Apprenticeship of the Novel: The Bildungsroman and the Invention of History, ca. 1770–1820

At the end of the seventh volume of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96) [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship], Wilhelm finally gains access to the inner sanctuary of the Society of the Tower, the mysterious Masonic lodge that has been clandestinely guiding his development. Inside the Tower’s padded walls, he discovers a complex bureaucratic surveillance apparatus: a vast collection of scrolls recording the story of his own life as well as those of many of the other characters whom he has encountered over the course of the novel. Biographies that meet the Society’s approval are matched with a second scroll containing a Lehrbrief [certificate of apprenticeship]. The discovery of this archival repository sheds a new light on the almost manic impulse towards autobiographical writing that so clearly marks Goethe’s characters. The numerous letters, diary entries, confessions, and late-night conversations through which Wilhelm and his companions expose their lives to one another’s scrutiny are revealed as an indirect product of the Society’s disciplining influence.¹ In both outward appearance and in function, the Masonic Tower thus emerges as a perfect mirror of the Benthamite Panopticon, the structure that Michel Foucault identified as an architectural metaphor for the creation of modern subjectivity through the internalization of discursive power.²

But an important organizational difference distinguishes the Tower archive from the way in which the autobiographical reminiscences are arranged throughout the rest of Goethe’s novel. The relationship between Wilhelm’s Bildung and the numerous autobiographical insets that interrupt it can perhaps best be described as one of narrative hypotaxis: the insets are subordinated in both form and content to the overriding imperative of the protagonist’s socialization and self-discovery. Even the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”—a functionally complete novella embedded within the novel—serves the ultimate purpose of advancing Wilhelm’s development. The Tower archive, on the other hand, reorganizes these narratives into a paratactic system. Wilhelm discovers “mit Erstaunen” [to his amazement] that previously subordinate characters, such as Jarno and Lothario, are given scrolls of their own in the Society library, and that they possess Lehrjahre that are outwardly indistinguishable from his.³ The very barrenness of the initiation chamber already indicates its multi-functionality. Other characters have previously passed through it, and yet others will follow after Wilhelm.

The Tower archive, in other words, replaces the laws of poetic necessity with the imaginative possibilities implied by mere spatiotemporal contiguity. The logic of story, according to which individual plots must obey gradations of significance, yields to the logic of history, in which every character is the protagonist of his or her own life. Wilhelm’s entry into the Tower thus signals the end not only of his own apprenticeship, but also of that of the novel, a rite of passage by which it assumes the mature form that will characterize it throughout the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault draws attention to the fact that the transition from punitive to disciplinary societies will inevitably produce new literary forms: “If from the early Middle Ages to the present day the ‘adventure’ is an account of individuality, the passage from the epic to the novel, from the noble deed to the secret singularity, from long exiles to the internal search for childhood, from combats to phantasies, it is also inscribed in the formation of disciplinary societies” (193). The process (only hinted at in Goethe’s novel) by which a character leaves behind the merely structural functions that he or she performs in one narrative and acquires an independent existence as the protagonist of another finds its fullest expression in Honoré de Balzac’s Human Comedy—that vast repository of stories through which, as Oscar Wilde once quipped, the nineteenth century was invented.⁴

Historical Philosophy and the Rise of the Novel

More than mere wordplay is at stake in this opposition between “story” and “history.” In German, as in the romance languages, a single noun [die Geschichte] covers both of these concepts, a fact...