Gegenbild, Reihenfolge, Sprung: An Essay on Related Figures of Argument in Walter Benjamin (review)

138 the minnesota review incorporate (rather than replace) formalist insights into narrative strategies and textual structures and at the same time encourage the appropriation of relevant models from history and the social sciences. The editors, WIad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, have performed a valuable service in making Jauss's book available in their series, "Theory and History of Literature." At the time of this writing, they are considering a third Jauss volume for translation and eventual publication. The readers of their series can only benefit from such an addition. STEVEN MAILLOUX Howard Stern. Gegenbild, Reihenfolge, Sprung: An Essay on RelatedFigures ofArgument in Walter Benjamin. Berne: Peter Lang, 1982. 122 pp. $34.70 (cloth). It is significant that so much writing on Walter Benjamin will at some point explicitly identify its method with that of its subject, while at the same time asserting that this very approach permits Benjamin's own convictions and concerns to be canceUed from the agenda . The justification is impUcit, so it seems, in his impressive and enviable capacity to discover hidden currents in a text which move in directions contrary to its surface flow— for example where he conjures a revolutionary social critique from the writings of the archconservative Karl Kraus. In most instances the rejection by critics of his conclusions rests on a sense that Benjamin occupied irreconcilable positions. It is argued that some—but not all—of these should come under the hammer to bring the undivided force of his method to the legitimate furtherance of the remainder. Yet this stiU permits that between the camps of lis Marxist and theologically oriented adherents there should still be, besides the obvious oppositions, agreement tht an understanding of his writing always looks towards the issues of truth, happiness and the redemption of Ufe. Howard Stern is interested in something quite different here— what he calls a "contextfree structural basis" (p. 12) of the texts under examination. He has taken a very small selection of passages by Benjamin and traces in them a triad of organizing figures— Gegenbild, Reihenfolge and Sprung—which he presents in terms of spatial metaphors drawn from geometry. He does so, moreover, with indisputable care and precision. One would not want to deny that these are possible readings, nor even that they are in places more than ordinarily ingenious and inventive. The difficulty arises with the question of what kind of authority such constructions can claim over their material. Stern's view of his own project is made dear in the references to the 1956 essay by Roman Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasie Disturbances." This comes in for high praise as a model, but not for its claim to find criteria outside the Uterary text itself which account for the readings made within it. "My method," Stern observes, "differs from Jakobson's in that I do not try to anchor my rhetorical readings in Unguistics or any other science, nor do I see any way in which this could be done" (p. 21). He then concludes: Jakobson's idea must be defended on the same ground as a good piece of New Criticism: it gives a systematic account of some features of literature that may be perceived by a Uterate reader and are very likely to be perceived by him after assimilating Jakobson's account. The idea has been successful not because of its objective derivation, but because the history of literatureand literary criticism has trained us to use the categories of rhetoric and to accept their logical extension as meaningful, (p. 22) Stern therefore not only builds on this familiar, adaptable but indifferent notion of what is at stake, but also distances himself from what is both starting point and conclusion for Benjamin , namely that such impassivity with regard to the received history of literature effectively negates any meaning in a serious sense whatsoever. 139 reviews History as the grand flow of tradition which has moulded and shaped us into its literate creature is certainly not the giver of that order of meaning—which is to say any of the formulations of an order of meaning— for which Benjamin's texts restlessly and sometimes desperately seek...