jackb
literature, experience, and storytelling
this week in my critical theory class we read an essay by walter benjamin entitled “the storyteller”. it serves as a critical examination of how the way people tell stories has changed. prior to the invention of the printing press and the wide practice of literacy, the only stories that most people heard were told to them in person by bards or the like. this is where we get folk tales, most of mythology, and epics. nowadays we call these kinds of stories and this mode of storytelling ‘oral history’. benjamin’s assertion is that what was once fundamental to the act of storytelling is now lost, if not obsolete:
memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. it is the muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. in the first place among these is the one practiced by the storyteller. it starts the web which all stories together form in the end. one ties on to the next, as the great storytellers, particularly the oriental ones, have always readily shown.
oral history is taught as something quaint, something romantic. this is because in a plain sense, it is. you don’t need to remember anything in 2020, except when taking exams. the whole of human knowledge is available within minutes online if you know a little bit about how to look. when i’ve gone to the bar with my dad and his friends, they’ve often lamented the extinction of the bar argument. they talk about how if you and a fellow patron had a disagreement over who won a heisman in what year, it used to be the case that you would argue about it. the right answer was whichever was supported with more convincing evidence, or, far more likely, by popular vote; you might tap your friend or the bartender on the shoulder to weigh in on the issue at hand. nowadays if we’re talking and aren’t sure about the fact of the matter, i can pull up several relevant wikipedia articles and put it to rest inside of a minute.
when i asked my dad if he missed it, he laughed. he said that that kind of discussion, in the past, was probably worse because it didn’t have anything to do with truth, and was more about the activity. people like to drink and fight about stuff, but it’s deeper than that. the old way was a fundamentally democratic approach to discussion; the point was to talk to your neighbors about sports, not to determine the historical facts. similarly to how portable google has redefined the subtle and delicate art of the drunken bar argument, the tendency towards immediacy and truthfulness has redefined, according to benjamin, the art of telling a story.
the intelligence that came from afar—whether the spatial kind from foreign countries or the temporal kind of tradition—possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. the prime requirement is that it appear “understandable in itself.” often it is no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries was. but while the latter was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensable for information to sound plausible. because of this it proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling. If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs.
the essay also disparages novels as a medium as responsible for the death of the storyteller. benjamin understands stories as live and active things, especially in that romantic sense i talked about earlier, where you would only know narratives that had been personally related to you by someone else. novels represent the atomization of storytelling. an individual constructs a narrative and tells you exactly where it begins and ends and what happens in the middle, and puts their name on it. it’s a private endeavor. when someone goes to the store and buys a copy of that novel, they read it in solitude. again, it is a private endeavor. benjamin’s view is that the real outcome is not just that his chosen medium is perceptibly less valuable, but that it speaks to a larger ill:
more and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.
this brings me to another essay i’ve wanted to write about. a friend sent me a copy of mark greif’s book “against everything”, which includes an essay titled “the concept of experience (the meaning of life, part i)”. greif starts by noting that our whole lives are lead in the pursuit of happiness, which, i grant you, isn’t particularly insightful. what’s interesting is what he claims to be the problem:
the problem is experience; specifically, a concept of experience that gives us the feeling we are really living, but makes us unsatisfied with whatever life we obtain.
greif goes on to discuss how, for most people, experiences are individual moments that we view as almost external to ourselves. we travel to faraway places and attend nominally exciting events so that we can encapsulate them in our memories. when we inevitably find ourselves in the future and want to be assured that our lives were well lived, we can look back on a collection of experiences and tell ourselves “see all the things i did, this life must have been good”. greif likens this to curation or collection. because we conflate a wealth of meaningful experience with happiness, the next logical step is to focus on obtaining as much experience as we can. you can see this in action already; a study from expedia and something called the ‘center for generational kinetics’ found that 74% of americans prioritize experience over ownership.
every profile on tinder mentions the desire to go on an ‘adventure’ - i think they might hard code it into the app - but the reality is rarely adventurous in character. i can’t find the tweet but a while back i saw something like “mfs will talk about wanting to go on an adventure and then smoke weed in their car in a jcpenney parking lot”. there’s a small but dedicated genre of tweet about how people in small / midwest / rural towns have fun. it usually consists of smoking pot in a parking lot or loitering at walmart. there’s nothing that says those aren’t experiences, though. i’ve spent a lot of time smoking in cars and searching for the funniest thing in the home good section at walmart, so i can tell you: that was almost always just a backdrop to simply being around my friends. it’s the activity we ‘planned’ so that we could justify being around each other, while the actual (but unspoken) point of it was to interface with each other in person for once. i think everybody knows this, because everybody has fun doing ‘nothing’. everybody loves to spend a whole day doing ‘nothing’, but we tell each other and ourselves that we’d rather be doing something exciting. we’re convinced that we need to go to exotic places and do exciting things in order to be fulfilled, but at the end of the day doing these things for the sake of them doesn’t meet the desire that initially drove us to them. experience becomes less and less valuable when we view it this way. kafka once said “we photograph things to drive them out of our minds. my stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” walter benjamin would criticize our practice of compulsive photography as a way of converting not just what we are told, but what we live, into information. the mindset of endless accumulation is, therefore, increasingly a failure. according to greif, what we really want is to be able to share experience:
you can wish your experiences had been more plentiful, or longer lasting. you can wish they had made you someone else—or that you could retell them to anyone who’d understand. but you do not wish you hadn’t had them. the need to retell experiences becomes your last means to try to redeem experience from aimless, pure accumulation—and either you cannot find a listener or you realize that you are mute, unfit to communicate the colors of this distant realm of experience in any way adequate to the wonders you found there. thus everyone longs to tell his story today, but not as literature.
anyone who’s tried to write something personal has been through this. the process of using the written word requires a few layers of translation across entirely distinct languages. the way sensory information enters your brain and is processed there has precious little to do with the ways in which we communicate that information to other people. there are some workarounds; for example, impressionist art creates images that have little, directly speaking, to do with the actual experience of our visual sense, but by blending light and color together, evoke an emotional response in the viewer that might resemble the wonderful ‘distant realm of experience’ that greif’s talking about. the theoretical argument of impressionism is that its approach creates art that is closer to what we ‘actually’ see when we look at the world. of course this brings up the same issue my dad discussed when i settled a bar argument with google — when you look at a monet, you aren’t looking at real life in the empirical sense, and the modern world relies on empiricism. we want exact knowledge of things, and to have them explained to us. i couldn’t tell you why, because it seems that more and more, people are yearning to live in a world of wonderment and mystery. they experience the latter desire a priori; it exists without need of experience. i could point you to capitalism or to ad firms or decry the societal ills proliferated by social media, but i don’t think it really matters who we blame for this cognitive dissonance between what we want and what we tell each other we want.