In part 2, focusing on the relationship between confessional discourse, the genre of autobiography, and the mise-en-scène of authorship, I have examined the intricate relationship between the transformation of religious practices and concepts of religion, on the one hand, and their impact on the emergence of an autonomous sphere of secular literary practices, on the other hand. We could see how the practices of narrating and publishing first-person narratives of the events culminating in an individual’s conversion or spiritual awakening—though very popular and widely spread—did not pave the way for a secular practice of soul searching and autobiographical writing; religious accounts were far too standardized and formulaic to achieve that. However, they must have contributed to bolstering the overall appreciation of an individual’s lived experience, belief, and judgment, independent of worldly values and opinions. For this latter aspect of valorizing an individual’s experience and of relying on one’s own spiritual resources rather than worldly judgment constitutes a crucial element both in Johanna Petersen’s spiritual autobiography, where her ability to disregard the opinion and values of her peers serves as a badge of honor and a stepping-stone to establishing her spiritual authority in her role as an author of devotional literature, as it also becomes as a central element in Rousseau’s assertion of his authority as an author in the narrative of his Confessions. And yet this one aspect of a more or less clear trajectory of a transposition from a religious practice to a worldly one does not do justice to the far more complex relationship between the two spheres.
There is first the pedagogical domain elaborating a model of subjectivity that has to be, at least to a certain degree, generalizable. In that regard we noted how Goethe and Rousseau attribute an important influence to religion, especially to the kind of religious practices that emerged with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century piety, which decisively contributed to the valorization of individual, lived experience as the ground of certainty and a source of an individual’s independence from her or his surrounding social pressures. But we have also seen that both authors do not merely transfer these practices into their works. Instead, they critically reflect on the uses of these religious genres as they also distinguish between the overall pedagogical value of confessional genres, on the one hand, and the advantages and disadvantages of the confessional mode when it comes to the assertion of their very own authorial role, on the other hand. Thus in the Émile Rousseau seized the official genre of the credo and the profession of faith and transformed it into a personalized individual confession that forms the centerpiece of the intimate exchange between friends. Clearly, with that Rousseau’s Émile offers a secular template of a new speech situation that is to take over the functions of the confession as well as the profession of faith. Goethe’s bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister actually picks up on this new template when he introduces a new character, friend, and potential love interest of his protagonist, Therese, who, exactly along those lines proposed in the Émile, takes Wilhelm on a walk in order to tell him her life’s story, as the story of how she discovered her current focus, values, and view of life. Goethe’s bildungsroman also offers a critical examination of the ends and limits of the spiritual autobiography by presenting the reader of the novel with a document entitled “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” which the external reader is supposed to read along with the protagonist. With that first-person narrative, both external reader and Wilhelm get to witness all the nuanced techniques of self-observation and carefully groomed interiority that were the product of the new piety and its writing, recording, and communication techniques, but also the ultimate limitations of this kind of emphatic and ultimately otherworldly, pathologically self-absorbed model of subject formation. Both authors thus promote a secularizing trend that is also prevalent in their own autobiographies.
Although Rousseau does not pay much attention to religion as an important resource for his emergence as an author, he nevertheless invokes Augustine’s Confessions in more than the title of his own autobiography. For he radically transplants Augustine’s autobiographical model into a secular context as he makes his own becoming an author, the publication of his prize-winning essay propelling him into the position of celebrity author, the equivalent of Augustine’s life-changing conversion to Christianity. Thus Rousseau’s autobiography provides a detailed account of the author’s victimization as a public persona resulting in his utter withdrawal from the cruelty and whims of any kind of live audience, reserving his oeuvre for the lasting effects in print, with its ideal, albeit absent but nevertheless infinite readership. And yet—and this may have been the most surprising aspect of the discussion of Rousseau’s Confessions—turning away from all contact with live audiences is not Rousseau’s immediate reaction to the trials of finding himself confronted with his own celebrity status and the intrigues and disappointments of the philosophes and salon culture. For there is a significant phase during which Rousseau develops an image of his utter independence and sovereign power ruling over a live audience, comparing himself to various actual sovereigns ranging from Louis XIV and King Stanislas of Poland to Louis XV, a phase that focuses on a model of the sovereign author as it seems to be particularly relevant in its medial aspects when it comes to the figure of the composer of an opera, since in that case, more than any other, the issue of live performance dominates the author’s relationship to his oeuvre.
Goethe’s model of authorship also insists on the importance of live audiences. For his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit works with a model of authorship that measures the effective artist and author by the impact of his personality on his contemporaries. Moreover, his autobiography, which is presented as the biography of his becoming a highly innovative original author, presents himself as a persona who can critically reflect on his own historical situation without being absorbed by or reduced to it. In this context he cannot be reduced to be the product of his education and upbringing, nor can he be dependent on literary models, precursors, or—even worse—current aesthetic programs or fashions. Instead, Goethe carefully builds a complex narrative within which he emerges as a discourse innovator.