[In the following essay, Redfield studies the concept of Bildung and the paradoxes of literary Bildung, maintaining that the complications of the Bildungsroman genre stem from its aesthetic ideology.]

For the being of Geist has an essential connection with the idea of Bildung.

—Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Among the challenges the modern novel offers to genre theory, that of the Bildungsroman is remarkable on several counts. Few literary terms—let alone German ones—have enjoyed greater international success, both in the academy and in high culture generally. “If a person interested in literary matters commands as many as a dozen words of German,” Jeffrey Sammons remarks, “one of them is likely to be: Bildungsroman.”¹ If this person also commands the staples of Western literary history, she or he will also know that this subgenre is epitomized by Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, is in some way deeply German, but represents nonetheless “one of the major fictional types of European realism.”² At once international and national, a “major fictional type” embodied in the historical event of a particular novel, the Bildungsroman seems to have inherited the virtues of its nominal father, Goethe, the genius whose life captured for provincial Weimar the full radiance of human potentiality. One would be hard-pressed to find another instance of a genre in which particularity and generality appear to mesh so thoroughly. For since the Bildungsroman narrates the acculturation of a self—the integration of a particular “I” into the general subjectivity of a community, and thus, finally, into the universal subjectivity of humanity—the genre can be said to repeat, as its identity or content, its own synthesis of particular instance and general form. An equivalent repetition is audible in the German word “Bildungsroman” itself, which no doubt largely explains why it is more frequently borrowed than translated: even knowledge of only a dozen words of German suffices to hear an interplay of representation (Bild) and formation (Bildung), and thus the whisper of a profound homology between pedagogy and aesthetics, the education of a subject and the figuration of a text. The Bildungsroman, in short, is a trope for the aspirations of aesthetic humanism. Indeed, a stronger claim can be made: given its simultaneously self-reflexive and universalizing structure, this genre presents itself as a version—a humanist, and thus fully ideological version—of what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, in their study of German Romanticism, term “the literary absolute.”³

The first of many paradoxes that one encounters in studying this genre is that this description of it probably surprises. I have done little more than unpack, in very abbreviated and literal-minded fashion, the assertions implicit in the notion of the Bildungsroman, yet the result no doubt seems at odds with the prosaic use to which the term is usually put. The very success of the term has made it part of the daily fare of educated discourse and has given it the aura of a well-worn literary tool. And besides the fact that one habitually employs this word to describe novels that may not display much literary value, the idea of the Bildungsroman, even considered abstractly as a form, appears compromised by a certain sordid wishfulness. It seems counterintuitive to expect high aesthetic ambition from a genre seemingly built around a hero who, in Hegel's ironic summary, “in the end usually gets his girl and some kind of position, marries and becomes a philistine just like the others.”⁴ We would certainly appear to be more than a little removed from the refined poetics of a Mallarmé, or the aestheticism of Pater or Wilde. Finally, even if this genre were not weighed down by bourgeois pettiness, it would still seem an illegitimate substitute for what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call the “literary absolute,” which, as “the genre of literature,” no specific genre can embody (Literary Absolute, 11). I shall return to the question of the “literary” in short order; for the moment it will suffice to note that according to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy the Romantics inaugurate the thought of literature in its modern sense, with the “literary absolute” naming an emphatically new and self-transcending genre “beyond the divisions of classical (or modern) poetics” (11). Even if one recalls the Romantics' high claims for the novel as the genre that transcends genre, or Friedrich Schlegel's assertion that Fichte's philosophy, the French Revolution, and Wilhelm Meister are “the great tendencies of the age,” the Romantic absolu littéraire will still at best halo the achievement of Goethe's novel, not the genre Wilhelm Meister presumably inspired.

But the tense interplay of meanings at work in the idea of the Bildungsroman is further complicated by a referential difficulty: it is uncertain whether this genre exists to be described in the first place. Scholarship in this area has turned up one complication after another. Problems begin, appropriately enough, on the level of the signifier itself, since the word “Bildungsroman,” purportedly the name of a nineteenth-century genre, was nearly unknown before the early twentieth century—its widespread popularity is, in fact, largely a postwar phenomenon.⁵ Generic terms are no doubt usually supposed to lag behind the phenomena to which they refer; but given the “Romantic” presuppositions that can be extracted from this particular term, its deferred occurrence raises questions about literary history which rapidly become complex and serious. One might begin to suspect that critics such as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have good reason to claim that “a veritable romantic unconscious is discernable today, in the most central motifs of our modernity” (Literary Absolute, 15). At the same time, however, one might also wonder whether the term Bildungsroman, like the more notorious label “Romanticism,” has at best an indirect relation to the texts it is supposed to describe. And indeed, unsurprisingly, scholars in German studies have been casting doubt on this word's referential purchase for nearly as long as it has been in wide circulation. As soon as one takes a serious look at the notion of the Bildungsroman, it begins to unfold such extravagant aesthetic promises that few if any novels can be said to achieve the right to be so defined—possibly not even the five or six German-language novels that, in postwar German studies, have constantly been put forward as this genre's main (and not infrequently its only) representatives.⁶ Sammons's well-known article, by no means the first of its sort,⁷ concludes by wondering whether, among the “legends of literary history,” there is one “so lacking in foundation and so misleading as the phantom of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman” (Sammons, “Mystery,” 243). Frederick Amrine writes more forgivingly of a “critical fiction”—though like Sammons, Amrine has hard words for members of English departments who appropriate the authority of the term Bildungsroman without investigating its history or, consequently, its referential difficulties.⁸

But the Bildungsroman seems to constitute one of those quagmires of literary study in which increased rigor produces nothing more tangible than increased confusion. On the one hand it is certainly true that under the lens of scholarship this genre rapidly shrinks until, like a figure in Wonderland, it threatens to disappear altogether. Even Wilhelm Meister has proved resistant to being subsumed under the definition it supposedly inspired: critics with little else in common have registered their sense that at the end of Goethe's novel, Wilhelm “is still a long way from Schiller's theoretically postulated ‘beautiful moral freedom’.”⁹ As Sammons remarks, “[I]f the status of the model text is problematic, then a fortiori the genre itself must certainly be insecure” (“Mystery,” 237). But on the other hand, Germanists seem all the more ideologically committed to the truth of this “critical fiction” for having examined it and found it ontologically wanting. Monographs on the Bildungsroman appear regularly; without exception they possess introductory chapters in which the genre is characterized as a problem, but as one that the critic, for one reason or another, plans either to solve or ignore;¹⁰ and despite the variety of solutions proffered, the definition of the Bildungsroman that emerges in study after study usually repeats, in ways and for reasons that I seek to elaborate here, the self-referential structure of the aesthetic synthesis sketched at the beginning of this chapter—which returns one to the beginning of the cycle and necessitates, of course, another book or essay on the Bildungsroman. The more this genre is cast into question, the more it flourishes. And though it is certainly poor scholarship to reduce Bildung to a vague idea of individual “growth,” as common parlance generally does, a more historically and philosophically precise understanding of Bildung does not appear either to keep the Bildungsroman healthy and alive, or to prevent its corpse from rising with renewed vigor each time it is slain. The popular success of vulgarized notions of the Bildungsroman simply repeats, on a grander scale, this genre's indestructibility within the specialized literature.

