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Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia: Bakhtin

on Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister and
the carnivalesque

Norman Franke

To cite this article: Norman Franke (2016): Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia: Bakhtin
on Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister and the carnivalesque, Educational Philosophy
and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2015.1135774

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 Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2015.1135774

Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia:

Bakhtin on Goethe’s Bildungsroman
Wilhelm Meister and the carnivalesque
NORMAN FRANKE
German Programme, University of Waikato

Abstract

This paper explores Bakhtin’s reception of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre with a
view to assess how Bakhtin’s interest in this early chronotopical masterpiece can be under-
Educational Philosophy and Theory

stood in the wider context of his utopian thinking and his political eschatologies. Bakhtin
reads Goethe’s novel as a critique of totalitarian forms of Socialist Realism as well as
Dostoyevsky’s bourgeois realism. Like his contemporary Ernst Bloch, Bakhtin praises the
complexity and richness of Goethe’s concept of realism. In the wake of Hermann Cohen,
Georg Simmel and Friedrich Gundolf to whom Bakhtin alludes and whom he quotes, Goethe
is regarded as a modern literary and anthropological role model, the epitome of Bildung. For
Bakhtin, Goethe’s and Rabelais’ writings about the carnivalesque constitute complementary
forms of reflection of and agents for social and cultural transformation in modernity.

Keywords: Bakhtin, Goethe, chronotopes, the good life, utopian discourses, the
carnivalesque

I
Since the collapse of states organised and run Marxist–Leninist and Stalinist forms of
socialist ideologies, latterly marginalised and discredited ideas of libertarian Socialism
and utopian thinking have made a slow but steady comeback in international scholar-
ship and politics. In this context, progressive twentieth-century thinkers such as Mikhail
Bakhtin and Ernst Bloch who defend the role of creative individuals and champion the
role of the arts and humanities in the critical assessment as well as the goal-setting of
modern social and pedagogical development, attract new attention, often with a view to
developing and adjusting their ideas to twenty-first-century contexts.
For Bakhtin, the work and life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was
of considerable importance in the process of developing his own notion of the ‘good
life’ and his utopian thinking. For the Russian cultural philosopher, Goethe’s two part
novel Wilhelm Meister (1796, 1824) constituted one of the earliest and, in some ways,

Ó 2016 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

 2 Norman Franke

an ideal, form of a literary ‘chronotype’ in which socio-geographical and historical fac-

tors impact on and are in turn influenced by the novel’s protagonists. Similar to
Bloch, Bakhtin shared a fascination with Goethe’s conceptualisation and artistic treat-
ment of modern social reality and his attempts to actively develop the full creative
and intellectual capacity of himself as both Bürger and Künstler (citizen and artist)
and the artistic and political collectives of which he was a member.
Bakhtin’s true beliefs about institutionalised Marxism/Leninism are hard to accu-
rately reconstruct because of the practice of co-authorship within Bakhtin’s circle and
the constant need to avoid direct political confrontation and censorship and pay lip-
service to some official political doctrines particularly during the Stalinist years in the
Soviet Union. However, it is probably safe to assume that not only Bakhtin’s epistemo-
logical and aesthetic ideas, but also his political and pedagogical views were largely
influenced by the left wing of the Marburg School of Neo Kantians. Hermann Cohen’s
‘Ethical Socialism’, an application of Kant’s ideas regarding ‘universal ethics’ in the
context of twentieth-century industrial society, reconciles ideas of free ethical and cre-
ative agency of the modern subject with ideas of social and political responsibility in
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order to overcome the injustice of modern class society, notions that were taken up in
some of Bakhtin’s aesthetic and political writings. In Kants Einfluss auf die deutsche
Kultur (1893) and Kants Begründung der Aesthetik (1899), Cohen had praised Goethe
as a kindred soul of Kant: In dramas such as Iphigenie auf Tauris and Faust, the mature
Goethe celebrated the free ethical and creative agency of striving individuals, and,
together with Schiller, encouraged the use of art as an illustration and as a reflective
medium of ethical and social issues thus fostering a culture of education (‘Bildung’)
through the potential creation of (fictional) role models and critical analysis.
In The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism, the principal text
considered here, Bakhtin also expressed a strong interest in Goethe’s ideas concerning
the ‘metaphysics of progress’ in the context of natural and human history and the
‘collaboration’ or ‘co-authorship’ of modern individuals in the creative development
of their physical and social environment. Bakhtin agreed with Marxist literary critics
such as Lunacharsky and Lukács that Goethe’s novels are a benchmark but also a
springboard for any future creative adaptation of the classical European ‘Bildungsro-
man’ or novel of development. Nonetheless, there is also a melancholic undercurrent
to Bakhtin’s assessment of Goethe’s life and art, as Bakhtin is also mindful that the
horrendous forms of twentieth-century totalitarianism and their aftermath, which
Bakhtin himself witnessed and endured have made a potential successor to the
humanist polymath Goethe, a man who turned his life into art and his art into life,
very unlikely.

