Bildungsroman: how literature responds to real problems

It’s not uncommon to think about epics as stories about the founding of nations. With all the horrific violence that such historical events entail, the epic normalises ideas about nations. Epics also convey ideas about what responsibility to a country is and what a government owes to its people.

Historically, tragedy has operated on a different set of problems. It worries about how human frailties and human vanities can end up threatening a particular social order, typically the State.

At the level of literary form, I tend to think about how particular story forms with their generic conventions operate to normalise certain ideas. These ideas might concern what it means to be an individual, an individual’s relation to society, the social good and so on.

I use the term normalising very deliberately to invoke norms and nomos. In this way, I think about how literature relates deeply to questions of law.

The Bildungsroman form, the coming of age novel, tells a story in which an individual struggles with society’s constraints and then grows up and becomes a responsible community member. I’ve argued this form normalises particular ideas about what it means to grow up as a responsible citizen within a democratic society. It teaches us how we think about ourselves in relation to society.

It just so happens that this problem, an individual’s responsibility and relationship to society, is at the foundation of human rights. Indeed, these two things are intimately connected.

One of the things that I’ve focused on over the years, especially in my book Human Rights, Inc., is how the Bildungsroman conventionalises fundamental human rights ideas. Of course, these ideas are also represented in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Bildungsroman emerged in the 18th century in Germany as a kind of counterpart to the French Revolution. It served as a pedagogical way for individuals to enter society as full democratic participants while avoiding the need for revolution.

Nevertheless, I think of the Bildungsroman as a social function more than a literary form. The social function it performs is that it incorporates marginal citizens or those who are not yet citizens. Indeed, I consider the form a genre of demarginalisation.

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship follows a young man who was left out of elite society. Goethe develops a plot structure that allows this bourgeois man to make individual choices guided by a kind of oversight society that will enable him to enter the aristocracy’s realms.

It’s true we no longer consider the white male subject as someone who needs to be demarginalised in the spirit of democracy in the 18th century. Yet, a real estate agent, which Wilhelm Meister is, was a marginal subject in relation to governance and power. So, the genre in the 18th century was one in which authors could pursue this issue of the individual’s relationship to a democratic society.

The genre of the Bildungsroman is a normalising genre. Typically, it tells a story of how an individual who has historically been excluded from the privileges and the rights of democratic society might somehow integrate or incorporate into that society.

This normalisation is one reason Bildungsroman is taught in schools around the world to children and adolescents. It serves as a kind of exemplum for good citizenship. Yet, it encapsulates a sense of contest. Again, populations excluded from the democratic project have used this form to claim human rights and inclusion within democratic societies.

Often, we tend to think about literature in a broad sense. One way in which I understand Bildungsromane is a story form that is making claims for political representation. It does this across societies. For instance, books about young Black men attempting to come of age but being stifled in that possibility seem to impact how society and the law develop significantly.

One way to think about this impact is to consider the dominant society as a readership. Typically, it’s a middle-class readership. Suppose a middle-class readership is reading stories about people who have been historically marginalised. They learn to recognise a desire for inclusion as parallel to their own wishes. This realisation must have a considerable impact on how middle-class society responds to those seeking inclusion.

The structure of the story is, on the one hand, an affirmation of the American invasion. Although I disagree with the notion, the story implies we’re doing good when we’re invading a country precisely because we’re producing Bildungsroman.

Naturally, George W. Bush, as President at the time, said that The Kite Runner was one of his favourite novels. Both he and Laura claimed it was their favourite book for about a year. I think there’s no coincidence that it was because the story itself makes a claim for inclusion in precisely the kind of ideals that the Bush administration claimed it was fighting for.