The Theater of Anamnesis: The Spaces of Memory and the Exteriority of Time in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

Abstract

When Wilhelm suffers his first great loss in the Lehrjahre, that of Mariane, he recovers his spirits on his travels by re-immersing himself in the natural world. He is revived by the rejuvenating power of nature, but also by the animating power of memory:alle erduldeten Schmerzen waren aus seiner Seele weggewaschen, und mit volliger Heiterkeit sagte er sich Stellen aus verschiedenen Gedichten . . . an diesen einsamen Platzen scharenweis seinem Gedachtnisse zuflossen. Auch erinnerte er sich mancher Stellen aus seinen eigenen Liedern, er mit einer besondern Zufriedenheit rezitierte. Er belebte Welt, vor ihm lag, mit allen Gestalten der Vergangenheit, und jeder Schritt in Zukunftwar ihm voll Ahnung wichtiger Handlungen und merkwurdiger Begebenheiten.1[all the pains he had suffered had been washed away from his soul, and in complete cheerfulness he recited to himself passages from various poems . . . and these passages swam in shoals into his memory in these lonely places. He also remembered many passages from some songs of his own which he recited with especial satisfaction. He enlivened the world which lay before him with all sorts of figures from his past, and every step that he took into the future was full of presentiment of important actions and strange occurrences.]2This passage illustrates what Novalis, partly on the basis of this novel, identified as one of the central hallmarks of Romanticism: the mysterious play of memory and premonition: Nichts ist poetischer als Erinnerung und Ahndung oder Vorstellung der Zukunft3 (Nothing is more poetic than remembrance and premonition or imagination of the future).4 For Hardenberg, the sense of presence proper to the poet is not a punctual now ordered within a linear series of nows. The poet's geistige Gegenwart (spiritual present) is rather a present die beide [Erinnerung und Ahnung] durch Auflosung identifiziert- und diese Mischung ist das Element, Atmosphare des Dichters (Novalis 2: 468, n. 123; that dissolves [memory and premonition] into an identity- and this mixture is the element, the of the poet). In creating the atmosphere of Poesie, the pre-rational communication between past and present, present and future, becomes a distinctive feature of Romantic interiority.My argument in this essay, however, is that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre not only evokes the Romantic temporal subject, but also radically undermines its elusive interiority. The novel's manifest aim in this regard is to communicate and publicize the temporal interior, thereby exposing the hidden exteriority of that interior. It reveals the soul's temporal depths to be an effect generated by the interplay of its manifold surfaces.In order to contextualize this reading, however, it is first of all necessary to situate the novel's memory-thematic within what is generally recognized to be its fundamental conflict-namely the conflict between self and other, or between the authentic, private self and the inauthentic, socialized self. Wilhelm's many reveries and reminiscences are the expressions of his ostensibly authentic self, and as such they signal Wilhelm's deep affinity with Mignon and the Harper. Through their common sensibility toward the deep past and distant future, these figures together form what Friedrich Schlegel appropriately designates die heilige Familie der Naturpoesie5 (Holy Family of natural poetry). The Tower then stands for the socialized self, or the self that has developed beyond the sphere of narcissistic self-reflection. The literature on the novel also tends to take sides along these lines. The classical line of Lehrjahre-interpretation established by Schiller and continued by Dilthey generally aligns itself with the Tower as the standard-bearer for social reality. Giuliano Baioni, for example, reads the novel against Mignon, as a representative of formless bourgeois interiority, and posits that the novel's goal lies in the education of the Sturmer und Dranger to reality. …