The storyteller essays, p.2
The Storyteller Essays, page 2
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A letter to Kitty Marx-Steinschneider, sent from Paris on April 15, 1936, allows us to peer over Benjamin’s shoulder as he starts writing “The Storyteller,” which he describes as
a piece on the Russian author Leskov, a less known contemporary of Dostoevsky’s. Do you know him? [. . .] Since I have no inclination to go into considerations on Russian literary history, I’ll use the occasion to take an old hobby-horse out of the stable and try to apply to Leskov my old ideas on the opposition between novelist and storyteller, as well as to talk about my long-time preference for the latter.
“Experience that is passed from one mouth to the next is the source from which all storytellers have drawn,” says Benjamin early on in the essay; as “experience’s stock” falls in value, so the “living presence” of the traditional storyteller vanishes before our eyes. That “man of good counsel” could draw on his “capacious memory” to tell exemplary tales taken from age-old tradition, tales that contained not so much answers to practical or moral questions as suggestions on “how to continue a story”—that is, our own personal or collective stories. In this way, stories were woven into “the fabric of one’s lived life.” In the guise of wisdom, they then took root in the artisanal societies in which they flourished. The novel, on the other hand, “differs from all other types of prose.” Its “stock-in-trade” is “the individual in his solitude” who cannot speak about his most urgent concerns in any exemplary way, “who has no one to counsel him and has no counsel to offer.” Mirroring his characters’ predicament, “the novelist has isolated himself” too, for his sort of narrative “neither comes from nor feeds into the oral tradition.” Collective memory cedes to personal remembrance; the transformation of experience into tradition (to quote Benjamin’s short note “On Proverbs”) gives way to modern perplexity; instead of the “moral of the story,” we must search for the “meaning of life.”
So far, Benjamin is summing up or elaborating on ideas he had already noted elsewhere. But now comes an unexpected move, as he declares it would be “foolish” to consider the twilight of storytelling and the rise of the novel as “a ‘symptom of decline’ much less a ‘modern’ symptom.” The whole process is rather to be understood as a “side effect of historical secular forces of productivity”: industrial societies have no place or, more precisely, no use for the kind of wisdom contained in traditional tales. The novel is a response to this new state of affairs, but even this eminently modern genre risks loosing its foothold, as a new form of “communication”—“much more threatening than the novel”—sets in: “information.” Information, whose first embodiment was journalism, forces narrative to change gears. Exit the “chaste brevity,” the born storyteller’s reluctance to let explanation intrude into his tale; from now on, stories must be promptly verifiable and readily comprehensible if they are to find a place in the assembly-line temporality of accelerating industrial societies. (It would not be hard to extend this observation to postindustrial societies: it might suffice to substitute “data” for “stories.”)
On a hasty reading, much of this might sound like standard-issue Marxist discourse of the 1930s. Benjamin, however, bypasses any sort of orthodox Marxist talk about narrative as superstructure when he places it right next to work (artisanal or industrial), in the center of social life. Narrative is as essential and integral to the persistence of societies as other, only apparently more concrete, activities are. Social life-forms thus go hand in hand with the social life of forms. The heterodox originality of these ideas can be seen, for example, in the way Benjamin suggests we should try to understand the evolution of “epic forms” not in terms of schools, generations, or national histories but as happening in a rhythm “comparable to the rhythms of the geological transformations the earth’s surface has undergone over millennia.” Hence the tripartite scheme of storytelling—novel—information; hence, too, the striking similarities between the general argument of “The Storyteller” and that of Benjamin’s most ambitious theoretical text of the time, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which he worked on at the same time.
Benjamin himself was very much aware of that, as can be seen in a letter he sent to Adorno from Paris on June 4, 1936: “I have recently written a piece on Nikolai Leskov which, without in the least aspiring to the theoretical scope of the one on art theory, nevertheless points to some parallels between the ‘fall of the aura’ and the fact that the art of storytelling is dying out.”
In both texts, Benjamin argues that landmark transformations of artistic forms can only be understood if studied in association with equally landmark changes in the deep domain of work and technology. Read in this light, Benjamin’s letter seems to suggest that what happens to narrative once it is cut off from experience is perfectly comparable to what happens to the work of art once it is cut loose from its crafted materiality, becomes an “image,” and starts to circulate much in the way money does. Read with hindsight, this is strikingly prescient: Benjamin points a finger toward our own time, in which—in another reversal of fate, though now a dismal one—storytelling and narrative have become key, cant terms in the vocabulary of corporate branding and political propaganda, the better to keep us from realizing that these are just the things of which modern life, with its flows of information and omnipresent algorithms, is bereft.
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“The Storyteller” shows Benjamin the critic at his seismographic best. Not only that: here, as in his essays on Proust, Kafka, Baudelaire, or nineteenth-century Paris (in which, by the way, a leading motif is again the dissolution of experience, Erfahrung, into sensation, Erlebnis), Benjamin is also at his literary best. Never flat or pedantic, his prose is all at once precise and musical, compact and evocative—as the reader may now judge from Tess Lewis’s superb, subtle translation. Benjamin’s writing at this moment in his career is also remarkable in the way it weaves a narrative element into critical discourse: many essays contain anecdotes, exemplary scenes, or parable-like stories. An example of just how this works and what it shows about how Benjamin worked as a writer may serve as a coda to this introduction.
