A Project in Its Context:

Walter Benjamin on Comedy

Adriana Bontea

'O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,

And in their barks my thoughts I'll character,
That every eye which in this forest looks,
Shall see thy virtue witness'd everywhere.
Run, run Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.'
-Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act III, Sc.

The attempt to assess Walter Benj amin's writings on comedy may seem
a risky enterprise indeed, given the fact that he never completed any
extensive body of work on this topic. The few fragments surviving from
this enterprise are scattered among his published works and writings
unpublished during his lifetime. Sometimes they are part of longer
developments in well-known books and essays, which are translated
into several languages and form the core of the critical reception of
Benjamin's writings in German , English, or French. Such is the case of
several passages on comedy from the Tra uersp iel book and the essay on

Fate and Character.

Some of the fragments on comedy are just sketches

gathered under the editors ' general heading

Asthetische Fragmente,

available only in the original. Given these circumstances, the visibility

of the proj ect and its significance are easily overlooked. Yet, these
passages and fragments , neither numerous nor fully expanded, prob
ably the remains of an account of classical French comedy Benj amin
mentions in a

curriculum vitae

from early 1928, contain important

clarifications on the relevance of art forms to the history of philoso

phy and on the task of criticism he was to formulate subsequently.
Presented as a further development of the critical path set out in the
MLN121 (2006) : 1041-1071 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

1042

ADRIANA BONTEA

dissertation on the mourning plays, this project was important enough

for Benj amin to envisage it as a companion piece to his treatment of
German Baroque drama. 1 It is in the context of this previous study
and of its achievements that I propose to begin the evaluation of the
fragments on comedy.

Trauerspiel and Allegory

Finished in 1925, the book on

Trauerspiel

introduced and shaped a

form of critique unfamiliar to both the philosophical studies and

literary criticism of the time. Its originality rested on the attempt to
render works of art, through the process of interpretation , equiva
lent to recognised forms of knowledge , to which particular sites of
truth may correspond. If works of art are to provide original forms
of knowledge, which only they can produce and spell out, then their
study must benefit both history of philosophy and literary history.
The study of Protestant theatre identified this integration under the
form of allegory and specified the task of criticism as an interpretation
enabling art works to sustain such a construction.
Benjamin's proposed approach , which guided both his investigations
of German Baroque drama and classical French comedy, came at a
time when works of art and their forms were not usually called upon
as examples by theories of knowledge . Left outside the vast systems
of knowledge that the nineteenth century had produced, the work
of art was either confined to aesthetic j udgment and the empirical
theory of faculties, or imprisoned inside the theory of particular
artistic forms. In the first instance, its evaluation was limited to the
j udgment of taste , in the second to aesthetic categorisations of genre
(tragedy, comedy, novel) or to impressionistic approaches to the media
presenting them (literature , painting, music) . Within this context,
as the example of the scholarly studies on the

Trauerspiel quoted

by

Benj amin showed, the interpretation of art forms was meant either
to illustrate an aesthetic classification, namely tragedy, or to allow for
several undirected remarks about Baroque tendencies identified in
the field and with the help of visual arts .
It i s against this doctrine o f the territorial character o f art that
Benj amin writes the last section of the book on

Trauerspiel,

while at

the same time proposing a new synthesis between poles of knowledge

usually kept apart. The process of this new synthesis was implied by
the study of allegory, a canonical expression familiar to the baroque
age through the books of emblems. In borrowing this form from the

1043

MLN

iconologies of Alciat, Ripa, Menestrier, and others , Benjamin recon

structs its meaning in order to identify a level of integration whereby
the different aspects of the genre , the action , the language , the music,
and the choreography retrieve their unity-a harmonic unity rather
than one based on judgment or conceptual summary. Each level attests,
in its own way, to the scattering of signifiers and signified into pieces,
and accounts for the sadness shaping the historical experience of the
time. The origin of such a feeling is to be found in the contemplation
of a world falling apart. The poetics of the genre is thus constructed
within the formal framework of Baroque emblems , which are them
selves decomposed old mythological symbols reduced to fragments
and made to accommodate Christian teachings. Taking this formal
aspect of allegory as a starting point, Benj amin sees in it more than a
principle able to account for the lack of formal unity of the Baroque
plays. He also enhances its powers of expression by attaching to it
political and theological contents presented in the prefaces introduc
ing this theatre alongside other theoretical writings of the time. The
detailed reconstruction of allegory from heterogeneous fragments
enables Benj amin to lay bare the content of experience as it was lived
by the individual creature of the Baroque age . In front of God's cre
ation and its fragments , he faces the impossibility of reuniting them
and himself with the main purpose of genesis secured by the promise
of redemption. "Within allegory, it is the

facies hippocratica

of history

which offers itself to the spectator as a primitive petrified landscape .

History always had inscribed its violent, painful and imperfect aspects
on a human face-nay: on a skull"

(GS 1.1 343). 2

Two main points convert Baroque allegory into a construction

able to rival other recognised philosophical tools. 3 On the one hand,
allegory proposes a valid level of integration of both individual and
historical experience. On the other it makes manifest the very way the
subj ect of experience is also the subject of knowledge shaping what it
experiences. The image of the skull, object of meditation and mute
interpellation of an individual biography within the flow of history,
articulates this double binding of experience. From the point of view
of the content of experience it points to a historical process, which
turns all that is touched by it into ruins. And from the standpoint of
the knowing subj ect, it is a foreboding that all that he sees will soon
look like the black holes of the skull returning his gaze , a point of
intersection where what it is being looked at and the one who looks
are j oined together in the same process of degradation. The value
of the

image

rests on its ability to offer a view of history and of its

1044

ADRIANA BONTEA

viewer as both protagonist and contemplator, within the dimensions

of a reduced model, encapsulating the philosophical, moral, and
theological content of the plays. Similar in its role and explanatory
powers to Aristotle's identification of unity of action as a philosophi
cal instrument disclosing both the epistemological powers of tragedy
and the conditions governing its perception by the spectator,4 alle
gory becomes the repository of history's endless catastrophe, while
capturing the sensible position of unredeemable sadness occupied
by the viewer. The philosophical significance of allegory consists in
its aptitude to give to the tonality of mourning songs resonating from
the

Reyen 5 and

dialogues of the

Trauerspiel a

physiognomy, while the

primary achievement of the book resides in proj ecting the excessive

cruelty and passion of the plays to a level where the obj ectivity of the
image keeps manifest the subjectivity of the beholder. The image of
the skull provides such a synthesis, allowing the full emergence of
the sadness of the individual experiencing his own life as part of a
historical process outside a final end. Under such a view, human his
tory regresses to natural history.

The Task of Criticism

The outcome of Benj amin's study reaches far beyond the particular
art form it was set out to clarify. Its consequences, rightly assessed,
should be regarded as part of a wider task, the task of a criticism to
come, and the study of the mourning plays may be seen as a first
attempt to replace the theory of the j udgement of taste by the pri
macy of the truth content of the work of art. Neither beautiful nor
able to produce the total sum of an impression enabling the specta
tor to resolve " the conflicting emotions into a harmonious tone of
feeling, " which, according to W. A. Schlegel, was the main task of the
dramatic poet,6 this art form receives in the process of interpretation
a new function, namely that of an organon for the knowledge of his
tory, including the present time.7 The study of allegory removed the
work of art from the realm of aesthetic j udgment and the harmony
of beautiful forms, where Kant and the Romantics had placed it, and
transformed it into a modality of knowledge according to which the
content of what is known is inseparable from the subject that knows
it. Furthermore , the art form of the mourning play delivers its content
as an obj ectified product, as a product of nature , which Benj amin's
own historical experience and the Expressionist tendencies in con
temporary art help to formulate. Hence the task of criticism and its

1045

newfound objectivity: an endeavour to reveal the truth content of art

forms through the consideration of their entire sphere, be it religious,
metaphysical, and political, and to capture it within the dimensions
of an image, a dialectic image . It is only later that Benjamin will call
this process "dialectics at a standstill"

(Dialektik im Stillstand) .8

Its ori

gins go back to the first attempts to develop a form of criticism that

forbids j udgment and suspends any theory of faculties, in favour of a
critique whose closer relative would be the practice of the old physi
ognomists. Benj amin, summarising the path he took in the study of
German Baroque drama as an attempt to bring about "a process of
integration of scholarship-one that will increasingly dismantle the
rigid partitions between the disciplines that typified the concept of
the sciences in the nineteenth century," holds this approach " to be
a precondition for any physiognomic definition of those aspects of
artworks that make them incomparable and unique" ("Curriculum
Vitae" 78). The identification of allegory as a form able to account
for the truth content of German plays was also the first step in an
enterprise which set out to establish a physiognomic criticism. Its
main function was to acknowledge the ability of art forms to open
new insights into the realm of truth and to specify the distinctive part
they play in its configuration. The task of Benj amin's criticism was
guided by the conviction that such an endeavour has to renounce
all forms of j udgement and move beyond both the empirical subject
and the object of contemplation presupposed by eighteenth-century
aesthetics, which was responsible for severing the study of art from
the realm of truth.

