Benjamin on Brecht

In one of his didactic poems on dramatic art Brecht says: "The effect of every sentence was waited for and laid bare. And the waiting lasted until the crowd had carefully weighed our sentence." In short, the play was interrupted. One can go even further and remember that interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring. It goes far beyond the sphere of art. To give only one example, it is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context. [ital. evb] It is therefore understandable that the epic theater, being based on interruption, is, in a specific sense, a quotable one. There is nothing special about the quotability of its texts. It is different with the gestures which fit into the course of the play. "Making gestures quotable" is one of the substantial achievements of the epic theater.

(Walter Benjamin: What Is Epic Theater?, p. 151 in Illuminations)

benjamin and collecting

just a quick note to say I am reading an edition of Illuminations
that has an introduction by Hannah Arendt that talks about the centrality of collecting in Benjamin's work, and also specifically of collecting quotations, fragments. You probably know all about this already, but given our own eranisteon of the Sirens, and your interest in this whole subject, I thought I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it: plus I like that it connects up to jess' interests, too! xoxox

Benjamin on Kafka on ... Native Americans

Kafka's collection of stories, Contemplation (in German, Betrachtung) includes one called The Wish to be a Red Indian (Wunsch, Indianer zu werden). Benjamin quotes it in the essay we've been looking at. He has just been talking about a childhood photograph of Kafka in which he has '[i]mmensely sad eyes':

The ardent 'wish to become a Red Indian' may have consumed this great sadness at some point. 'If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering briefly over the quivering ground, until one shed one's spurs, for there were no spurs, threw away the reins, for there were no reins, and barely saw the land before one as a smoothly mown heath, with the horse's neck and head already gone.' A great deal is contained in this wish. Its fulfilment, which he finds in America, yields up its secret.

Benjamin on ... Rivers!

This is almost a bit spooky! I'm going to quote another section of Benjamin's essay on Kafka and here B is talking about K's obssession with 'the question of how life and work are organized in human society'. The really startling bit comes at the end of this passage:

This question increasingly occupied Kafka as it became impenetrable to him. If Napoleon, in his famous conversation with Goethe at Erfurt substituted politics for fate, Kafka in a variation of this statement, could have defined organization as destiny. He faces it not only in the extensive hierarchy of officialdom in The Trial and The Castle, but even more concretely in the difficult and incalculable construction plans whose venerable model he dealt with in The Great Wall of China.

'The wall was to be a protection for centuries; accordingly, the most scrupulous care in the construction, the application of the architectural wisdom of all known ages and peoples, a constant sense of personal responsibility on the part of the builders were indispensable prerequisites for the work. To be sure, for the menial tasks ignorant labourers from the populace, men, women, and children, whoever offered his services for good money, could be used; but for the supervision even of every four day labourers a man trained in the building trade was required ... We - and here I speak in the name of many people - did not really know ourselves until we had carefully scrutinized the decrees of the high command; then we discovered that without this leadership neither our book learning nor our common sense would have sufficed for the humble tasks which we performed in the great whole.' This organization resembles fate. Metchnikoff, who has outlined this in his famous book La Civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques [Civilization and the Great Historical Rivers], uses language that could be Kafka's. 'The great canals of the Yangtze and the dams of the Yellow River,' he writes, 'are in all likelihood the result of the skillfully organized joint labour of ... generations. The slightest carelessness in the digging of a ditch or the buttressing of a dam, the least bit of negligence or selfish behaviour on the part of an individual or a group of men in the maintenance of the common hydraulic wealth becomes, under such unusual circumstances, the source of social evils and far-reaching social calamity. Consequently, a life-giving river requires on pain of death a close and permanent solidarity between groups of people that frequently are alien or even hostile to one another; it sentences everyone to labours whose common usefulness is revealed only by time and whose design quite often remains utterly incomprehensible to an ordinary man.'

This focus on the politics of maintaining a river system sounds interesting, I think. I don't know much about Metchnikoff - incidentally, his name is more usually transliterated Mechnikov - but I do know that La Civilisation et les grands fleuves is not a technical history of hydraulics so much as an anarchist thinker's account of how cooperation emerges as a principle in human history. This is a quotation from an article about Mechnikov by James D. White. The article has the title 'Despotism and Anarchy'. I think it gives a flavour of what is going on here:

Mechnikov considered that the first step by which a given people may raise itself on the way to advancement in civilization is to subordinate itself to a despotism. For, he remarks, although there are free peoples in considerable number in various parts of the world, they are without exception no further advanced than the Stone Age as regards science, art and industry, whereas all the advanced nations have at some time experienced despotism. In order to advance materially and culturally a people must combine its efforts and submit to stern discipline. The despot himself, however, is a mere symbol: it is not he who oppresses his subjects, but their own impotence to transform their surroundings individually without the combined effort and the discipline which this involves. In Mechnikov's opinion, it was typical that all the four great civilizations of the ancient world, the Egyptian, the Assyrio-Babylonian, the Hindu and the Chinese, were despotic. All of them, moreover, were associated with great river systems, the utilization of which for irrigation purposes made their high level of culture possible. Mechnikov, however, cautions that he is not propounding any variety of determinism or 'geographical fatalism'. He stresses that:

it is not in the environment itself, but in the relationship between the environment and the aptitude of its inhabitants to provide voluntarily the element of cooperation and solidarity imposed on each by nature that one must look for the raison d 'être of a people's primitive institutions and for their further transformations.

Thus the management of a river system becomes, in some sense, the defining political challenge from which civilization emerges...

