Documentary Fiction
John Schad, The Late Walter Benjamin
Continuum, 264pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781441177681
reviewed by Alex Niven
From the Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On aesthetic so beloved of middlebrow publishers and fashion designers, to the sort of atavistic monarchism sparked by the Diamond Jubilee and the Wills-and-Kate retro-domestic revival, the 1940s and ‘50s are – in contemporary argot – the hottest decades in the world right now.
Arguably, in a culture that has raided just about every other corner of 20th-century history to feed its consumer-kitsch sweet tooth, partying like it’s 1949 is merely another predictable turn of the screw. But perhaps the impulse to retread the immediate post-war period is not quite as shallow as might first appear.
Away from the vintage pageantry, the last few years have also witnessed a resurgence of interest in other, subtler strands of post-war history. Sci-fi literature, Brutalist architecture, energetic late-modernist art, the confident implementation of socialistic programmes at governmental level – these sorts of touchstones have begun to look increasingly salient as people seek to move beyond the twin impasses of postmodernism and neoliberalism.
The notion that post-war Britain was a time of utopian potential rather than a 1984-style nightmare or a golden age of gin-quaffing royalism is the basis of John Schad’s The Late Walter Benjamin, a work of counterfactual history recently published in Continuum’s New Directions in Religion and Literature series.
The premise of Schad’s clever, idiosyncratic novella is that Walter Benjamin did not in fact commit suicide in a hotel on the Franco-Spanish border while fleeing from the Nazis in 1940. Instead, Schad suggests – though his style is magic-realist enough that he does not have to produce a visible rationale for this – that Benjamin somehow survived to enjoy a surreal afterlife in the post-war British council estate of South Oxhey near Watford, one of the new developments arising from the Attlee government’s determined programme of house-building in the late 1940s.
To an extent, given this double focus on Benjamin and the civic architecture of Welfare-State Britain, The Late Walter Benjamin is a natural outgrowth of recent trends in both cultural theory (where Heidegger and the Frankfurt School have supplanted Derrida and Barthes as the first-port-of-call philosophers of the 21st century), and leftist circles more generally (see, for example, Owen Hatherley’s 2009 study Militant Modernism, a lyrical encomium to post-war British public housing, or Ken Loach’s pro-Attlee film tribute of this year, The Spirit of ‘45).
However, in spite of such contemporary analogues, Schad’s approach is emphatically not one in which theory is grounded in social realism. In fact, on a formal level, The Late Walter Benjamin is something like the antithesis of the latter-day kitchen-sink of a director like Loach (this in spite of Schad’s claim in his introduction to have written a work of ‘documentary fiction’).
The documentary element is present throughout the book in the form of newspaper extracts, occasional photos, and archival records relating to the founding of the South Oxhey estate. However, in order to integrate these factual cuttings with the fictional element, Schad juxtaposes them with verbatim quotations from Benjamin’s writings, weaving the two textual sources together by way of a dream narrative that recalls James Joyce’s Strindberg pastiche in the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses. Characters change roles abruptly, dialogue is jumbled, and the logical flow of the ‘plot’ is everywhere disrupted and diverted until it more or less evaporates.
On the level of readability, the effect of such techniques can be trying. A surrealist or absurdist aesthetic is strongest when it is used to explore dream states and the minutiae of consciousness. As such, given that the subject of The Late Walter Benjamin is post-war history and the life of a working-class community as a whole, it is unsurprising that the phantasmagorical narrative does not quite work. Under the weight of its collage of quotations, the work of prose fiction struggles and ultimately fails to assert itself (and perhaps length is a problem in this regard – a short story might have been a better way to work through the idea).
But then there is also something pithy about the attempt to marry modernist technique with a narrative of everyday life. Benjamin, after all, was a notable advocate of the political potential in using surrealism to transform quotidian experience. Consider his famous comments on Andre Breton, who, according to Benjamin,
… was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution - no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors … Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys ... on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance of the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action.
The great value of Schad’s narrative is its attempt to uncover this sort of ‘revolutionary energy’ in the story of a post-war North-London council estate that, for all its difficulties, managed somewhat heroically to create an environment defined above all by optimism, vitality, and buried glimpses of utopia.
