Of ladders and looms: Moving through Walter Benjamin’s ‘Storyteller’

The figure of the ladder: Rhyme and reason of ‘The Storyteller’

As I reflected on the ladder-like movement of the storyteller, and on how a narrated figure can ‘encounter himself’ on a higher level in the form of the narrating figure, I made a peculiar realization. The storyteller’s descent and ascent on the ladder of experience is mirrored by the structure of the essay. Though ‘The Storyteller’, like other pieces by Benjamin, seems to be a series of loosely related observations, one could organize the essay’s 19 parts as descending and ascending on a ladder. The pivot of the essay clearly occurs exactly halfway through in Part 10, when Benjamin makes the startling introduction of ‘the face of death’; death is the storyteller’s source of authority, and a modern avoidance of death parallels the avoidance of storytelling. If death is at the bottom of the ladder of experience as Benjamin suggests, then Part 10 can be seen as the tenth and bottom-most rung of the essay’s ladder. Parts 1 through 9 mark a descent to death, and Parts 11 through 19 the returning ascent. The essay thus traverses each thematic rung twice, once on the way down and once on the way up (see Figure 1). OPEN IN VIEWER

The top rung can be labeled ‘The Storyteller’, who is on the verge of disappearance in Part 1 but is eventually regained in Part 19. The next rung I call ‘Navigation’. Part 2 introduces the idea of the peripatetic storyteller who has the freedom to explore distant places and times, while Part 18 charts the storyteller’s navigation up and down the hierarchy of created things. Next comes ‘The Righteous Man’, Leskov’s archetype, introduced in Part 3 and recapitulated in Part 17 with a ‘maternal touch’. ‘Wisdom’ is next, which enters Part 4 as ‘counsel woven into the fabric of real life’; its vanishing in Part 4 is compensated by its return in Part 16 in the simple guise of the fairy tale. Parts 5 and 15 are strikingly complementary on the theme of ‘Isolation’ in modern writing and reading; the writer is isolated in Part 5, unable to give or take counsel, while the reader is isolated in Part 15, deprived of the writer’s companionship. Part 6 explores ‘Temporality’ in the form of fleeting information disseminated by news reports, while Part 14 draws on Lukács’ observation that the novel is ‘a struggle against the power of time’. In Part 7 ‘Memory’ is thematized through the remembrance of an ancient story, while in Part 13 the Muse of Memory produces ‘the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation’. Part 8 introduces ‘Weaving’, the craft that Benjamin takes as a crucial accompaniment to the listening of stories; Part 12 depicts Leskov himself as a weaver of both religious ‘golden fabric’ and profane ‘multicolored fabric’. The penultimate rung can be labeled ‘Routine’. In Part 9, the sustained effort of the craftsman can only be achieved through regularity and routine, while in Part 11, the routineness of death is shown to be at the root of storytelling.

Of all 10 themes I find ‘weaving’ to be the one that best encapsulates the kinetic stasis of ‘The Storyteller’. Benjamin adumbrates this theme, relating storytelling to weaving, in an essay that appeared four years earlier in 1932, ‘The Handkerchief’. There he first writes that storytelling is on the decline because ‘people have ceased to weave and spin’ while listening to stories’ (1999: 658). He makes this realization on a steamship voyage from Barcelona to Ibiza, listening to the story of the ship’s captain – here Benjamin’s maritime traveling exactly mirrors his storyteller/hero. (The captain proves to be the source of several inspirations that Benjamin takes as his own in ‘The Storyteller’, such as how ‘you can learn nothing from the papers’ because ‘they always want to explain everything to you’ (1999: 660). The boredom of sea travel gives Benjamin time to recognize how the art of both telling and listening to stories is declining because ‘there is no longer any place for boredom in our lives’ – boredom that weaving once provided.

