European Joyce Studies 21: Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism edited by Maurizia Boscagli and Enda Duffy (review)

This collection marks a major chapter in the ongoing belated encounter between James Joyce and the German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. In the 1930s, both writers lived in Paris and shared a veritable Venn diagram of overlapping friends and acquaintances—Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Stuart Gilbert, and Gisèle Freund, to name a few—but apparently never met each other. As Heyward Ehrlich reports in this volume, Benjamin heard the story of Joyce’s infamous meeting with Marcel Proust through Monnier and Léon-Paul Fargue (192), which, in the version that William Carlos Williams told, anticlimactically consisted of the writers complaining about their respective physical ailments (JJII 508). The meeting that this collection stages is, by happy contrast, an intellectual feast with Joyce and Benjamin as the honored guests, one that not only deeply engages the work of both writers in relation to each other but also confirms that to read Joyce alongside Benjamin is to discover unique new elements and interpretations of Joyce that prevailing literary methodologies have failed to uncover.

The bulk of Benjamin’s work was absent from Anglophone criticism during its canonization and institutionalization of modernism. Until relatively recently, Illuminations and Reflections were the most widely available collections of Benjamin’s essays in English.¹ As influential as these volumes were, they could not convey the full depth and scope of Benjamin’s thought. Important attempts to rectify this emerged in the 1980s from Terry Eagleton, Michael W. Jennings, Susan Buck-Morss, and others,² but only with the publication of the English translation of The Arcades Project in 1999 and the four volumes of Selected Writings published between 1996 and 2003 did the broad scope of Benjamin’s thought become widely evident.³ There are an exciting number of possibilities for reading Anglo-American modernism through Benjamin’s fascinating and seemingly endless coordinates, but in order to do so critics must, in good Benjaminian fashion, “blast open the continuum of history,” which has tended to claim Benjamin and Joyce for different traditions (Writings 4 396).⁴ Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism is part of the evidence that these translations have now taken root in the Anglo-American critical imagination and the blasting has begun in earnest.

A valuable key to the political vision of history Benjamin makes available to critics is the concept of phantasmagoria that pervaded his mature work of the 1930s. Phantasmagoria was the dream world of consumer capitalism under whose spell Europe fell during the nineteenth century. With the emblematic Parisian arcades at its center, the unfinished Arcades Project would reveal cultural history not only through the arcades but also through world exhibitions, bourgeois interiors, building materials, the streets, fashion, prostitution, photography, boredom, gambling, panoramas, and much more. Benjamin’s radical method of historiography, built upon what he called dialectical images, borrowed from the montage techniques of the European avant-gardes and was meant to counter the form of history that Benjamin called historicism. Historicism conceives of history as “homogeneous, empty time,” and the historicist “musters a mass of data” to fill it, often by constructing a deceptive narrative of historical progress (Writings 4 396). Not only does historicism necessarily lead to visions of history in which past and present are falsely divided from one another (as those self-consciously in the present train their sights on a supposedly completed past), but it also masks the fact that history is not progressing at all but is stuck in the grasp of phantasmagorical capitalism, which Benjamin conceived of not as progress but as a single catastrophe “piling wreckage upon wreckage” (Writings 4 392).

For Benjamin, the commodity is at the heart of this phantasmagoria. The dazzling succession of commodities presents the illusion of the new, but offers, repeatedly, the merely novel. Because of this illusion, Benjamin characterizes the nineteenth century as the “time of hell,” and modern people, us included...