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† From Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 167–72, 182–83. Originally published 1959. © 1987 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press and Suhrkamp AG, Berlin.
1. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a German scientist and writer and is best known today for his investigations in the field of electricity and for the wit and satirical edge in his notebooks [editor’s note].
2. Colportage refers to a book trade practice of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when literature was sold door-to-door through subscriptions [editor’s note].
WALTER BENJAMIN
From The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov†
The term storyteller has a familiar ring to it, but the notion of the storyteller as an immediate living presence has little purchase today. There is something incongruous, almost anachronistic, about storytelling, and those who tell stories seem increasingly irrelevant to us with every passing day. To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean that we will be on any more intimate terms with him but rather that he will become an even more remote figure. Viewed from a certain distance, it’s possible to detect in his work the key basic features that define the storyteller. Or to put it another way, we begin to distinguish those features in the same way that a human head or the body of an animal emerges from a rock formation once we situate ourselves at the proper distance from it with the right angle of vision. The distance and angle of vision enable something that we experience on what feels like a daily basis. It teaches us that the art of storytelling is drawing to a close. We encounter people who really know how to tell a story less and less frequently. And ever more often there is a sense of embarrassment when someone expresses the wish to hear a story. It’s as if some kind of fundamental blessing, one that once felt like one of the most secure of our possessions, had been taken from us: the ability to share experiences.
One reason for this loss is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it now looks as if its stock is plummeting even more. If you read the newspapers, you realize that it has reached a new low and that our understanding, not only of the world in general but also of our moral universe, has undergone changes overnight—changes that were never before thought possible. During the war years something began to stir, and it has not let up since. Wasn’t it obvious by the end of the war that men returned home from the battlefields and were silent, not richer but poorer in communicable experience? What emerged in the flood of war books ten years later was anything but experience transmitted by word of mouth. There was nothing remarkable about that, of course. For never before had past experience been contradicted more thoroughly than in the contrast between earlier military strategies and a war of attrition, past economic realities and inflation, bodily injuries and new technologies of warfare, moral understanding and political realities. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood under the open skies in a landscape where nothing was the same but the clouds. And what remained beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive currents and explosions: the tiny, fragile human body.
Experiences transmitted by word of mouth are the source from which all storytellers have drawn. And among those who write down stories, it is the great writers who try not to deviate from the speech of the many nameless storytellers before them. Incidentally, two groups of such storytellers surface, and they overlap in many ways. Only if you can picture both those groups will the figure of the storyteller become visible as a fully embodied presence. “When you take a trip, you return with something to talk about”—that’s how a German saying goes, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who is returning from afar. But we also like to listen to those who stay at home, making an honest living and becoming familiar with local traditions and tales. If you want to envision these two groups in their archetypal manifestation, then you could imagine one as the resident tiller of the soil and the other as the sailor out in the world of commerce. Indeed, every sphere of life has, in a sense, produced its own tribe of storytellers. Each of the tribes preserves its characteristic features centuries later. * * * Of course in some ways we are just talking about basic types. The actual flourishing of storytelling in its historical breadth and depth is inconceivable without imagining the most intimate interpenetration of these two archetypes. The Middle Ages was a time when such interpenetration manifested itself through the trade structure. The resident master craftsman and the journeymen worked together in the same room, and every master had once been a journeyman before he settled down in his hometown or somewhere else. Peasants and sailors may have been experts in the art of storytelling, but the artisan class served as its training ground. It brought together the lore of faraway places—what the well-traveled man brings back home—with the lore of the past, as it reveals itself to the natives of a place. * * *
A commitment to practical knowledge is characteristic of many born storytellers. That orientation is more pronounced in a writer like [Jeremias] Gotthelf, who gave his readers advice on agricultural matters, than in Leskov. You can find it in the work of [Charles] Nodier, who was interested in the perils of gaslight, and a writer like [Johann Peter] Hebel, who slipped bits and pieces of scientific instruction for his readers into his Schatzkästlein, also works along these lines. These observations point to an important feature of every true story. It contains, explicitly or covertly, something that can be useful. Sometimes the value lies in a moral; at other times practical advice is offered; and occasionally there is a proverb or maxim. In every case, the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. If the phrase “having counsel” sounds old-fashioned, it is because we are losing the power to communicate experience. As a result we are stripped of the ability to give advice, not only to ourselves but also to others. After all, advice is less about answering a question than proposing how a story that is unfolding should continue. To get at that advice, you would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from that, most people are receptive to counsel only to the extent that it remains relevant to their own concerns.) Counsel woven into the fabric of lived experience is wisdom. The art of storytelling is on the wane because the epic aspect of truth, wisdom, is dying out. That is a process that has been going on for a long time. Nothing could be more foolish than to dismiss it as little more than a “symptom of decay,” let alone a “symptom of modernity.” It is far more like an emergent symptom of the secular, productive forces of history, in which narrative has moved gradually out of the realm of living speech, enabling us to see renewed beauty in what is vanishing before our eyes.
