Flores et Folia: Bildungsroman: My favourite kind of fiction

Have you ever been asked what type of story or novel you like best and found yourself needing to add a qualifier to it? I like fantasy, but not that kind of fantasy. I like romance, but only this kind of romance. I like drama, but only when its handled in a certain way. I prefer character driven stories to plot driven stories. In the end, your answer to the question may have transformed into something rather specific.

When I consider the stories that resonate with me most, I've always been at a bit of a loss as to how to respond. Yes, I like fantasy. But not all fantasy. I also like a good classic. And a good romance, but only when its handled in a specific way, and usually I prefer it if that romance is packaged in a bigger plot because otherwise I don't find it very convincing. Some examples of what I like, perhaps, might be more helpful than any listing of genres: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Frank Herbert's Dune, Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto (pre-Shippuuden), Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, the How to Train Your Dragon movie trilogy, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Jane Eyre, Natsuki Takaya's Fruits Basket, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Hiromu Arakawa's Silver Spoon and Fullmetal Alchemist.

But those are all so completely different, aren't they? There's fantasy, sci-fi, memoir, romantic drama, classic and even a high school slice-of-life set in an agricultural high-school! Some are novels, some are movies, some are comic books. What a mish-mash that list is!

Or is it? There's actually a lot more that those works have in common than may be apparent at a first glance. Similarities that go beyond the trappings of genre or the tropes and cliches of each medium. A lot of them, it turns out, are some sort of coming-of-age story. But there are other coming-of-age stories I don't enjoy as much, like Looking for Alaska or The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This puzzled me for a long time. I love a good story about a youth facing hardship and learning and growing as they figure out that weird space between childhood and adulthood! But then why did so many of the movies and books about teenagers aimed at a teenage audience that seemed to cover that same ground not land for me, when certain others hit so well that I still think about them years later? I can't quite remember when I came across the concept of the Bildungsroman, but when I did a lot of things came together in my understanding of what I like and now look for in the fiction I consume, and one day hope to write.

A what Roman?

A Bildungsroman is in some ways simply a specific kind of coming-of-age story. People smarter and more highly qualified than me have dedicated lots of brainpower and lots of words to discussing the nuance of the term and how it should be applied, but I find that the word itself, of German origin, provides a good introduction:

Bildung (Education, formation) + Roman (Novel)

So, the Bildungsroman is a novel of formation. A narrative following the formative years of an individual. That sounds just like another way of saying 'coming-of-age', doesn't it? Yes, in some ways this is true. But the Bildungsroman is perhaps best understood as a particular sub-genre of the coming-of-age narrative. It has a long history in the literature of Europe, and its origin is usually attributed to one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's lesser known works: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-1796). But to us raised in English speaking societies, it is perhaps best encapsulated in the likes of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. All of these works are usually classified as Bildungsromans, and in the next section I will share a bit more about why.

Before getting to that, hoever, these three works are rather different in their scope and themes to something like Looking for Alaska. For one, they all follow their protagonists from a very young age up to—and sometimes past—the point of physical, emotional and spiritual maturity. Their protagonists tend to face long and arduous journeys—physically and metaphorically—and experience all manner of loss, grief and growth along the way. Over the course of the story we are likely to learn of old bonds that have broken or been lost, and to see the characters develop new bonds in the form of friendships, mentorships, rivalries and romances. We'll also see them come across new philosophies and ideas that challenge or reshape their perceptions of the world they inhabit, and we'll see how these experiences all come together to help the character find their place in life and society.

But far better than I can describe or define it in one or two paragraphs, is a little tool one can use to identify how much of a Bildungsroman something happens to be.

Iversen's Bildungsroman Index

In her dissertation, Change and Continuity: The Bildungsroman in English (2009), Iversen, in seeking to define and better understand the Bildungsroman, identifies a set of features that most Bildungsromans tend to have. She compiled these features into a rubric and assigned points to each depending on their importance or significance, and so developed what she calls the Bildungsroman Index (BRI, going forward). It is, in her own explanation a tool to help "pinpoint and describe typical features of novels that are generally recognized as bildungsromans" (2009:51).

