“Come over here and listen to a story,” said the aunt, when the bachelor had looked twice at her and once at the communication cord.3 The children moved listlessly towards the aunt’s end of the carriage. Evidently her reputation as a storyteller did not rank high in their estimation. In Saki’s short story, “The Storyteller”, the theme that the world isn’t just black and white is shown through his use of symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. Saki’s use of symbolism is demonstrated through his use of the the color black and white. In the story, ‘black’ represents evil in the world along with death and depression.

“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 astoryteller is. Though the name is surely familiar, they are almost entirelyconfined to the past. In the modern day, for various reasons, the craft – andit is a craft – of telling stories, is dying out. We may see the “great, simpleoutlines which define the storyteller”, but we cannot find them among ournumber anymore. The main reason for this is that experience, which is thesource 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 industrialisedstate, changing so rapidly that experience from the past no longer can havemuch effect upon the present. He finds examples of this in the horrors of histime: one’s experience of the economy becomes useless against the unprecedentednature of hyperinflation. One’s knowledge of war and battle is deemed useless inthe face of new military technologies like the tank and mounted warfare. Arelated cause is the consequence of the first World War: “was it not noticeableat the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – notricher, but poorer in communicable experience”. As a result of the truly awfulthings they have seen in the early 20^th century – overexperience, ina word – people no longer wish to talk about what a hundred years before mighthave 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 promptverifiability.” We have newspapers which will tell us not only what hashappened, but why it has happened, regardless of where in the world it tookplace. 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 theexperience of others. Information, however, “proves incompatible with thespirit of storytelling”, and since we are so surrounded by it, it can be hardto escape the idea that an informational understanding of the world is the onlyand best way to understand it. A further problem with information is the waythat it is intimately connected to its own time: “the value of information doesnot survive the moment in which it was new.” As time passes, news becomes outof date, explanations for events are improved, and the newspaper becomes goodfor nothing except scrap paper.

The Origin of the Storyteller

But Benjamin is not aiming to be depressing, at least notentirely. 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 bycalling the storyteller a craftsman – they take raw experience from themselvesand from others and make solid, useful, and unique works from it. And the beststorytellers, for him, are those whose work has the quality of being littledifferent from the speech of unnamed multitudes of storytellers. That is, thosewho seem to belong to a whole greater than themselves. He sees part of the successof the growth of the story in the structures of earlier societies. There weretwo people who gained a lot of experience: those who spent much time in thesame place, such as master craftsmen; and those who travelled a great deal andsaw 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, leadto the exceedingly fruitful combination of “deep” experience with “wide”experience. Storytellers, the essay notes, are often interested in practicalmatters, and Benjamin makes the point that the best of them are also “rooted inthe people”, with jobs that fully immerse them into life itself, such as beingsoldiers, 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 ascompletely separate from stories because it is completely “dependent on thebook”. “It neither comes from the oral tradition nor goes into it.” Think aboutthe last serious novel you read, and then think about the times you spoke aboutit with others. Rarely does the story itself assume prominence in these kindsof discussions anymore. Literary criticism is partially to blame for this, butwhatever the reason, the plot takes a back seat to forces like form, style, andgenre. Novels have their value, of course, in Benjamin’s eyes, but that valueis one disconnected from the value of stories. Novels for him show theconfusion of life, but they do not and cannot be vehicles for the disseminationof wisdom – the instant they do there are cries of “moralising”, “preachy”, andall sorts of other insults.

Another difference between the novelist and their work andthe storyteller and their own is to do with their relationship to their readersand listeners. Born out of social interactions and experience, a storyteller isa social animal, and so is their work. I tell you a story, and you are indialogue with me, able to ask questions, and challenge things. More importantlystill, my stories are a mixture

The Storyteller Short Story