ETYMOLOGIE / etymology

1135 en français estoire: «récit d’événements dignes de mémoire», du latin historia, du grec ὶστορἰα: «recherche, exploration; résultat d’une enquête; relation des événements dont on a eu connaissance», du verbe ἵστορἐω: «chercher à savoir, explorer, enquêter, interroger», par suite «connaître» et «relater, raconter, décrire». V. l’article QUÊTE sur l’idée de «recherche».

anglais story, spécialisé dans le sens de «récit», de l’anglo-normand estorie, du vieux français estoire.

ETUDE SEMANTIQUE / Definitions

1. La période de l’évolution humaine connue par des documents. «Les limites entre la préhistoire et l’histoire sont théoriquement fixées par l’apparition de l’écriture» (A. Leroi-Gourhan, Histoire universelle, I).

2. L’ensemble des événements, des faits, composant cette évolution et en témoignant. «Nous vivons dans l’histoire comme les poissons dans l’eau; nous avons une conscience aigue de notre responsabilité historique» (Sartre, Situations, II).

3. L’ensemble des connaissances relatives à cette évolution, considérée sous ses différents aspects. Ex.: l’histoire chronologique, diplomatique, religieuse, militaire, littéraire, contemporaine, anecdotique, etc.

l’histoire sainte: la Bible.

4. Le genre littéraire prenant les événements et les faits de cette évolution pour sujet et objet d’étude. Ex.: L’histoire de la révolution française, de Michelet; L’histoire de Charles XII, de Voltaire; Discours sur l’histoire universelle, de Bossuet; L’histoire de la langue française, de Brunet.

5. (Science; sens plus fréquent dans l’allemand Geschischte) Spécialement, histoire naturelle: Connaissance de l’évolution générale des corps observables. V. le sens 3 du terme HISTOIRE LITTÉRAIRE.

6. Récit.

Ce sens est pris en charge en anglais par story par opposition à history consacrée aux acceptations précédentes, à la différence de la réunion des différents sens dans le même vocable histoire familière aux langues romanes.

Pour ce sens, v. l’article RÉCIT, mais aussi FABLE, FABULA, FICTION.

COMMENTAIRE / Analysis

The attempt to devine the use of ‘history’ as a literary term is fraught with two immediate problems. The first is approximately that which was pointed out by Hegel in the Introduction to his own Philosophy of History. As he writes, “the term History (Geschischte) unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes quite as much the historia rerum gestarum, as the res gestae themselves; on the other hand it comprehends not less what has happened, than the narration of what has happened”. This terminological equivocation between history as a sequence of events, and history as the linguistic (specifically narrative) representation of those events is indeed an endemic feature, consecrated by popular usage. Hegel, however, justifies it by appealing to the historical genesis of history: “ we must suppose historical narrations to have appeared contemporaneously with historical deeds and events”. In other words, history begins at the precise point where events are of such signifiance as to merit narration: it begins with the emergence of the form of society which constitutes its preeminent subject matter, that is, the State.

Allied to this problem of definition is a further one. At least as as old as Thucydides, in the Western tradition, is the need to invoke metahistorical principles within the historical text, as a critical adjunct to narration. Thus, Thucydides, in the famous opening section of his History of the Peloponnesian War, explains that he has not merely repeated the assertions of others, but evaluated existing traditions in a rational and objective fashion. When he expresses the hope that readers will not miss the presence of ‘mythical’ (μιθδες) elements in his work, he sets in opposition the texts of the poets and those of the true historian. But he also implicitly sets up a distinction between the false (or mythical) historian and the true (or rational) historian. Wether or not he meant, by this distinction, to stigmatise his predecessor Herodotus, the implication has remained. Both in the Ancient World, and more unequivocally in the 19th-century, Thucydides has assumed the mantle of the good historian, whilst Herodotus has been type-cast as the bad.

