The first half of The Storyteller, concerns itself with the decline of storytelling and our ability to communicate experience in relation to the rise of the ‘information age’, an era marked by the prolific and instantaneous dissemination of information and devaluation of traditional creative impetuses. Benjamin laments the diminishing legitimacy of individual (which can be understood as encapsulating many lives by the transitive property of storytelling) experience, though it was an inevitable outcome: “The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out… It is only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.” (87) This is true, the authority that experience once had is being dismantled quite rapidly; manifested in my generation’s notorious lack of filial piety, obsession with the cutting-edge, in popular art and culture (it is very popular to play with the fallibility of our experience/perception: The Matrix, Inception, omnipresent magical-realist literature, anything in a modern art museum) and a completely unverifiable personal observation of mine: a yearning in our culture for authenticity, with the implication being that everybody around us a phony, their experiences being assumed invalid (this is an undeveloped thought, just putting it out there). Unfortunately, Benjamin fails to point out a crucial point: This a good thing. The farther away humanity can get from the human experience, the better. Every person’s individual experience is devalued as the collective experience reveals how flawed the individual experience has been all along. These are all the clickbait studies that pop up on one’s facebook feed about how you’re brain is tricking you, 7 statistics that will change the way you see the world, 5 ways everything you’ve ever known was a lie, the white-gold dress controversy, the prevalence of reactionary histories that always endeavor to prove that the way we’ve been recording and interpreting events has been inclusive or otherwise flawed, etc. It’s all around us, it is now known that any and every single person is completely clueless, beholden to an impulsive, subversive brain acting on input from inaccurate sensory organs. “…the perfect narrative is revealed through layers of a variety of retellings.” (93) Hopefully, we can understand that this is totally incorrect. From the very first telling, from the initial creation of a narrative, we have begun burying the truth of the matter and piling on more dirt will not bring us any closer.

Benjamin also points out that stories are remarkable in their capability for perpetual rejuvenation as opposed to information which has only transient use: “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) A stories’ relevance is elongated by each interpretation, but the text is dated (understandably so) in it’s handling of information. Yes, the nature of information is transient and insubstantial, but that becomes a moot point when it is constantly generated. The images on a computer screen are not projected, they are not being filtered through lenses or slides or film, they are being created instantaneously and unceasingly. The image is not formed by discrete units, it is just our perception of a continuum. Similarly, information in the 21st century is being updated, refreshed, populated, generated and re-generated, ad infinitum. The internet’s perpetual renewal of information is essentially what Benjamin admires about stories, but has the added dimension of not being bound to a single or discrete narrator.