Storie Orali: Racconto, Immaginazione, Dilogo

Storie Orali: Racconto, Immaginazione, Dilogo (Oral [Hi]stories: Narrative, Imagination, Dialogue) . By Alessandro Portelli. Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2007. 462 pp. Hardbound, € 25.00.

No contemporary oral historian (at either the praxis or the theory ends of the spectrum, which this author has never divorced) can have ignored Alessandro Portelli’s contributions to the field: for example, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, 1990; The Text and the Voice, 1994; Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, 1997; and The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, 2007 (as well as his, as yet, untranslated: Biografi a di una città: storia e racconto: Terni, 1830 – 1985 in 1985, Città di parole. Storia orale di una periferia romana [Centocelle], with Bruno Bonomo, Alice Sotgia, Ulrike Viccaro, 2006; Acciai Speciali: Terni, la Thyssen Krupp, la globalizzazione , 2008). This collection (divided into fi ve sections: Language or Linguistic Codes; War; Terni, Italy; Harlan, Kentucky; Century’s End), gathers globally scattered essays (in Finnish, Catalan, Italian, Spanish) from 1979 to 2006, more or less known to the English-reading world, and all belonging both to the past and the present: “they are the history of thirty years of work with oral sources, but also the summary of the point at which I find myself today, the foundation of other work not represented here” (3, citing The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, New York: Palgrave, 2003; Alessandro Portelli, et al., Città di parole: Storia orale di una periferia romana, Rome: Donzelli, 2007; “I’m Going to Say it Now: Interviewing the Movement,” in Reflection on the Fieldwork Process , eds., Bruce Jackson and Edward D. Ives, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). More importantly: “They are all works in progress, always open and never finished” (3). This collection therefore provides something of the pre- and intra-history of Portelli’s writings, while exemplifying the historical process itself. That is, they provide reiterations of the past in the never-ending process of reinterpreting it (Portelli intensely — somewhat obsessively — rewrites, updates, translates, thinking, rethinking thoughts and words under the influence of new experiences, new sociopolitical circumstances). These may therefore be considered essay variants, each with rich oral and written histories of their own: spoken, written, and translated, many times, tangibly illustrating a central tenet that oral history — mimicking variation in oral tradition itself (cf. folksong variants) can only provide variant tellings of history reflecting individual and collective perspectives shaped by the present. [1] Variation is inherent in oral research, embracing songs, stories, and histories. And, after all, Portelli is as much a scholar of “story making” (as a literary critic and folklorist) as of “history telling” (as an oral historian).
This collection is also an intra-history, providing a glimpse of Portelli meditating on Portelli as his own scholarship and activity evolves. He is a three-dimensional scholar/activist/political thinker and doer, an academic and public intellectual (e.g., he writes and blogs for Italian newspapers of the Left, il Manifesto, Liberazione, l’Unità). He is a consummate practitioner of the art of the oral interview, with a long history in the field, while he simultaneously engages all other parts of the oral historical process, from interview and transcription, to interpretation, always seeking to “ share authority ” with those interviewed (an “experiment in equality”). [2] He is a multifaceted oral historian ever reflecting critically on all parts of the process. But most of all, Portelli is a first-rate listener, always hearing the many, nuanced voices, layered simultaneously within the speaking (and silent) voice: the individual and the collectivity, the conscious and the subconscious, the generational, the mythic, the literary: all relevant and mutually illuminating. Reinforcing all, there are plenty of substantial, not token, transcriptions — so readers can hear for themselves.
Ronald Grele places Portelli’s oeuvre within the context of oral history scholarship in an excellent, almost lyrical introduction, noting how his colleague was one of the first to radically focus on the interview itself (i.e., not merely as a document in support of traditional historiography): its production, its dialogic nature, and the way the interview reflects on the nature of memory, language, and the structure of “history telling” (qua narration), on subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and the ways memory, myth, and ideologies play upon the past in the present, as well as the reciprocal interaction between written and oral culture.
The essays have been assembled and translated for an Italian readership by the author himself. Many, in fact, were rewritten in Italian here for the first time. Now Portelli must perform the inverse transposition, to provide focused accessibility to this collection in English. (It already has Spanish translations as Histories Orals, Barcelona: Memorial Democratic, 2009.) It may appear an irony that his writings are better known abroad than in his native Italy, but the demand for such texts was likely spurred by two rather recent events: the unexpected award of a prestigious national prize (Premio Viareggio, 2000) for his L’ordine è già stato eseguito (1999) [trans.: The Order Has Been Carried Out], increasing Portelli’s prominence nationally. Second, the Italian oral history association was not formed until 2006 (Associazione Italiana di Storia Orale [AISO]: http://www.aisoitalia.it), on the heels of the fi rst meeting of the International Oral History Association ever to be held in Italy (Rome, 2004), and chaired by Portelli. AISO has since ushered in many new Italian publications in oral history and has actively produced conferences, projects, and a new Web presence.
Portelli’s Italian persona may not be well known to oral historians outside Italy. He founded and continues to direct the Circolo Gianni Bosio in Rome, itself recently revived (where most of his interviews have been deposited), and which took a lively part in the folk music revival of the 1960s and 1970s (especially in the Lazio region). It was in this context I first encountered Portelli (e.g., I giorni cantati), as a latter-day scholar of the folk revival myself, coming to straddle a similar oral tradition/oral history divide. Indeed, part of my own pleasure in reading this collection were the references to the humus of folksong research. Portelli is a “classic 68er” (sessantottino), marked by the concerns common to his very engaged generation: e.g., labor history, class struggle, Fascism, and the Resistance. Yet Portelli is neither nostalgic nor clichéd but emerges as an acute intellectual still engaged in battles which need to be fought anew, given the resurgence of fascist ideologies and renewed labor battles in an era of globalization. Intentionally recalling the historic battles won against Fascism and Nazism, for a generation being newly seduced by them, Portelli never disengages from the struggle, committed to speaking to all sectors of Italian society (even to high school students — the ultimate challenge) about historical memory and political struggle. But he is equally mindful of the dangers of rigid and uncritical ideologies of the Left and always of inexcusable violence (cf. the disclaimer prior to his analysis of the courtroom use of oral testimonies in the historic trials against the Red Brigades). [3]
He straddles linguistic spheres too, as at home with English as with Italian. Indeed, he is his own best translator, providing sophisticated renderings, painless even to the bilingual reader. Here, too, one may savor the idiomatic, colloquial Roman and Lazio vernaculars of his interviewees, along with his own lively, even witty, incisive prose (in print and in person, in English and in Italian!)—even while treating topics which are not at all light, such as labor history and factory milieux (and not especially congenial to this reader; indeed, I politely declined the review of Portelli’s other recent volume, Acciaio [Steel], for instance).
He crosses other boundaries as effortlessly: as much at home in the study of oral as well as literary narrative, folksongs (American and Italian), popular culture, and American literature, as he is in the analysis of oral history per se. One cannot but be impressed by Portelli’s powers of minute observation, by his surprising and ingenious insights — stemming, at least in part, one might posit, from the habits of literary criticism, of parsing texts (literary, oral), examining metaphors, nuances of tone, sociolinguistic registers, inflection of dialectal language, character development — all dependent upon repeatedly meeting storytellers in the real world and interrogating them regarding meaning. Stamping his entire oeuvre is his moral commitment to the actual lives of his many narrators, and the larger implications of their words on the sociopolitical stage, of the past and present.

