To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation [1 ed.] 2022013462, 2022013463, 9781501767791, 9781501767807, 9781501767814

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TO THE COLLECTOR BELONG THE SPOILS

TO THE COLLECTOR BELONG THE SPOILS

MODERNISM AND THE A RT O F A P P R O P R I AT I O N

A nnie Pfeifer

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2023 by Annie Pfeifer. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2023 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Pfeifer, Annie, author. Title: To the collector belong the spoils : modernism and the art of appropriation / Annie Pfeifer. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022013462 (print) | LCCN 2022013463 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501767791 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501767807 (epub) | ISBN 9781501767814 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Criticism and interpretation. | Einstein, Carl, 1885–1940— Criticism and interpretation. | James, Henry, 1843–1916— Criticism and interpretation. | Collectors and collecting—Philosophy. | Modernism (Literature)— History—20th century. Classification: LCC AM231 .P48 2023 (print) | LCC AM231 (ebook) | DDC 790.1/32—dc23/eng/20220707 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022013462 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov​ /2022013463 Cover art: Recollecting Walter Benjamin by Therese Pfeifer. Used by permission.

To Yassi & Ma­ya

C o n te n ts

Acknowl­edgments  ix Abbreviations  xiii

Introduction: Dangerous Passions Part One: Possessing the Old World: Henry James and the Spoils of Eu­rope

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1. James’s ­Human Bibelots

21

2. Sardanapalus’s Hoard

51

Part Two: Between Salvation and Revolution: Walter Benjamin’s Conflicted Collector

3. The Collector in a Collectivist State

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87

4. Trash-­Talking in The Arcades Proj­ect 118 Part Three: Collecting Africa: Carl Einstein’s Ethnographic Surrealism

161

5. The Collector and His Circle

167

6. Einstein’s “Critical Dictionary”

203

Epilogue: Hoarding in a Digital Age

230

Notes  237 Bibliography  311 Index  337

A ck n o w l­e d gm e n ts

The idea for this book first grew out of my parasocial relationship with Walter Benjamin. My obsession led me beyond his archive to retrace Benjamin’s footsteps through Bern, Switzerland, the Paris Arcades, and even Peacock Island, just outside of Berlin, where young Walter collected feathers as a child. But without the support and encouragement of my teachers, mentors, editors, students, friends, and ­family my journey might have remained a jumbled set of passages. I am greatly indebted to Katie Trumpener, whose beautiful mind and enthusiasm ­shaped this book from its early germs in the Moscow-­ Berlin Seminar she cotaught with Katerina Clark at Yale University. I am also grateful to Rüdiger Campe, Henry Sussman, Marta Figlerowicz, and David Quint for their lucid, generous feedback on drafts and to Ruth Yeazell, Carol Jacobs, Pericles Lewis, Barry McCrea, Rainer Nägele, Kirk Wetters, and Abbas Amanat, whose courses and vibrant scholarship provided the larger backdrop for my research. At Columbia University, I have depended on the support of an incredible group of scholars whom I am lucky enough to call colleagues: Oliver Simons, Stefan Andriopoulos, Claudia Breger, Dorothea von Mücke, Mark Anderson, Jeremy Dauber, Noam Elcott, Susan Bernofsky, Sarah Cole, Jenny Davidson, Aubrey Gabel, and Hannah Weaver. I am especially grateful to Andreas Huyssen for his early support and indispensable feedback on what was to become chapter 3. Without the herculean efforts of my inimitable research assistant Devin Friedrich to bring this book over the finish line, I might still be buried in a footnote somewhere. He was the collector to my hoarder. A special thanks to Sophie Schweiger and Aaron McKeever for their help gathering materials and preparing the manuscript and to Sherene Alexander and Kerstin Hofmann, whose warmth and wisdom have buoyed this endeavor during the last two difficult years. Cornell University Press has been a formidable partner from day one. Michelle Scott, Karen Hwa, Susan Specter, and Bethany Wasik ­were integral members in the production of the book. Most of all, I am indebted to the insight and

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solicitude of Mahinder Kingra, who was a lifeline while I was trying to finish my book during the pandemic. This book developed through thought-­provoking exchanges with the students in my two seminars on related topics, “Dangerous Passions: Collecting, Hoarding, and Possessing” and “Walter Benjamin and the Crisis of Experience,” at Columbia University in 2019 and 2021 respectively, especially Hazel Rhodes, Chris Hoffman, Leo Claussen, Cosima Mattner, Iloe Ariss, Didi Tal, Connor Martini, Jeanne Devautour, Sarah Elston, Amara Jaeger, Jared Rush, Ocean Jensen, and Celia Abele. I am grateful to many brilliant interlocutors at the Tufts Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, the Rutgers German Department, the Institut für Germanistik at the University of Bern, and to Reto Sorg and the Robert Walser Center for their encouragement and spirited feedback along the way. Dan Geist dexterously provided me with some impor­tant last-­minute suggestions. Several formative conferences allowed me to test run my ideas. “Elective Affinities: Reading Benjamin Reading Kaf ka,” or­ga­nized by Ian Fleishman at the University of Pennsylvania, gave rise to lasting friendships with a gifted group of scholars. Claudia Breger’s impactful “Aesthetic and Politics” conference at Columbia introduced impor­tant theoretical considerations into my book. An invitation to speak at the “Night of Philosophy and Ideas” at the Brooklyn Museum at the auspicious hour of 1:30 a.m. inspired my epilogue on digital hoarding. I am particularly indebted to Keja Valens and Jordana Greenblatt for organ­izing a multiyear panel at the American Comparative Lit­ er­a­ture Association, which gave rise to their edited volume Querying Consent (Rutgers University Press, 2018). My chapters on Henry James benefited from the expertise of Joseph Vogl and his students at the Humboldt University in Berlin as part of a DAAD Postdoctoral Exchange in 2017. Many of my ideas took shape during a stimulating summer in gorgeous Ithaca at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory with John Brenkman, Amanda Anderson, Lauren Berlant, and other thought leaders. Research is only as good as the institutions that support it. I am very grateful to the late Christoph Pudelko in Bonn, Germany, and his staff for providing access to the rich archives of Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, the g­ reat collector and lifelong friend of Carl Einstein. A humid summer after­noon was brought to life with a fly swatter and some vivid anecdotes about Gottlieb and Carl’s excellent adventures. I am indebted to Jutta Billig, Peter Junge, Anja Zenner, and the rest of the staff at the library of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum for their generous help and archival support during my visit. Ursula Marx and her colleagues at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin provided much-­needed archival material. Fi­nally, I would like to thank the staff of the 2014 Dresden Summer



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School, “Power, Knowledge, and Participation—­Collecting Institutions in the 21st ­Century,” at TU Dresden for organ­izing a thought-­provoking workshop on the subject of collecting. Anke te Heesen at the Humboldt University in Berlin supplied me with many good leads and references, as well as the exciting opportunity to participate in her colloquium. Even in the best of times, it takes a village to write a book. But in a global pandemic, it takes a global village. Above all, I would like to thank my ­mother, Therese Pfeifer, for the strength, honesty, and talent she has modeled throughout her life. Her work graces the cover of this book. From across the Atlantic, she never ­stopped believing in me and my work, even when I did. When schools closed in March 2020, my manuscript might have remained a digital hoard without the help of my unflappable pandemic podmates: Jordan Pesci-­ Smith, Deomattie (Noreen) Ramdyal, and the formidable Ehrlich-­Elcott ­family. I continue to be guided by the luminous example of Helen Pfeifer, my wiser younger s­ ister. I am grateful to Peter Pfeifer, Christian Sassmannshausen, Amir Motamedi, and the Motamedi-­Azarm ­family for their support and encouragement along the way. Fi­nally, I would not have been able to pull this off without a ­little help from my friends around the world: Katrina Kaufman, John Ortved, Greg Melitonov, Sarah Wilkinson, Lauren Kaplan, Jessica Backus, Helena Hasselmann, Tess Vigil, Ariel Bardi, Beth Harper, Katrina Rouse, Tor Seidler, Joe Li, Annabel Seidler, Joe Williamson, Geeta Hanooman, Gillian St. Claire, and my much-­missed friends and f­ amily, the late Anna Abgottspon, Garland En­glish, and Kirk Mullins.

A b b r e vi ati o ns

Walter Benjamin AR BC CH GS IL MD SW TD UL WA

The Arcades Proj­ect Berlin Childhood around 1900 “On the Concept of History” Gesammelte Schriften Illuminations Moscow Diary Selected Writings The Origin of German Tragic Drama “Unpacking My Library” “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”

Carl Einstein AS DR NS PS W

“African Sculpture” “Dr. G. F. Reber” “Negro Sculpture” “Porträt eines Sammlers” Werke

Charles Haxthausen MF My­thol­ogy of Forms

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xiv A bb r e v i at i o n s

Henry James AP GB HB LV PL SP

The Aspern Papers The Golden Bowl “Honoré de Balzac” “The Last of the Valerii” The Portrait of a Lady The Spoils of Poynton

Sebastian Zeidler FR Form as Revolt

TO THE COLLECTOR BELONG THE SPOILS

Introduction Dangerous Passions

Already by the end of the nineteenth ­century the collector had acquired an unfortunate reputation as an amateur, uncreative, retrograde figure well past his prime. In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietz­sche paints an illustratively bleak portrait of the collector who “envelops himself in a moldy smell [Moderduft]. With the antiquarian style, he manages to corrupt even a more significant talent, a nobler need, into an insatiable lust for novelty, a desire for every­thing r­ eally old. Often he sinks so low that he is fi­nally satisfied with any nourishment and takes plea­sure in gobbling up even the dust of bibliographical quisquilia.”1 Opposing his own historically saturated epoch, Nietz­sche’s essay warns of the dangers of antiquarian history that “knows only how to preserve life, not how to generate it.”2 According to Nietz­sche, this “wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting [eine blinde Sammelwut], a restless compiling together of every­thing that ever existed” is a parasitic outgrowth of a “degenerative” approach to history that “buries” and “mummifies” life.3 The opposition Nietz­sche establishes between collecting and creating and between preserving and generating has persisted u ­ ntil the con­temporary period, with scholars like Susan Stewart arguing that collecting is a fundamentally dif­fer­ent type of activity from artistic production.4 Nietz­sche’s trenchant description could not be more dif­fer­ent from Walter Benjamin’s sanguine view of the collector as a revolutionary dreamer who liberates his objects and himself through his idiosyncratic practice. The collector, 1

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Benjamin posits, “makes his concern the transfiguration of t­hings. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting t­hings of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value.”5 Rather than preserving or hoarding, Benjamin’s collector transforms his raw materials as well as his society. In short, according to Benjamin, “The collector dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one—­one in which to be sure, h ­ uman beings are no better provided with what they need than in the everyday world, but in which t­hings are freed from the drudgery of being useful.”6 For Benjamin, the collector is not merely linked to transformative forces of production, he is a utopian dreamer. It is precisely the moldy, retrograde status that Benjamin tries to dust off and infuse with new meaning; he seeks to transform the collector. In the spirit of a true collector, he focuses on “­things” (die Dinge), which are liberated from utility even if ­humans are no better off. ­These two disparate views foreground the fundamental tension or dialectic at stake in the practice of collecting. Collecting is a conflicted practice, torn between preservation and transformation; it preserves its objects by stripping them from their original context and importing them into a new framework. Building on Benjamin’s characterization, this book rehabilitates the collector as a modernist figure who “dreams his way” into a “better world” by picking up the fragments of modern life. The collector is not only a revolutionary po­liti­cal figure but one with artistic aspirations who becomes a creator in his or her own right. Benjamin’s collector is a foil for the writer just as Nietz­sche’s collector is a type of antiquarian historian. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, tradition and revolution, order and chaos, nostalgia and anticipation, and the past and the f­ uture. To what extent does collecting remain an antiquarian practice in and for modernity? Is Benjamin’s view of collecting as a revolutionary, transformative pro­cess bound up with this regressive practice of history? T ­ here are vestiges of Nietz­sche’s reactionary hoarder in the most avant-­garde collection, at times even jostling uncomfortably with Benjamin’s radical politics.7 The collector, Benjamin warns, “is motivated by dangerous though domesticated passions [gefährlichen, wenn auch domestizierten Passionen].”8 The dangers of this passion extend beyond the toxic mold of Nietz­sche’s antiquarian to the artistic, social, and po­liti­cal sphere. By the end of Nietz­sche’s quote, the “blind mania of collecting” curiously slips into the textual realm of “bibliographical quisquilia.” Defined as “the sweepings of a ­house, the chats and whitlings of wood, all small sticks . . . ​all ­things that are of no value or estimation, riff-­raff,” quisquilia assumes the position of a strangely

D A NGERO U S PA SSIONS

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misplaced odd and end, a Latin leftover in German prose.9 Yet, gathering “the rags, the refuse” (Lumpen), the bibliographic quisquilia of nineteenth-­century French culture was precisely Benjamin’s stated objective in The Arcades Proj­ect.10 By his own account, Benjamin is a literary ragpicker (Lumpensammler) rummaging through the rubbish heap of history. But, unlike Nietz­sche’s antiquarian, he collects ­these bibliographical scraps in order to “blast” them out of their original context and redeploy them in radical new ways.

A Modernist Praxis This book traces the way three author-­collectors—­Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—­engaged with collecting as a literary practice that si­mul­ ta­neously reflected their preoccupation with the material world. Instead of a means to preserve the past, collecting becomes a dynamic, future-­oriented pro­cess of artistic creation that I label modernist.11 Gleaning, compiling, and transforming existing materials, t­hese authors embraced a modernist style of collecting that re­imagined the relationship between author and text, source and medium, not as derivative or imitative but as a form of creative appropriation. The synthesis between art production and collecting practices is a defining feature of modernist collections, which, as epitomized by Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ ect and Einstein’s Documents, incorporated their finds into their texts. The collections of t­ hese authors can no longer be distinguished from their work, prompting us to ask, where does the collection end and the work of art begin? Had the artist become a collector or had the collector become an artist? Sketching out a “shadow” history of modernism, this book posits that the techniques of collection, citation, interpolation, and paraphrase are at once timeless textual practices and quintessentially modernist. By emphasizing collecting as a praxis, I focus on the feedback loop between James’s, Benjamin’s, and Einstein’s collecting practice and their literary technique. Each of the following three parts connects the author’s material collections (the first chapter) with his literary technique of collecting (the second chapter), arguing that they w ­ ere mutually reinforcing pro­cesses. The point of comparison between ­these three author-­collectors is their collecting practices rather than their objects.12 Much of my strategy consists of connecting ancillary writings on collecting—­often dismissed as marginalia or detritus—to the literary corpus and methodology of ­these authors. To better map out the complexities of collecting, each part introduces a “negative” model of collecting: hoarding for James, ragpicking for Benjamin, and cultural appropriation for Einstein. The

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models are interconnected even as collecting is socially validated and its shady cousins are deemed pathological, unhygienic, or destructive. While the collecting impulse in modernism is certainly not l­imited to James, Benjamin, and Einstein, t­ hese three authors mediate between literary and material worlds, self-­consciously reflecting on their creative pro­cess as a practice of collecting that dovetails with their thematic preoccupations with the material world. Although he preceded the other two by a generation, James was ahead of his time in framing his creative pro­cess as a form of appropriation—­ one that would l­ater be employed by Benjamin and Einstein in very dif­fer­ent cultural and artistic contexts. James represents a significant shift from the fiction of the author as a genius creator to one who collects, samples, and curates the work of ­others. Unlike nineteenth-­century realists such as Honoré de Balzac, Theodor Fontane, or Wilhelm Raabe, who went to g­ reat lengths to stage themselves as literary geniuses, James consciously employed pro­cesses of compiling and collecting, which is, in part, why this genealogy of modernist collecting begins with him.13 Pairing James with Benjamin and Einstein exposes the surprisingly reactionary blind spots of Benjamin’s and Einstein’s aesthetics just as it illuminates the modernist, radical aspects of James’s literary praxis. Like collections that produce insights through unexpected juxtapositions, this seemingly idiosyncratic constellation of authors provides a fresh perspective on collecting as modernist praxis when read together. Collecting is not only a major activity at the root of the modernist sensibility; it structures and subtends many of the twentieth c­ entury’s most impor­ tant literary and theoretical works, such as Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the surrealist jour­ hese modernist texts foreground their own constructed, nal Documents.14 T fragmented form, which, like the collage or montage, draws on preexisting materials in order to recontextualize and transform them. Referring to the modernist preoccupations with archiving, ethnographic collecting, and anthologization, Jeremy Braddock states that “a collecting aesthetic can be identified as a paradigmatic form of modernist art.”15 The lens of collecting helps to uncover new constellations of modernism—­the secret affinities that might be overlooked by a more orthodox definition. Collecting also helps us understand what was “new” about modernism. No period or movement was more preoccupied with the myth of originality than the twentieth-­century avant-­garde, as Rosalind Krauss has shown.16 Yet the originality of modernist texts like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus” lies in their ability to recycle, refashion, and repurpose the old. One of the central paradoxes of modernism, therefore, is that the movement that was so fixated on breaking with the past collected its re-

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mains in order to establish its authenticity. The lens of collecting reveals that modernists ­were groundbreaking not b­ ecause they ­were ­doing something “new,” but b­ ecause they employed transformative techniques; by gathering objects and texts, they refashioned their finds into new works of art.17 Collecting is creation as curation, an act that rejects novelty by reconfiguring what already exists but in a new way. The collector becomes a meta-­artist whose second-­order work of art is created by compiling and curating the past. Casting themselves as collectors, James, Benjamin, and Einstein all eschewed claims of originality for vari­ous ethical, po­liti­cal, and aesthetic reasons. Not only does collecting give us a new vocabulary to explore originality, genius, and artistic creation, but it also prompts us to rethink the bound­aries of authorship.18 Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, “The Death of an Author,” punctured the myth of the author as ex nihilo creator, claiming that the writer’s “only power is to mix writings, to c­ ounter the ones with the o ­ thers, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.”19 By jettisoning the concept of genius, Paul Fleming observes, “the artist becomes a pseudo-­scientific investigator, collector, and appropriator or dilettante.”20 As self-­conscious author-­collectors, James, Benjamin, and Einstein showed that the death of the author long preceded Barthes’s autopsy. For them, the death of the author signaled the birth of the collector.

Spoils, Spolia, Spoliation On a most basic level, spoils are goods, property, or territory that are seized by force, often in a time of war.21 This book establishes a genealogy of collecting in spoliation—­the appropriation of the work or property of ­others.22 I borrow the multivalency of this word from James, who self consciously employs the discourse of spoils throughout his oeuvre by blending its appropriative and creative dimensions. Throughout this book, spoils have a similar valence—­they carry both the specter of destruction as well as the promise of renewal and transformation. The etymology of the word spoils bears witness to this ambiguity. The En­ glish word was borrowed twice, first from Old French (espoille) and then from Latin (spolium).23 Its Latinate plural, spolia was redefined by artist-­antiquarians around 1500 to describe reused architectural components and sculptures from antiquity (see figure 1).24 In an influential 1969 essay on spolia (Spolien), the German archaeologist Arnold Esch refuted the charge that the medieval use of classical spolia constitutes an act of barbarism, proclaiming, “No. The reuse of Antiquity in the ­Middle Ages is not ‘perpetua notte’; it is not death but rather new life, new agency, a new adventure. The ancient sarcophagus converted into

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Figure 1. ​A nude statue of Venus being unearthed at Ostia Antica, Italy (February 1939). © Archivio Fotografico del Parco Archeologico di Ostia Antica.

a fountain is not the death of Antiquity but its survival.”25 Though made u ­ nder dif­fer­ent circumstances, Esch’s remark resonates with Benjamin’s collector who ­frees objects by renewing them. By recognizing spolia as the result of a distinctive cultural practice rather than simply a subset of classical survival, Esch’s pioneering article gave rise to a new field.26 While Esch’s essay spawned a number of contributions to “spolia studies” in the fields of art history, archaeology, and architecture, it has received l­ittle attention in literary studies.

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Modernism was creative in its propensity to collect, appropriate, and transform, and the field of spolia studies helps us reexamine it from a new a­ ngle. Spolia ­ were modernist long before modernism; with their multiple layers of meanings and hybrid constructions, they ­were early pioneers of collage, montage, bricolage, and other forms of avant-­garde art. In this “shadow” history of modernism, the conscious collecting and appropriation of other works are more salient than radical innovation. Ezra Pound’s pithy modernist slogan “make it new” is a case in point; gleaned from classical Chinese lit­er­at­ ure, it was itself the product of cultural appropriation.27 We can trace modernist textual collecting back to the medieval practice of interpolation—­the inserting of entries or passages into another author’s text—­which blurred the role of author and compiler. As etymological proof of this long-­standing tension, compilare—­the Latin root of compile—­initially meant to pillage, deriving from pilare (to rob), and had, at first, a sinister meaning.28 In addition to collecting and compiling texts, the author was one who borrowed or stole from ­others. Modernist collectors engage in a form of creative plunder that both refashions and blows apart the original object. The term appropriation encompasses every­thing from the “improper taking of something and even abduction or theft” to the more mundane, “artwork’s adoption of preexisting ele­ments.”29 As Dale Kinney points out, “Appropriation is fundamental to h ­ uman existence and as such, it is essentially neutral. As with reuse, par­tic­u­lar acts or practices of appropriation can acquire positive or negative charges according to circumstances. Often the charge is po­liti­cal, and in con­temporary discourse it is frequently determined by the direction of the appropriation in relation to perceived distributions of power.”30 Acknowledging the creativity of certain forms of appropriation does not mean glossing over its po­liti­cal, ethical, or cultural implications.31 Spoliation is first and foremost a form of appropriation of what is “other” or “foreign.”32 ­Because it straddles the margins between cultures and disciplines, spolia studies is a useful framework to examine the ways all three authors used collecting and appropriation as a mode of engagement with cultures other than their own (Eu­ro­pean for the American James, Rus­sian and French for Benjamin, and African for Einstein). Even Benjamin and Einstein, two German Jews, are artistically connected through their interest in French culture and biographically linked through Georges Bataille—­the French archivist librarian—­r ather than through their shared sense of German or German-­ Jewish culture. Like writing, collecting can be a mode of mastering an unfamiliar or exotic terrain. All three authors are exiles who embrace collecting as a way to find meaning and orientation in their new environment. While all collections decontextualize their objects by importing them into a new framework, modernist collecting made the poetics of appropriation a

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fundamental part of its artistic pro­cess. By decontextualizing and appropriating their source materials in new, unorthodox ways, modernist collecting practices had impor­tant ramifications that could not be ignored in a colonial, interwar Eu­ro­pean context. Given Benjamin’s acute sensitivities to the fascist appropriation of art, it is hardest to ignore the reactionary aspects of collecting in his own work. Surprisingly, James shows himself to be more discerning of the dangerous h ­ uman consequences of collecting than the modernist Marxists Benjamin and Einstein. Rereading Benjamin’s concept of aura through James’s fiction, I posit that James’s skepticism of originality is more radical than Benjamin’s and his fear of aestheticization is more prescient than Einstein’s. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in conversation with James sharpens the contours of spoils as an aesthetic and po­liti­cal concept. Spoils ultimately gesture back to the origins of collecting: the triumphant display of the victor’s loot. James’s wealthy American collectors plundered Eu­ rope in search of culture while Benjamin ransacked the French Bibliothèque nationale. Einstein is the most direct example of the way modern collections continue to be furnished by the spoils of colonization and war. His mania for Africana ­rose to a fever pitch during his appointment in the Belgian colonial office, underscoring the imbrication of modern art and the Eu­ro­pean “scramble for Africa.” Thus, contrary to the claim that the object world was “beyond the reach of ideology” for modernists, collecting practices had undeniable po­ liti­cal ramifications.33 The collection often serves as a condensed space of control that crowns the collector with absolute dominion over its objects. Recent discussions in Eu­ro­pean and American museums about the restitution of the Benin bronzes and other looted artifacts reveal the violent, colonial forces which underpin collecting.34 Collecting has a bloody history which is only now starting to be acknowledged. The zealous collector’s humanization of objects is often accompanied by an objectification of h ­ umans, epitomized by Osmond in James’s Portrait of a Lady, who reduces Isabel Archer to the choice ornament of his collection. Bodies—­often female—­have been objectified and appropriated for aesthetic or sexual ends. The instrumentalization of individuals, problematized in James’s novels, is routinized in colonialism and fascism through the collection, ­ uman taxonomizing, and ruling of subjects.35 The monstrous apotheosis of h collection as policy took place in Nazi Germany as Jews and other minorities ­were systematically categorized and annihilated.36 Their property was gathered up to be redistributed, melted down, or other­wise appropriated, not least as a symbolic punishment for their putative acquisitiveness. In Jiří Weil’s Men­ delssohn is on the Roof, a Nazi museum in Prague exhibits expropriated Jewish

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artifacts as a “store­house of trophies commemorating the Reich’s victory.”37 Reflecting the bloody under­pinnings of collecting as a tool of domination, this museum demonstrates that the destruction of ­humans was intertwined with the collection of their possessions.

Vitrine of the Heart As Benjamin’s warning about “dangerous though domesticated passions” suggests, collectors have a deeply personal, emotional relationship with their objects. This sentiment is aptly expressed by Charles Swann in Marcel Proust’s Cities of the Plain as “the mania of all collectors—­very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one all t­ hose love affairs of which the world can know nothing.”38 If collecting is a trope to describe the most intimate part of life, lit­er­at­ ure is an appropriate medium through which to unlock this vitrine. This personal triangulation of collecting, desire, and mania is often lost in the study of museums and other institutional collections, which conceals the passions and whims of the individual collector. Collecting is a form of de-­objectification whereby an object is reanimated through its affective relationship with a collector. As Benjamin’s aforementioned distinction between use value and connoisseur value reveals, the collector not only takes an object out of its context but also “­frees” it “from the drudgery of being useful.”39 Jean Baudrillard makes an impor­tant distinction: ­Every object thus has two functions—to be put to use and to be possessed. The first involves the field of the world’s practical totalization of the subject undertaken by the subject himself outside the world. ­These two functions stand in inverse ratio to each other. At one extreme, the strictly practical object acquires a social status: this is the case with the machine. At the opposite extreme, the pure object, devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly subjective status: it becomes part of a collection . . . ​An object no longer specified by its function is defined by the subject, but in the passionate abstractness of possession all objects are equivalent.40 In contrast to the functional object, the collected object is no longer defined by its function. As the object becomes part of a collection, it sheds its use value to take on a “subjective status” through its individual bond with the collector. Without citing him, Baudrillard seems to echo Benjamin: “What is decisive in

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collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to ­things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility.”41 Untethered from the social and practical world, the collector’s passion takes a “dangerous” turn as it devolves into mania and even delusions. Werner Muensterberger’s classical psychoanalytic perspective maintains that beneath all passionate collecting “seems to lie a compulsive preoccupation” that may range from “concrete incidents such as physical hurt or emotional trauma or a­ ctual neglect to more or less tangible states of alarm and anxiety.”42 His account raises the possibility that the collector’s passionate attachment to objects is always a compensatory or pathological substitute for some form of loss. For all three author-­collectors, collecting is motivated by the failure of language. It is in the controlled microcosm of the collection that their desires, hopes, and fears—­often inarticulable in other symbolic systems—­find expression. Nietz­sche’s portrait suggests that collecting can never be fully disentangled from its musty relative: hoarding, the maniacal, less socially acceptable dimension of collecting. Recalibrating the terms introduced by Baudrillard, I am arguing that the value of the hoarded object is most subjective, intelligible only to the hoarder. Unlike the collector, whose objects still have some externally recognizable value even though they are withdrawn from their function, the hoarder is defined by an inappropriate relationship with objects that are deemed to be worthless or no longer useful.43 According to Nietz­sche, the “moldy smell” envelops the hoarder, reflecting the way the hoarded object—­ held on to beyond its proper use—­comes to infect the collector, who becomes equally obsolescent. In The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk delineates “two types of collectors: 1) The Proud Ones, ­those pleased to show their collections to the world (they predominate in the West). 2) The Bashful Ones, who hide away all they have accumulated (an unmodern disposition).”44 Although Pamuk does not phrase it in ­these terms, the “Proud Ones” fit the traditional designation of collectors while the “Bashful Ones” exhibit the shame and secrecy displayed by hoarders. Pamuk’s distinction reinforces the typology of triumphalist Western collectors who proudly display their spoils in museums. Hoarding, as Nietz­sche’s slippage from objects to quisquilia indicates, is a predominantly textual phenomenon, transforming papers into material objects. For James, hoarding is an obsessive editorial practice with strong ties to ­ ental Dis­ authorial control. According to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of M orders, hoarders are plagued by “fears of losing impor­tant information,” explaining why the most commonly hoarded items are “newspapers, magazines, old clothing, bags, books, mail, and paperwork.”45 Five out of the seven ex-

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amples provided are types of text, once again highlighting the overlap between material and textual techniques of collecting. The recent prevalence of hoarding is thus not only symptomatic of an inability to properly consume and dispose of objects in late-­stage capitalism, but, as I posit in the epilogue, a regressive response to the information overload of con­temporary culture.

A Genealogy of Collecting: From Won­der to Order In Benjamin’s utopian portrait, the collector “transfigures” ­things and “dreams his way into a better world,” by redeploying objects in new ways.46 This playful, creative approach recalls the whimsical space of the Wunderkammer, or curiosity cabinet, which arose in sixteenth-­century Eu­rope as a repository for wondrous or exotic objects. Coinciding with the conquest of the Amer­ic­ as, the Wunderkammer often acted as the exhibition space for the spoils extracted from the “New World.” Not only did the Wunderkammer’s lack of disciplinary distinctions mean that objects w ­ ere heterogeneously arranged through the recom­ ere binant powers of the imagination, but that naturalia, or found objects, w 47 often mingled with artificialia, or manmade works of art. Long before the institutionalization of collecting in nineteenth-­century museums, the visionary collector of the Wunderkammer doubled as a creator and inventor. This notion of the Wunderkammer as a ludic space was developed in Julius von Schlosser’s pioneering 1908 study, The Kunst and Wunderkammer of the Late Re­nais­sance, which begins by meditating on the origins of collecting in ­children’s play. Not coincidentally, the era in which collecting was first treated as a serious pursuit—in large part due to Schlosser’s work—­overlaps temporally with the beginning of modernist collecting. This playful dimension of collecting finds its most compelling expression in Benjamin’s account of the child who brings together objects in novel ways. As I argue in chapters 3 and 4, modernists give play new currency by embracing techniques like montage, collage, and bricolage that build the world anew through the reassembling of preexisting materials. Curiosity and won­der become salient epistemic categories for twentieth-­century surrealists just as they ­were in the age of the Wunderkammer. Chapter 6 reads Documents as a modernist curiosity cabinet in journal form that dismantled disciplinary distinctions by bringing ethnography, archaeology, art history, and popu­lar culture into the same space. Descended from the Wunderkammer, the museum was the product of Enlightenment reforms that sought to or­ga­nize, classify, and taxonomize objects in order to educate the public. In spite of its pedagogical purpose, the

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museum was a po­liti­cal space that was bound up with a certain image of the nation or culture from the very beginning, as Tony Bennett, Didier Maleuvre, and ­others have shown.48 Founded in 1793, the Louvre’s “initial purpose was to exhibit the spoils wrested from the aristocracy by the Revolution.”49 In German states, the existence of museums like the Louvre and the British Museum elsewhere in Eu­rope not only fueled competition and the development of German cultural institutions but also informed the writings of luminaries like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel.50 Goethe’s epistolary novella, The Collector and His Circle, epitomizes this Enlightenment view of collecting as an epistemological practice parallel to but ultimately separate from the production of art. From the outset, Goethe’s collector claims that his guiding princi­ples ­were “order and completeness” (Ordnung und Vollständigkeit), two categories that are no longer v­ iable by the early twentieth ­century.51 Even as it attempts to foreground the bond between a collector and his objects, Goethe’s novella enacts a strict regime of organ­ization by developing a typology of artists, connoisseurs, and amateurs (Liebhaber)—­a rubric that does not allow for the intersection of the artist and collector. This schema also reveals the slippage between the taxonomy of material objects and the typology of individuals, a central tension in James’s novels. Goethe’s collector is a doctor by profession, a self-­professed amateur who is sharply delineated from the artist as creator. His day job intensifies his love for collecting, as he declares, “Since I could not be an artist, I would have been in despair if I had not from birth been destined to be an amateur and a collector . . . ​my very dif­fer­ent occupation only seemed to add to my love of art and to my passion [Leidenschaft] for collecting.”52 In Goethe’s taxonomy, collecting is a dilettantish substitute for creation; he who cannot create collects. This stratification reflects the way collecting was deemed an amateur pursuit and rarely put into dialogue with artistic production ­after the decline of the Wunderkammer. Such clichés are overturned in the early twentieth c­ entury, when the roles of collector and artist once again fuse together. As chapter 6 argues, the dilettante as collector—­featured in Goethe’s novella—is a foil for the would-be artist turned “dilettante of won­der” in Einstein’s Bebuquin. Modernist collecting practices represent a significant departure from museums, which strove for organ­ization, mastery, and completeness. Instead, they revived many of the Wunderkammer’s inventive tendencies. Although the proliferation of museums in the nineteenth ­century helped pave the way for individualized collecting practices that no longer had mimetic or pedagogic aspirations, ­these institutions, nevertheless, played a central role in the works of the three authors—­the Louvre for James, the Bibliothèque nationale for Benjamin, and Berlin’s Ethnological Museum for Einstein. All three authors w ­ ere also reacting to the widespread popularization of collecting that prompted one British

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journal to proclaim the dawn of “the collecting age” in the late nineteenth ­century.53 While unwittingly influenced by such trends, avant-­garde collectors reacted against the popularity of bric-­a-­brac to refurbish collecting as a modern, artistic pro­cess. If Goethe’s doctor as dilettante collector is representative of an Enlightenment attitude t­ oward collecting, the modernist type of collecting is personified by John in V ­ irginia Woolf ’s short story, “Solid Objects,” who abandons a promising ­career in parliament for the reclusive life of a collector. A mysterious, amorphous lump of glass that John finds on the beach begins to hold a special power over him ­after it becomes a paperweight on his mantelpiece.54 The object preoccupies him more than the constituent letters it weighs down, prompting John to collect more and more at the expense of his professional duties. Subverting the Enlightenment notion of collection as mastery, John’s penchant instead begins to “consume” him.55 Unlike Goethe’s hobby collector who embarks on a serious medical c­ areer, John’s ­career is turned by his collection into “a t­ hing of the past.”56 As James’s novel The Spoils of Poynton dramatizes, the passionate collector’s oeuvre becomes her life’s work and her intense emotional bond with her spoils supersedes her h ­ uman relationships.57 Rather than bourgeois bric-­a-­brac, John hunts for detritus—­“some piece of china or glass curiously marked or broken” from “rubbish heaps” and “waste lands.”58 Modernist collecting becomes a self-­consciously fragmentary, recombinant pro­cess that foregrounds the schisms rather than the totality of the collection. The object no longer has currency as a representative of a larger conceptual framework; it possesses its own intrinsic value.59 Once the object is divorced from its epistemological and representative function, collecting is reconstituted as an artistic pro­cess.60 As early as the crack in James’s titular The Golden Bowl, the collection is no longer invested with completeness. This fragmentation culminates in the patchwork form of The Arcades Proj­ect, where Benjamin’s ragpicker is tasked with gathering the ruins of history. By artistically transforming fragments, the modernist collector both reflects and participates in this pro­cess of fragmentation. Fragmentation is also echoed on the level of the text. Not only ­were three of James’s late prose works, Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect, and Einstein’s Bebuquin II unfinished at the time of their deaths, but also most of their archives have been destroyed; Benjamin’s and Einstein’s collections w ­ ere lost during exile and war while James preemptively burned many of his personal papers and letters. This is part of a larger pattern; from Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, many of the most ambitious, encyclopedic works of modernism remained unfinished.

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Bibliographic Quisquilia This book brings together the analy­sis of textual and intertextual practices with the study of material culture.61 From Bill Brown’s “­thing theory” to Graham Harman’s object-­oriented ontology, the “material turn” in the humanities has yielded many studies on the previously neglected role of objects in lit­er­a­ture, philosophy, and other disciplines, such as Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects, Graham Harman’s Tool Being, Bill Brown’s A Sense of ­Things, Timothy Morton’s Ecological Thought, and Levi Bryant’s Democracy of Objects. The material turn has proved particularly productive for the field of modernist studies. As Mao and Brown have argued, modernism was, in part, a functionalist movement of widespread decluttering that followed the rabid accumulation of ­things during the Victorian era. Concomitantly, modernists established new relationships with the object beyond pro­cesses of commodification to ask the “fundamentally modernist question: the question of t­hings and their thingness.”62 My book poses the follow-up question, how does collecting—­the systematic accumulation of “­things as t­ hings”—­operate within a broader modernist rethinking of artistic forms and institutions that also questioned the coherence of the collection? At the same time, the object in the collection stands in relation not only to other objects but also to the collector. Collecting provides one way to orient material culture within a ­human framework to show the way the object and ­human world productively intersect. Susan Pearce, Anke te Heesen, and other scholars have written monographs on collecting from the perspective of museum studies or the history of science.63 Jeremy Braddock’s Collecting as Mod­ ernist Practice focuses on collective forms of modernist expression—­the art collection, the anthology, and the archive—­through the activities of major American art collectors and literary editors. Peter McIsaac’s Museums of the Mind considers how the invention and evolution of the public museum transforms the relationship between material objects and imaginative narratives from Goethe to W. G. Sebald. By contrast, this book analyzes collecting as an impor­tant but often neglected part of the artist’s creative pro­cess that c­ ounters the exhibition strategies of museums and archives.64 While the writer’s private collection opposes the classificatory organ­ization of museums, the avant-­garde aesthetics of clutter apparent in the montage and collage challenges the narrative that modernists ­were primarily focused on decluttering. Through the notion of bibliographic quisquilia, this book explores the interrelationship between collecting, writing, and authorial self-­fashioning. Although the concept of curation as artistic creation has been treated on a visual level in exhibits such as at the New Museum in New York and the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the relationship between

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writing and collecting remains underexplored. On a basic level, writing has always been integral to the practice of collecting. The rationale and coherence of collections depend on cata­logs that describe and archive their objects.65 On a more fundamental level, as Balzac, the nineteenth-­century realist and chronicler of t­hings, notes, the drives ­behind writing and collecting are linked: “The extent of the collector’s passion, which, in truth, is one of the most deeply seated of all passions, rival[s] the very vanity of the author.”66 The phi­los­o­pher Dominik Finkelde observes that collecting habits changed the “­human relationship to the object world” just as photography altered perception in the nineteenth ­century.67 Taking this one step further, I am arguing that practices of collecting s­ haped the way authors thought and wrote about writing. Building on literary studies’ and media theory’s recent interest in practice-­ driven approaches, this book analyzes collecting practices on two levels: first, collecting as a way of engaging with the material world and the literary repre­ sen­ta­tions of such practices; and, second, writing as a pro­cess of collecting.68 Defining collecting too broadly risks grouping many types of h ­ uman be­hav­ior ­under this rubric. I define material collecting through three main criteria: (1) the collector’s active pursuit of an object, (2) the emotional or affective relationship between the collector and his or her objects, and fi­nally, (3) the ele­ment of repetition or seriality that leads from the acquisition of an individual object to a larger collection. The first criterion rules out the inherited collection or the passive accumulation of objects that is retroactively labeled a collection. This characteristic also enables us to distinguish between a collector, who actively acquires objects, and Nietz­sche’s hoarder, who is marked by an inability to part with his objects. The second criterion rules out the shop­keeper in The Golden Bowl, who buys objects to resell them at higher prices without emotional expenditure. Fi­ nally, the last criterion rules out the one-­off acquisition of a work of art and foregrounds the affinities between the collector and the addict, constantly chasing the next fix, which simply redoubles the desire to procure more.69 This drive is already evident in Nietz­sche’s characterization of the collector’s “insatiable lust” that “gobbles up” (frißt) even the most meaningless rubbish.70

Plan of the Book To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces a historical shift in the representation of collecting from the sinister bourgeois practices in James’s novels to the radically modernist technique epitomized by Einstein. Unlike Benjamin and Einstein, James was not a collector of objects in the traditional sense, but he was nevertheless fixated on fictional repre­sen­ta­tions of collectors and collections. It was

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the ethical implications of collecting that preoccupied James, who, like Benjamin and Einstein, experimented with techniques of collecting on a textual level. James’s sensitivity to the ethical ramifications of collecting paradoxically makes him more progressive than Einstein and Benjamin, who pursued surprisingly reactionary proj­ects as part of their collecting practices. James’s apprehensions suggest that, even at its most playful, collecting always borders on hoarding, underpinned by regressive and deleterious tendencies. Composed of two chapters, each section centers around one author-­collector. The first chapter of each section focuses on the author’s material collections, such as Benjamin’s toys and Einstein’s Africana, while the second chapter examines textual collecting practices, namely, how the logic of collecting structures and informs the author’s work. Although Benjamin’s citation-­laden Arcades Proj­ ect is the most explic­itly bibliographical, James indulges in textual hoarding and Einstein cofounds Documents, a surrealist journal of art and ethnography. Like Benjamin, Einstein harnesses the radical possibilities of textual collecting in his “Critical Dictionary,” a separate section included at the end of each issue of Doc­ uments that attempts to rewrite language by collecting and redefining “bourgeois” words. Subverting the twin institutional forms of the dictionary and museum, Documents—­true to its name—is caught between the poles of documentation and transformation. James’s hoarder, Benjamin’s ragpicker, and Einstein’s “paraphraseur” each enlist a form of serial textual collecting that eschews notions of originality. Even in their most avant-­garde moments, t­ hese three figures perform the creative and po­liti­cal limitations of language. Paradoxically, Einstein’s obsessive paraphraser brings us back to where we started: Nietz­sche’s “antiquarian” hoarder who ceaselessly compiles and always returns to the old.

Pa rt O n e

Possessing the Old World Henry James and the Spoils of Eu­rope Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal pro­cession [Triumphzug] in which the pre­sent rulers step over ­those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils [die Beute] are carried along in the pro­cession. They are called cultural trea­sures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural trea­sures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the ­g reat minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. ­There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not ­free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. —­Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391–92

In November  1875, Henry James wrote to his f­ amily from London, “Dear P ­ eople All. I take possession of the old world—­I inhale it—­I appropriate it!” He remained both possessed by and in possession of Eu­rope for the rest of his life, only returning to visit Amer­i­ca in 1905. For James, the theme of possession was a central concern, particularly in the m ­ iddle years of his c­ areer, allowing him to explore the interplay between the h ­ uman and material world and to theorize the ethics of interpersonal relationships.1 Possession is a way of establishing dominion over a new territory, which for James was

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the Old World. Yet, unlike modernists like Carl Einstein, who despoil Africa to create an imperial archive, James and his characters despoil the spoiler—­ Europe—­underscoring the paradox of imperialism that transformed it from colonizer to a vassal state of the United States within half a c­ entury.2 Rooted in the extraction and display of the victor’s spoils, collecting is a contested practice of possession and accumulation. In James’s novel The Golden Bowl, the wealthy American financier Adam Verver’s insatiable appetite for Eu­ro­pean art objects becomes a harbinger of American economic ascendancy and cultural conquest. The transfer of art—­particularly old masters—­from British collections to American hands had reached unpre­ce­dented levels by early 1900, prompting Burlington Magazine to declare an “American Invasion.”3 Verver’s palatial British home is described as “a tent suggesting that of Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius,” underscoring the nature of possession as “triumphal pro­cession” highlighted by Benjamin in the epigraph.4 The figure of the enterprising American collector who despoils Eu­rope revises the traditional interpretation of James’s novels as the dramatization of naive Americans who are swindled by worldly Eu­ro­pe­ans. As a cultural conqueror, the collector labels and reshapes ­these spoils through new forms of organ­ization and cataloging—­like the marking of seized territory. The practice and politics of possession are manifested in James’s thematic preoccupation with collecting and remain at the forefront of his critical concerns as a writer. The lens of collecting gives us a new perspective on the agency, motivations, and relationships of James’s strongest characters. Many of James’s novels prominently feature collectors: in addition to Adam Verver in The Golden Bowl, ­there is Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson, Urbain de Bellegarde in The American, Dr. Sloper in Washington Square, Gilbert Osmond and Edward Rosier in The Portrait of a Lady, the unnamed narrator in The Aspern Papers, Mrs. Gereth in The Spoils of Poynton, and Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors. Yet James’s collector remains an ambivalent figure of modernity, with a dubious antiquarian past and a despotic personality. Personified by Osmond, Isabel Archer’s tyrannical husband in The Portrait of a Lady, this strand of the collector collects objects and h ­ umans in an attempt to dominate his surroundings. Similarly, Verver’s imperial collecting practices extend to his ­human “morceaux de musée,” his handsome, aristocratic son-­in-­law and the ornamental second wife he acquires alongside a set of rare Damascene tiles.5 James cultivated an intense, lifelong interest in collecting and its institutions, authoring many pieces on visual art, galleries, and museums. Yet, he refused the label of collector. Declaring in an 1883 letter, “I d­ on’t collect—­I fear possessions—­ which seem also to fear me,”6 James insists on the relation between possession and collection in order to explain why he does not collect t­ hings.7 The negative



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context makes the slippage between collection and possession even more significant; his fear of possession—or being possessed—­prompts him to eschew collecting altogether.8 In spite of his emphatic disavowal, James’s writing pro­cess can be described as a form of collecting that verges on hoarding. In the prefaces to his novels, he frequently describes writing as a pro­cess of collecting “germs” of inspiration that he then transforms into his stories. Using strategies of compilation, James consciously ­adopted techniques of copy and paste as an alternative to a Romantic model of genius creation embraced by Honoré de Balzac and many of his contemporaries. Viewing James as a literary collector sharpens our attunement to his modernist sensibilities. His conception of writing as a mode of collecting is distinctly modernist. Collecting is not his attempt to describe or cata­log the world; it is part of his self-­consciously patchwork artistic pro­cess that foregrounds the constructedness of his texts. This style marks a shift from nineteenth-­century realism, which purports to depict the world in situ in its totality.9 Numerous inquiries have focused on the repre­sen­ta­tion of material culture in the nineteenth-­ century novel.10 Yet modernist studies has not fully taken stock of the phenomenon of collecting, which has often been relegated to the domains of art history or museum studies.11 James stands at the end of a century-­long novelistic preoccupation with the cata­loging, description, and repre­sen­ta­tion of material objects epitomized in the British tradition by Charles Dickens and in the French tradition by Balzac.12 Just as modernists, according to Bill Brown, aimed to declutter the novel from this material and descriptive excess, James sought to recuperate the object from the bric-­a-­brac of Victorian lit­er­at­ure. James, like Benjamin and Einstein, shows us that the object in modernist lit­er­a­ture is neither tethered to its representative function nor u ­ nder any obligation to denote “the real” or what Roland Barthes labels the “real­ity princi­ple.”13 James’s astute awareness of both the creative and destructive aspects of collecting furnishes this book with its operative word: spoils. Not only does the word emphasize the decidedly modernist character of his literary praxis, spoils also illuminates the contradiction between preservation and transformation. For James, all three manifestations of collecting are tied to spoils: (1) the victor’s “triumphal pro­cession” of “cultural trea­sures”14 that gives The Spoils of Poynton its name, (2) the objectification of characters into collectible objects as a form of ­human spoils, and (3) the modernist, artistic notion of collecting that appropriates and transforms its object in an unorthodox way. Chapter 1 uses the material collections in The Spoils of Poynton as a lens for exploring James’s larger anx­i­eties about possession, with all its uncanny applications to the h ­ uman world. Chapter  2 reads The Aspern Papers alongside James’s own hoarding tendencies—­the obsessive way he controlled his work by commissioning

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frontispieces, extensively revising his texts, and framing them through detailed prefaces. Although The Aspern Papers was written before The Spoils of Poynton, it was heavi­ly revised by James for the 1908 New York edition to amplify the theme of spoliation, which is why it forms the backbone of chapter 2. The novella revolves around Juliana Bordereau, an eccentric old hoarder who tries to keep valuable papers out of the hands of the conniving narrator, an ambitious young editor. The narrator’s rapacity sets off a strug­ gle for possession, culminating in a climactic conflagration that consumes the entire collection. Setting fire to his own archive—­the papers, letters, and photo­g raphs he accumulated over forty years—­James reenacts the motif of the burned hoard that reoccurs throughout his fiction. Like Juliana and other characters who would rather destroy their valuable collections than see them fall into the wrong hands, James is troubled by the prospect of a meddling editor who might tamper with his work or disclose compromising information. The identification between Juliana and James opens up an unexplored queer reading of James’s fiction, namely, the hoarder as a closeted figure whose material deviance is coding for sexual deviance. Hoarding becomes a bulwark against spoliation, exemplified by the prying editor-­collector who seeks to quite literally force open Juliana’s closet. Chapter  2 concludes by examining James’s objectification of characters and personification of objects in relation to the ethics of writing as a form of possession. Ahead of his time, James shows himself to be more conscious and critical of the appropriative dimensions of collecting than l­ater, more po­liti­ cally radical writers like Benjamin and Einstein even as he occasionally employs them. Rather than simply using Benjamin to illuminate concepts of aura, originality, and mechanical reproduction in James, I reexamine Benjamin’s account of aura through James’s fiction. This reading suggests that James’s skepticism of originality and fears of aestheticization are more progressive than Benjamin’s and Einstein’s.

C h a p te r   1

James’s ­Human Bibelots

Already from a young age, James, like Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, was “­under the charm of a museum.”1 No museum made more of a lasting impression on him than the Louvre, which James first visited at the age of thirteen.2 As James reflected in his autobiography, “the g­ reat rooms of the Louvre” w ­ ere “educative, formative, fertilizing, in a degree which no other ‘intellectual experience’ could rival” and became central to cultivating his self-­awareness and literary creativity from an early age.3 The fact that he locates his own “Bildung” in the Louvre is a reminder both of the etymological relationship in German between “Bildung” and picture (Bild) as well as the centrality of visual art to James’s craft. For James, the Louvre’s “wondrous” Galerie d’Apollon was both “a splendid scene of ­things” and “the scene of im­mense hallucination . . . ​the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life,” he recounts in vivid detail in his autobiography.4 It is thus not surprising that many of his novels are set in the Louvre, including The American, The Confidence, The Tragic Muse, and The Ambassadors. Other James novels unfold against museal backdrops such as the Uffizi, the National Gallery, and the British Museum. James was writing in an age marked by explosive growth in the development and proliferation of museums. By the turn of the ­century, as Peter McIsaac notes, “the museum had become so entrenched in the cultural mainstream as cultural bastion, educational institution, and tourist destination, that it 21

22 Chap t e r  1

could . . . ​be taken for granted.”5 The role of the museum in James’s fiction reflects the larger trajectory of modernist collecting practices examined in this book. While the museum takes center stage in his early novels, James’s focus shifts to the repre­sen­ta­tion of art objects in domestic spaces in his ­later works.6 ­There are two related transitions at stake h ­ ere: first, the shift from public to private spaces, and second, the shift from cultural institutions to individual collections and collectors. In James’s last, unfinished novels—­The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, both published posthumously in 1917—­the works have “lost their museum classifications” and status.7 It is as if both James’s objects as well as the fictional frames into which they are placed become fragmented and divorced from external classification. In spite of his long-­standing passion, James was not uncritical of the museum. As Sergio Perosa has shown, James’s views t­ oward museums and art collecting changed from one of enthusiastic embrace to critique based largely on the influx of fabulously wealthy Americans looting Eu­rope like the “barbarians of the Roman Empire.”8 In late nineteenth-­century Britain, the decline of the rural economy combined with the rise of the manufacturing elite meant that landed aristocratic families ­were forced to sell their art collections—­often to wealthy American industrialists.9 The almost legendary infiltration of affluent American heirs and heiresses into the British aristocracy was memorialized in Edith Wharton’s 1937 novel, The Buccaneers, whose title aptly reflects the martial dynamics of possession and spoliation. In 1876, on the occasion of the purchase of Ernest Meissonier’s iconic painting 1807, Friedland (figure 2) by the American department store magnate Alexander Stewart for the then astronomical sum of $60,000, James applauded, noting, “One takes . . . ​an acute satisfaction in seeing Amer­i­ca stretch out her long arm and rake in, across the green cloth of the wide Atlantic, the highest prizes of the game of civilization.”10 It is not coincidental that the work in question depicts one of the greatest victories of Napoleon. Its transfer to American hands is a vivid example of the “triumphal pro­cession” of cultural spoils that si­mul­ta­neously serve as a “document of barbarism” in Benjamin’s epigraph to part 1 of this book.11 The discourse of spoliation is most blatant in James’s 1897 novel, The Spoils of Poynton. Mrs.  Gereth schemes to arrange a marriage between Owen, her dim-­witted son, and Fleda Vetch, not to ensure the happiness of her only child but to secure the perpetuity of her dazzling collection of trea­sures. According to En­glish laws of primogeniture, her late husband’s ­will stipulates that all property w ­ ill pass to Owen upon his marriage instead of remaining in Mrs. Gereth’s custody. Poor but artistic with a refined sense of taste and discretion, ­ ecause of her suFleda exhibits the kind of “flair” that attracts Mrs. Gereth.12 B perior aesthetic taste, Fleda becomes Mrs. Gereth’s appointed inheritor and de-

Figure 2. ​Ernest Meissonier, 1807, Friedland (ca. 1861–75). © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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sired match, whereas Owen’s love interest, Mona Brigstock, is dismissed by Mrs. Gereth b­ ecause she d­ oesn’t adequately appreciate the value of her trea­ sures. A major f­amily dispute ensues when Mrs. Gereth preemptively removes all her possessions from Poynton to her modest dower ­house in anticipation of Owen’s marriage to Mona. Revolving around the operative word, “spoils,” the novel dramatizes the martial origins of collecting in acts of despoliation and plunder. It also prefigures modernist practices of collecting, which appropriate and transform existing objects with all the attendant po­liti­cal ramifications.

Aura around 1900 The Spoils of Poynton is a timely meditation on the ubiquitous, obsessive dimensions of collecting. In the preface, James describes “the sharp light it [the novel] might proj­ect on that most modern of our current passions, the fierce appetite for the upholster’s and joiner’s and brazier’s work, the chairs and ­tables, the cabinets and presses, the material odds and ends, of the more labouring ages.”13 The proliferation of collectors in James’s fiction reflects the widespread collecting mania that seized the British ­middle classes by the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury, prompting the inventor Henry Cole to conclude in 1856 that the “taste for col­ ouse­hold in The Spoils of Poynton lecting was now almost universal.”14 ­Every h boasts a collection, from Mrs. Gereth’s invaluable trea­sures to the Brigstock’s nouveau riche bric-­a-­brac to the musty “relics and rarities” belonging to Mrs. Gereth’s maiden aunt, which had been “gathered as slowly and lovingly as the golden flowers” of Poynton.15 Even Fleda’s penniless f­ ather mimics this fad, surrounding himself with “objects he was fond of saying he had collected—­ objects, shabby and battered, a sort that appealed ­little to his ­daughter, old brandy flasks and match-­boxes, old calendars and hand books, intermixed with an assortment of pen-­wipers and ash-­trays, a harvest gathered from penny bazaars. Why ­didn’t she try to collect something? It d­ idn’t ­matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life—­there was no end to the ­little curiosities one could easily pick up.”16 In typical Victorian fashion, collecting is prescribed by Mr. Vetch as a mode of both education and engagement with the wider world. Although collecting was practiced by a wider subset of the population than ever before, it still provided the illusion of status, allowing individuals from aspirational classes to mimic their moneyed counter­parts and providing impoverished aristocrats with a link to their noble origins.17 The novel stages the clash between Mrs. Gereth’s consummate arrangement of tasteful trea­sures and the garish palate of the masses, exemplified by Mona’s gaudy mansion. Ultimately, the biggest evil, as far as Mrs. Gereth and Fleda are



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concerned, is not the “villainy of patriarchal primogeniture” but rather the monstrosity of “bad taste.”18 According to Mrs. Gereth, Owen’s “monstrous lack of taste” is apparent in both his lack of appreciation for Poynton and his choice of mate.19 Unlike the ever-­perspicacious Fleda, who tearfully appreciates Mrs. Gereth’s trea­sures, Mona interacts with Poynton like “a bored tourist in fine scenery.”20 When asked about his fiancée’s reaction to the collection he jokingly refers to as the “old shop,” Owen replies languorously, “Oh she thinks ­they’re all right!”21 Based on his crude, uncultivated habits, Owen can be thought of as the closeted American in The Spoils of Poynton—­a figure whose social naïveté is eclipsed only by his abysmal lack of taste. As Poynton’s heir apparent, Owen himself d­ oesn’t exhibit any pride in the collection, dismissively saying that “it goes with the h ­ ouse.”22 Yet, the idea that “it goes with the h ­ ouse” is itself a testament to the power of a collection that loses its clout once dismantled or dispersed. In spite of Mona’s philistinism, the completeness of the collection is a precondition of their marriage. Mona delays their wedding “­because he has lost her the t­ hings” that Mrs. Gereth has expropriated.23 Poynton is not only the aesthetic antithesis to the amateur collections of the Victorian age but a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that functions as an artistic totality. It is threatened by the very real and unseemly prospect of contamination, which would undermine the totality of Mrs. Gereth’s collection as a work of art. A ­ fter her visit to Mona’s home at Waterbath, Mrs. Gereth fears its “taint”: “She saw in advance with dilated eyes the abominations they would inevitably mix up with them—­the maddening relics of Waterbath, the ­little brackets and pink vases, the sweepings of bazaars, the ­family photo­graphs and illuminated texts, ‘the ­house­hold art’ and the ­house­hold piety of Mona’s hideous home.”24 Mrs. Gereth fears the “ignominy of mixture,” the prospect that Poynton might become cluttered with cheap, sentimental bric-­a-­brac—­the sorts of objects that had become fash­ion­able among the aspirational or newly moneyed classes.25 It is precisely this kind of overwrought collection that James’s close friend, the novelist Edith Wharton warned against in The Decoration of Houses, a manual of interior design she coauthored with the American architect Ogden Codman: “Decorators know how much the simplicity and dignity of a good room are diminished by crowding it with useless trifles.”26 Published within the same year, both The Decoration of Houses and The Spoils of Poynton decry the horrors of mass-­produced objects in their attempt to “distinguish between tasteful and vulgar uses of gilt.”27 In their final chapter, titled “Bric-­à-­Brac,” Wharton and Codman warn that “trashy ornaments” ­will “talk down” even the most beautiful adjacent works of art.28 Nouveau riche families like the Brigstocks amass this kind of “vulgar” bric-­a-­brac, lacking the “skill made up of cultivation and judgment, combined with that feeling for beauty that no amount of study can

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give.”29 In the words of Wharton and Codman, Mrs. Gereth longs for the connoisseurship of “days when rich men ­were patrons of the ‘arts of elegance,’ and when collecting beautiful objects was one of the obligations of a noble leisure.”30 Paradoxically, of course, while Mrs. Gereth wishes to resurrect this golden age of noble collecting, she herself is a beneficiary of its democ­ratization. In the eyes of Mrs. Gereth, the Waterbath estate symbolizes a world that no longer shares her aesthetic value for originality: “The world is full of cheap gimcracks in this awful age, and ­they’re thrust at one at ­every turn. ­They’d be thrust in ­here on top of my trea­sures, my own. Who’d save them for me—­I ask you who would?”31 In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” Benjamin famously suggests that the aura or “uniqueness” of an original work of art distinguishes it from a copy: “In even the most perfect reproduction, one ­thing is lacking: the ­here and now of the work of art—­ its unique existence in a par­tic­u­lar place.”32 In other words, according to Benjamin, “What withers in the age of technological reproducibility of a work is the aura.”33 Although first written in 1935, the main thrust of Benjamin’s argument is situated in the historical milieu of The Spoils of Poynton: “Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic pro­cesses.”34 Thus, questions around aura, authenticity, and originality raised by pro­cesses of mechanical reproduction are as central to James’s texts as they are to Benjamin’s. Read together, The Spoils of Poynton and The Decoration of Houses provide an impor­tant glimpse of the genealogy of aura in turn-­of-­the-­century discussions on collecting and design. Mrs. Gereth articulates the major rationale of collecting in the industrial age of mass reproduction: to salvage the few remaining items with a claim to originality, authenticity, and aura.35 Adorned with mass-­produced “souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself and of t­ hings it would have been a pious duty to forget” and “caricature-­portraits of celebrities taken from a ‘society paper,’ ” the Brigstock ­house embodies the fixation on the garish products of technological reproduction that Mrs. Gereth abhors.36 Her self-­serving rationalization has all the classist undertones that made aura a po­liti­cally problematic concept for Benjamin, who wrote the “Work of Art” essay with the imminent threat of fascism in mind. Nearly forty years before Benjamin, Wharton and Codman note that machines have “made pos­si­ble the unlimited reproduction of works of art,” stating, “It is an open question how much the mere possibility of unlimited reproduction detracts from the intrinsic value of an object of art. To the art-­lover, as distinguished from the collector, uniqueness per se can give no value to an inartistic



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object; but the distinction, the personal quality, of a beautiful object is certainly enhanced when it is known to be alone of its kind—as in the case of the old bronzes made à cire perdue. It must, however, be noted that in some cases—as in that of bronze-­casting—­the method which permits reproduction is distinctly inferior to that used when but one object is to be produced.”37 Although they ­don’t use the term aura, they foreground the “uniqueness,” “distinction,” and “personal quality” of a work of art. Like Benjamin, they link pro­cesses of reproduction with the erosion of originality. Yet, while for Wharton and Codman it is the collector who necessitates the category of originality by seeking value, Benjamin’s essay never mentions the collector. Wharton and Codman raise an impor­tant consideration for the classist implications of aura reiterated in Benjamin’s analy­sis: Are aura and originality merely the provenance of collectors and connoisseurs, lacking relevance for every­one ­else? Unlike the Brigstocks, Mrs. Gereth values the aura of the pieces she painstakingly “wrought” over twenty-­five years with her late husband. Reflecting “the rec­ord of a life” where “all France and Italy with their ages composed to rest,” Mrs. Gereth’s collection has a narrative that is bound up with both the past and her individual life.38 She cries plaintively about her trea­sures, “They ­were our religion, they ­were our life, they ­were us! . . . ​­There ­isn’t one I ­don’t know and love . . . ​Blindfold, in the dark, with the brush of a fin­ger, I could tell one from another.”39 Her personalized reverence for ­these objects certainly accords with “the distinction, the personal quality” described by Wharton and Codman. But it also anticipates Benjamin’s definition of aura as “a uniqueness” equivalent to its “embeddedness in the context of tradition” that began with the “ritual function” of art. According to Benjamin, “The unique value of the ‘au­then­tic’ work of art always has its basis in ritual,” ­whether religious or magical.40 This religious valence of aura resurfaces in other James stories including “The Last of the Valerii” and The Aspern Papers, examined in chapters 1 and 2 of this book.

The Genius of the Collector No longer merely the staid Victorian interior decorator, Mrs. Gereth personifies the new artistic spirit of the collector who creates in collecting. Her collection is not simply a substitute for her deceased husband and estranged son, it is “her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience of the collector.”41 It is a passion in itself, what Benjamin terms “the passion of the collector” (die Leidenschaft des Sammlers).42 Mrs. Gereth’s attachment to her collection supersedes any familial ties, its objects more ­human and humane than her philistine son who threatens to expropriate her. To Mrs.  Gereth, the Poynton trea­sures are

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“living ­things,” she insists—­“To lie t­here in the stillness was partly to listen for some soft low plaint from them.”43 Her obsession is diagnosed by Bill Brown as a case of “indeterminate ontology, the inability to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate.”44 Eclipsing the ­human world, her objects become her only real­ity: “­Things ­were of course the sum of the world; only for Mrs. Gereth the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental china.”45 She despises her son and his fiancée precisely b­ ecause they cannot be neatly assimilated into her collection like the rest of her picturesque trea­sures. Although scholars like Raymond Williams have labeled Mrs. Gereth’s materialism a prime illustration of Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, this term does not adequately encompass the complexity of her passion.46 As Benjamin and Baudrillard observe, by removing objects from their use value, collectors develop relationships with their objects outside of a cap­i­tal­ist framework.47 With the impassioned rhe­toric of an artist who has sacrificed every­ thing for her work, Mrs. Gereth laments, “The best ­things, as you know, are the t­ hings your ­father and I collected, t­ hings all that we worked for and waited for and suffered for . . . ​­There are ­things in the ­house that we almost starved for!”48 More than just another case of commodity fetishism, Mrs. Gereth’s passion is an expression of vocation and a l­abor of love. In The Spoils of Poynton, collecting as a calling functions on two dif­fer­ent levels: 1) as a c­ areer in the ilk of Woolf ’s short story, and 2) as the collector’s impression of the voices of the objects calling out, such as when Mrs. Gereth believes she hears the “soft low plaint” of her trea­sures.49 In The Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, published six years before James’s novel, Henry’s older b­ rother William James provides an alternative framework to the Marxist reading of Mrs. Gereth’s life work.50 Pairing William and Henry reveals the thematic interconnections between their works as well as the extent to which the psy­chol­ogy of collecting likely informed Henry James’s work. For William, ­things are not only “the sum of the world” but also the sum of the self. In the tenth chapter, “Consciousness of the Self,” he describes “the material self ” as one of the constituent parts of the self. The self is anything but stable, he observes: “We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating material. The same object being sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, ­ ere anticiand then again as if I had nothing to do with it at all.”51 As though he w pating the psy­chol­ogy of Ms. Gereth, he continues, “An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect property; and the collections thus made become, with dif­fer­ent degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. The parts of our wealth most intimately ours are t­ hose which are saturated with our l­abor. T ­ here are few men who would not feel personally annihilated if a life-­long construction of their hands or brains—­say an entomological collection or an extensive



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work in manuscript—­were suddenly swept away.”52 He then goes on to enumerate vari­ous attributes of the material self. What is most striking about William’s description is the primacy of collecting, which, just like for his younger ­brother, is construed as a natu­ral inclination. For William, collecting is as much a part of the “material self ” as the desire to “deck it with clothing of an ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife and babes, and to find for ourselves a home of our own which we may live in and ‘improve.’ ”53 The resulting depression a­ fter losing such objects, he continues, is not so much due to the loss of property but due to a “a sense of the shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon by itself.”54 As Mrs. Gereth’s predicament shows, the prospect of losing her collection threatens her sense of self. The astonishing equivalence between an “entomological collection” and “an extensive work in manuscript” in William James’s description suggests that collecting is as much of a vocation as writing. It helps explain why Mrs. Gereth assumes the position of an embattled artist taking a noble stand to defend her artwork: “It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble; it was that of the beauty Mrs.  Gereth has so patiently and consummately wrought. Pale but radiant, her back to the wall, she planted herself t­ here as a heroine guarding her trea­sure.”55 With all its connotations of l­abor and craftsmanship, the verb “wrought” highlights her artistic faculties, echoing William’s observation that the objects that are perceived to be “most intimately ours are t­ hose which are saturated with our ­labor.”56 From an artistic standpoint, Mrs. Gereth’s rationalization is straightforward; just as the work of art belongs to the artist who created it, the collection should be entrusted to the collector who assembled it. Mrs.  Gereth’s collection is a form of creative curation that transforms its raw materials into a new work of art. An artist in her own right, Mrs. Gereth is an early instantiation of the modernist collector who has an artistic rather than epistemological relationship with her objects. Fleda uses the striking language of artistry when praising her: “It’s your extraordinary genius; you make ­things ‘compose’ in spite of yourself.”57 Referred to as a poet, “the greatest of all conjurors,” and a “wonder-­working wizard with a command of good material,” Mrs. Gereth transforms the “physical into something metaphysical.”58 Her approach is described as the “art of the treasure-­hunter, in se­lection and comparison refined to that point, ­there was an ele­ment of creation, of personality.”59 Evoking the age-­old rhe­toric of the hunt, “treasure-­hunter” exemplifies the way her artistic flair is undergirded by practices of spoliation.60 It is her tactical, ruthless, and appropriative tendencies that make her a creative collector.

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A Victorian Wunderkammer, Mrs. Gereth’s collection assumes the status of a work of art that is destroyed when dispersed. As Benjamin notes, “The most distinguished trait of a collection ­will always be its heritability [Vererbbarkeit],” which persists beyond its dispersion.61 The heritability or ­future of the Poynton collection becomes the central plot driver as Mrs. Gereth seeks to find a suitable steward for her masterpieces. She implores Fleda to take possession of her trea­ sures by marrying Owen: “You would replace me, you would watch over them, you would keep the place right.”62 She voices the fantasy of many fanatical collectors—­that their collections w ­ ill be preserved in situ if entrusted to the right custodian. Poynton’s artistic value as an autonomous work of art makes its heritability more complicated than other collections: “­There w ­ ere places much grander and richer [than Poynton], but no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to ­those ­really informed.”63 As a “complete work of art,” Poynton cannot be continued by another person. For Mrs. Gereth, the collection assumes such h ­ uman proportions that dispersal is equivalent to dismemberment or amputation: “She saw Poynton dishonoured; she had cherished it as a happy ­whole, she reasoned, and the parts of it now around her seemed to suffer like chopped limbs.”64 The irony, of course, is that the w ­ hole drama stems from Mr. Gereth’s inequitable w ­ ill, which also treats Poynton as a unified entity that would be undone by division: “Mr. Gereth had apparently been a very amiable man, but Mr. Gereth had left t­ hings in a way that made the girl marvel. The h ­ ouse and its contents had been treated as a single splendid object; every­thing was to go straight to his son, his ­widow being assured but a maintenance and a cottage in another county. No account what­ever had been taken of her relation to her trea­sures, of the passion with which she had waited for them.”65 This “cruel En­glish custom of the expropriation of the lonely ­mother” conspires with the threat of Poynton’s dispersal to disinherit its creator.66 Just as Mrs.  Gereth abhors the “ignominy of mixture,” which would undermine the unity of the collection, her late husband’s w ­ ill militates against the division of the property and hence the devaluation of its objects.67 Given the centrality of objects to the plot, critics such as Brown have tried to answer the question of why the novel never provides a direct description of Poynton.68 During Fleda’s first visit to Poynton, which would have been the natu­ral place for a description, we receive only vague hints with a con­spic­u­ous absence of detail: “It was written in ­great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists.”69 By withholding description, James abides by Mrs. Gereth’s decorating spirit on the level of the text. In order to preserve the “heroic importance” of “The T ­ hings,” James writes, “something would have to be done for them not too ignobly unlike the ­great array in which Balzac, say, would have marshalled them.”70 The absence is deliberate; as with much of



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James’s work, the most impor­tant details are often omitted or concealed. James’s sketchy outline of “The ­Things” is meant to pre­sent a counterpoint to Honoré de Balzac’s ornate descriptions just as tasteful Poynton offers a lofty respite from cluttered, overstuffed Waterbath. The Poynton collection itself becomes the work of art, opposing the materially overdetermined Brigstock–­Balzac nexus: “­There ­were not many pictures—­the panels and the stuffs ­were themselves the picture.”71 This sentiment also reflects James’s literary style, even more evident in his late work; with minimal description, the objets d’art speak for themselves, leaving repre­sen­ta­tional gaps for the reader’s imagination to fill.72 This attention to gaps, ruptures, and absences positions James as a “Schwellenfigur” or threshold figure between realism and modernism. While James clearly satirizes extreme displays of materialism, he also contributes to the mythologization of Mrs. Gereth’s collection by withholding description: “It looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light, larger than ever, im­mense, and it brimmed over as with the hush of sorrow, which was in turn all charged with memories. Every­thing was in the air—­each history of each find, each circumstance of each capture.”73 For this reason, it would be difficult to argue that James had nothing in common with Balzac’s investment in material culture. In the 1918 issue of The ­Little Review dedicated to the deceased James, Ezra Pound affectionately quips, “His dam’d fuss about furniture is foreshadowed in Balzac, and all the paragraphs on Balzac’s house-­ furnishing propensities are of interest in proportion to our interest in, or our boredom with, this part of Henry James’s work.”74 In contrast to Balzac’s cluttered novels, however, James heightens the aura and effect of objects by omitting description. Brown observes, “James’s own capacity to generate aura and to eschew enumeration derives in large mea­sure from his enlistment of the nonvisual senses.”75 At the same time, James’s decision to include a photo­graph of the eponymous “spoils” on the frontispiece of the New York edition of The Spoils of Poynton shows the way he, like Benjamin and Einstein, was already attuned to the aura elicited by photography (see figure 3).76

A Genealogy of Spoliation The brilliance of James’s fiction resides partly in his ability to stage the imbrication between possession and appropriation, between collecting and spoliation. His b­ rother William observed a similar pattern in The Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy: Every­one knows how difficult a ­thing it is not to covet what­ever pleasing ­thing we see, and how the sweetness of the t­ hing often is as gall to

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us so long as it is another’s. When another is in possession, the impulse to appropriate the ­thing often turns into the impulse to harm him—­what is called envy, or jealousy, ensues. In civilized life the impulse to own is usually checked by a variety of considerations, and only passes over into action ­under circumstances legitimated by habit and common consent, an additional example of the way in which one instinctive tendency may be inhibited by o ­ thers. A variety of the proprietary instinct is the impulse to form collections of the same sort of t­ hing. It differs much in individuals, and shows in a striking way how instinct and habit interact.77 Collecting, according to William, is another dimension of appropriation—­a way of formalizing possession.78 It is only “instinct and habit” that differentiate the way this “proprietary instinct” manifests itself in h ­ uman be­hav­ior. Given ­these porous bound­aries, it is not difficult to see how the “unchecked” passions of a collector could culminate in appropriation and even theft. The evolution of the novel’s title, first from The House Beautiful to The Old ­Things when it was serialized in The Atlantic in 1896, and fi­nally to The Spoils of Poynton in 1897, bears out this progression, revealing the increasing centrality of expropriation and spoliation.79 This language is quite literally foregrounded in the frontispiece, a photo­g raph commissioned by James in 1906 to highlight the centrality of the spoils (see figure 3).80 However, the kernel of spoliation seems to have been t­ here from the beginning. Trying to flesh out the plot of the novel in an early diary entry dated May 13, 1895, James uses the language of spoils even before it emerges in the title: “She despoils Umberleigh, or what­ever the name is—­she skims it, she strips it.”81 Throughout the preface, James repeatedly refers to the fate of the Poynton collection in dialectically opposed martial terms of “spoliation” and “surrender.”82 When Mrs. Gereth removes her “­things” from the h ­ ouse in anticipation of Owen’s marriage to Mona, the word “spoils” takes possession of its original martial meaning.83 Not coincidentally does Mrs. Gereth conceive of her preemptive strike in militaristic terms: “I’ve literally come. . . . ​I’ve crossed the Rubicon, I’ve taken possession,” she writes to Fleda, evoking the tactics of Julius Caesar who precipitated the Roman Civil War by crossing the Rubicon River in 49 BC.84 Her allusion reflects the ancient origins of collecting: plunder, conquest, and the spoils of the victor.85 As Benjamin’s epigraph to part 1 of this book suggests, spoliation captures the pro­cess through which objects are stripped from their original context and appropriated by conquerors who often have no connection or shared history with them. On the one hand, conquerors must preserve their spoils as a trophy of war or testament to their prowess. On the other hand, the collection



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Figure 3. ​Frontispiece to Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, New York edition, volume 10 (1908), photographed at the Wallace Collection in London. Originally captioned “Some of the Spoils.”

becomes a way of marking the seized objects, transforming them by incorporating them into a new order. As the archaeologist Paolo Liverani posits, “A trophy is a trophy only if the viewer knows the e­ nemy from whom it has been seized and on what occasion.”86 Poynton itself is not the product of ­England but of the fruits of its power to conquer and extract. “Written in the tongues of other countries,” the collection “was all France and Italy with their ages composed to rest.”87 Referred to as “the long caravan of trea­sures,” ­these objects evoke the line of hands through which they had already passed before reaching Poynton.88 This vantage point suggests that the Poynton trea­sures

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are twice despoiled—­first through their initial extraction from their places of origin and for a second time when Mrs. Gereth transports them to her dower house.89 In the end, the inheritor is not the “rightful” owner who prevails through taste and aesthetic appreciation but the strongest, most determined one who is able to capture the prize, namely Mona. H ­ ere, the Latin etymology spoil or spoilum is instructive, meaning “armor stripped from conquered foe.”90 “Mona ­isn’t weak. She’s stronger than you! . . . ​Mona has got him,” Mrs. Gereth tells Fleda.91 Described as “tall, straight and fair, long-­limbed and largely festooned,” Mona’s large stature and physical prowess are repeatedly emphasized and counterposed with the “pale,” “slim” Fleda with her “colourless smile.”92 Unlike Fleda, who is often inert and indecisive, the self-­possessed, attractive Mona is always in motion. ­After Mrs. Gereth flings Mona’s undoubtedly lowbrow magazine into the air, Mona spryly jumps to catches it mid-­air, much to the chagrin of Mrs. Gereth.93 Owen’s delighted reaction—­“Good catch!”—is a fitting soundbite for Mona’s tenacity, her ability to “catch” Owen and thus secure the ultimate prize: the spoils of Poynton. Through her physical and tactical superiority, Mona is able to conquer the “blockhead,” Owen, who, according to Mrs. Gereth, is “disgustingly weak,” just like his late f­ather.94 It is exactly this weakness that allowed Mrs. Gereth to steamroll both Owen and his ­father. As Poynton burns at the end of the novel—­ostensibly due to neglect—it is not implausible that Mrs. Gereth might have orchestrated the fire in a desperate attempt to salvage her collection from expropriation. This climactic outcome would not be inconsistent with Mrs. Gereth’s persona as a domineering puppet master whose “ruling passion had in a manner despoiled her of her humanity.”95 She is depicted as a ruthless military commander who might well employ a scorched-­earth policy like burning down her collection in order to save it. Gender-­bending pervades the novel as the w ­ omen are repeatedly portrayed as power­ful and aggressive, while men function as their passive, ineffectual pawns. It is one of the few James novels—­and works of lit­er­a­ture more broadly—­that feature a power­ful female collector figure. Since classical antiquity, collecting had been considered to be a “male pastime,” both b­ ecause men almost always controlled access to disposable income and b­ ecause collecting was seen as an intellectual pursuit linked to power and prestige.96 Yet, in keeping with James’s negative characterization of collectors, Mrs. Gereth is demonized as unwomanly, unmaternal, and “monstrous”—so often the cliché of a ­woman in power. Like Juliana in The Aspern Papers, Mrs. Gereth is gendered as a witchlike miser who cannot bear to part with her t­hings. It is not coincidental, chapter 2 concludes, that both of their collections end up in flames.



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A Reifying Vision Mrs. Gereth is an aesthete par excellence whose power resides in her aesthetic sensibilities. Her rapacious be­hav­ior coupled with her strong aesthetic drive corroborates Viola Winner’s observation that for James an aesthetic sense is not equivalent to a moral sense.97 Throughout James’s novels, collectors resort to theft, fraud, and instrumentalization of other p­ eople in order to advance their aesthetic goals. As Jonathan Freedman observes in Professions of Taste, “The aesthete’s exaltation of taste . . . ​represents an expression of his or her ­will to power . . . ​a means of intimidating their gullible audience with recondite enthusiasms and dilettantish pretensions.”98 Mrs. Gereth’s superior aesthetic sense is not only a form of snobbery that ­causes her to revile inferior displays of taste but also the primary power dynamic at stake in her relationships and hence a central plot driver in the novel. Her despotic taste functions as what Freedman terms as a “reifying vision” in his analy­sis of Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady: “In Gilbert’s form of vision, the self is understood as a smug, observing entity, a private and self-­satisfied ‘point of view’ while all o ­ thers are treated as objects of this contemplative vision, to be ­either appreciated or rejected but always transformed into signs of the supreme taste of the observer. Gilbert’s aestheticizing vision, in other words, might also be said to be a reifying vision. Despite the nobility of his rhe­toric, Osmond perceives all the ­others he encounters as detached, deadened objects of his purely passive perception, and seeks to make t­ hose who refuse to be so.”99 Freedman’s notion of a “reifying vision” could be extended to many of James’s collectors to describe the way they treat other characters as part of their aesthetic drive to collect and curate. Fleda exemplifies the extent of Mrs. Gereth’s reifying vision. For all her “taste,” Fleda is continually relegated to the object world, treated as yet another specimen of Mrs. Gereth’s collection. “You’ll at any rate be a bit of furniture. For that, a l­ittle, you know, I’ve always taken you—­quite one of my best finds,” says Mrs. Gereth, grouping her with the rest of her trea­sured objects.100 In the eyes of Mrs. Gereth, Fleda’s “own value in the h ­ ouse was the mere value, as one might say, of a good agent,” as a f­uture caretaker or custodian of her collection.101 The rhe­toric of possession inflects e­ very relationship in the novel. During their brief flirtation, Fleda tells Owen, “[Mona] thinks me awfully designing—­ that I’ve taken some sort of possession of you.”102 Owen’s equivocal response, “You ­haven’t lifted a fin­ger! It’s I who have taken possession,” echoes James’s declaration of “taking possession of Eu­rope” at the beginning of this chapter.103 In a plot dominated by expropriation and spoliation, characters can only conceive of love in terms of possession.

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In the end, Mrs. Gereth’s constant meddling backfires, as her finest specimen “had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere expansion of another w ­ ill; and now ­there was but one gap left to the air.”104 Too concerned with propriety, Fleda refuses to pursue Owen in spite of their mutual attraction, leaving Mona with all the determining power at the end of the novel. While critics have often denounced her as “neurotic about sex” and “priggish,” Fleda’s seemingly passive renunciation of both her love object and Mrs. Gereth’s collection can be read as a culminating moment of triumph that f­rees her from the totalizing influence exerted by p­ eople and their t­hings.105 Rather than stressing Fleda’s sexual neuroses or passivity, this reading dovetails with James’s account in the preface, in which he states that the “­free spirit, always much tormented, and by no means always triumphant, is heroic, ironic, pathetic . . . ​‘successful’ only through having remained ­free.”106 As the “­free spirit” among “fools,” Fleda triumphs by liberating herself from the shackles of Mrs. Gereth’s toxic materialism.107 Rejecting the circumscription that entraps Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, Fleda, according to Millicent Bell, resists “the frame of Poynton and its ­things” and refuses to become its “portrait of a lady.”108 By offering Fleda the Maltese cross as a souvenir of their unfulfilled love, Owen reveals that collecting is often rooted in loss—it is si­mul­ta­neously an act of renunciation of the original object and a search for its substitute. Ultimately, a climactic conflagration seems to be the only suitable ending for a story in which objects take center stage while characters are systematically relegated to the background. It is the material equivalent of the death of a central character. When it becomes clear that the “blessed t­hings” cannot be rescued from the burning ­house, Fleda’s loss becomes manifest. In spite of her act of renunciation, “she felt herself give every­thing up.”109 It is not insignificant that Fleda refers to a collection that is not hers as “every­thing,” indicating that she still subscribes to the totalizing novelistic perspective in which “­things are the sum of the world.”110 Even while chronicling Fleda’s liberation, James participates in her objectification. He readily concedes that the main characters of the novel are not Mrs. Gereth or Fleda but rather the collection of trea­sures over which they clash: “Yes it is a story of cabinets and chairs and ­tables; they formed the bone of contention, but what would merely ‘become’ of them, magnificently passive, seemed to represent a comparatively vulgar issue. The passions, the faculties, the forces their beauty would, like that of Helen of Troy, set in motion, was what, as a painter, one had r­ eally wanted of them, was the power in them that one had from the first appreciated.”111 While acknowledging the “passions” inherent to collecting, James also emphasizes the aesthetic motivations that ultimately enslave the collector to the collection. James constantly reaffirms the



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centrality of “­Things” as the main plot driver, capitalizing the word or enclosing it in quotation marks as if to textually denote the aura that envelops them: “The ‘­Things’ themselves would form the very centre of such a crisis; t­ hese grouped objects, all conscious of their eminence and their price, would enjoy, in any picture of a conflict, the heroic importance.”112 Exhibiting the same “indeterminate ontology” that plagues Mrs.  Gereth, James entirely reverses the role of objects and characters. With all the drama that enfolds it, the collection is more storied than the characters, becoming the Helen of Troy whose abduction motivated the plot. Although the story of Helen of Troy similarly dramatizes the objectification of ­humans, James transfers the central drama of expropriation from the characters to the objects from the outset. By James’s own admission, the genesis of Fleda’s character occurs as an accessory or accoutrement to the “spoils.” In his preface, he notes, “Something like Fleda Vetch had surely been latent in one’s first apprehension of the theme,” a character who nevertheless reinforces “the real centre, the citadel of the interest,” namely, “the T ­ hings, always the splendid T ­ hings, placed in the ­middle light.”113 Statements of this kind are surely what prompted Pound to declare that James’s characters are “always or nearly always, the bibelots.”114 By repeatedly casting his characters as art objects, who, in turn, represent and objectify one another as paintings, statutes, jewels, and other objects, James participates in the reification of his own characters and begins to assume the characteristics of his most unscrupulous collectors.

James’s ­Human Spoils In the opening scene of James’s The American, Newman, the wealthy, recently arrived American philistine purchases his first picture at the Louvre and becomes “conscious of the germ of the mania of the ‘collector;’ he had taken the first step: why should he not go on? It was only twenty minutes ago that he had bought the first picture of his life, and now he was already thinking of art-­patronage as a fascinating pursuit.”115 This humorous episode aptly demonstrates the way one purchase lays the foundation for f­ uture acquisitions, corroborating the addictive tendency of collecting outlined in the introduction. As a naive social parvenu who acquired his fortune through the manufacture of washtubs, Newman’s collecting practices are part and parcel of his desire to conquer Eu­rope and are thus inseparable from his identity “as a commercial person.”116 Like Adam Verver, this American “new man” seeks to buy his own material genealogy to compensate for a missing cultural inheritance.

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Ultimately, the expensive pictures Newman buys are merely rehearsals for the main acquisition: Madame de Cintré. Newman hopes to use his self-­made American fortune to acquire a picturesque Eu­ro­pean aristocrat into his growing collection of Eu­ro­pean bibelots. With characteristic bravado, he announces, “I want to possess, in a word, the best article in the market.”117 Resolving to propose to her a­ fter a brief acquaintance, “he had begun to value the world’s admiration of Madame de Cintré, as adding to the prospective glory of possession.”118 Tellingly, James’s revision of the text for the 1907 New York edition further accentuates the acquisitive dimension of Newman’s spoils, as if to echo James’s own rhe­toric upon landing in Eu­rope: “He had begun to value the world’s admiration of his pos­si­ble prize, as adding to the prospective glory of possession.”119 The replacement of Madame de Cintré’s name with the word “prize” heightens the way Newman’s suit is merely an extension of his art collection. As in The American and The Spoils of Poynton, a pervasive theme in much of James’s fiction is the treatment of ­human characters as objects, particularly as precious art pieces or collector’s items.120 Hyacinth is accessorized by the eponymous Princess Casamassima as a picturesque specimen of the working class, Verena Tarrant is stolen and smuggled away from a rival by Basil Ransom in The Bostonians, Catherine Sloper is hoarded by her controlling ­father in Washington Square, and, in The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is acquired by a sinister collector. In The Eu­ro­pe­ans, the wealthy Robert Acton courts the exotic Eugenia to be the crowning jewel of his “oriental” collection, and in “The Last of the Valerii,” a wealthy American ingenue marries a chiseled Italian count “­because he was like a statue of de­cadence.”121 While James’s objectification of characters has a pre­ce­dent in Dickens’s ­Great Expectations and Balzac’s Cousin Pons, what distinguishes his novels is his portrayal of the way the h ­ uman object tries to subvert ­these attempts at collection: Fleda refuses Owen and thus abdicates owner­ship of Poynton, Hyacinth turns the gun on himself as he tries to escape the terrorist revolutionary plot that ensnares him, Verena seeks to escape both her captors, Catherine disobeys her ­father by continuing her engagement to Townsend, Isabel attempts to flee her husband, and, in The Wings of a Dove, Merton Densher resists becoming part of Kate’s marriage plot.122 In a similar vein, as chapter 2 shows, in The Aspern Papers, Tina Bordereau extinguishes the narrator’s hopes of securing his prize by burning the papers when he refuses to marry her. In The Golden Bowl, Adam Verver, the wealthy financier and “consummate collector,” seeks to acquire the Italian prince—­the last vestige of a disintegrating Eu­ro­pean nobility—­into his extensive collection of valuables through marriage to his only d­ aughter Maggie. Prior to their wedding, Maggie tells the Prince, “­You’re at any rate a part of his collection . . . ​one of the ­things that can



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only be got over ­here. ­You’re a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price . . . ​ ­You’re what they call a morceau de musée.”123 Verver’s long-­standing penchant for collecting has permeated his and Maggie’s interpersonal relationships to such an extent that both ­father and d­ aughter treat ­others as extensions of their trea­sured objects: “Representative precious objects, ­great ancient pictures and other works of art, fine eminent ‘pieces’ in gold, in silver, in enamel . . . ​had for a number so multiplied themselves round him, and, as a general challenge to acquisition and appreciation, so engaged all the faculties of his mind, that the instinct, the par­tic­ul­ar sharpened appetite of the collector, had fairly served as a basis for his ac­cep­tance of the Prince’s suit.”124 Foregrounding the serial addiction that often underpins collecting, James fittingly uses the rhe­toric of hunger to describe the way the Prince is an outgrowth of Verver’s “sharpened appetite of the collector.” Just like his other trea­sures, Verver acquires the Prince as a “representative precious object” from a distinguished Italian f­amily and transplants him into his expatriate ­house­hold in Britain. Verver’s “morceau[x] de musée” are extensions of his mythical accumulation of wealth as he applies the “same mea­sure of value to such dif­fer­ent pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new h ­ uman acquisitions.”125 Ultimately, Verver’s acquisition of the Prince is an attempt to preserve an artistic specimen, with all the attendant prob­lems of transferring cultural heritage from Eu­ro­pean to American hands. By displaying his spoils in a museum called “American City,” Verver fancies himself to be an indispensable purveyor of a vanis­hing Eu­ro­pean civilization to a wide-­eyed American audience: It was positively civilization condensed, concrete, consummate, set down by his hands as a ­house on a rock—­a h ­ ouse from whose open doors and win­dows, open to grateful, to thirsty millions, the higher and highest knowledge would shine out to bless the land. In this h ­ ouse, designed as a gift primarily to the ­people of his adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure—in this museum of museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek ­temple was compact, a receptacle of trea­ sures sifted to positive sanctity, his spirit to-­day almost altogether lived.126 Repeatedly referring to “American City” as a ship or boat, Verver casts himself as a modern Noah, salvaging the last remnants of a disappearing civilization for his countrymen. With this ark of imported cultural trea­sures, Verver would help release t­ hese “thirsty millions” of benighted Americans from “the bondage of ugliness.”127 He adopts the discourse of nineteenth-­ century Eu­ro­pean museums which sought to educate and reform the bourgeois public.128 In real­ity, however, Verver more closely resembles American

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collectors such as the steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick, the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, and the sugar magnate H. O. Havemeyer, who ­were responsible for “setting in motion one of history’s ­g reat migrations of art.”129 Verver’s almost ritualistic acquisition of the Prince who symbolically bears the name Amerigo, “the navigator crowned with glory,” captures the way New World conquerors of the modern era try to make their mark by mimicking Old World explorers such as Amerigo Vespucci through reconquest.130 Not coincidentally, Verver is captivated by John Keats’s sonnet chronicling Cortez’s conquest in the Pacific, which states “that a world was left for him to conquer and that he might conquer if he tried.”131 Along similar lines in The Eu­ro­pe­ans, Robert Acton establishes his collection of curiosities through imperial means, purchasing “the most delightful chinoiseries—­trophies of his sojourn in the Celestial Empire: pagodas of ebony and cabinets of ivory; sculpted monsters . . . ​porcelain dinner sets; large screens covered with tense silk and embroidered with mandarins and dragons” ­after “quintupling” his fortune in China.132 The imperial power structures that undergird collecting also reveal why collecting was historically deemed to be a masculine pursuit. With the notable exception of Mrs. Gereth—­who is often masculinized in her domineering, aggressive traits—­ all major collectors featured in this chapter are men. Focusing his collection on Eu­ro­pean art, Verver creates his own material genealogy to secure the lineage he lacks as a self-­made American industrialist. True to his name, Amerigo is an au­then­tic Re­nais­sance souvenir with “generations” of history that Verver hopes to annex. For Verver, the eminently collectible Prince bears the “­g reat marks and signs, stood before him with the high authenticities,” just like his best museum pieces.133 This storied genealogy is part of what makes him so appealing. As Maggie phrases it equally delicately, “Where, without your archives, annals, infamies, would you have been?”134 Just as Amerigo’s name conjures up a rich history replete with “crimes, plunder, and waste,” Adam’s biblical namesake implies innocence and the lack of antecedents associated with Amer­i­ca.135 One of the central paradoxes of collecting is that, while trying to preserve history or culture, it often transforms its objects by extracting them from their former context. The Ververs willfully ignore the Prince’s personal history as they strip him from his milieu and import him into their American museum. Soon thereafter, Charlotte, the Prince’s former lover, is assimilated into Verver’s collection to replace the now-­married Maggie and becomes an adulterous “appendage” and “ornament” to her son-­in-­law.136 Verver’s dispassionate marriage proposal to Charlotte is exceeded in detail and passion by his coterminous acquisition of rare Damascene tiles whose “infinitely ancient . . . ​ immemorial amethystine blue” is far more permanent than their ­union.137 James



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reinforces this dynamic as he depicts Verver’s crowning purchase with more interiority and pathos than the engagement scene, which is awkward, passionless, and anti-­climactic. The objects in James’s novels are often invested with a libidinal energy that is absent from interpersonal relationships. Given this preoccupation with possession, it comes as no surprise that adultery in The Golden Bowl functions as a mechanism of both personal emancipation and repossession from Verver’s grip. In other words, the Prince and Charlotte—­the two prized objects of Adam Verver’s collection—­symbolically defy their own objectification by commencing an affair. In typical Jamesean fashion, however, this revolt against their own appropriation is couched in the same terms of possession and surrender. Upon seeing Charlotte a­ fter a prolonged absence, the Prince thinks of her as a relic, “as a cluster of possessions of his own . . . ​items in a full list, items recognized, each of them, as if they had been ‘stored’—­wrapped up, numbered, put away in a cabinet.”138 So entrenched is the rhe­toric of possession that even James’s lovers reduce each other to the typological characterizations of the collector whose clutches they are trying to escape. As James’s characters are turned into objects, the titular golden bowl, like the Poynton collection, becomes the central character of his novel.139 This reversal reaches its climax when characters become aware of their objectification, as if to recognize their own existence as plot devices rather than autonomous agents. In Portrait of a Lady, Madame Merle identifies herself with stout porcelain: “But if I must tell you the truth I have been chipped and cracked! I do very well for ser­ vice yet, b­ ecause I have been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard—­the quiet, dusky cupboard . . . ​But when I have to come out, and into a strong light, then, my dear, I am a horror.”140 It is as if Merle becomes si­ mul­ta­neously aware of herself as a flawed object, meta­phor, and plot device. In The Golden Bowl, the prince also realizes his status as a “representative precious object” and symbol, observing, “Oh if I’m a crystal I’m delighted that I’m a perfect one, for I believe they sometimes have cracks and flaws—in which case ­they’re to be had very cheap.”141 At the same time, by intimating their “cracks and flaws,” they gesture ­toward their own obsolescence as symbols, suggesting that the modernist object, unlike its realist pre­de­ces­sor, was no longer tethered to its representative function in the novel. In d­ oing so, they seem to resist the novel’s narrative impositions just as they evade possession by one another. For this reason, Pound, in spite of all his criticism of James, praises his “hatred of personal intimate tyrannies working at close range”142 in the aforementioned article in The ­Little Review. Amid “the pettiness talked about Henry James’s style,” writes Pound, critics lose sight of his major contribution: “What I have not heard is any word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book a­ fter early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing

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oppression, the domination of modern life . . . ​The outbursts in The Tragic Muse, the w ­ hole of The Turn of the Screw, h ­ uman liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage! The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, ­didn’t ‘feel.’ ”143 Although Pound does not neglect to mock James’s prudishness or take issue with his naive misreading of poetry, he zeros in on James’s tireless examination of the power relations between individuals. In a footnote, Pound adds, “What he fights is ‘influence,’ the impinging of ­family pressure, the impinging of one personality upon another; all of them in the highest degree damn’d, loathsome and detestable. Re­spect for the individual may be, however, a discovery of our generation.” It is in the strug­gle over possession—­both on a material and personal level—­that James dramatizes this “sordid petty personal crushing oppression.”144 Edith Wharton similarly contemplates the tragic repercussions of objectifying h ­ umans in The House of Mirth.145 With its web of collectors, Wharton’s plot is more consummately Jamesean than James’s own novels. The House of Mirth opens with the beautiful and ambitious Lily Bart, who is torn between two suitors, both of whom are collectors: Selden, a poor but intelligent bibliophile, and Gryce, a dull but wealthy collector of Americana who has ­little understanding for h ­ uman nature. Upon glimpsing Selden’s extensive library, Lily asks, “You collect, ­don’t you—­you know about first editions and ­things?” “As much as a man may who has no money to spend. Now and then I pick up something in the rubbish heap; and I go and look on at the big sales.” “And Americana, do you collect Americana?” Selden stared and laughed. “No that’s rather out of my line. I’m not ­really a collector, you see; I simply like to have good editions of the books I am fond of.” She made a slight grimace. “And Americana are horribly dull, I should suppose?” “I should fancy so—­except to the historian. But your real collector values a ­thing for its rarity. I d­ on’t suppose the buyers of Americana sit up reading them all night—­old Jefferson Gryce certainly d­ idn’t.” She was listening with keen attention. “And yet they fetch fabulous prices, ­don’t they? It seems odd to want to pay a lot for an ugly badly-­ printed book that one is never g­ oing to read! And I suppose most of the ­owners of Americana are not historians ­either?” “No very few of the historians can afford to buy them. They have to use ­those in public libraries or in private collections. It seems to be the mere rarity that attracts the average collector.”146



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Taking place early in the novel, this flirtatious banter belies the thematic complexities around collecting. Collecting privileges items that are stripped of their utility or use value, such as the “ugly badly-­printed book that one is never ­going to read.”147 Based on t­hese par­ameters, a bibliophile like Selden is not a true collector ­because he reads, thereby using the books he purchases instead of valuing them as material objects divorced from their use value.148 Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument suggests that only a dull philistine like Gryce who is unable to understand the rare books he purchases is a real collector. By the same token, Lily is courted by vari­ous suitors who long to possess her as a beautiful but impractical ornament to their fortunes. This dynamic is personified by Rosedale, the ambitious parvenu who seeks Lily’s hand to cement his burgeoning social status: “The steady gaze of his small stock-­taking eyes . . . ​ made her feel herself no more than superfine ­human merchandise.”149 Just as she escapes absorption into Gryce’s famed Americana collection, she manages to evade Rosedale’s rapacious overtures. Yet, as in James’s novels, personal freedom comes at a high cost. In order to pay back her debts, Lily takes on a job in a local millinery. Her inutility is further dramatized as she fails in her task to produce the ultimate ornament, the lady’s hat: “Since she had been brought up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose.”150 Lily’s ambiguous suicide or drug overdose can be seen as a desperate attempt to save face while si­mul­ta­neously escaping the acquisitive marriage offers by Rosedale and other plutocrats. Through her tragic demise, Wharton, like James, foregrounds the notion of possession: If life dramatizes the tangle for possession, is the only respite in death—­the final moment of dispossession?

