Oldal 111 [111]
OCR
RITUAL AND THEATRICALITY IN GOETHES WILHELM MEISTER become a productive bourgeois citizen, instead entertains aspirations of helping to cultivate a cultured public through the establishment of a German National Theater. Sent on a business trip, he instead falls in with a traveling theatrical troupe and indulges his acting fantasies, only to realize after some time that he has idealized the tawdry reality of theatrical life. Groping around for a sense of direction in life, Wilhelm discovers that a mysterious Tower Society has intervened at various stages of his journey to influence the course of events and offer him veiled guidance. When Wilhelm seeks direction, they retreat, yet when he attempts to act independently, he discovers that they have anticipated and outmaneuvered him. Via a series of dramatic reversals and unexpected revelations, the tale ends happily: Wilhelm is extricated from a misguided engagement to the capable but unimaginative Therese, becomes involved in the noble Lothario’s enterprise of dismantling feudalism on his estates, and wins the heart and hand of the benevolent and aristocratic Natalie. But instead of settling down into some specific form of active life, he sets out on yet another journey, postponing marriage and settled adult life. What does Wilhelm learn by way of his lengthy detour through the world of theater? To some extent, the dominance of this theme reflects the earliest form of the novel, in which Goethe envisioned that Wilhelm’s theatrical ambitions would be realized. Goethe worked on the novel from 1777-1785, and it reflected his own involvement in the Weimar court theater and the hopes of many of the time to transform society by establishing National Theaters throughout Germany. The notion of a “National Theater,” while reflecting the ideal of a national literature rooted in the special character of the German language, was not quite what the name indicates. These were theaters, the first of which was established in Hamburg in 1767, which performed plays in German, but many of these plays were translated from French and Italian, as there was not an adequate supply of original German material. The idea was that courtsubsidized theaters would raise theater to cultural respectability, improve the lives of actors by giving them a steady income and taking them off the road, and by relieving these economic pressures also release the inherent power of theater to form sounder, more elevated public taste.° In a 1784 lecture to the “German Society” at Mannheim, Schiller expressed the aspirations of the day: The stage is the channel, open to all, into which the light of wisdom pours down from the superior, thinking part of the people, to spread from there in milder beams through the whole state. More correct ideas, sounder principles, purer feelings flow from here through all the veins of the people. The mists of barbarism, of dark superstition vanish, night gives way to victorious light.’ ° W.H. Bruford: The German Tradition of Self- Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, 31-32. 7 Friedrich Schiller, quoted by Bruford: Self- Cultivation, 31. - 109 +
