To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation

By Annie Pfeifer

To the Collector Belong the Spoils rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literary modernism and twentieth-century practices of collecting objects. From James's paper hoarding to Einstein's mania for African art and Benjamin's obsession with old Russian toys, she shows how these authors' literary techniques of compiling, gleaning, and reassembling constitute a modernist style of collecting that reimagines the relationship between author and text, source and medium. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in surprising conversation with James sharpens the contours of collecting as aesthetic and political praxis underpinned by dangerous passions. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, order and chaos, the past and the future.

Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. By despoiling and decontextualizing the work of others, these three authors engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting's long history in the spoils of war and conquest. As Pfeifer demonstrates, more than an archive or taxonomy, modernist collecting practices became a radical, creative endeavor—the artist as collector, the collector as artist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501767807

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Cover: To the Collector Belong the Spoils, MODERNISM AND THE ART OF APPROPRIATION by Annie Pfeifer

TO THE COLLECTOR BELONG THE SPOILS

MODERNISM AND THE ART OF APPROPRIATION

ANNIE PFEIFER

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

To Yassi & Maya

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Dangerous Passions

PARTONE: POSSESSINGTHEOLDWORLD

1. James’s Human Bibelots

2. Sardanapalus’s Hoard

PARTTWO: BETWEENSALVATIONANDREVOLUTION

3. The Collector in a Collectivist State

4. Trash-Talking in The Arcades Project

PARTTHREE: COLLECTINGAFRICA

5. The Collector and His Circle

6. Einstein’s Critical Dictionary

Epilogue: Hoarding in a Digital Age

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book first grew out of my parasocial relationship with Walter Benjamin. My obsession led me beyond his archive to retrace Benjamin’s footsteps through Bern, Switzerland, the Paris Arcades, and even Peacock Island, just outside of Berlin, where young Walter collected feathers as a child.

But without the support and encouragement of my teachers, mentors, editors, students, friends, and family my journey might have remained a jumbled set of passages. I am greatly indebted to Katie Trumpener, whose beautiful mind and enthusiasm shaped this book from its early germs in the Moscow-Berlin Seminar she cotaught with Katerina Clark at Yale University. I am also grateful to Rüdiger Campe, Henry Sussman, Marta Figlerowicz, and David Quint for their lucid, generous feedback on drafts and to Ruth Yeazell, Carol Jacobs, Pericles Lewis, Barry McCrea, Rainer Nägele, Kirk Wetters, and Abbas Amanat, whose courses and vibrant scholarship provided the larger backdrop for my research.

At Columbia University, I have depended on the support of an incredible group of scholars whom I am lucky enough to call colleagues: Oliver Simons, Stefan Andriopoulos, Claudia Breger, Dorothea von Mücke, Mark Anderson, Jeremy Dauber, Noam Elcott, Susan Bernofsky, Sarah Cole, Jenny Davidson, Aubrey Gabel, and Hannah Weaver. I am especially grateful to Andreas Huyssen for his early support and indispensable feedback on what was to become chapter 3. Without the herculean efforts of my inimitable research assistant Devin Friedrich to bring this book over the finish line, I might still be buried in a footnote somewhere. He was the collector to my hoarder. A special thanks to Sophie Schweiger and Aaron McKeever for their help gathering materials and preparing the manuscript and to Sherene Alexander and Kerstin Hofmann, whose warmth and wisdom have buoyed this endeavor during the last two difficult years.

Cornell University Press has been a formidable partner from day one. Michelle Scott, Karen Hwa, Susan Specter, and Bethany Wasik were integral members in the production of the book. Most of all, I am indebted to the insight and solicitude of Mahinder Kingra, who was a lifeline while I was trying to finish my book during the pandemic.

This book developed through thought-provoking exchanges with the students in my two seminars on related topics, Dangerous Passions: Collecting, Hoarding, and Possessing and Walter Benjamin and the Crisis of Experience, at Columbia University in 2019 and 2021 respectively, especially Hazel Rhodes, Chris Hoffman, Leo Claussen, Cosima Mattner, Iloe Ariss, Didi Tal, Connor Martini, Jeanne Devautour, Sarah Elston, Amara Jaeger, Jared Rush, Ocean Jensen, and Celia Abele. I am grateful to many brilliant interlocutors at the Tufts Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, the Rutgers German Department, the Institut für Germanistik at the University of Bern, and to Reto Sorg and the Robert Walser Center for their encouragement and spirited feedback along the way. Dan Geist dexterously provided me with some important last-minute suggestions.

