Berger’s ghosts: Storytelling and death in John Berger’s «The red tenda of Bologna»

This article discusses John Berger’s experimental work entitled The red tenda of Bologna first published in 2007. Like several other Berger’s late works, it mixes fiction, criticism and documentary forms to address aspects of the lived reality of our historical time; in particular, it focuses attention on the themes of death, temporality and memorialisation. Beginning at the end with the death of Berger’s uncle and working its way to the meaning of the life that has passed, The red tenda is exemplary of Berger’s late narrative’s attempts to rescue the past from oblivion, to find ways of bringing personal and historical memory into an enduring relationship, and to perpetuate cultural and collective memory through storytelling. This article proposes a critical trajectory that connects The red tenda with Berger’s late works and with Walter Benjamin’s essay The Storyteller. Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov.