Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman

Introduction

The Bildungsroman is often called the novel of formation, the novel of education (in the broad sense of the word), or the apprenticeship novel. It shows the development of the protagonist’s mind and character through a number of stages and a variety of experiences, often from childhood to early adulthood. He or she encounters conflicts and challenges, often including a spiritual crisis, which enable the protagonist to achieve a mature identity and eventually play his or her proper role in the world.

The Künstlerroman, also called the artist novel, is an important subtype of the Bildungsroman. It represents the growth of a writer or other artist into a condition of maturity that is marked by a recognition of art as the protagonist’s calling and by a mastery of an artistic craft. A related subtype is the Erziehungsroman (educational novel), which also presents the development of a hero from childhood to maturity, and has one or more teachers directly guiding the protagonist. Another subtype that occasionally overlaps with the Bildungsroman is the picaresque novel, which narrates the escapades of a rascal who lives by his wits in a sordid environment. The picaresque novel, however, has its origins in Spain; the Bildungsroman, as one might expect, has its roots in German literature.

The Bildungsroman in German Literature

The concept of the Bildungsroman as an arduous journey from inwardness into social integration is central to German fiction. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest writer, is the composer of its most influential apprenticeship novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1812). Wilhelm Meister is the son of a prosperous merchant; from childhood on, he is fascinated by the theater. A business trip taken for his father brings him into contact with a group of actors, whom he then accompanies and finances. After many difficulties, Wilhelm and his fellow actors join a famous theatrical company, which then puts on a production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (c. 1600-1601). After the public has grown weary of Shakespeare, however, the troupe stages more trivial plays and Wilhelm becomes estranged from them, finding other ways to explore his personality. He learns to become practical and to make the choices appropriate to his temperament and talents. He decides to study to become a surgeon, seeking his true self by obtaining a solid place in the community. Through Wilhelm, Goethe advocates the satisfactions of a stable social existence, of inner harmony and self-certainty. Goethe also indicates that Wilhelm will continue to doubt, seek, and err, to have great difficulty achieving mastery of his life. Critics have often been divided in their appraisals of this novel, disparaging its vague descriptions and long digressions from the central theme, but also admiring its subtleties and profundity.

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann, the foremost German fiction writer of the twentieth century, wrote several full-length novels as well as novellas that belong to the Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman genres. His greatest novel, Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927), is a deliberate renewal of the Goethean form of the novel of education and maturation. Its central character, Hans Castorp, an apparently mediocre young Hamburg engineer, visits his cousin, who is a patient in a Swiss mountain sanatorium. Hans’s visit turns into a seven-year stay when a doctor there diagnoses a tubercular infection in one of Hans’s lungs. At the end of the book he returns to the plains to enlist—it is 1914, and World War I has begun. Mann makes Castorp the representative of a generation of European middle-class persons. He is a young man in search of an education and becomes exposed to a rich variety of people and ideas. The “magic” mountain where the sanatorium is located has a dual aspect: as a realm of death, and as a possibility of rebirth. Its hermetic isolation removes it from the normal concerns of the land below, and makes it a place for enlightenment. Castorp turns out to be intellectually and morally adventurous. Mann makes the mountain a microcosm of European society, with the Voltairian rationalist Settembrini, apostle of humanism and liberalism, outnumbered by the forces of darkness and dissolution. They are represented most dangerously by Claudia Chauchat and Leo Naphta. She is a Lilith figure, a sinister temptress, while the Jesuit Naphta is the dialectical opponent of Settembrini: an advocate of absolutism, terror, warfare, and sadism. In a late chapter, “Snow,” Hans frees himself from his mentors and attains his own vision: He will understand life through his knowledge of death, health through his knowledge of disease, love through his knowledge of hatred.

In Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde (1947; Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, 1948), Mann wrote a Künstlerroman which represents in symbolic form the decline and ruin of Germany before and during the Hitler era. The composer, Adrian Leverkühn, is the Faust figure who makes his pact with the devil by having sex with a prostitute he knows to be venereally infected. By contracting syphilis and separating himself from the world of the healthy, Leverkühn becomes a great composer, gaining twenty-four years of heightened genius. He cannot love or marry, however, without disastrous consequences, and the deliberate rebarbarization of German society by the Nazi regime is paralleled in Adrian’s demoniac art and life. He holds bourgeois values in cold contempt. He ends his life after having fallen into total madness. The novel is an ambitious, complex tapestry that has awed many readers but also has discouraged a large number because of the novel’s extreme slowness in its narrative pace, its pedantic tone, and its flatness of characterization.

Far livelier is Mann’s comic masterpiece, Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull: Der Memoiren erster Teil (1954; Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years, 1955). In this novel, Mann stands the Bildungsroman on its head by linking it not only with the Künstlerroman but also with the picaresque novel. Like Wilhelm Meister, Felix is the son of a merchant who leaves his middle-class environment to roam the road, and sometimes speaks in Goethean aphoristic fashion. He is a criminal and an artist—a paradox that Mann never tired of illustrating. His thefts, masquerades, and other escapades are motivated less by greed or hunger than by the sheer joy of demonstrating his virtuosity. Mann’s parodistic approach is both deflating, showing the maculate individual behind the immaculate charm of art, and exalting, emphasizing the inspired talents of an artist behind Felix Krull’s roguery and narcissism.

The Bildungsroman in French Literature

Honoré de Balzac created about ninety interlocking novels to which he gave the comprehensive title La Comédie humaine (1829-1848; The Comedy of Human Life, 1885-1893, 1896; also The Human Comedy, 1895-1896, 1911). One of the most ambitious of these novels was a novel in three closely connected tales, Illusions perdues (1837-1843; Lost Illusions, 1893), which is a Bildungsroman and a Künstlerroman of epic proportions and encyclopedic content. It features an intelligent, ambitious, but morally weak young poet, Lucien Chardon, who changes his last name to that of his noble maternal ancestors, de Rubempré. Lucien seeks shortcuts to fame and fortune in Paris by consorting with corrupt aristocratic women and entering a sordid literary and journalistic world where success depends on bribery, flattery, forgery, and character assassination. After he has brought ruin to his family, Lucien falls under the sway of a brilliant criminal, Vautrin, who paraphrases the discourses of Satan to Christ, yet becomes the head of the Paris police.

Marcel Proust wrote one of the world’s greatest novels, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931, 1981). It is a Bildungsroman and perhaps the greatest single portrait of the artist in fiction. The narrative is related in the first person by Marcel, whose life resembles but does not wholly duplicate that of the author. The book describes how Marcel’s mind, by a progressive extension in breadth and depth, finally acquires that perception of life which distinguishes the vision of the artist from that of other people. The reader follows Marcel’s life from childhood to middle age as he awakens to his literary vocation. Proust stresses the disparity between what an artist appears to be in person and what he is in his art. Thus a prudish music master turns out to be the great musician Vinteuil, and the writer Bergotte, whose books delight the young Marcel, proves to be an awkward, ridiculous-looking man. In the novel’s course Marcel despairs of his literary talent and frequents the social world, mingling both with the bourgeoisie and high society. Yet society, friendship, love, and travel all prove disappointing. In the long novel’s last section, Marcel, after several years of solitude and poor health, decides to spend an evening in the salon of his old friend, the Princesse de Guermantes. There he experiences a series of involuntary recollections that restore to him significant events of his life. He determines to create a work of art that will unite the essences of his disparate experiences and reflect the special world of the artist’s consciousness. He decides, therefore, to write the novel that the reader has just read.

