زکریا بزدوده

Walter Benjamin in the beginning decades of the twentieth century indicated that storytelling has lost its value in the modern world. The reason for this failure has been traced back to the loss of wisdom for man in the modern world. Benjamin believes that a storyteller has counsel for his readers. The counsels originate from experience. When counsel is woven into the fabric of real life it creates, what Benjamin calls, wisdom. Accordingly, truth which Benjamin finds interconnected with wisdom has fallen in value. Now what is of interest in the present is the status of West and more particularly Europe and that of mostly Middle East and more particularly Iran in regard to this issue. If storytelling fell in value with the rise of modernity, there emerged a new form called novel that quite quickly replaced storytelling in West. Although novel cannot be a true replacement for storytelling, it has worked as a partial remedy for that gap that has formed in the culture throughout the last three centuries. On the other hand, we do not see the formation of novel until quite late, i.e., the beginning of the twentieth century, while it had already appeared in Europe in the late seventeenth century. The fact is in our country we see that this loss is quite visible because in our education system storytelling, as a quite useful means for involving different intelligences as Gardner enumerates them, has been ignored. Moreover, we have lost our power because our stories are not powerful. Pointing to the fact that the origin of storytelling is Eastern and more particularly Iranian, I want to argue that although we have provided material and means for storytelling for West, we have lost our power because we have forgotten about storytelling and have been able to write novels and short stories until very recently.