Several formative conferences allowed me to test run my ideas. Elective Affinities: Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka, organized by Ian Fleishman at the University of Pennsylvania, gave rise to lasting friendships with a gifted group of scholars. Claudia Breger’s impactful Aesthetic and Politics conference at Columbia introduced important theoretical considerations into my book. An invitation to speak at the Night of Philosophy and Ideas at the Brooklyn Museum at the auspicious hour of 1:30 a.m. inspired my epilogue on digital hoarding. I am particularly indebted to Keja Valens and Jordana Greenblatt for organizing a multiyear panel at the American Comparative Literature Association, which gave rise to their edited volume Querying Consent (Rutgers University Press, 2018). My chapters on Henry James benefited from the expertise of Joseph Vogl and his students at the Humboldt University in Berlin as part of a DAAD Postdoctoral Exchange in 2017. Many of my ideas took shape during a stimulating summer in gorgeous Ithaca at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory with John Brenkman, Amanda Anderson, Lauren Berlant, and other thought leaders.

Research is only as good as the institutions that support it. I am very grateful to the late Christoph Pudelko in Bonn, Germany, and his staff for providing access to the rich archives of Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, the great collector and lifelong friend of Carl Einstein. A humid summer afternoon was brought to life with a fly swatter and some vivid anecdotes about Gottlieb and Carl’s excellent adventures. I am indebted to Jutta Billig, Peter Junge, Anja Zenner, and the rest of the staff at the library of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum for their generous help and archival support during my visit. Ursula Marx and her colleagues at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin provided much-needed archival material. Finally, I would like to thank the staff of the 2014 Dresden Summer School, Power, Knowledge, and Participation—Collecting Institutions in the 21st Century, at TU Dresden for organizing a thought-provoking workshop on the subject of collecting. Anke te Heesen at the Humboldt University in Berlin supplied me with many good leads and references, as well as the exciting opportunity to participate in her colloquium.

Even in the best of times, it takes a village to write a book. But in a global pandemic, it takes a global village. Above all, I would like to thank my mother, Therese Pfeifer, for the strength, honesty, and talent she has modeled throughout her life. Her work graces the cover of this book. From across the Atlantic, she never stopped believing in me and my work, even when I did. When schools closed in March 2020, my manuscript might have remained a digital hoard without the help of my unflappable pandemic podmates: Jordan Pesci-Smith, Deomattie (Noreen) Ramdyal, and the formidable Ehrlich-Elcott family. I continue to be guided by the luminous example of Helen Pfeifer, my wiser younger sister. I am grateful to Peter Pfeifer, Christian Sassmannshausen, Amir Motamedi, and the Motamedi-Azarm family for their support and encouragement along the way. Finally, I would not have been able to pull this off without a little help from my friends around the world: Katrina Kaufman, John Ortved, Greg Melitonov, Sarah Wilkinson, Lauren Kaplan, Jessica Backus, Helena Hasselmann, Tess Vigil, Ariel Bardi, Beth Harper, Katrina Rouse, Tor Seidler, Joe Li, Annabel Seidler, Joe Williamson, Geeta Hanooman, Gillian St. Claire, and my much-missed friends and family, the late Anna Abgottspon, Garland English, and Kirk Mullins.

ABBREVIATIONS

Walter Benjamin

Carl Einstein

Charles Haxthausen

Henry James

Sebastian Zeidler

Introduction

Dangerous Passions

Already by the end of the nineteenth century the collector had acquired an unfortunate reputation as an amateur, uncreative, retrograde figure well past his prime. In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche paints an illustratively bleak portrait of the collector who envelops himself in a moldy smell [Moderduft]. With the antiquarian style, he manages to corrupt even a more significant talent, a nobler need, into an insatiable lust for novelty, a desire for everything really old. Often he sinks so low that he is finally satisfied with any nourishment and takes pleasure in gobbling up even the dust of bibliographical quisquilia.¹ Opposing his own historically saturated epoch, Nietzsche’s essay warns of the dangers of antiquarian history that knows only how to preserve life, not how to generate it.² According to Nietzsche, this wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting [eine blinde Sammelwut], a restless compiling together of everything that ever existed is a parasitic outgrowth of a degenerative approach to history that buries and mummifies life.³ The opposition Nietzsche establishes between collecting and creating and between preserving and generating has persisted until the contemporary period, with scholars like Susan Stewart arguing that collecting is a fundamentally different type of activity from artistic production.⁴

Nietzsche’s trenchant description could not be more different from Walter Benjamin’s sanguine view of the collector as a revolutionary dreamer who liberates his objects and himself through his idiosyncratic practice. The collector, Benjamin posits, makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value.⁵ Rather than preserving or hoarding, Benjamin’s collector transforms his raw materials as well as his society. In short, according to Benjamin, The collector dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one—one in which to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the everyday world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.⁶ For Benjamin, the collector is not merely linked to transformative forces of production, he is a utopian dreamer. It is precisely the moldy, retrograde status that Benjamin tries to dust off and infuse with new meaning; he seeks to transform the collector. In the spirit of a true collector, he focuses on things (die Dinge), which are liberated from utility even if humans are no better off.

These two disparate views foreground the fundamental tension or dialectic at stake in the practice of collecting. Collecting is a conflicted practice, torn between preservation and transformation; it preserves its objects by stripping them from their original context and importing them into a new framework. Building on Benjamin’s characterization, this book rehabilitates the collector as a modernist figure who dreams his way into a better world by picking up the fragments of modern life. The collector is not only a revolutionary political figure but one with artistic aspirations who becomes a creator in his or her own right. Benjamin’s collector is a foil for the writer just as Nietzsche’s collector is a type of antiquarian historian. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, tradition and revolution, order and chaos, nostalgia and anticipation, and the past and the future.

To what extent does collecting remain an antiquarian practice in and for modernity? Is Benjamin’s view of collecting as a revolutionary, transformative process bound up with this regressive practice of history? There are vestiges of Nietzsche’s reactionary hoarder in the most avant-garde collection, at times even jostling uncomfortably with Benjamin’s radical politics.⁷ The collector, Benjamin warns, is motivated by dangerous though domesticated passions [gefährlichen, wenn auch domestizierten Passionen].⁸ The dangers of this passion extend beyond the toxic mold of Nietzsche’s antiquarian to the artistic, social, and political sphere.

By the end of Nietzsche’s quote, the blind mania of collecting curiously slips into the textual realm of bibliographical quisquilia. Defined as the sweepings of a house, the chats and whitlings of wood, all small sticks … all things that are of no value or estimation, riff-raff, quisquilia assumes the position of a strangely misplaced odd and end, a Latin leftover in German prose.⁹ Yet, gathering the rags, the refuse (Lumpen), the bibliographic quisquilia of nineteenth-century French culture was precisely Benjamin’s stated objective in The Arcades Project.¹⁰ By his own account, Benjamin is a literary ragpicker (Lumpensammler) rummaging through the rubbish heap of history. But, unlike Nietzsche’s antiquarian, he collects these bibliographical scraps in order to blast them out of their original context and redeploy them in radical new ways.

A Modernist Praxis

This book traces the way three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—engaged with collecting as a literary practice that simultaneously reflected their preoccupation with the material world. Instead of a means to preserve the past, collecting becomes a dynamic, future-oriented process of artistic creation that I label modernist.¹¹ Gleaning, compiling, and transforming existing materials, these authors embraced a modernist style of collecting that reimagined the relationship between author and text, source and medium, not as derivative or imitative but as a form of creative appropriation. The synthesis between art production and collecting practices is a defining feature of modernist collections, which, as epitomized by Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Einstein’s Documents, incorporated their finds into their texts. The collections of these authors can no longer be distinguished from their work, prompting us to ask, where does the collection end and the work of art begin? Had the artist become a collector or had the collector become an artist?

Sketching out a shadow history of modernism, this book posits that the techniques of collection, citation, interpolation, and paraphrase are at once timeless textual practices and quintessentially modernist. By emphasizing collecting as a praxis, I focus on the feedback loop between James’s, Benjamin’s, and Einstein’s collecting practice and their literary technique. Each of the following three parts connects the author’s material collections (the first chapter) with his literary technique of collecting (the second chapter), arguing that they were mutually reinforcing processes. The point of comparison between these three author-collectors is their collecting practices rather than their objects.¹² Much of my strategy consists of connecting ancillary writings on collecting—often dismissed as marginalia or detritus—to the literary corpus and methodology of these authors. To better map out the complexities of collecting, each part introduces a negative model of collecting: hoarding for James, ragpicking for Benjamin, and cultural appropriation for Einstein. The models are interconnected even as collecting is socially validated and its shady cousins are deemed pathological, unhygienic, or destructive.

While the collecting impulse in modernism is certainly not limited to James, Benjamin, and Einstein, these three authors mediate between literary and material worlds, self-consciously reflecting on their creative process as a practice of collecting that dovetails with their thematic preoccupations with the material world. Although he preceded the other two by a generation, James was ahead of his time in framing his creative process as a form of appropriation—one that would later be employed by Benjamin and Einstein in very different cultural and artistic contexts. James represents a significant shift from the fiction of the author as a genius creator to one who collects, samples, and curates the work of others. Unlike nineteenth-century realists such as Honoré de Balzac, Theodor Fontane, or Wilhelm Raabe, who went to great lengths to stage themselves as literary geniuses, James consciously employed processes of compiling and collecting, which is, in part, why this genealogy of modernist collecting begins with him.¹³ Pairing James with Benjamin and Einstein exposes the surprisingly reactionary blind spots of Benjamin’s and Einstein’s aesthetics just as it illuminates the modernist, radical aspects of James’s literary praxis. Like collections that produce insights through unexpected juxtapositions, this seemingly idiosyncratic constellation of authors provides a fresh perspective on collecting as modernist praxis when read together.

