| As a Roman (novel) about Bildung (development), the European Bildungsroman has the exceptional task of describing a character's development, most typically, a hero's coming of age. What makes this task not only exceptional but also immensely complicated, however, is a paradox at the center of the project, a paradox that inheres in the German word bilden itself On one level, bilden refers to the activity of giving shape, the process of formation or development, on another, it refers to the reproduction of an object based on a prior model or form (Urbild), providing Bildung with a double meaning as both a process of free formation and a product modeled upon a prior form. This problematic raises certain critical questions for the Bildungsroman. First and foremost, how exactly does the Bildungsroman establish a normative form for producing character development? Next---one that goes to the very project itself---how free can any character's developmental process be that models itself on a normative form? And ultimately---for the genre itself---how novel is any novel of development that would necessarily borrow its formal devices from a prior text within its genre? This study is an examination of these questions, focusing first on the genesis of the Bildungsroman's normative form: what I identify as the narrative repetition and working through of a protagonist's triangulated desire. Second, I focus on the struggle for narrative authority enacted by certain authors in the tradition as they write under the influence of that form. To illustrate this particular trajectory, I will examine four writers: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and his genesis of the Bildungsroman's formal triangulation of desire as the paradigm for the protagonist's emergence and development; Jane Austen, and her negotiation for female narrative authority in relation that that formal convention; Henry James, and his attempt to rewrite that Bildungsroman form as the limitation of a reader's imagination; and, finally, Sigmund Freud, and his appropriation of that form as the predominant inter-text for his theory of psychoanalysis and the development of the subject. While critics like Franco Moretti (1987) have argued that the Bildungsroman genre enjoyed only a brief flowering before it fell into desuetude or others like Todd Kontje (1992) have argued that the Bildungsroman is a genre that readers now engage with incredulity, astonished by its outmoded philosophy and poetics, I will argue instead that the problematic of form that the genre introduces exerts a lasting influence on writing and reading narratives of development. And this influence, I will also show, is multi-discursive, deeply impacting psychoanalysis through Freud's reading, writing, and theorizing of character development. |
