Illuminations Read Online

This means that subject matter and truth content, united in the work’s early period, come apart during its afterlife; the subject matter becomes more striking while the truth content retains its original concealment. To an ever-increasing extent, therefore, the interpretation of the striking and the odd, that is, of the subject matter, becomes a prerequisite for any later critic. One may liken him to a paleographer in front of a parchment whose faded text is covered by the stronger outlines of a script referring to that text. Just as the paleographer would have to start with reading the script, the critic must start with commenting on his text. And out of this activity there arises immediately an inestimable criterion of critical judgment: only now can the critic ask the basic question of all criticism – namely, whether the work’s shining truth content is due to its subject matter or whether the survival of the subject matter is due to the truth content. For as they come apart in the work, they decide on its immortality. In this sense the history of works of art prepares their critique, and this is why historical distance increases their power. If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.

The critic as an alchemist practising the obscure art of transmuting the futile elements of the real into the shining, enduring gold of truth, or rather watching and interpreting the historical process that brings about such magical transfiguration – whatever we may think of this figure, it hardly corresponds to anything we usually have in mind when we classify a writer as a literary critic.

There is, however, another less objective element than the mere fact of being unclassifiable which is involved in the life of those who ‘have won victory in death.’ It is the element of bad luck, and this factor, very prominent in Benjamin’s life, cannot be ignored here because he himself, who probably never thought or dreamed about posthumous fame, was so extraordinarily aware of it. In his writing and also in conversation he used to speak about the ‘little hunchback,’ the ‘bucklicht Männlein,’ a German fairy-tale figure out of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the famous collection of German folk poetry.

The hunchback was an early acquaintance of Benjamin, who had first met him when, still a child, he found the poem in a children’s book, and he never forgot. But only once (at the end of A Berlin Childhood around 1900), when anticipating death he attempted to get hold of ‘his “entire life” … as it is said to pass before the eyes of the dying,’ did he clearly state who and what it was that had terrified him so early in life and was to accompany him until his death. His mother, like millions of other mothers in Germany, used to say, ‘Mr Bungle sends his regards’ (Ungeschickt lässt grüssen) whenever one of the countless little catastrophes of childhood had taken place. And the child knew of course what this strange bungling was all about. The mother referred to the ‘little hunchback,’ who caused the objects to play their mischievous tricks upon children; it was he who had tripped you up when you fell and knocked the thing out of your hand when it went to pieces. And after the child came the grown-up man who knew what the child was still ignorant of, namely, that it was not he who had provoked ‘the little one’ by looking at him – as though he had been the boy who wished to learn what fear was – but that the hunchback had looked at him and that bungling was a misfortune. For ‘anyone whom the little man looks at pays no attention; not to himself and not to the little man. In consternation he stands before a pile of debris’ (Schriften I, 650–52).

Thanks to the recent publication of his letters, the story of Benjamin’s life may now be sketched in broad outline; and it would be tempting indeed to tell it as a sequence of such piles of debris since there is hardly any question that he himself viewed it in that way. But the point of the matter is that he knew very well of the mysterious interplay, the place ‘at which weakness and genius coincide,’ which he so masterfully diagnosed in Proust. For he was of course also speaking about himself when, in complete agreement, he quoted what Jacques Rivière had said about Proust: he ‘died of the same inexperience that permitted him to write his works. He died of ignorance … because he did not know how to make a fire or open a window’ (‘The Image of Proust’). Like Proust, he was wholly incapable of changing ‘his life’s conditions even when they were about to crush him.’ (With a precision suggesting a sleepwalker his clumsiness invariably guided him to the very centre of a misfortune, or wherever something of the sort might lurk. Thus, in the winter of 1939–40 the danger of bombing made him decide to leave Paris for a safer place. Well, no bomb was dropped on Paris, but Meaux, where Benjamin went, was a troop centre and probably one of the very few places in France that was seriously endangered in those months of the phony war.) But like Proust, he had every reason to bless the curse and to repeat the strange prayer at the end of the folk poem with which he closes his childhood memoir:

Liebes Kindlein, ach, ich bitt,

Bet fürs bucklicht Männlein mit.fn2

In retrospect, the inextricable net woven of merit, great gifts, clumsiness, and misfortune into which his life was caught can be detected even in the first pure piece of luck that opened Benjamin’s career as a writer. Through the good offices of a friend, he had been able to place ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ in Hofmannsthal’s Neue Deutsche Beiträge (1924–25). This study, a masterpiece of German prose and still of unique stature in the general field of German literary criticism and the specialized field of Goethe scholarship, had already been rejected several times, and Hofmannsthal’s enthusiastic approval came at a moment when Benjamin almost despaired of ‘finding a taker for it’ (Briefe I, 300). But there was a decisive misfortune, apparently never fully understood, which under the given circumstances was necessarily connected with this chance. The only material security which this first public breakthrough could have led to was the Habilitation, the first step of the university career for which Benjamin was then preparing himself. This, to be sure, would not yet have enabled him to make a living – the so-called Privatdozent received no salary – but it would probably have induced his father to support him until he received a full professorship, since this was a common practice in those days. It is now hard to understand how he and his friends could ever have doubted that a Habilitation under a not unusual university professor was bound to end in catastrophe.