Walter Benjamin, “The Narrator” Toward a Novel-less Society?

Having fled from Nazi Germany to France, in 1936 Benjamin published “Der Erzähler” (“The Narrator”), an essay in which he offers a very personal take on the legacy of Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1916). While for Lukács the novel is fated to eventually give way to the epos and the “infinitude” of which it is the bearer, Benjamin notes the characteristics of this passing of the baton, placing it within the framework of what W. J. Ong will call “second orality.”