Surroundings: Interior vs. Exterior
In the section of his paper exploring the dialectical image and dream images, Friedlander makes this observation, following a description of the Parisian arcades of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as an attempt to make the exterior interior, this comment is made on the topic of surroundings:
Surroundings are essentially different from an object of attention. They cannot be simply individuated, broken into isolated parts, and take in, bit by bit. Assuming the initial incorporation of an environment, its internalization, we would have to treat the perceptible phenomena in which it is gathered as having an aura of meaning extending beyond what they are literally speaking. One could conceive, at the individual level, of the imagination as this gathering power of meaning in images, but it would be even better to consider this process to take place in the space of memory. That is, the claim is not that certain experiences such as strolling in the arcades have a dreamlike quality but rather that insofar as a world is put together in recollection, its initial coalescing would not be as a “totality of facts” but have the striking strangeness of a dream (Friedlander, 25).
The first part of this quote’s delineation of “surroundings” as being indivisible into parts, constituting a thing existing only when assembled, when together, is potentially useful when considering the importance of Capote’s emphasis on and depiction of “surroundings” as experiential and holistic within his place-portraits. This “aura of meaning extending beyond what they are literally speaking” is a sense that is palpable within the place-portraits; the loving way in which surroundings are constructed and depicted to constitute an affective experience of “place,” in particular, through his use of elaborate metaphor in certain places, highlights these pieces as not only depicting his “place” understandable as constructed, but also as depending on the necessarily holistic nature of “surroundings.”
Friedlander goes on to further delineate the holistic nature of “surroundings” as being “insofar as a world is put together in recollection, its initial coalescing would not be as a “totality of facts” but have the striking strangeness of a dream.” His delineation of a “totality of facts” from “the striking strangeness of a dream” in relation to world-imagining, and place-constructing, emphasizes the unplaceable nature of both the dream-like, and the dialectical image.
Friedlander goes on to state, in regards to dream images, that:
[w]ith this understanding of the necessity of dream images as concentrations of the surroundings, we rejoin the temporal dimension of realization. The dream images are the reflection of a broader reality to be given expression to. It is therefore with respect to them that one can speak of a potential or a tendency, as well as of a task of expression (Friedlander, 26).
While the dream image is unplaceable and strange, it is also the vehicle for the expression of a truth or reality that is only expressible through linguistic representations of these images – dialectical images.
Friedlander, Eli. “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 35.3 (2008): 1-26.
