A History of the Bildungsroman : From Ancient Beginnings to Romanticism [1 ed.] 9781527516762

Citation preview

A History of the Bildungsroman

A History of the Bildungsroman: From Ancient Beginnings to Romanticism By

Petru Golban

A History of the Bildungsroman: From Ancient Beginnings to Romanticism By Petru Golban This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Petru Golban All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0395-X ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0395-3

CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................. viii Preface ......................................................................................................... x Preliminaries ................................................................................................ 1 Towards a Definition and a Vector of Methodology in the Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System Chapter One ............................................................................................... 60 Bakhtin on Fictional Typology from Ancient Times to Goethe Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 67 Antiquity: The Beginnings and First Elements Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 80 The Middle Ages: The Contribution of French and English Romances Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 97 The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century: The Rise of the Picaresque Novel and the Birth of the Pattern Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 122 The Eighteenth Century: The Rise of the English Novel and the Pattern in Development 5.1 Picaresque Heritage and Neoclassical Principles Shaping Verisimilitude ............................................................................... 122 5.2 Verisimilitude in Its Literary Expression: Practical Argumentation.............................................................................. 138 5.2.1 Gulliver’s Travels and Verisimilitude Absent ..................... 140 5.2.2 Robinson Crusoe and Verisimilitude Implied ..................... 144 5.2.3 Pamela and Verisimilitude Limited .................................... 148 5.2.4 Joseph Andrews and Verisimilitude Complexified ............. 151 5.2.5 Tom Jones and Verisimilitude Panoramic ........................... 154

vi

Contents

5.3 Comparative and Final Remarks .................................................. 158 5.4 Other Fictional Voices: Smollett, Sterne, Austen, and the Gothic Authors ......................................................................................... 165 5.5 Neoclassicism Again, Now Also Shaping Literary Theory ......... 171 Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 182 The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established 6.1 Individuality and Romanticism: Characteristics and Thematic Complexity of a Unitary Movement............................................. 183 6.2 Individuality in Focus: Nature, Dualism of Existence, Escapism, and Rebelliousness ....................................................................... 194 6.3 Nature, Pantheism, and the Growing Poetic Mind: Practical Argumentation.............................................................................. 205 6.3.1 Tintern Abbey: Materialization of Theory, Self-Reflexiveness, and Formative Co-authorship ................................................. 207 6.3.2 Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark: Dualism of Existence and Co-authorship with and without Escapism ...................... 216 6.3.3 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Crime and Punishment .. 222 6.3.4 Nature as a Mode of Existence: Concluding Remarks ........ 229 6.4 The Concern with the Experience of Childhood: Towards a Literary Myth ............................................................................ 232 6.4.1 Voices of Innocence and Experience in William Blake’s Poetry...................................................................................... 234 6.4.2 The Child and the Concern with Individual Formation in the Poetry of William Wordsworth..................................... 244 6.4.3 Other Poets, and in Particular John Keats’s Insights of Infantile Experience in Letters and Poetic Practice ............ 256 6.5 English Romantic Movement and Its Social Concern: The Individual between Escapism and Rebelliousness ................ 262 6.5.1 Hypostases of the Byronic Hero, and the Byronic Hero in Development....................................................................... 263 6.5.2 History and Identity Development: Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley as a Novel of a Young Man’s Education ................ 279 Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 288 Goethe and the Pattern Reified 7.1 Elements of the Pattern in French and German Fiction: Lesage and Wieland ..................................................................... 291 7.2 Bakhtin on Goethe ....................................................................... 294 7.3 The Theme of Formation as a Literary Concern in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ....................................................................... 298

A History of the Bildungsroman

vii

Concluding Reflections ........................................................................... 310 The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System Bibliography ............................................................................................ 339 Index ........................................................................................................ 345

FOREWORD

The present book on the Bildungsroman development history emerged as an independent study from within the approach to a number of Bildungsromane (from the Victorian Age, the period of Modernism or late modern era, and the postmodern time) following the assumption that, like with the novel in general, certain thematic and structural elements occurred diachronically to survive, develop, disappear, change – including their status as centre and margin – in order to establish the literary system of the novel of formation as a distinct type or subgenre of the novelistic genre. Petru Golban’s book attempts to overcome the lack of such a critical concern, since an exhaustive appreciation of the stature of different literary experiences with regard to their nurturing of the rise of the Bildungsroman is rare if not, except Bakhtin’s “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism: Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel”, totally missing. As even high school students parrot the maxim “Art is thinking in images”, Shklovsky would claim, they also echo the assumptions, we would say, that one of the most important contributions by the Germans to world literature is the Bildungsroman, that the Bildungsroman was founded by Goethe with Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as the prototype of the form (since this novel marked the use of the principle of Bildung, formation, or as for Bakhtin, becoming, in matters of character representation strategies), and that the Bildungsroman (the novel of formation) flourished in English literature in the Victorian Age among the realists. Not only among the realists in the Victorian period, we should add, and it also continued in the age of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century as both modernist and realist, and also in the postmodern period to the present displaying a larger and a more remarkable typology. In Britain, we should though agree, the Bildungsroman became one of the most favourite literary models for Victorian realists because its fictional pattern, consisting of the literary treatment of the process of development and formation of a character in relation to society, offers the necessary extension and complexity to the literary concern with individual experience and the social background.

A History of the Bildungsroman

ix

And we should also add, as this book argues, that the rise of the Bildungsroman did not owe solely to the Germans and Goethe. Rather, the rise of the Bildungsroman is a long and complex process, of a larger literary and continental resonance, with antecedents in antiquity and the medieval period. With regard to the English Bildungsroman, it enjoyed a significant contribution from the picaresque tradition and the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century (with their verisimilitude, moral didacticism, social concern, and so on), and, last but not least, romantic literary practice (with its emphasis on individual experience, focus on nature, concern with the experience of childhood, the dualism of existence, and other thematising strategies). Finally, following Carlyle’s moment of a threefold literary reception of Goethe’s canonical Bildungsroman, this moment led to finding a way in which to produce a literary discourse that offers a particular modality concerning the figure of the main hero/heroine as being constructed in the novel, where in the Bildungsroman it constitutes the image of the individual subject in the process of becoming, growth, development, whose essence is the principle of identity formation. Without assuming the task to rewrite or complete Bakhtin’s unfinished study on the Bildungsroman, but pleased and willing to become one of his followers, Petru Golban argues that the Bildungsroman is a literary system with a development history. In this respect, the present book, which is the first part of a larger project, aims to reveal the process of the rise and consolidation of the Bildungsroman as a literary system from ancient literature to that of romanticism. Works and their authors are studied separately, as an object to be measured in itself, yet the writings are arranged chronologically in a developing tradition. Finally, as the book looks at some cultural and literary periods, movements and trends with regard to their terms, origins, features, main writers and representative texts, and their interrelationship and continuity, the reader will be pleased to find also a useful guide for his or her learning or strengthening of the knowledge of the historical advancement of world and English literature. Dr Nicoleta CINPOES University of Worcester

PREFACE

This first book in our series of studies on the Bildungsroman in English literature is in its diachronic essence a thematological and comparative approach to the novel of formation. As its title suggests, A History of the Bildungsroman: From Ancient Beginnings to Romanticism aims to argue the existence of a history of this novelistic subgenre. In England, in particular, the Bildungsroman emerged as one of the most popular literary types of fiction, especially among Victorian realists, and many of the most important works of realism are Bildungsromane. The Victorian writers focusing on the relationship between the individual and society and on the principle of determinism apparently found in the Bildungsroman’s concern with the process of development and formation of a character the most congenial way to treat and encompass their subjects in the complexity and large scale openings of a life experience as offered by the Bildungsroman. But the Bildungsroman did not emerge suddenly on the literary scene in the Victorian Age. Rather, it possesses, as Bakhtin would argue in his “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism: Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel”, its own development history as a distinct category, form, type, or subgenre of the novelistic genre, which is in itself a long, complex, and interesting process of rise and consolidation of a literary pattern, tradition, and literary system. This process can be summarized as follows: from the ancient epic and novel to medieval romances to Renaissance picaresque fiction (continued in the seventeenth century) to (in English literature) the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel with its strong picaresque substratum and through romanticism and Goethe (accredited with having introduced in fiction the element of Bildung) to the Victorian flourishing of the novel of formation following Carlyle’s moment of a threefold literary reception of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. These are the main conventions which nurture the rise of the Bildungsroman as a subgenre from ancient beginnings to romanticism. However, there are also other experiences and aspects of literary practice whose diachronic unfolding should be considered in a study on the development history of the Bildungsroman. Among the primary influences on the rise of the Bildungsroman, some belong, like romantic writings and Goethe’s canonical Bildungsroman, to

A History of the Bildungsroman

xi

the level of “allusion”. Others, like picaresque tradition and certain eighteenth-century English novels, belong to the level of “intertextuality”. The validity of our judgements is tested through the approach to the thematising strategies in a number of literary texts that represent these literary experiences occurring prior to the Bildungsroman. We aim to disclose those elements from their literary systems that would allude, overlap, or coincide with those that form the literary system of the novel of formation. In other words, in the present book, without endeavouring to enrich or complete Bakhtin’s unfinished study on the Bildungsroman, but glad to assume the position of his follower, we aim to argue that the Bildungsroman has a development history, and attempt to reveal it by way of critical discernment.

PRELIMINARIES TOWARDS A DEFINITION AND A VECTOR OF METHODOLOGY IN THE APPROACH TO THE BILDUNGSROMAN AS A LITERARY SYSTEM

There cannot be a system of existence. (…) When we speak about system we speak about a closed world, yet existence is precisely the opposite. (…) To think about existence, systematic thought must think of it as suppressed, that is different from what it actually is. (Sören Kierkegaard)

As in Kierkegaard’s view, our study attempts to show that existence cannot be rigidly structured as a system. However, it also tries to prove that the subgenre of the Bildungsroman, or the novel of formation, in English literature – in its focus on particular aspects and experiences of existence – is a literary system of various, consolidated and interrelated thematic and structural elements. However, as a system, the Bildungsroman is neither a closed fictional realm nor a static or rigid one; it is alive and dynamic, complex and varied – as varied as the life samples that the novels designated as Bildungsromane reflect. Significantly, neither is the protagonist of the Bildungsroman an “individual-model” (Girard 37) to be imitated, like Don Quixote, and Wilhelm Meister has not become so since his followers Pip, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Stephen Dedalus, Jacob, Fevvers, Saleem Sinai, and many others are individuals of various sorts and roles and of particular inner and outer perspectives on existence. Criticism both on the Bildungsroman, with a focus on particular texts, and on the history of the Bildungsroman, within both German studies and the studies of other national literatures, including English, has raised a complex controversy over such issues as the definition of the Bildungsroman; its consideration as a literary genre, or subgenre, type, species, or subspecies, and tradition; its main thematic and narrative features; its existence beyond German literature; the period of its birth and utmost flourishing; its death or, on the contrary, continuity, and, concerning the former, the period of its extinction.

2

Preliminaries

To engage in such critical and theoretical disputes is not our intention. Nonetheless, first, we reject random or abusive uses of the term, as well as its being employed in expressing false scholarship. Second, we assume and rely on the premise that the Bildungsroman (1) is subject to precise definition, (2) represents a particular type of novel, (3) possesses its own history of rise, development and consolidation as a literary tradition, and, above all, (4) constitutes a system of defining elements that are rendered typological by their thematic and narrative perspectives. Third, however, we refuse to consider this system to be static; we are reluctant to proclaim the death of the Bildungsroman at the beginning of the twentieth century and place it in the context of literary history along with the romance, the sonnet, the epistolary novel, picaresque fiction, and other once popular genres. Especially within Anglo-American literary scholarship, the Bildungsroman is viewed primarily as a nineteenth-century, particularly realist, literary phenomenon; the term is used so loosely and broadly that any novel, like The Catcher in the Rye, or even a narrative poem like Aurora Leigh, that includes elements of a coming-of-age story might be labelled “Bildungsroman”. It is often forgotten, however, or even neglected that the origins of the Bildungsroman on the Continent and in English literature precede the realist tradition. To some critics, the novel of character formation emerged and became one of the most favourite literary models in the literary discourse of pre-romanticism and romanticism, movements which realism arduously rejected and aimed to replace. To others, the idea of Bildung “began among the Weimar classicists as an expression of nostalgia for a Greek-like many-sidedness” (Jeffers 197), where Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre reveals this nostalgia and successfully connects the rising as literary concerns romantic individualism with socially and morally focused realism. There are a number of other connotations given to the term Bildung. Various critics have pointed to its spiritual essence, the idea of modern liberation, or a theological meaning (as in pietistic theology); they have related it to natural philosophy (Leibniz), or identified it with the Enlightenment, idealism, or philosophy in general, or political usage (Herder), or pedagogical usage (Campe and Rousseau). Still other voices, among which the earliest, sixteen-century pietistic theologies, emphasize Bildung as the “modelling oneself in the image of God”, whereas natural philosophies speak about “the development of potentialities in organisms”; on the whole, the word arises from the tradition of “a theological and philosophical education/cultivation of citizenship” (Jones 445). Critics also argue that the term Bildung has changed its primary theological,

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

3

philosophical and especially strong pedagogical meanings into formation as the culmination of a developmental process. This transition occurs most explicitly in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which is often regarded as a Bildungsroman that traces the self-development of spirit, its edification through adventures and pilgrimage. The history of the term might be an interesting study in itself, but we believe that, as conceived in its essence and type, our approach to the Bildungsroman should focus primarily on literature and in particular the novelistic genre. In this respect, relying on M. M. Bakhtin’s muchcelebrated “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” and especially “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism: Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel” (“Roman Vospitaniya I Ego Znacheniye V Istorii Realizma: K Istoricheskoi Tipologii Romana”, written in 1936-1938), we would claim that, like any other important literary tradition, the Bildungsroman has its own history of development. We further hypothesise that its developmental history corresponds to, or rather is to be found in, the history of development of the novel itself as a genre, while accepting Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (“Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”, 1794-1796) as the first canonical Bildungsroman. Mikhail Bakhtin’s “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” consists, actually, of some surviving passages from the introductory part of a book that Bakhtin intended to write. Notwithstanding, the intention and argumentative line are clear and might be taken, as we attempt to do, as the starting point for a certain topicrelated critical discernment. The destiny of Bakhtin’s work is likewise remarkable in that the manuscript tumbled into obscurity together with its author, until a scholarly renaissance led by Michael Holquist, Caryl Emerson, and several others introduced it to an English-speaking audience in 1986. Unfortunately, what had originally been a book-length manuscript now survives only in fragmentary form; Bakhtin, a heavy smoker, literally consumed his own pages when he used them as rolling papers during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. (Boes 236)

It is true that the type of novel commonly referred to as the “Bildungsroman” flourishes in British literature in the Victorian Age, becoming extremely popular among the realists. The reason behind the fact that Thackeray, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and others use the pattern for their novels of character formation is that the fictional model of the Bildungsroman, consisting of the literary treatment of the process of development and formation of a character in relation to society,

4

Preliminaries

offers the necessary extension and complexity to the realist literary concern with individual experience and the social background, a concern which is framed within a large-scale diachronic model of human existence. Be it highly popular and productive among the Victorian realists, the Bildungsroman has its roots neither in English literature nor in the literary trend called realism. It is in Germany that the Bildungsroman originated, and in the context of a literary movement – romanticism – against which realism emerged in its founding experience. It has indeed become a critical cliché to consider the term and type of novel known as “Bildungsroman” one of the most valuable contributions of German literature to international letters and to view it as a product of pre-romanticism, namely Sturm und Drang, given Goethe’s standing, or even romanticism. Likewise, it is taken for granted that the consolidation of a literary tradition of the Bildungsroman in German and world literature occurs with Goethe’s fictional text as prototype of the form, based on the assumption that in the thematic treatment of his protagonist’s developmental process, the German writer established Bildung, the principle of “formation” (for us), or “becoming” (for Bakhtin), as a literary concern in fiction. In other words, Goethe furnished the essential element of a new literary system, that of the Bildungsroman, by rendering the development of his hero as a process of identity formation. To Thomas L. Jeffers, the “idea of Bildung was conceived by the lateeighteenth-century Weimer classicists” (46), where the “supreme Weimer meditation on Bildung is Schiller’s 1793 work, Uber die Aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man)” (51). Not only does On the Aesthetic Education of Man promote the romantic emphasis on “personalistic pursuits”, meaning “the duty to realize our individual uniqueness” (50), “an innate individuality”, but it also “projects a history of and a model for such realization that would influence Goethe and the English novelists who came after” (51), in particular romantics and their heirs such as Carlyle and Pater. We agree, yet it would be more correct to regard Goethe’s novel as a turning point in the history of the Bildungsroman and to say that the subgenre’s developmental history is long and interesting: it starts in antiquity and culminates with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Subsequently, it reveals remarkable development and continuity: the newly established fictional form or subgenre flourishes on the Continent in general within nineteenth-century realism, which provides its typology; the Bildungsroman continues to a lesser extent among the realists as well as modernists in the first half of the twentieth century, but it becomes a stronger voice on the contemporary literary scene, in guises as diverse as

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

5

realist, postmodern, post-colonial, racial, of magical realism, in the discourse of metafiction, etc. It is, we believe, the permanence of the thematic perspective of individual growth, upbringing and formation of personality of a human subject, the continuous interest in this aspect of existence to be treated as a literary subject matter, as well as the openness of the Bildungsroman to originality on both thematic and narrative levels – when its main concerns and their modes of expression reveal flexibility within the framework of the newly emerging literary periods, movements and conceptions – that represent the main source of its vitality and the reason for its still being written. In short, as the present study, as well as others, attempts to evince, the study of the English Bildungsroman necessitates (1) a separate diachronic discussion of its origins and development until Goethe’s novel. Other approaches, synchronic in nature and culturally defined, may focus on (2) the Victorian Bildungsroman, (3) the Bildungsroman in the age of modernism, and (4) the postmodern and postmodernist Bildungsroman. The present book series covers all four concerns in three distinct books, along with our attempt at some theoretical and terminological contribution and explanation, as well as a vector of methodology that is the unifying principle of approach in all three studies. The first book pursues the development history of the Bildungsroman from antiquity to romanticism and Goethe. Given the intense flourishing of the Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century, the second book focuses solely on the Victorian novel of formation. Finally, the twentieth-century and contemporary Bildungsromane, with all their complexity and the new thematic and narrative perspectives on individual development and formation in the context of the opposition between modernity and postmodernity and between modernism and postmodernism, require separate approaches that are materialised as the concern of another, the third, independent study. The main reason for the division of the approach to the Bildungsroman according to three major periods constitutes the different perspectives from which the literatures of the Victorian Age, of modernism and of postmodernism consider the representation of individual existence. Prior to these periods – in neoclassicism – reason, rationalism, experiment, order, common sense, social responsibility, and moral principles govern the character representation strategies in the literary works. Against these principles, in particular against neoclassical social concern and its emphasis on reason and ethics, in romanticism the main concern encompasses personal emotional and psychological states; the individual is inadaptable, superior, solitary, intellectual, separated from community,

6

Preliminaries

while the relationships between the individual and society or reality are those of (1) rebelliousness and (2) escapism, the latter usually in the framework of the romantic dualism of existence. Following, and to a certain degree continuing, the romantic emphasis on individual experience with its personal, spiritual, mainly emotional accomplishment (as in Goethe and later in Sartor Resartus and Marius the Epicurean), the Victorian realists added and emphasised the social, professional, moral and family fulfilment more than the concern with individual subject. In the Victorian Bildungsroman, as in realist fiction in general, the character receives a complex thematic representation. The shift from romanticism to realism is the shift from the individual to the general human, from the subjective to the social, from the human being as master of his or her destiny to a multitude of character types as social units, from the narrow circle of personal existence to the wide social panorama containing many social sectors and character types presented in social interaction. Realism tends to present its characters as being defined by social and economic factors. The key-terms are “determinism”, “environment”, “heredity”, in other words, “la race, le milieu et le moment”, as well as “moral didacticism”. In David Copperfield, Dickens maintains alive a romantic perspective in which human personality is highly emphasised and the character is master of his destiny, independent and able to fulfil personally in spite of all social interaction and determinism. The determinism of the milieu is strong but not successful; there is no real social influence or effect on the development of personality, and the outcome is the success of character formation. In Great Expectations, however, the character is highly individualised but reveals strong bonds with the background: the character is a subjected subject, dependent on his milieu; he is subject to social determinism and as such subject to inner and outer change. Social determinism is strong and successful; society influences and affects the development of personality negatively, hence the failure of character formation. Thus, as in the latter novel, the Enlightenment’s reliance on mind and reason and the idea of their inseparability from or perfect match with world and nature are already challenged in the Victorian period. However, this challenge will reveal itself to the highest degree in the twentieth century. Modernists like Joyce and Woolf focus on individual experience in its personal, spiritual, subjective, emotional and now above all psychological dimensions, on abstract manifestations of the mind and on phenomena that make them possible. They keep the social concern to a lesser degree, to

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

7

show the impossibility of harmony between internal and external factors, hence the character’s frustration and alienation. Simply stated, such novels lack the harmony which is often constructed for their protagonists by the traditional Victorian writers of the Bildungsroman. In their attempt to achieve the a-politicization of aesthetics and to defend the high art, modernists like Joyce and Woolf promote the elevation of individual consciousness over social action and interaction as one component of a complex system of binary oppositions including culture versus science and nature, progressive versus degenerate forms and trends in human history, aesthetics versus politics, literary versus non-literary, and highbrow modernist art versus trash, kitsch, degraded mass culture. As fictionally treated by the modernists, personal experience reveals the demise of the integrated individual subject through the expression of the fragmentariness of self; the world too is rendered fragmentary through thematic and narrative organization, such as is achieved by employing the techniques of montage and collage. The thematic components of the novel of formation are adapted by modernists as well as by postmodernists to suit their various concerns and techniques. The postmodern Bildungsroman depicts the individual as “self”, as well as “subject” and “being”, occupying another position in language; the result of another conception and another discourse; author and character simultaneously; “subjected” and “ordered” by dominant, legitimizing discourses; or self being socially constructed. In all these cases the accomplishment is problematic. This view of the social construction of the self ignores the evidence for the growth of an individual through the socialization process, since the theory of the socially constructed self “ignores the way the self is constituted by an individual’s maintenance of an original, often idiosyncratic narrative of him or herself. This is the key to creativity in the individual” (Butler 58). Therefore, we should speak about two directions in the postmodern Bildungsroman, (1) a postmodernist view of the individual as being, self, subject that is subjected, ordered, dominated, determined, constructed, and so on; and (2) a liberal humanist view of the individual as being, self, subject that displays autonomy and self-sufficiency, that is, a free subject that creates himself or herself on the basis of his or her personal experience. Liberal humanism as a major alternative to postmodernism relies on a set of ideas which takes for granted the autonomy and selfsufficiency of the subject and argues that the human beings are free and create or form themselves and their self on the basis of their individual experience. The Bildungsroman Never Let Me Go, for instance, raises this problem of identity and the character is denied autonomy and self-

8

Preliminaries

sufficiency. Another novel of formation, Midnight’s Children, considers both views, but the former is a stronger voice. Nights at the Circus also contains both attitudes, but the latter emerges as dominant at the end. English Music, another postmodern Bildungsroman, argues for the latter, humanist opinion, while also reifying Harold Bloom’s accreditation of the canon and individual authority. In general, despite particular periods of its production, the Bildungsroman is often labelled the novel of youth, the novel of education, the novel of apprenticeship, the novel of adolescence, the novel of initiation, the coming-of-age novel, and the life-novel. The anglicised form the “apprenticeship novel” is highly used, yet the “novel of development” and the “novel of formation” are the most frequently used terms, often taken as synonyms. However, from a diachronic perspective on the novelistic genre concerning character representation strategies, development is different from Bildung or “formation”, and the latter, in our opinion, is the more accurate term to be applied to novels designated as Bildungsromane. In this respect, our further assumption is that, until Goethe’s novel, the main principles in the texts dealing with life experiences are the “development” of character and the “change” of his/her outer condition, as in various picaresque novels (characters may be round but not dynamic), whereas with and since the German writer to the present, the development is a process both biological and intellectual, spatial and temporal, internal and external (characters are both round and dynamic). Bildung or “formation” of personality – since it represents the expected outcome of the development and is reified by the change of inner condition as well – becomes the governing principle in the thematic arrangement that focuses on the process of growth and maturation, allowing the use of the label “Bildungsroman” and its existence as a still strong literary tradition and a systemic type of novel. Our approach will argue the validity of the ideas outlined above and suggest a possibility or even method of approach to a number of Victorian and later realist, modernist and postmodernist novels of formation. Avoiding any critical debates with the existing scholarship of many theorists and combining historical and theoretical parts with an approach to particular texts, the present books are studies on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction as containing in its typological diversity the Bildungsroman. In its focus on a number of Victorian and twentieth-century novels of formation, the present endeavour, which is both theoretical and critical, as well as historical, attempts to define the Bildungsroman, to reveal its status

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

9

as an established literary tradition with strong diachronic dimensions, to argue its viability as a fictional system by identifying the main thematic and structural elements of its literary pattern, and to suggest a methodological basis and a typology of approach to its thematic perspectives and narrative strategies. The practical argumentation of these goals is achieved through direct interpretative references to certain Victorian and twentieth-century English Bildungsromane, both realist and non-realist, and of both male and female authorship. To establish a vector of methodology in the approach to the novel of formation is to conceive of an interpretative modality which determines the direction of analysis and which consists of a set of methods, an ordered system of principles of research to be used for study in such a particular subject as the Bildungsroman. Such an interpretative modality would be helpful in the attempt to select theoretical concepts and critical ideas most applicable to this research, hoping to achieve pluralism and to conclude with new theoretical and critical suggestions of our own. They receive practical argumentation through the textual interpretation of a number of English novels of formation which would eventually reveal, although they differ as sharply as the lives they reflect, certain common, typical and typological features. These features or aspects found in every novel of character formation suggest a unique approach according to some principal elements that build the unique literary structure of the Bildungsroman and grant it the status of an ordered fictional system and a powerful literary tradition. “Tradition”, because, despite the attempts of Germanistik at a monopoly of the Bildungsroman, this type of novel is multi-national and, in English-language literature in particular and even more particularly in Britain, there is longevity and impact of the Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century and in the periods, modernist, postmodern and contemporary, succeeding the Victorian age. Despite certain inevitable thematic and narrative changes, such as the realist, large diachronic developmental scale co-existing with the more experimental synchronic, small, and fragmentary one, or self-sufficiency of personality giving way to subjected subjects, we can easily find a great number of twentiethcentury and contemporary realist as well as modernist and postmodernist novels that can be regarded as Bildungsromane or viewed as containing its main elements, in particular identity formation, which fulfils an essential and defining function. “System”, because of the existence of a pattern, a framework of certain common elements, both thematic and narrative, which are interrelated and dynamic in the changing of their central and marginal features and status

10

Preliminaries

within the system, and because of the possibility to provide a certain definition to the Bildungsroman. In this respect, our view of the Bildungsroman suggests a type of “generic identity” of the works designated as Bildungsromane as well as makes the term “literary system” synonymous with the term “genre” – and indeed the Bildungsroman is often called a “genre” – in the sense in which Alastair Fowler discusses genres (not subgenres!) as “historical kinds” and promotes the idea of the generic repertoire: a genre’s repertoire is the “whole range of potential points of resemblance” that a genre may exhibit, and a particular genre “has a unique repertoire, from which its representatives select characteristics”; these “distinguishable features” are various and may be “either formal or substantive” (55). To begin with the definition, the term “Bildungsroman” is of German origin, being used in German literary studies since around the turn of the nineteenth century, such as the one conducted by Karl Morgenstern in his 1819 lecture entitled “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman”. However, it gained currency much later with sociologist and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, who employed the term either in 1913 (Jeffers 60) or earlier in his 1870 biography of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and “popularised it with the success of his 1906 study Poetry and Experience” (Boes 231). The earliest English use of the word dates back to its occurrence in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1910. To the present, the definitions given to the novel of formation have been many and often confusing. As it often happens in the field of literary history and literary theory, and insofar as writing about writing (literary criticism) is concerned, the word “Bildungsroman” has become a term of abuse, flexible and vague, and often misleading; to the present its meaning and value have been continuously changed, defended, disputed, and expanded. Some critics use the term very broadly also applying it to verse narratives; others obsessively declare a canon and tradition, and offer, like Buckley, taxonomic definitions. Dilthey considers the Bildungsroman an aesthetic expression of the Enlightenment concept of Bildung and stresses that the Bildungsroman presents a regulated development of the hero or heroine who has to reach fulfilment and harmony by passing through various conflicts of life and succeeding and interrelated stages of growth and maturation, yet each with an intrinsic value. Martin Swales, however, does not consider the acquiring of success or a happy ending necessary in a novel in order that it be regarded as Bildungsroman, although the process of development targets the whole of an individual person that has to be revealed organically in all his or her complexity. Some critics emphasize individuality and individual change of the self in the process of formation,

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

11

whereas others look more at milieu, regarding the condition of the protagonist actively involved in the social world as essential; the latter critics would claim that the Bildung is “the earlier bourgeois, humanistic concept of the shaping of the individual from its innate potentialities through acculturation and social experience to the threshold of maturity” (Sammons 42). Some see this type of novel as indulging into wishful thinking, others as a construct of various, including aesthetic, forms of ideology. These other voices, representatives of more recent criticism, regard the Bildungsroman also as a self-reflexive or self-reflective novel, where it is neither the experience – either emphasizing individuality or involving society – of the protagonist, nor the personal organic growth or the selfrealization of the hero or heroine that counts, but the narrative process itself, which renders the “narrator’s discursive self-understanding”; here Bildung or formation is an “epistemological concept” and the Bildungsroman is a “discursive essay in the aesthetic mode” (Swales, German Bildungsroman 4). Psychoanalytical, feminist, post-feminist, Marxist, post-Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist, postmodern, thematological, narratological, post-colonial, minority, cultural and other studies only further broaden the definition and approach. Also, since the Bildungsroman claims its origins in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, a lot of critical attention comes from German scholarship, but, as the genre flourished and became popular among Victorian and later writers in England, there are many AngloAmerican and other critics that approach it too. Notwithstanding, there are still unfulfilled analytic perspectives, such as, for instance, the one that would be offered by placing the Bildungsroman in the context of the monomyth of the hero and the quest, since such a hero’s journey is a powerful and recurring archetype deeply ingrained in human psyche and therefore representative of and fundamental to human existence. Campbell explains that the monomyth refers to a hero’s and less often a heroine’s journey that could be found in all communities; the hero of various societies passes through various phases of a journey of self-empowerment and self-recognition that should transform both the hero and the citadel forever. Campbell associates the hero’s journey to the rites of passage from childhood to adulthood in which young people take responsibilities in their community, claiming that “the standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth” (30). These three elements represent “essential stages [that] define the monomythic life: the departure from the native

12

Preliminaries

environment, the adventure in the unfamiliar world, and the return with a new awareness of the world. This tripartite heroic experience is framed by a proper beginning and ending” (Golban 34). As regards the Bildungsroman, “this hero’s journey corresponds to a process of individual development from a disjointed sense of identity to a consolidated identity, when the individual acquires a clear sense of aspiration in life”; in other words, “the monomyth reveals human experience, in particular the process of maturation of an individual, the reaching and acknowledgment of the adult self” (Golban 34), that is, what we refer to, with regard to the Bildungsroman, as identity formation. Another approach, drawing on the assumption that the Bildungsroman is a literary system within the larger system of the novel within the general system of literature and interrelated with other socio-cultural systems, would be based on Itamar Even-Zohar’s theory of polysystem. EvenZohar views literature as a polysystem, a system of systems, a complex and heterogeneous structure, coherent yet dynamic, in that its elements are in a constant agonistic relation among themselves. Applicable along with formalism to the study of literary history and genre, this view of literature as a kind of system widens the approach to literature, whose system is regarded in relation to other systems and domains such as culture and cultural studies, translation, anthropology, and so on. But we still rely on more traditional approaches to the Bildungsroman as well as on Tynyanov elaborating on system and Bakhtin dealing with the novel, and on formalism on the whole given its emphasis on internal factors in literary historical advancement and change. In the context of the established critical debates over the issue whether Bildungsroman is “about life” or “about itself”, in Swales’ terms, we would accept, like Swales, both perspectives and regard the Bildungsroman as “both referential and self-constituting”, as “a novel genre which derives its very life from the awareness both of the given experiential framework of practical reality on the one hand and of the creative potential of human imagination and reflectivity on the other” (Swales, German Bildungsroman 5). Our approach as a rather thematic one is not, however, a promoter of referentiality and is not against any aesthetic or structuralist views, but expresses our desire to see the Bildungsroman as literary system of both thematic and narrative elements, a distinct pattern of significant thematic and structural integrity. Among other opinions that are worth mentioning, similar to Bakhtin interpreting the development of genres as corresponding to various historical stages, and to the view of various developments in thought,

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

13

technology, science, culture, etc. as influencing literary production, Friedrich Kittler regards the Bildungsroman as a product of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. More importantly, Franco Moretti views the Bildungsroman as raising the question of freedom and as a “symbolic form” corresponding to and revealing modernity. Drawing on the relationship between individual development and social values and relying on the dualistic perspective of the plot as explained by Yuri Lotman – in terms of two plot types governed either by the principle of “classification” or by that of “transformation” – Moretti finds four historical and national phases in the development of the Bildungsroman. The first phase, of the classical German Bildungsroman, shows no sign of conflict between the individual and society, since it “had found a solution in the world of ‘sociability’” (79). The second, which is that of Stendhal’s “Restoration Bildungsroman”, shows the conflict and incompatibility between individual aspirations and social requirements; Stendhal’s works illustrate how the “dialectic synthesis falls apart” and explore “the opposite poles of a wholly public existence and a strictly private passion” (79). The third phase, Balzac’s, demythicizes individual autonomy and values social integration and success instead. The fourth phase is that of the English Bildungsroman, which excludes any conflict or opposition between personal development and social requirements. Usually, the protagonist (David, Jane, Pip) behaves in a way in which order is violated; nevertheless, based on moral principles and prompted by social demands and social determinism, he or she attains maturity and receives an identity – and subsequently order is restored. The German and French Bildungsromane value youth and change; their English counterpart gives meaning and significance to childhood, whereas youth is a problematic and negative stage which the hero or heroine must go through unchanged (meaning to keep unaltered the values of moral essence, family, and so on assumed in childhood) in order to be rewarded with social integration and achieve success of formation. Moreover, the plot of the German and English Bildungsromane is therefore dominated by the principle of classification (emphasis on traditional, pre-industrial values of stability, order, success, maturity, selfculture), and the French Bildungsroman by that of transformation (emphasis on change and youth, signifying modernity). We may agree or disagree with Moretti, as we should with regard to some thematic aspects of the Victorian realist (also referred to as “classical”) Bildungsroman and non-realist Bildungsroman, as for instance concerning the element of change. But what is to be accepted is that the

14

Preliminaries

Bildungsroman is a “‘symbolic form’ of modernity”, and modernity is “a bewitching and risky process full of ‘great expectations’ and ‘lost illusions’” (Moretti 5). Bakhtin, in his “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism”, defines the Bildungsroman with respect to the issue of timespace and discusses the deep “chronotopic nature” of Goethe’s foundation of the novel of formation or, as he calls it, the “novel of emergence”. Bakhtin focuses on the image of man in the novel, where the emphasis lies on “the assimilation of real historical time and the assimilation of historical man that takes place in that time”; since the problem is too broad, it can be delimited and narrowed towards what can be taken as the defining thematic essence of the Bildungsroman, which is “the image of man in the process of becoming in the novel” (19). Following this, Bakhtin lists a number of works that can be viewed as Bildungsromane. More importantly, though, his presentation of the features of the subgenre results in his definition of the Bildungsroman as a type of novel dealing with “human emergence”. Emergence is synonymous with his other keyword, becoming, with our own term formation, and with the commonly used Bildung. Concerning these features, Bakhtin states that novels labelled “novel of education” (Erziehungsroman or Bildungsroman) are thematically diverse and different in their emphasis on a particular aspect: some of these novels “are essentially biographical and autobiographical”, others are not; in some, what prevails is the “pedagogical notion of man’s education”; in others, “the strictly chronological plane of the main hero’s educational development” with limited plot, whereas still others have “complex adventuristic plots”; but the most “significant are the differences in the relationship of these novels to realism, and particularly to real historical time” (20). Such a great diversity of thematic perspectives forces the Russian scholar, and us, in order to offer an adequate definition of the Bildungsroman, not to assign the name “Bildungsroman” to various novels arbitrarily, but to differentiate and list novels with regard to one essential aspect, which is that of emergence and becoming (“stanovlenia”), for Bakhtin, or formation, for us. A great number of novels present ready-made (“gotovii”), static and unchanging heroes and heroines. Such an image is the image of a human being that is shifted in space and along the social ladder by the movement in his or her life and fate as depicted in the novel and by the novel’s events and escapades in which he or she is involved and which represent the plot of the novel. The protagonist changes his or her destiny, or position in society and life (from tramp, for instance, to nobleman), he or she may

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

15

attain the goal, but “remains unchanged and adequate to himself” (20), a constant, with a solid, permanent image – that could be highly complex, the novel disclosing many individual aspects – and a static nature of his or her unity, whereas the various aspects of the main character’s life, fortune, destiny, social position, and so on vary. In such novels, the image is that of a ready-made hero; in this image “of the hero itself there is neither movement nor emergence” for the hero “is that immobile and fixed point around which all movement in the novel takes place” (21). In such novels, the plot is made of the static hero’s movement in his life and destiny, and whose permanent and ready-made features represent the prerequisite to novelistic movement. Bakhtin identifies three types of such novels, which he calls the “travel novel”, the “novel of ordeal”, and the “biographical novel”. There are other novels, however, representing the category of the Bildungsroman, in which the constituents of the plot are the character of the human being and his or her change and emergence. In this respect, Bakhtin defines the Bildungsroman as that type of novel “that provides an image of man in the process of becoming” (21) and explains it by arguing that [a]s opposed to a static unity, here one finds a dynamic unity in the hero’s image. The hero himself, his character, becomes a variable in the formula of this type of novel. Changes in the hero himself acquire plot significance, and thus the entire plot of the novel is reinterpreted and reconstructed. Time is introduced into man, enters into his very image, changing in a fundamental way the significance of all aspects of his destiny and life. (21, original emphasis)

Therefore, Bakhtin concludes his definition, this “type of novel can be designated in the most general sense as the novel of human emergence” (“roman stanovlenia cheloveka”) (21), or, as we prefer, the novel of formation. The human being can emerge, become, and achieve identity formation in quite different ways, where everything “depends upon the degree of assimilation of real historical time” (21), which explains the existence of various types of Bildungsroman. As presented and further described by Bakhtin, the types of the novel of emergence would represent what we consider to be some of the main thematic elements of the literary system of the Bildungsroman. The first two types rely on a cyclical quality and represent two kinds of cyclical emergence. The first is the “cyclical (purely age-oriented) novel” (Bakhtin 22) in which, on account of its idyllic time, a kind of “idyllic-

16

Preliminaries

cyclical ingredient”, the writer presents the process of development from childhood through adolescence and youth to maturity or even later to old age, “showing all those essential internal changes in a person’s nature and views that take place in him as he grows older” (22). The second type also follows a cyclical, repeating process or path of one’s formation and emergence “from youthful idealism and fantasies to mature sobriety and practicality” (22); in such novels, life and world are a school, an experience that a person goes through, which eventually leads to resignation and often scepticism. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus can be considered such a Bildungsroman. Bakhtin finds such elements also in Goethe, for whose novels the way was prepared by Wieland (in The History of Agathon, 1766-67) who originated this second type of novel of emergence. The third type, having no relationship to cyclical developmental movement, is the “biographical (and autobiographical) type” where emergence occurs in a biographical time that is responsible for “unrepeatable, individual stages” and is “the result of the entire totality of changing life circumstances and events, activity and work” (22). Bakhtin gives Tom Jones and David Copperfield as examples of such novels in which the character is created along his destiny, which is created as well; the emergence of the character’s “life-destiny fuses with the emergence of man himself” (22). The fourth type of novel of emergence, whose elements could be found in Rabelais and Goethe, is “the didacticpedagogical novel”; here, based on a particular pedagogical ideal, the writer “depicts the pedagogical process of education in the strict sense of the word” (22-23). The fifth and last type, which Bakhtin truly considers the realist type of novel of emergence, also depicts an individual’s change and emergence but differs very much from the previous four types in that it no longer presents the world as a background – static, given, same, immobile, stable and ready-made – against which the hero’s or heroine’s emergence takes place. In the previous four types, the individual changes and emerges within a given epoch and world which do not change or emerge; subsequently, the human being has to develop, change and emerge as required by the world and the rules of life that are stable and the protagonist must recognize, assume, and adapt to them. Such a world is a school, an experience, static and ready-made, “an immobile orientation point for developing man”, with private and biographical results in terms of emergence. Unlike in these four types of Bildungsroman, in the fifth kind, which is the realist novel of emergence, and which includes Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (but whose development was influenced greatly by Rabelais and, to a certain degree, by Grimmelshausen), the emergence and formation of identity are of a different nature, no longer a private affair,

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

17

and no longer in a given world. Rather, “man’s individual emergence is inseparably linked to historical emergence”, in the sense that “emergence is accomplished in real historical time, with all of its necessity, its fullness, its future, and its profoundly chronotopic nature” (23). To conclude, Bakhtin finds (1) novels with ready-made and static protagonists but with movement and change in their life and fate (the “travel novel”, the “novel of ordeal”, and the “biographical novel”); and (2) the novel of emergence, or the Bildungsroman (the novel of formation), with changing and emerging heroes and heroines with either non-emerging world (the first four types of Bildungsroman) or with an emerging world (the fifth type of Bildungsroman). The fifth, realist type of novel of emergence, which textualises the “historical emergence of man” (24), is the most important one because what “is happening here is precisely the emergence of a new man” (23) due to the person being placed at the point of transition between two epochs, and not within any given epoch; as transition is reached in and through the person, he or she is required to become a new type of human being. Exceeding, but to a certain degree also keeping, the narrow private and biographical domain, this type of Bildungsroman depicts the protagonist as emerging “along with the world and reflecting the historical emergence of the world itself” (23). He or she changes along with the changing world, and the image of the character in the novel encompasses the new, larger, spatial domain of historical existence that includes issues such as actual reality, social values, moral didacticism, social determinism and necessity, and individual potential, freedom and creative initiative. While distinguishing between five types, Bakhtin claims that one should focus on the last, because it is this type of Bildungsroman, the realist one, that best reveals the novel’s assimilation of real historical time in all of its essential aspects. But in doing so, since the five types are interrelated, the critic should consider this realist novel of emergence in relation to the other four types, namely the biographical novel of emergence, the idyllic-cyclical type, the idea of education, and especially the second type of Bildungsroman. We would also say that there is hardly a pure novel to represent a particular type of Bildungsroman as classified by Bakhtin, and that their various elements are predominant in one work or another, thus giving its specificity, while all of them are on the whole elements of the Bildungsroman literary system built upon the principle of identity formation. If the term “Bildungsroman” ultimately escapes precise definition or interpretation, then, no doubt, its meaning should emerge more or less clearly from the critical analysis of the Victorian and later, twentieth-century and contemporary novels the present studies are

18

Preliminaries

concerned with. Such novels are recognizable within the general pattern of the Bildungsroman in spite of vivid differences in manner and matter or of having their own distinctive artistic style and narrative substance. Still, the standard definition, to which we also subscribe, regards the term “Bildungsroman” as synonymous with “novel of formation”, and states that it names a genre or subgenre of the novel, a fictional category or species, a type of autobiographical fiction which renders the process of growth, maturation, education, apprenticeship, in general of upbringing – to which we necessarily add “formation” – of a character in his/her both biological and intellectual development within a time span typically set from childhood to early maturity. We would define the Bildungsroman in short as the novel of identity formation. With certain caveats, of course; namely, that the formation of identity is textualised as a process, diachronic and large-scale, from birth or early childhood through adolescence and youth to entering upon adulthood; this process is rendered in a biographical or autobiographical manner as development – spiritual, psychological and moral, rather than physical – leading to the formation of personality. Formation as the end of the maturation process necessarily implies change (inner rather than external); thus, the Bildungsroman portrays the protagonists, usually round not flat, as getting rid of their static and readymade features and becoming necessarily dynamic. With regard to the other variables – having to do with country, period, and movement to which the Bildungsroman authors belong – formation may convey a multi-sided personality, or mean self-cultivation, or signify social and professional success, or be reified as the balance between inner aspirations and social demands. Formation would promise completion and happiness, but it may also end in failure, or in a combination of both success and failure as conditioned by authorial message and thematic perspectives. Formation as the culmination of the developmental process is identity acquired, which is an experience that includes the realization of the self, and, along with it, of various other aspects such as a sense of who one is, gender distinction, family and professional perspectives, social and interhuman status and role, modes of thinking, communication and behaviour, personal discernment and assimilation of views, beliefs and values, and an acceptation of life as continuity and sameness. There are many other definitions in use, such as “the novel of youth, the novel of education, of apprenticeship, of adolescence, of initiation, even the life-novel”, where education can be understood “as a growing up and gradual self-discovery in the school-without-walls that is experience” and youth can imply “not so much a state of being as a process of

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

19

movement and adjustment from childhood to early maturity” (Buckley viiviii). “Bildungsroman”, a more fashionable term, is virtually synonymous with the autobiographical novel, the developmental novel, the confessional novel, the apprenticeship novel, Entwicklungsroman (or the novel of development), Erziehungsroman (or the novel of education), and Künstlerroman (or the novel of development of a writer or artist). In the first English academic book on the English Bildungsroman, written as early as 1930, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life, Susanne Howe speaks about the principle of formation, but defines the subgenre on the basis of the terms “apprentice” and “apprenticeship pattern”, in that the hero of the typical ‘apprentice’ novel sets out on his way through the world, meets with reverses usually due to his own temperament, falls in with various guides and counsellors, makes many falls starts in choosing his friends, his wife, and his life work, and finally adjusts himself in some way to the demands of his time and environment by finding a sphere of action in which he may work effectively. (4)

As another critic, Gisela Argyle, does, we may employ the original term Bildung, or the novel of Bildung, for convenience and in order to avoid terminological confusion. Argyle uses the term Bildung with its English synonyms “apprenticeship” and especially “development”, for which other critics prefer “education”. To us, however, Bildung has its English equivalent in the word “formation”, even if closer to the German word might be the French formation, the Romanian formare, and other such equivalents in Romance languages. To us, formation in a Bildungsroman is at once the expected fulfilment of the process of character development, the main thematic principle, and the central element of the Bildungsroman literary system. In this respect, a more correct definition belongs again to Gisela Argyle, for whom Bildung means “both the achievement and the process towards it” (26). She regards Bildung as “a special type of development in its stress on the hero’s conscious effort and on the manifold aspects of human endeavour; it is distinguished from education in its stress on the hero’s interior motivation and goal” (26). However, even if Argyle’s last remark disagrees with Bakhtin, the term “novel of education” is equally appropriate a synonym. Bakhtin himself calls the Bildungsroman “roman vospitaniya”, where “vospitaniya” actually means “education” or “schooling”, as well as “upbringing”, and is primarily translated as “education”.

20

Preliminaries

The standard definition, which alludes to the process of coming-of-age, identity formation and construction of personality, is true for the Bildungsroman in general, as our own generic definition and suggested elements of the Bildungsroman literary system may also seem to be. By this we answer the requirement of globalization “to look for broader patterns and treat local variations as nothing more than just that” (Boes 242). But we are also aware that various periods and movements as well as nations that produce novels of formation change the pattern and provide the Bildungsroman with various new nuances of thematic and narrative organization. It might be therefore more appropriate to define the Bildungsroman with regard to its historical and national corpus, and to the cultural and literary context within which it emerges, although its thematic essence remains unchanged: in a first-person, long, extended narrative, a young protagonist recounts his or her childhood, emphasizes the youth and young adulthood of his or her highly sensitive personality, and attempts to learn the essence of living, to discover the meaning and pattern of the world, to find love and friendship, as well as a profession and a place in society, and ultimately to acquire an identity, the art of living and a philosophy of life. Concerning the Victorian age, for instance, and with regard to its realist type, we would define the Bildungsroman as a type of biographical/autobiographical fiction (or a biographical/autobiographical type of fiction, or pseudo-autobiographical) which renders the process of growth, maturation, upbringing, and eventual formation of a character in his/her both biological and intellectual development usually from childhood to early maturity based on individual aptitudes and motivations as well as on inter-human determinism and social relationship. The transition from romanticism to Victorianism is the transition from free will and self-imposed, personal choice as a sign of individuality, to the ways of living, values and norms imposed by society. Such a thematic perspective will be preserved in the twentieth-century realist Bildungsromane in which we will find the determined construction of personality (by society, culture, language) in relation with the social construction of reality, where those that threaten it, or do not fit, or attempt romantically to create an alternative reality are scapegoated and their formative experience is rendered a failure. We insist on the term novel of formation to be used as synonymous with Bildungsroman, but the anglicised “apprenticeship novel” would be equally correct. Indeed, Dickens and other Victorians, like Goethe, would keep Bildung as synonymous with Lehrjahre, and create protagonists who

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

21

are apprentices to life, who are bildbare (“educable”) when placed in a relation of interdependence and determinism with the bildende (“educating”) world by which formation is both self-formation and a kind of guided, conditioned, determined formation. Other critics as well retain the term Bildung or formation to identify the main feature of the subgenre and the prime thematic concern to be depicted in the novel, despite claims such as Michael Beddow’s, who argues that not Bildung, or formation, but the “expression and recommendation of a particular understanding of the nature of humanity through the more or less overtly fictitious narrative of the central character’s development” (5) is the most important feature of the Bildungsroman. We would consider this one of the premises for character formation and insist on the principle of formation (Bildung) to be the central distinguishable feature and the essential element in the Bildungsroman literary system. Formation imparts specificity and uniqueness to this particular type of novel. In this we are supported by Bakhtin’s description, which we subscribe to, of the three novelistic kinds (the “travel novel”, the “novel of ordeal”, and the “biographical novel”) culminating in a fourth one, which is the Bildungsroman. We also agree to his argument that the “ready-made” character identified in the first three types of novel is replaced in the Bildungsroman by a hero that is “the image of man in the process of becoming” (19). Thus, the Bildungsroman reveals its essential hybridity since it would form its literary system by preserving and modifying, for its own thematic and narrative purposes, many of the elements of the previous three types of novel, as well as others derived from other kinds of fiction, even other different genres, or from other literary periods and movements, in which some of these elements receive a dominant, defining status. Such elements include the form of a fictitious biography or autobiography, the motif of ordeal, the motif of journey as either externally determined or as a selfimposed exile (inherited from romanticism), the “recognition-inheritance pattern” (Moretti 205), the chronotope of the city (London in English Bildungsromane), “the metropolis, the theatre of fluctuating and changing identities” (Moretti 203), as inherited from the eighteenth-century novel (as in Tom Jones), and other elements and thematic aspects. To follow Bakhtin’s typology and diachrony of the novelistic genre, the Bildungsroman receives the spatial movement from the travel novel; the psychological time, ordeal and test of values from the novel of ordeal; from the biographical novel it borrows biographical time, the realistic presentation of typical aspects of a life course, and, due to the principle of

22

Preliminaries

realism, the representation of the world in strong relation to a round character, but especially the crisis and rebirth of the protagonist. Certainly, the Bildungsroman became a distinct literary system by placing in the centre and making dominant other, predominantly new, elements, which provide its uniqueness and consistency. The protagonist became both round and dynamic, he or she was rediscovered as an individual, and the hero or the heroine acquired changing perceptions of the self, time, and milieu. This fictional breakthrough, which signals the rise of the Bildungsroman (or the novel of formation), occurred in the eighteenth century with Goethe articulating the destiny of his Wilhelm Meister. Here, as well as in the later Bildungsromane up to the present, “becoming” (for Bakhtin) means “emergence” and (to us) “formation”, which implies the “change” of the character in a threefold – psychological, emotional, and moral – perspective of spiritual existence as distinct from his or her physical change and from the change of the social or economic condition of the protagonist. To show that the protagonist changes in the process of identity development, the author uses the motif of “loss” (of life, love, status, money, innocence of childhood, etc.) which induces pain and suffering and which is the price for maturation, and often reifies another important element in the Bildungsroman literary system, which is that of “ordeal”, since such an experience would be the source of epiphanic realization signalling the change. Another premise for identity formation, apart from change (of especially inner perspectives of existence, which occurs in time) is the balancing of the social and moral demands with the decisions taken and choices made by free will. This balance needed for the completion of formation would be a requirement of realism, in which the former aspect is emphasised by socially concerned writers, whereas the latter is inherited from romanticism, with its focus and emphasis on individualism, egocentric viewpoints and behaviour, escapism and rebelliousness, and other aspects that champion subjective experience, reveal individual feelings and thoughts, and proclaim personal freedom. Our contention that formation should be equalled to Bildung is supported among others by Sarah E. Maier, who, like Buckle, points to a typology of the Bildungsroman: The German term bildungsroman has been used to designate a genre of novel (roman) which demonstrates the formation (bildung) of a character; indeed, the possibilities for such a novel proliferate. Ideas of literary characters’ self-development have been variously categorized as novels of growth, education (erziehungsroman), development (entwicklungsroman),

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

23

socialization, formation, culture, or as novels of coming-of-age of the artist (künstlerroman). (317)

Although Maier and others regard the Bildungsroman as a “genre”, we would rather use the latter term for narrative works in general, both in prose and verse, or for fiction, perhaps at most for the novel, and designate the novel of formation as a subgenre, although it may be also called a species, or category, or even subspecies or subcategory of the narrative genre. In labelling the Bildungsroman a subgenre, we reject Fowler’s definition of the subgenre as being distinguished merely by subject matter or a particular thematic concern. Instead, we use the term subgenre for the Bildungsroman in the way in which he defines genres and their repertoires as including a variety of thematic and structural features and elements. Specifically, for others who follow Fowler, if the Bildungsroman is a genre, then the realist Bildungsroman, for instance, is a subgenre: it shares with the Bildungsroman in general most characteristics of its repertoire, but it is differentiated by its social concern. The question is then whether the novel, or fiction, or imaginative prose is also a genre. For us, based on the assumption that particular texts, genres, movements, and so on, are literary systems with various defining and common elements, genre is narrative in form (paralleling the lyrical and dramatic ones); since we also accept novel/fiction as a genre, then the Bildungsroman is a subgenre (species or category) of the genre of the novel: the Bildungsroman shares with the novel on the whole most of its repertoire’s main features (such as characters, events, action, plot, chronotope, narration, point of view, narrator, etc.), but it is distinguished from the latter by its subject matter or theme, which is identity formation. The romantic Bildungsroman and the realist Bildungsroman, for example, are then sub-subgenres (subspecies or subcategories) of the Bildungsroman subgenre of the novelistic genre; they share most of their repertoire with the novel and the Bildungsroman on the whole, but are differentiated by the concern with inwardness and an emphasis on individual accomplishment, in the case of the romantic novel of formation, and, in the case of the realist one, by the rendering of social and moral issues, social determinism, social advancement, and the harmonious balance between individual and social aspects in attaining formation. The Bildungsroman is among those subgenres of the narrative or novelistic genre that demonstrate diachronic persistency and aesthetic vitality. Its development proceeds to establish the Bildungsroman as a literary tradition in the eighteenth century with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; then it flourishes, in English literature, in the works of the

24

Preliminaries

Victorian realists, and remains popular among the realists as well as modernists of the first half of the twentieth century; on the contemporary literary scene, it displays a complex typology (realist, postmodern, postcolonial, magic realist, racial, lesbian, metafictional, and so on). Just like the Victorian Bildungsroman, the late modern and postmodern Bildungsroman is a type of fictional biography or autobiography, or pseudo-biography and pseudo-autobiography, whose range of thematic elements concerns primarily identity development, the issue of Bildung, becoming or formation of a human personality, and ends at the stage of maturation of the protagonist, whose dominant existential endeavour is to achieve formation in the sense of individual and/or social accomplishment. In many such novels, just as in Victorian realist ones, to find a place in society – in other words, to achieve economic individualism, as earlier in Robinson Crusoe – despite being disillusioned by the ways of the milieu or not, is often more important than to acquire inner well-being and personal accomplishment. However, one may argue, this definition necessitates further elucidation, since it appears to describe accurately only the Victorian realist or classical Bildungsromane, such as Great Expectations and The Mill on the Floss, with their focus on both personal and social experience of the character in development, but not such novels as Sartor Resartus and Marius the Epicurean, and especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Jacob’s Room, and Nights at the Circus, with their emphasis on individual, private and inner aspects of existence, and their virtual rejection of the experiences that society offers. We need therefore to continue our consideration of the subgenre of the Bildungsroman as a literary system, which would be the essence of our vector of methodology. Our approach to the Bildungsroman targets the literary development of this novelistic category within a generic system. In viewing the Bildungsroman as a literary system we follow Tynyanov; in adding the historical dimension to the rise of a European – and not only – Bildungsroman novelistic subgenre we follow Bakhtin; and in showing its distinctive and typical thematic categories we are close to Buckley.1 1

To make categorizations or to find common characteristics, features and elements in order to label a particular novel as a Bildungsroman is a common and general practice of Bildungsroman criticism. Along with Buckley, another example would be Marianne Hirsch. Apart from using the term “novel of formation”, as we do, Hirsch lists, among other features, such aspects as the Bildungsroman avoiding to render a panorama of society, differentiating between the perspective of the protagonist and that of the narrator as the voice of the author, showing the protagonist as “a representative member of society”, and on the whole textualising

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

25

The common main thematic elements, or categories, shared by the plot pattern of all Bildungsromane, are the following: (1) a child (sometimes orphaned or fatherless) lives in a village or provincial town; (2) the child is in conflict with his actual parents, especially father, or any parental figures (the trial by older generation); (3) the child leaves home to enter a larger society (usually city), and the departure is determined either by (2) or other external stimuli, or by an inner stimulus (usually the desire for an experience that the incomplete, static atmosphere of home does not offer); (4) the child, or the adolescent, passes through institutionalized education and/or self-education; (5) a young person now, the character seeks for social relationship with other humans; (6) his/her experience of life is a search for vocation and social accomplishment, as well as, or rather above all, a working philosophy of existence; (7) he/she has to undergo the ordeal by society and occupational requirements (professional career); (8) he/she has to resist the trial by love (sentimental career); (9) the character passes through moments of spiritual suffering and pain; (10) now in his/her early manhood/womanhood, after having passed through physical change, the character experiences epiphanies that lead to (or should determine) his/her final spiritual (psychological, moral) change in the sense of initiation and by this achieve formation as the concluding stage of the process of development; formation is complete or relativistic, or not existing at all, that is to say, the final stage of the formative process upon entering maturity implies the dichotomy success/failure, or a third possibility of partial success/partial failure.

These thematic elements represent the literary system of the Bildungsroman and co-exist on the structural level with narrative ones to form a particular archetypal plot, helping critics and readers to identify a Bildungsroman. Among the structural features, the most common ones are the following: (1) the split focalization between the narrator and the hero; (2) the narrator is usually autodiegetic; (3) the complex chronotope and two temporal dimensions, one is the time of the story/narrative of identity formation and the other is the time of telling/narration; (4) the mode of narration is mainly linear and retrospective; (5) the tone of the narrative is usually ironic and often interrelated with the use of foreshadowing; (6) the point of view is mostly omniscient, revealing at full the main character’s interior existence and social experience; “a progression of connected events leading up to a definite denouement” (298299).

26

Preliminaries

(7) the text is “readerly”, the reader perceives the textual material through the eyes of the protagonist-narrator, and both the narrator and the reader understand and know more than the protagonist who changes by the end of the novel; this should be so since the novel depicts the process of an immature, inexperienced, often naïve character reaching identity formation.

The narrative scheme, with some, if controversial, exceptions such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Jacob’s Room, is built as the diachronic order of a traditional, linear, retrospective perspective that “prompts hero and reader to look back, towards the past” (Moretti 68). As such, the “Bildung is concluded under the sign of memory, of memoire voluntaire, of the rationalization of the accomplished journey” (68). Among these structural features, the reader-oriented narrative mode stands as the most prominent one, and indeed it should be so since in the Bildungsroman, human life becomes literature and the reader attempts to identify himself or herself with the protagonist. Unlike the thematic elements, which are less susceptible to change and replacement, the structural elements (that is, narrative features and techniques) would often be subject to modification. The authors search for and assume new perspectives and new methods, techniques, and means of artistic expression as championed by the period, or movement, or trend to which they belong. Notwithstanding narrative characteristics, ten thematic elements are defining but on the whole not compulsory features or aspects of thematic construction; they are rather common or typical, or representative.2 They are similarities for and in novels viewed as Bildungsromane, in which they combine and interrelate in various ways around the element of Bildung; in this they are “family resemblances” rather than simultaneously mandatory necessary aspects to be ordered strictly chronologically. In other words, many but not all of these elements are shared by the texts – which in this way resemble each other; yet these elements are more common and typical for the Bildungsroman than, say, various movements, trends and styles are for modernism. Thematically structured around the process of identity development and formation, these thematic and other elements reveal that the main concern is the protagonist presented in a threefold perspective reifying three often combined domains of maturation: (1) some of these elements, such as artistic potential, are located on a rather personal level, and thereby render the domain of the progress of the protagonist as an individual 2

The necessary and obligatory defining characteristic or element is formation (of a personal identity.

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

27

subject; (2) other elements, which exceed the narrow universe of individuality, such as parents, friendship, love, marriage and others related especially to family and school and representing various types of relationship, reveal the interpersonal development or inter-human development; and (3) on a larger social level, certain elements render the occupational development or professional domain which is strictly interrelated with moral and social concerns in the novel, and together mark the expression of identity development through the relationship between the individual and society. The Bildungsroman reveals thus the identity development and formation of the protagonist through his or her own consciousness, as influenced by other humans, and as a consequence of social interaction and determinism. Writers of Bildungsromane would emphasize particular aspects in their works according to their period, movement and personal artistic credo. The second and the third developmental domains should be differentiated, in that the third one represents a method of realism which emphasises social determinism and presents the character as part of a community, whereas the second one is more psychological and emotional, for it focuses on intimacy and on creating what Anthony Giddens calls “pure relations” of family, friendship and love, which are “not anchored in external conditions of social or economic life” (89). Concerning the second aspect of interpersonal relationships, there is often a God-like figure, a mysterious force, usually another character, that becomes a parental figure, either congenial or obstructing, who affects the life of the protagonist, makes things happen, drives his/her destiny, and is even responsible for the change. Our ten thematic components in their particular ways of narrativization also represent a kind of progression, or rather a particular “order” framed chronologically and rendered as a “temporal experience” of the protagonist. These ten thematic elements common to all Bildungsromane represent the “motifs” whose unifying “theme” is “formation”, and the related “idea” encompasses a particular perspective on the formative process with regard to its degree of fulfilment, often with authorial intrusion through comments and opinions about the outcome of this process. These thematic components render various syntagmatic structures – such as 1 2 3 4 (or 4 3) 5 6 7 8 (5-8, in any order) 9 10 – in certain novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among which, also representing the concern of our studies, are the following:

Preliminaries

The age of modernism or late modern period: Herbert George Wells – Tono-Bungay (1909) David Herbert Lawrence – Sons and Lovers (1913) E. M. Forster – Maurice (1913-1914, pub. 1971) William Somerset Maugham – Of Human Bondage (1915) James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Virginia Woolf – Jacob’s Room (1922)

Victorian Age: The postmodern and contemporary period: Thomas Carlyle – Sartor Resartus (1836) Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children (1981) Edward Bulwer-Lytton – Ernest Maltravers (1837) Kamala Markandaya – Pleasure City (Shalimar, 1982/1983) Edward Bulwer-Lytton – Alice (1838) Angela Carter – Nights at the Circus (1984) Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre (1847) Jeanette Winterson – Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights (1847) Anita Brookner – A Closed Eye (1991) William Makepeace Thackeray – The History of Pendennis (1848- Peter Ackroyd – English Music (1992) 1850) Zadie Smith – White Teeth (2000) Charles Dickens – David Copperfield (1849-1850) Monica Ali – Brick Lane (2003) Charles Dickens – Great Expectations (1860-1861) Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go (2005) Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Aurora Leigh: A Poem in Nine David Mitchell – Black Swan Green (2006) Books (1856) George Meredith – The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss (1860) Walter Pater – Marius the Epicurean (1885) Thomas Hardy – Jude the Obscure (1896) Henry James – What Maisie Knew (1897) Samuel Butler – The Way of All Flesh (1903)

28

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

29

The main thematic perspective in a Bildungsroman is Bildung, the “formation” of personality, and to achieve character formation means to work out one’s destiny, to fulfil expectations, and to accomplish oneself as an individual based on the crucial experience of not only physical or external change but obligatorily of spiritual, psychological, emotional, and moral change; that is, both inner and outer accomplishment of the formative process. In the same way, with regard to the larger national and cultural level, the distinction is made between the German Bildungsroman, which stresses the inward, and the general European one, including English, with its emphasis on social elements. With regard solely to the text, the principle of formation or Bildung as represented in the Bildungsroman also relies on this particular type of binary opposition involving inwardness and outwardness, individuality and society, individual and social/universal, self-realization and socialization. But it would be more appropriate to view this binary opposition as a kind of dualism in the Bildungsroman literary system, a dualism that emerges with Goethe, resurfaces in Victorian realist novels of formation (and not only), and persists in modernism and postmodernism. To be more exact, this dualism frames particular relations between the elements of the Bildungsroman literary system. For example, in the realist or classical novel of formation, the individual and the milieu are reconcilable, self-realization and socialization are compatible, interrelated, interdependent, and necessitate each other; in short, the development of selfhood is continuously shaped and reshaped by certain a priori social and moral values which are eventually internalized, thus leading to formation. In the Bildungsroman on the whole, various elements of the literary system are also rendered by means of oppositions, namely congenial parental figure vs. obstructing parental figure, right lover vs. wrong lover, right profession vs. wrong profession, correct philosophy of life vs. misleading philosophy of life, and so on; even protagonists in development have their contrary characters, and the juxtaposition helps to make clearer the uniqueness of the hero or heroine. Emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century in a romantic context, but flourishing in the nineteenth-century age of realism, and bringing into discussion the issue of spiritual and moral progress, the novel of formation focuses mainly on the growth and development of the protagonist within the context of a clearly defined milieu. Thus, the final formation and initiation imply a search for a meaningful existence within the range of social demands, including a harmonious family life, social integration and status, and professional and financial success.

30

Preliminaries

In the Victorian realist Bildungsromane, as in some of the succeeding twentieth-century novels of formation of realist inclination articulating social concern, to achieve Bildung (or formation) necessitates to accomplish both sides of human existence – internal and external – and to establish a harmonious balance between them, as in David Copperfield or Jane Eyre. In others, the pursuit of self-culture is even less important than social accommodation and success. In the Victorian and modernist Bildungsromane which depart from the realist perspective, to achieve formation is to gain individual completion of one’s consciousness; it entails spiritual, psychological, or other forms of inner accomplishment, whether intellectual and philosophical, as in Sartor Resartus, emotional, as in Wuthering Heights, or intellectual and artistic, as in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the case of those authors of the Bildungsromane that depart from the realist type of fiction and reality concerns, the character in development is revealed in the epoch and milieu, like in the realist novel of formation, but, unlike in the latter, the character is not identified with the epoch and milieu in order to be determined, as literature itself is in the opinion of the realists, by “la race, le milieu et le moment”. In such novels stressing the inner existence, the hero’s development rather relates to frustration and, in relation to society, to alienation, which are to be replaced with personal choice and solution leading, in turn, to formation. With regard to the binary opposition between inner life and external aspects of existence, and the dichotomy framed as a relationship between the individual and society, the concept of Bildung or formation requires some clarification, in that we should consider it from a twofold perspective as (1) self-formation and (2) guided formation. The first type is salient for Carlyle, Pater, Woolf, Ackroyd, with their stress on painful experience and self-discovery, as well as for Joyce and Carter, with their focus on individual subject and individuality of identity. The second type can be also seen in Goethe, but it is more dominant in those novels in which various parental figures assume guiding roles, whether congenial or obstructing, as mentors (in Goethe) or as characters representing moral and social types. Given this latter aspect, guided or determined formation is usually present in the realist Bildungsromane, in which the guiding principle is society, while the concept of determinism is at the core of thematising the relationship between the individual and society accepted by realists as pre-eminently revelatory for the process of identity development and formation. In this case, the guided formation becomes more of a kind of determined formation. The tone was given by Goethe again, as well as by Herder who insists on how the environment (natural,

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

31

social, cultural) shapes the development of individual organisms, since they are weak at birth, where language plays an important role as a factor of influence. Self-realization and individual autonomy act as far as the human being is allowed to choose the influences offered to him/her. Humboldt considers the individual to be more autonomous and to possess freedom enough to develop and achieve self-discovery based on his or her own innate potential as stimulated, not determined or influenced, by the environment. In the treatment of his hero, Goethe entertains both views and Wilhelm’s ensuing Bildung or formation is the result of what literary criticism stereotypically regards as the compatibility or equilibrium between self-realization and socialization. The relationship between self-formation and determined formation governing the process of identity development is seen by Moretti as a dilemma “conterminous with modern bourgeois civilization: the conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of civilization” (15). This is so because our distinction between self-formation and determined (guided) formation is actually underpinned by the dualism of co-existing individuality (“the necessary fruit of a culture of self-determination”) and normality (“the offspring, equally inevitable, of the mechanism of socialization”) (16) or rather normalization (as for Foucault). The Bildungsroman is to be considered a particular novelistic subgenre structured as a literary system in the line of such established literary and non-literary traditions as picaresque fiction and biography. In this respect, the Bildungsroman can be better explained by drawing on theories of genre and literary development, of which some of the most congenial theorization, still valid and viable nowadays, belongs to Yuri Tynyanov. Amid the huge amount of critical attention given to the English novel in general and the multiplicity of theoretical perspectives to be applied to its analysis, Tynyanov’s theories are apposite and applicable also because they characterize patterned types of fiction, among which is the Bildungsroman. However, one should avoid making one’s study a compilation of uncritically adopted and applied critical and theoretical categories simply due to their wide dissemination. In our case as well, instead of heavily borrowing ideas and providing quotations from critical and theoretical studies in an attempt to relate and apply them to the analysis of the English novel of formation, it is necessary to consider the essence of different opinions and ideas, to adapt them according to the vector of research, and especially to follow the interpretative perspectives emerging from the direct textual, contextual and comparative approach to English fiction as Bildungsroman.

32

Preliminaries

To revert to Tynyanov, drawing on the assumption that a literary work, like literature in general, is a system of interrelated and interdependent elements, the Russian formalist scholar discusses the genre in the essay entitled “Literaturnyi fakt” (“Literary Fact”) and the development (history) of literature in “O literaturnoi evolutii” (“On Literary Evolution”), both written in 1927. Both works postulate the formalist theory of internal change in literary history. In “Literary Fact”, in matters of its principles, rise, development, sources, death and rebirth, these aspects of the genre as well as the migration and transformation of the genre co-exist with and depend on the larger literary process, the emergence of new literary trends, movements, forms, and conceptions in literary history. The genre represents, in this respect, Tynyanov argues, not “a fall from the system”, “not a planned evolution”, not a “development”, but “a jump or leap” and a shift, “a substitution of systems”, and is therefore innovative and “unrecognizable” (“Literaturnyi fakt” 255-256). Like a literary work or movement, or literature in general, a genre is a system, but not a static, motionless system; it is a structure that may fluctuate, emerge from other systems, and weaken to become vestiges of subsequent systems. A new genre replaces an old one, succeeds it, and the decline and rebirth of a genre are to be understood, as Tynyanov shows, in relation to the concentric model of literature, which is organized by the principles of “centre” and “margin”: moving within this structure, a genre degenerates or dies out when it departs from the centre towards the periphery, but revives its literary potential when it approaches the centre, or “in its place from the trifles of literature, from the backyards and bottoms of literature, a new phenomenon emerges in the centre” (Tynyanov, “Literaturnyi fakt” 257258). Tynyanov emphasizes the diachronically inconstant feature of literary periods, movements, and genres, which are viewed as literary systems, their dynamic (not static) essence, which is based on the perpetual clash between tradition and innovation, the permanent conflict over hierarchy, which involves various elements in their position within the system as centre and margin, as central or peripheral, as dominant or marginal. An element or a form originally not considered literary is placed into a literary system, or it diverges from another element or form, and thereby it may give birth to a new trend or genre as a new system. Once established, a literary genre or trend never goes out of existence since its elements may emerge in either dominant or marginal positions in various other systems, namely newly emerging periods, movements, trends, genres, subgenres, and so on.

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

33

The medieval ballad, for instance, receives a new expression in romanticism by Coleridge. Also in this period, the historical element becomes dominant in the system of what is established as the historical novel by Scott. In Wieland and especially Goethe, the element of ordeal from medieval romances re-emerges as an important element in the Bildungsroman literary system to determine the inner change and prompt identity formation. Focusing primarily on literary genres, Tynyanov develops the formalist theory of internal change in literary development. After providing a concentric model of literature, he postulates the principle of the conflict between centre and margin, theorizes the obliteration and rebirth of genres, and insists on the migration and transformation of genres, according to which, moving within the literary system, a genre is forgotten or silenced if it moves away from the centre, and is renewed when it comes closer to the centre. A particular genre becomes dominant in a period and develops its system of elements: it attracts writers, who become more imitative than creative, expands temporally and territorially, and thereby a literary tradition or convention is established. Confronted by innovation and originality, the genre may lose its dominant position and be replaced with a new one that becomes dominant. The way in which Tynyanov discusses the genre is true for literary periods, trends, literary species, and literary works, all literary phenomena that represent, in the formalist view, literary systems with distinct characteristics. We also follow in our study the theory of internal change, and start from the premise of the battleground of innovation and tradition. Just like genres in Tynyanov’s conception, thematic and, to a lesser extent, structural elements of various literary systems3 perform individual breakthroughs and survive, or are modified, receive new positions, and interrelate anew around the central element of formation. In doing so, they can be placed into and become elements of the new Bildungsroman literary system. The Bildungsroman being currently perpetuated by various writers around the world reveals that changes still occur within its literary system. However, these changes have occurred and occur for both internal and external reasons such as newly emerging trends (magical realism, for instance), the audience, the publisher, or various social, cultural and political developments. 3

Literary systems are represented diachronically from ancient times to the end of the eighteenth century by different periods, movements, trends, genres, subgenres and texts categories.

34

Preliminaries

The formalist theory of internal change covers the domain of genres, and also those of literary periods, movements, trends, types of texts, including the Bildungsroman, and so on; nowadays it is also applied in feminist, minority and cultural studies and in postcolonial theory. In postulating intertextuality – new texts emerge as imitating, completing, competing, negating, or parodying other texts – the formalist theory of internal change alludes to Bakhtin’s dialogism, Shklovsky’s ostranenie, and Eliot’s new combinations of elements. “A new art emotion” is what T. S. Eliot declares, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, to be novelty in literature, its significance and the real artistic and poetic achievement. Tradition is for him an “order”, a term identical to that used by Tynyanov; likewise, order is not static but is continuously modified by new works which attempt to make their place in literary history. The poet is not an individual separated from history, and the significance of his poetry stands in its relation to the past: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists” (Eliot 44). The ideal order established by tradition becomes a simultaneous order when the past and present are united and expressed concomitantly: the simultaneous order is a kind of archive. Accordingly, the individual talent does not need to invent something or produce originality, since everything has been already written, but to recombine, rearrange the elements of order, keeping in mind – and here Eliot is not far removed from “dialogism” in Bakhtin and “intertextuality” in Kristeva – that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot 45). Another important aspect in the act of artistic creation is, for Eliot, the “process of depersonalization” based on the continuous surrender to tradition and “self-sacrifice”: the poet does not express a personality, but “a particular medium”; poetry, in Eliot’s famous anti-Wordsworthian declaration, “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (52-53). Actually, the process leading to novelty or “new art emotion”, as articulated by Eliot, begins with (1) learning, acquiring the knowledge of canonical works as standards of greatness (as later Harold Bloom would insist), that is, evolving an awareness of the past tradition, order and the world, the human condition; it continues by (2) the self-sacrifice or surrender to past tradition; which leads to (3) the poet losing personality, his or her impersonality or depersonalization; so that (4) the poet becomes a medium for the expression of existing elements, “impressions and experiences”; (5) the poet thereby produces new, original combinations of impressions, experiences, images, feelings,

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

35

phrases, etc.; which results in (6) the ideal order becoming simultaneous; which means finally that (7) “a new art emotion” emerges to take its place in the order or, in Tynyanov’s terms, in the literary system. T. S. Eliot is viewed in relation to Anglo-American “New Criticism”, whereas Yuri Tynyanov represents Russian “Formalism”; they are united in their pursuit of a formal approach to literature, hence certain similarities of their critical thinking. Other such examples are to be found in the work of the formal and formalist Viktor Shklovsky, namely in his “Art as Technique”, in which self-sacrifice and depersonalization become “ostranenie” (“defamiliarization”) and the key concepts are again “rearrangement”, “recombination” of elements and images so as to pursue the technique of art which is “to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (778). “Art is thinking in images”, and poetry is a special way of thinking, namely, thinking by means of images, where thinking in images allows for “economy of mental effort” (775). “Images”, in Shklovsky (“elements” in Tynyanov and “impressions and experiences” in Eliot), change little diachronically, or, actually they are the same, they pass or are taken unchanged from poet to poet: “from century to century, from nation to nation, from poet to poet, they flow on without changing” (Shklovsky 776); they belong to no one but the Lord, and they are identical in the works of various poets. Like Tynyanov and Eliot, Shklovsky draws attention to the fact that a certain poet would never invent or produce new images. Like Tynyanov, for whom elements are linked to co-exist in the system in correlation and interrelationship, and, like Eliot, for whom impressions and experiences are combined in new and original ways to produce a new art emotion, Shklovsky contends that the poets should remember images rather than create them – since images are given to poets – in order to rearrange and combine them in new and original ways. As in Tynyanov and Eliot, elements, images, experiences, feelings, themes, concerns, motifs, ideas, etc. are static; what is continually changing is their relation, or combination, or arrangement. The motivation for such arrangements and combinations focuses on impression, in that poetic imagery “is a means of creating the strongest possible impression” (Shklovsky 776). Shklovsky’s impression, like that of Henry James and especially that of Walter Pater, concerns the process of artistic perception; as in Pater, personal impression is a means of fighting stereotype or unconscious existence, or, as Shklovsky calls it, “habitualization”, the process of “algebrization”, “the over-automatization of an object” (778). Hence the requirement for successful and accomplished artistic endeavour

36

Preliminaries

is “ostranenie” or “defamiliarization”, by which the sensation of life is recovered, things are felt, the stone is made “stony”, and the purpose of art is achieved, namely “to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known”, since “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” (778). Shklovsky’s view of the arrangement of images in various new ways – just like Tynyanov’s view of elements and Eliot’s of impressions – represents one way to understand the historical movement of literature through periods, movements and trends. Poets and their works are grouped according to the arrangement of images, the “development of the resources of language”, and “the new techniques that poets discover and share” (Shklovsky 776). To us, such ideas represent a congenial way to understand the movement of the Bildungsroman as a fictional subgenre diachronically, including its rise, consolidation and further development. In matters of literary genre, Viktor Shklovsky talks about “the canonization of minor genres”, such as the romance, the picaresque novel, or the gothic narrative. The Bildungsroman is also such a historically emergent literary fact, first in German pre-romanticism with Goethe, to become aesthetically strengthened by the realists and modified and diversified by the modernist and postmodern writers. The Bildungsroman, a literary system as a particular species, category, type, genre or rather subgenre of fiction, demonstrates not only in the system of imaginative prose but in that of literature in general that “the literary fact is multi-structured and in this respect literature is a continuously evolving order” (Tynyanov, “Literaturnyi fakt” 270) consisting of a myriad of diverse forms within which occur a myriad of “merging episodes of the constructional principle with the material” (Tynyanov, “Literaturnyi fakt” 269). Unlike the romance, or the picaresque novel, or the gothic narrative, however, the Bildungsroman remains to the present day one of the few “strong” genres that reveal historical vitality and multifaceted creative consistency, since in its depiction of the life of a particular individual, this fictional subgenre relies on and proves the truth that literature has always been and will always be, to a lesser or greater extent, a reflection of the personal experience of the author. Tynyanov further applies his conception of literature as a system to the discussion of literary development, or, in his words, “literary evolution”, whose principles are, also in his terms, “fight” and “substitution”. In his study “On Literary Evolution”, Tynyanov compares the domain of the history of literature to a colonial state driven by an “individualistic psychologism” and “a schematically causal approach to the literary order”

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

37

(“O literaturnoi evolutii” 270). The divergence between them leads to a methodological discrepancy in the field of the historical investigation of literature. The former type replaces the problem of literature with the question of the author’s psychology and the issue of literary evolution with that of the genesis of literary phenomena. The latter leads to the disagreement between the literary order and the standpoint from which the observation of this literary order takes place. This place of observation constitutes social orders, and the construction of a closed literary order and the approach to evolution inside it (that is, to literary variability) would frequently come up against neighbouring cultural, domestic and, in the broad sense, social orders, and as such are doomed to incompleteness. Moreover, the theory of value in literary science has brought about the danger of studying major but isolated works and has changed the history of literature into what Tynyanov calls “the history of generals”, that is, masterpieces of literature (or the literary canon), to the detriment of the study of mass literature. The very term “history of literature” is a problem as well, continues Tynyanov, as it seems to be extremely broad and pretentious, suggesting the study of the history of belles lettres, the history of verbal art, and the history of writing in general. Meanwhile, the historical investigation of literature has forked into the investigation of the genesis of literary phenomena and the investigation of the evolution of the literary order, or literary mutability. The problem plaguing the historical approach to literature is the lack of theoretical methodology and of an awareness of the character of research. The solution for making the history of literature a science, conferring on it the necessary methodological rigour, must be its striving for “reliability” and veracity (“O literaturnoi evolutii” 271). The study of literary development must avoid the theory of “naïve evaluation” and the subjective response; it is also necessary to reconsider the notion of “tradition”, which is the abstractization of one or more literary elements in a system. The central concept in literary evolution is “the substitution of systems” (“O literaturnoi evolutii” 272). In order to analyse this essential issue, Tynyanov starts from the fundamental assumption that a literary work is a system, as is literature itself. In his opinion, the foundation of a science of literature and the investigation of the historical progress of literature are possible only in the view of literature as a system interrelated with other systems and conditioned by them. All the elements of a literary work are the elements of a system, that is, a literary system which is a system of functions of literary order which are in continual interrelationship with other orders. All the elements of the system of a literary work are interrelated, interdependent and interacting. Some

38

Preliminaries

elements of a work in prose, such as rhythm, are also elements of the system of a work in poetry, and their study shows that the role of such elements is different in different systems. The interrelationship of each element with every other in a literary work as a system, and therefore with the whole, is what Tynyanov calls the “constructional function of the given element” (“O literaturnoi evolutii” 272). This function is a complex entity: it shows that a distinct element is, on the one hand, interrelated in the order with similar elements of other works-systems and even of other orders, and, on the other hand, interrelated with other elements within the same system. Tynyanov names the former “auto-function” and the latter “syn-function”. Both operate simultaneously but are of different relevance. The lexis of a given literary work, for instance, is related at once to the literary lexis and the general verbal lexis, and to other elements of this work. Tynyanov points to the mistake of extracting certain elements from a system and, without their constructional function, of correlating them outside the system with a similar order of other systems. It is also impossible to study synchronically a literary work as a system outside its relation to the general system of literature; otherwise, such a study is another abstractization. The isolated study of the literary works is applied, successfully enough, to the evaluation of contemporary works, since the interrelationship of a contemporary work to contemporary literature is involuntarily taken as an established fact. However, Tynyanov argues, even in contemporary literature, isolated study is impossible because the very existence of a text as literary depends on its differential quality, that is, on its interrelationship with either literary or extra-literary order. In other words, its existence depends on its function: what in one period would be a matter of casual social communication, in another would be a literary fact, or vice versa, depending on the whole of the literary system in which the given text appears. Therefore, “studying the work in isolation, we cannot be sure that we speak in correct terms about its construction” (“O literaturnoi evolutii” 273). The auto-function (the interrelationship of an element to the order of similar elements in other systems and other orders) is a condition for the syn-function (the constructional function of the element). To summarize, according to Tynyanov, the constructional function is the correlation of each element of the literary work with other elements of the system, and thus with the whole system. It is a mistake to separate the elements from the system and to correlate them outside the system, that is,

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

39

to neglect their constructional function. The existence of a literary fact depends on its differential quality, that is, its function. Next, Tynyanov offers examples of poetry and prose, and focuses on the novel and its adjustment genres of story and novella to insist again that “the evaluation of literary phenomena does not occur outside their interrelationship” (“O literaturnoi evolutii” 276) and that, unfortunately, the evolutionary relation between the function and the formal element has not been studied. There are examples in literature of how the evolution of literary form determines the change of function; examples of how a form with indefinite function calls and builds up a new one; and examples of how function searches for its form. The variability of functions of a formal element of the system, the appearance of a new function of the formal element, and its association with the function are important issues of literary evolution. Again, the whole research depends on the consideration of literature as an order, a system, where “the system of literary order is first of all the system of functions of literary order in continuous interrelationship with other orders” (“O literaturnoi evolutii” 277). Each literary work is correlated with a particular literary system depending on its deviation, its difference, as compared to the literary system with which it is confronted. Moreover, since a literary system is a system of the functions of the literary order which is in continual interrelationship with other orders, such as social and cultural, orders change in their composition, but the differentiation of human activities remains. Due to the specificity of its material, the growth of literature, as that of other cultural orders, coincides neither in rate nor in character with those orders with which it is interrelated. The evolution of the constructional function occurs rapidly; that of the literary function occurs over epochs, and the one concerning the functions of the whole literary system in relation to the neighbouring systems occurs over centuries. To follow Tynyanov’s line of argumentation, to understand the development of literature as the “substitution of systems” is to perceive it as the change in the interrelationship of the elements of a system, which is the change of functions and formal elements. A system does not represent an equal interrelationship of all elements, promoting instead the differential interaction of its elements, where through a group of dominant elements producing the deformation of other elements, a new literary work emerges in literature and acquires its literary function by means of these dominant elements. Drawing especially on these theoretical assumptions by Tynyanov, as well as on those by Shklovsky and Bakhtin, the first book of our project

40

Preliminaries

focusing on the English novel of formation aims to demonstrate the consolidation of the Bildungsroman as an order of elements. We argue that the English Bildungsroman is a literary system that has passed through a change in its thematic and formal elements and functions in order to establish itself as a literary tradition with preceding systems as cornerstones. The substitutions of literary systems leading to new ones vary from epoch to epoch; they may occur rapidly or slowly; they do not necessarily require the complete renewal or replacement of the formal elements of the systems, but rather “a new function of these formal elements” (Tynyanov, “O literaturnoi evolutii” 281). A potential collation of certain literary phenomena must consider functions in addition to forms. Tynyanov concludes his study by summarizing his ideas: the study of literary evolution is possible only by viewing literature as an order, a system which is interrelated with other orders, systems, and is conditioned by them. The study must move from the constructional function (the interrelationship of each element with other elements of the system, and thus with the whole system of the literary work) to the literary function (the interrelationship of a literary work with the literary order), and from the literary function to the verbal function (the interrelationship of a literary work with the social conventions), while clarifying the issue of developmental interaction of functions and forms. Also, the investigation of literature in its development “must go from the literary order to the nearest correlated systems, not some distant ones, although these could be important” (“O literaturnoi evolutii” 281), such as social conventions, cultural doctrines, historical background, the author’s psychology, daily life and personal experience, and the tastes and interests of the reading audience. Yuri Tynyanov’s views on the literary work and literature conceived as systems and on the development of literature as the substitution of systems are applicable in other domains of the humanities, such as linguistics (as language itself is a system), translation studies, and cultural studies, and in different literary disciplines, such as comparative literature, where, in particular, the issue of “reception” – the study of the process of reception of a literature (as a system) in another literature or another cultural background (also conceived as systems) – receives a strong theoretical and practical basis. Although highly important for the elucidation of the status and role of literary history as a scientific discipline, Tynyanov’s theory of the literary system, due to its normative principles and methodological rigour, may not always be appropriate to the study of literature. This is especially the case when we face some national peculiarities of literary history, or when the individual creative imagination is both ready to

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

41

assume an established tradition, model or pattern of writing and to pursue unexpected innovation, literary experimentation, and modernization of the literary discourse. However, like many other concepts and principles of the formalists, and from the Russians’ ranks also those of M. M. Bakhtin, Tynyanov’s idea of literature as a system of dominant and peripheral elements turns out to be an important issue for postmodern theoretical and ideological debate regarding the “centre and margin” dichotomy. Bakhtin himself focuses on the concepts of “self and other”; he also coins the term and discusses “roman vospitaniya” (“the novel of education”), that is, the Bildungsroman. Bakhtin frequently refers to Dickens and Goethe, besides Dostoyevsky, and his principles and ideas on “roman vospitaniya” are the most congenial to our approach to the Bildungsroman, as are those on the chronotope and on the rise, development and consolidation of the novelistic genre in general. To return to the idea of system and the “centre and margin” dualism, this binary opposition is nowadays discussed in cultural, postcolonial, social, feminist, and literary studies. The postmodern attitude towards dominant elements, and in particular discourses, is twofold: (1) to come within dominant discourses and try to modify them from within, and (2) to accept and proclaim marginalization and try to make fringe move into centre. The relationship of centre and margin, or dominant and peripheral elements, can be applied to literature both diachronically and synchronically. From a diachronic perspective, we would link two explanations in the discussion of the development of literature in general, one late modern by Tynyanov, based on his theory of system, and another postmodern, based on the concepts of margin and centre. In its shift from the centre or a dominant position to the margin or periphery, literature becomes excentric (outside the centre), and “ex-centric” means “eccentric”, that is, unconventional, original, new. Thus, innovation emerges by rejecting tradition as centre within tradition, and moves towards the margin to become a peripheral phenomenon; if strong enough, innovation may eventually become a centre, that is, establish itself as tradition, as it happened with the baroque, with romanticism, symbolism, modernism, and the avant-garde. This component of “innovation” in literary history is a line of development having its origins in the Renaissance; it continued in the Baroque, was suppressed by the classical tradition but revived by romanticism, was developed by late nineteenth-century avant-garde trends and diversified by the twentieth-century modernism and postmodernism. Its interrelated and contrary component of “tradition” in literary history

42

Preliminaries

represents a developmental line having its origins in the ancient period which was revived in the Renaissance, changed, developed and was institutionalised in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century neoclassicism, was rejected and replaced with romanticism, but re-emerged on the literary scene as nineteenth-century realism, and continued and was diversified by the twentieth-century writers of social and realist interest. Innovation and tradition in literature are reified by various succeeding periods, movements and trends as literary orders or systems; their rise is based doubly on rejection of one literary system and continuation of some previous literary systems, and is influenced by contemporary developments in other more or less distant systems such as cultural, linguistic, scientific, sociologic, and so on. Although postmodernism rejects the notion of system, we should still pay attention to Tynyanov pointing to literature as a system containing dominant and peripheral elements when we speak about centre and margin from a postmodern standpoint to explain the development of literature by recourse to such concepts as innovation and tradition. We ought especially to recall Tynyanov’s theorization of literature as a system, of the evolution of literature as a substitution of systems, and of the elements of the literary system as interrelating and interacting both (1) among themselves and (2) with the elements of other literary and non-literary (social, cultural, political, ideological, artistic, etc.) systems. From a synchronic perspective and within national boundaries, a literary system may be described in terms of three criteria of development with regard to the interrelationship of its elements: (1) concerning individual authors, for example Alexander Pope as centre and Thomas Gray as margin, or Shakespeare as centre and Ben Jonson as margin; (2) the substitution of periods and movements, for instance neoclassicism as centre and romanticism as margin at the end of the eighteenth century, although subsequently romanticism becomes itself a centre and replaces neoclassicism; and (3) the shift of periods and movements, for example realism as centre and modernism as margin changes to modernism as centre and realism as margin in the first half of the twentieth century. The centre and margin dichotomy in feminism and in social studies is actualized as male/man as centre and female/woman as margin, heterosexual versus sexual minorities, dominant nationality or race versus national or racial minorities, and so on. In postcolonial studies: white versus non-white, colonizer/West/Europe as centre and the colonized/NonWest as margin. The opposition emerges also within each of the two elements taken separately. In Europe as centre, for example, Western Europe is centre and Eastern Europe is margin, which can be seen in

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

43

literature as well: in anthologies of literature you would barely find Alexe Rudeanu in the company of Ian McEwan. The margin may move into the centre, along with the emerging issue of identity, when an author is translated but especially when s/he assumes the language of the centre, its values, mentality and attitudes, but above all enhances the centre, as Eliade, Ionesco, Kundera, Kis, Safak, and others have done. Another example would be Latin America as margin which, in its relation to the West as centre, nevertheless produced a type of reversal of the binary opposition: after producing outstanding literature (Marquez or Coehlo), the erstwhile margin becomes centre when it is imitated by the already existing centre, as is the case, to mention just English literature, of Angela Carter and her novels of magical realism. Speaking solely about literary practice in the light of Tynyanov’s ideas, its development in the context of literary history is based on the “clash” between “innovation” and “tradition”. They stand to each other as centre and margin, the dominant element versus marginal element in the system of literature, each striving for the supremacy of aesthetic validity, longevity and potency. They are represented diachronically by different periods, movements, and trends that succeed and replace one another. Just like the literary genres, they are systems whose elements are correlated as depending again on their central and peripheral nature. Literature on the whole is a system with an on-going battle between central and marginal elements, where mutations happening on the level of any element generate and determine mutations on the general level of the system. If we conceive of the literary work and of literature on the whole as systems, the interrelationship between “tradition” and “innovation” in the historical advancement of literature acts upon a literary system that, by placing a group of its elements in the “dominant” position, makes the deformation of other elements possible. A new work or writing style emerges in literature and takes on its own literary function through this “dominant”: this is the factor that determines the change and development of literary phenomena in the course of succeeding periods. This is true as much of genres as of periods and movements. For instance, the literary system of the medieval romance changes in the Renaissance into the system termed by the noun “roman” (“novel”) when elements of extended narration, setting, character representation and others become “dominant”, whereas others, like verse form and the supernatural element, are extinguished. On the contrary, when other elements, such as love intrigue, subjective and psychological experience, the fantastic and the irrational involved in action, are placed in the “dominant” position, the literary system of the romance is substituted in the second half of the eighteenth

44

Preliminaries

century by the system of a particular type of poetry called by the adjective “romantic”. The element of “the revival of ancient classical tradition” in the literary system of the Renaissance becomes “dominant” in relation to the social and cultural orders (systems) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, making possible the substitution of the system of Renaissance literature by that of Enlightenment and neoclassicism. This is also true about any particular literary tradition, or type of literary text. The “dominance” of such elements as adventure, ordeal, trial, the road chronotope, moral issues of personal conduct, love experience, autobiography, change of condition with respect to the social background, representing the system of the picaresque novel, to which the “dominant” element of Bildung or character formation (emergence or becoming, as in Bakhtin), implying inner change, is added in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, makes possible the rise of the fictional system of the Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century. This type of novel, now a literary tradition, seeks its support in the previous systems, especially in the ancient and picaresque narratives and the romantic tradition, but places, in turn, a group of its elements in the “dominant” position, which makes possible the deformation of other elements, and as a result the related fictional types of Entwicklungsroman, Erziehungsroman, and Künstlerroman emerge in world literature. In our study of the English Bildungsroman, we regard the literary discourse of the Bildungsroman as a well-structured literary pattern and likewise as an ordered system of elements whose aesthetic values stand within the larger system of the novel. The novel, as a self-standing system, belongs, along with other literary genres and types of text, to the system of literature. Literature, in turn, is a system framed within the general system of culture and should be approached in relation to other cultural systems. Such an analysis takes into consideration the national peculiarities of a literary system (here English), its relation to world literature, as well as the interrelationship between national culture and the world cultural phenomenon in general. The English Bildungsroman is a fictional order, a system of elements which is not static, not rigid, not even normative, but a system of elements whose power of association and mutability provides this system with a generic nature. As in every system, some of its elements are dominant, in the centre, giving this subgenre its specificity; others are on the margin and representative of other literary systems as well, shared by the Bildungsroman and other literary conventions or types of fiction. Among the former, the most important and central one, giving the essence of the system, is Bildung, the principle of formation – necessitating a successful

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

45

coming of age – in its twofold perspective as self-formation and guided or determined formation; among the latter, the chronotope of the road, for instance, a common element in the Bildungsroman and picaresque fiction. The elements are systematized around the principle of formation, rounding out a more or less canonical pattern of large-scale diachrony but constructing various diachronic models of human experience, each in itself a distinct system or component within the Bildungsroman literary system. The main component in the general system of the English Bildungsroman is the literary system of the Victorian Bildungsroman, representing the flourishing of the subgenre. The system of the Victorian Bildungsroman consists, in turn, of a number of literary systems, such as the Victorian female Bildungsroman and the Victorian realist Bildungsroman, whose elements are at once (1) the elements of the general system of the Victorian Bildungsroman, (2) the elements of these and other particular types of the Bildungsroman as fictional systems, which actually constitute its general patterned system, and (3) the elements of other fictional and literary systems, such as the picaresque novel or romantic autobiographical poetry. A gender-based argument would stipulate that each Victorian male writer of the Bildungsroman frames his novel as a literary system within a more general fictional system of the Victorian male authorship of the novel of formation, each minor system being expressed through an individual fictional discourse. The Victorian male writers of the Bildungsroman, now a literary whole, reveal a complex system of thematic and narrative elements within the general fictional system of Victorian Bildungsroman. The elements of this system are interrelated and correlated among them as they are correlated with apparently different thematic perspectives of the Victorian female authorship. Another argument is linked to the cultural context of the Victorian age and regards the interrelationship of the elements of realist and non-realist Bildungsromane, which shape particular systems of the Victorian Bildungsroman as a system of a more generic essence. Great Expectations, for example, is a Victorian Bildungsroman in general and, in particular, a Victorian male and realist Bildungsroman; Wuthering Heights is likewise a Bildungsroman, a literary work representing a particular literary system in the general system of the Victorian Bildungsroman and, in matters of authorship, it is also a system in the larger system of the Victorian female Bildungsroman, whereas in matters of cultural ideology, this novel keeps romanticism alive and its elements form the system of a gothic Bildungsroman.

