The Respective Fourth Parts of Call it Sleep and The Book of Daniel as defining The Bildungsroman as a Genre

The Bildungsroman, commonly regarded as the novel of development, has an interesting development of its own as a parallel to historical development. Such is the case laid out by Franco Moretti in his The Way of the World, which chronicles the changes of the European Bildungsroman from its supposed origin with Goethe until the start of the Great War. In this time, the Bildungsroman passes through two distinct eras of the classical Bildungsroman and the Post-Napoleonic Bildungsroman; however, the Bildungsroman arguably lives on beyond this time period and beyond Europe, in such novels as Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep and E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. It may well be that these novels are merely reflections of their own time and place, or perhaps the between shadows of the European Bildungsroman and these possible Bildungsromans there are clues to a common “ideal form,” to borrow from Moretti’s terminology. Thus by looking upon the novels relative the qualification of these eras of Bildungsroman can a notion of genre be conceived. Thus the Bildungsroman itself can be described in terms of the striving for homeland, liberation from the past, and the fall of ideals, all in relation to its essential conflict between autonomy and socialization.

The striving for homeland in the classical sense essentially meant that “A Bildung is truly such only if, at a certain point, it can be seen as concluded” (Moretti 26), whereas in the Post-Napoleonic World the narratives “seem ‘interrupted’ more than ‘concluded’” (Moretti 118). Not apparently reconcilable teleologies, the final books of each novel should indicate their entirely appropriate union. First, in Call it Sleep, the protagonist, David Schearl, concludes with a listing of seemingly random, unrelated memories, of things and their various types, with no regard for their respective significances (Roth 441). Herein David does indeed create more than an interruption than a conclusion; very little is resolved; however, a conclusion yet exists. David has concluded, whether he himself realizes it or not, that all his situation, all his memories matter very little in relation to one another. He takes them simply for their existence, with no further analysis. It is a conclusion to draw no conclusions.

The Book of Daniel also demonstrates this union quite distinctly though its ending, an interruption in the fullest. Daniel, whose narration had just prepared the reader for a thorough conclusion, immediately announces, “However, just a moment ago…someone came through announcing that the library is closed” (Doctorow 302), and he proceeds to quote the Biblical Book of Daniel, pertaining to the closing of the book in which everyone is written until the time of the end. Quite plainly, this is an interruption as opposed to a neatly socialized conclusion; however, there is substantial difference in that Daniel has not failed to socialize. Simply, he has refused to cling to his autonomy, renouncing his opportunity to provide answers for his questions, the questions of the novel. As Daniel at one point laments, regardless of what he does, society is the victor. Such is the case in any Bildungsroman, that any occurrence and all endings favor society. Like David, by not answering, he allows all around him, society, to take its course, surrendering to its will.

Liberation from the past plays into the classical Bildungsroman with the mention of time against the whole, a reference to the work of G.W.F. Hegel: “having become superfluous, time abandons the stage to the harmonious dance of the Truth and the Whole” (Moretti 55), whereas the Post-Napoleonic Bildungsroman advances “an ‘accessible’ past, on the same hierarchical and chronological level with the present, and yet already ‘frozen’ and hostile to that experiment” (Moretti 122). Call it Sleep contends very much with the past upon nearing its completion when David’s parents’ secrets are revealed, those being his mother’s affair with the church organist and his father’s partial responsibility for the death of his own father. The matter of interest, though, is David’s involvement in these revelations. Having inadvertently brought them out, he successfully shatters the mysteries surrounding his parents, a subject troubling him throughout the novel, thereby exposing for himself the whole. This, however, is not an easy whole to contend with, especially considering that the whole of this whole is not known to those concerned, particularly the identity of David’s biological father. This gives the past its frozen hostility, as well as its imperativeness to the course of the novel. Furthermore, going in tune with the previous conclusions, the issues of this past are left fairly unresolved, rather, the unseen conclusion of the fight and David’s injured return cast attention away from the matter, the present defeating the past and leaving it on its own.

