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Anthony
Pym 1999
Quite fortuitously I had to
change trains there, leaving two and half hours free on
a fresh September morning. I was returning from Australia,
in 1996, carrying the one small case that now serves for
all seasons. I had read about Port Bou; I knew of Walter
Benjamin’s suicide in the ‘Hotel Francia’ in the night of
26-27 September 1940. Not that the suicide was of much interest;
I wanted to see the border. Is that what Benjamin went there
to see?
The story is roughly as follows:
A small party of Jewish refugees was fleeing Vichy, entering
Spain to make their way to the United States. They had visas
for Spain and the United States; they did not have exit
visas for France; so they made their way through the relatively
unguarded Pyrenees border. Having reached Port Bou they
were technically in Spain and on their way to freedom. But
the mayor of the town asked for their papers, saying that
refugees sans nationalité could not enter Spain and
would be deported. At night, while they waited, Benjamin
probably took the 14 morphine tablets he carried with him—
‘enough to kill a horse’, comments Koestler. In the morning
he died, reportedly having refused a stomach pump. The rest
of the group made their way to Spain.
The stigma of suicide is excused
in various ways. His friend Scholem suggests Benjamin merely
wanted to make himself ill so the group would necessarily
be allowed through, at least so as to seek medical attention
away from the border. Podszus, among others, makes much
of the fact that Benjamin’s death actually did allow the
rest of the group to continue: ‘he saved them through his
sacrifice’. Everyone needs a hero. But I suspect Benjamin
was simply not willing, intellectually or emotionally, to
cross that border.
Benjamin was deeply troubled
by the outbreak of war; this was a period of serious nervous
disorders. Adorno and his wife urged him to seek refuge
in the United States, or at least in England, where his
family was then living. Yet Benjamin resisted the path of
exile: ‘In Europe there are positions to defend.’ In 1940
Horkheimer secured him a visa for the United States. He
left Paris in June and made his way to Lourdes, then to
Marseilles for the visas, then the march through the Pyrenees
to Port Bou, a 48-year-old man carrying a heavy black suitcase.
Some say the case contained the manuscript of Passagenwerk;
which would be appropriate; others, more probably correct,
opt for a draft of ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’.
We will never know: the case, along with the man, was lost
in the crossing. Why should he not have wanted to cross
that border?
Port Bou is now one of those
European border towns that has as good as lost its former
function. It once lived on customs officers, police, and
the international train station. It must now attempt to
survive on its own intrinsic merits, on tourism, on any
little thing that can attract a casual passer-by. The death
of Benjamin, remarkably, is one such attraction. The town’s
frontier status of the past is now sublimated into glossy
brochures, commemorative acts, and a superb monument of
‘remembrance’ dedicated to Benjamin and to the ‘European
exiles of 1933 to 1945’. If we remember Spain’s Civil War,
we see the exiles moving both ways.
The ‘place of remembrance’
is called Passages, by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan.
It comprises several elements half concealed around the
cemetery at Port Bou, a true cimitière marin, overlooking
the sea. Not that they have much reason to use the cemetery:
Benjamin’s body was lost, presumably in a common grave,
and the niche that now bears his name, next to the unwittingly
self-referential plaque that reminds us that a ‘document
of culture is always also a document of barbarism’, is little
more than a cheap tourist trick. Yet we need not enter the
cemetery. As I approached, there opened, as if unseen, to
the left, a long rectangular shaft, in iron rusted to the
modes of postmodernism, leading diagonally from the level
of the path down to the level of the sea, cutting through
the slope of the cliff. This is a large and long shaft.
And when you look, it has steps. So you start walking down.
And down. You are quickly enclosed in a dark rectangular
space, a tomb, of course. Close, dark. And as you walk downward,
step by hesitant step, the sound of the wind dies behind
you and there, inside, the sound of your walking grows around
you, and there in front, at the bottom, is the black-framed
image of tumultuous waves crashing on rocks, in all the
light and trouble of white on deep blue. So you approach
that distant image, step by step, as you now hear yourself
breathe and it seems surely not true that one could continue
all the way, truly right down to the sea and a violent death.