II
In times of war, when an author can only smoke stale tobacco to combat hunger and
boredom, but has run out of cigarette paper and therefore has to fall back on their
own manuscript paper to roll a smoke, which parts of the manuscript do they smoke
first? According to Holquist (Bakhtin, 1987, p. xix), this is not a hypothetical ques-
tion. It was posed to Bakhtin, shortly after the attack of Hitler’s army on the Soviet
 Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia 3

Union, when the philosopher learned that his manuscript about Goethe and the
Bildungsroman, which he had submitted to Sovetsky Pisatel, had been destroyed. The
smoked manuscript may be little more than a revealing legend but the fact remains
that Bakhtin was left with only his fragmentary author’s copy on the German poly-
math which had been written between 1936 and 1938. Such are some of the gro-
tesque ironies of the Age of Extremes (Hobsbawm, 1994) in the Bloodlands (Snyder,
2010) of East Central and Eastern Europe. Only the introduction and some drafts of
Bakhtin’s Bildungsroman study survived, but they are fortunately sufficient to recon-
struct key aspects of Bakhtin’s Goethe reception and to pay tribute to Bakhtin’s ideas
about the development of the novel and the novel of development.
In order to assess the genealogy as well as the future potential of the modern novel,
in The Bildungsroman, Bakhtin’s starting point is a brief but thorough analysis of the
historical development of the genre in the wake of Hegel and Lukács: ‘[There is a]
need for a historical investigation into the novel as genre … Classification according
to how the image of the main hero is constructed …’ (Bakhtin, 1987, p. 10). Galin
Tihanov has discussed Bakhtin’s general indebtedness to Lukács’ theory of the novel
Educational Philosophy and Theory

as well as Lukács’ Marxist conceptualisation of literary realism, utopianism and

Goethean ‘Bildung’. Key aspects of Lukács’ ideas were selectively adopted by Bakhtin
(Tihanov, 1998).
For Bakhtin, as Lukács, the most innovative and complex form of the novel is the
Bildungsroman, as this form of modern literature presents the reader with ‘the image
of man in the process of becoming’ (Bakhtin, 1987, p. 19). Modern landmarks of the
genre include Rousseau’s Emile, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister; Dickens’ David Copperfield,
Tolstoy’s Childhood, Adolescence, and Youth, and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe.
According to Bakhtin, a near-perfect and in many ways still unsurpassed example of
the genre is Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister, because here the depiction of ‘man’s
emergence is accomplished in real historical time, with all of its necessity, its fullness,
its future, and its profoundly chronotopic nature’ (p. 23). As the social and geograph-
ical ‘foundations of the world are changing’ (p. 15), the novel’s protagonist, Wilhelm
Meister, ‘enters into a completely new, spatial sphere of historical existence’ (p. 23).
Thus, Goethe’s novel can be read as an early reflection and literary realisation of
‘chronotopoi’. In fact, Goethe’s whole worldview bears witness to a new philosophy
in which, both on an individual and a collective level as well as on an empirical and
artistic level, historical, spatial and social changes are intertwined: ‘Everything in
[Goethe’s] world is a time-space, a true chronotope’ (p. 42).
According to Bakhtin, it is in times of rapid historical and social transformation that
the literary and philosophical concept of the ‘chronotope’ comes into its own. Conse-
quently, the Wilhelm Meister narrative, which reflects the transition from a predomi-
nantly feudal to a bourgeois society and with it the changes in geographical and social
mobility at the beginning of early industrial society, can be considered a case study.
As Wilhelm visits some (fictionalised) centres of late eighteenth-century Central Euro-
pean civilisation as well as its fringes and engages with traditional and contemporary
English, French and German political and aesthetic philosophies, the entire social,
political and philosophical transformation of the age of late Enlightenment, the
French Revolution and German Idealism impacts on his personal development or
 4 Norman Franke

‘Bildung’. The novel’s spaces (Wilhelm’s home town, the merchant city, the court,
the loge, the theatre, the artists’ camp, various locations of his highway travels) epito-
mise, symbolise or counteract stages of individual and social transformation and help
the protagonist (and the reader) to experiment with diverse chronotopical scenarios in
order to envisage or create a better individual and collective future. Hence, this ‘novel
of emergence’ deals with ‘the historical future’ as well as ‘problems of reality, and
man’s potential, problems of freedom and necessity, and the problem of creative
initiative ris[ing to its] full height’ (Bakhtin, 1987, p. 23).
However, Bakhtin regards Wilhelm Meister not only as a historical example of
chronotopical literature in times of transition but also as a point of comparison and a
running comment on social, political and aesthetic transformations during the time of
the late bourgeois and early socialist period in Europe and Russia in the aftermath of
the October Revolution. In the following analysis of Bakhtin’s The Bildungsroman, I
shall confront some of Bakhtin’s key ideas about the function of the modern realist
novel with those of the Head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Cen-
tral Committee of the Russian Bolshevik Party, Andrei Zhdanov. Based on Zhdanov’s
Educational Philosophy and Theory

