Thoughts on "The Storyteller"

It is my nature to want to question and criticize a text to find its faults and holes, to play devil's advocate to the author. I have to say that I do agree with Benjamin's theory on the whole, but I have questions, always questions.

I agree with Benjamin that the storyteller is rare in present society, that is to say, present society in the US and other developed, capitalistic societies, but now that I think about it, I wonder what the status of the storyteller is in other nations with economies different from ours. Surely there are countries whose printing press has not become so advanced and distributable (sp) as ours. Surely there are societies that have not benefitted or been harmed by the mass distribution of information as opposed to oral tradition-type storytelling. True, I think that more primitive societies must still use storytelling as a means of communication, but I wonder why I suddenly think "primitive." Benjamin is right in that storytelling is archaic; we do not value it anymore, so that leads me to ask why. Why is it not valued and does that matter? Benjamin puts "narrative" and "living speech" in opposition of one another, so I also wonder about the presence of narrative in our current times. I think that narrative still exists, but maybe in a different form than what Benjamin was writing about. I think he was literally talking about oral narrative, the art of vocally narrating an experience, but I question why narratives today have to be so different. We hear in class, Dr. Powers talking about narratives and titles of English Symposium presentations declaring "narratives of African women writers" or "narratives of Holocaust survivors," which is interesting because Benjamin believes that storytelling began its decline when men came back from wars like WWI without anything to say, silenced by the horrors of war. But narratives do exist in writing. I believe this.

Benjamin said that the true storyteller takes his own experience with the experience of others and then tells his story and the listen benefits from this, find counsel in it, finds wisdom. The author, on the other hand, isolates himself and tells a story completely fabricated in his own mind. It is not a narrative and the reader does not gain wisdom from the story. I disagree with this. Novels can be plural, interwoven narratives of perspectives just as oral stories are. Maybe the first novels, along with many present ones, are completely fiction, but doesnt the author has to draw from some personal experience to write his tale? And doesnt he interweave the stories and perspectives and happenings of his friends and acquaintances into his tale as well? I think so. There is no divine outpouring from the author, like the Romantics may have you believe. The author can be that travelling seaman or the local color writer, writing about the traditions and happenings in his town in which he lives. The novel may not be so much an immediate connection between teller and listen as the story which is told orally, but doesnt it have the same function sometimes? Benjamin said that wisdom is not so much gained from a novel anymore and that explained information is more important nowadays than a story open to interpretation, and that may be true in mass media-type settings, but literature is still produced that must be interpreted by the reader and thus lends some wisdom to the reader. Just as Barthes had written in "Death of an Author," the words of the novel have their own meaning in and of themselves and it is up to the reader to extract meaning from them, not the author. The author has done his job in expelling the words and then the reader must do the rest. Isnt the storyteller somewhat like this? We say that they operate in different economies, particularly in different mediums, but arent they telling the same story?

I do not believe that society has a lack of interest in hearing a good story, and I do not believe that there are no storytellers to tell it. I have heard that people like to read less and less when they can just watch TV or a movie instead, but a story is still being told, whatever the medium. We do not just want the cold, hard facts. We want the characters and the setting and the minute details and the dialogue and the conflict. It is still enjoyable, at least to me.