Critical and literary method has not caught up with these new insights into the complexity of storytelling. Particular attention has been devoted to the "storytelling situation," to the manner in which it deviates from the implicit paradigm derived from Propp's Morphology, which may be imagined as a parent reading to a child from Grimm's Fairy Tales. The irony of Benjamin's death knell for the storyteller is that it sounded the same year, 1936, in which Faulkner demonstrated that storytelling could assume the novelistic burden of La Comédie Humaine, creating in Absalom! Absalom! Quentin and Shreve, "both thinking as one, the voice which happened to be speaking the thought only the thinking become audible, vocal the two of them creating between them, out of rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere." More recently, contemporary writers and critics exploring the resources of various oral traditions have discovered forms of storytelling that bear little resemblance to the already written stories of the early "folklore" collectors. 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. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant.
The difficulty is that even dissident modern critics, such as Walter Benjamin, who lament the course of history-social, economic, and aesthetic-view the story as somehow out of place in modern culture: Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. With the loosening of the hegemony of New Criticism, we have come to understand that the very notion of the story as an elementary, chronological, closed, rigidly formal genre is a product of the discourse that hails the rise of the "non-narrative" modern novel. The Hegemony of New Critical Modernism Walter Benjamin: The Storyteller
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