Second-hand Stories

Acknowledgements

The research which forms the basis for this book began in 2019 and was first completed during my PhD at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Its writing would not have been possible without the generous funding of Keith Sykes and the Cambridge Trust. The final revisions of the manuscript were further facilitated by the stability and support provided by the University of Oxford, the Leverhulme Trust, and a Bourse d’excellence from Wallonia-Brussels International held at the Université de Liège.

Over the years the project developed in multiple places and has benefitted from the lucky encounter with a number of exceptional people. My gratitude goes, first of all, to Pierpaolo Antonello for his invaluable advice, trust, and constant encouragement to think freely. I am also profoundly thankful to Robert Gordon for his kind guidance and generosity throughout my research. Both followed this project from the very start, and I am especially grateful that, together with Charlotte Ross, they welcomed its final publication as a book in the Italian Modernities series. The book would not have taken its actual shape without the insight and encouragement of Jennifer Burns and Emma Bond, who examined my PhD and supported the development of my research with unfaltering generosity. I also owe an enduring debt of gratitude to the University of Siena, where the first embryonic idea of this project took shape, and to my supervisor there, Pierluigi Pellini.

I owe heartfelt thanks to Clare College, its students, and fellows for creating a welcoming and friendly environment during my time at Cambridge and for their support during the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at Cambridge, particularly within the Italian Section, I found a vibrant and enriching community of which I am proud to have been a part. In addition to Pierpaolo Antonello and Robert Gordon, I am especially thankful to Abigail Brundin, Heather Webb, and John David Rhodes, whose support and generosity helped create such a welcoming and stimulating environment. I am grateful to the Department of Littérature générale et comparée at the Université de Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle, where I spent four months in 2022. In Paris I had the opportunity to conduct research at the Fonds Tabucchi, which is preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. I would like to thank Maria José de Lancastre for facilitating my research on Tabucchi and for her kind encouragement. I am also grateful to colleagues at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford and at St Hugh’s College for their warm welcome and for the stimulating environment in which the final stages of this book were completed.

I am profoundly indebted to the many people who, at various stages, have discussed and provided advice on parts of the project, including Marco Belpoliti, Daniela Brogi, Alberto Comparini, Guido Furci, Françoise Lavocat, Guido Mazzoni, Pierluigi Pellini, Thea Rimini, and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi. This debt extends on a personal level to the friends and colleagues encountered through the years, whom I am fortunate to have met: Erica Bellia, Anna Borgarello, Andrea Brondino, Alessia Carrai, Francesco Colombo, Sam FitzGibbon, Tommaso Forni, Mara Josi, Serena Laiena, Michele Maiolani, Nicole Maniero, Valentina Mele, Simone Monti, Ruth Murphy, and Nicole Siri.

Lastly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my mother and father, Ornella and Giorgio, and to my sister, Teresa: I owe everything to their unwavering support and encouragement in every circumstance. My dearest thanks go to Taffi, for filling my life with joy and love and for spurring me on with endless encouragement and critical wisdom: thank you for what we are building together, for the ten thousand steps we take together each day, and for the greatest gift of all.

Some preliminary materials and ideas presented in the Introduction have previously appeared as ‘Il narratore testimone nella narrativa contemporanea’, in Con i buoni sentimenti si fanno brutti libri? Etiche, estetiche e problemi della rappresentazione, ed. by Giuseppe Carrara and Laura Neri (Milano: Ledizioni, 2022), pp. 381–390 and as ‘The Second-hand Story: Origins, Meaning, and Use’, in Narratives Beyond the Self: Relationality in Contemporary Italian Literature, ed. by Jennifer Burns, Anna Borgarello, Michele Maiolani, and Luigi Pinton, special issue of the journal The Italianist, 44.2 (2024), pp. 274–291.

Introduction

Who bears witness to the witness? This question – at once ethical, political, and narratological in its implications – stands at the origin of the present book, which explores a key contemporary narrative form shaped by that very interrogation. I call this literary form ‘the second-hand story’, and we can see it deployed by a number of contemporary narratives which hinge on the figure of a narrator who listens to and reports other people’s words, whether in the form of fragments or a full-length story, thus becoming a witness of a witness.

