An echo […] awakened by a sound that seems to have issued from somewhere in the darkness of past life […]. (Benjamin 2006, 129)

1When in “The Storyteller” (1936) Walter Benjamin analyses symptoms of “the secular productive forces of history”, such as the question of the unspoken in the wake of the First World War or the “remov[al of] narrative from the realm of living speech,” he also points to the concomitant possibility of seeing “a new beauty in what is vanishing” (Benjamin 1982, 87) and thereby to a premise for rebirth. This idea of renaissance from destruction, coinciding with melancholy intensified by the losses of World War, is also presented by Freud in his short essay “On Transience” (1915). Here he draws the contours of possible psychical renewal from the depths of mourning by recalling to consciousness the value beyond materiality of what has been lost, thereby implying a form of recovery through memory traces: “But have those other possessions, which we have now lost, really ceased to have any worth for us because they have proved so perishable and so unresistant?” (Freud 1957, 307). Despite the apparent differences between Freud’s psycho-analytical and Benjamin’s mythico-poetical approaches to history, for Benjamin too revival is inseparable from traces buried in the past. The recollection of their vanished beauty will reignite the promise of hope. This is the promise crystallized in childhood or what Benjamin calls “the childlike element”, which, as the ultimate paradigm of renewal amidst decline, is renaissance per se.

2In “Unpacking my Library,” Benjamin unfolds a dialectical embrace of old and new which both subtends the paradigm of renewal embodied in the childlike element and which characterizes the collector of books:

For him, not only books but also copies of books have their fates. […] to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals – the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names. To renew the old world – that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things […]. (Benjamin 1982, 61)

3As Hannah Arendt emphasizes in her classic introduction to Benjamin’s thinking in Illuminations, the collector’s passion, like the childlike element, is “not primarily kindled by the quality of the object [as] something that is classifiable, but is inflamed by its ‘genuineness,’ its uniqueness” (Arendt 1982, 44). Yet what does “genuineness” or “uniqueness” mean when associated not only with originary, authentic “old” books but also with “new” readings of old books, by which the old is renewed as a dislocated, collected, or recollected afterlife?

4We might see this uniqueness as an apodictic quality related to Benjamin’s discussion of the unforgettable in his essay “The Task of the Translator”:

One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten […] Analogously, the translatability of linguistic creations ought to be considered even if men should prove unable to translate them. […] [A] translation issues from the original-not so much from its life as from its afterlife […]. (Benjamin 1982, 70-71)

5For like uniqueness, both the unforgettable and translatability have the quality of a remainder sealed in the “old world”, a condition of possibility whose release hinges on the illumination crystallized in the child’s gaze. As Nell Wasserstrom observes when considering Benjamin’s writing on history in her study of Belated Modernism, “traces of the past (echoes, breaths of air, residues of previous generations) demand from the future (that is, our present), its promise of redemption” (Wasserstrom 2022, 84). It is in this sense that in Benjamin’s thinking, as in Modernist writing in general, renaissance is synonymous with the temporal dislocation of afterlife.

Ghosted temporality and Acoustic anteriority

7For Benjamin, childhood, like the past, is yet undelivered of its promise, its enigmas yet unresolved. Both, however, resonate with the possibility of resurrection, as Benjamin suggests when he writes:

The conception of happiness, in other words, resonates irremediably with that of resurrection [Erloesung: transfiguration, redemption]. It is just the same with the conception of the past, which makes history into its affair. The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection (Benjamin 2005, unpaginated).

