Formative Genre Informative

    In Louis Dumont's discussion of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, we confront the role of genre (and particularly, genres of novel, as classified by Bakhtin) with both understanding of lived experience and encounter of other. In Meister, Goethe's gives form to a new genre, the Bildungsroman, by drawing upon and interposing old forms.  Wilhelm, the novel's primary character (yet not, interestingly, its "hero") sets out on what superficially resembles a picaresque novel (itself scaffolded by yet another genre, that of theater).  Subsequently, and more than half way through the composition, he and we are thrust--after what strikes as an apparent break (which we shall also return to)--into a novel of the ordeal, in the chivalric mode (the contrast of apprenticeship, as in a trade, to that of squireship is of note here), with its Society of the Tower at once implicating both the mystical and the courtly (lest we forget three marriages).  Yet here, the testing that is characteristic to this genre, it is revealed, has been present from the very beginning.of the text, as have a "diversity of types" (Bakhtin) fulfilled by the members of Wilhelm's theatrical troupe.  Yet, where in the picturesque the hero (and man, as such) is static, and in the ordeal the hero is an unmoved ideal, Goethe's presents a hero who is formed (Bildung) through his experiences (in particular, his failures).

    That is, where the hero of prior forms was a constant, unchanging, unbroken, here the non-hero is changed by his world even as he changes it (a death, a birth).  Yet, in this development, Wilhelm epitomizes Bakhtin's chronotope, through whose being the visibility of past (picaresque), present (ordeal), and future (his son) is achieved.  It is thus that the apparent break represented by the "Beautiful Soul" (presenting in the contemporaneously emerging genre of the biography) is bridged.  Yet, even this break is but appearance, as the Beautiful Soul herself continues with the chronotope of Natalie, a stone washed down from the mountain, fair weather emanating from what seems nothing more dynamic than a break in the horizon.  Through Natalie/Beautiful Soul, picturesque cum ordeal marries our literary non-hero to biographical specificity.  Where Wilhelm's art at once mirrored his life (hearing his dead father's voice in Hamlet's ghost), now Goethe's art speaks life doubly (both the life of becoming uniquely German and Goethe's own, autobiographical, life).

    Yet, even as all of these genres weave and merge one into the other within the text, the encounter of the text is likewise a function of the reader's operative genre.  Thus, like The Mousetrap in Shakespeare's play, the experience of the story harkens to the experience of life.  Where a German reader's encounter of Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre is one of "a problematic of the realization and development of individuality", for Hungarian György Lukács, and those situated in the French Enlightenment tradition he sought to perceive Goethe from, the significance of this novel was as invisible as was the salience of the Player's troupe's performance to most of the audience in attendance at Castle Elsinore.