The Storyteller and the Pattern Matcher

Walter Benjamin published 'The Storyteller' in 1936, mourning a figure he believed was already vanishing. The storyteller, as Benjamin described him, was not merely a person who told stories. He was a person whose authority to tell stories derived from experience — from having been somewhere, having done something, having survived something, and transmitting the knowledge gained through survival in the form of narrative. The storyteller's authority was somatic. It lived in the body that had traveled, worked, suffered, and returned. The story was not information. It was the residue of a life that had been lived in a particular way.