Tag Archives: Berlin Childhood

Walter Benjamin’s Messianic Butterflies

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In his introductory essay to Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 entitled “Hope in the Past,” Peter Szondi argues that, in his belief that the past held the secret of the future, Benjamin became a schlemiel of sorts.  To illustrate, Szondi cites one of the passages in which Benjamin remembers his childhood experience of a party, when the rooms of his home were filled with “something…impalpable, slippery, and ready at any instant to strangle those around whom it played.”  Commenting on this passage, Szondi says that Benjamin’s metaphors bring together “the present and the future, the premonitions of the child and the knowledge of the grown man.”  As I have pointed out many times, often in relation to Walter Benjamin, a schlemiel is half-man/half-child; the schlemiel passes between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.  What Szondi adds to my reflections on Benjamin is the claim that in going back to the past, in becoming a child, Benjamin was able to bring together the “present and the future.”   In other words, by becoming a child – and recording these reflections – Benjamin was not simply trying to understand himself; rather, he was trying to relate to his future and, to be sure, a messianic future shared by all.

Szondi suggests that Benjamin is close to Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire on this note because, in his search for “time past,” he is looking for the “disappearance of time.”  I would add, however, that this is not simply a search.  Drawing on Gershom Scholem’s reading of the Apocalyptic and Utopian elements of “The Messianic Idea,”  I would argue that Benjamin was looking for something that would “smash” history (as Scholem puts it) and expose him to something free of time.  For Scholem, what is free of time is…anarchic freedom.

And what better figure for freedom is there than a Butterfly?

Butterflies wander freely around space.  They move from thing to thing and aren’t touched by time or history.  To be sure, Benjamin was without a doubt familiar with Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Les Phares” (“Beacons”).  The poem begins by invoking a symbolist kind of garden.  And in each stanza, Baudelaire evokes several great artists such as Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrant, Michelangelo, Puget, Watteau, Goya, and Delacroix:

Rubens, garden of idleness watered by oblivion,

Where the quick flesh pillows the impotence of dreams,

Where life’s affluence writhes in eddying abandon.

Like air in the air, or water on streams.

The stanza on Watteau invokes butterflies:

Watteau, carnival where many a distinguished soul

Flutters like a butterfly, lost in the brilliance

Of chandeliers shedding frivolity on the cool,

Clear decors enclosing the changes in the dance.

Watteau, in this stanza, is associated with the carnival where “many a distinguished soul flutters like a butterfly, lost in brilliance.”   Besides acrobats, jugglers, and side show performers, we often find the clown.  And one of Watteau’s most famous series of paintings takes Commedia del Arte as their subject. One of the most famous of these, is his painting of Pierrot.   What I find so interesting about this painting is that the subject – a man-child – is separated from the others.  And his body, dress, and gaze are off.  Baudelaire, no doubt, was aware of this work, and wrote about it in his famous essay “The Painter of Modern Life.”

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What I find of interest is the fact that – for Baudelaire – people become like butterflies around this comic figure, lose their sense of time, and wander through space.  With this in mind, I read Walter Benjamin’s reflection on Butterflies, hoping to find what Szondi calls “omens of the future in the past” by way of becoming childlike (and, to some extent, like a clown).

Benjamin’s reflection on butterflies, in The Berlin Childhood around 1900, is entitled “Butterfly Hunt.”  Benjamin starts off his reflection by remembering “the beginnings of his butterfly collection.”  He goes on to provide a detailed description of some of these butterflies.  Following this, Benjamin remembers his movements which, to be sure, merge the present and the past and provide an opening on to the future.  And the main crux of these reflections points back to his own activity: to capture that which is fleeting from the past in the present so that it can be a sign for the future.  The butterflies take on the figure of this ephemera and, in a way, mark something almost “pre” and “post” historic”:

They would flutter toward a blossom, hover over it.  My butterfly net upraised, I stood waiting only for the spell that the flowers seemed to cast on the pair of wings to have finished its work, when all of a sudden the delicate body would glide off sideways with a gentle buffeting of the air, to cast its shadow – motionless as before – over another flower, which just as suddenly it would leave without touching.  (51)

