SOURCE: “Comic Configurations and Types in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, February, 1983, pp. 6-19.

[In the following essay, Amrine traces comic archetypes, symbols, and themes in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.]

I

Goethe himself ranked the Lehrjahre among the ‘most incalculable productions,’¹ yet critics have more often complained that the final sum is drawn all-too-neatly.² The ending of the novel, where all the loose ends of the plot are tied up in a flurry of disclosures leading to three marriages, has been felt to be inorganic—something appropriate to a comic novel or even a Trivialroman, but very much out of place in the progenitor of a new and complex historical genre. Emil Staiger has gone so far as to suggest a failure of nerve on Goethe's part, a victory of convenience over aesthetic judgment: ‘Mit den Vermählungen, die am Schluβ bevorstehen, fallen wir vollends in die Romanschablone einer vorklassischen Literatur zurück. Goethe wolhe fertig werden und lieβ es bei einer Fabel bewenden, die allzu deutlich die Spuren einer klugen Disposition verrät.’³

Yet comic elements are to be found not merely at the conclusion, but throughout the Lehrjahre; both the extent and the importance of these elements have been consistently ignored or greatly undervalued. The novel's entire plot-configuration, as well as numerous character types, symbols and themes, correspond closely to Northrop Frye's descriptions of archetypal comic form. By tracing these configurations, types, symbols and themes through the Lehrjahre, this study will seek to indicate how comic form works as a powerful integrating factor in what is essentially a comic novel.

Other critics have noted comic elements elsewhere in the Lehrjahre, but have remained content with general assertions about the spirit of the novel, or sought to subsume them beneath another generic designation. The novel's first interpreter found most remarkable in its overall impression ‘daβ Ernst und Schmerz durchaus wie ein Schattenspiel versinken und der leichte Humor darüber vollkommen Meister wird.’⁴ Friedrich Schlegel also discerned an underlying comic spirit in the novel, calling it a ‘heitere Erzählung’⁵ and underscoring the third book's ‘starke Annäherung zur Komödie’ in particular (p. 31). More recently, Joachim von der Thüsen has found comic types and formulas in the novel's opening scene, and Hans Reiss has traced ‘Lustspielhaftes’ through the whole of the Lehrjahre, although he finds the comic elements concentrated principally at the beginning and end.⁶ Mariane disguising herself as an officer, the ‘romantic triangle’ of Book One, the ubiquitous ‘Versteck- und Rollenspiel,’ Philine's playful and flirtatious nature, the incongruity between Wilhelm's illusions and reality, Mignon's sexual ambiguity and the atmosphere of ‘Heiterkeit’ that pervades the worlds of the itinerant actors and rococo nobility—all these Reiss finds typical of Enlightenment comedy. Moreover, Reiss points out that such amalgamation of genres, the inclusion of dramatic features in prose narratives, is altogether typical of Goethe's age (p. 142). However, even Reiss resists the momentum of his own evidence: he is committed to the notion of Bildung as that which ultimately unifies the text (p. 129), and thus concludes that the comic features of the Lehrjahre ‘in no way make it a comic novel’ (p. 140).

Yet, as more than one critic has well argued, taking Bildung as the structuring principle of the Lehrjahre proves exceedingly problematical: Wilhelm does not undergo Bildung in any clearly defined or programmatic sense of the term (e.g., the ‘aesthetic education’ leading to a harmonious development and integration of all his powers asserted by earlier interpreters of the novel),⁷ while if one understands Bildung as mere unspecified development, the notion becomes so vague that few novels would not qualify as Bildungsromane. One wonders whether the generic term Bildungsroman has come to have very much meaning at all when applied to the Lehrjahre; in any case, the term's validity is dubious enough that it can hardly be used as an excuse for not pursuing other promising interpretations. Indeed, it seems high time for new approaches.

II

Taken as a whole, the plot of the Lehrjahre exhibits the same ‘ternary form’ as Northrop Frye's comic modality.⁸ Frye's literary modalities (comedy, tragedy, satire and irony, and romance) are ‘pregeneric’; that is, they cut across historical genres in the way that tonalities in music transcend but are at the same time shared by different musical forms. Such an approach seems particularly well-suited to a work like the Lehrjahre that is generically ambiguous in the way described by Reiss above: thus our study of comic form in the Lehrjahre will employ Frye's masterly work on comedy as its touchstone.

