Melancholy, Allegory and Tyranny

Reading the Ruins with Walter Benjamin

'The enduring fascination of the downfall of the tyrant is rooted in the conflict between the impotence and depravity of his character ...[and] the extent to which the age was convinced of the sacrosanct powers of his role.'

Thus Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) describes the mood of the courtly theatre-going public in the decades after the Thirty Years War (1618-48). This was when, in various German states, the absolute authority of the Pope had given way to the rule of princes subject to the secular authority of the Emperor. As the princely powers were recognised and obeyed as 'sacrosanct', there was no easy moral satisfaction in the tyrant’s end, for his fall was also the fall of 'mankind and history'. The drama presents moral judgement and sentence, which leaves the audience feeling 'implicated'.

The implications are taken up by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, a treatise on the Trauerspiels. ‘Traditional’ tragedy is concerned with historical events such as they are conceived or imagined at the time, with the dramatis personae derived from the hierarchy of the monarchy; whereas in Trauerspiel - the 'Mourning Play' - the object is not history, but myth, and the dramatis persona derives from the pre-historic age of heroes and legend.

For George Lukács, a more ‘orthodox’ Marxist than Benjamin, good art was classical: realistic and well-rounded. Benjamin disagreed. Like Nietzsche, he regarded the whole notion of classical act as a myth. Benjamin was more interested in those works that were ambiguous to society and even to its creators: 'the remotest extremes and the apparent excesses of the process of development,' which reveal ‘the configuration of the idea – the sum total of all possible juxtapositions of such opposites.'

The Lutheran doctrine of 'the calling' and the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination were antinomic to everyday life. Having renounced the Papist doctrine of 'good works', which had been corrupted by indulgences, Protestant teaching imposed rigorous morality in the sphere of secularised civic life, devoid of miracles.

By relating the Trauerspiel to the politics, religion and philosophy of the time, Benjamin's work has been applied by literary historians to developments in Spanish baroque, and Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas.

Subjects living under the absolutist regimes in the 17th century were fascinated and horrified by the English propensity for decapitating or murdering their royalty. In a play about Charles Stuart by Andreas Gryphius, the king's impending fate on the chopping block is put into sharp focus by a ghostly visitation from his beheaded grandmother, Mary Stuart, 'Queen of Scots'. Gryphius assumes an audience that, despite differences between Protestants and Catholic, shares a moral consensus: that firstly, decapitating monarchs is a sin and a bad way of resolving social problems; and secondly, that monarchs shouldn't decapitate noble relatives, as it sets off the curse which will fall on Charles’ head. Thus Mary's ghost doesn't appear as a martyred Catholic divinity, but as an allegory.

In Baroque, the profane, phenomenal world loses any inherent meaning as an object in-itself. Instead the world is invested with an allegorical meaning that transcends the natural world. In presenting objects such as ruins, death-heads and monuments, allegorical techniques preserve and transform the pagan deities into 'emblematic fragments, presenting them as ruins.'

'In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. . . . Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.'

'The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of this world'.

The Baroque, as the art form of the Counter-Reformation. marks the transition from worldly asceticism to worldly aestheticism.

Gillian Rose, summarising Benjamin, writes

'If Protestant salvation gives rise to the ethic of worldly asceticism and its unintended outcome, the spirit of capitalism, the Counter-Reformation, Protestant and Catholic loss of salvation gives rise to the Baroque ethic of worldly aestheticism and its unintended outcome, the spirit of Fascism. To Baroque melancholy, the world is allegorical, the phantasmagoria of personification of soulless things.'

In Baroque drama the Prince's indecisiveness and melancholy is presented in the forms of the tyrant, the martyr and the intriguer. Any of these three may also be presented as a separate character (the martyr is often a female victim of the other two).

Gillian Rose investigates Benjamin's reference to 'the Baroque Ethic and the Spirit of Fascism' in relation to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber explores the development of Protestant 'inwardness' from Pietism to the Protestantism of the Counter-Reformation to 19th century French Catholic 'modernism'. In the allegorised, aestheticised world, writes Rose,

'..the evil genius of the Intriguer. the spirit of fascism, hierarchical and absolute sovereign – who, having destroyed his own impulses and, unscrupulous toward the world, rules by emergency and the frenzy of destruction.'

Mournfulness in Trauerspiel is rigid and petrified as opposed to genuine grief. As 'absolute spirituality' it is the 'theology of evil', which as Benjamin puts it, 'destroys itself in its emancipation from what is sacred.'

Fascism, Rose insists, has no spiritual value. She relates fascist violence to the mis-recognition Hegel writes about in the Phenomenology of Spirit as ‘atrophied spirit’. Fascism develops when politics becomes aestheticised and technology is mis-recognised as 'art'. Rose quotes Benjamin on the fascist turn of the Italian Futurists:

'Fiat ars - pereat mundi, ['Create art, though the world perish'] says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to provide the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology.’

In the Paris of the 1920s, allegorised by Surrealists inspired by Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin wandered through the old quarters where the ornate arcades from the 1830s still stood as the 'ruins' of the bourgeoisie's semi-utopian dreamscape. Benjamin’s book project, Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century features Baudelaire as the lyric poet who exploded the form by introducing as subject matter the 'shocks' of the new. As in 'The Swan':

'Paris has changed, but in my grief no change.
New palaces and scaffoldings and blocks,
To me, are allegories, nothing strange.
My memories are heavier than rocks'

Reading the chapter in Marx's Capital, ''The Fetish Character of Commodities - and the Secret it Entails' deepened Benjamin's analysis of the commodity in modern life, especially on how social relations between individuals 'assume the phantasmagoric form of relation between things.' Here Marx is referencing the magic lantern spectacle, in which real or imagined images are projected, one following the other as in a dream.

T.J. Clark sees an increasing convergence between Marx’s understanding of the logic of commodity exchange and abstract labour power in the world of the flâneur (stroller), the automaton, the photographer, the prostitute, the poet and the feuilletoniste (gossip columnist).

'He [Benjamin] sees the 19th century more and more as a society with abstraction as its doppelgänger, haunting and deranging its great panoply of inventions – “whereby the sensuous-concrete counts only as a phenomenal form of the abstract-general” [Marx]. What the new Paris book aims to do, above all, is to show this inversion actually happening.'

Still to come were the works which Benjamin is best known for: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,

Surrealism's 100 Years

Hegel, Freud and Breton

TO BE CONTINUED

References

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne (2003)

Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity:Philosophical Essays (Verso: 1993, 2017)

Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism; Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt Schoo Critical Theory, (2024)

Charles Rosen, 'The Ruins of Walter Benjamin', New York Review of Books,

October 27, 1977.

Bainard Cowan, 'Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory', New German Critique, Winter, 1981, No. 22.

Joel Lande, 'German Trauerspiel and Its International Nexus: On the Migration of Poetic Forms' in Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy,

T.J. Clark, 'Reservations of the Marvellous', London Review of Books, 22 June, 2000.