by Steven Moore
With its unconventional characters, relaxed realism, and smooth synthesis of pop fiction and aesthetic treatise, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was a triumphant success, and established the mode that would be followed by the great novelists of the 19th century. (The works of Dickens, Eliot, Stendhal, et al., have more in common with this novel than with those of Richardson, Fielding, Diderot, and other great novelists of the 18th century.) Goethe makes full use of the advantages a novel has over a play—the subject of a discussion between Wilhelm and his director (5.7)—namely, its slower pace, the privileging of sentiments over action (as they put it), and its elastic form. It’s not flawless: that same elasticity encouraged Goethe to devote the entire book 6 to a novella called Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, a tedious tale of religious mania of only tangential relevance to the rest of the novel, mainly as an outdated sacred version of Wilhelm’s secular quest. (Talk about your prefabricated forms for living! Confessions is reminiscent of La Roche’s pietist novel, though nobody is stripped.) Also, the narrator too often makes redundant observations like “And every day he was expanding the range of his ideas which had for so long been limited to a very narrow sphere” (4.17), too reminiscent of the lowbrow Erziehungsroman (educational novel) that enjoyed a fad at that time.109 While the Apprenticeship has never been as popular as the more sensational Werther, it’s a more mature work, and (for those who look for them) it sends a more mature message: “Remember to live” (8.5).
Like Nicolai’s Sebaldus Nothanker, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is set during the Seven Years’ War. In 1794, Goethe interrupted work on it to address the French Revolution in a short novel entitled Conversations of German Refugees (Die Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, 1794–95), an ingenious fiction about the socializing effects of ingenious fiction. In the fall of 1792, an aristocratic German family is forced to leave its home west of the Rhine for a smaller one on the east side of the river, driven there by invading French soldiers (responding to German threats of invasion if they harmed the French royal family). Naturally distraught, a few of them snap at each other, for, as the Baroness remarks, “times of general confusion and distress showed more clearly than any other how badly brought-up most people are” (17). Self-control and renunciation, she argues, are even more important in times of stress than in normal times. The Abbé, a friend of the family, agrees and suggests they tell stories to calm down, which recalls the frame of Boccaccio’s Decameron, a similar case of opposing disorder with fiction (though the Renaissance story-cycle Goethe had in mind was the 15th-century French collection Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, one of whose stories the Abbé retells).
As though recapitulating the history of narrative, the Abbé begins with simple, true-life anecdotes and concludes with a complex, allegorical fairy tale. The early stories mix the supernatural with elements of illicit sex—lowbrow entertainment—but as they progress, the stories become more literary and dramatize the benefits of self-control and renunciation, lessons that the distressed refugees gradually realize apply to themselves. Like the Apprenticeship, Conversations is a critifiction due to its many discussions of fiction: each story is critiqued by the listeners, who also discuss their literary likes and dislikes. The Abbé narrates most of these stories off the top of his head—the Baroness’s hotheaded son Karl narrates (poorly) two others—but he asks for extra time to prepare the final story after Karl requests a fairy tale, which the Abbé cannily crafts specifically for his audience.
The 20-page Märchen that concludes the 90-page novella is too complex to summarize, but what emerges from this imaginative tale of genial will-o’-the-wisps, a self-sacrificing snake, a dumb giant, and a beautiful maiden with lethal eyes is another lesson in the self-control and communal effort necessary for a stable society, applicable both to the German refugees and to the European nations leading the War of the First Coalition in response to the French Revolution. Significantly, Conversations ends without returning to the frame. The Abbé has been teaching his listeners (and us, his readers) how to interpret fiction; the fairy tale is our final exam to see if we’ve learned our lessons in both civilized behavior and critical reading. Goethe took a risk by ending with a fairy tale, for he “is not proposing simple escapism from the real world,” as Jane Brown cautions (20); rather, he is proposing that quality literature teaches us how to live in the real world. Because of its eccentric form, Conversations of German Refugees is the least known of Goethe’s novels, but it’s a brilliant demonstration of both his literary powers and of his conception of the proper role of literature in society.110
Goethe was a great admirer of a novel published in four installments from 1785 to 1790 entitled Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel by Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93). Reading the first three installments in 1786, Goethe apparently not only revised Werther under its influence but also reconceptualized Wilhelm Meister, for Moritz’s protagonist shares Werther’s self-destructive neuroses and Wilhelm’s misguided theatrical calling. But more than Goethe, more than any novelist of the time, Moritz delves into his protagonist’s first few years to show how one’s earliest experiences can determine the rest of one’s life.
As the novel’s unprecedented subtitle suggests, Anton Reiser reads like a case study written by a psychologist who combines objective reporting with evaluative remarks, occasionally making an unprofessional sarcastic aside. (Moritz founded the Magazine for Empirical Psychology around the same time he began writing the novel.) He begins with an account of the religious cult his parents belonged to, supporting Richard Dawkins’s charge (in The God Delusion) that early religious indoctrination is a form of child abuse. Living in poverty, Anton’s parents seek in self-obliterating Quietism an escape from their miserable lives, as their son will later do with literature. Anton, the narrator reports, “was oppressed from his cradle onwards:
The first sounds that met his ear and were understood by his dawning intellect were the mutual curses and objurgations of the indissoluble marital bond.
