Storytelling Always the Art of Repeating Stories Walter Benjamin

An Interpretation of the The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskóv

Walter Benjamin begins The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskóv with a pang of nostalgia for the extinct practise of storytelling: "the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no ways a present strength. He has already become something remote from the states and that is getting even more distant" (83). His pained tone evokes a personal also every bit historical sense of gloom. The modern world brought a shift in the daily experiences of people that led to an alienation along Marx's vein rendering humans incapable of exchanging experiences. Equally an example he recalls World State of war I soldiers who returned from the battlefield incapable of conveying the horrors they witnessed. The world had to wait ten years for the soldiers' accounts, but "the inundation of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to oral fissure" (84). Artificial concepts replaced natural experience, "for never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience past tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience past mechanical warfare, moral experience past those in power" (84). Natural accounts of battlefield events, 1 surmises, would have been conveyed in a direct and unaltered manner; rather, the soldiers seemed to want to delinquent from what they saw, or maybe the world cared little for their stories or wished to tame their severity by only accepting the contrived "war book." Even though Benjamin bemoans the fall in the value of experience, he concedes that such a shift allows for "the proper distance and the angle of vision" (83) to analyze the genre of storytelling. His reflections accomplish more than than the human action of reflecting seems to connote; rather, a rigorous genealogical study of literary genres emerges, past using as an example the outline of material events in history that brought the development and demise of storytelling. In a more than general sense, Benjamin performs theoretical work that examines genre development; he focus on three forces that touch on its change over time: the influence of social and economic forces, the role of personal and collective retentivity, and finally the relationship betwixt the writer and the reader, or in the specific case of the storyteller, the teller and listener.

In order to sympathize Benjamin'southward essay information technology is best to start from the betoken where he analyzes the part of memory in literature. He asserts that "memory is the epic faculty par excellence," and he adds that "the record kept by memory … constitutes the creative matrix of various ballsy forms … its oldest form, the ballsy, by virtue of existence a mutual denominator includes story and novel" (97). The storyteller exists equally the guardian of tradition through a twofold operation: he appeals to both personal and commonage memory, orates the stories present in them, and thereby preserves their place in memory. At the same fourth dimension, by telling the story in his words he leaves his own mark and thus contributes to the vitality of his tradition by giving it newness. Benjamin sees Scheherazade as the storyteller supreme; she creates "a chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation" (98). Scheherazade becomes a narrator through her wit and cunning because she unites formerly spread out stories and funnels them into the commonage retentiveness of her own tradition; she, therefore, contributes to forging an Arab identity. Co-ordinate to Benjamin, Mnemosyne influences the epic and all its subsequent genres; still, information technology manifests itself differently depending on the genre. For instance, Scheherazade acts as a storyteller and every bit an early novelist; she is inspired by the muse when she employs the "short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller" while she also acts like information technology by "perpetuating remembrance" similar a novelist (98). In other words, she recalls many diffuse occurrences to act like a hero engaged in an epic battle to salve the lives of women in her kingdom. Her part is dual, for she takes from retention, alters it, and returns her version to information technology. Through the storyteller retentivity leaves the by to be morphed in the present.

Under the umbrella of retentiveness Benjamin sees a human relationship between epic forms and historiography: "written history [is] in the same relationship to the epic forms every bit white lite is to the color of the spectrums" (95). He adds, "among all the forms of the epic there is not one whose incidence in the pure, colorless calorie-free of written history is more sure than the chronicle" (ibid). The chronicler is the "historyteller," as distinct from the historian whose purpose is to explicate history. The medieval chroniclers evaded the burden of explanation "by basing their historical tales on a divine plan of salvation" (96). The storyteller resembles the medieval chronicler but in secular class. Just as the chronicler gave a moving-picture show of the events of the world in accord with a teleological and eschatological plan, the storyteller observes the globe to create a portrayal of information technology. Information technology seems appropriate that Prince D.S. Mirsky writes that Leskóv "is more often than not recognized by Russians every bit the almost Russian of Russian writers and the one who had the deepest and widest knowledge of the Russian people equally it actually is" (Mirsky 333). The storyteller belongs to the people and from them he draws his inspiration; his chore it to observe and and so to compose images. Benjamin writes, "an orientation toward practical interests is characteristic of many built-in storytellers," and and then he refers to Leskóv's view that storytelling is more of a craft than an art: "writing is to me no liberal art, but a arts and crafts" (92).

