Always read more than one book at a time. He understands reading as playing with Chinese boxes: “Through a book others are read and many others are remembered.” The intellectual and mental journey intersects with Carlo Ginzburg (Turin, 84 years old) with his rigor as unorthodox but extreme accurate historian. The son of Natalia and Leo Ginzburg is not orthodox because he searched the traces of the past for what was not written. However, he works with the meticulous precision of classical historians: even when he speaks, he is unable to quote an idea without attributing it to its author. Of course he has the memory of an elephant to turn to Gramsci, Auerbach, Marc Bloch or his teachers: Delio Cantimori or Arsenio Frugoni. They are all summarized here because, as the reader will understand, an interview cannot contain footnotes.
Since 1970 he has lived in the heart of Bologna. Eight years ago he moved to the third floor of a palazzo with extremely high ceilings and endless rooms where only the kitchen table is not buried under books.
Everything interesting happens in the shadows.
Céline said: “We know nothing about the true history of humans.” There are infinitely many lives that leave no trace. And there are traces that have not been investigated. It’s as if the testimonies that decided history are just the tip of an iceberg.
Is the story with capital letters the story of the powerful?
Being able to leave your mark is a social privilege. Apparently, men left more of a mark on the distribution of data between men and women.
If you look at the story under the microscope, another one appears.
I arrived after studying Freud’s clinical cases. The case implies a generalization. I thought that the anomaly is richer than the norm. The rule cannot record all violations of the rule, while an anomaly includes the rule by definition.
In 1976 with the cheese and the wormsmade the little talk: it gave birth to the micro-story.
My book is cited as the origin of the term, but it was the discussions about the book that shaped it. They argued that the case I analyzed, that of Menocchio, a miller who could read and was interrogated and arrested by the Inquisition, was too extraordinary. Then Edoardo Grendi defined it as “the normal extraordinary”.
The difference between historian and anthropologist is that the former only uses the term culture for the upper class.
an oxymoron.
Just. Menocchio participated in an oral culture that did not belong to him alone, that is: it was generalizable and at the same time exceptional because he could read. And think. The difference between historian and anthropologist is that the former only uses the term culture for the upper class. And anthropologists use it to describe broader activities and ideas. In my work I recognize a dialogue between anthropology and history, between high and low culture.
Do the declassed have a story?
Of course they did. But the testimonies, the marks they left, were considered and filtered by the upper classes because the peasants couldn’t write. The poor were studied as statistics. I wanted to show that they can be studied in depth.
The author of “The Cheese and the Worms” in his house in the center of Bologna, definitely conquered by books.Jacobo Medrano
Is written history a manipulation?
The story depends on the questions we ask.
What gives a historian authority? The doubt? The objective data?
The case. What gives authorship gives authority, and that is the proof. There is no difference between fictional narration and historical narration, since in reality everything is rhetorical. That’s not my idea, it’s White’s. I have worked on two rhetorical traditions, the one beginning with Aristotle and the anti-Aristotelian tradition: Nietzsche. In the first case, the tests are essential. Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies argues that truth does not exist. There is power.
do you share it
I’ve always looked for some non-obvious strategy between the two. Antonio Gramsci, in his prison notebooks, which he wrote while incarcerated in a fascist prison, pointed out two strategies: war of movement and war of position: attack or entrenchment. He entrenches himself when he differentiates between hegemonic and subaltern culture in order to escape fascist censorship. If he had spoken of the proletariat instead of subaltern culture, it would not have been translated that way. When I first traveled to India in 1988, I realized that the public and I shared a common language. It was Gramsci: talking about subaltern culture was ambiguous, but that term allowed him to write a different story.
The history of India or Mexico was examined from the point of view of the colonizers.
