“If sleep, as many maintain, is not only a physical need of the organism, but also a compulsion from the unconscious that acts on consciousness — causing it to leave the scene to make room for drives and images — then perhaps the weariness that overtook me had more to say than it normally would in a southern Italian mountain town at noon. Be that as it may, I dreamt, I know I dreamt the name. But not as it had stood before me yesterday, undiscovered in the stone; it had been abducted into a different realm — elevated, disenchanted, and elucidated all at once — and amid the intertwining grasses, foliage, and flowers, the letters, which in those days made my heart beat most painfully, swayed and quivered their way over to me. When I awoke it was after eight. It was time to eat dinner and broach the question of how the rest of the evening should be spent. My hours of napping forbade me from finishing the day early, and a lack of money and inclination prohibited me from seeking out adventures. After a few hundred indecisive steps, I came upon an open piazza, the Campo. It was getting dark. Children were still playing around the fountains. This piazza, forbidden to vehicles, was no longer a meeting place, only a marketplace; it had found its purpose as the great stone bathing area and playground for children. Which is why it was also a favorite location for carts selling sweets, peanuts, and melon, two or three of which were still gathered on the piazza and starting to light their torches. A blinking light escaped from the circle of idlers and children who had gathered around the one nearest me. Upon approach, I could make out brass instruments. I am an observant stroller. What will or what hidden wish had forbidden me to notice what could not have eluded the attention of even the most distracted? In this street, at whose entrance I now found myself again, without having expected it, something was afoot. The silk mats hanging from the windows were not drying laundry, after all, and how could I have thought that the old style of lighting would survive here and yet nowhere else in the country? The music got under way, penetrating into the street, which quickly filled with people. It now became apparent that wealth, where it brushes up against the poor, makes it even more difficult for them to enjoy what is theirs: the torches and candlelight clashed with the yellow circles of light cast by the arc lamps across the pavement and exterior walls of the houses. I was the last to join the throng. All these preparations had been made to receive the procession before a church. Paper lanterns and light bulbs stood intimately side by side, and the dense band of the faithful detached from the celebrating masses in their wake, disappearing through the curtain folds that shrouded the open portal.
“I had paused a distance from the heart of this red and green glow. The people now packing the streets were hardly a colorless mass. It was the clearly defined, closely related population of the local neighborhood; because it was a petit-bourgeois community, there was no one from the upper classes present, let alone any foreigners. As I stood by the wall, I should surely have been conspicuous due to my clothing and general appearance. But strangely, no one paid me any heed. Did no one notice me, or did the man who was lost within this scorching and singing street, the man I more and more became, appear to them as one of their own? This thought filled me with pride; I was overcome with delight. I didn’t enter the church; content merely to enjoy the profane part of the festivities, I was heading back with the first satiated participants, long before the overtired children would do the same, when I caught sight of some marble plaques, the kind with which the poor towns of this region put the rest of the world’s street signs to shame. They were drenched in torchlight, appearing to be on fire themselves. However, crisp and glowing letters emanated from their centers, newly forming the name, which, mutating from stone into flowers, from flowers into fire, grabbed at me with increasing, all-consuming intensity. Firmly determined to get home, I set forth and was happy to find a little alley that promised to shorten my route considerably. Signs of life had already subsided. The main street, where my hotel was located and which was still so lively just a short while before, seemed not only quieter, but narrower as well. While I was still musing on the laws that dictate such couplings of phonetic and optical images, a distant and powerful music struck my ears. Upon hearing the first notes, suddenly I was struck: here it comes! That is why so few people, so few of the bourgeoisie, were in the street. This is the great evening concert of V…, for which the local residents gather every Saturday. All at once, a new expanded city, indeed a richer and more animated city history, stood before my eyes. I quickened my pace, turned a corner and stopped, paralyzed with astonishment. Once again I stood in that street that had snatched me up as if with a lasso. It was already pitch dark, and the music band was offering its last forgotten melody to this tardy and solitary listener.”
Here my friend broke off. His story seemed suddenly to desert him. His lips alone, which had just now spoken, offered a long smile in farewell. I looked reflectively upon the signs blurred in the dust at our feet. And the imperishable verse marched through the arch of this story as if through a gate.
“Dem Staub, dem beweglichen, eingezeichnet, Novelle,” GS, 4.2, 780–7. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, December 16, 1929. The broadcast was announced in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung for December 16, 1929, from 6:35–7:00 pm.
1 Benjamin borrows the title from Goethe’s poem, “Nicht mehr auf Seidenblatt” [No longer on a leaf of silk], a verse posthumously added to the West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan), “Book of Suleika.” Benjamin refers to this verse in “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” where he calls it “perhaps the most powerful poem in the Divan” (SW, 1, 329; GS, 1.1, 167).
CHAPTER 34. E. T. A. Hoffmann and Oskar Panizza
I would be delighted if the series “Parallels,” whose announcement you will have read and which I am hereby inaugurating, has aroused suspicion in a few of you.1 It is precisely because of this suspicion, I would like to suppose, that I have a chance of being understood in my attempt to keep this endeavor free of misinterpretation. You all know of the suspect eagerness with which an earlier contemplation of literature often concealed its bafflement at certain works, its inability to penetrate their structure and their meaning, how it hid behind research into so-called influences, into parallels between subject matter or form. Nothing of the sort will be dealt with here. Yet a pointless hunt for analogies would be even worse. To point out some affinities between the creations of various writers, from various epochs, may at most satisfy a pedantic anxiety to improve one’s mind, but it leads nowhere and would not be sufficiently accredited — even if in such instances now and then a younger, misjudged writer is rehabilitated by the name of a great and intellectually compatible predecessor. We do not wish to deny that such a rehabilitation of Oskar Panizza, as unknown as he is discredited, is a secondary aim of these observations. But here, at the beginning not only of these observations but of an entire series, we shall deal primarily with identifying its main intention, and to this end we must allow ourselves a little digression.
One likes to speak of the eternity of works of art; one strives to grant the greatest among them endurance and authority for centuries, without realizing how one thus runs the risk of letting them ossify into museum-like copies of themselves. Because, to say it in a word, the so-called eternity of works of art is by no means identical to their vital endurance. And what reason there truthfully is for this endurance is most prominently to be seen in their confrontation with similar creations from our own epoch. Then it becomes clear that only certain unformed tendencies or vague dispositions can be called eternal, and that the work that has a fully-formed, vital endurance, is instead the product of that tenacious, sly force with which not only the eternal moments assert themselves into the current moments, but the current ones assert themselves in the eternal. Yes, the work of art is much less the product than the setting of such a movement. And while its so-called eternity is at best a rigid, exterior continuation, its endurance is a vital, interior process. That is why, as we look at these parallels, we are dealing not with analogies, nor dependencies of individual works on one another, nor studies of the writers, but rather with the primal tendencies of literature itself, and how they assert themselves from epoch to epoch in an inwardly transformed sense.