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The Narrative Restitution of Experience: Walter Benjamin's Storytelling
The Narrative Restitution of Experience: Walter Benjamin's Storytelling
The Narrative Restitution of Experience: Walter Benjamin's Storytelling
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2 • The Narrative Restitution of Experience
41
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42 • The Chatter of the Visible
ryteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” 1936) and his trea-
tise “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”
(“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 1935–
39). In discussing the two texts in tandem, I also draw on a larger complex of
longer and shorter texts and annotations dating between 1929 and 1935 that
contribute to highlighting the thematic ties between montage and narrative.
My thesis is that the artwork essay adapts key traits of the desirable narrative
practice described in “The Storyteller” to outline a mode of narrative that
cannily turns to its advantage the noxious blend of massified experience and
altered forms of perception produced by urban life, as reinforced by new
technologies like film and undergirded by the alienated forms of labor of
industrial-capitalist modernity. Montage, I argue, is the key conceptual term
in this work of adaptation.
By focusing primarily on “The Storyteller,” this chapter outlines the fea-
tures of desirable narrative that provide a frame for the analysis of the art-
work essay in chapter 2. As a reading of this broad textual constellation will
make clear, Benjamin’s discussion of montage is primarily inspired by film as
a technology of mechanical reproduction that accelerates and radicalizes the
transformation in the status of art and the nature of (aesthetic) experience
ushered by photography. At the same time, his discourse on filmic montage
revives a pre-Platonic understanding of mimesis whose import goes well be-
yond a discussion of film poetics, laying the foundations for a broader recon-
ceptualization of narrative as a form of imitative behavior predicated on a
mimicry of forms that manipulates perception to engender new forms. This
understanding of narrative mimesis is no longer concerned with evaluating
stories based on verisimilitude as a criterion of resemblance or correspon-
dence, but rather depends on exploiting the interaction between the human
sensory apparatus and new technologies of mechanical reproduction.
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 43
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44 • The Chatter of the Visible
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 45
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46 • The Chatter of the Visible
What distinguishes the epic work? The author’s ability to get close to
reality and to pierce it to reach the simple, great, elementary situations
and figures of the human condition. In addition, in order to create the
living language artwork, the author’s incisive ability to construct a fa-
ble. And third, the whole pours itself into the stream of living lan-
guage, which the author follows.8
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 47
haunts the novel and endows narrative with exemplary force.9 The epic thus
configures itself as an imaginative engagement with the present that has no
use for the constraints of a normative aesthetics and especially rejects the lat-
ter’s relegation of art to the illusionary domain of beautiful semblance, which
constituted the hothouse in which the modern novel thrived. Döblin’s re-
conceptualization of the epic thus reflects his concern with endowing narra-
tive with a type of cognitive insight that is at a par with the knowledge pro-
duced by other human practices, thus rescuing it from its second-rate status
as the fanciful concoction of a creative individual. At the same time, it is
significant that his proposal for grounding narrative in a new epic practice
did not challenge the mimetic paradigm that had framed the discourse on
the epic since Aristotle. At stake is an understanding of narrative as a means
of representation that depends on the human ability to discern a meaningful
tie between an aesthetic artifact and experience. This is at bottom an ana-
logical relationship; it hinges on the ability to perceive some kind of similar-
ity or partial correspondence between a story and experience. Döblin’s em-
phasis on the writer’s skill in constructing a fable, his extended discussion of
narrative conception and production, and general concern with spelling out
the seemingly incongruous relationship between narrative and reality in his
lecture belies his desire to hold on to a traditional understanding of mimesis
as correspondence while freeing narrative from its confinement to the spheres
of illusionism and beautiful semblance.
The contemporary debates on a crisis of narrative explicitly or implicitly
revolved around the difficulties of just this understanding of mimesis. Its im-
plications are exemplarily summarized in a much-quoted passage from Robert
Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930–32), which unfolds trenchant poeto-
logical reflections on the novel by ascribing them to its antihero, Ulrich:
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48 • The Chatter of the Visible
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 49
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50 • The Chatter of the Visible
tions of the novel, which he saw as bent on exploiting the similarity between
narrative and experience in order to claim for itself a measure of self-
sufficiency and closure:
Hence, his [Kafka’s] love of detail has a quite different meaning from
that of an episode in a novel. Novels are sufficient onto themselves.
