262
PARTISAN REVIEW
their obvious differences, the spiritual concerns of the American author
and the German-Jewish critic yield several compelling connections. He
opens the first section of his book, "Place-And the Memories of
Place," with the following statement:
In the summer of I980, in the Archer City Dairy Queen, while
nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even
in the next Dairy Queen down the road-Olney's, eighteen miles
south-but easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a
Dr Pepper), I opened a book called
Illuminations
and read Walter
Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller," nominally a study of or reflec–
tion on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel,
after several rereadings) an examination, and a profound one, of
the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical mem–
ory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative
in our twentieth-century lives.
Pondering possible interpretations of Benjamin's essay, as considered
within the very provincial context of west Texan small-town life,
McMurtry notes that the arrival of Dairy Queens, which cropped up in
the late I960s (coincidentally, the same time that the first translations of
Benjamin became available), provided a place for the exchange of vil–
lage lore and everyday experiences. In essence, McMurtry suggests, they
perform the communal function of allowing local narratives to be trans–
mitted from one person to the next. "Storytellers were nearly extinct,"
he asserts, agreeing with Benjamin's assessment of half a century earlier,
"like whooping cranes, but the D. Q. was at least the right tide pool in
which to observe the few that remained."
McMurtry appropriates Benjamin as a springboard into his own con–
cerns rather than as an object of sustained analysis, but the symbolic
weight that he attributes to Benjamin's enduring influence is significant.
To be sure, McMurtry's memoir adds further testimony to the ever–
growing expanse of the Benjamin reception.
It
seems quite likely that
the final publication of Benjamin's collected works in English transla–
tion, "a landmark in the American reception," as one critic has called
it, will produce yet another generation of Benjamin scholars and read–
ers, maybe even some at the local Dairy Queen.
