PART II MISCELLANIES OF TIME
To the extent that seriality is associated with continuation and the promise of more, Jean Paul—the pen name of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825)—is a quintessential author of serial forms. His writings, with their cascading allegories, indirect references to current events, and satirical and sentimental fantasias, give the impression that they could just go on and on: incomplete novels, miscellaneous aphorisms, aesthetic and pedagogical treatises with ample supplements and appended continuations, thematically connected occasional pieces on political and cultural topics, fragmentary autobiographical writings, and more. Jean Paul is a key figure in the development of literary Unterhaltung in the early nineteenth century, an association that contributes to his contested reputation as the “most read author of his age,” even if his circuitous satires of the crowded landscape of journals, Taschenbücher, and anthologies make him difficult for modern readers.1 To be sure, his works’ propensity for continuation and digression leads to accusations that they lacked aesthetic coherence; Hegel, for example, claims that Jean Paul, “in his search for ever new material … superficially patches together the most heterogeneous things.”2 It must be said, though, that Jean Paul’s preference for serial juxtaposition over classicizing unity and coherence emerges from participation in and satiric mimicry of the serial publications of the day, a mimicry, as we will see, that subverts the concept of the self-standing autonomous literary work. At a time when serial formats cut across book- and journal-based literature, Jean Paul places journal-based modes of writing at the heart of his authorial self-presentation. He thus comes into view as a catalyst for contemporary and subsequent writers of serial literature, both the politically active writers of Vormärz and more literary figures such as Adalbert Stifter.
A central concern of Writing Time is how serial forms shape the awareness of time. The promise of more tethers serial forms to both the past (the present installment continues the previous one) and the future (the next yet-unwritten installment will soon come). Writing speculatively into the future is an integral feature of Jean Paul’s writings, which scholars recognize as being the “culmination of the processes of temporalization” of the period.3 Among other things, he writes a “conjectural biography” detailing his future life, he announces the future demise of Napoleon, he imagines his own death, he writes the future history of the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, and he announces the coming publication of his collected works, envisioning the ongoing production of more and less ephemeral works and their potential for reencounter. Whereas scholars exploring Jean Paul’s treatment of time have largely focused on the temporal footprints of particular genres (including the novel, the idyll, and the digression),4 I take a closer look in part II at the temporal and media-based specifics of his writings for journals in primarily the last roughly two decades of his life (1807–1825), a period when his writings for journals, Taschenbücher, and other anthologies increase in number and become a central part of his literary output.5 In doing so, I suggest new perspectives on Jean Paul’s significance both as a thinker of time and as an author of serial forms.
As Koselleck has argued, a fundamental feature of the early nineteenth-century temporalization of historical and cultural awareness is the turn away from the past to the future as a guiding temporal horizon. The future arises as a particularly acute concern in the tumultuous years of Napoleonic occupation and its aftermath: What is the proper vantage point from which to adequately understand the present? What will come of this revolutionary age or of Napoleon? What is this “new” time and what comes next? This is also a time of uncertainty about what is of lasting literary and cultural value: What formats secure an author’s reception as part of a nascent, national literary canon? What will future readers value in an age of ever-growing literary diversion? What sites and styles of authorship are most successful across a variety of print formats? Chapters 4 and 5 address these issues from two different yet related angles. Chapter 4 explores Jean Paul’s forays into political commentary and contemporary history, as he seeks to come to terms with the present and envision the future in analogy to other kinds of historical and literary projects. In chapter 4, I turn to how he envisions his authorial oeuvre both up to and beyond the horizon of his own death. I am particularly interested in how Jean Paul envisions the afterlife of his writings across journal and book formats, using the promise of continuation to craft his literary legacy while satirizing tropes of authorial immortality. He engages with various serial formats and genre conventions to create the sense of a dynamic, growing body of work that changes as time moves forward and new readers (re)encounter it. Jean Paul thus brings together key strands of contemporary history writing and authorial self-assertion in the realm of journal literature that is at the heart of this book, filtering his temporal reflections all the while through the trope of the ephemerality of print. In this way, a detailed case study of his nontraditional authorial career proves instructive in a book that is concerned as much with serial formats as with individual authors.