46

Preliminaries

The gender and cultural aspects of the Victorian Bildungsromane differentiate and classify these novels as distinct literary systems, but also unite them under the umbrella term of the “Victorian Bildungsroman”. The correlation of the elements of a literary work (itself a system), for instance that of a male author, with the elements of another literary work (another system), say, of a female writer, within the same, general literary system, implies the existence of a literary principle regarded as performing a constructional function, which is one of the many principles of existence, development, changeability, vitality and reinvigoration of the literary works and of the literary phenomenon in general. The Victorian Bildungsroman shares the ten main thematic elements and the principle of formation with the twentieth-century realist Bildungsroman, the modernist Bildungsroman and the postmodern Bildungsroman, all of these being distinct literary systems of the general fictional system of the English Bildungsroman. Tynyanov’s line of argumentation validates the hypothesis that the system of each literary work of an individual English writer contains certain thematic and narrative elements whose characteristic features – while revealing similar aspects to other types of text of the novelistic genre of the Renaissance, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Victorian period, or the twentieth century – condition the existence of the English Bildungsroman as a distinct typological system of fiction and encapsulate its literary significance. Diachronically, the exposition and evaluation of these elements would reveal the rise, development and consolidation of the Bildungsroman as a literary tradition. Synchronically, these elements would accomplish the main concern of our study to disclose, through a comparative, textual and contextual analysis of certain English novels, the existence of a systemic and patterned fictional discourse dealing with the complexity of a character’s psychological, emotional and physical experience as a process of development conducive to Bildung or formation of his or her personality. By being constructed around a pattern, these novels would show the existence of a number of thematic elements and certain structural devices which are correlated within one literary model. Identifying such a pattern would demonstrate the literary validity of the Bildungsroman in the Victorian age and later periods as a type of literary discourse which, as we argue, should be studied as a self-standing system. The peculiarity of the Bildungsroman as a literary work centred on the process of character formation – as both self-formation and guided formation – implies certain interpretative considerations. We should examine such elements of its system as (1) the author, the character, and

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

47

the degree of their identification and separation, as well as the character as an autodiegetic narrator, since the Bildungsroman is an autobiographical type of fiction; (2) the reader, since the Bildungsroman is intended to be representative of the human condition; but especially (3) the content, or the thematic level, and (4) the form, or the narrative level, with their distinct but interrelated arrangements within the text of the whole process of an individual’s development and formation. In matters of the thematic perspectives, particular concerns represent the milieu or society, the family background, parental figures, education, professional career, sentimental experience, ordeal, the philosophy of living, epiphany, moral didacticism, and others. In matters of structural perspectives, the focus is on the type of narration, point of view, narrator, narratee, mode, voice, and especially chronotope and its typology, and language as a means of both textualization of the process of growth and maturation and expression of the authorial point of view on this process. These elements may recall the elements of Roman Jakobson’s structure of communication in general (sender, receiver, message, context, contact and code) or those of literary communication as studied by Guy Cook (128): author, reader, text, (performer), society, texts and language. The elements of our concern emerge from the condition of the Bildungsroman as a literary phenomenon that represents a specific type of fictional discourse framed within a specific type of communicative situation, a literary discourse intended to be communicated to the reader; in other words, the text of the novel of formation is involved in a literary communicative situation. The correlation of these elements in the literary system of the Bildungsroman and its investigation roughly correspond to Paul Ricoeur’s (94) hermeneutic perspectives of the textual arrangement and text analysis with regard to the human experience considered diachronically: (1) the implication of language as discourse, (2) the implication of discourse as a structured literary work, (3) the relation between verbal and written forms in the discourse and the structured literary work, (4) the structured literary work/discourse as the projection of another world, (5) the structured literary work as the projection of the authorial life which is transfigured through the discourse, and (6) the structured literary work as the self-comprehension of the reader. In our books, the “world” of the literary system of the English Bildungsroman receives evaluative attention from three perspectives, which are the long-established domains of literary theory, literary criticism and the history of literature. An accurate approach to the novel of formation would require the symbiosis of the three directions of research; unfortunately, much of the modern literary theory and criticism addresses

48

Preliminaries

the literary work as a synchronic phenomenon, removing the text from its temporal and spatial context. The study of the novel of formation may avoid references to some distant systems, such as science and economy, but it should not ignore the importance of the private, social and/or historical factors, since it is within these contexts that the literary significance of the work can be better clarified. The emphasis on the historical dimension and the consideration of the social and biographical influences on the work must not, of course, exclude the synchronic dimension, methodological principles and the scientific rigour of literary theory and criticism to which literary history has access. Concerning the two components – social or historical, on the one hand, and biographical or psychological, on the other – that is, the author’s times and life, from a formalist perspective, literature is above all interrelated with social conventions, and as such the correlation takes place first of all through its verbal aspect. That is, the interrelation between literature and society is realized through language, and in relation to the social background the prime function of literature is its verbal function. Using the term “orientation” to denote the author’s creative intention, Tynyanov and the formalists suggest that the intention is changed by the structural function (the interrelationship of elements within a work) into a catalyst, that “creative freedom” yields to “creative necessity”, and that the literary function (the interrelationship of a work with the literary order) completes the process. Simply stated, the “orientation” of a literary work proves to be its “verbal function”, its interrelationship with social conventions. It would be futile to study the verbal function of literature in relation to some distant conditions, such as economic, as it is useless to study the author’s psychology, environment, daily life, and class directly in order to establish the origins of the literary phenomena. Clearly, formalists believe, the problem here is not one of individual psychological conditions, but of objective, evolving functions of the literary order in relation to the adjacent social order. Likewise, in discussing practical criticism, David Daiches states that the approach to the literary work should be different from going to biography or psychology to discover the author’s intention, for “it is less personal intention than artistic tradition that is the real question” (265), where literary tradition is the object of study of the history of literature. In the historical studies of British literature, or any national literature, or the history of world literature on the whole, it is clear that literary history, which provides a chronological vision on literature, is confronted with repeated methodological crises, as this discipline is unable to fully synchronise itself with the innovations that constantly take place in

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

49

modern literary theory and criticism. As Tynyanov has already warned on this matter in his formalist attempts to renovate the history of literature through the theory of literature as a system and that of literary evolution, the historical investigation of literature might still have no clear theoretical awareness of how to study a literary work or what the nature of its significance is. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, in their celebrated Theory of Literature (1948), also claim that the history of a national literature is hard to envisage and remains a distant ideal; strongly bound to their Russian formalist origins, they assume the theory of the literary system and claim that literary history must be the study of systems of “literary norms, standards, and conventions” and must be “the tracing of the changing from one system of norms to another” (264-268). Wellek and Warren believe that the separation of criticism from the diachronic dimension of the literary history and its subsequent consolidation as a distinct domain were caused by the distinction between the consideration of literature as a simultaneous order and the view on literature as diachronic order, a line of works arranged chronologically and regarded as constituent parts of the historical process. Our study attempts to balance the levels on the assumption that neither the research of the text as a synchronic phenomenon nor the historicization of literary experience are to be neglected. To achieve an adequate comprehension of the literary works of different writers and periods, it is necessary to overcome the gap between literary criticism and literary history by fusing the synchronic and diachronic dimensions in literary analysis, and by strengthening the relationship between text and context. Especially in the case of the Bildungsroman (or the novel of formation) – which has a long developmental history, focuses on a personal diachronic-scale of Bildung or identity formation, and flourishes in the age of realism with its social and moral concerns – without understanding literature in its growth, the relationship between tradition and innovation, the origins of the literary work, the author’s psychology, artistic sensibility and especially theoretical and philosophical views, and the social and cultural circumstances that make possible the production of the work and are reflected in the work, the critic would scarcely offer competent judgement on the value of the text. Despite the apocalyptic death verdict announced by so many concerning the future of literary history, the fact that any literary work is not historically determined, or that no literary text is an expression of an epoch, or that its production has no connection with the individual experience of the author, would never be proved. It is counterintuitive to think that a literary work can be properly understood by some criteria lacking temporal significance. Therefore, it is crucial to

50

Preliminaries

shoulder the effort of joining the synchronic and diachronic research, and to examine the literary work as projected on a diachronic scale, in relation to both its past and its contemporary perspective. In this case, the history of literature should endeavour to find ways to innovate its discourse by getting support from other disciplines of the humanities, such as cultural anthropology, social history, sociology, linguistics, and cultural studies, but especially from the most recent and world-wide acknowledged theoretical and critical modalities advanced by literary theory and literary criticism. Possessing scientific consistency, the history of literature is expected to form together with literary theory and criticism a distinct unified discourse of aesthetic evaluation of the literary phenomena. If continuously and adequately modernized, this discourse would be efficient enough to sustain the proper study of national and international literary heritage, and even eliminate the general illiteracy caused by the deformed vision of the literary truths from the past. The books of imaginative writing might then remain an important stimulus for the aesthetic and intellectual needs of the human race, despite the complexity of new cultural alternatives and the changing rhythm of human existence at the beginning of a new millennium. Assuming this belief, the vector of methodology, as we conceive of it, is threefold, to include (1) based on Bakhtin, Tynyanov and Shklovsky, a diachronic, historical consideration, a surveyistic approach to the origin, nature, mutation and substitution of the thematic and structural elements leading to the establishment of the Bildungsroman as a novelistic genre; (2) based on thematological, narratological and comparative perspectives of literary analysis, a direct approach to particular texts leading to their exposition as systems within the larger order, or system, or polysystem of the English Bildungsroman; and (3) based on these approaches, certain concluding reflections to summarize the ideas on the history of consolidation of the Bildungsroman as a literary tradition, and to systematize its characteristic features, principles, devices and elements (thematic and narrative) as correlated within one literary model, i.e. system. The first, diachronic direction – never attempted before, except for Bakhtin, in the literary scholarship on the Bildungsroman – relies on the idea that the Victorian Bildungsroman established itself as a fictional system and literary tradition historically, passing, hypothetically speaking, as its own literary concern – the process of growth and formation of a human personality – reveals, through the stage of beginnings and then development and consolidation as a literary pattern. A glance at the

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

51

Continental antecedents of the genre would reveal its first elements in antiquity; followed by French and English romances; especially the Spanish picaresque novel of the Renaissance and its continuation in the seventeenth-century European literary background; the assimilation of the picaresque tradition in eighteenth-century French fiction; the first elements of the novel of formation in eighteenth-century English literature; the romantic contribution; and the consolidation of the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman in German literature with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as the prototype of the new novelistic form and also a major source of inspiration for various, including English, future writers of the Bildungsroman. In order to disclose the rise, development and consolidation of the literary pattern of the novel of formation, our study considers the works of Heliodorus, Apuleius, and Longus in antiquity; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory in the Middle Ages; François Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, Mateo Aleman, Thomas Nashe, and Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes in the Renaissance; Francisco de Quevedo, Luiz Velez de Guevara, Charles Sorel, Paul Scarron, François de Fenelon, Hans Iacob von Grimmelshausen, and John Bunyan in the seventeenth century; Alain-René Lesage, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe in the eighteenth century; also, the idealist philosophy on the whole and some of its more particular manifestations such as Fichte’s theory of “subjective idealism”; and finally the literary practice of the romantics at the turn of the century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century. To discover the movement of the main aspects of the novel of formation and to avoid a simple presentation of the rise and development of novel writing in world literature in general, the focus is on those motifs and themes, as well as narrative strategies, in the works of these authors which would eventually become elements of the literary system of the Victorian and twentieth-century Bildungsroman and be recognizable within its fictional model. This first part of our series of books on the English Bildungsroman studies the history of the development of the Bildungsroman. It also explores the romantic impulse in Victorian fiction: a number of English romantic writers, such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Byron, John Keats, and Sir Walter Scott, reveal in their works (both poetry and prose) a number of common thematic elements that would represent the major concerns of the Victorian writers of the Bildungsroman, thus anticipating its consolidation.

52

Preliminaries

Outstanding among them are the growth of the individual mind through biological stages in relation to physical nature, and the experience of childhood and its lasting importance for the development of a mature personality and for human existence in general. Above all, romanticism gave birth to the author and to the expressive theory of authorship, which means the rise of literary self-reflexivity in tandem with the proclamation of individualism and the emphasis laid on human identity and individuality. It should not then be surprising to read claims like James McGlathery’s (in the book on the Bildungsroman edited by James Hardin), namely that “the intellectual underpinnings of the Bildungsroman emerge most clearly in the examples from Romanticism” rather than in Agathon and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (314), although it is Goethe’s work that is recognized and acclaimed as the founding novel of the subgenre. We would also support such claims, in particular by promoting the idea that in romanticism, childhood is a necessary experience for the consolidation of a “moral being”, a mature personality, and as such, childhood becomes an important formative principle, as in Blake and Wordsworth, and later in Dickens and George Eliot. Also for the romantics, especially for Wordsworth, but less for later Victorian authors of the Bildungsroman, another formative principle is nature, which participates in the developmental process of the human mind and becomes a kind of co-author, assisting the poet in the process of poetic composition and thereby contributing to the formation of the poetic mind, that is, the becoming of a poet. As childhood and nature are important formative principles, at least because these two romantic thematic perspectives later become elements of the Bildungsroman literary system, romanticism deserves a special and extended critical attention in our study. There are, therefore, two literary traditions to focus on primarily, picaresque narrative and romanticism, on account of their crucial impact on the rise of the Bildungsroman as a particular subgenre of the novelistic genre. In other words, a comparative thematological approach would reveal that the Bildungsroman is a bettered, superior version of picaresque fiction, which is the first established modern subgenre of the novel in its incipient stage. The picaresque literary system changes to crystallize a new one, that of the Bildungsroman, through the contribution of romantic principles and literary practice. Apart from the picaresque narrative and romanticism, the Bildungsroman establishes its literary system in the Victorian Age by adopting and adapting to its essence various thematic and structural elements from the newly risen eighteenth-century English novel (such as

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

53

the comic, the sentimental, and the moral), from Goethe’s canonical novel of formation Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, as well as from the system of literary realism emerging in the nineteenth century, which rejected romanticism and was also responsible for the decline of the picaresque tradition. But the picaresque narrative has not vanished. It is not extinct even nowadays, for as literary practice it has afforded both a critique and a reimagining of the world. Furthermore, as most periods and backgrounds of modernity starting with the Renaissance, which represents its rise, are marked with chaos, crisis and confusion, the life experience of the picaro(a) represents a search for identity, for a self, for a place in the world, for a working philosophy, which is an experience of universal resonance and symbolical for human existence in general, hence its yielding to continuous thematisation.4 Since the Victorian and twentieth-century writer of the Bildungsroman grants him- or herself a twofold status as subject and author, both hypostases in the process of becoming, the narrative form that textualises this process – in both the picaresque and romantic traditions, as well as in their aftermath – preserves, conveys and validates human behaviour. Such forms that incorporate various processes, are, according to Eduard Vlad, processes that, from a postmodern and poststructuralist perspective, “do not only preserve, communicate and legitimate, [but] […] also ‘construct’ human identity”. The point is that in these processes of either biographical/autobiographical or non-biographical writing, the writers “‘construct’, rather than ‘reconstruct’ or ‘express’ their identity, by selecting, omitting, foregrounding and expressing through language those aspects of their lives that would give meaning – and would justify – their existence” (Vlad 13-14). If Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is considered to be the first novel of formation in world literature, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus is credited as the first Bildungsroman in English. While the novel relies on the previous traditions of the picaresque and especially romanticism and Goethe, it owes its specificity to the fact that Sartor Resartus is not “touched” yet by the emerging realist fiction, as many later Bildungsromane would be. Instead,

4

Yet the vitality and popularity of the picaresque subgenre also owe to its unorthodox approaches to established social values, its challenge to hegemony, atypical modes of narration, the comic mode, and playing with literary and nonliterary genres and forms by at once parodying and incorporating them into a literary discourse aimed at entertainment and moral didacticism with regard to the issue of identity.

54

Preliminaries

Carlyle intermingles fictional narrative with original philosophical discourse. Thomas Carlyle was called by Goethe his “worthy reader”. Just as earlier Coleridge spread German aesthetic doctrine and idealist metaphysics in England, Carlyle, in his attempts at “Germanizing” English culture in the 1830s, promotes Goethe as an authority. His efforts successfully introduce Goethe’s novel and subsequently domesticate the Bildungsroman subgenre in English literature. This recruitment of a foreign literary experience should be viewed from a threefold perspective of literary reception comprising translation, criticism, and original literary work: “If Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister was the main medium for spreading the ideal of Bildung among Germans, Carlyle’s articles on and translations from Goethe, as well as his own version of the Bildungsroman, Sartor Resartus, were the most influential in introducing the concept to England” (Argyle 24). The second and third books of our series, which address directly the main concern of our overall project, focus on the Victorian Bildungsroman and on those novels of formation written in the age of modernism and in the postmodern period. First, we analyse the label “Bildungsroman” and affix it to a remarkable sequence of English fiction from Carlyle through Thackeray and Dickens to Hardy, whose thematic and narrative levels we interpret with regard to their elements representing the fictional system of the Bildungsroman. The condition of imaginative prose in Victorian times, with reference to the literary tradition of realism and its alternatives, would illuminate the coming into existence of a particular type of Bildungsroman, the Victorian one, since most of the period’s novels of formation follow realist concerns. These references to the period and the condition of literature may seem redundant to the academic reader, but the reason for their presence is that our book series is also a teaching aid aimed at meeting the needs of students of English literature. Our study makes its practical argument, conducted in relation to the general cultural and artistic context, as well as to gender distinctions in the literary practice, through the direct approach to some of the most representative writers and novels designated as Bildungsromane. The corpus for analysis includes, therefore, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34), William Makepeace Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis (1848-50), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849-50) and Great Expectations (1860-61), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh: A Poem in Nine Books (1856), George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860),

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

55

Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1881-84), Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1896), and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903). These novels, which represent the Victorian Bildungsroman, require a distinct approach in a separate book. Not only do they span the period of the highest flourishing and complexity in the history of the genre, but they can also explain the contemporary revival of realism as literary practice and critical thinking, or rather the persistence of the realist tradition to the present day. In this respect, the two famous works by David Lodge (“The Novelist at the Crossroads” and “The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?”) or the volume edited by Jose Lopez and Garry Potter, After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism would be revelatory. The realist tradition, persistent to the present, and the interest in realism justify our renewed interest in and concern with the Victorian Bildungsroman. Moreover, with regard to modernism and postmodernism, the Bildungsroman is no longer an attribute exclusively of realist fiction, which further justifies the present study on both Victorian novels of formation and later ones, written in late modernity or in postmodernity. Apart from the Victorian Bildungsromane, in the third book, we also focus on some major novels of formation produced in the age of modernism and in the postmodern period. In the Victorian Age, the Bildungsroman was mainly realist, with a few exceptions like Sartor Resartus, Wuthering Heights, and Marius the Epicurean. In the first half of the twentieth century, English authors wrote realist as well as experimental, modernist novels of formation. The subgenre flourished again, this time as a much more diverse and manifold literary practice in postmodernity, when it emerged within such trends as magical realism, historiographic metafiction, racial writing, postcolonial novel, and even the posthuman Bildungsroman. Examining the Bildungsromane of the late modern and postmodern periods deserves a book of its own, on the grounds that the philosophical and sociological contrast between modernity and postmodernity is paralleled by the literary contrast between modernism and postmodernism. Among the works to be studied, the most important are Herbert George Wells’ Tono-Bungay (1909), David Herbert Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1913-1914, pub. 1971), William Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Peter Ackroyd’s English Music (1992), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).

56

Preliminaries

The novels of all three periods (Victorian, modernist, and postmodernist), whose individual features as well as intertextual relationships and influences are presented in our study, display unity of thematic concern and, with such exceptions as Sartor Resartus, Wuthering Heights, or Never Let Me Go, also of narrative arrangement, and reveal their alliance to the tradition of the Bildungsroman. The great number of the Bildungsromane written until and in the contemporary period asserts the dialogic nature of cultures and literatures, and, in Bakhtin’s terms, the novel as a dialogical genre par excellence, which is opposed to poetry with individual as its main feature. The individuality of the poet, which is reflected in his/her language and speech, is contrary to what Bakhtin calls the prerequisite for authentic novelistic prose, namely the “social heteroglossia and the variety of individual voices in it” (“Discourse in the Novel” 264). Also, the individual word of poetry is “zaversheno” (finalized or completed), but the novelistic word, as the Bildungsroman reveals by its temporal persistency, due to its dialogized, parodic and carnivalistic features, is never finalized and always open to heteroglot operation. The consistency of the Bildungsroman system of elements, on the other hand, whatever the degree of modification, proves Umberto Eco’s statement that books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told. That the Bildungsroman is still being written also confirms the views that texts5 refer not to reality but to other texts, namely every text absorbs and transforms other texts, and is therefore a tissue of citations; that its meaning is shaped by another text and produced by the reader; and every text is “involved [in] an obsessional repetition or intertextuality” (Butler 31), which is not a series of relationships between different texts but is produced within texts. The works labelled Bildungsromane reveal that there is a literary system of the novel of formation, and their thematological and comparative assessment helps us to refute arguments about the uselessness and extensiveness of the term and tradition, in our attempts to show the vitality, validity and uniqueness of the Bildungsroman as a fictional model and to side with those of the same type of critical thinking. Against the argument of uselessness of the genre of the Bildungsroman, we agree with Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Franco Moretti, Martin Swales, Marianne Hirsch, and Gisela Argyle, who argue about the validity of the genre reified by different texts within individual fictions of various cultural backgrounds, of the past and the present, including the English novels of formation. 5

If we assume that the literary work is a text.

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

57

Each of the literary works discussed in this study attains its own strength and integrity, and deserves to be approached separately, as an object to be measured in itself, as a text that deconstructs its own concern, method, distinguishing features, difficulties, thematic devices and narrative strategies in order to prove its status as a unique literary system, a distinct Victorian, or realist, or modernist, or postmodern and/or postmodernist Bildungsroman that would reveal its own, interesting ways in which it maintains or changes the tradition, that is, uses the pattern to subscribe to it or depart from it. Romanticism would impose identity formation on individual grounds; realism would represent individual formation in social context and render “the clash between individual autonomy and social integration” (Moretti 67), which is expected to turn into a harmonious, balanced relationship between the individual and society as the basis for successful formation; modernists reject the balance between inwardness and milieu, refuse the interiorization of socialization, and re-legitimate individual consciousness and subjective experience as a self-sufficient domain in the process of identity development and formation; the postmodern writer views the formation of personality by conceiving of the individual subject either as produced historically, constructed socially, conditioned culturally, and subjected to discourse, or as a free individual proclaiming his or her own autonomous values, and whose personal experience is a means of identity construction. Whatever the ways in which the philosophical and sociological contrast between modernity and postmodernity is paralleled by the artistic and literary contrast between modernism and postmodernism, and despite Goethe and some Victorian optimistic, solution-giving identity formation samples, we should agree with Moretti that in most narrative cases of all periods and movements that have produced Bildungsromane, “individual autonomy and social integration are … no longer the two aspects of a single discourse … but incompatible choices” (80). Regardless of the period or movement, in our study, each novel that we designate as Bildungsroman is set chronologically in a developing tradition, structurally and thematically arranged in a kind of generic pattern in order to prove its status as a particular system of elements in the general order or system of the Bildungsroman and thereby to reveal the overall and peculiar thematic and narrative features of the Bildungsroman as a strong literary tradition in English literature from Victorian or even earlier periods to the present. The literary texts that form the basis of our analysis are not merely a category that needs to be included in an overall literary system of world culture, or British cultural heritage, or Victorian fiction, or late modernity and postmodernity, for the sake of rendering its

58

Preliminaries

completeness and aesthetic validity. Rather, they are different in kind, unique and representative of a type of literary discourse which should be studied as a system in itself, for they reveal the existence of a distinct thematic and narrative pattern possessing idiosyncratic features which, if properly comprehended, may enrich the existing critical views on Victorian, modernist, and postmodernist novels, in particular, and on fictional discourse, in general, reorganizing them, and suggesting new ones. This may appear as the result of indulging in wishful thinking, characteristic perhaps of every critic, but amid the wealth of historical and critical references to Victorian fiction, for instance, our concern lends itself to answering to the lack of a specific but systemic study of the Victorian Bildungsroman. The Victorian novels discussed in the second book are among the best works of English fiction, and as independent entities they have received much critical attention from different points of view. Victorian writers and novels have been also approached as practical means of rendering, and arguing about, the methodological validity of various theoretical backgrounds of a number of trends and schools in literary theory and fiction studies, which would often lead to conceptions and ideas that are different and subject to controversy. Few Victorian novels of formation, however, in fact not even David Copperfield, Great Expectations, or Jane Eyre6, have received a comparative appreciation as exponents of the Bildungsroman as a literary system, or have been regarded with direct reference to the conventions of the Bildungsroman in its diachronic and synchronic dimensions, its history of development, its distinctions of gender and literary doctrine, and its generic thematic and narrative elements correlated within the framework of a typolological system. Moreover, Bildungsromane such as Marius the Epicurean and Sartor Resartus are known to educated readers, but an approach to them as Bildungsromane and in relation to other novels of formation is missing. The aim of our study is to accomplish these goals by pursuing unity of concern and methodological rigour, and admitting a complexity of theoretical points of view which would confer pluralism and synchronization to this study, but selecting those that are mostly applicable to our approach and hoping to conclude with new ones. As with Paul de Man’s direction in deconstruction aiming at anti-essentialism and pluralism of approach, we also admit diversity and heterogeneity of views, 6 The situation is even worse in the case of the twentieth-century and contemporary Bildungsromane.

The Approach to the Bildungsroman as a Literary System

59

which we modify according to our purpose: to name just thematology and the comparative approach, Bakhtin on “roman vospitaniya” and the chronotope, Tynyanov on literary history, Genette on narrative categories, and so on. As substratum, we follow a formalist perspective to consider literature – along with the dichotomies of innovation and tradition, dominant and peripheral, centre and margin – as a system, and likewise the literary work as a system of elements which is to be evaluated with regard to both thematic and structural levels conceived in reciprocity and interrelatedness. Our view of the Bildungsroman as a system and our approach to it find support in the vitality of formalist theories adopted by various contemporary scholars, fields, and concerns, such as Itamar EvenZohar’s polysystem, Linda Hutcheon’s constant, or Brian McHale’s notion of “dominant” in relation to postmodernist fiction7. Given the extent and complexity of concern as well as the large critical ambit of our study, we divide our project – which can be called The Bildungsroman in English Literature Series – in three constituent parts, each allotted a separate book, as follows: (1) A History of the Bildungsroman: From Ancient Beginnings to Romanticism; (2) Victorian Fiction as Bildungsroman: Flourishing and Complexity; and (3) The Late Modern and Postmodern Bildungsroman: Reinvention and Diversity.

7

See in particular Nicol’s three main features or elements, which are mostly important, or dominants, in the postmodern novel (xvi), itself conceived as a literary system.

CHAPTER ONE BAKHTIN ON FICTIONAL TYPOLOGY FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO GOETHE

The present book focuses on the development of the Bildungsroman from ancient beginnings to Goethe. Such a concern with examining the process of the rise and consolidation of the Bildungsroman, or the novel of formation, as a literary system is needed and revelatory for an eventual discussion of its Victorian, modernist, and postmodern hypostases. Like every self-standing literary tradition or literary pattern, the Bildungsroman has had its own process of development, which manifests within and is interrelated with the larger process of development of the novel as a genre, in general, and in relation to various literary movements and trends. To the present, the only systemic and methodical presentation of this process of movement of the Bildungsroman through history belongs to M. M. Bakhtin in his “Roman Vospitaniya I Ego Znacheniye V Istorii Realizma: K Istoricheskoi Tipologii Romana” (1936-1938), known in English as “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism: Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel”. Bakhtin’s ideas in this study are not far removed from those in his other works dealing with the novelistic genre, for instance in his “Formi vremeni i hronotopa v romane” (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics”), written in 1937. In the latter, the types of novel which “The Bildungsroman” names the “travel novel”, the “novel of ordeal”, and the “biographical novel”, are addressed as the “adventure novel of everyday life”, the “adventure novel of ordeal”, and the “biographical novel”, respectively. Among Bakhtin’s other works, the following deal with the historical development of the novelistic genre and advance his theory of the novel: “Discourse in the Novel” (1934-1935), “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” (1940), and “Epic and Novel” (1941). To follow the Russian scholar’s assumption from “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (Bakhtin 84-258), antiquity saw the rise of prose fiction. Its three basic types of novel were extremely productive

Bakhtin on Fictional Typology from Ancient Times to Goethe

61

and determined the development of the genre throughout its history to the present. One type is the novel of travel or wandering, which Bakhtin provisionally called, in “Forms of Time”, the “adventure novel of everyday life” (111), represented by Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Petronius’s The Satyricon. The main hero is a moving point in space, with no definite characteristic features. His spatial movement does not situate him in the centre of the writer’s attention, but his wanderings and adventures allow the author to render the world’s spatial and social multiplicity through his narrator. This multiplicity is clearly static and is interrelated with a static view of human existence. The static character lives in a static world of contraries and opposite aspects of a life experience. Likewise, the time category, comprising personal, biological and more general, historical temporal aspects, is loosely fixed. Travelling experience is linked to two other types of experience, namely adventure and ordeal. The novel of trial or ordeal is the “adventure novel of ordeal” as another type of novel provisionally called so by Bakhtin in “Forms of Time” (86) with reference to the Greek romance, or, in general, to the so-called “Greek” or “Sophist” novels written before the second and sixth centuries AD. Ordeal, as the main thematic perspective, is to be found in, for example, Heliodorus’s Ethiopian History (Aethiopica) and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. Ordeal, or trial, will be a major thematic element in the Bildungsroman literary system, often responsible for the change and epiphany of the protagonist, and a kind of “opportunity: not an obstacle to be overcome while remaining ‘intact’, but something that must be incorporated, for only by stringing together ‘experiences’ does one build a personality” (Moretti 48). Ordeal or trial is later artistically assessed in medieval romances, picaresque novels, and even much later, even nowadays. Bakhtin contends that there are two different variants of this type of novel: the first one is represented by the ancient Greek novel and the second is linked to the early Christian lives of saints, especially martyrs. The first variant marks the trial of fidelity in love and the purity of the idealized hero and heroine. The experience of life might be rich as a series of adventures, but the psychological representation of the characters remains beyond a literary concern. The adventure novel of ordeal is another type of novel that produces static characters, “given” by the narrator, and whose unmodified features are tested and checked. Yet this type of novel, when compared to the novel of travel or wandering, provides a rather unique, complex and difficult, although likewise static, image of the human being. A similarly more complex picture of the characters is revealed by the second kind of novel of ordeal, namely the one centred on the lives of the Christian saints

62

Chapter One

and martyrs, with its pattern of ordeal and trial through pain and temptation and its psychological determinism of the adventurous aspect. Psychological and adventurous dimensions of the chronotope confer to the novel of ordeal a status superior to that of the novel of travel or of everyday life, for it focuses on character, whereas the surrounding world is the chronotope for the experience of being tested, for the trial of the static protagonists. Finally, antiquity provides the basis for a “biographical novel” (Bakhtin, “Forms of Time” 130), or a biographical form of fiction, which includes ancient biographies and confessions, and involves an individual’s biographical/autobiographical self-consciousness and a new type of chronotope, a kind of real-life chronotope. The character developmental principle is linked to a biographical organization of the character and the novel structure, where the character is again static, despite the novel’s focus on a more complex chronotope involving various spatial realities and longer periods of time such as childhood and youth. Apart from “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, another work sharing similar ideas with those from “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” is the essay “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel” (written in 1941). Here Bakhtin develops his theory of the “novelization” of other genres and of literature on the whole based on the idea of self-criticism of the novel and on the assumption that as an auto-critical genre, the novel develops perpetually through the principles of parody and self-parody. In “Epic and Novel”, Bakhtin engages with Lukacs in “The Theory of the Novel” (1914-1915); both conceive the development of the novel as embodying the growth of consciousness, but unlike Lukacs, who typologizes and compares fictional works, Bakhtin claims that the novel fights for its own hegemony in literature, since it has no canon of its own, as other genres do. He further contends that the novel is the only developing genre, still uncompleted, whose development takes place in the context of the historical day and whose triumph means the decline of other genres. For Bakhtin, the novel is the only genre that continues to develop and it does so since it is in relationship with other genres, which is a relationship of struggle and incorporation: We have already said that the novel gets on poorly with other genres. (…) The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them. (Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel” 5)

Bakhtin on Fictional Typology from Ancient Times to Goethe

63

Other genres have completed their development, they are fixed and static, such as the epic, which is, by contrast, a dead language. During its growth, the novel deploys parody as destructive on other genres and is also self-critical by parodic stylization of canonized genres; thus achieving the novelization of other genres, this process “does not imply their subjection to an alien generic canon; on the contrary, novelization implies their liberation from all that serves as a brake on their unique development, from all that would change them along with the novel into some sort of stylization of forms that have outlived themselves” (Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel” 39). The novel is thus in perpetual renewal of its thematic essence and form and, in its connectedness with other genres, it sustains their own vitality and renewal. This is once again a return to the discussion of polyphony at the level of cultural consciousness, of heteroglossia (raznorechie) and dialogism, promoting the idea of intertextuality. All these terms are interrelated and mutually revelatory in the discussion of the novel with regard to its diachronic assessment. Concerning the history of the development of the Bildungsroman as a literary system, dialogism would point to the novel of formation as a dialogic work which is in dialogue with other works, of various periods, movements, and genres, informing and being informed by such previous works. The Bildungsroman, the novel, or literature in general, is dialogic because language and verbal discourse represent, Bakhtin argues, (1) a phenomenon of cultural communication and (2) a social event, like consciousness, an ideological phenomenon, a product of social intercourse where meaning arises contextually, within a concrete and particular historical occurrence. Raznorechie, which refers to distinct varieties within a single language, shows that the novel originates in the co-existence of different types of speech (of characters, narrators, authors) and reveals again the primacy of context over text, which generates meaning. Polyphony, or manyvoicedness, is cognate with the relation between self and other, between subject and object, revealing, as in Dostoyevsky, that each character is a voice speaking for individual self, distinct from others, not subordinated to the voice of the author. It further demonstrates that the characters are in dialogue, or fight, or mutually express each other, where the authorial voice has no advantage: this is unfinalizability, which means that the self cannot be completely finalized, understood, known, or located. Related to the historical view of the novel, in general, and, to us, of the Bildungsroman, in particular, is another principle by Bakhtin, namely the “chronotope”, which is a cognitive concept and an important feature of language denoting the time and space relationship that is responsible for the organization of events in the narrative sequence. Emerging from real

64

Chapter One

historical time and space, the literary chronotope is related to the historical view of the novel and defines genre and generic distinctions. In his own words, Bakhtin gives “the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (“Forms of Time” 84). What characterizes the artistic chronotope is the intersection of axes and fusion of indicators: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (“Forms of Time” 84). The chronotope defines genre and generic distinctions, “for in literature the primary category of the chronotope is time. The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic” (“Forms of Time” 85). It means that “each literary genre codifies a particular world-view which is defined, in part, by its chronotope”, and that “the spatial and temporal configurations of each genre determine in large part the kinds of action a fictional character may undertake in that given world (without being iconoclastic, a realist hero cannot slay mythical beasts, and a questing knight cannot philosophize over drinks in a café)” (Falconer 112). Like the novel in general continuously developing, the Bildungsroman as a category of this genre also continues to develop and diversify thematically. Like the novel in general in its growth parodying and incorporating the elements of other genres leading to their novelization, the Bildungsroman in its process of development as a distinct novelistic subgenre incorporates elements from various other novelistic types. With regard to Bakhtin’s “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism”, a diachronic perspective begins with the first antecedents in antiquity, continues with the succeeding periods and concludes with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, to disclose the mode in which elements of the novel of ordeal, the biographical novel, and so on, find their way into the newly emerging system of the Bildungsroman, but they are reformulated and re-accentuated, and the element of character formation (“becoming”, as in Bakhtin) assumes the dominant position in this system. In this essay dealing particularly with the novel of formation, Bakhtin shows again that the novel originates in the co-existence of different types of speech (of characters, narrator, author) and that the novel develops as a parody on various genres, deconstructing and reconstructing their various patterns, forms, and structures.

Bakhtin on Fictional Typology from Ancient Times to Goethe

65

Among the fundamental concepts and aspects of the theoretical system of Bakhtin’s view on literature, culture, and history, such as polyphony, carnival, grotesque, dialogism, and chronotope, is also that of “roman vospitanyia” (“novel of education”) as a special subcategory of the novelistic genre. Bakhtin also calls this type of novel “Erziehungsroman” or “Bildungsroman”, and claims that it appeared – that is, established itself as a literary tradition – in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Bakhtin’s approach to this generic subcategory includes the definition, main thematic and structural elements, and especially its history of development which is to be found in the developmental history of the novel itself as a genre, in order to focus eventually on a number of canonical Bildungsromane, of which Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is the first to receive an extended critical attention. The study in which Bakhtin performs this endeavour and which is mostly important for our focus on the development history of the Bildungsroman is “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)”. Although introduced to the English-speaking reader only in the mid-1980s, it had been written some forty years earlier, probably 1936-1938, and it represents a fragment, which is the introductory part, from a lost booklength manuscript. The Russian scholar regards the Bildungsroman as an important literary tradition and, although it “appeared in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 19), he also names chronologically other works which are usually included as major examples of the “novel of education” (Erziehungsroman or Bildungsroman), such as Xenophon’s Cyropaedia in classical times, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival in the Middle Ages, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus in the Renaissance, Fenelon’s Telemaque in neoclassicism, and later Rousseau’s Emile, Wieland’s Agathon, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (both novels), Dickens’s David Copperfield, Tolstoy’s Childhood, Adolescence, and Youth, Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and others. For Bakhtin, the Bildungsroman is a distinct subcategory of the novel genre along with three other subcategories, namely the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, and the biographical (autobiographical) novel, each having its own subcategories. The classification presupposes historical relevance for each type and is done according to the construction or formulation of the figure or image of the hero; the principle for formulating “the hero figure is related to the particular type of plot, to the

66

Chapter One

particular conception of the world, and to a particular composition of a given novel” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 10). In the case of the Bildungsroman, we call this principle “formation”, and divide it into two types, self-formation and guided formation. For us, formation is the main and the most specific theme in the novel, whereas for Bakhtin in his study on the Bildungsroman “the image of man in the process of becoming” (19) is the more special and specific theme in a novel dealing with the growth and education of a protagonist. Actually, Bakhtin classifies the works of fiction according to how the image of the main hero is constructed in the novel. The character in the process of becoming is opposed to the ready-made and unchanging character. The latter type is the flat, static character of novels from antiquity to the turn of the nineteenth century. The former type is the round, dynamic and changing character that represents a superior phase in the history of novelistic development, and is materialized thematically in the Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman marks the height of the development of the novel, for it shows the emergence of the protagonist, who becomes a variable, in whom changes occur and acquire plot significance, and into whom time is introduced. In other words, the hero or heroine of the Bildungsroman receives a complex and deep subjective, emotional and psychological, thematic expression; with regard to this inner existence, he or she changes in time. The term “process of becoming” in Bakhtin is synonymous for us with the identity formation process. This basic, essential and defining element of “formation” or “becoming” shaping the hero emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century with the rise of the Bildungsroman. Until then, there had been other basic principles that took form and existed in novels formulating the particular hero image and subcategory of the novelistic genre; they prefigure and precede, and are interrelated with the elements of the literary system of the Bildungsroman, whose historical movement throughout the literary practice, Bakhtin argues, begins in ancient time.

CHAPTER TWO ANTIQUITY: THE BEGINNINGS AND FIRST ELEMENTS

The ancient period is where we should start to consider the possibility of existence of some literary elements in prose and narrative poetry which are later detected in the novels of various centuries, finally culminating as aspects of a typical Bildungsroman literary pattern. In the process of the development of the Bildungsroman from antiquity until its consolidation as a literary tradition in the eighteenth century with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the most important role was played by the picaresque mode of writing, the sentimental outlook, and the romantic perspectives in rendering the concern with the establishment of an individual personality. The ancient classical period already witnesses the emergence of a certain number of attributes and principles of the novel in its incipient stage that would become aspects and features of the fictional canon, in general, and elements and devices of the Bildungsroman literary system, in particular, in both form and especially content. Among them, a masterful delineation of characters who represent moral qualities and vices; realism in the observation of human behaviour; representation of the progress of the hero through the complexity and variety of the contemporary world; biographical or autobiographical elements; the tendency of the narrator to speak in propria persona; the spirit of adventure incorporated in the travel scheme of the narrative form; the character’s experience of life as a gradual self-discovery and gaining of knowledge and a satisfactory philosophy of life; the harmonious love of hero and heroine; comical effects produced while picturing different social experiences and settings through which the main character moves in his or her general search for a way of living where action counts more than welfare. In the discussion of the rise and consolidation of the Bildungsroman as a literary tradition one should focus on these and other elements in order to avoid a general, surveyistic approach to the complexity of the fictional phenomenon considered diachronically from antiquity to the Victorian

68

Chapter Two

Age. The structuralist and post-structuralist interpretative arrangements of Shklovsky (O teorii prozy, 1929) and Lotman (“Lektsii po strukturalinoi poetike”, 1994) concerning art as language and as a system of signs, and the written language of a novel, a poem and other literary works as their instrument and material, consider that language influences diachronically the essence of every cultural system as well as literature and fiction in particular. In turn, written language is also indispensable from the instability and dynamics of historical and cultural circumstances. The aestheticization of written language as a device in the literary act of communication becomes possible by means of a set of canons as literary elements and devices; they would eventually make things unique and complicate the form of a work of art in order to increase the difficulty and time of perception as this process in art is an end in itself and must be protracted. Adding Bakhtin to Shklovsky and Lotman, such canonical principles underpinning the development of the Bildungsroman and representing elements of its consolidated literary pattern include experience, journey, ordeal, adventure, personal history, remembrance, psychology and other thematic devices that make language be perceived as artistic and be conceived within the range of aesthetic values of the literary work. These elements appear and develop to strengthen their place in the literary discourse. However, it was not until the principle of formation – meaning emergence, becoming, and change of the protagonist – in its both types as self-formation and guided formation – emerged as a definite literary concern with Goethe’s novel that the system of the Bildungsroman was created and the formation of character acquired the status of a thematic category that would determine and reify the existence of the Bildungsroman as a fictional tradition up to the present. The development of the Bildungsroman, like that of other types of fiction, reveals a concern with the representation of events that sink in the rendering of the experience of life of a fictionalized human subject. This is how is constructed, in Bakhtin’s words, the image of the main hero. Things that happen, however, have little impact on this hero’s psyche and identity. They provide him with adventurous situations; he experiences them, and he is a good observer of these things. Observation and adventure, and above all experience represent the modes applicable existentially to the life of the protagonist thematized in various literary works. Experience, relevant to the condition of both author and character, becomes the principle of temporal representation of personal perceptions, memories and imaginings. It articulates literarily a personal history and

Antiquity: The Beginnings and First Elements

69

corresponds to a self-conscious narrative category. The process of experiencing – in order to be integrated in the framework of the Bildungsroman or the novel of formation – consists of events and life situations that transform the hero’s psyche and change his inward rather than his outward status within a certain social background. This process is one of spiritual development, transformation, emergence and becoming, and is aimed at achieving the formation and completeness of consciousness. Formation is the main fictional reality, the main thematic perspective, the main element in the literary system of the Bildungsroman. It differentiates this type of novel from other types of fiction dealing with the experience of a protagonist, namely, according to Bakhtin, the travel novel, the biographical (autobiographical) novel, and the novel of ordeal. The protagonist’s life-time presented as his or her experience of life leading to the formation of personality necessarily includes the elements of travel, ordeal, adventure, personal history, remembrance, psychology – hence the interrelationship and interdependence of the four novelistic subcategories. The analysis of the “whatness” and “howness” of experience as offering the basis for the rise of the Bildungsroman as a literary tradition should also consider its thematic alliance to the author’s imagination, remembrance and introspective representation in the fictional discourse of the character in the process of transition from childhood to maturity. This process is the main literary concern of two types of fiction that focus on rendering the growth of the hero’s personality. One is called the “developmental novel”, and another is the Bildungsroman or the “novel of formation”. The point of the “developmental novel is to achieve a verbal account of the process of mediation by means of which one (…) stage changes into the next” (Westburg 40), and the change of the personality is a pseudo-change, for it means only a change of outer but not inner qualities, a quantitative but not qualitative change. The “travel novel”, the “novel of ordeal”, and the “biographical novel” – as designated and discussed by Bakhtin in “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” – are different fictional hypostases of the developmental novel and differ from the novel of formation (Bildungsroman). Thus, the aspects formulating the figure of the protagonist in the developmental novel are static and allow for static stages of the character’s experience of life (except for biological growth), as well as for the change of his external condition exclusively, and for the writer’s social portrayal and attitude expressed in the literary work. In turn, although it may be also concerned with both the individual and society, regarding the former, however, the Bildungsroman implies a

70

Chapter Two

consideration of both static stages and a series of crises or painful experiences leading to psychological revelation, of both the continuity and the differentiation of these stages in a process of change and reconfiguration of the hero’s inner structure as the foundation for the formation of personality, which is the very essence of every Bildungsroman. In the travel novel, the first type of novel which originates in classical antiquity, both the image of man and that of the surrounding world are static, and therefore “barely distinguishable”, for “emphasis is placed only on differences and contrasts”; this type of novel “does not recognize human emergence and development”, and even if “his status changes sharply …, he himself remains unchanged” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 11). This pattern of the construction of the novel and of positioning of the character prevails in the works of Apuleius and Petronius. It continues and persists in later European picaresque novels, such as Lazarillo de Tormes, The Life of Guzman de Alfarache, Francion, Gil Blas, in the adventure-picaresque novels of Defoe (Moll Flanders, for example), the adventure fiction of Smollett (Roderick Random), and even in some nineteenth-century novels. One may argue, however, with references to Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, for example, that the character’s desire for new things and the knowledge of magic, as well as the re-evaluation of “metamorphosis” not as a tragic change of a character into a natural object (as in Greek mythology, which is the fictional material for Ovid, for instance), but, as in Egyptian mythology, as a personal, individual practice of man, which justifies the fantasy and imagination of the narrator, and the comedy of adventure (Roznoveanu 315), cause frustration and prompt the protagonist to engage in search and inner change. Such change traces the movement (which may or may not also refer to man’s biological development from childhood to maturity) from instinct to rationalism, idea, and spiritual revelation. In modern terms, these fictional perspectives8 would reveal thematic and narrative organization of the fictional system of the Bildungsroman as a novel of formation of a human personality. In other words, the formative process is expressed and assessed through the voice of a narrator who verbalizes and correlates the moral and aesthetic time of

8

They should be regarded along with certain notes of verisimilitude; metamorphosis as a narrative device of identification between author/narrator and character; confessional and retrospective representation of adventurous chronotope; ethical and didactical components of character’s experience of life and of his initiation; and others.

Antiquity: The Beginnings and First Elements

71

the creative act and the time of the human existence of his character who is being modelled by the duration of the metamorphosis. The character-narrator confesses his way through life with realism, irony, and satire, and with a Latin type of sarcastic oratory, applying his metamorphosis as a method that justifies the intrusion into his own self and into the intimacy of other characters. The metamorphosis is also “a rhetorical modality to strengthen the novelistic credibility in a world in crepuscule, a world which doubts its own gods” (Roznoveanu 319, my trans.). The novel of metamorphosis, critics claim, changes or provides the metamorphosis of the novelistic genre, in that the life experience and destiny of Lucius are apparently a parody on the Odyssean type of adventure. More importantly, in his act of narration, the narrator compresses the distance between narrator and character that remembers his adventures, makes simultaneous “the moral and aesthetic time of the act of creation with the time of the human existence of the character affected by the length of metamorphoses” (Roznoveanu 319). As a result, Apuleius’s novel is a proto-Bildungsroman which shows a character emerging, but not in Bakhtin’s sense, from the metamorphosis as acquiring initiation in a moral-educative sense, as becoming a moralist and a critic of his own experience and of the real world around which acts as the chronotope for his experience. Amid all this criticism mingled with satire and ironic realism, and in an almost postmodern thematic framework of magical realism, emerges the destiny of an individual subject, an individual model of existence that fuses into an original fictional formula pagan fantasy, Egyptian epic, Greek epic and adventure, stoicism, oriental theology, Christian ideas, logic, objectiveness, and realism. Contrary to Bakhtin’s emphasis on the static nature of the human subject and of the world’s diversity, it seems that the novel of antiquity already suggests the fact that the character’s external perspectives of change are intermingled with some internal states of developmental process, which are also subject to change (as later in the picaresque novel, for example). However, it was not until Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre that the formation of personality was considered a literary concern in fiction on an equal footing with, or even higher than, the concern with the representation of human existence against the social background or as being determined by it. Still, Bakhtin argues, although the sociocultural phenomena are complex, diverse, distinct, strange, and contradictory, there is no sense of the wholeness of such phenomena, and the conception of the complexity

72

Chapter Two

of the world is static. This multiplicity and diversity of the world and the milieu receive a spatial rather than temporal expression and, being static, generate a static view of the universe and especially of human existence; the character is static and does not change; the world – a spatially static coexistence of contraries and differences; life experience – “an alternation of various contrasting conditions: success/failure, happiness/unhappiness, victory/defeat, and so on” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 11). In the travel novel, the temporal category, unlike the spatial one, is poorly developed and less thematically and narratively fixed: the historical time of an epoch and even the biological time of the character (that is, his age and movement from childhood through maturity to old age) are not definitely determined and are often completely absent. The existence of contrasts and diversity in the sociocultural phenomenon, along with the absence of any narrative relationship and of the sense of unity of the world, determines the interest in and approach to some alien social systems, social groups, ways of living, and mores. Hence the static conception of the author and the static presentation of the world and of the character, and of his experience of life in this world. The background in which the character is involved is static and divided into strange, exotic, different, reciprocal if contrary situations and events. The protagonist’s main life experience is travelling or wandering; to travel suggests passing through adventure, and the adventurous time is the only form which exists in many novels of antiquity. This temporal representation is revealed with the aid of a narrator who grasps a line of adjacent interconnected temporal moments – seconds, hours, days – as parts of a general, united temporal process. Temporal descriptions are linked to a certain background (spatial reality, consisting of, say, home, roadway, city streets, and so on) of the adventurous action (fight, robbery, escape) and mark different temporal realities (for instance, “day”, “morning”, “night”, “next hour”, “a minute later”, “an hour before”, “on the next day”). The spatial category being static and the historical and personal time absent, emergence, formation, becoming and even a clearly conceived development of a protagonist do not belong to this kind of novel, for the hero does not change as a human being while wandering, even if his condition (in terms of welfare, for example, or social position) may change. One may see it in the whole ancient literary framework, including in the proto-novels The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) by Apuleius and The Satyricon by Petronius. The protagonist of The Golden Ass, for example, who reveals a character formulation principle linked to the novel of travel, is “a point moving in space” with “no essential distinguishing characteristics”;

Antiquity: The Beginnings and First Elements

73

he is of no real literary importance for the author or the reader, and his experience or movement in space enables the author “to develop and demonstrate the spatial and static social diversity of the world (country, city, culture, nationality, various social groups and the specific conditions of their lives)” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 10). Although essential for the rise of the novel as a distinct literary type is verisimilitude (a realist element), many ancient writings accept on the thematic level the fantastic element, as in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, in which Lucius is transformed into a donkey, but after a number of adventures reacquires his human identity. Also, Apuleius insists on an allegorical interpretation of the subject under the influence of different mystic and religious practices of late antiquity, as well as folklore. In Ovid, the “metamorphosis is limited to its sense from Greek mythology: a tragic transformation, and above all irreversible, of character into an object of nature” (Roznoveanu 315). By contrast, Apuleius revives the old, Egyptian meaning, which lacks a depressive note, and “uses magic, with its spectacular epic attributes”; as a result, metamorphosis “emerges as an accessible practice that justifies on the epic level the narrator’s flight of fantasy, the comedy of adventure”, the parodic convention, and to a certain degree the “criteria of verisimilitude and documentary truth” (Roznoveanu 315). Petronius’s The Satyricon is closer to the element of verisimilitude, since the novel reveals the development of the Roman society, a satirical manner in the representation of reality and people, the attempt to render the characters through their everyday speech. Such features have prompted many critics to speak about the realism of Petronius’s novel, and even about the naturalism of some of its scenes. The hero’s experience in this type of fiction consists mainly of wanderings and occasionally of escapades and adventures which are mostly of the ordeal type – hence the novel of travel is intertextually linked to the second type of novel emerging in antiquity, the novel of ordeal, which in Europe is more widespread than the other types. Like the other types, the novel of ordeal has a long history of development in subsequent centuries through the medieval period (the medieval chivalric romance) into the modern one with the baroque novel and later throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To travel and to wander, to interact socially and inter-humanly suggest passing a trial of life, an ordeal provided by various alien forces in order to test the character’s fidelity, wit, courage, bravery, virtue, bravery, value, nobility, purity, and even sanctity.

74

Chapter Two

The novel of ordeal or trial is a type of novel that engages ordeal as a particular principle of character construction within the general thematic and narrative construction of the novel as a series of tests for the protagonists in a sociocultural milieu itself constructed as an “arena of the struggle and testing of the hero”, and the events and adventures as “a touchstone for the hero” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 11-12). As in “Forms of Time”, in “The Bildungsroman” Bakhtin claims that the principle of ordeal is conceived of and engaged as a fictional device in the ancient classical period in two distinct subcategories of the novel of ordeal: the first is represented by the Greek romance, such as Heliodorus’s The Ethiopian Story (Aethiopica) and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, and the second by the early Christian hagiographies dealing with the lives of especially martyrs and other saints. Following the ancient period, its third category is the medieval chivalric novel, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the fourth, the most important and influential aesthetically and historically significant subcategory, is the baroque novel of d’Urfe, Lohenstein, and others. The last type, according to Bakhtin, has two different variants in the centuries to come, namely the adventure-heroic novel of Lewis, Radcliffe, Walpole, and others, and the pathos-filled psychological, sentimental novel of Richardson and Rousseau. The first subcategory (the Greek romance) is based on testing the “fidelity in love and the purity of the ideal hero and heroine” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 12). As in the travel novel, the image of the characters is static and therefore there is no idea of development or emergence of personality, no change or reshaping of personality; also, their nature is immutable, and their ideal features, such as fidelity, purity, innocence, and other moral values, are abstract and dogmatically accepted. An adventurous line of experience involving the heroes represents a threat to these values. Unlike the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, through its principle of testing, is closer to the Bildungsroman system with regard to the construction of the hero image from a twofold perspective. According to Bakhtin, (1) in both of its classical subcategories, the novel of ordeal provides a unitary (alas still static, predetermined, and ready-made) image of the hero, “a developed and complex image of man, one that has had an immense influence on the subsequent history of the novel” (“The Bildungsroman” 12); and (2) concerning only the lives of saints, the novel of ordeal turns the internal life (habitus or condition) and even psychology into important aspects of the hero image. In the Greek romance, as the first subcategory of the novel of ordeal, the characters’ experience of life (consisting mainly of adventures) is

Antiquity: The Beginnings and First Elements

75

important in so far as it provides provocations beyond their inner existence that attempt to thwart their love. But the static personality of the characters and their abstract idealization exclude formation, education, initiation and development because their experience of life provides no material for the characters’ inner change or their general formation (self-formation and/or guided formation) as a connection and balance of the inward and the outward. In other words, the hero’s experience of life is associated rather with the conception of external action as adventure than with psychology or any inner action as ordeal of the soul that would eventually produce the mental and spiritual change, and consequently the formation, that is, emergence – through change – of personality. The novel of trial or ordeal creates a static character, always “complete and unchanging”, whose qualities “are given from the very beginning, and during the course of the novel they are only tested and verified” (“The Bildungsroman” 12). In Bakhtin’s opinion, this image is linked to a kind of rhetorical-juridical concept of man deeply rooted in Greek rhetorical casuistry: the protagonist is viewed through different juridical categories, such as guilt, chastity, virtue, felony, merit, and others, and becomes the subject of a trial, prosecution, or defence, in other words, the bearer of felony or merits, human vices or values. The second variant of the novel of ordeal in the ancient classical period, describing early Christian lives of martyrs (but whose elements can be found also in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, and later in Bunyan and Charlotte Brontë) is constructed as a test of “a holy man through suffering and temptation” (“The Bildungsroman” 13). The testing is no longer external but internal, and adventure is psychologically determined; the tested hero displays again unity of personality, even if he or she is still static and predetermined; and the test does not represent a formative life experience, a factor of change (“The Bildungsroman” 13). The general experience of life is expressed from the point of view of a ready and dogmatically received ideal, but this type of narrative provides a more complex picture of the characters, and their inner existence is highly emphasized. Concerning the narrative organization of the novel of ordeal, in general, or plot (“sjuzhet”, in Bakhtin’s terminology), it is “always constructed on deviations from the normal course of the hero’s life, exceptional events and situations that would not be found in the typical, normal, ordinary biography” (“The Bildungsroman” 14). In other words, the events, situations, and the various experiences of life, differing from a typical, common human biography, and in the majority of cases being organized as adventures, lack any real biographical duration, any

76

Chapter Two

biographical or social significance. The novel of trial or ordeal “begins where a deviation from the normal social and biographical course of life begins, and it ends where life resumes its normal course”; therefore, the events in this novel “do not create a new type of life, a new human biography that is determined by the changing conditions of life” (“The Bildungsroman” 14). The action in the Greek novel of antiquity is linked to what usually does not happen between, or separates, two closely linked moments of biography (engagement and wedding, for example). This aspect curbs the normal course of life, but does not change it: the hero and heroine will be finally united, and the biographical course of the characters will continue outside the narration. Concerning the temporal category in this type of novel, the narrative time is deprived of a real biographical duration because of the thematic importance of incident, chance or fate. The peculiarity of the plot, consisting of deviations from the normal biographical course of life, transfigures the category of time: it lacks real historical, social and biographical values, as well as historical localization, events and circumstances; it is linked to an “adventurous time” taken out of biography and history, and is unlimited and perpetual. The novel of ordeal also contains the so-called “fairy-tale time”. However, the most important achievement of this type of novel in matters of temporal categories is the production of what Bakhtin calls “psychological time” (“The Bildungsroman” 15), which is subjectively felt and extended by the character (when facing danger, or expressing feelings, expectations, unextinguished infatuation), yet it lacks again any definite location in the individual’s experience of life. Concerning the spatial category (“depiction of the world”, in Bakhtin’s words) in the novel of ordeal, the surrounding world lacks historicity and independence. Unlike in the novel of travel or wandering, in which the world and everyday life occupy an important place, in the novel of ordeal, which focuses on character, the external world is “attached like a background to an immobile hero” (“The Bildungsroman” 15) and everyday life is almost absent. The surrounding world is important in so far as it provides temporal and spatial realities for the trial of the static characters who have no power to shift their own inner perspectives on existence and to alter the world. They certainly are not changed by it. There is thus no reciprocity or visible relationship between subject and object, character and external world: “the world is not capable of changing the hero, it only tests him”, the hero does not affect or change the world either, and “while undergoing tests and vanquishing his enemies, the hero leaves everything in the world in its place” (“The Bildungsroman” 16).

Antiquity: The Beginnings and First Elements

77

What links the novel of ordeal to the Bildungsroman – apart from the aspects of unity and interiority of the character – and makes it distinct from the travel novel in which the surrounding world is important, not the hero – is the concentration on the protagonist. Although still important, the surrounding world is often transformed, along with the secondary characters, “into a mere background for the hero, into a decoration, a setting” (“The Bildungsroman” 15). The novel of ordeal does not recognize any relationship, interaction or interdependence between the hero and the external world, but the focus on the experience of the protagonist and especially the idea of testing a hero continue to exist and, becoming more complicated, emerge as vital elements in the system of the novel of formation and not only, as for instance in the realist fiction of Stendhal, Balzac, and Dostoevsky. The main aspect that creates a gap between the novel of ordeal and the Bildungsroman – apart from the static, ideal, and predetermined aspects of the character – and renders the former similar to the travel novel, is the lack of change and emergence of a new character, the lack of a developmental principle, and the lack of a biographical form of fiction, in that the image of the hero would be linked to a biographical arrangement of the novel’s thematic and narrative structure. This problem is to a certain extent solved by the third subcategory of the novel in the ancient period, which is the biographical novel, based on ancient biographies, autobiographies, and confessions. The biographical element enters the tradition of novel writing and is later artistically assessed in medieval romances, picaresque novels, and even much later, even nowadays; it also becomes another important literary element of thematic consideration in the general system of the Bildungsroman. Bakhtin identifies “the naïve old (still classical) form of success/failure”, “the confessional form (biography-confession)”, “the hagiographic form”, and the eighteenth-century “family-biographical novel” (for example, Tom Jones) as the main subcategories of the biographical form. The biographical novel of antiquity differs from the previous two types in that it lays emphasis in the construction of its plot on some of the most typical, basic and everyday aspects of human life, such as birth, childhood, education, youth, marriage, work, and death, that is, moments of experience that may be said to exist before the beginning and/or after the ending of the novel of ordeal. The biographical novel does not take into account deviations from the normal course of life and therefore, concerning character representation strategies, the hero’s life is depicted and represents the novel’s main concern. However, his image “lacks any true process of becoming or development” (“The Bildungsroman” 17).

78

Chapter Two

The biographical type of novel is important for the further development of the literary pattern of the Bildungsroman on two counts: (1) the crisis of the hero and (2) his rebirth, both signifying the change in the hero himself. This change is the only essential aspect of the construction of the hero image, since, on the whole, the main character is not presented in a process of growth, development, or formation; the inner life of the hero is static, and the hero himself “remains essentially unchanged” (“The Bildungsroman” 17). The novel renders the experience of the character’s life as a process through which what is actually formed and changed are his external life and personal destiny. What really count in life are the objective results (merits, deeds, professional and creative accomplishments) and destiny, typologized by the happiness/unhappiness or success/failure dichotomy. The category of time that appears here is the “biographical time”, which is linked to the wholeness of human existence, colouring it with realism and singularity of a man’s life. As opposed to the adventure time, this type is quite realist; moreover, since each event “is localized in the whole of this life process”, it “ceases to be adventure” (“The Bildungsroman” 18). The total life process includes all the moments of the biographical time which make this process irreversible and limited. Moments, hours, days, nights – representing lines of adjacent interconnected temporal units subordinated to biographical time – almost lose their significance in the biographical novel. Rather, this novel is concerned with longer periods of time, say, childhood or youth, as aspects or parts of the general process of life and as being governed by a biographical temporal reality. In relation to the spatial category in the biographical novel, the external world is not the hero’s mere background. Rather, it assumes a special character, and there are strong links between the hero and the surrounding world, which are not random or unexpected: “secondary characters, countries, cities, things, and so on enter into the biographical novel in significant ways and acquire a significant relationship to the whole life of the main hero”; because of the link between a personal experience of life and the epoch and historical time, “it becomes possible to reflect reality in a more profoundly realistic way” (“The Bildungsroman” 18). Concerning the construction of the hero image in the biographical novel, in such narrative circumstances in which the third-person strategies lack an adventurous aspect, the hero’s experience of life is not determined by ordeal or trial, or by testing of his values. The protagonist is not a moving point, as in the travel novel, devoid of individual features; nor is he an abstract sample of heroization, as in the novel of ordeal. Instead, he strives for personal achievements according to his human nature, which

Antiquity: The Beginnings and First Elements

79

encompasses both positive and negative features. These features “are fixed and ready-made”, static, given from the very beginning, hence the character himself remains unchanged, “events shape not the man, but his destiny”, and the experience of life marks a development and consolidation not of man’s spiritual components but of his destiny and external condition (“The Bildungsroman” 19). According to Bakhtin, these are the basic principles that formulate and shape the image of the hero in the novel in its incipient form in the ancient period. These principles and elements continue to exist in the succeeding ages and can be found in the literary system of the Bildungsroman, for they determine, among others, the appearance of the Bildungsroman in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Antiquity provides therefore the fictional substratum for the further development of the literary pattern of the Bildungsroman with special regard to the thematic perspectives and the narrative techniques in the representation of the character and his or her range of fictional involvement. The elements and aspects of this artistic substratum change diachronically along with the development of fiction writing. They also reveal the consolidation of the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman and are of primary importance in the approach to the English novel of character formation. The traces of the novel in the ancient world are remarkably – though somehow similarly – unearthed by Mikhail Bakhtin in “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” and “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”. Most critics agree that the novel is also related to the ancient tradition of epic writing. Most critics also agree that the novel has its roots in the romance. A short discussion of the romance is necessary because, first, it is the closest to the novel in preceding literary tradition, and, second, it became, starting with the eighteenth century, an important concept in the critical debates on the novel, including its founding writer-critics, among whom Henry Fielding.

CHAPTER THREE THE MIDDLE AGES: THE CONTRIBUTION OF FRENCH AND ENGLISH ROMANCES

The medieval period represents a complex and diverse, as well as turbulent historical, cultural and literary phenomenon. It concerns us here in relation to the production of a remarkable sequence of European literature known as romance, which contains elements and principles that are important for the development of the Bildungsroman and for its consolidation as a literary system and tradition. The medieval romance (also referred to as “chivalrous romance”, “Arthurian legend”, “metrical romance”, or “prose romance”) represents an outstanding literary tradition in the European Middle Ages, being extremely popular in Western Europe, comparable with the novel in the modern period. Romances are extended narratives about the adventure, usually quest or test, of a noble knight, frequently idealized, sometimes accompanied by his squire or a lady; with the clear demarcation of good and evil, he displays knightly honour and ethical principles. The supernatural is often involved in his action. The didactic function of the romance allows for no moral ambiguity; the stories frequently contain ethical lessons based on the good-evil dichotomy, courtly traditions with ideals embodied by stereotypical heroes, and ideas presented by stereotypical situations. The didactic purpose of the romance focuses on feudal duties, social and courtly values. Nonetheless, in spite of some historic or pseudo-historic material presented in the narrative, a romance is not history, and the deeds of the knights are neither credible nor realist, though the hero remains involved in the courtly world. The courtly dimension of the romance gave idealised, static and ready-made, yet also violent and often adulterous heroes, celebrating their success in overcoming obstacles and making possible the triumph of good. The courtly component of the romance co-existed with the learned, the popular, and the religious traditions; the last aspect becomes apparent in the attempts of the church to respond to the popularity of the romance by

The Middle Ages: The Contribution of French and English Romances

81

developing its own romances, termed “romantic hagiographies”, such as the stories about Amis and Amiloun or about the Grail, which would offer more wholesome and didactic entertainment. However, the didactic purpose of the romance remains on the whole an expression of the courtly culture, and the courtly subject matter of the romance involves a number of frequent motifs such as “the distressed damsel, the evil challenger, the fair unknown, the knight of unusual prowess, the power of love that enables overcoming otherwise insurmountable obstacles, or the enchantment that must be removed by a feat performed only by the hero” (Craft 353). The romance was brought to Britain in a cross-cultural interaction following the Norman Conquest. French textual features were borrowed and imitated. In particular, the thematic features of love and adventure, the exaltation of women and the code of chivalry came to replace the sombre brutality and harsh tone of Anglo-Saxon literature. The literary reception of the French material in English literature goes beyond simple imitation, though. As early as the thirteenth century, original works were already produced in English: verse and prose narratives of adventure about King Arthur, Sir Gawain, Lancelot, other heroes, kings, knights, ladies, whose action is motivated by either desire for adventure, or certain goals (search, quest, rescue, fight), or love, or religious faith. In particular, the most famous in Britain were the tales in verse about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. One possible answer to the questions of what a medieval romance is and what its defining features are, is given by the anonymous writer of one of the best known and most popular English medieval romances, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The description of chivalry provided here by the Lady of Hautdesert addressing Gawain refers clearly to the stories about knights, thus providing also a description of the chivalric romance: And in the whole of chivalry, the thing most praised Is the loyal pursuit of love, the code of warfare; For, to speak of the endeavours of true knights, It is the title and text of their works, How lords have ventured their lives for their true loves, Suffered dreadful hardships for the sake of their love, And afterward avenged themselves through their valour and dispelled their pain, And brought bliss into their [the ladies’] chamber with their [the knights’] achievements.

According to Bakhtin, the medieval period furnished the romance (“medieval chivalric novel”) as the third subcategory of the novel of

82

Chapter Three

ordeal, which was significantly influenced by the two classical subcategories (the Greek romance and early Christian hagiographies) and whose idea of testing contains a mixture of “courtly, Christian, or mystical elements” (“The Bildungsroman” 13). Critics also compare the romance to the epic and consider the former to be the next developmental step of the latter towards the rise of the novel, although it is more often agreed that the place of the epic in literary history is taken over by drama. The epic in its turn emerges in the tribal system of ancient and medieval periods to answer some cultural needs, for it represents the imaginative verbalization of the history, beliefs, values, mentality, religion, and above all mythology of a community, that is, the textualization of its rising consciousness. The epic shares with the romance and later with the novel the narrative scheme containing a story; the story (or narrative) is a sequence of events involving characters, organized in a particular linear or non-linear sequence according to the principles of time and place. Depending on the type of events, characters, time, and place, one would identify the type of the narrative text. Thus, the epic is a text in verse form, namely, a long narrative poem with (1) events related to physical action (fight, battle, war, journey, rescue, etc.), supernatural forces (related to divinity, or monsters, or angels, etc.), fantastic elements, heroic and outstanding deeds that are also beneficent and congenial for the community; (2) the protagonist is a hero of superior condition, different by birth, above humanity, possessing a definite human identity, often idealized, and physically as well as morally extremely strong; (3) time is indefinite historically but mythic and legendary; whereas (4) place is more definite, representing a certain national background alluding to a certain national identity. The literary pattern of the ancient epic includes the interdependency of three basic elements that would form the structural essence of many literary works to come, from medieval romances to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

The citadel or human community is a kind of imago dei, but various obstructing forces within or beyond human nature destroy the balance and harmony of the relationship between the divine and the human. The hero, placed between these two aspects of existence, is then acted upon in order

The Middle Ages: The Contribution of French and English Romances

83

to perform heroic deeds generally to act in the interest of the community or citadel to restore the initial harmony. In Beowulf, for instance, with its mixture of pagan and Christian elements, and with its emphasis on the principle of comitatus (related to citadel or community) and that of wyrd (as providentia, a concept related to divinity), the hero successfully fights against the supernatural agencies embodied by monsters who intrude into human community, aiming at undoing human order. Beowulf’s struggle with supernatural, destructive forces suggests the pagan tribal awareness of the clash between human community bounded by loyalty around the protective lord and the insecure, untamed world of beasts, wilderness, natural forces, where the dragon connotes the destructive power of fire, Grendel’s mother that of water, and Grendel that of the earth itself. It is also the conflict between settled and unsettled cultures, between a stable agricultural society and one of migration, bound around a wandering hero. The basic thematic component in Beowulf is the fight between good and evil, between humanity and negative forces. Unsurprisingly, the main part of the narrative presents the warrior hero’s deeds of uncommon bravery. Beowulf, like many other epics, tells of the exploits of a mighty, idealized hero – but static and often determined by divinity or fate – who performs deeds of valour to save his people, humanity in general, from destruction. At the end of the Anglo-Saxon epic, the mortally wounded warrior dies knowing to have laid down his life for the good of his people. In ancient as well as medieval times, the epic illustrates the transition from myth to literature, from sacred to profane; it inherits, according to Olga Freidenberg, mythic images and transforms them into literary texts at the moment of transition from mythic thought to a conceptual one, based on formal-logical concepts. Also, given its narrative pattern, events of a particular nature, characters of a particular status, and the principles of time and place of specific arrangement, the epic can be considered the first step in the literary field towards the rise of the novel in general and of its complex typology, including the Bildungsroman, in particular, where its main features are inherited during the next step by the romance. In his archetypal and anthropological criticism, Northrop Frye differentiates between the romance and the myth, as he also does with regard to the romance and the novel. Concerning the myth and the romance, Frye points to “the hero’s power of action: in the myth he is divine, in the romance proper he is human” (188). Frye develops a theory of “mythos”, according to which the four seasons correspond to a number of thematic modes regarded as generic determinants of thematic universals, where the

84

Chapter Three

romance is the mythos of summer, comedy is spring, tragedy is autumn, and irony and satire are the mythos of winter. The romance does display a number of characteristics that correspond to certain defining features of the ancient epic, such as, in matters of form, an extended narrative in verse; concerning events, these often refer to physical action (war, fight, battle, rescue, etc.), involve supernatural, fantastic features and beings, and are extraordinary, heroic, outstanding, and above all beneficial for the community. The protagonists are outstanding, whether as heroes of supernatural origin or humans of high social status, but in either case above the human condition by their physical and moral strength. In matters of chronotope, unlike the historically indefinite time in the epic, in the romance it is more concrete but still bound to myth and legend; the place of action refers in both cases to a certain national background that expresses, in the case of the romance, a more definite national identity (as there are romances dealing with the matter of France and those with the matter of Britain). The subjects of English romances deal with various types of historical material, and they also include the matter of Rome (that is, classical legend), but the dominant category is the matter of Britain (Arthurian stories, or tales dealing with later knightly heroes). The medieval romance replaces the heroic age of the epic with a chivalric one, tragic seriousness with light-hearted mystery and fantasy, consistent narrative unity with a loose structure, pure physical action with a combination of deed and love, the dramatic mode involving characters that speak for themselves with a narrative one in which the voice of the narrator is a distinct presence. Nevertheless, medieval romances display a number of characteristics that correspond to certain defining features of the ancient epic, among which verse form, extended narration, extraordinary events involving outstanding characters, the supernatural element, action that is beneficent for human community, and others. Subsequently, romances would influence the rise and development of the novel by their elements of adventure, travel, quest, initiation, love, as well as the everyday, the social and the domestic, rather than by their supernatural element and those of improbability, fantasy, extravagance and naïveté. Mikhail Bakhtin is again to be mentioned here. For him, the romance was influenced by the ancient novel of travel and especially by that of ordeal with its static protagonists whose perfect and ideal features are tested, and to which the concern with Christian and chivalric values is added. Romances continue the ancient narrative with its adventure time, to which a fabulous time is added as a result of the influence by native folk

The Middle Ages: The Contribution of French and English Romances

85

or oriental tales, making possible a clear deviation from the normal time category. Although being influenced and having certain characteristics similar to those of the ancient epic and the classical novel of ordeal, since some elements of the literary system of the ancient epic resurface in the system of the medieval romance, the romance is not a direct continuation or development of the literary tradition of ancient writing. Rather, it is more the result of a development within its own, medieval cultural-literary context. Still, of the two main thematic elements of the medieval romance – physical action and love – the former emerges from an epic tradition, medieval not ancient, with chivalric military ideals and chivalric persons as main characters, which is the older chanson de geste (“song of great deeds”), an early French epic form, of which the best example is Chanson de Roland (c. 1100). The latter thematic component of the romance, love, or rather the delicate nuances of feeling in general, is deeply rooted in the lyrics of the troubadours, with their interest in the daily life of the castles, their intense passion addressed to a lady, making her the sole inspirer of all that is good in her lover. In the lyrics of the troubadours and in romances, the worship and adoration of women were mixed with the cult of the Virgin Mary as a part of the medieval religious fervour. The woman was idealized as a superior yet unapproachable being, even as the poet would often lay emphasis also on the extra-marital tie between men and women, to render romantic love as adulterous. Out of the combination of these two thematic perspectives or motifs – love and adventure – romances emerged in the twelfth century as long, romantic, fantasy verse narratives that were composed in central and northern France, and later, following the Norman Conquest, in England (first in Anglo-Norman French, and later in Middle English and in prose form). One of the first writers of extant romance is the French Chretien de Troyes (second half of the twelfth century), whose romances, among other French creations of this type, spread to England and were imitated there as in many other countries. The romance was written or oral, in verse or prose, and most of its content, including English Arthurian material, is pure medieval fiction, although critics hypothesise some historical basis for it. Hence the division of its material into the “Matter of France” (based on chansons de geste, and containing Charlemagne legends), the “Matter of Britain” (based on the Celtic oral tradition, and containing the Arthurian legends), and the “Matter of Greece and Rome” (drawn from ancient history and literature, and containing tales about Alexander the Great, and the fall of Troy and its consequences, or romances based on other classical

86

Chapter Three

stories from the Mediterranean area, such as those dealing with Thebes, of which an example would be Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale”). In English literature, the founder of the Arthurian romances is Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1100-c.1155) in his Latin Historia Regum Britanniae (“The History of the Kings of Britain”). Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed to use an old Anglo-Saxon verse that helped him to recount the Arthurian legend, but the existence of such a source was doubted by many historians. Monmouth is important for the consolidation of the romance as a literary tradition in Britain by changing Arthur the legend into Arthur the character, by imposing upon him Christian attributes, and, in general, by making the themes of love, adventure, and chivalric conduct dominant. The literature of later periods owes to Geoffrey of Monmouth other “gifts” too, such as the first known story of King Lear. In medieval England romances were first cultivated in Anglo-Norman French under the direct patronage of Queen Eleonor of Aquitaine. One of the first works is claimed to be Roman de Troie (c.1160), written by a certain cleric named Benoit de Sainte Maure: the text is a long romanticized account of the Trojan war, adding the new story of a secret, chivalrous love connecting Prince Troilus and a Trojan lady, Briseida. The rise of the romance owes its most important step to the writers’ interest in romanticized history, especially in the legend of King Arthur, which is expressed, for instance, in French in the Roman de Brut by Wace (c.11151183) and its later (after 1200) English version by Layamon, the author of a voluminous 16,000-line poem entitled Brut and based on Wace’s text. Wace himself bases his work on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, and narrates the events from the founding of Britain by Brutus of Troy to the end of the legendary British history created by Monmouth. Another point of interest is the short lai depicting a single adventure as a closely connected series of events, focused on a single problem of courtly behaviour, which is also generally about the Arthurian knights and their ladies. Not all the romances composed in Anglo-Norman concern King Arthur and his knights, as some of them – Horn et Rimel (c.1180) and Haveloc (c.1190), and their later versions, for example – deal with princes exiled from their patrimony, who regain it by deeds of arms. Such romances demonstrate the interest of the French-speaking British aristocracy in native materials, settings and themes. The stories were called “romances” because they were first cultivated in a Romance language (French) as contrasted to Latin; they very soon became the most popular form of medieval literature because of the language accessibility of the vernacular with all types of readers, including

The Middle Ages: The Contribution of French and English Romances

87

commoners. In the process of literary reception, the French material was imitated in the beginning, but then replaced with the British material about King Arthur and his knights, which resulted in literary originality of character and chronotope, where much of the medieval English romance (the matter of Britain) uses the court of King Arthur as a background. Such romances are believed to be rooted in the fabled tales or “stories of determined Celtic resistance to the Saxons in the sixth century, a resistance directed by a prince claiming imperial authority, [which] were later associated with the largely mythological exploits of the fabled King Arthur” (Sanders 17). The heroes are Knights of the Round Table, who spend much time and energy rescuing ladies from dangers such as capture, siege and oppression, and preventing attacks by robbers, incursions by monsters or evil doings by magicians. The rescuers perform all sorts of services, and patiently endure whatever trials or humiliations the ladies impose upon them. When compared to French models, English romances show less artistry, less sophistication, and are less interested in the service of ladies than in pure adventures; they lay emphasis less on inner conflict and delicate nuances of feeling than on verisimilar physical action and didactic principles. They imitated French plots and adopted French verse form, which, in turn, supplied the greatest number of their plots, whether directly or indirectly, from sources ultimately ancient classical, Oriental (the “Arabian Nights”), Celtic and Germanic, thus making use of a supranational fund of imaginative writing. English romances used the same literary mixture: warlike adventure, whether in the form of internal feuds, crusades against Saracens or encounters with supernatural forces; love for and chivalrous service to noble ladies, or rescue of maidens; complications of personal relations due to false accusations, separation and reunification of families; quests for information, revenge, or magic talismans, in particular the Holy Grail. Because of its roots in the ancient and medieval epic, lyrics of the troubadours and the ancient novel of ordeal, the thematic material formulating the hero image in the romance follows a threefold course: (1) the knight is involved in action, such as adventure, deed, test, ordeal, quest, rescue, etc.; (2) the knight is involved in a love relationship; and (3) the knight is an ideal model of honour, nobility, various ethical principles, the code of chivalry, trawthe (loyalty, honour, faith, keeping one’s word), and so on, which are tested. The first two aspects of the romance disclose its purpose of being a source of entertainment and pleasure, and make this genre a form of entertainment as popular as drama in the Renaissance and the novel nowadays. The third aspect reveals the didactic purpose of the

88

Chapter Three

romance and its content as a moral lesson. Erich Auerbach also speaks about adventure, deeds of arms, love, and character nobility, and links these thematic components to two elements identified by him as “interiorization”, which cannot come close to “terrestrial reality”: interiorization and social reality “have existed from the very beginning in the ideal of knighthood” (125), where the interiorization of the heroic ideal in the personality of a perfect knight keeps the fantastic and the sublime in dominant position to the detriment of human reality, which represents a medieval, “special form of departure from reality” (126). Rather than love and the over-refined analysis of sentiment and behaviour, characteristic of French romances, English romances emphasize action and adventure. They also concentrate less on elegant adultery and more often rely on and express ethical principles, and have the stories culminate in the happy ending of a conventional marriage. Out of the four parts of the famous fourteen-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the first, second and fourth are about adventure and action, the third deals with the theme of love, and on the whole, this romance teaches a moral lesson of chivalry, since it narrates the story of testing the moral strength of the protagonist. The nucleus of the narrative is the moral conflict concerning the baldric: return the baldric and the knight loses protection, keep the baldric and he loses moral values. Gawain chooses the latter, that is, to fall morally but survive physically; he values physical strength over moral strength, and in punishment, he is wounded; this physical punishment for his moral failure cleanses his moral weakness, and he is eventually announced and celebrated as a hero. Gawain’s behaviour is typical of the characterization strategies in a medieval romance. Likewise, Roland “loves the danger and searches for it; also, he values high his own prestige” (Auerbach 93). The character of Sir Gawain is important because it allows an already old-fashioned chivalric, gentlemanly ideal, in which personal integrity is linked to feudal and communal loyalties, to coexist with human failure, as the protagonist fails to give up an object presented to him by his hostess. Gawain’s valour remains undoubted, and his quest becomes a trial not of his valour but of his chastity. This aspect is important as an element in the system of the Bildungsroman because the protagonist discovers his fullest humanity in an act of failure, and reveals the most important aspect of a human personality: its individuality. Apart from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, other famous English romances are the early thirteenth-century King Horn and the late thirteenth-century The Lay of Havelok the Dane, also known as Havelok the Dane or Havelok. In the latter (c. 1300), much of the action takes place

The Middle Ages: The Contribution of French and English Romances

89

in an enchanted world; occasionally does a hero in trouble, such as Havelok during his exile, establish a kind of contact with reality by engaging in useful labour. Even when the plot itself depends but little on magic and the supernatural, the tone and the motivation remove it from reality. Havelok is of unknown parentage, dispossessed and seeking refuge in England. He is at first obliged to carry on a humble existence, but his noble origins are revealed by a mystical light and the king mark on his shoulder. Havelok returns to Denmark with his bride, kills the earl who assumed kingship and regains his rightful throne of Denmark, and, by removing another usurping earl, gains his wife’s late father’s throne of England. Havelok, now the king of two countries, rules justly and assures his realm’s stability through his fifteen sons. The Lay of Havelok the Dane is the second, after King Horn, oldest surviving romance written in English. It comes from popular rather than courtly tradition, as the story dwells on details of ordinary life and labour, and shows a hero who is prepared to defend himself with his fists and a wooden club as much as with his sword. A more realist delineation of the character is to be noticed in King Horn (c. 1225), the earliest surviving English poem to have been categorised as a romance. It tells the story of the prince Horn, the son of a king murdered by Saracen pirates, who, matured by both adventure and love, and especially by the painful experience of a double exile (first from his own land, then from the kingdom of his future bride), settles the affairs of two kingdoms, returns to his patrimony as king and is happily matched by a woman equal to him in fidelity, wit, and courage. Maturity here is not maturation and does not imply, as it usually does in a Bildungsroman, the final stage of the process of growth and development from childhood through adolescence and youth. Nor does it reveal the success of the formative process with regard to spiritual and mental wholeness. Rather, it considers the unilateral self-accomplishment of a personality through the challenges of life. The idea of challenge and ordeal is of primary importance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, together with the motifs of the quest and initiation, as Gawain does when attempting to find the Green Knight and the Green Chapel. So is also the motif of the resistance to temptation in terms of Christian knighthood. Actually, Christian elements permeate almost all English romances, and co-exist with pre-Christian elements: in Sir Gawain the beheading myth is obviously of pagan Celtic origins. Where in later writings, such as the novel, the religious institution is satirised or not taken into consideration (with some exceptions, of course), in the romance it is

90

Chapter Three

valued, and the protagonists perform deeds, apart from the matter of a noble lady, for the glory of God and Christianity, and in defence of the latter. This aspect is more vivid in the romances belonging to the matter of France, in stories about Charlemagne and his knights, or about the struggle against the advancing Saracens. Despite the variety of subject, setting, and thematic treatment of many early English romances, none seriously challenges the sustained energy, the effective patterning, and the superb detailing of the already mentioned Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1370) and Sir Thomas Malory’s masterpiece Morte d’Arthur (c. 1470), both romances belonging historically to later periods, not Anglo-Norman but the age of Chaucer in the case of the former and the fifteenth century in the case of the latter. Together with three other untitled alliterative poems in Northwest Midlands dialect, which are purely didactic (Pearl, Purity, and Patience), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the fourth poem in the Cotton Nero A.X. manuscript. Close resemblance in dialect, diction, and style lead to the assumption of a single authorship of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, approximately 1370 or 1390. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a romance of four fyttes (parts), totalising some 2,530 lines in stanzas of irregular numbers of alliterative verses, each stanza being followed by five short lines rhyming a-b, a-b, a, the first line having one stress, while the next have three stresses each. The first fytte of the poem, “The Challenge”, tells how a giant knight – “A semigiant on earth I suppose that he was”, exclaims the narrator, “But at any rate the largest man I consider him to have been, / And the most pleasing of his size that ever did ride” – completely green in colour, interrupts King Arthur and his court’s feast on New Year’s Eve, at Camelot, daring anyone present to chop off his head on condition that he receives a similar stroke a year and a day later at the Green Chapel. As the court falls back frightened, King Arthur offers to give the blow, but his nephew, Gawain, seizes the champion’s role and straits off the head of the Green Knight. The intruder, however, picks up his severed head by the hair and leaves the place, calling upon Gawain to fulfil the bargain. The second part, “The Knightly Quest”, presents Gawain setting out on All Hallows Day for his rendezvous in North Wales. Lost in a forest on Christmas Day, he finds himself near a great castle where he is graciously welcomed by the lord, the lady, and an aged hag. Gawain’s host assures him of the proximity of the Green Chapel and arranges for three days of pleasure. The two men agree to exchange each night whatever kinds of pleasure each has won during the day. In the third fytte, “The Temptation”, the lady of the castle forces her attentions on the startled

The Middle Ages: The Contribution of French and English Romances

91

Gawain, and that night, after he receives the game killed by the lord in the day’s hunt, he responds with a kiss. The next day is a repetition of the first, but now Gawain responds with two kisses. On the third day the lady gives him three kisses and also a green baldric considered to be magical in preserving the life of its wearer. Gawain gives three kisses to the lord but improperly retains the magic baldric. In fytte 4, “The Return Blow”, Gawain presents himself to the Green Knight at the Green Chapel on New Year’s Day. Gawain shrinks twice from the feints of the giant, but then he steels himself for the third stroke, which only gashes his neck. The Green Knight reveals himself as Bertilak de Hautdesert (the lord of the castle), and the aged witch as Morgan-le-Fay, Arthur’s fairy sister. The entire stratagem was devised to corrupt Gawain and thus to shame the entire court of Arthur and Guinevere. Gawain’s scratch was the penalty for violating his agreement to exchange the day’s winnings. Henceforth, celebrating and glorifying Gawain’s deed, the knights and ladies of the court wore green baldrics to commemorate Gawain’s experience: The king comforts the knight, and all the court also Laughs loudly at this and gladly agrees That lords and knights who belong to the [Round] Table, Each warrior of the brotherhood, a baldric should have, A band tied about him, of bright green, And, for the sake of that knight, to wear that, following suit. For that was granted the fame of the Round Table And he who owned it would be honoured for ever after.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is perhaps the greatest Arthurian romance, but also one of the best narrative poems in English literature, combining the most important elements of the literary pattern of the romance with a wonderful selection of folk motifs, such as New Year’s Day feasts, the vegetation myth, the beheading game, the exchange of winnings, and the temptation of the hero. The well-packed narration consists of a succession of colourful scenes; the dialogue is expert, the action moves forward with a remarkable and rare grace and continuity. Particularly noteworthy is the description of the natural scenery (probably Lake County); it was not until the romantic poets of the nineteenth century that English poetry saw the beauties of nature and its subtle effects so well expressed. The poem neatly unites two ancient Celtic themes: the Temptation and the Beheading. Critics have suggested a previous French romance, no longer extant, that joined the separate themes and might have been the direct source for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poem has a tag

92

Chapter Three

line in French at the very end: with variations of old spelling, it sounds “Hony Soit Qui Mel(y)ence”, which was the motto of the Order of Garter (founded about 1348). It is hypothesized that the romance was intended as part of the knightly indoctrination of the Order; however, it is possible that the author9 composed it as an original work. The medieval meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may include the following aspects: (1) the romance is a holiday tale, Christmas and New Year representing for the medieval people a brief period of excitement and prolonged revelry during a bleak time of the year when agricultural deities were few, and the season is rendered in spiritual, fanciful tales of marvels, magicians, colourful adventure, and a happy ending; (2) the character of Green Knight is a preChristian fertility deity, commemorating the eternal death-and-rebirth cycle of nature10; (3) the poem has a didactic purpose, expressing a lesson of chivalry, as the author recognizes with humour and humanity the weaknesses and sinfulness in humankind and demonstrates how these might cause suffering, while virtue – one of the most important values of knighthood – gives strength. Gawain himself, despite the Arthurian court’s festive and congratulatory reception, recognizes his fault and refers to the baldric as a reminder of his mistake: “But your girdle”, said Gawain, “– May God bless you! – That I will most willingly use, not for the lovely gold, Nor the girdle, nor the silk, nor the hanging pendants, For wealth nor honour, nor for the beautiful workmanship; But in sign of my error I shall see it often, When I ride in fame, remember with remorse, The faults and the frailty of the crabbed flesh, How vulnerable it is to catching bits of dirt. And thus, when pride shall incite me to deeds of arms, A glance at this luflace shall humble my heart.”

The third interpretation seems especially likely if it is the same author who wrote the other three alliterative poems, Pearl, Purity, and Patience, of the Cotton Nero A.X. manuscript, also with a didactic purpose. The subtle and blatant immorality of many romances is fully supplanted in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by a pervasive morality. The romance shows and, at the same time, extols the values of Christian chastity, honesty, and faithfulness, as the character of Gawain, except for the 9

As the courtly tone suggests, the author could have been a cleric in Lancashire at the castle of John de Gaunt. 10 The tradition is still preserved nowadays in many English villages under different popular manifestations.

The Middle Ages: The Contribution of French and English Romances

93

baldric episode, is a wholly exemplary model. In later narratives, however, such as in Malory’s, the noble Gawain becomes coarse and cowardly. Another highly individualised character of the romance is Sir Thomas Malory’s King Arthur, a Christ figure, whose story is traced from the begetting, birth, education, and obtaining of power to his personal and his court’s tragic decay, in the masterpiece of medieval English literature, and the last of the matter of Britain texts, entitled Morte d’Arthur. It appears that Thomas Malory (?-1471) wrote his Morte d’Arthur in 1469-70 during a period of imprisonment, but the text was published and printed posthumously in 1485 by William Caxton (c. 1422-1491) who is claimed to have edited and excised Malory’s original version in eight sections (rediscovered only in 1934) and recorded it in twenty-one books. Between the narrative poles of the rise and decay of the king, the author creates long sections about Lancelot, Gareth, the pursuit of the Holy Grail, the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and other thematic components that are culled by Malory from a considerable variety of French and English sources and converted into a remarkable prose epic. It begins with the optimism associated with the unknown prince who “lightly and fiercely” pulls the sword out of the stone; it ends with the fearful decline of Arthur’s greatness and his death, the end itself being haunted by the recurring phrase “the noble fellowship of the Round Table is broken for ever”, which conveys a sense of the changeableness of all human values. Malory, the greatest prose writer of the fifteenth century, infused epic, tragedy, chronicle, legend, and ballad into his romance, and composed an elegy in prose for the dying age of aristocratic chivalry, which also meant the death of the English romance as a literary tradition. Romances represent a definite and important part in the history of English literature, charming the readers of different periods by their appeal to imagination and their moral didacticism intended to better human conduct. The medieval romance owes its importance to its courtly values often blended with the popular ones, its idealism, didacticism and entertainment value. The possible reason for the great popularity of the medieval romance in its time and in later periods is the fact that the text abounds in magic and supernatural elements, in the worship of beauty, which might have given the reader the possibility to escape into the realm of imagination from the violence and hardship of real life. The audience is charmed by the extraordinary landscape, the perfect moral conduct and the physical beauty of the characters, their feelings of love and justice, which might provide the reader with an experience of spiritual relief that could not be experienced in daily existence. Romances have remained highly influential during the periods of literary history succeeding the Middle

94

Chapter Three

Ages, and the elements of the literary system of the romance are found in the Renaissance in the works of Ludovico Ariosto, author of the famous epic poem Orlando Furioso (“Orlando Enraged”, 1516), and Torquato Tasso, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme Liberata (“Jerusalem Delivered”, 1580), as well as in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, and some drama of the time, such as romantic comedy. The return to the thematic universe of the romance is also seen in the escapist poetry of the Victorian Age (such as Alfred Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King), and in general in the writings of a laudator temporis acti. Most importantly, the romances are directly connected to the rise of the novel, to which they offer – excluding the fantastic, the improbable, and the extravagant – elements of a narrative of love, adventure, the marvellous and the mythic, travel and quest, ordeal and trial, the test of life and initiation, and, to a lesser extent, aspects of daily, domestic and social life. In post-medieval times, the two major thematic components of one literary system diverge into other literary patterns. The word “romance” gave in many European languages the noun “roman” (“novel”, in English) to name a new literary tradition that preserves the narrative component of the romance (the story as a sequence of events, characters, narrator, point of view, etc.) and excludes the verse form and the fantastic element, which are replaced with the prose form and the realist element, respectively. The word “romance” also gave the adjective “romantic”, referring to the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century age of romanticism, this time due to the similar supreme emphasis, in the romance and romantic poetry, on love, feeling, imagination, fantasy, and a special attention given to the psychological treatment of the character. The medieval romance is connected to the rise of the novel, as well as to that of the Bildungsroman, by sharing with it common elements such as the sentimental career, the travel scheme, the chronotope of the road, testing and ordeal, and, above all, the developmental experience of the protagonist. In this respect, and despite the hero remaining static in his inner and outer features, the medieval romance is more important for the rise of the Bildungsroman than other popular and even more acclaimed medieval works, to say nothing about Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the monument of medieval English literature and culture. Despite being written in verse form and in general regarded as a narrative poem, The Canterbury Tales also deserves to be labelled a “novel”. With regard to the Bildungsroman, with its focus on character, Chaucer’s work is equally praised for character delineation and

The Middle Ages: The Contribution of French and English Romances

95

individualization. An important aspect on the structural level of The Canterbury Tales, which links it to the novelistic genre, is the concentric narrative organization, namely stories within the story, narrations within the narrative, the frame-story about the pilgrimage to Canterbury narrated by Chaucer’s pilgrim-self as the narrator of the General Prologue, to which twenty-four stories are added, narrated by the characters. Chaucer the pilgrim and narrator in the General Prologue introduces the characters as his fellow pilgrims; afterwards, each character changes into a narrator when he or she tells his or her own story to the others, who become narratees. Concerning the author’s pilgrim-ego, either for certain moral considerations or since reality surpasses his knowledge and understanding as a narrator, Chaucer declines omniscience; the lack of an omniscient point of view enables a very modern type of authorial withdrawal, while simultaneously conferring to Harry Bailly the status of “governour” (judge), the authoritarian and unifying principle. On the thematic level, three aspects are usually considered and viewed as interrelated and boasting a high degree of credibility and semblance of reality. First, with respect to character representation strategies, Chaucer has been acclaimed for having created individuals with complex, round personalities. Second, Chaucer presents, by means of characterization, a complex, panoramic picture of his contemporary English society with historical insight. Thus, the characters – apart from being individuals – are also exponents of both secular and religious life, both urban and rural, both male and female, and both upper and lower social standing. These are actually the four main dichotomies disclosing different moral and social levels and professional groups, including the aristocracy, the clergy, merchants, clerks, peasantry, etc. Third, both characterization and the presentation of the social background benefit from the satirical outlook of the comic mode. The Canterbury Tales is a satirical narrative poem which demonstrates the medieval popularity of a special type of satire called “estates satire”. Focused on social and moral typology, Chaucer presents the faults of each estate along with its values, beliefs, and characteristic features. Chaucer owes his importance as a writer to his ability to present his characters as (1) individuals, (2) social types, and (3) moral types, where the author achieves this by two types of characterization, a direct one performed by Chaucer the narrator and a self-characterization when the characters become narrators of their own stories. Except for the idealized Knight, Plowman, Parson and Clerk, both types of characterization express and are achieved through the use of satire. The stories range from the moralised fairy-tale and oriental tale to fabliau, “cherles tales”,

96

Chapter Three

“gentillese”, as well as “hoolynesse” and “moralitee”. Therefore, it is also appropriate to understand that apart from being an individual and representing a social and a moral type, each character is also linked to an appropriate tale from a large (4) literary typology. The four perspectives of the character delineation technique are interrelated and mutually sustain each other. To give an example, the Knight is a male individual with his own particular features defining a distinct personality; as a social type, he stands for the aristocracy, urban and secular; as a moral type, he embodies honour, modesty, and bravery; and concerning the literary type, his story is a romance, the most important medieval literary genre. Considering all the main structural aspects, typical to fiction, of its concentric narrative organization, the element of verisimilitude in character representation strategies, the complex (panoramic) picture of the medieval society, and the satirical mode on the thematic level, it can be argued that Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a satirical narrative poem as well as a novel (in verse form) in medieval English literature.

CHAPTER FOUR THE RENAISSANCE AND THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: THE RISE OF THE PICARESQUE NOVEL AND THE BIRTH OF THE PATTERN

Although the first novel in modern world literature is considered to be Don Quixote, it would be more correct to say that the first type of modern fiction is represented by the picaresque narratives that emerged in the Renaissance. It is the latter genre that this chapter examines first. The literary system of the medieval romance of chivalry changes in the modern period, starting with the Renaissance, into the system termed by the noun “roman” (in English, “novel”), originally meaning any Romance vernacular, as opposed to Latin, and nowadays used in most European languages to denote a novel. During the metamorphosis, some elements are preserved (such as extended narration, setting, plot, themes, character representation, point of view, narrator, and others, which are enriched, diversified, and acquire a different typology), whereas others are replaced and become extinct. Thus, the main changes that occurred in the medieval romance and made possible the rise, in the Spanish Renaissance, of the novel writing tradition – of which the first type was the picaresque – concern the replacement of the verse form by the prose form and of the fantastic element by the realist element, respectively. Verisimilitude, or the vraisemblable (Tzvetan Todorov’s term), synonymous with realism and the realist element, is responsible for the development of the fictional form of writing which requires fidelity to actuality in its representation regarding both the social and cultural context and the character representation strategies. Responsible for the rise of the novel, the critics would also argue, is the Renaissance distrust of the high forms of culture and literature, the challenge of hegemony, the popular laughter and the carnivalesque with its various categories such as the grotesque and the picaresque. However, although traditionally the picaresque is viewed “as the antiromance par excellence, it is now also

98

Chapter Four

viewed as reflecting a pervasive longing for romance wish fulfilment” (Brownlee 28), as in the rogue’s quest for a home (in the sense of a social position, social and material fulfilment), or in his spiritual betterment by acquiring moral values and a sense of union with God. With respect to the rise and development of the novel as a new and distinct literary genre, the Renaissance represents, in its cultural and literary context, the moment of transition from the romance to the novel (roman, in most European languages) at the beginning of modernity. In the Renaissance, Spain was ahead of the rest of Europe in the development of the novelistic form. With his Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605 and 1615), extolled as the last romance and at the same time the first modern novel, Cervantes is credited with having made possible and consolidating the transition from medieval to modern times. The father of the novelistic genre is Cervantes, critics would claim, for, the change from verse to prose form having already occurred, now verisimilitude (the realist element) substitutes for the fantastic element in the novelistic concern with human existence and the social background. The textual representation of this concern follows the principle of faithfulness to actual reality in its textualization. Cervantes starts what later will be called realism and defined, such as by Northrop Frye, as the art of verisimilitude and implicit simile. Terry Eagleton, however, claims that to call Don Quixote the first novel, or even a novel, is a mistake, because the picaresque prose fiction had also challenged the romance in this way, at least implicitly, at that time. Moreover, Cervantes’s great work “is in fact less the origin of the genre than a novel about the origin of the novel,” showing “how the novel comes about when Romantic idealism, here in the form of Quixote’s chivalric fantasies, collides with the real world” (Eagleton 3). The conflict, emerging in the Renaissance, between the literary tradition of the romance and that of the novel concerns the conflict between the fantastic element and the realist element, which is the conflict between romanticized imaginative flight and actual fact, idealism and realism, dream and reality, and, finally, the conflict between “the person having noble aspirations and the reality that is alien and hostile to these aspirations, that is to say, that type of conflict which will be typical of the later social novel and the realist literature on the whole” (Pavlicencu 112, my trans.). A similar conflict would be found later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, between romantic novels, especially gothic, still called romances, and realist novels as anti-romances. The transition from romantic illusion to realist maturity can be sensed at work in Walter Scott’s Waverly, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, William Makepeace

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

99

Thackeray’s Pendennis, or in Charles Dickens’s progress from David Copperfield to Great Expectations. Both Cervantes and the picaresque authors that had started earlier in the sixteenth century to produce their narratives should be accredited with the rise of the modern novelistic genre based on the principle of verisimilitude. The rise of the fictional form of writing in the Renaissance is also indebted to the French François Rabelais, the author of Gargantua et Pantagruel (1532, 1534). Fundamental for the rise of the novel as a genre in the modern period is the production of picaresque fiction as standing against the romance, or, in Bakhtin’s words, against the high chivalric novel of ordeal, the extraliterary rhetorical genres – such as biographical, confessional, and sermon genres – and the later Baroque novel. In his “Discourse in the Novel”, a study on style and stylistics, Bakhtin defines the novel as “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262). The combination of languages and styles, speech types and utterances into unities, as well as their links and interrelationships, represents the rise of the novel as well as the defining feature of the stylistics of the novel. In this way, raznorecie (“heteroglossia”, or different speech types) is introduced in the novelistic text: The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity and speech types [raznorecie] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speech of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznorecie] can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). (263)

Concerning the development of the novel and differentiating between the First Stylistic Line (rooted in the Sophistic novel with its single style and language, later changed into the Baroque novel, the adventure-heroic novel, and the sentimental psychological novel) and the Second Stylistic Line, Bakhtin argues that raznorecie enters the novel with the emergence of the second line, whose first great example is the picaresque novel. What made possible the appearance of raznorecie is the main character’s status as an anti-hero with a distinct voice: he/she is a speaking person with a distinct discourse, striving for social significance, whose speech type is determined by personality as well as conditions; he/she is an ideologue and his or her perception of the world is an ideologeme.

100

Chapter Four

In what he calls the “picaresque adventure novel”, Bakhtin focuses on the image of el picaro (the rogue), the artistic representation of his or her discourse and action: The hero of such novels, the agent of gay deception, is located on the far side of any pathos – heroic or Sentimental – and located there deliberately and emphatically; his contra-pathetic nature is everywhere in evidence, beginning with his comic self-introduction and self-recommendation to the public (providing the tone of the entire subsequent story) and ending with the finale. The hero is located beyond all these basically rhetorical categories that are at the heart of a hero’s image in novels of trial: he is on the far side of any judgment, any defense or accusation, any selfjustification or repentance. A radically new tone is given here to discourse about human beings, a tone alien to any pathos-charged seriousness. (406)

The picaresque novel (Sp. picaro meaning “rogue”) originated in sixteenth-century Spain, an early example being the anonymous Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). Another example would also be La Celestina (1499). The most important Spanish authors of picaresque novels are Mateo Aleman, who wrote Guzman de Alfarache (1599, 1604), Francisco de Quevedo, who wrote La Vida del Buscon don Pablos de Segovia (1626), and Luis Velez de Guevara, the author of El Diablo Cojuelo (1644). These four works form the nucleus of the Spanish picaresque tradition and govern other major and minor writings which were produced between 1600 and 1646. Along with picaresque fiction reified in a number of individual texts, the greatest of all Spanish novels, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, written at the beginning of the seventeenth century, also contains a number of picaresque elements. It depicts the contemporary context while satirizing chivalry and, in Bakhtinian conception, parodying other earlier genres, in particular the romance as symptomatic of the medieval literary incorporation of chivalry. As parody and satire, it is unquestionably the principal work to expose the narrative and thematic discrepancy of the romance, and it does so by a comic outlook on the conventions of chivalry and by contrasting them with the realities of ordinary life, to concentrate on everyday routine. Cervantes incorporates verisimilitude into his novel through play, parody, irony, ridiculous and other forms of the comic that focus on the romance and its main thematic components, and on other literary forms, especially on the protagonist and his relations with other characters, in particular Sancho. Don Quixote is tragic and humorous, ridiculous and comic, but always faithful to the assumed ideal; his values are always highly moral, his feelings true and profound, and in his madness he

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

101

remains superior to all other people by his spirit and by the strong character of his ethics. Don Quixote’s madness, actually, is at the core of the novel’s treatment of actual reality. Madness transposes the protagonist from immediate reality into the realm of imaginary life; the comic effect and entertainment result from the various clashes between these two worlds. In fact, “from the numerous clashes between Don Quixote and reality, there never results any situation that would question the right of existence for this reality; it is always right against him, and after a few comic situations, it continues to flow as static and calm as before” (Auerbach 311). Don Quixote’s adventures, consisting mainly of comic confusions, do not reveal much, do not point to any stringent issues of everyday existence, do not satirize or criticize much, do not disclose profound philosophical debates, but mainly form a pretext to present the writer’s contemporary social and human life in all its complexity and diversity. Don Quixote’s madness does not reveal much of the contemporary tragic and problematic aspects of existence, either, the “whole book being a game in which madness becomes ridiculous through its clash with a solidly built reality” (Auerbach 312). Don Quixote is not tragic or problematic; he is humorous rather than ridiculous, but above all he is dignified, superior, educative and formative, as Sancho becomes in his company wiser and morally bettered. Despite playing a role and playing with his master’s madness, Sancho sincerely loves and respects Don Quixote. In employing madness in the treatment of his protagonist, Cervantes himself plays not only with various literary forms but also with reality, which yields to a never-ending and complex game that is prompted by Don Quixote’s madness which “transforms the real, actual world into a funny play performed on stage” (Auerbach 316). But Don Quixote’s madness also transforms the world into the way of spiritual and moral improvement, and in this respect his madness reveals wisdom which is “the reason, nobility, common sense and dignity of a wise and balanced man”, humble, modest, and helpful (Auerbach 314). By these spiritual features, Don Quixote remains static, but the experience of his personality is assumed and assimilated in its totality by Sancho more than others, in that he transposes himself into Don Quixote’s soul, whose madness and wisdom become productive in Sancho. Thus, the reader understands the protagonist better through Sancho’s behaviour and attitudes. Sancho is Don Quixote’s alter-ego, his adversary and consolation, his contrastive figure, but their spiritual connection is developed to such an extent that, in matters of the character formation principle, one would claim, as Auerbach does, that these two protagonists, “each for himself as well as their

102

Chapter Four

relationship, would form themselves gradually and without intention” (319). More explicitly dealing with elements of development and growth is picaresque fiction; Cervantes’s novel assimilates the picaresque narrative of adventure, its travel scheme, its motifs of trial and quest, but only in some of his Novelas ejemplares is Cervantes closer to the picaresque mode of writing. The picaresque (or rogue) novel emerging in the Renaissance influenced the fiction writing of centuries to come, in its turn being influenced by and drawing on previous traditions. Thus, it uses elements reminiscent of the novel and epic in antiquity, and of the romance in the Middle Ages. But it also reveals some new aspects of the third-person strategies in terms of a protagonist’s process of development and thus provides, in matters of both content and form, new steps towards the consolidation of the literary pattern of the Bildungsroman. The rogue novel has its origins in an age of instability on different levels and of changing human values. A mixture of virtue and impudence, spirit of adventure and of revolt, the protagonist of the anonymous Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes or of Mateo Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache always changes his condition and social position; he is almost all the time a servant to different masters, a beggar, soldier, robber, merchant, actor, passing through different social levels and meeting in his wanderings all sorts and conditions of men. The narrator of the picaresque novel can reveal a pessimistic view on the human condition, as in Lazarillo de Tormes, but always with a mixture of understanding, humour and criticism. The author of the picaresque novel may fail to render characters with moral qualities, or does not mean to do that, as is the case of Mateo Aleman, but he would identify himself with the protagonist, providing long moral speculations and fusing the moral with the picaresque. The picaresque novel of the Renaissance is viewed as the product of an age of crisis, of a period of transition, and is accredited with having contributed to the infiltration of innovative ideas in various realms (religious, political, economic, artistic, and so on) against the traditional mind-set. In this respect – and contrary to a chivalric social idealism still preserved in Cervantes – the picaresque narrative is devised as a “sociocritical genre” that displays at once a critique of traditional mores and values of an aristocracy typical of medieval Spain, and a support for the ascendance of the new, materialistic and capitalist mentality and ethical system. In other words, this type of fiction emerges in a period of transition from the conflict between the old, chivalric idealism and the newly emerging values of material basis and social ascension, where with

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

103

regard to the literary character, the medieval pilgrim and knight are replaced with the rogue and the fool. In connection with carnivalesque categories, picaresque writing is also viewed as a literary response to and rejection of the contemporary cultural hegemony. It is a form, at first, of popular culture concerned with disrespect for and challenge to authority, which is in dialogue with the form of high, aristocratic culture in the Renaissance as the embodiment of dominant ideology. The picaresque fiction of the Renaissance continues, in terms of structure and theme, the ancient narratives of travel and ordeal, and those of biography or autobiography, whose elements now combine to construct a new type of protagonist (which implies the principle of development). The ordeal is committed to wandering and both types of character experience intermingle with many biographical or autobiographical elements. In the picaresque novel, which may be considered a type of the travel novel, or of the novel of ordeal, or a type of pseudo-autobiographical novel, depending on the predominance of certain elements, the status of the character may change sharply – from beggar to rich man, from homeless wanderer to nobleman – but he himself seems to remain unchanged as an individual. Gradually, however, the novel becomes more complex with regard to individual existence and provides the narrator’s deeper insight into human psychology and inner existence. It reveals the concern with the character’s physical and intellectual growth, with his gradual self-discovery amid the complexity of the external world. The picaresque novel constitutes a remarkable sequence of Spanish and then general European literature from its beginnings in the Renaissance until late into the eighteenth century; while it remained influential in the nineteenth century, its elements can also be found in the twentieth century and even nowadays, in narrative texts of various stripes. The thematic pattern of picaresque fiction represents a syntagmatic and fixed structure of a series of definite elements rendering a rather normative fictional tradition, in other words, a system. In so far as it appeals to readers as a didactic form of entertainment, it has remained popular to this day and in various countries and cultural backgrounds, for it offers the possibility of laughter and playing, while verbalizing/textualizing the concern with individual experience and the social background, that is, verisimilitude in its twofold perspective. The picaresque novel has dynamic thematic features and rejects literary conventions, while being open to innovations and influences of every kind and going through various mutations. However, many critical voices, such as Walter L. Reed, Harry Sieber, and Peter N. Dunn, point to

104

Chapter Four

the difficulty of conclusively defining the picaresque as a distinct subgenre of the novel genre as well as to the flaw in regarding it as a homogeneous whole, stable and with invariable elements. Nevertheless, a more formal and formalist approach would attempt a definition and classification capable of providing clarification, not of generating confusion. In pursuit of such a goal, Claudio Guillén (in “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque” 71-89) has identified eight main features of picaresque fiction, summarised as follows: (1) the picaro as the main focus of the novel; (2) pseudo-autobiography as the narrative form; (3) a subjective point of view; (4) a challenge to social norms and values while learning from personal experience; (5) the lack of money and a continuous struggle for survival; (6) detailed observation and account, and often satire, of various circumstances of human existence and social conditions; (7) travel and adventure as the main types of the picaro’s experience; and (8) the episodic structure of the novel to depict a chaotic world of confusion and disorder. As for the definition, a picaresque novel is a pseudo-autobiography narrated in the first person by the protagonist/autodiegetic narrator el picaro (or picara), a rogue, whose discourse constructs an individual, selfconscious subject in a continuous, omniscient dialogue with the reader in the form of what has been called a “spoken epistle”. Concerning the thematic treatment of the relationship between the individual and his/her milieu, the natural goodness of the protagonist is supressed by external conditions that make him/her repudiate moral values such as decency and virtue, and thus transform him/her into an anti-hero/anti-heroine who has to deceive and pretend in order to survive and be accepted in a desired social group. Wit and irony, pragmatism and sentimentalism, deception and theft, and for the picara also prostitution, are means for survival and obtaining employment, money, marriage, and other forms of economic security. The picaro’s changing of masters is equalled by the picara’s changing of lovers and husbands; in the case of both, each experience is either a new beginning or a new step towards becoming a gentleman or gentlewoman. With regard to this ethical component, a picaresque fictional narrative is a moral history of the self and society, a chronicle of a corrupt world whose false ideals imperil the spiritual innocence of a character in development. The literary system of picaresque fiction reveals that the novel as a new genre developed in its incipient stage from some previous literary traditions as well as from other discourses, in particular the legal one. Victim and at the same time exponent of a social order in a turbulent process of transition, the rogue occasionally displays naivety, more often

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

105

wit, and sometimes a humorous, more often satirical attitude towards the human condition and especially society, in particular its corruption, which he or she exploits. In a society retaining a strong sense of social hierarchy, the picaro’s experience is in most cases bound to lower levels of employment, especially as a servant. The position of servitude strengthens his valueless status in society, while it also grants the anti-hero the possibility to observe, tell, comment, evaluate, be a victim or take advantage of society, as well as wander and change his condition, and above all learn, strive, change the inner perspectives of existence, and acquire a philosophy of living and an identity. The protagonist, at first a kind of social parasite, struggles and aspires to higher values and embarks on a process of social-climbing never explicitly deployed thematically but which emerges clearly at the moment of existential debate to highlight the drama of individual consciousness. The true picaro is forced to travel and change his condition in order to earn his living and learn life, and consequently, while acquiring knowledge, he “criticizes the corrupt society of whose disease he is a symptom” (Giddings 34). However, suggestive of social improvement and paralleling a personal betterment, and amid the general corruption and moral degeneration of a period of transition, a picaro may yet integrate into a milieu, whose evolving on genuine and ethical principles he would eventually come to accept and adopt. Built around the chronotope of the road, the elements that construct the system of picaresque novels constitute a complex typology which covers a life-time sequence with the formula “from childhood to maturity or old age”. In his wanderings, the character changes his condition, encounters various social levels and professional groups, various types of human and social existence, which are recounted and evaluated by him/her while displaying a comic, predominantly satirical, attitude and a particular philosophy of life. From place to place, from master to master, from job to job, and from childhood to adolescence and so on, the panoramic picture of contemporary society unfolds in a narrative structure of an episodic plot seemingly deprived of unity; its only linking principle is the temporal and spatial movement of the picaro or, in other words, the chronotope of the road, which, according to Bakhtin, determines the plots of the picaresque novels of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The picaresque novel as a series of episodes relies less on the cause and effect organization of events in a narrative sequence than on chronology; the picaro acts as bound by chance, or fortune, or providence, or accident, or personal choice or initiative, but always travelling on. In the chronotope of the road, time

106

Chapter Four

fuses with and flows in space, thus fashioning the road, in Bakhtin’s words, as a place suitable for particularly random encounters, a place for events to find their denouement as well as a place for new departures, for new beginnings in the course of an individual’s life. On the actual road, various adventures and various types of meetings occur. The asocial picaro’s experience of life is also a kind of road that belongs to no one in particular but to human-kind in general, and on this road (“the high road”) various encounters take place; also on this road, like on an actual one, the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people – representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages – intersect at one spatial and temporal point. People who are normally kept separate by social and spatial distance can accidentally meet; any contrast may crop up, the most various fates may collide and interweave with one another. On the road the spatial and temporal series defining human fates and lives combine with one another in distinctive ways, even as they become more complex and more concrete by the collapse of social distances. (Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” 243)

The thematic typology includes, first, the experience of the rogue as a child at home, usually in a provincial setting where he or she is dissatisfied with the present conditions, or future perspectives, and leaves or is driven from it to face a larger, disordered world and a chaotic, uncertain existence, just as their narrated form is, without much concern with causality on the part of the author. Except the protagonist, asocial but depicted with individual personality, the other characters lack unified and psychologically nuanced selves, representing instead social and moral types. The road of life becomes for the picaro a complex experience of changing conditions, backgrounds, jobs, masters, and meetings, where the events and adventures that the picaro encounters in the course of his real life determine his failings, wrong choices and mistakes, on which depend his turning into a cunning and shameless subject and his gravitating towards immoral and lawless behaviour. At first a warm-hearted and naïve person, the picaro loses his innocence in the encounter with the milieu and emerges as a ruthless opportunist who learns to turn every chance to his advantage in order to survive and overcome the difficulties of life. Nonetheless, some rogues break the pattern and preserve their innocence despite succumbing to vices and temptations. In these two and other cases, however, as the universal principle of “crime and punishment” dictates, on reaching a particular moment in his stage of maturity, the narrative flow is in the phase of a moral and existential debate which dramatizes the drama of individual consciousness as the conflict between personal values and social ones. This conflict

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

107

reaches its climax at a moment of inner, psychological and emotional tumult from which there is no escape and which can end in either success or failure. To overcome the painful moment generated by the opposition between self-assumed values and those that he should have adopted for social integration, the rogue has to reassess his earlier life course, largely immoral and lawless, and change his life philosophy accordingly. However, acquiring a social status and attaining happiness do not necessarily mean that they are definite assets and will last forever, as they indeed cannot be confirmed by or quarantined from the chaotic and changing world, but rather imply a sense of open ending. The conflictual and painful episode in personal development becomes a thematic constant in fiction, as in Tom Jones, Wilhelm Meisters, Sartor Resartus, and, more importantly, in the Bildungsromane in which it represents an epiphanic experience and a priori condition for individual formation. Indeed, one may see clearly in our exposition of the typical plot pattern of the picaresque narrative a great number of elements that are also aspects of a typical Bildungsroman thematic pattern. The picaresque elements survive in other novelistic types too; for example, in the twentieth-century fiction of the Angry Young Men, and our presentation of the picaresque narrative can be said to describe exhaustively a novel like Room at the Top. By playing with and reshaping previous literary forms, and establishing verisimilitude, the picaresque novel that emerged in the Renaissance (and remained influential throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) marks the rise of the novel as a modern genre. By its manner of handling the realist element, it also prefigures the realist type of fiction. More important in our study, however, is that the picaresque novel contains many of the central, system-forming elements of the Bildungsroman. In this respect, it marks the mid-way between the earlier ancient and medieval narrative tradition encapsulating such elements, on the one side, and the novel of formation (the Bildungsroman) which would flourish in the nineteenth century, on the other. Like the medieval romance, picaresque fiction blends entertainment with moral lesson: personal accomplishment in matters of love, money, law, and the acquiring of a social status signify that the protagonist has achieved a kind of success and has adapted to society; this is possible, however, only after having changed the personal and social perspectives of existence by reviving decency, embracing virtue, and on the whole abandoning immorality. It proves the contention that the picaresque literary form developed from “Spanish doctrinal-moralistic literature during the second

108

Chapter Four

half of the sixteenth century” and that “the organization of a modern state in Spain, beginning in the reign of the Catholic kings and the attendant growth of a patrimonial bureaucracy”, created a literary “discourse dealing with criminals and common people that writers found compelling partly because it also pertained to them as subjects of the new polity” (Echevarría xiv). In the literary system of picaresque fiction, the elements of both tradition and novelty in the establishment of the novelistic genre, in general, mark the different as well as specific features of the rise of the novel of formation. Such features include: the autobiographical form; didactic and moral values; character portrayal along the adventurous versus provincial dichotomy; the road as the axis of narrative structure; the adventurous aspect of the plot; ordeal and the trial of life; the quest as trial of the character’s moral validity; childhood, youth, and maturity as biological steps of the character’s development; change in the character’s condition along with the change of his inner perspectives (which is, as a literary concern, in its incipient stage) while gaining life experience. The last feature is particularly important in so far as the character is no longer shown as static and as moving through the narrative structure by means of time and space categories, with certain changes only in his condition, destiny, and social position. The aspect of change alongside the loss of the static feature provides the image of man in his development and progress with the rising problem of apprehending the moment of the character’s real change of consciousness on both the level of concrete reality (the passing from one social stratum into other, meeting all facets of the human condition, and so on) and that of moral and philosophical speculations (suggested by the character’s experience of life and consisting of an impressive theory of living). These general aspects have their direct representation in the picaresque writings of the Renaissance and in the novel of François Rabelais. La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (“The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel”), which has remained popular to this day, can be classified (besides being a novel which satirizes and parodies the romance) as a work of grotesque, philosophy, fantasy, and as mythopoetic. Rabelais’s basic source is the folk legend of Gargantua; the novel demonstrates the writer’s attempt to create a realist novel of character development within the framework of folk time, as, indeed, folklore provides a stable basis for the novel’s narrative structure and organization of thematic elements. Other forms of the time category are adventurous time (due to its aspect of travel), the psychological time of the novel of ordeal, and the biographical time (Gargantua’s birth, his childhood and deeds). A certain pedagogic

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

109

strain is of primary importance in the novel, for it reveals the pedagogic process of character development. The external world is viewed in terms of schooling and education, through which the protagonist has to pass in order to develop, change, and acquire an identity. The progress of the character allows the exclusion of his static features; likewise, the world assumes a changing historical dimension and, at the same time, becomes subject to a wealth of contrasting aspects. With regard to this thematic aspect, in “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism”, Bakhtin gives special credit to Rabelais. Rabelais is among the writers of novels of emergence (or Bildungsromane), while Gargantua et Pantagruel (along with Simplicissimus and Wilhelm Meister) represents the fifth and most significant type of novel of emergence, the realist one, which shows the emergence of a changing hero in relation not to a static and stable world, as in the previous four types of the Bildungsroman, but as inseparable from historical emergence. The protagonist emerges as a new type of human being along with the world, and actually reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. Rabelais’s importance in the history of the Bildungsroman lies both in “the entire problem of the assimilation of time in the novel” and in “the problem of the image of emerging man” since his novel is, next to Goethe’s and, to some degree, to Grimmelshausen’s, “the greatest attempt at constructing an image of man growing in national-historical time” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 25). Bakhtin also discusses Rabelais in a special study entitled Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kultura srednevekovia i Renessansa (1965, “Rabelais and His World”). Dealing with the issues of “carnival”, “grotesque”, and “laughter”, Bakhtin shows that the related concepts of the carnivalesque and the grotesque are based on folk laughter as it emerged against the medieval official culture (which prohibited laughter except on feast days). Folk laughter started to give form to carnival rituals and paved the way for the Renaissance self-consciousness. The function of laughter in the historical development of culture, art, and literature is immense: Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naivete and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permit seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness. (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World 123)

The way – in which laughter’s victory over fear and its power of freeing people indicate that folk laughter and folk humour play an

110

Chapter Four

important role in grotesque imagery – is that people are playing with fear and are trying to laugh at it, and the result is that all “that was terrifying becomes grotesque” (Rabelais and His World 91). Two aspects emerge out of this experience. First, medieval laughter is not a subjective, individual and biological consciousness of the uninterrupted flow of time. It is the social consciousness of all the people. Man experiences this flow of time in the festive marketplace, in the carnival crowd, as he comes into contact with other bodies of varying age and social caste. He is aware of being a member of a continually growing and renewed people. This is why festive folk laughter presents an element of victory not only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts. (Rabelais and His World 92)

Second, no less important, is that medieval laughter, “when it triumphed over the fear inspired by the mystery of the world and by power, boldly unveiled the truth about both. It resisted praise, flattery, hypocrisy. This laughing truth, expressed in curses and abusive words, degraded power” (Rabelais and His World 92-93). According to Bakhtin, there are four features endemic to the carnivalesque chronotope, namely the open dialogue between the participants; free, classless environment and subversion of hierarchies; eccentricity; and mockery, subversion of attitudes. The carnivalesque, as a form of popular culture concerned with disrespect, challenge and subversion of authority and hegemony, is therefore in dialogue with the forms of high, aristocratic culture in the Renaissance as the embodiment of dominant ideology. Also, the carnivalesque categories are not “abstract thoughts about equality and freedom”, but “they were able to exercise such an immense formal, genreshaping influence on literature”; this included “the organization of plot and plot situations, it determined that special familiarity of the author’s position with regard to his characters (impossible in the higher genres)” (Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 123-124). Bakhtin idealizes the potential of popular culture to challenge the hegemonic culture, but he fails to see the implications of the historical substratum: the carnivalesque only occurs if the authority permits it. Moreover, the subversive aspect would often hesitate to attack authority and hegemony, focusing instead on some categories that were underprivileged and marginalized even more than the common people such as women, national minorities, etc., amounting to “displaced abjection”.

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

111

Nonetheless, nowadays, magical realism, using defamiliarization, is linked to Bakhtin’s concepts of “grotesque realism” and “carnivalesque spirit”. The Russian scholar exemplifies the latter concept with Rabelais, the French writer who is, among other things, “the purest and the most consistent representative of the grotesque concept of the body” (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World 30). Magical realism is a postmodern type of fiction, but its antecedents, apart from Rabelais, can be found earlier, even in antiquity, with Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, and later with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, in which exaggeration of exaggeration provides both the grotesque and the substratum for the author’s satirical endeavours. In Gargantua et Pantagruel, the triad of the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and laughter furnished Rabelais’s means of literary expression, his most characteristic manner of presentation, his distinctive way of textual arrangement of the narrated material, which covers all major episodes in the novel from the reflection of the feasts to the issues of philosophy and education. Certainly familiar with the carnival life existing in his time in the cities and in the countryside, Rabelais describes the “feast of cattle slaughter” at the very beginning of the novel; this cattleslaughtering feast coincides with a merry banquet during which Gargantua’s miraculous birth takes place. In Rabelais, the grotesque, inseparable from the carnivalesque and laughter, is expressed primarily through the textualization of the dismembered body and its anatomization as if to construct a whole comedy of the body. Human life, the social, even nature itself, everything is compared to body and bodily life, as in Book 5, Chapter 5: “Those trees seemed to us terrestrial animals, in no wise so different from brute beasts as not to have skin, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages, kernels, bones, marrow, humours, matrices, brains, and articulations”. In one of the most remarkable episodes at the beginning of the novel, an anatomical analysis concludes with the unexpected and completely carnivalesque birth of Gargantua through his mother’s ear, which is also a grotesque image (of reversal) since the child does not go down, but up. Comic as well is Gargantua’s first cry, calling for a drink, which alludes to, or rather develops, along with the images of cattle slaughtering and dismemberment, the theme of the feast. According to Bakhtin, the images “continue to unfold along the lines of a banquet: devouring of the dismembered body”; these images are later transferred to the anatomic description of the generating womb and thus they “create with great artistry an extremely dense atmosphere of the body as a whole in which all the dividing lines between man and beast, between the consuming and consumed bowels are intentionally erased” (Rabelais and His World 226).

112

Chapter Four

These “consuming and consumed organs are fused with the generating womb”, which results in “a truly grotesque image of one single, superindividual bodily life, of the great bowels that devour and are devoured, generate and are generated”; but this is not an “animal” or “biological” bodily life, as we can see “the devoured and devouring womb of the earth and the ever-regenerated body of the people”, signifying, as Rabelais’s novel demonstrates, that “the merry, abundant and victorious bodily element opposes the serious medieval world of fear and oppression with all its intimidating and intimidated ideology” (Rabelais and His World 226). The grotesque co-existing with laughter and the carnivalesque is the substance of another famous episode in the novel, which is that of Gargantua’s drowning 260,418 people in his urine “exclusive of women and children”. Bakhtin is again the best in summarizing the episode and pertinently interpreting it: This scriptural formula is taken directly from the Gospel story of the crowd fed with 5 loaves of bread. (Rabelais quite often uses these formulas.) Thus the entire episode of the drenching in urine and the crowd’s reaction is a travestied allusion. We shall see that this is not the only travesty of that kind in Rabelais’s novel. Before performing his carnivalesque gesture, Gargantua declares that he will do this only par ris, for sport or laughter’s sake. And the crowd concludes its volley of oaths by using the same expression, which, as the author tells us, is the origin of the word Paris. Thus, the entire episode is a gay carnivalesque travesty of the city’s name. At the same time it is a parody of the local legends about the origin of names in general (serious and poetic forms of these legends were popular in France and were created by Jean Lemaire and the other poets of the school of rhetoricians). The name of Paris, the names of saints and martyrs, as well as the Gospel miracle, were all drawn into the game for laughter’s sake. This was a game in which “exalted” and “sacred” things were combined with images of the lower stratum (urine, erotic images, and banquet travesties). Oaths, as the unofficial elements of speech and the profanation of the sacred, were organically woven into the game and were in tune with it. (Rabelais and His World 192)

In Rabelais, as can be seen in this episode, in that showing the hero’s birth, and in many others, characteristic of the grotesque concept of the body and bodily life is the thematization of the elements of fertility, death, and renewal of life, that is, the theme of life and death, or birth and death, or killing and birth, which reveals the grotesque figures and images to be interwoven, apart from the carnivalesque and laughter, also with cosmic phenomena. For instance, Rabelais in Book 2, Chapter 2: “At the age of four hundred fourscore and forty-four years, Gargantua begat his son

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

113

Pantagruel upon his wife named Badebec, daughter to the king of the dimly-seen Amaurotes in Utopia. She died in the throes of childbirth. Alas! Pantagruel was so extraordinarily large and heavy that he could not have possibly come to light without suffocating his mother”. To Bakhtin, this theme is already familiar to the reader “from the Roman carnival of combined killing and childbirth”, but in Rabelais “the killing is done by the newborn himself, in the very act of his birth”, so that “birth and death are the gaping jaws of the earth and the mother’s open womb”; further on, “gaping human and animal mouths will enter into the picture” (Rabelais and His World 329). In this connection, a terrible drought occurring at the time of Pantagruel’s birth is described: “beasts were found dead in the fields, their mouths agape. As for the men, their state was very piteous. You should have seen them with their tongues dangling like a hound’s after a run of six hours. Not a few threw themselves into the wells. Others lay under a cow’s belly to enjoy the shade”. The theme of death and birth is further developed by Gargantua, who does not know whether to weep over his wife’s death or to laugh with joy at his son’s birth: he moos “like a cow”, as his wife gave birth and died, and laughs “like a calf”, as his son has just been born. Certainly, like his father Gargantua’s birth, Pantagruel’s also occurs in a grotesque atmosphere involving laughter and the carnivalesque. The novel presents Pantagruel’s emergence, “shaggy as a bear”, from his mother’s womb, preceded, indeed triggered, by a caravan of wagons loaded with salted, thirst-arousing food. Of the five books of Gargantua et Pantagruel, which can be seen as distinct novels dealing with the life experience of the protagonists, the father Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, the first two focus more or less explicitly on their respective birth, growth, schooling, social interaction, learning knowledge and philosophy, participating in human affairs, and others aspects of a process of development. But the Bildung of the protagonists is not the main authorial aim, since Rabelais himself in the prologue to the first book of his novel, Gargantua, points out the meaning of his work to be rather reader-oriented: “Here you will find a novel savor, a most obstruse doctrine; here you will learn the deepest mysteries, the most agonizing problems of our religion, our body politic, our economic life”. Indeed, in Rabelais the narrative and thematic movement which depicts the life and adventures of the characters involves a wealth of various “avant-garde positions”, as Bakhtin calls them, in the fields of politics, culture, science, morals, and values. Rabelais articulates them in various parts of his novel, as in the episodes of Gargantua’s education, Gargantua’s

114

Chapter Four

letter to Pantagruel, Pantagruel’s speech on medieval commentators of Roman law, and others. These episodes disclose their rhetorical nature and are expressed in scholarly and official language, in a highly serious speech. This new form of discourse is “a progressive speech, the last word of the epoch and at the same time Rabelais’s completely sincere opinion” (Rabelais and His World 453). Fortunately, the novel also contains other episodes and is built on the triad of laughter, grotesque, and carnivalesque; otherwise, Rabelais, to Bakhtin, “would be merely one of the progressive but commonplace humanists of his time, perhaps one of the foremost” (Rabelais and His World 453). In focusing on the life of his father and son protagonists, Rabelais, the master of grotesque and satire, prefigures in his double proto-novel of formation certain thematic elements of the Bildungsroman literary system, in particular that of fictional biography, and especially the concern with education and its role in subject formation from childhood to maturity, which offers some dynamism to the developmental process. Pedagogical sources and perspectives are multiple and reflect mainly Rabelais’s own ideas on various aspects of existence as well as his biography. Gargantua’s famous letter to Pantagruel in Book Two, Chapter 8, contains such ideas in their theoretical expression and is also a piece of self-confession, philosophy, and prescriptive-moralizing discourse. Another example comes from Book 1, Chapter 24. The narrator, depicting young Gargantua’s studies under the guidance of Ponocrates, declares: “Instead of herborizing, they would inspect the shops of druggists, herbalists and apothecaries, studiously examining the sundry fruits, roots, leaves, gums, seeds and exotic unguents and learning how they could be diluted or adulterated. He viewed jugglers, mountebanks and medicasters … carefully observing their tricks and gestures, their agile capers and smooth oratory. His favorites were those from Chauny in Picardy who are born jabberers”. This episode of young Gargantua’s education, according to Bakhtin, can be interpreted as autobiographical, since Rabelais himself studied all these aspects of popular life. Let us stress that popular spectacles and popular medicine, herbalists and druggists, hawkers of magic unguents and quacks, could be seen side by side. There was an ancient connection between the forms of medicine and folk art which explains the combination in one person of actor and druggist. This is why the images of the physician and the medical element are organically linked in the novel with the entire traditional system of images. In the previous quotation we see medicine and the theater displayed side by side in the marketplace. (Rabelais and His World 159)

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

115

A substantial part in a young person’s education is also attributed to games, which Ponocrates does not exclude from young Gargantua’s education: they devote themselves to painting and sculpture, the ancient custom of playing dice, and while playing, they would often recall the ancient authors who mentioned this game; therefore, games are not a part of ordinary life but instead recall knowledge and contain philosophical meanings. In Gargantua’s education, an important role is played even by feasts and banquets, with their images of people eating and drinking; as we have seen, even Gargantua’s grotesque birth takes place during a banquet and the feast of cattle slaughter. At the beginning of modernity, Rabelais also prefigures Goethe’s formula of identity formation for Wilhelm Meister as encapsulated in the principles of humanism that promote “an ideal image of the multilateral and harmoniously developed man” (Auerbach 275). This image, supported by the late medieval notions of the perfect courtier and ideal knight, is essential to the humanist ideal of universal man. Auerbach wonders whether Rabelais “believed that a perfect culture consists in the mastery of all sciences; that universality would be the sum of all the specialized types of knowledge; and perhaps he took seriously, in this sense, the suprarealist educative programme of Gargantua” (275). The dynamic feature of the character textualized within a process of character development is, to us, perhaps even more vivid in the picaresque novel in which education and pedagogical principles are often superseded by the protagonist’s larger, social interaction. The literary concern with the character’s experience of life representing a developmental/formative process reveals here, as in Rabelais, its incipient stage: it has already become a matter of narrative and thematic organization, but there are still the adventurous time and the travel scheme that dominate the fictional perspective. Travel suggests an experience of life as a temporal and spatial movement through different components of the social setting, which provides both a realist and a satirical outlook based on action, analysis and self-analysis of the main character. Travel is also governed by the picaro’s need to support his living and by his spirit of adventure; the latter, actually, dominates the narration and suggests that for the particular kind of character development as expressed in picaresque fiction, action counts more than welfare. The picaresque discourse uses the autobiographical form as another premise or principle of the developmental process. A firstperson narrative recounts and assesses the experience of life of a character from childhood through youth and maturity to old age, and sometimes along with various changes of his inner life; for instance, from idealism

116

Chapter Four

and indulging in wishful thinking in youth to reason and pragmatism in old age. The development of the character is thus linked to both biological growth and the progress of psychological and sentimental activities, the latter as a result of a great number of changing and often contrasting circumstances and events, stimuli and conditions from beyond the hero’s inner existence. The narrative organization of the picaresque novel consists of a succession of different events/adventures – such as encounter, arrest, separation, escape, sudden acquisition and waste, robbery, as well as institutionalized and/or self-education, professional initiation, love affairs, ordeal by love, and others – which are coloured with both pure humour and irony. Satire often reveals the more or less explicit critical outlook of the picaro (sometimes the same as the narrator’s, but almost always identified with the author’s) on his milieu and generally the external world. The picaresque mode of writing originated in Spain and influenced a significant number of Renaissance writers who belong to different cultural backgrounds. In England, in particular, it influenced the fiction of Thomas Nashe, who adapted many features of the anonymous Lazarillo to write The Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jack Wilton (1594). This novel is credited as the first English picaresque novel; and acclaimed for its experiments in realism, but disliked for its loosely constructed frame of episodes. Faithful to the picaresque disconnection and fragmentariness, the episodic structure is assembled as a sequence of events, travels, adventures, misfortunes, and various narrative fragments, by the voice of an autodiegetic narrator who recounts them as recollections of past experiences with comic commentary and wit. Experimenting with style and bringing lexical novelty, Nashe allows his narrators to express themselves in ways that correspond to their social condition and the incoherent and disorienting circumstances in which their life experiences occur. Proving the superiority of his wit, Nashe’s nominal hero-narrator controls the reader’s views on events, displays vigorous and unflattering observation, and is delighted by his tricks, which he regards as achievements, wishes that his actions could be “booked in order as they were begotten”, while reflecting upon them: “This was one of my famous achievements, insomuch as I never light upon the like famous fool. But I have done a thousand better jests, if they had been booked in order as they were begotten. It is pity posterity should be deprived of such precious records; and yet there is no remedy; and yet there is too, for when all fails, well fare a good memory”.

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

117

The events are fictive but credible and they owe their verisimilitude to the employment of several techniques. First, Nashe’s hero Jack Wilton, an English page and indeed a rogue and hardly “a Gentleman at least”, is aggressive, digressive, and drunk, allowing – contrary to the early Spanish picaresque tales – no repentance, regret or atonement in a world of crisis, chaos and violence, where drinking and defiance side with wit to become a means of escapism as well as of dealing with a horrible reality. In his immorality, he voyeuristically watches a rape “thorough a crannie of my upper chamber unseeled”, and records two executions in Rome after claiming that “Ile make short worke, for I am sure I have wearyed all my readers”. Second, intermingled with the fictional material is the historical one of real historical people and events, which also grants the narrative a certain degree of veracity. The novel glances with nostalgia at the age of Henry VIII, “the onely true subject of Chronicles”, the promoter of chivalry and martial arts, and refers to many contemporary social and historical realities. Accompanying Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, a real historical figure, in his sentimental endeavours for Geraldine, a beautiful Florentine woman, Jack Wilton, Howard’s fictional travel companion and the novel’s character-narrator in his journey, is involved in various adventures in Italy, Germany, and France, where Italy with its Venice and Florence is presented as the centre of European civilization, culture, and arts. In a typical picaresque mode of narration, the character’s spatial movement is a pretext to provide a complex picture of the contemporary late sixteenthcentury culture, mores, mentality, as well as social realities, history and politics, and to comment on these and other aspects. Jack witnesses the massacre of Baptists in Germany, meets Erasmus and More in Rotterdam, and along with these history-based experiences, Jack is involved in Howard’s quest to defend the honour of his beloved lady in a tournament in Italy. Howard returns to England, and Jack continues his adventures, quests and ordeals, wanderings and sufferings, yet learning little and remaining essentially static, and pursuing his own sentimental experience with Diamante, whom he eventually marries. Although Italy is ahead of Europe, they finally escape “the Sodom of Italy”, its immorality and political crisis, and as in a cyclical type of life experience, at the end they are back at the English military encampment in France where the story actually began. The seventeenth century continues the brilliant tradition of the picaresque novel in Spain with Francisco de Quevedo’s La Vida del Buscon don Pablos de Segovia and Luis Velez de Guevara’s El Diablo Cojuelo. Nonetheless, this kind of fiction has also spread to other cultural

118

Chapter Four

areas: to France, with Charles Sorel’s Histoire Comique de Francion (1623-1633), Paul Scarron’s Le Romance Comique (1651), and Francois de Fenelon’s Les Aventures de Telemaque (1699); to Germany, with Hans Iacob von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668); and to England, with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). As a result of the translation of the four main Spanish picaresque novels into French, German and English, the picaresque fictional pattern began to emerge in other cultural backgrounds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and gave types of national picaresque narrative. In this respect, [each] of these novels is a unique fusion of existing conventions and an imaginative response to specific historical circumstances, but within the novel writing traditions of their respective countries, they all performed similar functions. By breaking down the traditional separation of styles and expanding the range of acceptable subject matter to include the morally serious treatment of nonaristocratic characters, they constituted one of the most important stages in the transition between earlier literary prose and the modern novel, which itself became the dominant mode of fictional expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. (Bjornson 3)

Apart from performing similar functions, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century picaresque novels maintain similar elements of their thematic and narrative pattern, including the form of a fictional autobiography; the linear, chronological narration; omniscient, usually autodiegetic, narrator; the protagonist as a low-born subject, a rogue with no fixed social status and obligations, a vagabond with no fixed occupation or profession, sometimes an offender against social/civil and moral law. They represent quest narratives and narratives of travel, adventure, ordeal, they are pictures of society, as well as life-novels about the picaro(a) seeking self and freedom from social laws and conventions, and, paradoxically, a role in society and social advancement at the same time with defying the milieu. Just as the novel in its incipient stage parodies and plays with various other genres and forms, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century picaresque fiction offers to quest, ordeal, travel and other types of narrative “new ironic or parodic or tragicomic forms” (Dunn 15). The seventeenth-century picaresque novels emerge in other cultural and literary contexts, in particular German, French, and English, marking – as would also happen in the eighteenth century – the universalization of the subgenre, as well as its novelty and transformation of the picaresque content. At the turn of the sixteenth century, Nashe already added the

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

119

historical concern to the established pattern of the picaresque thematic elements, whereas more drastic innovation – by adding the element of reflection on the human condition and especially a more detailed observation of and focus on individual experience of the character – would emerge in the eighteenth century in novels such as Gil Blas and Moll Flanders. These new picaresque novels represent new steps in the general process of development and consolidation of the Bildungsroman as a literary tradition. This is due to their characters’ life experience, which consists mainly in physical and spiritual pilgrimages, and culminates in changes in the exterior condition and sometimes inner world of the characters. These novels are often the equivalents of Renaissance conduct books insofar as one of the recurrent themes is the making of the gentleman. But in a complex and busy existence the gentlemanly ideal is difficult to discover; and the struggle for survival in the contemporary world is also hardly conducive to good manners and quiet consideration of others. In terms of the general pattern of picaresque fiction, the character’s experience of life consists of a long journey from home into the crowded and exciting background of contemporary society. The journey is instrumental in the fulfilment of the character’s desire for adventure and action, but also acts as the source of corruption. The narrator follows carefully his character’s growth (also biological) as it becomes more complex, and presents his experience at the same time with the influences of the background. The character’s adventures and wanderings provide the narrator with the possibility of rendering the spatial (social) multiplicity, which is chiefly static and consists of the contraries of human existence as determined socially. Some of the seventeenth-century novels which continue the picaresque tradition are centred on the pedagogic idea governing the process of character formation, for example Fenelon’s Les Aventures de Telemaque. Others, for instance Sorel’s Histoire Comique de Francion and Scarron’s Le Romance Comique, fashion a burlesque design drawing on the picaresque tales of adventure, bringing together, and also satirizing, the travel scheme and the adventurous form of the picaresque and the pastoral elements. Scarron, on the one hand, satirizes the false intellectual and spiritual values of his contemporary social environment, and tells, at the same time with a remarkably coloured picturesqueness and humour, the story of two lovers who find refuge among some itinerant actors.

120

Chapter Four

Sorel, on the other hand, when his character becomes a shepherd and lives for a while among simple people, praises the pastoral values and creates the image of an uncorrupted existence away from the court and town, from acquiring and spending. Thus, Francion’s passionate quest for Nays, whom he truly loves, is mingled with his yearning for a lost innocence, for a prelapsarian paradisiacal life in which man existed in harmony with nature. Sorel’s critical outlook on reality, the same as Quevedo’s and Guevara’s, transfigures the external world, which becomes less interesting in itself and is turned towards comicality and caricature. Sorel’s novel follows closely the picaresque mode of writing: its protagonist passes through different social media and meets different sorts and conditions of man, and he is presented in his general development from childhood to maturity; its narrative consists of events which succeed each other and are united by the thematic implications of initiation and education of the main hero, who experiences adventures and trials; its structure is thus a linear movement with no special or distinct narrative levels of the general narrative framework. The same thematic and structural perspectives of literary organization are more or less preserved in Grimmelshausen’s novel, which marks the continuation of the picaresque tradition and provides a new step in the consolidation of the Bildungsroman as a literary tradition. The aspect of novelty represents the fact that the character formation principle in the novel is linked to the changes that take place in the external world. That is to say, the character’s growth and development take place at the same time with the evolution and consolidation of the world. The world’s foundation changes and the character has to change with it; the hero thus loses his private features and becomes subject to such issues as reality and human possibilities, freedom and the problem of creative initiative. The character’s development and change are placed on a moral level: Simplicius reveals a gradual movement from youth’s naïveté and idealism, through a dissolute life, to the final moral regeneration and desire to leave the world full of injustice and cruelty and become a hermit. An account of a more personal spiritual pilgrimage is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a direct development from his previous work, Grace Abounding (1666, an autobiographical representation of the awakening of his soul to sin, his conversion, and his later ministry). Pilgrim’s Progress is a picaresque tale and an allegory, as well as a moral and theological book about the search for salvation. Such religious themes co-exist in the century with the pursuit of knowledge and the belief in the perpetual renovation of knowledge, as Francis Bacon, in Novum Organum

The Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century

121

(1620), promotes viva activa and philanthropy directed at personal and social reformation.11 The Pilgrim’s Progress can be labelled a novel, but it is actually an allegory which traces the progress of Christian through the world in search of salvation: “Christian’s progress, accompanied at first by the martyred Faithful and latterly by the redeemed Hopeful, represents that of the individual believer blessed by the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity”; he is also “blessed with a gathering certainty of his election to eternal salvation and he forges a way forward aided simply by his understanding of Scriptural promises” (Sanders 246-247). The Pilgrim’s Progress is thus an interesting departure from Bunyan’s earlier work in its allegorical illumination of spiritual experience; its allegory draws on Biblical images, Christian typology, and popular retellings of stories of virtuous conduct. Yet Bunyan’s work reveals intertextual connections also with picaresque fiction and the romance, and to an extent with the Bildungsroman too. The Pilgrim’s Progress relates to the development history of the Bildungsroman through its focus on the protagonist’s spiritual progress, an important element in later novels of formation. Bunyan’s work is also a novel in its continuation of the picaresque tradition: in this quasipicaresque story, the characters are intended to represent moral qualities and vices, and their names are only moral tags (Christian, Faithful, Obstinate, Hopeful, Madam Wanton), although, strikingly enough, they actually acquire individuality through speech. The naturalness of the dialogue makes the allegory deeply rooted in the actual and the familiar: such scenes as those of the “vanity” and the trial of Christian and Faithful are fully compatible with scenes which the later writers of fiction would emphasize in rendering their protagonists’ process of development. Actually, with its masterful delineation of character and realism in the observation of human behaviour, The Pilgrim’s Progress marked a new and important step in the development of the novel and influenced a huge body of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiction. Its thematic focus on the spiritual experience of moral improvement of a human subject is crucial in the process of character formation as textualized by the Bildungsroman.

11

Bacon argues that knowledge no longer comes only from books but also from observation and experiment, and from the pursuit of inductive method as a process from individual observation to general laws.

CHAPTER FIVE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL AND THE PATTERN IN DEVELOPMENT

The rise of the novel, a genre that received a status of popularity equal to that of Elizabethan drama during the Renaissance, is one of the three major aspects of eighteenth-century British literature, along with neoclassicism and pre-romanticism. The typology of eighteenth-century novels is remarkable: the picaresque novel, the adventure novel, the epistolary novel, the sentimental novel, the novel of manners, the moral novel, the comic novel, the anti-novel, and others. Concerning the development history of the Bildungsroman in English literature, the rising in the eighteenth-century novel assimilated picaresque writing and revealed the first elements of the Bildungsroman pattern in English fiction as being shaped by the prescriptive neoclassical principles which influenced the rise of the novel on the whole and also the rise of the theory of the novel. In its turn, the eighteenth-century English novel is equally responsible with romanticism and Goethe for the rise and flourishing of the Bildungsroman in Victorian literature, and therefore necessitates an exhaustive and detailed as well as text-oriented critical approach, as we attempt to do in what follows.

5.1 Picaresque Heritage and Neoclassical Principles Shaping Verisimilitude In the eighteenth century, apart from neoclassicism mastering the genres and literary theory, Spanish picaresque novels remained highly influential works. They marked the literary activity of Alain-Rene Lesage in France; Swift, Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett in England, who assimilated the picaresque elements and at the same time developed and diversified the fictional concern, thematizing some initial elements and aspects of the Bildungsroman leading to its consolidation as a novelistic

The Eighteenth Century

123

subgenre; and Wieland and Goethe in Germany, the latter actually responsible, through his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, for the consolidation of the Bildungsroman as a fictional pattern and as a literary tradition in world literature. In the eighteenth century, like in the seventeenth century, the picaresque narrative remained popular and influential, and in English literature, in particular – along with the moral and didactic purpose, neoclassical influence, and other thematically textualized aspects –, it contributed to the rise of the novel as a distinct literary genre, a phenomenon that occurred in England much later than on the Continent. Or rather, the comic (including satirical) attitude, social concern, and moral didacticism (emerging from both the picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles) together with the picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles are responsible for the emergence of verisimilitude as the forming element responsible, in turn, for the rise of the literary system of the novel in eighteenth-century English literature. An outstanding contribution to the emergence of this cultural and literary phenomenon was made by the neoclassical principles and the moral concern reflected in novels. And like in the seventeenth century, the picaresque tradition in eighteenth-century England, France or Germany was altered by new social settings, different cultures, new literary doctrines – such as neoclassicism in English literature – and various other literary forms. The subgenre revitalized, refreshed concepts; its literary system incorporated new elements; some structural and thematic changes occurred, such as the shift from first-person to third-person narrative, the picaro(a) only occasionally appearing as servant, or his/her experience being more inside than outside the milieu, and less on the margins of society. The spirit of the original Spanish picaresque narrative remains nevertheless intact, as do most of its founding features. El picaro(a) is still an alienated character, in search for identity and social status. As a protagonist and sometimes narrator, he/she provides through his or her life experience a particular, alternate understanding and point of view of mainstream reality, a historical record, an insight into culture, politics, mores, values, society in general with all its both positive and negative aspects. The discussion of the picaresque tradition in the eighteenth century, the closest one to the emergence of the Bildungsroman, cannot avoid, with regard to English literary and cultural background, the discussion of the rise of the English novel, both experiences being interrelated and mutually shaping.

124

Chapter Five

The discussion of the picaresque tradition in eighteenth-century English literature cannot avoid a thorough consideration of neoclassicism, the dominant literary doctrine in the period, whose influence on the rise of the English novel was crucial. Of all eighteenth-century English novels, the most faithful to the picaresque tradition are Moll Flanders, Roderick Random, and Tom Jones. At the same time, these are novels that also feature the most important thematic elements of a typical Bildungsroman literary pattern as established later in Victorian fiction, in particular of the realist type. The examination of the imitation and influence of picaresque fiction in eighteenth-century English literature should consider (1) the rise of the novel with regard to the principle of verisimilitude; (2) the fact that the picaresque model in Europe in general ceases to be the only model, hence in English literature the typology of the novel is extremely complex; and (3) the fact that the period is the age of neoclassicism, whose principles affecting the rise of the novel are thematically textualized in novels. The influence of neoclassicism on the rise of the novel should be understood in a threefold perspective encompassing three main principles represented textually, namely verisimilitude (or the realist element), reason (rationalism, order, common sense) and experience (along with applicability and usefulness) pertaining to knowledge, and individual and social existence. Among other things – such as the comic mode, sentimental outlook, character idealization, or the delivering of moral values – these three aspects advocated and imposed by neoclassicism are responsible for the emergence of the novel as a distinct genre in English literature, and, consequently, of the Bildungsroman as one of its particular types. Meanwhile, the picaresque mode, with its realist element, moral didacticism, and comic features, remains another important influence on the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. Neoclassicism meets the picaresque in matters of some common principles, particularly verisimilitude, social concern, interaction between the individual and the milieu, and metropolitan culture, to signify the consolidation of an almost entirely new genre in English literature, that of imaginative prose, which dominated the literary practice of the period. Towering over the eighteenth century in matters of literary doctrine, neoclassicism, however, which embraced both literary theory and literary practice, did not produce a “neoclassical novel”, its genre being poetry (mainly philosophical and satirical). The rise of the novel as another literary aspect of the eighteenth century, next to neoclassicism, provided an impressive amount of literary criticism, in particular on the part of those writer-critics who were

The Eighteenth Century

125

conscious of being the founders of a new literary genre. Like Pope, Addison, and Johnson with reference to neoclassicism, many of the founders of the English novel expressed critical views on the newly rising genre, namely Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Reeve, and others. In this respect, neoclassicism, dominating and prescribing the ways of writing poetry, not only influenced the rise of the novel but also the rise of the novel theory, especially principles and concepts such as faithfulness to fact, truthfulness of representation, instruction of readers, ethical instruction, and the neoclassical convention to align and compare an original work to some ancient literary precedents, to argue about writing in a well-established and honourable literary tradition. The convention determined Fielding, Richardson and others to successfully defend the literary validity of the new genre of fiction and provide it with a theoretical foundation. The convention influenced Henry Fielding, in particular, in his “Preface” to Joseph Andrews, to trace the theoretical foundation of novel in general, as a new literary form, and of the comic novel, in particular, as a sub-species of the novel. The British literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or more precisely between the 1660s and the 1780s, is dominated by neoclassical theory, whose corresponding literary practice includes satirical and philosophical poetry. Drawing on ancient tradition and classical values, revived in the Renaissance and now institutionalised, neoclassicism promoted a way of thinking and writing based on reason, clarity, common sense, measure, good taste, verisimilitude, and above all the dependence of literature upon rules and ancient models. Neoclassicism focuses on arts and literature from within the context of the Enlightenment, aiming to encompass, with regard to literary practice, the realist, essentialist and foundationalist perspectives and principles, in particular reason (rationalism) and experience (empiricism) as firm foundations for knowledge. Neoclassicism represents at once a distinct cultural period, a literary movement, and a poetic trend, which appeared as a reaction against the late Renaissance cultural extravaganza of Baroque and metaphysical poetry, and which can be defined by the two main principles put forward by Alexander Pope: “imitate the classics” and “follow nature”. Pope, actually, in his prefaces and the famous An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man, together with Joseph Addison in a series of critical studies delivered to The Spectator and with Samuel Johnson in his essays, prefaces, and the celebrated Lives of the Poets, best championed the neoclassical doctrine. The eighteenth century was on the whole a period of progress and prosperity based on the idea of order and proportion, stability and self-

126

Chapter Five

confidence, where “an ideal of providential harmony, of co-operation, and of a political order reflecting that of nature seemed to many to be realized in the triumph of practical reason, liberal religion, and impartial law. Temperate kings would reign over a united nation in which individual liberty would be constitutionally guaranteed” (Sanders 277). English literary neoclassicism manifested itself both in the creation of a strongly prescriptive cultural doctrine and in the production of literary texts, namely poetry. Pope, Johnson, and other neoclassical authors wrote a type of philosophical, didactic and satirical poetry, approaching general aspects concerning human nature in relation to man’s place in the universe and to the social background. The complete neoclassical writer would combine in his work the side of a theoretician of the doctrine with that of a poet, just as Pope does in his An Essay on Man, being able to articulate, in one literary discourse, neoclassical ideas through highly elaborated and philosophical poetic expression. Apart from neoclassical theory and its poetry, there are other important literary experiences of the eighteenth century, such as pre-romantic poetry, which emerged more or less as a regular trend with the weakening of neoclassicism by the middle of the century. Pre-romanticism with its “primitive” and “mournfully reflective” types of poetry emerged as an alternative to neoclassical poetry and as a precursor of romanticism. But towering over the entire period in matters of literary practice is the novel, whose rise and consolidation in the eighteenth century represented a distinct process of development. Neoclassicism assumed first the control over the poetry of the period, but the rise of the novel is in some respects – and in relation to both novel related literary practice and critical thinking – dependent on the neoclassical theory. A great exception would be sentimentalism, which pervades the prose writings of Richardson, Sterne, and Goldsmith. Moreover, neoclassicism would influence not only contemporary poetry and the consolidation of the novel writing tradition, but also the later nineteenth-century Victorian realism with its novels of the socially concerned, realist, and moral type. The novel, whose rise and consolidation throughout the century was influenced by neoclassical theory, reveals however an independent, distinct process of development. The emergence of the English prose fiction in the eighteenth century makes this period, among other things, the “Age of the Novel”. The eighteenth-century process of British novel rise and development is to be regarded within the context and as the consequence of another, longer developmental process, which originates in the ancient Greek and Latin epic, and ancient Hellenistic romance and Latin novel, and continues

The Eighteenth Century

127

in the medieval romance and the Renaissance picaresque fiction. The first novelist in world literature is considered to be Miguel de Cervantes and in English literature Daniel Defoe. Like Cervantes being challenged by the emerging picaresque fiction, there is no general agreement concerning the exact date of birth of the novel writing tradition in English literature – either 1719 with Robinson Crusoe, or 1741 with Pamela, or later with Fielding’s novels. The eighteenth century on the whole saw the beginnings and consolidation of the novel as a new form of writing, which throughout the nineteenth century and then in the twentieth century became the most popular and prolific type of literary text. The novel, together with the novella and the short story, is a literary species of the narrative genre, a variety of imaginative prose, a text of fiction. The standard definition regards the novel as a long, extended narrative consisting of many characters involved in a complex range of events organized by chronotope in narrative sequences. Above all, the realist element (or verisimilitude) is considered to represent the most important criterion according to which a text in prose is regarded as a novel. It is actually the essence of the existence of the novel as a literary fact, in spite of the issue concerning the relation between fiction and fact. Terry Eagleton defines the novel as “a piece of prose fiction of a reasonable length”, but immediately warns that “the novel is a genre which resists exact definition”, “less a genre than an anti-genre”, since there are novels written in verse form, or the novel becomes a process of integration, usually unconscious, of some alien discourses: you can find poetry and dramatic dialogue in the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy and any number of other literary modes. Virginia Woolf described it as “this most pliable of all forms”. The novel quotes, parodies and transforms other genres, converting its literary ancestors into mere components of itself in a kind of Oedipal vengeance on them. (Eagleton 1)

The English novel passed, in the eighteenth century, through a process of rise and consolidation in which realist, thematic, and structural elements occurred subsequently to survive, be developed, or disappear in accordance with the tacit requirements of the novel writing tradition. However, in the context of the epoch, the novel emerged more like a plebeian genre, a minor form, with no classical models and no established codes and systems of norms. No doubt, because the novel form was in its incipient state, and there were few rules to be followed, the diversity of eighteenth-century imaginative prose was remarkable.

