McGann has taken up. He rightly recognizes that Benjamin's method explores literary texts not for their revelations of the real but for the accuracy of their insights into error. Benjamin does insist that all authority in literary texts is limited by the falsity of worldly exchange in its social conditions, but differences in literary achievement arise according to the degree of critical consciousness by which a body of work actively separates its standpoint from mere passive participation in the continuities and conformities of its circumstances.

McGann is able to present the claim to accuracy in error for Rossetti by identifying his position precisely with the conditions of worldly exchange that characterized his time:

In twenty years Rossetti had moved from the margin to the very heart of his culture: as Blake would have said, “he became what he beheld.” In tracing that movement, Poems (1870) achieved its greatness. The analogy to Les Fleurs du Mal is quite exact, so that what Benjamin said of the latter can be applied, pari passu, to Rossetti: “Baudelaire was a secret agent—an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule.” In Rossetti's case as well, therefore, “the point of departure is the object riddled with error.” And in the nineteenth century there are few English books of poetry more secretly discontented, more riddled with error, than this book of Rossetti's.

(p. 348)

Yet Benjamin's notion of error does not necessarily support this equation. He is neither agnostic about the truth, letting it remain as undecidable so that error itself is indifferent; nor atheistic, abandoning the concept completely so that error is inevitable; nor ideological, claiming to have a direct formulation of truth in his hands by which he can judge error and correct it. Benjamin always insists with the same persistent vehemence that there is reality, there is truth, and by his own definition, in every context of his work without exception, that truth is messianic. That is, even though it is absent from the world in the condition of our knowledge, the value of all things is determined by their relation to it. The relationship to a messianic truth is not made equal by a common condition in the fallenness of the world in untruth. The same point of departure does not determine the same vector value. That is to say, the value of a work that turns away from error is not just a matter of secret discontent. What Benjamin looks for in historical culture is a critical consciousness of error and illusion, and what he demands of literature is an explicit resistance to myth by the discipline of thought and language.

Benjamin's messianism causes extraordinary problems for those who want to draw a direct political inference from his criticism, and that includes himself in his later work. While the early stage of his philosophical reasoning used the messianic idea as an exclusion of subjective authority from false claims to objective truth, his Marxist outlook required that he move this theological term closer to a secular function, while remaining aware that the history of all approaches between theological authority and temporal power is fraught with dangers. For the viewpoint of those who would base their own authority on the representations of an ideology derived from Marxism, the hesitation to which Benjamin always returns by repeating the messianic nature of materialist truth remains an obstacle to his reception. Terry Eagleton, for example, clearly finds it an embarrassment that has to be explained away.² Yet in all the forms of textual analysis that Benjamin undertook, it also results in an extraordinary capacity to overcome problems that obscure the structure of interacting forces in cultural artifacts.

In particular, the unique rigor Benjamin derives from a messianic exclusion of truth from representation opens up the critical space between desire for what is absent and the discipline that preserves that desire from illusion. Because he can distinguish so radically between transcendence and truth, he is able to separate the artistic pleasure that a work can make present from the human value of the truth that it cannot provide. This applies both to aesthetic pleasure in the formal mastery by which composition has confronted the medium of expression, and to delight in representations that possess an object of longing by enframing its image in the form of a tangible artifact. This marks out a critical position that preserves a neutral point of balance between “greater” and “lesser” works and between high art and the object of mass consumption. Protected from the seductions of each, Benjamin remains free to explore all as attractive powers without having to assert the rights of one over the other. He can describe these powers in the way they distinguish individual works, a particular oeuvre, or a period and argue the case of a classical masterpiece or an object of mass consumption, not in order to privilege either, but in order to play off one pleasure against another to demonstrate the distance from truth in both.

There can be little doubt that the discipline of separating aesthetic pleasure from illusion also distinguishes Baudelaire from Rossetti. This difference in artistic consciousness can be deduced from their formulations when they reflect on their poetic work in their poetry. The complex self-consciousness that thematizes the work of composition itself within the writing is much rarer in Rossetti than in Baudelaire. Rossetti's verse does not often refer directly to the art of poetry, but late in life he did write a sonnet reflecting on the sonnet as a form. It was included as an introductory statement for the 101 sonnets that make up the sequence “The House of Life” in the new edition of his work in 1881. Though it might be tempting to take this statement as a theoretical position as we now understand the force of theory, to do so would clearly misuse the text. The first line, “A sonnet is a moment's monument,”³ should apply to this sonnet, too. It is the reflection of a moment looking back on a lifetime's writing, a view on a practice, not a critical penetration of that practice. Nevertheless, its primary images are useful as figures that not only convey something about Rossetti's weaknesses but also identify what afflicts him in the situation he shares with other poets of his time. By identifying his place in the developing history of lyric verse, this sonnet brings achievements like his and those of other contemporaries into a context by which one can better measure them against Baudelaire's achievement. And it enables us to state more clearly what gave Benjamin the material for a political critique found nowhere in Baudelaire's own attitudes or statements.

The key motif is given in the completion of the opening thought, which reads, “A sonnet is a moment's monument, / Memorial from the Soul's eternity / To the one dead deathless hour.” At first, it might sound like the same appreciation of the lyrical moment that one may find as the most typical temporal structure in Romanticism. But in fact that structure is collapsing here. If one compares it with the opening of Blake's “Auguries of Innocence”—“To see a World in a grain of sand, / And a Heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour”—the change is clear. For Rossetti, the moment no longer survives in the form of such living intimations. That hour is now dead and lost to him. In its place the poem appears. To fulfill the role of substitute, the text has to be given a monumental destiny, and in its heavily ornamented diction it is constructed to house a new “deathless” life of mannered exaggeration.