Collecting is not only a major activity at the root of the modernist sensibility; it structures and subtends many of the twentieth century’s most important literary and theoretical works, such as Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the surrealist journal Documents.¹⁴ These modernist texts foreground their own constructed, fragmented form, which, like the collage or montage, draws on preexisting materials in order to recontextualize and transform them. Referring to the modernist preoccupations with archiving, ethnographic collecting, and anthologization, Jeremy Braddock states that a collecting aesthetic can be identified as a paradigmatic form of modernist art.¹⁵ The lens of collecting helps to uncover new constellations of modernism—the secret affinities that might be overlooked by a more orthodox definition.

Collecting also helps us understand what was new about modernism. No period or movement was more preoccupied with the myth of originality than the twentieth-century avant-garde, as Rosalind Krauss has shown.¹⁶ Yet the originality of modernist texts like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus lies in their ability to recycle, refashion, and repurpose the old. One of the central paradoxes of modernism, therefore, is that the movement that was so fixated on breaking with the past collected its remains in order to establish its authenticity. The lens of collecting reveals that modernists were groundbreaking not because they were doing something new, but because they employed transformative techniques; by gathering objects and texts, they refashioned their finds into new works of art.¹⁷ Collecting is creation as curation, an act that rejects novelty by reconfiguring what already exists but in a new way. The collector becomes a meta-artist whose second-order work of art is created by compiling and curating the past. Casting themselves as collectors, James, Benjamin, and Einstein all eschewed claims of originality for various ethical, political, and aesthetic reasons.

Not only does collecting give us a new vocabulary to explore originality, genius, and artistic creation, but it also prompts us to rethink the boundaries of authorship.¹⁸ Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, The Death of an Author, punctured the myth of the author as ex nihilo creator, claiming that the writer’s only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.¹⁹ By jettisoning the concept of genius, Paul Fleming observes, the artist becomes a pseudo-scientific investigator, collector, and appropriator or dilettante.²⁰ As self-conscious author-collectors, James, Benjamin, and Einstein showed that the death of the author long preceded Barthes’s autopsy. For them, the death of the author signaled the birth of the collector.

Spoils, Spolia, Spoliation

On a most basic level, spoils are goods, property, or territory that are seized by force, often in a time of war.²¹ This book establishes a genealogy of collecting in spoliation—the appropriation of the work or property of others.²² I borrow the multivalency of this word from James, who self consciously employs the discourse of spoils throughout his oeuvre by blending its appropriative and creative dimensions. Throughout this book, spoils have a similar valence—they carry both the specter of destruction as well as the promise of renewal and transformation.

The etymology of the word spoils bears witness to this ambiguity. The English word was borrowed twice, first from Old French (espoille) and then from Latin (spolium).²³ Its Latinate plural, spolia was redefined by artist-antiquarians around 1500 to describe reused architectural components and sculptures from antiquity (see figure 1).²⁴ In an influential 1969 essay on spolia (Spolien), the German archaeologist Arnold Esch refuted the charge that the medieval use of classical spolia constitutes an act of barbarism, proclaiming, No. The reuse of Antiquity in the Middle Ages is not ‘perpetua notte’; it is not death but rather new life, new agency, a new adventure. The ancient sarcophagus converted into a fountain is not the death of Antiquity but its survival.²⁵ Though made under different circumstances, Esch’s remark resonates with Benjamin’s collector who frees objects by renewing them. By recognizing spolia as the result of a distinctive cultural practice rather than simply a subset of classical survival, Esch’s pioneering article gave rise to a new field.²⁶ While Esch’s essay spawned a number of contributions to spolia studies in the fields of art history, archaeology, and architecture, it has received little attention in literary studies.

A nude statue of Venus lies half-uncovered in a dirt pit. It lacks its head, arms, and lower legs. This Venus demonstrates the fragmentary nature of found classical artifacts and their reuse as spolia.

FIGURE 1. A nude statue of Venus being unearthed at Ostia Antica, Italy (February 1939). © Archivio Fotografico del Parco Archeologico di Ostia Antica.

Modernism was creative in its propensity to collect, appropriate, and transform, and the field of spolia studies helps us reexamine it from a new angle. Spolia were modernist long before modernism; with their multiple layers of meanings and hybrid constructions, they were early pioneers of collage, montage, bricolage, and other forms of avant-garde art. In this shadow history of modernism, the conscious collecting and appropriation of other works are more salient than radical innovation. Ezra Pound’s pithy modernist slogan make it new is a case in point; gleaned from classical Chinese literature, it was itself the product of cultural appropriation.²⁷ We can trace modernist textual collecting back to the medieval practice of interpolation—the inserting of entries or passages into another author’s text—which blurred the role of author and compiler. As etymological proof of this long-standing tension, compilare—the Latin root of compile—initially meant to pillage, deriving from pilare (to rob), and had, at first, a sinister meaning.²⁸ In addition to collecting and compiling texts, the author was one who borrowed or stole from others. Modernist collectors engage in a form of creative plunder that both refashions and blows apart the original object.