128

Chapter Five

For a long period of time, until the late eighteenth century, the terms “romance” and “roman” were a matter of confusion. Similar to the word romance, the term roman (“novel” in English) “appeared in the Middle Ages to name a story, at first in verse (like Tristan et Iseut) and later in prose (Le Roman de Renart), and which was written in vernacular, Romance language different from Latin, the language reserved for scientific and religious texts” (Valette 21). Beginning in the eighteenth century and especially with the rise of romanticism, there were more conclusive efforts to distinguish between the romance and the novel, emphasising the importance of one form of writing over the other alternatively, but the genres also proved to be less conflicting than complementing each other. Thus, “the revival of traditional romance from the late eighteenth century onwards had a huge impact on the novel, spawning subgenres explicitly mixing the characteristics of novel and romance such as the gothic, the sensation novel, the thriller, the crime novel, science fiction, children’s fiction, and modern fantasy” (Parrinder 13). Also, our contemporaries use the word “romance” to name novels of love, sensation and sentimentalism, often censored as being just popular and of low aesthetic quality. The eighteenth-century English novel, intruding upon such established genres as the epic, the romance, and the picaresque novel, gradually replaced them, flourished and became extremely popular in a short period of time. In the eighteenth century, the English novel was separated from the epic and the romance in the framework of “a temporal and spatial shift from distance and heroic scale to the “here and now” of bourgeois immediacy” (Lane 30), including in Swift and Defoe with their “implied versions” of the contemporary society, and, as in Swift, of neoclassical principles, or, as in Defoe, also of middle-class values. In the same way, their contemporary Tobias Smollett formulates, in the “Preface” to his The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), the distinction between the romance and the new type of fiction of his day. According to him, the novel is “a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes for the purpose of a uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient”. William Congreve declares, in the “Preface” to his Incognita (1691), that romances present “Mortals of the first Rank”, whereas novels deal with “more familiar” experiences of life. Also, a very important and modern distinction between the novel and the romance (as the novel’s diachronically most related text) was drawn by Clara Reeve in “the first book in English wholly devoted to the study of

The Eighteenth Century

129

the narrative tradition” (Scholes and Kellogg 6), which is The Progress of Romance through Times, Countries, and Manners (1785): The Romance is a heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons or things. The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the time in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. The Novel gives a familiar relation to such things as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it is to represent every scene in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses of the persons in the story as if they were our own.

A twentieth-century distinction between the literary forms of the romance and the novel, but not far removed from Reeve’s, considers the romance to be full of marvels, whereas the modern novel is nothing if not mundane. It portrays a secular, empirical world rather than a mythical or metaphysical one. Its focus is on culture, not Nature or the supernatural. It is wary of the abstract and eternal, and believes in what it can touch, taste and handle (...). The novel presents us with a changing, concrete, open-ended history rather than a closed symbolic universe. (Eagleton 3)

These definitions may be useful to any attempts at tracing the realist element as a common feature of apparently such different works as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews, or Tom Jones. The realist element, or verisimilitude, refers to a factual experience similar to reality and to a concern with the real, familiar world around. It means shifting attention from the general and the abstract to the concrete and the particular, and involves characters that share their condition with that of the readers. In the eighteenth century, realism was a result of the whole spiritual context of an age built around the principles of the Enlightenment and neoclassicism. The century began with an emphasis on reason and a literature of intelligence, which celebrated the joy of thinking, understanding, and of making others understand. This type of writing was governed by an empirical method, founded by great philosophers of the previous century, in the investigation of the world (the object, or the other) by the individual (the self, or the subject): all knowledge we can possibly get comes from our senses and perceptions, which are the basis of reflection for the human intellect. Also, truth can be discovered by the

130

Chapter Five

individual through his/her senses, and the individual experience is a major test of truth. The self with a unique consciousness is a “subject” that is related to another entity which exists inside or outside of itself: the “object”. In the modern sense, and with regard to the revival of ancient classical tradition, the subject is I and the object could be a tree, or a memory, or a desire. The interaction between subject and object is called experience (Latin experiri: to test, to try). For Aristotle, experience arises when memories of doing the same thing accumulate and become principles. John Locke and empiricism see experience, not reason, as the origin of knowledge: experience is linked to the ways in which our senses tell about the physical world, that is, the world gives information to our senses, which is experience, which is then processed by concepts; for Locke, these concepts derive from earlier experiences, that is, concepts come from the world. Rene Descartes and rationalism see reason, not experience, as the origin of knowledge: concepts come from the mind not the world. Immanuel Kant sides with the rationalists: knowledge might begin with experience, but does not arise from it. Hegel and idealists will emphasize mind and spirit, and the power is granted to consciousness. Such views would gradually change so that the subject and object (or self and other) dichotomy is conceived of in different terms in modern and postmodern contexts. In the postmodern sense, the subject is decentred, loses its primacy (including the author), and becomes a place from which a voice speaks, or a function, or a play of desires, or is constructed by various institutions and discourses, or is produced historically and conditioned culturally. Such views would determine the character representation strategies in the literature of different periods, including in the Bildungsroman. Empiricism and rationalism would also dictate a particular character typology, and on the whole assist the rise of the eighteenth-century English novel. The rise of the English novel was a late phenomenon that occurred almost two hundred years later than on the Continent. From a strictly historical perspective, the beginnings of the English novel are related to the contemporary background and certain antecedents in the previous literary periods. Concerning the former, the picaresque mode was one of the major influences on the rise of the English novelistic prose, although weakened in the eighteenth century because of the dominance of the principles of the Enlightenment and neoclassicism in literature, and also due to the emergence of a more innovative and experimental pre-romanticism. One

The Eighteenth Century

131

should consider the influence of the Enlightenment and neoclassical principles on the rise of the novel in particular with regard to the interest of the writers in immediate reality, actual social conditions, and the moral development of the human being. The novel developed in a particular context of complex social and cultural manifestations, such as – apart from the dominance of neoclassicism – the growing interest in the issues of everyday life, the scientific and technological developments, the dominance of reason along with the rise of sentimentalism, the new geographical discoveries and colonial expansion, and others. These also constituted some of the major reasons for the diversity of fictional forms and thematic concerns in the eighteenth-century novel. Concerning the latter, the ancestry of the English novel corresponds to the general European developmental process. It is multiple and extremely diverse, going as far as back as the ancient period, in particular in relation to the epic writing tradition. In short, the ancient period produced epics and novels, followed by medieval romances representing the mixture of narrative (chanson de geste) and lyrical (lyrics of the troubadours) elements, leading to the emergence of picaresque fiction (and Cervantes), which was very popular during the Spanish Renaissance and later also throughout Europe, especially in France and Germany, in the seventeenth century, and finally became a major influence on the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Apart from such antecedents in the past, other influences would be contemporary neoclassicism and various related factors, such as philosophical debate, the importance given to moral values, social concern, comic outlook, and others. The pattern of the epic consists of long extended narratives, with a great number of events and characters, which include the supernatural element and are written in verse form, alien to the modern fictional system. The modern novel is also linked to a number of novels of low esteem in antiquity because of their prose form and thematic frivolity: Heliodorus’s Ethiopian History, Petronius’s The Satyricon, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. They were imitated during the Italian and Spanish Renaissance, and inspired Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe during the English Renaissance. Other sources for the modern English novel, as for the novel on the Continent in general, would be medieval romances, Spanish picaresque tales, Renaissance conduct books, and other works which feature character delineation and an amount of realism in the observation of human behaviour and the social background (as in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress), where the individual is socially conditioned. In the seventeenth century, according to Isobel

132

Chapter Five

Grundy, the word “novel” meant “a short story for popular reading, often issued in collections”, for example Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), which “is only one ancestor of the novel. Others are the essay, which often dealt in fiction, and those various prose narratives which purported to be nonfictional, primarily travels, biographies, and collections of letters” (Grundy 253). To follow the theory of monogenesis, according to which each genre has one or at most several inventors, the founder of the English novel is considered to be either Daniel Defoe or Samuel Richardson. The latter together with Henry Fielding also establishes the realist or verisimilar novel; Fielding is the father of the comic novel, Richardson of the epistolary one, and so on. Such a view is convenient but misleading, confusing, and difficult to prove: how certain is one about the fact that “epic goes back to Homer, tragedy to Aeschylus, the verisimilar novel to Fielding and Richardson, the historical novel to Scott, the open-form long poem to Pound and Williams” (Fowler 153)? Before Pound, there was Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue; before Scott, there were romances dealing with historical data; and before Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, there were picaresque novels, Elizabethan novels, medieval romances, ancient epics and novels. It seems again that antiquity is the beginning, including for the modern novel, where “the classical literature provides us with prototypes of virtually all later narrative forms and with paradigms of the processes which govern their interaction and evolution” (Scholes and Kellogg 57). Every new text is only apparently original, being a rewriting of some previous discourses, and having multiple ancestors and antecedents. With all of its antecedents, the English novel still emerged as a new type of literary text, a new literary expression as imaginative prose, a new genre of fiction lacking definite models and norms of writing, which represented a major reason for the huge diversity of fictional forms and thematic concerns in the eighteenth-century novel, as well as for its openness to different influences. Spanish picaresque novels remained influential and were imitated, but the authors developed and diversified the fictional pattern of the picaresque tradition. The first novels also tried to assume some other identities (“memoirs”, travel books, “true histories”, collections of letters, found manuscripts, etc.), that is, any form compatible with the revealing of a particular view of life. Actually, there was a lack of recognisable form – in that the “newness” in form is paralleled by the “newness” of concern, as the individual experience is always unique and therefore new – because one may often find the same novel under several headings. Gulliver’s Travels

The Eighteenth Century

133

is an imaginary travel book and a satire written in prose; Moll Flanders is a pseudo-autobiographical novel, but also a picaresque novel; Joseph Andrews is a comic novel, a parody, and a picaresque novel; Pamela is a sentimental novel, an epistolary novel, and a novel of confession; Tom Jones is a novel of manners, but an important part of it follows the picaresque mode. A major reason for this diversity is the lack of rigid rules and traditions of novel writing; the picaresque would be one, but its influence diminished significantly in the eighteenth century, given the dominance of the Enlightenment and neoclassicism over literary production. The beginning of the English novel is almost symbolical for the new ways of literature: the new prose style is plain, simple, devoid of all ornaments, clear and direct, and serves a clear thinking and an interested eye cast upon the surrounding world. This aspect is also to be noticed in the delineation of the character, governed by reason and efficient action based on scientific experimental spirit (for instance, Robinson Crusoe’s experience in a deserted part of the world). Actually, “the novel was born at the same time as modern science, and shares its sober, secular, hardheaded, investigative spirit, along with its suspicion of classical authority” (Eagleton 7), but attempting to identify the authority, principles and rules of composition within itself. In his celebrated book on the rise of the English novel, which Tzvetan Todorov labels “realist criticism” (106), Ian P. Watt regards the main reason for the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century to be the newly emerging middle-class, practical, rational, and materialistic, interested not in the metaphysical but in the concrete, curious about the self, individual psychology and the concrete world, and confident about historical progress. Congenial to such a material interest would be the art of realism, emerging in the eighteenth century and becoming dominant as the trend called “realism” and its realist novels in the nineteenth century. Of course, not all novels are realist, but realism – meaning to be “credible” and “similar to actual reality” – is the dominant matter of representation in the novel of all periods. Exceptional is perhaps only the period of modernism, in which the great experimental novelist – whether Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Virginia Woolf – “was able to weave together myth and history, psychological insight and social commentary, ethics and politics, satire and spirituality, comedy and tragedy, realist narrative and a fantasia of the unconscious” (Eagleton 336). To revert to the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel, Watt has shown its connection with new philosophical realism. He remarks that the method of eighteenth-century realism in the novel is “the study of the

134

Chapter Five

particulars of experience by the individual investigator”, having as its primary criterion the “truthfulness to individual experience” (12). Watt identifies the roots of realism in philosophy, namely in the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum and the pursuit of truth as a particular matter, from which realism emerges as a particular mode of representation. Watt also insists that the eighteenth-century novel is concerned with the individual and champions those works that reflect human psychology. If the novel sets out to deal with individual experience, its language has to serve the purpose: to be a source of interest in its own right and to establish a close correspondence between words and their objects. The double dependence of fiction on language and on reality represents another reason that makes it difficult to classify the eighteenth-century novels morphologically. The novelist of the eighteenth century – just like the author of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman – was interested in individual life, as he was concerned with different aspects of social existence in general. The interested look the novelist cast upon the aspects of everyday life was both realist and critical, and linked to a kind of universal criticism exercised in different fields (literature, ethics, politics, and philosophy). This is a common aspect of the eighteenth-century English novel, as well as of the European novel in general, along with the continuation of the picaresque form, which gave at that time the thematic and narrative perspectives most congenial to the fictional expression of the concern with the personal and the social. The picaresque novel represents a dynamic narrative movement that goes over different social settings, with characters whose main features are clearly and definitely rendered, even if the author fails over psychological aspects. The protagonist of the picaresque novel is usually an autodiegetic narrator recounting his own life and colouring it with the presentation of the other characters’ lives, as well as with many personal reflections and points of view on events, people and things he meets in his both physical and spiritual pilgrimage. El picaro is born in a provincial town in a family of lower-class parents, or is sometimes an orphan educated by relatives. He passes through different adventures consisting in an extraordinary experience of life and showing the development of his personality from childhood to manhood: trap, abduction, escape, pursuit, penal servitude, servant of several masters, coming into money, collapse, and the final triumph. The experience of life of the picaresque hero is important so far as it changes the inner existence of the protagonist, together with his condition, destiny and social position. The changes in his inner life, that is, of his personality, are based on his understanding of moral values, on his acquiring of the sense of right and wrong, and the ability to reconcile the

The Eighteenth Century

135

outward and the inward, revealing how a high social position and money can also contribute to the character’s true enrichment of spirit. As a continuation of seventeenth-century fiction, the eighteenth century also saw an increase in autobiographical writing, which might be related to the rise of the interest in self-analysis and individual experience. It was a form of self-expression open to both men and women, later leading on to experiments with fictional first-person narratives. Apart from comprising novels of character and social realism, eighteenth-century English fiction is in some respects the equivalent of early genres. Like the Renaissance conduct book, it traces the process of the making of a gentleman; like the picaresque story of adventure, it traces the story of a personal experience of life along with the representation of the social background; and, as a continuation of the seventeenth-century fiction, it is less a psychological study than a representation of the character’s development along with the influences of the milieu, for most of the characters in eighteenth-century fiction are flat but dynamic characters. On the other hand, given this diversity and openness to influences of different kind, as the novel had no models to be determined by, and accordingly they felt free from any traditions and norms, the eighteenth-century English novelists started to create new literary conventions, which became the elements of the newly emerging fictional pattern of the novel writing tradition. On the thematic level, apart from the social concern specific to the art of realism, the eighteenth-century novel embodies other elements that would come to characterise the further advancement of the genre in English literature, even to the present day, and give the novel its “Englishness”. One is the moral element; others are educational, sentimental, melodramatic, self-reflexive, adventurous, comic, and panoramic. However, the dominant one is the realist element, which overrides the rest; standing next to it in matters of fictional concern are the sentimental and especially moral elements. “The fable is always made for the moral, not the moral for the fable”, claims Defoe through the voice of his character Crusoe, and since then, in particular in Victorian realist fiction, moral didacticism has emerged as a dominant thematic perspective. Hence the categorization of the eighteenth-century British novel into different trends or types, such as the sentimental novel, the moral novel, the comic novel, the picaresque novel, the adventure novel, the epistolary novel, and others, including Sterne’s “anti-novel”. On the narrative level, the best example would be the rise and immediate acquiring of dominance of the omniscient viewpoint over the narrative material for almost two centuries. It will be the technique of

136

Chapter Five

Dostoyevsky, Henry James and later the stronger experiments in form and technique by Proust and Joyce to determine the authorial withdrawal for the story-telling to be conducted from a detached point of view and through the impressions of the characters. Meanwhile, in close relation to the moral and educational specificity of the British novel on the thematic level, on the narrative level, in Fielding and Scott, in Thackeray and George Eliot, the author is everywhere present in person to see that you are properly informed on all the circumstances of the action, to explain the characters to you and insure your forming the right opinion of them, to scatter nuggets of wisdom and good feeling along the course of the story, and to point out how, from the failures and successes of the characters, you may form a sane and right philosophy of conduct. (Beach 14)

Another interesting example is the “epistolary technique”, which provides a complex narrative, appealing narrators and multiple points of view, as in Richardson’s novels. The epistolary technique has as its advantages the possibility to achieve individualization and immediacy, and uppermost to disclose the universe of the inner existence: “the letter – that most spontaneous, up-to-the-moment, self-confessional of forms – gives us access to the inner truth of his characters” (Eagleton 71). Among the drawbacks, its multiple and chaotic narrative lines, narrators and points of view make the story complex but disorganised and difficult to follow since authorial voice involvement is abandoned. Also, the lack of simplicity and directness in the presentation of the characters and events, and the lack of retrospective narration, which would allow omniscient intervention and evaluation, led to the decrease in popularity and finally the disappearance of the epistolary form. The primary aim of these new conventions – thematic (social concern, moral education, sentimentalism, melodrama, and so on) and structural (travel narrative, memories, diary, epistolary technique, and so on) – was to achieve verisimilitude (the illusion of reality) and to organize the fictional material mostly accessibly to the reading audience, given the moralizing and critical concern of the authors. The particular way of linguistic representation of the story – what Ian P. Watt calls “the distinctive narrative mode” – has to do with the sum of literary techniques, “whereby the novel’s imitation of human life follows the procedures adopted by the philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report the truth”, and is conventionally called “formal realism”, that is, the narrative embodiment of the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore

The Eighteenth Century

137

under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as to the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms. (Watt 41)

In Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (1987), Alastair Fowler speaks about the “verisimilar novel” of Richardson and Fielding. Realism became the unifying principle of novels written in the eighteenth century. In other words, the first English novelists were pioneers of realism by assuming – as determined by neoclassicism – the task of giving the impression of fidelity to human experience, which is always treated in relation to the milieu, including the morals, manners, and different aspects of life of the writer’s society. Moreover, the writer’s concern with the everyday life was critical, that is, the presentation of different aspects of the social and the personal without exaggeration had to convey certain elements of opposition to those aspects that appear incompatible with the personal or social accomplishment. In prose fiction, verisimilitude is a kind of implicit simile by which the author offers a semblance of reality, attempts to describe things similar to real ones, and the reader considers them as credible, probable, since for him or her they look real. It could be defined in this respect as faithfulness to actuality in its representation, which is to be displayed in literary discourse by a writer intent on prompting in readers, to use Coleridge’s words, a “willing suspension of disbelief”. Verisimilitude emerged in Spanish literary works in prose at the beginning of modernity, namely in the Renaissance, giving rise to the first type of fiction called the picaresque; later it emerged in Cervantes, and generally in Western European countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but in English literature only in the eighteenth century. Its emergence is based on philosophical assumptions that there are grounds for reality and foundations for knowledge, that understanding and meaning are given and accessible by their pure presence, and that language may truthfully represent reality. Its emergence made possible the establishment of the novel as a new genre, but what was in those periods just an element, although among the dominant ones, in the literary system of the novel, became in the nineteenth century the subject matter of a particular type of fictional discourse, which made possible the rise of realism, or the realist novel, as a distinct and still important trend in fiction. Verisimilitude is to be approached on two levels: (1) the concern with individual experience and the social background, and (2) the textual representation of the concern with individual experience and the social

138

Chapter Five

background. To be considered a novel, a work should feature both the realist concern and its textualization in a realist way. Individual experience in the novel is expressed through literary characters, either highly individualised or presented in relation to society. The social background is depicted dually: from a physical perspective, reflected by social types (institutions, classes, professional groups, etc.), and from a non-physical perspective, reflected in moral typology (including social values, customs, standards, rules, etc.), both made possible again through character representation strategies. In eighteenth-century novels, realism constituted an important element in the process of consolidation of the novel writing tradition. In the nineteenth century, after the decline of romanticism, realism established itself as a trend which continued and strengthened the eighteenth-century concern with the actual social and the actual personal, and opened new perspectives of literary representation of the relationship between individual experience and the social background, including the aspect of identity formation of the protagonist in the Bildungsroman. In other words, in the eighteenth century, verisimilitude is an element in the literary system of the novel making possible its consolidation as a distinct genre (the novel includes verisimilitude), whereas in nineteenthcentury realism, verisimilitude becomes its main thematic concern (the novel is about verisimilitude).

5.2 Verisimilitude in Its Literary Expression: Practical Argumentation In order to see the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century, verisimilitude (or the realist element) is of primary importance, but there are other things that should be looked at. These should be primarily the most important and dominant aspects of the thematic arrangement not of a particular novel but of a number of works. Among them, the picaresque tradition, social concern, neoclassical principles, moral values, didactic purpose, comic attitude, and others that are interrelated – for instance, in a way in which comic attitude, social concern and moral didacticism emerge from both under the neoclassical influence and from the picaresque tradition – as well as related to verisimilitude. Or rather, as we attempt to show in the following, these aspects determine the emergence of the realist element as a forming device in the rising literary system of the eighteenthcentury English novel. Therefore, in the study of the rise and consolidation of the British novel writing tradition in the eighteenth century, one should avoid taking

The Eighteenth Century

139

novels separately; instead, he or she should consider them comparatively in a developmental process starting with Gulliver’s Travels (which should be viewed as the starting point despite not being a novel) to texts – undoubtedly novels – such as Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, and finally Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. The interpretation would allow seeing the beginnings of verisimilitude as the defining and compulsory element in eighteenth-century English fiction, where its emergence is a result of especially neoclassical influence, the thematic perspective of moral didacticism, and the continuation of the picaresque tradition, meaning that they are responsible for the rise of the English novel on the whole. The realist element, or verisimilitude, is of primary importance in any attempts to disclose the ways in which the rise of the novel is a process of “becoming”, gradual, self-changing and self-enriching, and continuing to the present. This is so, despite the postmodern doubts about reality or its mourning over the death of reality, authorship, and originality, and despite its claim that language constitutes (does not represent) reality, so that reflexive fiction has been or should be replaced with self-reflexive metafiction. Along with verisimilitude, in a comparative approach to the five novels, the critic might focus on (1) the origin of each novel: literary or non-literary, a conscious attempt at writing the novel or by accident, and in relation to each novel’s intertextual perspectives; (2) the type of novel; (3) the thematic level of the novel, including major themes and concerns, character representation strategies, moral doctrine, relation with neoclassical principles, etc.; and (4) the narrative organization of the novel, including the type of narration, narrator, point of view, chronotope, etc. These four concerns would reveal the main aspect, which is (5) verisimilitude, the realist element, including its appearance and evolution, and its textual representation. In particular, the thematic and narrative strategies in various novels, starting with Gulliver’s Travels, would suggest the changes that occurred in and with each new novel, leading to the consolidation of a fictional tradition with Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. The process of development of the English novel in the eighteenth century would be best comprehended by focusing primarily on the realist element in its sense as “verisimilitude” or “being similar to reality” and offering “credibility”.

140

Chapter Five

5.2.1 Gulliver’s Travels and Verisimilitude Absent Classical doctrine had an indirect rather than direct impact on the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century, all the more so as the literary genre of neoclassicism was poetry, not fiction. Concerning the issue of the origin of Jonathan Swift’s work, it was the neoclassical precept of “respect to the genre” that made him12 write his Gulliver’s Travels (1726) as a satire in prose aimed at the contemporary travel-books in which many writers of the period would exaggerate their travel experience. As the travel-book is a genre requiring veracity and faithfulness to the fact, what started as Swift’s task to provide “an exaggeration of exaggeration” as the main point in his satire on travelbooks, was extended into a satire on England, Europe, science, philosophy and art, and finally on the human condition in general, to become a protonovel. The technique of exaggerating the exaggeration13 thus refers to what began as a satire on travel books: the work originated by accident, both literary, but non-novelistic (satire as a literary genre), and non-literary (aimed at travel books). Concerning the type, Gulliver’s Travels is a travel book, satire (with deviation from the genre, since this one is written in prose, not verse), adventure story, picaresque tale, and novel (with regard to its narrative level). Its intertextual perspectives entail utopia and dystopia, Homer’s Odyssey, stories of the adventures of Sindbad, and others. The thematic level of this work consists of a number of adventures of the main character, Lemuel Gulliver, presented in four narrative units, four different settings. Every time Gulliver sails off from England to a new place, at first for professional reasons, the second time by his own adventurous spirit, the third as asked by a friend, and the fourth for reasons of money. The first setting is the island state of Lilliput. Here Swift develops his satire on politics and war, aiming at the Whig party, as well as at corruption, hypocrisy, pride, and vanity. The small size of the people is contrasted to the huge range of their spiritual manifestation, largely immoral and degraded. On the other hand, their size symbolizes their inner world, shrunk to immorality and lacking true moral values. In the voyage 12 A famous satirist – as in A Tale of a Tub (1704) – and, together with Pope, an exponent of neoclassicism and a member of “Scriblerus Club”. 13 To exaggerate is a method used in satire to reveal the problem in order to criticise and fight it, which is the exaggeration in travel books (hence exaggeration of exaggeration).

The Eighteenth Century

141

to Brobdingnag, whose inhabitants are more moral and noble than those of the previous country, Swift shifts his satire on to European governments. Contrary to Lilliput, here the author focuses on the private, personal, intimate, physical, and on family. In the third part, Gulliver travels to Laputa, a flying island, and other places inhabited by artists, mathematicians, scientists, and shades of the ancient scholars. Its satire focuses not on individual experience and the social background, but on philosophy and science, to champion the ideas of the Enlightenment and neoclassicism, and the “battle between ancients and moderns”. However, it points primarily to the absurdity of knowledge, which is purely abstract, not tested and applied empirically, and not designed to improve human life. Thus, Swift advocates empirical principles (English) over those of rationalism (French). The last part, about the country of the Houyhnhnms, is the climax of the work: it is actually a neoclassical study, which offers an enquiry into human nature emerging from the aesthetic representation of the binary opposition between the human and the non-human. This part is a satire on the human condition in the presentation of the Yahoos (humans) versus the Houyhnhnms (horses). The former are pathetic representations of the human race, driven by passion, feeling, instinct, whereas the latter stand for reason and rationalism, order and calculation, proving anew that Swift champions neoclassical principles. One may notice in the representation of the Houyhnhnms the elements of utopia, in that, although they lack love and other feelings, these non-humans express the ideal community which, according to a neoclassical mind, humans must aspire to: the ideal community implementing the ideal of rational existence, moderation, order, and common sense. Similarly, in the previous part, the neoclassical spirit transpires in the presentation of the flying island of Laputa or other places whose inhabitants are concerned with philosophy and especially science, and its satire is aimed in particular at the Royal Academy. In Swift’s novel, in general, two directions are followed: one refers to the thematic concerns shifting from small to big, immoral to moral, spiritual to physical, and finally from emotional to rational; the other one shows the process of the main character’s inner experience passing through change so as to end his development after the final trip in disgust for himself, for society and humanity in general. The adventures of the protagonist – representing his travel experience, both physical and spiritual – are employed not only to build a satirical world vision, but also to broach the issue of the individual’s identity. Gulliver’s journey is the journey of the self in relation to the others, a journey of self-discovery, of acquiring and paradoxically losing

142

Chapter Five

knowledge/understanding of himself and of the human condition, or rather human nature (which is a neoclassical concern). From spiritual to physical, from England to Europe, from the science and philosophy of neoclassicism to human nature and the human condition in general, Gulliver acquires self-knowledge and knowledge of the world and of human nature, and ends his spiritual and physical journey to become a split identity, an alienated character, an isolated individual who fails to integrate socially. It is the result of revealing that, in Part 1, we are ugly, dirty inside, as we are ugly, disgusting outside, physically, in Part 2, and that, in Part 3, science and knowledge are suspicious, as human nature is in its bond to the animal condition, in Part 4. There are two lines of thematic organization which include (1) Gulliver’s spiritual journey and (2) Gulliver’s physical travel disclosing the diversity of the author’s satirical concerns. In his concern with individual experience and the social background, as well as human nature, the human condition in general, Swift creates a frame-story consisting of four narrative units corresponding to the four parts of his journey, each reifying a certain concern through a satirical mode of representation. All four parts, united by the voyage of Gulliver, a thinly veiled refiguration of the chronotope of the road, have in common the concern with the protagonist’s individual experience. The Lilliput section, in particular, includes also the concern with the social background (English politics, social institutions, conflictual situations and war) and with human nature (inner world, spiritual existence). In creating a contrast between inside and outside, the Brobdingnag section also focuses on the social background (in particular European governments) and human nature (physical, external appearance besides inner life). The Laputa section shifts the concern towards the Enlightenment, and the Houyhnhnms part looks primarily at human nature. Consequently, the satire in Lilliput is on English political affairs and human inner world; in Brobdingnag on European governments and human physical appearance; in Laputa on science and philosophy; and in the Houyhnhnm land on the human condition in general. The narrative level of the text appears to be a novel, with a complex, linear narrative – involving a great number of characters involved, in turn, in a wide range of events – framing a structure of four narrative units; the autodiegetic narrator expresses a complex point of view, seemingly omniscient, though it also often seems to be rendered through places rather than the voice of the narrator. There are critical claims that Gulliver’s Travels is the first English novel, which are supported by references to its narrative organization.

The Eighteenth Century

143

The claims have no validity on the thematic level, however. With regard to the realist element, the textualization of verisimilitude is disputable, given the predominance of the fantastic element (as a result of the method of exaggerating the exaggeration). One may notice a clear concern with individual experience and the social background but no textual representation of the concern, which is reified, instead, in the shape of fantastic creatures and settings. That is why Gulliver’s Travels is less referred to as a novel and more often as a satire in prose form. Swift’s greatest satire also appears to be a novel of adventure. Nonetheless, the simple picaresque representation of events and likewise the protagonist’s involvement in an incredible journey through several countries are altered by the extraordinary authorial use of allegory, imagery, symbol, along with an apparent realism and reasonableness, in order to express satirical aims and moral attitudes. In some of these respects, Swift’s text discloses elements intrinsic to the tradition of fiction writing, in general, and to some of its types, such as the Bildungsroman, in particular, among which the adventurous spirit, the chronotope of the roadway, a concern with human characterization, moral insights into human existence, insights into the hero’s inner conditioning of personal experience of life, moments of internal crisis and revelation as the basis for psychic change, or possible identification of protagonist and author: at the end of the narrative, when Gulliver returns home after staying with the virtuous horses, he understands the disgusting habits of the human race, which he can no longer tolerate. This position of the protagonist is taken as an image of Swift’s own relation to humanity, since a similar satirical outlook is displayed in his other literary works, which reveal a mind taking to social criticism, scepticism about intellectual and scientific pretensions, struggle against contemporary meanness, and indignation at the English treatment of Ireland. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift moves from particular to general, and Swift-the-satirist becomes Swift-the-philosopher handling modern dichotomies and binary oppositions to offer a pessimistic view with regard to individual, social and general human existence. In Gulliver’s Travels, on the thematic level, Swift focuses on (1) society, science, philosophy, and human nature to reify a satirical mode, and regarding (2) character experience he reifies a tragic account. In both cases he betrays a pessimistic sense of futility, a personal vision which is different from many contemporary optimistic outlooks expressed in various works, such as Robinson Crusoe.

144

Chapter Five

5.2.2 Robinson Crusoe and Verisimilitude Implied Daniel Defoe’s best novel is Moll Flanders (1722), but Robinson Crusoe (1719), written when Defoe was already fifty-nine, is more important, revelatory and helpful to understand the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Concerning its origin, the writing of the novel is related to journalism, for it extends a journalistic event. However, Defoe made no conscious attempts to write a novel, to argue for a process of fictionalization, and rejected any possibility that the text should be a piece of imaginative writing, claiming faithfulness to fact. In the “Preface” to the novel, Defoe (1) assumes the status of an “editor”, not novelist; (2) his work is “History of Fact” with no “Appearance of Fiction in it”, that is, not a novel; but with (3) a clear purpose to provide moral lessons and instruction for living (“Instruction for others by this Example” and “Instruction of the Reader”), that is, an educational purpose, rather than pleasure or entertainment. This is how Defoe meant to achieve verisimilitude, to provide credibility and faithfulness to fact, to use a semblance of reality, and hence to win the reader’s acceptance. This renders the writing of Robinson Crusoe by accident and from within a non-literary context, namely journalism. Defoe came across the event – the experience of Alexander Selkirk who lived between 1704 and 1709 on a deserted island – as a journalist. The name of Robinson Crusoe came from a tombstone in a graveyard where Defoe was hiding from soldiers when he participated in the Monmouth rebellion against James II. The news about Selkirk is the pre-text developed into a complex text whose meaning is shaped through intertextuality to include typologically the extended journalistic event, the diaristic genre (a diary containing Crusoe’s memories), confession, allegory, adventure story, and novel (with labels such as adventure novel, allegorical novel, and moral novel). On the thematic level, like Swift beginning with a satire on travelbooks yet extending it, Defoe extended the journalistic event to provide a didactic message. Due to his wish to travel on sea, the protagonist goes against his parents, especially against his father’s will. The father advocates the middle-class status in society, which he considers to be the right standing and the proper way to happiness, better than either the upper or the lower status, even though to travel on sea implies either earning fortune or experiencing adventure, neither of which is of the middle type. The father advocates various middle-class values such as temperance, moderation, quietness, health, and others which recall some of the neoclassical principles. Robinson leaves his family and country without

The Eighteenth Century

145

his father’s permission and his mother’s blessing (because she does not want to disagree with her husband). Robinson Crusoe shows blatant disobedience; he refuses to accept the values, mentality, and morality of his parents, of being “in the middle”, and to find a proper place in the community. Instead, he is driven by an urge to travel, which could be seen also as “a perverse form of selfdestruction” (Eagleton 36) when he gloomily remarks that “I was born to be my own destroyer”. The result of disobedience, in relation to the novel’s moral end, is the punishment to spend twenty-eight years on a deserted island, to be lonely, excluded from the community. As with the later Ancient Mariner and Ishmael, only Robinson survives the shipwreck to give a lesson through his own example and experience. The lesson is at once a sample of survival and a warning not to rebel, not to be individualistic, but to listen to one’s parents and conform to the accepted values of family and society. While Coleridge and Melville deliver a lesson about the consequences of any attempts to destroy nature, Defoe’s message is related to survival and fulfilment of both material (shelter, food, clothes) and spiritual, inner needs. In the case of the former, the neoclassical influence on writing the novel promotes empiricism more than other perspectives for achieving the status of a monarch, the king of the island; or rather, the struggle for survival in a marginal situation corresponds to the desire to gain economic individualism, that is, to follow the middle-class way. In the case of the latter, rationalism is more dominant in the search for a superior, divine guidance by readings from the Bible, meditating on the human condition, and so on, so as to achieve the balance of the mind, a major neoclassical value. Both spiritual and material needs are achieved in the process of survival due to faith, but above all due to reason and to rational and empirical dominance over emotionalism and sentimentalism. This enables Crusoe to reconstruct Englishness by constructing a social system similar to the one that he left at home, where the rebuilt British social system represents, in Baudrillardian terms, a kind of simulacrum comprising various social, including colonial, aspects. The possibility of achieving it by an individual subject is the ultimate, most important message of the lesson. Defoe advocates the idea of survival and reconstruction through neoclassical reason and common sense, and expresses the belief in human potential and an optimism in the power of the rising middle-class. The main concern of the novel is individual experience; the main theme of the novel is the survival of the individual removed from any social setting or social interaction, who, guided by reason and a sense of order, escapes the

146

Chapter Five

traps of sentimental self-pity for such a situation and enacts the recreation/re-construction of the contemporary English society on various levels: social, cultural, moral, religious, political, economic, personal and, with the appearance of Friday, even related to the colonial expansion of England. The individual removed – as punishment – from society is able not only to survive but to rebuild an environment (social) and to dominate another one (natural) in order to progress spiritually and materially. Also, survival and the rebuilding/re-creation of Englishness on various levels is based on the belief in the potential and power of the individual (in particular, of the rising middle-class) from two perspectives, namely (1) learning and discovering from experience (empiricism), and (2) repressing and subduing emotions by reason and cold calculation (rationalism). That is why there are critics who avoid calling Robinson Crusoe a novel, but link it to the literary tradition of allegory, or call Robinson the “Universal Englishman” (Parrinder 76). Defoe intended his novel to be more than an adventure story since the issues concerning human nature link Robinson Crusoe to the neoclassical spirit and make it an allegory with a moral message. Here more than anywhere else in the diachronical movement of the English novel, with regard to the influence of neoclassicism on the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, one may approve of Foucault’s interest in the episteme as the unconscious assumptions of a period and society, as a body of ideas and principles that determines the knowledge that is intellectually certain and valid during a particular period. Unlike nineteenth-century realism, which places the individual within the milieu to embark on sociological studies on their relationship and the issue of determinism, Robinson Crusoe removes the individual from the social background and aims to observe what happens, thus becoming a study, virtually a research experiment on human nature concerning the isolated individual and issues of survival, progress, revival, construction and reconstruction of identity and the surrounding world, and of the human mastering the non-human. The narrative level, consequently, has to suit such a thematic framework. It does so by its limited narrative movement, encompassing two characters involved in a limited range of events and setting, to allow more space for reflection with strong moral considerations. On this level, then, Defoe’s the text is less close to being a novel than are other contemporary works. With regard to the realist element, its textual presence is debatable, given the concern with individual experience and the social background

The Eighteenth Century

147

but not the textual representation of the concern; or, at least, the social background is not textually represented, although the individual existence is textualized. However, Robinson Crusoe is called a novel and represents an important step in the new genre’s eighteenth-century process of development, given the total disappearance of the fantastic element. To this we should add that the textual representation of the social background is implied in rebuilding Englishness, by which the protagonist also reconstructs and shows the human history in its double perspective: of spiritual and moral development (implied in Crusoe’s reflections and soulsearching) and economic, political, colonial growth (implied in Crusoe’s hunting, agriculture, house building, and other activities). Both aspects are founded on his successful survival, which in its turn is based on the selfassumed moral, religious, family values and on the neoclassical rationalistic and empirical principles. Robinson Crusoe’s experience may be viewed as a neoclassical study on human nature, having symbolical, universal, and general human meaning and repercussions. By contrast, Defoe’s other novels are more “worldly”, more realist, the characters are more individualized, and their experiences more diversified, in particular those that rely on the picaresque tradition. Moll Flanders, the narrator of Defoe’s eponymous novel (written in 1722), born in prison, practically recounts her dubious liaisons with husbands, lovers, and seducers, her progress through thievery to transportation to Virginia, and final financial and emotional happiness. Her social and moral progress is difficult, and her memoirs – unlike those of Richardson’s Pamela, which are private and immediate, so that the reader becomes something of an intruder into her confessions – are ostensibly public and instructive; they suggest a rather too meticulous retrospection on a period of personal disorder. Originally, Moll, before discovering the virtue of religion, honest money and marriage, possessed “no sense of virtue or religion”, and combined wit with thieving skills to become a criminal. It is not Defoe’s eagerness to achieve the realist presentation of a chaotic social world as much as his focus on the individual experience that gives aesthetic validity to Moll Flanders. In this respect, rather than the picara’s adventures, marriages, and sexuality, it is the author’s ability to render a process of character development through stages leading from innocence to experience and then to moral betterment and economic individualism, a process which also reveals Defoe’s special insight into feminine psychology. His restless book receives many of the qualities of an adventure story and shows the influence of the picaresque mode of writing, still strong in the first half of the eighteenth century, as well as a

148

Chapter Five

number of certain thematic and narrative elements – in particular those related to the development of Moll’s character, such as the stages of biological and spiritual growth, sentimental career, quest for social security, parental figures as comforters and guides, and so on – that will be also elements of the literary system of the Bildungsroman.

5.2.3 Pamela and Verisimilitude Limited Samuel Richardson’s best novel is Clarissa (1748), perhaps the longest in English literature, with its 547 letters, but Pamela (1740) is more helpful to appraise the process of development of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Its origin, like that of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe, is also non-literary, by accident: its author, a printer, was asked by Charles Rivington and John Osborne to write and compile samples of didactical and ethical letters on different aspects of human conduct, known by the title of “Familiar Letters on Important Occasions”. Richardson’s life is also related to the writing of his novel and the rise of the English fiction in general in more ways than being a printer. Various aspects, such as his relations established with high society and writers, his own moral vision, his being a father of four daughters, and especially his epistolary relations with friends, where correspondence stimulates writing skills, contributed to Richardson’s literary project. And like Swift expanding satire on travel-books to other concerns and Defoe extending journalistic news, Richardson fell into the trap of imaginative flight to enlarge a real story he claims to have remembered but most probably to develop a couple of letters he wrote on behalf of a father and his daughter. In Richardson’s own words, from a letter to Aaron Hill, he reveals that Pamela emerged from giving “way to enlargement” to the “writing [of] two or three letters to instruct handsome girls, who were obliged to go out to service, as we phrase it, how to avoid the snares that might be laid against their virtue, and hence sprung Pamela”. And hence its typology, which includes, first, an epistolary work consisting of letters, more precisely a collection of moral and didactic letters, and a diary, as well as an ethical book (or conduct book) containing norms of behaviour. Ultimately, Pamela is definitely a novel, and a novel of three types – epistolary, moral, and sentimental – which is supported by references to its thematic level (disclosing its moral and sentimental nature) and narrative organization (disclosing its epistolary structure). The concern with individual experience and the concern with the social background as two main thematic aspects in the novel are related to

The Eighteenth Century

149

sentimentalism and moral didacticism – individual experience to sentimentalism and social existence to moral values – which become the main thematic perspectives, interdependent and inter-revelatory, but which limit the textual representation of the concern with individual experience and the social background to the issue of “virtue rewarded”. The two main thematic perspectives of the novel – individualization and social concern – promote sentimentalism and morality, which, in turn, imply a more materialistic approach with regard to the issue of whether the heroine’s sentimental personality and moral principles are genuine or just masques of a social climber whose aim is to marry a rich person and ascend socially. The three thematic perspectives – moral, sentimental, social climbing – are prefigured in the reasons implied in her decision to remain in the house after the lady’s death. Moral: people might think she did something wrong or immoral, like stealing, and has been expelled; sentimental: belief that Mr. B will protect her, as well as the growing feelings towards him and attachment to other servants; materialistic: to earn money by keeping the job, plus she would feel odd if returning to the village, as she has become used to urban and fashionable world. All these three thematic perspectives lead to one single end: reward for her moral strength, where marriage signifies her personal success and social accomplishment. Ethical principles are part of the contemporary neoclassical interest in the social and in issues of everyday life, whereas sentimentalism is an important eighteenth-century alternative to neoclassical hegemony, having its own status as a literary system with its own origins, definition, representatives, works, and characteristics. It emerged primarily from the focus being placed on individual psychological and emotional states, on personal experience in relation to others, the human condition in general, or the social, in most cases with strong moral considerations. It could manifest as a personal, mournful reflection on the “short and simple annals of the poor” buried in a country churchyard, as in Thomas Gray. In Pamela, what makes it a sentimental novel is the special way of treatment of the protagonist, whose sufferings and inner turbulence are induced by the social imperative to resist sexual harassment. In other words, sentimentalism in the novel emerges from the conflict between morality and immorality. Pamela is virtuous and moral, and assumes to remain so, but her immoral master threatens her moral nature, and accordingly she also assumes to fight for it; sentimentalism arises from this battle between morality and immorality, to shape the life experience of the heroine. The experience centres artistically on the notion of connectedness and mutual exposition of the moral and the sentimental

150

Chapter Five

as the two main thematic perspectives in the novel. The moral element, as the novel’s most important aspect, shapes the sentimental mode of character portrayal and is, in turn, sustained by the sentimental outlook. The reason for employing ethics and sentimentalism as interrelated and interdependent in one discourse is the novel’s didactic purpose, to teach, as in Robinson Crusoe or The Ancient Mariner, by her own example, oversaturated with suffering and painful soul-searching, moral values. Morality or moral didacticism targets the implied reader as the receiver of a moral lesson, aimed both at young, socially vulnerable, girls as servants and at their masters, representatives of a higher class, the former standing for moral values under threat by the latter as exponents of immorality. This could be seen in the use of the names, where, in contrast to the name “Pamela”, the name “Mr. B” suggests, on the one hand, his insignificance as an immoral being, and, on the other hand, the generalization of this human and social type: he becomes a kind of “everyman”. In delivering a moral message, Pamela is closer to The Ancient Mariner rather than to Robinson Crusoe. It does not limit the message to teaching moral values by disclosing them and showing their relevance, but also includes the social imperative of moral improvement, of making moral, of bettering another person who lacks such values; or, as Dryden claims in defending the value of poetry, both “to teach and move to virtue”. Moral values, in general, and virtue, in particular, as the theme of the novel, are related to moral didacticism in its twofold perspective, which involves individual experience and a more general matter of inter-human, social determinism: (1) didactic on the personal level (namely the view that one should remain moral, keep virtue and eventually be rewarded), and (2) didactic in matters of inter-human determinism (namely the view that morality wins over immorality, as a moral being determines another one to become moral). The moral Pamela against her immoral master, the moral self against an immoral other, where the social and family morality helps the heroine successfully face him, on the personal level, and, on the general human one, by means of her moral discourse materialized in her letters and diary, she can eventually change Mr. B into a moral being and fit member of society. The individual receives moral support from her family and the social background not only to sustain her moral nature, but above all to return the gift, to strengthen and improve the more general, human and social, ethical context.

The Eighteenth Century

151

The assumed authorial task of delivering a moral lesson finds its congenial counterpart on the thematic level as sentimentalism, and on the narrative level it finds the most suitable form of representation in the framework of an epistolary mode of narration. A complex narrative, with several narrators and multiple points of view, the epistolary technique displays many advantages: it provides the means to achieve individualization and to best disclose the universe of inner existence; above all, it enables the work to achieve credibility and create a sense of immediacy and intimacy between character and reader, by which the moral lesson is better delivered. However, in the historical advancement of the novel, due to certain drawbacks and disadvantages, such as multiple narrations, narrators and points of view, making the story complex but disorganised and difficult to follow, the lack of simplicity and directness in the presentation of characters and events, and the lack of retrospective narration, the epistolary novel did not endure. What has endured is the opinion that Pamela reveals the process of the rise of the English novel coming to its final stages, especially with regard to verisimilitude (or the realist element). The text shows both the concern with individual experience and the social background, and the textual representation of the concern, although the latter aspect is limited to a didactic, moralizing and sentimental outlook.

5.2.4 Joseph Andrews and Verisimilitude Complexified That the rise of the English novel had successfully occurred in the eighteenth century is finally confirmed by Henry Fielding with his novels Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). Joseph Andrews (the full title being The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams, Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote) is neither the first English novel nor Fielding’s first novel, but in English literary history it is the first comic novel. Fielding, who, like Richardson, came into novel writing almost accidentally, was aware, as the “Preface” to Joseph Andrews testifies, of being the author of a new genre, the novel, and of a new species, the comic novel, and understood the great opening forged by its thematic perspectives. The novel is humorous, rather than satiric or ironic, and reveals a good-tempered author, optimistic about a harmonious resolution: “Fielding’s good-naturedness, however, is not a matter of tone. It is also a whole moral vision, one which reflects a certain genteel way of seeing. Fielding admires the kind of good nature which seems to come

152

Chapter Five

spontaneously, as a self-delighting overflow of high spirits” (Eagleton 62). Joseph Andrews is also important for the history of literary criticism, as in its celebrated Preface, Fielding provides one of the first critical theories of the novel in English. In his attempts to define and explain fiction as a literary genre, Fielding considers his novel to be a sort of “comic epic poem written in prose” or a “comic romance”, but apart from the intertextual relations to the epic, comedy, and the romance (that is, the contemporary eighteenth-century “serious” novel), Joseph Andrews owes much of its thematic narrative material to the “manner of Cervantes”, and, to a lesser extent, to Richardson’s Pamela and to the picaresque tales in general. Fielding, unlike Richardson (a printer prior to becoming a novelist), was a writer of literary works (comedies) and thus became successful in novel writing as emerging from within the literary field. The origins of Joseph Andrews are not extra-literary or merely accidental, but, unlike other novels discussed here, are purely literary. The novel, that is, originates in literature, for it has three major fictional connections: (1) Richardson’s novel Pamela; (2) Cervantes’s Don Quixote, as its subtitle (“the manner of Cervantes”) suggests; (3) the tradition of picaresque fiction. Besides, another genre, drama, particularly comedy, would give the novel its comic substratum. Joseph Andrews was intended to be a second parody on Pamela (the first parody was Shamela). However, what started as a parody – in which the comic effect would emerge from the changed gender perspectives in the treatment of the protagonist – resulted in a pseudo-parody, an independent novel whose intertextualism is to be considered exclusively within the system of literature, namely Richardson’s and Cervantes’s novels, and picaresque fiction. The text of Joseph Andrews refers to external reality and also to other texts (Pamela, Don Quixote, the picaresque narrative). Within this intertextual framework, then, its meaning is shaped and its independence becomes relative, because it is highly imitative especially of Cervantes. From Cervantes, Fielding borrowed the Quixotic character (Mr. Abraham Adams), the picaresque tradition, the burlesque technique, the “contrast between norm and exception” (Girard 155), and the “relation between the innate goodness and social influences” as “one aspect of the relation between Nature and nurture” (Eagleton 68) which is also present in Tom Jones. Abraham Adams is the teacher of moral lessons to Joseph, or rather a parental figure guiding and sustaining the moral being of a young man who is, like Pamela in her confrontation with Mr. B, an exponent of morality, although at times also ignorant and inexperienced.

The Eighteenth Century

153

Concerning its type, the text is a novel which forges an interesting typology out of its relationship with Richardson’s and Cervantes’s novels. As a “parody on Pamela” Joseph Andrews acquires the status of (1) a comic novel (by altering gender perspectives) and also (2) a moral novel (with Joseph as an exponent of ethical principles). As an “imitation of the manner of Cervantes” Joseph Andrews becomes simultaneously (1) a comic novel (among other things, by employing the burlesque and portraying Abraham Adams as naïve, unable to discern between reality and fantasy), (2) a moral novel (with the morally perfect guide Abraham Adams as a Quixotic character), and also a (3) picaresque novel (to mention just the picaresque narrative of the adventures of an el picaro and the chronotope of the road). These perspectives are interrelated and also indicate, through the author’s use of imitation and contrast, the burlesque as another typological feature of this novel, which, together with the use of parody, satire, humour, irony, and ridicule, represents the reason for the general appraisal of Joseph Andrews as the first English comic novel. On the thematic level, the picaresque tradition is revived in character representation, his individualization and his placement on the road. The novel “occupies a much wider world symbolized by the open road and the hero’s unpredictable and frequently hazardous journey” (Parrinder 131), where the complexity of the world and Joseph’s life experience are wider than in Pamela and will be superseded only by those in Tome Jones. The picaresque tradition in Joseph Andrews also emerges from the comic mode and the moral doctrine, which, unlike in Pamela, is extended, besides virtue, to include values such as faithfulness, friendship, kindness, stoicism, and others, and thus the moral dimension is rendered much more complex. Fielding’s novel is therefore more ethically educational than Richardson’s novel: in the latter novel there is only one element, “virtue”, whereas in Fielding the range of moral doctrine is extended and made multidimensional. Paradoxically, although Fielding intended Joseph Andrews as a parody on Pamela aimed at its heavily moralizing and sentimental outlook, he manages to replace the sentimental by the comic. However, concerning moral didacticism, Fielding made his novel stronger and more comprehensive than in Pamela. Joseph Andrews starts as another parody on Richardson’s novel Pamela, yet this time the source of the comic is a virtuous male counterpart to Pamela, her brother, Joseph Andrews. As the novel progresses, Fielding seems to forget about Pamela and presents the reader with a genuine, non-parodic text with its own moral tenets. The plot is constructed within a double framework: the picaresque narrative (the chronotope of the road involving the characters in a great variety of

154

Chapter Five

adventures in various places, thus offering a complex picture of English life) and the burlesque of romances (with its startling turns of events, revelations of identity, stolen children, and foundlings restored to their position and heritage in the last chapters). Joseph Andrews is, however, less an ethical or a picaresque book than a comic one: Joseph has to go through an ordeal similar to Pamela’s, for he is the object of Lady Booby’s desire and struggles hard to preserve his virtue; nonetheless, the literary treatment of male chastity with the same seriousness with which Richardson treated female chastity could only generate comic effects, and indeed Joseph Andrews is the first great comic novel in English. The comic mode applies first to the character representation strategies: to argue on his use of comedy, Fielding borrows Jonson’s theory of humorous characterisation. Even with regard to the innocent Parson Adams, since “it is not always easy to distinguish … moral innocence from simple ignorance” (Eagleton 66) that could become another source of comic effects. The comic characters are usually “flat”, common, and representative of a human or social typology. “I describe not men, but manners, not an individual, but a species”, says Fielding, yet his characters retain an individualism that makes them unforgettable, the most remarkable example being Parson Adams, a counterpart to Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Strictly on the narrative level, the novel clearly reveals the two narrative lines resulting from the two main thematic perspectives: “parody on Pamela” and “imitation of the manner of Cervantes”. The former determines the story of Joseph Andrews, Mrs Booby, and Fanny; the latter gives the story of Abraham Adams, the eighteenth-century Don Quixote; both narrative lines include comic and moral elements and are linked by the chronotope of the road, characteristic of the picaresque tradition. Concerning the realist element, the semblance of reality is achieved both through the concern with individual experience and the social background and through the textual representation of that concern. Unlike in Pamela, though, in Joseph Andrews they are extended and made more complex.

5.2.5 Tom Jones and Verisimilitude Panoramic It was with Tom Jones (1749), however, that verisimilitude, with its concern with individual experience and the social background, and the textual representation of this concern, has become panoramic. This means that the process of development of the eighteenth-century English novel had come to an end and the subgenre had established a definite literary tradition.

The Eighteenth Century

155

Unlike the other novels we have surveyed, except Joseph Andrews, the origins of Tom Jones lie in imaginative writing, if not as a result of intercourse either with other literary texts (as in Joseph Andrews with Pamela) or with extra-literary experience (as in Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Pamela). Besides, its author is clearly a novelist writing fiction, who is aware of his status and argues that in the Prefaces to both his novels. In the case of Tom Jones, its intertextual connections would still go, however, as far as to the picaresque tradition and to Fielding’s previous novel Joseph Andrews, in particular with regard to its moral and comic features. Joseph Andrews is first a comic, then a moral, and to a lesser degree a picaresque novel, whereas Tom Jones is first a picaresque novel, then a moral and a comic one. To the latter, labels such as “panoramic” and “of manners” are used to enlarge its typology, and, strictly in connection with the developmental process of the protagonist, the novel can be also called a “proto-Bildungsroman”. With regard to the panoramic feature, the novel’s intertextuality would also cover the tradition of epic writing, as, in the “Preface” to Joseph Andrews, Fielding has already related his work to this genre, calling his text a “comic epic-poem written in prose”. Concerning its character representation strategies and formal organization, Tom Jones is also related to a totally different genre, drama. And, last but not least, just as in his previous novel Joseph Andrews, Fielding reveals in Tom Jones his indebtedness to Cervantes in both his moral outlook and character portrayal: like Parson Adams, Alworthy is a quixotic character; Tom Jones is accompanied by Partridge, who is very similar to Cervantes’s Sancho Panza. First and foremost, however, with Tom Jones, influenced by the picaresque tradition, Fielding wrote another picaresque novel, adding more picaresque characters (including a female picara), as well as the chronotope of home and of the city to that of the road. As a picaresque work, Fielding’s Tom Jones represents at once a realist account of the contemporary background and an autobiographical (biographical) type of the character development novel. The biographical time is a typical individual time category which provides the basis for character development and growth. The development is the result of all changing life circumstances and events, activities, and actions. The destiny of a man is formed together with his inner perspectives on existence; in other words, the development and perspectives of the character’s life, his external condition and personal destiny are interrelated, as well as determined by the development and consolidation of sound spiritual components.

156

Chapter Five

In this novel, Fielding also continued and further developed his comicvision (and the comic mode borrowed from drama) and moral doctrine, stating in the dedicatory “Preface” that “goodness and innocence hath been my sincere endeavour in this history. (…) I have employed all the wit and humour of which I am master in the following history; wherein I have endeavoured to laugh mankind out of their favourite follies and vices”. With Tom Jones, Fielding indeed wrote another moral novel, teaching old as well as new moral lessons, and enlarging his moral doctrine by adding a great variety of characters. The moral doctrine is expressed through the individual experience of Tom (moral), Blifil (immoral), Allworthy (like Adams, representing the Quixotic, moral ideal), and other characters who are moral as well as social types. But Tom Jones does not simply continue the picaresque tradition and the moral didacticism of Joseph Andrews. Rather, it extended them to a panoramic mode by resorting to the chronotope of the road, expanding character typology and enlarging the range of events and setting. On both thematic and structural levels, the novel is highly multifaceted, readeroriented, and expresses a panoramic social concern, revealing a complex picture of the writer’s contemporary English life, its values, customs, manners, and forms of behaviour. This form of realism, intruding upon the textualization of actual reality with a critical and satirical mode of narration, comprises a complex, again panoramic, range of settings which includes streets, inns, prisons, servant quarters, public coaches, private bedrooms, and so on. In relation to the adjective “panoramic”, the term “novel of manners” is applied to Tom Jones, for both reader-oriented and panoramic features make this novel a novel of manners. In Holman’s and Harmon’s definition, the “novel of manners” is “dominated by social customs, manners, conventions, and habits of a definite social class” (325). In so far as in “the true novel of manners the mores of a specific group, described in detail and with great accuracy, become powerful controls over characters”, it “is often, although by no means always, satiric; it is always realistic, however” (325). In Fielding’s novel as well, the representation of the eighteenth-century British society and people is panoramic and described with great accuracy. Fielding attempted to depict his contemporary England in all its diversity and detail – a successful endeavour, since Tom Jones is acclaimed as the next literary work, after The Canterbury Tales, which has given such a complex picture of English society. In this respect, Fielding’s novel “is a tour-de-force of patterning, an assertion of the ultimate tidiness and proportion of the universe, and a

The Eighteenth Century

157

working-out of a representative human destiny” (Sanders 312). Finally, it is a literary work which expresses neoclassical principles and includes a number of comments on and evaluations of other eighteenth-century forms, such as satire, pastoral, comedy, picaresque. The omniscient narrator often disrupts the symmetry of the novel’s construction and the representation of events with pauses, unexpected reappearance of characters, interpolation of varied stories, comments on his narrative methods, recapitulations of his ideas about philosophy, literary criticism, and the works of Cervantes, Rabelais, and others. Yet the narrator, rational but with a strong sense of the comic, emerges as the dominant, all knowing and controlling voice, which analyses everything, and, above all, advocates, as Allworthy does throughout and Tom would eventually do, the true moral principles in the novel. The novel is close-packed, complex and dependent on the protagonist’s journey, which represents Tom’s progress towards a triumphant moral vindication of his developmental process, and to which, through the panoramic covering of individual and social existence, Fielding offers an epical dimension. The narrative is divided into eighteen books, as in Homer, which may be regarded as well-structured narrative stances: the first six assess Tom’s supposed origins, his education, and his fall from grace; the next six trace his journey to London, a journey paralleled by that of Sophia; the last six bring all the characters together amid the chaotic life of the city, and provide the resolution to an implied conflict. This organization of the narrative, highly symmetrical in design, distinguishes Fielding’s work from the bulk of earlier and contemporary picaresque novels with their episodic structure and unconvincing relations between events. It also links Tom Jones to drama, in particular because the novel conforms to the tripartite structure recommended by Aristotle, which is, on the other hand, revelatory for the contemporary neoclassical belief in the order of the world. Indeed, the first six parts reveal the cause of the action; the next six represent the consequences of the action; and the last six books bring resolution through painful circumstances of imprisonment and incest, followed by the discovery of family and acquiring of social status, as well as the downfall of his rival Blifil and final reconciliation with Squire Allworthy and Sophia. What links the novel to the dramatic genre is also the character representation strategy. Many characters are stock theatrical types; also, the comic mode, the stage-like employment of concrete visual symbols, and the confusing intricacies of the narrative movement, among others, show the influence of drama on the writing of this picaresque novel and proto-Bildungsroman. Bakhtin in his “The Bildungsroman and Its

158

Chapter Five

Significance in the History of Realism”, lists Fielding’s novel among the Bildungsromane or, in his words, “novels of emergence”. The Russian scholar considers Tom Jones, along with David Copperfield, illustrative of the third type of novel of emergence, the biographical or autobiographical kind. The emergence Bakhtin speaks about results from the totality of changing life experiences and circumstances, where the hero’s destiny “is created and he himself, his character, is created along with it” meaning that the “emergence of man’s life-destiny fuses with the emergence of man himself” (22). This labelling as Bildungsroman, or rather proto-Bildungsroman, is sustained by the ways in which the life journey of the protagonist is rendered thematically. Tom makes mistakes, though he is also misjudged, his perspectives on life are often frustrating, and his journey towards justification is complex and difficult. The journey is both physical and spiritual, depicts both a biological development from childhood to maturity and presents psychological consistency (which appears, however, static throughout the narrative), which leads to “prudence and religion”, the personal triumph best acquired through a personal experience of life. In depicting the protagonist’s journey, the novel includes, in terms of realism, both the concern with individual experience and the social background, and the textual representation of the concern, which, unlike in the other novels, is panoramic. It is panoramic due to the extended concern that gives the mode of writing a complex representation of the writer’s contemporary social and human existence. The complexity results from extending the realist element to a panoramic mode, which entails (1) a complex character typology, (2) a complex social typology, and (3) a complex moral typology. It is the type of complexity that will be found in some of the best Victorian realist novels, including such Bildungsromane as David Copperfield and Jane Eyre, the former perhaps the closest to the eighteenth-century fictional tradition.

5.3 Comparative and Final Remarks A study on the rise of the English novel would comprise three parts of the process, namely (1) origin, (2) development, and (3) consolidation. The origin is better revealed by finding contemporary influences as well as its antecedents in earlier periods, namely those early literary traditions, movements, types of texts which are related intertextually to the eighteenth-century English novel and influence its rise. This includes, in the ancient period, Greek and Roman epics and two Latin novels; in the

The Eighteenth Century

159

medieval period, romances and other works, such as travel books, as the one by John Mandeville; in the Renaissance and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, romances then picaresque fiction, as well as autobiographical writing, biographies, travel books, conduct books, personal and historical memoirs, letters, diaries, essays, allegories, and so on. The rise of the English novel is a late phenomenon, unlike in the rest of Europe, occurring almost two hundred years later, during a period ruled by neoclassicism. Yet the rise of the novel is not a neoclassical experience, but is influenced by the neoclassical doctrine. Also, the rise of the novel reveals a complex typology because of the absence of a definite tradition or strict rules in English literature. The most popular and influential tradition, as in Span in the sixteenth century and in the rest of Europe in the seventeenth century, remains that of picaresque fiction. In their rise as a literary system, novels came to share a strong grasp of reality, and, with Richardson and Fielding, the writing of fiction became a conscious endeavour to suit the increasing demands of a rising novel reading public as drama declined.14 In doing this, the writers found their artistic argument in the picaresque tradition as well as in neoclassical principles, and also in related comic, social, didactic and moral views. Apart from these aspects, some of which render a novel’s type, many of the eighteenth-century fictional works reflect suffering and intensity of feeling as touchstones of moral worth and thus provide a new fictional type, that of the sentimental novel. Sentimentalism shows that the rise of the English novel is a literary manifestation independent of neoclassicism, but influenced by neoclassical ideals and also as an alternative to neoclassicism. Of particular interest would also be the emerging gothic tradition of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, and, last but not least, “baring the device” and the self-reflexiveness of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. The rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century – to become the dominant literary practice of the period – was a gradual process of development and consolidation in which realist, thematic and structural elements occurred in order to survive, be developed or disappear in accordance with the emerging requirements of the novel writing tradition. Therefore, in order to understand the process of development of the eighteenth-century English novel, a comparative study of certain novels of this period with respect to a number of elements (origin, type, thematic level, narrative level, and especially the realist element of each novel) is

14

For instance, Fielding turned in his career from drama to novel.

Chapter Five

160

useful and revelatory. A systematised perspective on the origin, type, and realist element better would disclose the advancement of this process: Literary work

Origin with regard to the status of the author and intertextuality

Type

Gulliver’s Travels

Satirist; literary and nonliterary: extended satire on travel books Journalist; nonliterary: extended journalistic event

Satire in prose, fantastic travel book, adventure story

Robinson Crusoe

Pamela

Printer; nonliterary: extended didactic and moral letters

Joseph Andrews

Playwright; literary: parody on Pamela, imitation of Cervantes Playwright and novelist; literary: picaresque tradition, moral doctrine, and comic mode continued and extended from Joseph Andrews

Tom Jones

Adventure novel, diary, confession, allegory, philosophical and moral treatise Moral novel, sentimental novel, epistolary novel, conduct book Comic novel, moral novel, picaresque novel Picaresque novel, novel of manners, moral novel, comic novel

Verisimilitude with regard to the concern with individual experience and the social background, and the textual representation of this concern (both the concern and its textualization pertain to realism) Absent: concern, but not its textual representation, textualization through the dominance of the fantastic element Implied: concern, but its textual representation considers explicitly only individual experience by means of which the milieu is reconstructed Limited: concern and its textual representation are both achieved, but focus primarily on the moral value of virtue in the treatment of the master and servant relationship Complex: concern and its textual representation are both achieved and further developed Panoramic: concern and its textual representation are both achieved and extended to cover and encompass numerous aspects of personal and social existence, family life, social and moral typology, values, norms, customs, manners, and so on, in all their diversity, complexity and detail

The Eighteenth Century

161

During the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century, at its very beginning with Gulliver’s Travels, the fantastic element (resulting from the exaggeration of exaggeration) emerged as part of the imaginative process to textualize the concern with individual experience and the social background; hence Swift’s text is not a novel/fiction but a satire in prose. With Robinson Crusoe, however, verisimilitude (or the realist element) replaces the fantastic element and emerges within the imaginative process by offering credible characters and events, where this semblance of reality in the textual representation of the concern with individual experience and the social background makes Defoe’s text a novel, perhaps the first in English literature. The critics who are reluctant to call Robinson Crusoe a novel would prefer the term “allegory” and point to the implied essence of textualization of the concern with the social background; this implied verisimilitude is suggested by re-building the English society by means of neoclassical precepts that the protagonist must assume and follow in order to survive. Other works would follow the path of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe until their authors became aware of and assume the status of writers of novels and thus creators of a new genre. Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones, as different as they appear to be in matters of their origin, type, and handling of the realist element, share certain features. Save for Pamela (with its epistolary method), on the narrative level they use an omniscient point of view, linear narration, and a “readerly” perspective as common features. On the thematic level, to a lesser or greater extent, these novels also show some common aspects: the focus on individual experience, social concern, moral didacticism, comic attitude, picaresque strategies, sentimentalism, neoclassical influence, and others, of which the most common are moral, comic, and neoclassical elements. Of these, neoclassical and moral-didactic aspects are so dominant and textually present that they seem to be responsible for the emerging of verisimilitude to establish, in turn, a novel writing tradition in English literature. The rise of the novel is, along with neoclassicism and pre-romanticism, a major literary experience of eighteenth-century English culture and literature. The novel in its emerging phase and pre-romantic poetry were influenced by the neoclassical principles, visible in a great number of texts, but they also attempted to reject and challenge this dominant doctrine, whose representative genre is poetry, mainly satirical and philosophical. It would be inappropriate to talk about a neoclassical novel and to affix this label even to such texts that are heavily influenced by neoclassicism

162

Chapter Five

as Gulliver’s Travels, the most satirical one, or Robinson Crusoe, the most philosophical one. Swift’s work reflects neoclassicism by being a satire in its concern with social and human existence in the first two parts, and a philosophical treatise in its concern with scientific knowledge, empirical principles and those of rationalism in the last two parts. A similarly strong philosophical dimension covers the thematic material of Defoe’s work, to which a moral and didactic dimension is added also as a result of neoclassical influence. Moral didacticism dominates the thematic level of Pamela assisted by the interested look cast upon the issues of everyday life, another neoclassical element, but the mode of representation and the appeal of such a thematic construction are achieved by employing sentimentalism, a strong alternative to neoclassicism in the period. The social concern, the interest in issues of everyday life and the moral vision are intensified and persist in Joseph Andrews as well as in Tom Jones, the latter also employing the neoclassical satirical endeavours. Since Gulliver’s Travels is not a novel due to its special handling of verisimilitude, Robinson Crusoe remains perhaps the most neoclassical novel of the period in its heavy reliance on and employment of philosophical issues. Or rather, they are materialized in literary practice as elements of thematic construction comprising the character and events in which the character is involved. Robinson Crusoe enters, in this way, the line of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, which reifies the author’s theory of the origin of poetry, and later of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which expresses his aestheticism. Defoe, in his turn, seems to render, through the experience of his protagonist, the neoclassical philosophical principle expressed by Alexander Pope in the Essay on Man concerning the individual development: “See him [man] from Nature rising slow to Art!” Such neoclassical filiation can be better revealed by following a cyclical movement of thematic analysis of Defoe’s work. Starting with its origin, (1) an extended journalistic event, the neoclassical principles prompt faithfulness to fact (“History of Fact”) and, more importantly, the task (2) to provide a moral lesson, the didactic purpose being mentioned twice (as the word “instruction” of the reader/others) in the Preface. A means of delivering the instruction is by Robinson’s own example, that is, his (3) experience, which is both (4) survival and (5) punishment for having rejected his father’s middle-class values. The punishment/survival is presented in the context of a neoclassical debate on issues regarding (6) human nature, in particular the one dealing with what may happen to an individual when excluded from

The Eighteenth Century

163

society. Such a concern receives the form of (7) allegory, since Robinson’s experience is of universal resonance: it is general, symbolical and representative for human condition. The issue receives an (8) optimistic view on human potential given (9) the reconstruction of a social system (reflecting Englishness, based on middle-class values, and relying on the principles of rationalism and empiricism). The reconstruction is actually the form which (4) survival takes to represent the real life (3) experience of the protagonist. The neoclassical influence determines further (10) the reward which ultimately signifies (11) the moral lesson as the message of the novel, revealing a return to the second element of our analysis. The didactic purpose (“instruction”) of the work to which Defoe points in the Preface is thus achieved, the beginning of this process being the entrance into imaginative writing by interpreting, changing, and especially extending and enriching a journalistic event. Like Swift, and like Pope in his philosophical poetry, Defoe reflects on human nature. However, unlike Swift, whose vision on the human condition in Gulliver’s Travels is pessimistic, Defoe is optimistic in his belief in the human potential to rise “to Art” through survival when assisted by rational and empirical endeavours. The moral vision is further extended and strengthened in English fiction in its incipient stage by Richardson in his Pamela. Defoe, who also embarks on a moral and didactic purpose, follows a different approach, which is neoclassical, not that of sentimentalism. The ethical element, along with neoclassical principles, strongly assists the emergence of verisimilitude as a dominant element that is, in turn, responsible for the rise of an English novel literary system in the eighteenth century, and it does so, in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, again in the context of delivering a moral lesson. Joseph Andrews, in particular, is referred to in arguments about the rise of the English novel from the rivalry between Richardson and Fielding, a rivalry that also includes the concern with delivering a moral message. Eager to prove the literary validity of his work (in the title – “imitation of the manner of Cervantes” – and in the “Preface”), Fielding would attempt to exceed Richardson also in this ethical matter. Joseph Andrews seems to prove the view on parody in postmodern age as an intertextual mode, as asserted by Kristeva, and, as asserted by Hutcheon, parody as “a perfect postmodern form, in some senses, for it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that what it parodies” (Hutcheon 11). Concerning its relation to Pamela, Joseph Andrews as a parodic or pseudo-parodic work both incorporates and challenges the perspective of

164

Chapter Five

moral didacticism, whereas its other two major thematic perspectives – the manner of Cervantes and the picaresque mode – confer to it independence and originality. The perspective of moral didacticism, through the parodic mode, limits and bounds Joseph Andrews to Pamela. This perspective is also common to both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, but what also link these two novels are two other perspectives involving the picaresque tradition and Don Quixote. Since Joseph Andrews and Pamela share one thematic link (moral concern), whereas Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones share three (moral, picaresque, and Cervantes), it would be more appropriate to consider for a comparative analysis these two works by Fielding which reveal the process of the rise of the English novel coming to completion. The word “extended” could be used here as well to discuss the relationship between novels, and it regards all three major thematic aspects, as in general Tom Jones reveals extended rendering of characters, events, and setting. With regard to (1) the manner of Cervantes, Mr. Allworthy is another Quixotic character, but the real complexity is achieved in handling (2) the picaresque tradition with its picaro and chronotope of the road. Concerning the character, in Joseph Andrews, there is one loosely presented el picaro, that is, the protagonist Joseph, whereas in Tom Jones, there are two clearly defined picaresque characters, Tom, a male picaro, and Sophia, the female picara; especially the former, starting from being a foundling and eventually gaining an individual and social identity, shows all the major attributes of a typical picaresque hero. Concerning the chronotope, the first novel limits the experience of the characters to the chronotope of the road; in Tom Jones, the sequence of events is constructed first by the chronotope of the home followed by the chronotope of the road leading to the chronotope of the city (London). Such a narrative organization will be common to the depiction of the life experience of the protagonists in later Victorian novels, in particular in the type labelled Bildungsroman. Like in the Bildungsroman and similarly complex is the extension in Tom Jones of (3) ethical didacticism through the presentation of characters as social and moral types. In Joseph Andrews, the hero is a moral being, innocent and pure, and Abraham Adams as a moral ideal and a parental figure guides and sustains Joseph’s morality. In Tom Jones, the author adds a conflict, the fight between morality and immorality in both external (Tom versus Blifil) and internal (inside Tom’s personality) manifestations. Morality co-exists with immorality; first, it seems that immorality prevails, but the induced punishment leads to the understanding of moral values

The Eighteenth Century

165

resulting in a reward that entails (1) the rediscovery of family relations offering a social status, and (2) marriage offering personal fulfilment. This scheme in portraying the character in his or her process of formation amid a complex range of social interaction would remain almost unchanged in Victorian realist fiction, including the realist Bildungsroman, for instance, in History of Pendennis, David Copperfield, and Jane Eyre.

5.4 Other Fictional Voices: Smollett, Sterne, Austen, and the Gothic Authors A text of imaginative prose less revelatory for the rise of the novel, since at the moment of its publication the genre had been already established, than for the continuation of the picaresque tradition and the rise of the Bildungsroman, is Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748). The novel has as its hero a well-born and educated Scotsman exposed to the “selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind” (Sanders 315) in England and the wider world: Roderick is often aggressive and combative; he is affectionate and sexually inquisitive; he is also a victim who, through singularly devious paths, fights his way back to money and respectability. Despite being a wronged and disinherited heir and a stranger in his wandering, he never emerges as the kind of rebel and romantic outsider that later novelists might have made of him. Much of the ‘randomness’ had of course been implied by the title, but the novel’s true originality lies in its inclusion of scenes of contemporary warfare as clear alternatives to the fantasy battles of earlier romances. (Sanders 315)

Mixing the historical account – as the protagonist is presented at the siege of Cartagena in 1741 and later as a soldier in the French army fighting at Dettingen in 1743 – with the narrated account of a process of personal development, the novel is centred on el picaro, a peregrine, “a wandering hero who even as a boy has shown ‘a certain oddity of disposition’” and who “maintains this oddity as an adult, exhibiting a violence, an imprudence, a savage coldness, and an arrogance which both alienates sympathy and attracts retribution” (Sanders 315). As a result of his immoral behaviour and attitude, the protagonist, in the tradition of the picaresque narrative, is at various times imprisoned in the Bastille in Paris and in the Fleet prison in London, where he suffers as “the hallow-eyed representative of distemper, indigence, and despair” (Sanders 315). Also, as in a typical picaresque thematic pattern, the hero’s “repentance, which coincides with rescue from prison and an inheritance, allows for a happy

166

Chapter Five

marriage and retirement to the country beyond the pull of metropolitan temptation” (Sanders 315). The novel shows many common elements with picaresque fiction, particularly Lesage’s Gil Blas, but, although Smollett praises the French novel, which he translated into English in 1749, he distances himself from Lesage’s deviations from “probability” and from his sudden transitions which “prevent that generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader, against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world” (Sanders 315). Many of Smollett’s fictional elements in the novel, in both form and content, would be recognizable within the general system of the Bildungsroman, except for the principle of formation (either self-formation or guided formation), still disregarded as a literary concern. Otherwise, Smollett’s picaresque narrative – however episodic and disjointed, with an arbitrary transition from adventure to adventure and scene to scene – contains elements of both picaresque and Bildungsroman literary patterns: an orphan child in a provincial setting, who, unlike a typical el picaro, is offered the advantages of birth and education but at odds with the older generation represented by his tyrannical grandfather; as a consequence of this conflict, the boy is sent to school, where he enlarges his social relations, acquires a congenial parental figure in Tom Bowling, experiences further misfortunes, embarks on apprenticeship, and eventually is placed on the road accompanied by a friend. The chronotope of the road turns into the chronotope of the city: in London, Roderick embarks on both sentimental and professional careers, and passes through a great number of adventures and various fortune circumstances of rise and fall; he gains favours and enmities, friends and rivals, all over again towards his maturation and, at a certain moment, his active life reaches the experience of being imprisoned. Another picaro as victim of circumstances and often fortune in a disordered world of violence and immorality, the young Scotsman moves between misery and happiness, departure and return, changes status from surgeon to servant, and so on. In his life journey towards acquiring an individual identity, imprisonment is a necessary step in the process of character development for the protagonist to suffer spiritually in order to learn honesty and endurance and get rewarded by being released, then return to the sea, discover his wealthy father to be alive, marry Narcissa and return triumphantly to his homeland, Scotland. Roderick’s experience of life resembles in many details that of David Copperfield, in particular with regard to his circular movement from the background of a wealthy family and high social position, from which he is banished into an alien and obstructing world, so as to eventually earn the right to return to his original system and status of gentleman by relinquishing

The Eighteenth Century

167

pride, vanity and violence, and by embracing true human values and moral precepts. In other words, like Tom Jones’s, Moll Flanders’s, and David Copperfield’s, Roderick’s is a movement from innocence to experience to moral improvement and subsequent successful accomplishment of the process of character development, a movement which is typical of both the picaresque and the Bildungsroman thematic pattern. Smollett adopted the picaresque tradition “both to suit a modern English taste for realism and in order to describe a recognizably modern world” (Sanders 314). Moreover, the interested look that the novelist casts upon everyday life going on around him has a remarkable quality: it is critical, linked to a kind of universal “indignation” and criticism reified with respect to ethics, politics, philosophy, literature, social life, and human existence in general. There were, however, particular manifestations in eighteenth-century fiction which departed to a certain extent from the realism-forming fictional discourse of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. In this respect, mention should be made of Laurence Sterne and his “anti-novel” Tristram Shandy, “a celebrated early revolt against conventional chronology” (Bergonzi 27) of the narrative organization. Tristram Shandy, Sterne’s only work, is an anti-novel in its tendency to be experimental and to break with traditional story-telling methods, especially by asserting the idea that all art is artifice, which is indicated by the abundance of stylistic digressions and typographical devices, and above all by a rambling narrative consisting of episodes, conversations, interruptions and digressions, flashbacks and interpolations, black pages, asterisks, dashes, and blanks. Sterne’s anti-novel represents a kind of imaginative prose whose fictional discourse lacks an obvious plot, developing instead diffuse episodes, minimum character portrayal, which discourages the reader from self-identification with the character, and detailed surface analysis of objects. Tristram Shandy as an anti-novel is also a parody on various conventional and traditional types of writing, including the novel in general, and on some of its subcategories in particular, especially the picaresque. Regarding history and biography, for instance, Sterne considers that biographical and historical narratives are nothing but mere varieties of elaborate fiction. Sterne suggests by his fiction that with its beginning, movement of events, and ending, the biographical or historical convention is inappropriate to the human experience which finds that beginnings do not really exist, and that sequences are frustrated by different kinds of distraction.

168

Chapter Five

Sterne also focuses on Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, from which he borrowed and parodied the theory of the association of ideas, which allowed Sterne to present each of his characters trapped in a private world of illusions. Also, according to Locke’s theory of the association of ideas, a present experience might trigger a succession of ideas corresponding to memories of past sensations, and the mind will continue to associate the ideas that carry thought far away from the immediate contact. Sterne gives to this psychological principle a comic treatment, as for instance in the scene in which Uncle Toby proposes marriage, but, opening the Bible, he finds a reference to battle that bears him away to war and makes him forget about his matrimonial intentions. With regard to parodying the novelistic genre, against his contemporary novelists’ “well-wrought” novel, Sterne offers a rambling narrative of detached episodes and incoherent temporal and spatial sequences of events with alternative beginnings and endings, and many repetitions. Also, in order to suggest the lack of an illusion of reality and to express the absurdity of moralizing and learned debates, the author indulges in word play and linguistic experiments with vocabulary, syntax and punctuation, with lists and puns, these and other aspects being coloured with a considerable amount of Rabelaisian humour, to which he adds coloured and blank pages, drawings and hieroglyphics. With regard to parodying the picaresque subgenre, on the structural level, against the novel’s sequential pattern, Sterne transposes chapters, places dedication and the preface in the middle of the book, or leaves one chapter blank to be filled in by the reader. Against the picaresque novel’s large scale diachronic representation of human existence, on the thematic level, Sterne parodies and mocks the pattern of character development in his exaggeration of the formula “from birth to old age or death” by starting with Tristram Shandy’s conception and his father’s interrupted ejaculation. Tristram as the novel’s protagonist, according to its title, is not born until volume IV, never gets beyond infancy, and plays little part in the events. Tristram as the narrator, however, with his random associations determines the form of the narrative. Nonetheless, he appears incapable of organizing the narrative material, has no claim or control upon it, and follows no ordering principle to organize it in a logical pattern. In his parody of picaresque fiction, Sterne plays with language and with narrative and thematic movements, and handles the chronotope, which promotes digressions, freely as if to deny any order and coherence to the temporal and spatial dimensions. Consequently, the narrator fails to fulfil his declared, rather Quixotic aim to tell the reader about his “life and

The Eighteenth Century

169

opinions”, since most part of the novel consists of his father’s and uncle’s opinions and theories. Finally, Tristram Shandy can be ranked as an experimental, modernist or rather postmodernist fiction, for apart from anti-novel and parody, it can be also labelled metafiction. Given its self-reflexive nature, Sterne’s novel best reveals extreme artificiality in the process of composition, showing that language fails in its primary function as a means of communication. “Well might Locke write a chapter on the imperfections of words”, exclaims the narrator, who tries to recuperate communication through means other than linguistic. Hence, Sterne’s text is full of dashes and asterisks, black pages (for example introduced at the death of Yorick), so as to suggest that communication takes place more truly through gestures and sympathetic identification than through words, which may be elusive. With regard to the Bildungsroman, Eagleton notes that Sterne’s novel “is an allegory of the coming into being of every human subject” (82). The specificity of this work consists in that Tristram believes and hopes that writing “is the way he will oust his heavy-handed father and become autonomous, even self-generating. He can live his life through again, this time on his own terms. What he discovers is that nothing is less simple to master than script” (Eagleton 82). In its self-reflexive mode, the text renders its author’s concern less with the life experience of an individual than with the condition of literature (imaginative fiction) and its relation to reality. Language cannot provide proper communication and likewise the literary work cannot provide a semblance of reality: the artificiality of the writing process shows that the book is a palpable object, and that any attempt at making literature out of real life is an illusion. In other words, a novel cannot parallel real life and truthfully represent it since life is too elusive to be forced into a pattern, be it literary or not. Sterne’s novel is also related to Victor Shklovsky’s famous concept of “baring the device” as a moment of narrative self-reflexiveness. The writer does not conceal the devices to give the impression of an effortless creation, but lays bare the devices by which he or she defamiliarizes the reader’s perception. These devices are presented without any realist motivation to become the subject of the novel, its main thematic concern. By its metafictional essence and especially by its parodic mode, Tristram Shandy proves Bakhtin’s tenet that the novel develops as a parody of other genres, deconstructing and reconstructing their various forms and structures. Nevertheless, Sterne’s text also remains a comic and sentimental novel, his characters gentle and modest, incapable of conceiving of evil and deceit in the world. Unlike his other contemporary

170

Chapter Five

fellow-writers, Sterne seems not to assume moral and social responsibilities to disclose and criticize human frailties, vanity, corruption, and other negative manifestations and social issues, which in his opinion could be scarcely resolved. Thus, his work emanates a sense of comic scepticism about the power of literature to construct order out of the inherent disorder of life. Apart from Laurence Sterne, one should also remember Jane Austen, whose domestic realism is presented through a unique blend of neoclassical rationalism and sentimentalism of the romance. Jane Austen is also linked to, or rather prefigures the romantic view, as established by Scott in his historical fiction, of characters dreaming of high values, such as love, friendship, honesty, loyalty, and attempting to impose spiritual and mental components on the manifestations of the real world. In Austin, romanticism co-exists with realism and some neoclassical principles, such a fusion being responsible for her choice of subject matter: human nature revealed in typical English circumstances, regarding the experience of young girls and their commitment to family and marriage. Realism is here not merely the setting but the source of the issue concerning the harmony between individual aspirations and social imperatives, where marriage and happiness symbolize the achievement of reconciliation, which is a personal achievement coloured with sentimentalism. In the eighteenth century, sentimentalism as such had already pervaded the prose writings of Richardson, Sterne, and Goldsmith, as well as pre-romantic poetry. Another example of a different fictional tradition is the gothic novel of Walpole, Reeve, and others, which emerged as part of the romantic reaction against neoclassical rationalism. Gothic fiction emerged also as a part of the romantic revival of interest in the medieval tradition, culture, and in particular setting. Romanticism produced two types of fiction: gothic and historical. The former is set in the present, which the characters avoid, whereas the latter is set in the past, but not to avoid the present. Unlike in the gothic novel, in the historical one the past, with a significance in itself, is linked to the present in order to give a sense of the flow of history. The tradition or pattern of the historical novel – as established by Scott in the wake of the rise of a particular view of history originating in the study of the development of societies initiated by the Scottish Enlightenment – differs from gothic fiction. The historical novel follows a realist perspective: it presents the characters as determined by historical and social circumstances of their birth and development, and as linked to an ancestry which conditions their existence and which they may follow or reject.

The Eighteenth Century

171

Another realist perspective is that the exploration of the past offers answers to the present and explains how the present has come about. But, essentially, the historical novel is another writing aspect of the romantic revival, along with the gothic and with the rebirth of ballads, folk-songs, legends – on the whole, the rediscovery of local culture and vernacular language and literature. The word “romantic” itself derives from the Old French “romans”, a vernacular language descended from Latin (namely Romance languages), and thus it is linked to the “romance” as a medieval type of text. Unlike the historical novel built on verisimilitude, gothic fiction creates on the premise of the fantastic element and promotes the improbable, imaginary, the world of dreams, including nightmares as a universe of existence, as well as the illusionary, supernatural, non-real, demonic, destructive, even madness and death. In its pursuit of a spiritual reality and an alternative to the actual reality world, the gothic novel reifies the romantic dualism of existence, where one world (linked to the supernatural and often death) threatens the other (real life), which results in horror and sepulchral effects. Highly influential, the gothic novel loans its elements to genres other than fiction and as exploited by the romantics. Gothic elements are easy to identify in the play Manfred by Byron and in the narrative poems of medieval inspiration The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and Lamia by Keats. Even after its end as a regular trend in the 1820s, along with the completion of romanticism as a regular movement, gothic fiction has continued to emerge in various works, such as in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, even in the works of realist writers (Dickens’s Great Expectations and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre).

