Reading Pleasures
Michael Minden explores questions of identity in the modern German novel.

Is it possible to generalise about the modern novel? Probably not when it comes to content: the word post-modern emerged when it was no longer clear what modernism was about, although it had become equally clear that it could be about anything at all. Then perhaps in relation to how it is written and how it is read? Well, maybe, although there have been different kinds of reading even in Europe in the century just past. If we are interested in democratic capitalism – the sort of environment that gives rise to the extraordinary richness of writing displayed in the pages of new books in german - perhaps we can say something about reading novels in that environment and the contribution German novels have made to it.

Once reading a novel provided a simple but double pleasure. This pleasure derived from identification. The identification went two ways. First, you identified with the morality that informed the novel’s representation of the world. But then you also identified with the transgressions of the characters against this morality. You thus enjoyed both the pleasure of vicarious misbehaviour, and the pleasure of belonging to a community that condemned it. Put in a purely formal way, with the novel in your hand you could both be in society and out of it at the same time, or, to put it in linguistic terms, you could enjoy lies without depriving yourself of the indispensable convenience of the integrity of language. You could indulge yourself with the sanction of the rest of the world (at least that of the authors, publishers and booksellers: the moral arbiters of former times were distinctly uneasy and sometimes hostile).

The modern world, the one that came to itself in shock after the First World War, sees the consummation of the social mobility of personality that had its first stirrings in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Novel-reading changed. The double identification afforded by the pre war novel mutated. On the one hand you identified with the partialness of subjective experience in a world where men were no longer responsibly in control (this control had been struggling with its own absurdity for a long time: this is marvellously depicted in the least typical novel in the world, Stifter’s Indian Summer). On the other, in recognising this inner fracture as a shared experience, you were already experiencing the deep satisfaction of the inalienable human need to be part of a community. This must account for the publishing surprise of the 1920s, the unique success of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. In it this paradox, the sharing of the feeling of alienation, first found mass resonance.

If we concentrate on the development of democratic capitalism, and leave aside the forms of extreme political organisation that arose in contradistinction to it in the post war world, then we find that personality is more fluid, less defined by internalised sets of values, while the culture industry becomes more predatory. So while the search for community with others who, like ourselves, are condemned to organise their own identity, grows more intense and more universal, the culture industry meets this need with forms of immediate gratification which exploit it, seeking, you could say, to close it down into a single pleasure of identification, which hides our differences, even to ourselves.

In this environment the novel as a form of socially sanctioned entertainment takes on a new function. It naturally speaks to and of the unique individual in each of us, not least in the private pleasure it affords (both to read and to write), and it admits us into the community of writers, readers, publishers, booksellers, reviewers, pundits and publicists who represent a public aspect of our world, even if it is no longer possible, as it certainly is not, to talk of a ‘public sphere’ in the eighteenth-century sense. Like psychoanalysis and the many lifestyle therapies deriving from it, the novel now helps each reader and writer (modestly and temporarily, no doubt) to keep the show on the road and to manage the ride between the Scylla of madness (too much individuality) and the Charybdis of hollow conformity (with machine-generated virtual identities).

The German novel has contributed to this in at least two ways that can be mentioned briefly here. The first is typified by that maligned, but in my view absolutely representatively modern writer, Hermann Hesse. Hesse is a worthy heir to an under-acknowledged tradition of middlebrow writing in the German novel that includes Schnabel, Wieland, Jean Paul and E.T.A Hoffmann, who write for an existing public rather than an imagined one. Their work like Hesse’s, and indeed Thomas Mann’s, was rewarded with popular success. In Hesse there are irreducibly non-comformist characters (inspired by Hesse’s own experiences refracted back to him through psychoanalysis), who appeal to everybody, by virtue of their uniqueness. This is the double pleasure of the novel, but adjusted for the post war world. It is the eccentricity that you now identify with, while you share with others the pleasure of doing so, and thus, to that extent, overcome it. It is perfectly calculated to help with modernity’s ‘revisable narrative of self-identity’ of which the social theorist Anthony Giddens speaks.

The other example is the tendency, say from Max Frisch onwards, but with roots in Nietzsche, Proust, Kafka and doubtless many other authors too, towards what one might call autobiographical fiction. Here the old-fashioned individualism of the production of the novel is important. This preserves a space of self-dramatisation for the author not really available in the techno-corporate forms of narrative which have displaced the novel as dominant. In this space, the doubleness of every author (the failure ever to identify perfectly with oneself – rather wearyingly depicted in Frisch’s work) is offered to the double identity of the reader to … identify with.

In both cases the German novel has had a special contribution to make to the surprising survival of the habit of novel writing and reading. In a world full of cultural deformation, the marvellous proliferation of narrative possibilities preserves the pleasure of complex individualism.

Michael Minden is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and University Senior Lecturer in German. He is currently working on a Cultural History of German Literature to be published by Polity in 2005.