Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia: Bakhtin on Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister and the carnivalesque

Abstract

This paper explores Bakhtin’s reception of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre with a view to assess how Bakhtin’s interest in this early chronotopical masterpiece can be understood in the wider context of his utopian thinking and his political eschatologies. Bakhtin reads Goethe’s novel as a critique of totalitarian forms of Socialist Realism as well as Dostoyevsky’s bourgeois realism. Like his contemporary Ernst Bloch, Bakhtin praises the complexity and richness of Goethe’s concept of realism. In the wake of Hermann Cohen, Georg Simmel and Friedrich Gundolf to whom Bakhtin alludes and whom he quotes, Goethe is regarded as a modern literary and anthropological role model, the epitome of Bildung. For Bakhtin, Goethe’s and Rabelais’ writings about the carnivalesque constitute complementary forms of reflection of and agents for social and cultural transformation in modernity.

Keywords:

• Bakhtin
• Goethe
• chronotopes
• the good life
• utopian discourses
• the carnivalesque

Notes

1. With Zhdanov’s speech, the exciting era of diverse and often competing revolutionary art forms that were encouraged or tolerated by Lenin and his followers and included Constructivist, Formalist, Productivist, Expressionist, Futurist and Proletkult elements, came to an end.

2. On reading Maxim Gorky’s Death and the Maiden, Stalin was reported to have proclaimed: ‘This thing is more powerful than Goethe’s Faust’; Rayfield, Stalin and his Hangmen, 1989, p. 70.

3. In his introduction to The Bildungsroman, p. xiv.

4. ‘If to the moment I shall ever say: “Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!” Then may you fetters on me lay, Then will I perish, then and there!’.

5. Shortly before his death, the blind Faust exclaims in Faust II, 5 ‘[Sollte ich] auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn./Zum Augenblicke dürft ich sagen: /Verweile doch …’ Here Goethe applies dark irony. Believing to hear workers reclaiming land from the sea in order to ‘stand on free land with free people’, the ageing Faust seems to be near to the moment of the fulfilment when his personal and political dreams seem finally to come true. However, what he really hears are grave-diggers digging his own grave.

6. For a detailed account of the publication history, see Caryl Emerson, Editor’s Preface of the translation of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. The first publication of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art occurred in the same year as Bakhtin was arrested (1929). At the instigation of young literary scholars, a revised version was published in 1963. The 1963 edition retained the crucial passages about Goethe. It is probably safe to assume that throughout the late 1920s and 1930s Bakhtin was occupied with both Goethe’s and Dostoevsky’s theory of the novel.

7. ‘… Dostoevsky … is not master in his own home, and the disintegration of his personality … is what makes him subjectively qualified to be the tormented and necessary reflector of the confusion of his epoch.’ (Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 35).

8. All Goethe translations and translations from German by N.P.F. if not otherwise stated.

9. Written between 1772 and 1774, Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’ poem about the creative genius who defies the gods was widely regarded as the essence of ‘Sturm und Drang’ philosophy.

10. Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 28.

11. For a more detailed discussion of Bakhtin’s notion of ‘great time’, see Shepherd, 2006.

12. It is possible to read these passages as a critical comment on the ‘otherworldly spirituality’ of such Russian Orthodox classics as the Cherubikon. Here Bakhtin’s and Marx’ critique of orthodox Christianity coincide. According to Marc Chagall, Bakhtinians listened to Tchaikovsky’s music in Vitebsk; it is unknown if this included Tchaikovsky’s ‘Hymn of the Cherubim’, one of the Cherubikon’s most sublime musical settings.