THE PLEASURES OF THE TEXT: ANGELUS NOVUS

Author(s): Allen Dunn

Source: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal , Spring/Summer 2001, Vol. 84, No. 1/2
(Spring/Summer 2001), pp. 1-7
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41178996

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 THE PLEASURES OF THE TEXT

ANGELUS NOVUS

T^HE cover of this issue presents Paul Klee's Angelus N

new angel. The angel is suspended in a grey graphic s
hovering between the comic caricature of Klee's early wor
the more austere modernist abstraction that was to follow. Klee's
angel has eyes that are disconcertingly askew, enormous asym-
metrical ears, a feline nose, and fleshy lips that are parted to re-
veal a set of vampirishly pointed teeth. This creature's
appendages are constructed of shapes that suggest some kind of
bird/human hybrid: feather-finger wings and talon-toe feet. Its
hair is a tangle of scroll work; its jowls are backlit by a kind of
fallen halo of tarnished light, and its breast is marked with an X
and a heart-blush of red pastel. The lower part of the figure is
comprised of a triangular swatch that could double as both tail
feathers and the skirt of a gown. Appropriately enough, the dis-
position of this angel is very difficult to read. It presents a Ror-
schach of various possibilities: Is this a nervous and uncertain
side-long glance? A half-formed look of surprise? Or a look of
good humored acknowledgment, hinting, perhaps, at irony, even
condescension? What face does a new angel wear?
Shortly after the water color was completed in 1920, the Ger-
man social theorist Walter Benjamin bought Angelus Novus from
Klee for 1,000 already unstable German marks. It provided both
the name and some of the inspiration for a journal that Benja-
min hoped to start. Benjamin's plan, a plan that should sound
familiar to Sounding readers, was to assemble experts in such
fields as politics, linguistics, philosophy, Judaism, and literary
criticism and to enjoin them to keep the journal's readers abreast
of the most important developments in these fields. The editorial
board included Ernst Bloch as the philosophy editor, Gershom
Scholem as the editor in charge of Judaic studies, and Benjamin
himself as the authority on literary criticism. Benjamin envi-
sioned a topical journal, a journal that would change with the
changing Weimar world. In his advertisement for Angelus Novus,

Soundings 84.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2001). ISSN 0038-1861.

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 2 SOUNDINGS Allen Dunn

he predicts that the pub

which he embraces as "the
genuine topicality." He just
from the Talmud:

according to a legend from the Talmud, even the angels are cre-
ated - new ones at every moment and in countless hosts - simply
to sing their hymns before God, then to cease and disappear into
nothingness. May its very name signify that the magazine will be
graced with such topicality, which is the only truth, (qtd. in Brod-
ersen 118)

Benjamin's praise of ephemerality fits well with the figure of

the flaneur, that patron of change and adaptability who will play
such an important role in his later work. The flaneur is able to
transform rootlessness and anomie into sources of imaginative
productivity. The notion of ephemerality also gives us an interest-
ing frame in which to situate Klee's painting. It suggests that
what we are seeing is only a brief moment in an artistic or divine
process: Perhaps this angel is only a momentary confluence of
shapes and colors that will at any second morph into some new
being or recede into nothingness.
Unfortunately, the journal proved to be an all-too-sensitive ba-
rometer of the times. Because of delays in production and soar-
ing inflation, it had to be abandoned before the first issue
appeared. At the same time, Benjamin found himself short of
money and sold the painting to Gershom Scholem, whose family
owned it until recently. As Momme Broderson points out in his
biography of Benjamin, the elaborate plans laid out in Benja-
min's advertisement for Angelus Novus were not wasted, however,
since they constituted a kind of prospectus for Benjamin's work
in the following two decades (Broderson 123). In the simplest
terms, much of this work expresses the hope that the culture of
change ushered in by the process of modernization contains Uto-
pian possibilities that the artist as flaneur might exploit. In his
famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-
duction," for instance, Benjamin dares to hope that even in the
process of modern mass production we might find the means to
expand human freedom.
References to Klee's angel continued to recur in Benjamin's
writing following the collapse of the journal, and charting the
textual transformations of this image has become a sub-field of

