Benjamin's Mirrors

Bar BritanicoIn my creative writing class here I read Walter Benjamin for the first time. Wikipedia describes him as a “German Jewish Marxist Literary Critic” and I smile. I guess he is that, or at least that’s one way to categorize him. Benjamin is also identified with the Frankfurt school, the same institution responsible for a solid chunk of introductions to sociology and cultural studies. His works read as snippets of his own writing interspersed with swaths of quotations from an immense mental collection of sources. In a way I relate him to Borges because both men write very consciously as members of a larger tradition. But Benjamin is not a fiction writer so his texts include the words which inspired them. Reading a chapter from The Arcades Project, a collection of essays vaguely focused around the Parisian arcades of the late nineteenth century, reads like an expanded and engaging reference work which strives to catalogue the sense of an era—the sense of space in particular.

In class we read a chapter on the Flâneur. In his own indirect and multi-voiced way Benjamin defines the Flâneur in many ways but most simply as an urban wanderer who experiences the city as they walk through streets and the emerging bustling public spaces which began to characterize Paris towards the end of the 1800s. The Flâneur has an encyclopedic knowledge of the city. They know its history; the gory details, the pomp and circumstance. Yet the monuments don’t attract them as much as do the people. The Flaneur is a fly-on-the-wall but not as insignificant or invisible. Benjamin calls him or her a journalist and a detective, but with stories only for themselves. Yet the Flaneur is also “buoyant” and a true lover of life as opposed to a urban hermit like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov or the Man in the Crowd, a mysterious figure in Edgar Allen Poe’s story by the same title which Benjamin cites multiple times in his essay on Flânerie.

I took The Arcades Project out of the library and found a short essay titled “Mirrors” in which Benjamin muses about the rising number of mirrors in the Paris, “in cafes and restaurants, in shops and stores, in haircutting salons and literary salons, in baths and everywhere”. He devotes much of his time describing why mirrors are used. To expand space. To spread light. To support egotism. He also gets at how mirrors transform things. He says that all the mirrors, especially in the arcades, evoke ambiguity; “for although this mirror world may have many aspects, indeed infinitely many, it remains ambiguous, double-edged.”

I chose to write about “Mirrors” because I’ve had my own musings about mirrors here in Buenos Aires. Soon after I got here I realized that there were not only mirrors in cafes and restaurants but there were also small reflective rectangles in subway cars by the doors (for security), not to mention many newer buildings have tall tinted windows on their first floors which I have seen people adjusting their appearance in on more than one occasion. The mirrors in the busses are in the same places as they are in New York but they are engraved with delicate and ornate designs. I ended up asking the same question that Benjamin did. What is at the root of Buenos Aires’ obsession (too strong?) with mirrors. Amplification of space. Egotism. To spread light. But here there is something else.

At first I guessed (more hoped than guessed) that mirrors might be so common because of the silver found in Argentina and Latin America when Buenos Aires was beginning to take shape. Mirrors are made by joining a thin layer of silver to a pate of glass and Argentina was named for Argentum, a Greek epithet for silver. When my parents visited I posed the question to my dad and he didn’t have to think before he said, “Paris”. When I saw Benjamin’s essay and read his descriptions I saw a similarity and a relation. Here, the designs of the oldest cafés and many important buildings were taken from European models. The landowning class’ desire to appear Enlightened, French, Spanish, Parisian. The mirrors here may reflect a society preoccupied with appearance, aesthetics, and seeing over the shoulder, being the fly on the wall while sipping a café con leche; but the mirrors are also a symbol of a reflection conjured from across the Atlantic. Talk about amplification of space.

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