Van heinde en verre

Ernest Claes is among the many interwar Flemish and Dutch writers who have gone down in history as so-called “storytellers” or “vertellers”. Although this concept is very often used to describe their authorship, its cultural-historical connotations have never been studied systematically. This article aims to fill this scientific lacuna by analyzing the relationship between narrative texts of the interwar period and the themes and techniques of the folk tradition of oral storytelling. Claes and two of his narrative texts function as representative case studies. To begin, the present paper zooms in on Claes’ views on the tradition of oral storytelling and links them with an essay on the same topic by Walter Benjamin, a contemporary of his. Next, two narrative texts by Claes are interpreted as literary revitalizations of the storytellers’ tradition and of its epistemic functions. The knowledge of storytellers, so the argument goes, exceeds the merely regional but also concerns the exotic.