The term appropriation encompasses everything from the improper taking of something and even abduction or theft to the more mundane, artwork’s adoption of preexisting elements.²⁹ As Dale Kinney points out, Appropriation is fundamental to human existence and as such, it is essentially neutral. As with reuse, particular acts or practices of appropriation can acquire positive or negative charges according to circumstances. Often the charge is political, and in contemporary discourse it is frequently determined by the direction of the appropriation in relation to perceived distributions of power.³⁰ Acknowledging the creativity of certain forms of appropriation does not mean glossing over its political, ethical, or cultural implications.³¹

Spoliation is first and foremost a form of appropriation of what is other or foreign.³² Because it straddles the margins between cultures and disciplines, spolia studies is a useful framework to examine the ways all three authors used collecting and appropriation as a mode of engagement with cultures other than their own (European for the American James, Russian and French for Benjamin, and African for Einstein). Even Benjamin and Einstein, two German Jews, are artistically connected through their interest in French culture and biographically linked through Georges Bataille—the French archivist librarian—rather than through their shared sense of German or German-Jewish culture. Like writing, collecting can be a mode of mastering an unfamiliar or exotic terrain. All three authors are exiles who embrace collecting as a way to find meaning and orientation in their new environment.

While all collections decontextualize their objects by importing them into a new framework, modernist collecting made the poetics of appropriation a fundamental part of its artistic process. By decontextualizing and appropriating their source materials in new, unorthodox ways, modernist collecting practices had important ramifications that could not be ignored in a colonial, interwar European context. Given Benjamin’s acute sensitivities to the fascist appropriation of art, it is hardest to ignore the reactionary aspects of collecting in his own work. Surprisingly, James shows himself to be more discerning of the dangerous human consequences of collecting than the modernist Marxists Benjamin and Einstein. Rereading Benjamin’s concept of aura through James’s fiction, I posit that James’s skepticism of originality is more radical than Benjamin’s and his fear of aestheticization is more prescient than Einstein’s. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in conversation with James sharpens the contours of spoils as an aesthetic and political concept.

Spoils ultimately gesture back to the origins of collecting: the triumphant display of the victor’s loot. James’s wealthy American collectors plundered Europe in search of culture while Benjamin ransacked the French Bibliothèque nationale. Einstein is the most direct example of the way modern collections continue to be furnished by the spoils of colonization and war. His mania for Africana rose to a fever pitch during his appointment in the Belgian colonial office, underscoring the imbrication of modern art and the European scramble for Africa. Thus, contrary to the claim that the object world was beyond the reach of ideology for modernists, collecting practices had undeniable political ramifications.³³ The collection often serves as a condensed space of control that crowns the collector with absolute dominion over its objects. Recent discussions in European and American museums about the restitution of the Benin bronzes and other looted artifacts reveal the violent, colonial forces which underpin collecting.³⁴ Collecting has a bloody history which is only now starting to be acknowledged.

The zealous collector’s humanization of objects is often accompanied by an objectification of humans, epitomized by Osmond in James’s Portrait of a Lady, who reduces Isabel Archer to the choice ornament of his collection. Bodies—often female—have been objectified and appropriated for aesthetic or sexual ends. The instrumentalization of individuals, problematized in James’s novels, is routinized in colonialism and fascism through the collection, taxonomizing, and ruling of subjects.³⁵ The monstrous apotheosis of human collection as policy took place in Nazi Germany as Jews and other minorities were systematically categorized and annihilated.³⁶ Their property was gathered up to be redistributed, melted down, or otherwise appropriated, not least as a symbolic punishment for their putative acquisitiveness. In Jiří Weil’s Mendelssohn is on the Roof, a Nazi museum in Prague exhibits expropriated Jewish artifacts as a storehouse of trophies commemorating the Reich’s victory.³⁷ Reflecting the bloody underpinnings of collecting as a tool of domination, this museum demonstrates that the destruction of humans was intertwined with the collection of their possessions.

Vitrine of the Heart

As Benjamin’s warning about dangerous though domesticated passions suggests, collectors have a deeply personal, emotional relationship with their objects. This sentiment is aptly expressed by Charles Swann in Marcel Proust’s Cities of the Plain as the mania of all collectors—very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing.³⁸ If collecting is a trope to describe the most intimate part of life, literature is an appropriate medium through which to unlock this vitrine. This personal triangulation of collecting, desire, and mania is often lost in the study of museums and other institutional collections, which conceals the passions and whims of the individual collector.

