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Walter Benjamin

The Storyteller (1936)

Der Erzhleris a rich and complex essay that claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai

Leskov; nevertheless, it also touches on the difference between a story (in the sense that a story-

teller tells stories; Erzhlung, not Geschichte) and a novel, on the communicability of experi-

ence, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man

and nature, and on several other topics.

I

The art of story-telling is dying out. With it also dies the human capability that is the essence of

story-telling: trading experiences (Erfahrungen). The explanation for this is that experience itself

is falling away.

II

Experience, passing from mouth to mouth, is the source from which all story-tellers have creat-

ed. This is illustrated by the folk-notion of a story-teller: he is either someone who has traveled

far, or someone who has learned the history of his own country. In both cases, experience not

readily available to all is passed on by means of the story-teller.

III

Leskov is at home in the distances both of space and time. He is a man of the earth, of practicali-

ty; his exemplar is the man who finds his way about the world without getting too deeply in-

volved with it.

IV

This connection with the practical is a natural one for a story-teller. A story always has its own

practical use; the story-teller is someone who has counsel for his listeners. If "having counsel"

sounds old-fashioned, this is because the communicability of experience is dwindling. We have

no counsel, either for ourselves or for others. Counsel is less an answer to a question than a pro-

posal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To catch up with this coun-

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sel one would first have to be able to tell the story. Counsel, woven into the fabric of a lived life,

is wisdom. Story-telling is dying out because wisdom, the epic side of truth, is dying out.

V

The decline of the story is the rise of the novel. Where the story-teller takes his stories from lived

experience, either his or that of others, to change it into experience for his listeners; there the

novelist is the lonely individual, no longer able to speak exemplarily about his most important

concerns, unable to give or receive counsel. In the midst of lifes fullness, and through the repre-

sentation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound despair/perplexity (Rat-

losigkeit; literally 'counsellessness') of the living.

VI

A new form of communication has arisen with the rise of the press (read: mass-media); this new

form is information.* Information is antithetical to the story. Every morning brings us the news

of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer

comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. It is half the art of storytelling

to keep a story free from explanation. It is left up to the reader to interpret things the way he un-

derstands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. (Hermann

explains that information is a self-contained unit whereas storytelling/novel is free from explana-

tion.

VII

[An example from Herodotus of a story without internal explanation is given.] The reason that

the story is still food for thought is exactly that Herodotus explains nothing.

VIII

The stories that linger in memory are the ones free of psychological analysis. This process of

memorizing stories, however, is becoming less and less common, because the situation in which

it most easily takes place becomes less and less common: boredom. It is the hearer entranced in

the rhythm of laborsuch as weaving or spinningwho most naturally assimilates the story. As

craftsmanship dies out, so does the story.

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IX

The storyteller does not try to convey dry, impersonal information; he sinks the story into his

own life, in order to bring it out of him again. Story-telling itself is not a liberal art, but a craft.

The great story is therefore a carefully crafted thing, the "precious product of a long chain of

causes similar to one another". It takes time, a lot of time, to create such a story; and this is why

story-telling is dying out. "All these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and

the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be ab-

breviated."

X

If this is so, then there seems to be a connection between the decline of story-telling and the slow

vanishing of the concept of eternity from how we conceive our lives. Indeed. The idea of eternity

has its source in the idea of death. It is the vanishing of the idea of death that is linked to both the

dying-out of story-telling and the dwindling of the communicability of experience.

Death used to be a central part of life; but it is so no longer. In modernity, the phenomenon of

death was slowly removed from daily reality. (Who still lives in a house in which at some point

someone has died?) It is, however, characteristic that not only a mans knowledge or wisdom,

but above all his real life and this is the stuff that stories are made of first assumes trans-

missible form at the moment of his death. A the moment of death, suddenly in his expressions

and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority

which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at

the very source of the story.

