Dreaming in Books - uncopy

24 / Chapter One
through space in the Travels is always a travel through ideas. 22 Even Dostoevsky’s
heteroglossia begins to appear decidedly monological in comparison
to Goethe’s novelistic polyphony.
Such current scholarly interest in Goethe’s novel’s capacity to represent
and engage with the totality of available genres and forms of knowledge
would of course have been deeply resonant with a particular romantic theory
of the novel out of which the Travels emerged and to which the Travels’
prequel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, had done much to contribute. 23
As Novalis asked in his Allgemeine Brouillon, “Should not the novel comprehend
all genres of style in a sequence diversely bound by a common
spirit?” 24 Or as Friedrich Schlegel prophesied, “In the next generation the
novel will take the place of the encyclopedia.” 25 It was the novel more than
any other genre that captured Schlegel’s theory of a progressive Universalpoesie
with its simultaneous claims to totality and transformation. 26 As Goethe
himself wrote to J. F. Rochlitz about the Travels, “With such a little book [!]
it is like life itself: within the complex of the whole one fi nds the necessary
and the chance, the superior and the associated, occasionally successful,
occasionally blighted, through which it achieves a kind of endlessness and
which judicious or reasoned words can neither completely comprehend nor
encompass.” 27
In placing Goethe’s Travels at the heart of a larger story of the romantic
novel, and the novel at the heart of a larger story of the romantic book, I
want to redirect the way we have attended to the novel’s cultural work during
the romantic period. Goethe’s contribution to the history of the novel
did not simply lay in his capacity to represent the novel as a discursive archive
or as an agglomeration of extraordinary formal heterogeneity within a
single work, which Broch had suggested was necessary to counteract modernity’s
antipathy to representation, its Abbildfeindlichkeit. Rather, the innovative
contribution of Goethe’s Travels lay in the way it decoupled the novel’s
claim to represent everything from the unifi ed space of the single book, the
way it transformed the work into a network. Its very stylistic heterogeneity
was mirrored by, and indeed depended upon, a complimentary bibliographic
heterogeneity. Novel reading for Goethe was not framed as an act
of splendid isolation but required attention to the elaborate bibliographic
horizon in which novels proliferated and circulated. And novel writing did
not solely encompass the patient imagination of complex narrative tapestries
but involved attention to the available technologies of dissemination
and preservation. Writing was crucially envisioned in Goethe’s late work as a
“craft.” Where Novalis had written down in his notebooks that his task was
“to fi nd a universe in a book,” 28 Goethe’s project by contrast relocated this