SOURCE: “Ghostly Bildung: Gender, Genre, Aesthetic Ideology, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” in Genre, Vol. 26, No. 4, Winter, 1993, pp. 377-407.

[In the following essay, Redfield highlights aesthetic and gender representation in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,evaluating the novel and its relationship to the genre of the Bildungsroman.]

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

—Gadamer

Whoever could manage to interpret Goethe's Meister properly would have expressed what is now happening in literature. He could, so far as literary criticism is concerned, retire forever.

—Friedrich Schlegel

Among the challenges the modern novel offers to genre theory, that of the Bildungsroman is remarkable on several counts. Few literary terms have known greater success, both in the academy and in high culture generally, and in any number of national or linguistic contexts. “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” (229). If this person also commands the staples of Western literary history, she will also know that this subgenre is supposed to have been founded, or at least epitomized, by Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, is in some way deeply German, but nonetheless also represents “one of the major fictional types of European realism” (Hirsch 300).¹ At once international and national, “a major fictional type” springing from 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 mankind—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 signifier itself, which no doubt largely explains why the term “Bildungsroman” is more frequently borrowed than translated: even 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.

But if the Bildungsroman appears as a figure for a certain aesthetic ideal, it also presents itself as fiction or Schein in a less positive sense. For some time now the trend in German studies has been to call the genre's existence into question. 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.² 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 that rapidly become complex and serious. One might begin to suspect that critics like Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have good reason to claim that “a veritable romantic unconscious is discernible today, in the most central motifs of our modernity” (15). At the same time, however, one might also begin to suspect that the term “Bildungsroman,” like the more notorious label “Romanticism,” might have 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.³ Sammons's well-known article, by no means the first of its sort (see, e.g., Pabst), 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” (243). Frederick Amrine writes more forgivingly of a “critical fiction” (127)—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.⁴

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 Lewis Carroll's 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’” (Gille 17).⁵ As Sammons remarks, “if the status of the model text is problematic, then a fortiori the genre itself must certainly be insecure” (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;⁶ and despite the variety of solutions proffered, the definition of the Bildungsroman that emerges in study after study usually repeats the self-referential structure of the aesthetic synthesis sketched at the beginning of this essay—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, and this is because the content of this genre is never simply a “content,” but is always also “Bildung,” formation—the formation of the human as the producer of itself as form. Dilthey's seemingly content-oriented definition of the Bildungsroman as a “regulated development within 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” (394), 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 [die organsiche Plastizität des Menschen]. 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. (572)

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—one might also say, less human—than Musil's comments might 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 (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 become a sheer mirage. And yet, at once too referential and not referential enough, the Bildungsroman nonetheless 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” (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.

Such reflections, however, do not yet fully respond to the question of the Bildungsroman, which as an aesthetic genre requires exemplification in a text. Ordinarily we do not think of genres as requiring a model, let alone a visible point of origin; but the Bildungsroman is not an ordinary genre: though all generic terms may be considered aesthetic categories, the Bildungsroman is the genre of aesthetics. In this it differs from a classical genre such as the lyric, for instance, which, for all the aesthetic and ideological investment it has occasioned, bears the traces of multiple and heterogeneous histories. The notion of the Bildungsroman, however, has no existence apart from either the post-Romantic history of aesthetics, or the aesthetic formalization that this “genre” takes as its content—in the guise, of course, of the formation of a specific, anthropological subject.⁷ As an aesthetic of genre, the Bildungsroman must find embodiment in an example; and the burden of such exemplarity has been assigned to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ever since Friedrich Schlegel nominated it, with Fichte's philosophy and the French Revolution, as one of the “greatest tendencies of the age,” and asserted that it was “so thoroughly new and unique” that “only in itself [aus sich selbst] can one learn to understand it” (132). Schlegel, in other words, not only emphasized the text's power to represent “nature or Bildung itself … in manifold examples” (143), but also insisted on its exemplary force as a text: 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]. (133-34)

Critical representations of the text would consequently serve it badly, “apart from the fact that they would be superfluous [überflüssig].” In short, as the auto-productive, self-representative text, Wilhelm Meister would seem the very incarnation of what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call “the literary absolute,” and thus would indeed be the exemplary Bildungsroman.⁸

But Schlegel's understanding of the self-sufficient or “self-conscious” text is not what one might expect. 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 god-like from artistic willfulness,” performs an aesthetic judgment and necessarily finds the text wanting. But this magisterial critical stance 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. If the question of the Bildungsroman can be said to become that of how Wilhelm Meister figures the possibility of its own theorization, Schlegel suggests that the difficulties afflicting the idea of this genre might have something to do with the problem of reading.

I

Given the importance, for such questions, of Wilhelm Meister's representation of art and aesthetic judgment, we might ask first after the relation between the two forms of art most salient in the unfolding of Wilhelm's Bildung—theater and portraiture. The two would initially seem to function in opposing ways. The theater is the negative locus of Wilhelm's education: by giving up his dream of becoming an actor he emerges from apprenticeship, a moment of growth registered in his assumption of paternal responsibility toward his son Felix: “His apprenticeship was therefore completed in this sense, for along with the feeling of a father he had acquired the virtues of a solid citizen” (8.1).⁹ We shall discuss Wilhelm's acknowledgment of Felix later; for the moment we can focus on his renunciation (Entsagung) of the theater, and thus of a desire that has intermittently ruled his life from his infant fascination with marionettes to his climactic assumption of the title role in Hamlet in Book V. Though it will be necessary to ask what exactly is being renounced in the name of “theater,” and why, the text would at least appear to be allowing its hero to acquire genuine self-knowledge, albeit in the negative mode of knowing what he is not. Meanwhile the unvarying pleasure that Wilhelm takes in contemplating a putatively mediocre painting—a painting of a “sick king's son,” which initially forms part of Wilhelm's grandfather's art collection, and then reappears in the possession of the Society of the Tower at the end of the novel—seems to record a hitch in the works of Bildung, as Schiller noted in his occasionally anxious remarks to Goethe about this novel.¹⁰ Though the painting is poorly executed, Wilhelm cheerfully affirms at the beginning of his Bildungsroman that “the subject is what appeals to me in a painting, not the artistry” (1.17), and near the end of the text he is still sticking to his guns: “He returned eagerly to the picture of the sick prince, still finding it as moving and affecting as ever” (8.3). Like the schöne Seele, Wilhelm remains vulnerable throughout his itinerary to the attractions of kitsch, unable to achieve the formal universality of the disinterested subject of aesthetic judgment. Indeed, in his attitude toward the painting Wilhelm would appear neurotically fixated, trapped in the defiles of a repetitive desire that the painting thematizes as oedipal impasse—the sick prince is dying for love of his father's bride. In the case of the theater Wilhelm can give up his narcissistic and oedipal investments, stop playing Hamlet, and start being a father; in the case of the painting he remains a son unable to give up forbidden desire.