Benjamin on Kafka on Ulysses #2

Following on from the quotation I posted here, Benjamin starts to talk about the world of myth, which promises redemption to Kafka's 'older' world:

Even the world of myth of which we think in this context is incomparably younger than Kafka's world, which has been promised redemption by the myth. But if we can be sure of one thing, it is this: Kafka did not succumb to its temptation. [I take it that by 'its temptation' Benjamin means the temptation of myth - RSJ.] A latter-day Ulysses, he let the Sirens go by 'his gaze which was fixed on the distance, the Sirens disappeared as it were before his determination, and at the very moment when he was closest to them he was no longer aware of them.' Among Kafka's ancestors in the ancient world, the Jews and the Chinese, whom we shall encounter later, this Greek one should not be forgotten. Ulysses, after all, stands at the dividing line between myth and fairy tale. Reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths; their forces cease to be invincible. Fairy tales are the traditional stories about victory over these forces, and fairly tales for dialecticians are what Kafka wrote when he went to work on legends. He inserted little tricks into them; then he used them as proof 'that inadequate, even childish measures may alos serve to rescue one.' With these words he begins his story about the 'Silence of the Sirens.' For Kafka's Sirens are silent; they have 'an even more terrible weapon than their song ... their silence.' This they used on Ulysses. But he, so Kafka tells us, 'was so full of guile, was such a fox that not even the goddess of fate could pierce his armour. Perhaps he had really noticed, although here the human understanding is beyond its depths, that the Sirens were silent, and opposed the afore-mentioned pretence to them and the gods merely as a sort of shield.

Kafka's Sirens are silent. Perhaps because for Kafka music and singing are an expression or at least a token of escape, a token of hope which comes to us from that intermediate world - at once unfinished and commonplace, comforting and silly - in which the assistants are at home.

At this point Benjamin refers back to the story of Potemkin, with which the essay began. (In the story, Benjamin describes Potemkin's deep depressions, which resulted in the whole Russian bureaucracy grinding to a halt because he was not in a fit state even to sign papers.)

Kafka is like the lad who set out to learn what fear was. He has got into Potemkin's palace and finally, in the depths of its cellar, has encountered Josephine, the singing mouse, whose tune he describes: 'Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness which can never be found again, but also something of active presentday life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet real and unquenchable.'

There is something that I like about Benjamin's brief allusions to the role of music. And I'm not sure that Rebecca Comay quite captures it in the section of her essay that I quoted here. She presents Benjamin's view as being that 'by Kafka's day, the Sirens have fallen silent because music as such - the last "token of hope" - has been permanently gagged'. But that surely isn't what Benjamin is saying in the two shorter paragraphs I've quoted above. It sounds more as if, even now, music offers a glimpse - or 'token' - of hope, restricted and abject, certainly, but not 'permanently gagged', surely?

Benjamin on Kafka on Ulysses

I wrote here about Rebecca Comay's article and the references she makes to Benjamin's essay on Kafka. (Incidentally, I also mentioned there an article by Laurence Rickel but I've looked at that now and didn't find it helpful.) Over the last few days I've been following up Comay's reference by reading Benjamin's essay, 'Franz Kafka on the tenth anniversary of his death'. I hope it's OK with you if I quote some sections from the essay? The discussion of Ulysses and the Sirens is preceded by some thoughts on hope and on the issue of who can reasonably feel hope in the present world. I'll just quote that for today - the connection with the Ulysses myth will become apparent later:

'I remember,' [Max] Brod writes, 'a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. "We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God's head," Kafka said. This reminded me of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. "Oh no," said Kafka, "our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his." "Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know." He smiled. "Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope - but not for us."' These words provide a bridge to those extremely strange figures in the Kafka, the only ones who have escaped from the family circle and for whom there may still be hope. These are not the animals, not even those hybrids or imaginary creatures like the Cat Lamb or Odradek; they all still live under the spell of the family. It is no accident that Gregor Samsa wakes up as a bug in the parental home and not somewhere else, and that the peculiar animal which is half kitten, half lamb, is inherited from the father; Odradek likewise is the concern of the father of the family. The 'assistants', however, are outside this circle.

These assistants belong to a group of figures which recurs though Kafka's entire work. Their tribe includes the confidence man who is unmasked in the 'Meditation'; the student who appears on the balcony at night as Karl Rossman's neighbour; and the fools who live in that town in the south and never get tired. The twilight in which they exist is reminiscent of the uncertain light in which the figures in the short prose pieces of Robert Walser appear. In Indian mythology there are the gandharvas, celestial creatures, beings in an unfinished state. Kafka's assistants are of that kind: neither members of, nor strangers to, any of the other groups of figures, but, rather messengers from one to the other. Kafka tells us that they resemble Barnabas, who is a messenger. They have not yet been completely released from the womb of nature, and that is why they have 'settled down on two old women's skirts on the floor in a corner. It was ... their ambition ... to use up as little space as possible. To that end they kept making various experiments, folding their arms and legs, huddling close together; in the darkness all one could see in their corner was one big ball.' It is for them and their kind, the unfinished and the bunglers, that there is hope.

What may be discerned, subtly and informally, in the activities of these messengers is law in an oppressive and gloomy way for this whole group of beings. None has a firm place in the world, firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading qualities with its enemy or neighbour, none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe, none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence. To speak of any order or hierarchy is impossible here. Even the world of myth of which we think in this context is incomparably younger than Kafka's world, which has been promised redemption by the myth.

It is this mention of myth that leads on the story of Ulysses but I'll leave that for now so that the posting doesn't become too long. I'll just say that one sentence leaps out at me from the passage I've just quoted and I hope I'm not making too much of it just because it 'fits' with some of what we've been discussing. The sentence is this one: 'None has a firm place in the world, firm, inalienable outlines'. The state of the characters whom Benjamin calls 'assistants' is hardly enviable in any normal sense but they are the ones in whom hope resides and their condition is to be 'out of place' and without 'inalienable outlines'.