The Tension between Idea and Narrative Form

For the literature of the eighteenth century, particularly for those works that are seen as part of the Enlightenment, critics have foregrounded the moral, didactic interest of these texts. In the Enlightenment view, literature is supposed to serve a purpose (cf. Pizer, 2005, p. 91), and literary texts are always understood in terms of their function as serving moral goals. This penchant for the usefulness of literature is not very surprising: The Enlightenment defines itself as a movement towards greater intellectual independence and moral instruction – leading mankind out of its ‘self-inflicted immaturity’. ² Hence the Enlightenment tends to explain the (ever-noticeable) short-comings of reason in the world not as the world’s inherent lack but as our lack of understanding of the reasonable order of the world. Such an attitude allows for an improvement for the better; in particular, the possibility of improvement that is due to the subject (instead of the state of the world) and it leads to a global call for projects of education (which in German would be connected with the concept of Bildung). ³ These projects are allied with a more specific purpose of literature: if we live in a world for which a reasonable (or at least comprehensible) order is assumed, then the reason why ‘truth’ does not seem to prevail in the general state of affairs must be that it is not put across very well. In order for truth to hold sway, it needs to be popularised. Thus the Enlightenment movement discovers literature as ‘a means of effecting rational, moral instruction under the aspect of entertainment’ (Mazur, 1986, p. 53) and the instrument for generalising ‘valid truths’ about the world – be it a moral rule or a theoretical insight – so that these gain wide acceptance. As the Enlightenment stresses the functionality of literature, it draws on the familiar concept of didactic literature but, at the same time, it also discovers a possibility for legitimising the aesthetic sphere. ⁴