Collecting Texts: Miscellaneity in Journals, Anthologies, and Novels (Jean Paul)

The cultural technique of collecting is relevant for the history of books and literature in a fundamental way: already in antiquity, texts were not only published as coherent works by individual authors, but also as compilations of various authors or genres. In a sense, these collections of texts are second-order books, as it were, that select and rearrange published material, mostly short genres such as poems or essays. In doing so, they may also reinforce the concepts of the singular work of art and individual authorship (as in the case of a best of-collection). At the same time, however, collections of texts emphasize the importance of different agents within the literary field such as editors (as well as readers) who, by selecting and recombining texts, contribute to a notion of the book apart from the idea of the completed and isolated work (as in the case of a Reader’s Digest).1 In premodern and early modern times, such collections of texts were either labeled collectanea or, in metaphorical reference to the practice of collecting flowers, anthologies, florilegia, or Blütenlese.2 In a similar way, the metaphor of silvae (or Wäldchen) was used, which refers to the different trees in a mixed forest. But the idea of mixture is most explicitly represented by the concept of “miscellany,” a term that is also used for the section of short news found in journals and papers, which Roland Barthes characterized as faits-divers and which Sara Danius and Hanns Zischler identified as one of the previously overlooked starting points for the composition of the modern novel, namely James Joyce’s Ullyses.3

And "miscellany" is also the term for the various genres and formats of collections of text, ranging from bookish compilations to periodical journals and almanacs.4 According to Barbara Benedict, the success of these miscellaneous collections of texts in bookish formats, i.e., miscellanies in the sense of anthologies, was based on the increasing demand for easily accessible reading material and the lack of copyright regulations. As a result, cheap portable paperback books were published that contained a "selection of short, light pieces, often humorous or satirical, into which the educated reader could dip at convenient moments for a literary lift."5 While this made literature easily accessible in the form of extracts, Benedict also emphasizes the dialectical downside of this democratization process, the canonization of particularly marketable authors: Anthologies contribute in several ways to the dialectical movement of canon construction and deconstruction that marks the eighteenth century. They disseminate particular texts by making copies of fashionable works reasonably affordable and by recycling unsold copies with additions sewn into them. At the same time, by grouping unknown publications under the rubric of a famous name, either accurately or not, and by providing expansive and flexible envelopes for pirated pieces, they continually test the limits of an author's popularity and authority.6 But as such a heterogeneous and unstable endeavour, anthologies were also subject to criticism in the eighteenth century -mainly due to their lack of uniformity, which was opposed to the classicist understanding of art, as well as because of the libertine tendencies that collections of popular texts seemed to support.7 Most notably, Shaftesbury and Pope lamented the lack of form and the arbitrary contents of anthologies, labelling them as fragmentary, shapeless, grotesque, disgusting, and dangerous.8 This criticism, of course, only reflects the genre's success. In this sense, there is a connection between collections of texts and the monographic genre of the novel, which was subject to the same twofold reception: novels were also popular on the growing book market while being received critically with respect to their lack of form, relevant content, and seriousness. In addition, there is a structural relation between novels and anthologies: novels often inlcude digressions as well as changes in genre, style, and narrative perspective, so that -as in the cases of Swift, Defoe, and Sterne -eighteenth-century books appear miscellaneous and polyphonic in content and structure in spite of their monographic format.9 The epistolary novel, for instance, appeared as a collection of letters by various writers. By integrating further subgenres, novels could be read as collections of miscellaneous texts that sometimes tended to overrule the linear narrative of the plot.

