2011-02-23 03:44:01
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Berlin Childhood around 1900的评论
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The Perdurability of Ephemerality (first version)
Examining the "punctums" in Benjamin's "Berlin Childhood Around 1900"
"(Punctum) is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. "(26)
--Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
In "Berlin Childhood Around 1900", Walter Benjamin, the literary critic and archaeologist of urban history, depicts his rich impressions of the German capital at the turn of the century through sophisticated methods of metaphor and allegory. On one hand, Benjamin’s smooth and gentle tone avoids revealing any sentiment that might damage the aesthetic sense of the scenes he depicts. On the other hand, his delicate touches presents each of the thirty sections in the form of a photography with certain "punctums" that "prick" its readers.
Punctum, a Latin term meaning puncture or wound, is introduced by Roland Barthes in his short book Camera Lucida, to describe how he feels touched by certain photographs, because of incidental details which trigger emotionally charged personal associations, unrelated to the meaning of photographs as culturally determined. Influenced by phenomenology, this book investigates the essence that unites not photographs but viewers' encounters with them. Punctum could be almost anything as long as it has a capacity that hits the viewer, but normally it would be details that "in a certain fashion, to give myself up"(Barthes, 43). Though it is a concept applied in photography, by examining Walter Benjamin's essay "1900", we may find the existence of the elements similar to "punctums", and the connections between the critical elements with the author's spiritual world.
Through Benjamin's poetic topographical map, the city’s sites, such as the Victory Column, Tiergarten, and the street corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner, gain a new life in "1900". Benjamin's wistful and regretful feelings for the metropolitan symbols readily leads critics to associate him with the French poet Baudelaire, who was filled with bittersweet passion for the city of Paris. However, the subtle emotions within Benjamin is qualitatively different from the sentiment of Baudelaire who loitered along streets in Paris. As an urban observer and analysist of pedestrians, Baudelaire was full of passion evoked by the modernity of the city, as Benjamin points out in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire", "The masses were an agitated veil, and Baudelaire views Paris through this veil."(323) In the poem "To A Woman Passing By", Baudelaire writes, "A lighting-flash — then darkness! Fleeting chance/ Whose look was my rebirth — a single glance! /Through endless time shall I not meet with you?"(Baudelaire, 177) This is his melancholy, a melancholy that has a fleeting nature and the embrace to the nature. Oojf[d voooOOn "Le Jeu" [The Game], another poem of Baudelaire, Benjamin comments, "The motif he treats in his night piece is integral to his view of modernity, and writing this poem formed part of his mission." (Benjamin, 330) By contrast, the melancholy of Benjamin is more absolute or, precisely speaking, more desperate. Dedicated to fathoming the subtle meaning of fleeting moments, Benjamin tries to capture eternal value of the ephemerality, and those sporadic inspirations that he tempts to invoke become the "punctums", which are the essences of his essay.
A typical kind of punctum is the unexpected connection between random childhood memories and serious philosophic thinking. In the section called "The Sock", Benjamin exquisitely portrays the pleasure of finding socks in the deepest corners of the cabinet. The socks were rolled up inside each other in pairs, looking like small pockets, and Benjamin describes putting his hand into the depths as he "made certain that I possessed the stretchable woolen mass".(374) Afterwards, he would pull out the rolled "presents" from the woolen pocket and draw it closer to him until something that dismayed him happened. "I had brought out 'the present', but 'the pocket' in which it had lain was no longer there.' " This incident inspired Benjamin to recognize that content and form, like the encased and the package, are in fact one. "It led me to draw the truth from worked of literature as warily as the child's hand retrieved the sock from 'the pocket'." By connecting early memories to the present life, Benjamin recycles the temporality of the past and turns it into part of his eternal philosophy that retains in his texts.
Through "1900", Benjamin liberates his stranded senses of childhood atmosphere which had almost faded away along with those destructed buildings. In "The Butterfly", Benjamin depicts the experience of butterfly hunting during his boyhood with mixed feelings. His mind was occupied by both the affection toward beauty and the pity for its inevitable loss. The more he deplored about its death, the more he found this sentiment indescribably splendid and delicate. Meanwhile, Benjamin groped the old law of the hunters to capture a butterfly - "that every quiver or palpitation of the wings I burned for grazed me with its puff and ripple."(351) His combination of himself with prey in heart and soul made everything with the butterfly take on the color of human volition, "...and in the end it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human existence." Reflecting on this anecdote in childhood, Benjamin deduces that man and nature are innately connected, and this Interdependent relationship lead humans to the process of imitating the nature, assimilating with it, and regressing from it. The "price" that he paid from the "foreign language in which the butterfly had come to understanding before his eye" was the precept, that language is like the prey, and one needs first "become" it before capturing it. The combination of language and spirit makes language more than a tool for communicating ideas. Benjamin's Proustian nostalgia to the old times, along with its disintegration to current reflections, causes another type of punctum.
