On Literature

ON CAMPORESI: BLOOD, BODY, LIFE

It is difficult to say who Piero Camporesi is. Over the course of fifteen books he has studied the various aspects of what is called "the material life"—our customs, behaviors, and in particular the "lower" functions, those connected with the body, food, blood, feces, sex—and thus he is certainly a cultural anthropologist. And yet one expects a cultural anthropologist to carry out "fieldwork," exploring the customs and myths of some civilization that still exists.

Camporesi, on the other hand, reads texts. He reads literary texts, or, rather, texts that belong to the history of literature. In fact, if you go and check what his academic field is you will see that he is a historian of literature (Italian literature, as is indicated in the list of faculty at Bologna University, but Camporesi makes frequent incursions into other literatures).

However, Camporesi reads and discovers texts that histories of literature have ignored, because they deal with everyday questions, moral or physical problems. Some official histories of literature have taken these texts into consideration, but from the point of view of their style, not of their content. Camporesi, on the other hand, has spent his life rediscovering and rereading them as witnesses to a way of life. Camporesi is therefore a cultural anthropologist who, in order to find material, does not go and study the men of today, whether "savage" or "primitive," but rather the (very civilized) men of the past.

I would like to explain myself better: Camporesi is the kind of man who goes into a room where there is a carpet with beautiful patterns and colors, which everyone has always looked at as a work of art; he takes it by the edge, turns it over, and shows us that the underside of that carpet was teeming with worms, cockroaches, grubs, a whole unknown and underground life. A life that nobody had ever discovered. And yet it was on the underside of the carpet all the time.

Camporesi has spent his life reading and rereading these forgotten texts, these texts that were staring everyone in the face but which no one had yet read in that way, to tell us how in past centuries the world was inhabited by vagabonds, charlatans, healers, thieves, murderers, madmen inspired by God, fake and genuine lepers. He has rediscovered the millennial dreams of a land of Cockaigne, the dreams of peoples who were oppressed by famine: he has rediscovered the rituals of Carnival, of witches' Sabbaths, of diabolical hallucinations.

He has brought to light texts that help us understand how in the past people had different ideas of their own bodies, and of food (Camporesi is a gourmet, and he understands what the smell of cheese or the taste of milk meant in those times). He has reread passages by religious preachers about the Inferno and its torments (which meant rediscovering a vision of the body as a site and occasion of pain, punishment, and endless suffering), he has looked at the way men ate, cooked, how they clicked their tongue when swallowing, how they heightened their sexual appetite through unguents and elixirs, how in the eighteenth century they welcomed those exotic and (at that time) marvelous beverages such as coffee and chocolate, how miners, weavers, barbers, surgeons, doctors, and healers worked, what image was held of the poor, the disinherited, the scoundrel, the thief, the murderer, and the desperado.

All the things Camporesi discovers were already there, as clear as day, in books that had piled up over the course of centuries. Camporesi simply knows how to reread these books.

He is, then, a historian of literature, who invites us to rediscover the least celebrated literary texts. He is a cultural anthropologist, but one who rediscovers the customs of ancient civilizations through the traces they have left in various texts.

It is difficult to say who Camporesi is. I confess that if I had to reread at a single sitting all the books he has written, I would be seized with nausea: they amount to a sequence of insights on the way bodies were loved, dismembered, fed, anatomized, devoured, rejected, humiliated.... Camporesi's cultural anthropology is shocking, ruthless, richly documented, and true. If someone decided to read all of Camporesi's books one by one, the reader would feel horror, satiety, and a desire to escape from this orgy of fibers, intestines, mouths, buboes, vomit, and greed. Camporesi's books must be sipped slowly, bit by bit, to escape the obsession with the body triumphant, with all its miseries and glories. Reading them all at once would be like eating nothing but cream cakes for an entire week, or swimming for a week in one's own excrement (which amounts to much the same).

The reader of this book will find just one aspect of this unbearable representation of the human body throughout the centuries: blood, its rites, myths, and reality. As we read this book we are seized by a slight (or not so slight) anxiety. We are made of bones, flesh, and blood. Blood is important. But nowadays it is analyzed only in laboratories, and we do not have a direct relationship with our blood. If we cut ourselves with a knife, we stop the bleeding with a bandage or with a styptic pencil. When a surgeon operates on us, and the blood flows, we are asleep. If there is an accident on the highway, we call the police and the ambulance, but we try not to see the blood. And yet, as Camporesi shows us, in past centuries blood was a daily reality, people knew its smell and its stickiness.

Are we really strangers to blood? Are we really that far from those centuries Camporesi tells us about? And if so why are there still so many Satanic sects, so many blood cults? One can even find them advertised on the Internet.

Have we solved the problem of our relationship with blood? True, we no longer have public ceremonies of dismemberment, where blood flowed in rivers. But as I write, the Italian newspapers feature accounts of a Madonna who weeps blood. A superstition, of course, but is there not also an element of superstition in those charismatic sects who order their faithful to carry out a bloodbath? What is the relationship between the Madonnas who weep blood and the taste for blood that hung over the slaughter of Sharon Tate?

That brings me to what I want to say: Camporesi reconstructs customs, feelings, fears, and desires that seemed ancient to us, and invites us to look inside ourselves, to understand the obscure relationship between rites and myths of the past and our own urges today, and to discover the ancient man inside us, we who use the Internet and think that blood only concerns surgeons and those who study new epidemics on our planet.

Perhaps Camporesi must be read in small doses, because if we read all his books, we would invariably ask ourselves: "Who are we, we civilized men?"

This is a short book. Let us read Camporesi in a homeopathic dose. That is enough for the moment. Later perhaps you will want to read his other books.

Written as a preface to Piero Camporesi, The Juice of Life (New York: Continuum, 1995).