Abstract
The foremost theorist of humor in the German romantic period and one of its most popular novelists, Jean Paul Richter developed a poetics of antithesis at odds with the harmonious dialectics proposed by many of his contemporaries. In narrative form, characterization, and figuration Jean Paul insisted on deepening antitheses rather than seeking reconciliation. Cultivating the incommensurate, his novels give form to his definition of humor as “the inverse sublime,” placing Jean Paul in a line from Kant through Kierkegaard and on to Kojin Karatani and Slavoj Žižek. This essay traces the origins of Jean Paul’s style in his reception of Kant, Rousseau and the French Revolution, all of which to him signaled a clash between human finitude and the infinity of desire. Tracing this clash in formal and thematic features of Jean Paul’s major Bildungsromane, the essay elucidates what is at stake in his enigmatic claim that literature represents “the only second world” (i.e. the world of the resurrection) “in the first one.” Unlike Friedrich Schiller and the Jena Romantics, Jean Paul’s version of “aesthetic education” grounds the authority of literature on its ability not to synthesize polar opposites, but to let each pole critique each other mutually.
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Notes
- 1.
This formula for the aesthetics of ancient Greek sculpture, coined by J.J. Winckelmann in 1756, was one of the most often cited passages in the later eighteenth century and subsequently became a shorthand to describe (and oversimplify) the ethos of Goethe and Schiller’s Weimar (Pfotenhauer 1993, 48).
- 2.
All citations from Jean Paul refer to the 2000 edition edited by Norbert Miller and include the volume number in Roman numerals followed by the page number. In order to avoid unnecessary repetition, I will omit “Jean Paul 2000” in consecutive citations. All translations of Jean Paul are my own.
- 3.
A comparable expression of the ambition of “early Romantic” synthesis can be found in Friedrich Schlegel’s assertion that “intellectual intuition is the categorical imperative of theory” (Lacoue-Labarthe 1978, 107).
- 4.
Jean Paul had leveled this accusation against Schlegel in particular (Jean Paul 2000, IV: 1145).
- 5.
The difficulty of translating Jean Paul’s claim that Um den Ernst, nicht das Spiel, wird gespielt stems from the spatial dimensions of the preposition um (“about, around”). The sentence indicates that seriousness is the purpose or goal of play, but also suggests that play encircles or rotates around seriousness.
- 6.
- 7.
Romantic fascination with the reversals implicit in this epigram are not limited to Jean Paul: see Percy Shelley’s ironic allusion to the poem in an infernal vision of Plato as a slave of passion in “The Triumph of Life” (Shelley 1977, 462; l. 254–9). Shelley translated the accompanying poem, which serves as epigram to his elegy “Adonais” (390).
ἀστὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες ἐνὶ ζῳοῖσιν Ἑῷος,
νῦν δὲ θανὼν λάμπεις Ἕσπερος ἐν φθιμένοις.
Shelley’s version reads: “Thou wert the morning star among the living / Ere thy fair light had fled; / Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving / New splendor to the dead” (390).
- 8.
Some critics read into this tension the entire problematic of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. Peter Horst Neumann notes the proximity of Walt’s Polymeter to the Greek Anthology, which Herder had translated (Neumann 1966, 20–24), and Wulf Köpke argues that Walt’s poems and their cool reception by the town’s cultural authorities thematize the humoristic “collision” between classical Greek form and modern/romantic interiority, which condemns the poems to failure in the eyes of their pedantic judges (Köpke 1990, 51–2). Their judgment in turn exposes “the impossibility of poeticizing bourgeois life” (54).
- 9.
Incidentally, Jean Paul gave an epilogue to Die Unsichtbare Loge the title “Seven Last Words” (Sieben Letzte Worte), traditionally a designation of Jesus’s last utterances before his crucifixion, which include, “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” (I: 463–9).
- 10.
For the original, see: Adorno 1951, 281.
- 11.
Hölderlin’s poem “Andenken” closes with the well-known enigmatic statement that “but what is lasting the poets provide” (was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter), establishing poets as founders (Stifter) of a communal legacy (Henrich 1997, 255).
- 12.
The scene of Gustav emerging from the cave has become a battleground for critics seeking to define Jean Paul’s “humor” by contrast with the Schlegel ian notion of “romantic irony .” Herbert Kaiser takes Gustav’s conversion very seriously, commenting that “[h]umor does not actually kill finite life, but... transfigures it, in that it suspends the earthly positing of the finite as an absolute—in the idea, that all life is life from the sun of God.... Humor... annihilates the finite, in order to create it anew in the light of the idea. Gustav’s ‘death’ is his resurrection into the this-worldly” (Kaiser 1992, 26). By contrast, Paul Fleming reads the episode satirically, emphasizing the pleasure resulting from Jean Paul’s narrative subjecting Platonic transcendentalism to the “magic mirror of fantasy” (Fleming 2006, 39–40). Fleming stresses the delight both Gustav and the reader experience when earth is substituted for heaven, not the way the ideology of earth-as-heaven informs both Gustav’s ethical development and Jean Paul’s consistent characterization of his poetics. To my mind, each of these critics settles for one moment of a polarity that would be more productively read dialectically, as a clash between infinite Idea and finite reality in which neither emerges unchanged, and whose only resolution comes in the form of a self-conscious as if. It seems to me that Kaiser sides with heaven and Fleming with earth because neither is troubled by the narrator’s complicity with the transcendentalism that the novel’s plot has exposed as fictional play; the dialectical view imposes itself the moment one considers the narrative voice to be constitutive of meaning.
- 13.
In French: Rousseau 1995, 304.
- 14.
Translation cannot really capture the tone of Börne’s lovingly frustrated evocation of the German people: “er wartet geduldig an der Pforte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, bis sein schleichend Volk ihm nachkomme” (Börne 1964, 789).
- 15.
For more on Jean Paul’s relationship to the book-market, in historical context, see: Ludwig Fertig 1989, 93–117, esp. 104–8.
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Coker, W. (2018). Jean Paul’s Lunacy, or Humor as Trans-Critique. In: Moland, L. (eds) All Too Human. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91331-5_4
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