A key part of Jean Paul’s mimicking of the forms and formats of journal literature lies in his playful embrace of miscellaneity. The miscellany was a long-standing literary format convention with roots in early modern notions of the florilegium and eighteenth-century moral-satirical traditions of mixed writings, or Vermischte Schriften. The miscellany tradition flourished in the moral weeklies of the eighteenth century and related anthology genres, which presented readers with a deliberately varied mixture of edifying and entertaining materials.6 The guiding principle of miscellaneity takes on new cultural authority around 1800, as expanded reading audiences grow more eager for mixed contents in cultural journals. Indeed, in a piece commissioned for the inaugural issue of the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, Jean Paul states that miscellaneity is the essence not merely of the Morgenblatt and all other periodicals but of the age itself.7 Such programmatic statements are echoed by later definitions of nineteenth-century periodical literature in terms of the formal properties of seriality and miscellaneity.
Being an author in an age of the miscellany requires strategies for distinguishing oneself, a challenge that Jean Paul addresses in a series of aphorisms and other short pieces titled “My Miscellanies” (Meine Miszellen).8 He notes that, like so many other writers for the periodical press, he actively contributes to an ever-accumulating flood of textual units on offer: “If there are Russian, English, French, etc. miscellanies, then why shouldn’t there be German ones? And if there are German ones, why not mine?”9 Part of Jean Paul’s joke here is in referencing specific products on the literary market, with Russian Miscellanies, French Miscellanies, and English Miscellanies all titles of contemporary journals; indeed, Cotta created the Morgenblatt in 1807 by consolidating his two earlier journals, Französische Miszellen and Englische Miszellen (French miscellanies and English miscellanies) (1803–1806), which were modeled on the tremendous success of London und Paris.10 In writing his “own” miscellanies, Jean Paul mimics the format and structure of periodicals and other anthologies (including the Taschenbuch in which it appears), but he stamps them with his own particular voice and style: they are “his.” Authorship lends provisional order to heterogeneous print. The gesture of writing his “own” miscellanies is thus an ironic reflection on his authorial brand in an age abounding with literary entertainment.
There is a strong logic of serial continuation in this piece. As Jean Paul notes, with mock resignation, “I don’t know how one might bring this reading [of miscellanies] to an end” (Ich weiß nicht, wie man diesem Lesen ein Ende machen soll).11 Like satire and digression, two of Jean Paul’s favorite discursive modes, the principle of miscellaneity does not on its own contain a clear directive for how it might conclude or wrap up. A combined sense of ever-proliferating texts and of the lack of any decisive conclusion informs Jean Paul’s choice to call his writings for periodicals Werkchen, “little works,” associating them with the ephemeral, the topical, and the occasional, and ironizing the aspiration for stand-alone cohesion (Zusammenhang) and monumental completion (Vollendung). Scholars have recently explored how Jean Paul’s embrace of the Werkchen challenges standard notions of the literary work.12 Along with embracing provisionality and the promise of more, Jean Paul’s journal-based writings are premised on being part of a collection of multiple Werkchen. Indeed, such collections—ranging from Taschenbücher to journals and various literary anthologies—are a defining feature of the age, and such anthologies build on the moral miscellany tradition while also capitalizing on the material and metaphorical potential of contemporary serial formats as archives of varied contents.13 Jean Paul makes extensive use of such formats when repackaging his writings in single-author collections, including the three-volume Herbst-Blumine, oder gesammelte Werkchen aus Zeitschriften (Autumn flora, or collected little works from journals), the 1814 Museum (Museum), the 1817 Politische Fastenpredigten während Deutschlands Marterwoche (Political Lenten sermons during Germany’s holy week), and an 1825 collection of his book reviews. Jean Paul constantly faces the challenge of having his writings excerpted, repackaged, and reprinted without authorization (Raub- or Nachdruck). This is another side of the age of the miscellany with which he contends. In a sense, Jean Paul’s authorized anthologies represent additional versions of “his” miscellanies; as we will see, he also uses the anthology to ironize the hermeneutic coherence of the idea of collected works. Emphasizing plurality and open-endedness, Jean Paul presents readers with a network of plural, recirculating works that resist the norms of the book and of the works edition at a time of their ascendancy.
