History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences

THE NEW FRONTIER PREFACE TO THE CORNELL EDITION

To reconcile research with creation, invent new forms for embodying knowledge, and take on the challenge of a creative history: for me, these propositions are one and the same thing. This book aims to highlight under what conditions they are possible in the realm of the social sciences. I do not claim to decree norms; I am speaking in terms of opportunities.

The continued professionalization of disciplines from the nineteenth century on has led to progress on the level of method but regression in the areas of form, emotion, and pleasure. History—to speak just of my own discipline—has not learned much from the modern novel, journalism, photography, cinema, or the graphic novel, and this lack of interest is not unrelated to the closure that is now threatening the social sciences, with the increasing hyperspecialization of scholars, fascination with the impact factor, and the belief that an article published in an academic journal is more scientific than a documentary or museum exhibit.

One might object that a researcher is a highly trained specialist who needs colleagues and students as readers, not laypersons. The problem is that ignoring matters of form and disregarding writing are obstacles to the very enterprise of knowledge. For without writing, knowledge is incomplete, an orphan from its form. All the great leaps forward in epistemology—Herodotus, Cicero, Bayle, Michelet, Nietzsche, Foucault—were also literary revolutions. That is what leads me to say that, instead of weakening the method of the social sciences, literature strengthens it.

How do we proceed so that research does not simply amount to citation and commentary but to creation? How do we bring imagination and audacity together with scholarship? It would be a mistake to return to seventeenth-century belles lettres, and an illusion to transform history into a grand nineteenth-century novel. Hanging on to the existing hyper-specialization would simply mean following the path of least resistance. It is possible to get beyond both literature without method and method without literature, in order to practice literature within a method, a form designed for knowledge, a research text, with research inextricably tied to the facts, to the sources attesting to those facts, and to the form in which they are conveyed.

The idea of reconciling social science research with literary creation can lend itself to a certain number of misunderstandings. If, for example, we define history simplistically by the facts and literature by the fiction, then the two domains may well be incompatible. If we judge history to be a serious pursuit while deeming literature to be dilettantism, we have to consider the former as our profession while relegating the latter to weekend hobbies. But if we consider history to be an investigation, and historians investigators driven by a problem, we can then draw the literary consequences of our method : using the I to situate one’s approach and perspective, telling the story of the investigation as well as its results, going back and forth between the past and the present to which we belong, using emotion as a tool for a better understanding, placing the cursor at the right spot between distance and empathy, choosing the right words, and allowing for the languages that the investigator usually does not share with the people (living or dead) that he or she encounters.

These new rules are operators of textuality, that is to say, both cognitive and literary tools that, all while increasing the rigor and the self-reflexive character of the investigation, drive the researcher to write, in other words, to create. The point of intersection between history and literature is situated here. More than an academic discipline, history is a voyage in time and space, an investigation based on a way of reasoning; without being limited to the realm of fiction, literature engages language, with a narrative construction, a singular voice, an emotion, an atmosphere, a rhythm, an escape to another world, as well as a canon fashioned by institutions. Happily, these two definitions overlap: history is a contemporary literature. The way of reasoning, which enables the production and transmission of knowledge, is the living heart of writing, the pulse of the text. That is how we can create new forms: social sciences for the twenty-first century.

Since it was first published in 2014, I have presented my book at several European, North American, and South American universities, where it was then discussed. The debate over writing the social sciences and the cross-fertilization of disciplines has been particularly rich in the United States. I am not unaware of the fact that a large number of researchers, intellectuals, and epistemologists on American campuses and throughout the world have already reflected on a wide swath of the issues that I am focusing on so insistently. I pay them homage. However, while their thought has enriched my work, it has also allowed me to understand what distinguishes my work from theirs.

It was in Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (1984) that Paul Veyne set forth the notion that history is a true novel. That striking formula recalls a crucial point: the historian tells a story; history is a narrative. But why the novel? I am not sure that one could do something new with Zola or Steinbeck. Or else one has to be capable, in the manner of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner, of breaking with the conventions handed down from the nineteenth century (realism, a linear narrative, a hierarchy of heroes and secondary characters, a chain of actions proceeding by cause and effect, and so forth). But we do not have to limit literature to the novel. Poetry, theater, the essay, autobiography, testimony, feature newspaper and magazine stories, and creative nonfiction belong to literature, not to the genre of the novel.

