Benjamin read the novel’s myth-bound world against the novella’s sober light of true love.

Evidence

For this purpose, Benjamin contrasted the four partners in the novel itself with the pair of lovers from the novella The Wayward Young Neighbours' which is told within it. The four partners in the novel, he argued, live in a world ruled by the mythical forces of Law and of Nature. Coolness in the face of a collapsing marriage; the wan light under which the whole landscape lies; the narrowness of the choice of names for the characters; the wealth of anticipatory and parallel elements; the return of the same’; the significance of the merely materialall of these Benjamin interpreted as symptoms of a concept of Nature burdened with myth, a Nature which human beings had nowhere outgrown, a fatal form of existence which encloses living natures within a single structure of guilt and penance'. By contrast, the novella about the wayward young neighbours is marked by the bright light’, `the sober light’ of those who love one another truly, with genuine abandon. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 353

Categorization

• DEFINE: This introduces Benjamin’s method of ‘immanent criticism’ or ‘absolutization’ — illuminating a work thoroughly from within itself.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 353