The movement of comedy begins with a temporary thwarting or ‘blocking’ of the ‘comic drive,’ which is most commonly that of two lovers striving to become one. Yet comedy need not be romantic: the fundamental comic drive is directed toward union and socialization in the broadest sense, and anything that seeks to thwart this movement (such as a ‘humour’ in the comedy of manners) can perform the blocking function. The tension of comedy often results from competition between two different societies, one entrenched and the other trying to take form, and the most common form of this struggle is a conflict between the society identified with the ‘father’ and that of the ‘son,’ with a romantic attachment usually the bone of contention. This first comic phase has been completed in the Lehrjahre by the end of book one: Wilhelm's romantic striving to unite with Mariane has been effectively blocked, and his struggle against the bourgeois society of the ‘father’ (a generic term that fits Norberg, Werner and Melina's ‘judges’ as well as Wilhelm's own father) leads to a break with that world in favour of the life of an itinerant actor.

The second phase is characterized by ‘confusion and sexual license’; Frye also terms it ‘the phase of temporarily lost identity’ (NP, p. 76). The comic action descends into a world of personal, sexual and social ambiguity, a carnivalesque ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ where ‘illusions caused by disguise, obsession, hypocrisy, or unknown parentage’ abound (AC, p. 170). The worlds of the actors and the Rokokoadel in books two through five could hardly be described more accurately: Reiss has touched on some of these elements in the aforementioned study, and I will discuss others further below.⁹

In its third phase, the dialectic of comic form evolves from picaresque chaos into integrations at a higher level in the form of new personal, social and ‘dual’ identities (NP, p. 78; AC, pp. 43-4 and 163-5; SS, pp. 136-7). The new social identity achieved in comedy's third phase has two major components: a reversal of societal standing, and utopianism. Usually the new society forms around the new ‘dual’ identity of the hero and his bride. The establishment of a new ‘dual’ identity in the third phase depends upon a dispelling of the illusions created in the second; this is usually accompanied by a sudden turn in the plot, a revelation that Frye terms ‘the comic discovery, anagnorisis or cognitio’ (AC, p. 163). Usually the cognitio has to do with a revelation concerning the social status of the hero or parentage of the heroine, or both, that renders either or both suddenly marriageable. Comic revelations in the third phase also create or initiate a movement toward a new ‘singular’ or personal identity on the part of the protagonist. Frye's descriptions of the third phase of comedy's ternary form fit well the events in books seven and eight of the Lehrjahre, where Wilhelm enters the province of the utopian Turmgesellschaft, is united with Natalie, and achieves painful self-knowledge as the mysteries of his own biography are successively revealed.¹⁰

III

Having sketched in broad strokes the plot of the Lehrjahre and shown it to reflect comic ternary form, I turn now to consider in greater detail certain archetypal comic figures, symbolic configurations and themes that can be discerned within the Lehrjahre. Frye has noted that comedy generally develops away from mimetic realism in the direction of symbolism, idealization and convention (NP, pp. 8 and 12); part of this tendency is for comic fictions to replace individualized portraits with easily recognizable, standard ‘types.’ Goethe's ‘realistic tic’ never allows his characters to become schematic or abstract, yet his complex creations in the Lehrjahre can nevertheless be seen as embodying the functions of comic ‘types’—less so in the realistic-satirical middle books, more so in the first and last books, in which the novel tends toward the ‘romantic’ side of the comic modality. The most important of these types are the hero and the heroine, the senex, the fool and the ‘Eros figure.’

Comedy treats its heroes and heroines in two fundamentally different ways, depending whether it is chiefly satirical or romantic in tenor. Satirical comedy tends to surround a ‘somewhat dullish pair of technical leads’ with blocking characters who become the real focus of attention, while romantic comedy tends much more to focus upon the final scenes of recognition and reconciliation (AC, p. 167). In the Lehrjahre one finds both treatments: in the early and especially the middle books, Wilhelm is very much the dull and uninteresting hero one would expect in this picaresque-satiric phase, while in the last two books he becomes considerably more interesting as his romantic union with Natalie becomes more and more the focal point of the novel. Our attention is no longer diverted by a colourful band of itinerant actors and actresses; even Mignon and the Harfner stand at the periphery, tragic figures unable to find a place in the final comic synthesis. Outwardly, Wilhelm experiences a complicated anagnorisis in which many identities are revealed: not only those of the ‘schöne Amazone,’ Felix, Mignon, Therese, the Harfner and the Abbé, but also, in a way, the identity of Mariane, whose real nature Wilhelm had so long and so tragically mistaken. Yet outer events also call forth self-reflection and memory that were hardly present earlier; Wilhelm's attempts to come to terms with his own past are very much an internalized process of ‘recognition and reconciliation,’ such as that occasioned by Mignon's death:

