Satirische Metabolistik: Jean Pauls Skizze „Über die Schriftstellerei“

Abstract Jean Paul’s collection Grönländische Prozesse, oder Satirische Skizzen (1783–4/1821) has been scrutinized regarding its exuberant similes and its satirical wit, but ranked low compared to his novels. From the beginning, however, it exposes a groundbreaking strategy resonating in his more famous literary and theoretical works alike. The first sketch “On literary writing. An opusculum posthumum” converts a rhetoric of the known material world – with its diversity of life forms – into a materialistic-physiological writing (and vice versa). The text interchanges processes of transformation (e. g. ‘metabolic,’ ‘biotic,’ ‘chemical’) with techniques that are capable of changing things rhetorically. Pertaining to Jean Paul’s later analysis of antithetical wit, I suggest grasping the structure of this interchanging as a rhetorical process in itself, which can be pinpointed by the figure of antimetabole (or commutatio). Consequently, this complex dynamics is connected to transitions between ‘alive’ and ‘dead’. The status of “On literary writing” as a posthumously published draft and pseudo-poetological treatise, introduced by a fictive editor, thus exactly fits the rhetorico-physiological processes it stages and complements a genuinely anticipatory writing.