The
barbarians An Essay on the Mutation of Culture
Alessandro Baricco t ra nsl ate d f r om t h e i ta l i a n by ste phe n s a rta re l l i
pra i se f or a le s s a n dr o ba r i c c o “Alessandro Baricco is a novelist who weaves words into a fabric as delicate as Venetian lace. His approach to prose is musical, sensitive to the melody of a sentence and the rhythm of a paragraph.” —Chicago Tribune
p ra i s e for emmaus “Emmaus operates at such high intensity that all three times I set the book down—twice to make coffee, once to eat a small lunch— my eyes took minutes to readjust, so flat and muddy and standard definition did the world around me appear by comparison.” —Adam Levin, author of Hot Pink and The Instructions
pra i se f or silk “Silk has the brilliant colors . . . and the enchantment of a miniature. . . . Vividly erotic.” —Newsday “A riveting, lyrical love story, an accomplished historical fiction, a compact, condensed . . . epic about human hearts in crisis.” —Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered
First published in hardcover in the United States of America in 2013 by Rizzoli Ex Libris, an imprint of Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 300 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10010 www.rizzoliusa.com Originally published in Italian as I Barbari Copyright © 2006 by Alessandro Baricco English Translation Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Sartarelli This ebook edition © 2013 by Alessandro Baricco All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publishers.
2013 2014 2015 2016 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-4296-4
The fear of being overrun and destroyed by barbarian hordes is as old as the history of civilized culture itself. Images of desertification—of gardens ransacked by nomads, and of decrepit palaces in which goatherds tend their flocks—have haunted the literature of decadence from antiquity to the present day. wol f g a n g s c h i v e lb us c h , The Culture of Defeat
contents
pre face to t h e e n g li s h - l a n g uag e e diti on ix intr od ucti on 1 pl u nde r i ng 5 Wine 1 7 Wine 2 14 The Animal 22 Soccer 1 26 Soccer 2 31 Books 1 38 Books 2 47 Books 3 52 bre ath i ng w i t h g o o g le g i l l s 59 Google 1 61 Google 2 65 Google 3 69 Experience 76 l o si ng one ’s s o ul 83 Soul 85 Classical Music 90 vii
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the bar bar ians
Monsieur Bertin 97 Monsieur Rivière 99 Hard Work 102 War 108 p ortra i t s 113 epil o g u e 151 The Great Wall of China 153
preface to the english-language edition
i w r o te thi s book in 2006, in installments. Every five or six days I published a chapter in La Repubblica, the Italian daily I write for. I was writing “live,” so to speak, in the sense that when each installment came out, I still hadn’t written the subsequent one, and so the comments I would find still fresh on the Web, and the reactions of my friends, relatives, and neighbors, could change my mind, and therefore the book, with every day that passed. It’s a strange way to write a book. It was as though in order to study dolphins I had decided to live like a dolphin. At any rate, I remember that it came to me rather naturally. Even as I was writing the installments, The Barbarians already prompted a lot of discussions and arguments, and these only increased later, when the essay was published as a single volume. Apparently it touched upon something dear to the hearts of everyone that seemed to require urgent attention: the impression that the planet was lurching toward a sort of cultural apocalypse, a spectacular descent into a new barbarism. The unease, if not the horror, at this sort of phenomenon was such that it took me a little while to make it clear that my book was not denouncing the new barbarians. I often had to explain patiently that, on the contrary, I had written the book in order to understand the barbarians, with the suspicion that, deep down, they might be right. And when I would say this, often my interlocutor (usually an intellectual or journalist) would react with deep dismay and ix
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astonishment—as if I had just stolen his or her Christmas presents. What I had taken from them, in effect, was a facile cause for indignation and disdain, and it was clear that this fact didn’t sit well with them at all. But one thing I’m proud of is that there are a great many people who, after reading The Barbarians, were forced to realize that they wouldn’t be able to get away anymore with the usual preaching to the young who don’t read, who eat fast food, and who don’t know who Michelangelo Antonioni was. Before scorning what was happening, they would at least have to sweat a little. Given the fact that publishing houses, too, are often strongholds of the (sublime) civilization that the barbarians are (rightly) transforming, I have had more than a little difficulty getting this book translated. It must be an unconscious form of self-defense. Or else I’m overrating the quality of the book. I don’t know. The fact remains, for example, that I have never found a publisher who wanted to have the book translated into English. Not that the Americans and the English are particularly interested in what we do in the far reaches of the Empire, in this lovely country of ours called Italy. Still, it irked me that the English-language audience couldn’t read a book that concerned them—as it concerned any other citizen of the planet, of course—but concerned them above all, as masters of the planet. And so I did something I never do. I became determined, and for years I sought a way to bring The Barbarians to the very places where it apparently was not wanted. I was at the point of resigning myself to doing what I think is one of the most depressing things in the world—that is, self-publishing it as an e-book—when I happened to mention the problem to Oscar Farinetti. Farinetti is not a publisher, let alone an intellectual. He is simply the most ingenious businessman I
preface to th e engli s h - l a n g uag e e dit ion
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have ever met. And one of the most enthusiastic readers of The Barbarians that I have ever met. When I told him that the book did not exist in English, he said, “I don’t believe it.” “I swear it’s true,” I said. “All right, then,” he said, “we’ll do it ourselves.” By we he meant himself, me, and Eataly, his latest invention, a store in New York that has become one of the five most popular attractions in the city. Then we moved on to other subjects. But a year later, here we are, with The Barbarians. Try telling me this is not a peerless man. Try telling me not to dedicate to him, my friend and teacher in so many things, this English edition of my book. One last note. Eight years have passed since I wrote The Barbarians. An eternity for a book that speaks of the present while trying to intuit the future. For example, when I was writing it, Twitter didn’t even exist yet (it was born right around that time, to be precise). I have not, however, taken the trouble to correct mistakes, or update examples, or add any chapters on the latest developments. I would like people to read it as a book written in 2006, with the advantage of knowing how many things have turned out since. I would certainly have corrected it had I found that it had aged too much. But I remain convinced that, in its main tenets, the book still revolves very closely around what is happening across our planet. If you should happen to disagree, please let me know.
