Walter Benjamin: Marxism, Allegory and Modernism

In an earlier post, I quoted Theodor Adorno’s dictum that lyric poetry can be read as a “sundial telling the time of history."

The challenge for Marxist and other historicist methods of literary criticism has always been to think through the relation between history on the one hand and literary

When Walter Benjamin was on his way to Marxism (and it’s debatable whether he ever arrived) he wrote a dense and esoteric study of German Baroque Drama, the Trauerspiel. The central motif of the study is a brilliantly eccentric definition of Allegory, as the revelation of history and the historical sense within a specific literary form. 

Allegory for Benjamin presupposes that a sign has broken away from its meaning, that there has been a leakage of significance. The initial meaning has leaked away and therefore the sign or symbol is assigned a different meaning by the allegorist. The example that Benjamin gives is Pagan symbols taken over and recoded by Christian allegorists:

The pantheon of ancient gods, “disconnected from the life-contexts out of which they sprang”, became “dead figures”, standing arbitrarily for the philosophical ideas they has once embodied as living symbols.

Venus/ Aphrodite, for example, once the natural symbol that raised human Eros to the level of divine love, lived on as “Dame World”, the profane allegorical emblem of earthly passion.

Thus, allegorical materials are signs and symbols that have fallen outside their place within a definite Symbolic support system (here, the old pagan world). No longer plugged into their living context, these ruined signs can now be overwritten by a different Symbolic Order (Christianity).

But if Christian allegory is an attempt to recode and ‘contain’ the old gods, their dangerous potency is never entirely extinguished. The exorcism of allegorical re-writing is never complete. Something has escaped, and the allegorist senses this. The

Thus, Allegory recognises a ‘jagged line of demarcation between sign (eg the Pagan objects) and meaning (their true original significance within a particular life-word)’.  What underwrites allegorical signs is the assumption that Meaning – whether that of God or some Other – has withdrawn, leaving only a rubble of cyphers and enigmatic objects. And this leads on the one hand to a sense of melancholy, a preoccupation with the lost inaccessible object, with the labour of interpretation, endlessly deferred, required to bring it into daylight. It involves, it brings with it, an awareness of lost forms of life, the limitations of our own temporal horizon, the time lag between sign and meaning. As a form, allegory is marked by the presence of

Wittgenstein:

There is however, a counterpoint to all this. To recap: the Pagan world leaves in its wake idols, ritualistic objects, symbols of worship, which Christianity, far from discarding, seizes and re-uses, presiding over these dead gods - in all their recalcitrant otherness and antique dignity - with a sovereign interpretative and destructive power. Although the allegorist frequently purports to be discovering some deeper or real meaning, what he or she ends up drawing attention to is the ability of the allegorist to

Thus: on the one hand, an attitude of pensive immersion, a serial movement of sign to sign in search of lost or buried significance; on the other, a heightened awareness of the power to invest and assign meaning, often with wilful caprice.

It is this combination which seems to me the defining feature of a certain strain of modernism, in both literature and philosophy [to be continued].