I shall be tracking the rationale of this vacillation at some length in what follows; but with a glance back to the preceding chapter's discussion of aesthetic ideology, we may note that the Bildungsroman's paradox derives from that of aesthetics. The “content” of the Bildungsroman instantly becomes a question of form, precisely because the content is the forming-of-content, “Bildung”—the formation of the human as the producer of itself as form. Wilhelm Dilthey's seemingly content-oriented definition of the Bildungsroman as a “regular development … in the life of the individual,” in which each stage of development “has its own intrinsic value and is at the same time the basis for a higher stage,” is animated by a formal principle that undermines the content's specificity, as shown clearly in a remark by Robert Musil:

When one says “Bildungsroman,” [Wilhelm] Meister comes to mind. The development of a personal Bildung. There is, however, also Bildung in what is at once a narrower and a more extensive sense: with every true experience a cultured man educates himself [bildet sich ein geistiger Mensch]. This is the organic plasticity of man. In this sense every novel worthy of the name is a Bildungsroman. … The Bildungsroman of a person is a type [Typus] of novel. The Bildungsroman of an idea, that's quite simply the novel per se.¹¹

The content is thus in an essential sense the form, and the principle of formation is the human: if every novel worthy of the name is a Bildungsroman, this is because every human being worthy of the name embodies an essential humanity, an “organic plasticity” that permits the “geistiger Mensch” to produce himself (sich bilden). And yet, if the “person” immediately becomes a figure of the “idea”—and the novel a figure for the production of the novel itself—the ongoing debate about the Bildungsroman suggests that this power of formalization is less stable than Musil's comments imply. The idea of this genre persistently drives it in the direction of universality, but since its particularity is constantly in danger of disappearing, a “disturbing dialectic of everything and nothing,” as Amrine puts it (“Rethinking,” 124) comes to afflict the notion of the Bildungsroman as it vacillates between signifying in vague fashion a narrative in which a protagonist matures (such that “precious few novels would not qualify as ‘Bildungsromane’” [122]) and signifying in more rigorous fashion an aesthetic synthesis that threatens to disappear into sheer illusion. At once too referential and not referential enough, the Bildungsroman appears ineradicable from literary criticism. In its nonexistence it is so efficaciously present that Sammons is led to speak more than once of a “phantom genre” (“Mystery,” 239, 243). And since a tension within the procedures of institutionalized literary studies has generated this ghost, one can hope to learn something about the nature of literary reception by keeping it in view.

A closer look at what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call the “literary absolute” is in order here, since their study attempts to capture the presuppositions on which the institution of literary criticism is based. We may first dilate on a topic that surfaced intermittently in the preceding chapter: the appearance of the notion and institution of “literature” as part of the development of modern aesthetics over the course of the eighteenth century. Though Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are no doubt being overpunctual in locating the irruption of literature in Jena Romanticism, they are certainly right to insist on literature's modernity. As is well known, throughout most of the eighteenth century texts were organized rhetorically, according to generic principles that had not changed substantially since the classical era. The notion of “fiction” did not begin to have its present classificatory power before the Romantic period, as every student of the eighteenth-century novel knows: Samuel Richardson's stubborn insistence that he was indeed the “editor” rather than the “author” of the letters composing Pamela, for instance, only begins to make sense when one considers the ambiguous epistemological and ethical status of a text unprotected by prestigious generic conventions, and written several decades too early to profit from the category of “serious fiction,” or literature. This category became available as part of the wholesale rearrangement of discourses marking the advent of what we generalized in the preceding chapter as aesthetics. Literature emerges with the developing commodification of cultural production, the concomitant development of the “author” as the producer of intellectual property, and the production of the category of the aesthetic as the guarantor of social and philosophical unity. The fictionality of the text, like the disinterestedness of aesthetic intuition, becomes the mark of identity and value by being recoded as the imaginative expression of an exemplary subject.¹²

The history of literature's appearance and institutional development, which has been the object of many recent critical studies, does not in itself, however, answer the ritualistically modernist question, “What is literature?” It is imperative to take this question seriously if one's historical account is to have any real purchase on its object; and the great accomplishment of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's Literary Absolute is to have provided an uncompromisingly rigorous formulation of literature as an aesthetic ideal. Building on the work of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy unpack the commonplace of the “self-conscious text” into the model of a text that generates its own theory: into “theory itself as literature, or, in other words, literature producing itself as it produces its own theory” (12). The literary text becomes what it is—“literary”—in reflecting on its own constitution, pursuing, in Blanchot's words, “the almost abstract demand made by poetry itself to reflect itself and to fulfill itself through its reflection.”¹³ Literature thereby inscribes within itself the infinite task of criticism, hollowing out a space for readers who, in engaging the text, repeat the production of the text as its own (and their own) self-understanding. This self-understanding always lies on the horizon, à venir, because each production of the text calls out in turn for a further moment of completion. Literature is thus inexhaustible; it is an infinite, reflective, fragmentary movement, Schlegel's “progressive universal poetry,” or, in Blanchot's words, “a veritable conversion of writing: the power for the work to be and no longer to represent” (“Athenaeum,” 165).

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy rightly insist that “we ourselves are implicated in all that determines both literature as auto-critique and criticism as literature” (Literary Absolute, 16), for this understanding of literature provides the rationale of criticism's scientific and pedagogical operations, whether criticism knows it or not. On the one hand, literature is the “all,” as Blanchot points out: literature concerns everything, to the point of conveying Being itself in an intuitive, unmediated moment of insight. On the other hand, literature is what one approaches endlessly, through specialized, technical processes of mediation. The absolute character of the text's truth calls for editions and variorum editions, biographies, memoirs, and all the minutiae of scholarship, as well as for the reiterated acts of interpretation we call criticism proper. One may thus claim in the abstract what the historical record confirms: not only is there no literature without criticism, but the history of the idea of literature is the history of the institutionalization of literary study. It must also be noted, however, that a contradiction highly productive of discourse labors at this institution's heart. “Literature” is both infinitely populist and irreducibly elitist in its aspirations, and at once avant-gardist and archival in nature. The result is a persistent tension between academic and anti-academic discourse about literature (a literature that is always being “betrayed” by the scholarly reverence it elicits); between scholarship and criticism within the academy; and between poetics and hermeneutics within criticism. The critical endeavor, however, is as irreducible as it is conflicted, since it embodies the very self-consciousness of the “literary” text. Indeed, criticism has so thoroughly displaced philology in the twentieth-century academy partly because criticism's appeal to the “opacity” and “inexhaustibility” of the literary text results in the full integration of the literary absolute as an institutional rationale.¹⁴

The discussion of aesthetics in chapter 1 [of Phantom Formations] has prepared us to understand that the emergence of literature as theory involves the participation of larger metaphysical and political issues than the extremely modest world-historical destiny of academic literary criticism might lead one to conclude. In modeling the autoproduction of reflection, literature, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy insist, represents an absolute instance of “poiesy or, in other words, production”:

Romantic poetry sets out to penetrate the essence of poiesy, in which the literary thing produces the truth of production in itself, and thus, as will be evident in all that follows, the truth of the production of itself, of autopoiesy. And if it is true (as Hegel will soon demonstrate, entirely against romanticism) that auto-production constitutes the ultimate instance and closure of the speculative absolute, then romantic thought involves not only the absolute of literature, but literature as the absolute.

(Literary Absolute, 12)

The literary absolute “aggravates and radicalizes the thinking of totality and the Subject” (15), and thereby becomes the privileged other of philosophy, at once the object of philosophy's desire and an excess toward which philosophy must maintain a reserve. For our purposes two consequences bear emphasizing. (1) The Subject, in the full metaphysical sense of the term, remains in proximity to and possibly depends on a linguistic model, since the thought of “literature” provides the Subject with its most immediate self-image—though not necessarily with a fully reliable image: Hegel's hostility toward Romanticism is only one event in the well-known story of philosophy's profound ambivalence toward literature. I shall return to this ambivalence, which is arguably at play even in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's analysis of it. (2) The Subject, in its historicity, comes into being as Bildung, “the putting-into-form of form” (Literary Absolute, 104), the elaboration of the Subject in the specifically aesthetic terms of phenomenal or sensory realization.

