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.

LRB 27 October 1988 | PDF Download