Adam Wodruff - The Shape of a City

"The Shape of a City":Recollection in Benjamin's"A Berlin Chronicle" and Breton's Nadja

Adam Woodruff

In his essay "A Berlin Chronicle," Walter Benjamin reveals that an un-named source once encouraged him to keep a diary of noteworthy phe-nomena of Berlin, the city of his upbringing, "in a loosely subjectiveform" (305). The task of ordering his recollections in a series of glosses,Benjamin explains, proved more problematic than it had first appeared:

I believed a retrospective glance at what Berlin had becomefor me in the course of years would be an appropriate"preface" to such glosses. If the preface has now far ex-ceeded the space originally allotted to the glosses, this isnot only the mysterious work of remembranceÂ—which isreally the capacity for endless interpolations into what hasbeenÂ—but also, at the same time, the precaution of the sub-ject represented by the "I," which is entitled not to be soldcheap. (305)

As Pierre Missac has remarked, "the principles most solemnly affected arenot always those practiced" (41)Â—a point perhaps ironically acknowl-edged in the self-conscious proliferation of the first person pronoun fromthe beginning of the essay. If the premium that Benjamin places on literary

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.2 (Summer 2003): 184-206. Copyright Â© 2003 byJNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.

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objectivity can be seen as somewhat excessive, however, it is not alto-gether clear that the interest of "A Berlin Chronicle" resides, conversely,in the facets of Benjamin's "personal character" that it throws to light.1Benjamin's recollection of a childhood and adolescence spent in Berlinconsists of a fragmentary and elliptical set of thoughts and images that re-fuses to be ordered by autobiographical conventions of narrative andchronology. This formal dislocation is clearly linked to the topographiesof the "Naples" and "Moscow" essays, in which Benjamin draws a the-matic parallel between the experience of the child and that of the new-comer to a foreign city; but the formal arrangement of "A Berlin Chroni-cle" also manifests an anxiety over recent historical events, and theirrepresentation in literary form, characteristic of modernist literature. In hislater essay "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,"Benjamin would declare that "With the [First] World War a process beganto become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeableat the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silentÂ—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?" (83-84), and with itswandering anecdotes and jarring elisions "A Berlin Chronicle" presents adistorted terrain of memory where public symbols have hollowed into dis-carded shells while background figures have attained portentous signifi-cance (most poignantly Fritz Heinle, a friend from Benjamin's days in the"Youth Movement" who had formed a suicide pact with his lover in Au-gust 1914). An outsider in the city of his birth by the early 1930s by virtueof both his Jewish roots and political leanings, Benjamin was soon to beforced into permanent exile in France, and the very unfinished textual for-mat of "A Berlin Chronicle," with its abrupt breaks and missing pages,can also be read as a figure of the National Socialist catastrophe that wasto come. Thus, as Graeme Gilloch has noted, the many spectres thatemerge in Benjamin's reflections on Berlin do not merely point toward thepast: "The catastrophes and sufferings of the past, present and future arelocated within the spaces of the city" (57).

In the opening pages of the essay, Benjamin enumerates some of theguides that first opened up Berlin as a readable space, a labyrinth of in-scription: the nursemaids who regulated what activities he could perform,where he could go, and how long he could spend there, as a young child;the city of Paris, the setting for his "endless flÃ¢neries'" ("Berlin Chronicle"299); and Franz Hessel, with whom Benjamin had worked on a translation

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of Proust. This (incomplete) selection of guides situates the city as a sceneof memory, but it also illustrates the way that the events of childhood havebeen topographically re-encoded throughout adulthood, crystallized as ashifting set of street names, monuments and buildings that stand in theplace of dead relatives, lost loves, absent friends. As Benjamin's reflec-tions on Paris imply, to enter the mythical labyrinth of the modern city canbe to explore the significance of childhood:

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninterestingand banal. It requires ignoranceÂ—nothing more. But to loseoneself in a cityÂ—as one loses oneself in a forestÂ—thatcalls for quite a different schooling. Then, signboards andstreet names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speakto the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in dieforest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, likethe sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erectat its centre. Paris taught me this art of straying; it fulfilleda dream that had shown its first traces in the labyrinths onthe blotting pages of my school exercise books. (298)

The reference to the "school exercise books" establishes a thematic con-nection between city and text as labyrinths that graphically encode thepast. This passage also implies, though, that authentic remembrance ispartly a matter of forgetting, of unlearning (or studiedly avoiding) adultcodes and habits in order to revive not the experience of childhood per sebut the sense of unfamiliarity with which both child and outsider en-counter the city as an enchanted forest of signs.

In one passage, Benjamin recalls the time when, sitting at the CafÃ© desDeux Magots in Paris waiting for a friend (who now escapes him), a par-ticular insight compelled him to attempt to map his social existence:

Suddenly, and with compelling force, I was struck by theidea of drawing a diagram of my life, and knew at the samemoment exactly how it was to be done. With a very simplequestion I interrogated my past life, and the answers wereinscribed, as if of their own accord, on a sheet of paper thatI had with me. A year or two later, when I lost this sheet, Iwas inconsolable. [. . .] Now, however, reconstructing its

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outline in thought without directly reproducing it, I should,rather, speak of a labyrinth. I am not concerned here withwhat is stored in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego orfate, but all the more with the many entrances leading intothe interior. (318-19)

