Matt Charles (Middlesex): ‘The Snow Line of the Archive: Walter Benjamin On the Trail of Old Letters’

My paper is concerned with exploring Benjamin’s practice of what he calls literary-historical pragmatism in relation to the archive, and how this is informed by a messianic humanism. The critic Gundolf describes the archival material of literary criticism as a mountain, stratified into the foothills of conversations, the lower slopes of correspondences, and the peaks of the creative works themselves. In line with his theory of criticism, Benjamin subverts Gundolf’s metaphor by describing those glacial peaks as problematically frozen and fixed by the dominant historical method of contemporary interpretation. To resist such historical reification, Benjamin turns to what he calls the “snow line” of the archive, the letters and correspondences in which the dominant cultural reception begins to thaw and is amenable to new modes of cultural reception. Such an approach is put into practice in Benjamin’s subversive collection of letters from 19th century German Classicism, German Men and Women. Its aim is to enact what, in the Arcades Project, he calls the “Copernican turn” in historical remembrance, by subjugating the past to the pragmatic interests of present and future human suffering. I want to develop this idea of the archive’s ’snow line’ by considering it in relation to the place of translations in the archive. Indeed Benjamin’s theory of translation allows us to begin to philosophically articulate his pragmatic conception of archival criticism. This will be illustrated through consideration of Gerard de Nerval’s French prose translation of Goethe’s Faust, and its place in what should be understood as the messianic humanism of Benjamin’s One-Way Street and Arcades Project.