So saβ er neben ihr auf dem Kanapee, auf dem er Natalie zuerst angetroffen hatte. Er dachte mit groβer Schnelle eine Reihe von Schicksalen durch, oder vielmehr er dachte nicht, er lieβ das auf seine Seele wirken, was er nicht entfernen konnte. Es gibt Augenblicke des Lebens, in welchen die Begebenheiten gleich geflügelten Weberschiffchen vor uns sich hin und wider bewegen und unaufhaltsam ein Gewebe vollenden, die wir mehr oder weniger selbst gesponnen und angelegt haben.¹¹

In a subtle metamorphosis of the convention, Wilhelm is made to experience an ‘inner anagnorisis’ as well, an often painful dose of self-awareness symbolized by the frequent references to mirror-gazing (e.g. HA VII, 433, 489, 499 and 505) and, above all, by Wilhelm's reading of his own biography (HA VII, 504-5), in which he is granted a ‘narrator's-eye-view’ of himself.¹² By the end of the novel, the dullish ‘Kaufmannssohn’ of the earlier, more realistic books has become not only a comic type, but even an archetypal figure, a ‘Königssohn’ by virtue of his identification with the ‘sick prince’ in the rediscovered painting and with ‘Saul, der Sohn Kis, der ausging, seines Vaters Eselinnen zu suchen, und ein Königreich fand’ (HA VII, 610). Here the comic novel shows its roots in a ritual still evident in Greek Old Comedy, where the victorious hero is crowned king of a newly-formed society. The heroine is an enormously complex and ambiguous function in the novel, yet an analogous progression can be seen in the development of Mariane and Natalie, who might be termed the ‘co-heroines.’ The heroine of the realistic earlier books becomes an ever more spectral presence as the novel progresses until she ‘appears’ for the last time, reconciled with Wilhelm's father, in his dream (HA VII, 425-6), while Natalie is so completely idealized (typical bordering on the archetypal) that she can appear in the earlier books only as a dream-like, almost mythical figure.

The blocking action of comedy is, in its archetypal aspect, an Oedipal conflict between father and son:¹³ the most important blocking character is thus the father-figure or senex. In the Lehrjahre, this function is again complex and ambiguous: Wilhelm is opposed by no less than four senex-figures. The first is of course his own father, who opposes Wilhelm's involvement in the theatrical life, and thus his involvement with Mariane. Here the Oedipal situation is disguised, but present by virtue of a symbol and a surrogate. The father fulfills his Oedipal function symbolically in two ways: by opposing the ‘younger’ society of the theater; and by selling the painting of ‘Der kranke Königssohn,’ which depicts the classic Oedipal situation of the son desiring his father's bride. In his conversation with the stranger in book one we learn that it had been Wilhelm's favourite painting, and that he had identified intensely with the sick prince (HA VII, 70). The paternal surrogate, who opposes Wilhelm directly, is Norberg. Norberg conforms perfectly to Frye's description of the father-surrogate fulfilling the function of the senex: ‘The opponent to the hero's wishes, when not the father, is generally someone who partakes of the father's close relation to established society: that is, a rival with less youth and more money’ (AC, pp. 164-5). Werner represents the third senex: he, too, stands in ‘close relation to established society,’ and even threatens legal action in his heartless struggle to insulate Wilhelm from Mariane. Moreover, Werner appears as an ‘old man’ when we meet him again in book eight (HA VII, 498ff.), even though he is, chronologically, a member of Wilhelm's generation. The fourth senex, Lothario, also rivals Wilhelm at one point for the same woman, although Wilhelm's desire for Therese is shown at the end to belong to the blocking complication rather than the resolution. Lothario has all the makings of a good senex: compared to Wilhelm, he has closer ties to established society, is older and has more money. Yet from another point of view Lothario is also a romantic comic hero freed by anagnorisis from the threat of incest that blocks his own desires. Perhaps one should term Lothario a ‘temporary senex’ or a ‘pseudo-senex’ in his relationship to Wilhelm, for while he does not embody this function purely, he does stand in a fatherly relationship to Wilhelm and seems, temporarily at least, to compete with him as a representative of the ‘older’ society. Although Lothario is certainly a ‘father-figure’ to Wilhelm, he is more than just a senex: Lothario (as well as the Abbé and, to a lesser extent, Jarno) are in a way benevolent father-figures who educate Wilhelm and thus help him toward the fulfillment of his desire. The point is not to make each character in the Lehrjahre fit neatly into the pigeonhole of a prescribed comic role, but to show that the roles are indeed present in the Lehrjahre as functions of comic form, however varied, transformed and symbolically removed.

