Storytelling Hasn't Completely Lost Its Sting...Not For The Children I Babysit

* Note the picture of Walter Benjamin- not gonna lie, sometimes my head hurts from spinning after studying literary criticism too =P*


By now you might think I have fallen off the planet or at the very least have taken a brief hiatus from this blog. You are correct in your assumption of the later. Last week marked my college’s combined Easter/spring break. I didn’t forget about my blog over break, but couldn’t seem to bring myself to dealing with the turtle speed of the internet connection at home. Furthermore, I was focusing on trying to accomplish some writing for another class, namely, a forty page paper that is due in a few short weeks. Regardless, of all this I am back to this lovely blog and hope to post on a regular basis.
Over break I received an e-mail from a woman at my church requesting that I babysit her six children. Might I add that her six children are under the age of well, I know they are at least under the age of ten. Seeing as I am a poor college student, I really didn’t consider myself to have a choice in the matter. My mother thought it was a grand opportunity that might allow me to consider the realities of having six children. My father apparently must have thought I would struggle to find ways to occupy the enthusiastic children at 6 a.m. (yes a.m.), and got a few tips from their grandmother, who told him that they love to hear stories. My father of course reported back to me telling me that I might want to consider the tactic of storytelling. I panicked ever so slightly as thoughts of our recent literary criticism reading assignment, The Storyteller Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, filled my mind. After having read this essay by Walter Benjamin, I was unsure whether I even knew what it meant to tell a story, to be a storyteller.
According to Benjamin, we are losing the act of storytelling at large. He suggests that this is because the idea of experience has lost its value. I have to admit that I struggle to agree with this notion. It seems to me that much of our society places a strong emphasis on experience. Nearly any position one might apply to will likely ask of the applicant’s experience. Furthermore, most positions requires experience and interviewees the interviewer of his or her experience. I think that perhaps Benjamin is getting at “something” but I don t think that experience is the correct term for that which he is alluding to.
I hate to keep picking at Benjamin, but I also disagree with his notion that the nature of every real story is that it contains something useful. Benjamin suggests that a real story must have a moral, or give practical advice. What I ask of this suggestions is what of stories that don’t contain a moral, and don’t give practical advice. Are they not stories? It seems to me that many stories that are told orally are simply stories with humor. We tell such stories to provide entertainment. Shall we dispose of such stories?
Benjamin’s statements against the novel are fairly strong. It is almost as thought he is saying that in came the novel and out went real communication. Perhaps Benjamin’s issue with the novel is similar to my present day issues with things like instant messenger and facebook. Seems to me that all with the aim of bettering communication we have made it worse. We no longer no how to communicate in the real sense, as mechanisms like instant messaging and facebook have made to easy to communicate falsely. In my estimation they have so much distorted our way of thinking about communication that we no longer know what it means to truly communicate.
The premise of Benjamin’s essay is largely the idea that storytelling has lost its importance. I think this is to be expected with society’s advances (advances- ha!- oxymoron?). It is obvious that oral tradition will certainly become more and more marginalized as we have more options in regards to communication. However, I don’t think that storytelling will ever completely lose its sting. After all there will always be children, like the six that I babysit, who ask to hear stories.