Several books by Philip Roth, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), Emmanuel Carrère’s L’Adversaire (2000) or Limonov (2011), Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014; 2017; 2018) or Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors (2019) are all good examples of this kind of narrative form.¹ Equally significant cases can be found in contemporary Italian literature, which will constitute the focus of this book. We might think, for instance, of Antonio Tabucchi’s novels, especially Sostiene Pereira (1994) and Tristano muore (2004), Walter Siti’s Resistere non serve a niente (2012), Eraldo Affinati’s Vita di vita (2014), Melania Mazzucco’s Io sono con te. Storia di Brigitte (2016), or Francesco Pacifico’s Il capo (2023).² In each of these books, the narrator (who sometimes conflates with the author, troubling the distinction between fiction and non-fiction) engages in a face-to-face encounter with another person – for instance, an aged dying partisan, a young student from The Gambia, or a migrant nurse from Congo – and bears witness to this encounter by reporting the other person’s story.

Developing the older literary convention of the reported tale and revitalising the figure of the narrator as storyteller (as famously described by Walter Benjamin), this narrative form offers an ethical reflection on the value of listening and reporting other people’s stories.³ The specific form of second-hand story considered in this book emerged in the 1980s and has found expression in some of the most important – and in some cases influential – works of contemporary fiction. Although I do not intend to offer a narratological study of such a literary structure (nor a record of cases), identifying the existence of such a form within the contemporary literary field − in a timeframe that spans broadly from 1980 to 2020 − and defining its salient characteristics will provide a key to narrative, political, and ethical issues in contemporary literature and theory.

By introducing the figure of a narrator who acts as mediator and reporter of another’s testimony, the second-hand story seems to stand as an answer to our initial inquiry. A closer look, however, reveals that such a narrative form in fact gives rise to a series of further, open-ended questions. First, how does this narrative mediation affect the authenticity, authority, or ethical force of the witness account? When the presence of the mediator becomes as important as the other person’s testimony (or, in some cases, even predominant), one may also wonder whose story is ultimately being told. It may not always be clear who has the right to tell someone else’s story: in fact, what responsibilities does the narrator of a second-hand story assume in relaying someone else’s experience? Finally, how does such a narrative structure challenge traditional notions of authorship and subjectivity?

At their most fundamental level such interrogations reverberate with an epistemological inquiry on truth and knowledge. A witness is summoned whenever there is a search for truth, whether in a trial or in an everyday dispute. But how do we trust a testimony? Who can guarantee its authenticity and truthfulness? Can we trust a mediating figure who reports a testimony? As soon as concerns are raised on the mediating figure and the element of trust is added to the equation these questions quickly become ethical ones.

Today, however, such questions bear an unprecedented historical burden, since, in the wake of Second World War and the Holocaust, the witness has become one of the key figures of our epoch, up to the point that Annette Wieviorka coined the expression ‘the age of the witness’.⁴ As we shall see, the modern figure of the witness came to prominence especially from the 1960s onwards, following events like the Eichmann trial and the publication of survivors’ memoirs. From the 1980s, in particular, the publication of these testimonial voices, which had been often overlooked, together with a renewed historical interest fostered what has been called a ‘memory boom’, reshaping Europe’s engagement with its recent past, with Holocaust memory taking centre stage.⁵ As the last survivors started ageing, the transmission of their testimonies to the next generations became a pressing matter. Their children therefore began to bear witness in their place, giving rise to a still growing number of texts (e.g. interview-based works, reportages, second-generation memoirs) that attempt to register, mediate, and report to readers and future generations the words and the memories of the last witnesses.⁶ The cultural importance and the proliferation of second-hand testimonial accounts could not but influence contemporary literary works, not just in their themes but also, and more interestingly, in their structure.