The complex itinerary of Bildung in German or, more broadly, in European intellectual history from Herder onward can only be suggested here; however, lest it be imagined that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are overstating the metaphysical force of this concept, we may recall Hans-Georg Gadamer's authoritative description of Bildung at the beginning of Truth and Method. I quote at length, since Gadamer's synthesis brings clearly into view the synthetic power of the aesthetic tradition:

The first important observation about the familar content of the word Bildung is that the earlier idea of a “natural shape” which refers to external appearance (the shape of the limbs, the well-formed figure) and in general to the shapes created by nature (e.g., a mountain formation—Gebirgsbildung) was at that time detached almost entirely from the new idea. Now Bildung is intimately associated with the idea of culture and designates primarily the properly human way of developing one's natural talents and capacities. Between Kant and Hegel the form that Herder had given to the concept was perfected. … Wilhelm von Humboldt, with his sensitive ear, already detects a difference in meaning between Kultur and Bildung: “but if in our language we say Bildung, we mean something both higher and more inward, namely the attitude of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavor, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character.” Bildung here no longer means “culture,” i.e., the development of capacities or talents. The rise of the word Bildung calls rather on the ancient mystical tradition, according to which man carries in his soul the image [Bild] of God after whom he is fashioned and must cultivate it in himself. The Latin equivalent for Bildung is formatio, and accordingly in other languages, e.g., in English (in Shaftesbury), “form,” and “formation.” In German also the corresponding derivations of the idea of forma, e.g., Formierung and Formation, have long vied with the word Bildung. … Yet the victory of the word Bildung over “form” does not seem to be fortuitous. For in Bildung there is Bild. The idea of “form” lacks the mysterious ambiguity of Bild, which can mean both Nachbild (“image,” “copy”) and Vorbild (“model”).

In accordance with the frequent carry-over from becoming to being, Bildung (as also the contemporary use of “formation”) describes more the result of this process of becoming than the process itself. The carry-over is especially clear here because the result of Bildung is not achieved in the manner of a technical construction but grows out of the inner process of formation and cultivation, and therefore remains in a constant state of further continued Bildung. It is not accidental that in this the word Bildung resembles the Greek physis. Like nature, Bildung has no goals outside itself. … In this the concept of Bildung transcends that of the mere cultivation of given talents, from which concept it is derived. The cultivation of a talent is the development of something that is given, so that the practice and cultivation of it is a mere means to an end. Thus the educational content of a grammar-book is simply a means and not itself an end. Its assimilation simply improves one's linguistic ability. In Bildung, contrariwise, that by which and through which one is formed becomes completely one's own. To some extent everything that is received is absorbed, but in Bildung what is absorbed is not like a means that has lost its function. Rather in acquired Bildung nothing disappears, but everything is preserved. Bildung is a genuine historical idea, and because of this historical character of “preservation” is important for understanding in the human sciences.¹⁵

Since Bildung is grounded in a linguistic model—in the “literary absolute” as the autoproductivity of language—it is unsurprising that Gadamer finds in this concept's signifier a fusion of process, telos, and self-representation (“In Bildung there is Bild. The idea of ‘form’ lacks the mysterious ambiguity of Bild”). Signifying both Nachbild and Vorbild, Bildung encloses the structure of mimesis itself, which, through the temporalizing prefixes nach and vor, becomes the structure of typology: Bildung mirrors and prefigures its own fulfillment. Thus, as the representation of its own striving, Bildung “remains in a constant state of further continued Bildung” and achieves the autoproductivity of nature or physis, having “no goals outside itself.” Its destiny is the universality of Hegel's Absolute Spirit, which later on in his discussion Gadamer specifically invokes: “It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being” (13).

There are, of course, well-known historical reasons why speculative philosophy, the idea of Bildung, and a certain thought of literature emerge with particular intensity in late eighteenth-century Germany. But as we saw in chapter 1, analogous concepts, frequently, though by no means always, the result of the direct or indirect influence of German thought, saturate post-Romantic European cultural discourse, informing directly political as well as philosophical or belletristic contexts.¹⁶ This should be the less surprising in that the idea of Bildung is an idea about the historical realization of Bildung. “Promotion to the universal,” Gadamer writes, “is not something that is limited to theoretical Bildung” (13); it could not be: its logic renders it an essentially political process. Lacoue-Labarthe has in fact argued that Bildung summarizes the thought of politics in Western culture, insofar as “the political (the City) belongs to a form of plastic art, formation and information, fiction in the strict sense. This is a deep theme which derives from Plato's politico-pedagogical writings … and reappears in the guise of such concepts as Gestaltung (configuration, fashioning) or Bildung, a term with a revealingly polysemic character (formation, constitution, organization, education, culture, etc.).”¹⁷ The ambitious analyses that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy derive from this insight are not our immediate concern here, but Bildung's practical orientation holds sufficient relevance for the more humdrum problem of the Bildungsroman in the modern academy that it is worth pausing to recompose the preceding chapter's analysis of aesthetic narrative around the question of aesthetic pedagogy.¹⁸

The autoproduction of the literary or speculative absolute lies in its representing-itself-to-itself, its identifying with itself. Its process or historicity consists in its ongoing identification with an identity that is its own. However, in making overt the aesthetic or speculative absolute's pragmatic claim to realize itself in the phenomenal world, Bildung brings into play the figurative and temporal complications of exemplarity. An identity must be formed through identification with an example: a model that on the one hand is the true identity of the identity-to-be-formed, but on the other hand is separated from the ephebe by the temporality or process of Bildung itself. Bildung's engine thus runs on the double bind of identification: the subject must identify with the model in order to become what the subject already is; however, this also means that the subject must not identify with anything—particularly not a master or exemplar—that is not always already the subject itself. Aesthetic history, in its rigorous manifestations, thereby becomes a dialectical story of pain—of “the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative” that Hegel elaborates very much in opposition to, though not, as we see, simply in contradiction with, the Romantic “literary absolute.” Though Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man does not work out a fully dialectical argument in Hegel's sense, it is arguably the most influential text on the notion of aesthetic pedagogy to come out of Germany during this period; so we may usefully extract and examine its famous central claim, which we have already heard echoed in Gadamer's invocation of “the ancient mystical tradition, according to which man carries in his soul the image of God after whom he is fashioned and must cultivate it in himself”:

Every individual man, one may say, carries in himself, by predisposition and determination [der Anlage und Bestimmung nach], a pure ideal Man, with whose unchanging oneness it is the great task of his being, in all its changes, to correspond. This pure Man [reine Mensch], who makes himself known more or less clearly in every subject [Subject], is represented by the State, the objective and as it were canonical form in which the diversity of subjects seeks to unite itself.¹⁹