It is in the English language that these two problems of definition can be most succintly, and paradoxically formulated. On the one hand, ‘history’ is ‘story’. That is to say, the meaning attributed to a sequence of events cannot be envisaged in any way other than as a feature of the linguistic representation of those events. On the other hand, ‘history’ is not ‘story’. There are ways of representing events in such a fashion as to achieve a true history, and there are ways of representing events in such a fashion as to achieve a false history. If ‘history’ and ‘story’ both share the protocol of narration, they must be rigidly discriminated in respect of their claims to truth.

To generalise about this issue is, however, to take us nowhere. My intention is to draw some brief conclusions about the way in which the history/story relation has operated in the past few centuries, and, in particular, how it operates at the present day. In this task, I see it as essential to construct a three-stage explanatory schema similar to that developed by Michel Charles, in his introduction to a special issue of Poétique, on “Le texte de l’histoire”. Charles justifies including texts by the 18th-century French historian Mably and the contemporary critic Barthes with the claim: “Mably is still inscribed within a space where historical discourse has a fundamentally literary dimension; with Barthes, the new task is to interrogate it, if not as literary, at least as discourse”. Here are stages one and three of my schema. Stage two is the one in which (as Charles puts it), “people forfot that every scientific discourse could also be apprehended as a linguistic operation”. The three-stage schema therefore has a broadly dialectical progression to it. In the first instance, history is story; in the second, history is not story but science; in the third, history is science, but also story.

Let me argue the pertinence of this distinction by taking a specific example, which will at the same time correct the possible over-statement of my case. In 1667, the Italian historian Gregorio Leti a study entitled Il Nipostimo di Roma, which, because of its inflammatory religious subject matter, was rapidly translated into English and French: here was a book which not only presented the Counter-Reformation papacy in a highly Machiavellian light, but also embodied a direct criticism of one of the official contemporary accounts of church history: Cardinal Pallavicino’s Historia del Concilio Tridentino (1619). These are the original text, and the translations into French and English, which relate to Leti’s condemnation of his predecessor:

1.

 Questo con la speranza di guadagnare il cappello, ... s’era posto a scrivere la sua Historia del Consiglio di Trento, che si puo dir veramente sua, perche la maggior parte non e Historia, ma una massa di concetti, e parole, infantade nel suo cervello, con la quale volendo mostrare al mondo, che l’Historia del Padre Paolo Servita, sporo lo stresso soggetto, sia falsa, si da con l’accetta ne ‘ piedi, come si suol dire, mentre i medesimi concetti, servono a corroborare, e dar forza maggiore a’ concetti dell’ Historia del Padre Paolo.

Eper me posso dire di non haver mai creduto cosi pura, sincera e reale l’Histoire del Servita, se non doppo c’ho veduta quella del Gesuita.

2.

Ce personnage brigant un Chapeau ... s’était mis à écrire son Histoire du Concile de Trente, que nous appelons avec bien de justice son Histoire n’étant autre chose qu’un ramas de ses propres pensées et imaginations, ou voulant refuter le Père Paul de l’ordre des Servans, il se coupe de son propre couteau, comme l’on dit, ses conceptions ne servant qu’à appuyer l’Histoire du Servant qui ne m’a jamais paru si dégagé, si sincère, et si solide, que dès que j’ai vu le fatras de celle du Jésuite.

3.

[Padre Pallavicino, the Pope’s Confessor] had undertaken to write the Story of the Councel of Trent ; which indeed may be justly call’d his, for the greatest part of it is not history and relation, but an abundance of words by which he endeavours to prove, that the history of Fra Paolo upon the same subject, was and is false, but he stumbleth at every step he goes, and is so ill furnish’d with Arguments, that for my part I must confess, that I never believed Fra Paulo’s History to be real, sincere and true, but since I read the Jesuites.