Another important function, particularly in Shakespearean comedy, is that of the fool, which Frye terms a ‘spectator role’ because the fool stands outside, or is at least not fully identified with the society that he mocks:

The fool, when technically so, is frequently (Lavache, Touchstone, Feste) said to belong to the older generation, his jokes in a different idiom from what the society of the comedy wants and expects. He is often … said to be lustful, more inclined to get girls into trouble than to take responsibility for them afterward. (NP, pp. 92-3)

Frye's description fits Friedrich (the Friedrich of book eight, that is) remarkably well. He, too, stands outside, mocks, and is an embarrassment to the comic society of the Turmgesellschaft. And while it is true that Friedrich is not a member of the older generation, his way of speaking certainly is: a witty, old-fashioned idiom peppered with Biblical and classical allusions that he happened to have learned while entertaining himself in a Baroque library¹⁴ together with the girl he has ‘got into trouble’ (HA VII, 555ff.). Friedrich also bears some resemblance to the character type of the ‘tricky slave’ of classical comedy, whose machinations—like Friedrich's eavesdropping—usually constitute the ‘efficient cause’ of the comic resolution.¹⁵

Another comic character type who plays a central role in the consummation of the comic drive toward erotic union is what Frye calls the ‘Eros figure’ (a potentially confusing term that should not be equated with the Eros-figure in Greek mythology). Frye's ‘Eros figure’ is ‘in himself sexually contained, being in a sense both male and female, and needing no expression of love beyond himself’ (NP, p. 82). In many Shakespearean comedies, this function is fulfilled by the heroine disguised as a boy (NP, p. 83). In the Lehrjahre, it is fulfilled by Mignon. Mignon is, of course, an extremely complex and ambiguous figure with other important dimensions, yet as one proceeds toward the final books she becomes increasingly identified with this symbolic function. In her study of Mignon and Balzac's Seraphita, Marie Delcourt recalls the ancient myth of the hermaphrodite, whose role, like that of Frye's comic Eros figure, is to bring about and oversee the erotic union: ‘Goethe a retrouvé un archétype de la pensée religieuse la plus archaïque, celui de l'être doué des deux puissances, qui n'en exerce aucune, mais qui est invoqué, ainsi que le fut l'Hermaphrodite grec, comme daimon tutélaire de l'union sexuelle.’¹⁶ Mignon ‘oversees’ Wilhelm's night of love with Philine, and it is because of Mignon that Wilhelm travels to Natalie's castle, initiating their comic union (HA VII, 508ff.). Yet Mignon is beyond sexuality in the ways that both Frye and Delcourt describe.¹⁷

IV

Just as new light is shed upon a mysterious character such as Mignon by viewing her as an archetypal comic figure, new light can be shed upon some of the Lehrjahre's most important themes, symbols and plot-devices by viewing them within the context of comic form. At first these elements seem unrelated; but when they are viewed under the aspect of comic form, a mutually illuminating and interdependent configuration emerges. To a remarkable extent they correspond to Northrop Frye's catalogue of ‘themes’ that run throughout Shakespearean romantic comedy: ‘The storm at sea, the identical twins, the heroine disguised as a boy, the retreat into the forest, the heroine with the mysterious father, the disappearing ruler: these themes occur so often that in some plays—Twelfth Night, for example—a whole group of such formulas is restated’ (NP, p. 7). Although the source of the list is Shakespearean, these themes and devices are far from unique to Shakespeare: they are recurrent archetypes within a long comic tradition that Shakespeare assimilated and restated in its essence. Goethe knew extremely well both Shakespeare and the comic tradition that Shakespeare knew: thus we need not be surprised that such themes surface together with other comic elements in the Lehrjahre.

