“The Storyteller”
In the essays titled “The Storyteller” the model around whom Benjamin constructs his theories and analysis is Russian author Nikolai Leskov. Very early in the text, Benjamin calls upon a powerful metaphorical image to situate Leskov appropriately within his role:
“To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him. Viewed from a certain distance, the great, simple outlines which define the storyteller stand out in him, or rather, they become visible in him, just as in a rock a human head or an animal’s body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision.”
Translation
“The Task of the Translator” is Benjamin’s analysis of the difficulty of translating meaning as opposed to merely translating words. The focus of the translation must be on the language into which the original is being translated with the intent being to stay true to the meaning. He illustrates this abstraction through a metaphor to make it, paradoxically, more literal:
“Unlike the words of the original, it is not translatable, because the relationship between content and language is quite different in the original and the translation. While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds.”
Kafkaesque
The nightmarish twisting of the real into the lonely walks down the dystopian corridors of bureaucracy which make up the world of Franz Kafka’s fiction is particularly ripe source material for Benjamin’s talent at wielding the metaphorical image. In describing the sense of alienation that is stimulated by the ambiguous feeling of having lost or misplaced an element of one’s humanity, Benjamin boils down the central conceit of Kafka’s perspective into one finely tuned metaphorical image:
“Oblivion is the container from which the inexhaustible intermediate world in Kafka’s stories presses toward the light.”
The Act of Literary Creation
In his analysis of French poet Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin does some more boiling of abstraction and ambiguity down to an essential assertion. The topic here is even more expansive; he’s not just discussing the world in which a writer’s fiction inhabit, but the very system by which those worlds are brought into being. In reference to Baudelaire:
“He speaks of a duel in which the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright. This duel is the creative process itself.”
The Love of Books
The opening essay of the collection is not about any particular writer or literary theory or school of critical thought. It is an expression of the love of books of all kinds. Written during the process of moving his expansive personal library from one home to another as the result of less than amicable divorce, Benjamin writes loving of the love of books. More than just the love of books, but the love of acquiring them. It is a process of evolutionary transcendence:
“…not only books but also copies of books have their fates. And in this sense, the most important fate of a copy is its encounter with him, with his own collection. I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.”
