History Is a Contemporary Literature

Manifesto for the Social Sciences

Ivan Jablonka, Nathan J. Bracher

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501709876
• eBook ISBN: 9781501710766
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Ivan Jablonka's History Is a Contemporary Literature offers highly innovative perspectives on the writing of history, the relationship between literature and the social sciences, and the way that both social-scientific inquiry and literary explorations contribute to our understanding of the world. Jablonka argues that the act and art of writing, far from being an afterthought in the social sciences, should play a vital role in the production of knowledge in all stages of the researcher's work and embody or even constitute the understanding obtained. History (along with sociology and anthropology) can, he contends, achieve both greater rigor and wider audiences by creating a literary experience through a broad spectrum of narrative modes.

Challenging scholars to adopt investigative, testimonial, and other experimental writing techniques as a way of creating and sharing knowledge, Jablonka envisions a social science literature that will inspire readers to become actively engaged in understanding their own pasts and to relate their histories to the present day. Lamenting the specialization that has isolated the academy from the rest of society, History Is a Contemporary Literature aims to bring imagination and audacity into the practice of scholarship, drawing on the techniques of literature to strengthen the methods of the social sciences.

Part I THE GREAT DIVIDE

1

HISTORIANS, ORATORS, AND WRITERS

Everybody knows that history is not literature. But since when is that the conventional wisdom on the subject? It would be an anachronism to try to study the divergence between history and literature prior to the nineteenth century, since they did not exist as distinctly separate concepts; or at least they took on meanings very different from the ones we give them today. However, it would be erroneous to conclude that their divorce dates only from Romanticism or the revolution of methodical history, as if “history” and “literature” had become independent of each other from the very moment they emerged.

In order to avoid such misinterpretations, we need to retrace the genealogy of these two concepts as genres and as institutions within an economy of intellectual production, while at the same time paying attention to the interrelationship existing between them even before their meaning was set in our vocabulary. From its very beginnings, history was intimately tied to literature (understood as poetry, rhetoric, or belles lettres), before separating off to emerge as a science in the nineteenth century. Even in antiquity, however, critical debate led to a distinction between history and its “literary” fringes: the separation of history and literature in fact began twenty-five centuries ago.

History as Tragedy

Herodotus has had a paradoxical posterity. As the historian of the Greco-Persian wars, Salamis, Marathon, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Scythians, and the Babylonians, he is both celebrated as “the father of history” and derided for his naïveté. Written in the fifth century BCE, his Histories (literally “inquiries” in the original Greek) seek rationally to know the causes of events (and those of the war between the Greeks and the barbarians in particular), while at the same time fulfilling the archaic function of memory: “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory.”1 These famous beginning lines lead us back into a world in which, as those who hold the truth, the gods make it flash in oracles and shimmer in dreams, and where the prophetic priestess of Apollo knows the future of humans and can even number the grains of sand on the seashore. As does Homer in The Iliad and Hesiod in his Theogony, Herodotus celebrates both the power of the gods and the great deeds of men, whose memory he passes on to future generations. (A later tradition will moreover name the books of The Histories after the nine daughters of Mnemosyne, the Muses.) Was he the first modern historian or the last epic poet of the oral tradition?

For his detractors, the “poetic” side of Herodotus stems also from his spinning of yarns and trafficking in stories. Aristotle, Diodorus of Sicily, and Strabo all consider The Histories to be a collection of idle gossip. Plutarch lampoons the cleverness of Herodotus. What motivates this “writer for hire,” this “lover of myth,” this “fabulist”? The desire to entertain. Herodotus allegedly sacrificed the truth to the pleasure of his audience. His aim is not to provide a truthful account, but rather to offer a delightful style and an enchanting story. That is why it is even “easier to believe in the fictions of Hesiod and Homer.”2

At the beginning of The History of the Peloponnesian War in about 430 BCE, Thucydides lays out his method in opposition to Homer and Herodotus. The former can be trusted only with great caution, because “as the poet he was,” he decorated and embellished everything. The latter starred in the Olympic Games with pompously staged lines for a moment’s pleasure. Hence the articulation of Thucydides’s own epistemological ambition, which is to leave the applause to the crowd-pleasers: “The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest.”3 One cannot obtain any definitive knowledge with rousing speeches: truth requires a historiography of austerity.

