“
A new form of communication has arisen with the rise of the press (read: mass-media); this new form is information. Information is antithetical to the story. Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation. It is left up to the reader to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”
—
The Gaming Philosopher: Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler” (The Storyteller). Found this branching off some stuff on Anna’s tumblr.
There’s a lot of interesting things about this passage, written in the ’20s (fuck, almost 100 years ago!) but one of them is how we are still poor in noteworthy stories, but not for the reasons that Benjamin outlines, because the circumstances he longed for have certainly come to pass (e.g., you are reading this in a tumblr feed of random ephemera)
If explanation was the thing that suppressed narratives, it’s not clear what it is that produces them. With that, heading to sleep, where none of this matters anyway.