It makes sense, thus, that Benjamin traces the rise of storytelling by exploring the social and economic forces that determined it. He believed, the "trading seaman" and the "resident tiller of the soil" (84-5) made for the best storytellers, because the traveler had an audacious and varied experience to relay while the resident tiller knew the local tales and traditions. Stories emerged, writes Benjamin, during the Middle Ages when the trade structure brought together resident master craftsmen and the traveling journeymen. He writes, "if peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its academy. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it all-time the reveals itself to natives of place" (85). Benjamin writes, "the storytelling that thrived for a long time in the milieu of piece of work—the rural, the maritime, and the urban—is itself an artisan grade of advice" (91). One can infer, therefore, that during a time when experience was varied relative to the modern earth, folklore originated in the well-nigh ordinary and practical ways when the artisan classes shared common experiences among itself—life took on the form of art. Eventually, those who write downwards the stories, such as Leskóv, capture the speech and the rhythm from the oral course. The close association with such a trade eventually spelled the demise of storytelling, for stories died out as the world changed from an artisan and order structure to an industrial economic model.

Benjamin attributes the terminate of storytelling to a shift in the value of experience that occurred during the demographic shifts at the advent of modernity: "a generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained the unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a filed of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body" (84). However, he does non dedicate much room to justify his claims well-nigh these social shifts; Benjamin'southward musk take them as given to understand how social arrangements affect literary genres. Although the foregrounding of a particular genre over another may seem to happen all of a sudden, Benjamin brings to our attention that it is not and then; rather, "the transformation of epic forms [occur] in rhythms comparable to those of the change that has come over the globe'southward surface in the course of thousands of centuries" (88). Don Quixote, by and large considered to be the start novel, represents an example of this transition, for while it is indeed a novel which recounts the adventures of a hero, information technology is besides interpolated with stories that are essential to its structure and plot; Cervantes forges a new genre while depending on an one-time one for coherence and structure in his work (Shklovsky 72-100).

All the same, the novel eventually superseded the story in modern times marking "the earliest symptom of a process whose cease [was] the decline of storytelling" (87). Fifty-fifty though elements of the novel could be constitute back in antiquity, and for much of history it existed alongside other genres, it sprung to privileged status when it captured the attention of a rising middle class during the industrial revolution. Information technology became slated for better commercial success because it depended on the book, a format that rose to prominence subsequently the invention of the printing press. Narration broke away from oral tradition with the emergence of the novel concomitant with industrialism; for the first time, people seemed to want to read the telling of life by an private imagination, rather than come together to listen to stories held in collective memory and tradition. 1 can infer from Benjamin's work that the specialized functional roles that arose with capitalism led to the rise of the writer, an individual who could produce a very specific product to cater to the needs of a eye class that wished to distinguish itself from the aristocracy. The double part of storyteller-listener collapsed as the best narrators assumed the roles of authors while anybody else turned into the reading public.

Benjamin reflects on the formal qualities of the story and how such qualities became less appreciated in modernity. Its defining characteristic is that the teller gives counsel to his listeners, and it creates counsel from everyday happenings in order to bring wisdom to life: "counsel woven into the textile of real life is wisdom" (86-7). At the same time, the listener who receives counsel must later be able to evangelize it when he assumes the role of the teller. Benjamin cites the fairytale as the supreme example of delivering counsel past looking at the role information technology plays in shaping the moral development of children. However, the didactic qualities present in stories lead to the end of the genre, "because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out" (87). "Having counsel" begins to have an "old-fashioned ring," because experience has become impossible (86). Benjamin quickly points out that such a transition does not represent a modernistic symptom of decay; "it is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same fourth dimension is making information technology possible to come across new beauty in what is vanishing" (87). When the author of the novel who specializes in the art of narration isolates himself he creates an entirely different production from the story. Apart from life he is thus unable to requite counsel; his objective becomes to represent man life in all its "perplexities." Much like the author removes himself from society, the novel's reader as well isolates himself; the reader, thus, must commit himself to absorb the cloth, only never will he need to chronicle word for word the novel to another—he volition never contribute to the authorship of the story.