It would be difficult to find a more compact rendering of the essence and itinerary of Bildung, which appears here in its full anthropological determination as the aesthetic education of “man,” a pragmatic process of autoproduction-as-identification that is both predestined and a “great task.” The difference of history separates the subject from the Subject, and in the gap of this difference—which is an exacerbated version of the difference, at once annulled and maintained, which makes possible the self-identifying Subject—the political force of Bildung inheres. It is not simply that the subject discovers the objective form of its own ideality in the State, though this is certainly not without consequence for the political character of aesthetics. Even more crucial, however, as we saw in the previous chapter, is that the difference between subject and Subject allows the latter to reveal itself “more or less clearly” depending on the stage of development that the former occupies. Any particular subject, to the precise extent that it remains particular, will always remain underway toward full self-realization, just as every determinate State will remain “more or less” what Schiller calls a “dynamic state,” underway toward the “moral” or Aesthetic State that forms the telos of Bildung. As an aesthetic event, however, Bildung demands phenomenal manifestation: this is to say that it requires a figure, a Bild, exemplifying and prefiguring the identity underlying Bildung's difference and deferral. In the concordant discord of history, then, certain subjects and states can, indeed must, become exemplary. They will always fall short of their own exemplarity, but exemplarity inheres in this very shortfall: Bildung, as Gadamer says, “remains in a constant state of further continued Bildung.” It is thus inherent in the logic of aesthetic education that Schiller's treatise should regress from the universalist promise of its title to the less democratic model of history suggested in the text's conclusion: “[A]s a need, [the Aesthetic State] exists in every finely attuned soul; as a realized fact, we are likely to find it, like the pure Church and the pure Republic, only in some few chosen circles” (Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 27.12). These chosen few acquire the ability to identify with “pure ideal Man” by actualizing, through acculturation, their inherent human ability to perform an aesthetic judgment—a disinterested, formally universal judgment that enacts the individual subject's point of contact with the formal universality of humanity, thus providing the subject with what Schiller calls “the gift of humanity itself” (21.5).²⁰ And since the process of acculturation or Bildung that actualizes this potential will always in turn be found to have manifested itself most purely in a historically specific site (classical Greece; Germany, England, or, more generally, “Europe”; the educated classes; the male psyche; etc.), the narrative of Bildung clearly has enormous political utility and is in fact inseparable not just from the rhetoric of class struggle and colonial administration in the nineteenth century, but more generally from the very thought of history itself, as, in David Lloyd's words, the “individual narrative of self-formation is subsumed in the larger narrative of the civilizing process, the passage from savagery to civility, which is the master narrative of modernity.”²¹

This account of Bildung, sketchy enough given that, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy remark, this concept “brings together shaping and molding, art and culture, education and sociality, and ultimately history and figuration” (36), returns us to the task—mercifully limited in some respects, though far-reaching in others—of understanding what happens when Bildung acquires the suffix Roman, and the institution of criticism is forced to confront more directly its origins in the question of literature. The results, as we have seen, are mixed. It should at least be more obvious at this point why studies of the Bildungsroman generally display a deep investment in this genre's existence, since we are now able to establish that the Bildungsroman presents itself as a certain modality of the “literary absolute” in offering itself as the literary form of Bildung. This emerges most overtly in formalizing accounts such as Monika Schrader's, in which the Bildungsroman is defined as “the mimesis of poietical [poietischer] productivity”;²² but the aesthetic heritage is no less forcefully at work in seemingly more pragmatic definitions. If, as we are provisionally accepting, the literary absolute “aggravates and radicalizes the thinking of totality and the Subject,” and if Bildung names the actualization of the Subject as pedagogy, which in turn generates the empirical determination both of the Subject (as “man”) and of Bildung (as acculturation), then the notion of the Bildungsroman returns us to the literary armed with what Schiller would call “the determination [we] have received through sensation” (Aesthetic Education, 20.3): the literary will now be absolute as a mirror for the anthropological subject of Bildung, Musil's “organically plastic” Man.²³ This humanization of the literary helps explain certain vacillations that, as we noted earlier, seem inseparable from the Bildungsroman. The genre's definition inflates so easily into commonplaces of “progress” or “growth,” for instance, because the pragmatic universalism of Bildung encourages it to. The case of the Bildungsroman confirms the generalization offered in the preceding chapter: “high” and “popular” culture are the two sides of a single coin, and an absolute aesthetic performance must be both at once. This double imperative accounts for the hint of crassness or vulgarity haunting the idea of a Bildungsroman: precisely because it is an aesthetic genre—the genre of the aesthetic—it will need to be a degradable form and address itself to what an acculturated class understands as the masses. In fascist or totalitarian Marxist narratives, the masses will, furthermore, become the protagonist of such a novel; the translation of the Subject into the fantastic immediacies of blood and race is a logical (though by no means a necessary) exacerbation of aesthetic ideology, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, among others, have shown.²⁴ The more banally sordid kind of upward mobility that drew Hegel's irony is for similar reasons an essential ambiguity within Bildung, which, though it manifests the universal disinterestedness of aesthetic culture, also (therefore) occurs as the accumulation of sensuous forms of this universality, and thus always remains exposed to its seeming opposite, philistinism—and more generally, in complex and far-reaching ways, to the commodity form and the ruses of capital.²⁵ Like aesthetics generally, the Bildungsroman will always risk the uneasy contempt of the philosopher. In short, as an aestheticized literary absolute, it will always risk falling short of itself as “literature.”

Meanwhile, however, the genre will also demand to be understood in terms of internalization and negation, not just because it constantly risks tumbling into the world of economic exchange, but also because Bildung, as we have seen, constitutes the effacement of the difference between the ephebe and the exemplar: a task that, in presenting itself as infinite, becomes understandable as an ironic predicament and easily acquires the tonality of melancholy. The Bildungsroman is thus frequently characterized as the great genre of German inwardness; and numerous critics, faced with the paradoxes of this genre, have sought to define the Bildungsroman in ironic terms as the exemplary novelistic genre of failure or loss. I shall return to the concept of irony later in this chapter and in subsequent chapters; for the moment, we need simply note that so long as irony is understood as self-reflection or knowledge, the essential structure of Bildung is preserved: the subject “matures,” either in a wry or a penseroso mode, by transforming loss into the knowledge of loss, thus acquiring representative status as an entity capable of universalizing its own mortality. All of the dangers and opportunities sketched here return us to the predicament of aesthetic exemplarity. For it is, in short, because the Bildungsroman, as the literary form of Bildung, must be an exemplary genre that it must shoulder the compromises and contradictions that wait upon political efficacity.

If criticism depends on literature (as theory) to furnish it with the model of its own possibility, and if the Bildungsroman is the pragmatic, humanist rewriting of literature-as-theory, then it is certainly understandable that criticism as an institution, like Lacan's infant before its mirror, should perform a “jubilant assumption of its specular image” when faced with the notion of this genre—and should therefore find itself committed to a certain irreducible paranoia. Definitions of the Bildungsroman share a practically immovable deep structure for just this reason. Though the genre's instability forces its constant retheorization, the definition that results is always plotted around three interrelated qualities, which are those of a pragmatized absolu littéraire: self-reflexivity, self-productivity, and exemplarity. The frequency with which “self-reflexivity” is emphasized as the quality that makes the Bildungsroman different and distinct is perhaps the most glaring sign that something has gone wrong in the critical process and that whatever has gone wrong has something to do with the problem of literature. To define a literary genre as “self-reflexive” is to offer, in lieu of a definition, a supererogatory, paranoid assertion that the genre is indeed “literary.”²⁶ One could make a similar point about “self-productivity,” which is inseparable from self-reflexivity and is similarly literary in its generality, though here the pragmatic thrust of Bildung generates the appearance of greater specificity. Self-productivity, for Bildung, means the production of selves: in producing itself the genre produces—i.e., educates—readers. The Bildungsroman's pedagogical power has thus constantly served as the focal point of its self-consciousness and exemplarity, as in the earliest recorded use of this term, by Karl Morgenstern in 1820: “It will justly bear the name Bildungsroman … because it portrays the Bildung of a hero … 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.”²⁷ The full metaphysical system of Bildung rarely displays itself in contemporary criticism as overtly as it did in Gadamer's definition of the term; but a certain structure of assumptions generally remains intact, and remains capable of emerging as a recognizably aesthetic ideology. The pragmatics of Bildung inhere, for instance, even in the title of Michael Beddow's The Fiction of Humanity (1982): the human is the essence of fictionality because in being imagined it is produced; fictionality, however, is essentially human because the human is its referent and meaning. The Bildungsroman, consequently, is the exemplary genre of humanity's autoproduction: “[T]he novels all testify to a conviction that there is something about imaginative fiction, and something about authentic humanity, which makes the former an especially suitable medium of insight into the latter.”²⁸ If one turns to Martin Swales's influential The German Bildungsroman, one finds that once again the genre is exemplary of “the literary work” in its combination of self-consciousness and pragmatism, rendered here as a double attention to imagination and reality: “I want to suggest in my analysis of the Bildungsroman that, in general terms, the literary work is both referential and self-constituting, that, more specifically, the Bildungsroman is a novel genre which derives its very life from the awareness both of the given experiential framework of practical reality on the one hand and of the creative potential of the human imagination and reflectivity on the other.”²⁹ The skeleton of the literary absolute remains visible in all these definitions. Reading is a process of Bildung inscribed in the text itself as the text's reflection on its own human essence; consequently, Bildungsromane are the most “realist” as well as the most “self-conscious” of novels, since their referent is the self-positing consciousness of the human. They are the most pedagogically efficient of novels, since they thematize and enact the very motion of aesthetic education.³⁰ In short, they are exemplary fictions, not least, as noted earlier, when they are characterized as the ironic knowledge of human finitude: such melancholy would in fact be the definitive manifestation of their realism, self-consciousness, and educative force.