II
In what follows, I will pursue this interrelation between the anthology and the novel through an exemplary analysis of a satirical short novel by the popular German writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, better known as Jean Paul, which was first published 1809: D. Katzenbergers Badereise; nebst einer Auswahl verbesserter Werkchen ("Dr. Katzenberger's journey to the spa; with a selection of revised minor works"). As I will argue, Jean Paul published this novel as an anthology, i.e., he not only added a selection of articles he had previously published in various periodicals to the novel's 'monographic' narrative but designed the entire publication as a heterogeneous arrangement of miscellaneous texts, including the chapters (called "Summula") of the actual story. This miscellaneous structure of a novelistic publication implies a number of challenges and difficulties both with respect to the analysis of the network of references between the different texts as well as with respect to conventional methods of reading and hermeneutically reducing such heterogeneities and differences. Moreover, this structure differs from Jean Paul's earlier incorporations of fictional newspaper and magazine articles in his novels such as the "Extrablättchen" ("Special supplement") in his first novel Die unsichtbare Loge from 189310 or the Pestitzer Realblatt in the appendix to Titan in 1800.11 At first glance, D. Katzenbergers Badereise seems much more conventional compared to these experiments: it tells the humorous story of a medical anatomist and vivisectionst who travels to the spa of Maulbronn, where he intends to beat up the author of a critical review of his book on the vivisection of animals. He is accompanied by his daughter Theoda and an incognito playwright whom Theoda passionately admires (but does not recognize), resulting in series of mix-ups and entanglements that are to be expected in a satirical novel.
However, these confusions not only result from the novel's content. They are intensified by the paratextual presentation of the first edition in 1809: the subtitle announces a selection of "revised minor works" as an addition to the novel's core narrative; the table of contents presents these eleven "minor works" on the same hierarchical level as the two sections of the "spa story" ("Badgeschichte"), inasmuch as they are listed by the same Roman numerals as the two parts of the novel -although a glance at the page numbers on the right shows that the two installments of the Katzenberger narrative comprise almost 300 pages, while the eleven "minor works" cover only roughly half of this amount. This paratextual framing controls the reader's expectation to the effect that the Katzenberger narrative seems to be merely one element among others -so that it is not considered as a major "work," but one of the "minor" works next to which it appears in the table of contents. Thus, the design of the table of contents suggests that Katzenberger's journey is only one topic within a heterogeneous collection of texts: it is published, among others, alongside a sermon that honours the sun as a symbol for political government on the first day of the new century, which Jean Paul had originally written for Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Überflüssiges Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1800 ("Superfluous almanac for the year 1800"); a review of Johann Peter Hebel's Allemannische Gedichte ("Alemannic Poems") from the Zeitung für die elegante Welt ("Newspaper for the elegant world") of 1803; and an essay on German christening names ("Urdeutsche Taufnamen") also from the Zeitung für die elegante Welt in 1803. And finally, the "minor works" consist of a number of articles Jean Paul had contributed to annual almanacs such as the eulogy on the stomach of a dead prince from 1801, metaphysical reflections on "Death after Death" from 1802, a short biography of Charlotte Corday, a visionary fantasy on "Destruction," and a series of aphorisms under the headline "Polymeter." Research on Jean Paul's Katzenberger has nevertheless mostly treated the "minor works" as an unnecessary appendix and focused solely on the spa storyprobably due to the fact that Jean Paul chose a different presentation for the second edition of his novel in 1823. In the second edition, he not only distributed the text into three volumes and rearranged the minor works accordingly but also clearly separated the previous periodical articles from the spa story in the table of contents by listing all of its forty-five chapters individually. Thus, the second edition clearly highlights Katzenberger's journey as the actual novelistic content of the book opposed to the symmetrical arrangement of "spa story" and "minor works" in the anthological format of 1809. Through this arrangement, the first edition presents itself not as a novel but as a miscellaneous collection much in the sense of a book project that Jean Paul had already briefly mused about in a footnote to his Preschool of Aesthetics in 1804: Hence the question would be whether a collection of essays might not be useful and appealing in which ideas from all sciences were shuffled together like cards, not mixed together like poisons, without any certain straight aim, be it artistic or scientific, like Lessing throwing spiritual dice, thus bringing gains to the one who knows how to win by gaming; but as far as the collection is concerned, I have it and increase it daily, alone for the sake of making my head as clear as my heart should be.12 12 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, in Paul, Sämtliche Werke, vol. IX, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1989), 202: "Es wäre daher die Frage, ob nicht eine Sammlung von Aufsätzen nützete und gefiele, worin Ideen aus allen Wissenschaften ohne bestimmtes gerades Ziel -weder ein künstlerisches noch wissenschaftliches -sich nicht wie Gifte, sondern wie Karten mischten und folglich, ähnlich den Lessingschen geistigen Würfeln, dem etwas eintrügen, der durch Spiele zu gewinnen wüßte; was aber die Sammlung angeht, so hab' ich sie und vermehre sie täglich, In addition, there is immediate evidence for my reading of the Katzenberger's first edition as a miscellaneous "collection of essays" in Jean Paul's correspondence with various publishers in the spring of 1808. Already on April 6, 1807, Jean Paul announced to his publisher Cotta a book by the title Vermischte Schriften ("Miscellaneous writings") for the next book fair, and on November 13 of the same year he announced to the publisher Geßner in Zurich: They are miscellaneous minor writings (I don't know the title yet), of which 2/3 are completely new (e.g., a journey to the bath by Doctor Katzenberger, a comic novel of about 12 printed sheets) and the last third has been revised and improved.13 It is remarkable that the hierarchy between the Katzenberger-story and the miscellaneous articles seemed to be in favour of the latter at this early stage, when Jean Paul continues: "The book begins with serious essays, e.g., on immortality and about Corday, the satirical ones as well as the journey to the spa follow in between, distributed on the two volumes.

