Benjamin and Proust’s Autobiography as Critical Writing
By its title “A Berlin Chronicle,” one automatically presumes that it is a memoir, an autobiographical account of sorts. One is introduced to the present Walter Benjamin calling back, to the past, to the people that introduced him to the city, conjuring up details and fragments of artifacts that comprise of memories. In later passages, one suspect it is more than a memoir, because it is as if these random details of memories seem to spring up by his conjuration, to surprise or ambush, and capture him at the moment of the present: “Here, I am talking of space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of recollection.” (Benjamin, 28)
By conjuring an omen of syphilis – a dubious way to end the chronicle – he gives a clue as to why he wrote his Berlin chronicle. He seems to rejoice in historical accounts that live in his present melancholia. It is as a critique of society, a certain class, his own and others, and the prospect of that reflected in the present, where it seems to Benjamin, imminently bleak. He wrote this in 1932. Germany having endured the First World War and its own revolution, faces a grim omen. The country was ridden with unemployment, monetary crisis, poverty reigns, chaos plagues Berlin, and Marxism was considered a threat. In 1932, Hitler runs for presidency. Although he and his Nazi party didn’t win, the elected government of Hindenburg is a regime rotten with scandals. Reading “A Berlin Chronicle,” one assumes that Benjamin’s associations with Marxism, and his pessimism of the present conditions in Germany and Europe in general are the reasons to write this account.
His accounts certainly resonate Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” but does not duplicate it. Like Proust, he does not compose a story, but it weaves a history. He seems to be fascinated by the city of Berlin, not its generalities, but the particulars (acute details) that make up after conjuration complete the former. Its images and characters, the people that interrelate to his childhood and youth, his interactions with them, his social activities that form his attitude, the details of jewelry, architecture, furniture, his collection of books, and the some details of the books itself, intrigue him. It is clearly not composed like a chronology – it purposely contradicts the title – instead it is made of bits and pieces, slivers of memories jump at once in the body of writing, to his present.
As a translator of Proust’s writing, Benjamin continues his method, an attempt by Proust to synthesize the memoir, historical writing, theoretical discourse, and social criticism. It is an attempt to methodically acknowledge and deploy his melancholia, using constellations of events, having no ‘apparent’ connection to one another to enrich the subject to act. The melancholic dwells involuntarily in the unconscious. Benjamin’s manner of writing is much like the unconscious that Proust scrutinizes to identify his lost ego, by drawing out from “stars” – nodes of memories past, that, if focused into a funnel, will generate action, perhaps salvation for his present, which Benjamin curiously ends with “syphilis.”
Benjamin recognizes Proust’s autobiography-novel as a self-criticism of the Bourgeoisie, in which [for whom] the melancholia is characteristic. With Freud, the melancholic cannot see what they have lost, in this case an inability to recollect the ego unconsciously: “… by perceiving that the self reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted onto the patient’s own ego.” It is a misdirection of the libido to the ego – the ego established as the abandoned object: narcissism. Proust was melancholic, characterized by his withdrawal from daylight, living in the ambivalent darkness, he retreats from his friends, his social circle, and drowns in his sickness, living in the prospect of death, which he views as being imminent. Death is the drive to bring the past to the present: a desire to heal, to replace his lost ego. Benjamin was similarly melancholic. His account of hating school, having to raise his cap to his teachers, being fooled by his father, which he wrote as the greatest disappointment of his life, and the ominous syphilis all describe such a symptom, a loss of “something” that preoccupies him to the present, a “thing” he cannot shake off.
Benjamin’s melancholia reflects his society’s melancholia. One recognizes this with his preoccupation with images of the past that figure in the present. He describes them by writing about his postcards (Benjamin, 40-44), and, in his bleak account of despising authority in school there is perhaps a critic of the present regimes policy in controlling its citizens (Benjamin, 48-52). He described his first memory of sexual urge in the prospect of missing a religious event he was obligated to attend (Benjamin, 52-53), perhaps as a reflection on the strict illogical regulations that bound citizens. He wrote about disappointments in his life such as not finding peacock feathers, as his father insinuated that he would (Benjamin, 56-57), as a critic of “spins” and lies presented by the state to fool and coerce the public. To Benjamin, society’s melancholia is caused by the failure to recover its lost ego, therefore losing direction and meaning in the progress of life. It is this loss that is reflective of the Bourgeois, the German upper middle class so caught up in the nonsensical of life that it does not recognize and so cannot recover what is lost, wrought by havocs of war, by poverty, by corruption, by loss of authority. Writing the past in the present is a way to methodically interrupt the past, open with numerous possibilities, placing into the present, perhaps to recover such consciousness, to emancipate the content of the melancholia.
Having to have lived in a state (Indonesia) that tends to dictate and persuade its people to forgive and forget the state’s past sins, reading into this autobiographical-historical-critical theory account is both a treat, as well as strenuously insightful. With Benjamin, drawing from the past and bringing it to the present exists a possibility to give an agency for the human subject to act. How so? Recollection to Benjamin is more than learning the lessons of the past. It is the past living in and through the present, in forms of echoes, and of retrospections that form more than mere introspection. It causes action for the future, perhaps to start anew. The past exists, therefore it must be acknowledged by the subject in order to recollect, or replace their lost ego. In this case Proust’s writing is important, as it documents that one can indeed “live” in the past but for the future. The action that takes place as a result is the richness of details, a hybrid and synthesis that stream from the unconscious to reconstruct the present and future. Melancholia, then, is the key. In Proust, his recollections as his melancholia were his re-invention of the novel form that overtakes the reader as the subject, and claim it as their own (or Proust’s) own subjectivity. It is his own tool to create an art, to master oneself, to master the subject. His autobiography is to point out the follies that his society projects, a failure that if carried out further, empty to be dwelled upon, will end in destruction.
Sources
Benjamin, Walter. “A Berlin Chronicle” (1932), Reflections [NY: Schocken Books, 1986], 3-94
Benjamin, Walter. “The Image of Proust,” Illuminations [NY: Schocken Books, 1969], 201-215
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Collected Papers [NY: Basic Books, 1959], vol. 5: 152-170.