Daniel’s troubles deal greatly with the past, and the whole novel might be considered the character’s attempt to come to terms with it, not just his own but with the history that made it as it was. In the end, though, the great number of manipulations and interpretations of both history itself and personal events become glaringly obvious. The past is corrupted by the faults of memory and the twists of the individual will. In his meeting with Linda Mindish, the reader is presented with an interpretation of the Isaacson trial heretofore unheard of (Doctorow 282-283), though intimately known, essentially the contemporary, condemning view of the courts. This flat contradiction to all Daniel believes, or would like to believe, or at least thinks he believes or might like to believe, compels him even further to speak to Selig Mindish, the man he views as being most responsible for his parents’ death. Interestingly, Dr. Mindish is to be found in a surreal, fantastic world of tomorrow at Disneyland. As Dale puts it, “‘He’s senile…there’s nothing left up here’” (Doctorow 292). Dr. Mindish has ventured into an imagined future, utterly devoid of any particular sense of time, including sense of the past. Indeed, it is almost a parody of the usual Communist aim, and it is certainly a slap in the face to any Marxist analysis of history. This is the complete absence of a whole, and it makes the past both inaccessible and seeming almost worthless. The present makes the past worthless, and its future is either blank or a delusion. In both novels, any attempt at drawing an autonomy from the past, as one might draw from Napoleon in the Post-Napoleonic Bildungsroman, falls instead to the society of the present, for socialization is always a matter of existing therein.

The fall of ideals is essentially the vehicle by which society gains its ultimate victory over the Bildungsroman’s protagonist and his autonomy. In the world of the classical Bildungsroman, this was achieved to this protagonist’s benefit: “Its purpose is to creat ‘full and happy men’” (Moretti 31), whereas in the Post-Napoleonic age the protagonist was merely made impotent: “the story must end in the protagonist’s death to be deprived of meaning” (Moretti 119). Call it Sleep has a different approach in a world wrought with ideals, at least to David’s perception. In the end, they all indeed fall, perhaps best exemplified in Leo, whose almost messianic presence became tainted when he brought David immense trouble in the episode with his cousins, and David’s father, who, in the final scene, is observed in his speech to have “a peculiar harshness as though he were at the same time provoking and steeling himself away against a blow” (Roth 440), exposing weakness in his father’s idealized strength. The result is neither complete socialization nor impotence, but it seems much more to be an acceptance of reality as it stands, a new reality purged of ideals, leaving only reality itself. The last lines of this final book of the novel read “… and feel them all and feel, not pain, not terror, but strangest triumph, strangest acquiescence. One might as well call it sleep. He shut his eyes” (Roth 441). The classical finds itself echoed in triumph, and the Post-Napoleonic in acquiescence. Society has not accepted David, but he has accepted society, becoming socialized in an autonomous stroke not evident in the European Bildungsroman.

The Book of Daniel’s fourth part is dominated by the deaths of ideals, embodied plainly in those who hold to them. Daniels parents are executed by electric chair for their communist ideals, and Susan, embodiment of her own ideals, dies under their weight. Even at her funeral, Daniel makes a parody of these ideals of the past when he rounds up the old, “misfit” rabbis, “usually shabby, their heels run down” (Doctorow 300), around the cemetery to pray old prayers over Susan’s grave in an absurd, pluralistic call of history. Daniel, like the Daniel of the Old Testament book, has before him a dream, but he cannot tell what it means. Though he spends the entire time interpreting the dreams of others, he in the end cannot interpret his own. In this way Daniel’s ideals are not only dead, they were not allowed to manifest in the first place, regardless of any attempt to develop them. Daniel was never given a chance to be autonomous; he was guaranteed socialization by the attempts at autonomy by those around him, for he was granted freedom by and from the past. The fall of ideals is essential to the inevitable victory of society.

At the last, these three textual elements of the striving for homeland, liberation from the past, and the fall of ideals, readily observable in the history of the Bildungsroman, are also apparent in the conclusions of these novels, Call it Sleep and The Book of Daniel. Together, they paint a picture of the Bildungsroman through its primary tension between the individual and society, and they show that society is always the victor. In the classical Bildungsroman, the conclusion consisted of a pure, willing integration of the protagonist into society. Society was the victor. After Napoleon, the protagonist’s refusal to integrate led to his undoing, usually by death. Again, society’s maintained its flow. In these novels, it is a willing, but untidy, integration, wherein the unknown is left to linger. All the same, society supplants the individual. It seems then that most basically the Bildungsroman is the novel of society’s triumph over the individual, or conversely the individual’s submission to society. The rest is merely a reflection of history, but if this is development, then so be it.

Bibliography

Doctorow, E.L. The Book of Daniel. Random House, New York: 2007.

Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culutre. New Edition. Verso, London: 2000.

Roth, Henry. Call it Sleep. Picador, New York: 1962.