Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory

As early as 1923 Walter Benjamin announced his intention of working out a of allegory.' The first stage of this intention was realized as his most complete single study, the book on Baroque Trauerspiel (now translated in English as The Origin of German Tragic Drama). First published in 1927, the work that ironically closed all doors to academic respectability for him was completed before the first of his rapprochements with Marxism in the mid-1920s. Critics and historians have justifiably emphasized the different phases of Benjamin's intellectual life, but what impresses one about his writings on allegory is the essential consistency of their direction throughout his career. Baudelaire, the one writer to whom he devoted most of his mature study, is for Benjamin the inheritor of the Trauerspiel; from an early indication that Baudelaire's which is fed on melancholy, is an allegorical genius, Benjamin maintained and deepended his sense of allegory as he transferred its focus from the 17th to the 19th century.2 Unable to complete his projected book on Baudelaire, one of whose three sections was to be Baudelaire as Allegorist, he left only the fragmentary collection of notes, itself allegorically titled Central Park, that form his last reflections on any literary subject. More than half of its forty-five fragments are concerned with allegory, ostensibly on Baudelaire, but many of them explicitly relating and contrasting Baudelairean allegory to Baroque allegory. In these notes, written during the last year of his life, he refers more than once to his Baroque-book, noting down points of consonance or contrast with the arguments developed there (GS, I, 2, pp. 659, 690). Almost every study of Benjamin's thought mentions allegory at some point; surprisingly, however, the theory in its entirety, as elusive and unconventional by scholarly standards as it is, has gone virtually without