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grasp a kind of exalting illusion of having made contact with their hidden
essence because a sense is created that the mind is no longer estranged
from the world it apprehends, having entered through the image into a
realm of mobile, perhaps infinite, connectedness. The concatenation of
resemblances, the metamorphoses of the image with their power to suf–
fuse the object with associations of beauty, value, and pleasure - birds,
flowers, maidens, gold - become an equivalent of "home," which I sus–
pect ultimately means for Proust that primal experience of connectedness,
the mother's embrace.
One hardly wants to deny that Kafka and Proust are antithetical fig–
ures on the map of modernism, nor does one want to resist the obvious
perception that their appeal for Benjamin marks the antipodes of his criti–
cal sensibility.
It
is nevertheless instructive that he should have seen a cer–
tain nostalgia at the root of their very different impulses to dissolve and
create genres. In both cases, it is a rigorously unsentimental nostalgia,
though the objects are different - for Proust, a lost primal unity; for
Kafka, a lost tradition, a time when law and observer, text and interpreter,
were united in certainty. In both cases, the act of writing provides a bril–
liant if desperate compensation for the vanished world of origins, though
the brilliance is paramount for Proust, the desperation for Kafka. It is a
critical commonplace to associate modernism with iconoclasm, whether
the iconoclastic impulse is an expression of alienation and emotional in–
coherence (T. S. Eliot) or of exuberant refurbishing of literary form for a
new age Goyce). Benjamin's distinctive insight into Proust and Kafka
is
that their iconoclasm was an artistically innovative strategy for holding
onto a consoling vestige of something precious from the past, whether
personal or cultural, that was otherwise irrevocably lost. There is a reso–
nant doubleness in Benjamin's own sense of modernity. He was excited
by the revolutionary possibilities of the new technologies of representa–
tion - especially photography and cinema - at the same time that he
saw
them as catalysts of the sundry processes of human self-alienation and the
breakdown of community he associated with urbanization, industrializa–
tion, commodification, and secularization. The most heterodox of
Marxists, he was drawn to the transcendent realm of mysticism both early
and late in his career, and he cherished the idea of tradition as the agency
for the transmission of immemorial wisdom. Himself a thoroughly
Europeanized Jew who intermittently contemplated the notion of a return
to Jewish sources, Benjamin was in a peculiarly advantaged position to
imagine Kafka and Proust, the tortuously self-conscious and the residual
Jew, as masters of the impossible return, modernists who created the
compelling novelty of the new century's literature out of the acuteness of
their longing for a world that had gone before it.