Although he had a father and mother, he was forsaken even in his earliest youth by both father and mother, for he did not know to which of them he should turn, to whom he should be attached, since they hated each other and yet were equally close to him.
In his earliest youth he never tasted the caresses of fond parents, was never rewarded after some small effort by a smile.
When he entered his parents’ house, he entered a house of discontentment, anger, tears, and complaints.
These first impressions have never been erased from his soul, and have often filled it with black thoughts that no philosophy could drive away.111
“These first impressions” determine the rest of his life, a hard-luck story that breaks off when Anton is about 20. He tries to compensate for this early neglect with dreams of becoming either a preacher, an orator, an actor, or an author—anything that will win him the attention his parents denied him. He has nothing in particular to say, as the narrator often remarks during his account of Anton’s failed attempts to achieve any of these goals, just a childish need for people to applaud him for saying it. Unlike the similar protagonists of Butler’s Way of All Flesh and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, Anton doesn’t triumph over his religious upbringing and childhood humiliations.
Part 1 of the novel records a number of seemingly insignificant anecdotes that account for Anton’s feelings of neglect, self-contempt, victimhood (he’s often unjustly accused of misdemeanors), and crippling lack of confidence, which, along with his poverty, perpetual outsider status, religious guilt over his inability “to lead a truly godly and pious life” (106), and general geekiness doom him to a frustrating life that is painful to read. Aware that most novelists skip over these early details, Moritz defends them in his preface to part 2 as an important step in the genre’s pursuit of greater realism: “Anyone who values such a faithful portrayal will not be offended by what initially seems trivial and insignificant, but will bear in mind that the intricate texture of a human life consists of
an infinite number of trifles, all of which assume great importance when interwoven, however insignificant they may seem in themselves” (87). With psychological acuity, the narrator will note how a seemingly insignificant trifle like Anton’s accidentally tearing a page in his headmaster’s book by turning it too quickly becomes “the principal source of all the sufferings that henceforth awaited Reiser in his school years; they resulted chiefly from the low opinion of the headmaster, whose approval, which mattered so much to him, Reiser had forfeited by turning over the page too quickly” (132). (The pedagogic narrator also uses incidents like this to argue that educators need to show greater patience and understanding with their students.) The narrator also notes the self-consuming nature of embarrassment: “this idea caused him to behave in company in a self-conscious, silly, and stupid fashion, and he himself was probably more aware of this self-consciousness and silly behavior than anyone else” (135).
Even more remarkable than Moritz’s attention to childhood trauma—common enough today but not in the 18th century: no one then would have dreamed of discussing bed-wetting, as Moritz does—is his investigation of psychological concepts like word-association and involuntary memory. The narrator informs us “Anton as a child used to form strange pictures and notions of people and towns suggested by the sound of their names,” adding that the relative pitch “of the vowels in such a name did most to determine such an image” (40). I’m tempted to quote the two-page passage in which a pastor’s use of the expression “the heights of reason” leads Anton to think of the organ loft in the church, then a gallery tower in Hanover where musicians announce the mornings and evenings, then the tower itself with its clock dial and bell, to dreams “on lofty staircases in a thousand labyrinthine windings” that bring him back down to the organ loft and finally to the pastor’s “heights of reason,” leaving him with yearning tears in his eyes for such unobtainable heights (70–71). More than a century before Proust dipped a madeleine into his tea, the narrator notes the workings of involuntary memory: after a religious painting is revarnished in an oppressive house where his protagonist must live for a while, “the recollection of its smell, which persisted for some weeks, was for Anton always associated with the idea of his condition at that time. Whenever he smelt varnish, all the unpleasant images of that time arose involuntarily in his soul; and contrariwise, if he found himself in a situation that bore some chance resemblances to that one, he fancied that he could smell varnish” (46). The novel contains dozens of similar examples of how “the soul works” (41) that are highly unusual in an 18th-century novel; I had to keep checking the copyright page to remind myself this novel was published in 1785, not 1985.
