Abstract

Walter Benjamin has rarely appeared in fiction. To adequately represent Benjamin in a creative manuscript, writers cannot resort only to the conventions of biography or historical fiction—conventions that ignore or negate Benjamin’s theses about history. The Allegorist puts into practice Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image, in which an historian extracts a piece of text from its original context so as to place it within a new context, establishing a “constellation which [one] era has formed with a definite earlier one”. Susan Buck-Morss argues that this process represents “a modern form of emblematics”. The Allegorist expounds upon Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image in order to argue for a “hieroglyphic” experience of modernity. Using textual montage, The Allegorist explores this hieroglyphic experience while applying Benjamin’s concept of historiography to the history of his own life.