Why is weaving, as opposed to any other craft, so singled out? It of course provides Benjamin with a sturdy metaphor for storytelling – weaving words, as it were. Despite the much-discussed commonality between ‘text’ and ‘textile’, Benjamin clearly does not mean to use weaving only metaphorically; he means to evoke the very tactile, corporeal image of the weaver working at a loom. The weaver perhaps more than any other artisan is a Benjaminian figure of constant motion in stasis. The loom moves rhythmically, combining warp and weft, as the weaver’s hands move over the work in silent communion with the loom. The rhythm of the loom does not just mark time but marks the painstakingly slow progress of building and embellishing a patterned textile.

The tactility of craftsmanship is essential to Benjamin – he revels in how a crafted object displays the subtle interaction of soul, eye, and hand (1968: 108). The imprint of the human hand is Benjamin’s mark of aura and authenticity; as he puts it in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, the aura associated with a utilitarian object is ‘the experience which has left traces of the practiced hand’ (Benjamin, 1968: 186). Similarly, in the craft of storytelling, ‘traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’ (1968: 92). Though the craft of weaving does not leave behind handprints as in pottery, there are other traces of authentic tactility. Benjamin alludes to this in an essay from 1933, ‘Short Shadows (II)’:

A word of Schuler’s has been preserved for us. [Schuler was a German intellectual who believed in magical cults and communion with the dead.] Every piece of knowledge, he said, contains a dash of nonsense, just as in ancient carpet patterns ‘it was always possible to find somewhere or other a minute deviation from the regular pattern’. This is the inconspicuous mark of authenticity which distinguishes it from every kind of standard product that has been mass produced. (1999: 699)

The practiced hand of the carpet-weaver leaves traces in imperfections, imperfections that would seem to have no place in the age of mechanical reproduction. Yet the aura of tactility lingers even today; international connoisseurs of carpets and textiles continue to prize the authentic traces of imperfect weaving.

Weaver as the archetypal storyteller

Let us return to the weaver as the archetypal storyteller’s archetypal listener/reteller. Michael Taussig notes that Benjamin’s freely traveling storyteller-as-artisan is apparently gendered male, ignoring the coerced migration of women traveling to work as servants (1993: 41). But the ideal listener of the storyteller, the weaver or spinner, is also gendered male: ‘When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself’ (Benjamin, 1968: 91). This seems particularly odd considering that weaving and spinning in Europe and elsewhere have traditionally been female professions. Are weaving women not properly receptive to storytelling? Perhaps instead Benjamin idealizes the listener as simultaneously male and female, a match for Leskov’s righteous man with ‘a maternal touch’ (1968: 104). The feminine tactility of storytelling’s ‘maternal touch’ is palpable in ‘Thought Figures’, where Benjamin writes:

The child is sick. His mother puts him to bed and sits down beside him. And then she begins to tell him stories. How are we to understand this? The answer dawned on me when N. told me about the strange healing powers of his wife’s hands. What he said about her hands was this. ‘Their movements are highly expressive. But it is not possible to describe their expression. It is as if they were telling a story.’ (1999: 724)

The woman’s hands weave the story.

Carpet weaving and Benjamin’s feminine hand

Though Benjamin elsewhere mentions Schuler’s observation that ‘in ancient carpet patterns it was always possible to find somewhere or other a minute deviation from the regular pattern’ (1999: 699), nothing in ‘The Storyteller’ suggests that he had carpet-workers in mind as his imagined weavers and spinners who carry on the storytelling tradition. But the resonances are striking. Not only does the weaving of Persian carpets fulfill Benjamin’s ideal storytelling ambience – the repetitive motion of craft forcing relaxation and even boredom – but weaving itself has been viewed historically as a kind of storytelling in Iran: storytelling not of voice or pen, but storytelling of the moving hand creating color and texture. The most obvious types of ‘story-weaving’ occur in the various regional traditions of pictorial rugs, in which human and animal forms inhabit the frame of the rug – textualizing the textile.