However, upon closer inspection, Wilhelm's failure to renounce the painting bears a certain relation to his ability to renounce the theater. The common denominator of both gestures is Wilhelm's inability to preserve aesthetic distance. He is only capable of responding to an aesthetic object when he can identify with its meaning or content; and, as he learns during the premiere of Hamlet, he is only capable of good acting when he can identify with the role to such an extent that he is not acting. In giving up the theater Wilhelm thus records his knowledge that he can never give up the particularity of self-interest. His response to the painting confirms this knowledge; and he can thus claim to have undergone a certain ironic “Bildung” insofar as he has learned that he will never truly become the universal subject of aesthetics. Since an aesthetic education is always underway toward its own occurrence, to a certain degree it accommodates being refigured as an impossibility, a refiguration that would be ironic in Lukács's sense of irony as compensatory knowledge, as that which “with intuitive double vision, can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God” (92). And indeed, Wilhelm's double gesture of renunciation and identification structures a complex dialectic in the course of which the text rigorously explores the possibility of Bildung as irony.¹¹

The Society of the Tower, it will be recalled, perversely lends its aid to Wilhelm's production of Hamlet by providing a Ghost capable of frightening Wilhelm into complete identification with his role. The Abbé justifies this intervention on the dialectical grounds that “error can only be cured through erring” (8.5). The Society of the Tower helps in order to hinder, and hinders in order to help; and Wilhelm, by acting well when he wasn't acting, learns that he isn't an actor. A genuinely dialectical sublation thus appears to occur, with knowledge emerging within error, as the truth of error. But the status of this knowledge is uncertain, as becomes clear when we examine more closely what it is that Wilhelm gives up in giving up the theater. Learning that he is not an actor, he learns that he cannot control the act of identification. Actors such as Serlo or Aurelie enter into their roles knowingly; one could say that, for them, identification is an intentional act. The “self” of an actor, qua actor, resides in his or her ability to intend identification. Wilhelm, the mildly talented amateur, however, identifies blindly with Hamlet because he is frightened by the Ghost: the aesthetic power of his performance is the result of an event over which he has no control. Identification occurs precisely where knowledge and intention are absent. It is therefore slightly misleading to say, as we did above, that Wilhelm cannot give up self-interest. His problem is not that he suffers from an excess or stubbornness of self that prevents him from acting well or judging aesthetically; rather, the opposite is the case: prefabricated roles seize him unpredictably, and without encountering resistance. The actor is always an actor, but Wilhelm, experiencing “Hamlet's” fear, has no identity with which to structure this literary space: the sense of the uncanny that he feels belongs to no one and is in a sense experienced by “no one.” And this uncanny moment is precisely the site of pedagogy or Bildung. A strange, radical self-loss, which from the “self”'s perspective arrives by accident, must be transformed into self-knowledge: the knowledge that the self cannot intend the occurrence, or construction, of the self—in other words, that the self is not an actor.

This transformation of loss into knowledge occurs as Wilhelm's renunciation or Entsagung of the theater, which consequently is a gesture of some complexity. In the first place, Wilhelm is not simply recognizing his own particular limitations: he is simultaneously renouncing an idealized image of the theater. Because acting consists in a power to control identification, the actor provides the illusion of being the aesthetic subject—the subject modeled on the artwork that knows what it does, or on the “literary absolute,” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's sense, which performs itself into existence as the knowledge of its own performance. To the youthful Wilhelm, the stage had thus seemed to offer a middle-class route toward the sprezzatura of the aristocrat, and toward the nation as the Aesthetic State, the collective subject of aesthetics. In turning in disillusionment from the theater, Wilhelm recognizes the inessentiality of the theater's aesthetic synthesis: the actor intends identification, but only in the orbit of fiction. When the act of self is known, it is a lie. This insight takes narrative shape as Wilhelm's gradual assessment of the fallibility, or indeed the vulgarity, of his professional colleagues, and as his turn toward the real-life theatrics of a company of genuine aristocrats, the Society of the Tower. The renunciation is thus also a substitution, and the coherence of renunciation depends on the nature of the Society of the Tower's difference from the acting company. The two communities intersect precisely at the point of Bildung—Wilhelm's uncanny thespian encounter with the Ghost. In taking up the role of the Ghost, the Society of the Tower acts in order to cure acting, enfolding the craft of the actor in a higher knowledge of a genuine act—the act of imparting knowledge to Wilhelm. Pedagogy thus replaces the theater as the matrix of aesthetics.

Whether Wilhelm has actually acquired knowledge rapidly becomes dubious, however, since the Society of the Tower is more fantastically theatrical than any of Wilhelm's acting companies. Actors at least know that their performance is fictional; the Society of the Tower, seducing Wilhelm with a parody of Masonic ritual, can either be seen as wiser than the actor, or vastly more naive and less genuine. It is for this reason that Schiller registered unhappiness with the idea of the Turmgesellschaft, worrying that it might appear “merely a theatrical game and a trick [Kunstgriff]” (Seidel 197). Similarly, another writer in the aesthetic tradition, the young Georg Lukács, felt that the appearance of this “fantastic apparatus” introduces “a disruptive dissonance into the total unity of the whole,” such that “the miraculous becomes a mystification without hidden meaning, a strongly emphasized narrative element without real importance, a playful ornament without decorative grace” (142). (All the same, “it is quite impossible to imagine Wilhelm Meister without this miraculous element.”) On this account, the Society of the Tower is itself the aesthetic but inessential fiction that the actor performs. Pedagogy, therefore, would be not the negation but the redoubling of acting: the pedagogue, qua pedagogue, acts acting, and then, the day's work done, retires to the theatricality of a Society that, unlike the acting company, intends to prefigure the Aesthetic State. If Wilhelm has learned that he is incapable of the aesthetic synthesis of acting and that this synthesis is a sham, both he and his teachers would appear capable of attaining this insight only at the price of entering into a more absurd and literal-minded version of the original delusion. The teacher, in other words, knows how teaching occurs only to the extent that the teaching, like acting, is untrue: Wilhelm may acquire knowledge, but cannot be said to learn anything.

The pedagogical plot thus assumes the aspect of a trick, a Kunstgriff, and the novel itself becomes the level on which the wise irony of Bildung would reside: the text “itself,” as a literary text, can be said to know the event of itself as text, even if the characters it represents fall short of such aesthetic self-production. On this level too the novel follows out the skewed logic of Wilhelm's predicament by allowing the painting of the sick prince to dictate the terms of the text's closure. Wilhelm's recently-acknowledged son Felix assumes the role of the sick prince: seeing a glass and a bottle of milk, he drinks, not knowing that there is a deadly amount of opium in the milk, since Augustin, the former Harper, has just discovered he is Mignon's incestuous father and has decided to commit suicide. However, the opium is only in the glass, not in the bottle, and the child's bad habit of drinking out of bottles rather than glasses saves him. The doctor speaks of “the luckiest chance [glücklichsten Zufall]” and subsequently of divine intervention: “a good spirit guided [Felix's] hand”; Nathalie offers the more dialectical comment that “he has been saved through his bad habit [Unart]” (8.10). This revelation transforms into comedy two days of despair, since Felix, afraid of his father's anger, will not confess his poor table manners, and swears he drank from the glass; meanwhile he has been so frightened by the fear of the adults and so pumped full of medicine that for awhile he appears ill—and when, after a few hours, he appears well again, Wilhelm continues for some time to fear that his good health is merely appearance [Schein]. Nathalie, meanwhile, swears privately to the Abbé that if Felix dies she will ask Wilhelm to marry her, an oath that Friedrich overhears and subsequently publicizes: “Now that the child lives, why should she change her mind? What one promises in that fashion, one holds to under any circumstance.” And he embarrasses Wilhelm and Nathalie into confessing their love for each other by pointing to the painting of the sick prince, and mockingly asking for an unaesthetic, referential reading of it:

“What was the king's name? … What's the name of the old goat-beard with the crown there, pining at the foot of the bed for his sick son? What's the name of the beauty who enters with both poison and antidote [Gift und Gegengift] in her demure eyes? What's the name of that bungler of a doctor who at this very moment is seeing the light, who for the first time in his life has the chance to order a rational prescription, a medicine that cures from the ground up [die aus dem Grunde kuriert], and is as tasty as it is wholesome?” (8.10)

Wilhelm, thus invited, moves from the position of the child to that of the father, whose illness, in this fantasy, is cured by the discovery that the sick child is not sick. Though the mother's promise of love had seemed to require the child's death, the promise holds without exacting its sacrifice: the child lives in the love that a father receives. These magic gestures of recovery and recompense culminate in Wilhelm's assumption of a unique happiness in the novel's closing words: “I don't know the wealth of a kingdom … but I know I have gained a fortune [Glück] that I haven't earned, and that I wouldn't exchange for anything in the world.”