Collecting is a form of de-objectification whereby an object is reanimated through its affective relationship with a collector. As Benjamin’s aforementioned distinction between use value and connoisseur value reveals, the collector not only takes an object out of its context but also frees it from the drudgery of being useful.³⁹ Jean Baudrillard makes an important distinction:

Every object thus has two functions—to be put to use and to be possessed. The first involves the field of the world’s practical totalization of the subject undertaken by the subject himself outside the world. These two functions stand in inverse ratio to each other. At one extreme, the strictly practical object acquires a social status: this is the case with the machine. At the opposite extreme, the pure object, devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly subjective status: it becomes part of a collection … An object no longer specified by its function is defined by the subject, but in the passionate abstractness of possession all objects are equivalent.⁴⁰

In contrast to the functional object, the collected object is no longer defined by its function. As the object becomes part of a collection, it sheds its use value to take on a subjective status through its individual bond with the collector. Without citing him, Baudrillard seems to echo Benjamin: What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility.⁴¹

Untethered from the social and practical world, the collector’s passion takes a dangerous turn as it devolves into mania and even delusions. Werner Muensterberger’s classical psychoanalytic perspective maintains that beneath all passionate collecting seems to lie a compulsive preoccupation that may range from concrete incidents such as physical hurt or emotional trauma or actual neglect to more or less tangible states of alarm and anxiety.⁴² His account raises the possibility that the collector’s passionate attachment to objects is always a compensatory or pathological substitute for some form of loss. For all three author-collectors, collecting is motivated by the failure of language. It is in the controlled microcosm of the collection that their desires, hopes, and fears—often inarticulable in other symbolic systems—find expression.

Nietzsche’s portrait suggests that collecting can never be fully disentangled from its musty relative: hoarding, the maniacal, less socially acceptable dimension of collecting. Recalibrating the terms introduced by Baudrillard, I am arguing that the value of the hoarded object is most subjective, intelligible only to the hoarder. Unlike the collector, whose objects still have some externally recognizable value even though they are withdrawn from their function, the hoarder is defined by an inappropriate relationship with objects that are deemed to be worthless or no longer useful.⁴³ According to Nietzsche, the moldy smell envelops the hoarder, reflecting the way the hoarded object—held on to beyond its proper use—comes to infect the collector, who becomes equally obsolescent. In The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk delineates two types of collectors: 1) The Proud Ones, those pleased to show their collections to the world (they predominate in the West). 2) The Bashful Ones, who hide away all they have accumulated (an unmodern disposition).⁴⁴ Although Pamuk does not phrase it in these terms, the Proud Ones fit the traditional designation of collectors while the Bashful Ones exhibit the shame and secrecy displayed by hoarders. Pamuk’s distinction reinforces the typology of triumphalist Western collectors who proudly display their spoils in museums.

Hoarding, as Nietzsche’s slippage from objects to quisquilia indicates, is a predominantly textual phenomenon, transforming papers into material objects. For James, hoarding is an obsessive editorial practice with strong ties to authorial control. According to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, hoarders are plagued by fears of losing important information, explaining why the most commonly hoarded items are newspapers, magazines, old clothing, bags, books, mail, and paperwork.⁴⁵ Five out of the seven examples provided are types of text, once again highlighting the overlap between material and textual techniques of collecting. The recent prevalence of hoarding is thus not only symptomatic of an inability to properly consume and dispose of objects in late-stage capitalism, but, as I posit in the epilogue, a regressive response to the information overload of contemporary culture.

A Genealogy of Collecting: From Wonder to Order

In Benjamin’s utopian portrait, the collector transfigures things and dreams his way into a better world, by redeploying objects in new ways.⁴⁶ This playful, creative approach recalls the whimsical space of the Wunderkammer, or curiosity cabinet, which arose in sixteenth-century Europe as a repository for wondrous or exotic objects. Coinciding with the conquest of the Americas, the Wunderkammer often acted as the exhibition space for the spoils extracted from the New World. Not only did the Wunderkammer’s lack of disciplinary distinctions mean that objects were heterogeneously arranged through the recombinant powers of the imagination, but that naturalia, or found objects, were often mingled with artificialia, or manmade works of art.⁴⁷ Long before the institutionalization of collecting in nineteenth-century museums, the visionary collector of the Wunderkammer doubled as a creator and inventor.

This notion of the Wunderkammer as a ludic space was developed in Julius von Schlosser’s pioneering 1908 study, The Kunst and Wunderkammer of the Late Renaissance, which begins by meditating on the origins of collecting in children’s play. Not coincidentally, the era in which collecting was first treated as a serious pursuit—in large part due to Schlosser’s work—overlaps temporally with the beginning of modernist collecting. This playful dimension of collecting finds its most compelling expression in Benjamin’s account of the child who brings together objects in novel ways. As I argue in chapters 3 and 4, modernists give play new currency by embracing techniques like montage, collage, and bricolage that build the world anew through the reassembling of preexisting materials. Curiosity and wonder become salient epistemic categories for twentieth-century surrealists just as they were in the age of the Wunderkammer. Chapter 6 reads Documents as a modernist curiosity cabinet in journal form that dismantled disciplinary distinctions by bringing ethnography, archaeology, art history, and popular culture into the same space.

