Carlo Ginzburg: The Historian as a Detective

In the First Person

António Guerreiro

An interview with Carlo Ginzburg in which the Italian historian speaks about his intellectual journey and the ‘situations’ and coincidences that have defined all his research and made him one of the world’s most important names in contemporary historiography. The conversation also touches on the circumstances in which he lived from childhood – at the heart of the flourishing literary and cultural scene of post-war Italy.

Carlo Ginzburg is among the most important contemporary historians. He is the author of a vast output that has revolutionised historiography, not only due to his use of sophisticated methodological and analytical instruments from other disciplines (anthropology, rhetoric, philology, narratology, etc.), turning the writing of history into a unified field, but also because he studies singular ‘cases’, facts and people (it would be more apt to call them ‘characters’). Eschewing the heroic tales of the powerful, outside of the horizon where traditional historiography finds its heroes and protagonists, these cases become exemplary and as universal as certain character novels. That is the case of Menocchio, a 16th-century Friulian miller. More cultured than most of his class, he suffered at the hands of the Inquisition and was eventually sentenced to death for heresy. Menocchio, whose real name was Domenico Scandela, is the ‘protagonist’ of one of Carlo Ginzburg’s master- pieces: Il formaggio e i vermi [The Cheese and the Worms], published in 1976. Similarly to many of his other books, this one can also be adequately described with an old phrase that is often abused: ‘It reads like a novel.’

The analytical processes introduced by ‘microhistory’, the name given to the historiographical current with which Ginzburg is indelibly associated and of which he has been the main theorist and practitioner, strongly encourage this narrative dimension and demand that special attention be given to the stylistic and rhetorical factor in the writing of history. It is not by chance that the author of Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1989) says in this interview that the path that brought him to microhistory was marked by two great figures of 20th-century literary studies: Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, the author of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Equally important to his task as a historian, where the tension between morphology and history is essential, is the influence (so to speak) of Aby Warburg, a singular art historian and founder of a ‘nameless science’.

But the immersion in a form of narrative writing that is aware of its processes (taken both from literature and cinema) and that presents a strong self-reflective component should also be understood through a biographical interpretation, reclaiming Carlo Ginzburg’s family history. Born in Turin in 1939, his mother was the writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991), one of the great names of 20th-century Italian literature. His father, Leone Ginzburg (1909–1944), born in Odessa into a Jewish family that migrated to the West, first Berlin, later Turin, was a writer, professor, translator of Russian literature, founder of the Einaudi publishing house, and hero of the resistance against fascism. His academic career was interrupted when he refused to swear allegiance to the regime and he was eventually detained and tortured in prison, where he died in 1944, at the age of 39, as a consequence of the torture to which he had been submitted. Carlo was only five years old and in that little time he had experienced the fascist and anti-Semitic persecution of his family. Much later, as an internationally renowned historian, he understood that this circumstance had been behind his decision to study the Inquisition trials, especially the ones concerning witchcraft, when he was still a student at the University of Pisa. At a later stage, until 2010, he held a chair there, at the Scuola Normale Superiore (his academic path also included important moments at American universities). His integration into the literary world, which initially took place within his own family, continued as he moved in writers’ circles that included Italo Calvino and Cesare Pavese. More than an important Italian historian, Carlo Ginzburg is a central figure in the cultural and intellectual history of post-war Italy.

One of the main innovations of Carlo Ginzburg’s historiographical investigation is his focus on the popular culture, oral tradition, religious behaviours and customs of the ‘subaltern classes’ (a notion that dates back to Gramsci, another central influence on his intellectual path). He criticised an aristocratic view of culture, sometimes explicitly, which, from his perspective, has always limited the historian’s work. The question of the ‘task of the historian’ is implicit in all of his work and is developed in theoretical terms in some of his essays. When asked what it means to be a historian today, he answered: ‘First of all, one has to go against the current.’

