Walter Benjamin considered reading – along with thought, dreams, waiting, opium and intoxication – a source of “profane illumination” . Moments of intuited truths, connections between horizons of apparently distant meanings, flashes and glimmers, fragments, instants. A contact with truth that indifferently weaves aesthetic impressions, hallucinations, dialectical images and logical reflections into kaleidoscopes of meaning. But also times and places of the mind in which to experience the possible through imagination.
Benjamin never wrote a theory of the novel, an organic and structured text – as György Lukács did – that gives a coherent image of his reflections. What he left behind is an abundant and fragmented corpus of texts, in which his reflections repeatedly touch upon the themes of language, writing, narrative, literature and the novel in relation to culture, politics, totalitarianism and modernity. All that remains is to try to collect these fragments into kaleidoscopes of meaning, seeking profane illuminations.
This essay aims to follow the trail of the Romantic form of the novel described in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism and its influences on some later literary reflections. A form, the romantic one, whose peculiarity seems to derive from the interweaving, at its core, of finiteness and infinity.
Originally published as:
C. Diotto, “Walter Benjamin e la forma romanzo tra Finitezza e Infinità” in F. Cecconi, C. Diotto, P. Zeni, Sotto queste forme quasi infinite. La narrazione tra Letteratura, Filosofia, Teatro e Cinema, Mimesis, Milano 2021, pp. 119-133 ISBN: 9788857572505
Caterina Diotto 