One of these themes is not present as such in the Lehrjahre: ‘the storm at sea,’ G. Wilson Knight's Shakespearean ‘tempest’¹⁸ that symbolizes individual passion and social upheaval. Symbolic drowning, near-drowning or actual drowning occur more frequently in Shakespeare's romances (Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest) than in his comedies, although Viola and her twin brother survive a shipwreck in Twelfth Night, and Falstaff is ritually dunked in The Merry Wives. Similarly, the symbolic theme of drowning becomes central only in Goethe's romantic Wanderjahre, where comic form has modulated into romance.¹⁹ Yet it is present at one place in the Lehrjahre: in Wilhelm's dream at the beginning of book seven, in which Felix falls into a pond and nearly drowns, but is miraculously saved by Natalie. The closely related symbol of fire, however, is to be found in book five, with the same import.

‘The disappearing ruler,’ pure myth in the literary modes that are not mimetically ‘displaced’ in Frye's sense, emerges in the Lehrjahre in the only way possible in more realistic fictions, as a significant image associated with the hero (AC, pp. 136-7): I mean of course Wilhelm's association with the ‘sick prince’ in the painting of the same name. Not only does the painting disappear until book eight (and with it the prince's kingly father), but Wilhelm's ‘kingly’ father disappears as well, both Wilhelm's actual father, who dies but seems to play the Ghost, and his dramatic ‘father,’ the man who really performs the elder Hamlet, mysteriously appearing and then disappearing until book eight.

Closely related to ‘the disappearing ruler’ is ‘the heroine with the mysterious father.’ A clear variant is again Wilhelm, who becomes ‘the hero with the mysterious father’ when he plays Hamlet. His own father is anything but ‘mysterious’—until Wilhelm believes that he has actually returned from the dead to play the Ghost. The novel does not have a single heroine upon whom all would agree, but all the major candidates (I do not consider Philine or the ‘schöne Seele’ serious contenders) have suitably ‘mysterious’ fathers: Mariane is an orphan, and her parentage thus a total mystery; Mignon's father long seems to be ‘der groβe Teufel’ (which is mysterious enough in itself), but is actually the even more mysterious Harfner; Therese's father dies unable to communicate to his daughter the mystery of her parentage; Natalie's upbringing—the office of a father—is entrusted entirely to the Abbé, about whom nobody seems to know much of anything.²⁰

The essence of the ‘retreat into the forest’ is the establishment of a social utopia. The clear analogy to this Shakespearean theme in the Lehrjahre is the movement of the novel's action into the province of the Turmgesellschaft. The society of the Turmgesellschaft exhibits many of the most important characteristics of the ‘forest world’ or ‘green world’ Frye finds in Shakespearean comedy (e.g., NP, p. 141). The forest utopia is ‘the place where the upper or purely human world toward which the comic action moves begins to take shape, and around which that world crystallizes’ (NP, p. 141); one might also say, as has often been said of the Turmgesellschaft, a world of enlightened ‘Humanität.’²¹

Another theme that ‘runs through all the history of comedy’ (AC, p. 181), that of ‘the identical twins’ or doubled characters, is almost maddeningly ubiquitous in the Lehrjahre. It seems to be a disease with which the Turmgesellschaft and those around it are afflicted. Natalie, the ‘schöne Amazone,’ is hauntingly similar in appearance to her sister, the Gräfin (HA VII, 240), and their handwriting is so similar that Wilhelm mistakes Natalie's for the Gräfin's (HA VII, 508 and 511). Moreover, the ‘schöne Amazone’ looks so much like the ‘schöne Seele’ that Wilhelm mistakes a painting of the aunt for a bad portrait of Natalie (HA VII, 517). Lothario mistakes a cousin for the Pächterstochter herself (HA VII, 466), the Abbé has a twin brother (HA VII, 494 and 511), and Mignon dresses as an angel to help celebrate the birthday of twin sisters (HA VII, 514). Even those previously unconnected with the Turmgesellschaft become susceptible when they enter into its environs: in Wilhelm's dream, Natalie even ‘doubles’ Felix as a kind of magic trick (HA VII, 426)! As Lieselotte Dieckmann has noted, these doublings usually have the effect of temporarily blurring or confusing the identity of certain characters.²² Yet this is but half the effect: the other is the strong establishment of identity that occurs when the ambiguities are clarified, as they are in the final two books. This change in function represents a movement away from the second into the third phase of Frye's ternary comic form, from ambiguity and alienation into the creation of new forms of personal, social and ‘dual’ identity.²³ The confusion of identity that results from doubling can be harmless (for example Harlequin in the commedia dell’ arte, who among other things divides himself in two and holds dialogues with himself) or a sinister Doppelgänger-experience that can produce insanity (NP, p. 78; SS, p. 117)—as happens when Wilhelm ‘doubles’ as the Graf.

