Austin Harrington – 1945: A new order of centuries?

Hannah Arendt and Hermann

Broch’s “The death of virgil”.

Pensar en EC.el ensayo sobre Broch.

All Arendt's citations in this review stem notably from a dozen pages in them
iddle of the novel where Broch himself evokes motifs from the fourth Eclogue,
including the key line magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, rendered in one
passage of di alogue between Virgil and Caesar Augustus as "the glory of the ages [that
has] been fulfilled by our time". The poet avers that

"we stand between epochs" in a way that must be called "expectancy, not emptiness",
tow hich the Emperor rejoins: "What happens between epochs is empty and without
chronology, impervious to moulding, impervious to poetry; you yourself have
maintained this, and at the same time, almost in the same breath, you have praised this
time of ours, this time that I have been at pains tom ould, as the culmination of human
existence as well as of po etry,a s a veritable time of burgeoning. I remind you of your
Eclogue inw hich you de clared that the glory of the ages had been fulfilled by our
time".10

A page earlier, the ailing poet, contemplating burning the manuscript of The Aeneid in a
fit of despair, broods that a reason for poetic endeavour "no longer exists"; to which
Augustus again retorts: [A] "'No longer exists?N o longer?Y ou sound as thoughw e
were standing at the end of something...' [V] 'Perhaps itw ould be better to say,n ot yet!
forw e may assume that a time for artis tic tasksw ill dawn again.' [A] 'No longer and
not yet', - Caesar, much dismayed, was weighing thesew ords- 'and between them yawns
an empty space.' Yes, no longera nd not yet; that ish ow it sounded, how ith ad to sound,
lost in nothing ness, the lost, passed-away inter-realm of dream.. .".

The narrative voice tells of perplexity at "empty spaces between the epochs ... the empty
nothingness that yawns wide, the nothingness forw hich everything comes too late and
too early, the empty abyss of nothingness beneath time and the aeons". The Emperor,
cannot tolerate any "abyss of unformed time ... no interruptionm ust occur, time must
flow on incessantly, each moment simultaneously enclosing the end and the
beginning...". The poet languishes tensely in a state of "waiting, in expecting the
fulfilment ... waiting between epochs while yet between the shores of time... on the
bridge that is spanned between invisibility and invisibility ...". This again prompts the
exchange: [V] "'Behind us, oh, Augustus, lies the drop into amorphousness, the drop
into no thingness; you are the bridge-builder, you have lifted this time out of its depths
of rot tenness/ ... [A] 'Yes, it is true, the times had become completely rotten.' [V] 'They
were marked by loss of perception, loss of the gods, death was their pass word; for
decades the barest, bloodiest, most raw lust for power was in the saddle, it was civil
war, and devastation followed upon devastation/ [A] 'yes, that ith ow itw as; but I have
re-established order.' [V] 'And so it follows that this order,w hich is your work, has
become the one com mensurate approximation of the Roman spirit... we had to drain the
goblet of horror to itsd regs before you came and saved us; the timesw ere sunk deeply
inw retchedness, more followed with death than ever before, and now that you have
silenced the powers of evil, itm ust not be allowed to have been done in vain, oh, itm ust
not have been in vain, the new truthm ust arise radiantly from the blackest falsehoods,
from thew ildest raging of death the redemption will come to pass, the annulment of
death.. ."'.
Lynn R. Wilkinson – Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between storytelling and theory

Although some version of Arendt's epigraph may eventually crop up in an electronic

search of Dinesen's work, the probable source is a telephone interview published in
TheN ew YorkT imesB ookR eviewo n November 3, 1957 (and reprinted in 2000 in a
collection of interviews and talks edited by Else Brundbjerg). The passage in question
both reveals the epigraph to be a misquotation and suggests the framework for Hannah
Arendt's interest in the Danish writer and her work. Blixen/Dinesen had not yet visited
the United States. Tongue-in-cheek, the inter-viewer, Bent Mohn, asks her: "You have
written about eighteenth and nineteenth century people-wouldn't you like to write about
people of 1957, living in semi-detached houses with radio and TV?" She replies: "Im
ustg ivey ou the impressiont hat I don'tw antt o writea bout my own contemporaries. But
to me it is as if the people of 1957 shrink back from the story. You can put them into a
novel, full of observa-tions of man's emotions and also of the subconscious, but I feel
that they simply won't go into a tale. And I am not a novelist,r eallyn ot even a writer;I
am a storyteller.O neo fm yf riendss aida boutm et hatI think all sorrows can be borne if
you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely
untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in
life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.

"Do you then look on your own life as a 'tale'?"

"Yes, Isuppose so but in a sense only I can grasp.A nd, after all, the tale is not yet quite
finished!" (Brundbjerg 254-55; my emphasis)

in the interview, Dinesen ties storytelling not only to mourning but also to meaning and
aesthetic patterns perceived in actions when relived in memory, patterns that don't fit
into novels, since the latter are "full of observations of man's emotions and also of the
subconscious" (Brundbjerg 255). Storytelling, uniquely, is able to capture the shape of
an individual human life and to endow it with meaning.

