles. The learned individual, therefore, appears as master rhetorician, a divided self whose reconciliation with himself and his world can only come when he realizes that all the fractured discourses and roles “objectified” in the world are in fact part of himself. Bildung involves not growth or integration but neohumanist training and a mastery of social forms in which the self simultaneously alienates and represents itself according to laws governing desire. (One apparent alternative to this notion of self is the “schöne Seele” who withdraws from society to find a pure identity, only to discover that the negative definition of self—“I am not society”—implicates the self in the negated. We shall return to Hirsch's parallel reading of Goethe's “schöne Seele” below.)

Taken together, Hegel's discussions of Bildung in the Phenomenology of Spirit allow us to understand this concept as a social interaction of subjects in which they work through the dialectics of desire in the process of working toward forms of (self)representation. Since the slave does not confront the master directly but only through the mediation of organized work and language, consciousness is propelled out of a dyadic structure into the possibility of a semiosis—in Peircean terms necessarily a triad of sign, object, and interpretant (Peirce 99)—that both regulates desire and, by means of self-objectification for an Other, allows the self to attain self-consciousness in society. As a product of Bildung, this self-consciousness has internalized social modes of representation that both constitute and fragment its identity.

III. LACAN—DESIRE AND THE SYMBOLIC ORDER

Having provided this socio-rhetorical analysis of the philosophical concept of Bildung, I still must show that it can be used to discuss narrative structures in terms of gender. As every reader of the Phenomenology knows, the book is frustrating and fascinating because of its peculiar mixture of apparent historical concreteness and radical abstractness. Thus, the chapter on the alienated world of Bildung, for all its conceptual generality, refers specifically to Enlightenment France, and the “gebildete” individual that Hegel has in mind is the title character from Diderot's Rameau's Nephew.4 To show how Hegel's analysis leads to a narrative “cultivation of gender,” I will make a detour through Lacan.5 The connection is by no means arbitrary: The crucial ideas that Lacan borrowed and reinterpreted from Hegel relate specifically to the dialectical moves of Bildung—namely the dialectic of desire and the individual's development into a world of structures of representation.

Like Hegel and Freud, Lacan begins with the assumption that the human being is moved or motivated essentially not by needs but by desire.6 Desire, like need, is generated by a lack. But, unlike need, desire is not fulfilled by providing the lacked object because the read object of desire is within the psyche of the subject, namely the subject's image of a fulfilled desire. The Freudian/Lacanian distinction between “désir” [Wunsch] and need is summarized by Lacan's students Laplanche and Pontalis: “[Desire] is irreducible to need, because it is not in principle a relation to a real object which is independent of the subject, but in relation to the phantasy” (cited in Lacan-Wilden 189). In Lacan's words: “Man's desire is the desire of the Other” (Écrits 264). Wilden explains this phenomenon with reference to Hegel:

Desire, as an absolute, is fundamentally the Hegelian desire for recognition, in that the subject seeks recognition as a (human) subject by requiring the other to recognize his (human) desire; in this sense one desires what another desires. And in the sense that desire is unconscious, one desires what the Other (here the unconscious subject) desires.

(189)

Three simple examples of this dialectic: An infant comes to interact and learn modes of social behavior by recognizing, mimicking, and constantly striving for the desires and recognition of its parents, initially even by “reading” the face of the parent to see his or her desire vis-à-vis some object or the infant itself (see Winnicott); the difference between love and exploitation is that the lover also loves the returning love of the beloved; and in our capitalist society consumption far outdoes need because objects are sold and bought on the principle that they are desired by an Other and so their possession responds to one person's desire for the other's desire (“Keeping up with the Joneses” would be the most prosaic formulation of this phenomenon).

