JOYCE, BENJAMIN, AND THE FUTURITY OF FICTION

Abstract

On 20 January 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote to his friend, Gershom Scholem, that he wished to become foremost critic of German literature - but he did so, characteristically, in French: Le but que je m'avais propose [...] c'est etre considere comme le premier critique de la litterature allemande (III23). ' lure of Paris would lead Benjamin in time to do distinguished work on Baudelaire and Proust. Meanwhile, lure of Paris already had been felt by Joyce as a young man residing there in 1903 - same year that Henri Bergson gave a revolutionary course of lectures on how mind worked - not as workings of time upon its repository of European languages, but as a independent processing engine using syntax of a new invention then sweeping Paris. Bergson startlingly compared the mechanism of conceptual thought to that of cinematograph.2Such new connections available for language, memory, and literature coming from science, invention, and politics were in air for Joyce and Benjamin, both living in Paris as exiles in 1930s. Bergson had been one of first to use metaphor of cinematograph for a model of mind. It arrived at a time when old separation between representation of time by literature and of space by painting was being overthrown by new silent cinema: narrative, formerly a matter of language in time, suddenly could be produced by silent images arrayed in space. In 1909, Joyce had opened first movie house in Dublin; in 1922, Ulysses depicted his most famous family, Virags and Blooms, practicing their hereditary profession of photography; and in 1936, Benjamin's most famous essay explored impact of photography and film on aura of art, nature of narrative, and politics of culture. Joyce and Benjamin moved in same intellectual circles in Paris in 1930s, - they actually had many of same friends - responding to Modernist order of day to reposition old boundaries. Even though they never met, Joyce and Benjamin had much in common: each created a body of work that ignored contemporary conventions of publication, that by intent did not avoid difficulty or obscurity, and that therefore remained substantially inaccessible during their lifetime. None of this was accidental: each of them wrote, it might be said, only partly about their contemporaries but not really for their contemporaries. Each wrote about past in present: each wrote both for and about futurity.Young Benjamin already expressed a strong sense of fluid nature of time in his cryptic remark: All future is past. past of things of future of T time. But past things have futurity (SWI 15). Benjamin, past tradition retained its extraordinary persistence in present, but at same time past had no guarantee of permanence: The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again (/// 255). survival of past depended on its continuing relevance in present: For every image of past that is not recognized by present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably (Ul 255). Major political revolutions could restart historical memory, as when a new calendar had been introduced in France after 1789, denying past admitting only present and future: Benjamin provided an unexpected metaphor: The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera (Ul 261). Benjamin's recording angel wrote history in technological media of cinematography and film.Joyce, too, restarted clock of 20th century with his technical literary innovations that cut a wedge between past and future. Joyce told his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver that Ulysses was his response to technical challenge of writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow (JJII 512), Joyce's stylistic experiments put his fellow tradesmen on notice, challenging future writers to meet or master his redefinitions of narrative techniques. …