Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader

In the storyteller the chronicler is preserved in changed form, secularized, as it were. Leskov is among those whose work displays this with particular clarity. Both the chronicler with his eschatological orientation and the storyteller with his profane outlook are so represented in his works that in a number of his stories it can hardly be decided whether the web in which they appear is the golden fabric of a religious view of the course of things, or the multicolored fabric of a worldly view.

(Walter Benjamin, "A Storyteller")

Two ideas in Jakobson's contribution to modern literary theory deserve special mention. One was his identfication of the rhetorical figures, metaphor and metonymy, as models for two fundamental ways of organizing discourse that can be traced in every kind of cultural production. ...

The other was his attempt to understand 'literariness'-to define in linguistic terms what makes a verbal message a work of art. This was a preoccupation of the Russian formalists from the inception of the movement, but in "'Linguistics and Poetics'", reprinted below, we find a lucid exposition of Jakobson's mature thought on the subject, enlivened and illuminated by a staggering range of illustration.

Language at any given time involves an established system and an evolution. At any given time, it is an institution in the present and a product of the past. At first sight, it looks very easy to distinguish between the system and its history, between what it is and what it was. In reality, the connexion between the two is so close that it is hard to separate them.
Would matters be simplified if one considered the ontogenesis of linguistic phenomena, beginning with a study of children's language, for example? No. It is quite illusory to believe that where language is concerned the problem of origins is any different from the problem of permanent conditions. There is no way out of the circle.

Most of Jakobson's published work cosists of highly technical articles on matters of grammar and phonology, expecially in Slavonic languages. But he was able to apply his immense learning and speculative intelligence to theoretical questions of universal interest and importance, and to incisive linguistic analysis of classic literary texts in English and French. The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, whose work gave such a powerful impetus to structuralism in the 1960s (see "'Incest and Myth'", section 40 in the 20th Century Literary Criticism), acknowledged his indebtedness to the linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson.

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. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. Leskov is a master at this (compare pieces like 'The Deception' and 'The White Eagle'). The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

(Walter Benjamin, "A Storyteller")

The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing. What can be handed on orally, the wealth of the epic, is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel. What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature -- the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella -- is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience -- his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, ...

(Walter Benjamin, A Storyteller)