As is clear in the very form of the statement “desire is the desire of the desire of the Other,” this structure is essentially self-reflexive, specular, mirroring. This is particularly the case to the extent that the “Other” involved is a concrete human being, an “other” (small “o”), like an infant's mother or like the infant's own projection of itself and its phantasmatic wish-fulfillments of totality (total satisfaction). Lacan refers to this stage or (to use Melanie Klein's term) “position,” as the “Imaginary.” (“Position” because it is not something “overcome,” as if one merely “grew out of the stage.” Rather, as Hegel says in the Phenomenology, it becomes a “trace” in us—“was vorher die Sache selbst war, ist nur noch eine Spur” [32]—paradoxically present and not present, a track we can return to under the appropriate conditions.) The Imaginary position of the subject is problematic and inadequate (at least according to models of development underlying our society) since the individual's lack leads to a desire and a projection of the Other as fulfiller insofar as the Other also desires; but the knowledge of the Other's desire reveals the Other also to be lacking and hence potentially neither fulfilled nor fulfilling. The individual in the grips of the Imaginary and desire therefore oscillates between fulfillment and impoverishment, whereby fulfillment, paradoxically, is the result of ignorance of the Imagined Other and impoverishment results from knowledge of the Other as a self-conscious being and hence lacking.7

According to Lacan, something steps in—necessarily—to regulate this oscillation, or, more precisely, to break the specularity of the Imaginary and to open it up into a dialectical movement. Like Hegel, he sees the individual moving out of the Self-Other dyad by entering into a triadic relationship with a wider social sphere, or more properly discourse, which is structured like a language, since, as mentioned above, only a triad brings about the possibility of meaningful sign, thus casting desire into a semiotic relationship under an interpretive social code. “Desire,” Lacan states as a basic assumption, “is an effect in the subject of the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier” (Écrits 264). It is in articulating desire as the desire of the Other that the subject recognizes his dependence on a system of signification, a prestructured world of signs (the “defiles of the signifier”). Lacan refers to this triadically organized, signifying system as the “Symbolic Order,” and to the “signifier of signifiers,” the sign under which the play of presence and absence of signs takes place, as the Phallus (Wilden 186). Entry into the Symbolic Order is made possible by Lacan's clever description of the Oedipus complex as the “No/Name-of-the-Father” (“Le Nom-du-Père”). The individual boy—and here gender clearly becomes important—must socially regulate his desire of the (m)other and bow to the “no” of the father in order to gain entry into the patriarchal domain symbolized by the patronym. In giving up the (m)other he internalizes the now essential lack (desire of the Other) and adopts a painful and powerful position that mediates objects through a partiarchal signifying system. The individual is thus set on a trajectory, the end position of which, to use Hegel's term, is a “Sprache der Zerrissenheit,” a patriarchal language that controls the individual's desire even as it leaves him torn, alienated, symbolically castrated. It is in this patriarchal language that the self will finally come to be able to speak of, and control, desire. But at the roots of this language is the lack and the father's “no/name” generating the desire. The locus of that “desire of the Other,” which is the fundmental lack that creates the very possibility of differences out of which the individual's (patriarchal) language arises, is the “unconscious” (“der andere Schauplatz,” according to both Freud and Lacan, which is “structured like a language”). The movement from apprentice to master marks, therefore, the male subject's acquisition of a voice in his father's tongue, a movement that links expression inextricably to repression. The goal of (psycho)analysis is to grant the speaking subject a voice in that language such that the subject can actually—even if indirectly—speak (about) its lack and desire of the Other (the unconscious). The goal of the Bildungsroman, I argue, is to represent the self's developmental trajectory within the bourgeois partiarchal order and thereby to expose the structuration of (male) desire.8

IV. GENDER

Combining the treatments of Hegel and Lacan, I believe we can offer a conception of Bildung that could yield fruitful results for a gender analysis of novels. We have first moved away from an non-Hegelian notion of Bildung as a vague, organic process of self-development/growth that leads to the individual's integration into society to an understanding of Bildung as the process whereby an individual experiences self-alienation in the form of different self-form(ul)ations in order to discover that both he and his society are nothing but mutually recognized self-representations. And now we can see, thanks to Lacan, that the individual engendered by the process of Bildung is more than a neuter person, since the “sich bildende” individual is not just developing into a social being by mastering society's language but adopting a male position within the patriarchy. Thus, Hegel's parodic description of the typical Bildungsroman plot is more accurate than one might have thought in its characterization of a man's entrance into a man's world. This means a number of things: Man gains access to the language and power in society which are under the sign of the name of the father; his desire, earlier under the domination of the Imaginary, now becomes Symbolically regulated by the “no” of the father; he sees his identity in terms of his identification with socially acceptable self-representations and roles; and therefore he has bought his position in the partiarchy at the price of a necessarily repressed lack or desire of the Other. Bildung thus describes a very specific process of cultivating gender or a gendered “identity” (that is torn by its role) within the modern partiarchal social structure.

