Review of Carlo Ginzburg's "The Night Battles"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This book presents an extraordinarily complex set of historical data that even beginning to write about it seems like a daunting task. Making matters short and sweet for the sake of reviewing a book of such scholarship might not be advisable, but that’s what I’ll try to do here.

This book carefully combines an analysis of folklore, popular tradition, and culture. In the Friuli region of Italy, a group known as the “benandanti” (literally “well-farers” or “good walkers” but literally translated here as the “night battlers”) leave their villages on prescribed nights of the year to engage in fights with witches. These men and women who identify themselves as benandanti are born with the caul – that is, a piece of amniotic sac around their necks – and are thereby marked as benandanti from birth. According to them, the purpose of these nighttime adventures were to fight witches who were trying to infect and kill crops; they saw themselves as protectors of the crop. Therefore, they are usually identified as an “agrarian cult.” The origins of this cult are ambiguous, but seem to date back to older German divinity cults, and especially the auspices of the goddess Diana. No matter their origins, this is most important: the benandanti always imagined themselves as warriors for the Christian God, and completely Christian themselves. 

The most fascinating part of the book, which by far takes up most of its content, is what happens when this cult meets the Catholic Church in the form of the Inquisition. Over a very long period of time, this interaction slowly turns a very Christian cult into a devilish coven of witches convening at a sabbat fighting against God, and therefore against the Church. Members were called before Church trials and demanded to explain their experiences. Some claimed that the night battles were oneiric visions, while others insinuated that they were quite “real.” Other irregularities were quickly latched onto by the Church, and it was soon turned into, at least in the eyes of the Church, nothing short of witchcraft. 

Because Ginzburg spends most of his time showing this careful transformation, the numerous – perhaps a few dozen – case studies presented are all carefully examined, sometimes dropped, picked up later in the text, and then re-examined; this can make the thread of the argument and its most prominent actors difficult to keep straight. Despite Ginzburg’s tight, short presentation, parts of the book can seem repetitive. Of course, this aspect of the book is essential for scholars of the Italian folklore of the time, but it can be more than a little tedious for someone just interested in one of the more seminal texts in the development of what we now call “microhistory.” While this might be difficult for someone with a less-than-scholarly interest in this material, it is nonetheless a careful and very important study that deserves the attention it has garnered.

Review of Julian Barnes' "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

For whatever reason, I like my fiction to cohere in predictable ways; oftentimes when that doesn’t happen, I leave a reading experience feeling less than satisfied. Chalk it up to being weaned on something other than the so-called “postmodern” novel. In several ways, “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” complicates my expectations. It can feel more like a series of short stories than a traditional novel – however, one cannot avoid the interconnectedness they share. 

The chapters do span the scope of what we call human history, from a re-telling of the story of Noah’s Ark from the perspective of a stowaway woodworm to a chapter clearly based on the 1985 PLF hijacking of the MS Achille Lauro. A playful jokiness reminiscent of Nabokov and concomitant preoccupation with the mythic (resembling Borges) informs the way in which the chapters speak to and resonate with one another; in “The Wars of Religion,” a Bishop sits down on this throne during a service in church, and immediately falls down due woodworm infestation. Church officials decide to bring suit for the slow, careful, destruction of the Bishop’s seat. Against whom do they file suit? The woodworms, of course. Even for fiction, this sounds twee and jokey, but it works in a most convincing way.

I think it works so well because these pieces do hang together as something more than a series of stories, and many of them provide fascinating things to think about. “Parenthesis” (which might be the half-chapter of the title) provides an almost essayistic analysis of love which I find didn’t at all detract from the novel’s progress. It’s told through the voice of a man laying next to a woman, desperate to fall asleep but unable to stop meditating on the power and mystery of human love. It quietly informs other chapters without letting Barnes’ authorial voice get in the way.

Another entire chapter is dedicated to a fictionalized account of Gericault’s rendering of perhaps his most-recognized painting, “The Raft of the Medusa.” Incorporating the “real life” (we quickly learn how perfunctory such labels are) accounts on which the painting is based, Barnes adeptly shows how Gericault selected details carefully, leaves others out, and made still others up, in order for the painting to ring true to the viewer. This immediately raises important questions about history and any mode of representation, more generally. How is history possible if we recognize it only as a true account of past events? Is the historian always a writer? Or, to put matters more explicitly, is she always a novelist? 

Another theme that echoes throughout the novel is that of religion and its mystifying effects. Read without care, this can seem a harsh treatment of religion and the religious mindset. Noah is identified by the stowaway woodworm as a vicious drunk, the Catholic officials who try the woodworm for eating the Bishop’s throne come off as a little maniacal, and the last chapter coyly pokes fun at common ideas of Heaven. “Project Ararat” takes up a former astronaut who has had a religious conversion, and now has put his and his wife’s lives on hold to find Noah’s Ark. Despite coming from a conservative, Christian town, the locals have their reservations. The chapter ends with him having raised enough money to go on his mission. He finds the Ark, collects samples, and quickly returns home to have them tested. The tests show that they are no more than a couple hundred years old. This doesn’t matter, though. He is already planning his second mission next year, even more determined to find Noah’s remains. It’s not God that works in mysterious ways. It’s the human mind. That’s Barnes’ point.

Rarely do I find works of fiction so self-referential simultaneously so appealing. Barnes might be telling us about Noah’s Ark and Mount Ararat, but he’s telling us about very human, all too human, forces. Love, the weird preoccupations that perennially concern us, ideas – they’re all here, and not in the heavy-handed way we’re probably only too familiar with. This book is playful, and serious without taking itself too seriously, which gives it a coy sort of charm that’s nearly impossible to dislike.

Book Shelf Tour (More Miscellaneous)

Slowly working on showing each and every one of my books...