(in-)famous speech entitled ‘Soviet Literature—Richest in Ideas, most advanced Liter-

ature’ which was given at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ congress, the ‘Zhdanov Doctrine’
dominated the discourse of ‘Socialist Realism’ in Soviet-dominated countries until
1989.1 Zhdanov delivered his speech as Stalin’s representative in the same year when
Bakhtin began to write his manuscript on the Bildungsroman.
Bakhtin’s reading of Goethe can be also understood as a complementary study to
his other great work on modern literature, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, in which
Bakhtin presents a detailed discussion of forms of ‘heteroglossia’ in the modern novel
and also about the relationship between modern authors of novels and their protago-
nists. Dostoevsky was considered a reactionary bourgeois author by many members of
Zhdanov’s Propaganda Department, as were some imminent Goethe scholars such as
Friedrich Gundolf and Georg Simmel whom Bakhtin invoked in his own interpreta-
tion of Goethe’s anthropology and aesthetics. Yet it is precisely Goethe whom Luna-
charsky and even Zhdanov and Stalin himself2 regarded one of the highest gods in
the pantheon of realist writers and his analysis of Goethe gave Bakhtin licence to
discuss problems of realism that were disregarded or marginalised by Zhdanov’s
doctrinaire approach.
It was probably with more than the Soviet censors in mind that, in The Bildungsroman,
Bakhtin concedes that there are ‘socio-economic contradictions’ that can become ‘forces
of development’ both in science as well as in ‘human relations and ideas’ (Bakhtin,
1987, p. 25). But what fascinated him about Goethe in contrast to the somewhat pre-
conceived and deterministic theories of history, espoused by those who saw time and
space as an ‘immobile background’ or a ‘given that is completed once and for all’, is
Goethe’s ‘ability to see time, to read time’ and ‘to read in everything signs that show time in
its course’ (p. 25). There is a clearly discernible subtext in Bakhtin’s The Bildungsroman
which challenges and contradicts the monological closure of Zhdanov’s ‘Socialist Real-
ism’ with its over-simplistic and propagandistic interpretation of the links between class
and literature but also its assumption that the kind of socialist society envisaged by Marx
and Engels had not only in principle be achieved ‘once and for all’ by the October
 Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia 5

Revolution but that Stalinism was its legitimate successor. Zhdanov saw the ideal
modern author as an omniscient ‘engineer of human souls’, for Bakhtin they are careful
readers. And whereas Zhdanov claimed ‘never to return are the times when bourgeois
literature … was able to create great works’ (Zhdanov, 1977) and that Stalinist literature
was the peak of modern artistic development, Bakhtin celebrates the ‘historical multi-
temporality’ in Goethe’s Bildungsroman that contains ‘contradictions of contemporary
life … remnants of the past, and rudiments and tendencies of the future’ (Bakhtin,
1987, p. 26). In contrast to the doctrines of Historical Materialism that stress the vecto-
rial progress of time and postulate distinct ‘plateaus’ of socio-historical development,
Bakhtin’s theory allows for what appears to be an almost postmodern notion of the coex-
istence of different layers of time and historical mentalities. For Historical Materialism,
the telos of history (‘the dictatorship of the Proletariat’, ‘Communist society’) is clearly
defined, Bakhtin, on the other hand, speaks much more cautiously of ‘tendencies of the
future’. Invoking the historical context of the eighteenth century, he also challenges the
supremacy of philosophy amongst the knowledge-generating disciplines and, implicitly,
the Soviet notion of Marxist/Leninist philosophy being a ‘scientific’ instrument for
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explaining social and historical developments. As Bakhtin submits: ‘[The] process of

preparing for the disclosure of historical time took place more rapidly, completely, and
profoundly in literary creativity than in the abstract philosophical, and strictly historical,
ideological views of Enlightenment thinkers.’ (p. 26). Akin to Gramsci’s and Berdyaev’s
notions of art (who in turn adopted elements of Marx’ ideas about Produktivkraft to
modern media society), Bakhtin considers artistic creativity as a potentially productive
force within the framework of a humanist utopian mission: ‘The creative past must be
revealed as necessary and productive under the conditions of given locality, as a creative
humanisation of this locality, which transforms a portion of terrestrial space into a place
of historical life for people …’ (Bakhtin, 1987, p. 34).
In contrast to the totalitarian and levelling tendencies of twentieth-century Stalinist
(as well as global Capitalist) industrialisation, with its one-size-fits-all approach
regarding technical infrastructures and standardised artefacts and their ubiquitous ide-
ological media, Goethe’s ‘creative humanization’ requires a humanist local involve-
ment, which Bakhtin associated with Goethe’s work in Weimar as a minister of
culture and infrastructure, as an educator, as theatre director, as an organiser of liter-
ary and scientific salons and as a famous sponsor and supporter of arts and crafts.
This local cultural involvement with like-minded friends and fellow artists is also rem-
iniscent of Bakhtin’s own collaboration with the Vitebsk artist community in the early
1920s. The kind of communitarian engagement that Bakhtin associates with Goethe
would have been considered renegade by orthodox Stalinists, had it been linked to
any contemporary philosopher’s or artist’s name. Yet, an implicit critique of the Bol-
shevik’s claim to philosophical omniscience and absolute truth becomes possible with
reference to Goethe: ‘Not abstract moral truth (abstract justice, ideology, and so on),
but the necessity of any creative work or historical deed was the important thing for
Goethe’ (Bakhtin, 1987, p. 39). Challenging the Party’s abstract socio-economic engi-
neering as expressed in its Five Year Plans and rule by ukase and its frequent disre-
gard for the unique temporal and spatial conditions regarding the development of
educational and cultural practices and values, Bakhtin proclaims Goethe as an artistic
 6 Norman Franke