A few references to recent studies on gender and sexual differences in capitalist western societies could provide further clarification and confirmation. Chodorow's 1978 study, The Reproduction of Mothering, argues powerfully that the fact of “women's mothering in the isolated nuclear family of contemporary capitalist society creates specific personality characteristics in men that reproduce both an ideology and psychodynamic of male superiority and submission to the requirements of production” (180-1). While neither the details of her powerful argument nor her analysis of the mothering roles of women are of central interest for our purposes, her basic point about the self-perpetuating structures of modern society is. She writes: “Institutionalized features of family structure and the social relations of reproduction reproduce themselves” (209). I would argue that Bildung, and its narrativization in the Bildungsroman is not an “organic” but a social phenomenon that leads to the construction of male identity in our sex-gender system by granting men access to self-representation in the patriarchal Symbolic order. As such Bildung is a central form of the institutional cultivation of gender roles. Thus, whereas the ideological significance of Bildung, though present from the beginning of discussions of the Bildungsroman, is implicitly or explicitly avoided in many discussions of the genre, I would incorporate precisely the socio-textual function of the concept into my analytical framework for studying the modern novel.

Gilligan's 1982 study of women's development, In a Difference Voice, investigates the development of ethical judgments in men and women. She demonstrates that the great majority of models of development use male roles as their norm. Without reference to Hegel, Lacan, or Bildung, she concludes that the present norm of moral development is a gradual movement toward “separation and individuation” (8) which leads not to isolation but to “learning to take the role of ‘the generalized other’” (10). In our terms, male Bildung proceeds toward a language, its own representation, opposed to a “different (nonpatriarchal) voice,” by accepting the socially recognized and organized projection of the Other.

And finally, in a more radical voice that both her American co-feminists and her French co-Lacanians, Irigaray already in 1974 focused on distinctions in the positions occupied by men and women in our society, positions that preclude and enable different courses of development. The very title of her major text on psychoanalysis and philosophy, Speculum of the Other Woman [Speculum de l‘autre femme], reveals that she is questioning the very process of speculation and the move through and “beyond” the Imaginary, which were described by Hegel and Lacan; her question and movement arise from considering the (female) Other of the desire that propels the (male) self to “higher” modes of self-reflection and social integration. In one of her more lyrical passages, she defines the relationship between man and woman in the modern patriarchy as the product of a kind of “Copernican revolution” in which man projects himself into the sun around which woman/earth revolves, offering him the means of reflection:

As things now go, man moves away in order to preserve his stake in the value of his representation, while woman counterbalances with the permanence of a (self)recollection which is unaware of itself as such. And which, in the recurrence of this re-turn upon the self—and its special economy will need to be located—can continue to support the illusion that the object is inert.

(134)

The first movement we can see as corresponding to that of Bildung (or the “bildende Bewegung” of which Hegel speaks in the Phenomenology [33]): It is essentially alienating in its motion away from “matter”; its goal is a stable economy of representations (the Symbolic); it depends on an apparently inert Other as lack (or lacked object) to make possible its reflectivity. This process functions, is highlighted, and is doomed to “vertiginous failure” (134), Irigaray writes, thanks to its inherent miscognition (or as Lacan would say of this subject, its “meconnaissance” [Four Concepts 74-75]) of the Other's unique and as yet unrepresentable rotating, distorting movement.

By dealing with the Other of Bildung, these three feminist writers from disparate fields (and there are many others), calrify the ideological and patriarchal structure of a process long thought intricately involved with “Humanität.”9Bildung captures the long and conflictual form(ul)ation of male subjectivity which is made possible by a specific oedipal regulation of (the desire of) the Other. To the extent that Bildung is institutionalized in our society—through education and its narrativization in literature—it serves to propagate its triangular codification of Self-Other, male-female relations.