As Anton grows up and attends various schools—always the new kid, always forced by poverty into wearing the wrong clothes and living in attics, always taunted by his socially adept classmates—he begins losing himself in novels and plays, which further isolate him. Indeed, there are so many references to books that Moritz’s English translator claims Anton Reiser is “virtually a summary of eighteenth-century literary history” (xix). In the narrator’s unromantic view, literature is as dangerous as religious mania when it’s used as an escape from life (rather than as an enhancement). Greatly moved by Goethe’s Werther, Anton’s self-destructive tendency pushes him often to the brink of suicide, pulled back only by his recurring, unrealistic dreams of fame.112 In the last part of the novel, Reiser goes “on the road” in bohemian fashion—Reiser is German for “traveler”—starving most of the time and wandering in a psychotic daze in which he has trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. The narrator’s account of the disintegration of the teenager’s ego is astonishing, as in this passage (it’s hard to resist quoting extensively from the startling novel):
Thenceforth, whenever he saw an animal being slaughtered, he always compared himself to it mentally—and as he so often had the opportunity to see this happening at the butcher’s [where Anton lodges], for a long time all his thoughts were fixed on the attempt to divine the difference between himself and such a slaughtered animal.—He would often stand for hours staring at a calf, with head, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose; and, just as he did with human strangers, he would lean as close as possible to the calf, often in the foolish delusion that he might gradually manage to think himself into the being of such an animal—he wanted intensely to know the difference between himself and the animal—and sometimes after contemplating it for a long time he would forget himself so that he really believed that for a moment he had apprehended the nature of the existence of such a being.—In short, from his childhood onwards he often wondered what it would be like for him if he were, for example, a dog living among people, or some other animal. (183)
Always back to his childhood. The narrator’s objective relationship to his protagonist is equally startling; any other novelist of the period (except perhaps for Voltaire) would have solicited pity for this decent but psychologically damaged boy, especially since the novel is autobiographical and the temptations of self-pity and -justification must have been great. But Moritz’s narrator keeps his distance and limits himself to clinical observations on his case study (who sounds like one of David Foster Wallace’s solipsistic neurotics):
It was the undeserved paralysis of his soul, resulting from his own parents’ disregard of him, that from his childhood on he had not yet managed to overcome.—It was impossible for him to regard anyone else as his equal—everyone seemed somehow to be more important, more significant in the world than he was—hence signs of friendship from others always felt like a kind of condescension—since he thought he could be despised, he really was despised—and often he interpreted something as contempt when somebody else with more self-confidence would never have understood it in that way. . . . Strong self-confidence irresistibly consumes its weaker rival—by mockery, by contempt, by stigmatizing its object as ridiculous.—Becoming ridiculous is a kind of annihilation, and making someone ridiculous is an unsurpassably murderous assault on that person’s self-confidence. (259–60)
At the end of the novel, when Reiser makes one final, potentially life-saving attempt to join an acting troupe in Leipzig, the heartless narrator—guilty himself of making Reiser look ridiculous—concludes his report with a final jab of sarcastic irony; overcoming great odds to reach Leipzig, Reiser receives “the comforting news that the worthy director of this troupe had no sooner arrived in Leipzig than he had sold all the properties and absconded with the money.—Speich’s troupe, therefore, was now a scattered flock” (351). Not a word on how this crushing disappointment effects Reiser. Your hour is up, the next patient is waiting.
Anton Reiser is revolutionary. Few novelists before Moritz would abandon their protagonists like that without comment, or maintain such a pitilessly objective tone, or avoid a romantic subplot, or focus so tightly on how (as Wordsworth would put it a few decades later) “The child is father of the man.” Its style also breaks with tradition: translator Robertson notes “the seeming artlessness of Moritz’s text, with its occasional ambiguous pronouns and incoherent sentences, its many short paragraphs, and its idiosyncratic punctuation” (xxiv–xxv). The novel is an evolutionary leap toward inwardness and realism in fiction, and also gives new purposes for novels: not merely to provide entertainment or inspire romantic dreams, but to alert readers to the many ways parents and educators inadvertently wound children psychologically, and to promote empathy for the walking wounded among us.
While writing Anton Reiser, Moritz also wrote a two-part novel entitled Andreas Hartknopf (1786, 1790). “In form and style the work is very different from the autobiographical Anton Reiser,” Emmel tells us. “Moritz no longer relates the story of his hero chronologically, but presents episodes in which symbolic relationships are of primary importance” (66). Sounds intriguing, but since it has never been translated into English, let’s move on to another writer associated even closer with Goethe.
After achieving fame with several plays full of Storm and Stress, Fri
edrich von Schiller (1759–1805) began to experience doubts about his work and turned to writing essays on aesthetics and editing a journal called Thalia. To attract more readers to the latter, he published there the first installments of a novel entitled The Ghost-seer (Der Geisterseher, 1786–89), which he eventually abandoned to write history. Brought out in book form in 1789 and translated into English in 1795, this 100-page novella is one of Germany’s first contributions to the Gothic novel, which had been haunting England and Spain since the 1760s, and which crested in the 1790s during the French Terror, not surprisingly. As noted earlier with Goethe’s Conversations, times of upheaval and uncertainly vomit forth tales of terror and uncertainty that reflect and magnify readers’ fears. The Germans specialized in a species of Gothic called the Bundesroman, or secret-society thriller, a genre that has made Dan Brown richer than the dreams of avarice. Masons, Rosicrucians, and the Illuminati offered alternatives to mainstream religion, which was wilting under the harsh light of the Enlightenment, providing its members with a haven for mystery, brotherhood and exclusivity, and raising suspicions among outsiders, a paranoia novelists were happy to exploit. (You’ll recall that Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister also has a secret-society subplot.)