"For punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also the cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)". (Barthes, 26-27) The third type of punctum in Benjamin's essay is the prophetic symptoms that remind readers of the situation in the present. Among all the merry personal childhood stories, the rarely revealed fear readily becomes the third type of punctum. In "1900", Benjamine mentions burglary twice, however, instead of condemning the crime, he wants to retrospect the vulnerability and ignorance in his childhood, when he was a sensitive child in need of adults' protection. In the section "A Ghost", he recalls one example of the protection from his parents, "A large band of thieves was said to have slipped in during the hose..... Leaving my parents to await the sunrise at my window, in the vain hope of sending signals to the street." (Benjamin, 377) In "The Telephone", Benjamin describes a plot that the telephone rang between two and three in the afternoon, "menaced not only my parents' midday nap but the historical era that underwrote and enveloped this siesta" (Benjamin, 350). the breathtaking ring which sounded like alarms, seemed to be a metaphor implying that it was time to stop indulging in old dreams.
Around 1900, before World War I, Berlin was in the process of rapid industrialization, and European bourgeois life was secure in a perhaps over-confident atmosphere of comfort. After the Franco-Prussian War, Imperial Germany was in fast rising period, and had not been suffered from World War. Most of the citizens were filled with confidence in the future, therefor they developed a highly aggressive and privileged attitude. Instinctively concerned about the unicity of the spirit, Benjamin discloses his fear particularly through "Two Brass Bands". At the beginning he writes, "No subsequent music has ever had such an inhuman, brazen quality as that played by the military band... Today I understand what made for the violence of that flow." (377) Benjamin believed that the violence of the uniform militarism would be much greater than the unknown criminals who broke into their home. If the unfortunate accidents in the early years of Benjamin's life were merely exceptions, what the "inhuman, brazen" music had brought to people, is a whole era of disasters.
Soon after, as Nazi came to power, Benjamin's premonition became reality, which contributed to the unspeakable despair in his essays. In the preface he writes, "In 1932, when I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to thee city of my birth."(Benjamin, 344) While writing this essay in Italy in 1932, he felt he might never again see the city of his childhood. With great changes of the reality, the old Berlin in people's mind soon became obsolete memories washed by time tide. As Benjamin stressed in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire", "Such is our past. It is vain to seek to evoke it. All the efforts of our intelligence are useless."
Benjamin is not simply recalling memories, but also implicitly regarding the wrting as an escape from the gloomy reality postwar, when the formerly splendid Tiergarten was inevitably immersed in the hustle and bustle. The deeper Benjamin's intimacy with and affection was to his birthplace and the more gentlly he describes Berlin, the more fatally he was hit by its cruel reality. Struck by despair, in 1940, Benjamin committed suicide at the border of France and Spain by overdosing morphine, thus left the incompatible reality.
In "Mummerehlen", Benjamin has showed the sign of his confrontation with the twisted world, when he complained about an unpleasant experience of behaving passively, "Not those that made me similar to well-behaved children but those that made me similar to dwelling places, furniture, clothes. ...... Like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me" (374) Nevertheless, this very initiative "punctum" turned to be a melody in the silence, like Benjamin's imagination of calling his fictional fairy "Mummerhlen" to come and save him, "It had, quite possibly, almost no voice. Its gaze spilled out from the irresolute flakes of the first snow. Had that gaze fallen on me a single time, I would have remained comforted my whole life long."(375) The previous ephemeral past, as displayed in his essay, had been living with him until the end of his life, which fulfills his willing to capture the eternal within it. Just like Benjamin's meditation on the past, his life is also memorialized by descendants , as Hannah Arendt's poem "W.B" (Arendt, 163) says,
Out of the darkness sound softly,
Small archaic melodies, listening.
Let us wean ourselves away,
Let us at last break ranks.
Memory sometimes is more like a beam of artificial light, which illuminates all the clues along the most subtle patterns, twinkles the other memories with similar qualities. Although the evoked memories no longer retain the original continuity, at the recall they are endowed with new meanings and thus gained the necessity to be inherited.
