Art, at the very limit of its mimetic capacity, draws attention to its construction and in doing so finds the resources to encapsulate a deeper truth. It is against what Benjamin calls the Christian-mystical certainty in future reconciliation (which Goethe inserts into the conclusion of the novella as an attempt to counter the mythical fatalism which holds sway elsewhere) that he instead endorses the paradoxical glimmer of hope identified with the image of a shooting star which appears in Goethe’s novella (SW 1, 354–5). If the image of the star retains its relationship to the symbolic here, it does so in accordance with Benjamin’s earlier description of the expressionless as “the torso of a symbol” (SW 1, 340). However, it might be better to understand the significance of the caesura here in the context of the theory of allegory. This is only properly formulated in Benjamin’s next major work, his thesis on the Origin of the German Mourning-Play (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928).