Benjamin: A Literary Critic?

Benjamin’s Aura

One cannot get around Walter Benjamin in the study of modern urban culture and its literature. In that context, whether he would like it or not, he has become haloed in an aura of mastery. For good reason: his analyses of the nervous dynamic of the modern city are unique, and his influence can be traced in many examples of urban analysis, even if he is neither cited nor named explicitly. His sense of the decisive role that minutiae play in one’s experience of the city, and his ability to transform the marginal into the typical through broad associative cross-sections breaking up established intellectual categories and types of text, make his work both necessary and stimulating for any cultural analysis of the state of the modern city.

Benjamin had no desire to be a specialist within literary criticism or any other specific discipline. He was a visionary diagnostician of culture. As it happens, very large parts of his oeuvre take literature as their subject, or at least as their substance: early works on art criticism in German Romanticism, on Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften (The Elective Affinities) and, most exciting, on Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) with the important notion of allegory. There are also numerous reviews, surviving notations, short author introductions, radio speeches, and occasional references to literature side by side with more comprehensive treatments of Baudelaire, woven into broader analyses of Paris, of surrealism, and of Brecht. Not to mention his translations of Proust.

However, his interest in literature does not automatically make him an outstanding literary critic. Since the 1960s, Benjamin’s importance has been upheld, to a great degree, by a literary and aesthetic interest in the cultural history of modernity, with emphasis on the city as its locus. But his particular themes of cultural analysis led him to overwork certain texts, and certain aspects of texts, and caused him to omit others. The focal point of this essay is to examine how the analysis of culture and the analysis of literature mutually define and limit each other in Benjamin’s work.

Literature as Illustration

Most of Benjamin’s literary analyses have an opposite orientation to that of his analyses of the city. The latter are sensitive to fragmentation, to the network of details in a directly perceived—which is to say, aesthetic—experience of one’s surroundings, with all its structures of conflict and paradoxes. Conversely, the thread running throughout Benjamin’s literary studies is their concentration on the synthesizing motifs or themes of the works involved. These analyses are not greatly concerned with literature’s aesthetic aspects, its transgressions and paradoxes, nor with the history of particular genres and their gradual or abrupt changes. In his book on tragedy, Benjamin stresses that an artwork should be carried by an idea, ¹ and the concluding sentence of his dissertation on art criticism emphasizes, too, the idea behind a work of art. ²

His most detailed presentation of the nature of ideas is found in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. In contrast to the analytical character of a concept, bound to specific formal languages and leading to unity, if not uniformity, an idea is a principle that makes “the extreme reach a synthesis,” that is, not a unity but a totality in which the contrasting elements, similar to Leibniz’s monads, are still active. The constant reference to the dialectic character of the synthesis also adds a Hegelian touch to Benjamin’s notion of idea. Like the monad, the idea has no specific manifestation of its own: it “can not be thought of as an object of observation, not even by the intellect” (Ud 1.1:215). It occurs in various sign complexes—“semiotics” (Ud 1.1:342)—that represent such a principle, for instance, the arts or any other cultural artifact down to the most trivial, as became clear in Benjamin’s work on Paris. The point is that no type of sign complex in advance has priority over any other for the unfolding of the idea (see Ud 1.1:350).

Benjamin chooses works that are...