THE STORY OF THE STORY OF THE STORY _ PETER BROOKS 

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nybooks:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/01/16/walter-benjamin-storyteller/  

The Story of the Story of the Story
Peter Brooks
January 16, 2020 issue 

Reviewed:
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 important 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 inseparably stitched into Benjamin’s thinking. It also contains other pieces by Benjamin that offer first approximations 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 opposition of the oral tale to the printed novel. The tale comes to life in the milieu of work and travel and trade: it is an oral transaction in the workshop or with a traveler returned to tell his adventures to those at home. Above all, it involves one living person transmitting 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 potter’s hand cling to a clay bowl.” Stories are compact; they have a “chaste brevity” 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.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/01/16/walter-benjamin-storyteller/