and philosophical role model. Bakhtin’s expression of his admiration for Goethe’s life
and art reaches hymn-like proportions as he celebrates ‘the inseparability of the time
of an event from the specific place of its occurrence (Localität und Geschichte) …
and, on the basis of the necessity that pervades localised time, the inclusion of the
future, crowning the fullness of time in Goethe’s image’ (p. 41/42).
Alluding to Judaeo–Christian religious discourse, Bakhtin re-mythologises the
notion of historical eschatology. Goethe’s novel and its semi-autobiographical protag-
onist, Meister, as well as the author himself are potentially elevated to an almost mes-
sianic status (‘crowning the fullness of time in Goethe’s image’). It was, in fact, no
other than the apostle Paul who, in allusion to passages in the Tanakh, had popu-
larised the phrase ‘fullness of time’ within a distinct eschatological framework: ‘But
when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, to redeem those who
were under the law’ (Gal, 4:4–7). Bakhtin’s invocation of Paul’s proclamation of the
end of slavery under ‘the law’ and the ‘adoptation to sonship’ of a perceived redeemer
has an immanent and immediate as well a transcendent and utopian dimension.
Bakhtin reclaims Paul’s eschatological theology and adopts it to modern authorship.
Educational Philosophy and Theory

It is the creative artist, not the political or academic ‘engineer of the soul’, who antici-
pates and realises the fullness of time. For Bakhtin, Goethe appears as the first born
of a new breed of artists who creatively transform ‘chronotopoi’. It is in passages like
these that Holquist’s observation of Bakhtin being first and foremost an anthropologi-
cal and cultural philosopher rather than a literary historian are born out.3 It is in
Bakhtin’s quasi-messianic allusions and in his praise of Goethe’s attempts to live an
un-alienated life as a man and as an artist, particularly during his sojourn in Italy
(Bakhtin, 1987, p. 31–33) that the cultural philosopher outlines a utopian vision that
is both positive and concrete. It can be read as a positive counterpart to Bakhtin’s
attempts to develop a concept of utopia ex negativo, as ‘Utopia as Critique’ (Gardiner,
1992), in his later studies of Rabelais. In The Bildungsroman, Goethe appears to be a
modern man who managed to realise, both in his life and in his art, a ‘gelungenes
Leben’—a rich and fulfilling life, a utopian anthropological dream come true. How-
ever, Bakhtin’s allusion to the fullness of time also contains an ironic or cautionary
twist. As readers of Goethe’s drama Faust are aware, it was Goethe’s best known
character Faust who, in an almost obsessive way, was striving for the fulfilled
moment, for bliss and lasting happiness (Faust I, 7 ‘Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! Du bist so schön!”).4 Due to the intervention of Mephistopheles, the
devil, this longed-for fulfilment is not granted during Faust’s life time.5 Only in the
apotheosis of the last scene of Faust II could there be a hint of (metaphysical) fulfil-
ment. However, by that time Faust no longer dwells amongst the living.
Bakhtin’s The Bildungsroman can also be read as a complementary and contrastive
text to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.6 While Bakhtin’s Wilhelm Meister study con-
siders the design and the sociological as well as spatiotemporal environment of the
early modern bourgeois novel, Dostoevsky’s Poetics turns to late bourgeois scenarios
and issues. As Bakhtin demonstrates, Goethe’s novel is rather optimistic about the
potentially fulfilling life of a nineteenth-century European bourgeois: Wilhelm Meister
learns from and is encouraged by a large number of friends, mentors and companions
who help him and the novel along the way to a happy ending. Dostoevsky, on the
 Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia 7

