A great storyteller will always be rooted in the people, primarily among craftsmen. But just as the artisan class encompassed the worlds of peasants, sailors, and city dwellers in the various stages of their economic and technical developments, there is a great divergence of concepts in which their experiences are reflected.
— Walter Benjamin[1]
The sort of storytelling that Benjamin is addressing in the citation above is genuine storytelling, storytelling as the crafting of carefully conceived and executed works of fiction. Such were the stories of Nikolai Leskov, the great 19thcentury Russian novelist and short-story writer, in an essay about whom Benjamin, the great 20th century German-Jewish cultural-critic and essayist, crafted the above remarks. The sort of storyteller at issue is someone who creates just such fictions.
In September 1940, Benjamin himself committed suicide in Catalonia by taking an overdose of morphine tablets. He was driven to take such action when all his efforts to escape from the Nazi terror that by then dominated Western Europe were blocked. He preferred killing himself to letting the Nazis kill him.
The Nazis were also storytellers. They told many stories. However, those stories were of a very different kind from the stories told by creators of fiction such as Nikolai Leskov. Such storytellers as the Nazis and all others who lay claim to authority are not “rooted in the people” at all, nor do such coercive storytellers occur “primarily among craftsmen,” to use Benjamin’s own phrases. Rather, those who tell the sort so stories the Nazis told root themselves in the sheer claim to coercive power, and their storytelling is really no more than the telling of lies to hide their total lack of true authority itself. Their manner of storytelling is thoroughly disingenuous, and their stories are no more than lies.
Nikolai Leskov, 1894 portrait by V. Sorov
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In his 1989 novel Affliction, the creative storyteller Russell Banks has his own imaginary narrator draw a distinction between “imagining” and “making up.” [2] I characterize that distinction as drawn in that work of fiction in my non-fiction book The Irrelevance of Power as follows:
“Making up” is telling stories in the sense of fibs and prevarications. “Imagining” is telling stories in the sense of writing fiction. The former is a matter of machinations and manipulations; the latter is a matter of truth and art.
Imagining is creating fictions. In the deepest etymological sense of the two words taken together, “creating fictions” means giving shape to, forming or building, drawing forth creatively. In contrast, making up is fabricating — camouflaging in order to deceive[…].[3]
Creating imaginative works of fiction is itself a craft, a craft of the highest order. In contrast, making up manipulative lies is no craft at all. It is just crafty.
Russell Banks in 2011
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Thinking is required in crafting any genuine craft-work at all, most definitely including works of fiction. Indeed, thinking itself is the very highest of all high crafts. Martin Heidegger, who was a master teacher as well as a master thinker, teaches us that about thinking in many passages of his own works, including the following passage, which everyone should read with care (a not inappropriate word to use when thinking of Heidegger):
It may well be that thinking is just the same as building a shrine. In any case, it is a hand-work. The hand has a meaning of its own. [. . .] But the essence of the hand can never be clearly defined as a mere bodily organ for grasping. After all, an ape also has organs for grasping, but he has no hand. [. . .] Only an entity that speaks, i.e., thinks, can have hands, and in having them accomplish works of the hand.
The work of the hand is much richer than we commonly imagine. The hand doesn’t just grab and catch, push and pull. The hand extends itself to and embraces — not just things, but also the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand comports itself. The hand signifies, presumably because the human being as such is a sign. The hands fold when this gesture is intended to convey great simplicity. Hands fold themselves together, enfolding all that is human in one great fold. All this is the hand, and authentic hand-work. [. . .] And the gestures of the hand everywhere go through language, and indeed precisely then when a person speaks by keeping silent. For only insofar as humans speak do they think; not the reverse[…]. Every movement of the hand in each of its works carries itself through the element, and comports itself in the element, of thinking. All work of the hand is based in thinking. That is why thinking itself, wherever it may occur, is the simplest — and therefore the most difficult — of all human hand-work.
— Martin Heidegger[4]
[1] Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in The Storyteller Essays, translated by Tess Lewis (New York: New York Review Books, 2019), p. 66.
[2] Russell Banks, Affliction (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 47.
[3] Frank Seeburger, The Irrelevance of Power (San Jose, CA: Juxtapositions Publications, 2020), p. 155. (Copies of this book are available in the “Store” at the top of this blogsite.)
[4] Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (Gesamtausgabe 8—Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), pp. 18-19, in my own interpretive, inclusive translation.