From Walter Benjamin’s “Theses On the Concept of History”: Theses V and IX

Question for the Class:

Why do these parables/ideas about the meaning of History relate to Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin?

Thesis V:

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.

 

Thesis IX:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

 

Coll IMJ,  photo (c) IMJ

Why do these parables/ideas about the meaning of History relate to Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin?

Walter Pater, “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame”

Hows does Pater’s foundational manifesto for Aestheticism resonate with Woolf’s Mrs.  Dalloway and Clarissa’s “exquisite moment” with Sally Seton?

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Walter Pater, Conclusion to The Renaissance (1873)

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. [236/237]

 

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Lori’s Post

As discussed in class, one of the precepts of the modernist tradition is in making the small big. In Mrs. Dalloway, we get this in the physical book itself: one day is stretched across two hundred pages of a fully formed novel. This aesthetic of magnification applies to the story’s characters as well. When Clarissa ascends the stairs to her attic room, she does so “like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower” (Woolf, 31).  Instead of being confined to Clarissa’s world, we discover fragments from other worlds as well: the nun in her convent, and the child in the tower.  While Clarissa mends her green dress, her thoughts wander and the motions of her needle and thread become waves rolling on a beach during a summer’s day (Woolf, 46).  When she and Peter sit side-by-side on the sofa, “horses paw the ground; toss their heads” and “the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve” (Woolf, 44).  Clarissa gets up from the sofa, and she moves “as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera glasses, and gets up to go out of the theater into the street” (47). The physical realm does not dictate the psychological landscape. Leaning in for a kiss does not make Clarissa think to herself that she’s nervous or feel her heart flutter. Instead it gives a fugitive glimpse of “plumes like pampas grass in a tropic gale,” (Wool, 46).  The character’s internal worlds are vast and innumerable, and in some ways more expansive than the physical realm. Because the outside world is relatively large compared to our bodies, it is easy to think of us as small and finite. However, Woolf shows that our minds cover a much broader scope, and individuals hold within themselves their own universe.

– Lori