The novel itself thus “identifies” with the painting's content, as the text's closing tableau repeats and inverts the structure of Wilhelm's obsession, simultaneously replaying the pedagogical gesture of the Society of the Tower. Here Wilhelm is manipulated into post-oedipal love (for Nathalie) rather than oedipal fear (for Hamlet's father's ghost). In a final twist on the Abbé's attempt to “cure error through error,” the text cures Wilhelm through his own neurotic fixation on the painting and its deadly oedipal content, a cure imaged in miniature in the text's construction of salvation for Felix through the child's own Unart. Given such intricacies of closure, it is hardly surprising that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre should always have been regarded as a paradigmatically self-conscious novel.¹² Nothing, indeed, could be more self-aware than the text's repetition of Wilhelm's act of identification; however, this is also to say that nothing could be more manifestly fictional than the closing tableau, the “fairy tale, or operetta-like character” of which, as Michael Beddow reminds us, is often remarked. The three promised marriages are all mésalliances between aristocrats (Natalie, Lothario, Friedrich) and commoners (Wilhelm, Therese, Philine), and the novel refuses to offer the slightest indication that these liaisons cut across the grain of the social text¹³—which is fair enough, since the social text has been dissolved into a rush of stylized literary events: Mignon's death and burial, Augustin's multiple and finally successful attempts at suicide, Felix's false death, and what the novel ironically summarizes as “so many terrible and wonderful events coming one after another” as to put the community into a “feverish oscillation.” The theatrics of the Society of the Tower are left behind by the text's own performance; and one could thus say that, in closing, the novel imitates not just Wilhelm (who imitates the painting), and not just the Society of the Tower (which imitates this imitation), but also the actor, who knows and controls the production of the self, but only does so in and as a fiction.

The Lehrjahre, in short, offers itself as a “literary absolute” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's sense, and consequently as an ironic text in Lukács's sense. Bildung, the autoproduction of the self, is strictly speaking impossible, but this impossibility can be sublated into the self-knowledge of the Roman that is Bildung, the text that builds itself as a self-reflexive structure, a figure (Bild) of the fictionality of self-knowledge. This fictionality is figured as the symbolic sacrifice of aesthetics: as the text “identifies” with a poorly-executed painting of its own invention, literature becomes literature in knowing and effecting its own destruction.¹⁴ The literary text's identification with kitsch is a renunciation that negates itself, transforming loss into the “fortune” invoked in the last words of the novel, the Glück that, Wilhelm insists, is beyond exchange and cannot be earned. The close of the text is an impossible, absolute gift, which emerges through a gesture of giving so absolute that the gift is precisely that of luck (Glück). Schillerian Bildung is negated and recuperated as the irony of luck: as the lucky chance that only fiction can reliably provide.¹⁵

But we have seen that readers of this novel have not always entirely shared its protagonist's happiness; and the grounds of Schiller's concern that the novel is written more “for the actor” than “of the actor” (Seidel 82) have become clearer. In itself, the “literary absolute,” as the ironic knowledge of its own fictionality, is a demandingly ascetic form of aesthetic totalization; but the anxiety it inspires may be traced to the even less comforting status of the “fictional” in these scenes, which is always slipping away from its own knowledge. Fiction's power to posit is unlimited, but what is posited is fictional, bearing within it the insistent question of referential truth that reduces what is posited to “mere” fiction, and spurs the production of another fiction to compensate for the hollowness of the first. The falseness of the theater spurs Wilhelm's renunciation of it, but the result is an even more improbable theatricalization of his life and world; and though the self-conscious fictionality of the text thematizes and absorbs into itself the constant desire for an imperial referent (“What was the king's name?”), a residue of dissatisfaction will always potentially remain, “something isolated in the first and last reading,” in Schlegel's words. The Glück of fiction at once exceeds the world of exchange and bears the trace of it—though what one exchanges it for is always another fiction. Entsagung is thus not a true dialectical process, but rather an act haunted by being an “act,” a fiction; and this fictionality cannot be renounced even by a fiction seeking to renounce fictionality via a renunciation of truth.

Consequently, as a figure of Bildung—of Bildung as the knowledge of the impossibility of Bildung—Entsagung becomes illegible. If the knowledge this figure conveys is that the self cannot posit itself, such knowledge can only emerge by annihilating itself: knowledge is knowingly renounced only through a posited homology between knowing and acting that is precisely what knowledge renounces. An ironic spiral results: the act of presupposition (of a homology between knowledge and act) contradicts the knowledge, which confirms the knowledge (of this contradiction), which contradicts it again, and so on. And this ironic spiral is not grounded in an inevitability of intention; rather, the homology between knowledge and act is precisely fictional, available only in and as a fiction. Fiction thus becomes (mis)understandable as an incoherent productive force lodged within intention, and within irony as an intentional structure. Why such a force should dominate the rhetoric and narrative of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in the guise of Bildung, is not yet clear, and to advance further we shall need to look more closely at the text's analysis of the genesis of theatricality. But first we might briefly examine the novel's elaboration of its oedipal allegory, since the figure of fatherhood in the text provides a more lurid, and thus more manifestly unstable, version of the rhetorical difficulty we encounter in the trope of Entsagung.

II

The oedipal scenario, as psychoanalysis extracts it from literature, constitutes a dramatic version of the story of identification through the fiction of a renunciation: a story that Lacan captures memorably in his punning interweaving of the “Name” and the “No” of the Father.¹⁶ The male subject becomes the father precisely by not becoming the father: by turning his desire elsewhere so as to desire what the father desires. Since the subject emerges under prohibition, desire is an endless process of substitution; and the psychological subject's successful negotiation of oedipal conflict occurs as the acceptance of loss, just as the ironic subject of aesthetics accepts the endless deferral of aesthetic totalization. This analogy is prompted by the text itself: it is of course no accident that both the painting Wilhelm fetishizes and the play in which he acts feature oedipal narratives as the “content” with which he identifies. Borrowing Hamlet's fear of his ghostly father, and the sick prince's deadly desire for his father's bride, Wilhelm engages himself in the errancy of family romance to the precise extent that, within the orbit of aesthetic judgment, he fails to perform one—thus, as we have seen, committing himself to the ironic recuperation of aesthetics through failure. The novel cooperates by negotiating a proper object-choice for him: in an often rambunctious parody of oedipal emplotment, Nathalie replaces the all-too-maternal Mariane, the “mother” of Wilhelm's child—Mariane who is implicitly paired with Wilhelm's own mother in the text's opening chapters, and is ultimately consigned in dream to Wilhelm's dead father (“his father and Mariane seemed to be running away from him. … Impulse and desire impelled him to go to their assistance, but the Amazon's [Nathalie's] hand held him back—and how gladly he let himself be held!” [7.1]). The accession to the Name of the Father (“Meister”) involves the acceptance of a No that takes the form of a renunciation of the self and its desires, and in this acceptance, which the text figures as Wilhelm's acknowledgment of Felix, the son becomes the father: “Everything he planned was now to mature for the boy, and everything he built was to last for several generations. His apprenticeship was therefore completed in this sense, for along with the feeling of a father [dem Gefühl des Vaters] he had acquired the virtues of a solid citizen [eines Bürgers]” (8.1). Oedipal identification generates a social identity and a consciousness of historical temporality, and thus provides a model version of negative Bildung: though desire always points elsewhere, this lack can be transformed into an index of maturity.