The Harmonic Concept of Truth

This radical reconsideration of the role of works of art is the leading
thread running through all of Benj amin's projects dealing with the
status of art forms. These projects are responsible for the constitu
tion of a whole new region of our intellectual map, as they add a
new modality to the usual ways to establish truth, reminiscent of the
sciences and their representation within a closed system . Apart from
this truth, which corresponds to a systematic hierarchy of concepts,
there are truths that "can be expressed neither systematically nor
conceptually-much less with acts of knowledge in j udgments-but
only in art. Works of art are the proper sites of truths. There are
as many ultimate truths as there are authentic works of art. "9 This
enigmatic formula guides all of Benjamin's art criticism, accounting

1046

ADRIANA BONTEA

not only for the diversity of forms he examined, from the Romantic's
fragments to epic theatre , from Baroque drama to lithography and
the art of cinema, but also for the quality, and at times, for the dif
ficulty, of his own prose. If truths do not come into contact with one
another, and above all, cannot be completed through one another,
their systematic investigation is impossible. The task of criticism would
then be to make them become manifest, "with a sound like music."
One must acquire what he calls elsewhere the harmonic concept of
truth , "a truth which won 't deceive once it proves it is not watertight .
. . . Much we expect to find in it slips through the net. " 1 0 The inves
tigation of the Trauers piel might well have made Benjamin aware of a
level of experience, which was left over, despite the detailed poetics
of allegory he constructed in order to describe the language , action ,
and dramatic structure of the plays. The experience lies behind , j usti
fies the principles of repetition pervading the Baroque drama. The
genre 's conventions set this reiteration in relief by the even number
of acts and by the singing interludes, which suspend the action and
transpose it into the realm of music.
The interplay between sound and meaning remains a terrifying phantom
of the mourning play; it is obsessed by language, the victim of an endless
feeling-like Polonius, who was overcome by madness in the midst of his
reflections. This interplay must find its resolution, however, and for the
mourning play that redemptive mystery is music-the rebirth of the feel
ings in a nature above sensibility.11

This "metaphysical order" points to a tension between unbridgeable

domains, here the feeling of sadness and the spoken word. For the
overflow of emotion resists the interruptions imposed by language .
In the process of signifying, language freezes emotion and breaks the
continuity of the Trauerinto meaningful words. On the way from feel
ing to speech , lament becomes hyperbolic use of language . Yet, cruel
and violent as it is, the language of the mourning plays does not bring
out all the intensity of feeling. The poetics of allegory captures this
tension by the fragmentation it imposes on all its contents, but doesn 't
solve it. However, it is with the help of allegory that this redeeming
remnant of the Trauerspiel is disclosed and its overwhelming power
recognised in the sound of music.
The poetics of allegory and its minute details had two closely related
consequences. The first was a working through of the mourning
plays that revealed an originary Baroque phenomenon , melancholy.
Similar to Calderon's and Shakespeare 's theatre , German drama had

1047

MLN

its own share in framing a phenomenon, which can be neither per

ceived nor seen outside the limits defining these particular art forms.
Hence the title of the book: it underlines the emergence

(Ursprung)

of the genre from an overwhelming feeling of sadness particular to

Silesian writers and the Protestant view of salvation . The second con
sequence of Bertjamin 's approach was to liberate the

Trauerspiel from

its long-lasting amalgamation with ancient tragedy. For Greek theatre

and the German drama are the repositories of two quite different
phenomena. Tragedy refers to a culpability no one is guilty for, while
Protestant drama reveals the state of fallen man and his sorrow. To the
first corresponds a view of human life as being already condemned,
condemned beforehand. The second alludes to the status of creature
and to the feeling of loss that nothing can appease. The two genres
are both original forms enabling the introduction , into the realm of
consciousness, of phenomena that, outside the limits imposed by art,
can only be intuited. In the process of criticism, antique tragedy and
German drama receive a new dignity: to shape truths and present
them independently of a systematic investigation.
The proj ect on comedy was guided by the recognition that this
genre also qualifies for a place in the history of forms, by virtue of the
originality it preserved in respect to both mourning plays and tragedy.
Its design probably evolved from the parallel Benj amin set between
the mourning play and tragedy. Due to the general tendency of the
scholarship of the day to conflate the two art forms, it was virtually
inevitable to see in the first a continuation of the second, rather than
a distinctive form in its own righ t. 1 2 The invocation of comedy sug
gests its relevance to the criteria Benj amin designed to dissociate the

Trauerspiel from tragedy within a history of forms

considered from the

point of view of an experience they shape and express. On this point

Benj amin makes a very clear distinction between the two forms when
he proposes two criteria against which they should be measured: the
first is their relation to historical time, the second refers to the role
of language. 13

Fate and Character

When placed in connection to historical time tragedy appears as a
struggle of the individual to uproot himself from the demonic past
he has inherited in its mythological form, in order to break through
the complications imposed by prophecy and guilt. Tragedy and the
concept of fate derived from it represent a stage prior to the birth of

104 8

ADRIANA BONTEA

law, a stage that the law

was

intended to overcome, but which it was

never able to surpass completely. I ts historical relevance rests on the

hope it expresses that the newborn law might be able to deliver the
hero from natural guilt, while at the same time never showing this
task as fully achieved. When Benj amin calls the death of the tragic
hero an ironic death he refers to the fact that his sacrifice doesn't
institute a new order, as it has been so often claimed. The death of
the hero reveals the hidden face of the law and the demonic forces
it wished to silence. In the context of tragedy, this remnant appears
as destiny. It is this understanding of the law that ties up the tongue
of the hero. He is mute , for the language capable of breaking the
circle of destiny that tightens up around him in his last moments is
still to come.
Benjamin's interpretation of tragedy was guided by the need to free
the concept of fate from its association with ethics, on the evidence
that there is no correlative concept for destiny within the moral sphere
embodied by j ustice,

as

there is for guilt, namely innocence. " In the

Greek classical development of the idea of fate , the happiness granted

to a man is understood not at all as confirmation of an innocent con
duct of life but as a temptation to the most grievous offence, hubris.
There is, therefore , no relation of fate to innocence . " 1 4 Claiming that
innocence remains outside the realm of tragedy, Benj amin not only
removes the tragic hero from an e thical sphere which escapes him,
but also denies the relevance of the religious sphere : there is no room
within tragedy for anything that is not misfortune, and thus there is
no possible path for liberation. The context in which tragedy can be
best understood in its relation to the Greek perception of phenomena
remains that of law in its earlier stages, when the first forms of admin
istratingjustice , contemporary with the representation of tragedy, were
still embedded in the demonic forces they set out to overcome. The
setting of this theatre reminded the audience of the court of law in
several ways: the dialogue (the direct interpellation and the defence) ,
the unity of action (the trial) , the unity of place (the tribunal) , and
the unity of time (the judicial session) . 15 Yet tragedy remains foreign
to the administration of j ustice when it confines the hero to natural
determinations and stages the enslavement to natural guilt, be it by
negligence or omission. The protagonist enters the stage loaded by
a remote mythological past, of which the mask, costume , and buskin
give a hint. These theatrical devices place him on a larger scale than
mere human determinations, as does the open-air theatre . And the
plot sets out the knot of an ancient and indelible culpability. This far-

MLN

1049

reaching past is remembered in the deeds and the death of the hero,
and by the complicated threads of prophecy, which leave no room for
innocence . This remnant never enters the domain of tragedy. Rather
it is kept carefully outside it, either in the satirical play that precedes
the representation of tragedy or in the comedy that follows it. A
passage from the essay " Fate and Character" situates tragedy on the
balance of law and suggests that on such a scale " bliss and innocence
are found too light and float upward" :
Law condemns not t o punishment but t o guilt.Fate is the guilt context o f the
living. It corresponds to the natural context of the living-that semblance

(Schein),

not yet wholly dispelled, from which man is so far removed that,

under its rule, he was never wholly immersed in it but only invisible in his
best part. It is not therefore really man who has a fate; rather the subject
of fate is indeterminable.The judge can perceive fate wherever he pleases;
with every judgement he must blindly dictate fate.It is never man, but only
the life in him that it strikes-the part involved in the natural guilt and
misfortune by virtue of semblance. (204)

