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protagonist "might understand himself," Benjamin writes, "but what an
enormous effort would be required! It is a tempest that blows from the
land of oblivion, and learning is a cavalry attack against it. " Benjamin's
image here is almost the same as the famous one he would use two years
later to describe Paul Klee's
Novus Angelus
as the angel of history blown
backward by a wind from Eden into the ruined landscape of future
events. A cavalry attack on' a tempest is of course an exercise in futility,
though one that expresses a heroic impulse. The persistence of the ideal of
learning in Kafka's desperate world - always nevertheless hoping for hope
- is just this sort of quixotic heroism. Meanings may be indefinitely with–
held; the law may be no more than a bureaucrat's whim, a banal official
directive, or a scrambled telephone message. The engines of interpreta–
tion, however, grind on, imparting to the fictional world an almost con–
soling hum of dynamic process; for it is a supremely human act to con–
tinue to seek meaning, even against all odds, and Kafka's ultimate intu–
ition is that this has been the characteristically Jewish response to the most
abysmal revelations oflife in history.
Kafka and Proust share a painfully acute self-absorption. "Since the
spiritual exercises of Loyola," Benjamin observes of Proust, "there has
hardly been a more radical attempt at self-absorption." In Kafka, however,
the self-absorption is projected onto objects, events, agencies, and persons
in the protagonist's environment, for he desperately needs to find some
clue to who he is and where he needs to go - in Benjamin's formulation,
he seeks to "encounter fragments of his own existence" - in whatever he
finds
all
around him, In Proust, on the other hand, the vector of self-ab–
sorption points in the opposite direction, from the world to the self In a
process of alchemical transmutation through language - which in Proust is
always a dense refractive medium, not a seeming transparency as in Kafka
- the world is absorbed by the self, steeped in the strange and magical
luminosities of mental association and memory. Kafka's world, shrinking
beneath the looming shadow of the father, is a realm of acts, obligations,
commands, and their interpretation. Proust's world, ultimately oriented
by the polar star of the longed-for mother, seeks to reconstitute the bliss
of primal unity in the orchestrated harmonies of art and in the sense of
grace vouchsafed through memory. "The intonation of Proust's voice,"
Benjamin notes in an approving allusion to an essay by Cocteau, "obeyed
the laws of night and honey."
In Proust's novel, then, the "sightings" oflandscapes, architectural sil–
houettes,
fa~ades
and interiors of buildings do not represent the vista as a
space to penetrate or a sphere to contend with but as a stimulus for the
aesthetic imagination. Let us recall one of the most famous of these sight–
ings, the youthful protagonist's view from a moving carriage of the three
