The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin – Summary and Analysis

“The Storyteller”, or “Die Erzähler”, is an essay, written in 1936, by the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, consisting on one level of a discussion of the stories of the little-known Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, and on another of Benjamin’s views on the division between stories and storytelling, and novels and writing. It is included in the collection of essays entitled Illuminations, which I’ve been reading in the past weeks, but I had been meaning to have a look at this particular essay for much longer, since I had guessed already that its contents would appeal to me. Though Benjamin is a challenging thinker and I doubtless missed things here and there, still I want to share what I got out of the piece. Here is a summary of its main points.

The Death of Experience and the Death of Stories

Benjamin begins by making us consider what exactly a storyteller is. Though the name is surely familiar, they are almost entirely confined to the past. In the modern day, for various reasons, the craft – and it is a craft – of telling stories, is dying out. We may see the “great, simple outlines which define the storyteller”, but we cannot find them among our number anymore. The main reason for this is that experience, which is the source of all stories, has fallen in value and is no longer used. As to why, Benjamin suggests three potential causes.

The first of them is that society is, in its industrialised state, changing so rapidly that experience from the past no longer can have much effect upon the present. He finds examples of this in the horrors of his time: one’s experience of the economy becomes useless against the unprecedented nature of hyperinflation. One’s knowledge of war and battle is deemed useless in the face of new military technologies like the tank and mounted warfare. A related cause is the consequence of the first World War: “was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience”. As a result of the truly awful things they have seen in the early 20^th century – overexperience, in a word – people no longer wish to talk about what a hundred years before might have made a ballad or a thousand years before an epic poem.

The third and final cause Benjamin gives special mention to: the rise of “information”. Information, Benjamin writes, “lays claim to prompt verifiability.” We have newspapers which will tell us not only what has happened, but why it has happened, regardless of where in the world it took place. In the past, intelligence and experience that came from afar was valued, even if it could never be verified that a traveller spoke the truth. But now, through the ubiquity of the “why” in the form of news, we no longer care for the experience of others. Information, however, “proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling”, and since we are so surrounded by it, it can be hard to escape the idea that an informational understanding of the world is the only and best way to understand it. A further problem with information is the way that it is intimately connected to its own time: “the value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new.” As time passes, news becomes out of date, explanations for events are improved, and the newspaper becomes good for nothing except scrap paper.

The Origin of the Storyteller

But Benjamin is not aiming to be depressing, at least not entirely. He sees a beauty in the story and he wants to share that with us, even as it breathes its last. Storytelling, as has become something of a commonplace, is something ancient, deeply rooted inside us. Benjamin concludes the essay by calling the storyteller a craftsman – they take raw experience from themselves and from others and make solid, useful, and unique works from it. And the best storytellers, for him, are those whose work has the quality of being little different from the speech of unnamed multitudes of storytellers. That is, those who seem to belong to a whole greater than themselves. He sees part of the success of the growth of the story in the structures of earlier societies. There were two people who gained a lot of experience: those who spent much time in the same place, such as master craftsmen; and those who travelled a great deal and saw much of the world, albeit in less detail, such as journeymen. For Benjamin, the cross-pollination of these two groups, such as in a blacksmith’s home, lead to the exceedingly fruitful combination of “deep” experience with “wide” experience. Storytellers, the essay notes, are often interested in practical matters, and Benjamin makes the point that the best of them are also “rooted in the people”, with jobs that fully immerse them into life itself, such as being soldiers, sailors, or other manual workers.

Stories: Wisdom and Advice

But what exactly is a story? What are these mysterious things that the storytellers tell? Well, to begin with, every real story has “openly or covertly, something useful” hidden within it. “A moral… some practical advice… a proverb or a maxim”, whatever the case, the story has “Rat” within it – some advice, or counsel. This is not surprising – if the storyteller lives among the people and works among them too, then naturally what they want to do is help them using their experience. There is more to them than that, but Benjamin already hears criticism of this idea of stories. It’s awfully old fashioned to want a moral, to want some kind of advice, out of the things we hear or read. But Benjamin doesn’t see the problem in the stories themselves, but rather in a society which, due to its ever-growing specialisation, has meant that “the communicability of experience is decreasing.” What an accountant might be able to say usefully to a cleaner at a hotel nowadays is far less than, two hundred years ago, two similar such people might be able to share with each other. Barriers have arisen between us. This has the knock-on effect of disarming wisdom too, which is “Rat” “woven into the fabric of real life”. What use could be the use of the wisdom of a banker, unless we want to be a banker? Consciously, or unconsciously, we devalue the wisdom of others more and more and instead rely upon that upstart known as information. Another reason for wisdom’s death is that instead of using experience for finding our “truth”, we also increasingly use bigger narratives, such as ideologies, cutting out the human element entirely.

