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SCRIPT. IMAGE, SCRIPT-IMAGE
or prophecy, is something very 'pleasing' and very popular." This game, like other, similar ones that were so often taken for trivialities, actually speaks to the matter itself. Bombast as verbal gesture is so uninhibited in these games that they could very well serve as illustrations of its formula. Language, which on the one hand seeks, in the fullness of sound, to assert its creaturely rights, is on the other hand bound, in the flow of the alexandrine verse, to a forced logicality. This is the stylistic law of bombast, the formula for the "Asian words"7 of the Trauerspiel. The gesture that seeks to incorporate meaning in this way is of a piece with the most violent deformation of history. To adopt, in language as in life, only the typical forms of creaturely movement and yet to express the entire world of culture, from antiquity through Christian Europe-this is the extraordinary intention that js never renounced, even in the Traue1'spiel. The same extreme longing for nature found in pastoral plays thus underlies the enormous artificiality of the Trauerspiel's mode of expression. On the other hand, this very mode of expression, which only representsrepresents the nature of language, that is-and so far as possible circumvents profane comn1Lll1ication, is courtly and elegant. One really cannot say that the Baroque was truly overcome, that sound and meaning were truly reconciled, until Klopstock, thanks to what A. W. Schlegel called, figuratively, the "grammatical" tendency of his odes. s His bombast is based far less upon sound and image than upon the coordination of words-upon word order. Written in 1925; published in 1928. Gesammelte Schriften, I, 380-384. Excerpted from Origin of the German Trauerspiel, section 3, "Allegory and Trauerspiel." Translated by Michael W. Jennings. A previolls translation by John Osborne (London, 1977) was consulted.
Notes 1. Calderon) Schauspiele (trans. Gries), III, 316 (Eifersucht das grolSte Schellsal, II). [Benjamin's note. Benjamin cites Johann Diederich Gries's translation of Calderon's plays, published in Berlin in 1815. The Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) is a major figure in Benjamin's Trauerspiel book. See also "Calderon's El Mayor Monstruo" Los Celos, and Hebbel's Herodes ul1d Marianme" (1923), in Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 1: 19.13-1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp.363-386.-Tral1s.] 2. Gryphius, Trauerspiele, p. 62 (Leo Armenius, II, 455ff.). [Benjamin's note. See Andreas Gryphius, TrauerSfJiele, cd. Hermann Palm (Tiibingen: Litterarischer Verein in Stuttgart, 1882). The Silesian poet and dramatist