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fencer. And this discovery "reveals the beauty of that stanza to its very
depth." For Benjamin, "beauty" as a category of modern aesthetics is
precisely this play of concealment and revelation in the hidden figure.
The same poetic way of thinking is apparent in Benjamin's
fondness for quoting writers on writers-Baudelaire on Musset, Gour–
mont on Baudelaire, Valery on Proust.
In
Benjamin's text, these
apparently elliptical and metaphoric remarks become suddenly lucid
and exact. Charles Peguy says Victor Hugo could recognize the ancient,
sacred threshold beneath the ordinary one, and Benjamin gives a
stunningly precise illustration from Hugo's
L es Miserables.
The
combination of indirectness and precision in poetic criticism suits
Benjamin's aim, for it too shows the force of the real within poetic
figures. And there is a trace here of that ideal project Benjamin once
proposed, a whole volume of criticism made up of nothing but
quotation-not an anthology, but a kaleidoscopic confrontation in
which hidden figures would reveal their significance to the reader's
imagination. Such a volume would have been less the product of
research than memory's spontaneous allegory of Benjamin 's reading.
In
fact, "memory" and its concomitant, "tradition," play the
central mediating role both in poetic creation and in criticism for
Benjamin. Images from ordinary life, " implanted" in Baudelaire's
memory, are not directly described in his poems, but haunt them as
"secret presences." Analogously, Benjamin retraces the connnection
between poetic image and ordinary life by a "chain of reflections,"
what Jameson aptly calls "exercises in allegorical meditation. " These
reflections rise to consciousness from a memory saturated in Baude–
laire's poems and in the details of Parisian life. Part of Benjamin's
exemplary greatness is this fresh testimony that critical ingenuity and
imagination can only flourish on a memory packed with minute
particulars. So deeply absorbed was Benjamin in his material that one
would scarcely be surprised to find among his papers poems of his own
composition indistinguishable from Baudelaire's.
It
may be worthwhile to sharpen the difference between Benjamin
and a Marxist like Lukacs. Scorning any vulgar concentration on
"content" or on an author's direct expression of political and social
views, Lukacs analyzes literary works to reveal the class-based ideology
reflected in their "methods of composition." He asks what intellectual
grasp of experience a work's means of representing reality permit. AntI
he then evaluates the work according to how far it escapes the
bourgeoisie's inevitable distortions of reality and approaches to the
Marxist model of knowledge in the service of human liberation (what
Lukacs calls "tendentious humanism"). Lukacs's "ideological" cri-
