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

No less undead than the vampires and zombies that burden late-capitalist popular culture, the Bildungsroman can always be counted on to rise again. Even so, the number of English-language academic books with “Bildungsroman” in their titles that have appeared over the past decade is remarkable—something like twelve, by my count. German departments may be struggling to survive in American universities, but this famous German genre-term appears to be attracting more investors than ever, with no downturn in sight—even though under scrutiny the critical profit margin tends to be slender at best. It is hard to say anything new about anything, but perhaps especially about the Bildungsroman. A ritual has evolved: at the beginning of her or his study the critic will offer a potted summary of the idea of Bildung and of some of the problems involved in defining a Bildungsroman; will then affirm the usefulness of the term “Bildungsroman” despite the problems it raises; then, propitiative rite satisfied, will go on with nary a look back to examine novels from whatever archive is being targeted (a couple of these recent books focus on the German tradition, but most have other interests: British modernist novels, African novels, Russian novels, postcolonial narrative, contemporary ethnic American women’s fiction). That little two-step shuffle conveys a twinge of conscience and a desire. Assuming they have read even modestly in the field, critics know that the idea of the Bildungsroman comes loaded with complications . . . but they want it anyway. It conveys an aesthetic purposiveness and integrity that terms like “novel of education” can’t match. For all the affirmations of heterogeneity and otherness; for all the denunciations of “idealist aesthetics” or “romantic ideology,” our profession reserves a special place in its heart for the Bildungsroman.

Tobias Boes writes as a comparatist and Germanist with a genuine knowledge of the field, and his book offers a good example of some of the difficulties and temptations that arise when one tries to say something new and affirmative about the Bildungsroman. Boes has a promising thesis: he suggests that although “the Bildungsroman is a genre connected more than any other to the rise of modern nationalism,” the novels making up this genre produce “a remainder” that “resists nationalism’s aim for closure,” even as they seek to give national form to a character’s individual trajectory. “These remainders are the novels’ cosmopolitan elements” (3). Boes associates this cosmopolitan remainder with “asynchronicity” (the reference here is to Bloch and Benjamin), and he draws on writings by Homi Bhabha to conceive of a “vernacular cosmopolitanism” that would not simply be a higher transcendental unity, but would rather enact trans-national border crossings arising out of quotidian local practices. Boes intends his approach to chart a middle way between, on the one hand, national essentialism (the Bildungsroman as a particular German form), and, on the other, empty universalism (the Bildungsroman as any narrative of development, meaning practically any novel).

Formative Fictions has three divisions. Its first includes the requisite chapter on Bildungsroman theory, followed by the requisite chapter on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96). Boes reads the Society of the Tower in Goethe’s novel both as a proleptic figure for abstract national identity (everyone, not just Wilhelm, has a scroll in the archive), and as an asynchronous complication of this space (the proliferating family and marital ties at the end of the novel point back to the ancien régime; yet the Tower’s new international orientation points forward, foreshadowing what Boes nicely calls a “global risk management system” [68]). The second division consists of three chapters that compare a German novel to a novel from a different European tradition. The pairings are not always obvious, as Boes admits. Chapter 3 pairs Karl Immermann’s now quite obscure novel Die Epigonen (1836) with Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1830); the point is to compare two efforts to “possess the past” in the...