The labyrinthine scheme of "family trees," like the identity of the friendwhose lateness was the pretext for this project, has left only a trace inmemory in the form of a particular urban location; and if Benjamin speaksof the mass of his "primal acquaintances" as "so many entrances to themaze" (319), then the figure of Paris as a guide is to be included amongthemÂ—a figure that was to take on a central role in the Arcades Project.Benjamin's fascination with the topographic figuration of memoryÂ—rather than with the content of its "enigmatic centre"Â—points, as Carol Ja-cobs argues, toward a form of recollection beyond the personal:

If the individual identity is relegated to the shadows, lan-guage, here, the graphic symbol, (isn't this what Benjaminis telling us?) is always primal: even if (or perhaps in-evitably) unintentionally found and accidentally lost, evenif fundamentally impossible to reproduce, its originationnever to be repeated and certainly not by the person whowrites it down. Another hand weaves the text, puts forththe symbol, whose only face is a dream image revealed inthe depths of sleepÂ—memory woven by a concealed artisanin which the image of people is always, possibly, a ques-tion of mistaken identity, and nevertheless our passagewayto the past. (102-03)

The text of "A Berlin Chronicle," then, is threaded along pathways thatdeviate from the well-trodden courses of autobiography;2 and though asGilloch has suggested in this essay Benjamin "attempts to recover theshocks of the urban setting which have scarred the child's unconsciousand whose traces linger in the adult mind" (69), its associative weave ofreflections and images also questions the concept of a purely individualunconscious, located beyond the urban and textual figures. The monotonyof school and family life in West End Berlin, of mottoes, verses, shoppingtrips and family gatherings, is resurrected as "isolated pieces of interior

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that have broken away and yet contain the whole within them" ("BerlinChronicle" 337)Â—like the moulding above the classrooms, "cast out innu-merable times by the healthy beat of everyday waves until it was leftstranded like a shell on the shore of my daydreaming" (337). Benjamin re-calls the habitual taxi ride to the Anhalt station (an isolated ordeal withnone of the tactility of the streetcar ride in Moscow) that conjured the mi-rage of the dunes of the Baltic in the sandy colours of the station building:

But this vista would indeed be delusive if it did not makevisible the medium in which alone such images take form,assuming a transparency in which, however mistily, thecontours of what is to come are delineated like mountain

peaks. The present in which the writer lives is this medium.And in it he now cuts another section through the sequenceof his experiences. He detects in them a new and disturbingarticulation. (300)

If the excavation of memory incorporates the purposive wandering of thelabyrinth motif with the surprise encounters of the Proustian mÃ©moire in-volontaire, then Benjamin seems to uncover something beyond the effectof dÃ©jÃ vu whereby something (usually a sound) "is endowed with themagic power to transport us into the cool tomb of long ago" (345). In-stead, Benjamin recounts the occasion in early childhood when his fathercame to say good night and disclosed the cause of an uncle's deathÂ—aheart attack brought on by syphilisÂ—to his uncomprehending son: "Butthat evening I must have memorized my room and my bed, as one ob-serves exactly a place where one feels dimly that one will later have tosearch for something one has forgotten there" (346). The mission of Ben-jamin's "urban archaeology" would appear to be less to assemble the re-mains of the past like a jigsaw than to interrogate them for those "wordsand gestures from which we infer that invisible stranger, the future, wholeft them in our keeping" (345).

The feeling of strangeness that accompanies the work of recollection isespecially palpable in Benjamin's description of the "Meeting House" andthe cafÃ©s of the Tiergarten quarter that form a memorial to Heinle: "If Ichance today to pass through the streets of the quarter," Benjamin states,"I set foot in them with the same uneasiness that one feels when entering


an attic unvisited for years. Valuable things may be lying around, but no-body remembers where" (309). A set of public locations stands in for anindividual narrative of the past, but in the same movement the Tiergartenquarter is recalled in terms of private domestic space. The figure of death,banished from the bourgeois interiors and the streets of Berlin (unlikeNaples and Moscow), returns to disturb the topography of the city:"Berlin, the city of work and the metropolis of business," writes Ben-jamin, "nevertheless has more, rather than less, than some others, of thoseplaces and moments when it bears witness to the dead, shows itself full ofdead" (316).3 Such allegorical overtones punctuate Benjamin's archaeo-logical approach to remembrance throughout: Benjamin scrutinizes theclassroom moulding "like Hamlet addressing the skull" (337). Moreover,the search among the ruins of individual and collective life entails the un-canny effect that the exhumed remains find their context not in the past,but in the configuration into which they have been gathered together:

Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrumentfor exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium ofpast experience, as the ground is the medium in which deadcities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buriedpast must conduct himself like a man digging. This confersthe tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He mustnot be afraid to return again and again to the same matter;to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turnsover soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum,which yields only to the most meticulous examination whatconstitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the im-ages, severed from all earlier associations, that standÂ—likeprecious fragments or torsos in a collector's galleryÂ—in theprosaic rooms of our later understanding. (314)

An imagistic link between memory and revolutionary practice is estab-lished in this extraordinary passage: the reading of objects in terms of in-terior spaceÂ—the "prosaic rooms of our later understanding"Â—evokes themuseums described in Benjamin's "Moscow" essay where (unlike the in-stitutions of Western Europe) children and proletarians are not trespassersor subject to the passive contemplation of masterpieces (184). The exca-vation of memory, like revolution, depends on suspending the spatial and