The infinite no longer enters the poem as a revelation in an illuminated moment but leaves its mark in the form of a recollection that something has passed away and cannot be named or touched in the text memorializing it. In Romanticism the dimension of an infinitude or transcendence entering and informing the lyric moment effects that “unique experience of a distance no matter how near it may be,” in Benjamin's famous definition of aura.⁴ The poem now finds no natural opening toward that infinite internal space, even though the unresolved longing prompts every piling on of artifice in the desperate hope that doing so may spark an alternative into being. His language comes upon itself in a condition of displacement and struggles to supply a replacement for the zero at its bone. This is the general condition of Rossetti's poetry, and he stands very equivocally before the contradiction.

At times Rossetti draws on a heavily loaded language of glittering objects and rich materials to rebuild an atmosphere of illumination, as indeed where the introductory sonnet invokes its own “flowering crest impearled and orient.” At times he employs a recherché archaism of vocabulary, or else he appeals to a profane sensuality whose intensity may be taken as either a substitute for or a reminder of the intensity of that missing dimension lost somewhere in the house of life. Yet without any illuminating savor of that “secret life of things” still living for the Romantics, there is only the “bitterness of things occult” with which Rossetti concludes his bleak sonnet dedicated to Leonardo's painting, “Our Lady of the Rocks” (CWR, p. 344). And in the bitterness left behind when the eternal dimension refuses itself, illumination returns in reverse, as a dark and demonic threat. Because it is framed by a longing whose object has gone from the nerve of experience, it persists as a terror that has no corresponding link to any promise of happiness. It is an intimation of emptiness or chaos, casting an implacable and melancholy shadow over all his monuments. The introductory sonnet mentions this as the two sides of a coin whose face reveals the soul, but whose converse side may show contrary possibilities in “to what Power 'tis due,” whether its worth is for a purchase on life and love or a debt paid out to death.

The division reflects the unrestrained force of desire or will within this poetry as well as the weight of sorrow before which it is equally defenseless due to that lack of restraint. This helplessness before recurrent melancholy is, of course, equally characteristic of other poetry in this halfway stage between Romanticism and a more austere, chastened style of modernity that places its reflections on eternity within much tighter bounds. The “secret agent” that Benjamin saw in Baudelaire is remarkably unsure of his agency in Rossetti's case. The pursuit of cultural goods from tradition to hold and fill up the vessel of the moment is driven by a desire for which there is no real help. When the illusion that the moment has gained possession of transcendent time collapses, the emptiness of failed illusion itself becomes a demonic trap whereby the moment encloses the imagination in timelessness without egress. This contrasts with the glassy clarity by which Baudelaire challenges spleen and holds it in the open space of his own poetic perspective.

Baudelaire's poem “Allégorie” gives the most explicit picture of what powers of composition he draws on to combat the threatening horror of a world bereft of transcendent meaning. The allegorical figure of allegory, emblem of the position he takes in the act of writing, confers her invulnerable separation from things onto him. The “granit de sa peau” (granite of her skin) lets all the corrosive attacks of death and debauchery slip harmlessly from her.⁵ Being thus untouched by the world in which she stands, this “vierge inféconde” (barren virgin) is equally indifferent to hell and purgatory. Her beauty is a pure surface promising nothing, less even than skin-deep because she is no more than the presentation of an aesthetic artifice. She is “sans haine et sans remords” (without hatred and without remorse), and she knows her sterile beauty can “de toute infamie arrache le pardon” (compel forgiveness of every infamy) because there is nothing in her abstract relations that guilt or punishment could find. Guilt in Benjamin's view always hovers about symbolic meaning because it is a deceit, an imposition of longing on an object whose inherent significance it represses by that false naming. Allegory makes no such close approach and risks no such shock of rebuff.

His having accepted the role of allegorist was for Benjamin the key to what sets Baudelaire against the ruling forces of nineteenth-century culture. Armed against the fetishistic power of objects that bewitch others who cannot contemplate the barrenness of the world, he does indeed move without impediment like a secret agent among the dense crowds of those enthralled by illusion. There are not only sharp differences of standing between these two poets within the canon of lyric poetry; Baudelaire's achievement also reveals a much more precise consciousness of the significance of a mass culture under modern conditions than Rossetti's. The unrestrained effect of Rossetti's desire causes his form of competition to participate in temptations similar to those of mass culture and therefore to leave him within reach of its purgatory and hell. Benjamin finds something new and very important for the development of modernist aesthetics in Baudelaire's critical refusal of an illusory distraction by mythic elements in traditional literature, which appear only as the masks of a theater over which time has left its dust as an antidote to any lingering spell.

Rossetti uses the subjective affect gathered up from the conventional storehouse of tradition to graft a decorative layer of mythic content onto the representation in both his paintings and his verse. Baudelaire's canonical stature comes from the acknowledgment by all subsequent practitioners of aesthetic modernity that the only place left for art lies beyond the reach of that pleasurable beguilement for which the traditional audiences of both high and low art continue to long. The doubts one feels about Rossetti are a response to his embrace of the affect into which he wishes to escape and into whose illusion he invites his readers to lose themselves. Our century's equivocal judgment on Rossetti's value cannot be separated from a broader equivocation in our relationship to all Victorian writers, which in turn springs from the complexities of their relationship to modernity.

We should be reminded in general that the task of applying Benjamin's ideas on nineteenth-century literary history and aesthetic theory to English literature is no simple one. Little in his writings indicates either familiarity with or interest in the English-speaking tradition. Certainly he never produced any study of an English writer that could be compared to his work on German, French, or even Russian examples. This has not kept scholars of British and American literature from making frequent reference to his ideas, but in many cases quotations of his words establish only a tenuous link to the insights in other fields on which his reputation has been built. Even where those words seem to correspond to the terms of debate in English scholarship, closer examination of the texts from which they are drawn, and of the full body of Benjamin's work in which they are developed, reveals profound reasons to doubt that their direct transfer to the context of Anglo-Saxon styles of reasoning preserves what is most essential in their origin.

