근대성과 기억: 발터 벤야민과 T. S. 엘리엇

Abstract

The main aim of this article is twofold: first, to uncover the theoretical significance of Walter Benjamin’s critical revaluation of Bergson, Proust, and Freud, who shed new light on the understanding of memory, and secondly, to re-read Eliot’s poetry in the context of Benjamin’s ideas of modernity and memory. In “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire,” Benjamin highly values Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as a ground-breaking work in understanding how perception and memory co-operate. In À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust reworks Bergson’s pure memory by illuminating that memory is in essence involuntary. However, both of them, Benjamin argues, fail to address the historical and social characters of memory. By channelling Bergson’s pure memory and Proust’s involuntary memory into Freud’s insightful idea that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive, Benjamin finally locates a historical/social schema of memory. Conscious remembering or the voluntary memory is devoid of the creative and redemptive force of the involuntary memory, and becomes the main form of memory in the age of high capitalism when Erlebnis (everyday lived experience), not Erfahrung (genuine experience), is overwhelmingly dominant. What Benjamin calls Erlebnis and its memory are problematized in Eliot’s early works, including some of his unpublished poems as well as “Boston Evening Transcript,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and other published ones. In “Goldfish,” the traces of a young man’s past experiences are deployed as allegorical signs that visualize the meaningless daily routine and its “dead” memory. For Eliot, as for Benjamin, a symptom of modernity is that people increasingly tend to experience the world indirectly through newspapers and other news sources. Distancing themselves from their communities, urban people are, as presented in “Boston Evening Transcript,” controlled and, even, enslaved by newspapers, and real, felt, embodied experiences sharply decline in modern cities full of sensational and shocking news. “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” on the other hand, presents a young man’s longing for genuine experiences that may transgress the logic of rationality, calculation, and discipline. However, imprisoned in the modern world, where his memory as well as his body functions as an automatic machine and even the moon is transfigured into a prostitute whose re/usable body, like a factory worker’s, is sold in the market, he fails to carve out a space/time of difference or redemption.