Bruce Chatwin's Suitcase, Cipher of History

Abstract

This essay seeks to investigate the critic impact of a childhood scene of the writer Bruce Chatwin, lived during the Second World War, from which arise two artifacts of main historical significance: the suitcase and the gas mask. The gas mask, however, have the peculiarity of being aimed at children and therefore have the shape and features of the Mickey Mouse character. Both the suitcase and the mask are read with the notion of “Dialectical Image”, as developed by Walter Benjamin. The essay also draws on the reflections of the former author on the Mickey Mouse character, the reflection also expanding towards the ideas of Giorgio Agamben on miniaturization as a key to History, a phenomenon that is observed in the two artifacts selected for analysis in the text, the suitcase and the mask. The text indicates and aligns to what is configured as a new historiographical sensitivity in the human sciences, based on reading the traces left by the objects and their morphological peculiarities.