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ReadySteadyBlog
TEV: "One of the UK's best and brightest book bloggers"
Thursday 26 October 2006
Me on WB
Last week, The Bookseller kindly asked me to write a 200-word piece for their Reading for Pleasure section. I chose to write about Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900. The piece was slightly cut for the magazine, as so often happens, and it isn't online, so here it it is, below, in full:
In Berlin Childhood Around 1900 one of the twentieth century's most incisive literary minds turns to his own earliest memories. Walter Benjamin, the celebrated German translator of In Search of Lost Time, wrote his minor counterpoint to complement Proust's Olympian masterpiece. Benjamin (along with Rilke) was one of the first to recognise the revolutionary nature of Proust's writing, but he was concerned in his own investigation into how memory creates and confounds us not to ape either Proust's unique style nor his philosophy. In beautiful, compact, stand-alone paragraphs, Benjamin becomes again the flaneur of his own bourgeois childhood. He finds a city in which he can lose himself. Losing oneself (as one does when reading) being the beginning of discovery (learning to get lost is a vertiginous skill). And writing, almost in fragments, he disturbs the teleology of autobiography. Today, perhaps more than ever, we need Benjamin's nuanced radicalism. Despite his Marxism, he knew human beings could not be reduced to avatars of their class, but were irreducibly complex. He knew the Messiah would only come to save us if we recognised the social system that is destroying our humanity as surely as it destroyed the Berlin of his childhood.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, publishing news
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Books of the Week
First published in 1931 and now appearing for the first time in English, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a disquieting anatomy of a deviant mind in the tradition of Crime and Punishment. Letham, the treacherously unreliable narrator, is a depraved bacteriologist whose murder of his wife is, characteristically, both instinctual and premeditated. Convicted and exiled, he attempts to atone for his crimes through science, conceiving of the book we are reading as an empirical report on himself – whose ultimate purpose may be to substitute for a conscience. Yet Letham can neither understand nor master himself. His crimes are crimes of passion, and his passions remain more or less untouched by his reason – in fact they are constantly intruding on his “report,” rigorous as it is intended to be. Both feverish and chilling, Georg Letham explores the limits of reason and the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity. Moving from an unnamed Central European city to arctic ice floes to a tropical-island prison, this layered novel – with its often grotesquely comic tone and arresting images – invites us into the darkest chambers of the human psyche.
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To live well in the world one must be able to enjoy it: to love, Freud says, and work. Dejection is the state of being in which such enjoyment is no longer possible. There is an aesthetic dimension to dejection, in which the world appears in a new light. In this book, the dark serenity of dejection is examined through a study of the poetry of Hopkins and Coleridge, and the music of 'depressive' black metal artists such as Burzum and Xasthur. The author then develops a theory of 'militant dysphoria' via an analysis of the writings of the Red Army Fraction's activist-theoretician, Ulrike Meinhof. The book argues that the 'cold world' of dejection is one in which new creative and political possibilities, as well as dangers, can arise. It is not enough to live well in the world: one must also be able to affirm that another world is possible.
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Serendipoetry
This World is not Conclusion
This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond --
Invisible, as Music --
But positive, as Sound --
It beckons, and it baffles --
Philosophy -- don't know --
And through a Riddle, at the last --
Sagacity, must go --
To guess it, puzzles scholars --
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown --
Faith slips -- and laughs, and rallies --
Blushes, if any see --
Plucks at a twig of Evidence --
And asks a Vane, the way --
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit --
Strong Hallelujahs roll --
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul --
-- Emily Dickinson
The Complete Poems (Faber & Faber)
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