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. For Love of the World
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida
Benjamin, Walter. "On some Motifs in Baudelaire." "Berlin Childhood Around 1900"
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings
Baudelaire, Charles. The flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen: poems
Berlin Childhood around 1900的评论
4
提示: 有关键情节透露
The Perdurability of Ephemerality (first version)
Examining the "punctums" in Benjamin's "Berlin Childhood Around 1900"
"(Punctum) is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. "(26)
--Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
In "Berlin Childhood Around 1900", Walter Benjamin, the literary critic and archaeologist of urban history, depicts his rich impressions of the German capital at the turn of the century through sophisticated methods of metaphor and allegory. On one hand, Benjamin’s smooth and gentle tone avoids revealing any sentiment that might damage the aesthetic sense of the scenes he depicts. On the other hand, his delicate touches presents each of the thirty sections in the form of a photography with certain "punctums" that "prick" its readers.
Punctum, a Latin term meaning puncture or wound, is introduced by Roland Barthes in his short book Camera Lucida, to describe how he feels touched by certain photographs, because of incidental details which trigger emotionally charged personal associations, unrelated to the meaning of photographs as culturally determined. Influenced by phenomenology, this book investigates the essence that unites not photographs but viewers' encounters with them. Punctum could be almost anything as long as it has a capacity that hits the viewer, but normally it would be details that "in a certain fashion, to give myself up"(Barthes, 43). Though it is a concept applied in photography, by examining Walter Benjamin's essay "1900", we may find the existence of the elements similar to "punctums", and the connections between the critical elements with the author's spiritual world.
Through Benjamin's poetic topographical map, the city’s sites, such as the Victory Column, Tiergarten, and the street corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner, gain a new life in "1900". Benjamin's wistful and regretful feelings for the metropolitan symbols readily leads critics to associate him with the French poet Baudelaire, who was filled with bittersweet passion for the city of Paris. However, the subtle emotions within Benjamin is qualitatively different from the sentiment of Baudelaire who loitered along streets in Paris. As an urban observer and analysist of pedestrians, Baudelaire was full of passion evoked by the modernity of the city, as Benjamin points out in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire", "The masses were an agitated veil, and Baudelaire views Paris through this veil."(323) In the poem "To A Woman Passing By", Baudelaire writes, "A lighting-flash — then darkness! Fleeting chance/ Whose look was my rebirth — a single glance! /Through endless time shall I not meet with you?"(Baudelaire, 177) This is his melancholy, a melancholy that has a fleeting nature and the embrace to the nature. Oojf[d voooOOn "Le Jeu" [The Game], another poem of Baudelaire, Benjamin comments, "The motif he treats in his night piece is integral to his view of modernity, and writing this poem formed part of his mission." (Benjamin, 330) By contrast, the melancholy of Benjamin is more absolute or, precisely speaking, more desperate. Dedicated to fathoming the subtle meaning of fleeting moments, Benjamin tries to capture eternal value of the ephemerality, and those sporadic inspirations that he tempts to invoke become the "punctums", which are the essences of his essay.
A typical kind of punctum is the unexpected connection between random childhood memories and serious philosophic thinking. In the section called "The Sock", Benjamin exquisitely portrays the pleasure of finding socks in the deepest corners of the cabinet. The socks were rolled up inside each other in pairs, looking like small pockets, and Benjamin describes putting his hand into the depths as he "made certain that I possessed the stretchable woolen mass".(374) Afterwards, he would pull out the rolled "presents" from the woolen pocket and draw it closer to him until something that dismayed him happened. "I had brought out 'the present', but 'the pocket' in which it had lain was no longer there.' " This incident inspired Benjamin to recognize that content and form, like the encased and the package, are in fact one. "It led me to draw the truth from worked of literature as warily as the child's hand retrieved the sock from 'the pocket'." By connecting early memories to the present life, Benjamin recycles the temporality of the past and turns it into part of his eternal philosophy that retains in his texts.
Through "1900", Benjamin liberates his stranded senses of childhood atmosphere which had almost faded away along with those destructed buildings. In "The Butterfly", Benjamin depicts the experience of butterfly hunting during his boyhood with mixed feelings. His mind was occupied by both the affection toward beauty and the pity for its inevitable loss. The more he deplored about its death, the more he found this sentiment indescribably splendid and delicate. Meanwhile, Benjamin groped the old law of the hunters to capture a butterfly - "that every quiver or palpitation of the wings I burned for grazed me with its puff and ripple."(351) His combination of himself with prey in heart and soul made everything with the butterfly take on the color of human volition, "...and in the end it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human existence." Reflecting on this anecdote in childhood, Benjamin deduces that man and nature are innately connected, and this Interdependent relationship lead humans to the process of imitating the nature, assimilating with it, and regressing from it. The "price" that he paid from the "foreign language in which the butterfly had come to understanding before his eye" was the precept, that language is like the prey, and one needs first "become" it before capturing it. The combination of language and spirit makes language more than a tool for communicating ideas. Benjamin's Proustian nostalgia to the old times, along with its disintegration to current reflections, causes another type of punctum.
