Thinking Poetically

The publication of Walter Benjamin’s literary essays offers American readers a set of texts that may at times be puzzling but that reveal a cast of mind and critical perspectives by which Europeans have for the past ten years been increasingly fascinated. To accept Benjamin’s stature, to appreciate the scope of his appeal, and perhaps to understand his influence upon contemporary criticism will not be altogether easy on the basis of these miscellaneous or occasional writings. Benjamin’s entire output, though not extensive, is more varied than this selection indicates, and by no means narrowly or professionally focused upon the interpretation of literature. Two wide-ranging and difficult historical studies are here omitted because of their length and their specificity: one an article, “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism” (1920), the other an eminently rich and rewarding book, The Origins of German Tragedy (1928). Two other works, more general but in their style strikingly characteristic, One Way Street, (1928) and A Berlin Childhood (printed posthumously in 1950), ought to be made available before long to enable us to see the full scope of Benjamin’s intentions.

by Walter Benjamin edited by Hannah Arendt translated by Harry Zohn (Harcourt, Brace & World, $5.95)

The canon of his literary criticism present in this meticulous, translucent translation by Harry Zohn is enough to suggest the quality and direction of his thinking and to convey the seriousness with which he grasped and defined some of the social and cultural issues that emerged in Germany during the two decades between the wars, and that continue to occupy us thirty years after his death.

Benjamin’s career as a writer and the central features of his work are significantly related to his early life. He was born in Berlin in 1892 in the German-Jewish society under the Kaiser. This was an ambiguous world of diminishing loyalty toward the Jewish heritage and of a strong desire to subordinate the Jewish tradition to the intellectual and political realities of German nationalism. Benjamin, with others of his faith (Kafka among them), recognized and resented the contradictions and weaknesses of this position and sought to transcend them, first in a cautious interest in Zionism and later by moving toward a halfhearted and academic sort of Marxism. Neither position could he fully accept. It was inevitable that he should increasingly face the intellectual dilemma of one who achieves an extraordinary measure of critical detachment vis-a-vis the disintegrating social convictions of his time, but who is unable, or unwilling, to submit to an adequate theory of action that might give a conclusive and perhaps revolutionary thrust to his insights.

Until the advent of Hitler, Benjamin remained in Germany as one of the most sophisticated literary essayists. Despite his brilliant if unconventional thesis, he had failed to obtain a university post and therefore formed an understandable distaste for the academic and critical establishment. What he envisaged for himself was a life not as a scholar but as a cultivated man of letters who could remain aloof from political pressures and the vulgarities of the society from which he felt profoundly estranged. It was a curiously utopian and unrealistic attitude which was bound to prove illusionary: early in 1933 he left Germany for Paris, where he became a member of the Institute for Social Research. He traveled throughout Europe, wrote a series of remarkable pieces of literary and historical criticism, and after the beginning of World War II was for a short time interned in France and released only on the intercession of his French friends.

In September, 1940, he had decided to emigrate to the United States. As he attempted, with a group of other refugees, to cross from France into Spain, the border police warned that they might on the following day be returned to Vichy France. During the night Benjamin took his own life; the police permitted the rest of the group to cross the border.

The ten essays in this volume are unequal in substance, but they reveal a mind of wholly unprovincial mobility; if there should be anything “German” about them, it is an uncompromising preoccupation with the telling forms, the comprehensible structures of the human imagination. Benjamin’s central concern is at all times with the character of perception, of experience, as revealed in the collective life, in the “monuments,” both literary and architectural, of that “bourgeois” nineteenth century whose physiognomy he sought to understand. If this is an essentially historical task, its particular methods and goals were determined by Benjamin’s view of the past. “To articulate the past historically,” he notes in one of the important “Theses on the Philosophy of History” with which this volume concludes, “does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

This determination to recover the resonance of the past in critical recollection motivates most of Benjamin’s writing. In each significant document of the past he recognizes an “aura” of experienced life which must be made available to the present perception, and which in turn will affect the shape of the future. “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.”

In a number of essays, notably those on Proust and Baudelaire (but no less vividly in Benjamin’s childhood recollections), the evidence of this historical “aura” and the character of the human perception in a given historical context are admirably examined. For Benjamin is above all a “concrete” thinker whose argument is always prompted by an incident of observed reality and whose language tends to be metaphorical rather than speculative. “Proust’s most accurate, most convincing insights fasten on their objects as insects fasten on leaves, blossoms, brandies, betraying nothing of their existence until a leap, a beating of wings, a vault, show the startled observer that some incalculable individual life has imperceptibly crept into an alien world,”

If Proust was preoccupied with the recovery of the past, Benjamin argues the importance of its continued presence in the future. But his work as a whole is a recognition of the steady deterioration of perception and memory, the paralysis of experience in its fullest and most productive sense, as the result of the technological processes of modern life. In a superb essay on Baudelaire he inquires into the causes of this loss of perception, the destruction of the “aura” of the human “gesture.” And in the most original and provocative of the pieces in this volume, his celebrated analysis of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he explains (thirty years before McLuhan) that the loss of the “aura,” the singularity of the work of art, is the result of die technical conditions that determine its availability in our contemporary society. For “the manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.”Modern techniques of reproduction detach the reproduced object from the domain of tradition, “By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.”

Benjamin’s view of the technological society is not so much critical as utopian; it directed his affectionate interest again and again toward the nineteenth century in France and Germany, in Paris and Berlin, where the beginnings of the modern crisis could be sharply delineated. But it enabled him also to speak with extraordinary affinity and clarity of his contemporaries Kafka and Brecht. In both he recognized a capacity and method that he admired in Proust, an ability to “actualize and not merely to reflect.” His own “concrete” imagination was captivated not by any ideological affinity in Brecht’s work, but by the firmness of speech and imagery of what Brecht himself proudly called his “crude thinking.”

Kafka, too, seemed to him—in 1934 and 1938—less an advocate of a philosophical position than a poet of great purity and beauty who “listened to tradition” precisely in Benjamin’s own spirit, and related it in unmistakable “gestures" to the present. In this effort Kafka appeared to Benjamin inevitably to have failed. “He failed in his grandiose attempt to convert poetry into doctrine, to turn it into a parable and restore to it that stability and unpretentiousness which, in the face of reason, seemed to him to be the only appropriate thing for it. No other writer has obeyed the commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image’ so faithfully.”

If Benjamin’s attitude as a critic was one of defiance of the platitudinous business of print and talk, if he kept desperately aloof from it and preferred the laconic aphorism to the elaborate essay, his increasing doubt in the future efficacy of the work of art and the critical act was bound to drive him into an idiom of nearly private reflection. Yet in all his writings he maintained an unshakable and unfashionable faith in “a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate secrets with which all thought is concerned.”

Miss Arendt, who provides in her introduction to this volume a wellinformed and judicious appraisal of Benjamin, reminds us that in all his critical studies he was resolved “not to investigate the utilitarian or communicative functions of linguistic creations” but to make this language intelligible. He understood language, she concludes, as an essentially poetic phenomenon, and what is unfolded in these essays with impressive consistency is “something that may not be unique but is certainly extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically.”