‘Harnessing the forces of intoxication for the revolution’ – meaning what? Literary politics? ‘Nous en avons soupé [‘Not again!’]. Anything but that!’ Well, you will be all the more interested to hear how much light a digression into literature will throw on things. What is the programme of the bourgeois parties, in fact? A spring song, pure and simple. Full to bursting with similes. The Socialist sees that ‘sunnier future for our children and grandchildren’ in everyone behaving ‘as if they were angels’ and everyone having as much ‘as if he were wealthy’ and everyone living ‘as if he were free’. Of angels, wealth, freedom – not a trace! Nothing but images. And the image bank of Social Democracy’s ‘resident poets’? Their ‘gradus ad Parnassum’? Optimism. What a different air is breathed in the piece by Naville17 that makes ‘Organizing pessimism’ the order of the day. On behalf of his literary friends he lays down an ultimatum, demanding that this conscienceless, dilettantish optimism without fail show its true colours. In what do the prerequisites of the revolution consist? he asks. In changing minds or in external circumstances? This is the key question governing relations between politics and morality, and it allows of no cover-up. Surrealism has come steadily closer to its Communist responsibility. And that means: pessimism all along the line. Yes indeed, very much so. No confidence in the fate of literature, no confidence in the fate of freedom, no confidence in the fate of European humanity, but above all no confidence – in fact, thrice no confidence in any kind of accommodation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And boundless confidence only in I. G. Farben and in the peaceful perfecting of the Luftwaffe. But what now, what indeed?

  Here the insight comes into its own that in Traité du style [1928], Aragon’s latest book, calls for a distinction to be drawn between simile and image. A happy insight in matters of style and one that asks to be extended. Extension: nowhere do these two (simile and image) clash as drastically and irreconcilably as in politics. The fact is, organizing pessimism means quite simply expelling moral metaphor from politics and finding in the sphere of political action the image sphere in its entirety. Contemplatively, however, that image sphere cannot be measured up at all. If it is the dual task of the revolutionary intelligentsia to topple the intellectual dominance of the bourgeoisie and to make contact with the proletarian masses, in the second part of that task it has failed almost entirely; the second part of the task can no longer be performed in the mind. Yet that has prevented very few from repeatedly framing it as if it could, calling for proletarian writers, proletarian thinkers, proletarian artists. Trotsky himself, in Literature and Revolution, had to disagree, pointing out that these will emerge only from a victorious revolution. The truth is, it is far less a question of making the artist of middle-class origin into a master of ‘Proletarian art’ than of giving him a function, be it at the cost of his artistic influence, at significant points of that image sphere. Indeed, ought not interrupting his ‘artistic career’ to be an essential part of that function, possibly?

  The jokes he tells will be the better for it. So will the way he tells them. For in humour, too, in abuse, in misunderstanding – wherever an action itself bodies forth and is the image, draws in and consumes the image, wherever proximity sees itself through its own eyes, this sought-after image sphere opens up, the world of all-round, integral actuality in which ‘good manners’ are missing – the sphere, in a word, in which political materialism and the physical creature share with one another the inner man, the psyche, the individual, or whatever else we wish to throw at them, in accordance with dialectical justice, such that none of his limbs is left untorn. Nevertheless (in fact, precisely following such dialectical destruction) that sphere will still be an image sphere, and more concretely: a body sphere. Because there is nothing for it, the admission must be made: the kind of metaphysical materialism cultivated by Vogt and Bukharin cannot segue smoothly into the anthropological materialism underlined by the experience of the Surrealists and before them by Hebel, say, or Georg Büchner, or Nietzsche, or Rimbaud. Something is left over. The collective, too, has body. And the physis currently organizing itself for the collective in technology is something that, in accordance with its entire political and material reality, can be generated only in that image sphere in which secular illumination makes us feel at home. Only when, in that physis, body sphere and image sphere interpenetrate so deeply that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation and all bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge will reality have outdone itself to the full extent required by The Communist Manifesto. For the moment, the Surrealists are alone in having grasped its present command. They all, to a man, swap their facial expressions for the dial of an alarm clock that strikes each minute for the duration of sixty seconds.