V. BILDUNGSROMAN—ANALYSIS.

This analysis of Bildung sheds light on certain narrative and thematic structures commonly found in works received as Bildungsromane. Given my conceptual approach, it seems to me legitimate to differentiate between “Entwicklungs-” or “Erziehungsromane” (novels of development or education) and “Bildungsromane.” The narratives of the former are determined by the general thematic unity of a hero's growth or maturation, whereas the latter display as a motor of their narration specific forces of desire, control, and representation that propel the hero from Imaginary oscillation to Symbolic grounding and repression. Three examples, mostly from the German tradition, will have to suffice. Each of these, and more, would have to be worked out in detail. Given the novels' complexity and the explicit function of this essay as a theoretical framework for future investigations, I shall merely state a variety of features of three texts that could be fruitfully interpreted using my analytical tool.

Goethe's Wilhelm Meister has for me profound significance in the genre of the Bildungsroman, but not for the same reasons that other critiques have adduced. I would not consider it the “first” novel in its genre or a source of conscious or unconscious imitation by followers,10 but merely one of the most involved narrativizations of the process of Bildung. The opening book of the novel clearly locates Wilhelm in the realm of the Imaginary. The first word, “das Schauspiel,” foregrounds the hero's captivation in the specular.11 Thanks to Lacan, we can understand the identification of Wilhelm's mother and the theater (initially through the “Wollust” and “Freude der Illusion” of the puppets presented to him by his mother [18-19]) as a specular identification that is transferred onto his first lover, Marianne. His desire grows in his unconscious to the extent that his father denies him immediate access to the objects(s) of his desire (22-23), thereby creating in him a multilayered consciousness with planes of dyadic-specular and triangular-dialectical structures that propel him in an interplay of tension and resolution. That these oedipal conflicts are played out not just “in” Wilhelm but also at the narrative level is clear from the novel's insistence on repetitive images and patterns beyond the hero's explicit control. An obvious image is that of the picture presenting “wie der kranke Königssohn sich über die Braut seines Vaters in Liebe verzehrt” (70, 494, 513), which is unfolded and displaced in the various presentations of Hamlet, which in turn makes clear how the “Turmgesellschaft” can be interpreted as more than a Masonic institution issuing the hero into bourgeois life. That the Turmgesellschaft is a necessary element of the Symbolic ordering of the Imaginary can be seen graphically, for example, in the Abbé's role as the spirit of Hamlet's father, a role that reminds both actor (Wilhelm) and character (Hamlet) of their captivation in desire and the demands of patriarchal social roles. It is also certainly not by chance, seen from the perspective of our understanding of Bildung, that an essential key to Wilhelm's “happiness” in that Symbolic order is the arrangement of his paternity. Given the biological uncertainty of paternity, the generational passing-on of the patronym becomes the means of guaranteeing power in the patriarchy, and it is through Felix, handed over by the Turmgesellschaft, that Wilhelm becomes integrated into a line of succession. This is why, for example, the Abbé's response to Wilhelm's question after receiving the “Lehrbrief” (itself a network of quasi-ethical proverbs linking its apprentice to social and socializing modes of representation), is so crucial: “Feliz ist Ihr Sohn … Empfangen Sie das liebliche Kind aus unserer Hand, kehren Sie sich um, und wagen Sie es, glücklich zu sein!” (497).12 Wilhelm is integrated not by “organic growth” into society but by adopting the role that will make possible the passing on of the power contained in the patronym. Finally, Wilhelm's relationship to women in general, or more precisely, the narrative structuring of women in contrasting pairs, can be interpreted as an objectification of attempts to resolve oedipal conflicts in socially acceptable ways.13 (The story of the “schöne Seele” offers an interesting and problematic alternative to the hero's Bildung since she, as we would expect from our use of Freud, Lacan, Chodorow, and Gilligan, does not pass through the “law” as must her male counterparts.)14 In short, a wide array of textual features of Wilhelm Meister—from images, to themes, to broad narrative structures—can be interpreted in light of a specific process that leaves the hero not a “harmonious self”15 but a torn member of the patriachy striving for (an) appropriate mode(s) of representation in society.

