The Arcades Project (review)

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann Cambridge, MA and London, U.K.: Harvard University Press, 1999, ix-xiv, 1073 pages.

A good measure of the miracle of Walter Benjamin's prose derives from the play of different densities, consistencies, what the social scientists call "grains" of specificity, within its sweep. Up until Harvard University Press's English rendering of Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften by Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt, Benjamin has been largely known in this country for writings, say in Illuminations or Reflections, toward the condensed or polished extreme of his script, such as "The Task of the Translator" or "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire." With the appearance of a splendid English edition of The Arcades Project by Harvard University Press, English-language readers are treated to the full spectacle of the emergence of Benjamin's utterly measured, allegorical prose out of the multitudinous, often diffuse and contradictory sources, true "bribes et morceaux," that inspired it.

Conceptualized and to some degree plotted out still in the late 1920's, The Arcades Project was to preoccupy Benjamin especially during the last years of his stay in Paris before his ill-fated escape journey to Spain in 1940. Benjamin's imaginative immersion in a different historical setting and epoch, the Paris of the preceding century, his projection of his own cognitive faculties and creative processes into a different world from his own, is akin to the achievement that Jorge Luis Borges attributes to his character, Pierre Menard. The title character of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is such an efficacious and imaginative scholar that he succeeds in composing several chapters of Don Quixote solely on the basis of the reconfiguration of Golden Age Spain in its many facets as achieved by his research. We need hardly dwell on the reasons why, in his final years, Benjamin was far more a citizen of Paris during the preceding century than of his native and contemporary Germany; his final emanation was as a Menardian messenger to an alien but enchanting domain.

In breadth and conceptual power, Benjamin's reconstruction of nineteenth-century Paris significantly surpasses Menard's fictive achievement. The "Convolutes" into which The Arcades Project is divided are largely composed of fragmentary extracts documenting the "capital of the eighteen-hundreds" assembled by Benjamin from a bewildering array of primary and secondary sources, "from the epoch" and contemporary (as late as 1939). Among the discursive scraps left by other writers, Benjamin coyly intersperses paragraphs of his own commentary, in no particular sequence and with no predictability. Benjamin's interjections trace his own reactions to the material that he located, mostly in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, even as it was becoming increasingly off-limits. In contrast to the knots of utterly shocking yet inevitable prose that Benjamin achieves in the Illuminations essays, to wit, "The delight of the urban poet is love--not at first sight but at last sight," the texture of the Convolutes is spongy and cloudlike. It can be no accident that Benjamin comments on the skies in the Paris graphics of Meryon and in the writings of Gautier and Baudelaire (96, 231, 281-82). The telling story of the synthesis of Benjamin's prose is its transformation of the Convolutes' diffuse texture into the nuclear fusion achieved by the finished essays. To make certain that the full metamorphosis from Benjamin's source notebooks and preliminary observations to the miracle of his finished critical prose is registered, the edition begins with the 1935 and 1939 versions of "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century." The counter-versions of the essay strike out in slightly skewed directions. Perhaps in compliance with some of Adorno's 1938 criticisms, the latter version underscores a Marxian drift from which the imagistic fascination of the 1935 text may somewhat distract. (By the same token, a section of the first version on Daguerre and photography has fallen out of the second...