Stories: Novels and Isolation

Nowadays we still come across what can be called “a story” within novels and other works of written art, but we no longer see “stories”. The novel rose in prominence as the story declined. Benjamin sees novels as completely separate from stories because it is completely “dependent on the book”. “It neither comes from the oral tradition nor goes into it.” Think about the last serious novel you read, and then think about the times you spoke about it with others. Rarely does the story itself assume prominence in these kinds of discussions anymore. Literary criticism is partially to blame for this, but whatever the reason, the plot takes a back seat to forces like form, style, and genre. Novels have their value, of course, in Benjamin’s eyes, but that value is one disconnected from the value of stories. Novels for him show the confusion of life, but they do not and cannot be vehicles for the dissemination of wisdom – the instant they do there are cries of “moralising”, “preachy”, and all sorts of other insults.

Another difference between the novelist and their work and the storyteller and their own is to do with their relationship to their readers and listeners. Born out of social interactions and experience, a storyteller is a social animal, and so is their work. I tell you a story, and you are in dialogue with me, able to ask questions, and challenge things. More importantly still, my stories are a mixture of my own experiences and those of others, and when I tell you my story, you have a new story for yourself – storytelling involves connection and giving. Even if written down a story still creates a copy of itself in your head in a way that a novel, for Benjamin, does not. By contrast, the novelist is isolated, creating alone, for a reader who may not even exist. He is “no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others”. He doesn’t have any advice to give because his experiences cannot create stories. There is a sense of great loneliness implied here. Benjamin has in mind here, I think, those truly huge and serious novels, works like Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov, which deal with such great philosophical and theological concerns, but are all ultimately the product of too much thinking, rather than too much experience. A story about the same topics of faith and God, one imagines, would be simply tell of a man or woman pacing up and down in a wood-panelled room and raging against their mind and the world it contains. Not exactly a good story, in short. The practical nature of the storyteller’s life means that their stories are also practical in theme and advice.

A good and simple way of comparing the division between stories and novels is this: consider the contrast between our two phrases “the moral of the story” and “the meaning of life.” A story has its moral and answer, whereas a novel merely searches for an answer to that undoubtedly greater but certainly also more abstract question of “what is it we must do?”.

Stories: Ambiguity

Benjamin relates a story told by Herodotus. King Psammenitus of Egypt, defeated in battle and enslaved, sees his son go by to be executed without any outward show of emotion. Next he sees his daughter go by as a maid. But when finally he sees one of his old servants go by as a prisoner he starts crying and falls into the deepest mourning. Herodotus does not explain why. The story illustrates the next key idea of stories – their ambiguity. When I read Benjamin’s description of the incident, I thought initially that the king was crying because he suddenly realised that all previous social ranks had been abolished, and he was no different to one of his servants in status. Yet another, equally valid suggestion that Benjamin puts forward is that the king was restraining his grief, and seeing the old servant is the feather that finally made the dam of his sorrows burst. We have no way of knowing who of us is right, or whether the explanation is yet another one.

Stories are marked by their ambiguity. Unlike the novel, coming from an age of information, which tries to explain everything through psychological detail, stories do not try to explain things. “The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy”, but there are no attempts to offer up a “why” for them. Our own imaginations are left with that task. Information demands an attempt to offer a why, which also means it is bound to what is scientific, verifiable. On the other hand, stories can use any manner of fantastic ideas or miracles, because they are not defined by the pursuit of a “why” or a scientific idea of “truth”. You can tell a story again and again, and each time, depending on one’s mood, one’s station in life, one’s age, you will get a different reaction to it. But information is always the same – the work of imagining is impotent before facts and their explanations. Stories “resemble the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day”: each time they are told, they create a new version of themselves, a new experience, within us. Whereas a novel is doomed to being dated – its psychological framework always bears the brand of its own age.

