A pox on storytelling

In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote something illuminating about the place of storytelling in Western culture. 

Storytelling is alive in traditional societies, he said, but dying a slow death in Western one's. Why? Because Western societies are being consumed by the power of information.

A little context here: Benjamin was writing against the grain of rising fascism, a social system that relied heavily on information and technology to anchor itself in Western Europe after World War I. 

Stories communicate unique truths that lie at the heart of experiences in a relatively unmediated way. An individual would tell a story of survival to another individual, or to a group gathered communally perhaps on the occasion of a death or birth. 

Information, on the other hand, is mediated because it's distributed in a more or less standardized format through technology. In Benjamin's day, the technological apparati used both by the state and business conglomerates would be the mass media.

News of death, especially deaths of soldiers in the war zones of Europe, would be transmitted; similarly stories of survival would be appropriated by the state and transmitted as narratives of triumph or heroism. 

Mourning would cease to be an occasion to share unique experiences in common physical space.

Death in this Benjaminian cosmology occupies not a place of recoil and terror, but one of renewal or creation. People would congregate around the dying or the dead and find new meaning in their lives through sharing their experiences, memories, of or around the dying subject.

The 21st century, an era allegedly of hypermodernity, is an era where storytelling is back with a vengeance. 

As fiction writer Sam Lipsyte says in a discussion of his recent New Yorker story, The Naturals, we are living in a cultural moment where everything is communicated on the back of a story: 

You don’t just buy some jam or a loaf of bread or a chair or a car. You have to hear a whole story about how the product came about, often a tedious tale about how somebody quit the rat race (after making a mint in advertising or data mining or manufacturing weapons) and discovered an old family recipe and then made friends with local farmers and woodsmen. 

The hero of the story is a "free range cultural consultant" which is an euphemism for a storyteller; his job is to help the government build structures in public spaces on the back of stories, as though it isn't just enough to build, the building project from inception to completion has to be wrapped in a story.

Lipsyte's hero rebels against the blind adoption of storytelling as the only vehicle via which the worth of experiences and products can be communicated. He refuses to be a storyteller in the story; consequence? He loses the contract.

But the kind of storytelling that is preponderant in our cultural moment is not the kind of storytelling that Benjamin mourned the loss of. Our storytelling is largely an elaborate sales pitch, of ourselves, our lives, our achievements and of course of the products we consume. 

Today's storytelling is intrinsic to sales and is indistinguishable from information whose effects Benjamin decried not too long ago. When Benjamin said "story" he didn't mean the selling of ourselves/marketing ourselves to the world; he meant seeking new dots of meaning through the telling of them regardless of how spontaneous and messy they sound. 

A person, in Benjamin's vision, might seek hilarity from death, because that is how he specifically experiences death. 

In our contemporary storytelling, we have to narrate events of death in one way and one way only, in a monotonous, monochromatic tone of solemnity. This tantamounts to the selling of death as anti-life.

Lipsyte's hero encounters death--the death of his father. He flies halfway across the country to speak to his dying father after a long interregnum of icy silence between father and son.

Indeed, in a Benjaminian way, the hero becomes the son, the one and unique son of the one and unique father, and experiences meaningful changes within himself, which by the time the story ends, he refuses to share with the readers.

A pox on storytelling.