Kafka’s books are never that; they are stories pregnant with a moral to
which they never give birth. This is why Kafka learned . . . not from
the great novelists but from much more modest writers, from mere
storytellers. (SW 2:496)16
The montage explodes the framework of the novel, bursts its limits
both stylistically and structurally, and clears the way for new, epic pos-
sibilities. Formally, above all. The material of the montage is anything
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 51
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52 • The Chatter of the Visible
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 53
ness, “The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that
reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are
listening to his tale” (SW 3:146).24 Storytelling is thus portrayed as a proces-
sual practice that is constitutive of the experience of both the storyteller and
his listeners, and not just a medium for communicating a content that is in-
dependent of it. Whereas the novelist relies on content that is grounded in
the putative self-sufficiency of abstract information, the storyteller’s ability
to mold stories from the clay of experience concretely shapes both his and his
listeners’ life:
The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work . . .
does not aim to convey the pure “in itself ” or gist of a thing, like infor-
mation or a report. It submerges the thing into the life of a storyteller,
in order to bring it out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller
cling to a story the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay ves-
sel. (SW 3:149)25
Storytelling is woven so deeply into the fabric of experience that it bears the
storyteller’s physical imprint just as a clay vessel carries the traces of the hand
that molded it. The image of the potter molding a vase is, however, not in-
tended to evoke the centuries-old aesthetic discourse of art-making as an in-
dividual’s skillful negotiation of both the raw material of a given art form and
the elements of experience. The essay portrays the storyteller as the facilitator
of an open-ended collective practice rather than the lone maker of aesthetic
artifacts. The collective dimension of this process is intimately bound up
with the practical type of knowledge storytelling conveys:
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54 • The Chatter of the Visible
This passage unfolds the essay’s central theme of a relation between the
decreasing communicability of experience and the fading of storytelling. As
the argument goes, storytelling is on the retreat because experience can no
longer be communicated the way it used to. This begs the question of what,
exactly, is meant by the Mitteilbarkeit the text presents as a precondition of
both authentic experience and storytelling. At stake is not the kind of ex-
change of information that would be implied by the ability to understand
and properly answer a question. What is rather at issue is the sharing of
“counsel” (Rat), a practical knowledge that can take the form of a moral
teaching or a piece of advice. Sharing these practical truths, what Benjamin
calls “wisdom,” presupposes a listener who is not a mere recipient of informa-
tion, but rather an integral part of the unfolding story recounted by the sto-
ryteller. In other words, communicability is not about the transfer of infor-
mation from an individual with superior knowledge to one with inferior
knowledge, but rather entails a symbiotic relation between a storyteller and
a listener.The storyteller can only offer counsel to a listener who is already
part of the process and even able to continue unfolding it himself. For story-
telling’s wisdom to emerge, then, the storyteller needs the listener as much as
the listener needs the storyteller. Their positions are equal and in principle
reversable, which accounts for both the anonymous character and the collec-
tive quality of storytelling.
Section XVI further elaborates on the collective utility of storytelling by
focusing on what is assumed to be its most basic narrative form, namely, the
fairy tale. As Benjamin maintains, the narrator of fairy tales enjoins the expe-
riential wisdom of the community in order to challenge myth, that is, the
blind acceptance of the forces that dominate individual and collective exis-
tence under the guise of immutable fate. Hence, storytelling is a key practice
that allows humans to act deliberately and freely in defiance of the forces that
oppress them. It does not simply relay experience, but constitutes it in funda-
mental ways by enabling an emancipatory mode of collective agency that is at
the heart of the positive understanding of tradition the text subscribes to.
One must note in this regard that the emancipatory Märchengeist of story-
telling does not entail claiming unrestricted mastery over nature, but rather
enables humans to recognize their embeddedness in the whole of creation,
engendering the stance of radical openness to the creaturely world that im-
bues Leskov’s stories. At stake is the unconditional attentiveness to an alter-
ity that “surpass[es] the confines of the merely human,” as Beatrice Hanssen
has maintained. The ethos engendered by this stance is “sentient and pre-
reflexive,” that is, ultimately mystical in its irreducibility to conceptual reflec-
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 55
tion.27 This is to say that righteousness is not something one knows or under-
stands. Rather, the righteous individual is given to encounter his own
righteousness in the symbiotic practice that ties him as storyteller to a lis-
tener, or, as formulated in the apodictic statement that closes the essay: “The
storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself ” (SW
3:161).28 It is in this symbiotic relation that ethics is, as it were, performed.
The assumption of a symbiotic relation between storyteller and listener
further raises the question of the specific circumstances that enable the Mit-
teilbarkeit at the heart of storytelling. This question is key to accounting for
the distinctive openness to experience that sets storytelling off from the nov-
el’s mimetic self-sufficiency and makes it a more desirable narrative practice.