other hand, displays and analyses the tormented souls of the late bourgeoisie in
Russia. In both Goethe’s and Dostoevsky’s novels, the dynamics of the text are
produced by the polyphony of characters or ‘voices’. As so often in Bakhtin, in The
Bildungsroman, no detailed analysis of the protagonists’ voices or their dialogues
occurs. Bakhtin simply assumes an in-depth knowledge of Wilhelm Meister on the part
of his readers. Those familiar with Wilhelm Meister would know, then, that the novel’s
‘multitemporality’ is achieved through the diversity of voices in the novel. All of them:
Wilhelm Meister, Mariane, Philine, Mignon, Aurélie, Natalie, Felix, Lothario, etc.
stand in for certain bourgeois attitudes and chronotopoi. Interacting with each other,
the characters change the spaces and the time they live in and have a decisive influ-
ence on Wilhelm Meister’s development and education (‘Bildung’). With a few excep-
tions, these many individual voices converge to create a harmonious effect on their
surroundings and the ‘Bildung’ of the main protagonist. This, according to Bakhtin,
is quite different from the polyphony in e.g. the Brothers Karamasov. In the late days
of the bourgeoisie, the dialogues of the protagonists do not result in harmony but in
arguments and strife frequently leading to depression and metaphysical despair. In
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addition, the multiple voices of the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s novels are no longer
related to the education process of a single outstanding character. Dostoevsky’s char-
acters represent equal and distinct individual personalities who not only struggle with
each other but also with their author. Late modern authorship no longer involves the
design of a (fictional) ‘soul’ but bears witness to the conflicts of different and chang-
ing souls, their psychomachia which may result in the author’s indictment by their
own (fictional) creatures.
It was precisely this dilemma of the modern author that the first Soviet People’s
Commissar of Education, Lunacharsky, had in mind when he criticised Dostoevsky
for ‘not [being] the master in his own home’.7 It is with general respect and often
with approval that in Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin refers to Lunacharsky, particularly
with regard to the latter’s ideas about social diversification and polyphonic writing
styles in late modernity. Although strongly interested in the development of harmo-
nious and positive topics and styles in Socialist literature and hence in the tradition of
Goethe, Lunacharsky nonetheless acknowledged the necessity of independent authors
and the need to truthfully record and criticise aspects of late bourgeois and early
socialist life. Highly educated and multi-lingual, as a Commissar of Education, Luna-
charsky had encouraged or tolerated a wide range of authors and their literary experi-
ments and scholarship, including Bakhtin’s. But in the period following
Lunacharsky’s ousting and death (1933), the old question of how modern authors
and protagonists can retain their integrity and authority and realise, perhaps even col-
laboratively, a fulfilled or good life without glossing over social and psychological
problems like in the propagandistic literature advocated by Zhdanov arose with a ven-
geance. For Bakhtin, despite being born in the days of the Ancient Regime, Goethe
appeared to be a happier person and author and more of a uomo universale than the
late bourgeois Dostoyevsky, or Soviet model authors such as Gorky or Sholokhov,
although, or perhaps because, the author of Wilhelm Meister preceded them by more
than a 100 years. In terms of literary and psychological complexity, Dostoevsky’s
polyphony, however, appears more developed than Goethe’s.
 8 Norman Franke

For Bakhtin, it is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novel that upholds the (utopian) notion
of the fullness, harmony and beauty of ‘the good life’. To be realised immanently in
time and space, this Goethean ideal nonetheless retains a reference to traditional
metaphysics, namely to the discourses of the human Imago-Dei and of Paradise lost
and regained. In Book Six of Wilhelm Meister in the ‘Bekenntnisse einer schönen
Seele’, the ‘Confessions of a beautiful Soul’ (sic), Goethe submits: ‘There does not
have to be a contradiction between the concept of man and the concept of the
godhead. And if we frequently feel a certain dissimilarity to and distance from the
godhead, it is our obligation to refute the perspective of the advocate of meanness
and evil who only focuses on the shortcomings […] of our human nature. On the con-
trary, we should seek to realise our perfectibility so that we can verify our claim to be
the images of god.’8 With reference to Goethe, in the opening passages of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics, Bakhtin makes explicit mention of the author as the ‘creator’ of (fictional)
human beings, of ‘souls’. However, in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, it is not the optimistic
Judaeo–Christian Imago-Dei discourse that Goethe’s ‘beautiful soul’ advocates, it is
the more ambivalent Greek tradition of Prometheus and Goethe’s lyrical adaptation
thereof,9 that is recalled: ‘Dostoevsky, like Goethe’s Prometheus, creates not voiceless
Educational Philosophy and Theory

slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator,
capable of not agreeing with him and even rebelling against him.’ (Bakhtin, 1984,
p. 6). These ‘Promethean souls’ are free from the tutelage of the gods and they are
free to interact and act collectively as they please—with the possibility of acting inhu-
manely and even radically evil. After Auschwitz and the Gulag Bakhtin’s literary the-
ory focuses more on the darker and cruder traditions of modernity such as
Dostoevsky, but also Rabelais. Bakhtin, however, did not totally discard the Goethe
ideal of his early scholarship, which continues to linger in the background of his later
works as a reminder of the shamefully lost opportunities of late modernity. As late as
1963, in the revised edition of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin contrasted Goethean liter-
ary aesthetics and anthropology with those of Dostoevsky when he noted the con-
densed ‘juxtapose and counterpose’ of Dostoevsky’s ‘dramatic’ storytelling as
compared to Goethe’s ‘organically… evolving sequence(s) and “the various stages” of
an essentially “unified development.” (p. 28)
Let us now turn briefly to some of the Goethe scholarship that Bakhtin (may have)
used to develop his ideas about Goethe. As many Bakhtin experts have pointed out
before, this is not an easy task, as Bakhtin was notoriously unconcerned with referenc-
ing his sources. Bakhtin’s general indebtedness to Cohen’s thinking has been men-
tioned above. More specifically, Bakhtin’s reception of Simmel’s Goethe (1913) and
Gundolf’s Goethe (1916) demands attention, as we know for certain that Bakhtin was
familiar with them, as he explicitly refers to them in Dostoevsky’s Poetics.10 Interest-
ingly, at the time of writing their monographs, both Simmel and Gundolf were in dif-
ferent ways influenced by the Goethe cult of the ‘George Kreis’, by anti-modernist
and Nietzschean readings of Goethe, although Simmel, who had published a mono-
graph, Kant and Goethe, in 1906 tried to reconcile Kant’s and Goethe’s humanism
with the celebration of George’s ‘Bildner und Gestalter’, the heroic creative genius. In
his Goethe monograph, Simmel submits that in Goethe’s development ‘there is noth-
ing monstrous as so often shows in the path of a great genius’ (Simmel, 1913,
 Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia 9