It would be a mistake to imagine that more overtly skeptical readers or methodologies find it easy to avoid repeating these gestures. The Marxist tradition, for instance, while obviously committed to a critique of “German ideology,” has nonetheless tended to accept uncritically the existence, and therefore the exemplarity, of the Bildungsroman. Ferenc Fehér writes that the Bildungsroman “differs from other novels only in so far as the educational process itself is purposely put forward as the goal of the action.”³¹ Franco Moretti, in a particularly emphatic profession of faith in this genre's uncomplicated existence, claims that it represents the “symbolic form” of modernity.³² Even David Lloyd, whose critique of aesthetics informs much of my argument, seems unable to avoid making an overhasty investment in the existence of the Bildungsroman. Ironically, in Lloyd's case a political critique of Bildung leads to Bildung's ghostly return: seeking firm differences between a “major” literary tradition laboring in the service of aesthetics and contestatory, “minor” literatures that prepare the way for political alternatives, Lloyd commits himself to a binary opposition in which the Bildungsroman becomes the other of otherness, the stable site of production of subjects whose claim to universality may be materially interested and bogus, but can be exposed as such only from the vantage of other cultural productions.³³

If the Bildungsroman can figure so unproblematically in critical texts even when the critic's agenda and methodology oppose those of humanist aesthetics, one has reason to suspect that the persistent return of the problem of the Bildungsroman in recent scholarship is a symptom of an instability within criticism. The symptom, as a symptom of instability, is itself at once overdetermined and contingent: criticism obviously should be able to get along quite well in the absence of this recently invented Bildungsroman, which, however, as we have seen, is as saturated with meaning as if it were a metaphysical cornerstone. There is no secure way to decide whether the idea of this genre is either necessary with regard to aesthetics or referential with regard to literature, which means that criticism is threatened with an inability to know the status or control the production of its own knowledge. In response to this uncertainty, critics return obsessively to this phantom genre, usually in order to grant it human warmth and substance, and this frequently in the hyperbolic mode of naturalization. Moretti, for instance, not only idealizes the Bildungsroman into the “symbolic form” of modernity, but naturalizes it into a biological species that “emerged victorious from that veritable ‘struggle for existence’ between various narrative forms that took place at the turn of the century: historical novel and epistolary novel, lyric, allegorical, satirical, ‘romantic’ novel, Künstlerroman. … As in Darwin, the fate of these forms hung on their respective ‘purity’: that is to say, the more they remained bound to a rigid, original structure, the more difficult their survival” (Moretti, Way of the World, 10, Moretti's ellipsis).³⁴ Alternatively, one can seek to exorcise the problem through skepticism—a gesture all the easier to make if, like Sammons, one adopts the no-nonsense tone of an empiricist, and pretends to believe that a Bildungsroman would be very easy to recognize if only one could find one.³⁵ Such skepticism is thus in one sense no more than the negative face of a recuperative movement in which criticism's ability to account for its own error is reaffirmed. But even in its most naively empirical form, the skeptic's negative gesture has a critical force beyond its own limitations, because in seeking to recalibrate and remove the difference between criticism and literature, it reminds criticism that this difference exists. The entire debate about the Bildungsroman revolves around this difference, constantly suspected and repeatedly effaced, and since we have seen that the relation between criticism and literature is one in which literature produces itself in and as criticism, the question of the Bildungsroman returns us to that of the “literary absolute,” which is perhaps less absolute, or even more absolute, than Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are able to claim.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy occasionally suggest literature's irreducibility to the Subject, but their pathbreaking study does tend to underplay or forget the most incisive gesture in Walter Benjamin's thesis: his contention that German romantic criticism understands “reflection in the absolute of art” to be in the strictest sense non-subjective, an “I-less reflection” (Ich-freie Reflexion).³⁶ “What is at stake in Benjamin's account,” Samuel Weber affirms, “is nothing less unusual, idiosyncratic, or, if you prefer, original, than the effort to elaborate a notion or practice of ‘reflexivity’ that would not ultimately be rooted in the premise of a constitutive subject.”³⁷ Weber's commentary elucidates non-subjective reflection in terms of what Benjamin calls “the irony of form,” which Weber unpacks as “a practice of writing which, precisely by undermining the integrity of the individual form, at the same time allows the singular ‘work’ to ‘survive’” (“Criticism Underway,” 315). Rather than represent an internalization of reflection as subjectivity, this irony would reside in the excess of form over its own self-constitution as form: in the mechanical linguistic repetitions that destroy the singularity of the artwork while permitting it to emerge. This mechanical element in art is what Benjamin calls the “prosaic,” and criticism, Benjamin writes, exists as a strange form of presentation [Darstellung] of this prosaic nucleus:

Criticism is the presentation of the prosaic kernel in each work. The concept “presentation” is thereby to be understood in the chemical sense, as the generation of one substance [Erzeugung eines Stoffes] through a determinate process to which others are subjected [unterworfen]. This is what Schlegel meant when he said of Wilhelm Meister that the work “does not merely judge itself, it also presents itself [stellt sich dar].”