Descended from the Wunderkammer, the museum was the product of Enlightenment reforms that sought to organize, classify, and taxonomize objects in order to educate the public. In spite of its pedagogical purpose, the museum was a political space that was bound up with a certain image of the nation or culture from the very beginning, as Tony Bennett, Didier Maleuvre, and others have shown.⁴⁸ Founded in 1793, the Louvre’s initial purpose was to exhibit the spoils wrested from the aristocracy by the Revolution.⁴⁹ In German states, the existence of museums like the Louvre and the British Museum elsewhere in Europe not only fueled competition and the development of German cultural institutions but also informed the writings of luminaries like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel.⁵⁰

Goethe’s epistolary novella, The Collector and His Circle, epitomizes this Enlightenment view of collecting as an epistemological practice parallel to but ultimately separate from the production of art. From the outset, Goethe’s collector claims that his guiding principles were order and completeness (Ordnung und Vollständigkeit), two categories that are no longer viable by the early twentieth century.⁵¹ Even as it attempts to foreground the bond between a collector and his objects, Goethe’s novella enacts a strict regime of organization by developing a typology of artists, connoisseurs, and amateurs (Liebhaber)—a rubric that does not allow for the intersection of the artist and collector. This schema also reveals the slippage between the taxonomy of material objects and the typology of individuals, a central tension in James’s novels. Goethe’s collector is a doctor by profession, a self-professed amateur who is sharply delineated from the artist as creator. His day job intensifies his love for collecting, as he declares, Since I could not be an artist, I would have been in despair if I had not from birth been destined to be an amateur and a collector … my very different occupation only seemed to add to my love of art and to my passion [Leidenschaft] for collecting.⁵² In Goethe’s taxonomy, collecting is a dilettantish substitute for creation; he who cannot create collects. This stratification reflects the way collecting was deemed an amateur pursuit and rarely put into dialogue with artistic production after the decline of the Wunderkammer. Such clichés are overturned in the early twentieth century, when the roles of collector and artist once again fuse together. As chapter 6 argues, the dilettante as collector—featured in Goethe’s novella—is a foil for the would-be artist turned dilettante of wonder in Einstein’s Bebuquin.

Modernist collecting practices represent a significant departure from museums, which strove for organization, mastery, and completeness. Instead, they revived many of the Wunderkammer’s inventive tendencies. Although the proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century helped pave the way for individualized collecting practices that no longer had mimetic or pedagogic aspirations, these institutions, nevertheless, played a central role in the works of the three authors—the Louvre for James, the Bibliothèque nationale for Benjamin, and Berlin’s Ethnological Museum for Einstein. All three authors were also reacting to the widespread popularization of collecting that prompted one British journal to proclaim the dawn of the collecting age in the late nineteenth century.⁵³ While unwittingly influenced by such trends, avant-garde collectors reacted against the popularity of bric-a-brac to refurbish collecting as a modern, artistic process.

If Goethe’s doctor as dilettante collector is representative of an Enlightenment attitude toward collecting, the modernist type of collecting is personified by John in Virginia Woolf’s short story, Solid Objects, who abandons a promising career in parliament for the reclusive life of a collector. A mysterious, amorphous lump of glass that John finds on the beach begins to hold a special power over him after it becomes a paperweight on his mantelpiece.⁵⁴ The object preoccupies him more than the constituent letters it weighs down, prompting John to collect more and more at the expense of his professional duties. Subverting the Enlightenment notion of collection as mastery, John’s penchant instead begins to consume him.⁵⁵ Unlike Goethe’s hobby collector who embarks on a serious medical career, John’s career is turned by his collection into a thing of the past.⁵⁶ As James’s novel The Spoils of Poynton dramatizes, the passionate collector’s oeuvre becomes her life’s work and her intense emotional bond with her spoils supersedes her human relationships.⁵⁷

Rather than bourgeois bric-a-brac, John hunts for detritus—some piece of china or glass curiously marked or broken from rubbish heaps and waste lands.⁵⁸ Modernist collecting becomes a self-consciously fragmentary, recombinant process that foregrounds the schisms rather than the totality of the collection. The object no longer has currency as a representative of a larger conceptual framework; it possesses its own intrinsic value.⁵⁹ Once the object is divorced from its epistemological and representative function, collecting is reconstituted as an artistic process.⁶⁰ As early as the crack in James’s titular The Golden Bowl, the collection is no longer invested with completeness. This fragmentation culminates in the patchwork form of The Arcades Project, where Benjamin’s ragpicker is tasked with gathering the ruins of history. By artistically transforming fragments, the modernist collector both reflects and participates in this process of fragmentation.

Fragmentation is also echoed on the level of the text. Not only were three of James’s late prose works, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and Einstein’s Bebuquin II unfinished at the time of their deaths, but also most of their archives have been destroyed; Benjamin’s and Einstein’s collections were lost during exile and war while James preemptively burned many of his personal papers and letters. This is part of a larger pattern; from Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, many of the most ambitious, encyclopedic works of modernism remained unfinished.