The earliest symptom of a process marked at its endpoint by the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modernity. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense of the term) is its deep dependence on the book. The rise of the novel became possible only after the invention of print. What can be handed down through oral traditions, the essence of the epic, is radically different from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel. The novel does not derive from oral traditions, nor does it merge with them, and that is what makes it profoundly different from all other forms of narrative prose—fairy tales, legends, and even the novella. And above all it is different from storytelling in general. Storytellers take what they tell from experience—their own or what has been passed on to them. And they turn it into the experience of those listening to the tale. But novelists close themselves off. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, someone no longer able to talk about the most pressing concerns in ways that apply to everyone. The novelist is perplexed and unable to offer guidance. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in representing human life. The novel concedes its profound bewilderment in the face of the fullness of life and in trying to represent it.
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Imagine the transformation of epic forms as a process occurring in rhythms comparable to those that shaped the earth’s surface over a stretch of thousands of years. Scarcely any other forms of human communication have developed more slowly and died out more slowly. It took the novel, with its roots in classical antiquity, hundreds of years before it encountered, in the rising bourgeoisie, the elements favoring its efflorescence. With that turn, storytelling slowly took on the aura of the archaic. It took hold of the new elements but was not really shaped by them. At the same time, we recognize how a new form of communication emerged, with the full control of a middle class that used the press as one of the most important instruments in an age of fully developed capitalism—a form that, no matter how far back its origins may lie, never influenced the form of the epic in a decisive way. But now it does exert an important influence. It turns out that it confronts storytelling as no less of a stranger than the novel, but it does so in a far more menacing way. This new form of communication, which also is creating a crisis for the novel, is information.
[Hippolyte de] Villemessant, the man who founded Le Figaro, famously captured the essence of information with these words: “For my readers,” he used to say, “a roof that catches on fire in the Latin Quarter is more significant than a revolution in Madrid.” This makes it strikingly clear that news coming from a distance has less resonance than information that provides a way of connecting with what is immediately relevant. News that came from a distance—whether from spatially remote places or temporally removed eras—possessed a kind of authority that made it valid, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, by contrast, lays claim to immediate verifiability. For one thing, it must appear “completely plausible.” Often it is no more precise than the news that was passed on in earlier centuries. That news could traffic in wonders, but today it is absolutely necessary for information to sound plausible. And for precisely that reason it is incompatible with the spirit of storytelling. If the art of storytelling is fading away, the dissemination of information has played a decisive role in this state of affairs.
Every day brings news from around the world, and yet we lack noteworthy stories. This is a result of the fact that descriptions of events come to us now teeming with explanations. In other words, almost nothing that happens is shaped into a story and is instead presented as information. Half the art of telling a story is keeping the story, as you tell it, free of explanations. Leskov is a master of this art (look at plays like The Deception or The White Eagle). The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are told with the greatest precision, yet psychological motivations are not forced on readers. It is left up to them to interpret things as they understand them, and the story acquires an amplitude that information lacks.
Leskov was schooled in the Ancients. The earliest Greek storyteller was Herodotus. In the fourteenth chapter of the third book of his Histories, there is a tale that is revealing. It tells the story of Psammenitus. When the Egyptian king Psammenitus was defeated and captured by the Persian King Cambyses, Cambyses was determined to humiliate his prisoner. He gave orders to position Psammenitus on the road used by the Persians for their triumphal march. And he also arranged to make sure that the prisoner would see his daughter, now a maid, walk to the well to fill a pitcher. When every single Egyptian was objecting to this spectacle and bemoaning it, Psammenitus just stood there, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground. When he saw his son, who was being led to his execution, he continued to remain unmoved. But when he next recognized one of his servants, a poor old man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his forehead and displayed all the signs of deepest mourning.