Fate corresponds to a vision of man that links him to nature and

makes him appear at the same level as natural phenomena. Seen
on this level, only a part of the entire being of the hero emerges.
Yet this mere fragment is the most visible from outside , the point
of view that tragedy configures for its godly and human spectators.
Here Benj amin seems to propose a reading of fate similar to other
practices of interpretation, such as astrology, haruspices, or augury, all
claiming to identify a concept of fate within a correlation borrowed
from the physics of natural phenomena. The difficulty of the text
corresponds to the difficulty of the task he sets forth . 1 6 Perhaps the
enigmatic prose extends from an implied analogy Benj amin draws
between identifying a pure concept of fate and reading the mantic
signs. In fate , as in these different interpretative practices, the one
who is struck is unable to access its meaning. Only a staged act of
interpretation supplies this meaning, whether carried out by the
judge or the soothsayer. Both link the living being to the circle of
nature that, by virtue of its semblance provides a similarity between
the human order and the physics of things. It is this similarity and its
mere appearance that obscures the part of the human being soaring
above the sea of culpability and sentences him to natural guilt and
misfortune. If tragedy grasps the natural life of man under the com
plicated knot of destiny, leaving no room for other determinations
besides the physical ones, comedy opposes this definitive sentence
with the belief in the natural innocence of man . Based on the notion

1050

ADRIANA BONTEA

of character, Benj amin's interpretation of comedy is guided by this

original phenomenon , equivalent to natural culpability and of equal
import for both anthropology and philosophy.
The essay " Fate and Character" was devoted to spelling out the
confusion between the two concepts and to deny any intimate asso
ciation between them, as established both by scholarship and several
practices of interpretation, including chiromancy. It was important to
withdraw fate from the religious and ethical spheres and to introduce
it instead among perceptions of natural phenomena, in order to make
explicit the constraints this determination imposes on the speech
and deeds of the tragic hero. By the same token, the identification
of fate as a natural constraint touching the physical life of the tragic
hero through the complicated thread of guilt, underscored the sim
plifications involved in the practice of predicting someone's future
from reading the lines of a hand. The practice remains a legitimate
one in so far as it indicates a series of corresponding phenomena in
nature and in man , which may be identified only through a process
of interpretation or reading of the signs of the body. Its outcome
however, is not. Furthermore it was crucial for Benjamin to divorce
the concept of character from its moral connotations and to find a
natural correlation for it, if it was to occupy the same scale as fate and
allow him to measure one against the other.
This might well have been the purpose of a project on classical
French comedy: to develop , as exemplified by the genre , the notion
of character as the proper site of the natural innocence of man and
to assess its weight on a scale that already places on its other pan the
concept of fate , proper to tragedy. Derived from the study of Moliere's
comedy, the concept of character, might have received enough weight
to rebalance the scale and to temper the Greek vision of culpability and
its heaviness with the perception of happiness. The closing paragraphs
of " Fate and Character" suggest this new envisaged equilibrium :
While fate brings to light the immense complexity of the guilty person, the
complications and bonds of his guilt, character gives this mystical enslave
ment of the person to the guilt context the answer of genius.Complication
becomes simplicity, fate freedom....To the dogma of the natural guilt of
human life, of original guilt, the irredeemable nature of which constitutes
the doctrine, and its occasional redemption the cult, of paganism, genius
opposes a vision of the natural innocence of man. (205-06)

A line from the fragment " Moliere:

The !magi.nary Invalid"

indicates

the place Benj amin intended to secure for comedy: " Moliere is the
exact tangent of the French spirit in respect to the Greeks. " 1 7 This

105 1

MLN

scant remark suggests the importance he was to assign to comedy on

the basis of its authenticity. French comedy, like Greek tragedy, is an
art form able to secure and disclose a perception and attach to it an
original form . As much as Greek tragedy brings forth the understand
ing of guilt outside the domain of justice, French comedy reveals its
originality when it presents innocence outside the relationship to
law. Neither the brief fragments on comedy nor the several passages
dedicated to this topic elsewhere allow for the pursuit of the inster
section suggested by Bertjamin in his own terms. Nevertheless, the
relationship between comedy and tragedy deserves to be taken further,
in order to clarify the significance both of a genre whose treatment
was supposed to stand as a companion piece to the treatment of the
Baroque drama and of the philosophical issues brought forth by the
consideration of works of art as proper sites for truths.

Comedy and Law

According to the law, the accused is declared innocent only by clear
ing him of the charges brought against him. To this extent the state
of innocence is derived from the rej ection of an accusation of guilt
already made: a person becomes innocent only after guilt has been
initially supposed and then set aside for lack of evidence. Because in the
realm ofjustice innocence is thus drawn from guilt, it cannot appear
but in reference to it, as its negation. And no matter how much relief
or happiness one may feel when acquitted, no release from a charge
can completely restore what was taken away from the moral identity
of the accused by the incriminator, j ust as no apology can erase the
impact of a lightly thrown word. It can only acknowledge it. To this
extent innocence as a restoration of what is right carries with it the
shadow of deceit. The legal context denies the state of innocence

facto when it acknowledges innocence

de

dejure. Therefore, in the context

of law, innocence is to be proved according to a protocol. It is never

an assured matter, as it can always be attacked by public or private
accusations. " Thus the freedom of the citizen depends on the good
formulation of criminal law,"18 never on presumed innocence. When
Montesquieu remarks that whenever the innocence of citizens is not
assured by the laws freedom has not been granted either, he implies
that innocence is a matter of accurate formulations of law, not a mat
ter of legal principle . Innocence doesn 't refer to the nature of man; it
refers to the nature of governments in their capacity to produce good
legislation. Within this correlation it remains a derivative product,

1052

ADRIANA BONTEA

following from a presupposed, yet unsubstantiated guilt, not a primary

and fundamental determination of the human being, as it is presented
in comedy. The relevance of the genre , which Benj amin places on the
same footing as tragedy, consists in proposing a vision of innocence
that no law can question, acknowledge , or refute .
Moliere 's comedy shows the proper sphere occupied by natural
innocence when it places at its centre as the main protagonist " an
individual whom, if we were confronted by his actions in life instead
of by his person on the stage , we would call it a scoundrel. On the
comic stage, however, his actions take on only the interest shed by the
light of character, and the latter is, in classical examples, the subj ect
not of moral condemnation but of high amusement. It is never in
themselves, never morally, that the actions of the comic hero affect his
public; his deeds are interesting only insofar as they reflect the light
of character" (" Fate and Character" 205). These lines suggest that the
study of comedy is perforce grounded in the concept of character,
whic h , in classical examples, offers a framework for the perception
of innocence outside the ethical realm ofj ustice. The mention of the
scoundrel among the main protagonists of comedy points to a set of
natural determinations morally indifferent, such as cleverness or stu
pidity, which are foreign to the sphere of law. However fruitful these
remarks on the comic character are, Benj amin never followed up these
general statements on the nature of comedy. Yet they deserve to be
taken a step further, more fully delineating this sphere of comedy as
a counterpart to the tragic vision of man defined by the Greeks.
An example from Moliere 's plays may clarify the issue .

Schemer presents a series of intrigues and inventions

Scapin the

forged by the title

character to bypass the stipulations of law and to keep himself out

of the grip of j ustice. All the devices he imagines, all the dangers he
encounters, including the clubbing, are the signs of the liberties he
takes with and against the law. And his long discourse, exposing to
Argante the reasons not to go to court and annul his son 's unwanted
marriage, points to a world of serenity and ease where life could be
lived ever after, once the complications of heavy legal procedures
are avoided: "I beseech you to keep away from this Hell on earth. To
go to the law is to be damned while you are still alive , and the very
thought of such a thing would be enough to send me off in voluntary
exile as fast as my feet would carry me."19 In Scapin's words, the legal
course of action becomes a punishment in itself, inflicted prior to
any j udgement. It ensures everlasting pain even before a sentence is
passed. Through his speech he warns that each stage of the procedure

1053

MLN

will fall upon the claimant as blows of clubs, for every word he utters
slaps Argante and makes him shrink.20 While presenting the exercise
of human justice as irredeemable damnation falling upon the victim
much before the last judgement, Scapin proposes a new path for rec
onciliation between the involved parties as a way to save everyone.
I t is common knowledge that at the time the multiplicity of French
royal, county, and ecclesiastical decrees, and above all their overlap
ping, made the administration of j ustice heavy to handle, difficult to
understand , and easy to defer. Racine 's comedy

The Pkaders presents

these ins and outs of law at the end of the play when the judge turns
mad and the guilty parties of a long-lasting trial are declared to be
two dogs. To this failure of law, Moliere brings a deeper insight.
Scapin's incredible stratagems are rooted in his cleverness. These
include the story about the Turkish galley kidnapping Geronte 's son,
a ploy invented to secure from the father the necessary sum to buy
Leandre 's bride without having to steal the money. Such contrivances
point to a realm foreign to the law. Moreover they suggest that, in
its alienation, the legal system relates to the rule of law on land as
pirate justice at sea.21 By means of the comic character, comedy not
only points at the holes within the j udicial system, it also annuls its
very

raison d'etre,

by turning justice into a scarecrow, a toy one can

play with as one pleases. At the moment when it reconciles fathers,

sons, and servants in the act of pardon , clearing all involved parties
of any responsibility and ill faith ,

Scapin the Schemer

challenges the

law's very necessity. Through this process that counterposes the law
to the high cleverness of man , the comic character of the scoundrel,
the one who acted and devised all the way through , appears as a sign
of nature , a

stigma.

