Jan Christoph Kueveler
"Beyond the Bildungsroman: Youth as Narrator of Modernism"
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Abstract
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Arguably, the prime symbolic form of the European 19th century is the Bildungsroman, whose belief in the human potential for development mirrors that of its age. Hegel famously suggests this development lead from juvenile idealism to mature “philistinism.” But the scheme also befits novels that don’t heed Hegel’s conviction: although they eventually resist adult, corrupted “maturity,” youthful characters like Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov are all along obsessed with the idea of making social headway — the meter against which their actions are measured is still intact.
This drastically changes around 1900 where we see an astonishingly large group of young protagonists refuse to mature. Rather, they latch onto their youthful selves usually either by dying (accident/suicide) or by vanishing off the pages and into a bohemian future — a continuation of their juvenile indeterminacy and (moral) freedom. Society at large (as featured in the Bildungsroman) and the ambition to climb its ladder are completely blanked out. The examples are legion: Kipling’s Kim (1901), Th. Mann’s Tonio Kröger (1903), Musil’s The Perplexities of Young Törless (1906), R. Walser’s Jakob von Gunten (1909), Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1904-1914), Kafka’s Amerika (or The Lost One, 1911-1914), Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes (1913), etc.
While this phenomenon of narrated youth recoiling into itself continues to be unnamed — if anything it has, misleadingly, been called “late Bildungsroman” — I believe that it could, properly understood, decidedly further our comprehension of European modernity. Why was the belief in ongoing human development enduringly shattered? And why precisely then, over a decade before the war? I aim to explore these questions in their aesthetical, social and political dimensions.
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