The Truth of Realism

A Reassessment of the German Novel 1830-1900

John Walker

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351193290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"In his new book, Walker offers a radical reassessment of the German realist novel in the nineteenth century. Especially in the English- speaking world, German narrative realism has persistently been interpreted as the literary expression of an ideology of the aesthetic. The German realist novel is alleged to reflect philosophical idealism: to reject the prose of modern society in favour of the poetry of the inner aesthetic life. This book challenges that received view. Walker argues that German narrative realism should be read not only in relation to, but in crucial respects against, the dominant philosophical idiom of nineteenth century Germany. German narrative realism often functions as a critique of the idea and ideology of inwardness in nineteenth century German culture. To understand this, the author argues, we must reread German realist novels above all as narratives, not as the supposed reflection of philosophical categories. The core of the book is therefore the close reading of eight of the best known realist novels in German by Keller, Raabe and Fontane. This reading shows how the German realist novel, far from transposing the assumptions of aesthetic idealism into narrative form, exposes the real consequences of those assumptions in the culture and society of its time. John Walker is Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London."

CHAPTER 1
Realism, the Narrative Self, and the Legacy of German Idealism

The point of this chapter is to focus more sharply the two questions I have posed about the kind of truth German realism conveys and the kind of alternative self that realism envisages. I will do so by situating the German realist novel in relation to both the idealist philosophical aesthetics through which it has often been understood and the tradition of the romantic Bildungsroman to which it has often been seen as the heir. I will then suggest some ways in which the practice of German literary realism might challenge, even contradict, the view of narrative prose which the philosophical tradition implies.

As we have seen, one of the chief contributions of that tradition to aesthetic theory is the link in idealist epistemology between aesthetic experience and the free expression of human subjectivity. At the beginning of the German idealist tradition in aesthetics, Kant argues in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790: Critique of Judgement) that art can achieve what philosophy, religion, and moral discourse can never manage. Art can show transcendental truth, both moral and intellectual, as embodied in and accessible through a mode of experience which is no less cognitively relevant because it can never be made fully cognitively explicit. This is the source of the moral and cultural primacy as well as the philosophical relevance of art in the post-Kantian philosophy of German idealism. It is also the origin of the idealist doctrine of the special character of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic experience, for Kant, links intellectual truth to its sensuous apprehension. In the same way, Kant construes aesthetic judgement as a mode of truth, capable of being shared and assented to in a community of taste; and yet as only partially capable of explicit articulation. According to Kant, aesthetic judgement can never be made wholly explicit in conceptual terms. For the terms of the judgement can never entirely be separated from the medium — that is, the work of art — to which the judgement refers. For this reason aesthetic judgements, although they cannot be reduced to aesthetic experience, must necessarily appeal to that experience for their legitimation or indeed refutation. To show such a judgement to be adequate or otherwise is to point to the aesthetic experience which bears it out or shows it to be lacking.¹ This quality of aesthetic judgement has a relevance beyond the sphere of the aesthetic. For Kant, the way in which aesthetic judgement synthesizes experience — partially inarticulate, tacit, and yet capable of being socially shared — can act as a model for the way all intellectual judgement describes experience in terms of intelligible principles. For all judgement, even if it must ultimately take an explicit linguistic and logical form, proceeds via an act of what Kant calls the productive imagination (produktive Einbildungskraft), in which the manifold content of experience is imagined as a meaningful whole before it can explicitly be described as such by the categories of the understanding.²

The philosophy of Kant bequeaths to its idealist successors a high doctrine of both aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgement, which influences not only German philosophy but the cultural ideal of German intellectual life from around 1780 until at least 1830. The Kantian philosophy as a whole (and especially its aesthetic component) is distinguished by an unprecedented synthesis and reconciliation of reason and experience: an achievement which has a cultural and even political resonance in German life which extends far beyond the sphere of the academy.³