Picture rugs in their ‘high art’ are found in the intricate tales of word and picture woven into the silken rugs of Kashan, Isfahan, Tabriz and other aesthetic centers. This type of weaving – depicting scenes from folk tales and the classical poetry of Omar Khayyam, Hafez, and others – carries on the storytelling tradition that Benjamin romanticizes as ‘Oriental’, wherein each tale is linked to a web of others: ‘In each of them there is a Scheherazade who thinks of a fresh story whenever her tale comes to a stop’ (Benjamin, 1968: 98). Scheherazade, or Shahrzād in the original Persian, is the king’s wife in the 1001 Nights story-cycle who figures as both character and narrator. What better example of how a story’s protagonist can ‘encounter himself’ (or in this case herself) than in the figure of the storyteller (Benjamin, 1968: 109)?

But the link between woven character and weaving storyteller is even more explicit in the case of gabbeh rugs woven by the nomadic Qashqa’i tribe, where the storytelling craft is firmly in the hands of the women who weave. In village-based carpet production, a picture rug is painted as a ‘cartoon’ by a (male) designer, and the weavers then receive this design in long strips as they weave the rug, only seeing the entire design at the very end of the weaving process. ¹ In contrast to the piecework of village weavers, the women who create gabbeh rugs weave their own life stories and hence control the aesthetic production from conception to delivery. The metaphor of birth here is of course not accidental. The ‘natural history’ of the life cycle from birth to death in which storytelling is embedded (Benjamin, 1968: 94–5) is crucial to gabbeh-weaving.

In the summer of 2003 I encountered a stunning gabbeh that completely encapsulates the progression of ‘natural history’ – often episodic, fragmentary, and elliptical – at the center of storytelling. The gabbeh’s story, as is customary in this weaving style, begins at the bottom of the rug. ² It commences with a picture of a mother and newborn daughter. The next picture, a little farther up the rug, shows the daughter grown up, standing with her mother, but the daughter is in mourning, dressed in black. The final picture shows the mother and daughter alongside the daughter’s new husband. This rug, I learned, was first woven by a Qashqa’i woman while pregnant. She wove the first picture of her and her expected child, as she imagined her future to be. But the mother died in childbirth, and the rug was left unfinished. When the daughter grew up, she decided to finish the rug in her mother’s memory. In the second picture she wove herself in mourning, but showed what might have happened if her mother had stayed alive. For the final picture the daughter pictured herself in the future, just as her mother had done before her; the daughter sees herself betrothed to her future husband. Thus the daughter united her past and future histories by finishing her mother’s weaving. The tale of this gabbeh illustrates how the chain of storytelling is passed from generation to generation, taught like any craft. The mother even in death trains her daughter as an apprentice in story-weaving. We think again of Leskov’s righteous protagonists, each ‘suffused with the imago of his mother’ (Benjamin, 1968: 103); Leskov perpetuated his mother’s memory and the ‘maternal touch’ of storytelling through his characters.

Story-weaving a gabbeh is often compared to rocking a baby to sleep. The incessant movement of the women translating their lives on to the rugs is said to keep them from worrying about their husbands. In every way gabbehs – and their stories – are quintessentially familial products, predominantly woven for the sole use of the tribal kin group. The carpets tend to be thicker than most Persian rugs and are therefore ideal for migratory tribes on the hardened earth. It is also an object that historically has seldom been sold to ‘outsiders’. Gabbehs are meant to be passed down from mother to daughter, ensuring a continuous feminine biography throughout. This is an experience that is passed down from hand to hand, reflecting Benjamin’s idealized storyteller: ‘Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn’ (Benjamin, 1968: 84).

Gabbehs capture and recreate women’s stories past and future, experienced and imagined. Women exclusively story-weave gabbehs, often telling stories of bravery accomplished by their husbands, brothers, and fathers. A popular theme in recent years depicts the epic hero, the man, battling a voracious lion; such rugs have become treasured as commodities by merchants, where there is a market for such rugs internationally. The depictions of the husbands are at times revealing of the relationships in the family. Sometimes the husband is a hero, depicted larger than the lion or the bear that he is battling, or he has killed the game, all depicted exquisitely on the rug. But at other times the animals may appear larger than the man, indicating his lack of prowess.