This word is to be taken not in its moral, but in

its physiognomic sense: as a birthmark or a scar.

After fathers and sons are reunited in the play's final scene, Scapin
performs his last trick to obtain pardon and escape justice. He enters
the scene with his head wrapped with bandages covering a mortal
wound and begs for mercy so that he may leave the world in peace. This
mask features his character

as

a natural inscription of his doings, and

his spirited temper and inventiveness as a physiognomic trait, "laying

bare all his brain. "22 The mercy he receives is the acknowledgement
of an innocence never in need of proof, but granted under the aegis
of character, with the words, deeds, and gestures that the comic poet
lends to the protagonist. The comedy of character interjects this insight
into the natural innocence of man ; it endows this innocence with the
obj ectivity of a mask, a mask on which one can read the protagonist's

1054

ADRIANA BONTEA

features like on a forehead or a hand. This aspect of the genre was

retained by Benjamin when he envisaged Moliere 's comedy in the
same tradition as Greek tragedy, the tradition of drama of mask. The
originality of both genres rests on two equivalent modes of knowledge
shaping the natural determination of the living being, character and
fate, outside the moral and religious spheres.
Was Benj amin's envisaged study on comedy guided by the forebod
ing that comedy can bring a new dimension to recognised forms of
knowledge defining human understanding and the use of reason? Did
he also feel that the genre might help to achieve a level of integration
between natural phenomena and their representation, beyond the
self-imposed limitations of Kantian anthropology? According to that
conception , character is an acquired mode of thinking revealing a
person's compliance with certain principles prescribed by reason. As
such, the notion of character describes what the individual does with
himself, and is opposed to temperament, which bears the imprint of
nature. 23 Is comedy a genre testifying to that indiscernible level of
human action and reasoning where thought is not j ust recognisable
through deeds in a moral sphere , but is also inscribed in an exterior
mark? A mark that is bold enough to envisage a natural sphere for
thought? In other words, could thought be expressed in the same
ways as the ancient doctrine of humours envisaged temperament? In
order to answer this question we have to go back to the tradition of
the drama of mask Benj amin invokes and to the philosophical issues
it raises.

The Drama of Mask

Aware of the immense distance in time between Greek tragedy and
French comedy, yet convinced of their significant correlation when
viewed together from an anthropological point of view, Benj amin
sought a point of intersection between the two genres prominent
enough to j ustify a common ground yet sufficiently distant to account
for the centuries separating them. This point emerges when Benj amin
places Moliere 's comedy within the remote tradition of the drama
of mask, a tradition which probably started before the Greeks, took
its first historical form in the Greek drama, was then continued in
Plautus's and Terence's Latin comedies, and reached the Middle Ages
through Hroswitha von Gandersheim 's theatre. These landmarks of
the dramatic tradition leading up to the seventeenth-century French
comedy designate the milestones according to which the genre was to

1055

MLN

be measured in order to answer what was the main question raised by

such an art form. "The question is to establish if he (Moliere) continues
this tradition, the tradition of the drama of mask. The comic mask as
well as the tragic mask. All of these are the most fundamental issues
concerning drama and the classical spirit of the drama depends on
the mask" ("Moliere:

Der Eigenbildete Kranke" 612).

The mask, characterising both tragedy and comedy, is the distinc

tive feature that captures, over a long span of time , the very spirit of
classicism. The investigation of classical French comedy was directed,
as much as was the study of German Baroque drama, towards the jus
tification of an aesthetic categorisation, historically grounded within
a philosophical tradition that Benj amin enlarged to accommodate
works of art. In this light the project on comedy appears indeed as
a companion piece to the book on the mourning plays, since it was
probably also intended to reconsider the notion of classicism in a
manner paralleling Benj amin's reflection on the tensions character
ising the Baroque age. The comparison may be taken a step further
in terms of method. We may see in the proposal to treat Moliere 's
dramaturgy in the context of the drama of mask the deployment of
a tool equal to allegory. What would then be the content of French
comedy if considered in this tradition?
One of the most common features of the

Trauerspiel

consists in

presenting sovereigns accompanied by their councillors. These char

acters are the intrigants of the plays; with them comic elements enter
the drama.24 While one represents sadness, the other, always near the
despot, presents derision toward human vanity. Their ill-council, while
fooling the prince and sealing his damnation , gives them pleasure and
makes them laugh at the credulity of the master. Benj amin invests this
dramatic construction with a theological content. If the melancholy of
the prince is so close to the j oy of the intrigant, it is because both phe
nomena reveal in the distance the kingdom of Satan. This significant
correlation , associating deep melancholy with the relation between
the prince and his demonic j ester, is a major theme of the theatre of
the era, including Calderon's and Shakespeare 's. This linkage resides
at the very heart of the law of the genre. Baroque theatre reveals its
historical identity when it shows comedy developing within drama.
Here Benj amin touches the clearest foundations governing the status
of Baroque theatre. Under no circumstances could comedy emerge in
the realm of tragedy, and it is their separation that accounts for the
opposition of classical drama to the Baroque forms that were to be
further developed by Romanticism. The essay "Fate and Character,"

1056

ADRIANA BONTEA

while setting the two concepts apart, also argued indirectly for the
separation of two different truth contents, which do not mix together
within the classical tradition .
The reflection on classical comedy and the insight into the law
of the genre goes back to this particular point in the analysis of the
mourning play when Benj amin clarifies the mixed feeling of sadness
and joy. The

Trauerspiel owes

nothing to either tragedy or comedy in

their classical guise. From a historical point of view, Greek tragedy

had been put to death long ago by the Platonic dialogue , at the end
of the

Symposium

when Socrates, still awake, suggests that the true

poet is the one who can write both tragedy and comedy. Giving this
advice to Agathon and to Aristophanes at the end of a night-long
dialogue opposing different forms of discourse given in honour of a
god, Socrates keeps his own speech out of both, and thus suggests a
different way to continue the dramatic form. Benj amin refers directly
to the last lines of the

Symposium

in a concluding passage on the

tragic dialogue , as a way to introduce the language of

Trauerspiel and
( Ursprung 297). He also refers
Moliere 's Imaginary Invalid, when

its mixture of melancholy and comedy

to it indirectly in the fragment on

h e briefly mentions why classical drama, both tragedy and comedy,

can be explicated within the context of the drama of mask-because
both develop forms of knowledge and language divergent from the
Platonic dialogue and the philosophical norm it imposed on the
subsequent history of philosophy. Philosophy can be neither comic
nor tragic , only sober, like Socrates's speech at dawn. Comedy and
tragedy are forms which remain outside the recognised philosophical
forms, and for which Socrates set the rule of sobriety: "Only when
one had recognised the depth of the unexpressive in tragedy and the
intellectual purity of comedy, and established their interchangeable
role, would it be possible to consider the problem of philosophy and
establish with precision the genre of Platonic dialogues, from which
these two forms of language and knowledge-for this is how these two
forms are to be grasped-are falling apart" ("Moliere:

Kranke" 612).

Der Eigenbi/,dete

Thus the study of comedy and tragedy delineates here

a role never before accorded to them; they are invoked to shed light
on the philosophical genre invented by Plato , a genre which departs
from both of them.
Was Benj amin about to set out one of the possible ways to draw the
historical limits of the Platonic dialogue between Greek tragedy and
French comedy? A long development on the tragedy in the

