The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin

Author:Walter Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2019-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

THE STORYTELLER

Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov

I

AS FAMILIAR as the name sounds, the storyteller is far from an active, living presence in our lives. He is already a distant phenomenon and is moving still farther away from us. To portray Leskov as a storyteller does not bring him closer, but rather increases his distance.* Viewed from a certain remove, the storyteller is reduced to his most prominent traits. More precisely, they become visible the way the lineaments of a human head or an animal are perceptible in a cliff face to a viewer who stands at the proper distance and angle. An experience we have almost every day dictates our position and viewpoint. It tells us that the art of storytelling is dying out. Encounters with people who know how to tell a story properly are becoming ever rarer. And ever more frequently an awkward silence spreads through a group when someone expresses the wish to hear a story. It’s as if a capacity we had considered inalienable, the most reliable of all our capacities, has been taken from us: the ability to share experiences.

One reason for this state of affairs is obvious: experience’s stock has fallen in value. And it seems this fall will never end. Every glance at a newspaper confirms that its value has reached a new low, that not only our image of the external world, but also of the moral world, has suffered changes overnight which were once thought impossible. With the world war, it became clear that a process had begun and it has not stopped to this day. Didn’t everyone notice at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield completely mute, not richer in experiences they could share, but poorer? What streamed into the flood of books about the war that appeared ten years later was anything but the kind of experience that flows from one mouth to the next. And this was not surprising. For experiences have never been refuted more thoroughly than strategic ones were by trench warfare, economic ones by inflation, physical ones by mechanized warfare, ethical ones by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars found itself under open sky in a landscape in which only the clouds were unchanged and below them, in a force field crossed by devastating currents and explosions, stood the tiny, fragile human body.

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