  [1929]

  Unpacking My Library

  A Talk about Collecting1

  I’m unpacking my library. Really. So it is not yet arranged on the shelves, not yet shrouded in the faint tedium of order. Nor am I yet in a position to stride along its ranks and take its salute in the presence of a friendly audience. You need fear none of that. I must ask you to imagine yourselves with me, amid the disorder of torn-open packing cases, breathing in the sawdust-laden air, the floor around me littered with scraps of paper, eyeing piles of books that have only now, after two years of darkness, been returned to the light of day; I want you, from the outset, to share a little of the mood (not a mournful mood by any means, rather one of anticipation) that they awaken in a true collector.

  For such a one is speaking to you today, and by and large he speaks only of himself.2 It would be presumptuous, surely, to insist on an illusion of objectivity and functionalism by enumerating for you the chief pieces or principal sections of a library or expounding its origins or even explaining for your benefit how it helps the writer? Certainly it is my intention, in what I am about to say, to pursue a more immediate, more tangible aim; my heart is set on giving you a sense of the collector’s relationship to his possessions, something of an understanding of collecting rather than of a collection. It is quite arbitrary that I do this by way of an examination of the various ways of acquiring books. Such a device or indeed any other is simply a dike raised against the spring tide of memories that comes rolling in towards any collector contemplating his things. Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories.

  However, I want to say more than this: chance, fate, which colour the past as I look back – these are simultaneously present to the senses in the familiar muddle of my books. For what are these possessions but a disorder in which, habit having made itself so much at home among them, that disorder can seem like its opposite. You will have heard of people who became invalids after losing their books and of others who, in acquiring books, have turned criminal. In these areas in particular, any kind of order is nothing but a state of uncertainty, a hovering above the abyss. ‘The only precise knowledge that exists,’ Anatole France once said, ‘is knowledge of the publication dates and formats of books.’ The fact is, if the randomness of a library has a counterpart, it is the regularity of its catalogue.

  The collector, in other words, has his being in a state of dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.

  Of course, his existence is bound up with a great many other things as well. With a highly enigmatic relationship to ownership, about which more later. Then with a relationship to things that, rather than highlighting their functional value (the benefits they bring, the purposes they serve), studies and loves them as the scene and showplace of their destiny. The most powerful spell cast by the collector is to enclose the individual item within a magic circle where, even as the final shudder (the shudder of having suffered acquisition) runs through it, it turns to stone. Everything remembered, everything thought, all awareness becomes base, frame, pedestal, lock and key of his ownership. Period, region, craft, previous owners – all, for the true collector, merge in each one of his possessions into a magical encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. Here, then,in this narrow field, one glimpses how great physiognomists (and collectors are physiognomists of things) become fortunetellers. One need only watch a collector handling objects taken from his cabinet. No sooner does he have one in his hand than he appears inspired by it; his eyes take on a remote look. So much for the magical side of the collector – his ‘old man’ image, I might call it.

  Habent sua fata libelli may have been conceived as a general principle applying to books.3 Books – The Divine Comedy, for instance, or Spinoza’s Ethics, or The Origin of Species – have their fates. But the collector will interpret this Latin tag differently. To him it is not just books that have their fates but copies. And in his view the most important fate undergone by that copy is its having collided with himself, with his own collection. I am not exaggerating: for the true collector, acquiring an ancient book is its rebirth. That is precisely the childish quality that, in the collector, merges with the ‘old man’ image. The fact is, for children, renewing existence is something that can be done a hundred times over; the ability is never lost. Back then, in childhood, collecting is only one process of renewal, another is painting things, another cutting out, yet another copying, and so on through the whole gamut of the child’s methods of appropriation from grabbing things right up to naming them. Making the old world new again – that is the deepest drive in the collector’s desire to acquire new things, and that is why the collector of older books is closer to the fount of collecting than the person interested in reprints for bibliophiles.

  A word or two now about how books cross the threshold of a collection, how they become the property of a collector, the history of their acquisition.