Gabbehs can be a source of joy and sorrow, mirroring the lives of the women who tell their stories. Lois Beck relates one poignant incident involving a Qashqa’i weaver and her gabbeh:

The carpet had come to represent her distress and then her relief; she had woven talismans into it to aid her mother’s recovery. She had crafted the item with care, for she had expected it to be part of her dowry. As Borzu [her brother] and the two men haggled over the price and the method of payment, Zolaikha and her mother and sisters stood dumbfounded. They had never considered that Borzu might sell the carpet. One of the Persians told his young son to fold the carpet and put it in the car. Having difficulty securing loans and desperately needing cash for the migration, [Borzu] had borrowed money from this man earlier in the day on the stipulation that he would throw in a good carpet. On seeing it, the man said he would give him forty dollars. Borzu in essence gave away the carpet in order to get a cash loan. When Zolaikha and Zohreh went to collect water at a spring at the bottom of the gorge, they spotted the two Persians having a picnic with their families. There, under the feet of romping children, was Zolaikha’s carpet laid out with food and a samovar. The sisters put their arms around each other, and tears ran down Zolaikha’s face. (Beck 1991: 188)

This story details a loss, the loss of the story. If a gabbeh contains the traces of the weaver/storyteller, with the loss of the gabbeh from its true home there is the break of the continuation of the story. The need for currency replaces the art of storytelling. The rug, having been taken from the hands of the weaver, no longer is bounded by the biography of the woman and the story she has told. There is a residue of her work, but no longer in this case is the story told and retold. The Benjaminian aura is lost, as the woven object is exiled from the act of weaving. Zolaikha views from a distance her story separating from her, losing her tale forever. But the disintegration of the bonds between story-weaver and woven-story does not mark an inexorable path of decline; in the emblematic loss of aura, Benjamin talks of finding ‘a new beauty in what is vanishing’ (Benjamin, 1968: 87).

Benjamin’s nostalgia for the loss of the storyteller’s aura also tinges the movement of the gabbeh from the circulation of the nomadic Qashqa’i into the circulation of local and global commodity markets. It is a nostalgia reiterated and retold elsewhere, by Marx as capitalism’s alienation of the commodity from labor, and by Mauss as the transformation of ‘immovable’ objects anchored in the household into ‘movable’ objects freely circulating in trade. When the story is so palpably objectified as a woven rug, Benjamin’s eulogy for the loss of storytelling also becomes a eulogy for the loss of the object in commoditization. Modernity, or better yet modern economic need, has taken over the art of story-weaving, separating the story-weaver from her communicable object, cutting short the process of the gabbeh to continue telling and retelling its story. At the point of sale the gabbeh, l’object de raconteur, exists as commodity. The story of the gabbeh, having never been told by the story-weaver to the new owner, irrevocably alters the relationship between the gabbeh, a weaver like Zoliakha, and the new owners.

Where do we look for the ‘new beauty in what is vanishing?’ The rich irony of the gabbeh’s transfiguration into a global commodity is that traces of irretrievable ‘authenticity’ become paramount to the connoisseurship of story rugs. Connoisseurs love, or perhaps need to hear, a story that stamps the gabbeh in their mind and soul with its importance and permanence in the life of those who weave. Further establishing nomadic story-weaving as the purview of a rarefied international elite, an Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, produced an avant-garde film called Gabbeh, which circulated in art-houses worldwide in 1997. Perhaps it is true that storytelling ‘is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship’ (Benjamin, 1968: 91). But in this unraveling, the strands of storytelling spin outwards in unforeseen directions.

Genealogy of ‘The Storyteller’

My reading of ‘The Storyteller’ converges on two internal motions propelling the essay: the storyteller’s ascent and descent on the 10-rung ladder, and the weaving and spinning of the listener/reteller of the story. I see Benjamin tracing both of these motions as part of his ongoing effort to achieve ‘profane illumination’. This becomes clear if we attempt to reconstruct something of the genealogy of ‘The Storyteller’ by unearthing the sources wherein Benjamin sought illumination, both sacred and profane, in the years leading up to the essay’s 1936 publication in the exile magazine Orient und Occident.

