The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, New Edition

Rating:
Summary: Re-Bildung the European Bildungsroman
Review: Franco Moretti is one of those rare critics who consistently churns out books that--though never unassailably argued or immaculately interpretive--nevertheless change forever the way you read a genre. In "The Way of the World," Moretti sets his sights on the European Bildungsroman.

Moretti's basic argument is that the Bildungsroman genre served, in its various national incarnations, both to reveal and modify the processes of socialization--of putting each member of society into his or her proper place within the society--specific to each culture represented. He begins with an innovative reading of Napoleon at Waterloo and its innumerable literary reproductions throughout the 19th century, arguing that societies embroiled in Napoleonic Republicanism developed radically different styles of envisioning the individual's position vis-à-vis society than were evident in the societies Napoleon didn't reach (namely England, whose Bildungsroman Moretti finds unpalatably reactionary, "far more elementary and limited than its continental counterparts"). This framework enables closer readings of Stendhal, Goethe, Brontë, Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, Austen, Pushkin, etc.

Implicit in Moretti's thesis is a valorization of all things Napoleonic that gives slightly favorable treatment to those works whose individualism pits the protagonist against a repressive society (Stendhal's Sorel is a fave here), as against the less progressive tendencies of, say, Dickens, whose heroes are constantly checked--and who constantly ALLOW themselves to be checked--in their efforts to reach beyond the lot afforded them by a rigidly hierarchized industrial society (David Copperfield, Pip, etc.).

"The Way of the World" combines an amazing attention to detail with an equally amazing occasional lack of it. Moretti's readings of Stendhal are at times revelatory, but finally incomplete, as he fails to account for punishments meted out by the text. Is Stendhal really more progressive than Dickens simply because Stendhal's heroes end up dead and Dickens' end up employed? This may make the heroes more progressive in Stendhal, but the text seems to perform its own brutal socialization, checking the protagonists even more definitively than Dickens ever does. Likewise, the lack of treatment of Thackeray, a huge figure who could have single-handedly troubled Moretti's pronouncements on the supposedly conservative English version of the genre, is palpable.

The fact is, though, this is an illuminating book. You won't be able to read anything written in the 19th century the same way afterwards. Moretti reveals novels for what they are--vicarious testing grounds for various ways of being in the world--and goes a long way toward making us more attentive to what subtle social messages they convey and what those messages can do to us.