One must begin, as Susan Sontag did in her great essay ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’, by looking at photographs of the man. This is because, despite our curiosity and ardent interest, we know relatively little about him, and the little we know is too familiar. So we go back to the man himself, to the likeness – as we sometimes study the faces of those whose lives were interrupted early, to see what they can tell us. Sontag notes that Benjamin, in 1927, at the age of thirty-five, is, with his ‘high forehead’ and ‘mustache above a full lower lip’, ‘youthful, almost handsome’. His head is lowered in this picture, and ‘the downward look through his glasses – the soft, daydreamer’s gaze of the myopic – seems to float’, believes Sontag, ‘off to the lower left of the photograph’. In a picture taken after about ten years, though, Sontag finds ‘no trace of youth or handsomeness… The look is opaque, or just more inward: he could be thinking… or listening… There are books behind his head.’
Two things strike a chord in Sontag’s summation, although it takes a long time to grasp what they are. The first is the portrait of the intellectual – in this case, Walter Benjamin – as contemporary, and contemporaneousness being a quality (bestowed on him by death) at once tragic and optimistic. Despite losing his ‘youth’ and ‘handsomeness’, Benjamin will never grow old, and we are always subliminally aware of this: Benjamin, thus, never forfeits his curious unworldliness – he never settles into success or hardens into conservatism, never disintegrates into infirmity or dependence. This contemporaneousness, achieved through both the texture of the work and the arc of the life, is the essence of the photographs, and gives Benjamin, despite – or because of – his strange life, his anomalous, friend-like status in our imaginations. It makes this, in many ways, difficult and complex writer seem oddly accessible.
This brings me to the second thing that Sontag notices almost inadvertently: the recognizability proffered by the photographs. Sontag does not approach the man in them as if he were a stranger; instead, she speaks of him with intimacy. This note of intimacy allows her to draw the portrait within the essay, which elaborates upon a single remark that Benjamin made about himself: ‘I came into the world under the sign of Saturn – the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays…’ Benjamin’s ‘melancholic self-awareness’, ironically fortified by his fatalism, draws Sontag out, in this connection, on ‘his phantasmagorical, shrewd, subtle relation to cities’, on his famous flânerie, as a theory and a practice, and even on his ‘slowness’, his ‘blundering’, his ‘stubbornness’:
Slowness is one characteristic of the melancholic temperament. Blundering is another, from noticing too many possibilities, from not noticing one’s lack of practical sense. And stubbornness, from the longing to be superior – on one’s own terms.
In this way, Benjamin is turned, by Sontag, into a familial figure, an obscure relative whom one had largely studied from a distance, and, somewhat peremptorily, thought one knew. There might be a reason for this sense of curiosity and recognition; Benjamin might belong to a family that many of us have a relationship to.
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When I look at Benjamin’s photographs, I realize now that I, too, experience that sense of recognizability – which Sontag builds her argument around, and uses to her advantage, but does not explain: so subtle and integrated into the personal, into memory, is that register of affinity. When I look at Benjamin’s face, for instance, I realize that I do not see, first and foremost, a ‘Western’ man; I see someone familiar, someone who could also have been a Bengali living at any time between the end of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries. Certainly, the ‘high forehead’ and the ‘mustache above a full lower lip’, and especially the ‘soft, daydreamer’s gaze of the myopic’, the features characterized not by nationality or caste but by introspection, gentility, and the privileges of childhood, mark him out as a bhadralok – the Bengali word for the indigenous, frequently bespectacled bourgeoisie that emerged (mainly in Calcutta; but also in the small towns of Bengal) in the nineteenth century. The bhadralok boy was born to well-being and maternal affection, but well-being is not the only connotation of the word: it could denote anything from well-to-do to hand-to-mouth. Almost the only assured possession of the bhadralok was, in lieu of property (since the bhadralok often also comprised East Bengali migrants settled in Calcutta) what Pierre Bourdieu misleadingly called ‘cultural capital’, made material, commonly, in a collection of books (‘There are books behind his head’). I say ‘misleading’ of Bourdieu’s term because it misses the often self-defeating romance, the fantasy, of bhadralok pedagogy, learning, and autodidacticism, circulating as these are in a milieu of subjugation, migration, and colonial history; it misses, too, the self-fashioning elitism and extravagance of the imaginary world of the bhadralok, often amassing cultural capital in a context of mofussil or small-town marginality, while at the same time exceeding that context. No one has formulated better than Benjamin the peculiar poetic resonance of the relationship of ‘cultural capital’ to marginality and imaginative extravagance. Thus, in the syntax of the following sentence from ‘Unpacking My Library’, the verb, which denotes performance, action, and imagination (in this case, the verb is ‘collecting’) is given a greater weight than the noun, which is commonly at one with identity, self, and the source (the noun is ‘collection’): ‘my heart is set on giving you a sense of the collector’s relationship to his possessions, something of an understanding of collecting rather than of a collection’. Not so much an ideal or an aim, but a form of daydreaming is being anatomized here. Culture, daydreaming, and the imagination become interchangeable for both the bhadralok and the Jew, for those who are placed just outside of the mainstream of twentieth-century Western history: ‘Of all the ways of getting hold of books, the most laudable is deemed to be writing them yourself.’
