Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (review)

Paul Fleming’s book Exemplarity and Mediocrity sets up its titular juxtaposition to be read both ways: exemplarity as opposed to mediocrity, and exemplarity along with, even as part of, mediocrity. The study follows Hegel’s paradox from his Lectures on Aesthetics, the requirement of art to eliminate the substance and appearance of the everyday while at the same time acknowledging that prosaic reality increasingly defines all thought and expression. This tension becomes exacerbated with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the art forms seeking to portray their quotidian existence, and still further in the twentieth century discussions of what art is. The challenge facing art—for the purpose of Fleming’s study, German language literature between 1750–1850—is thus to find and illuminate the exemplary in the common, to represent the ordinary in an exceptional way, “to lend an aesthetic nimbus to what resists and opposes art the most—everyday, mediocre life” (6). Fleming uses the term “Werther complex” to express this particular conundrum and Goethe’s solution to it: “to view bourgeois life as the antithesis of art and yet to fall in love with it (madly, limitlessly) all the same and thus transfigure its prosaic structure into poetry” (5). Fleming recognizes this as a particular problem of literature, and especially German letters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is due in large part to the explosion of both literary output and its market in a nation where the bourgeois status of dilettantish producers and consumers of literature was in fact dependent on their literary and artistic education (as opposed to middle class status in England or France, largely defined by commerce). Germany as a “belated nation” had to establish a classical literature under the influence of market pressures and at the dependence of mass tastes.

Western aesthetics has traditionally taken an extreme position on mediocrity, calling into question whether mediocre art is art at all. This stands in opposition to most other vocations, in which mediocrity is tolerated or even fruitfully employed to win over the masses, as in politics or law. The historical roots of the conflict between the mean as ideal/beautiful versus average/mediocre stretch back to Horace and Aristotle, whose conception of the ‘golden mean’ or ideal resists middling quality because it is relative to the situation and extremely difficult to achieve. Despite his locating perfection in the middle instead of on one end of a spectrum like the moderns, Horace expresses the general consensus stretching well into the post-Kant discussion, that if an artwork slips up even a little from its exceptional status, its quality plummets. Gottfried Benn outlines the “tragic experience of the poet” who, despite a lifetime of toil and asceticism, is only able to produce six to eight complete poems worthy of the name, gems which are in turn only appreciated by a select audience, as popularity in art immediately raises suspicions of average quality. Jean Paul even locates the mediocre below the bottom: “completely miserable poetry is better than every mediocre poetry” (17). Even an extreme failure is safely away from the wasteland of middling quality, and furthermore harbors the possibility of simply being misunderstood by its contemporary audience. Despite his requirement of extreme perfection and genial originality, Kant brings a notion of the mean back into the equation, by prioritizing taste over genius as the element to rein in “genial nonsense.” This form of disciplined balance is not an inborn talent but is ultimately learnable, is derived from a sort of universal or common sense, and follows the laws of statistical averages. Kant’s subjugation of even genial creativity to what ultimately amounts to an “average” ability reinforces the ambivalence surrounding exemplarity and mediocrity, and the impossibility of maintaining the division between them.

After the first chapter, in which Fleming lays out his theoretical problem in detail, he includes three more chapters on bourgeois tragedy, the dilettante, and German realism...