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temporal boundaries of modem life, giving rein to the childlike imperative"to return again and again to the same matter." Freud's investigations intothe permeation of the material of everyday life by unconscious processesled him, on occasions, to illustrate the workings of the psyche in terms ofthe city,4 and here it is apt to cite a curious disturbance of memory fromhis paper "The 'Uncanny' ":

As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through thedeserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was un-known to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose charac-ter I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but paintedwomen were to be seen at the windows of the small houses,and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning.But after having wandered about for a time without inquir-ing my way, I suddenly found myself back in the samestreet, where my presence was now beginning to excite at-tention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by an-other dÃ©tour at the same place yet a third time. Now, how-ever, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe asuncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at thepiazza I had left a short while before, without any furthervoyages of discovery. (359)

This exemplary anecdote concerning the "unintended recurrence of thesame situation" announces "the dominance in the unconscious mind of a'compulsion to repeat' proceeding from the instinctual impulses"(359-60). In the provincial town Freud finds himself straying from hisconscious plan of action, just as in the paper Freud finds himself digress-ing from his scientific effort to map the psyche into the libidinal patternsof his own behaviour: as Victor BÃ¼rgin notes, "He has temporarily forgot-ten what he himself taught us: there is always another side to this map,'another place' in this topography" (270). Freud does not seek to partici-pate in the childlike "sabotage of real social existence" that captivatesBenjamin, but he is nonetheless caught up in a similar "obstinate andvoluptuous hovering on the brink" of social and topographical frontiers("Berlin Chronicle" 300-01). Whatever the identity of the provincial Ital-ian town, and whether or not heÂ—like BenjaminÂ—has felt compelled to


"See Naples and die,"5 Freud's anecdote situates the urban as a psychicterrain in much the same way as does Benjamin's urban archaeology.

The psychoanalysis of Freud (along with the literature of Baudelaireand Proust) constitutes a key influence Benjamin shares with the surrealistmovement, and his notion of "profane illumination" echoes what he un-derstands as surrealism's drive "to win the energies of intoxication for therevolution" ("Surrealism" 236). The developing mode of urban represen-tation manifest throughout Benjamin's work departs from surrealism in hislater conception of the "dialectical image,"6 culminating in his essay"Theses on the Philosophy of History" where the arrest of narrative pro-gression is aimed at a Social Democratic narrative of 'Progress. Yet for alltheir fascination with new technologies of the image and vacillating depic-tions of a moribund aura, Benjamin's later writings are infused by residuesof the subjective that offer something more nuanced than an embattled es-sentialism, as recent criticism has demonstrated.7 The much contestedvalue of Benjamin's work for contemporary materialist criticism can befurther investigated if we read his recollection of Berlin through Paris inthe context of surrealism, and in particular AndrÃ© Breton's NadjaÂ—a workthat calls to mind the ambiguous story of Benjamin's pursuit of Asja Lacisin the 1920s.

In the "First Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924), Breton sought to pro-vide a definition for a distinctive set of artistic practices influenced by, butless anarchic than, Dadaism. Breton recounts the time when a bizarre sen-tence about a man cut in half by a window appeared to him before fallingasleep:

Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time,and familiar as I was with his methods of examination

which I had had some slight occasion to use on some pa-tients during die war, I resolved to obtain from myself whatwe were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologuespoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention onthe part of the critical faculties, a monologue consequentlyunencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, asclosely as possible, akin to spoken thought. It had seemedto me, and still doesÂ—the way in which the phrase aboutthe man cut in two had come to me is an indication of itÂ—

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that the speed of thought is no greater than the speed ofspeech, and that thought does not necessarily defy lan-guage, nor even the fast-moving. (437)

This mode of writing, also practised by Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupaultand others who wrote for the review LittÃ©rature, is termed "Psychic au-tomatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to expressÂ—verbally, bymeans of the written word, or in any other mannerÂ—the actual functioningof thought" (438). The "First Manifesto" is adamant that the writings ofFreud provide a key to unlocking the rationalistic cage in which the mod-em subject is imprisoned, and at the same time implicitly wams that it isnot simply a matter of privileging the unconscious over the conscious: ifstrange forces are at work in the mind, then "there is every reason to seizethemÂ—first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control ofour reason" (434). However, while this proposed appropriation ofFreudian psychoanalysis entails an understanding that it cannot becomethe weapon for a total rebellion against the forces of reason and consciouscontrol, Breton seeks to radicalize Freud's insights, wrenching them awayfrom their context in the social panacea of the clinic. In a short article en-titled "The Quinquagenary of Hysteria (1878-1928)," Breton and LouisAragon situate the medical treatment (and abuse) of the hysterical patientwithin a broader history of social antagonism:

Thus, in 1928, we propose a new definition of hysteria:

Hysteria is a more or less irreducible mental conditioncharacterised by the subversion of the relations which areestablished between the subject and the moral world withwhich he believes himself able to cope, outside everydelirious system. This mental condition is based upon theneed for a mutual enticement, which explains the prema-turely accepted miracles of medical suggestion (or counter-suggestion). Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenonand can be considered in every respect a supreme means ofexpression. (Aragon and Breton 62)

The particular "mental condition" of hysteria is appropriated as the modelof an intoxication outside any "delirious system" of religion, yet not out-


side of politics. Much of the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism" is ad-dressed to the affinities of the new movement with a contemporary politi-cal Left deeply suspicious of its practices. As Breton argues, "I really failto seeÂ—some narrow-minded revolutionaries notwithstandingÂ—why weshould refrain from supporting the Revolution, provided we view theproblems of love, dreams, madness, art, and religion from the same anglethey do" ("Second Manifesto" 447).