As he follows the Butterfly move from flower to flower, Benjamin loses his sense of time.   He experiences freedom…a kind of experience that is like that of a dandy (moving from thing to thing and from space to space effortlessly).  But, as this happens, it seems he has forgotten to capture it.  But then he remembers his task to “capture” the butterfly and feels “as if” the Butterfly has made a “fool of me through its hesitations, vacillations, and delays.”  In response, Benjamin becomes a hunter by virtue of losing his identity as a man.  He becomes-a-butterfly in order to capture the butterfly. But this is not a simple act of hunting a butterfly; as Benjamin describes it, this act of becoming breaches the limits of the human:

Between us, now, the old law of the hunt took hold: the more I strove to conform, in all the fibers of my being, to the animal – the more butterfly-like I became in my heart and soul – the more this butterfly itself, in everything it did took on the color of human volition; and in the end, it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human existence. (51)

What follows this capture, more or less, is a recording of how Benjamin became a “man” who had subdued his prey and gained new knowledge:  “His lust for blood had diminished and his confidence was grown all the greater”(52).

Instead of seeing this as the narrative of his movement toward maturity, I would like to suggest that Benjamin took the moment of following the butterfly and becoming the butterfly – while fearing that he may not come back to humanity – as the messianic moment in the text.  In this moment, Benjamin frees himself of the human while, at the same time, reflecting on it.  He has, in a sense, captured this moment of oscillation between the human and the non-human which, as Giorgio Agamben has argued in The Open (and elsewhere), has messianic resonance.

That said, how does this all connect to the fool, the butterfly, Watteau, and Baudelaire’s poem?  I would like to suggest that Benjamin was aware of Baudelaire’s “butterfly’ and understood how it was likened to the people who were amused at the circus.  These people get lost in what they say and move from thing to thing.  Of the things that fascinate them most, we find the clown or man-child. What he does is similar to what Benjamin does, he reflects back to them their deepest desire which is a desire to be free of Time and history.

Although Scholem associated this messianic moment with smashing history, Benjamin (at least during one point of his reflections) believed that, in becoming-a-butterfly (by becoming a child), one could, for a brief moment, gracefully touch upon this messianic moment.  However, as Benjamin notes, it also paved the way for his manhood.  The risk of capturing the butterfly is that, as Benjamin notes, a “price” must be paid. For him, the price of knowledge and manhood is the experience of timelessness and the sense that, in becoming a messianic butterfly, one may not come back to humanity.

When we watch the fool or schlemiel lose himself (as Sholem Aleichem’s Motl does with nature, Singer’s Gimpel with trust, etc) do we also experience that moment which is suspended between childhood and adulthood as well as between the human and the inhuman?  Is our “post-historical” hope (our future) locked up in this “pre-historic” past?

The Voice on the Other Side of the Line: Walter Benjamin, The Telephone, and the Schlemiel

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My parents used to take my brother and I to New York City at least once a month. (Since both of my parents were born and raised there, and because they wanted to visit family and leave the Adirondacks for the city, this was an imperative.)  We used to go to museums a lot.  Although my parents preferred to go to MOMA or the MET, my brother and I liked the Museum of Natural History.  And if we ever went to the MET, we would spend a lot of time in the Egyptian exhibits.  There was something so intriguing about the way the exhibit was laid out.  The walls, the coffins, the animal worship, the hyeroglypics, were astonishing.  Being so intrigued with the mysteries of the past, I had little interest in Modern Art.  But my mother, a BFA, wouldn’t let that bother her.  More important than seeing art was doing art.  She would often paint, draw, and work clay with me.  To be sure, some of my most memorable childhood moments were when I was doing art with my mother.   She prompted me to taste, touch, hear, and feel things in nuanced ways that are still with me today.  But as I grew older and became a teenager, all of my artistic experiences took a backseat.

