The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-01-16)

50 The New York Review

wisdom, is dying out,” he writes. But

then he adds:

This phenomenon is far from new.

Nothing would be more foolish

than to consider it merely a “symp-

tom of decline” much less a “mod-

ern” symptom. It is, rather, a side

effect of historical secular forces

of productivity that have gradually

eliminated the storyteller from the

realm of living speech and at the

same time have made a new beauty

visible in what has disappeared.

We can find versions of this dialec-

tical nostalgia brought into being by

the “historical secular forces of pro-

ductivity” in many nineteenth-century

writers, first of all Balzac, the novelist

crucial to Lukács and also to Benja-

min’s favorite writer of Paris, Baude-

laire. Over and over again, Balzac

stages scenes that give us “the

oral in the written,” simulations

of the situation of oral storytell-

ing. In Another Story of Woman-

kind (Autre étude de femme), for

instance, at a late-night gathering

at the home of the novelist Fé-

licité des Touches (broadly based

on George Sand), the illustrious

guests take turns telling stories

to this elite set of listeners. “All

eyes listen, gestures ask questions,

and physiognomy responds.” The

value of the story lies as much in

its hearing as its telling. The last

tale of the evening is told by the doc-

tor, Horace Bianchon: a tale of betrayal,

jealousy, and a punishment so chilling

that when it is finished his listeners are

silent, and the circle breaks up.

Framed or embedded tales—tales

within tales—were popular with

nineteenth- century writers, not only

Balzac but also Maupassant and Kipling

and Saki and Conrad, to name just a few,

no doubt because they can dramatize lis-

teners’ reactions to and interpretations

of what they have heard. Think of the

telling of and the listening to Marlow’s

account of his adventures with Kurtz

on board the ship Nellie anchored in

the Thames estuary in Conrad’s Heart

of Darkness. By the time Marlow has

done with his tale, its grimness seems

to have infected the whole scene. It

has been so absorbing that the Nellie,

bound down the river, has lost the turn

of the tide. And we reach the final line:

The offing was barred by a black

bank of clouds, and the tranquil

waterway leading to the uttermost

ends of the earth flowed somber

under an overcast sky—seemed to

lead into the heart of an immense

darkness.

Marlow has in the course of his tale

come face-to-face not only with Kurtz’s

transgressions of civilization and his

bleak death but also with his last words,

his final pronouncement on life: “The

horror! The horror!” If Marlow con-

tinues to affirm that Kurtz was “a re-

markable man,” it may be because his

scene of death confronts ethical nihil-

ism and existential nothingness with-

out flinching.

Heart of Darkness offers matter for

all sorts of reflections on the place

and effect of storytelling, coming to

us in a written simulation. By Conrad’s

time—well on the way to Benjamin’s—

the oral tale has taken up its home

within the written and the printed;

it is tinged with a sense of its belated-

ness, so to speak. Balzac stands at the

point where the oral tradition still ex-

ists but will be saved only by transcrip-

tion—just about the moment when the

Grimm Brothers were assembling their

Kinder- und Hausmärchen (the first

volume was published in 1819) in order

to preserve an oral tradition in print.

Balzac’s nostalgia for oral storytelling (a

kind of “Old Régime” of narrative, he

calls it) is traversed by his lucid aware-

ness that he writes and publishes at

the dawn of what came to be known as

“industrial literature” (the phrase was

coined by the critic C. A. Sainte-Beuve,

who disliked Balzac intensely, to de-

scribe novels serialized in daily news-

papers and designed to make money).

One of Balzac’s greatest novels, Lost

Illusions, recounts the adventures of a

sometime poet who is caught up in the

newly powerful forces of journalism

and experiences the transformation of

literature into a commodity. According

to Lukács, who wrote often on Balzac,

the profound subject of Lost Illusions is

“the capitalization of spirit.” The prod-

ucts of mind become objects of commer-

cial exchange. Balzac records a moment

when the old values of aristocracy and

wealth rooted in land give way to the

nascent speculative capitalist economy,

dominated by financiers such as his

corrupt fictional banker, the Baron de

Nucingen. Everything in Lost Illusions

speaks to the power of the “devouring”

printing presses that are featured in the

first paragraph of the novel. The oral is

henceforth a nostalgic echo within print.