Trauerspiel

book may point in this direction as it contrasts the death of the tragic

MLN

1057

hero with Socrates's death and with the martyr drama, a close relative
of the mourning play. Was this an alternative to Nietzsche 's approach
to the same question concerning the end of the tragic poem as genre
and the beginning of Plato 's prose through a critique of art forms?25
And

was

the understanding of French comedy directed towards find

ing a terminus point for the rationality instaured by Socrates within

the Platonic dialogue? The answer to these questions depends on
the way both genres are made to accommodate forms of knowledge
which remain outside the reach of the Platonic dialogue. Benj amin
identifies these forms in tragedy and comedy, both forms of dialogue
shaped by the distinctiveness of the drama of mask they represent in
opposition with Plato 's dramatic staging.
The Greek drama of mask corresponds to a staging of human speech
preceding the beginning of philosophy as we find it in the Platonic
dialogue. Philosophy's urge to identify, to the best of human abilities,
a way to speak about the nature of things (physics), of men and gods,
from the point of view of humans, left behind the vision of enslaving
guilt, and brought about the end of tragedy. Searching for the most
appropriate way to talk about natural phenomena, laws, education,
love , the protagonists participate in all these things. They undertake
their specific course of action not as objects in the hands of gods but
as subjects , attaching to each topic a good formula, a correct expres
sion. It

was

Socrates 's task to endorse through each of his speeches,

the stake that human beings have in what happens, and to present
this involvement as a proper way to speak and behave , as their own
responsibility. In the person of Socrates, the individual breaks free
from the demonic powers of fear by turning the gods, and what poets
and myth say about them, to his side. Phaedo, recounting Socrates's
last hours, which were no different from the other hours of his life,
describes the dialogue scene in opposition to the tragic scene: "I
certainly found being there an astonishing experience. Although I
was witnessing the death of one who was my friend, I had no feeling
of pity, for the man appeared happy both in manner and words and
he died nobly and without fear. "26 Here another scene opens up,
cleared of tragic passions, of terror and pity. It is the scene in which
the protagonist acquires speech, and its apprenticeship institutes a
rationality not only for him but also for his disciples and others to
come. With the change of scene another form of truth emerges when
the protagonist, now able to speak for himself, bequeaths his speech to
his friends. This anonymity of truth and of the rationality to which it
gives rise, required further developments in Plato's writings, including

1058

ADRIANA BONTEA

the dialogues where Socrates is absent or keeps silent. There are many
instances where the participants , after agreeing on a formulation in a
given context, remove it from its original setting and try it again on a
different topic, to check and prove its validi ty. Although never directly
expressed in these terms, Benj amin acknowledges this procedure as
the norm of philosophy: the subject who speaks withdraws from the
scene of the dialogue for the benefit of what is said, so that what is
said could be spoken by other mouths.
These remarks on the withdrawal of the individual from the scene
of the dialogue conclude the historical presentation of tragedy in the

Trauerspiel

book, but the anonymity of truth to which several other

fragments and writings refer becomes the touchstone of the critique

to come. Whenever he considers art forms like tragedy or comedy, the
task of criticism is to position them according to a canon responsible
for our rationality and the anonymous way it is constituted. And thus,
through interpretation , it is also to make the work reveal its truth
as an anonymous or unexpressive form. In other words, Benj amin
conducts the study in such a way as to deliver its meaning, not as the
consequence of an act of j udgement, but rather as the unveiling of
the different possibilities of a work within a framed historical time.
Thus tragedy and comedy are invoked as forms able to elucidate
the nature of the Platonic dialogue on the assumption that they too
participate in the constitution of truths through their dramatic form.
To the anonymity of reason delivered by the Platonic staging of the
dialogue , corresponds the unexpressiveness of the drama of mask,
in both its tragic and comic forms. Their distinction is firstly one
of language. Benjamin made this point clear when he opposed the
silence of the tragic hero to Socrates's loquacity, lasting beyond his
death. The anonymity of the masked protagonist refers to another
content. For in tragedy, the covered face marks a degree of passion
that overcomes speech and annihilates its powers. It refers precisely
to a force, that of fate, whose grip on the hero keeps him immature
and speechless.
The comic mask is different. It alludes to the same serenity Socrates
exemplifies, yet it turns against the ways it is achieved in Plato's dia
logues. The language of comedy points precisely to the limits of faith
in human language and its reliability. In the comic dialogue, language
can always be turned around and twisted by language. Moreover
no knowledge remains intact when subjected to an art of dialogue
devised to elicit human individuality in its capacity to question com
mon grounds, the very grounds of a shared dialectical scene. This

MLN

1059

is revealed by comedy not as an intention to deceive , even less as a

way to revoke the achievements of logic, but rather as a description
of the very nature of rationality and its tendency to enthrone itself
at the expense of other kinds of knowledge. Don Juan 's response ,
when queried regarding his beliefs, is: "I believe that two and two
make four, Sganarelle, and four and four make eight. "27 Don Juan ,
the rational character, uses his reason like his sword, to kill dead
arguments stopping him from proceeding on his way. But through
comic dialogue these arguments keep bouncing back, forcing reason
to spin around itself until it surrenders in laughter.28 No matter how
much commentators wished to emphasise Don Juan 's punishment by
the statue of the Commander, it is still difficult not to see in this huge
marionette, who merely nods his head, an allegory of reason , suiting
the fashion of the time. The statue grasping Don Juan 's hand and
consuming him in fire leads him to the depth of reason the

libertin

was first to claim. This landscape is no different from the hell Scapin
referred to when presenting the arcana of law. Never does Moliere
come closer to the drama of mask than when he introduces on stage
the moving statue of the Commander, this revenant who comes back
from the dead, to interrupt the supper and demand his dues. His
petrified face shows at once all that Don Juan has said and done dur
ing five acts, transforming the allegations into a kind of playful word
game. If Don Juan 's speeches were an attempt to set him free from
any given conventions-marriage , religion, money-and thus to end
lessly defer the question of responsibility, then this remote place of
freedom which he always envisages in the name of (another) reason,
is opening to him with a nodding welcome and consumes him on its
pyre. The statue discloses in an unexpressive form , beyond words and
deeds, the pursuit of reason to the end by reducing it to a gesture. In
this image , Benjamin 's insight into the nature of comedy as the drama
of mask finds its confirmation. The mask of comedy, here Don Juan 's
e ternal youth and thirst for experience, conveys the anonymity of the
moral person, whose character says nothing of his intentions, only of
his thinking. Like Scapin's mask pointing to his brain, the statue of
the Commander is an enlargement and exaggeration of Don Juan 's
reasoning, until it disappears into void or laughter. After all, his dashing
off might as well be a scheme to avoid paying Sganarelle 's wages.29
Benj amin 's longest passage dedicated to French comedy is the frag
ment on Moliere 's

Imagi,nary Invalid.

It is likely that the identification

of the mask as the particular mode of delivering the truth content of

comedy was in the first instance guided by this play. In the last lines

1060

ADRIANA BONTEA

of the fragment he cursorily notes that the main character should

wear a mask, even if only an ideal mask so that the imagination which
possesses him is also clearly marked from outside. "When he makes
himself dead, he should veil his head even if Moliere doesn 't indicate
so" (613). This remark refers to the third act of the play, when Argan,
the Hypochondriac , plays dead in order to convince his brother that
his young wife is not the inheritance hunter he believes her to be.
The moment when he reluctantly accepts to counterfeit the dead-"Is
there no danger in faking the dead?" he asks before taking on his
role-his head must be veiled so that his illness is not mere appear
ance but a form of life that is lived as an illness. The veil, concludes
Benj amin, is the secret origin of the spirit of drama.

The Unexpressive
It is not possible at this point to further elucidate Benj amin's claim
about the origin of drama remaining within the context of the frag
ments on comedy. However some developments from the essay on
Goethe's

Elective Affinities might shed some light on its meaning.

They

occur on the occasion of clarifying Ottilie's beauty, and its relation to

both semblance and its opposite , the unexpressive.30 In beauty, a term
that holds for both the character of the novel and the work of art,
dwells a semblance which gives to it the features of life. All in beauty
is not semblance however, despite the fact that what is beyond it, the
unexpressive, cannot appear on its own:
Although the expressionless contrasts with the semblance, it stands in such
a fashion of necessary relationship to the semblance that precisely the
beautiful, even if it is not it.self semblance, ceases to be essentially beauti
ful when the semblance disappears from it. For semblance belongs to the
essentially beautiful as the veil and as the essential law of beauty, shows
it.self thus, that beauty appears as such only in what is veiled. 31

This passage, while emphasising the necessary relationship between

beauty and semblance, identifies a remnant of the beautiful, which
doesn ' t disappear when beauty is envisaged outside semblance. Ben
j amin designates that level, which criticism has as its task to construct
whenever it approaches a particular art form , with the term 'unex
pressive ' . Its role is to forbid the beautiful to become an empty word
when it is conceived by art criticism as beyond mere appearance . If
semblance remains the medium in which the beautiful is perceived, if
the former covers the latter like another skirt stuck to Glauce 's body, it

MLN

106 1

does not consume it in its radiance. It is the task of criticism to make

sure that the beautiful as semblance doesn 't absorb the work of art
entirely and that it is confined only to its presentation. The beautiful
presents the content of the work as veiled and thus grants its mystery.
Therefore the role of art criticism is, on the one hand, to acknowledge
the beauty of works as secret, and by so doing to forbid empathy. On
the other it has to show the necessary veiling for us. In other words,
the meaning of an art form is never significant for us, unless in the
process of interpretation the exposition of its meaning is parallel with
the acknowledgement of its obscurity. The unexpressive corresponds
to a concealment, inherent in all important works of art that the veil
of beauty helps to fo rmulate. Shakespeare 's comedy, from whom Ben
j amin probably borrowed the term, furnishes an illuminating instance
of the unexpressive in a scene where Orlando carves on trees not only
the words praising Rosalind's beauty and virtue , but also a meaning
he attaches to them which escapes feeling. The "unexpressive she"
addresses the one he likes, Rosalind, as the one whom we like too, the
beautiful girl disguised as a witty boy. Under the name of Ganymede,
Rosalind's beauty is enhanced by the shepherd's inventive words and
games, and saves it from being mere appearance.32
In a fragment on As

