The Images Inconsistent With Their Identity In Benjamin's Literary Criticism

In his literary studies,Walter Benjamin pays attention to a type of images which are“not what they are”.In Benjamin's vision,they include both the literary images and the writers themselves.The main feature of them is that their self-awareness and behaviors are completely inconsistent with their identity.This article summarizes this type of images as "not what they are".In the first chapter of this article,before explaining what is "not what they are" in Benjamin's literary criticism,the author analyze his interpretation of the "real" images.They are the opposite of "not what they are".Benjamin thinks that it is the Internal and external consistency that caused their veritable contradiction and finally led to their bad luck.Benjamin first analyzed the image of Otilie in Goethe's novel Affinity.Otilie is chaste and innocent,but this these characters make her lose her chastity.Benjamin then interprets the image of the monarchs in the German tragic drama.These monarchs have supreme power,but they are finally countered by the power;Benjamin then interprets the image of father and son and defendant in Kafka's novels:the reason why father and son blame each other is their father-son relationship and the defendant gets convicted because he initiated an appeal.These people are facing a contradiction that cannot be resolved because of their veritable facts,and they eventually perish.In Benjamin's view,the only thing that can resolve this inner contradiction is "not what they are".The second chapter of this article will explain Benjamin's comments on the images which are not what they are.Benjamin interprets the images of "assistants" in Kafka's novels:the assistant of the land surveyor K in Castle does not understand the land survey,however,during the entanglement with them K fulfilled the duty of measuring the land without knowing it.Benjamin then explained the Ambiguity of the writer.He believes that Kafka regarded his writing as a failure because he realized that he had described what he did not understand and Proust recorded not only his memory but also those things he had forgotten.If their writing makes them feel strange,then they can't understand their identity as a writer.In the interpretation,Benjamin does not shy away from the price of being a non-being.For a real person,being a person who is not who he is means not being able to get a clear meaning in life,but also means being unfamiliar with himself.The third chapter of this article will explain Benjamin's further exploration of the possibility that this kind of gesture get linked to social life.In the poet Baudelaire,Benjamin discovered this possibility.Benjamin first linked Baudelaire's sense of strangeness in writing with the working conditions of workers in a capitalist society,pointing out the alienation of poets and workers;then he connects the poet to the early revolutionaries of the proletariat and discover their common gestures.Benjamin sums up Baudelaire's stance as an immature state that people showed in a rapidly changing era.On the point of immaturity,the proletarian power still in the cradle is common to Baudelaire.In Benjamin's view,this immature state is precisely caused by their constant separation and transcendence from themselves during which they felt the shock and strangeness of the new world.