‘The heroine disguised as a boy’ or hermaphrodism, perhaps the most important comic theme in the Lehrjahre, also has a dual function. In the second phase of comedy's ternary form, it contributes to the confusion of identity by creating sexual ambiguity, while in the third, it works as a symbol of union and psychic wholeness to establish new, higher forms of identity. In dramatic comedy, the movement toward resolution is often effected by the heroine disguising herself as a boy (Twelfth Night and As You Like It spring immediately to mind); in the Lehrjahre, the comic movement is propelled by a whole series of hermaphroditic heroines. The only major female figure who exhibits no sexual ambiguity is Philine—Laertes calls her ‘die wahre Eva, die Stamm-Mutter des weiblichen Geschlechts’ (HA VII, 100).²⁴ Beginning with Mariane's entrance in officer's dress on the second page of the novel, all the other heroines contribute either to the sexual ambiguity of the second phase or to the new, trans-sexual identity of the third, or to both at different times. Of the last possibility, the prime example is Mignon. She is first introduced as ‘ein junges Geschöpf,’ ‘das Kind,’ ‘die Gestalt’ (HA VII, 91), and the ambiguity of her sex is preserved throughout the earlier books by pronominal sleight-of-hand, male clothing, and her constant assertion that she wants to be a lad (HA VII, 207, 236-7 and 336). In this second phase, the ambiguity of her identity seems, as Staiger has argued, to be pre-sexual;²⁵ in the third phase, however, she too exhibits, like the ‘Amazonen,’ ‘eine über das Geschlecht erhabene Menschlichkeit,’²⁶ a new, ‘angelic’ identity beyond sexuality that is adumbrated in her song:

          Und jene himmlischen Gestalten,
Sie fragen nicht nach Mann und Weib,
Und keine Kleider, keine Falten,
Umgeben den verklärten Leib.

(HA VII, 516)

Mariane is also initially ambiguous, but shown in the final books (HA VII, 480) to have been a ‘true hermaphrodite’ when she again donned her ‘Offizierstracht’ to assert both her individual and a new ‘dual’ identity by remaining faithful to Wilhelm. Mignon's initial ambiguity, as well as Landrinette's (HA VII, 104) and the Baronesse's (HA VII, 188), contribute to the carnivalesque sexual ambivalence of the second phase, although the earlier, ‘low comic’ books contain important ‘Rückwirkungen’ from the third phase, anticipations of the higher forms of identity revealed there. Most important is the apparition of the ‘schöne Amazone’ (HA VII, 226ff.), who reminds Wilhelm of the ‘Mannweiblichkeit’ of Tasso's Chlorinde (HA VII, 26-7 and 235). Therese is a ‘true amazon’ who wears men's clothing and ‘can put a hundred men to shame’ (HA VII, 439, 446-7 and 454), while even the ‘schöne Seele’ exhibits ‘männlicher[n] Trotz’ by demanding complete freedom in the way she conducts her life (HA VII, 379). There are even hints that Wilhelm is on his way to achieving hermaphrodism: his union with Natalie is symbolic rather than erotic, which led Körner to write of him: ‘Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit erscheinen in ihren bedeutendsten Gattungen, und zwischen beiden sehen wir Meister, als eine mittlere Natur—eine Art von Hermaphrodit.’²⁷ In its highest form, the form in which it is presented in the final books of the Lehrjahre, hermaphrodism represents a merger of comic personal identity and ‘dual’ identity, a metaphor of psychic wholeness. Schiller's metaphor for the aesthetic condition of balance and inner harmony is Juno Ludovisi, whom he overtly terms a hermaphroditic ‘weiblicher Gott’ and ‘göttliches Weib.’²⁸ In this highest manifestation, the theme of hermaphrodism is, like comedy itself, a symbol of ‘man's quest for wholeness,’²⁹ a dream of some future time ‘quand le désir aura été aboli et avec lui les conséquences de la chute.’³⁰