Benjamin does not construct an armory of concepts that each identify and guard the way to a specific positive phenomenon. Furthermore, the positions he argues do not stay consistently within the limits of a fixed standard by which one could predict how he would approach different texts. Terms such as aura, on which one must depend in Benjamin's statements concerning the effect of commodification, do not define a single point of judgment for him but rather mark out a trail of critical development as they undergo shifts of meaning from essay to essay. Nonetheless, the notion of development implies another level of consistency as he pursues the complex potential of an idea through successive aspects and applications. The problem that keeps one from fixing on a definition for that idea is described by calling the process dialectical. It is a mistake, however, to sound too knowing when invoking dialectics as though it in any way solved the problem.

The reception of Benjamin's work remains radically divided as various camps try to anchor him to a specific set of explicit values that they consider fundamental. The difficulty with each set is that Benjamin will accept no such explicit formulation as fundamental. This has prompted Michael Jennings to argue at length that Benjamin is fundamentally a nihilist.⁶ Yet while Jennings makes the very important point that Benjamin's thinking corresponds to that of none of the ideologues who try to claim him as their own, it also does not resemble that of any other nihilist. His apparently nihilistic side is derived from the element of destructiveness that all messianism directs against the totality of the world it opposes. Benjamin's insistence on negation remains an obstacle for any particular ideology because of his reticence in giving the messianic truth over to ideological claims.

Benjamin does not espouse any image that vulgar authority declares to be the truth. He refuses, in other words, to allow the force vested in a theological position to pass into a theocratic camp. Those who feel he ought to have been more forthright in eliminating theological elements that cloud the political stand they see him approach with such strong philosophical and ethical support are quite wrong to take his reticence for a confused ambivalence. He is simply consistent in maintaining the distinction between messianic truth and his own, or any other, temporal knowledge. For this reason, nevertheless, the accuracy of Jennings's estimation of how isolated Benjamin stands among different ideologies makes his account of Benjamin's literary theory the most precise and intellectually honest available to us.

It is also true that Benjamin's distinctive stand does not present difficulties to assimilation by the English-speaking tradition only. Bernd Witte, a leading German commentator on his work, argues that the brilliance and originality of Benjamin's formulations depends on an “extreme individualism” rooted in such a private order of experience that it remains irredeemably locked up in a “hermetic esotericism.”⁷ Rodolphe Gasché takes up Witte's objections again to show that, despite its “idiosyncrasy,” Benjamin's position continues to share in the philosophical tradition enough to implicate it in a metaphysics of presence.⁸ While Gasché's argument does emphasize the central and fundamental place of truth in all of Benjamin's work, and thus distinguishes his outlook from what we normally think of as nihilism, he certainly does not do justice to the concept of truth in that work.

Philosophical debate in recent years has unfortunately been inclined to inflate the metaphysics of presence into a blunt instrument of polemic designed to bulldoze any text in which there is a claim to truth. The opportunity to elucidate the conception of truth as the most varied and complex feature of any text is thus wasted. Though such an elucidation does not address the purely metaphysical problem that remains for philosophy, it is the most proper concern and care of literary criticism. What moves Benjamin in his varied and unpredictable approaches to a text is his sense that its primary content emerges not in what it names but in the intricate labor of mediation and approximation in the process of naming and, perhaps even more, in the veils and stratagems of resignation involved in the failure to complete that approximation. In short, Benjamin looks in the interplay of nearness and distance for the reality of language, including, of course, his own. Aura for him is not a fixed quantity but a term relating to the more fundamental questions of nearness and distance.

Differences of accomplishment for Benjamin concern the achievement of forms of artistic or poetic transcendence that do not vitiate the concrete sphere of human life by recourse to veils of illusion. In simple terms, he is looking for forms of distance in the media of expression and representation that do not cancel nearness beyond recovery. To consider how Benjamin's theory would result in a “judgment” of Rossetti's artistic stature misses the point. It is quite misleading to guess which side Benjamin would have taken in the debate over Rossetti's literary value if making the guess means trying to estimate how Benjamin would have ranked him in the hierarchy of aesthetic standards.

In the Passagenwerk, the extensive but unfinished study of cultural history in nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin notes: “The pathos of this work: there are no periods of decline. I take pains to be as thoroughly positive in my view of the nineteenth century as I was with the seventeenth century in my work on the play of mourning. No belief in periods of decline.”⁹ It is rather difficult to say precisely what Benjamin means by “pathos,” but it may be presumed to indicate the rhetorical maneuver of appealing to readers to align themselves with the perspective he describes. But if this perspective suspends the distinction between the grandeur of classical beauty and those lesser accomplishments brought forth by other periods, he does not argue that no such distinctions exist. Similarly, he does not argue in this great study that there is no essential distinction between high art and the object of mass consumption, even though he pays a degree of attention to lowly articles usually reserved for the classical masterpiece. Those differences are a matter of the kind and degree of artistic pleasure offered. By setting aside and suspending concern with such pleasures, which are the pleasures of distance, Benjamin gains access to the meaning of other differences.

These differences are more worldly than artistic transcendence and more intimately connected to the concrete realities of life, which Benjamin addresses in the concern with “nearness.” In the same section of the Passagenwerk he extends his thought:

What I observed above, put another way: the indestructible highest element of life present in all things. Against the prognosticators of decline. To be sure: is it not a desecration of Goethe to make a film of Faust, and is there not a world of difference between the book and the film? Indeed. But is there not another world of difference between a bad and a good filming of Faust? It is never a matter of the “great” contrasts, but the dialectical ones, which often can be mistaken for mere nuances. Yet from these, new life is constantly reborn.

