1. On 16 May 1348, the Jewish community of La Baume, a small Provençal village, was exterminated. This event was just one link in a long chain of violence which had started in southern France with the first eruption of the Black Death just one month before. The hostilities against the Jews, who were widely believed to have spread the plague by poisoning wells, fountains, and rivers, had first crystallized in Toulon during Holy Week. The ghetto had been assaulted; men, women, and children had been killed. In the following weeks similar violence took place in other towns in Provence—Riez, Digne, Manosque, and Forcalquier. In La Baume there was a single survivor, a man who ten days before had departed for Avignon, summoned by Queen Jeanne. He left an emotional recollection of the episode in a few lines written in a copy of a Torah now preserved in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. In an excellent essay Joseph Schatzmiller, by combining a new reading of the passage inscribed in the Torah with a document extracted from a fiscal register, has succeeded in identifying the survivor: Dayas Quinoni. In 1349 Quinoni had settled in Aix, where he had received his Torah. We do not know if he ever went back to La Baume after the massacre.1
Let us turn briefly to a different, though not unrelated, case. The accusations against Jews in 1348 that they had spread the plague closely imitated a pattern which had been established a generation before. In 1321, during Holy Week, a rumor suddenly spread throughout France and some neighboring regions (western Switzerland, northern Spain). According to the different versions, lepers, or lepers influenced by Jews, or lepers urged on by Jews inspired by the Muslim kings of Tunis and Granada, had concocted a plot to poison Christians. The Muslim kings were obviously out of reach, but for two years lepers and Jews became the targets of violent acts by mobs but also by religious and political authorities. I have tried elsewhere to disentangle this complex muddle of events.2 Here I would just like to analyze a passage from a Latin chronicle written in the early fourteenth century by the so-called continuator of William of Nangis, an anonymous monk who, like his predecessor, lived in the convent of Saint-Denis.
Many Jews were killed, most of them in northern France, after the discovery of the alleged conspiracy. Near Vitry-le-François, according to the chronicler, approximately forty Jews were confined in a tower. To avoid perishing at the hands of the Christians they decided, after long deliberations, to take their own lives. The execution of the deed was to be carried out by an elder who enjoyed great authority among them, and a youth. The older man then asked the younger man to kill him. The latter reluctantly did so but then, instead of committing suicide himself, took the gold and silver from the pockets of the bodies on the ground. He then tried to escape from the tower by knotting sheets together as a rope, but it was not long enough and the young man fell to the ground, broke a leg, and was subsequently put to death.3
The episode is not implausible. However, it resembles closely two passages from Flavius Josephus’s The Jewish War. The first passage (3:8) speaks of forty persons who, after hiding in a cave near Jotapata in Galilee, all commit suicide, with two exceptions: Josephus himself and a fellow soldier who agrees not to kill him. The second passage describes the celebrated siege of Masada, the desperate resistance of the Jews who had taken refuge inside the fortress, followed by a collective suicide, here also with two exceptions, both women (7:8–9).4 How should we explain the analogies between Josephus’s texts and the aforementioned passage in the chronicle by William of Nangis? Should we assume a factual convergence or, on the contrary, the presence of a historiographical topos (which in the more recent version also included an allusion to another topos, Jewish greed)?
The hypothesis of a historiographical topos has already been cautiously formulated in regard to Josephus’s reconstruction of the events at Masada.5 Flavius Josephus’s work, either in Greek or in the famous Latin version prepared under the direction of Cassiodorus, circulated widely in the Middle Ages, especially in northern France and Flanders (if we can judge from the many extant manuscripts).6 Although we know that Flavius Josephus was mandatory reading during Lent at the monastery of Corbie c. 1050, his works are not included in a fourteenth-century list of required books for the monks of Saint-Denis, among whom was, as we have seen, the continuator of William of Nangis.7 Moreover, we have no direct proof that manuscripts of Josephus’s Jewish War existed in the library of Saint-Denis at all.8 But the anonymous chronicler could have consulted them without difficulty: among the many manuscripts housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris there is one (a twelfthcentury copy) from the library of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.9 We can conclude that the continuator of William of Nangis could have been familiar with Flavius Josephus’s Jewish War (or its fourth-century adaptation known as “Hegesippus”).10 But it does not necessarily follow from this that the collective suicide near Vitry-le-François never took place. More work is needed on this question, although it may be impossible to reach a definitive conclusion.
