The Storyteller (2 page)

When the energies of the night are wrenched into the day through the process of linguistic representation, repressed desires and wishes can no longer evaporate through a process of forgetting. Benjamin, in
One Way Street
, equates such writing-up with betrayal,
²⁷
for it is in the moment of transcription that latent desires have to be confronted. Just as the person who wakes up after dreaming betrays the night with food, so too does the writer who reaches for a pen. Censorship operates to protect dreamers from their dreams. Elaboration operates to capture the intensity of the dream-experience against the inadequacies of memory and language. But censorship has a limit. To an audience familiar with Freud, records of dreams become stark declarations of desire, arguably more exposing than the speech-act conducted between the analysand and the analyst. Symbols are read as pathology and, in Benjamin's case, declaimed loudly in public.

The elaboration of dreams has never been a problem for interpretation or analysis, for it is in the telling and retelling, in the remembrance and mis-remembrance, that significance
might be drawn out. It is through this act that the latent content of the dream (its wishes and desires) might override the manifest content (its details and events). As Adorno famously surmised, it is in exaggeration that psychoanalysis finds truth
²⁸
– and, to an extent, dreams are already exaggerations. Though dreams are universal, and their objects and images boundless in quantity and variation, in a formal sense they are fairly standard. When read as a literary form, they tend to disintegrate linear narratives. In this way, they represent a modernist aesthetic prior to the formal development of modernism, but this perhaps fails to fully encapsulate their significance. Everything that has been shattered under the conditions of modernity is shattered further by the dream and its transcription.

What persists through them is the suspension of natural laws: substances merge, physical laws are overridden, space is fractured, events occur without linearity, and nature – in one particular case – is absolutely reversed. Figures pass through walls, and lions do somersaults. In this sense dreams work against the hardening of law to provide images of redeemed (or, at least, another) nature.
²⁹
But it should be noted that these tendencies are not unique to Benjamin's dreams. What is perhaps remarkable about the dreams here is how unremarkable they actually are. For, when written down as narratives, in their expression of desire outside physical, political and psychic constraints, dreams echo the general desire for a world that cannot so easily be imagined in the daytime. Benjamin's attachment to the Jungian image of the ‘collective unconscious'
in ‘Convolute K' of
The Arcades Project
, despite protestations of its proto-fascism,
³⁰
can be understood as an acknowledgment of this tendency. Not only do dreams operate against the status quo, but they do so through a universal or collective impulse.

This is not to say that the dream sits outside nature or history; rather, the propensity to dream is both motivated and constrained by such conditions. In the opening of the short sketch ‘Dream Kitsch' (1925), Benjamin writes that ‘dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety – indeed, the range – of dreams'.
³¹
Dreams shape history and are shaped by it. Dreamworlds are the displaced expressions of this world within a world of their own. It is imperative to read the dream historically, as that which breaks from the familial and from private neuroses. The content of dreams – if not sleep itself – no doubt transformed with each decade of the twentieth century, but Benjamin does not embrace the unbounded quality of the night-dream as a general and universal desire. Dreams are not simply open; they are desires conditioned, even ‘determined' by history.
³²
They thus hold to the anxieties, banalities and brutalities of each epoch as much as they point to the destruction of those conditions. Their world is our world as much as it is its inversion, and it is in this double movement that their use can be found and mobilised. The process of recording dreams might congeal an unformed block of memory and desire, thereby betraying it by casting its original images all too starkly in language. However, dreams still work against the conditions of the day – possibly to overwhelm them.