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 Angelus Novus 3

Benjamin scholarship. One of the most dramatic transformations

occurs in the successive versions of a piece entitled "Agesiliaus
Santander." Here what was formerly an angel of praise becomes a
darkly satanic figure of revolt, an avenging angel with wings like
knives. In his overview of Benjamin's various uses of the angel
image, O.K. Werckmeister observes that Benjamin invokes this
figure of destruction to represent the revolutionary violence that
he saw as prerequisite to both political and artistic progress.
More specifically, Benjamin uses the angel to embody the often
discordant aspirations of a Parisian artistic avant garde and a mil-
itant Soviet Communism. In this guise, Benjamin claims, the new
angel represents a "new positive image of barbarism" (qtd. in
Werckmeister 251). It is the figure of a destructive force that he
hopes will clear the way for the construction of a new artistic and
political world.
With the rise of Nazism, however, this hope was to be severely
tested. Klee's Angelus Novus makes its final appearance in Benja-
min's work in his "Thesis on the Philosophy of History," an essay
he completed shortly before his death in 1940. In this piece, Ben-
jamin invokes Klee's angel not as the patron of the ephemeral or
as a romanticized figure of political and artistic revolt, but as the
angel of history:
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face turned to-
ward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with
such violence that the angel can no longer close them. . . . This
storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 257-58)
The angel of history has his face turned toward human catastro-
phe rather than toward the divine splendor that the Talmudic
angel praises. From the perspective of this backward-looking an-
gel, all of human history is a single, timeless, catastrophic event,
an enormous pile of wreckage and debris in dire need of divine
intervention. According to Benjamin the stormy winds of pro-
gress that prevent the angel from returning to the past have been
generated by society's faith in modernity and modern technol-
ogy. It is this faith, he thinks, that has set the stage for fascism.
"One reason why Fascism has a chance," he observes, "is that in
the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm"

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 4 SOUNDINGS Allen Dunn

(Benjamin 257). Clearly, o

complacency was the Sovie
itself to one version of hi
pact. Benjamin, however, s
tion, the German Social D
acquiescing to Fascism beca
technological progress for
this human political blind
future toward which his ba
serve an age-old calamity t
jamin goes on to explain,
turning away from the pre
discipline thatallowed friars
affairs" in order to disenta
such discipline, Benjamin h
plicity in this technologica
min hopes that this turnin
to achieve a perspective on
crystalize into a single m
which "the present comp
(Benjamin 263). In this fusi
society will finally be able
cannot; it will redress the
progress toward a truly M
Benjamin's Angelus Novus
is compounded of an uns
revolution, and change, a
deem the past by experien
prepared to assume the ed
have felt a similar ambivalence, an excitement about the chal-
lenges that lie ahead, but an excitement tempered by feelings of
loss. To be sure, it is not that I view the journal's distinguished
past as in any way in need of redemption or that I would think
myself qualified to provide such redemption if it were. Like many
of the Soundings readers with whom I have spoken, I am sorry to
see Ralph Norman move on to other tasks. I will miss working
with him, and I will miss reading his always eloquent introductory
essays. During the transition period of the past year or so I have
had the chance to observe Ralph's work at close quarters. I have
seen what the journal's readers do not see: his patient and pains-

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 Angelus Novus 5

taking correspondence with contributors and would-be contribu-

tors, his ability to inspire and empower his editorial staff and his
editorial board, his grace and clear thinking under pressure, his
emotional fortitude during crisis, and, most impressively, the
consistently high level of intellectual engagement that he has
brought to all aspects of the job. Of course, evidence of this high
level of engagement, both direct and indirect, has been on dis-
play in the pages of Soundings since Ralph assumed the editor-
ship, but those who have not spent time in conversation with
Ralph will likely be unaware of the depth of his commitment to
the kind of conversation that Soundings has facilitated. He is a
model of the public intellectual. Ralph has generously agreed to
serve on the board of editors, and I am sure that I will continue
to rely on his good advice.
The articles in this issue reflect many of the fault-lines of am-
bivalence about modernity that mark Benjamin's texts, although,
truth be told, the angel of history is much more in evidence here
than is his ephemeral twin. Kimlyn Bender's essay is perhaps the
clearest example of this. It defends an Aristotlean model of
moral education that will preserve and nurture a cultural tradi-
tion while remaining flexible enough to acknowledge a chang-
ing, pluralistic American society. A similar sort of balancing act is
evident in the Chinese judicial system as it is described by Vin-
cent Luizzi. In Luizzi's account, a Chinese court system that is
the product of over a thousand years of historical development
attempts to retain elements of its traditional inquisitorial system,
a system that places great emphasis on the wisdom of the judge as
a patient and impartial investigator, while at the same time
adopting features of a Western adversarial system in which the
judge plays a more neutral role and courtroom culture is shaped
by the conflict of competing parties.
Wesley Wildman takes a much broader view of moral econ-
omy. He describes the role that religious narratives play in ex-
plaining and in failing to explain the existence of pain, suffering,
and evil. He contends that religious narratives present the cause
of evil in deliberately ambiguous terms: horrendous conse-
quences follow from small slips, from minor mistakes. This very
lack of balance between the causes of evil and its effects is a nec-
essary feature of religious narratives, he argues, since it allows
them to balance an ethically problematic indifference to human