5.5 Neoclassicism Again, Now Also Shaping Literary Theory Sentimentalism and the gothic represented in the eighteenth century two major alternatives to the cultural dominance of neoclassicism (based on rationalism, realism, rules, order, measure, and common sense). Neoclassical theory dominated the poetical production of the eighteenth century, but also influenced the newly emerging genre of fiction concerning the practice of novel writing, where verisimilitude, faithfulness to the fact, and respect to the genre are among the strongest points of the neoclassical doctrine that had a direct impact on the rise of the English novel.

172

Chapter Five

It was neoclassical theory that had a strong impact on this literary experience by promoting the concern with actual reality and moral issues, and its textual expression, as important literary principles. Mastering the genres, and subjugating poetry, neoclassicism influenced the rise of the novel as well as the rise of the theory of the novel in the eighteenth-century English literature. The rise of the novel makes its authors become writer-critics who, especially in their prefaces to novels, develop critical and theoretical ideas revealing their awareness of producing a new genre, the novel, in relation to which they attempt, on the one hand, to prove its aesthetic validity, and, on the other, to differentiate it from another genre, that of the romance. The influence of neoclassicism was thus immense: neoclassicism determined the literary practice of novel writing, in general, and by this, indirectly, the rise of the Bildungsroman. Likewise, the neoclassical doctrine also influenced the rise of critical thinking on the newly emerging genre. First, the first critical theories of the novel, developing simultaneously with the rise of the English novel, focus on moral issues: Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding consider that the fictional text delivers a message of moral didacticism. Second, based on the neoclassical principles of verisimilitude, faithfulness to the fact, and respect to the genre, the first instances of novel criticism include critical debate on the relationship between fiction and reality. It was also the neoclassical emphasis on verisimilitude and faithfulness to fact that made Defoe declare, in his prefaces to Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, that his novels are true stories, authentic records of actual events. Third, and what is even more important, the neoclassical rationalism rejecting subjective and emotional manifestations, like the expression of personal feelings in poetry and the sentimentalism of the romance, there is also a critical debate on the similarities and differences between the novel and the romance in favour of the former, although the sentimental novel is among the most important eighteenth-century types of English fiction. Finally, and what is most important concerning the influence of neoclassicism on the eighteenth-century theory of the novel, is the neoclassical revival and reliance on ancient classical tradition which, when used by writer-critics, fulfils the task to defend the novel as a new type of literary work. This fourth example of the ways in which neoclassicism influences the rise of novelistic theory in the eighteenth century is related

The Eighteenth Century

173

to the previous third example, which is about the critical debate on the novel and the romance as distinct genres. This aspect of the eighteenth-century critical thinking is best seen in Henry Fielding’s “Preface” to his novel Joseph Andrews, although the author-critic does not use the term “novel” for his work but “romance” and “epic”, which could be a source of terminological confusion. Apart from Fielding, extremely revelatory for the rise of novel-related literary theory in the period are Defoe and Reeve. It would be interesting to hypothesize that the three of them indicate a process of development of the theory of the novel (from Defoe to Fielding and finally to Reeve) comparable, in literary practice, to the rise of the novel as it proceeds from Swift to Defoe to Richardson and finally to Fielding, Random, Sterne and others. Defoe is not aware of the emergence of a new genre, rejects the notion of fiction and emphasizes the didactic purpose by proffering his protagonist as an example. Fielding is conscious of writing in a new genre (novel/fiction) and of founding a new type (the comic novel), but he does not use the new term, and above all has no regard whatsoever for verisimilitude, or the realist element. By contrast, Clara Reeve is superior to both of them by being conscious of a new genre, by differentiating between the novel and the romance, and above all by promoting the realist element as the dominant one and emphasizing its thematic role in picturing “real life and manners”, “the time in which it is written”, “things as pass every day before our eyes” and “may happen to our friend, or to ourselves” so that they “appear so probable, as to deceive us into persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses of the persons in the story as if they were our own”. It should be mentioned, however, that another founder of the English novel, Samuel Richardson, as his letter to Aaron Hill reveals, also claims faithfulness to fact in the writing of his novel Pamela: he recalls that an acquaintance told him a story as that of Pamela. Richardson, moreover, shows that he is aware of being the producer of a new type of writing: I thought the story, if written in an easy and natural manner, suitably to the simplicity of it, might possibly introduce a new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue.

It is significant that Richardson differentiates between the romance and his “new species of writing” by dismissing the fantastic element and

174

Chapter Five

replacing or rather opposing it not with the realist one, as Reeve does, but with moral didacticism. Thus, “Richardson understands his achievement as the morally motivated expulsion of improbable romance” (Seager 8). Fielding too is among those eighteenth-century writer-critics who, like Richardson, Smollett, and later Reeve, are conscious that what they are writing is something completely different from the romance and totally new in English literature, and articulate their ideas on fiction in the prefaces to their novels, in essays and other non-literary writings, or through the voice of their narrators or characters. Unlike them, Johnson or Goldsmith, for instance, fail to see any difference between the novel and the romance, and are not aware of the emergence of the novel as a new type of literary text. Still others, like Defoe, refuse to consider their writings even to be imaginative prose. In the eighteenth century, English literary history witnessed the rise and consolidation of the novel writing tradition, with Fielding not only one of the founders of this genre but also the founder of a new species of novel, the comic novel. In the “Preface” to Joseph Andrews, Fielding states the general principles that govern his writing and argues about the relationship between his new, comic type of novel and some longestablished literary genres – namely the epic, comedy, and the “serious romance” (that is, medieval or contemporary novel) – thus successfully indicating the literary validity of his work and its literary value. In the “Preface” to Joseph Andrews, Fielding speaks about his work as a new type of writing: a “kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language”; in the first volume of Tom Jones he calls himself “the founder of a new province of writing”.15 From the very beginning of his “Preface” to Joseph Andrews, Fielding defines his work as a “comic romance”, which is a “comic epic poem in prose”. Widely read in classics, Fielding draws on them to find points of contact between the established traditional genres and his new literary creation. In doing so, Fielding proves that he has been writing within a highly respectable tradition, that of the ancient epic, and aims to prove that his work is important enough to be considered part of a literary tradition in itself – that of the comic novel – aesthetically valuable enough to be 15 Like Fielding, Richardson formulated some early theories of the novel with respect to his own epistolary technique by valuing a dramatic mode of narration. Drawing on “the classical distinction between pure, imitative and mixed narrative”, Richardson “distinguishes between first-person narration (in which the writer tells of his own adventures), epic narration (controlled by what we would call an authorial narrator) and a technique which is more dramatic, introducing dialogue and direct speech” (Onega and Landa 16).

The Eighteenth Century

175

accepted by the reading public and implemented in the contemporary cultural and literary background. In this respect, Fielding claims, in the ancient period both epic and drama had the tragic and comic modes, and the ancients left patterns of those types, except the comic epic: Homer is said to have written one, now lost. Fielding attempts to argue that it is possible to fill this empty case by his own work, which possesses all the elements of an epic – fable, action, character, sentiment, and diction – except metre, his text being written in prose. Almost all the elements being similar, except one, then it is appropriate, Fielding believes, to call his novel Joseph Andrews an “epic”. Moreover, it is reasonable to do so, since “no critic hath thought proper to range it under any other head, nor to assign it a particular name to itself”. Fielding should have added, actually, besides “meter”, the realist element in his comparison of epic and his work in order to differentiate between them. Thus, he should have stated that the epic contains the “fantastic element”, whereas his work contains the “realist element”. A realist feature of his novel, however, would greatly separate the genres, diminish the value of the five found similarities, and disturb his chain of reasoning, which allows us to speculate that he might have been aware of that and avoided mentioning verisimilitude on purpose. Fielding then carefully delimits his text from other literary species, with which it shares certain elements in common, namely from comedy and the serious romance (referring to either the medieval romance or to other novels written in his period). It differs from comedy, “as the serious epic [does] from tragedy”, in that “its action [is] more extended and comprehensive; [it] contain[s] a much larger circle of incidents, and introduc[es] a greater variety of characters”. His text also differs from the serious romance in its fable and action, which are “light and ridiculous”, whereas in the serious romance they are “grave and solemn”; in its characters, by introducing characters of different types, including “persons of inferior rank, and consequently of inferior manners”, whereas the serious romance “sets highest before us”; and finally in its sentiments and diction by introducing the ludicrous instead of the sublime in sentiment and the burlesque in diction. Being a playwright, in particular of comedies, before coming to novel writing, Fielding is able to delimit clearly these two notions of the comic genre, as well as that of the ridiculous, which has its source in affectation arising from hypocrisy and vanity as depicted in the characters and their feelings. The comparative approach to his comic novel (which he calls “comic romance” and “comic epic poem in prose”) and the three traditional genres of the epic, comedy, and the serious romance shows some similarities

176

Chapter Five

between Joseph Andrews and epic, a series of differences between Joseph Andrews and comedy, and a number of differences between Joseph Andrews and the serious romances. Here it is interesting to observe that in his comparative assessment of Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding, by comparing his text to epic and comedy, points to the characteristics of the novel in general and gives a very modern definition of what a novel is in the broadest sense: a novel contains “fable, action, characters, sentiments, and diction”; it is written in prose form; and it has “extended and comprehensive” action, a large “circle of incidents”, and a great “variety of characters”. By comparing his comic novel to the serious romance on the basis of the common elements found between the epic and his own literary work, Fielding identifies the comic elements in the novel and thus offers the modern definition of what a comic novel is in particular: a comic novel contains “light and ridiculous” fable and action; characters of “inferior rank” and “inferior manners”; and “ludicrous” sentiments and “burlesque” diction. The rise of the novel is a major aspect of the eighteenth century British literature, next to neoclassicism and pre-romanticism. The genre of fiction received a status of popularity equal to that of Elizabethan drama during the Renaissance, and was founded by such writers as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and others. Nowadays nobody challenges the idea that the novel has antecedents in antiquity, namely the epic and Latin novels, and in the Middle Ages, namely the romance. Through a complicated but continuous development, the novel evolves subsequently in the Renaissance and in the seventeenth century as picaresque fiction in Europe, to establish itself as a new form in the eighteenth century in English literature too. Neoclassicism also influenced the first instances of critical thinking on the novel, especially with regard to the novelty of the novel. One salient issue of novel-related critical thinking is the distinction between the romance and the novel. Much of this novelistic theory consists of the writer-critics’ attempts to render familiar the new literary form by the standards of older forms. Bakhtin, Lukacs and other theorists of the novel consider the epic and the romance to be the novel’s most important literary precedents. Likewise, Fielding speaks about both the epic and the romance as respectable traditions: he aims to justify his newly developing genre by identifying in the framework of a comparative analysis certain similarities but also differences between the three genres. In doing so Fielding establishes a convention of writing; by the end of the century the genre of novel would have already become a tradition, a conventional form, and the “new genre in search of its own rules had quickly become so rule-bound as to appear utterly formulaic” (McKeon 244).

The Eighteenth Century

177

Henry Fielding excels in both familiarizing and defending the aesthetic validity of a new genre, the novel, and of one of its new forms which is the comic novel. Fielding materialises this belief in his critical thinking, and shows, together with other eighteenth-century novelists and critics, that neoclassicism dominates not only the poetic production of the period but also influences the literary practice of novel writing and especially the critical thinking related to novel writing. Important representatives of critical thought concerning novel-related literary theory and criticism in the eighteenth century, yet distinct from the neoclassical critics Pope, Addison, and Johnson, were Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and other founders of the novel writing tradition in English literature. Unlike for Pope and Johnson, for the novel there was no classical theoretical precedent, since it emerged as a new literary form of the modern period. Hence the novelists’ own attempts to defend the literary validity of their works and to provide them with a theoretical foundation. Yet in order to do so, the writer-critic would pretend that his writings are true stories, as Defoe did with reference to Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. In the “Preface” to the former he denies that his book is a romance (novel, fiction) and assumes the position of a mere editor of Crusoe’s life as a true history – it was “all historical and true in Fact” – which deserves to be told because of its unbelievable content and especially because it provides moral instruction to the reader (an important aspect, for it is mentioned twice). Likewise, in the “Preface” to Moll Flanders, Defoe pretends that Moll’s story is true and it is told by the heroine herself, as a “private history”, yet “put into new words, and the style [being] a little altered”; although, he admits, “it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine”. In typical Cervantes fashion, Defoe confronts the reader with the claim to historical truth by arguing that the book is not a romance or novel but a “private history” written by the “Author” (Moll) herself, and that her own history is “her own tale” told “in moderate words”. As in Robinson Crusoe, here the reader is the main focus, the receiver of moral instruction; his/her main responsibility is to grasp the lesson, and thus “will be more pleased with the moral than the fable”. For Defoe’s reader, the ethical principles should be more important than the story as a mere source of entertainment. Both Prefaces are similar in that in both Defoe insists on realism and credibility, and on faithfulness to the fact. Yet Defoe attempts to persuade the reader that his novels are authentic records of actual events and as such are also messages containing ethical lessons. In doing so, Defoe raised one .

178

Chapter Five

of the most important matters of critical concern in later debates on fiction, namely the issue of realist depiction of human and social life, along with the question of the status of the narrator, its relationship to both the thematic content and the reader, and the issue of the moral and didactic elements in the novel. In his prefaces and in An Essay Upon Literature, Defoe proves to be a sociologist of literature: he gives attention to the relation of writer and reader and to all the elements involved in maintaining a trustful relationship between the two. Among them, “word”, “pen”, “ink”, “paper” and the printing machine were “the excellency of the art of printing” and “everything worth recording in the world, is now so secured, that it may almost be said, it cannot be lost, and perhaps may never till the general conflagration”. After Swift, Defoe represents the next step in the rise of the art of prose fiction in eighteenth-century English literature. His novel Robinson Crusoe is an intermediary in the process of development of the novel towards Richardson’s Pamela, in which the realist element, though limited to a sentimental and moralizing outlook, since his fiction “is more about judgement and observation than experience” (Eagleton 69), covers both the concern with individual existence and the social milieu, and the thematic representation of this concern. The process comes to its end and the novel establishes itself as a definite literary tradition with Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, in which the impression of realism is fully achieved in that both the concern with individual experience and the social background, and the textual representation of the concern are extended and made complex, as in the former novel, or made panoramic, as in the latter. It is this realist element that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allowed the realist novel to grow to maturity. Not Swift but Defoe, given his supersession of the fantastic element in fiction by verisimilitude, is claimed to be the first true master of the English novel. Nevertheless, this claim may arguably have limited validity for those who content that Defoe’s novel lacks the textualization of the concern with the social background which is indeed implied in Crusoe’s attempts to learn, selfimprove, and rebuild a whole milieu. Second, regarding the origin of the novel, namely the author rejecting any possibility of the text to be taken as a piece of imaginative writing and claiming faithfulness to fact, the text is conceived as an extended journalistic event apparently based on a diary containing Crusoe’s own memories. Like other novels, Defoe’s prose fiction in general “sprang from an experimental involvement in other literary forms, most notably the polemic pamphlet, the biography, the

The Eighteenth Century

179

history and, latterly, the travel-book. His novels included elements of all these forms” (Sanders 302). Another, more common way of defending the literary validity of the newly emerging genre and its discussion in theoretical terms, Fielding’s, was to make references and comparison to honourable literary traditions. The precedent had been given earlier by John Bunyan, who, in the “Apology” to his proto-novel The Pilgrim’s Progress, justifies his work by reference to the Bible, which also contains parables. Bunyan is also indebted to the tradition of dialogue which, in his prose, “has attempted to reproduce the movement of conversation in a variety of regional accents and on different social levels” (Gordon 162). In the eighteenth century, a more elaborate and argumentative attempt to include the new form of novel in traditional classical and neoclassical theories was made by Henry Fielding, truly a writer-critic, who combines fictional writing with critical commentary, as in the “Preface” to Joseph Andrews and in the introductory chapters to each book from Tom Jones. According to Frank Kermode, in his celebrated The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), the history of the novel “is the history of forms rejected and modified, by parody, manifesto, neglect, as absurd” (304). Cleaning itself from thematic and narrative elements alien to fictional discourse, the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century, starting with Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe and culminating with Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, gave rise, according to Watt and other critics, to a social consciousness of the British novelist. It means the concern with the representation of the complexity of social and personal life in order to achieve the semblance of the real world. It means also an idea of social reformation, an ethical didacticism in matters of spiritual betterment, reforming the manners, beliefs, moral values, and the entire society. Defoe, Richardson and Fielding “demonstrably honour ‘reality’ more faithfully than their predecessors in narrative literature, but they are also demonstrably more committed to the stereotypes than, say, Jane Austen or George Eliot, who, in turn, impose a degree of order upon experience that would be impossible to sustain (at their level of seriousness) in the modern era” (Lodge 44). The eighteenth-century English novelists, like their Victorian successors, saw themselves responsible for society’s moral edification. Both social consciousness and social reformation represent interdependent parts of the element of realism that forms the basic component in the literary pattern of fiction writing, whose beginnings found their textual expression in the eighteenth-century novels. In many nineteenth-century

180

Chapter Five

realist novels, the concept of determinism and the principles of the social study would also contribute to realism. Thus, the first instances of novel-criticism emerging with the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century focus primarily on the moral implications of the narratives, as for Dr Samuel Johnson. The eighteenthcentury novel writing is perceived as a pedagogical exercise, whose purpose is to teach existence as moral becoming. The best examples of this “educational impulse” in fiction are Richardson’s epistolary works, Fielding’s novels of character and manners, and, even earlier, Defoe’s novels, where “the experience of the protagonists renders the idea of life as a continuous series of moral trials. Formal realism – the transcription of real life – is meant to persuade and teach about ethical challenge and evolution” (Mindra 68, my trans.). Moral didacticism in the eighteenthcentury novel is a consequence of the neoclassical influence on the rise of the fictional genre. Also neoclassical is the convention to align and compare an original work to some ancient literary precedents, or to argue about writing in well-established and honourable literary traditions, which made Fielding in his “Preface” to Joseph Andrews trace the theoretical foundation of the novel in general, as a new literary genre, and of the comic novel, in particular, as a sub-species of the genre of novel. Henry Fielding, “the most theoretically minded of the great early English novelists, was a strict neoclassicist who believed that all valid literature was derived from the ancient Greek and Roman literary forms” (Parrinder 24). In this respect, Fielding’s contribution to literary criticism is that he “brought a blast of fresh air into the world of criticism, not only because he so cheerfully exposed pretentiousness, but because he came representing a new genre of literature which was eventually to transform the arena of critical studies” (Blamires 167). Among the eighteenthcentury founders of the English novel, who also turned literary critics (namely Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson), Fielding is perhaps the only novelist who, in the “Preface” to Joseph Andrews, by comparing his work to the epic, comedy, and the “serious romance”, not just assigned a respectable tradition to his new literary form, but also attempted to develop a theory of the novel and a proper terminology. Defending the literary value of his novel in theoretical terms, he successfully traced the characteristics of the novel, in general, and those of a comic novel, in particular, in a way that most of them are considered valid to this day. For Fielding, a novel is a new genre, whose action is “more extended and comprehensive; containing a much larger circle of incidents, and introducing a greater variety of characters”, including “persons of inferior rank, and consequently of inferior manners”.

The Eighteenth Century

181

By contrast, the later rise and consolidation of novel and fiction writing did not reveal any serious theoretical approaches to the novel and narrative issues, except some attempts by Friedrich Schlegel, G. W. F. Hegel, or Sir Walter Scott. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the ancient distinction of genres and the eighteenth-century commentary on novel took new and interesting perspectives. In the Anglo-American world, it was Henry James, in The Art of Fiction and in a series of prefaces to his novels, and especially Percy Lubbock who, influenced by James, made the distinction between two different modes of event representation in novels, or “points of view”. One is the “dramatic” viewpoint, reminiscent of the classical mimesis, which is that of “showing”, characterized by the non-intrusiveness of the author, where the discourse and its events are directly presented to the reader. Another, called “panoramic”, following the ancient diegesis, is that of “telling”, where an omniscient author/narrator controls the events and mediates their comprehension by the reader. The first technique concentrates on the importance of the discourse as text and its relation to the receiver, as for Lubbock for instance, while the second revives the importance of the author, as for E. M. Forster and W. C. Booth. Later, distinctions will be made between narrator and author, while the mode, or “point of view”, will be opposed to “voice”. The most important contribution to the development of theoretical studies on the narrative genre was made by French scholars, in the 1960s, especially by Tzvetan Todorov, Gerard Genette, and Roland Barthes as exponents of structuralism. Their concepts originated in Russian Formalism and were prefigured by the rise of linguistic studies at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the eighteenth century, as the novel was a new genre in English literature, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and other novelists, who founded it, produced literary criticism. Theirs were the first efforts to provide a theoretical basis for their own novels, to explain them, and defend their literary validity in order to make the contemporary reader accept the new literary convention, and thus enable its adoption in the period. Romanticism would come to reject, in addition to neoclassicism, the novel related realist aesthetic which became increasingly predominant in the eighteenth century. But similarly to this one, the following romantic period in English literature expanded this defensive and prescriptive type of literary criticism, which, against neoclassical principles, assumed the task to explain and defend the value of romantic poetry as a new literary tradition, and to secure its place and development in the conservative and conventional British culture, as we shall see in the next chapter.

CHAPTER SIX THE ROMANTIC IMPULSE AND THE PATTERN NEARLY ESTABLISHED

Predominantly a poetic discourse, in matters of form differing by its lyrical expression from the fictional correlation in the Bildungsroman of the narrative organization of the literary discourse, in matters of thematic perspectives of the Bildungsroman literary pattern, however, the English Romantic Movement anticipated and influenced the consolidation of the Bildungsroman in Victorian fiction in so far as one would detect in the novel of character formation the continuation of the romantic spirit and artistic conception, as well as of a number of thematic elements which would eventually become parts of the general system of the Bildungsroman. These thematic aspects, which include individual subjective experience, emotional and psychological states, nature, the experience of childhood, the growth of personality, are essential and some of them defining elements of the Bildungsroman pattern. It would not be an exaggeration to say that romanticism was the final and crucial influence on the rise of the Bildungsroman, and, therefore, it requires a comprehensive critical attention. A special place in the romantic impulse in and influence on the Bildungsroman belongs to the historical novel and gothic fiction, which represent romantic prose production emerging within the context of the romantic revival (which also rediscovered the ballad), and which sought to recover and emulate the national, autochthonous cultural heritage. The same context saw the recording, spreading and the original production of romances, legends, and various narratives, including fairy-tales, among which those that form a particular type of children’s literature. The nursery of Blake and others receives more imaginative and didactic contribution from such narratives as those contained in German Popular Stories by Grimm (Hansel and Gretel, Tom Thumb), translated into English in 1823, and in Andersen’s tales, whose fairytale motifs would intrude upon the plot of the Victorian novel of formation: for example, the cruel stepmother or stepfather sends children to boarding-schools or forces them into various misfortunes, which the resourceful and spiritually powerful

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

183

children characters manage to survive, as in David Copperfield and Jane Eyre; another example, the beginning of the history of the Earnshaw family in Wuthering Heights clearly derives from the fairytale tradition. Apart from child experience, human and nature interaction, maturation of consciousness, the individual and society, history, and other thematic elements provided by the romantics to the process of development of the Bildungsroman, the emergence of the confessional writing and the establishment of the literary autobiography also influenced the rise of the novel of formation. The birth of the author in romanticism prompted the form of confession as a new manner of writing, which, as “the revelation of an authentic authorial voice, identity, or experience”, becomes “one of the dominant models of literary production” (Bennett 50). In romanticism, confession, or confessional manner in poetry, evokes the author’s own subjectivity, which can be seen in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opening words of his Confessions (1770): “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself”. Although a philosopher of the Enlightenment, Rousseau developed new approaches to subjectivity, influenced the rise of nationalism and the romantic movement, and, with Confessions, founded the modern autobiography in which an individual is no longer reluctant to express personal emotional experience; the autobiographical element, following the romantic period, became an important part of the literary system of the Bildungsroman.

6.1 Individuality and Romanticism: Characteristics and Thematic Complexity of a Unitary Movement With respect to the aspect of continuity of literary periods and movements, English romantic writers represent innovation in “battle” against tradition; they attempted to reveal a major concern with psychological issues, their special insights into the inner human existence, promoting individuality, focusing on the individual and the experience of childhood. All these thematic perspectives are artistically intermingled with a number of other literary concerns, such as the concept of imagination, or the importance of natural objects and phenomena (as both actual appearance and promotion of pantheism), or unadaptability, escapism, rebelliousness, and the dualism of existence with regard to the relationship between individual subject and milieu and/or reality. These elements combined constitute a generic aspect, which is actually another major characteristic of the romantic trend in literature, which

184

Chapter Six

reveals a new kind of sensibility closely linked to the new kind of environment that the human being was in the process of creating for himself or herself, or to the changed relation between the artist and what is beyond his or her artistic concern. If the human personality was, due to industrialization, on the way to being regimented and was losing individuality, poets and artists began to seek to balance the scale by attributing the greatest value to individual consciousness, and, in doing so, they praised feelings and imagination, the latter as the noblest of human faculties. It seems that the poets foresaw the threat posed by the growth of a mass-society with its inevitable regimentation of the individual, or, at the very least, its heavy pressure leading towards spiritual and intellectual conformity. Hence the romantic promotion of the fragment against order and system. Hence the romantic concern with nature and countryside. Hence the romantic emphasis placed on the subject, on the individual as distinct from man, on personal values, and the interest in human psychology, as opposed to behaviour, in the human being, as an individual subject, opposed to the general issues concerning human nature. Hence the rise of the “Romantic Hero” and the multiplicity of its hypostases, among which the figure of the Solitary, inadaptable for social existence, a specifically romantic creation16. Hence the romantic concern with the experience of childhood, the special insight into children’s psychology, realizing the vital and lasting importance of early, infantile experience, of childhood impressions (“spots of time” in Wordsworth), especially of natural objects and forces, for the whole development of human mind and the formation of a mature personality (in Wordsworth: “The Child is father of the Man”). In William Blake, who reveals the same concern with the experience of childhood as in the writings of other English romantic poets, childhood is contrasted with maturity as the incorporation of all that is divine, innocent, moral, and pure in the human being. In John Clare’s poetry, who himself notes apologetically that “childhood is a strong spell over my feelings”, immaturity (or the failure to assume the conventional manner of maturity) 16

The Wanderer in Wordsworth’s The Excursion is a Solitary, also his lyrical I in The Prelude and Tintern Abbey; Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is on one level a psychological study, but also about a Solitary; Dejection: A Letter, another of Coleridge’s works, which may be read as a piece of profound selfanalysis, shows that the poet himself in the hypostasis of the lyrical I can be a Solitary; in Shelley the Solitary is the Outcast or the Misfit, and is to be identified with the poet in Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude; the protagonists of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Manfred, his Rebel in Cain may be said to be different facets of the same figure.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

185

merged with his close and sensitive attention given to natural objects, wild things, flowers, and simple human pursuits of the countryside he knew. The poet enjoyed them for their own sake rather than for any moral or spiritual meaning to be read into them. As a boy and a young man he found them unquestionably valuable, but he went through the experience, common and distressing in later life, of seeing that their vivid significance had faded. But, compared to Wordsworth, for example, who reveals stronger psychological insights into human personality, Clare’s distress is linked to some external changes; his acute nostalgia and the sense of loss arise from having to leave the native village, but they count less than his inner loss of the sense that the pleasure he has taken in natural things is intensely important. It seems that in the poetic discourse of Wordsworth and other romantic authors, the temporal principle is rendered as consisting only of two “spots of time”: the present and the past, the latter viewed from the positions of the present and represented in the form of its detailed analysis. The purpose of this part of the book is to trace the development of the themes of nature, childhood, and individual experience (including the whole range of motifs, attitudes, and ideas related to these aspects, such as the dualism of existence, escapism, rebelliousness, pantheism, and others) during the English romantic period. These themes represent an important part of a more general image of childhood and the development of personality in English literature, and the many aspects of the way in which the romantic writers reveal in their literary works a vivid interest in the human personality as growing and forming, which is the essence of the Bildungsroman thematic organization. One may say that there are certain lines of thought in the literary and theoretical works of a series of English romantic writers, which reveal a constant and permanent concern with the experience of childhood and (perhaps, now we may use the word) “formation” of personality. This concern is mingled with a larger and more complex range of approaches and preoccupations, such as the growth of a poet’s mind, the act of literary composition, the inner existence and the external, real world, the binary opposition of mind and body (the spiritual and the material), the relationship between man and divinity, the relationship between man and society, and other forms of the dualism of existence; finally, rebelliousness, escapism, and the importance of imagination, memory, and nature. These aspects are thematically encompassed as notions and principles in the literary works by William Blake (Songs of Innocence and of Experience), William Wordsworth (The Prelude, Tintern Abbey, and Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood), Percy Bysshe Shelly (Odes), George

186

Chapter Six

Gordon, Lord Byron (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Manfred, Cain, and Don Juan), as well as in John Keats’s Letters, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, and other writings, each of them attaining its own strength and integrity. Among them, more explicitly dealing with the growth and development of a mature personality is Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, a kind of Bildungsgedicht or Lehrgedicht, a romantic equivalent, as a proto-Bildungsroman, of the eighteenth-century Tom Jones, which represents the rise of the English novel. In The Prelude and other writings by Wordsworth and other English romantic authors, childhood is not only a universe of escapism, an alternative to the mature world, but also a formative principle in the process of character development, where the personal past is the foundation for a future harmonious growth of personality. Such a formative principle is also nature, as, for instance, in Tintern Abbey, which can be called a Bildungsgedicht or Lehrgedicht too, and viewed as a short romantic proto-Bildungsroman in verse form, because in the poem “the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” co-participate in the process of poetic composition and, in this way, contribute to the process of development, and, eventually, formation, of a poetic mind. Romanticism was a wide-ranging European movement with its origins in Germany, the German romantic literature being at the forefront of literary innovation. It was closely followed by romantic literature in Britain and other countries, whereas French romanticism emerged late, since in France the influence of classicism lasted longer. The adjective “romantic”, which derives from the word that gives phrases “the Romance languages” and “the narrative of romance”, came to name the literary movement which emerged on scene in the last decades of the eighteenth century and lasted throughout the first decades of the next one. Prior to the romantic period, by the seventeenth century, “in English the word “Romantic” had come to mean anything from imaginative or fictitious, to fabulous or downright extravagant. It was often used with overtones of disapproval; as the eighteenth century progressed, however, it was increasingly used with approval, especially in descriptions of pleasing qualities in landscape” (Lamont 274-275). Following romanticism as a regular literary period and movement, the term continued and still continues to refer to a type of creative writing, but it has also exceeded the literary context, signifying today that type of human personality which is sensitive, emotional, imaginative, instinctual, proud, as well as lonely, escapist, assuming a distance from the others, breaking the contacts with reality, and existing in a universe of his/her own.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

187

Romanticism was a great period of new developments in thought, including literary theory and criticism, and of artistic experimentation in music and poetry, and, to a lesser extent, in drama and fiction. Romanticism spread out initially from Germany, and co-existed with a political revolution in France (acclaimed by the romantics, except the German ones, as providing individual freedom and abolition of the authority) and an industrial revolution in Britain (rejected as a way to human regimentation), as well as with some reactionary political attitudes of the period. Hence, many critics speak about the politics or ideology of romantic literature, regarding it as a social movement: Setting romanticism in the context of contemporary exchanges about them – and examining such exchanges for what their figures of speech, and sexual allusions, as well as political allusions, may reveal about how the literary work in question accords or conflicts with established discourses and interests – has been a fruitful approach in recent criticism. (Chase 31)

However, other critics are reluctant to speak about a romantic ideology in Marxist terms pertaining to the socio-historical position of literature. For them romanticism is first of all a cultural revolution and it is inappropriate to attribute some definite political and social grounds to the new artistic sensibility of romanticism, or to view romanticism as a social or political movement, and the romantic hero as a political rebel. Romanticism is a cultural and artistic movement that refuses to adapt to current social developments; romanticism reacts against the types of thinking which draw on rationalism and reason, namely classicism and the Enlightenment, and, on the whole, the romantic state of dissatisfaction results in the need to pursue and achieve originality, experimentation, and innovation in arts and literature. Also, rather than view romanticism as socially or politically involved, it is more correct to look at the identification of “literature with philosophy [which] appears in Romanticism … in the emergence of German Romanticism in response to Kant, and in the Jena Romantics’ conception of literature as containing its own criticism”, and it “has been for Romantics and their readers a way of describing a kind of truth value or truth effect of poetry” (Chase 15). Concerning literary theory, the romantic author-critic would focus on art and its product, and on what art is and what it does. There are, however, important critical voices, including that of M. H. Abrams, who consider that romantic writers were “political and social poets”, that “to a degree without parallel, even among major Victorian poets, these writers [the romantics] were obsessed with the realities of their era”, and that it is “a peculiar injustice that Romanticism is often described as a mode of

188

Chapter Six

escapism, an evasion of the shocking changes, violence, and ugliness attending the emergence of the modern industrial and political world” (101). Harry Blamires unites the views: the romantic age “was an age of revolution, social and technological, philosophical and literary”; nonetheless, he emphasises the socio-economic conditions: “The harnessing of steam-power, the consequent development of mass-production, and the movement of population from rural areas to the growing urban areas of industry of commerce, marked one of the crucial turning-points in modern history” (217). An extremely complex and diverse literary practice and theoretical discourse, there have been continuous and, we should say, successful efforts made to argue that romanticism is a unified movement. Critics stress the unity of romanticism as a remarkably strong cultural tradition, which gave birth within its artistic system to a number of literary concerns (themselves established as traditions) due to the recurrence of certain attitudes, themes, motifs and principles in the writings of many artistic voices. Some of these reveal new feelings for nature and the emphasis placed on imagination, general uses of subjectivity and the concern with the experience of childhood and with the development of the human mind in general. Others constitute the representation of some important psychological issues, while exploring the complexity of the characters’ inner world, and the expression of individuality as the most important aspect of human personality. Among those who champion the idea of a unified romantic movement is Rene Wellek with his famous definition of the romantic poets as authors who “see the implication of imagination, symbol, myth and organic nature, and see it as a part of the great endeavour to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and the unconscious” (220), which is the common and central creed of all major romantic writers. For Harold Bloom, what allies romantic authors is “their strong mutual conviction that they are reviving the true English tradition of poetry, which they thought had vanished after the death of Milton, and had reappeared in diminished form, mostly after the death of Pope” (“The Internalization of Quest-Romance” 5); or, one would add, the revival of earlier literary traditions, going as far back as the medieval cultural background, in the framework of what is called the “Romantic Revival”. The eighteenth century is the period of classical authorship, and an important common principle in romanticism is the reaction against classical and neoclassical views. The eighteenth century is also the period of the rise of the novel, and another unifying factor is the romantic rejection of the realist aesthetic, which was becoming dominant in that

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

189

period. A means of achieving such a rejection is the so-called “romantic irony”, which is present “when texts become self-reflexive about their construction as texts and authors show genuine scepticism about their own aesthetic control of their products. Ironic texts confront their audiences, shattering the facade of aesthetic illusion and acknowledging the artificiality of aesthetic experience” (Handwerk 206). Thus, rather than considering romanticism “a historical phenomenon which must be associated with political and social circumstances”, one should try to understand it “aesthetically, as a theory about the nature and origin of art” (Butler M. 8), which emerged from three quite different perspectives: as a reaction against classical and neoclassical principles, as a continuation of some classical views, and as an attempt at critical and theoretical originality. In this respect, the legitimised term “romantic ideology”, first coined and used by Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology: a Critical Investigation (1983), may be applied to refer to romantic literary theory and criticism expressed in Europe and America in a great number of works; in British literature, the most important are Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry. Romanticism is the producer of a huge amount of critical theory developed by philosophers, writerphilosophers, and writer-critics. In order to comprehend the great theoretical input of romanticism, one should look at Germany as the major source of the most important romantic conceptions in philosophy and literary theory. The literary theory was produced “by poets like Goethe and Schiller, by journal-critics like Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel (especially in their journal, the Athenaeum), and by academic philosophers like Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Hegel”, where the “last group was especially significant, in that the advent of German idealist philosophy impacted very directly upon Romantic literary theory” (Harland 61). Also, in Germany, more than in other countries of Europe, the “intellectual scene exhibits an unusual degree of interaction between academics and creative writers throughout this period, often involving close circles of friendship and personal acquaintance” (Harland 61). The literature of romanticism was, in its beginnings, a rejection of the Enlightenment and neoclassicism in their various aspects. Romanticism means individuality and individualism; in romanticism, literary practice focuses on individual experience (emotional and psychological), and literary theory on the poet. With the Enlightenment, the human being was placed and studied in his/her social context, whereas the romantics “created simpler, more colourful imaginative worlds, dominated by heroes

190

Chapter Six

of superhuman effectiveness” (Butler M. 2); such a romantic hero is Goethe’s Faust, Schiller’s Karl Moor, Shelley’s Prometheus, and Byron’s Childe Harold, Manfred, and Cain. The critical doctrine of romanticism, at its start also a reaction against classicism, neoclassicism and the Enlightenment, apart from focusing on the poet, expresses a newly discovered interest in national literature rather than in that of the ancient Greece and Rome. In the case of literary criticism, romanticism developed a greater variety of opinions about literature and poetry, the poem’s thematic content and language, and broadened the critical concerns, namely regarding the processes, sensibility, imagination, and emotions of the writer. Against the neoclassical critical view that the poet is a craftsman, observing and reproducing nature with the help of the classics and as subjected to rules, romantic critics regard the poet as an individual apart, who possesses a special sensibility and a stronger imaginative power than the ordinary human being. In this respect, against the view of literature as simply the imitation of a model, or as the representation of nature or actual “prosaic conditions”, romantic writers and philosophers developed the expressive theory of literature and authorship. The fundamental idea is that the literary work is expressive of the author, the poet’s own interiority, subjectivity, and sense of the self: “The art suspended the limits of subjectivity letting it develop freely; the art made accessible the kingdom of fantasy and emotion, in which the alienated man would escape his anxieties and experiment on the reconciliation between his self and his own feelings” (Frevert and Haupt 257). German romanticism, in particular, regards the work of art as the product of an original creative force, which is that of the author. By its expressive theory of authorship the romantic period represents the origin of “thematic criticism”, or thematic perspective in literary criticism, which emerges from the view that “the work results from an imaginary universe which is specific to a certain artist, and the themes are the signs, traits or marks of this world which the critical act should be able to reconstruct” (Gengembre 26). Romanticism means subjectivity, irrationality of the mind, emotionalism, demonism, and reveals the complexity of the human being in its contradictory states between sublime and grotesque. Romanticism means the new sentiments and attitudes towards nature; romantic literature means also the dualism of existence, rebelliousness, escapism; it also means the romantic revival as if to find a simpler way of living, less complicated than the one which is contemporary to the poets, even though rudimentary or primitive, belonging to an extinct autochthonous civilization. As an

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

191

aspect of the romantic revival and against the sophistication of the classical civilization, the romantics turned to their own, autochthonous, national cultural heritage, which is reified in the creation of literary ballads and various gothic and historical novels. Other forms of the romantic revival are allegory, symbol, and myth. Linked to the romantic revival and also as a reaction against neoclassical urban spirit is the concept of the “noble savage”, meaning “man in his primitive state is in a higher state of purity than civilised, urban man, whose natural instincts have been ground out of him by the process of civilised life” (Stephen 89). A similar status is given to the exponent of rural life in a natural environment, who is superior to and more cultivated than an inhabitant of the city, and to the child, who is admired and worshipped as a purer and wiser being than an adult. Childhood along with countryside and nature, as well as art, myth, dream, the past (personal and historical), and individual experience are the main sources of inspiration for all the romantic writers. The emphasis is placed on human individuality and personality, on psychology, emotional states, the inner world, and intimacy. Intimacy is “the consciousness of the Romantic period” which “became accustomed to the inner antagonism, simultaneous contrast of values, as well as to recurrence and redundancy” (Durand 220). Romanticism emphasises those values which are representative of humanity and which ultimately are opposite to the pressure of a spiritual and intellectual conformism which romantics saw as being determined by industrialization, which gave birth to our contemporary consumerist society. Romantic poets confer, thus, major significations to individual consciousness, and, in doing so, they lay emphasis on imagination, considering it the noblest of human faculties. Romantic writers and philosophers create a remarkable complexity of the conceptions about the author of poetry and poetic imagination, including them in a larger domain of debates on poetry, language of poetry, origin and purpose of poetry, and the act of artistic creation in general, as well as on nature and human spirit, reality and intuition, myth and religion, symbol and metaphor. This is familiar to us from Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, and especially Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. In his celebrated book The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), M. H. Abrams shows that the romantic period adds to the two critical theories on art, which existed since antiquity, – the mimetic and the pragmatic ones – a third one, which is the expressive theory of authorship. The major critical concern is now the poet: the producer of art has moved to the centre of critical attention, the true function of art being the communication and expression of the artist.

192

Chapter Six

In romanticism, art “becomes subjective rather than objective, and intuitive rather than rationally planned”, which is remarkably shown by Abrams when he considers that for the romantics the work of art resembles a lamp, “which throws out images originating not in the world but in the poet”, whereas for the classicists it “resembles a mirror, which is passively mimetic or reproductive of existing reality” (Butler M. 7). The romantic period in Britain covers the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth century, coming to its end as a regular literary movement somewhere towards mid-century; or else, it refers to about fifty years of literary history approximately dated between the 1780s and the 1830s. It is a chronological habit, however, to view romanticism as a nineteenth-century phenomenon, or as starting with the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and more or less ending with the death of Byron in 1824. This view is convenient but misleading, for English romanticism manifested itself as an artistic system producing aesthetic values long before Wordsworth and Coleridge published their volume (to mention just Blake) and went on long after Byron died at Missolonghi, even if by then Shelley and Keats were dead and the authors of the Lyrical Ballads mainly silent. French and German criticism, and even some English critics avoid calling romanticism a literary movement, that is, a definite cultural and literary manifestation that is united, well-packed and well-structured as a literary system, for two reasons: there is no definite and united theoretical doctrine (Wordsworth struggles against neoclassicism and classical ideas, Coleridge semi-plagiarizes German philosophy and turns towards psychology, and Shelley relies on ancient models and Sidney); there are no definite and united thematic perspectives, but a clash between the first and the second generation. Such critics speak about the romantic revival, which emerges in a period still dominated by neoclassical principles and marked by the industrial and technological developments which started in England. But other studies (as we attempt our own book to be), which focus on romanticism in relation to the general European literary experience and in the light of contemporary comparative perspectives (concerning the term, origins, general characteristics, main representatives and major works, and the literary doctrine), would reveal the fact that English romantic literature displays a remarkable amount of different elements of a structured and systemic, as well as unitary thematic complexity, where Blake’s, Wordsworth’s, Coleridge’s, Shelley’s, Byron’s and Keats’s works are the primary arguments for such a statement.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

193

The English Romantic Movement, like its general European counterpart, is primarily a cultural, artistic, and literary manifestation. In relation to literature, like on the Continent, British romanticism is to be considered in a twofold perspective as an important literary doctrine and as a new type of literary discourse consisting mainly of lyrical and narrative poetry, as well as lyrical drama and imaginative prose (historical fiction and gothic narratives). Both aspects emerge as rejecting the neoclassical principles on art along with a more general reaction against classical Greek and Roman tradition, the philosophy of rationalism, material values, regimentation by a society which conditions the individual, and against industrialization, rules, reality, urban civilization (“London is a city much like hell”, Shelley declares), common sense, order, and so on. In this respect, since the literature of the romantic period represents a strong reaction against neoclassicism, the characteristics of the romantic movement’s literary practice and theory emerge clearer in opposition to those of the previous neoclassical period: Characteristics of Neoclassicism

Characteristics of Romanticism

The revival of ancient classical models, traditions, ideas, or rather the continuation of the Renaissance revival of the ancient classical tradition.

The so-called “romantic revival”, meaning the rediscovery and revival of national cultural heritage, the newly awakened interest in the Anglo-Saxon and medieval historical past, popular and folk literary tradition, of which major examples of romantic works would be ballads, gothic tales, and historical novels. The importance given to feelings, inspiration, and especially imagination, which is regarded as the most important human faculty (creative, cognitive, innovative, unifying, etc.).

The emphasis on reason, rationalism, calculative thought, empiricism, order, measure, and common sense in the treatment of different subjects, themes, and concerns, while rejecting the poet’s subjectivity and imagination. The importance given to normative prescriptions (decorum, poetic diction) concerning artistic content and form, while rejecting the freedom of artistic expression. The importance given to the relationship between text and reader, given the social, moral and didactic purpose of the neoclassical art, especially concerning moral topics and ethical values transmitted by the focus on the audience

The freedom of artistic expression and the rejection of the normative prescriptions of literary composition.

The importance given to the relationship between author and text, as literature has become the expression of the author’s own sensibility, emotional states, and states of the mind.

194

Chapter Six

and social issues, or issues of general human interest, and the involvement in matters of community and the problems of social existence. The abstract meditation, philosophising, and theory focused on human nature, while rejecting the representation of the personal, private, and individual experience. In the context of abstract reasoning, the main concern is with human nature in relation to the general human condition, as well as to the social, real, actual, and public issues.

The development of a metropolitan type of culture, the view of art as the expression and product of a conventional urban society.

The “rise of individualism” expressed by the concern with individual experience, both subjective and psychological. The concern with the non-real, imaginary, fantastic, instinctual, demonic, and mysterious elements of nature and the human inner world, as well as with the experience of childhood (personal and of human race) and with a more remote, historical and mythological, past. The concern with nature and the countryside, the former being not just a matter of poetic contemplation and description, but rather a mirror of human life, a spiritual healer, a major source of feelings and inspiration, and even ranked to divinity (Pantheism).

The main features of the romantic literature could be summarised as (1) the romantic revival; (2) imagination as a creative principle, moral principle, cognitive principle, and so on; (3) personal emotional and psychological experience as both the source of poetry and a poetic concern; (4) the freedom of artistic experience; (5) concern with nature and the countryside; and (6) the rise of individualism.

6.2 Individuality in Focus: Nature, Dualism of Existence, Escapism, and Rebelliousness The rise of individualism in romantic literature is related to Fichte’s concept of “subjective idealism” – according to which the individual is a subject who is above the human world, who is “absolute, logically prior to the world or nonsubject, and the active agent in asserting a material [and real] world opposed to it” (Holub 90) – and which is the key to a specifically romantic type of binary opposition – the dualism of existence – which is a thematic perspective of significant standing in romanticism and in its aftermath, and also in the Victorian and later Bildungsromane.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

195

These and other characteristics confer on romanticism a pattern, a distinct literary system, in which each of the characteristics of romanticism displays in its turn a remarkable complexity of thematic perspectives. For instance, concerning the emphasis on individual experience, all English romantic authors create a special type of persona, character or lyrical I, which is a solitary, an alienated being, at odds with society and human kind, inadaptable, rejecting and being rejected by the community, but also above the human condition by possessing outstanding intellectual skills and imaginative flight, which allows him/her to transcend common human existence and reality. These and many other thematic lines involve a romantic persona who finds himself/herself trapped in the so-called “dualism of existence” (Blake’s chimney sweeper, Shelley’s lyrical I in Ode to the West Wind, the Byronic hero, and many others), expressing either “romantic rebelliousness” (for example, Byron’s Cain) or “romantic escapism” (for example, Byron’s Childe Harold). Nature, another major concern in romantic poetry, also receives a complex thematic expression, where just in one poem, as in Shelley’s To a Skylark, for example, one may find nature to be divine, an expression of supreme art, standing for spiritual existence, having no equivalent in reality, being the product of pure imagination, and existing only in the poet’s mind and as textual representation. Nature is also a source of feelings, source of knowledge, and source of inspiration. Nature is here, as in romantic poetry in general, opposed to the human condition in the dualism of existence, to which Shelley adds, in Ode to the West Wind, the idea of nature as a source of escapism and that of the romantic claim for immortality, which is possible by entering the eternal natural cycle of death and rebirth. The romantic literature in Britain manifested mainly in verse, comprising both lyrical and narrative poetry, by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats. It also produced a special type of drama known as “lyrical drama”, the most famous texts being Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Byron’s Manfred and Cain. Drama, in particular, answers to Friedrich Schlegel’s demand, in Rede uber die Mythologie (1800), for a modern mythology based on the revival and renewal of the classical myth. The imaginative flight and the change of the classical myths in order to transmit a new philosophy make recent critics discuss romanticism as a myth-making movement. Prometheus Unbound, for instance, develops the figure of a romantic rebel, but also represents, in Carol Jacobs’s opinion, the withdrawal from politics to poetic creation and the proclamation of the power of words. The strength of this romantic Prometheus lies in his voice: “in contradistinction to Aeschylus’s hero, Shelley’s has not acted

196

Chapter Six

his defiance but rather spoken it. The mythological Promethean deed is transformed into an originary act of words, the annunciation of the curse” (Jacobs 242). More than drama, romantics produced an important sequence of prose fiction, consisting of two types: the historical novel (Scott) and gothic fiction (Walpole, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and others). Fathering the English historical novel is the writer-critic Sir Walter Scot, acclaimed for “the suggestive power of historical colour and detail, the individual physiognomy of a past epoch, and the perspective enabling historical events to be pursued through persons instead of through the usual impersonal actions” (Jauss 55). Above all, according to Jauss, critics and readers are impressed by Scott’s dramatic form of the narrative: as the narrator of the historical novel remains completely in the background, the story can unfold itself like a play, giving the reader the illusion that he himself is present at the drama of the persons involved. This also means that the reader is put in the position of being able to make his own judgements and draw his own moral conclusions. (55)

The gothic fictional form developed many of its images from the sentimental literature of the graveyard poets Gray and Thompson with their dark forests bordering old mansions with dark rooms and melancholic characters. Modern critics have come to consider gothic fiction as one phase of the romantic movement in English literature, although it might have disappointed some idealistic romantic poets for its sentimental protagonist (idealized by Ann Radcliffe, for example), who could not transcend into reality. One should not disregard the lasting effects of gothic fiction on the literature of the Victorian period, after romanticism, for it is easy to find gothic elements in the realist novels of Dickens, not to mention Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, as well as in some of the more realist Bildungsromane such as Jane Eyre. The gothic novels invaded the literary scene as a reaction against the excessive rationalism of the early eighteenth-century literature, and meant to excite suspense through their textualization of the fantastic, improbable, demonic, morbid, destructive, a non-reality that intrudes into the actual world and threatens its status quo, which is another version of the romantic dualism of existence. These texts appeared to fulfil some of the reading needs similarly to what nowadays are the forms of science fiction, mystery, and horror narratives. In the history of English literature, the aesthetic values of the eighteenth-century gothic novels, similar to the importance of sentimentalism in prose fiction, and along with the relevance of the

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

197

“mournfully-reflective” verse and the “sentimental philosophising” of the pre-romantic poetry, must be considered in the context of a change in literary taste and a shift of focus, which were to be spectacular and dominant in English literature and which came to represent the dimensions of romanticism. Indeed, the romantic gothic prose corresponds to the features of the movement as expressed in poetry, where Walpole in The Castle of Otranto and Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho, like Coleridge and Shelley in their poems, assumed the task to reify the dualism of existence and “to find ways of writing which would communicate excited feelings. Pathos terror, and warm sentiment, they discovered, could be induced by syntax, through variations in the sentence-structure” (Gordon 149-150). Romanticism is a movement consisting of both literary practice and literary theory, producing poetry, fiction, drama, essay, letters, confessions, memoirs, aesthetic doctrine and literary criticism, all based on a solid philosophical foundation and having its origins in Germany. A predecessor in literature is “Sturm und Drang” with Goethe promoting sentimentalism, Schiller differentiating between the naïve poetry of the ancients and the sentimental poetry of the romantics, and Herder calling attention to folklore, language, and collective individuality of a society (by which preceding Foucault and his theory of episteme and the epistemological unconscious of an age). Fichte promotes subjective idealism; Herder conceives of the Bildung, but less with regard to an individual experience of identity formation than to the development of a sense of identity of Volk (“people”) as a social whole, united and classless. Likewise, the individual should develop into a kind of organic unity leading to a personal Bildung, the fulfilment of personal potentials which, in turn, should determine the social Bildung. In literary theory, Friedrich Schlegel introduced the term “romantic” and promoted self, individualism, and subjectivity, whereas his brother August Schlegel introduced the principle of the organic form in connection with themes and ideas which develop according to their own nature. In philosophy, Kant proclaims the human understanding of the external world to come from both experience and a priori knowledge; Friedrich Schleiermacher develops the hermeneutical circle, but the most important influence on the rise of romanticism came from the idealist philosophy of Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling. Schelling develops a philosophy of nature and pantheism, and views imagination as a force that unconsciously creates the real world and consciously creates the ideal world of art.

198

Chapter Six

For romantics in general, imagination is Einbildungskraft (the word contains Bildung), a faculty essentially creative, able to unite in a single act of artistic creation, similar to acts of nature, all spiritual forces. Kant has already attributed three functions to imagination – reproductive, productive, aesthetic – and for romantics, particularly in Schelling’s and Coleridge’s opinion, imagination is the supreme human faculty in being creative and is creative in being able to unify and unite. Hegel proclaims that art is the sensuous semblance of the Idea and that it evolves through the history of its forms and through the history of the spirit itself. His “dialectal historical sequence for art” consists of three phases: symbolic, classical, and romantic (in which what is predominant is the spiritual level). Against reason (Descartes and rationalism) and experience (Locke and empiricism) as sources of knowledge, Hegel promotes consciousness as the ground of reality, arguing that one has feelings and sensations which his/her consciousness shapes into particular experiences by various categories such as cause and effect. Hegel is also concerned with Bildung, and there are critical voices that call his Phenomenology of Spirit a Bildungsroman in that it traces the development of both the individual and humanity, or society (environment), in which the human being encounters various experiences that shape his or her personality and assist his or her acquiring of knowledge and a right philosophy of life. It is within experience that the subject and object dualism is an important moment functioning as the catalyst for the emergence of the self. In English literature, romantic authors were practitioners rather than theoreticians, although most of them were writer-critics, producing literary texts as well as critical and theoretical texts on literature. Among them, Coleridge was a poet and a philosopher, schooled in German thought: we remember his philosophical method involving wholes and parts in discussing poetry (from Schleiermacher), his theory of the organicity of poetry (from Schlegel), and his theory of primary and secondary imagination (from Schelling). Romantic writers reveal a remarkable unity of critical focus in their approach to poetry – the most common theoretical and critical concerns are the poet, imagination, subject matter, language, purpose, origin and definition of poetry – but differ in matters of their ideas and views. The natural world is also a matter of critical concern, as in Schiller’s “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (admired as a prototype of ecocritical theory), with its famous statement that poets “will either be nature, or they will seek lost nature”. Another famous statement from this essay, “Our feeling for nature is like the feeling of an invalid for health”, implies that

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

199

“having such an alienated, or “reflective”, relation to nature is an ambiguous predicament, because by it we gain in freedom and perspective what we lose in spontaneous immediacy and feeling” (Garrard 49). Nature and wilderness are subjects approached in a larger context of the romantic theoretical and critical discussion on literature (in England, the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, for example), but receive their full power and extent as being literary expressed in poetry. In English literature, as a particular thematic perspective in itself and as related to other romantic subject matters, the romantic concern with and textual depiction of nature result in a particular type of modern nature poetry, or ecopoetry, which either comprises whole works, such as To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, and Ode to a Nightingale, or represents a thematic aspect among others in such texts as Tintern Abbey, Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. An approach to these texts, in particular, would disclose the most important aspects of the thematic complexity of nature poetry as an ecopoetical discourse by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, the true poets of nature. The concern with the countryside as a source of genuine feelings incorporated in the beautiful and permanent forms of nature, as in Wordsworth, represents a particular doctrinaire response to the principles of neoclassicism and its concern with human nature and the exaltation of rational cognition. However, as various more recent studies reveal, including those united under the umbrella term of “ecocriticism”, in romanticism nature is not yet seriously endangered so as to put forward ecological issues and receive an angry literary retort or require environmental protection. Therefore, the question of the ways in which the physical environment is thematised to render the relationship between the human being and nature as expressed in romantic literary works considers various thematic elements, such as pantheism, the dualism of existence, and escapism. Nature is a mode of living, an alternative to culture, a mode of existence, the source of inspiration and co-authorship, where dualism, escapism, pantheism, and authorship are the four cornerstones of the romantic concern with nature. Thus, the concern with nature in literature is interrelated with other major romantic concerns; in particular, it emerges from the larger cultural context of the rise of individualism, and becomes indispensable to the textualization of the major romantic thematic perspective of the dualism of existence. Our starting point is that the romantic dualism of existence, in its textual representation, is indispensable – with some exceptions such as

200

Chapter Six

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and To a Skylark – from the selfindulging experience of escapism, both representing – together with the experience of rebelliousness – defining aspects of the romantic rise of individualism. Romanticism emphasises and exalts individual experience (emotional, instinctual, psychological, conscious, subconscious, etc.), makes it the focus of the writer’s attention, and provides it with the status of a literary concern. With regard to literary doctrine and perspectives on art, romanticism developed the expressive theory of authorship, proclaimed the authority of the author, and, in literary practice, the author’s own subjectivity became the subject matter of the text. Concerning the relationship between the creative individual and nature, the conviction is that creativity is driven by the relationship between nature and the individual, and that “we can only truly know nature through articulating our inner nature”, a conviction which “gives rise to the expressive subject, that is, to the modern idea of expression as self-shaping and self-creation, i.e. the idea of self-development” (Murphy and Roberts 43). This can be seen in English romantic poetry starting with and predominantly in Wordsworth’s egocentric and autobiographical lyrical discourse of The Prelude, Tintern Abbey, and other poems. The romantic dualism of existence, as a particular type of dualism, refers to a number of binary oppositions, of which the most important is the mind and body dualism. The typology also includes spirit and corporeality, psychology and physiology (in Coleridge), soul and body, good and evil, freedom and system (in Schelling), and, by extension, other dichotomies and dualities, such as subject and object, culture and nature, history and nature, the individual and society, reality and dream, reality and illusion. They constitute, essentially, various forms of reality (human, real, actual world) versus non-reality (spiritual, imagined dream-world). First and foremost, the romantic dualism of existence receives its supreme materialization in literary practice, in those literary texts in which Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats create dream worlds following the general and deliberate romantic trend “to project an imaginative world which is clearly distinct from the actual world”, where the source is again German: Hoffmann “evokes a mysterious universe, in which events are inexplicable, unwilled by man; if the world is ultimately coherent, its ordering is divine and not human” (Butler M. 124). The world of dreams can be also induced by opium in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Coleridge and other romantics, conceiving both elements in dualism as inseparable, lament and wish to overcome the Cartesian and post-

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

201

Cartesian division between them, since separation would deprive them of all meaning, root, living essence, and objective truth. Coleridge, in particular, coining the term “psychosomatic”, declares the body to be the fixture of the mind, and, in his essay “On the Passions” and other late works, the romantic writer-critic-philosopher “works toward a physiological psychology that gives primacy to mind and makes the body its expression” (Richardson 63). Blake, in a neo-Platonist way, also asserts the supremacy of the spiritual world over the physical, and advocates the central importance of the presence of the divine in the human being.

This diagram of the romantic dualism of existence reveals that this type of dualism is a consequence of the renewed emphasis on individual experience; it also shows that the romantic persona (in its textual presence as lyrical I, protagonist, or character) is thematically constructed in a relationship with reality, the actual world, a certain background epitomized by corporeality, society, city, daily life, routine existence, dominance of reason, morality, institutionalized religion, communal mentality, values, norms and rules. This relationship is actually one of non-relationship, essentially of unadaptability, because it is based on the romantic hero’s awareness of the reality as being cruel, obstructing and a thwarting factor for personal accomplishment and individual existence. In relation to this background, the romantic persona is individualistic, alienated, inadaptable, superior, and rejects it; he or she is a misfit, a solitary wanderer, a lonely soul, unable to establish communication and relationship, a person who suffers in it and seeks separation from it. This relationship between the romantic persona and reality opens two major perspectives for the thematic representation of individual existence in romantic literature: (1) to react against reality and attempt to change it – romantic rebelliousness – sometimes, however, without a definite end, as with the famous romantic rebels in Shelley and especially Byron; and (2) to avoid reality and attempt to find an alternative place – romantic escapism – in the form of non-reality, a non-tangible world, a kind of

202

Chapter Six

spiritual reality, a different background through which the human condition with its actual, social, material and bodily manifestations is rejected. This non-reality, congenial for individual experience, is an imaginary place or space of divine and spiritual essence, a fantastic setting, an ideal and utopian world, a spiritual reality, a type of existence reified by and within the realm of dream, art, myth, history, individual past (childhood), nature, and countryside. The romantic hero is rebellious and escapist, and positioned in the dualism of existence because his spirit is defined by inadaptability, a continuous soul search, his inwardness “torn by antagonisms, never finding peace”, and “haunted by doubts and unexplained desires” (Calin 107, my trans.). Passive unadaptability, as a source of escapism, and active unadaptability, as a source of rebelliousness, emerge and are sustained by the conflict between individual and real world, whose spiritual consequences are loneliness, demonism, titanism, and faustianism. These and other features become enhanced and dominant in a romantic persona who is a genius, abnormal, above the common human condition, outstanding, sensible, nostalgic, dreamer, solitary, solidary with those in suffering as his own, and a follower of knowledge, seeker of the meaning of life, and a promoter of freedom. The inferior material and physical reality and the superior spiritual non-reality are two worlds of existence, which represent a binary opposition in the form of the romantic dualism of existence, where the perspective of escapism is more common than rebelliousness, for it can be found in all major romantic poets from Blake through Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron to Keats. Romantic escapism is possible by means of imagination17 and inspiration into a non-real, spiritual world that displays a complex typology (dream, art, myth, past, nature, etc.), where non-reality, or rather some of its elements, especially nature, is actually the main source of inspiration. The romantic need for escapism, originating in unadaptability, may consume itself “in the universal order (exoticism) or the temporary order (memory, remote past, utopian future), or in fiction (dream, myth, legend)” (Calin 158). The refuge is always desired and the access to the non-real background (created by the imaginative endeavour to become an alternative to reality) is often granted to the romantic persona, but as an ecstatic yet fleeting moment of experience. Escapism is never fully achieved, given the bond 17 This is another reason for imagination to be considered by the romantics as the most important human faculty to the detriment of reason.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

203

that the romantic character has with reality; briefly attained, escapism is neither strengthened nor even maintained; it persists as textualized, a distinct literary perspective within the thematic development of the text. Hence, the romantic individual subject transcends or moves from one world into another, or is placed between the worlds, having access to nonreality, but still bound to human condition: this is what we call the “dualism of existence” in romantic literature. Examples of the dualism of existence in English romantic poetry are numerous: Chimney Sweeper, Tintern Abbey, odes by Shelley, odes by Keats and his The Eve of St. Agnes, Byron’s narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and his plays Manfred and Cain. The dualism of existence very often suggests escapism, with such exceptions as in To a Skylark and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The dualism of existence exhibits a complex typology of thematic expression; similarly, romantic escapism displays its large typology: for instance, dream in Chimney Sweeper, nature and the countryside in Tintern Abbey, art in Ode on a Grecian Urn, natural cycle in Ode to the West Wind, nature as artist in Ode to a Nightingale, nature, imaginative flight, and pilgrimage in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; and even the futility of escapism in Manfred. In the typology of the romantic dualism of existence, each aspect is a binary opposition in which one element is superior and the other is inferior. The inferior element stands for reality and the superior one for non-reality. The superior, non-real element constitutes in most of the cases a particular type of escapism: in Chimney Sweeper, the reality of the beginning of industrialization versus the non-reality of dream; in Tintern Abbey, the reality of the city and the human condition versus the nonreality of nature and the countryside; in Ode on a Grecian Urn, the human condition versus art; in Ode to a Nightingale and To a Skylark, the human condition versus nature and its artistic expression; in Ode to the West Wind, the human condition versus natural cycle; in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, society and the human condition versus nature, imaginative flight, and pilgrimage; in Manfred, real world and the world of spirits; and even the dangerous essence of the dualism of existence, as in Cain. In both typologies, an important element is nature with its multiple manifestations. The relationship between individualism and the surrounding nature, as thematised in both religious and aesthetic romanticism, encapsulates the newly declared reconnection of physical nature and spiritual nature, of natural world and natural goodness of the human subject against universal reason, rationalization, progressive history, social organization, and especially learning, opinion and convention, which thwart our inner

204

Chapter Six

drives. As declared by the romantics, the inner impulses and the inner voices of feeling and sentiment are the real sources of goodness, truth, and moral strength. Subjectivism opposes reason that lacks the means to unite the inner with the external, spirit with nature; only the inner voice is “the key to access to the natural order”, and the individual subject builds himself – in other words, achieves formation, as in Tintern Abbey – through nature as a formative principle and through the reconnection of the inner self with nature, where becoming “attuned to nature and the cosmos brings with it a deeper and fuller experience of the self, at one with the current of life in nature” (Murphy and Roberts 43). The critical vitality of the approach to romanticism in relation to its concern with physical environment, wilderness, flora and fauna, is justified by the idea that nature is not only a particular thematic perspective or characteristic of romanticism, but also runs through, or is connected to, or at least is revelatory for other romantic concerns and features. Against the neoclassical metropolitan and urban consciousness, the romantics value rustic existence, which is always expressed as symbiotically united to natural environment, as, for instance, in Wordsworth’s expression of “these pastoral farms, / Green to the very door”. Against the neoclassical emphasis on reason and rational attitude, the romantics promote unpredictable psychological and especially emotional states whose origin is often found in the poet’s intercourse with nature. Against the neoclassical normative and dogmatic outlooks, the romantics rely on imaginative flight and freedom of artistic expression which occur within natural surroundings. Against the neoclassical concern with human nature and involvement in issues of general human interest, the romantic expression of individualism once again depends, among other things, on the individual interacting with nature. Also, against the neoclassical involvement in the real, actual and social, and the issues of everyday life, romantics develop a dualism of existence and search for escapism, whose realm consists of mountains, forests, lakes, and rivers. The romantic reliance on Platonism and neo-Platonism, the interest in illusion and the supernatural, along with the exaltation of imagination and feelings, and the focus on nature and the countryside, as well as the rise of individualism and various new forms of religious expression, propounded the pursuit of a spiritual reality and a spiritual truth far above and beyond the actual and the real, leading to the issue of the dualism of existence. It is a personal search for the spiritual as a mental, non-real experience based on emotional and psychological states and on imaginative flight, but also on the identification with and exploration of circumstances and creatures

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

205

of the natural world and the circumstances and persons of the rural background. The dualism of existence, escapism, and rebelliousness promoting and nuancing individuality are common thematic perspectives in the works of all the romantics, of both generations. However, it is accepted that the “older generation” of Wordsworth and Coleridge is more escapist and didactic, whereas Shelley, Byron, and Keats, representing the so-called “younger Romantics”, in contrast to the “Lake Poets”, are less escapist, autobiographical, reflective, introvert, religious, Christian, medievalist, and more rebellious, extrovert, and pagan, preferring objective forms, such as narrative and drama, to the confessional forms like autobiography. In keeping with their formal sense and their inclination to objectivity, they use traditional genres – elegy, ode, drama, verse epistle – more consistently and consciously than their elders. Moreover their poems are deliberately structured, often along dialectical lines that suggest the rational play of mind. (Butler M. 124)

6.3 Nature, Pantheism, and the Growing Poetic Mind: Practical Argumentation To revert to romantic concern with nature, apart from helping illuminate the rise of individualism, nature assists and even influences the growth of the human, in particular poetic, mind, and supports the creation of a particular romantic religious system of values. Actually, concerning the romantic view on religion, three major perspectives emerge: (1) a reinterpretation of the Christian doctrine by returning to the origins of the belief in order to react against the established institution, authority, and dogma of church, as in Byron’s Cain and Manfred; (2) a return to pagan Roman and Greek religious systems, as in Shelley, Byron, and Keats; and (3) the promotion of the sublimity of nature, which is romantic pantheism as another aspect of pantheism, which “flows from the sense that we can gain access to the divine through living nature” (Murphy and Roberts 43). By extension, in this type of pantheism, whose best label would be “pantheistic naturalism” (Wimsatt 77), nature is itself deity, ranked as divinity, as Wordsworth and Shelley would show in their works, on the premise that human nature destroyed the bond with God, but nature is still its reflection. Among the founders of the romantic doctrine, explicitly addressing pantheism is Friedrich Schelling, who “saw pantheism as the only completed system of pure reason”, serving “to stand in for Kantian natural necessity, since Spinozism held that all things, including the human will,

206

Chapter Six

proceeded necessarily from the (rational) divine essence, which was identical with nature” (Freydberg 19). As a model system of reason, however, pantheism does not exclude freedom; moreover, Schelling notes, pantheism “must itself be recognized as a product of freedom” and as emerging from those systems with “the liveliest feeling of freedom”. As theorized by Schelling, Spinoza, and other philosophers – and as expressed in literary practice by Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and others – pantheism is the essence of human feeling of freedom, on the one hand, and, on the other, it expresses the human striving for wholeness, unity, and completeness. The way in which Schelling and other romantics conceive of pantheism is not far removed from another system discussed by Schelling, which is that of idealism, “indispensable for its elevation of freedom”; like pantheism, “idealism is incomplete, and its very incompleteness provides the enticement necessary for its overcoming” in order to achieve unity (Freydberg 27). The pantheism of Wordsworth, Shelley and other romantics can be called “nature mysticism”, which includes the idea of unity as being rooted in nature and as containing sometimes “the idea of a plan or purpose” (Levine 44), as for Hegel and Fichte. Pantheism encompassing the concern with nature has also a theological dimension in that many romantic poets, like Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads, would “discover, in pantheist spirit, the divinity in innumerable aspects of nature”, where nature “develops in the human being a state of wonder, which allows the mystic communication to occur” (Calin 159). Pantheism is considered an alternative to theism as well as atheism, denying “that what they mean by God (i.e. an all-inclusive divine Unity) is completely transcendent”; pantheists also deny “that God is “totally other” than the world” and that “the divine Unity and the world are “ontologically distinct” if this is taken to mean that the Unity is “totally other” than the world” (Levine 2). Coleridge claims that “every thing God, and no God, are identical positions”. Nature is worshiped as deity by all English romantics, but, unlike the “Lake Poets”, the younger generation of more “liberal poets” is less escapist, reflective, and Christian, and more rebellious and pagan; one can see this in Byron’s Manfred in which, besides intertextually alluding to Goethe’s Faust, when “Manfred calls his dead love Astarte from the shades, he sounds like Orpheus summoning Eurydice, while the shadowkingdom is ruled over by Arimanes, the evil deity of the ancient Persian religion” (Butler M. 122). The individual experience, as a major concern in romantic literature rendering the rise of individualism, shows nature and the countryside to be

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

207

indispensable for the expression of personal emotions and feelings, as in Tintern Abbey, and, along with the supernatural, for the expression of psychology, as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Above all, nature depicts and expounds the construction of the dualism of existence in romantic literature. Apart from illuminating a number of various romantic thematic perspectives, nature is a major romantic concern in itself, another thematic perspective, in turn, being illuminated and maintained by others. Nature is in itself a source of escapism and represents that world in dualism which is an alternative to the obstructing realities of the social and the urban; nature is a major source of feelings, knowledge, spiritual insights and consolation, inspiration and creativity, and many other thematic aspects alike, as we shall see in the following part of our study with direct reference to a number of romantic texts.

6.3.1 Tintern Abbey: Materialization of Theory, SelfReflexiveness, and Formative Co-authorship William Wordsworth is the poet of nature and the self. His literary conception, which is materialised in his own literary practice, emerges as a reaction against neoclassical principles of decorum, poetic diction, personification, the concern with human nature, and, in general, against what Wordsworth referred to as the artificial poetic practice of the earlier periods, in particular the neoclassical one, which “depraved” the public taste and made it grow accustomed to “gross and violent stimulants”. Thus, as a rejection of neoclassical poetic concerns with the general human and the urban, Wordsworth, in his famous “Preface”, proposes the subject of poetry, in general, and of the poems in the volume of Lyrical Ballads, in particular, to be threefold: common, rural life; the beautiful forms of nature (indispensable from the rural existence); and the individual subjective experience. These three thematic concerns do not exist separately, but represent a unity of interrelated and interdependent aspects, where elementary feelings, unaltered by “social vanity”, stand as dominant and the most important of all the elements of the subject matter of poetry: emotions find their source is rustic life, and their highest expression and embodiment are the natural objects. It appears, as revealed by Wordsworth’s own poetic practice, that of the three components, feelings represent the primary, or the actual, subject matter, whereas the countryside and nature are important insofar as they become the source and incorporation of those “elementary feelings”, that is, the source of inspiration for the poet. The materialization of these

208

Chapter Six

aspects of life in poetic form is possible only by the use of poetic imagination, in that what is usual, common, and elementary becomes unusual, sophisticated, and universal. Indeed, Wordsworth’s literary practice, in particular The Prelude and its shorter version Tintern Abbey, reveals that the only major theme of his poetry is his own subjectivity, his individual emotional experience and states of mind. More exactly, with reference to these two poems, the themes are the growth of the poet’s/poetic mind, the development of imagination, and his experiences of sense, feeling and thought (following Locke’s theories). Expressing a romantic attitude, the growth of the mind and the use of imagination are presented in close interaction with nature and the countryside, as for most critics, but also, as for Paul de Man in Time and History in Wordsworth, in the relationship with personal and historical time (55-77). In a kind of autobiographical proto-Bildungsromane, The Prelude and Tintern Abbey, which could be viewed as Bildungsgedicht or Lehrgedicht, Wordsworth expresses a romantic poet’s endeavour to disclose the development of the poet’s own consciousness, raising it to the level of universality and making it representative for the entire human condition. Wordsworth’s autobiographical and confessional poetry shows that, like many romantics, “Wordsworth had passed through a depression clearly linked to the ravage of self-consciousness and the “strong disease” of selfanalysis” (Hartman, “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness” 44). In Wordsworth, self-consciousness becomes art impregnated by lyricism. Wordsworth’s autobiographical interpretation of life and art made Keats call his poetry “egotistical sublime”. Others acclaim Wordsworth as the pioneer of modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self, for, after him, the poets’ main subject has been their own subjectivity: “Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, from Wordsworth through the Victorian period at least to Eliot and Yeats, takes subjectivity as its central theme”, the main poetic concerns being the “developing self of the poet, his consciousness of himself as poet, his struggle against the constraints of an outer reality” (Belsey 67), here, the development of the self is indispensable from the earlier experience of childhood and an already established relationship with nature in childhood. The concern with nature in romantic poetry receives a very complex thematic expression, which can be seen in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, a poem whose representation of the natural world transforms the tradition of the topographical and locodescriptive genres, and is also quite different from modern ecological perspectives on physical nature. Wordsworth “is, on the whole, far more interested in the relationship of non-human nature

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

209

to the human mind than he is in nature in and for itself. … Wordsworth spends rather little time describing nature, and rather a lot reflecting upon his own and other people’s response to it” (Garrard 47-48). Nature stimulates passionate wishes and instinctive sympathies in youth, for a young man sees it as feeling, and the relationship between them is still strong and of great importance, yet not as strong as in the stage of childhood in which the human being is a part of nature. As emphasized in The Prelude and Ode. Intimations of Immortality, the self, in childhood, is one with nature; the individual subject is in a state of perfect harmony with the environment, which is a kind of status that Hegel calls “natural consciousness”, which lacks the sense of the dualism of subject and object. By the time the stage of maturity approaches, the individual loses the invisible ties with nature at the cost of accumulating more and more experience, and steps into “many wonderings” about the mysteries and depths of real life. In Tintern Abbey, a violent desire emerges to restore the relationship with natural objects; however, the problem is not only that the human being lost these ties, but also the realization of the difficulty to restore them when real life experience, “the dreary intercourse of daily life”, stands in-between. The relationship with nature is restored in poetry only by looking into the past, at the period of childhood and youth, and the gap between mature man and nature is filled by the workings of the poetic imagination assisting the process of recollection, of the “picture of the mind”, which is being revived. As expressed in Tintern Abbey, the stage of maturity, governed by thought, is a tragic and most complicated one, in which the lyrical I makes the distinction between pure sensation, feeling and thought (knowledge). The individual is aware of being distinct from nature, but he understands that, though the “time [of youth] is past” and he experiences no new feelings, he would receive “abundant recompense” consisting of thoughts, thinking, knowledge, and, above all, high ethical standards. Here the love of nature led to love of man, where nature was the guide of all his “moral being”, and Wordsworth speaks of nature in terms of humanity and religious faith, identifying it pantheistically with a holy spirit. The enthusiastic romantic affirmation of nature represents a kind of organic dialogue, a quintessential specimen of romantic symbolism which unites the concrete and the universal, a “cosmic unity” of Man, God and Nature, as in Ancient Mariner, and, as in Sartor Resartus, a relationship leading to the proper development of a mature personality.

210

Chapter Six

Many romantic poets – especially Wordsworth (“a worshipper of Nature”), who passed through the most impressionable years of childhood and early youth among the mountains and lakes of England – could draw from their own reminiscences of wild nature18 strong and valuable ideas about the relationship between the individual and nature. They would sometimes approach nature and the countryside as mere sentimentalists, sometimes present their philosophy of nature in a more rational, mature form, revealing in their verse what is called pantheism, or the idealism of nature, and looking at nature as something eternal and holy, where nothing disappears completely, but changes. Nature, as “presence” and the object of Wordsworth’s perception, exerts a special influence on the human state of mind, which is described as: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts,

and which confirms the unity of human psychology and nature, showing their indivisibility at the early stage of one’s life. Thus, the relationship between the individual and nature forms the basis of existence for the person who, once matured and having gained experience, will face “evil tongues”, “rash judgments”, “the sneers of selfish men”, “greetings where no kindness is”, or the “dreary intercourse of daily life”. Wordsworth’s philosophy of the maturation of the mind is closely linked to human responses to and attitude towards nature. In Tintern Abbey, the lyrical I revisits the same place after an absence of five years (then, a young man of 23; now, matured by his life experience) to behold and once again experience the moment of spiritual intercourse with nature, to contemplate the scene, which is now familiar to the poet; the contemplation of the landscape is important for his meditation and expression of ideas in poetry. In order to meditate, enjoy and pour out his feelings, the poet is looking for tranquillity, which, together with contemplation, can be provided only by nature, and the result is the creation of a special kind of poetic mood or state of mind. The poet is now a mature man, governed by the workings of his mind: it helps to perceive the knowledge offered by nature, but the mind is first of all memory, recollection of past experiences, and it seems that the idea of “remembered memory” clearly stands in front of all the ideas in Tintern Abbey. Five 18

As children, they roamed the hills and moors, amused themselves with rowing and angling, when there was nothing but light breath-taking and sense-impressions.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

211

years ago the poet was a young man; he experienced a large range of feelings, which are now recollected due to the mature abilities of his mind. As we shall see later, this aspect reveals, in Wordsworth’s poetic practice, his own ideas, from the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, on the origins and nature of the creative act: I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

Moreover, in Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth points out to the way in which memory operates upon a man’s sensations: the “picture of the mind revives again” means that the lyrical I views the present landscape through his mental picture of the landscape as it was five years earlier. In other words, a man associates a present perception with all previous perceptions that he experienced not only from the outside, but also from the inside, which means that a human being possesses experience rather than sensation. The lyrical I becomes conscious of the pattern of his life by linking together his apparently disparate days (in other words, by discovering continuity in the disparate pictures through the principle of growth). The sense that he will acknowledge his remembrance in the future, just as he has done after the period of five years, is indeed part of a developmental experience. The human mind is a spiritual storehouse of memory, filled with the “rememberable things” that “the earth / And common face of Nature spoke to me”, a fountain where the poet drinks his “visionary power”. The lyrical I develops his sense of identity along with the process of the growth of his mind, and for this end he identifies himself more and more with the beautiful places and forms of nature, which are the source of some significant experiences. Topos, in Wordsworth, because it represents the repository of memory, becomes a spatial projection of the psyche; chronos, which implies the process of growth and development of human personality, becomes a continual journey back to the beginnings and an eternal reassessment of man’s life. In Tintern Abbey, nature is neither linked to an elegiac sense nor related to classical values, nor personified, nor presented as “a token of the social values of order and prosperity”, but “the presentation of nature is structured according to the inward motions and transitions of the observing consciousness” (Day 60). According to an established critical

212

Chapter Six

tradition, Tintern Abbey is regarded as dealing with the theme of nature, memory and the growing human/poetic mind; it is accepted that the main theme and subject are the individual subjectivity, the poet’s mind with all its range of thoughts and memories, and the nature is a token of all these abstract manifestations of the mind. However, a more attentive consideration of the expression of nature in the poem, along with Wordsworth’s theory of the origin of poetry from his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, would provide alternative interpretations to the poem. In the poem, nature is certainly not a token. Instead, the poetic expression of nature discloses a large typology concerning the relationship between the individual and nature: nature is a source of feelings in youth (“sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart”); a source of knowledge (“the burthen of the mystery” and “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world” are “lightened”) and, at the same time, of spiritual existence as a distinct version of romantic escapism or Descartes’s dualist theory of the separation of body and spirit (when “the breath of this corporeal frame / And even the motion of our human blood” are “Almost suspended” and “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul”) enabling one to “see into the life of things”. In childhood, the human being is a part of nature discovering the world through senses. Five years ago, in his youth, when the poet first visited the place, nature and all its elements, such as “the tall rock, / The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, / Their colours and their forms”, were then to him “An appetite; a feeling and a love”. That time has passed; the poet is now – in the present of this poem’s moment of composition – in his stage of maturity and realizes that all those feelings “are now no more”; they can be only remembered or recollected: the “picture of the mind revives again”. But for this loss he neither faints, nor mourns nor murmurs, since other gifts have followed offering “Abundant recompense”, namely the joy of “elevated thoughts”, for he has learned “To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth”. The idea that in maturity the mind is “lord and power”, responsible for the process of thinking and nature is the source of elevated thoughts, is emphasised a few lines later by the use of alliteration regarding the sound “th” alluding to “thought” and “thinking”: “All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things”. For the reason of nature being the origin of so many “gifts”, the lyrical I declares that he remains a lover of “the meadows and the woods”, which is increased by the idea of nature being the source of moral improvement (nature is “The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being”); ultimately, the

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

213

poet declares himself a “worshiper of nature”, where nature is ranked as divinity as expression of pantheism. Spinoza coexists in Wordsworth’s poem with Descartes, and – given the expression of the stages of human development through sense in childhood, feeling in youth, and thought in maturity – also with Locke. Tintern Abbey refers explicitly to youth and maturity, whereas childhood is only mentioned in two lines (“The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, / And their glad animal movements all gone by”) pointing to the idea that in childhood the human being is part of nature, given the sensory experience which precedes emotional and rational responses, which would later denote the separation, painful to the poet, between individual subject and nature. The Prelude dedicates its first two books to the happy season of childhood, recollections of which begin the tracing of the growth of a poet’s mind from the infantile phase through adolescence and youth to maturity. In his poetry, Wordsworth alludes recurrently to nature as “she”, and nature’s role “sounds like that of the pre-Oedipal phase called “primary narcissism”, the first differentiation from the mother” (Chase 9), and “the effect and function of the topos of the sublime or the “analogy” between “the mind” and “nature” is to establish a coherent image of the mind or the self, one that can be invested in, loved” (Chase 8). Keats truly calls Wordsworth’s poetry “egotistical sublime”, for he constantly writes himself into it and his apprehension of the universe is purely subjective, based on the assumption that “The Child is father of the Man”. A return through memory to childhood experience would link present and past, natural world and individual experience, keep the balance of the inner world, and provide stability to the troubled process of maturation. Likewise, anxious to be a part of nature, the lyrical I in Ode to the West Wind, apart from claiming escapism and immortality by entering the natural cycle, nostalgically wishes a return to childhood as a period of inseparability between the human being and nature: “If even / I were as in my boyhood, and could be / The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven”. The lyrical I in Tintern Abbey is a mature subject accompanied in his tour by his sister, who is what he was five years ago, that is, a young person. The poet, a worshiper of nature, prays nature to be his sister’s friend and guide, just like nature has been for him in the turbulent process of maturation of his individual mind that has gradually become aware, among other things, of its separation from nature. As in The Prelude, in Tintern Abbey Wordsworth encompasses lyrically his individual experience and makes it representative for the human condition in general,

214

Chapter Six

offering to it universal resonance; moreover, both individual subjectivity and nature are “transcendentalized: they are attributed a spiritual dimension that is greater than the merely individual and the material” (Day 60). As poetically treated in Tintern Abbey, nature is a formative principle in the process of growing of an individual’s mind, a kind of congenial parental figure. Also, nature is a creative principle in the process of becoming of a poet, because nature is a source of both emotional experience and tranquillity, where the former is the poetic concern and the latter represents a distinct poetic mood, a state that is necessary to the process of poetic creation. In this process, nature is a kind of co-author, since it is responsible for two out of the three elements in Wordsworth’s theory of the origin of poetry in the “Preface”: “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. “Recollection” is the ability of the mind of an individual subject to revive within himself or herself a past experience (here, youthful emotions), whereas nature is the source of both (1) “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, that is, of emotions emerging in youth (five years ago), and (2) tranquillity, in which these emotions are later (that is, now, the present moment of composition, five years later) recollected. As a consequence, nature is actually a co-author, a creative principle, but also a formative principle, a parental figure, responsible for the formation of a poet at the moment of entering upon early maturity. Tintern Abbey is, therefore, a kind of short Bildungsgedicht or Lehrgedicht, and, besides rendering the growth and formation of a poet, it also materializes the idea of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” by expressing this instance of literary theory in the line of nature, memory and the growing human/poetic mind as a major theme. In this respect, the poem emerges as a text that discloses or deconstructs its own process of composition. In the process of reading, the poem reveals, or rather represents in itself, the poetic activity in progress, and can be called a selfreflexive poem or a poem about writing a poem: a metapoem. With regard to Tintern Abbey as well to The Prelude, it would be more appropriate to say that Schiller’s Uber die Aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (“On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, 1793) more than Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding is connected to the idea of Bildung, or the formation of a poetic individuality, as reflected in Wordsworth’s literary practice. As explained by Thomas L. Jeffers, Schiller’s three stages through which a human being or human race, in general, goes include, first, the sensuous stage, in which the subject is “mostly intent on material provision” with the laws of the Good, the True,

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

215

and the Beautiful written in his/her heart, or, in other words, “genetically coded in his unconscious”; the second stage is the rational one, in which he or she is free to choose how to act and in which he or she “becomes aware of these laws, and his [her] intellectual character awakens – conscious of distinctions between good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly”; aware of personal freedom, the subject enters the third stage, which is the aesthetic stage that “subsumes the other two, since to educate him for Beauty is also to educate him for physical health and for intellectual and moral understanding”, and where “the aesthetic individual achieves the comely Humanitatsideal that was the ideological centre of Weimer humanism” (52). Five years ago, the poet visited for the first time the beautiful place near Tintern Abbey, where he experienced powerful feelings, because he was in his youth in which nature is a source of emotions and everything was to him “an appetite; a feeling and a love”. Now, revisiting the place after five years, which is the moment of the composition of the poem, the poet is in his maturity in which “mind is lord and master”, and he has lost the ability to experience powerful feelings, but has acquired the one of thinking and rationalizing. At the present moment, governed by mind, reason and thoughts, not emotions, and receiving from nature and the countryside that special poetic state of tranquillity, the poet’s “picture of the mind revives again” and the emotion experienced five years ago is now recollected, remembered, re-experienced, leading to the act of poetic creation, that is, to the actual composition of the poem during a tour in the countryside. Indeed, as with Schiller, the third, aesthetic stage incorporates the first two stages, and memory serves as a bridge between the stages of maturation; it is an agent of integration of past and present experiences, where a past emotion intensely remembered works for a present purpose of aesthetic consequence. Nature is, for that reason, and above all, the poet’s co-author, and the idea of co-authorship emerges from the poem materializing in literary practice the theory of the origin of poetry as developed by the author in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. Its full title – “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798” – apart from its content, clearly points to the poem being a kind of metapoem, a self-reflexive text, a discourse disclosing its own process of composition, a type of writing about the ways in which it is being written. The truth in the poem and in Wordsworth’s poetry in general “is not a truth about objects in nature but a truth about the self” (De Man 72), the

216

Chapter Six

self of an individual in the process of formation and acquiring of the authority of authorship, the process of self-discovery and self-knowledge through imagination, memory, and natural world. In this process, the individual is an isolated subject, despite being accompanied by his sister, because Wordsworth himself, “the most isolated figure among the great English poets”, “can turn to no one in his desire to save nature for the human imagination” (Hartman, “The Romance of Nature” 305).

