Profound Silences

I’ve been thinking deeply about the following passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”:

The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.

One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible. With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

Walter Benjamin, being a Eurocentric writer, cites the aftermath of the First World War as the moment when the “decline” of storytelling first became apparent, but the First World War was only the moment when this process became apparent on the European continent. The “decline” of storytelling became apparent elsewhere in the world when modern European colonialism and imperialism accomplished elsewhere what the First World War would only later accomplish on the European continent. Especially for the colonized but also for the colonizer, experiences of modern European colonialism and imperialism were life altering in a manner akin to the manner in which the experiences of the “front generation” were life altering.

Consider the experiences of the 5.5 million indigenous peoples of the New World who witnessed the deaths of 55 million of their kin due to violence and the intentional spread of disease by European colonizers between 1492 and 1600. Consider the 12.5 million Africans who experienced the Middle Passage, two million of whom died en route, then recall that another two to five million captured Africans died before ever making it onto a slave ship, then go a step further and consider that every African dead and disappeared in order to supply colonizers with chattel was taken from a community in Africa, leaving a void behind them. Consider the experiences of the starving peoples of the tropics who clung to life while 30-60 million of their kin died of disease and hunger while being forcibly incorporated into a European centered global economy during the Late Victorian Holocausts. Consider the experiences of the 10 million people of the Congo who watched while an equal number of their kin, another 10 million, died under the genocidal, grasping, and rapacious reign of the Belgian King Leopold. Consider that all of this does not even begin to exhaust the horrors that modern European colonialism and imperialism visited upon our planet and her peoples, and then go one step further: recognize that all of the survivors of colonialism and imperialism emerged from so many horrors having “grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience.”

There is no making sense of our present era without making sense of the silences of all those who survived the horrors of modern European colonialism and imperialism only to find themselves poorer in communicable experiences. 

Going further, there is no making sense of our present era without making sense of the fact that the flood of books that have been published about modern European colonialism and imperialism contain so little of the experience that goes from mouth to mouth. 

What’s more, there is no making sense of our present era without making sense of the fact that those in power today do not want anyone to make sense of our present era. 

Indeed, so much of the senseless sound and fury of our era is part and parcel of the ceaseless endeavors undertaken by those in power to undermine and break the silences of all those who survived the horrors of modern European colonialism and imperialism. Those in power feel threatened by these silences because these silences say more than words could ever possibly say and, therefore, those in power are desperate to undermine these silences with so many senseless words.

Despite all of this, returning to the earlier quoted passage, I find that I am in profound disagreement with Walter Benjamin. The art of storytelling hasn’t come to an end but, rather, it has been radically transformed. 

Walter Benjamin was wrong in thinking that the art of storytelling is primarily about communicating experiences. As I see it, the art of storytelling has always also been about framing silences that gesture at experiences that cannot be communicated. Indeed, all the horrors of modern European colonialism and imperialism have, above all else, demanded that we radically shift the balance of the art of storytelling: storytelling after such horrors becomes less and less about communicating experiences and more and more about framing silences that gesture at indescribable experiences of profound horrors. 

If Walter Benjamin had been able to recognize this, his essay would have been less about the demise of the storyteller and more about the storyteller’s increasing struggle to (re-)create and frame moments of silence, because any and every story that enables us to make sense of modern European colonialism and imperialism must feature an increasing number of indescribable horrors.

Having said this much, I shall stop here, and leave you to ponder in silence how little I have said…