The Bildungsroman in English Literature

Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849-1850) is highly autobiographical. It is both a Bildungsroman and a Künstlerroman. As in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the plot is frequently burdened with incidents that have no direct relation to David’s story. Yet the work succeeds as a journey toward maturation, with David surviving loneliness and cruel exploitation in childhood, misplaced loyalties in some of his friendships, the early deaths of his parents, and marriage to Dora, a childish, shallow woman. After Dora’s death, he has the good sense and luck to marry a suitably understanding woman and prepares to become, like his creator, a novelist. While David’s placidity and calm make him an unlikely candidate for the role of artist, Dickens does stress his love of reading and storytelling, his gift for close observation, and his ability to withdraw into the shelter of his strong imagination.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) wrote, in The Way of All Flesh (1903), a hymn of hatred for Victorian Christianity and for the Victorian bourgeois family, bitterly attacking their shams and false sanctities. The book is so overtly autobiographical that it employs letters written by Butler’s relatives, and establishes the pattern of parent-son conflicts that was to be followed in such Bildungsromane as D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1915). Butler’s novel covers four generations of the Pontifex family. In the first three, overbearing fathers beat and bully their children and force them to become clergymen or be disinherited. Ernest Pontifex, Butler’s hero and alter ego, is a pathetic failure much of his life. He does poorly at school and then as a minister, being physically weak and mentally morose. Extremely naïve, he entrusts his grandfatherly inheritance to a false friend who cheats him of it, becomes innocently entangled in legal snares, is disowned by his father, and marries out of mistaken kindness a former family maid who is an alcoholic. At last Ernest’s luck changes: His wife is exposed as a bigamist, a wealthy aunt leaves him her fortune, and he is then content to lead a bachelor life, writing, painting, and reflecting upon the world’s follies. Butler’s work is a brilliant, embittered attack on the cant and cruelty of conventional bourgeois life.

Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers as a highly autobiographical Bildungsroman. Paul Morel, the protagonist, is the youngest son of a mother, Gertrude, who has married beneath her station as a schoolteacher. She is married to a miner who declines into alcoholism and brutality. In her disillusionment, Gertrude turns to her children, particularly Paul, who is shy and sensitive and loves to read and paint. Their mutual devotion becomes intensely Oedipal, with Gertrude seeking to plan Paul’s life and fulfill her fantasies through him. As a young man Paul tries to escape his mother’s domination through two relationships with women. One is with the possessive Miriam, whose intellectual interests he shares, but whom he cannot enjoy physically; and another is with independent Clara, separated from her husband, who is emancipated and sensual. While Miriam trespasses on his mother’s ground by demanding a wholly committed love, Clara offers Paul sexual bliss but remains emotionally unreachable. Paul reunites Clara with her husband, helps his cancer-stricken mother end her pain with an overdose of morphine, and says farewell to Miriam. He has freed himself for an autonomous new life.

Joyce composed what may be the most influential of English Künstlerromane, his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The book traces the education into young manhood and recognition of his calling as an artist of sensitive, brilliant, proud, and shy Stephen Dedalus, whose life is close to a literal transcript of Joyce’s first twenty-two years. The work’s early chapters relate Stephen’s unrelievedly sad childhood, with the first few pages superbly presenting a continuum of the infant’s tastes, smells, sights, and sounds. Soon Stephen begins to associate his feelings with phrases and show other literary interests. At Clongowes Wood College, then at University College in Dublin, Stephen is subjected to public humiliations by bullying teachers, only to assert his contempt for received authority and demand justice for himself. For a while he is tempted to join the Jesuit order, but then dedicates himself to a wholly different priesthood—that of literature. Eventually he frees himself from his declining family, Catholicism, and even his native country, using the strategies of silence, exile, and cunning. Stephen’s last name refers to Daedalus, a mythical Athenian craftsman who made wings for himself and his son in order to escape a prison. The name symbolizes the artist with his aloofness from society, total absorption with his craft, and escape. These traits are Stephen’s, and Joyce’s. With this novel, the archetype of the artist figure became firmly established for modern literature in English.