This story captures the essence of true storytelling. The value of information expires the moment it is no longer new. It is alive only at that moment, and it has to submit completely to it and explain itself without losing any time. A story is completely different, for it is not self-consuming. It manages to preserve its strength and is capable of releasing it even after much time has passed. Montaigne also made reference to the Egyptian king and asked himself: “Why did he grieve only when he caught sight of the servant?” Montaigne answered, “Since his heart was already flooded with grief, it took only a small trickle for it to burst fully through the dams.” That’s what Montaigne tells us. You could also say, “The king was not moved by the fate of those with royal blood, for it was his own destiny.” Or, “Often we are moved more by what is staged than what happens in real life. The servant was nothing more than an actor for the king.” Or, “Sharp pain can be kept pent up and releases itself only when you let your guard down. The king saw the servant at that exact moment.” Herodotus explains nothing in his report, which is drier than you can imagine. For that reason the story from ancient Egypt can still arouse astonishment and make us think. It resembles seeds of grain that have remained dormant for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids. Sealed in those chambers, they kept their power to take root to this day.
There is nothing that commends a story to memory more compellingly than a chaste compactness that does away with psychological analysis. The more spontaneous the process by which the storyteller lets go of psychological nuance, the greater the story’s claim to a place in the minds of listeners, the more perfectly it is integrated into their own experience, and the more likely will be the wish to repeat it to someone else one day, sooner or later. The process of absorbing a story, which takes place at a subconscious level, requires a state of leisure that is becoming more and more rare today. If sleep is the height of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling of leaves drives it away. Its nesting places—the activities intimately associated with boredom—are already extinct in the cities and are on the decline in the country. The art of listening is on the wane, and with it communities of listeners. For storytelling is always the art of passing things along, and it is lost when the stories are no longer maintained. It has been lost because spinning and weaving no longer create circles of listeners. The more absorbed listeners are, the more deeply the story is impressed upon their minds. When the rhythms of work have been internalized, people listen to the stories in such a way that retelling them is completely spontaneous. This, then, is the web in which the storytelling instinct is situated. It is beginning to become unraveled after having been woven for thousands of years in milieus that formed the setting for practicing older forms of craftsmanship.
Storytelling, which flourished for a long time in the milieu of manual labor—agricultural, maritime, and then urban—is itself an artisanal form of communication, as it were. It is not invested in conveying the pure gist of a thing, as is the case with information or a report. It submerges the thing into the life of the storyteller in order to extract it again. Traces of the storyteller cling to the story in the way that the fingerprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel. Storytellers often begin their tales with a description of the circumstances in which they themselves learned about what follows, unless they simply pass it off as their own experience. Leskov begins his tale “Deception” with a description of a train trip on which he hears from a fellow passenger about the events that he then proceeds to narrate. In “A propos of the Kreutzer Sonata,” he imagines Dostoevsky’s funeral and turns it into the setting in which he meets the heroine of the story. And in “Interesting Men” he evokes a meeting with members of a reading group in which the events that he reproduces for us are told. Thus his presence is frequently felt in his narratives, if not as the person who experienced what happens in them, then as the person who is reporting them.
The craft of storytelling was understood by Leskov to be exactly that. “Writing,” he declared in one of his letters, “is craftsmanship rather than art.” It is no surprise that he felt a strong kinship with the crafts but faced industrial technologies as a stranger. Tolstoy, who must have sympathized with this view, puts his finger on somethi
ng important about Leskov’s storytelling talent, when he describes him as the first person “to emphasize the inadequacies of economic progress.… It is strange that everyone reads Dostoevsky.… But I simply cannot understand why Leskov is not read.” In his artful and spirited story “The Steel Flea,” which is part legend and part farce, Leskov celebrated native craftsmanship through the silversmiths of Tula. Their masterpiece, the steel flea, is shown to Peter the Great and persuades the ruler that the Russians need not feel inferior to the English.
The poetic image that captures the world of crafts and artifacts in which storytelling thrived was described nowhere more importantly than in the writings of Paul Valéry. He tells us about perfect objects in nature; flawless pearls; full-bodied, mature wines; and truly complex creatures. He describes them as the “exquisite products of a long chain of causes that resemble each other.” The cumulative effect of such causes has temporal limits only when perfection has been attained. “Nature’s patient way of working,” Valéry continues, “was once a model for humans. Miniatures, ivory carvings crafted to the point of perfection, stones perfectly polished and engraved, lacquered objects or paintings in which thin, transparent layers are put on top of each other—all of these products of sustained effort required sacrifice and have rapidly vanished. The day and age is long gone in which time does not matter. Today people no longer work on anything that does not allow shortcuts.” Today we are witnessing the evolution of the short story, which is no longer connected to oral traditions and no longer allows for the gradual accumulation of thin, transparent sheets that capture the most accurate picture of how a perfect story emerges from the layering of a variety of retellings. * * *
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