Paul Klee's blessed Angelus Novus (1920)
Readers familiar with this blog will know that I have a thing for writers whose names begin with the letter B: from Baudelaire to Baudrillard; and from Georges Bataille to Roland Barthes [1].
To this list might also be added the name of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish cultural critic and theorist whose convoluted (unfinished) work about Paris as the capital of the nineteenth-century - known in English as The Arcades Project (1927-40) [2] - affirms the figure of the flâneur as having crucial philosophical significance.
Often regarded as a seminal text for postmodernism, the Arcades Project also anticipates the world of blogging and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that, in some ways, Torpedo the Ark is my very own version of Benjamin's posthumously edited and published masterpiece [3].
For example, like the Arcades Project, TTA relies heavily on compositional techniques including paraphrase, pastiche, and plagiarism [4] - affirming the idea of intertextuality and attempting to create a kind of literary-philosophical collage that defies any attempt to systematise ideas or enforce any kind of grand narrative.
Like Benjamin, I dream of being able to simply stroll through the ruins and piece together found fragments of text from old works by dead authors, thereby creating something new and idiosyncratic, but not something that pretends to be an entirely original work born of individual uniqueness or any such Romantic fantasy. TTA is shaped by (functions and circulates within) a wider cultural history and a shared linguistic network of meaning.
And, like the Arcades Project, TTA has grown and mutated in a monstrous manner. Initially, Benjamin envisioned wrapping things up within a few weeks. However, as the work expanded in scope and complexity, he eventually came to view it as his most important achievement.
Similarly, when I began TTA I thought it would provide a window on to a wider body of work. But it then became the work, absorbing huge amounts of time and energy and without any conceivable end point other than death (the final post may very well be a suicide note) [5].
Notes
[1] See the post dated 17 August 2022 in which I discuss these four French writers: click here.
[2] Das Passagen-Werk consists of a massive assemblage of notes, fragments, and quotations that Benjamin assembled between 1927 and his death in 1940. The manuscript (along with additional material) for the Arcades Project was entrusted to Benjamin's pal Georges Bataille when the former fled Paris following the Nazi occupation. Bataille, who worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, hid the manuscript in a closed archive at the library where it was eventually discovered after the war.
The full text was published in an English translation by Harvard University Press in 1999, having been first published in a German edition in 1982.
[3] There are, of course, some important differences between Benjamin and myself and our respective projects. For one thing, my work has been influenced less by Jewish mysticism and Marxism and more by Jewish comedy and the punk philosophy of Malcolm McLaren.
[4] I know the idea of plagiarism is one that some readers balk at. However, it's one I'm happy to endorse; see the post entitled 'Blurred Lines' (21 January, 2016): click here. And see also the post 'On Poetry and Plagiarism' (13 December, 2018): click here.
[5] Readers unfamiliar with the biographical details of Benjamin's story, may be interested to know Benjamin ended his own life, aged 48, on 26 September, 1940, in Portbou, Spain (a small coastal town just over the border with France). Fearing he was about to fall into the hands of the Gestapo, who had been given orders to arrest him, Benjamin chose to overdose on a handful of morphine tablets.
This post is for Anja Steinbaum and Natias Neutert.
'All great works of literature dissolve a genre or invent one' (Walter Benjamin). Self-evidently, it's complicated, just as Benjamin was complicated (if not actually, like Nietzsche, like TTA, self-contradictory)!
ReplyDeleteIf the notion of intertextuality complicates the drama of 'Romantic' authenticity and novelty, it certainly doesn't do away with it. There is more to authorship than mere post-modern bricolage, and (much) more to reading and writing than a pile of Gothic ruins.
The blogger also seems to be replacing triggering terms for him ('Romantic', 'authenticity', 'uniqueness', 'originality' etc.) with the actually even more problematic word - especially as he has recently told us there are no private languages/ idiolects - 'idiosyncratic' ('idios' = one's own + 'krasis' = mixture of personal characteristics).
All that said, I enjoy biting off and chewing over many pieces of TTA, for all its author's need to assert himself or withdraw himself depending on what he's had for breakfast (or have his lit-critical cake and eat it). And one should certainly be wary of building systems or monuments - not least because one might turn into one!
Furthermore, one look at the basis of Benjamin's argument in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' concerning the irreplaceability/non-iterability of the 'aura' of an artefact, its authenticity, and aesthetic authority, is surely sufficient to undermine the view that Benjamin was purely some kind of proto-postmodernist flaneur. To extend his thesis into poetic art, a poem is self-evidently a unique artefact, inseparable from its time, place and the sensibility, creativity and skill of its poet-producer.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, poetry is (or can be) also a performative/spoken/ voiced art, inextricable from its unique perturbation of the air as exchanged between poet and audience. The late Peter Redrgrove has written powerfully on this topic in regard to the material atmospherics of the poetry reading.
To say that reproduced/repurposed poetry is as good as the real thing is like conflating sex and pornography. Found poetry as a self-styled 'genre' is really more a meta-poetic/ conceptual extension (and dilution) of the medium, as different from 'poetry proper' as a sonnet is from a scrapbook.