Benjamin's developing preoccupation with the surrealist movementcan be gauged by the prominence of Paris in meditations on his childhoodin "A Berlin Chronicle," and as Margaret Cohen has demonstrated, theplethora of allusions to surrealism in the earlier, seminal "One-WayStreet" reflects Benjamin's ambivalence, exhibiting both a deep affiliationwith and sustained polemic against the movement (173-80). In his essaysof the late 1920s entitled "Hashish in Marseilles" and "Surrealism: TheLast Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" Benjamin attempts to ex-plore, and also to reproduce, the effects of intoxication on language. In the"Hashish" essay, Benjamin writes of how hashish-eating alters perceptionsof space and time, generating "a continual alteration of dreaming and wak-ing states," and how the eater "attains experiences that approach inspira-tion, illumination" (215). In a manner akin to the technique of hypnosis inpsychoanalysis, the hashish trance appears to transport the individual intoa different reality out of step with the present. There is a pronounced reso-nance between Benjamin's meditations on the hashish trance and a de-scription of the early psychoanalytic technique of hypnotic recollection byJacques Lacan, whose critical reflections are similarly (if more methodi-cally) steeped in surrealist rapture:

Hypnotic recollection is, no doubt, a reproduction of thepast, but it is above all a spoken representationÂ—and assuch implies all sorts of presences. It stands in the same re-lation to the waking recollection of what is curiously calledin analysis "the material," as the drama in which the origi-nal myths of the City State are produced before its assem-bled citizens stands in relation to a history that may well bemade up of materials, but in which a nation today learns toread the symbols of a destiny on the march. (Ã‰crits 47)

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An important qualification needs to be made in this analogy between hyp-notic recollection and the hashish trance: Lacan reminds us that Freudquickly came to the conclusion that "nothing can be grasped, destroyed, orburnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia" {FourFundamental Concepts 5O);8 and in a corresponding manner, Benjaminwarns that the lesson of surrealism and its overcoming of religious illumi-nation "certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in profane illumina-tion, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium,or whatever else can give an introductory lesson" ("Hashish" 227). Ac-cordingly, Benjamin is acutely aware that the key to his experience on anevening in Marseilles lies less in the hashish trance per se than in the im-pressions that he writes down the following day (like Breton's attempt towrite his strange dream), when the dreamlike dramatization that the tranceaffords can be discerned. As Benjamin notes, "People and things behave atsuch hours like those little stage sets and people made of elder pith in theglazed tin-foil box, which, when the glass is rubbed, are electrified and fallat every movement into the most unusual relationships" (221). In the morepolemical "Surrealism" essay, the motif of "profane illumination" an-nounces a mode of representation that would incorporate this sense of cor-poreal and reflective appropriation of public space in order to "win the en-ergies of intoxication for the revolution" (236):

The most passionate investigation of the hashish trance willnot teach us half as much about thinking (which is emi-nently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinkingabout the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loi-terer, the flÃ¢neur, are types of illuminati just as much as theopium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane.Not to mention that most terrible drugÂ—ourselvesÂ—whichwe take in solitude. (237)

Benjamin's "profane illumination" can perhaps be seen as a mode ofAragon and Breton's "supreme means of expression," that hysterical "sub-version of the relations which are established between the subject and themoral world," both a historical phenomenon and a mode of articulating thepresent historically. Vanishing social forms pushed to the margins of mod-em lifeÂ—"the reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flÃ¢neur" ("Surrealism"


237)Â—form a typology with which to trace the ruptures that appear on asocial body subject to the demands of technological progress and com-modity capitalism. The figure of the storyteller also features prominentlyin the catalogue of vanishing social forms symptomatic of these ruptures.9In a society that has succeeded in eradicating the traces of death (as thepristine bourgeois interior of Benjamin's Berlin childhood bears witness),storytelling appears as arcane and even perhaps disturbing, for "Death isthe sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed hisauthority from death" ("Storyteller" 93). The dying art of storytelling, likethe discourse of the hysteric, enables us to view the remembered past assomething irreducibly reconstructed through language rather than as atransparent, linear sequence of facts:

Any examination of a given epic form is concerned withthe relationship of this form to historiography. In fact, onemay go even further and raise the question whether histori-ography does not constitute the common ground of allforms of the epic. Then written history would be in thesame relationship to the epic forms as white light is to thecolours of the spectrum. (94-95)

It is significant that Benjamin characterizes the writing of history in termsof an optical metaphor, recalling the Denkbilder (or "thought-images") of"Naples" and "Moscow" and the images crucial to the urban archaeologyof "A Berlin Chronicle." The storyteller, as a secularized version of thechronicler, exercises a "profane outlook" ("Storyteller" 95), whose distin-guishing feature is the absence of the sort of explanation with which histo-rians are prone to furnish their versions of the past. By inviting interpreta-tion, and by constantly drawing attention to the natural history of death,Benjamin's storytelling corresponds to what Lacan terms "the recitation ofthe epos" in which the narrator "brings back into the present time the ori-gins of his own person" in the form of "archaic, even foreign language"{Ecrits 47). The hieroglyphic formation of hysteria can be seen as "speechfunctioning to the full, for it includes the discourse of the other in the se-cret of its cipher" (69): and similarly, storytellingÂ—bodying forth the fos-silised traces of bygone timesÂ—rehearses the deaths of its listeners by

