One of the old guard

“Was it not noticeable”, Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936 in his essay “Der Erzähler” (“The Storyteller”), that men returned from the battlefields of the First World War “not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?” German has two words for “experience”: Erfahrung, experience accrued over time and the wisdom that arises from it; and Erlebnis, the thrills and spills of life in the raw. According to Benjamin, Erlebnis was what “poured” out in a “flood” of books appearing some ten years after the war. But Erfahrung was attenuated and its impoverishment entailed another decline: that of storytelling. “Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly”, Benjamin lamented. In place of the tale, there had evolved the “short story”, which no longer permitted “that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers” by which “the perfect narrative is…