9I want to draw attention to how ghosted or deflected temporality operates not only visually but acoustically in Benjamin and Woolf, in the manner of what Benjamin in the 1933-34 version of “News of a Death” calls “events which affect us like an echo – one awakened by a sound that seems to have issued from somewhere in the darkness of past life” (Benjamin 2006, 129). In this sense, tracing in regress the echo heard in the present is tantamount to lending one’s ear to the sound of an anteriority made audible and to be made (re)citable: “Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable” (Benjamin 2005, unpaginated). So, in Berlin Childhood Benjamin will listen to the whispering secrets of that fin de siècle sealed like his childhood in the seashell of the nineteenth century and, in “The Mummerehlen”, he writes: “Thus, like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear. What do I hear?” (Benjamin 2006, 98). We might compare this image with that of Virginia Woolf watching her parents reading as a child, in a photograph which captures the presence to come – in the afterlife – of her writing out a certain lyrical anteriority (Smith-Di Biasio 2024, 154-160). Woolf, like Benjamin, hollows out the past of the word. Indeed, in To the Lighthouse, through the figure of the child she establishes a primary contact with words heard anew in their oldness. This radical infra-lyrical turn to the past of the word is also present in the first pages of “Anon.” Here, Woolf restores the lyrical anteriority of an infra-scriptural voice to literary history through the figure of Anon, the common minstrel: “the voice of Anon murmuring still [...] the old dream with its strange mix of fact and fable [...] the old hidden world [...] castles – Knights – white mules – Excalibur. The story is told with a child’s implicit belief (Woolf 2011, 583-584, my emphasis). The renewal or rebirth of the past through the murmurs of old words resounding in the present is a form of lyrical anteriority which resonates through To the Lighthouse as a two-way echo. Here, words are overheard by Mrs. Ramsay as if they were at once the sound of her own voice speaking and the echo of a forgotten call: “She did not know what they meant, but like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside herself, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things” (Woolf 1979, 102). This double echo, set up by words overheard by Mrs. Ramsay as her own and which I am reading as the echo of a forgotten call, corresponds to a model of intertextual anteriority. I have defined this in terms of words echoing out of one reading frame into another, recited and set adrift in a displacement of the forgotten as the speech object is both lost and found (Smith-Di Biasio 2025, forthcoming). It is moreover as if Virginia Woolf were dreaming the past awake, in a mode of Benjaminian renewal. We might see this as an awakening in which the “old dream” (Woolf 2011, 583-584) comes alive in the telling and is recovered as a primary contact with words heard anew in their oldness. Indeed, in To the Lighthouse, the speech object moves in and out of consciousness in a mode of Woolfian reminiscence. Hence, repeated ad infinitum, the acoustic anteriority of the words of the title resonate throughout the text like “an echo […] awakened by a sound that seems to have issued from somewhere in the darkness of past life” (Benjamin 2006, 129).

10Let us recall how, long before the journey to the lighthouse is accomplished and yet always already awaited, Mrs. Ramsay, the mother, reads to her child James a tale by the Brothers Grimm. The acoustic imprint of the tale is reflected in the child’s eyes as “something pale and wondering like the reflection of a light” (Woolf 1979, 60), just as the light of the lighthouse is perceived at that same moment. And let us recall how this reflection of a light crystallizes in both instances the same promise of a journey into a past yet to be discovered, nestling in the childhood of language (Smith-Di Biasio 2024, 29-47). In this sense the reflection in James’ eyes is like that of a yet undeveloped photographic negative and we recall that the lighthouse is all this – at once an imprint of words heard and an image in negative, pale and questioning, a memory of childhood and a destination. In the words of Benjamin in “Departure and Return,” it is “[a]s though we’d already made the journey which was about to begin” (Benjamin 2006, 125). For the child is the figure of a listener/reader/interpreter in Woolf’s novel, and as such a key figure in the restoration of a forgotten past. Through the child, the resonance, reverberation and reflection left by the mother’s reading a tale by the Brothers Grimm, as Mrs. Ramsay recites fragments from Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade in the background, lead us back to and forward through the lyrical anteriority of the nineteenth century and its acoustic traces – “blunder” (Woolf 1979, 21-22), “flounder, flounder” (ibid., 55). It is through these recited fragments of Tennyson and the Brothers Grimm that the writing at once recalls and prefigures war, whilst it suspends and retains the promise of a journey through the words, “To the Lighthouse,” thereby tracing an acoustics of anteriority which is at the heart of Woolf’s poetics and thinking (Smith-Di Biasio 2018).

