Romanticism, Bildung, and the Literary Absolute

MARC REDFIELD

The notion of Romanticism has led a disputatious life ever since its uncertain beginnings in the Romantic era. In the first half of the twentieth century, as the term's use shifted slowly but irreversibly away from that of literary polemic and toward that of an academic term–away, that is, from overtly ethical and axiological battles and toward historical and hermeneutic ones–the famous debate between A. O. Lovejoy and René Wellek caused scholars to speculate whether Romanticism existed in a more than nominal fashion as a coherent entity. The subsequent institutional history awards the victory to Wellek, who claimed that it did, but the production and reproduction of Romanticism as an academic field does not in the end render Romanticism a less uncertain phenomenon. The difficulties it poses for the literary historian are well known. Romanticism is used to characterize diverse historical moments in national literatures and to privilege specific writers or movements at the expense of others; at the same time, as a style or "system of norms" (Wellek 2), it seems ensnared in recurring contradictions, with a mode that is variously utopian and despairing, naive and self-conscious, humanist (Abrams) and satanic (Praz). The larger significance of these literary and academic paradoxes revolves around their denoting, as Maurice Blanchot remarks, a Romanticism that has also stood for a "political investment," one with "extremely diverse vicissitudes, as [Romanticism] was at times claimed by the most reactionary regimes (that of Friedrich Wilhelm in 1840 and the literary theoreticians of Nazism), and at other times ... illuminated and understood as a demand for renovation" (163). If the term now primarily serves an academic institutional arrangement, it nonetheless comes burdened with enough cultural significance to pose the conundrum of our own historical identity.

For the difficulty Romanticism presents is not simply that of a contradictory entity, but rather that of a phenomenon that has to a great extent shaped our attempt to grasp it. Romanticism designates the historical emergence of a modern understanding of history, along with ideas of revolution, democracy, the nation and its literature, literature and its criticism, and the cultural and pedagogical institutions that convey and reproduce such ideas. Literary historians and critics know a particularly circular version of this predicament, which may help explain why polemics against Romanticism so visibly mark the literary-critical record: the embarrassment of indebtedness is all the more irksome when the very terms of one's polemic—an opposition, say, of romanticism to classicism—derive from the movement one wishes to castigate and escape. Not restricted to a preprofessional era, this double bind recurs persistently in contemporary academic criticism, sheltered though we now might be within a scholarly bureaucracy. The Romantics may no longer be undergoing chastisement of the sort meted out by Babbitt or Hulme, but Romanticism is still being accorded the treatment of an ideology available for debunking—a debunking that then is found to consist in the remarkably Romantic endeavor to "return poetry to a human form" (McGann 160). Yet an obscurity persists at the heart of these paradoxes. We have not gained much by claiming to be inside a Romanticism we cannot properly define, which may not, in fact, have an identity within which we could dwell. This obscurity is displayed in literary studies as a tension between literature and the Romantic aesthetic that defines literature as such. Texts that have seemed particularly Romantic—those of Shelley, for instance, or Rousseau or Schlegel—have in their long, curious history been judged at once irreducibly literary and yet unsatisfactory or flawed. More recently, academicians have had to confront Romanticism as the matrix of literary theory, whose various forms draw inspiration from the slippage between a text and its aesthetic or critical reception—from the fact, in other words, that literature seems able to mean both too much and too little to be reducible to the pleasure of an intuition, or to the stability of an intention or a well-wrought form. With Romanticism defining the terms of its own debate, we need to account for it as a phenomenon that not only calls itself into question, but also seems to slip away from its own standards and its own critical language, resulting in criticism that inhabits a constant, though usually only half-acknowledged, state of crisis.

The focus of this essay, an instance of critical crisis and its half-acknowledgment, is appropriate to the theme of this section: the status of the notion of the bildungsroman, or novel of education, in literary studies. The idea behind this genre is at once a commonplace and a minor embarrassment, and its vicissitudes replay in dramatically compressed form the paradoxes at work in the concept and history of Romanticism. Few critical terms, let alone German ones, have achieved comparable success, both within and without the academy; yet the moment one takes seriously the definitions and implications of the word "bildungsroman," it appears to lose most or all of its referential purchase. A bildungsroman ought to be a novel that represents and enacts...