Benjamin's Storyteller through African eyes: Rallying the experience of the "ordinary" in late modernity

Abstract

Benjamin's famous figure of "The Storyteller", uncoupled from its exemplary historical representatives like Nicolai Leskov, Johann Peter Hebel and, among others, Herodotus, Poe and Kipling, has become almost stock in trade in contemporary reflections on narrative. Literary criticism in particular has engaged with the storyteller and, to a lesser extent, with his artisan-like craft and the form of the tale as opposed to the novel. Yet, the importance of experience as being both an enabling condition and an effect of narration which Benjamin's essay foregrounds is often concealed. Nevertheless, it is the experience of modernity, as I shall argue, which animates this text in as much as its companion piece, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", and numerous others of the later writings, not least "On some Motifs in Baudelaire". Experience furthermore, as "The Storyteller" makes abundantly clear, situates us and governs the way we conduct, what amounts to, the narrative of our lives, or to put in Biblical terms: the way in which "We spend our years as a tale that is told". Conversely, as Benjamin says in relation to Baudelaire's character: "For someone who is past experiencing, there is no consolation. But it is nothing other than this inability which denotes the actual essence of anger. The angry man 'does not want to listen'; his arch-image (Urbild) Timon rages against people indiscriminately; he is no longer in a position to distinguish the proven friend from the mortal enemy". It is at this intersection between the (historical) conditions of possibility of experiencing and 'non-experiencing' or 'raving' where I wish to situate my reading of "The Storyteller" against the foil of a recent 'local', that is a Black South African, appropriation of the well known text in order to examine the figure of a narrator, Ndebele, who is, as yet, not fully detached from the oral tradition of his community, unlike most Western novelists. In addition, Benjamin's concept of experience (Erfahrung) in its two dimensions of theory and critical method of investigation will be of major concern, as will be the quality and desirability of a 'transaction of experience' or austauchbare Erfahrung today.