A Symbolic-Mystic Monstrosity: Ideology and Representation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

In a short excursus in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), Jürgen Habermas points to a letter in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796) as an example of the end of feudal, rank-based representation (repräsentative Öffentlichkeit) and of the beginning of a new, bourgeois public sphere. In the letter, the novel’s protagonist Wilhelm Meister explains to his friend Werner the reasons for his ambition to become an actor. In the theater he believes he will find satisfaction for his penchant for poetry and education of the spirit: “Du siehst wohl,” Wilhelm writes, “daß das alles für mich nur auf dem Theater zu finden ist, und daß ich mich in diesem einzigen Elemente nach Wunsch rühren und ausbilden kann” (291).¹

The world of theater, Habermas argues in his study, is a world of the aristocracy, which he identifies with “Öffentlichkeit in ihrer repräsentativen Gestalt.” This admiration of the aristocracy, however, is only a pretense for the introduction of the ideals of the bourgeoisie: “In unserem Zusammenhang,” Habermas continues, “ist Goethes Beobachtung wichtig, daß das Bürgertum nicht mehr repräsentieren, sich von Haus aus eine repräsentative Öffentlichkeit nicht mehr erwirken kann.” Wilhelm’s ambition to become an actor, he concludes, must fail, since the spectators, members of the upcoming bourgeoisie, are bearers of this new form of public life, which differs from the outdated representative form of personal display, embodied by the theater.² Habermas’ ambition, then, is to show how a new division between public and private is born with the modern, bourgeois society. This revolution in the social display of the body constitutes a revolution in our representation of social and political identity.

My ambition is to examine the ideology of aesthetic representation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Rather than examining the political representation, the following discussion will focus on the politics of representation or representation as ideology. Goethe’s novel on the education of Wilhelm Meister, I suggest, constitutes one standpoint in a still ongoing debate on the nature of aesthetics and of representation, a debate which since the Renaissance has gone by the name paragone. In the paragone, W. J. T. Mitchell demonstrates in his influential study Iconology (1986), iconoclasm stands against iconophilia and the conventional sign stands against the natural. This exceedingly ideological conflict, he insists, “is never just a contest between two kinds of signs, but a struggle between body and soul, world and mind, nature and culture.” Nevertheless, the natural sign, the indivisible unity of signifier and signified, has according to Mitchell a unique and phantasmal position in Western culture as its fundamental “fetish or idol.”³

My intention, then, is to study how Goethe’s novel reflects the paragone and the desire for the natural sign in the representation of the theater and of imagery in the narration. Vis-à-vis representation the novel displays an ideological double bind, which Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981) defines as

the unthinkable and the conceptually paradoxical, that which cannot be unknotted by the operation of pure thought, and which must therefore generate a whole more properly narrative apparatus—the text itself—to square its circles and to dispel, through narrative movement, its intolerable closure.⁴

We will see that Goethe’s struggle with the nature of representation and his endeavor to form a naturally constituted sign inevitably is intertwined with the historical socioeconomic presuppositions, namely, the rise of a capitalist attitude towards the work of art. The formation of a natural sign, I intend to show, results in a fetishistic conception of the sign whose omnipotence Goethe is unable to evade.

Like most of Goethe’s important works, Wilhelm Meister required a considerable amount of time to complete, nineteen years to be precise. The name “Wilhelm Meister” is first mentioned as early as in 1777, in an entry in Goethe’s diary.⁵ A more intensive phase in the conception of the novel took place between 1782 and 1785. During this period Goethe wrote the first six books of a novel, which he at that time...