But this all changed when I left my hometown for university.  When I was an undergraduate, I wanted to better understand the artistic experiences I had as a child.  But instead of taking an interest in realism or classical art, I took an intense interest in Modern Art.  I found something reminiscent of my childhood experiences of art in some modern artists.  I can still remember the astonishment I had when I saw, for the first time, paintings by Cy Twombly, Paul Klee, Arshile Gorky, and Phillip Guston.  What struck me about their work was the fact that they would paint and draw “as if” they were children.  Around their work, I would feel like a child.  And when I went to art school in Manhattan, I spend a lot of time working in this manner.  I have journals full of drawings that are very childlike.  And, looking back at what I wrote, I can see that I was constantly fascinated with memories of childhood and dreams of childhood.  Certain moments, smells, sights, feelings, or gestures stuck out in my mind and I would explore them.  And in this, I felt like a schlemiel, a man-child who – in my case – lost touch with adulthood while he/she tapped into allusive memories, gestures or feelings from childhood.   In many ways, I felt that Twombly, Klee, Gorky, and Guston were all schlemiels – artistic schlemiels – they were, so to speak, caught up with voices on the other side of the line (voices that spoke to them from out of their childish relationships with things).

While my artwork drew a lot of inspiration from the work of the above-mentioned painters, the thinker whose approach to childhood caught my eye was none other than Walter Benjamin.  When I first read Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (Berliner Kinderheit um Nunzehnhundert), I was astonished by how he would mime the child and his/her experiences of things.

I recently decided to reread the book, and was hoping to find things I had never found before.  And, to my joy, I stumbled across several things that were very appealing to me. For now I’ll only mention one: a section entitled “Telephone.”

Benjamin’s description of his childhood relation to the telephone (a device of social communication) is mystical and may very well constitute what he, elsewhere, called a “profane illumination” or what Richard Wolin, in his book Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, calls “redemptive criticism.” According to Wolin, this criticism (which could also take the form of a memoir like Berlin Childhood) saves the moment from “the ever threatening forces of social amnesia to which humanity over the ages has become inured”(45).  Wolin says the goal of this activity is “remembrance.”

Benjamin starts off his meditation on the telephone with this very notion:

Whether because of the structure of the apparatus or because of the structure of memory, it is certain that the noises of the first telephone conversations echo differently in my ear from those of today. (48)

In other words, the call – as he remembers it – is different from what he hears today.   And what interests him most about those calls are the “noises” on the line: “They were nocturnal noises.  No muse announces them.”  Benjamin, alluding to mysticism, notes that these noises “precede every true birth.”

The schlemiel aspect of all this comes out in Benjamin’s description of his relationship to the phone.  To begin with, he calls the phone his “twin brother” and looks to it for hope.  The phone, unlike himself, “rises above the humiliations of its early years.”  It is “like a legendary hero once exposed to die in a mountain gorge.”  And unlike other technologies that are moved into the back room, the phone is prominent; it stays in the front.  Benjamin, in this scenario, is not the hero; and instead of standing in the front, he stands in the back.

But the phone is more than just a hero.  It is messianic: “Now, when everything depended on its call, the strident voice (of the phone) it had acquired in exile was grown softer.”  The ringing of the phone is a portent of things to come but this ringing is also an alarm of sorts that sets family members on edge and against each other.  It is an “alarm signal” that “menaced” his family and “the historical era that underwrote and enveloped the siesta”(49).

The most interesting observations of the phone come through his father’s specific relation to it.  He  noticed, on the one hand, the “threats and curses” uttered by his father at operators; and, on the other hand, he noticed his father’s “real orgies” which came when he “cranked the handle” or when doing this he totally forgot himself:

His hand, on these occasions, was a dervish overcome by frenzy.  My heart would pound.

In these moments, Benjamin is terrified by his father.  He imagines that his father will yell at someone after getting worked up by the phone: in other words, the phone has a redemptive function and a daemonic one, too.  To be sure, after describing his father’s relation to the phone, he says the phone, when it wrung, “served to multiply the terrors of the Berlin household.”

In response to all of this violence put forth by the phone and through the phone, Benjamin notes that he had managed to “master his senses with great effort.”  In this state, he musters the strength to attack the phone.  His description denotes his counter-violence to the phone’s ringing:

I tore off the two receivers, which were heavy as dumbbells, thrust my head between them, and was inexorably delivered over to the voice that now sounded.  There was noting to allay the violence with which it now pierced me. (50)

Since he says he was “inexorably delivered over to the voice that now sounded” – a voice that is violent and pierces him – one would be amiss not to notice how his moment resonates high in the religious frequency.

