Modernist interventions in historiographic narratives:

Natalie Zemon Davis and The Return of Martin Guerre (1983)

[Paper presented at the national seminar on Multiple Modernisms organised by

IRIS (Institute for Research in Interdisciplinary Studies), Jaipur, 25-27 September
2015]

In this paper I attempt to conflate the pervasive modernist mood of scepticism with
the historiographic narrative, The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon
Davis (henceforth Return, 1983), which recounts a remarkable historical event of
the 1540s in France. Peasant Martin Guerre leaves his family following a dispute
with his father and remains missing for eight years, until a man calling himself
Martin Guerre returns and resumes life with his wife, Bertrande de Rols, and
family. Three years later, he is denounced as Arnaud du Tilh, an impostor, by
Martin’s uncle and Martin’s wife; although Arnaud initially redeems himself in
court by displaying the kind of knowledge that only the ‘real’ Martin could have
possessed, he is exposed just before the verdict is delivered at the court in
Toulouse, by the dramatic arrival of the real Martin Guerre on the scene: and the
impostor is sentenced to death.

In the early 1980s, the story of Martin Guerre was revived in popular as well as
academic imagination. The 1982 French film Le Retour de Martin Guerre had for
its conseiller historique, Natalie Zemon Davis, who is a Canadian and American
historian of the early modern period. Davis, whose main interest lies in social and
cultural history, brings to bear documents ranging from judicial records, tax rolls
and pamphlets to autobiographies and folk tales, in addressing historical questions.

Left unsatisfied with the film’s treatment of this ‘piece of history’, she went on to
write The Return of Martin Guerre (French 1982, English 1983). In Davis’ words,
“the film was departing from the historical record, and I found this troubling. The
Basque background of the Guerres was sacrificed; rural Protestantism was ignored;
and especially the double game of the wife and the judge’s inner contradictions
were softened” (Return, viii).

Versions of the story have been haunting storytellers down history. In 1941, Janet
Lewis wrote a fictional tale titled The Wife of Martin Guerre. A century earlier,
Alexandre Dumas had alluded to this story in his novel, The Two Dianas (1846),
which in flagrant contradiction of other existing versions, portrays Martin Guerre
as “timid” and “forgiving” (139), Arnold (sic) as a “culprit” (140), and Martin’s
reunion with his formerly shrewish and now docile wife in a ‘happily ever after’
fashion. Dumas’ account however concurs with that of the others in showing that
during the trial, “the perplexity of the judges was always the same, their
uncertainty always as great. Appearances and proofs were as clear and as eloquent
on one side as on the other”(114). Michel de Montaigne, essayist, is in fact
believed to have attended the trial of Martin Guerre, and refers to this story when
speaking of the impossibility of certainty.

The earliest account of the amazing story of Martin Guerre’s impersonation was
authored by Jean de Coras, whose Arrest Memorable (1561) was a consequence of
his having served as judge in the trial at Toulouse. The hearing at Toulouse came
after an appeal was made by Arnaud after a previous hearing at Rieux. Coras, who
also plays a fairly prominent role in the French film of 1982, presents a
comprehensive and direct account of the trial, as I shall proceed to show.

Coras’ text reads Bertrande favourably, as someone who was duped by Arnaud,
and whose cohabitation with him was a result of ignorance. His description of how
she came to learn of the deception is also economical: “[a]t last, this woman de
Rols was made aware of this prodigious disgrace…[h]aving informed the Judge of
Rieux of this matter, and claiming that everything could be verified, she ended by
asking double penance against the said du Tilh” (2, emphases added), spiritual and
material.

The irony in her claim that ‘everything could be verified’ stands out; as things
were to unfold, nothing could be verified conclusively. On the contrary, several
contradictory assertions were maintained, resulting for instance “in two very
different proofs:…that Sanxi, son of Martin, did not resemble the accused at all,
and…that the sisters of Martin resembled the accused strongly” (4-5).

The court in Toulouse decided, in the interest of obtaining certain knowledge, to

increase the number of witnesses from those who deposed in the earlier hearing.