The endlessness of desire, however, which is totalizable precisely as an endlessness, and hence as a loss or lack that can be mourned, derives from a less stable epistemological or rhetorical problematic: the transformation of doubt (whether Felix is really Wilhelm's son) into conviction. We recall that by the end of Book VII, Wilhelm has been informed by various authorities—first the duenna Barbara, whom he does not believe; then the Abbé, whom he does—that Mariane, the actress he had abandoned in Book I, and who has since conveniently died, is Felix's mother, and that he, Wilhelm, is the father. Having given up the theater and received his Lehrbrief from the Tower, Wilhelm accedes to his overdetermined patronymic—“Meister”—in acceding to fatherhood. “Yes, I feel it,” he cries, embracing Felix, “you are mine!” (7.9)—a moment of identification summarized in Friedrich's ironic mot late in the novel: “Fatherhood is based entirely and only on conviction; I'm convinced, therefore I'm a father” (8.6). Thus, if Wilhelm's Bildung is to occur, it will proceed, like Freud's famous “advance of civilization,” under the affirmation that “paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premiss” (Moses and Monotheism 114). The uncertainty of fatherhood is certainly not simply subversive in its effects: it is a topos in Western culture that is regularly associated, as in Freud, with a passage from nature to culture, and from sense-certainty to cognition;¹⁷ if, in Stephen Dedalus's words in Ulysses, “paternity may be a legal fiction” (170), this fiction, according to Stephen's parodic reading of Hamlet, underwrites theology itself.¹⁸ Fatherhood is founded “upon incertitude,” but as a “mystical estate, an apostolic succession” (170); thus, Stephen concludes, Shakespeare lives on in the ghost of Hamlet's father: “But, because loss is his gain, he passes on toward eternity in undiminished personality. … He is a ghost, a shadow now … a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father” (162).

The tension in Stephen Dedalus's—and Wilhelm Meister's—narrative is between an initial “incertitude,” on the one hand, and a dialectical passage from “loss” to “gain” on the other. Uncertainty is not quite the same as loss, and though the dialectical narrative tells the story of the father's “undiminished” survival, the uncertain status of the father renders him “a ghost, a shadow,” precisely because this uncertainty can never be entirely stabilized as a loss. Like Ulysses, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre routes this tension through the figure of Hamlet's father's ghost. On the one hand, Wilhelm, terrified into his role as Hamlet by the mysterious Ghost, hears in its voice the power of an “undiminished personality”: “The voice seemed familiar to everyone, and Wilhelm thought it sounded like that of his own father” (5.11). However, when the Ghost reappears during Wilhelm's initiation into the Society of the Tower, Wilhelm is far less certain he has heard correctly: “he thought he heard his father's voice, and yet not; so confused was he by present reality and past memories” (7.9). Doubt necessarily recurs within oedipal narrative, since this narrative is founded not on a referent but on uncertainty.

For this reason, fathers, for all their omnipresence in Wilhelm Meister, seem to have no more than a wraith-like grip on the world: Jarno is of uncertain parentage, and his name is strange (3.4); no one knows where the Abbé comes from (6); Lothario's name is a pseudonym (4.16); Nathalie's family is not in the genealogical books (4.11); and so on. Even the identity of the actor playing the ghost of Hamlet's father is in doubt, since the Abbé turns out to have a mysterious twin brother who might or might not have taken the role. And because the father cannot guarantee his own promise to exist, the figure of the ghost drifts away from that of the father, becoming associated more generally with uncertainty itself. Thus, glimpsing the “shadow” of Norberg, the rival who helps bring uncertainty to the paternity of Felix, Wilhelm feels the “uneasiness” of a ghost-effect: “And like a ghost at midnight that scares the wits out of us, and when we regain our composure seems the product of our anxiety and leaves us with doubts whether in fact we ever saw it, a great uneasiness came over Wilhelm” (1.17). Unsure what woman visited him in the night after the production of Hamlet, Wilhelm is relieved at the end of the novel to be told that Philine, and not Mignon, had been the “lovely palpable ghost [fühlbare Gespenst]” in his bed (8.6). Similar ghostings proliferate, infecting the production of subjectivity at all levels in this novel.¹⁹

The duplicity of a ghost-effect that at once enables the Father to survive death and makes it impossible for him to come into existence is represented in Wilhelm Meister through counterpointed figures of portrait and mirror. The portrait, at least at first glance, represents a stable figurative structure, grounded in a particular referent that it sublimates into a meaning. When Wilhelm obtains his Lehrbrief and reads the Turmgesellschaft's account of his life,

he saw a picture of himself, not like a second self in a mirror, but a different self, one outside of him, as in a portrait [Porträt]. One never approves of everything in a portrait, but one is always glad that a thoughtful mind has seen us thus and a superior talent enjoyed portraying us in such a way that a picture survives of what we were, and will survive longer than we will. (8.1)

The subject of Bildung, brought to self-consciousness in the gaze of the Other, shoulders its oedipal discomforts (“one never approves of everything”) for the sake of an identity that, portrait-like, would sublimate its referent into the historical temporality of a meaning. This, however, is what the text refuses to guarantee; and the “mirror,” which Wilhelm distinguishes from the “portrait” in characterizing the narrative of his apprenticeship scroll, registers the volatile nature of all figural relations: the self can duplicate into the “second self” of the mirror because the first self is always possibly a figure masquerading as a referent.²⁰ In one of the novel's charged moments, Wilhelm, disguised as the count, sees “in the mirror” the real count entering his wife's bedroom: “He saw me in the mirror, as I did him, and before I knew whether it was a ghost or he himself, he went out again” (3.10). The shock of seeing himself redoubled drives the count to forsake the world for a Moravian community; and “you,” Jarno tells Wilhelm later, “are the ghost who drove him into the arms of religion” (7.3).

But to be or to see a ghost is precisely not to know whether or not one is or has seen a ghost. Even the “great uneasiness” one feels at such moments is “like a ghost” that “at midnight scares the wits out of us, and when we regain our composure seems the product of our anxiety and leaves us with doubts whether in fact we ever saw it” (1.17): the pathos of a haunting is itself spectral, infected with uncertain theatricality. It is significant that Wilhelm feels drawn to Hamlet's famous meditation on the fictional pathos of the actor (“What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba / That he should weep for her?” [5.6]). The dignified suffering of the oedipal subject, the pathos of Entsagung, the labor and patience of the negative, emerge only at the risk of being exposed as fraudulent, just as the transcendental spiral of Bildung can occur only at the risk of being exposed as a trick, a Kunstgriff. And yet the production of Bildung, particularly in its oedipal form, relies upon affect: Wilhelm, we recall, acquires “the feeling of a father [Gefühl des Vaters]” in passing out of apprenticeship. The father is a rhetorical effect. And the structure of this rhetorical effect is double: on the one hand it is uncertain, since it can always fail to convince; on the other hand, it can only exist as the obliteration of this uncertainty: unless one is convinced, one is not a father. Fatherhood exists as the repression of its own rhetoricity. Thus fatherhood repeats, more violently, the predicament of Entsagung: while the ironic subject of Bildung renounces self-knowledge but can only do so knowingly, the subject of paternity comes into being as a “knowledge” that, like Oedipus, blinds itself to itself. While the ironic spiral of knowledge culminates in the text's theatrical assumption of sheer fictionality, the paternal hoax recurs as the constant vacillation of an assertion that cannot know its own impossibility.