Luisa Del Giudice
Los Angeles

NOTES
[1] For example, “Un autobus rosso: ovvero, vittime innocenti di cannone liberatore” (163-92), published in English as “So much depends on a Red Bus, or, Innocent victims of the liberating gun” (and still “in progress”) was read in Ohio, in 2000 during the war in Kosovo, rewritten with Afghanistan and then Iraq in mind, and published in 2004, 2006, and 2007. The many essays entitled “What Makes Oral History Different” also contain variant contents (the latest of which is found in Oral History, Oral Culture and Italian Americans, ed. Del Giudice (New York: Palgrave, 2010) — a written transcription of an orally delivered plenary lecture!).
[2] See his self-presentation on the AISO board’s Web page: http://www.aisoitalia.it/2008/12/alessandro-portelli/.
[3] For example, “What follows does not imply an endorsement of all the people tried on April 7, nor of the political (and non-political) practices of some among them and of their political group, nor is it an assessment of the outcomes of this trial.” Yet, he continues: given that this court case had such a major role, at such a “critical pass,” in the making and remaking of history, it appeared especially useful and necessary to the author to reflect on the methods and approaches to the uses of this oral testimony, that is, as it was so consequential to national historic memory.

Source:
ORAL HISTORY REVIEW, Volume 37, Issue 2, pp: 264-268