The anxiety of enclosure is real. Yet misfounded. About
halfway down a glass barrier now shows itself as your reflection.
The dark silhouette of a traveler, from Australia, with
a small suitcase, framed against the blue and white of the
sky, walking down to the white and blue of the sea. So you
advance to the glass, to look for a sign, and sure enough
there is one: in the bottom left corner: ‘Generalitat de
Catalunya’, lest we forget who is paying for the experience.
After which, there is nothing for it but to turn around
and walk up, step by now quickening step, up to the light
of day, and you hurry to escape oppressive tunnels and damn
participative art, marching quickly uphill, to the Spanish
side of the border and fresh rebirth in the wind and light
of the clouds and sky.
The entire scene takes place
within the border, perhaps within the imaginary border that
was Benjamin’s space that night in Port Bou.
As the day began I found information
on the work, collected a handful of brochures, and chatted
with the local tourism officer, born and condemned to the
border town. He insisted that the anxiety of descent was
a common experience, in fact the whole point of the remembrance.
I tried to argue that no, the point was the ascent, the
rise into rebirth once the border had been crossed. But
he couldn’t see my point. He asked if I was a philosopher.
I replied that I just taught English.
There is no reason to celebrate
suicide, nor to dwell excessively on the blacker moments
of our collective history. Nor do I really have much reason
to venerate Benjamin’s role in all of this, since it seems
to me that his thinking was profoundly ill-equipped for
any kind of border identity. Travel itself was not the problem:
Benjamin had sojourned in Bern, San Remo, Capri, Moscow,
Ibiza, Svendborg in Denmark, and had had a base in Paris
since 1933. The problem, I suspect, was the passage to America,
which implied a degree of extra-European exteriority for
which there is little place in his writings. The text Benjamin
worked on that year, 1940, before leaving Paris, was the
series of imaginings and comments known as ‘Über den
Begriff der Geschichte’. It offers as much stimulating thought
as you seek. Yet its history is exclusively of time, of
a non-spatial axis where the past rushes forward and the
subject passively awaits a Messiah. There is only one place
here, one tradition, that is, no place and an unelaborated,
hidden epistemology of tradition. Europe rushes through,
as in the oft-cited fragment:
One of Klee’s
watercolours is called Angelus Novus. The angel appears
to be trying to move away from something, something that
he is staring at. His eyes stand out, his mouth agape, his
wings outstretched. Thus must appear the angel of history.
His gaze is turned to the past. Where a chain of occurrences
appears to us, he sees just one catastrophe, which unrelentingly
lays ruin upon ruin and flings them before his feet. He
would like to stay there a while, to awaken the dead and
piece together the broken parts. But a storm is sweeping
in from paradise. It has caught his wings and is so strong
that the angel can no longer close them. This storm carries
him remorselessly into the future, to which he turns his
back, while in front of him the ruins are piled to the heavens.
That storm is what we call progress. (‘Über den Begriff
der Geschichte’, IX)
It is an imaginative and much-fêted
piece; Terry Eagleton even wrote a poem on it; it might
be a useful figuration for all historical marxists. But
it is foreshortened and shortsighted: if there is no space,
and only time, then it is technically impossible to turn
around. And in the diagonal timespace of the border, turning
around is perhaps all that Benjamin and his angel really
had to do.
[More recently, and quite by
chance, I am looking at Eduardo Arroyo’s painting El
paraíso de las moscas o el último suspiro
de Walter Benjamin en Port-Bou (26-ix-1940). It depicts
the moment of Benjamin’s death in Port Bou not in terms
of the Angel but in connection with an upturned perambulator,
one of the philosopher’s earliest memories, which supposedly
rushed forward and inverted in the morpheme-blissed agony.