What is it that makes Benjamin, for me, so familiar? What is it that converges in the face of a certain kind of Bengali and Jewish bourgeois, a face that is now, to all purposes, a relic? It is a current of history that shaped the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries everywhere, and brought a particular kind of individual – putatively, the ‘modern’ – into existence. The face of the ‘modern’ belongs to someone who is secular, probably deracinated, and whose face, in place of the old patrician certainties of class, caste, and standing, possesses a new expression of inwardness; the glasses add to the refractedness of the expression. It is a face that inhabits a world in which various cultures are suddenly in contact with one another, and it is a product of that contact; but its inwardness refutes any easy formula – internationalism, miscegenation, hybridity – for how that contact takes place. Both Benjamin’s and the bhadralok’s face, with their look of introspection and contemporaneity, conceal something: in Benjamin’s case, the shame of Jewishness; in the Bengali’s, the disgrace of colonial subjugation. This is what makes the secular Bengali, the secular Jew, political: his or her angularity in relationship to the mainstream. But, unlike today’s post-colonial or proponent of identity politics, the bhadralok is unsure of his own identity: confronting world history has displaced him from his lineage, and his politics extends to a critique of his forebears. Many of us know what it means to occupy such a position, or to emerge from a tradition of individualism, of modernity, inflected by minority; and of minority not being a political certitude, but an experience of ambivalence. This is what makes Benjamin’s face, and its pensiveness, recognizable to us; for a large number of twentieth-century moderns belong to, or are a progeny of, that peculiar, nomadic family. Even Sontag – a Jew, a lesbian – is shaped by world culture in such a way as to permanently complicate, for her, simple affiliations of race and sexuality, and to force her to constantly reinterpret minority; in the end, for the modern, ambivalence becomes identity, and modernity a very specific kind of problem.
What kind of problem is Benjamin pondering in these photographs? I think it is the problem of constructing tradition – his very special approach to which makes him unique in the annals of modernism, as well as integrally a part of it, and also makes him continually resonate for us. That war, capitalism, industrialization, and technology destroyed the unity, the presence, of the European past is a well-worn myth; so, too, is the consequent myth supporting the modernist aesthetic, of revisiting the past, or only being able to revisit it, through the fragment and the moment; to privilege that inheritance less, in a sense, than the talismanic bits and pieces through which it would henceforth be useful – thus, Eliot’s simultaneously resigned but assertive admission in The Waste Land about shoring fragments against ruins. Benjamin himself explored this nostalgia in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: ‘We can say: what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced by technological means is its aura.’
This account misses how much of what is inadequately called ‘European culture’ was being reinterpreted, in this unprecedented way – a way that destroyed, in effect, traditional historical narrative – by those who, for reasons of race or religion or gender, had no ‘natural’ proprietorial claim to it: that the mode of disjunctiveness, and the problem of constructing a tradition, was not to do with the onset of industrialization alone, but liminality and disenfranchisement: for, say, Jews, Bengalis, and women, both political disenfranchisement and cultural inadmissibility. And so, for example, in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, the act of perusal, the right to access books (especially in Oxbridge), or, in the case of women, the dismemberment of that right, is directly connected, in an arc, to the act of writing, in a tale of humour and frustration that echoes Benjamin’s ‘Of all the ways of getting hold of books, the most laudable is deemed to be writing them yourself.’ Not only writing them, but, as in the case of Woolf and Benjamin and others, abandoning the safety of a certain mode of telling for disjunctiveness as an entry into a tradition one has no natural right to, but in relationship to which one harbours both a deep kinship and a concealed sense of alienation. ‘The world changed in 1910,’ said Woolf; this is taken to be a reference to many things, including the loosening of sexual mores in Woolf ’s own family; but it could also include a subterranean awareness that the emergence of the disenfranchised ‘other’ – the Jew, the female, the non-Western – was going to be increasingly coterminous with the career of the ‘modern’; and this is one of the principal reasons why, from the prism of modernity, tradition, in a way at once theatrical and exemplary, becomes so difficult to access or even recognize.
