January 16, 2020 49
The Story of the Story of the Story
Peter Brooks
The Storyteller Essays
by Walter Benjamin,
edited and with an introduction
by Samuel Titan and translated
from the German by Tess Lewis.
New York Review Books,
109 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The
Storyteller: Reflections on the Work
of Nikolai Leskov,” rich in aphorism
and vatic utterance, has for many years
been a point of reference I return to
when thinking about narrative and
why its various forms play such an im-
portant part in our lives. Like all of
Benjamin’s work, the essay stands in
dialogue with a number of other texts
that had talismanic value for him: not
only by the author ostensibly under
discussion, the nineteenth-century
Russian novelist and short-story writer
Leskov, but also Georg Lukács, Paul
Valéry, Ernst Bloch, and Johann Peter
Hebel. So it is gratifying to have this
slim volume, edited by the translator
and critic Samuel Titan, that brings
“The Storyteller,” newly translated
by Tess Lewis, together with excerpts
from all of these writers and others
(Herodotus, Montaigne) who are in-
separably stitched into Benjamin’s
thinking. It also contains other pieces
by Benjamin that offer first approxima-
tions of “The Storyteller” and provide
glosses on it, including one of his radio
tales for children, the captivating “The
Lisbon Earthquake.”
“The Storyteller” stages an oppo-
sition of the oral tale to the printed
novel. The tale comes to life in the mi-
lieu of work and travel and trade: it is
an oral transaction in the workshop or
with a traveler returned to tell his ad-
ventures to those at home. Above all,
it involves one living person transmit-
ting experience of life to another in a
vital exchange. The personality of the
storyteller, Benjamin writes, clings to
the story “the way traces of the pot-
ter’s hand cling to a clay bowl.” Stories
are compact; they have a “chaste brev-
ity” that precludes explanation. They
unfold within the rhythms of work.
The tale offers human counsel. What
it transmits, in Benjamin’s strikingly
simple term, is “wisdom.”
If storytelling is dying out, so is the art
of listening: the creation of a commu-
nity of listeners around the storyteller.
And beyond that, the very communica-
bility of experience is threatened with
loss. We no longer know how to share
our experiences; we have been impov-
erished by the shock of the Great War
and its sequels:
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 devastat-
ing currents and explosions, stood
the tiny, fragile human body.The war that destroyed high European
culture is both the symbol and the his-
torical event of the decline of shared
experience passed on as wisdom.
Story requires a state of relaxation
akin to boredom: “Boredom is the
dreambird that broods the egg of expe-
rience,” writes Benjamin in a sentence
worthy of the Surrealists. He quotes
Leskov’s opinion that storytelling is
not high art but a craft—“ein Hand-
werk”—and this leads him to reflect
on Valéry’s meditations on the elabo-
rate embroidery of Marie Monnier, the
product of infinite patience and the un-
hurried acquisition of perfection. “The
era is past when time did not matter,”
writes Valéry. “Today no one cultivates
what cannot be created quickly.” And
then, in one of Benjamin’s sleight-of-
hand transitions, this loss of patient
practices of handwork parallels the
fading of the “idea of eternity,” which
in turn suggests that “the idea of death
has lost persuasiveness and immediacy
in the collective consciousness.” Death
has ceased to be public, and in the pro-
cess it has lost its authority, which “lies
at the very source of the story.”
Now Benjamin can make what may
be the central pronouncement of his
essay: “Death is the sanction of every-
thing the storyteller can relate. It is
death that has lent him his authority.”
This authority of death, reflected in the
way a storyteller such as Hebel recounts
the passage of time—in which the
Grim Reaper reappears with the regu-
larity of his figure in a church clock—
sets up the contrast to the novel, which
Benjamin sees, in the extraordinary
phrase from Lukács’s The Theory of
the Novel, as a “form of transcendental
homelessness.” Lukács sets the novel in
contrast to the epic, in which meaning
inhabits the life of the hero, whose ex-
ploits carry it into eternity. In the epic,
meaning is immanent to life, whereas
in the novel, Lukács writes, “meaning
is separated from life, and hence theessential from the temporal; we might
almost say that the entire inner action
of the novel is nothing but a struggle
against the power of time.”Lukács points us to the essential func-
tion of temporality in the novel. If those
novels that best define the genre tend
to be long—from Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa through Dickens’s and Bal-
zac’s and Dostoevsky’s and George El-
iot’s huge productions, and on to Henr y
James and Proust—it is because their
meanings must be played out over pass-
ing time: people age, make mistakes,
regret decisions, choose new partners,
perhaps learn something about life.