III
The letters to various publishers prove that Jean Paul did not simply add a series of random articles to an otherwise self-contained work of art. Instead, the book was planned as an anthology from the start, so that D. Katzenbergers Badereise emerges from the collection of miscellaneous articles rather than the other way around -in the same sense of Leah Price's argument that anthological formats were the foundation for eighteenth-century novels.
In his preface to D. Katzenbergers Badereise, Jean Paul establishes a similar connection: With the pocket almanacs and journals, minor miscellaneous works have to increase in number -because authors have to support them with their best contributions -so that in the end hardly anybody writes a major one anymore. Even the author of this work (though also the author of several major ones) has established himself in eight journals and five almanacs by way of minor branch offices and other properties.18 According to this confession, the changes on the book market bring about a shift toward the production of miscellaneous articles, which influences the status of the literary artwork as an autonomous monography. And the table of contents of the first edition, in its ahierarchical presentation of the two parts of the novel and the eleven articles, visually represents this shift toward an equality of literature and journalism. The notion of autonomous literature is challenged by the economic requirements of filling periodicals with ongoing content. It is, in other words, the economic success of serial and miscellaneous formats that forces literary authors to orient themselves toward multiple "minor works" instead of singular major ones.
The opening sentence of the preface thus uncovers the hybrid conditions of producing texts at the turn of the nineteenth century, which literary history usually hides within a 'black box' in the sense of Bruno Latour's reconstruction of the hybrid production of scientific facts through multiple layers of inscriptions, paperwork, and mobilizations19 -so as to maintain the idea of the creative 18 Jean Paul, D. Katzenbergers Badereise; nebst einer Auswahl verbesserter Werkchen (Heidelberg, 1809), I: "Mit den Taschenkalendern und Zeitschriften müssen die kleinen vermischten Werkchen so zunehmen -weil die Schriftsteller jene mit den besten Beiträgen zu unterstützen haben -, daß man am Ende kaum ein großes mehr schreibt. Selber der Verfasser dieses Werks (obwohl noch manches großen) ist in acht Zeitschriften und fünf Kalendern ansässig mit kleinen Niederlassungen und liegenden Gründen." 19 See Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together: Die Macht der unveränderlich mobilen Elemente," Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Cultures sovereignity of the individual author in relation to his publishers and editors. It may well be that the contemporary criticism of miscellanies I referred to above was also based on an attempt to maintain this idea, including the idea of the selfcontained work of art. But if we adopt Latour's method of reverse blackboxing, i.e., if we unfold the actual process of producing and publishing a book, it turns out that this process is not a linear creation of consistent form, but prompted and influenced by heterogeneous precursors and preliminary stages as can be found in miscellaneous formats. Writing a text, then, is not so different from collecting texts, insofar it is based on compiling and transforming existing linguistic material rather then discovering and representing an entirely new and homogeneous idea.
