Rorotoko

In a nutshell

My book explores various conflicts surrounding the terms “mediocre,” “common,” “ordinary,” and “non-exceptional” in literary and aesthetic discourse since the eighteenth century, when the average man, the market place, and (proto-)democratic institutions began to assert themselves.

Art, it should be noted, has always had an uneasy relation to mediocrity. Horace himself claims that a middling lawyer is still valuable, while a mediocre poet “falls below contempt.” And with the traditional confinement of the proverbial “little guy” to comedy and the art of ridicule, the common man and everyday life were largely removed from elevated artistic expression.

This state of affairs, as I delineate, begins to undergo profound changes in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, literature now repeatedly attempts to address, affect, and ultimately educate the common man by representing his or her position and milieu. From bourgeois tragedy to realism and beyond, average heroes and everyday life begin to saturate modern letters. On the other hand, however, just when the subject matter of high art turns to the common and quotidian, aesthetics mobilizes the genius and the imperative of originality to brace itself against an excessive intrusion of the average on the level of critic and artist (e.g., majority rule in taste or the artist as “career choice”). Via this exclusion, art secures autonomy in a society where “success” is increasingly gauged by popularity.

One of the main arguments I make, therefore, is that the aesthetic issues surrounding the average and ordinary are resolved or at least contained via a strategy of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. Literature reaches out to the middle class as its audience and subject matter, but excludes the average man as artist and only includes him as a critic and arbiter of taste under the strictest conditions.

The tension between exemplarity and mediocrity is also played out in artistic production itself. One of the crucial questions I pursue in the book is how modern literature (and art in general) increasingly can be attuned to quotidian life – common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events – while at the same time avoiding all notions of mediocre quality. That is, how can art embrace mediocre life without falling prey to it in turn?

Art, I argue, can be seen as attempting to fulfill this double demand by aesthetically transforming the quotidian and thus lending it an exemplary form. Literature repeatedly puts the common person and ordinary life at the center of literary presentation but only in order to adorn them and render them exemplary. By, paradoxically, offering exemplary models of mediocrity, art simultaneously seeks to fulfill the demand of originality and grant aesthetic dignity to common life.

The wide angle

Much theoretical work on literature and art concerns itself with extremes: excesses, limits, traumas, ruptures. And rightfully so. Regardless of whether art is defined as a rule-based mode of production (i.e., the normative poetics of Aristotle and Horace that prevailed into the eighteenth century) or as the original work of a naturally gifted genius (as theorized by Kant and others), art has always been an extreme discipline, one that abhors mediocrity.

In art—and perhaps here alone among human activities—there is, therefore, something worse than the worst: the mediocre. Total artistic failure (think: Ed Wood) occurs under the sign of an extreme and thus still bears something extraordinary, which places it along side the beautiful as its sublime sibling. Mediocre art, however, is just that: nice but nothing exceptional, well-executed but not exactly original—and therefore perhaps not even true art, at least if true art is defined as something extraordinary. The harshest judgment one can bestow on an artist is: “This work is mediocre.”

Against this backdrop of the aesthetic taboo of mediocrity, the bigger perspective for my book follows the footsteps of Hegel’s aesthetic thought. As history or Spirit moves away from its earlier poetic days to its modern more prosaic form, art more and more runs the risk of becoming enmeshed with and indistinguishable from what Hegel calls the “prose of the world” – the all-pervasive network of bourgeois, utilitarian relations that at once ends and outlives the age of heroes and exceptional figures. Modern art, in a word, runs up against mediocrity in all its forms, from the state of the world to the ways of negotiating one’s way within it.

Therefore, the greatest proving ground for the modern artist is perhaps not the extreme case but the mundane, the quotidian, and the trivial. The ultimate test for today’s artist or author is to take material that, from an aesthetic perspective, apparently offers so little (because it is so plentiful) and to form it into something extraordinary. And the true artistic challenge: to do so in such a way whereby the material doesn’t lose its ordinariness.

From this perspective, Duchamp’s “Fountain” can be viewed not as total break with tradition, but as the culmination of a process that has its roots much earlier, in the prose of the world that defines the modern, bourgeois age: in the non-exceptional domestic interiors that become the scene of bourgeois tragedy or in the failure to become exceptional (an artist) followed by renunciation and integration into normal society as articulated by the Bildungsroman (e.g., Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister).

One of the central arguments I make is that the aesthetic tension between mediocrity and exemplarity is a particular problem of literature (as opposed to, say, painting or music) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that German letters occupy a special position within this dynamic.

Literature is unique in this period because it alone allowed just about any educated person to produce art and, additionally, was the crucial medium for shaping the identity of the new middle class. This power of letters was conditioned by the drastic reduction in printing costs as well as by the emergence of the marketplace, which forced literature as the first of the arts to address the dilemma of success being measured in sales.

This potential equation of popularity with literary quality poses a particular problem for Germany as the one European nation to not have experienced a golden age prior to the rise of the middle class and the marketplace. German letters were therefore faced with the unique task of trying to establish a “classical literature” during the very age when capitalist tendencies and common life began to exert a profound influence on literary life.

Literature reaches out to the middle class as its audience and subject matter, but excludes the average man as artist and only includes him as a critic and arbiter of taste under the strictest conditions.