(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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KARL IVAN SOLIBAKKE
V
Drawing attention to Baudelaire’s clairvoyance for comprehending the
broken imagery that imposed itself on modern urban spaces, Benjamin
alleges that modernity adopts an allegorical mode of cultural representation.
With its advent, symbolic forms once founded on sacred connotations
were projected into secular allegories, which according to Benjamin
the Baroque dramatists regarded as the hieroglyphics or iconology of
historical decline and decay. Temporal in nature, allegories conjure up
primordial landscapes by eliciting apparitions of death and fragmentation.
Benjamin explains this concept in his Trauerspiel book (Ursprung
des deutschen Trauerspiels; Origin of the German Mourning Play, 1928):
“Während im Symbol mit der Verklärung des Untergangs das transfigurierte
Antlitz der Natur im Lichte der Erlösung flüchtig sich offenbart,
liegt in der Allegorie die facies hippocratica der Geschichte als erstarrte
Urlandschaft dem Betrachter vor Augen” (GS I.1:343 “Whereas in the
symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is
fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is
confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial
landscape,” Origin, 166). Because they are able to detect temporal
extremes and marshal visions of the past in the now, allegories mix reality
with the mystification of the primeval. Accordingly, dialectical approaches
to cultural semiotics combine allegories with the intentions of the clairvoyant
artist, who while cognizant of his vision of the future is also acutely
aware that he has been deprived of the assurance of divine signification.
The index realigning the relationship between images and cultural
signs is characteristic of Benjamin’s approach to language as an allegorical
medium and a cornerstone of the dialectical image codified in the Passagen-Werk.
Not unlike Baudelaire, Benjamin seeks out flash-like correlations
between the present and citations of past fragments that are wrenched
out of their original contexts and suffused into the horizon of the modern
materialist. In essence, however, he reinforces an ongoing process of
fragmentation and symbolization that was not unfamiliar to nineteenthcentury
cultural commentary. Despite paying tribute to the social theorist
Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and the photographic inventor Louis
Jacques Daguerre (1787–1851), as well as to Grandville, Baudelaire, and
the urban modernizer Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809–91) for
the technical and intellectual contributions that made modern cityscapes
possible, the Passagen-Werk makes little or no reference to two of the
most innovative and provocative depictions of Parisian urbanity in
German intellectual history, Französische Zustände (French Conditions)
and Lutezia by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). 8 Why Benjamin chose
not to allude to Heine remains a conundrum, although he does mention
reading Heine’s prose on Paris in a letter to Werner Kraft in 1936