Some other major difference between the story and the novel returns the states to the part of memory in each genre. Benjamin identifies the "perpetuating remembrance of the novelist" compared with "short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller" (98). The novel exalts its subject area affair, whether information technology is a life, an act, or an event, by placing it in memory; the novel forces the reader to think and reverberate on life, information technology elevates life, and therefore tells of life. The storyteller's objective, on the other mitt, is to recount a shared experience or popular tale that has some didactic quality; the story resides in memory and is accessed when information technology is told. The novel tells of the "profound perplexity of the living" (87) it incorporates one element not found in stories: time. Benjamin refers to Georg Lukács who finds that the novel is "the only art class which includes fourth dimension amongst its constitutive principles" (99). The novel incorporates time considering it is not bound to a region, a history, an identity similar the story. It takes up every bit its central event "the meaning of life," which, however, does non mean that information technology ever offers a satisfying explanation to this quandary. Instead, "the quest for it is no more than the initial expression of perplexity" (ibid). Benjamin quotes from Lukács Theory of the Novel: "just in the novel are significant and life, and thus the essential and the temporal, separated; one tin almost say that the whole inner action of a novel is nothing else merely a struggle confronting the power of time… And from this … arise the genuinely epic experiences of time: hope and memory" (ibid). The novel presents life with its ontological uncertainties. Time delimits the novel, for its boundaries are set with the beginning and end of the life of its hero. The figurative death at the end of the novel becomes the moment when pregnant tin can near clearly disembalm itself to the reader. Benjamin states, "the novel is significant … considering this stranger'south fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields united states the warmth which we never draw from our ain fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads nearly" (101). And so the reader assumes a post decease condition that allows him to call up the life he lived in the novel; through the act of remembering he can reflect on the life he lived through its grapheme, a privilege which he cannot enjoy in bodily life. The listener of a story, on the other mitt, derives counsel, learns a moral, and he redelivers the aforementioned counsel and moral to future listeners—his function is unselfish. The reader of the novel is greedy past comparison, for he immerses in cocky-absorption to fulfill an insatiable desire for significant in his life. In the end, Benjamin observes obliquely that the story speaks directly to the listener, teaches him, whereas the novel engulfs him, allows the reader admission into another life.

Benjamin identifies data as a new genre that volition supplant the story and novel. He does not locate its origin in the epic form, but he asserts that data will inevitably influence it. News appeals to its audience past its "verifiability" and the ease with which information technology is understood. While the story borrowed from the miraculous and took centuries to be composed, news is existent, plausible and it delivers its message instantly. Benjamin writes, "the value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only in the moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself without losing whatever time" (90). The rise of information creates a distance to analyze storytelling. To render to memory, while the data presented in the news evaporates the moment afterwards publication, "there is cipher that commends a story to memory more finer than that celibate firmness which precludes psychological analysis" (91). Its resistance to appoint in psychological analysis insures that the story is retained and thus passed on: "the more natural the procedure by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story's merits to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is information technology integrated into his own experience, the greater will exist his inclination to repeat it" (91). In contrast, the estimation of news occurs non with the reader but inside the news story itself—all that matters is the gist of the news and the facts information technology transmits. Specialists assume the human activity of telling the news story while the public listens; the news continues when further information presents itself—newness is of the essence—while it dies without follow up stories. The "psychological shading" of a news story creates a gulf betwixt the story and the reader; the knowledge conveyed keeps the reader at bay by creating a subject-object relation. The story, however, "does not aim to convey the pure essence of the affair, like information or a report. Information technology sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in lodge to bring it out of him once more" (91-ii). Benjamin implies that the story is something organic, it is nearly life while it exists within life; it means to entertain while as well to teach its listeners; it reflects the prevalent mores of a region fifty-fifty though it remains timeless through each storytellers contributions. Information's purpose is singular: to deliver knowledge of the world to a mercantile class that sees it as crucial to the furtherance of its interests. Although Benjamin does not delve into an assay of the political purpose of information, it can be said that the news serves the ideological interests of groups while seeming to be objective and impartial.