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 6 SOUNDINGS Allen Dunn

suffering against a powerf

with members of one's ow
sists, these narratives beco
incorporated in and med
institutions.

Another group of articles in this issue address the continuities

and discontinuities of human identity as it is shaped and
threatened by modernity. Mark Cladis, for instance, presents
Rousseau as a kind of pioneer of modern selfhood. He focuses
on one of Rousseau's best-known strategies for dealing with the
stresses of modern life: the strategy of solitary self-cultivation.
Cladis concludes that this solitary path is deeply problematic, and
he admits that it is only one of the ways that Rousseau responded
to the pressures of modern life; nonetheless, he finds that it pro-
vides important insights into the modern psyche and into the
modern culture of self-repair. Richard Hutch explores the
more extreme case of Brian Keenan who was held as a hostage
for four years in Lebanon and spent much of that time in solitary
confinement. In Keenan's account of his captivity, Hutch finds a
drama of abjection, self-loss, and narcissistic self-recovery that he
thinks sheds light on our more mundane experiences of self-
hood. The magical thinking that sustained Keenan in his isola-
tion is visible in a wide array of interpersonal encounters, Hutch
claims, including the reader's encounter with Keenan's text. By
contrast, M. Michael Lustigman reflects upon both personal
and cultural identity from an ethnographer's point of view. He is
particularly interested in the way that ethnography, his disci-
pline, can distort and disguise the communal and creative pro-
cess through which human identity is produced. He finds some
remedy for this distortion in the discipline of waiting as it is prac-
ticed by the country doctor whose practice he is observing.
This issue also includes a number of articles dedicated to read-
ing across and against the grain, articles that delight in showing
us that the texts in question are not exactly what they seem. They
provide a more conspicuous form of many of the interpretive
strategies found in the articles mentioned above. William Shurr,
for example, finds a homoerotic subtext in the various strands of
Hellenism that are woven into the Gospel of St. Luke. David
Booth calls our attention to the legacy of sexism as it is reflected
in the American cultural memory of the Salem witchcraft trials,

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 Angelus Novus 7

and he finds this same legacy reflected in The Crucible, Arthur

Miller's dramatic account of these trials, despite that play's politi-
cally progressive message. Similarly, Robert Stillman argues
that John Dryden's Annis Mirabilis does more than curry favor
with a newly restored British monarchy. In this poem, Stillman
finds the paradigm of a modern cultural order based on a part-
nership between science, industry, and government, a partner-
ship underwritten by a distinctive new vocabulary and a new
attitude toward knowledge itself as a fungible commodity.
Finally, but first in order of appearance in this issue, there is
Worth Hawes's deconstructive engagement with René
Magritte's Attempting the Impossible. The purpose of this article is
not so much to reveal the hidden meaning of Magritte's work as
it is to call our attention to the machinery of interpretation itself.
Paradoxically, but perhaps not surprisingly, Hawes discovers that
this baring of interpretive devices seems to have been what
Magritte himself had in mind. Thus, the meaning recovered
from this painting seems to be a revelation of both the inevitabil-
ity and the futility of looking for hidden meanings in the myster-
ies of life or of art. This reading of Attempting the Impossible thus
keeps us suspended between meaning and mystery with an am-
bivalence reminiscent of Benjamin's readings of Klee. This am-
bivalence provides a salutary warning against interpretive hubris;
it encourages us to attend to the beams of fantasy that encumber
our own interpretive ventures before we set out to remove motes
from the eyes of others.

AD

WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocke

Broderson, Momme. Walter Benjamin: A Biography. Trans. Malcom R. G
Ingrida Ligers. London: Verso, 1997.
Werckmeister, O.K. "Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, or the Trans
tion of the Revolutionary Historian" Critical Inquiry 22.2 (Winter
239-67.

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