The story of Walter Benjamin—20th century German literary critic and philosopher who won the hearts and minds of many theorists, writers, and readers—is a deeply tragic one. Based on letters from Lisa Fitkko and Henny Gurland, we know that Benjamin spent his final days fleeing Europe during the rise of Nazi Germany, arduously hiking through the Pyrenees mountains with an attachè case containing a manuscript he believed to be more important than his own life. Benjamin was in poor health and would pause every ten minutes to catch his breath. Upon reaching Portbou, he was denied passage by border authorities for the day and that evening took his own life. Had he waited till morning, he would have been granted passage as the border reopened. He might have lived to take a ship to America. The attaché case and its contents have been lost to history.
Benjamin was a collector; an amateur archivist of books, ephemera, and drawings that he felt revealed more about history than anything else. Chinese Canadian author Madeleine Thien is obviously drawn to this aesthetic, as made clear by her many references to Benjamin. The Book of Records is structured around a fictional landscape called the Sea, into which three historical figures are dropped. As these figures recount their stories, Thien includes references to or excerpts of their actual documented work—a poem, letters, conversations, etc.
But this is the tragedy of The Book of Records: a novel brimming with potential that fails to achieve a moment of synthesis. Thien has missed the forest for the trees and latched onto the aesthetics of collecting, while refusing to provide any analysis of these historical artifacts. Thinking that meaning will miraculously spring forth from disparate parts, the book is so weighed down by the history it’s trying to preserve, it ends up preserving nothing.
People attempt to recreate The Arcades Project, but you can’t, because it is an unfinished work. The works Benjamin did finish are very complete and have a clear message. To him, the goal of collecting was to pinpoint a singular historically specific truth, not to conclude that every interpretation is equally valid. The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s scripture interpretation for Paris instead of Genesis.
The fact that Benjamin died before he saw The Arcades Project through to completion adds to its aura, as he would call it. Although this sense of sanctity is retroactively bestowed upon the work of human hands, it is believed to be intrinsic. A depressing thought, but nevertheless true. In an attempt to capture the aura of infinite interpretation via montage, we are left without a feeling of intentionality or synthesis. Far from an invitation to collaborate, it would appear that Thien did not know how best to proceed after collecting a series of artifacts, and the reader is left to pick up where she left off.
In the frame narrative, Lina and her father have come to the Sea after ecological disaster has forced them to leave their home. They wait in this limbo for a boat to take them somewhere else. Lina’s father has brought with him three children’s biographies of historical figures: the medieval Chinese poet Du Fu, 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and 20th-century German philosopher Hannah Arendt. Three volumes in the series The Lives of the Voyagers.
We spend most of our time with Hannah Arendt. We follow her through her last days in university to her eventual escape from Nazism across the Atlantic to New York. We are watching a slide projection of Arendt’s life—without any commentary.
With Spinoza, we get little to no philosophy and limited insight into his life. He speaks in empty signifiers, like “Time never goes missing. I think the structure of reality can be no other way. Therefore to glimpse reality as best we can is the root of true happiness.” Empty philosophical statements or un-profound truisms seem to be the only kind of statements these characters are capable of uttering.
With Du Fu, we get even less. For what can we expect to know from the life of a 8th century Tang Dynasty poet? While these three figures are each fascinating in their own right, the way in which Thien has brought them together makes them completely uninteresting. Depositing these figures into this fantasy landscape as shells of their real selves has stripped away any possibility of illumination. Their historic specificity serves as a mere backdrop to their occupation as “voyagers” within Thien’s telling.
The final section of The Book of Records is the wreckage that has been piling up since the book began. Thien returns to her tried-and-not-so-true formula of interpolating the four plot lines she opens with. Only this time, instead of changing stories between chapters, she shifts perspectives every page break.
It appears as if Thien wanted to somehow write a book about three historical figures she found interesting, but couldn’t think of any other way to bring them all together, picking the lowest common denominator.
John Berger writes in The Success and Failure of Picasso regarding the cult of personality and mundane description of Pablo Picasso’s biographies that, “In the end one is forced to accept that there is nothing else to describe. Why then describe it? Because Picasso is a celebrity, floodlit with a lighting that from the spectator’s point of view makes everything significant.”
The renewed obsession with classic 20th-century totalitarian governments should come as no surprise. Be it of the Hitler or Stalin variety. Either way, we seem to have reached a point where the reading public, and perhaps even mainstream media, is capable of seeing every kind of authoritarianism but the uniquely 21st-century American variety. History certainly offers lessons. But there is a danger in fixating on emblems of history, letting other stories and varieties be pushed to the side. Should we continue to learn from the horrors of Hitler, Franco, or Mussolini? Of course. However, as Walter Benjamin writes in The Origin of the German Trauerspeil, we should be careful to resist the spirit of the age that seizes “on the testimony of cultures remote in time or space in order to clasp them to itself and lovelessly enclose them in its self-absorbed fantasizing.” Benjamin’s diagnosis of the zeitgeist, which applies as much then as now, is that “no new style, no previously known folk tradition, could be discovered that would not immediately, and with full self-evidence, speak to the feelings of contemporaries.” Or as Fredric Jameson would so succinctly advise, “Always historicize!”
There is an anxiety to collecting and preserving. Yes, we must learn to save and remember, but the things that jump out to us immediately are not always what needs to be saved. On the one hand, the rise and fall of fascism in the 20th century still has its lessons to teach. Yet on the other hand, our worst fears are not ghosts returning from the past but rather the ruins that are crumbling right in front of us.
