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world of ancestors took him down to the animals."
It
is to a certain degree justified but also too facile to say that these
two spectacular literary opposites, Proust and Kafka, simply appealed
to
the two opposite sides of Benjamin's sensibility - on the one hand, his
aestheticizing impulse, his love of the opulent and the sensuous, his fasci–
nation with society and historical milieu, his attraction to the shimmering
perspectives of the inner world; on the other hand, his exegetical and
theological imagination, his interest in how doctrine is translated into
tradition, his speculative concern with man and speech and meaning
against the background of eternity. But there are also a few points of
contact between his two contrasting touchstones of modernism. It
is
surely more than coincidental that both were Jews, one an acutely self–
conscious Jew with an active if camouflaged interest in Jewish tradition;
the other, a half-Jew raised as a Catholic who had a residual but potent
sense of the ambiguous standing in French society entailed by his ances–
try. The two thus appealed to the two ends of Benjamin's own wavering
spectrum of identity as a Jew: the engaged Jew who aspired to master
Hebrew (Kafka made somewhat better progress on this front than
Benjamin) and to orient himself in the classic sources and their theological
authority, and the vestigial Jew who in most though not all respects was a
quintessential European, perhaps more European than others by virtue of
the hint of marginality. It is perfectly appropriate that Benjamin should
make a good deal of the Jewish character of Kafka's writing - much to
the distress of his friend Brecht - and not invoke the Jewish background
at all in the case of Proust. Yet if both were founders and dissolvers of a
genre, the radicalism of their literary enterprise might well be energized
by their location as outsiders (a much more painful and extreme predica–
ment, of course, for Kafka, who constantly monitored and reinforced his
own marginality, and who was actuated by the consciousness of being an
outsider to Jewish tradition as well as to European culture). If modernity
as Benjamin imagined it, tracing a literary genealogy back to Baudelaire,
involved the erosion of experience, a sense of alienation, the dissolution
of aura, the displacement of communal wisdom by the perplexity of the
individual, Kafka and Proust, at very different removes from the ancestral
Jewish realm, were in a position as transitional Jews to experience this set
of interrelated losses with exemplary acuteness and also to nurture what
Benjamin called in relation to Proust a "homesickness," though each con–
ceived the longed-for home in very different terms.
Benjamin clearly construed the sickness component of homesickness
quite literally, as one can infer from his famous image of Proust lying in
bed racked with longing for a remembered world, and from his observa–
tion that Proust's serpentine sentences are the perfect rhythmic expression