2. These events dating back to a distant and largely forgotten past are connected by myriad threads to the theme expressed in the subtitle of this chapter. Pierre Vidal-Naquet was acutely aware of this when he decided to republish, in two essays in the same volume (Les juifs, la mémoire, le présent, Paris, 1981), “Flavius Josephus and Masada” and “A Paper Eichmann,” a detailed discussion of the so-called revisionist school which claims that the Nazi extermination camps never existed.11 The similarity of content—the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages, the extermination of Jews in the twentieth century—is less important, in my opinion, than the similarity in the theoretical issues posed in both cases. Let me try to explain why.
The analogies between the two passages from Josephus, describing the Jotapata and Masada episodes, concern, in addition to the collective suicide, the survival of two people: Josephus and his fellow soldier in the first case, the two women in the second.12 The survival of at least one person was logically required by the necessity to provide a witness, but why two? I think that the well-known rejection of a single witness in court, shared by the Jewish and Latin legal traditions, explains the choice of two witnesses.13 Both traditions were familiar, of course, to Flavius Josephus, a Jew who became a Roman citizen. Later, the emperor Constantine transformed the rejection of the single witness into a formal law, later included in the Justinian Code.14 In the Middle Ages the implicit reference to Deuteronomy 19:15, Non stabit testis unus contra aliquem (“A single witness shall not prevail against a man”), became testis unus, testis nullus (“one witness, no witness”), a recurring maxim, implicitly or explicitly, in trial records and the legal literature.15
Let us try to imagine for a moment what would happen if such a criterion were applied to the field of historical research. Our knowledge of the events which took place at La Baume in May 1348, near Vitry-le-François sometime during the summer of 1321, and in the cave near Jotapata in July A. D. 67 is based, in each case, on a single, more or less direct witness. That is, respectively, the person (identified as Dayas Quinoni) who wrote the lines in the Torah now in the National Library in Vienna, the continuator of William of Nangis, and Flavius Josephus. No sensible historian would dismiss this evidence as intrinsically unacceptable. According to normal historiographical practice, the value of each document will have to be tested by way of comparison—that is, by constructing a series including at least two documents. But let us assume for a moment that the continuator of William of Nangis, in his account of the collective suicide near Vitry-le-François, was merely echoing Josephus’s Jewish War. Even if the supposed collective suicide should evaporate as a fact, the account itself would still give us a valuable piece of evidence about the reception of Josephus’s work (which is also, except to an inveterate positivist, a “fact”) in early fourteenth-century Île-de-France.
Law and history, it seems, have different rules and different epistemological foundations which do not always coincide. Consequently, legal principles cannot be transposed in their entirety into historical research.16 Such a conclusion would seem to contradict the close contiguity stressed by such sixteenth-century scholars as François Baudouin, the legal historian who solemnly declared that “historical studies must rest on a solid legal foundation, and jurisprudence must be joined to history.”17 From a different perspective, related to antiquarian research, the Jesuit Henri Griffet, in his Traité des différentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la verité de l’histoire (1769), compared the historian to a judge testing the reliability of different witnesses.18
Such an analogy today has a definitely unfashionable ring. Many historians would probably react with a certain embarrassment to the crucial word preuves, “proofs,” in Griffet’s title. But some recent discussions show that the connection among proofs, truth, and history cannot be easily dismissed.
3. I have mentioned “A Paper Eichmann,” the essay that Pierre Vidal-Naquet wrote to refute the notorious thesis, advanced by Robert Faurisson and others, that Nazi extermination camps never existed.19 This essay has been republished in a small volume, Les assassins de la mémoire, which Vidal-Naquet dedicated to his mother, who died at Auschwitz in 1944. It is not difficult to imagine the moral and political motives which drove him to engage in a detailed discussion, involving, among other things, a punctilious analysis of the evidence (witnesses, technological possibilities, and so on) concerning the gas chambers. Other, more theoretical implications have been spelled out by Vidal-Naquet in a letter to Luce Giard which was included in a volume in memory of Michel de Certeau which appeared a few years ago. Vidal-Naquet writes that the collection of essays, L’écriture de l’histoire, published by de Certeau in 1975, was an important book which contributed to the dismantling of historians’ proud innocence: “Since then, we have become aware that the historian writes; that he produces space and time, being himself intrinsically embedded in a specific space and time.” But we should not dismiss, Vidal-Naquet goes on, that old notion of “reality,” meaning “precisely what happened,” as evoked by Ranke a century ago.
