Benjamin on Pain and Storytelling

The chapter focuses on Walter Benjamin’s conception of physical pain and its important relationship to language and expression, especially to storytelling. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Benjamin’s early texts on pain (the Trauerspiel book and his “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem”) and then moves to close readings of sections from Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Thought Figures, Ibizan Sequence and The Storyteller (all from the 1930s). I argue that for Benjamin, the content of the story is not as important as the practice of story-telling itself, to which he returns in different texts and through usually feminine figures. The chapter also discusses one of the central images Benjamin uses to describe storytelling: that of water (rivers, sea, waves, etc.) and his metaphor for pain as the “staudamm”, a dam, blocking the flow of language. Even though the relationship between pain and linguistic expression seems at first to be contradictory, for Benjamin, pain’s self-definition is inherently dependent upon the establishment of its relation to expression. In Benjamin’s conceptualization of pain, relief or healing is achieved when language has the upper hand, when its flow is powerful enough to tear down the opaque, blocked inexpressibility of pain.