Abstract
For Walter Benjamin, modernity could be understood as a crisis in human experience and communication, both of which were under assault from multiple sources that ranged from economic inflation to contem¬porary forms of warfare. However, Benjamin granted a major role in this crisis to the newspaper, central as it is to the representation and reproduc¬tion of human affairs. Thus, as we have seen, Benjamin could assert what at first seems paradoxical: “Every morning brings us news from across the globe, yet we are poor in noteworthy stories.”1 There is no paradox, however, if the newsworthy can be distinguished from the noteworthy, a point of distinction that for Benjamin also divides explanation from experience, empathy from pathos, and distance from nearness. Indeed, these distinctions together inform Benjamin’s basic view of communica¬ble experience in the mass-mediated age in which the very language of experience (Erfahrung) is so scarce that it becomes saturated with revo¬lutionary potential. For Benjamin, this potential is above all located in intimate or anecdotal forms that can communicate unmediated experi-ence, prompting a flash of awakened consciousness that he terms the “pathos of nearness” (Pathos der Nähe).2
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Notes
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. Selected Writings, Volume 3 1935–1938 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 147.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 846.
Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. Selected Writings, Volume 3 1935–1938 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 262.
Beatrice Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work,” in David S. Ferris, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 55.
Margaret Cohen usefully elucidates the way Benjamin draws from Surrealism, Marx, and Freud in his conception of phantasmagoria: “Benjamin proposed to differentiate himself from Surrealism, in particular, by remedying its lack of rigorous theorization concerning how collective and individual psychic processes interpenetrated. Benjamin’s point of departure was the rhetorical affinity between the dream vocabulary Marx sometimes used to describe the mystifications of capitalism, and the importance of dream in a Freudian schema. Perhaps the supernatural dimensions to modern life, Benjamin speculated, were manifestations of a dream sleep that came over Europe with the invention of modern capitalism; what was then needed was a way to promote awakening from the dreams of the nineteenth century. Benjamin found the notion of a dreaming collective all the more appealing because the psychoanalytic notion of dreams as the fulfillment of wishes meshed with his interest in the unrealized hopes and desires contained in the garbage of history,” Margaret Cohen, “Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria: The Arcades Project,” in David S. Ferris, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 205.
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1989), 253.
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. Selected Writings, Volume 4 1938–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 315–16.
Benjamin echoes these concerns in a short piece called “The Newspaper.” However, there, in a characteristically dialectical turn, he also sees the newspaper as a site of potential for readers to become authors: “The fact that nothing binds the reader more tightly to his paper than his all-consuming impatience [to see his interests expressed], his longing for daily nourishment, has long been exploited by publishers, who are constantly inaugurating new columns to address the reader’s questions, opinions, and protests. Hand in hand, therefore, with the indiscriminate assimilation of facts goes the equally indiscriminate assimilation of readers, who are instantly elevated to collaborators. Here, however, a dialectical moment lies concealed: the decline of writing in this press turns out to be the formula for its restoration in a different one.… The reader is at all times ready to become a writer—that is, a describer or even a prescriber,” Walter Benjamin, “The Newspaper,” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. Selected Writings, Volume 2 1927–1934 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 741. One need only think of Internet discourse communities such as news blogs to find evidence of this dialectical turn in our moment.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 33.
Werner Hamacher, “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time,” in Andrew Benjamin, ed. Walter Benjamin and History (New York: Continuum, 2005), 47.
Max Pensky, “Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,” in David S. Ferris, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 187.
John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 276.
The Arcades Project, 846. Benjamin names Anatole France as an example of such a skeptic. However, in anticipation of the connections I go on to make between Benjamin’s anecdotal form and modernist fiction, consider Joyce’s characterization of Ulysses and its relationship to Irish nationalism: “It is the work of a sceptic, but I don’t want it to appear the work of a cynic,” See Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), 152.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004), xvii.
Irving Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986).
Beatrice Hanssen, ed. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 19.
Virginia Woolf, “Sympathy,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (San Diego: Harcourt, 1989), 108. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text. Compare to “A Death in the Newspaper,” also in Complete Shorter Fiction, 315.
Magritte copied the image in the upper left quadrant from a medical book, F.E. Bilz’s (1899) La Nouvelle Médication Naturelle (The Natural Method of Healing).
A.M. Hammacher, René Magritte, trans. James Brockway (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985, 1995), 82.
As Tiedemann writes, “Past history would be grounded in the present, analogous to Kant’s epistemological grounding of objectivity in the depths of the subject,” Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk,” in Gary Smith, ed. On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1988), 282.