One sacred source was undoubtedly the teachings of the Kabbala, transmitted in part by his close friend Gershom Scholem. Once the ladder-like structure of ‘The Storyteller’ reveals itself, the essay’s Kabbalistic underpinnings seem undeniable. As I discovered only after the figure of the ladder with 10 rungs flashed into my mind, this image is in fact a common one in Kabbalistic writings, linked to the sephiroth, the 10 emanations through which God manifests himself. For instance, Johannes Reuchlin, who introduced the study of Hebrew to Germany, wrote in his 1517 treatise De Arte Cabbalistica:

The two intervals between the three regions, sense and judgment, are doubled accordingly as they are higher or lower, and each can be reduced to two end points. There remain to be found the ten rungs of the ladder on which we climb to know all truth, be it of the senses or of knowledge, or of faith; from bottom to top we climb. (1983: 51)

In a similar way Martin Buber (1995) entitled his collection of Hasidic aphorisms Ten Rungs. Writings on the Sephiroth. It is full of figures that resonate in ‘The Storyteller’: wisdom, the hermaphrodite, the maternal aspect of God, the righteous one. The tenth sephira, Malkuth, is sometimes known as the Gate of Death.

If the Kabbala at least indirectly sculpted the essay’s ladder imagery, then a more profane source of illumination helps to explain the centrality of weaving and spinning: Benjamin’s ornamental visions during his drug experiments (1927–34). Benjamin began experimenting with hashish in 1927 and shortly thereafter conducted a series of scientific protocols under the supervision of doctors, taking fixed doses of hashish, and also occasionally opium and mescaline. He recorded his sensations during the experience of Rausch (intoxication or rush), and planned to write a book based on these notes (Benjamin, 1972; Witte, 1991: 130–2). As with his studies on the flâneur and the urban crowd, Benjamin looks to Baudelaire, that ‘connoisseur of narcotics’, as his model (1968: 56). But Benjamin faults Baudelaire for overlooking ‘the charm displayed by addicts under the influence of drugs’: ‘Commodities derive the same effect from the crowd that surges around and intoxicates them’ (1968: 56). Similarly, the flâneur who disappears into the crowd shares in this commodity-like intoxication: ‘He is not aware of this special situation, but this does not diminish its effect on him and it permeates him blissfully like a narcotic that can compensate him for many humiliations’ (1968: 55).

Certainly this trope of intoxication could be extended to the storyteller’s listener who, primed by the repetition and boredom of work, becomes engulfed in the flow of the story. Indeed, if we read ‘The Storyteller’ alongside ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ and ‘Hashish in Marseilles’, we can see a three-way analogy at work: the weaving listener lost in the reverie of the story, the flâneur lost in the reverie of the Parisian crowd, and the hashish smoker lost in the reverie of Rausch. In all three cases, the intoxicated subject is overcome by the trance-like effects of repetition and boredom, allowing for a higher level of illumination. This monotonous and rhythmic repetition, as ‘The Storyteller’ suggests, is emblematized by the weaver working at her loom.

It is therefore not entirely surprising that Benjamin’s narcotic writings erupt again and again with visual and rhythmic impressions of weaving, knitting, spinning and winding. In ‘Hashish in Marseilles’, the pleasure of Rausch is likened to the ‘rhythmical bliss’ of unraveling Ariadne’s thread:

To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne’s thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread. And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of trance, as to that of creation. We go forward; but in so doing we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread. The certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein – is that not the joy of all productivity, at least in prose? And under hashish we are enraptured prose-beings in the highest power. (Benjamin, 1986)