Both Hölderlin and his title hero, Hyperion, can likewise be understood as engaged in the attempt to attain a Symbolic anchoring, to grapple with the positions of dyadic and dialectical (triadic) desire, to move toward social modes of self-representation made possible through the individual's experience of alienation (both from self and society). Since this process of Bildung accounts for the text's narrative momentum, I have reason to view Hyperion in terms of the genre Bildungsroman (see Jacobs, 120-23, for a discussion of critics' difficulties with this categorization). What distinguishes this novel from, say, Agathon or Wilhelm Meister (and what undoubtedly disturbed the Weimar classicists in Hölderlin's and Hyperion's personality) is the relentlessness of the oscillation within the Imaginary and the complexity of the self that finds stability in his desire through writing. The position of the Imaginary in the novel is structured around the poles Hyperion and (Mother) Nature-Diotima. The hero's Bildung takes place simultaneously as a “fortda” movement into and out of the Imaginary totality of his desire, i.e. between fullness and emptiness, and as a “progression” through different triads in which he must develop a dialectical self torn and positioned in the Symbolic: He is forced out of Nature/childhood by the symbolic father Adamas; he enters a relationship of triangular desire with Diotima and Alabanda; and he finally reaches a complex and dynamic “Ruhe” of poesis in which his writing links him and Bellarmin.16 He finds his social identity, paradoxically, as a hermit who masters himself and internalizes the lost Other through language.

As one final example of how the concept of Bildung can be applied to novels, we can consider the way that triadic structures abound beneath the level of plot and character in Stendhal's Red and Black, structures that mediate Julien Sorrel's desire and propel his movement through society. In most discussions of the Bildungsroman, this novel is mentioned as a possible candidate; and yet many critics also seem to fear that its inclusion could be expanding the boundaries of the genre too far. To my mind, however, no analysis shows why it might be considered—for all its historical specificity as opposed to the apparent “timelessness” of numerous German counterparts—a Bildungsroman (see Wells). My interpretation would take Girard's stimulating analysis as a point of departure and show that “triangular desire” is not just a repetitive structure in the novel, but part of a development and formation that we can equate with Bildung (see also MacCannell).17

VI. CONCLUSIONS

I would like to raise three possible consequences one could draw from the ideas presented here. I would hope that the terseness of my formulations, restricted by space and time, will arouse debate. They are intended not as prescriptions but to provoke thought about the way Bildung is used in the study of literature.

1. The process of Bildung depicted in Bildungsromane is essentially self-deconstructive (Hegel: “zerrissen”) since the structure of representation that they unfold and aspire to paradoxically depends on and excludes the female voice as the Other whose desire is desired yet never expressed. Understood as the depiction of Bildung, Bildungsromane have a kind of disjuncture at their heart because the Symbolic Orders they establish do not reconcile the basic opposition to a lacked/lacking Other. I thus agree with Schings that Bildungsromane like Wieland's Agathon, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and Moritz' Anton Reiser depict the “pathogenesis of the modern subject”; however, I wish to stress not just the individual's conflict with society but the contradictions inherent in the male position within the patriarchal order. That position, and hence the male modern subject, opens up and is exposed to the forces of the unconscious defined as the lack underlying the discourse and desire of the Other.

2. In terms of literary history, both the impossibility of fulfillment at the root of Bildung (because of the repression that makes expression possible) and the resulting frustration help explain why it seems as if so many novels accepted as Bildungsromane do not attain a positive conclusion. Such a consistent absence of satisfactory resolution need not frustrate the expectations of a genre based on Bildung and is not a priori evidence against the existence of Bildungsromane. Conversely, one need not assume per definitionem that a novel representing an individual's tornness at the end of his search for “identity” must be an “anti-Bildungsroman.” Rather, it reveals a truer understanding of how Bildung is frustrating and frustrated. I would see the notion of the optimistic, organistic “Humanitätsidee” underlying this genre as an ideological mask of the nineteenth century which is constantly torn off by the novels themselves and should be further challenged in critical readings—like those in the volume The Voyage In—that take sexual difference into account.18

