On Angels, Demons and Hobgoblins

I wanted to post a picture here, but it was not to be - here's the link in any case:

http://usuarios.lycos.es/asocinnuendo/Grandville.jpg

I’m glad Alice mentioned Benjamin’s angel of history in an earlier post – this figure has been lingering in my mind as well, as it seems to connect with some of the most critical aspects of the course.

It is perhaps testament to the catastrophic character of the last century that, just nine years after his 1931 radio broadcast on the Lisbon earthquake, in which he optimistically identified the science of prediction with our eventual salvation from such tragedies, Benjamin would present such a comparatively doom-laden view of our historical destiny. In the years following 1931 the Nazi Party rose to power, and proceeded to perpetrate some of the twentieth century’s most terrible atrocities in the name of an irresistible force of progress. Consequently, from around 1932 onwards, Benjamin’s life itself arguably constituted a hopeless flight from catastrophe.

In response to our discussion last week, I was prompted to imagine a kind of demon accompanying the angel of history. Whilst the angel of history contemplates the past, perceiving in horror the ever rising tide of ruin it leaves behind, its demonic twin gazes in detached rapture at immediacy, the newness of the now, the now-froth, and so, blind to its destructive trail, surfs gleefully on the spectacle of history’s disintegration. I think that traces of this second figure can possibly even be found to haunt Benjamin’s earlier radio broadcast, particularly given the medium through which it was delivered. Far from refining our control over the future, it often seems that the most significant consequence of technological development has been a surplus of media, always interceding too late. Since the spread of pamphlets, which Benjamin describes, documenting purportedly eye-witness accounts, the scope, scale and intensity of the popular media has exploded, generating a tidal wave of its own, which, in surging forth, has left a legacy of devastation in its wake. The enlightenment ideal of freedom founded in rationality, that which was supposed to quell this tide of historical destruction and in its place build at least a secure road towards the future, if not utopia itself, has, from this perspective, served only to feed a demon obsessed with the fractured transience of the now.

How are we to distinguish our discourse on catastrophe from the nihilistic bent of these twin incarnations of time?

In place of an answer I want to introduce a third figure, this time from Joyce’s Ulysses. Preceded, appropriately enough, by the Newsboys’ announcement of a ‘Stop press edition’, as well as Stephen Dedalus musing ‘A time, times and half a time’, this character can be seen to stand for the point towards which both angel and demon are heading. Certainly in Joyce’s account that which is encountered once history and the present have done their work, a capricious satirical creature, delighting in the vacillations of chance, is not exactly what might be expected. Perhaps even more surprisingly, once the goblin has made its exit, it only takes a stuck needle on a gramaphone record to allow history to continue on its way:

[…]A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose, tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness.)

ALL
What?

THE HOBGOBLIN
(His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs.) Il vient! C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigène! (He whirls round and round with dervish howls.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks.) Rien va plus! (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into vacuum.)

FLORRY
(Sinking into torpor, crosses herself secretly.) The end of
the world!