Implicitly linking Hamlet's ghost with the picture of the sick prince, Wilhelm insists that in the production of Hamlet there be a “lifesize” portrait of Hamlet's father drawn and positioned “so that he looks exactly like the Ghost when it goes out the door. That will be very effective when Hamlet is looking at the Ghost and the queen at the portrait” (5.9). And, after the mysterious Ghost shows up at the opening performance, it is remarked that he had looked exactly like the portrait, as if “he had sat for it himself” (5.12). The portrait precedes its referent, which of course, as a “father,” is not a referent but a ghost. Here, in other words, the portrait is revealed to be a trope, a metalepsis dependent for its referent on fiction's power to provide one, just as the father is only persuasive thanks to Hamlet's, or the Lehrjahre's, rhetorical force. And if we ask after the text's representation of the genesis of this problematic, we need to account for the remaining term in this oedipal scenario: the mother who gazes at the portrait, who is marginalized, half forgotten, and, in the person of Mariane, killed off, but who is also never entirely expelled from the narrative of Bildung.

III

The figure of the mother presides over the opening of the novel, though not precisely over the origins of theatricality: Wilhelm cannot decide whether his love for Mariane caused him to love the theater, or vice-versa (4.19), and the reader similarly cannot decide whether Wilhelm loves Mariane or her masculine stage-costume, the “red uniform” and “white vest” that he embraces so eagerly (1.1). Via the language of erotic fetishism, the novel suggests that one can never be certain that desire has not already mimicked itself. And though we discover that a set of marionettes originally gave the child Wilhelm a “taste for the theatre,” this taste is uncertainly figurative: since the puppets are kept locked up in the maternal (and, of course, forbidden) space of the kitchen pantry, they literally acquire tastes and smells associated with maternal care (1.2).²¹ On the one hand the mother is paired with theatricality as the literal to the figurative; on the other hand, the difference between these two is precisely what cannot be established. This uncertainty means that the very relation between mother and theater, or literal and figurative meaning, is irreducibly theatrical or figurative, since no stabilizing ground of meaning presents itself. However, the drama of uncertainty confronting us here differs slightly from that staged by the tropes of fatherhood or Entsagung. In keeping both with bourgeois gender roles and a metaphysical hierarchy that Wilhelm Meister at least pretends to respect, the mother represents a prelinguistic site of natural origin; and thus in her proximity the text allegorizes the impossible and contradictory referential drive of fiction as the condition of all language. Both fatherhood and renunciation represent the possibility that the referent can be recuperated through negation—that by turning from the father's desire one can become the father; that by giving up self-knowledge one can recover it; that by annihilating the referent in pure fictionality one can obtain the plenitude of “Glück.” The mother, however, represents not just a referent to be negated in oedipal narrative, but the site of referentiality itself; and the marks of maternal care—the tastes and smells of the pantry—figure the pressure of referentiality precisely as the undecidability of the sign.²² Nourishment, belonging to what Lacan would term the realm of “need,” is not language; yet as Cathy Caruth comments apropos the “Blessed Babe” passage in Wordsworth's Prelude, “in order to nurse his mother's breast the babe first has to read it”: gestures of care only become maternal when they are taken as signs (56). There is thus no such thing as the “mother” outside of a signifying system, yet the mother marks the impossibility of closing this system. Language could be said to “prop” itself on nonlinguistic gestures, rather as Freud, in a famous passage, speaks of sexuality “attach[ing] itself to functions serving the purpose of self-preservation” (Three Essays 182)—except that what is undecidable is precisely whether marks are nonlinguistic or not.²³ The mother, and the marionettes, figure a non-empirical materiality of the sign: the sign's dependence, or “propping,” upon an illegibility rather than a presence.²⁴

The sign is thus always already theatrical because it can only pretend to be unequivocally a sign. Its possibility entails a radical contingency which must be suppressed if the sign is to be taken as a sign, but which leaves its mark in the sign's excessive and insatiable need to refer. The puppets register the material condition of this predicament, which is that of signification as the inscription, the violent imposition, of the possibility of reading. As Wilhelm takes up the puppets (1.3), “he was transported [versetzt] back to the time when he thought they were alive [wo sie ihm noch belebt schienen], when he thought he could bring them alive [zu beleben glaubte] by the liveliness [Lebhaftigkeit] of his voice and the movements of his hands” (1.2). The puppets, which as material objects are properly speaking neither dead nor alive, represent the “prop” necessary for the imposition of figure as Schein or Bild: in this sense they are not phenomenal or empirical objects, but rather indicative of an unguaranteed possibility of articulation. Like Mignon's corpse at the end of the novel, they acquire a “Schein des Lebens” by virtue of a rhetorical event that Paul de Man's late work thematizes as catachretic prosopopeia, the disruptive incoherence of which appears in the sentence above as the compressed conjunction of a false constative presupposition (belebt schienen) and a fictitious performative act (zu beleben glaubte).²⁵ Henceforth desire can vacillate between the binary oppositions of figurative and literal, life and death, appearance and reality, etc.: once “the appearance of life” has been posited, death can become negation.²⁶ This dialectic erects itself upon the taking of signs as such, figured here as the taking of bodies: the body is here the trope of the legible sign, and the marionettes register this body's material support, and hence its ongoing figurative dismemberment. And as critics from Schiller onward have well understood, this predicament leaves its mark in the narrative through the figure of Mignon.²⁷

Mignon should indeed, as Eric Blackall claims, be understood as “the spirit of poetry” and the “guiding force of the book,” though the consequences of such an insight are not necessarily positive.²⁸ Mignon, like Wilhelm's grandfather's art collection (and its symbolic complement, the marionettes), comes from Italy, the land of art. Like her father the Harper, she provides the text with a mouthpiece for its famously haunting lyrics; as a corpse she becomes herself a work of art at the end of the novel, lending her body to the “schöne Kunst” of the embalmer (8.5). As befits the “spirit” of poetry, she is deeply associated with the Father's Ghost, and implicated in every turn of Wilhelm's Bildung. Hers is the dead father of Hamlet and Wilhelm (“The big devil is dead” [2.4]); the Ghost, she has reason to add, is her “uncle” (“No one understood what she meant, except those who knew that she had called the man she thought was her father ‘the big devil’” [5.12]). Knowing the secret of the father, she knows that Felix is Wilhelm's true son: “The ghost told it to me” (7.8). But this is also to say that Mignon is the “riddle” of the text: “Here is the riddle [Rätsel],” Philine says, introducing Mignon (2.4); and the legibility of this poetic riddle is never entirely certain. Though Wilhelm is finally told that Philine was the ghost, the Gespenst, who came to him in the night after his debut in Hamlet, the novel is curiously, even stagily coy in its refusal to provide evidence: “His first guess was that it had been Philine, and yet the charming body he had clasped in his arms did not seem like hers” (5.13). Wilhelm is subsequently “frightened” by a new maturity he sees in Mignon—“she seemed to have grown taller during the night”—and though he persuades himself that his nocturnal visitor must have been Philine after all, the narrator adds, in an atypically theatrical aside, that “we too must share this opinion, because we are not able to reveal the reasons which had made him doubt this and had aroused other suspicions” (5.13). The rationale of this aside—the reason of these “reasons”—is never revealed; the Rätsel remains riddled. Mignon thus embodies a remainder of uncertainty within the transcendence of sense perception that is fatherhood.²⁹ In relation to the gender discriminations that oedipal narratives seek to police, this means that Mignon, a product of the “Gespenst” of incest (8.9), must appear a “hermaphrodite creature” (3.11), the focal point for the text's interest in androgyny.