Bibliographic Quisquilia

This book brings together the analysis of textual and intertextual practices with the study of material culture.⁶¹ From Bill Brown’s thing theory to Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, the material turn in the humanities has yielded many studies on the previously neglected role of objects in literature, philosophy, and other disciplines, such as Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects, Graham Harman’s Tool Being, Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things, Timothy Morton’s Ecological Thought, and Levi Bryant’s Democracy of Objects. The material turn has proved particularly productive for the field of modernist studies. As Mao and Brown have argued, modernism was, in part, a functionalist movement of widespread decluttering that followed the rabid accumulation of things during the Victorian era. Concomitantly, modernists established new relationships with the object beyond processes of commodification to ask the fundamentally modernist question: the question of things and their thingness.⁶² My book poses the follow-up question, how does collecting—the systematic accumulation of things as things—operate within a broader modernist rethinking of artistic forms and institutions that also questioned the coherence of the collection?

At the same time, the object in the collection stands in relation not only to other objects but also to the collector. Collecting provides one way to orient material culture within a human framework to show the way the object and human world productively intersect. Susan Pearce, Anke te Heesen, and other scholars have written monographs on collecting from the perspective of museum studies or the history of science.⁶³ Jeremy Braddock’s Collecting as Modernist Practice focuses on collective forms of modernist expression—the art collection, the anthology, and the archive—through the activities of major American art collectors and literary editors. Peter McIsaac’s Museums of the Mind considers how the invention and evolution of the public museum transforms the relationship between material objects and imaginative narratives from Goethe to W. G. Sebald.

By contrast, this book analyzes collecting as an important but often neglected part of the artist’s creative process that counters the exhibition strategies of museums and archives.⁶⁴ While the writer’s private collection opposes the classificatory organization of museums, the avant-garde aesthetics of clutter apparent in the montage and collage challenges the narrative that modernists were primarily focused on decluttering. Through the notion of bibliographic quisquilia, this book explores the interrelationship between collecting, writing, and authorial self-fashioning. Although the concept of curation as artistic creation has been treated on a visual level in exhibits such as at the New Museum in New York and the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the relationship between writing and collecting remains underexplored. On a basic level, writing has always been integral to the practice of collecting. The rationale and coherence of collections depend on catalogs that describe and archive their objects.⁶⁵ On a more fundamental level, as Balzac, the nineteenth-century realist and chronicler of things, notes, the drives behind writing and collecting are linked: The extent of the collector’s passion, which, in truth, is one of the most deeply seated of all passions, rival[s] the very vanity of the author.⁶⁶ The philosopher Dominik Finkelde observes that collecting habits changed the human relationship to the object world just as photography altered perception in the nineteenth century.⁶⁷ Taking this one step further, I am arguing that practices of collecting shaped the way authors thought and wrote about writing.

Building on literary studies’ and media theory’s recent interest in practice-driven approaches, this book analyzes collecting practices on two levels: first, collecting as a way of engaging with the material world and the literary representations of such practices; and, second, writing as a process of collecting.⁶⁸ Defining collecting too broadly risks grouping many types of human behavior under this rubric. I define material collecting through three main criteria: (1) the collector’s active pursuit of an object, (2) the emotional or affective relationship between the collector and his or her objects, and finally, (3) the element of repetition or seriality that leads from the acquisition of an individual object to a larger collection. The first criterion rules out the inherited collection or the passive accumulation of objects that is retroactively labeled a collection. This characteristic also enables us to distinguish between a collector, who actively acquires objects, and Nietzsche’s hoarder, who is marked by an inability to part with his objects. The second criterion rules out the shopkeeper in The Golden Bowl, who buys objects to resell them at higher prices without emotional expenditure. Finally, the last criterion rules out the one-off acquisition of a work of art and foregrounds the affinities between the collector and the addict, constantly chasing the next fix, which simply redoubles the desire to procure more.⁶⁹ This drive is already evident in Nietzsche’s characterization of the collector’s insatiable lust that gobbles up (frißt) even the most meaningless rubbish.⁷⁰

Plan of the Book

To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces a historical shift in the representation of collecting from the sinister bourgeois practices in James’s novels to the radically modernist technique epitomized by Einstein. Unlike Benjamin and Einstein, James was not a collector of objects in the traditional sense, but he was nevertheless fixated on fictional representations of collectors and collections. It was the ethical implications of collecting that preoccupied James, who, like Benjamin and Einstein, experimented with techniques of collecting on a textual level. James’s sensitivity to the ethical ramifications of collecting paradoxically makes him more progressive than Einstein and Benjamin, who pursued surprisingly reactionary projects as part of their collecting practices. James’s apprehensions suggest that, even at its most playful, collecting always borders on hoarding, underpinned by regressive and