The Storyteller

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Book: The Storyteller Read Online Free PDF
Author: Walter Benjamin
he writes, engages ‘that most secret part of our selves … in which we now only sense a wish, the wish to decode the language of signs and omens, and thus we may get hold of the disconcertment that fills the person who considers human life for one moment in all its strangeness, with its dangers, its alarm, its beauty and its sad limits’ (xvii). Considerations in the concluding part are devoted to Surrealist poetry and determine the author’s orientation from the outset – a sign, indeed, of how concerned he is to remove himself from the realm of academic scholarship. It should be added that he does not at all relinquish the most rigorous academic standards in his handling of the apparatus of scholarship, even if that is not the case with his method. The book is exemplarily worked through, with precision, without learned pomposity. Due to this commitment, the details here are often as original as they are appealing, irrespective of the problematic aspects of the book’s basic position.
    The weaknesses of the work are clearly exposed in its allegiant formulations. The author says: ‘Objectivity, which certainly can and should form the law of the descriptive sciences, cannot fruitfully determine the humanities. In this realm every “disinterested” research includes an unforgivable betrayal of the self and of the “object” of investigation’ (xvii). One would not want to raise any objections to this. The error only arises where one tries to align an intensive interest with an immediate interest. The unmediated interest is always subjective and has just as little right in the human sciences as in any other. One cannotimmediately pose the question of whether Romantic doctrines of the dream were ‘correct’; rather, one should explore the historical constellation from which the imaginary Romantic enterprises sprang. In such a mediated interest, which directs itself first and foremost towards the historical state of affairs of Romantic intentions, our own contemporary involvement in the object comes into its own more legitimately than in the appeal to inwardness, which approaches the texts immediately in order to retrieve truth from them. Béguin’s book proceeds with such an appeal and thereby has, perhaps, fostered misunderstandings.
    André Thérive, who supplies Le Temps with literary criticism in the secular tradition, observes of this book that it depends on the opinion that we hold of the purpose of humanity, whether we declare ourselves in agreement with it, or whether we are compelled to find it utterly repellent ‘when the spirit is directed towards the darkness as the only place where it finds joy, poetry, the secret dominion over the universe’ ( Le Temps , August 1937). Perhaps it should be added that the path via the initiates of earlier times is enticing for the adept only if these are authorities, only if they appear to him as witnesses. When it comes to poets that is rarely the case; it is most certainly not true of Romantic poets. Only Ritter might be understood as an initiator in the strict sense. The shaping not only of his thoughts, but of his life, is proof of that. One might also call Novalis to mind and Caroline von Günderode – the Romantics were for the most part too bound up in the business of literature to feature as ‘guardians of the threshold’. This state of affairs means that Béguin often has to echo the usual modes of procedure in literary history. One can agree with him that these do not quite correspond to his theme. This speaks as much against them as against the theme.
    Anyone who undertakes an analysis, as Goethe reminds us, should ensure that a genuine synthesis is at its root. As alluring as the object dealt with by Béguin is, the question remains whether the mindset with which the author approached it can be compatible with Goethe’s counsel. Completion of the synthesis is the privilege of
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