Walter Benjamin, On the Image of Proust, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Theses on the Philosophy of History, The Story-Teller

(1892-1940)

Berlin Childhood Around 1900
Denkbilder, “thought figures”

part of his general gravitation toward the ''dialectical method of montage, with its simultaneous isolation and assemblage of materials''

Something more than just a methodological imperative, ''also historical imperative—the imminence of exile'' and the need for a certain inoculation

“these childhood memories are…not narratives in the form of a chronicle but…individual expeditions into the depths of memory.” At issue here is an ontological rather than psychological memory, not first of all a faculty but an element. Memory forms the horizon of perception. What is called remembrance is for B a matter of the actualization of a vanished moment in its manifold depth.

From “On the Image of Proust”: “A remembered event is infinite, because it is merely a key to everything that happened before it and after it.”

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater.”

Involves the method of superimposition or composite imagery that reflects the palimpsest character of memory.

The moments evoked communicate with and overlap the others..composite transparency…Elsewhere in the text—different points in time, remembered sensations, form constellations in the horizontal and vertical montage (the “depths of the image”) amid the constantly shifting topography. By the same token, the text as a whole continually superposes the author’s present day on his past—framed in the perspective of exile. Everywhere the man is felt to be prefigured in the child. In this way the text fully realizes the idea of “intertwined time” a la Proust.

The child is a collector, flaneur, and allegorist in one. He lives in an antiquity of the everyday; for him everything is natural and therefore endowed with chthonic force. His relation to things is wholly mimetic. That is, he enters into a world of things with all his senses. …everything is alive, full of eyes and ears

The child builds his nest in the depths of the everyday, secure and hidden in the fragile magic of the “home”

The world of his childhood is socially irretrievable. By means of the text’s framing devices, the child’s mythology is dissolved into the space of history.

Pivots on the threshold between the 19th and 20th centuries, memorializing a world that was about to disappear, not without marking its complicity with the unending brutality of the “victor” while glancing simultaneously backward to the heyday of the bourgeoisie and forward to the global crisis. àdialectical consciousness, both detached and engaged, distinctive tonality of the work, at once sunny and melancholy

Question of whether Proust and Benjamin had similar ideas about “lost time”:

In the last volume of a la recherche, the hero decides to write the novel that the reader holds in his hands, allowing the book, as it were, to catch up with itself and, simultaneously, causing the anxiety of the beginning to join in an unforgettable manner with the triumph of the completion.

“for, as I have already shown, they would be not my readers but readers of themselves, my book serving merely as a sort of magnifying glass…”

Parks, the promenade: the park of Tansonville with its red hawthorne, where the young Marcel first glimpses Gilberte, and the gardens of the Champs-Elysees, in which he finds her once more, Balbec, etc.

Benjamin also begins with a park of sorts, the Tiergarten zoo.

A sentence in the book points to the central experience of Proust’s work: that almost everything childhood was can be withheld from a person for years, suddenly to be offered to him anew as if by chance.” “For a long time, life deals with the still tender memory of childhood like a mother who lays her newborn on her breast without waking it.”

The meaning of Proust’s search for time past is explicitly stated at the end of the novel. The moment when Marcel recognizes this meaning is the high point of the worok; for the point is simultaneously that toward which the book has been aiming and that from which it issues. This knowledge has two sources, one happy and one painful, both of which become evidence very early in the book.

In the latter incident Marcel recognizes the connection between his two feelings of happiness and terror. That which underlies the feeling of happiness in the one case liberates him from the terror of the other: “I caught an inkling of this reason when I compared these various happy impressions with one another…that is to say, entirely outside of time.”

Proust undertakes his search for “lost time,” the past, so that through its rediscovery and in the coincidence of time past and present, he can escape from the sway of time itself. For Proust, the goal of the search for time past is the disappearance of time as such.

For Benjamin it is different. The intention behind the evocation of BC can be readily perceived from a characteristic shared by many of the places, people, and events he selects as subject of the individual vignettes. – “what only later I had a word for: love.”

The Fever: “I was often sick. This circumstance perhaps accounts for something that others call my patience but that actually bears no resemblance to a virtue: the predilection for seeing everything I care about approach me from a distance, the way the hours approached my sickbed.” It prefigures the character trait of the adult.

“My hand can still dream of this movement, but it can no longer awaken so as actually to perform it. By the same token, I can dream of the way I once learned to walk. But that doesn’t help. I no know how to walk; there is no more learning to walk.”

The zoo, the larder, the reading boxes: in these Benjamin detected omens and early traces of his later life. Yet his recollective glance encountered other things, too, in which it was not his own profile but rather his historical and social environment which first becam erecognizable. This environment in turn acted upon B himself and became an object of his conscious reflection.