“A Copy of a Copy” As an art collector and aficionado who, like Mrs. Gereth, appreciates the aura of artwork, what Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady “despises most in the world is bad, is stupid art.”151 Osmond is the Anglo-­American “epigone of aestheticism,” a product of “the mania whose apotheosis James was witnessing in London” in the 1870s.152 It is his deep veneration for originality that prompts him to acquire the impressionable young Isabel Archer. He “was fond of originals, of rarities, of the superior and exquisite . . . ​he perceived a new attraction in the idea of taking to himself a young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects.”153 The Jamesean villain who can least differentiate between ­humans and material objects, Isabel’s sinister and cunning husband imperiously demands that Isabel take on “her husband’s views.”154 An intimate discussion between Madame Merle and Osmond on the subject

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of his marriage is conducted through heavy-­handed meta­phors about art, prompting Merle to admonish Osmond with re­spect to Isabel, “Please be very careful of that precious object.”155 In a novel quite literally framed by the idea of artistic repre­sen­ta­tion, no character escapes this reifying vision. As if in crude imitation of his prospective father-­in-­law, Rosier, the amateur collector, longs to possess Osmond’s d­ aughter, Pansy, described as a “rococo h ­ ouse­hold angel,” an “Infanta of Velasquez,” and a “Dresden-­china shepherdess.”156 The fact that the collector who most values originals is the central villain of James’s novel reaffirms Winner’s observation that a discriminating aesthetic sense is not a crucial aspect of a character’s development. Like Mrs. Gereth and James’s other morally dubious collectors, Osmond reveals the profound disparity between aesthetic and moral sense, attesting to the deleterious effects of collecting on a character. From a po­liti­cal vantage point, this thesis is as radical as Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, which contemplates the fascist appropriation of aura and originality. Long before Benjamin, Osmond’s character is a prescient warning that an exclusively aesthetic focus on aura and originality has a dangerous authoritarian, if not fascist, dimension. It also anticipates the risks of Einstein’s aestheticization, which, when applied to ­humans, has especially pernicious results. A direct counterpoint to the fastidious Osmond is Newman, the wealthy but ingenuous American collector who prefers copies of artworks to their originals. The American opens with Newman’s visit to the Louvre in Paris: “He had looked out all the pictures to which an asterisk was affixed in ­those formidable pages of fine print in his Bädeker; his attention had been strained and his eyes dazzled, and he had sat down with an aesthetic headache. He had looked, moreover, not only at all the pictures, but at all the copies that w ­ ere ­going forward around them, in the hands of ­those innumerable young ­women in irreproachable toilets who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces; and if the truth must be told, he had often admired the copy more than the original.”157 ­Here Newman suggests a certain equivalence between the original and the copy that disregards what Benjamin refers to as the auratic quality of a work. Mr. Tristram says, “nodding at the Titians and the Vandykes, ‘­these, I suppose, are originals?’ ‘I hope so,’ cried Newman. ‘I ­don’t want a copy of a copy.’ ‘Ah,’ said Mr. Tristram, mysteriously, ‘you can never tell.’ ”158 They harbor a skepticism about originality that raises the possibility that even masterpieces are copies or repre­sen­ta­tions of other works. Thus, while both The American and The Portrait of a Lady, like Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, reflect the way pro­cesses of reproduction undermine aura and originality, the skepticism exhibited by James’s characters indicates that the concept of originality is itself in question. From this perspective, James’s staging



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of the prob­lem is more radical than that of Benjamin, who still assumes the ontological possibility of an origin. Acquiring copies without regard for their originality or authenticity, Newman prefigures a modernist paradigm of collecting that establishes its own aesthetic criteria. Newman’s lack of concern with originality is mirrored in the way he is described in the opening scene of the novel: “An observer with anything of an eye for national types would have had no difficulty in determining the local origin of this undeveloped connoisseur, and indeed such an observer might have felt a certain humorous relish of the almost ideal completeness with which he filled out the national mould. The gentleman on the divan was a power­ful specimen of an American . . . ​He had the flat jaw and sinewy neck which are frequent in the American type.”159 Rather than being described through his singularity, as protagonists usually are, he is taxonomized as a variation of the rugged American type. The extent to which Christopher Newman is an original or “new man” is most obviously played out in his name. The “patron saint” of Newman’s name, according to a young copyist at the Louvre, is Christopher Columbus, who “in­ven­ted” Amer­i­ca.160 Her comic malapropism is instructive; rather than “discovering” a continent that had existed for millions of years, Columbus was responsible for its invention in the Eu­ro­pean imagination. The derivative nature of Christopher’s character is underscored by the fact that his namesake did not actually discover anything new. Recalling Amerigo’s namesake in The Golden Bowl, this Columbus reference once again reinforces the imperial link between collecting and territorial conquest.161 This classification scheme extends to the way characters conceive of themselves and each other. James’s characters incessantly categorize one another, repeatedly juxtaposing “original” characters with “types.” Newman concedes to Tristram, “I ­shall never be original, as I take it that you are,” while Valentin ­later tells him, as if in response, “No, I think ­you’re original.”162 This preoccupation with classification takes place against the backdrop of a larger cultural shift in the repre­sen­ta­tion and categorization of objects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth ­centuries.163 Echoing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Collector and His Circle, discussed in the introduction, the collector’s drive to label and categorize is often imbricated with a classification of ­human beings. In order to collect, institutions and individuals needed to taxonomize their objects according to disciplinary or aesthetic rubrics. Eu­ro­pean museums ­were riddled by an anxiety about the classification of objects as they grew in size and cultural influence, culminating in the “museum wars” that raged in Germany around the turn of the c­ entury—­the subject of chapter 5. While Eu­ rope was at the height of imperial expansion, the United States had only recently outlawed slavery; both institutions perpetuated the objectification and

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categorization of entire races of p­ eople.164 In James’s texts, t­hese epistemological debates take shape in an ontological question over what is h ­ uman and what is an object. The prob­lem is that both James and his characters keep getting it wrong. Their classification failure is part of the larger breakdown in categorization, epistemological certainty, and social order that characterized modernism. In James’s fictional universe, the characters who cannot be classified according to a type are often the most threatening. Where originality appears to exist as a character trait, it acquires an insidious valence. In The Princess Casa­ massima, Paul Muniment, whose “manner is so fresh and original,” is untrustworthy in his opacity.165 In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel muses on Osmond’s originality ­after meeting him: He had resembled no one she had ever seen; most of the p­ eople she knew might be divided into groups of half a dozen specimens . . . ​­There ­were other p­ eople who ­were relatively speaking original—­original, as one might say by courtesy—­such as Mr. Goodwood, as her cousin Ralph, as Henrietta Stackpole, as Lord Warburton, as Madame Merle. But in essentials, when one came to look at them, ­these individuals belonged to types already pre­sent in her mind. Her mind contained no class offering a natu­ral place to Mr. Osmond—he was a specimen apart . . . ​He was an original without being an eccentric.166 Like a collector, Isabel classifies the dif­fer­ent “specimens” of ­humans she knows into a system into which Osmond cannot be categorized. Yet, a­ fter they marry, Osmond’s inimitable taste and superior judgment become “sinister attributes.”167 His defiance of all categories renders him uncanny and treacherous, as they imply an absence of shared personal characteristics—­a negation of what is ­human. James’s reader, however, might recognize Osmond as a variation of a “Romantic” type—­the Byronic hero-­villain—­whose name is rooted in the literary annals of villainy.168 Like Newman’s “copy of a copy,” the paradox of an “original type” calls the possibility of originality into question. Thus, although they are classified by other characters as originals, Osmond and Muniment are themselves distinct “types.” By destabilizing the value of originality as both a h ­ uman and aesthetic category, James questions not only its existence but also ­whether it is a desirable attribute. Precisely in its overestimation of originality, collecting inflicts damage on its objects, both material and h ­ uman. Perhaps most telling is Isabel’s face a few years into her unhappy marriage to Osmond: “­There was something fixed and mechanical in the serenity painted on it, this was not an expression, Ralph said—it was a repre­sen­ta­tion, it was an advertisement . . . ​What did Isabel rep-



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resent? Ralph asked himself; and he could only answer by saying that she represented Gilbert Osmond.”169 Osmond’s semblance of uniqueness deprives Isabel of her own “original” qualities, transforming her into a repre­sen­ta­tion or “mechanical” reproduction of her husband.170 Applying Mrs. Gereth’s conjuring methods to a ­human level, Osmond the connoisseur-­collector transfigures Isabel into a collectible object, circumscribing and framing her as a portrait. Exemplified by the novel’s title, this portraiture reveals her ultimate transformation into a type and fixed object—­a fate she seeks to evade throughout her young life. At the end of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel contemplates her own fate as if she ­were an object, concluding despondently, “When had it ever been a guarantee to be valuable? W ­ asn’t all history full of the destruction of precious ­things?”171 Recasting Benjamin’s epigraph to part 1 of this book in h ­ uman terms, Isabel warns about the dangers of collection and appropriation. Like Benjamin, James is deeply concerned with what or who is steamrolled, excluded, and erased by the emphatic march of pro­g ress. In this “triumphal pro­cession” (Triumphzug) of history, h ­ umans are the ultimate casualty.

Dangerous Aura Fifty years before Benjamin’s groundbreaking “Work of Art” essay, James illustrates the dangerous way aura engenders a kind of object worship and fetishism that ultimately renders h ­ umans expendable. A modern twist on Ovid’s Pygmalion story, James’s “Last of the Valerii” (1874) is a cautionary tale about the power of art over its collector as well as the dangers of treating ­humans like works of art. A closer look highlights James’s underappreciated relevance to discussions of aura and timely debates around cultural provenance. Like many of James’s plots, the short story revolves around the marriage between a young American heiress, Martha, and a beautiful, impoverished Italian count, Marco Valerio, and is narrated by Martha’s unnamed, meddling godfather. In another example of Freedman’s notion of the “reifying vision,” Count Valerio is repeatedly described as a bronzed statue resembling the “busts in the Vatican” with “large, lucid eyes” that “stared at you like a pair of polished agates.”172 Like Maggie Verver, Martha seeks to possess Valerio as much as his storied Italian lineage: “­After that slow-­ coming, slow-­going smile of her lover, it was the rusty complexion of his patrimonial marbles that she most prized.”173 Initially, he is described as “a perfect original (not a copy), and seemed quite content to be appreciated,”174 but he becomes “impenetrable” and “grotesque” like Osmond and Muniment.175 Martha and Valerio’s newlywed bliss is thrown into disarray ­after a magnificent statue is unearthed on the grounds of their crumbling Roman villa.

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Since this is James, it is only fitting that the entire h ­ ouse­hold becomes consumed “by the rapture of possession.”176 From the first moment of its excavation, the “majestic, marble” Juno statue exudes a power­ful aura over every­one—­but most of all the handsome count, who falls so deeply in love that he flees into a Greco-­Roman fantasy world of his “pagan” ancestors.177 ­Here, the full meaning of possessed—­being controlled by a ghost or evil spirit—­ manifests itself; Valerio becomes so possessed by the statue that he begins to neglect his young wife.178 By now, this is a familiar pattern: collectors and aesthetes who forsake the ­human world for an inanimate one, which becomes more real and intimate than the real­ity they escape. With the power she exudes over all who behold her, Juno embodies the aura of a work of art that cannot be captured by mechanical reproduction. Aura, according to Benjamin, is rooted in the way the “Stone Age man” perceived the animal drawings on the walls of the cave as “instruments of magic.”179 Benjamin posits, “The earliest artworks originated in the ser­vice of rituals—­first magical, then religious. And it is highly significant that artwork’s auratic mode of existence [diese auratische Daseinsweise des Kunstwerks] is never entirely severed from its ritual function. In other words: the unique value of the “au­then­ tic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value [Gebrauch­ swert]. This ritualistic basis, however mediated it may be, is still recognizable as secularized ritual in even the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.”180 James’s story is an illustration of the precarious way ritual value continues to undergird the work of art. The Count locks up Juno “in a deserted garden-­ house built in not ungraceful imitation of an Ionic t­ emple”181 and “treats her as if she ­were a sacrosanct image of Madonna.”182 One climactic night, the godfather witnesses Valerio “swooning” with “fabulous passion” in front of the moonlit statue, which “stood bathed in cold radiance, shining with a purity that made her convincingly divine.”183 Eventually the Count succumbs to a kind of pagan frenzy, complete with blood sacrifice. As the godfather explains to Martha, “He has reverted to the faith of his ­fathers. Dormant for so many centuries, that imperious image has silently evoked it . . . ​In a word, dear child, Marco is an anthropomorphist.”184 The venerated object of Martha’s admiration, Valerio takes indeterminate ontology to the next level by worshipping and falling in love with a statue. In contrast to collectors, who proudly exhibit their finds, Marco Valerio goes to g­ reat lengths to conceal Juno from curious scholars and passersby.185 As the crafty excavator of the archaeological excavation laments, “So beautiful a creature is more or less the property of every­one; we have all a right to look at her. But the Count treats her as if she w ­ ere a sacrosanct image of Madonna. He keeps her u ­ nder lock and key, and pays her solitary visits. What does he do,



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a­ fter all? When a beautiful w ­ oman is in stone, all one can do is look at her. And what does he do with that precious hand? He keeps it in a silver box; he has made a relic of it!”186 Juno is the epitome of what Benjamin calls cult value (Kultwert), which stands opposed to its exhibition value (Ausstellungswert), produced by modern museums and techniques of reproduction. As if describing Valerio’s attempts to lock Juno away, Benjamin states, “Cult value as such tends t­ oday, it would seem, to keep the artwork out of sight: certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain images of the Madonna remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are not vis­i­ble to the spectator at ground level.”187 Overpowered by Juno’s aura, the Count seems to transfer her cult value back into a sacred “relic” and, in the pro­cess, find his way back to the pagan beliefs of his ancestors.188 In a consummate Jamesean plot twist, the Count identifies his beloved statue as a Greek rather than a Roman artifact in the closing lines of the story: He [Valerio] never became, if you w ­ ill, a thoroughly modern man; but one day, years ­after, when a visitor to whom he was showing his cabinet became inquisitive as to a marble hand, suspended in one of its inner recesses, he looked grave and turned the lock on it. “It is the hand of a beautiful creature,” he said, “whom I once greatly admired.” “Ah—­a Roman?” asked the gentleman, with a smirk. “A Greek,” said the Count with a frown.189 By insisting on the Juno/Hera distinction, Valerio reflects the convoluted but deeply intertwined history of Greek and Roman culture.190 The statue represents the age-­old art historical dilemma: Was she an “original” Greek work of art or a Roman copy? The lens of spoils sheds additional light on this plot twist. ­After expanding across the Mediterranean in the late fourth ­century BC, Roman generals returned with booty—­Greek artifacts that became so popu­lar that Roman artists began creating marble and bronze copies of famous Greek statues to meet the demand.191 By positing that his beloved object is Greek rather than Roman, Valerio acknowledges his own contested cultural inheritance. If the statue found beneath his Roman estate is, in fact, Greek, then she is an original—­a spoil—­rather than merely a Roman imitation or copy.192 Perhaps Valerio believes that Juno, like he, is “a perfect original (not a copy).”193 The entire story can be read through spolia studies and the fraught relationship between Greek and Roman art. Sequestered in an “imitation of an Ionic ­temple,” Juno stands b­ ehind a “roughly extemporized altar, composed of a shapeless fragment of antique marble, engraved with an illegible Greek inscription.”194 During a spring shower in Rome, the narrator encounters the

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Count while seeking shelter in the Pantheon—­the Roman t­emple famously turned Catholic church. He “hurried for refuge into the big rotunda which its Christian altars have but half converted into a church.”195 Finally, the most recent spoil is Juno’s hand, described in the previously cited closing lines of the story. ­After Juno is unearthed, workmen notice that one of her beautiful, broken marble hands has dis­appeared. The excavator suspects Valerio has “purloined it,” much to the surprise of the godfather, who d­ oesn’t understand how he can “purloin” his “own property.”196 The denouement corroborates the excavator’s accusation; it is revealed that Valerio has hoarded Juno’s broken hand in his cabinet years ­later, long ­after the statue is reinterred. A spoil of a spoil, the talismanic hand is extracted and never returned—­a trophy of Valerio’s possession and illicit desire. Objectification never turns out well in James’s stories, and, as the godfather realizes, “The countess was being neglected for this senseless pagan block,”197 perhaps as karmic retribution for her reification of the Count. Angrily, the godfather declares, “Her beauty be blasted! Can you tell me what has become of the Contessa’s? To rival the Juno she is turning to marble herself.”198 Not only are h ­ umans devalued as objects gain power, aura seems to come at the cost of humanity. To win back her husband, Martha herself must turn to stone. In a last-­ditch effort to save her marriage, Martha decides to bury Juno, exclaiming, “She must go back! We must smother her beauty in the dreadful earth. It makes me feel almost as if she ­were alive; but it came to me last night with overwhelming force, when my husband came in and refused to see me, that he ­will not be himself so long as she is above ground. To cut the knot we must bury her!”199 With this final dramatic gesture, Martha effectively relinquishes the role of a collector by eliminating their prized find. A ­ fter burying Juno in the original site, the c­ ouple ceases any further excavation of their villa grounds. In yet another Jamesean tale of renunciation, “The Last of the Valerii” suggests that precious objects often come at too high a h ­ uman cost. To preserve our humanity, trea­sures must be returned or, better yet, destroyed.

C h a p te r   2

Sardanapalus’s Hoard

In James’s novella The Aspern Papers, the eccentric centenarian Juliana Bordereau is described as “an old w ­ oman who at a pinch would, even like Sardanapalus, burn her trea­sure.”1 Throughout the novella, she tries to keep the papers of her former lover—­the late Romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern—­out of the hands of the conniving, obsessive narrator, who vows to obtain them at any cost. Sardanapalus was the apocryphal Assyrian king, legendary for his de­cadence and depravity—­a favorite figure for Romantic poets such as Lord Byron. Rather than fall into the hands of his enemies, he ordered that all of his eunuchs, concubines, and collections of trea­sures be amassed on a huge funeral pyre to be burned with him. In Byron’s play Sardanapalus, the eponymous character resolves never to leave “your treasure—­your abode—­your sacred relics / Of arms, and rec­ords—­monuments, and spoils” to the “defilement of usurping bondmen,” highlighting the interrelationship between spoils and the archives that rec­ord them.2 Like Mrs. Gereth, who would rather disinherit her son and destroy her trea­sures than face Mona Brigstock’s bad taste, Sardanapalus is a befitting meta­phor for James’s infamous collectors who demolish their own collections to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Setting fire to his prized objects alongside his servants, Sardanapalus—­like James’s collectors—­does not distinguish between material and ­human possessions. The epitome of a hoarder, Sardanapalus identifies himself so closely with his possessions that his death mandates the destruction of his hoard. The violent 51

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Figure 4. ​Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus (La mort de Sardanapale) (1827). © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

underpinning of Sardanapalus’s orgiastic self-­immolation is most vividly portrayed in Eugène Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (figure 4), inspired by Byron’s play. James himself was enthralled by Delacroix’s early masterpiece, which he praised when it was exhibited in Paris in 1876.3 In the foreground of the painting, a man in oriental garb is poised to stab his naked victim while Sardanapalus watches dispassionately from his opulent bed, littered with the corpses of his female victims. Mounting the ­woman from ­behind while forcefully grasping her arms, the man si­mul­ta­neously appears as a rapist who forces himself on his victim by threatening vio­lence. This slippage between hoarding, rape, and murder suggests that a material acquisitiveness also extends to a person’s social and sexual be­hav­ior. The hoarding of objects becomes an index for aberrant, coercive tendencies. Sardanapalus suffers from an extreme case of what Bill Brown labels “indeterminate ontology,” treating ­people as extensions of his objects by raping and killing them at his whim.4 Like much of James’s fiction, The Aspern Papers pivots around the question of possession. The unnamed narrator of James’s novella embarks on an obsessive quest to obtain the famed Aspern papers, rumored to be in the possession of Juliana, Aspern’s former lover. Labeling himself “a critic, a commentator,

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an historian, in a small way,” the narrator is an aspiring writer, willing to go to any lengths to secure his prize.5 Confessing, “­There’s no baseness I ­wouldn’t commit for Jeffrey Aspern’s sake,” he plots to become a lodger in the Bordereau ­women’s dilapidated Venetian palace in hopes of gaining access to Aspern’s papers.6 When the narrator’s attempts to acquaint himself with the aging “spinster” fail, he begins to court Tina, her naive niece, who is also “of minor antiquity.”7 On one oppressive Venetian summer night, the narrator thinks Miss Bordereau’s bedroom is empty and is seized by “an acute, though absurd sense of opportunity”; he tries to open the cupboard believed to contain the papers. His transgression is witnessed by Juliana, who stands in the doorway, uttering her famous last words, “Ah you publishing scoundrel!” and collapses, ­dying soon thereafter.8 Upon her aunt’s death, Tina inherits the collection, promising to “give him every­thing” on the condition that the narrator marry her.9 When he refuses her offer, she burns all the papers, in the vein of Sardanapalus, leaving him scarcely able to “bear his loss.”10 In broad strokes, The Aspern Papers stages an existential conflict between two divergent yet overlapping figures: the hoarder ( Juliana) and the collector (the narrator). The hoarder is old, regressive, and reclusive while the collector is young, enlightened, and aggressive. In gendered terms, the hoarder is cast as the female perversion of the masculine collector who brings order and organ­ ization. While the hoarder strug­gles to keep her papers private, the collector constantly threatens to expose and publish them. The generation gap between them is reflective of the way the face of collecting has changed from a regressive form of hoarding—­exemplified by Nietz­sche’s scathing critique—to a modern artistic practice tied to the collector’s professional life, encapsulated by Benjamin’s sanguine account in the introduction. Torn between hoarding and publishing his own work, James balances precariously between t­ hese two poles. As an author struggling to maintain control of his work and guard his private life, James shares more affinities with the hoarder than the collector. My reading of The Aspern Papers explores James’s fictional dramatization of hoarding against the backdrop of his methodological approach to writing—­namely, his continued attempts to exert authorial and editorial control over his own work ­after its publication. Like Miss Bordereau, James fears the prospect of a meddling editor who might disclose compromising information. By obsessively revising his texts and destroying his own archive, James engages in a form of textual hoarding that resembles the dubious actions of his own characters. Paradoxically, this chapter concludes, hoarding can function as a bulwark against the threat of plunder and rapacity. In contrast to Sardanapalus’s solipsistic, orgiastic hoard, Juliana’s hoarding, like James’s editorial control, acts as a defensive mea­sure against the perceived threat of the intrusive editor. Repeatedly demonizing Juliana as an

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eccentric witch, the narrator seeks to justify his predatory pursuit of her papers—­a tactic that seems to be condoned by the broader literary community. Reading The Aspern Papers through the lens of hoarding brings new focus to the vio­lence that inheres in possession. While biographers have speculated about his sexual orientation, James’s equivocal meanings and frustrated romantic subplots have often lent themselves to queer studies. Most famously, Eve Sedgwick situates James’s Beast in the Jungle in the context of the rampant paranoia about homo­sexuality in Victorian E ­ ngland, suggesting the story’s obvious silences and ellipses, like John Marcher’s secret, have a latent “homosexual content.”11 Yet, interpreting The Aspern Papers as primarily a story of repressed homoerotic desire downplays the very real plot of vio­lence at the heart of the novella. In contrast to other queer theoretical readings of the novella, this chapter centers on the Bordereau ­women—­a relationship that has been ignored in much of the secondary lit­er­a­ture. Building on Scott Herring’s Hoarders: Mate­ rial Deviance in Modern American Culture, I examine hoarding as a social construct rather than merely a psychopathological category. Establishing an alternative material genealogy outside of marriage, procreation, or inheritable property, the hoarder pre­sents a queer threat to both the dominant heteronormative and economic order. Curiously, the gender dynamics of hoarding are absent even from Herring’s account—­and much of the secondary lit­er­a­ ture on hoarding—­which represents it as a phenomenon that “cuts across gender” even as it draws attention to the interplay between material accumulation and queer sexuality.12

A Brief History of “Hoardiculture” In spite of the recent upsurge in hoarding discourse, ­there is nothing con­ temporary about the condition, as Rebecca Falkoff shows in Possessed: A Cul­ tural History of Hoarding.13 Published two years a­ fter The Aspern Papers, William James’s Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy devoted several paragraphs to the topic of hoarding. Noting that “the hoarding instinct prevails widely among animals as well as among men,” William continues, In ­every lunatic asylum we find the collecting instinct developing itself in an equally absurd way. Certain patients w ­ ill spend all their time picking pins from the floor and hoarding them. ­Others collect bits of thread, buttons, or rags, and prize them exceedingly. Now, “the Miser” par excellence of the popu­lar imagination and of melodrama, the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is simply one of t­ hese mentally deranged

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persons. His intellect may in many m ­ atters be clear, but his instincts, especially that of owner­ship, are insane, and their insanity has no more to do with the association of ideas than with the precession of the equinoxes. As a ­matter of fact his hoarding usually is directed to money; but it also includes almost anything besides. Lately in a Mas­sa­chu­setts town ­there died a miser who principally hoarded newspapers. T ­ hese had ended by so filling all the rooms of his good-­sized ­house from floor to ceiling that his living-­space was restricted to a few narrow channels between them. Even as I write, the morning paper gives an account of the emptying of a miser’s den in Boston by the City Board of Health.14 At ­g reat length, William cites the newspaper for lurid details about the hoarder’s “curious collections,” suggesting that the media’s morbid fascination with hoarders is nothing new.15 His slippage between collecting and hoarding is instructive, revealing the difficulty for even a pioneering psychologist to distinguish between them. Initially it seems that hoarders are ­those who have not properly curbed or channeled their “collecting instinct.”16 Yet, already in this early account, the hoarder is distinguished as a pathological social deviant, with William concluding, “ ‘the Miser’ par excellence of the popu­lar imagination and of melodrama, the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is simply one of t­ hese mentally deranged persons.” T ­ oday’s image of the spectral, pathological hoarder suggests the staying power of William James’s account of the “monster of squalor and misanthropy” even among psychologists.17 Although Nietz­sche’s “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” was written a de­cade before The Aspern Papers and Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, Nietz­sche’s portrait of the musty antiquarian overlaps significantly with the hoarder.18 As Falkoff observes, hoarding produces a “flat epistemology” that “eschews hierarchies and orga­nizational princi­ples in f­ avor of polyvalent connections between ele­ments.”19 Like a hoarder who is preoccupied with excessive details, Nietz­sche’s antiquarian “cannot mea­sure value and therefore takes every­thing as equally impor­tant. Thus, for the antiquarian sense each single t­ hing is too impor­tant.”20 Lacking the ability to distinguish between what is useful or useless, valuable or worthless, the antiquarian “compiles every­thing,” becoming as socially isolated as his “restricted field of vision.”21 Instead of producing growth, this antiquarian approach to history “buries further living” and “mummifies it” just as the Collyer b­ rothers and other hoarders are quite literally buried alive u ­ nder their piles.22 Like William and Henry, Nietz­sche indicates that the negative cultural associations around hoarding had already began to coalesce during the “age of collecting,” complicating the narrative of Herring who sees it primarily as a postwar phenomenon.23

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The pathology of hoarding has only been heightened in recent psychological discourse. As a reflection of its growing currency, hoarding has been classified as a distinct diagnostic entity in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of M ­ ental Disorders (DSM-5). According to the psychologists Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, hoarding is characterized by three features: “1) the failure to discard a large number of possessions that appear to be useless or of l­imited value, 2) extensive clutter in living spaces that precludes activities for which the rooms ­were designed, and 3) significant distress or impairment in functioning caused by hoarding.”24 Although collectors divest objects of their traditional use value by inserting them into a collection—as the introduction argued—­Frost and Steketee’s rubric suggests that an object’s “uselessness” is also a distinguishing feature of hoarding.25 T ­ here is an explicit value judgment h ­ ere; unlike collectors who are perceived to possess exotic or valuable objects, hoarders retain everyday objects that are often deemed to be rubbish. While ­these objects might be labeled “useless” or “of ­limited value” by external standards, the hoarder holds on to them for their potential ­future use value. ­Because the object’s use value does not accord with normative, socially accepted standards of what is worth saving, this be­hav­ior is pathologized as hoarding. Modifying Frost and Steketee’s definition, I am arguing that the potential use of the object is subjectively valued by the hoarder but is not externally communicable.26 In contrast, the value of a collection’s objects is externally communicable; o ­ thers can recognize the value of a philatelist’s old stamps. As a result, the hoarder—­like the ragpicker, who occupies a central role in chapter 4—is often represented as a marginalized, reviled figure who threatens social, economic, and sexual norms by operating outside of traditional property relations. According to Falkoff, hoarding “is the limit case of classical liberalism: a test of the idea that individuals acting rationally in their own best interest constitute a beneficent ‘invisible hand.’ ”27 The temporal framework of the hoarder—­like that of the ragpicker—­threatens the consumer culture of late capitalism, which is predicated on a cycle of acquisition, consumption, and disposal. Not only do hoarders accumulate in a pathological way; they fail to discard t­hings at the appropriate time. Hoarders are not oriented towards the present, e­ ither clinging to the past or collecting for a f­uture that never takes place, recognizing the object’s utility without ever using it. In our clutterphobic culture, the asocial, unhygienic activities of the hoarder have often served as a pretext for forceful interventions. In A&E’s hit real­ity tele­ vi­sion show Hoarders, subjects are ordered to “clean up their mess” ­under threat of property eviction, divorce, or the loss of child custody. Recalling Orhan Pamuk’s distinction between the “proud” and “bashful” collectors outlined in

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the introduction, hoarders are plagued by poverty and psychological disorders and express shame about their disordered homes, which are hidden from public view only to be exposed for the first time with the pseudo-­documentary camera in the vein of a crime or detective series.28 The show frequently stages dramatic confrontations: Betty has two days to clean up her ­house or ­else the city ­will seize her home. Most episodes follow a predictable plotline: ­after the hoarding reaches a crisis point, individuals are counseled by a team of psychologists, and, with the help of professional organizers and cleanup crews, their hoards are disposed of and their homes are saved. ­Because hoarding is considered a threat to heterosexual marriage and f­ amily life, it merits intervention. The home as an orderly, bourgeois domestic space is predicated on the appropriate and timely disposal of objects once they have achieved their purpose. As Italo Calvino elegantly shows in “The Agreeable Trash Can” (“La Poubelle Agréée”), the proper disposal of the f­amily poubelle into the communal poubelle is a constitutive moment both for his role as a “paterfamilias” and his role as a social being, “the first link in a chain of operations crucial for collective cohabitation.”29 Conversely, holding onto objects beyond their expiration date is not only unsanitary and potentially dangerous but severs this “link of collective cohabitation” by imposing on the space occupied by other f­amily members.30 Episodes of Hoarders feature countless scenes in which spouses are shut out of rooms to make way for growing clutter or ­children are unable to sleep in their beds b­ ecause they are piled high with stuff. At this point, a team of psychologists and personal organizers usually steps in to help hoarders save their marriages or regain custody of their ­children.31 As the hoards are discarded, the h ­ ouse as a clean, safe, bourgeois space is restored.

The “Monster of Squalor” In the eyes of the narrator of The Aspern Papers, Juliana Bordereau is “the ‘Miser’ par excellence of the popu­lar imagination and of melodrama, the monster of squalor and misanthropy” described by William James in Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy.32 Charging the narrator an exorbitant monthly rent for his lodging, Juliana’s miserliness is an extension of her propensity to cling on to all sorts of rubbish. Her “room was a dire confusion; it looked like the room of an old actress. ­There ­were clothes hanging over chairs, odd-­looking, shabby bundles ­here and ­there, and vari­ous pasteboard boxes piled together, battered, bulging and discoloured, which might have been fifty years old.”33 Sensing the narrator’s disdain for the disordered scene, Tina, the niece, explains, “She likes

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it this way; we ­can’t move ­things. ­There are old bandboxes she has had most of her life.”34 This tendency prompts the narrator to suspect that she would “cling” to her letters ­until she “should feel her end at hand.”35 Underscoring the textual dimension of hoarding, Miss Bordereau clings to papers and letters alongside heaps of material objects, which seem to lose their distinction from one another upon entering the hoard. Even her last name alludes to an inventory, report, or list of ­things. An “ancient spinster” who lives with her unmarried, aging niece, Juliana epitomizes the ste­reo­typical portrait of a hoarder as old, reclusive, unmarried (or long widowed), female (or effeminate), and possibly queer.36 An embodiment of the useless objects she accumulates, the spinster hoarder is depicted as outliving her purpose, namely, marriage and sexual reproduction accompanied by heteronormative patterns of property inheritance. Imbricated with senility, Juliana’s hoarding tendencies are a cultural index for improper aging as well as inappropriate social relationships. In con­temporary discourse, Juliana’s hoarding might be characterized as a manifestation of senile squalor syndrome—­the combination of hoarding rubbish, self-­neglect, and social alienation that sometimes accompanies old age.37 Hoarders are often regarded as asocial and reclusive.38 Together with her niece, Juliana lives “in obscurity, on very small means, unvisited, unapproachable, in a dilapidated old palace on an out-­of-­the-­way canal.”39 Their life of “domestic isolation” b­ ehind “closed shutters” is repeatedly derided by both the narrator and his confidant, Mrs. Prest, who appear to represent the normative perspective of the rest of the community.40 Frustrated with his attempts to engage the two ­women, the narrator fi­nally concludes, “I had never met so stiff a policy of seclusion; it was more than keeping quiet—it was like hunted creatures feigning death.”41 Not only is their be­hav­ior deemed to be improper, but their lifestyle appears to threaten the rest of the community. Mocked and spurned, they foreshadow Big and ­Little Edie, the first cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whose eccentric, sequestered life in a derelict East Hampton mansion was memorialized in the Maysles b­ rothers’ documentary Grey Gardens (1976). Both pairs are el­derly, female, related, and intergenerational, cohabiting in the same chaotic, ungovernable domestic space. In both cases, the younger ­woman is controlled by the older hoarder who appears to stymie her marriage prospects. Uncanny specters in their Venetian neighborhood, the two ­women are rumored to be witches. Mrs. Prest declares, “Perhaps the ­people are afraid of the Misses Bordereau. I daresay they have the reputation of witches.”42 The narrator flippantly repeats this claim several times, stating, “She was such a subtle old witch that one could never tell where one stood with her.”43 Build-

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ing on Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Stanley Cohen’s Folk Dev­ils and Moral Panics, Herring draws a parallel between the role historically occupied by witches and the con­temporary status of hoarders. Linking the “repre­sen­ ta­tions of hoarding as mysterious forms of deviance, disorder, and perversion,” Herring shows how the hoarder is typecast as a “material deviant” who threatens con­temporary social norms the way “folk dev­ils” such as witches did in ­earlier epochs.44 Indeed, the two types share many similarities; like witches, hoarders are characterized as old, spooky, unmarried, and often female. The site of squalor and chaos, the hoarder’s home exists outside of the regimes of purity, cleanliness, and order enforced by bourgeois social norms. The only way the editor is able to gain access to the dilapidated mansion is by posing as a gardener who offers to “put its wild rich tangle” in “order.”45 Once inside, he finds their rooms to be “all dusty and even a l­ittle disfigured with long neglect.”46 This neglect is echoed in the personal hygiene of Tina, who is “not young” and has “a g­ reat deal of hair which was not ‘dressed,’ and long fine hands which ­were—­possibly—­not clean.”47 Herring’s application of Douglas’s Purity and ­ ere: “A messy hoarder comes to exemDanger to hoarding is especially relevant h plify moralized forms of disorder vilified by the social body . . . ​­little won­der that hoarders seem dangerous when their residences are thought to reek of ‘unsanitary deviancy.’ ”48 An uncanny, “esoteric,” and “orientalized” zone located on the periphery of Western Eu­rope, Venice itself represented a disorderly and potentially infected space with its pungent canals and narrow alleys.49 Both Juliana and her niece are repeatedly referred to as “aging spinsters” who prefer the com­pany of each other to any kind of romantic relationship. For James, who is notoriously elliptical about the repre­sen­ta­tion of sex, the hoarding practices of ­these ­women seem to imply other unseemly be­hav­ior. As the narrator recounts, “In ­these win­dows no sign of life ever appeared; it was as if, for fear of my catching a glimpse of them, the two ladies passed their days in the dark. But this only proved to me that they had something to conceal; which was what I had wished to demonstrate. Their motionless shutters became as expressive as eyes consciously closed.”50 One can easily apply Sedgwick’s observation about the “highly equivocal, lexical pointers to a homosexual meaning” in James’s Beast in the Jungle to The Aspern Papers.51 Yet, instead of applying her reading only to the “closeted,” homoerotic desires of the narrator, like Gero Bauer and ­others have done, we could use it examine the ambivalent relationship between the two ­women.52 In light of James’s sexual reticence, hoarding could be another coded way to describe same-­sex female relationships. Miss Bordereau’s cohabitation with her niece evokes the same specter of queerness that was associated with the Collyer ­brothers, whose disor­ga­nized clutter was linked to their social deviance.53 When normally solitary hoarders

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live in pairs, they are often of the same sex, like the Collyer b­ rothers and Big and ­Little Edie. Their ambivalent social and sexual status makes them a threat. Without husbands, they operate outside of the bounds of procreative reproduction and inheritance, the heteronormative transfer of private property. Similarly, the widowed Mrs.  Gereth in The Spoils of Poynton is portrayed as a narcissistic hoarder who is willing to disinherit her own son in order to preserve her invaluable collections. In keeping with the same-­sex affinities of the other hoarders, Mrs. Gereth forms a close bond with Fleda Vetch, who shares her aesthetic taste. Circumventing primogeniture and accepted patrimonial patterns of inheritance, Mrs. Gereth undermines the social order by destroying her hoard upon her son’s marriage to an “unworthy” ­woman. Be­hav­ior that deviates from “normal” patterns of material acquisition practiced by men is often pathologized as hoarding. Returning to Byron’s play, we can see Sardanapalus’s coupling of material acquisitiveness and deviant sexuality as a reflection of the way inappropriate accumulation becomes indexical of aberrant sexual be­hav­ior.54 Already according to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, Sardanapalus “lived the life of a ­woman . . . ​assumed the feminine garb and so covered his face and indeed his entire body with whitening cosmetics and the other unguents used by courtesans, that he rendered it more delicate than that of any luxury-­loving ­woman.”55 Byron similarly describes him as “femininely garbed, and scarce less female / The grand­son of Semiramis, the Man-­Queen” who was “nursed in effeminate arts from youth to manhood.”56 In most versions of the myth, Sardanapalus is depicted as an effeminate king whose sexual depravity threatens the entire kingdom as much as his material greed.57 Accused of ignoble deeds ranging from perverting youths to burning his entire ­house­hold, Sardanapalus represents the extreme case of the hoarder whose aberrant relationship with objects becomes part of his monstrous sexuality. In effect, the hoarder becomes the feminized, potentially queer perversion of the orderly, normative masculine collector. As suggested in chapter 1, the classificatory drive to taxonomize p­ eople is part and parcel of the larger effort to or­ga­nize objects in vari­ous disciplinary and institutional settings in late nineteenth-­century Eu­rope. Yet this identification seems to break down once objects are disordered. It is not coincidental that Pliushkin, the notorious hoarder and wealthy landowner in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead ­ oman by Chichikov, the protagonist: “ChiSouls, is initially mistaken for a w chikov spent some considerable time working out the gender of this figure. It was dressed in something very indeterminate, very like a w ­ oman’s ­house­coat, it wore a hood, as do female yard servants in the country, but its voice sounded to

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Chichikov’s ears a bit hoarse for a ­woman’s. ‘Ah, a ­woman,’ he thought and then immediately added, ‘Oh no, a man! Of course, a ­woman,’ he fi­nally said when he had taken a closer look.”58 The more Pliushkin takes on the characteristics of a hoarder, the less conspicuously male he seems. The “indeterminacy” of his gender is related to the disordered objects; just as objects lose their distinction once they become part of Pliushkin’s “notorious heap,” the hoarder becomes harder to classify.59 The ambiguous hoarder along with “its” indistinguishable objects represents an epistemological threat to the bourgeois collector’s taxonomic regime.

The Spoils of Venice Hoarding not only sheds light on the gender dynamics in this novella but also draws attention to the foundational act of vio­lence that often underpins cultural acquisition. Rather than dwelling on the narrator’s queer, “closeted” desire for Jeffrey Aspern—as other critics have already done—­this reading focuses on the central plot of appropriation. Reducing “the strug­gle for material acquisition” in James’s fiction to an “epistemological pursuit” (Terry Ea­ gleton) or a gesture of closeted same-­sex desire (Gero Bauer) marginalizes the brutalizing effects of the strug­gle for possession.60 Matching Juliana’s obsession with guarding her hoard is the narrator’s insatiable desire to obtain it at any cost. In light of James’s queer hermeneutics, the abrasive collector is not as straightforwardly heteronormative as he feigns. His single motivating force is his passion for the dead poet. Jeffrey Aspern was most certainly “not a w ­ oman’s poet,” the narrator repeats several times, as if to reclaim him for himself and the homosocial community.61 Mrs. Prest instantly seizes on this obsession, finding “my interest in my pos­si­ble spoil a fine case of monomania. ‘One would think you expected from it the answer to the riddle of the universe,’ she said, and I denied the impeachment only by replying that if I had to choose between that precious solution and a bundle of Jeffrey Aspern’s letters I knew indeed which would appear to me the greater boon. She pretended to make light of his genius and I took no pains to defend him. One ­doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defence.”62 The label “monomania” aptly captures the link between neurosis, addiction, and collecting.63 When he fi­nally comes face-­to-­face with Miss Bordereau, he is compelled by “an irresistible desire to hold in [his] own for a moment the hand Jeffrey Aspern had pressed.”64 He “flushes” when he sees Aspern’s portrait and learning that Juliana is in possession of the papers ­causes “all [his] pulses to

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throb.”65 James uses a nearly identical formulation in “The Last of the Valerii” when the unearthing of Juno elicits the narrator’s erotically charged response: “My pulses began to throb for I felt that she was something ­g reat.”66 Unlike other collectors who collect as a substitute for an absent love object, the loss of the Aspern papers is the ur-­loss from which the narrator strug­ gles to recover.67 When he learns that Tina has burned the papers, “real darkness descended on [his] eyes.”68 It is as if his thirst for ­these papers stands for the unspeakable—­the narrator’s romantic passion for Aspern. As Tina muses, “ ‘How much you must want them!’ ‘Oh I do, passionately!’ I grinned, I fear, to admit.”69 Negotiated through Aspern’s material traces, the narrator’s latent desire for Aspern is couched in a more socially acceptable manner as a lust for ­things.70 Now it is the lusty narrator, more than Juliana Bordereau, who begins to resemble Sardanapalus. Frequently described as “sacred relics,” Aspern’s papers are imbued with a distinctive aura. Benjamin’s notion of aura, as chapter 1 suggested, is rooted in ritual, “first magical, then religious.”71 As if to underscore Benjamin’s argument, the narrator constantly resorts to religious terminology while attempting to commune with the poet, his “god.”72 Proximity alone is a source of comfort: “I should never have doubted for a moment that the sacred relics ­were ­there; never have failed to know the joy of being beneath the same roof with them.”73 This aura even inhabits Juliana by osmosis: “­There was something even in her wasted antiquity that bade one stand at one’s distance. I felt an irresistible desire to hold in my own for a moment the hand Jeffrey Aspern had pressed.”74 Longing to establish even the most tenuous connection with his love object, he corroborates Benjamin’s description of aura as “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.”75 Yet, just as with the decor of Poynton, the reader is never privy to the details of the papers—­like the narrator, we are kept at arm’s length from the subject of the plot.76 The narrator disguises his mission in the language of courtship. Initially, he attempts to woo the w ­ omen with “floral tributes,” as if sexual conquest provided a socially acceptable pretext for his more sinister motive.77 Whereas material objects often become the vehicle to attain sex, ­here sex becomes the means to acquire objects. This dynamic is reinforced by Tina, who promises to “give him every­thing” on the condition that he marry her.78 Sex, for the narrator, as for Sardanapalus, is linked to possession and disassociated from romantic attachment. As the narrator furtively sneaks into Miss Bordereau’s bedroom one night, he can “feel himself close to the objects [he] coveted.”79 Stealing into the female chambers would normally smack of rape or sexual assault, but ­here even the slightest sexual undertone is channeled into his lust to be close to his beloved “objects.”

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The narrator is so single-­minded in his quest that when he tries to break into the cabinet that he believes contains the papers, he reads the most trivial circumstances as a sign left by Tina: “If she wished to keep me away, why h ­ adn’t she locked the door of communication . . . ​That would have been a definite sign that I was to leave them alone. If I ­didn’t leave them alone she meant to come for a purpose—­a purpose now represented by the super-­subtle inference that to oblige me she had unlocked the secretary. She ­hadn’t left the key, but the lid would prob­ably move if I touched the button.”80 Only the monomaniacal narrator can be so solipsistic as to assume that Tina would have thought to make such arrangements while tending to her ­dying aunt. The infatuated narrator even believes the poet himself consecrates his efforts: “I had invoked him and he had come; he hovered before me half the time; it was as if his bright ghost had returned to earth to assure me he regarded the affair as his own no less than as mine and that we should see it fraternally and fondly to a conclusion.”81 Framed in dubious rhetorical terms, the narrator’s rationalization echoes self-­serving justifications of rape and sexual assault. A queer reading of James adds another layer to the story by foregrounding the way the intrusive editor tries to force open the closet—or bordereau—of Juliana’s private papers. “She would die next week, she would die tomorrow,” he schemes. “Then I could pounce on her possessions and ransack her drawers.”82 The overtly polysemous valence of the notion of “ransacking her drawers” again attests to the imbrication of material and sexual rapacity throughout The Aspern Papers: theft and rape are interchangeable.83 Repeatedly demonizing Miss Bordereau as an old hoarder, social deviant, and witch, the narrator seeks to rationalize his plunder, which he legitimates ­under the auspices of collecting. In keeping with the gendered norms of property owner­ship, the narrator’s illegitimate seizure of property is socially sanctioned by Mrs. Prest, his coeditor, and the broader literary community, while Juliana’s legitimate claim to secure her papers is considered dangerous. Highlighting her incompetency as a cultural steward, the young editor can justifiably strip valuable trea­sures from the aging hoarder who would misuse or damage them. While in real­ity the narrator is far more threatening than Juliana, his actions are legitimized in the name of the public good, while hers are deemed a violation of hygiene and decency. Male collectors are celebrated while their female counter­parts, like Miss Bordereau or Mrs. Gereth, are vilified as unsanitary hoarders or dangerous old witches. Particularly in his ­later years, James was conscious of the ethics of cultural appropriation and its origins in martial plunder. James’s views t­ oward the insatiable American appetite for Eu­ro­pean art had shifted from his early enthusiasm.84 In his Italian travel sketch, “Two Old Houses and Three Young

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­ omen,” James dramatizes the detrimental effects of the Austrian possession W of Venice, which officially ended in 1866. Recasting the occupation in gendered terms, James laments, “Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, her figure, her reputation, her self-­respect.”85 He encounters a young Venetian girl who had recently traveled to the British Museum in London to see “a room exclusively filled with books and documents devoted to the commemoration of her ­family. She must have encountered at the National Gallery the exquisite specimen of an early Venetian master in which one of her ancestors, then head of the State, kneels with so sweet a dignity before the Virgin and Child. She was perhaps old enough to have seen this precious work taken down from the wall of the room in which we sat and—on terms far too easy—­carried away forever.”86 James frames the annexation of Venice as a rape, whereby an innocent girl is forcefully deprived of her cultural heritage. Reinforcing the link between rape and spoliation, James builds on the historical understanding of ­women as property, whereby virginity was treated as a ­woman’s—or her ­father’s—­most impor­tant asset. Like the Prince in The Golden Bowl, the Venetian girl is left to encounter her ­family history in the British Museum.87 Setting his sights on his own Venetian spoils, the narrator follows a long line of spoilers and collectors who had ravaged the city before him. In The Aspern Papers, it is the Americans who now assume the role of the Austrian occupiers by carry­ing off the Venetian valuables.88 This novella, too, falls into the aforementioned Jamesean paradigm of a culturally rich but financially strapped Eu­ro­pean f­amily annexed by an aggressive American collector. Although the Bordereau ­family was initially American, the narrator emphasizes the “French strain in their origin,” commenting on several occasions that “it was plain that the American name had ceased to have any application to them.”89 In James’s terms, they are signifiers of Eu­ro­pean culture. The newly arrived American (the narrator) despoils the original American spoilers-­turned-­ natives (the Bordereau ­ women). Personifying historical shifts in buying power, Americans like the narrator, Newman, and Verver seek to possess old world booty.90 Like the countless conquerors who seized cultural trea­sures from vanquished ­people through duplicitous schemes and coercive treaties, James’s narrator resorts to theft. As in The Spoils of Poynton, the operative word, spoils, pervades the novella. When Mrs. Prest suggests approaching Juliana with money, the narrator protests indignantly, “The old w ­ oman ­won’t have her relics and tokens so much as spoken of; ­they’re personal, delicate, intimate, and she ­hasn’t the feelings of the day, God bless her! If I should sound that note first I should certainly spoil the game. I can arrive at my spoils only by putting her off her guard, and I can put her off her guard only by ingratiating diplomatic arts. Hy­poc­risy, duplicity are

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my only chance. I’m sorry for it, but ­there’s no baseness I ­wouldn’t commit for Jeffrey Aspern’s sake. First I must take tea with her—­then tackle the main job.”91 Like Mrs. Gereth, he speaks of his quest in martial terms, invoking the aggressive language of “spoliation” and “surrender.” One of the major differences between the 1897 original and James’s 1907 revision is the addition of more “connotatively loaded” words such as “spoils,” “tokens,” “relics,” and “mementoes” in place of the more neutral “documents” and “papers,” as if to further accentuate the dynamics of spoliation.92 In fact, it is only in the 1907 version of The Aspern Papers that James adds the reference to Sardanapalus. In one telling revision, James changes the narrator’s declaration from I would pay her with a smiling face what she asked, but in that case I would give myself the compensation of extracting the papers from her for nothing. (1888) to I would pay her with a smiling face what she asked, but in that case I would make it up by getting hold of my “spoils” for nothing. (1908) The narrator’s boastful tone, “getting hold” of his “ ‘spoils’ for nothing,” highlights the way his predatory quest is elevated—­rather than debased—­through its overt vio­lence.93 The narrator’s monomania transforms him from a savvy collector into a common thief as he is apprehended by Miss Bordereau, who looms before him in her nightgown like a frightening specter: her “extraordinary eyes . . . ​glared at me, they w ­ ere like the sudden drench, for a caught burglar, a flood of gaslight; they made me feel horribly ashamed.”94 It is as if the compulsion to collect perpetually threatens to devolve into what Benjamin terms “dangerous though domesticated passions” as the individual stops at nothing to obtain his or her object.95 The narrator’s relentless attempts to possess have far-­reaching ramifications that contribute to Juliana’s death and her niece’s destruction of the papers. Unlike the unsuspecting Venetians who belatedly realize the cost of their “sacrifice,” Juliana is all too aware of his schemes.96 She parrots the narrator by employing the same bellicose language: “Do you dream that you can get off with less than six months? Do you dream that even by the end of that time you’ll be appreciably nearer your victory?”97 Poor Tina, on the other hand, is described as a “perfectly artless and considerably witless w ­ oman” who is “capable of ­doing almost anything to please a person markedly kind to her.”98 Her first words to the narrator are “Nothing h ­ ere is mine,” as if to dispel any illusion of power and thus shirk all responsibility.99 Sensing Tina’s meekness,

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the narrator tries to “bribe” her with attention and “charming influences,” hoping to “make her turn in some way against her aunt.”100 Yet, as she helplessly confesses to the narrator, “Why I have no control of her. It’s she who controls me . . . ​I’ve always done every­thing she has asked for.”101 Like so many of James’s novels, The Aspern Papers has no space for a functional relationship predicated on reciprocity. Owner­ship is equated with control; t­ hose who possess ­things are ­those who can manipulate other ­people. Tina, like Fleda Vetch, is depicted as a naive, submissive young ­woman u ­ nder the control of a stronger, older hoarder-­type figure. Without property in the Jamesean economy, Tina and Fleda are tools to be acted on rather than agents. ­After Juliana’s death, the narrator once again tries to secure his spoils through deceit rather than l­egal means. Proclaiming, “I could not accept. I could not, for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridicu­lous, pathetic, provincial old ­woman,” he rejects the possibility of the most heteronormative ave­ nue of inheritance—­marriage, albeit to a ­woman well beyond her childbearing years.102 Perpetually driven by “stratagems and spoils,” the narrator brags, “I would not unite myself and yet I would have them.”103 Tina’s climactic decision to burn the Aspern collection at the end of the novella ­frees her from ­these schemes. Like Fleda, who ultimately refuses Owen and thus abdicates owner­ ship of Poynton, Tina comes into her own through her act of dispossession. Even for the monomaniacal narrator, Tina is briefly transformed into an attractive, self-­possessed figure: “She stood in the ­middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon me, and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic. It beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridicu­lous old ­woman.”104 For Tina and Fleda, the price of self-­emancipation comes at the cost of dispossession, both in emotional and material m ­ atters; they must sacrifice their love interest as well as their claims to valuable trea­sures. Pervaded by the dialectical, interrelated themes of possession and renunciation, The Aspern Papers, like The Spoils of Poynton, follows the pattern of most of James’s novels, which typically begin with a desire to possess and end in the renunciation of erotic or material satisfaction. Far from the controlling hoarder her aunt was, Tina becomes the ultimate Sardanapalus in her own surprising act of renunciation. But rather than burning the papers in order to save them from misuse, she burns them to save herself.

Portrait of an Author as a Hoarder The Aspern Papers’ professionalized collector-­as-­editor represents an impor­tant shift away from wealthy dilettantes like Newman and Verver who collect as a

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way to show off their self-­made fortunes. The character constellation in James’s Roderick Hudson is reminiscent of the strict separation between ­career and hobby in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Collector and His Circle, outlined in the introduction. Rowland Mallet, the wealthy art collector who lacks artistic talent, is perfectly complemented by Roderick, a talented but poor young artist. In The Aspern Papers, however, the narrator’s collection is an extension of his professional life as an editor focused on Jeffrey Aspern.105 He anticipates a modernist collector like Carl Einstein, whose collection of African artifacts is bound up with his vocation as a critic and writer. To what extent the narrator is himself an author remains an open question. He tells Tina, “I read a good deal, but I d­ on’t often write.”106 Claiming to act as an advocate or mouthpiece for dead poets, he writes “about the books of other p­ eople . . . ​better ones than myself: the ­great writers mainly, the ­great phi­los­o­phers and poets of the past; t­hose who are dead and gone and c­ an’t, poor darlings, speak for themselves.”107 Through the persona of the narrator, The Aspern Papers raises fundamental questions about the responsibility of the writer and critic in reconstructing the past. One exchange between him and Juliana is particularly revealing: “Do you think it’s right to rake up the past?” “I ­don’t feel that I know what you mean by raking it up. How can we get at it ­unless we dig a ­little? The pre­sent has such a rough way of treading it down.” “Oh I like the past, but I d­ on’t like critics,” my hostess declared with her hard complacency. “Neither do I, but I like their discoveries.” “­Aren’t they mostly lies?” “The lies are what they sometimes discover,” I said, smiling at the quiet impertinence of this. “They often lay bare the truth.” “The truth is God’s, it ­isn’t man’s: we had better leave it alone. Who can judge of it?—­who can say?” “­We’re terribly in the dark, I know,” I admitted; “but if we give up trying what becomes of all the fine t­ hings? What becomes of the work I just mentioned, that of the ­g reat phi­los­o­phers and poets? It’s all vain words if ­there’s nothing to mea­sure it by.” “You talk as if you w ­ ere a tailor,” said Miss Bordereau whimsically.108 Anticipating Benjamin’s critique of historicism—­the subject of chapter  3​—​ ­Juliana incisively exposes the critic masquerading as a historian who deludedly believes his discovery to accurately represent the past. When Tina asks the narrator, “Do you write about him—do you pry into his life?”, she echoes her aunt

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to point out the way the critic, like the collector and historian, has a way of “digging up” and displacing the past.109 Concluding, “We had better leave it alone,” Juliana ultimately denounces the meddling critic-­collector who c­ auses upheaval in his ruthless quest for a “discovery.”110 This dialogue stages the clash between the collector, who seeks to unearth, displace, and make public, and the hoarder, who preserves, retreats from public scrutiny, and values privacy. H ­ ere, the two types of collectors delineated by Pamuk in The Museum of Innocence become actualized: the narrator-­collector is one of “The Proud Ones, t­ hose pleased to show their collections to the world,” whereas Juliana falls into the latter category of “The Bashful Ones, who hide away all they have accumulated (an unmodern disposition).”111 As in Pamuk’s novel, this dichotomy is amplified by the sexual politics of the novella: the female hoarder must hide her trea­sures from the rapacious male collector who seeks to possess and publish them.112 Hoarding—­personified by Juliana and James—is a bulwark against spoliation, exemplified by the greedy editor-­collector who quite literally tries to force open the closet. In the end, the chauvinist editor’s public imperative trumps the disorderly hoard of a voiceless old ­woman. Epitomized by her famous last lines—­“Ah you publishing scoundrel!”—­Miss Bordereau is worried more about the possibility of publication than theft.113 Her climactic deathbed accusation foregrounds the complex, ethical ramifications of collecting in the public domain. The narrator acknowledges his transgressions in a curious formulation that prefigures Juliana’s allegation: “I felt almost as base as the reporter of a newspaper who forces his way into a ­house of mourning.”114 Even his similes indicate the extent to which his attempt to possess the Aspern papers is predicated on his expectation of publicity. As justification, he claims to be acting in the public’s interest: “It ­isn’t for myself; ­there is no personal avidity in my desire. It is simply that they would be of such im­mense interest to the public, such immea­sur­able importance as a contribution to Jeffrey Aspern’s history.”115 In disputes over the fate of cultural trea­sures, the stated rationale of public interest has often obscured colonial motives to justify why, for example, the British Museum rather than the Egyptian Museum should exhibit ancient Egyptian trea­sures. Although professionally aligned with the narrator, James seems to identify with Juliana, whose fate lays bare his worst fears about a meddling editor who would possibly disclose “compromising” information.116 During a discussion with Tina, the narrator inquires, “Does she have them [the papers] out often?” “Not now, but she used to. She is very fond of them.” “In spite of their being compromising?”

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“Compromising?” Miss Tina repeated as if she was ignorant of the meaning of the word. I felt almost as one who corrupts the innocence of youth. “I mean their containing painful memories.” “Oh, I ­don’t think they are painful.” “You mean you ­don’t think they affect her reputation?”117 ­ ere James hints at his own anx­ie­ ties, thinly veiled in the narrator’s probing H questions, about authorial legacy and privacy in an age when “the public’s interest in authors’ private lives seemed to be outgrowing the interest in their literary works.”118 Notoriously guarded about his private life, James was especially concerned with preventing the publication of any details around his erotic relationships and ambivalent sexuality.119 This circumspect nature comes to life in John Singer Sargent’s portrait (figure 5), commissioned for James’s seventieth birthday. Although his face is illuminated, James’s eyes express a sense of reserve and skepticism—­precisely at the moment they meet the viewer, they seem to avert their gaze. The hand tucked into the side of his jacket—­a gesture of studied ease—is, upon closer inspection, awkwardly contorted as if he was grasping the fabric too tightly. A Sardanapalus in his own right, James “built one of the biggest bonfires in Anglo-­American literary history” in 1909 when he destroyed the letters, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and photo­graphs he had accumulated over forty years.120 In early 1909, James wrote to his editor that he had “sacrificed” many items in “a g­ reat garden-­fire of old rubbish and papers.”121 In 1915, the year before his death, James orchestrated another major conflagration. Although he was by no means the only modernist—­let alone author—to destroy his own archive, James’s bonfires reenact the most defiant gestures of his own characters.122 In addition to Tina’s momentous act, Miles burns his governess’s letter to his guardian in The Turn of the Screw, perhaps in a futile attempt to save his reputation, while Kate flings an unopened letter from Milly into the fire in The Wings of the Dove. In “Sir Dominick Ferrand,” an enterprising young writer ends up burning the compromising papers of a public figure rather than selling them. In The American, Newman thrusts “a paper containing a secret of the Bellegardes—­something which would damn them if it ­were known”—­into the fire rather than using it as valuable blackmail.123 Similarly, in Wharton’s House of Mirth, Lily Bart does the ethically upright but socially damaging ­thing by burning the valuable love letters that might have restored her reputation. If Mrs. Gereth did, in fact, burn Poynton as a final act of revenge, she would have been in good com­pany.124 The centrality of fire in James’s life and novels forges a link between his personal archive and fictional material collections through the question of

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Figure 5. ​Portrait of Henry James by John Singer Sargent (1913). James was a friend and admirer of Sargent, writing to his ­brother in 1884, “I have seen several times the gifted Sargent, whose work I admire exceedingly and who is a remarkably natu­ral and charming fellow.” Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1986), 124. The Morgan Museum’s exhibition Henry James and American Painting (2017) featured many of ­these works. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

perpetuity. Perpetuity, or what Benjamin labels “heritability,” is the collection’s ability to survive transfer or dispersion in an externally recognizable form. Epitomized by Adam Verver’s “American City,” heritability is a central concern for collectors who long to secure the posterity of their trea­sures. At first glance, the act of setting fire to one’s own possessions seems to be a radical act of dispossession that intrinsically opposes the construction of a collection. Yet The Aspern Papers reveals that the arsonist is the ultimate hoarder who would rather destroy a collection than risk contamination by dispersing it or sharing it with ­others. Like Tina, James preemptively destroys his papers to prevent anyone from gaining control of them.125 The collector and hoarder represent two opposing strate-

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gies in controlling the fate of an archive or collection; while the narrator seeks to publish the papers, Juliana hoards them to keep them private. Collecting—as stated in the introduction—is si­mul­ta­neously destructive (insofar as the original object is transfigured or destroyed) and creative (insofar as it assem­bles new objects). The destructive side of collecting takes shape in the climactic fires that destroy James’s own archive and the many collections in his fiction. Fire, notes Ulrike Vedder, is a ubiquitous motif in the destruction of museums and libraries in film and lit­er­a­ture.126 As Myrrha, one of Sardanapalus’s slave mistresses, consoles herself in Byron’s play, “At the least, / My fate is in my keeping: no proud victor / S­ hall count me with his spoils.”127 Immolation is the only surefire way to prevent spoliation. By burning his archive, James seeks to preempt precisely the acts of editorial appropriation that his fictional narrator-­editor attempts to pull off. As James instructed his nephew in 1914, “My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as pos­ si­ble the post-­mortem exploiter—­which, I know, is but so imperfectly pos­si­ ble.”128 James’s anx­ie­ ties coalesce around the way critics might revise or appropriate his work ­after he is “dead and gone and ­can’t, poor darling, speak for [himself].”129 His act of destruction is part and parcel of his larger obsession with curating and revising his work in order to shape his literary legacy, most evident in the New York edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James, published between 1907 and 1909.130 In a 1908 letter to W. D. Howells, James writes of his attempt to curate his papers: “They o ­ ught, collected together, none the less, to form a sort of comprehensive manual or vade mecum for aspirants in our arduous profession. Still, it w ­ ill be long before I s­ hall want to collect them together for that purpose and furnish them with a final Preface.”131 Arranging, editing, and penning the prefaces, James effectively becomes the editor of his own work. Similarly, by burning his papers, according to Ellen Brown, he “reenacted a narrative of revision” that offered an alternative approach to dealing with the work of the dead writer.132 Examined against the backdrop of The Aspern Papers, James’s attempt to curate his literary legacy is symptomatic of his hoarding tendencies. Along similar lines, James’s obsessive post-­publication revisions are yet another manifestation of his compulsion to control e­ very aspect of the writing pro­cess. Hannah ­Sullivan reads Dencombe—­the aging author in “The ­Middle Years”—as a foil for James, who is “serially addicted” to revising his work ­after it is published: “He [Dencombe] threatens to alienate his readers, publishers, even the collectors of his work by restricting its dissemination. His continual revision also has a more personal cost. Although it begins as a ‘treat,’ as a private, passionate act of self-­pleasuring, the plea­sure quickly sours.”133 While

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S­ ullivan ­doesn’t compare his perfectionism to hoarding, her language is suggestive; much like hoarding, James’s obsessive revisions—­thinly veiled in fiction—­ are private and for his own gratification, alienating his editors and collectors. It is thus not surprising that S­ ullivan’s interpretation of “revision as a response to trauma, a kind of repetition” overlaps with the clinical diagnosis of hoarding, which also manifests itself as a response to trauma or loss.134 Dencombe’s compulsion to revise is even experienced by his most avid readers as interfering with their role: “The second chance has been the public’s—­the chance to find the point of view, to pick up the pearl.”135 The author’s gain is the reader’s loss. The distinction between collector and hoarder often becomes a normatively charged conversation about what is worthy of being saved and who has the socially sanctioned right to control it. James’s textual hoarding is not merely a reaction to Victorian clutter and its literary analogues; it is deeply rooted in his preoccupation with privacy and authorial self-­fashioning. James’s biographical act of renunciation jostles uncomfortably with his most poignant themes of expropriation, appropriation, and cultural amnesia. By destroying his archive, James is guilty of the violent erasure many of his own characters commit. Hoarding is as much a frantic, restless act of amassing ­things as it is an obsessive concern with controlling their owner­ship and circulation.136

A “Grain of Gold” It would be a m ­ istake to classify James as only a hoarder. In spite of all his protestations, he was ultimately also a collector in his own right. James’s writing pro­cess is informed by a modernist practice of collecting, which is most evident in his strategies of compilation and appropriation. On the most basic level, James’s aleatory methodology of note-­taking and list-­making is a pro­cess of compilation. His surviving notebooks provide insight into the origins of his characters’ names, which w ­ ere meticulously collected from vari­ous sources. Scattered throughout his journals are lists of names that he encountered in vari­ ous newspapers, publications, or real life and noted for pos­si­ble f­ uture use.137 For instance, he jotted down “Gereth,” “Brigstock,” and “Waterbath” as part of the same list in an entry dated March 4, 1895, while the name “Mona” was part of a dif­fer­ent list of names collected several months l­ater.138 As opposed to the name “Gilbert Osmond,” which was jotted down as a single entity in a 1879 entry, the first and last names of the characters in The Spoils of Poynton ­were listed separately and presumably compiled at a l­ater date.139 The assembly of ­these names helps explain the allegorical, typecast quality of characters such as Christopher Newman, Adam Verver, and Amerigo, whose names

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­ ere gleaned from other sources. Critics have often noticed the intertextual w dimensions of James’s character names, but a modernist reading of James foregrounds the self-­conscious constructedness of t­ hese names.140 Compiling his ideas, names, and images from vari­ous sources, James’s textual strategies share significant similarities with Benjamin’s archive of citations in The Arcades Proj­ ect and Einstein’s use of montage and collage in Documents. Though certainly not the first or only writer to adopt this magpie approach, James was one of the first realists to come out as a compiler, consciously adopting copy and paste as an alternative to the Romantic model of genius creation.141 He describes writing The Spoils of Poynton as a pro­cess through which he found “his vital particle, his grain of gold” amid an array of “splendid waste”: “Life has no direct sense what­ever for the subject and is capable, luckily, of nothing but splendid waste. Hence the opportunity for the sublime economy of art, which rescues, which saves and hoards and ‘banks,’ investing and reinvesting ­these fruits of toil in wondrous useful ‘works’ and thus making up for us, desperate spendthrifts that we all naturally are, the most princely of incomes.”142 In the preface to a novel about a hoarder, James instructively characterizes his own creative practice as one that “saves,” “hoards,” and “banks.” The task of the writer, then, becomes one of “rescuing” rather than creating. James’s rhe­toric prefigures both Benjamin’s salvage collector in “Unpacking My Library” and The Arcades Proj­ect’s fascination with the author as ragpicker, who feeds off “the rags, the refuse” of the nineteenth ­century.143 Like Benjamin and his beloved poet Charles Baudelaire, James rescues the object from “splendid waste” in order to reuse and transform it. Both James and Benjamin conceptualize storytelling in material terms as a pro­cess of collecting. Absorbing and appropriating heterogeneous fragments is a natu­ral part of storytelling, James observes: “Improvisation, as in the Arabian Nights, may keep on terms with encountered objects by sweeping them in and floating them on its breast.”144 His reference to The Arabian Nights is not coincidental; like his own fiction, the tales employ a technique of collecting that integrates discrete “encountered objects” into their narratives. Similarly, according to Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” storytelling “does not aim to convey the pure ‘in itself ’ or gist of a t­ hing, like information or a report. It submerges the ­thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again.”145 Just as the object is embedded in a collection to be preserved, the story must be incorporated into the experience of the storyteller in order to be passed on. To highlight the recombinant nature of their literary craft, both Benjamin and James resort to a trope of germination. In the preface to The Ambassadors, James declares, “Never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion.”146 He uncannily anticipates Benjamin’s

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phraseology, which posits that a story “preserves and concentrates its strength [bewahrt ihre Kraft gesammelt] and is capable of releasing it even a­ fter a long time . . . ​It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the airtight chambers of the pyramids and have retained their germinative power [Keimkraft] to this day.”147 The storyteller who releases the grain to germinate in new soil is the antithesis of the hoarding author, who, like Dencombe, denies the public “the chance to find the point of view, to pick up the pearl.”148 This conceptualization of writing represents an outright rejection of the Romantic conceptions of originality, genius, and creatio ex nihilo.149 As his prefaces relate, each novel contains a par­tic­ul­ar “germ” that has been collected by James from vari­ous sources—­stories, newspapers, conversations—­and “grown” with “due freshness.”150 Just as he rummages through life’s “splendid waste” to find his germ in The Spoils of Poynton, James won­ders why “so fine a germ, gleaming ­there in the wayside dust of life, had never been deftly picked up” in the preface to The Turn of the Screw.151 The Aspern Papers pre­sents another instructive example of James’s textual gleaning. The “germ” that inspired the narrative was the “legend” of an “ardent Shelleyite” who had taken up lodging in Florence with an old w ­ oman rumored to once have been Byron’s mistress in hopes of procuring valuable Shelley documents ­after her death.152 Yet, unlike the historian, who “wants more documents than he can ­really use,” the writer, according to James, “takes more liberties than he can ­really take . . . ​Nine tenths of the artist’s interest in them [facts] is that of what he s­ hall add to them and how he ­shall turn them.”153 This authorial appropriation “turns” facts just like the collector transforms existing objects by importing them into another framework. Reading James alongside Benjamin and Einstein as a self-­professed literary collector sharpens our attunement to his modernist sensibilities. Anticipating the conceptual meta­phors of James Joyce, who alternately referred to himself as a literary “engineer” and a “scissors and paste man,” James characterizes himself as an architect working with preexisting material rather than a genius creator.154 As an “outfit” for the “germ” of The Portrait of a Lady, James constructs a “large building” or “square and spacious ­house,” just as a collector builds a cabinet around his collection of objects.155 Writing is a pro­cess of “piling brick upon brick” in order to “erect on such a plot of ground the neat and careful and proportioned pile of bricks that arches over it and that was thus to form, constructionally-­speaking, a literary monument.”156 With his architectural imagery, James prefigures Benjamin’s allegorist-­collector who “piles up fragments” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama and constructs passages in The Arcades Proj­ect.157 James’s most impor­tant “germs” ­were his own impressions, which he collected in a similarly methodical way.158 In a 1904 letter to his editor, James

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Pinker, he writes, “My state is most prosperous . . . ​I feel the w ­ hole t­ hing quite inspiring, in fact, to ­doing my book of Impressions; that as far as seeing, observing, and collecting material &c, goes -­for all of which I am in possession, evidently, of the very best advantages.”159 Using the trope of possession once again, James suggests that his pro­cess lies in the way he “collects material,” in the ilk of the ethnographer or natu­ral historian, impor­tant foils for Einstein and Benjamin.160 In his methodology of collecting impressions and experiences, James resembles his most famous heroine, Isabel Archer, who wishes to “begin by getting a general impression of life.”161 Not coincidentally does the word impression appear forty-­six times in The Portrait of a Lady.162 What is strikingly modernist about James’s practice of collecting is the way he, like Benjamin and Einstein, openly advocates its transformational properties. In the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James describes the way his writing is a pro­cess of translating impressions or images into writing. He frequently deploys the meta­phor of translation to describe the transformation of an image or idea into writing, stating, “The girl hovers, inextinguishable, as a charming creature, and the job ­will be to translate her into the highest terms of that formula.”163 Like their author, his characters often “translate” each other into material objects, works of art, or texts. The notion of “translating” an image into writing resembles the literary technique of Einstein, who, like James, straddled the worlds of lit­er­a­ture and visual art. Both James and Einstein draw on visual art to address what they perceived to be the limitations of literary expression. James suffered from what Ruth Yeazell has called “portrait envy” while Einstein—as chapter 6 shows—­was similarly riddled with doubts about the efficacy of literary expression when confronted with the immediacy of visual art.164 Framing his writing pro­cess as a mode of translation, James highlights the mediated composition of texts. This meta­phor also interrogates the existence of a stable, accessible original just as the proliferation of Jamesean character types in novels obfuscate any “original” characters. To claim facts rather than genius as the basis of his craft and “translation” as his primary strategy is a decidedly modernist gesture. Even in his own reflections, James distances himself from creative writing practices. Noting Honoré de Balzac’s fa­cil­i­ty with description, James points out, “Portraits shape themselves ­under his pen as if in obedience to an irresistible force; while the effort with most writers is to collect the material—to secure the model.”165 James was likely juxtaposing his own rigorous methodology of collecting “germs” or impressions with Balzac’s seemingly effortless composition. ­Whether or not Balzac’s writing pro­cess was, in fact, as seamless as James conjectured, this characterization shows that James conceived of himself as a very dif­fer­ent kind of writer. As Millicent Bell muses, “James may

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still have wondered w ­ hether a modern could hope to be creative in the g­ rand Romantic way. In his relation to active life and love James may have felt himself closer to his fictional researcher than to Shelley or Byron . . . ​His life . . . ​ was no Romantic poem.”166 While James is not known for avant-­garde techniques like fragmentation or montage, his patchwork artistic pro­cess has a distinctly modernist valence. Early in his c­ areer, James experimented with the collaging of quotations and paintings in texts like “My Friend Bingham,” long before it became a modernist tool.167 Gathering steam t­ oward the end of his c­ areer, James’s obsessive revisionary tactics began approximating the practices of younger modernists. As ­Sullivan notes, “James became a more experimental, additive and accretive writer . . . ​Some of his bizarre habits of extension might even be called Joycean.”168 The final posthumous publication of his autobiography—­also entitled The ­Middle Years—­appeared “modern” ­because of its “multilayered mix of preface, text, and notes.”169 Although widely divergent in structure and purpose, James’s unfinished final product shares surprising affinities with the multilayered, montage form of The Arcades Proj­ect. This confluence suggests that James’s modernist turn occurred on the level of artistic praxis as well as stylistics and themes.170

“Columbus upon the Isle of San Salvador” Labeling James a literary collector risks placing him in the com­pany of Aspern’s editor, Osmond, Mrs. Gereth, and some of his most unscrupulous characters. Yet it is hard to ignore the moments when James seems to take on the role of the spoiler, especially while describing his own writing pro­cess. He introduces The Aspern Papers in the following way: I not only recover with ease, but I delight to recall, the first impulse given to the idea of “The Aspern Papers.” It is at the same time true that my pre­sent mention of it may perhaps too effectively dispose of any complacent claim to my having “found” the situation. Not that I quite know indeed what situations the seeking fabulist does “find;” he seeks them enough as­suredly, but his discoveries are, like ­those of the navigator, the chemist, the biologist, scarce more than recognitions. He comes upon the in­ter­est­ing t­hing as Columbus came upon the isle of San Salvador, ­because he had moved in the right direction for it—­also ­because he knew, with the encounter, what “making land” then and ­there represented. Nature had so placed it, to profit—if as profit we may mea­sure the ­matter!—

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by his fine unrest, just as history, “literary history,” we in this connexion call it, had in an out-­of-­the-­way corner of the g­ reat garden of life thrown off a curious flower that I was to feel worth gathering as soon as I saw it. I got wind of my positive fact, I followed the scent.171 In the preface to a tale that stages the evils of appropriation, James characterizes himself as a literary conqueror. Just as Columbus encounters Amer­i­ca rather than “discovering” it, the writer “finds” his object rather than creating it. Given The American’s satirical portrait of Christopher Newman as a nouveau riche Columbus, James’s depiction of the writer as a Columbus figure seems rather unbecoming. He inserts himself into the pantheon of shameless collector-­explorers whose practices are bound up with a desire to conquer and possess, such as Mrs. Gereth with her “loud lawful tactless joy of the explorer leaping upon the strand. Like any other lucky discoverer she would take possession of the fortunate island.”172 James’s account of his “find” echoes verbatim the rhe­toric of Mrs. Gereth, who tells Fleda, “­You’re my best find.”173 ­There is one crucial difference between James’s triumphant account of his “find” and The Aspern Paper’s conniving narrator: James is successful in his publication where the narrator fails. Reflecting the notion that the victor or conqueror writes history, perhaps the successful writer can gloss over his appropriative practices. Given his forceful critiques of appropriation, it is worth considering why James, by his own admission, takes on some of the most appropriative tendencies of his characters. Depicting his mind as a veritable pawnshop in the preface to The Portrait of the Lady, James describes writing as a pro­cess of collecting that acquires and instrumentalizes a character. The genesis of the novel, he explains, came about through “my grasp of a single character—an acquisition I had made.”174 Just as in the novels of Ivan Turgenev, a major influence on James, character precedes and often determines the plot: The figure has . . . ​been placed in the imagination that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence in the dusky, crowded heterogeneous back-­shop of the mind very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends, competent to make an “advance” on rare objects confided to him, is conscious of the rare ­little “piece” left in deposit by the reduced, mysterious lady of title or the speculative amateur, and which is already t­ here to disclose its merit afresh as soon as a key s­ hall have clicked in a cupboard-­door . . . ​I quite remind myself thus of a dealer resigned not to “realise,” resigned to keeping the precious object locked up in­def­initely, rather than commit it, at no m ­ atter what price, 175 to vulgar hands.

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Characterizing his own mind as a “dusky, crowded heterogeneous back-­shop,” he recalls both The Golden Bowl’s curiosity shop where Charlotte buys the eponymous bowl as well as the “old shop” disparagingly invoked by Mona and Owen to refer to Mrs. Gereth’s collection. But like Juliana Bordereau, James instinctively seeks to hoard by “keeping the precious object locked up in­def­ initely.”176 To write, he implies, is to cease hoarding his trea­sure by releasing it into written form and, ultimately, into public circulation. Considering the drama surrounding Aspern’s papers, it is hard not to interpret a similar impulse in James’s unease with “committing” Isabel, his “precious object,” to the “vulgar hands” of the reading public.177 Calling Isabel “the rare ­little piece,” James recalls Osmond, who sought to acquire Isabel into his “collection of choice objects.”178 The gender dynamics of James’s “acquisition” seem particularly unsettling when James describes “the image of the young feminine nature that I had for so considerable time all curiously at my disposal.”179 The characteristically avuncular James sounds particularly patriarchal when he maintains that Isabel is a “treasure” to be “preserved, protected,” and ultimately “displayed” in the most favorable “light.”180 Is what James “does” with Isabel so dif­fer­ent from Osmond’s manipulative schemes? Or is writing, for James, implicated in a pro­cess of spoliation? Alluding to the double sense of the “nefarious” word plot with all of its connotations of “designs,” “schemes,” and “contrivances” that James himself invokes, Bell argues that Isabel is the “victim of narrative ideas of what she ­will be and do, which ­others try to impose on her.”181 Thus, Isabel, according to Bell, becomes a “character in search of a plot” on several levels: the traditional marriage plot, vari­ous plots contrived by other characters, and fi­nally on the level of the novel itself.182 Even Ralph, the benevolent champion of Isabel’s freedom, becomes a plotter, bequeathing her a fortune to “put a ­little wind in her sails.”183 By introducing the traditional marriage plot with its attractive heroine and bevy of suitors, Bell continues, “James’s story promotes our expectations of such narrative development” and “implicates the reader . . . ​by the force of literary tradition.”184 As a result, she concludes, Isabel is no less trapped by James’s narrative than by the marriage plot of Osmond and Merle. At the same time, t­ here is an ethical valence to James’s self-­professed “pious desire to place my trea­sure right” absent from the plots of his avaricious characters.185 Casting James as a literary pawnbroker, Sharon Oster examines James’s prologue to The Portrait of a Lady: “For James the question becomes not ­whether to sell, but rather to whom? In effect, James passes to us an ethical responsibility to receive his trea­sure, not with ‘vulgar hands,’ but ‘right.’ ”186 As a cosmopolitan shop­keeper at the center of exchange, Oster notes, James’s role has strong parallels with the historical position of the Jew.187 At the other end of

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this cap­i­tal­ist exchange is the reader, who occupies the role of the customer. It is impor­tant for Oster’s thesis to portray James as a middleman rather than a collector, since collecting, as Jean Baudrillard’s analy­sis of use value cited in the introduction suggests, takes its objects out of economic circulation. Oster’s interpretation raises impor­tant considerations for an analy­sis of the collector: Is James’s writing more of a form of dispensing or selling rather than a pro­cess of collecting? She concludes, “James’s meta­phor of the writer-­ as-­pawnbroker forces us to see something far less obvious about writing: that producing fiction is neither a business of buying cheap and selling dear, nor of creation ex nihilo. Rather, it is a pro­cess of value production, just as the ritual exchange, placement, and re-­contextualization of objects renders them socially valuable.”188 Through a dif­fer­ent line of argumentation that depicts James as a cosmopolitan literary pawnbroker, Oster arrives at a similar conclusion: James’s writing is an alternative to notions of creatio ex nihilo by transforming existing objects. Although Oster does not elaborate on this point, it actually contradicts her central argument. If James is preoccupied with the “placement” and “re-­contextualization” of his objects, he resembles a collector who is concerned with the affective, ethical dimensions of possession rather than a shop­keeper whose objective is merely to sell to the highest bidder. “Resigned to keeping the precious object locked up in­def­initely,” rather than entrusting it to “vulgar hands,” James is the collector as would-be hoarder who contemplates his legacy as he decides w ­ hether and where to exhibit his “find.”189 James’s role as a collector raises the question, can t­ here be an ethical collector who re­spects the freedom of his objects, whose purpose is not merely unbridled possession? In her study of James’s relationship with the visual arts, Viola Winner concludes, “Art collecting becomes a sign of a wrong, an arbitrary relationship to the past if the collector or connoisseur views art purely aesthetically and acquisitively, not as an expression of h ­ uman life.”190 The blind spot in Winner’s argument, as James’s work reflects, is that aesthetics and acquisition always underpin the drive for collection, particularly art collecting. Winner assumes that collecting must always have some kind of representative or epistemological relationship with the past when, in fact, it is always an act of transformation. Just as James translates found “germs” into fictional narratives, skilled collectors import objects into a new aesthetic framework. Like her modernist successors, Mrs. Gereth’s concern is not to reconstruct the past; she is an artist guided by “her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience of the collector.”191 Collecting, particularly in its modernist instantiation, has an ethically dubious dimension by appropriating and decontextualizing its spoils without properly acknowledging their history or origins.

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In James’s terms, the ethics of collecting could be rephrased in another way: How can the author treat characters as autonomous beings rather than mere playthings, “precious objects,” or agents of the plot?192 Trying to avoid the “nefarious” novelistic technique of plotting, James emphasizes the freedom of his characters to circulate freely in his novels to realize their own development.193 Isabel is a case in point. In the preface, James describes the “germinal property and authority” of the character, which trumps the plot or setting: “I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting . . . ​which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the ­horse. I might envy, though I c­ ouldn’t emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards.”194 Highlighting the power his “germs” exert over the narrative, James once again contrasts his writing style with his literary foil, the Balzacian “imaginative writer” who seems to invent his fable out of nothing.195 Even in The Spoils of Poynton, in which characters largely function as personal accessories to the furniture, James acknowledges the autonomy of his characters, who sometimes defy his authorial control. He claims, “I had intended to make Fleda ‘fall in love’ with Owen . . . ​But I had not intended to represent a feeling of this kind on Owen’s part. Now, however, I have done so; in my last ­little go at the ­thing, it inevitably took that turn and I must accept the idea and work it out.”196 Rather than following a predetermined plot, he defers to the internal momentum of characters.197 Hence, he concludes in the preface to The American, the writing pro­cess inheres not in “an author’s plotting and planning and calculating, but just of his feeling and seeing, of his conceiving.”198 This rhe­toric distinguishes James from hoarders who refuse to give up control over their objects at any cost. He also echoes the sentiments of fanatical collectors, like Benjamin, whose manias lead them to feel as though they eventually cede control to their objects. As the next chapter proposes, the idea of emancipation is an illusion that the collector, like the writer, harbors. James is never fully able to relinquish his power, just as his protagonists are unable to find true freedom. Bell notes that James is still subject to the limitations of his narrative form: “He would like to create a character f­ ree of the obligation to determine itself in limiting action; he would prefer to believe in the immanence of personality and its unquenchable potentiality. Yet t­ here is no other way to tell stories than to suppress some of the infinitude of ­human possibility.”199 James, like Isabel, must come to terms with the limitations of his freedom, namely as an author and hence a plotter. To represent is to frame, which is why Isabel becomes doubly framed in The Portrait of a Lady, as both a repre­sen­ta­tion of her sinister hus-

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band and a character circumscribed by the novel. Ultimately writing, like collecting, reinforces the authority of the author at the cost of the subject. One of James’s most innocuous collectors is Rosier, who is willing to give up his collection to obtain his love object, Pansy—­Osmond’s d­ aughter. Although he adores his bibelots, he sells most of them to try to secure Osmond’s approval for his suit. Horrified by his impetuous action, which undermines his very viability as a suitor, Isabel notes drily, “It was well that Mr. Edward Rosier kept his enamels!”200 On a material level, Rosier does with his bibelots what James does with Isabel by deciding to release her rather than “keeping the precious object locked up in­def­initely” in his “cupboard.”201 In James’s materialistic universe, ­there is no example of benign owner­ship: collectors who are not preoccupied with unfettered possession lose their value once they give up their collections. For James, publishing is like dispersing or transferring a collection, which necessitates the surrender of one’s private possessions to public exhibition. One of the hallmarks of hoarders is the tendency to avoid displaying their objects.202 In this re­spect, the hoarder is the antithesis of the collector, who is able to showcase the collection in order to guarantee its perpetuity. Poised uncomfortably between his private, hoarding impulse and his public, professional persona, James strug­gles to surrender his “precious objects” to public circulation.203 Writing, for James, becomes a means to relinquish control and disperse the “germs” he has gathered. As James’s revisions, editions, and prefaces reveal, he was fundamentally uneasy with public scrutiny as he continually sought to control his works. His bonfire of 1909 quite literally represents another form of consumption, but one that signals absolute possession through total dispossession. In order to achieve ultimate control, the hoarder, like Sardanapalus, must destroy the object to remove it from circulation. In contrast to the collector, who surrenders a collection to the public domain, the immolator, like the hoarder, claims absolute authority in the negation of public consumption.