It will be evident from these alternative versions that the antithetical force of the distinction between ‘ true’ and ‘false’ History transcends the particular linguistic formulations given to it by the respective translators. The original Italian text, for example, makes the antithesis turn on the personal nature of Pallavicino’s text (‘ la sua Historia’/veramente sua’), while the French translator plays on the double sense of Histoire (‘son Histoire du Concile de Trente’/ ‘son Histoire’). The Italian syntagm for designating ‘true’ History is ‘pura, sincera e reale’, which is modified by both the Frenchman (‘si degagee, si sincere,et si solide’) and by the Englishman (‘real, sincere and true’). It is noteworthy, furthermore, that the English translator uses ‘Story’ as a synonym for ‘History’ (‘Story of the Councel of Trent’) whilst a further English commentator makes use of the Story/History antithesis to stigmatise, laconically and definitively, the work of the unfortunate Jesuit: ‘I was told at Rome that his story (not history) of the Council of Trent got him the Cardinal’s cap’. 10

This series of extracts does indeed show that, in the context of religious polemic, the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ history was indeed maintained among 17 th-century historical commentators ; and it shows that, for both French and English, this distinction could be expressed by loading the same term or similar terms with different nuances (‘Histoire’/’son Histoire’, ‘story not history’). But it must be emphasised, at the same time, that religious polemic does not simply supply the context : one might go so far as to say that it is only the disputational vigour aroused by works such as that of Pallavicino that mobilises the adverse criticism. Pallavicino is a Jesuit before he is a historian, and it is because he has proved himself, in his historical writing, a good Jesuit that he must be stigmatised as a bad historian.

We return therefore to that ‘Space where historical discourse has a fundamental literaty dimension’ mentioned in connection with the French 18 th-century historian Mably. What I am suggesting is that, within this space, it is possible only to set up a ‘weak’ distinction in not critical, ‘scientific’ commitment, but religious, or anti-religious zeal. Perhaps the last historian to suffer from such an onslaught - openly about cristical standards, but covertly about religious ideology - is the Englisham Edward Gibbon, author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is by successfully displacing the debate on to the critical level, and showing his own superiority over his critics, that Gibbon can expose them as being witless eccle siastics in search of preferment. 11

Yet Gibbon’s Vindication anticipates a new mentality among historians, when the ‘strong’ distinction between history and story becomes an article of faith. Writing of the French Enlightenment, Suzanne Gearhart can speak of ‘The open boundary of history and fiction’. 12

Mably, for one, freely transgresses that open boundary when he recommends : ‘Take care that you bring the novel into history’. 13

For the Eropean historians of the 1820' s, however, it is precisely the antithetical model provided by the celebrated and successful novel of Sir Walter Scott that reminds them, unambiguously, that their purpose is very different. The future historian of English society, Thomas Babington Macaulay, wrote in 1828 of a strategy exactly opposite to that recommended by Mably. ‘But a truly great historian’, he claims, in a passage referring directly to the achievements of Scott, ‘ would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated’. 14

Leopol von Ranke, whose Preface to the History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (1824) was taken as the manifesto of the new critical historiography, evidently maintained till the end of his life the strong desire to recuperate the historical materials which Scott the novelist had so effectively filched. According to his first English translator, he was worrying only weeks before his death that Scott ‘was not more available for the purposes of a historian than he is ... What valuable lessons were not to be drawn from facts to which the great English novelist had the key...’15

I return to my original formulations. For the period beginning, roughly, in the mid-17 th-century and ending with the 18 th-century, history and story are distinguished by a weak antagonism, which has to be mobilised by other polemical and adversarial forces. From the early 19 th-century onwards, there comes into place a strong antogonism, based on the historian’s new-found conviction that science (not religious ideology) must be his guiding beacon. In this context, it is interesting to note the 19 th-century judgement on the case of Antoine Varillas, a 17 th-century French historian who was foolish enough to trespass into the contentious area of the History of Heresy. It was only after Varillas had mobilised the religious antagonisms through his choice of subject matter that his critics determined to look carefully into the historical credentials not only of the latest history, but also of ‘ses premiers ouvrages’.16

When they did so, the writer of the Biographie Universelle, triumphantly exclaims, they found him to be entirely lacking in the basic critical skills of the historian, and from that time ‘Varillas fut regardé comme un romancier’. 17

Looking back on the controversy, the 19 th-century writer both understands and misunderstands it. He loads with special weight the fact that Varillas was demoted from historian to novelist, but he does not pick up the significant point that is was only Varillas’s incautious choice of subject that let loose the comprehensive criticism of his entire previous œuvre. If he had not chosen to write on heresy, he would have continued to pass ass a historian.