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The Romantic stereotype of the artist and the radical – who, in his propensity for wandering and towards exclusion prefigures, in some ways, the flâneur – is, with his exacerbated individualism, visibly ‘different’: ‘flashing eyes… floating hair’. With the modern, a new and deceptive quality emerges worldwide – normalcy – where difference and even radicalism are formative but implied. The gentleman (literally, the bhadralok: ‘civilized person’), the most characteristic face of normalcy, is the product of a complex contemporary history – to do with secularism, but also to do with colonial history, on both sides of the divide – where all sorts of inadmissible intellectual transactions (between languages, between cultures) are taking place within the domain of normalcy and sameness. It is worth recalling that both capitalism and colonialism generated an administrative class that was crucial to governance but which was disallowed real political power; from this class emerge Kafka’s hapless protagonists as well as the doorkeepers who so bewilder and confound them. ‘Sameness’ and ‘normalcy’ become the mode, then, through which the governed and subjugated – let’s say, Jews and Indians – share in governance through this new class, but are also denied absolute power: the ‘world of chancelleries and registries, of stuffy, shabby, gloomy interiors, is Kafka’s world’, says Benjamin. This, too, is the world that Macaulay intended when, in 1835, he spoke of conjuring, in India, ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’; an administrative class, predominant within India at first in Bengal, working away in rooms and creating refracted lives of the mind, and reshaping and relocating its difference under the illusion of the normal and the recognizable. The artists and radicals who are the products of this class and history also conceal their marks of departure and oddity, just as those administrative servants do; a safe and conventional (and secular) respectability is the defining air of the Jewish or bhadralok intellectual – indeed, of the modern – a respectability interrogated from within through both the workings of the imagination and, significantly, of radical difference. Baudelaire’s description of the dandy provides a clue as to how this marginal but recurrent type will proliferate everywhere from the late nineteenth century onwards: ‘the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions’ (my emphasis).
Both the discourse of politeness and the one to do with the artistic or imaginative individual who emerges from the polite classes contain a paradoxical narrative to do with development, impairment, and slowness. Tagore rhetorically exhorts the motherland, Bengal, to reform her genteel progeny: ‘You are content, Mother, for your seventy million children to remain Bengalis, and not turn into men.’ ‘Bengalis’, here, are not being configured as primitives, but quite the opposite: as super-refined, spoiled, genteel children – in the privileged familial world of the colonial bourgeoisie – who haven’t grown up into ‘manhood’; in other words, into self-governance. In this way, the modern is insinuated subtly, and seductively, into a vocabulary of backwardness. And so Benjamin himself draws attention to the sign under which he was born, Saturn, the sign of impediments, expressing, through a mixture of metaphor and superstition, the melancholy not only of the intellectual life but also of minority; so Sontag recognizes in him the subaltern or peasant characteristics of ‘slowness’, ‘blundering’, and ‘stubbornness’; so Benjamin himself admits to his ineptness with objects, his inability, even in adulthood, to make a proper cup of coffee, his lack of mastery of the inanimate world. When writing of Proust, he describes him, revealingly, as a ‘hoary child’; the quote he chooses from Jacques Rivière to comment on Proust’s odd backwardness, his marginality, is instructive, and serves partly as a self-commentary on the scandal, the increasing unacceptability, on many levels, of being a Jewish modern: ‘Marcel Proust died of the same inexperience as enabled him to write his work. He died of unworldliness and because he lacked the understanding to alter living conditions that had begun to crush him. He died because he did not know how to light a fire or open a window.’ It’s a fairly accurate, if figurative, account of the exigencies, as well as the peculiar creative opportunities, of the colonized bourgeoisie.
From somewhere within the interstices of the various themes and languages of development (the avant-garde, for instance, or the colonizing mission) and backwardness (tradition; the ‘primitive’) that comprise modernity comes Benjamin’s indictment of linearity and progress, and his strategic embrace of the backward, the slow. Thus, his famous observation: ‘The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.’ This critique is what gives Benjamin’s work its unresolved, anti-narratorial quality; and it embodies what is characteristic of modernism, but what is insufficiently acknowledged in the canonical versions of that phase – the coming together, as in Benjamin, of the primitive, the barbaric, on the one hand, and the ‘high’ cultural, the ‘European’, on the other, in one mind, one place, one personality, in such a way that, fundamentally for the modern, redefines these terms and oppositions. It is a problematic confluence that brings to civility and gentility their distinctive aura and slowness.
Amit Chaudhuri