Walter Benjamin in New York with Antonio Muñoz Molina - Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority

Antonio Muñoz Molina, the Spanish novelist, has an 85-page chunk of memoir in the latest Hudson Review (Autumn 2018).  He is writing about a walk, or maybe blending a number of walks, from the southern tip of Manhattan Island all the way to the Bronx, where he is “now,” meaning next to my bookmark (I haven’t finished the piece).  The piece, the walk, is in part inspired by Walter Benjamin, a classic flaneur, who is mentioned occasionally and at one point even encountered on the sidewalk, in Muñoz Molina’s imagination.

Muñoz Molina, up near Columbia University, has been noticing the honorary street names.  Duke Ellington, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and so on.  He imagines Federico García Lorca walking the same streets in 1929.  He remembers that Hannah Arendt lived nearby, and realizes that this is, more or less, where Benjamin would have lived if he had made it out of Spain.

Toward the end, his will and his imagination were focused on New York.  He had started learning English.  He was fond of American films and read Faulkner, Light in August, but found it so hard that he helped himself along with a French translation.  (410)

He read Poe’s “The Man in the Crowd,” which I find it hard to believe such a devotee of Baudelaire had not read, The Turn of the Screw, lots of Melville, The Postman Always Rings Twice.  This was to prepare for living in America, in New York.  He falls in love with Katharine Hepburn.  I am just taking Muñoz Molina’s word for all of this.

But it is true that if he had reached New York, he would have found a city as suited for his signature method – walking, looking, thinking – as Paris or Berlin, enjoying or at least absorbing

the noise, the rush, the general air of commercial vulgarity, the people speaking German or Yiddish or English with a German accent, the Jewish smells and flavors of the delis, the joy and guilt of having fled the apocalypse in Europe. (411)

It is hard to imagine Benjamin ending up in Los Angeles like Schoenberg and Mann, easy to imagine him finding some kind of tenuous university appointment like Nabokov.

So we are missing not only a New York Arcades Project, but full-length essays on Faulkner, Melville’s Pierre, the New York City Poe, and who knows what else.

I have been wondering, reading Illuminations, why this particular configuration of Benjamin has been so powerful.  There is a four-volume Selected Writings in English now, for example, so a different collection would be feasible.  But

Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition.  (Arendt, Introduction, p. 43)

And Illuminations has it from both ends now, authority and tradition.  Plus, poking around in the first two volumes of Selected Writings, I now realize that as far as complete, literary essays, Illuminations has almost everything Benjamin published.  But there are more book reviews, more excerpts from letters and fragments of notebooks.  Some other anthology could work.  I don’t know.  For a critic of this stature, there is just not that much.  What exists is extraordinary and makes me deeply regret that imaginary Faulkner essay.

The Muñoz Molina is titled “Mr. Nobody” and is a chunk of the untranslated Un andar solitario entre la gente (2018).

Freedom and writing, those two thrilling gifts - reading and the death of Franco

Another enthusiastic reading list:

I read Proust, and I read about Proust; I read Faulkner, I read Mario Vargas Llosa, Borges, Onetti; I read Raymond Chandler, Julio Cortázar, Flaubert, Stendhal.  Long after midnight, I turned off the light, so excited by my reading that sleep would not come. (34)

Antonio Muñoz Molina, in his essay “A Double Education,” is writing about his life as a student in Granada in 1975.  He is supposed to be, so he believes, doing what he can to fight Franco, dying but somehow never quite dead, smash the state, attend illegal demonstrations, and further revolutionary consciousness.  He is also supposed to go to his classes.  All he wants to do, though, and pretty much all he does, is read fiction, and just the good stuff.  A fellow revolutionary catches Muñoz Molina reading Swann’s Way and calls him a “revisionist,” which is a wounding insult in Marxist fantasy land.

Freedom and writing, those two thrilling gifts, had something in common:  both had to be learned, and they had to be learned the hard way by us Spaniards, because there were no teachers on hand. (37)

The first legal public rally Molina attends is a commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the murder of Federico García Lorca in the little town where he was born, surrounded by police, just sixty minutes long, all images and slogans “other than Lorca’s portrait and name” forbidden.  This is how Molina learns to be free, and perhaps also part of how he learns to write.

That time, he realizes, made him the writer he is now.  The books, of course, purchased with his scholarship money, and the political activity, but also “two decades of banned international films” that suddenly appeared in the Granada theaters, and recreational drugs, and pornography, and contraceptives, and gay rights’ parades, all of which seemed to simply appear in his world within a year or two of Franco’s death:

You had to learn, and you had to learn fast.  Your hands were full, and your mind had to work at a maddening speed.  But what an opportunity to learn for an aspiring writer: what a need to make some sense of what keeps rushing around you and at the same time to take stock of the long suppressed past and to try to peek into the fast approaching future.  (39)

What a luxury to live in a place and time when no writer’s name is likely to bear as much extra-literary power as Lorca’s.  Muñoz Molina, at the end of the essay, is clear enough that he prefers to recall 1975 rather than to live through it.

Who, by the by, is Antonio Muñoz Molina?  Let’s see.  I have to find the right part of the magazine. He

is the author of over a dozen novels, most recently La noche de los tiempos.  He twice received the Premio Nacional de Literatura in Spain.  He lives in Madrid and New York.

Now you know as much as I do, or perhaps more, since Molina has several novels in English, which you might have read.  Where did I read this memoir?  In the new issue of The Hudson Review, Spring 2011, a special treasure trove titled “The Spanish Issue.”  The rest of the week, more of The Hudson Review, more of “The Spanish Issue.”