Benjamin understands that orality

can now only be preserved through lit-

eracy. He surely knows that Leskov, a

businessman, journalist, and author of

novels as well as tales who lived from

1831 to 1895, offers an example of a

later and sophisticated simulation of

orality. Benjamin’s preference for the

oral tale over the novel is at the same

time sincere and strategic. It enables

him, as he puts it, to see the beauty in

what is vanishing and to suggest, along

with Lukács, why the novel has become

the modern genre that has eclipsed,

maybe devoured, all others. Benjamin

offers an earlier version of his polemic

on the reading of novels in a 1930 ar-

ticle on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alex-

anderplatz: the novelist, he says,

is the truly solitary, silent individ-

ual.... The birthplace of the novel

is the individual in his solitude who

is no longer able to speak about his

most important concerns in an ex-

emplary way, who has no one to

counsel him and has no counsel to

offer.

The novel, he claims, has attained an

“outrageous proportion” in our read-

ing. And in a fragment from about

1933: “All books should not be read in

the same way. Novels, for instance, are

there to be devoured.”

But such statements imply a recogni-

tion that there is no turning back from

the part that novels have come to play

in our modern self-understandings and

our ways of deciphering other people.

There is no way out from the novel, and

the indebtedness of “The Storyteller”

to Lukács’s Theory of the Novel shows

clearly enough that whatever nostalgia

Benjamin harbors for the epic and the

oral exists within the written. So it is

that he praises Arnold Bennett’s The

Old Wives’ Ta le on the twenty-fifth an-

niversary of its publication, in 1933:

Of all the gifts [the novel] offers,

this is the most certain: the end....

The novel is not important because

it portrays the fate of a stranger

for us, but because the flame

that consumes that stranger’s

fate warms us as our own

fates cannot. What draws the

reader to the novel again and

again is its mysterious ability

to warm a shivering life with

death.

In the forlornness of our modern

condition, deprived of “coun-

sel,” it is the novel that brings us

warmth through its capacity to

make us understand the end.

The threat to both tale and novel

is in fact the same: information (which

might best be expressed today, says

Samuel Titan in his fine introduction,

as “data”). Storytelling risks degrada-

tion by its promiscuous overuse in pub-

lic life. “Story” has entered the orbit of

political cant (candidates now all have

“great stories” in their backgrounds; “I

love his story,” said George W. Bush of

one of his cabinet appointees) and cor-

porate branding. The media proclaims

story everywhere, as if that were the

only form of understanding left in our

civilization.

This saturation by the mindless pro-

motion of story argues the need for

Benjamin’s rich and acid analysis of

culture by way of its literary exemplars,

themselves largely dissenters from cul-

tural consensus. Critical attention to

the way stories are told and the way

they work on us, their listeners, is ever

more crucial, in politics, in law, in nar-

ratives of “who we are,” as a nation as

well as individuals. Failure to under-

stand narrative and its persuasive ef-

fects has consequences for the polity

itself. When we fail to see stories as

ways of representing reality and take

them for reality itself, they become

myths, such as of the “master race” or

the “invasion” of our nation by mur-

derous immigrants. We seem to find

ourselves in a confusion of living and

telling that needs constant critique.

Benjamin’s analysis of the dying arts

of telling and listening to stories is at

once an affirmation that other forms—

and all forms—of narrative need to

be analytically engaged since they are

crucial to our self-understandings. He

concludes his essay with the vatic ob-

servation: “The storyteller is the figure

in which the righteous man encounters

himself.” But the essay convinces us

equally that beyond righteousness in

any simple sense, the novel at its most

powerful offers us our best under-

standings of what it means to live, to

have lived, to construct a life. Q

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