XI

Death is the authority of the story-teller. In other words: his tales (Geschichten) refer back to the

tale of nature (Naturgeschichte; both 'story of nature' and 'natural history'). [An extended exam-

ple of a modern story-teller who embeds a personal life in the natural cycle of death and birth.]

XII

Consider the difference between a historian and a chronicler. The historian writes history; the

chronicler is the history-teller. The historian explains history; in the chronicle, the place of expla-

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nation is taken by interpretation, which is not concerned with an accurate concatenation of defi-

nite events, but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world.

XIII

Erinnerung(remembrance) takes different forms in the story and the novel. In the story, it ap-

pears as Gedchtnis (memory). The cardinal point for the unaffected listener to a story is to as-

sure himself of the possibility of reproducing it. Memory (Gedchtnis) is the epic facultypar ex-

cellence. Only by virtue of a comprehensive memory can epic writing absorb the course of

events on the one hand and, with the passing of these, make its peace with the power of death on

the other. In the novel, on the other hand,Erinnerungappears asEingedenken (reminding?). The

novel is about aparticularcharacter, event or situation; of which it 'reminds' us. Hermann notes

that memory is closely tied with the epic because there is a proliferation and continuity of story.

Every new story is a retelling of an old story generation.

XIV

"Only in the novel are meaning and life, and thus the essential and the temporal, separated; one

can almost say that the whole inner action of a novel is nothing else but a struggle against the

power of time." Indeed, the 'meaning of life' is the centre around which the novel revolves. Here

'meaning of life' there 'moral of the story': with these slogans novel and story confront each

other, and from them the totally different historical co-ordinates of these art forms may be dis-

cerned. There is no story for which the question as to how it continued would not be legitimate.

The novelist, on the other hand, cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond that limit at which

he invites the reader to an anticipated realization of the meaning of life by writing "Finis."

XV

Moritz Heimann said: "A man who dies at 35, is at every point of his life a man who dies at 35."

This is false, but merely because Heimann got the tenses wrong. The truth is: "At every point of

his life, man who dies at 35, will have been a man who dies at 35." The meaning of a life only

becomes apparent after death. The reader of a novel looks for human beings from whom he de-

rives the "meaning of life." Therefore he must, no matter what, know in advance that he will

share their experience of death: if need be their figurative deaththe end of the novelbut

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preferably their actual one. The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone

elses fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger's fate by virtue of the flame which

consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the read-

er to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about. Hermann

notes that there is the idea of the righteous man; the storyteller is the account of the righteous

man finding himself, the idea of company and community.

XVI

The fairy-tale is the earliest step man has taken to free himself from the pressure of the mythical.

The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a

mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity

only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes

him happy.

XVII

In the world of the story-teller, creatures are positioned on a continuous ladder that sinks down

into the interior of the earth and goes up into the clouds. For Leskov, the highest creature is the

righteous person; who is also a bridge between the mundane and the divine world.

XVIII

The whole created world speaks not so much with the human voice as with what could be called

"the voice of Nature". [An extended rendering of a tale of Leskov's, which is about the voice of

nature.]

XIX

Because the whole world speaks with the voice of nature, Leskov can even write about stones,

the least conscious of all beings, as if they have a significance to man and communicate with

him. One can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, hu-

man life, is not in itself a craftsmans relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the

raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way.

Seen in this way, the storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counselnot

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for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage. For it is granted to him to

reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience

but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his

own). His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life. The

storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle

flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura about the storyteller, in Leskov as in

Hauff, in Poe as in Stevenson. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters

himself. Hermann: who is this figure and what can we do with it in relation to Lukcs? Perhaps

similarity in their nostalgia? Pre-industriality? Beyond voluntary memory and into historical

memory storytelling to indicate how human connection is breaking down, no more experience

because the press produces information.

Hermann notes that there is an underlying paradox to Benjamins idea of community in that ev-

erybody can continue telling the story; members have to possess knowledge of the storytelling

process, connecting to the ongoing process. I dont know what this means. If you figure it out, let

me know.