Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman

Abstract

Redfield, Marc. Phantom Formations. Aesthetic Ideology and Bildungsroman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. 220pp. $35.00 hardcover. For Redfield has an exemplary status in exhibiting-and thus exposing-the claim to a referential basis of literature. For insofar as content of a narrative is taken to be Bildung-the formation of human (42)-this very idea is derived from form that narrative as text, as aesthetic construct, provides. Robert Musil succinctly formulated paradox: every true experience a cultured man educates himself. This is organic plasticity of man. In this sense every novel worthy of name is a Bildungsroman (cited 42). But it is not only specificity of as genre that is at issue. Redfield extends his argument to a wide-ranging critique of aesthetic emerging from German Idealism and Romanticism. His claim is that is not in first instance a genre (such as lyric) but the genre of aesthetics (65). In Bildung inherent paradox of autopoesis-the self-constitution of a subject on a model that already presupposes that very subject- is played out in a scenario that draws on career of Hegelian World Spirit as filtered through a number of twentieth-century commentators. There is endlessness of a process that can never find its telos, pain and alienation of a constantly unfulfilled striving, erection of highly restricted models-- church, state, an elite community-the lapse or degradation of ideal-as melancholy or irony, as authoritarian politics, as mere aestheticism. These are branchings of a narrative that draws on Georg Lukacs, Paul de Man, David Lloyd, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and Redfield weaves them together with considerable skill. He asks us to view literature in its post-Romantic, modern guise as institutionalization of a process whereby historico-critical debate perpetually works over a substance, a referent that, one presumes, has a kind of primal, originating status. What is at stake here is perhaps most interestingly developed in sections on history and fetishism in chapter devoted to Flaubert's L Education sentimentale. At one level this chapter-like those on other novels treated, Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and The Lifted Veil-is an exercise in deconstructive reading: work in question is designed to serve as an instance (figure or trope) of a basic narrative, disruption (171) or exposure of language's aspiration to meaning. …