But imagine! These enquiries having been made by order of the court, the
judges were more uncertain than ever: for among twenty-five or thirty
witnesses heard officially, nine or ten were sure that it was Martin Guerre,
and seven or eight that it was Arnauld du Tilh: and the rest because of
conflicting circumstances and the resemblance of the prisoner to Martin
Guerre remained in doubt, not daring to be positive whether it was the one or
 the other…From which it is easy to gather and understand that the judges
were in great perplexity (Coras 5, emphases added).

Although Coras signs his text with the comment “A Raison Cede” (14), that Davis
translates as “‘[t]o reason, yield’” (Return, 120), I would prefer to opine with the
translator (of Coras’ text) Jeannette K. Ringold who explains her reluctance to
translate this phrase saying: “[I]t seemed a very fine conclusion, and the
implications of reason and right in English and French are too great for us to deal
with” (15). The translator’s note suggests that reason may not be an adequate
rubric within which to explain the story like that of Martin Guerre, characterized
by so much wonder.

Modernist doubt

My own mapping of this text onto the theme of this seminar comes from the
extensive domain of doubt that the story of Martin Guerre’s impersonation
straddles, which I locate in spirit as distinctively modernist. Within the frame of
realistic fiction, a narrative such as this might be dismissed as incredible, marred
by coincidence, or naively judgmental in its resolution; its historical veracity
notwithstanding. But a paradigm-shift in reading it from within the tradition of
realism to that of modernism reveals the gaps and questions beneath the bold
outline of this story. These gaps project indefiniteness and inaccessibility of
knowledge, and tentativeness is made apparent at several nodes in the way the plot
moves. This space is taken over by speculation, which Davis highlights when re-
presenting the event, and which makes her text highly modernist.

In the words of Salman Rushdie:

 Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the
twentieth century. One of the things that has happened to us in the twentieth
century as a human race is to learn how certainty crumbles in your hand. We
cannot any longer have a fixed certain view of anything…and that is the
basis of the great artistic movement known as Modernism” (qtd. in The
Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, 90).

Brian McHale in his book Postmodernist Fiction evokes the concept of the
dominant while trying to underscore the difference between modernist and
postmodernist literature. He points out that while the dominant or pre-eminent
concern of the former is epistemological, that of the latter is ontological. That is,
the questions of modernism pertain to the discourse of knowledge, such as “What
is there to be known; Who knows it; How do they know it, and with what degree of
certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with
what degree of reliability?...What are the limits of the knowable? And so on”
(McHale 9, emphasis added).

The ways in which knowledge is implicated in these questions already suggest

incertitude as an integral part of the modernist reading experience. Reading
Rushdie and McHale together, modernism can be described as a mode that puts
knowledge to disadvantage in the tests of certainty and absoluteness. Sure, the
Martin Guerre story does this in a literal manner, (and also perhaps
anachronistically if prophetically pointing ahead at modernist twentieth century),
but it is a text that unarguably interrogates certitudes to the extent of reducing the
question to: ‘who is Martin Guerre?’ This becomes an epistemological question
after the real Martin is replaced by the ‘pseudo Martin’ as Arnaud is sometimes
referred to. And even though this question is resolved at the end, the questions of
‘How’ – ‘how did Arnaud so successfully impersonate a man he barely knew, and
that too to his close family and friends?’ which is in essence the story of Martin
Guerre, can only be answered through speculation and conjecture. Davis
foregrounds this when she uses the word ‘interpretation’ while trying to explain
Bertrande’s conduct at the trial at Toulouse.

Versions of the Martin Guerre story:

The only certain piece of knowledge in the story of Martin Guerre is that he was
impersonated by a man called Arnaud du Tilh well enough to fool everyone
including his closest family members.

Whether they were really fooled, or for how long they were fooled, how many
colluded with the deception and at what points in time, are questions addressed
variously by the versions or addressed in a speculative fashion. For example, Coras
limits his description to “at last”, not “how”: “[a]t last, this woman de Rols was
made aware of this prodigious disgrace…” (2).

In her fictional text, Lewis muddies the waters thus:

At the end of a few months Bertrande found herself with child. She rejoiced
thereat, and she also trembled, for at times a curious fear assailed her, a fear
so terrible and unnatural that she hardly dared acknowledge it in her most
 secret heart. What if Martin, the roughly bearded stranger, were not the true
Martin, the one whom she had kissed farewell that noonday by the side of
the freshly planted field? (41).