By tracing numerous comic configurations, character types, symbols and themes through the Lehrjahre, this study has attempted to show that the comic ending of the novel is not an inorganic, inartistic appendage, but rather an integral part of a pervasive comic structure. Indeed, it seems impossible to understand the unity of certain themes long held to be central to the novel (hermaphrodism and the ‘Königssohn’ are the most important) outside of the context of comic form. This approach represents, moreover, an alternative to the problematical notion of Bildung, a way of describing the structure of the Lehrjahre in terms of purely literary categories. Might this not also represent, perhaps, a way of overcoming the ever-more-dubious generic classifications Bildungsroman, Entwicklungsroman and Erziehungsroman—designations that have tended to isolate the Lehrjahre, and so many other German novels, from the mainstream of Western literature?

Notes

1. J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 1948), p. 141 (18 January 1825): ‘Es gehört dieses Werk übrigens zu den inkalkulabelsten Produktionen, wozu mir fast selbst der Schlüssel fehlt.’

2. Even Friedrich Schlegel's laudatory review of 1798 expresses misgivings about the unity of the novel as a whole (‘Die gewöhnlichen Erwartungen von Einheit und Zusammenhang täuscht dieser Roman eben so oft als er sie erfüllt.') and the ending in particular, which he finds ‘fast allgemein seltsam und unbefriedigend’ (‘Über Goethes Meister,’ in Goethes Wilhelm Meister: Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Lehr- und Wanderjahre, ed. K. Gille (Königsstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 1979), pp. 29-30. Further on, Schlegel goes through strange contortions attempting to defend the ‘Willkürlichkeit’ of the ending (pp. 36-7).

3. E. Staiger, Goethe (Zürich: Atlantis, 1959), 11, 172. Other critics have noted the ending's formulaic comic elements in passing, but then either failed to pursue or retreated from the implications of their presence in the novel. P. Pfaff, for example, sees the resolution of the conflict in the ending as ‘Lustspiel,’ but fails to elaborate (‘Plädoyer für eine typologische Interpretation von “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren”,’ Text und Kontext, 5 [1977], 52), and H. Thomé, who finds in the ending elements of the commedia dell’ arte (Roman und Naturwissenschaft: Eine Studie zur Vorgeschichte der deutschen Klassik (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1978), p. 481). According to Thomé, Goethe turned to comedy at the end of the Lehrjahre in order to guarantee a kind of synthesis and harmony he had sought, unsuccessfully, in his scientific studies (p. 482). Yet Thomé expressly denies that these comic elements have any further implications for the Lehrjahre as a whole (‘Nun sind die “Lehrjahre” gewiβ keine “erzählte Komödie”,’ p. 482). Staiger's judgment is harsh, but perhaps more honest.

4. Schiller, letter to Goethe, 28 June 1796.

5. ‘Über Goethes Meister,’ p. 24.

6. J. von der Thüsen, ‘Der Romananfang in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren,’ DVjs, 43 (1969), 622-30; H. Reiss, ‘Lustspielhaftes in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,’ in Goethezeit: Studien zur Erkenntnis und Rezeption Goethes und seiner Zeitgenossen: Festschrift für Stuart Atkins, ed. G. Hoffmeister (Bern und München: Francke, 1981), pp. 129-44.

7. K. May argued convincingly against this notion as early as 1957 (‘Willhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, ein Bildungsroman?’ DVjs, 31 (1957), 1-37), and H. Eichner, among others, has rejected this view in the strongest terms: ‘Bestehen wir also darauf, die “Lehrjahre” als die Darstellung einer Entwicklung zu einem einfachen, wohldefinierten, widerspruchsfreien Bildungsideal zu interpretieren, so kommen wir zu dem Ergebnis, dieser Roman sei Goethe miβglückt. Es fragt sich nur, ob ein solches Verfahren berechtigt ist.’ (‘Zur Deutung von “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren”,’ Jb.d.fr.dt. Hochstifts 1966, p. 176).

