Introduction: The Short Story and the Postcolonial

Abstract

In ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), his meditation upon the death of orality, Walter Benjamin writes:

We have witnessed the evolution of the ‘short story’, which has removed itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings. (92)

For Benjamin, the short story exemplifies the cultural tendency for abbreviation, a symptom of the economic, bureaucratic and technological organization of society that ‘quite gradually’ has ‘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’ (86). Benjamin’s melancholic diagnosis, ‘Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell’ (93), seeks to recover those trace elements of the oral tradition that he finds, especially, in the work of Nikolai Leskov but also J.P. Hebel, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe. Benjamin is unclear as to exactly when the oral tradition began to disappear — although its demise seems to coincide with the development of print culture — and he tends to mythologize the figure of the storyteller as an epic bard for whom ‘counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom’ (86).