DRAFT Below IS EXPENDABLE

Interval as Staging Ground: The Teletopical Poetics of Close(d) Reading, or Reading Rings Around things

set up the carousel via a circle from shelf help storage) to toys as staging to children's books as tropes of reading) that are linguistic and medial transfers of things that become readable, “thingable,” as they turn into other storage media with specific tropes of containment (frames, shelves, boxes, and so on) and fragmentation.

So troping things becomes a carousel of stagings and intervals.

[Note: The first two sentences of this section need to be revised]

Before we come to a full stop in our introduction, we want to ride out a bit longer by taking up the interval discussed by linked to the movement of being mechanically rotated, troping things becomes a carousel of stagings and intervals, like the frame in the film required for us to see the film in motion when run at 24 frames in The Ring a second turn our text into a thing, by moving to the trope of the carousel as a way of staging and (being incapable of) reading things set up the carousel via a circle from shelf help storage) to toys as staging to children's books as tropes of reading) that are linguistic and medial transfers of things that become readable, “thingable,” as they turn into other storage media with specific tropes of containment (frames, shelves, boxes, and so on) and fragmentation. addressed by Benjamin in a brief section ofColors: A Berlin Childhood. Entitled “The Carousel,”the section focuses on the child's experience of leaving the mother, speeding up and slowing down.[1]

The revolving deck with its obliging animals skims the surface of the ground. It is at the height best suited to dreams of flying. Music rings out—and with a jolt, the child rolls away from his mother. At first, he is afraid to leave her. But then he notices how he himself is faithful. He is enthroned, as faithful monarch, above a world that belongs to him. Trees and natives line at the borders at intervals. Suddenly, his mother reappears in an Orient. Then, from some primeval forest, comes a treetop—one such as the child has already thousands of years ago, such as he has seen just now, for the first time, on the carousel. His mount is devoted to him: like a mute Arion, he rides his mute fish; a devoted Zeus-bull carries him off as immaculate Europa. The eternal return of all things has long since become childhood wisdom, and life an ancient intoxication of sovereignty, with the booming orchestration as crown jewel at the center. The music is slowly winding down; space begins to stutter [as opposed to mute “animals”], and the trees start coming to their senses. The carousel becomes uncertain ground. And his mother rises up before him—the firmly fixed mooring post around which the landing child wraps the line of his glances.

Berlin Childhood, 122-23

As in Benjamin’s account of habit form playing in his essay on “Old Toys,” his account of the child and mother on the returning carousel bears some similarity to Freud’s “Fort Da” toy story. As in Freud’s “Fort Da,” Benjmain’s account of the carousel involves a story about a child dealing with the loss of his mother. But in Benjmain’s segment, Freud’s infantile, narcissistic, self-centered monarch becomes sovereign as a child through a shocking but pleasurable decentering and repetition (“with a jolt, the child rolls away”), a destabilization of ground and proximity, a kind of time travel in which the present is the first time. And this time the mother moves East as opposed to the father who returns to the Western “fwont” in “Fweud”’s account. The child in the carousel is literally and metaphorically getting high: “It is at the height best suited to dreams of flying.”[2]

The crucial developments in this essay are, first, the varying speed as the ride begins and ends, allowing for the unfixing and refixing of things, a break up and intensification of fixation, and, second, the interval that allows for the mother to appear. It's a later moment of detachment that makes intelligibility necessarily vertiginous as space and things become animated, first mute and then verging on speech by stuttering.[3]In Benjamin’s story, the carousel provides a stage to show that there are no stages of ego development, only rereadings that are also always restagings.[4]

We close down this chapter, turn our text into a thing, by moving to the trope of the carousel as a way of staging and (being incapable of) reading things addressed by Benjamin in a brief section ofColors: A Berlin Childhood. Entitled “The Carousel,”the section focuses on the child's experience of leaving the mother, speeding up and slowing down.[5]

Berlin Childhood, 122-23

The crucial developments in this essay are, first, the varying speed as the ride begins and ends, allowing for the unfixing and refixing of things, a break up and intensification of fixation, and, second, the interval that allows for the mother to appear. It's a later moment of detachment that makes intelligibility necessarily vertiginous as space and things become animated, first mute and then verging on speech by stuttering.[7]In Benjamin’s story, the carousel provides a stage to show that there are no stages of ego development, only rereadings that are also always restagings.[8]

