Alexander Stern at The Hedgehog Review:
But the problem with advice is not conceptual. Atwood’s disappointed acolytes were hoping not for a kind of guidance that is analytically impossible but for one that is merely in severe decline.
The German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” nominally about the Russian short-story writer Nikolai Leskov, offers a historical reason for this decline: “the communicability of experience is decreasing.” Benjamin tries to get at this shift by way of the decline of storytelling. Storytellers like Leskov, Franz Kafka, and Edgar Allan Poe write in a way that approximates the oral tradition. Their stories are still “woven into the fabric of real life,” and they contain, “openly or covertly, something useful,” whether it is moral, practical, or proverbial. Benjamin gives an example of a story from Herodotus about the Egyptian king Psammenitus, who is defeated and captured by the Persians and forced to watch as his son and daughter are marched toward death or enslavement as part of the Persian victory procession. Psammenitus is unmoved, “his eyes fixed on the ground,” until he recognizes among the prisoners one of his servants—“an old, impoverished man.” Only then does “he beat his fists against his head and [give] all the signs of deepest mourning.”
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