Travel

Walter Benjamin professed a love of travel from early on. He claimed that it was stimulated by postcards from his grandmother, who undertook trepidatious adventures across land and sea. His imagination kindled by her postcards, he soon undertook dream-journeys to ‘Tabarz, Brindisi, Madonna di Campiglio', sailing the world's oceans.
³³
As he grew into an adult, he began to travel widely across Europe – to the far northern reaches of Scandinavia, to Moscow and Riga in the East, to Paris in the West – and he was drawn to the South, to Marseilles, Naples, Capri and Ibiza. The Mediterranean South figures on various occasions in his fictional writing. In this regard, he follows in the footsteps of the German Romantics, for whom Italy in particular was a source of fascination. In their accounts of travel to Italy, German writers often established a dichotomy between the realities of day-to-day life in their homeland and an idyllic South, an imagined elsewhere, which promised an escape from the cold conduct of German society. In the German psyche, North and South represent two irreconcilable poles.

Benjamin began to dislodge himself from Germany in 1917, seeking other homes – Bern, Capri, Moscow, Ibiza, Paris, Denmark. He went back to Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s, working for the radio, for newspapers and writing reviews. But he sensed the changing times. With his precarious mode of employment as a freelance writer, he was always searching for the cheapest place to eat, sleep, read and write. He reports in his diary in 1931 that, having spent all of his money, he seriously considered living in a cave
on an island in the Mediterranean.
³⁴
He observed that he would endure any deprivation not to have to return to Berlin. Benjamin was blown by historical forces from the cushioned bourgeois home of his childhood to the comfortless cave of the dispossessed.

The city's spaces, especially those that are perceived only in passing, unexpectedly, and made available to a particular gaze, provide material for stories. It is here that lives and locations intertwine, and someone with an ear to the ground might pick up on a thousand tragedies, misdemeanours, lost or fulfilled loves. The city absorbs history, reflecting and deflecting the markers of power. After wandering in Paris, one of the settings for these stories, Benjamin reports in his
Arcades Project
:

There is the Place du Maroc in Belleville; that desolate heap of stones with its rows of tenements became for me, when I happened upon it one Sunday afternoon, not only a Moroccan desert but also, and at the same time, a monument of colonial imperialism; topographic vision intertwined with allegorical meaning in this square, yet not for an instant did it lose its place in the heart of Belleville.
³⁵

Belleville is perceived through a bifurcation of views: a topographical one, which sees the shapes of the land, its hills and depressions, or in this case its sand, which is evoked in the miserable stones and poor ugly housing; a historical one, which sees colonial imperialism, the snatching of Morocco by the French, Morocco's desolation and all that is implied in terms of political history and morality. Benjamin goes on:

But to awaken such a view is something ordinarily reserved for intoxicants. And in such cases, in fact, street names are like intoxicating substances that make our perceptions more stratified and richer in space. One could call the energy by which they transport us into such a state their
vertu évocatrice
, their evocative power – but that is saying too little; for what is decisive here is not the association but the interpenetration of images.
³⁶

The street name is charged, a poetry available to all, a stratification and amplification of sense and senses that will cascade for those who are open to it, a cataract of connections, leading into and out of political, historical understanding and emotional truth. (The play on street names in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust' comes into focus here.) Benjamin draws out of the things he witnesses an interpenetration of images which is a concentration of the energies of the world in their most potent state, amplified because of the constriction of the space that holds them. The short story likewise focuses energies into a few pages, acts as a concentration of actual and possible realities. As in the diary form, these stories record something of a tangible, recognisable world, but also bring out the ways in which our encounters and our exposures are overwhelming, mysterious, at times magical and otherworldly.