You Like It, Benj amin takes this particular comedy

for the epitome of the idea of art developed by the Romantics and the
sense of infinity they attached to it.33 Shakespeare 's ease in transmut
ing one appearance into another, in pursuing one deliberation into
the next and in turning a previous form into the content of the fol
lowing one , provided the German Romantics with the understanding
of reflection as an endless process. They moved reflection from the
world of drama, where Shakespeare staged it through his characters,
into the realm of art critique-a c ritique that Benj amin was now pre
pared to take a step further in the light of the discrepancy between
the claim and the accomplishment of their philosophy. Opposing
Goethe's theory of archetypes to the early Romantics idea of art, he
writes: "With respect to the concept of beauty, Romanticism rej ected
not simply rule but measure as well , and its literary production is not
only ruleless but measureless. "34 The unexpressive35 was a way to stop
the infinite process of reflection characterising the contemplation of
works of art and to limit the experience they provide to the experience
of knowledge they host. Through the unexpressive, the work of art
unfolds its truth content as a language-formation, which is neither that
of the work nor of the subj ect who contemplates it. Such a language
draws and displays the dimensions according to which what is known is

1062

ADRIANA BONTEA

necessarily limited, while the veil under which it is known leaves open
the possibility to know it again. The veiling of the content accounts
for the historical life of a work, the one that will appeal to future
generations because it allows them to read the artwork in features
of their own time. In this respect the process of criticism contributes
to the life of the work, while dispelling the appearance either of its
beauty or of what its contemporaries identified with. To this extent,
the unexpressive touched on the meaningful level of a form belonging
to the past. Perhaps it also expressed Benj amin's distance from the
contemporary Expressionists ' art and its fits of passion.
Benj amin 's own contribution to the staging of Moliere 's play-the
request to veil Argan 's head-was a way to indicate the secret of the
genre of classical comedy and to establish its truth content in rela
tion to the use of reason and its first enthroning through Plato 's
dialogues. I t is under this veil that the old tradition of the drama of
mask made its last appearance , while pointing to the use of reason
emerging from the determinations of man , the character of comedy,
in his highest degree of individuation. Moliere 's comedies present the
forces resisting the exercise of reason as coming from reason itself. Its
classical character rests on the dramatic role it assigns to appearance,
to paradox or to flights of imagination. Appearance takes the form of
a mask under which reason is covered, without being denied. Scapin
covering his head is a means of rendering his mental ruses sensible
to the audience. Moliere 's text is explicit here in terms of stage direc
tions. This is, however, not the case in his last play.

The Imaginary Invalid

In a consultation scene, Argan describes the symptoms of his illness
as a veil intermittently covering his eyes (Act III, Sc. X) . Benj amin
takes this sign for a distinctive mark of character and sees in it a mode
of constructing a reason particular to comedy. Compared to the way
reason is achieved within Plato 's dialogue , to which Benj amin briefly
alludes, comedy proceeds differently. In order to develop its argument,
the philosophical dialogue marks clearly the instance of agreement
bringing the protagonists together. They stop, as did Socrates on his
way to Agathon's house , before moving ahead. This explicit moment
of decision on what needs to be discarded from the next stages of
conversation is absent from comic dialogue. It is precisely this absence
that the comic action represents through obstacles and devices. The
actions and knots of comedy teach that no agreement can be achieved

1063

MLN

through conversation, as long as the characters maintain their high

individuality. Resolution can come from action alone. In the case
of Moliere 's

comedies-baUet,

such as the

Ima{!jnary Invalid,

where the

last scene is a masquerade , the ceremony ritualises thought and its

driving force, through music and dance. Thus thought is presented
as an action , however abbreviated it may be to the dimensions of a
gesture .
The last scene of the play stages a ceremony Argan performs to
become a physician , get rid of the parasite presence of his doctor
and apothecary, and take care of himself. This triumph of imagina
tion in music and dance reformulates on the level of sensibility the
sense of the dialogues in prose, and it confirms the invalid 's infirmity,
who suffers not from ruined body but failed judgement. Nevertheless
comedy doesn 't present this failure as an error or a deception. Rather
it emphasises the process of imagination in its work of de-forming
what has been previously formed within recognised formulae. The
language of the scene awarding to Argan the title of doctor, is neither
French nor prose anymore , but a mixture of several idioms sometimes
scanned and sometimes sung, yet perfectly comprehensible. "It is
characteristic of all imagination that it plays a game of dissolution with
forms. "36 Benjamin describes this process not in terms of a faculty of
an empirical subject who is affected by his inner representations but
rather as a manifestation of a form dissolving itself from within when
it is perceived no longer as an instant of stillness, but as a transient
moment. The veil claimed by Benj amin for the Imaginary Invalid, is
therefore justified by an astute reading of comedy as a way to repre
sent reason and its recognised forms in the process of deformation
imposed by imagination.37
The law of comedy would then be to make reason visible to the
extent it is covered by the appearance of imagination and undergoes
a process of disintegration. Benj amin 's veiling of Argan suggests
that in the world of classical comedy, reason doesn 't collapse into
nothingness or into the absurd, as in later forms of drama. What is
envisaged in Moliere 's plays is a new birth of the world, according to
a subject, the character of the comedy, who undoes what has been
previously done without destroying it. The creation of a new genre,
the

comedie-ballet,

as well as the whole series of

ima{!jnaires

Moliere

invented, initiate a metamorphosis of the old genre of drama of

mask and its forms. 38 They correspond to a perception of dissolution
permeating old modes of thought and speech , one is transforming
while remembering them . The tension between what was once said

1064

ADRIANA BONTEA

and coined and its transformation into another shape is at the basis
of Moliere 's comedy and its serenity. The disintegration about to
take place is not painful, since it doesn 't destroy, but reshapes. The
parody of the Hippocratic oath , closing the

Imagi,nary Invalid,

is one

instance of such a happy conversion. And Agnes, the protagonist of

the

School of Wives,

understands Arnolphe 's instruction to chase her

lover by throwing stones at him as a way to send him a letter wrapped

in a pebble . The action, reduced to a gesture , not only saves her
from an unwanted marriage and announces the happy ending of the
play. It also saves the old world from becoming mere appearance as
its meaning is fading away into a new form, constantly referring to
the old one. "It is like the sun setting over the abandoned theatre of
the world with its deciphered ruins" ("Imagination" 281). If classical
comedy, through the deformations through which it subj ects the com
mon formulae of ordinary language or recognised discursive forms
(Hippocrates, Aristotle or Descartes) ,39 offers a view of the world at
dusk, it opposes the dawn of Platonic dialogues and Socrates's sober
speech. For in the latter, all subj ects of debate are submitted to a
process of clarification for which the scene of the dialogue provides
the theatre. Law, education, love, among other topics, receive in the
course of the conversation a light, which indicates, like on a sundial,
the physical determinations and the natural perception responsible
for their formulation. In Moliere 's comedy, the diminishing light pene
trates the theatre in the night scenes. Yet the dialogue, music, and
dance exhibit, while exaggerating the features of the comic character,
a striving to penetrate the darkness.40 This breaking through retrieves
its positive meaning when understood as a gesture to undo what has
been already done and reform it afresh.
Benj amin 's understanding of Moliere 's comedy in the tradition of
drama of mask is to be placed at the intersection of several paths he
was

pursuing when he envisaged the role of artworks as proper sites

of truth. Its consideration came about at an early stage of the criticism

he was beginning to synthesize. Before the later formulation of a criti
cism able to put on display, through dialectical images, the indirect
and distant ways in which truth contents are released in the process of
interpretation , Benj amin 's initial attempts to configure criticism were
guided by the art of physiognomy, both an art of interpretation devoid
of moral j udgment and an art of reading images.41 On this basis he
was to relieve artworks from both ethical and aesthetic judgment, and
make them j oin a history of forms, whether conceptualised by literary
or philosophical classifications. The project on comedy was meant