In the seventh section of “The Storyteller,” where Benjamin sets out to show how stories thrive when left unexplained, he turns to an episode from The Histories of Herodotus. Defeated by the Persian emperor Cambyses, poor Psammenitus, “the last Egyptian pharaoh,” is forced to look on as his daughter is taken into captivity and his son is led to execution. But Psammenitus does not weep. It is only the sight of one of his former attendants that makes him beat his forehead with grief. Why? Herodotus does not tell us—or so Benjamin says—and in this lack of explanation lies the reason why this story “does not use itself up” the way information does but preserves its “germinative power.”
The problem is that Herodotus does offer an explanation for Psammenitus’s behavior, as can be seen in the relevant passage of The Histories printed at the end of this volume. Of course, Benjamin may have forgotten this detail—a rather crucial one. But then it is not clear that Benjamin actually read the story of Psammenitus in Herodotus. His source may have been Montaigne’s essay “On Sadness”; he certainly read it in Ernst Bloch’s “Silence and Mirror,” one of the short pieces collected in Traces (1930)§; or maybe he stumbled upon it in Jean Paulhan’s article “Carnet du Spectateur” in the November 1928 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française. There Paulhan tells the story of Psammenitus and quotes his friend René-Martin Guelliot’s reaction to it (“If Psammenitus lived in our times, newspapers would say he liked his servants better than his children”).‖ Paulhan’s piece may also have inspired Benjamin to tell the story to his lover Asja Lacis and his friend Franz Hessel, asking them for their interpretations, which Benjamin then proceeded to quote (along with Guelliot), first in his short piece “The Art of Storytelling” from 1933 and then in the seventh section of “The Storyteller.”¶
This tiny example shows us Benjamin at work: collecting bits and pieces everywhere in the course of his vast readings and travels, and stitching them together into text that may be compared to the embroideries of his contemporary Marie Monnier, always careful not to hide the mixed and sometimes fragmentary nature of what goes into his work, and terribly conscious that the very web of life seems to be “unraveling on all sides after having been woven thousands of years ago.”** In this way, and against the odds of the times, Benjamin the essayist is like a quirky, modern-day descendant of the craftsmen he celebrates in “The Storyteller.”
—SAMUEL TITAN
*For a fuller survey of the question, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chapter 8: “Lamenting the Crisis of Experience: Benjamin and Adorno”; the question is also discussed in many passages of Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings’s recent, reliable biography, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014).
†Since Hebel is far from being a familiar author in the English-speaking world, it seemed useful to include three stories from his collection The Treasure Chest of the Rhenish Family Friend in this volume: “Unexpected Reunion,” “Kannitverstan,” and “How Firebrand Freddy Escaped from Prison One Day and Safely Crossed the Border.”
‡Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (1916) was very much in Benjamin’s mind as he wrote the Bennett review—see his letters to Gershom Scholem, May 7, 1933, and to Siegfried Kracauer, December 10, 1934.
§In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin also quotes extensively from a 1935 essay by Bloch, “The Giant’s Toy as Legend,” printed here as well.
‖Paulhan’s 1925 book on proverbs, Expérience du proverbe, is an important source for what Benjamin has to say on the subject.
¶As recorded in the undated manuscript notes under the title “Material on Psammenitus,” reproduced in the first Suhrkamp edition of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften, volume IV.2, pages 1011–12; the same notes refer to Paulhan’s 1928 article.
** Marie Monnier was the sister of Adrienne Monnier, the avant-garde librarian at whose shop on the rue de l’Odéon a show of Marie’s embroideries was held in 1924; Valéry wrote a text for the catalog, from which Benjamin quotes in a key moment of his 1936 essay.
THE STORYTELLER ESSAYS
JOHANN PETER HEBEL
PERHAPS, ladies and gentlemen, you have had the experience while reading the newspaper of being brought up short by a particularly striking or outrageous item, the report of a fire, say, or a sordid crime. And if you then tried to picture the event in greater detail, you would without a doubt have undertaken something very strange whether you were aware of it or not. You would, namely, have created a kind of photomontage by unconsciously integrating into the setting hovering in your mind—the incident may have occurred in Goldap or in Tilsit, a city you do not know at all—elements from a setting entirely familiar to you and a very specific one at that, that is, not Frankfurt in general, but your very home or parlor in Frankfurt. Home or parlor, which suddenly seemed to have been transported to Tilsit or Goldap. But in fact, the very opposite occurred: Tilsit or Goldap was transported to your parlor. And you went yet a step further. Once you had found the “here,” you proceeded to establish the “now.” The news item may have been dated September 11, but you did not read it until the 15th. However, if you had wished to grasp and to experience the affair, you would not have projected yourself back four days but instead would have thought: this is occurring right now, at this very moment and in my parlor. You have suddenly endowed the random, abstract, sensational event with a “here and now.” You have made it concrete, and there is no telling where this might lead you.
