Romance Narration in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

In a letter to Gottling of January 1829, Goethe compared the he was straining to complete to a sisyphischer Stein that he hoped soon to push over the summit and roll toward the public.' Predictably, Goethe's readers have for the most part merely scurried out of the way. Interpreters of the Wanderjahre, attempting to roll this great boulder of a back uphill to see whence it came, have all too often abandoned the Sisyphean task in utter frustration. Numerous critics have turned to the Wanderjahre seeking a coherent formal or structural principle only to come away convinced that there is none to be found. In his history of the of the Goethezeit, H. H. Borcherdt has given the a chapter apart, as an anomaly;2 Hermann Broch and Ehrhard Bahr have seen the Wanderjahre as an experimental novel anticipating modernism's total break with traditional genre forms.3 The long-prevailing view of the Wanderjahre is presented succinctly by Emil Staiger, who suggests that the unity of the work lies somehow jenseits des Romans and is to be supplied by the reader, but also, less charitably, that the work's represents Zeichen des Verlusts an Kraft ... den das hohe Alter bringt. Die Energie reicht nicht mehr aus, ein weitgedehntes Ganzes bestimmt und folgerichtig durchzubilden.I He goes on to conclude that one can find grounds for reading any interpretation into the novel: all interpretations, and none, are justified in what Staiger sees as a situation of utter formal ambiguity and ambivalence.' Certain of Goethe's own pronouncements upon the two versions of the Wanderjahre (some of which Staiger quotes) might well seem at first glance to support such a contention.6 I would like to argue, however, that such statements on Goethe's part must not be taken as apologies for formlessness, but rather as descriptions of a kind of formal unity different from that which Goethe's contemporaries had come to expect in a novel: warnings that the form of the Wanderjahre was of a different order altogether, and that the thus had to be read in a different way. Contemporary readers also failed to find any unifying principle in the Wanderjahre, but Goethe himself saw it differently: he wrote of a romantischer Faden running through the work, weaving it together into a wunderlich anziehendes Ganze.7 To one correspondent who had criticized the disunity of the first

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