ANTÓNIO GUERREIRO Some of your books can be read like narratives; they bring historiography close to a literary genre. Nonetheless, you have always opposed the idea defended within post-modern theory that there are no clear borders between fictive narrative and historiographical narrative…

CARLO GINZBURG In the course of this controversy with certain post-modernist academic sectors that defend the continuity between fictive history and historiography, I have realised that within our tradition the relationship between fictive narrative and historical narrative has always been one of competition for the representation of reality, since fiction also engages with reality. On the one hand, Homer, on the other, Herodotus. But Herodotus is impossible without Homer. Just think of Balzac, who said: ‘I will be the historian of the 19th century.’ In this way he challenged historians. This challenge can be mutual. I have tried to work on specific topics, as a way of showing how the techniques used by novelists can be interpreted on the historical plane. In an essay entitled ‘À propos du ‘style’ de Flaubert’, Proust says that the height of Flaubert’s art is not the writing itself, but the blank space at the end of Sentimental Education. I took that as a challenge: to interpret that moment as a challenge to historical understanding. In this passage, the protagonist Frédéric Moreau is moving through the barricades when he recognises the National Guard officer who had just killed his friend Dussardier. Flaubert describes the scene in the following way: ‘Et Frédéric, béant, reconnut Sénécal.’ [And Frédéric, gaping, recognized Sénécal.] Here, a blank space opens up, a complete absence of commentary, a hiatus, and the chapter ends. The next chapters begins with: ‘Il voyagea.’ [He travelled.] I examined the manuscripts of this novel and discovered that Flaubert initially wrote ‘Then he travelled’ but in the end he omitted the adverb. We have to understand that the narrative – and this is the point that I am trying to make – is a way of engaging with reality, and that all narrative experience, even the blank space, has cognitive implications and potentialities, in the sense that it can be read as a historical document. And the historian has to necessarily question himself about the narrative forms that he uses.

AG As a historian who pays close attention to the methodological instruments and formal implications of your work you were forced to reflect on literary categories and introduce them in theoretical terms. Is the literary environment where you grew up partially responsible for that?

CG Yes, I cannot ignore what is behind my work and what I owe to my mother. My relationship with narrative was certainly passed on by her. But it also derives from my father’s work as a translator, since the novel that has influenced me the most was War and Peace, which I read when I was quite young, in the translation revised by my father. Its preface was signed with an asterisk, since my father, who was a Jew, was forbidden to sign it. During the war, my father revised the translation of War and Peace. I wrote an essay on microhistory where I talked about what I learned with Tolstoy and the challenge that he posed for me. He was the one who taught me that in order to relate a battle we should relate the experience of everyone who participated in it. Not only the general's experience but also that of the humblest soldier. In retrospect, my idea of microhistory stems from there.

Piero della Francesca, Flagellation of Christ, 1468-70 (detail)
© Photo: Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo

"My relationship with narrative was certainly passed on by my mother [Natalia Ginzburg]. But it also derives from my father’s work as a translator, since the novel that has influenced me the most was War and Peace, which I read when I was quite young, in the translation revised by my father."

AG How would you describe the path that led you to microhistory?

CG The first essay that I published, in the Annali of Pisa’s Scuola Normale Superiore, in 1961, was called ‘Stregoneria e pietà popolare’ [Witchcraft and Popular Piety]. It focused on a case against a peasant woman from Modena who was accused of witchcraft in 1519. At the end of the essay there is a paragraph where I defend that this is a paradigmatic case, despite its specificity. When I later came back to this paragraph, I thought about the word ‘paradigmatic’ and I realised that I had written it a year before the famous book by Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, came out. My essay is from 1961, while Kuhn’s book is from '62. What did I mean by ‘paradigmatic’? I meant ‘exemplary’. That process seemed like an exemplary case, despite its specificity. It was an exemplary case in the sense that it was atypical. And another word that grabbed my attention was ‘case’, which shows my early interest in ‘cases’. What did I mean by the word when I wrote the essay? On the one hand, it was a reference to Freud, to his ‘clinical studies’, which I read in their Italian translation; on the other hand, I was alluding to Sherlock Holmes. Psychoanalysis and detective novels. Later, I wrote an essay entitled ‘Spie’ [Clues], which was widely discussed, and where at the beginning I evoked the triad composed of Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes, i.e. an art historian who created a detective-like investigation method, the founder of psychoanalysis, and a character from a novel.

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*Translated by Ana Macedo