Stories: Memory, Boredom, and Endings

Stories are told for plenty of reasons. Ambiguity is one of them, because it means a retelling is never in vain. They are also told because of boredom. Benjamin writes that “boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience”. Through boredom we are receptive to stories, but not only in the sense that we are willing to listen to them – we are also willing to remember them. For remembering, and then retelling, stories is key to the art of storytelling, “and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained”. Unfortunately, Benjamin sees our age as one without the sort of boredom we need for stories. There are many of us who get bored – children especially complain of it. But nowadays we hardly ever live in such a state for long. Phones, games, and videos all provide a rapid escape from that tiresome emotion. But they also provide an escape from the possibility of telling stories, of passing the time through conversation and company. Given this environment of boredom, Benjamin adds that stories end with the sense that they can always be picked up and carried on. Novels, however, end without the same kind of feeling that they can just be continued. A novel, once it has ended upon a sufficiently good revelation about the meaning of life, stops and digs its heels in. Again, this is also a formal thing – a speaker can carry on, but a novel always arrives as a finished article.

Stories: the “transparent layers”

Benjamin is critical of the short story too, which is due to its intimate connection to the novel, but the shorter work has the added problem of struggling to deal with the larger thematic concerns that novels excel at. So, it occupies an awkward artistic position of failing to be either story or novel and thus flounders. In the case of a story, the “how” of its creation is important. Each storyteller will give their account of how they heard the tale, and in this way “traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel”. Short stories, though they can approximate this with certain frame narrative structures, nonetheless prove themselves storytelling “abbreviated”. They have lost their connection to the oral tradition, and also no longer permit “that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings”. By cutting out the middleman – the storyteller – a short story also cuts out the power and mystery that a history of retellings brings to a story. By doing so they also lose the “chain of tradition”, that a real story has. A short story, no matter how good, no longer reaffirms our connection to our roots.

Leskov and the Rest

So, where does Nikolai Leskov fit in to all this? The Russian is a modern-day storyteller for Benjamin, though his dates (1831-1895) mean he had been long dead even by the time that our author put pen to paper. Leskov was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and throughout his life had worked various odd jobs around the country, most successfully for an English firm which paid him to travel all around Russia on behalf of its leaders. Because of this, Leskov had the wealth of experience needed to give his work a story-like quality. He wrote novels, but more often shorter stories and novellas, all of them incorporating the ideas of story-ness that Benjamin highlights above. His most famous story, at least in the English-speaking world, is “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, and Benjamin also singles out stories such as “The Deception” and “The White Eagle”. Leskov is not the only storyteller who Benjamin names, though he is the focus. Among the others are Kipling, Poe, and Johann Peter Hebel. I might add Joseph Conrad, whose tales of the sea often also display the characteristics of stories.

Conclusion: Against the System

Even today, Benjamin writes, do people still pay attention to the words of a dying man or woman. In dying we have the same power, place the same demands of silence and thought and memory, as did the storyteller long ago. The story is not dead, but from my own experience it is certainly dying out in our time. I remember rare evenings, long ago, walking back from a long run with friends in the dark and fog of a November night, trying desperately to find some kind of ghost story worth telling, and being unable to. Only one us knew one, which they heard one from someone else. But that story remains with me, buried in my memory, unlike so many carcasses of novels and short stories. We oughtn’t let stories disappear from our lives without a fight. For stories, as Benjamin hints at, allow us to escape the systems that dominate our lives, most notably capitalism itself. They allow us into a carefree existence of laziness, boredom, and relaxation, safe from deadlines and reckoning up of bank accounts. They also, unlike novels, draw us closer to other people. Novels, formed by the bourgeois and capitalist system of their origin, can never truly escape it. Telling stories, meanwhile, is a permanent act of rebellion, an assertion of our freedom and the value of our experience against a world that tries to tell us we are nothing unless we add to information. Stories are the deepest, and greatest, treasure we have.  

If all this has inspired you to take a look at Leskov for yourself, my translation of “A Righteous Man” is located here.

Alternatively, for another recent writer who has carried on the tradition of ambiguous storytelling, my translation of Franz Kafka’s story “Before the Law”, can be found here.