In this sense, Jean Paul's preface opens the black box from which his concept of publishing a novel as a collection of texts emerged. In the same way that Barbara Benedict refers to the "pirated pieces" contained in anthologies because of lacking copyright regulations,20 Jean Paul reacts to the reprint of his periodical articles in an unauthorized anthology in the Katzenberger preface: This inspired the Voigtian book publishers in Jena in 1804 to reprint "small writings by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter," without asking me and their conscience. In return, this inspires me to bring to the light here their small writings of J.P. likewise without asking. Calmly, I let the publisher complain about reprinting the reprint, reediting the reedition.21 Hence, by designing his Katzenberger-novel as an anthology of "miscellaneous writings," Jean Paul claims to steal back his intellectual property, as it were. But the "minor works" from Voigt's reprint make up only "one sixth of this book," as Jean Paul continues: The second sixth I collected from magazines, from which he has not yet collected anything from me. The second and third thirds of the book are completely new, namely Dr. Katzenberger's journey to the spa and history, as well as the final polymeters.22 D. Katzenbergers Badereise is thus, at the same time, a new novel, a reprint of already published material by Jean Paul, a reprint of a previous reprint of this material, and a compilation of all these elements within one book, which makes for a highly heterogeneous collection of texts both in terms of genre, content, origin, and textual history.
The miscellaneous status of the Katzenberger is further supported by a work that Jean Paul published in 1810 (before adding two further volumes in 1815 and 1820) and which picks up the subtitle of the Katzenberger novel: Herbst-Blumine, oder gesammelte Werkchen aus Zeitschriften ("Autumn flowers, or collected minor works from journals"). Besides their subtitles, the two collections of texts -Katzenberger and Herbst-Blumine -share the same layout of the table of contents, which lists miscellaneous articles by Roman numerals.
In addition, the first volume of Herbst-Blumine contains a text that reflects the genre and structure of miscellaneity, "Meine Miszellen" ("My miscellanies"), which Jean Paul had first published in an almanac in 1807, and which Voigt had also included in his pirated edition, although the collection of aphorisms is clearly marked by a possesive pronoun. The three sections of these miscellaneous aphorisms repeatedly reflect the scattered thoughts that miscellaneous writings present to their equally absent-minded readers, for instance: How insatiable man is, especially when he is reading. Even scattered thoughts are read in a scattered manner, and instead of starting from the beginning, he browses and eyes through aphorisms here and there, as everybody will recall from these miscellanies.23 The concept of miscellaneity refers here to a reading practice on a self-referential level, insofar Jean Paul's miscellanies not only reflect on but also provoke the scattered reception they talk about. In a similar manner, Jean Paul reflects the Here, Jean Paul not only declares the genre of miscellanies to be the textual form that best represents the general structure of miscellaneity within periodicals but  also figuratively transfers this structural feature of periodical media onto a basic attribute of the entire nineteenth century, which he labels as the "Quodlibet-Säkulum." These attributes of heterogeneity and arbitrariness are productive features insofar as they are the foundation for the success of miscellaneous articles -as well as for the attempt to design a novel as a collection of texts.

IV
The connection between Jean Paul's Katzenberger and his theory of miscellaneous articles is established by the many references to periodicals in the spa story: Katzenberger's journey is initiated by a critical review of his book on animal vivisection in a medical journal; he learns about the whereabouts of the reviewer from the same journal; and this journal also reports that his daughter Theoda's favorite playwright, who goes by the name of Theudobach, is expected at the spa in Maulbronn as well. Finally, in order to find a fellow traveller with whom he can split the coach fare, Katzenberger places an advertisement in a journal to which a certain Mr. Niess (or "Mr. Sneeze") responds, who happens to be no other but Theoda's favorite playwright, although as an author he uses the euphonic name of "Theudobach" as a pseudonym (instead of the actual "Sneeze").
The proximity of the Katzenberger novel to periodical formats is further emphasized on a formal level, most of all by the serial structure of its chapters -for example, in the case of the coach's departure as related through a "Fortsetzung" ("Continuation") and a subsequent "Fortgesetzte Fortsetzung der Abreise" ("Continued Continuation of the Departure").25 Another series of "Summula" is dedicated to Katzenberger's much feared "Mittags-Tischreden" ("dinner conversations") at Maulbronn that treat topics of medical anatomy and, as such, result in chapters that are actually essays very similar to some of the "minor works," such as on the prince's stomach or the art of sleeping, that Jean Paul reprints in Katzenberger. 26 But one might even go so far as to call the entire setting -the coach ride in the first part as well as the conversations among the guests at the spa in the second part -"journalistic," insofar as coaches and baths are heterotopias of nineteenthcentury culture that provide polyphonic semiospheres of news, gossip, rumor, and popular culture. This structural relation that connects periodicals with nineteenth-century spa culture is also illustrated by the fact that many journals include a section on spas, e.g., the category "Nachrichten von Bädern" ("News from spas") in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt, in which several of Jean Paul's articles were published -including, on March 4, 1809, a preprint of one of the Katzenberger chapters.27 Hence factual and fictional "news from the spas" actually came to stand alongside one another.
