Destiny’s Fool

Since this text never came out elsewhere I'm putting it here - it was part of Reposaari course 2017, my talk in written form. The theme of the course was "Destiny", and there was a variety of takes on it, by both teachers and students. We did a google doc collection of the texts, but as the students wished it would not be published, it wasn't.

In his essay Fate and Character(Charakter und Schiksal) Walter Benjamin associates fate with guilt, misfortune and tragedy. There is a common error, claims Benjamin, to see fate related to religion, the misfortunes it inflicts as a punishment for a guilt, a moral offence against gods. Thus fate would be a moral valuation of a human being. But consider, says Benjamin: fate has no relation to innocence or good fortune and happiness. Happiness indeed has no relation to fate, it is a liberation from fate. What then is the sphere where only misfortune and guilt are meaningful, and which dissolves when innocence and happiness are encountered? Not religion but the order of law (which is not to be confused with the order of justice). “Fate shows itself, therefore, in the view of life, as condemned, as having, at bottom, first been condemned and then become guilty.” Law condemns to guilt, and passing the judgement the judge dictates fate. 

Fate is life seen as inherently guilty. “Fate is the guilt context of the living.” For Benjamin it is not “the man” (the human being) that has a fate and that resides in a guilt context, but the human being’s life, in its natural condition. The human being as mere life. Tragedy in Benjamin’s thinking is not simply the misfortune that has struck the condemned life. Tragedy happens when the human being, still under the power of its mere life, its guilt context, its condemned state and misfortunes, nevertheless becomes aware of having been betrayed by its gods. The tragic hero is dumb and cannot shed its fate (rebel against the gods that have tricked him), but its genius and its sublimity is in knowing it has been tricked.

Instead, for Benjamin character is associated with comedy. Like fate, character is connected to the natural condition of the human being, its life.  And like fate, in reality character or character traits have nothing to do with moral valuation of a human being. The protagonist of a comedy is often more or less a scoundrel says Benjamin – but its actions do not raise moral condemnation, they raise amusement. What attracts the audience are not the actions of the hero as such, but the actions insofar as they reflect the hero’s character. And they illuminate its character “like a sun, in the brilliance of its single trait”. Comedy sets out a “crass” image of the character, simplifying and simultaneously individualizing the hero, setting it free. “The vision of character, on the other hand, is liberating in all its forms: it is linked to freedom”. The character of the comic figure is not about depicting an inescapable destiny, it is a “beacon”, a light that makes visible the freedom of the character’s actions. The comic character outdoes all tricks and plots set against it.

Benjamin makes an interesting note about time, saying that “the guilt context (i.e. fate) is temporal in a totally inauthentic way”. The time of fate is not autonomous, it is parasitic and dependent on another (higher, less natural) life. It is different from the time of redemption, music, or of truth, says Benjamin. Fate is not of the order of truth – it is again of the order of deception, a pitfall, a snare where also the time is caught. Benjamin doesn’t directly refer to the time of comedy or character, but one can infer from the context that since comedy has an “affinity to logic”, in Benjamin’s terms this means that it also has an affinity to redemption and truth (about music I could not say since Benjamin rarely mentions music in his writings). The time of comedy, and of character, is thus authentic and therefore linked to freedom.  

The comic hero is nobody’s fool. In comedy time is flexible. Time forms unexpected lacunae and makes unexplained leaps. Time waits: no matter how urgent the issue, there is always time to bandy words and weave hare-brained plots, break into a song and a dance and recite obnoxious poetry. And while the story may unfold in one direction, the storylines can be reversed and remedied, returned to where it all started from. In comedy time moves divergently. 

Time is the tragic hero’s enemy. Time in tragedy is linear and irreversible, unstoppable, limited and always runs out. The tragic hero is destiny’s fool.

Walter Benjamin: Fate and Character, in Walter Benjamin: Reflectionspp 124 - 131. Penguin Random House 1984