  Of all the ways of getting hold of books, the most laudable is deemed to be writing them yourself. Some of you will at this point recall with delight the large library that Jean Paul’s impoverished little schoolmaster Wutz acquired over time by noting all the works whose titles interested him in exhibition catalogues and, since he could not afford to buy them, writing them himself. Actually, writers are people who write books not out of poverty but out of dissatisfaction with the books they could afford but do not like. That, ladies and gentlemen, you will regard as a whimsical definition of the writer; but everything said from the standpoint of a true collector is whimsical.

  Among common modes of acquisition, the neatest for the collector is undoubtedly borrowing followed by failing to return. The sort of book-borrower on a grand scale that we are looking at here shows himself to be an inveterate book-collector not just (say) by the fervour with which he hangs on to his borrowed hoard and receives all reminders from the everyday world of legality with deaf ears; far more by the fact that he does not read the books either. Take it from me (a man with experience in such matters): it has been a more frequent occurrence that someone does occasionally return a book I had lent him than that he has read it, for instance. And is that (you will ask) typical of the collector – not reading books? Not at all. No. Experts will tell you that in fact nothing has changed in this respect; let me simply remind you of the reply that, again, [Anatole] France held in readiness for those philistines who, having admired his library, rounded matters off with the obligatory question: ‘And you’ve read all these, Mr France?’ ‘Not one tenth of them. Do you dine every day off your Sèvres?’

  I, incidentally, have had occasion to cross-check how right such an attitude is. For years (certainly for the first third of its existence hitherto) my library consisted of no more than two or three rows of books, which grew only by centimetres annually. This was its martial age, when no book was allowed in it that I had not quoted from, that I had not read. I might never have attained anything that, in terms of extent, may properly be called a library had it not been for the period of inflation, which abruptly switched the emphasis to things, turning books into assets or at least making them difficult to get hold of. At least, that is how it seemed in Switzerland. For it was from there (and at the last minute, so to speak) that I placed my first major book orders, getting my hands on such essential items as the Blue Rider or Bachofen’s Myth of Tanaquil, both then still available from the publisher.

  Well, you’ll be thinking, after all this toing and froing we were bound to come eventually to the broad avenue of book acquisition: buying books. It is indeed a broad avenue, but not a leisurely one. For the book-collector, buying has very little in common with what a student, getting hold of a textbook, or a man of the world, looking for a gift for his lady, or a commercial traveller, in search of something to shorten the next railway journey, does in a bookshop. My most memorable purchases were made on holiday – when I happened to be passing. Possession, ownership, are tactical matters. Collectors are people with an instinct for tactics; in their experience, when they take a fresh town the tiniest antique shop may constitute a fortress, the most out-of-the-away stationer’s a key position. What a quantity of cities have revealed themselves to me through those marches undertaken in search of books to conquer!

  Of the most important purchases, of course, only a few involve visiting a dealer. Catalogues play a far greater role. And no matter how well the purchaser knows the book he has ordered from a catalogue, the copy will always come as a surprise and ordering always represent some risk. But as well as dire disappointments there are also those happy finds. I recall, for instance, once having ordered a book with coloured illustrations for my old collection of children’s books purely on the grounds that it contained stories by Albert Ludwig Grimm and had been published in a town called Grimma in Thuringia. But Grimma was the place of publication indicated in a book of tales brought out by the same Albert Ludwig Grimm. And the copy of that book of tales in my possession, with its sixteen illustrations, was the only surviving example of the early work of the great German illustrator [Johann Peter] Lyser, who lived in Hamburg around the middle of the last [nineteenth] century. Well, my reaction to the consonance of the names had been quite correct. Here again I discovered pictures by Lyser – and indeed a work (Linas Märchenbuch, ‘Lina’s book of fairy tales’) of which all his bibliographers are unaware and that merits a more detailed reference than this, my first allusion to it.

  It is certainly not true that buying books is all about money or all about expertise. Not even the two combined will suffice to set up a proper library, which always has something inscrutable and at the same time unmistakable about it. Anyone buying from a catalogue must also, in addition to the things mentioned, possess a fine instinct. Year numbers, place names, formats, previous owners, bindings, and so on, all these things must speak to him – and not just to convey dry information, either; they need to sound in concert, and depending on the harmony and clarity of that sound he has to be able to recognize whether such and such a book is his or not.

