UNPACKING THE ARCHIVE

9 3 R U N P A C K I N G T H E A R C H I V E L O U I S E B E R N A R D ‘‘I am unpacking my library. Yes I am,’’ writes the German-born critic Walter Benjamin in exuberant spirit, as he expounds – note that first-person pronoun, that autobiographical ‘‘I,’’ sharp and clear and jaunty – on the pleasures, the ine√able loveliness of books, books and the collecting bug. Benjamin is not merely a reader; he is at once cultural commentator and connoisseur, his erudite and enquiring toe well-dipped, so to speak, in the waters of a gentle madness, a bibliomania that encompasses not only his acquisition of printed volumes in all their charismatic glory but the near-obsessive accumulation of quotations – notes, ‘‘thought fragments’’ – that now constitute his magnum opus, the monumental unfinished study The Arcades Project. The passion that one finds so ineluctably attached to books and their ownership is very much alive in ‘‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,’’ first published in Literarische Welt in 1931 and selected by Hannah Arendt for Illuminations, a collection of Benjamin essays whose title is as perfect a distillation as any. For what Benjamin brings to light here, which he is quick to point out, is not so much the contours of a particular collection (his own or any other) as the act of collecting itself, a pursuit that embraces the 9 4 B E R N A R D Y three interwoven spheres of bookshop, catalogue, and auction. Each intrepid step toward possession of the desired object is its own profound enchantment: the thrill of the chase, the luck of the draw, the unexpected confluence of time and chance, the fluctuations and seeming whims of the market, the idiosyncrasies of the buyer’s own mind – a mind that is often pitted, sometimes for no good reason, against the mind of another equally determined hound in that thing known, not without understatement, as a bidding war. Out of this peculiar sort of chaos the sober, ordered logic of the library will appear. As Benjamin mines these sensations, the scene for the essay is set, a tableau well known to any avid reader and buyer of books who has had the misfortune, or perhaps good luck, to move house: ‘‘I must ask you to join me in the disorder of the crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight after two years of darkness, so that you might share with me a bit of the mood . . . which these books arouse in the genuine collector.’’ The invitation is a rhetorical flourish, but one pro√ered in the guise of common fealty – to only connect, as E. M. Forster would have it, both in regard to the spoken or written word and through a common notion of those most human needs: the right, in a bourgeois world buoyed by capital, to property, to knowledge, to freedom of expression, to a safe space to call one’s own. The mood evoked is not, Benjamin proclaims, ‘‘elegiac,’’ yet his consistent return to the figure of memory and the emotive role that ‘‘nostalgia’’ plays in the collector’s quest reveals that he is filled not with thoughts but with ‘‘images, memories.’’ Nostalgia is oftentimes cast as something of a trite word, shrouded in cliché, and yet we would not be remiss, in this instance, to heed its potent roots (New Latin, from Greek nostos, ‘‘return home,’’ and New Latin algia, ‘‘pain,’’ ‘‘ache’’; akin to Greek neisthai, ‘‘to return,’’ Old English ge nesan, ‘‘to survive,’’ and Sanskrit, nesate, ‘‘he approaches’’). From these, a personal cartography emerges, a series of interconnected byways along which the man of letters is transported from the here and now back to the formative days of his burgeoning book lust: U N P A C K I N G T H E A R C H I V E 9 5 R Memories of the cities in which I found so many...