In The Writing of History (1988), Michel de Certeau recalled that, contrary to what the partisans of scientism have repeatedly claimed, history is written. But the title of his book suggests that it is the vocation of all historians to write, which is far from what they do. Quite often, they put into practice not writing but a technique: a set of archival sources, a patchwork of citations, and footnotes, all arranged according to a structure laid out with an introduction, chapters, and a conclusion. At that point, the historian produces not a text but a non-text, a specialist’s dissertation, in a purely instrumental form, inert, dead to language, continually denying its own literary character: in other words, a cardboard box stuffed with facts, excerpts, and a few concepts.

When will we open creative writing workshops for historians and sociologists? Throughout the entire twentieth century, anthropologists such as Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, and Geertz accepted writing in the fullest sense of the word, and Michel Leiris was both an ethnologist and a writer. In Writing Culture (1986), James Clifford and George Marcus reflected on poetics and the making of ethnographic texts. With others, they criticized the rhetoric of ethnologists, their naïve realism, stylistic effects, discourse of authority, and their ethnocentric and colonialist biases. We can only applaud this critical enterprise.

Unfortunately, Writing Culture fixes its gaze on only one horizon: the renewal of ethnology. James Clifford became the ethnographers’ ethnographer, but he could have become the ethnographer of historians or sociologists, or the historian and the sociologist of ethnographers. Historians also carry out fieldwork, on-site investigations, because, in their temporal and geographical journeys, they interview witnesses, they question people, they collect evidence. We can approach the past as sociologists, the present as historians or anthropologists. There is always something subversive in pluridisciplinarity, because it perturbs habits, upsets routines, and decenters perspectives. As I have pointed out, historical writing is often confined to a technique. With the ethnologists, the opposite is true: criticizing the apparatus of writing risks resulting in unbridled, ragged creations, fictionalized autobiography, performances, egotistical reveries, or poetry of the self. In the end, literature has killed the social sciences.

Telling the story of one’s investigation, saying I in a self-reflexive manner, and finding the right word instead of perpetuating a jargon constitute both a scholarly and literary act. On this point as on others, the contributions of gender studies have been crucial. In the introduction to Feminism and Methodology (1987), Sandra Harding argues that the researcher’s situation in terms of gender, race, class, educational background, values, and social power should be made explicit. Neutrality is never neutral: it often takes the masculine for the universal. It looks down at the world from lofty heights, that position of superiority and exteriority typical of traditional historiography, in which the invisible voice of the historian blends indistinguishably with that of the Past.

I think on the contrary that taking account of the researcher, and in particular of her ties to the objects of her study, is part of the research. The I places the researcher back among the other mortals that he is studying. That makes it possible to avoid scientism looking down from on high, relativist skepticism, and the supposed epistemological privilege of the oppressed class. Situated knowledge recuses the methodological sexism that, for males, consists of studying great men, great deeds, landmark dates, and institutions, and for females, the social relations of the sexes and the place that women occupy in societies favoring men.

The way in which we look at human activities, including intellectual pursuits, is deeply gendered: the arid gravitas of science is supposedly masculine, while literature, sensitive, introspective, and psychological, is supposedly feminine. That is one reason why so many university professors refuse to fall into literature: Would men lose their imperium if they consented to give birth to texts? As we see, accepting the literary aspects of the social sciences is a way of refusing malestream history.

It is not possible to embody a method in a text, an investigation in a narrative, without paying attention to language. In this sense, my book dialogues with the linguistic turn, informed by intellectuals such as Rorty, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and, closer to history, Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. This current of thought, which is so rich that we might speak of linguistic turns in the plural, pursued several agendas throughout the 1970s and 1980s: the discursive form of all experience, the role of rhetoric and imagination among scholars (the nineteenth-century historians in Hayden White’s Metahistory); the languages of class (the English working class in Gareth Stedman Jones’s work); the analysis of literary texts in relation to the context of their production (Musset and Baudelaire in Richard Terdiman’s Present Past); the wider agendas of structuralism, New Historicism, and the philosophy of language. All of these fundamental debates have enriched the reflection of historians.

There is a bone of contention, however: that of asserting there to be no difference between history and fiction. To the extent that the linguistic turn consists of studying language in all its forms or of recalling that writing is a creative force belonging to the process of knowledge, you can count me in. Historians should not mistrust writing, for writing is not the problem but the solution. And I do think that devising fictions of method (from hypotheses and counterfactual scenarios to abstract concepts) may be conducive to a better understanding of the world. If, however, the linguistic turn becomes a machine for war against the social sciences, on the pretext that everything is fiction or that there is no escape from the empire of signs, I cannot get on board. Contrary to the way poeticians would have it, the historical text communicates with what is outside the text, not only material evidence (ruins, coins, skeletal remains) but also the reality to which this evidence testifies. The difference between one of Flaubert’s novels and a book by Darnton resides less in the literary quality of the former than in the latter’s capacity for veridiction. That is why it is not possible to completely deconstruct the social sciences.