This, for Lukács, makes Flaubert’s
Sentimental Education the novel of
novels, one in which the failure to wrest
meaning from the struggle with time
leads, at the end, to the compensation
of telling stories about it, as Frédéric
and his friend Deslauriers in their final
meeting engage in “exhuming” their
youth. The recounting of memories has
become the only pleasure left to them.
“Only in the novel,” Lukács claims,
“does memory occur as a creative force
affecting the object and transforming
it.”
What this demonstrates, in Benja-
min’s use of Lukács, is a fundamental
distinction between story and novel.
In the one, we have the “moral of the
story”; in the novel, it is a question of
the “meaning of life.” Whereas the lis-
tener to the story is in the company of
the storyteller, the reader of the novel
is “solitary, more so than any other
reader.” He appropriates the novel,
“devours the book’s contents as fireconsumes logs in the fireplace.” What
readers look for in the novel is that
which is inaccessible to them in their
own lives: the knowledge of death. It is
with the end of a life that its meaning
becomes apparent. And that is what
we seek in the death (which may be
figurative but is preferably literal) of
the fictional character: “The flame that
consumes this stranger’s fate warms us
as our own fates cannot. What draws
the reader to a novel is the hope of
warming his shivering life at the flame
of a life he reads about.”
So it is that solitary modern readers
consume fiction in order to understand
the meaning of life by way of a surro-
gate who has reached the end and thus
retrospectively cast meaning on all that
has gone before. The end-orientation of
novels, their constant attempt to trans-
form experience into meaning, or, in
the terms used by Jean-Paul Sartre, to
make living into adventure, into a life
with a destiny, may be what fictional
narrative is all about (and why Sartre
eventually found it untrue to experi-
ence). It is designed to rescue meaning
from passing time.
The novel brings to the solitary in-
dividual something of a simulacrum
of the sociality of listening to a story,
but always with a residue of knowledge
that modernity has shattered true com-
munity. Think of the death-bed scene
in the traditional novel, from Clarissa’s
edifying end to Old Goriot’s final rants
about his daughters’ betrayals and the
collapse of family and society in Bal-
zac’s Père Goriot, or Barkis’s “going
out with the tide” in Dickens’s David
Copperfield, or Jude Fawley’s final
Job-like pronouncements in Hardy’s
Jude the Obscure, on to Milly Theale’s
final absolution of Merton Densher in
James’s The Wings of the Dove. These
moments of transition from life to
death, often from one generation to an-
other, offer the transmission of a kind
of wisdom, a final summing-up on life.
Proust, one of Benjamin’s favorite
authors, makes the argument that it
is only through a fictional character
that we can understand the profound
changes of life, hidden from us in the
routine passage of time in our own lives.
The heart changes in life, that is our
worst sorrow, but we know this change
only in reading. The novel should,
then, serve as “an optical instrument”
through which the reader becomes
“the reader of himself,” understanding
through fiction what is obscured to him
in the perpetual wandering, the “per-
petual error” that we call life.Benjamin in his claim that death is
the “sanction” of narrative subscribes
to this same view: that reading a narra-
tive is the only meaningful experience
we can have of life. Telling trumps liv-
ing, as in the final scene of Flaubert’s
Sentimental Education. Memory has
become transformative. Yet that is a
sad wisdom, which may make us want
to recover the live communicative
situation of storytelling. There is in
Benjamin, here as elsewhere, a sophis-
ticated nostalgia that holds in balance
loss and the insight it provides. “The
art of story telling is coming to an end
because the epic side of truth, that is,Walter Benjamin; portrait by Maira Kalman, 2007