Pa rt T w o

Between Salvation and Revolution Walter Benjamin’s Conflicted Collector Collecting ­ought to be something other than a self-­indulgent capitalization of aesthetic values. Collecting is meaningful if it represents a bold intervention into time; if through a collection that which has been historically defined is reassessed. The collector who passionately reshapes refuses the comfortable terrain of spiritual and optical nonchalance. He discovers areas that elude established standards; in short, the collector as explorer. —­Carl Einstein, “Dr. G. F. Reber,” 121

During the biblical flood, Noah’s Ark becomes an archive. Ordered by God to collect two types of each animal, Noah assem­bles an ark that constitutes a complete set of all surviving creatures ­until he reaches dry land. In The Cultures of Collecting, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal identify Noah as the first collector, whose ark is “the unique bastion against the deluge of time,” foregrounding the temporal, preservationist dimension of collecting.1 If collecting becomes a self-­conscious preservation of a lost or disappearing world, does it entail a certain practice of history, transforming the collector into a historian and the historian into a collector? If so, collecting becomes a time-­sensitive ­battle against the threat of dispersion, and the prospect of destruction gives the collection a par­tic­ul­ar urgency. While describing his own archive in “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin espouses a vision of collecting that echoes Noah’s task: “To renew the old

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world—­this is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire ­things.”2 The task of renewal introduces another dimension of collecting that seems to conflict with preservation, namely, the impetus to generate and transform. Benjamin elaborates: “One of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, ­because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it to give it its freedom—­the way the prince bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom [wahre Freiheit] of all books is somewhere on his shelves.”3 Benjamin’s Orientalist analogy is another case of indeterminate ontology; when a collector becomes possessed, objects become p­ eople and ­people become objects. On the one hand, he articulates the collector’s fantasy of the Noachian rescue or deliverance of an object. From this vantage point, book collecting is a type of salvage collecting—­a conservative practice that falls u ­ nder the purview of Nietz­sche’s concept of antiquarian history, which “knows only to preserve [bewahren] life, not how to generate it [zeugen].”4 On the other hand, Benjamin’s suggestion that the collection grants “true freedom” to its object attests to the conflicted nature of collecting, which renews and transforms while trying to preserve its object. Benjamin’s analogy also provides an impor­tant clue to the intrinsic dynamic of collecting; the collector seeks to f­ ree his objects from the despotic control of an unworthy possessor. By extricating the object from its former context, the collection endows it with the freedom to achieve a new kind of existence within its transformative framework. Yet, even if collecting is staged as a l­abor of love, it is never an innocuous practice, as Benjamin’s “beautiful slave girl” highlights. Not only does the prince have to purchase the girl’s “freedom,” but “true freedom” is from the collector’s perspective; for the slave girl, it merely means that she changes hands to her new keeper. As Benjamin warns in the epigraph to part 1, “­There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Just as such a document is not ­free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.”5 Rather than a liberator, the prince is simply the latest installation in the “triumphal pro­cession” of conquerors.6 Like James’s avuncular desire to “preserve” and “protect” Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, Benjamin’s slave girl analogy reveals that collecting is often underpinned by a gendered, racist fantasy of mastery and owner­ship even as it conceives of itself as liberating and progressive.7 Collections have a dialectical or even paradoxical character; they preserve precisely by decontextualizing the object. The collector disrupts an existing order by extracting objects from their original context and placing them in a new schema. In order to save selected animals, Noah has to remove them from



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land. In its inability to reconstruct the context of its objects, the collection becomes a site of transformation rather than preservation. While the collection preserves the object from destruction, it also signals a kind of figurative death by extraction and decontextualization. To survive the flood, the animals enter the ark—­arguably history’s first natu­ral history museum or zoo.8 An avid collector who himself theorized collecting, Benjamin elegantly embodies the tension between collecting as a historical, at times antiquarian, technique and a transformative artistic practice with revolutionary implications. He was possessed by a lifelong “Sammelmanie” (mania for collecting), which, according to Berlin Childhood around 1900, began in boyhood with butterflies, picture postcards, and stamps, ­later continued with his collections of baroque emblems, toys, and rare books, and ultimately culminated in his archive of citations and quotations in The Arcades Proj­ect. Hannah Arendt goes so far as to insist that “collecting was Benjamin’s central passion.”9 As a passionate collector, Benjamin inscribes his objects with life, meaning, and subjective value. It is in the collector’s passion that we find an irreverent, personal impulse that differs fundamentally from the ambitious repre­sen­ta­tional or mimetic claims of museums, libraries, and other public institutions. In keeping with the central dialectics of collecting, this passion can be both revolutionary and reactionary. None of Benjamin’s objects w ­ ere as si­mul­ta­neously playful and fetishistic as his Rus­sian toy collection, amassed during his 1926 visit to Moscow. Instead of acquiring modern Soviet souvenirs of his travels, he collects pre­industrial Rus­ sian toys in order to salvage them from rapid modernization. In his Noachian impetus to preserve, Benjamin assumes the role of an ethnographer who saves indigenous cultures by documenting them. At the same time, Benjamin’s collection is a site of transformation which rips toys out of their context and exhibits them in new ways. Through the lens of Benjamin’s toys, chapter 3 examines the contradiction within collecting between preservation and transformation, locating a distinct tension between his theory of collecting as a historical practice of conservation and his modernist appreciation for the object as singular, artistic, and transformative. Arguing that his practice of collecting replicates the primitivist impulse of ethnography, this chapter builds on the work of Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett and James Clifford to recast a theme in Benjamin’s work that has received relatively ­little critical attention. Reading Benjamin against the grain—­and, at times, against himself—­chapter 3 explores the dialectics of collecting that occasionally jostle uncomfortably with Benjamin’s radical politics.10 Benjamin’s archive (The Arcades Proj­ect) is programmatically related to his ark (his toy collection). Although it has thus far been overlooked in the secondary lit­er­a­ture on collecting, Benjamin’s Rus­sian toy collection is critical to understanding the composition and methodology of The Arcades Proj­ect.

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Most of the scholarship on Benjamin’s collection has focused on his lifelong penchant for books.11 Instead, chapters 3 and 4 show that Benjamin’s fraught, ethnographic relationship with Rus­sian toys provides an impor­tant clue to his revolutionary citational praxis in The Arcades Proj­ect, which seeks to blast ­things from their original context. Both are constitutive of a patchwork modernist aesthetic that values fragments, curiosities, and spoils. The toy collection also enables us to rethink Benjamin’s famous concept of aura as a transformational, historically contingent notion. Toys are transitional objects whose aura is always already in flux. Reading the Moscow Diary alongside The Arcades Proj­ect allows us to see more clearly the way Benjamin redefines collecting with all of its revolutionary artistic and po­liti­cal possibilities. Pairing The Arcades Proj­ect with Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I, chapter 4 examines ragpicking as a methodology of writing. The unique temporality of gleaning allows Benjamin to reimagine both the text and history as nonlinear, digressive, and open-­ended. By repurposing waste, the ragpicker, like the hoarder, questions what merits being saved and by whom. The modernist collector resembles Benjamin’s allegorist in The Origin of German Tragic Drama who recognizes the arbitrary connection between an object and its meaning and acknowledges the impossibility of completing a collection. Allegory—­like collecting—­introduces an alternative form of artistic production based on creative curation rather than Romantic notions of creatio ex ni­ hilo. For Benjamin, collecting becomes a type of second-­order creation that creates out of existing materials.

C h a p te r   3

The Collector in a Collectivist State

During his two-­month sojourn in Moscow from December 1926 to January 17, 1927, intended to establish literary relations with Soviet intellectuals and secure the affections of Asja Lacis, his Latvian love interest, Walter Benjamin seems to have been concerned with one t­hing: toy shopping.1 In the Moscow Diary, which recorded his impressions of the trip, his observations on Soviet life and politics are trumped by over thirty-­five references to toys, from his visits to the Rus­sian Toy Museum to his fixation with purchasing old Rus­sian toys. Imbued with a pathos and accessibility absent from the rest of this elusive city, ­these toys supplant the Muscovites to become the real protagonists of his diary. Disoriented and heartbroken, Benjamin resorts to collecting when he fails to connect with Moscow on a po­liti­ cal, artistic, or erotic level. Like John, the politician-­turned-­collector in ­Virginia Woolf ’s “Solid Objects,” Benjamin seeks meaning in objects while his alienating external real­ity loses relevance. Yet, Benjamin’s frenzied purchases are more than mere substitutes for his personal failures; they provide a tactile orientation in a foreign country that dovetails with his efforts to salvage the pre­ industrial Rus­sian toy. Collecting becomes a safeguard against the destruction of culture caused by modern production pro­cesses. Benjamin’s habits pre­sent an in­ter­est­ing counterpoint to his communist surroundings; as Rus­sians are shedding their private possessions, Benjamin is acquiring more and more; he is collecting while they are collectivizing. As 87

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Benjamin’s longest-­surviving autobiographical document, his Moscow Diary has been valued both for its depiction of Soviet culture and its insight into his personal relations and po­liti­cal reflections.2 What is less often discussed is the role collecting plays in his experiences. As the nexus of his personal preoccupations and his social and po­liti­cal circumstances, collecting offers a new perspective on Benjamin’s sojourn, which is not reflected in his failed relationships or evasive descriptions of Moscow. This watershed biographical moment also becomes a prism through which to reexamine two of Benjamin’s most impor­tant theoretical constructs: aura and historical materialism. Fi­nally, his intimate engagement with the material world of Soviet Moscow can help us productively reimagine object relations outside of the overdetermined Marxist framework of commodity fetishism. Of the existing scholarly examinations of Benjamin’s relationship with collecting, not a single one refers to his toy collection or links his praxis with the aims of salvage ethnography. Perhaps this lacuna stems from his own reluctance to label his toys a collection or to refer to himself as a toy collector. Benjamin’s reticence on the subject is especially curious in light of his self-­professed, lifelong “Sammelmanie” (mania for collecting), which ranged from butterflies in his boyhood to baroque emblems and rare books in his later life as a scholar and critic. None of ­these nineteenth-­century Rus­sian toys are extant in Benjamin’s bequest—­the only trace of their existence is scattered references across a few essays and eleven surviving photo­graphs, six of which are pictured in this book (figures 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 24). Nevertheless, they are key to understanding Benjamin’s modernist praxis of collecting. Following Gerhard Richter’s aim to situate Benjamin’s corpus in the context of his “impor­tant but often overlooked acts of self-­portraiture,” we can read the Rus­sian toy collection as a critical autobiographical moment that stages the complex childish, antiquarian, and playful dimensions of collecting more clearly than Benjamin’s l­ater essayistic reflections on collecting.3 Benjamin’s experiences in Moscow suggest that collecting is a subjective response to the basic h ­ uman need to orient oneself in the world. For Benjamin, the old Rus­sian toy is the consummate spoil, smuggled from a foreign country and distant past. Poised somewhere between a child’s plaything, an adult fetish object, an ethnographic source, and a historical curiosity, the toy is an ambivalent, contested entity that embodies the very paradoxes at stake in collecting. The transformative possibilities that inhere in toys foreground the ludic, artistic under­pinnings of modernist collecting—­a perspective that is missing from the secondary lit­er­at­ ure on Benjamin’s book collection. Ultimately, Benjamin’s toy collection allows us to reexamine what

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Figure 6. ​Benjamin’s caption reads, “Furniture set for a doll’s h ­ ouse. Work of Siberian prisoners from the nineteenth ­century. Assembly of the tiny pieces of wood demands untold patience” (Möbelgarnitur für die Puppenstube. Arbeit sibirischer Sträflinge aus dem 19ten Jahrhundert. Das Zusammenfügen der winzigen Holzstückchen erfordert unsägliche Geduld). Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv 1589. Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.

Ackbar Abbas describes as the “difficult relations between collector and modernist” from another, as it ­were, more playful vantage point.4

The Dialectics of Collecting We collect b­ ecause we are mortal and objects are scarce. In The Arcades Proj­ect, Benjamin reveals how the threat of extinction becomes central to collecting: “Perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the strug­gle against dispersion. Right from the start, the g­ reat collector is struck by the confusion [Verworrenheit], by the scatter [Zerstreutheit], in which the t­hings of the world are found.”5 He alludes both to the “confusion” and subsequent “dispersion” that characterized the flood and the Tower of Babel episode. Collection becomes a mode of salvation and redemption, as it signals the difference between absolute extinction and perpetuity, guaranteed by Noah’s reproductive pairing of twos. The threat of extinction most blatantly foregrounds transmissibility, or the collection’s ability

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to persist beyond its dispersion in an externally recognizable form. According to Benjamin, “The most distinguished trait of collection w ­ ill always be its transmissibility [die Haltung des Erben],” which survives its dispersion.6 Collecting is often framed as a form of safeguarding, in which collectors believe themselves to be charged with a sort of otherworldly, Noachian task to archive or keep objects for the f­ uture.7 In its drive to preserve a par­tic­ul­ar culture, ethnographic collecting has similar aspirations. James Clifford highlights the temporal dimension of ethnography, labeling it “a form of culture collecting” that claims to rescue the “real ­thing”: “Collecting—at least in the West, where time is generally thought to be linear—­implies a rescue of phenomena from inevitable historical decay or loss. The collection contains what ‘deserves’ to be kept, remembered, and trea­sured. Artifacts and customs are saved out of time. Anthropological culture collectors have typically gathered what seems to be ‘traditional’—­what by definition is opposed to modernity.”8 Ethnography is predicated on a discrete, antimodern past that can be extracted and sal­vaged. As H. Glenn Penny argues, the discourse of salvage anthropology was the most power­ful force shaping turn-­of-­the-­century German ethnography, combining feelings of urgency and loss with the desire to ­ ere compelled by the imperative to preserve rec­ords possess.9 Ethnographers w of h ­ uman culture from the sweeping forces of industrialization. Seeking to recover the Rus­sian toy as the locus of pre­industrial production, Benjamin, in the vein of an ethnographer, locates the source of his collection in a past that must be “saved out of time.” The preservation of the old wooden toy becomes a safeguard against the diluvian destruction of traditional handi­work caused by modernization and commodification. Yet precisely this preoccupation with preservation introduces the destructive ramifications of collecting. In Berlin Childhood around 1900, Benjamin recounts the formidable hunt that furnishes the contents of his butterfly collection in vivid detail: Between us, now, the old law of the hunt [Jägersatzung] took hold: the more I strove to conform, in all the f ibers of my being, to the animal—­ the more butterfly-­like [falterhafter] I became in my heart and soul—­the more this butterfly itself, in every­thing it did, took on the color of h ­ uman volition . . . ​Once this was achieved, however, it was a laborious way back from the theatre of my successes in the field to the campsite, where ether, cotton wadding, pins with colored heads, and tweezers lay ready in my specimen box. And what a state the hunting ground was in when I left! Grass was flattened, flowers trampled underfoot, the hunter himself, holding his own body cheap, had flung it heedlessly ­after his butterfly net.

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And born aloft—­over so much destruction, clumsiness, and vio­lence—in the fold of this net, trembling and yet full of charm, was the terrified butterfly. On that laborious way back, the spirit of the doomed creature entered into the hunter.10 Young Walter’s victory is Pyrrhic, as it portends the death of a beautiful creature left to flutter helplessly in a net. To join the collection and serve its consummate purpose u ­ nder a colored pinhead, the butterfly must die. Collection comes at the cost not only of an object’s functionality but also of a creature’s life. The multivalent nature of preservation is instructive: the object is maintained in an unaltered condition but is suspended in a lifeless void that belies its former existence, like a pickled sardine. Benjamin’s experiences reflect nineteenth-­century bourgeois culture in which collecting—­particularly natu­ral historical objects—­ was heralded as a crucial part of education, practiced by a broad spectrum of society, from amateur hobbyists to schoolchildren.11 In its essence, however, collecting accomplishes the opposite of any systematic or pedagogic reconstruction: it isolates and decontextualizes. The dialectical, paradoxical character of collecting becomes apparent, namely its tendency to reconstruct the past or a hidden form of life by extracting and killing its object. The practice of mortals, collecting becomes a substitution for immortality; its object is a testament to an existence that is interrupted when taken out if its context. Yet, the g­ reat irony of collecting, dramatized by the naturalist, is that the object that should bequeath perpetuity dies in the pro­cess. ­Because the object is suspended in time and place in the attempt to preserve it, it ceases to exist in its original state, like Walter’s hapless butterfly specimen. Emphasizing the link between collecting and mortality, Benjamin quotes Gui Patin: “The need to accumulate is one of the signs of approaching death.”12 For this reason collecting often occurs during dislocating experiences such as exile or travel; loss, transience, and uncertainty produce the desire for a type of memorial grounded in the object world. Benjamin poignantly articulates this sentiment in “Unpacking My Library,” recalling, “I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient.”13 His butterfly anecdote foregrounds another type of transformation: the change the collector undergoes as a result of the collecting pro­cess. In order to conquer his prey, the hunter-­collector has to momentarily transform himself into his object. As the “spirit of the doomed creature enters the hunter,” the life of the sacrificed object is transferred to the collector as a form of perpetuity.14 While the butterfly begins to take on ­human characteristics, Benjamin as hunter becomes “more butterfly-­like” (falterhafter).15 This reversal pervades Benjamin’s work, as collectors ranging from the bibliophile to the

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child assume the qualities of the objects they acquire, which, in turn, begin to resemble them. Collection is thus a pro­cess of exchange or transformation that leaves both the collector and the object inexorably altered. Benjamin’s account does not shy away from the “destruction, clumsiness, and vio­lence” of the collecting pro­cess.16 “Grass was flattened, flowers trampled underfoot,” he recalls, detailing the ravaged “state” of his hunting ground.17 ­Later in Berlin Childhood, Benjamin’s description of the way he “ransacks” and “takes possession” (Besitz genommen) of Peacock Island “with a single feather” sounds rather Jamesean in its emphasis on military spoils.18 This martial language suggests that, even in its childish instantiation, collecting has roots in the instinct to dominate, appropriate, and despoil. As Benjamin observes in the “Untidy Child,” a Denkbild (thought-­image) from One-­Way Street, “Each stone he finds, each flower he picks, and each butterfly he catches is already the start of a collection, and ­every single ­thing he owns makes up one ­great collection. In him this passion shows its true face, the stern Indian expression that lingers on, but with a dimmed and manic glow, in antiquarians, researchers, bibliomaniacs. Scarcely has he entered life than he is a hunter. He hunts the spirits whose trace he scents in ­things.”19 Inflected with the long-standing German fetishization of Native Americans, this Denkbild shows how the spirit of the hunter is pre­sent in the child and, ­later, in the “manic glow” of the collector. In short, Benjamin’s “collector is a deeply paradoxical figure. He is a modern figure who stands in opposition to some of the dominant tendencies of modernity,” dangerous b­ ecause he often appears as a “destructive character,” a figure who ­will return in chapter 4.20

Collecting as Reauraticization Benjamin’s complex notion of aura reveals how collecting functions as both an act of preservation and an art of transformation. Chapter 1 drew on aura to describe what motivates James’s collectors to value original or au­then­tic works of art. This chapter proposes another reading of aura as a transformative concept that can be applied to material objects more broadly by building on Benjamin’s “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” instead of the oft invoked essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.” In the Baudelaire essay, he articulates a more open-­ended idea of aura decoupled from questions of originality and authenticity: “Experience of aura rests on the transposition of a response common in ­human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natu­ral object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return [den Blick erwidern].”21 He gestures

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back to an e­ arlier definition proposed in “Little History of Photography,” where aura implies an active, contingent encounter between viewer and image. Early viewers of the daguerreotype ­were frightened, Benjamin reports, believing that the “­little tiny ­faces in the pictures could see us.”22 As in the Baudelaire essay, aura implies a belief that the object is invested with some kind of life or subjectivity.23 This formulation echoes the notes Benjamin scribbled on San Pellegrino stationery, pictured in chapter 4 (figure 16): “To experience the aura of an appearance or a being means becoming aware of its ability [to pitch] to respond to a glance. This ability is full of poetry. When a person, an animal, or something inanimate returns our glance with its own, we are drawn initially into the distance; its glance is dreaming, draws us a­ fter its dream. Aura is the appearance of distance however close it might be.”24 This marginalia places Benjamin’s canonical definition of aura as “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be” into a new light.25 In this case, it seems that the distance—so central to aura—is actually effected by the imagination or projection of the “dreaming glance” of another. Rather than physical removal, aura is the proximity imparted by the imagination of the subjectivity of a person or t­ hing. ­These alternate conceptions of aura allow us to understand Benjamin’s fascination with toys as objects that return the gaze. In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin describes how unwilling objects dismiss the “poor wretch” gazing through the shop win­dow: “­These objects are not interested in this person; they do not empathize with him.”26 ­Here Benjamin invokes Baudelaire, who by listening to the “whisper” of objects developed an “empathy with inorganic ­things which was one of his sources of literary inspiration.”27 This belief in the life of objects occurs early on, as Baudelaire notes in “The Philosophy of Toys,” where “the first metaphysical stirring” of c­ hildren resides in the desire to “get at and see the soul of their toys.”28 The child who imagines his or her toys to be imbued with life lays the foundation for an intimate, dialogical relationship between collector and collection in which objects talk back.29 The collector’s belief in the souls of objects could even be seen as a facet of animism, or the belief in the spiritual essence of objects.30 ­After all, aura, according to Benjamin, is rooted in the way the “Stone Age man” perceived an animal drawing on the walls of the cave as an “instrument of magic.”31 This open-­ended definition of aura brings a fresh perspective to Benjamin’s formulation of aura in the “Work of Art” essay as a uniqueness, or “unique existence in a par­tic­u­lar place.”32 Aura, he famously argues, is “what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of a work.”33 Pro­cesses of mechanical reproduction destroy the artwork’s aura, generating a “sense for sameness in the world” that “extracts sameness even from what is unique.”34 Although

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Benjamin defines aura with re­spect to the work of art, we can extend the concept to material objects more broadly to see how the collection becomes a safeguard against the destruction of aura caused by mechanical reproduction. As chapter 1 suggested, for Edith Wharton, the aim of collecting in an industrial age is to salvage items with a claim to uniqueness. For Benjamin, like Mrs. Gereth in James’s Spoils of Poynton, collecting recalls a now-­defunct “relation to movables” in which the uniqueness of the object had primacy: “The collector develops a relationship with his objects . . . ​which are enriched through his knowledge of their origin and duration in history—­a relationship that now seems archaic” and “would no longer be pos­si­ble in an age of standardized mass production.”35 If aura, as his “Work of Art” essay proposes, is a throwback to the “cult” or ritual value of the artwork, then collecting can be seen as a ritualized form of preserving and transmitting an object’s aura. This more conservative understanding of aura, in Nietz­schean terms, emphasizes preservation ­(bewahren) over creation (zeugen). On the other hand, aura is always already an elusive concept that is historically contingent and does not have a fixed point of origin. Benjamin’s account seems to leave open a more fluid interpretation of aura as a characteristic that changes when an object is placed in another context. His aforementioned definition of aura continues, “It is a unique existence in a par­tic­u­lar place—­and nothing else—­that bears the mark of history to which the work has been subject. This history includes changes to the physical structure of the work, together with changes in owner­ship.”36 From the outset, history plays a pivotal role; the aura inheres in the way the object is situated in and acted upon by history and is thus subject to transformation: “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a dif­fer­ent traditional context [Traditionszusammenhange] with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the M ­ iddle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, ­were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura.”37 Benjamin acknowledges the way aura changes when the work of art is placed in a dif­fer­ent tradition. Applying this dynamic notion of aura to material objects more broadly, we can see how the tensions within aura help explain the conflicted nature of collecting: even as the collector seeks to preserve the object, its aura is already in flux. The collection disrupts the aura of an object by taking it out of its context and placing it into a new system. ­After it is decontextualized, the object is reauraticized, or endowed with another aura in its new context: the collection.38 Collecting thus foregrounds not only the auratic transformation an object un-

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dergoes once it is placed into a collection but also the changeable aura of the object itself. The protean nature of the child’s toy, which changes meaning and function based on its context, encapsulates this transformation. This open-­ ended version of aura accords with Benjamin’s concept of the “afterlife” (Nachleben) of a work, a word that surfaces in many of his writings. For Benjamin, afterlife refers to the pro­cesses of renewal and transformation of a work that are carried out by readers or viewers a­ fter it has been completed by the creator.39 Echoing the dialectics that underpin collecting, the afterlife of a work si­mul­ta­neously preserves and transforms it. The concept of afterlife also underscores a critical similarity between material objects and works of art: the collector breathes new life into the object, which takes on a dif­fer­ent signification, just as when a work of art is exhibited or reused.

“Beautiful Toys” The collector, Benjamin observes in “Praise of the Doll,” is himself “a child and fetishist.”40 The Moscow Diary provides many glimpses of Benjamin in this childlike state, wandering the streets of Moscow with unwieldy packages of toys, including a large Chinese paper fish that annoys his companions. His growing collection begins to overshadow the ostensible purpose of his visit, which, according to Gershom Scholem, was motivated by “his desire to get a closer look at the situation in Rus­sia, and perhaps even to establish some sort of official tie with it.”41 During an excursion to a neighboring town, Benjamin becomes childlike in his furtive desire to sneak away from his appointed tour to visit the local toy store. He claims he wants to buy a doll for Asja’s ­daughter but ­later confesses, “I primarily want to take the opportunity to get one for myself as well.”42 His parting scene with Asja—­another major impetus ­behind his visit—is both moving and hilarious as he unpacks “the toys I had purchased during the past few days and showed them to her.”43 In this surreal last encounter, toys become an ersatz object for the absence of sexual intimacy between them.44 Lovelorn and broke, he leaves Moscow ­after spending his last pennies on a pouch of Crimean tobacco and a domino set. It is as if all of Benjamin’s frustrated attempts to secure Asja’s affections and a role in the Communist Party are sublimated into his “mania for collecting.”45 The spoils, a trunk of “beautiful toys” he arduously transports back to Berlin, are the only real fruits of his trip.46 The few remaining traces of Benjamin’s toys are some photo­g raphs that ­were pictured in his essay “Rus­sian Toys.”47 Instead of appearing in the Frank­ furter Zeitung for which it was intended, “Rus­sian Toys” was published in shortened form in the Südwestdeutschen Rundfunkzeitung in 1930 along with six of

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Figure 7. ​Benjamin’s caption reads, “It is in­ter­est­ing to compare the two Viatka dolls. The ­ orse, which is still vis­i­ble in one model, has merged with the man on the one next to it. Demotic h toys strive for simplified forms” (Interessant ist der Vergleich dieser beiden Wjatka-­Puppen. Das Pferd, das auf dem einen Modell noch sichtbar ist, ist auf dem nebenstehenden schon mit dem Manne verschmolzen. Volkstümliches Spielzeug strebt nach vereinfachten Formen). Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv 1591. Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.

the eleven photo­g raphs Benjamin had submitted, a few of which are reproduced h ­ ere (see figure 7). The more extensive original manuscript is not among his papers. The archival loss of the toys and original manuscript compounds the personal loss that motivates Benjamin’s collection in the first place: the absence of any erotic, social, and intellectual fulfillment in Moscow. Benjamin’s seemingly quixotic fascination with toys in Moscow Diary must be examined in the context of his larger body of work, which reveals a fixation with toys, play, and child development. His writings on toys have been infrequently studied and often relegated to the role of “marginalia.”48 Besides “Rus­ sian Toys,” published in an appendix to the En­glish edition of Moscow Diary, Benjamin wrote at least ten other essays on the subject of toys, toy exhibitions, and ­children’s books, even devoting the last convolute in The Arcades Proj­ect to “The Doll, the Automaton.” Throughout t­hese articles he insists that play is not merely confined to the sphere of the child but is part and parcel of the way the adult works, creates, and engages with the world.

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The Moscow Diary reveals the fundamental contradictions between Benjamin’s romanticization of Rus­sian childhood and the Soviet reeducation program that put the child at the center of social change.49 Carlo Salzani argues that the “child holds a central theoretical place within Benjamin’s proj­ect” as a prelapsarian figure of redemption and revolution who provides an alternative model of experience to the “hollowed out experience of the modern bourgeois adult.”50 The Moscow Diary, not treated in Salzani’s analy­sis, affirms the centrality of toys to Benjamin’s depiction of the child. However, an ethnographic reading of Benjamin’s toy collection problematizes Salzani’s dichotomy between the prelapsarian child and the fallen, bourgeois adult. Benjamin’s equation of the child with the Rus­sian proletarian is a form of primitivism that prompts him to collect old toys as the key to an idealized peasant past. Ultimately, toys are impor­tant for Benjamin’s “corpus” less ­because they are constructed from body parts like bone, as Richter suggests, than ­because he collects them as substitutes for the exoticized, eroticized body of the Rus­sian proletarian personified by Asja.51 Beneath the ludic, comic-­tragic aspect of Benjamin’s “Sammelmanie” lurks a more basic motivation best examined through its childhood origins: the desire for mastery over frightening or uncharted territory.52 ­Because of the language barrier, he is transformed into a childlike state of de­pen­dency, relying on Asja and Bernhard Reich—­Asja’s lover and Benjamin’s sexual rival—­for even the most basic form of communication. His diary rec­ords how “depressed and upset” he is to have such l­ittle contact with Rus­sians.53 The plays and films he attends are “unbearable botches” and an anticipated meeting with a publisher of ­children’s books “made a mediocre impression on me.”54 The w ­ hole city is frozen over like an icy citadel, except the wares for sale “in the open street, as if the minus twenty-­five degree Moscow winter was in fact a Neapolitan summer.”55 As he realizes the futility of his efforts to connect with Soviet society, Benjamin’s professional and social life take a backseat to his collection, which, as for John in Woolf ’s “Solid Objects,” becomes the locus of meaning.56 By domesticating and ordering a frightening world, collecting is a transformative type of play that extends into adulthood. Echoing Baudelaire’s “Philosophy of Toys,” Benjamin posits that play serves a crucial role in forming a child’s subjectivity: “Before we transcend ourselves in love and enter into the life and the often alien rhythm of another being, we experiment early on with the basic rhythms that proclaim themselves in their simplest forms in t­hese sorts of games with inanimate objects.”57 Through the repetition of play, we “first gain possession of ourselves” and achieve mastery of our surroundings, particularly over threatening objects or events.58 Similarly, Freud contends, play transforms a passive experience into an active one, harnessing the child’s desire for mastery. In its reliance on techniques such as se­lection and organ­ization,

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collecting, like play, is an active pro­cess that tries to impose order on a chaotic world. The safe, contained space of the collection is also a microcosm in which the collector can enact the desire for control. Benjamin writes, “the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with its image in reduced form [verkleinertes Abbild].”59 Applying his theory to his diary allows us to see how he seeks to master his “threatening” new environment of Moscow by collecting it “in reduced form.” Werner Muensterberger rephrases this observation in clinical terms: “Objects in the collector’s experience, real or ­imagined, allow for a magical escape into a remote or private world” and thus represent “the illusion of protection against the dread of being alone and powerless.”60 Like collecting, play is a concrete, tactile way of pro­cessing a new, unexplored world for the child and an uncontrollable terrain for the adult. Play is presided over by the “laws of repetition” (Gesetze der Wiederholung), through which c­ hildren are able to master what is frightening on their own terms, enabling them to better cope with the threat.61 Repetition—as the introduction suggested—is a hallmark of collecting, which is differentiated from other types of acquisition in its emphasis on seriality. Muensterberger emphasizes the centrality of “repeated acquisitions” to help assuage the collector’s “renewed anxiety” and “inner uncertainty,” arguing: “it is not enough to escape to this world only once, or even from time to time. Since it represents an experience of triumph in defense against anxiety and the fear of loss, the return must be effected over and over again.”62 From this vantage point, Benjamin’s “Sammelmanie” lies in the serial nature of his purchases, which he made over the course of countless shopping trips during his stay. Perhaps it is his Moscow tribulations that ­later prompt Benjamin to reflect, “Collectors are ­people with a tactical instinct. Experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in pursuit of books!”63 Echoing his childhood butterfly hunt, Benjamin invokes the same language of spoliation to describe how toy shops enable him to “capture” the “fortress” of Moscow.64 His toy collection c­ ounters the overwhelming scale of Moscow, which resists all categorization and description. Along similar lines, his diary functions as a therapeutic way to cope with his new environment through storytelling. Just as collecting is a tactile way to pro­cess a bewildering terrain, “an adult relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it into a story.”65 Writing stems from the same impulse as collecting: both are attempts to create and control miniature worlds.

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Benjamin collects when words begin to fail him. Abbas’s concept of collecting as a form of “material storytelling” could easily be applied to the Moscow Diary, where toys help fill in the blank spaces in Benjamin’s portrait of Moscow.66 Esther Leslie similarly suggests that the tactility of the collector is related to the technique of the storyteller.67 Pairing Abbas with Leslie, we can see the collector—­exemplified by the child—as a storyteller who weaves a narrative with material objects. The kinship between the collector and storyteller goes beyond their roles in cultural transmission: both creatively redeploy the materials handed down to them. Just as objects find new afterlives once they change hands, a story is reshaped and transformed as it is passed on. Collecting is a form of material storytelling as much as storytelling, according to James and Benjamin, is a pro­cess of collecting material. Through their focus on collecting, all three author-­collectors conceive of texts as material objects while viewing objects as narratives. For all three, the interrelationship between material and verbal modalities of collecting is a crucial part of their artistic pro­cess. Benjamin’s early collections of c­ hildren’s verses and books anticipates the archival turn of his own collecting practice in The Arcades Proj­ect. His “Collection of C ­ hildren’s Rhymes from Frankfurt” highlights the way rhymes transform World War I into a comprehensible experience, exemplified by the repetition of the verse “My m ­ other becomes a soldier.”68 Perhaps not coincidentally, “Old Forgotten ­Children’s Books,” one of Benjamin’s earliest essays on the figure of the collector, emerges from the sizable collection of c­ hildren’s books that Benjamin and his wife Dora amassed over the years. Like his Rus­ sian toy collection, most of ­these books dated from the nineteenth ­century, when modes of production preceded the failures of “specialization.”69 Emphasizing the mutually reinforcing relationship between Benjamin’s collecting and writing practices, “Old Forgotten C ­ hildren’s Books,” like many of his texts on ­children’s lit­er­a­ture, develops themes that resonate with his own collecting practice. Another essay, “A Glimpse into the World of ­Children’s Books,” contains four photo­graphs of ­children’s books from his own collection, including The Magical Red Umbrella (figure 8). Tellingly, the rhe­toric of spoils surfaces even in his account of the origins of his book collection, which lay in a “large raid” (großer Raubzug) of his ­mother’s library.70 By foregrounding the childish, acquisitive side of collecting, Benjamin’s Mos­ cow Diary and toy essays cast new light on Benjamin’s image of the child. Instead of the prelapsarian figure, who Salzani suggests precedes “bourgeois ‘possessive individualism,’ ” Benjamin’s child is a complex individual who works through the same issues as the adult.71 Fundamentally, collecting is an individualistic if not solipsistic practice in which ­there is only room for one collector’s

Figure 8. ​ Der rote Wunderschirm: eine neue Erzählung für Kinder (The Magical Red Umbrella: A New Story for ­Children), cover, ca 1890. Institut für Jugendbuchforschung, Kinderbuchsammlung Walter Benjamin.

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ordered vision. As a self-­composed universe, the collection is a space of intense, individual control whose childhood origins bespeak an attempt to order an unfamiliar world. Just as play, for Benjamin, enables the child or adult to master their environment, his own solitary “play” allows him to impose order on an impervious city that eludes him in his everyday experiences.

Collect(iviz)ing Moscow The major historical irony, of course, is that Benjamin is fervently amassing a collection while Soviet society is shedding its individual possessions. He was one of thousands of Germans—­tourists, business travelers, intellectuals, and the po­ liti­cally curious—­who journeyed to the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1941 and produced nearly nine hundred travel accounts.72 Like Benjamin, many w ­ ere leftists looking for alternatives to Western capitalism. Against this backdrop, his Baudelairean “empathy with inorganic t­ hings” is all the more jarring since it occurs in the midst of his serious meditations on joining the Communist Party: “January 9. Further considerations: join the Party? Clear advantages: a solid position, a mandate, even if only by implication. Or­ga­nized, guaranteed contact with other ­people. On the other hand: to be a Communist in a state where the proletariat rules means completely giving up your private in­de­pen­dence. You leave the responsibility for organ­izing your own life up to the Party, as it ­were.”73 The party offers him the very collectivity that is at odds with the “private in­de­ pen­dence” he exerts on his shopping sprees. Benjamin realizes that communism in a communist state is vastly dif­fer­ent than in a cap­it­ al­ist state, in which the individual is left to his or her own pursuits while subscribing to party politics.74 Particularly striking is the clash between Benjamin’s colorful descriptions of material objects and his frequent references to the “bleak,” “sparsely furnished” ­house­holds.75 His few encounters with locals reflect the extent of the social upheaval, namely the radical dispossession and “withering away of private life” (Eingehen des Privatlebens).76 The place of a collector in this type of society, as in the rapidly changing twentieth ­century more broadly, is anything but clear. Through his habits of consumption, Benjamin’s collector initially seems to uphold the bourgeois norms of nineteenth-­century capitalism. Ensconced in the velvety interior of the bourgeois dwelling, the collector pre­sents a striking counterpoint to the emptying Soviet ­house­hold.77 In his exposé for The Arcades Proj­ect, Benjamin posits, “The collector is the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the transfiguration of t­ hings. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting ­things of their commodity character by taking possession of them [Besitz ergreifen].”78 Although the first sentence affirms the collector’s place in

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the bourgeois ­house­hold, the qualifiers that follow endow him with a radical task. As the operative word, transfigure has a subversive resonance; by taking objects out of their economic framework of exchange value and utility and reappropriating them, the collector represents an affront to commodification. As Benjamin clarifies, it is “only as commodity that the ­thing has the effect of alienating h ­ uman beings from one another,” whereas, if placed into the proper hands, it can serve a revolutionary function.79 It is not the objects that are problematic, but the ways in which they are used or abused. Just as the Moscow Diary seems to be surprisingly unaware of Benjamin’s own “Sammelmanie,” it does not yet articulate the revolutionary model of collecting espoused in The Arcades Proj­ect. Benjamin’s diary often treats collecting as an antiquated practice that dates back to an outdated, bourgeois order. His account of the Kremlin Armory—­one of the oldest museums in Moscow—­recalls his observation that the collector has an “archaic relationship”80 with his objects: “All ­these trea­sures ­were acquired in a manner that has no ­future.—­Not only their style but also the very way they ­were acquired are now defunct . . . ​But now a picture of Lenin hangs at the entrance to t­ hese collections, as if converted heathens had planted a cross where sacrifices previously used to be made to the gods.”81 As spoils, he seems to suggest, collections are simply extensions of politics. In this fraught political climate, his collection is more than a whimsical hobby­horse, namely, a bourgeois act of individual possession and control that clashes with the collectivist system he contemplates joining. The po­liti­cal consequences of Benjamin’s practice are exemplified by the fate of Ilya Ostroukhov, a wealthy painter and art collector who amassed a forty-­year collection of Byzantine icons and Rus­sian wood sculpture. Benjamin notes that “the Revolution left the museum intact; of course, it was expropriated, [but] he was kept on as director of the collection” just as the Armory collection was preserved ­under new auspices.82 Like the Kremlin Armory, the Ostroukhov collection shows that museums and collections are often at the front lines of the revolutionary strug­gle. In an in­ter­est­ing testament to the transmissibility of a collection—­the need for a specific individual to unify its heterogeneous objects—­ the collector maintains the position of overseeing his own collection even as he is personally expropriated. ­Because of what Benjamin labels the “thoroughgoing politicization of life,” u ­ nder communism, the personal practice of collecting cannot easily be divorced from its po­liti­cal associations.83 The power to oversee a collection is an index of po­liti­cal sovereignty and, hence, mastery. As “master of all he surveys,” the collector assumes a position of surveillance that resembles what Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett calls the “panoramic perspective of all-­encompassing classifications” in which the ­whole world is on display.84 As Susan Stewart, Richard Handler, and o ­ thers

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have argued, collecting is always bound up with identity formation—­a pro­ cess that is never neutral and is often implicated in some populist or nationalist end.85 Thus, not only does collecting reflect po­liti­cal practices on a micro level, but it is also bound up with them. The childish origins of collecting suggest that its practice is rooted in the individual desire for mastery and possession as much as in the impetus to preserve. As the Noah’s Ark story demonstrates, the collector becomes the analogue of an autocrat by selecting, ordering, and excluding based on God’s command. While forming the covenant a­ fter the flood, God imparts Noah with sovereignty over the animal kingdom, instructing him, “The fear and dread of you ­shall rest on ­every animal of the earth, and on ­every bird of the air, on every­thing that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. ­Every moving t­ hing that lives s­ hall be food for you, and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you every­thing.”86 By salvaging and collecting according to God’s decrees, Noah earns unlimited power over the earthly realm. The collection passes from God—­the creator—to man, the curator and collector.

The Collector as Historical Materialist In exile in Paris, nearly ten years a­ fter his sojourn in Moscow, Benjamin wrote “Eduard Fuchs, the Collector and Historian,” profiling the German Marxist and collector of caricature and erotica who died in Paris in 1940. This essay helps to situate Benjamin’s “mania for collecting” within his theoretical framework of historical materialism, foregrounding the dialectics of collecting in the way the object both encapsulates and negates its historical context. A Marxist conception of history that stresses the influence of changes in material conditions on the organ­ization of society, historical materialism was appropriated by Benjamin in his own reflections on history. Benjamin’s turn ­toward historical materialism was initially informed by his encounter with György Lukács’s recently published History and Class Consciousness in 1924 and was still being worked out in the Mos­ cow Diary.87 The lens of the Fuchs essay allows us to examine Benjamin’s toy collection as an early foray into the praxis of historical materialism. By analyzing his subject through its material traces, Benjamin lays the groundwork for his formulation of the interrelationship between collecting and history. Benjamin’s collector, as epitomized by Fuchs, is a conflicted figure, at once bourgeois, fetishistic, antiquarian, and avant-­garde as well as the quin­tes­sen­tial historical materialist.88 Above all, Fuchs exhibits a singular passion for his subject m ­ atter, Benjamin observes, quoting Balzac’s description of the collector, “They walk along as if in a dream, their pockets empty, their gaze blank; and

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one won­ders what sort of Pa­ri­sian they r­ eally are. ­These ­people are millionaires. They are collectors, the most passionate p­ eople in the world.”89 ­After the Balzac quote, Benjamin continues, “As a collector Fuchs is truly Balzacian—­a Balzacian figure that outgrew the novelist’s own conception.”90 At the same time, Benjamin accentuates his distinctly modern sensibility: “Fuchs is a pioneer of a materialist consideration of art. Yet what made this materialist a collector was his more or less clear feeling for his perceived historical situation. It was the situation of historical materialism.”91 In other words, Fuchs became a cutting-­edge collector through his sensitivity to the historical impact of culture, economics, and technology on art production. Fuchs vis-à-vis Balzac enables Benjamin to envision the collector as a boundary-­breaking figure who destroys “traditional conceptions of art” by elevating and treating marginal disciplines such as caricature in art historical ways.92 As a “pioneer” and “alchemist,” Fuchs demonstrates the way “the collector’s passion is a divining rod that turns him into a discoverer of new sources.”93 Even as he praises Fuchs’s historical contributions, Benjamin stresses the inextricable link between a collector’s passion and creativity. Through the Fuchs essay, Benjamin attempts to formulate the way a collector could be enlisted as a progressive critical force against fascism’s manipulation of history in the name of pro­g ress. In its scope and approach, historical materialism is positioned by Benjamin in opposition to the academic historicism of German historians like Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, and Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke, who, following G. W. F. Hegel, represented history as a linear, coherent pro­cess.94 According to Benjamin’s polemical account, historicism “pre­sents the eternal image of the past,” a reified picture of the past as a continuum that produces and justifies the pre­sent.95 Departing from Marxist paradigms, Benjamin’s version of historical materialism abjures historicism’s vision of history as a continuum ­because it reinforces the Hegelian, instrumentalized view of history that perpetuates a dangerous ideology of mechanistic pro­g ress.96 Committed to “the specific epoch, the specific life, the specific work,” historical materialism eschews ­these sweeping narratives that ­were often deployed by fascists.97 Historical materialism is far from a reconstruction of the past and is defined by Benjamin in transformational, revolutionary terms as a “consciousness of the pre­sent that blows apart [aufsprengt] the continuum of history.”98 By “blasting the epoch out of its reified continuity,” it results in the “simultaneous preservation and sublation of the lifework in the work, of the epoch in the lifework, and ­ ere we can see the historiographical under­pinnings of history in the epoch.”99 H the dialectics of collecting: the collection si­mul­ta­neously preserves and transforms while its object both embodies and negates its context. Thus, according to

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Benjamin, the collector fuses art and history as he values the singularity of the object while upholding its representability, given the history embedded within it. Fuchs treats “the work of the past as still uncompleted” and ongoing like the historical materialist, who is epistemologically grounded in the pre­sent.100 In contrast, historicism falsely claims to “remove the pre­sent of the historicizing subject in ­favor of an autonomous past.”101 ­Because it “conceives historical understanding as an afterlife [Nachleben] of that which has been understood and whose pulse can be felt in the pre­sent,”102 historical materialism, like aura, acknowledges the active transmission of the object by locating it in the pre­sent, unlike historicism, which aspires to understand it in a void. Benjamin’s notion of the afterlife resurfaces again, but this time in the context of history to show the way the past, like a work of art, is transformed through the gaze of the pre­sent. Returning to the Moscow Diary, we can observe how Benjamin acts as a Fuchsian collector and historical materialist during his stay. Not only do objects interest him as material traces of a vanis­hing culture, but they also inspire a passion that escapes him on a personal level: “January 12. ­Today in the Kustarny Museum I bought a lacquer box on whose cover a female cigarette vendor is painted against the ground of black. A slender l­ittle tree stands next to her, and next to it, a boy. It is a winter scene, since t­here is snow on the ground. The box with the two girls also suggests snowy weather, for the room in which they are sitting has a win­dow which seems to be filled with frosty blue air.”103 As this lacquer box reveals, Benjamin’s descriptions of objects are far more detailed and poignant than his dispassionate observations about Moscow. The reader becomes lost in Benjamin’s intimate focus on the scene, which exceeds any description of his own wintry surroundings. Like his beloved “Rus­sian eggs, each one encased in another,” his elliptical descriptions encase further descriptions.104 All of his frustrated libidinal energy is channeled into this acquisition, which is staged as an erotic conquest: “It had been several days now that, as often happens with me, I had been concentrating exclusively on one ­thing as I made my way through the streets: it was lacquer boxes in this case. A short passionate infatuation. I would like to buy three.”105 Exhibiting the same “insatiable hunger for material” that drove Fuchs, Benjamin is motivated by the “dangerous though domesticated passions” (gefährlichen, wenn auch domestizierten Passionen) that he attributes to the collector.106 Benjamin’s attention to the specificity and singularity of this box is also an expression of the historical materialism personified by Fuchs. A traditional craft that often depicts folktales, the lacquer box becomes a lens for Benjamin to examine the Rus­sian culture that evades him during his travels. Its delicately painted exterior is materially and historically grounded b­ ecause “­there is a more

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Figure 9. ​Benjamin’s caption reads, “Old wooden ­horsey from the governate of Vladimir” (Altes Holzpferdchen aus dem Gouvernement Wladimir). Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv 1592. Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.

direct relation between wood and color h ­ ere than elsewhere.”107 Wood, the most impor­tant material in this “land of ­great forests,” constitutes the focus of his photo­graphs: nineteenth-­century doll­house furniture (figure 6), two Viatka dolls (figure 7), a ­horse from the Vladimir province (figure 9), and a painted toy depicting a Rus­sian legend (figure 24).108 Not only do Benjamin’s wooden folk toys jar with his stated intention of examining con­temporary Soviet culture, but his attunement to their auratic value also gestures back to the preservationist valence of collecting. Following the antiquarian collector who guards the aura of objects by studying their origin and history, Benjamin focuses on nineteenth-­ century, handmade toys composed of natu­ral materials. For instance, Benjamin’s own caption to figure 7 reads, “Demotic [Volkstümliche] toys strive for simplified forms.”109 Against this backdrop, the toy is an accessible object that both represents the Rus­sian peasant and evades his bewildering con­temporary milieu. The Moscow Diary suggests that long before the Fuchs essay, Benjamin assumed the role of the historical materialist by using his toy collection to examine the impact of social, material, and technological conditions on the development of toys. B ­ ecause play occupies such a formative role in the development of the child, changes in toy production have a discernible impact on the development of the child and society while also reflecting larger historical and cultural trends.110 Before industrialization, Benjamin argues, a toy was a ­simple

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object that bound c­hildren and parents through its production pro­cess and served as a pedagogical tool about its own construction.111 But “the more industrialization penetrates, the more it decisively eludes the control of the f­ amily and becomes increasingly alien to c­ hildren and also to parents,” reflecting the industrialized laborer who is alienated from the production pro­cess ­under capitalism.112 The toy is manufactured in such complex ways that the child can no longer understand the way it was created. In contrast, the old wooden Christmas toys still reflect their history and production and “to the c­ hildren . . . ​even without Santa Claus, tell how they come from deep in the forests of Rus­sia.”113 For Benjamin, the simplistic construction of ­these toys renders them more au­ then­tic and hence reliable as a source. Paradoxically, Benjamin’s ethnographic, materialist approach was completely at odds with the way Soviet society sought to reclaim childhood from the bourgeois clutches of folklore and magic by emphasizing practical training, modernization, and con­temporary technology.114 Moscow Diary works through many of the ideas that ultimately lead Benjamin to a new understanding of collecting in the Fuchs essay. During a discussion with Reich, Benjamin’s excursus on the “opposition between materialist and universalist modes of repre­sen­ta­tion” provides an early glimpse of how a collector might act as a historical materialist: “The universalist mode is always idealistic b­ ecause [it is] undialectical. Dialectic in fact inevitably moves t­oward representing each thesis or antithesis it encounters as the fresh synthesis of the triadic structure, and in this way it penetrates ever deeper into the interior of the object and only via the latter does it represent the universe. Any other concept of the universe is without object, idealist.”115 Benjamin then explains how ­every examination of a universal princi­ple must discover its own specific object, as opposed to theory, “which hovers above science.” In part, his focus on the toy as a material object emerges from this view; only through a par­tic­u­lar object (the toy) can the general (Rus­sia) be represented. Thus, for Benjamin, collecting is an antidote to this undialectical, universalist form of theorizing that has no object with which to ground its repre­sen­ta­tion. His explication is consistent with his diary’s self-­described modus operandi: “My pre­sen­ta­tion ­will be devoid of all theory . . . ​I want to write a description of Moscow in which ‘all factuality is already theory’ and which would thereby refrain from any deductive abstraction.”116 Just as Benjamin’s toys offer one way to forgo theory, Fuchs’s “collections are the practical man’s answer to the aporias of theory” and constitute an “intimate engagement” that theory lacks by facilitating access to the “historical content of a work.”117 In effect, for Benjamin, collecting offers one way to practice historical materialism by maintaining a firm footing in the object world while avoiding the large, totalizing claims of historicism.

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The Collector as Ethnographer In spite of the best efforts of the historical materialist, collecting does not simply offer unfettered access to “historical content.” As Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett argues, the notion that the specific object can actually represent the general— as opposed to a fragmented part of the whole—is a myth. Benjamin’s efforts to collect Rus­sian toys constitute his most substantial attempt to cata­log and analyze Moscow in a systematic if not ethnographic way, even if this was never his explicit objective. Moscow Diary generated multiple essays on Rus­sian toys, suggesting that he had an anthropological objective in addition to his journalistic instinct to rec­ord his own experiences. Reading his diary in conjunction with Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett’s Destination Culture and Clifford’s Predicament of Culture casts new light on his collection and study of toys as an ethnography of Rus­sian culture in which the child acts as a substitute for the proletariat other­wise inaccessible to Benjamin. With its focus on the problematic exhibition strategies practiced by museums and heritage sites, Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett’s conceptual framework allows us to reexamine the collecting of foreign cultures as a contested ethnographic practice that fragments and decontextualizes its object.118 The ethnographic collection exemplifies the way the attempt to preserve an object always transforms it. Even before the toys themselves w ­ ere dispersed or lost, the photo­g raphs function as a second-­order collection for Benjamin (see figure 6). In a letter to Siegfried Kracauer in February 1927, he describes “a lovely collection of photos (toys of Rus­sian origin)” that was to arrive in Frankfurt.119 In Benjamin’s letter, the emphasis of the collection has already shifted from the object to its documentation—the photo­g raphs. The prospect that Benjamin purchased ­these toys in order to document them highlights their ethnographic dimension, especially considering the fact that Benjamin commissioned a series of photo­g raphs from the Moscow Toy Museum before his departure.120 All of the extant photo­g raphs are accompanied by Benjamin’s handwritten captions that detail the provenance and cultural significance of the toys. As chapters 5 and 6 show, this ethnographic motivation unwittingly puts Benjamin in dialogue with Einstein and his surrealist colleagues at Documents. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett’s concept of the ethnographic fragment reveals the limitations in the historical representability of the collected object theorized by Benjamin. Instead, her analy­sis implies that by removing objects from their contexts, the collector acts more like an ethnographer than a historical materialist. Although she never explic­itly defines its object, she describes ethnography as “the paradox of showing t­hings that w ­ ere never meant to be displayed.”121 The ethnographic exhibit resembles a collection in its emphasis on display as

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well as in its effect, decontextualizing an object and investing it with new meaning: “The artfulness of the ethnographic object is an art of excision, of detachment, an art of the excerpt . . . ​Perhaps we should not speak of the ethnographic object but of the ethnographic fragment. Like the ruin, the ethnographic fragment is informed by a poetics of detachment. Detachment refers not only to the physical act of producing fragments but also to the detached attitude that makes fragmentation and its appreciation pos­si­ble.”122 As a collector, Benjamin similarly detaches objects from their context and imports them into a new framework.123 Not unlike the classical spolia adorning a medieval church, Benjamin’s spoils become fragments that no longer accurately represent the context in which they are found. Collecting can be a particularly problematic way to study c­hildren’s toys, which Benjamin himself acknowledges derive their value and function from context. Tourism further complicates his proj­ect; unaware of their cultural function, he collects Christmas tree decorations, appliances, and miniatures as toys even a­ fter their real purpose is revealed. B ­ ecause the classification of objects from foreign cultures is fraught with reductionist overtones, Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett argues that the ethnographer “creates” objects of ethnography just as Benjamin “creates” toys out of objects not meant for play. By inscribing the toy with cultural and historical value, Benjamin further extracts it from its function in the child’s world. Just as his own toy fixation reveals more about his aspirations in Moscow than it does about the play patterns of Rus­sian ­children, toys shed more light on the adults who design them than the ­children they entertain. B ­ ecause toys are the product of adult preoccupations, it is “impossible to construct them as dwelling in a fantasy realm, a fairy­-­tale land of pure childhood or pure art . . . ​Toys are a site of conflict, less of the child with the adult than of the adult with the child.”124 ­Here Benjamin himself undermines the ethnographic value of toys as culturally representative objects. Like the collector who seeks to recover a lost world through objects, the adult becomes an archaeologist investigating an irretrievable childhood through its ruins—­toys. Through its temporal separation from the adult world, the child’s toy poignantly reflects the way the ethnographic object can never fully represent the world from which it was extracted. Resembling young Walter’s butterfly that must die to be preserved, the toy loses its status as a child’s plaything once it is collected. The collection divests ethnographic objects of their function just as it strips the butterfly of its life. Collecting dramatizes the auratic transformation that occurs once an object is taken out of its initial environment and placed into a collection. Replicating the effects of the museum on an ethnographic object, collections “reduce the sensory complexity of the events they represent.”125 Once annexed

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Figure 10. ​Benjamin’s caption reads, “Wooden model of a sewing machine. If one turns the wheel the needle goes up and down and as it strikes it makes a clattering sound that suggests to the child the rhythm of a sewing machine. Peasant handicraft” (Hölzernes Modell einer Nähmaschine. Dreht man die Kurbel, so geht der Nagel auf und nieder und erzeugt im Auffallen ein klapperndes Geräusch, das dem Kinde den Rhythmus der Nähmaschine vorstellt. Bauernarbeit). Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv 1585. Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.

by Benjamin, ­children’s books, a model sewing machine (figure 10), and a Chinese paper fish acquire a new significance as they are grouped together, underscoring the transformative power of a collection.126 Asking, “Where does the object begin, and where does it end?” Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett highlights the indeterminate bound­aries of the ethnographic fragment.127 As the collector becomes part of his or her objects, the collection becomes an ethnographic object of the second order.128 Thus a collection’s transmissibility—­its ability to persist beyond dispersion in an externally recognizable form—is linked to the collector who unites its heterogeneous objects. Too often, the goal of historical preservation obfuscates the transfigurative effect of an ethnographic collection. In “Rus­sian Toys,” for instance, Benjamin maintains that the museum is a valuable means of safeguarding the Rus­sian dolls: “It is good they found a safe asylum in the Moscow museum. For who knows how long even this kind of folk art can withstand the triumphant pro­ gress of technology which t­ oday sweeps across Rus­sia?”129 By transforming and decontextualizing, the collection becomes more than what he prescribes in the Fuchs essay as “an intimate engagement with the historical content of a

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work.”130 The question remains, can an object still provide access to “historical content” once it has under­gone such a transformation? No, Susan Stewart would reply: “The collection seeks a form of self-­enclosure which is pos­si­ble ­because of its ahistoricism. The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality . . . ​All time is made simultaneous within the collection’s world.”131 By placing its heterogeneous objects into the same space, the ethnographic collection flattens time and undermines the object’s historical value as well as the collector’s role as a historical materialist. Thus, despite Benjamin’s aspirations for historical materialism to marry the specificity of an object with its historical value, the ethnographic fragment’s decontextualized form threatens its historical representability.132 If practiced unselfconsciously, collecting replicates the illusions of historicism, namely its “eternal image of the past.”133 Collectors harbor the fantasy that they can seamlessly transport their objects into a more representable or portable framework. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett debunks this myth, writing, “Only the artifacts, the tangible metonyms, are ­really real. All the rest is mimetic, second-­order, a repre­sen­ta­tion, an account undeniably of our own making.”134 By amassing quotidian objects, the ethnographic collector quite literally objectifies the subject, making “one man’s life into another man’s spectacle.”135 Toys provide a certain entry­way into the Rus­sian p­ eople, who remain so elusive and mysterious to Benjamin. Observing, “The degree to which the exotic surges forth from the city is always astonishing. I see as many Mongol f­aces as I wish ­every day in my ­hotel,” he reveals a surprising refusal to further engage with his subject despite his stated intention to render a “physiognomy” of Moscow.136 As real Rus­sians remain frozen in their essentialized exoticism and corporeal strangeness, the ethnographic object provides the illusion of knowledge and access without offering any real forum for meaningful engagement. In Benjamin’s fantasy, the Rus­sian toy stands in for the prelapsarian childhood of an idealized Rus­sian peasant. Marveling at the rudimentary construction of some wooden wagons and spades, he notes, “The craftsmanship of all this is far more ­simple and sturdy than in Germany, its peasant origins clearly apparent.”137 ­There is a discernible slippage between the simplistic construction of the toy, its childish function, and its agrarian register. His own caption describes the harvest doll pictured in figure 11 as a “memory of ancient fetish of the harvest [uralter Erntefetisch],” as if it enabled him to channel a primal, agrarian Rus­sian past.138 Viewed through this lens, his preoccupation with old toys can be seen as a quest to fabricate a classless, utopic past vis-­à-­vis the Rus­ sian peasant’s childhood. Throughout his Moscow writings, he equates the proletarian with the child, noting that “the liberated pride of the proletariat is matched by the emancipated bearing of the ­children.”139 If, for Benjamin, the

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Figure 11. ​Benjamin’s caption reads, “Straw doll. Height: 6 zoll [1 zoll is approximately equal to an inch]. Made in the summer field during harvesting and ­later, once dried out, kept as a doll. Memory of the ancient fetish of the harvest” (Puppe aus Stroh. Höhe: 6 Zoll Tambosk. Wird sommers im Feld bei der Erntearbeit verfertigt und später, getrocknet, als Puppe bewahrt. Erinnerung an einen uralten Erntefetisch). Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv 1582. Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.

cultural and intellectual development of the proletariat is on par with the child’s, the Rus­sian toy allows him to access their simplistic nature. Their unformed minds, like ­those of ­children, embody the fantasy of a clean slate and herald the advent of a new mode of perception. Like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Paul Gauguin, and other modernists, Benjamin investigated non-­Western cultures with the belief that they ­were more “real” and closer to “natu­ral man” than the industrialized West, perpetuating

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a temporality in which the non-­West represents the childhood of a Western culture that signals the advent of a universal modernity.140 Benjamin’s “ethnographic” account of Rus­sia reflects many of the same ele­ments of primitivism that dominated surrealism and avant-­garde art. “Every­thing is enfolded in the womb” of the lacquer box, he writes, equating the primitive source of maternal Rus­sianness with his prized object, which tellingly depicts a figure he calls the “Soviet Madonna of Cigarettes.”141 Constructed by Benjamin as a gendered symbol, the lacquer box becomes a syncretic fetish object that both contains the mythical origins of the inaccessible Rus­sian proletarian and acts as a substitute for Asja’s equally inaccessible body. In a dif­fer­ent context, Muensterberger makes an observation that speaks directly to Benjamin’s motivation: “By searching for objects and, with any luck, discovering and obtaining them, the passionate collector combines his own re-­ created past consoling experiences with the fantasied past of his objects in an almost mystical ­union.”142 The fantasied past of Benjamin’s objects become a pseudohistorical corrective to his personal and professional failings in Moscow. It is as if Benjamin, disappointed by his lack of access to “real” Rus­sians, tries to unearth their childhood origins to endow them with a history that aligns with his utopian fantasies. Exemplified by his lacquer box, the toy functions as a symbolic key to the Rus­sian proletarian as well as an erotic material substitute for Asja.

The Collector as Artist By appropriating and recontextualizing its objects, an ethnographic collection becomes an artistic site of reauraticization rather than a form of preservation. At his most radical, Benjamin sanctions the transformative power of collecting in his reflections on the proletarian appropriation of the Tretiakov Gallery: This collection reaches out to the proletarian in a most familiar and reassuring manner. In it he can recognize subjects from his own history, “The poor Governess Arrives at the House of the Wealthy Merchant” . . . ​ and the fact that ­these scenes are rendered entirely in the spirit of the bourgeois art does not in the least detract from them. The education of the eye . . . ​is not exactly served by the contemplation of “masterworks.” By contrast, the child or the proletarian who is just learning about art recognizes (and rightfully so) certain ­things as masterworks by criteria that are completely dif­fer­ent from t­hose of the collector. T ­ hese paint143 ings take on a very temporary yet solid meaning for him.

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Once again equating the child and proletarian, Benjamin touts the revolutionary potential of the art object based on its new context, as it assumes new meaning upon extrication from its bourgeois associations. Familiar paintings take on a proletarian “afterlife” (Nachleben), as they acquire a dif­fer­ent meaning in their revolutionary new setting. In “Old Toys,” Benjamin rephrases this contextual transformation more provocatively: “Once mislaid, broken, and repaired, even the most princely doll becomes a capable proletarian comrade in the ­children’s play commune.”144 ­Here Benjamin’s focus on the transformative potential of the toy questions its very stability as a form of repre­sen­ta­ tion. Instead, with its vari­ous layers of meaning and history, the “broken” doll encapsulates the spoil, torn from its context and given new signification. Precisely ­because it escapes Benjamin’s own theoretical reflections, his toy collection stages the creative complexities of collecting more clearly than any of his other writings. In “­Children’s Lit­er­at­ ure,” Benjamin seems to describe his own Rus­sian toys when he praises a c­ hildren’s book as the marriage of “the pure seriousness of mastery with the pure playfulness of the dilettante.”145 The notion of the collector as child foregrounds the creative dimension of collecting that is bound up with the “mastery” of artistic production and “pure playfulness.” Einstein’s concept of “the collector as explorer,” introduced in the epigraph, finds a compelling counterpart in Benjamin’s account of child’s play, which brings together objects in novel ways.146 Benjamin observes, “For ­children are particularly fond of haunting any site where ­things are visibly being worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, ­house­work, tailoring, or carpentry . . . ​In using ­these ­things, they do not so much imitate the work of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship. ­Children thus produce their own small world of t­ hings [Dingwelt] within the greater one.”147 Just as Benjamin tries to master Moscow by collecting its objects in miniature, c­ hildren “produce their own small world of ­things within the greater one.”148 The transformative power of collecting is rooted in the way ­children fashion toys out of preexisting “materials of widely differing kinds.” By taking objects out of their contexts and deploying them in novel ways, the child is a model for both the collector and artist rather than a figure of mimesis. Through play, the child experiments with collage, montage, and bricolage—­modernist techniques that blur the lines between collection and artistic creation. For this reason, as Benjamin concludes in “Unpacking My Library,” the child becomes a force of creative regeneration who takes up Noah’s task of “renewing the old world”: “­children can accomplish the renewal of existence [die Erneuerung des Daseins] in a hundred unfailing ways. Among c­ hildren, col-

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lecting is only one pro­cess of renewal; other pro­cesses are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals—­the ­whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching t­ hings to giving them names. To renew the old world [Die alte Welt erneuern]—­that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new ­things.”149 Even in Benjamin’s most sustained treatment of collecting, ­there is a discernible slippage between collecting and other types of childhood play that blend mastery of the environment (touching and naming objects) with artistic expression (painting objects and applying decals). This slippage attests to both the porous bound­aries and suggestive possibilities of collecting. As the introduction noted, the link between collecting and play was already established in the early modern period, when the Wunderkammer served as an inventive space that mimicked the cosmos playfully created by God.150 For both early modern polymaths and twentieth-­century modernists, play was a productive zone located between ordering a known world and creating a new one. Although Benjamin would not have understood his own toy collection as surrealist, his practice of bringing together heterogeneous objects mixes ethnography, history, and art in a way that anticipates Einstein’s Documents. Clifford notes the affinity between ethnography and surrealism, asking, “Is not ­every ethnographer something of a surrealist, a reinventor, a shuffler of realities?”151 Both practices appealed to the exotic through non-­Western alternatives, questioned social norms, and tried to level the distinction between high and low culture. As “an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions . . . ​drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious,” surrealism revives the Wunderkammer’s epistemic category of won­der.152 Yet, unlike a field-­worker who “strives to render the unfamiliar comprehensible,” surrealists sought to make the “familiar strange.”153 Reveling in “cultural impurities and disturbing syncretism,” surrealists w ­ ere passionate collectors who frequented Pa­ri­sian flea markets to buy “exotic” African or Oceanic sculptures.154 They reauraticized t­hese objects by decontextualizing and incorporating them into their own artwork. This is not to imply that Benjamin’s attitude ­toward collecting informed his understanding of surrealism. Rather, it seems that Benjamin engages in the creative blurring between ethnographic collecting and modernist art outlined in Clifford’s analy­sis. Poised between cultural preservation and artistic transformation, the “ethnographic surreal” epitomizes the dialectic at stake in collecting. The playful, shape-­shifting quality of Benjamin’s toys crystallize the complexities and ambiguities of surrealism’s art objects. Surrealists transformed their spoils into art through the provocative possibilities of exhibition, underscoring the way modernist collecting practices

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transform preexisting materials into something new through appropriation and reauraticization. In the Fuchs essay, Benjamin suggests that the meaning of the artwork is informed by its reception: “Works of art teach [us] how their function outlives their creator and the artist’s intentions are left ­behind. They demonstrate how the reception of a work of art by its contemporaries is part of the effect that the work of art has on us ­today. They further show us that this effect depends on an encounter not just with the work of art alone but with the history which has allowed the work to come down to our own age.”155 This statement conveys the way Benjamin’s historical materialism focuses on transmissibility, treating objects in the pre­sent through their afterlife rather than in the autonomous, closed-­off past of historicism. But it also has compelling implications for the collector, who imparts objects with new meaning by placing them in dif­fer­ent contexts. Reception is predicated on display, or what Benjamin in the “Work of Art” essay terms “exhibition value [Ausstellungswert].” A ­ fter the artwork is emancipated from its ritual or religious function, its cult value is supplanted by exhibition value. Exhibition can violate the aura of art by putting it into a new context, although aura, as we have seen, is itself a dynamic construct. “Through the exclusive emphasis placed on exhibition value,” Benjamin writes, “the work of art becomes a construct [Gebilde] with quite new functions,” gesturing t­ oward the generative possibility of exhibition, which can transform the work of art into a dif­fer­ent object.156 In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Martin Heidegger takes Benjamin’s argument about exhibition value to its logical extreme. ­Every act of display irrevocably transforms the artwork once it leaves its creator’s hands: The Aegina sculptures in the Munich collection, Sophocles’ Antigone in the best critical edition, are, as the works they are, torn out of their native sphere. However high their quality and power of impression, however good their state of preservation, however certain their interpretation, placing them in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world. But even when we make an effort to cancel or avoid such displacement of works—­when for instance, we visit the t­ emple in Paestum at its own site or the Bamberg cathedral on its own square—­the world of the work that stands ­there has perished. World-­withdrawal and world-­decay can never be undone. The works are no longer the same as they once ­were.157 Once the epoch of artistic creation has passed, the artwork’s reception becomes part of its construction. Any interpretation is thus framed by the conditions in which it is viewed. Hence the collection is always already a type of re-­collection or reconstruction.158 Yet, instead of being destroyed, the aura of the work is

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transformed by what Benjamin might call its afterlife, or its new context, namely, its exhibition and reception.159 In its tendency to decontextualize its objects, Benjamin’s toy collection becomes as much an artistic site of auratic transformation as a forum of historical preservation. More than a historical materialist, Benjamin, the toy collector, becomes a creator in his own right.

C h a p te r   4

Trash-­Talking in The Arcades Proj­ect

Amidst the deluge of po­liti­cal chaos and financial ruin that characterized the waning days of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin’s personal life was becoming increasingly desperate. His divorce from Dora had been finalized, his m ­ other passed away, Asja—­his love interest and the impetus ­behind his Moscow trip—­had returned to her other lover, Bernard Reich, and, ­because of the growing climate of fear, censorship, and anti-­Semitism, Benjamin was unable to publish his work. In a letter to Gershom Scholem in April 1931, he wrote that the atmosphere in Berlin had grown stifling, permitting one only to “scarcely breathe,” and described himself as “a shipwrecked person adrift on the wreck, having climbed to the top of the mast which is already torn apart. But he has the chance from ­there to give a signal for his rescue.”1 As the floodwaters of fascism w ­ ere rising, Benjamin conceived of himself as a castaway even before ­going into exile in 1933. He constructs his own ark, The Arcades Proj­ect just as, five years ­earlier, he resorted to collecting a­ fter failing to connect with Moscow po­liti­cally, intellectually, or romantically. Collecting becomes a two-­pronged form of preservation: a preservation of culture doomed for destruction and a type of self-­preservation for Benjamin. Benjamin’s collection of material objects provides a new lens through which to examine his practice of citation, which I interpret as a form of textual or bibliographical collecting. A seemingly ever-­expanding and inexhaustible compilation of quotations, The Arcades Proj­ect represents the textual collection par 11 8

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excellence.2 It is the paragon of Roland Barthes’s definition of a text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”3 Defying any sense of linear chronology, the vertiginous links between passages not only anticipate the advent of the hypertext, but also provide us with a nonlinear, open-­ended model for reading.4 Quotations far outnumber commentaries, revealing an emphasis on source rather than interpretation.5 More than just an archive, The Arcades Proj­ect exemplifies the modernist dimension of collecting that seeks to transform its object. Epitomized by Benjamin’s main goal to “blast” quotations “out of the historical continuum,” it decontextualizes, despoils, and appropriates.6 Like the more properly “modernist” forms of collage and montage, Benjamin’s citational praxis is constitutive of a modernist aesthetic that values fragments, curiosities, and juxtapositions. Surprisingly, few, if any, critics have analyzed Benjamin’s collecting practices in relation to his own citational techniques.7 This omission partly stems from the fact that the majority of the secondary lit­er­a­ture on collecting concentrates on Benjamin’s bibliomania. Since book collecting focuses on the materiality of the object, it obscures the transformative, artistic possibilities of collecting in The Arcades Proj­ect. A case in point, Ackbar Abbas’s reading focuses on the collector primarily as a way to tease out the category of experience in Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire and Proust: “Benjamin’s argument . . . ​is that certain practices of collecting, like certain textual practices, are alternative means of laying hold of experience in modernity.”8 What Abbas’s astute analy­sis ignores, however, is the transformative, artistic modality of collecting that is critical to its modernist practice. Rather than privileging the category of experience—­which has been the focus of much secondary lit­er­a­ture—­this chapter describes textual collecting as a dialectical practice, in which cultural transmission is only half of the equation. It is Benjamin’s fraught, ethnographic relationship with Rus­sian toys that provides a better clue to his citational praxis. This chapter rehabilitates the collector as a modernist figure who, in the vein of Baudelaire’s ragpicker, picks up the fragments of modern life. Analyzing Benjamin’s ragpicker as an impor­tant critical and creative interlocutor, I make a case for gleaning or ragpicking—­its urban instantiation—as a practice of redeploying waste with transformative aesthetic and artistic implications. Ragpickers are revolutionary not only in their ability to transform and appropriate waste but also with re­spect to their erratic methodology, which, for Benjamin, becomes a model for a discursive, nonlinear type of writing. Reading The Arcades Proj­ect through Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I, I argue that the unique temporality of gleaning allows Benjamin, like Varda, to reimagine historical narrative as digressive and discontinuous. Although methodologically related to the collector, the ragpicker—­like the hoarder—­embodies the

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regressive side of collecting in a consumer culture that is predicated on the proper, timely disposal of objects. Like hoarding, ragpicking leads us to question and rethink what aspects of culture should be saved in the first place. Fi­ nally, the ragpicker has a kinship with Benjamin’s figure of the allegorist; both work with fragments, deny the possibility of completeness, and acknowledge temporality as nonlinear and contingent. Benjamin’s Moscow Diary reflects the way the po­liti­cal contradictions of collecting play out on an interpersonal level, but what are the larger social and po­ liti­cal consequences of collecting? Chapter  3 showed the way collecting, like authorship, often entails a desire for mastery through the creation of the world in miniature. Yet, t­here is also an affective similarity between the collector and the author that is foregrounded in Balzac’s statement, cited in the introductory chapter: “The collector’s passion . . . ​is one of the most deeply seated of all passions, rivaling the very vanity of the author.”9 This chapter proposes that this link is more than a shared trait; it indicates a homology between writing and collecting. It is the collector’s passion that gives collecting its revolutionary thrust, epitomized by Benjamin’s quip that the collector is “motivated by dangerous though domesticated passions.”10 Modernist collecting is both conservative and revolutionary, conservationist and destructive; it is a self-­conscious preservation of a disappearing world enlisted in the attempt to excavate meanings from the rubbish heap of history. Even with its dangerous po­liti­cal ramifications, collecting resorts to one of its most conservative princi­ples: preservation.

The Architecture of the Arcades Written on the subject of the Pa­ri­sian arcades—­a network of historic covered shopping arcades—­this staggering collection of quotations, citations, and commentary was amassed over a period of thirteen years. Comprising several essays and a brief text entitled “The Ring of Saturn,” the material that would become known as The Arcades Proj­ect also includes over nine hundred pages of notes, which Benjamin grouped and divided into “convolutes” (Konvolute) or­ ga­nized by capital letters A–­Z and ten additional files marked by lower-­case letters. The German word “Konvolut” literally means a bundle of manuscripts or printed materials that belong together, both attesting to the imbrication of textual and material practices as well as the porous bound­aries between collecting and hoarding.11 As chapter 2 suggested, hoarders often have a highly systematic, personalized system of organ­ization, though it might not always be legible to ­others. Perhaps The Arcades Proj­ect would have remained a bundle of papers had it not been for the efforts of Benjamin’s friend, Georges Bataille, the

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Figure 12. ​Gisèle Freund, “Walter Benjamin at the Bibliothèque Nationale on Rue Richelieu,” Paris (1937). © IMEC, Fonds MCC, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

librarian of the Bibliothèque nationale and co-­founder—­together with Carl Einstein—of Documents. Before fleeing Paris in the spring of 1940, Benjamin entrusted the manuscript to Bataille, who stowed it away in the Bibliothèque during the war. It was only retrieved and delivered to New York at the end of 1947.12 The very institution that enabled his magnum opus was also responsible for preserving it. At the time of Benjamin’s death in 1940, it was still unfinished, although, as many critics have pointed out, it inherently defied completion.13 Part of what distinguishes Benjamin’s text from a hoard is that it is externally legible and culturally valuable. If not for this twist of fate, The Arcades Proj­ect might have remained where it began: a bundle of papers in the archive. This was a collection amassed in exile.14 As his personal library was dispersed between Paris, Berlin, and Brecht’s ­house in Svendborg, Benjamin went about assembling a massive archive of citations of nineteenth-­century French culture. Just as the museum provided the backdrop for many of James’s novels, the storied Bibliothèque nationale in Paris—­the national library of France—­was the fulcrum of The Arcades Proj­ect. Figure 12 provides a glimpse of the way Benjamin would spend entire days in the library picking through the card cata­log, taking notes, and occasionally commissioning copies of relevant illustrations. The Bibliothèque both textually and architecturally informs Benjamin’s work. While gathering sources in the Labrouste reading room, Benjamin must have glanced up at the g­ rand iron arcades above him, reminiscent of the shopping

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arcades he was trying to memorialize (see figures 13 and 14). Two almost identical passages read: ­ hese notes devoted to the Paris arcades w T ­ ere begun u ­ nder an open sky of cloudless blue that arched above the fo­liage; and yet—­owing to the millions of leaves that w ­ ere visited by the fresh breeze of diligence, the stertorous breath of the researcher, the storm of youthful zeal, and the idle

Figure 13. ​This 1906 photo­graph of the Galerie Vivienne by fellow flaneur Eugène Atget captures the decline into which the outmoded Pa­ri­sian arcades fell by the early twentieth ­century and that inspired Benjamin’s proj­ect. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Figure 14. ​The Salle Labrouste in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. In Convolute F, “Iron Construction,” Benjamin cites a description of the Labrouste reading room, where he spent many hours working: “It is difficult to imagine anything more satisfying or more harmonious than this ­great chamber of 1,156 square meters, with its nine fretted cupolas, incorporating arches of iron lattice.” The Arcades Proj­ect, F7a, l, 168.

wind of curiosity—­they’ve been covered with the dust of centuries. For the painted sky of summer that looks down from the arcades in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris has spread out over them its dreamy, unlit ceiling.15 ­ ere, Benjamin explic­itly links the construction of his text with the architecture H of the room. On the one hand, The Arcades Proj­ect is an archive of an archive—­a textual collection of a physical book collection. On the other, although the library played a foundational role in his work, his revolutionary strategy of citation stridently dismantles the idea of the collection as an archive. In practice, Benjamin was programmatically breaking apart the archive and reassembling it in radical new ways. It is impor­tant to register what Benjamin is not ­doing in The Arcades Proj­ ect: he is not investigating his con­temporary Weimar milieu or the Pa­ri­sian society he sought refuge in.16 Just as he sought to recover pre­industrial Rus­sian

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toys as the locus of meaningful cultural production in Moscow, Benjamin’s nineteenth-­century Pa­ri­sian archive is part of the exile’s quest to navigate the perplexing contradictions of his prospective—or adoptive—­homeland through its history. James, Benjamin, and Einstein are all linked biographically through exile, yet again affirming the link between collecting and the Noachian strug­ gle for preservation in the face of loss and cultural dispersion. If collecting is a personal pro­cess, then the interpretation of a collection becomes, in part, a biographical endeavor.17 With this in mind, it is crucial to analyze James, Benjamin, and Einstein’s reflections on collecting practices with an eye ­toward their personal collections and modes of literary production. In retrospect, Benjamin’s experiences toy shopping in Moscow can be seen as a rehearsal for what he already proclaims in 1930 to be the “the theater of all my strug­gles and all my ideas.”18 The genesis of this proj­ect began soon a­ fter his trip to Moscow, during his extended stay in Paris in the summer of 1927.19 The facile thematic link between the Moscow Diary and The Arcades Proj­ect—­ shopping—­belies the more complex way both collections use objects to critique the economic system they are embedded in: the first provides a snapshot of the marketplace transformed by communism while the second interrogates the phantasmagoric spectacle of nineteenth-­century consumer capitalism.20

The Collector as Ragpicker A revolutionary antiquarian, the figure of the collector plays a central but conflicted role in The Arcades Proj­ect. Along with the prostitute, gambler, and flaneur, the collector takes his position among the allegorical types of the nineteenth ­century who have their own convolute, in this case, Convolute H, “The Collector.” At first glance, the collector seems to be as obsolescent as the objects he preserves. Benjamin concedes, “I do know that time is ­running out for the type that I am discussing ­here . . . ​But as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction [im Aussterben] is the collector comprehended.”21 At the same time, Benjamin’s collector is distinctly modern in his peripatetic ramblings and scattered attention as he makes his way through the metropolis: ­things “strike him. How he himself pursues and encounters them, what changes in the ensemble of items are effected by a newly supervening item—­all this shows him his affairs in constant flux.”22 Like his kindred spirit, the perpetually distracted flaneur, the collector must come to terms with diverse, overwhelming urban stimuli while browsing in vari­ous shops, flea markets, and arcades.

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In The Arcades Proj­ect, Benjamin’s collector finds his most potent modern expression in the figure of the ragpicker (Lumpensammler). A term for someone who made a living by collecting the refuse in the streets, the ragpicker or chiffonnier was a frequent symbol of social abjection in nineteenth-­century Eu­ro­ pean lit­er­a­ture and art.23 Like the prostitute, gambler, or flaneur, Benjamin’s ragpicker exists at the social margins, picking up and reusing the rubbish cast out by the rest of the city. Although similarly preoccupied with the accumulation of objects, the ragpicker seems to be the diametric opposite of the collector—­the Apollonian figure of enlightened taste who occupied a central role in the nineteenth-­century bourgeois public sphere.24 Like the hoarder, the ragpicker represents the Dionysian underbelly: the regressive dimension of collecting in a cap­i­tal­ist society that necessitates the proper disposal of objects ­after they are deemed to be useless or valueless. He shares affinities with other Benjaminian figures like the ­little hunchback in Berlin Childhood around 1900, who belongs to the “Lumpengesindel” (riffraff ) that inhabit the subterranean world below the grates. The operative word that binds ­these figures is “Lumpen” (rags), a testament to their social status as waste, excluded from the bourgeois, commercial sphere above ground. Benjamin gleans the figure from Baudelaire, who devoted several poems and prose pieces to the chiffonnier who “collects and cata­logues every­thing that the ­g reat city has cast off, every­thing that is lost, and discarded, and broken.”25 While sketching his portrait of the ragpicker, Benjamin cites Baudelaire: “The bearing of the modern hero, as modeled on the ragpicker: his ‘jerky gait’ [sein pas saccadé], the necessary isolation in which he goes about his business, the interest he takes in the refuse and detritus of the ­g reat city.”26 In the German original, Benjamin employs the French expression “pas saccadé,” which seems to refer to the legendary photographer Nadar’s description of Baudelaire’s “pas saccadé,” quoted by Benjamin in “Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.”27 The fact that Nadar’s description of Baudelaire becomes a proxy for the ragpicker reveals the extent to which Benjamin conflated Baudelaire with the figure of the ragpicker. Through Baudelaire, Benjamin retools the ragpicker as a subterranean salvager of a disappearing way of life who repurposes the “archives of debauchery and the jumbled array of refuse.”28 This interrelationship is apparent in the structure of The Arcades Proj­ect—­ interwoven with Convolute H (“The Collector”), Convolute J (“Baudelaire”) pivots around the figure of the ragpicker. Baudelaire was so closely associated with the ragpicker that even Edouard Manet’s Le Chiffonnier (see figure 15) was thought to be inspired by Baudelaire, who had died two years ­earlier. Manet’s ­earlier painting The Absinthe Drinker,

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Figure 15. ​Edouard Manet, Le Chiffonnier (1869). © The Norton Simon Foundation.

which similarly featured a full-­length repre­sen­ta­tion of an alcoholic ragpicker, was rejected by the Paris Salon, leading to the creation of the famed Salon des Refusés in 1863—­quite literally the “trash” of the French acad­emy.29 The Ab­ ­ atter sinthe Drinker was not only rejected b­ ecause of its scandalous subject m but also on technical grounds: the painting was unevenly finished, with brushstrokes vis­i­ble in several places.30 The painting itself seemed to exhibit the “pas ­ atter. saccadé” or spasmodic movements associated with its scrappy subject m For Benjamin and Baudelaire, ragpickers have a radical register precisely ­because they are able to develop relationships with objects outside of the traditional patterns of production and consumption.31 Benjamin capitalizes on

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the Marxist valence of “Lumpen” in the German word “Lumpensammler” (ragpicker), declaring, “The ragpicker is the most provocative figure of h ­ uman misery. ‘Ragtag.’ Lumpenproletariat in a double sense: clothed in rags and occupied with rags [in Lumpen gekleidet und mit Lumpen befaßt].”32 Quite literally an outcast from society’s cap­i­tal­ist economy, the ragpicker, like the Lumpenproletariat, was even dismissed by Marx as too dangerous and marginalized to be part of the revolutionary class.33 For one ­thing, the ragpicker exists outside of the standardized schedule that regulates the workday of most factory workers. In his portrait of the Pa­ri­sian ragpicker, the nineteenth-­ century British journalist Henry Sutherland Edwards notes, This chiffonnier . . . ​regards with infinite contempt the slaves who are shut up from morning till night in a workshop, or ­behind a c­ ounter. Let ­others, mere living machines, mea­sure out their time by the hands of the clock, he, the philosophical rag-­picker, works when he likes, rests when he likes, without recollections of yesterday or thoughts of the morrow. If the north wind is icy, he warms himself with a few glasses of camphor, or a cup of petit noir; if the heat incon­ve­niences him, he throws off part of his rags, lies down beneath the shadow of his basket, and goes to sleep . . . ​Subjected to all kinds of privations, the chiffonnier is proud ­because he feels himself ­free.34 The ragpicker does not conform to the temporality of modern society, in which lives are dictated by the productive, structured regimen of industrial life. Unlike the factory workers who produce the objects that are gleaned ­after expiration, ragpickers determine their own schedules and hence, for Baudelaire and Benjamin, their own subjectivity. Even Edwards’s largely factual account romanticizes the philosophical, literary dimension of the ragpicker, who is able to attain a certain freedom of thought and movement by eschewing the monotony of factory life. This individualism makes the ragpicker, like the collector, an unlikely vector of class consciousness and hence Marxist radicalization. The ragpicker’s discordant temporality also inflects his comportment. In Baudelaire’s “Rag-­Picker’s Wine,” the jerky, idiosyncratic gait of the ragpicker differentiates him from the rest of the urban masses, whose lives are dictated by the inhuman working conditions of capitalist modernity: “­These p­ eople harassed by domestic worries / Ground down by their work, distorted by age, / Worn-­out, and bending beneath a load of debris / The commingled vomit of enormous Paris.”35 Benjamin builds on this depiction by citing Marx: “In working with machines, workers learn to coordinate ‘their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton.’ ”36 The synchronized, automatic, machine-­inspired harmony of the workers differs markedly from

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the unpredictable “pas saccadé” of the ragpicker, who bends and scoops ­things up at ­will, driven by chance rather than by routine. In Convolute J, Benjamin provides an impor­tant corrective to Baudelaire’s emphasis on the intoxication of the ragpicker: “The jerky gait [démarche saccadé] of the ragpicker is not necessarily due to the effect of alcohol. ­Every few moments, he must stop to gather refuse, which he throws into his wicker basket.”37 More than a sign of social deviance or aberration, the ragpicker’s spasmodic gait epitomizes the erratic temporality of ragpicking and signals a refusal to be subsumed by the seamless synchronization of modern life. By his own account, Benjamin is a literary ragpicker, the trashy, down-­and-­ out cousin of the more respectable collector. Rummaging through the heaps of nineteenth-­century history, he proclaims, “I ­shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenuous formulations. But the rags, the refuse—­these I ­will not inventory but allow, in the only way pos­si­ble, to come into their own: by making use of them.”38 For Benjamin, the ragpicker is a symbol for the writer, who goes about his business in a patchwork way, gleaning at the margins of culture. Benjamin himself emphasizes the way he recycles this concept from Baudelaire’s On Wine and Hashish: The poets find the refuse of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse . . . ​This new type is permeated by the features of the ragpicker, who made frequent appearances in Baudelaire’s work. One year before Baudelaire wrote “Le Vin des chiffonniers,” he published a prose description of the figure: “­Here we have a man whose job it is to pick up the day’s rubbish in the capital. He collects and cata­ logues every­thing that the g­ reat city has cast off, every­thing that is lost, and discarded, and broken. He goes through the archives of debauchery, and the jumbled array of refuse. He makes a se­lection, an intelligent choice; like a miser hoarding trea­sure, he collects the garbage that ­will become the objects of utility and plea­sure when refurbished by Industrial magic.” This description is one extended meta­phor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse . . . ​This is the gait of the poet who roams the city in search of rhyme-­booty, it is also the gait of the ragpicker, who is obliged to come to a halt ­every few moments to gather up the refuse he encounters.39 Deeming ragpicking an “extended meta­phor for the poetic method,” Benjamin makes a similar link between the content and technique of The Arcades Proj­ect. “Collecting and cata­loguing every­thing that the g­ reat city has cast off,” the ragpicker is revolutionary not only in his ability to transform waste using

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“industrial magic” but also with re­spect to his approach—­the way he “roams the city to gather up refuse.”40 In short, the “gait of the poet” influences his movements through the “archives of debauchery” in “search of rhyme-­booty” just as Benjamin’s methodology determines the content of The Arcades Proj­ect. Benjamin’s essay “An Outsider Makes His Mark” closes with the image of a writer as a “malcontent,” “spoilsport,” and “ragpicker”: “Thus, in the end this writer rightly stands alone. A malcontent, not a leader. No pioneer, but a spoilsport. And if we wish to gain a clear picture of him in the isolation of his trade, what we ­will see is a ragpicker, at daybreak, picking up rags of speech and verbal scraps with his stick and tossing them, grumbling and growling, a l­ittle drunk, into his cart . . . ​A ragpicker, early on, at the dawn of the day of the revolution.”41 Picking up the “rags of speech and verbal scraps,” ragpickers, like hoarders, lurk at the junction between literary and material practices of collecting. Far from a “leader” or “pioneer,” the writer is a “spoilsport” whose method is appropriating the refuse—­the “rags of speech” (Redelumpen) and “verbal scraps” (Sprachfetzen) made by ­others. Both slightly intoxicated and resolutely sober, Benjamin’s surly, solitary ragpicker is a harbinger of revolution. Benjamin along with Baudelaire could justifiably be accused of aestheticizing or romanticizing the figure of the ragpicker for their models of artistic production. While he may operate according to a dif­fer­ent calendar, the ragpicker is still dependent on the economic system of consumption and waste disposal. Rather than a ­free agent, the ragpicker, Edwards explains, is indebted to “the master chiffonnier who buys the contents of his basket,” who “is often a millionaire, and splashes with his carriage wheels as he returns from the theatre ­those wretches who next day w ­ ill go and sell to him what the city has thrown into the gutter.”42 Whereas the ­actual ragpicker serves and depends on the reproductive needs of the cap­i­tal­ist economy, Benjamin’s literary ragpicker seeks to save his trea­sures from commodification to help upset the cap­i­tal­ist order.43 At the same time, Benjamin’s precarious position as an exiled writer with l­ittle disposable income suggests that his veneration of the ragpicker was not merely a whimsical fancy. Ursula Marx and her colleagues point out that “economic need dictated that every­thing he got his hands on be used (or re-­used): the reverse sides of letters sent to him, postcards or an invitation to review, library forms, travel tickets, proofs, an advertisement for S. Pellegrino . . . ​some scraps are no bigger than 4.5cm × 9cm. But Benjamin was able to utilize e­ very last square millimeter.”44 With his library and collections dispersed, Benjamin had no choice but to reuse and recycle existing materials. Necessity had turned the collector into a ragpicker. But it was more than a thrifty hack, Benjamin’s self-­conscious deployment of scraps played an impor­tant methodological role in his literary production. Highlighting the close relationship between waste production and his

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writing pro­cess, Benjamin frequently referred to his own work as “scrappy paperwork” (verzettelter Schreiberei).45 Gleaning scraps was the primary method by which he assembled his own archive. It was the way he developed some of his most impor­tant concepts, like aura, which he outlined on San Pellegrino stationery (see figure 16). The fact that aura was conceptualized on an advertisement for a product that commodified w ­ ater poignantly captures the contradictions of Benjamin’s position as a ragpicker: like his counter­parts rummaging through the refuse in the streets, he too was entangled in the web of commodities.

