Reading/ Writing the Dialectical Image—Walter Benjamin and Osip Mandel’stam

Abstract

READING/WRITING THE DIALECTICAL IJ\IAGE-WALTER BENJAMIN AND OSIP MANDEL'STAI'J Anastasia Graf is a graduate swdcn/ ill ,he Department of Comparalil'e Li,eraflJre. Prince/all Ullin·rsiZI·. In the last four lines of Notre Dame. one of Mandel'stam's manifesto-poems of Acmeist poetics, the poet vows to be apprenticed to the construction of the cathedral: But the more attentively I studied Notre Dame, your monstrous ribs, your stronghold, The more I thought: I too one day shall create Beauty from cruel weight. (Selected Poems 17) This was 1912 and Mandel'stam and his fellow Acmeists were struggling to push away from what they perceived to be the mystical and mystified Symbolist aesthetics. The acmeist notion of the word as stone and phenomena rather than symbol. dominates Mandel stam's early poet!)'. Notre Dame and Hagia Sophia in fact read as textbook exercises in ekphrasis, where the poet's task is two-fold--to describe the monument and to construct a cathedral-poem fmm the stony words. Ten years later, Mandel'stam still thought of the poet as the apprenlice from the last stanza of Notre Dame, but his notion of the word had changed from a seif-cont:Jined building block to a polyserruc cluster, pointing beyond itself but still fiml1y grounded in the rich metaphoric tcxture of his poetry, For the Symbolist notion of the statically bin:J!)' word tv1andel'st:Jm substituted the notion of metamorphosis and mutation as the principle of poetic composition and defined the poet as one who moulds the word rather than one who creates. In the poet!)' and essays of this middle period. the poet appears as the medieval scribe, the apprentice to nature or the archaeologist who must transcribe from image to language, but a language that preserves the visuaL fragmentary quality of the image. These two aspects of Mandel'stam's poetics--the poem as a transcription of cullural and natural texts and the notion of the poetic word as polysemic cluster rather than discrete building block-will serve as my point of departure in this discussion. From herc, I would like to proceed to a staged encounter between Mandel'sram's poetics and the aesthetic and historiographic theo!)' of Walter Benjamin. Questions of biographie or historical affinity aside, the intellectual kinship of Mandel'stam and Benjamin is striking in their shared notion of histo!)' as a non-linear and non-narrative form which stands to be disrupted, fragmented, blasted out of its sedimenta!)' periodization and opened up to the present moment. To Benjamin's allegorist-collector corresponds Mandel'stam's figure of the poet as the ploughman who turns over buried strata of the past so as to create a new surface of synchronic time and spatialized histo!)I,1 Opposed 10 intentionality. linearity, logic and grammar in the writings of Benjamin and Mandel'stam. is the image or figural thought. Mandel'stam's poet and Benjamin's critic or materialist historiographer share the task of bringing what Benjamin calls the historical object or the dialectical image to its legibility in the present.