(GS, 1:573; my translation)

But before one can pursue this new life in the differences between Baudelaire and Rossetti, one has to confront the complexity of a contrast between the two poets that does not simply retreat to a restatement of their established canonical merit determined by the measure of classical aesthetics. One has first to arrive at a degree of clarity about what gateway that retreat looks for, since as a matter of practical literary criticism the maneuver is by no means as simple as it sounds.

The centenary issue of Victorian Poetry dedicated to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (vol. 20, nos. 3-4 [Autumn-Winter 1982]) departed a little from the usual celebratory tone when it led off with an essay by William E. Fredeman titled “What Is Wrong with Rossetti?” The question itself is an old one, referring specifically to Evelyn Waugh's biography, Rossetti: His Life and Works, written in 1928. Fredeman follows Waugh's example by turning to the issue of Rossetti's personal flaws rather than considering how the matter extends into questions of literary institutions in the Western tradition. Waugh's own comments, such as that Rossetti “lacked the moral stability of a great artist,”¹⁰ are not, as Fredeman suggests, brilliant, but rather trite. The causes of any behavior that subsequently invited Waugh's moral censure might have hindered Rossetti but should surely not be called on to explain corruptions of artistic accomplishment.

It might be thought that a shared relation to “the object riddled with error” could dispose of Fredeman's question with the answer “What is wrong with Baudelaire?” Although Fredeman states quite rightly that the problem with Rossetti's verse is more subtle than with his paintings, whose weaknesses “are obvious to even the untrained eye” (p. xxi), he sees the issue in both cases as one of “technique” or the consistency of style. But if that accomplishment marks a world of difference between Rossetti and Baudelaire, it is equivalent to the world of difference between Faust and a film and therefore is not the world to which Benjamin's pathos directs our concern. Nonetheless, the world of difference between a good film and a bad film, as determined by Benjamin's particular view, also lies between these two poets. One should remember that Benjamin states clearly throughout “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that what makes a good film is not to be confused with the currently established criteria for a great work of art.

The effect of a “culture industry,” whose products are delivered to the market at an unprecedented tempo and are consumed in unprecedented quantities, opens up an overwhelming public forum for something that previously may have been ubiquitous but would have been controlled by the authority of social norms and the institutions of social education: bad taste. What sets value in the mass market is the effectiveness of a product as fulfillment in effigy of fantasy desires determined by the framework of a conventional set of images. It is no doubt nostalgic illusion to think that before the system of commodity exchange extended its reach into the sphere of art, the tendency to receive representations in that form had not yet come into being. The difference mechanical reproduction makes is that it confers on bad taste an expanded power to corrupt an old form of art as well as to bring a new kind of art into being.

The producer of literature has to contend with a split now. The discipline of composition, of technical accomplishment in the unique identity of the work, retains its historical position. That is why no sudden oblivion in our times has swallowed up the great works of the preindustrial tradition. At the same time, the writer participates in a society whose most widespread form of consciousness is that of the consumer. Where once the discipline of a restricted public sphere for artistic reception supposed a singular notion of canonical pleasure in the thoroughly composed masterpiece, with its rigorous demands on the imagination, the position of work that must compete in the market has to acknowledge the power of a second order of pleasure, the consumption of fantasies. What distinguishes Rossetti from Baudelaire is the way he has negotiated this split. Less innocent than Blake, perhaps, but less a “hypocrite” than Baudelaire, he has permitted the fantasy of pleasures in effigy to afflict the work of imagining thoroughly composed forms.

The writing therefore participates in a subaltern appreciation that “aestheticizes” experience in a fundamentally different direction from the stricter modernist aestheticism of Baudelaire. Such appreciation belongs to the reader who enjoys the mere evocation of affective values as a supplementary fulfillment of the desires that multiply in all levels of urbanized and industrialized culture. This reading gives up the aspiration of formal integrity to emancipate itself from the fascination its motifs exercise on a more banal consciousness of them. Rossetti's nostalgic evocation of lost beauties, his rebellious sensuality, the melancholy retreat from everyday reality, and the posturing that asserts the privilege of a cultivated interior all have their equivalents in Baudelaire's sensibility. But Rossetti's self-seduction by these affects has brought his imagination to a halt on the winding road that Baudelaire followed to its destination. Baudelaire's fraternal address to his “hypocrite lecteur” is a cryptic message to the few who, like himself, understand the difference between enthralled rapture before the dark indulgences at which his progress through Paris clearly hints and a more ascetic pleasure of insight into the irony and autonomy won by purely literary efforts of language and composition.

This split corresponds to a division that is central to the work of the Frankfurt school, whose members distinguished between “culture” and “mere culture.” The importance they attached to culture, demonstrating the rigorous technical mastery of the classical tradition, lay in its being directly antagonistic to the latter, representing the totality of conventional images, desires, and myth. That is, they separated the tradition of an active, rational analysis of works of art for their critical meaning as structures composed by an autonomous command of technique, from the inheritance of works and passive reception that sustain an established system of values and social order. They used this criterion both to separate authentic works from objects of consumption and to separate critical modes of apprehending the work from passive fantasy pleasures derived from the same object. Theodor Adorno, for example, makes the former application in his essay on jazz and the latter in his essay on art museums.¹¹

When Benjamin takes the position in his Passagenwerk that he will dispense with the usual distinction between periods of classical vigor and those of decline, he is certainly not retreating from the distinction between authentic and inauthentic culture but radicalizing its possibilities. His project differs from Adorno's work not in its focus on the primacy of historical understanding over pleasurable consumption but in its view of the aesthetic pleasure taken in the classical work. The Frankfurt school takes the mastery of a medium in the solution of technical problems to reflect the relative autonomy of the classical work from myth or ideology as these predominate in the ordinary social world, and thereby to sustain a utopian ideal of autonomous rationality within that aspect of culture for the subject. In that view, the subject of mere culture is the product of institutional power that predominates throughout the given social system, and the irrational logic of those abstract systems asserts itself throughout the existence of such subjects. Nonetheless, the potential for rational subjectivity persists, no matter how isolated and deeply sequestered, in the domain of classical form.