Reading-to-Hand

For a wonderful illustration of how Benjamin turns the object into a trope in his own writing practice, we may turn to his use of theatrical metaphors to stage an analysis of children’s book in his essay “A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books” (SW 1, 435-43). We offer an extended reading of this dense and poetic essay in order to bring out some of the dimensions of closed reading as they relate to the pedagogy, aesthetics, the body, media, technology, and their finitude, both their spatial dimensions and their duration. Benjamin tropes the child picturing / reading children’s picture books and pull out as a metaphorics of hallucinogenic, fantastical, immersive play, theatricalization and carnivalization unbound by sense. Color becomes the atmospheric “medium” (442) par excellence that makes reading and writing into transferential experiences of turning words into images and vice versa. Near the end of the essay Benjamin concludes that “pure color is the medium of pure fantasy, a home among the clouds for the spoiled child, not the strict canon of the constructive artist” (442).[9]

Why is color so central to Benjamin? Because it is a trope of tropes as attachments and detachments, much like clothes:

The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead, the gazing child enters into those pages, becoming suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the world of pictures. Sitting before his painted book, he makes the Taoist vision of perfection come true; he overcomes the illusory barrier of the surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted partitions to enter a stage on which fairy tales spring to life. Hoa, the Chinese word for “painting,” is much like kua, meaning “attach”: you attach five colors to the objects. In German, the word used is anlagen: you “apply” colors. In such an open, color-bedecked word where everything shifts at every step. The child is allowed to join in the game. Draped with colors of every hue that he has picked up form reading and observing, the child stands in the center of a masquerade and joins in, while reading—for the words have all come to the masked ball, are joining in the fun and whirling around together, like tinkling snowflakes. . . At a stroke, words throw on their costumes and in the twinkling of an eye they are caught up in a battle, love scenes, or a brawl. This is how children write their stories, but also how they read them. And there are a rare impassioned ABC-books that play similar sort of game in pictures. . . .

Staging reading through the metaphor allows Benjamin to describe the knowledge and memory as containers that may be turned inside out, with no loss:

Children know such pictures like their own pockets; they have searched through them in the same way and turned them inside out, without forgetting the smallest thread or piece of cloth. And if, in the colored engraving, children’s imagination can fall into a reverie, the black and white woodcut or the plain prosaic illustration draws them out of themselves. Just as they will write about the pictures with words, so, too, they will “write” them in a more literal sense: they will scribble on them. Unlike the colored pictures, the surface of the black and white illustration seems to be incomplete and in need of additions. So children imaginatively complete the illustrations. At the same time, they learn language from them, they also learn writing: hieroglyphics. (SW, 1, 436)

Benjamin interrupts this line of thought about the importance of the lack

of color as the double determination of what kinds of book surfaces invite writing and define writing as scribbling and completion. He takes a detour first to the body, particularly the child reader's hand, and the “disintegrat-ability,” as it were, of one kind of picture book that has detachable parts, before returning to broader considerations about color, media, language, and the body at the end of the essay:

And even in children’s books, children’s hands were catered to just as much as their minds or imaginations. There are the well-known pull-out books (which have degenerated and seem to be the most short-lived as a genre, just as the books themselves never seem to last long). . . . you now find in books those beautiful games in which little cardboard figures can be attached by means of invisible slits in the board and can be rearranged at will. This means that you can change a landscape or a room according to the different situations that arise in the course of the story. For those people who as children—or even as collectors—have had the great good fortune to come into the possession of magic books or puzzle books, all of the foregoing will have paled in comparison. These magic books were ingeniously contrived volumes that displayed different series of pictures according to the way one flicked through the pages. The person I the know can go through such a book ten times, and will see the same picture on page after page, until his hand slips---and now it is as if the entire book were transformed, and completely different pictures make their appearance. (437-38).

In this techno moment of reading by hand, the book becomes magical precisely when the hand slips: the magic effect occurs at the moment of the hand loses control, not the hammer breaking apart, as in Heidegger’s Being and Time, what he calls equipment becomes no longer “ready-to-hand” but “present-to-hand” when it fails. And paradoxically, only the reader who knows how to let his hand skip can perform the magic trick on the book.

