Wilhelm Meister and Hamlet, Identity and Difference

R. ELLIS DYE Wilhelm Meister and Hamlet, Identity and Difference Challenging a common view that Wilhelm Meister identifies with Hamlet, Mark Bonds remarks, "Ähnlichkeit darf nicht mit Identifizierung verwechselt werden."1 Nor identification with identity, one might add. There is a difference between identity and similarity of any kind — a difference consisting in the presence of difference in any set of similars.2 Identification too implies difference. Attired in the Count's own dressing-gown and sitting in his favorite chair, Wilhelm looks like the Count and will be mistaken for him by the pretty young Countess — or such, at least, is the plan. As it turns out, the similarity is so great, the illusion so perfect, as to make the unexpectedly returning Count think he sees himself. Wilhelm and the Count constitute an identity. Wilhelm identifies with the Count, however, only in the sense that, at a psychological level just below full consciousness, he would like to take his place in a more intimate and more permanent way. The Baroness suspects that the Countess might welcome Wilhelm in place of her aging and unromantic husband, which is why she thinks up the prank in the first place. Wilhelm's difference from the Count is what makes the prospect of his standing in so delicious. My subject in this essay will be Wilhelm Meister's identification with Hamlet as one move in a complex game of identity and difference played out in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (and, as it happened, in the history of its reception), as its protagonist errs along the road to self-knowledge and an affirmation of life. I will claim that Wilhelm's encounter with Hamlet is but one among other encounters with otherness, while the very categories of self and Other, identity and difference, are both used and questioned, thus employed ironically throughout the narrative. As everyone knows, Wilhelm views Hamlet as a tragedy brought about when a great deed is demanded of a soul unequal to it. Hamlet is like a precious vase that should have been reserved for lovely flowers but in which an oak tree has been planted instead. The roots spread and the vessel is destroyed (246). Whatever the much debated merit of this characterization and of Wilhelm's enactment of the role of Hamlet, which elicits Jarno's brutal judgment that Wilhelm is no actor because 68 R. Ellis Dye in playing Hamlet he was only playing himself (550-51), his struggle with Hamlet is an episode in the articulation of Wilhelm's identity and selfhood. The very idea of personal identity, however, is foregrounded as a useful but insufficient conceptual device. I We are told already in the Theatralische Sendung that Wilhelm does identify with Hamlet, even to the point of becoming melancholy in his own life,3 and there are hints that the reader is to accept this identification as well, such as the name of Wilhelm's fencing partner — Laertes. Wilhelm's identification with Hamlet shows his aptitude for the role he is to play on the stage, just as his understanding of the master's tragedy suggests his promise, as Shakespeare's ephebe, for his theatrical mission in life. But authorial intention is always affected by the discourse in which it is realized.4 The attribution of the passages on Hamlet to a fictional character affect their status and value from the very beginning, a status and value that change when the character himself is recast and resituated in the different fictional context of the later work. The displacement of the Hamlet criticism from the Theatralische Sendung into the Lehrjahre is its first reception — by a reader and author no longer identical to the author of the Sendung. Among the questions ignored by those who take Wilhelm's views simply to be Goethe's own are why even the author of the Sendung chose to assign them to the hero of a work of fiction; how their meaning is affected by this choice; and what the consequences of their later displacement into a narrative governed by irony might be.5 "Nichts weiter über Hamlets Charakter," said A.W. Schlegel, "nach dem was Wilhelm Meister...