I became very conscious of all this when the affaire Faurisson, which unfortunately continues, began. Naturally, Faurisson is the antithesis of de Certeau. The former is a crude materialist, who, in the name of the most tangible reality, transforms everything he deals with—pain, death, the instruments of death—into something unreal. De Certeau was deeply affected by this perverse folly, and wrote me a letter about it . . . I was convinced that there was an ongoing discussion on gas chambers, that everything should necessarily pass through discourse [mon sentiment était qu’il y avait un discours sur les chambres à gaz, que tout devait passer par le dire]; but beyond this, or rather, before this, there was something irreducible which, for better or worse, I shall continue to call reality. Without this reality, how can we tell the difference between fiction and history?20
In the United States the question regarding the difference between fiction and history usually seems to spring from the work of Hayden White, or, at least, is associated with it. That there are differences in the historiographical practices of the two writers is obvious: but it cannot be denied that there is a certain convergence between White’s Metahistory (1973) and de Certeau’s L’écriture de l’histoire (1975, but which includes essays published earlier). To fully comprehend Hayden White’s contribution, it seems essential to sketch out first his intellectual biography.21
4. In 1959, introducing to an American audience the translation of Dallo storicismo alla sociologia, by Carlo Antoni, one of Benedetto Croce’s closest followers, White spoke of Croce’s youthful essay “La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte,” (“History subsumed under a general concept of the arts”) as a “revolutionary” contribution.22 The significance of this essay, published in 1893 when the author was twenty-seven years old, had already been emphasized by Croce himself in his intellectual autobiography (Contributo alla critica di me stesso) (“Contribution to a critique of myself”), as well as later by R. G. Collingwood (The Idea of History).23 Not surprisingly, the chapter on Croce in Metahistory includes a detailed discussion of “La storia ridotta.”24 But at a distance of sixteen years White’s appreciation of this essay had cooled considerably. He declared that he still agreed with certain crucial statements in Croce’s essay, such as the sharp distinction between historical research, deemed a purely propaedeutic activity, and history proper, equated with narrative history. But then he concluded in this vein:
It is difficult not to think of Croce’s “revolution” in historical sensibility as a retrogression, since its effect was to sever historiography from any participation in the effort—just beginning to make some headway in sociology at the time—to construct a general science of society. But it had even more deleterious implications for historians’ thinking about the artistic side of their work. For, while Croce was correct in his perception that art is a way of knowing the world, and not merely a physical response to it or an immediate experience of it, his conception of art as literal representation of the real effectively isolated the historian as artist from the most recent—and increasingly dominant—advances made in representing the different levels of consciousness by the Symbolists and Post-Impressionists all over Europe.25
This passage already points to some elements of Hayden White’s later work. Since writing Metahistory he has become interested less and less in the construction of a “general science of society,” and more and more “in the artistic side of the historian’s work”—a shift not far removed from Croce’s long battle against positivism, which inspired, among other things, his scorn toward the social sciences. But in Metahistory Croce had already ceased to be the crucial influence he had been in the early stages of White’s intellectual development. Undoubtedly his esteem of Croce remained high, and he continued to define him as “the most talented historian of all the philosophers of history of the century”; even on the last page of the book he is warmly praised for his allegedly “ironical” attitude.26 But the global evaluation cited above testifies to the existence of significant disagreement with Croce’s theoretical perspective.