But there is that of the colonized: I call it ethnophilology. [El Inca] Garcilaso de la Vega was the son of a conquistador and an Inca princess. He wrote in Spanish, his father’s language, and tried to defend his mother’s culture. He emphasized the distance between what was interpreted and what happened. Drawing an analogy with landscape painters, Machiavelli pointed out the need to go up to see the chasms and down to contemplate the peaks. The princes watch from the people and the people from the command. Only the distance allows a deep understanding.
The historian starts from questions of the present.
Of course, the perspective of those who experienced this moment is missing. Benedetto Croce wrote: “All true history is contemporary history.” And his friend Giovanni Gentile, who was Minister of Education and later became a fascist and was murdered by partisans in 1944, wrote: “The past does not exist. It only exists in the moment that we think about it.” Every story is a story that is compared between our questions and those of those who lived through that moment. Micro stories are stories of the world.
Does microhistory produce a worldview?
I distinguish two types of alienation to build the big story. One is based on Marcus Aurelius, the other on Proust, who represents an unexpected aesthetic. Proust invented a painter who drew the sea as if it were a meadow. Because? Because what you know about the sea is not important. It is what is perceived. In order to see, one must distance oneself from the known.
As a historian, how can you make yourself understood by someone who knows little?
The alienation consists in looking from afar and observing with a different light. I’ve dealt with anonymous people like Menocchio, the miller in “The Cheese and the Worms”. But I also studied Piero della Francesca. And I examined how Dante read the texts by understanding how Menocchio had read them. I don’t want to say that this Miller and Dante were the same. I want to say that I learned things from one that allowed me to understand the other more fully.
Why did you have to question everything?
I don’t doubt everything, but I doubt a lot. I come from a privileged family.
Privileged but severely persecuted.
Quite. The two things together. This dual condition has shaped my way of investigating. Not only was my privilege growing up surrounded by books, but also having models.
Written culture is under threat. Reading has become a privilege that requires spending more time than money
Your father died when you were five years old.
Mussolini’s regime ended on July 25, 1943. Shortly thereafter, my father went to Rome, where he ran an underground anti-fascist newspaper, L’Italia Libera. My mother then took us there to meet him. And they stopped him. They tortured him and he died in February 1944. His idea of philology was central to me. I met her posthumously while collecting her writings.
do you remember him
i have memories When I was hiding near Florence with my mother and my maternal grandmother – the only non-Jew in the family – I remember him saying to me: “If they ask what your name is, answer Carlo Tanzi”. My brother stayed in Rome with a person who had taken care of my father. My sister was housed in an institution until the end of the war. Then we meet in Turin. My brother was an economist. He died in Bologna last year. And my sister is a psychoanalyst and lives in Rome.
In his writings he compares psychoanalysis to confession.
Yes.
In psychoanalysis you either forgive yourself or you don’t. And in confession the priest does it.
Exactly. I was referring to the fact that confessions were commonplace in Freud’s circle. In a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess he wrote: “I am struck by the closeness between what the women accused of witchcraft said and what my patients told me.”
He compared circles, the persecution of witches and the persecution of the Jews.
I’ve been trying to figure out the circle. In 1321, a conspiracy against Christianity broke out in France. One version said that behind it were lepers who wanted to poison the water. Another referred to lepers inspired by the Jews. And a third, to the lepers, inspired by the Jews, inspired in turn by the king of Granada. The first evidence of this conspiracy leads to the persecution of the Jews at the time of the plague, 1348, being blamed for the plague. Here we are again faced with elements of high and low culture. The shamanic part has popular roots and the action part is controlled from above. The compass arises from the intersection of these two elements.
“In order to see, you have to distance yourself from what you know,” says Carlo Ginzburg. Jacob Medrano
He didn’t have a chance to question his parents.
Of course my father wasn’t there, I could avoid his memory or find out more about him. And I did. My mother wrote novels. And I dreamed of doing the same. I also dreamed of becoming a painter. And all of that ended up mixed in my way of working: storytelling, passion for painting…
What do you remember from your childhood?