Thus, what must be expelled from the aesthetic plot, and reintegrated, however problematically, as a “corpse,” is Mignon's body. A member of an acrobat's entourage when Wilhelm adopts her, Mignon is associated with bodily deformation as well as with poetic language: when she writes, for instance, her body interferes: “the letters were uneven and the lines not straight. In this too her body seemed to contradict her mind [dem Geiste zu wiedersprechen]” (2.12). And if we examine the figurative resonance of this contradiction, we find that Mignon's crampings of the heart and epileptic seizures return us repeatedly to the puppet theater. Mignon prepares the ground of Wilhelm's Vaterherz in a series of curious scenes: accepting him as a surrogate parent, she performs an egg-dance for him like a mechanism [Räderwerk] or a clock [wie ein Uhrwerk], and Wilhelm, transported by this Schauspiel, desires to resuscitate her “with the love of a father” (2.8). A little later, Mignon has a seizure: her body convulses and she falls “as if every limb of her body were broken”:

It was a terrifying sight! “My child,” he said, lifting her up and embracing her, “what is it?”—The convulsions persisted, spreading from the heart to the dangling limbs [schlotternden Gliedern]; she was just hanging in his arms. (2.14)

Then “all her limbs became alive again”; she clasps his neck “like a lock that springs shut,” and when Wilhelm repeats “My child!” she responds “My father! … You will be my father!”

The dangling limbs and convulsive, mechanical motions recur later in a scene in which the puppets figure overtly. Wilhelm and his troupe are celebrating a successful premiere of Hamlet, and Mignon and Felix, sitting in a chair reserved for the mysterious Ghost, mimic the marionettes:

The children, who, sitting in the big armchair, stuck out over the table like puppets out of their box, started to put on a little play [Stück] of this sort. Mignon imitated the rasping noise very nicely, and they finally banged their heads together and on the edge of the table, in such a manner as actually only wooden puppets can withstand. Mignon was almost frenetically excited … she now began to rush around the table, tambourine in hand, hair flying, head thrown back and her limbs flung in the air like one of those maenads whose wild and well-nigh impossible postures still astonish us on ancient monuments. (5.12)

The final simile compresses and repeats, with a frisson of orphic dismemberment, the aesthetic trajectory that later in the novel Mignon will follow. And a deforming, disfiguring force will haunt that trajectory, wracking Mignon's body to the moment of death—when once again her “schlotternde Körper” will hang like a puppet's (8.5). Felix as well as Mignon must play out this Stück, sitting in the place of the father, for Felix's condition of possibility hangs no less than Mignon's on an act of identification with a puppet—an impossible act that the text registers in one of its most astonishing turns of phrase (“banged their heads together … in such a manner as actually only wooden puppets can withstand”).³⁰ The children are not puppets, but they do that which only puppets can do. It is impossible to identify with puppets, but this impossibility “occurs.” The story of the child Wilhelm's projection of life onto the marionettes could be told with less manifest strain, since that act of Belebung could at least appear to originate in the plenitude of the child's living identity. But Mignon and Felix's grotesquely inverted repetition of Wilhelm's act underscores the violent, figurative origins of all identities and of all identifications. The children are actors, who intend the identity they posit, and in doing so they reveal the rhetorical precondition of all acting, and all aesthetics, which resides in a prosopopeia irreducible to intentionality: the children, the actor, and the aesthetic text “are” puppets in the sense that they have, impossibly, been made possible by them; and the disruptive materiality of signification that the puppets record is one name for the deadly force inhabiting the body of the “spirit of poetry.”³¹ The expulsion of this foreign body takes, of course, the form of aestheticization as entombment: once dead, this body will be able to enter the meaningful universe of death and life as a body. Mignon thus becomes a beautiful object, a Schein des Lebens, through the schöne Kunst of the embalmer, as with great ceremony she is encrypted in an antique sarcophagus long devoid of its original inhabitant—a coffin become a commodified artwork, purchased in Italy, the land of art, by Nathalie's uncle. An artwork entombed in art, Mignon is a treasure [Schatz] and a portrait, a “beautiful picture of the past [schöne Gebild der Vergangenheit],” and is ready to resurface in domesticated form as the sentimental figure of melancholy, Sehnsucht, and Heimweh that literary history was to make of her.³²

Death, however, does not lay the ghost to rest. Even before the funeral service has ended (the choir is still busy singing “Unconsumed, in marble it rests; in your hearts it lives and works”), the audience has stopped listening: “no one heard the fortifying message,” for everyone has been distracted by the appearance of a story about Mignon's origins. Once again Mignon must be encrypted; but this time, having exhausted other resources, the text can only tell the story of a false burial and a fictional body.³³ The story goes that Mignon, after disappearing from her Italian home, was presumed to have drowned in the local lake; her mother, Sperata, under the influence of a miraculous story, begins to comb the shore for her child's bones, believing that if she could only gather up the entire skeleton and take it to Rome, “the child would appear before the people, in its fresh white skin, on the steps of the high altar of St. Peter's” (8.9). Daily she gathers up animal bones, a deluded reader patiently and madly pursuing reading as the gathering [légein] of a body,³⁴ until public sympathy, in the hope of curing error through error, suggests that “the bones of a child's skeleton should gradually be intermingled with those she already had, to increase her hopes.” Sperata experiences great joy as, thanks to yet another dead child, “the parts gradually fitted together.” Only a few extremities remain missing when she has a vision of her child, embodied and thus transcendent: “It rose up, threw off the veil, its radiance filling the room, its beauty transfigured, its feet unable to touch the ground, even had they wished to. … I will follow my child.” Sperata dies, and like Mignon, or Ottilie in the The Elective Affinities, her body miraculously resists corruption, and she becomes a religious icon: “There were several cures, which no attentive observer could explain or dismiss as false.”

Sperata, the exotic, hoodwinked, and sentimentalized peasant mother, has been brought on stage by a fictional power that fiction is powerless to control. She is Schlegel's reader-as-supplement, a reader generated by the slippage of the text that is the production of the text: she is thus at once the figure of a reading, and the figure of the violence with which a text, or a reading, comes into existence—a blind force that is constantly, but always anxiously, misread as the exquisite corpse of a meaning. And if meaning here attains figuration as the body, meaning's materiality is that of scattered bones: minimal units of articulation that, like letters assembled into words, serve as the fragments of a fictional skeleton. This predicament is exemplary precisely to the degree that it is staged and suspect, and in a certain fundamental sense impossible—the impossible generation of identity or meaning out of a tangled pile of articulations, the fragments of marionettes or skeletons. If the Bildungsroman rises like a ghost from these scattered bones, this is because of, rather than despite, the impossibility of Bildung's story: a story that can have no origin and no conclusion, since the aestheticization of texts, authors, and bodies must always be done over again to cover up the undoing that composes their possibility.

Thus the story of the puppets becomes the story of Mignon, which in turn becomes the story of a mad, mourning mother, whose incestuous production of her child is reiterated in her deluded labor to re-member or re-produce it. But through the rigor of this figurative sequence Wilhelm Meister demonstrates that the mother is neither a natural site of meaning nor a deviation from such a site, but is rather the mark of a linguistic predicament, the trace of a randomness within language that can neither be comprehended nor entirely effaced. This readable disjunction within signifying processes is the general condition for all tropes and figures, and can be termed irony. Irony, as the displacement constitutive of language, disarticulates the aesthetic and naturalizing illusion that composes all ideologies, thus opening them to critique by accounting for their occurrence and power. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in other words, in demystifying the Society of the Tower's “portentous words and signs” (8.5), registers the force, as well as the absurdity, of its corporate, multinational cultural ambition. For, as Jarno says, “since property is no longer safe anywhere,”

from our ancient Tower a Society [Sozietät] shall go forth, which will extend into every corner of the globe, and people from all over the world will be allowed to join it. (8.7)

Notes

1. See also Schaffner, and, for a representative study with a more narrowly German focus, Swales. On the history of the term “Bildungsroman,” see Martini.

2. The term, according to Martini, makes its earliest appearance around 1819-20 in essays by a professor at the Universität Dorpat, Karl Morgenstern. 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” (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 Selbmann.

