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History as a Kind of Writing
Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography
By Philippe Carrard The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-42801-7
CHAPTER 1
Dispositions
The first questions about writing I want to ask of contemporary French historiography pertain to "disposition," in the sense this term enjoyed in ancient rhetoric. Since historiographic texts are composed of different units, according to what principles are these units organized? How are they connected with each other? Specifically, are these connections always temporal? Before taking on the texts themselves, I will briefly review the theoretical statements that historians, philosophers, and theorists have made on this subject, whether in essays, lectures, or programmatic articles.
Squabbles about Narrative
The issue of textual arrangement in historiographic texts has often been reduced to their membership in the narrative genre, and for some time it was formulated in normative terms. Taking for granted that historians do use narrative, participants in the debate have asked whether that form was suited for serious scientific discourse, leading to the "squabbles" surveyed by François Hartog (2005a), from whom I borrow the title of this section. In English-speaking countries, discussions first opposed supporters and critics of narrative within the framework of analytical philosophy and philosophy of science. Assuming that historians necessarily rely on narrative, philosophers such as Carl Hempel (1942, 1962) and Karl Popper (1957) argued that history, measured by the standards of physics, is an imperfect science, which at best can offer "explanation sketches" (Hempel 1962, 15). True scientific knowledge, they held, is provided by laws that "cover" the phenomena to be described, making it possible to predict the way they would unfold in the future. History for them is devoid of this faculty, because explanation sketches — while providing some form of clarification — do not allow for predictions.
Starting in the 1960s and still within the analytical tradition, philosophers like William Dray, Morton White, Arthur Danto, and Louis Mink attacked the concept of "the unity of science": the idea that the only correct model of explanation is the covering law, and that history therefore cannot be regarded as a truly scientific discipline. Other models, according to them, produce perfectly admissible explanations, narrative supplying, for the type of understanding needed in history, a well-suited "cognitive instrument" (Mink 1987, 182, first published in 1978). The function of that instrument, they argued, is to place an action on a temporal continuum, relating it to previous actions as well as to future scenarios, and so rendering possible an account of how certain events occurred when the covering law model would not. While these philosophers acknowledged that history does not have laws comparable to those of physics, they also maintained that it is not bereft of regularities, since it frequently relies on "lawlike statements." Michael Scriven (1959, 458), for instance, defended the thesis that perfectly valid historical explanations are based on "truisms": statements that say "nothing new but something true," like "power corrupts," "proportional representation tends to give minorities excessive influence," and "other things being equal, a greater number of troops is an advantage in a battle" (465). These generalizations, Scriven specified, obviously do not always apply, and they frequently come with an adverb that modalizes them, like "doubtless," "probably," and "habitually." Addressing the same issue, philosopher of science Avezier Tucker (2004, 160) has called statements of this type "middle-range theories," that is, theories that are "not universal" and may have "exceptions," sometimes "many exceptions."
Debates about the existence and role of laws in historiography are no longer current in English-speaking countries. Discussions concerning the nature and function of narrative in the historical discipline have of course continued, conspicuously in journals such as History and Theory, Past and Present, and Rethinking History. Yet those discussions have taken place within the framework of what has been called narrativism: the assumption that historians, when they organize their data, inescapably give them a narrative structure. Thus a self-professed postmodern theorist like Alun Munslow has written a book revealingly titled Narrative and History (2007). From page 1 of his introduction, he states that his objective is to analyze the "rules," "procedures," and "compositional techniques" historians employ when they "turn the 'past' into that narrative about it we choose to call history." Similarly, historians Elizabeth Clark (2004), Robert Berkhofer (1995), and Herman Paul (2015) reduce historiographic writing to a narrative when they give the chapters of the studies they devote to textual arrangement the titles "Narrative and History," "Narrative and Historicization," and "The Aesthetic Relation: Historical Narratives." Theorists who still dispute the value of narrative as a mode of knowledge no longer pit that mode against the laws of physics; their objections bear on the coherence of historiographic narratives, a coherence they hold to be repressive. This position is represented in the United States by Sande Cohen, in the United Kingdom by Keith Jenkins. In History Out of Joint and other essays, Cohen (2006, 246–47) has excoriated what he holds to be the artificial homogeneity of historiographic narratives. Such narratives, according to him, render "continuity out of discontinuity," thus concealing the "cognitive dissonance" between the different moments of the past as well as between the past and the present. Extending Cohen's argument, Jenkins (2009, 283) has added that the arbitrary order historians impose on their data has ideological implications: by legitimizing "strong, contentious, present interests," that order obliterates injustice and prevents any kind of social change.
