In order to understand Benjamin’s essay it is best to start from the point where he analyzes the role of memory in literature. In a more general sense, Benjamin performs theoretical work that examines genre development he focus on three forces that affect its change over time: the influence of social and economic forces, the role of personal and collective memory, and finally the relationship between the writer and the reader, or in the specific case of the storyteller, the teller and listener.

His reflections accomplish more than the act of reflecting seems to connote rather, a rigorous genealogical study of literary genres emerges, by using as an example the outline of material events in history that brought the development and demise of storytelling. Natural accounts of battlefield events, one surmises, would have been conveyed in a direct and unaltered way rather, the soldiers seemed to want to runaway from what they saw, or perhaps the world cared little for their stories or wished to tame their severity by only accepting the contrived “war book.” Even though Benjamin bemoans the fall in the value of experience, he concedes that such a shift allows for “the proper distance and the angle of vision” (83) to analyze the genre of storytelling. Artificial concepts replaced natural experience, “for never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power” (84). The world had to wait ten years for the soldiers’ accounts, but “the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth” (84). As an example he recalls World War I soldiers who returned from the battlefield incapable of conveying the horrors they witnessed. The modern world brought a shift in the daily experiences of people that led to an alienation along Marx’s vein rendering humans incapable of exchanging experiences. His pained tone evokes a personal as well as historical sense of gloom. He has already become something remote from us and that is getting even more distant” (83). Walter Benjamin begins The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskóv with a pang of nostalgia for the extinct practice of storytelling: “the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. An Interpretation of the The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskóv

Benjamin the storyteller