3. The only novel consistently cited is, of course, Wilhelm Meister, 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); Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer (1857); Wilhelm Raabe's Der Hungerpastor (1864); Gottfried Keller's Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55; 1879/80); and, in the twentieth century, the novels of Hesse and Mann.

4. See also Sammons, 232. The principal target of both critics is Buckley.

5. Cited by Amrine, 125-26. (All translations in this essay are mine unless otherwise noted.) See also Eichner; May (the question of whose title, “‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,’ ein Bildungsroman?” 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]); Saine; Schlechta.

6. This remark may seem cavalier, but is meant seriously and could be justified with many examples, Kontje's remarks at the close of the introductory chapter to his recent Private Lives in the Public Sphere 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).

7. This is also what distinguishes the question of the Bildungsroman from that of other problematic genres such as the récit or Novelle—or, for that matter, from that of the novel itself.

8. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's definition of the “literary absolute” is complex and nuanced, but may for present purposes be reduced to their claim that it “aggravates and radicalizes the thinking of totality and the Subject” (15) insofar as literature, in producing itself as the reflection on itself, offers itself as exemplary to the Subject. Generally speaking, then, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy tend to conceive of literature, and (“Romantic” or “literary”) irony as self-reflection, though elements in their argument move in another, more radical direction. For an account and a fine critique of The Literary Absolute, see Newmark.

9. Since editions vary and the novel's chapters are generally very short, I have indicated quotations from Wilhelm Meister by book and chapter number. The text is that of the Hamburger Ausgabe (abbreviated where necessary HA); my translations generally follow those of Blackall.

10. Schiller's correspondence with Goethe during the period 1795-96 has become one of the sacred cows of the modern German canon, because in many respects it provides a bridge between Goethe's novel and one of the founding texts of aesthetic culture, Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man. See, for instance, Wilkinson and Willoughby: “We … would seek the most adequate fictional counterpart [to the Aesthetic Education] in the work that Schiller was receiving in installments while actually engaged on his treatise, namely Wilhelm Meister” (cxcv-cxcvi). Schiller's response to the novel, however, is complex and occasionally frankly ambivalent, and merits careful study—not least since these letters compose the first “reading” that Wilhelm Meister received, and in a sense can also be understood as the first attempt to read the novel as a “Bildungsroman.” Often the language of the Aesthetic Education is squarely in view: “In him,” Schiller writes, for instance, of the character Wilhelm, “dwells a pure and moral image of mankind” (Seidel 189), a claim that echos the typological system of the Aesthetic Education: “Every individual man … carries in himself, by predisposition and determination, a pure ideal Man, with whose unchanging oneness it is the great task of his being, in all its changes, to correspond” (Letter 4.2, translation modified). But elsewhere more anxious comments appear, many of which resemble the complaints of twentieth-century critics who have had trouble identifying Wilhelm Meister as a Bildungsroman. I refer here to a moment when Schiller worries that Wilhelm, gazing at aesthetic objects in the Hall of the Past, is “still too much the old Wilhelm, who liked best to linger, in his grandfather's house, by the [portrait of the] sick king's son” (Seidel 208).

11. For a powerful analysis of aesthetics as a structure of ironic postponement, see Lloyd.

12. Wilhelm Meister in fact lent its “scènes de marionettes ou de fête au château” to André Gide's famous formulation of the “mise en abyme”: see Gide, 41. For a study of Gide's text that (briefly) engages Wilhelm Meister, see Dällenbach, 23-24.

13. “The utopian element here is not just that these marriages are proposed in the first place, but that they are envisaged without any issue being made of the socially outrageous character of the unions, even though the narrative has earlier drawn explicit attention to the ‘vast gulf of birth and station’ separating Wilhelm from the Countess, Nathalie's sister” (Beddow 139). The present reading will be indirectly questioning Beddow's assurance that the emphatic fictionality of the novel's ending “does not amount to a radical ironisation of Wilhelm's represented fulfilment” (139, Beddow's italics).

14. Goethe's writing about Wilhelm Meister and the theater, from the Theatralische Sendung (1777-85) to the Wanderjahre (1829), pursues a trajectory that ironically repeats Wilhelm's and his text's gestures of Entsagung—a reflexive turn typical of the Bildungsroman problematic, which at some point necessarily generates the referential question of the “author.” If the hero of the Theatralische Sendung goes relatively unchastened in his ambition to build a national theater, and the Wilhelm of the Lehrjahre is brought to renounce that desire, the protagonist of the Wanderjahre will find that the theater has become the only artform to be banned from the Pedagogical Province—primarily because of its ability to attract crowds through “false and unsuitable emotions” (HA 8, p. 258). Lest we be tempted to confuse this apparent narrative of Bildung-through-Entsagung with these texts' (or Goethe's own) vastly complex relation to the theater, we are told that Wilhelm, after listening patiently to the pedagogues' lecture on the evils of drama, “was only half convinced and perhaps somewhat annoyed.” Furthermore, “The editor of these pages might himself confess that he has allowed this strange passage [wunderliche Stelle] to slip by with some reluctance [Unwillen]; for has he not also in various ways expended more life and energy on the theatre than is proper? And is he now to be persuaded that this was an unforgivable error, a fruitless effort?” (ibid.).

15. For a fine reading of the figure of Glück and its relation to economic and libidinal exchange in this novel, see Hörisch. The present analysis of fortune, luck, and fiction owes much to Derrida's remarkable analysis of these figures in Donner le temps.

16. Lacan's pun exploits the fact that “nom” (name) and “non” (no) are homophones in modern French: see in particular “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits, 30-113. For a study of the Bildungsroman inspired by Hegel and Lacan, see Smith.

17. For an incisive analysis of the father as a metaphor for the supersensory, see Culler, chapter 9.

18. The Ulysses episode in question (“Scylla and Charybdis”) begins with an invocation of Goethe's novel: “And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister. A great poet on a great brother poet” (151).

19. The ontological uncertainty of identity repeats itself, within the terms of oedipal narrative, as a teasing ambiguity of gender identity. Wilhelm's education at the hands of phallic women begins with Mariane, who on the first page of the novel is dressed as a solider; then there is Therese, who becomes the perfect bourgeoise housewife only by being mannishly independent, and Nathalie, the “Amazon,” who when we first meet her is dressed in a man's overcoat. Even the schöne Seele begins her career as a tomboy: she is called at one point an “errant son,” and later, in becoming a Beautiful Soul against the wishes of her frivolous fiancé, demonstrates a “manly defiance.” I discuss the special case of Mignon below; unfortunately, space does not permit an examination of the character most remarkable in this respect: Aurelie, the actress who confuses Schein and Sein by carrying a real dagger and by mingling her real life with her role as Ophelia—a dark parody of Wilhelm's narcissistic investment in Hamlet. “Smile at me, laugh at my theatrical display of passion!” she cries at Wilhelm; but “the terrifying, half-natural and half-forced state of this woman tormented him too much for that.” A moment later Aurelie cuts Wilhelm's hand with the dagger, striking a blow, perhaps, on behalf of the countless damaged and discarded female characters who litter the path of male Bildung: “One must mark (zeichnen) you men sharply!” (4.20). For a feminist reading of the Lehrjahre that discusses Aurelie, see Kowalik.

20. This is one way to understand the frequent redoubling of characters in Wilhelm Meister. The Abbé's mysterious twin brother is only one instance of a more general narrative principle, according to which characters no sooner emerge than they divide and multiply: the countess generates a twin sister in Nathalie, Mignon is paired with Felix, etc.