In the postface to his seminal article Rethinking Chartism (1983), Gareth Stedman Jones concluded, opposing Saussure to Derrida, The historian cannot dispense with an implicit referentiality. Would there be one linguistic turn for historians and another for literary specialists? The real dividing line is in fact the desire for truth that is driving us. Truth is not slippery. Words and archives do not have an infinite number of meanings. The notion of objectivity may well lend itself to criticism; it nevertheless retains its value. Instead of throwing the noble dream away, I prefer to make it less naïve, less biased, more self-reflexive. The reason why postcolonial, gender, queer, women’s and men’s studies are so important is not that they should allow each group to formulate its own truth, according to its own needs and vision of things, but rather that they provide tools for better grasping the world. History as a science will always prevail over identity discourses. I say so as a Jew and a feminist.

My position therefore consists not of lowering the requirements for social sciences but on the contrary raising them, by making investigations more transparent, procedures more honest, research more audacious, and words better adjusted, which as a result enriches critical debate. By switching from discourse to text, we can proceed so that writing produces a net gain in epistemology: not by a proliferation of flashy words and metaphors, but by inventing new forms. Within the rules that constitute the method, we are free. And no one should apologize for exercising their liberty. A process of creation, a vibrant reflexivity, a refusal of methodological sexism, an independence of tone and style, a sensitivity to language, a respect for the reader, an uninhibited use of photography, video, the graphic novel, and digital resources: that is what the future of scholarship in the social sciences could be.

On the map of writing, there are two continents: novels made of fiction and the nondescript texts of academia, both originating in the nineteenth century. We can live happily on both of these continents—I myself have published a novel and produced a number of scholarly books and articles—but we can also consider this terrain to be heavily cultivated, even a bit crowded, and it is possible to venture out into the unsettled parts of the world. Dipesh Chakrabarty put forth the idea of provincializing Europe. I propose, for my part, to get out of the nineteenth century. It is my way of dreaming of a world devoid of borders, title deeds, barbed wired fences, and walls. There is a third continent opening up before us, that of the creative social sciences—a pluridisciplinary investigation, a hybridization, a research text, a truth literature, a quite enjoyable intellectual adventure.

Two of my books, A History of the Grandparents I Never Had (2016) and Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes (Laetitia or the End of Men, 2016), stem from just such an exploration. Their reception leads me to think that I have not gone completely astray. And should I get lost along the way, well . . . at least I shall have perished exploring the New Frontier. In the meantime, I am pleased to submit this book for the consideration of my English-speaking colleagues and readers. My warmest thanks go to my translator, Nathan Bracher, and to Mahinder Kingra, editor in chief of Cornell University Press, as well as to the anonymous referees who were willing to read my book and who, with their judicious remarks, inspired this preface.

INTRODUCTION

Can we imagine texts that would be both history and literature? The challenge makes sense only if it spawns new forms. Literature can be something other than a Trojan horse for history, and vice versa.

My idea is the following. The writing of history is not merely a technique involving an outline, citations, and footnotes: it represents a choice. The researcher has the opportunity to write. By the same token, an opportunity for knowledge is available to the writer: literature has a historical, sociological, and anthropological potential.

Because at the end of the nineteenth century, history and sociology broke away from the realm of belles lettres, the debate over writing the social sciences is usually defined by two postulates: that the social sciences have no literary interest, and that a writer does not produce knowledge. We supposedly have to choose between a history that is scientific to the detriment of writing, and a history that is literary to the detriment of truth. This alternative is a trap.

To begin with, the social sciences can be literary. History is not a fiction, sociology is not a novel, anthropology is not exoticism, and all three must meet methodological requirements. Within this framework, nothing prevents the researcher from writing. While shunning erudite pronouncements tossed off in some nondescript document, the researcher can compose a text that embodies a way of reasoning and creates a specific form for the purposes of a demonstration. To reconcile the social sciences with literary creation represents an effort to write in a more precise, free, original, honest, and reflexive way, not loosening the requirements of scientific research but on the contrary making them more rigorous.

If writing is an indispensable component of history and the social sciences, it is less for reasons of aesthetics than for reasons of method. Writing is not simply a vehicle for delivering the results, nor is it just the wrapper used to quickly package research once it has been finished: writing is the very body of the research as the inquiry itself is carried out. In addition to the intellectual pleasure and epistemological capacity of writing, there is its civic dimension. The works of the social sciences must be discussed among specialists, but it is essential that they also be read, enjoyed, and critiqued among a wider audience. The use of writing to make the social sciences more attractive can be a way to counteract the distaste for them in universities, bookstores, and mass media.

I moreover wish to show the ways in which literature is suited to accounting for reality. Just as the researcher can provide a demonstration by means of a palpable textual form, so the writer can compose a text to implement a historical, sociological, or anthropological line of reasoning. Literature is not necessarily the realm of fiction. It adapts and sometimes anticipates modes of inquiry in the social sciences. Writers who want to convey the reality of the world become in their own way researchers.

Because they produce knowledge about the real world, past and present, and because they are capable not only of representing it (according to the old notion of mimesis) but also of explaining it, the social sciences are already present in literature in the form of travel logs, memoirs, autobiographies, correspondences, testimonies, diaries, life stories, and news reports. In all of these texts, someone is observing, giving a deposition, consigning, examining, transmitting, recounting their childhood, describing those who are absent, retracing some individual’s itinerary, giving an account of some experience, going through a country at war or a region in crisis, or investigating some accident, violent crime, or professional mi-lieu. All of this literature displays historical, sociological, and anthropological ways of thinking, along with tools for making our lives intelligible: in other words, it reveals a way of understanding the present and the past. Literature can take us far away on its wings; it can also help decipher the world.

This book thus attempts to answer the following questions:

•How can we renew the writing of history and the social sciences?

•Can we define a literature of reality, a writing of the world?

These two questions converge toward a third, more experimental interrogation: Can we conceive of texts that would be both works of literature and studies in social science?

People have reflected on the way to write history for as long as history has existed. Two and a half centuries ago, Voltaire observed that since so much has been said on the matter, it is necessary here to say very little.¹ But not so many thinkers have tried to figure out to what extent the social sciences can contribute to literature and what literature has been doing to the social sciences. One of the reasons is that the latter are relatively young. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, history and sociology have formed a third culture, between letters and the so-called exact sciences. Two world wars and mass crimes have also altered the stakes: since 1945, history, testimony, and literature no longer have the same meaning.

This book deals with a literature permeated with the world, history as a social science, and research as method and creation, an epistemology in writing. History is more literary than it cares to be; literature is more of a history that it believes. Each is malleable, rich in extraordinary potentialities. Initiatives have been flourishing everywhere for a few years now, in journals and in books, on the Internet and within universities. One can sense an immense appetite on the part of researchers, writers, and journalists, and a huge expectation on the part of readers.

That does not amount to saying that everything is in everything. There are the social sciences, and there is literature: the dividing line between them exists. If, as Philip Roth has said, the writer, is not responsible to anyone,² researchers are at the very least responsible for the accuracy of what they state. I would simply like to carry out a reflection on genres, in order to see whether the dividing line might not be turned into a frontier for pioneers, exploring a new avenue instead of laying down the law: we can instead of we have to. I would like to suggest a possibility, to indicate a path that we might walk down from time to time.

Writing History

Speaking of writing history in the fullest sense of the term (writing as literary form, history as social science) requires that we look into the ties between literature and history. Now these notions are in some ways so multivalent, fluctuating, and recent that bringing them together inevitably produces misunderstandings.

First mistake: the supposition that literature and history would be obviously akin. Is not the historical novel proof? Actually, that literary genre adheres to an epico-memorial conception that goes all the way back to antiquity: history, says Cicero, deals with important facts worthy to be remembered.³ History with a capital H supposedly constitutes what is important in the past: a spectacle in which great men produce great events, a fresco in which wars, revolutions, intrigues, marriages, and epidemics overwhelm individual and collective destinies. Certain novelists supposedly latch on to that great History, resuscitating Cleopatra, the gladiators, the Mayflower, Lincoln, D-day, and the conquest of space. But history is less a content than a manner of proceeding, an effort to understand, an analysis of the evidence. If Memoirs from Beyond the Grave by Chateaubriand and If This Is a Man by Primo Levi are more historical than cloak-and-dagger novels, it is not because they speak of Napoleon or Auschwitz, but because they produce a historical line of reasoning.

Regardless of the subject, we might identify history and literature on the basis of their narrative vocation: both tell a story, arrange events, weave a plot, and depict characters in action. History thus blends into a vast corpus of literature in the form of a true novel.⁴ But is history necessarily a story with twists and turns? And can literature be summed up in the novel? Just as history is not a fascinating narrative full of kings and commanders in chief, smoke and blood, the novel is not the alpha and omega of literature. If, with a still more restrictive notion of literature, we pretend to believe that literature consists of pleasantly turned, well-balanced sentences, history can be transformed as if by magic: a fine style would suffice to make literature.

In the 1970s and 1980s, thinkers such as Hayden White, Paul Veyne, Michel de Certeau, Richard Brown, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Rancière, and Philippe Carrard established that there was a writing of history and even a poetics of history (or sociology). But the fact that researchers tell a story or cite evidence does not settle the question of their work of creation. The literary character of a text is something other than its dis-cursive nature. It is obvious that there is a technical writing of history (the handling of the past, the organization of documentary material, and the apparatus of erudition), but not all researchers choose to write; far from it. On that score, in fact, the social sciences are far from having undergone the same revolutions as the twentieth-century novel. If they accept going from discourse to the text, historians set their eyes on a new horizon: no longer historical writing but simply writing. Which means creation.

Reflecting on the writing of history thus requires that we avoid these false encounters with great History, the true novel, fine style, and scholarly technique. It is not because it excites, tells a story, or configures a speech that history is literature.

The second mistake is symmetrical to the first: history is supposedly an anti-literature. To attain the status of science, history tore itself away from belles lettres, and sociology has been constructed over against novelists who claimed to be sociologists. Associated with amateurism, pretentiousness, and lack of method, literary work comes indeed to jeopardize the work of the researcher. Moreover, the idea of literature nowadays connotes fiction, but history is not fiction. If such were the case, it would lose its reason for being, which is to hang on to that old-fashioned thing, ‘reality,’ ‘what actually happened.’ ⁵ It would produce not knowledge but a more or less convincing version of the facts. In the 1970s and 1980s, the most radical proponents of the linguistic turn and postmodernism attempted to dispute the cognitive scope of history by assimilating it to literature (understood as both fiction and rhetoric).

As soon as one tries to oppose literature and history, the issues have already been decided. On one side, we have writing as entertainment, and on the other, we have history, which means serious work. This dichotomy explains the ambiguous relationship that numerous researchers have with literature. They use it in the context of their work, they privately delight in it, but they do not write it; that would be betraying their principles. The only universally accepted writing stays within the prescribed bounds: introduction, chapters, footnotes, with a few figures of style.

Researchers in the social sciences are right to be wary of belles lettres and fiction, but by constantly insisting that their work has nothing to do with literary pursuits, they risk weakening their research. With its capacity for figuring and problematizing, the novel profoundly influenced history in the nineteenth century. When banishing writing from research on the pretext that it only concerns literati, one consigns entire chapters of historiographical thought to oblivion, since from Herodotus to Polybius, Cicero to Valla, Bayle to Gibbon, Michelet to Renan, each and every epistemological advance consisted also of a literary innovation. That is why we risk paying a very heavy price for disregarding the work of writing.

Reflecting on the writing of history thus involves refusing anathema. It is not because history is a method, social science, or professionalized discipline that there is nothing literary about it.

Is the writing of history something that goes without saying, or does it represent a peril? Is history always literature? Or can history never be literature? The only way of escaping from this fruitless opposition is to see to it that literary pursuits signal not the abandonment of serious research, nor a well-earned rest after the real work has been completed, but rather an epistemological gain. The point is not to embellish the text but to lay out and deepen the method. Thanks to writing, research can obtain heightened self-awareness, increased honesty, greater rigor, a more clearly understandable protocol, an in-depth discussion of the evidence, and a more open invitation to engage in critical debate. To want to write the social sciences is not to rehabilitate History with a capital H, or to sink to the level of dime store sociography, or to sing the praises of flowery language. By reconciling methods of research and forms of writing, we can implement a method within writing, and thereby renew the fundamental elements of history and the social sciences. It is not a matter of burying history under mounds of fiction and rhetoric but of recasting it in a new form, reinvigorating its narrative construction, its language, its rhythm, its atmosphere, its inner voice, through an investigation-text whose form espouses its effort to say things that are true. Literary creation is the other name for the scientific ambition of history.

Researchers have every interest in writing in a more sensitive, free, and precise manner. In this respect, accuracy, liberty, and sensitivity are of a piece with cognitive scope, as is the case when we say that a mathematical demonstration is elegant. Chronologies and annals do not produce knowledge, and the idea that the facts supposedly speak for themselves is the stuff of magical thinking. On the contrary, history produces knowledge because it is literary, because it is carried out by means of a text, because it recounts, reveals, uncovers, unearths, explains, contradicts, and proves; in other words, because it writes what is true. Writing is therefore not the researchers’ scourge but the form they give their demonstration. Writing entails no deterioration or loss of truth; it is the very condition of truth.

It is up to each researcher to forge his or her own writing method. Renewing writing in the social sciences thus consists not of abolishing all rules but of freely giving oneself new rules.

Literature of the Real World

The rhinoceroses drawn on the walls of the Chauvet Cave about 32,000 years ago, the forests