Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman by Tobias Boes (review)

Tobias Boes, who received his training in comparative literature but who now teaches in a national literature department, combines the best of these two scholarly worlds in Formative Factions. In his introduction and first chapter on “The Limits of National Form: Normativity and Performativity in Bildungsroman criticism,” Boes argues that while the Bildungsroman is a genre that has been linked with modern nationalism since the term’s first employment by Karl Morgenstern in the second decade of the nineteenth century, in each of the novels that he will be discussing there are significant elements that resist the harmonious union of the individual and what came to be known as the nation-state; these remainders are what Boes calls the “cosmopolitan” aspects of the Bildungsroman. Not surprisingly, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96) and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) are at the beginning and end points of Boes’s study. What distinguish Formative Fictions from the many previous treatments of “the Bildungsroman from Goethe to Thomas Mann” are, firstly, the interpretation of these two novels in the context of the rise and crisis of historicism, and secondly, the three intervening chapters that compare and contrast German novels written with an awareness of Wilhelm Meister—Immermann’s The Epigones (1836), Freytag’s Debit and Credit (1855) and Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)—with roughly contemporary novels from the French, English, and Irish traditions that also display cosmopolitan remainders.

Comparing Immermann’s Epigones with Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830), Boes observes that both novels are dealing with the clash of generations and memories in post-Napoleonic Europe. In The Red and the Black, “Stendhal achieves the illusion of a unified world, even while he simultaneously challenges the reader to recognize that there are different ways of interpreting it” (88). Immermann’s sugarcoated ending to his novel, by contrast, creates family relationships in order to bring fictive unity to a geographically and ideologically divided Germany. Here we witness Boes’s skillful use of Benedict Anderson’s notion of nationalism as an “imagined community.” At the same time, the different narrative trajectories taken by Stendhal and Immermann point to the need to consider specific national circumstances when writing literary history.

The next pairing of novels—Freytag’s Debit and Credit and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876)—may appear surprising, given the explicit antisemitism of Freytag’s once immensely popular tale as compared with Eliot’s philosemitism and proto-Zionism. Here, though, Boes is interested in exploring another aspect of what he calls the “performative” dimension of the Bildungsroman, namely how the self-understanding of the main characters affects not only their development and immediate surroundings, but also the reader as well. Freytag’s and Eliot’s pairing of a socially rooted protagonist with a more mercurial and unsettled Jewish counterpart highlights ethnic and also geographical differences in the modern Imperial state that pose a challenge to liberal nationalism. Whereas Freytag sees nationalism and Judaism as antithetical categories, “Deronda emerges as a powerful figurehead for a rejuvenated nationalism, but Eliot’s titular protagonist is also an aristocratic, cosmopolitan Jew. The great accomplishment of Daniel Deronda is that it shows that none of these terms excludes any of the others” (121). Boes also observes, however, that the exoticism in which Daniel Deronda is cloaked at the end of Eliot’s novel, written during the peak years of the British Empire, as he embarks on his journey to the East removes any potential challenge to a Gentile readership.

In the chapter entitled “Urban Vernaculars”—which compares Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz with two other modernist classics, namely Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) and Ulysses (1922)—Boes explores how Joyce and Döblin bring imperialism’s “synchronicity of the non-synchronous” (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen—a concept by Ernst Bloch used repeatedly throughout this study) back home to...