In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

2. Benjamin’s and Goethe’s Passagen: Ottilie under Glass

2. Benjamin’s and Goethe’s Passagen: Ottilie under Glass the story of Wahlverwandtschaften entails, as story, the aesthetic objectification of those relations, the representation of the figural as image. Just as story and imaging take place within the context of architectural activity in this particular narrative, so the addition of building to death in the novel exceeds both its narrative and aesthetic scope. To pose the question of the concluding passage, and final building, in Goethe’s novel—why add building to death?—is tantamount to asking what Benjamin saw, not in the narrative text he identified as bordering on the realm of aestheticized myth, but in the buildings he treated as if they were texts in that they were already aesthetic relics, the remaining curiosités of a myth of imperial capital, the Parisian Passagen.14 The view of history that the Passagen housed for Benjamin can be seen to shed light on the architectural impulse 14. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 201: ‘‘In the Arcades project Benjamin himself practiced allegory against myth.’’ The reception of Benjamin’s influential essay on the novel has issued, by contrast, in the widely held view of the Wahlverwandtschaften as being itself a work of ‘‘myth,’’ a view blind to the contradiction between that simplifying characterization and Benjamin’s own language-based critique of the subordination of the literary and the aesthetic—forms of representation constitutive of historical-epistemological objects—to either nonhistorical myth or an historicism equated with chronology. Sharf offers an interesting variant on this interpretive tendency, arguing that Goethe’s novel combines ‘‘the socialhistorical ’’ and the ‘‘mythical’’ in the figures of nobility who, occupying ‘‘a border region between Eros and Thanatos,’’ ‘‘first develop in that realm into mythological figures,’’ both ‘‘subordinated to’’ and ‘‘transcendent of’’ the ‘‘laws of time and space’’ (Scharf, Goethes Ästhetik, p. 218). 75 76 ‡ built time with which the novel begins and ends, as well as Benjamin’s own, profoundly peculiar response to the Wahlverwandtschaften.15 Like Eduard’s permanent installation of the dead body of ‘‘his life’s happiness’’ in a showcase beneath an arch appearing to be no building but sky, the transparently roofed arcades enclose glassfronted inanimate objects whose effect upon their viewer is to reverse , if not eradicate, conventional historical knowledge and knowledge of objects, the categorical differentiation between the given and the positioned, and subject and object, as between past and present, life and death (VI:485). Edifices that appear improbably to contain the external world, confusing the limits of imaged visual experience with the continuous act of movement through space, the arcades turn the natural view of the synecdochic relation of building to world, as of seeing to doing, inside out. Side-chapels for so many Ottilies, so many goods promising happiness, these historical temples of viewing create a public that consumes ocularly, i.e., without consuming. But they also provide the medium for what Benjamin called the ‘‘reading’’ of ‘‘dialectical images,’’ those whose ‘‘tension’’ renders 15. It is fair to say that the discussions in ‘‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’’ devoted to the cognitive effect of Goethe’s novel, in direct opposition to those that reflect upon the integral historical relationship of criticism and art, are rife with discursive qualities not only atypical, but even inimical to Benjamin’s literary criticism and theoretical writing generally: tendentiousness, repetitiveness , and an unexamined conceptual assertiveness whose cumulative effect is more nearly melodramatic than critical, for instance, ‘‘The lovers are destroyed in as far as fate rules’’; ‘‘Fate is the context of guilt of the living’’; ‘‘The mythical is the content of this book’’; ‘‘In such representations the sensory must become master; but punished through fate, that is, through moral nature’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,’’ in Illuminationen, pp. 70, 75, 78, 81). The introduction of such fundamentally noncritical notions as ‘‘myth’’ and ‘‘fate’’ in Part I of the essay is accompanied by an equally uncharacteristic emphasis on das Leben und Werk of the author in Part II. Indeed, as Goethe is presented biographically, so is the novel—perplexingly—read by Benjamin mimetically (in the conventional rather than Benjaminian sense), as an unhappy love story driven by fate whose unfathomability resides in myth. See the continuation of this note in the Appendix. passagen: ottilie under glass ‡ 77 them no longer discrete representations of history but rather ‘‘identical with the historical object’’ itself.16 For Benjamin...