At the outset of Berlin Childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin suggests that something out of his past was calling to him and that he had decided to surrender himself to it. His memory has a narcotic affect. But it is teaching him something. Peter Szondi argues that, for Benjamin, the “search for time past is […]
Critics like A.O. Scott and Josh Eells are frustrated when it comes to Hollywood. They feel that the possibility of adulthood – which they equate with progress – is stifled by countless films that encourage “perpetual adolescence.” Scott, at the end of his essay “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” tells that “to get […]
Following the passages of Witold Gombrowicz’s diary entries on Simone Weil, which I commented on the other day, there is a fascinating entry labeled “Friday.” It’s first two words – at the top of the entry – are “Polish Catholicism.” In this passage, Gombrowicz expresses his past and present ambivalent attitude toward “childishness” by way […]
As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself. Reader precedes writer. We read before we write. We learn to write by reading. –Leo Strauss, Persecution and the […]
Yesterday’s blog ended with several questions which puzzled over why Walter Benjamin or Georges Bataille would be so interested in “returning to childhood” or describing the “true child.” Before going to sleep last night, I thought about these questions. But instead of simply thinking about them, I thought about myself. After all, I am as […]
The schlemiel is a man-child. The character presupposes a man who has not grown up or a child who has not matured to become a man. The schlemiel lives in the world of people but is in his own world because he doesn’t know how to live in that world. He lives in a […]
The destructive elements of the American schlemiel cannot be understood apart from the innocent aspects of this character – its childishness. Likewise, one cannot understand the “destructive element” in Walter Benjamin without understanding its relationship to innocence, childhood, and youth. Benjamin’s intense interest in childhood and in the daemonic from early on in his life […]
After reading and writing on Walter Benjamin for nearly twenty years (since I was first introduced to him as an undergrad), I seldom saw any photos of him smiling or happy. Most of the images I saw were pensive or melancholic. One of my graduate school professors, Max Pensky, wrote a book entitled Melancholy Dialectics: […]
Theodor Reik was one of the founders of psychoanalysis in America and, in Europe, was one of Sigmund Freud’s closest confidants. He argued, in his book on Jewish Wit, that the schlemiel is a masochistic character. In Masochism and Modern Man, Reik goes beyond the Jewish context of this character and says, at the end […]
Most of Woody Allen’s schlemiels are anxious, intellectual, and highly self conscious. But not all schlemiel’s are intellectual or hyper-self-conscious. Take, for instance, schlemiels in Shalom Aleichem, IB Singer, or Bernard Malamud’s stories and novels, or schlemiels played by Seth Rogen or Adam Sandler. While they may miss a beat or a social cue, their […]
Schlemiel Theory 