Iversen's BRI presents Bildungsromans as existing on a continuum ranging from works which have no features of the Bildungsroman to those which have all of them. Thus, works tested against her BRI are unlikely to be simply 'Bildungsroman' or 'Not Bildungsroman', but will fall somewhere between the two on the Bildungsroman continuum.

The BRI is made up of 9 sections. Each section is broken down into a list of features, with points assigned for each feature. The sections are:

NUMBER	TITLE	MAXIMUM POINTS
1	Narrative perspective and mode	15
2	Characterization: Protagonist	15
3	Characerization: Secondary characters and their functions	17
4	Topical story elements: Affecting protagonist	26
5	Topica story elements: Affecting secondary characters	9
6	Setting	5
7	Plot and structure	28
8	Generic signals	4
9	Theme, subject matter and motifs	29

I will not detail the features of each section here, as it will make this post very long. They are very interesting features, however, and may fairly well be considered the 'tropes' of a Bildungsroman. Here's a sample of a few before looking at some example novels and their numbers:

Section 2: Characterization: Protagonist:

"Protagonist is dynamic; changes in the course of the novel" (2 points)

"Protagonist is an orphan, or fatherless, or parent dies in the course of the novel" (2 points)

"Ordinary (not particular talented or untalented)" (2 points)

Section 4: Topical story elements: Affecting protagonist

"Experiences poverty" (2 points)

"Goes to boarding school" (1 point)

Section 5: Topical story elements: Affecting secondary characters

"Dangerous or disastrous fire" (1 point)

"Family secret of other family revealed" (1 point)

Section7: Plot and structure

"Story goes from childhood to adulthood (early 20s)" (2 points)

"Returns to childhood home after many years" (1 point)

"Protagonist learns to 'see' at the end" (3 points)

Section 9: Theme, subject matter and motifs

"False idealism gives way to acceptance of reality" (1 point)

"Death and grief" (3 points)

"Love, relationships, and marriage" (3 points)

"Portrayal of society" (2 points)

The maximum number of points that a work can earn is 148. Anything that gets 148 points is therefore theoretically the most Bildungsroman. 0 is naturally the minimum, and would mean the work lacks any qualities of a Bildungsroman. I imagine there are very few pieces of fiction that would manage this, however.

If we take a look at our three examples from classic English literature and the original Bildungsroman itself, here's how they fit in on this continuum once the BRI has been applied to them:

Here we see that all three works come very close to achieving maximum points, with David Copperfield taking first place and even out-scoring Wilhelm Meister.

In contrast to these high scorers, in her thesis, Iversen discovered that Huckleberry Finn is not very Bildungsroman.

To add my own observations to this graph: for my undergraduate thesis I applied the BRI,—with a few adaptations to translate Section 1 to the conventions of film rather than the novel—to the Harry Potter and How to Train Your Dragon film series to find out how Bildungsroman they happened to be. They both scored fairly high, setting them both in the 'very Bildungsroman' section.

I've yet to apply the BRI to any of the other titles listed in the introduction to this post, but I am quite certain that a fair number of them will also find themselves on the far right of this graph.

After thinking about the Bildungsroman recently, and revisting Iversen's BRI, I have also come to the belief that there are two key things all Bildungsromans should have: scope and depth. Bildungsromans tend to covers quite a few years in a person's life, and also cover a vast array of human experiences. They also seem to explore their themes, emotions, and topics deeply, with a particular focus on the moral, spiritual and psychological aspects of a character's choices, experiences and conceptions. That is my super summarised understanding of them based on my own reading and experience of them, so far at least.

Part of the reason I decided to write this very insufficient and sloppy little post about the Bildungsroman is because I want to investigate just how many of the works I enjoy actually end up with a high BRI value.

I have recently finished reading Sharon Kay Penman's The Sunne in Splendour and Anya Seton's Katherine, both of which I adored and have become instant favourites. I intend to make them my first test subjects in applying the BRI to the novels I read. I am working on some rather silly reviews of them now, which I hope to share here soon along with the values I get when applying the BRI to them.