(Begriff der Kunstkritik, 109)

Commenting on this difficult passage, Weber draws attention to its sacrificial logic: “The romantic idea of criticism thus turns out to consist in a process of ‘subjection’: ‘others’ are subjected so that something can matter.” And then, tacitly reversing the poles of Benjamin's chemical analogy, he continues: “As a result of this subjection to the other, criticism ‘stellt sich dar,’ sets itself forth, sets forth, departing from itself to become something else, something lacking a proper name and which Benjamin, and after him de Man, will call ‘allegory’” (“Criticism Underway,” 317). It is perhaps not immediately clear how or to what criticism subjects itself in this passage, but Weber's proposed reversal, though unexplained, is consequent: criticism is always the criticism or “Darstellung” of itself, and thus is a subjection of itself to an alterity which is itself. All of the terms in this sacrificial story can in fact be substituted for each other, as Benjamin's passive and paratactic syntax allows either “criticism” or the “prosaic kernel” to occupy the place either of “the one substance” or of the “others.” It must be noted that this narrative is still essentially that of Bildung, when Bildung is unfolded into its full dialectical model and understood as the ironic understanding of its own impossibility. But another story shadows the sacrificial and substitutive one both in Benjamin's text and in Weber's, legible in the political term “subjection”: the story of an Unterwerfung, a sub-jection or “throwing under” of a plural otherness. In this sense the anonymous “others” in Benjamin's sentence have no existence except as placeholders for the violence of the “determinate process” of Darstellung: they are thus irrecuperable, inaccessible to the substitutive process that, like syntax, they make possible. The sacrificial exchange, which leads back to the auto-productive world of natural production (Erzeugung) and Bildung, could not exist without this violent Unterwerfung, which nonetheless remains radically heterogeneous to it. The thrown-under others thus reiterate an alterity irrecuperable to yet constitutive of the subject: this is also to say that they mark the mechanical insistence that Benjamin, deliberately contesting the subjectivist model of irony, terms the “irony of form.” Criticism, the “presentation” of this irony, is thus the figure of its own unwitting and unstoppable “subjection,” an ongoing throwing-under of understanding that, as Weber reminds us, is what “Benjamin, and after him de Man, will call ‘allegory’.”³⁸

What this might mean becomes clearer if we examine the passage to which Benjamin refers us in Friedrich Schlegel's famous essay on Wilhelm Meister. For Schlegel, this novel is so “thoroughly new and unique” that it can only be understood “in itself [aus sich selbst].”³⁹ When reading it we must perform a purely reflective judgment, deriving our generic concept (Gattungsbegriff) from the object in its particularity:

Perhaps one should thus at once judge it and not judge it—which seems to be no easy task. Luckily it is one of those books that judge themselves, and so relieve the critic of all trouble. Indeed, it doesn't just judge itself; it also presents itself [stellt sich auch selbst dar].

(Schlegel, “Über Goethes Meister,” 133-34)

Thus critical representations of the text would serve it badly, “apart from the fact that they would be superfluous [überflüssig].” But the strange order of Darstellung that Benjamin read in the formation of this “literary absolute” ensures that a certain reading, however superfluous, will be called for. A few sentences later we read that the novel “disappoints as often as it fulfills customary expectations of unity and coherence,” and that it in fact fails to judge itself insofar as it fails to pass from the level of the particular to that of the general: a failure that signals the return of the formerly “superfluous” reader:

If any book has genius, it is this one. If this genius had been able to characterize itself in general as well as in particular, no one would have been able to say anything further about the novel as a whole, and how one should take it. Here a small supplement [Ergänzung] remains possible, and a few explanations will not seem useless or superfluous [kann nicht unnütz oder überflüssig scheinen]. … [T]he beginning and the ending of the novel will generally be found peculiar and unsatisfactory, and this and that in the middle of the text will be found superfluous and incoherent [überflüssig und unzusammenhängend]. And even he who knows how to distinguish the godlike from artistic willfulness will feel something isolated in the first and last reading, as though in the deepest and most beautiful harmony and oneness the final knotting of thought and feeling were lacking.

(134)

The text judges itself but does not judge itself; it accounts for its own particularity but fails to inscribe itself in a genre (Gattung). And the reader, initially suspended between judging and not judging, then made überflüssig by the text's self-reflexive power, finally becomes a supplement (Ergänzung) that is nicht überflüssig. This reader, a master reader who knows how to distinguish “the godlike from artistic willfulness,” performs an aesthetic judgment and necessarily finds the text wanting—rather as Hegel, in the Aesthetics, was to find Schlegel's work of an “indefinite and vacillating character,” “sometimes achiev[ing] too much, sometimes too little” (63). But nothing could be more suspect than this magisterial act of judgment, for it has been generated by the text's inability to account for itself—a predicament replayed in the lucid incoherence of Schlegel's own theoretical narrative.

Theory or criticism here is “literary” precisely to the extent that it is unable to know its own origin, and the literary is “absolute” only in the sense that it recedes from theory in the very act of constituting it. Theory becomes theory out of an irreducible self-resistance: a paradox nicely exemplified by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's The Literary Absolute, which achieves its insight into the Subject's dependence on literature only by remaining blind to what Benjamin gives us to think as literature's disruptive subjection.⁴⁰ In meditating such “subjection” in terms of a fundamentally non-subjective, formal irony, Benjamin remains faithful to Schlegel's own much-misunderstood presentation of irony. In the passage just examined, for instance, irony must be thought precisely in Benjamin's terms, as an excess of exemplarity or of form, a surplus or remainder that produces the judging subject by disrupting the dialectical passage from particular to general. When Schlegel goes on to characterize Wilhelm Meister in terms of “the irony that hovers over the whole work” (137), he is referring to a textuality that, in this most exemplary of texts, is überflüssig und unzusammenhängend, “as though in the deepest and most beautiful harmony and oneness the final knotting of thought and feeling were lacking”: irony here is the “permanent parabasis” of Schlegel's famous fragment 668, and is thus another word for literariness itself.⁴¹ Irony, as Kevin Newmark comments, is therefore “a term that always marks the encounter and potential tension between literature and philosophy, or truth and tropes” (“L'absolu littéraire,” 906). When Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy tell us that irony is “the very power of reflection or infinite reflexivity—the other name of speculation” (Literary Absolute, 86), they are in a crucial sense very far from Schlegel, and paradoxically close to the formulations that Hegel directs against Schlegel in the name of speculative thought, when he defines irony as “the principle of absolute subjectivity” (Hegel, Aesthetics, 67), and condemns its “concentration of the ego into itself, for which all bonds are snapped and which can live only in the bliss of self-enjoyment. This irony was invented by Friedrich Schlegel, and many others have babbled about it or are now babbling about it again” (66).

In denouncing irony as a bad or parodic form of the Subject, and Schlegel as a bad or parodic version of the philosopher, Hegel draws a distinction between criticism and philosophy that is at once sharp and ambiguous:

To touch briefly on the course of the further development of the subject, alongside the reawakening of the philosophical Idea, A. W. and Friedrich von Schlegel, greedy for novelty in the search for the distinctive and extraordinary, appropriated from the philosophical Idea as much as their completely non-philosophical, but essentially critical natures were capable of accepting. For neither of them can claim a reputation for speculative thought. Nevertheless it was they who, with their critical talent, put themselves near the standpoint of the Idea, and with great freedom of speech and boldness of invention, even with miserable philosophical ingredients, directed a spirited polemic against the views of their predecessors. […] But since their criticism was not accompanied by a thoroughly philosophical knowledge of their standard, this standard retained a somewhat indefinite and vacillating character, so that they sometimes achieved too much, sometimes too little.

(Hegel, Aesthetics, 63)

“Criticism” and the “critical,” achieving at once too much and too little, fails the test of philosophy but in doing so attracts philosophy's anger, since in criticism's failure philosophy is confronted with a figure of its own demise. And if Hegel goes on to insist, again in raised tones, that “if irony is taken as the keynote of the representation, then the most inartistic of all principles is taken to be the principle of the work of art” (since “the result is to produce, in part, commonplace figures, in part, figures worthless and without bearing”) (68), he is identifying criticism's failure as a failure to prevent irony from causing criticism to fail to become criticism. Literature would be another name for this failure, and the Bildungsroman would be an exemplary site in which criticism's failure and its failure to fail become legible as the simultaneous co-implication and incompatibility of literature and aesthetics, thanks to the illegibility of “the most inartistic of all principles,” irony. Such reflections suggest that when the figure of Bildung survives to compel a reading—in other words, becomes a Roman—it survives as a phantom, built and unbuilt through Bilder, figures, which record in the excess of their formalism a historicity that aesthetics labors to conceal. The rest of this book will try to unpack that conundrum.