p. 286). In Goethe’s life and art, Simmel also discerns a ‘unified development’ that
the philosopher regards as the ‘Urphänomen Goethe’ (Goethe, the archetype): ‘In the
sum and unity of his achievements, Goethe did not only proclaim but lived an essen-
tial and absolute human life (“das allgemeine und absolute Menschliche”), over and
above the creation of his masterful individual works.’ (Simmel, 1913, p. 286). And it
is with reference to both Kant and Goethe that Simmel exemplifies his seminal idea
of ‘Wertbedeutung’: ‘Since the eighteenth century, philosophy is confronted with an
important cultural task: to regain, at a higher level, the lost unity of nature and spirit
(“Geist”), mechanistic empiricism and intuition, scientific objectivity and the emo-
tionally grounded sense of the value of life and things (“gefühlte[n] Wertbedeutung”)’
(Simmel, 1913, p. 2/3), which is akin to Bakhtin’s understanding of Goethe’s philoso-
phy and also of Bakhtin’s own philosophy that eschews the extremes of modern posi-
tivistic and esoteric trends and, with the mature Goethe, settles for an ethically
grounded ‘spirited materialism’ instead.
Craig Brandist has analysed the epistemological concerns of Bakhtin in the wake of
(Neo-) Kantian rationality and Brentano’s phenomenology, including the up-take of
Educational Philosophy and Theory

German ‘Gestalt-Theorien’ by Kantian and Marxist Bakhtinians (Brandist, 2002b). It

seems to me that in celebrating the artistic and human ‘Bildnis’ or ‘Gestalt Goethes’,
the ‘image of Goethe’ with reference to Simmel and Gundolf, Bakhtin suggests an
ideal candidate for the reconciliation of realist and materialist and nominalist and ide-
alist epistemologies—and practices. In Goethe, the man and the artist the idea of
‘menschliche Gestalt’ appears to be realised and elevated to a quasi-divine status.
Goethe becomes the epitome (this, too is an aspect of the German term ‘Bildnis’ or
‘Gestalt’) of the artist who, as a co-creator, humanises nature by substantially improv-
ing his own chronotopical environments. For Bakhtin’s Goethe, literature is a reflec-
tive refraction of socio-historical developments, but its highest, aesthetically, and
hence symbolically, encoded value judgements reflect positively back on these reali-
ties. This reading of Goethe’s ‘Gestalt’-theory recalls core elements of Ernst Cassirer’s
philosophy of symbolic forms and Cassirer’s 1932 Goethe-scholarship (Cassirer,
1995). Bakhtin may have been familiar with Cassirer’s ideas.

III
The ‘Vollkommenheit’ (‘wholeness’ is probably a better translation here than ‘perfec-
tion’) of Goethe’s ‘Gestalt’ that Bakhtin perceives with Simmel and Gundolf would
not be complete without the imperfect, the subversive, the ironic, the carnivalesque—
not just as ‘the other’ or as a supplement to ‘Gestalt’, but as an integral part of its
unified development. Goethe’s great striving individual, Faust, cannot operate without
his negative and ironic sidekick Mephistopheles. And before and even during the time
that Goethe’s semi-autobiographical hero Wilhelm Meister becomes a settled and
responsible adult, there is a subversive, if not anarchic element at play in his educa-
tional development. No one picked the novel’s critical and subversive tone up more
keenly than the Neo-Marxist Ernst Bloch who, in his reading of Wilhelm Meister, links
the adventures of its hero to the Sturm and Drang spirit of the young Goethe and his
friend Schiller: in their early narratives, Bloch senses ‘something utopian, [a] “new
 10 Norman Franke

dimension”, wild-vague yet conjuring, a republic without cowards …’ (Bloch, 1986,

p. 978). It is Meister’s youthful creativity and anarchism and his celebration of the
good things in (youthful) life that meet with Bloch’s approval. Even when he finally
matures and becomes a man of the bourgeois establishment, Meister is still reminis-
cent of his early life in a number of ‘subcultures’ amongst actors, poets, wandering
scholars and wayfarers: ‘when the hero, taught by experience, returns to active, real
life … it is not into the philistine existence such as that of Werner [Wilhelm’s brother,
N.P.F.], that of the practical man … who has never known the element of exuber-
ance, whose practice is spiritless and whose realism is itself the most incomplete.’
(p. 980). A detailed comparison between Bloch’s and Bakhtin’s reading of Wilhelm
Meister goes beyond the scope of this article, but I think there is little doubt that
Bakhtin who e.g. in Rabelais and his World is highly critical of the unfree, philistine
and humourless bureaucracies and drab lifestyles in all forms of totalitarian societies
would have endorsed Bloch’s interpretation.
It is in the context of historical development in the ‘Bildungsroman’ and Goethe’s
strategies of visualising time and space in Wilhelm Meister that Bakhtin, briefly, talks
Educational Philosophy and Theory