A good point of entry is the baffling, almost literal-minded insistence on the
materiality of storytelling throughout the text. This is defined at first as a
mode of communication that hinges on bridging a distance defined in either
temporal or spatial terms:
“When someone makes a jouney, he has a story to tell,” goes the Ger-
man saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has
come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has
stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local
tales and traditions. . . . If peasants and seamen were past masters of
storytelling, the artisan class was its university. There the lore of far-
away places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, was combined
with the lore of the past, such as is manifested most clearly to the na-
tive inhabitants of a place. (SW 3:144)29
In this stylized account of a bygone age, the artisan emerges as the unsur-
passed master of storytelling for his ability to combine the peasant’s skill in
narrating tales from the past with the seaman’s gift for relating the lore of
distant places. One may at first be tempted to interpret the trope of a dis-
tance to be bridged as belonging to the staple imagery of hermeneutics. The
Ferne traveled by the storyteller would then be a metaphor for the overcom-
ing of alterity in the act of understanding that is a precondition of a mean-
ingful encounter between self and other. It is, however, significant that the
subsequent section, which further unfolds this theme in relation to Leskov’s
storytelling, reprises the image of distance in pointedly literal terms, namely,
as the traversing of space that establishes a physical proximity. “Leskov was at
home in distant places as well as in distant time” (SW 3:145),30 and this is to
be understood in a concrete rather than metaphorical sense. Leskov’s gift for
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56 • The Chatter of the Visible
This passage explores what may at first seem like a strained connection be-
tween the antipsychological orientation of storytelling and its boundedness
with a mnemonic practice sustained by the rhythms of the working body. In
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 57
Coming on the heels of quoted remarks by Paul Valéry that stress the quasi-
mystical interplay of mind, perception, and action in the artistic process, this
passage ties storytelling to an artisanal mode of labor predicated on coordi-
nating the eye, the hand, and the mind. This connection is all but lost in an
age in which the hand can only claim a marginal role in the labor process,
presumably as a result of the shift to discrete, automatized tasks in an indus-
trial environment.34 Benjamin’s desire to underscore the link between story-
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58 • The Chatter of the Visible
telling and bodily movements prompts him to claim that the same hand ges-
tures that are used in telling a story are also involved in performing artisanal
labor. This statement well exemplifies the text’s peculiar discursive thrust,
which tends to generalizing extrapolations that draw on what would be em-
pirical observations, yet as a rule lack the necessary nuance and supporting
evidence. While one may well take objection with the blurring of observa-
tion, conjecture, and apodictic judgment that often shapes the essay’s dis-
course, this mix is important in accounting for the distinctive materialism
that undergirds its arguments. In spite of its avowed debt to The Theory of the
Novel, the text charts a very different course from the Hegelianism of the
early Lukács, who saw in the novel the aesthetic form that registers the pro-
gressive self-alienation of consciousness understood as the engine of world
history. At the same time, it is also at odds with the humanism that drove the
early Marx’s denunciation of the alienating modes of production in capitalist
modernity. The most significant departure from a Marxian account lies in
the conceptual terms that frame the depiction of artisanal labor, and, by ex-
tension, of the labor of storytelling. Consciousness, as the indispensable mo-
ment of self-awareness that grounds a person’s unity and moral agency, does
not play a role in either. It is neither the guarantor of just labor that could
effect a reconciliation between individual and nature, nor the principal actor
in an all-important quest for meaning grounding in hermeneutics. In this
respect it is significant that, in part thanks to the framing through the Valéry
quote, the text ends up casting its account in conceptual terms that curiously
recall those of contemporary psychotechnics. Specifically, the claim that
both artisanal labor and storytelling rely on the partially autonomous inter-
play of different functions—the mind, the perceptual apparatus, and the mo-
toric ability to execute actions—recalls the psychotechnic understanding of
the person as consisting of discrete modules that need to be coordinated for
processes to run smoothly. To be sure, the insights of psychotechnics were at
bottom what authorized the Taylorist forms of labor that the text holds re-
sponsible for storytelling’s demise. At the same time they also made it possi-
ble to describe an older mode of coordination among the individual’s func-
tions that accounts for the peculiar tie between artisanal work and storytelling
without mobilizing fraught notions like consciousness.35
In this way, the text underscores that storytelling’s tie to experience, its
outward orientation as it were, hinges on its association with the habitual
routines of the body as shaped by specific technologies and modes of labor.
This provides a template for ensuring narrative’s formal openness to experi-
ence, that openness which Benjamin had recommended as an antidote to the
novel’s closure in his review of Berlin Alexanderplatz. As previously noted,
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 59
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60 • The Chatter of the Visible
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The Narrative Restitution of Experience • 61
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