Clive James trashes Walter Benjamin
Dipping lately into Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, an alphabetically organized listing of delightfully written brief lives. Here he is on Walter Benjamin’s sad fate:
…to have his name bandied about the intellectual world without very many of its inhabitants being quite sure why, apart from the vague idea that he was a literary critic who somehow got beyond literary criticism; he got up into the realm of theory, where critics rank as philosophers if they are hard enough to read. Clever always, he was clear seldom: a handy combination of talents for attaining oracular status…To write with scholarship and insight about the small change of culture was his calling card.
Karl Kraus…had an infallible ear for the kind of rhetoric whose only real subject is its own momentum
The lowly journalism of others, then and since, leaves his [Benjamin's] paroxysms of verbiage sounding inarticulate."
