Dreaming in Books - uncopy

30 / Chapter One
format of the miscellany consisted of a translation, an incomplete “book”
from the novel, half of a novella, half a novella with an original preface,
an incomplete novella, and then the concluding half of a novella that had
appeared three years earlier in print and that had been omitted in Goethe’s
autobiography published even earlier. What was the status of the “pre” in
these “prepublications”? Conversely, what was the status of the “publication”
itself that always pointed either forward or backward? In each case,
the “prepublication” challenged the simultaneous autonomy of both the
part and the whole to which these parts belonged. They consistently begged
the question of where the Travels was located, as each subsequent publication
only contributed to the growing sense of omission that surrounded
the work itself.
That Goethe’s prepublication strategy occurred solely through the bibliographic
scene of the Pocket- Book (literally a book that could fi t in one’s
pocket, but more specifi cally a small format literary miscellany) would play
a key role in shaping this emerging understanding of the “work” or “publication.”
Not only was there a tremendous semantic investment in the Travels
in the use of diminutive forms—through words like Täfelchen, Büchlein,
Kästchen, and Schlüsselchen (little writing tablet, book, casket, and key)—but
as I will discuss in chapter 4, one of the miscellany’s central identities in the
nineteenth century was its capacity to promote the sharedness of writing, to
break down the boundaries surrounding the physical object of the book and
its contents. Goethe’s publications that appeared in Cotta’s Pocket- Book were
each in their own way invested in precisely this project of undoing boundaries,
of reformulating the cut as continuity. And yet as I will show in the
fourth chapter, where the miscellanies promoted the sharedness of writing
between individuals, between one reader and another and between readers
and writers, Goethe’s publishing practices were ecstatically self- referential.
As they promoted the increasing diffi culties of isolating a work’s boundaries—its
excerptual qualities—Goethe’s prepublications also promoted the
amplifi cation of the authorial persona that regulated and orchestrated this
print performance.
The bibliographic format of the miscellany through which Goethe organized
the Travels’ prepublication would not, however, serve as a passing
interest, a kind of early generic stage through which he passed on the way
to a more developed or advanced genre of the novel. As I will show at the
conclusion of this chapter, the media poetics of the cut enacted through the
deployment of the excerpt would play a key role in the later composition
of the second version of the novel. Far from simple marketing devices, the