Varda’s Gleaners In her 2001 film, The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse), the French filmmaker Agnès Varda takes up the timeless topic of gleaning, which has occupied an impor­tant but underexamined role in the agricultural economy since early antiquity. She redefines “gleaner”—­a person who collects leftover crops from farmers’ fields a­ fter they have been commercially harvested—to include anyone who thrives off something o ­ thers leave ­behind. Varda herself proclaims to be a gleaner, inserting herself into the rich artistic tradition of Benjamin and Baudelaire, albeit in a more agrarian register. She never references Benjamin and Baudelaire by name, but they are very much in the background of Varda’s proj­ ect, particularly at the intersection of waste, temporality, and artistic praxis. Impor­tant critical studies ranging from Gay Hawkins’s Ethics of Waste to Maurizia Boscagli’s Stuff Theory have heralded Varda’s film as an example of the politics and aesthetics of waste management. T ­ hese studies have centered on the materiality and “ontological instability” of waste, parsing out the distinctions between refuse, garbage, junk, and trash. Foregrounding gleaning as a pro­ cess, my reading seeks to re­orient the collecting of refuse as a ­human, artistic praxis. Rather than focusing on the disintegration of t­ hings into waste, the practice of gleaning gives us insight into the complex transformation of waste back into ­things. Gleaning, like hoarding, is not collecting. Yet, tracing their interconnections helps illuminate the complexities of collecting—­why its practice is valorized while hoarding and ragpicking are deemed unhygienic and déclassé. It also reveals why collecting is an imprecise label for what Benjamin, James, and Einstein are ­doing. Reading Benjamin through the lens of Varda’s film sheds new light on the methodology of The Arcades Proj­ect. The unique temporality of gleaning allows Benjamin, like Varda and Baudelaire, to reimagine narrative time as discontinuous and digressive. Ragpickers are not only revolutionary in their ability to transform waste, but with re­spect to their erratic movements,

Figure 16. ​Walter Benjamin, “Was ist Aura?” Draft to the Continuation of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’ ” (between 1936 and 1939). Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv 264/2. Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.

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which, for Benjamin, become a model for a new kind of discursive, nonlinear writing. Pairing Benjamin with Varda also highlights gleaning as an intermedial artistic praxis that incorporates other forms of art. Unraveling t­hese vari­ous strands of gleaning or “nachlesen” allows us to reconsider The Arcades Proj­ect as a text that anticipates the reading practices in the information age. Varda interviews vari­ous gleaners, ranging from c­ hildren in French potato fields to artists who selectively collect trash for use in their work. ­Today, agricultural gleaning is most frequently a response to the regulation of commercial produce. According to The Economist, some 20–40 ­percent of fruit and vegetables are rejected by American and British supermarkets on purely cosmetic grounds.46 Gleaning becomes a kind of do-­it-­yourself practice of waste management, helping to curb the excesses of cap­i­tal­ist commodification. Few of the gleaners Varda encounters truly subsist on the food they glean. Rather, most pursue it consciously as a form of social activism to protest against consumer culture and traditional norms of property owner­ship.47 Using the leftover crops or produce too “ugly” to be sold in supermarkets, they hark back to the agricultural roots of gleaning. ­Here, the operative word spoil resurfaces again, only gleaning functions as an antidote to the spoiling of food rather than the despoiling of a resource or place. The etymology of spoilage from a synonym of spoliation in the seventeenth ­century to a word that primarily denotes food waste in con­temporary usage reflects the close connection between gleaning and collecting, reusing and laying waste.48 What are the stakes of bringing together gleaning and ragpicking, two distinct but related practices of dealing with waste? Varda’s film is not alone in glossing over the distinction between the two. In Old and New Paris, Edwards refers to the ragpicker’s “reaping of the gutter harvest.”49 Gleaning traditionally takes place in an agricultural setting and involves the gathering of leftover food or grain, while ragpicking is the collecting of discarded material objects, linked to the excess of waste in an urban sphere. Whereas food is gleaned to be eaten, objects are gleaned to be repurposed. Phrased differently, the use value of food and its finite life cycle differs markedly from the multiple uses of junk collected on the street corner. One sculptor in Varda’s film claims, “What’s good about ­these objects is that they have a past. ­They’ve already had a life and ­they’re still very much alive. All you have to do is give them a second chance.”50 Benjamin’s concept of afterlife reemerges; like hoarders, ragpickers extend the life of an object beyond its typical use. Not only does the sculptor allude to the deferred temporality of gleaning—­the subject of the next section—­but he also describes the malleability of objects that distinguishes them from food. One of the more scandalous parts of the film is Varda’s irreverent “mixing of the categories of need and plea­sure in her depiction of glean-

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ing,”51 which conflates the dire economic real­ity of subsistence with playful artistry. At the same time, this irreverent combination is pre­sent in the definition of glean, which denotes the gathering of grain as well as the retrieval of facts or information.52 It is partly Varda’s camera that breaks down this distinction by transforming discarded commodities into aestheticized objects. By filming heart-­shaped potatoes, she transforms produce into affective objects with narrative interiority. When Varda turns the camera on her own wrinkled hands, she, in turn, becomes an object. “I like filming rot, leftovers, waste,” she narrates, grouping herself along with the cultural and agricultural refuse she is filming. Through her camera lens, the commodity is animated and invested with affective qualities while the body of the filmmaker becomes objectified, deadened, and estranged. Time itself seems to become distended and frozen as Varda’s camera attempts to chronicle its passage. Like the leftover grapes, Varda’s hands are filmed as specimens of old age and impending expiration. The temporality of gleaning is one of deferral and delay, which, by definition, always occurs ­after the central event. Agricultural gleaning is only permitted ­after the harvest, while ragpicking can occur only ­after items have been placed onto the curb or into trash bins for disposal. Just as salvaging garbage is circumscribed by city ordinances, regulations in much of Eu­rope dating back to the medieval period deemed that gleaners w ­ ere only allowed to 53 enter the fields once the harvest was over. This deferred temporality is already inscribed in the German word for gleaning, “nachlesen,” which implies that the act occurs a­ fter or with delay.54 If waste “is m ­ atter for whom time has run out,” then gleaning could be seen as a form of salvage collecting, preserving an object against the ravages of time.55 Upon closer inspection, however, the gleaner, like Benjamin’s spasmodic ragpicker, disrupts the regulated, structured time of commodity culture and invests an object with a new temporality. The art historian Homay King argues that “Varda and her gleaners recover, save and collect ­things, not in order to embalm them, but to use them, in the sense of putting them into practice and circulation . . . ​Gleaning involves a recognition of transience, not a denial of it.”56 From a temporal ­angle at least, gleaning appears as the opposite of hoarding, which implies a denial of transience, or at least an attempt to arrest time.57 Like collecting, gleaning is a form of preservation through transformation. In Benjamin’s terms, Varda employs gleaning as a form of practical memory, which allows her to remember the places she has visited. “It’s what I’ve gleaned that tells me where I’ve been,” she says, as the camera lingers on the Japa­nese souvenirs brought back from a recent trip.58 Gleaning evokes finitude, mortality, and disintegration by giving objects new life.

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Ruth’s Harvest: Female Collecting Historically, agricultural gleaning, Varda reminds us, used to be primarily ­women’s ­labor. This is dramatized in Jean-­François Millet’s painting The Glean­ ers (figure 17), which reportedly helped to inspire Varda’s film: the ­women in the foreground are picking up the remains of the crop while the harvesting appears to occur in the background, presided over by an official on ­horse­back. As opposed to the solitary perambulations of the ragpicker dramatized in Manet’s paintings, gleaning is staged as a collective act of collecting as clusters of ­women are depicted in concert with one another. The prostrate, humbled posture of the female gleaners directly c­ ounters the erect and deliberate verticality of the male official. Gleaning seems to follow the main event, the harvest, which is staged as an official, productive, and masculine affair. Picking up the refuse, the female gleaner is the scrappy, out-­of-­place counterpart of the sovereign male harvester who reigns by cata­loging the main crops. From agricultural gleaners to the Trümmerfrauen tasked with cleaning up the rubble of Germany ­after World War II, gathering refuse or leftovers often falls to the w ­ omen. In The Lit­er­a­ture of Waste, Susan Morrison describes the way historically subjugated classes or groups of p­ eople, such as ­women or mi-

Figure 17. ​Jean-­François Millet, The Gleaners (Des glaneuses) (1857). © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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norities, ­were often othered and treated as waste or filth. Tracing the etymology of ­matter in “mater,” (­mother) she suggestively rephrases Mary Douglas’s well-­known dictum that “dirt is ­matter out of place” to “dirt is ­mother out of place.”59 Just as hoarding is often gendered as the queer, female perversion of collecting, agricultural gleaning is disparaged as the scrappy, female manifestation of harvesting. Yet, in the scattered leftovers amassed by female gleaners we find a dif­fer­ent conception of collecting—­one closer to Benjamin’s proj­ect than to the regimented, hegemonic apparatus of museums. Varda’s film allows us to rethink gleaning as the open-­ended antidote to the collection fixated on mastery, completion, and spoliation, often coded as masculine and power­ful. Like hoarding, gleaning offers a countermodel to the dominant patterns of acquisition tethered to consumer capitalism. Since biblical times, gleaning has been left to the poor and marginalized. As God’s injunction to Moses in Leviticus suggests, gleaning was a biblically sanctioned social welfare practice: “Thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest . . . ​neither shalt thou gather e­ very grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger.”60 In the story of Ruth, the eponymous heroine advances from a bereaved w ­ idow who survives by gleaning in the field of Boaz—­a wealthy landowner—to become Boaz’s lawfully wedded wife.61 ­After coming to terms with the death of her first husband, Ruth finds a second life with Boaz and the son born out of their u ­ nion. It is Naomi, the widowed m ­ other of her deceased husband, who encourages Ruth to move on: “Why w ­ ill ye go with me? Are ­there yet any more sons in my womb, that they may be your husbands? / Turn back, my d­ aughters, go your way; for I am too old to have a husband. If I should say I have hope, if I should have a husband also to­night and should also bear sons, / would ye tarry for them ­until they ­were grown? Would ye refrain for them from having husbands?”62 Naomi’s injunction illustrates the deferred temporality of gleaning in its most extreme and gendered form: Ruth must wait to find another husband but is unable to “tarry for” Naomi’s ­f uture son to be born. In the same way Varda’s gleaners find physical and spiritual renewal in their activities, Ruth finds rebirth in the deferred fruits of her ­labor. The temporality of gleaning, as made evident in Naomi’s explication of the pro­cesses of reproduction, is anything but linear and immediate. From this perspective, we can see recycling as a form of re-­cycling, or entering into a new temporality outside of the traditional linear chronology. Like The Arcades Proj­ect, Varda’s film meanders, or­ga­nized according to associative matches rather than narrative chronology. It follows a long tradition of what Ross Chambers labels “loiterature,” a kind of “loiterly” writing that moves without advancing and emphasizes digression, distractedness, and delay, but also

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plea­sure and subversion.63 Although the film is set in the “resolutely linear, teleological progression of the twentieth ­century ­toward its finale,” Varda “uses a visual rhyme, metonymic link, or verbal pun as her means of connecting one segment to the next.”64 This nonlinear relationship to time is encapsulated by an object Varda gleans during a nocturnal ragpicking expedition: a Lucite clock without hands. As the camera lingers on this new acquisition, we are made aware of the way gleaning represents an incursion into the film’s own narrative structure. This unconventional chronology is part of Varda’s “cinécriture,” her portmanteau of “cinéma” (filmmaking) and “écriture” (writing). Like Benjamin’s intermedial embrace of montage, Varda’s praxis of gleaning draws on other media and artistic forms to rethink narrative temporality. In keeping with Einstein’s epigraph to part 2, Varda and Benjamin demonstrate that “collecting is meaningful if it represents a bold intervention into time.”65 It is precisely the erratic temporality of gleaning that allows Varda and Benjamin to reconfigure narrative time as discontinuous and nonlinear. More than simply mimicking the “swipe of a paint­er’s brush stroke” as King suggests, the resulting jerkiness of Varda’s handheld camera reminds us both of her advancing age and the “jerky gait” (pas saccadé) of Benjamin’s ragpicker.66 When stooping down to film a bunch of grapes or a pile of junk on the street corner, Varda imitates the gleaner’s prostrated posture and spasmodic movement. In Two Years L­ ater (Deux ans après), the film’s sequel, Varda observes the way the gleaner is defined by her striking posture in the fields: “You can see the repeated gesture of bending down to pick ­things up.”67 Varda accentuates the inescapable corporality of gleaning as both a gendered and humbling gesture of stooping down to gather leftovers. The most compelling example of Varda’s own “pas saccadé” is what she names “the dance of the lens cap”: when, during a stroll through an abandoned vineyard, she forgets to turn off the camera and inadvertently films the lens cap swinging erratically as she walks along the brush, leaves, and trampled grapes. Choosing to include this footage and other “waste products” in her final product, Varda highlights the constructedness of her film, as well as the role chance encounters and spontaneity play within it. Not coincidentally, this self-­ referential interlude is accompanied by jazz ­music, which was deemed to have a syncopated and jerky rhythm in comparison to the 3–4 time of classical ­music. The jerkiness of her handheld camera becomes especially apparent when Varda films paintings, photo­graphs, and other works of art. This “pas saccadé” is not only a function of the way she picks through the work of other artists but also a temporal reflection of the ekphrastic transformation of visual art into film. She imposes a new temporal frame onto visual art by filming it, just as she had done by turning the camera onto her own time-­ravaged hands.

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Tellingly, Benjamin’s other allusions to a “jerky tendency” occur in his commentary on film in an early draft of The Arcades Proj­ect, where he describes the “downright jerky rhythm of the image sequence, which satisfies the deep-­seated need of this generation to see the ‘flow’ of ‘development’ disavowed.”68 The jerkiness of the ragpicker seems to chime with the distinctly modernist aesthetic of temporal discontinuity, disruption, and fragmentation. Varda herself cites this “jerky rhythm” of early cinema in another playful interlude that follows the dancing lens cap scene: a montage of clips from Étienne-­Jules Marey’s film experiments featuring dogs, donkeys, and other animals, accompanied by the jerky motion of his proto motion picture camera. Like Manet’s uneven brushstrokes, ­these spasmodic movements interrupt the film’s narrative flow, foregrounding the limitations of the medium and revealing the “imprint” (Spur) of the artist. Just as the ragpicker recalibrates the expiration date of commodities, ­these moments disrupt the “uniformly constant movements of an automaton” to remind us of the h ­ uman, the corporeal, and the mortal.69

Reading against the Grain Gleaning is an antidote to the phallocentric mode of collection preoccupied with mastery and completion. Pivoting around the ragpicker, The Arcades Proj­ect offers a dif­fer­ent vision of culture collecting, one predicated on open-­endedness, digression, and incompletion. Citing Ursula Le Guin, Jake Wilson argues that Varda similarly subscribes to “narrative not as pro­gress ­towards a goal but as an open-­ended gathering of disparate ele­ments.”70 Le Guin links this type of narration to femininity and the female’s historically typecast role as a gatherer rather than a hunter in a way that resonates productively with Ruth’s story. Although Le Guin never specifically mentions gleaning, its cyclicality and nonlinearity provide an alternative literary model to what she calls “the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-­arrow mode of the Techno-­Heroic.”71 One could just as easily recognize this model in the structure of The Arcades Proj­ect, which eschews completion, closure, and stasis in its restless attempt to compile. “Abandoning the traditional prerogatives of authorship” for a “marginal, subterranean position” by letting the “materials speak for themselves,” the author as gleaner resists the imperious impulse to subsume every­thing within a linear, ordered narrative.72 Reading The Arcades Proj­ect through the lens of Varda’s film, one could say that Benjamin brings together the two meanings of the word “nachlesen,” si­ mul­ta­neously denoting a practice of gleaning and an act of reading, but always deferred, or a bit late. Benjamin uses the term “nachlesen,” albeit in the con­temporary sense of “checking a passage” rather than gleaning.73 Notably,

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the German synonyms for gleaning revolve around the word “lesen,” including “auflesen” (to pick up), “ährenlesen” (to glean), “nachlesen” (to glean), and “zusammenlesen” (to gather). The word “lesen” derives from the Proto-­Indo-­ European root “les,” meaning to gather or collect, another testament to the imbrication of material and textual collecting. Ultimately, Benjamin, like Varda, reinforces the link between gleaning as a material and artistic practice. Rather than reading, we are re-­reading, reading again, or reading a­ fter. Instead of consulting the original sources, we are reading the scraps, the predigested quotations that have been compiled by Benjamin. In the spirit of “nachlesen,” we are reading ­after Benjamin, reaping the scraps of his cultural harvest. Like a ragpicker, the reader of The Arcades Proj­ect picks through Benjamin’s “rags of speech and verbal scraps,” the refuse of nineteenth-­century French culture that he compiled.74 The ragpicker’s sporadic jerkiness manifests itself in the way the reader approaches his text. Instead of reading linearly, we are constantly flipping pages, referring back to previous sections to try to make connections between dif­fer­ent passages.75 While this nonlinear mode of reading might also apply to dictionaries and encyclopedias, it is programmatically relevant to The Arcades Proj­ect, which, unlike t­hese other genres, is not or­ga­nized chronologically even as it adopts its basic structure of alphabetically arranged convolutes. Just as Varda’s film follows her chance encounters at a junk sale or in the field a­ fter a potato harvest, Benjamin’s reader is driven by chance, as her eye is caught by a quotation that may lead her to flip to a par­tic­u­lar section. Kenneth Goldsmith notes that it is “a ­great book to bounce around in, flitting from page to page, like window-­shopping, pausing briefly to admire a display that catches your eye without feeling the need to go into the store.”76 But we may also slow down to examine a find more closely. Whereas we might be tempted to skip over a block quote in a conventional secondary text, we have no choice but to confront the source directly in The Arcades Proj­ect. The gleaning reader’s “pas saccadé” prefigures the jerky, erratic movements and chance encounters of t­ oday’s virtual readers, who shuffle between dif­fer­ ent tabs, files, and applications, and end up somewhere entirely dif­fer­ent from where they started. Unlike the linear structure of the novel or essay, this form grants more agency to readers, who create their own narratives by gleaning and piecing together information.77 The flighty, flitting reader also recalls Benjamin’s “distracted” viewers in “The Work of Art” essay, who develop new habits and modes of perception by watching films.78 Their scattered attention anticipates the con­temporary flow of information and its diffused, distracted absorption by an “absent-­minded” public.79 Benjamin shows us that it is only by losing our way, by reading distractedly, and by surrendering to chance that we can tackle his most challenging work.

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Child’s Play Epitomized by the suggestive possibilities of toying with garbage, gleaning—­ like collecting—­sees its most revolutionary manifestation in child’s play. In the works by the nineteenth-­century French paint­ers Jules Breton and Pierre Hédouin featured in Varda’s film, gleaning ­woman are depicted alongside groups of ­children, who run exuberantly through the fields to gather the leftovers. Filming ­children gleefully skipping and tossing potatoes while singing “Les patates” in the fields outside of Arras, Varda recasts gleaning as a form of child’s play. Returning to the quote from “Old Forgotten ­Children’s Books,” discussed in chapter 3, we can see that child’s play stages the way waste is sal­vaged from industrial production and repurposed in unexpected new ways: “For c­ hildren are particularly fond of haunting any site where t­ hings are visibly being worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, h ­ ouse­work, tailoring, or carpentry . . . ​In using ­these t­ hings, they do not so much imitate the work of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship.”80 Ragpicking taps into the basic childish instinct in play to use known objects in new ways. More than toys, waste invites creativity as ­things are freely deconstructed and reassembled. In Hédouin’s painting (see figure 18), the sky seems to open over the child gleaners, who are cast as the figures of redemption, tasked, like Noah, with renewing the old world in the face of catastrophe. The creative possibilities of assemblage, according to Benjamin, also lie in ­children’s fascination with storytelling: “­Children are able to manipulate fairy stories with the same ease and lack of inhibition that they display in playing with pieces of cloth and building blocks. They build their world out of motifs from the fairy tale, combining its vari­ous ele­ments. The same is true of songs. And the fable.”81 The product of oral transmission, fairy tales have no identifiable point of origin, obviating any notion of originality or authenticity. Comparing the construction of toys with folklore and other discarded parts of popu­lar culture, Benjamin makes explicit the link between material and textual forms of ragpicking with a Goncourt citation reminiscent of Baudelaire: “Write history out of the refuse of history” (Geschichte aus dem Abfall von Geschichte machen).82 This quote draws attention to the semantic ambivalence in German between “Geschichte” as story and history, a tension highlighted in “Rastelli Narrates” and “On the Concept of History.”83 Along similar lines, Benjamin’s magnum opus is a history constructed out of the refuse of history. It is precisely at the porous, playful border between “Geschichte” as story and history that The Arcades Proj­ect is located: it preserves like history and transforms like a story; it stores the “seeds of grain” by letting them germinate “centuries ­later” in foreign soil.84

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Figure 18. ​Still from Agnès Varda’s Gleaners and I (2001) depicting two museum workers carry­ing Pierre Hédouin’s painting Gleaners at Chamboudoin out of storage. Reproduced with the permission of Ciné-­Tamaris.

When paired with Varda’s film, The Arcades Proj­ect demonstrates the creative modernist possibilities of gleaning as an artistic praxis that self-­consciously reflects on its own temporality. A medley of scraps, colored symbols, and ink, Benjamin’s manuscript is a material object that evokes the child’s play he affectionately describes. Benjamin’s decision in the mid-1930s to include images accentuated this heterogeneous, montage form.85 Yet, unlike Joyce’s Ulysses and Alfred Döblin’s Ber­ lin Alexanderplatz, which experimented with montage within a novel structure, The Arcades Proj­ect’s scrappy form is programmatically linked to his historical proj­ ect. Intrinsically opposing the continuity of a linear narrative, Benjamin’s montage technique pre­sents historical materialism’s answer to the sweeping myths and master narratives of historicism most apparent in its insistence on linear models of pro­gress. H ­ ere we might productively compare The Arcades Proj­ect’s palimpsest form to architectural spolia which consisted of layers of overlapping history and meaning.86 Viewing montage through the lens of gleaning gives us a fresh perspective on the way modernism was bound up with the aesthetics of collecting and despoiling on the most basic level. The avant-­garde aesthetics of clutter embodied by the montage and collage form also challenges the narrative that modernists w ­ ere primarily interested in decluttering and paring down.

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Not only is gleaning methodologically related to the patchwork aesthetic of modernism, the gleaner’s proj­ect is part and parcel of modernism’s broader preoccupation with salvaging “detritus” from the rubbish heaps of society. Freud collected discarded dreams to understand the subconscious, T. S. Eliot harvested the refuse of Western civilization in The Waste Land, Marcel Duchamp exhibited urinals as modern art, Kurt Schwitters integrated discarded scraps into his collages, and James Joyce’s Ulysses is full of both waste objects and “waste words.”87 In Franz Kaf ka’s Trial, the junk room (Rumpelkammer) containing “old obsolete printed forms and overturned empty ceramic ink ­bottles” represents Kafka’s literary subconscious as much as the novel’s excessive subterranean vio­lence.88 The broader modernist preoccupation with waste was a way of engaging in the timely debates around cultural preservation, questioning what aspects of culture ­were worthy of being saved.89 Beyond The Arcades Proj­ect, Benjamin frequently employed gleaning as part of his writing pro­cess. Long before the techniques of copy and paste became a cornerstone of word-­processing, Benjamin copied and pasted parts of texts onto new sheets of paper and rearranged them.90 The resulting text was perpetually fluid and nonlinear, consisting of discrete ele­ments that could be shifted at w ­ ill. Punctuated by half-­explained quotations, his weighty sentences seem to be strung together like the beads of a necklace rather than arranged in chronological continuity. This approach is borne out by Susan Sontag’s observation that “each sentence is written as if it w ­ ere the first or the last.”91 With vignettes entitled “Antiques” and “Sewing Box,” One-­Way Street and Ber­ lin Childhood read like modernist curiosity cabinets whose objects are arranged around the whims of their collector rather than in any linear pattern.92 Recalling the way James describes Isabel in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Benjamin advises that the writer should practice his craft like the “possessor of the valuables of a curiosity cabinet.”93 By recalibrating writing as a pro­cess of collecting and displaying one’s valuables, Benjamin provides insight into the architecture of his own texts, which are composed of distinct pieces that act like found objects. In an alternative model of creation, the writer reuses and rearranges ­these “valuables” rather than creating them from scratch. Ultimately, the modernist modality of Benjamin’s practice reveals that his textual collection is programmatically dif­fer­ent from his bibliophilia. According to John Hamilton, Benjamin venerates the aura of the book as a “magical” or inviolable material object.94 In contrast, The Arcades Proj­ect dismantles books and their auras in order to impart them with new meaning. Instead of being displayed on the shelf in their physical entirety, books are dematerialized—­literally dismembered into quotes, which become appropriated by Benjamin once they enter his archive.95 The Arcades Proj­ect is the anti-­book; not only is it the product of an exile

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who no longer has access to his own books (and thus must “borrow” them—­ much to the chagrin of any passionate collector), it subverts the materiality of the book through its incomplete and potentially endlessly iterative form.96 From this ­angle, bibliophilia undermines Benjamin’s main criteria of collecting, namely that an object is taken out of its original context and stripped of its functionality. Beyond Benjamin’s book collection lies a more complex, radical relationship with material objects—­one that has a stronger link to modernism than bibliomania.

On the Reuse and Abuse of History The alternative temporality of ragpicking gives us insight into the way history can be understood beyond historicism’s premise of a continuous, homogeneous temporality. As Hannah Arendt explains, collecting is a uniquely modernist response to the fragmentation of tradition, endowing the collector with new life as an agent of modernity: “The figure of the collector, as old-­fashioned as that of the flâneur, could assume such eminently modern features in Benjamin b­ ecause history itself—­that is, the break in tradition which took place at the beginning of this ­century—­had already relieved him of this task of destruction and he only needed to bend down, as it w ­ ere, to select his precious fragments from the pile of debris.”97 This cataclysmic break in tradition turns the historian into a collector who is tasked with making sense of the pieces. By using the word “debris,” Arendt, whose essay was written in 1968, seems to forge a link between Benjamin’s historical proj­ect and the proj­ect of rebuilding postwar Germany.98 Tellingly, the collector as historian even adopts the gleaner’s stooping, humbled posture as he bends down to pick up the “precious fragments” of tradition. No longer the discerning collector who bids on choice items at the auction h ­ ouse, the historian as ragpicker must be content with the leftovers. Viewed against his own watershed historical moment, Benjamin vis-­à-­vis Arendt resembles a salvage ethnographer, gathering up the ruins of history before the deluge expels him. Building on Arendt’s reading of Benjamin, we can say that the collector is modernist in two dif­fer­ent, seemingly contradictory ways: (1) the collector is a modernist response to the fragmentation of culture and tradition, and (2) the collector participates in this fragmentation by interrupting history and appropriating its objects. This contradiction is, in some ways, a reformulation of the dialectical nature of collecting. The first type of collector preserves while the second type transforms. This second type of collector is attracted to collecting precisely ­because it decontextualizes and thus overturns tradition and cultural norms. A far cry from Nietz­sche’s portrait of the collector as a regressive figure on the wrong side of history, the collector as a historian of rubble has a distinctly modern tenor.

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Recalling his childhood forays into lepidoptery, Benjamin takes up the mantle of a fossil collector and natu­ral historian who rummages through the debris of history. He groups his diverse materials u ­ nder the rubric of “primal history” (Urgeschichte), which encapsulates the decay of the past in the pre­ sent.99 Just as salvage ethnographers sought to preserve indigenous cultures, he strives to capture the glass-­roofed arcades that ­were already facing extinction in his own time. Constructed in the early nineteenth c­ entury, the Pa­ri­ sian arcades had failed financially one hundred years l­ater, unable to compete with the mass-­produced commodities sold by department stores. “If this book ­really expands something scientifically, then it’s the death of the Paris arcades, the decay of a type of architecture,” he reflects.100 Exemplified by Convolute I, “The Interior, the Trace,” Benjamin as a natu­ral history collector examines fossilized “traces” (Spuren), specifically the imprint of bourgeois artifacts on their interior dwellings. Citing August Strindberg’s Märchen, Benjamin writes, “Extinct nature: a shell shop in the arcades.”101 Like young Walter’s hapless butterfly, the shell is a petrified remnant of the past that attests to the loss and transformation effected by a collection. Tracing the “historical” origins of the pre­sent through the arcades, Benjamin investigates the ruins of the bourgeoisie: “As the rocks of the Miocene or Eocene in places bear the imprint of monstrous creatures from ­those ages, so ­today arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of the vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-­imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Eu­rope.”102 It becomes clear that his proj­ect goes beyond preservation; in the ruins of the arcades, Benjamin finds the raw material to rewrite and revolutionize history. Convolute J, “Baudelaire”—­the largest extant section of the proj­ect—is indicative of Benjamin’s historical method: “What I propose is to show how Baudelaire lies embedded in the nineteenth c­ entury. The imprint [Abdruck] he has left b­ ehind ­there must stand out clear and intact, like that of a stone which, having lain in the ground for de­cades, is one day rolled from its place.”103 Once again adopting the persona of the natu­ral history collector, Benjamin plucks Baudelaire from the annals of nineteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture and transplants him into his text. The operative phrase “rolled from its place” suggests that the purpose of the collection is not to reveal Baudelaire in situ, but rather to displace and transform him. In a similar way, storytelling “does not aim to convey the pure ‘in itself ’ or gist of a ­thing, like information or a report. It submerges the t­ hing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again.”104 Just as the object is embedded in a collection, the story must be incorporated or “sedimented” into the experience of the storyteller in order to be passed on.105 ­Here, Benjamin’s concept of the afterlife is revived again, showing the way that Baudelaire, like the story, is reanimated by his new context.

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In The Arcades Proj­ect, Benjamin turns away from the historical, ethnographic orientation that guided his Rus­sian toy collection to adopt an overtly iconoclastic and deconstructive approach.106 He summarizes his interpretation of historical materialism in the following way: “1) An object of history is that through which knowledge is constituted as the object’s rescue. 2) History decays into images, not into stories. 3) Wherever a dialectical pro­cess is realized, we are dealing with a monad. 4) The materialist repre­sen­ta­tion of history entails an immanent critique of the concept of pro­gress. 5) Historical materialism bases its procedures on long experience, common sense, presence of mind, and dialectics.”107 In keeping with Noah’s two-­pronged task of saving and renewing, Benjamin’s historical materialism is accompanied by a critical imperative: it must “rescue” objects from historicism’s false narrative of pro­gress. Yet this mission also goes hand in hand with a more radical agenda: “It may be considered one of the methodological objectives of this work to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of pro­gress.”108 Insisting that history must intervene and critique, Benjamin’s approach comes closest to Nietz­sche’s third model of history, namely the critical method, which must analyze the past “in the ser­vice of the living” by “breaking [zerbrechen] with the past and dissolving it.”109 Liberated from its context of falsifying narratives and “blasted out of the historical continuum,” the object does not lose its historical representability.110 As the operative verb blast suggests, Benjamin deploys explosive rhe­toric that reflects the revolutionary character of his praxis. A separable verb, “herausprengen” (blast) performs the very action it signifies by being torn asunder into its composite parts, “heraus” and “sprengen,” which are dispersed across the sentence. Benjamin also uses “blast” in the Fuchs essay, explaining that this “construct results in the simultaneous preservation and sublation of the epoch in the lifework.”111 This act is the revolutionary apotheosis of the natu­ ral historian who “rolls” Baudelaire from his place and the storyteller who “submerges” the story in himself to pass it on.112 Ultimately, however, even in its most iconoclastic form, collecting never loses track of its task to distill the past: “Collecting [sammeln] is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of ‘nearness’ it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of po­liti­cal reflection makes for an epoch in the antiques business. We construct h ­ ere an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous ­century to ‘assembly’ [Versammlung].”113 Returning to the tension between collecting and collectivizing that underpinned Benjamin’s Moscow visit, “sammeln” (collecting) etymologically and semantically facilitates “Versammlung” (assembly)—­the collective—­with all its revolutionary implications. He politicizes collecting by highlighting its linguistic propinquity with the collective, effectively stripping it of its cap­i­tal­ist, bourgeois associations.

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Historical materialism, for Benjamin, is a revolutionary form of modernism, epitomized by collecting practices that are as artistic as they are historical. To properly put historical materialism into practice, one must “carry over the princi­ple of montage into history. That is, to assem­ble large-­scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut details.”114 In keeping with the patchwork temporality of gleaning, the disruptive effect of montage defamiliarizes history by deconstructing and reassembling it piecemeal.115 It thus avoids the pitfalls of historicism, which depicts the past as a continuous and homogeneous temporality. Benjamin underscores the centrality of montage to his proj­ect, declaring, “Method of this work: literary montage. I ­needn’t say anything. Merely show.”116 The goal of his form of historical materialism is not mimetic repre­sen­ ta­tion but iconoclastic transformation that takes its cue from visual art. A ­ fter all, “History decays into images, not into stories,” states Benjamin in the second point of his aforementioned summary of historical materialism.

Citing as In-­citing Of all the tools in the modern historian-­collector’s arsenal, citation most clearly carries out this revolutionary historical task, according to Benjamin. Yet, paradoxically, Benjamin’s citational praxis is at odds with the way he is most frequently cited. One analy­sis of the frequency of author citations in Critical Inquiry from 1974 to 2004 reveals that while Benjamin was the fourth most cited author, he was the only one whose work was cited “non-­argumentatively.”117 As if this was not problematic enough, this uncritical reading of Benjamin goes against the grain of his own method of critique. Benjamin’s citational praxis provides a clue to the way scholars have often misused quotes to understand his work. By their selective nature, quotes always distort and ossify, but the open-­ended, dialectical quality of Benjamin’s writing lends itself less easily to this form of repre­sen­ta­ tion. Citation extricates and concretizes his ideas in a way that gives them more authority than their contextual position grants. Benjamin himself attunes us to the epistemological limitations of citation, which we should bear in mind when quoting him. Applying Benjamin’s critique to The Arcades Proj­ect allows us to critically examine the po­liti­cal ramifications of his own practice of citation—­ ramifications that risk reinscribing the very pro­cesses he opposes. The use of citation and quotation as rhetorical devices has a long history, as Rüdiger Campe and Arne Höcker have persuasively shown.118 At first glance, ­these devices lead us back to the role of the collector as preserver or transmitter of the past. So, what, then, is specifically modern or revolutionary about Benjamin’s practice? As Patrick Greaney observes, “If ­there is something dif­fer­ent

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about con­temporary quotational practices, it might be found not in the practices themselves but in how t­ hese practices respond to historical developments in the materials that they copy and the situations that they mimic.”119 H ­ ere is the basis of a citational praxis that cites not to transmit authority but to destabilize it and to include marginalized or overlooked voices; in short, citation as politics. In accordance with his transvaluation of the collector, Benjamin’s deployment of citation in The Arcades Proj­ect undermines its traditional use as a conservative technique that venerates authority.120 Arendt explains it in the following way: Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority pre­sents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime ­were irreparable and concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by a citability and that in the place of authority ­there had arisen a strange power to s­ ettle down, piecemeal, in the pre­sent and to deprive it of  . . . ​the mindless peace of complacency.121 With the erosion of “authority” and “tradition,” the collector as historian gathers the bibliographic fragments of the past, orchestrating the “piecemeal” effort ­toward “citability.” In this way, the second characteristic of modernist collecting (to fragment tradition) emerges from the first (to gather the fragments of tradition). Benjamin himself was caught between the two. The last line of Arendt’s quote gestures t­ oward the collector’s interventionist, revolutionary stance that disturbs the “mindless peace of complacency.”122 Undermining the authority of the past and unsettling the hierarchy of source materials, Benjamin’s use of citation—­like his practice of collecting—­sheds many of its outmoded associations. By interpolating and intruding, citing becomes a form of in-­citing. Benjamin declares, “To write history thus means to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation, however, that the historical object in each case is torn from its context.”123 Juxtaposing heterogeneous, decontextualized fragments with his own commentary, he takes pains to ensure that his quotations are not exhibited in situ. Unlike the medieval textual practice of interpolation, which seeks to add to or supplement the text written by a previous author, Benjamin’s aim is not to transmit history faithfully, but rather to interrupt and fragment it with his own commentary.124 As previously noted, compilare, the Latin root of compile, derives from pilare—to rob—­and initially meant to pillage.125 In effect, the author was one who stole from or appropriated the work of ­others. Part of a broader modernist strategy of decontextualization and

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appropriation, Benjamin’s praxis of citation engages in a form of creative plunder that blows apart and refashions the original text. In its most modernist, radical form, collecting returns to its violent origins, epitomized by his eminently quotable phrase from One-­Way Street: “Quotations in my works are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction.”126 The vio­lence in this statement is not just rhetorical—it takes us back to the roots of collecting in spoliation.127 Goldsmith goes so far as to read The Arcades Proj­ect as a “literary roadmap of appropriation,” positing that Benjamin “anticipates the more radically appropriative texts being produced ­today” such as Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter’s pirated poetry anthology, Issue 1.128 The etymological roots of the word piracy, like compile, help elucidate the way the unauthorized use of another’s work is staged as a violent act. When Benjamin proclaims that his proj­ect is to “develop to the highest point the art of citing without quotation marks,” adding that “its theory is intimately related to that of montage,” is he not outlining an avant-­garde practice based on the unauthorized use or appropriation of another text?129 The quotation marks appear so routinely that they almost recede from the quotation, giving Benjamin rather than his sources authorship. Benjamin’s rhetorical posturing raises the question, are textual strategies of citation equivalent to material spoils? Thus far, the question has been addressed mostly from the perspective of art historians and archaeologists around the concept of spolia.130 The archaeologist Paolo Liverani argues that they cannot be equated: “Whereas spolia are materially wrested from a pre-­existing context, thereby damaging or even destroying it, the citation replicates an expression considered to be authoritative.”131 Thus, he continues, while it is pos­si­ble to “verify a citation or an allusion by comparison with the original text, by definition this cannot be done in the case of the reuse of physical material, as the source simply no longer exists ­after it has been reused.”132 Although he identifies an impor­tant difference between the status of their original contexts, Liverani makes several assumptions. He assumes that it is always pos­si­ble to locate a source and “verify a citation or an allusion by comparison with the original text.”133 His second, bolder assumption is that citation is a good faith practice that affirms the authority—or authorship—of the source. His argument overlooks the complexity of citations, in par­tic­u­lar the appropriative avant-­garde praxis which can culminate in theft and plagiarism.134 Fi­nally, the possibility that the textual source remains intact could prompt authors like Benjamin to take greater license with their appropriations than an architect or builder. Examining Benjamin’s citational practice through Barbara Kirshenblatt-­ Gimblett’s framework, discussed in chapter 3, we can see that the strategies of textual appropriation have po­liti­cal implications that Benjamin might not have

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anticipated. Benjamin himself was concerned with appropriation as a cultural strategy, particularly in his ambivalent relationship with Dadaism and surrealism, which transformed found objects into art, alongside other acts of de-­ auraticization. The danger of photography lies in its potential to disfigure, Benjamin admonishes, citing Albert Renger-­Patzsch’s book of photo­graphs, The World is Beautiful, which “made misery itself an object of plea­sure by treating it stylishly and with technical perfection.”135 Without a “revolutionary” caption to “tear it away from fash­ion­able clichés,” a photo­graph can aesthetically appropriate its subject.136 Paradoxically, in criticizing photography’s appropriative potential, Benjamin outlines his own methodology in The Arcades Proj­ect, which sets out to transform its content through new context and editorialization. Based on his experiences with the feuilleton, Benjamin noted a side effect of the mass media montage of newspaper stories, fiction pieces, and advertisements: the merging of the realms of art and politics. According to “The Work of Art” essay, t­here are two pos­si­ble solutions: “the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism,” or the “politicizing of art,” offered by Communism, whereby writers can illuminate their own emancipation by developing new technological forms.”137 His own approach of “blast[ing]” objects out of their “historical continuum” seeks to politicize art rather than aestheticize politics. Yet, how does Benjamin’s playful, subversive textual appropriation guard against a more sinister practice that erases history as it tries to blow it apart? Andreas Huyssen observes, “Benjamin’s celebrated practice of montage is indeed haunted by its dark side in what Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment would call mimesis hardened into reification, prejudice, and murderous intent.”138 Considering Benjamin’s admonitions about the fascist appropriation of art, it is hard to ignore his blind spot concerning the potentially reactionary aspects of citation. As Moscow Diary vividly illustrates, the personal, fetishistic strain of collecting continually runs up against Benjamin’s avowed po­liti­cal commitments. To explore this tension, the remainder of this chapter tackles two related issues: first, the psy­chol­ogy of the collector, and second, the figure of the allegorist.

The Destructive Character Benjamin’s collector invests an object with personal meaning and subjective value rather than epistemological or mimetic claims. According to Benjamin, a collection is or­ga­nized in a “surprising, incomprehensible, even profane context.”139 Arendt’s gloss is that “the collector’s passion . . . ​is not only unsystematic but borders on the chaotic, not so much b­ ecause it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object—­something that is classifiable—­but is in-

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flamed by its ‘genuineness,’ its uniqueness, something that defies any systematic classification” and hence the logic and legitimacy of tradition.140 Opposing the traditional view of collecting as the hallmark of bourgeois order and enlightened classification, Arendt’s characterization instead makes it resemble the disor­ga­nized, pathological character of hoarding. Unlike collecting, which is predicated on an externally recognizable category of value, hoarding, as chapter 2 suggested, is characterized by a hermetic order that is not recognizable to ­others. In Arendt’s quote it is precisely the collector’s “passion” that makes it “chaotic,” “unsystematic,” and “beyond classification.”141 She concludes, “Benjamin could understand the collector’s passion as an attitude akin to that of a revolutionary.”142 Based on Benjamin’s approach in The Arcades Proj­ect, we could take this one step further to contend that the passion of the collector has revolutionary possibilities. Yet, following the central dialectics of collecting, this passion can be both reactionary as well as revolutionary. Modernist collecting is a private, idiosyncratic practice rather than a public expression claiming exhibition value.143 In effect, the heterogeneous space of the individual collection pre­sents a stark contrast to the ordered system of the museum.144 Upon being acquired by a collector, according to Benjamin, the object is integrated “into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection . . . ​For the true collector, ­every single ­thing in this system becomes an encyclopedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, and the owner from which it comes.”145 For Benjamin, the object is not severed from its history ­after entering the collection. Rather, history constitutes the layers of richness that, to the collector, reflect the object’s life and afterlives. Instead of attempting to re­create context, Benjamin adopts the mentality of an impassioned book collector for whom “true freedom [wahre Freiheit] of all books is somewhere on his shelves.”146 Like Mrs. Gereth in The Spoils of Poynton, Benjamin insists that he is not archiving but enabling ontological expression: “The true method of making t­ hings pre­sent is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and so does the anecdote.)”147 This concession not only undermines any kind of ethnographic fantasy about unmediated or objective repre­sen­ta­tion but also reinforces the subjectivity of collecting. No exhibition space is able to transmit “Sammelmanie,” the deeply personal, complicated relationship between collectors and their objects. Benjamin observes, “The phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning when it loses its subject. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.”148 This remark is echoed in James Fenton’s poem “Pitt-­Rivers Museum, Oxford,” which begins by announcing its restrictions: “Is shut / 22 hours a day and all day Sunday,” creating a foil for the life the objects assume outside of

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opening hours.149 The dusty cabinets can only be brought to life by the child’s imagination, which fantasizes outside of the institution’s “salutatory” narrative of “cultural pro­gress.”150 Retreating into the private sphere of nostalgia and fetishism, the child alone is successfully able to reclaim objects from public spaces. Benjamin himself recognizes the destructive under­pinnings of the collector’s passion, warning, “The true, greatly misunderstood passion of the collector is always anarchistic, destructive. For this is its dialectics: to combine with loyalty to an object, to individual items, to t­ hings sheltered in his care, a stubborn, subversive protest against the typical, the classifiable.”151 Not only does his portrait of the collector jettison the traditional associations of enlightened order, typology, and classification, it also shares striking parallels with Benjamin’s “Destructive Character.” By way of conclusion, Abbas reflects, The collector can fi­nally be compared to what Benjamin calls the “destructive character.” Like the “destructive character,” the collector positions himself “at crossroads”; b­ ecause he sees “nothing permanent” or sacrosanct, “he sees ways everywhere” that can lead to action. Furthermore, “­because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear ­things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined.” In this description of the destructive character, Benjamin’s double characterization of the collector as attractive and motivated by “dangerous though domesticated passions” receives its most suggestive gloss.152 Blasting ­things out of their context, the collector—­like the destructive character—­engages in a certain kind of “clearing out” (räumen) that was part of Benjamin’s larger proj­ect of “purgation” in The Arcades Proj­ect.153 By purging and destroying, the collector becomes the diametric opposite of the hoarder, who clings and preserves. The destructive character recalls Benjamin’s intrepid butterfly collector who leaves ­behind “flattened grass” and “trampled flowers” in his impassioned hunt.154 He also evokes James’s snooping, conniving editor who longs to clear out Miss Bordereau’s archives in The Aspern Papers. At the same time, the destructive character’s avoidance of “creative [schöpferisch] work” and love of “empty space” lacks the ludic aspect of Benjamin’s collector.155 While the destructive character “clears away traces [Spuren] of our own age,” the collector preserves them, albeit in an altered state. The collector leaves his “traces” on the shells (Gehäuse) he inhabits while the destructive character “wipes away even the traces of his destruction.”156 In a draft of “Destructive Character,” Benjamin states, “Some p­ eople hand t­ hings down through tradition [tradierbar] (­these are above all the collectors, conservative, conserving nature).”157 As Heiner Weidmann notices, the collector is effaced—­cleared out—­from the published version while the destructive char-

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acter begins to take on the characteristics of the collector.158 Destroying and preserving, clearing out and ensconcing himself, Benjamin’s conflicted collector lies somewhere between a creator and a “destructive character.”

The Collector as Allegorist Once upon a time, Noah sought to collect a complete set of animals to repopulate the world ­after the flood. But what, if anything, replaces the goal of totality for the modern collector? Could Benjamin even conceive of the completion of his own life’s work? Given its iterative structure, The Arcades Proj­ect might well have been fated for eternal incompletion even if Benjamin had lived to continue working on it as planned. While some critics have lamented its incompleteness, o ­ thers, like Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, have deemed it “an unfinished and fundamentally unfinishable collection of ‘passages.’ ”159 Considering Benjamin’s intellectual emphasis on historical materialism as an antidote to the sweeping myths of historicism, it is conceivable that this fragmentary form might have been preferable to the traditional book form. Rather than a work, The Arcades Proj­ect is a work in pro­gress or a working-­through, just as col­ lecting as a pro­cess or verb (rather than collection, the noun) highlights seriality and open-­endedness.160 Much like each toy purchase in Moscow begets another trip to the toy store, one citation produces another ad infinitum. The iterative quality of collecting renders the closed book form insufficient for Benjamin’s purposes. Rather, it seems that the medium best suited for his proj­ect would be a website, blog, or social media account that allows for continuous updates. The arcades adhere to “variability,” the possibility of endless permutation that never allows for a final, definitive version of the text.161 If a collection can never truly achieve completion, how can we differentiate it from hoarding, the maniacal “compiling together [Zusammenscharren] of every­thing that ever existed” that Nietz­sche so trenchantly satirized?162 As chapter 2 proposed, Nietz­sche’s portrait of the antiquarian uncannily resembles the hoarder who “cannot mea­sure” and “assigns to the t­ hings of the past no difference in value and proportion which would distinguish t­hings from each other fairly.”163 Collecting is, by definition, a selective pro­cess whereby the collector tries to amass as many of a par­tic­u­lar class or variety of ­thing as pos­si­ble by making distinctions and value judgments. Therein lies another central difference between hoarding and collecting: a collection can theoretically contemplate its own completion or conclusion whereas hoarding, like gleaning, has no determinate limits. Collections are finite b­ ecause the life of the collector is finite. The collector’s task is circumscribed by time, resources,

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and the potentially unlimited number of acquisitions. Even if all objects of a certain category—­such as extant Canadian stamps from 1901—­are collected, the collection becomes the entire known set. If Noah had been ordered to include all animals, his task would have been to conduct a census rather than to collect.164 For ordinary mortals, however, completeness is in the eye of the collector, who determines the criteria for—­and, hence, the contours of—­a collection. From the standpoint of a collector, the completion of a collection is disastrous ­because it signals the end of the pursuit. For instance, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel” is complete but fundamentally inscrutable to ­humans: “When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret trea­sure. ­There was no personal or world prob­ lem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified.”165 Yet, as Borges’s story brilliantly illustrates, “excessive depression,” suicide, and book burning ensue as ­people are confronted with the futility of their existence in the face of this complete but illegible collection.166 Incompletion grants potentiality and agency, whereas “completedness” signals closure, powerlessness, and death. This might also explain why Henry James abandoned The ­Middle Years and two other works more than two years before his death; his endless postpublication revising was a way of ensuring his immortality and control. Perhaps as a clue to his own magnum opus, Benjamin affirms the endless seriality of a collection: “As far as the collector is concerned, his collection is never complete; for let him discover just a single piece missing [fehlte ihm nur ein Stück] and every­thing he’s collected remains a patchwork [Stückwerk], which is what ­things are for allegory from the beginning.”167 According to Benjamin, allegory resembles the collection in its fragmentary relationship to the irretrievable w ­ hole. Unlike the symbol, which presupposes an organic unity between a sign and its meaning, allegory questions the possibility of a natu­ral relationship between them. As developed by the Romantics, the symbol conjoined an object with its meaning, reinforcing the concept of “nature” that preserves unchanging, complete, organic identities.168 Allegory, a concept that had preoccupied Benjamin since his habilitation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, was perceived to be inferior ­because it arbitrarily linked an abstract concept to a ­thing and thus could never reach the totality that inhered in the symbol. For this reason, Benjamin compares the “allegorist with a collector who must go on adding without ever coming to completeness.”169 ­Because allegory destroys any illusions of the organic unity between sign and meaning, it is accompanied by alienation and melancholy even in its ba-

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roque heyday. Juxtaposing allegory with the symbol, Scholem asserts, “The allegory arises, as it w ­ ere, from the gap which . . . ​opens between the form and 170 its meaning.” Allegory itself illustrates this rupture; if truth or meaning w ­ ere directly accessible, ­there would be no need for allegory.171 Acknowledging the “ambiguity” and “multiplicity of meaning,” allegory has a proto-­modernist register, prompting Benjamin to write, “Baudelaire’s genius, which is nourished on melancholy, is an allegorical genius.”172 As with the ragpicker, Benjamin vis-­à-­vis Baudelaire attempts to resurrect allegory for modernity, giving it a central role in The Arcades Proj­ect and “Central Park.” Unlike the symbol, which suppresses history by claiming the eternal value of nature, allegory confronts history directly and finds its most poignant figuration in the ruin: “The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-­history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is pre­sent in real­ity in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the pro­cess of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of t­ hings. This explains the baroque cult of the ruin.”173 Decoupled from the ­human subject of historical hermeneutics, natu­ral history h ­ ere stresses the “contingency, singularity, transience and alterity of history.”174 Their temporalities could not be more divergent; allegory depicts “irresistible decay” and mortality whereas the symbol claims “eternal life.” While the symbol’s aspirations to totality and transcendence cause it to appear as “momentary” and “instantaneous,” allegory approaches temporality as “a progression in a series of moments.”175 In allegory, history manifests itself in decaying nature and is studied retrospectively, without the symbol’s pretension of finding timeless truths. By acknowledging temporality as nonlinear, allegory, like gleaning, emphasizes the “recognition of transience, not a denial of it.”176 With its focus on ruins and remains, allegory, like gleaning, foregrounds loss, delay, and deferred meaning. Exemplified by the shell shop in the Paris arcades, allegory stages the “pro­cess of natu­ral decay that marks the survival of past history within the pre­sent.”177 Drawing on the same rhe­toric of petrification and ruin he ­later deploys in The Arcades Proj­ect, Benjamin describes allegory in the following way: Whereas in symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Every­thing about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a

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face—or rather in a death’s head. And although such a t­ hing lacks “all symbolic” freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity—­ nevertheless, this is the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of ­human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual.178 Benjamin champions allegory for its materiality, historical specificity, and transparency—­the same reasons he embraces collecting as a tool of historical materialism. Like historical materialism, allegory posits no narrative of pro­ gress, thereby avoiding the symbol’s claim to a mythical state of unification. “Allegory,” Benjamin declares, “should be shown as antidote to myth.”179 If allegory is a form of dialectical materialism, then myth and symbol are the tools of the historicist. ­Here we are in the Baudelairean realm of the mortuary and rubbish heap, where the ragpicker acts as an allegorist in action or what Irving Wohlfarth calls the “grave-­digger of the bourgeois world.”180 Evoking the methodology of the ragpicker—as well as the hoarder—­baroque allegorists “pile up fragments [Bruchstücke] ceaselessly, without any strict thought or goal.”181 Just as the ragpicker infuses rubbish with new meaning, the allegorist rehabilitates discarded literary forms. Not only is the tragic drama based on the concept of the ruin, but the genre itself also functions as a kind of cultural ruin. A minor literary genre that was rarely studied, the Trauerspiel was deemed by many of Benjamin’s contemporaries to be the “trash in the rubbish bin of lit­er­a­ture.”182 In salvaging this refuse, Benjamin provides us with an early blueprint for The Arcades Proj­ect’s archaeological mission. It was the baroque poets who first demonstrated to Benjamin that the ruins of his own time could be “elevated to the position of allegory.”183 Just as the petrified commodities of the arcades showcase the decay of capitalism, the allegory exposes ruin in a way that is absent from the time-­collapsing, transcendental symbol. The extension of the relic, according to Benjamin, is the collectible souvenir: “The relic comes from the corpse; the souvenir from the experience that has died out.”184 It is precisely their hollowed-­out, fragmentary form that allows the allegorist, like the ragpicker, to breathe new life and signification into ­these objects. But rather than lamenting the fallen state of the world, like his baroque pre­de­ces­sors, Benjamin uses allegory to underscore the fragility of the socioeconomic order and lay the foundation for revolution. In “Central Park,” for instance, Benjamin draws on the rhe­toric of natu­ral history to reveal how allegory provides a guide for dissent: “Allegory holds fast to the ruins. It offers the image of petrified unrest.”185

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As early as in German Tragic Drama, Benjamin contemplated the relationship between allegory and collecting. It was Benjamin’s penchant for collecting baroque emblem books that first piqued his interest in this epoch, attesting to the feedback loop between the author’s personal collection and his literary production.186 As a combination of visual image and linguistic sign, the emblem was central to the baroque vision of nature as the allegorical repre­sen­ta­tion of history.187 By combining a title, image, and interpretive commentary, the baroque emblem could be thought of as a precursor to the montage or collage. Like a collage, the proliferation of meanings for each emblem produces an arbitrary, fragmentary clutter of images: “In its fully developed, baroque, form allegory brings with it its own court; the profusion of emblems is grouped around the figural center . . . ​this court is subject to the law of ‘dispersal’ and ‘collectedness’ [‘Zerstreuung’ und ‘Sammlung’]. T ­ hings are assembled according to their significance; indifference to their existence allowed them to be dispersed again . . . ​In the dialectic of this form of expression the fanat­i­cism of the pro­ cess of collection is balanced by the slackness with which the objects are arranged.”188 Allegory simulates the practice of collecting by “assembling” or “grouping” emblems, albeit in a more lackadaisical manner than the “fanatic” pro­cess of collection. The allegorist transforms ­things into signs just as the collector transforms objects into a constellation of values beyond their use value.189 Like the allegorist, the collector eschews completion and transcendence, working with objects or words that are already embedded in history—­what Steinberg terms “signs that refer to other signs.”190 Making ­things into signs, the allegorist acts as a bridge between the material and textual world just like the collector as allegorist bridges material and textual forms of collecting. ­Because the allegorist has relinquished the possibility of reconstructing any totality and accepts a fragmented world, he does not share “the most deeply hidden motive” of the collector, namely the Noachian “strug­gle against dispersion.” Each confronts the postdiluvian world of “confusion” and “scatter” in a dif­f er­ent way: The allegorist is, as it w ­ ere, the polar opposite of the collector. He has given up the attempt to elucidate ­things through research into their properties and relations. He dislodges t­ hings from their context and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning. The collector, by contrast, brings together what belongs together, by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information about his objects. Nevertheless—­and this is more impor­tant than all the differences that may exist between them—in e­ very collector hides an allegorist, and in e­ very allegorist a collector.191

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Benjamin’s text deconstructs itself; while at the beginning the allegorist and collector are polar opposites, the two are interwoven in the end. By “dislodging ­things from their context” and abandoning the “attempt to elucidate” interconnections, Benjamin’s collector resembles the allegorist more than his own nineteenth-­century pre­de­ces­sor, who still subscribes to the epistemological totality of the collection.192 Dispersion is etymologically linked to diaspora.193 It is in the strug­gle against dispersion, in the hope of saving “that which is scattered,” that Benjamin’s collector comes “closest to certain trends in Jewish mysticism.”194 Through his lifelong friendship with Scholem, the preeminent modern scholar of Jewish mysticism, Benjamin studied modern kabbalah—­the mystical Jewish system.195 Central to kabbalah is the sixteenth-­century mystic Isaac Luria’s “myth of exile and redemption.”196 Like Noah’s Ark, Luria’s myth reenacts the narrative of dispersal and collection that almost certainly informed Benjamin’s reflections on collecting. Luria’s myth describes the cataclysmic shevirah (‫ )שבירה‬or the breaking of the vessels of divine creation. What ensues, according to Scholem, is chaos and dispersion: “Nothing remains in its proper place. Every­thing is somewhere ­else. But a being that is not in its proper place is in exile. Thus, since that primordial act, all being has been a being in exile . . . ​every­thing is in some way broken, every­thing has a flaw, every­thing is unfinished.”197 The gathering and restoring of the scattered fragments is called tikkun (‫)תיקון‬, what Scholem calls the “harmonious correction and mending of the flaw which came into the world through the shevirah.”198 Put into kabbalistic terms, the collector embarks on the pro­cess of restoration (tikkun) and redemption by assembling the broken fragments of the vessel. Yet, the pro­cess is never complete; the vessels, like Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect, remain “broken” and “unfinished.” As Scholem notes, “From a historical point of view, Luria’s myth constitutes a response to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, an event which more than any other in Jewish history down to the catastrophe of our time gave urgency to the question: why the exile of the Jews and what is their vocation in the world?”199 In this state of exile and dispersion, Benjamin seems to respond, the Jew becomes a collector.200

“A Stern Sultan in the Harem of Objects” Restoration is not simply preservation; it is a creative pro­cess of renewal. It is a form of creatio ex materia, or creation out of preexisting parts. Like collecting, allegory introduces an alternative to creatio ex nihilo, the theological concept that the world was created out of nothing.201 Benjamin describes it in German Tragic

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Drama in the following manner: “Lit­er­a­ture o ­ ught to be called ars inveniendi. The notion of the man of genius, the master of ars inveniendi, is that of a man who could manipulate models with sovereign skill. ‘Fantasy,’ the creative faculty as conceived by the moderns, was unknown as the criterion of a spiritual hierarchy . . . ​The writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere ­whole as its obviously constructed quality was the principal impression which was aimed at.”202 Allegory anticipates the structure of the “obviously constructed quality” of modernist art such as The Arcades Proj­ect in which the writer’s activity is primarily “one of arranging” discrete fragments. In its montage-­style construction that privileges patchwork over a seamless narrative, allegory, like collecting, offers a shifting ­middle ground between mimesis and poiesis, the long-­standing modes of artistic production. If the artist is an arranger rather than creator, the collection becomes an artistic site in which the possibilities of “manipulating models” carries creative currency. Like the child who repurposes the scraps discarded by adults, the artist as a collector creates out of objects, fragments, waste, or other preexisting materials. Benjamin shares James’s aversion to the overvaluation of originality. In the preface of his “Work of Art” essay, he denounces “outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—­which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling them is difficult ­today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism.”203 While aura is not explic­itly listed by Benjamin in the preface, it—­like creativity and genius—is similarly implicated in a fascist sense of pro­cessing the world, especially in light of the essay’s ambivalent cele­bration of the decline of aura in the era of mechanical reproducibility. Aura can too easily be co-­opted by fascism, which constantly announces itself as original in spite of being every­thing but. The worship of the artist as an “Originalgenie” (original genius) has uncanny parallels to the charismatic, fascist leader who is imbued with divine or mythological qualities. As Adorno observed, the genius aesthetic is also bound up with cap­i­tal­ist norms of individualism, productivity, and competition.204 The methodology of collecting, then, is a refusal of the Romantic fetishism of originality—­one that had a troubling legacy in the twentieth ­century. In keeping with their re­sis­tance of fascist affinities, both Benjamin’s collector and the allegorist seek to destroy the mythical unity between objects and their meanings and imbue them with new signification. Taking a cue from the “armed” quotations of One-­Way Street, the allegorist who “dislodges” shares a subversive bond with the modernist collector who “blasts” objects “out of the historical continuum.”205 Baudelaire’s “rage” in “Central Park” is a testament to the destructive under­pinnings of allegory: “Baudelaire’s allegory bears traces of the vio­lence that was necessary to demolish the harmonious facade of the world that surrounded

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him.”206 Harboring ele­ments of Benjamin’s “destructive character,” the collector and allegorist are equipped with the weapons to resist and destroy the status quo. At the same time, allegory, like collecting, has regressive, despotic under­ pinnings that continue to collide with Benjamin’s po­liti­cal agenda. B ­ ecause of the fragmentariness of the allegory, the allegorist assumes paramount importance by determining its meaning and significance: “It is unconditionally in his power . . . ​He places it within it, and stands b­ ehind it, not in a psychological but in an ontological sense. In his hands the object becomes something dif­fer­ent; through it he speaks of something and for him it becomes a key to the realm of hidden knowledge and he reveres it as the emblem of this. This is what determines the character of allegory as a form of writing.”207 He might as well have been speaking about the collector. In the domain of allegory, Benjamin continues, the allegorist rules “with acts of cruelty both lived and ­imagined” like “a stern sultan in the harem of objects . . . ​It is indeed characteristic of the sadist that he humiliates his object and then—or thereby—­satisfies it.”208 Dripping with Orientalist clichés, his portrait of the allegorist anticipates Jean Baudrillard’s despotic vision of the collector: “Man never comes so close to being the master of a secret seraglio as when he is surrounded by his objects.”209 This rhe­ toric sheds new light on the passage from “Unpacking My Library” that opened part 2 of this book. Perhaps the collector’s fantasy of rescuing the “beautiful slave girl” is merely in order to give her “true freedom” within his own despotic domain.210 The gendering is not coincidental; just as Benjamin casts his prized lacquer box as a primitive Rus­sian womb, the collected object is feminized and exoticized as a sexual spoil in the collector’s quest for domination.211 Allegory, like collecting, can have despotic ramifications when it endows the collector with an “unconditional power” to determine meaning and order.212 Ultimately, the collection crowns the collector with sovereignty over its miniature world. In The Arcades Proj­ect, Benjamin summons us back to the childlike realm of the collector who rules over his dominion through ordering and cata­loging: For the collector, the world is pre­sent, and indeed ordered, in each of his objects . . . ​We need only recall what importance a par­tic­ul­ ar collector attaches not only to his object but also to its entire past, ­whether this concerns the origin and objective characteristics of the ­thing or the details of its ostensibly external history . . . ​All of t­ hese come together for the true collector, in ­every single one of his possessions, to form a ­whole magic encyclopedia, a world order, whose outline is the fate of its object. H ­ ere, therefore, within this circumscribed field, we can understand how the ­great physiognomists (and collectors are the physiognomists of

Figure 19. ​Dani Karavan, Passages—­Homage to Walter Benjamin, detail, Portbou, Spain (1990–94). © Jaume Blassi.

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the world of ­things) become interpreters of fate . . . ​No sooner does he hold them in his hand than he appears inspired by them and seems to look through them into their distance, like an augur.213 Recalling Benjamin’s quote about the allegorist’s “key to the realm of hidden knowledge,” this description illuminates the subjective quality of the collection, in which the entire world is “pre­sent” and “ordered” from the personal standpoint of the collector.214 Like Poynton, which is both the “the rec­ord” of Mrs. Gereth’s life as well as “all France and Italy with their ages composed to rest,” Benjamin’s collection fuses “external history” with its subjective “importance” to the collector. This personal, “magical” bond between collectors and their objects suggests that a collection always changes its meaning when it changes hands. Benjamin ends “Unpacking My Library” with a characteristic inversion. Although it initially appears to be the collector who saves the “lonely and abandoned” object, it is actually the opposite.215 It is the collection that saves the collector by providing order and perpetuity against his imminent dispersion. Inside the collector, “­there are spirits, or at least ­little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector—­and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ­ought to be—­owner­ship is the most intimate relationship that one can have to ­things. Not that they come alive in him, it is he who lives in them. So I have erected before you one of his dwellings [Gehäuse], with books as the building stones; and now he is g­ oing to dis­appear inside, as is only fitting.”216 In a similar way, ­children come to inhabit their books: “The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead the gazing child enters into t­ hose pages.”217 And, fi­nally, Benjamin himself “vanishes into the intertextual murmur of the Archive, pre­sent only as the invisible hand that attaches quotation marks to the past.”218 It is this disappearance which Adorno feared when he chastised Benjamin for “blockading” his ideas b­ ehind “impenetrable walls of material” in The Arcades Proj­ect.219 As Adorno wrote to Benjamin, his wife Gretel “once said in jest that you [Benjamin] inhabit the deep caverns of the Arcades and shrink from completing the work b­ ecause you are afraid of leaving the burrow.”220 The archive is transformed into a hoard, as Benjamin is unable to “complete,” let alone “leave” his fortress. As part of its afterlife, the collection begins to assume a life of its own—­a power transfer that also underpins James’s authorial anx­i­eties about renouncing control over his texts. Now it is his collection that finds Benjamin, “lonely and abandoned on the market place,” and bestows freedom upon him. Whereas Noah’s Ark became his archive, Benjamin’s archive becomes his ark (see figure 19).

Pa rt Th r e e

Collecting Africa Carl Einstein’s Ethnographic Surrealism “The happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the reigns without any history.” “Oh, I’m not afraid of history!” She had been sure of that. “Call it the bad part, if you like—­yours certainly sticks out of you. What was it e­ lse,” Maggie Verver had also said, “that made me originally think of you? It ­wasn’t—as I should suppose you must have seen—­ what you call your unknown quantity, your par­tic­u­lar self. It was the generations ­behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and the waste—­the wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in your ­family library are all about. If I’ve read but two or three yet, I ­shall give myself up but the more—as soon as I have time—to the rest. Where, therefore”—­she had put it to him again—­“without your archives, annals, infamies, would you have been?” —­Henry James, The Golden Bowl, 32

In Carl Sternheim’s 1917 novella Ulrike, the eponymous heroine seeks to escape the horrors of World War I through a flight into the uninhibited sexuality of primitivism—­first offered by the cinema and then by African art. A young Prus­sian aristocrat who is brought up to accept Lutheranism, patriotism, and a stern sense of duty, Ulrike becomes a volunteer nurse at a hospital where she is traumatized by the grotesquely disfigured soldiers she treats. While seeking refuge in the movie theaters of occupied Berlin, Ulrike encounters Posinsky, a Jewish painter and African art enthusiast, who becomes her lover. Sternheim’s satirical portrait of Posinsky was most likely inspired by

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the German-­Jewish writer and art critic Carl Einstein.1 Ulrike and Posinsky’s romance mirrors Einstein’s ten-­year relationship with the Countess Aga von Hagen. Known as the “red countess” for her pacifist views, von Hagen volunteered for medical ser­vice during World War I and sought to escape her noble origins and strict Protestant upbringing through her liaison with Einstein.2 During their first encounter, Posinsky regales Ulrike with details from his regenerative Africa trip, where he acquired a sculpture collection: “He possessed Sudanese wood and ivory sculptures which he wanted to show her. She followed him and marveled at the cubistic works, leafing through his African sketches which captured their fiery noble gestures.”3 As with many collectors—­with the notable exception of Henry James—­the promise to unveil a collection is a prelude to seduction. Ulrike becomes Posinsky’s model, muse, and lover, increasingly secluded from the world as she becomes drawn into his wild, colonial artistic fantasies. In the African kraal he constructs in the living room, Ulrike regresses to her most “primitive” state: ­because he “wants her to be African” (da er sie afrikanisch wollte), “she allowed Posinsky to paint and tattoo her skin and dye her hair a deep black color. She decorated her lips and breasts with vermilion.”4 Satirizing the primitivist fetishization of all ­things African, this modernist attempt at ­going native is depicted as a tool of self-­liberation: “The accretions of civilization dropped away from Ulrike, her original nature, buried over the generations, was scraped f­ree and emerged in pristine form, and she became her most concentrated self.”5 The novella ends on a cryptic, unnerving note as Ulrike dies in childbirth with “ecstatic grimaces” in fulfillment of Posinsky’s artistic and erotic fantasies. Since the child “repelled” him, “he gave it to an orphanage, but only ­after painting the outlines of it in the lap of a sleeping Ulrike u ­ nder palm trees . . . ​The painting is called ‘Nevermore’ and hangs in a public collection.”6 Sternheim makes an overt reference to Nevermore (figure 20), Paul Gauguin’s 1897 painting of his young, naked Tahitian mistress.7 More than twenty years before the publication of Ulrike, Gauguin sought to escape an overcivilized Eu­rope in search of a primitive model that defied Western norms and artistic conventions. The fact that Africa is a proxy for Tahiti and the Prus­sian aristocrat stands in for the “primitive” female subject in Gauguin’s painting is an ironic commentary on the racist, parochial dimension of Eu­ro­pean primitivism, which reveals more about its own misguided ambitions than the “exotic other” it claims to represent. Emphasizing the mutually reinforcing relationship between collecting and creating as well as between African art and cubism, Posinsky’s artistic production is intimately bound up with his collection of spoils. Although he never went to Africa, Einstein sometimes misled ­people into believing that he had actually

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Figure 20. ​Paul Gaugin, Nevermore (1897). Photo credit: Courtauld Institute.

traveled ­there.8 Einstein’s passion for Africana grew out of his tenure as a colonial officer in Brussels during World War I. Nevertheless, like Posinsky, Einstein acquired a sizable collection of African art objects, which w ­ ere pictured in his essays on African art. Hardly a flattering tribute to Einstein, Posinsky is depicted as an imperial despot who willingly sacrifices his lover for art; his sexual occupation of Ulrike is inextricably tied to his conquest of Africa, both on a material and an artistic level. Sternheim’s caricature also conflates Einstein’s role as art critic and collector with Posinsky’s role as an artist and collector, illustrating how intertwined t­hese vocations w ­ ere considered to be. Hanging on display in an “open collection” (öffentlicher Sammlung), the last painting of Posinsky’s deceased lover is a testament to the way private trauma is sublimated into art and given new meaning in public circulation. Ulrike demonstrates both how collecting practices are often rooted in empire and how they replicate the vio­lence of colonization on a personal level by appropriating objects and instrumentalizing other ­human beings. A colonial, avant-­garde Portrait of a Lady, this novella dramatizes what would happen if Gilbert Osmond ­were an aspiring expressionist with a flair for kink and exotic art. In collecting and appropriating African art objects, Einstein, like his fictional alter ego, searched for countermodels to the inherited Eu­ro­pean aesthetic tradition. Among other exaggerations, Sternheim’s satirical portrait overlooks Einstein’s groundbreaking art criticism, which transformed the Western reception of African art beyond a passing primitivist craze. Einstein’s Negro Sculpture was

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the first art historical work to treat African sculpture as art rather than ethnographic objects. Its 111 striking black-­and-­white photo­graphs of African masks and sculptures are not accompanied by any captions or identifying information. It was partly Einstein’s modernist approach to collecting that made them into “modernist icons worthy of aesthetic contemplation.”9 Like Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect, which extracts quotations by “blasting” them out of their original context, Einstein’s practice of collecting is emphatically modernist in its effort to strip objects of their historical or cultural import. Epitomized by Negro Sculpture, the modernist collector becomes a decontextualizer rather than a taxonomist, privileging the specificity of an object over its representability or epistemological value. Einstein pre­sents an impor­tant case study for Benjamin’s warnings about the dangers of aestheticization and the troubling po­liti­cal implications of decontextualization. Paradoxically, it is the seemingly buttoned-up James, more than his avant-­garde successors, who recognizes the dangers of appropriation. As Einstein discovers, his pioneering exhibition strategies often misrepresent objects by bracketing cultural and historical context. When he finds he has gone too far in his art historical experiments, Einstein embraces an ethnographically informed approach. Einstein’s l­ater attempt to revise his aestheticism in African Sculpture restores the centrality of context and marks a shift to a more modified understanding of collecting as a balance between preservation and artistic display. A similar aim is reflected in the documentary impulse of Einstein’s surrealist journal, Documents, which championed evidence-­based disciplines such as archaeology, ethnography, and photography. Exhibiting artwork as documents, Documents inverts the aim of Negro Sculpture, which transformed ethnographic finds into works of art. Einstein’s shift from championing the aestheticized object to the privileging of context in his ­later work reveals the fundamental limitations of the artistic praxis of collecting. Both in its heterogeneous structure and its focus on material culture, Documents, like The Arcades Proj­ect, is a self-­conscious textual collection that reflects on its own collecting practices. Yet, even as Einstein and his surrealist colleagues critiqued the colonial practices of museums, their roles as collectors, art historians, and ethnographers made them direct beneficiaries of the Eu­ro­pean despoliation of Africa (see figure 21). In a series of largely overlooked essays, Einstein espouses a theory of collecting that is connected to his broader literary and art historical aims. Chapter 5 is one of the first works of criticism to take seriously “this genre of collection writing,” making a case for its centrality to Einstein’s scholarly output as well as to his writing pro­cess.10 The importance of t­hese essays reinforces my argument that during the modernist period, the previously distinct roles of collector and artist began to intersect. Reflecting on his friend, the renowned art collector Dr. Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, Einstein develops the notion of the “creative collec-

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Figure 21. ​Photomontage in Einstein’s “Masks and Magic in the South Seas,” published in Galerie Flechtheim’s Omnibus: Almanac for the Year 1932. “Carl Einstein and Dr. Eichhorn, Director of the Ethnographical Museum of Berlin, inspecting the Flechtheim ­Collection, 1926.”

tor” who rejects the role of the historian to preserve and rec­ord, becoming an explorer who “boldly intervenes.”11 Reber’s collection is uniquely modernist in its reliance on juxtaposition to break down and reconfigure the conventional arrangement of objects. Equally applicable to Einstein as a collector of Africana, his notion of the “creative collector” represents the culmination of the artistic current of modernist collecting—­the polar opposite of Nietz­sche’s neurotic, antiquarian hoarder. This designation raises several questions: When does the task of “passionately reshaping” become a pro­cess of creation in itself ? At what point is the object of collection transformed beyond recognition?

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In his use of juxtaposition, Reber’s collection anticipates the methodology of Documents—­the subject of chapter 6. Building on Klaus Kiefer’s work, chapter 6 demonstrates Einstein’s centrality to the founding of the “Critical Dictionary,” the section at the end of each issue of Documents.12 The “Critical Dictionary” attempted to rewrite language by collecting words and transforming their meaning. In spite of Documents’ putatively documentary ambitions, the Dictionary is a paradigmatic modernist collection that aims to decontextualize words in order to reinvest them with new semantic significance. A close reading of “Nightingale,” Einstein’s Dictionary entry, exposes the limitations of this proj­ ect. By paraphrasing Einstein’s e­ arlier work, “Nightingale” performatively highlights the failures of literary language to achieve innovation even in a medium designed to transform it. As chapter 6 concludes, paraphrasing is an endlessly iterative form of textual collecting that eschews any notion of originality. For an author, the recycling of one’s own ideas is both a way of archiving oneself—­a fitting endpoint for a genealogy of collecting—as well as an illustration of the limitations of language.

C h a p te r   5

The Collector and His Circle

The German-­Jewish writer, art critic, collector, and po­liti­cal activist Carl Einstein (1885–1940) led “not a happy but an exemplary life.”1 ­After spending his early years in Karlsruhe and Berlin, Einstein left for Paris in 1928, before joining the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia in 1936. He committed suicide in 1940 in the South of France. Unable to escape prosecution by Nazi forces as a Jew and communist and prevented from fleeing into Spain b­ ecause of his participation in the Spanish Civil War, Einstein threw himself into the Gave d’Oloron river with a stone tied around his neck.2 Regarded as a “prophet of the avant-­garde,” Einstein was an influential mediator for the cultural transfer not only between Paris and Berlin but also between lit­er­a­ture and visual art. Thus far, the growing body of secondary lit­er­a­ture on Einstein has focused ­either on his pioneering contributions to the Eu­ro­ pean study of African art, or, more recently, Einstein’s incisive commentary on cubism.3 ­There has been no study of Einstein as a collector, never mind any effort to link his practices of collecting objects with his writings and literary collections.4 Perhaps this lacuna reflects the difficulties of trying to connect the wide-­r anging fields to which Einstein contributed. Like Benjamin, Einstein’s genius resides partly in the vertiginous disciplines his writings wove together. Their critical writings function on both literary and performative levels and must be examined in conjunction with their methodological impulses.

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This is why the modality of collecting plays an especially central role as a structuring princi­ple in Benjamin’s and Einstein’s work. In the literary history of missed connections, few are as poignant as the encounter that never took place between Einstein and Benjamin. To start with, ­there are the uncanny biographical parallels. As German-­Jewish intellectuals, both left Berlin for Paris, Einstein in 1928 and Benjamin in 1929 (and more permanently in 1933), and, facing the imminent threat of the advancing Nazis, both committed suicide in 1940 near the French-­Spanish border, Einstein in Pau in July and Benjamin in Portbou in September. Motivated by a strong conviction in the revolutionary potential of art, both writers w ­ ere active in leftist circles 5 in Berlin and Paris. Although ­there is no known correspondence between them, both had contact with Georges Bataille and other French intellectuals from the Collège de Sociologie during their Pa­ri­sian exile.6 Both emphatically rejected positivistic notions of history as a linear chain of causality. Both drew on visual culture in their style and method, Einstein through avant-­garde painting and Benjamin through the media of film and photography.7 Fi­nally, as Charles Haxthausen notes, through their interdisciplinary approaches, both Benjamin and Einstein “developed a theory that was driven by a sustained, utopian faith in the socially transformative potential of con­temporary visual practices.”8 Pivotal to this pro­cess, was the collector, whom both recuperated as an impor­tant figure of modernity. Just as Benjamin’s radical citational practice in The Arcades Proj­ect represents the literary apotheosis of his Rus­sian toy collection, Einstein’s “Critical Dictionary” is a textual collection that emerges from his collection of African artifacts. The trajectories of their approaches, however, oppose one other. While The Arcades Proj­ect culminates with a revolutionary ragpicker whose goal is to disrupt and decontextualize, Einstein’s notion of the creative collector is qualified as he increasingly emphasizes context, evidence, and documentation during his tenure at Documents. Einstein was both an adviser to power­f ul twentieth-­century collectors and a collector in his own right. Unlike hoarding, which is intensely private, collecting is often a collaborative pro­cess involving complex networks of collectors, dealers, curators, and artists who influence the production and circulation of artworks.9 Returning to the etymological relationship between collecting and the collective established in chapters 3 and 4, we could say that Einstein’s collecting practice was a collective pro­cess. While Einstein advised collectors on their acquisitions and connected them to gallerists, they allowed him to document and analyze their collections. He was the driving force b­ ehind the Swiss banker Eduard von der Heydt’s influential collection of non-­European art.10 Einstein also persuaded the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim—­himself a famous collector—to include non-­European art in his gallery agenda. With Einstein’s

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support, Flechtheim’s gallery held an influential exhibit in 1926 devoted to von der Heydt’s two hundred sculptures from the South Seas, which was shown in Berlin, Zu­rich, and Düsseldorf and reviewed in magazines like Cicerone and Cahiers d’Art.11 Einstein penned the preface for Galerie Flechtheim’s exhibition cata­log. He was so invested in the South Seas collection that ­after the exhibit he wrote to Thomas Joyce, a leading ethnologist, to ask ­whether the British Museum might be interested in purchasing it in its entirety, explaining, “I have no commercial interests whatsoever. I just want to keep this lovely collection I have assembled from being dispersed [zerstreut], a wish you w ­ ill easily understand.”12 Guided by Benjamin’s princi­ple of heritability, Einstein yearns to “preserve a valuable ensemble” that does not even belong to him.13 Parsing out the circle of collectors complicates our understanding of a work of art, which is both the creation of an individual as well as the product of a larger sociocultural network. In Benjaminian terms, it is a way of examining the afterlife of a work. The feedback loop between Einstein, Flechtheim, and von der Heydt not only underscores the way objects circulated between collectors, galleries, and publications but also affirms the link between material and literary collections, which often served as de facto exhibition cata­logs. In 1921, Flechtheim launched Der Querschnitt, perhaps the most impor­tant German art magazine of its time, which published articles by Einstein and photos of Flechtheim’s 1926 South Seas exhibit and works from von der Heydt’s collection. The evolution of Der Querschnitt from a gallery cata­log into a preeminent art and culture magazine edited by the author Hermann von Wedderkop attests to the generative possibilities of t­ hese networks of avant-­garde collections, which spawned other collections, journals, and works of art.14 Ultimately, Einstein’s artistic vision of collecting was exemplified by his close friend Dr. Gottlieb Friedrich Reber. Although the circumstances or exact date of their acquaintance remain unknown, the friendship between Einstein and Reber most likely formed in the mid-1920s.15 A successful German textile businessman, Reber began collecting incunabula and rare books and turned to nineteenth-­century French art in 1906, acquiring some of Paul Cézanne’s most famous paintings, such as The Boy in the Red Vest.16 ­After moving to Switzerland in 1919, Reber began selling his nineteenth-­century paintings to buy works by early cubists. Recognizing that “a new formal, h ­ uman mode of viewing was being constructed,” Reber, according to Einstein, “sacrificed his most meaningful Cézannes in order to build a con­temporary collection.”17 ­Until the 1929 financial crisis forced him to sell many of his works, he was in possession of the largest, most impor­tant cubist collection of his time, consisting of 80 works by Juan Gris and 160 works by Pablo Picasso, including more than 70 oil paintings spanning his entire ­career.18 Like Gertrude Stein’s

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famed modern art collection, his acquisitions drew the attention of prominent artists including Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Hugo Ball, who visited his famed Château de Béthusy in Lausanne partly also to become acquainted with the works of their contemporaries, highlighting the pivotal role of the collector in shaping and disseminating artistic trends.19 Einstein was far from a detached scholar who used Reber to articulate his theories of collecting and art history; he played a pivotal role in the development of Reber’s art collection. He not only accompanied Reber on his journeys through Pa­ri­sian studios and galleries but also advised him in his purchases, informed him about current art trends, and discussed his writings with him. Einstein allegedly influenced Reber’s “conversion” to cubism and withdrawal from Cézanne, and it was Einstein who first encouraged him to begin collecting non-­Western art.20 Reber, like Flechtheim and von der Heydt, allowed Einstein access and permission to photo­g raph his most valuable works for his publications. In gratitude, Einstein dedicated The Art of the Twentieth ­Century’s fourth chapter on cubism to him: “For G. F. Reber, in sincere friendship.”21 He even expressed the intention of writing a cata­log for Reber’s collection as an entry point into his theoretical observations on cubism, for which The Art of the Twentieth C ­ entury was merely a “preview.”22 As their extensive correspondence suggests, Reber was also an impor­tant interlocutor for Einstein as he began to conceptualize the organ­izing princi­ple for Documents. It is often difficult to discern to what extent Einstein ­shaped Reber’s collection and to what extent Reber’s collection informed Einstein’s theories of art and collecting. But that is precisely the point. Their communications challenge the assumption that Einstein was a collector by proxy aided by Reber’s financial wherewithal by revealing that the two had a sustained, symbiotic relationship.

The Creative Collector Out of Einstein’s writings emerges a veritable theory of collection that sharply differentiates Reber’s praxis from both the dominant bourgeois culture of collecting and institutional exhibition practices. Reber’s collection served as the “paragon” (Mustersammlung) of what a modern collection should look like, allowing Einstein to test his own theories about collecting. He published several articles devoted entirely to his reflections on collecting, which all centered around the figure of Reber as the epitome of a “creative,” visionary collector, including “Portrait of a Collector,” which appeared in Documents in 1930; “Dr. G. F. Reber,” published on the occasion of Reber’s fiftieth birthday in Die Kunstauktion in April 1930; and a related but shorter French piece,

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“La Collection Reber,” published in the French newspaper L’Intransigeant in 1930. The Pudelko Archive in Bonn contains a fourth, unpublished essay by Einstein on Reber’s collection, which reiterated the themes of the other pieces. For Einstein, the creative collector as personified by Reber was deliberate and methodical in his practice instead of being driven by the idiosyncratic whims of a dilettante. An explorer who “discovers areas that have never been discovered,” Reber is a real-­world example of a conquering collector fictionalized in Henry James’s novels.23 Never analyzed or compared in any scholarly inquiry, several of Einstein’s essays on collecting have not yet been published. Like Benjamin’s toy essays, ­these writings have been brushed aside as marginalia. Sebastian Zeidler’s impor­ tant intellectual biography of Einstein summarily dismisses them as “splenetic,” “tortuous and unsurprising.”24 Positing that “Reber d­ oesn’t ­matter,” Zeidler concludes, “It is Einstein himself who’s the collector ­here and his own text that’s the collection: not of objects but of the words that fail to reach them.”25 Even while disavowing the role of Reber, Zeidler unwittingly affirms how impor­tant collecting was to the framing of Einstein’s literary proj­ect. As early as in his 1913 essay “The Collection of Henri Rouart,” Einstein articulates the concept of a “creative collector” (schöpferischen Sammler). Henri Rouart, an impressionist with works on display at the Louvre, is depicted by Einstein as primarily a collector: “A man like Rouart lived among paint­ers and his passion for art research drove him to become a painter. Prob­ably not ­because he believed his paintings w ­ ere necessary, more likely ­because he wanted to study the composition of his beloved paintings more closely . . . ​Rouart’s collector’s passion [Sammelpassion] was so inward, intense, and immediate [unmittelbar] that it became a creative pursuit [daß sie sich zur schöpferischen Tätigkeit steigerte].”26 Unlike other art collectors who began as paint­ers, Rouart’s art developed out of his collection just as Benjamin’s bibliophiles take up writing ­because they are “dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”27 Foregrounding the slippage between collecting and creation, Einstein suggests that the collector’s “passion for collecting” can prompt his own artistic production. Painting alongside his friend Edgar Degas, Rouart “stood in the pro­cess of artistic creation [Prozeß des Kunstschaffens]” instead of acquiring art from the sidelines. B ­ ecause he was an “intimate” participant and mediator in the art world, Rouart was ultimately able to assem­ble a formidable collection.28 On several occasions, Einstein uses the French word “passion” instead of “Leidenschaft” as if to differentiate Rouart’s emphatically French collecting practice from that of German art dealers masquerading as collectors.29 His profile of Rouart as the collector-­turned-­artist is as much a critique of German collectors who are too invested in the art market to understand art itself.

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Like James, Einstein professes anxiety about the proliferation of meaningless bourgeois collections in the nineteenth c­ entury. For Einstein, the creative collector represents an assault on traditional bourgeois forms of accumulation, just as Mrs. Gereth’s tasteful trea­sures are the antidote to nouveau riche bric-­a-­brac in The Spoils of Poynton. Einstein’s homage to Reber, “Portrait of a Collector,” opens with the following lament: “The world is flooded with collections [Die Welt ist von Sammlungen überschwemmt] that above all reveal the wealth and expertise of their possessors. T ­ hese structures lack inner activity and are often based on values that quickly begin to falter. I know few collections in which a deeper sense of the ­future resides . . . ​Improperly designed collections are mortal and frail like fashion.”30 The French translation of the essay uses the more imaginative phraseology, “bric-­à-­brac classique,” in place of “­these structures” as if to sharpen the contrast between Reber’s collection and the nineteenth-­century mania for collecting. Similarly, the art critic Julius Meier-­Graefe describes Reber’s collection through its departure from the “manic compulsions” of his contemporaries: “No vitrines, none of the frantic, self-­contained mania of collectors who sacrifice plea­sure for excess. Nothing less than a museum.”31 Meier-­Graefe’s depiction harks back to Nietz­sche’s trope of the “moldy” antiquarian who represents the “wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of every­thing that ever existed.”32 Unlike the neurotic antiquarian, the modernist collects with the skill and solicitude honed by the artist. Far from expressing arbitrary “opinions or whims” (Meinung und Laune), Reber’s collection was cultivated through “perception and knowledge.” Reber’s “highly active collection,” which “attests to the forward-­looking knowledge of its creator [Schöpfer],” offers an impor­tant antidote to the absence of “inner activity” that Einstein had bemoaned in “Portrait of a Collector.”33 Einstein’s formulations of collecting as “programmatic” signal a shift away from Benjamin’s impassioned, spontaneous collection that emerges from personal desire. At the same time, Reber’s collection is possessed by an idiosyncratic spirit that gives it a distinctive character. The opening lines of Einstein’s unpublished essay capture this sentiment: “Dr. Reber’s collection differs from other g­ reat collections insofar as it displays a methodological, spiritual [geistige] structure.”34 Along similar lines, “Portrait of a Collector” articulates a vision of collecting that initially recalls Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library”: “One can speak h ­ ere of a demon or a conscience of a collection . . . ​It is demonic ­because of its exploratory restlessness and b­ ecause it reveals the hard w ­ ill of a person in e­ very piece. This collection possesses a conscience [Gewissen] ­because every­ thing that is not equivalent to its world view [Anschauung] is excluded.”35 Instead of an assembly of heterogeneous parts, Reber’s collection functions as an autonomous ­whole, like a work of art. His collection is possessed by a

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“demon or conscience,” an inviolable spirit that, like Poynton, vanishes upon dispersion or dismemberment. This spirit endows the collection with its agency and creative potential: “This collection is creative [schöpferisch] ­because it is singularly possessed by a definitive spirit [Geist].”36 Similarly, Benjamin describes the “spirits, or at least l­ittle genii” that inhabit the collector and provide him with a sense of meaning.37 Emphasizing the power transfer from the collector to his objects, Benjamin suggests that the collection assumes a life of its own, eventually possessing the collector. Yet, the apparent affinity between Benjamin and Einstein’s recognition of the “spirit” of the collection belies a greater difference in their approaches: while for Benjamin, the collection is intensely personal and manic, Einstein’s collection vis-­à-­vis Reber retains a self-­contained autonomy that resembles the work of art. The task of the collector, as outlined by Einstein, increasingly approaches the role of the artist rather than the curator. Throughout his Reber essays, he deploys the verb “schaffen” (to create) to refer to Reber’s work of collecting. Einstein posits, “Reber lent the word ‘trouvaille’ a new, collectorly [sammlerisch] meaning,” differentiating his collecting praxis from the accumulation of “banal, pretty t­ hings.”38 Invoking the language of artistic creation, he concludes, “This collection was created by a living, creative person [von einem lebendigen, schöpferischen Menschen geschaffen].”39 Similarly, in “Portrait of a Collector,” he outlines the “character of its creator [Schöpfer],” effectively treating Reber as an artist in his own right.40 In sentences like “Reber thus creates [schuf] a total work of early antique art,” Einstein strikingly shifts the power of creation from the original artist to the collector.41 The revisions to “Dr. G. F. Reber” reveal that Einstein strengthened the imperative of the collector in ­later drafts.42 The collector becomes a meta-­artist whose second-­order creation constructs a work of art out of the individual objects he acquires, arranges, and furnishes with context. Like an artist who cultivates illusions about the metaphysical origins of their artwork, Reber refused to divulge the history of his collection, treating it as an organic ­whole that had always already existed.43 Bearing noticeable traces of Einstein’s theory of collecting, Reber declares in Documents, “A collection must have a program, may even be a program itself.”44 In his epitaph to Einstein, Reber ventriloquizes Einstein when chastising o ­ thers for failing to support him before his death: “And you, you creative collectors [Ihr kreativen Sammler], did you entirely forget the value of this creative, congenial critic?”45 Creative is the operative word, repeated twice in this brief admonition. Reber’s phraseology suggests that the power dynamic has shifted almost entirely to the collector, who wields power not only over the artwork but also over the beleaguered critic.