The Bildungsroman in American Literature

In 1899, Kate Chopin published The Awakening, which was largely neglected until the 1970’s, when feminist critics began to reevaluate it as a Bildungsroman about a courageous woman’s rebellion against a tedious, self-important, and selfish husband. The novel has gained a prominent place on the syllabi of many American fiction courses. The heroine, Edna Pontellier, awakens to her identity during a summer vacation spent with her two children and a stockbroker husband who joins the family on weekends. Tired of his cold self-centeredness after eight years of matrimony, she spends time with her landlady’s handsome son, Robert, and turns seriously to what used to be only a hobby, painting. When her husband leaves on a long business trip, Edna sends the children away to their grandmother, moves into a cottage by herself, works hard at her painting, and takes Robert as her lover. When he leaves after a few weeks, she revisits the site of their first meeting and from there swims to her death in the sea. It is no wonder that the book’s contemporary reviewers were shocked, charging the author with immorality, even though most of them admitted that the novel was engrossingly written in an intense, vivid style. Chopin’s heroine, who was ahead of her time, has been welcomed by many readers as a bold, sensual, and imaginative nonconformist.

Willa Cather reviewed The Awakening disparagingly, declaring that the failure of romantic love had already been definitively explored by Gustave Flaubert. In a reference to Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886) Cather wrote that the world could do without a “Creole Bovary.” In The Song of the Lark (1915) Cather wrote a Künstlerroman, creating a protagonist who, unlike Chopin’s, is not caught in a conflict between her feminine and artistic needs. Cather’s Thea Kronborg is as single-minded in her devotion to singing as Cather was to her writing. Born in a Colorado small town, Thea ends up as a Metropolitan Opera star. On her way a number of men become her mentors and benefactors. The family doctor encourages her; a piano teacher, symbolically named Wunsch (German for “desire”), assures her that she can achieve her fervent ambition; in Chicago, her voice teacher tells her she is, should she work hard enough, destined for greatness; and a rich St. Louis beer brewer, Fred, helps her financially and by betraying her. He entices her to Mexico for an affair, only to have Thea discover that he cannot marry her because he already has a wife. Thereafter she never again commits herself to a man, emphatically rejecting bourgeois benedictions for her art. In Cather’s preface to a later edition of this novel she notes that she regretted having allowed her publisher to use “lark” in the book’s title: Thea was more aptly to be called an eagle—willful, wild, powerful, and soaring to great heights. In the work’s last section Thea triumphs as a singer, but at the cost of having become cold, hard, and unapproachably self-sufficient. Like Stephen Dedalus, she has sacrificed friends, family, and love on the altar of Almighty Art.

Thomas Wolfe drew virtually no distinction between his life and his art, so that his four enormous novels can be considered a single autobiographic Bildungsroman or Künstlerroman. The first, Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (1929), deals with the childhood, youth, and early manhood of Eugene Gant, the name Wolfe gave his fictive self. Eugene is born in a small town in North Carolina and is descended from hill people. His parents are cruelly mismatched: The mother, Eliza, lusts for property and acquires land until she is wealthy, meanwhile nursing every penny. The father, Oliver, a stonecutter who cannot abide his wife’s stinginess, is alcoholic and promiscuous but also wildly generous and lyrical; his cancerous condition forces him to return to Eliza after they have lived in separate houses for years. Eugene resembles his father in his strong imagination and appetite for life. At home he is taunted by siblings envious of his brilliance. His older brother Ben, the noblest of the Gants, is the only one who does not tease Eugene. Ben succumbs to pneumonia, probably because his mother fails to seek out a competent physician in time. Eugene’s prospects brighten when he is permitted to attend a private school, where the principal’s wife encourages his love of literature. At fifteen, he enrolls in the state university (Wolfe was a precocious student at Chapel Hill). After graduation, Eugene prepares to move north to attend graduate school, but first he is forced by his brothers and sister to sign a document forswearing his family inheritance, since they insist he has received its equivalent in school and college costs. Relieved to put his largely unhappy Southern upbringing behind him, Eugene sets out for northern adventures, to be chronicled in Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth (1935). Wolfe’s last two, posthumously published novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), revisit the terrain of his first two, with the hero’s name changed to George Webber.