about the carnivalesque, more precisely about Goethe’s essay Das Ro¨mische Karneval
(The Roman Carnival): ‘[The] feeling for time profoundly permeates [Goethe’s] cele-
brated description of the Roman carnival’ (Bakhtin, 1987, p. 32). Together with some
passages in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, this is one of the earliest references to the carnival in
Bakhtin’s writings. When in Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin later develops his own
ideas about the Roman Carnival, his knowledge and his examples regarding the
Roman Carnival are largely based on Goethe’s essay (Nährlich-Slatewa, 1989).
Closely connected to the Italienische Reise (Italian Journey) and published in 1788,
Goethe’s Das Ro¨mische Karneval contains a vivid recollection of and some concise the-
orising about the anarchic events Goethe had witnessed in the spring of 1787 in
Rome. Performed in prominent public spaces in Rome (the ‘Corso’), Goethe
describes a lively subversive spectacle that involves the entire population of the city.
According to Goethe, during carnival, the Roman street ‘ceases to be a street, it
rather resembles a large ballroom, a huge decorated gallery’ (Goethe, 1964, p. 489)
thus pointing to the general ‘Bewohnbarkeit der Welt’ (a benevolent, habitable
world), soon ‘the masks start to multiply. Young men, dressed in the Sunday best of
women of the lower classes, show of their breasts and indulge in cheeky self-regard.
They caress other men, enter in intimate private conversation with women as if they
were no strangers and generally do what their fancy, wit or naughtiness compel them
to do’ (Goethe, 1964, p. 490). This is reciprocated by the women assuming male
roles. Amongst the crowds, there are countless Pulcinella figures who mock or lam-
bast the actors and a pitiful ‘advocate’ who, ironically and unsuccessfully, tries to
accuse and arrest them all.
Similar to Bakhtin’s observations about the carnivalesque in Rabelais’ writings, a sig-
nificant element of the carnival Goethe describes is that it challenges all‚ given ‘order’
and social constructs of gender and power differentials, especially the deeply ingrained
dichotomies of ‘high and low’, ‘sacred and profane’, ‘male and female’, ‘public and
private’, and ‘nature and culture’. Undermining all etiquettes of everyday life and
allowing the suppressed voices of the people to be heard, the Roman Carnival has a
 Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia 11

profound liberating and levelling effect. As Goethe observes: ‘The difference between
the social orders seems to be abolished for the time being … and the insolence and
licence of the feast is balanced only by the universal good humour’ (Goethe, 1962,
p. 54). Nährlich-Slatewa demonstrates that both Goethe and Bakhtin celebrate the
Roman carnival for its cheerful anarchy and the ‘freie Familisierung’ of its participants
(1989, p. 195). Goethe and Bakhtin also agree on a more general philosophical
note: that ‘matter becomes fully creative and historical’ only as human body (p. 197).
Bakhtin, however, stresses the corporeal grotesqueness and longevity of the carniva-
lesque thus reading the ‘Roman Carnival’ partly against Goethe, whose ‘Aristocratic
reading’ insists on its geographical, social and chronological delimitation.
As Bakhtin would have been well aware, Goethe’s Italian journey was amongst the
happiest and most productive times in the life of the ‘Universalgenie’. Throughout his
Italian Journey, Goethe reflected on time. In Das Ro¨mische Karneval, Goethe describes
the old institution of the Roman Carnival as a ‘bedeutendes Naturereignis und Natio-
nalereignis’ (Goethe, 1964, p. 668), inviting a reading of it in line with similar remarks
on natural history and the development of folk culture in the Italian Journey. Bakhtin
considers and approvingly explores Goethe’s view of long durée in nature and culture,11
Educational Philosophy and Theory

when, in The Bildungsroman, Bakhtin first quotes Goethe on the chronotopical develop-
ment of the Alpine mountains, then moves on to Goethe’s reflections on natural and
folk culture and national culture(s) which he sees imbedded in ‘organic time’ (Bakhtin,
1987, p. 31) and finally turns to the most elaborate and sophisticated examples of
philosophically informed literary culture in the form of the novel of development. Here
Bakhtin’s own reflection on time takes an Aristotelian and Hegelian turn: there is an
entelechial dimension in both natural and cultural history, with the possibility of an
eschatological dimension in cultural history. Similar to Lukács who in his analysis of
modernity’s negative dialectics draws on Schiller, Hegel and Marx (Tihanov, 1998),
Bakhtin deplores modern history’s tendency to separate nature and culture, reason and
sensibility and to engender the project of ‘Bildung’ within the alienating structures of
bourgeois capitalism (or, for Bakhtin, also State-run Socialism) which in turn are
reflected in its literature. Nonetheless, akin to Bloch, although focused on an individual
and communitarian level rather than on political universalism, Bakhtin discerns positive
and concrete utopian traces of ‘gelungenes Leben’ (fulfilled life) ‘im Aufschein’ (shining
through) even in alienated modernity. In Goethe’s Roman experience: ‘the space of
Rome revealed for Goethe the “fullness of time” … the Italian journey was its culmina-
tion point’ (p. 41). Twenty years after the American Declaration of Independence had
enshrined the right to the ‘pursuit of happiness’, through his universal ‘Bildung’ (which
included an embrace of the carnivalesque) Goethe realised it together with international
friends and fellow artists in Rome.
Towards the end of The Bildungsroman fragment, Bakhtin’s focuses on religious
issues criticising forms of premodern religious thinking as ‘otherworldly and fantastic’
that did not only ‘fill in the gaps of … impoverished reality’ but also ‘disorganised and
bled … present reality’ (Bakhtin, 1987, p. 43). This criticism of traditional religious
metaphysics e.g. in orthodox Christianity12 is contrasted with Goethe’s Roman
experience of an immanent, rich and fulfilling life, with Goethe’s ‘Weltfrömmigkeit’
(reverence for the world), a ‘materialist spirituality’, as Bakhtin states: ‘Goethe’s world
 12 Norman Franke