8. See, e.g., Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 171 (hereafter: AC). See also Frye's important studies A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965) (NP) and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) (SS).

9. For a fuller discussion of comic form in the Lehrjahre generally, see F. Amrine, ‘Goethe's Human Comedy: The Unity of the Wilhelm Meister-Novels,’ Diss. Harvard 1981, pp. 1-153.

10. The establishment of these new forms of identity is treated at length in Amrine, pp. 99-124.

11. Goethe, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. VII, 7th ed., ed. E. Trunz (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1968), p. 544. Citations of this edition will hereafter be abbreviated ‘HA.’

12. For a fuller discussion of this important moment in the novel, see Amrine, pp. 116-24.

13. N. Frye, ‘The Argument of Comedy,’ in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D. Robertson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 58.

14. See the commentary by E. Trunz, HA VII, 703.

15. N. Frye, ‘The Argument of Comedy, p. 59. Thomé also ascribes to Friedrich an important function: rather abstractly, he views Friedrich not as a ‘fool,’ but as a ‘Symbol des Humors’ (p. 482).

16. M. Delcourt, ‘Deux interpretations romanesques du mythe de l‘androgyne Mignon et Seraphita,’ Revue des langues vivantes, 38 (1972), 239.

17. Cf. H. Ammerlahn, ‘Mignons nachgetragene Vorgeschichte und das Inzestmotiv: Zur Genese und Symbolik der Goetheschen Geniusgestalten,’ Monatshefte, 64 (1972), 15-22. Ammerlahn offers an interpretation of Mignon that is different, yet closely related to that offered here. He sees Mignon as a ‘genius-figure born out of the protagonist's longing for the ideal, out of a mental love relationship poetically equated with that between man and woman’ (p. 15). Rather different perspectives on Mignon are to be found in two recent studies: W. Gilby, ‘The Structural Significance of Mignon in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,’ Seminar, 16 (1980), 136-150 and H. Ammerlahn, ‘Puppe-Tänzer-Dämon-Genius-Engel: Naturkind, Poesiekind und Kunstwerdung bei Goethe,’ The German Quarterly, 54 (1981), 19-32.

18. G. W. Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest (London: Methuen, 1953³), passim.

19. On the Wanderjahre as romance, see Amrine, ‘Goethe's Human Comedy,’ pp. 154-234, and Amrine, ‘Romance Narration in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,’ The German Quarterly, 55 (1982), 29-38.

20. The ‘schöne Seele,’ for example, describes him as ‘ein wunderbarer Mann, den man für einen französischen Geistlichen hält, ohne daβ man recht von seiner Herkunft unterrichtet ist’ (HA VII, 419).

21. A more picaresque variation on this theme is found in the middle books, where the itinerant actors attempt to form a kind of ‘anti-society’ in parodistic opposition to the ‘official’ social order. Melina establishes a ‘kleine Polizeiverordnung’ within the Graf's castle (HA VII, 163); later they imagine themselves as a ‘Republik’ replete with Senate, and finally a ‘wandernde Kolonie’ and a ‘wanderndes Reich’ (HA VII, 215ff.). Although not purely comic, their society is ‘carnivalesque’ (in Bakhtin's sense of the term), and thus utopian in its own way.

22. L. Dieckmann, ‘Repeated Mirror Reflections: The Technique of Goethe's Novels,’ Studies in Romanticism, 1 (1961-2), 154-74.

23. Cf. Frye's discussion of the dual nature of this theme in The Secular Scripture, p. 117.

24. See W. Larrett, ‘Wilhelm Meister and the Amazons. The quest for Wholeness,’ PEGS, 39 (1968), 31-56.

25. Staiger, p. 166.

26. Staiger, p. 166.

27. Letter to Schiller, 5 November 1796. See Larrett, p. 52.

28. Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, letter XV. See Larrett, pp. 53-4. In his book Goethe the Alchemist: A Study of Alchemical Symbolism in Goethe's Literary and Scientific Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), Ronald Gray stresses the hermaphroditical nature of the ultimate alchemical symbol of union, the Philosopher's Stone (p. 34), and speculates elsewhere in the same work that Mignon might have been inspired by Goethe's alchemical studies.

29. Larrett, p. 56.

30. Delcourt, p. 239.