Poetry and/or Truth: An Essay on the Confessional Imagination

EUGENE L. STELZIG Poetry and/or Truth: An Essay on the Confessional Imagination Gestandnis und Luge ist das Gleiche. Urn gestehen zu konnen, lugt man. (Franz Kafka) [Confession and the lie are one and the same. In order to be able to confess, one tells lies.]l I The German critic Friedrich Schlegel signalled towards the close of the eighteenth century the subjective character of much Romantic literature with the observation that {the modern poet must create all things from within himself ... each poet separately and each work from its very beginning, like a creation out of nothing.' Yet the Romantic work is not necessarily a production ex nihilo; unlike {ancient poetry' it is {based entirely on a historical foundation,' for it has 'a true story at its source, even if variously reshaped.'2 Much Romantic and post-Romantic literature aims for a definition of the self in historical terms, as a process of becoming.3 This process has been enacted in literary form since the Romantics through autobiography as well as fiction, with confessional fiction forming a prominent and problematic middle term. Modern autobiography first found its self-referential voice in the self-serving Confessions of Rousseau (1782-9), and the self-advertising adventures of the letter 'I' have held a centre-stage position in much writing since 1800. Indeed, what Schlegel observed about the relationship between writers of fiction and their works seems to hold substantially true nearly two hundred years later: 'What is best in the best novels is nothing but a more or less veiled confession of the author.'4 With the rise of Romanticism in the later eighteenth century, the drive to literary confession was able to find an outlet through a variety of established forms which itcould make over oradapt to meetits formal and psychological requirements. In each case a distinctive new type or subspecies was likely to emerge. As Roy Pascal has concluded, the great age of autobiography is the' late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth: the 'search for the true self' is the new element in Rousseau's Confessions; in Goethe's Poetry and Truth it is the sense that being IS UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 1, FALL 1984 18 EUGENE L. STELZIG becoming.5 For Karl Weintraub, 'the full convergence of all the factors constituting this modern view of the self occurred only at the end of the eighteenth century,' as manifest in Goethe's autobiography.6 The Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman are closely allied forms that represent Romantic refashionings ofthe novel, and whose modern prototypes are to be found in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister volumes and The Sufferings ofYoung Werther respectively. Jerome Buckley has underscored the fact that the Bildungsroman draws extensively on autobiographical material turned into fiction, as the examples of Joyce's Portrait ofthe Artist as aYoung Man or Lawrence's Sons and Lovers - amalgams of the education and the artist novel- will attest.7 And in poetry, the Romantic turn to the lyric allowed for an intense overflowing ofpowerful feelings, evidentin the prolific lyrical production of the early Goethe and Wordsworth. The long poem too in the Romantic age and beyond came readily to serve as a vehicle for the direct or veiled self-exploration of inward-gazing writers, as can be seen in such otherwise different works as Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Shelley's Alastor, Wordsworth's Prelude, Novalis's Hymns to Night, Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre - all of them highly subjective tentatives of the confessional imagination. Then too the essay, or essayistic prose - not to mention the letter, diary, and journal- could easily be put to the uses of a new-found inwardness, as in France in Rousseau's Reveries du promeneur solitaire and in England in the form of the familiar or personal essay in leading men of letters like De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Lamb. Last and probably least successfully, Romantic drama too could take upon itself the burden of disguised autobiography, as is apparent in different ways in Goethe's Faust, Byron's Manfred, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, mythic cosmodramas that soar beyond the limitations of the stage, and in which the extended dramatic monologues...