In a column for The Point magazine, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, comes out against advice. She makes her case using an anecdote involving the novelist Margaret Atwood. Asked about her advice for a group of aspiring writers, Atwood is stumped and ends up offering little more than bromides encouraging them to write every day and try not to be inhibited. Callard excuses Atwood’s banality, blaming it on the fundamental incoherence of the thing she was asked to produce.
Advice, for Callard, occupies nebulous terrain between what she terms “instructions” and “coaching.” “You give someone instructions,” she writes, “as to how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to some...further goal,” whereas “coaching...effects in someone a transformative orientation towards something of intrinsic value: an athletic or intellectual or even social triumph.” The problem with advice, according to Callard, is that it tries to reduce and condense the time-intensive, personal work of coaching into instructions:
The young person is not approaching Atwood for instructions on how to operate Microsoft Word, nor is she making the unreasonable demand that Atwood become her writing coach. She wants the kind of value she would get from the second, but she wants it given to her in the manner of the first. But there is no there there.
Atwood, Callard writes, might tell a story about her own development as an author, but those particulars would not amount to anything like universal wisdom a young writer could integrate into her own life. “The moral of every great person’s story,” Callard writes, “seems to be that they were not trying to retell another’s.” Asked for a kind of guidance that doesn’t exist, Atwood can only provide platitudes that someone with no writing experience could produce.
Callard is certainly right to bemoan the tendencies to seek instrumental solutions to existential problems and to treat the rich and famous as if they’ve cracked some code they can simply share with their fans. The Internet is filled with dubious life hacks and opportunistic lifestyle gurus like Jordan Peterson and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Yet, Callard sees the problem as one with the analytic category of advice itself, and she rather hastily rejects it outright. But the problem with advice is not conceptual. Atwood’s disappointed acolytes were hoping not for a kind of guidance that is analytically impossible but for one that is merely in severe decline.
The German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” nominally about the Russian short-story writer Nikolai Leskov, offers a historical reason for this decline: “the communicability of experience is decreasing.” Benjamin tries to get at this shift by way of the decline of storytelling. Storytellers like Leskov, Franz Kafka, and Edgar Allan Poe write in a way that approximates the oral tradition. Their stories are still “woven into the fabric of real life,” and they contain, “openly or covertly, something useful,” whether it is moral, practical, or proverbial. Benjamin gives an example of a story from Herodotus about the Egyptian king Psammenitus, who is defeated and captured by the Persians and forced to watch as his son and daughter are marched toward death or enslavement as part of the Persian victory procession. Psammenitus is unmoved, “his eyes fixed on the ground,” until he recognizes among the prisoners one of his servants—“an old, impoverished man.” Only then does “he beat his fists against his head and [give] all the signs of deepest mourning.”
Benjamin contrasts this kind of storytelling, which is open-ended, puzzling, and thought-provoking, with the novel, which he calls “the earliest indication of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling.” The novel depends on the technology of the book, which allows narrative to detach itself from the oral tradition. It eventually becomes the refuge of an individual sealed off from society and tradition. The main character of the novel is “the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel and can give none.” Benjamin cites the first great novel, Don Quixote, which exhibits an explicit lack of counsel: “the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest men...contain not one scintilla of wisdom.”
The heroes of great novels—think also of Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger or Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—tend to struggle, whether comically or tragically, with the dissolution of coherent contexts of meaning. Far from offering readers counsel, novels offer them consolation for modern alienation—what György Lukács called “transcendental homelessness.” “What draws the reader to the novel,” Benjamin writes, “is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.”
A traditional story forgoes psychological realism in favor of a universality that can be integrated into the lives of its listeners. We might invoke a parable, even an ambiguous one, to explain some action we’ve taken.
The novel, on the other hand, offers vicarious experiences that are often psychologically relatable and even cathartic but bear more on the cultivation of feeling than on the guidance of action. We are more likely to invoke a novel to define what kind of person we are than to capture what we’ve learned about the world and how to act in it.
Benjamin also contrasts storytelling with a “more menacing” form of communication that threatens even the novel’s significance: information. Information comes to us in newspapers—and, today, through TV and the Internet—“already...shot through with explanations.” In journalism, experience is processed, and anything ambiguous or uncanny gets explained away in favor of “snackable content” that is consumed without being at all integrated into the reader’s or the viewer’s experience.
The intention of information, Benjamin asserts in a separate essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” “is just the opposite [...]: to isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experience of the reader.” Interpretations are explicitly and implicitly appended to events to make them understandable in themselves.
