Cited in the Arcades Project:
“The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly. Many pages in Marivaux or Rousseau contain a mysterious meaning which the first readers of these texts could not fully have deciphered.”
The intriguing suggestion here is that literary texts are ‘historical’ not only because they ‘belong’ to certain times, but because they become readable only at definite times, perhaps awaiting certain historical conditions before their meaning, or some of their meanings, shine through. What is historical here is not just the text, the text entangled in determinate historical conditions, but its conditions of legibility. Successive historical moments are like different optics through which different dimensions of a text are visible. Or perhaps particular authors are only legible at certain historical moments. Suddenly, Blake will seem urgent and necessary, or Swift will suddenly swim into view after years of comparative neglect. And of course, in such moments, it is not just that these authors or these hidden dimensions of a classic are newly readable; their new visibility comes about because they in turn seem to render legible the present moment. History turns a corner and at once John Webster’s concerns with putrefaction and soullessness are our own. The past reads us at the very moment when it becomes visible to us. Hence Walter Benjamin’s image of the lightning flash. The present has no sovereign rights over the past, unable to predict exactly when it will yield its meaning or which meanings it will yield. The present does not simply look at the past with a truth-demanding stare; it is in turn looked at, illuminated, by a gaze and a shaft of light from outside its own orbit.