As Bernd Witte puts it, “The historical manifestations of human society are conceived by him as dream images whose displacements it is the historian’s task to decode. Like the Messiah at the end of time, the historian must rearrange the ‘demented’ images and thereby endow the world with its true meaning,” Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James Rolleston (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 110.
Thus, Elissa Marder: “The gesture of‘actualization’ that Benjamin identifies in Proust becomes the germ of his own conception of the ‘dialectical image’ of history in the Passagen-Werk. The dialectical image is nota representation of history, but it presents to us the history of a past time that happened without our knowing it, and which comes looking for us, momentarily, at the moment of awakening,” Elissa Marder, “Walter Benjamin’s Dream of‘Hap-piness,’” in Beatrice Hanssen, ed. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (New York: Continuum, 2006), 192.
As Robert Gibbs explains, “Anecdotes make characters come into our world. And so the great monuments must be entered in our world, and not seen as a time-machine that takes us back to theirs. They retain their life when we go and seem them,” Robert Gibbs, “Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV,” in Andrew Benjamin, ed. Walter Benjamin and History (New York: Continuum, 2005), 209.
Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in H. Aram Veeser, ed. The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989).
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, “Counterhistory and the Anecdote,” in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Jane Gallop, Anecdotal Theory (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002).
Harry D. Harootunian, “The Benjamin Effect: Modernism, Repetition, and the Path to Different Cultural Imaginaries,” in Michael P Steinberg, ed. Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 75.
Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005), 62.
Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two, 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1978), 14.
Any full answer to this question would also have to consider Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s ownership of the means of production as a condition for Woolf’s new literary experimentalism. As Michael Whitworth puts it, “Owning the Hogarth Press liberated Woolf’s experimentalism. Its first publication, ‘The Mark on the Wall,’ was her first sustained experiment in literary form,” Michael Whitworth, “Virginia Woolf and Modernism,” in Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 150.
Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall,” in Susan Dick, ed. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (San Diego: Harcourt, 1989), 83. Subsequent references are given in parenthesis within the text.
Although Woolf leaves the gender of the second speaker unspecified, some critics have assumed that this speaker is a man, and thus that the news and war with which this speaker is aligned can be contrasted to the feminine thought experience represented by the narrator. For example, Laura Marcus claims, “The mark is identified by the male speaker who enters the room at the end of the story as a snail,” Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf (London: Northcote House, 1997), 19. Whether or not this is a sound assumption, this division of gender would seem to coincide with the gendered characterizations of the narrator’s own reverie. For instance, Marcus also argues that the story, “explores the difference between the ‘masculine’ point of view—fact-bound, hierarchical, constraining—and a free-associative thinking which revels in the multiple imaginings opened up by freedom from the desire to find out what things ‘really’ are” (19). While this dichotomy surely structures much of the story, it may make for a more complex, or at least a more nuanced, reading if we image the second speaker to be a second woman. In the end, however, it may be more important to reflect on how readers respond to Woolf’s purposeful ambiguity in this matter, and to think through how this indeterminacy may work to challenge binaries established elsewhere in the story.
To borrow Roland Barthes’s terms: “Let us designate as hermeneutic code (HER) all the units whose function it is to articulate in various ways a ques-tion, its response, and the variety of chance events which can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even, constitute an enigma and lead to its solution,” Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 17.
Woolf also holds our sense of narrative time in suspension. At many points it is difficult to tell whether the present tense of the narrator’s thoughts represents the active retelling of past thoughts, closer to the time she first noticed the mark, or whether the tense indicates the time of the story’s telling. For a close examination of the story’s temporality, see Marc D. Cyr, “A Conflict of Closure in Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall,’” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996), 197–205.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 88.
It is important to maintain a sense of just how audacious this thought experiment is. As Vincent Sherry puts it, “To dedicate lengthy and even recondite attentions to the microscopic spot on the wall entails a sort of archly matter-of-fact outrageousness. A strange reason-seemingness provides the performative pretense of the piece,” Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 260.
For considerations of Woolf as a war novelist, see Mark Hussey ed., Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991).
For a perspective on the influence of news media during World War I on Woolf, see Karen L. Levenback, “Virginia Woolf’s ‘War in the Village’ and ‘The War from the Street’: An Illusion of Immunity,” in Mark Hussey, ed. Virginia Woolfand War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991).
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© 2011 David Rando
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Rando, D. (2011). Nearness. In: Modernist Fiction and News. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119666_2
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