Myth is something that is inescapable, a series of events that one cannot control or overcome. Myth, says Benjamin, is tied to the idea of Fate and Tragedy. It should also be clarified that Benjamin identifies a difference between the Story and the Myth. The way that dialogue, scenic description, and the internal life of characters functions in novels is foreign to storytelling. In this way, it is like the written piece is being told to us word-of-mouth by the author: a kind of “let me tell you a story that someone else once told me.” It’s impossible to try and tell most novels as stories in this way, and not simply because of their length. Part of this comes from the presence of a narrator inside the text who tells the story to another character. In the essay, Benjamin is actually talking about the writings of Nikolai Leskov, but he considers these written works to be some of the last examples of storytelling. However, this isn’t necessarily as straightforward as it seems. It has an explicit oral element that allows it to spread and be incorporated into an individual’s life in a way that the novel cannot.

First, for Benjamin, the Story is something that is told. While we now use the term “story” to indicate any sort of narrative, Benjamin is referring to “story” as its own unique genre. The story, it seemed, was losing to modernity and the new form of the Novel was rising up to take its place. Travelers no longer engage in trade in the way that seafaring merchants used to, there is no longer the need to swap stories and news. At home, work lacked the artisanship and personal element that allowed for a knowledge of local stories and history: in modern life nobody talks while working or incorporates their work and their stories. Veterans who came back had experienced that which was too terrible to speak of.

So starts Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” To Benjamin, who lived through the first World War, the art (or “craft” as he likes to call it) of storytelling was dying out due to the impoverishment of experience. One meets with fewer and fewer people who know how to tell a tale properly.” “The art of storytelling is coming to an end.

Benjamin the storyteller