The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (review)

In this succinct, elegant study, Paul Fleming simultaneously places Jean Paul in the context of his time, argues persuasively that he belongs to ours as well, and goes through the major texts, carefully clarifying Jean Paul's metaphysics of humor. It is sobering to discover how well known and admired Jean Paul was in his lifetime, how many twentieth-century intellectuals have paid homage to him, and yet how little known he is today, especially in the English-speaking world. Fleming's book is a welcome corrective to this situation, with its many quotations, all translated, its own beautiful, meticulous commentary—there is not a weak sentence in the book—, and its innate feeling for the material. This is a book to savor and enjoy and, in a world where works by Jean Paul are hard to come by, an excellent introduction to his thought.

Fleming argues that for Jean Paul, as for Nietzsche and Freud, humor defines the human condition in relation to its own existential plight, consisting of "abandonment" on the one hand and infinity on the other because of man's inescapable experience of the world through imagination. Jean Paul's mischievous take on this perennial dilemma, articulated first in The Life of the Cheerful Little Schoolmaster Maria Wutz, is to champion the finite or the small as a path to the infinite, the only path. Humor is, for Jean Paul, the "inverted sublime" (20), a compensation for the idea-dominated aesthetics of the nineteenth century, and thus, for Stefan George and others, a proper balance, more than Schiller, to the monumental Goethe (14). Thus humor, especially "black humor" becomes the sine qua non of modern art, bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Jean Paul's theology, expressed in the bestseller Hesperus and The Speech of the Dead Christ, is audacious and ironic. A belief in immortality makes of the earth a paradise; but merely believing in the earth as such achieves nothing, any more than believing in immortality means that there is "really" any such thing, in an objective sense. Something of a fool saint, the mystic pedagogue Emanuel romps in a "delusional paradise," but it is "truly paradisiacal" (102). Similarly, Christ's announcement in Jean Paul's most famous text, long before Nietzsche, that there is no God and that we are all orphans, is intended to shock the reader into realizing how meaningless affect-less bourgeois religion is compared to a real questioning of the meaning of existence. Fleming comments that when Madame de Staël attempted to make Jean Paul more modern in her reprinting of his text by omitting the and-then-I-woke-up ending, she actually lost his point: faith is closer to questioning than to complacency.

Jean Paul touches on the psychological dimensions of humor in Siebenkäs, an exploration of the miseries of marriage. Life is innately too "small" for "the ideal of man and wife working harmoniously together" to be anything but comic. Jean Paul wittily conjoins wit and marriage, famously remarking that wit is "the disguised priest who marries every couple." Or as Fleming says, "In wit, as in marriage, every couple is potentially an odd-couple" (126). The largest part of this chapter is a fascinating, pedagogically useful history of "wit," and how Jean Paul fits into that history. Also of interest for students of the period is Fleming's thoughtful comparison of Jean Paul's sense of the "infinite" with that of the Jena Romantics. Romanticisms—German, English, and American—could profitably be discussed using the categories developed by Fleming. And it should be said that Fleming's discussion of Jean Paul's Preschool of Aesthetics richly answers Wulf Koepke's plea for a discussion of this work as a seminal document of literary theory (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture 57 [1991]: xxi).

A glance at Fleming's subtitles on the Contents page reveals the playful, witty style of this study. "Brain...