The principal motive for White’s dissatisfaction with Croce’s thought hinged, as we have seen, on his “conception of art as a literal representation of the real”—in other words, on his “realistic” attitude.27 The term, which in this context has a cognitive and not merely aesthetic meaning, may sound a bit paradoxical when applied to a neo-idealist philosopher like Croce. But the latter’s idealism was of a rather special sort: the term “critical positivism,” as applied to him by a highly discerning critic of his work, seems more appropriate.28 The most distinctly idealistic phase of Croce’s thought has to be traced back to the strong influence exerted over him by Giovanni Gentile, to whom he was linked for two decades by a close intellectual bond.29 In a note added to his Logica come scienza del concetto puro (“Logic as the science of pure concept”) (1909) Croce traced a retrospective reconstruction of his own intellectual development, moving from his “La storia ridotta” to the recent recognition of the identity between history and philosophy achieved under the influence of Gentile (“my very dear friend . . . to whose help and stimulation my intellectual life owes much”).30 Some years later, however, the intrinsic ambiguities of this identity (as well as, on a general level, of the alleged theoretical convergence between Croce and Gentile) emerged fully.31 Croce, by interpreting philosophy as “the methodology of history,” seemed to be dissolving the former in the latter. Gentile moved in the opposite direction. “Ideas without facts are empty,” he wrote in 1936 in his Il superamento del tempo nella storia (“The overcoming of time in history”); “philosophy which is not history is the vainest abstraction. But facts are simply the life of the objective moment of self-consciousness, outside of which there is no real constructive thought.” He emphasized that history (res gestae) “must not be a presupposition of historiography (historia rerum gestarum)”. Gentile vigorously rejected “the metaphysical theory of history (or historicism) based directly on the idea that historical writing presupposes historical fact, an idea as absurd as those of other metaphysics, and pregnant with worse consequences; for no enemy is so dangerous as one who has managed to creep into your house and hide there.”32
By identifying that unnamed “metaphysical theory of history” with “historicism,” Gentile was reacting to a polemical anti-Fascist essay by Croce, “Antistoricismo,” which had just appeared.33 The theoretical core of Gentile’s essay went back to his Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1918), a response to Croce’s Teoria e storia della storiografia (1915).34 But by 1924 the philosophical dispute between the two old friends had transformed itself into a bitter political and personal feud.
This apparent digression was required to clarify the following points:
a. Hayden White’s intellectual development can be understood only by considering his exposure, at an early stage of his career, to Italian philosophical neo-idealism.35
b. White’s “tropological” approach, suggested in Tropics of Discourse, his 1978 collection of essays, still showed the impact of Croce’s thought. In 1972 White had written that Croce
moved from his study of the epistemological bases of historical knowledge to a position in which he sought to subsume history under a general concept of art. His theory of art, in turn, was constructed as a “science of expression and general linguistics” (the subtitle of his Aesthetics). In his analysis of the linguistic bases of all possible modes of comprehending reality, he came closest to grasping the essentially tropological nature of interpretation in general. He was kept from formulating this near perception, most probably, by his own “ironic” suspicion of system in any human science.36
Such an approach started from Croce but then proceeded in a totally different direction. When we read that “tropics is the process by which all discourse constitutes [the emphasis is in the text] the objects which it pretends to describe realistically and to analyze objectively” (a passage from the introduction to Tropics of Discourse [1978]),37 we recognize the aforementioned criticism of Croce’s “realism.”
c. This subjectivist stand was certainly reinforced by White’s encounter with the work of Michel Foucault. But it is significant that White tried to “decode” Foucault through Giovanbattista Vico, the alleged founding father of Italian philosophical neo-idealism.38 In fact, White’s statement about discourse creating its own objects seems to be echoing—with a major difference discussed immediately below—Croce’s emphasis on expression and general linguistics combined with Gentile’s extreme subjectivism, according to which historiography (historia rerum gestarum) creates its own object: history (res gestae). “Le fait n’a jamais qu’une existence linguistique” (“A fact never has anything but a linguistic existence”): these words by Roland Barthes, used by White as an epigraph for The Content of the Form (1987), could be ascribed to this imaginary combination of Croce and Gentile to which I have just alluded. Even White’s reading of Barthes in the early eighties (he was still barely mentioned in Tropics of Discourse)39 reinforced a preexisting pattern.
5. There is a questionable element in this reconstruction—namely, the role attributed to Gentile. As far as I know, White never studied his writings or even mentioned him (with one relevant exception, as we shall see). But familiarity with Gentile’s work can be safely assumed in a scholar such as White, who, through Carlo Antoni, had been introduced to the philosophical tradition of Italian neo-idealism. (On the other hand, a direct knowledge of Gentile’s work must be ruled out in the case of Barthes. The crucial role played by Barthes in de Certeau’s intellectual development can explain, but only to a certain extent, the partial convergence between the latter and Hayden White.)
