Category Archives: 1920s

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

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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?

Narrator or Author

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In our last class we discussed the line that exists between the author and the narrator. The narrator of a story is just another character of the novel. All the opinions and thoughts expressed by the narrator do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the author. This was one of the critics expressed by Du Bois for Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. Thurman’s narrator would both criticize Emma Lou, while at the same time express her thoughts, almost always self-hating, as his/her own opinions.  In these instances it can be difficult to distinguish the author from the narrator. Had the novel been in the first person point of view, from Emma Lou’s perspective, there would not have been any accusations towards Thurman. Another example provided in class was Nabokov’s famous work, Lolita. In this case as well, the narrator, who also happens to be the main character, is often confused for the author. This caused Nabokov a lot of problems as well as creating a lot of controversy.

This brings me to The Berlin Stories. In this case the author and the narrator both share the same name and a lot of other similarities, including the experiences mentioned in the novel. Since the work is fiction, are we as the readers supposed to separate the author or from the narrator? This is made very difficult with the fact that they both share a name.

Something else I found very interesting was the fact that this is the first piece or writing that has the average man as the storyteller. Stories such as The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men have this same man. In The Great Gatsby the main character is Gatsby, but the narrator, who is also a character in the story, is Nick Carraway and in All the King’s Men, the story is about Willie Stark but the story is told by Jack Burden. Up until now, we have only had an unknown, invisible character as the narrator. This is the first instance of a character being a vessel to tell the stories of other people, such as Sally Bowles. The Berlin Stories, were published in 1945, maybe this technique is a more recent development.

Staring

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Deemed a “monstrosity” (192) by his own mother, Alva Junior is an unfortunate, misshapen creature, with “a shrunken left arm and a deformed left foot.” (192). Even the narrator refers to Alva Junior as an “it” (192), rather than using the more humanizing pronoun “he.” Alva Junior is presented as an object, a product of the shallow, loveless union between Alva and Geraldine. To further develop Alva Junior’s role as an object, the child is completely static and lifeless, for “it neither talked or walked.” He is both figuratively and literally a burden and for people who place such a premium on physical appearance, Alva Junior  is a cruel and ironic existence– a bad joke with “thick grinning lips” (192). If Alva Junior has inherited anything from his parents, its is  perhaps his “insanely large and vacant eyes” (192), for that empty gaze is reminiscent of how Alva, Geraldine (and perhaps their peers) live: forever fixated on someone’s appearance and the color of the color of his or her skin.

Let us now turn to Alva Junior and Emma Lou. As readers, we can’t help but shake our heads in disapproval when she decides to return to Alva Senior. She takes responsibility of Alva Junior, and under her care, manages “to make little Alva Junior take on some of the physical aspects of a normal child” (208). At first glance, he seems to be getting better, yet the one thing that doesn’t change is “his abnormally large eyes” which “still retained their insane stare” and “appeared frozen and terrified as if their owner was gazing upon some horrible yet fascinating object or occurrence” (208). What is the “horrible yet fascinating object” that the child is looking at? Emma Lou? His father? The society that he will have to grow up in? If children are the future, than the future seems to be portrayed as horribly grotesque.

We can explore another dimension to Alva Jr’s symbolism if we agree that Alva Junior is a caricature of Black society and its obsession with skin tone (as discussed in the first paragraph). If this true, then can’t we also say that his relationship with Emma Lou is metaphorical of her relationship with the rest of society? Her decision to stay with Alava Junior is in a way self destructive because although she “loved to fondle [Alva Junior’s] warm, mellow-colored body, loved to caress his little crooked limbs” (211),  her actions and affections place her in the stereotypical role of “a black mammy,” something that she even admits to on page 218. This is perhaps analogous to the catch 22 of wanting to be part of a system that will only spurn and marginalize you in the end.

Internalized Racism in The Blacker the Berry

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We talked in our last class about W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of the “Talented Tenth,” and how, as unfair as it may be, it is the talented tenth’s responsibility to uplift African Americans. Wallace Thurman’s characters in The Blacker the Berry seem to believe in a similar ideal, except they have interpreted the talented tenth as becoming as white as possible, to ingratiate themselves into white culture instead of to fight for racial equality. Emma Lou’s own family motto reflects that:

“Whiter and whiter every generation. The nearer white you are the more white people will respect you. Therefore all light Negroes marry light Negroes. Continue to do so generation after generation, and eventually white people will accept this racially bastard aristocracy, thus enabling those Negroes who really matter to escape the social and economic inferiority of the American Negro.” (37)

Naturally, by believing that black people should strive to be whiter in order to be respectable, black people themselves must believe that they are inferior. At one point, Emma Lou refers to her African heritage as “primitive” (44). The extent of the internalized racism is actually astounding. The black community has not only established hierarchies based off of the darkness of one’s skin color (as well as where a person is from, as we see in Emma Lou’s treatment of Hazel Mason), but also treats it like religious dogma. Even amongst college-educated people, the lighter a woman’s skin, the more desirable a woman is as a romantic partner/spouse because, as white society has instilled in everyone, light skin screams intelligence and respectability, while dark skin does just the opposite.