At this moment, he becomes “powerless.” His “consciousness of time” as well as his “firm resolve” and “duty” are “obliterated.”  Benjamin goes so far as to liken himself to a “medium” who obeys “a voice beyond the grave.”  But what was the content of the call?  It doesn’t matter.  For, at this moment of “profane illumination,” Benjamin, in affect, is showing us how, by way of the phone, he became a schlemiel.

He was so enthralled with his childhood experience of the phone that he forgot where he was and what he was doing vis-à-vis reality.  And his act of heroism, when he attacks the phone, discloses itself as a flop since, in the end, he becomes totally powerless to the voice at the other end.

What I love most about this passage, is that Benjamin is not simply engaging in “remembrance.”  He is also reliving the process he went through in relation to the phone and I would suggest that it evinces a pattern we see throughout his memoir (and in One Way Street) where Benjamin looks into how, in his childhood, his relationship with things often evinced some form of failure or disconnection.  And by disconnection, I mean disconnection from reality.  All of these comes out of an intimate experience of how things, such as the telephone, affect who we are and how we are.  He isn’t simply interested in analyzing this like a sociologist; rather, he is interested in how he experiences things.  He realizes that the only way he can experience these things is through an “immanent criticism” that is offered by way of the thing itself; here, the telephone.  But what we find, time and time again, is that in his relationship to things he often loses control of himself and his world.  He can’t stand up to the phone, but when he does, he becomes subject to the voice – a voice that comes from the dead (the inhuman); that is, from things.

I think Cy Twombly, Paul Klee, and the other artists I mentioned above were also fascinated with this childish relation to things because, in this relation, they found something more intimate than any discovery they had ever made.  However, in doing this, these artists become children and schlemiels.  And this requires a kind of passivity and receptivity that may make them all subject to the voice on the other side of line.

 

A Note on Franzlations: The Imaginary Kafka Parables

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Schlemielintheory.com has hosted and posted many blog entries on Franz Kafka.  I have had a guest post by Matthue Roth on his very popular book My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs, a guest post on Walter Benjamin’s reading of Franz Kafka by Hillel Broder, and more than ten of my own posts on the work of Franz Kafka.   His work, without a doubt, is of great interest to this blog and my book project.  That said, I have recently come across an exceptional book that plays on Franz Kafka’s parables entitled Franzlations: The Imaginary Kafka Parables.  This enchanting book was co-authored by Gary Barwin, Craig Conley, and Hugh Thomas.  Gary Barwin is the author of fifteen books,  which include works of poetry, fiction, and children’s fiction (here’s his blog).  Like Barwin, Craig Conley is an eclectic writer whose books span fiction, mysticism, linguistics, pop culture, folklore, children’s fiction, and grammar.    Hugh Thomas is a Canadian poet who has published a few books of poetry.   In collaboration with each other, they have created a book that speaks to anyone who is interested not just in reading Kafka but in, so to speak, taking his work as the basis for new texts, images, and interpretations that “open” up the text to play and new meaning.   Moreover, this book speaks to people who are well versed in what is called “intertextuality.”  And by this I mean the textual practice of moving between texts which, in effect, offers new meanings (I will return to this below).

But I would argue that since Franzlations also includes images, one text doesn’t simply translate into another; it also translates a text into another image (or rather a set of images which harken back to the early 20th century).  By doing this, this book takes the work of Kafka into a wholly other sphere of meaning with an entirely different register of connotations.  And for someone like myself, who loves textual play, this is doubly exciting.  It brings us into the zone where Walter Benjamin, in his book Berlin Childhood around 1900, wanted to go; namely, to a space where the imagination can be freed by virtue of the play of images, text, and history.  In this space, one becomes like a man-child, interpreting text, images, and history while at the same time playing with them.   This touches on depths by way of traveling across different surfaces.

I’d like to take a look at the interplay between text and text and text and (historical) image to illustrate how these texts open up horizons that I have not experienced in any previous academic readings or fictional plays on Kafka’s novels, short stories, or parables (as in Phillip Roth, Paul Celan, or Aharon Appelfeld’s work– to mention only a few examples of writers who engage in intertextuality with Kafka’s work).

