Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Walter Benjamin
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corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need. During sudden rainshowers, the arcades are a place of refuge for the unprepared, to whom they offer a secure, if restricted, promenade—one from which the merchants also benefit.” The customers are gone, along with those taken by surprise. Rain brings in only the poorer clientele without waterproof or mackintosh. These were spaces for a generation of people who knew little of the weather and who, on Sundays, when it snowed, would rather warm themselves in the winter gardens than go out skiing. Glass before its time, premature iron: it was one single line of descent—arcades, winter gardens with their lordly palms, and railroad stations, which cultivated the false orchid “adieu” with its fluttering petals. They have long since given way to the hangar. And today, it is the same with the human material on the inside of the arcades as with the materials of their construction. Pimps are the iron bearings of this street, and its glass breakables are the whores. Here was the last refuge of those infant prodigies that saw the light of day at the time of the world exhibitions: the briefcase with interior lighting, the meter-long pocket knife, or the patented umbrella handle with built-in watch and revolver. And near the degenerate giant creatures, aborted and broken-down matter. We followed the narrow dark corridor to where—between a discount bookstore, in which colorful tied-up bundles tell of all sorts of failure, and a shop selling only buttons (mother-of-pearl and the kind that in Paris are called de fantaisie)—there stood a sort of salon. On a pale-colored wallpaper full of figures and busts shone a gas lamp. By its light, an old woman sat reading. They say she has been there alone for years, and collects sets of teeth “in gold, in wax, and broken.” Since that day, moreover, we know where Doctor Miracle got the wax out of which he fashioned Olympia. They are the true fairies of these arcades (more salable and more worn than the life-sized ones): the formerly world-famous Parisian dolls, which revolved on their musical socle and bore in their arms a doll-sized basket out of which, at the salutation of the minor chord, a lambkin poked its curious muzzle.
All this is the arcade in our eyes. And it was nothing of all this. They <the arcades> radiated through the Paris of the Empire like grottoes. For someone entering the Passage des Panoramas in 1817, the sirens of gaslight would be singing to him on one side, while oil-lamp odalisques offered enticements from the other. With the kindling of electric lights, the irreproachable glow was extinguished in these galleries, which suddenly became more difficult to find—which wrought a black magic at entranceways, and peered from blind windows into their own interior. It was not decline but transformation. All at once, they were the hollow mold from which the image of “modernity” was cast. Here, the century mirrored with satisfaction its most recent past. Here was the retirement home for infant prodigies …
When, as children, we were given those great encyclopedic works World and Mankind, New Universe, The Earth, wouldn’t our gaze always fall, first of all, on the color illustration of a “Carboniferous Landscape” or on “Lakes and Glaciers of the First Ice Age”? Such an ideal panorama of a barely elapsed primeval age opens up when we look through the arcades that are found in all cities. Here resides the last dinosaur of Europe, the consumer. On the walls of these caverns, their immemorial flora, the commodity, luxuriates and enters, like cancerous tissue, into the most irregular combinations. A world of secret affinities: palm tree and feather duster, hair dryer and Venus de Milo, prosthesis and letter-writing manual come together here as after a long separation. The odalisque lies in wait next to the inkwell, priestesses raise aloft ashtrays like patens. These items on display are a rebus; and <how> one ought to read here the birdseed kept in the fixative-pan from a darkroom, the flower seeds beside the binoculars, the broken screws atop the musical score, and the revolver above the goldfish bowl—is right on the tip of one’s tongue. After all, nothing of the lot appears to be new. The goldfish come perhaps from a pond that dried up long ago, the revolver will have been a corpus delicti, and these scores could hardly have preserved their previous owner from starvation when her last pupils stayed away.
Never trust what writers say about their own writings. When Zola undertook to defend his Thérèse Raquin against hostile critics, he explained that his book was a scientific study of the temperaments. His task had been to show, in an example, exactly how the sanguine and the nervous temperaments act on one another—to the detriment of each. But this explanation could satisfy no one. Nor does it explain the unprecedented admixture of colportage, the bloodthirstiness, the cinematic goriness of the action. Which—by no accident—takes place in an arcade. If this book really expounds something scientifically, then it’s the death of the Paris arcades, the decay of a type of architecture. The book’s atmosphere is saturated with the poisons of this process, and its people are destroyed by them.
One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld—a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades (which are galleries leading into the city’s past) issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness bursts forth like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past—unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into the narrow lane.
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