In his essay on Nikolai Leskov, Walter Benjamin observes, almost in passing, that the novel inevitably brings about the end or storytelling. Like many of Benjamin's paradoxes, this insight is very unsettling to the received idea - oh dear no, the novel doesn't tell a story after all. Benjamin's reasoning runs thus: the story (the only current example would be the dirty joke, I imagine) has no identifiable single author and is transmitted face to face. It rises from the common anonymous stock of oral recitation and intimate social exchanges. Unlike the novel, it is not immutably fixed in form: nor is it a negotiable commodity. Nor, to add to Benjamin's distinction, does the story go round with a minatory © attached to it as does every novel.

LRB 2 October 1980 | PDF Download