In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain.
The most famous work by Benjamin—the one that would substantiate his fame and status even if he’d never written any else reasonably close to being as influential—is this essay which delves into the concept of what makes a work of art unique and special and what makes even an exactly perfect duplicate less so. For most of history, this was not an issue. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and other artists copied it and after a few centuries maybe there were a few hundred or even thousands of those copies. But the Mona Lisa was still the one and the only and if you wanted to see it you had to make plans to travel. By contrast, by the time the average American kid enters elementary school he’s likely already seen the Mona Lisa countless times. Except, of course, that he has never—with precious few exceptions—actually see the Mona Lisa. Despite copies of every sort imaginable in every form imaginable on every product available, there still remains just one (well, technically two, but just one that is world famous) Mona Lisa. Even so, the very fact that with the press of a button literally hundreds of reproductions can be printed in minutes has undercut its value. This value and its undercutting and what is now left is the subject which Benjamin examines.
The epic theater purposes to “deprive the stage of its sensation derived from subject matter.” Thus an old story will often do more for it than a new one.
Most essays by Benjamin, including those included here, begin from a specific starting point such as explaining “The Task of the Translator” and then works it way outward to span a mélange of related topics and subjects. It is not through digression that this expansion of the interest of the writer takes place; Benjamin’s writing style has more of Modernist stream-of-consciousness style in which one thought produces perhaps two more worth following. “What is Epic Theater?” is, by contrast, the most tightly controlled, precise and leanest of the essays in this volume. The title asks a simple question and the body of the essay produces a simple answer neatly laid out in subtitled sections. This quote, however, is the closest that the essay gets to actually offering an answer to the title question boiled down to an essential line or two. And even then, it is somewhat unclear. Which is fine because if one reads the entire essay closely, all ambiguity and mystery dissolves.
Kafka had a rare capacity for creating parables for himself. Yet his parables are never exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings. One has to find one’s way in them circumspectly, cautiously, and warily.
The names of famous writers are found in abundance in the essays collected here, but Franz Kafka is honored by being the subject of two different works, both of which bear his name somewhere in the title. Weirdly, however, both Kafka and Charles Baudelaire pop up by name almost exactly as many times. Baudelaire was the poet that acts almost like Benjamin’s muse as he follows his career-long interest—perhaps obsession—with the philosophical foundation of crowds. But the writing and analysis on Kafka stands out as personal; the obsession with Kafka’s writing stems not from Benjamin’s interests in the world, but his interest in the strangely twisted surreal nightmare landscapes created by the writer.
The image of Proust is the highest physiognomic expression which the irresistibly growing discrepancy between literature and life was able to assume. This is the lesson which justifies the attempt to evoke this image.
“Physiognomic” refers to the practice of judging the character of a person by their physical features, especially their facial features. As in the “beady-eyed” con man not to be trust or the wide-open eyes of the “innocent.” In this case, the term is being applied to the writer Marcel Proust relative not to judgment of his character on the basis of physical features, but rather on the basis of the “autobiographical” aspects of his monumental literary magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past. The essay is warning against judging too quickly and harshly the connection between the “art” and the “life” of individuals and their creative expressions. In examining where Proust’s life ended and his expression of that life in his artistic achievement begins, Benjamin pauses to remind readers before leaping to conclusions that people, including artists, “do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us.”