All this is of course to say little more than that the Rankean revolution in historiography initiates a professional and institutional commitment to critical standards in the subject. From the early 19 th-century onwards, the Avenging Angel is ready to strike down the bad historian, in principe whether or not that historian has written on a contentious subject. Moreover the growing prestige of the novel as a popular literary genre, which itself succesfully attempts to take over the functions of historical narrative, gives the historian a clear antagonist against which to pit his own cognitive claims. Forced to confront the literary craftsman who has invaded his territory, the historian reacts by disavowing the element of linguistic representation in his achievement. The novelist works with words, but he, the historian, works with facts. A whole inheritance which insists that history, in the last resort, is a literary genre comparable to other literary is jettisoned by a profession which entrenches itself in its increasing sophistication and prowess of research.

How far has this situation changed in the past half century ? I indicated earlier that I saw the relation betwen ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ in terms of a three-stage progression : in Michel Charles’s terms, first of all history is story, then history is not story but science. Finally, it is science, but also story. Charles associates this third stage with the determination of Barthes to ‘interrogate’ history, if not as literature, ‘at least as discourse’. And it is in terms of Barthes’s own career as a critic that we can see some of the main features of the new approch emerging into view. His remarkable Michelet par lui-même (1954) gives an unprecedented attention to the specificity of a historian’s style, analysing the predominant features of Michelet’s extraordinary creativity. Nevertheless this is a book about a single author, and about a historian who has always been recognised as forming an exception to every rule. More challenging, therefore, are the essays which Barthes wrote in the 1960's, on ‘The reality effect’ (‘L’effet du réel’) and particularly ‘The discourse of history’ (‘Le discours de l’histoire’). 18

Here he seeks to understand not simply the contributory effects of style, but the protocol whereby the historian makes his unique claim to register the real. Indeed Barthes strongly implies that this claim can now be seen as yet another rhetorical device, which we can understand because we have outgrown it. Hence he concludes the second essay, first published in 1967, with the prediction that ‘the sign of History from now on is no longer the real, but the intelligible’. 19

It is worth looking a little more closely at Barthes’s claim, since if his contention is true, the antagonism between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ dissolves completely : the historian becomes a scientist, purely and simply, and he has no need to repudiate, or compete with, the writer of fiction. To support his claim, it should be mentioned that he is undoubtedly to the increasingly mature and self-conscious historiography of the French Annales School, which had formulated its aims clearly and cogently by the early 1960's. He writes just two years after the appearance of Braudel’s Mediterranean World, which is a work that repudiates traditional narrative in favour of an immense intellectual construction paralleling the ‘longue durée’ of history. 20

He also writes at a time when Levi-Strauss had directed a shrewd attack at traditional concepts of historical method, raising the prospect that history would have to choose between adopting the methods of social anthropology and withering away to nothing. But, as Barthes himself was one of the first to recognise, the moment of high structuralism (to which ‘The discourse of history’ belongs) itself passed away very quickly. Would Barthes have come to the same conclusion if he had written on history the years later, after the publication of Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou ? Here was a book which, in its totality, formed a kind of ‘reality effect’, bringing back the plethoric life of one medieval village to an enchanted international audience. 21

So we are obliged to remain with history as a problematic category -‘ science, but also story’. In the Anglo-American world, no one has done more to address the implications of this status than Hayden White, whose pioneering work Metahistory was published in 1973. It is important to set White’s approach to his subject matter in context. For the historian, the annals of 19 th-century historiography may be said to have formed a kind of residual good conscience. The works of Ranke and his successors remained unread, but their status as progenitors of the scientific approach to history was at the same time unchallenged. White’s Metahistory demonstrated that the writing of history in the 19 th-century was governed by tropes, and fashioned according to a number of alternative mode of ‘emplotment’. 22

What is more, his analysis took in both respectable historians and discredited historians -Ranke and Michelet - and purported to discover even in philosophers of history like Hegel and Croce the same governing rhetoric as in the historical texts proper. Far from taking his stand on the irreducible difference between ‘history’ and ‘Fiction/literature/rhetoric’, White claimed that history would benefit from the acknowledgement of its literary basis. 23