21. The young Wilhelm sneaks into the pantry and discovers the puppets there, and his mother ultimately rewards this mildly erotic transgression by giving the child the puppets, just as she gives the adult Wilhelm the key (1.2, 1.5). The sexual dimension of the episode, obvious enough in the Lehrjahre, is made explicit in an explicit in an equivalent scene in Goethe's first version of the novel, Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung, where the young Wilhelm's lifting the curtain of the puppet-theater is explicitly compared to falling into sexual knowledge: “Thus at certain times do children become conscious of the difference between the sexes, and their glances through the covers hiding these secrets bring forth wonderful movements in their nature” (AA, vol. 8, 532).

22. Of interest in this context would be the unstable place of smell and taste in Kantian aesthetics: see Derrida, “Economimesis.”

23. The translation of Freud's term Anlehnung as “propping” (in place of Strachey's “anaclisis”) was originally suggested by Jeffrey Mehlman as a translation of Jean Laplanche's translation of Freud's term as “étayage” (see Laplanche). Cathy Caruth examines the rhetorical consequences of this moment in Freud's account of the origin of sexuality: see especially pp. 44-57. In this context it is worth noting that anlehnen, like the words Freud once represented as “primal,” has two opposing meanings: to lean against, but also to leave ajar.

24. See Chase for a brilliantly original articulation of Julia Kristeva's notion of the “abjection” of the mother with the allegory of meaning-production that a rhetorical reading uncovers: the uncertainty afflicting the sign aligns with the uncertain border between mother and infant, which is the uncertainty that the infant must expel as an “abject” in order to enter the linguistic world of subjects and objects. The scenario Chase describes would clearly hold interest for the reader of Wilhelm Meister, given the narrative's reiterated expulsion of maternal figures (Mariane, Wilhelm's mother, Sperata, etc.; as suggested below, Mignon is also in this sense a distorted figure of the “mother”).

25. On catachresis and prosopopeia, see in particular de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” in The Resistance to Theory, 27-53. For a reading of Heinrich von Kleist's reading of Wilhelm Meister, “On the Marionettentheater” (1810), see de Man's “Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 263-90. Since this random element in signification is what lies concealed in the post-Kantian commonplace of the non-referentiality of aesthetic form, it is appropriate that the marionettes be complemented by an image of a scattered art collection: Wilhelm's grandfather's, which is broken up and sold around the same time that the puppets make their Christmas appearance in the Meister household.

26. Wilhelm, in other words, will be able to narrate a mini-Bildungsroman: the story of his internalization of the puppet-theater's text, of how he reproduced its pathos [pathetische Rede] through his good memory [gutes Gedächtnis] (1.2). Mariane, appropriately, falls asleep during Wilhelm's story (1.8), for it bores (through) us as the narrative of the disarticulation of narrative. Thus accounting, perhaps, for the addictive tonal blend of sentiment and lighthearted indifference that Goethe achieves in Wilhelm Meister—the blend that Schiller, acutely enough, found so disturbing. Pathos has an odd, theatrical status in a novel that, for instance, insists on Mariane's determinative emotional, erotic, and symbolic importance for Wilhelm's development, while granting her very little narrative or descriptive attention before ejecting her from the plot line at the end of Book I.

27. Schiller's first response to a reading of the completed text of Wilhelm Meister was to write that “the figure of Mignon looms at the moment most strongly before me” (Seidel 176); and this figure looms her way in interesting fashion through subsequent letters, providing a locus for reflections on pathos and art. As Ammerlahn remarks, “No figure in Wilhelm Meister so spoke to the heart and imagination of Goethe's reading public as Mignon; over no other character was so much reflected, conjectured, and written; none has been so frequently imitated, and yet remained so mysterious” (“Wilhelm Meisters Mignon—ein offenbares Rätsel” 89). See also Ammerlahn's more recent study, “Puppe—Tänzer—Dämon—Genius—Engel.” For a recent account of the figure of Mignon in literary history, see Tunner. Like these essays—and Schiller's correspondence, and any number of other responses to Wilhelm Meister—the present essay represents among other things an attempt to read the “riddle” of Mignon.

28. See Blackall's “Afterword” to his edition of Wilhelm Meister, 386. Blackall is invoking a topos in Goethe criticism that, as noted earlier, informs the remarks of the novel's first critic, Schiller, and receives corroboration by countless nineteenth-century readers, from Friedrich Schlegel and Carlyle to Hegel, for whom Mignon's character is “wholly poetic [schlechthin poetisch]” (857).

29. The “unnaturalness” of Mignon is frequently invoked in Goethe criticism when the “naturalness” of some other aspect of the novel is in peril: e.g., Beddow: “Both Mignon and the Harper produce, in their solitary and secret predicaments, deeply moving poetry, but their creativity is not for them an experience of human freedom. … What little potential humanity they do manage to realise is embodied in the poetry which gives voice to their sense of separation from full humanity. … And so Mignon and the Harper take their place among the figures whose destinies develop so differently from Wilhelm's, reminding us that the course of his life, whilst eminently ‘natural’, is by no means to be taken as normal, in the sense of everyday” (146).

30. Eric Blackall's translation of this sentence is curiously elliptical: “the children started a little game of their own, with Mignon making a rasping noise as puppets do. They banged their heads together as if these were made of wood. Mignon was almost frenetically excited. …” The translation of Stück (“play” in the sense of theater-piece) as “game,” and the elision of Goethe's uncompromising equation of the act of the children with the being of puppets (“Mignon machte den schnarrenden Ton sehr artig nach, und sie stieβen zuletzt die Köpfe dergestalt zusammen und auf die Tischkante, wie es eigentlich nur Holzpuppen aushalten können”) relieves the scene of much of its figurative density. It is tempting to speculate that once again, the reception of this “spirit of poetry” has exacted a sacrifice. (The passage is accurately represented in Carlyle's translation: see Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship [London: The Anthological Society, 1901], p. 292.)

31. The figurative language here attached to Mignon recurs in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, where Ottilie and her servant Nanni in some ways divide up Mignon's overdetermined role: Ottilie becomes an exquisite corpse, and Nanni, feeling the corpse beckon to her, falls out of a window and lands next to it: “she seemed to be shattered in every limb [es schien an allen Gliedern zerschmettert].” Then “either by chance or providential dispensation” her “dangling limbs [schlotternden Gliedern]” touch the corpse and she is resuscitated (HA vol. 6, 486). The place of these puppet-metaphors in the rhetorical structure of Die Wahlverwandtschaften would require interpretation; for a reading that moves in the direction of the present essay, see Miller.

32. Mignon thus appears in the Wanderjahre fully aestheticized as a subject for sentimental exercises in painting by a young artist taken with her story (Book II, ch. 7; HA vol. 8, 226ff). See Tunner for a discussion of some of the many literary imitations and invocations of Mignon from Goethe's time to the mid-twentieth century.

33. MacLeod's article was published too late for me to do more than signal here my sense of the congruence between our readings. Though MacLeod understands the figure of androgyny in this text more positively than I do, her interpretation of Mignon's role in the novel is not dissimilar from mine: the arguments being advanced here may be taken as elaborations of MacLeod's claim that “the Bildungsroman, whose goal is the education of desire, declares itself as the agent of Mignon's death” (409), and that Mignon is “appropriated aesthetically by the Turmgesellschaft—after her elaborately theatrical funeral, she is turned into narrative. The content of the Abbé's narrative is itself revealing, in that it casts the child's story as an incest plot, the only form in which the androgynous Mignon can be rendered intelligible by these purveyors of bourgeois socialization” (411).

34. One thinks here of a well-known passage by Heidegger: “légein, being a laying, is also legere, that is, reading. We normally understand by reading only this, that we grasp and follow a script and written matter. But that is done by gathering the letters. Without this gathering, without a gleaning in the sense in which wheat or grapes are gleaned, we should never be able to read a single word, however keenly we observe the written signs” (208).

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