Most notably, however, the practice of collecting miscellaneous articles is reflected on a thematic level in D. Katzenbergers Badereise: Katzenberger repeatedly stops on his journey to add new specimens to the various collections of animals and monstrosities he passionately maintains: he "hunts" for spiders at an inn where the coach party rests and buys an eight-legged "double hare"28 from a local pharmacist; he collects human bones from a cemetery, while Theoda and Niess/ Theudobach have their first rendevouz at this ghostly location.
Thus, Katzenberger is a medical doctor whose scientific theories are based on collections of highly heterogeneous material, which is, in addition, considered grotesque and disgusting by all nonprofessional protagonists. And since Katzenberger reports these theories during his dinner conversation, the spa story in itself is composed of a series of grotesque digressions, i.e., as a collection of miscellaneous "minor works." From this perspective, the articles that Jean Paul reprints at the end of the novel's two volumes seem less alien to its structure. Rather, the presentation of the "minor works" reflects the miscellaneity of the spa story itself.
More than four decades ago, Peter Horst Neumann already argued that these "minor works" should not be read as a negligible supplement to the actual text of the "spa story."29 However, this approach has remained without response for a long time. It was not until Armin Schäfer connected Katzenberger's collection of anatomical monstrosities with the compilation of miscellaneous genres that the "minor works" were acknowledged as an essential part of Jean Paul's book, which Schäfer characterized as "monstrous writing" due to this generic hybridity: the monsters from Katzenberger's anatomical collection are metaphors for the miscellaneous format of the book, which escapes conventional genre classifications.30   This reevaluation of monstrosity precisely matches Foucault's description of the transition from the previous notion, according to which monsters disturb the classification schemes of natural history with the modern theory that monsters are not mistakes of nature but genuinely natural phenomena.31 And indeed, one of the initiators of this paradigm shift, the anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel, who was a notorious collector of specimens, recognized himself in Jean Paul's Katzenberger and dedicated his treatise De duplicitate monstrosa commentarius to the "viro clarissimo Frederico Richter alias Johanni Paulo," who in return commented on this dedication in the second edition of the novel.32 And yet, it seems questionable whether the experiment on the format of the book that Jean Paul conducts in Dr. Katzenberger should in fact be interpreted as part of Jean Paul's poetic encyclopedia of human knowledge, as Schäfer suggests.33 Rather, it seems that the miscellaneous format of the book undermines all attempts of a systematic presentation of knowledge. In addition, the fields of knowledge Katzenberger refers to in the novel are all related to what the remaining part of the preface refers to as the specific cynicism of the novel: by chosing a medical doctor as a protagonist, the novel can address phenomena of the human body that would otherwise be excluded from aesthetic discourse and considered inappropriate. Thus, Jean Paul bases his novel on "comic disgust,"34 and adds a series of references to the various forms, metaphors, and cultural contexts of human excretions such as the "album graecum" (i.e. a remedy extracted from dog excrement) or the "caca de Dauphin."35 In his preface to the second edition of 1823, this connection between comical effects and bodily effluents is complemented by the reference to vomiting, which "disgusting" texts such as Katzenberger may cause in readers. 36 These references to excretions are of interest not only because they coincide with Mikhail Bakhtin's observations of grotesque scenarios in early modern novels. In the present context, they reflect the way miscellaneous collections of texts were criticized in eighteenth-century literary criticsm: as grotesque, shapeless, and worthless.37 In this sense, Jean Paul reflects the notion of an anthology's grotesque lack of form in his multiple digressions on grotesque contents in the novel. Within the aesthetic debate of his time, Jean Paul positions himself on the side of those authors and theorists, above all from England, who do not rely on the classicist understanding of organic work of arts.38 And as in the case of the paradigm shift within the discourse on monstrosity in natural history, one can say: grotesque monstrosities are metaphors for the format of collections of texts, and yet this format is no longer considered a mistake within the system of classification but recognized as an independent generic form.