Benjamin cannot find this secure capability in subjectivity of any kind. In his essay “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin” Adorno himself observes, “In all his phases, Benjamin conceived the downfall of the subject and the salvation of man as inseparable” (Prisms, p. 231). Benjamin's understanding of objectivity necessitates an idea of truth that is not a product of any subjectivity but its counterpart:

His target is not an allegedly over-inflated subjectivism but rather the notion of a subjective dimension itself. Between myth and reconciliation, the poles of his philosophy, the subject evaporates. Before his Medusan glance, man turns into the stage on which an objective process unfolds. For this reason Benjamin's philosophy is no less a source of terror than a promise of happiness.

(Prisms, p. 235)

It is a source of terror because the special dignity of the great work, the distinction and pleasure of whose aesthetic achievement Benjamin registers as fully as any reader in history, is irrelevant before his further acknowledgment that this greatness is still only the finest expression of a domain that will be swept away in its entirety at the advent of truth, or the redemption of man.

Benjamin examines all human productions for a negative determination of the truth, or traces of the objectivity that now survives at the darkest limit of that stage. Those traces are approached by the subtlest consideration of each manifest object for the “indestructible highest element of life present in all things.” This consideration produces dialectical contrasts, or differences that break through the illusions of subjectivity. Such illusions for Benjamin are pleasures that the subject may take either in the fully composed harmonies of classical form or in the consumption of displaced affect in the artifacts of mass culture. It is necessary to reiterate this double displacement of pleasure by Benjamin because the debates into which his ideas are imported so commonly use him to sustain one side against the other. Where he writes that he will not observe the difference between periods of great works and of decadent ones he announces his intention to turn a more devastating eye on the participation of all these works, whether high art or low, classical masterpieces or works of decline, in a culture of subjectivity that he regards as entirely false.

Where Baudelaire and Rossetti differ is precisely where McGann says they meet: at the center of a “culture.” The spatial metaphor may well be applicable to both, but one has to consider what Benjamin means by the relation to “error” and to the secret agency of each practice. Baudelaire does not engage the formal control of his verse as an aesthetic end in itself to reproduce the artistic transcendence of classical work. He employs it, in Benjamin's reading, to generate a dialectical opposition to “the object riddled with error” without accepting the allure of that formal beauty as a resolution to the contradictions between world and desire. It is not that Baudelaire's technical mastery is the result of going back to the position of classical art still “innocent” of any banal relationship of desire to the banalities it portrays, which is what Rossetti appears to attempt and fails to do. As Benjamin reads him, he achieves autonomy from the illusions to which such desire falls prey as a result of a new, characteristically modernist perspective. He moves vertically in that central situation and separates himself from the general sensibility of the mass audience by the rigor of an unrelenting discipline in his writerly form.

One can best understand the value Benjamin asserts here by recalling the other phenomena of cultural history to which he ascribes a similar worth. Baudelaire achieves his modernity by a mastery that puts him on an equal footing with the tradition in which, pace Benjamin, beauty itself afflicted the deluded subject as myth. The same immunity to the allure of tradition appears in quite different phenomena of art as aesthetic modernity grows more radical in its challenge to art as an established institution. Surrealism and Dada, for example, require no such technical underpinnings to launch their provocations. On that basis, too, Benjamin himself is able to argue the rights of the fragment, the ruin, the displaced industrial commodity, the object of fashion that has outlived its time. His expert critical examination of high art corresponds to the alienating effect of exhibiting a collage of found objects or a “ready-made” in a gallery.¹² It displaces beauty from its accustomed place in the procedure. By separating the work as an object of beauty from its function as a cult value, Benjamin lets that value wither away when life brings it to light for a second glance.

What is wrong with Rossetti is exactly what McGann says, a “complete immersion within the contradictions, indeed, … an enslavement to them” (p. 348). What Benjamin admires in Baudelaire is the same Medusa gaze Adorno describes in Benjamin himself. Rossetti's attempt to hold things fast as a “moment's monument” is the aestheticization of life that seeks refuge in an alternative world of masquerade constituted through pleasure in the possession of graven images. It is the same pleasure that attracted wealthy patrons to purchase Rossetti's own poor copies of his painted women with flowers, cult objects of erotic transference for naïve adorers innocent of artistic discrimination.¹³ Baudelaire's poetry seeks, and permits his hypocritical reader, the moment that unlatches the door leading from the worldly house of life and allows a glimpse of freedom from that which his worldly being cannot help desiring. His vision resembles what Adorno says of Benjamin's philosophy: it is a source of terror as well as a promise of happiness, for this freedom emerges in an instant that negates the world entirely.