6.3.2 Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark: Dualism of Existence and Co-authorship with and without Escapism Percy Bysshe Shelley, like other English romantic poets, assumes the task to argue about the enduring and lasting importance of nature for human existence, and he does this in his celebrated odes. Also, like other romantic authors, Shelley is a writer-critic, who, in his much acclaimed A Defence of Poetry, assumes the role of a defender of the poetic productions in his society, and, in general, the defender of the whole notion of imaginative literature as a part of an industrial culture. Against a background of classical and European literature, Shelley came to write his own poetic credo with passionate force and conviction, conferring to it the beautiful shape of lyricism. It is true that Shelley is “an intense lyricist”, converting into lyrical ornament every literary form he touches – verse, drama, satire, romance, and this critical prose essay – in accordance with the fact that “lyrical poetry at its most intense frequently moves toward direct address between one human consciousness and another, in which the “I” of the poet directly invokes the personal “Thou” of the reader” (Bloom, “The Unpastured Sea” 376). According to Peter Barry, Shelley sees poetry in relation to what Russian Formalists would later call “defamiliarisation”. Also, Shelley’s critical work “anticipates T. S. Eliot’s notion of impersonality (put forward in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) whereby there is a distinction between (as we might call it) the author (who is the person behind the work) and the writer (who is, so to speak, the “person” in the work)” (Barry 23). Shelley’s primary ground for discussion is the place of poetry in the social context and its importance for the well-being of humanity. He also discusses in detail the nature of poetic thought and inspiration, the value of lyrical poetry, the connection between poetry and politics, and his most important concept, which is that of the nature of poetic imagination. Poetry, the way Shelley conceived of it, is the expression of imagination, where the nature of imagination is essentially moral, and, therefore, in its social implications, poetry “acts to produce the moral improvement of

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

217

man”; poetry is also something divine, for it “redeems from decay the visitation of divinity in man”. Shelley speculates on the relation of poetry to reality and the poet’s mind, and, like other romantic critics, Shelley discusses the language of poetry. In Shelley’s opinion, language has a direct relation to thought alone, and there is nothing that interposes between concept and its textual expression. In modern terms of “concept”, “signifier”, and “referent in reality” of the linguistic sign, as Shelley puts it, the thematic material of a poem has no referent in the real world, and the artistic sign is purely a creation of the poet’s mind, having its referent only in the thought of the poet. This remarkably modern theory is materialised by Shelley in his own poems, as in the famous To a Skylark, in which the skylark is “blithe Spirit/Bird though never wert”. An interesting aspect of Shelley as a poet-critic is that he represents, together with Byron, the second, younger, and more rebellious generation of the English Romantic Movement, as compared to the more traditionalist and escapist first generation of Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge. It is one of those remarkable oddities that non-conformism and rebelliousness emerge in Shelley’s literary practice, whereas in his literary criticism – with a few exceptions like his theory of language, the idea of “defamiliarisation”, and the romantic emphasis on individual emotions and imagination – Shelley remains a follower of many of the classical principles. In particular, his ideas on the subject matter and purpose of poetry emerge as classical or rather neoclassical. Shelley searches beauty and truth in a Platonic way and it is clear from his literary practice and theory that Shelley “admired Plato as a poet, a view he derived from Montaigne … Nothing is further from Shelley’s mind and art that the Platonic view of knowledge, and nothing is further from Shelley’s tentative myths than the dogmatic myths of Plato” (Bloom, “The Unpastured Sea” 382). Also, “of all the Romantic poets, Shelley, by far, is the greatest devotee of Plato, embracing Plato’s beliefs and establishing himself as the voice of neo-Platonism in British Romanticism”, which is vivid in that Shelley “embraces Plato’s concept of the Ideal Forms, the belief that all things around us are merely representations or shadows of the Truth, of the Ideal world, of spiritual reality – what Plato means The One” (Bressler 37-38). Like other neoclassical as well as romantic critics, Shelley emphasises the superiority of poetry over other forms of writing; nothing is more perfect and useful than poetry; and, prefiguring Matthew Arnold’s ideas in the Victorian Age, Shelley attributes to poetry a sacred status, as both art and a teacher of moral and social improvement.

218

Chapter Six

Apart from the purpose of poetry, as he has made clear in A Defence of Poetry, also neoclassical are Shelley’s definition of poetry – “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” – and his view on the subject matter of poetry: “the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator”. Shelley’s literary practice reifies, actually, many of his critical ideas expressed in A Defence of Poetry, such as the consideration of the poet as an inspired bard in To a Skylark and Ode to the West Wind, which promote nature as a major source of inspiration. Shelley emphasises the idea of the necessity of inspiration as a state prior to the poetic composition, and of the poet as a mechanical agent, an unconscious agency, the voice of the spirit of his age, or, as in the famous Odes, the voice of nature. Nature as a particular concern represents the object of poetic expression in To a Skylark and Ode to the West Wind, poems which are odes dedicated to nature. These odes, rendering the complexity of the romantic concern with nature, glorify not famous people or events, as in traditional ode, but nature, which is in the spirit of the newly emerged romantic sensibility: To a Skylark exalts the beauty of nature and Ode to the West Wind the strength of nature. The two poems, dealing with nature more explicitly and in a more direct manner than Tintern Abbey, are thematically connected with respect to the dualism of existence reified in poetic expression and the juxtaposition of two worlds, one of which is reality and another nonreality. In To a Skylark, the world of non-reality is the superior world of the skylark’s song, non-real and spiritual, since the skylark itself has no material presence and is the creation of the poet’s own imagination: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert”, “unbodied joy”, “art unseen”, “we hardly see – we feel that it is there”, and so on. Corporeality is rejected in accordance with Shelley’s theory of poetic language from A Defence of Poetry, which is materialized in To a Skylark. In Shelley’s opinion, the language of poetry “is arbitrarily produced by imagination and has relations to thoughts alone”, meaning that concept is arbitrarily related to word, idea to language, and the referent in reality is excluded from the linguistic sign. The bird in the poem does not exist in reality in order to be imitated in the art of poetry; it is the creation of the poet’s mind, the poet imagining such a creature “singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest” somewhere above him in the sky; the poet is able only to hear its music, its song representing “profuse strains of unpremeditated art”, “a rain of melody”, “music sweet as love”. The negation of corporeality confers to skylark a divine status, “from Heaven,

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

219

or near it”, “Like a star of Heaven”, and “Heaven is overflowed” by skylark’s song. By these poetic images, heavily ornamented in the poem, and numerous other figures of speech, usually metaphors, similes and personification, the bird is represented in a sophisticated way, Shelley offering to nature a complex romantic picture ranging from its expression as pure spirit, perfect beauty and superior form of art to its consideration as the ultimate source of inspiration and even as divinity in the tradition of romantic pantheism. However intricate and complex, these stylistic devices can be grouped under three main headings corresponding to three main aspects or hypostases of the skylark: (1) a superior artist and its song a superior form of art; (2) spiritual essence of the skylark; and (3) the skylark as divinity. An attempt to count the figures of speech calling attention to each of the three aspects would reveal the predominance of the first one, that is, the music produced by the skylark, and it is actually this aspect of the non-real and superior world of the bird’s existence in opposition to which the real world is presented. The real world is the inferior world of the human condition in which people “scorn / Hate, and pride, and fear”, and are “things born / Not to shed a tear”; consequently, the human music is surpassed by the skylark’s song in comparison to which our songs “would be all / But an empty vaunt”, since humans “look before and after, / And pine for what is not”, the human’s “sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught”, and the human’s “sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”. The question that emerges as asked by the lyrical I is “how thy joy we ever should come near”? If humans represent the inferior counterpart in the dualism of existence, how can we have access to the superior world of the skylark’s song and grasp its music? The answer is romantically egocentric enough: the lyrical I declares his superiority towards humans (real world in the dualism of existence) and his inferiority to nature (nonreal world), and assumes the task to unite the worlds, to help us reach the superior world by means of poetry (“harmonious madness”) which he would produce only on condition that he is inspired by nature. Getting inspiration from nature, namely the skylark’s song, the author becomes an inspired poet to whom the “world should listen” as he is “listening now” to the skylark. Shelley conceives of the skylark and its song as the substance of the realm of non-reality, which stands above the reality of the human world, a world of the “mortals”, inferior to the supreme world of the skylark’s music. Both reality and non-reality, both the human, mortal world and the spiritual world of nature are two distinct parts of the

220

Chapter Six

romantic dualism of existence. In its framework, the poet acknowledges his human part, as he learns only “half the gladness”, and assumes through his lyrical I a place between the worlds, an intermediary position between the reality of humans and the non-reality of the skylark. In this position, the existential perspective of the poet is twofold: he is at once an inspired bard, when the skylark is viewed as an artist of superior status, and a prophet, when the skylark is ranked as divinity: Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow The world should listen then – as I am listening now.

To a Skylark differs from the traditional representation of the romantic dualism of existence in this absence of the desire of escapism and moves towards the idea from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which the romantic hero must face the real world and work for the benefit of the human community. Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind offers a no less remarkable expression of the romantic concern with nature, and although it traditionally links dualism and escapism, which are mutually revelatory, the poem is likewise thematically complex and unique. Like the previous ode dedicated to the skylark, Ode to the West Wind presents the dualism of existence as the juxtaposition of the spiritual and the material, of two worlds, one real and another non-real, the former inferior and the latter superior. Non-reality is again the world of nature, here the west wind whose action on three elements (earth, air, and water) suggests – by direct reference to leaves, clouds, and waves as representing these three elements of nature – the natural cycle of death and rebirth. Also, like in the previous poem, the west wind, similar to the skylark, is depicted in three hypostases as (1) artist (“art moving everywhere” by driving away “leaves dead” in autumn and spreading “winged seeds” from which new life emerges in spring); (2) divinity (“from the tangled boughs of Heaven”); and (3) of spiritual essence (“Wild Spirit”, “unseen presence”). Like in To a Skylark, here the artistic essence of the natural phenomenon – the wind – is emphasized, and, what to the skylark is music as its artistic expression, to the wind the aspects connected to art are clouds, waves, and leaves, upon which the wind acts and which, apart from art, also allude to immortality, preservation of life, the eternal cycle of death and rebirth in nature. Unlike the skylark, however, a distant and unseen musician, the wind is a powerful force, its action upon nature is

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

221

strong enough to make other natural elements “suddenly grow gray with fear, / And tremble and despoil themselves”; the wind is of rebellious essence, “wild”, “tameless, and swift, and proud”. Nonetheless, as in To a Skylark, the real world is the inferior world of the humans, an “unawaken’d earth” in which a “heavy weight of hours” chains the individual. Unlike in To a Skylark, however, in which the lyrical I assumes the task to connect the inferior humanity with the superior world of the skylark’s music, in Ode to the West Wind the lyrical I expresses first the romantic claim of immortality by arduously desiring to enter the natural cycle of death and rebirth – “Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!” – which actually means the desire to be taken by the wind into its world; in other words, the expression of the claim of immortality is another manifestation of the romantic dualism of existence, another aspect of the attempt at escapism, a moment of lyrical experience which is absent from the previous ode. Escapism is impossible – a common romantic perspective – since, in the succeeding line, the lyrical I declares: “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” The romantic individual is bound to reality, part of the human condition, just as Byron’s romantic character Childe Harold is. The impossibility of escapism in Ode to the West Wind yet offers a choice, which is similar to that from To a Skylark, namely to assume a position between the worlds as an inspired poet and prophet: “Make me thy lyre”, “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe”, and “Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth / The trumpet of a prophecy!”, and, finally, to ask rhetorically “O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” The end of the poem, in particular, reveals the function of this ode to be “apocalyptic, and the controlled fury of his [Shelley’s] spirit is felt throughout this perfectly modulated “trumpet of a prophecy”” (Bloom, “The Unpastured Sea” 388). In both odes, as in Tintern Abbey, the idea of co-authorship emerges from the poetic treatment of the theme of nature. Nature is a parental figure and a kind of co-author; not as a source of feelings in youth and of thoughts and tranquillity in maturity, as in Wordsworth, but as a source of inspiration in its status as a perfect and superior form of art. Nature as a source of inspiration affirms authorship also in John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, a poem in which the non-real world of the forest and another invisible bird, a nightingale, or rather its song, are contrasted to the real world of humans with all its negative features, in which the poet’s soul is in “pain” as if “of hemlock I had drunk”. As in To a Skylark and the romantic tradition of presenting the dualism of existence

222

Chapter Six

and the desire for escapism, in general, Keats’s lyrical I escapes into the superior, non-real world of art by means of poetry and poetic imagination and as taken away from reality by the song; when the song fades, however, the poet has to return, as in Ode to the West Wind and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, to his “sole self”, to come back to reality, but the dualism of existence grants to the poet the status of being “in-between” and creates confusion: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” and “Do I wake or sleep?” Nature as a chronotope of non-reality, as one of the two worlds in the romantic dualism of existence, is expressed by William Blake, in his Chimney Sweeper from the Songs of Innocence, in a paradisiacal or Edenic form. Nature constitutes to children their form of paradise, their vision on how the true experience of childhood should be, and, ultimately, their realm of escapism. In Blake’s Songs, although childhood not nature is the main concern, nature is, nevertheless, indispensable from the treatment of this and, in romantic poetry in general, various other themes and concerns such as dualism, escapism, pantheism, art, and others. To end the line of discussion on the poetic expression of nature in romanticism, we should say that the natural elements building up a paradisiacal and divine setting are employed by other romantic poets, including Coleridge in his celebrated and much discussed Kubla Khan, a poem in which various aspects of nature are at once elements of a primordial space and time, parts of a (false) paradise, and elements of a beautiful object of art.

6.3.3 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Crime and Punishment Like other romantic writer-critics, Samuel Taylor Coleridge expresses in his literary works his own critical thinking, literary theory, and philosophical views. Unlike Wordsworth and Shelley, Coleridge submits his own critical credo not as rejecting or accepting certain neoclassical principles, but as finding its sources in the literature and, especially, philosophy of the German romanticism. Also, unlike Wordsworth, who, as Coleridge explains, proposed “to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to the … loveliness and the wonders of the world before us”, Coleridge’s preference (as he made clear in Biographia Literaria) is for a kind of poetry that “should be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

223

truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith”. Coleridge uses the supernatural element in his poems as a technique of psychological revelation, allowing the poet to bring into play the hidden forces of the mind. For Umberto Eco, Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” is essential for the critical apprehension of the text and it means a “fictional agreement” between the reader and the writer: “The reader has to know that what is being narrated is an imagined story, but he must not therefore believe that the writer is telling lies. According to John Searle, the author simply pretends to be telling the truth. We accept the fictional agreement and we pretend that what is narrated has really taken place” (75). All English romantic writers share imagination as a common critical concern. The poetic imagination is the most important human faculty and the only valuable creative principle for a romantic writer. In romanticism, the value of imagination has become for poets “an article of faith, and they mention it with reverence”, whereas “for eighteenth century theorists the imagination was simply a faculty for reordering former sense impressions: the perceiving mind and the perceived object were separate” (Lamont 290). Among British romantic writer-critics, only Coleridge formulates a theory of imagination, which, in spite of being viewed as hardly coherent, is considered to be his most important contribution to English literary theory and criticism. Relying on Friedrich Schelling’s distinction between two forms of imagination, Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, also distinguishes between two forms of imagination, which he calls “Primary Imagination” and “Secondary Imagination”. In Coleridge’s opinion, primary imagination is a common human faculty, acts independently of human will, and represents an ordering principle which enables man to separate and synthesize, to divide and order, with the aim of making perception possible and intuitively grasp the wholeness of an object. Primary imagination is perception, not a creative faculty; however, it is important for Coleridge’s articulation of individualism, of “a sudden awareness that “I am” a separate being in a social mass, and no longer a cohort in a local community or parish” (Lewis 113). What Coleridge sees as secondary imagination is actually the poetic imagination, the most important faculty of the poetic genius, the creative gift possessed by a poet, whose genius employs it to perform the act of poetic creation. The secondary imagination acts dependently of human will, differs from “Fancy”, and, unlike primary imagination, it is the creative principle,

224

Chapter Six

symbolic and emblematic, because it “generates and produces a form of its own”, transforming and bringing into unity the nature of what it perceives. All Coleridge’s poetry is the result of the employment of secondary imagination over the concerns, rendered thematically, with the supernatural, fantastic, psychological, and, last but not least, the natural world. Nature as chronotope of non-reality is displayed in Kubla Khan as nonreality in non-reality, a vision in a dream, providing elements that make the “pleasure dome” an entity of three hypostases created by Kubla Khan as an individual subject also having three hypostases: (1) the pleasure dome is a beautiful palace of a solid, material, physical presence, built by Kubla Khan as a military leader, successful conqueror, to celebrate his victories; (2) the pleasure dome is a paradise or a garden of Eden created in primordial times and a primordial place by Kubla Khan this time as divinity; and (3) the pleasure dome is a piece of art, again the creation of Kubla Khan, now a powerful artist, an all-mighty producer of aesthetic values. His artistic work, the pleasure dome, however beautiful and strong in its enduring material manifestation, is the creation of a conqueror and murderer, and lacks the spiritual component. The pleasure dome is contrasted to the type of art generated by “a damsel with a dulcimer”, which is music and therefore ephemeral, as well as volatile and frail given her status as a slave at the court of Kubla Khan and whose task is to entertain the ruler. The girl is “[s]inging of Mount Abora”, her homeland; she is pure and innocent, and her music is of spiritual essence, but lacks the actual substance of a physical component. In the context of this opposition, the art of Kubla Khan emerges as incomplete and even false, a false paradise consisting of a form without essence: “a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice”. In his turn, the lyrical I (the voice and alter-ego of the poet), representing in the poem a third type of artist, discloses through his vision that the pleasure dome is the object of the poet’s subconscious wish/obsession revealed in a dream. He wishes to combine the components; he wishes the girl’s music to be his source of inspiration in order to create his own pleasure dome; through his wish, the poet voices the claim of achieving perfection in art. A fragment19, and perhaps intended so, the poem ends in a twofold perspective regarding the success or failure of the poet’s artistic endeavours.

19

No one would have ever thought of Kubla Khan as a fragment, or a dream, or “a vision in a dream”, if Coleridge had never added a subtitle to his poem or written his “Preface”.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

225

Coleridge deals with the theme of nature in some of his conversational poems too, such as Frost at Midnight, but it is a poem from another group, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which fits an ecopoetical discourse. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is, however, so complex in its thematic implications that it is indeed an opera aperta, revealing that there are no limits of interpretation and welcoming various approaches ranging from mytho-archetypal, Marxist, psychoanalytical, narratological to those of cultural studies, literary theory, or symbolical and ecocritical. As an ecopoem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in its thematic perspectives, is one of the few romantic texts that render the destructive human action on nature. The poem, of course, is more than that; Coleridge chooses the ballad type of lyric-narrative thematic framework to focus on a single character involved in one event, both the protagonist and his experience having universal and symbolical appeal and being representative for human existence in general: here, crime and punishment, the act of murdering of the albatross and its consequences. The Ancient Mariner, a Cain figure, a romantic Ahasuerus, shot the bird, his brother in God’s creation; the hero is won by Life-in-Death, remains immortal, whereas all his fellow mariners die, and he must forever wander the world and tell the story of his sin. This thematic line is remarkably revealed through the narrative organization of the text with its abrupt beginning – “It is an ancient Mariner, / And he stoppeth one of three” – and an open ending. This strategy makes the poem a perfect sample of the famous romantic fragment which, according to Maurice Blanchot, (1) has a hidden centre in the text; (2) is a self-enclosed item separated from others; (3) is required to be short; and (4) “remains in fee to identity: not a formal unity, to be sure, but a supposedly higher, imaginative wholeness” (Hart 72). Indeed, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as romantic fragments, promise a unity higher than that of the formal philosophy; the poems do not satisfy the reader with a full meaning but invite him or her to create the meaning; the poems (art) point out that the meaning would never be a definite and an ultimate one, and, therefore, they call attention to the mystery of the infinite. The apparently broken concentric narrative of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner makes the text of the poem represent a particular moment – as a fragment – as well as a process – in the ad infinitum line of recurrent similar moments linked by the hero’s wandering. Each moment consists of (1) the protagonist experiencing the feeling of the inner necessity to tell the story of his crime and punishment; (2) identification by the protagonist

226

Chapter Six

of the listener to his story; (3) the protagonist tells the story; (4) he feels spiritual relief – the particular moment ends. Each moment is a short and fleeting period of spiritual liberation, since it is followed again by the feeling of the need to tell the story, and the travelling recommences, and another moment begins, and so on till the end of times. The starting point was the first telling of the story as an experience of confession to the Hermit, followed by an innumerable number of such moments that will never end. The reader is invited to witness such a moment/fragment and to listen, together with the narratee Wedding-Guest, to the story told by the protagonist and autodiegetic narrator, the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge’s poem is a “lyrical ballad”, but its intertextual alliance rests on the epic tradition as well, in which divinity acts upon the hero (who differs in some respects from other humans, but usually possesses no self and no character in its own right), who receives the existential aim to act in the interests of the citadel (as a type of imago dei), that is, society or human community, when the balance of existence is broken and the harmony of the world is thwarted. Likewise, in Coleridge’s poem, divinity, or whatever other superior forces, represented by the Christian God, or nature, or the Mariner’s own subconscious, acts upon the protagonist making him commit a crime against nature. There are no actual psychological motivations for such an action, for the character himself does not say why, neither does he know why, he shot the bird; however, it is not the reasons for the act that count but its consequences. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, unlike the typical romantic hero, is neither rebellious nor escapist; rather, as the hero of the epic tradition, he is supposed to act and work for the benefit of society: his sin becomes a universal example of what may happen to those who try to challenge the universal harmony of the natural system, or attempt to destroy nature, or, in general, perform an evil act regardless its degree of its immorality and gravity. Coleridge’s narrative poem is about the human relation to nature, a sample of which is the mariner’s link to nature, which represents a process, complex and assiduous, whose result is the formation of a moral lesson that is beneficial for community. In Part IV, after killing the albatross and suffering alone, the process begins at the moment when the mariner reveals that (1) he is unable to die and (2) he is unable to pray, as his soul is dry, and, consequently, he hates the creatures of the sea because they are alive. From now on a romantic existential perspective opens, in which (1) a solitary figure, (2) alone facing nature, (3) realizes the beauty of nature, which leads to (4) love for nature, which leads to (5) unaware

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

227

blessing nature, which leads to (6) his being allowed to pray, where the question is whether it leads also to salvation. It might be so, the body of the albatross carried around his neck as a cross falls down, but, along with it, comes the punishment to live forever, roam the world, eternally “pass, like night, from land to land”, and tell the story of his sin. The initial condition of being unable to pray and unable to die turns into being able to pray but remaining unable to die, as the punishment must be extended to eternity: “The man hath penance done, / And penance more will do”. At the present moment of narration, the Mariner is ancient because he remains eternal, not an old or aged person expecting death. Also, his “eye is bright” and “beard with age is hoar”, and he is still carrying, and he will always do, the burden of his crime as being trapped in an existential mode in which “at an uncertain hour”, “agony returns” and “till my ghastly tale is told, / This heart within me burns”. Intertextuality points out here to Ishmael, the character of Moby Dick, whose narrative is another story of crime and punishment involving the relationship between man and nature. As in Melville’s novel, in Coleridge’s ballad the punishment changes its semantic substance, and to be punished means to act in a twofold perspective: (1) as an artist, cursed by the inner always burning desire to express himself, which is materialized in the narrative; and, since he teaches, not tells the story, (2) as an individual who is determined to sin, and, as sinful, is determined to suffer in order to spread a tale, which signifies the dissemination of moraldidactic values among humankind. One may argue, also, with regard to the latter, educative aspect, that, apart from the use of language, archaic spelling and metrical organization, Coleridge’s ballad reveals its alliance to medieval literary tradition in that the Ancient Mariner could be taken not as an individual subject but an “everyman”, sinful and fallen in his human condition, whose experience supports a symbolic structure and is an allegory of sin, confession and redemption. Critics, in general, regard Coleridge’s text in connection with the supernatural and nature, and especially with the ballad tradition. Coleridge’s poem is, indeed, the closest among the texts in the volume of Lyrical Ballads, to the notion of “lyrical ballad” and to the intended, as revealed by the title of the volume, revival of national cultural heritage. The experience of the Mariner is reified and transmitted as a verbal discourse, a story, a narrative, and as such, narrating the story becomes an act of atonement in the line of the modern Ishmael from Moby Dick and the postmodern Briony Tallis from Atonement. The transfiguration of the Ancient Mariner in order to be able to perform his role makes him into a character of spectacular qualities. First,

228

Chapter Six

he acquires the supernatural ability to identify potential sinners – “That moment that his face I see, / I know the man that must hear me: / To him my tale I teach” – and prevent the evil doing. The Wedding-Guest would have done something immoral or sinful at the wedding, but, by means of his story, the Mariner thwarted the emergence of the evil in the world; although there were three guests, the Mariner “stoppeth one of three”, not all of them, but a particular, chosen one. Second, the Ancient Mariner possesses telepathic abilities revealed when the Wedding-Guest attempts to escape the story and insists that, as next of kin to the bridegroom, he must join the merry feast; the Mariner, apart from holding him “with his skinny hand”, holds him “with his glittering eye” and the Wedding-Guest “stood still”, “listens like a three years’ child”, and he “cannot choose but hear”, because the “Mariner hath his will”. Third, the Ancient Mariner possesses narrative skills – “I have strange power of speech” – whose metamorphic effects emerge at the end of narration, when the Mariner is gone and the Wedding-Guest meets the morning alone, as if he “that hath been stunned” “is of sense forlorn”. The outcome is beneficial for the community rather than entertaining, despite Coleridge’s claim in Biographia Literaria that the purpose of poetry is solely “pleasure”; instead, Coleridge’s narrative poem confirms what the title of Book Eight of The Prelude suggests: “Love of Nature [Leads] to Love of Mankind”. More precisely, the goal of the Mariner’s recounting of the story is threefold: first, didactic (“And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth”); second, formative (when he departs from the Ancient Mariner, the Wedding-Guest is a “sadder and a wiser man”; he does not want to participate in the feast of the wedding anymore and turns away from the door, as compared to the beginning of the poem, when he displayed anger at being stopped); third, ethical, with an intelligible moral and high religious allusions: Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

229

6.3.4 Nature as a Mode of Existence: Concluding Remarks In English romantic poetry, nature is a major concern, thematically heterogeneous in its textualization, as well as different from earlier literary traditions. The typology of nature, as conceived by the romantic writers, calls attention to ecological issues and the humanity’s destructive effects on the environment as a result of industrialization. However, the romantic author more often exalts, praises, and deifies a great variety of natural elements and phenomena, by which thematizing nature’s diverse manifestations and their effects on human existence. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats, among others, follow this path by expressing and exploring nature culturally and socially, subjectively and autobiographically; they study the influence and effects of nature on individual experience rather than vice-versa. The concern with nature in romanticism could be regarded as a consequence of various socio-cultural experiences, such as industrialization and the rise of our modern mass-society, but it is equally important to name the growth of the experimental sciences as another aspect modulating the new attitudes towards and expressions of nature in literature. As an example, Shelley’s odes, in particular Ode to the West Wind, show scientific exploration making “a particular radical impact on human perception by its implicit challenge to the whole Platonic tradition of idealism which rests on the hypothesis that art, i.e., the cultural outcome of the human mind, is superior to the crude products of nature” (Esterhammer 12). It is also of equal importance to explore the changes and opinions occurring in the literary focus on nature, changes of thematic expression and the newly evolved concepts of the natural world, which were provided by the new scientific, aesthetic, cultural and social developments and were expressed in romantic literature. These changes occurring in romanticism, as compared to the eighteenth century and earlier periods – whose writers’ opinions and methods, then correct and credible, are now, in romanticism, no longer adequate – are numerous and irreversible, and aim to eradicate from literary discourse the “conventional elegiac topos of the invocation to nature” (Kneale 35). Romanticism is also against the early poet’s wish to enjoy landscape for its picturesque qualities, to contemplate nature in order to meditate on human nature, to explore and wonder at its grace, to proclaim its corporeality and immobility, and, in order to assert its inferiority, to beautify and transform nature as well as to tame and impose control over it.

230

Chapter Six

On the contrary, nature in romanticism is of spiritual, not material essence, and does not refer to a particular and concrete topos; though a poem like Tintern Abbey may offer a semblance of a real natural setting, or an equivalent in reality, as in Ode to the West Wind, more often natural elements and beings, such as Shelley’s skylark and Keats’s nightingale, are signifiers with no referents in reality, not physical entities but imagined beings, pure products of the poet’s imagination. Nature exists in the poet’s mind as concept and is beyond any particular location, receiving its textual representation in various poems such as odes and pastoral lyrics. The way in which pantheism is literarily treated by the romantics helps clarify this matter. Divinity is in nature, as God is everywhere, pantheism would claim, the world is God’s body, and God stands in relation to the world as humans do to their own bodies, and, because God and the world are “spatially coextensive”, “God meets the necessary condition for perception without being limited by any particular location” (Levine 10). Nature is divine and the poet regards it as the substance of a superior, pantheistic dimension of a world which is non-real and above and superior to the world of the humans, which is inferior, real and concrete. In the romantic expression of the dualism of existence, nature is the substance of non-reality as a superior form of existence, often a world of escapism rather than the expression of rebelliousness. In relation to the two worlds of existence (the mediocre reality of the human condition and the superior non-reality of the world of nature poetically rendered), the lyrical I is placed between them, inferior to non-reality but superior to the human world, either as an inspired poet or a prophet, or both of them. In relation to the two worlds of the dualism of existence, nature provides particular types of escapism, either as a more earthly, congenial background for the human being in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, or as a dream, and likewise congenial, paradisiacal setting in The Chimney Sweeper and Kubla Khan. As a major source of escapism, nature accepts the poet as its constituent part similar to his experience in childhood (The Prelude, Tintern Abbey, and Ode to the West Wind), offers a promise of immortality to the poet as an element in its cycle (Ode to the West Wind), and is a spiritual healer in Ode to a Nightingale. Nature is loved for its consistency, endurance and vastness, but nature is above all beautiful and represents for the romantics a perfect work of art; a natural object, or element, or phenomenon, is a supreme manifestation of art, the product of divinity or of nature itself, like a bird’s song, where nature is both art and artist. Nature as art or the art of nature is superior, because nature is more beautiful and meaningful than the art of the humans; for example, the skylark’s melody surpasses all the other

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

231

music in the world. Nature as artist creates a superior form of art which is contrasted to human artistic endeavours and is the substance of a superior world of existence, which is opposed to the human condition. The best human art results from painful experience, such as the death of a beautiful woman in Poe, but what is the source of the perfect art of nature is a question that remains rhetorical. The human being tends to “come near” perfection, but to access it is impossible unless the romantic persona intervenes as a mediator or linking principle. Shelley’s ode to the skylark is again revelatory: asserting his individualism, superiority and egocentrism, the lyrical I, another artist, seeks inspiration (“teach me”) and assumes the task to unite the superior form of art belonging to the skylark with the human condition by being inspired by nature and producing, in turn, art/poetry (“harmonious madness”). As an artistic object, nature is the source of inspiration for the poet, and, as an artist, nature is the poet’s co-author in his lyrical efforts. Apart from being the source of inspiration and avoiding the traps of personification and pathetic fallacy, to the romantic poet, nature is also a source of genuine feelings and elevated thoughts, and a source of knowledge, where the poet acquires new views, opinions, conceptions, and attitudes based on a blend of experience and subjective response to nature rather than nature being attributed with consciousness and knowledge to be shared with the humans. A perfect and superior piece of art, nature is yet by no means a static and stable universe, a visual experience statically and panoramically recorded, an inert and “mechanically functioning mass”, in short, an external object, but a dynamic internalized dimension where “the vibrant life of lakes, forests, swamps, and oceans revealed an animate universe in a continuous state of movement” (Esterhammer 12). To this, we should add that nature receives a structure, which is both mobile and transcendental; nature is a substance composed of both fleeting and enduring elements; nature is a vast world, attractive and inspiring, for artistic quest; there is partnership and a dialogue established between nature and humanity, but more often nature receives supremacy and control in its relation to humans, and offers transient but joyful moments of escapism in the experience of the dualism of existence. The way in which Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats conceive of dualism, escapism, pantheism, and authorship, these four cornerstones of the romantic concern with nature, accounts for abstractness in place of lifeness, excludes eros in favour of logos. Logos, the act of articulation, is a deed eminently and essentially creative, producing by means of imagination something that was not present and in

232

Chapter Six

this way reifying the freedom of spiritual flight and the freedom of artistic expression, and achieving simultaneously authorial identity and artistic unity. The romantic concern with nature is indispensable from the romantic focus on childhood, which, like the thematic elements of nature and society, relates to the issues of the dualism of existence, escapism, and rebelliousness, and also to the process of development and formation of a mature personality, which will become, in the Bildungsroman, one of the most important elements of its literary system.

6.4 The Concern with the Experience of Childhood: Towards a Literary Myth Child, childhood, and childhood experience are thematically treated by all romantic authors to such a great extent that we may talk about the rise of the myth of childhood in English literature during romanticism. The breakthrough is assisted by the changed views of the early experience and its lasting importance for the process of growing up and maturation. The new opinions are supported by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (from Emile) and Friedrich Schiller (from Aesthetic Education): “Rousseau helped Europe realize that children were not miniature adults but creatures with their own peculiar needs and capacities, which parents and teachers had to honour. Schiller concentrated on how, in growing up, a child’s needs and capacities might be shaped and directed” (Jeffers 13-14). With Blake, Wordsworth and other representatives of the romantic trend in English literature, the child is the only person who keeps his/her mind always inquisitive, open to external phenomena, which in the long run turns to become trite and conventional for a mature person. Wordsworth and others remain highly subjective in matters of pursuing the transformations of the mind. Their apprehension of the universe being very personal, egotistic, egoistic, and self-centred, their poetry focuses the reader’s attention on the germination of the inner self of an individual, together with the implied theme of the lasting importance of childhood impressions, especially of natural forces, in the general process of formation of a human personality. The dualistic interrelation between reality and non-reality, soul and body, childhood and maturity, joy and sorrow, innocence and experience, which can be traced in the works of the English romantic poets, seems to serve the same purpose. This method of binary opposition serves as a means to emphasize the contradictions as the result of perceiving the external world through the perspective of the inner self and its expectations. In this respect, the concern with childhood was

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

233

part of a broader tendency to re-emphasize the significance of the individual subject and validate individual judgment in their clash with conventional opinion. The literature of the romantic period becomes psychologically oriented, and also has the retrospective principle as a dominant one. Romantic poetry is a poetry of the past: Bakhtin felt in the works of the romantics the remoteness of the past, solitude and, on the whole, a very specific colouring of the mood; this aspect is the direct consequence of the authors’ alienation from reality and their incapability of fitting in with the contemporary process, their unwillingness, originating from obedience to destiny, though not fatal, to change the future. In the atmosphere of uncertainty and unsteadiness within the new social and cultural developments, and of rejection of the old system of values, the personality gets alienated, which is reflected in literary works in the position “between Heaven and Hell”. As in every experimental literary enterprise, personality is determined to become the focus of investigation of the romantic author, whose tools are imagination and emotional intensity, and the invented matter would fit the outbursts and aspirations of this subjective master. To live in an imaginary world is easier than in reality – the one deprived of imagination will never be able to escape from the kingdom of conventionalism – and this becomes a widespread leit-motif in a great number of writings. The temptation is to live in a dream-world related to the past, to come back to what already occurred and does not exist anymore, but can be aesthetically revived, to a fabulous arabesque of impressions, for imagination and recollection can bring anyone to the beginnings of life, when one felt secure. As the works of various writers, which belong to English romanticism, suggest, this temptation compels the imagination to constantly undertake the trip to childhood. As for the succeeding periods and trends in English literature dealing with the theme childhood, they need a special critical approach, including the Bildungsroman in Victorian fiction, for one may detect there the same lasting concern with infantile and childhood experience and its importance for the general process of character formation. This concern was anticipated by the romantic movement, in which a number of writers revealed a willingness to explore the less conscious aspects of feeling and thought, which was accompanied by a concern with the experience and insights of childhood more serious than many previous periods would have thought reasonable.

234

Chapter Six

6.4.1 Voices of Innocence and Experience in William Blake’s Poetry The first in the line of those concerned with the experience of childhood is William Blake with his Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1974). In the first set, the poem Chimney Sweeper may be labelled a “complete romantic poem” with regard to the literary expression of nature, social concern, religion, childhood, the dualism of existence, and escapism. The poem may be also labelled “postmodern” or “postmodernist” relying on Lyotard’s assumption that the postmodern is what is radical and different in the modern, and on Eco’s claim that every period has its postmodernism. In its thematic construction, the poem promotes incredulity towards meta-narratives, creation of an alternative universe of existence, play of textual meaning, anti-essentialism, an overall meaning being rejected by alternative interpretations (such as the psychoanalytical one, ironic retort against dominating doctrine, escapism and dualism, and so on), the creation of binary oppositions, among which, in the postmodern way, between self and other, centre and margin. The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Innocence is first and foremost a remarkable expression of the romantic dualism of existence: in the nonreality of a dream, children live their childhood against the misery of their real existence, in which they suffer and must work, and for that reason are bereaved of childhood; in dream, however, they can accomplish the subconscious need for childhood and escapism based on their selfassumed, and at the same time imposed by the real and adult world, belief in an eventual reward, after death, for the whole of earthly suffering. And what would be the best “reward” for a child other than to be a child, to live his/her childhood? This religious doctrine, Blake ironically implies, is the ideology used by the adults to subject children – socially, among the most vulnerable human beings – and use them as cheap labour force. As conceived by Blake, the pairs of poems from the sets of the songs of innocence and experience, bearing the same title or contrastive titles, represent another version of the romantic dualism of existence: the innocence of childhood versus the experience of maturity. The poems constitute binary oppositions in which one element is an aspect of innocence, which is contrasted to another one representing an aspect of experience: for example, infant joy versus infant sorrow, or the mercy of God as an aspect of innocence in The Lamb versus the wrath of God as an aspect of experience in The Tyger. Not all poems in the volume, however, can be grouped into pairs to reveal

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

235

contrastive aspects; even so, they contain each an aspect of either experience or innocence: personification, metaphors and symbols in the presentation of nature in The Sick Rose, for example, disclose the loss of virginity as an aspect of experience that would have no equivalent in the world of innocence. The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Innocence contains belief as the aspect representing innocence in this poem: the child believes in the doctrine, because, having experienced the reward in the form of childhood in dream, “Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm”. The child is pure and innocent, limited in comprehension, but an adult reader would easily sense the authorial ironic retort at the child’s access to heaven and God to be conditioned by suffering; the question whether the child has to suffer in order to be rewarded challenges the goodness and humanism of the religious doctrine: “if all do their duty they need not fear harm” is the last line of the poem, which clarifies an earlier statement that “the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, / He’d have God for his father, and never want joy”, where “to do your duty” and “be a good boy” mean, we understand from the very beginning of the poem, to sweep the chimneys, that is, to live a miserable life and to suffer. “So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep” – I clean your sins and dirt, and redeem you by my childhood innocence – states the child addressing the adult world, meaning that a child is by his or her nature innocent and pure and, therefore, the access to heaven is naturally granted. The romantic irony here clearly “results from both the mythification of childhood and the egocentrism of the self that regards himself as the creator of the world” (Calin 193, my trans.). Blake, indeed, is such a creator of a particular world, universe, mythology, a whole of existence by his unprecedented and uncommon mythopoetic imagination. The second Chimney Sweeper, in Songs of Experience, reveals loss of belief as the aspect representing experience, because the child no longer believes in the doctrine as a result of his acquiring of experience; he understands that “God and his Priest and King” have invented the reward (“make up a heaven of our misery”) in order to dominate and use children. The child yet retains innocence and purity; he smiles and is “happy and dance[s] and sing[s]”, unlike the sinful adults who must go to church to pray in order to access divinity.20 20

It is interesting to notice that in The Chimney Sweeper from the Songs of Innocence, at the very beginning – “When my mother died I was very young / And my father sold me (…)” – the Oedipus complex is revealed through the love towards mother and hate towards father: the child-speaker intentionally “kills” his mother to deliberately exclude her from the despicable and mean world of the

236

Chapter Six

The volume entitled Songs of Innocence and of Experience is the first part of William Blake’s imaginative writing. The second part of his literary activity is represented by the so-called Prophetic Books, which constitute a series of poems rooted in Blake’s own interpretation of the Bible, his readings in Gnosticism, and his interest in the doctrine of the Swedish philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg. In these poems, Blake attempted to transmit a personal mythology coloured with obscurity and a cloudy idiom alien to the mentality of his contemporary audience. All poems in the volume of Songs of Innocence and of Experience deal explicitly with the experience of childhood; many of the Songs of Innocence have counterparts in the Songs of Experience, the relationship being indicated either by a common title, as with Holy Thursday, The Chimney Sweeper, and Nurse’s Song, or by contrasting titles, as with The Lamb and The Tiger, The Divine Image and The Human Abstract, Infant Joy and Infant Sorrow. The poems from the two sets are contrary but highly interrelated. Many poems in the Songs of Experience represent comments on the Songs of Innocence; they are, eventually, satires on the latter set, and many of the poems in both sets are symmetrical and set against each other not only in the thematic implication (“mercy” in The Lamb versus the “wrath” in The Tiger, or “belief” in the first Chimney Sweeper and “disbelief”, or the “loss of belief”, in the second one), but also in the language and stanza form. The volume reflects Blake’s views of innocence that exists in children as their purity, kindness, and naivety. Experience belongs to adults and represents the corrupt and conventional adult world. Innocence is equated with purity, saintliness, and can be regarded as the spiritual, dream-like existence; experience, with its abstract rationality and firm general principles, is the actual world, which, though inferior to innocence as a state of being, is a necessary aspect of human personality, be that human being a child or a grown-up. Innocence is the ideal or paradisiacal world of protection and peace, which the child assumes in the world he is born into. With innocence, the poems show the state of man before the Fall (the Edenic state) and, with experience, the state after the Fall, but the “two contrary states of the human soul” suggest “not only a failing away from Edenic innocence to experience, but also the possibility of progress towards a Christ-inspired “higher” innocence and a future regain of paradise” (Sanders 353).

adults, whereas, by stating that his father sold him, the child makes him a true exponent of the evil and corrupted mature existence.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

237

The voices of innocence and experience in Blake’s poetry are those belonging mostly to children, and, as a poet, Blake is to be approached insofar as he reveals in a number of poems in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience an intense conviction of the importance of childhood in the general development of human personality, a special concern with the universe of childhood, the condition of the child, his place in a world governed by mature principles. All these aspects are in close relationship with the writer’s attempt to touch on the problems of religion, the relationship between man’s religious attitude, power of knowledge, and his “Poetic or Prophetic” capacity (a concept introduced by Blake in There Is No Natural Religion, 1788), the last three aspects being actually explored to a lesser or greater extent in all his work. During childhood, innocence is prolonged, children and young men become characters in Blake’s poetic enterprise, the poet himself answers a request from a child “on a cloud” to write the songs: And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water dear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.

The first set of poems “is an evocation of that paradise which Milton declared lost”, and Blake located the innocence and purity of humanity not in the childhood of the race, “but in the individual’s childhood” (Lamont 280). The lyrical I from The Little Black Boy – a poem that openly supports colonialism – is a child who lives in a world of colonial expansion and becomes the exponent of that part of the world to which England brought civilization. England is seen as the greatest colonial empire in the world, as a factor of progress spreading civilization: “And I am black, but O! my soul is white”. The civilized world makes a difference between white and black, good and evil, and the little black boy has been taught by his mother about the differences between them.21 In a postmodern West and East dichotomy, or centre and margin, the child has also learned that “there God does live” in the West, that the earthly existence is limited and “we are put on earth a little space”, which is time, and the human experience of life in material bodies is transitory and prepares man for an eternal, spiritual existence. In this case, the body is nothing but a cloud that is shadowing the soul that will be released to 21

One may comprehend here the implication of the abstract notion of maternal nature in a concrete representative of the human race, because the physical mother would belong to the mature, corrupt world, which Blake disregarded.

238

Chapter Six

immortality: “The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice” (it implies death, but without any note of tragedy, for death is transition from one state to another). The equation of God with the sun suggests tacit ties between the two basic principles of life: the existence of the soul, that is, spiritual life, and the physical, material, fleshly existence; both are embodied in the entity of Man “put on earth” that he “may learn to bear the beams of love”, and attaining joy only by the end of human earthly life impregnated with experience. In this text as a colonial discourse, the symbol of the sun and its counterparts – day, light, morning, beams, golden tent – are scattered all over the poem, spreading away the radiant energy of the desire to live, even if self-sacrifice (the complex of inferiority, or the posture of the little black boy as a human-slave, a marginalized and subjected subject) would be the price for that: I’ll shade him from the heat, till he can bear To lean in joy upon our father’s knee; And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him, and he will then love me.

The same tone of confidence is preserved in The Chimney Sweeper from the first set. However, one can detect here the drama of childhood experience: the boy’s mother died when he was very young and his father, unable to support him, put him in a work-house to the care of officials. The poem is viewed by traditional criticism as a protest against the way in which, at the beginnings of industrialization, children were treated and bereaved of childhood: at that time in England children were employed as sweepers – they were cheap and small, and in the poem “weep” is actually “sweep”, for the little boy could not talk properly, which shows Blake’s irony. Also, the same interplay of the two colours as concepts is implicitly prompted in the poem: soot, “coffins of black”, darkness in the morning – the concept of the conventional real existence – are opposed to “white hair”, “white children”, “bright key” – representing the concept of a dream-like, visionary, non-real existence. The chimney sweepers are “locked up in coffins of black”, representing the dream image of the narrow and dark space of the chimney, which is a symbol of death and prison. Tom’s vision changes the life of children, for only imagination and the refuge provided by a subconscious need for escapism materialized in dream can compensate for the misery of reality and offer spiritual joy. For Blake, in Jerusalem, imagination is “the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies are no more”.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

239

The dream, passing through the child’s mind, leaves its print in his consciousness, thus forming an illusion of an ideal reality; dream or sleep is a superior form of existence, says, among others, Lucian Blaga. But it seems that Blake is drawing a clear demarcation line between the two seemingly equal notions: the ideal and the dream. The former is never attained, touched or grasped, and represents a highly abstract transformation of thought or idea; the latter, abstract as well, inclines towards a more concrete realization through the mental fulfilment on the conscious level of the human psyche of a hidden and obsessive wish, and the later relief: “Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm”. In spite of the fact that the poet mentions a number of children alluding to a more numerous group (“That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack”), one can easily see the theme of solitude that dominates the poem. The child may be a limited reasoner; he or she may not be entirely aware of his or her miserable life, as the reading audience is, but he or she is innocent, can see angels, and possesses a direct means of access to the world of God. Blake, even if he reveals a special insight into the experience of childhood and the psychology of children, or his lyrical I takes the posture of a child and his poems are utterances not of the author but of a child-character that he created, he sometimes looks at them from a moralizing grown-up point of view and mentality: “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm”. However, as we have already argued in this study, these words are ironic, disclosing Blake’s critical attitude towards what he viewed as a fallacious system of morality perpetuated by the false church of a fallen world, and it seems that Blake does not thematize, as Wordsworth, the indivisible unity of God, nature, and the human being (as child). In another poem in the first set, Holy Thursday, with its solemn, ceremonious verse, showing how pure children are brought to the ceremony of the fortieth day after the resurrection of Christ at St. Paul’s cathedral, the lyrical I urges the reader to cherish pity, to welcome any stranger, who might be a missionary from heaven, “lest you drive an angel from your door”. An ironic comment on Holy Thursday is provided by the poem with the same title from the Songs of Experience, which shows that people profit either materially or spiritually by capitalizing on their charity. The lyrical I has passed through experience: for him the Edenic season is spring, the sun is a symbol of imagination and light, the rain and the rainbow represent hope for a better world, different from the earthly human way of life, with its poverty, man’s dependence on the material needs, a place where “sun does never shine” and “fields are bleak and

240

Chapter Six

bare”; instead, he is seeking a better place for children, which will be like heaven: For where-e’er the sun does shine, And where-e’er the rain does fall, Babe can never hunger there, Nor poverty the mind appal.

The poems from the first set represent a vehicle for the author to proclaim eternal love, hope, and joy for everyone, but the succeeding Songs of Experience, on the contrary, declare such dreams as utopian and not childlike but childish. Blake is aware of the terror and hostility of the conventional adult society in the face of some features of the child’s outlook, for the child and the young adult are impeded by social and religious oppression, with a sickly conscience of it. The illustrations accompanying the poems to depict the world of experience show death, weeping, menace, and desolation; also, the tone of the poems is more varied: it may be one of angry protest, as in Holy Thursday, or of cynical reasoning, as in The Human Abstract and The Chimney Sweeper. The latter, set against the poem with the same title from Songs of Innocence, is essentially a dialogue, in which the degree of tragedy is extended (“A little black thing among the snow”, “They closed me in the clothes of death”), but the ideas that a child is pure and innocent, his misery is the means of access to heaven, and that he needs no earthly institutions of God (church, priest, king) are preserved. A poem with a great satirical, even sarcastic, edge, The Chimney Sweeper, from the Songs of Experience, is less a contemplation of the scene of misery than indignation and revolt at the unjust and undeserved destiny, condemning regimentation and exploitation, which occurred due to the change in the child’s mind concerning the way of perceiving the external world, which compelled the transformation of his attitudes. Now an experienced observer, not an innocent and pure chimney sweeper, starts the first stanza of the poem, uttering the striking words of truth at the end of it, words that are coming out of a child’s mouth and are linked to his mental conviction of the illusion of a better existence, thus rejecting his own universe of escapism: “And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery”. Blake also rejects in this poem a contemporary conception according to which children are “small sinners”, the aim of cruelty towards them being to give them the steadiness and wisdom of adults as soon as possible, which is a conception materialized in the moral and puritanical stories of the time.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

241

For Blake, parents, nurses, and priests are true exponents of the adult, corrupt world, where the wisdom of the old and the calculating force of human reason bring oppression and serve to limit what is innocent and pure. Especially the father is viewed as a figure of oppression, jealousy and terror: “And my father sold me while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!” (The Chimney Sweeper in the Songs of Innocence). The mother is obliged to join her husband in his terrifying and tyrannous control of the child. Nonetheless, statements like “My mother bore me in the southern wild”, “My mother taught me underneath a tree”, “She took me on her lap and kissed me”, “Thus did my mother say, and kissed me” (in The Little Black Boy) and “I thought best / To sulk upon my mother’s breast” (in Infant Sorrow) perpetuate the mother symbol of universal kindness and womblike protection. A similar change in the speaker’s mind occurs in Holy Thursday from the second set, where the name of God the Creator, with his power to reverse the darkness and renew and control, is not even mentioned. Like Byron, Blake doubts the good in God’s creation, as he does in The Lamb and The Tiger, by contrasting the mercy of God to the wrath of God. The human being, Blake suggests, having gained experience to move to another stage of life, further away from innocence, “now can see no more” (Wordsworth) the things that he has seen before. Blake also hints at God’s failure to fit innocence into the appropriate entourage to sustain its utmost plain complexity, but, like other romantics, Blake remains hopeful about childhood preserving those values that project the actions of maturity onto past experience. An extended interpretation of Blake’s poetry raises doubts concerning the definiteness of its meaning and spawns a diversity of opinions; many of Blake’s and our contemporaries might have viewed most of his works as too obscure for an adequate understanding of the implied ideas and symbols. About this, in one of his letters, Blake writes: “But I am happy to find the Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate my Visions and Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I ever hoped. Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity”. Despite their hymn-like simplicity and nursery-rhyme rhythms, their simple language and direct utterance, Blake’s Songs reveal a complex range of meanings, symbols, and poetic devices sparked off by a plain and common poetic material, which consists of descriptions of the condition of children, their life experiences, and the contact and conflict of the old with the young. The poems in both sets escape the limited universe of childhood due to their comprehensive nature of meaning and symbolism,

242

Chapter Six

which is beyond a child’s understanding; moreover, as in Infant Sorrow in the Songs of Experience, the child is terrified by the world around, and the poem renders the protest of the child at birth, his/her first experience of danger and violence in the mature world. Although the poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience stand apart in Blake’s literary work, many of their recurrent symbols and motifs are present in his Prophetic Books, in which myths are created or recreated, with an uncommon mythopoetic imagination of the author, within the framework of a four-dimensional universe governed by “the four Zoas”, in which contraries co-exist and are necessary to each other. Such symbols include the Lamb and the Tiger (the mercy of God versus the wrath of God, soul and goodness versus reason and revolt, the outburst of energies), the Tree of Mystery and other enigmatic symbols of psychological states presented in a single image; for instance, the rose and the worm suggest sexual symbolism in The Sick Rose, and, having universal resonance, may determine a Romanian reader to think of Heliade-Radulescu’s Zburatorul. The theme of childhood is rendered by Blake’s own conviction that the child is primarily an aspect or possibility of every human personality. The greater part of his writing bears witness to the individual testing of the wisdom, morality and theology of his time; sometimes the author is amused when he takes the church, the dwelling place of God on earth, as the shortest distance between the Holy Spirit and innocence; sometimes he renders the value of strong emotion, notably anger, as the tool or weapon of a healthy mind. The latter aspect stands clearly in front of other aspects in those poems in which Blake depicts the ways in which children are bereaved of childhood, and, without any parental guidance, they become intellectually weak, especially when no one can answer their questions that are linked to their attempts to discover the world. Blake focuses on the mental type of starvation, which, if not dealt with, may lead to retardation and a tragic waste of human potential. Blake’s children-characters are disturbed in their early life and have difficulties in coping with other people, especially when concepts and principles of their specific thinking become more abstract. Children’s early life consists of play, which is an important method of gaining knowledge, and, as in Rabelais’s work and in later Bildungsromane, play is also an important aspect in the process of development and formation of a mature personality. Play is central to children, but also to adults and the entire society they live in, because play is a function of culture, one of civilization’s foundations, entirely universal and integrated in the lives of both children and grown-ups. The children of

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

243

Blake’s poems are bereaved of play, that is, of childhood, but their wish to play can be fulfilled in dream, in an existence close to God, where “down a green plain leaping laughing they run” and “rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind” (The Chimney Sweeper from the Songs of Innocence). The child’s dream is also, in romantic terms, the non-real realm of escapism framed, or rather juxtaposed, in the dualism of existence, to the real world that induces suffering, misery and hard work at the beginnings of industrialization in England. The children in the Songs of Innocence experience effortlessly a vision; they enjoy it against the attempts of rational adulthood to thwart it. In a similar way, Wordsworth (in Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood) and Coleridge (in Christabel) employ such an image of the child as a polemic response to the excessive morality and rationality of the eighteenth century. Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge anticipate the concern of the Victorian writers of the Bildungsroman with the visionary experience of children as answers to adult methods of frustration and moral determinism. The Bildungsroman, in general, presents the image of the child as an archetype rendering the wholeness of human psyche, which is set up against the divisions of mind and feeling, excessive rationality and emotion, morality related to rationality and instinctive action. In David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel a cruel father or another obstructing parental tries to discourage the child’s potential by inducing excessive morality and rationality, which leads to a separation of action from instinct and mind from feeling. “The man of mist and fire”, as Swinburne called him, William Blake ranks today with the names of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, and holds a special place in the history of literature and that of painting. Like Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and other English romantic writers, Blake felt the significance of childhood experience, but, unlike the Wordsworthparticipator with stronger psychological insights into the experience of childhood, the Blake-contemplator pictures to the reader a number of aspects of the experience of childhood without focusing the reader’s attention on the sharp psychological conflict in individual minds. What Blake’s poetry does is allowing the reading audience to contemplate with him the facts in their emotional intensity, or the conflict between innocence and experience, and to share his complex attitude towards sorrow, admiration, or inquiry. He is also dealing with the psychological and moral problems of all humans, those that are inescapable in family life and in the contact of the mature mind with the infantile one. These problems and their effects on human personality are the ultimate material

244

Chapter Six

of his symbolic Prophetic Books too, but in the short poems from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience they receive a clearer statement.

6.4.2 The Child and the Concern with Individual Formation in the Poetry of William Wordsworth William Wordsworth is another English romantic poet that focuses on the child and childhood based on the famous assumption, from My Heart Leaps Up, that “The Child is father of the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety”. Thus, unlike Blake, Wordsworth does not textualize the experience of childhood as a distinct realm of existence, separate, self-sufficient, and opposed to maturity; rather, Wordsworth links the stages, placing youth in the middle, to thematize an individual formative process. During this process, the first and crucial is the period of infancy and childhood. In other words, for Wordsworth, the experience of childhood is not a microcosm, a world of existence framed within its own thematic parameters, as in Blake, but a stage, a part of a process, the initial phase in a larger period of growth and development of an individual subject. In the case of Wordsworth, since his poetry is mainly the poetry about his own subjective experience, the process encompasses the growth, development, and eventual formation of a poet; thus, his work, particularly The Prelude and its shorter version Tintern Abbey, is a kind of proto-Bildungsroman or proto-Künstlerroman. In his concern with the growing human poetic mind, Wordsworth focuses solely on childhood in Ode. Intimations of Immortality; in Tintern Abbey, he reveals the transition from youth to maturity and only mentions childhood; in The Prelude, he covers all three stages and presents the development of personality as a complex and turbulent process. Though Wordsworth claimed that poetry’s concern should be simple, rustic existence, his best literary productions, especially The Prelude, centre on the development and workings of his own mind, the complexity of his own personality, with pregnant autobiographical allusions, rendering the principles governing the formation of individuality, which is actually the major concern in the Bildungsroman. The Prelude could be considered a proto-Bildungsroman, or rather Bildungsgedicht or Lehrgedicht, of the age of romanticism just like Tom Jones is in the context of the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century. The poem, written between 1798 and 1805, representing the first major version which Wordsworth refused to publish, was continually revised during several decades, culminating in the 1850 version, published

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

245

posthumously. It is viewed as a surviving fragment of imposing magnitude of a magnum opus that was intended to be The Recluse, which Wordsworth started planning in 1798 on Coleridge’s persuasion. The Recluse, with its first part The Prelude and The Excursion (1814), its second part, is “a philosophical poem containing views of Man, Nature and society … having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement”; with admiration anticipated by Coleridge as “the great philosophical poem in existence”, the poem was to employ Wordsworth’s energies for the next 17 years, but it was never completed. As Keats remarkably wrote in a letter dated October 27, 1818, The Prelude clearly expresses Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime”, for it seems that Wordsworth constantly writes himself into the text and his comprehension of the universe is purely subjective. The poem renders the growth of the poet’s own consciousness, and its subtitle clearly indicates this: Growth of a Poet’s Mind. An Autobiographical Poem. One can say that Wordsworth began modern poetry, the poetry of the personal emotional and psychological experience. Wordsworth himself, speaking of The Prelude on its completion in a letter of May 1, 1805, declared that it was “a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself. It is not selfconceit that has induced me to do this, but real humility. I began the work because I was unprepared to treat any more arduous subject, and diffident of my own powers”. The introduction to Book I discloses the poet’s ambition to produce a great epic, along with the fear of confusing the grand and the grandiose, and the too easy rationalization of inactivity; also, the object of the poem is made explicit: “to fix the wavering balance of my mind” by reviewing the whole past, its defeats and merits, disappointments and moments of exaltation. By the end of Book XII in the earliest version, Wordsworth had achieved, partly in the actual process of writing, the “healthy” imagination of his maturity and was ready to begin his epic. At that time, Wordsworth could hardly have suspected that The Prelude was actually already that major work, not merely a preliminary exercise but itself a deed accomplished. The poem follows the main events of the poet’s life: Book First and Second describe his childhood and school-time, and the next books successively trace his residence at Cambridge, a Summer Vacation, the return to Cambridge and his Alpine tour, his residence in London, his stay in France and his experience of the French Revolution, the disillusionment and final restoration. The poem is thus a highly personal work, an extended confession or apologia, and as such indeed “a thing unprecedented” in English poetry.

246

Chapter Six

But like every autobiographer, or writer of the Bildungsroman, Wordsworth deliberately selected his materials, rejected what he had no need or wish to use, and laid particular stress on the themes of most importance to him or to the self-portrait he chose to paint. For example, when preparing a convincing record of his political sentiments in France, he passed over in silence his French love affair with Annette Vallon, and the critic who regards this relationship as crucial in the poet’s development, and its later repression and sublimation, may find The Prelude gravely weakened by a studied hypocrisy. This aspect should not alter, however, the essential appeal of the poem, for the work has its own integrity and speaks to the reader in its own aesthetic terms: its chronicle of character formation seems neither false nor evasive, its argument is coherent and self-sustaining, and one can enjoy reading it with or without possessing the knowledge of some facts not revealed here. Yet the final estimate of The Prelude, like that of the autobiographical novels that followed (including the Bildungsroman), is revealed by the author’s capacity to make his development seem representative as well as idiosyncratic. The “egotistical sublime”, or the consciousness of being different and possessing a special sensibility and dedication, renders the assumption that the lyrical I may speak for all humanity and that a painful account of the growth of his own mind necessarily reveals much of what is characteristic of the mind of the human being in general. In The Prelude, Wordsworth is answering to John Locke’s theories expressed in Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which reject the doctrine of inborn ideas or knowledge, maintaining that the source of knowledge is experience; Locke’s concern is also about the origin and extent of man’s knowledge; he also examines the nature and limits of knowledge, and the workings of the human mind and the association of ideas.22 The development of the mind has three main stages, says Locke and Wordsworth closely follows this idea throughout his poetry. The first of the three ages of man is infancy, or childhood, which is a time of absolute sensation and complete communion with nature, and he tells the reader (in Book I, lines 269-281) that his life began to the sound of the river Derwent:

22

Locke’s views have been scarcely valid in the postmodern philosophical context, being already rejected in the late modern period by the theories of Jung, but at the time of Wordsworth they were highly influential.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

247

Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou, O Derwent! winding among grassy holms Where I was looking on, a babe in arms, Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.

Wordsworth recalls his years of childhood and schooling as very happy; he enjoyed perfect liberty and a paradisiacal surrounding where he could roam at will and which had a definite formative influence on his upholding mind: “Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”. However, the whole framework of the poem reveals a more subtle progress, a search for lost time, a journey to seek a remembered world (which eventually turned out to belong to imagination), and the poet can find it only by returning to a perception which was also creation, to a way of thinking which was once a way of recognition. Wordsworth began the tracing of the “growth of a poet’s mind” with recollections of early childhood on the assumption, psychologically acute, that the child was poet and prophet, and the father of man; that is to say, certain well-defined attributes of the child’s character would somehow build a bridge over the troubled currents of adolescence to a more stable maturity. Memory serves as the principal agent of integration, for a past emotion intensely remembered serves a present purpose: “So feeling comes in aid / Of feeling, and diversity of strength / Attends us, if but once we have been strong” (Book XI, lines 326-328). The deepest strength sparks, like an epiphany, from sudden insight, “spots of time” (some vital impressions offered by the surrounding world in the process of growth) scattered throughout the whole of existence, most frequently from the selfunconscious childhood: these are moments when the soul, being far from an immediate selfish concern, catches a brief intimation with some ultimate pattern or the natural world. The second stage in the development of the human mind, as described in The Prelude, is youth, a time when the wonder and fear of childhood begin to weaken, as the sensation is pondered and translated into simple ideas. Hence the possibility to enter with a fuller understanding into the experience familiar to him from childhood, in which sense merges with

248

Chapter Six

spirit: “Bodily eye and spiritual need” seem now to have become “one great faculty”, and self-consciousness emerges. But youth is also the stage of passionate intuition and feeling rather than of intellectual response, even if the vital impressions that become the “spots of time” and which provide shocks to the moral being of the young man, especially the disillusion and despair attendant upon the collapse of the liberal cause in revolutionary France, are to be understood intellectually, as the logical consequence of the responses to events in time. The memory of such impressions and perceptions is the “natural piety” that links the poet’s days to each other, the child to the youth and the youth to the mature man. Following this interpretation, the “spots of time” acquire a religious significance; each is a true epiphany, a warranty of the soul’s belonging to a larger life; each seems almost “a leading from above, a something given”, sent by a special act of grace “from some far region”. The epiphany, or revelation, though involuntary (as later in James Joyce), comes to the prepared sensibility of an artist, for the poem traces the “growth of a poet’s mind”, and the harmony that it establishes is no less aesthetic than religious. In the Bildungsroman, such epiphanies, occurring at the moment of passing from youth to maturity, prompt the inner change of the protagonist and become the main premise for his/her identity formation. For Wordsworth, the final stage of maturity, in which “the mind is lord and power”, represents a synthesis of the process leading from sensation to feeling and from feeling to thought, and then creating a union of all these faculties in God. The simplicity of infantile responses grew to have a moral and religious dimension, which is an essential part of the function of nature in his poetry. The means of communication between God and man is nature in its sensuous forms, and Wordsworth’s term for the spirit, which speaks through, is “Presence”.23 The importance of the natural forms emerges also from their contribution to making up a man’s soul (as in Book I, lines 464-475): Ye Presences of Nature in the sky And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills! And Souls of lonely places! can I think A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed Such ministry, when ye, through many a year Haunting me thus among my boyish sports, 23

The word emphasizes the vitality of Wordsworth’s conception of “living Nature” and suggests the immediacy with which he can apprehend forms as symbols.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

249

On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills, Impressed, upon all forms, the characters Of danger or desire; and thus did make The surface of the universal earth, With triumph and delight, with hope and fear, Work like a sea?

The lyrical I turns to nature to find his own image: “what he has, what lacks / His rest and his perfection”; but maturity is also the stage when the poet knows that he is now wholly apart from nature, his mind having risen above the objects that it contemplates, for the individual mind “keeps her own / Inviolate retirement, subject there / To Conscience only, and the law supreme / Of that Intelligence which governs all”. Portraying the reciprocal influence of nature and the mind as a part of the nature it perceives, Wordsworth welcomes an overflow of descriptions of rural scenes. In this respect, Wordsworth and other romantic poets were able to see that an important part of valuable human experience was lost in the sophisticated urban civilization; that is why the life of villages and farms, as Wordsworth presented it, sustained the exploration of some real possibilities in human experience and gave an effective means of defining human values. Since Wordsworth stresses in his work the lasting importance of infantile experience, which is almost entirely characterized by pure sensation, the growth of the mind is governed by another one of Locke’s theories, according to which the human psyche is built up by sensations, by what a man receives from the outside, the greatest part of human mental life consisting of reflections on personal ideas. No two succeeding sensations from the same object can be the same, because the later sensation reaches a mind already modified by the earlier sensation. Wordsworth’s poetry attempts to explore the interchange between the external and internal worlds, between mind and nature, the perpetual reciprocal modification of mind and sensation, and Wordsworth actually portrays the mind itself as part of the nature it perceives, and this connection, sensed through what he calls “Joy”, offers confidence in the reality of ourselves and the external world. The growth of the mind is governed by another concept that Wordsworth borrowed from Locke, that of “associationism”, only that with Wordsworth (as well as Coleridge) associations take place, according to Robert Langbaum (36-42), “not through the ideas or manifest content of an experience, but through the affective tone, which can then be communicated to experiences with quite different manifest contents”; for Wordsworth, this affective tone is, Langbaum again, “a feeling of infinity

250

Chapter Six

which connects the individual mind with the Great Mind and cannot be entirely accounted for by the present, or even recollected experience”; in The Prelude (Book II, lines 311-322) the lyrical voice states that: Thence did I drink the visionary power; And deem not profitless those fleeting moods Of shadowy exultation: not for this, That they are kindred to our purer mind And intellectual life; but that the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, whereto With growing faculties she doth aspire, With faculties still growing, feeling still That whatsoever point they gain, they yet Have something to pursue.

The instrument of associative as well as transforming power is memory, and recollection and recognition are actually the key words in understanding Wordsworth’s philosophy. In a passage from The Prelude, he expresses his delight to move backward down through the corridors of memory, from forms through sensations to the recovery of a vision of light at the point where conscious memory fades out, with the still open questions whether Wordsworth believed that his comprehension of spirit came from outside or from inside, whether he was a Lockean empiricist or a Platonic believer in innate ideas. It seems that at his best, as revealed in Book I, lines 619-634, of The Prelude, he uses a blend of the two doctrines in order to evoke the mystery of life, vitality, organic connection: Meanwhile, my hope has been, that I might fetch Invigorating thoughts from former years; Might fix the wavering balance of my mind, And haply meet reproaches too, whose power May spur me on, in manhood now mature To honourable toil. Yet should these hopes Prove vain, and thus should neither I be taught To understand myself, nor thou to know With better knowledge how the heart was framed Of him thou lovest; need I dread from thee Harsh judgements, if the song be loth to quit Those recollected hours that have the charm Of visionary things, those lovely forms And sweet sensations that throw back our life, And almost make remotest infancy A visible scene, on which the sun is shining?

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

251

The Prelude also touches upon the concept of imagination, to which Wordsworth constantly refers as a power, explicitly defining it and giving it the name of “imagination” only in Book VI (lines 592-608), when he recounts an instance of disappointment with the natural world:24 Imagination – here the Power so called Through sad incompetence of human speech, That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost; Halted without an effort to break through; But to my conscious soul I now can say – ‘I recognise thy glory’: in such strength Of usurpation, when the light of sense Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, There harbours; whether we be young or old, Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be.

It seems that at the very moment of composition, which was some 15 years later after crossing the Alps, the poet was suddenly overpowered by a feeling of glory, a kind of epiphanic experience, to which he gave expression in the above rapturous lines and which confirmed his final admission that imagination, although usurping “the light of sense”, is that human faculty which sustains morally the soul with the hope of its immortality and feeds the mind with “perfect thoughts” during the poetic creative act. Thus, imagination, as a power, redeems the blindness to the external world, which is the tragic and necessary condition of a mature man and poet, but also constitutes a measure of independence from the immediate external world, which a human mind receives in its process of growth and development. Imagination closes the gap between man and nature when the estrangement between them, at the time when man reaches the stage of maturity, has occurred. Wordsworth would also prove that man’s soul and nature have the same divine origin, hence the idea that imagination allows 24

Crossing the Alps with his friend and having “hopes that pointed to the clouds”, they were told by a peasant whom they met that they had to return to their starting point and follow a stream down instead of further climbing, an incident recorded in the poem.

252

Chapter Six

the divine current to run unhindered through the triad of man, nature, and God. The same concern with nature, memory, imagination, the individual subjective experience, and the development of the human, in general, and poetic, in particular, mind is revealed in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798), which can be regarded as a shorter version of the longer The Prelude. Like The Prelude, Tintern Abby can be called a Bildungsgedicht or Lehrgedicht; the poem is significant for the materialization in poetic practice of Wordsworth’s theoretical conception on the origin and nature of the creative act of poetry. Again, Wordsworth displays the three stages in the development of a man’s life and touches on the problem of childhood, as the first stage in the growth of an individual captured by the forms of nature. This stage is characterized by pure sensation, the human subject has no consciousness of being apart from nature. In the poem, the poet refers only parenthetically to the “coarser pleasures” of childhood, since he cannot state how he was then; his verse is first of all intuition that comes from a feeling of unity experienced in early childhood. Wordsworth the child is later replaced with Wordsworth the young man and both are to be taken as parts of Wordsworth the mature man who views life as an unbroken continuity of human experience, of which the second stage is “thoughtless youth” and the third one is maturity. It is in the famous Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1803-6) that Wordsworth exploits further the concern with the experience of childhood, which takes new and interesting perspectives, the poet himself confessing that “this poem rests entirely upon two recollections of childhood: one that of a splendour in the objects of sense which is passed away; and the other an indisposition to bend to the law of death, as applying to our particular case”. The poem opens with the expression of the poet’s acute sense of having forever lost the visionary capacity which children have been noted to have: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more”. It seems that the vividness of the poet’s ordinary perception is still strong (we may notice the use of the present tense in the description in the second stanza), but he is entirely aware of the fact “[t]hat there hath past away a glory from the earth”, and a further description of the natural objects and his senses prompts the obsessive question, or rather a kind of ubi sunt formula: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (IV). One answer to this question is rendered by the poetic use of the Platonic notion of pre-existence:

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

253

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

These truths are denied to man at birth, and the poet tries, in his desperate attempt to recapture them, to resist change and turn back with nostalgia to the stage of childhood that he has left. The child is called “best Philosopher”, “Eye among the blind”; he/she alone can read “the eternal deep, / Haunted for ever by the eternal mind”. He/she is also a “mighty Prophet” of the soul’s infinity; the sense of that infinity may be lost, but through the vision and image of the child it can be recaptured: Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find, In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; Thou, over whom thy Immortality Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave, A Presence which is not to be put by; Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height, Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke The years to bring the inevitable yoke, Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight, And custom lie upon thee with a weight Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

254

Chapter Six

The poem, thus, also reveals the idea that the process of growing up has its equivalent in man’s sense of mortality, for his first day after birth is the first step towards death. Hence, another answer is given to the above question (apparently a counterpoint to the mentioned Platonic idea and a rather primitive one), namely the acceptance of growth, for man’s progress towards death means fulfilment and development by choosing what is difficult, painful and necessary. It seems that Wordsworth achieved a subtle blend of these two apparently contradictory doctrines by emphasizing the healing virtues of memory, described as Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake, To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! Also through memory: (…) in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

It seems that, if the problem between the two doctrines exploited by Wordsworth is whether a man gains or loses spirituality by living, he suggests that men grow spiritually by conferring spirituality upon the world. To follow Carl Jung’s conception of child as archetype, the human state of infancy is unconscious and represents the pre-conscious essence of man; maturity provides an anticipation of life after death, also unconscious but representing his post-conscious essence; this idea, Jung points out, expresses the spiritual and intellectual wholeness of man. However, in Wordsworth’s poem, the sense of earlier “glory” in childhood leads to a sense of future glory not necessarily in an afterlife but in certain moments of development of personality and, as mentioned above, in certain states of mind, especially of pain and frustration.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

255

This aspect constitutes one of the most important elements of the romantic impulse in the Bildungsroman within the general assertion of childhood’s importance in the development of a mature personality, for it anticipates the concluding moments of epiphany and self-revelation which would eventually determine the formation of character. As in Tintern Abbey and The Prelude, the frustrations of a mature mind regarding the loss of vision and of the spiritual link between the poet and nature are compensated in Ode. Intimations of Immortality by the power of the “philosophic mind” (mature, reflective mind) to connect man to nature on another, superior level, which is that of the communion with “the human heart by which we live” (that is, the entire mankind). Wordsworth concludes, stressing the idea that maturity offers rewards no less precious than childhood and youth, that Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

As it is, Wordsworth’s vision of the child renders its image as a symbol, or rather an archetype that presupposes the psychic completeness of man, a cyclical temporal movement from birth to the anticipation of a new life after death. In this respect, it seems that Wordsworth rejects in a way – perhaps, a subconscious drive – John Locke’s idea that experience is the sole and ultimate source of knowledge and personal development. Instead, Wordsworth insists on the lasting importance of the childhood period for the growth and development of a character, on the indivisibility between childhood and the succeeding stages in the process of maturation of personality. Childhood is a formative experience that is necessary for a righteous maturation, where the actual contribution by childhood in this process regards primarily the ethical dimension, the moral being of the individual, as in the famous poem My Heart Leaps up: My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

256

Chapter Six

Similarly, the writers of the Bildungsroman found in their fictional representation of the experience of childhood a possibility to realize their own wholeness through a temporal reality covering childhood, youth and early maturity, and by conceiving as a whole reason and emotion, mind and feeling, rational speculation and instinct, moral determinism over action and instinctive action. As in Wordsworth, the protagonists of the Bildungsromane, entering upon maturity as the final stage of their formation, attempt to revive the image of childhood (their vision of the child being one of infinite potential) in order to re-evaluate and recapture the infinity of the inward and to realize themselves as a whole of an individual subject. For many protagonists, to mention just David Copperfield, this aspect becomes the primary factor for the formation of their personalities. The formation in the case of the heroes and heroines of the Bildungsroman is both self-formation and guided formation, the latter type emerging from social action and social determinism on protagonists, but childhood, as in Wordsworth, remains a crucial factor nurturing the acquisition of a mature identity. In Wordsworth, besides childhood, a major formative principle is nature, which, as we have already revealed in this book, is also responsible for the growth and foundation of a poetic mind.

6.4.3 Other Poets, and in Particular John Keats’s Insights of Infantile Experience in Letters and Poetic Practice In the Bildungsroman, the process of growth and development that leads or should lead to the formation of character identity is rendered through the principle of the chronotope, whose spatial and temporal components reveal a complexity of narrative perspectives. It seems, however, that in the poetic discourse of Wordsworth, as well as of other romantic authors, the spatial reality is conceived primarily as an element (nature and the countryside) that mirrors special states of the poetic mind and determines a congenial medium for their expression in poetic discourse. Similarly, we would consider the temporal component as consisting only of two “spots of time”: the present and the past, where the latter – represented primarily by the period of childhood – is viewed from the position of the present and is textualized in the form of its detailed scrutiny. Among the possibilities of getting into one’s past is hearing the melody of a singing bird, whose song reminds one of childhood, as in Wordsworth’s To the Cuckoo: “The same whom in my school-boy days / I listened to,

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

257

that cry / Which made me look a thousand ways, / In bush, and tree, and sky”. The bird’s song equated to the insights of childhood is viewed as denominator of the whole human life; at the same time, the song remains to be “but an invisible thing, a voice, a mystery”, and the human mind, behaviour, reactions are “mystery” too: “What though art we know not / What is most like thee?” (Shelley in To a Skylark). Perhaps the most imaginative and the most idealistic of all English romantic poets, Shelley has his own unique way of pursuing the stages of human life and the inevitability of the cycle of human existence, which he emphasizes (in Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, lines 50-60) as a necessary condition of the artist and as the essence of the artist’s life experience: There was a Poet whose untimely tomb No human hands with pious reverence reared, But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds Built over his mouldering bones a pyramid Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness: – A lovely youth, – no mourning maiden decked With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath, The lone couch of his everlasting sleep: – Gentle, and brave, and generous, – no Lorna bard Breathed over his dark fate one melodious sigh: He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.

In Ode to the West Wind, Shelley follows Wordsworth’s ideas about the possibility of a child to be part of nature (“If even / I were as in my boyhood, and could be // The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven”), and, like Wordsworth, Shelley apprehends the separateness of the mature human being and nature with an acute sense of despair, hence his last rhetorical question in the poem suggesting either hopeful exaltation or a painful acceptance of the inevitable. Coleridge as well, in Frost at Midnight, like Wordsworth, renders the memory of himself as a child, and, like Shelley, reveals an archetypal romantic persona yearning for his childhood past and his place of birth, “sweet” but lost for him now, yet suggestive of a happy prospect for his small son’s future with wanderings “like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores”. Among the English romantic authors, Blake and Wordsworth, more than Coleridge, Shelley, and others, found new aesthetic possibilities to render in the literary discourse the newly discovered thematic concerns with the developing individual consciousness of which an important part is childhood experience as “the intuitive early stages of the developing imagination” (Banerjee 31).

258

Chapter Six

Apart from them, another English romantic writer revealing insights of infantile experience is John Keats in his Letters as well as in his poetry. In the history of English literary criticism, Keats is a relatively late discovery, whose letters, after a more careful examination in the 1930s, revealed a romantic literary critic whose ideas, ranking with those of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, have been acclaimed as “really intuitively contemplative”, direct, detailed, and sincere, and as belonging to a poet of true genius, a writer of great intellectual and moral strength. Contemporary readers are impressed by Keats’s clear reasoning on issues of art and existence, the relation of art to sensation, thought and ethics, as well as on various literary issues such as poetry, poet, and imagination. Keats cultivated the cult of beauty, but his “aestheticism” is different from that of the later Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Pater in that Keats does not separate beauty from the moral values: “for him, beauty is inseparable from truth, and poetry is often employed for moral progress, which he greatly believed in” (Cartianu and Preda 208). Keats is famous for his theory of “negative capability” (in a letter dated December 21, 1817, to George and Tom Keats) and for his concept of “Poetical Character” (in the letter of October 27, 1818, to Richard Woodhouse), and acclaimed for his discussions, also in letters, of the relationship between imagination, beauty, and truth. In a letter dated November 22, 1817 (to Benjamin Bailey), Keats calls imagination the “old wine of heaven, which I call the redigestion of our most ethereal musings on earth”. Here he distinguishes between the “simple imaginative Mind”, which is delighted by the “repetition of its own silent working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness”, and the “complex Mind”, which is “imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits – who would exist partly on sensation, partly on thought – to whom it is necessary that the years should bring the Philosophic Mind”. In the same letter, Keats states that “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination. What Imagination seizes as Beauty must be the Truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love – they are all in their sublime creative of essential beauty”. An original approach to imagination is represented by Keats’s view on the stages of imagination – childhood, youth, and maturity – which are, actually, the main stages in the development of human personality. During the progress from childhood to maturity, as experienced by Keats himself, one passes through moments of confusion, a sense of misdirection, or, at least, uneasy melancholy.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

259

In a letter from April 1818, Keats states what would constitute an essential aspect of the formative process in the Bildungsroman, in particular the English one, which is the experience of youth. Youth represents, in both romanticism and the Victorian Bildungsroman, a troubled and turbulent period: “the imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted”. A month later, in a famous letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, dated May 3, 1818, Keats further extends the discussion on existence and the states of the human mind, and develops the metaphor of life as a manychambered mansion: I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me – The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think – We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle – within us – we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight: However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man – of convincing one’s nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression – whereby this Chamber of Maiden-Thought becomes gradually darkened and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open – but all dark – all leading to dark passages – We see not the balance of good and evil. We are in a Mist – We are now in that state – We feel the “burden of the Mystery”. To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive when he wrote Tintern Abbey and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages. Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them.

John Keats is another English romantic poet, who gave prolonged and serious attention to each stage of imagination, to childhood, youth, maturity, and the relations between them, thus contributing to the romantic impulse in the rise of the Bildungsroman. In the “Preface” to Endymion, he describes the work as a product of immaturity and inexperience, “a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished”, yet the long-drawn, tortuous poem, which by allegory depicts the awakening of the sympathetic imagination, marks (and the poet

260

Chapter Six

is conscious of that) a necessary phase in his growth as an artist. Like Endymion, who at length finds the ideal enclosed in human and earthly love, or like Wordsworth, who reveals the acceptance of growth as man’s means for fulfilment and development, Keats would also eventually achieve a calm and steadying acceptance of life’s frustrating perspectives. Meanwhile, as he explains in his letters, his bewilderment and troubled sense of confusion are overwhelming, which account for his own present state of mind and the general malaise of youth. Malaise or disease becomes a general romantic metaphor to render the depression, the ravages of self-consciousness and self-analysis of the individual in the process of maturation, in particular of an adolescent mind. It seems that the romantics, such as Keats (in his letters), Wordsworth (in the Book XI of the Prelude), and Carlyle (in Sartor Resartus), among others, explored the “dangerous passages of maturation” showing how crucial and critical these diseases are for the individual: Endemic, perhaps, to every stage of life, they especially affect the transition from adolescence to maturity; and it is interesting to observe how man’s attention has shifted from the fact of death and its “rites de passage”, to these trials in what Keats called “the chamber of MaidenThought”, and more recently still, to the perils of childhood. (Hartman, “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness” 47)

Keats reveals in his letters the same concern with the experience of childhood, as Blake, and its importance for the general progress of a man from boyhood to the stage of maturity, as Wordsworth. According to Keats, the child lingers in “the infant or thoughtless Chamber” as long as he remains content with simple sensations and impressions; all too soon, however, the assertion of the thinking principle drives him into the second room, where his new-found delight in ideas, in the joyous liberty of speculation, is shadowed by his perception, through lens of emotion, of the world’s misery and pain, an awareness which gradually darkens the bright chamber and at the same time opens new doors “leading to dark passages”; his perspectives all lost, the young man now can see no balance of good and evil, no real harmony or purpose in his life. In his poetic practice, Keats reveals the same concern: The Human Seasons, for example, develops in a concise form the philosophical approach to human life and the transformational growth of the human mind. The four seasons of the year (spring, summer, autumn, and winter) are childhood, youth, maturity, and death, which show the unity of nature and man, taken as being similar not only in their outlook and external succession, but also in their inner quality of circulating matter:

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

261

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear Takes in all beauty with an easy span: He has his Summer, when luxuriously Spring’s hoey’d and of youthful thought he loves To ruminate, and by such dreaming high Is nearest unto Heaven: quiet coves His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings He furleth close; contented so to look On mists in idleness to let fair things Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook. He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

Keats shows the inevitable obedience of the human mind to the forces that impel all things and objects, and “mortal nature” is a natural consequence of development. The poem represents a short survey of mind’s general life and workings, though it would be of essential importance to further speculate on the first and the most significant stage, that is childhood. Childhood or infancy is the time of contemplating beauty, which in his famous Odes is viewed as truth, and as a source of joy and happiness in Endymion: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”. Childhood is the most important stage in the development of a human personality, a state of innocence, whose principles give to man’s mind no possibility to forget or deny them. Keats’s poetry and letters help illuminate this state, and his interest in what transpires in the “Chamber of Maiden Thought”, in the transition from childhood to maturity, and the darker space between, anticipates the concern with the identity formation process in the novels of a considerable number of Victorian and later writers of prose fiction, the creators of the Bildungsroman. With necessary changes, of course, for in later novels the imagination of a child is not entirely “healthy”, the textualization of the experience of childhood involves nostalgia and regret, and the child character is rendered largely through the lens of sentimentalism with a sense of frailty and loss. The Victorian representation of childhood, in general, and of the Bildungsroman child character in the process of formation, in particular, has its origins in romantic literature, but it can be also traced, as Jacqueline Banerjee argues, in earlier fiction, during the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel, and as earlier as 1719, the year of Robinson Crusoe, a novel in which the child character emerges even if the reference to childhood is brief. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, as well as Jane Austen in some of her novels, among others, brought child

262

Chapter Six

characters into the thematic framework of their novels to account for a personal past experience as well as for various social concerns, including the interaction and relationship between the growing child and the background. The eighteenth-century English novels would be, along with romantic poems, important sources of inspiration for the Victorian fiction writers, and for some of them even primary sources; The Prelude, for instance, acclaimed as revolutionary in its “new inwardness in the presentation of childhood” was published only in 1850, and “was therefore unknown to Charlotte Brontë when she wrote Jane Eyre or Dickens when he was writing about David Copperfield’s boyhood” (Banerjee xxi). In the eighteenth century, Smollett and Sterne, in particular, “each in his own way advances the importance of childhood, without allowing their child characters to come into their own”, unlike the next century “which placed such tremendous physical and psychological burdens on its young” and “was the first in which the rich interior life of the child would be explored and presented in literature” (Banerjee 20). We agree with these statements except for the last one, since there were romantics before the Victorians, such as Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Scott, who explored the thresholds and turbulences of childhood and, above all, experimented with the representation of the process of a developing consciousness, a maturing self.