Once again metaphor is accorded a special role: the comparison brings together the present and the future, the premonition of the child and the knowledge of the grown man.

The sections from BC themselves answer the question about the difference between P’s and B’s search for time past. P sets off in a quest of the past in order to escape from time altogether. This endeavour is made possible by the coincidence of the past with the present, a coincidence brought about by analogous experiences. Its real goal is escape from the future, filled with dangers and threats, of which the ultimate one is death. In contrast, the future is precisely what B seeks in the past. Almost every place that his memory wishes to rediscover bears “traces of what was to come,” as he puts it at one point in BC.

Proust listens attentively for the echo of the past; B listens for the first notes of a future which has meanwhile become the past. Unlike Proust, B does not want to free himself from temporality; he does not wish to see things in their ahistorical essence. He strives instead for historical experience and knowledge.

Nevertheless, he is sent back into the past, a past, however, which is open, not completed, and which promises the future. B’s tense is not the perfect, but the future perfect in the fuullness of its paradox: being future and past at the same time.

“The phenomenon of déjà vu has often been describe. Is the term really apt? Shouldn’t we rather speak of events which affect us like an echo—one awakened by a sound that seems to have issued from somewhere in the darkness of past life?...the shock with which a moment enters our consciousness as if already lived through tends to strike us in the form of sound…

Metaphors based on twofold definitions, to which he owes the most masterly passages in his prose, are among B’s favorite stylistic devices.

In such passages his intellectual force and imaginative power prove to be the same faculty. In any case, nothing can obscure the fact that the translation effected by the deja vu is just as much the basis of Proust’s work as its mirror image is the basis of ''Berlin Childhood.''

To conjure up the moments that are marked by this shock, so very different from the other, is the task of B’s remembering. “Like ultraviolet rays, memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.”

The poet of the déjà vu is on the track of those moments in which the experience of childhood shines forth anew; he must, accordingly, recount an entire life. Benjamin, on the contrary, can disregard later events and devote himself to the invocation of those moments of childhood in which a token of the future lies hidden.

Lost timeàlost future

“A deathly air permeates the scenes poised to awaken in Benjamin’s depiction. Upon them falls the gaze of the condemned man.”

A knowledge of ruin obstructed B’s view into the future and allowed him to see future events only in those instances where they had already moved into the past. This ruin is the ruin of his age. BC belongs in the orbit of that primal history of the modern world on which B worked during the last thirteen years of his life—Paris—

His understanding of utopia is anchored in the past.

The way to the origin is, to be sure, a way backwards, but backwards into a future, which, although it has gone by in the meantime and its idea has been perverted, still holds more promise than the current image of the future.

“contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.” // “Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear on day in the messianic light.”

Since this picture harbors the future, it must not be allowed to disappear. It is for its sake that the ability to get lost is something to be wished for.

B’s last effort, undertaken in the face of the victory of National Socialism and the failure of German and French social democracy, was devoted to formulating a new conception of history which would break with the belief in progress, with the notion of the progress of humanity in a “homogeneous, empty time.”

“illusion that the factory work ostensibly furthering technological progress constituted as a political achievement.”

Benjamin’s new conception of history is rooted in the dialectic of future and past, of messianic expectation and remembrance. “The origin is the goal”

B on origin: does not at all mean the formation or becoming of what has arisen, but rather what is arising out of becoming and passing away. The origin is a whirlpool in the stream of becoming and draws into its rhythm the material that is to be formed. …

There exist other thematic connections which simultaneously touch on the motif of memory in P and in BC. The most important category in this regard is that of experience, the atrophy of which constitutes, for B, the distinguishing mark of the moderns. In P’s work he detects the attempt “to produce experience…in a synthetic way under today’s social conditions,” …

In the “souvenir”…we find “precipitated the increasing self-estrangement of human beings, whose past is inventories as dead effects. In the 19th century, allegory withdrew from the world around us to settle in the inner world.” The inventorying of the past, with which the allegory of the Baroque period was turned inward, is at the same time, for B, the personal correlate of the prevailing view of history against which his theses rebelled.

“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.”

The Story-Teller
Highlights the changing conditions of temporality, and of storytelling, with the rise of modern culture. We are “now” in a culture that values “information” and not wisdom, like in stories. This is because of the secular productive forces of history, and also because of WWI, Benjamin says. Men came back from war with less communicable experience than more.

Experience has fallen in value. “Never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”

Generation that “had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and eplosions, was the tiny, fragile human body…”

“The communicability of experience is decreasing.”

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. … removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing…

The storyteller takes what he tells from experiences—his own or that reported to others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself.

Emerges a form of communicatio which…never before influenced the epic form in a decisive way.