A. B. June 2013
introduction
it may not seem like it, but this is a book. I thought I might like to write one in serial form, for a newspaper, to appear together with all the world’s entrails passing through its pages. What attracted me to the idea was the fragility of the thing—like writing outside, standing atop a tower, with everyone looking on and the wind blowing, everybody passing by with so many things to do. There you are, unable to revise, turn back, or redesign the ladder. Whatever happens, happens. And then, the next day, the page will be used to wrap a head of lettuce or become a hat for a housepainter. Assuming people still make hats out of newspapers, like little boats floating on the seas of their hair. Every so often, and not only in our work, we go out and seek hardship. It’s probably a way to regain some sort of authenticity. All the same, I wouldn’t want to create false expectations, and so I’d like to be clear: this is not a novel. I have no interest in serial novels. This will therefore be an essay, in the literal sense of the term—that is, an attempt. At thinking while writing. There are a number of things I would like to understand about what is happening around me—and by “around me” I mean in the very slender slice of the world in which I move about: educated people, people in the process of being educated, fiction writers, performers, intellectuals. That sort of thing. A nasty world, in many ways, but this is where ideas graze, and it’s from this soil that I have grown. Anyway, I lost touch with the rest of the world 1
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quite a while ago, sorry to say. But it’s true. It takes a great deal of effort to understand one’s own clod of earth, which leaves little time to understand the rest of the field. But perhaps every clod contains the whole field, if you know how to read it. At any rate, as I was saying, there is something I would like to understand in all this. At first I thought of titling this book Mutation. But I couldn’t find a single person who actually liked the title, not even a little. Oh, well. And yet it was quite apropos. What I mean is that it’s the very thing I’m trying to understand. I want to know what the mutation I see around me consists of. If I had to summarize, I would say this: there’s a sense of incomprehensible apocalypse in the air—we all feel it—and there’s a rumor going around: the barbarians are coming. I see subtle minds with eyes glued to the television, scanning its horizon for the imminent invasion. From their university chairs, clever professors survey, in their students’ silences, the ruins left behind by a horde that nobody actually managed to see. And over what is written or imagined hovers the bewildered gaze of exegetes who tell in dismay of an earth sacked by predators with no culture or history. Meet the barbarians. In the world I inhabit, there is a shortage of intellectual honesty, but not of intelligence. Not everyone has gone crazy. They see something there. But I’m unable to see it with their eyes. Something doesn’t add up for me. It could be, I realize, just the normal duel between generations, the old resisting the invasion of the young, established power defending its position by accusing the emerging forces of barbarism, and all those things that have always happened
in t r od uc t ion
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and that we’ve seen so many times before. This time, however, it seems different. That is, the duel is so profound that it seems different. Normally the struggle is for control of strategic points on the map. In our case, however, the aggressors seem to be doing something much more radical and profound: they are changing the map. They may have changed it already. This is how it must have been during the blessed years in which the Enlightenment was born, or at the time when the whole world discovered, all of a sudden, that it was Romantic. There weren’t any troop movements, not even any sons killing their fathers. There were only mutants replacing one landscape with another and establishing their new habitat there. Perhaps this is one such moment. And perhaps those we call barbarians are actually a new species who have gills behind their ears and have decided to live underwater. Obviously to us, with our pathetic little lungs, it all looks, from the outside, like an imminent apocalypse. Where they breathe, we die. And when we see our children gaze longingly at the water, we fear for them and blindly lash out against the only thing we can see—namely, the shadow of a barbarian horde on its way. Meanwhile, those abovementioned children, under our wings, are already having a hard time breathing and keep scratching behind their ears, as if there were something back there to set free. And this is what I really want to understand. I don’t know, maybe it has something to do with this odd form of asthma that keeps coming over me more and more these days, and my strange new inclination to swim for long stretches underwater, as if I were waiting for gills of my own to appear and save me. Whatever the case, I would like to see those gills up close. And study the animal that is slowly withdrawing from dry land
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and becoming a fish. I would like to examine the mutation, not to explain its cause (that’s beyond my reach), but just to be able, however remotely, to draw it. The way naturalists used to draw a new species discovered in Australia in their sketchbooks. Today, I opened my sketchbook. Don’t understand? Obviously, since the book hasn’t even begun. A journey for patient travelers—that’s what a book is.