Gentile’s close association with Fascism, right up to his violent death, has somewhat darkened, at least outside Italy, the first phase of his philosophical career. His adherence to Hegelian idealism resulted from a firsthand reading of Marx’s early philosophical writings (La filosofia di Marx, 1899).40 In his analysis of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, Gentile interpreted Marxist praxis through Vico’s famous dictum verum ipsum factum, or rather through the neoidealistic interpretation of it. Praxis, therefore, was regarded as a concept implying the correspondence between subject and object, insofar as the Spirit (the transcendental subject) creates reality.41 Even Gentile’s much later statement on historiography creating history was just a corollary to this principle. The presentation of Marx as a fundamentally idealistic phiiosopher had a lasting impact on Italian intellectual and poiitical life. To be sure, Antonio Gramsci, by using an expression such as “philosophy of praxis,” instead of “historical materialism,” in his Prison Notebooks, was obviously trying to circumvent Fascist censorship. But he was also echoing the title of Gentile’s second essay on Marx (“La filosofia della praxis”) as well as, more significantly, Gentile’s emphasis on “praxis” as a concept which diminished materialism, almost to the point of eliminating it, as a crucial element in Marxist thought. Other echoes of Gentile’s interpretation of Marx have been detected in Gramsci’s early idealistic Marxism.42 It has been proposed that even the well-known passage in the Prison Notebooks suggesting that Gentile’s philosophy is closer to Futurism than Croce’s implied a favorable opinion of Gentile: had not Futurism been regarded by Gramsci in 1921 as a revolutionary movement which had been able to respond to a need for “new forms of art, of philosophy, of behavior, of language”?43 A similar closeness between Gentile’s philosophy and Futurism, both seen as negative examples of “antihistoricism,” had instead been implicitly suggested by Croce in a liberal-conservative anti-Fascist perspective.44
In light of a left-wing reading of Gentile’s work (or at least of part of it), the quasi-Gentilian flavor detectable in Hayden White’s writings beginning with The Burden of History—his 1966 plea for a new historiography written in a modernist key—sounds less paradoxical.45 One can easily understand the impact (as well as the intrinsic weakness) of this attack launched against liberal and Marxist orthodoxies. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s subjectivism, even in an extreme form, had a definitely radical flavor. But if one regarded desire as a left-wing slogan, then reality (including the emphasis on “real facts”) would have looked definitely right-wing. Such a simplistic, not to mention self-defeating, view has largely been superseded—in the sense that attitudes implying a basic flight from reality are certainly not restricted today to a few factions of the left. This should be taken into account in any attempt to explain the rather extraordinary appeal of contemporary skeptical ideologies, even outside the academic world. In the meantime Hayden White has declared that he is “against revolutions, whether launched from ‘above’ or ‘below’ in the social hierarchy.”46 This statement was elicited, he explains in a footnote, by the fact that “the relativism with which I am usually charged is conceived by many theorists to imply the kind of nihilism which invites revolutionary activism of a particularly irresponsible sort. In my view, relativism is the moral equivalent of epistemological skepticism; moreover, I conceive relativism to be the basis of social tolerance, not a license to ‘do as you please.’ ”47
Skepticism, relativism, tolerance: at first the distance between this selfpresentation of White’s thought and Gentile’s theoretical perspective seems as though it could not be greater. Gentile’s attacks against positivist historians did not have skeptical implications, since his philosophical position implied a transcendental Spirit, not a multiplicity of empirical subjects.48 He was never a relativist; on the contrary, he strongly advocated a religious commitment, intransigent in both philosophical and political matters.49 And, of course, he never theorized tolerance, as his support of Fascism—including squadrismo, its most violent aspect—shows.50 The notorious statement describing the truncheons of the punitive squads as a “moral force” comparable to preaching—a remark Gentile made during a speech in the 1924 electoral campaign51 —was consistent with his strictly monistic theory: in a reality created by the Spirit there is no place for a real distinction between facts and values.