Yet, as his subsequent works have made clear, White never held that the exposure of the literary and rhetorical underpinning of historical texts amounted to a critique of its cognitive claims. He has strongly defended the claim that narrative is a unique mode of cultural expression, White history can hardly dispense with, and which exists even in the most impoverished examples of historical record. 24

 White’s comments are also useful in assessing the significance of the critical movement known as ‘The New Historicism’, which has had a considerable effect in the United States, particularly, since Stephen Greenblatt coined the term in 1982.25

New Historicism cann be understood in a number of ways, not least as a productive direction for literary scholars who were repelled by the anti-historical cast of New Criticism, Structuralism and Deconstruction, and sought to anchor their critical discourse in the rich milieu opened up by the ‘New Historians’ of the Annales tendency. Representations, the journal closely associated with the tendency, has opened up a vital interdisciplinary discourse in whish literary scholars, art historians and social historians all participe. Nonetheless, there is an undeniable force to the point which White makes in his comment on an anthology of ‘new historicist’ texts ...they appear to have turned to history. Less for information about that literature of which they are students, than for the king of knowledge that a specifically historical approach to its study might yield. What they have discovered, however, is that there is no such thing as a specifically historical approach to the study of history, but a variety of such approaches, at least as many as there are positions on the current ideological spectrum ; that, in fact, to embrace a historical approach to the study of anything entails or implies a distinctive philosophy of history ; and that, finally, one’s philosophy of history in a function as much or the was one construes one’s own special object of scholarly interest as it is of one’s knowledge of “history” itself. 26

White’s comment may be recapitulated concisely, in terms of this article. The New Historicists may have imagined that they were trading science for story. But in so far as they became historians, they had to recognise the truth that history is ‘science, but also story’. They had to become conscious of the option that they were taking, within the many modes of historical writing. To return to Hegel’s intuition, they had to recognise that the connection between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum was forged in ideology. There is no neutral ‘history’.

Stephen Bann

University of Kent

BIBLIOGRAPHIE / Bibliographie

Analyses et Réflexions... :L’histoire- Tome 1: Les philosophies de l’histoire.– Paris : Ellipses, 1980.

Ariès, Philippe.– Le temps de l’histoire.– Paris : Seuil, 1986.

Bahti, Timothy.– Allegories of History.– Baltimore, MD : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Certeau, Michel de.– Histoire et psychanalyse, entre science et fiction.– Paris : Gallimard, 1987.

Citron, Suzanne.–

Dominico, Maurice.– «Les genres et l’Histoire, Esquisse d’une problématique» in Recherches sur le roman historique (tome I).– Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 1977.

Dufeil, Michel-Marie.– «Trois “sens de l’histoire” affrontés vers 1250-1266» et autres articles in: Saint Thomas et l’histoire.– Montpellier : CUERMA, 1991.

Frogneux, N.; Mies, F. (éds.).– Emmanuel Lévinas et l’histoire. Actes du colloque des Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix à Namur (1997).– Paris : CERF, 1998.

Gilli, Marita.– «La fuite devant l’histoire dans la genèse de l’idéal classique allemand: Les entretiens d’émigrés allemand de Goethe» in Recherches sur le roman historique (tome I).– Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 1977.

Hegel, Friedrich.– La Raison dans l’Histoire: Introduction à la philosophie de l’Histoire.– Paris, Plon, 1965.

Keller, Edwige; Lasalle, Thérèse (éds.).– Histoire et narrativité. L’Europe en représentation dans la littérature du XVIIe siècle. Actes de la journée d’étude à l’Université Lumière-Lyon 2 par le Groupe de recherche Littérature, rhétorique, idéologoqiue, topique (29 avril 1997).- Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1999.

Kerr, James.– Fiction against History: Scott as a storyteller.– Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Lansdown, Richard.– Byron’s Historical Dramas.– London : Clarendon Press, 1992.

Leroy, Géraldi.– Les écrivains et l’histoire 1919-1956.– Paris : Nathan, 1998.

White, Hayden.– Metahistory.– Londres : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.