If we have to look back with nostalgia on the Britain of the ’40s and ’50s, Schad suggests, it is to places like the South Oxhey estate – and to a wider working-class culture of political empowerment, flourishing literacy, and collective dreaming – that we should turn.
Arguably, in a culture that has raided just about every other corner of 20th-century history to feed its consumer-kitsch sweet tooth, partying like it’s 1949 is merely another predictable turn of the screw. But perhaps the impulse to retread the immediate post-war period is not quite as shallow as might first appear.
Away from the vintage pageantry, the last few years have also witnessed a resurgence of interest in other, subtler strands of post-war history. Sci-fi literature, Brutalist architecture, energetic late-modernist art, the confident implementation of socialistic programmes at governmental level – these sorts of touchstones have begun to look increasingly salient as people seek to move beyond the twin impasses of postmodernism and neoliberalism.
The notion that post-war Britain was a time of utopian potential rather than a 1984-style nightmare or a golden age of gin-quaffing royalism is the basis of John Schad’s The Late Walter Benjamin, a work of counterfactual history recently published in Continuum’s New Directions in Religion and Literature series.
The premise of Schad’s clever, idiosyncratic novella is that Walter Benjamin did not in fact commit suicide in a hotel on the Franco-Spanish border while fleeing from the Nazis in 1940. Instead, Schad suggests – though his style is magic-realist enough that he does not have to produce a visible rationale for this – that Benjamin somehow survived to enjoy a surreal afterlife in the post-war British council estate of South Oxhey near Watford, one of the new developments arising from the Attlee government’s determined programme of house-building in the late 1940s.
To an extent, given this double focus on Benjamin and the civic architecture of Welfare-State Britain, The Late Walter Benjamin is a natural outgrowth of recent trends in both cultural theory (where Heidegger and the Frankfurt School have supplanted Derrida and Barthes as the first-port-of-call philosophers of the 21st century), and leftist circles more generally (see, for example, Owen Hatherley’s 2009 study Militant Modernism, a lyrical encomium to post-war British public housing, or Ken Loach’s pro-Attlee film tribute of this year, The Spirit of ‘45).
However, in spite of such contemporary analogues, Schad’s approach is emphatically not one in which theory is grounded in social realism. In fact, on a formal level, The Late Walter Benjamin is something like the antithesis of the latter-day kitchen-sink of a director like Loach (this in spite of Schad’s claim in his introduction to have written a work of ‘documentary fiction’).
The documentary element is present throughout the book in the form of newspaper extracts, occasional photos, and archival records relating to the founding of the South Oxhey estate. However, in order to integrate these factual cuttings with the fictional element, Schad juxtaposes them with verbatim quotations from Benjamin’s writings, weaving the two textual sources together by way of a dream narrative that recalls James Joyce’s Strindberg pastiche in the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses. Characters change roles abruptly, dialogue is jumbled, and the logical flow of the ‘plot’ is everywhere disrupted and diverted until it more or less evaporates.
On the level of readability, the effect of such techniques can be trying. A surrealist or absurdist aesthetic is strongest when it is used to explore dream states and the minutiae of consciousness. As such, given that the subject of The Late Walter Benjamin is post-war history and the life of a working-class community as a whole, it is unsurprising that the phantasmagorical narrative does not quite work. Under the weight of its collage of quotations, the work of prose fiction struggles and ultimately fails to assert itself (and perhaps length is a problem in this regard – a short story might have been a better way to work through the idea).
But then there is also something pithy about the attempt to marry modernist technique with a narrative of everyday life. Benjamin, after all, was a notable advocate of the political potential in using surrealism to transform quotidian experience. Consider his famous comments on Andre Breton, who, according to Benjamin,
… was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution - no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors … Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys ... on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance of the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action.
The great value of Schad’s narrative is its attempt to uncover this sort of ‘revolutionary energy’ in the story of a post-war North-London council estate that, for all its difficulties, managed somewhat heroically to create an environment defined above all by optimism, vitality, and buried glimpses of utopia.
If we have to look back with nostalgia on the Britain of the ’40s and ’50s, Schad suggests, it is to places like the South Oxhey estate – and to a wider working-class culture of political empowerment, flourishing literacy, and collective dreaming – that we should turn.