In the story, by contrast, “psychological connections among the events are not forced on the reader” but left open to interpretation. Psychology is abjured in favor of universality. We do not need, for example, a blow-by-blow account of the psychodrama between the Prodigal Son and his father to grasp the significance of the story, which, as a consequence, can be integrated into our lives and dealings with others rather than consumed and discarded like a seedy tabloid feature. The knowledge provided by information is superficial and, at best, instrumental. It might help us take advantage of the features of Microsoft Word, but it can’t address deeper questions. “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new,” Benjamin writes.
This relates to a distinction he makes elsewhere between immediate, episodic experience (Erlebnis) and integrated, continuous, and narratable experience (Erfahrung). Erlebnis he associates with modern spectacles and discretely consumable information. It includes fragments whose connection to one another we can scarcely discern or piece together. Erfahrung, by contrast, is the type of experience that makes one “experienced”—that situates one’s life in a recognizable tradition so that one feels some degree of contact with what came before. Instead, the experiences and attitudes of our forebears frequently seem almost incomprehensible, if not outright embarrassing, and we live in a state of near pastlessness. To the extent the past is known at all, it is as processed information, uprooted from context and made into mere content to be ordered up and consumed in an eternal present.
For Benjamin, without the kind of experience reflected in storytelling, we are deprived also of the possibility of non-instrumental advice. “Counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story.” This type of counsel is neither instrumental instruction nor coaching, which involves orienting an individual to some particular goal or field. Nor is it a form of advice that mistakenly seeks to condense the latter into the former. It involves universal wisdom abstracted from concrete, coherent experience: a piece of practical wisdom or a moral that is something beyond merely “being oneself” or, as Callard puts it, “not trying to tell another’s [story].”
In contemporary professional culture, one is most likely to hear the words “narrative” and “storytelling” in reference to building one’s “personal brand.” One is encouraged to curate—if not outright fabricate—details from one’s personal life to present to the market. Ideally, these specifics can be tailored for whatever context they’re needed. One’s life becomes something like the opposite of a story in Benjamin’s sense. Instead of an integrated, coherent experience from which wisdom can be drawn or to which it can be applied, it becomes a collection of isolated and alienated set pieces, instrumentalized sociopathically and trotted out to effect a desired impression or effect. Personal narrative becomes a finely tuned instrument for scaling shaky institutional ladders. To such a life story, the informational advice offered as a consumer product online is well-suited.
Can we rescue coherence from fragmentation, integration from alienation, wisdom from instrumentality? Despite no small measure of nostalgia in his essay, Benjamin resists viewing this disintegration as a “symptom of decay.” Rather, he calls it “only a concomitant of the secular productive forces of history—a symptom that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to find a new beauty in what is vanishing.” He suggests the folly of pining after or playacting at a form of life that is definitively past. But that doesn’t mean that some manner of narrative coherence is completely out of reach. In fact, Benjamin suggests, its very disappearance can lead us to value and pursue it in a new way.
Benjamin uses explicitly religious language to refer to the recovery of meaningful experience from modern fragmentation. Such efforts, he writes, involve “redeeming” experience. He finds one example in the poetry of Baudelaire, who tries to make an integrated whole out of the isolated “shock experiences” of chaotic urban life in industrializing Paris. Another comes in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which an involuntary memory, triggered by the taste of a madeleine, allows Proust to “take hold of his experience.”
Of course, we can’t all be Baudelaires or Prousts. But we can cultivate the kind of attention necessary to resist the fragmentary absorption in this or that shiny new experience; we can try to take hold of our experiences and integrate them into a discernible whole. We can also resist the temptation to regard our story as a collection of private possessions and mechanical processes whose relevance to the lives of others depends on the overlap of specific conditions.
As Callard points out, Atwood’s biography will not furnish anything like “Ten Simple Steps to Becoming a Successful Novelist,” but is it too much to expect an attempt to find in a thoughtful recounting of her career the suggestion of object lessons for the aspiring writer? Such advice would not be easily expressible tips extracted from an informational narrative; they would emerge from the interpretation of an ambiguous narrative that inspires audience members’ deeper reflection on the continuation of their own stories.
Extrapolating further, is it too much to expect from those in positions of authority some counsel that goes beyond personal coaching or outdated instructions for navigating institutions in decline? Such advice might acknowledge a breakdown of meaning but still hold out some hope of redemption.