is … utterly real, visibly available, and at the same time filled with an equally real
future that is growing out of it’ (p. 50).
There is no Bolshevik carnival, nor is there capitalist spirituality. So in his post-war
philosophy of subversion, Bakhtin had to resort to (literary) instruments of gargantuan
proportions in order to criticise and change contemporary totalitarian tendencies. In
an article on Bakhtinian Criticism in the Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory,
Ken Hirschkop argues that on realising that the transformational dialectics between
literary chronotopes and empirical culture can be frustratingly slow and are potentially
infinite, Bakhtin ‘cleverly switched horses … exchanging Goethe for the extravagant
world of Rabelais.’ (Hirschkop, 2011, p. 234) In seems to me, however, that, in the
end, the Bakhtinian ideas of ‘realised utopia’ and of ‘utopia as critique’ (Gardiner,
1992) belong together. So do the carnivalesque of Goethe, imbedded in ‘organic
time’, and the carnivalesque of Rabelais, linked to revolutionary and even apocalypti-
cal time. All of them are cultural forms and options that are potentially present in,
and can be (re-)activated in, the strangely diverse and precarious development of
(post-) modern chronotopes.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. With Zhdanov’s speech, the exciting era of diverse and often competing revolutionary art
forms that were encouraged or tolerated by Lenin and his followers and included Construc-
tivist, Formalist, Productivist, Expressionist, Futurist and Proletkult elements, came to an
end.
2. On reading Maxim Gorky’s Death and the Maiden, Stalin was reported to have proclaimed:
‘This thing is more powerful than Goethe’s Faust’; Rayfield, Stalin and his Hangmen, 1989,
p. 70.
3. In his introduction to The Bildungsroman, p. xiv.
4. ‘If to the moment I shall ever say: “Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!” Then may you fetters
on me lay, Then will I perish, then and there!’.
5. Shortly before his death, the blind Faust exclaims in Faust II, 5 ‘[Sollte ich] auf freiem
Grund mit freiem Volke stehn./Zum Augenblicke dürft ich sagen: /Verweile doch …’ Here
Goethe applies dark irony. Believing to hear workers reclaiming land from the sea in order
to ‘stand on free land with free people’, the ageing Faust seems to be near to the moment
of the fulfilment when his personal and political dreams seem finally to come true. How-
ever, what he really hears are grave-diggers digging his own grave.
6. For a detailed account of the publication history, see Caryl Emerson, Editor’s Preface of
the translation of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. The first publication of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art
occurred in the same year as Bakhtin was arrested (1929). At the instigation of young liter-
ary scholars, a revised version was published in 1963. The 1963 edition retained the crucial
passages about Goethe. It is probably safe to assume that throughout the late 1920s and
1930s Bakhtin was occupied with both Goethe’s and Dostoevsky’s theory of the novel.
7. ‘… Dostoevsky … is not master in his own home, and the disintegration of his personal-
ity … is what makes him subjectively qualified to be the tormented and necessary reflector
of the confusion of his epoch.’ (Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 35).
8. All Goethe translations and translations from German by N.P.F. if not otherwise stated.
 Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia 13

9. Written between 1772 and 1774, Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’ poem about the creative genius
who defies the gods was widely regarded as the essence of ‘Sturm und Drang’ philosophy.
10. Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 28.
11. For a more detailed discussion of Bakhtin’s notion of ‘great time’, see Shepherd, 2006.
12. It is possible to read these passages as a critical comment on the ‘otherworldly spirituality’
of such Russian Orthodox classics as the Cherubikon. Here Bakhtin’s and Marx’ critique of
orthodox Christianity coincide. According to Marc Chagall, Bakhtinians listened to Tchai-
kovsky’s music in Vitebsk; it is unknown if this included Tchaikovsky’s ‘Hymn of the
Cherubim’, one of the Cherubikon’s most sublime musical settings.

Notes on contributor
Norman Franke is the convenor of the German Programme at the University of Waikato in
Hamilton, New Zealand. He has published widely about German Enlightenment and Romanti-
cism (Novalis, Lessing) as well as German-speaking exile literature (Albert Einstein, Ernst Kan-
torowicz, Else Lasker-Schüler, Karl Wolfskehl) and Albert Schweitzer. Norman has been invited
to give guest lectures in Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA. He also works as
a documentary film-maker (Past Present—the Poet and Environmentalist Peter Dane, together with
Elaine Bliss) and translator. Email: franke@waikato.ac.nz
Educational Philosophy and Theory

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