6.5 English Romantic Movement and Its Social Concern: The Individual between Escapism and Rebelliousness The romantic concerns with childhood and nature are indispensable from the romantic focus on the relationship between the individual and society, which, like nature and childhood, is a thematic perspective that is related to, deals with and reveals the romantic dualism of existence, rebelliousness, and escapism. Moreover, the romantic social concern is another thematic aspect which discloses the way in which romanticism nurtures and influences the rise of the Bildungsroman. It is necessary to point out that society in romanticism is not rendered exactly like in the eighteenth-century novels or as later in Victorian fiction, that is, a milieu representing a system of social institutions, norms, values, actual situations, issues of everyday existence, and people as social and moral types. Society – in the thematic context of the romantic dualism of existence and/or escapism – is equalled to reality in general, corporeality, the human condition, physical existence and material values; nevertheless, sometimes it is reminiscent of a social background (an actual country, or the city, or a set of moral values, or some social norms),

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

263

normative and punitive, a form without essence, an existence of inferior status lacking a spiritual dimension. Byron and Shelley, in particular, are interested in such thematic perspectives. They create an imposing and appealing character type named “romantic hero”. Childe Harold is one of the most famous romantic characters in English and world literature, and is the first in the line of protagonists generically labelled “Byronic Hero”; however, as we shall see in the following, in depicting the hero’s experience of life, some of Byron’s texts are vivid exceptions to the romantic rule and could be viewed as a type of romantic anti-romanticism.

6.5.1 Hypostases of the Byronic Hero, and the Byronic Hero in Development The Byronic hero and the hypostases of the Byronic hero represent actually the first thing that anyone would normally think about when critically approaching Byron’s literary activity. The English romantic writer creates a number of characters who become protagonists in various literary works; their distinct characteristics at once permit their labelling as “hypostases” of the same hero, and allow, due to some common features, their being united under the generic name of “Byronic hero”. Among these general features, most of them reminiscent of a typical romantic persona, as well as of the author himself, the character Byron created is a handsome young person, of impressive aristocratic origin, rejecting and being rejected by his own class; proud and egocentric; a misfit and outcast in relation to any social environment, inadaptable and solitary, concerned with separating himself from humanity and seeking solitude, knowledge and worlds of escapism created or re-created by his own imaginative resources; and, last but not least, a rebel and radical by the English standards of his day. The character that Byron created is not far removed from the poet, and, like the hero, the poet is the most antithetical of men: handsome but born half-lame; a solitary figure yet unable to keep himself completely distanced from the temptations of everyday life; passive and sceptical regarding the benefits of either reform or revolution; an active revolutionary in Italy and Greece25, he despised modern Greeks for their loss of ancient greatness; romantically ironic and critical towards the social environment and the human condition, viewed by him as “herd”, his 25

Byron financed, trained and led the Greeks in their rebellion against the Turks, being regarded as the martyr-hero of the Greek Revolution.

264

Chapter Six

criticism is actually closer in spirit to what constitutes the neoclassical tradition and doctrine of the eighteenth-century neoclassicists Johnson and Pope26; apparently a radical in connection with religion and a reformer of Christianity, he secretly sympathized with Catholicism; acclaimed as a libertine and a great lover, he was actually passive towards women and became early disgusted with erotic experience. Among the many hypostases of the Byronic hero, the protagonist of Don Juan, especially, where Byron adopts ottava rima as a new form for his new voice, presents the Byronic hero in development as a distinct aspect, or hypostasis, of what is called a Byronic hero. Concerning the hypostases of the Byronic hero, in general, and the Byronic hero in development, in particular, there is a number of certain characteristic features of the Byronic hero which suggest certain thematic elements of the Bildungsroman literary system: the autobiographical substratum; the identification between the author, narrator and character; the dissatisfaction with the present state and an attempt to escape from it in order to achieve spiritual fulfilment within other (either real or imaginary) spaces and spheres of existence. In this respect, a brief presentation of the hypostases of the Byronic hero is needed in order to disclose their contribution to the development of the Bildungsroman. The creation of the Byronic character is directly connected with and dependent on the rise of the romantic hero, in general, which is an important aspect of the more general romantic rise of individualism. In their writings, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and especially Shelley have already anticipated the main features of this type of character. Concerning the relationship between the individual and society and the issue of the dualism of existence, the Byronic hero Childe Harold displays at first rebelliousness and then escapism; Manfred, another famous Byronic hero, wishes escapism, or rather aims to escape escapism, since isolation and seclusion, suggesting accomplished escapism, bring neither happiness nor the desired oblivion. Here romanticism is actually antiromanticism, and the narrative of Manfred is an anti-Faust story or a negation of the Faust story. Cain, another hypostasis of the Byronic hero, wandering throughout the worlds, is a romantic rebel; his rebelliousness, however, has little to do with any social background or the poet’s concern with social, moral, and normative aspects of existence. On the contrary, Don Juan is expressed as a rebel in the milieu; the text, on the whole, with 26

In his poetry, however, Byron is closer to the sentimentalism, the Ossianic legends, the poetry of the Graveyard School, the gothic tales, the revival of the old popular ballads, in other words, those elements of the eighteenth century which oppose neoclassicism.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

265

its critical views on the actual social background, could be viewed as linking romanticism to the age of realism. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is the first version of the general literary pattern of the kind of protagonist that Byron created to be the characteristic Byronic hero. The first two Cantos were first published in 1812 and the hero’s pilgrimage covers much of the ground of Byron’s recent tour in southern Europe, namely the Iberian Peninsula, East Albania and Greece. The tour lasted for two years and provided the material for the work. Byron’s journals contain descriptions of the beautiful nature and his personal responses to it, as well as meditations on human existence, history, destiny and decay of former great nations, and the call of the poet to the now degenerate people to recover their lost greatness of the ancient glorious past. These and other elements of a personal travel experience are artistically rendered in the poem. In April 1816, Byron quit England for good, travelled through Brussels, sailed up the Rhine to Switzerland, then settled on the shores of Lake Geneva (Leman), where Shelley was his neighbour and a frequent companion during spring and summer. Canto the Third was written in May and June, and first published in November. Childe Harold takes the same journey as Byron has just taken, and, once again, the line separating the poet’s own meditations from those he attributes to his pilgrim is rarely easy to draw. Also, there is no clear existential perspective which is expressed by the ambiguous handling of rebelliousness and escapism. The hero, at the beginning a rebel, fails to achieve anything and ends in escapism, becoming an outcast, a misfit, lonely and alienated in the human world. Rebelliousness turning into escapism occurs because the protagonist has acquired the understanding about the impossibility of improving the human condition, yet continues searching for a better place. The publication of the first Cantos made Byron famous overnight, the public identifying the poet with the hero. Modern criticism still holds strong the opinion that the character is the projection of the author, which Byron himself denied, but certain aspects show that they have indeed a lot in common. Childe Harold27, like Byron, is an aristocrat by birth and in spirit, sensitive, highly imaginative, intelligent and generous-minded, but also disillusioned, lonely and unloved, rejecting human community.

27 “Childe” is an archaic title of courtesy once given to a nobleman’s eldest son, and also a reference to the ballad tradition.

266

Chapter Six

In point of technique, the omniscient narrator intrudes on the narrative progression in order to provide poetic unity to the fragmentariness of the narrative28, the ambiguity of tone and of the narrative distance between author and hero, and the ever-changing frame of the work, which is sometimes arbitrary and sometimes even episodic. However, the confusion and ambiguity of the poem’s movement seem to serve the method: the voice of the poet alternates with that of the character and it is sometimes difficult to separate them; displaying a powerful lyric tension, the events and incidents from the hero’s experience are mingled with events from the poet’s own experience and with events from the historical past. In comparison to the first two Cantos, Canto III reveals a greater intensity of feeling and a deeper understanding of existence while recalling local historical events and contemplating human and natural life. The tone of the poem is rendered by the poet’s own exploitation and manipulation of his moods, often egocentric and egotistical, and becomes more assured and steadier. Towards the end of Canto III it is clear that the speaking voice is Byron’s, and the poem’s progress is now more direct and flexible; this aspect is revealed again through the process of character portrayal. Harold has gradually become a Byronic hero: in Canto III he is already a real outcast from his social class, proud and lonely, trying to assume the position of an observer, detached and keeping aloof from other people. However, his “guarded coldness” cannot protect him from the vortex of life and its temptations of fame and ambition, when to exist means to chase time, yet this trip is different from his previous pilgrimages insofar as it offers a more distant relationship with people, and provides him with a nobler goal. Harold knows that he is “the most unfit / Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held / Little in common”; hence his search for some universes of escapism, which will suit the desires and needs of his soul. A possible form of escapism is hinted at by his pilgrimage, for, travelling from place to place, one seems not to belong to a certain spatial reality. Another is given by the romantic attitude towards nature and its elements. The forms of nature are disclosed to the lonely spirit, who lives a life in itself, without mankind, as a powerful unity of these forms. With romantic writers, nature has a language of its own, and only Harold understands it and finds it to be much more meaningful than that of his 28 A modern device, which anticipates, among others, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse Bildungsroman Aurora Leigh.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

267

fellow countrymen: Harold and nature speak a “mutual language, clearer than the tome / Of his land’s tongue”. Another form of escapism is the most appealing one to the romantic persona: “Like the Chaldean, he could watch the stars, / Till he had peopled them with beings bright”. Harold is here an artist, whose visionary capacity and power of imagination allow the freedom of the creative act to separate him from the rest of humanity, to lift him above the human condition: “and earth, and earthborn jars, / And human frailties, were forgotten quite”. We have seen a similar situation in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, in which, as for Byron’s hero, for Shelley’s lyrical I, to remain in the non-reality of escapism (a universe of happiness, a type of “heaven” for the protagonist) is to be fulfilled; however, reality, corporeality, the human condition, which Byron calls “this clay”, would eventually destroy the “spark immortal” of imagination and keep the hero bound to earth and human nature. One may notice that the words “herd” and “clay”, and their synonyms are used very often in the poem to describe the people and their inferior condition. Similarly, the protagonist of the Bildungsroman will find in his/her imaginative flight moments of delightful refuge from the frustrating perspectives of existence. The romantic protagonist, however, would remain, in most cases, bound to the dualism of existence, his or her tragic essence emerging from the impossibility to find a permanent, stable, satisfactory, and congenial perspective of existence in either. For Byron as well, the moment of internal crisis of the character is the source of a spiritual ordeal, where the only escape is to continue the pilgrimage. Harold continues his journey with unchanged scepticism and irony, with “nought of hope left”, for he has been granted the epiphanic realization and understands the absurdity of the human condition; he is aware that he has “lived in vain”, that “all was over”, the values of life, knowledge and science do not account for his own desires; gradually, Harold becomes a passive spectator and is finally excluded from the narrative. Even if Byron gives another explanation in the “Preface” to Canto IV, it is clear that he has created a character whose passiveness and inability to fulfil the poet’s inner drives are responsible for the incompatibility between Byron’s own aspirations and those of the hero, and for their thematic and narrative separation as author, character, and narrator; hence, there are critics who claim that Harold has become a caricature of Byron. Canto IV was written in 1817 and published in 1818. Byron uses his travels in Italy as poetic material without resorting to the fictional hero, Harold. In his “Preface” to Canto IV, Byron states that it “was in vain that

268

Chapter Six

I asserted, and imagined I had drawn, a distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to preserve this difference, and disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether – and have done so”. Indeed, the voice now is that of Byron only, and there is no more confusion between them, for the author has completely dropped the device of the pilgrim, turning, instead, to the expression of his own views as meditations on art, time, and history29. The work ends with the evocation of loneliness and refuge in nature, the final image being dominated by the eternal symbol of the sea, which unmistakably links Byron to other romantic writers. Childe Harold, the first in the line of the hypostases of the Byronic hero, thematically treated in the context of the romantic dualism of existence, is closer to the literary pattern of dualism, escapism, and rebelliousness than other Byronic characters. Harold reveals, through his life experience, that rebelliousness is meaningless and futile, and that escapism, for him, as for Shelley’s lyrical I from Ode to the West Wind, is impossible, because, as every romantic persona, Harold is an individual bound to reality and the human condition. In relation to Harold, Byron builds up a whole romantic typology of escapism, which, as we have already seen, includes nature, his own pilgrimage, and an imagined universe of existence juxtaposed to society and corporeality. The escapist essence of Childe Harold’s experience is summarized in Canto III, in which the Byronic hero assumes distance from men and indulges in wishful thinking, stating that “he had mix’d / Again in fancied safety with his kind”; but, the question, as asked rhetorically by the narrator, is whether a human being can avoid being human: But who can view the ripen’d rose, nor seek To wear it? who can curiously behold The smoothness and the sheen of beauty’s cheek, Nor feel the heart can never all grow old? Who can contemplate Fame through clouds unfold The star which rises o’er her steep, nor climb?

29

For example, Byron’s meditations on Venice, which are sparked off by his own contemplation of the present state of the city, along with the nostalgic evocation of its glorious past; other meditations are on Petrarch, Boccaccio, the cities of Florence and Rome and their great men.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

269

Similar to Shelley’s lyrical I, Byron’s protagonist finds nature to be the most congenial place for fulfilling the escapist wish: “Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends”, “Where roll’d the ocean, thereon was his home”, “Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends, / He had the passion and the power to roam”, and “The desert, forest, cavern, breaker’s foam, / Were unto him companionship” and with whom he spoke a mutual language. Solitary and unfit “to herd with Man”, and, apart from (1) nature (providing escapism) and (2) his pilgrimage (another form of escapism), Childe Harold, by means of his imaginative flight creates on stars (3) his own world of escapism, a non-reality “peopled” with “beings bright”. The result of this imaginative experience is an apparent fulfilment of escapism in that “earth, and earthborn jars, / And human frailties, were forgotten quite”. But escapism is again impossible: Could he have kept his spirit to that flight He had been happy; but this clay will sink Its spark immortal, envying it the light To which it mounts, as if to break the link That keeps us from yon heaven which woos us to its brink.

The impossibility of escapism determines the hero to continue his pilgrimage with no “hope left”, and he displays an ironic smile at having acquired the knowledge that there could be no change, everything is in vain, that “he lived in vain, / That all was over on this side the tomb”. In the “self-exiled” hero’s tragic condition as bound to the human world (in which he is “a thing / Restless and worn, and stern and wearisome”), Harold is symbolically presented as a “wild-born falcon with clipp’d wing” in a cage beating his “breast and beak against his wiry dome” in desperate efforts to escape into his home of “the boundless air”. Manfred represents a further development of the Byronic hero, the author adding to this hypostasis a new dimension, that of a superman, halfway between gods and mortals. Like other protagonists created by Byron, Manfred is an outcast from society, a proud soul, sceptical, inadaptable, seeking solitude, and expressing an immense capacity for suffering. He is actually completely separated from humanity, living in estrangement from ordinary people, alone in a castle in the Alps. But he is more than that, for his alienation, his negation of the whole existence, the intensity of his mental frustration, coming from the sickly sense of despair, make him different from other hypostases of the Byronic hero in that his unadaptability is a passive one; resisting with extreme lucidity both the spirits and the Abbot, Manfred becomes a sort of passive rebel who struggles with his own ambiguous nature, which, being equally

270

Chapter Six

of the godlike and the mortal, reveals his abnormality (which characterizes the romantic hero in general). Byron describes Manfred as “half-dust, half-deity”, and makes him the romantic prototype of the exceptional individual, who possesses unusual sensitivity and impressive intellectual capacity. The romantic attributes of the work are also found in the character’s alliance with the sense of universal melancholy, the feeling of inevitable grief and suffering. As with other romantic heroes thematically involved in the dualism of existence, Manfred is caught between the world of spirits, a superior form of existence, for whom he is no more than a “mortal” (though he expresses an offending pride and refuses to kneel before Arimanes), and the real world of men, among whom he feels alone as a lion, refusing to mingle “with a herd, though to be a leader”. Manfred is regarded as a Faustian figure, but certain characteristics of the work and the hero point to a repudiation of the Faust story. Faust is at the beginning an ordinary mortal, who, appealing to the powers of the supernatural, will obtain the supreme knowledge and escape the old age (which would predictably lead to death) by maintaining his youth (the final stage is to become a superman). Manfred, however, is shown from the very beginning as a mystic, superhuman character, an accomplished Faust, but wholly dissatisfied with the knowledge, science, and philosophy, which he has acquired. Tortured by the memory of a never clearly named guilt or sin (possibly an incestuous love as the cause of the death of his sister Astarte), all Manfred thirsts for is self-oblivion, forgetfulness, and death, which are common human attributes. Hence, the reverse textualization of the Faustian myth and the status of the protagonist as an anti-Faust (from superhuman to human, not, as it should be in the myth, from human to superhuman). Manfred unsuccessfully attempts to find oblivion in madness, imagination and knowledge; overcoming the fear of death, he attempts suicide, but is saved by a solitary hunter, who would never change the place with Manfred; summons the spirits of the universe, but they offer him everything except forgetfulness; applies to the powers of the Witch of Atlas, but she denies him his request. Making use of his own mystic, supernatural powers, Manfred enters the Hall of Arimanes, Master of all Spirits, who raises his sister from the dead: her phantom appears only to announce to him that he is to die the following day. Manfred’s end also represents a negation of the Faust story: the hero dies in complete solitude, rejecting, as both are disputing his soul, both the Abbot’s and the Spirit’s claim upon him. The former, as an exponent of the human condition, tries to convert his spirit to orthodox piety and help

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

271

him redeem his lost soul by prayer, but Manfred, having accepted his end, calmly declares: “Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die”. However, what links Byron’s work to the traditional Faustian narrative is a fusion of thematic elements, which includes the desire of the hero to escape his condition, his destructive nature that causes the death of an innocent being, the collision of the supernatural forces, and the absence of God’s grace upon a soul which seems irremediably lost. In Manfred, in matters of dualism and escapism, Byron deviates from the romantic tradition. Like the Byronic hero in general, this hypostasis is a tragic figure, solitary, misfit, superior, proud, a Faustian type of character, or rather an accomplished Faust, a “superman” displaying the “abnormality” of the romantic condition. In relation to the theme of the dualism of existence in the play, the main concern is escapism: a type of dualism is Manfred’s own universe of existence as contrasted to the human world, and, as an accomplished Faust, it seems that he has also accomplished escapism. Escapism is desired, agrees Byron, and when seemingly acquired, the poet raises the question whether it is a source of joy. The answer is that the escapism he achieves does not provide happiness, as one would expect in the context of the romantic tradition, because his desire to forget and be forgiven reveals typically human needs. Manfred’s escapism of escapism parallels his anti-Faust condition, as in both cases he desires oblivion and forgiveness that in his superior status neither escapism nor the acquiring of knowledge could offer. A second type of dualism consists of the world of spirits versus the world of humans, and, as a typical romantic character, Manfred is placed between them: he is “half-dust, half-deity”, inferior to spirits and superior to men. Here Manfred reveals also rebelliousness suggested by his defiance of the spirits and, in the play in general, his rejection to pray and accept the Christian God. The climax is his meeting of the phantom of Astarte and his obsessive attempts to find answers: to his questions about forgiveness and meeting again, Astarte answers by “farewell”, suggesting “no”, and only to the question “Say, thou lovest me”, she utters “Manfred”, suggesting “yes”. Manfred is relieved spiritually and embraces calmly his death, by which transmitting to the reader his final realization that love remains the only true human value, which transcends the human condition and is beyond the world of humans and that of spirits; love is superior to both and even more important than escapism. Cain also constitutes a further development of the Byronic hero, the author adding the titanic dimension to the demonism of Lucifer, making him the characteristic romantic rebel. The same stratagem is applied in the treatment of the title-hero, whose active version of unadaptability, like

272

Chapter Six

Lucifer’s, makes him a rebel too, and both of them illustrate the Byronic hero in the last stage of his development. The element of revolt introduced in the presentation of both characters is deeply rooted in Byron’s own personality. The poet, by interpreting the Bible, emphasizes the revolt and rebellion following the realization that the human condition is absurd; through his character, Byron presents and interprets rebellion, but eventually understands the proper limits of rebellion: Cain finally feels sincere remorse for his rebellious murder30, and consciously praises the value of love, which seems to be the only true and certain human value in the world of irrational conflict and loss of equilibrium. Cain is the only revolted and unhappy human being, who lives with his family outside the walls of Eden. It seems that he is also the only member of Adam’s family who is given the knowledge of the tragic consequences of his parents’ original sin. Cain’s rebellion, compared to that of Harold (who is passive in expounding his disgust regarding the human condition, expressing dislike but taking no measures to change the situation), is active, finally materialized in killing Abel in the anger at and revolt against God’s thirst for blood. What is more important is that Cain’s rebellious act has an intellectual foundation, because the hero identifies the problems and searches for solutions. Moreover, is the search for knowledge a sin, which must be so cruelly punished? Why do I have to atone for a sin that is not mine? By choosing the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge instead of that of the Tree of Life, Adam and Eve condemned the rest of humanity to death. Hence the idea of the incompatibility of the short life and the absolute nature of knowledge, the essence of this dilemma being fully realized by Cain, who refuses to pray to God, and whose doubts are strengthened, becoming a conviction, by the arrival of Lucifer. Cain believes that knowledge without eternal life is the source of unhappiness, and he is eager to know what death is. Thus, Cain is more than just a rebel-philosopher. Lucifer takes Cain, a Faust-like figure in search of knowledge, on a trip through the ethereal spaces (a cosmic flight interpreted as a dream of an inhibited person), where he is presented the past and the future worlds. The goal of his search is to “learn to anticipate” his immortality, that is the knowledge of death, for death itself “leads to the highest knowledge, / And being of all things the sole thing certain, / At least leads to the surest science”, but he cannot be taken further than the “Gate of Death”. 30 Not to be confused with hubris, that is, excessive pride, ambition and arrogance, leading to the final ruin of the character, which is not the case of Byron’s Cain.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

273

However, as the result of his dream, Cain gets rid of his fear of death (because he has not known it yet), the subjective knowledge he has received raises his self-esteem, and he becomes everything he wanted to be: a proud and indifferent person, capable of asserting his personality by killing his brother. The murderous act seems to be a result of the character’s own confusion between the dream/vision and reality (two different planes governed by different laws), because to him the dream is reality, or rather the continuation of the former into the real world, and he is not able to distinguish between these two levels. The confusion is later indicated by his bewilderment at seeing his dead brother: “Death is like a sleep?” or “Is silence death?” By exorcising his fear of death and murdering Abel in rebellion against God, Cain chooses knowledge without love, which is only death. Love means togetherness and is the source of happiness; Cain’s idea of love is different from Adam’s love of God, which is worship and fear of divinity despite having been expelled from Paradise. The loss of Paradise resulted in gaining the inner hell and the unhappiness of all characters, including Cain. The problem of happiness/unhappiness is emphasized in the poem also in connection with the second main character, Lucifer, who is unhappy because he remains alone. His condition is similar to that of God: the latter is not happier, because he is also alone. “He is great, but in his greatness / He is alone”, says Lucifer about God, but loneliness means unhappiness for both of them. Lucifer is the opponent of God, characterized as an “Omnipotent tyrant”, who “makes but to destroy”, both representing the two mysterious principles ruling the world, two antitheses necessary to each other in the universal dialectical essence. Lucifer is also a Faust-like figure, at the level of divinity, acquiring his power, independence and courage to defy God through the knowledge he has managed to gain: “And I, who know all things, fear nothing, / This is true knowledge”. Adah feels a strange attraction towards Lucifer, this “immortal thing”, giving her a “pleasing fear”. Milton, earlier, in Paradise Lost, had already interpreted and revised the Biblical material by reconsidering the status of the Biblical Satan, turning him into a myth of revolt and rebellion, energy and selfreliance. Similarly, Byron presents his character as a symbol of revolt, a romantic solitary hero, an active rebel, and a symbol of the intellectual power: “a shape like to the angels / Yet of a sterner and a sadder aspect / Of spiritual essence”. Both Lucifer and Cain are rebels against God, both are proud and indifferent; their arrogance is a sin that extends the dramatic tone, giving them the status of two remarkable tragic heroes, where Cain is impartial in his relation to Lucifer, worshipping neither God nor Lucifer.

274

Chapter Six

The major themes of Byron’s work are theologically subversive, even more dangerous than atheism, for the author does not question the existence of God, he dares judge God, through the character of Cain, doubting God’s justice and questioning God’s goodness. However, both Lucifer and Cain are used by the author, very close to the romantic spirit of self-assertion, to render Byron’s own protest against the existence of evil in a world created by God. In order to achieve his aim, Byron undertakes a process of cultural transfer, almost unique in world literature, applying a particular theme, from the huge range of literary possibilities provided by the Bible, to his own literary activity. The Bible, consisting of a great number of literary themes, motifs, and symbols of its own, offers to the diachronic development of the literary phenomenon a complexity of literary images, events, themes, ideas, and characters. Distinct aspects of a well-defined cultural background, these elements, in the process of cultural transfer, are extended over and adapted by other cultural backgrounds; they become elements of other artistic trends and ages, transfiguring these artistic traditions, and, in turn, being transfigured, changed, remodelled by both the social and cultural circumstances of a new milieu and the artist’s creative power. Byron, like other representatives of the English Romantic Movement, is capable of achieving his own cultural transfer by concentrating on Biblical material, which he transforms according to the inner laws of his own artistic enterprise and the romantic spirit in general, and he changes its meanings by changing the relationships between its components. It seems that the four generally accepted modes of reading and understanding the Bible31, which are highly interrelated, find their textualization in Byron’s work, especially the mode of reading which emphasizes the idea of the Bible as belonging to the literary domain and as being one of the most important products of world literature. Byron’s work also materializes the idea that the Bible is a depository of primordial and fundamental myths, events, archetypes, and prototypes. As every literary work represents the re-writing of some previous books and refers to other texts, the Bible is one of the main sources of all literary products, providing themes, ideas, motifs, principles, and character types, which are found in the literary process, in general, diachronically developing, and in various works belonging to authors of different literary 31 The first level of reading represents the adventure story; the second level reveals the mythical aspect of the book; the third level helps to perceive the existence and immensity of the universals within the shortness and relativity of human existence; the last level of reading champions the idea of God and is linked to Christian faith and the re-discovery of the image of divinity in the human condition.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

275

trends, traditions and epochs, including the romantic one. The Bible is also fundamental in its expression of perennial values of love, compassion, mercy, innocence, and so on. Manfred advocates the value of love; similarly, Cain champions the idea of love and declares that love is more important than rebelliousness. Cain is another play in which Byron focuses on love, and renders it again in the context of the theme of the dualism of existence, in relation to which the main concern is now rebelliousness, not escapism. Cain rejects both God and Lucifer, and while everyone is obedient, only Cain is dissatisfied. As we have already argued, his rebellious attitude develops on intellectual grounds through asking questions: for instance, why he must be punished by death for his parents’ sin, and why is search for knowledge a crime or a sin to be so cruelly punished? If the punishment for the access to knowledge is death, the ultimate question is: what is death? In his search for the knowledge of death, Cain turns into a Faust figure, who is taken by Lucifer into a cosmic flight through ethereal spaces, but the “Gate of Death” remains closed, the knowledge of death is not provided, since Cain and his family are the first humans and nobody has died yet. The initial dualism involving the lost Paradise and the acquired earth is accompanied by a larger typology consisting of the dualisms of ethereal space and physical world, cosmos and the human condition, dream and actual world, in which one element is non-real and the other represents reality. Back from his flight, Cain’s dissatisfaction is materialized in rebelliousness, whose materialization, in turn, is the act of killing his own brother, by which he asserts his personality and identity. The murderous act is a result of the dualism of existence, which persists; in other words, the dualism of existence is responsible for the murder: Cain is confused, and his confusion (between dream or vision and reality as two different planes or worlds governed by different laws) occurs because to him the dream is reality, or rather the continuation of the former into the real world, and he is not able to distinguish between these two levels, to separate the worlds. The result is confusion, which is indicated by his bewilderment at seeing his dead brother – “Death is like a sleep?” and “Is silence death?” – followed by his return to reality – “Where am I? alone! Where’s Abel? where / Cain? Can it be that I am he? My brother” – only to acquire an inner hell, an acute sense of failure and frustration. From dissatisfaction to asking what is death to becoming a Faust to receiving no answer to rebelling by bringing death into the world to spiritual pain to understanding that rebelliousness is useless and offers neither knowledge (of death) nor satisfaction. At the end of this long and torturous process of acquiring self-knowledge, Cain, like Manfred,

276

Chapter Six

understands that the true values are love, togetherness, mutual support, and family relationship: the real values in the human world and the true sources of happiness. Cain is eventually happy because in his wanderings he is together with his wife and children. Being together with those whom he loves is the supreme source of happiness, and this is actually the poem’s greatest thematic reversal: “Why wilt thou always mourn for Paradise? / Can we not make another?”, asks Adah, Cain’s sister and wife, who possesses the firm instinct that one should choose love. The essence of love as the most important human value is thus re-affirmed, in a romantic accession, along with foreseeing the possibility of building a new Eden. Answering Lucifer’s question: “And thou couldst not / Alone, thou say’st, be happy?”, she says: “Alone! Oh, my God, / Who could be happy and alone or good? / To me, my solitude seems sin”. In Byron, love brings reconciliation to the escapist Manfred and ransom to the rebel Cain; love constitutes, as expressed in both plays, the supreme value in the human world, and may indicate “a possible solution to the problem of demonism in romanticism” (Calin 131). In Manfred, escapism is meaningless; in Cain, both the dualism of existence and rebelliousness are meaningless and dangerous; both works would let us, therefore, declare “anti-romantic” Byron’s romanticism. Our next interest is in Byron’s Don Juan, a work which, like the writings of Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats, discussed in this book, but in a quite different way, a more socially related one, also anticipates the Bildungsroman as the autobiographical novel of character formation, because Don Juan also follows a young man in his progress from boyhood to the threshold of poised maturity. A sort of comic counterpart to the solemn The Prelude, Byron’s masterpiece is, though in some respects iconoclastic in attitude and reductive of all ideals, more conventional and less “unprecedented” than Wordsworth’s: its form “looks back to the sprawling epic medleys of the Italian Renaissance. The conduct of its narrative derives in part from the picaresque tradition”; whereas the satiric technique “owes not a little to the examples of Dryden, Pope, and Swift. The unheroic hero is the ingénue like Gulliver or Candide, eventually sophisticated by his travels through a corrupt society” (Buckley 7). In spite of this, the poem is a new and original work, highly personal and subjective, and to a degree even autobiographical. But Juan of course is not Byron, and he should not be, for the best work of literature is the one in which the voices of Byron the man, Byron the creator, and Byron the character are entirely detached and have distinct features, whereas in an aesthetically inferior work these three aspects coincide. Yet Juan’s

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

277

mother seems to be drawn from Byron’s wife, his early reading seems more remembered than invented, and the local colour of the Greek and Turkish Cantos may be traced to his 1810 tour. Apart from these biographical considerations relating Byron to Juan and his adventures, and “though Juan is certainly no poet, the narrator, self-depicted, gives us a portrait of the artist concerned with politics and war and women but also with art itself, the logic of burlesque, the morality of satire, the relation of truth to poetry, and the inadequacy of the critics who have misconstrued his intention” (Buckley 8). In this respect, this hypostasis of the Byronic persona “finds an irony of detachment rather than a natural piety as the surest perspective in which to view his hero, his younger self, and the world he has intimately known”, and by the “last cantos Juan has begun to approximate the maturity of the narrator; he is becoming the ironic eye turned upon the follies of an English aristocracy” (Buckley 8). Due to a special concern with the process of character formation from boyhood to maturity, as well as the special insights into human psychology and its relations to the social environment, Byron’s work anticipates, and in some respects influences, a number of later literary concerns, especially those which will be recognized as building up the thematic and narrative pattern of the Bildungsroman. Don Juan is the most socially concerned of all Byron’s works, and, its narrative deriving mainly from the picaresque tradition, it follows the experience of an unheroic hero acquiring self-knowledge and knowledge of the world by his travels through a corrupt society. The omniscient narrator indicates that the author himself is a strong presence, from the beginning, “the controlling voice, humorous, sardonic, sentimental on occasion, confiding and concealing, learned, infinitely digressive, altogether inexhaustible” (Buckley 7-8). The text has an open ending, and it seems that it ends before moving in a new direction. The final appeal of the work is that Byron in another age, Victorian perhaps, might have been a master of prose fiction, an analyst of English society comparable to Dickens or Thackeray. Finally, another part of Byron’s literary activity, which deserves our attention, is the so-called Oriental Tales, which were written as a result of the success of the first two Cantos of Childe Harold. They were inspired by Byron’s own travels to and experiences in those mysterious eastern lands (Greece, Turkey, Albania), which were practically unknown to the English readers, but whose exoticism both attracted and fascinated them. The Oriental Tales consist of a series of verse tales, which render other versions of the Byronic hero, perhaps even more spectacular developments of the same kind of protagonist, confronted with Byron himself: The

278

Chapter Six

Giaour and The Bride of Abydos (1813), Lara and The Corsair (1814), The Siege of Corinth and Parisina (1816). Though structurally fragmented, these tales are based on a single pattern, a common structure centred on the creation of the character’s image, which is formed by a mixture of contradictions applied to his nature and actions. Usually an aristocratic youth of impressive beauty, the protagonist of these tales is more than Harold a born rebel, at odds with human existence, seeking independence from this material world. His nature embodies both the demonic and the angelic, but the prevalence of the former creates a sinful and corrupt creature, who suffers from a sickly pride. His unadaptability is active, making him detached from the common moral norms and building his own superior consciousness, but his sense of superiority and his extraordinary imaginative capacity and power of will bring only misfortune and solitude; the human aspect in him creates impediments to the aspirations of his soul, and determines him to confuse good and evil, right and wrong, which leads to moral ambiguity and spiritual arbitrariness. Another humanizing aspect of his personality is usually his love for an angelic woman, or just her memory, or sometimes the power of his passion causes the death of this innocent being (as in The Giaour, for instance), leading to a feeling of remorse and awareness of his sin, which create pathetic atmospheres. The mixture of love and alienation, displayed as heroism and passion in exotic settings, leads inevitably to dramatic endings. The Oriental Tales present the Byronic hero with his satanic component, because the character’s presence is at once the source of death and destruction, and because the force of his passion and later suffering exceeds the normal human proportion. Though the story may be told from a number of different perspectives (the hero’s, that of a witness, or that of the author himself, who often comments on the already complicated intrigue of the narrative), it is often ambiguous, and the reader is kept in permanent suspense and a sense of mystery resembling that of the gothic tales. Among the representatives of the English Romantic Movement, Byron expresses the major romantic attitude of the mal du siecle, that is, a painful consciousness of living in a world of constraints and universal suffering, and consciously assuming it. Compared to other writers, who were rejected or isolated by the rest of their generation, or by the reading public, Byron’s personality was earlier and better understood, and his work, which exceeded any other notoriety or influence of any other romantic writer not only in England but on the whole continent, was and still is identified with the essence of the romantic literary tradition.

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

279

6.5.2 History and Identity Development: Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley as a Novel of a Young Man’s Education As a more immediate influence of the romantic movement in England on the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman in British fiction, many critics name Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), which has been relatively recently described not as “a romantic novel at all but an ironic novel of a young man’s education” (Johnson 524). Waverley, Scott’s first novel, is also regarded as the first historical novel ever written. The tradition of the historical novel owes its literary relevance to the work of Walter Scott in terms of both literary practice (fiction writing) and critical thinking (on fiction writing). Scott, besides establishing the form of the historical novel with his Waverley, also established, some critics argue, the form of the short story with The Two Drovers and The Highland Widow. Sir Walter Scott is a romantic producer of the historical novel; he wrote almost thirty historical novels, a genre as popular in romanticism as the gothic novel of Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Marry Shelley. Scott, if he did not invent the “historical novel”, certainly launched it as a subgenre, in which history is fictionalized and which points to an age in which two cultures are in conflict, and into this cultural conflict both fictional and historical characters and events are introduced. As founded by Scott, the literary pattern of the historical novel requires the inclusion of a historical event that has made a change in the course of affairs, historical and imagined characters, a local situation which fits the general context and verisimilitude in matters of language, costume, place and historical occurrences. Scott himself followed this formula, while others departed from it. One tendency was the “costume romance”, in which history is merely a background for adventurous or sexual exploits; another represented the “novel of the character”, in which the setting and the age were secondary to the representation of the characters (Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, for example). As conceived by Scott, the historical novel is set in a period before the birth of the author, and, although it allows the imaginative flight, the novel requires a serious attempt on the part of the writer at historical accuracy and credibility. In Ivanhoe, for instance, the first novel in which Scott adopted a purely English subject, apart from many imaginary people and events, the author describes the days of Richard I, real historical battles, other real historical characters, which form the spatial and temporal substratum of the story: Ivanhoe, a disinherited Saxon hero in a Norman world as a fictitious and fictional protagonist, participates in actual events and moves among actual characters.

280

Chapter Six

Also, in the tradition of the historical novel, the thematic organization is based on the conflict between two opposed types, the conflict which is applicable to a more or less unvaried fictional pattern and design: pursuit, abduction, escape, and then, time and again, another trap and escape. The positive characters triumph over the evil ones in the end, but this optimistic mood, coming from the sentimental novel of manners, is seriously disturbed by a note of romantic sadness, a definite touch of nostalgia. This sense of ruin, as well as the tendency to turn away from reality, includes Scott’s novels into the formula of the romance and the general tradition of the romantic writings. Scott also emphasizes in his novels the action as the unifying structural principle, which determines the collision between good and evil characters, and the unity of the narrative process. Scott, a romantic writer, does not only initiate in practice and theoretically the tradition of the historical novel, but also, in praising Jane Austen’s achievement as a novelist in Emma, he gives an almost modern definition of realism: “the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him”. The romantic Scott influenced realism in another way: his “success in presenting characters in a historical setting made Balzac realise that an equal success might be achieved in presenting characters in a contemporary setting where the interrelation of social types and the milieu in which they worked could be more easily documented and convincingly demonstrated” (Larkin 35). Indeed, Scott, more than Jane Austen, is viewed as the first novelist successfully making possible the transition in prose fiction from the romantic tradition to realism: a dominant feature of his novelistic writing “is offered by the symbiosis between romantic imagination and realist scrutiny in reviving a former epoch” (Calin 65). Scott’s respect for individual emotions and his appraisal of idealism co-exist with his accomplishment “to place his characters convincingly within a recognizable portrait of a complex society”, and his “rendering of a stratified, mobile, interacting national community derives from the sociology, economic history, and law of the late Enlightenment” (Butler M. 111). Character portrayal is thus realistically related in his historical novels to various contemporary and, especially, earlier phases and traits of the historical process. Despite its realistic perspectives, Scott’s work is produced in – and, therefore, is an indispensable part of – the context of the romantic revival,

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

281

which means the discovery and revival of national cultural heritage, the discovery of folklore, national and local, for literature, and, with folklore, “there burst into literature a new, powerful, and extremely productive wave of national-historical time that exerted an immense influence on the development of the historical outlook in general and on the development of the historical novel in particular” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 52). The folkloric time, since all images of folklore are highly chronotopic, is used by Scott to produce the historical novel and also to prepare the grounds for the rise of the Bildungsroman by his ability, like Goethe’s, to visualize and read time in space, to unite time and space, to overcome the self-sufficiency of a closed historical past and to bring it creatively into the present, and to achieve the wholeness and the assimilation of real historical time in the novel. First and foremost, Scott established the form, the literary pattern, even the convention and the literary tradition of the historical novel. The term implies a literary discourse and a literary creative process in which history is fictionalized; this kind of writing contains both invented, fictional and real, historical events and people, in both cases rendered by the principle of verisimilitude. This classic formula for the historical novel champions verisimilitude as synonymous with realism, or the realist element. However, while realism emerges in the eighteenth-century novel as a means of rendering fidelity to actuality in its representation, implying a synchronical representation of everyday life, contemporary to the writer, verisimilitude can concentrate, diachronically, on other spatial and temporal realities, precisely as in Walter Scott’s historical novel. Verisimilitude becomes the concentrated expression of the relation between the literary text and the social, cultural and the larger literary context; in this respect, every work is the work of many things besides the author, and the novel becomes a process of integration, usually unconscious, of some alien discourses, such as sociology, economic history, law of the late Enlightenment, and, in the work of historical fiction, the national historical and cultural account. In the prefaces and introductions to his own novels, in the spirit of the romantic revival, Scott insists that the novel acquire a “national” identity. This idea is also expressed, in Lives of the Novelists (1824), in Scott’s discussion of Fielding’s admirable presentation of Englishness: Of all the works of imagination, to which English genius has given origin, the writings of Henry Fielding are, perhaps, most decidedly and exclusively her own (...) Parson Adams, Towwouse, Partridge, above all, Squire Western, are personages as peculiar to England as they are unknown to other countries. Nay, the actors, whose characters are of a

282

Chapter Six more general cast, as Allworthy, Mrs Miller, Tom Jones himself, and almost all the subordinate agents in the narrative, have the same cast of nationality, which adds not a little to the verisimilitude of the tale. The persons of the story live in England, travel in England, quarrel and fight in England; and scarce an incident occurs, without its being marked by something which could not well have happened in any other country.

In the “Introduction” to Ivanhoe, which Joseph Conrad labelled “a familiar preface”, Scott speaks about his own work, in which “Scottish manners, Scottish dialect, and Scottish characters of note, being those with which the author was most intimately, and familiarly acquainted, were the groundwork upon which he had hitherto relied for giving effect to his narrative”. Scott also insists that the writer develop a serious view of history before a serious historical novel could be written, making the historical element prevail over the literary one. The contemporary historiographic metafiction, on the contrary, “attempts to demarginalize the literary through confrontation with the historical, and it does so both thematically and formally” (Hutcheon 108). Also, the historical novel fictionalizes history, whereas what occurs in the postmodern and postmodernist historiographic metafiction is narrativization of history or historization of narrative. It has become critically fashionable to discuss historical fiction in relation to historiographic metafiction and to view them as two aspects of one type of literary practice, which are different, but interrelated, and determined by their own culture and period. Historiographic metafiction incorporates three domains: theory, history, and literature; in the historical novel history is fictionalized to draw attention to an age with two cultures in conflict (which could be found in historiographic metafiction too, in Hawksmoor, for instance). Concerning theory, the postmodern views on the individual subject, language, novel, society, and the historical process shape the content of historiographic metafiction, whereas in the case of the historical novel, the view of history which is textualized in fiction originated in the study of the development of societies as initiated by the Scottish Enlightenment. As founded by Scott and imitated or followed by other writers, to mention just James Fennimore Cooper (the “American Scott”), the historical novel includes certain defining elements of its literary system: (1) real historical data, facts, events, people, values, customs, mores, clothes, cuisine, and verisimilitude in matters of these and other cultural and social aspects, representing the historical dimension in the novel; (2) the imaginative element of fiction creating fictitious characters and events,

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

283

especially related to the romance tradition with its thematic perspectives of love, adventure, quest, ordeal, beneficent action, moral values, and others, representing the literary dimension in the novel; (3) the spirit of nationhood, of Englishness, from medieval to later periods32, representing the national dimension in the novel; and (4) romanticism unites the three aspects above in the historical novel by constructing the image of a protagonist who is highly individualized, solitary, lonely, sensible, sometimes inadaptable, and rendered in relation to the dualism of existence, escapism, rebelliousness, concern with nature, strong emotions, dream of honour, love, loyalty, and the attempt to impose such values on the real world. This fourth element keeps us aware of the fact that the historical novel is actually a romantic literary product, the result of the romantic revival; but, diachronically, it came under the influence of other cultural and literary experiences, for instance, realism. Nowadays, the historical novel flourishes both as traditional historical novels (by realists) and experimental historiographic metafiction (by postmodernists); the latter is the postmodern historical novel: a self-conscious and self-reflexive work of fiction concerned with writing history. Historiographic metafiction emerged on the premise that there is no objective history but only its narrated form; history is a narrative consisting of various histories containing various ideologies; history is not a certain past as an objective entity; and there is no stable and fixed history to be treated as the background against which literature can be foregrounded. Consequently, historiographic metafiction is a type of literary practice of postmodernism that accepts the narratives of history and represents, like the historical novel, a mixture of historical and fictional material; unlike the historical hovel, this postmodern version is a critique of the realist norms for the relationship between fiction and history. For this aim, historiographic metafiction views history as a narrative which is commented on with retrospective irony and scepticism, and which relies upon textual play, parody, and historical re-conceptualization. To achieve this, according to Linda Hutcheon, parody plays the most important role, and it plays an important role in the poetics of postmodernism in general. The forms of parody are intertextuality and pastiche, among others; parody discloses the representation of the link between the present and the past, and also the ideological aspects of the dialectics of continuity and change;

32

Or representing Americanness through the motifs of frontier, pioneering, wilderness, exploration, and friendship between white man and the native one, as in Cooper.

284

Chapter Six

hence, pastiche is an inseparable dialogical and intertextual form, which reveals respect towards cultural heritage and not the lack of originality. Metafiction – a kind of self-reflexive fiction, story about story, writing about writing, text about itself – can be seen as one particular aspect of intertextuality, because, as intertextuality involves connections to other texts, metafiction focuses on “itself and its artificiality, as well as referring to other texts, making the self-ironic, self-parodic game obvious” (Vlad 28). Historiographic metafiction would then signify either narrativization of history or historicization of narrative emerging on the premise of “the end of history”, as in Waterland by Graham Swift. Writing history becomes a fictional act and history is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots which interact independently of human design, which is remarkably argued by Patricia Waugh in her Metafiction (1984). John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in particular, reveals how events are ranged conceptually through language to form a world-model. Linda Hutcheon introduces the term and considers that the works of historiographic metafiction are “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (5). Hutcheon claims that the past cannot be avoided, neglected or controlled, but we should deal with it; hence the concept of “the presence of the past”, which means that history and time represent an open space of endless transformations which possess a critical character rather than being nostalgia for the past. Therefore, one would understand that the expression and the result of the postmodernist view on history constitute the mixture of the temporal layers of the narrative. Bran Nicol emphasizes the self-reflexiveness and artificiality of this type of fiction: as metafiction is a self-reflexive writing that lays bare its own process of construction to remind us that reality is similarly constructed and mediated, historiographic metafiction uses metafictional techniques to remind us that history is also a construction/construct, not equated to the past, but a narrative based on documents created in the past (99). Also, the postmodern narrativization of history or historization of narrative, along with parody, pastiche and irony in the system of metafiction, determines the writer to acquire a distinct authorial identity. Against the claim about the death of the author, metafiction, in particular, as in Changing Places, points out to fictional self-reflexivity by means of which the author abandons impersonality and detachment and foregrounds himself as an artist, acquires authorial authority in his or her own process of fictionalization (as in Atonement).

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

285

Acquiring a distinct authorial voice in the context of the romantic rise of the expressive theory of authorship, according to which the work of art is the expression of the author, Scott founds the historical novel. Along with Robert Burns, Scott turned the Scottish literature of the epoch to English and ensured it a definite place within the general British literary phenomenon. Scott, especially, displaying a deep interest in folklore and history (mainly medieval), a strong sense of Scottish history and nationhood, and a peculiar attitude to the past and the present, which derives from a unique Scottish experience, with his “romantic realism” (Eagleton 103) took the English literary production triumphantly into the nineteenth century. In matters of development of the Bildungsroman, Scott’s Waverly – with its thematic components, such as romantic sensibility and historical material, and a certain degree of realism which assists the rendering of the process of character development – contributed to the rise of the Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century, and can be labelled, in the line of Tom Jones and The Prelude, a proto-Bildungsroman. The protagonist is brought up, passes through various adventures, assumes roles and tasks, searches for a meaningful existence, decides on allegiance, experiences ordeal, and is eventually rehabilitated and receives a royal pardon as a form of identity formation. All these thematic aspects are rendered through a mixture of romanticism and realism, individual concern and historical coverage; the principle of formation fuses the personal and the historical: the narrator remarks, in retrospect after sixty years, that, “once the ‘romance’ of Waverly’s youth has ended, his historical role is to represent the resolution of inherited conflicts in the building of a new, modern Scotland” (Parrinder 153). As a historical novel, Waverly looks back over a century, assessing the story of Edward Waverley who fights for the Jacobite forces in 1745. As a Bildungsroman in its incipient form, Waverley focuses on an idealistic character that departs from his family and develops to self-knowledge and the knowledge of the world through adventures and experiences of love, ordeal, military career, accusation of fomenting mutiny, possibility to redeem himself in battle, and so on. Scott begins his narrative with a brief family history and with an autobiographical account of his hero’s early readings; he reveals no special psychological insight into Edward’s experience of childhood or any clear artistic impression of the growing boy; it seems, argues Buckley, that Scott “is concerned merely to show a danger which he feared he himself might not wholly have escaped” (8).

286

Chapter Six

Later in the novel, the autobiographical component vanishes, and narration reveals no authorial effort to develop significantly the theme of initiation, development, and formation of Edward’s personality. Buckley again: “His growth is little more than the vacillation his name suggests, and his maturity brings him a possible respite from bemused indecision but no real perspicacity or depth of insight” (9). The narrative continues with young Captain Waverley’s setting off to join his regiment, and, henceforth, his inner and moral development and upbringing are far less important to us than the places he visits, the men and women he meets, and the historical events in which he takes part. These elements, more than the life of the hero, make the novel memorable and the author a successful writer. Waverly is scarcely an engaging character: he is naïve, low-spirited and driven only by circumstances and action; and, although like a romantic character he seeks to impose his mental ideas on the real world, his idealism does not provide the circumstances for identity fulfilment. Nonetheless, Walter Scott, among other English romantic writers discussed in this study, reveals a willingness to explore the less conscious aspects of feeling and thought, which is accompanied by a more serious concern with the experience and insights of childhood, and the human developmental process than many previous periods would have thought reasonable. Scott is credited with the foundation of the historical novel, the creation of the archetypal pattern of this type of fiction, the introduction of the cult of the noble savage, and so on; however, as an exponent of romanticism, he is also interested in nature and individuality, the romance and emotional experience, and, with regard to the Bildungsroman development history, in the maturing individual self, framed as a process with its origins in childhood. In Guy Mannering, for example, we can find the experience of the character rendered from boyhood through the motif of the disinherited hero, which will be found in certain Victorian works; in Peveril of Peak, another example, with another motif – “the redemptive function of the child” (Banerjee 33) – the motherless Alice resembles the later Bildungsroman characters, such as Pip and Jane, in her sufferings and ordeals amid thwarting social circumstances to be eventually rewarded, like Jane rather than Pip, by accomplishment and personal happiness. Sir Walter Scott’s influence as a novelist was incalculable; he was widely read and imitated throughout the nineteenth century not only by historical novelists but also by writers who treated rural themes, contemporary provincial life, regional speech and mores. He was highly acclaimed abroad, especially in America, where Cooper, taking over the convention from Scott’s historical romance, and its narrative technique,

The Romantic Impulse and the Pattern Nearly Established

287

was called an “American Scott” (only partly justifiable). Scott’s reputation gradually declined (due to critics objecting to his stylized elaboration of the dialogues, to their crowded, improbable plots, to his flat, onedimensional characters, and his inability to portray heroines otherwise than sentimental) until renewed interest was shown by some European critics in the 1930s, who interpreted his novels in terms of historicism. Scott’s historical novels reconstruct history and re-create it imaginatively; they build a bridge between the contemporary world and the historical past, between the fragments of actuality and the fragments of existence in the previous centuries, fragments that form the essence of a civilization.

CHAPTER SEVEN GOETHE AND THE PATTERN REIFIED

This last part of the book pays tribute to the established critical tradition according to which the foundation of the Bildungsroman as a novelistic tradition occurs at the moment of Goethe producing Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. However, as we have attempted to show in the present study, apart from Goethe’s canonical Bildungsroman, the development of fiction in general from antiquity to Goethe’s novel of formation, particularly the picaresque novel, is no less important in the consolidation of the fictional system of the Bildungsroman. Moreover, the focus on world fiction (as well as on the rise of the English novel, neoclassicism, and romanticism) reveals the ways in which the Bildungsroman “collects” and “assembles” its literary elements and principles of fictional organization in both form and content. Ultimately, the focus on the historical movement of fiction suggests interesting and revelatory interpretative perspectives and modalities of analysis of the nineteenthand twentieth-century English novel of character formation. As remains to be shown in other studies, these thematic and narrative lines of textual organization represent certain thematic and narrative elements as literary counterparts in a particular novel of formation and in different English Bildungsromane, which are hypostases of one literary pattern, or different minor fictional systems within a larger novelistic system of the Bildungsroman as a complete and definite fictional universe. Among those elements that are highly revelatory for the narrative structuring of the Bildungsroman, in general, we should mention the identification between author and narrator, author and character, sometimes narrator and character (due to the autobiographical substratum and confessional manner of the narrative); the linearity of the narrative movement determined by the logical succession of events within a causeand-effect narrative perspective; the chronotope of home, that of the road, and of the city; the introspective and retrospective representation of events and states of the character’s mind, as well as their omniscient assessment; the ethical component of the narrative distance between author and character, and between narrated events and reader; and the implication of

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

289

the reader in the process of apprehension, delineation, and even production of the meaning and significance of literary discourse. The novel from antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century – especially the Spanish picaresque fiction of the Renaissance and the picaresque novels that emerged in the cultural systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – prompted also the consolidation of a remarkably rich complexity of thematic principles and perspectives of fictional organization. Among them, we should first consider those that depict the protagonist’s experience of life as a gradual process of internal and external development through childhood, youth, and maturity, as the three stages of growth; here, such thematic components include juvenile experience, conflict with the older generation, the sentimental and professional career, epiphanic realization, physical and spiritual change, and especially the principle of formation. Other thematic elements are ethical principles of personal conduct; physical and spiritual trial by the social environment and human interrelationships; ordeal by love; spirit of adventure; search for a stable place in the social background, that is, social integration and social success; an attempt to correlate the social anticipation of success with the spiritual fulfilment and psychic completeness and stability. These thematic aspects, applied diachronically from the ancient period to Goethe’s Bildungsroman, are not textualized with regard to a process leading to the formation of personality through conscious change and epiphanic understanding of life. In this way, they suggest growth and development rather than formation, becoming, or emergence of personality; despite this, they represent the very fictional substratum of the Bildungsroman. Concerned with the Bildungsroman development history, the analysis of the representation of personality in picaresque fiction is of major importance to our study insofar as it discloses certain particularities of the third-person strategies that would be eventually helpful in rendering the character typology in the Bildungsroman. Although Richard Bjornson does not consider that these particularities have any links to the literary pattern of the Bildungsroman, he believes that they provide crucial distinctions among picaresque novels in that some of them portray character as a process during which picaresque hero’s personality emerges; others depict character as a function of the protagonist’s inherent nature. Some create fictional worlds in which the picaresque hero can plausibly attain wealth and psychological well-being; others situate “picaros” in worlds where they cannot possibly escape a “double-bind” situation in which they are compelled to choose between survival and integrity. (3)

290

Chapter Seven

Apart from the picaresque tradition, the impact of the eighteenthcentury English novel and the later romantic influence on the establishment of the Bildungsroman as a convention of fiction writing were enormous. As a result, Goethe and his followers, including those in English literature, would transfigure the literary essence of these thematic and narrative elements so as to concentrate on the protagonist’s inner life and reveal special insights into human psychology in the process of growth and development, and, of course, would add many more fictional elements with regard to the Bildungsroman in its essence as a literary work, literary discourse, and literary system. These elements in the Bildungsroman represent mainly a change of the inner life and a shift in mental and emotional perspectives, which may determine the hero’s or heroine’s formation in the sense of a stable consolidation and maturation of his or her personality in matters of both spiritual and socially determined experience of life (in spite of the fact that the desired stage of completeness and fulfilment may sometimes end in tragic failure or be rendered as ambiguous). The narrative and thematic principles and elements in the fiction of different centuries from antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century (and in Goethe’s novel), considered to govern diachronically the rise, development, and consolidation of the Bildungsroman as a fictional system within the larger system of imaginative prose and that of world literature, in general – and the developmental process of character, in particular – are important for our approach to and understanding of the Bildungsroman, because they indeed prepared the way for the consolidation and flourishing of this form of the novel in the nineteenth-century English fiction, as well as in the age of modernism and in the postmodern period. Critics regard Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as exerting influence over Victorian and later writers of the Bildungsroman, first with regard to Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. This English novel, perhaps the first English Bildungsroman, reveals that within the British cultural background the Bildungsroman was also anticipated and in some respects influenced by a number of literary concerns of various English romantic poets, whose contributions to the consolidation of the Bildungsroman are quintessential, and for this reason they have been included and discussed by us in our analysis of the Bildungsroman development history. We should agree, however, that apart from the picaresque and romantic roles, along with that of the eighteenth-century novel, Goethe’s novel is a more direct factor of influence on the rise of the Bildungsroman in the nineteenth-century English literature, in particular in the context of its literary reception in English literature through the contribution of Thomas

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

291

Carlyle, who translated Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in English as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and published it in Edinburgh in 1824. Carlyle also developed critical ideas on Goethe’s novel in his “Preface” and “To the Reader”, and wrote his own Bildungsroman, Sartor Resartus, influenced by the German novel. Thus, although acclaimed as the best of Goethe’s translators into English, Carlyle’s contribution to Goethe’s novel, and consequently to the Bildungsroman type of novel, in general, penetrating into English literature is not limited to his translation of the German original text, but discloses a threefold perspective of reception in that “the genre of the Bildungsroman was introduced through Carlyle’s criticism and translation of Wilhelm Meister and through his own Sartor Resartus” (Argyle 10). The ways in which this reception occurs and what makes Carlyle’s work of fiction the first instance of the novel of formation in English literature, followed by the approach to a number of other nineteenthcentury Bildungsromane, represent the concern of our second book of the series. Meanwhile, Lesage and Wieland should be known as other important contributors to the rise of the Bildungsroman, and, without doubt, Goethe’s novel deserves detailed critical attention.

7.1 Elements of the Pattern in French and German Fiction: Lesage and Wieland The writer’s realist and critical outlook represents a common aspect of the eighteenth-century English novel and of the European novel, in general, along with the continuation of the picaresque form. Lesage reveals, in his best novels Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715, 1724, 1735) and Le Diable Boiteux (1707), a dynamic narrative movement that goes over different social spaces, with characters whose main features are clearly portrayed, even if the author fails to render precisely their psychological aspects. Gil Blas, in the tradition of the picaresque novel, as hero-narrator, tells his own life, colouring it with the presentation of other characters’ lives, and with many personal reflections and points of view on events and people that he meets in his both physical and spiritual pilgrimage. Born in a provincial town in a family of lower-class parents, and educated by a rich uncle, Gil passes through various adventures amounting to a remarkable experience of life: entrapment, abduction, escape, pursuit, penal servitude, servant to several masters, ordeal, love encounters, financial success, collapse, and final triumph.

292

Chapter Seven

The design is clearly reminiscent of the picaresque tales of adventure, and the hero also shows individual development from childhood to manhood in the Bildungsroman tradition, which is in the final stages of its process of consolidation as a literary system in that period. Gil’s experience of life is important insofar as it allows change in his inner existence along with the change of his condition, destiny, and social position. The changes in Gil’s inner life and personality are determined by his self-understanding, the apprehension of moral values, the development of a sense of right and wrong. A robber, he saves donna Mencia and escapes the oppressive atmosphere of the thieves’ community; a servant to doctor Sangrado, he leaves the town in painful soul-searching stemming from his thoughts that he may have killed people by his medical attendance; a servant to don Matias de Silva, he is an aspiring dandy, learning “to speak non-sense” and express personal value and glamour, but he understands the worthlessness of such a perspective on life; a servant to Arsenia, he is attracted to theatrical life, but he becomes tired of “the dissipation of actors’ lives”; a secretary to Duke de Lerma, he achieves financial success and popularity, but money changes his character for the worse, making him a snob who turns away from his parents and friends; and then another failure and final triumph of the changed hero. Meanwhile, after many other adventures and turns of fate, fortunes and misfortunes – happy marriage with Antonia and her death, a new job as secretary to don Gaspar de Guzman, the new prime-minister, and his death, and the final happy marriage to Dorotea – the hero appears capable of reconciling the outward and the inward, and to reveal, as in Goethe’s Bildungsroman, how a high social position and money can contribute to an individual’s true enrichment of the spirit. Gil Blas is an equivalent of Renaissance conduct books, which trace the process of the making of a gentleman; Gil Blas is a picaresque story of adventure, and, as a continuation of seventeenth-century fiction, less a psychological study than a representation of the character’s development at the same time with the influences of the background. Wieland, in his picaresque Die Geschichte des Agathon (1765-6), also proposes to describe a contemporary world and life, but in doing so he glances at antiquity, fusing it with the contemporary milieu, that is, relating a historical past to contemporary realities. Wieland’s novel presents the life experiences leading to maturation of a Greek youth in ancient Athens. The novel handles the character formation principle in close relation to the gradual development of the protagonist from youth’s idealism to the reason that governs a mature mind, and it does so in such a way that, according to some critics, among whom Martin Swales, Agathon

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

293

is actually the work that establishes the Bildungsroman as a distinct fictional category. Wieland’s novel, just like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and very similar to it will be Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, corresponds to one of the first definitions of the Bildungsroman as stated more than a century ago by Wilhelm Dilthey: in such novels, the development of an individual is a regulated one and consists of stages each of which having its own intrinsic value and representing a stage higher to the previous one, and the problems and conflicts in life are necessary to pass through in order to attain harmonious identity formation. For Bakhtin, in “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism”, Wieland is an important author in the development of the Bildungsroman, or the novel of emergence, who occupies a special place in the originating of the second type of this novel, which traces cyclically the formation of the protagonist from idealism and maximalist views, specific to youth, to mature rationalism and practicality. Wieland’s work of fiction is also related to the fourth type of novel of emergence, which, according to Bakhtin, draws on a pedagogical ideal, because the novel approaches the external world of the character in terms of education in order to make him act and pass through it and achieve the final accomplishment and a stable place amid the complexity of the world. The novel is on the way to the nineteenth-century Bildungsromane in that it raises the problem of real human possibilities and creative resources in the way in which an ancient Greek youth moves towards accomplishment through a difficult process of moral development. Wieland’s narrative is directly related to the pseudo-biographical novel of character growth and development, such as Fielding’s Tom Jones (a novel which heavily influenced the German writer, as Wieland himself, in his celebrated “Foreword”, directly links his Agathon with the type of hero created in Tom Jones), and to the more complex fiction of character emergence and formation, such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Actually, for Bakhtin, Wieland, who originated the second type of novel of emergence, prepared directly the way for Goethe, whose novels, in particular Wilhelm Meister, represent, along with Gargantua and Pantagruel and Simplicissimus, the realist, which for Bakhtin is the most significant, type of novel of emergence. This type reveals the emergence of the protagonist as indispensable from and as reflecting the historical emergence and change of the world itself. Bakhtin highly values Rabelais and dedicates special studies to him, to mention just Rabelais and His World, but in his study on the Bildungsroman, even if Rabelais is mentioned, and it is claimed that a

294

Chapter Seven

special attention is devoted to him, the extant text contains a part, entitled “Time and Space in Goethe’s Works”, which follows the part about the history, definition, features, and types of the Bildungsroman, and which is dedicated primarily to Goethe, with some final references to Rousseau and Scott.

7.2 Bakhtin on Goethe In “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)”, Bakhtin argues that Goethe’s achievement, not only in Wilhelm Meister but also in his Autobiography, Italian Journey, and Annals, is what links the German writer to the realist type of novel of emergence: his ability to “see time, to read time, in the spatial whole of the world”, which is an ability “to read in everything signs that show time in its course, beginning with nature and ending with human customs and ideas” (25). Bakhtin argues about the connection between Goethe’s work and realist aesthetic and about Goethe’s achievement of verisimilitude on the assumption that Goethe realized a high point of visualizing and depicting historical time in literature. The Enlightenment prepared the way for such a depiction of historical time by developing signs and categories of cyclical time – the everyday, natural, rural-labour idyllic – and themes like seasons of the year and ages of man. A great sense of time in human life and nature emerges in the eighteenth century with the prevalence of cyclical kinds of time, but, towards the end of the century, simultaneously “the theme of the ages of man, evolving into the theme of generations, begins to lose its cyclical nature and begins to prepare for the phenomenon of historical perspectives”; this “process of preparing for the disclosure of historical time took place more rapidly, completely, and profoundly in literary creativity than in the abstract philosophical and strictly historical, ideological views of Enlightenment thinkers” (26). Goethe emerges as a high point in the artistic/literary visualization of historical time, claims Bakhtin, which raises the problem of time and historical emergence in Goethe’s creativity, especially the image of the emerging human being. The discussion begins by stressing “the exceptional significance of visibility for Goethe”, who attached great importance to the art of the eye, where anything essential must be visible, anything invisible is inessential and does not exist for him; the seeing eye, or visibility, is a centre, the first and last authority, when “the visible was already enriched and saturated with all the complexity of thought and cognition” (27). Moreover, as for Goethe, the clearest and the most concrete visibility coincides with the

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

295

“word” and, losing its static feature, fuses with time, then everywhere in the world “the seeing eye seeks and finds time – development, emergence, and history. Behind the ready-made it perceives what is emerging and being prepared” (29). Thus, for Goethe, whatever appears to be a stable and immobile background becomes a movement, a change, a part of emergence, saturated with time, and emergence assumes the role of creative mobility in literature. In Wilhelm Meister, in particular, “everything that usually serves in the novel as a stable background, an unchanging quantity, an immobile prerequisite for plot movement, becomes for Goethe an essential vehicle of movement, its initiator, an organizational centre for plot movement through which the novel’s plot itself changes in a fundamental way” (30). Goethe’s ability to see time in space is revealed by his keen eye for the visible signs of time in nature and by his insight into all visible signs of time in human life, from everyday time and common order of an ordinary day to the time of the whole of a human life, namely the phases and stages of a person’s emergence. This type of “biographical time” is dominant in Goethe’s autobiographical and biographical works, as well as in his Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Apart from visualizing and depicting these times of nature, daily existence, and the whole of a human life, which are to a certain degree cyclical, Goethe also reveals the ability to find “the visible movement of historical time, which is inseparable from the natural setting (Localitat) and the entire totality of objects created by man, which are essentially connected to this natural setting” (32). Here Goethe departs from the romantic fondness for a remote, estranged past that exists in itself, and considers instead the “necessary connections between this past and the living present, to understand the necessary place of this past in the unbroken line of historical development” (33). In Goethe, the past living in the present discloses another feature of his vision of historical time: the past itself must be creative in that it must have its effects in and on the present. By this fusion of the temporal dimensions of the past and present, a “fullness of time” is achieved, which offers or predetermines a particular type of future. In this respect, Goethe’s historical vision always relied on a deep, painstaking, and concrete perception of the locality (Localitat). The creative past must be revealed as necessary and productive under the conditions of a given locality, as a creative humanization of this locality, which transforms a portion of terrestrial space into a place of historical life for people, into a corner of the historical world. (34)

296

Chapter Seven

The romantics would bring into literature authorial self-expression, individuality, escapism, imaginative flight, emotion, nature, the wild and even the primordial (as in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan), whereas the realists would consider the milieu, its determinism, the background with social and, in the case of English authors, also moral concerns in literature. Goethe’s work marks the transition from the romantic component to the realist one, from his joining of Sturm und Drang to his declaration that “Klassisch ist das Gesunde, Romantish das Kranke” (“Classicism is health, Romanticism is sickness”), which is the transition from the romantic feeling of past and present merging into one another, from “the ghostly (Gespenstermassiges), the terrifying (Unerfreuliches), and the unaccountable (Unzuberechnendes), which were strong in his initial feeling of a merged past and present”, to a particular way of visualizing time: “the aspect of an essential link between the past and present, the aspect of the necessity of the past and the necessity of its place in a line of continuous development, the aspect of the creative effectiveness of the past, and, finally, the aspect of the past and present being linked to a necessary future” (36). The overcoming of all that is ghostly, terrifying and unaccountable results in the rise of a realistic sense of time, which is seen in Wilhelm Meister and Faust. Goethe’s “seeing eye” saturates the landscape with creative and historically productive time, and space or place is, therefore, not self-sufficient and abstract, but concrete and necessary as a given locality, revealing a potential for historical life and representing a spatial reality of historical events where the movement of historical time occurs. Hence, the “essential and necessary character of man’s historical activity”, where space (place, or locality, or landscape) is “illuminated by human activity and historical events”, and a “piece of earth’s space must be incorporated into the history of humanity”, because, outside this history, it is “lifeless and incomprehensible” (38). As rendered by Goethe, the historical event must be localized and must occur at a particular time and in a particular place, just like creativity necessitates a particular time and a particular place, and hence “this visible concrete necessity of human creativity and of the historical event” (38). According to Bakhtin, Goethe owes his immense significance to his capability of having inseparably fused in one concrete vision space (terrestrial) and time (human history), which results in historical time in his work to be “dense and materialized” and space to be “humanly interpreted and intensive”, which represents “the major way in which necessity manifests itself in artistic creativity” (40). As Bakhtin sums it up, the main features of Goethe’s mode of visualizing time are

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

297

the merging of time (past with present), the fullness and clarity of the visibility of the time in space, the inseparability of the time of an event from the specific place of its occurrence (Localitat und Geschichte), the visible essential connection of time (present and past), the creative and active nature of time (of the past in the present and of the present itself), the necessity that penetrates time and links time with space and different times with one another, and, finally, on the basis of the necessity that pervades localized time, the inclusion of the future, crowning the fullness of time in Goethe’s images. (41-42)

What is to be emphasized here is the aspect of necessity and fullness of time, which represents a particular feeling for time, and which goes beyond the moral, abstract, rational, and utopian limitations of the Enlightenment. Goethe saw everything in time and in the power of time, which is a productive and creative power. In Goethe, everything bears the sign of time, is saturated with time, and assumes its form and meaning in time; everything is intensive; everything is mobile and changing; space participates in action and emergence, and time is localized in a concrete space; events are related to a particular spatial reality – everything in this world is “a time-space, a true chronotope” (42). Therefore, the world as depicted by Goethe is built on the principle of verisimilitude and encompasses a real, concrete, compact, intense, integral and necessary whole, a realistic picture, a real-life image reflecting the entire world and the whole life, which “are given in the cross section of the integrity of the epoch”, and the “events depicted in the novel should somehow substitute for the total life of the epoch”, where in their capacity to represent the “real-life whole” lies the “artistic essentiality” of these events (43). Rabelais and Cervantes had already shown a fundamental condensation of reality, but it was in the eighteenth century in Goethe’s time that the real world was rounded out, artistically integrated, and became historical in a real-life sense. In Goethe’s novels, including Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, “the integrity of the world and life in the cross section of the epoch are relegated for the first time to this new, concretized, graphically clarified, and complemented real world”, where behind “the whole of the novel stands the large, real wholeness of the world in history” (45). Goethe, like Fielding and Sterne, selects and condensates what is essential in the whole of life and rounds it out into a novelistic whole in order to achieve a new, realist literary reflection of a new, real wholeness of the world with all its both spatial (geographic) and temporal (historical) fullness, actuality, and concreteness. This new sense of time and space regroups ideas, images, and events to convey a direct spatial reality that actually occurs in real time; this renders the deep chronotopic essence of

298

Chapter Seven

Goethe’s work, its construction on an inseparable unity and interdependence of place and history, space and time, a unity which is “both in the plot itself and in its individual images”, where both time and space are particular to a world that has become real, actual, and definite. Bakhtin’s arguments about Goethe’s fiction, including his novel Wilhelm Meister – which represents the realist type of novel of emergence in its presentation of the change and formation of a personality along with the emergence of the world (social, moral, aesthetic, and so on) – and about Goethe’s way of visualizing time in space, of uniting past, present, and future by means of necessity, and of seeing and depicting historical time, that is, about the assimilation of real historical time in literature, must be attentively considered by contemporary studies on the Bildungsroman, in general, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in particular. We should also emphasize certain romantic aspects of the novel, and, in relation to its realist perspectives, certain biographical and pedagogical elements, as well as the principles of freedom and determinism.

7.3 The Theme of Formation as a Literary Concern in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (“Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”) was published between 1794 and 1796 as a reworking of Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung, begun and abandoned some years earlier. In the abandoned text “it is Wilhelm’s object to seek selfrealization in the service of art: as actor and later manager of a stage company, he will make of the German theatre a primary agent of cultural change”, whereas in the finished novel this aim must compete with many other intentions and values. The Lehrjahre consequently is a curios medley, without center or consistency; dull exposition and prosy asides jostle lively scenes from Bohemian life among the itinerant troupers; wit collides with sentiment, short dramatic ballads with long irrelevant interpolated tales and large tracts of cloudy occultism. (Buckley 9)

The friendship and correspondence with Friedrich Schiller during the 1790s, which parallel the excellence of other literary exchanges in European literary history (between Wordsworth and Coleridge, or Byron and Shelley), resulted, among other things, in the writing of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, a Bildungsroman that blends realist approach and actual life with speculations on nature, history, and dramatic genre, and links symbolism with psychological individualization of the characters.

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

299

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship “marks simultaneously the birth of the Bildungsroman (…) and of a new hero: Wilhelm Meister” (Moretti 3). At the end of the eighteenth century, Goethe’s novel marks the rise of the Bildungsroman as a literary tradition (which will be consolidated by the nineteenth century writers) by having established the theme of formation as a literary concern in fiction against the ready-made hero of the earlier fiction. Goethe’s novel of formation became, through Carlyle’s moment of reception, the supreme example and the most familiar model for the nineteenth-century English writers of the Bildungsroman. Apart from other fictional and poetic antecedents of the Bildungsroman, such as the picaresque novel and romanticism, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is the prototype of the novel of character formation, and it certainly discloses a remarkable amount of thematic and narrative arrangements of fictional elements typical of the Bildungsroman literary system. Wilhelm, the protagonist, as Goethe’s self and voice in the novel, yet very often a mere spectator, becomes a young man whose process of formation contains many details of the author’s own experience of life, which are actually elements of the Bildungsroman literary pattern: childhood, here burdened by a practical father thwarting the visionary flight of a sensible boy who shows delight in puppets; the professional career and search for a working philosophy of life, as here Wilhelm makes attempts at amateur acting and becomes interested in esoteric rituals of freemasonry in order to prove, eventually, that, just like Goethe’s own dreams of plastic arts, Wilhelm’s ambition to excel in dramatic arts is a mistake; another element, the sentimental career, where the hero suffers from a troubled love experience just as Goethe did in his actual affection for Lili Schonemann. Despite its structural weakness and ambiguity of tone, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre has established itself in literary history as the prototype of the Bildungsroman, or the prototypical Bildungsroman, which depicts the struggles of the hero in a formative process as textualized and shaped in a complex dialectic involving free choice and imposed acceptance, self-cultivation and determined education, and other similar elements in the more general cultural and literary context which connects the rise of individualism with the rise of realism in their literary expression. We can see this clearly in the issue of finding a profession, where Wilhelm is placed between what circumstances dictate (to take over his father’s business) and his own choice to develop as an individual subject (to join the theatrical world). He joins a theatre company assuming many tasks and involving himself in many activities, and, despite forming views on drama and stage performance, Wilhelm discovers that his theatrical

300

Chapter Seven

apprenticeship is not the right source of personal fulfilment. Erich Auerbach assesses as “profound and beautiful” the famous interpretation of Hamlet by Goethe expressed in the novel. In Book 4, Goethe, building on the image of his own epoch, speaks of a delicate and sentimental young man, idealist but a weak spiritual force: “eine grosse Tat auf eine Seele gelegt, die der Tat nicht gewachsen ist” (“a great deed placed in a soul that is not at its level”). Goethe explains the tragic essence of Hamlet “by the sudden downfall of life that was externally and morally supported in his youth, by the disappearance of belief in moral order that was once represented by the relationship, now so horribly broken, between his parents, whom he loved and respected” (Auerbach 296). Goethe’s interpretation is famous and admired by many, especially romantics, but, asks Auerbach, is it possible that Goethe could not feel the original force in Hamlet growing stronger and that “because of the passion by which a strong personality follows his drives, these inner drives became so overwhelming that the obligation to live and act became embarrassing and painful” (297)? To this, Auerbach answers that Goethe’s interpretation is developed to suit his epoch and to relate Shakespeare to the views and values of his time. Following his dramatic experience, at Lothario’s estate, Wilhelm embarks on inter-human relationships with various persons, friends and lovers, and discovers that Felix is his son. In Book 8, this next period in the protagonist’s process of identity formation considers occupation and profession, which, with their material values, are less important than interpersonal development and spiritual issues, such as responsibility for his son and commitment to idea and ideal. Although after his father’s death Wilhelm is involved in managing his father’s company, he is, nevertheless, more devoted to his friends and his son. With regard to his friends, he transcends the narrow individual circle and understands the value of contributing to the improvement of the life of others and of society as a whole, which he can do by joining the Society of the Tower; concerning his son, Wilhelm learns true love and, more importantly, by his dream of his father and seeing his grandfather’s works of art, Wilhelm reconciles with the past and gains a sense of continuity and historicity. These two kinds of epiphany give meaning to his life, and Wilhelm’s formation is, therefore, the result of a twofold realization, a double change in the process of becoming a fully integrated human being, which is actually “materialised” by receiving the apprenticeship certificate. Also, as in Carlyle’s Bildungsroman, heavily influenced by Goethe, and in later novels such as David Copperfield and Jane Eyre, another important

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

301

formative element is love. His separation from Mariane following her betrayal determines Wilhelm to embark on a journey during which he meets a variety of people and opportunities, learns lessons and opinions, and, in general, increases his knowledge of himself and of existence. At the end of the novel, seemingly unhappy and his identity incomplete, Wilhelm learns of Natalie’s love for him and he himself realizes that he loves her, which leads to the completion of his formative process, whereby he reaches maturation and identity formation by adding to the social dimension the individual (emotional and psychological) achievement. The accomplishment on the personal and family level combined with finding the right social place, expressed by his devotion to the Society of the Tower, Felix and Natalie, suggest the success of formation, a fulfilled Bildung. The ending, however, may seem quite open when comparing the last and penultimate chapters, his proposal to Therese and making a home with Natalie, his spiritual, internal aspirations and becoming a business partner of Werner, and the final rather utopian scenario of the novel’s end that blends realism and improbability. The certainty of formation is challenged by a sense of confusion persisting also due to authorial irony, even farce, as well as the hero’s dispersed reflections on life, fate, chance, free will, which undermine the success and seriousness of the developmental process of the protagonist. A stronger sense at the end of the novel is yet that which suggests the completion of the character formation process, and Wilhelm experiences the feeling of having accomplished his search and having found what he had always desired. The identity formation of Wilhelm, as in Victorian and later Bildungsromane, follows a pattern of binary oppositions, which involve the most important aspects of existence, of a personal development experience – education, profession, social role, love, and so on – and in which one element is negative, fallacious or obstructing, and another positive and congenial, the true one. The obstructing father and the congenial Tower parental figures, the theatre and the Tower, Mariane and Natalie, individual and interpersonal, spiritual and material, and, regarding the last opposition, the protagonist himself has his own contrastive character, who is Werner, his alter-ego, a symbol of materialism and the money-making middle-class way of life, which Wilhelm sees as detestable. These contradictory elements are extremes combined; they suggest dualisms, where one element is apparently better than the other. They also suggest the unity of a life experience in which oppositions are necessary to each other for formative and educational purposes, and each is partly correct, yet one perhaps more than the other. For instance, the apparently wrong choice of theatre as a profession does offer fulfilment and identity

302

Chapter Seven

achievement, that is, formation of personality, and teaches him responsibility and commitment. Likewise, the suffering induced by Mariane starts his spiritual crisis but also teaches him social life and practical ways of existence. Some of these opposing elements cannot be combined – namely those referring to profession and love – but others can be accepted together and this happens only when they are harmoniously balanced as parts of the hero as an individual subject, including emotion and reason, self and other, egocentrism and devotion to others, inside and outside. The essential and defining dualism in the novel is between subject and object, spiritual and material, personal and social, and it is by this blending of individualism and realism in what has been labelled “hybrid realism” that Goethe’s novel both resembles and differs in manner and matter from the Bildungsromane that followed, both realist ones, such as Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, and those that rely on other literary principles, such as Sartor Resartus and Marius the Epicurean. However, what Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre would offer to the future Bildungsromane is not only the theme of formation, but, especially, the main idea, related to this theme, which didactically stresses the humanist ethical values of compassion and love; another idea is that one should surpass selfishness to assume responsibilities towards the others. In its essence a romantic or neo-romantic work, Goethe’s Bildungsroman reflects the epoch, mores, and milieu on the whole, but is less interested in the social accomplishment of the protagonist despite Wilhelm’s own written assurance to Natalie (a symbol of the transcendental, Kantian good) that “I shall appear as a useful, a necessary member of the society”. The narrative focuses, instead, heavily through the lens of sentimentalism and authorial irony, and by preaching ethical values, on Wilhelm’s artistic and emotional development and maturation, that is, more on his individual accomplishment. Wilhelm himself claims to have pursued the ideal of correct maturation, complete growth, harmonious development, and, in his words, “harmonious cultivation of my nature”. As shown in Chapter II of Book III, when he decides to join the players on their visit to the count’s castle, “Wilhelm, who had come from home to study men, was unwilling to let slip this opportunity of examining the great world, where he expected to obtain much insight into life, into himself and the dramatic art”. More precisely, in rendering the developing identity, a largely occupational one, Goethe lays emphasis on his hero’s personal educative experience, in the spirit of Rousseau, which leads to accomplishment, to the end of “apprenticeship”, which means that the principle of character

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

303

formation, or Bildung, has been thematized in fiction. More often an indecisive, frustrated, even weak character, Wilhelm is, nonetheless, eager to achieve independence and self-assertion, and especially self-expression in the realm of dramatic art; in this respect, he proves an active mind, a strong self-conscious personality, an artistic temperament that maintains unchanged his quest for spiritual accomplishment and search for selfculture. Goethe’s Enlightenment ideals are shaped by a romantic vision, indebted to idealists, or rather vice versa, since (romantic) individuality and individual achievement, for Goethe, are possible through interaction with other subjects, society, the world and existence, in general; the German writer adds, in his depiction of the developmental process, the historical aspect to that of moral didacticism, both thematic dimensions linking the newly emerging Bildungsroman to the early picaresque tradition. An essentially picaresque and romantic hero, a romantic el picaro, on the side of denial and sometimes escapism, Wilhelm searches for a place in the world, explores it, acquires knowledge, but is less concerned with acquiring a social identity. The social interaction of the hero includes his position as a debt collector for his father and that of an itinerant actor. He is offered the possibility to choose to join a theatrical life instead of a commercial and business one, decided by his father, which also points to an act of romantic rebellion. Moretti, however, sees Wilhelm’s refusal to follow his father’s steps not as an expression of a romantic rebellious search on personal grounds, but as the beginning of a type of apprenticeship which is “rather an uncertain exploration of social space” (4), and that Wilhelm’s experiences of his maturation process “begin when he refuses to devote himself to business” (164). Wilhelm, however, is first a person in love, whose feelings are directed at young girls (Marianne, Natalie) and the world of theatrical performance. These are the two aspects of Wilhelm’s experience that lead to the acquisition of moral wisdom as the supreme ground for his formation, along with a happy marriage and artistic accomplishment, which also reify formation and mark it as successful; the consequence, or, rather, an equivalent, of formation is wisdom. The reader learns this moral-didactic meaning with the help of an ironic narrator, whose tone merges with the sentimental representation of the progress of the hero, where irony and sentimentalism are mutually illuminating in communicating to the reader an open viewpoint which contains a pedagogical meaning. In Goethe’s novel, moral didacticism renders the hero’s educative experience as inseparable from his moral progress; in other words, influenced by

304

Chapter Seven

Schiller, “Goethe came to include aesthetic experience and education as a necessary contribution to the ethical character of Bildung” (Argyle 17). Apart from romantic, realist, and picaresque features, due to its pedagogical substratum and the ways in which the educative process and its moral outcomes are textualized, the essence of Wilhelm’s experience is also humanistic and supported by a didactic intent with the idea of perfectibility transcending the individual towards humankind. The whole life-story of Wilhelm – in pseudo-biographical form – is a sample of existence for everybody to learn the progress towards educational maturation. Maturation is the end of apprenticeship; it represents the physical and especially psychological and moral change of the protagonist. Maturation (along with wisdom) is equalled to the principle of formation – the main and central thematic component of the literary system of the Bildungsroman – and the steps and parts of the progress towards maturation (formation) are also elements of the system of this literary innovation. Since they represent apprenticeship, an educative process or experience, most of adventures and events being also educative, these steps and phases are painful and turbulent, sources of suffering, search, rebelliousness and escapism, denial and acceptance. They finally lead, through watching and guidance which are never disclosed, to the wisdom of experience. These stages of development are the experience of childhood, nurturing in Wilhelm the artistic potential and enthusiasm for theatre; relation with parental figures, both congenial (the Tower) and obstructing (the father); educational experience and trial by the larger society; sentimental career and the professional one, in both cases rendered as binary oppositions of two experiences, one humiliating and another exalting (debt collecting and theatre, and Marianne and Natalie, respectively). Furthermore, still relying on the picaresque tradition and its providential nature of experience, Goethe’s Bildungsroman reveals an action, a sequence of events, which is complex and rapid, with constant change of condition and of the chronotope of the road with multiple adventures. These adventures constitute a great typology – spiritual, emotional, psychological, sexual, artistic, social, educative, professional, moral – which would reveal the ideal of uomo universal, which is expressed by the author’s concern to create a hero in the process of a many-sided development pursuing a many-sided self. This thematic pattern unites growing up, education, cultivation, struggle, questioning, travelling, and other elements; it will be kept largely unmodified and followed by all writers of the Bildungsroman; among them, the closest in tone and point of view to Goethe is Carlyle, who

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

305

translated Goethe, critically evaluated him, and was influenced in the writing of his own Bildungsroman, Sartor Resartus, by the German writer and his novel. More than in Carlyle, in Goethe the process of personal development of the protagonist is of pedagogical essence with its aspects of moral betterment and the learning of the wisdom of experience, which stands for Bildung, or formation of personality. The climax of development, signifying the occurring of formation (Bildung) and its success, is the accomplishment of “apprenticeship” to life as expressed at the end of Book Seven, when Wilhelm is allowed into the Tower to receive ceremonially his “Certificate of Apprenticeship”, which is actually the conclusion of his process of education. It occurs when the pedagogical process ends with the affirmation of positive life and moral values, thoughtfulness, wisdom, altruism, and the personality passes through the experience of change of its inner components. With regard to the readers, specifically the “desired readerly response”, we “are meant to first perceive the world as Wilhelm does, then entertain his ideas as imaginative possibilities, and finally formulate critical ideas for ourselves”; thus Goethe prompts us, “his readers, to cultivate ourselves” (Jeffers 20) as coparticipants in the hero’s growing-up experience. Bildung, or formation, is lehr, or apprenticeship, a process both biological and spiritual, which is textualized in order to be communicated to the reader, in the form of the novel, by Goethe through the voice of his narrator. When receiving his certificate, Wilhelm sees in the library the “scroll” of his own life narrative, a version of his story of apprenticeship written by his secret Tower mentors. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the scroll is an internal, another, different version of Wilhelm’s life experience as education and apprenticeship, paralleling the novel/book itself as the actual, official, surface version of the protagonist’s life experience as education and apprenticeship. In the Victorian period, David and Pip would themselves assume the task to communicate their own developmental experience in a didactic and moral manner in their retrospective, linear narratives, as autodiegetic narrators. In Goethe, Wilhelm’s educative process is presented through the personal, inner experience of the student, recorded and evaluated by the narrator as the voice of Goethe. The protagonist’s life is also written down by his secret mentors (pedagogues, like Jarno) of the Tower, who, during the hero’s educational process, contrary to the ironic points of view of the narrator, watch over him and offer him guidance. Indeed, here, the tone of the narrative is rather serious, where, at the end of the Book VII, Wilhelm discovers a parchment in the Hall of the Past, The Years of Apprenticeship

306

Chapter Seven

of Wilhelm Meister, meaning that “the novel we are reading has been written by the Tower for Wilhelm, and only by coming into its possession does he assume full possession and control of his life” (Moretti 22). The authorial irony, of a romantic type, is used in the representation of the protagonist: for instance, when his long sententious speeches are ironically undercut by Goethe, or when Wilhelm is viewed as an “armer Hund” (“poor dog”), and also as Goethe’s own real likeness (“mein geliebtes dramatisches Ebenbild”). The ironic tone, which touches the idea of the Lehrjahre as a whole, of an apparently detached author who views his protagonist with marked ambivalence, is contrasted by the mystification and mystery of a “secret society”, by the ritualist solemnity of receiving his certificate, and by the seriousness of the pedagogical process of Wilhelm, in general. The reader is puzzled at this mixture of the serious and the comic in thematizing the process of development and formation of a character whose apprenticeship to pursue a vocation on stage eventually proves a failure and misdirected. Wilhelm, realizing the limited nature of his talents, is willing to abandon theatre, and this rejection becomes, as stated by critics, an allegory or symbol for the illusions of a troubled youth. The true human formation, or becoming, in Wilhelm’s case, is not professional but inner, and the true human development is both a physical Bildung33 and a spiritual one, both as dimensions of a moral self-culture acquired through education, or apprenticeship to life; in this respect, unlike other writers, including Carlyle, of Bildungsromane coming after him, Goethe promotes Bildung as an “organic concept of a gradual, manifold, and harmonious cultivation of an individual’s own nature” (Argyle 40). The final conclusion of the novel relies upon the Tower endeavouring in educational theory and practice, in a kind of pedagogical experiment having Wilhelm as the object of study; the experiment in this case seems to be in “social psychology, trying to find out how an individual sensibility might develop in this time and that place, and how it might be integrated with others to increase the common wealth” (Jeffers 42). The educational process of Wilhelm as a student is a process of both self-formation and guided formation, both types representing the culmination of an educative process of development from youth to maturity, innocence to maturation, emotion to thought, sentimental response to external stimuli to moral wisdom. This is revealed in a 33 As of a plant, Goethe elaborating on Herder’s and August Schlegel’s ideas of organicity and organic form.

