(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Benjamin was a German philosopher and critic.
Benjamin’s essay analysing Goethe’s novel, Elective Affinities, demonstrated his idiosyncratic approach to reading and criticism. The novel, about the complex relationships of an aristocratic couple, and two people they invite to live with them, resembled the love quadrangle in which Benjamin was involved at the time. This featured a married Benjamin—whose wife was openly in a relationship with his school friend, Erich Schon—and a sculptor who was the subject of Benjamin’s unrequited love and also loved Schon (Eilenberger 2020, 143). In reading the novel Benjamin immediately had an interest in better understanding his own situation—he read actively due to being affected by the content, but also because he decided to use the text as an impetus for a critique of bourgeois marriage, and therefore the core of bourgeois society.
That is, he read using his personal circumstances, the fictional framework of the novel, and a desire to meditate and theorise on the problems that arose, to produce an essay which was ostensibly an interpretative criticism, but was actually about everything. It was “an exercise in myth-busting, which reveals all the hidden forces and dynamics that actually hold a modern bourgeois society together, with all its constituent promises of freedom and self-involvement” (p. 144). From this, “he answers the question of how the supposedly free and self-determining subject is to liberate himself from the subtly pernicious effects of these forces and ideas and thus lead a life in which a true and fulfilling marriage might be possible” (ibid.).
Benjamin was able to use the novel in this way by using “allegory and allegorical reading as a tool in a truth-oriented critique of the state of his age”; he couldn’t “express the truth in language in the cultural context to which he is irrevocably confined, but he [could] indicate it” (p. 221). This novel was not merely a springboard for theorising; it provided a language in which he could work. Incidentally, this is also how he often wrote: in One-Way Street he presented “thought-pictures” and “recorded situations” which invited his reader “to produce very different, ideally even mutually exclusive, interpretations” (pp. 278–9).
Certainly, most readers don’t have such lofty aims or even attempt to write criticism of what they read. But Benjamin shows that if we read to answer questions about our own lives, not only is our reading far more active, but that through meditating on the experience we may better understand ourselves and others. By considering the specifics of our personal dilemmas, how these map on to a fictional world, then what this means for our peers and our society, we can potentially read our way to broad, creative insights.
Benjamin’s methodology for using books involved this habit of turning “Whatever he did, and whatever he would do, whatever befell him” into a theory, which ennobled it: “revealing it to have been truly relevant and consequential, even a potentially world-saving mode of experience” (p. 102). This is both narcissistic and dazzlingly energetic and creative. It’s a way of reading that, beginning from a self-interested perspective, forces deep engagement with the text, exercises all of our faculties, and potentially concludes in providing succour for others.
He explains this power of narrative by considering the nature of storytelling (Benjamin 2015, 87). Storytelling is the communication of experience whereby the storyteller combines their experiences with those passed down through the oral tradition, to provide counsel for their audience. This counsel is “less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding” (p. 86). This is clearly how he experienced Goethe’s novel: it couldn’t answer his specific questions directly, but it could guide him toward continuing the narrative, to ask what comes next. Further, even if Goethe had directly addressed Benjamin’s situation, it still wouldn’t have yielded wisdom for Benjamin, because wisdom comes from us weaving counsel into “the fabric of real life” (ibid.).
Communicated experience is distinct from written information in that information is expected to seem “understandable in itself”, “to sound plausible”, whereas the stories of old “borrowed from the miraculous” (p. 88). Information may sound more exact, but is not necessarily more intelligent than the communicated experience. When a newspaper, say, informs of us an event, it “comes to us…shot through with explanation” (p. 89). Non-fiction and formal writing exemplifies the same principle. Novels tend to force on us “the psychological connection of the events” (ibid.). Texts that polish out all the ambiguity and mystery from what they convey write out their audience: the reader is expected to merely receive. A story, however, demands our interpretation. It is “half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it” (ibid.).
We gain wisdom from stories because we’re forced to supply the psychological explanations in a way that makes sense to us (ibid.). They resonate with us because of how they relate to our lives. The timeliness and diverse interpretations of classic, culture-defining wisdom literature, be it scripture and spiritual writing, epic poetry, fables, or fairy tales, still bears this out (p. 101).
These stories are characterised by their enduring through retelling (pp. 91–2). Retelling is not an act of replication, but involves this blending and personalising of others’ experiences with ours in such a way that our telling captures something of us. Listening to stories, therefore, is a particularly active process because we attend to the details that matter to us in order to retell our version. We amplify the tale through transformation. If a story is impossible for us to recall exactly—because of its length perhaps—we must concentrate on the most salient details, actively forgetting the rest. Through this assimilation they become memorable to us (p. 90).
But to become wiser in this way requires us to be bored. Boredom is the “apogee of mental relaxation” required for deep assimilation, the “gift of listening” (pp. 90–1):
The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. 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.
The context for this deep mediation on storytelling was Benjamin’s consideration of the novels and short stories of Nikolai Leskov—confirming the productivity of his methodology, and bringing us back to where we began.
To use books like Benjamin did, we must select those which permit creative, allegorical readings and address our interests and concerns. With the language and imagery they provide, we can view the world in a different way. We can explore how their message can be generalised—how does the story continue? While reading we can ask ourselves how we’d retell this story: how can we share the sentiment without reducing it to mere information? Reading in this way, in a self-forgetting state, filtering the events through our own experiences, makes the story meaningful, memorable, and inspiring.