Constellations of Waking (Dos Madres, 2019), Michael Heller’s libretto for composer Ellen Fishman Johnson’s opera concerning the life and work of Weimar philosopher, cultural theorist, and social critic Walter Benjamin, was first performed in Philadelphia in 2000. The origin of the text, Heller notes in his fascinating and insightful preface to the libretto’s publication in book form, was occasioned some four decades earlier. A twenty-something-year-old Heller living in Nerja, a small Andalusian village, in the late 1960s, was first introduced to the writings of the then little-known (at least in the United States) Benjamin. Benjamin’s cultural theory and criticism, a synthesis of Marxism, Frankfurt School social theory, and Jewish mysticism, were then making their first appearance in English translation with the 1969 UK publication of the posthumous collection Illuminations.
A Jewish intellectual, Benjamin was desperate to escape persecution by the Nazis. He committed suicide while at the Spanish border with Nazi-occupied France. In Nerja in the late sixties, Heller found himself in a similar “place of transition,” a Europe at a moment of collapse of its social order, a time of ongoing rapid technological and social changes whose calamitous origins Benjamin experienced firsthand in the earlier half of the twentieth century. What struck Heller about Benjamin was his “inability to commit his life wholly to any one of a number of social and political causes, or to settle on any philosophical world-view with certainty.” This kind of negative capability had considerable appeal to Heller: a young, itinerant poet, freshly arrived on European shores, who was then confronting other temporal uncertainties and—having just turned his back on an engineering career—a specific lack of commitments.
Benjamin’s world was marked by the European catastrophes of a war followed by depression and another war followed by the threat of racial extinction, not to mention the loss of friends and an academic career. His “life was a chronicle of dis-ease and discomfort,” Heller observes, which generated “a sense, as one studied him, of his never feeling at home.” Benjamin was the perpetual homesick traveler and wanderer, in both mind and body—he could no more attach himself to a place than he could to an idea. As Heller notes, this wandering was internally motivated by both Benjamin’s nature and the world thrust upon him.
Texts became, for Benjamin, “hieroglyphs of redeemed life,” concretions of resistance to the seismic forces of history, what Heller describes as “a kind of dynamic intersection in the arena in which history met the possibilities of knowledge and redemption,” a “messianic moment…where language and thought come together as both prophecy and dread.” Thus, Benjamin’s “redemption” of history through these cultural texts was aimed at the possibility of finding historical, political, and economic currents where more hopeful directions might have been taken.
To this end, Charles Baudelaire became, in Heller’s description, Benjamin’s “hero against complacency,” in his use of the fantastic. For Heller, Baudelaire’s work represents “the marvelous construction of the impalpable.” His writings questioned the familiar—the vulgar, the ordinary—and suggested the possibilities of the real: the aura of the familiar object used to suggest the unfamiliar, the unheimlich, where the quotidian is made strange, the bedrock of surrealism and modernist poetry. This method of perception allowed Benjamin the intellectual freedom and dispassionate objectivity necessary to view commodity culture as an essentially absurd force that imperceptibly, almost invisibly, directs and motivates all of modern existence. This method also provided him with an opportunity to, in Heller’s description, “articulate a response to [society’s outrages] that embodies hope.”
For Benjamin, language becomes a means of liberation, as in 1914 Berlin, or, of repression or concealment, as in 1926 Moscow. In the intermezzos of Heller’s opera, Heller has Benjamin say to his friend, the historian Gerhard Scholem: “Gerhard, our path / is with the word; / let us prepare / the purest and holiest / places for it.” In this sense, Benjamin’s great testament is one of both dread and redemption, and the tragedy of his life is redeemed by the work it produced. This dialectic between life and text—and the tension between repression and liberation that language represents—is neatly summarized in the following exchange between Benjamin and playwright Berthold Brecht:
BENJAMIN
The attainment of
technical progress
in literature
eventually changes
the function of the art form.
BRECHT
And the change
in the art form
affects the social order.
Benjamin’s redemption of history, of art affecting the social order, is obtained through the accretion of knowledge and text. It is a process that involves considerable quotation, as if lifting specific phrases from their contexts amounts to an almost archaeological rescue, renewal, and reification. This is the case most obviously in Benjamin’s vast, unfinishable Arcades project, but also in his many essays and articles. In his libretto, Heller has followed Benjamin’s example, as “rearrangements of fragments of letters, instantaneous observations and contingent felicities of phrasing” make up the bulk of Constellations of Waking. The term “constellation” is one that Benjamin uses often; Heller, in his “Notes on Concept and Performance” for the opera, points to Benjamin’s observation of how “the past and the now flash into constellations.” (Another example, from Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, also applies: “ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.”) The constellation illustrates how to perform the work. It is comprised of correspondences between voice, word, music, and mise-en-scène, which are “realized as a series of expressive tensions.” In so doing, Heller has attempted to illustrate the “implicit hope and dread” that exist between life and text.
Rather than present a linear dramatic narrative, Heller’s libretto consists of montage and embodies the spirit of Benjamin’s resistance to the mandated official history, what Heller labels “counter-continuities.” Thus, Heller structures the libretto in a non-linear fashion. He presents specific moments: Benjamin at the Spanish border in the prologue; indistinct intermezzos in non-specific time and place where Benjamin plays chess or exchanges letters and ideas with Scholem; in Berlin in 1914 participating in a Youth Movement whose idealisms are smashed by the onset of world war; with revolutionaries and workers in Moscow in 1926 under the disillusioning iron fist of Stalin; with Brecht in Svendborg in 1934 on the eve of the Nazi reign (“while the sun / shines here, / all are in hell”); in the Arcades of Paris on the eve of and during the Nazi occupation. One of the libretto’s major themes is homelessness: Benjamin’s wandering in exile both physical and mental—both geographic and existential—and how the ultimate tragedy represents not simply the doomed characteristics of fate but also the contours of redemption.