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

307

dualistic thematic context concerning the change of personality of the hero from early infatuation with theatre and belief in a theatrical vocation – “Often would he stand in the theatre behind the scenes, to which he had obtained the freedom of access from the manager” (Chapter XV of the Book I) – to mature realization of his artistic potential and the life-story turning towards science. The final stage is also that of finding the right life partner and assuming mature responsibilities, like those of fatherhood. The early, passionate drives of the hero’s undisciplined heart, as in Chapter XV of Book I, would determine the narrator to claim: HAPPY season of youth! Happy times of the first wish of love! A man is then like a child that can for hours delight itself with an echo, can support alone the charges of conversation, and be well contented with its entertainment, if the unseen interlocutor will but repeat the concluding syllables of the words addressed to it. So was it with Wilhelm in the earlier and still more in the later period of his passion for Mariana; he transferred the whole wealth of his own emotions to her, and looked upon himself as a beggar that lived upon her alms: and as a landscape is more delightful, nay, is delightful only, when it is enlightened by the sun; so likewise in his eyes were all things beautified and glorified which lay round her or related to her.

Youth, as a developing experience, is a troubled period of mistakes and wrong choices; however, essentially romantic in its focus on individual experience, Goethe’s novel does not emphasise childhood but “codifies the new paradigm and sees youth as the most meaningful part of life”, since youth “becomes for our modern culture the age which holds the ‘meaning of life’” (Moretti 3-4). Leaving such a formative experience behind in the dark passages of his process of development, Wilhelm is predestined to succeed despite his obstinate errors, to become accomplished as an individual subject, to acquire conscious self-culture, to become aware of his status and role, that is, to understand life and consequently to achieve formation despite the novel’s comic ending which renders it open-ended, with certain issues remaining unsolved. The success of his formation is reified by his being ready for initiation into a secret society, a brotherhood that assumed the role of a parental figure, who, with a “higher hand”, watched over and guided him since childhood. “I know I have attained a happiness which I have not deserved, and which I would not change with anything in life”, declares Wilhelm at the end of the novel, and, according to Moretti, his formation is a success and he “can become an individual only by accepting the guardianship of the Tower” (21), meaning that “Wilhelm’s formation is achieved only by subordinating himself to the Tower” (22). We agree with Moretti that in

308

Chapter Seven

this way “happiness is the opposite of freedom, the end of becoming” (23), which is further strengthened by “this happiness [being sealed] with marriage” (24), and Wilhelm’s formation is indeed completed by marriage, which is not a simple one, since it is marrying into aristocracy. Another “higher hand” belongs to nature, that is, human nature with a personal unconscious which leads and makes Wilhelm perceive, choose, act, speak, etc. in particular ways. Therefore, although it would be quite revolutionary for a son to disagree and to choose to be someone different from what the father points to, for the successful formation of personality (the fulfilment of “personal cultivation”) there should be a balance and cooperation between self-cultivation with nature’s “higher hand” and the “higher hand” of an elite group that plays the role of parental authority. As the agency of his salvation and representing the principle of guided formation in the novel, this group of the elect pronounces the completion of Wilhelm’s formation through the words of a mysterious abbe saluting him at the very end of the Book VII with “Hail to thee, young man! Thy Apprenticeship is done: Nature has pronounced thee free”. However, Buckley argues, “as the novel follows him through new snarls of relationships and much windy rhetoric, it sacrifices most of its appealing realism to an abstract and unconvincing philosophy … [which] most later readers have found … unsatisfactory” (12). Despite such criticism, and although the romantics, like Wordsworth, already textualized the principle of formation through their thematic concern with individual, predominantly subjective, both emotional and psychological, experience, in the Bildungsroman development history, it was not until Goethe’s novel that individual Bildung (emergence and change, that is, the formation of personality) was considered a literary concern. Identity formation is equated to the rendering of the social background and character’s development amid the changing complexity of the real world, with social considerations and perspectives of his or her both spiritual, inner and physical, exterior progress, which means, in Bakhtin’s terms, “historical emergence of man”, “man growing in national-historical time” (“The Bildungsroman” 25). It is romanticism that, by innovating poetic discourse, brought new thematic perspectives, among which the formation of personality related to nature, childhood, the dualism of existence, individual experience, and others, and it is also Goethe’s novel that broke the pattern of a pure developmental fiction and a more or less pure developmental process of the ready-made protagonist through the breaking of the static nature of his inner life.

Goethe and the Pattern Reified

309

In romanticism and in Goethe, the process of development and growth becomes a process of acquiring Bildung, or character formation (in this sense, the maturation and consolidation of the spiritual perspectives of life experience) through the newly reconsidered concern with inner life and the mutations happening on this level of human existence: the division of the psyche and an attempt to re-establish its wholeness through certain painful and frustrating moments of spiritual activity; self-revelatory change of moral perspectives; the importance of psychological completeness and stability in the general well-being of the individual; and an attempt to correlate instinctive action with a more rational consideration of passionate and emotional drives. Goethe was a member of both Sturm und Drang and later Weimer Classicism, and he tried to unite emotion with reason, to harmonize romanticism with the Enlightenment, and to show that there could be a unity of feeling and thought, spirit and body, the individual and society, in all cases an organic unity, in Herder’s sense, in that the individual achieving personal progress and Bildung necessarily influences and participates in social progress and Bildung. The formation of the individual is based on his/her inner potential and his/her inner character, personal talents and aptitudes, which made critics link Goethe to the German “neo-humanism”, where again the finding of the right vocation contributes to the social and cultural growth, and the harmony between individual self-realization and social development is again proclaimed.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS THE RISE AND CONSOLIDATION OF A LITERARY SYSTEM

The birth certificate of the Bildungsroman names Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in 1795-1796. It is a remarkable coincidence that the fin de siècle of all centuries of modernity represents an important breakthrough in the literary advancement: the end of the sixteenth century saw in English literature Elizabethan drama and Shakespeare; the end of the seventeenth century proclaimed the age of reason and, in English literature, neoclassicism; the eighteenth century ended in romanticism and the dominance of poetry (in English literature, with Wordsworth and Coleridge), and, also in English literature, the novel is founded; the nineteenth century ended with the innovation of symbolism and aestheticism as origins of modernism; and the last decades of the twentieth century, as postmodern, also revealed the flourishing of literary innovation and experimentation under the auspices of postmodernism, which mainly manifest themselves in imaginative prose. The picaresque novel, the psychological novel, the adventure novel, the realist novel, dystopia, the stream-of-consciousness novel, the Bildungsroman, or the novel of formation, and many other types: the types, or categories, or subgenres of the novel are classified less according to some formal or technical features than by considering the novel to be “an indication of the order of the paratext (everything that precedes, introduces or surrounds the text)”, and, therefore, the types “refer to content and not the modality to narrate”, and they name, actually, “the subject matter” (Valette 25-26). We accept this, but have to point out that there are novels whose identity also emerges from their manner of writing, such as the epistolary novel, journal, fictional autobiography, stream-ofconsciousness novel, metafiction, and others. The list of novelistic types is rather long and the classification ambiguous as it happens when approaching the term “novel” itself. It has indeed a variety of meanings and implications in different developmental stages and through different theoretical perspectives, and no other literary

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

311

form has attracted more writers, and more readers and critics, and it continues to do so despite the repeated affirmation that the novel is dead and that fiction has been replaced with metafiction. Also, no other literary form has proved so pliable and adaptable to a seemingly endless variety of topics and themes, and no other form has been so susceptible to change and development; the person who approaches it at once finds himself or herself confronted with a wide range of sub-species or categories in both English and world literature. Fiction, or imaginative prose, or the novel, has a long developmental history starting with the ancient period, and among the works of fiction, those that are labelled Bildungsromane, representing also the concern of the present study, are free from the danger of not surviving for years and centuries in the human cultural depository, or of becoming a handful of dust in a remote corner of an old forgotten library. They focus primarily on one of the most interesting thematic perspectives, which is the growing up of an individual subject, whose development and formation of personality are disclosed and scrutinized. Another criterion of their and of literature in general survival is popularity which is determined by consumerist, public and market demand, and another one is their literacy, or aesthetic validity, provided by academic and critical evaluation. Today both concepts – popularity and literacy as essential principles of their survival – comprise many types of mass communication and theories of mass culture. According to this media-culture perspective, during the last decades a number of worrying reports have been produced in Western countries on the decline of literary value and the future of imaginative literature. One reason, perhaps, would be the overconfidence in and reliance on technology, internet, cinema, and other forms of communication, which, apart from traditional arts, including literature, are simultaneously our contemporary forms of art and our contemporary sources of utile et dulce. The starting point of our study is the assumption that among the literary systems of the world and English fiction, the one which belongs to and represents the aesthetic value of the subgenre of the Bildungsroman, or the novel of formation, has definitely entered the literary tradition of novel writing and is nowadays quintessential to literary practice and to critical, scientific and popular (of the wider public) reception of the English cultural background, along with its importance and singular place in the general context of English literary studies. The Bildungsroman is perhaps the first type of novel allowing the hero or the heroine to speak, to show his or her individualized, subjective personality, to express a personal world-view, and to promote individual

312

Concluding Reflections

values against or as an alternative to some social and moral values, or some more general, eternal, and objective truths. The Bildungsroman proclaims and foregrounds the individual and individuality, and reveals the psychological and emotional complexity and spiritual insight of the human being, who is capable of changing and acquiring a distinct identity, of emerging, becoming, and completing formation. The Bildungsroman creates complex portrayals of individuals: not symbols or ideals, not social or moral types, although in realism, other, secondary characters may be so, as well as flat and static, unlike the round and dynamic protagonist, who is an individual subject with feelings, thoughts, memories, dreams, a whole consciousness in progress, growth, and, above all, capable of changing. However, it is wrong to consider such an approach as egocentric or individualistic, or as promoting loneliness and isolation, since most of the Bildungsromane value inter-human relationship and inter-personal dependence, and many of them also value social determinism. The Bildungsroman has certainly developed to the present day – despite being seen as solely of German origins, and, by traditional Germanists, as ascribed only to this national literature and representing a unique, typically German cultural identity – as an international and multinational novelistic category, extremely rich and complex within the English-language literary production in Britain as well as America, Canada, and Australia. The interest in an approach to the Bildungsroman such as ours is provided by the remarkable amount of interpretative attention given in our period to the analysis of the novel-writing tradition, in general, and of the Bildungsroman, in particular, which is being continually re-evaluated according to older but still valid, or more recent, or even newly emerging experiences in literary theory and criticism. Our aim is not to add another theory or basis for research to the list; also, we try to avoid the simple compilation of different elements of some known and widely disseminated categories of literary theory as that by Bakhtin, or formalists, or structuralists, or postmodernity, or as in thematology, narratology, or comparative studies. From the multiplicity of critical trends, schools and approaches, rendering a system of complex and often contradictory theories that may thwart one’s attempt to provide new conceptions and ideas, it is possible to pick out threads of thought, which contain principles, opinions, and ideas mostly applicable as elements of a set of methods, a vector of methodology that could be developed and applied to the analysis of the Bildungsroman. Ideas, opinions, views, and concepts, such as system, centre and margin, chronotope, development, formation, epiphany, and many others

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

313

contribute to an effective study of the Bildungsroman, for, though it seems that they belong to different and often incompatible domains, by avoiding their rigid categorization and compartmentalization, they would eventually reveal similar and mutually supporting principles of research and become a guide to be implemented in order to define, describe, and approach the novel of formation. They co-exist and co-work in their focus on a particular type of literary discourse, that is, a systemic and patterned type of literary text, which is the Bildungsroman. Apart from the theoretical background, the approach to the Bildungsroman relies also on a biographical element, since most novels of formation are highly autobiographical. Also, especially with regard to the realist Bildungsroman, which requires personal accomplishment to be harmoniously balanced and related to various social requirements, the study of the novel of formation may consider the relation of literary discourse to its historical, social, and cultural context. Theoretical component apart, it is equally important to focus on particular literary texts dealing with the process of growing up of the protagonist, because a particular theoretical contribution has no validity and efficiency unless it is well-rooted in the reality of the fictional discourse that would eventually provide its practical argumentation. In this respect, our approach to the Bildungsroman is conceived to move cyclically from theory (the existing theoretical categories of literary analysis) to practice (the direct approach to a number of novels of formation following the appropriate conceptions and points of concern according to specific features of the chosen texts), and then again to theory, or rather new theoretical arrangements which we hope will emerge in order to be used again in one’s endeavours at practical, text-oriented criticism. Practical and text-oriented approaches consider the Victorian, late modern and postmodern Bildungsromane, but it is of equal importance, in a study on the development history of the Bildungsroman, to focus on particular texts, such as picaresque works, Tom Jones, The Prelude, and, necessarily, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in order to disclose the aspects of thematic arrangement that are later detected as elements of the Bildungsroman literary system. Conceived in three distinct but interrelated parts, the first major concern of our study is the development history of the Bildungsroman as a novelistic subgenre. This concern is the substance of the present book. It will be followed up in subsequent books with an attempt to disclose the complexity of the novelistic textualization of the principle of formation by

314

Concluding Reflections

Victorian, late modern and postmodern authors of fiction to eventually reveal, on grounds both methodological and theoretical, and through the practice of literary criticism, the literary status of the Bildungsroman as a distinct fictional tradition, a literary system consisting of thematic and narrative elements that encompass a literary pattern. The present book assumes the validity of the theory of internal change in literary advancement through history and shows that the Bildungsroman emerges as a literary system of certain common, typical and defining thematic and structural elements as a result of a historical developmental experience during which various aspects, in particular thematic, of different periods, movements and genres, survived, changed and interrelated anew – and continue to do so – in their acts of narrativization within the system of the Bildungsroman. In this way, these aspects disclose the essential hybridity of the Bildungsroman novelistic subgenre, whose central element is identity formation. Indeed, the antecedents of the Bildungsroman are many and temporally extensive from antiquity to the eighteenth century. Bakhtin and other critics made remarkable attempts to identify them in their studies on the Bildungsroman; they mostly emphasize Goethe, but also find intertextual relations to such traditions as allegory, picaresque fiction, and the romance, which are among the most important “non-Goethean prototypes for the Bildungsroman”, ranging from the Bunyanesque hero looking for salvation through a world peopled with allegorical representations of virtue and vice, to the picaresque hero whose adventures take him instructively through various strata of society, to the quester like Parsifal, who learns through painful experience how to reach his goal, and what his goal is worth. (Jeffers 61)

Following Bakhtin’s classifications and arguments, which are foundational to any research on fiction, and relying on the assumption that the Bildungsroman, as literature in general, is a system of certain defining elements that emerged and were established diachronically, we have also identified, in the present book, by focusing on literary periods, movements, trends, genres, subgenres, particular writers and texts, what we believe are the most important antecedents of the Bildungsroman. We have recognized, apart from a number of ancient and medieval sources, five major modern precursors of the English Bildungsroman, its main sources of origin and influence: (1) picaresque narrative, (2) the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century, (3) romanticism, (4) Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and (5) realism.

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

315

We have seen that the Bildungsroman in its historical movement, at least in its English version, can be viewed as part of a larger, generic system, of the novel, or of literature, in general, in which it represents at once the culmination of a developmental process and the starting point for a complex novelistic typology, which, to the present day, still develops and diversifies its system of elements:

With antecedents in ancient and medieval periods, and influenced by picaresque fiction, the rise of the eighteenth-century novel, the romantic aesthetic and literary practice, and Goethe’s prototypical work, the Bildungsroman in English literature emerged in the nineteenth century from the context of romanticism and was established as a novelistic pattern and tradition systematized by realism. The pattern is built upon the principle of Bildung (formation, becoming, or emergence), which acquires the central, dominant position in the newly developed literary system. Formation is linked to the reconfiguration of the entire spiritual spectrum, the world of inner existence; it became central in romanticism paving the way for Goethe through the romantic emphasis on individual emotional and psychological experience. But Goethe also relies on the idealist tradition of the Enlightenment, which stipulates an organic and gradual growth leading to both individual fulfilment and social integration. This aspect of individuality in the process of identity formation remains essential and defining to the present, including the realist type of the Bildungsroman, and Victorian authors (also, to a certain extent, originating in Goethe) added the component of acquiring meaningful existence in society, where individual development often clashes against a cruel milieu and social integration is only possible by compromise.

316

Concluding Reflections

This classification takes for granted the existence of a typical English Bildungsroman, and shows that it has been highly prolific and that it is still very much alive, not only in Great Britain and in English-language literature. In the field of literary theory and criticism, the Bildungsroman studies should dismiss the critical cliché claiming that the Bildungsroman declined or even died with modernism; instead, one should take into account nation, culture, and genre as distinguishing features and differences among novels, since the Bildungsroman is internationally widespread (in the West as well as in Africa, Asia, Latin America) and popular with various types of minority writers, and especially responsive to different older and newly emerging theories, ideas, means of artistic expression, and literary and novelistic experiences (such as psychoanalysis, feminism, post-colonialism, magical realism, metafiction, historiographic metafiction, dystopia, simulacrum, posthumanism, and others), which provide the Bildungsroman with its present diversity and vitality. This first book of our series on the English Bildungsroman covers the first part of the taxonomy, which represents the Bildungsroman development history until its rise as a literary system with an established thematic pattern. In the case of our first concern with the development history of the Bildungsroman, the conclusion is that the Bildungsroman is subject to a long developmental process with antecedents and features in all periods, beginning with antiquity until the end of the eighteenth century. Another conclusion is that the Bildungsroman emerges with Goethe as a distinct subgenre of the novel genre largely as a modified, different, and more advanced, we should claim, version of picaresque fiction. This version occurs owing to the contribution of pre-romanticism and romanticism, in particular the romantic concern with individual experience and the romantic expression of the dualism of existence, escapism, rebelliousness, and, on the whole, of various emotional and psychological states. Our view of the Bildungsroman having roots in antiquity and as a superior, more advanced novelistic form of the picaresque combined with various romantic perspectives materializes itself in our work from assuming the hypothesis that to follow the rise, development, and consolidation of the Bildungsroman fictional pattern is to follow, according to Bakhtin, the historical movement of novelistic prose, in general, and, in particular, the ways in which the image of the main hero is constructed (formulated) diachronically in the novel. On the whole, there is this critical cliché stating that the novel as a literary fact appeared in the ancient period, but the modern novel appeared in the Renaissance as a counterpoint to the ancient epic and the medieval romance, as a parodic

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

317

play with their forms and concerns, which is remarkably argued, among others, in his diachronic approach to the novelistic genre, by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis. According to M. M. Bakhtin in “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism: Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel”, there are four types or subcategories of the novel dealing with the life experience of the fictional hero or heroine: (1) the “travel novel”, (2) the “novel of ordeal”, (3) the “biographical novel”, and (4) the Bildungsroman. The first three types have a longer history of development starting with the ancient period, whereas the Bildungsroman emerges on the literary scene at the end of the eighteenth century. However, all four of them are interrelated by having in common thematic elements such as biography, life-time period, ordeal, travel, adventure, love, place in human community, and others. For us, the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, and the biographical novel constitute the development of the novelistic genre from antiquity in the form of a process during which, at the beginning of modernity, occurs the moment of the rise of the literary system of the picaresque narrative, which – along with the previous types of novel, certain romantic thematic aspects, the eighteenth-century English novel, and, finally, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre – provides the main elements for the rise of a new literary system, which is that of the Bildungsroman. Plainly stated, the history of the development of the Bildungsroman in English literature represents a process extending from (1) the ancient epic and novels to (2) medieval romances to (3) Renaissance and later picaresque fiction to (4) eighteenth-century neoclassicism and the rise of the English novel and (5) romanticism through (6) Goethe and Carlyle, and the influence of (7) realism to the Victorian novel of formation. What differentiates the Bildungsroman from other types is the element of formation, which stands as the centre, the main thematic element in the literary system of the Bildungsroman. Formation, for us, or Bildung, in general, or becoming and emergence (stanovlenia), for Bakhtin, provides the main feature, specificity, and essential nature of the Bildungsroman. In other words, the element of formation makes the Bildungsroman that type of fiction which deals with “the image of man in the process of becoming” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 19). Also, we could say that the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, and the biographical novel are different fictional hypostases of the developmental novel (or the novel of development) distinguished from the Bildungsroman as the novel of formation, that is, Entwicklung as opposed to Bildung, or Entwicklungsroman, as Germanists would say, as opposed to Bildungsroman.

318

Concluding Reflections

The physical aspect of experience aside, concerning the thematization of the psychological aspect, spiritual life, and inner dimensions of experience, the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, and the biographical novel have as the key word with regard to character representation the term static, whereas for the Bildungsroman the key word would be change of the inner perspectives of existence (psychological, emotional, and moral), which leads to formation, emergence, becoming of the personality of an individual subject. The Bildungsroman as a particular subgenre, literary tradition and literary system emerged when identity development became a literary concern and the character started to be presented – or his/her image in the novel to be constructed – in the process of becoming (in Bakhtin’s formulation), emergence, change, that is, what we call Bildung or formation of character, that is, acquiring of identity, which replaced the static and fixed, ready-made features of the human subject, and to which the thematic perspective of rendering the biological and intellectual growth and development of personality from childhood through adolescence and youth to maturity was added. Change is a major premise for achieving identity formation, where change and identity, along with “freedom and happiness”, “security and metamorphosis”, are “all equally important for modern Western mentality” (Moretti 9), among whose aesthetic products ranks the Bildungsroman. Another assumption, which we rely on, and which follows the formalist theory of system and internal change, is that the rise and advancement of fiction writing from the ancient period to the end of the eighteenth century encompass a number of principles, devices, and elements of the literary discourse which developed and changed diachronically in the history of novel writing so as to eventually offer to the Bildungsroman a number of narrative and thematic aspects by which to prove the aesthetic validity and continuity of a literary tradition. According to Bakhtin in “The Bildungsroman”, these elements and aspects construct or formulate, already in the ancient classical period, the image of the hero in literature; among them, although mostly always offering a static, abstract, and idealized image, are those of realism, spatial and social diversity, complexity and diversity of the external world, complexity and unity of the image of man, inner life and psychology, biographical course of life, adventure spirit, ordeal, testing of virtues, crisis, spiritual rebirth, and, to a certain extent, change of some spiritual components. These elements, aspects and categories are all of primary importance when describing the rise and development of the literary pattern of the

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

319

Bildungsroman, since they represent elements of the Bildungsroman literary system that was established in the eighteenth century and flourished in the nineteenth century. What is primarily involved in our interpretative strategy is the image of the character (main character, hero or heroine, protagonist) presented in the process of development (of identity) leading to formation (of identity) according to the principle of chronotope, and to this element of formation all other aspects and elements are to a greater or lesser degree subordinate. Chronos and topos, time and place, play a significant role as counterparts of one single mechanism of literary approach to the development of the Bildungsroman, in general, and of the image of its protagonist, in particular, from antiquity through picaresque fiction, the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel, romanticism and Goethe to the Victorian Bildungsroman. In Bakhtin, the chronotope is of several types, and concerning literature: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. (Bakhtin, “Forms of Time” 84)

In Bakhtin, the “chronotope” – the name (literally, “time space”) being given to “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” – is a key-element in his theoretical framework on genre (an important organ of memory and no less important vehicle of historicity) and in particular in his theory of the novel. Fiction in its incipient form in antiquity already provides some clearly marked types of the novel (the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, and the biographical novel), their elements being in a state of interdependence and reciprocity, and characterizing one principle of the character development process or another. Diachronically these principles change as does the novel itself in its general historical and cultural development, just as they mark the importance and dominance of one upon the other. Among the complexity of ancient literature, the closest to the modern idea of Bildung, or formation, is Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses). The protagonist Lucius is thirsty for knowledge and news, and, leaving his homeland to learn magic, his adventure ends in a “final dissociation between essence and appearance” (Roznoveanu 317); he acquires a personal identity, almost similar to that of a Bildungsroman character, at

320

Concluding Reflections

the end of a process leading from instinct to idea and reason, and instead of magic and witchcraft he eventually discovers philosophy. Concerning the next period in the movement of literature, the Middle Ages, and the contribution of the medieval romance to the Bildungsroman development history – even if it appears at first that the romance represents a series of incredible adventures constructed on trite formulas – this narrative tradition nourished the spirit of adventure, promoted initiation and a sense of ordeal, trial, testing of human moral potential. The romance strengthens some elements in and offers new ones to the system of the Bildungsroman despite the characters not being presented in their general growth or as changing while gaining experience (they are, as in antiquity, mainly static), and despite an attempt at escaping from reality, or the idealization of it, which represents, along with moral didacticism, another chief value desired by the authors of romances. In particular, the ordeal or test will become a central element in the Bildungsroman literary system. In the Bildungsroman, there are various types of tests, which are initiatory and crucial for the achievement of identity formation. The first one is related to the sentimental career, a kind of “sexual test”, in which the protagonist moves beyond the family background and “finds someone else – an appropriate partner outside the family – to love”; the second is related to the professional career, a “vocational test”, more common in the realist Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist “must find a way relating himself not just to someone but to everyone in the society at large”; the third is a type of individual test, more specific to the Künstlerroman dealing with the maturation of the artist or to modernist novels, which is “that business of ruminating, but especially about the connections between art, ethics, and metaphysics, the practical stress falling on the middle term” (Jeffers 64). In all cases, the protagonist of the Bildungsroman goes through several vocational perspectives, and through at least two love affairs, and changes artistic projects in order to find the right one and to become aware of the kind of existence and philosophy of life that are the most appropriate to his individuality. In the Renaissance, responsible for the transition from the romance to the novel (roman) are Cervantes and the writers of picaresque fiction. As a modern form of writing, the novel is a “parvenu” that achieved considerable success in a short time at the expense of the conquered and exploited territories of its neighbouring genres – drama, essay, story, epic, romance, apology, chronicle, biography, and so on – territories that it patiently absorbed until transforming the whole literary domain into a

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

321

colony (Robert 48). The novel dominates to the present the literary life modified by its aesthetics and depending on its consumerist success. The romance becomes roman as verse is replaced with prose, and especially as the fantastic element is replaced with verisimilitude (the realist element), generously privileged by both literature and reality, and, as a consequence acquiring unlimited and absolute freedom of expression. These principles of freedom and of absence of the fantastic element and its substitution by verisimilitude, necessary to the existence of the novel, brought changes and diversification on both structural and thematic levels from the romance and other genres to the novel. Concerning themes and plot, and in the context of the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century, it meant, as shown by Fielding in his novels and his “Preface” to Joseph Andrews, an extended social concern, focus on individual experience, a large circle of incidents, characters from different backgrounds, and so on. Among the aspects of transition and as an essential difference between the romance and the novel is the element of characterization, which is also important for our surveyistic approach to the Bildungsroman development history. The most concise remark on this matter belongs to Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, in which he claims that the romancer “does not attempt to create ‘real people’ so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes”, whereas the novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks” (304-305). However, we may disagree with Frye’s affirmation that the romance deals with individuality and the novelist needs the framework of a stable society. The medieval romance – be it Gawain, or Chanson de Roland, or whatever chanson de geste – promotes the heroic ideal and the heroic narrative which is also a historical one, at least in its reference to real historical situations and characters with a “historical-political function”, even if they are “denaturated and simplified”, and with a limited representation of real life, the daily practical domain being separated from “the sublime heroic domain” (Auerbach 110). The novel, in turn, promotes verisimilitude, social and moral concern, and tends towards character individualization. Verisimilitude is a constituent element in the rise and consolidation of the literary system of the novel in the Renaissance in Spanish and then European literature, in general, and in the eighteenth century in English literature. Verisimilitude becomes, in the nineteenth-century fiction, the main material of thematic concern, the subject matter of the fictional discourse; the novel is here about verisimilitude and by this it establishes a new type and trend in fiction – realism and the realist novel – which can be defined, in Frye’s words, as the “art of verisimilitude and implicit simile”.

322

Concluding Reflections

With respect to the Bildungsroman development history, apart from the textualization of verisimilitude, the Renaissance brought new elements in the construction of the image of the protagonist to further contribute to the process of establishment of the novel of formation. Just as with the novelistic genre, the romance changing into the novel, the static character is on his or her way to being marked by change and eventually replaced with the formation (or emergence) of character to result in the eighteenthand nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. Namely, the transition from the static feature of the character towards the principle of development and through it eventually to that of formation is provided by the picaresque novel, one of the first and most important types of fiction. Like the Bildungsroman, the picaresque novel reveals continuity and vitality to the present due to its being established since the sixteenth century as a definable system with particular features/elements, and, like the Bildungsroman, due to its being “capable of regenerating and transforming itself in a surprising variety of new environments” (Alter ix). The elements of the picaresque novel, which form its thematic pattern, include (1) the chronotope of the road; (2) the inconsistency of the protagonist (picaro(a)) of low social standing, but of a vast typology of roles and individual traits: orphan, servant, delinquent, beggar, trickster, and so on; typically a “nomad”, a “rolling-stone”, rootless, homeless, social rebel, radical, escapist, sometimes ending his revolt in compromise; (3) the “pseudo-autobiographical perspective”, in Richard Bjornson’s terms; (4) the “panorama of representative types”, again Bjornson with regard to the literary convention of realism and its social concern; (5) moral didacticism, since the story conveys a message to the reading public of the middle class and “literate people from the lower classes” (Bjornson 206); (6) the comic mode combining ironic attitude and social satire, the picaro(a) observing and disclosing without any prejudices the social and human frailties and hypocrisies; (7) the twofold perspective of self-fulfilment reified by a double change: (1) social advancement/climbing (development towards social accomplishment, including professional, financial, artistic, and other aspects, that is, socio-economic change of the individual’s external condition) and (2) spiritual gain (development towards maturity (intellectual, psychological, emotional, as well as

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

323

physical) and acquiring of the self through struggling with a hostile and chaotic world, and especially through spiritual suffering, trial and repentance, that is, the moral-religious change of the individual’s inner condition). Like Guillén’s eight characteristics (in “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque” 71-89), our seven features are essential but not invariable; they are indispensable to understanding the development of the picaresque as a subgenre, in particular, and of the novelistic genre, in general, but they do not encompass a strict formula. Like Guillén, we accept exceptions and secondary characteristics, and consider that no single picaresque novel embodies completely all these seven features; the subgenre has been and still is flexible and subject to development, change, thematic and structural enrichment. To qualify as picaresque, a novel must contain the majority of them; otherwise, the presence of the pseudoautobiographical form, or of moral didacticism, for instance, does not automatically make it a picaresque text. These seven features, emerging in different literary periods, trends, genres, and textual typology, modified and accompanied by various other secondary features, are essential to provide a conclusive definition to the picaresque subgenre of the novel and to make the picaresque a universal narrative type, which leads to its classification as “picaresque myth” born from within a socio-cultural context and marking the rise of the novel as a distinct genre, which, in its incipient stage, combines literature with history, especially law, and other discourses. In this respect, it is revelatory to disclose the meaning of the term used to label the protagonist. The noun giving the adjective – picaro(a) – is used in most cases, whose main synonyms in critical discourse are vagabond and delinquent, and most often rogue, but there are critics, such as Claudio Guillén, who make a clear distinction between picaro and rogue: first, the former is exponential only to the genre of the picaresque novel, whereas the latter appears in various genres and under different guises; second, more importantly, the former lacks the connotation of delinquency, as compared to rogue: The picaro is an occasional delinquent. The tendency to criminal behavior is not an in-bred feature of his character. His allergy to work, his spirit of defiance lead him to use crafty, half-dishonest methods of the parasite. If he steals, he is driven by necessity and more sinned against than sinning. (Guillén, The Anatomies of Roguery 138-9)

324

Concluding Reflections

Action, adventure, travel, trial, interaction with the external world dominate the picaresque narrative, in which “the self is frequently depicted in the traditional manner as an inherent ‘nature’ which is tested and revealed for what it is during the course of the hero’s fictional adventures” (Bjornson 11). The picaro/picara in his/her double hypostasis as character and narrator provides, on the one hand, unorthodox, satirical attitudes towards social values and conventions disclosing that reality is different from what it appears to be, and, on the other hand, unorthodox, parodic attitudes towards other literary and non-literary discourses and traditions. But the picaro(a) is naturally good, changed into a villain or delinquent by the circumstances, and breaks the law only occasionally and in order to survive rather than to question or defy it, as in the case of the picaro in Lazarillo, for instance, who steals the sausage not to take advantage of his master’s blindness but not to starve. In general, the picaro(a) is solitary, outcast, alienated, as well as a fighter, never defeated, and in all cases does not see society as an enemy; his/her action is far beyond any serious criminal act, and involves disguise or trickery in order to deceive for food, or money, or a better job, or a higher social position. All or some of these are eventually granted to the picaro(a); however, on other grounds and for other reasons: containing the premise of changing over and over again, s/he is granted the possibility of understanding, repentance, moral betterment, spiritual gain, and the subsequent realization of the self and eventual change of inner condition, in order to acquire a new, improved spiritual and moral status, and a new, genuine and solid philosophy of life. These are aspects of a private experience that offers success, personal and social accomplishment, and, in another, distinct and more advanced form of thematization, becomes indispensable to the principle of formation in the Bildungsroman. These are aspects of an existential process, which Bakhtin, in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, in relation to the “adventure novel of everyday life”, calls “the path of life” and speaks about the sequence of guilt – retribution – redemption – blessedness (120-121), which could be also said to represent the experience of the picaresque hero as well as that of David Copperfield, Pip, Jane Eyre, and other protagonists of the Bildungsromane. In this process of transformation of the static character into a dynamic one, that is, into an individual subject subjected to formation and emergence, the most important contribution was that of the picaresque novel and later romantic literary works. In the case of the former, a less sentimental literary discourse, the picaro(a), or the rogue, an anti-

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

325

hero/anti-heroine – struggling for survival in a marginal situation, desiring economic individualism and a congenial social status, placed on the road, changing outer and inner condition, and acquiring an identity, a self, and a philosophy of living – is a major predecessor of the character of the Victorian Bildungsroman with regard to the thematic treatment of the relationship between the individual and the milieu, and the issue of the success of formation reified by social integration and accomplishment of a socially determined subject who gains economic individualism and independence. The romantic tradition, with its emphasis on individual experience, constructs a character typology that prefigures the character of the Bildungsroman pertaining to the literary expression of inner thoughts and feelings, inner emotional and psychological states, the value of private life, the importance of childhood experience, the interdependence of the human and nature, the concern with the dualism of existence and escapism, and the issue of the success of formation reified by the personal accomplishment of an individual subject. Romanticism would come to enrich and improve the literary system of picaresque fiction by making individual, in particular subjective, experience a literary concern, which is no less inferior than society, especially the complex range of feelings, since in the picaresque narrative, in general, the hero “is oriented toward action, not feeling. In his rough world, he has neither leisure nor the interest to relish the nuances and degrees of purity of his own emotions” (Alter 79). In the history of literature, in general, the importance of romanticism emerges from breaking the linearity of literary development dominated by classical principles, and from reviving the spirit of originality in literature, which resulted in the co-existence of both innovative and traditional trends in the Victorian Age, the twentieth century, and the contemporary period. In the Bildungsroman development history, the importance of romanticism is no less significant. Although Goethe is generally accredited with having introduced Bildung, making formation, or becoming, a fictional reality with regard to character representation strategies, the romantics, in their literary concern with the development of an individual subject, introduced the formative principle and used it in a way of thematic representation that is very similar to that of the Bildungsroman. To give an example, Tintern Abbey shows an individual in his early adulthood corresponding to the moment in the Bildungsroman of the character entering upon maturity. Therefore, Wordsworth’s poem can be viewed as a short proto-Bildungsroman in verse form, or even called a Bildungsgedicht or Lehrgedicht. The principle of formation here is conceived as interrelated with nature and the rural setting; nature, in particular, is the

326

Concluding Reflections

source of formation and becoming not simply of a mature personality but of a poet. In the process of development of a poetic mind from youth to maturity, concerning the formation as a poet, nature co-participates – in matters of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” – in the process of literary composition. As a result, in a kind of co-authorship, the poem is being written by the assistance of nature, which means that the poet achieves formation, and the poem deconstructs its own process of composition, the way in which it is actually being written, and hence the poem, besides being a proto-Bildungsroman, or rather Bildungsgedicht or Lehrgedicht, is also a self-reflexive poem, a metapoem. Nature is a parental figure, a formative principle offering, to be more precise, guided formation, which in romanticism, besides nature, could be offered by the experience of childhood, or a particular type of relationship with reality and human community. Such a guided formation is common to the Bildungsroman in general and could be of various other kinds, as in the Victorian realist Bildungsroman, for instance, in which society rather than nature is a formative principle providing a special type of guided formation, which we could call determined formation. Nurturing the rise of the literary system of the Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century English literature, romanticism contributes to this process by both its fiction and poetry. Above all, the romantic contribution encapsulates its concern with personal, private, inner, individual experience and all its related thematic perspectives – including childhood, nature, rustic life, pantheism, the dualism of existence, escapism, rebelliousness, and a certain social attitude – which the Victorian writer of the novel of formation will add to those already provided by the rise of the eighteenth-century English novel: social concern, moral didacticism, picaresque elements, and others. Some Victorian novels of formation, such as Sartor Resartus (claimed to be the first English Bildungsroman), rely heavily on these romantic aspects; others, like the more avant-garde Marius the Epicurean, reshape them; but, more often, they are incorporated to a lesser or greater extent in various realist novels, such as Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The Mill on the Floss. As expressed by the romantics, childhood is the writer’s co-author; nature is also involved in co-authorship; childhood and nature represent a mode of existence, just like dualism is; pantheism is related to dualism as much as escapism and, to a certain extent, rebelliousness are; and, in English romantic poetry, the dualism of existence is a result of creating an alternative universe to the contemporary social construction of reality.

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

327

Therefore, the concern with the growth of a poetic mind, the concern with the experience of childhood, the concern with nature and the countryside, the dualism of existence, and escapism represent aspects of the contribution of romanticism to the rise of the literary system of the Bildungsroman. A romantic social concern and whether the individual placed between escapism and rebelliousness is rendered in the context of a milieu remain important topics of critical inquiry. Whether romantic writers are concerned or not with social issues, are involved or not in topics of actual existence, is a matter of critical debate as is, for instance, the question of whether romanticism is a fragmented or unitary movement with regard to its range of literary perspectives and theoretical approaches. The argument favouring the textualization of a romantic social concern relies on the assumption that the romantic focus on the relationship between subject and society, just like the romantic concern with nature and childhood, emerges from a particular cultural response to the beginnings of industrialization, the threat of regimentation of the individual, and the rise of our mass-society, which is perceived as obstructive. The question, however, of the ways in which individual and social life are thematized to render the relationship between the human being and society is much more complex than the above stated critical clichés, ranging from the aspects of childhood, nature, authorship and culture to those of the dualism of existence, rebelliousness, and escapism. To reveal the complexity of the thematic concern regarding the relationship between the individual and society as expressed in romantic literary works in relation to these aspects by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron represents a way of identifying romantic elements in the general system of the Bildungsroman. The starting point in achieving this desiderate would be to assume the view that all these aspects – childhood, nature, society, dualism, pantheism, escapism, rebelliousness, co-authorship – are interrelated under the auspices of the more general romantic concern with the individual experience of a particular human subject. Brought together in the context of the rise of individualism in romantic culture and literature, these aspects receive their textual expression in all English romantic authors and can be found throughout the entire romantic literary practice, in particular poetic works about nature, in which nature is the chronotope of dualism, escapism, and the assertion of pantheism and authorship in romanticism. Paralleling the relationship between the individual and nature is the relationship between the individual and society, both of these romantic concerns being disclosed by the romantic dualism of existence.

328

Concluding Reflections

Although the relationship between the individual and society is a literary concern commonly attributed to realist fiction emerging in the nineteenth century succeeding to and as a reaction against romanticism, there are many critical voices who claim romanticism to be a cultural as well as a social movement with its own ideology and politics, where romantic literary works disclose a particular outlook on the contemporary French revolution, industrial revolution, the rising reactionary political attitudes and various social theories, etc. M. H. Abrams, for instance, calls romantic writers “political and social poets”, and, “to a degree without parallel, even among major Victorian poets, these writers [romantics] were obsessed with the realities of their era”; therefore, it is “a peculiar injustice that romanticism is often described as a mode of escapism, an evasion of the shocking changes, violence, and ugliness attending the emergence of the modern industrial and political world” (101). To others, romanticism is first of all a movement in arts and literature, a literary doctrine and literary practice with a strong philosophical basis developed in Germany, which established itself as a strong literary tradition, which covers all major genres, especially poetry, as well as, to various extents, fiction, drama, essay, letters, confessions, memoirs, aesthetic guidelines, and literary criticism. Such critics understand romanticism “aesthetically, as a theory about the nature and origin of art” (Butler 8), and the identification of literature with philosophy “appears in romanticism not only in the emergence of German romanticism in response to Kant, and in the Jena romantics’ conception of literature as containing its own criticism. It has been for romantics and their readers a way of describing a kind of truth value or truth effect of poetry” (Chase 15). Romantics are those writers who “see the implication of imagination, symbol, myth and organic nature, and see it as a part of the great endeavour to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and the unconscious” (Wellek 220). Therefore, despite the opinion that romanticism is not a “coherent movement or period in Western literature, thought and culture – it was too contradictory, with too many forms and tensions, to be known by one name” (Bahti 32), one would claim that romanticism is a cultural, aesthetic, and literary attitude, a unified movement, a literary system whose thematic concerns include, among others, the emphasis on imagination, feelings and inspiration, the exploration of the complex range of emotional and psychological states, the rise of individualism, the revival of national cultural heritage, the dualism of existence, escapism, rebelliousness, the concern with nature and the countryside, and the importance of childhood experience.

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

329

As some of these aspects are related to the rise of the Bildungsroman in the Victorian period, we have focused on the ways in which the romantics thematized the relationship between the individual and society in order to discuss this issue in connection with the above mentioned thematic concerns, namely the rise of individualism and the dualism of existence, as well as escapism and rebelliousness. The starting hypothesis is that the textual representation of the romantic dualism of existence is thematically interconnected with and reveals the romantic textualization of the relationship between the individual and society, the relationship between the individual and nature, the return to the experience of childhood, and, more important to the essence of the Bildungsroman, a process of individual growth and development. Such thematic concerns as the dualism of existence, rebelliousness, escapism, childhood, nature, and the relationship between the individual and society reveal romanticism to be a unitary movement and to emerge in the literary discourses of various writers from different cultural backgrounds, who came under the influence of romantic aesthetic theory and practice – even from those cultural backgrounds, such as Turkish, which do not possess, like Germany or England, a clear, historically delineated, romantic period, but whose nineteenth-century literary works contain romantic elements and concerns. Founding the literary system of the Bildungsroman, the Victorian writer of the novel of formation will keep the romantic thematic perspectives adding them to those already provided in the context of the rise of the eighteenth-century English novel. The romantic aspects would be mostly predominant in those Victorian novels of formation that keep alive the romantic tradition, as in Sartor Resartus, perhaps the first English Bildungsroman, and persist in realist, both low-mimetic and high-mimetic, novels, as in Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The Mill on the Floss, or be reshaped in more avant-garde, anti-realist works, as in Marius the Epicurean. The Victorian Bildungsroman would combine the perspectives (picaresque, of the eighteenth-century novel, and romantic) and declare identity formation successful if at the end of the protagonist’s process of maturation the inner and outer aspects of existence are harmoniously balanced, and personal ambitions and values agree to the requirements of social existence. To this end, the picaresque narrative passed through a process of especially thematic transformation that occurred in the eighteenth century due to the new social and cultural circumstances, new literary forms, and, in particular in English literature, due to neoclassicism, the dominant

330

Concluding Reflections

literary doctrine of the period, which subjugated poetry and influenced the rise of the English novel in general. Tom Jones, in particular, reveals the picaresque tradition as modified and innovated in order to adapt its thematic pattern to the new cultural and social circumstances. The emphasis is “more on the ingenuity and less on the struggle” (Alter 31), more on reflection than on adventure. Also, breaking the convention of picaresque fiction, Moll Flanders is placed in a middle-class setting, but, subject to the world’s and life’s chaotic and obstructing circumstances, and bereaved of a stable existence, she has to struggle for survival in an alien world both as a picara and as a woman, and, like Jane Eyre, embark on a more difficult and complex process of social ascension and affirmation of an individual identity. Unconventionally, if Moll is adopted by a middle-class family, Roderick Random is born in an upper-class family, but he is likewise subject to misfortune, finding himself soon enough – after the death of his parents and being rejected by his grandfather – with no support to face the harsh conditions of social reality. Tom Jones, a foundling, is rewarded with a superior social status in a novel that reveals a fresh approach to an established novelistic tradition; first, by enlarging to a panoramic dimension the social depiction; second, by providing coherence to a complex narrative organization; and, third, by focusing on a single character as the centre of events, who receives veracity in his movement from animal drives to intellect, from immorality to morality, self-knowledge, and eventually inner change. Influenced by neoclassical realism, foundationalism and essentialism, and by its principles of reason, rationalism, order, common sense, clarity, credibility, experience, and applicability as the grounds for knowledge and discovery, eighteenth-century picaresque fiction passes through a process of thematic transformation involving respect of the genre, faithfulness to fact, a more detailed observation of the social context, a deeper perception of the social perspectives and values, and, consequently, keeping satirical attitude alive, a deeper reflection on contemporary social situations. The innovation is more important, however, with regard to character representation strategies, the picaro/picara losing his/her flat characteristic and becoming more complex as an individual, acquiring the inner perspectives of existence. Gradually, the rogue loses also the static feature to become subject to real development based on change, in particular of inner perspectives, in order to acquire, in this way, a dynamic personality. In the case of the eighteenth-century English picaresque novels, these changes are assisted and strengthened by strong moral vision and didactic purpose, as in Moll Flanders and Tom Jones.

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

331

Along with the insight into the character’s private and spiritual universe, prefiguring the nineteenth-century realist novel, in general, and the Bildungsroman, in particular, the eighteenth-century picaresque narrative becomes more socially involved, displays more social and moral attitudes, the character tends more towards economic individualism, which, along with the effects of romanticism, determine the picaresque tradition’s falling into decline. Decline, but not complete disappearance from the literary scene; it would be present, revived, reshaped and adapted to other settings and circumstances, and the examples are numerous, to mention just Conrad’s Lord Jim, or the fiction of the Angry Young Men, or the more experimental Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, or, in the literature of the United States, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Joseph Heller’s Catch22. For us, many elements of the picaresque literary system pass into a new one in order to form – together with the elements provided by romanticism, the eighteenth-century English novel, and Goethe – the Bildungsroman literary system, or pattern, whose elements are centred on the principle, or element, of identity formation. In the general eighteenth-century European literary background, the literary work representing the birth of the novel of formation, or the Bildungsroman, is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the founding work of the subgenre, which occurred as a consequence of the German writer having introduced and established, concerning the plot and character representation strategies, Bildung, or the theme of formation as a literary concern in the novel against the ready-made protagonists previously rendered in fiction. The Bildung, that is, formation, emergence, or becoming of the hero’s character increasingly mirrored the emergence (social, economic, political, and ideational) of the world around him, which means that Goethe constructed, just as Rabelais had earlier, “an image of man growing in national-historical time” (Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman” 25). Essentially a romantic work, by others yet labelled a “hybrid realism” that fuses realism with individualism, Goethe’s text influenced the nineteenth-century English authors of the Bildungsroman. In the novel, the development of Wilhelm as a romantic el picaro is rendered twofold, comprising emotional and artistic experiences, whereas the principle of formation in his case would be reified by the success or failure of his accomplishment as a happily married and successful artist following his “sensitive soul” consciously “striving for self-development accompanied by a quest for a suitable vocation and role in the community” (Argyle 13).

332

Concluding Reflections

Such a thematic element in the literary system of the Bildungsroman persists in most of the Victorian Bildungsromane, as in David Copperfield, and even in later fiction, as in Sons and Lovers and English Music. Certainly, however, Goethe is far beyond and above such a simple and straight narrative scheme. As in later novels of formation, in Goethe’s Bildungsroman the personal experience of the hero – textualized as a process of building his character – is inseparable from time and milieu, and depends upon Wilhelm’s “readiness to respond” to both “nature’s material offerings” and “nature’s spiritual promptings” (Jeffers 27). In this way, Goethe is rooted in German idealism but also in the Enlightenment, and his model of identity formation is based on the idea of an organic growth of the individual and on the belief in historical progress and human perfectibility. Whatever the degree of grounding the self and the individual psychology in the outward and society, Goethe is more concerned with individual experience, the inward, the soul, the inner life that for him has a meaning, and, since this meaning refers to the process leading to the acquiring of moral wisdom as the highest premise of formation, materialised by the “Certificate of Apprenticeship”, Goethe is also concerned with the ways in which the meaning of experience is communicated to the reader. The experience of Wilhelm, in this respect, can be labelled educative or pedagogical, in the spirit of Rousseau, where “apprenticeship” means accomplishment of maturation, both corresponding to the principle of formation of personality and being reified by the acquisition of values such as devotion, wisdom, moral strength, altruism, and so on. In other words, formation is equalled to maturation and emergence of personality, and represents the outcome of the change (with emphasis on the spiritual, psychological, emotional, and moral rather than on the physical) of personality, thus revealing and supporting Bakhtin’s hypothesis that the Bildungsroman creates “the image of man in the process of becoming”. Goethe’s Bildungsroman is discussed as originating primarily in the Enlightenment and idealist philosophies, and even in the German adoration of the achievement of universal man in the Renaissance. Nonetheless, an important part of its mode of narration, perhaps even the general one, reveals a romantic rebellious attitude in that Goethe’s novel founds and “defines the genre through its rebellious archetypal hero who rejects his bourgeois origins for more aesthetic aspirations (morphing in later incarnations to the ubiquitous life of the mind), only to be subsumed again through recognition by his masters and the love of a good woman” (Jones 445), here resembling Byron’s form of compromise and the

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

333

declaration of love as a superior value to the detriment of either rebelliousness or escapism. Assisted by the educational ideal of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (in Emile) and Friedrich Schiller (in Aesthetic Education), Goethe’s romantic formation or Bildung is a humanistic Bildung as well, where individual development – concerning the issues of “eros, parental responsibility, and freedom of choice” (Jeffers 14) – framed within high moral standards – has a double perspective of accomplishment. First, it is linked to the idea of nurturing, maturation, learning, formation, emergence, and enlightenment of “an individual’s many-sided potential – the development of the uomo universale” (Jeffers 14). Second, it is the source of perfectibility of humankind, in general, and the moral-didactic aspect of social resonance is another thematic focus that would persist in the system of the Bildungsroman. With regard to aesthetics, the humanist attitude is that a good writer must be a good man, a guide and guardian of morality. Sustained in Goethe by a sentimental tone accompanied by irony and framed within a lucid and precise narrative movement, the point of view, expressed by the voice of an apparently distant narrator, invites the reader to progress and pursue his/her own Bildung along with the protagonist; and, along with the narrator, to review the process of experience and apprehend, if not create, its meaning. Almost unchanged, this strategy of rendering the development and formation of a mature personality is followed by Carlyle in his own Bildungsroman, Sartor Resartus, but the closest to the spirit of Goethe as a pedagogical author would be Dickens, whose characters David and Pip also pass through educative experiences with strong moral considerations. Dickens would send his message to the reader, however, through the voice of a more deeply involved, omniscient narrator. Dickens would also change Goethe’s authorial irony into softer, humour-like types of the comic and add to sentimentalism a good portion of melodrama. The Victorians would also keep the unity of education and travelling, apprenticeship and journey as major dimensions of the experience of development leading to individual Bildung, or formation. As in Goethe, the chronotope of the road invites the large-scale representation of the world, in the interaction with which the protagonist achieves physical growth, and, above all, spiritual accomplishment, or Bildung, as selfrealization, self-culture, and attainment of individual identity. In the eighteenth-century English literary background, the literary work that marks explicitly the transition from the picaresque to the Bildungsroman – that is, from mere development to both development and formation of the individual subject – is Tom Jones, perhaps the most

334

Concluding Reflections

complex novel of the period. Tom Jones gives the highest literary expression to the principle of verisimilitude, marking the coming to its end of the process of the rise of the English novel. Fielding’s masterpiece, termed “of manners” and “panoramic”, and linking the comic with the moral, apart from Moll Flanders and Roderick Random, is the most picaresque of all the eighteenth-century English novels. The picaresque elements are present in a text that keeps intact the picaresque character representation strategies, the episodic structure of the picaresque narrative, the presentation of a world without order, the character involved in many, often unpredictable, and always realistic circumstances and events. Prefiguring the types of chronotope in a Bildungsroman, in Tom Jones, the chronotope of home equals in matters of thematic consistency that of city life, and both are linked by the equally important chronotope of the road. As in picaresque fiction in general, and as in the future novels of formation, travelling, or wandering, offers the possibility of escape, freedom, adventure, separation from the past, fresh perspectives, but also anonymity, difficulties, misfortune, danger, and especially embarrassing situations and traps of immorality to test the hero’s spiritual strength. In later picaresque novels, as in Tom Jones, diachronically closest to the rise of the Bildungsroman, these, especially negative, aspects of experience, which are placed on the road and not only, constitute formative principles in building personal identity; eventually, through repentance and reflection, the protagonist is changed, and the new inner perspectives offer a possibility of reward, allow the character to remove his/her picaresque personality and to be granted a social status, a place in the world. The eighteenth century, as the age of the birth of the Bildungsroman, saw the convergence and, in some ways, the fusion of novel and biography, which manifested itself in the mutual enrichment of the two types of writing and in the gradual dissolution of their stylistic differences. The novel, assuming either an objective biographical or a subjective confessional manner of writing, would include diaries, letters, memoirs, and other documents that support faithfulness to fact and verisimilitude. Biography borrowed, in turn, the psychological insight and description of spiritual experience to enrich the plot and especially to achieve character individualization. In this period, biography becomes a fictional element together with the chronotope of the city and both are positioned as thematic components within the Bildungsroman literary system. As neoclassicism is an urban, metropolitan type of culture, the rise of the English novel includes the city as a chronotope to be found in Victorian and twentieth-century Bildungsromane.

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

335

The rise of the Bildungsroman as a subgenre in English literature in the Victorian Age is thus nurtured by a threefold stream of literary traditions: (1) the picaresque narrative, (2) romanticism, and (3) Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. All of them are of equal importance for the establishment of a new fictional pattern, a new literary system in a new, that of the Victorian Britain, literary and cultural background. Of the three sources, the second and the third are, to a greater extent, already vivid in the first English Bildungsroman, which is Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. To these three sources as points of reference in the study of the Bildungsroman development history, we should add (4) the eighteenthcentury rise of the English novel, in general, with its threefold thematic perspective that consists of (a) sentimental outlook, (b) comic mode, and (c) moral didacticism, as revealed in Tom Jones; also, as revealed in other novels, such as Robinson Crusoe, with its expression of certain (d) neoclassical principles. The label “Age of the Novel” given to the eighteenth century points to the fact that in that period the English novel manifested itself as an eruption of long extended narratives representing a phenomenon which is comparable to another which had occurred more than a century earlier: the flourishing of Elizabethan drama. The four sources of the Bildungsroman thus identified – romantic principles, picaresque elements, thematic aspects of Goethe’s and the eighteenth-century English novel – persist in later Victorian fiction, in general, and in the Bildungsromane, in particular, each to a lesser or greater extent depending on each individual novel. The four sources receive a new, fifth literary input, this time from within the contemporary cultural and literary context, which is that of (5) realism, following the remarkable contribution of Carlyle with his moment of a threefold literary reception of Goethe’s canonical Bildungsroman that became a supreme example and inspired the early British authors of the novel of formation. The rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century nurtured the rise of the Bildungsroman as a subgenre representative of English fiction by its social focus, moral and didactic concern, and the expression of some of neoclassical principles. By these elements and, by keeping the picaresque tradition, the eighteenth-century English novel equals the contribution of romanticism and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century relies on the belief in personal and historical progress, and especially on the interest in individual psychology. Responsible for the foundation of the modern novel is verisimilitude, or the realist element, whose significance stands in serving moral and pedagogical ends. Another more or less strict requirement is “a sign of our freedom” (Eagleton 17) – “I am at liberty to make what laws I please

336

Concluding Reflections

therein”, declares Fielding about himself in Book 2 of Tom Jones – and the realist novel “emerges at a point where everyday experience begins to seem enthralling in its own right” (Eagleton 37). Equally responsible for the rise of the Bildungsroman in English literature, shaping its thematic components, is the romantic literature of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Scott, and Keats. Among the many works of these writers that should be discussed in relation to the rise of the Victorian novel of formation is Waverly, in its both individual and historical perspective of literary concern. More important is perhaps The Prelude, “the history of a Poet’s mind”, that could be called Bildungsgedicht, or Lehrgedicht, and viewed as a romantic protoBildungsroman in verse form, similar to the novel Tom Jones as another proto-Bildungsroman representing the age of the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century. The Prelude, a subjective response to the external world, a poem about the transition from external reality to the internalization of the external reality, “enacts an intellectual and spiritual journey in terms of the poet’s own experience” and reveals how he “perceived that significance lay not in the simple object in the world of Nature, but in the power of imagination to work upon the impression he retained” (Butler 67). Gisela Argyle truly calls Wordsworth’s poem “a typical Romantic Bildungsgeschichte (story of Bildung)”, as she does with Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, a “quasi-Bildungsroman”, in her words, in which Coleridge attempts “to derive, in the German manner, principles of literary criticism from philosophical speculation” (15). Romanticism changes the concern from the social to the personal, from social accomplishment and security to private, inner well-being with regard to acquiring an identity and the accomplishment of an individual experience. Apart from the concern with the individual, other thematic aspects of the literary system of the Bildungsroman, which have their roots in the English Romantic Movement, would be the emphasis on individuality, individual emotional and psychological states, the concern with the development of a personal consciousness, the concern with the experience of childhood, the concern with nature and the countryside, pantheism, escapism, rebelliousness, and the dualism of existence. The Victorian writers of the Bildungsroman, in the age of realism covering much of the nineteenth century, would keep these elements, and, in particular, those novelists who, like Thackeray and Dickens, embraced the realist strategies would also mark a return to social and moral concerns, and thereby give new thematic and formal perspectives to the way in which the process of development of character as identity formation is rendered.

The Rise and Consolidation of a Literary System

337

The romantic elements preserved by the Victorian novel would be, of course, changed and would receive different textual representations. For example, concerning childhood and the child’s character, in romanticism they are exponents of a paradisiacal, pure, innocent, imaginatively created, in all respects a superior level of existence as an alternative to the harsh and thwarting reality; the childhood experience is the essence of a particular literary myth, a mode of escapism and also an inseparable, forming and initiatory, part for the process of maturation. No matter how transitory, frail and viewed through the lens of nostalgia, romantics declared childhood a “happy season”, which is not the case in the realist Bildungsroman, as the representation of the childhood experience in romanticism is “far removed from the realities of daily life in which the novel deals” (Banerjee 31). Victorians would keep the importance of childhood in their rendering of the development and formation of an individual personality, but more often in the way in which Erik Erikson views childhood “as a gradual unfolding of the personality through phasespecific psychological crises” (128), which emerge as turning points suggesting at once something negative and something positive, and being determined by various internal conflicts, usually between two elements: for instance, Pip faces the choice of either remaining in the village or beginning his school experience, each of the two perspectives containing positive and negative aspects. On a more general level, the shift from romanticism to Victorianism in matters of writing the Bildungsroman is the shift from the self-imposed, personal values and choices, as a sign of individuality, to those imposed by society (to hypothesise an opposition of Cain, Manfred and Childe Harold versus David Copperfield, Pip and Jane Eyre). What in romanticism is a relationship of non-relationship between the individual and society34, in the period of realism becomes a relationship based on the principles of determinism and interdependence. Now, the success of character formation includes the development and accomplishment on both the inner and the outer levels of existence, and those who rebel, or individualize, or keep creating alternatives are marginalized, fail, like Pip, or are viewed as threatening or different and, as a result, even scapegoated, like Maggie. Like the previous traditions (picaresque, the eighteenth-century novel, neoclassicism, romanticism, and Goethe) combined to give the Bildungsroman, the elements of the literary system of realism emerge in 34

Rebelliousness and especially the dualism of existence and escapism emerge as a result of the author’s attempts, by means of imagination, to create an alternative reality (or rather, a non-reality) to the contemporary social construction of reality.

338

Concluding Reflections

the aftermath of romanticism into the newly established literary system of the novel of formation (the Bildungsroman) to receive various degrees of thematic and structural representation, depending on the author’s adherence to one trend or movement or another, and on his or her extent of concern with and the weight of focus on individual experience and/or social and moral issues. Realism is a strong literary presence in the Victorian Age and as such co-exists with a continuation of the romantic tradition and with the more experimental and original avant-garde. Apart from the realist Bildungsroman, the Victorian period contains novels of formation expressing concerns other than social and moral and reflecting views other than realist and sociological. Also, the advancement of female authorship determines the Bildungsroman to focus on women as well and to render their experience of self-assertion as framed in a process of development and formation of an individual personality similar to that of male protagonists, but with necessary changes and nuances of textualization. Realism versus aestheticism, male versus female, individual versus social, spiritual versus material, childhood versus maturity, rustic versus urban, personal achievement versus social success, these and many other thematic aspects offer power and scope to the nineteenth-century English novel of formation, which will be the substance of another, separate book focusing on the Victorian Bildungsroman.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M. H. “English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age”. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. Ed. H. Bloom. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970. 91-119. Alter, Robert. Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965. Argyle, Gisela. Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction, 1830s-1930s. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: Reprezentarea realitatii in literatura occidentala. Iasi: Polirom, 2000. Bahti, T. “Literary criticism and the history of ideas”. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 9: Twentieth Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Eds. C. Knellwolf and C. Norris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 31-42. Bakhtin, M. M. “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel”. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 1-40. —. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 84-258. —. “Discourse in the Novel”. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 259-422. —. “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism: Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel”. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. 10-59. —. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. —. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Banerjee, Jacqueline. Through the Northern Gate: Childhood and Growing Up in British Fiction, 1719-1901. Bern: Peter Lang AG, 1996. Barry, P. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Beach, J. W. The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique. New York: Appleton Century Crofts Inc., 1960. Beddow, Michael. The Fiction of Humanity: Studies in the Bildungsroman from Wieland to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Belsey, C. Critical Practice. London: Routledge, 1980.

340

Bibliography

Bennett, A. “Expressivity: the Romantic theory of authorship”. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. P. Waugh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 48-58. Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Bjornson, Richard. The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. Blamires, H. A History of Literary Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1991. Bloom, H. “The Internalization of Quest-Romance”. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. Ed. H. Bloom. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970. 3-24. —. “The Unpastured Sea: An Introduction to Shelley”. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. Ed. H. Bloom. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970. 374-401. Boes, Tobias. Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends. In “Literature Compass 3/2 (2006): 230–243, 10.1111/j.17414113.2006.00303.x”. Blackwell Publishing, 2006. (http://www.tobiasboes.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Boes_Modernist.pdf). Bressler, C. E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 2007. Brownlee, Marina S. “Discursive Parameters of the Picaresque”. The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue’s Tale. Ed. Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael Zappala. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. 25-35. Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Calin, Vera. Romantismul. Bucuresti: Editura Univers, 1970. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Cartianu, A., and I. A. Preda. Dictionar al literaturii engleze. Bucuresti: Editura Stiintifica, 1970. Chase, C. (Ed.). Romanticism. London: Longman, 1993. —. “Introduction”. Romanticism. Ed. C. Chase. London: Longman, 1993. 1-42. Cook, Guy. Discourse and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Craft, C. “Romance”. A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature. Ed. L. Cooner Lambdin and R. T. Lambdin. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group Inc., 2002. 352-375. Daiches, David. Critical Approach to Literature. London: Longman, 1982. Day, Aiden. Romanticism. Florence, Routledge, 1995. De Man, Paul. “Time and History in Wordsworth”. Romanticism. Ed. C. Chase. London: Longman, 1993. 55-77. Dunn, Peter N. Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

A History of the Bildungsroman

341

Durand, G. Figuri mitice si chipuri ale operei: de la mitocritica la mitanaliza. Bucuresti: Nemira, 1998. Eagleton, T. The English Novel: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Echevarría, Roberto González. Love and the Law in Cervantes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Eco, U. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1994. Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. Erikson, Erik H. Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers. New York: Norton, 1980. Esterhammer, Angela. Romantic Poetry. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002. Falconer, Rachel. “Heterochronic Representations of the Fall: Bakhtin, Milton, DeLillo”. Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives. Ed. Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, Michel De Dobbeleer, Kristoffel Demoen, Koen De Temmerman, and Bart Keunen. Gent: Academia Press, 2010. 111-129. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Freidenberg, Olga. Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Frevert, U., and H.-G. Haupt. Omul secolului al XIX-lea. Bucuresti: Polirom, 2002. Freydberg, Bernard. SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy: Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay: Provocative Philosophy Then and Now. Ithaca: SUNY Press, 2008. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London, Routledge, 2012. Gengembre, G. Marile curente ale criticii literare, Iasi: Institutul European, 2000. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Girard, Rene. Minciuna romantica si adevar romanesc. Bucuresti: Editura Univers, 1972. Golban, Tatiana. Rewriting the Hero and the Quest: Myth and Monomyth in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH, 2014. Gordon, I. A. The Movement of English Prose. New York: Longman, 1980. Grundy, I. “Restoration and Eighteenth Century”. The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature. Ed. P. Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 214-273. Guillén, Claudio. “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque”. Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. 71-110.

342

Bibliography

—. The Anatomies of Roguery. The Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature. New York: Garland, 1987. Handwerk, G. “Romantic irony”. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5: Romanticism. Ed. M. Brown. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 203-225. Hardin, James. (Ed.). Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Harland, R. Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes: An Introductory History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Hart, Kevin. Postmodernism: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2004. Hartman, Geoffrey H. “The Romance of Nature and the Negative Way”. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. Ed. H. Bloom. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970. 287-305. Hartman, G. “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness”. Romanticism. Ed. C. Chase. London: Longman, 1993. 43-54. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusion”. Genre 12, 1979. 293-311. Holman, C. H. and Harmon, W. A. A Handbook to Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Holub, R. C. Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Howe, Susanne. Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London, Routledge, 1988. Jacobs, C. “Unbinding Words: Prometheus Unbound”. Romanticism. Ed. C. Chase. London: Longman, 1993. 240-269. Jauss, H. R. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Jeffers, Thomas L. Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Johnson, Edgar. Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Jung, Carl. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Kermode, Frank. “The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction”. The Idea of Literature: The Foundations of English Criticism. Ed. D. M. Urnov. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979. 304-307. Kneale, J. Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998. Lamont, C. “The Romantic Period”. The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature. Ed. P. Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 274-325. Lane, R. J. “The Fiction of Jim Crace: Narrative and Recovery”. Contemporary British Fiction. Eds. R. J. Lane, R. Mengham, and P. Tew. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. 27-39.

A History of the Bildungsroman

343

Langbaum, Robert. The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Larkin, M. Man and Society in Nineteenth Century Realism: Determinism and Literature. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977. Levine, Michael P. Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Deity. London, Routledge, 1994. Lewis, J. Cultural Studies: The Basics. London: Sage Publications, 2004. Lodge, David. The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. Lotman, Y. M. “Lektsii po strukturalinoi poetike”. Y. M. Lotman i tartuskomoskovskaya semioticeskaia shkola. Moskva: Gnozis, 1994. 10-257. Maier, Sarah E. “Portraits of the Girl-Child: Female Bildungsroman in Victorian Fiction”. Literature Compass, 4.1, 2007. McKeon, M. “Prose fiction: Great Britain”. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 4: The Eighteenth Century. Eds. H. B. Nisbet and C. Rawson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 238-263. Mindra, M. The Phenomenology of the Novel. Iasi: Institutul European, 2002. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 2000. Murphy, Peter, and David Roberts. Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism. London: Continuum International Publishing, 2005. Nicol, Bran. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Onega, S., and J. A. G. Landa. “Introduction”. Narratology: An Introduction. Eds. S. Onega and J. A. G. Landa. London: Longman, 1996. 1-41. Parrinder, P. Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pavlicencu, S. Caiet de studiu la Istoria literaturii universale: Epoca Renasterii. Chisinau: Litera Educational, 2004. Reed, Walter L. An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic Versus the Picaresque. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Richardson, Alan. Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Port Chester: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ricoeur, Paul. Eseuri de hermeneutica. Bucuresti: Humanitas, 1995. Robert, Marhe. Romanul inceputurilor si inceputurile romanului. Bucuresti: Editura Univers, 1983. Roznoveanu, Mirela. Civilizatia romanului. Bucuresti: Editura Albatros, 1983. Sammons, Jeffrey L. “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at Clarification”. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Ed. James Hardin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. 26-45. Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Scholes, R., and R. Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Seager, Nicholas. The Rise of the Novel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Shklovsky, Viktor. O teorii prozy. Moskva: Federatia, 1929.

344

Bibliography

—. “Art as Technique”. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997. 774784. Sieber, Harry. The Picaresque. London: Metheun, 1977. Stephen, M. An Introductory Guide to English Literature. London: Longman, 1984. Swales, Martin. The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. —. “Irony and the Novel”. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Ed. James Hardin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. 46-68. Todorov, T. Literature and Its Theorists: A Personal View of Twentieth Century Criticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Tynyanov, Y. N. “Literaturnyi fakt”. Poetika. Istoria literaturi. Kino. Moscva: Nauka, 1977. 255-270. —. “O literaturnoi evolutii”. Poetika. Istoria literaturi. Kino. Moscva: Nauka, 1977. 270-281. Valette, B. Romanul: Introducere in metodele si tehnicile moderne de analiza literara. Bucuresti: Cartea Romaneasca, 1997. Vlad, E. Authorship and Identity in Contemporary Fiction. Constanta: Ovidius University Press, 2005. Watt, I. P. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Wellek, R. Concepts of Criticism. Ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. London: Yale University Press, 1963. Wellek, R., and Warren, A. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, 1962. Westburg, Barry. The Confessional Fictions of Charles Dickens. Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1977. Wimsatt, Jr., William K. “The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery”. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. Ed. H. Bloom. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970. 77-88.

INDEX

Abrams, M. H. 187, 191, 192, 328 Ackroyd, Peter 28, 30, 55 Addison, Joseph 125, 177 Aleman, Mateo 51, 100, 102; Guzman de Alfarache 100, 102 Ali, Monica 28 Apuleius 51, 61, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 111, 131, 319; The Golden Ass 61, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 111, 131, 319 Argyle, Gisela 19, 56, 336 Ariosto, L. 94 Aristotle 130, 157 Auerbach, Erich 88, 101, 115, 300, 317 Austen, Jane 99, 170, 179, 261, 280 Bacon, Francis 120, 121 Bakhtin, M. M. viii, x, xi, 3, 4, 12, 1417, 19, 21, 22, 24, 34, 39, 41, 44, 50, 56, 59, 60-66, 68-79, 81, 84, 99, 100, 105, 106, 109-114, 157, 158, 169, 176, 233, 281, 293, 294298, 308, 312, 314, 316, 317, 318, 319, 324, 331, 332 Balzac, H. de 13, 77, 280 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 28, 54, 266 Barthes, Roland 180 Bjornson, Richard 289, 322 Blaga, Lucian 239 Blake, William 51, 52, 182, 184, 185, 192, 195, 201, 202, 222, 232, 234244, 257, 260, 262, 276, 327; Songs of Innocence and of Experience 234-244 Bloom, Harold 8, 34, 188 Boccaccio, G. 268 Booth, Wayne C. 181

Brontë, Charlotte 3, 28, 54, 75, 171, 261 Brontë, Emily 28, 54, 171, 196 Brookner, Anita 28 Browning, Robert 132 Buckley, Jerome Hamilton 10, 24, 54, 285, 286, 308 Bunyan, John 51, 75, 118, 120, 121, 131, 179; The Pilgrim’s Progress 118, 120, 121, 131, 179 Burns, Robert 285 Butler, Samuel 28, 55 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 28 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 51, 171, 184, 186, 190, 192, 195, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 217, 221, 229, 231, 241, 243, 263-278, 298, 327, 332, 336; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 186, 265-269; Manfred 186, 205, 206, 269-271, 275, 276; Cain 186, 205, 272-276; Don Juan 186, 276-277 Campbell, Joseph 11 Carlyle, Thomas ix, x, 4, 16, 28, 30, 53, 54, 260, 290, 291, 299, 300, 304, 305, 306, 317, 333, 335 Carter, Angela 28, 30, 43, 55, 331 Caxton, William 93 Cervantes, Miguel de 51, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 127, 131, 137, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 160, 163, 164, 177, 297, 320; Don Quixote 98, 100, 101 Chaucer, Geoffrey 86, 90, 94, 95, 96, 131, 243 Clare, John 184, 185 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 33, 51, 54, 82, 137, 145, 189, 191, 192, 195,

346 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206, 217, 222-228, 229, 231, 243, 245, 249, 257, 258, 264, 296, 298, 310, 327, 336; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 82, 222-228 Conrad, Joseph 282, 331 Cook, Guy 47 Cooper, J. F. 282, 283, 286 Defoe, Daniel 51, 70, 122, 125, 127, 128, 132, 135, 144-148, 161, 162, 163, 167, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 261; Robinson Crusoe 144-148, 161, 162, 177; Moll Flanders 70, 147, 177 De Quincey, Thomas 200 Descartes, Rene 130, 198, 212, 213 Dickens, Charles 3, 6, 20, 28, 41, 52, 54, 65, 99, 171, 196, 262, 277, 333, 336 Dilthey, Wilhelm 10, 293 Dostoyevsky, F. 41, 63, 136 Eagleton, Terry 98, 127, 169 Eco, Umberto 56, 233, 234 Eliade, Mircea 43 Eliot, George (Marian Evans) 3, 28, 52, 54, 136, 179 Eliot, T. S. 34, 35, 36, 216 Fénelon, François de 51, 65, 118, 119; Les Aventures de Télémaque 65, 118, 119 Fichte, J. G. 51, 194, 197, 206 Fielding, Henry 51, 79, 122, 125, 127, 132, 137, 151-158, 159, 163, 164, 167, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 261, 281, 293, 297, 321, 334, 336; Joseph Andrews 125, 151-154, 155, 163, 164, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 321; Tom Jones 154-158, 178, 179, 293, 334, 336 Forster, E. M. 28, 55, 181 Foucault, Michel 31, 146, 197 Fowles, John 284

Index Frye, Northrop 83, 98, 321 Genette, Gerard 59, 181 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von viii, ix, x, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14, 16, 20, 22, 23, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 41, 44, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 60, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 109, 115, 122, 123, 189, 190, 197, 206, 281, 288-291, 292, 293, 294-309, 310, 314, 315, 316, 317, 319, 325, 331, 332, 333, 335, 337; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre viii, x, 3, 4, 23, 44, 51, 53, 54, 64, 65, 67, 71, 123, 288-291, 293, 294309, 310, 314, 317, 331, 335 Goldsmith, Oliver 136, 170, 174 Gray, Thomas 42, 149, 196 Greene, Robert 131 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jacob von 16, 51, 65, 110, 18, 120; Simplicius Simplicissimus 65, 118 Guevara, Luis Velez de 51, 100, 117, 120; El Diablo Cojuelo 100, 117 Hardy, Thomas 28, 54, 55 Hawthorne, N. 279 Hegel, G. W. F. 3, 130, 181, 189, 197, 198, 206, 209 Heliade-Radulescu, I. 242 Heliodorus 51, 61, 74, 131; Ethiopian History 61, 74, 131 Heller, Joseph 331 Herder, J. G. von 2, 30, 197, 309 Homer 132, 140, 157, 175 Howe, Susanne 19 Hutcheon, Linda 59, 163, 283, 284 Ishiguro, Kazuo 28, 55 Jakobson, Roman 47 James, Henry 28, 35, 136, 181 Jauss, Hans Robert 196 Johnson, Samuel 125, 126, 174, 177, 180, 264 Jonson, Ben 42, 154

A History of the Bildungsroman Joyce, James 6, 7, 28, 30, 54, 133, 136, 248 Jung, Carl 254 Kant, Immanuel 130, 187, 189, 197, 198, 328 Keats, John 51, 171, 186, 192, 195, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 213, 221, 222, 229, 230, 231, 243, 245, 256, 258-261, 262, 276, 327, 336 Lawrence, David Herbert 28, 55 Leibniz, G. W. 2 Lesage, Alain-René 51, 122, 166, 291; Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane 166, 291-292 Locke, John 130, 168, 198, 208, 213, 214, 246, 249, 255 Lodge, David 55 Longus 51, 61, 74, 131 Lotman, Y. 13, 68 Lubbock, P. 181 Malory, Sir Thomas 51, 90, 93 Mann, Thomas 65, 133 Markandaya, Kamala 28 Maugham, William Somerset 28, 55 McEwan, Ian 43 Melville, Herman 145, 227 Meredith, George 28, 54 Milton, John 188, 237, 243, 273 Mitchell, David 28 Monmouth, Geoffrey of 86 Moretti, Franco 13, 31, 56, 57, 303, 307 Morgenstern, Karl 10 Nashe, Thomas 51, 116, 117, 118, 131; The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton 116 Ovid 20, 73 Pater, Walter 4, 28, 30, 35, 55, 258, 293

347

Petrarch, F. 268 Petronius 61, 70, 72, 73, 131; Satyricon 61, 72, 73, 131 Plato 217 Pope, Alexander 42, 125, 126, 162, 163, 177, 188, 264, 276 Pound, E. 132 Proust, Marcel 133, 136 Quevedo, Francisco de 51, 100, 117. 120; La Vida del Buscon don Pablos de Segovia 100, 117 Rabelais, François 16, 51, 65, 99, 108-115, 157, 168, 242, 293, 297, 331; Gargantua et Pantagruel 65, 99, 108-115 Radcliffe, Ann 74, 159, 196, 197, 279 Reeve, Clara 125, 128, 129, 170, 173, 174, 279 Richardson, Samuel 51, 74, 125, 126, 132, 136, 137, 148-151, 152, 153, 154, 159, 163, 167, 170, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 261; Pamela 148-151, 152, 153, 154, 173, 178 Ricoeur, Paul 47 Rolland, Romain 65 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 2, 65, 74, 183, 232, 294, 302, 332, 333 Rushdie, Salman 28, 55 Sainte Maure, Benoit de 86 Salinger, Jerome David 331 Scarron, Paul 51, 118, 119 Schelling, F. W. J. von 189, 197, 198, 200, 205, 206, 223 Schiller, Friedrich 4, 189, 190, 197, 198, 214, 215, 232, 298, 304, 333 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 189, 197, 306 Schlegel, Friedrich 181, 189, 195, 197 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 10, 197, 198

348 Scott, Sir Walter 33, 51, 98, 132, 170, 181, 186, 196, 262, 279-287, 294, 336; Waverley 98, 186, 279-287 Shakespeare, William 42, 243, 300, 310 Shelley, Mary 196 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 51, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 216221, 222, 229, 230, 231, 257, 258, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268, 269, 298, 327, 336 Shklovsky, V. B. 34, 35-36, 39, 50, 68, 169 Sidney, Sir Philip 94, 192 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 51, 74, 81, 88, 89-93 Smith, Zadie 28 Smollett, Tobias 51, 70, 122, 128, 165-167, 174, 181, 261, 262; The Adventures of Roderick Random 70, 165-167 Sorel, Charles 51, 118, 119-120; Histoire Comique de Francion 118, 119-120 Spenser, Edmund 94 Spinoza, B. 206, 213 Stendhal (Henry Beyle) 13, 77 Sterne, Laurence 51, 126, 135, 159, 165, 167-170, 173, 261, 262, 297; Tristram Shandy 159, 167-170 Swift, Graham 284 Swift, Jonathan 51, 111, 122, 128, 140-143, 144, 148, 161, 162, 163, 173, 178, 276; Gulliver’s Travels 111, 140-143 Swinburne, Algernon, Charles 243 Tasso, T. 94 Tennyson, Alfred 94 Thackeray, William Makepeace 3, 28, 54, 99, 277, 336

Index Todorov, Tzvetan 97, 133, 181 Tolstoy, L. 65 Troyes, Chretien de 85 Twain, Mark 331 Tynyanov, Y. N. 12, 24, 31-33, 34, 35, 36-41, 42, 43, 46, 48, 49, 50, 59 Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes 51, 70, 100, 102, 116, 324 Wace 86 Walpole, Horace 74, 159, 170, 196, 197, 279 Warren, Austin 49 Watt, Ian 133, 134, 136, 179 Wellek, Rene 49 Wells, Herbert George 28, 55 Wieland, Cristoph Martin 16, 33, 51, 65, 123, 291, 292-293; Die Geschichte des Agathon 16, 65, 292-293 Wilde, Oscar 162 Winterson, Jeanette 28, 55 Woolf, Virginia 6, 7, 28, 30, 55, 133 Wordsworth, William 51, 52, 162, 184, 185, 186, 189, 191, 192, 195, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207216, 217, 221, 222, 229, 231, 232, 239, 241, 243, 244-256, 257, 258, 260, 262, 264, 276, 298, 308, 310, 325, 327, 336; Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey 162, 200, 207-216, 252, 255; Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood 243, 244, 252-255; The Prelude 186, 200, 214, 244-252, 255 Xenophon 65