1065

MLN

to elucidate a number of issues opened by the preliminary research

on the German mourning plays, and in the direction of inquiry and
method set out by that book-in this respect the study of classical
comedy was to be a continuation of it. For it was adding, to the form
of baroque allegory, the classical mask, a form devised also to account
for the truth content of a genre and to claim for it an original position
in the history of art forms. Where allegory accounted for the sadness
shaping the experience and contemplation of history as endless fall,
the mask was to bring forth the serenity emerging from the deforma
tion of previous forms. To the pain that accompanies the ongoing
dissolution of creation into fragments corresponds the painless birth
of new shapes. Both forms of drama refer to a perception of time
as an endless series of transitions, and bring this perception to the
dimension of an image. One captures it under the

facies hippocratica

of history prognosticating imminent death , the other grasps it under

the mask of imagination , a

stigma

that figures the living being not

only as alive , but also deathless. If Argan needs to wear a mask, as

Benj amin requires, it is not only to allude to the melancholy of the
hypochondriac , whose imagination makes him sick of living. The ill
ness, to the extent it occupies him ceaselessly, doesn 't kill him. Quite
in the contrary, it keeps him alive. For the comic mask of the ill man
presents the living being not as being condemned to death, only as
being everlastingly ill. Comedy therefore displays him as ready to play
with death itself, and in so doing it shapes the truth content proper
to the genre. It appears as a moment of lucidity when from under the
veiled face of death the human face breaks through , clear and pure ,
and triumphs over fears and pains.
If the relationship of Moliere 's comedy to the

Trauerspiel points

to

a method of investigation, allowing a delineation between classical

and Baroque forms, both present in the same century, its relation to
tragedy helps to describe accurately and over a huge span of time a
content-innocence-never envisaged before outside the realm of
j ustice. Comedy rightly deserves a place within the history of forms,
for it shapes an original perception and gives to happiness enough
weight to even the perception of misfortune hosted by the form of
tragedy. Furthermore , its insertion within the drama of mask, a tradi
tion primarily recognised in relation to tragedy, but less remembered in
the context of Moliere 's comedy,42 would have furnished a standpoint
for reshaping the concept of classicism on the basis of the status of
appearance. It is the appearance of phenomena that was responsible
for placing perception under the aegis of vision, and for translating

1066

ADRIANA BONTEA

it into a terminology borrowed from the physics of things. 43 Once this

classical tradition was identified within drama under the figure of the
mask, and the language particular to tragedy and comedy described,
once both suffering and serenity were exposed as determinations of
nature in man and their objectivity established under the unexpressive
mask, a further question was to follow, one concerning the status of
the Platonic dialogues as a form removed from the tradition of the
drama of mask. It is from the perspective of such a reflection, which
can be followed in other fragments written at the time, that the pas
sages on comedy can be clarified. 44
Benj amin refers to French comedy at different stages of his work
in different ways. As a classical genre contemporary with a Baroque
form , Moliere 's plays demonstrate that the concept of classicism is
not given to us with the ancient texts we 've inherited. It has rather
to be produced in the act of interpretation: this was the meaningful
relationship Benj amin drew when he situated Moliere 's comedy in the
tradition of the drama of mask. As a form of dialogue emerging from
this tradition, comedy was called upon alongside tragedy to clarify the
sobriety of philosophical discourse , and also perhaps to show what
it silenced when it made Aristophanes speak according to his head,
not his muse.45 As truth content it opposed, through the notion of
character, the concept of fate shaped by tragedy, and rebalanced an
asymmetry that could never sustain happiness on an even scale with
unhappiness. In this respect, comedy revealed itself in relation to a
rationality, which Plato had seen at its dawn , and Moliere , at its dusk.
Constellating all these issues, the study of comedy offered a new point
of intersection between literary criticism, history and philosophy. Why
was

it abandoned?

The Image-Space
All these directions of inquiry formed the core of Benj amin 's reflec
tion between 1916 and 1922, at a time when he was preparing for an
academic career. If the Trauersp iel book could not bring him a chair in
German Studies in 1925, he revisited the option again in 1928, when
the University of Jerusalem was prepared to create an Institute of
Human Sciences and envisaged appointing him to teach German and
French literature. The curriculum mentioning the project on French
classical comedy might have been written on this occasion. After the
completion of the

Habilitationschrift, however, Benjamin's interests and

approach to art took a different path . It is the time of the political

MLN

1067

fragments published first in the press, later assembled under the title

One-Way Street,

and a growing preoccupation with French Surrealism

and Russian Naturalism. These directions and others lead to the

conception of

The Arcades Project,

which feeds directly or indirectly all

major essays to come. Here another path takes shape, and with it an
increased awareness of the tensions at hand in any attempt to base a
theory of knowledge on the perception of the present time, without
losing the visibility

(Anschaulichkeit)

of history itself.46 The reception

of Benj amin's work follows the critical reflection on modernity and

the modem,47 which he was first to signal when he noted the affinity
between his understanding of mourning plays and Baudelaire 's proj
ect of making poetry into an organon for the perception of modem
life. On his way to Calvary, the poet was sustained by a precious coin
he received from the treasury of European society: "On its head it
showed the figure of Death; on its tail, Melancholia sunk in brooding
meditation. This coin was allegory. "48
Regular collaborations in the literary press after the failure at the
University of Frankfurt, trips to Paris and Moscow, losses of different
sorts: all these circumstances brought Benjamin's work closer to the
conceptualisation of history and the exposition of it under the category
of present time

( das Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit) , already sketched in the

Trauerspiel book and the fragments on comedy. More acquainted with

the most recent forms of art, familiar with the political engagement
of Russian and Surrealist writers, Benj amin retraces his own awaken
ing under the aura of Aragon's

Traite du Style

when he calls for the

expulsion of moral metaphor from politics and for the discovery "in
the space of political action the one hundred percent image-space. "49
Such an image-space , like the actual space of the city, receives the task
of organising pessimism by showing that each action of the modem
man is absorbed and consumed in its very image . It also has the virtues
of lucidity, the one first allowed by profane illumination. This integral
actuality, presenting the inner man as a field common to materialism,
the physical determinations of the creature , individuality, and j ustice,
points to the fact that there is no exterior room left for evaluation ,
and hence, no outside point of view for contemplation. Benj amin
perceived this new synergy already at work in Charlie Chaplin 's films. 50
Asserting the great significance of the cinema, Benj amin saw in it the
ability to construct an image-space annulling any exterior position at
the moment it brings together the moving image and the distraction
of the audience. The film transforms the spectator into a collective
body when it appeals to its emotions by means of laughter. It awakens

1068

ADRIANA BONTEA

life by innervating the sleeping organs of the masses. In front of this

new scene framed by technology, happiness withdraws to a minimum
of perception. Chaplin 's image reminds Benjamin of it: "His clothes
are impermeable to every blow of fate , " yet these clothes are "far too
small for him. "51 Alongside the mask of non-involvement, cinema pre
cludes any relationship to comedy in its classical forms, and with it the
perception of happiness as an original phenomenon. Charlie Chaplin 's
comedy and Benj amin 's remarks on the genre recall the actuality of
Kant's assertion that happiness may be only a usurped concept. By an
ironic historical detour, which deserves its own recounting, a project
once conceived as a way to rebalance the heaviness of Greek fate and
suffering by individual freedom, happened to be abandoned.
University of Sussex

NOTES

Curriculum Vitae (III ) , in Walter Benjamin, Sel.ected Writing3 II, edited by Michael
W. Jennings, Howard Eliand, and Gary Smith ( Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999) 78.
It is this translation we follow for the English version of Benjamin's texts. For the
fragments available in German only we refer to the Gesammelte Schriften, published
by Rolf Tiedmann and Hermann Schweppenhiiuser, reprinted by Suhrkamp
(Frankfurt am Main, 1991) .
2 The translation is mine.
3 Allegory serves the exposition of Trauerspiel in the same way that the theory of
mimesis, formulated by Aristotle's Poetics, furnished a level of integration able to
host all human productions, be they in the realm of art, logic, or science. For an
understanding of mimesis as an original mode of knowledge able to account not
only for the exercise of arts, but also for the constitution of Greek science and
philosophy, see C. Imbert, Phenomenologies et languesfurmulaires ( Paris: PUF, 1992)
ch. II, 7 0-88. Furthermore, allegory may be understood as a way to supplant the
Kantian synthesis devoted to establishing the conditions under which judgement
articulates experience, and to bridge the gap between objective knowledge, limited
to the dimensions of the object of experience, and general aesthetics, as it was
formulated on the one hand by the judgment of taste, and on the other by the
early Romantics' philosophy of art.

4 Poetics 50a 1 5 .
5 The Reyen generally concludes each act o f the TrauerspieL It i s often a versified
part where allegorical or mythological characters comment upon the action , while
singing and dancing.