Kant’s dual emphasis on the autonomy of aesthetic experience and its relevance to our understanding of experience as a whole is sustained, in a different form, in post-Kantian German idealism and its aftermath in nineteenth-century German philosophical aesthetics. However, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a decisive shift takes place in German philosophical aesthetics, which has equally profound effects on the life of the surrounding culture. German philosophical aesthetics after 1830 becomes less concerned with particular philosophical arguments about the nature of art and more concerned with a discourse about the difference and potential conflict between philosophy and art themselves as activities in relation to human experience as a whole. In this context, a gap begins to emerge between the apparently harmonious account of experience provided by the idealist philosophy of art and the very different mode of experience which is art itself. German idealism is still the dominant influence in both aesthetics and general philosophy in Germany until at least 1850. Idealist metaphysics continues to offer a vision of experience in which freedom and necessity, intellectual principle and sensuous form, are reconciled. What changes is the perception of the role of philosophy itself in German cultural and political life. The reconciliation which philosophy offers comes increasingly to be seen as radically limited in its human relevance and so in its cultural import. In short, the cultural import of philosophy — especially philosophical aesthetics — comes to be defined by what Schelling calls ‘a powerful reaction from the side of life’ (‘eine so mächtige Reaktion von Seiten des Lebens’).⁴ That is to say: a reaction, by a culture saturated with the intellectual legacy of aesthetic idealism, against the idea that speculative philosophy can or should determine the role of art in relation to the society and culture of the age. Art, especially literature, comes to be seen as autonomous, not only in the sense which German idealism defines, but in a way which philosophical idealism cannot predict or foreclose. Aesthetic practice is increasingly experienced as a mode of truth radically different from the philosophy of art by which that practice is defined. The rest of this chapter outlines — without, of course, any claim to present a comprehensive intellectual history — the most important origins and dynamics of that process.

The dominant representative of the German idealist tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century, whose work was especially influential in the two decades after his death, was undoubtedly G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel famously argued in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (1831: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art), that modern experience is intrinsically prosaic, not poetic, and can therefore never adequately be represented in the aesthetic mode. That is so, according to Hegel, because the modern subject can only be satisfied by a fully self-conscious — that is a philosophical — relationship to the culture of which he or she is a part.⁵ Aesthetic experience can communicate the whole truth only when truth itself is experienced as immediately embodied in the whole of cultural life, and so as independent of philosophy: for example, in the Middle Ages, when a socially shared and culturally embodied faith is implicit in art, religion, and philosophy alike. However, for Hegel, the modern age is defined by the loss of this kind of cultural immediacy. Only philosophy, therefore, can fully express the truth of modernity. In Hegel’s philosophy art, like religion and philosophy, is seen as one of the ways in which absolute spirit — the ultimate truth — discloses itself to human consciousness. He argues that art embodies truth in the form of sensuous intuition (Anschauung), whilst philosophy articulates it in the explicit form of the speculative concept (Begriff ) (K, I, 4–6; W, 13, 17–19). However, in modernity art can only express the truth in an intrinsically inadequate way: that is to say, one which reveals the inadequacy of artistic form to its object (K, I, 101; W, 13, 140). For Hegel, a key moment of the truth of modernity is precisely the impossibility of its artistic expression.⁶

Hegel expresses this thesis as an account of the dissolution (Auflösung) of the romantic form of art (die romantische Kunstform) (K, I, 593–611; W, 14, 220–45). For Hegel, romanticism is intrinsically linked to the Christian spirit, for which the inner life of the soul is linked to a transcendent meaning beyond any historically actual world (K, I, 435; W, 14, 23). In this sense, Hegel argues, the art of the Christian era as such represents a departure from the immediate sensuous embodiment of aesthetic truth in the life of the community which distinguished the art, especially the drama, of ancient Greece. What is different about modern romantic art (which Hegel sees as the art of his own time) (K, I, 103; W, 13, 142) is that modern culture lacks the symbolic resources for the expression of this transcendence. For Hegel, therefore, modern art is defined by a divorce between form and content. The contents presented to modern art by modern experience, lacking any publicly shared form of symbolic organization, necessarily appear arbitrary, just as their representation appears formal and abstract (K, I, 600; W, 14, 228).

Hegel therefore insists that aesthetic communication can never fully do justice to the kind of reflectivity by which modern experience is defined. The truth expressed in modern art is therefore necessarily transcended (aufgehoben) by that of modern philosophy. Yet Hegel’s account of the relevance of the end of romanticism to the possibility of modern realism has a powerful counter-current: what might be called his second philosophy of art. Hegel also argues that the intrinsically self-reflective character of modern experience means that something more than a philosophical expression of human selfhood is urgently required. Modern philosophy, according to Hegel, can indeed reconcile the modern subject to the modern social and political world in a way denied to both art and religion. Yet this reconciliation is itself severely limited in its effect: it satisfies only the selfconscious mind. The modern subject thus continues to be afflicted by unrest and pain (Unruhe und Schmerz) (K, I, 96; W, 13, 133), which bear witness to spheres of experience which neither reflection nor the abstractly public realm can satisfy. A more immediate satisfaction (unmittelbare Befriedigung) (K, I, 97; W, 13, 135) remains a human need; it is this deep reconciliation which art, as a more concrete and immediate form of consciousness than philosophy, is called upon to provide. Thus Hegel, whilst seeming to dismiss as merely contingent the subjects presented for the modern novel by contemporary experience, also comments approvingly on the breadth of subject-matter which modern realism, especially in painting, is able to encompass (K, I, 607; W, 14, 237–38). Modern art does not have to be formal and abstract: it can be an authentic expression of the inwardness of the modern spirit. Thus, he argues, the cultural spirit of Protestantism gives meaning to the lives of ordinary people by hallowing the sphere of civic and domestic life. The detachment of meaning from any particular sphere of public and symbolic life means that all of ordinary experience is potentially meaningful. Hegel therefore praises seventeenth-century Dutch painting, in which the details of domestic interiors embody and reflect the spirit of the men and women who inhabit them (K, I, 169–70; W, 13, 198).