While in English-speaking countries controversies about the relation between narrative and history mostly involved philosophers and theorists, in France they first implicated trade historians. Starting in the 1930s, scholars who were to become members of the Annales school attacked what they condescendingly called "narrative history" (histoire récit) and "event history" (histoire événementielle): studies published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by historians who mainly focused on the political, military, and diplomatic past of nation-states. Lucien Febvre derided this type of research in his reviews. Fernand Braudel dismissed it in the preface to his study of the Mediterranean. And François Furet (1982, 76, first published in 1975) celebrated what he deemed to be the definitive shift from a history made of "narrations" and "compilations" to a history "scientifically conducted," whose purpose was to "pose problems" and "formulate hypotheses." Furet did not indicate which textual form(s) "problem history" was supposed to take, and he did not seem to notice the irony inherent in presenting his thesis as a narrative — in this instance, as a success story in which the "good" way of doing things had eventually triumphed over the "bad" one.
From the 1930s to the 1980s, the antinarrativist position of the Annales dominated the discussions by French historians of the relations between their discipline and storytelling. Besides Febvre, Braudel, and Furet, other members of the Annales such as Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie also condemned narrative, either in accounts of their intellectual journey (e.g., Le Goff 1987), or in reviews of books that did not conform to the Annales' standards (e.g., Le Roy Ladurie 1983). Obviously not all French historians belonged to the Annales school or to that school's successor in the 1970s, New History (Nouvelle Histoire). But if they wrote studies that still fell under the heading of narrative or event history, they did not theorize their position. A notable exception, in 1971, was Paul Veyne's Comment on écrit l'histoire: Essai d'épistémologie (Writing History: Essay in Epistemology). Using provocative language, Veyne (1971, 10, 13) had the boldness to state that history is "nothing but a true novel," "nothing but a truthful story." Relying on German, British, and American philosophers and sociologists, he also argued that in history explanations are provided not by laws, but by the comprehensive plots that historians devise when they textualize their data. Veyne's intervention was so unexpected that the editors of the journal Annales had to farm out the reviews of Comment on écrit l'histoire to scholars more attuned to issues of writing and epistemology: in this instance Raymond Aron (1971) and Michel de Certeau (1972). Aron, for that matter, was to give in 1972 at the Collège de France a course in which he introduced Anglo-American analytical philosophy of history, but neither this course nor Veyne's book had much resonance at the time. Tellingly, the encyclopedia La Nouvelle Histoire, published in 1978, had no entry for "narrative," and entries like the one devoted to "event" (written by Jacques Revel, one of the editors) only restated the Annales' party line.
Things in France hardly changed before the early 1980s and the publication of Paul Ricoeur's Temps et récit (Time and Narrative). Ricoeur's theses have been exhaustively discussed, notably by Dominick LaCapra (1985) and Hayden White (2010), and this is not the place to rehearse them. For my purpose, the most important issue concerns what Ricoeur (1983, 133) calls the "fundamentally narrative character of history": that even "the study the most remote from narrative form continues to be related to narrative understanding by way of a derivation, which can be reconstructed step by step, degree by degree, using the appropriate method." Applying this "method" to productions of the Annales school that were meant to be non- and even antinarrative, Ricoeur argues that such studies as Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II, Le Goff's Pour un autre Moyen-Âge, and Duby's Les trois ordres, ou L'imaginaire du féodalisme (Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined), in fact fall under storytelling. Of course, these works do not constitute a return to the "kings and battle" history that the Annales had indicted. But the Mediterranean and even abstract entities like feudalism can be regarded as "quasi characters," playing different roles in "quasi plots." For Ricoeur (1983, 303), Braudel relies on one of these quasi plots, specifically on the narrative topos of "decline," to tell the story of the Mediterranean's "withdrawal from major history" and the sea's "slow deterioration" as an important place of exchange.
