Thus, Benjamin did not so much take over and update Baudelaire’s portrayal of modernity as read it ‘symptomatically’ (in Louis Althusser’s sense), or more precisely, allegorically, in order to uncover beneath it the experience of the transformation of historical time by the commodity form.  Baudelaire was able to grasp this experience, according to Benjamin, through the contradictory historical temporality that structured his work: at once resolutely modern yet, in its poetic form (lyric), already anachronistic. Benjamin similarly valued the disjunctive historical temporality of Kafka’s fables: their status as parables after the ‘end of storytelling’. But whereas Kafka was for Benjamin “the figure of a failure” (BS, 226)—the inevitable failure of an attempt to translate the experience [Erlebnis] of modernity into the language of tradition (Judaism)—Baudelaire’s poetry was able to convey the intensity of the experience of modernity through the very tension between that experience and his chosen, lyrical means; not merely negatively (like Kafka), but via the way in which modernity transformed those means. In particular, the lyric allowed Baudelaire to register the full effect of the temporality of the modern on the dissolution of subjectivity, and the fact that it consequently “takes a heroic constitution to live the modern [die Moderne]” (SW 4, 44, translation amended; GS 1.2, 577). The extraction of the metropolitan ‘motifs’ for which Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire is justly famous—the bohemian, the flaneur, the prostitute, the gambler, the ragpicker—are the figures via which this structure of experience appears. Primary within Baudelaire, they are nonetheless methodologically secondary for Benjamin, as he explained to Adorno: “I only have to insert [them] in the appropriate place” (BA, 90). Baudelaire had found a method—what he called ‘correspondences’—which reflectively incorporated the anachronism of the lyric form into his work. Benjamin appropriated this method, with its dissociated ‘ritual elements’ (SW 4, 333), to read Baudelaire himself.  In the essay ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, correspondences of temporal structure, experienced as ‘shock’, link the machine, the film, the crowd, and the game of chance:  