Although there are a number of ways to enter this text, I’d like to suggest reading it (for the first few times) in a linear manner.  Playing on the text, I would like to suggest my own “Franzlation” of this book.  Taking the text as its guide, my reading looks to play on one of the central signifiers in this text: the parable.

To be sure, the meaning of the parable is one of the main concerns of this text.  The Oxford Dictionary defines parable as “a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson, as told by Jesus in the Gospels.”  It comes from the Latin “parabola” which means comparison.   Working with the Latin root, I would like to suggest that Franzlations works not by way of illustrating a “moral or spiritual lesson, as told by Jesus and the Gospels” as a textual-imagistic strategy to compare one text or image to another so as to “reinvent” Kafka’s text.  This comparison has a spatial and a textual dimension, but, instead of illustrating a lesson from the Gospels, it articulates a number of relationships with which all of us are intimately familiar.

We see this in the introduction to the book, which likens such comparison to taking a step to the left; a – so to speak – parabolic step to the edge of a cliff:

We have stepped a few paces to the left in order to reinvent them. Sometimes this means we have walked off a cliff into the empty air.

In the body of the text, the Tarot card of the “fool” illustrates this by having a sign on the edge of a cliff; that is, on the edge of an abyss:

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As you can see, the text for this image gives one a spatial coordinate for how one’s eye moves from text to image.  It is self-reflexive in the sense that it is a parable of reading in which the reader “clasps” at meaning as he/she “attempts to climb toward meaning.”  This, let me stress, is likened to the movement of the fool (reader-writer)  since it is a risk that most adult readers wouldn’t venture.

The introduction plays on the fact that when we read we move between things (the “inter” – the between – is located in a few different places).  And this explanation, itself, is a parable since it is a comparison “between” different pairs; one of which is between the reader and these writers:

This, itself, is a parable.

And so it is clear, that at its heart, Franzlations is a collaboration.  Between writers and writings.  Between words and images.  Between readers.  Between the past, the present, and the future.  For it is our belief that new writing is the imaginary future of past writing, even if that writing was never written.

The last words suggest that this book casts forth, for the reader, new, possible relations to a past that may or may not have been written by Kafka.  But I can assure you that as a reader of Kafka, they do include fragments of his aphorisms; but they also play on them and write them in configurations that never appeared in Kafka’s text.  Regardless, as they note in the introduction, “Kafka’s words have been an inspiration for us.”

The text/image demonstrates the movement “between” things, images, times, and readers; and between Kafka and their text.  This movement informs what they call the parable.  For instance, in an image of a cow and a crow, they write “A COW is a parable for a CROW.  And vice versa.  Humans are their own parables.  And this suggests that one thing (parable) can be translated by another and that humans are parables of themselves (which suggests, based on this, that they are not themselves but something other).

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While the reader might see this as a free-for-all which lacks any connection to reality, I would like to suggest taking a look at page 8.  In this image-text, the proposition that “a single poem can destroy war” is tested.  It suggests that war is the impossibility of poetry; and if the work of the between, the parabolic work, is poetry, then this suggests that this book is a challenge to war only insofar as it dwells in the parabolic.  As Emmanuel Levinas notes in his book Totality and Infinity, war dwells in absolutes.  Franzlations, on the contrary, doesn’t deal in absolutes; it deals with the parabolic. As we can see in this image of a naked-man-warrior who is sloping parabolicly with a feather (away from war).

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Another major theme in Franzlations is the movement between the serious and the comic.  This movement is of great interest to me and my own schlemiel-project.  The movement suggests that poetry moves between the two.  On page 32 we see such an image/text.  It plays on the initial parable in the book – drawn from Kafka – about hearing a train inside of oneself moving along.  Here, we see a little boy with a clown nose under a crescent moon listening to a large ear.  He is listening to a “car full of clowns inside him.”  But the text takes a serious, poetic note by referencing silence.  If one listens to the clowns, against a deep silence, one can hear “the toes of the clowns curling in their big shoes.” One can also hear the “toot of the car’s horn” as it floats up into the “funny sky.”