I was born in Turin. My father had come from Odessa. And his underground work as an anti-fascist only began after he became an Italian citizen. He was bilingual. He taught Russian literature. But his academic career ended when the fascist regime asked professors to swear allegiance to the regime, which they did not do. With the racial laws of 1938, he lost his citizenship and spent two years in prison. He founded the Einaudi publishing house with 21-year-old Giulio Einaudi and was imprisoned as a Jew without citizenship in a small town in Abruzzo. My mother took us there to live with him, my brother Andrea and me. Then they got our sister Alessandra. So my early childhood between 1940 and 1943 was ignorant but beautiful. I later realized how rooted my research style was in that childhood experience.
What does that mean?
There was a girl, Concetta, who helped my mother. And my mother wrote about them. My mother saw everything.
Have you read all the novels your mother wrote?
Yes.
Have you applied what you defend in The Little Virtues: generosity over savings…?
Yes, we talk about it a lot. It was like this. The cover photo of this book was taken by me.
He wakes up. She walks up the stairs, finds the book, looks at her mother’s picture on the cover and smiles, “Bella, huh?”
what do you remember about her
Can you imagine… [Silencio] I couldn’t tell.
Don’t you like talking about your mother?
I belong to a generation in which the separation between public and private was different than it is today.
And is that better or worse?
I don’t know it. I feel it is part of my culture, my psychology. mine is mine
Does he have children?
Two daughters and three grandchildren. One, Silvia, is an art historian and teaches at Roma 3. The other, Lisa, writes novels.
How difficult to be called Ginzburg!
introduce. But he’s fine.
How did his mother raise him not to be afraid of Natalia Ginzburg’s shadow?
My mother; my father; My maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Levi—a famous biologist and three of his Nobel Prize-winning students—they were all important figures for me. In education, what matters is what is not said. What cannot be put into words. What is conveyed without words, but which is decisive, shapes life and establishes a relationship with the truth.
He claims that it is fear that creates the gods. Who or what creates the fear?
Fear is always there. The question is who uses it. You create and then you believe in what you create. It is a wonderful phrase from Tacitus, found in many other thinkers.
Doesn’t the truth change?
You have to differentiate. Mathematical truths do not change. But the meaning of the words does. Our words are not yours. It is about reconstructing the specific meaning of a truth in a specific context.
Was Jesus Christ the first poor and powerful man?
The power of Christ was not part of his life. He didn’t found Christianity, it did Paul. It is true that it is impressive for a fringe religion to take over the empire at a given moment. But the worldly power of Christ was nil. The consternation of Jesus: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s in the Gospels. And it’s the opposite of power.
Has poverty brought you closer to people?
i am an atheist In “Big Wooden Eyes” I start from the idea that many Old Testament prophecies are fulfilled in the New Testament. That is, we are faced with a text that produces another. If we follow this trail, it turns out that much of Christ’s infancy and passion is a restatement of events from what Christians call the Old Testament. I believe Jesus existed. But that the gospels have revised the story. Many Christian scholars come to this idea but do not articulate it clearly. The Jews also resist it.
Nowadays, culture arises from the popular teaching of music, cinema…
Films that talk about the popular classes, as a rule, do not have immediate success. Think of a bike thief. I saw it with my mom when I was 10 years old. He blew my mind. But it wasn’t a great success.
Today is film history.
It’s a very emotional film. But it’s hard to identify with the protagonist: nobody looks so miserable. That’s the strength of the film.
Very few young people read. Are we witnessing the end of the monopoly of written culture?
Written culture is under threat. Reading has become a privilege that requires spending more time than money.
It is paradoxical that this is the case with the highest literacy rates in history.
My suggestion would be to combine internet speed with slow reading. Nietzsche defined philology as “the art of reading slowly”. Is that. Each speed leads you to some kind of knowledge.
Protects against unexpected data. Did the algorithm destroy this coincidence?
I use google often. Alienation is the key: to understand reality, it is important to look at it as if it were something dark, something you don’t understand.
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