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Reber is Einstein’s Eduard Fuchs—­the iconoclast collector who embodies his approach to history. Reber “boldly” intervenes in history while Fuchs’s historical materialism privileges a historically grounded specificity that c­ ounters the my­thol­ogy of historicism.46 Reber “composes,” Einstein observes, by endowing the collection with a historical narrative: “He discovered the history and tradition of con­temporary art and composed it in a collectorly way [sammlerisch komponiert].”47 Einstein reaffirms this idea in “Dr. G. F. Reber” when he states that “Reber accomplished a tremendous amount for ­these cubists,” implying that it was Reber rather than the artists who secured their place in the annals of history.48 Presenting works of Greek antiquity alongside their Asian progenitors, Reber’s collection offered a new understanding of antiquity by revealing that “Greece was no isolated won­der but a part of a larger Mediterranean culture.”49 Composing through historical discovery, the collector straddles the divide between preservation and transformation to fuse history and art. Using Benjamin’s terms, it is Einstein’s collector who gives the object its afterlife (Nachleben).50 By deciding what is saved, the collector writes or rewrites history. As Einstein’s epigraph to part 2 suggests, collecting has an undeniable temporal and historical dimension: “Collecting is meaningful if it represents a bold intervention into time . . . ​collecting means bold intervention [heftiger Eingriff].”51 Einstein’s collector is not merely a historian who preserves and rec­ords but one who explores and hence “intervenes” in history. In Reber’s collection, history is not treated as the completed past but always intermingled with the pre­sent: “­Here, the historical is transformed into the unmediated pre­sent [unmittelbaren Gegenwart] while t­ oday it is restricted to the era of historical permanence.”52 Echoing Benjamin’s notion of historical materialism, in which ­there is no such a t­ hing as a discrete, distinguishable past and pre­sent, Einstein saw history primarily as a retrospective form of contemplation constructed out of the criteria of the pre­sent: “Reber always recognized that the beginning of all history is buried in the pre­sent.”53 The model of collecting embodied by Reber, like Fuchs, takes aim at the myths of historicism through its active, interventionist approach to history. Through juxtaposition and recontextualization, Reber’s collection revolutionizes history by bringing art from dif­fer­ent cultures and epochs into dialogue with each other. With ­these new frames, Reber, like Fuchs, unleashes the “historically revolutionary” aspect of art: “He exhibits the major historical tradition of the defining modern artists. Picasso’s Flute Player is placed next to the Guido of Siena’s Madonna; colorful Pierots are arranged between archaic sculptures of the Cyclades and the paintings of Gris are illuminated against the fur-­clad Sumerians. ­These facts reveal something very dif­fer­ent from the

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usual compilation [tagesmäßige Zusammentragen] of paintings where daily a newly discovered genius swiftly treads on the heels of another genius and where daily the form or cosmetic makeup of the newest soul is preached.”54 ­Here, too, Reber’s thoughtful practice contrasts with the haphazard “compilations” of other collectors who simply fetishize novelty. Pairing a Gris painting with “fur-­clad Sumerians,” Reber “makes a bold intervention into time” (heftigen Eingriff ) in order to “transform the past into the immediate pre­sent” (zur unmittelbaren Gegenwart verwandelt).55 According to Einstein, “Reber creates ­these Moderns, who compelled a complete transformation of perspective, with historical projection and depth,” a depth they lack as stand-­alone works.56 Again, the use of the word “schaffen” (creating) is instructive as it imparts Reber with creative agency. Once annexed by Reber’s collection, t­hese pieces are “endowed with historical depth” and “woven into a historical totality.”57 Removed from the act of creation, Reber as collector is able to provide ­these works with a larger aesthetic and historical context that might elude the individual artist. His praxis bears out Peter McIsaac’s observation that by enabling new relationships to be uncovered, the collector creates the conditions for new configurations of thoughts.58 Through juxtaposition, Reber’s collection echoes the montage form, breaking down the conventional arrangement of objects and placing them into a new order. Described by Einstein as a “living school,” Reber’s Château de Béthusy was a constantly rotating art gallery.59 Photos corroborate his strategy of combining cubist paintings, medieval sculptures, and ancient art objects in unorthodox combinations. One photo shows a medieval Madonna and Child displayed against the backdrop of a Persian rug hung vertically on the wall, while another depicts an ancient Egyptian figurine standing in front of Picasso’s Three Musicians. Such displays attest to the way Reber and other visionary private collectors w ­ ere able to challenge mainstream exhibition strategies. Unlike museums, which ­were or­ga­nized chronologically or typologically, Reber’s private collections could take risks to create subtle, ingenious acts of juxtaposition. Paradoxically, at its most avant-­garde, Reber’s Château harkens back to the structure of the princely Wunderkammer. Like its early modern pre­de­ces­sors, the Château was a private, idiosyncratically curated collection that brought together heterogeneous trea­sures into the same physical space. Reber as a meta-­creator arranges a world in miniature. Neither the Château nor the Wunderkammer sought to pedagogically represent objects in their “original” context or historical chronology but instead juxtaposed them in unorthodox ways. Exhibiting ethnographic and artistic objects alongside each other, the Château recalls the Wunderkammer’s approach of incorporating exotica into the same

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epistemological framework as religious relics and paintings before Enlightenment-­ era disciplinary distinctions funneled them into dif­fer­ent institutions.60 This arrangement anticipates the methodology of Documents—­the subject of chapter 6—­which explic­itly employed visual and textual juxtaposition to level the distinction between Eu­ro­pean and non-­Western cultures. Most importantly, Reber’s collection enables a revolutionary “new, living form of seeing [Schauen].”61 Unlike the more passive “sehen” (seeing), the active verb “schauen” (looking at) dominates Einstein’s “Portrait of a Collector.” We can observe a progression from Einstein’s formulation of “seeing as discovery” (entdeckerisches Sehen) in the Rouart essay to the more active “looking at” (Schauen) embodied by Reber.62 Reflecting Reber’s dynamic technique of collecting, this kind of vision requires active participation and “demands the exertion and concentration of the viewer.”63 The revolutionary view (Anschauung) produced by Reber’s collection is etymologically linked to this active pro­cess of “schauen”: “­Here is no more talk of a view [Anschauung] that . . . ​only accepts that which is officially dead. The collectorly accomplishment [sammlerische Leistung] of Dr. Reber means nothing other—­and this is neither an exaggeration nor immodesty—­than a breakthrough of traditional art historical modes of viewing [Anschauung]; h ­ ere aesthetic values are reassessed.”64 By prompting this “reassessment of aesthetic values,” Reber has a momentous impact of Nietz­schean proportions that exceeds the contribution of any individual artist.65 This perceptual breakthrough is part of the transformative historical impact of Reber’s collection. Einstein goes on to underscore the groundbreaking sensory implications of Reber’s practice: “Upon entering the Reber collection, one stands amidst the testament to a revolutionary art historical perception.”66 Precisely b­ ecause it is carefully curated instead of haphazardly compiled, the collection is an organic totality, as the works “stand like blood-­related friends, who belong together in a meaningful, living, effective mode of viewing [Anschauung].”67 Connected both by an affective and familial bond, the individual pieces unite to generate new modes of perception. The active mode of perception accords with Einstein’s theory of cubism, which was predicated on the idea that vision is an active pro­cess that radically reconfigures a viewer’s intuition of visual phenomena. According to Einstein, cubism pre­sents “multiple aspects of three-­dimensional objects on a two-­ dimensional surface” to “rupture” an existing model of perception that treats objects in “neat temporal succession.”68 By asking the viewer-­subject to mentally “complete” the image, cubism produces a generative multiplicity that belies the centralizing, totalizing gaze of mimetic Western art.69 Like Reber’s collection, a cubist work thrusts the observer into an active role by requiring

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them to “complete” the picture and fill in the narrative gaps. In cubism, Einstein saw the stirrings of a perceptual revolution that could serve as a blueprint for renewal in modern Eu­ro­pean culture. Perhaps one of the strongest intellectual bonds between Einstein and Reber was their common belief that cubism represented a new type of worldview (Weltanschauung).70 As Einstein explains, objects do not exist in the world but are constituted for the first time in acts of seeing: “Art has as its end not the depiction of an object but the structuring of a way of seeing.”71 Art offers not only an alternative to scientific causality, but a new form of “viewing” that constitutes objects in other ways than are found in the empirical world.72 Like Benjamin, Einstein’s revolutionary aesthetic imperative was po­liti­cally grounded in the conviction that the artist-­intellectual would transform society. Fostering a revolutionary form of perception, the collector is the staunch ally of the cubist and artist-­intellectual in transforming the way the spectator sees the world.

“Excess of Africa” In addition to his close relationship with influential collectors, Einstein was a lifelong collector and connoisseur of African art, culture, and folklore. The seeds of Einstein’s passion ­were planted in his early visits to African art in galleries and museums in Berlin, but flowered during his appointment in the Belgian colonial office during World War I. ­After suffering a serious head injury during the war in November 1914, Einstein was posted at the colonial department of the civil administration for the Government General in Brussels from 1916 to 1917. This position gave him access to the Musée du Congo at Tervuren, one of the best libraries in the world on Central Africa.73 It is ­after this period that Einstein’s correspondences become replete with references to the collection and circulation of African art (often referred to as “bois” or “sculptures”) between gallerists, artists, and collectors.74 Thanks to his connections in the Belgian colonial office, Einstein began to amass a significant collection of African Art, both material and archival, reinforcing the close relationship between collecting and colonization. Einstein’s bourgeoning “Sammelmanie” is most vividly reflected in his ebullient prose in a 1916 letter to his friend, the writer and publisher Franz Blei. Einstein gets straight to the point: “Dear Franz. First of all, friendly greetings. I am completely ­going black ­here [ich negriere hier gänzlich]. Excess of Africa. This effort removes me from myself.”75 Fraught with racist and colonial overtones, Einstein’s “­going black” is fundamentally an attempt to escape the self. It is h ­ ere that Einstein most closely resembles Posinsky, his fictional alter

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ego in Carl Sternheim’s Ulrike who satisfies his colonial artistic kink through blackface. Like Posinsky and his lover Ulrike, Einstein’s desperate desire for transformation arose, in part, from the trauma of the battlefield. A few lines ­later, Einstein resolves, “And this time I’ll collect Africa in two volumes [diesmal werde ich Afrika in zwei Büchern versammeln]” with “German meticulousness” [heimatliche Gründlichkeit].76 As with Benjamin’s Moscow sojourn, collecting is a personal response to both an archival and emotional excess that often takes on an obsessive, manic quality. Even on a semantic level, collecting is transformed from a material practice into an archival proj­ect that he ­will tackle with his native German resolve. Reminiscent of James’s triumphant 1905 proclamation, “I take possession of the old world—­I inhale it—­I appropriate it,” Einstein’s “­going black” reveals the way collecting is a confluence of power, authorship, and fetish. Einstein’s trajectory from soldier to colonial officer to scholarly collector is a testament to the enduring centrality of spoliation to collecting. As he giddily reports in his letter to Blei, he is writing from the desk of the “late Belgian Colonial Minister.” This “poor devil,” Einstein quips, would be a perfect “subject for a pretty good comedy,” with his “primitivity,” “trained disrespect,” and irresponsible arbitrary powers.77 Einstein’s mocking tone captures his liminal privilege as an avant-­garde intellectual; he can safely critique the deceased colonial minister while profiting from his proximity to power and resources. As part of his ambitious plan to “collect Africa” (Afrika versammeln) in the Belgian colonial office, Einstein collected African songs, prayers, fairy tales, and myths that appeared in vari­ous anthologies and journals, such as Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion. Although t­ hese compilations formally departed from academic approaches, they w ­ ere often indebted to ethnographic sources. For instance, Einstein’s 1925 anthology African Fairy Tales and Legends, was based on a series of ethnographic surveys printed in the 1917 periodical Marsyas. Einstein’s African lit­er­a­ture “Sammelmanie” was part of a larger trend; Tristan Tzara collected expressions from African tribes in “Poèmes Nègres,” Blaise Cendrars compiled his bestselling Anthologie Nègre, and Alain Locke published The New Negro.78 Avant-­garde writers did not merely collect ­these tales and poems but appropriated and integrated them into their work just as cubists incorporated African motifs into their paintings to formulate an alternative visual syntax.79 Admiring the cadences of African poems and songs, they sought to experiment with rhythm and repetition in their own verses. Outside of the Western constraints of mimesis, African lit­er­a­ture and sculpture was believed to offer a spontaneous, unmediated form of expression.80 The synthesis between art production and collecting practices is a defining feature of modernist collections, which incorporated their spoils into the work of art u ­ ntil they became

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inextricably interwoven. Einstein’s African poems aimed not to display his finds in situ but rather within his own aesthetic idiom. They w ­ ere stylized as a “Nachdichtung,” which tries to re­create the spirit of another poem without aspiring to provide a literal translation. The awkward integration of African source material foregrounds the porous bound­aries between collection and creation and between Geschichte (history) and Geschichten (stories). In contrast to his collections of African stories and songs, Einstein’s personal collection of African artifacts is no longer extant. Like Benjamin, whose personal collection was dispersed ­after his exile, Einstein’s collection signals a double loss: the archival loss in addition to the more existential loss inherent in a collection, which is heightened, in this case, by the cultural and geographic impasse between Einstein and his spoils. The author Henri-­Pierre Roché alludes twice to Einstein’s collection of “African sculpture” (bois nègres) during a visit to his home in October 1921.81 Of the nearly fifty photographic illustrations in Afri­ can Sculpture, Einstein includes seven objects from his own collection, including a wooden figure of a girl from the Belgian Congo standing nearly forty-­eight centimeters tall.82 Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology rec­ords the acquisition of at least one object from Einstein’s personal collection—­a subject that has never been mentioned in Einstein scholarship. Still on display in the museum’s African wing is a “double-­sided ancestral figure” dated to the nineteenth or early twentieth ­century (figure 22). The museum’s bill of purchase confirms that it was purchased from Einstein for 600 Reichsmark in August 1926.83 Made of carved wood and covered with bronze metal, Einstein’s sculpture is an abstractly rendered bust whose nearly closed eyelids reveal dazed—if not slightly sinister—­pupils. As if to accentuate the figure’s ambiguity, its teeth are bared, contributing to the uncertainty as to w ­ hether the figure is grinning or grimacing. The double-­sided aspect of the figure contributes to its uncanniness, particularly as the concave side reveals the lack of a mouth and hence appears opaque and introverted—­quite literally its structural and psychological opposite. This “two-­sidedness” is summarily described by Einstein in Negro Sculpture: “Occasionally it appears to be virtually impossible to determine which expressive type a given Negro work represents: the terrified or the one who terrifies. H ­ ere we have excellent proof for the ambiguous indifference of psychological expression. ­After all, our own experience teaches us that the physiognomic expressions of opposite emotions are identical.”84 Although Negro Sculpture includes no footnotes, citations, or captions, Einstein could well be describing his own object, highlighting the ambiguity between the two sides of the figure as well as the unsettling indeterminacy of its expression. By understanding Einstein’s personal collecting practices, we can better grasp his intellectual trajectory and corpus. His Africana collection reveals that

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Figure 22. ​Reliquary figure: “Mbulu Viti” (Collector: Carl Einstein), Ethnological Museum of Berlin. © bpk Bildagentur/Ethnological Museum of Berlin/Martin Franken/Art Resource, NY.

Einstein’s publication of Negro Sculpture was not a “surprise” with “no indication for his interest in the topic at all,” as Zeidler has suggested, but rather the culmination of his intersecting professional and personal interests.85 The symbiosis between Einstein’s personal collection and his scholarly and artistic output suggests that by the early twentieth ­century the role of collector becomes difficult to disentangle from the artistic profession. This confluence between ­career and “hobby” represents a marked shift from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Collector and His Circle, in which the collector’s professional life as a doctor is neatly bifurcated from his dilettantish, amateur love for art collecting.86 By integrating their collections into their creative production, modernists fused the role of collector and artist u ­ ntil they became indistinguishable.

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The question of w ­ hether Einstein’s professional, critical interests stemmed from his collection or w ­ hether he began collecting once he started writing about African art can be rephrased as follows: Had the collector become a critic or had the critic become a collector?

“A Harvest of Loot” Even before Einstein’s appointment in Brussels, his Africana collection was intertwined with the Eu­ro­pean extraction and appropriation of African art that accompanied colonialism. By regulating Eu­ro­pean colonization and trade in Africa, the Berlin conference of 1884, or­ga­nized by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, formalized the “scramble for Africa.” Newly unified Germany was one of seven Western Eu­ro­pean powers that colonized Africa, eventually acquiring parts of present-­day Cameroon, Namibia, Nigeria, and several other countries.87 For nineteenth-century European powers, racism and colonialism ­were a self-­reinforcing system of evils: colonial powers sought to legitimate their exploitation through race, which, in turn, provided further ­ uman Races, justification for slavery and colonization.88 In the In­equality of H Arthur de Gobineau laid out a toxic formulation of racial taxonomy that became the foundation of modern biological racism and anti-­Semitism.89 Not only did the Jewish Einstein not subscribe to this virulent racism, he went beyond his avant-­garde contemporaries to value African art as an aesthetic form in its own right rather than merely a negation of bourgeois Eu­ro­pean values. However, as Einstein’s letter to Blei indicates, this comparatively progressive attitude did not prevent Einstein, like so many modernists, from adopting his own form of racism and cultural essentialism. Like the Louvre for James and the Bibliothèque nationale for Benjamin, the museum that figured most prominently in Einstein’s thought and work was Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology, founded in 1873. Although Einstein visited it throughout his c­ areer, he had an ambivalent relationship with its exhibition practices. Einstein—­like James—­was both fascinated and dismayed by the dramatic expansion of museums in the late nineteenth c­ entury. ­Under the direction of the ethnologist Adolf Bastian, the Berlin museum had become a pioneering institution in the imprint of Alexander von Humboldt’s liberal, cosmopolitan vision.90 Unlike British institutions like the Pitt-­Rivers Museum that aimed to prove a theory of cultural advancement, Bastian sought “to exhibit similar patterns across cultures” in a more pluralistic manner.91 ­There is a striking parallel between Bastian’s monumental vision of museum pavilions and Benjamin’s arcades: objects prominently arranged in cabinets made of glass

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and steel, flooded by natu­ral light, connected through an overarching structure so that a visitor could survey the entire exhibit while moving easily from one display to the next. With the expansion of empire and capital, both the arcades and cabinets produced new pa­noramas of exhibition and consumption that allowed the simultaneous repre­sen­ta­tion of objects in the same space. But, by the turn of the c­ entury, Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology functioned largely as an overstuffed ware­house for ethnographic objects.92 This disor­ga­ nized hoard of colonial spoils was a significant departure from the progressive, Humboldtian vision espoused by Bastian and his successor Felix von Luschan.93 The regression of the museum from Bastian’s enlightened form of exhibition, argues the historian H. Glenn Penny, was partly due to its success acquiring one of the most extensive collections in the world. Collecting, Penny posits, changed from a means (of scientific study) to an end (possession) in itself: “This salvage mentality, along with the empirical need for material objects, led ethnologists to privilege collecting over every­thing ­else, including the itemizing, cata­loging, and ordering of artifacts.”94 By 1907, German museums had been taken over by a new generation of anthropologists who increasingly served the state’s nationalist and imperialist objectives and rejected Bastian’s humanist approach.95 It was this version of the Museum of Ethnology that decisively ­shaped Einstein’s own collecting practices as well as his critique of the museum. Between 1880 and 1914—­the years of German expansion in East Africa—­ the collection grew from 3,361 objects to 55,079.96 A ­ fter Germany assumed colonial powers in 1884, a “steady stream of collectibles flowed out of the German protectorates and quickly became the focal point of the department of African Art.”97 Corroborating the link between colonization and collecting practices, museum rec­ords reveal that objects w ­ ere directly transferred from the colonies to the museum as “Beutestücke” (war booty). A rec­ord of one expedition culminates in a lengthy cata­log of fifty objects, ranging from an ivory war horn to an ostrich egg—an almost parodic throwback to the Re­nais­sance Wunderkammer. Remarkably, the museum cata­log treats the imperial origins of objects as a way to “guarantee” that they are “genuine and original” (garantiert echt und Originale).98 Luschan, Bastian’s successor, was responsible for assembling a collection of more than six hundred objects from the Kingdom of Benin.99 The majority of the pieces w ­ ere obtained through a British raid on the kingdom in 1897, which is described in the following manner: “Upon entering the King’s court, the British officers ­were shocked to find more than 900 bronze plaques in addition to a large number of carved ivory tusks. The British collected all they could, assigned some objects to the men who led the retaliatory force, and shipped the rest to London,” where they w ­ ere auctioned off to Eu­ro­pean mu-

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seums and collectors, the largest of whom was Luschan, acting for the Berlin museum.100 One attending British officer described the raid as “a regular harvest of loot.”101 With its matter-­of-­fact description, this account shows the seamless circulation of cultural spoils from the battlefield to the museum. Af­ rican Sculpture mentions Benin art over thirty times, citing the writings of Luschan, whom Einstein personally contacted to source images for his publications, in hopes of “stimulating collectors to take up ‘primitive art.’ ”102 At least five out of its twenty-­two illustrations from the Museum of Ethnology are photo­g raph plates of the Benin Bronzes.103 Still ­today, Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology has one of the largest collections of Benin objects—­around 440 of the more than 500 existing objects can be traced back to the British raid.104

“Museum Wars” The interconnection between modernism and the early twentieth-­century interest in African art is well-­trodden ground in art history.105 Already in Negro Sculp­ ture, Einstein describes the “necessary” simultaneity of the “discovery of Negro sculpture” and the broader crisis in repre­sen­ta­tion heralded by Eu­ro­pean modernism.106 What is less known is the way collecting practices helped reframe African artifacts as aesthetic art objects, which, in turn, influenced the development of modern art. Although collecting was a cornerstone in the interrelationship between modernism and African art, existing scholarship has overlooked the role collecting practices played in resituating ­these objects in an aesthetic rather than ethnographic framework. The private collecting of African art not only spurred the creation of modernist art but also changed the field of art history. It was, in no small part, Einstein’s modernist approach to collecting that helped reframe African art as serious aesthetic objects rather than ethnographic museum specimens. In Negro Sculpture, Einstein argues for the centrality of collecting to this pro­cess: “One collected Negro art as art; passionately . . . ​ with this activity now validated one constructed a newly interpreted object [ein neu gedeutetes Objekt] out of the old materials [alten Materialien].”107 His statement encapsulates the aesthetics of modernist collecting, which constructs new interpretations “out of the old materials,” recalling Ezra Pound’s modernist injunction to “make it new.” Collecting, according to Einstein, helped “validate” African art by both treating it on the same level as Eu­ro­pean art and considering it a source of creative inspiration. Einstein’s use of the word “passionately” (passioniert) illustrates how the affective dimension of individual collecting helped shape the progressive attitude ­toward African art by opposing the clinical, dispassionate, and “objective” displays of museums.

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The interpretive techniques and exhibition strategies of Reber, Einstein, and other private collectors provided a new context for interpretation. At stake was not just the trajectory of modern art, but the very disciplinary bound­aries between anthropology and art. Chapter 1 situated the collector’s classificatory drive against the backdrop of a larger cultural shift in the repre­sen­ta­tion and categorization of objects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth c­ entury. Collecting, becomes, in part, a way to pro­cess the latent anxiety surrounding the classification and organ­ ization of objects—­many of them foreign and non-­Western. Before they ­were deemed worthy of aesthetic contemplation, African artifacts languished in the neglected displays of cluttered ethnographic museums. As Andrew Zimmerman and Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett have shown, the art/artifact distinction was central to the formation of modern museums and the disciplines associated with them. Anthropology sought to secure its scientific status by defining objects as artifacts, specimens, and documents—­and emphatically not as art.108 ­Because it competed directly with art in its visual emphasis, anthropology was forced to distinguish itself in its focus on the quotidian rather than the beautiful and exceptional, thereby privileging an object’s epistemological status over its aesthetic status.109 In contrast to art history, which studied the art created by Eu­ro­pe­ans, “objective” anthropology focused on the artifacts produced by “natu­r al cultures.” For this reason, Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett contends, objects are not born ethnographic but become so through the work of the ethnographer.110 By 1921, the debate over the most appropriate method of displaying non-­Western objects became part of what the art critic Karl Scheffler dubbed the “Berlin museum war” in his eponymous tract.111 Sparring over the distinction between art and anthropological objects, critics and institutions debated w ­ hether artifacts reclassified as artwork should be removed from ethnographic museums. ­These debates ­were ­later taken up by Documents, whose very name questions the ontological status of a document by blurring the bound­aries between fine arts and ethnography. Although modernist collecting practices often self-­consciously oppose the taxonomic organ­ization of institutions, museums nevertheless played a formative role in the genesis of both modernist art and collections. Most famously, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907 ­after visiting the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro in Paris. Meanwhile, it was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s encounter with Polynesian carvings in the Dresden Ethnological Museum that sparked the interest in Oceanic and African masks and sculpture demonstrated in Die Brücke.112 James Clifford goes so far as to speculate that modernist techniques evolved out of the artists’ own muddled sources—­museums that haphazardly exhibited mislabeled, misclassified objects with erroneous or

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missing captions.113 The displays in the Trocadéro, where Picasso first encountered African art, lacked any contextualization, meaning the museum’s objects w ­ ere viewed as “detached works of art rather than cultural artifacts.”114 It is thus likely that the displays of museums unwittingly helped sow the seeds for the aesthetic treatment of African art objects. Such encounters undermine the frequent charge made by artists and scholars alike that the museum was a sepulchre fundamentally inimical to the creation of art.115 It is not coincidental that many pioneer modernists ­were themselves avid collectors of African art. The fauvist Maurice de Vlaminck, who credited himself with “discovering” African art, traces his interest back to a 1905 encounter with André Derain: Derain and I had explored the Trocadéro Museum several times . . . ​but neither Derain nor I viewed the works on display t­ here as anything but barbarous fetishes . . . ​­These three Negro statuettes in the Argenteuil bistro ­were showing me something of a very dif­fer­ent order entirely! I asked the owner to sell them to me. He initially refused, but I insisted, and ­after many more refusals and excuses, he gave them to me on the condition that I pay for a round of drinks. I fi­nally left with the three statues. Shortly afterward, I showed my acquisition to a friend of my ­father’s. He offered to give me some of his African sculptures since his wife wanted to get rid of ­these “horrors.”116 As Vlaminck’s dismissive attitude ­toward the displays of African art in Trocadéro indicates, while they might have been inspired by museums, ­these collections ultimately bore fruit outside institutional frameworks. The bistro escapade suggests that ­great modernists ­were often mediocre collectors. Unlike Reber’s refined Château, their collections ­were ­limited by the paucity of the markets, their meager earnings, and a surprising lack of discernment. The art critic and curator William Rubin has even questioned ­whether the word “collection” even applies to the acquisitions of the modernists. Of Picasso’s more than one hundred “primitive objects,” the majority w ­ ere “poor-­ quality carvings” and “inauthentic ‘tourist’ works,” while the entire collection of the surrealist Wilfredo Lam was, “unbeknownst to him, made up of fakes.”117 Thus, Picasso was “less a collector than an accumulator of objects” who spurned the designation of “collectionneur.”118 Rubin distinguishes Picasso, for whom “tribal sculpture represented primarily an elective affinity and secondarily a substance to be cannibalized,” from connoisseur collectors—­such as Rubin himself—­who “diligently search out and trail objects, study and compare them.”119 As l­ imited as Rubin’s distinction is, it reveals the way collecting was bound up with the production of modern art from the very beginning.

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The German expressionist Emil Nolde provides an in­ter­est­ing case study in just how collecting becomes integral to an artist’s creative pro­cess. Like Einstein, he honed his interest in ethnographic objects while visiting Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology between 1910 and 1912. Sounding like Benjamin, Nolde recounts, “An almost childlike ­little passion had taken possession of me. I needed ­little figures and objects for my still lifes. I bought such ­things ­here and ­there, more than was necessary. A collection began to accumulate.”120 The genesis of his collection illuminates the inextricable relationship between collecting and modernism: Was it their work that drove modernists to collect or was it the collection that drove them to create? In a veritable visual palimpsest, Nolde’s paintings integrated many of t­ hese objects—­ranging from African masks to German ceramic Madonnas—­into his work.121 In 1913, Nolde participated in a medical-­demographic expedition to German New Guinea as a chief anthropological researcher, assigned to sketch the Indigenous population and collect their anthropological objects.122 The fact that the artist moonlighted as a colonial anthropologist highlights not only the porous bound­aries of art and ethnography in the early twentieth c­ entury but also the tension in Nolde’s work between documenting and creatively transforming his ethnographic subject. It was a self-­reinforcing pro­cess; his collections inspired sketches and paintings that prompted him to continue collecting, which, in turn, produced more art.123 Upon his return to Eu­rope, Nolde painted a series of related still lifes that incorporated objects from his South Seas expedition. Nolde’s Stilleben N (1915) depicts an ancestral Malanggan figure from New Ireland, which was part of German New Guinea (called New Mecklenburg) between 1884 and 1914. Mimicking the effect of the collection, his paintings detemporalize and despatialize ­these objects that Nolde appropriates for his own aesthetic purposes. He reaffirms an iterative pattern of colonial collecting and art production fictionalized in Sternheim’s Ulrike, which was modeled on Gauguin’s famous South Seas journey. As African artifacts circulated beyond the purview of ethnographic museums into the hands of individual collectors and artists, they began to be prized for their aesthetic value rather than merely their historical representability. Surrealists like André Breton and Max Ernst continued this habit by frequenting the Marché aux Puces in Paris, collecting African or Oceanic sculptures and other “curiosities, as chapter 3 related.”124 By the 1920s the widespread collecting of ethnographica by modernists had reached a fever pitch, prompting the critic Waldemar George to proclaim in 1930 that “Negro and Oceanian Art have become the prey of avant-­garde poets, married, sterilized, and converted into collector specialists.”125 Incorporating their spoils into their works

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of art, modernists exploded existing categories of art and culture and blurred practices of collecting and creating.126 At its most radical, the primitivism espoused by many modernists held that alterity was the primary point of subverting Eu­ro­pean culture. This sentiment is exemplified by Hugo Ball’s statement that “the idea of Dadaism . . . ​is the idea of the absolute simplification, the absolute Negro-­ness [der absoluten Negerei] appropriate to the primitive adventures of our time.”127 Beyond conflating African culture with the usual primitivist ste­reo­types, he equates it with the radical, transgressive aims of Dadaism. Hal Foster describes the primitivist fantasy that “the other has access to primal psychic and social pro­cesses from which the white bourgeois subject is blocked.”128 For modernists, African and Oceanic art—­grouped together ­under the rubric of “l’art nègre”—­represented this unmediated, spontaneous, and au­then­tic form of expression absent from Eu­ro­pean culture.129 African art was both a way to subvert bourgeois Eu­ro­pean norms and part of a larger search for creative regeneration that tapped into chronic modernist anx­i­eties about originality and artistic inheritance. Yet, as Jill Lloyd, Cordula Grewe, and ­others have persuasively argued, even while trying to rebel against bourgeois culture, the avant-­garde fascination with African art participated in and facilitated the mainstream imperial consciousness.130

Einstein’s Negro Sculpture: Myopia or a New Way of Seeing? Einstein was one of the first modernists to publicly oppose the avant-­garde classification of African artifacts ­under the rubric of primitivism.131 Opening with a sweeping denunciation of racist Eu­ro­pean approaches to African art, Negro Sculpture set out to treat African artifacts formally as aesthetic art objects. “The Negro is not undeveloped,” he contends. “A meaningful African culture has perished. The con­temporary Negro corresponds to an ‘ancient’ about as much as the fellah corresponds to the ancient Egyptian.”132 For Einstein, unlike many of his contemporaries, African art was not merely in­ter­ est­ing as a negation or subversion of bourgeois Eu­ro­pean values but as an art form in its own right with its own aesthetic princi­ples. According to Negro Sculpture, Western art ­after the Re­nais­sance privileged perspective to the detriment of the three-­dimensionality of art such that sculpture and painting became one and the same.133 The artist’s formal task was to pre­sent an object as it was intended to be viewed by the spectator, who was supposed to see the object in the same way as the artist.134 A “crisis” in France,

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argued Einstein, led to a reappraisal of the way space is structured—­a paradigm shift that coincided with the Eu­ro­pean “discovery” of African art.135 Cultivating “pure sculptural forms,” African art uses formal distortion to pre­sent a simultaneity of perspectives apprehended in a single act of perception rather than presenting a frontal perspective combined with a suggestion of depth.136 It produces an impression of totality by welding together the dif­fer­ent perspectives in their in­de­pen­dent, distorted ways. This approach was embraced by cubists, who championed subjectivity, multiperspectivism, and fragmentation but also sought a critical apparatus to overturn the worn-­out conventions of Western art.137 In effect, Einstein concludes, African art creates a new way of seeing. The African “artist produces a work that is self-­sufficient, transcendent, and unentangled” and “precludes e­ very function of the beholder.”138 The beholder is irrelevant b­ ecause “the art of the Negro is defined above all by religion. As with many ancient p­ eople, the sculptures are objects of worship.”139 Religious function determines form, as the “pronounced individuation of their parts” are “oriented, not according to the beholder’s point of view, but from within themselves.”140 Released from the artist’s dependence on the perspective of the beholder, the work is characterized by a level of autonomy and “power­ful realism of form” that differs from the optical naturalism of Eu­ro­pean art.141 Preoccupied with “frontality,” the Eu­ro­pean sculptor privileges the position of the beholder by focusing on one centralizing vantage point.142 In contrast, cubism, following African art, jettisons this “collusion between artist and spectator which characterizes Western art” by emphasizing three-­dimensionality and fragmentation.143 As intriguing as it sounds, Einstein’s theory was entirely philosophical and had l­ittle basis in historical real­ity, as several reviewers at the time noted.144 His account was largely speculative and not grounded in any ethnographic or historical sources, leading the art historian Zoë Strother to conclude, “­There are not many traces of Africa in Negerplastik.”145 Haxthausen remarks that it reads like “the product of theory in search of an object—­Einstein’s recently articulated radical theory of totality.”146 Instead of providing art history, Einstein enlists African art to champion a form of autonomy aesthetics; only if art is absolute and autonomous is it able to transcend the confines of history.147 Consisting of 111 black-­and-­white photo­graphs of African masks and sculptures, Negro Sculpture was, in part, the result of Einstein’s efforts to obtain professional photo­g raphs of African art from his circle of gallerists and collectors.148 Einstein’s art objects are transformed on two levels: from sculptures into photo­graphs and from ethnographic specimens into art objects. Paradoxically, a book that explores the fundamental prob­lem of three-­dimensionality transforms sculpture back into two-­dimensional objects through photography. As Wendy Grossman observes, the medium of photography helped transform

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the ethnographic object into an art object.149 Eschewing any attempt to document, the photos are not meant to serve as illustrations of the text and are never even directly referenced by Einstein.150 Einstein’s usage of photography as a transformative pro­cess of avant-­garde repre­sen­ta­tion questions its status as a documentary medium. Unlike Documents’ photo­graphs of African art, which made putative claims to document, Negro Sculpture’s photo­g raphs ­were emphatically anti-­documentary. By omitting captions, provenance, or context, Einstein hoped his subject would be treated as “pure form.” The absence of captions was intended to draw the viewer’s attention to the aesthetic value of the object rather than to its historical or cultural context. Zeidler notes, The image shows a sculpture, but it is not accompanied by a caption that would identify its cultural or phenomenological context. It is impossible to know with any certainty where the object came from, when it was made, by whom, for what purpose, whom (if anyone) it represents, or ­under which circumstances it became available to a Western photographer. Nor is it pos­si­ble to determine, from the scarce visual evidence the image provides, the size of the sculpture or even just its spatial situatedness. The photo­graph miniaturizes the object, but it is not clear at which scale; the absence of a ruler or indeed any other object prohibits an inference based on a comparison with e­ ither a mea­sur­ing standard or with some item intuitively familiar to the reader from his own everyday environment.151 Without any captions or explanations, ­these objects-­turned-­images seem to float freely, appearing aestheticized and autonomous (see figure 23). The formal qualities of t­ hese objects are quite literally foregrounded in the absence of any contextual cues.152 The overall effect of Negro Sculpture must have been one of disorientation as the average reader would have no clue about the origins, purpose, or provenance of an object, let alone “under what circumstances it became available to a Western photographer.”153 The sleek minimalism of the objects coupled with the book’s sparse layout was especially suited for the modernist palate. By decontextualizing and inserting t­ hese objects into a new order, Einstein’s text flattens, misrepresents, and homogenizes. Strother draws on photography theory to argue that Negro Sculpture’s images are presented with a “compelling stylistic unity” that “obliterates” geographic origin, regional specificity, or cultural difference “in the search for ‘pure sculptural forms.’ ”154 She concludes that the “creation of a homogeneous archive of images, skillfully sequenced for purposes of comparison and contrast, constituted the founding

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Figure 23. ​Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (1915), plates 74–75.

act of African art history.”155 Like Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Strother shows how an archive or collection erases the distinction between objects, which now occupy a simplified status based on their proximity to other objects. In effect, the collection imparts the illusion of aesthetic cohesion, which, in the case of foreign cultural objects, is particularly suspect. Rather than situating t­hese works in a historical, geographic, or cultural framework, Einstein seeks to establish broad categories for all African art. He deliberately excludes ethnographic sources, declaring, “We ­will bracket out subject ­matter and its related contextual associations, and instead analyze ­these objects as formal constructs.”156 Einstein’s “curt dismissal” of cultural knowledge and ethnographic research “reads suspiciously as a rationalization of his own ignorance.”157 His skepticism ­toward historical context also resulted in serious blunders: several of Negro Sculpture’s objects are from Oceania rather than Africa.158 As Einstein ­later realized, the idea of “bracketing” context is a positivistic fantasy that overlooks the observer’s biases even as it seeks to repudiate primitivism.

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In part, Einstein’s treatise was groundbreaking ­because it formally treated as art what had heretofore been relegated to the domain of ethnography. Long before most museums questioned the disciplinary distinctions between art history and ethnography, Negro Sculpture transformed the ethnographic artifact into an aesthetic object.159 Einstein concedes that “the majority still demands proof that this is art at all.”160 By focusing on the aesthetic dimension of ­these objects, Einstein programmatically counteracts the primitivist ethnographic discourse that constructed the non-­European as childlike, ahistorical, and hence incapable of producing serious art.161 “To view art as a means to anthropological and ethnographic insights seems to me dubious,” Einstein states, framing his proj­ect as nothing short of a disciplinary assault on ethnography that “appropriates” sculpture “as a guide to some practice outside of its proper domain.”162 By stripping t­ hese objects from their dusty, ethnographic, “museal” context, Einstein reinvigorates them with artistic value in accordance with their “formal properties.” Like Benjamin, Einstein sought to overturn linear, historicist models of temporality that privileged causality and a teleological narrative of pro­g ress.163 In its blatant refusal to provide context, Negro Sculpture offers an antidote to both causal models of art history and the museum, which frames its objects using captions and narrative. In the mid-­nineteenth-­century museum, Kirshenblatt-­ Gimblett explains, texts started to be prioritized over objects as the curatorial charge shifted to using objects in order to illustrate ideas: “Curators w ­ ere to objectify texts and textualize objects and labels to explain them.”164 Against this backdrop, Einstein’s objective to reclassify ethnographic objects as art not only revolted against the institutional practices of the museum but carried with it revolutionary disciplinary ramifications. Thus, it is particularly ironic that his African sculpture—­one of the few extant objects from his collection—­was purchased by the Museum of Ethnology as if to reclaim a twice-­appropriated object for the discipline of ethnography. Although his approach gave art history a new mandate, it was not without consequences, as Einstein himself l­ater realized: “Vari­ous divisions of the ethnological collection have been reor­ga­nized as art collections with varied success, depending on w ­ hether art was available that could be removed from its milieu and general functional context. An endless group of dif­fer­ent cultures and ways of life had to be merged. The circumstances forced violent excerpts [gewaltsamen Ausschnitt].”165 The transformation of the ethnographic collection into an art collection often caused fragmentation and “violent” extraction. Just as Benjamin’s quotations function as “armed” robbers by attacking their original text, Einstein’s aesthetic excerpt is far from an innocuous repre­sen­ta­tion.

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Strother points out the way Negro Sculpture strips objects down to the wood carving, divesting them of their cultural identifying markers in an effort to render them aesthetic.166 Thus, while Einstein’s approach of reclaiming an object from the fraught space of the museum may seem emancipatory, it also functions as a tool of cultural erasure and appropriation. Epitomized by Negro Sculp­ ture’s modernist impulse, t­hese forceful acts of transformation recall the destructive roots of collecting in spoliation and plunder. Paradoxically, James was miles ahead of Benjamin, Einstein, and the avant-­garde in his awareness of the destructive consequences of appropriation. What Einstein calls formal analy­sis—­his methodological alternative to ethnography—is ultimately a practice of decontextualization. His notion of a “violent excerpt” anticipates Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett’s critique: “Perhaps we should speak not of the ethnographic object but of the ethnographic fragment. Like the ruin, the ethnographic fragment is informed by a poetics of detachment.”167 Even if reclassified as art, the object ­will always remain ethnographic: “Many ethnographic objects become singular, and the more singular they become, the more readily they are reclassified and exhibited as art . . . ​but no ­matter how singular the ethnographic object becomes, it retains its contingency, even when by a pro­cess of radical detachment, it is reclassified and exhibited as art.”168 Herein lies the central difference between ethnographic collecting and art collecting. Seeking objects based on their representative value, ethnographers relegate objects to the status of artifacts and downplay their aesthetic value.169 In contrast, the art collection privileges the singularity of its objects at the cost of their representative value. The art object, unlike its ethnographic counterpart, is valued for itself and is thus noncontingent, autonomous, and transcendent. Thus, while Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett’s statement that an ethnographic object w ­ ill always remain ethnographic no ­matter how artistic it is seems to reinscribe restrictive disciplinary binaries, she, like Grossman, underscores the difficulties of abstracting African artifacts “into pure, modern form.”170 Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett’s point about the limitations of the ethnographic fragment is borne out by the way aestheticization effaces the religious origins of many of Negro Sculpture’s objects. Collected by Eu­ro­pe­ans with scant knowledge about their origins, objects are stripped from their religious or devotional context and viewed through an aesthetic rather than cultural lens. Masks, in par­tic­u­lar, capture the transformative dimension of collecting; beginning as costumes or ritual items, they become decorative objects in the hands of their collectors. According to Einstein, the African “transforms himself through the mask into the tribe and the god” and ultimately into his prey: “Perhaps he escapes revenge for the dead animal by transforming himself into it.”171 Con-

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structed as a trophy of the hunt, the mask recalls Benjamin’s evocative description of the way “the spirit of the doomed creature entered into the hunter” during his butterfly hunt in Berlin Childhood around 1900.172 In this case, however, the spoils are not displayed by the naturalist ­under a pinhead but abstracted into a mask that enables the hunter to appropriate the spirit of the vanquished animal. When acquired by Eu­ro­pean collectors, the masks are further transformed from ritual into aesthetic objects. In the sanitized space of the museum, masks, like other spoils, extol the superiority of the Eu­ro­pe­ans who seized them and placed them on display. One of Einstein’s seemingly tangential remarks is revelatory: “We must assume that ­here as elsewhere tribes fought over the fetishes and that the victors appropriated for themselves the gods of the defeated so as to benefit from their powers and protection.”173 For a text that claims to bracket history and culture, this is an oddly specific assumption that seems to be more of a projection of Eu­ro­pean colonial practices than a result of research. By alluding to the spoliation that underpins collecting, this statement momentarily punctures the illusion of a purely aesthetic treatment of African art. Appropriation is part of the colonial vio­lence that seeks to commit the kind of historical and cultural erasure that Einstein’s repre­sen­ta­tions unwittingly reproduce.

Aura in Negro Sculpture ­ here is something undeniably auratic about Einstein’s free-­floating, disembodT ­ ere inied sculptures, often illuminated against a black background.174 They w tended to awe and provoke. In their enigmatic grandeur, the photo­graphs are reminiscent of Benjamin’s genealogy of aura in “the ser­vice of rituals—­first magical, then religious.”175 Religion was the only part of “Africa” that Einstein nominally included in his theory: “As with many an ancient p­ eople, sculptures are objects of worship. The maker creates his work as the deity or its guardian, which means from the beginning he maintains a distance from the work, which ­either is or captures the god.”176 His formulation is remarkably similar to Benjamin’s definition of aura as “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.”177 Nor does Negro Sculpture attempt to bring its subject any closer to the reader by framing or contextualizing the images; on the contrary, Einstein compounds this distance throughout the text by omitting captions. In Benjaminian terms, Einstein’s images are a continuation of the religious origins of aura: they become high modernist icons. Even their mysterious lighting recalls Einstein’s oft-­stated observation that the “idols are often worshipped in darkness.”178

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Comparing Einstein’s and Benjamin’s collecting practices reveals the unexpected affinities between them. Negro Sculpture exemplifies the ethos of modernist collecting, namely decontextualization, privileging objects for their singular, artistic form rather than their historical or cultural representability. Einstein strives to understand “the African sculptures themselves!”179 The punctuation is indicative of his overstated ambition. According to Einstein’s essay “Totality,” the aim of the work of art is to isolate “an object from a web of causal connections in which it is enmeshed, freeing it from a realm of scientific rationality in which it is related to all objects of a similar class, and constituting it as an object in its own right through its form.”180 In this quote, Einstein also outlines the task of the collector, who removes an object from “all objects of a similar class” by inserting it into a new order. This is Einstein sounding like Benjamin, who posits, “What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to ­things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness.”181 Both Einstein and Benjamin suggest that the modernist collector is more of a decontextualizer than a curator or aggregator of knowledge. At the same time, Benjamin’s writings illuminate the po­liti­cal implications of Einstein’s visual practices. We might fruitfully compare Negro Sculpture’s illustrations to Benjamin’s collection of Rus­sian toys, profiled in chapter  3. Both Einstein’s and Benjamin’s black-­and-­white photo­graphs seem to aestheticize their objects as specimens from “exotic,” remote realms: Africa and Rus­ sia. Both had their collections professionally photographed, presumably with the intent of creating an archive. Since neither Einstein’s African artifacts nor Benjamin’s Rus­sian toys are extant, the photo­g raphs are the only trace of the collections. Both serve as ethnographic repre­sen­ta­tions of artifacts that have dis­appeared on two levels—­they are witness to a “disappearing folk culture . . . ​ which is ­under threat” and they themselves embody “traces of a disappearance” from the archive.182 However, in marked contrast to Einstein’s decontextualized photo­g raphs, captions play a central role for Benjamin. As is the case with figure 24, handwritten notes on the back of the photo­g raph outline the purpose and context of each object. In keeping with Benjamin’s historical materialism, the caption anchors the object in the material, historical world—­the context that Negro Sculpture deliberately dislodges. But most importantly, for Benjamin, the caption prevents the appropriation of an image for dubious po­liti­cal ends. Photo­ graphs, he explains, “demand a specific kind of approach; free-­floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels chal-

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Figure 24. ​Benjamin’s Rus­sian toys with his own caption: “The earth on three w ­ hales. Made out of wood by an artist. The motif stems from a Rus­sian tale” (Die Erde auf drei Walfischen. Von einem neueren Künstler aus Holz verfertigt. Das Motiv entstammt einer russischen Sage). Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv 1590. Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.

lenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no m ­ atter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether dif­fer­ent character than the title of a painting.”183 Benjamin was deeply concerned with the aestheticization of images, such as Albert Renger-­Patzsch’s The World is Beautiful, which “made misery itself an object of plea­sure by treating it stylishly and with technical perfection.”184 Yet, while the caption helps prevent aestheticization, it also risks transforming the image into a documentary specimen. It is worth noting that the closing question of Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”—­“­Will not the caption become the most impor­tant component of the shot?”—­echoes the injunction of Washington Matthews, a nineteenth-­century ethnographer, who declared, “The label is more impor­tant than the specimen.’ ”185 As chapter 4 argued, the po­liti­cal repercussions of the modernist praxis of decontextualization are hard to ignore in spite of a writer’s putatively progressive aims. Although their politics are opposed, Negro Sculpture’s aestheticized repre­sen­ta­tion of African culture shares troubling similarities with Leni

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Figure 25. ​A photo­graph from The Last of the Nuba (1973) by Leni Riefenstahl. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—­Kunstbibliothek/Leni Riefenstahl.

Riefenstahl’s collection of ethnographic photo­graphs, The Last of the Nuba (1973) (see figure 25). While Riefenstahl’s images are nominally better contextualized, the appropriation of culture for aesthetic purposes is precisely what prompts t­ hese images—­like Einstein’s sculptures—to sit poised uncomfortably between ethnography and art.186 In “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag points out that The Last of the Nuba represents an unapologetic continuation of the ­ ill rather than aesthetics of Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the W a disavowal or disjuncture. In spite of its ostensibly progressive racial politics, The Last of the Nuba endorses “a primitive ideal” of corporeal perfection masquerading as a “sanctimonious promotion of the beautiful.”187 The arresting image of the Nuba warrior—­naked and pristine in his raw alterity, perfectly curated for the taste of the Western viewer—­uncannily evokes Einstein’s free-­ floating, aestheticized sculptures that erase all traces of history, power, and vio­lence ­under the pretext of formalism. Sontag’s argument reminds us of the fascist under­pinnings of this kind of decontextualized, ungrounded aesthetic repre­sen­ta­tion. It also recalls Benjamin’s warning in “The Author as Producer” that without a “revolutionary” caption to “tear it away from fash­ion­able clichés,” a photo­graph can aesthetically appropriate its subject in ser­vice of fascist or other po­liti­cally dubious ends.188

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The Return to Context An attunement to the dangers of decontextualization persuaded Einstein to adopt a more historical approach in his ­later studies of African art. Between Negro Sculpture (1915) and African Sculpture (1921), he shifted from a primarily analytical, formal interpretation of African art objects to an approach that linked the ethnographic and art historical methods. By then, Einstein had done his homework, “having read widely on Africa” while serving in the Belgian colonial office.189 In a substantial revision of his aesthetic approach, African Sculp­ ture argued for a contextual understanding of its objects. Acknowledging the pitfalls of Negro Sculpture, he concludes, “The consideration of African art must be detached in equal mea­sure from the romantic and the purely ethnological stage. For this we need the collaboration of anthropologists and art historians.”190 African Sculpture’s injunction to find a ­middle ground between art history and ethnography would drive much of his ­f uture work. Even on a structural level, African Sculpture represents a dramatic shift from Negro Sculpture. The caption, conspicuously absent in Negro Sculpture, becomes the center of gravity. Not only does Einstein include a legend referencing the origin of each object, but he also adds a detailed description of the history and function of each object, some more than two pages long. Aside from a brief scholarly introduction, the entire text is woven together by ­these object descriptions, which essentially function as extended captions. Through its focus on the concrete and the historical, it seeks to impart the context that Ne­ gro Sculpture bracketed. ­Here too, Einstein makes a case for the vantage point of the author-­collector, which allows him to provide historical context and make new connections between objects. Just as he praised Reber’s unique juxtapositions for revealing that “Greece was no isolated won­der but a part of a larger Mediterranean culture,” African Sculpture exhibits works from Yoruba not as “an isolated won­der” but by bringing them into dialogue with art from Benin and Cameroon to “establish larger patterns.”191 African Sculpture argues that the formal method is inherently flawed b­ ecause it makes faulty assumptions about the original significance and function of objects: ­ hese t­ hings, lived as part of life [gelebten Dinge] remain theoretically T ungraspable ­because felt and experienced in countless variants. Abstraction remains distanced from the object and no pile of accumulated commentaries ­will change that. I already indicated how dangerous it is to try to explain the spiritual mood of an exotic work. ­Here nasty errors can occur. A facial expression that seems cheerful to us may have

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given the Negro a terrible fright, and a demeanor that to us appears frightful may have cheered him. ­Things that may seem an incidental detail to us may have an extraordinary meaning for the Negro.192 In a striking reversal from Negro Sculpture, Einstein dwells on the affective associations of objects to articulate the limitations of the formal method, which can “dangerously” gloss over t­ hese connotations. Einstein’s reservations about the “theoretical” incomprehensibility of “lived t­ hings” intersect suggestively with Benjamin’s objective to “refrain from any deductive abstraction” in Mos­ cow Diary.193 Both embrace collecting as a way to privilege the materiality of experience over theory. Even the “pile of accumulated commentary” (aufgehäufte Kommentar)—­like the bibliographical quisquilia of Nietz­sche’s hoarding historian—­fails to provide any real clarity. By the time he was writing The Art of the Twentieth C ­ entury (1926), Einstein was fully cognizant of the dangers of aestheticization. Using au courant terminology of appropriation, Einstein observes, “For the Eu­ro­pean with his longing for the past and the distant, primitive cultures served as often misused means of re-­thinking his own history . . . ​Among the primitive p­ eoples you could still find mystical forces, a hierarchy of instincts suppressed in Eu­rope, the tyranny of dream and ecstatic rite . . . ​He misappropriated ­these cultic and mystical forces for his aesthetic purposes by tearing them out of their cultural context. In this way a surrogate religion was established.”194 Even in his seminal art treatise, Einstein pinpoints the flaw in the strictly aesthetic approach to art history: it both glosses over a violent history of possession and plays into ethnocentric Eu­ ro­pean attitudes that marginalize context in order to fuel primitivist fantasies.195 To use Benjamin’s terms, Einstein critiques historicism’s creation of a mythical, primitive non-­Western past that justifies and celebrates the Eu­ro­pean pre­sent as part of the linear pro­gress of history. Recognizing the dangers of this “surrogate religion,” African Sculpture tries to stop this “misuse” of history by considering the “cultural context” of ­these objects. In a similar way, Benjamin hoped that the historical materialist’s focus on the specificity and materiality of the object would provide an antidote to the sweeping mythologies of historicism. Still, the attempt to provide context was often unsuccessful. Einstein concedes the difficulties of understanding the function, status, and circulation of ­these works due to the “embarrassing” absence of a “clear sense of history, of fixed time” in “our rudimentary knowledge of Africa.”196 Like Benjamin’s allegorist-­collector, Einstein acknowledges that “every­thing he’s collected remains a patchwork” (Stückwerk):197 African history glimmers faintly in overgrown or collapsed traditions of families and tribes. Much that is said about Africa resembles a lovely, un-

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fathomable tale. Time and space remain questionable in the uncertain slumber of the mythological; what survives is marked by violent decay or such disfiguring degeneration that to draw conclusions based on the pre­sent excessively diminishes the African past. The old traditions crumbled ­under colonization, the ancestral imaginary mingled with imported visuality . . . ​Let us reconstruct African history with caution; for one slips easily into idealizing it and becomes number by the modish ideas of a romantic primitivism.198 In the margins of his attempt to sketch a historical outline of his African art objects, we catch a glimpse of a dif­fer­ent temporality that, like The Arcades Proj­ ect, imagines time beyond a s­ imple linear narrative. Einstein catches himself slipping into this dreamy reverie of “romantic” speculation partly ­because of this patchwork, “crumbling” (zerbröckelt) archive. It is almost as if Einstein has to continually remind himself to separate his task of “reconstructing African history” from his other proj­ect of collecting African folklore.

“Trophies of Eu­ro­pean Greed” As the only one of the three author-­collectors with experience in colonial administration, Einstein was perhaps most directly aware of the fraught origin of many collections. In African Sculpture, Einstein seems to realize that the epistemological prob­lem of reconstructing African history is directly linked to colonial vio­lence. Asserting that “what survives is marked by violent decay or such disfiguring degeneration that to draw conclusions based on the pre­sent excessively diminishes the African past,” he demystifies the ethnographic fantasy that a collection can accurately reconstruct the past.199 ­Because “the old traditions crumbled ­under colonization,” African culture and history “eludes with slippery skin the Eu­ro­pean desire for knowledge.”200 Colonialism has made it impossible to reconstruct context—it has turned history into myth. It is partly the destruction caused by colonization that motivates Einstein’s vitriolic critique of museums.201 In 1926—­five years ­after the publication of African Sculpture—­Einstein authored two articles on the reopening of Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology, which ­were published in Der Querschnitt within weeks of each other.202 The fact that Einstein’s critique was printed in a leading gallery magazine not only suggests that private collections offered alternative approaches to mainstream exhibition strategies and disciplinary formations but also affirms the importance of in­de­pen­dent collectors like Einstein and Reber who questioned institutional agendas. He opens with a polemical but

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not unfamiliar contention: “An art object or artifact that lands in a museum is stripped of its existential conditions [Lebensbedingungen], deprived of its biological milieu and thus of its proper agency. Entry into the museum confirms the natu­ral death of the artwork, it marks the attainment of a shadowy, very ­limited, ­shall we say aesthetic immortality.”203 Echoing Nietz­sche’s skepticism ­toward museums, Einstein stops short of Filippo T. Marinetti’s vitriol in “The Futurist Manifesto”: “Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other.”204 Uwe Fleckner situates Einstein’s critique as a response to the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the Museum of Ethnology, observing the way his rhe­toric oscillates between “opposing semantic poles,” the “deadened” artifact and “living” research.205 This rhe­toric of life and death is part of the dialectic of collecting established in chapters 3 and 4: the artwork must die in order to be preserved and achieve aesthetic immortality. Emphasizing the artwork’s removal from its “biological milieu,” Einstein evokes Benjamin’s butterfly that must be deprived of life to enter the collection. Although Einstein’s wrath is directed at the museum, his invective also indicts Negro Sculpture, which strips its objects of culture and history in order to attain some “shadowy aesthetic immortality.” In even starker terms than African Sculpture, his museum essays expose the vio­lence at the heart of collecting. The museum, he argues, is complicit in the widespread looting and pillaging of African culture: “The signs of the defeat of conquered, colonized p­ eoples, trophies of Eu­ro­pean and American greed and curiosity [Trophäen europäischer Habgier und Neugier] lay crushed in cabinets. They bore witness to the decline of distant arts in the wake of technical imports of the white man, who had attained such a state of perfection that his own soil no longer had the capacity to support his throng. This, then, was a museum of Eu­ro­pean imperialism, of a scholarly as well as an economic kind. The spoils [der Fang] rested deadened in the cold storage rooms of the insatiable white man’s drive for knowledge [Wißgier].”206 Using the word “Fang” instead of “Beute” to denote spoils, Einstein recalls the way hunting undergirds the drive to collect, which is semantically underpinned by “Gier” (greed) in each case: “Habgier, Neugier, Wißgier.” He acknowledges not only the colonial origins of the exhibition’s content but also the way the acquisition of ­these items aborts further cultural production and study. Such statements undermine the claim that Einstein’s critique of museums was purely aesthetic and thus oblivious to the realities of Germany’s colonial skele­tons.207 In anthropomorphic detail, Einstein’s article describes the way ­these once “living” objects ­were divested of their purpose, “boatless, oars hung above bowls, snatched away from hands and the play of rivers. Weapons rusted in peace, alongside t­ hings representing the most diverse activities, divorced from

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context.”208 According to Einstein, it is precisely the context that imbues such objects with their aesthetic value: “The beauty of an altar panel lay in its being surrounded by fears, desires, and anxious cries to God . . . ​that the shadow of God dwelled within it and it was served by priests rather than by museum officials.”209 By affectively linking aesthetics with context and function, he seeks to dissolve the disciplinary divide between art and anthropology—­a dramatic departure from the autonomous art object of Negro Sculpture, which dismissed context and functionality as aesthetically unimportant. Anticipating the critiques made by Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Didier Maleuvre, and Ulrike Vedder, Einstein accuses the museum of severing the object from its original use value by transplanting it into an artificial context: “An altar panel or a portrait is executed for a specific purpose, for a specific environment; without the latter, the work is a deadened fragment, ripped from the soil [ein totes, dem Boden entrissenes Fragment], just as if one had broken a mullion out of a win­dow or a capital from a column.”210 In the Heideggerian terms sketched out in chapter 3, Einstein indicates that e­ very act of ethnographic exhibition “withdraws the work of art from its own world.”211 Ultimately, Einstein’s articles go beyond museological criticism to articulate an alternative approach to collecting and exhibiting artifacts. In his followup article, Einstein diagnoses the prob­lem on a meta-­institutional level: “One should not tear the ethnological museum out of the living educational w ­ hole [lebendigen Bildungsganzen]; one should link display and research more closely than ever. With the arts-­and-­crafts aestheticism, one diminishes all too much the effectiveness of the Berlin collection.”212 An object’s aesthetic value must be represented alongside its use value so that it can be properly understood. To prevent the museum from becoming “frozen in narrow aestheticism,” Einstein advocates the importance of a research institute maintaining close scientific and educational ties with the museum.213 Not only does Einstein’s notion of the “musée laboratoire” as the nexus of display and research echo the princi­ples championed by Bastian twenty years ­earlier, it also harks back to Samuel Quiccheberg’s vision of a complex devoted to collecting, research, and display, which he outlined in his 1565 treatise.214 Invoking the “opposing semantic poles” between the “deadened” artifact and “living” research, Einstein touts the “living flexibility” of collections “brought to life by teachers” just as he had praised the way Reber “brought his objects to life.”215 ” More than a rhetorical flourish, Einstein’s discourse meaningfully brings together the two opposing poles of collecting: preservation and creation. In a reverse trajectory from other modernist collections, which grow increasingly artistic as they shed their epistemological ambitions, Einstein’s emphasis shifts from aesthetics and formalism to context and pedagogy. At first

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glance, Einstein’s formal treatment of African art seems radical as it invested its objects with the same importance as Western art. Yet, it was Einstein’s understanding of the colonial under­pinnings of collecting that enabled him to recognize the limitations of the aesthetic approach, which erased history and appropriated its objects. H ­ ere too, Einstein overlaps po­liti­cally with Benjamin, who, in spite of his iconoclastic methodology in The Arcades Proj­ect, was elsewhere attuned to the dangers of po­liti­cal appropriation. Examining the cultural context of African art objects, Einstein aspired to give them the same status as their Eu­ro­pean counter­parts in the Louvre and the British Museum. Although it was never realized, Einstein’s plan for a comprehensive history of sub-­Saharan art is indicative of his course correction. Begun in 1925 with Thomas Joyce, the ambitious proj­ect was an attempt to actualize the “collaboration between ethnologists and art historians.”216 Einstein, like Benjamin, acknowledged that captions ­were no longer a luxury.

C h a p te r   6

Einstein’s “Critical Dictionary”

“What we call the soul is for the most part a museum of signs stripped of meaning,” Einstein proclaimed in “Nightingale,” one of the pi­lot entries for the “Critical Dictionary,” published in May 1929.1 His withering denunciation of language is as much a critique of the museum, which represents the hollow “facade of con­temporary life.”2 The “Critical Dictionary” was a separate section included at the end of each issue of Documents, the surrealist journal Einstein co-­founded with Georges Bataille. Documents and its linguistically oriented dictionary offered a forum for revolutionizing language precisely through the generative exchange both between literary and visual culture and between ethnography and art history. Just as Documents took aim at visual exhibitions, the Dictionary endeavored to deconstruct language. Treating art objects as cultural “documents,” Documents—as its name suggests—is emblematic of Einstein’s turn to context in African Sculpture. Yet, while Documents championed a documentary, evidence-­based approach to art and culture, the “Critical Dictionary,” like The Arcades Proj­ect, acted as a vehicle of artistic transformation rather than a site of preservation. The Dictionary’s technique epitomizes modernist collecting at its most granular: stripping words from their conventional context and redefining them in unorthodox ways. Ultimately, the Dictionary extended Einstein’s material practices of collecting in Ne­ gro Sculpture to a lexical level even while ­going against the grain of the journal and Einstein’s newfound appreciation for ethnographic approaches. 203

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By releasing words from their bourgeois signification, the “Critical Dictionary” was as radical as the linguistic experiments of Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, and other Dadaists. As theorized and practiced by Einstein, collecting participated in Dadaism’s broader initiative, characterized by Rainer Rumold as the liberation of “the linguistic sign from its symbolic work, from its culturally determined bondage to meaning, to its unbounded potential within a play of signifiers.”3 Just as Gottlieb Friedrich Reber’s idiosyncratic exhibition strategies sought to dismantle the hierarchical taxonomy of the museum, the “Critical Dictionary” revolted against the framework of the standard dictionary and language more broadly. Both targeted the institutional form of the collection while adopting its basic structure. For this reason, the lens of collecting provides a fresh perspective on the origins of Documents as well as its continuities with the Reber essays—­a perspective that has been neglected thus far. At the same time, the fact that “Nightingale” recycles Einstein’s 1911 essay “Paraphrase” calls into question the revolutionary, transformative strategies of the Dictionary. Performing the very the linguistic conventions he seeks to overturn, Einstein, like Benjamin and James, deconstructs the modernist myth of originality. As he turned from lit­er­at­ ure to art, Einstein grew dismissive of avant-­garde lit­er­a­ture, deeming it inferior to the innovations in visual art. This artistic impasse suggests that Einstein’s collections are not just a creative source for his work, they are a parallel pro­cess to writing that compensates for the limitations of language. Like Benjamin’s Rus­sian toys, a collection picks up the slack when other symbolic systems such as language fail.

Dilettantes of Won­der Already the subtitle of Einstein’s 1912 novella Bebuquin, or the Dilettantes of the Miracle (die Dilettanten des Wunders) foregrounds the themes of dilettantism and won­der, two subjects at the heart of the history of collecting.4 It encapsulates the trajectory of collecting from the won­ders of the Wunderkammer to the dilettantish pursuits of bourgeois amateurs. Bebuquin was Einstein’s only published novella, serialized in Franz Pfemfert’s literary journal Die Aktion in 1912.5 Written when Einstein was twenty years old, Bebuquin had initially been titled “Prelude” (Vorspiel) as if the novella, like its titular character, ­were awaiting the miracle of fulfillment. Perhaps due to Einstein’s subsequent disciplinary shift to the visual arts, much of the existing commentary on Bebuquin has focused on its connections to cubism.6 Instead, reading Bebuquin alongside Benjamin and in dialogue with James shifts the focus to Einstein’s preoccupation with material objects as a ludic meditation on the commodification of won­

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der. The transformative power of objects in Bebuquin provides another perspective on the twin idées fixes of modernism, namely novelty and originality. At first glance, the work of James and Einstein could not be more dif­fer­ ent: situated at the opposite bookends of modernism, they have widely diverging stylistics, idioms, and politics. A characteristically expressionist work, Bebuquin breaks with the novelistic tradition of realist, linear, and narrative-­ bound works—­a tradition that James himself embodied and perfected. Like many of Benjamin’s aphoristic texts, Bebuquin lacks linearity or any temporal or causal continuity; sentences are orphaned fragments that could just as easily be placed anywhere e­ lse in the text. Nevertheless, Bebuquin and James’s novels share surprising affinities; both situate their plots in museums and strenuously engage with visual culture, especially painting. Both use strategies of collecting to reject modernism’s aestheticization as well as the Romantic fantasy of creatio ex nihilo. By placing Einstein into conversation with James, we can see the way James’s aversion to originality and aestheticization anticipated some of the most radical aims of the avant-­garde. In keeping with the modernist obsession with ­things, Bebuquin, like many of James’s novels, elevates the importance of objects over characters.7 The eponymous, young antihero Bebuquin, too, seems to suffer from “an indeterminate ontology, the inability to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate.”8 A portmanteau of the French words “bébé” (baby) and “mannequin,” Bebuquin signifies a diminutive, lifeless, puerile person.9 Effectively, Bebuquin has been turned into an object, not unlike Isabel Archer at the hands of her well-­meaning patrons in The Portrait of a Lady. As suggested in chapter 1, this indeterminate ontology is a reflection of the debates around the classification of objects and disciplines that w ­ ere raging in museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions at the turn of the c­ entury. Bebuquin says as much t­oward the end of the novella: “Many t­hings occur which cannot be classified, which are ignored or rejected, that are hidden from deadly reason.”10 Not only does the novella take aim at the “deadly reason” of Immanuel Kant and other phi­los­o­phers but it also targets the institutions that supported this kind of reasoning.11 Not coincidentally does the opening scene take place in the “Museum of Cheap Thrills” (Museum zur billigen Erstarrnis), where objects are transfigured into vessels that wield strange power over their beholders.12 In Bebuquin, won­der has become commodified; the museum has been purged of all its grandiose associations. More of a carnival turned brothel than a genteel institution, the museum is guarded by Fräulein Euphemia, a fat lady whose naked body is decorated with “fairly lifeless arabesques.”13 As in Negro Sculpture, the items in this museum are stripped from their original use and transformed into aestheticized fetish objects. “Angered by the silence of lifeless t­ hings [Leblosen],” Bebuquin screams

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at a “big fat doll with rouge and painted eyebrows” who “had been trying to blow a kiss” and throws her from her chair, where she is calmly picked up by Euphemia, who curiously seems to resemble her.14 A burlesque version of James’s Madame Merle, Euphemia ­later describes herself as a “wax doll of cheap thrills.”15 In Bebuquin, like The Spoils of Poynton, the fierce passion evoked by physical objects is compounded by the apparent indifference to all t­ hings h ­ uman; love is irrelevant, childbirth is boring, and death is quotidian. As if to structurally foreground the importance of objects on the level of plot, Bebuquin has only one titled chapter, “The Story of the Curtains,” in which the narrator arrives at a moment of Hegelian self-­recognition through his encounter with an object: “I stood before a large piece of sackcloth and shouted, You are but knots. / Must you always swear? / D ­ on’t interrupt me. I need to verify myself [dokumentieren]. / I soon noticed that the sackcloth was none other than myself. That was the first self-­awareness.”16 Just as Baudelaire posits that ­children first develop subjectivity by bestowing a “soul” on their toys, Bebuquin’s self-­awareness is precipitated by his identification with objects. In a ­later essay, Einstein returns to this theme, noting, “­Humans and ­things speak out of themselves and the one strengthens the peculiarity of the other.”17 Bebuquin’s indeterminate ontology is most apparent in his obsessive love for a vase from Cnidus whose rich owner could not bear to be compared to her beautiful “svelte” figure.18 He recounts, “This vase almost destroyed me, my senses ­were moodily abstract. For weeks I looked for a ­woman with the proportions of the vase. Understandably in vain. Maybe the doll of Euphemia’s cheap thrills.”19 Bebuquin is spared from madness only ­because he decides to smash it. Like Euphemia’s riveting doll, the power of the vase eclipses the ­humans who function as poor copies or surrogates. This “svelte” vase evokes John Singer Sargent’s haunting painting The ­Daughters of Edward Dar­ ley Boit, in which the scale, beauty, and power of two large vases dwarf the young girls who are grouped like still lifes around them.20 In a more radical version of the Jamesean proclivity to or­ga­nize plots around objects while demoting ­humans to decorative accessories, Einstein’s characters all, at some point, express the desire to become objects. Bebuquin’s drunk female companions, for instance, “wanted to be visionaries and to be completely inhuman.”21 Bebuquin takes the modernist fascination with “thingness” observed by Bill Brown and Douglas Mao to the next level, suggesting that ­humans must transform themselves into objects in order to revolutionize their consciousness. The concept of metamorphosis fuses Einstein’s avant-­garde artistic praxis with his ethnographic interests, once again underscoring collecting’s dialectical relationship between transformation and preservation. At its most intense, the drive ­toward artistic transformation culminates in death and destruction

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as the object is transfigured beyond recognition. Throughout Bebuquin, the protagonist seeks vari­ous forms of physical and spiritual transformation which ultimately culminate in his own self-­induced illness and death.22 Says Böhm, his remarkably verbose dead friend, “One hope remains, Bebuquin. Perhaps metamorphosis comes with death. E ­ ither we remain t­ here as what we are or we w ­ ill be annihilated and transformed. Bebuquin: But i­sn’t it pos­si­ble that one can transform oneself in life, and that one can lose one’s wretched memory?”23 In this exchange, Bebuquin reveals the destructive impulse that underpins this modernist quest for transformation; as in André Gide’s The Immoralist, the desire to transform masks the desire for self-­destruction.24 An unpublished fragment written by Einstein around 1928 reiterates this idea: “Death is the master of transformation [Verwandlung]; the big abyss into which man can insert his elementariness, like in sleep. Thus, death and sleep are the only escape for ­humans to realize themselves.”25 As chapter 3 argued, Berlin Child­ hood around 1900 stages a typical Benjaminian reversal when the young Walter is momentarily transformed into a butterfly while collecting his prey. Einstein takes this dynamic of metamorphosis to its logical extreme to suggest that only through death is real transformation—­like won­der and sublimity—­achieved. Privileging metamorphosis over any stable real­ity, Bebuquin targets the rational metaphysics championed by Descartes and Kant, and, like Benjamin, advocates the primacy of lived experience above theoretical claims.26 Several critics have observed that the novella reflects Einstein’s desire to dislodge the conventional philosophical subject-­object distinction. Where James’s late work The Golden Bowl presents the crack as a rupture in signification, Bebuquin—­penned only eight years l­ ater—­begins with a heap of fragments: “Splinters [Scherben] of a glass yellow lamp clattered across from the voice of the slattern.”27 Like many of the cubist paintings Einstein studied, Bebuquin literalizes the modernist disintegration of classical forms on the level of objects.28 The ­angle of collecting shows that the novella’s propensity to deconstruct and reconfigure objects not only reflects cubist techniques but also coheres with modernist collecting practices that repurpose old materials. H ­ ere, too, fragments execute the task of the modernist collector—­just like that of the ethnographer—­ liberating objects from their context and endowing them with new meaning through recontextualization. Ultimately, the transformative power of objects provides Einstein with another lens through which to explore the modernist preoccupation with novelty and originality. This fixation is exemplified by one of Bebuquin’s feverish soliloquies: “Your goal is thought, a new, the newest thought [ein neuer, neuester Gedanke].”29 On one occasion, a­ fter being enraged at the sight of the doll, Bebuquin tries to calm himself: “­Don’t let yourself get so excited by objects, it is

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only a combination, not something new. D ­ on’t rave with misplaced means. Where are you then? We ­can’t jump out of our skins . . . ​You almost became original ­because you almost became insane. Let us sing the song of common loneliness. Your search for originality [Ihre Sucht nach Originalität] comes from your shameless emptiness, mine also.”30 This drive for originality is the avant-­ garde apotheosis of Osmond’s aesthetic ideal in The Portrait of a Lady. Plagued by fears that he merely reassembles what came before him, Bebuquin beseeches an unknown power with Jamesean echoes: “I ­don’t want to be a copy, no influence, I want myself, I want something unique from my soul, something individual, even if it is only holes in the private air. I c­ an’t start anything with t­ hings, one t­ hing involves all other ­things. It stays in flux and the infinity of a point is a horror.”31 The impossibility of this radical originality becomes apparent as Bebuquin searches in vain for a “won­der” as an antidote to the proliferation of copies. Bebuquin’s fixation on originality parallels the quest of modernists like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, whose anx­i­eties about innovation ­were manifested in their extensive use of quotation and citation. While Bebuquin d­ oesn’t cite other texts and paintings directly, Einstein’s many allusions are most readily apparent in the parody of figures ranging from Plato to Oscar Wilde.32 In its deployment of intertextuality, the novella itself repudiates claims to originality. Bebuquin could thus be read as a young modernist’s adieu to the fantasy of creatio ex nihilo.33 The poetic conceit of creatio ex nihilo derives, so to speak, from the biblical notion that God created the world out of nothing, a concept that had preoccupied Einstein for his entire intellectual life.34 ­After “staring for weeks at the corner of his room,” Bebuquin muses, “It must be pos­si­ble, just as in the old days, to believe in a God who created the world out of nothing [der die Welt aus nichts erschuf]. How anguishing that I can never be complete. But why do I lack even the illusion of completeness?”35 As the myth of creation crumbles, so does the illusion of completeness. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the task falls to the collector to pick up and reassemble the pieces— in Bebuquin’s case the pieces of totality rather than the fragments of tradition. Like Benjamin’s allegorist, the modernist collector acknowledges the inability to achieve completeness. As chapter 4 argued, the collection is an affront on novelty as it reconfigures what already exists but in a new way, without subscribing to the fiction of creatio ex nihilo. Even Bebuquin’s aforementioned lament that every­thing starts “with ­things”—­creatio ex materia—­lies at the heart of collecting as an artistic practice. In Bebuquin the task of producing the miracle falls to the dilettante—­a far cry from the Wunderkammer connoisseur who reigns sovereign over a miniature world.36 Like Newman, Osmond, and other Jamesean dandy connoisseurs, Bebuquin is never able to prove mastery. In Exemplarity and Mediocrity, Paul Flem-

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ing posits that although dilettantes often master artistic technique and display significant skills, they lack “the spark of genius” that real artists are thought to possess.37 As Fleming suggests, the distinction between the artist and the dilettante is wrapped up in the notion of genius espoused by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in the mid-­eighteenth ­century. By deconstructing the miracle of creatio ex nihilo, Bebuquin also deflates the illusion of the creative genius ­behind the work of art. Artists, Bebuquin suggests, have become dilettantes. More mature than its twenty-­year-­old author indicates, Bebuquin crystallizes the theoretical issues that would l­ater preoccupy Einstein in his ­career as an art historian and critic. Neil Donahue argues, “The quest for a miracle reflects the writer’s attempt to capture in referential language a transcendent subjectivity in the amimetic, autonomous work of art.”38 Three years ­later, Negro Sculpture takes up a similar aim of trying to locate “an autonomous work of art” but in a very dif­fer­ent place. But it too fails. Like Negro Sculpture, Bebuquin’s radical aestheticization of objects undergirds his impetus to restore context in his ­later work. As a meditation on the failure of literary language to produce originality, Bebuquin foreshadows Einstein’s ­later “turn” to visual art. It is almost as if Einstein resorts to collecting once he realizes the impossibility of his youthful quest for novelty. His collection is not just a creative source for his work but also a compensatory pro­cess that runs parallel to his literary endeavors.

Documents: A Surrealist Wunderkammer While acquiring African art, Einstein also began collecting African songs, prayers, and legends ­after his formative stint in the Belgian colonial office, as chapter 5 described. Such efforts constitute a concerted ethnographic effort to collect African culture, albeit in a translated, transposed state. ­These collections culminated in Documents, a short-­lived journal founded by Einstein and Bataille in Paris, which circulated between April 1929 and January 1931. Docu­ ments was the leading forum for the dissidents (“les transfuges”) who challenged André Breton’s mainstream surrealism. As its subtitle “Archeology, Beaux-­Arts, Ethnography” indicates, the journal breached disciplinary bound­ aries as it wedged fine arts between archaeology and ethnography and freely mixed high and low culture by juxtaposing Hollywood stills with African masks and classical art. Irreverently bringing vari­ous disciplines, media, and cultures into the same space, Documents is a surrealist textual Wunderkammer that harnesses epistemic categories like won­der and curiosity, much like its early

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modern pre­de­ces­sor.39 Like Benjamin’s toy collection, t­ here is something ­ludic and childlike in Documents’ exuberant faith in its own mission. Einstein’s notion of the “creative collector,” discussed in chapter 5, allows us to reexamine Documents as an artistic collection that draws on a range of other collections—­both literary and material—in its deployment of unexpected, iconoclastic combinations.40 Collecting also casts fresh light on the role Einstein’s relationship with Reber and other collectors played in the genesis of Documents. Existing scholarship has often overlooked Einstein’s instrumental role in the formation of Documents by focusing almost exclusively on Bataille and the French surrealists.41 Einstein’s recently published letters, together with Klaus Kiefer’s groundbreaking research, demonstrate Einstein’s centrality to its founding, in par­tic­u­lar the creation of the “Critical Dictionary,” for which Reber was a crucial sounding board.42 Documents was likely conceived ­after his move to Paris in May 1928.43 From its inception, Documents was meant to be the marriage of Einstein’s literary, art historical background and Bataille’s ethnographic, archaeological interests, made pos­si­ble by the financial backing of art collectors.44 A member of the editorial board from the very beginning, Einstein contributed twenty-­one articles as well as two Dictionary entries—­the most articles ­after Bataille and Michel Leiris. In an unpublished note from 1954, Bataille even reflected on the “German poet Carl Einstein” as “nominal director” of the journal “against” whom he recalled positioning himself.45 In a testament to the journal’s close ties to the collecting world, Einstein first arrived at the idea through a desire to collaborate with two collectors: Georges Wildenstein, an art dealer, publisher, and the son of a famous gal­ ere very taken by lery owner, and Reber.46 Claiming that “the Wildensteins w our outlines,” an August 1928 letter to Reber provides a detailed plan for the first ten issues of the journal, including proposed articles on subjects ranging from Greek carpets to Picasso’s harlequins.47 For each issue, he lists the topics for “Chronique,” a section on current events.48 Einstein’s August letter to Reber also includes plans for a “dictionnaire des idéologies,” which would eventually become the “Critical Dictionary.”49 Meanwhile, Bataille, who was then employed at the Cabinet des Médailles (Cabinet of Medals), was in talks with Wildenstein and the curator Georges Henri Rivière to create a publication about ethnography and archaeology.50 Self-­consciously stylized as an archive, a textual curiosity cabinet, and a juxtaposition of text and images, Documents was itself a meditation on the practice of collecting. Following Einstein’s 1928 outline, which had listed collections, museums, and “l’objet d’une collection” as pos­si­ble subjects, the “Chronique” section of the published journal went on to review exhibits, galleries, and mu-

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seums.51 Documents both curated its own materials and reframed other collections by putting them into dialogue with one another.52 The journal’s penultimate issue included Ralph von Koenigswald’s illustrated description of skull trophies collected by “primitive ­peoples” and Emil Waldmann’s essay on Oskar Schmitz’s art collection.53 Bookending the history of collecting, ­these two contributions trace its practice from martial spoliation to its most cultivated, aesthetic instantiation. Contributors often reflected on collecting practices, such as Waldmann, who echoes Einstein’s Rouart essay when observing, “Unlike France or E ­ ngland, Germany is not a country of collectors, at least in the proper sense of the word.”54 Differentiating Schmitz’s collections from ­those of amateurs, Waldmann’s article suggests that Documents, like Einstein, championed nontraditional practices of collecting. Like The Arcades Proj­ect, the origins of Documents can be traced back to the Bibliothèque nationale, namely the Cabinet des Médailles, where Bataille worked. “The adventure of Documents began very far from the avant-­garde,” Denis Hollier points out, defining numismatics as the “disinterested love for . . . ​ that which is dead and forbidden, at once on display and in reserve.”55 Hollier not only reinforces the journal’s origins in institutional, antiquarian collecting practices but suggests that numismatics—­like Documents—­takes objects out of circulation to exhibit and reclassify them. Challenging “the opposition which dictates that one uses a tool and looks at a painting,” Documents aligns with Einstein’s critique of Berlin’s Museum of Ethnology.56 A document, observes Hollier, is, by definition, a “ready-­made” that can be collected and compiled with other documents.57 The textual equivalent of the found object, ­these documents are transformed in their new context just like Marcel Duchamp’s ready-­mades assume new meaning when exhibited. The central tension in collecting between preservation and transformation is highlighted by the textual valence of the name, Documents. On the one hand, true to its name, the journal makes a claim to documentation. Ostensibly, its aims ­were anti-­aesthetic: evidence not art, documents not writing.58 Described as “a war machine against aesthetics” and against all received ideas, Documents set itself in opposition to art reviews like the Gazette des Beaux-­Arts.59 Thus, in spite of the large number of literary contributors, the journal focused on documentary fields such as archaeology and ethnography and provocatively excluded lit­er­a­ture.60 In a pronounced reversal of Einstein’s aestheticization of artifacts in Negro Sculpture, Documents transformed art objects into documents, destabilizing the very meaning of art just as Negro Sculpture had more than ten years ­earlier. Foregrounded by its strangely formal name, Documents also claimed the authority to make academic and institutional interventions, inserting itself into the anthropological discourse and engaging with the curators of major museums.

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Einstein’s own contributions include ethnographic reports, ranging from an illustrated description titled “Ritual Dance Masks of the Ekoi ­People” to a short piece on Bapindi masks. By collecting anthropological documents, Documents seemed, at least at first glance, to espouse similar objectives to the Trocadéro and other museums, which had long asserted that ethnographic objects should be preserved b­ ecause of their documentary importance.61 On the other hand, Documents’ practice of documentation was inherently transformative as it changed its content—­ranging from enlarged photo­graphs of toes to images of ancient coins—­into documents that it then preceded to collect and order. By elevating dust and spit to the level of critical discourse, it not only subverted the notion of what constituted a document but also questioned what merited preservation in the first place. In short, Documents did not seek to preserve conventionally but rather to collect in an irreverent way by teasing out all facets of the concept of documentation. Linking Benjamin’s and Einstein’s proj­ects, James Clifford observes, “The fragmentation of modern culture perceived by Benjamin, the dissociation of cultural knowledge into juxtaposed ‘citations,’ is presupposed by Documents. The journal’s title, of course, is indicative. Culture becomes something to be collected, and Documents itself is a kind of ethnographic display of images, texts, objects, labels, a playful museum that si­ mul­ta­neously collects and reclassifies its specimens.”62 Just as Negro Sculpture relabels its spoils as art objects by stripping them from their cultural context, Documents “reclassifies its specimens” by transforming visual and textual sources into documents. Besides corroborating the link between material and citational forms of collecting, Clifford, like Arendt and Benjamin, shows how collecting is a characteristically modernist response to the fragmentation of culture. The journal’s use of juxtaposition, montage, and collage emphasizes the avant-­garde objective of Documents.63 Both Documents and The Arcades Proj­ect deployed and subverted traditional institutional frameworks: The Arcades Proj­ ect is an avant-­garde archive of quotations that reflects the fragmentation and dispersal of culture while Documents is a museum of deconstructed cultural symbols and artifacts. With immediate pre­de­ces­sors such as Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne and Der Querschnitt, the journal’s montage editorial technique can be traced back as far as The Blue Rider Almanac, which paired ­children’s drawings with ancient Egyptian art and Chinese painting with Picasso’s works.64 The Al­ manac’s layout was inspired by comparative art exhibitions that combined works from dif­fer­ent cultures and epochs in ways that anticipated Reber’s exhibition practices. This cross-­pollination reflects the way modernist journals—­textual collections—­emerged from material collections, which, by their very design, pioneered techniques of montage and juxtaposition long before they became

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trendy avant-­garde tools. One particularly striking juxtaposition in the “Critical Dictionary” is the illustration for “Angel,” which combines a Spanish miniature with a con­temporary photo­graph of the black actor Wesley Hill portraying the Angel Gabriel in a production of Green Pastures. This arrangement recalls Reber’s approach to grouping works of art from the ancient Near East, ­Middle Ages, and avant-­garde Paris in his Château de Béthusy. Like The Arcades Proj­ect and Mnemosyne, Documents’ provocative, fragmentary juxtapositions explode existing disciplinary formations and unsettle notions of linear history or pro­gress—­what Benjamin labels historicism.65 All of t­hese modernist collections preserve their content by transforming it, generating new modes of perception and inquiry. Breaking down conventional objects and images in the manner of an “unfinished collage rather than a unified organism,” Documents, as Clifford points out, exemplifies the aims of surrealism.66 Its techniques of arrangement “pose” the same issues that plague the ethnographic museum on an institutional level: “What belongs with what? Should masterpieces of sculpture be isolated as such or displayed in proximity with cooking pots and ax blades? The ethnographic attitude must continually pose t­ hese sorts of questions, composing and decomposing culture’s ‘natu­ral’ hierarchies and relationships. Once every­thing in a culture is deemed worthy in princi­ple of collection and display, fundamental issues of classification and value are raised.”67 Like museums, archives, and other collections, Documents extracts objects from diverse cultural and historical contexts and places them into a new system of organ­ization. Pairing Clifford’s analy­sis with Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett’s notion of the ethnographic fragment reveals how Documents fragments and distorts when exhibiting its heterogeneous parts. Clifford’s concept of the “ethnographic surreal,” outlined in chapter  3, reveals that even the most venerable ethnographic museum unwittingly shared surrealism’s goals in its arrangement of discrete, decontextualized objects.

Objets Trouvés Like collecting, photography in Documents plays a dialectical role, supplying visual documentation on the one hand and subverting an existing order through decontextualization on the other. In contrast to Breton’s La Révolution Surréali­ ste, which aestheticized and attached meaning to photos, Documents radicalized documentary photography.68 Photography was harnessed for its transformational possibilities as much as for its documentary value. As a case in point, Karl Blossfeldt’s five enlarged photographic illustrations for Bataille’s article “The

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Language of Flowers” look more like architectural constructions than natu­ral objects.69 In the vein of Benjamin’s optical unconscious or Siegfried Kracauer’s nonintentional real­ity, ­these images capture ele­ments of real­ity not ordinarily perceived or intended to be perceived by the photographer. B ­ ecause they reflect this very nonintentional real­ity, the photographic illustrations disturb rather than document and hence appear disjointed from the articles they claim to illustrate.70 Along similar lines, the photos accompanying Einstein’s contributions often have an autonomous narrative that is not subordinate to the text.71 Rather than forming a coherent narrative, text and images disrupt and compete with one another throughout Documents. Even in its most outlandish moments, Documents’ documentary orientation is never completely jettisoned. A case in point is Jacques-­André Boiffard’s spread, consisting of three full-­page photo­graphs of a magnified big toe. Accompanying Bataille’s essay “The Big Toe,” this spread is reminiscent of medical documentation that enlarges injured or diseased body parts to exhibit disfiguration or pathology. At the same time, text and image conspire to completely sever the toe from the rest of the body, with no indication of its h ­ uman origin, underscoring the way Documents often decontextualized everyday objects only to place them into an entirely new system of signification. Literalized by the photo­graph of the disembodied toe, this technique of amputation is a visceral reminder of the way collecting violently extracts its objects from their original context, often in the name of knowledge. Provocatively blurring the bound­aries between science and art, this technique is more radical than the modernist photomontages that populated the pages of La Révolution Surréaliste. Boiffard also supplied the illustration for Bataille’s Dictionary entry for “Mouth,” a now often reproduced photo of a blurry, enlarged mouth with the tongue prominently displayed. Unseemly, obscene, and unnatural precisely ­because it is magnified and decontextualized, the image performs Bataille’s definition: “On impor­tant occasions, h ­ uman life is concentrated, animalistically, in the mouth . . . ​Terror and dreadful suffering turn it into the organ of harrowing cries.”72 Echoing the structure of Documents, ­these articles si­mul­ta­neously document through illustration and disfigure through radical redefinition. The extreme attempt to document—­epitomized by Boiffard’s photo­graphs—­accomplishes the opposite by rendering the known object strange and unfamiliar. Lacking captions or explanations and illuminated against a black background, t­ hese severed body parts appear as fragmentary and autonomous as Negro Sculpture’s African art objects. Although Negro Sculpture’s photo­g raphs miniaturize the artifact instead of magnifying it, they similarly decontextualize and transform their objects through illustration. Yet the rationale ­behind their techniques of decontextualization differ substantially: Negro Sculpture

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seeks to aestheticize its objects while Documents purports to transform its objects into evidence. While the former omits captions altogether, the latter deliberately severs the connection between image and text. The confluence of their end products suggests that, at their most extreme, documentation and transformation both render the original object unintelligible. Like Negro Sculpture, the photo spread of Einstein’s exhibition review, “Exposition de Sculpture Moderne,” forms a second-­order collection by transporting its objects into another medium. Einstein’s review includes a full-­page reproduction of three works by the famed sculptors Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz, and Constantin Brancusi alongside a photo­g raph of a pebble from his own collection (figure 26).73 Found by Einstein on a beach, the pebble is

Figure 26. ​Carl Einstein, “Pebble collected on the beach,” Documents (1929). Drawings and Archives, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

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quite literally an “objet trouvé,” recalling one of John’s finds in ­Virginia Woolf ’s short story “Solid Objects.” Lacking any indication of scale, the pebble is taken out of its context and enlarged. Juxtaposed with sculptures created by renowned artists, the pebble is transformed into an amorphous, abstracted sculpture of a head through clever lighting and a zoom lens. But unlike the Wunderkammer, which brought strange won­ders home, this object elicits won­der through the surrealist objective of making the “familiar strange.”74 Positioned next to Brancusi’s “First Man,” this pebble is equally anthropomorphic—­one is carved out of wood by a famous sculptor; the other is created by a critic using a camera lens. Both sculptures imagine an alternate genealogy of ­humans using inanimate objects. Through juxtaposition, Einstein reduces sculpture to a found object while elevating the “objet trouvé” to the level of fine art, erasing the distinction between high and low culture. Not only does this arrangement destabilize the bound­aries of art, it also irreverently equates collecting with the creative pro­cess of renowned artists. The caption reads, “Sculpture is often an accident between bibelots and monuments to the dead, a neutral terrain condemned to banality.”75 Einstein unwittingly seems to follow Benjamin’s instructions in “The Author as Producer”: “What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture a caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use value. But we ­will make this demand most emphatically when we—­the writers—­take up photography.”76 In addition to giving the photo a critical caption, Einstein the writer “takes up photography” as part of his visual turn. Concluding his text with the injunction to “order sculpture! Sculptors need influential collectors,” Einstein again emphasizes the collector’s formative role in creating and shaping art history.77 Transformed through the medium of photography, this provocative documentation of Einstein’s found object enters the artistic realm as it becomes part of a second-­order collection.