The effect would be even more unpredictable, however, if such evidence of the here and now could be furnished to significant and momentous events rather than merely to random sensational news stories. All the more so if the “now” were historically significant and the “here” were flourishing and complete! If we imagine all these premises as perfectly realized, we have the prose of Johann Peter Hebel. All engagement with this great and still underappreciated master consists in making vividly present this man who has no equal in his ability to make things vividly present for us. He is a vivid presenter, to be sure, not only of tales of robbers, of family dramas, of shipwrecks, or stories of the Wild West (although of these too), but also of the highest powers of his region and his time. This is to say that these very modest and simple works (perfect examples according to philologists of “folk art,” by which they really mean the literature of the poor), that these works, I maintain, thanks to thousands of tiny, invisible wings, keep themselves aloft over a great abyss, the abyss that yawned between Hebel’s time and the region in which he lived. A contemporary of the great French Revolution who was most decisively and radically struck by the great thinkers of the time, he nevertheless remained a southern German provincial, a retiring bachelor and court deacon to the Grand Duke of Baden, not only obliged to live in extremely straitened circumstances, but even forced to embrace his modest position. That Hebel was incapable of saying or thinking weighty, important things any other way than figuratively is one of the strengths of his stories, and underlay what aimlessness and weakness there was in his life. Indeed, the almanac stories of the Rhenish Family Friend were written out of his extreme constraint, about which he often grumbled. This did not prevent him, however, from keeping his sense of proportion, and even if he never managed to express things great and small in any other way than deeply interwoven and intertwined with each other, his realism was always strong enough to protect him from the mysticism of the petty and the small, a mysticism to which Stifter occasionally succumbed.
What saved Hebel from this mysticism was precisely his theological training. It is evident throughout his oeuvre, which is thoroughly edifying, yet has a worldly and intellectual breadth almost without compare since the end of the Middle Ages. For what is it that edifies Hebel? The Enlightenment and the great Revolution. Not their so-called ideas, but their situations and their social types, the cosmopolitan, the enlightened abbé, the ruffian, and the philanthropist. The way theological and cosmopolitan stances are fused in his writing is the secret to the incomparable concretion at the heart of his work. His characters’ present, for example, is not simply that of 1760 to 1826 (the years of his own life); the era in which they live has no date. Indeed, because theology measures history in generations, Hebel, too, sees in the actions of his little people the struggles of generations through all the crises unleashed by the Revolution of ’89. The lives and deaths of entire generations beat in the rhythm of the sentences in the story “Unexpected Reunion” that cover a span of fifty years during which a fiancée mourns her beloved, who perished in a mining accident.
In the meantime, the city of Lisbon in Portugal was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years’ War came to an end, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit order was dissolved, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died, and Streunsee was executed, America was liberated, and the combined French and Spanish forces could not capture Gibraltar. The Turks imprisoned General Stein in the Veterani Cave in Hungary, and Emperor Joseph died too. King Gustav of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, and the French Revolution and the long war began, and Emperor Leopold II went to his grave as well. Napoleon conquered Prussia, and the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the farmers sowed and reaped. The millers milled, and the blacksmiths hammered, and the miners dug for metal seams in their workshop under the ground. Yet in the year 1809, when the miners of Falun . . .
When Hebel depicts the passing of fifty years of mourning this way, it almost becomes a lament, but a lament for the way of the world similar to those sometimes found in the opening pages of medieval chronicles. For we do not encounter the attitude of a historian in these lines, but that of a chronicler. The historian limits himself to “world history,” the chronicler recounts the way of the world. The former is concerned with the web of events woven from incalculable threads of cause and effect—and all that he has studied or learned is but a tiny nodal point in this net; the latter is concerned with the minor events, narrowly circumscribed, of his town or region—but for him this is not a fragment or a mere element of the universal, it is rather something other and more. Because in writing his chronicle, the true chronicler also writes a parable of the way of the world. What the town’s local history and the way of the world reflect is the old rapport between the microcosm and macrocosm.
When Hebel begins one of his stories with: “As everyone knows, an old bailiff from Wasselnheim complained to his wife that his French had almost cost him his life,” we hear in that simple opening “as everyone knows” an ironic echo of all the correspondences between the way of the world and local gossip. Just as ironic and just as far removed from any provincial smugness is the narrowness of his Baden settings, because the horizons of Hebel’s terrestrial globe, in the center of which lie Segringen, Brassenheim, and Tuttlingen, are marked by Moscow and Amsterdam, Jerusalem, and Milan. So it is with all authentic, spontaneous folk art: it speaks of the exotic and the monstrous with the same affection and in the same language as it does of its local subjects. Hence the powerful “here” of his stories’ settings. The wide-open, observant gaze of this parson and philanthropist integrates the edifice of the world with village economics, and he treats the planets, moons, and comets as a chronicler, not as a schoolteacher. And so, for instance, we read of the moon (which suddenly appears like a landscape just as it does in one of Chagall’s famous paintings): “One day there lasts about as long as two of our weeks and a night lasts equally as long, so a night watchman must take care not to lose count when the clock strikes 223 or 309.”