  Quite different again are the skills an auction will call for in the collector. So far as the catalogue reader is concerned, the book alone must say something to him, as must its previous owner, possibly, where the provenance of the copy is known. Anyone joining the bidding must divide his attention equally between the book and rival bidders and at the same time keep a cool enough head not to (as regularly happens) become sucked into the competitive struggle, ultimately reaching the stage where, having bid more to beat his man than to acquire the book, he finds himself landed with an elevated purchase price. On the other hand, among the collector’s finest memories will be the moment when he leapt to the aid of a book that he may never in his life have spared a thought for, let alone a wish, and for the simple reason that there it stood, all forlorn and abandoned on the open market, bought it (as the prince did to a beautiful slave girl in the tale from A Thousand and One Nights) in order it to set it free. The fact is, for the book-collector the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

  As a monument to my most exciting auction experience, I still have in my library, towering over long rows of French volumes, Balzac’s Peau de chagrin. The experience dates from 1915 and occurred at the Rümann auction at the premises of Emil Hirsch, one of the greatest bibliophiles and at the same time most distinguished dealers. The edition in question was published in Paris at Place de la Bourse in 1838. Picking up my copy, I see not just the number that it had in the Rümann Collection but also the label of the bookshop where the first purchaser bought it more than ninety years ago for approximately one eightieth of its price today. ‘Papeterie I. Flanneau’, it says. What a time that was, when such splendid works (for the steel engravings in this book were designed by the finest French draughtsmen and executed by the finest engravers) could be purchased at a stationer’s. But I was telling you how I came to acquire the book. I had attended the viewing at Emil Hirsch’s and had picked up and put down forty or fifty volumes – this one, though, with a burning desire never to let it go. The day of the auction arrived. It so happened that this copy of Peau de chagrin was preceded in the bidding order by the complete series of its illustrations in offprints from China. The bidders sat at a long table; at an angle across from me the man on whom, in anticipation of the sale just coming up, all eyes were focused: the famous Munich collector, Baron von Simolin. He was keen on this series, but he had rivals; in short, there was a sharp struggle, out of which came the highest bid of the whole auction, a price of well over 3,000 reichsmarks. No one seemed to have expected so high a sum, and a stir went through those present. Emil Hirsch ignored this and, either to save time or for some other reason, proceeded to the next item largely unheeded by the assembled buyers. He called out the reserve and I, with my heart in my throat and in the clear knowledge that I was no match for any of the great collectors present, bid slightly above it. However, without insisting on the attention of the assembly, the auctioneer went on to utter the usual form of words, ‘No further bids’, and with three blows of his gavel (separated, it seemed to me, by almost limitless stretches of time) knocked the item down to me. As a student, I still found the sum high enough. However, next morning’s visit to the pawnshop no longer forms part of this story; instead, let me tell you about an incident that I should describe as the reverse side of the auction. This had occurred at a Berlin auction the year before. On offer was what in terms of both quality and subject matter was a very mixed batch of books, the only interest attaching to a number of rare works on occultism and natural philosophy. I bid for some of these, but whenever I did so I became aware of a gentleman towards the front who seemed only to have awaited my intervention before putting in a suitably higher bid of his own. When this had happened to me enough times, I gave up all hope of acquiring the book I was keenest on that day. This was the rare Fragmente aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers [‘Fragments from the unpublished works of a young physicist’] that Johann Wilhelm Ritter published in 2 volumes in Heidelberg in 1810. The work was never reissued, but the Foreword (in which the writer, by way of delivering an obituary of his allegedly deceased anonymous friend, who is in fact none other than himself, describes his own life) has always struck me as the most important personal prose text of German Romanticism. In the very instant of the number being called out, I had a flash of inspiration. It was simple enough: since my bidding inevitably resulted in the item being knocked down to the other man, I must not bid. I forced myself to remain silent. What I had hoped for supervened: no interest, no bid, the book went back. I thought it was a good idea to let a few days pass. Sure enough, when I appeared at the antiquarian’s a week later I found the book there, and the lack of interest that had been shown in it was much to my advantage in buying it.