Fifty-fifty though a historical distance seems crucial to Benjamin'south enquiry, the theoretical piece of work he conducts can still exist used to study genres that are emerging at the moment. The appearance of testimonial literature in Latin America is fruitful ground for such an analysis. A member of the lower class who witnessed and suffered social injustices normally delivers a testimony to a listener who then puts the account into written form. Globalism has given subaltern groups who formerly did not accept a phonation a take chances to speak, because social and economic changes have led to a rearrangement of global power structures that have forced the Western World to confront the "other." In a world that supposedly does not value feel according to Benjamin, there exists a grouping of people who wish to have their experiences read, who are subverting postmodernism with their insistence on referentiality. The writer of a testimonial is not a storyteller, though; he is witness who gains his authority from his experience, which is an feel he shares in common with the members of his socio-economic grade. Thus, the writer of testimonial is not an individual; rather, he is his grouping. The testimonial breaks downwards Western notions of individuality, because the voice of the speaker is interchangeable, it is allegorical, the vocalization of a whole. For example, the smash of prison testimonials in Brazil in recent years brought attention to those who alive on the margins of order, for whom prison is a metonym of the miserable atmospheric condition of the lower class. One can infer that Benjamin would be interested in the shift of the locus of literature from the bourgeois to the lower classes. He would particularly be interested in the reinterpretation of difference that such a alter implies, specially its effect on the formal aspects of literature.

Furthermore, i can assume that he would also wish to consider testimonial literature'southward close relation to autobiography, specifically how each uses memory. In the classical autobiography the author considers his individual life in retrospect, whereas in a testimony the witness draws from his retentiveness to forge the identity of his social grouping. The witness'due south life events merely have relevance if they assistance explicate and illustrate how the lower form experiences injustice. The writer of an autobiography tin employ whatever part of his life, and he reflects and narrates on it to requite it meaning. Much similar in the novel, the end of an autobiography becomes an artificial death which gives its writer the distance to analyze his life. The appeal to memory in testimonial writing resembles the appeal stories make to memory; the witness speaks afterward a traumatic issue experienced by many to clear a collective memory around a item event to insure its remembrance. Additionally, at that place is the deed of denouncing the injustice experienced, which makes the testimony a literary genre with an overt political purpose. It seeks to alter society by forcing society to confront its by transgressions. For case, a number of testimonials were written in Brazil after a prison massacre of 111 inmates in Carandiru in 1992. 10 years after the massacre the prison closed in a symbolic act of recognition. In the end, the testimony emerges from the autobiography, gains its structure from the autobiography, simply uses the structure to wholly dissimilar end.

At the end of the mean solar day, Benjamin's theoretical work seeks to account for the foregrounding and backgrounding of genres driven by the "secular productive forces of history" (87). While he examines the formal qualities of each genre, he relates those qualities to the social and economic structures of a given fourth dimension that brand, for instance, memory operate in a different style in each genre. In fact, the ordering principle for literature according to Benjamin is memory. So he takes an interest in understanding how each genre formally grapples with this muse. In add-on, his model suggests that all these genres were built-in with the advent of the epic form and are related to it; they evolved over centuries and became prevalent when certain conditions fomented their assent. None of these genres exist in a vacuum; rather, they influence each other in an economy of genres and shape the configuration of each genre. Within his model, the storyteller, the author, or the writer of a given work shape it according to the demands of a market place. Finally, it almost goes without saying that to carry work forth Benjamin's lines one would want to have a sound cognition of genre development, as well as being versed in social and cultural history viewed through a materialistic perspective. In add-on, one would want to know several theories on retentivity, whether collective or personal, and its relation to identity.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Reflections on Nikolai Leskóv." In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

Mirsky, D.South., Prince, A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900. Edited by Francis J. Whitfield. Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Illinois, 1958.

Shklovsky, Viktor. "The Making of Don Quixote." In Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Dalkey Archive Printing: Normal IL, 1990.

Orginal Benjamin's Text

The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskóv

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