Notes

1. Jeffrey Sammons, “The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman; or, What Happened to Wilhelm Meister's Legacy?” Genre 14 (1981): 229.

2. Marianne Hirsch, “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions,” Genre 12 (1979): 300. See also Randolph P. Schaffner, The Apprenticeship Novel: A Study in the “Bildungsroman” as a Regulative Type in Western Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1984).

3. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's definition of the “literary” is highly nuanced, but for the moment their notion of the “absolu littéraire” can be taken in its proximity to idealist aesthetics: “[T]he literary Absolute aggravates and radicalizes the thinking of totality and the Subject” (15). I return shortly to the details, the implications, and finally the limitations of this claim.

4. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 593, translation modified. The German text consulted is Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, ed. Friedrich Bassenge (Berlin, 1955), 558.

5. On the history of the term Bildungsroman see Fritz Martini's classic study, “Der Bildungsroman: Zur Geschichte des Wortes und der Theorie,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 35 (1961): 44-63. The term, according to Martini, makes its earliest appearance around 1819-20 in essays by Karl Morgenstern, a professor at the Universität Dorpat. It then seems to have sunk into oblivion until, fifty years later, Wilhelm Dilthey rather offhandedly introduced it in Das Leben Schleiermachers (1870) to describe “those novels which make up the school of Wilhelm Meister,” a definition he later elaborated in a famous passage in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (1906): “A regular development is observed in the life of the individual: each of the stages has its own intrinsic value and is at the same time the basis for a higher stage. The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as the necessary points of passage [Durchgangspunkte] through which the individual must pass on his way to maturity and harmony.” Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing Goethe Novalis Hölderlin (Leipzig: Teubner, 1913), 394. The idea of a Bildungsroman subsequently caught on, though scholarly studies of it did not begin to appear with great regularity in Germany until the postwar era. Morgenstern's, Dilthey's, and Martini's texts, among others, are conveniently collected in Rolf Selbmann, ed., Zur Geschichte des deutschen Bildungsromans (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988).

6. The only novel consistently cited is, of course, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, though as noted below even this novel has been denied entry into the genre it is usually supposed to have founded or exemplified. Apart from Wilhelm Meister, the novels most frequently granted chapters in books on the Bildungsroman include Wieland's Agathon (1767); Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800); Stifter's Der Nachsommer (1857); Raabe's Der Hungerpastor (1864); Keller's Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55; 1879/80); and, in the twentieth century, the novels of Hesse and Mann.

7. See for instance Walter Pabst, “Literatur zur Theorie des Romans,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 34 (1960): 264-89.

8. Frederick Amrine, “Rethinking the Bildungsroman,” Michigan Germanic Studies 13.2 (1987): 126, 127; Sammons, “Mystery,” 232. The principal target of both critics is Jerome H. Buckley's Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).

9. Klaus F. Gille, “Wilhelm Meister” im Urteil der Zeitgenossen: Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte Goethes (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), 17. Cited by Amrine, “Rethinking,” 125-26. (All translations in this chapter, as in other chapters, are mine unless otherwise noted.) See also Kurt May, “‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,’ ein Bildungsroman?” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 31 (1957): 1-37. The title's question is answered negatively: “In the Lehrjahre, Goethe has written a novel around the belief that the modern humanistic ideal of harmonious ‘Bildung’ has to be abandoned” (34).

10. This remark may seem cavalier, but is meant seriously and could be justified with many examples, Todd Kontje's remarks at the close of the introductory chapter to his Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German Bildungsroman as Metafiction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) being simply more overt than most: “Thus I will not rehearse the tired debate as to whether or not particular texts examined here ‘count’ as Bildungsromane. Obviously I think they do” (17).

11. Robert Musil, Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. A. Frisé (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), 2, p. 572. For the Dilthey passage see note 5 above.

12. On the aesthetic as the guarantor of social and subjective unity, see chapter 1. The relatively recent emergence of our modern notion of the “author” is emphasized and narrated in Michel Foucault's famous essay, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). Recent scholarship has also drawn attention to the ways in which copyright law developed in the eighteenth century, thus providing juridical space for the proprietary and “original” author. See especially Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

13. Maurice Blanchot, “The Athenaeum,” Studies in Romanticism 22.2 (1983): 165.

14. Michael Warner, “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: 1875-1900,” Criticism 27.1 (1985): 11, 16. I thank John Rieder for drawing my attention to this article. The classic account of the struggle between philologists and belletristic critics during the early years of literature's integration into the U. S. university is provided in Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For a history of English studies in Britain, see Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), and for the development of professional literary study in France, see Antoine Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres, de Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Seuil, 1983). The institutionalization of literature as criticism in Germany is documented and analyzed by Peter Uwe Hohendahl in The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), and Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830-1870, trans. Renate Baron Franciscono (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). The special case of Spain is addressed in Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini, eds., The Crisis of Institutionalized Literature in Spain (Minneapolis: Prisma Institute, 1988).

15. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 11-12. To my knowledge no full historical study of the vicissitudes of the word and concept Bildung exists, though a useful overview, more concretely historical in orientation than Gadamer's meditation, is offered by W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

16. The peculiar situation of the German bourgeoisie is often remarked in this context. Economically weak, politically fragmented, but intellectually advanced, and necessary to the construction of the bureaucratic state, the middle classes plausibly required more elaborate theoretical compensations in Germany (a still nonexistent “Germany,” of course) than elsewhere. Aesthetic discourse, however, pervades European cultural history of the period, as we have sought to indicate: usefully general overviews may be obtained in Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 [1939]), 3-50, and the entries “Aesthetic,” “Art,” and “Culture” in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For a more specific study of the (massive) influence of German thought on British writers, see Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). And, for searching analyses of the political role of aesthetics in post-Romantic Western culture, see in particular the work of David Lloyd, cited and noted below, no. 21.

17. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (London: Blackwell, 1990), 66.

18. The question of the aestheticization of politics was touched on in chapter 1; see also chapter 4 below. Of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's texts, see in particular “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 291-312, for an analysis of the degradation of Bildung as fascism, where the “double trait of the mimetic will-to-identity and the self-fulfillment of form,” which is “the fundamental tendency of the subject” (312), is exacerbated and naturalized as the putative immediacy of blood and race. The argument is a careful and nuanced one: “Nazism does not sum up the West, nor represent its necessary finality. But neither is it possible to simply push it aside as an aberration, still less as a past aberration,” drawing as it does on ideological structures that “belong profoundly to the mood or character of the West” (ibid.).

19. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), letter 4, paragraph 2. Subsequent quotations from the Aesthetic Education are to this bilingual edition, and are indicated by letter and paragraph number.

20. Exemplarity is consequently in need of unending renewal on the level of the individual subject: “True, he possesses this humanity in potentia before every determinate condition into which he can conceivably enter. But he loses it in practice with every determinate condition into which he does enter. And if he is to pass into a condition of an opposite nature, this humanity must be restored to him each time anew through the life of the aesthetic” (Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 21.5).