In The Human Condition, a long footnote in the chapter on labor credits Dinesen as the
only modern author to have recognized the close relationship between the cessation of
pain and the illusion of pleasure, and the chapter on action refers to "The Dreamers," a
story from Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen's first collection in English. Arendt's essay
"Truth and Politics," published in The New Yorkerin 1967 (and reprinted in the
collection Between Past and Future in 1968), again quotes the sentence used as the
epigraph to the chapter on action, this time in the context of a discussion of the
relationship of storytelling to truth in politics. And the sentence appears yet again in
Arendt's highly critical 1968 review in TheN ew Yorker of Parmenia Migel's 1967
biography of Isak Dinesen (Titania: The Biography of Isak Dinesen), which discusses
her life and works in terms that would seem to agree with Arendt's enigmatic epigraph
-namely, that the loss of her African farm and lover made Dinesen into a wise woman
and a storyteller.
In articles published in 1990, Seyla Benhabib and Dagmar Barnouw emphasize Arendt's
debts to literary and theoretical models in two of her works. Benhabib argues that
Arendt drew above all on the work of her friend Walter Benjamin for the structure of
her argument in The Originso f Totalitarianism, which attempts to delineate a
"constellation" of the elements of totalitarianism rather than trace a chronological
development: Arendt's use of the word "origin" in her title echoes Benjamin's in The
Origin of German Tragic Drama. Barnouw claims that Arendt drew on the literary
technique of oratio obliqua in her account of the Eichmann trial in order to represent his
testimony in her own words. LisaJane Disch's Hannah Arendt and the Limits of
Philosophy argues, in turn, that storytelling is central to Arendt's work in the late 1950s
and 1960s.

Barnouw, Dagmar. "Speaking about Modernity: Arendt's Construction of the Political."

New German Critique 50 (Spring/Summer 1990): 21-39.

Benhabib, Seyla. "Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative." Social
Research 57.1 (1990): 167-96.

Arendt cites out of context and fails to take into account the structure of individual
works or any kind of chronological sequence. Here, as in some of Walter Benjamin's
works, quotation is an integral part of a kind of interpretation that emphasizes the task
of the critic as that of assembling the fragments of a tradition into a meaningful
constellation that evokes hope for the future, rather than explaining the past in terms of
a determined chronology of events.

Young-Bruehl's biography suggests that Arendt in fact emulated Dinesen in her own
public appearances: "She [Arendt] had learned, slowly, to control-though never to
conquerher great stage fright by yielding to her story, to what she had to say" (Hannah
Arendt 18).

Dinesen's appearances offered to Arendt a model for her own oral performances, it
would be misleading to identify Dinesen's performances with the narrative traditions of
preliterate communities, as discussed by ethnographers or by Walter Benjamin in his
essay "The Storyteller." Dinesen had little in common with Benjamin's storyteller,
whose narrating recalls familiar faces and lives to a relatively small audience and fosters
their sense of community: not only did the Danish writer perform for relatively large
audiences at the New York "Y,"b ut she also gave readings of stories and talks over the
radio, the latter subsequently published as "essays.

In a pioneering article, Heather Keenleyside characterizes Arendt's notion of storytelling

as revelatory of the "who" rather than the "what" of identity in the context of an
argument that draws on Benveniste, Ricoeur, and Bakhtin, thus inviting further
discussion of the links between Arendt's work and that of Dinesen and these theorists:

In the essay on Benjamin, Arendt mimics Dinesen's storytelling performances, both in

her books and at the "Y.
Hannah Arendt's own narratives are indebted to the kind of storytelling she ascribed in
The Human Condition to the Greeks, as well as to Dinesen.

Arendt wrote in "Truth and Politics" that Dinesen "not only was one of the great
storytellers of our time but also-and she was almost unique in this respect-knew what
she was doing" (262). Arendt, one might argue, was not only one of the great political
theorists of our time but also one of the few who knew what she was doing when she
told a story or wrote about storytelling
Pierre Pachet – The authority of poets in a world without authority

Arendt cree que no hay autoridad, pero habla de los poetas como poseedores de
un “divine gift”. Los ve como dotados de cierta autoridad. pensar en el texto que le
dedica a Auden. Tras su muerte.
Lance Banning – Jefferson Idoelogy revisited: liberal and classical ideas in the new
american republic.

Joyce Appleby denuncia la mala comprensión de Jefferson por parte de autores

como Hofstadter o Pocock o el mismo Banning hacia una nostalgia por el pasado en vez
por un entusiasmo por el futuro, que se queda en la autarquía agraria en vez de celebrar
el desarrollo comercial. Se lo ve como un derrotado de la modernidad (Appleby,
Commercial Farming and Agrarian Myth). Cree que Appleby les retrata mal. Comenta
mucho el pensamiento de Jefferson (debería releer artículo). Valora a Arendt (p. 17).
[Richard K. Andrews, The radical politics of Jefferson, parte de Arendt].
Allen Speight – Arendt on narrative and practice

En MDT entra mucho en el daimon. Importancia de la amistad.

Carta a McCarthy 1975: arendt ha hecho algo mal para agradar al público.