The difficulty with Hegel’s analysis is that insights of this kind are constantly contradicted by a general speculative thesis about the necessary inadequacy of art as an expression of the modern age. How is this contradiction to be explained?

Hegel defines the possibility or otherwise of modern art in relation to what he sees as the end of the romantic form of art. He therefore discusses the probability of the modern novel in terms not of literary realism, but of the continuation of the Bildungsroman: the form of extended narrative prose which he considers most representative of German romanticism. Hegel finds the continuation of this form especially problematic, because the idea of subjectivity which he thinks so characteristic of the Bildungsroman is, in Hegel’s judgement, simply incompatible with the reality of the modern age. For Hegel, the project of the Bildungsroman depends on the credibility of an imagined connection in experience between the development of the inward self and the discovery of a social role. In the post-romantic age, Hegel argues, the connection has ceased to be imaginatively credible, because it is no longer socially real. The finding of a social role is no longer a serious affair. Rather, the hero ‘gets his girl and some sort of position, marries her and becomes as good a Philistine as others’ (K, I, 593; W, 14, 219–20): things which Hegel considers unworthy of, even at odds with, the romantic idea of the self which the Bildungsroman once sought to express.

Hegel’s thesis of the inadequacy of realism to represent modernity is therefore inseparable from his focus on romanticism and the Bildungsroman. Equally, it is an integral part of his philosophy of art, which is dominated by the premisses of his philosophical system as a whole. Hegel’s philosophical aesthetics, in which art, like religion and philosophy, is seen as the revelation or self-disclosure of absolute spirit, is informed by an aesthetics of presence — a doctrine of the embodiment of truth in a sensuous medium — which is very much more persuasive about the visual arts than it is about literature. Art is important for Hegel precisely because it can do what philosophy cannot. Art, for Hegel, can make spirit sensuously and immediately real. But this very difference between art and philosophy is defined for Hegel in philosophical terms, as a difference between conceptual articulation and the intuitive beholding (Hegel’s term Anschauung has an inescapably visual emphasis) of the truth of spirit. Hegel never suggests that the philosophical knowledge of art (die Wissenschaft der Kunst) is irrelevant to modernity; only that the practice of art must now be subordinate to such knowledge (K, I, 10–13; W, 13, 24–28). It is highly significant, then, that Hegel’s philosophical aesthetics owes very much more to his discussion of the visual and plastic arts than it does to his understanding of literature, and that his account of aesthetic symbolism is more philosophically, indeed theologically, than socially or linguistically based. Art, for Hegel, is about disclosure; philosophy is about interpretation. Hegel never discusses the possibility of modern literary realism on its own most characteristic terms: as an imaginative representation of the modern social domain, in which the mode of representation itself suggests the criteria for its own interpretation. What is most lacking in Hegel’s discussion of modern literature is any serious account of the way symbolic representation interacts with human discourse: the verbal fabric of the social world. But it is just this interaction with which the realist novel is especially concerned. What is most striking about Hegel’s account of the modern novel is that it is extremely brief and, seen in context, larg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• 1 Realism, the Narrative Self, and the Legacy of German Idealism
• 2 Representing the Real: Gottfried Keller's Der grüne Heinrich
• 3 Refusing the Real:Wilhelm Raabe's Der Hungerpastor
• 4 German Realism after 1870: Literature, Philosophy, and Human Selfhood
• 5 Wilhelm Raabe: Pfisters Mühle — The Reality of Inwardness
• 6 Wilhelm Raabe: Die Akten des Vogelsangs —The End of Inwardness
• 7 Theodor Fontane: Effi Briest — Realism, Empathy, and Identity
• 8 Theodor Fontane: Irrungen, Wirrungen — Realism and Transfiguration
• 9 The Limited Whole: The Realism of History in Der Stechlin and Vor dem Sturm
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index