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symptomatically announcing the splitting of the subject, "the birth of truthin speech" (47).10

For Benjamin however it is in surrealism, more than in any otherresidual or emergent cultural practice, that "Image and language takeprecedence" ("Surrealism" 226), and the most prominent literary work tofeature in Benjamin's essay on surrealism is Breton's Nadja, which hadappeared in 1928. Neither exactly autobiography nor quite a work of fic-tion, Nadja records the "profane illumination" of a love affair that res-onates with Benjamin's urban meditations. Searching, like his surrealistassociates, for chance encounters and unexpected correspondences amidstthe routine of modem Parisian life, Breton becomes fascinated by thespontaneity of a chance acquaintance, Nadja (or LÃ©ona D.), whose com-pulsive behaviour (even in dire poverty) steals a march on his own attemptto incorporate art and politics in the sphere of everyday life (and viceversa).11 It is, of course, no ordinary tale of romance: Breton is often boredby Nadja, it is frequently unclear who is soliciting whose advances, andmoreover his wife appears to endorse the relationship. The unconventionalnature of the relationship is perhaps best formulated by Breton's statementthat "When I am near her I am nearer things which are near her" {Nadja90). Their barely consummated love affair appears less a relationship be-tween people than a relation between people and things, people andspaces:

Perhaps life needs to be deciphered like a cryptogram. Se-cret staircases, frames from which the paintings quicklyslip aside and vanish (giving way to an archangel bearing asword or to those who must forever advance), buttonswhich must be indirectly pressed to make an entire roommove sideways or vertically, or immediately change all itsfurnishings; we may imagine the mind's greatest adventureas a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls. (112)

Through the "profane illumination" of love, the ennui of Parisian intellec-tual life is broken up and reappropriated as a mine of inner recesses, mys-teries and hidden correspondences, like a return to Benjamin's childhoodexperience of the bourgeois apartment. As the "Surrealism" essay notes,"Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything that we have ex-


perienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age),on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the greatcities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apart-ment, into revolutionary experience, if not action" (229).

The stream of consciousness form of Nadja is integral to this idea of aconversion of urban banality into revolutionary experience, and serves asa reminder of the radicalism with which psychoanalytic topoi were associ-ated amongst the surrealists. As Hal Foster has demonstrated, surrealismadheres to the Freudian model of memory to the extent that it may be con-sidered an art of the uncanny (57-100). According to this model, aneventÂ—such as when Benjamin was told, uncomprehendingly, of the deathof his uncleÂ—only becomes traumatic at a later date, when a second eventor object triggers a memory in which the features of a primal fantasy maybe discerned.12 As Foster observes, the ambiguity of the viewing subjecteffected by such surrealist spatial distortion can be seen as the expressionof a profound concern with origins:

As expressly visual scenarios in which the psychic, the sex-ual, and the perceptual are bound together, primal fantasydoes much to explain the peculiar pictorial structures andobject relations of surrealismÂ—specifically why subjectpositions and spatial constructions are rarely fixed. Thescene of a daydream, for example, is relatively stable be-cause the ego is relatively centered. This is not the case inprimal fantasy where the subject not only is in the scenebut also may identify with any of its elements. Such partic-ipation renders the scene as elastic as the subject is mobile,and this is so because the fantasy is "not the object of de-sire, but its setting," its mise-en-scÃ¨ne. Such fantasmic sub-jectivity and spatiality are put into play in surrealist art,where the first is often passive and the second often per-spectivally skewed or anamorphically distorted. (59)

Such a sense of spatial distortion and perspectival confusion permeatesBreton's narrative from its disorienting opening question "Who am I?"{Nadja 11)Â—and nowhere more so than in the Place Dauphine, "one of theworst wastelands in Paris" whose "cmshing embrace" Breton cannotevade (80), and where Nadja becomes convinced that in a past life she was

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a member of Marie Antoinette's circle (85). In a manner akin to Ben-jamin's storyteller or Lacan's hypnotized analysand, Nadja relives afounding myth of the City State, borrowing her authority from death toimplicate her listener and those around her in the drama ('"And who, then,who were you?' " [84]). His analytical ear hearing only death in her repro-duction of the collective past ("And the dead, the dead!" [83]), Breton isno doubt attuned to the hysterical stagecraft that underpins Nadja's identi-fication with the passive victim of the Revolution; but by recasting the cityas a scene of memory Nadja discloses the mise-en-scÃ¨ne of surrealist fan-tasy, its chance encounters constituted only in repetition.13 This is perhapsthe fundamental trauma at the root of the novelÂ—a stranger to its own nar-rative processes, beset with disturbing images, disembodied voices andblind-alleys of mmination, the anxious narrative subject oÃ- Nadja repeat-edly bids to "bring[s] back into the present time the origins of his own per-son":

It is not for me to ponder what is happening to the "shapeof a city," even of the true city distracted and abstractedfrom the one I live in by the force of an element which is tomy mind what air is supposed to be to life. Without regret,at this moment I see it change and even disappear. It slides,it burns, it sinks into the shudder of weeds along its barri-cades, into the dream of curtains in its bedrooms, where aman and woman indifferently continue making love. (154)

In this evocative surrealist vision, the city is reconfigured as a maelstrom,a formless chain of objects and events that is nonetheless held together bya privileged signifierÂ—in Lacanian terms a.point de capiton.Â™ The primalscene where the "man and woman indifferently continue making love"brings into focus all the more vividly the heterosexual impasse betweenBreton and Nadja around which the narrative is stmctured, implying thatneither society nor sexuality can be said to have any reality beyond thesliding articulations of language. This is, perhaps, Breton's version of"profane illumination"Â—an experience of subjective annihilation that cannonetheless be read as intersubjectively and socially affirmative in its im-plications.