The Lexical as Critical Beginning with the second issue of Documents, a regular section entitled the “Critical Dictionary” presented short essays and expositions on subjects ranging from the “Absolute” to “Eye” to “Factory Chimney.”78 The idea was hardly novel for Einstein, who, together with Carl Sternheim and Gottfried Benn in Brussels, hatched a plan to create an “Encyclopedia to Eliminate Bourgeois Ideology” (Enzyklopädie zum Abbruch bürgerlichen Ideologien), a proposal that never came to fruition.79 Redefining clichés or petrified concepts that evoked

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mechanical reactions in their readers, the “Critical Dictionary” shared similar aims to other satirical reference books such as Ambrose Bierce’s Dev­il’s Dic­ tionary and Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas that lampooned the form of the standard dictionary. Yet, unlike its pre­de­ces­sors, the “Critical Dictionary” had longer, encyclopedic entries that seriously attempted to redefine their terms through illustrations and evidence. So why ­were the entries of an avant-­garde journal or­ga­nized ­under the rubric of the most traditional, hierarchical type of textual collection—­the dictionary? Calling the Dictionary “one of the most effective acts of sabotage against the academic world and the spirit of system,” the art historian Yve-­Alain Bois posits that “this sabotage derived its effectiveness from the contrast between the formal ruse—­the very use of the ‘dictionary form,’ that is, one of the most obvious and conventional markers of the idea of totality—­and the effect of surprise.”80 Just as the Wunderkammer tried to elicit won­der through its novel displays, the Dictionary’s aim of provoking surprise was part and parcel of the mixture of insight, playfulness, erudition, and shock that the journal was created to elicit.81 The “Critical Dictionary” was the avant-­garde apotheosis of the philological practice of collecting and defining words that dated back to the Enlightenment. Yet, in keeping with the modernist repudiation of Enlightenment ideals, the “Critical Dictionary,” like The Arcades Proj­ect, questioned the encyclopedia’s values of completeness, totality, and linearity even as they imitated its structures. Rebelling against the univocal authority of conventional dictionaries, a “Critical Dictionary” entry often consisted of multiple—­sometimes conflicting—­ definitions authored by dif­fer­ent contributors. In marked contrast to the standard dictionary, which sought to compile and define all words, the Dictionary never aspired ­toward totality, restricting itself to a few charged, even redundant, concepts. Unlike other dictionaries, which define words through their most reducible generality, the “Critical Dictionary” was attuned to the radical singularity of its objects. Like a modernist curiosity cabinet, the Dictionary brought t­ hese heterogeneous concepts together u ­ nder a new rubric according to the princi­ple of juxtaposition rather than completeness. Rather than organ­izing and taxonomizing, the Dictionary empowered words to actively fulfill dif­fer­ent roles, just as Einstein’s collector “boldly” intervenes in history. As Bataille metatextually declared, “A dictionary would begin as of the moment when it no longer provided the meanings of words but their tasks.”82 Exemplified by the coauthored entry “Metamorphoses,” the Dictionary is a paradigmatic modernist collection that functions as a vehicle of artistic transformation in spite of its encyclopedic ambitions and the purportedly documentary impetus of the journal that contains it. By freeing words

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from the most conventional, formulaic meanings, Einstein and his colleagues sought to shatter the relationship between signifier and signified with their newly minted definitions. Einstein’s entry “Absolute” shows how seemingly totalizing constructs are actually manmade and contingent, deconstructing the way definitions acquire authority and truth through their lack of content. Like the vague, generalized definitions of the standard dictionary, “the absolute is power­f ul ­because it is perfectly empty” and hence “demonstrates nothing.”83 Without jettisoning the journal’s documentary ambitions, the Dictionary suggests that language, like images, can be used as a revolutionary medium to transform existing lexical and semantic structures. Playfully deploying examples from a wide range of media and cultures, entries break down the taxonomic classifications at work in dictionaries. Bataille’s entry, “Formless,” is illustrative: Formless [informe] is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term serving to declassify [déclasser], requiring in general that ­every ­thing have its form. What it designates does not, in any sense what­ever, possess rights, and everywhere gets crushed like a spider or an earthworm. For academics to be satisfied, it would be necessary, in effect, for the universe to take on a form. The ­whole of philosophy has no other aim: it is a question of fitting what exists into a frock-­coat, a mathematical frock-­coat. To affirm on the contrary that the universe resembles nothing at all and is only formless, amounts to saying that the universe is something akin to a spider or a gob of spittle.84 Defining—or trying to give form to—­formlessness seems to be a contradiction in terms just as “Absolute” seeks to define what is perfect, all-­powerful, and hence precisely beyond definition. Like Einstein, Bataille aspires to ­counter the purpose of the conventional dictionary, which, like philosophy, tries to wrap the world in a “frock-­coat.” Reminiscent of the definition of “encyclopedia” in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, this entry is given the programmatic job generally granted the article “Dictionary.”85 Formlessness becomes the Dictionary’s antisymbolic symbol of lexical discursivity, defining through negation and organ­izing through transformation.86 In escaping formal definition, this entry epitomizes the singularity accorded to the object of a modernist collection. At the same time, by defining what is formless even through indefinition, Bataille imposes his own order, however unconventional, nonhierarchical, and relative. The “Critical Dictionary” was part of Einstein’s larger attempt to challenge the disciplinary structures and repre­sen­ta­tional strategies of institutional collections, w ­ hether textual (a dictionary or encyclopedia) or material (a museum or archive). Just as Reber’s Château de Béthusy dismantled the hierarchical tax-

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onomy of the museum, the “Critical Dictionary” took aim at the standard dictionary. On a more fundamental level, just as Reber’s collection revolutionized perception through his ingenious acts of juxtaposition, the Dictionary sought to transform language by presenting words in novel ways. For this reason, both are beholden to mainstream institutions to imitate and subvert their structures. Citing the Grande Encyclopédie for the “modern sense of the word,” Bataille’s “Museum” entry is as much an interrogation of the institution as a critique of the dictionary that it cites. He connects the origins of the museum to the “development of the guillotine,” underscoring their shared tendency to destroy through their attempts to preserve. His polemic echoes Einstein’s critique of the Museum of Ethnology, which declared, “The entry into the museum confirms the natu­ral death of the artwork.”87 Alastair Brotchie argues that “a dictionary’s sole purpose is the imposition of form and homology” as “definition fixes objects in thought, extracts them from the world and pins them to a page. A dictionary is never critical, any ele­ment of subjectivity would allow in the formless, that heterological gob of spittle. Formless declassifies and is the negation of definition.”88 As a textual collection, the dictionary categorizes words by isolating them from their context. The standard dictionary is the lexical analogue of the museum, which “fixes” objects, “extracts them from the world and pins them” to a wall. Entries in the “Critical Dictionary” struck at the heart of the idea of a lexical definition. In “Ju-­Ju,” the anthropologist Marcel Griaule begins by scrutinizing the way “the Eu­ro­pe­ans have a distinct predilection for striking and compressed turns of phrase and expressions whose con­ve­nience does not trou­ ble their habits of thought.”89 Griaule exposes the roots of a word that was appropriated by the Portuguese when colonizing Africa, who, a­ fter “finding themselves confronted with the im­mense prob­lems of beliefs, mysteries, forces, gods, and evil spirits, resolved them immediately, and with a single word: Djoudjou.”90 A linguistic spoil, the word juju was then appropriated by the “successors of the successors” before it became the fash­ion­able accoutrement of a “­little clan of informed aesthetes” in Paris.91 What initially seemed like an exotic, playful word—­especially given its apparent proximity to jeu (game)—­becomes much more complex. The word juju’s semantic ambiguity con­ve­niently allows Eu­ro­pe­ans to gloss over the violent history of its acquisition. Griaule’s critical genealogy probes beneath the layers of a word in much the same way African Sculpture’s historical approach hoped to restore context to aestheticized African art objects. Both take issue with the trendy aestheticization and appropriation of African culture. By inserting critique, the “Critical Dictionary” did exactly what its “objective” pre­de­ces­sors sought to avoid. Griaule’s entry “Gunshot” exemplifies the

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way the Dictionary’s radical textual agenda is intertwined with a scathing disciplinary critique. He ridicules museums for refusing to exhibit African artifacts decorated with Eu­ro­pean motifs, arguing that such standards of “cultural” purity would invalidate most Eu­ro­pean art. He concludes, “I call folklore the ethnography of pretentious p­ eoples, of t­ hose colourless p­ eoples whose habitat lies north of a sea of low tides and weak storms . . . ​the ethnography of t­ hose who fear both words and ­things, who refuse to be called natives, and whose dictionaries offer Latin explications of unseemly ­things, so as to reserve small pleasures for their elites.”92 Denouncing the Eu­ro­pean “fear of both words and ­things,” Griaule not only attacks conventional dictionaries for being primarily accessible to “elites” but also implicates them in ethnography’s racist imperative. By exhibiting Eu­ro­pean culture as ethnography, the “Critical Dictionary” both subverts the discipline and turns the t­ ables on its “pretentious” prac­ti­tion­ ers. Thus, unlike the field-­worker, who, according to Clifford, “strives to render the unfamiliar comprehensible,” Documents seeks to render the “familiar strange.”93 ­Here we see a more positive dimension of collecting as Griaule tries to defamiliarize concepts by presenting them in irreverent new ways to help unsettle regressive cultural and disciplinary distinctions. Documents was obsessed with material culture, in its photo­g raphs, descriptions, and extended studies of objects, but most of all in its Dictionary entries. With its entries on earthenware and the factory chimney, skyscraper, and talkie, the “Critical Dictionary” could be seen as the critical heir of the object history—­ the eighteenth-­century narrative device of the speaking object, which involved narrating stories from the perspective of a commodity such as a coin. The mobility and anonymity of the object as a manufactured unit of exchange endowed it with storytelling authority.94 But instead of celebrating the circulation of the commodity like the object history, the Dictionary used the object to interrogate capitalism and commodification, as well as subject-­object relations. Beyond theoretically reflecting on objects, the journal, like Benjamin’s collector, used them as a medium for critique.95 In its preoccupation with objects, Documents seems to mirror its ethnographic subjects, who, according to Einstein, inscribed inanimate objects with anthropomorphic powers.96 This animism resurfaced in modernist movements like surrealism and cubism, Einstein observes in his article on the artist Fernand Léger, but in a very dif­fer­ent register: Léger is a fanatic of objects. Man is an object among other objects; he is determined by a majority of inhuman forces in­de­pen­dent of him . . . ​ ­Here reigns an energetic, Industrial totemism: man—­weapon—­tree—­ turbine . . . ​Man lives between and with objects, both stand in the same

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light and influence one another. An unromantic, industrial leveling of values and objects occurs ­here; key chain against a ­human organ­ization. ­Things are dramatically and plastically enhanced in order to grow to a spatial, formal equivalence with ­humans. Objects are dramatized animistically while the ­human is reduced to an object. Mutual adaptation.97 With his ethnographic eye, Einstein reveals the way modernity has produced a new totemism that elevates objects while reducing ­humans. He explores Léger’s “possession” by the object world, arguing that he seeks to “or­ga­nize man as a component of this con­temporary, object-­oriented milieu. Man—­ keychain—­cogwheel—­face.”98 H ­ umans become part of a system of objects that they produce which now, in turn, subjugates them. Radicalizing James’s argument in The Spoils of Poynton about the centrality of objects, Léger concludes, “In modern painting, the object must become the leading character and dethrone the subject. Then, in turn, if the person, the face, the h ­ uman body become objects, the modern artist ­will be offered considerable freedom.”99 Instead of chronicling the dehumanization unleashed by modern ­ umans and humanizacapitalism, Léger suggests that the objectification of h tion of objects can unveil new artistic possibilities.

Einstein’s Nightingale: Every­thing but a Bird Alongside Bataille’s entry “Architecture,” one of the Dictionary’s first two pioneering entries was Einstein’s “Nightingale,” which appeared in the second issue of Documents. This entry was not merely a ludic lexical redefinition but a serious meditation on the transformative possibilities of literary symbols. A cursory reading suggests that Einstein seized upon the radical aims of the Dictionary to emancipate the word from its literary and bourgeois associations. Yet, a closer look reveals that “Nightingale” performs precisely the failures of language. Throughout much of his ­career, according to Rainer Rumold, Einstein criticized lit­er­a­ture “as the privileged language of the culture of writing,” opposing the “linguistic turn” of modernism with its emphasis on subjectivity, interiority, and symbolic language.100 Dipping into the repertoire of outworn words, his entry begins with a major lexical re­orientation: “Except for unusual cases, we are not talking about a bird.”101 Already Einstein breaks with the conventional dictionary, which defines an object in its most elemental form: “The nightingale belongs to the inventory of bourgeois diversions through which one seeks to suggest lewd ­things even while seeming to be skirting them. The nightingale is perhaps also

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the sign of erotic fatigue; in any case, belonging, like the majority of words, to the category of paraphrases, this creature serves to dispel offensive ele­ ments.”102 An oft invoked symbol in lit­er­at­ ure dating back to Greek myth, the nightingale typically represents erotic love, beauty, and song. Through its clichéd, “bourgeois” connotations, the symbol of the nightingale “paraphrases” sex and other “shameful pleasures” by avoiding concrete or direct language. Describing the nightingale as “emptied of meaning” and “less an object than a vague opinion,” Einstein seeks to reinvest it with specificity and materiality rather than amorphous lexical generality.103 Recalling the polemics of his museum essays, Einstein announces that “the nightingale should be locked up with the classic still lifes of lyricism.”104 The disproportionately high number of entries on animals—­camels, reptiles, blackbirds, crustaceans—­reflects the way the Dictionary, like the museum, was fixated on natu­ral history. Just as the museum preserves its object by killing it, the bourgeois lexical web has ensnared the poor nightingale in its clutches: “The nightingale is almost always a cliché, a narcotic, a form of laziness and ignorance. Indeed, what we designate with the help of words is less an object than a vague opinion; one uses words as though they w ­ ere ornaments of one’s own person. Words are usually petrifications that trigger mechanical reactions in us. They are instruments of power suggested by the cunning or by drunks.”105 Listing the banalities surrounding the nightingale, he both demonstrates and deconstructs the mechanism that regulates all dictionaries, namely that words ­ ere a frequent target for elicit mechanical reactions in their readers.106 Clichés w modernists, who w ­ ere preoccupied with quotation and its slippage into trite overuse. In Benjamin’s terms, Einstein’s semantic redefinition of nightingale can be seen as a modernist natu­ral historical attempt to reclaim a petrified creature from the fossilized ruins of bourgeois sentimentality. Used twice in the entry, “petrification” evokes the rhe­toric of The Arcades Proj­ect, which resurrects the collector as a natu­ral historian who excavates the ossified remains of the bourgeois past to appropriate them for revolutionary ends. Along similar lines, Einstein’s entry tries to f­ ree words from their bourgeois “fossilization.” Defined by Einstein as an “allegory” in the opening lines of the entry, the nightingale was selected for its storied history as a lyrical poetic construct. He continues, “The allegory, the surrogate, must conceal ­human frailty and ugliness. Hence the ­human soul is made of stars, of roses, of twilight, ­etc.; in other words, we impose a diagram on a defense-­less world and proj­ect an idealized self into a lapdog. One weeps with the nightingale in the hope of winning big in the stock market. We are speaking ­here of the gracious sentimentality of the American.”107 Like other signifiers, the nightingale as allegory is a shortcut and hence “a means of avoiding reflection and m ­ ental prob­lems.”108 ­Here,

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allegory functions as an extension of the conventional dictionary, which defines through generality rather than singularity. Einstein tries to endow the nightingale with a radical singularity that allegory forecloses in its attempt to illustrate complex ideas through a generalizable image. Sebastian Zeidler similarly connects Einstein’s Dictionary entry to his treatment of material objects, noting, For Einstein, to say that “Nightingale” is a lyrical “allegory” that suppresses both the ­actual bird it allegorizes and the ­actual desire that motivates it . . . ​This is a metaphysics that hinges on a double pro­cess of derealization: singular objects are generalized into concepts, which then become exchangeable properties of an unchanging, self-­identical subject, who reifies them as abstract expressions of his personality—­such that “nightingale” ­will stand for sentimental love, “turbines” for modernity, and “stars” for “the Absolute.” In each case, a material object or experience ­will be merely “paraphrased,” which is to say, literally, written around.109 Like the stultifying museum, the allegory is a metaphysical prison that “suppresses” the signified by tethering it to a single, abstract meaning. Generalized into a rigid concept, the word becomes a reviled “paraphrase,” reified like a commodity u ­ nder capitalism. Zeidler’s explanation suggests that Einstein’s poetics must also be examined within the economy of exchange. Einstein tries to jettison the nightingale from its lyrical, bourgeois associations just as Bataille’s numismatists take money out of circulation.110 Modernist collecting inheres in the contextual transformation that removes an object from its economic framework, strips it of its exchange value, and gives it new meaning.111 In textual terms, the “Critical Dictionary” removes a word from its bourgeois framework, strips it of its signifiers, and gives it new meaning. Like Benjamin, Einstein defines allegory in contradistinction to the symbol: “Symbols die, yet as they degenerate into allegories, they become eternal, perpetuating themselves through petrification.”112 Einstein’s understanding of allegory, like Benjamin’s, foregrounds death, decay, and history as it exposes the distended petrification pro­cess. Yet, unlike Benjamin’s allegory, which disrupts myth with its materiality and historical specificity, Einstein’s allegory is immaterial, abstract, and devoid of any redemptive quality. For Einstein, the relationship between an object and its meaning is just as arbitrary as the lexical connection between the signifier and signified showcased by the dictionary. This might explain another key difference between the two authors: while Benjamin continues to value language in spite of its limitations, Einstein loses faith in the expressive power of language altogether.

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Einstein’s treatment of allegory is illustrative of his much larger prob­lem with language: like a museum, language murders and destroys in its attempt to give expression.113 According to Einstein, allegory is a rapacious force that destroys an object through its proj­ect of artificial preservation. Declaring in his typically splenetic way, “Allegory is a form of murder, since it suppresses the object and robs it of its proper meaning,” Einstein recalls the dialectic of collecting that to preserve an object, we have to kill or destroy it. On a textual level, his entry gestures back to the etymology of compiling (compilare) as a form of pillaging (pilare). Writing, quite literally, is a way of putting ­things down. Einstein’s 1923 letter to the famed art dealer Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler—­a text known primarily for its early formulations of cubism—is just as much a meditation on the shortcomings of language in representing experience. He declares, “I want to write a story of a man . . . ​who feels dead language to be something that has deadened his experiences.”114 This goal is expressed in strikingly similar terms in Bebuquin II, the unfinished sequel to his novella, which languishes in thousands of note-­like fragments in Berlin’s Akademie der Künste: “BEB ages through language which poisons and cripples him.”115

Paraphrasing a Paraphrase By redefining the nightingale, Einstein nominally avoids the dictionary’s perfunctory task of paraphrasing. Yet, his assertion that the nightingale “belongs to the category of paraphrase” belies the fact that the Dictionary entry is, itself, a paraphrase of his own work—­his 1911 piece titled “Paraphrase.”116 “Nightingale” is thus as much a work of self-­citation as a deconstruction of the nightingale cliché. Surely Einstein, a self-­conscious writer, is aware of this contradiction, so what are we to make of it? On the one hand, paraphrasing is ultimately an act of re-­collection. By paraphrasing himself, is Einstein not simply corroborating Jean Baudrillard’s observation that “what you ­really collect is always yourself ”?117 On the other hand, it is more than merely an act of literary bravado. “Nightingale” can be read as a writer’s ultimate concession of the failure of language—­the capstone to Bebuquin. Einstein’s skepticism ­toward literary language makes him doubt his ability to redefine even the most basic cliché. If we read the entry allegorically, so to speak, “Nightingale” self-­ referentially performs the impossibility of literary innovation. In this most avant-­garde forum, Einstein denies the creative possibilities of language by paraphrasing his own paraphrase. It is hard not to interpret this move as a slap in the face of Documents’ radical mission. What ­else is a dictionary—­even a

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critical one—­but a proj­ect of paraphrasing words by defining them? What ­else is a cliché other than a repetition or a paraphrase? The specter of paraphrase looms large in Einstein’s corpus, occurring in almost e­ very phase of his oeuvre. It occupies a critical role in his art historical writings on Picasso and Georges Braque, where it helps him conceptualize the destructive effects of language.118 Similarly, Reber’s collection “is wrested away from the zone of passive assimilation” and “does not smack of lit­er­at­ ure and paraphrase.”119 A few lines ­later, Einstein repeats that “it is not a collection of literary circumlocution or paraphrase” (Es ist keine Sammlung literarischer Umschreibungen) as if to perform exactly what he denounces.120 The German word “Umschreibung” foregrounds the way paraphrasing literally “writes around” a word rather than imparting any real meaning. In contrast to other collectors, Reber does not smother his pieces “in the slime of suffocating paraphrase” or produce “a mode of viewing [Anschauung] that limps ­after museums and lit­er­at­ ure and only accepts the traditional and deadened.”121 Collecting is elevated to critique while lit­er­a­ture is debased to the status of a museum, which circumscribes and petrifies its object through meaningless mediation. To put it into the opposing semantic poles of Einstein’s museum essays, collecting is alive while writing is dead. In a complete inversion of Goethe’s amateur doctor-­collector, Einstein’s collector becomes the genius while the writer is demoted to dilettante. In “On Primitive Art,” Einstein invokes paraphrase to conceptualize the crisis of originality that plagued Eu­ro­pean modernism. The manifesto opens with a polemical tirade: “What the Eu­ro­pean world lacks in immediate art can be mea­sured inversely by the surplus of t­hose who exploit art, above all the scribes and paint­ers of paraphrases [Paraphrasen-­Maler]: indirect, second­hand ­people, pensioners who live off the dividends of tradition, in short, mediate Eu­ro­pe­ans.”122 According to Charles Haxthausen’s gloss, the primitive becomes “identified with the word unmittelbar, unmediated or immediate, a key term in Einstein’s theoretical vocabulary, associated with intuition (Anschauung) and totality” as well as creativity.123 In contrast, mediation is associated with the twin evils of paraphrase and capitalism. Although this Marxist fervor would dis­appear from his ­later writings, as Einstein “made pragmatic accommodation with the cap­i­tal­ist art world,” the notion of paraphrase continued to be his way of conceptualizing artistic unoriginality.124 It also helps explain how Einstein’s ethnographic collection might spring from his anx­ie­ ties about the impossibility of artistic originality or immediacy already thematized in Bebuquin. As “Nightingale” shows, many of Einstein’s critiques lapse into repetition, ellipses, and paraphrase even while denouncing ­these conventions. “Paraphrase”

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is no exception; it performs the very dynamic it seeks to point out by failing to come to any real point, showing precisely how difficult it is for Einstein to articulate the limitations of language. Several critics have pointed out that Einstein’s fraught relationship with writing was often reflected in his tortuous, rambling prose. Zeidler argues that Einstein’s famously elliptical, incomprehensible writing style should be viewed as an extension of his theories of groundlessness rather than an obstacle to understanding his ideas.125 As a case in point, he notes Einstein’s penchant for the phrase “that is” or “that is to say” (“das heißt,” “das ist,” or “c’est-­à-­dire”), which occurs “too often in his texts to be dismissible as a quirk.”126 This expression is, of course, another form of paraphrase—­ circling around the meaning of words rather than expressing them directly. This book’s constellation of author-­collectors provides a dif­fer­ent perspective on Einstein’s practice of paraphrasing. Reading Einstein together with James allows us to examine paraphrase as a form of textual collecting or re-­ collecting that verges on hoarding. The act of editing and paring down one’s work, as James realizes, is an act of destruction. Like a hoarder, Einstein has trou­ble letting go of ideas and continues to mull over them obsessively; he seems unable to get rid of anything, even the ­things he has already memorialized in print. In “Paraphrase” Einstein notes, “One is surprised when the Paraphraser [der Paraphraseur] decides that he is finished since he always turns back to the old . . . ​He always repeats himself and especially at incon­ve­nient times.”127 ­Here, the paraphraser again resembles the hoarder, who is equally obsessive and chronically unable to “finish” anything. In his “insatiable lust” for “every­thing ­really old,” the paraphraser shares an affinity with Nietz­sche’s antiquarian hoarder who “knows only how to preserve life, not how to generate.”128 Neither harbor any illusions about their originality as they “always turn back to the old.”129 Borrowing Benjamin’s terms, we could say that both face the prob­lem of completeness: paraphrasing is a form of serial compiling that has no end. “Paraphrase is limitless,” Einstein writes, “­because he who writes around [der Herumschreiber] and who, with precise, woeful certainty, talks around [an issue], can, in the absence of precise imagination, relate a thousand ­things.”130 At some point, Einstein’s paraphrasing stops being quirky and clever and verges on a pathology that obstructs the meaning and development of his own texts. Throughout his ­career, Einstein strug­gled to or­ga­nize his ideas in linear form. Like gleaning, the temporality of paraphrase is cyclical, defying linear progression as he re-­cycles around (herumschreiben) words. While his deployment of nonlinear writing techniques such as repetition, iteration, and recycling shares affinities with the methodology of Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect, Einstein regarded them as limitations rather than tools of creative stimulation.

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Einstein, like Benjamin, resorts to collecting when words fail him: he collects African sculptures and folklore as he realizes the futility of his artistic ambitions. Baudrillard’s analy­sis helps us unpack this dynamic: “­Because he feels alienated and abolished by a social discourse whose rules escape him, the collector strives to reconstitute a discourse that is transparent to him, a discourse whose signifiers he controls and whose referent par excellence is himself. In this he is doomed to failure: he cannot see that he is simply transforming an open-­ended objective discontinuity into a closed subjective one, where even the language he uses has lost any general validity.”131 As Benjamin’s Moscow sojourn shows, a collection often picks up the slack when other symbolic systems like language fail. It is in the controlled microcosm of the collection that desires, hopes, and fears—­often inarticulable in other forms—­find expression. For this reason, Einstein’s collection should be regarded not merely as a creative source for his own work, but as a compensatory pro­cess ­running parallel to his literary enterprise. This linguistic impasse helps us understand not only why he looks to material culture and visual art for inspiration, but why Einstein, unlike Benjamin, is unable to use language for po­liti­cal ends. In his 1919 manifesto, “To the Intellectuals,” he declares his allegiance to the communist cause over any intellectual pursuits by pointing out the limitations of literary language. Anticipating the rhe­toric of “Nightingale,” he proclaims, “Decorative words steal decisions. Your manifold nuance does not befit us. The simpleton is fanatical; we reject the obstacles of the multifaceted intellect. We renounce allegory and legerdemain meta­phor. We have no need for originality.”132 Gone are his youthful, misguided ambitions for originality fictionalized in the frantic quest of Bebuquin. Like his dilettantish alter ego, Einstein seems to recognize the impossibility of novelty. Initially, at least, Einstein’s polemic against originality overlaps with the stance of Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” on the dangers of aura. Yet, unlike Benjamin, who touted the value of a revolutionary caption, Einstein’s prob­lem is language itself. For Einstein, the imprecision and mediation of literary language impedes rather than clarifies or agitates for po­liti­cal c­ auses; the caption would simply be another form of decorative paraphrase. As Einstein set out to fight in the Spanish Civil War, he wrote in a 1939 letter to Kahnweiler, “Nowadays the r­ ifle is necessary to make up for the cowardice of the pen.”133 Einstein’s linguistic floundering recalls the writerly difficulties that plagued James at the end of his life, a crisis augmented by the onset of World War I. Para­lyzed by revisions, James’s late prose becomes even more dense, digressive, and periphrastic.134 Like James’s last two novels—­The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past—­his autobiography remained unfinished nearly two years be­ iddle of dictating The ­Middle Years, James reported, fore his death.135 In the m

22 8 Chap t e r  6

“I was struck dumb, like most of us all, ten weeks ago, and you ­will perhaps have noted that consistently dumb I have remained.”136 Like Benjamin, Einstein, Warburg, and other modernists, James’s faith in any notion of historical pro­g ress was irrevocably shaken by the war. Still, it would be a m ­ istake to reduce the breakdown of James’s language only to geopo­liti­cal ­causes. Instead, his meandering, elliptical, periphrastic prose—­like Einstein’s—­increasingly became part of his literary praxis, one that reflected a growing sense of groundlessness on an aesthetic and material level, accompanied by the erosion of the classification of objects and p­ eople. Reading Einstein together with James helps us see the unexpected affinities between them. Not only does it reveal the overlap between Einstein’s “herumschreiben” and hoarding tendencies, but it allows us to see James’s revisionary praxis and late work as a form of “herumschreiben,” or writing and rewriting without ever reaching the point. Like ellipses, repetition, and other literary techniques of equivocation, paraphrase is a way of deferring and delaying completion and, hence, death. Even in a medium designed to transform language, “Nightingale” draws attention to its profound failings. Although it tries to expose the repression underpinning lexical definitions, Einstein’s entry ends up reinforcing language as an “instrument of power” to “cover over misery” by highlighting the limitations of its ability to redefine.137 The nightingale is doomed to remain “an eternal accessory” and conventional literary construct: “It goes so far as to offer a few daring notes within a familiar harmony, for the nightingale uses even sadness as though it ­were a pastry.”138 With obvious po­liti­cal implications, Einstein portrays the nightingale as a figure of passive quietude whose song replaces action: “We must also mention the po­liti­cal nightingales who, taking their coffee without caffeine, practice the politics of the absolute via Hegel and double accounting, graciously avoiding all danger by issuing manifestos. Song is a substitute for action.”139 Einstein takes aim at his youthful literary ambition that sought to revolutionize through “manifestos” rather than “action.” More than affirming the shortcomings of the Dictionary’s radical agenda, “Nightingale” reveals Einstein’s doubts about the transformative possibilities of literary symbols. Perhaps for this reason, Einstein only authored two entries of the brainchild he had worked so hard to create. It might be tempting to conclude that Einstein gave up on lit­er­a­ture altogether. As many critics have pointed out, a growing awareness of the “inadequacy of language” prompted Einstein to turn to visual culture over literary expression in his ­later work.140 But such assertions are based on the assumption that completion is the only indicator of success.141 For collectors, it is more often the pro­cess than the result that is at stake. In spite of his existential doubts and splenetic tirades, Einstein continued to dabble in lit­er­at­ ure u ­ ntil the end

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of his life, never abandoning his plans to finish Bebuquin II. Like James’s unfinished autobiography and Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Proj­ect, it is conceivable that Bebuquin II could never have been completed even if its author had avoided his untimely, tragic death. A ­ fter all, can a writer, like a collector, ever feel that his or her task is complete?

Epilogue Hoarding in a Digital Age

All that’s left to me and belongs to me is a sheet of paper dotted with a few sparse notes, on which over the last few years ­under the title La Poubelle Agréée I have been jotting down the ideas that cropped up in my mind and that I planned to develop at length in my writing, theme of purification of dross throwing away is complementary to appropriating the hell of a world where nothing is thrown away one is what one does not throw away identification of oneself rubbish as autobiography satisfaction of consumption defection theme of materiality, of starting again, agricultural world cooking and writing autobiography as refuse transmission for preservation and still other notes whose thread and connective reasoning I can no longer make out. —­Italo Calvino, “La Poubelle Agréée,” 125

I never thought of myself as a hoarder ­until I started writing a book on collecting. I was frugal, disliked shopping, and owned few valuables. With my large collection of books, I had always fancied myself more of a bibliophile. So how could I be hoarder? It seemed virtually impossible—­well, at least u ­ ntil I opened my laptop. Hidden in my Dropbox Pro folders is a dizzying stockpile of unfinished drafts—­hundreds upon thousands of versions of the same file, with only minute differences between them, but each saved as a new version. In my book manuscript folder, t­ here are files labeled “Benjamin v726 reorder museum section,” “Benjamin v1494 shortened footnotes,” and then a more conclusive version labeled “Benjamin v1503, failure.” Recently, while he was fixing my computer, an IT specialist called me a “tab hoarder” a­ fter seeing the thirty open tabs I had on the bottom of my desktop. One tab was a file called “garbage v5” which was the most updated version of the discarded sentences from my book draft. Guided by the self-­serving logic of the hoarder, I was sure it would be useful in the ­f uture.

23 0



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The contours between saving, hoarding, and collecting grow increasingly nebulous in the infinitely expanding universe of the information age. At the same time, the need to discriminate between useful and useless ­things diminishes when space increases. Faced with unlimited information, how are we supposed to know what to hold onto? Why not save every­thing? Thus far, most psychological studies on hoarding focus on in its material instantiation. Very ­little is known about the characteristics of digital hoarding, partly b­ ecause it is more difficult to mea­sure.1 Given our virtually limitless electronic storage capabilities, should we even still call it hoarding? The preoccupation with hoarding and decluttering in both popu­lar culture and psy­chol­ogy is a way of concretizing our own anx­i­eties around storing, archiving, and disposing data. Since hoarding—​ as chapter 2 suggested—is so often a textual phenomenon, it seems to act as the material subconscious of our information-­saturated age. It is also the affliction of the late cap­i­tal­ist era, which crystallizes fears around clutter, consumption, and waste disposal.2 Digitization is perhaps why we cling to objects, realizing just how immaterial every­thing has become. Hoarding has to do with anx­i­eties about value—­both cultural and material. How do we choose what is worth saving? Whose standards dictate w ­ hether something should be saved or discarded? And, fi­nally, who is able to own ­things? In spite of its fraught roots in spoliation, collecting—at least since the princely cabinets of curiosity—­has been celebrated as enlightened and prestigious while hoarding has been the provenance of the poor, the el­derly, and w ­ omen. Like ragpickers, hoarders operate at the margins of a capitalistic society, questioning the value and utility of what we keep and throw away. The nagging question that perplexes all three of my author-­collectors also permeates Italo Calvino’s essay: What separates their writing from rubbish? Is their work worth being published, archived, and interpreted, or, in the case of James, is it better off destroyed? Calvino’s essay closes with an act of renunciation. Like Benjamin in “Unpacking My Library,” he surrenders authorial control to his collection. Although he begins by reflecting on the quotidian ­house­hold chore of taking out the garbage, Calvino concludes by considering the writerly contents of his wastepaper basket, reflecting, “Writing, no less than throwing ­things away, involves dispossession, involves pushing away from myself a heap of crumpled-up paper and a pile of paper written all over, neither of the two being any longer mine, but deposited, expelled.”3 ­Here James’s idea of publishing as a form of dispossession becomes materialized: the author who releases his or her work to the public is the opposite of a hoarder. Meditations on collecting and hoarding invariably lead back to the notion of the text as archive or compilation. Almost as if in response to Nietz­sche,

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Calvino’s essay on the materiality of garbage ends with a bibliographical quisquilium. Like hoarders, Calvino dreads throwing out the newspaper, “hoping it may prove useful l­ater on.”4 But for Calvino, “the moment of resurrection comes, of course, when I pull out a sheet from the heap of old newspapers to line the poubelle and headlines appear all creased up in the concave perspective of the bucket demanding an immediate second reading.”5 The montage technique embraced by modernists is performed again but by chance, as in The Arcades Proj­ect. Like a page from Documents, the text is distended and fragmented—­read distractedly rather than linearly. The newspaper, too, has an afterlife, thrown into a new relief by unexpected juxtapositions. Calvino imagines the way his own discarded work might be “food for another’s reading, for a ­mental metabolism,” pondering, “what transformations it ­will undergo in passing through other minds, how many of its calories it w ­ ill transmit 6 and ­whether it ­will set them in circulation again.” Like “The Storyteller,” Calvino’s waste sews the seeds for ­f uture production. In a typical postmodern move, Calvino’s essay references the writing of his own essay. But d­ oing so seems to threaten dissolution; the text appears to unravel just as Calvino is trying to tie up the loose ends. If modernism is a transformative kind of collecting no longer invested in completeness or indexicality, as this book has argued, then what happens to a collection in the age of postmodernism? In its self-­conscious, patchwork methodology, modernist collecting foreshadows a postmodern aesthetic that harnesses fragmentation, intertextuality, irony, and authorial self-­referentiality. Spolia studies provides another link between modernism and postmodernism, which was more brazen in its use of appropriation. Anticipating the postmodern author, the collector as meta-­artist creates a second-­order work of art by curating and sometimes even stealing the work of ­others.7 This might explain why the Wunderkammer has experienced a resurgence in the past thirty years. The apotheosis of the postmodern collection is Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence, which comes complete with an admission ticket to Pamuk’s own museum. Set in Istanbul during the turbulent 1970s, the plot revolves around Kemal, a wealthy, thirty-­year-­old playboy. A ­ fter an unhappy love affair with Füsun, his poor, young relative, Kemal begins to collect mementos of her, including some 4,213 cigarette butts she had smoked. Unlike lovelorn Benjamin in Moscow, Kemal seems to be hyperaware of his affliction: “I knew that I had become habituated, addicted to objects that brought me relief, but that my addiction was in no way helping” and instead perpetuating his obsession by proxy.8 To add to t­ hese layers of self-­reflexivity is Pamuk himself, who makes a cameo at the end of the novel as the storyteller and curator of the eponymous Museum of Innocence.



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While writing the novel Pamuk was si­mul­ta­neously building a museum to showcase the items in the story, including, most memorably, a wall containing Füsun’s 4,213 cigarette butts. Pamuk describes the evolution of the two-­ pronged proj­ect in the following terms: At the same time, I was also writing a novel, as well as keeping an eye out for items in second­hand shops, flea markets, and the homes of acquaintances who liked to hoard ­things. I was looking for objects that could have been used by the fictitious f­ amily whom I ­imagined to be living in that old ­house from 1975 to 1984 . . . ​Intending to use them in my novel, I was imagining situations, moments, and scenes suited to ­these objects, many of which (such as a quince grater) I had bought on impulse. Once, when browsing in a second­hand shop, I found a dress in a bright fabric with orange roses and green leaves on it, and I de­cided it was just right for Füsun, the heroine of my novel. With the dress laid out before me, I proceeded to write the details of a scene in which Füsun is learning to drive while wearing that very dress.9 Rather than finding objects that reflect the plot, Pamuk weaves a story by connecting his vari­ous finds. Pamuk’s proj­ect is a more entrepreneurial version of James’s “story of cabinets and chairs and ­tables” in which the plot is driven by the furniture.10 Like for James, the feedback loop between writing and collecting is iterative, but in this case, Pamuk writes to create a context for the objects he is collecting. While each of our three author-­collectors is influenced by an institutional collection—­the Louvre, the Bibliothèque nationale, and the Museum of Ethnology—­Pamuk builds his own. Like Einstein, much of his fascination is wrapped up in a fundamental critique of museums, which, for Kemal, are “the repositories of ­those ­things from which Western civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world.”11 From a perspective outside of the Eu­ro­pean center, the bloody fingerprints are still vis­i­ble on the vitrines of the colonial spoils. For this reason, it is the smaller, idiosyncratic museums that inspire him: I do not mean the Louvre or the Beaubourg, or the other crowded, ostentatious ones of that ilk; I am speaking now of the many empty museums I found in Paris, the collections that no one ever visits . . . ​the Musée Jacquemart-­André, where other objects ­were arranged alongside paintings in the most original way—­I saw empty chairs, chandeliers, and haunting unfurnished spaces t­ here. Whenever wandering alone through museum like this, I felt myself uplifted. I would find a room at the back, far from the gaze of the guards . . . ​It was as if I had entered a separate

23 4 E P ILOG U E

realm that coexisted with the city’s crowded streets but was not of them; and in the eerie timelessness of this other universe, I would find solace.12 The Musée Jacquemart-­André’s “haunting unfurnished spaces” are signifiers of emptiness rather than completeness, into which Kemal can proj­ect his own memories and desires. It also evokes Benjamin’s notion of aura as an intimate, dialogical relationship in which objects appear to “look at us in return.”13 ­After all, it is the aura of Füsun’s objects—­their mysterious proximity to his beloved—­ that compels Kemal to start collecting them in the first place. If modernist collecting practices extricate themselves from institutions, as this book has argued, then where does Pamuk’s museum leave us? What is the role of the museum or public collection ­today? In a section of his museum cata­log appropriately titled “A Modest Manifesto for Museums,” Pamuk addresses ­these questions, which could be read as a response to Einstein’s polemical museum essays: “It is imperative that museums become smaller, more individualistic, and cheaper. This is the only way that they w ­ ill ever tell stories on a ­human scale. Big museums with their wide doors call upon us to forget our humanity and embrace the state and its ­human masses. This is why millions outside the Western world are afraid of g­ oing to museums.”14 The list ends with a short, albeit “modest,” declaration: “The ­future of museums is inside our own homes.”15 Is this not, in fact, what James had in mind while describing Mrs. Gereth’s well-­curated h ­ ouse in The Spoils of Poynton? If the modernist collection moved into the private sphere, then perhaps the postmodern collection is the home itself. We seem to have come full circle, back to the princely chambers of the Kunst and Wunderkammer of the Re­nais­sance, which ­were ­housed in private estates. ­There is one key difference: Kemal’s collection is not made of exotic marvels or extraordinary princely splendors; it is furnished with everyday objects. Like Benjamin’s ragpicker, he ends up “sifting through the detritus” and “heaps” of the notorious “rubbish dens” of Istanbul to furnish his museum.16 This brings us back to Pamuk’s delineation between the “proud” collectors who display their finds and the “bashful” collectors, motivated by shame to “hide away all they have accumulated.”17 Although he does not call the latter hoarders, their dispositions overlap significantly. Pamuk’s distinction raises the question, is the difference between collectors and hoarders that the former amass “­things for a museum as one might in the West, simply on account of being rich and inclined to celebrate [their] collection[s]?”18 As a privileged, educated man, Kemal has the means of exhibiting his finds, while hoarders live in “secret shame,” convinced that “their mania for collecting t­ hings [is] an illness that wealth would surely have cured.”19



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Kemal’s predilection for everyday objects also puts him into dialogue with the surrealists, whose obsession with cultural artifacts has an ethnographic valence. Like Einstein and his colleagues at Documents, he casts himself as a cultural anthropologist, professing, “I was coming to see myself as someone who had traveled to distant countries and remained t­here for many years; say, an anthropologist who had fallen in love with a native girl while living among the indigenous folk of New Zealand, to study and cata­log their habits and rituals, how they worked and relaxed, and had fun. My observations and the love I had lived had become intertwined.”20 In real­ity, however, Kemal is collecting himself through an anthropology of his own culture, estranged from him through the commodified Westoxification of the Istanbul elites. His incestuous love for Füsun becomes a form of self-­love: “I could consider—­and even feel—­all that passed through her heart and mind; I could speak through her mouth, understand how she felt a t­ hing even as she felt it herself—­for I was she.”21 Collecting Füsun’s t­hings becomes a form of appropriating her identity and ventriloquizing her, to “feel . . . ​all that passed through her heart and mind” and “speak through her mouth.”22 In keeping with the kleptomaniac tendencies of zealous collectors, Kemal often resorts to theft and stealth to obtain objects ­ ouse. ­Here, too, he follows a long history of male collectors from Füsun’s h who treat ­women as conquests, collectibles, or curiosities. This dynamic is most ­uncomfortably captured in Box 23, a ­simple vitrine containing Füsun’s white underwear stuffed into her “dirty” white sneakers—­a testament to the virginity she “deliberately elected to give him.”23 Even in Pamuk’s dichotomy between the “proud” and “bashful” collectors, ­there are implied gender differences borne out by the sexual politics of the novel: while male collectors proudly exhibit their material and sexual exploits, ­women must safeguard or hoard their virginity like a prized possession. Following the fate of James’s Isabel Archer, the end result of Kemal’s display is the objectification and sacrifice of Füsun. The fact that Kemal builds a museum to memorialize her is beside the point; Füsun was never alive to begin with. Even during the novel’s most moving scenes, Füsun is only ever focalized as Kemal’s love object. In The Museum of Innocence, as in James’s novels, ­things take center stage while the ­people serve as accoutrements or bibelots. In both cases, it is the female characters who bear the consequences; Füsun, like Isabel Archer, is framed by her literary repre­sen­ta­tion. During the novel’s final scene, Pamuk and Kemal creepily gaze “at a photo­g raph of Füsun in a black swimsuit embroidered with the number nine—at her honey-­hued arms, and her face, and her splendid body.”24 Was Füsun ever anything but an image, a projection, a fantasy? We are reminded of Isabel’s haunting words at the end of The Portrait of a Lady, when she contemplates her own fate as if

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she ­were an object: “When had it ever been a guarantee to be valuable? ­Wasn’t all history full of the destruction of precious ­things?”25 If Pamuk problematizes the toxic effects of obsessive love, then it is undermined by his fictional alter ego’s participation in Füsun’s objectification.26 This overidentification is part and parcel of the way narratives of collecting tend to stray into the autobiographical realm. Both the museum and novel blur the bound­aries between Kemal, Pamuk the character, and Pamuk the author in yet another telltale sign of postmodernism. As the book’s title suggests, Pamuk’s museum is as much a novel as his novel is a museum, with each vitrine corresponding to a chapter of the novel. By referring to one another, Pamuk’s book, like his museum, belies any illusion of totality or completeness. Like a Wunderkammer, Pamuk’s museum has no encyclopedic aspirations. Like a novel, it simply wants to “tell a story.”27 One of the dangers of digitization is that, like Borges’s library, it gives us the illusion of totality even as the information it pre­sents is filtered and fractured.28 Finishing my book during the scatter of the COVID-19 pandemic, I tried to assem­ble a digital archive without libraries, museums, or access to the books in my shuttered office. Trips to the archives ­were canceled, conferences ­were postponed, and the reading list was pared down. One key source was found, by chance, through Twitter. I read in fragments, distracted yet absorbed, with one eye on the devastating newsfeed or the squabbling kids who w ­ ere interminably home from school. Piecing together PDF files, e-­books, and snippet views on Google Books, I realized the way Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect not only anticipated the hypertext but also our con­temporary reading practices. We scan rather than read, scrolling to the section that catches our eye. We peruse piecemeal by gleaning bytes. Necessity has forced us to digitize, economize, and minimize. I would like to think I have followed this recent trend to declutter. This epilogue, for instance, only has twenty-­six versions. Then again, as Benjamin warns us, we should never trust a collector.29 Let alone a hoarder.

N ote s

Introduction

1. Friedrich Nietz­sche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 12. 2. Ibid. Of the triad of historical types—­critical, antiquarian, monumental—­that Nietz­sche identifies, all three can “serve life,” but each can also “grow up into a destructive weed” (10). The antiquarian type is fundamentally a preserver. For more on Nietz­sche’s conception of history, see Anthony Jensen, Nietz­sche’s Philosophy of His­ tory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 83–90. 3. Ibid. 4. See Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souve­ nir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 160. 5. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth ­Century, 1935,” in SW III, 39. 6. Ibid. 7. Benjamin concedes, “I fully realize that my discussion of the ­mental climate of collecting w ­ ill confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is ­behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type.” UL, 66. 8. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian, 1937,” in SW III, 275. 9. Robert Ainsworth, An Abridgment of Ainsworth’s Dictionary (Philadelphia: Uria Hunt, 1837), 877. 10. AR, N1a, 8, 460. 11. Orhan Pamuk notes, “The viewpoint of aspiring writers and paint­ers has a lot in common with that of pioneering collectors . . . ​Despite all their idealistic talk about history and memory, the first collectors did not set out to preserve the traces of a past life, but to fashion for themselves a new identity—­and a new f­ uture to go with it.” The Innocence of Objects, trans. Ekin Oklap (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2012), 46. Along similar lines, Stewart observes, “While the point of the souvenir may be remembering, or at least the invention of memory, the point of the collection is forgetting, starting again.” On Longing, 152. 12. For Benjamin, too, the pro­cess of collecting eclipses the ­actual object, which becomes arbitrary even in an essay on his book collection: “What I am r­eally concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the vari­ous ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary.” UL, 59–60. 13. Petra McGillen’s The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2019) demonstrates that Theodor 237

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TO PAGES 4– 5

Fontane made ample use of copy and paste in his writing pro­cess. Her book suggests that, although it was widespread, “compiling was one of the practices that could not easily be admitted” (12) by nineteenth-­century authors, who often felt pressured to “stage themselves as creative geniuses” (11). In contrast, James openly embraced citation and compilation as a literary praxis. 14. ­Because my book hinges on the relationship between collecting and writing as an artistic praxis, I chose not to focus on Aby Warburg, whose texts are situated in an art historical and anthropological milieu. Although he was not a writer, Warburg was an impor­tant collector, scholar, and interlocutor for both Benjamin and Einstein. The connections between their proj­ects are manifold; like The Arcades Proj­ect, Mnemosyne employed montage, juxtaposition, and images and remained unfinished during Warburg’s lifetime. Mnemosyne—­like Einstein’s Documents—­used provocative visual combinations to bring together art history and anthropology with the pre­sent. Just a few of the many impor­tant scholarly works on Warburg are Christopher Johnson’s Memory, Meta­phor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); E. H. Gombrich’s Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Leiden: E.  J. Brill, 1970); Philippe-­Alain Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004); and Georges Didi-­Huberman’s seminal The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). For more on the relationship between the proj­ects of Benjamin and Warburg, see Cornelia Zumbusch’s Wissenschaft in Bildern (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004). 15. Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 2. Braddock states that “if a collecting aesthetic describes a salient form of modernist art, it is b­ ecause it bears witness to a larger set of crisis and possibilities that the collection could both represent and witness” (2). Crisis is an important subtext in this book, giving form to the interconnection of the aesthetic and the po­liti­ cal in Benjamin’s and Einstein’s work. 16. Rosalind Krauss writes, “More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-­ garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth. Marinetti, thrown from his automobile one eve­ning in 1909 into a factory ditch filled with w ­ ater, emerges as if from the amniotic fluid to be born—­without ancestors—­a futurist. This parable of absolute self-­creation that begins the first Futurist Manifesto functions as a model for what is meant by originality among the early twentieth-­century avant-­garde . . . ​the self as origin is the way an absolute distinction can be made between a pre­sent experienced de novo and a tradition-­laden past.” The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 157. 17. In T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1932), he notes that it is not so much that “the past should be altered by the pre­sent as much as the pre­sent is directed by the past” (5). Instead, Eliot claims, “the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past” (6). 18. See Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), Marjorie Perloff ’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New ­Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Paul Fleming’s Exemplarity and Medioc­ rity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008). Like Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, Perloff ’s Unoriginal Genius explores

NOTES TO PA GES 5– 7

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con­temporary lit­er­a­ture’s “obstinate” refusal to make any “claim on originality” by copying, recycling, and appropriating the work of ­others—­a trend they both trace back to Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect (12). ­ usic, Text, trans. Stephen 19. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, M Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146. For Barthes, “the author is a modern figure,” who emerges in the Enlightenment with the “prestige of the individual” as “the culmination of cap­i­tal­ist ideology” (143). Similarly, Theodor Adorno notes in Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), that “prior to the age of genius the idea of originality bore no authority. That in their new works composers of the seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries made use of w ­ hole sections of their own ­earlier works and t­hose of ­others.” Thus, he argues, originality “presupposes something on the order of emancipated subjectivity . . . ​Originality remains touched by the historical fate of the category of individualness from which it was derived” (172). 20. Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 127. 21. “Spoils,” The Oxford En­glish Dictionary, 2nd  ed. (1989), OED Online, https://­ www​-­oed​-­com​.­ezproxy​.­cul​.­columbia​.­edu​/­view​/­Entry​/­187260. 22. For an overview of the field of spolia studies, see Dale Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Eu­rope, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). She notes, “Rather than a coherent category, spolia might better be considered a theme of categories like architecture and sculpture . . . ​Spolia also resonate with themes of postmodern cultural criticism, such as appropriation, bricolage, historicism, the fragment, and the ruin” (234). 23. “Spoils,” Oxford En­glish Dictionary. 24. Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” 233. 25. Arnold Esch, “On the Reuse of Antiquity: The Perspectives of the Archaeologist and Historian,” in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture, ed. Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney (New York: Routledge, 2011), 19. 26. Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” 244. 27. Michael North, “The Making of ‘Make It New,’ ” Guernica Magazine, August 15, 2013, https://­www​.­guernicamag​.­com​/­the​-­making​-­of​-­making​-­it​-­new. 28. Walter William Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the En­glish Language, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), 350. 29. Robert Nelson argues that appropriation locates agency in the maker or receiver of a work of art: “Compared to traditional terms of art history—­for example, ‘influence’—­ considering appropriation shifts the inquiry ­toward the active agents of signification in society and illumines historical context. It cuts away the privileged autonomy of the art object or at least permits the construction of that autonomy to be studied.” “Appropriation,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 12. 30. Dale Kinney, “Introduction,” in Reuse Value, 8. Historically, rulers often used spolia as a show of power or domination, such as Charlemagne displaying Roman marble spolia as a po­liti­cal gesture. 31. Some productive forms of appropriation are what Andreas Huyssen has termed counter-­appropriations that “reveal alternative potentials of a cited source, especially in the realm of po­liti­cally charged aesthetic practices.” Huyssen cites the Brazilian anthropophagy movement in the 1920s and “its guiding idea of digesting Eu­ro­pean models of

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artistic practice and transforming them to create a modernism sui generis in Brazil. Such forms of digestion or counter-­appropriation are widespread t­ oday in artistic practices in the global South and aesthetic theory needs to deal with them beyond its traditional Eu­ ro­pean context.” His comments are drawn from his response to my talk at the virtual conference “Aesthetics and Politics,” held at Columbia University in November 2020. 32. ­After Esch’s intervention, the definition of spolia expanded to become what Richard Brilliant called “a subset of the broader category of appropriation” which involve “the physical incorporation of artworks, or fragments thereof, into new artistic contexts. Spoliation reintroduces the past and the ‘other’ into the pre­sent . . . ​Spoliation further involves the removal of the artworks from their place of origin and their subsequent display in novel environments, often, not invariably dedicated to asserting cultural and historical possession for con­temporary viewers.” “Authenticity and Alienation,” in Reuse Value, 168. 33. Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1998), 9. 34. Bénédicte Savoy’s Africa’s Strug­gle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat (Prince­ ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2022) is an impor­tant contribution to this scholarship. Savoy shows that efforts of African nations to repatriate looted art dates back to the 1960s. See also Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (London: Oneworld, 2021). 35. Quoting Aimé Césaire, Barbara Johnson explains, “Both capitalism and colonization (which are tied closely together) tend to turn persons into t­ hings so that every­thing serves the needs and centrality of commodities. ­Here, colonized man loses his humanity and becomes a t­hing to extend the reach of capitalism itself.” Persons and T ­ hings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 22. 36. Susan Sontag notes that “the turning of p­ eople into t­ hings, the multiplication or replication of t­ hings, and the grouping of people/things around an all-­powerful leader” is part of the fascist aesthetic that goes “far beyond” the typical associations of Nazism like the ideology of blood and soil or the cult of “brutishness and terror.” “Fascinating Fascism,” in ­Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays (New York: Picador Paper, 2002), 91. 37. Jiří Weil, Mendelssohn is on the Roof, trans. Marie Winn (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 69. 38. Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 139–40. 39. Benjamin, “Paris,” 39. 40. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996), 86. 41. AR, H1a, 2, 271. 42. Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1994), 9. It is worth pointing out that Sigmund Freud—­himself an avid collector of antique art objects—­never conceptualized collecting beyond its regressive, anal origins in the childhood plea­sure of retaining feces. Lynn Gamwell notes Freud’s “curious silence” on the psy­chol­ogy of collecting as well as his complete reticence on his private collection, which consisted of over two thousand objects. Lynn Gamwell, “A Collector Analyses Collecting: Sigmund Freud on the Passion to Possess,” in Excavations and Their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquity, ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 2. For more on Freud’s private collection, see Barker’s Excavations

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and Their Objects and Janine Burke’s The Sphinx on the ­Table (New York: Walker & Com­ pany, 2006). 43. Rebecca Falkoff observes that the diagnosis of hoarding is primarily an “aesthetic prob­lem,” requiring psychologists to establish “aesthetic standards with which to evaluate a hoard.” Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 6. 44. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), 691. 45. American Psychiatric Association, “Hoarding Disorders,” Diagnostic and Statisti­ cal Manual of M ­ ental Disorders, 300.3 (F42.3) (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2013), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1176​/­appi​.­books​.­9780890425596. 46. Benjamin, “Paris,” 39. 47. The art historian Horst Bredekamp argues that the Wunderkammer was not only an interdisciplinary zone where classificatory schemes ­were overturned and cultural hierarchies ­were destabilized but a space in which the senses w ­ ere allowed to play freely, aided by the recombinant powers of the imagination. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology (Prince­ton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1995). Other notable scholarship on the Wunderkammer includes Oliver Impey’s The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth ­Century Eu­rope, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2017); Krzystof Pomian’s Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-­Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); John Elsner and Roger Cardinal’s The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994); Arthur MacGregor’s Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth C ­ entury (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Marjorie Swann’s Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern ­England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 48. Tony Bennett maintains that the museum as a paradigmatic “institution of high culture” was “enlisted . . . ​for governmental purposes” to produce “a better economy of cultural power.” To do so, the nineteenth-­century museum had to “detach that space from its e­ arlier private, restricted and socially exclusive forms of sociality.” The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), 23, 24. 49. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 10. Thus, Maleuvre argues, “the museum immediately had the effect of politicizing the contents of artwork,” 11. 50. McIsaac, Museums of the Mind, 57. 51. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Collector and his Circle,” in Goethe on Art, trans. John Gage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 41. An avid collector of prints, drawings, fossils, rocks, and plant specimens, Goethe chronicles his own collecting habits in The Italian Journey. He was also a discerning observer of the changing museum landscape. For more on Goethe’s relationship with museums, see McIsaac, Museums of the Mind, 55–126. 52. Ibid., 42. 53. Jacqueline Yallop, Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2011), 33. 54. The object’s power seems to derive from its pos­si­ble imperial origins: “The smoothing of the sea had completely worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say

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­ hether it had been ­bottle, tumbler or win­dow pane; it was nothing but glass; it was alw most a precious stone. You had only to enclose it in a rim of gold, or pierce it with a wire, and it became a jewel; part of a necklace, or a dull, green light upon a fin­ger. Perhaps ­after all it was r­ eally a gem; something worn by a dark Princess trailing her fin­ger in the ­water as she sat in the stern of the boat and listened to the slaves singing as they rowed her across the Bay.” “Solid Objects,” in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1972), 81. 55. Woolf, “Solid Objects,” 85. In his reading of Woolf ’s story, Mao suggests that John’s obsession is a “projection of Victorian childhood onto a modern adulthood, a discrete subversion that takes the 19th ­century at its word while deploying that word against it.” Mao argues that Woolf represents collecting as “a vocation in the richest sense of that term” while John is portrayed as a “connoisseur” and “tormented artist.” Solid Objects, 28, 26, 30. 56. Ibid., 85. 57. Eckhardt Köhn argues that this collector’s sensibility is new: “­Towards the end of the 19th ­century, a dif­fer­ent type of collector emerged in Germany . . . ​who was guided by an ‘affective relationship,’ an attachment to the collected object.” This collector possessed an “inner relationship” (innerliche Beziehung) or “coexistence” (Mitleben) with the objects of his desire. “Sammler,” in Benjamins Begriffe, vol. 2, ed. Michael Optiz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 697. Translation mine. 58. Woolf, “Solid Objects,” 85. 59. In this re­spect, the modernist fragment differs from the Romantic fragment, which still aims at completeness. See Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe and Jean-­Luc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Lit­er­at­ ure in German Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988) and Anne Janowitz, “The Romantic Fragment,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999). 60. John’s preoccupation with broken china is instructive: “He now began to haunt the places which are most prolific of broken china, such as pieces of waste land between railway lines, sites of demolished ­houses.” Woolf, “Solid Objects,” 83–84. 61. See Julia Kristeva, “Bakhtine: Le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” Critique 239 (1967); Renate Lachman, “Intertexualität als Sinnkonstitution: Andrej Belyjs Petersburg und die ‘fremden’ Texte,” Poetica 15 (1983): 66–67; and, more recently, Rüdiger Campe and Arne Höcker’s special section on citation, “Introduction: The Case of Citation: On Literary and Pragmatic Reference,” in The Germanic Review: Lit­er­a­ture, Culture, Theory 89, no. 1 (2014). 62. Bill Brown, A Sense of ­Things: The Object ­Matter of American Lit­er­a­ture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13. 63. Collecting in Con­temporary Practice (London: Sage, 1998) and Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992) are two of Pearce’s many works on this subject. It is fitting that the topic of collecting has inspired a host of edited volumes (Sammelbänder). The most comprehensive is Sprachen des Sammelns: Literatur als Medium und Reflexionsform des Sammelns, ed. Sarah Schmidt (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016), which focuses on the intersection of language and collecting from the Wunderkammer to con­temporary multimedia art. 64. Peter McIsaac concentrates on the institutional dynamics of collecting in modern German history, particularly in conjunction with the development of the museum. In his

NOTES TO PA GES 15– 18

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examination of American art collections and literary anthologies, Braddock focuses largely on institutional patterns of collecting rather than the personal dimension of collecting and its relationship to literary production: “The collection was not a form of retreat . . . ​but instead a means of addressing the work of art to the public modeling and creating the conditions of modernism’s reception.” Braddock’s modernist collection “is a provisional institution, a mode of public engagement modeling ­future—­and often more democratic—­relationships between audience and artwork.” Collecting as a Modern­ ist Practice, 3. 65. Swann notes that the terms “collection” and “collector” as we now use them in En­glish grew out of a textual designation in Elizabethan E ­ ngland: “By 1651 the word ‘collection,’ used since the mid-15th ­century to refer to gathered historical or literary materials had also come to designate an assemblage of physical t­hings while the term ‘collector,’ first used in 1582 to refer to a literary compiler, similarly came to refer to an individual ‘who collects works of art and curiosities.’ ” Curiosities and Texts, 2. Inextricably linked to the writing pro­cess, collecting emerged from the author’s relationship with the text and gave rise to new conceptions of authorship. 66. Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons, trans. Herbert Hunt (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 42. 67. Dominik Finkelde, “Vergebliches Sammeln: Walter Benjamins Analyse eines Unbehagens im Fin de Siècle und der europäischen Moderne,” Arcadia 41, no. 1 (2006): 191. 68. McGillen’s book takes a “practice-­driven approach” by examining the way Fontane understood “text as pro­cess.” Fontane Workshop, 25. Other examples include Lorraine Daston’s “Taking Note(s),” ISIS 95, no. 3 (September 2004); and Rüdiger Campe’s “Die Schreibszene,” in Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche. Situa­ tionen offener Epistemologie, ed. Hans Gumbrecht and K. Pfeiffer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1991). 69. This seriality is what prompts Muensterberger to label collecting as a form of compulsive repetition, for which “the obtainment of one more object does not bring an end to the longing” but rather augments it, like a hunger that must be continually sated. Collecting, 13. 70. Nietz­sche, Use and Abuse, 12. Part 1. Possessing the Old World

1. Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 213. 2. I am indebted to Mahinder Kingra for this formulation. 3. Christine Riding, “Old Masters and Edwardian Society Portraiture,” in The Ed­ wardians: Secrets and Desires (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2004), 84. 4. GB, 39. 5. GB, 33. 6. Philip Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters (New York: Viking, 1999), 144. 7. Unlike most of his fictional collectors, James bought very few works of art. When he did, “it was for personal rather than aesthetic reasons.” Adeline Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1986), 235.

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8. Although Rebecca Falkoff focuses on hoarding, her observation is relevant to collectors: “Even in exercising control over ­things, we are possessed by them. Hoarding marks a dangerous threshold at which control over objects cedes to a sense of helplessness before the material world. That threshold—­between control and submission, between the subject and object of the verb possess—­may be used to draw a distinction between collecting and hoarding—­a tantalizing exercise that finds provincial resolution in considerations of value.” Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 16. 9. Didier Maleuvre observes, “A museum is almost a textbook case for realist description. T ­ here the eye looks upon a world made of objects undisturbed by ­human presence. Indeed a description of a gallery of objects may serve as an allegory of objective stance called realism.” Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 197. 10. The proliferation of t­hings in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century fiction has been astutely analyzed in Cynthia Wall’s The Prose of ­Things: Transformations of Descrip­ tion in the Eigh­teenth ­Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in ­Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 11. Tintner’s Museum World of Henry James is a case in point. Focused on James’s repre­sen­ta­tion of museums rather than private collections, it is structured thematically as a museum with dif­fer­ent “wings” devoted to James’s writings on vari­ous aesthetic subjects. Notable exceptions in modernist studies are Jeremy Braddock’s Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1998), and Bill Brown’s A Sense of T ­ hings: The Object M ­ atter of American Lit­er­a­ture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 12. Objects proliferate in Dickens’s novels, ranging from The Old Curiosity Shop to Our Mutual Friend. The realist excess of description also pervades the novels of Balzac, as James noted, “­There is nothing in all imaginative lit­er­at­ ure that in the least resembles his mighty passion for ­things—­for material objects, for furniture, upholstery, bricks and mortar. The world that contained ­these t­ hings filled his consciousness, and being, at its intensest, meant simply being thoroughly at home among them.” “Honoré de Balzac,” in Henry James: Literary Criticism, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1984), 48. 13. In the “Real­ity Effect,” Barthes argues that superfluity of objects in the realist novel signify a generic real rather than functioning as a part of a symbolic register, stating, “The very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the real­ity effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity.” Barthes suggests that the cata­log of objects in realist fiction do not denote any larger significance other than the real world of objects. “The Real­ity Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148. 14. CH, 391.

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1. James’s ­Human Bibelots

1. Adeline R. Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1986), 2. At the age of seventeen, James had even tried his hand at being an artist. For more on James’s complex, evolving relationship with museums and art collections, see Tintner, Museum World, and Sergio Perosa’s “Henry James and Unholy Art Acquisitions,” Cambridge Quarterly 37, no.  1 (2008), and for James’s own writings on visual art, see The Paint­er’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Picto­ rial Arts, ed. John  L. Sweeney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). ­There is a substantial body of scholarship on James’s relationship with visual art, such as Ruth Yeazell’s recent article, “Henry James’s Portrait-­Envy,” New Literary History 48, no. 2 (Spring 2017); Tintner’s Museum World and Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Jonathan Freedman’s Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Jennifer Eimers’s The Continuum of Consciousness: Aesthetic Experience and Visual Art in Henry James’ Novels (New York: Peter Lang, 2013); Viola Hopkins Winner’s Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 1970); and Colm Tóibín, Marc Simpson, and Declan Kelly’s Henry James and American Painting (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). 2. James’s fascination with the Louvre was lifelong; on his deathbed, his last delirious dictations imagine himself as a Napoleonic creator of a new wing of the Louvre. Tintner, Museum World, 14. As Leon Edel notes, much of the ambient libidinal energy of Ernest Hemingway and other novelists was, for James, channeled into his love for the museum. “Foreword,” in Tintner, Museum World, xix. 3. Henry James, A Small Boy and ­Others (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2008), 349. 4. Henry James and Frederick Wilcox Dupee, Henry James, Autobiography (Prince­ ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2014), 349. 5. Peter McIsaac, Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Col­ lecting (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 151. According to some reports, the number of museums in Amer­i­ca would rise from 50 during the mid-­nineteenth ­century to 2,500 in 1914. Perosa, “Henry James and Unholy Art Acquisitions,” 152. 6. By 1900, James’s “museum is the private ­house of the very rich.” Tintner, Mu­ seum World, 62. 7. Ibid., 237. 8. Perosa observes, “James’s turn from the early enthusiastic and acritical view of art wealth and collecting to a ­later skeptical, embarrassed, and dismayed awareness of the prob­lems involved seems to reflect both a historic and a personal experience. The historic change was the appearance in force, in the l­ater part of the nineteenth c­ entury, of the American ‘robber barons’ turned art collectors, bent on an unpre­ce­dented acquisition of art trea­sures of all kinds, mostly from Eu­rope and the Orient.” “Henry James and Unholy Art Acquisitions,” 152. I am indebted to Perosa for this quote from James’s 1895 Notebooks.

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9. Christine Riding, “Old Masters and Edwardian Society Portraiture,” in The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires (Canberra and Seattle: National Gallery of Australia, distributed by University of Washington Press, 2004), 82. 10. Henry James, “The American Purchase of Meissonier’s Friedland,” in The Paint­ er’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John L. Sweeney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 109. 11. CH, 392. 12. SP, 43. 13. SP, 26. 14. Jacqueline Yallop, Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2011), 33. 15. SP, 68. 16. SP, 131. 17. Yallop, Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves, 31. In The American even Valentin de Bellegarde, “penniless patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector” whose “damp, gloomy” ­house was “crowded with curious bric-­à-­brac” arranged “in a picturesque disorder.” Henry James, The American, ed. James Tuttleton (New York: W. W. Norton & Com­pany, 1978), 96. 18. Fotios Sarris, “Fetishism in The Spoils of Poynton,” Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ ture 51, no. 1 ( June 1996): 54. 19. SP, 38. 20. SP, 50. 21. SP, 52. 22. SP, 44. 23. SP, 94. 24. SP, 45. 25. SP, 66. Bill Brown maintains that the pro­cess of “decluttering” of interior spaces in the Victorian period was echoed in The Spoils of Poynton, which “participates in a new decorating impulse of the era” and “tests the limits of realism by evacuating the genre of, say, its material possessions.” The minimalist style embraced by many modernists ­ hings: The echoes the paring down of objects in the interior space, he argues. A Sense of T Object ­Matter of American Lit­er­a­ture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 141. 26. Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 185. 27. Sarah Luria, “The Architecture of Manners: Henry James, Edith Wharton, and the Mount,” American Quarterly 49, no. 2 ( June 1997): 267. 28. Wharton and Codman, Decoration of Houses, 190. 29. Ibid., 187. 30. Ibid. 31. SP, 54. Wharton and Codman’s rhe­toric is nearly identical as they bemoan “the production of that worst curse of modern civilization—­cheap copies of costly horrors.” They warn against the use of “cheap machine-­made furniture,” “trashy china ornaments,” and the “accumulation of superfluous knick-­knacks.” Decoration of Houses, 186, 24, 84. 32. WA, 253. 33. WA, 254.

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34. SP, 219. 35. Benjamin writes, “The collector develops a relationship with his objects . . . ​ which are enriched through his knowledge of their origin and duration in history—­a relationship that now seems archaic” and “would no longer be pos­si­ble in an age of standardized mass production.” AR, H4, 4, 210. 36. SP, 56. According to Benjamin, “Film responds to the shriveling of the aura with artificially building up the ‘personality’ outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.” WA, 261. Translation modified. 37. Wharton and Codman, Decoration of Houses, 191. 38. SP, 47. 39. SP, 53. 40. WA, 256. 41. SP, 42. 42. UL, 60. 43. SP, 85. 44. Brown, Sense of ­Things, 137. 45. SP, 49. 46. Williams comments, “I was extraordinarily impressed re-­reading The Spoils of Poynton, not merely by its treatment of money, but of money as con­spic­u­ous display. Although it is presented as a spectacle, ­there is absolutely no deception pos­si­ble for the spectator. It’s an incredibly power­ful demonstration of a certain kind of fetishism. One might even say that ­after the first chapter of Capital, ­people should be sent to read The Spoils of Poynton.” Politics and Letters: Interviews with “New Left Review” (Norfolk: Lowe and Brydon, 1979), 258. The centrality of objects in the novel seems to affirm Marx’s observation about the way objects “rule over their possessors instead of being ruled by them.” Capital, vol. I, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Dover Publications, 2011), 86. 47. Elaine Freedgood and Bill Brown argue that the theoretical currency of commodity fetishism belies a more complex relationship between a culture and its material objects. Brown observes that the ­human interaction with the nonhuman world of objects cannot “fully be explained by the so-­called reifying effects of a society permeated by the commodity form.” Hence this relationship, “however mediated by the advance of consumer culture, must be recognized as irreducible to that culture.” Sense of ­Things, 13. Freedgood notes that commodity culture was preceded by “Victorian ‘­thing culture’ . . . ​a more extravagant form of object relations than ours, one in which systems of value ­were not quarantined from one another and ideas of interest and meaning ­were perhaps far less restricted than they are for us.” The Ideas in ­Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 8. I have opted to avoid using loaded terms such as “commodity fetish” or “fetishize” as much as pos­si­ble to complicate the Marxist reading of collecting as symptomatic of bourgeois consumption. 48. SP, 53. 49. SP, 85. In an interview with a passionate collector, a student in my collecting seminar at Columbia in 2019 concluded, “Objects call out to her in a language I cannot

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understand.” The idea that a collector hears the voices of objects is found across the lit­er­a­ture of collecting. 50. Only sixteen months apart in age, Henry and William had a close relationship marked by rivalry and mutual re­spect. For more, see their surviving letters: Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley, eds., William and Henry James (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 1997). 51. William James, The Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, vol. 2 (New York: Henry Holt and Com­pany, 1918), 292, https://­www​.­gutenberg​.­org​/­ebooks​/­57634. It is almost as if William is punning on the concept of the material self. He continues, “In its widest pos­si­ble sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his h ­ ouse, his wife and c­ hildren, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and h ­ orses, and yacht and bank-­account. All ­these ­things give him the same emotions.” Ibid. 52. Ibid., 293. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 294. 55. SP, 63. 56. W. James, Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, 293. 57. SP, 202. 58. SP, 82, 80; Brown, Sense of ­Things, 148. ­ hings, 148; SP, 47. Curiously, Poynton is so overwhelming to 59. Brown, Sense of T Fleda that she is no longer able to produce her own artwork: “Poynton, moreover, had been an impossible place for producing; no art more active than a Buddhistic contemplation could lift its head t­ here. It had stripped its mistress clean of all feeble accomplishments” (133). It is as if Poynton’s potency extinguishes any artistic capabilities in its beholders. 60. Benjamin’s observations are relevant to Mrs.  Gereth’s skill: “Possession and having are allied with the tactile . . . ​Collectors are beings with tactile [taktisch] instincts.” AR, H2, 5, 206–7. 61. UL, 66. Translation modified. 62. SP, 54. In The Eu­ro­pe­ans, the collector Robert Acton contemplates marriage, in part, to find a proprietor or curator for his “museum,” his extensive collection of Chinese “trophies.” Henry James, The Eu­ro­pe­ans (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Com­pany, 1879), 131. 63. SP, 41. 64. SP, 85. 65. SP, 43. 66. SP. 67. SP, 66. 68. “Highly particularized objects appear elsewhere in the novel’s domestic landscape,” Brown notes, but are conspicuously absent from Poynton. “But as though such individuating description w ­ ere to be preserved for the ele­ments of bad taste alone, or as though it w ­ ere in bad taste to visualize exquisite taste, James renders the mise-­en-­scene at Poynton as a ­matter of aura, not artifacts.” Sense of T ­ hings, 147. 69. SP, 47.

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70. SP, 27. James observes, “­There is accordingly a very much greater amount of description in Balzac than in any other writer . . . ​We, for our part, have always found Balzac’s ­houses and rooms extremely in­ter­est­ing; we often prefer his places to his ­people. He was a profound connoisseur in ­these ­matters, he had a passion for bric-­à-­ brac and his ­tables and chairs are always in character. It must be admitted that in this ­matter as in e­ very other, he had his right and his wrong, that in his enumerations of inanimate objects he often sins by extravagance. He has his necessary ­houses and his superfluous ­houses: often when in a story the action is r­ unning thin he stops up your mouth against complaint, as it ­were, by a choking dose of brick and mortar.” HB, 50. 71. SP, 48. 72. In the preface, he writes, “The Spoils of Poynton ­were not directly articulate, and though they might have, and constantly did have, wondrous ­things to say . . .” SP, 29. 73. SP, 71. 74. Ezra Pound, “Henry James,” The ­Little Review (New York: Margaret Anderson, August 1918), 19. 75. Brown, Sense of ­Things, 149. 76. For a history of James’s revisions to The Spoils of Poynton, see S. P. Rosenbaum, “ ‘The Spoils of Poynton’: Revisions and Editions,” Studies in Bibliography 19 (1966): 161–174. 77. W. James, Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, 422. Italics mine. 78. “The chief interest of the objects, in the collector’s eyes, is that they are a collection, and that they are his,” he reiterates a few lines ­later. Ibid., 423. 79. Even the iteration of titles is instructive—­the focus of the novel turns from the ­house itself to its possessions to the collection as a ­whole. It also attests to James’s desire to declutter and streamline his own novel. 80. James himself gave instructions to the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. Rosenbaum, “ ‘The Spoils of Poynton’: Revisions and Editions,” 174. 81. James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 217. 82. SP, 32. 83. As David Lodge points out, James had originally intended for Mrs. Gereth to remove her ­things ­after her son’s marriage but ­later revised the plot so that she preemptively removed the ­things before Owen’s marriage “so that the question of their restoration became entangled with the question of Fleda’s personal destiny.” “Introduction,” in SP, 5. 84. SP, 73. Repeatedly using the word “spoils” to refer to Mrs. Gereth’s trea­sures, Fleda similarly stresses the acquisitive, territorial aspect of collecting. The word “spoils” is invoked by characters on at least twelve dif­fer­ent occasions. 85. See the introduction for a more detailed discussion on the origins of collecting in spoils and spoliation. 86. Paolo Liverani, “Reading Spolia in Late Antiquity and Con­temporary Perception,” in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, ed. Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney (New York: Routledge 2011), 45. 87. SP, 47. 88. SP, 184.

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89. At the end of the novel, the newlyweds are “spending the winter in India,” possibly annexing Indian trea­sures to their collection to create an imperial wing of Poynton. SP, 208. 90. Sir William Smith and Theo­philus Dwight Hall, A Copious and Critical English-­ Latin Dictionary (New York: Harper & ­Brothers, 1871), 786. 91. SP, 187. James corroborates this characterization in the preface: “The ­will that rides the crisis quite most triumphantly is that of the awful Mona Brigstock, who is all w ­ ill, without the smallest leak of force into taste or tenderness or vision into any sense of shades or relations or proportions. She loses no minute in that perception of incongruities in which half of Fleda’s passion is wasted and misled.” SP, 33. 92. SP, 39, 32. 93. SP, 57. 94. SP, 186. 95. SP, 58. 96. Sheila Ffolliott, “Introduction,” in ­Women Patrons and Collectors, ed. Susan Bracken et al. (London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), xv. 97. Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts, 127. 98. Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste, 148–49. Freedman situates James within the larger Anglo-­American debates around aesthetics in the 1870s and 1880s. 99. Ibid., 153. 100. SP, 200. 101. SP, 57. 102. SP, 158. 103. SP, 158; Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 213. 104. SP, 175. 105. Lodge, “Introduction,” 8. 106. SP, 32. 107. SP, 31. 108. Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 215. 109. SP, 213. 110. SP, 49. 111. SP, 30. 112. SP, 27. 113. SP, 29. 114. Pound, “Henry James,” 13. 115. Henry James, The American, ed. James Tuttleton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 26. I generally cite from this volume of The American. When citing the revised New York edition, I use The American (London: Macmillan, 1921). 116. Ibid., 245. Just as Newman’s fabulous source of wealth lies in prosaic washtubs, Lambert Strether’s fortune in The Ambassadors comes from unmentionable sources that are never disclosed to the characters or readers. Both acquire fortunes through vulgar or even questionable means. 117. Ibid., 44. 118. Ibid., 118. 119. James, The American (London: Macmillan, 1921), 180. Italics mine.

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120. Even though Barbara Johnson’s Person and T ­ hings only tangentially treats James’s work, her analy­sis is relevant ­here. Reification, she notes is “the mirror image of ‘anthropomorphism’—­becoming-­thing versus becoming-­man—­except that the impulse to find a name for such a pro­cess has totally dif­fer­ent motivations. Whereas treating a ­thing like a man locates it in a ­human world, treating a man like a ­thing locates ­human beings in the realm of the inhuman.” Persons and T ­ hings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 21. 121. James, The Eu­ro­pe­ans, 7, LV, 9. 122. In Cousin Pons, the miser Elias Magus hoards his d­ aughter along with his other invaluable trea­sures. By guarding his mansion with three vicious dogs, “he had no fears for the safety ­either of his ­daughter, who was his paramount trea­sure, or of his pictures, or of his gold.” Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons, trans. Herbert Hunt (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 143. 123. GB, 33. 124. GB, 128. 125. GB, 169. This objectification extends to Verver’s own f­amily members. He handled his grand­son “in the way of precious small pieces . . . ​whose Italian designation endlessly amused him and whom he could manipulate and dandle.” His own ­daughter reminds him of a “precious vase.” GB, 133, 162. 126. GB, 132. 127. GB, 132. 128. See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), 23. 129. Cynthia Saltzman, Old Masters, New World: Amer­ic­ a’s Raid on Eu­rope’s ­Great Pictures (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 3. A ­later example is the industrialist Henry Huntington, who amassed a major art collection, nearly half of which came from British aristocratic collections, including Thomas Gainsborough’s famed The Blue Boy. When The Blue Boy was exported to Amer­i­ca ­after World War I, The New York Times described it as a “picture . . . ​ which En­glishmen wept to see leaving their country.” Its departure seemed to encapsulate the feeling of national crisis. Riding, “Old Masters and Edwardian Society,” 85. 130. GB, 82. 131. GB, 128. 132. James, The Eu­ro­pe­ans, 131. Kim Vanderlaan reads Acton as “James’s loose po­ liti­cal allegory of a complicated and sometimes contradictory American Empire in the nineteenth ­century,” who seeks “po­liti­cal alliance and trading negotiations with prospective parties—­a version of colonialism modeled a­fter the British Empire.” “Empire and Allegory in Henry James’s The Eu­ro­pe­ans,” Journal of American Studies 45, no. 1 (February 2011): 42–43. 133. GB, 128. 134. GB, 32. Maggie visits the British Museum to examine the “rec­ords of the Prince’s race.” During her marital crisis, she returns to the museum to revisit the “quality of her husband’s blood . . . ​and its remarkable references” and “noble and beautiful associations” as if to reassure herself of his worth. GB, 32, 432. 135. GB, 32; Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts, 158. 136. GB, 220. 137. GB, 182. 138. GB, 59.

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139. Critics have noted that in James’s novels abstract meta­phors such as the pagoda in The Golden Bowl become characters. Brown observes, “One of the effects of this evacuation is that characters and character, ideas and ideation, begin to assume a thing-­like quality, as they do mostly in The Golden Bowl, where the collection of what we are asked to apprehend as materialized thoughts seems far more ‘massive’ than any collection of ­ hings, 141. objects.” Sense of T 140. PL, 168. 141. GB, 127. 142. Pound, “Henry James,” 10. 143. Ibid., 7. 144. Ibid. 145. It was James who encouraged Wharton in 1902 to pursue “the American subject. ­There it is round you. D ­ on’t pass by it—­the immediate, the real, the only, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for. Take hold of it and keep hold and let it pull you where it ­will.” Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 203. 146. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: The Library of Amer­i­ca, 2009), 10–11. 147. Ibid., 11. 148. This view compares with Benjamin’s statement in “Unpacking My Library” that the true book collector is one who has not read even a fraction of his own books. Along similar lines, Jean Baudrillard observes that the collected object is no longer defined by its use value. The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996), 86. 149. Wharton, House of Mirth, 268. 150. Ibid., 313. 151. PL, 261. 152. Freedman, Professions of Taste, 147. 153. PL, 258. 154. PL, 350. As Freedman observes, Isabel herself does not escape the aesthetic “contagion” of the novel: “Her unwitting Osmondian tendency to see Osmond as he sees himself—as a rare and fine work of art—­leads her to equally unwitting Osmondian attempt to collect Osmond . . . ​Seeking to collect a collector, she finds herself collected.” Professions of Taste, 157. 155. Ibid., 436. 156. Ibid., 301, 311, 322. 157. James, The American, 17. 158. Ibid., 28. 159. Ibid., 18. 160. Ibid., 21. 161. Not only do names like Newman or Amerigo make historical allusions, they also evoke a type and subsequently individuate it, reinforcing the “idea of the typical in the par­tic­u­lar.” Evelyn J. Hinz, “Henry James’s Names: Tradition, Theory, and Method,” Colby Quarterly 9, no. 11 (September 1972): 564. 162. James, The American, 33, 101. James’s use of “type” is even more pronounced in the revised New York edition, which includes lengthy discussions on character types that did not exist in the 1877 edition. For instance, a revision was made to the discussion between Newman and Valentin about Noémie. The revised edition of The American in-

NOTES TO PA GES 45– 48

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cludes a lengthier discussion about types: “ ‘She’s very in­ter­est­ing,’ he [Valentin] went on. ‘Yes, the type shines out in her.’ ‘The type? The type of what?’ ‘Well, of soaring, of almost sublime ambition! She’s a very bad l­ittle copyist, but endowed with the artistic sense in another line, I suspect her none the less of a strong feeling for her ­great originals.’ ” The American (London: Macmillan, 1921), 183. Again, “types” are inextricably linked to the aesthetic tension between originality and copy. 163. I am grateful to Josef Vogl for this comment during my lecture at the Humboldt University in January 2017. According to Christopher Whitehead, in the 1850s it was museums rather than universities that w ­ ere the “primary disciplinary d­ rivers as institutions involved in the l­abor of organ­izing and imparting knowledge through the se­lection, classification, and display of material culture.” Far from entrenched, the nascent disciplines of art history and archaeology w ­ ere “not detached from antecedent knowledge associated with practices of dilettantism and antiquarianism.” “Categorization,” Whitehead explains, “involves the construction of structures for organ­ization and differentiation of types according to identifiable (but variable and arbitrary) coordinates, such as materials, use, geo­graph­i­cal context, shape, age, ­etc.” Museums and the Construction of Disciplines: Art and Archaeology in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2009), 8, 9, 40. 164. Within an American context, Brown posits that James’s objectification of p­ eople is part of “the effort to rethink this possessiveness in the era just a­ fter h ­ uman property, in the Southern U.S., existed literally and legally.” For James, “proprietary objectification looks rather like an inescapable ­human condition.” Brown, Sense of ­Things, 156. 165. Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, ed. Derek Brewer (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 450. 166. PL, 224. 167. PL, 292. 168. William Veeder points out that James’s character names are often consciously modeled a­ fter characters in other novels. Isabel traces her literary genealogy to Isabella, the heroine of Horace Walpole’s gothic novel, The C ­ astle of Otranto. Osmond’s name comes from Lodowick Carlell’s seventeenth-­century play, Osmond, the G ­ reat Turk. When “villainous characters become famous, ­later authors create genealogical lines, not only by borrowing names directly, but by echoing them unmistakably.” Henry James: The Les­ sons of the Master (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 120. 169. PL, 330–31. 170. PL, 350. 171. PL, 466. 172. LV, 4. 173. LV, 6. 174. LV, 9. 175. LV, 9, 22. 176. LV, 21. 177. LV, 16. The statue is often perceived as lifelike: “Her finished beauty gave her an almost h ­ uman look, and her absent eyes seemed to won­der back at us.” LV, 16. James’s description of Juno anticipates the conception of aura introduced in chapter 3: the idea that objects return the gaze. 178. For a psychoanalytic reading of the story, see Suzi Naiburg, who examines the “archaic depths” of the story: “James’s tale demonstrates that t­here can be no

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understanding or rendering of psychological depths without a penetration and portrayal of the psyche’s shadows.” “Archaic Depths in Henry James’s ‘The Last of the Valerii,’ ” The Henry James Review 14, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 152. 179. WA, 257. 180. WA, 256. Italics Benjamin’s. 181. LV, 18. 182. LV, 21. ­ hings, 126. 183. LV, 31. Johnson calls this “adultery in space and time.” Persons and T 184. LV, 34. Invoking vari­ous examples, from Byron to Riefenstahl, Johnson notes that this dynamic is often encoded in Greek art: “Would classical Greece stand for an idealized unity if its artifacts ­were not scattered all over Eu­rope? Is the function of their dismemberment merely to radiate w ­ holeness? . . . ​Greece stands in the nineteenth ­century as Eu­rope’s pure, lost origin.” Persons and ­Things, 125–26. 185. When the godfather tries to reason with the Count, declaring, “She might as well still be in the earth, if no one is to see her,” he replies coldly, “I am to see her, that’s enough!” LV, 20. 186. LV, 21. 187. WA, 257. 188. LV, 21. 189. LV, 39–40. 190. According to James’s narrator, “The workmanship was of the greatest delicacy, and though perhaps ­there was more in her than usual of a certain personal expression, she was wrought, as a ­whole, in the large and ­simple manner of the ­g reat Greek period. She was a masterpiece of skill and a marvel of preservation.” LV, 16. 191. Department of Greek and Roman Art, “Roman Copies of Greek Statues,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2002, http:// www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rogr/hd_rogr.htm. 192. According to Naiburg, “The Count’s identification of the statue as Greek rather than Roman indicates that his affinities are more with Hera than with Juno, with the more poetic and older religious tradition of the Greeks than with the more functional, civic, and secular tradition of the Romans. The Greeks personified their gods and goddesses and developed a rich lit­er­a­ture and my­thol­ogy about them. The Romans w ­ ere more practically and po­liti­cally oriented; their deities w ­ ere more functionally defined.” “Archaic Depths,” 160. 193. LV, 9. 194. LV, 18, 35. 195. LV, 25. 196. LV, 21. 197. LV, 25. 198. LV, 33. 199. LV, 38. 2. Sardanapalus’s Hoard

1. A modified version of this chapter was published as “Sardanapalus’s Hoard: Consent and Queer Possession,” in Querying Consent, ed. Keja Valens and Jordana Greenblatt (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018); AP, 39.

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2. George Gordon Byron, “Sardanapalus: A Tragedy,” in The Works of Lord Byron Poetry, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 22. Before succumbing to the flames, Sardanapalus proclaims, “Rather let them be borne abroad upon / The winds of heaven, and scattered into air, / Than be polluted more by ­human hands / Of slaves and traitors. / In this blazing palace, / And its enormous walls of reeking ruin, / We leave a nobler monument than Egypt / Hath piled in her brick mountains, ­o’er dead kings.” 3. In his review of the painting, James declares that “the w ­ hole picture indicates the dawning of a g­ reat imagination.” “Two Pictures by Delacroix,” in The Paint­er’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John Sweeney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 113. 4. Bill Brown, A Sense of ­Things: The Object ­Matter of American Lit­er­a­ture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 137. 5. AP, 50. 6. AP, 6. 7. AP, 3. 8. AP, 66. 9. AP, 76. 10. AP, 80. 11. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-­Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 201. Sedgwick locates “the embodied male-­ homosexual thematics” in a “very par­ tic­ u­ lar, historicized—­ thematics of absence, and specifically of the absence of speech” (201). In the wake of Sedgwick’s seminal reading, much ink has been spilled on the theme of ambiguous homo­sexuality in James’s work, in works by authors such as Eric Savoy (2005), Kevin Ohi (2011), and Gero Bauer (2016). Building on Sedgwick’s analy­sis, Ohi notes, “The queerness of Henry James’s writing resides less in its repre­sen­ta­tion of marginal sexualities—­ however startlingly explicit ­those may be—­than in its elusive and multivalent effects of syntax, figure, voice, and tone, in its systematic challenging of the presumption that desire can be, or o ­ ught to be, represented.” Henry James and the Queerness of Style (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 2–3. For an overview of the queer theory approaches to James, see Gero Bauer, Houses, Secrets, and the Closet: Locating Masculinities from the Gothic Novel to Henry James (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016), 27–29. 12. Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 128. 13. I borrow the neologism “hoardiculture” from Rebecca Falkoff, who gleans it from the Elsewhere Proj­ect in Greensboro, North Carolina. Possessed: A Cultural His­ tory of Hoarding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 185. 14. William James, The Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, vol. 2 (New York: Henry Holt and Com­pany, 1918), https://­www​.­gutenberg​.­org​/­ebooks​/­57634, 424–25. 15. Ibid., 425. 16. Ibid., 424. 17. Ibid. Psychologists Gail Steketee, Randy Frost, and Kim Hyo-­Jin reference William James’s account of accumulation in their genealogy of hoarding studies. “Hoarding by El­derly ­People,” Health & Social Work 26, no. 3 (August 2001): 47–48.

