The Collector’s Care against Phantasmagoria in The Bookbinder of Jericho

Chen, Ping-Ju

National Chengchi University

Abstract

This paper reconceptualizes care through Walter Benjamin’s figure of the collector, as embodied in Maude’s actions in The Bookbinder of Jericho, arguing that care operates not as affective empathy or moral obligation but as a practice of rebuilding meaning and connection through collecting under conditions of modern fragmentation. Drawing on Benjamin’s analysis of the Paris arcades, the paper situates modern fragmentation within the illusion of phantasmagoria, in which objects’ use value, labor, and social relations behind are obscured by the marketing exchange value. This dreamlike illusion not only exists in the nineteenth-century Paris but also pervades the early twentieth-century Jericho. Its insidious erosion of humanity is crystallized in Peggy’s alienation through binding labor and her suppressed scholarly aspiration. Against such capitalistic devastations under phantasmagoria, Benjamin figures the collector as the one who decontextualizes objects from the logic of exchange, loosening their confinement within capitalistic definitions under modernity. In the novel, the idiosyncrasy of the collector is manifested in Maude, Peggy’s twin sister, whose echolalic communication filters words and grants them a second life to be examined anew. Initially perceived by Peggy as an embarrassment, Maude’s echolalia, in fact, compels words to be reconsidered in their singularity. In this light, Maude emerges as the true collector, and her selective repetitions ultimately serve as an alarm awakening Peggy from the mist of phantasmagoria and confronting her with a long-deferred truth. By reframing care through a Benjaminian lens and its literary reconfiguration, the paper presents care as a cross-cultural response to modern fragmentation.

Image Credit: Photo by the author, taken at Anthony McCall: Meeting You Halfway, Fubon Art Museum