Although French historians had not been convinced by Veyne's conception of history as a "true novel," in contrast they have adopted Ricoeur's views with surprising unanimity. Roger Chartier, for example, long associated with the New History, has now become a major spokesperson for narrativism. In the entry "Récit et histoire" (Narrative and history) that he wrote for the Dictionnaire des sciences humaines (2006, 969–70), he speaks of the "unanimous opinion that holds history as a narrative," of the "acknowledgment that history is narrative," and of the "membership, long ignored, of history in the category 'narrative.'" Unanimous opinion, acknowledgment, membership: these terms show that for Chartier the problem is solved — that history, whatever its practitioners might have contended at a certain point, inescapably belongs to storytelling. François Hartog (2005a, 173), who, like Chartier, adopts Ricoeur's theses, has argued that from antiquity to the contemporary period, history, however it is configured, has always relied on narrative: it has consistently "recounted the doings of men, told not the same story, but stories of diverse types." When the Annalistes rejected event history, Hartog concludes, they did not abandon "narrative" altogether; they dismissed "a specific form of narrative" but invented new ones, the Braudelian model constituting in this respect an innovation not just at the level of content, but at that of emplotment. Discussing the rehabilitation of storytelling in the entry that a post-Annales encyclopedia, Historiographies, now devotes to the genre, François Dosse (2010c, 871) argues along the same lines. He confidently asserts that historians, even when they are no longer concerned with "recounting political, military, or diplomatic events," always "emplot" the data they have gathered. Narrative, in this respect, constitutes the "indispensable mediation" that links "historical work" with one of the basic human "experiences," the unfolding of time.
Ricoeur's take on the necessarily narrative character of historical endeavors has hardly been questioned. One of the few (and timid) challenges was issued by Bernard Lepetit in an essay in his Carnet de croquis (Handbook of sketches). Discussing studies that fall under microhistory, like Giovanni Levi's Le pouvoir au village (Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist), Simona Cerutti's La ville et les métiers (Town and trades), and his own Les villes dans la France moderne (The Pre-industrial Urban System: France, 1740–1840), Lepetit (1999, 85–86) writes: "None of these works juxtaposes temporal cross sections to account for processes. But none of them is structured as a chronicle, either: their goal is to provide neither an exhaustive description nor a linear narrative. It is not the succession of episodes but that of analytical viewpoints and modes of observation (choice of 'local' interpretation grids, selection of sources, ways of processing the evidence) that shapes the development — I was about to say the plot." Showing that he has read Ricoeur, Lepetit here poses a crucial question: whether "development," in historiographic studies, is necessarily synonymous with "plot"; in brief, whether such studies, to count as historiographic, must take the form of a story and organize their data on the model of narrative.
Before addressing this question, it is indispensable to define what is meant by "narrative" — something the texts I have just analyzed often fail to do. As the German historian Johannes Süssmann (2002, 86) has stressed in the entry he devotes to Erzählung in the Lexicon Geschichtswissenschaft, on points like this one, literary theory can contribute to the analysis of historiographic discourse. Narratology in particular can offer clarifications, since one of its aims is to characterize narrative by distinguishing it from other modes of textual organization. Turning to narrative theorists, I will here, with Gerald Prince (2012, 25), define narrative as "the logically consistent representation of a least two asynchronous events, or a state and an event, that do not presuppose or imply each other"; and with James Phelan (2007, 203), as "somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened." Whether they treat narrative as an object or as a transaction, these definitions say basically the same thing: to count as a narrative, a text must include at least two units located on a temporal axis, even if the first may remain implicit. Thus the minitext "France was a monarchy" is not a narrative, because it does not involve the representation of an event; but the subsequent minitext "France's monarchy fell on August 10, 1792" is, because it represents a change with respect to a state and could be parsed into "there was a monarchy in France" and "that monarchy fell on August 10, 1792.
If we use Prince's and Phelan's definitions to ask whether contemporary French historians rely on narrative, we cannot help noting that a large part of their production does not fall under storytelling. Some of the works they have published develop a plot, but others do not, resulting in three main categories of textual disposition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from History as a Kind of Writing by Philippe Carrard. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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