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18. Friedrich Nietz­sche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 12. See the introduction to this book. 19. Falkoff, Possessed, 173. She cites Frost and Steketee’s research, which describes hoarders as preoccupied with seemingly insignificant details and unable to see the bigger picture. A defining feature of hoarding, according to Frost and Steketee, is the pro­cess of churning, which “replaces the thematic organ­ization conventional in domestic interior spaces with a temporal one, that of objects or­ga­nized by their being currently or recently in use, creating incongruous juxtapositions along the way.” Ibid., 47. Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of ­Things (New York: Houghton-­ Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). 20. Nietz­sche, On the Use and Abuse, 12. 21. Ibid. 22. The Collyer ­brothers, Homer and Langley, ­were two notorious American hoarders who ­were found dead in their Harlem brownstone in 1947, surrounded by more than 140 tons of clutter that they had amassed over several de­cades. See Scott Herring, “Collyer Curiosa: A Brief History of Hoarding,” Criticism 53, no. 2 (2011): 162–71. 23. Tracing the way unusual habits of accumulation become correlated with hygiene and social propriety in twentieth-­century American culture, Herring locates the origins of this pathologization in the postwar preoccupation with the Collyer ­brothers in Harlem. Herring, The Hoarders, 19. 24. Frost and Steketee, Stuff, 3. 25. Along similar lines, Falkoff observes, “Hoarding looks like an investment of libidinal energy unmatched by economic value.” Possessed, 54. 26. ­Here I disagree with Jean Baudrillard, who maintains that “no ­matter how open a collection is, it w ­ ill always harbour an irreducible ele­ment of non-­relationship to the world. B ­ ecause he feels alienated and abolished by a social discourse whose rules escape him, the collector strives to reconstitute a discourse that is transparent to him, a discourse whose signifiers he controls and whose referent par excellence is himself. In this he is doomed to failure: he cannot see that he is simply transforming an open-­ended objective discontinuity into a closed subjective one, where even the language he uses has lost any general validity.” The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996), 17. Unlike collectors, I am arguing, hoarders are defined by a failure to transform their objects into an objectifiable symbolic realm. 27. Falkoff, Possessed, 8. 28. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), 691. In one episode of Hoarders, Jeri Jo describes her obsessive hoarding as a way to cope with the absence of her husband who has been incarcerated for thirty years for murder. Yet she seems to have created her own prison: “I’m scared I’ll never get out,” she tells the camera from under­neath the pile of garbage in her living room. 29. Italo Calvino, “La Poubelle Agréée,” in The Road to San Giovanni (Boston and New York: Mari­ner Books, 2014), 98. “The transfer from one container to another, which for most inhabitants of the metropolis takes on the significance of a passage from private to public, for me in our ­house, in the garage where we keep the big poubelle during the day, is the only gesture of the ceremonial upon which the private is founded—­and as such is accomplished by myself as paterfamilias—my taking leave of the leftovers of t­ hings confirming their complete and irreversible appropriation.” Examining the En­glish root of

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“agréé,” as “agreement or pact,” Calvino concludes that taking out the garbage is both “a contract and a rite.” Ibid., 96, 101. 30. Ibid., 98. 31. Scott Herring asks, “Why are hoarders presumed to be a threat to reproductive heterosexuals who have created offspring? Could it be that hoarding rattles our ideas of the normal f­amily or the material cultures thought to inform this fantasy of domestic life?” The Hoarders, 11. 32. W. James, Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, 425. 33. AP, 59. 34. AP, 57. 35. AP, 20. 36. The hoarders featured in TV shows like Hoarders are predominantly female. Although the Diagnostic Statistical Manual states that the rates of hoarding disorders are comparable in males and females, research shows that the majority of hoarders are ­women. According to a study of sixty-­two hoarders in the Boston area, 73  ­percent ­were female, 55 ­percent had never married, and 29 ­percent ­were widowed or divorced; overall, 82 ­percent lived alone. The researchers concluded that “never-­married status was associated with more severe hoarding and greater impairment and possibly with worse outcomes of intervention efforts.” Steketee, Frost, and Kim, “Hoarding by El­derly ­People,” 178, 176. 37. Hoarding tends to increase with age, with hoarding individuals significantly older than nonhoarding individuals. Ibid, 176. Along similar lines, hoarding be­hav­ior is exhibited by up to almost half of all p­ eople suffering from dementia; p­ eople with dementia may hoard b­ ecause they are unable to discriminate between objects and hence unable to decide what to keep and preserve. Michael Tompkins, A Clinician’s Guide to Severe Hoard­ ing: A Harm Reduction Approach (New York: Springer, 2015), 16. 38. It is not coincidental that the homes of famous hoarders like Homer and Langley Collyer are characterized as fortresses of filth with narrow tunnels leading to the outside world. For more see Herring, Hoarders, 20–50. 39. AP, 2. 40. AP, 6. 41. AP, 23. 42. AP, 4. 43. AP, 35. 44. Herring, Hoarders, 7. 45. AP, 26. 46. AP, 13. 47. AP, 7. 48. Herring, Hoarders, 8. Research reveals that nearly two-­thirds of the el­derly hoarders “showed difficulty with self-­care” and “more than one-­third ­were moderately to substantially dirty and unkempt.” Steketee, Frost, and Kim, “Hoarding by El­derly ­People,” 180. 49. AP, 17. On the fringes of familiarity for the Western Eu­ro­pean tourist yet just southern enough, Venice was a well-­established site of the exotic. James was evidently aware of this cliché, writing in Italian Hours, “­There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. ­Every one has been ­there, and ­every one has brought

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back a collection of photo­graphs.” Collected Travel Writings: The Continent, ed. Richard Howard (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1993), 287. Venice offered an ideal setting for outlandish tales of de­cadence, lawlessness, and the uncanny. As a liminal space with fluid borders between the past and the pre­sent, inside and outside, Venice enables the editor’s homoerotic fantasies as it would for Thomas Mann a few years ­later. Bauer, Houses, Se­ crets, and the Closet, 176. 50. AP, 24. 51. Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet,” 203 52. While acknowledging the editor’s “implicitly sexist attitude ­towards the two ­women,” Bauer is mostly concerned with reading the shuttered ­house as a defense against “the penetrative invasion of her most private spaces,” noting that the narrator “is ultimately denied the a­ ctual (sexual) penetration of t­ hese private spaces.” Houses, Secrets, and the Closet, 169. Thus, for Bauer, the epistemology of James’s closet seems to be ­limited to male sexuality. 53. See the chapter in Herring’s book titled “Collyer Curiosa” for an exploration of the link between sexual and material deviance. Herring notes that the ­brothers ­were labeled as incestuous deviants: “Two bachelor b­ rothers . . . ​dependent on each other in a way more incestuous than fraternal.” Hoarders, 43. 54. Already by the 1880s, Herring notes, the word curiosa had become a euphemistic term for “erotic or pornographic books.” Hoarders, 42. The semantic ambiguity between curiosa as both a collectible rarity and a deviant object attests precisely to the slippage between aberrant material practices and sexual deviance. 55. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Volume I: Books 1–2.34, trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library 279 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 425–27. 56. Byron, “Sardanapalus: A Tragedy,” 42–43, 222. 57. For instance, Gómez Manrique’s poem “Regimiento de príncipes” cites the example of Sardanapalus as an “effeminate prince.” Josiah Blackmore and Gregory Hutcheson, Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the ­Middle Ages to the Re­nais­sance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 319. 58. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. Donald Rayfield (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), 121. 59. Ibid., 125. 60. Terry Ea­gleton argues in Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1978) that the epistemological pursuit trumps the plot of the novel. Along similar lines, Bauer seems to overlook the vio­lence at the core of the novel, concluding, “His wish to penetrate the ­woman’s ‘closet’ heterosocially—in becoming their secret sharer—­and achieve a state of unpoliced, homoerotic satisfaction, is disappointed.” Houses, Secrets, and the Closet, 141. 61. AP, 3. 62. AP, 2. 63. The narrator’s fixation is again colored in typical Jamesean fashion in terms of possession, as he ­later confesses to Tina, “I’d give anything to possess it.” AP, 58. 64. AP, 17. 65. AP, 53, 44. 66. LV, 16. 67. Even his physiological responses to objects are sexualized. Although “secretary” refers to a piece of furniture, the slippage reveals the way the narrator’s libidinal

NOTES TO PA GES 62– 64

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energy is transferred to material objects: “I ­stopped in front of the secretary, gaping at it vainly and no doubt grotesquely.” AP, 65. 68. AP, 80. 69. AP, 62. 70. Richard Salmon argues, “If, on an immediate level, the narrator couches his siege of the Bordereaus in terms of a sexual conquest, structurally both Juliana and Miss Tina serve as conduits, or instrumentalized objects, within a pro­cess of hermeneutic desire which is ultimately fixated upon the figure of Aspern himself.” Henry James and the Cul­ ture of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 92. 71. WA, 256. 72. AP, 2. 73. AP, 25. 74. AP, 17. 75. WA, 255. 76. According to Esther González, “Endowed with a curious semiotic status, the papers occupy a position somewhere between repre­sen­ta­tion and sign.” The questors seek “to possess it as a sign, symbol and legitimation of the social power they in fact covet.” “The Lure of the Object in Henry James’s Fictions of Thwarted Desire,” Atlan­ tis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-­American Studies 30, no. 2 (December 2008): 32, 34. 77. AP, 37. 78. AP, 76. 79. AP, 56. 80. AP, 65. 81. AP, 24. 82. AP, 13. 83. At times, the narrator seems to be aware of his lapse of judgment, conceding “the importunities, the indelicacies, of which my desire to possess myself of Jeffrey Aspern’s papers had made me capable.” AP, 16. 84. Sergio Perosa, “Henry James and Unholy Art Acquisitions,” Cambridge Quar­ terly 37, no. 1 (2008): 152. 85. Henry James, “Two Old Houses and Three Young ­Women” in Collected Travel Writings: The Continent, 347. 86. Ibid., 355. 87. Scott Byrd, “The Spoils of Venice: Henry James’s ‘Two Old Houses and Three Young ­Women’ and The Golden Bowl,” American Lit­er­a­ture 43, no. 3 (November 1971): 380. “ ‘Go to the British Museum,’ Fanny Assingham tells her husband as she explains the Prince’s value, ‘­There’s a ­whole im­mense room, or recess, or department, or what­ever filled with books written about his f­ amily alone.’ ” GB, 83. 88. Scott Byrd notes, “James had long been aware of the En­glish pillaging of Italian art collections which had occurred during the Austrian possession and which had continued, though somewhat checked by the fierce American competition in the latter part of the ­century. ‘You are not among the greatest art producers in the world,’ James tartly reminded the British public in 1877, ‘But you are among the ­g reat consumers.’ ” “The Spoils of Venice,” 378. 89. AP, 1, 18.

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90. American collectors had been dominating the Eu­ro­pean art market since the 1870s. Their demand produced “suspicions of an art drain abroad during the late-­ Victorian and Edwardian era that was exploiting aristocratic insolvency and that threatened the nation’s patrimony.” Andrew Stephenson, “ ‘A Keen Sight for the Sign of Races’: John Singer Sargent, Whiteness, and the Fashioning of Angloperformativity,” in Visual Culture in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Com­pany, 2005), 217. 91. SP, 6. 92. Ellen Brown, “Revising Henry James: Reading the Spaces of The Aspern Pa­ pers,” American Lit­er­a­ture 63, no. 2 ( June 1991): 267. 93. Ellen Brown observes that the narrator’s bedroom invasion is expanded in the 1908 edition, perhaps to dramatize the narrator’s transgression and Juliana’s “virtue ­violated.” But rather than simply increasing the story’s “romantic quality” as Brown suggests, I argue that t­ hese changes heighten the violent stakes of the quest. “Revising Henry James,” 267, 266. 94. SP, 66. 95. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in SW III, 275. 96. James, “Two Old Houses,” 347. 97. AP, 52. 98. AP, 35, 46. 99. AP, 9. 100. AP, 46. 101. AP, 47. 102. AP, 52. 103. Ibid. Bauer interprets this scene in the following way: “Trapped between the impulse to establish a stable, ‘masculine’ gender identity for himself and the wish to live his homoerotic desire, he rejects a heteronormative choice, and has to face the impossibility of any real fulfilment of his homoerotic fantasy.” Houses, Secrets, and the Closet, 179. In his reading, Bauer seems to gloss over the real moments of gender-­based vio­ lence inflicted by the editor against the two w ­ omen in the text. 104. AP, 79. 105. The text suggests that the narrator-­editor might have name recognition as a critic. “ ‘But you ­will have to change your name,’ said Mrs. Prest. ‘Juliana lives out of the world as much as it is pos­si­ble to live, but none the less she has prob­ably heard of Mr. Aspern’s editors; she perhaps possesses what you have published.’ ” AP, 6. 106. AP, 35. 107. AP, 50. 108. AP, 51. 109. AP, 37. 110. AP, 51. This perspective recalls Count Valerio’s plea to Martha about the trea­ sures she is trying to excavate: “Let them lie, the poor disinherited gods, the Minerva, the Apollo, the Ceres you are so sure of finding . . . ​­Don’t break their rest. What do you want of them? We ­can’t worship them. Would you put them on pedestals to stare and mock at them? If you d­ on’t believe in them, ­don’t disturb them. Peace be with them.” LV, 13. 111. Pamuk, Museum of Innocence, 691. 112. Kemal, like the narrator, seeks to transform the stolen possessions of his deceased beloved into a museum.

NOTES TO PA GES 68– 69

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113. AP, 66. ­ ater, he confesses, “It rankled for me that I had been called a publishing 114. AP, 46. L scoundrel, since certainly I did publish and no less certainly h ­ adn’t been very delicate.” AP, 67. 115. AP, 31. 116. AP, 31. Declan Kiely notes, “In review a­ fter review, over nearly three de­cades, James was unable to consider editions of authorial correspondence without worrying about the ethical issues related to its publication—­the invasion of privacy that it implied, and the cultural and literary consequences.” The theme of privacy is also taken up in James’s short story “The Abasement of the Northmores” in Henry James. Complete Stories 1898–1910, ed. Denis Donoghue (New York: Library of Amer­ic­ a, 1996), 235–254, which concerns the posthumous publication of the letters of a famous po­liti­cal figure. In his analy­sis of this story, Kiely remarks, “The existence of a cache of personal letters poses always, for James, a sense of immanent threat and exposure of the inner self.” “ ‘­Pardon My Too Many Words’: Henry James Manuscripts and Letters at the Morgan Library & Museum,” in Henry James and American Painting, ed. Colm Tóibín, Marc Simpson, and Declan Kelly, Henry James and American Painting (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 102, 106. 117. AP, 31. 118. Jakob Stougaard-­Nielsen, “ ‘No Absolute Privacy’: Henry James and the Ethics of Reading Authors’ Letters,” Authorship 1, no.  2 (2012): 1. Stougaard-­Nielsen notes, “The tale reveals that questions of the public’s right to knowledge and the protection of privacy are entangled and unstable positions. The Aspern Papers suggests that James’s conception of authorial ‘privacy’ is of a more complicated nature than his attempt to frustrate his own executors ­will let us believe.” “ ‘No Absolute Privacy,’ ” 6. 119. As several critics and biographers have pointed out, in spite of James’s keen thematic interest in homo­sexuality “in the guise of aestheticism,” he was careful to keep a personal distance from “Oxford aesthetes.” Elaine Pigeon, Queer Impressions: Henry James’ Art of Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2011), 64. 120. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 664. 121. James’s letter to Pinker is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. 122. Other authors who destroyed their archives include Lord Byron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Dickens, and Nikolai Gogol, who burned part 2 of Dead Souls. Franz Kaf ka burned an estimated 90 ­percent of his work during his life and requested that his unpublished work be destroyed a­ fter his death. Elif Batuman, “Kaf ka’s Last Trial,” The New York Times, September 22, 2010. Robert Walser’s unpublished manuscripts ­were saved from a similar fate only ­because the executor “was also Max Brod’s ­lawyer and as such already familiar with the genre of the immolation request.” Susan Bernofsky, Clairvoyant of the Small (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 309. 123. Henry James, The American, ed. James Tuttleton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 308. 124. Baudrillard describes “the ritualized execution of collections—­a kind of suicide based on the impossibility of ever circumscribing death. It is not rare in the context of the system of jealousy for the subject eventually to destroy the sequestered object or being out of the feeling that he can never completely rid himself of the adversity of the world, and of his own sexuality. This is the logical and illogical end of his passion.”

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System of Objects, 107. Baudrillard’s analy­sis is particularly apt given James’s reported attempts to destroy evidence of his homo­sexuality. Departing from Baudrillard, however, I would contend that the ritualized execution of a collection exhibits more similarities with the pathological characteristics of hoarding than with collecting. 125. According to Eric Savoy, James’s biographical reenactment of his tales of immolation “illuminates the conflicting drives that Derrida has conceptualized as mal d’archive . . . ​Given Derrida’s position that archival practices and protocols determine the meaning of the archived event, one could argue that the entire queer proj­ect on James, turning as it does on indeterminacy, both results from and requires James’s archival conflagration, the destruction of ‘evidence,’ and the subsequent absence that is si­mul­ta­neously central to the biographical proj­ect and resonant with James’s fictional poetics. The triumph of the death drive over the conservation drive, then, is precisely what has engineered the rise of Queer James.” “Aspern’s Archive,” The Henry James Review 31, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 63. 126. Focusing on film, Ulrike Vedder suggests that the iconography of the museum on fire extends back to the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 48 BC. “Pro­cesses of destruction are inherent to the order of collections and institutions while at the same time threatening them,” she concludes. “Visionen der Sammlungszerstörung,” in Sprachen des Sammelns, ed. Sarah Schmidt (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016), 291, 294. 127. Byron, “Sardanapalus: A Tragedy,” 61. 128. Edel, A Life, 806. 129. AP, 50. 130. Stougaard-­Nielsen notes, “James’s practice of thoroughly revising his own author-­image and not least his novels and tales for the New York Edition may, however, also be considered a complement to ‘letter burning.’ ” “No Absolute Privacy,” 4. 131. Philip Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999), 463 132. Brown, “Revising Henry James,” 278. Brown concludes, “The narrative of revision that produced the 1908 Aspern Papers may suggest how James wanted his art to be treated (or not to be treated) when he was no longer around to protect himself from critical vultures who, like his tales’ editor, often hover over the literary remains of the famous dead or d­ ying waiting for the moment to dive down to a repast that ­will feed their professional ambitions and fill their scholarly bellies.” Ibid. 133. Hannah ­Sullivan, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 74. This rhe­toric is already pre­sent in James’s text: “Dencombe was a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last t­ hing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself. His ideal would have been to publish secretly, and then, on the published text, treat himself to the terrified revise, sacrificing always a first edition and beginning for posterity and even for the collectors, poor dears, with a second.” Henry James, The ­Middle Years (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 181. 134. ­Sullivan, The Work of Revision, 72. 135. James, The ­Middle Years, 353. 136. When faced with the prospect of giving away some of their objects, subjects of A&E’s Hoarders frequently lament that other ­people “­wouldn’t understand” or “properly take care” of t­ hese objects. 137. Adrian Dover, “Index to Henry James’s Notebook Name-­Lists,” April 2009, http://­www​.­henryjames​.­org​.­uk​/­nbnames​/­home​.­html.

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138. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall  H. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 108. 139. As Petra McGillen notes in The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), compiling was “a legitimate form of authorship” in the early modern period but was subsequently “devalued as unoriginal” as the “romantic model of the inventor as creative genius emerged.” Although she ­doesn’t examine James, McGillen’s analy­sis of Theodore Fontane’s textual practices is relevant: “He amassed large quantities of source material—­culled mostly from circulating newspapers and journals—in disconnected notebook entries and on loose folio sheets. He then surveyed t­ hese textual building blocks, outlined rearrangements with the help of lists, and combined them into a new text.” Ibid., 8, 5. 140. Evelyn J. Hinz, “Henry James’s Names: Tradition, Theory, and Method,” Colby Quarterly 9, no. 11 (September 1972): 561. 141. McGillen’s book suggests that, although it was widespread, “compiling was one of the practices that could not easily be admitted.” As she demonstrates, nineteenth-­ century authors such as Fontane and Wilhelm Raabe often cultivated the affectation of creative genius, “undoubtedly in full awareness that virtually nobody truly worked this way.” She argues that the discovery of Fontane’s compilation practices overturns “established narratives about literary production in the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury.” The Fontane Workshop, 12, 11, 7. 142. SP, 24. 143. AR, N1a, 8, 460. 144. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 119. 145. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller, 1936,” in SW III, 149. 146. Henry James, The Ambassadors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xxix. 147. Benjamin, “Storyteller,” 148. 148. James, The ­Middle Years, 353. 149. As discussed in the introduction, critics like Theodor W. Adorno, Robert Macfarlane, Marjorie Perloff, and Kenneth Goldsmith have shown the derivative nature of the ideas on originality and artistic genius. Edward Young posits, “An original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by ­those mechanics, art, and ­labor out of preexistent materials not their own.” “Conjectures on Original Composition,” in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. H ­ azard Adams and Leroy Searle (Boston: Wadsworth Publishing, 2004), 339. 150. PL, 6. 151. SP, 24; James, Turn of the Screw, 118. In the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James quotes Turgenev, who fails to find “the origin of one’s wind-­blown germs,” concluding, “They accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them.” PL, 5. 152. AP, vii. His journal reveals how closely the novella’s plot mirrors his germ: “Capt. Silsbee, a Boston art critic and Shelley-­worshipper . . . ​Miss Claremont, Byron’s ci-­devant mistress was living, u ­ ntil lately, h ­ ere in Florence, at a g­ reat age, 80 or thereabouts, and with her lived her niece, a younger Miss Claremont—of about 50. Silsbee knew they had in­ter­est­ing papers—­letters of Shelley’s and Byron’s—he had known it for a long time and cherished the idea of getting hold of them. To this end he laid the plan of ­going to

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lodge with the Misses Claremont—­hoping that the old lady in view of her ­great age and failing condition would die while he was t­here, so that he might put his hand upon the documents, which she hugged close in life . . . ​The old ­woman did die—­and then he approached the younger one on the subject of his desires. Her answer was ‘I w ­ ill give you all the letters if you marry me!’ . . . ​Certainly t­ here is a ­little subject t­ here: the picture of the two faded, queer, poor, and discredited old En­glish ­women living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign town—­with t­hese illustrious letters their most precious possession. Then the plot of the Shelley fanatic—­his watchings and waitings—­the way he couvers his trea­sures.” James, Complete Notebooks, 33–34. 153. AP, viii. 154. James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957), 279. 155. PL, 8. Tellingly, characters in The Golden Bowl are often describing themselves as being entombed. “I should like to see my tomb,” the Prince tells Maggie early on in the novel. GB, 35. 156. PL, 11. 157. TD, 178. 158. For more on James’s collection of impressions, see Tintner, Museum World, 235–36. 159. Horne, Henry James, 405. 160. He describes the pro­cess of writing The Princess Casamassima as follows: “I have been all morning at the Millbank Prison (horrible place) collecting notes for a fiction scene. You see I am quite the naturalist.” Ibid., 168. 161. PL, 56. ­ iddle ground that allows 162. James relies on the medium of collecting as a safe m him to maintain a privileged outside vantage point while “getting an impression.” In the preface to The American, he notes, “I have ever, in general, found it difficult to write of places u ­ nder too immediate an impression—­the impression that prevents standing off and allows neither space nor time for perspective. The image had for the most part to be dim if the reflexion was to be, as is proper for a reflexion, both sharp and quiet.” The American, 6. 163. PL, 11. 164. Ruth Yeazell, “Henry James’ Portrait Envy,” New Literary History 48, no.  2 (Spring 2017): 309. Yeazell persuasively argues that James “sought to model fiction on painting,” frequently invoking the language of portraiture to describe his craft. “At the heart of James’s portrait-­envy . . . ​lay his recognition that a ­great portrait could provide that illusion with an immediacy unavailable to the art of the novelist.” Ibid., 316, 314. 165. HB, 53. 166. Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 191. 167. Tintner, Museum World, 180. 168. ­Sullivan, The Work of Revision, 85. 169. Ibid., 91. 170. ­Sullivan points out that although James’s executor Percy Lubbock implied that James’s three late prose works (The Sense of the Past, The Ivory Tower, and The ­Middle Years) had been left unfinished by accident, another “possibility is that his method of

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composition and revision changed . . . ​and James lost the ability to ‘finish.’ ” The Work of Revision, 88. 171. AP, v. 172. SP, 22. 173. SP, 200. 174. PL, 7. 175. PL, 8. 176. PL, 8. 177. PL, 8. 178. PL, 8, 258. 179. PL, 8. ­ uman collection anticipates the morbid turn in 180. PL, 12. Osmond’s rhe­toric of h John Fowles’s The Collector, as the lonely entomologist Caliban abducts and imprisons Miranda like one of his butterfly specimens. Miranda says, “It’s me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything ­human. He’s a collector. That’s the g­ reat dead t­ hing in him.” It is fitting that Caliban has to kill butterflies to collect them: he is the dark apotheosis of Osmond, who wishes to display his gem as part of his collection. The Collector, 171. 181. PL, 86. 182. Ironically, Bell argues that, by resisting the marriage plot of early nineteenth-­ century fiction such as Jane Austen’s Emma, Isabel unwittingly becomes a character in the conspiracy plot of her Gothic suitor, Osmond: “The reader is implicated by the force of literary tradition in this plot against Isabel.” Hence, “in this strug­gle the two senses of plot conflate; both plots are schemes of entrapment, though it is only from the unconcealed and seemingly unthreatening marriage-­plot that she (vainly) tries to escape.” Ralph, “like a novelist experimenting with the possibilities latent in his characters,” leaves Isabel “subject to the arbitrary impositions of ­others” precisely by exercising no authority over her direction. Meaning in Henry James, 86, 89. 183. PL, 160. 184. Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 87. 185. PL, 8. 186. Sharon Oster, “The Shop of Curiosities: Henry James, ‘the Jew,’ and the Production of Value,” ELH 75, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 965. Oster paints a compelling portrait of James as a cosmopolitan middleman, who mirrors the economic position of the Jew: “James redeems the avaricious Jewish pawnbroker who, both central and marginal, best captures the position of the modern cosmopolitan writer at the nexus of cap­i­tal­ist and gift exchange.” Oster’s analy­sis is largely focused on a detailed reading of the Jewish shop­keep­er’s transactions in The Golden Bowl. Ibid., 985. 187. The Jewish merchant Elias Magus in Balzac’s Cousin Pons is a case in point. At the intersection of cultures and systems of exchange, Magus occupies a similar role as James’s shop­keeper. 188. Oster, “The Shop of Curiosities,” 965. 189. PL, 8. 190. Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 1970), 166. 191. SP, 42.

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192. PL, 8. For more on the ethical dimensions of this prob­lem, see Barbara Johnson’s Persons and ­Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). She writes, “Using ­people, transforming o ­ thers into a means for obtaining an end for oneself, is generally considered the very antithesis of ethical be­hav­ior and with good reason. Faced with the vio­lence of colonial, sexual, and even epistemological appropriation, ethical theorists have sought to replace domination with re­spect, knowledge with responsibility.” Persons and ­Things, 94. 193. PL, 4. 194. PL, 5. As Bell writes, “James is tenderly permissive of Isabel’s self-­contradictions, and he encourages her to escape the determinism of the fixed and l­imited character.” Meaning in Henry James, 89. 195. PL, 118. 196. SP, 222. 197. Even the minor characters in The Portrait of a Lady are imbued with freedom: “If I would trust them they would show me,” he writes. PL, 12. For the same reason, he praises Balzac’s “re­spect for the liberty of the subject,” which gives his creation the “long rope” to exercise self-­determination f­ ree from the meddlesome author. HB, 62. 198. James, The American, 8. 199. Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 90. 200. PL, 462. “ ‘It’s very soon told,’ said Edward Rosier. ‘I’ve sold all my bibelots!’ Isabel gave instinctively an exclamation of horror; it was as if he had told her he had all his teeth drawn out . . . ​‘I’m glad to hear it; but I wish you had kept your pretty ­things.’ ‘I have the money instead—­fifty thousand dollars. ­Will Mr. Osmond think me rich enough now?’ ‘Is it for that you did it?’ Isabel asked ­gently. ‘For what ­else could it be? That’s the only t­ hing I could think of  . . . ​Do you mean without my bibelots I am nothing? Do you mean they ­were the best ­thing about me? That’s what they told me in Paris.’ ” PL, 438–39. 201. PL, 8. 202. Herring, Hoarders, 66. Unlike collectors, whose system can be externally understood, a hoard is characterized by a private, subjective order that is often only apparent to the hoarder. 203. PL, 8. Part 2. Between Salvation and Revolution

1. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 1. “Noah was the first collector. Adam had given names to the animals, but it fell to Noah to collect them . . . ​Menaced by a Flood, one has to act swiftly. Anything overlooked w ­ ill be lost forever: between including and excluding t­here can be no half-­ measures. The collection is the unique bastion against the deluge of time. And Noah, perhaps alone of all collectors, achieved the complete set, or so at least the Bible would have us believe. H ­ ere is saving in its strongest sense, not just casual keeping but conscious rescuing from extinction—­collection as salvation . . . ​In the myth of Noah as ur-­collector resonate all the themes of collecting itself: desire and nostalgia, saving and loss, the urge to erect a permanent and complete system against the destructiveness of time.” Ibid. 2. UL, 61.

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3. UL, 64. 4. Friedrich Nietz­sche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 12. 5. CH, 392. See epigraph to part 1. 6. CH, 392. 7. ­After salvaging Isabel from the clutches of “the speculative amateur,” James feels he is charged with her deliverance as he “preserves” and “protects” her. PL, 8. 8. Although Susan Stewart similarly observes that “the archetypal collection is Noah’s Ark, a world which is representative, yet which erases its context of origin,” she arrives at a dif­fer­ent conclusion: “The world of the ark is a world not of nostalgia but of anticipation . . . ​Once the object is completely severed from its origin, it is pos­si­ble to generate a new series, to start again within a context that is framed by the selectivity of the collector.” On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collec­ tion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 152. 9. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in IL, 39. In his memories of Benjamin, Theodor Adorno recalled the “traces” of an “animal that collected supplies in his cheeks” in Benjamin’s own physiognomy. Eckhard Köhn, “Sammler,” in Benjamins Begriffe, vol. 2, ed. Michael Optiz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 699. 10. According to Sonam Singh, the “uncritical and imprecise deployments of Benjamin have become routine in con­temporary literary-­critical discourse.” “Baudelaire without Benjamin: Contingency, History, Modernity,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 64, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 412. 11. Arendt notes, “It started early with what he himself called his ‘bibliomania’ but soon extended into something far more characteristic, not so much of the person as of his work: the collecting of quotations.” “Introduction,” 39. 3. The Collector in a Collectivist State

1. Portions of this chapter w ­ ere published in my article “A Collector in a Collectivist State: Walter Benjamin’s Rus­sian Toy Collection,” The New German Critique 45, no. 1 (February 2018). 2. Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 33. 3. Richter notes, “The autobiographical writings are especially significant in his corpus not only ­because they contain theoretical and aesthetic formulations of the modern autobiographical act . . . ​but also b­ ecause they enact on a literary level the historico-­ political concerns of his more overtly speculative texts.” Corpus of Autobiography, 32. 4. In his essay, Ackbar Abbas posits that “the collector as a figure . . . ​can help us sort out the issues of experience and modernity.” Abbas focuses on the collector primarily as a way to tease out the role of experience in Benjamin’s writings: “It is as if the w ­ hole complex question of experience in modernity w ­ ere somehow hidden in the folds of the collector figure, waiting to be uncovered.” He concludes, “The collector one is tempted to say has the capacity to articulate experience, to give experience a language.” “Walter Benjamin’s Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience,” New Literary History 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 235, 226, 233. 5. AR, H4a, 1, 211.

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TO PAGES 90– 93

6. UL, 66. 7. This preservationist ­angle of collecting was highlighted in a 2016 exhibit at the New Museum in New York City titled “The Keeper,” which showcased the “impulse to save both the most precious and the apparently valueless.” The threat of loss or dispersion loomed over each of the collections in the exhibit, which ­were responding to war, persecution, or other existential threats. Several of the artists spent time in ­mental institutions, such as the Brazilian artist Arthur Bispo de Rosario, who produced hundreds of tapestries and sculptures, believing himself to be tasked with the messianic imperative to assem­ble every­thing worthy of redemption during the imminent apocalypse. Massimiliano Gioni, cur., wall text, The Keeper (New York: New Museum of Con­temporary Art, 2016). 8. James Clifford, Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Lit­er­a­ture, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 231. 9. H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Impe­ rial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 30. 10. BC, 51–52. 11. See Jacqueline Yallop, Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2011). 12. AR, H2a3, 208. 13. UL, 63. 14. BC, 52. 15. BC, 52. 16. BC, 52. 17. BC, 51. In Berlin Childhood around 1900—­which takes the form of short vignettes—­ the butterfly hunt follows Benjamin’s musings on Berlin’s Victory Column (Siegessäule). Noting that the monument was constructed out of the cannon barrels Prus­sia captured from its vanquished enemies, Benjamin ponders, “Had the French gone to war with gold cannons, or had we first taken the gold from them and then used it to cast cannons?” (47). 18. BC, 82. 19. Walter Benjamin, “One-­Way Street,” in SW I, 465. The rest of Benjamin’s Denkbild reads as follows: “His life is like a dream: he knows nothing lasting; every­thing seemingly happens to him by chance. His nomad-­years are hours in the forest of dream. To this forest he drags home his booty, to purify it, secure it, cast out its spell. His dresser drawers must become arsenal and zoo, crime museum and crypt. ‘To tidy up’ would be to demolish an edifice full of prickly chestnuts that are spiky clubs, tinfoil that is hoarded silver, bricks that are coffins, cacti that are totem poles, and copper pennies that are shields. The child has long since helped at his m ­ other’s linen cupboard and his f­ather’s bookshelves, while in his own domain he is still a sporadic, warlike visitor” (465). Heiner Weidmann reads this Denkbild as emblematic of the “productive disorder” (produktive Unordnung) that characterizes a collection. Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: Die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992), 96. 20. Abbas, “Walter Benjamin’s Collector,” 233. 21. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in IL, 188. 22. Walter Benjamin, “­Little History of Photography,” in SW II, 512.

NOTES TO PA GES 93– 95

269

23. Charles Haxthausen locates “the identification of aura with a semblance of ­ uman subjectivity. The aura of the early photography is bound up with the ­human h gaze into the primitive camera, a gaze that ‘penetrated the medium.’ ” “Reproduction/ Repetition: Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 53. In keeping with its religious origins, aura seems reside in the perceived magic, divinity, or subjectivity of a device that derives from an incomplete understanding of its function. 24. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut Wizisla, eds., Wal­ ter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso, 2007), 2.7. 25. WA, 255. 26. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in SW IV, 32. 27. Ibid. The most vivid example of Benjamin’s fascination with the inner life of objects is “Rastelli’s Story,” in which a famous juggler mistakenly believes his magical ball to be inhabited and operated by his dwarf assistant. ­After a climactic per­for­mance at the sultan’s court where the juggler “breathes new life into the ball,” he is shocked to find out that the dwarf was not inside it. “Rastelli’s Story,” in SW III, 97. 28. Charles Baudelaire, “The Philosophy of Toys,” in Essays on Dolls, trans. Idris Perry (London: Syrens, 1994), 5. ­Virginia Woolf muses, “That impulse, too, may have been the impulse which leads a child to pick up one pebble on a path strewn with them, promising it a life of warmth and security upon the nursery mantelpiece, delighting in the sense of power and benignity which such an action confers, and believing that the heart of the stone leaps with joy when it sees itself chosen from a million like it, to enjoy this bliss instead of a life of cold and wet upon the high road. ‘It might so easily have been any other of the millions of stones, but it was I, I, I!’ ” “Solid Objects,” in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1972), 81. 29. Claiming her t­ hings “know me, they return the touch of my hand,” Mrs. Gereth anticipates Benjamin’s description of aura as an intimate, dialogical relationship between collectors and objects. SP, 53. 30. “Giving a doll or some other object ‘a soul’ or a name,” writes Werner Muensterberger, “is one telling example of animism.” Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Prince­ ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1994), 10. 31. WA, 257. Perhaps it is Benjamin’s animism that underpins his references to the collector’s “magical” relationship with his collection in “Unpacking My Library” and The Arcades Proj­ect, H2a, 1, 207. 32. WA, 253. 33. WA, 254. 34. WA, 256. It is hard not to discern some level of ambivalence on the part of Benjamin ­towards the disappearance of aura, as many readers have noticed. 35. AR, H4, 4, 211. 36. WA, 253. 37. WA, 256. 38. Reauraticization is also related to Benjamin’s concept of Umfunktionierung, or “re-­functioning,” as a means of transformation to effect social change. “The Author as Producer,” in SW II, 774. 39. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings relate his notion of criticism to “one of his central literary-­historical tenets,” namely the “afterlife of a work,” arguing, “The idea

27 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 95– 97

of the afterlife of works—if not exactly the idea of an aesthetic absolute—­assumes decisive importance in Benjamin’s subsequent writings.” Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2014), 112. 40. Walter Benjamin, “Lob der Puppe, 1929,” in GS III, 215. My translation. 41. Gershom Scholem, “Preface,” in MD, 6. 42. MD, 28. His attachment to toys is moving, describing them as he does with a mixture of childish won­der and aesthetic appreciation: “Rus­sian eggs, each one encased in another, and animals carved out of lovely soft wood” (18), “brightly colored clay h ­ orse­man” (26), “a small doll, a vanka-­vstanka” (28), a beautiful shop with “papier-­ mache toys” (119), a peddler carry­ing “a bundle of ­children’s pistols” that he shot off from “time to time” (106), in addition to an extensive description of the “very beautiful toys” he sees at the Kustarny Museum (39–40). 43. MD, 121. 44. Susan Pearce notes, “The language of collecting parallels that of sexual activity . . . ​ Sex and collecting are not so much va­ri­e­ties of each other or surrogates for each other but rather facets of the same basic ­human drive.” Collecting in Con­temporary Practice (London: Sage, 1998), 126. 45. MD, 43. 46. MD, 120. 47. The photos are located in the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Chapter 5 provides more analy­sis of Benjamin’s photo­g raphs, especially in comparison with Carl Einstein’s Negro Sculpture. 48. Carlo Salzani, “Experience and Play: Walter Benjamin and the Prelapsarian Child,” in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin and Charles Rice (Melbourne: Re-­Press, 2009), 185. 49. Alla Rosenfeld shows that the Bolshevik Revolution introduced monumental changes to education, which emphasized modernization, con­temporary technology, and the development of useful skills while undoing the pre-­Revolution emphasis on fairy tales, fantasy, and ancient and medieval history. “Does the Proletarian Child Need a Fairy­tale? The Soviet-­Production Book for ­Children,” Cabinet 9 (Winter 2002/3), https://­ www​.­cabinetmagazine​.­org​/­issues​/­9​/­rosenfeld​.­php. 50. Salzani, “Experience and Play,” 175. 51. Richter, Corpus of Autobiography, 137. 52. According to Richter, Benjamin’s trip is characterized by “illness, rejection, impotence, and interference.” Corpus of Autobiography, 126. 53. MD, 84. 54. MD, 32, 101. 55. MD, 36. Benjamin’s dislocation in labyrinthine Moscow echoes his disorientation in Berlin Childhood. His feelings of impotence are thus connected to his inability to map out the city in his writing. Labyrinths, writes Carol Jacobs, “have no beginnings and no endings,” pointing us to the “involutions on the blotting pages of his childhood copybooks.” In the Language of Walter Benjamin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 21. 56. ­Here Benjamin reflects the tendency he described in a draft of “Unpacking My Library”: “Happiness of the Collector, Happiness of the Lonely [Glück des Einsamen].” Eckhardt Köhn, “Sammler,” in Benjamins Begriffe, vol. 2, eds. Michael Optiz and Erdmut

NOTES TO PA GES 97– 99

271

Wizisla (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 707. For Benjamin, collecting becomes what Honoré de Balzac calls “a poultice to the soul,” namely, an affective substitution for the satisfaction that constantly eludes him during his trip. Balzac writes in Cousin Pons, “Let all ­those no longer able to drain what has always been called ‘the cup of joy’ take to collecting something, and in this they ­will find the solid gold of happiness minted into small coinage.” For Pons, like Benjamin, “bric-­à-­brac stood in lieu of a ­woman’s affection.” Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons, trans. Herbert Hunt (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 27, 31. 57. Walter Benjamin, “Toys and Play,” in SW II, 120. 58. Thus, the essence of play is the way a “jarring experience” is transformed into a parody or habit through repetition. Andrew Benjamin, Walter Benjamin and History (Towbridge: ­Cromwell Press, 2005), 169. 59. Benjamin, “Toys and Play,” 120. 60. Muensterberger, Collecting, 15. Although Muensterberger focuses on Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library,” his observations are more relevant to the Moscow Diary, which he does not mention. Muensterberger concludes, “The objects [the child] clings to can become a shield against all sorts of dangers, real or i­magined. As such, they provide the child with a feeling of mastery and a mea­sure of in­de­pen­dence.” Hence, for both ­children and adults, “objects of this kind serve as a power­ful help in keeping anxiety or uncertainty ­under control.” Ibid., 9, 22. 61. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Plea­sure Princi­ple, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 120. This pattern of be­hav­ior is most evident in Freud’s description of his nephew’s “Fort-da” games, whereby the one-­and-­a-­half-­year-­old boy learned to pro­cess his m ­ other’s brief absences by playing with a wooden spool, which, according to Freud, represented the m ­ other. 62. Muensterberger, Collecting, 16. 63. UL, 63. 64. MD, 34, 51. 65. Benjamin, “Toys and Play,” 120. 66. Abbas, “Walter Benjamin’s Collector,” 232. 67. For Benjamin, storytelling not only thrives in an artisanal world of weaving and spinning but can also be seen as an analogous craft. According to Esther Leslie, “Benjamin’s own braiding of craft and narration in ‘The Storyteller’ goes further to illumine a historical, practical affinity between craft skills and storytelling.” Leslie also pinpoints this affinity in Benjamin’s “The Image of Proust,” where she correlates “Proust’s textual practice and weaving,” particularly in the “textured and textual pro­cesses of memory.” “Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft,” Journal of Design History 11, no. 1 (1998): 5–6. 68. Walter Benjamin, “Sammlung von Frank­furter Kinderreimen,” in GS IV, 793–94. At the same time, this verse collection attests to its own ­limited ability to reconstruct the child’s world of play. Benjamin himself questions “­whether t­hese are the idiom of the child itself or ste­reo­typical expressions in the language of the parents.” Ibid., 792. Translations mine. 69. Walter Benjamin, “­Children’s Lit­er­a­ture,” in SW II, 252. 70. Walter Benjamin to Ernst Schoen, July 31, 1918, in Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 197–98, quoted in Köhn, “Sammler,” 698. 71. Salzani, “Experience and Play,” 186.

27 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 101– 104

72. Diane Koenker, “Reisen zu den Sowjets: Der Ausländische Tourismus in Russland 1921–1941,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 7, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 137. 73. MD, 73. 74. Paul Holdengräber contextualizes Benjamin’s penchant for possession within his affluent, decidedly bourgeois upbringing: “Benjamin is fully aware, and thus far from being naive, that his numerous ruminations on the collector type are seemingly far from being consonant with his po­liti­cal outlook.” “Between the Profane and the Redemptive: The Collector as Possessor in Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-­Werk.” History and Memory 4, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1992): 111. What is missing from Holdengräber’s analy­sis is a consideration of how Benjamin’s experiences in Moscow crystallize this incongruity. 75. He seems to give his penchant for collecting an ideological valence when he juxtaposes the emptying Soviet interior with “the décor of the petit-­bourgeois interior: the walls must be covered with pictures, the sofa with cushions, the cushions with coverlets, the consoles with knickknacks.” MD, 26. 76. MD, 85. 77. Weidmann argues that the collector embodies the “private individual” who lives in his “sealed up ­house in which he pursues his favorite hobbies: to be a property owner.” Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel, 94. ­ entury,” in SW III, 39. 78. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth C 79. AR, J92, 4, 386. 80. AR, H4, 4, 211. 81. MD, 65. Similarly, during a visit to the Tretiakov Gallery, Benjamin notes the “proletarian appropriation” of the bourgeois art collection: “The proletarian ­here has truly begun to take possession of the cultural resources of the bourgeoisie.” MD, 77. 82. MD, 88. 83. MD, 71. 84. Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heri­ tage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 55. 85. Applying C. B. Macpherson’s analy­sis of Western “possessive individualism” to Quebecois cultural “patrimonie,” Richard Handler argues that collection and preservation of an au­then­tic domain of identity is always implicated in nationalist politics and contested encodings of past and ­future. Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). Similarly, as Maleuvre points out, “the ideological dimension of a museum exhibition invalidates the idea that art can be neutrally exhibited.” Museum Memories, 11. 86. Genesis 9:2–4 (New Oxford Annotated Bible). 87. Benjamin even refers to Lukács’s “thesis of historical materialism” in a conversation with Asja. The concept of historical materialism figures most prominently in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (in SW IV), as well as in Convolute N of The Arcades Proj­ect, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Pro­g ress.” 88. Michael Steinberg, “Introduction: Benjamin and the Critique of Allegorical Reason,” in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 88. 89. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in SW III, 275. 90. Ibid., 275.

NOTES TO PA GES 104– 109

273

91. Ibid., 261. 92. Ibid., 269. 93. Ibid., 261, 282. 94. Steinberg, “Introduction,” 91. 95. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 262. 96. Steinberg, “Introduction,” 92. 97. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 262. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid., 267. 101. Steinberg, “Introduction,” 92. 102. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 262. 103. MD, 75. 104. MD, 18. 105. MD, 75. 106. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 275. See introduction. 107. MD, 20. 108. Much of Benjamin’s “infatuation” also derives from the fact that t­hese toys reflect Rus­sia’s “hundreds of nationalities” and are “produced in hundreds of dif­fer­ent stylistic idioms, of the most diverse materials.” MD, 123. 109. Marx et al., Walter Benjamin’s Archive, 4.4. 110. Benjamin states, “The question of the cultural impact of childhood play and work on national and linguistic communities . . . ​is one of the most unexplored chapters of cultural history.” “Frank­furter Kinderreimen,” 792. 111. Walter Benjamin, “The Cultural History of Toys,” in SW II, 115. 112. Ibid., 114. 113. Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” in SW II, 33. 114. Rosenfeld points out that debates around c­ hildren’s lit­er­a­ture and education “engaged Communist Party leaders at the highest levels” in the 1920s and 1930s. Many Soviet educators argued that the fairy­tale “reflected the ruling-­class ideology of the eras in which they ­were created” and “acted as an obstacle to the child’s understanding of historical materialism,” so they “called for the abolition of the genre.” “Does the Proletarian Child Need a Fairy­tale?” 4. 115. MD, 38. 116. MD, 6. 117. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 263. 118. See also Ulrike Vedder, “Visionen der Sammlungszerstörung,” in Sprachen des Sammelns, ed. Sarah Schmidt (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016). 119. Walter Benjamin to Siegfried Kracauer, February 1927, in MD, 129. 120. MD, 120. 121. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture, 2. 122. Ibid., 18. 123. Writing about the souvenir collection, Susan Stewart argues that “its function is not the restoration of context of origin but rather the creation of a new context.” On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 151.

27 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 109– 114

124. Benjamin, “Toys and Play,” 118. In ­Children’s Toys from Olden Times, the subject of Benjamin’s 1928 book review, Karl Gröber reflects, “The child’s experience of the pulsating life of the most mundane doll cannot be accessed by the adult.” Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit, eine Geschichte des Spielzeugs (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1927), 1. Gröber’s book begins as a tale of nostalgia and loss, lamenting the inability of the adult to enter the child’s world. 125. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture, 57. 126. Arnold Esch espouses a similar notion in art historical terms: “Removal destroyed the ancient context, so the spoliated piece had to find a new meaning, a new significance in a new context.” “On the Reuse of Antiquity: The Perspectives of the Archaeologist and Historian,” in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Archi­ tecture, ed. Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney (New York: Routledge, 2011), 14. 127. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture, 18. 128. For instance, Freud’s study, containing an amateur collection of ancient art and archaeological objects, has been exhibited in situ in museums across the world. This collection is noteworthy ­because of its association with Freud’s psychoanalysis rather than the value of its objects. See Janine Burke, “Sigmund Freud’s Collection: An Archeology of the Mind,” cata­log (Sydney: Monash University Museum of Art, Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, 2007). 129. Walter Benjamin, “Rus­sian Toys,” in MD, 124. 130. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 263. 131. Stewart, On Longing, 151. 132. Maleuvre shows that “museums manufacture an image of history” rather than simply preserving it: “Even the creation of a museum is a historical coup staged on the idea of what history is.” The museum is both “historical and ahistorical: the former ­because it actively shapes the historical becoming of its collections; the latter b­ ecause it seeks to raise them into a realm above the vagaries of history, where history itself has come to a stop or has not yet begun.” Museum Memories, 9, 12. 133. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 262. 134. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture, 30. 135. Ibid., 47. 136. MD, 104. 137. MD, 20. 138. Marx et al., Walter Benjamin’s Archive, 4.8. 139. Benjamin, “Moscow,” 27. 140. See James Clifford’s Predicament of Culture for a detailed analy­sis of this primitivist fantasy. 141. MD, 33. 142. Muensterberger, Collecting, 14. 143. MD, 77. 144. Walter Benjamin, “Old Toys,” in SW II, 101. 145. Benjamin, “­Children’s Lit­er­a­ture,” 252. 146. DR, 121. See epigraph to part 2. 147. Walter Benjamin, “Old Forgotten ­Children’s Books,” in SW I, 408. 148. Ibid. Along similar lines, Benjamin describes elsewhere how c­ hildren create out of “the most heterogeneous materials . . . ​a bit of wood, a pine­cone, a small stone—­

NOTES TO PA GES 115– 119

275

however unified and unambiguous the material is, the more it seems to embrace the possibility of a multitude of figures of the most varied sort.” Benjamin, “Cultural History of Toys,” 115. 149. UL, 61. 150. Just as early modern conceptions of divine creation emphasized playfulness, the Wunderkammer—­the miniature, sublunary reflection of God’s cosmos—­was meant to serve as a creative, ludic space. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology (Prince­ton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1995), 31. 151. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 130. 152. Ibid., 118. As Krzysztof Pomian shows, curiosity in the Wunderkammer was “exuberant, incoherent, and muddled, assailed by contradictions . . . ​an interim rule between ­those of theology and science.” Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-­Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 64. 153. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 121. 154. Ibid., 135. 155. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 262. 156. WA, 254. Translation modified. 157. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 39. 158. Quoting François-­René de Chateaubriand and Heidegger, Maleuvre posits, “By wrenching them out of their original contexts, the museum deprives them of their lifeblood. Once removed from its environment in the church, ­temple, or the agora, the statue is neutralized, washed of its cultural, po­liti­cal, religious, spiritual functions.” Mu­ seum Memories, 15. 159. Esch’s art historical perspective is remarkably similar: “Reuse transforms the ancient piece from an antiquarian object into a historical one, which must be understood historically . . . ​For reuse grants life, both in the sense of survival (an individual capital that is not reused ­will perish) and in the sense of an afterlife.” “On the Reuse of Antiquity,” 17. 4. Trash-­Talking in The Arcades Proj­ect

1. Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, April 17, 1931, in Briefe, vol. 2, 532, eds. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978). I am indebted to Susan Buck-­Morss for this citation. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Proj­ect (Boston: MIT Press, 1991), 37. 2. This model of compiling quotations had already guided Benjamin in writing The Origin of German Tragic Drama in the Berlin State Library in 1923–24. He wrote, “What has piled up over months of reading and constant brooding is ready now, not so much like a mass of building blocks as like a heap of brushwood to which I must, with some circumspection, transport the first spark of inspiration from some place quite dif­fer­ ent.” Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 72. ­ usic, Text, trans. Stephen 3. Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image, M Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146.

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4. Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 116. 5. According to Hannah Arendt, Benjamin’s “collection [of quotations] was not an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of the study but constituted the main work, with writing as something secondary.” Arendt, “Introduction,” in IL, 47. 6. AR, N10, 3, 475. 7. Concluding that collecting remains strictly a meta­phor in The Arcades Proj­ect, Ekhardt Köhn posits that t­ here is no equivalence between the collecting of citations and material objects. “Sammler,” in Benjamins Begriffe, vol. 2, ed. Michael Optiz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 713. Although Heiner Weidmann labels it a “Sammelwerk,” he d­ oesn’t discuss Benjamin’s methodology of collecting citations. Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: Die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1992), 100. 8. Ackbar Abbas, “Walter Benjamin’s Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience,” New Literary History 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 228. 9. Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons, trans. Herbert Hunt (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 33. 10. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in SW III, 275. 11. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin note the translation difficulties that stem from the fact that the noun “convolute” in En­glish means “something of a convoluted form.” AR, “Translators’ Forward,” xiv. The En­glish translation foregrounds the extent to which Benjamin’s bundle of papers might have approached the disor­ga­nized or jumbled hoard. 12. Ibid. 13. Similar questions have been raised about ­whether Mnemosyne could ever have been completed had Aby Warburg lived on. See E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An In­ tellectual Biography (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970), 292. 14. Including photo­g raphs of Benjamin’s sundry scraps and registry of his own correspondences and manuscripts, Ursula Marx and her colleagues make a compelling case that Benjamin was an archivist of his own writings. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut Wizisla, eds., Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Im­ ages, Texts, Signs, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso Books, 2007), 2. 15. AR, Nl, 5, 458. 16. Benjamin’s essay “Imperial Pa­norama: A Tour of German Inflation” already reveals a deep-­seated discontent with German society, which would only increase as social unrest gave way to fascism. Along with spending time in the Soviet Union, Italy, and France, he even considered emigrating to Palestine u ­ nder the influence of Scholem. By the end of the 1920s, Benjamin, like Einstein, openly expressed his alienation from con­ temporary German writers and declared his affinity with French culture. AR, xi. 17. Along similar lines, Irving Wohlfarth concludes, “The ‘author’ of the Passagen­ werk is—as befits—­deeply implicated in his own bibliography.” “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Proj­ect, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2006), 145–46. 18. AR, x. 19. Officially, it began in 1927 as a planned collaboration for a newspaper article on the arcades. AR, ix. Buck-­Morss argues that the proj­ect’s intellectual origins can be

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traced back to his trip to Naples in 1924 and his encounter with Asja Lacis. Dialectics of Seeing, 11. 20. As Tony Bennett has suggested, the growth of the museum parallels the development of the department store as a new site of surveillance and discursive formation. The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), 30. Even on a biographical level, the two seem to be interrelated—­Benjamin’s trips to toy stores often overlap with his museum visits in Moscow Diary. 21. UL, 67. 22. AR, H1a, 5, 205. 23. One of the most memorable literary portraits of a ragpicker occurs in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, in which a dustman-­ragpicker stands to inherit the large fortune of a misanthropic miser who acquired it by scavenging the London streets. In the nineteenth ­century, the term “dust” was as capacious as the word “waste” is now, serving as a catch-­all phrase for all kinds of “shifting ­matter.” Boffin, the ragpicker, is called the “Golden Dustman” throughout the novel. Our Mutual Friend (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 805. For an examination of the ragpicker’s role in flea markets, see Rebecca Falkoff, Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 60–68. 24. This dynamic is apparent in James Silk Buckingham’s plan for a model town that would reform the citizen with “ready access to Libraries, Lectures, Galleries of Art, Public Worship, with many objects of architectural beauty, fountains, statues, colonnades around him, instead of rags, filth, drunkenness, and prostitution, with blasphemous oaths or dissolute conversation defiling his ears.” National Evils and Practical Reme­ dies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849 and 2011), 225. I am indebted to Tony Bennett for this citation. Birth of the Museum, 17. 25. AR, J68, 4, 442. 26. AR, J79a, 5, 368. 27. Benjamin also cites Nadar in a description of Baudelaire’s gait in The Arcades Proj­ ect: “Baudelaire walked about his quar­tier of the city at an uneven pace, both ner­vous and languid, like a cat, choosing each stone of the pavement as if he had to avoid crushing an egg.” AR, J1a, 3, 230. 28. AR, J68, 4, 442. 29. Peter Russell, Delphi Complete Works of Édouard Manet (Hastings: Delphi Publishing, 2016), 19. 30. Ibid. 31. The ragpicker disrupts the traditional power relations of waste disposal. Italo Calvino recounts, “My relationship with the poubelle is that of the man for whom throwing something away completes or confirms its appropriation . . . ​while for the man who unloads the poubelle into the rotating crater of the dustcart it offers only an idea of the amount of goods which are denied to him, which reach him only as useless detritus.” “La Poubelle Agréée,” in The Road to San Giovanni (Boston: Mari­ner Books, 2014), 110. 32. AR, J68, 4, 350. 33. Marx writes, “The ‘dangerous class,’ [Lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, h ­ ere and ­there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

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Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto,” in The Marx-­Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 482. 34. Henry Sutherland Edwards, Old and New Paris (London: Cassell and Com­ pany, 1893), 362. 35. Charles Baudelaire, “The Rag-­Picker’s Wine,” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. William Aggeler (Fresno, CA: Acad­emy Library Guild, 1954), 356. 36. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in IL, 175. 37. AR, J77, 4, 364. 38. AR, N1a, 8, 460. 39. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in SW IV, 48. 40. Ibid. 41. Walter Benjamin, “An Outsider Makes His Mark,” in SW II, 310. He also cites Baudelaire’s “The Ragpickers’ Wine”: “One sees a ragpicker coming—­shaking his head, / stumbling, and colliding against walls like a poet.” “Second Empire,” 8. 42. Edwards, Old and New Paris, 361. 43. Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera,” 19. Gleaning, like ragpicking, is not outside the cap­i­ tal­ist order. Rather than an autonomous practice that affirmed the in­de­pen­dence of the gleaner, gleaning was a contested but impor­tant part of the complex agricultural economy. Liana Vardi, “Construing the Harvest: Gleaners, Farmers and Officials in Early Modern France,” American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (December 1993): 1424. 44. Marx et al., Walter Benjamin’s Archive, 31. 45. Ibid., 30. Marx and her colleagues link Benjamin’s deliberate use of the word “scrap” (verzetteln) with the dispersion (Verzettelung) of his archive while in exile. Walter Benjamin’s Archive, 29–33. 46. “The Return of Gleaning in the Modern World,” The Economist, December 22, 2018, https://­www​.­economist​.­com​/­christmas​-­specials​/­2018​/­12​/­22​/­the​-­return​-­of​-­glean​ ing​-­in​-­the​-­modern​-­world. 47. According to Boscagli, “Varda renders gleaning a po­liti­cal activity, a transformative practice through which excess is repurposed in ways that defy established economic and ­legal rules of property. Gleaning is both ­legal and outlaw at the same time.” Stuff Theory, 258. 48. “Spoilage,” The Oxford En­glish Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), OED Online, https://­ www​-­oed​-­com​.­ezproxy​.­cul​.­columbia​.­edu​/­view​/­Entry​/­187266. For John Locke, the prevention of waste is a natu­ral curb on excessive acquisition. In response to the question of how many fruits one person can collect, Locke submits, “As much as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his ­labour fix a property in. What­ever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to ­others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.” “The Second Treatise of Government,” in Po­liti­cal Writings, ed. David Wooton (Indianapolis: Hacket, 2003), 276. 49. Edwards, Old and New Paris, 362. 50. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), dir. Agnès Varda (France: Zeitgeist Films, 2001). 51. Boscagli, Stuff Theory, 263. 52. This ambivalence is at the heart of Benjamin’s “Storyteller,” which juxtaposes the burgeoning information economy with the art of storytelling, whose “seeds of

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grain . . . ​have lain for centuries in the airtight chambers of the pyramids and have retained their germinative power to this day.” Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in SW III, 148. 53. Varda, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse. 54. Another term frequently employed in German for gleaning is “ährenlesen.” Obscuring the etymology of this word, Varda’s film is translated into German as Die Sammler und Die Sammlerin. 55. Viney, Waste, 2. 56. Homay King, “­Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I,” Quar­ terly Review of Film and Video 24, no. 5 (2007): 10. 57. Unlike hoarding, which often involves hanging onto rotten food, ­there is usually a utility to ragpicking. An object is gleaned for its potential use value. 58. Similarly, Benjamin’s books call up “memories of the cities in which I found so many ­things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris.” UL, 67. 59. Susan Morrison, The Lit­er­a­ture of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical ­Matter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 184. 60. Leviticus 19:9–10 (New Oxford Annotated Bible). 61. Boaz commands, “Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her not. / And let fall also some of the handfuls purposely for her; and leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not.” Ruth 2:16–17 (NOAB). 62. Ruth 1:11–13 (NOAB). 63. Although Loiterature predates The Gleaners and I, its analy­sis of a category-­blurring genre of writing is relevant h ­ ere. Digression, Ross Chambers writes, is, “in diachronic terms, a critique of the pre­sent—­the local in temporal guise—­against which it mobilizes the dilatory as a mode of deferral.” Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 16, 19. 64. King, “­Matter, Time, and the Digital,” 8. 65. DR, 121. 66. King, “Matter, Time, and the Digital,” 9. 67. Glaneurs et la glaneuse: Deux ans après, dir. Agnès Varda (France: Zeitgeist Films, 2002). The rappers featured in Varda’s movie reinforce this message: “Bend down / But down lower yourself / When I see them stooping / I suffer for them.” Benjamin’s phraseology is almost identical when describing an eccentric collector who “stoops to pick up” a discarded “misprinted streetcar ticket.” AR, O3, 3 496. 68. AR, H16, 845. 69. Benjamin considers shock as a constitutive force in Baudelaire’s work. The shock of Baudelaire’s encounter with modernity manifests itself on a corporeal level, making the body “contract in a tremor.” Benjamin, “Motifs in Baudelaire,” 175–76. 70. Jake Wilson, “Trash and Trea­sure: The Gleaners And I,” Senses of Cinema, December 2002, http://­sensesofcinema​.­com​/­2002​/­feature​-­articles​/­gleaners. 71. Ursula Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 170. 72. Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera,” 13. 73. Benjamin’s aforementioned description of the ragpicker’s “démarche saccadé” while gathering garbage makes the link between this methodology of reading and gleaning more explicit. AR, J77, 4, 364.

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74. Benjamin, “Outsider,” 310. 75. While con­temporary in its anticipation of the hypertext, the nonlinear temporality of The Arcades Proj­ect also harks back to Samuel Quiccheberg’s 1565 conception of the Wunderkammer, which “offers not one linear narrative but an open-­ended set of possibilities.” Bruce Robertson, “Preface,” in The First Treatise on Museums, trans. Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), x. 76. Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, 115. 77. ­Here too The Arcades Proj­ect elicits a similar reaction to Warburg’s Mnemosyne, which “creates a mutable space of and for contemplation, a Denkraum (thought-­space), that still calls for interpretation.” Christopher Johnson, Memory, Meta­phor, and Aby War­ burg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2012), xi. 78. WA, 260. 79. WA, 261. 80. Walter Benjamin, “Old Forgotten ­Children’s Books,” in SW I, 408. 81. Ibid. 82. Walter Benjamin, “Lob der Puppe,” in GS III, 218. Translations mine. 83. Rastelli notes, “Our profession ­wasn’t born yesterday and we too have our history [unsere Geschichte]—or, at any rate, our stories [unsere Geschichten].” Walter Benjamin, “Rastelli’s Story,” in SW III, 98. The singular, historicist notion of History (Geschichte) is upended by a multiplicity of historical narratives (Geschichten). 84. Benjamin, “Storyteller,” 148. 85. The ­album of images he had assembled and copied from the Bibliothèque nationale and stored in his Paris apartment now appears to have been lost. Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 71. 86. According to Kinney, “The reuse of time-­bound pieces exposes history, and the presence of multiple such ele­ments creates ‘palimpsests of an historical pro­cess’ (Esch) that may be the deliberate product of reuse, or only its unintended effect.” In Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, ed. Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney (New York: Routledge, 2011), 3. 87. For more on Joyce’s focus on waste, see William Viney, Waste: A Philosophy of ­Things (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 101–23. 88. Franz Kaf ka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 81. 89. Maurizia Boscagli states that “Modernism’s interest in trash and in the minutiae of the everyday is invariably an attack on the dominant ordering systems of modernity.” Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 235. 90. Marx et al., Walter Benjamin’s Archive, 33. 91. Susan Sontag, “­Under the Sign of Saturn,” in ­Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays (New York: Picador Paper, 2002), 129. 92. Benjamin had already experimented with the looser, more flexible montage form in One-­Way Street, Berlin Childhood around 1900, and “On the Concept of History.” In the early stages, Benjamin conceived of The Arcades Proj­ect as a “kind of Pa­ri­sian counterpart to One-­Way Street, a montage text combining aphorisms and anecdotal material.” Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2014), 286.

NOTES TO PA GES 141– 144

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93. Benjamin, “Puppe,” 216–18. 94. John Hamilton asks, “Should we, in fact, reduce Benjamin’s bibliomania to the collecting method exemplified by the Passagen-­Werk? Are the two acts perfectly congruous? . . . ​Does Arendt perhaps conflate too quickly the compulsion to acquire rare books and the drive to collect obscure texts?” He argues that Benjamin ­favors a materialist valuation of the book by prizing it as a magical object “like a fetishist who fondles ­things that exhibit a certain aura well beyond any use value.” Philology of the Flesh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 163, 161. 95. This distinction perhaps motivates his parenthetical remark following an excursus on collecting: “It would be in­ter­est­ing to study the bibliophile as the only type of collector who has not completely withdrawn his trea­sures from their functional context [Funktionszusammenhänge].” AR, H2, 7; H2a, 1, 275. 96. Benjamin quips, “Of the customary modes of acquisition, the one most appropriate to a collector would be the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-­returning.” IL, 62. 97. Arendt, “Introduction,” 45. 98. For an illuminating history of Arendt’s introduction to Benjamin’s Illumina­ tions, see Cosima Mattner’s dissertation chapter, “The Transatlantic Critic. Arendt and Sontag on Benjamin.” 99. Benjamin writes in a 1935 letter to Theodor W. Adorno, “As you know, my main concern is with the ‘primal history’ [Urgeschichte] of the nineteenth c­ entury.” “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on the Essay ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth ­Century,’ ” in SW III, 52. Though related, primal history (Urgeschichte) is not the same as Benjamin’s concept of natu­ral history (Naturgeschichte). For more on ­these concepts, see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, ­Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 2. Without trying to intervene in ­these debates, my purpose is to show the way Benjamin self-­consciously stylizes himself as a “natu­ral history” collector. 100. AR, H1, 3, 204. 101. AR, H1a, 4, 205. This passage might explain Benjamin’s preoccupation with the shell as a meta­phor for dwelling that reflects its own loss. In German, shell (Gehäuse) connotes both housing and casing: “The original form of all dwelling is existence not in the ­house but in the shell [nicht im Haus sondern in Gehäuse]. The shell bears the impression of its occupant. In the most extreme case, the dwelling becomes a shell. The nineteenth c­ entury, like no other ­century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior.” AR, I4, 4, 221. 102. AR, R2, 3, 541. 103. AR, J51a, 5, 321. 104. Benjamin, “Storyteller,” 149. 105. Glossing Benjamin’s quotation, Abbas proposes that collecting can be “regarded as a ‘way of telling,’ or transmitting experience through objects rather than verbal language.” “Walter Benjamin’s Collector,” 232. 106. Buck-­Morss states, “Ur-­history was thoroughly po­liti­cal knowledge, nothing less than a revolutionary Marxist pedagogy. If  . . . ​Benjamin came to refer to himself as a ‘historical materialist’ he was well aware that he was filling this nomenclature

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with very new meaning . . . ​His objective was to ‘rescue’ the historical objects by ripping them out of their developmental histories.” Dialectics of Seeing, 218. 107. AR, N10a, 3, 476. 108. AR, N2, 2, 460. 109. Friedrich Nietz­sche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 33. In his triad of historical types, Nietz­sche acknowledges that the critical historian’s “systematic annihilation of inherited traditions, taken to a too-­extreme degree, engenders an unhealthy distrust of all inherited values, indeed, a distrust even of the possibility of value at all. Critical history is ‘always a dangerous attempt b­ ecause it is so difficult to find a limit in denying the past.’ ” Anthony Jensen, Nietz­sche’s Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 84. 110. AR, N10, 3, 475. 111. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs,” 262. 112. Benjamin, “Storyteller,” 149. 113. AR, H1a, 2, 205. 114. AR, N2, 6, 461. Richard Sieburth summarizes: “History is not a cumulative, additive narrative in which the uninterrupted syntagm of time flows homogeneously from past to f­ uture, but rather a montage where any moment may enter into sudden adjacency with another. History as parataxis.” “Benjamin the Scrivener,” Assemblage, no. 6 ( June 1988): 14. 115. ­Here too, ­there are in­ter­est­ing parallels with Warburg’s methodology: “The disparate objects whose images Warburg collected for his panels . . . ​­were objects taken from dif­fer­ent levels of the past, freed from functionality, abandoned to a strange figural floating.” Philippe-­Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 261. 116. AR, N1a, 8, 460. 117. Anne Stevens and Jay Williams, “The Footnote, in Theory,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 22, cited in Sonam Singh, “Baudelaire without Benjamin: Contingency, History, Modernity,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 64, no. 4 (Fall 2012). 118. See The Germanic Review’s special section on citation, edited by Rüdiger Campe and Arne Höcker. Their study focuses on the “discursive practices of citation as procedures with a par­tic­ul­ar relevance for the production of epistemological knowledge.” “Introduction: The Case of Citation: On Literary and Pragmatic Reference,” The Ger­ manic Review: Lit­er­a­ture, Culture, Theory 89, no. 1 (2014): 42. In his article, Campe builds on the theory of intertextuality to argue, “If indeed the canon is no longer a cultural given, but its production becomes part of the literary writing pro­cess itself, the intertext is indeed never distinguishable from the discursive practice called ‘lit­er­a­ture.’ Citation is part of lit­er­a­ture reflecting and constituting itself as lit­er­a­ture.” “Three Modes of Citation: Historical, Casuistic, and Literary Writing in Büchner,” The Germanic Review: Lit­er­ a­ture, Culture, Theory 89, no. 1 (2014): 49. 119. Patrick Greaney, “Last Words: Expression and Quotation in the Works of Luis Camnitzer,” The Germanic Review: Lit­er­a­ture, Culture, Theory 89, no. 1 (2014): 95. 120. The technique of citation has historically been opposed to creation. Campe emphasizes the “irritation” caused by Büchner’s use of citation, which was perceived as a “lack of originality or authorial responsibility . . . ​Büchner’s use of quotation seems

NOTES TO PA GES 146– 148

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to have stood in conflict with the very idea of poetic creation.” “Three Modes of Citation,” 45. 121. Arendt, “Introduction,” 38. Italics mine. 122. Building on Arendt, Philippe Simay observes that “the collector appears as opposing all the normative pro­cesses of transmission and reception” by questioning “the classificatory logic of tradition.” “Tradition as Injunction: Benjamin and the Critique of Historicism,” in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2005), 146. 123. AR, N11, 3, 476. In the gloss of Eiland and Jennings, “To cite is at once to explode and to salvage: to extract the historical object by blasting it from the reified, homogenous continuum of pragmatic historiography, and to call to life some part of what has been by integrating it into the newly established context of the collection, transfiguring and actualizing the object.” Critical Life, 290. 124. Many medieval or biblical interpolations resulted from transcription errors. I am indebted to Hannah Weaver for her analy­sis of the relationship between medieval practices of interpolation and notions of history. “Interpolation as Critical Category,” New Literary History 53, no. 1 (Winter 2022). 125. Walter William Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the En­glish Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), 350. See the introduction to this book. 126. Walter Benjamin, “One-­Way Street,” in SW I, 481. 127. According to Campe and Höcker, “Citation is a practice and a form of appropriation.” “Case of Citation,” 40. 128. Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, 117. Both Goldsmith and Marjorie Perloff locate the genesis of “uncreative writing” or “unoriginal genius” in Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect. Goldsmith uses the term patchwriting, “a way of weaving together vari­ous shards of other ­people’s words into a totally cohesive ­whole . . . ​While this new writing has an electronic gleam in its eyes, its results are distinctly analog, taking inspiration from radical modernist ideas and juicing them with twenty-­first ­century technology.” Collecting gives us a new perspective on Goldsmith’s con­temporary man­tra “context is the new content.” Uncreative Writing, 4. 129. AR, N1, 10, 458. 130. Arnold Esch warns that such comparisons should be made with caution, “always mindful that the use of spolia destroys the old context, while the literary citation leaves the old text intact.” “On the Reuse of Antiquity: The Perspectives of the Archaeologist and Historian,” in Reuse Value, 26. 131. Paolo Liverani, “Reading Spolia in Late Antiquity and Con­temporary Perception in Reuse Value,” in Reuse Value, 41. 132. Ibid., 42. 133. Ibid. 134. Dale Kinney argues, “Plagiarism is the limit case in which quotation turns from the respectful ascription of authority into plunder. By usurping authorship, the plagiarist steals intellectual property from the author and diminishes what some might call the author’s symbolic capital.” “Introduction,” in Reuse Value, 6. 135. Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” in SW II, 775. 136. Ibid. See chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion. 137. WA, 242.

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138. I am grateful to Andreas Huyssen for his comments on an excerpt of this chapter that I presented at “Aesthetics and Politics,” a conference or­ga­nized by Claudia Breger at Columbia University in November 2020. 139. Benjamin, “Puppe,” 217. 140. Arendt, “Introduction,” 44. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid., 42. 143. Benjamin observes that the collector’s “mysterious relationship to objects . . . ​ does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—­that is, their usefulness.” UL, 60. 144. Benjamin cites Proust’s Remembrance of T ­ hings Past on the museum: “But in this re­spect, as in ­every other, our age is infected with a mania for showing ­things only in the environment that properly belongs to them, thereby suppressing the essential ­thing: the act of the mind which isolated them from that environment.” AR, S11, 1, 561. 145. AR, H1a, 2, 205. 146. UL, 64. 147. AR, H2, 3, 206. 148. UL, 67. Douglas Crimp comments, “If we find this concept of the positive countertype of the collector difficult to grasp, it is not only ­because the type has become extinct but also b­ ecause what has arisen in its stead are two distinct, though related phenomena. The first of ­these—­the con­temporary private collection, as opposed to Benjamin’s personal collection—is amassed by ­those ‘stupid and passive’ collectors whose objects exist only insofar as they literally possess and use them. The second is the public collection, the museum . . . ​This cultural history, to which Benjamin opposes historical materialism, is precisely what the museum offers.” On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 202–4. 149. James Fenton, “The Pitt Rivers Museum,” in The Memory of War and ­Children in Exile (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 81. 150. Ibid., 82. 151. Benjamin, “Puppe,” 217. Translation provided by Arendt, “Introduction,” 45. 152. Abbas, “Walter Benjamin’s Collector,” 236. 153. Eiland and Jennings note that “the idea of purgation—­clearing out, blasting apart, burning away—­plays a leading role in Benjamin’s criticism.” Critical Life, 168. 154. BC, 51. 155. Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” in SW II, 541. 156. Ibid. 157. I am indebted to Weidmann for this quotation. Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel, 98. 158. Ibid., 98–99. 159. Eiland and Jennings, Critical Life, 287. Eiland and McLaughlin note that “despite the informal, epistolary announcements of a ‘book,’ ” Benjamin’s “research proj­ect had become an end in itself ”: “The transcendence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism—­grounded, as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogenous temporality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting at a thousand dif­fer­ent a­ ngles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of recent history, so as to effect ‘the cracking open of natu­ral teleology.’ ” AR, xi.

NOTES TO PA GES 151– 154

285

160. See the introduction. According to my tripartite definition of collecting, the seriality of collecting differentiates it from other types of acquisitions. 161. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 133. The digital text allows for a play of substitutions in a series. I am indebted to King for this reference: “­Matter, Time, and the Digital,” 12–13. 162. Like hoarding, completion for the gleaner remains a more elusive task ­because its par­ameters are not clearly defined; whereas a Rus­sian doll collection has preestablished criteria, gleaning does not. 163. Nietz­sche, On the Use and Abuse, 12. 164. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal use this fact to argue that Noah was the only known collector to achieve a complete set. The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 1. 165. Jorge Luis Borges, “Library of Babel,” trans. James Irby, in Labyrinths, ed. Donald Yates and James Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 54–55. 166. Ibid., 55–56. Jean Baudrillard diagnoses precisely this prob­lem when he declares, “Madness begins once a collection is deemed complete and ceases to center around its absent term.” The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996), 99. 167. AR, H4a, 1, 211. 168. Jeremy Tambling, Allegory (London: Routledge, 2010), 116. 169. Ibid., 168. 170. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), 26. 171. Bainard Cowan claims, “The affirmation of the existence of truth, then, is the first precondition for allegory; the second is the recognition of its absence. Allegory could not exist if truth ­were accessible: as a mode of expression it arises in perpetual response to the h ­ uman condition of being exiled from the truth.” “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique 22, no. 22 (Winter 1981): 114. 172. Charles Rice, “Walter Benjamin’s Interior History,” in Walter Benjamin and History, 177. Baudelaire’s quote, “Every­thing becomes an allegory for me,” is Benjamin’s epigraph to section 5 on Baudelaire. “Paris, the Capital of the 19th ­Century,” in SW III, 39. 173. TD, 178. Tambling comments, “For Benjamin, the symbol is idealizing ­because it ignores history, claiming the absolute eternal value of nature, which supplies symbolism with its idea of unchanging, organic forms. Nature has been presented in ideal terms . . . ​It has been turned into an abstract but authoritative entity.” Allegory, 116. 174. Hanssen explains that the meaning of natu­ral history shifted throughout Trau­ erspiel: “Natu­ral history could e­ ither signal the temporality of transience” or “refer to the dehistorizing tendency that marked baroque drama.” Walter Benjamin’s Other His­ tory, 50. 175. TD, 165. 176. King, “­Matter, Time, and the Digital,” 10. 177. Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 160. 178. TD, 166. 179. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” in SW IV, 179. 180. Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera,” 22.

28 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 154– 156

181. TD, 178. 182. Salzani, “Experience and Play,” 195. 183. Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 164. 184. Walter Benjamin, “Zentralpark,” in GS I, 681. Translation mine. He elaborates, “The key figure in early allegory is the corpse. In late allegory, it is the ‘souvenir’ [Andenken]. The ‘souvenir’ is the schema of the commodity’s transformation into an object for the collector,” 190. 185. Benjamin, “Central Park,” 169. 186. George Steiner, “Introduction,” in TD, 9. 187. Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 161. 188. TD, 188. 189. Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” 110. Stating that “the emblems of the baroque return as commodities,” Benjamin implies that the relationship between an object and its meaning in allegory is as arbitrary as the connection between a commodity and its market value. “Central Park,” 183. In The Arcades Proj­ect, he notes, “Broken-­down m ­ atter: the elevation of commodity to the status of allegory. Allegory and the fetish character of the commodity.” H2, 6, 207. 190. Michael Steinberg, “The Collector as Allegorist: Goods, Gods, and the Objects of History,” in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 9. 191. AR, H4a, 1, 211. 192. Dominik Finkelde proposes that Benjamin’s collector “must artificially construct totality in his ‘transcendental homelessness,’ ” comparing him to György Lukács’s modern writer. In his insightful reading of “Unpacking My Library,” Finkelde theorizes, “In late nineteenth-­century bourgeois culture collecting lost its traditional sense b­ ecause desiring a totality could no longer serve as the basis of collecting. Solitary individuals had to face a universe of unstable signs in which the accumulated objects no longer possessed an original purpose or religious meaning.” For this reason, Finkelde labels Benjamin’s collector a “nostalgic figure.” “Vergebliches Sammeln: Walter Benjamins Analyse eines Unbehagens im Fin de Siècle und der europäischen Moderne,” Arcadia 41, no. 1 (2006): 194, 187. 193. Paul Holdengräber, “Between the Profane and the Redemptive: The Collector as Possessor in Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-­Werk,” History and Memory 4, no.  2 (Fall/Winter 1992): 126. 194. Ibid. Mentioned in a footnote, Paul Holdengräber’s point merits closer examination. I am grateful to Juliana Mendelson, a student in my Benjamin seminar at Columbia, for making a similar connection. 195. See Gershom Scholem, A Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2003). Benjamin’s conversations with Scholem provided the basis of most of his knowledge about Jewish messianism. On Benjamin’s relationship to Jewish messianism, see Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985). On the conception of Tikkun, see Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 109–17.

NOTES TO PA GES 156– 158

287

196. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 117. Peter Brier notes, “Benjamin’s dedication to the recovery of lost t­ hings—­his haunting reach for original language, his determination to keep that rendezvous with the messianic promise of social justice—­comes in ­g reat part from his embrace of the Kabbalah.” “Walter Benjamin’s Sparks of Holiness,” Southwest Review 88, no. 1 (2003): 81. 197. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 112–13. 198. Ibid., 110. 199. Ibid. 200. Benjamin’s reflections on allegory can also be traced back to his lifelong study of Kabbalah. See James McBride, “Marooned in the Realm of the Profane: Walter Benjamin’s Synthesis of Kabbalah and Communism,” Journal of the American Acad­emy of Religion 57, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 247. Like the collector, the allegorist is tasked with restoration or repair (tikkun) ­after the shattering of the primordial vessels (shevirah). 201. Benjamin’s re­sis­tance to the myth of creatio ex nihilo is already latent in an early, unpublished essay that was influenced by kabbalah. He emphasizes the “cre­ uman lanativity” (das Schöpferische) of God’s creation, noting, “The infinity of h guage always remains ­limited and analytic in nature, in comparison to the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word.” “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in SW I, 68. Gathering, collecting, and naming are fundamentally dif­fer­ent from the pro­cess of creation. 202. TD, 179. 203. WA, 252. 204. Adorno argues, “From the start, the genius aesthetic shifted emphasis t­ oward the individual—­opposing a spurious universality—­and away from society by absolutizing this individual . . . ​The person ­behind the work is purported to be more essential than the artworks themselves.” This concept of the original genius “suits crude bourgeois consciousness as much b­ ecause it implies a work ethic that glorifies pure ­human creativity regardless of its aim as b­ ecause the viewer is relieved of taking any trou­ble with the object itself: The viewer is supposed to be satisfied with the personality—­essentially a kitsch biography—of the artist.” Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 171. 205. AR, N10, 3, 475. 206. AR, J55a, 3, 329. 207. TD, 184. 208. TD, 185. 209. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 94. The personification of the collection as a harem can be traced back to Balzac’s Cousin Pons, in which two rival collectors jealously guard their private museums, depicted as “seraglios” and “harems.” Cousin Pons, 142. 210. UL, 64. 211. I take issue with Max Pensky’s interpretation that collecting is the noninvasive antidote to allegory’s “intensive, subjective rage which ­will insist on the destruction of ­things for the sake of the imposition of subjective w ­ ill.” “Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of the Passagenwerk,” in Walter Benjamin and the De­ mands of History, ed. Michael Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 185.

28 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 158– 166

212. TD, 184. 213. AR, H2a,1, 207. 214. TD, 184. 215. UL, 64. 216. UL, 67. 217. Benjamin, “A Glimpse into the World of ­Children’s Books,” in SW I, 435. 218. Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener,” 19. 219. “Exchange with Theodor Adorno on the ‘Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,’ ” in SW IV, 100. 220. SW IV, 103. It is tempting to read Gretel’s remark as a veiled allusion to Kaf ka’s unfinished short story “The Burrow,” in which an animal’s efforts to defend his elaborately constructed dwelling from intruders becomes the source of existential agony. Although the burrow is announced as “completed” in the first line of the story, it quickly becomes clear that, like The Arcades Proj­ect, it is an inherently incompletable proj­ect. Kaf ka, “The Burrow,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 325. Part 3. Collecting Africa

1. Neil H. Donahue, A Companion to the Lit­er­a­ture of German Expressionism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 96. An author and playwright with connections to expressionism, Sternheim had been personally acquainted with Einstein since 1908, when Einstein contributed to Hyperion, the journal financed by Sternheim. Rhys Williams, “Primitivism in the Works of Carl Einstein, Carl Sternheim and Gottfried Benn,” Journal of Eu­ro­pean Studies 13, no. 52 (December 1983): 256. 2. Heike Neumeister, “Masks and Shadow Souls: Carl Einstein’s Collaboration with Thomas A. Joyce, The British Museum, and Documents,” Carl Einstein and the Eu­ro­pean Avant-­Garde, ed. Nicola Creighton and Andreas Kramer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 137. 3. Carl Sternheim, Ulrike: Eine Erzählung (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1918), 11. 4. Ibid., 11–12. 5. Ibid., 12. 6. Ibid. 7. Gauguin fascinated Sternheim, who purchased his art in 1916 and acquired his manuscript in 1914. Williams, “Primitivism,” 265. 8. Liliane Meffre, Carl Einstein: Itinéraires d’une pensée moderne (Paris: Université de Paris-­Sorbonne, 2002), 62–65. 9. Yaëlle Biro, cur. museum placard, African Art, New York, and the Avant-­Garde (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art), 2013. 10. FR, 177. 11. DR, 121. Translations mine. See the epigraph to part 2 of this book, in which Einstein suggests that collecting should be a “bold” artistic intervention. 12. Klaus H. Kiefer, “Die Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses: Carl Einsteins Beitrag zu Documents,” in Elan Vital oder Das Auge des Eros (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1994), 35.

NOTES TO PA GES 167– 169

289

5. The Collector and His Circle

1. FR, 26. 2. Neil Donahue, “Analy­sis and Construction: The Aesthetics of Carl Einstein,” The German Quarterly 61, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 419. 3. Charles Haxthausen points out that roughly eighty ­percent of Einstein’s work was devoted to visual art. “Introduction,” in MF, 2. Sebastian Zeidler’s Form as Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), the first English-­language intellectual biography of Einstein, pre­sents a rigorous analy­sis of his wide-­ranging corpus. Uwe Fleckner’s Carl Ein­ stein und Sein Jahrhundert: Fragmente einer Intellektuellen Biographie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006) was the first monograph on Einstein by an art historian. 4. Fleckner’s book devotes one chapter to Einstein’s relationship with Dr. Reber but does not treat Einstein as a collector nor link his reflections on collecting with his literary praxis. 5. Like many intellectuals, Einstein was radicalized by his experiences during World War I. A communist, he was one of six ­people to speak at Rosa Luxemburg’s funeral in 1919. Charles Haxthausen, “Bloody Serious: Two Texts by Carl Einstein,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 107. 6. While working at library in the 1930s, Benjamin made the acquaintance of Bataille, who was working t­ here as a librarian. For more details, see Michael Weingrad, “The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research,” New German Cri­ tique, no. 84 (Autumn 2001): 133. 7. Rainer Rumold, “ ‘Painting as a Language. Why Not?’ Carl Einstein in ‘Documents,’ ” October 107 (Winter 2004): 79. 8. Charles Haxthausen, “Reproduction/Repetition: Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 48. Haxthausen analyzes the way their “antithetical positions on the issue of reproduction and repetition in the visual order” emerge from their “differing positions on language, media, and perception.” Ibid. 9. A 2014 conference, “The Collector and His Circle,” held at the Wallace Collection in London, focused on the collaborative constellations in the history of collecting. 10. Gesa Jeuthe and Britta Olényi von Husen, Albert Flechtheim: Art Dealer of the Avant-­Garde, Provenance Research Work Group, February 11, 2014, http://­alfredf​l ech​ theim​.­com. 11. Carl Einstein to Thomas Joyce, 1926, in Carl Einstein: Briefwechsel, 1904–1940, ed. Klaus Kiefer and Liliana Meffre (Berlin: J. B. Metzler, 2020), 406. 12. Ibid., 407. 13. Ibid., 406. 14. For instance, Documents published Einstein’s review of Flechtheim’s Juan Gris exhibition as well as advertisements for Flechtheim’s other exhibitions. One advertisement for Galerie Flechtheim was strategically placed right ­after Einstein’s review of Galerie Pigalle. “Juan Gris—­Ausstellung,” in W III, 592–93. 15. They must have been acquainted by 1922, given that Art of the Twentieth ­Century contains at least twenty-­five illustrations from works in Reber’s collection. Peter Kropmanns and Uwe Fleckner, “Von Kontinentaler Bedeutung: Gottlieb Friedrich Reber und Seine Sammlung,” in Die Moderne und Ihre Sammler, ed. Andrea Pophanken and Felix Billeter (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 361.

29 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 169– 173

16. Reber’s first collection consisted of late nineteenth-­century French masters such as Manet, Degas, Gauguin, and Renoir and included at least twenty-­seven works by Cézanne. Dorothy Kosinski, “G. F. Reber: Collector of Cubism,” The Burlington Magazine 133, no. 1061 (August 1991): 521. In 1920, Reber purchased Cézanne’s The Boy in the Red Vest and Young Man and Skull, which adorned the walls of his château in Lausanne. During my visit to Reber’s archives in Bonn, the late Christoph Pudelko—­Reber’s grand­ son—­generously devoted several hours to showing me Reber’s photo­graphs, letters, and guestbook and sharing personal anecdotes about his collection and relationships with artists, collectors, and art historians. 17. DR, 121. 18. Word of Reber’s collection even spread to American newspapers, which touted him as “the most impor­tant collector of modern art in Eu­rope ­today.” Fleckner, Carl Einstein, 315. 19. Filled with signatures and notes from artists like Richard Huelsenbeck and Hugo Ball, Reber’s guestbook reads like a who’s who of the twentieth-­century avant-­ garde. Pudelko Archive, n.d. 20. Kosinski, “G. F. Reber,” 523. To what extent the transformation of Reber’s collection was a result of Einstein’s own influence remains an unanswered question. As Fleckner points out, the period in which Reber began to sell his impressionist works in ­favor of cubist pieces also coincides with the beginning of his friendship with Einstein. Fleckner, Carl Einstein, 311. Pudelko disputes Fleckner’s and Kosinski’s claims that Einstein was the motivating force b­ ehind Reber’s turn to cubism, arguing that the content of his collection had changed before he became acquainted with Einstein. “This was no indoctrination,” said Pudelko in a conversation on June 3, 2014, of his grand­father’s interest in cubist art, which, he maintained, preceded his acquaintance with Einstein. 21. Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1931), dedication. 22. Kropmanns and Fleckner, “Von Kontinentaler Bedeutung,” 360. 23. DR, 121. 24. FR, 177. In his portrait of Einstein as a “lost wanderer” and “man apart,” unmoored from disciplinary and geographic orientation, Zeidler downplays the circles and journals that Einstein was involved with. FR, 9. 25. FR, 177. 26. Carl Einstein, “Die Sammlung Henri Rouart,” in W I, 149. 27. UL, 61. 28. Einstein, “Die Sammlung Henri Rouart,” 150. 29. Ibid., 149. 30. PS, 584. Translations mine. 31. Fleckner, Carl Einstein, 325. 32. Friedrich Nietz­sche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 12. See introduction. 33. PS, 585. 34. Carl Einstein, “Die Sammlung Dr. Reber,” in W IV, 282. Translations mine. 35. PS, 585. 36. Ibid., 587. 37. UL, 67.

NOTES TO PA GES 173– 176

291

38. Carl Einstein, unpublished manuscript, Pudelko Archive, n.d. 39. Ibid. Einstein also invokes the word “schaffen” in “Dr. G. F. Reber” when referring to the construction of his collection. 40. PS, 585. 41. Ibid., 586. 42. For instance, Einstein changed “Sammeln kann etwas anders sein als” to “Sammeln müsste anders sein” and “So wird eine Sammlung heftiger Eingriff ” to “Hiermit bedeutet Sammeln heftiger Eingriff.” “Dr. G. F. Reber” (draft, Pudelko Archive, n.d.). 43. Kropmanns and Fleckner, “Von Kontinentaler Bedeutung,” 150. 44. Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, “Homage à Picasso,” Documents 2, no. 3 (1930): 175. 45. Pudelko Archive, n.d. 46. Reber’s intention was not to propose a historical genealogy or a network of influences, but rather to suggest that works from the ancient Near East, ­Middle Ages, and avant-­garde Paris all manifested comparable forms of expression described by Einstein as “mythic and tectonic.” Fleckner, Carl Einstein, 328. Borrowed from Einstein’s teacher, Heinrich Wölfflin, the tectonic initially appears as the paradigm of or­ga­nized form that prizes stasis and preservation. Stressing the formal, reciprocal relationship between the filling and frame of a work of art, Einstein’s tectonic functions as an orga­nizational princi­ple that allows him to compare art from vari­ous cultures and historical epochs. Sebastian Zeidler, “Life and Death from Babylon to Picasso: Carl Einstein’s Ontology of Art at the Time of Documents,” Papers of Surrealism 7 (2007). 47. Pudelko Archive, n.d. 48. DR, 121. 49. PS, 586. 50. Einstein’s view of the collector dovetails with Benjamin’s account of the way photography is able to shed new light on masterpieces by miniaturizing them: “The [­great works of art] can no longer be seen as the productions of individuals; they have become collective formations [kollektive Gebilde] of such enormous dimensions that their assimilation is dependent precisely on their diminution.” Walter Benjamin, “­Little History of Photography,” in SW II, 523. Translation modified. 51. DR, 121. 52. DR, 122. 53. PS, 586. 54. DR, 122. 55. DR, 122. 56. DR, 122. 57. PS, 586. 58. Peter McIsaac, Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Col­ lecting (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 58. 59. Pudelko Archive, n.d. 60. According to Horst Bredekamp, the Wunderkammer “built visual bridges in order to emphasize the playfulness of nature through the associative powers of sight.” Characterized by “apparent disorder,” collections w ­ ere not arranged chronologically, typologically, or thematically but instead “allowed to mingle” playfully. The Lure of An­ tiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology (Prince­ton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1995), 73.