Once again, time not space is the reductive dimension of
reflection.]
In the seven or so years that
I lived illegally between France and Spain, I was twice
refused passage on the French-Spanish border near Port Bou,
once for lack of an exit visa from France. So twice I crossed
illegally, first by simply trying an alternative point,
and second by walking along smugglers’ tracks over the hills.
If you look in the right direction, there is always a way.
No spatial border is impervious. And always, crossing to
Spain, there was an inevitable sense of freedom since, in
this country more than to the north, you can generally talk
your way around a rule. Benjamin’s suicide, his backward
vision and refusal of exteriority, looks for no such permeability
and thus offers no positive model for contemporary European
identity.
The border towns are dying.
That is no great loss. Our frontiers are now in the interfaces
of cities and computer networks; our border workers are
mobile multilingual professionals, in virtual yet still
doggedly urbanized societies. The formation of identity
myths and consensual ethics for these new groups is no easy
affair. Slick references to generalized intellectual exiles
or joyous hybridity bring little consolation to those who,
like most of us, have had to traverse the passages condensed
in Port Bou. The formulation of ideas able to express and
guide such identities requires as much feeling as abstraction;
the passage is hard, sometimes painful, and there is not
always another side, since our profit lies within the labyrinths
of the crossing itself. A few of the circulated sayings
come close to this. Here, for example, is Tvetzan Todorov
taking a far more positive view of the border:
In our age it
is the exile who best typifies, while changing its meaning,
the ideal expressed by Hugh of Saint Victor in the twelfth
century: ‘Those who find their homeland sweet are no more
than tender beginners; those who are at home everywhere
are stronger; but the most perfect are those for whom the
whole world is a foreign country’ (I, a Bulgarian living
in France, take the citation from Edward Saïd, a Palestinian
living in the United States, who had found it in Erich Auerbach,
a German exiled in Turkey). (La Conquête de l’Amérique,
1982: 253)
Yes, the list of intellectual
exiles is impressive, all passing on the phrase as a ticket
of mutual commiseration or even secret pride. (We who work
the frontiers are stronger and more perfect; Benjamin failed
the test?) Almost, but not quite. Hugh of St Victor, unfortunately,
was referring most immediately to the need for students
to spend time on foreign soil (‘exilium’), in accordance
with twelfth-century Erasmus programmes avant la lettre;
and he was referring more ideologically to the ascetic retreat
of monks, the most perfect of whom should have little contact
with the world in order to focus on heaven. (Didascalicon
3.19). Such is perhaps not the experience of the modern
exile. Yet it is still a risk, perhaps a turning of the
back on this Europe of the holocaust and the first American
century, a convenient forgetting of the power that now,
in the age of information, lies precisely along intercultural
interfaces. Indeed, if monastic retreat were the only
option in an age of ruins, Benjamin would perhaps have been
right to stay in Europe to defend ‘positions’.
But no, there is no real need
for all three levels of the citation. The second level,
that of the strong, or the strengthened, is perhaps enough.
It is easily drawn back to that most classical of European
exiles, Ovid: ‘Omne solum forti patria est’ (Fasti 1.493-4).
For the strong, all soil is home. (I found it at the end
of Lluís Marcó i Dachs, a Catalan Republican
reflecting on the exile of Spanish Jews.) And the Loeb translation
reads:
Every land is
to the brave his country, as to the fish the sea, as to
the bird whatever place stands open in the void world. Nor
does the wild tempest rage the whole year long; for thee,
too, trust me, there will be springtime yet.
This is Evander’s mother telling
him exile is no sin or crime; exile is merely fate ensuing
from an unwittingly angered god. Valéry: ‘Le vent
se lève! Il faut tenter de vivre.’ And Ovid: ‘Cheered
by his parent’s words, Evander cleft in his ship the billows
and made the Western land.’
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