A paradigmatic example is W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, a novel that not only addresses the theme of the legacy of the Holocaust in the second generation but formally embodies it in its very structure. The novel recounts the story of Jacques Austerlitz, an eccentric English architecture professor who gradually comes to unveil his traumatic past. Deported as a child from Prague to England via a Kindertransport to escape the Nazis, Austerlitz had grown up unaware of his true origins. Only later, through his encounter with his former governess Věra, does he recover the repressed memory of his family and history. Such a story is reported to the reader not directly by Austerlitz, but by an anonymous first-person narrator, who fortuitously meets Austerlitz in Antwerp’s railway station and continues to meet up with him over the years. For the most part the novel unfolds as the extended monologue of Jacques Austerlitz mediated and reported by the narrator. As Aleida Assmann has noted, the novel marks the emergence of a new type of narrator in contemporary fiction, that is, the ‘witness-narrator’, born in the wake of testimonial literature after the Holocaust.⁷ While I will return to Assmann’s argument in greater depth later in the Introduction, it is worth noting here how Austerlitz’s narrator creates a layered structure – the one typical of the second-hand story – which reflects its protagonist’s difficulty of accessing its traumatic (and indirectly experienced) past and makes possible the retrieving of his identity. In Austerlitz indeed, as Chantal Massol noted, ‘la reconquête de soi passe par une parole adressée à un autre’: the narrator, that is, does not merely occupy the role of a recorder, but that of someone who enables the act of witnessing itself.⁸

While Austerlitz provides a paradigmatic example of the second-hand story as a response to historical trauma, namely the Holocaust, such a narrative structure has also travelled beyond that context. Second-hand testimonial narratives have established modes of articulating the narrative retrieval of an indirectly experienced past which have then been adopted in different contexts. Many contemporary literary works deploy this mediated mode of testimony, yet they engage with different histories and urgencies. One of the aims of the present book is to show how what is perceived as a historically charged question – who bears witness to the witness? – can also interrogate narratives which extend beyond the Holocaust-related testimonial paradigm.

Taken from a different angle, this central question takes on a social and political valence, echoing and renewing Juvenal’s old proverbial phrase ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ and even Spivak’s much more recent and provocative ‘can the subaltern speak?’, pointing not only to the reliability of testimony, but to issues of power, representation, and access to speech itself.⁹

An intriguing example of this different function that the second-hand story assumes can be found in Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow (2011), a work that resists easy classification: novel, memoir, perhaps a ‘time capsule’ of our age as it defines itself.¹⁰ Its first-person narrator claims to possess an unusual gift – he calls it ‘empathy’ – that allows him to ‘embed’ himself into other people, inhabiting and narrating their experience from their perspective, be they his father, his grandfather, or even the mythological Minotaur.¹¹ Yet, towards the end of the book the narrator confesses that he can no longer enter other minds as he once did. Instead, he turns to purchasing stories from strangers:

In the past I could implant, now I’m forced to buy. I could introduce myself this way, too: I’m a person who buys up the past. A story trader. Others might trade tea, coriander, stocks and bonds, gold watches, land … I go around buying up the past wholesale. Call me what you want, find me a name. Those who own land are called ‘landholders’, I’m a timeholder, a holder of others’ time, the owner of others’ stories and pasts. I’m an honest buyer, I never try to undercut the price. I only buy up private pasts, the pasts of specific people. Once they tried to sell me the past of a whole nation, but I turned it down.

I buy all sorts of stories – about abandonment, about unfaithful women, about childhood, about travelling and getting lost, about sorrow and unexpected deliverance … I also buy happy stories, but there aren’t many sellers of those. From the first word I can tell fresh from rancid goods, true stories from those of fibbing shysters who only want to make a quick buck.

Most people sell their stories for a pittance, some are even dumbfounded that I offer them money for something that doesn’t cost a thing. Others are thankful to have someone to take on the burden they had previously been carrying alone.

What’s in it for me? Thanks to an earlier illness and to the purchased stories, I could now move through the corridors of various times. I could have the childhood of everyone I had bought one from, I could possess their wives and their sorrows. I could pile them up in the Noah’s Boxes in that basement.¹²

This metaliterary passage signals a shift that seems to hold true for an increasing number of contemporary narrators: storytelling is not thought of (and portrayed as) a gift of deep connection or as an imaginative resource, but rather as a form of transaction. The narrator is a mediator, but also a consumer and the stories he purchases become commodities. His offer elicits a range of responses: while some are wary, others are relieved, grateful to offload what burdens them. Such a transactional idea of narration raises a different set of ethical and political questions: who benefits from this exchange? ‘What’s in it for me?’ – the narrator asks himself; what’s in it for those whose story is bought ‘for a pittance’? – we may also ask. This fragment of The Physics of Sorrow gives us a glimpse on the second-hand story as a site of negotiation, revealing how deeply storytelling is entangled with issues of power, value, and voice.