29 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 176– 179

61. PS, 587. 62. Einstein, “Die Sammlung Henri Rouart,” 149. 63. DR, 122. 64. PS, 585. 65. Einstein’s reference to Nietz­sche in his unpublished essay provides a theoretical basis for his claim that Reber’s collection subverts existing categories of classification and “revolutionizes art historical values.” Einstein, “Die Sammlung Dr. Reber,” 282. 66. PS, 586. 67. PS, 585. 68. Sebastian Zeidler, “Introduction,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 6. Much ink has been spilled on Einstein’s theories of cubism. For more thorough analy­sis, see Zeidler’s Form as Revolt, Fleckner’s Carl Einstein, and Oliver Simons’s Raumgeschichten: Topographien der Moderne in Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Literatur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007). 69. Zeidler, “Introduction,” 6. 70. Fleckner, Carl Einstein, 314. 71. Carl Einstein, “Totalität I-­V,” in W I, 215. 72. Rhys Williams, “Primitivism in the Works of Carl Einstein, Carl Sternheim and Gottfried Benn,” Journal of Eu­ro­pean Studies 13, no. 52 (December 1983): 253. 73. Zoë Strother, “Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” African Arts 46, no. 4. (Winter 2013): 12. What Einstein’s role or duties as a colonial officer entailed is not known. Briefwechsel, 88–89. 74. See especially Briefwechsel, 123, 132, 172. 75. Carl Einstein to Franz Blei, 1916, in Briefwechsel, 88. Several critics including Haxthausen and Strother have cited Einstein’s letter to Blei, but nobody has focused on the role that collecting plays in his fanat­i­cism. 76. Ibid., 88. 77. Ibid. ­ ere also drawn from eth78. Tzara’s poems and the Dada Almanac’s “Negerlieder” w nographic journals. For more on modernist anthologies, see Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Braddock’s book privileges the role of anthology form in the dissemination of modernism, which, he notes, “emerged in the 1910s as the genre par excellence of ‘all the isms’ ” and “persisted throughout the 1920s . . . ​as an instrument of ­future reconfigurations and arguments about the aesthetic and social agency of the modernist cultural proj­ect as such.” Braddock argues that modernist anthologies “figured modernism less as a canon of works than as a set of aesthetic and cultural practices.” Collecting as Modernist Practice, 16, 160. 79. For Tzara, African words served the purpose of breaking down the semantic structures of language to try to move poetry back to the foundations of language and its intuitive sound-­qualities. Kai Mikkonen, “Artificial Africa in the Eu­ro­pean Avant-­ Garde: Marinetti and Tzara,” in Europa! Europa? The Avant-­Garde, Modernism, and the Fate of a Continent, ed. Sascha Bru et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 401. 80. Alemán, “Die Konstruktion des Anderen,” 172. 81. Henri-­Pierre Roché, Carnets: Les Années Jules et Jim, pt. 1: 1920–1921, ed. André Dimanche (Marseille: Cours Jean Ballard, 1990), 386. Einstein even expresses amusement that his own collection was appreciated. Einstein to Wasmuth F ­ amily, 1925, in Briefwech­ sel, 389.

NOTES TO PA GES 179– 182

293

82. AS, 110. Other objects from Einstein’s collection pictured in African Sculp­ ture include a headpiece (95), a palm oil vessel (96), a door frame of a chieftain’s hut from Cameroon (100), and a statuette of a crouching ­woman from the Bahuana ­people (128). 83. Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Akten, 137. 84. NS, 58. 85. FR, 62. 86. See the introduction. 87. The German colonization of Africa has been the subject of a growing body of scholarship. A few recent examples include Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Cul­ ture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2012), Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in Ger­ man East Africa (Columbus: Ohio State, 2014), and Steven Press, Blood and Diamonds: Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). 88. Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History, tr. Sorcha O’Hagan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012), 1. 89. Gobineau appropriated the rhe­toric of science to allege that the “Aryan” race was superior to “yellow” and “black” types, who ­were deemed “the lowest,” defined by their “animal character” and lack of intellect. Arthur de Gobineau, An Essay on the In­equality of the ­Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (London: Heinemann, 1915), 205. 90. As H. Glenn Penny argues, “Bastian’s museum—by far the largest and most impor­tant of Germany’s ethnographic museums—­was not simply a by-­product of German ethnology. It was a constitutive site for its development, a spatial and institutional cipher for the history of German anthropology, as well as a motor for its subsequent evolution.” “Bastian’s Museum: On the Limits of Empiricism and the Transformation of German Ethnology,” in Worldly Provincialism, ed. Matti Bunzl (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 88, 125. 91. Kathryn Gunsch, “Art and/or Ethnographica? The Reception of Benin Works from 1897–1935,” African Arts 46, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 26. 92. For a more detailed analy­sis, see Uwe Fleckner’s “The Death of the Work of Art,” in Die Schau des Fremden, ed. Cordula Grewe (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006). ­ ere created in conscious oppo93. German ethnographic museums, argues Penny, w sition to curiosity cabinets to move t­oward an empirically based science of h ­ uman culture and history. Bastian drew on the cosmopolitan Humboldtian tradition to or­ga­nize his museum geo­graph­i­cally in order to allow visitors to make their own connections between objects. Adhering to Humboldt’s notion of a unitary mankind, ethnographers argued that a comparative analy­sis of “mankind’s variations” could best be pursued in museums, where theories about humanity could be tested. Unlike Anglo-­American institutions such as the Smithsonian, German museums lacked the developmental approach to exhibiting artifacts that placed Western culture at the top of the hierarchy. H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 34–35. 94. Ibid., 103. 95. Ibid., 124.

29 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 182– 185

96. Kurt Krieger and Gerd Koch, Baessler Archiv: Beiträge zur Völkerkunde, vol. 21 (Berlin: Verlag von Dietrich Reimer, 1973), 106. 97. Penny, Objects of Culture, 17–50. When I asked the curator about West Africa, he replied that East Africa made up most of the collection due to Germany’s colonial presence. Penny offers a historiographic corrective to the argument that colonialism was the only ­factor in the growth of German ethnographic museums, citing the role of scientists, collectors, tourists, and civic competition among German cities. 98. Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Akten: Betreffend die Erwerbung Ethnolo­ gische Gegenstände aus Afrika, vol. 57 ( January 1, 1926–­December 31, 1926), 131. 99. “The Benin Collection in Berlin,” Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, accessed December 2, 2021, https://­www​.­smb​.­museum​/­en​/­museums​-­institutions​/­ethnologisches​ -­museum​/­collection​-­research​/­benin​-­collection. 100. Benin pieces ­were praised by Eu­ro­pean viewers as art rather than being relegated to the sphere of ethnographic objects like other Africana. According to Gunsch, Luschan “was one of the first curators to recognize the ‘art status’ of Benin works.” “Art and/or Ethnographica,” 23. 101. Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (London: Oneworld, 2021), 87. 102. Carl Einstein to Felix von Luschan, 1913, in Briefwechsel, 74. 103. AS, 74–75. Einstein notes that Benin bronze art “is the most accessible for the typical Eu­ro­pean. ­There he finds what is for African conceptions a strong naturalism and he delights in the opportunity to marvel at technique and skill. Nothing, however, raises suspicions about the artistic quality of ­these bronzes more embarrassingly than their proximity to average Eu­ro­pean taste.” AS, 81. Einstein’s illustrations 5.6–5.10 are all listed as coming from Benin. 104. The Benin Bronzes are the subject of extensive con­temporary debates around the patriation of looted artwork. When Victor Ehikhamenor, a con­temporary artist from Benin, went to see the Benin Bronzes displayed in the British Museum, he said he felt as though he was “visiting relatives b­ ehind bars.” Phillips, Loot, xxii. The phraseology evokes James’s characters who visit their familial past in the British Museum. 105. Most controversially, the MoMA presented an ambitious survey exhibition titled “Primitivism” in 20th ­Century Art, which included 150 modern art works and some 200 tribal artifacts, in September 1984. 106. NS, 48. Translation modified. 107. NS, 44. Echoing his Reber essays, Einstein’s use of the word “interpret” connects material collecting with the literary realm. 108. Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, “Reconfiguring Museums: An Afterword,” in Die Schau des Fremden, Bd. 26, ed. Cordula Grewe (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 362. 109. Andrew Zimmerman, “From Natu­ral Science to Primitive Art: German New Guinea in Emil Nolde,” in Die Schau des Fremden, Bd. 26, 284. 110. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, “Reconfiguring Museums,” 365. 111. See Karl Scheffler, “Berliner Museumskrieg” (Berlin, 1921), 20. For more analy­sis of this debate, see Fleckner, “The Death of the Work of Art.” 112. Williams, “Primitivism,” 248. 113. James Clifford, Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Lit­er­a­ ture, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 135.

NOTES TO PA GES 185– 187

295

114. Ibid., 239. 115. Noting the link between museum and mausoleum, Theodor Adorno argues that the word museal “describes objects to which the observer no longer has a relationship and which are in the pro­cess of ­dying . . . ​Museums are like the ­family sepulchers of works of art. They testify to the neutralization of culture.” “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, trans. Paul and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 175. 116. Jack D. Flam and Miriam Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-­Century Art: A Docu­ mentary History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 27. 117. William Rubin, “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction,” in “Primitivism” in 20th ­Century Art, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 14. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid. 120. Emil Nolde, Welt und Heimat: Die Südseereise 1913–1918 (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1965), 18. 121. Zimmerman observes, “Nolde’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the masks as animate suggests a critique of the way in which the curators at the Berlin Museum of Ethnology rendered the objects in their cases as artless, cultureless, and ahistorical. The situation of the masks in both the museum cases and Nolde’s painting conveys a sense of life trapped in a Eu­ro­pean apparatus.” “From Natu­ral Science to Primitive Art,” 296. 122. Ibid. 123. Zimmerman provides the following gloss: “Nolde’s attempt to reconfigure the primitive art/natural scientific object opposition was . . . ​an integral part of the larger re­orientation of colonial administration away from anthropological natu­ral science and ­toward a policy of development. Nolde’s primitivism was not merely consonant with the new view of the economic and cultural potentials of the inhabitants of the colonies, but in fact led him to participate directly in this new colonialism.” Ibid., 297. 124. Even a­ fter World War II, Claude Lévi-­Strauss and the refugee surrealists ­were passionate collectors in New York, frequenting the ware­houses of the American Museum of Natu­ral History and the Museum of the American Indian. While Clifford argues that collecting during the 1940s was part of “a strug­gle to gain aesthetic status for ­these increasingly rare masterpieces,” Negro Sculpture suggests that this shift occurred much ­earlier, partly due to Einstein’s efforts to treat ethnographic objects as legitimate works of art. Predicament of Culture, 238, 239. 125. Flam and Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-­Century Art, 214. 126. The African objects that Picasso “collected ­were tools for ­doing specific jobs: the projecting cylindrical eyes of a Grebo mask, for example, suggesting the sound hole of a metal guitar construction.” Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 148. 127. Hugo Ball to August Hoffman, 1916, in Briefe 1911–1927, ed. Annemarie Schütt-­ Hennings (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1957), 66. I am indebted to Manuel Maldonado Alemán for citing this letter. “Die Konstruktion des Anderen: Carl Einstein und der Primitivismus-­Diskurs der Europäischen Avantgarden,” in Carl Einstein and the Eu­ro­pean Avant-­Garde, ed. Nicola Creighton and Andreas Kramer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 170. 128. Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 303. 129. Ibid.

29 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 187– 189

130. See Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), and Cordula Grewe, Die Schau des Fremden, ed. Cordula Grewe (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006). 131. Alemán, “Die Konstruktion des Anderen,” 180. 132. NS, 44. 133. Sculpture must tackle the “difficulty of fixing three-­dimensionality in a single act of optical repre­sen­ta­tion and viewing it as a totality.” In contrast to the “optical naturalism” of Eu­ro­pean sculpture, which “essentially cheats the viewer out of the experience of the cubic,” the formal realism of African art “seems to have found a valid, pure solution to the prob­lem” of totality. NS, 52. 134. Williams, “Primitivism,” 251. 135. NS, 48. 136. NS, 48. 137. Rainer Rumold explains that Einstein found in African sculpture a “power­f ul extra-­European model for a reconstitution of seeing as experience.” Archaeologies of Modernity: Avant-­Garde Bildung (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 142. 138. NS, 49. 139. NS, 48. 140. NS, 49. 141. NS, 49. 142. NS, 46. 143. Williams, “Primitivism,” 251. 144. Strother, “Looking for Africa,” 9–10. 145. Ibid., 14. 146. Haxthausen, “Introduction,” in NS, 42. 147. Andreas Michel writes, “This intimate nexus between form and function is grounded in Einstein’s adherence to a strong version of autonomy aesthetics. In his view, art can only function as a critique of modern civilization if it is founded upon a radical separation between itself and the historical beholder. This separation is expressed through the work’s formal properties . . . ​It is the concept of totality that guarantees art’s autonomous status.” “Formalism to Psychoanalysis: On the Politics of Primitivism in Carl Einstein,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 150. 148. The art dealer Josef Brummer was the “instigator” for Negro Sculpture, supplying most of the illustrations and financing the book’s publication. Jean-­Louis Paudrat, “From Africa,” in “Primitivism” in 20th ­Century Art, 151. 149. Wendy Grossman, “Photography at the Crossroads: African Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Die Schau des Fremden, Bd. 26, 321. 150. At the same time, Einstein was aware of their power, writing, “Not a soul would have read Negro Sculpture without the photo­graphs.” Carl Einstein to Tony Simon-­ Wolfskehl, 1923, in Briefwechsel, 331. 151. Sebastian Zeidler, “Totality Against a Subject: Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 15–16. 152. Grossman, “Photography at the Crossroads,” 328. 153. FR, 67.

NOTES TO PA GES 189– 193

297

154. Strother, “Looking for Africa,” 9. 155. Ibid., 11. “As an ensemble, the systematic pre­sen­ta­tion of a doctored and highly selective group of images from roughly twenty countries conjured ‘African art’ into being as a corpus that literally never existed before . . . ​The resulting impression of stylistic unity is so compelling that it is wise to remember Allan Sekula’s warnings about how ‘archival proj­ects’ achieve a fake coherence made credible by the sheer quantity of images assembled . . . ​It is the archive which ‘liberates’ meaning from use, which extracts the object from its context in order to establish a relation of abstract visual equivalence between pictures.” Ibid. 156. NS, 45. Translation modified. 157. Haxthausen, “Introduction,” in NS, 39. The scholarly consensus is that before his time in Brussels, Einstein had scant knowledge of Africa. 158. FR, 64. 159. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett argues that when ethnographic objects are reclassified as art, the categories are maintained: “Now the newly defined work of art must be accorded the same re­spect that art historians bestow on Eu­ro­pean art. This means that that the creativity of individual artists must be recognized and that aesthetic response in local contexts be given its due. Without an indigenous art category comparable to art history’s disciplinary subject and without indigenous art categories comparable to painting and sculpture, art historians use distinction to effect the transformation of artifacts into art in two ways. ‘Artifact’ is a byproduct of the distinction between what is and what is not art and as such helps to secure the integrity of the art category and the value of every­thing within it. This is why the category of artifact does not—­indeed cannot—­ dis­appear when artifacts are reclassified as art.” “Reconfiguring Museums,” 363. 160. NS, 45. 161. Michel, “Formalism to Psychoanalysis,” 149. 162. NS, 45. ­ ere. He 163. Simons’s notion of spatial discontinuities is particularly relevant h demonstrates how Negro Sculpture represents a “radical inversion of Eu­ ro­ pean thought.” Raumgeschichten, 216. For a more extensive discussion, see 216–50. 164. Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 31. 165. Carl Einstein, “The Berlin Museum of Ethnography,” in MF, 199. Translation modified. 166. Strother, “Looking for Africa,” 8. 167. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture, 18. 168. Ibid., 25. 169. As the ethnologist Richard Thurnwald wrote in 1912, “Their value does not lie, as in the case of art objects, in the single objects themselves, rather they have a representative meaning. It depends on their position and relationship to the entire life, on the functions, that they have to fulfill, on the needs, out of which they ­were created.” I am indebted to Penny for the citation and translation of Thurnwald’s quotation. Objects of Culture, 206. 170. Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture, 327. 171. NS, 58. 172. BC, 351.

29 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 193– 197

173. NS, 44. 174. ­There are significant parallels with Warburg’s pre­sen­ta­tion and approach in Mne­ mosyne, which also lacked captions: “The disparate objects whose images Warburg collected for his panels . . . ​­were objects taken from dif­fer­ent levels of the past, freed from functionality, abandoned to a strange figural floating.” Philippe-­Alain Michaud, Aby War­ burg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 261. 175. WA, 256. 176. NS, 48. 177. WA, 255. 178. NS, 49. 179. NS, 45. 180. Williams, “Primitivism,” 224. Totality ­frees the object from the illustrative, classificatory function that it assumes ­under causal scientific rationalism. 181. AR, H1a, 2, 205. 182. Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, trans. Esther Leslie, ed. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut Wizisla (London: Verso Books, 2007), 74. As Marx and her colleagues note, “By airbrushing and the imposition of a stencil, the background [of the toys] is neutralized, in order to excerpt the objects from the surroundings, allowing them to emerge more clearly.” 183. WA, 108. Haxthausen’s gloss is helpful in distinguishing Einstein, who privileged the image over the word from Benjamin’s “belief in the primacy of the word,” noting that “what­ever the effect of the technical apparatus of film on sense perception of the spectator, it is the word that makes it a po­liti­cal instrument.” “Reproduction/ Repetition,” 64. 184. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in SW II, 775. 185. Benjamin, “­Little History of Photography,” 527. I am indebted to Kirshenblatt-­ Gimblett for citing Matthews’s 1893 lecture. Destination Culture, 32. 186. Kobena Mercer observes that Riefenstahl’s book “demonstrate[s] the colonial roots of the negrophile’s scopic fetishism—­what is shown has precious ­little to do with the culture of African body adornment, rather, like a blank page, the very blackness of black skin acts as a tabula ra­sa for the inscription of a look that speaks primarily of a white, Eu­ro­pean sexuality. Riefenstahl admits that her fascination with this East African ­people did not originate from an interest in their ‘culture,’ but from a photo­graph of two Nuba wrestlers.” Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 187. As with Negro Sculpture, the photo­graphs rather than the culture are the focal point. 187. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in ­Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays (New York: Picador Paper, 2002), 97. 188. Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” 775. 189. Haxthausen, “Introduction,” in AS, 64. Haxthausen argues that African Sculpture is the most “conventionally art-­historical of Einstein’s writings,” which perhaps also accounts for “the book’s relative neglect in Einstein scholarship.” Far from “being a ‘second volume’ of Negerplastik,” he concludes, it was “every­thing that the book was not.” Ibid., 67. 190. AS, 71. Alluding to the shortcomings of Negro Sculpture, Einstein argues, “The museum has overreacted to the excessive mishmash of its old installation by embrac-

NOTES TO PA GES 197– 200

299

ing its aesthetically defined opposite, which lacks a vital foundation.” “Berlin Museum,” 200. 191. Ibid., 74. 192. Ibid., 72. 193. MD, 6. 194. Einstein, Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 161. Translation provided by Williams, “Primitivism,” 254. 195. In a 1930 exhibition review, Einstein echoes this sentiment: “[African] art must be treated historically, and no longer considered just from the point of view of taste or aesthetics.” “Zu einer Ausstellung in der Galerie Pigalle,” in W III, 572. 196. AS, 70–71. 197. AR, H4a, 1, 211. 198. AS, 70. 199. AS, 70. This “violent decay” anticipates Jacques Derrida’s “archival vio­lence.” Invoking Freud’s death drive as “archive destroying,” Derrida writes, “The vio­lence of a power (Gewalt) which at once posits and conserves the law . . . ​the vio­lence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival vio­lence.” Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 12. 200. AS, 70, 72. 201. Haxthausen provides helpful context for this critique: “Rarely considered in the lit­er­a­ture, Einstein’s review of the museum’s reor­ga­ni­za­tion stands out among the published responses for its probing critical assessment of the new installation and of museums in general. He frankly acknowledges the circumstances of colonial plunder, the hoarding, musealization, and cultural estrangement of artifacts, a pro­cess that had, a­ fter all, made pos­si­ble his own growing expertise—he had never before written so explic­itly, or with such eloquence and passion, about the colonialist foundation of ethnography.” Introduction to “Berlin Museum,” 197. 202. Fleckner, “Death of the Work of Art,” 306. 203. Einstein, “Berlin Museum,” 198. 204. Filippo T. Marinetti’s tirade singles out the museum: “We want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries. Italy has been too long the g­ reat second­-h ­ and market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries . . . ​To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! . . . ​But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum ­every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?” “The Futurist Manifesto,” in F.  T. Marinetti’s Critical Writings, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2006), 12. 205. Fleckner, “Death of the Work of Art,” 312. 206. Einstein, “Berlin Museum,” 199. Translation modified. 207. Zimmerman contends that Einstein “repressed the colonial origin of this critique [of anthropology], which then appeared only as an aesthetic and moral dislike of the anthropology museum.” In real­ity, Einstein, who worked in the Belgian colonial office, directly participated in ­these discussions. His efforts to include context in African Sculpture provide further evidence of his understanding of the colonial situation. “From Natu­ral Science to Primitive Art,” 299.

30 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 201– 205

208. Einstein, “Berlin Museum,” 199. 209. Ibid. 210. Ibid. 211. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 39. 212. Carl Einstein, “Schausammlung und Forschungsinstitut,” in W II, 453. 213. Carl Einstein, “Das Berliner Völkerkunde-­Museum: Anläßlich der Neuordnung,” in W II, 447. Translation mine. 214. In 1905, Bastian stated that ethnographic museums “should not only function as archives and libraries, but must also serve as laboratories” in which ethnologists could test the latest theories. Penny, Objects of Culture, 101. Einstein’s emphasis on an optimum balance between an aesthetic and ethnological approach also returns to the same exhibition princi­ples which underpinned Bastian’s “comparative ge­ne­tic method.” See Fleckner, “The Death of the Work of Art,” 310. Samuel Quiccheberg, The First Treatise on Museums, trans. Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), vi. 215. Fleckner, “Death of the Work of Art,” 312. The mature Einstein bears out Theodor Adorno’s observation that the princi­ple of art for art’s sake is “too ingenuous” in the “suspicion that museums alone are responsible for what is done to paintings . . . ​ What eats away at the life of the artwork is also its own life.” Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” 184. 216. AS, 71. For more on this unfinished proj­ect, see Heike Neumeister, “Masks and Shadow Souls: Carl Einstein’s Collaboration with Thomas A. Joyce, The British Museum, and Documents,” in Carl Einstein und die Europäische Avantgarde/Carl Ein­ stein and the Eu­ro­pean Avant-­Garde, ed. Nicola Creighton and Andreas Kramer (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), and Briefwechsel, 401–7. 6. Einstein’s “Critical Dictionary”

1. Carl Einstein, “Dictionnaire critique: Nachtigall,” in W III, 544. All translations from Einstein’s “Nightingale” entry are provided by Charles Haxthausen in October 107 (Winter 2004): 152–54. 2. Ibid. 3. Rainer Rumold, “ ‘Painting as a Language. Why Not?’ Carl Einstein in ‘Documents,’ ” October 107 (Winter 2004): 77. 4. “Miracle,” the official En­glish translation of “Wunder,” downplays this etymological link. 5. Einstein never published the sequel to Bebuquin—­a text he worked on intermittently between 1922 and the mid-1930s. Charles Haxthausen, “Introduction,” in MF, 6. 6. For more on Bebuquin and cubism, see Patrick Healy, “Carl Einstein and the Dilettantes of the Miracle,” in Bebuquin: or the Dilettantes of the Miracle, by Carl Einstein, trans. Patrick Healy (Amsterdam: November Editions, 2017); Conor Joyce, Carl Einstein in Documents (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2003); and Neil Donahue, “Analy­sis and Construction: The Aesthetics of Carl Einstein,” The German Quarterly 61, no. 3 (Summer 1988). 7. Just a few examples are Rainer Maria Rilke’s “­Thing” poems, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, ­Virginia Woolf ’s “Solid Objects,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Comedian as

NOTES TO PA GES 205– 207

301

the Letter C,” and Franz Kaf ka’s “Odradek.” See Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modern­ ism and the Test of Production (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1998) for a discussion of Anglo-­American modernism’s preoccupation with objects. 8. Bill Brown, A Sense of ­Things: The Object ­Matter of American Lit­er­a­ture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 137. 9. Neil Donahue, “Analy­sis and Construction,” 429. 10. Carl Einstein, Bebuquin: or the Dilettantes of the Miracle, trans. Patrick Healy (Amsterdam: November Editions, 2017), 65. 11. For more on Einstein’s relationship with Kant, see Sebastian Zeidler, “Totality Against a Subject: Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” October 107 (Winter 2004). 12. Klaus Kiefer notes that Einstein’s intertext was prob­ably Max Dessoir’s The Double Ego, which references several museum-­like booths on a fairground (Jahrmarkt), including a “magnetic cabinet” and a sleeping fortune teller. Klaus H. Kiefer, “Die Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses: Carl Einsteins Beitrag zu Documents,” in Elan vital oder Das Auge des Eros (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1994), 35. 13. Einstein, Bebuquin, 25. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 48. 16. Ibid., 31. 17. Carl Einstein, “George Grosz,” in W II, 466. 18. Einstein, Bebuquin, 32. 19. Ibid. 20. As Brown observed, the painting pre­sents a portrait of vases and a still life of the girls. Sense of ­Things, 140. 21. Einstein, Bebuquin, 32. 22. Neil Donahue argues that Bebuquin “has less to do with the formation of character than with its deformation . . . ​unlike the protagonist of a Bildungsroman the character has l­ittle potential for positive change.” Bebuquin’s character “is one of puerility and experimental identity for the sake of negation, in the manner of a dilettante.” “Analy­sis and Construction,” 429. 23. Einstein, Bebuquin, 64. 24. Einstein had, ­after all, dedicated Bebuquin to André Gide. 25. Carl Einstein, “der tod ist meister der verwandlung,” in W IV, 48. Einstein’s unpublished, untitled original does not provide capitalization or umlauts. 26. At one point, Böhm, who is dead, says, “Kant’s seductive meaning is that he created an equilibrium between the object and subject. But one ­thing, the main ­thing he forgot was that which the cognizing subject does, namely constitute a subject and object.” Einstein, Bebuquin, 35. 27. Einstein, Bebuquin, 25. 28. Healy notes, “The idea of qualitative time implied for Einstein a multitude of multiple qualitative discontinuums; past, pre­sent and ­future dissolve into a complex time experience which is the decisive meta­phoric character of the work. As in cubism, t­ here is a spatial and temporal simultaneity of diverging views and a simultaneous complex of transitory figuration and transformation. This culminates in the destruction of discrete, determined objects, and Einstein abandons the notion of a substantial I.” “Carl Einstein and the Dilettantes of the Miracle,” 10.

30 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 207– 210

29. Einstein, Bebuquin, 33. 30. Ibid., 26. 31. Ibid., 26. 32. For an insightful discussion of the many intertexts in Bebuquin, see Kiefer, “Aternalistisches Finale oder Bebuquins Aus-­Sage: Carl Einsteins Beitrag zur Postmoderne,” Neobelicon 21 (TIME 1994): 23–26. 33. Zeidler summarizes, Einstein “shared the early twentieth-­century’s urge, even its rage, to make the world new. But he also recorded the terror that attended that urge, and the wretchedness of a novelty that’s merely the figment of a private imagination.” FR, 221. 34. See Kiefer, “Aternalistisches Finale,” 45, for Einstein’s preoccupation with the story of creation. See Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), for a discussion on the genealogy of the concept of originality: “ ‘Romantic’ theories of literary creation have assumed an analogy, if not an equality, with divine creation, whereby the literary work is created from beyond the material or phenomenal context. Originality is treated by such theories as an immanent or transcendent value which inheres in the text, rather than being ascribed to it . . . ​The poet was deemed to be ‘a maker . . . ​such as . . . ​we may say of God; who . . . ​made all the world out of nought’ ” (2–3). 35. Einstein, Bebuquin, 33. 36. Kiefer points out that Einstein’s prologue refers to Nietz­sche’s Thus Spoke Zara­ thustra, as it “anticipates the coming of a master.” “Die Ethnologisierung,” 19. In Donahue’s reading, “each figure is a mere dilettante of the absolute,” namely the miracle. “Analy­sis and Construction,” 430. 37. In his insightful reading of Schiller and Goethe, Paul Fleming concludes that, unlike true artists, “Dilettantes remain on the surface—­mostly of their own passion—­ and therefore miss both the depths and the surface.” Thus, instead of producing art, dilettantes produce “a documentation of the desire to be an artist.” Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008), 78. 38. Donahue, “Analy­sis and Construction,” 430. 39. According to Horst Bredekamp, the Wunderkammer mingled cultures in a nonhierarchical way to bring together a diverse set of disciplines and cultures into the same physical space. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology (Prince­ton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1995), 35. H ­ ere we can find a pre­de­ces­sor for the playful surrealist attempts to bring Eu­ro­pean and non-­Western cultures into the same epistemological framework. 40. ­These orga­nizational princi­ples date back to the Wunderkammer, which juxtaposed natu­ral objects (naturalia) such as fossils alongside marvelous objects (mirabilia) like unicorn horns as well as works of art (artificialia), not according to any epistemological hierarchy. Bruce Robertson, preface to The First Treatise on Museums, by Samuel Quiccheberg, trans. Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), vi. 41. Even Denis Hollier’s seminal introduction to Documents, “The Use-­Value of the Impossible,” trans. Liesl Ollman, October 60 (Spring 1992), neglects Einstein’s role in the founding of the journal, mentioning only Georges Bataille, Pierre d’Espezel, and

NOTES TO PA GES 210– 211

303

Georges Wildenstein (4). Georges Didi-­Huberman concedes, “Einstein’s precise function at the center of Documents remains obscure. It ­will prob­ably take the publication of new archival material to redress the silence, the bad faith even, that has dogged his contribution to the theory of the Pa­ri­sian avant-­garde around the time of Documents.” “ ‘Picture = Rupture’: Visual Experience, Form and Symptom according to Carl Einstein,” trans. C. F. B. Miller, Papers of Surrealism 7 (2007): 1. 42. Carl Einstein: Briefwechsel 1904–1940, ed. Klaus Kiefer and Liliana Meffre (Berlin: J. B. Metzler, 2020). It was thanks primarily to the work of Kiefer that the formative role of Einstein was first recognized. See Kiefer’s Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994) and “Die Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses.” 43. In a 1928 letter to Erna Reber, Einstein states, “Surely you must know about our magazine. I think it ­will become something. I have already drawn up the contents of 15 issues.” Carl Einstein to Erna Reber, 1928, in Briefwechsel, 439. 44. Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein, et al., Kritisches Wörterbuch, ed. Rainer Maria Kiesow and Henning Schmidgen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2005), 99. 45. Didi-­Huberman, “Picture = Rupture,” 1. 46. Bataille et al., Kritisches Wörterbuch, 98. 47. Ranging from “Transformation de l’espace” to “Arabische Religion in Plastiken vor dem Islam,” his list of proposed topics switches between French and German. The correspondence between Einstein’s outline and the published product of Documents merits closer investigation. Although not all of his early ideas made it into the issues, the heterogeneous format he proposed was retained. Carl Einstein to G. F. Reber, in Brief­ wechsel, 441–46. 48. Ibid., 441. 49. Ibid., 444. 50. Individual issues often involved compromises between Bataille’s faction of dissident surrealists and the conservative alliance of academics and curators led by Pierre d’Espezel, Bataille’s colleague at the Cabinet des Médailles. Alastair Brotchie, “Introduction,” in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ed. Alastair Brotchie (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 9. ­After its dissolution in 1931 due to financial constraints, Documents was succeeded by the journal Minotaur (1933–39), which never assumed the same provocative role, although it featured pieces by many of the same contributors. Hubertus Gaßner, Elan vital, oder, Das Auge des Eros: Kandinsky, Klee, Arp, Miro, Calder (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1994), 75. 51. Einstein to G. F. Reber, 441–46. 52. Documents’ approach has in­ter­est­ing parallels with The New Negro, which sought to “per­sis­tently articulate its disparate materials together. It thus obtains the status of a ‘curated’ volume.” Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 182. 53. Documents 2, no.  7 (1930). All Documents citations refer to Documents: Doc­ trines, archéologie, beaux-­arts, ethnographie, 2 vols. (Paris: J. M. Place, 1991). 54. Emil Waldmann, “La collection Schmitz: L’Art français,” Documents 2, no. 6 (1930): 313. 55. “­There is something of the miser in the numismatist’s passion. He loves money but, like Molière’s Harpagon, only to keep it and look at it. He cannot stand expenditure. He is possessed by a strange, disinterested love for money, a love for that which makes every­thing pos­si­ble, but cut off from all that it permits; a love for that which is

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TO PAGES 211– 213

dead and forbidden, at once on display and in reserve. He demands of the conductors of exchange value that they themselves be out of ser­vice.” Hollier, “Use-­Value,” 3. 56. Hollier elaborates that the ethnographers of Documents “want a museum that would not automatically reduce exhibited objects to their formal, aesthetic properties, an exhibition space from which use-­value would not be excluded, but rather one in which it would not only be represented, but exhibited. They would like to undo the opposition which dictates that one uses a tool and looks at a painting.” Ibid., 9. 57. Ibid., 20. 58. Brotchie, “Introduction,” 11. 59. Still, the two journals remained intertwined. d’Espezel, a board member of the Gazette, was involved in the founding of Documents. Wildenstein, a financial backer of the Gazette, also financed Documents. Hollier, “Use-­Value,” 3. Documents even contained advertisements for the Gazette. 60. Taking a cue from Bataille’s 1922 thesis, which claims that the medieval poem L’Ordene de Chevalerie “has no interest aside from being an old, peculiar document,” Documents treated literary works as documents. Hollier, “Use-­Value,” 4. 61. Documents followed the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the Museum of Ethnography, undertaken by Georges Henri Rivière, who summed up its MO as “fundamentally anti-­ aesthetic. The Trocadéro was to be no more another museum of fine arts than Documents was another Gazette des Beaux-­arts. Not for an instant did Rivière envision competing with the Louvre.” Hollier, “Use-­Value,” 14. 62. James Clifford, Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Lit­er­a­ture, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 132. 63. Heike Neumeister argues that the journal’s photographic “culture-­critical juxtapositions” w ­ ere inspired by Einstein’s own early work at the Malik-­Verlag. “Masks and Shadow Souls: Carl Einstein’s Collaboration with Thomas A. Joyce, The British Museum, and Documents,” in Carl Einstein and the Eu­ro­pean Avant-­Garde, ed. Nicola Creighton and Andreas Kramer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 146. 64. In its usage of juxtaposition and montage, Mnemosyne has many affinities with Huberman describes Warburg’s proj­ ect as “knowledge montage.” Documents. Didi-­ “Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies),” in Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 16. With their interest in the marginal and noncanonical, particularly in ethnography and non-­Western art, Warburg shared Documents’ refusal to accept disciplinary bound­aries. Einstein corresponded with Fritz Saxl of the Warburg Institute, writing that Documents would be interested in commissioning a review of their publications. Joyce, Einstein in Documents, 39. 65. According to Christopher Johnson, Mnemosyne “recalls how ­these themes and styles originate in antiquity to survive and thrive in the Re­nais­sance and then persist in mutated, often debased forms into the pre­sent. Unlike most synoptic thinkers, then, Warburg trades discursive excess for the more immediate metonymies produced by juxtaposed images and heuristic diagrams. He revives the synchrony of seeing and demotes the diachrony of reading.” Memory, Meta­phor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), xi. 66. Clifford, Predicament, 133. 67. Ibid., 132. 68. Joyce, Einstein in Documents, 83.

NOTES TO PA GES 214– 218

305

69. ­After this spread, Joyce argues, the photo­graphs in Documents increasingly served as dramatic devices and active compositional ele­ments rather than mere illustrations of articles. Joyce persuasively connects the increase in dramatic and contradictory use of images in Documents with Bataille’s interest in montage. Einstein in Documents, 149. 70. Ibid., 71. 71. Uwe Fleckner contends that this is ­because Einstein’s “deep skepticism with re­spect to the descriptive capabilities of language when faced with the superiority of visual expression” prompts him to refrain from using photos merely as evidence of the text. Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert: Fragmente einer Intellektuellen Biographie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 353. 72. Georges Bataille, “Bouche,” Documents 2, no. 5 (1930): 300. 73. Carl Einstein, “Exposition de sculpture moderne,” Documents 1, no. 7 (1929): 392. 74. Clifford, Predicament, 121. As critics such as Krzysztof Pomian and Bruce Robertson have argued, the Wunderkammer’s emphasis on won­der decentered rationality by startling the viewer into making unexpected connections between dif­fer­ent objects. By juxtaposing anthropology, art history, and natu­ral history, Documents similarly sought to startle or awe readers. 75. Einstein, “Exposition de sculpture moderne,” 391. The “accidental” dimension of sculpture evokes the chance encounters of Benjamin’s ragpicker, who stumbles upon a discarded trea­sure. 76. Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” in SW II, 775. 77. Ibid. 78. According to some accounts, Einstein implemented the dictionary as a compromise to give Bataille ­free reign to include experimental content while trying to appease d’Espezel’s desire for a more traditional format. Brotchie, “Introduction,” 9. 79. For more on the collaboration between Einstein, Sternheim, and Benn, see Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins, 227–30. 80. Yve-­Alain Bois, “The Use Value of ‘Formless’,” in Formless: A User’s Guide, ed. Yve-­Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Zone Books 1997), 16. 81. As Krzysztof Pomian explains, the Wunderkammer was “where anything could happen, and where, consequently, e­ very question could legitimately be posed . . . ​It was a universe to which corresponded a type of curiosity no longer controlled by theology and not yet controlled by science, both t­hese domains tending to reject certain questions as ­either blasphemous or impertinent, thus subjecting curiosity to a discipline and imposing certain limits on it. Given ­free reign during its brief interregnum, curiosity spontaneously fixed on all that was most rare and most inaccessible, most astonishing and most enigmatic.” Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-­Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 77–78. 82. Georges Bataille, “Informe,” Documents 1, no. 7 (1929): 382. Translated in Ency­ clopaedia Acephalica, 51. 83. Carl Einstein, “Dictionnaire critique: Das Absolute,” in W III, 554. 84. Georges Bataille, “Formless,” Documents 1, no. 7 (1930): 382. Translated in Ency­ clopaedia Acephalica, 51–52. 85. Bois, “Use Value of ‘Formless,’ ” 18. 86. Bois argues that formless “is not so much a stable motif to which we can refer, a symbolizable theme, a given quality, as it is a term allowing one to operate a

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TO PAGES 219– 223

declassification, in the double sense of lowering and of taxonomic disorder. Nothing in and of itself, the formless has only an operational existence: it is a performative, like obscene words, the vio­lence of which derives less from semantics than from the very act of their delivery.” Ibid. 87. Carl Einstein, “The Berlin Museum of Ethnography,” in MF, 198. 88. Brotchie, “Introduction,” 23. 89. Marcel Griaule, “Joujou,” Documents 2, no. 6 (1930): 367. Translated in Encyclo­ paedia Acephalica, 53. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 92. Marcel Griaule, “Gunshot,” Documents 2, no. 1 (1930): 46. Translated in Ency­ clopaedia Acephalica, 99. 93. Clifford, Predicament, 121. 94. Christopher Flint, “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eigh­teenth ­Century Prose Fiction,” PMLA 113, no. 2 (March 1998): 212. 95. As Einstein writes in his André Masson article, interpreting objects “as symptoms or parts of psychological pro­cesses” can help overcome the subject-­object divide. “André Masson, eine Ethnologische Untersuchung,” in W III, 542. 96. In “Galerie Pigalle,” Einstein notes that this animism extended to works of art: “The statues are doubles, with which one captures the spirits . . . ​They are also intended to bring about the return of the deceased to his tribe and the cancellation of his unfortunate death . . . ​The statue is the astral body, and can be described as a living corpse.” W III, 513. 97. Carl Einstein, “Man unterschied einmal zwischen Psychiker und Hyliker,” in W III, 588. Translations mine. 98. Ibid. 99. Carolyn Lanchner, Fernand Léger at The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 208. 100. Rumold, “Painting as a Language,” 83. 101. Carl Einstein, “Nightingale,” 152. 102. Ibid. 103. Einstein expresses this desire for a multiplicity of meanings as a form of artistic renewal: “O, to feel the delight of the manifold of words and meanings; and how painful to learn only one interpretation. Form makes ­things, the stiff eyes, the steady tone. If only I could hide myself in the jouissance of the multiple and not know from what center I would resurrect.” Bebuquin, 122. 104. Einstein, “Nachtigall,” 544. 105. Ibid. 106. Bois, “Use Value of ‘Formless,’ ” 17. 107. Einstein, “Nachtigall,” 544–45. 108. Ibid., 483. 109. Sebastian Zeidler, “Critical Dictionary: ‘Nightingale,’ ” October 107 (Winter 2004): 151. 110. For a more extensive discussion of use value and exchange value in Docu­ ments, see Hollier, “Use-­Value,” 8.

NOTES TO PA GES 223– 227

307

111. This is a more programmatic restatement of Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that the object, “devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly subjective status: it becomes part of a collection.” The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996), 88. 112. Einstein, “Nachtigall,” 545. 113. Haxthausen posits that “Einstein equated naming with loss, with disenchantment, an impoverishment of the world.” “Reproduction/Repetition: Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 68. The loss that naming enacts is linked to the loss of life that must occur in order for Benjamin’s butterfly specimen to be preserved. 114. Carl Einstein to Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler, 1923, in MF, 142. 115. “The child experiences how in language an uncanny power takes control of him, one that continues to work within him and speaks through him against his ­will . . . ​ So through his speaking most of the world becomes dead for him, becomes powerless and mute.” I am indebted to Haxthausen for this quote as well as its translation. Carl Einstein, “Bebuquin II,” quoted in “Reproduction/Repetition,” 68. 116. Einstein, “Nachtigall,” 544. Zeidler notes that the entry is a “rehearsal of the performative contradictions of the ‘Paraphrase’ prose piece . . . ​a denunciation of the comparative symbolism of language that programmatically defeats itself by indulging in an orgy of symbolic comparisons.” He thus concludes, “Its fame is quite undeserved.” FR, 176. 117. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 91. 118. “One has enshrouded and walled off pictures with paraphrase. Artworks are smothered by ­these clichés.” Carl Einstein, “Georges Braque,” in MF, 299. 119. PS, 585. Translations mine. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122. Carl Einstein, “Zur primitiven Kunst,” in W II, 27. Translation mine. 123. Charles Haxthausen, introduction to “On Primitive Art,” in MF, 61. 124. Ibid., 63. 125. “At the level of discourse, groundlessness was the promise of a new beginning. At the level of writing, it was the collapse of the proj­ect even as it was being proclaimed. It is this basic tension that’s responsible for the irritation felt by all readers of Einstein past and pre­sent. Even in a text just three pages long, white noise appears to be obscuring the thesis. The text seems to make the same point over and over again, to make it too elliptically or hyperbolically, or e­ lse to stray off topic altogether.” FR, 18. 126. FR, 19. 127. Carl Einstein, “Paraphrase,” März 5, no. 4 (1911): 114. I am indebted to Sophie Schweiger for her assistance with this translation. 128. See the introduction. Friedrich Nietz­sche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 12. 129. Einstein, “Paraphrase,” 114. 130. Ibid., 115. 131. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 17. 132. Carl Einstein, “An die Geistigen,” in W II, 18.

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TO PAGES 227– 231

133. Carl Einstein to Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler, 1939, in “Reproduction/Repetition,” 70. 134. Hannah S­ ullivan notes, “Instead of making t­hings clearer, James’s postcompositional changes tend to darken the already muddy ­waters. ­Simple vocabulary items are replaced with the complex, and very often a surprising periphrasis replaces some initially straightforward piece of syntax.” The Work of Revision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 93. 135. In part, as S­ ullivan notes, “This functional failure of language in The ­Middle Years is part of James’s despairing response to the outbreak of war in August 1914.” Work of Revision, 97. 136. Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 1914, in Work of Revision, 98. 137. Einstein, “Nachtigall,” 544. 138. Ibid., 545. 139. Ibid. 140. Einstein to Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler, 140. Rumold argues that Einstein’s work categorically privileges visual culture at the expense of lit­er­a­ture: “In valuing the visual image over the modern written word—­painting over lit­er­a­ture—­and in the quest for theorizing experience freed from the constraints of subjectivity, Einstein discarded as relatively outdated the ‘linguistic turn’ modernist and avant-­garde writing had taken since Stephane Mallarmé.” Archeologies of Modernity: Avant-­Garde Bildung (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 172. 141. Far from abandoning lit­er­a­ture, Einstein continued to write ­until the end of his life. Biographical information corroborates the fact that Einstein did not simply turn against a “culture of writing.” Eugene Jolas recounts “talking about poetry” in Einstein’s “book-­cluttered studio” in Paris. Einstein “had grandiose plans for a collection of poetry plaquettes to be issued in German from Paris. We discussed the proj­ect at ­great length, wrote manifestos, gathered a number of manuscripts, but in the end nothing came of it.” Man from Babel, ed. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 123–24. Epilogue

1. Nick Neave, Pam Briggs, Kerry McKellar, and Elizabeth Sillence, “Digital Hoarding Behaviours: Implications for Cybersecurity,” Computers in ­Human Behaviour 96 ( July 2019). Although Rebecca Falkoff ’s book d­ oesn’t focus on digital hoarding, her conclusion about archival failures is relevant h ­ ere: “The prevalence of newspapers in hoards can help to explain the vigor of hoarding discourse in the twenty-­first ­century, as print culture goes digital.” Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 171. Building on Falkoff ’s observation, I am proposing that hoarding is one response to information overload. 2. According to the anthropologist Susan Lepselter, “Hoarding speaks to and about our moment. In the manic depression surrounding crashes, foreclosures, and the secular jeremiads on consumer folly and greed, all occurring against years of confident neoliberalism and globalization, the hoarder’s monstrous accumulations loom with an increasingly ambivalent fascination.” “The Disorder of ­Things: Hoarding Narratives in Popu­lar Media,” Anthropological Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 920.

NOTES TO PA GES 231– 235

309

3. Italo Calvino, “La Poubelle Agréée,” in The Road to San Giovanni (Boston and New York: Mari­ner Books, 2014), 125. 4. Ibid., 121. According to the DSM, newspapers and magazines are the most frequently hoarded objects. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of ­Mental Disorders (Arlington: American Psychiatric Association, 2013), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1176​/­appi​.­books​ .­9780890425596. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 125. 7. Dale Kinney observes, “Late twentieth-­century appropriation art represents the practice at its most naked and is an aty­pi­cal extreme. Unlike the general habit of appropriation, it called attention to itself by testing the limits of permissible taking.” It is not a coincidence that many postmodern artists such as Jeff Koons ­were sued or accused of piracy. “Introduction,” in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture, ed. Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney (New York: Routledge 2011), 7. 8. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), 245. Evoking the romantic failures that fueled Benjamin’s toy collection, Kemal suggests that the collection is a substitution for the beloved and hence always born out of loss. While contemplating Caravaggio’s The Sacrifice of Isaac in Florence, Kemal “saw that it was pos­si­ble to substitute for one’s most cherished object another, and this was why I felt so attached to the ­things of Füsun’s that I had collected over the years.” Pamuk, Museum of Innocence, 501. 9. Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, trans. Ekin Oklap (New York: Harry Abrams, 2012), 121–22. 10. SP, 30. 11. Pamuk, Museum of Innocence, 99. 12. Ibid., 495. 13. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in IL, 188. Pamuk notes in the museum cata­logue, “I felt as if they [objects] ­were communicating with one another. Their ending up in this place ­after being uprooted from the places they used to belong to and separated from the p­ eople whose lives they ­were once part of—­their loneliness, in a word—­aroused in me the shamanic belief that objects too have spirits.” Innocence of Ob­ jects, 52. 14. Pamuk, Museum of Innocence, 56. 15. Ibid., 57. 16. Ibid., 505. 17. Ibid., 691. See the introduction. 18. Ibid., 508. For instance, the fact that Andy Warhol’s private hoard was turned into an orderly, taxonomized collection ­after his death exemplifies the way that institutions transform private collections beyond recognition. Scott Herring observes, “In its attempt to retaxonomize ­these possessions, the auction ­house sought to secure their status as appropriate collectibles embedded within the modern history of everyday mass collecting. By thrusting Warhol’s goods into a material standardization, the cata­log also tried to erase any stigma of psychopathology.” The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern Ameri­ can Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 70. 19. Pamuk, Museum of Innocence, 509. 20. Ibid., 681.

31 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 235– 236

21. Ibid., 243. Elsewhere Kemal notes, “I could not deny the startling truth that when looking at Füsun, I saw someone familiar, someone I felt I knew intimately. She resembled me . . . ​I felt I could easily put myself in her place, could understand her deeply.” Ibid., 18. 22. Ibid., 243. 23. ­There has been surprisingly l­ittle criticism written on the role of gender and the commodification of virginity in The Museum of Innocence. 24. Pamuk, Museum of Innocence, 531. 25. PL, 466. 26. “ ‘I am writing the novel in the first person singular,’ said Orhan Bey. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘In the book you are telling your own story, and saying I, Kemal Bey. I am speaking in your voice. Right now I am trying very hard to put myself in your place, to be you.’ ” Pamuk, Museum of Innocence, 515. 27. Pamuk, Innocence of Objects, 18. 28. For a lively account of the fraught pro­cess of digitizing books, see Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001). 29. “But every­thing said from the ­angle of a real collector is whimsical.” UL, 61.

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Index

abstraction, 9; dangers of, 191–93, 197–98 acquisition: gender dynamics of, 77–78, 84, 113, 158, 235; gleaning as countermodel to cap­i­tal­ist acquisition, 135; in James’s literary practice, 76–81; and vio­lence, 61–66. See also appropriation Adorno, Theodor: on genius and originality, 157, 239n19; letter to Benjamin, 160 aesthetics, 133, 176–77, 179–80, 241n43; aesthetic value, 201; appropriation, 186; autonomy aesthetic, 188; dangers of aestheticization, 44; decontextualization, 214–15; and ethics, 35, 44, 200; fascist aesthetic, 43–44, 148, 157–58, 196; genius aesthetic, 157; imperial vio­lence, 219; of originality, 26–27; primitivism, 198; repre­sen­ta­tional value, 192 alienation: collecting as antidote to, 101–2, 227; enacted by object as commodity, 101–2, 107; of reader, 71–72; and toys, 107 allegory, 151–60, 222–24; Benjamin and Einstein compared, 223; and collecting, 86, 152, 155–56; despotic potential of, 158; and historical materialism, 153–54; and modernity, 153; as revolutionary, 154, 157–58; and ruin in the Trauerspiel, 152−54; vs. symbol, 153; and transformation, 155; as uncritical, 222–23 appropriation, 20, 161–63; authorial, 74; creative, 3, 146; cultural (see cultural appropriation); and decontextualization, 146–47; fascist aesthetic and, 148, 157, 196; fear of, 71; linguistic appropriation and colonial vio­lence, 219; and modernism, 115–16; photography as, 148; as politics, 147–48; ragpicker’s (re-)appropriation of cultural/literary refuse, 129; revolutionary appropriation of bourgeois tropes, 222; and spoliation, 7–8; and vio­lence, 8. See also acquisition

Arabian Nights, The, 73; Benjamin’s analogy of the slave girl to book collecting, 84 archive, 83, 90, 141, 160, 194, 231–32; The Arcades Proj­ect as, 73, 85, 119, 121–30; destruction of, 53, 69–71, 125; Negro Sculpture as, 189–90, 194, 297n155; photography and, 194; publication of archive as theft, 68; and spoils, 51 Arendt, Hannah, 85, 142, 146, 148–49, 276n5 art, visual, 72, 168, 172–73; alternative to language, 209; art dealers and creative collecting, 17; collecting as, 3, 25, 29–30, 113–17, 157, 169, 171; porous boundary between anthropological object and work of art, 184–87, 201; work of, 172, 188 aura, 9, 92–93; and animism, 93, 269n31; in The Aspern Papers, 62; and authenticity, 26–27; and collection’s slippage into hoarding, 148–49; dangers of, 47–50; and decontextualization in Negro Sculpture, 193; fascism’s manipulation of, 157; as historically specific, 94; and historical materialism, 105, 116; and photography, 31, 32f; religious, 61–62; and ritual value, 48; in The Spoils of Poynton, 24–27; and technological reproducibility, 93–94; of toys, 93; transmissibility of, 116. See also reauraticization authenticity, 43–47; aura and, 26–27; collecting and, 182; of toys, 107. See also genius: originality author: anxiety over editors, 68−72; author-­ collector as attuned to historical context, 197; as collector, 197; as gleaner, 137; as hoarder, 66–72, as paraphraser, 226 autonomy: autonomous vs. non-­autonomous object, 192; of characters, 80, 266n192; and historical materialism, 105, 188; loss of in museum collection, 200; of work of art, 188 337

33 8 I n d e x

avant-­garde, 140–41, 147, 167–70, 212–13; and clutter, 140; collection and Wunderkammer, 175; creative networks, 169; Eu­ro­pean avant-­garde and Africa, 178–79, 184–87; and myth of originality, 4–5, 204–9, 225; primitivism, 112–13, 178, 186–87 and spoils, 7 Balzac, Honoré de, 19, 30–31; on collecting and literary production, 15; Cousin Pons, 38, 251n122; as creator vs. Henry James as collector, 75–76; Eduard Fuchs as Balzacian, 103–4 Barthes, Roland, 5, 19, 244n13 Bataille, Georges: and Arcades Proj­ect manuscript, 120–21; in the Critical Dictionary, 217–19, 221; role in Documents, 209–11, 213–14, 302n41, 303n50, 304n60, 305n78 Baudelaire, Charles, 93; in Arcades Proj­ect, 143; Benjamin and, 92, 97, 157–58; poet as ragpicker, 128; ragpicker, 125–30, 139, 153–54; and toys, 97, 206 Baudrillard, Jean, 9–10, 158, 227, 261n124 Benin Bronzes, 182–83 Benjamin, Walter: Adorno’s letter to, 160; afterlife, 95, 105, 132, 143, 174; and allegory, 152–58, 223; Baudelaire, 92, 97, 157–58; biographical affinities with Einstein, 168; “blasting” out of context, 144; citation practice, 145; as ethnographer, 143; and exile, 118, 141–42; fragmentation in collection of, 109; and historical materialism, 103–7, 144–45; as literary gleaner, 141; literary practice as plunder, 146–47; and montage style, 141; in Moscow, 101–3; primitivist reading of ­children’s toys, 97, 111–13; as ragpicker, 129–30; renewal of discarded forms through work with Trauerspiel, 154; social transformation through art, 168; on toys/play and the child’s experience, 96–97, 99–101, 139; and transformation/ destruction of archive, 125; view of ­children, 99–101; view of the collector, 1–2, 124; writing style of, 141 Benjamin, Walter—­Arcades Proj­ect, The: collector in, 124; composition in Bibliothèque nationale de France, 121, 121f; convolute as hoard or collection, 120; and decontextualization of history, 119; and Documents, 212; and exile, 141–42; and The Gleaners and I, 130–32; gleaning as literary praxis, 137–38; and historical

materialism, 140; and (im)possibility of completion, 151; manuscript of, 120–21; as modernist collection, 3; non-­linearity in, 138; overview of, 120; palimpsest in, 140; reader as ragpicker, 138; as revolutionizing history, 143; Salle Labrouste and arcades, 120–24, 122f, 123f; as self-­ preservation in exile, 118; spolia in, 140; subversion of traditional disciplinary frameworks, 212; “unoriginal genius” in, 283n128 Benjamin, Walter—­collecting: book collection, 84, 99, 100f; butterfly collection, 90–91; collecting mania, 85; collecting practice of, 3n12, 97–98, 141–42, 271n60; and commodity fetishism, 88; ethnographic, 89–92; as modernist, 145; in Moscow, 87–89; opposed with Einstein, 168, 172–73; overlap with writing, 99; photo­g raph collection, 194–95, 195f; as reauraticization, 92–95; Rus­sian toy collection, 85, 87–88, 95–101, 106, 114, 194–95; Rus­sian toy collection, photos of, 89f, 96f, 106f, 108, 110f, 111–12, 112f, 195f; surrealism and, 115 Benjamin, Walter—­“Eduard Fuchs, the Collector and Historian,” 103–7, 116, 174 Benjamin, Walter—­“­Little History of Photography,” 92–93, 195 Benjamin, Walter—­Moscow Diary, 87–88, 95–108; anthropology, 108; and Arcades Proj­ect, 102, 124; collecting and historical materialism, 105–7; museums, 277n20; politics of collecting, 120, 148; toys and alienation, 106–7 Benjamin, Walter—­“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 92–93 Benjamin, Walter—­“What is Aura?,” 93, 130, 131f Benjamin, Walter—­“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” 24–27, 47−49, 92–94 Benjamin, Walter—­Arcades Proj­ect, The: collector in, 124; composition in Bibliothèque nationale de France, 121, 121f; convolute as hoard or collection, 120; and decontextualization of history, 119; and Documents, 212; and exile, 141–42; and The Gleaners and I, 130–32; gleaning as literary praxis, 137–38; and historical materialism, 140; and (im)possibility of completion, 151; manuscript of, 120–21;

I n d e x as modernist collection, 3; non-­linearity in, 138; overview of, 120; palimpsest in, 140; reader as ragpicker, 138; as revolutionizing history, 143; Salle Labrouste and arcades, 120–24, 122f, 123f; as self-­ preservation in exile, 118; spolia in, 140; subversion of traditional disciplinary frameworks, 212; “unoriginal genius” in, 283n128 Borges, Jorge Luis, 152, 236 Braddock, Jeremy, 4, 14–15, 242n64, 292n78 Bredekamp, Horst, 241n47, 275n150, 302n39 Brown, Bill, 14, 19, 28, 30–31 Calvino, Italo, 57, 230–32, 256n29, 277n31 capitalism: vs. communism, 101–2, 124; and gleaning, 135, 278n43; hoarding as a threat to consumer culture, 56; and ragpicking, 127, 129 Chiffonnier, Le (Manet), 125–26, 126f citation, 145–48; and authority, 147; Benjamin’s modernist citation practice, 145; as collection, 118, 146; as fragmenting source text, 147; as po­liti­cal, 145–46; as revolutionary, 146; and spoliation, 147 classification: collecting and, 184; misclassification in museums, 184; shifting standards in early 20th ­century, 45–46, 60, 253n163 Clifford, James, 85, 90, 108, 115, 184, 212–13 Codman, Ogden. See Wharton, Edith: The Decoration of Houses collecting practice, 11–13; as addictive, 37, 39, 71–72; and allegory, 86, 152, 155–56; animistic, 80; and anthropology, 235; antidote to universalism, 107; and appropriation, 20, 31–32, 161–63; as art, 3, 25, 29–30, 113–17, 169, 171; and aura, 234; and authenticity, 182; authorial power, 178; authoritarian, 103; Benjamin’s citation practice, 145; bound­aries of, 236; book collecting, 141–42; bourgeois collecting, 12–13, 172; and ­children’s play, 11, 92, 97–98, 158–60; citation as, 118, 146; and classification, 149–50; and collectivism, 101, 144; and control, 98; creative collecting, 14–15, 26–30, 104, 109–10, 113, 170–79; as critique, 225; and cultural dispersal, 17–18, 124; dangers of, 1, 8–10, 47, 65; as decommodification, 102; and

339

decontextualization, 40, 79, 113–14; d­ espotic potential of, 158; as destructive, 90–91, 147, 149–50; dialectic of (see dialectics); and digital media, 151; and Enlightenment, 12; and enslavement, 84; ethics of, 15–16, 79; and ethnography, 90, 108–13, 164; and exhibition value, 149–50; and exile, 7, 118, 124; and experience, 99–101, 119; and fragmentation, 146, 155–56; and freedom, 84; as gendered, 63, 158; and historical materialism, 103–7, 174; as historical preservation, 85, 103; and historicism, 111; vs. hoarding, 1, 15, 55, 68, 81, 135; and identity, 102–3; immolation, 66, 71; as individualist, 101; and Judaism, 156; and juxtaposition, 165, 174, 210, 302n40; and libido, 105; and literary production, 4–5, 14–15, 141–42, 155, 180; as masculine, 34, 40; and mass production, 26; and mastery of the exotic, 7, 162–63; modernist, 3–5, 44–45, 79, 164, 172; in modernist studies, 19; mortality, 151–52; negative model of, 3; as obsessive, 13, 61–63, 105, 177–78, 232–33; as outdated, 102, 124; as personal response to emotional trauma, 177–78; politics of, 101–3; postmodern collecting, 232–34; as preservation, 83, 89, 90; private vs. public, 22, 68; as programmatic, 172–73; proud vs. bashful, 10, 56, 68, 234−235; as reactionary, 85; as reauraticization, 94–95, 109, 113; as revolutionary, 2, 85, 102, 113–14, 146; revolution of industrialism, 157–58; as ritual transmission of aura, 94; as self-­preservation in exile, 118; seriality of, 15, 151; and sexual intimacy, 95; and social class, 24–27; and social/ cultural value, 213; souvenir, 154; as spoliation, 29, 92, 98, 147, 268n17; and status, 24; subjective, 88, 160; surrealism and, 115, 186, 209–14; and totality, 151; transformation, 83–85, 99, 113, 155, 164–66; transformation of collected objects, 29, 75, 192–93, 102; transformation of the collector, 91–92; transformation of past into pre­sent, 175; as uncreative, 12; as urgent, 83; and use-­ value, 9–10, 28, 42–43, 108–9, 194; and value of object, 149; Victorian mania for, 24; and vio­lence, 8–9, 84, 90–91, 147, 161–63; as vocation or hobby, 66–67; and writing, 14–15, 29, 98–99, 120, 227, 243n65. See also aura

34 0 I n d e x

collection: of African art, 183, 186–87; as alternate real­ity, 213–14; as autonomous ­whole, 172; destruction of, 30, 51, 53; fate of, 70–71; flattening of time, 111; immolation of, 71; (im)possibility of completeness, 151, 228–29; passive vs. active engagement with, 176; provenance of, 32–34; role in shaping engagement, 176; as stability for collector, 88, 97–98, 160; transmissibility of, 30, 34, 69–70, 90, 160, 169; as work of art, 29−30, 172 collector: anxiety of, 98; in Arcades Proj­ect, 124; artist as, 157; author as, 73, 197; as bourgeois, 101–2; child as, 114; as childlike, 95; collector’s passion, 10, 120, 148−49; collector’s power over work of art, 173; creative collector’s assault on bourgeois collecting, 172; as critical, 220–21; as dilettante, 204−209; as explorer, 114; as fetishist, 95, 178; gender of, 53, 63; and historian, 67–68, 83, 174; vs. hoarder, 53, 68, 129; as modern, 53, 142; passion of, 149–50; psy­chol­ogy of, 28–29, 61, 148–51; and ragpicker, 124–30; relationship to objects, 28, 92–93; as thief, 65; and won­der, 204 colonialism: appropriation and colonial vio­lence, 219; Berlin ethnographic museums and German colonial expansion, 182–83; collecting’s roots in, 161–63; and Eu­ro­pean collections of Africana, 181–83; German colonial expansion and spoliation, 182–83; museums’ role in perpetuating colonial vio­lence, 200; Negro Sculpture as colonial spoliation, 193; vio­lence and loss of historical context, 199. See also imperialism commodity, collecting practice as decommodification, 28, 101–2; commodification of wonder/dilettantism, 204–6; fetishism, 28; interrogation of commodification, 220–21 conquest: collecting practice and, 8, 98, 161–63, 171, 240n35; spoliation and, 32–33; of Venice by Austrian Empire, 69 context, 197–99; and aesthetic value, 201; author-­collector as attuned to, 197; role in collecting practice, 195–99; vio­lence and loss of historical context, 199 creatio ex nihilo, 5, 79, 205; and allegory, 156–57, 205; in Bebuquin, 208–9; Benjamin, 287n201. See also genius

creativity: creation as allegory, 156–57; creation as compilation, 156—57; creation and mimesis/poesis, 157; and waste, 139 Critical Dictionary. See u­ nder Documents ( Journal) Cubism: as anti-­totality, 176; and fragmented perception, 176–77 cultural appropriation, 7, 63–64 cultural transfer: collection and dispersal of culture, 124; from Eu­rope to United States, 18, 22, 39–40, 63–64, 260n90; pillage of cultural heritage, 64 cult value, and exhibition value, 49, 116 Dadaism: and linguistic experimentation, 204; and shedding of bourgeois culture, 187, 204 decontextualization, 7–8; appropriation as, 146; as “blasting” out of context, 144; and collecting, 40, 79, 113–14, 119; as creative plunder, 146; dangers of, 189–92, 197; ethnographic museums lacking cultural context, 184–86; and grotesquery, 214; in The Last of the Nuba (Riefenstahl), 195–96, 196f; and loss of use-­value, 194; and primitivism, 198; and recontextualization, 32–33; as revolutionary history, 174; and surrealism, 115; as surrogate religion, 198; vari­ous rationales for, 214–15. See also recontextualization Destructive Character, 148–51 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of ­Mental Disorders (DSM-5), on hoarding, 10–11, 56, 257n36 dialectics, 89–92; archive, preservation vs. destruction in Arcades Proj­ect, 125; collector, “destructive character” vs. creator, 150–51; collecting, encapsulate and negate historical context, 103–5; collecting, of fragments vs. fragmenting objects, 146; collecting, historical vs. transformational, 85, 115, 89–99; collecting, preserve through decontextualizing, 84–85, 89–99, 164; collecting, preserve through destruction, 219; collecting, revolutionary vs. reactionary, 85, 120, 144; collecting, transformation vs. preservation, 2, 128, 133, 142, 200; lonely objects rescued by/rescue lonely collector, 160; photography, documentation vs. transformation, 211−14 dictionary, as traditional textual collection, 204, 217

I n d e x dilettante: alternative to genius, 208–9; collector as, 12–13, 204 dispossession: possession through, 81; and self-­emancipation, 66; writing as relinquishing literary hoard, 78, 81 Documents ( Journal), 209–13; and Arcades Proj­ect, 212; as archival, 210–13; collecting praxis of, 209–10; creative collecting in, 210; cross-­disciplinary collecting in, 209–11; documentation vs. disruption, 211–12; Einstein’s role in founding, 210; ethnographic collecting in, 209–11; as inversion of Negro Sculpture’s praxis, 164, 211–12; as modernist collection, 3; origin in numismatic collections, 211; photography in, 213–16; and reclassification, 211; subversion of historicism, traditional disciplinary frameworks, 212; and surrealism, 209–14; transformative decontextualization in, 214–15; and Wunderkammer-­style juxtaposition, 210, 302n40 Documents—­Critical Dictionary, 203–4, 216–29; autonomy of words in, 217–18; challenge to institutional collection, 218–19; as ethnography of Eu­rope, 220; as modernist collection, 203; and revolutionized language, 203; subversion of traditional dictionary, 217 (see also dictionary); transformation undermining received ideologies, 216–17 editorial practices, 68, 71−72, 261n116 Einstein, Carl: in Africa, 177; and allegory, 223; belief in social transformation through art, 168; biographical affinities with Benjamin, 168; biographical sketch of, 166; as collector-­explorer, 114; as colonial officer in Congo, 177, 199–202; creative collecting, 171–73; critical engagement with Einstein’s collecting writings, 171; critique of museums, 199; embrace of ethnographic collecting practice, 164; failure of language and shift to visual art, 209; on history’s being buried in the pre­sent, 174; influence on Reber’s collection practice, 170, 290n20; language as destructive, petrifying, 224–26; lost collection of, 179–80, 180f, 194–95; motivation to preserve collections, 169; “musée laboratoire,” 201; and museum exhibition practices, 181; and museums’ role in perpetuating colonial

341

vio­lence, 200; as paraphraser, 226; passion for Africana, 162–63, 177–81; pos­si­ble depiction in Ulrike (Sternheim), 161–62; and Reber, 170–77, 225; relationship to anti-­African/Black racism, 177−78, 181, 187; and revolutionary museum practices, 201; and Riefenstahl’s The Last of the Nuba, 195–96, 196f; role of context, 197–99; role in elevating African art in Eu­rope, 183–84; role in founding Docu­ ments, 210; spoliation of Africa, 177–78, 181–83; theory of collecting, 164–65; theory of totality, 188 Einstein, Carl—­African Sculpture: re­ introduction of context, 197−99 Einstein, Carl—­Bebuquin, 204–9; fragmentation and rejection of genius cult, 208; fragmentation and transformation, 207; and Henry James, 205; indeterminate ontology in, 205; indifference at humanity, emotion for objects, 205–6; intertextuality in, 208; and rejection of genius cult, 208; Subject-­object inversion in, 207 Einstein, Carl—­collecting practice of: as collaborative/collective affair, 168; as granting afterlife to collected objects, 174; opposed to Benjamin, 168, 172–73; as programmatic, 170−77 Einstein, Carl—­Negro Sculpture, 187–93, 190f; aesthetic decontextualization in, 214–15; as archive, 189–90, 297n155; argument of, 187–88; aura in, 193–96; as collection, 188–89; consequences for museum collecting, 191–92; dangerous consequences of decontextualizing in, 189–92; decontextualization in and aura, 193−94; decontextualization as cultural appropriation and erasure, 192; Docu­ ments as inversion of, 164, 211–12; as intersection of collection and aesthetics, 179–80; modernist collecting practice in, 163–64; overthrow of historicism, 191; rejection of institutional taxonomy/ disciplinary distinctions, 187−92; rejection of primitivism in, 187; transformation of artifacts reproduced in, 188–89, 191; as violent colonial appropriation/­ despoliation, 193 Emancipation, and dispossession, 37−43, 66, 160 Empire, collecting’s roots in, 161–63 Enslavement, as possession, 84, 158 Esch, Arnold, 5–6, 274n126, 275n159

34 2 I n d e x

ethics: and aesthetics, 35, 43–44, 200; of collecting, 15–16, 79; of consuming a collected character, 78–79; and Henry James, 15–16, 17, 20, 63–64, 68, 78–80; of plunder, 63–64; of publishing private papers, 68; of dispossession, 78–79. See also morality ethnography: Benjamin, 89–92, 143; in Berlin museums, 181–84, 293n93; Berlin museums and German colonialism, 182–84; and collecting, 90, 108–13, 164, 274n128; collecting for exhibition vs. for possession, 182; creativity and, 109; and documentation, 108; in Documents, 209–11, 220; Einstein’s embrace of, 164; “ethnographic fragment,” 108–9, 111; exoticism, 111; and historical materialism, 111; and modernism, 184–86; museums and lack of cultural context, 184–86; Noah’s ark as ethnographic collection, 90; and transformation, 108, 183; and vio­lence, 219–20 exhibition value: and cult value, 49, 116; modernist collecting as anti-­exhibition value, 149–50 exile: Benjamin and, 118, 121, 129, 156; and collecting, 7, 91, 118, 124; Einstein and, 168 experience: child’s, 96–97, 99–101; and collecting, 99–101, 119; and language, 224; materiality’s privilege over, 197–98; storyteller’s, 73; visual (see visual experience) fascism: appropriation of originality, 44, 157; collecting and, 8–9, 240n36, fascist aesthetic and photographic appropriation, 148, 196; manipulation of aura, 157; manipulation of history, 104 fragmentation: in Benjamin’s collection, 109; collecting and, 146, 155–56; modernist collecting as, 13; in postmodern collecting, 232; recontextualization, 207; rejection of genius cult, 208; spolia, 109; transformation, 207. See also juxtaposition; montage Freedman, Jonathan, 35, 250n98 Freud, Sigmund: and collecting, 240n42; collection as ethnographic artifact, 274n128 Frost, Randy, 56, 256n19, 257n36 Fuchs, Eduard, 103–7; as Balzacian, 103–4 Gaugin, Paul—­Nevermore, 162 gender: collector as gendered, 53, 63; dynamics of acquisition, 77–78, 84, 113, 158, 235; gleaning as gendered, 134;

hoarding as gendered, 53, 58–59, 257n36; property and, 63; Sardanapalus (legend) and, 60; vio­lence, 66, 84, 260n103 genius, 27–31; dilettante as alternative to, 208–9; fragmentation and, 208; genius aesthetic, 157; intertextuality and rejection of genius cult, 208; and originality, 157, 239n19; rejection of, 73–74, 208; Romantic model of, 19; undermined by collectivity, 169; undermined by creative collecting, 4, 136, 156–57; undermined by the imprint of the artifact, 137; “unoriginal genius” in Arcades Proj­ect, 283n128. See also creatio ex nihilo gleaning, 86; aestheticized, 133; author as gleaner, 137; and capitalism, 130–32, 135, 278n43; as collective vs. solitude of ragpicking, 134; cultural critique of, 119–20; food vs. material goods, 132; as gendered, 134; vs. harvest, 134–35; as literary praxis, 137–38; and memory, 133; protest, 132; reading, 137–38; regulation of, 133; as revolutionary praxis, 130–32; Ruth the Gleaner (Biblical), 135; as social welfare, 135; and spoils, 132; and subalternity, 134–35; and temporality vs. ragpicking, 133; textual vs. economic, 132–33; and transformation, 130; transience of vs. of hoarding, 133; and waste management, 132 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: and collecting, 12–13; hobby vs. vocation, 67, 180, 225; and taxonomy, 45 Gogol, Nikolai, 60–61 Grey Gardens (Maysles), hoarding in, 58 Herring, Scott, 54–55, 59, 256n22−23 historical materialism: and allegory, 153–54; as alternate temporality, 199; in Arcades Proj­ect, 140; and aura, 105, 116; and autonomy, 105, 188; Benjamin, 103–7, 144–45; and Benjamin’s toy collection, 106; and blasting of history, 104; collecting practice, 103–7, 174; education and, 273n114; ethnographic collection and threat to, 111; and fascism, 104; vs. historicism, 103–7, 199; in Moscow Diary, 105–7; and non-­linear temporality, 199; and transmissibility of aura, 116 historicism, 104; vs. historical materialism, 103–7, 199; subversion of, 142, 191, 212; and symbol, 154; and teleology, 198–99; transcended by autonomy aesthetics, 188;

I n d e x and unselfconscious collecting, 111; and the writer, 67–68 history, 142–45; antiquarian approach to, 55; aura and, 94; author-­collector as attuned to, 197; Benjamin’s citation practice, 145; blasting of, 104; buried in the pre­sent, 174; collecting as intervention in, 174; and decontextualization, 119; fascism’s manipulation of, 104; historical detritus as literary germ, 74; historical pro­gress and threat to ­human subjectivity, 47; historical value vs. use-­value, 108–9; revolutionary, 143, 174; story vs. history, 139–40; transformation of historical context, 110–11; as written by collector, 174 hoarder, 54–63; and antiquarian, 55; arsonist as, 70; authority of, 81; and collector, 1–2, 53, 55, 68, 129; home of, 58–59; and ragpicker, 129 Hoarders (A&E), 56–57 hoarding, 54–61, 230–34; and aesthetics, 241n43; and age, 58–59, 257n37; antidote to plunder, 68; and capitalism, 11, 231; and coercion, 52; and collecting practice, 1, 10, 15, 55, 68, 81, 135, 151; conflation with rape and murder, 52; and control, 20, 72; cultural critique of, 119–20; in Dead Souls (Gogol), 60–61, in digital age, 231; in DSM, 10–11, 56, 257n36; as gendered, 53, 58–59, 257n36; vs. gleaning, 133; in Grey Gardens (Maysles), 58; literary hoarding, 19, 78, 81; in media, 55; paraphrase, 224−26; psy­chol­ogy of, 54–56, 60; as queer, 59–60, 63; Sardanapalus (legend), 51–52; social construction of, 54–56; social deviance, 55, 58–61, 256n23; and social value, 231; spoliation, 68; storytelling, 73–74; textual hoarding, 18–19, 53, 58, 71, 79; threat to bourgeois domesticity, 57; threat to consumer culture, 56; use-­value, 56; witches, 58–59 hypertext, and digital reading practices, 138, 236 immolation, 66, 69, 71, 81 imperialism, 8; collecting’s roots in, 161–63; cultural, 18; museums and colonialism, 200; “Scramble for Africa,” 181. See also colonialism indeterminate ontology, 28, 48, 52, 84; in Bebuquin (Einstein), 205; and the slippage between collecting and ethnography, 110; unstable ontology of waste, 130

343

James, Henry: archive of, 69–71; and art, 52; character types, 45–46, 66; collecting vs. hoarding, 81; on collecting as literary practice, 4, 75, 76–81; collecting practice as modernist, 19, 72; collection of names, 72–73; collectors as motif, 18, 34, 35; control over literary production, 53; creative collecting, 75–76; cultural despoliation, 64; and description, 30–31; and ethics, 15–16, 17, 20, 63–64, 68, 78–80; failure of revision, 228; and genius cult, 73–74; homo­sexuality, 54, 69, 255n11; immolation of archive, 69, 261n122; impulse to possess, 77; interpersonal power dynamics in the work of, 41–42; inversion of objects and characters, 36–37, 252n139; John Singer Sargent portrait of, 69, 70f; literary practice, 71–81; literary spoliation, 76–78; and museums, 21–22; objectification in the work of, 38; owner­ship and agency, 66; portrait envy, 75, 264n164; and possession, 17–19; private life of, 69; queer reading of, 20, 34, 54, 63; and revision practice, 19–20, 65, 71–72, 228; as Sardanapalus, 69; and sex, 59; skepticism of originality, 4, 8, 46; as textual collector/ hoarder, 18–19, 53, 71, 79 James, Henry—­The American: Newman as collector, as conqueror, 37–38; Newman as original, as copy, 44–45 James, Henry—­The Aspern Papers: aura in, 62; gendered vio­lence in, 66, 260n103; homoeroticism in, 59, 61; meddling editor, 68; queer reading of, 63; Sardanapalus as a symbol in, 66; scheming collector in, 65–66 James, Henry—­The Golden Bowl, 18; Adam Verver, 38–41; adultery, 41; American appetite for Eu­ro­pean art, 39, 259n88; objectification in, 38–41 James, Henry—­“Last of the Valerii,” 47–50; aura and ritual in, 47−48 James, Henry—­T he Portrait of a Lady: aesthetics and ethics, 44; Gilbert Osmond, 35; originality, 43–44, 46–47 James, Henry—­T he Spoils of Poynton, 19, 22–31; Fleda, 35–37; indifference to humanity, emotion for objects, 205–6; inheritance in, 34; Mrs Gereth, 24–35; rhe­toric of possession, 35; spoliation, 31–34, 64–65; taste in, 24–27, 35, 43−44

34 4 I n d e x

James, William—­The Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, 28–29, 31–32 Joyce, James: citation, 208; detritus, 141; modernism, 74, 140 Judaism, and collecting, 156 juxtaposition: and collecting practice, 165, 174, 210, 302n40; as modernist collecting practice, 165; and montage, 175; as revolutionary history, 174; and shock, 217; Wunderkammer and, 210, 302n40. See also fragmentation; montage Kabbalah, myth of exile and redemption, 156 Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Barbara, 85, 108–11, 147–48, 184, 192, 213 language: as destructive, 224–26; and experience, 224; failure of, 10, 75, 99, 209, 228; failure of literary production, 204; gleaning as literary praxis, 137–38; as ideology, 221–22; inadequacy of, 221–22, 224–27; limitations of, 75; literary praxis of collecting, 14–15; paraphrase (see paraphrase); revolutionary, 203–4, 216–222; vio­lence of, 223–24 literary ragpicking, 73, 128−130. See also ragpicker Lord Byron. See Sardanapalus (Lord Byron) Lumpen. See rags Manet, Édouard. See Chiffonnier, Le (Manet) Marx, Karl, commodity fetishism, 28, 247n46–47 Marxism, 103−04, 126−27 material culture, in lit­er­a­ture, 19. See also material culture; modernism Messonier, Ernest—­1807, Friedland, 22, 23f modernism, 74; and allegory, 153; and appropriation, 115–16; citation, 145; collecting practice, 3–5, 19, 44–45, 72, 79, 119, 172, 203; collector as modernist, 53, 142; ethnography, 184–85; exhibition value, 149–50; fragmentation, 13; juxtaposition, 165; and material culture, 14–15; modernist collecting in Negro Sculpture, 163–64; modernists’ collections of African art, 184–87; primitivism, 162–63, 178, 183, 187; and spoils, 7, 232; transformation, 119; transgression in Eu­ro­pean Modernism, 187; and waste, 141; Wunderkammer, 12

montage, 140, 145, 148; Benjamin, 141; and juxtaposition, 175, 212−213; narrative construction, 136. See also fragmentation; juxtaposition morality: of plunder and appropriation, 63–64; Victorian-­era moral panic, 54. See also ethics Muensterberger, Werner, 98, 113, 271n60 museums, 102; autonomy of work of art, 200; Benjamin, 277n20; Berlin museums and German colonialism, 182–83; Berlin Museum Wars, 183–87; classification practices, 45–46, 184; collecting practices of, 182, 191–92; and colonial plunder, 68, 181–83; colonial vio­lence, 200; and cultural context, 184–86; Einstein’s critique of, 181, 199–201; and Enlightenment, 11–12; ethnography, 181–85, 293n93; and exhibition value, 49; Henry James, 21–22; “musée laboratoire,” 201; as po­liti­cal, 11–12, 68, 102; vs. private collections, 149–50, 175; small collection as antidote to, 199, 233–34; taxonomy anxiety in, 45–46, 184−85 Nevermore (Gaugin), 163f; referenced in Ulrike, 162 Nietz­sche: collecting and hoarding intertwined, 10, 151; on the collector/ hoarder, 1–2, 10, 55; history, 1, 144, 282n109 Noah’s Ark (Biblical), 83, 90, 118, 160; authoritarian collecting, 103; as preservation, 83−84, 89 Nolde, Emil: and aesthetic appropriation, 186; African art collection of, 186, 295n121–24; research on German New Guinea, 186, 295n123–24 objectification, 8, 36–37; adultery as re­sis­ tance to, 41, 48; and death of objectified ­human, 206–7; desire to objectify/be objectified, 206; The House of Mirth (Wharton), 42; of lovers, 41; of the self, 41–42; subject-­object inversion, 37, 50, 84, 133, 207, 220–21, 252n139; transformation of ­human into object, 206–7; of ­women, 38, 64, 84, 158, 162–63, 235–36 objects: autonomy of, 80, 200–1; commodification of won­der, 204–5; cult value of, 48–49; infatuation with, 48–49, 205–6; libidinal energy of, 41, 113

I n d e x originality: aesthetic of, 26–27; and aura, 92–93; creativity and, 139; fascist appropriation of, 44, 157; myth of and the avant-­garde, 4–5, 204–9, 225; skepticism of, 44–47, 157; “unoriginal genius” in Arcades Proj­ect, 283n128. See also authenticity; creatio ex nihilo; genius Pamuk, Orhan—­Museum of Innocence, 10, 68, 232–37; self-­consciousness of, 232–33 paraphrase, 3, 222–27; cyclical temporality, 226; as hoarding, 226; mediation, 225; reification, 223; unoriginality, 225; as violent, 224–26 perception, revolutionized by African art, 187–88. See also visual experience photography: as alternate real­ity, 213–14; as appropriative, 148; aura, 31, 32f; comparison of Benjamin’s and Einstein’s photo collections, 194–95, 195f; in Documents, 213–16; fascist aesthetic, 196; surrogate for lost artifact, 194; transformation, 189, 214. See also Benjamin, Walter: Rus­sian toy collection, photos of plagiarism, as plunder, 147 play, 139–42; ­children’s play and social pro­g ress, 106–7; child’s experience, 96–101; collecting, 11, 92, 97–98, 158–60; creation, 115, 139−40; and modernity, 11 plunder: Benjamin’s literary practice as, 146–47; creative appropriation, 146–47; cultural appropriation, 63–64; ethics of, 63–64; German colonial expansion, 181–83; hoarding as antidote to, 68; museums, 68; plagiarism, 147. See also spoils possession: and control, 17−18, 66; death as respite to, 43; dialectic of possession and renunciation, 66; and dispossession, 81; Henry James and, 17–19, 35; ­human, 51, 84; manipulation, 66; material, 51; and obsession, 52–53; postmodernism, 232–34; and sex, 62–63, 235; by a spirit, 48; as violent, 54, 63–66, 181–83, 198–99 Pound, Ezra, 7, 31, 37, 41–42 power: and allegorist, 158; collecting practice and authorial power, 178; collector, 173; interpersonal dynamics, 41–43, 66 primitivism: aesthetics, 198; as antidote to bourgeois modernity, 178; Benjamin and ­children’s toys, 97, 111–13; decontextualization, 198; Einstein, 187; fetishization of Africa, 162; and fetish object, 113;

345

modernism, 162–63, 178, 183, 187; racism, 162, 187; sexuality, 161–63; teleology, 198 property: and gender, 63−64, 84, 158; virginity, 64, 235 Proust, Marcel, 9 psy­chol­ogy: of collector, 10, 28–29, 61, 148–51; of hoarding, 54–56, 60 racism, 162, 181, 187. See also primitivism ragpicker, 56; as anti-­modern, 128; author as, 73; in Baudelaire, 125–30, 139, 153–54; Benjamin as, 129–30; and cap­i­tal­ist economy, 127–29; and class consciousness, 127; collector, 124–30; contradictions of, 130; cultural refuse, 125, 129; as deviant, 127; historian, 142; hoarder, 129; Lumpen­ sammler, 3, 125–27; reader, 137–38; and (re-)appropriation of cultural/literary refuse, 129; subjectivity ­under capitalism, 127; writer as, 128−30 ragpicking: as anti-­historicist, 142; food vs. material goods, 132; literary, 73, 128–29; and renewal, 154; as revolutionary, 126–27; as solitary vs. collectivity of gleaning, 134; and temporality vs. gleaning, 132–33 rags, 3, 129; Lumpen, 3, 125; Lumpenprole­ tariat, 127; Lumpensammler, 3, 125–27 rape, 68; Austrian conquest of Venice as, 64; and spoliation, 63–64 reading: alienation of reader, 71–72; con­temporary practices of, 236; digital reading, 139, 236; gleaning, 137–38; ragpicking, 137–38 reauraticization, 92–95, 109, 115−16 Reber, Gottlieb Friedrich, 164–66, 169–77, 199–204, 225; as creative collector, 170–71, 210–13, 218–19; and Einstein, 170–77, 290n20 recontextualization. See decontextualization reification, 35–37; of individual, 37−41; paraphrase as, 223−24; reifying vision, 35, 38−39, 47 revision: as deferral, 227; failure of, 228; Henry James’s practice of, 19–20, 65, 71–72 revolution: aesthetics as revolutionary, 176–77; allegory, 154, 157–58; appropriation, 222; citation as, 146; collecting practice, 2, 85, 102, 120, 113–14, 144, 146; gleaning, 130–32; history, 143, 174; language, 203; museum practices, 201; perception, 187–88; ragpicking, 126–27; visual experience, 176–77, 187–88

34 6 I n d e x

Riefenstahl, Leni—­T he Last of the Nuba, 195–96, 196f Ruth the Gleaner (biblical), 134–37. See also gleaning “Sardanapalus” (Delacroix), 52f Sardanapalus (legendary), 51–52; gender/ sexual fluidity in, 60; Henry James as, 69 Sardanapalus (Lord Byron), 51–52; deviant sexuality in, 60; immolation, 71 von Schlosser, Julius, 11 sex and sexuality, 36, 52, 56, 61, 222; collecting, 59, 95; deviance, 59−62; Henry James’s homo­sexuality, 54, 69, 255n11; and possession, 62–63, 158, 235; and primitivism, 161–63; same-­sex relationships, 59–61; vio­lence, 52, 63; virginity as property, 64, 235 Singer Sargent, John, portrait of Henry James, 69, 70f social norms: ­children’s play, 106–7; collecting practice, 24–27, 213; garbage disposal and the social contract, 57, 256n29; gleaning as social welfare, 135; hoarding, 54–56, 58–61, 231, 256n23; ragpicking, 127; social transformation through art, 168 Soviet Union: collecting as simulation of collectivity, 101−03, 144; communism as anti-­materialist, 101; politicization of life ­under communism, 102 spoils, 5–9, 31–34, 37–43; appropriation, 240n32; The Arcades Proj­ect, 140; archives, 51; avant-­garde, 7; Benjamin’s Rus­sian toys, 88; citation, 147; collecting, 19, 92, 147; conquest, 32–33; cultural inheritance, 49–50; destruction, 147; fragmentation, 109; German colonial expansion, 182–83; and gleaning, 132; and modernism, 7, 232; as operative term, 19; and (post)modernism, 232; rape, 63–64; recontextualization, 32–33; in The Spoils of Poynton, 22–24 spolia studies. See spoils Steketee, Gail, 56, 256n19, 257n36 Sternheim, Carl—­Ulrike: collection of African sculptures in, 162; Einstein’s pos­si­ble depiction in, 161–63; reference to Nevermore (Gaugin) in, 162 storytelling: antithesis to hoarding, 73–74; collecting, 73, 99; germination, 73–74, 263n152; storyteller’s experience, 73; transformation, 99

surrealism: in Documents, 209–14, 220; ethnography, 115−16, 213, 235; Wunderkammer, 115 Temporality, nonlinear, 135–36 theft, 63, 71; of archive, 67−69; collector as thief, 65, 235 totality: of a collection, 25, 28–30, 151; contingency of, 217–18; cubism as anti-­totality, 176; in digital age, 236; as subjective, 151–52 toys: alienation, 107; authenticity, 107; Benjamin’s Rus­sian toy collection, 85, 87–88, 95–96, 106, 108, 111–12, 114, 194–95. See also Benjamin, Walter: Rus­sian toy collection, photos of transformation: allegory, 155; archive, 125; art, 168; of bourgeois ideology, 223; of collected objects, 75, 188–93; collecting practice, 29, 75, 83–85, 91–92, 99, 102, 113, 118, 155, 164–66; Critical Dictionary, 203, 216–17; decontextualization, 214–15; ethnography, 108, 183; fragmentation, 207; gleaning, 130; history, 110–11; juxtaposition, 166; modernist collecting, 119; objectification and death, 206–7; objects’ transformation of collector, 192–93; past into pre­sent, 175; person into object, 206–7; of photographed objects, 189, 214; shock, 217; storytelling, 99; writing, 79. See also dialectics translation, as collecting, 75 Trauerspiel, allegory and ruin in, 152−55 use-­value: and aesthetic value, 201; collecting practice, 9–10, 28, 42–43, 108–9, 194; decontextualization, 194; food vs. refuse, 132; and historical value, 108–9; hoarding, 56; life of the object, 200–1; loss of, 28, 194; subversion of, 9–10, 108–9, 194, 211 Varda, Agnes, 130–39; cinematic montage and constructed narrative, 136; and gleaners, 130, 133 Varda, Agnes—­The Gleaners and I, 130; and The Arcades Proj­ect, 130–32, 137–38 vio­lence: of acquisition, 61–66; of appropriation, 8, 219–20; of child’s collecting, 92; collecting practice, 8–9, 84, 90–92, 147, 161–63; colonial, 219, 200; ethnography and, 219–20; gendered, 66, 84, 260n103; of language, 223–24; and loss

I n d e x of historical context, 199; museums, 200; sexual, 52, 63−64 visual experience, revolutionized by African art, 176−77, 187–88. See also perception Warburg, Aby, 228; as collector, 238n14; Mnemosyne Atlas, 4, 13, 212–13, 238n14, 304n64 waste, 231–32; creativity, 139; and gleaning, 132; John Locke and food spoilage, 278n48; and modernism, 141; unstable ontology of waste, 130; use-­value of food vs. refuse, 132; waste management, 130 Wharton, Edith: The Buccaneers, 22; The Decoration of Houses, 25–27; The House of Mirth, objectification in, 42–43 Witches, and hoarding, 58–59 Woolf, ­Virginia—­“Solid Objects,” 13, 87, 241n54, 242n55

347

work of art. See art writing: collecting practice, 14–15, 29, 98–99, 120, 227, 243n65; and history, 67–68; limitations of literary expression, 75 (see also James, Henry: portrait envy); palimpsest in Arcades Proj­ect, 140; ragpicking as literary praxis, 128–30; as relinquishing literary hoard, 78, 81; task of, 73; as transformation, 79; as value production, 79; writer as pawnbroker, 77–79; writer as ragpicker, 128–29 Wunderkammer, 11–12; and avant-­garde collection, 175–76; modernist revival of, 12; play and creation, 115; postmodern revival of, 234. See also Bredekamp, Horst Yeazell, Ruth, 75. See also James, Henry: portrait envy