To travel is to leave behind the familiar. It should be noted that the familiar has its secret side too, as Benjamin established in his review of Franz Hessel's novel
Secret Berlin
, which defamiliarises Berlin by casting it as ‘the stage for an Alexandrine musical comedy'. Travel enables new rules and ways of life. In ‘Voyage of
The Mascot
', the ship is a floating ‘Magic City' where revelry is the norm and the captain holds no authority. But over time the revolutionary spirit of the ship morphs into
a monumental bureaucracy that clogs up action. In ‘Detective Stories on Tour', a review essay, Benjamin details how the train carriage becomes a mythic space where various demons hold sway. The lonely traveller is exposed to a world in books that is not the usual one, and the rhythms of reading are realigned with the rhythms of the locomotive. Stations are thresholds to other worlds, as are harbours. Travel brings the threshold into view, as for instance in ‘Nordic Sea' when Benjamin observes women who stand in the doorways of buildings to negotiate the ‘strict boundaries of the house'. Thresholds between the world of rationality and hallucinatory realms are crossed in these stories, as for example in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust' when the traveller gains access to ‘another realm – elevated, disenchanted and clarified at once', through an encounter with a graffitied early Gothic capital bearing the name of a demonic woman. The erotic yearnings kindled especially in the space of the city span Benjamin's writings. An early tale, ‘Still Story', describes the journey home of a young female student pursued by the narrator, who stalks her to her door. The city itself becomes a threshold.

A number of these stories were written and set in Ibiza. Benjamin appears fascinated by the differences between peasant life and the lives of the metropolitan figures who find themselves there, usually as exiles from some previous existence. Such a person might misunderstand or misread the signs on the island, as does the narrator of ‘The Wall', who is sent on a wild goose chase in pursuit of a place that does not exist, or rather he finds it back where he started, a place of misunderstanding. Travel leads somewhere and misleads, though in being misled, one also witnesses much that is not otherwise revealed.

Play and Pedagogy

When travelling from Ibiza to Paris in September 1933, Benjamin devised a number of riddles. This was a longstanding pursuit for him, his wife Dora and his brother Georg, who would exchange riddles on birthdays and at Christmas. Just as he collated the words and sayings of his son, Stefan, as he was growing up, so too did he glean insights from the way that children deploy language when confronted with a handful of words.
³⁷
One example is ‘Fantasy Sentences', constructed during Benjamin's stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926–7, which is probably based on the formulations of Asja Lacis's daughter, Daga. A similar experiment was disseminated to a wider audience in 1931, when Benjamin delivered a radio programme entitled ‘Radio Games: Poets with Keywords'. Adapted from a Baroque parlour game, the programme presented listeners with a series of seemingly unrelated words with which they were to construct sentences. Though this programme has been lost to history, the listeners' contributions remain, having been published in the radio station's newspaper, the
Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitschrift
.
³⁸
The process of translation or transposition best reveals the mechanism at work here. The game is, in Benjamin's words, poetry by keyword. With each formulation, a horde of analogies open up. New constellations of meaning crystallise as every word – each with a multiplicity of meanings – enters into new relations with another. Here we find a pedagogy rooted in fantasy and the
deformation of existing meanings, an interest that dates back to Benjamin's involvement with the prewar youth movement.

This conception of pedagogy cannot be disconnected from play. Play is at the centre of Benjamin's thinking. It appears in different guises. It is there as something peculiar to children. It is also something that the gods do with humankind, as indicated in this piece of marginalia that Benjamin wrote on a review in 1930: ‘Collectors may be loony – though this in the sense of the French lunatique – according to the moods of the moon. They are playthings too, perhaps – but of a goddess – namely τ
ύ
χη (Tyche, Goddess of Luck).'
³⁹
Play is there in the concept of
Spielraum
, which Benjamin develops in his writings on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility: ‘Technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action [
Spielraum
], immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he registers his demands on it.'
⁴⁰
Spielraum
– room for play or manoeuvre, a space in which some exploration may take place. In this instance, play is a result of technological change and exists in tandem with it, a reorganisation of the self in the world. This room for play is an imagined space, a potential for habitation and habituation contained in the technical form of film or radio. But play was also more universal for Benjamin. Play is what each child longs to do. Wherever the child exists, the likelihood is that a space of play will develop. The
Spielraum
conjures forth and expands imagination. It develops
the capacity for motile thought, and it is manifest in the facility of children to let language slip.
Spielraum
develops through mishearings and misunderstandings. It prompts children's affection for the speculative space of fairy tales and silly stories.