In his preface, Heller doesn’t comment on his decision to utilize the opera form to tell (or re-tell) Benjamin’s tortured and fragmented yet ultimately heroic life. Perhaps, given the over ten years of collaboration with Fishman Johnson, this form seems inevitable. In a brief essay on the apparent differences and similarities between opera and poetry, librettist J. D. McClatchy observes, “A libretto is a dramatic entity, not a lyrical one. It is a structure of words that, first, is meant to evoke music from a composer, and then to create a drama for voices. Because music dominates an opera and is so encompassing and slow, a libretto cannot afford too much obscurity or nuance, psychology or history.” Poetry, on the other hand, “thrives on these.” Heller delves into matters of considerable psychological and historical complexity with nuance and, yes, at times, obscurity. And, arguably, Heller’s subject matter encourages, if not outright demands, such complexity.
McClatchy claims that the best thing for a librettist to do after they have evoked a musical response from a composer is to “get out of the composer’s way.” Yet such a simplistic reading of the librettist’s role cannot be applied whole cloth to Heller’s admirable undertaking, whose subject’s central occupation was the assertion of the primacy of text as rescue of both the turmoil and potential salvation of history. McClatchy allows that the librettist does have a role, possibly even an obligation, in assuring that as the “story tightens into an emotional climax, the language has to tighten too—often into an expressive intensity that only verse can provide.” Yet he insists that the poem is essentially the poet’s own voice, whereas the libretto is a medium for an assortment of voices. This view of the poem, however, ignores the vast history of dramatic poetry from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Beckett. It overlooks, too, the dramatic origins of poetry: are not the works of Homer and Dante essentially dramatic in structure? To argue against a poetic interpretation of the libretto is also to forget poetry’s basis in musical performance. McClatchy pretends that the human detail of voice and music is not found in poetry and, conversely, that there is no element of poetry in song.
Heller, refreshingly, has no such hang-ups. He understands that the libretto’s restrictions and freedoms, its combinations of music and image, its collaboration with composer and performers, are what make it a unique mode of textual transmission. Granted, Heller has framed this print version as a reworking and reshaping of the libretto; nevertheless, the published text retains stage instructions and is clearly meant as a corollary to the performance of opera. Still, this current volume also means to function as a coherent, independent work, and it contains some of Heller’s most precise poetry. Its use of quoted text fragments certainly helps some, though a comparison with Heller’s previously published, original poem “Constellations of Waking,” reprinted at the end, clarifies Heller’s conceptions of the poem as distinct from the libretto. Contrary to the single, authoritative, Romantic speaker of the poem, Heller frequently allows two voices to sing at once, and for dialogue, imagery, (including rear video projections and phantasmagorias), and sounds to overlap, echo, and challenge each other. These are aural equivalences to Heller’s “counter-continuities” and a dramatic representation of Benjamin’s lack of fixity in his comprehension of the “official” version of historical and personal events that allowed them to be “broken open to reveal their contradictions and ambiguities.”
The themes of hope and dread are reflected throughout: Benjamin as a young idealist member of the Youth Movement in Berlin, described by his friend Herbert Belmore as a “sphinx [who] make[s] riddle[s] out of words,” an oracle able to read history for clues of its eventual fate (“The image is now / that of a dead man”). Benjamin, “bitten clean from old romantic lies,” means to “explode the logic of the fathers.” “The true task of language,” Benjamin says, “is the crystal-clear elimination of the unsayable.” In one particularly powerful moment, Benjamin’s idealistic proclamations are answered by the recitation of a poem by the ghost of friend and poet Friedrich Heinle, who committed suicide as a means of escape from nihilism: Benjamin, Heinle observes, “was never / engulfed in nothingness. / He and Gerhard / made their Kafka holy, / pored over their meretricious / kabbalah to dispel doubt.” Benjamin, in the face of nihilism, managed to retain hope through the reclamation and reification of texts as a convergence of language and thought that achieves an almost mystic transcendence of specific historical contexts. To Heinle however, language is “spectacular in its failure. Why discuss / the betterment of / this impoverished progress?” Why indeed? Heller, by including his poem “Constellations of Waking,” perhaps answers implicitly Heinle’s query. Heller quotes from one of Benjamin’s transcriptions of his dreams in which he imagines that “he climbed a labyrinth, / a labyrinth of stairs, / past other stairways / descending,” which, along with Heller’s poem, suggests “Redemptive time” must embody some sort of hope.
Heller’s fragmented portrayal of Benjamin’s fragmented life consists largely of a masterfully orchestrated collection of voices whose words are drawn from fragments of texts, both of Benjamin’s and of those who knew him—his friends and colleagues. It is surely one of the most penetrative and empathetic depictions of this unlucky yet inspiring man. Through his sensitive comprehension of Benjamin’s life and work and of the tragic historical impingements that created and fated him, Heller achieves that rarest of feats: he manages a work of startling beauty and profound poetic achievement while providing the reader with a clearer grasp of Benjamin’s complex ideas. “There is nothing so whole,” Heller has Benjamin quote Rabbi Menachem Mendel, “as a cleft heart.”