As part of Breton's declared project to fashion a politically charged


aesthetic out of psychic trauma, Nadja unravels the myths of origin buriedin the everyday even as it begs the question of whence these surrealist fan-tasies themselves originate. In this respect both surrealism and Benjamincan be squarely located within a cultural tradition that sees the female (andthe feminised opacity of the city) as the most appropriate figure throughwhich the question of origins can be posed. It is also important, though, toheed Foster's point that "the surrealist image is not a direct trace of a psy-chosexual trauma, any more than the surrealist found object is a simple re-finding of a lost one. Unconscious as they are, these terms cannot be in-tentional referents or literal origins of this art; rather, they help us tounderstand its structure" (Foster 96). Neither sheer contrivance nor the un-mediated expression of the unconscious, the surrealist method consists ofa "working over" of fantasmic scenes "that is never purely involuntary orcontrolled and curative" (96). However, if the unconscious is grasped notas a pre-existing entity but as emergent in language and inherent in itssymptoms,15 then can such a project avoid participating, to a certain ex-tent, in the mystification and reproduction of the unconscious forces itproposes to unleash? Indeed, it is arguable that NadjaÂ—devastating Bretonwith casual recollections that hint at prostitution {Nadja 113), and whimsi-cally transforming a routine car journey into a near death drive by cover-ing his eyes and pressing her foot down on his on the accelerator(152-53)Â—reveals the extent of Breton's conformity rather more than sheoffers him a blueprint for a lifestyle of political action. In any case, Bre-ton's account of the damaging effects of her eventual incarceration (an in-carceration that, as he points out, exacerbates and even produces madness)is tainted by the rather louche admission that he has done nothing to helpsecure her release and has not even visited her; he remarks somewhat air-ily that "I never supposed she could lose or might already have lost the giftofthat instinct for self-preservation which permits my friends and myself,for instance to behave ourselves when a flag goes past, confining our-selves to not saluting it" (143). Thus, Breton's search for the enigmatictraces of the unconscious in everyday life appears to stop short of therecognition that the everyday is perhaps little other than the site of ideo-logical processes of repression and fantasy.

This is, in nuce, the crux of Benjamin's complaint against surrealism:for all his essential enthusiasm, Benjamin finds "very disturbing symp-toms of deficiency" in both Aragon's The Peasant of Paris and Breton's

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Nadja ("Surrealism" 227). Breton's faith in the prophesies of MadameSacco, for example, is viewed with some disdain: the "breakneck career ofsurrealism" may have licensed itself, like a "cat burglar," to prowl theshadier recesses of the city, but Benjamin is "not pleased to hear it cau-tiously tapping on the window-panes to inquire about its future" (228). Inother words, if the surrealist movement is to be tme to its professed affin-ity with historical materialism,16 it must not place itself at the mercy of aspeculative future but must help shape a revolutionary future latent in itsown practices and their thematics of compulsion. As Benjamin argues,"histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterioustakes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that werecognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that per-ceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday" (237).Thus "profane illumination" is cast, in Benjamin's conclusion to the "Sur-realism" essay, as the auratic effect of a technology that must desecrateaura, including many of those mystical and recherchÃ© aspects of Parisianlife in which both Benjamin and the surrealists have taken delight:

The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is beingorganized for it in technology can, through all its politicaland factual reality, only be produced in that image sphereto which profane illumination initiates us. Only when intechnology body and image so interpenetrate that all revo-lutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation,and all the bodily innervations of the collective becomerevolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to theextent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. For the mo-ment, only the Surrealists have understood its present com-mands. They exchange, to a man, the play of human fea-tures for the face of an alarm clock that in each minuterings for sixty seconds. (239)

The interpÃ©nÃ©tration of body and image and the erasure of contemplativedistance would culminate in what Weigel has termed "the leap into a me-chanical state" where "matrix and material of expression and representa-tion are one" (Body- and Image-Space 19-20).17 Such a fusionÂ—an "en-fleshment of expressive matter" that is no longer allegorical, and in which"the category of time as the fourth dimension of culture is entirely absent,


eliminated" (19-21)Â—is only ironically attained in the tattered remains of"A Berlin Chronicle," while Nadja struggles to articulate its heroine be-yond the metaphorization of women: "You are not an enigma for me" in-sists Breton, reflecting that the very existence of his now abandoned andincarcerated muse obviates the need for his book in the first place (158).Yet it was precisely as a "Sphinx without a secret," a freely mobile womanin the city, that Nadja posed the greatest threat to myths, and not least tomyths of femininity. It is only by identifying with her position that the nar-rator can begin to comprehend the extent of the web of ideological fantasygoverning his life, as he repeats to himself and all who will listen: '"Whogoes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything be-yond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me?Is it myself?" (144).