John P. McGowan offers a clear statement of what is most certainly the position in literary history with which Rossetti has to contend and whose contradictory tensions he fails to resolve:

He longs for the correspondences between thought and world found by the Romantics. But those correspondences elude him, and the world constructed by thought seems far superior to the dead world discovered by the senses. However, Rossetti is rarely able to effect a retreat into pure thought with a clear conscience. He still believes in a reality which exists independent of thought, and which is also stronger than thought. If Rossetti's difficulty in finding a home in nature distinguishes him from the Romantics, his uneasiness with residence in the halls built by imagination equally demonstrates his separation from the moderns.¹⁴

The uncompromising modernist aestheticism with which Baudelaire brought French verse to the leading position in Europe still lies out of Rossetti's reach. He occupies an interim, and there he has probably more in common with the French poets who preceded Baudelaire in the nineteenth century, such as Nerval.

Because Rossetti fails to achieve the Medusa-like aesthetics of Baudelaire's modernity, the feebler enframing effect of arrest for the sake of possession in effigy that characterizes his moment's monument is prone to the instability that Fredeman and Waugh blame on his “character.” Like Nerval, he is bound to oscillate between demonic anxieties to which he offers no reply, and attempts to retreat into fantasies of artistic privilege. The first sonnet of the cycle of three titled “The Choice” contrasts the poet's way with the error of those who do not share his knowledge. But the insight makes no effort to establish a stable position vis-à-vis the world's mysteries. It explicitly abandons the world to its own devices: “Surely the earth, that's wise being very old, / Needs not our help” (CWR, p. 212). The poem calls on the pleasures of the senses and the power of their celebration to master time: “We'll drown all hours: thy song, while hours are toll'd, / Shall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky.” Wine and love light up the moment so the beloved's flesh will “glow like gold,” to outweigh if not defeat the certainty of death.

In this monument to oblivion, cocooned in a moment illuminated by this gold, the poet invites his “high bosomed beauty” to exalt the certainty of this choice by recalling that death has already conquered those who chose not to enfold themselves in the moment of arrested time but tried to sustain themselves by worldly labors instead: “Now kiss, and think that there are really those, / My own high bosomed beauty, who increase / Vain gold, vain lore and yet might choose our way!” For them death does not wait at the threshold of the morrow, held back by the drowning of hours, still excluded from the monumental moment: “Through many years they toil; then on a day / They die not,—for their life was death,—but cease; / And round their narrow lips the mould falls close.” Baudelaire's “Une Charogne” makes a far swifter and more decisive feint to outwit the shadow of death that falls on his beloved's flesh. He disdains the helpless attempt to drown it out in a passing glow and sustains an undimmed consciousness in the face of death and corruption where Rossetti chooses obliviousness.

In the second and third sonnets of “The Choice,” the vanity of that thought and the hopelessness of human fate before time return with all the greater force. In the closing four lines, the thought that had dreamed of drowning the hours with a golden companion is made to contemplate its brief spirit engulfed by loneliness. Where once it had been harbored by those bright illusions, it is now made to see that it is encircled by an endlessly overpowering and abysmal immensity.

Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown'd.
Miles and miles distant though the last line be,
And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,—
Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea.

(CWR, p. 213)

The shock of disillusionment occurs at the moment of transition between a desiring fantasy of companionship and harmony in the order of being, and the failure of imagination to find them in a representable form that resists the impact of experience and knowledge. Benjamin declares the forestalling and neutralizing of shocks by a state of heightened alertness to be the constitutive tactic of Baudelaire's aesthetics,¹⁵ but related ideas have a long history in his work on the modern philosophy of art. There can be no doubt that at all stages of his thinking he saw a defining principle for modern art in the deliberate suspension of illusion because of its susceptibility to sudden dispersal.

As far back as his doctoral dissertation, published in 1920 as Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The concept of art criticism in German Romanticism), Benjamin established the idea of soberness (“Nüchternheit”) as the foundation of modernity in the idea of art. He connected it directly to an element of indestructible content as the genuine substance of art, as opposed to illusion, which, being dependent on “ecstasy,” fell before the effect of irony. Ecstatic consciousness depended on the protected enclosure of a privileged myth and could be “zersetzt,” or frayed and deflated, by contact with anything that did not conform to it. It was out of place in a world now filled with diversity, confusion, and contradiction. Therefore beauty itself lost its claim to a place in art, “because beauty, as an object of ‘enjoyment,’ of pleasure, of taste, did not seem compatible with soberness, which defined the essence of art according to this new understanding” (GS, 1:106; my translation). The same idea of critical soberness is developed through the “dialectics of intoxication,” which he discusses in the essay “Surrealism,” written in 1929.¹⁶

Without wishing to add to one hundred years of critical reception, one can cite the way Baudelaire achieves a stable position before the same motifs that whirl Rossetti and Nerval between desire and desolation, and will and guilt. The sea, which had appeared as the indomitable negation of human meaning in Rossetti's “The Choice,” remains an opponent to the human will in Baudelaire's “L'Homme et la mer,” but in its role as the allegorical mirror of man's powers, it can be accorded a balanced place as an equal, even fraternal, counterpart in their struggle. In “Le Gouffre” he feigns desire for the banal security of “des Nombres et des Etres” (numbers and beings [FDM, p. 306]) to put a mocking distance into the fear of the “abîme” (abyss) that brought down Nerval in “Le Christ aux oliviers.”¹⁷ In “Le Goût du néant” the idea of drowning in endless time, “Et le Temps m'engloutit minute par minute” (And time swallows me minute by minute [FDM, p. 140]), recollects the same theme in “The Choice,” but Baudelaire portrays it from a viewpoint of elevation far above the globe. He now disdains “l'abri d'une cahute” (the shelter of a hut) in order to convey the new equanimity that permits his intrigued contemplation of destruction itself in the avalanche, or the overwhelming rush and shock of disordered moments.

