1. The Greeks tell us that Theseus received a thread as a gift from Ariadne. With that thread he found his bearings in the labyrinth, located the Minotaur, and slew him. The myth says nothing about the traces that Theseus left as he made his way through the labyrinth.
What holds together the chapters of this book dedicated to some highly heterogeneous topics is the relation between the thread—the thread of narration, which helps us to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of reality—and the traces.1 I have been a historian for some time: using such traces, I seek to narrate true stories (which at times have falsehoods as their object). Today it seems to me that none of the terms of that definition (narrate, traces, stories, true, false) can be taken for granted. When I began to learn my craft, toward the end of the 1950s, the prevailing attitude in the guild of historians was completely different. Writing narrative history was not considered a matter for serious reflection. I remember one exception to this rule: Arsenio Frugoni, who, as I understood later, returned now and then in his seminars in Pisa to the topic of the subjective nature of the narrative sources, which he had discussed a few years earlier in his Arnaldo da Brescia.2 Frugoni suggested to me—I was in my second year at the University of Pisa—that I prepare a colloquium on the school of the Annales, so I began to read Marc Bloch. In his Métier d’historien I ran into a page which many years later, though I was not fully aware of it, helped me to reflect on traces of evidence.3 But in those days historians did not speak of traces and the trail they leave.
2. I refer to that distant background to explain to myself the unreasonable euphoria I felt when I wrote the first sentences of my first book.4 It seemed to me that the documents on which I was working (inquisitorial trials) opened a broad range of narrative possibilities. The tendency to experiment in that direction, which also sprang from my family background, found both encouragement and limits in the sources. But I was persuaded (and still am today) that between testimonies, both narrative and nonnarrative, and the reality to which they bear witness there exists a relationship that needs to be analyzed from time to time. The possibility that someone could radically put in doubt that relation did not even enter my mind.
All this is part of the prehistory of the present book. In the second half of the 1960s the climate began to change. Some time later it was announced with great fanfare that historians write. I remember at first remaining indifferent to the hyperconstructionist (and, in fact, skeptical) implications of that revelation. It shows up in a passage of my essay “Spie” (1979), which considers the connection between deciphering traces and narration without mentioning any eventual skeptical objections.5 The turning point came for me only when, thanks to an essay of Arnaldo Momigliano’s, I realized the moral and political (as well as cognitive) implications of the thesis that basically canceled the distinction between historical and fictional narrations. The afterword that I wrote (1984) for the Italian translation of Natalie Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre (see chapter 4) registers that somewhat belated awareness.
Those pages might be the place to begin reading the present book since they outline a program of study and its polemical objective. Or, more precisely, its inverse, the pars destruens came first, as is perhaps always the case. Against the tendency of postmodern skepticism to blur the borders between fictional and historical narrations, in the name of the constructive element they share, I proposed a view of the relation between the two as a competition for the representation of reality. But rather than trench warfare, I hypothesized a conflict made up of challenges and reciprocal, hybrid borrowings. If this was how things stood, one could not combat neoskepticism by going back to old certitudes. We have to learn from the enemy in order to oppose it more efficaciously.
These are the hypotheses which, in the course of twenty years, have oriented the studies included in this volume.6 Only gradually did I discern the significance of the challenge in Bertolt Brecht’s “bad new things” (see chapter 1) or the choice of terrain on which to challenge it. Today the postmodernists seem less strident and less confident: the winds of fashion may already be blowing from another quarter, but it does not matter. The difficulties ensuing from that discussion and the attempts to resolve them remain.
3. The skeptical attack on the scholarly nature of historical narrations has emphasized their subjectivity, which allegedly likens them to fictional narratives. Historical narratives speak to us less about reality than they do about whoever has constructed them. It is useless to object that a constructive element is present to some extent even in the so-called hard sciences: they, too, have been the object of similar criticism.7 Let us talk instead about historiography. We know that historiography has a subjective component, but the radical conclusions which the skeptics have drawn from that fact did not consider a fundamental shift about which Marc Bloch spoke in his posthumous methodological reflections: “Today [1942–1943], even in the most spontaneous and voluntary testimonies, what the text tells us no longer constitutes the primary object of our attention.” The Mémoires of Saint-Simon or the lives of early medieval saints interest us not so much for their allusions to actual facts, which are often invented, as for the light they throw on the mentality of the writers of those texts. “Despite our inevitable subordination to the past,” Bloch continues, “we have freed ourselves at least to the extent that, eternally condemned to know only by means of its ‘tracks,’ we are nevertheless successful in knowing far more of the past than the past itself had thought it good to tell us. . . . Properly speaking, it is a glorious victory of mind over its material.”8 In another passage in Métier d’historien Bloch responds to the doubts of those who lament the impossibility of ascertaining what happened in single historical events—for example, the circumstances in which the gunshots were fired that ignited the revolution of 1848 in Paris. Bloch observes that such skepticism does not touch on what lay behind the event but rather on mentalities, technology, society, and economics: “What is most profound in history may also be the most certain.”9 Against the positivist skepticism that cast doubt on the believability of one document or another, Bloch offered, on the one hand, involuntary testimonies, and on the other, the possibility of isolating within voluntary testimonies an involuntary, hence deeper, core.