Three centuries later, another historian, Polybius, distances himself from other poet-historians, the tragics, whom he reproaches for their errors, their lack of rigor, and above all, their taste for pathos. In recounting the capture of Mantinea, Phylarchus paints one “scene of horror” after another: the vanquished are led off to be slaves, while women, with their hair undone and breasts bared, cling to one another desperately.4 Phylarchus makes the mistake of indulging in an emotional history that does not provide anything to explain the causes of events, motives for deeds, or human intentions. By criticizing Phylarchus’s intensely moving or cruel scenes, Polybius is responding to Aristotle, who had asserted the superiority of poetry over history. In order to establish his own value in contradistinction to the poets, Polybius sets intelligibility over against pleasure: “I did not aim so much at giving pleasure to my readers, as at profiting those who apply to such studies.”5 Tragedy, spectacle, and oddity are for poets; historians deal with rock-solid truth.

The “myths” of Herodotus and the “tragedies” of Phylarchus tend toward poetry. Be it epic or tragic, poetry arranges muthoï (stories, tales told) in view of creating the greatest effect on the spectator. What is this sort of history worth? Aristotle has already given the answer: it is inferior to poetry. But a theatrical history is also bad history. It is less concerned with truth than with the sensational; it would rather charm or horrify than teach. Whether they be historians according to poets or poets according to historians, “tragedians” (or “mythologists”) are condemned to write second-rate poetry and second-rate history.

From the dark legend of Herodotus and the quarrel of the tragics emerges an ideal: history as the truth, without entertainment, standing over against its opposite, history as poetry and theatrics, full of alluring lies. In this way, Thucydides and Polybius make an epistemology coincide with an aesthetic: history can never be delightful or moving; it can only aim for the bare truth.

However, that does not keep them from producing “tragedies” of their own. Thucydides does not spare us the spectacle either of victims buried alive in a wall in Corcyra, or of Athenians drinking from a river reddened with their own blood. Polybius’s talent for making the action come alive is intrinsically tragic, since by making it seem “as if you were there,” he evokes pathos. For his part, Livy has no qualms about impressing the reader with his narrative of the death of Lucretia or that of Virginia, or by his depiction of Rome at the mercy of the Gauls: the cries of the enemies were drowned out “by the weeping of women and children, the hissing of flames and the din of houses collapsing.”6

As Cicero writes in his letter to Lucceius, the tragic arouses an emotion that is delicious and ambiguous (cathartic, says Aristotle). Transformed into a fabula full of perils, twists, and turns, the history of his consulate leads the reader through all states of admiration, expectation, joy, sadness, hope, and fear. There is doubtless a difference between gratuitous dramatic effects and an instructive episode, but the main thing here is the rule that historians make and then immediately break: no staged production, no emotion, no show. This conception, which prefigures history as science, carries with it a mistrust of language, the shimmering, self-serving word so enamored of its own power that it winds up substituting itself for the world.

