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䊏 53 䊏 CHAPTER THREE Monuments and Relics, I MELANCHOLIC COLLECTIONS The collection of drafts, notes, and sketches Benjamin worked on at the same time he was planning his monumental work on the Arcades Project carries the title of “Convolutes” or sheaves of writings dedicated to a wide variety of topics. Composed of short essays and prose fragments oriented around multiple motifs and themes, and presented from various and distinct points of view, these writings are structured as a montage (Eiland and McLaughlin xi). Items such as the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, urban Paris, painting, spectacle, beauty and the transient, and modern manners in general are the centers of his constellations which spin out in multiple directions with only the writer’s observations at the gravitational center to hold them. As the translators of his Arcades Project into English conclude, “the montage form—with its philosophical play of distances, transitions, and intersections , its perpetually shifting contexts and ironic juxtapositions—had become a favorite device in [his] later investigations . . . this ostensible patchwork as, de facto, a determinate literary form, one that has effectively constructed itself (that is, fragmented itself) . . . would [surely produce] significant repercussions for the direction and tempo of its reading, to say the least. The transcendence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism—grounded, as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogenous temporality” (xi). Intersecting at different angles, and then splitting apart into constellations of meanings and experiences, these “convoluted” texts could be referred to as “blinks” of an eye (Eiland and McLaughlin xi) or fragments and discontinuous pieces of thought, rather than a cogently presented linear argument . Like Benjamin’s own apprehension of the city in all of its excessive modernity, the entries in these notebooks and sketches—much like the Arcades Project that is, finally, left behind—respond to a way of perception and a counternarrative structure. If such texts can be seen from the point of view of the visual arts— as blinks in our eyewitnessing of events, and far from historiography in its traditional form—they may also be superposable and fragmentary fossils of cultural perception. Remnants of daily life as lived by the taker of notes therefore acquire an “afterlife” (Eiland and McLaughlin xii) long after the gaze of the spectator has moved on. They are not articulated around formal relations of literary narration nor coherent epic stories. Rather, the framework of the montage, much as it did for Sergei Eisenstein and other filmmakers of the early twentieth century, split historical chronologies wide open. For Benjamin at least, this allowed for the infiltration or “vislumbre” (Paz) of secret, powerful, hidden, and forgotten moments and affinities to seep through into discourse. Given the innumerable different angles from which each splintered nucleus or “convolute” is approached and addressed, these notes are perfect examples of the Benjaminian concept of the baroque allegory as “a structuring of the antithetical feeling for life” (Bolz and van Reijen 33). Depicting much more than what is seen at face value, allegory is the container of antithesis, the holder of the ruin. Gilloch writes of the power of allegorical figures for Benjamin as they reveal “the apparent or surface meaning [as] a veneer which conceals . . . . One narrative appears disguised as another; it is a palimpsest” (Myth 135). Meaning is elusive, but the profane world of the everyday comes to mean anything and everything, not merely the quotidian details one finds on the surface of places and events. The tension that holds together the subjects and the forms of the “convolutes” is cited by Benjamin as the force of the melancholic gaze. The capacity of the melancholic vision to produce art (vision, genius) is its contradictoriness and its richness; it is “the precondition for brilliant breakthroughs of petrified systems of order” (Bolz and van Reijen 33). While the object, scene, or memory remains behind, petrified in the allegorical fragment on the page, dead in some way to the forces of history, it can now paradoxically evoke meanings in multiple directions since it has been wrenched from its limiting context . And here we have come full circle to our trope of the ruin, for “[t]he allegorical, melancholy gaze must reduce the world to rubble” (Bolz and van Reijen 33) to build it up in innovative form from the shards of the past. One particular nucleus for these fragmentary texts is the allegorization of the bourgeois world as an image filled...

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