The Sunset Clause

We may begin to appreciate better the importance of color as a trope of tropes for Benjamin and how this tropology uses children’s books to connect German classicism, staged as the non-canonical novels of Jean-Paul Richter and the color theory canonical writer and critic of Jean-Paul, namely, Goethe. At stake in account of the pedagogical and aesthetic value of children’s books is whether we are to understand Benjamin as endorsing a classical German pre-critical aesthetic of completion and unity or championing “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”, an aesthetic of incompletion and fragmention. Benjamin returns to his initial metaphorical connection with color and children’s reading by yoking the classical Goethe’s theory of colors with the true “spirit of children’s games” through “sensibility,” and the detachment of color from the objects: expanding on his characterization of the child “draped with colors of every hue that he picked up from reading and observing,” (435).[10]

Benjamin develops his discussion of children’s books and children reading not as an explicit argument about aesthetics but by quietly and indirectly changing his metaphors. After quoting Goethe on color, Benjamin makes a series of notable shifts from his earlier discussion of writing and color: snowflakes are replaced by the glow of the sunset, and writing disappears entirely in favor of reading as a magical experience that transforms the child’s body into a lamp.[11] Instead of colors being attached to the child, color is now separated from the object: “Just think of the many games that are concerned with pure imaginative contemplation: soap bubbles, parlor games, the watery color of the magic lantern, watercoloring, decals. In all of these, color seems to hover suspended above the objects. Their magic lies not in the colored object or in the mere dead color, but in the colored glow, the colored brilliance, the ray of colored light” (443).

Why is colored light separated out as it becomes glowing? Again, only indirectly, Benjamin implies that medial transfer happens through colored light that creates contact that is pre-critical but not quite literal nor complete. Consider Benjamin’s final sentence with its image of “the eyes and cheeks of children poring overbooks are reflected in the glory of the sunset [of a Lyser painting of a landscape]” (442). As we will recall, Benjamin earlier said that colored books not do invite writing, only black and white books do.[12] In “Old Forgotten Children’s Books,” which takes its title from Karl Hobreckers’s book Old Forgotten Children’s Books (1924), Benjamin discusses Biedemeier books, remarking that the pictures in children’s books usually exclude any synthesis of color and drawing” and describes the books in terms of a classical aesthetic: “This resplendent, self-sufficient world of colors is the exclusive preserve of children’s books.” Self-sufficiency seems to imply a classical aesthetic of completion: color tends to exclude drawing. Yet color does includes theater, or, perhaps implicitly, theatrical lighting with color filters, which in turn takes the form of contemplative one might even say closet drama: “The inward nature of this way of seeing is located in the color, and this is where the dreamy life that objects lead in the minds of children is acted out. They learn from the bright coloring. For nowhere is sensuous nostalgia free contemplation as at home as in color.” (410).

Enlightenment for Benjamin involves an aesthetic of sensuous media transfers that work best, “magically,” when there is a contact problem: the hand slips, the book parts get detached and losts. Color as a ray of light throws a Romantic shadow, as it were, on German classicism by turning a transcendental thing separate from all playthings. This transcendence is less reassuring, however, than an unsettling experience of exteriorization necessitating new attachments. Benjamin ends his essay with an ekphrasis of a landscape populated by a poet whose instruments lie scattered whose “melodious hands” do not play them and by a nearly mute Muse who whispers into a “winged-child,” who then draws whatever the Muse said. Yet Benjamin’s ekphrasis appears initially as a narrative, only revealed retroactively to resemble a classical painting in the manner “Lyseronce painted” and thus subject by Benjamin to a certain Romantic tork that focuses on the near finitude of the aesthetic and its artificiality. The painting’s apparently harmonious classical aesthetic, in which scattering is harmonized through a muting of sound, gets troped and reattached as a media specific landscape painting. But the “painting” then becomes the reflection of children outside it who are not looking at it but instead poring over books. The temporality of the classical aesthetic comes with a Sunset clause, the promise of an ending that is deferred to a future soon to come. Like the child’s pocket that turns inside out, children’s books exteriorize their readers; these books operate successfully and harmoniously only by their failure to contain their readers’ experience of reading-to-hand, allowing children a time to reflect light beyond the book’s pages without knowing it.