Home – Exile: Writing for Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin Mathelinda Nabugodi FIGS Friday Forum: Home, 15 March 2013 My research brings together Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin. One of the few things that the two writers have in common is that they wrote a significant part of their works in exile. Additionally, both died prematurely and tragically in exile. However, in this short paper I do not want to focus on their biographies, but rather talk a bit about different ways in which home and exile can function as metaphors for reading and writing – in Shelley and in Benjamin. Shelley’s journey to Italy was ostensibly undertaken for reasons of health. However, Shelley also left England because he felt prosecuted for his political opinions and had just underwent an acrimonious divorce from his first wife, Harriet. Shelley never intended to not return to England and his life in Italy was peripatetic, moving house on average every third month, never really finding a home. When he died he left one of his greatest poems unfinished – its title seems cruelly ironic with hindsight – it was called “The Triumph of Life”. Benjamin first went into exile during the First World War. Together with his wife Dora he fled to Switzerland to avoid conscription. In the 1920’s and 30’s Benjamin travelled to Italy and Ibiza as well as Moscow and Paris but always returned to his native Berlin, a place that was very important for him. In texts like “One-­‐Way Street” and “Berlin Childhood around 1900” Benjamin weaves together the city, his personal experience of it and his philosophical positions. Being forced to leave his Berlin was deeply unsettling for him and Benjamin never really found a home after he left Berlin. Shelley’s travels in Italy and Benjamin’s escape to Paris did not merely imply a geographical exile, they were also journeys into the past – as attested by Shelley’s engagement with classical antiquity or Benjamin’s work on the Paris Arcades. Going to a different place also meant discovering a different time – the past in the present as well as one’s present in that foreign past. Thus, for Shelley, exploring the world of the ancients that he found in Italy’s ruins had a clear link to his own radical politics and he saw their society as a model of liberty to be resurrected in the present. Not uncritically to be sure, but as a clear antitype to engage with when challenging the norms of his day. Shelley’s probably most famous political poem, “The Mask of Anarchy,” was written ‘as he lay asleep in Italy’ as the opening lines put it. In actuality, the poem was Shelley’s direct response to the news of the Peterloo Massacre that took place Mathelinda Nabugodi | Home – Exile: Writing for P. B. Shelley and W. Benjamin 2 FIGS Friday Forum: Home | 15 March 2013 in Manchester in 1819 and his letters home are filled with requests for news about political developments. Likewise, Benjamin’s Arcades Project is as much a work that tries to revolutionise the present by awakening the past, as it is a history of Paris, “the capital of the 19th century” as he termed it. When it comes to literature, both Shelley and Benjamin argued that literary works only find their proper home in relation to other works, works of the past as well as works not yet written. Shelley stressed the importance of posterity and saw all poems as part of a great cyclic poem that is always being written. Jacques Derrida, when analysing Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life” uses explicitly Benjaminian language, although he does not cite Benjamin directly. Derrida’s essay on “The Triumph of Life” is entitled “Living On” and in it Derrida plays with the equivocal nature of the title of Shelley’s last poem: Is “The Triumph of Life” about life’s triumph or is it about something else triumphing over life? And what triumphs over life if not death? That is, is the triumph of life actually death or does life’s triumph imply that life is living on, surviving, even after death? And this very “living on” for Derrida opens a route into translation, it leads him via the French survivre to the German überleben. Überleben can in turn be translated back into English as afterlife, life after life, or life after life’s triumph, that is, after death. Now, überleben is of course a central concept in Benjamin’s theory of translation, according to which the translation participates in the afterlife, or survival, of the original text. In other words, the original lives on in translation. At the same time, both original and translation are part of the life, or survival, of language as a whole. Benjamin locates work of art’s true life is in its afterlife. This afterlife is, in Shelleyan terms, a cyclic poem whose beginning coincides with the beginning of man. Therefore, the work of art does not belong to a particular time or place or author but lives on in a form of temporal exile that is suspended between past and future. More practically, however, it lives on amongst its readers. The afterlives of works constitute what T.S. Eliot termed our tradition, the literary canon. Hannah Arendt has also expressed a comparable thought – according to her, thinking belongs, or is at home, nowhere, because it dwells whenever or wherever someone thinks. When we think we enter a space that is both timeless and placeless. We step outside of our everyday reality and into an elsewhere of thought. Likewise, when we read, we step outside of ourselves and into the life, or the afterlife, of the work that we are reading. This is where texts live on, this is their home. At the very same time it is the very opposite of a home – not a private space, but one that belongs to anyone and everyone, it takes place anywhere and nowhere, whenever someone takes up a book. Mathelinda Nabugodi | Home – Exile: Writing for P. B. Shelley and W. Benjamin 3 FIGS Friday Forum: Home | 15 March 2013 So, for a work of literature the way home lies through exile. To write for posterity, for the afterlife of one’s writings, is to write for a state of exile. Exile into the future. At the same time, works come home when they are read by future readers; they find a home in us, as readers. Reading, even as it is located elsewhere (according to Arendt), always takes place in a present, I am reading something right now. Thus the afterlives of works are also constituted by a moment of presence. They are actualised in the present of reading which is, after all, a kind of home. In other words, while works are exiled in the future they are at home in the present. Not in the present of their authors, to be sure, but of their readers. This is why the concept of becoming or actualisation is so important. When we read, truly read, a work we actualise it – and thereby we bring it home. Out of its exile in the future and into our now. This is the triumph of the work’s life. At the end of the day, it is not about the being of the work as such, but of what it may become to us when we read it. Both Shelley and Benjamin are today read as canonical figures. This is a bit of a double-­‐
edged sword. On the one hand it ensures the survival of their works as they are being re-­‐read. On the other hand it does nothing to guarantee that they are being properly read. Shelleyan poems like “Ode to the West Wind” or “Ozymandias” are hammered into unsuspecting school children. Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” is foisted on translation students who can see no sense in this essay or how it relates to translating and why they have to read it. Reading either Shelley or Benjamin often means to read isolated sections of their lifework. The home that their works find in the canon overlaps with their exile from less famous pieces, even though these “minor” writings may help us approach the canonical texts. Nonetheless, because the writings of Shelley and Benjamin are exiled and enshrined as intellectual heritage, as part of our tradition, we believe that they belong in our present almost without questioning why. For literary works as much as for people, exile is a home away from home. Or it is a state of unhomeliness that may happen at home. Importantly, this is a home that is not tied to a place or time, any nation or particular culture. After all, I myself, like many of their contemporary readers, am neither English nor German, neither Romantic nor Modernist. Their home, where we also live, is a European home, or even, at best, a universal home. A home that is as intimate and private as reading, and as open and shared as a public library. Writing is at home where we aren’t, it dwells in a home that is no home. Freud’s concept of the uncanny – Das Unheimliche, literally unhomely – comes to mind. The home of literary works is an unhome, a place both specific and placeless, both menacing and enchanting. And this, I believe, is where we read from.