Most important for Walter Benjamin are the site of the street and the experience of the flâneur as the exponent of a new kind of presence in the chaos of the city. Where Rossetti's collection “The House of Life” serves the idea of art as a refuge, it longs for the ineradicable distance of aura that distinguished an older tradition of art, that “unique experience of a distance no matter how near it may be.” Rossetti knows the nearness of human life in the concrete world only as that which besieges the house of aesthetic life and threatens it with death and disruption. The aesthetic distance cultivated by the flâneur, or the modernist dandy, permits Baudelaire to penetrate the most desolate wastes of urban barbarism ruled by the fetish of commodity, to sail, like Odysseus braving the Sirens, through the emptiest oceans of the crowd. The claims Benjamin makes for the camera in the achievement of nearness by the exercise of a discreetly managed complementary distance in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” apply also to this aspect of Baudelaire's passages through each city scene.

Benjamin illustrates the position that distinguishes the cameraman's act of representation from that of the portrait painter by comparing it with a distinction he constructs between the figures of a surgeon and a faith healer:

The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between the patient and himself by penetrating into the patient's body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs.

(Illuminations, p. 233)

Benjamin's polemical interest in asserting a value for truth in the techniques employed by the culture industry should not distract us from the essential duplicity of that value as he presents it. The commodity of mass culture shares in the abstraction inherent in all commodities as described by Marx in the fetishism of exchange value, which is the starting point for Benjamin's essay. The idea Benjamin develops as his own contribution to the theory of mass culture derives from the nature of meaning and reference in all historical manifestations. They can achieve nearness only by approaching from the position of a concomitant distance.

Any language, grammar, or medium to which we have any recourse whatsoever achieves its coherence only by a distance from the disordered world to which it refers. This rule applies even to the simplified spatial metaphor that Benjamin uses to describe this relationship, for the quantitative opposition of nearness and distance in the figure really names much more complex qualitative shifts in historical consciousness. The effectiveness of Benjamin's own description is sustained by the accessible figure but limited by it, too. He continues the comparison of painter and cameraman by emphasizing a particular potential for truth: “The painter maintains … a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web.” Yet he also exposes the other side of that apparent nearness by conceding that the commodity of film as actually produced by the market is steeped in distance and magic. Despite the political effect Benjamin affirms for that nearness, he also concedes in the epilogue to his essay that in its actual effect the camera has contributed to an aestheticization of politics in the fascist sense: “Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympic gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own self-destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Illuminations, p. 242).

For this reason, there is nothing contradictory in Benjamin's having written “The Storyteller” at the same time as his essay on mechanical reproduction. Though Benjamin “scandalously” sets out to defend an old genre rich in aura with the figure of the storyteller (Eagleton, p. 60),¹⁸ he is clearly consistent in attaching a value to the special mode of nearness that this genre once achieved but that we are now in the process of losing. This does not commit him to the error with which the oral tale is also riddled, nor does it mean that he clings nostalgically to that form of distance in its aura that conditions of modern military and economic violence have rendered moribund. He takes that falsity into account just as clearly as he must concede the exorbitant price of distance concomitant with whatever value remains potential or actual in the photographic image. The relentless intellectual labor to retrieve usable forms of nearness and to overcome the mythic distraction and delusion of distance runs uninterruptedly through all of Benjamin's efforts and through work on the most disparate material from various historical periods. Therefore he defends the manifestations of aesthetic modernity for their having achieved a stable position of consciousness adequate to those discordant phenomena of urban and industrial experience that disrupt the previous forms of distance, but he must also distinguish that consciousness from new forms of distance poor in or destitute of any vital nearness and thus useless for producing a critically powerful perspective capable of resisting fascist politics.

Adequacy of vision begins with a refusal to buckle and quail before the spectacles of commerce, the crowded streets, the harsh sounds, the paltry glitter, the depths of ugliness, and the stream of shocks in encounters that cannot be rendered in the stable harmonies of a classically ordered image of the world. And here one can say conclusively that the ironic play of desire denied, by which Baudelaire copes with the thoroughfares of Paris in a poem like “A une passante,” contrasts with Rossetti's sonnet “Memorial Thresholds” in “The House of Life,” where the poet is thrown into panic by the astounding isolation of a city street.

Baudelaire's poem does not require any perturbation in the rhythm dictated by the traffic in the moment that permits two people only a single glance as they pass one another. Rossetti seems brought up short in desperation for a door of escape. Baudelaire records an exchange of glances so brief and so disconnected from the slightest possibility of true human association that there is nothing in the event from which knowledge of the other could be grasped. The blank in that instant recreates it as a space for the writing and the opportunity to inscribe a fiction across it. It is a moment of not knowing: “Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais” (Because I don't know where you're running off to you don't know where I'm going [FDM, p. 174]), but the alluring surface itself, the object of a gaze that cannot overcome the state of error amid universal anonymity in this city, is instated as the allegory of knowledge. And knowledge is surrendered beyond mourning by the acknowledgment of its absolute absence in the dubious allegorical act and token of the woman's passing beauty. He concludes, “O toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!” (O you whom I could have loved, o you who knew it!).

In “Memorial Thresholds” Rossetti first feels his isolation as a shock of arrest to be compared with the contradictory touch of fire and snow or time and timelessness at the end or beginning of the world.

What place so strange,—though unrevealèd snow
With unimaginable fires arise
At the earth's end,—what passion of surprise
Like frost-bound fire-girt scenes of long ago?

(CWR, p. 217)

Because the answer to this dramatic question has nothing to offer but the spectacle of the questioner limited to the tiniest enclosure of hour and place, its unimaginable and unrevealed cosmic terms highlight mere isolation. He can in no way sustain any ecstatic perspective of sublime forces in struggle that might have lifted up a different kind of solitude, perhaps like that of Shelley contemplating Mont Blanc, and unfolded more richly in a more expansive time.