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The irony in this piece is that the floating away into the sky is also a melancholic image of loss.  Silence is often associated with the tragic, not the comic.  And the comic sound runs up against tragic silence.  But although the sounds disappear there in the sky, this is not tragic; it is “funny.”  This juxtaposition of the two makes for a depth and a paradox that takes this text out of the zone where textual play is the only thing on the table.

This juxtaposition returns on page 46 where we see an image of a lonesome tree in the foreground.  The text notes the “SORROW” of the forest; but what stands out is not suffering and despair so much as the “jokes of the wood” which “bring you alone, laughing among the ranks of trees.”  It muses that this “perhaps” may cause “confusion in the forest” but “you know nothing of that.  You know only your shimmering leaves.”

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This image speaks to me and my project.  It suggests that the reader is child-like (a man-child/schlemiel of sorts).  Yet, at the same time, it suggests an adult-awareness of sorrow and tragedy. This frission makes for a relation that I ponder often in schlemiel-in-theory.  Namely, the relation between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote (a relation that both Kafka and Benjamin found so much interest).  This awareness takes us into a space between the comic and the tragic which is also the space between childhood and adulthood.

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Franzlations, much like Walter Benjamin in his reflections on childhood terror, explores this zone of childhood as it relates to death.  The text-image that brings this out is on page 44.  This image and text play on this relation vis-à-vis a mystical image.  In it we see a boy who appears to be dreaming of a land from the space of his heart.  The text, however, suggests that he may be dead.  It intensifies the claim by speaking in the first person: “I asked for my body to brought to me.  They did not understand.”   The boy speaks to a Doctor about this (which would, of course, be impossible, since he is dead).  The doctor doesn’t hear him. The ensuing dialogue, we can suppose, is with himself.  He will take his body away; but he has no destination for it: “We do not need a DESTINATION.”  This implies that the body can be taken anywhere; this may be an allegory of the dead letter. On the other hand, it may just be a way of addressing death in a way that is steeped in the imagination and the “between” of life and death; dream and reality.

The theme of terrified children and the “other world” is also seen on page 48. The antiquated images that are used for this (and other texts in Franzlations) bring us back to a cultural childhood (in the early 20th and late 19th century) where, it seems, the relation of childhood to death was of interest.  It also helps us to “look back” at ourselves and our relation to death.  Here, “shadows” and “fear” are foregrounded.  When I see this image, I also think of the shadows of words and images and the fear they evoke (as it were, the fear of unknown possibilities).

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But perhaps there is nothing to fear.   The end of Franzlations offers some comfort by way of offering us – as if we the readers are children – images of a man posing like a crescent moon above him.

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These images are parabolic and remind me of the circus.  The shape of the man is compared to the moon in this image.  But the text tells us that these images emerge out of duress: “Birds shrieked. We crawled through the dust, hoping to DANCE.”

This movement itself may be comforting; like the image of a ball whose movement through space is also parabolic.

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Maybe there is hope at the end of the parabola.  Maybe there is a new morning.  Or is it just the course of the day or of a parabola?  A ritual?

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All of these questions are left open for the reader to decide on.  But, in truth, they are well posed. The images and the texts selected give me much food for thought as so much dwells in that arc between one thing and another – especially if that arc spans what is and what could be or between what was and what may be.  These are the thoughts of children…and adults.

The last image of Franzlations casts a possibility that never happened.  As any scholar of Kafka knows, Kafka wanted his best friend Max Brod to burn all his work.  But he didn’t.  Playing on its task of translation, Franzlations purposefully misreads what actually happened (the texts were not burned and served as the basis for much of Franzlations’s musings).

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Here Kafka (playing on Gregor Samsa of “The Metamorphosis”) wakes up to find Brod lighting a match.  He never did, but let’s take a moment to imagine that he did.  For if he did, we, just like these authors, would have to “invent” another Kafka.  Regardless…. they did invent or rather re-invent him!  And for that, I am very happy: because the way they chose to reinvent Kafka brings us into a space that is made especially for schlemiel-readers (see the “fool” Tarot card above) who travel back and forth between adulthood and childhood, a space that is evoked by way of moving our eyes on a page between text and image, and between the past, present, and imaginary possibilities of the future.