V
But if the nineteenth century is in fact a "quodlibet century" and if the textual formats it produces are in fact genuinely miscellaneous, how should heterogeneous collections of texts be analyzed? How do we read a novel that is presented as an anthology? Does not reading always imply a homogenizing approach? Are the chapters of Dr. Katzenberger entirely miscellaneous or are there crossreferences between the spa story and the "minor works"? And then again: would focusing on these connections not undermine the miscellaneity at which Jean Paul is aiming? In the light of these questions, D. Katzenbergers Badereise reveals the basic paradox of any collection of objects or texts: as a cultural technique or medial format, collecting strives for unity; but with respect to the individual elements it combines, it is based on difference.
In recent research on the periodical as a genre, this interplay between unity and difference has been metaphorized through the relation of centripetal and centrifugal elements within a journal: insofar as periodicals are serial publications, there is a redundancy of format that allows readers to recognize each individual number as part of a continuous sequence. This centripetal force enables journals to present highly heterogeneous content, which, as such, contributes to the centrifugal miscellaneity of each individual number.39 But how do we deal with the centrifugal forces of miscellaneity if they are no longer compensated 37 See Wilkinson, The Miscellaneous, 23: "Pope identifies the miscellaneous productions of modern authors as literary grotesques whose commitments to excess and variety destroy the uniformity that true art required. by the centripetal forces of seriality, that is to say: how do we read and analyze anthologies as singular works of art? I can only hint at the way D. Katzenbergers Badereise reflects and mitigates this tension between unity and difference by structuring a seemingly monographic novel as an anthology of periodical articles. Most notably, the very metaphors of centripetality and centrifugality are used by Jean Paul in his satire on absolutistic regimes, the "Sermon of Obeisance to the Sun's Accession to Power," which first appeared in the "superfluous" almanac for 1800 and opens up the sequence of "minor works" in volume one of Dr. Katzenberger. In the original version of this article that compares the position of the sun in the solar system to the position of the King in absolutistic regimes, Jean Paul wrote: "According to Newton, centripetal force behaves to centrifugal force or attraction to omission in the same way as in all cameralistic courts, namely 47000 to 1."40 The fact that Jean Paul uses the same terminology as current debates on the homogenizing and heterogenizing dynamics within miscellaneous publications is no mere coincidence, since collections of texts also raise the question of a unifying center. But can this question be answered at all? Upon comparing the original version of the "Sermon of Obeisance" ("Huldigungspredigt") with its reprint in the first edition of D. Katzenbergers Badereise, one comes across a peculiar omission. The sentence here reads: "According to Newton, the centripetal force or the attraction to omission behaves as in all cameralistic courts, namely 47000 to 1."41 The reference to "centrifugal forces" is missing here, so that the word "omission" remains without internal reference. This may well be a mere printing error. But what if Jean Paul deliberately played with the semantics of omitting here -and actually omitted the reference to the very force that causes omission by dissolving unity? In that case, the centrifugal forces of a collection of texts would affect the text on a performative level insofar the replacement of the sun as a "centripetal" ruler results in gaps in the text.
In a similar way, one can easily relate the topic of a dismembered stomach from "D. Fenk's Eulogy on the Stomach of the Duke of Scheerau" both to Katzenberger's dinner conversations on anatomy and the grotesque miscellaneity of 40 Jean Paul, "Huldigungspredigt vor und unter dem Regierungsantritt der Sonne gehalten Neujahrsmorgen 1800 vom Frühprediger dahier," Überflüssiges Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1800, ed. Johann Georg Jacobi, 43-54, here 49: "Nach Newton verhält sich bey ihr die Zentripetalkraft zur Zentrifugalkraft oder das Anziehen zum Weglassen wie bey allen kameralistischen Höfen, nämlich 47000 zu I." 41 Jean Paul, D. Katzenbergers Badereise (1809), 175: "Nach Newton verhält sich bey ihr die Zentripetalkraft oder das Anziehen zum Weglassen wie bey allen kameralistischen Höfen, nämlich 47000 zu I." an anthological novel. But it is precisely the temptation to look for connections between the miscellaneous parts of the book that highlights the fundamental methodological problem when dealing with miscellaneous collections of text: whenever such connections are found and identified, the centrifugal structure of the collection is reduced and recentered.