11Regarding the figural promise of acoustic anteriority, which is equally bound to the childhood names and words recited in Woolf’s writing, Walter Benjamin speaks of “That unfathomable reserve which childhood names possess for the adult. Long kept silence, long concealment, has transfigured them” (“Butterfly Hunt,” Benjamin 2006, 52), pointing to a process of word sedimentation, which is transfigurative. It is this alchemy of revival which Hannah Arendt defines as Benjamin’s poetics of sea-change:

This thinking delves into the depths of the past, but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements […]. (Benjamin 1982, 51)

12Here Arendt points to the deferred trajectory of afterlife in Benjamin’s thinking whereby the past is transfigured in a dialectical embrace with the present.

Transfiguration

13Sedimented in the landscape of the past, when retraced on the acoustic surface of the present, childhood names release the transfigurative alchemy they hold in reserve. We see this in “Butterfly Hunt” when Benjamin recalls a name hovering in the atmosphere of childhood summers:

Thus, through air teeming with butterflies vibrates the word “Brauhausberg” which is to say “Brewery Hill”. It was on the Brauhausberg, near Potsdam, that we had our summer residence. But the name has lost all heaviness, contains nothing more of any brewery […]. (Benjamin 2006, 52)

14And thus the proper name dissolves into nothingness, leaving only a figural emergence out of the blue air, out of the unfathomable reserve of its possible transfiguration, like a mnemic messianic mirage “a bluemisted hill that rose up every summer to give lodging to my parents and me” (ibid., 52):

And that is why the Potsdam of my childhood lies in air so blue, as though all its butterflies –its mourning cloaks and admirals, peacocks and auroras – were scattered over one of those glistening Limoges enamels, on which the ramparts and battlements of Jerusalem stand out against a dark blue ground […]. (Benjamin 2006, 52-53)

15The tracing or decal of the childhood name and its associated images onto the present moment produces a hallucinatory alchemy of displacement, from the blue remembered air of Potsdam to the dark blue background against which the city of Jerusalem appears engraved. This recalls the reminiscent image in a poem by Jorge-Luis Borges, of “the South […] Where my entrance is forbidden. As it were within a lithograph” (Borges 2011, 183). Furthermore, the transition through proper names from “Brauhausberg” to “Potsdam” transfigured into “Jerusalem” and the temporal spiral into implicit promise it occasions remind us that the proper name as such possesses the enigmatic choric possibilities underlined by Derrida (1987, 265-296), which, in turn, recalls the luminous obscurity of Plato’s definition of the chôra as a space of rebirth:

16For an image, since the reality after which it is modeled does not belong to it, and it exists ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another (that is, in space), grasping existence in some way or other, or it could not be at all….And there is a third nature, which is space and is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended, when all sense is absent, by a kind of spacious reason, and is hardly real […]. (Plato 1973, 1178)

17The chôra is this third nature of space eternal in which one image is the fleeting shadow of another. Benjamin will not name the chôra as such, yet in searching for an index for resurrection through the child he establishes this broken chôric moment at which the old and the young or new coincide, the zero hour of Stillstellung, “where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions” (Benjamin 2005, Thesis XVII). In this sense the child of Berlin Childhood possesses a mystical solidarity with the realm of the dead at a dialectical “moment of danger,” wherein this phantom space is one of rebirth. Recalling the snapshot flash of the thought-image (Denkbild) that emerges and passes away in the blink of an eye, Benjamin writes, “Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast” (Benjamin 2005, Thesis V).

