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The Storyteller Quotes
The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
by
Walter Benjamin643 ratings, 3.64 average rating, 104 reviews
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The Storyteller Quotes
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“To illustrate this claim, Benjamin relates a fable about a father who taught his sons the merits of hard work by fooling them into thinking that there was buried treasure in the vineyard by the house. The turning of soil in the vain search for gold results in the discovery of a real treasure: a wonderful crop of fruit.
With the war came the severing of ‘the red thread of experience’ which had connected previous generations, as Benjamin puts it in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’. The ‘fragile human body’ that emerged from the trenches was mute, unable to narrate the ‘forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions’ that had engulfed it. Communicability was unsettled. It was as if the good and bountiful soil of the fable had become the sticky and destructive mud of the trenches, which would bear no fruit but only moulder as a graveyard. ‘Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?’ Benjamin asks.”
― The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
With the war came the severing of ‘the red thread of experience’ which had connected previous generations, as Benjamin puts it in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’. The ‘fragile human body’ that emerged from the trenches was mute, unable to narrate the ‘forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions’ that had engulfed it. Communicability was unsettled. It was as if the good and bountiful soil of the fable had become the sticky and destructive mud of the trenches, which would bear no fruit but only moulder as a graveyard. ‘Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?’ Benjamin asks.”
― The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
“In the last case it is clear that state censorship played its part, but the distortion of dreams should also be understood as psychic protection from the messages they carry.
When the energies of the night are wrenched into the day through the process of linguistic representation, repressed desires and wishes can no longer evaporate through a process of forgetting. Benjamin, in One Way Street, equates such writing-up with betrayal, for it is in the moment of transcription that latent desires have to be confronted.
Just as the person who wakes up after dreaming betrays the night with food, so too does the writer who reaches for a pen. Censorship operates to protect dreamers from their dreams. Elaboration operates to capture the intensity of the dream-experience against the inadequacies of memory and language.”
― The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
When the energies of the night are wrenched into the day through the process of linguistic representation, repressed desires and wishes can no longer evaporate through a process of forgetting. Benjamin, in One Way Street, equates such writing-up with betrayal, for it is in the moment of transcription that latent desires have to be confronted.
Just as the person who wakes up after dreaming betrays the night with food, so too does the writer who reaches for a pen. Censorship operates to protect dreamers from their dreams. Elaboration operates to capture the intensity of the dream-experience against the inadequacies of memory and language.”
― The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
“the journalistic jargon of the newspaper is the highest expression of experiential poverty – a lesson that Benjamin learned from Karl Kraus.8 As Benjamin comments, ‘every morning brings us the news of the globe and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories.”
― The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
― The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
