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.