As the task of awakening the collective body of 1930s Europe from itsdangerous slumber came to seem a more and more pressing imperative,Benjamin's attention was to tum from the avant-garde to the wider appealexercised by new technologies of the image, and it is no doubt tempting toconclude that the ruins of Benjamin's historical materialism are foretold inthe runes of a more (un)canny surrealism. But for anyone who would en-dorse the prescient claim that no Marxist transcribed the revolutionarymanifesto of Marx and Engels quite so faithfully as the surrealists, Ben-jamin brings an altogether more alarming caveat to the surrealist dictumwith which Nadja ends: "Beauty will be convulsive or NOT BE AT ALL."

Notes

1. Though Missac illuminates some important details about Benjamin's life and works,his approach can border on the reductive: for example, he states that "the essentialmerit of Î† Berlin Chronicle' is undoubtedly to serve as the point of departure or thebasis for Î† Berlin Childhood Around 1900,' Benjamin's more accomplished work, inwhich the personal character is most clearly expressed, and in the most refined form,before all the elaborations and metamorphoses" (41).

2. Sigrid Weigel points out that Benjamin omitted the passage concerning the diagram-matic plan from his more finished essay "A Berlin Childhood" ("Reading/Writing,"93). Nonetheless, it can hardly be sufficient to term this plan an "autobiographical con-cept" (93) given that the anecdotal presentation of "A Berlin Chronicle" evokes theearly twentieth-century metropolitan reportage of newspapers such as the Berliner

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Morgenpost and Berliner Tageblatt in which, as Peter Fritzsche has noted, "On excur-sions in and around Berlin reporters collected the debris of the city and displayed it asrough-hewn collage" (103).

3. This highly evocative passage evokes the eerie conclusion to Joyce's "The Dead,"where (gazing out over Dublin and its surroundings blanketed in snow) the newspapercolumnist Gabriel sheds his stilted concern with social approbation after his wifeGretta's unexpected disclosure of her grief for a deceased lover: "His soul had ap-proached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, butcould not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity wasfading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead hadone time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling" (224-25).

4. For example, in the first of a series of lectures in America on psychoanalysis, Freudasks his audience to consider the concept of the hysterical symptom by proposing that"The monuments and memorials with which large cities are adorned are also mnemicsymbols" (Two Short Accounts 39).

5. At the end of the "Naples" essay, Benjamin recites the old pun "Vedere Napoli e poiMorf (176): the first (mÃ©tonymie) sense is "see Naples and then the town of Mori"; asecond (metaphorical) sense is "You haven't lived until you've seen Naples" (i.e. ex-tolling the uniqueness of the visit); but a third (literal) sense implies that the prostitutesof Naples will bring about the death of the male visitor from venereal disease.

6. Weigel discusses the importance of this shift in her Body-and Image-Space (16-29).

7. For example, Samuel Weber has pointed out that Benjamin's apparent celebration offilm's destruction of aura in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"is misleading, for it allows for the possibility that "The aura would be able to return inthe age of technical reproducibility because, as the appearance or apparition of an irre-ducible separation, it was never uniquely itself but always constituted in a process ofself-detachment: detachment from the self as demarcation of a self (87-88). Similarly,for Simon Cooper Benjamin's essay implies that authentic modes of auratic experiencemay be discernible in technology provided attention is paid to the social form in whichthey appear (167-68). Werner Hamacher has also suggested that a literary-theoreticalagency may be derived from the narrative and nomenclatural ambiguity that Benjaminfound in the fiction of Kafka: "In this way, all art, even the oldest, has a dimension thatcould be called 'modern' whenever it exposes in the presentation of historical experi-ence a caesura, a 'cloudy spot,' or the incomprehensible gesture that opens itself to thealterity of the future" (307).


8. By comparing the relationship between hypnotic and waking recollection to that be-tween epic drama and written history, Lacan is not making a distinction between anunmediated unconscious reproduction of the past and a mere version of events. Rather,Lacan's point is that both forms of anamnesis manifest repetition compulsion, a markof the death instinct that expresses "the limit of the historical function of the subject"(Ecrits 103). As Lacan goes on to argue, "This limit represents the past in its real form,[. . .] the past which reveals itself reversed in repetition" (103). In other words, it isless important to consider which mode of representation is more accurate than to pin-point the various ways in which they "reorder past contingencies by conferring onthem the sense of necessities to come" (48).

9. With a characteristic ambivalence, Benjamin makes it clear that the decline of the sto-ryteller is not to be seen as "merely a 'symptom of decay,' let alone a 'modern' symp-tom"Â—a lament characteristic of narratives that idealize the pre-capitalist past as aGolden Age. Rather, the virtual disappearance of the art of storytelling is "only a con-comitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that hasquite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the sametime is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing" ("Storyteller" 86).

10. Lacan states that while clinical forms of "madness" may be characterized by verbal si-lence, it is crucial to acknowledge that "The absence of speech is manifested here bythe stereotypes of a discourse in which the subject, one might say, is spoken ratherthan speaking", here we recognize the symbols of the unconscious in petrified formsthat find their place in a natural history of these symbols beside the embalmed forms inwhich myths are presented in our story-books" (Ecrits 69). If Lacan's priorities areclearly less overtly political than Benjamin's, his subsequent remarks are highly sug-gestive when considered in the light of Benjamin's concerns: "Let it be noted in pass-ing that it would be worthwhile mapping the places in social space that our culture hasassigned to these subjects [. . .] for it is not unlikely that there is at work here one ofthe factors that consign such subjects to the effects of the breakdown produced by thesymbolic discordances that characterize the complex structures of civilization" (69).

