Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (review)

The collected essays of a famous author are normally awkward to review; the essays are likely to be uneven in quality and length, either repetitious or unconnected. There is no such weakness in this case, even though Ginzburg’s title, Threads and Traces, like his introduction, makes only the most modest of claims as to how well these fifteen chapters fit together. Yet in fact they do, from the first, in which the problem of truth and reality in historical writing is raised by noting that those two words are crowned with finger-wiggling quotation marks in American academic presentations. From that gentle provocation, the essay moves quickly to Polybius’ remarks about truthfulness in Homer and then onward, in one short chapter, to the opinions of other Roman authors and to an account of seventeenth-century reflections on the difference between annals and histories. This surprising pace, intellectual range, and learned discourse is typical throughout the book.

Different as they are, subsequent chapters follow a similar pattern: Citation from a text leads to commentaries on that text, and then to consideration of other texts somehow related. With acrobatic erudition, Ginzburg leaps across centuries and languages, exploring hidden ties (threads or traces) across texts, ties that he uncovers by tracking shared references, similar concerns, personal friendships, or mere coincidence. The effect is like watching a skilled magician, although this one works with texts and is attentive to the precise meaning of individual words and is a stickler for exact dates.

The topics that launch these excursions do not (at least at first) appear related: The second chapter, about the conversion of Jews in fifth-century Minorca, is followed by one focused on Montaigne and then an introduction to Natalie Zemon Davis’ Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). A chapter called “Tolerance and Commerce” starts with Voltaire’s description of the London stock exchange and Voltaire’s use of estrangement as a rhetorical device, which leads to criticism of Erich Auerbach’s assessment of that passage in Mimesis (trans. Willard R. Trask) (Princeton, 1953; orig. pub., in German, 1946). Then (after a reference to Spinoza) comes a rejection of the argument that Voltaire’s is a technique comparable to Nazi propaganda, which was made in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (trans. Edmond Jephcott), Dialectic of the Englightenment (Stanford, 2002; orig. pub., in German, Amsterdam, 1947).

The following chapter uses Eric Hobsbawm, Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), and Lord Byron to lead into some historical detective work on fourteenth-century Venice. There follow a chapter about Stendhal’s conception of history (built from a brilliant analysis of his novel, The Red and the Black [Paris, 1830]), then a chapter on the literary model for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and another about Holocaust denial that becomes a criticism of Hayden White. The chapter on microhistory (with a skeptical treatment of the Annales school) leads to the final one, a rather autobiographical essay about witches and shamans, in which Ginzburg records his surprise when it was pointed out to him that a Jew in the twentieth century might find resonance in the lives of distrusted outsiders during the Middle Ages (a reader will have noticed that the social lot of Jews is a recurring theme in these chapters).

Chapter headings, however, only begin to convey the richness of these essays, which playfully plumb cultural associations to serve a serious purpose. Perhaps Ginzburg’s intellectual sparkle can be better demonstrated with a closer look at a single chapter. Typically, the title hints without revealing much: “Details, Early Plans, Microanalysis: Thoughts on a Book by Siegfried Kracauer.” Renowned for his important work on film, Kracauer in this instance wrote about history, and Ginzburg is so delighted by the book’s enigmatic title, History: The Last Things before the Last, that he cites it multiple times. The book, which Oxford University Press first published in 1969, came out in a revised edition in 1995 (dates are always important in these essays); and Paul...