The Crisis of Art: Max Kommerell and Jean Paul's Gestures

I. Jean Paul and his Critics

From the very beginning Jean Paul has posed a problem for the literary world. Already with his first novels, readers, critics, and fellow authors were at a loss when it came to describing the unique phenomenon of his writings: their form, their words, their wit, and their pathos. For one contemporary, Jean Paul's pastiche of disparate elements recalled an impossible archaeological site, where one finds, "eine Sammlung aus allen Trümmern Babylons, Persepolis', Roms und Nürenbergs, auf einen Platz auf gut Glück untereinander zusammengehäuft." ¹ This metaphor of a collection of ruins does not lie far from the truth; Jean Paul's remarkable, idiosyncratic erudition together with his philosophy of wit (that functions like "der verkleidete Priester, der jedes Paar kopuliert" ² ) produced a kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of word, metaphor, and image that is as enticing and strange today as it was at the time of composition. ³ No reference, no allusion lay beyond the immeasurable limits of Jean Paul's prose. In fact, Jean Paul felt most at home outside the parameters of traditional narration--hence, the countless digressions, interruptions, footnotes, introductions, and appendices. This deformation of the novel, of its word and structure, did not go unnoticed in Weimar. Goethe could only describe Jean Paul's Hesperus as a "Tragelaph von der ersten Sorte," i.e. a mixed beast, a misformed being. ⁴ Even Jena was not exactly sure of what to make of Jean Paul. Friedrich Schlegel's famous Fragment recognizes his greatness, but this greatness clearly does not lie in talent, at least not in the usual sense: "Ein eigenes Phänomen ist es; ein Autor, der die Anfangsgründe der Kunst nicht in der Gewalt hat, nicht ein Bonmot rein ausdrücken, nicht eine Geschichte gut erzählen kann, nur so was man gewöhnlich gut erzählen nennt, und den man doch schon um eines solchen humoristischen Dithyrambus willen, [. . .], den Namen eines großen Dichters nicht ohne Ungerechtigkeit absprechen dürfte." ⁵ In Schlegel's view, Jean Paul embodies the paradox of the artist who does nothing right as an artist--and therein lies perhaps his greatness as an artist.

This ambivalence towards Jean Paul only marks a simultaneous wonder and repulsion, without naming or explicating the problem he poses. It is only with his critical rediscovery in this century, largely indebted to Max Kommerell's 1933 study Jean Paul, that precise contours have been given to the problematic nature of Jean Paul's work. In the Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage (1939) of Jean Paul, Kommerell not only notes the uniqueness and difficulty of Jean Paul ("er ist ein Besonderer und schlüpft aus allen Verknüpfungen in seine Seltenheit zurück" ⁶ ), but more decisively attempts to define what is at stake in Jean Paul's theory and practice of literature. The problem of Jean Paul's work, Kommerell writes in concluding his preface, may ultimately be a crisis of art, of its very possibility: "Ist Kunst in der Geistesverfassung Jean Pauls noch möglich, und ist diese Verfassung sein persönliches Los oder erstreckt sie so weit auf Nation, Zeitalter und Folgegeschlechter, daß man sie symbolisch nennen darf--ein Reifegrad des geistigen Werdens mit so bedeutender wie bedenklicher Möglichkeit, so daß dieses Buch beinahe den Zusatz haben könnte: Jean Paul und die Krise der Kunst!" ⁷ In this passage, Kommerell underscores two decisive arguments: first, that there is something about Jean Paul's "state of mind" that begins to question the possibility of art and, second, that Jean Paul may not be a unique, isolated phenomenon--a blemish on the face of art--but rather symptomatic for much that follows in his wake, for "Modernity" itself. How is Jean Paul "symbolic" for modern art? And what is it about his art that is, for Kommerell, the harbinger of a crisis?

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