Lo! this is none but I this hour; and lo!
This is the very place which to mine eyes
Those mortal hours in vain immortalize,
'Mid hurrying crowds, with what alone I know.

The scale of the question and the magnitude of possible knowledge in its images is quenched at once. The questioner's dissociation amid the hurrying mass crowds him in and reduces him to a state from which he cannot regain the spacious distance of language that might reinstitute a nearness to any human locus. The potential to transform the poet by the extension of his poetry lives in vain in that fragmented moment. By sundering him from a security of traditional speech, the particularity of his knowledge now grips him in its irredeemable mortality, for if he cannot set it up in the form of manifest display (“a moment's monument”), it will only perish within him. To rescue a permanence of meaning from the shattering force of these aimless tides in the immensity of urban circulation requires precisely what has gone out of this experience for Rossetti, an object charged with the presence of eternity, a vital symbolic form. He calls on the city itself to return to a longed-for condition of the past and open for him some door of perception like that which had been accessible to Blake in a previous generation.

City, of thine a single simple door,
By some new power reduplicate, must be
Even yet my life-porch in eternity,
Even with one presence filled, as once of yore:
Or mocking winds whirl round a chaff-strown floor
Thee and thy years and these my words and me.

Only by that path can he hope for the chance of a future continued in the vein he hopelessly recalls from the poetry of the past. Without this nostalgic redemption, he and his language become nothing but “chaff,” helplessly pulverized by time in a city without the continuity of memory in history, or the preservation of an identity in myth.

This nostalgia for a reinstated power not only is aroused by the failings of the world ruled by the commodity, alienation amid objects riddled with error, but also remains within the fascinated orbit circling its own objects of desire, and it yields to the same fetishistic forces that maintain their rule. The attraction of tawdry glitter offered by the culture industry draws heavily on archaic dreams from an imaginary past. The more privileged sensibility of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is not less in thrall to the empty promise of recovered and imitated beauty. Its longing goes in search of the consumable art object in a cult of beauty pursued by the mourning connoisseur. The “one presence” that would unite the poet's being, “what alone I know,” with his meaning in the words he speaks and writes sends him to the fantasy of a door behind which that “once of yore” beguiles him with the same hopeless faith that drives the crowds of Baudelaire's Paris to the arcades and into the rows of shops past which the flâneur steers his cold glance.

A will lingering fascinated by a door that never opens to fulfillment twists about itself in “mocking winds” before which consciousness endures this doubling and scattering like chaff. That is the disordered striving and melancholic disappointment of Rossetti's “flawed character.” The sober acknowledgment of the limits on secure knowledge appears in the “allegorical” aspect of Baudelaire's solution to the labile sensibility of post-Romantic poetry. He moves dialectically beyond that split to what Julia Kristeva calls the position of a single “heterogeneous subjectivity.”¹⁹ Freed from the mythic delusion of a unity in “one presence,” the artifice of an allegorical standpoint gives his Medusa gaze an aestheticizing power equal to the task of sustaining this point of balance.

This is the sober relationship to truth that Benjamin finds in a modernist aesthetics that does not attempt to capture the essence of the world and put it on show woven in the net of beauty. Rossetti moves in a cycle between the high-swelling fervor of a fetishized beauty and bleak exposure when it ebbs from him, for which the only relief is a renewed intoxication. But what permits Benjamin to see a “secret agent” in Baudelaire is the cold suspension of that longing and his conspiratorial acknowledgment of solitude itself. Baudelaire does not expect the simple promise of happiness unalloyed with terror, but he accepts the aesthetic power given by his icy position in “un corps pris de roideur” (a stiffened body [“Le Goût du néant”]) as recompense. In rejecting the simulacra of happiness, he achieves the aesthetic equivalent of the philosophical and political critique that Benjamin regards as the beginning of a process whereby the truth vested in material things may come into its own.

Notes

1. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Betrayal of Truth,” Victorian Poetry, 26 (1988): 341-42.

2. Walter Benjamin; or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), p. 114.

3. The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William M. Rossetti, 2 vols. (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1890), 1:176 (all references to this work—henceforth cited as CWR—refer to volume 1 of this edition).

4. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 222.

5. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, ed. Paul Valéry (Lausanne: Payot, 1946), p. 231 (henceforth cited as FDM).

6. In his Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).

7. Walter Benjamin: Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976), pp. 34, 61.

8. “Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamin's Theory of Language,” in Benjamin's Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 83.

9. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 1:571 (hereafter cited as GS). My translation.

10. Quoted in “What Is Wrong with Rossetti? A Centenary Reassessment,” Victorian Poetry, 20 (1982): xv. Fredeman also notes that Waugh was “heartily ashamed” of his book.

11. “Perennial Fashion—Jazz” and “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, trans. Shierry and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 119-32, 173-86.

12. See, for example, his comments on Dadaist collages in “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 229.

13. See John Nicholls, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Studio Vista, 1975), p. 143.

14. “The Bitterness of Things Occult: D. G. Rossetti's Search for the Real,” Victorian Poetry, 20 (1982): 50.

15. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, p. 162.

16. “Surrealism,” in Reflections, pp. 181, 189-90.

17. Œuvres, ed. Albert Béguin and Jean Richer (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 1:6.

18. Eagleton also offers a justification of Benjamin's “celebration” of the oral tale by arguing that the tale is actually much like the photograph in that anyone can produce either. Benjamin, of course, says the opposite. The premise of his essay is that the communication of experience in that form was a special capacity of wisdom that has become impossible in our times.

19. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 100: “The experience of nameable melancholia opens up the space of a necessarily heterogeneous subjectivity, torn between the two co-necessary and co-present centers of opacity and ideal.”