JOYCE, BENJAMIN, AND THE FUTURITY OF FICTION

On 20 January 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote to his friend, Gershom Scholem, that he wished to become the foremost critic of German literature - but he did so, characteristically, in French: "Le but que je m'avais propose [...] c'est etre considere comme le premier critique de la litterature allemande" (III23). ' The lure of Paris would lead Benjamin in time to do distinguished work on Baudelaire and Proust. Meanwhile, the lure of Paris already had been felt by Joyce as a young man residing there in 1903 - the same year that Henri Bergson gave a revolutionary course of lectures on how the mind worked - not as the workings of time upon its repository of European languages, but as a independent processing engine using the syntax of a new invention then sweeping Paris. Bergson startlingly compared "the mechanism of conceptual thought to that of the cinematograph."2Such new connections available for language, memory, and literature coming from science, invention, and politics were in the air for Joyce and Benjamin, both living in Paris as exiles in the 1930s. Bergson had been one of the first to use the metaphor of the cinematograph for a model of mind. It arrived at a time when the old separation between the representation of time by literature and of space by painting was being overthrown by the new silent cinema: narrative, formerly a matter of language in time, suddenly could be produced by silent images arrayed in space. In 1909, Joyce had opened the first movie house in Dublin; in 1922, Ulysses depicted his most famous family, the Virags and Blooms, practicing their hereditary profession of photography; and in 1936, Benjamin's most famous essay explored the impact of photography and film on the aura of art, the nature of narrative, and the politics of culture. Joyce and Benjamin moved in the same intellectual circles in Paris in the 1930s, - they actually had many of the same friends - responding to the Modernist order of the day to reposition old boundaries. Even though they never met, Joyce and Benjamin had much in common: each created a body of work that ignored contemporary conventions of publication, that by intent did not avoid difficulty or obscurity, and that therefore remained substantially inaccessible during their lifetime. None of this was accidental: each of them wrote, it might be said, only partly about their contemporaries but not really for their contemporaries. Each wrote about the past in the present: each wrote both for and about futurity.Young Benjamin already expressed a strong sense of the fluid nature of time in his cryptic remark: "All future is past. The past of things of the future of the T time. But past things have futurity" (SWI 15). For Benjamin, past tradition retained its extraordinary persistence in the present, but at the same time the past had no guarantee of permanence: "The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again" (/// 255). The survival of the past depended on its continuing relevance in the present: "For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably" (Ul 255). Major political revolutions could restart historical memory, as when a new calendar had been introduced in France after 1789, denying the past admitting only the present and the future: Benjamin provided an unexpected metaphor: "The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera" (Ul 261). Benjamin's recording angel wrote history in the technological media of cinematography and film.Joyce, too, restarted the clock of the 20th century with his technical literary innovations that cut a wedge between past and future. Joyce told his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver that Ulysses was his response to the technical challenge of "writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen" (JJII 512), Joyce's stylistic experiments put his fellow tradesmen on notice, challenging future writers to meet or master his redefinitions of narrative techniques. …