Visualization of Walter Benjamin’s Allegory and History in J.J. Grandville’s Illustrations

Abstract

This research aims to demonstrate the relationship between the important concepts of Walter Benjamin’s “allegory” and “history” and how they are effectively expressed by the illustrations of J.J. Grandville. As the only visual artist taking up a separate section in Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, Grandville was a talented caricaturist and illustrator in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. This research deals with Grandville’s illustrations from Un Autre Monde (Another World, 1844) with Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and several writings such as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (ca. 1924-25) and “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1942), in which the latter’s two concepts were discussed. Based on such a method and scope, this research establishes the following results. First, Grandville’s illustrations show how Benjamin’s idea of allegory as a representational form works to capture the changes of Paris during the nineteenth century. By juxtaposing the antithetic pair of “nature (rainbow, comet, moon, clouds)” and “culture (commodities, technology),” his works illustrate the specific moments when the universe was transformed to a banal bourgeoisie’s capitalistic world. Second, his illustrations correspond to how Benjamin conceptualized the idea of history in the modern era. By using allegory to describe the transformations of humans into commodities and machines, Grandville’s works alludes to alienation in a fragmented and oppressive history. This intersects with the fact that, to Benjamin who was far from the position of a historicist or a historical materialist, the “double” of modernity appeared “new and innovative” but at the same time, “arbitrary and destructive” like trendy fashion. Though Grandville observed the radical changes in Paris before Benjamin, the former’s keen vision is said to have penetrated the important moments that expanded over the latter’s lifetime, namely instances filled with the growth of capitalism alongside fascism that eventually led to the Second World War.