This effect can be demonstrated by examining the original publication context of the "minor works" in D. Katzenbergers Badereise: "D. Fenk's Eulogy," for instance, was first published in Leopold von Seckendorffs classicist Neujahrs-Taschenbuch von Weimar auf das Jahr 1801 ("New Year's almanac from Weimar for 1801"), which contained, among others, contributions by Goethe and was dedicated to the Duchess of Weimar, Anna Amalia. By chosing the topic of the burial of the dismembered stomach of a Duke, Jean Paul's contribution to the Taschenbuch seems entirely inappropriate. Through this inappropriateness, however, the grotesque and morbid topic of the essay is transposed to the level of form precisely by not fitting in with its context. Thus, "D. Fenk's Eulogy" is miscellaneous in the twofold sense of the word when it is published in Seckendorff's Taschenbuch: it presents a disgusting topic and it interferes with the formal unity of the book.
When Jean Paul reprints "D. Fenk's Eulogy" in D. Katzenbergers Badereise, however, the result is exactly the opposite: here, the text blends in among the dinner conversations and other satirical contributions. This blending results in the paradoxical consequence that the grotesque content of the eulogy, which contributed to the article's miscellaneity when it was first published, now reduces this very miscellaneity because it is now contextualized by similar contents. This result demonstrates the interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces even in the case of monographic collections of texts. And it suggests that this interplay cannot be stopped but must rather be recognized as an ongoing tension between unifying and differentiating forces within cultural techniques of collecting.
This hypothesis is further supported by the reverse relation, i.e., a "minor work" that does not fit into the context of the Katzenberger (and, by not fitting, emphasizes its miscellaneity) but was perfectly embedded within its original publication context (which accordingly appears less miscellaneous). Jean Paul's brief biography of the radical revolutionist Charlotte Corday, for instance, was first published in Jean Paul's own almanac in 1801, which consisted almost exclusively of articles on revolutionary uprisings in France, England, and Germany.42 Transferred to D. Katzenberger's Badereise, the sentimental account of Corday's childhood, her murder of Jean Paul Marat, and her execution hardly relates to any of the book's satirical contents (unless one is willing to see revolutionary potential in Katzenberger's outrage against his reviewer). Hence in this case, it is the reprint that produces the article's miscellaneity, whereas the original version is dominated by the centripetal force of political ideology.
An exemplary analysis of Jean Paul's novel-anthology thus hints at general aspects of interest when dealing with collections of texts: reading miscellanies means accounting for both the agreement and disagreement of the individual contributions with respect to the respective context from which they were taken and into which they were placed, as well as the differences between the levels of format and content. On the level of format, collections of texts bring together heterogeneous contents and thus highlight the centripetal force of the book; on the level of content, collections of texts highlight the centrifugal forces between the different texts so as not to be mistaken as a homogenous monograph. Thus, collecting is revealed as a cultural technique that simultaneously aims at unifying differences and differentiating unity.
This simultaneity is also the very dynamic of Jean Paul's D. Katzenbergers Badereise, as the work emphasizes both the homogeneity and the heterogeneity of the textual elements it combines and thus highlights the hermeneutical paradox of any miscellaneous collections of texts: while a miscellaneous reading of the novel would have to account for the differences between the "minor works" and the "Summula" and in doing so would dissolve the unity of the book in the light of its heterogeneity, the structure of miscellaneity itself can be identified as the unifying principle of Jean Paul's selection of articles as well as his compilation of these articles within the chapters of the spa stories. The literary work of art and the miscellaneous anthology therefore cannot be separated as "purely" as modern literary criticism would have it: by designing a novel as a collection of texts, Jean Paul exposes the basic hybridity of both formats and presents the cultural technique of collecting as a basic operation of literary communication.