Jean Paul’s keen awareness of print’s ephemerality and its potential for preservation and recirculation is at the heart of his attempts to write the time of the present and the recent past (historical time) as well as the time of an authorial oeuvre at the end of his life and beyond. If chapter 4 asks about the time and timeliness of miscellanies, chapter 5 asks how a miscellaneous oeuvre might end. Jean Paul pursues a collected works edition at a time when this format was under consolidation in the world of German letters, with his and Goethe’s Ausgabe Letzter Hand published at almost the same time. This was a time of ever-increasing interest in the literary legacies of important authors, but Jean Paul ironizes the tendency to include ever more material in his collected works. In the process, he repeatedly comes back to scenes where his own death and the realization of his works edition converge. On the one hand, these scenes subject the time of his own life to the dictates of literary form and medial format. On the other hand, imagining the end of his life and works also provides an occasion for imagining the continuation of both. Writing the end thus paradoxically is a way of writing the future and of imagining the open-ended futures that ephemeral writings might have.
1. See Eduard Berend, “Jean Paul, der meistgelesene Schriftsteller seiner Zeit?” in Jean Paul, ed. Uwe Schweikert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), 155–69.
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 13, ed. Eva Muldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 382.
3. Dirk Göttsche, Zeit im Roman. Literarische Zeitreflexion und die Geschichte des Zeitromans im späten 18. und im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2001), 119.
4. Göttsche, Ralph Berhorst, and Helge Jordheim have all explored questions of time and the novel in Jean Paul; see Göttsche, Zeit im Roman; Ralf Berhorst, Anamorphose der Zeit. Jean Pauls Romanästhetik und Geschichtsphilosophie (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002); and Helge Jordheim, Der Staatsroman im Werk Wielands und Jean Pauls. Gattungsverhandlungen zwischen Poetologie und Politik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007). On the temporality of the idyll and digression, see Ulrike Hagel, Elliptische Zeiträume des Erzählens: Jean Paul und die Aporien der Idylle (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2003); and Magnus Wieland, Vexierzüge: Jean Pauls Digressionspoetik (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2013).
5. Dorothea Böck designates these writings the “nucleus of his entire belletristic creative production in the period between 1807 up to his death, meaning both his journalistic and more narrow poetic production.” Dorothea Böck, “Archäologie in der Wüste. Jean Paul und das ‚Biedermeier‘–Eine Provokation für das Fach (ante portas),” in Atta Troll tanzt noch Selbstbesichtigungen der literaturwissenschaftlichen Germanistik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Petra Boden, Holger Dainat, and Ursula Menzel (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 263.
6. On the miscellany tradition, see Barbara Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
7. Jean Paul, “Abschiedsrede bey dem künftigen Schlusse des Morgenblatts,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1807): 3; II/3, 234. In cases where I deal in an extended fashion with a text by Jean Paul, I cite the text in its relevant journal, anthology, or works edition version as well as in the modern Hanser critical edition, Sämtliche Werke in 10 Bänden (henceforth cited in the footnotes with no abbreviation, with part and volume number followed by page number). See figure 4.1 for a diagram of publication history that foregrounds journal, anthology, and works edition publication patterns. In contrast to the table at the end of the Hanser edition showing the location of each of Jean Paul’s publications across five nineteenth- and twentieth-century works editions, my figure seeks to visualize the patterns of republication beginning with the journal version of parts or the whole of given publications.
8 . He first published this in 1807 in the multiauthor Taschenbuch für Jahr 1807, der Freundschaft und Liebe gewidmet (Frankfurt: Wilmans) and republished it in the 1810 Herbst-Blumine anthology.
9 . “Wenn es russische, englische, französische, etc. Miszellen gibt, warum soll es nicht deutsche geben? Und wenn diese, warum nicht auch meine?” II/3, 129.
10. On the rise in titles, see Roman B. Kremer, “Miszellen,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding, vol. 10 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 714.
11. II/3, 133.
12. See Nicolas Pethes, Vermischte Schriften. Jean Pauls Roman-Anthologie “D. Katzenbergers Badereise” (1809) (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2022); and Bryan Klausmeyer, “Fragmenting Fragments: Jean Paul’s Poetics of the Small in ‘Meine Miszellen,’ ” Monatshefte 108, no. 4 (2016): 485–509.
13. On the importance of collections in this period, see Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit. Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972), 1–82.