"For punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also the cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)". (Barthes, 26-27) The third type of punctum in Benjamin's essay is the prophetic symptoms that remind readers of the situation in the present. Among all the merry personal childhood stories, the rarely revealed fear readily becomes the third type of punctum. In "1900", Benjamine mentions burglary twice, however, instead of condemning the crime, he wants to retrospect the vulnerability and ignorance in his childhood, when he was a sensitive child in need of adults' protection. In the section "A Ghost", he recalls one example of the protection from his parents, "A large band of thieves was said to have slipped in during the hose..... Leaving my parents to await the sunrise at my window, in the vain hope of sending signals to the street." (Benjamin, 377) In "The Telephone", Benjamin describes a plot that the telephone rang between two and three in the afternoon, "menaced not only my parents' midday nap but the historical era that underwrote and enveloped this siesta" (Benjamin, 350). the breathtaking ring which sounded like alarms, seemed to be a metaphor implying that it was time to stop indulging in old dreams.
Around 1900, before World War I, Berlin was in the process of rapid industrialization, and European bourgeois life was secure in a perhaps over-confident atmosphere of comfort. After the Franco-Prussian War, Imperial Germany was in fast rising period, and had not been suffered from World War. Most of the citizens were filled with confidence in the future, therefor they developed a highly aggressive and privileged attitude. Instinctively concerned about the unicity of the spirit, Benjamin discloses his fear particularly through "Two Brass Bands". At the beginning he writes, "No subsequent music has ever had such an inhuman, brazen quality as that played by the military band... Today I understand what made for the violence of that flow." (377) Benjamin believed that the violence of the uniform militarism would be much greater than the unknown criminals who broke into their home. If the unfortunate accidents in the early years of Benjamin's life were merely exceptions, what the "inhuman, brazen" music had brought to people, is a whole era of disasters.
Soon after, as Nazi came to power, Benjamin's premonition became reality, which contributed to the unspeakable despair in his essays. In the preface he writes, "In 1932, when I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to thee city of my birth."(Benjamin, 344) While writing this essay in Italy in 1932, he felt he might never again see the city of his childhood. With great changes of the reality, the old Berlin in people's mind soon became obsolete memories washed by time tide. As Benjamin stressed in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire", "Such is our past. It is vain to seek to evoke it. All the efforts of our intelligence are useless."
Benjamin is not simply recalling memories, but also implicitly regarding the wrting as an escape from the gloomy reality postwar, when the formerly splendid Tiergarten was inevitably immersed in the hustle and bustle. The deeper Benjamin's intimacy with and affection was to his birthplace and the more gentlly he describes Berlin, the more fatally he was hit by its cruel reality. Struck by despair, in 1940, Benjamin committed suicide at the border of France and Spain by overdosing morphine, thus left the incompatible reality.
In "Mummerehlen", Benjamin has showed the sign of his confrontation with the twisted world, when he complained about an unpleasant experience of behaving passively, "Not those that made me similar to well-behaved children but those that made me similar to dwelling places, furniture, clothes. ...... Like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me" (374) Nevertheless, this very initiative "punctum" turned to be a melody in the silence, like Benjamin's imagination of calling his fictional fairy "Mummerhlen" to come and save him, "It had, quite possibly, almost no voice. Its gaze spilled out from the irresolute flakes of the first snow. Had that gaze fallen on me a single time, I would have remained comforted my whole life long."(375) The previous ephemeral past, as displayed in his essay, had been living with him until the end of his life, which fulfills his willing to capture the eternal within it. Just like Benjamin's meditation on the past, his life is also memorialized by descendants , as Hannah Arendt's poem "W.B" (Arendt, 163) says,
Out of the darkness sound softly,
Small archaic melodies, listening.
Let us wean ourselves away,
Let us at last break ranks.
Memory sometimes is more like a beam of artificial light, which illuminates all the clues along the most subtle patterns, twinkles the other memories with similar qualities. Although the evoked memories no longer retain the original continuity, at the recall they are endowed with new meanings and thus gained the necessity to be inherited.
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. For Love of the World
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida
Benjamin, Walter. "On some Motifs in Baudelaire." "Berlin Childhood Around 1900"
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings
Baudelaire, Charles. The flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen: poems
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> Berlin Childhood around 1900
作者: Walter Benjamin
isbn: 067402222X
书名: Berlin Childhood around 1900
页数: 192
译者: Eiland, Howard
定价: CAD 16.50
出版社: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
装帧: Paperback
出版年: 2006-05-30
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