Portelli's Oral History Method: Memory, Truth, and Bias

Introduction: Croce's Elitist Historiography and Its Postwar Critics

The most influential Italian historian in modern times would certainly be the Neapolitan philosopher and literary critic Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). For many historians, however, Croce's indisputable greatness is badly flawed by the blatant elitism of his philosophy of history. In his Filosofia e storiografia (1949), for example, he represented human beings as falling into two classes: the politically active few who are intrinsically part of the historical process, and the majority who, like mere animals, stand outside it. Historiography, according to Croce, has no reason to concern itself with this second, essentially passive class of beings: they belong to the realm of nature, rather than to the dynamic — indeed heroic — process by which history is made (Portelli 293 n. 6).

In the postwar period, however, the Italian masses became far more active politically than Croce would have thought possible or considered desirable. His theories about the inevitable passivity of the majority seem profoundly contradicted by the widespread politicization of the 1950s and 1960s, which culminated in the legendary "Hot Autumn" of 1968–69. A key feature of post-fascist Italy was the growth of a large-scale communist movement. The most influential communist intellectual of this period was Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Together with the writings of Salvemini and Borgese, Gramsci's Prison Notebooks — posthumously published in 1947 — played no small part in weaning Italian intellectuals from Croce's overpowering legacy (Roberts). For Gramsci, Croce "was the most sophisticated, influential and dangerous philosophical opponent of Marxism and working-class revolution in Italy and Europe." Gramsci blamed Croce's theories for creating the political inertia he attributed to the masses ("Overview of the Prison Notebooks"). As fascism vanished, a more inclusive mode of writing about ordinary Italians was pioneered by Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945) and numerous works on magic and ritual in southern Italy produced between 1948 and 1961 by the socialist folklorist Ernesto de Martino (Portelli 36).

It is against the backdrop of this reaction against Crocean historiographical elitism — characteristic of postwar Italian communism — that, towards the end of the 1960s, Alessandro Portelli took up a tape recorder and traveled Italy in an effort to recover, through direct oral encounters, the historical voices of ordinary people (Portelli viii). While searching out folk songs about the Italian working-class experience, he stumbled upon the story of the enigmatic death of a young communist steelworker, Luigi Trastulli.

Portelli's Discovery: The Death of Luigi Trastulli

Trastulli's death at the hands of police during anti-NATO protests in Terni in 1949 was eerily reminiscent of the death of Carlo Giuliani, the young anti-globalization protester killed by police in Genoa in 2001. But while nearly every detail of Giuliani's death was captured by photographers avid for sensational images, Trastulli's death was part of a drama that went under-reported by the local media and was probably not photographed at all. Portelli found that he had little to go on except the memories of those who had been present at the event or knew someone who had.

Memories proved unreliable: some people said Trastulli had been shot while exiting the factory gates, while others asserted that he had been fired at while climbing a wall. Portelli's most disconcerting discovery was that, in some people's memories, Trastulli had been murdered during street fights over job losses at the Terni steelworks in 1953, rather than during the anti-NATO protest of 1949.

Memory, Unreliability, and the Birth of a Methodology

In the end, faced with the reality of interviewing people thirty years after the events he was asking them to recall, Portelli realized that his inquiries had led him not to the truth about Trastulli's death, but to a confrontation with the instability of human memory itself. Instead of interpreting this as a disappointment, he viewed it positively, aware perhaps that he had invented a new historical field. "'Wrong' tales," he decided, are valuable because "[t]hey allow us to recognize the interest of the tellers, and the dreams and desires beneath them" (Portelli 2).

Portelli's book The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (1991) appeared at a time when oral history was already widely practiced — for example, by Studs Terkel — but was not yet informed by a self-conscious methodology. Portelli's work, says Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Oral History Research Office at her university, "has transformed oral history from being a kind of stepchild of history into a literary genre in its own right. He has allowed us to see oral histories as more than eyewitness accounts that are either true or false, and to look for themes and structures of the stories" (qtd. in Stille).

Conclusion: Naivety and the Problem of the Unreliable Narrator

By way of conclusion, the comment might be made that Portelli's approach can seem naive. Because he seems normally to interview people whose politics he shares, he constantly seeks out factors to explain discrepancies in their accounts — factors that lend the narrators' motives a degree of nobility which they probably do not always deserve. To this reader, a fair proportion of the stories he reviews in relation to the Trastulli event carry more than a hint of self-exculpation. One fears that Portelli's methodology, which seeks to minimize the distance between historian and speaker, may in the end unwittingly elevate the incorrigible liar to the same status as the conscientious reporter.