18As with Benjamin’s visual thought-image, in Woolf’s sound-image the moment of lyrical anteriority occurs in reading when our listening is stopped, as if arrested by sound from afar at a moment of Stillstellung. We might consider the visual sonority of Woolf’s poetics in this sense, or the vocal reverberation of images in The Waves, whereby sound and image waves ripple through texts simultaneously: “In this vast wood. I hear nothing. That is only the murmur of waves in the air [...] afloat in the shallow light which is like a film of water drawn over my eyes by a wave. I hear through it far off, far away, faint and far” (Woolf 1992, 12, 18).

19Here voices break through a film, as an upsurge of lyricism breaks into the writing, hypnotically, hither and thither: “Silence will close behind us […] silence closes over our transient passage [...] I should be as transient as the shadow on the meadow, soon fading, soon darkening, and dying where it meets the wood were it not …” (ibid., 48).

20This is a moment at which lyricism breaks the silence of death, or rather the memory of the silence of death in the writing, closing over “our transient passage”, then fades as a shadow darkens and we await the next wave of sound and light. It is a dialectical moment at which perception coincides with the shadow of reminiscence.

Reading the thread of life

22There is a moment in Berlin Childhood encapsulated in an image, when listening to stories of his ancestors recounted by his mother Walter Benjamin contemplates the thread of his own life. In the fragment “The Fever,” as his mother replaces the governess in the nursery and attends to his sick bed, a strange scene emerges in which he awaits her stories:

The vigorous current that infused these stories ran through the body itself, carrying morbid symptoms away […] I loved them, for in my mother’s hand there were stories rippling, which I might later hear from her lips […] stories […] of my forbears […] as though to make me understand that it was premature for me to give away, by an early death […] my origins (Benjamin 2006, 74).

It contained on little tablets, the various letters of the alphabet inscribed in cursive, which made them seem younger and more virginal than they would have been in roman style. Those slender figures reposed on their slanting bed, each one perfect […] I marveled at the sight of so much modesty allied to so much splendor. It was a state of grace […] The longing which the reading box arouses in me proves how thoroughly bound up it was with my childhood. Indeed, what I think of it is just that: my entire childhood concentrated in the movement (Griff) by which my hand slid the letters into the groove, where they would be arranged to form words (ibid., my emphasis).

24The reading box holds the child entranced before the letters of the alphabet, here eroticized by the recall of his sense of wonderment and the moment of desire suspended “in the movement (Griff) – what I seek in it is just that, my entire childhood concentrated in the movement – by which my hand slid the letters into the groove, where they would be arranged to form words” (ibid.). As if in an infantile theory of the letter, this memory announced the afterlife of writing as the melancholic renaissance of a moment no longer initiatory: “My hand can still dream of this movement, but it can no longer awaken so as actually to perform it” (ibid.). At the same time, the virginity of the letter is held, suspended in the image.

25The virginal space of pre-writing is reminiscent of Woolf’s “pale borderland of no man’s language”. This is the place where we find ourselves when, looking at pictures, we are suspended in a shadowy area subtending our access to language. In the essay “Pictures”, she writes “as we gaze words begin to raise their feeble limbs” (Woolf 1994, 245), opening a pre-inscribed archaic space with a history, which is no doubt psychically anterior to Benjamin’s encounter with the letter, but is at once equally chôric or pre-oedipal (Smith-Di Biasio 2014). Woolf’s Modernism, like Benjamin’s, is hinged at that zero hour where the chôric moment and the birth of writing coexist as superimposed strata of the same script. In this sense, that Benjaminian “state of grace,” heard here in Woolf’s memories of her childhood as “the purest ecstasy I can conceive,” is the event of a remainder:

My other memory, which also seems to be my first memory […]. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursey at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive […]. (Woolf 1985, 65)

26For both Woolf and Benjamin, this renascent coalescence of age and infancy forever lost and recalled at a moment of danger crystallizes our reading of Modernist renaissance. In this way, if we continue to disrupt the ordinary circulation of time, to gather and read anew the words of Woolf and Benjamin, then “childhood, always already lost, returns and is reborn in a moment of happiness detached from time, that is to say in episodes and flashes is forever reborn” (Proust 1999, 86).