21. David Lloyd, “Violence and the Constitution of the Novel,” in his Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 134. A fuller discussion of the structure and politics of aesthetic exemplarity and of the aesthetic “narrative of modernity” may be found in chapter 1. It may be added that this “master narrative” weaves itself through the modern bureaucratic state in numerous ways, not least as the story of what Friedrich Kittler calls the “socialization,” and Michel Foucault the “disciplining,” of subjects. Exemplary or aesthetic pedagogy occurs not just as metanarrative, but as the concrete and microscopic practices we sum up as the civilization or socialization of a self. The institutions responsible for Bildung in this sense would include the nuclear family, the schools, and certain forms of mass media as well as the university; and, as Kittler suggests, the institution of literature has a central role to play in this scenario: not just as a discourse exemplary of national or ethnic identity, but as a pedagogical instrument central to the production of “individuals” on all levels of the socialization process. See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3-173, for a discussion of the newly prominent role of the mother in the discourse of primary education around 1800 (such that she becomes the Bildnerin, the erotic site of Bildung's origins [50]), and an analysis of coeval developments in German educational bureaucracies, and in technologies of pedagogy and reading. Kittler's interpretation of the role of the Bildungsroman in this context is most fully laid out in his long essay “Über die Sozialisation Wilhelm Meisters,” in Gerhard Kaiser and Friedrich A. Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1978), 13-124. For Michel Foucault's account of the production of the disciplined modern subject, see Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). See also Dorothea von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), esp. 161-206.

22. Monika Schrader, Mimesis und Poiesis: Poetologische Studien zum Bildungsroman (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), 21.

23. My citation from Schiller alludes to the aesthetic moment proper in his theory: the point at which the subject, having passed through sensuous determination and having developed the autonomous power of reason, must harmonize these faculties in a moment of disinterested free play: “[W]e must call this condition of real and active determinability the aesthetic [den ästhetischen]” (Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 20.4).

24. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” and see, e.g., Hans Heinrich Borcherdt's article, “Der deutsche Bildungsroman” (1941) (in Selbmann, Zur Geschichte, 182-238), which praises Hans Grimm's Volk ohne Raum as a novel in which “all of Germany [appears] as the hero of the work” (Selbmann, Zur Geschichte, 209; cited in Kontje, Private Lives, 14). Sammons provides shrewd observations on the nationalist ideology at work in the fabrication of “an essentially German tradition” in Germany from the early twentieth century through the National Socialist years. The production of the “phantom Bildungsroman,” Sammons points out, is locatable to an era—the Wilhelminian period—that saw the formation of “the qualitative canon of German literature that we now recognize” (“Mystery,” 239-40). (And one could add in this vein that the explosion of books and articles on the Bildungsroman since the Second World War responds to the need to reconstruct and reconfirm both a German and, more generally, a Western European identity.)

25. On the circulation of capital and its signs in this genre, see Jochen Hörisch, Gott Geld und Glück: Zur Logik der Liebe in den Bildungsromanen Goethes, Kellers, und Thomas Manns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983).

26. All writers on the Bildungsroman will at some point necessarily stress its self-reflexiveness, but for two particularly vivid examples, one from the period in which book-length studies of this subject were beginning to appear and one quite contemporary, see Schrader, Mimesis und Poiesis, and Kontje, Private Lives.

27. Karl Morgenstern, “Über das Wesen des Bildungsromans” (1820), in Selbmann, Zur Geschichte, 64.

28. Michael Beddow, The Fiction of Humanity: Studies in the Bildungsroman from Wieland to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 5, 6.

29. Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 5.

30. This performative and referential power will always be found to coexist with the “inwardness” of Bildung or the Bildungsroman, precisely to the extent that the disinterestedness of the aesthetic serves the pure universality of the human. Swales's distinction between the Bildungsroman and the realist novel necessarily resolves itself through a tacit subsumption of the latter into the former, despite the “foreignness of the Bildungsroman tradition” to the European realist tradition (German Bildungsroman, ix).

31. Ferenc Fehér, “Is the Novel Problematic? A Contribution to the Theory of the Novel,” in Reconstructing Aesthetics: Writings of the Budapest School, ed. Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 47.

32. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 5, passim. Moretti's claim is particularly stark, but versions of this aesthetic of history are to be found throughout the critical literature—sometimes taking the reverse form, as in Beddow, for instance, where the Bildungsroman, notwithstanding its self-conscious fictionality and link to authentic humanity, is “more culturally remote” from modern readers “than they themselves realise,” since it lies “outside the mainstream” of the European realist tradition (3, 4). The non-modern, in this case, turns out to be the authentic bedrock of the human: the self-conscious self-positing of fiction, or the imagination.

33. Thus one encounters claims such as the following: “In the typical Bildungsroman, from Wilhelm Meister through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, erotic and cultural or economic desires are mapped on one another so as to produce a certain coherence in the subject. For Mustafa Sa'eed [in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration], on the contrary …,” and the analysis proceeds under the aegis of a binary opposition that is never entirely questioned. David Lloyd, “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review 13.1-2 (1991): 80. For a discussion of the Bildungsroman as the exemplary form of “major” literature, see Lloyd's Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 19-26 and passim. I should emphasize here that these are local, if symptomatic, gestures in texts of great theoretical sophistication and practical skill. When Lloyd grants real attention to canonical (but) powerful texts, interpretations of great complexity result; but for reasons of political as well as expository economy he is frequently drawn to binary oppositions that, for instance, pair Jane Eyre with Wide Sargasso Sea such that the latter “reverses Jane's attainment of ethical autonomy in Bronte's novel” (Nationalism, 21). The challenge of cultural critique, however—which Lloyd elsewhere meets in every respect—is to interrogate difference without relying on the canon's own account of its achievement. It is finally worth noting that these indirect affirmations of the Bildungsroman occur at moments in Lloyd's text when strongly ethical claims are being advanced, which suggests that the aesthetic's traditional role of mediating between understanding and ethics is still to some extent in force.

34. One encounters such language regularly in the literature on the Bildungsroman, from Dilthey to the present: see especially François Jost, “Variations of a Species: The Bildungsroman,” Symposium (Summer 1983): 125-46. The recurrence of such nineteenth-century vitalism in a purportedly materialist study such as Moretti's, however, suggests the continuing power of aesthetics as ideology. Naturalization, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy comment, is precisely the dream of auto-formation that art or technē locates in and seeks to borrow from physis: “the organic is essentially auto-formation, or the genuine form of the subject” (49).

35. In this context it is also worth pointing out that Sammons stops short of disbelief in his phantom: though he finds no evidence for a Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century, “the situation is obscured further by the fact that the Bildungsroman genre definitely occurs in modern German literature,” specifically, in Hesse and Mann (“Mystery,” 242). As noted below, however, Sammons's article possesses iconoclastic energy simply in being willing to deliver negative judgments, which in their negativity draw attention to the odd referential status of the notion of the Bildungsroman.

36. Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 40. The “strictest sense” in this context is Fichtean.

37. Samuel Weber, “Criticism Underway: Walter Benjamin's Romantic Concept of Criticism,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 310.

38. For a discussion of allegory as the figure of theory or criticism, see my “Humanizing de Man,” Diacritics 19.2 (1989): 35-53.

39. Friedrich Schlegel, “Über Goethes Meister” (1798), in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler (Munich: Paderborn, 1967), 2:133. Subsequent references are to this edition.

40. See the chapter 1 for a differently inflected discussion of theory as the resistance to theory. As we are now in a position to appreciate, it is no coincidence that de Man's work positions itself in proximity to that of Schlegel. For a reading of Schlegel that doubles as a de Manian critique of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's The Literary Absolute, see Kevin Newmark, “L'absolu littéraire: Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony,” MLN 107 (1992): 905-30. The present discussion would reconfirm the force of Newmark's claim that “irony might just turn out to be one of the most rigorous ways to name a ‘readability’ so resistant to theoretical formulation that it would necessarily remain hidden or dissimulated with respect to any properly philosophical understanding of Schlegel's text” (914).

41. See Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, 18:85. Fragment 668 is famous in contemporary theoretical circles because of its prominent place in de Man's writing on irony. See especially “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed., rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228, and the closing pages of Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), esp. 300.