William Faulkner wrote the great novelette “The Bear” as part of a collection of tales published under the title Go Down, Moses (1942). Its protagonist is Isaac “Ike” McCaslin, and his age in the work varies from ten to young adulthood. Ike is taught a love for the wilderness, humility, patience, and self-reliance by Sam Fathers, son of an Indian chief. He acquires other qualities on his own. The quarry of the hunters is an immense, seemingly immortal bear, Big Ben, who has become legendary. The annual hunt for him is a near-sacred ritual presided over by Sam as priest of the wilderness. Sam traps and tames an initially wild great mongrel dog, Lion. When the bear appears to the hunters, neither Sam nor Ike are eager to kill it. One year Lion manages to stop Old Ben for a few seconds, but the bear escapes. The next year Lion jumps and clings to Old Ben’s throat while one of the hunters plunges a knife into the bear’s heart. With Old Ben’s death, Sam collapses. The next day he and Lion die.

In the fourth part of “The Bear,” Ike is twenty-one, the last living descendent of his male line and expected to take possession of his family’s plantation. Instead, he renounces his inheritance. He gives two reasons: Nature belongs to all humanity, so no individual can own it. Second, he feels guilty for having descended from a line of slaveholders. In a long talk with his cousin Cass, Ike insists that white men settling America brought with them the curse of slavery, thereby repeating Adam’s Original Sin. Moreover, Ike has discovered a shameful heritage: His grandfather not only begot a daughter with one of his slaves, that grandfather had also committed incest with that daughter. He seeks to expiate this ancestral sin by leading a simple life, even buying carpenter’s tools to emulate Jesus. His marriage breaks up when his wife cannot persuade him to accept his inheritance. Sadly, Ike comes to realize that, with lumber companies felling timber, an irreparable divorce has occurred between humankind and nature.

Saul Bellow wrote a Bildungsroman that is also a picaresque novel in The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Augie is a Chicago-born Jewish youth who calls himself self-taught and free-styled. Bellow bounces the episodic, haphazard action of the book from Chicago to Mexico to Manhattan to an Atlantic voyage to France, as Augie quests for his true vocation and love. He finds neither, but he does make devoted friends and maintains a continued enthusiasm for existence. Augie is complex: He has the driving energy of a Ulysses but also the passive enervation of an Orpheus. His family, girlfriends, and employers often succeed in manipulating him but never in confining him. Above all he is Proteus, sliding away from full commitments, assuming varying guises, never sure of what he really wants and who he really is. In a revealing episode, Augie and his lover Thea travel to Mexico to train their captive American bald eagle to capture gigantic iguanas. The bird proves reluctant: Bitten by a small iguana, it pulls back; attacked by a large one, it retreats altogether. Augie applauds the eagle’s cowardice; Thea is furious. Their relationship sunders, and Augie moves on, headlong and restless, insisting on a life untrammeled by theories.

In a pluralistic and fragmented world, a stable reality is often impossible to secure; a rootless spirit such as Augie March seems far more representative. The protagonists of many twentieth century novels often find themselves compelled to question and to reject the beliefs they inherit or experience. Even in a world that is often absurd and disordered, however, writers still compose Bildungsromane that show an individual’s self-discovery and maturation.

Bibliography

Alden, Patricia. Social Mobility in the English Bildungsroman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986. Treats the social and political views expressed in the fiction of George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, and D. H. Lawrence. A solid, scholarly account.

Beebe, Maurice. Ivory Towers and Sacred Faunts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce. New York: New York University Press, 1964. Concentrates on Künstlerromane as well as short stories dealing with the artist by Goethe, Mann, Balzac, Flaubert, James, Lawrence, Joyce and a number of others.

Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. A leading authority on Victorian literature, Buckley writes with learning and grace.

Harper, Margaret Mills. The Aristocracy of Art in Joyce and Wolfe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Compares the autobiographical fiction of Joyce and Wolfe to each other’s work and to each other’s lives.

Lemon, Lee T. Portraits of the Artist in Contemporary Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. Lemon’s governing thesis is that, between the generation of Joyce and that of John Fowles, the fictional portrait of the artist changed from that of an isolated hero contemptuous of the ordinary world to that of an ordinary human being trying to connect with nonartists who are equally important. The writers Lemon studies are Lawrence Durrell, Doris Lessing, and John Fowles, all British, the Australian Patrick White, and the American John Barth.