Storytelling vs. Noveltelling

Alrighty - so I have a book cracked open on my desk because I am struggling with something. Last night I saw Nature Theater of Oklahoma's RAMBO SOLO at Soho Rep.

My quandry here is that after the show Pavol, Kelly and Zach were discussing the work and kept talking about story-telling and how the piece was based on a desire to collect stories that meant something to people. And then the resultant piece (as magical as it is) is actually a retelling of a novel. This statement and the subsequent post is irrelevant to Nature Theater's activities and in no way meant to critique them or their rigor or dramaturgy, its just a thought the show and subsequent discussion triggered in me. You see, in my little back water of cultural/philosophical anthropology, stories and novels are two sort of mutually exclusive things - thanks in part to an essay Walter Benjamin wrote called "The Storyteller" back in the early 1900s and which theorized their mutally exclusive natures.

• Storytelling in Benjamin's context is a (primarily oral and therefore LIVE) craft in which experiences are exchanged and useful knowledge is passed on (a moral, practical advice or maxim).
• Whereas the novel, (like modern cinema or modern plays I would argue) is instead a representation-of-experience and reproduces the confounding nature of human life.

Benjamin says a lot more than this in his essay - things about the coming information age and about death and about boredom and about knitting - but I'll stop at this point, because this dichotomy is the one that is most fascinating to me.

What NTofOk's show made me ponder is this: so much of contemporary performance these days is creative responses to films, novels, and other "representations-of-experience". At the core of this otherwise live experiential exchange between artists and listener/watcher is not an experience the artist lived through, but a representation-of-experience the artist read about or watched in 2D on a screen at some point before. What is that about?

How does this/can this co-opting of the representation-of-experience then translate to the contemporary hunger for "experiences"? Is there some difference in the take-away from a piece of performance that is a retelling of a story/experience vs. a representation-of-experience? If so what is it? And would we children of the Spectacle even know the difference having grown up in a world enveloped by representations-of-itself?

OR

is it that in our "post-modernness" we are just replacing the problematic truthiness of the "social/practical knowledge" at the heart of the Benjaminian story, with the very real intensity of perplexity, doubt and confoundedness at the heart of the human experience?