These are not minor theoretical divergences. Any argument suggesting intellectual contiguity between Gentile’s and White’s approaches must account for these major differences. So we may wonder on what ground White stresses, in his article “The Politics of Historical Interpretation,” that his own historical perspective shares something with “the kind of perspective on history . . . conventionally associated with the ideologies of Fascist regimes,” whose “social and political policies” he simultaneously rejects as “undeniably horrible.”
6. This contradiction, so clearly perceived, leads us to the moral dilemma implicit in White’s approach. “We must guard,” he says, “against a sentimentalism that would lead us to write off such a conception of history simply because it has been associated with Fascist ideologies. One must face the fact that when it comes to apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of constructing its meaning over another.”52 No grounds? In fact, in discussing Faurisson’s views on the extermination of Jews, White does not hesitate to suggest a criterion according to which we must judge the validity of conflicting historical interpretations. Let us look at his argument.
White’s above-mentioned statement is based (1) on the distinction (even better, disjunction) between “ ‘positive’ historical inquiry” and “proper history”—that is, narrative—advocated by Croce in La storia ridotta; and (2) on a skeptical interpretation of this distinction, converging in many ways with Gentile’s transcendental subjectivism. Both elements can be detected in White’s reaction to the refutation, provided by Vidal-Naquet “on the terrain of positive history,” of Faurisson’s “lies” about the extermination of Jews. Faurisson’s claim is as “morally offensive as intellectually bewildering”; but the notion of a “lie,” insofar as it implies concepts such as “reality” and “proof,” is clearly a source of embarrassment for White, as this remarkably twisted sentence shows: “The distinction between a lie and an error or a mistake in interpretation may be more difficult to draw with historical events less amply documented than the Holocaust.” In fact, even in this latter case White is unable to accept Vidal-Naquet’s conclusion, suggesting that there is a big difference “between an interpretation that would ‘have profoundly transformed the reality of the massacre’ and one that would not. The Israeli interpretation leaves the ‘reality’ of the events intact, whereas the revisionist interpretation derealizes it by redescribing it in such a way as to make it something other than what the victims know the Holocaust to have been.”53 The Zionist historical interpretation of the Holocaust, White says, is not a contre-verité (as has been suggested by Vidal-Naquet) but a truth: “its truth, as a historical interpretation, consists precisely in its effectiveness in justifying a wide range of current Israeli political policies that, from the standpoint of those who articulate them, are crucial to the security and indeed the very existence of the Jewish people.” In the same way, “the effort of the Palestinian people to mount a politically effective response to Israeli policies entails the production of a similarly effective ideology, complete with an interpretation of their history capable of endowing it with a meaning that it has hitherto lacked.”54 We can conclude that if Faurisson’s narrative were ever to prove effective, it would be regarded by White as true as well.
Is this conclusion the result of a tolerant attitude? As we have seen, White argues that skepticism and relativism can provide the epistemological and moral foundations for tolerance.55 But this claim is historically and logically untenable. Historically, because tolerance has been theorized by people who had strong intellectual and moral convictions (Voltaire’s assertion “I will fight in order to defend my opponent’s freedom to speak” is typical). Logically, because absolute skepticism would contradict itself if it were not extended also to tolerance as a regulating principle. Moreover, when moral and intellectual differences are not ultimately related to truth, there is nothing to tolerate.56 In fact, White’s argument connecting truth and effectiveness inevitably reminds us not of tolerance but of its opposite—Gentile’s evaluation of a truncheon as a moral force. In the same essay, as we have seen, White invites us to consider without “sentimentalism” the association between a conception of history which he has implicitly praised and the “ideologies of Fascist regimes.” He calls this association “conventional.” But the mention of Gentile’s name (along with Heidegger’s) in this context does not seem at all conventional.57
7. Since the late 1960s the skeptical attitudes of which we are speaking have become more and more influential in the humanities and social sciences. This broad diffusion is only partially related to their presumed novelty. Only an encomiastic impulse could have suggested to Pierre Vidal-Naquet that “[s]ince then [i.e., the publication of Michel de Certeau’s L’écriture de l’histoire in 1975] we have become aware that the historian writes; that he produces space and time, being himself intrinsically embedded in a specific space and time.” As Vidal-Naquet knows perfectly well, the same point (leading sometimes to skeptical conclusions) was strongly emphasized, for instance, in a not particularly bold methodological essay of 1961 by E. H. Carr, What Is History?, as well as at a much earlier date by Benedetto Croce.