3. Although numerous interesting studies have attempted to apply the generic category Bildungsroman to women's novels of development, I would argue that the strict gender codification at the basis of Bildung, taken in its historical context, makes female Bildung a contradiction in terms. This claim is by no means intended to imply that Entwicklungs- or Erziehungsromane are not central to the telling of women's experiences, i.e. my point is by no means that there is no (self)development, or (self)formation, unique to women. On the contrary, such self-development has found powerful literary expression in works that shatter the Bildungsroman genre by shattering its underlying conceptual and ideological frame. The relativization of the concept “Bildung” in terms of sexual difference, which I have been arguing for here, ought to remind critics of the difficulties of applying a supposedly “universal” but in fact gender-coded concept (and concommitant narrative structure) to both genders. Labovitz, for example, in her insightful work on “the female Bildungsroman in the twentieth century,” seems to me forced into certain equivocations: On the one hand she argues for a “new genre”; on the other, this genre is brought about when Bildung, apparently in the traditional sense, becomes possible for women in the form of “structures … [that] support women's struggle for independence, to go out into the world, engage in careers, in self-discovery and fulfillment” (7). Labovitz' significant call for a “feminist perspective” and “second look, or ‘re-vision’ at writings that earlier might not have been valued as female Bildungsromane” may be needlessly clouded by the use of the term Bildung(sroman) that cannot do justice to the “new areas of study about the ‘concerns and experience of women’” to which she appeals.19 This is not to say that I would disagree that a new genre is in the making; but the new narrative (and thematic) structures appearing in twentieth-century women's writing—as Irigaray, for example, insists—challenges the dominant developmental pattern that we call Bildung. Much women's literature addresses, in fact, the inappropriateness of male developmental models for women in the patriarchy (Labovitz 249; see also Keller for a criticism of the “myths” that have cast roles for women in male narratives). This is, I propose, one reason why “novels of awakening” are much more common for women and why the awakening often leads to death, since women have not been granted access—i.e. Bildung—to the existing patriarchal structures of representation. Once those structures change, or are at least emptied of their supposed universality, we may begin to formulate a new concept of Bildung that would be appropriate to the radical Otherness of much women's writing. My tendency for now, however, would be to reserve the term Bildungsroman for those works that illustrate narratively the cultivation and discontent of Bildung understood as the engendering of the male subject in the modern patriarchal Symbolic order.

Notes

  1. The following essay began as a contribution to that session. It will form the introductory chapter to a monograph on the gender-analysis of Bildung and the Bildungsroman. Thus, this essay will remain largely at the level of theory in order to provide a framework for future analyses.

  2. Ziolkowski raises this issue in similar terms, although he comes down more squarely than I would wish to on the “realist” (indeed empiricist) side in his study of the classical German elegy (pp. xi-xiii). Also Jacobs speaks of the “Zirkel, in dem das Denken sich hier bewegt, als notwendige Voraussetzung sinnvoller und fruchtbarer Durchdringung des Stoffes” (9).

  3. I attempt to demonstrate the significance of rhetoric for Hegel's conception of Bildung in my study The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of Bildung. To my knowledge, Altieri is one of the few critics who refers to the competing organic and humanist undercurrents in the notion of Bildung and the Bildungsroman, although he makes no mention of Hegel.

  4. Since this work was translated by Goethe in 1805 for its “rhetorical and ethical” brillance, it would not be too farfetched, I think, to consider Rameau's Nephew a paradigmatic depiction of Bildung and hence an early and overlooked Bildungsroman.

  5. For the connection between Lacan and narration, see the volume edited by Robert Con Davis of that name, esp. the editor's introduction which begins: “Jacques Lacan as narrative theorist? A Lacanian narratology? The answer to both questions, as this collection advances generally, is a qualified yes” (848).