History as Eloquence

The first chroniclers display an economy of means that reaches the degree zero of the narrative: biblical genealogies, lists of memorable things having occurred each year in Egypt, names of kings engraved on the steles of the acropolis at Susa, lists of the winners of the Olympic Games, public memories recorded by the great pontiff in Rome, and ephemerides. The Roman chroniclers, from Cato to Fabius Pictor, hardly do any better. In the dialogue On the Orator and the treatise On the Laws (written between 55 and 52 BC), Cicero deplores the poverty of such a radically event-based history that contents itself with recording names, places, and deeds. Unlike Greece, Rome does not yet have any historians. For in Cicero’s estimation, the historian knows how to decorate his narrative: as an exornator and not just a narrator, he is distinguished by the quality of his writing, his rich style, and his ability to switch registers. That is why history is a magnificent undertaking for an orator.7

Such a history as eloquence highlights the real, framing great deeds and events in beautiful language. That is precisely what marks the historian’s inferiority. As a pure storyteller, he does not lay out any argument, prove anything, or refute anybody; he merely displays his talent by reporting “what happened.” In contrast to the nobility of rhetoric in the forum and the courtroom, this historia ornata does not take part in any effort to persuade. The maxim presenting history as the “oratory art par excellence” should not obscure the fact that, for Cicero himself, the historian is inferior to orators, the politicians and lawyers brilliantly representing the deliberative and judiciary genres. The historian orchestrates an eloquence for show; politicians and lawyers deploy their eloquence for combat. Purely decorative, history’s eloquence has nothing of the agonistic eloquence active in the political arena. After Lucretia’s suicide, Brutus arouses the people’s anger with virulent words “such as occur to a man in the very presence of an outrage, but are far from easy for an historian to reproduce.”8

History can place itself in service to the nobility of rhetoric by providing examples, precedents, and anecdotes that can make judges reflect and impress the crowd. For Cicero and Quintilian, it is useful for the orator to know the chronology of events, the history of Rome, and that of the great kings. The history considered to be the “teacher of life” (maîtresse de vie, from the Latin magistra vitae) by Polybius, Livy, Suetonius, and Plutarch is full of examples to imitate and lessons to apply fruitfully. History is profitable for orators, politicians, lawyers, and young men launching a career in the public arena. It is also the bittersweet refuge of those who have withdrawn from public life, such as Sallust, who, after the death of Caesar, meditates on the virtues of Scipio, the wild ambition of Jugurtha, and moral decadence. In addition to being useful for clashes in the public forum, history is also a substitute for confrontations in the public forum.

Ciceronianism, the art of fine speech, this “rhetoric” in the modern sense (as opposed to the rhetoric of politics and the courtroom theorized by Aristotle and Cicero himself), illustrates both the glamour and the infirmity of history: glamorous because it is beautiful, but infirm because it is only beautiful. Since it remains subordinate to true rhetoric and delivers “truth” only in the form of moral lessons, it merely provides the pleasure of language, and not of knowledge or combat. Demoted to the status of a sub-rhetoric and a sub-politics, history serves as an outlet for the frustrated ambitions of the one who narrates it. History, says Quintilian, aims solely “to record events for the benefit of posterity and to win glory for its author.”9 Once he conceives of his discourse as a repertory of admirable deeds heightened by well-ordered action (dispositio) and the finest expression (elocutio), the historian becomes a stylist. He slips quietly toward sophistry, where the important thing is not what is true but what is effective, if not beautiful.

Classical antiquity associates the virtues and vices of style with historians. In this respect, Cicero becomes an apostle of a “flowing and ample” style, mellow, even, rich, and full of grace. Thanks to his reading of Herodotus, his discourse acquires greater color, just as a person tans from walking in the sun. Thucydides, however, with his arid style and obscure ideas, is of no use to the orator.10 It is Sallust, the adversary of Cicero in politics and historiography, who prolongs the Thucydidean tradition fed by Attic style: purity of language, concision, gravitas, and absence of ornament. Such sobriety of writing, which one also finds with Caesar in the same era, is part of a history as intelligence that seeks first of all to understand, as opposed to an impassioned history intended to excite the audience. Does a rigorous style correspond to rigorous reasoning?

The opposition between historia nuda and h...

Table of contents

• The New Frontier: Preface to the Cornell Edition
• Introduction
• Part I. The Great Divide
• Part II. The Historical Way of Reasoning
• Part III. Literature and the Social Sciences
• Index