By looking at these issues in historical perspective, we obtain a better grasp of their theoretical implications. As a starting point I would suggest a brief essay written by Renato Serra in 1912 but not published until 1927, after his untimely death in 1915. Its title, “Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia” (“The departure of a group of soldiers for Libya”),58 gives only a vague idea of its content. It begins with a description, written in a daringly experimental style reminiscent of Umberto Boccioni’s Futuristic paintings from the same era, of a railway station full of departing soldiers surrounded by a large crowd.59 At this point a series of anti-Socialist observations intrude, followed by a reflection on history and historical writing, which abruptly leads to a passage couched in a metaphysical tone, full of Nietz schean echoes. This unfinished essay, which certainly deserves a longer and deeper analysis, reflects the complex personality of a man who, besides being the best Italian critic of his generation, was an erudite person with pronounced philosophical interests. In his correspondence with Croce (to whom he was personally very close, without being a follower) he explained the genesis of the pages we are discussing here.60 They had been elicited by “Storia, cronaca e false storie” (1912), an essay by Croce which later was included, in revised form, in the latter’s Teoria e storia della storiografia. Croce had mentioned the gap, emphasized by Tolstoy in War and Peace, between an actual event, such as a battle, and the fragmentary and distorted recollections of it on which historical accounts are based. Tolstoy’s view is well known: the divide could be overcome only by collecting the memories of every individual (even the humblest soldier) who had directly or indirectly participated in the battle. Croce dismissed this suggestion and the skepticism which it seemed to involve as absurd. “At every moment we know all the history that we need to know”; therefore, the history we do not know is identical to “the eternal ghost of the thing itself.”61 Serra, ironically defining himself as “a slave of the thing itself,” wrote to Croce that he felt much closer to Tolstoy; however, he added, “my difficulties are—or at least seem to be—much more complicated.”62 It is impossible not to agree with him. “There are people who imagine in good faith that a document can be an expression of reality.. . . As if a document could express something different from itself. . . . A document is a fact. The battle is another fact (an infinity of other facts). The two cannot become one.. . . The person who acts is a fact. The person who tells a story is another fact. . . . Every piece of testimony is only a testimony of itself; of its immediate moment, of its own origin, of its own purpose, and of nothing more.”63
These were not the reflections of a pure theoretician. Serra knew what erudition was. In his incisive critiques he did not artificially oppose historical narratives to the materials on which they are constructed. He was well aware that any document, regardless of how direct it is, always has a highly problematic relationship with reality. But reality (“the thing in itself”) exists.64
Serra explicitly rejected simple, positivist attitudes. But his thoughts also help us to reject a point of view which brings together positivism (in other words, “positivist historical inquiry” based on a literal reading of documents) and relativism (namely, “historical narratives” based on figurative, incomparable, and irrefutable interpretations).65 In fact, the narratives based on one witness discussed earlier in this chapter can be regarded as experimental cases which deny such a clear-cut distinction: a different reading of the available evidence immediately affects the resulting narrative. A similar although usually less visible relationship can be assumed also on a general level. An unlimited skeptical attitude toward historical narratives is therefore groundless.
8. On Auschwitz, Jean-François Lyotard wrote:
Suppose that an earthquake destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes, directly and indirectly. The impossibility of quantitatively measuring it does not prohibit, but rather inspires in the minds of the survivors the idea of a great seismic force.. . . With Auschwitz, something new has happened in history (which can only be a sign and not a fact), which is that the facts, the testimonies which bore the traces of here’s and now’s, the documents which indicated the sense or senses of the facts, and the names, finally the possibility of various kinds of phrases whose conjunction makes reality, all this has been destroyed as much as possible. Is it up to the historian to take into account not only the damages, but also the wrong? Not only the reality, but also the meta-reality, that is the destruction of reality? . . . Its name [Auschwitz] marks the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned.66
I am not at all certain that this final observation is true. Memory and the destruction of memory are recurring elements in history. “The need to tell our story to ‘the rest,’ to make ‘the rest’ participate in it,” Primo Levi wrote, “had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs.”67 As Emile Benveniste has shown, one of the Latin words for “witness” is superstes—survivor.68