Something has simply happened for a particular set of reasons, “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.” If “boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience” and gives rise to the possibility of storytelling, lives increasingly bent towards the harried, incessant pacing of capital’s regime of labor denies the generative space whereupon experience can become a story. Information has none of the story’s mystifications. Stories occupy the register of the collective commons, a communistic crafting which always denies the provenance of authorship in so far as each story belongs equally to teller and listener, mutable as to the particulars upon its subsequent retelling. In fact, at least half of the art of storytelling consists in keeping one’s tale free of explanations.” Stories rely upon a central ambiguity, an ability to drift one way or another, to possess a multitude of meanings simultaneously. This is due to the fact that no incidents reach us not already permeated with explanations.

Information, this endless stream of occurrences omnipresent before us, suffers from a surfeit of explanation: “Every morning, news reaches us from around the globe. The silence left in the absence of the storyteller has, in Benjamin’s formulation, been suffused by information. It’s as if a capacity we had considered inalienable, the most reliable of all our capacities has been taken from us: the ability to share our experiences.

And ever more frequently an awkward silence spreads through a group when someone expresses the wish to hear a story. Encounters with people who know how to tell a story properly are becoming rarer. It tells us that the art of storytelling is dying out. An experience we have almost every day dictates our position and viewpoint. He is already a distant phenomenon and is moving still further.

Walter Benjamin’s 1937 essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov” opens upon a lament for storyteller’s decline:Īs familiar as the name sounds, the storyteller is far from an active, living presence in our lives.

Bertolt Brecht, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny

Benjamin the storyteller