Dreaming in Books - uncopy

26 / Chapter One
the Travels in books alongside its rhetorical strategies that oriented readers
towards such diffusions suggests that the novel’s rise was as much a consequence
of a coherent set of stylistic affi nities as it was of the capacity of such
writing to promote a particular bibliographic hegemony. The novel’s success
depended upon a capability not only to be everywhere at the same time but
also to incubate rhetorically and narratively such imaginary everywhereness.
Reconceiving the novel as a network—the very challenge Goethe’s Travels
places upon its readers—solicits us to study precisely those derivative spaces
that underpinned the novel’s emerging generic centrality over the course of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 33 In facilitating what we might call
the topological study of literature, 34 network theory draws attention not to
timeless, static, and ultimately enclosed literary objects but instead to the
material distributedness and connectivity of literary work. 35
The Problem of the Where
In the summer of 1815, Goethe published a short advertisement in the
German newspaper Morning Paper for the Educated Classes (Morgenblatt für
gebildete Stände), entitled “Reply to an Inquiry about Wilhelm Meister’s Travels.”
The advertisement apologized for the absence of the Travels from the
German book market, whose appearance had been anticipated since the
publication of the fi rst four chapters of the novel fi ve years earlier in Cotta’s
Ladies’ Pocket- Book in 1809. The advertisement, however, did not announce
the pending appearance of the Travels in print but instead announced another
series of excerpted novellas from the novel. It did not amplify the
presence of an extant work, as an advertisement typically would, but rather
substituted itself for a work which would not appear for another fi ve years.
Goethe’s advertisement and the deictic problems it both addressed and
performed indicated the degree to which the problem of the “where” had
emerged as one of the key identities of the work called Wilhelm Meister’s
Travels. Such ambiguous locatability was not simply a matter of Goethe’s
incapacity to produce, a convenient way of linking the work with the aging
body and mind of the writer, but rather would come to mark an intrinsic
aesthetic and bibliographic feature of the Travels from beginning to end. The
advertisement was merely one of a variety of textual strategies that Goethe
used during the 1810s to complicate the identity of the Travels, which included
the publication of six separate novellas or portions of novellas from
the novel in Cotta’s Ladies’ Pocket- Book prior to the initial appearance of
“part one” of the novel in 1821.
In his study of this publishing strategy, Wolfgang Bunzel has argued that