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magtferg 's review for:
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
by Walter Benjamin
The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov by Walter Benjamin
"Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant. To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him." (83)
"one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman" (85)
"If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place."
"Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom" (86-7)
"The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." (89)
Herodotus, Histories:
When the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been beaten and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyse was bent on humbling his prisoner. He gave orders to place Psammenitus on the road along which the Persian triumphal procession was to pass. And he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher. While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of the deepest morning." (89-90)
"The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. a story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time." (90)
Herodotus's story of King Psammenitus "from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day." (90)
"There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story's claim in the memory of the reader..." (91)
"The traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel." (92)
"Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death." (94)
Hebel: "In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died...America became independent, and the united French and Spanish forces were unable to capture Gibraltar. ...Napoleon captured Prussia, and the English bombarded Copenhagan, and the peasants sowed and harvested. The millers ground, the smiths hammered, and the miners dug for veins of ore in their underground workshops. But when in 1809 the miners at Falun..." brought up his body." (95)
"A man who dies at the age of thirty-five," said Moritz Heimann once, "is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five." Nothing is more dubious than this sentence . . . A man . . . will ... remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at thirty-five." This is the nature of character. The meaning of his life is revealed in his death. The characters make the reader understand that death is waiting.
Paul Valery: "Artistic observation," he says in reflections on a woman artist whose work consisted in the silk embroidery of figures, "can attain an almost mystical depth. The object on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in their own inner self." (107-8)
"The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself." (108-9)
Other Benjamin:
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule."
"Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time."
"Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant. To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him." (83)
"one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman" (85)
"If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place."
"Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom" (86-7)
"The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." (89)
Herodotus, Histories:
When the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been beaten and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyse was bent on humbling his prisoner. He gave orders to place Psammenitus on the road along which the Persian triumphal procession was to pass. And he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher. While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of the deepest morning." (89-90)
"The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. a story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time." (90)
Herodotus's story of King Psammenitus "from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day." (90)
"There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story's claim in the memory of the reader..." (91)
"The traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel." (92)
"Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death." (94)
Hebel: "In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died...America became independent, and the united French and Spanish forces were unable to capture Gibraltar. ...Napoleon captured Prussia, and the English bombarded Copenhagan, and the peasants sowed and harvested. The millers ground, the smiths hammered, and the miners dug for veins of ore in their underground workshops. But when in 1809 the miners at Falun..." brought up his body." (95)
"A man who dies at the age of thirty-five," said Moritz Heimann once, "is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five." Nothing is more dubious than this sentence . . . A man . . . will ... remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at thirty-five." This is the nature of character. The meaning of his life is revealed in his death. The characters make the reader understand that death is waiting.
Paul Valery: "Artistic observation," he says in reflections on a woman artist whose work consisted in the silk embroidery of figures, "can attain an almost mystical depth. The object on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in their own inner self." (107-8)
"The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself." (108-9)
Other Benjamin:
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule."
"Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time."