  6. Freud speaks of the distinction between need (physical) and wish (psychical) already in the Traumdeutung (538-39). Need (Bedürfnis) leads to some motor activity to become satisfied; a wish (Wunsch), however, is the result of the internal feeling of satisfaction (Befriedigungserlebnis) which we desire to have repeated (“das Wiedererscheinen der Wahrnehmung [or Wahrnehmungsidentität] ist die Wunscherfüllung” 539). It is a desire for a feeling—ultimately, for another desire—rather than the need of an object. Lacan generally translates Wunsch as désir (“desire” in English).

  7. I am grateful to brief statements in Stanley Corngold's The Fate of the Self for the outlines of this argument (see his chapter on Hölderlin, 21-53 passim). I shall sketch out below how it is played out in Hölderlin's Bildungsroman, Hyperion.

  8. Hörisch comes to much the same conclusion: “Von dieser vierfachen Transfiguration der Dyade in die Triade, des Bedürfnisses ins Begehren, des Idealichs ins Ichideal und des Imaginären ins Symbolische berichten die Bildungsromane. Ihr tiefenstrukturales Thema ist somit der Mangel, den jene Transfigurationen ins Wunschleben einführten; die familiäre Triade von Vater, Mutter und Kind unterscheidet sich von der Mutter-Kind-Dyade durch den Mangel, daß das Kind mit seinem anderen nicht länger ichinflationäre Symbiosen bilden darf; das Begehren ist dementsprechend durch den Mangel des Begehrten gekennzeichnet” (17). Hörisch only implicitly deals with issues of gender, however, and focuses on different thematic relations in the novels from those that I shall pursue.

  9. Jacobs points out that the Hegelian aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer even tried to introduce the term “Humanitäts-Roman” as synonymous with Bildungsroman (11).

  10. I have already implied that Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, as an inspiration for Hegel's conception of Bildung, would be for me open to interpretation as a Bildungsroman; and Wieland's Agathon also deserves interpretation in terms of its narrativization of the transformations of “mimetic desire” (Girard), as Newman has shown in an unpublished essay.

  11. To the extent that Bildung involves the movement from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, one would expect, as Bahr points out, a common element of theater images (in my terms, the specular) to appear in Bildungsromane.

  12. Clearly the term “Glück” is of prime significance for the maintenance of the patriarchal order in this text (recall the meaning of “felix” and the book's concluding lines). For a general discussion of this concept, see Hörisch, 17-19.

  13. I am grateful to one of my students, Michael Esmailzadeh for working out a reading of female pairs in terms of Freud's work on male “object choice” and “degradation” in erotic life.

  14. She writes: “Ich erinnere mich kaum eines Gebotes, nichts erscheint mir in Gestalt eines Gesetzes, es ist ein Trieb, der mich leitet und mich immer recht führt” (420). See also Hirsch in Abel et al.

  15. Here I agree fully with Saine's criticism of Kurt May. I also think that I provide a (different) explanation for Wilhelm's concern as described by Saine: “das Wiedererlangen des in der Kindheit und im 1. Buch der Lehrjehre Verlorenen” (77). I interpret this indeed as Wilhelm's motivation, in terms of the loss of Imaginary totality and a desire of the lack in the Symbolic.

  16. See Roche for a different, though certainly dialectical and Hegelian reading of “Ruhe” in Hyperion. Also Ryan, 227-28.

  17. Miles' arguement that Rilke's confessional novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) “is the logical and at the same time most radical development of the Bildungsroman in the twentieth century” (987) points to numerous features that parallel my discussion (esp. those concerning Malte's childhood and break with it) and indicates how we could include further novels in this array.

  18. Thus I agree with Hörisch that Literaturwissenschaft has made the Bildungsroman “unlesbar” to the extent that it covered up this self-critical (self-deconstructing) feature of the genre as a depiction of the modern patriarchal, bourgeois order (10-12).

  19. I suspect this ambivalence was at the base of Simone de Beauvoir's response to Labovitz (248) that she was both not influenced by the Bildungsroman tradition but also, under an entirely new definition, would consider her novel a “female Bildungsroman” (a definition, I would add, that at this point in our society still stretches Bildung beyond its historical horizon. May that horizon be shattered.).

Works Cited

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