11. In Benjamin's essay "One-Way Street," a "thought-image" entitled "Ministry of the In-terior" points out that "The more antagonistic a person is towards the social order, themore inexorably he will subject his private life to the norms that he wishes to elevateas legislators of a future society" (53).

12. The implications of this Freudian model might be described as threefold: first, thememoryÂ—structured by primal fantasyÂ—may be an indeterminate composite of factand fiction; second, in spite of this, it has real effectsÂ—as Foster notes, "it is memory,not the event, that is traumatic" (58); and third, the repressed event is only constituted

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as such in the futurity of its later repetitionsÂ—which is therefore, in an importantsense, from whence it returns. Thus, the primal fantasy resonates ambiguity in that itprecipitates itself, initiating the trauma it was supposed to allay.

13. As Cohen has noted, in contrast to the affirmative nature of Breton's chance encounter,"For Lacan the subject's essential encounter is a meeting that has already occurred andoccurred badly"Â—though Lacan's more negative version helps explain the "fundamen-tally unsatisfying nature" of the surrealist encounter (Cohen 151).

14. BÃ¼rgin deploys Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe's application of Lacanian theoryto the social in his discussion oÃ- Nadja: as an incomplete system of differences, the so-cial is structured by various points de capiton, or "quilting points" (BÃ¼rgin 280,282-83; Laclau and Mouffe 112-13).

15. As Lacan puts it, "Repressed and symptom are homogeneous, and reducible to thefunctions of signifiers" (Four Fundamental Concepts 176).

16. In the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism," Breton speaks enthusiastically of the move-ment's "allegiance to the principle of historical materialism," but also of his fear thatsurrealists may be considered by more orthodox revolutionary movements "as somany strange animals intended to be exhibited" (447)Â—a statement perhaps alsoprophetic of the ambiguous status of Benjamin within Marxism.

17. Though Weigel highlights some of the correspondences between the writings of Ben-jamin and Michel Foucault (30-48), it seems to me that Benjamin's reworking of sur-realism and Freudian psychoanalysis has greater affinities with Lacanian theory inview of its reluctance to relinquish the category of the subject. In this respect, the sur-realist "leap into a mechanical state" can be read as an "identification with a sinthome"where the materialist historian encounters "a certain signifying formation penetratedwith enjoyment" (Zizek 75)Â—in the terms of the "Theses," the scars in official historythat mark the plight of the oppressed.

Works Cited

Aragon, Louis, and AndrÃ© Breton. "The Quinquagenary of Hysteria (1878-1928)." Trans.Patrick Waldberg. Surrealism. Ed. Waldberg. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.61-62.

Benjamin, Walter. "A Berlin Chronicle". One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Ed-mund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1997. 293-346.


"Hashish in Marseilles." One-Way Street. 215-22.

_. "Moscow." One-Way Street. 177-208.

_. "Naples." One-Way Street. 167-76.

_. "One-Way Street." One-Way Street. 45-104.

_____. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Illuminations. Ed.and Intro. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana Press, 1992. 83-107.

_____. "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia." One-Way Street.225-39.

Breton, AndrÃ©. "The First Manifesto of Surrealism." Trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane.Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison andPaul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 432-39.

_____. Nadja. Intro. Mark Polizzotti. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Penguin, 1999.

_____. "The Second Manifesto of Surrealism." Trans. Seaver and Lane. Harrison andWood 446-50.

BÃ¼rgin, Victor. "FlÃ¢neur and DÃ©traquÃ©e in Breton's Nadja." Space and Place: Theories ofIdentity and Location. Ed. Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires. London:Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. 269-83.

Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revo-lution. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1995.

Cooper, Simon. "Walter Benjamin and Technology: Social Form and the Recovery ofAura." Arena Journal ns 6 (1996): 145-70.

Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995.

Freud, Sigmund. Two Short Accounts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. London:Pelican, 1962.

______"The 'Uncanny'." Art and Literature. Ed. Albert Dickson. Trans. James Strachey.London: Penguin, 1990. 335-76.

Fritzsche, Peter. Reading Berlin 1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.

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Gilloch, Graeme. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Cambridge: PolityPress, 1997.

Hamacher, Werner. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan.Trans. Peter Fenves. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1996.

Jacobs, Carol. "Walter Benjamin: Topographically Speaking." Walter Benjamin: Theoreti-cal Questions. Ed. David S. Ferris. Stanford, CA: Stanford U P, 1996. 94-117.

Joyce, James. "The Dead." Dubliners. London: Penguin, 1992. 175-225.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1980.

______"The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1994.

Missac, Pierre. Walter Benjamin's Passages. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge,MA: The MIT Press, 1995.

Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media. Ed. Alan Cholodenko. Stanford,CA: Stanford UP, 1996.

Weigel, Sigrid. Body-and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin. Trans. GeorginaPaul, with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines. London: Routledge, 1996.

______"Reading/Writing the Feminine City: Calvino, Hessel, Benjamin." Trans. Joe 0'-Donnell. With the Sharpened Axe of Reason: Approaches to Walter Benjamin. Ed.Gerhard Fischer. Oxford: Berg, 1996. 85-98.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

Adam Wodruff - The Shape of a City

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