6 W. A Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art, trans. J. Black ( London: Bohn , 1846)

Lecture Ill, 28.
7 On the several stages accounting for Benjamin's conceptualisation of history with
the help of works of art, see C. Imbert's essay "Le present et l'histoire," in Walter
Benjamin et Paris ( Paris: Cerf, 1986) 743-92. Although the shaping of a concept
of history to accommodate the present time as a time in which a work is able to
be known is fundamental for describing the full extent of Benjamin's criticism,
we have to leave here aside the relationship between allegory and Expressionist

MLN

1069

art in favour of an earlier formulation of criticism as art of physiognomy. For it is

this aspect of the task of criticism, present in the early writings, which sheds light
on the fragments on comedy.
8 See the introduction Benjamin wrote in 1 935 to the Arcades Project and the entry
N2a, 3, in The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge:
Belknap, 1 999) 3-1 3, 462 .
9 "Truth and Truths/Knowledge and Elements of Knowledge, " fragment written in
1 920-2 1 , in Selected Writings I, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cam
bridge: Belknap, 1 996) 278.
1 0 "Language and Logic," fragment written in 1 920-2 1 , in SW I, 272.
1 1 "Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy" [ 1 9 1 6] in SW I , 6 1 .
1 2 The title o f the study i n its English version, The Origi,n of German Tragi,c Drama, may
contribute to entertain the assimilation of German plays with Greek tragedies and
thus make less bold a fundamental distinction Benjamin draws between the two
genres. This is why the genre is called here, as elsewhere, 'mourning play ' .
1 3 Apart from t h e developments contained in the first part o f the Trauerspiel book,
these two issues are presented in the preparatory studies "Trauerspiel and Trag
edy" and "The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy," both dating from
1 9 1 6 when the project was conceived. Their early composition as much as the
reformulation of the same distinction in different terms, show the importance
Benjamin was giving to their separation, and above all to the construction of the
very criteria which allowed this.
14 "Fate and Character," in SWI, 203.
15 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in GS l . l , 296.
16 Andrew Benjamin comments on the destructive character of the essay and its
hermetic formulations in a different context: fate and character provide a reading
for the thesis on history and the possibility of discarding both historical tempo
rality and empirical chronology for the benefit of the concept of present time.
See "Shoah, Remembrance and the Abeyance of Fate: Walter Benjamin's 'Fate
and Character, ' " The Actuality of Walter Benjamin, them. issue of New Formations 20
( 1 993) : 98- 1 03 .
1 7 "Moliere: D er Eingebildete Kranke," in G S I I . 2 , 6 1 2 .
1 8 Montesquieu, D e l 'esprit des lo is ( Paris: Flammarion, 1 979) XII.II 328.
19 Scapin the Schemer, trans. G. Graveley and I . Maclean (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1 998)
Act II, Sc.V 365.
20 "Just think of all the dishonest practices of the law, the number of appeals and
different legal processes, the tiresome procedure, the ravenous rabble, through
clutches you must past; sergeant-at law, attorneys, advocates, registrars, deputies,
assessors, judges and their clerks" (365 ) .
2 1 To Geronte's faith i n law, Scapin replies: "Law o n the high seas? You must be
joking ! " (Act II, Sc.VII 371 ) .
22 These are Carie's words introducing Scapin's last appearance, in which h e performs
his trick of "going fast" to meet his death (Act III, Sc. XII 389 ) .
2 3 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. M. J. Gregor (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1 974) Part II, Div. 285 1 5 1 .
2 4 See Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 304-07.
25 Section 1 4 of The Birth of Tragedy presents the fading away of tragedy concomitant
with the raise of Platonic dialogues. According to Nietzsche, the dialogue, with its
a mixture of prose and poetry, broke the old law of the unity of linguistic form ,

1070

ADRIANA BONTEA

characterising previous classifications, and instituted the genre of the nove a kind
of "enhanced Aesopian fable. " The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann ( New
York: Modern Library, 1 968) 99. The inquiry into the genre of Plato 's dialogues
is simultaneous, in Benjamin 's reflection , with the formulation of concepts such
as sobriety and the unexpressive. Such an approach was inductive of Benjamin's
recognition of the fruitful path opened up by Nietzsche's work, yet it also expressed
dissatisfaction with his terminology, which leads to the disappearance of all art
forms into appearance.
26 Plato, Phaedo, 58d, in Complete Works (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1 997)
51.
2 7 Don Juan, i n Don Juan and Other Plays, trans. George Gravely and Ian Maclean
(Oxford: Oxford, 1 989 ) Act II, Sc. I, 6 1 .
2 8 See Sganarelle's long response to Don Juan 's discourse o n the best way t o do
whatever he likes with "no risk of being called to account for it" (Act V, Sc.II
86-88 ) . Sganarelle's reply brings to mind the first principles of philosophy.
29 The last words of the play are Sganarelle 's: "But who will pay my wages?" (Act V,
Sc. VI 9 1 ) .
3 0 The term translates the German "das Ausdruckslose," often rendered into English
as "expressionless" like in the quote above. However because the use of the term
may be followed back to one of Shakespeare's comedies, I 've opted for the exist
ing English word.
31 "Goethe's Elective Affinities," in SWI, 350.
32 For the separation between appearance and truth within the beautiful, and the
wider meaning of the unexpressive as a concept designed by Beajamin 's criticism
to capture the content of the artwork in its relationship to natural life, see Bernd
Witte, Walter Benjamin: Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker ( Stuttgart, 1 976) 2.6, 69-79.
33 GS ll.2, 6 1 0-1 1 .
3 4 The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, i n SW I, 1 84.
35 In his German translation of As You Like It, W. A. Schlegel rendered ' the unexpres
sive she ' by ' die unnennbare sie ' , the one who cannot be named. The unexpres
sive, as concept able to measure what is un-nameable, is also an indirect way for
Benjamin to distance himself from the Romantics ' understanding of infinity.
36 "Imagination," fragment written in 1920-2 1 , in SW I, 280.
37 On the aesthetic dissociation between creation and formation replicating the
distinction between life and art and the relation of the latter to the unexpres
sive, see Rainer Nagele, "The Eyes of the Skull," in Theatre, Theury, Speculations:
Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1 99 1 )
1 08-34.
38 Among the most famous are Sganrelle ( le Cocu Imaginaire) , Monsieur Jourdain
( the Would Be Gentleman) , Jupiter (as Aphithryon ) .
39 The same holds for Moliere's theatre in relation to the comic tradition of both
Latin comedy and Italian commedia dell'arte.
40 Besides the Prologue of the Night, framing the setting of Amphitryon, see also the
opening scene of Le Sicilien and George Dandin, Act III, Sc. IV.
41 The configuration of a physiognomic criticism was an important step in framing
art forms within the dimensions of an image, and in securing objectivity without
compromising the subjectivity of the viewer. Beajamin will invoke the same art
of reading in the essay "On the Image of Proust," written in 1 929 and revised
in 1 934. On the development of Benjamin's "physiological stylistics" as a way to

MLN

107 1

construct an image of aging to be placed at the threshold between autobiography

and novel, between forgetting and retrieving, see Carol Jacobs's essay "Walter
Benjamin: Image of Proust," in Jn the Language of Walter Benjamin ( Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1 999) 40-57.
42 The mask in Moliere's comedies becomes an object of reflection for drama pro
ducers first. Jacques Copeau had introduced the mask in the representation of
the plays from 1 9 1 3 . The first production, opening the new founded Theatre du
Vieux-Colombier, was Moliere 's L'amour midecin. Benjamin mentions his work in
a review of Baty's book, Le masque et l'encensoir [ 1927) , in GS III, 66.
43 The appearance of art works will be formulated again under the concept of aura,
a distinctive feature allowing the identification of the characteristics of mechani
cally reproducible art forms. For the loss of aura and the parallel eviction of ap
pearance from criticism , see Rodolphe Gasche, "Objective Diversions," in Walter
Benjamin '.s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter
Osborne (London : Routledge, 1994) 1 90.
44 See, for example, "Das Gliick der antiken Menshen" ( 1 9 1 6) , "Socrates" ( 1 9 1 6) ,
"Language and Logic" ( 1 920-2 1 ) , and "The Paradox of the Cretan" ( 1 9 1 9-20) .
45 The Symposium, 1 89, b7, 472.
46 See The Arcades Project [N2,6] 461 .
4 7 On the first reception of Benjamin in Germany in the 1 960s, simultaneous with
a wider reception of Surrealism, see Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin ( 1 985 ] , French
translation ( Paris: Cerf, 1 988) 1 30. The reception of his critical work started
mainly in the following decade, with the publication of the German edition of
the collected writings and the critical apparatus it contains. Since the collective
volume Zur Aktualitiit Walter Benjamins ( 1 972) , published just after Maurice de
Gandillac 's, "Trois entretiens" ( 1 971 ) , Benjamin 's inheritance has been divided
among several disciplines and directions of inquiry. Numerous articles and books,
several conferences, and a learned society have brought Benjamin's work to the
core of academic research around the world.
48 "Central Park" 36, in Selected Writings IV, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings
( Cambridge: Belknap, 2003) 1 85 ( translation revised) .
49 "Surrealism," in SWII, 2 1 7.
50 "Chaplin in Retrospect" ( 1 929] , in SW II, 224.
51 "Chaplin" [ 1 928] , in SWII, 1 99 .