Against the radically antipositivist skepticism which attacks the reliability of texts as such, one can use a line of argument that is in some way analogous to Bloch’s. By digging into the texts, against the intentions of whoever produced them, uncontrolled voices can be made to emerge: for example, those of the women or men who, in witchcraft trials, eluded the stereotypes suggested by the judges. In medieval romances we can trace involuntary historical testimonies relating to habits and customs, isolating fragments of truth within the fiction. This is a discovery that today seems to us almost banal, but toward the mid–seventeenth century, in Paris, when it was explicitly formulated for the first time (chapter 5), it had a paradoxical ring to it. This was a research strategy not too different from the one Bloch describes concerning the lives of early medieval saints. In the long run, the gap opened up by this simultaneously detached and participatory attitude toward the literature of the past had unpredictable results. Three centuries later, we find the great scholar Erich Auerbach taking a similar path in his analysis of Voltaire and Stendhal when he read the Lettres philosophiques and Le Rouge et le Noir not as historical documents but as texts impregnated with history. Interpretation is infinite, even though its contents are not unlimited: Auerbach’s interpretations can be read in a different perspective, following the intentions and the perspective of their author, by making use of the traces that he himself left more or less involuntarily (chapters 7 and 10). Fiction, fed by history, becomes material for historical reflection or else for fiction, and so on. This unpredictable intermingling can come together in a knot, or in a name (chapter 9).
Reading historical testimonies against the grain, as Walter Benjamin suggested—that is, against the intentions of the person or persons producing them (even if those intentions must of course be taken into account)—means supposing that every text includes uncontrolled elements.10 The same can be said of literary texts that strive to present an autonomous reality. Something opaque insinuates itself into them as well, much like the perceptions that sight registers without understanding them, as does the impassible eye of the camera. This is a theme that Siegfried Kracauer acquired from Proust, who in turn was reworking a passage of Saint-Simon (chapter 13). These opaque zones are some of the traces which a text—any text—leaves behind. I have found them when I sought to reflect on my own studies in two experiments suggested by temporal distance (and, in one case, spatial distance as well: chapters 14 and 15).
4. To draw up an inventory of the forms taken on by fiction in the service of truth would obviously be impossible. The human and intellectual generosity that inspired Montaigne to write his essay on Brazilian cannibals had absorbed something from the mannerist taste for the grotesque and bizarre (chapter 3). The thin narrative thread of the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce enabled Jean-Jacques Barthélemy to organize an enormous mass of antiquarian data, making them accessible, in the span of a century, to a vast public scattered throughout Europe (chapter 8). Montaigne is considered an exception; Barthélemy, at most an anomaly. But both men refer back to a choice that shaped, without my being aware of it at first, much of the physiognomy of the present book. Given that it is an area infested with commonplaces and generalities, the relation between historical narration and fictional narration had to be confronted in the most concrete manner possible, through a series of examples. chapter 6, which seeks to reconstruct “not the exception but the rule,” falls within this viewpoint, but, to be accurate, it treats an exception. In retrospect, I realized that most of the topics discussed were not illustrations or examples referring to a preexistent norm, but rather cases: stories (or histories) in miniature which, according to the definition of André Jolles, pose a question without furnishing the answer, thus signaling an unsolved difficulty.11 When I began to work on documents which speak of a Jew who was the only surviving witness to the extermination of his community, I thought that cases like this one showed just how unsustainable the position was of the skeptics who, de facto, equated fictional narration and historical narration. If an account is based on a single document, how is it possible to avoid questioning its authenticity (chapter 12)? At almost the same time, I found myself asking the very same question about a text from the fifth century, a letter of Bishop Severus of Minorca (chapter 2) recounting an early case of Christian-Jewish conflict. Here the unus testis, the only surviving witness, is a document, not an individual, as also occurs in medieval legal writings which reflect on the characteristics of a community (universitas) through the fictional case of a unique survivor.12
5. From the thicket of relations between fiction and truth we have seen a third term emerge: the false, the nonauthentic—the pretense that advertises itself as true.13 Naturally, after Marc Bloch (Les rois thaumaturges) and Georges Lefebvre (La grande peur de 1789), no one will think it useless to study false legends, false events, or false documents, but it is indispensable to take a preliminary stand, on each occasion, about their falsity or authenticity. On this point I have nothing to add regarding the infamous anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion (chapter 11). I have limited my efforts to a parallel reading of the fabricated Protocols and their principal source, the imaginary dialogue of Maurice Joly. From this comparison sprout not only many very bad old things but also some “bad new things,” unpleasant truths which merit reflection.
Historians, Aristotle tells us (Poetics 51b), speak of what has been (of the true, of the real world); and poets, of what might have been (of the possible). But, of course, truth is a point of arrival, not a point of departure. The historian’s craft (and, in a different way, the poet’s) involves something that is part of everyone’s life: untangling the strands of the true, the false, and the fictional which are the substance of our being in the world.