In Benjamin’s notes on the drug experiments, the coiled skein of Ariadne’s thread explodes into baroque visions of embroidered finery. After smoking hashish in March 1930, Benjamin wrote, ‘I was not very attentive to what Egon [Wissing] said because my hearing immediately converted his words into the perception of colorful, metallic glitter which coalesced in patterns. I made this understandable to him by comparing it to the knitting patterns which we loved as the beautiful colored plates of ‘Herzblättchens Zeitvertreib’ [Darling's Diversions] when we were children’ (Benjamin, 1997: Protocol V). During an experiment with opium in 1932 in Ibiza, he found the primary experience of Rausch to be the penetration of ‘that hidden, generally inaccessible world of surfaces constituting the ornament’:

[W]ith the deepest pleasure we playfully exhaust those experiences of the ornament which childhood and fever made us capable of observing. … It is highly characteristic of the reverie that it tends to present before the [opium] smoker objects – particularly small ones – in series. The endless successions, in which the same contrivances, little animals or plant forms suddenly surface in front of the person over and over again, depict, so to speak, misshapen, barely formed sketches of a primitive ornament. (Benjamin, 1996: 57–61)

These visions of weaving, knitting and embroidered ornament make a dramatic return in the protocol of Benjamin’s experiment with mescaline on 22 May 1934. According to his doctor, Fritz Fränkel, as Benjamin descends into Rausch he focuses on maternal images of caressing, hemming and combing, then ‘with eyes shut tight’ he ‘sees something ornamental before him, which is described as ornamentation fine as hair’. Benjamin’s own laconic notes on the experiment record his ornamental phantasms:

Essence of the Mother: To undo what's been done. To cleanse one’s life in the stream of time.

Feminine Work: hemming knotting braiding weaving …

Hemming – the hemming of the child, dalliance: they pull the fringe from personal experiences, braid them together. Therefore the child dallies. ‘Dilatoriness’ – one could call this the best part of the feeling of happiness. First Faust experiences shuddering with the Mothers, then comes the moment when he becomes dilatory. In the midst of his masculine work, the moment surprises him. At that moment, the Mothers fetch him home.

Two kinds of fabric: vegetable, animal. Tufts of hair, tufts of plants. The secret of hair: on the borderline between plant and animal …

Ornaments delicate as a hair: These patterns, too, come from the world of weaving. (Benjamin, 1997: Protocol XI)

Benjamin’s Rausch illuminations – knitted patterns from children’s colored plates, the mother hemming the garment of the dallying child, delicate hair-like fringes from the world of weaving – are clearly of a piece with the figures of maternal tactility in ‘The Storyteller’. Through Rausch Benjamin seeks to recapture ‘those experiences of the ornament which childhood and fever made us capable of observing’, reminding us again of the sick child caressed by his mother’s healing stories in ‘Thought Figures’. The (masculine) child through feverish hallucination conjures the (feminine) world of ornament, which he takes joy in unraveling like Ariadne’s thread, only to be hemmed and woven again by the curative maternal touch. Likewise storytelling, which is in danger of unraveling, needs to be hemmed in by the mother’s careful hand.

The Kabbalistic ladder and the narcotic dreamworld of weaving and spinning are uncanny images that Benjamin the ‘enraptured prose-being’ stitches together in the warp and weft of ‘The Storyteller’. Benjamin may have sought inspiration in the revelations of the Kabbala, but unlike Scholem felt that any ‘sacred illumination’ had to be translatable into a ‘profane illumination’. In ‘One-Way Street’ he reflects that the Rausch of mind-altering drugs can at least supply an initiatory exercise in profane illumination:

These experiences are by no means limited to dreams, hours of hashish eating or opium smoking. It is a cardinal error to believe that, of ‘surrealist experiences,’ we know only the religious ecstasies or the ecstasies of drugs. … But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration to which hashish, opium or whatever else can give a preliminary lesson. (Benjamin, 1986: 227)

His goal in ‘The Storyteller’, then, is to combine his divine and earthly enlightenments, just as Leskov the secularized chronicler mixed ‘the golden fabric of a religious view of the course of things’ and ‘the multicolored fabric of a worldly view’ (Benjamin, 1968: 96). Benjamin encourages us to search for the ‘anthropological inspiration’ along the rungs of the ladder of experience and in the interstices of life’s interwoven patterns.