Stephen Greenblatt

A few months ago, in California, I had a message that a New York Times reporter had telephoned. I conjured up a half-dozen possible reasons for the call, all of them unabashedly narcissistic, only to find, when I finally reached her, that the reporter wanted to know what I thought of a scholarly book that had just been published. Such a question from the press is highly unusual in the United States: American newspapers rarely interest themselves in scholarship, and our reporters, like our politicians, have failed to develop a public discourse that can accommodate ideas of a complexity greater than that conveyed in advertising jingles. Even papers that take themselves very seriously indeed regard cultural and intellectual life as generally beyond the pale of the ‘news’. (The exception proves the rule: when the New York Times Sunday Magazine decided recently to run an article on deconstruction, the reporter wrote as if he couldn’t believe not only the outlandishness of the intellectual movement he was purporting to chronicle but the peculiarity of writing about it at all.)

The 15th-century classic of paranoid witch-hunting, Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum, provides a convenient gloss on the word ‘glamour’. Witches, the Dominican inquisitors tell us, can rob a man of his penis or at least make him think that he has been robbed. The victim wakes up in the morning, looks down and sees nothing there – or rather he sees, where his penis should be, what is called a ‘glamour’.’

Giovanni Levi’s Inheriting Power bears a generic resemblance to those recent historical studies that illuminate the lives of European peasants by isolating and reconstructing a single resonant story. The best of these microhistories – Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre – succeed in making their stories what Kenneth Burke calls ‘representative anecdotes’, reflections of reality that are inevitably selections of reality. The selections work if they manage to convey a sense of both resonance and particularity. The particularity functions rhetorically to persuade the reader that she has made contact not with another statistical table or an allegorical idea but with a palpable life and its concrete material world (‘to take note’, Hal tells Poins, ‘how many pairs of silk stockings thou hast, viz., these, and those that were thy peach-color’d ones’). The resonance functions to raise this enumeration of particulars above the trivial or the random, to evoke what Yeats called the emotion of multitude, to make the anecdote representative.’

The small dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow where Boris Pasternak lived for several years and where in 1960 he died is now a museum. It was there that the Writer’s Union representative took us – a group of jet-lagged American journal editors – on the first afternoon of our recent visit. The books and the furniture and the grand piano and the drawings by his father Leonid, all of which had been carted off after Pasternak’s death, when the dacha was unceremoniously assigned to another writer, have been brought back, and the poet who had been expelled by the Writer’s Union in the wake of the publication of Doctor Zhivago, is now given culture’s highest tribute – museumification. This means a woman at a desk, tearing tickets printed on cheap paper; another woman with a feather duster and an expression of unutterable boredom; and a voluble young man with mad eyes who conducts a tour. He shows us the drawing-room, the dining-room, the small bedroom where Pasternak died. A framed reproduction of his father’s portrait of Tolstoy hangs on the wall; on the bed lies a wilted bouquet of flowers, a reminder of the thousands of mourners who showed up to pay their last respects, lining up for three days on the lanes that ran through the birch woods, even though there had been only the smallest death notice in the newspapers and though public expressions of grief were not, to put it mildly, encouraged.’