The novel goes on to show that she had experienced moments of incredulity on the
night he returned, but which he had dismissed and she had dismissed too, in the
clear light of day. In the novel, Betrande eventually confronts the pseudo Martin
with her suspicion, but he rejects them. Her suspicion is finally confirmed by a
soldier from Rochefort who calls the pseudo Martin an impostor, and after the
latter asks his share of the money from his uncle, a case against him for
misrepresentation comes to be registered.

This section of my paper has begun deliberately with a fictional text to show how
fiction and history, in these two instances, may not differ from each other so much
after all. This comparison between the two texts, made inevitable insofar as both
engage in surmise with respect to the motivations of the prime players in the
action, collapses the compartmentalization of history and fiction, by showing how
and how much of ‘reality’ is contingent upon imagination.

Bertrande is at the centre of Davis’ reading as well. “According to Davis,

Bertrande was in fact Arnaud’s accomplice, for she knew that the man claiming to
be her husband was a fraud” (Finlay 555). Robert Finlay’s comment however is
more in the form of censure; in “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre” he attacks
Davis of having stretched the facts at her disposal of this case: “If historical
records can be bypassed so thoroughly in the service of an inventive blend of
intuition and assertion, it is difficult to see what distinguishes the writing of history
from that of fiction”, and “[i]n historical writing, where does reconstruction stop
and invention begin?” (569).

Davis responds to Finlay’s objections in her counter-essay “On the Lame”, which
she begins by referring to the “exploration of the problem of truth and doubt: of the
difficulty in determining true identity in the sixteenth century and of the difficulty
in the historian’s quest for truth in the twentieth. ‘In historical writing, where does
reconstruction stop and invention begin?’ is precisely the question I hoped readers
would ask and reflect on” (572).

A predominant rhetorical strategy deployed by Zavis is the deployment of the

subjunctive mood, indicating doubt. Reconstructing the Martin Guerre episode,
Davis’ language veers towards the epistemologically unverifiable, with “[a]s best
we can see” (Return, 27), “may have met” (38), “[a]s a ‘thought experiment,’ let us
imagine what might have taken place” (38), “[t]his is a possible scenario” (39), “so
one must surmise” (46),”[i]f I were to hazard a guess about the Martin Guerre
case” (56), “[p]ossibly he did” (58, all emphases added). The language of doubt
pervading the account arises not just because of the impossibility of knowing what
really happened due to lack of records (if one were to take a pre-modernist
position, believe that only one account of events is true and any other is false), but
also because of a changed way of looking at history and understanding reality.

Indeed in her rejoinder to Finlay, Natalie Zemon Davis declares that she sees
“complexities and ambivalences everywhere”, and is “willing to settle…for
conjectural knowledge and possible truth (“On the Lame” 574).

History, Fiction and Modernist doubt

Davis explains further that she “decided to use a literary construction for The
Return of Martin Guerre that would allow the book to be read, if one wished, like a
detective story…I also chose to advance my arguments…as much by the ordering
of narrative, choice of detail, literary voice, and metaphor as by topical analysis”
(“On the Lame” 575). This is an endorsement of Hayden White’s statement about
stories that they “are not true or false, but rather more or less intelligible, coherent,
consistent, persuasive, and so on. And this is true of historical, no less than of
fictional, stories” (“Historical Pluralism and Pantextualism”, 236).

In this essay White marks a distinction between a view of history as a report of

past events that are in themselves meaningful (the position of historical veracity or
truth), and the position that a historical representation is in the order of
construction aided by language and imagination. White observes that the latter
kind of historical pluralism “leaves it virtually indistinguishable from fiction”
(227). He reinforces his point about the constructed-ness of history by gesturing
towards the possibility of “mutually exclusive narrative interpretations of the
same historical phenomenon” (230). White’s position foregrounds alternate and/or
parallel accounts of ‘a’ historical incident much in the spirit of modernism, which
sees reality as constructed. Forging literature and history together in this essay by
introducing the idea of emplotment, White declares: “[n]either the reality nor the
meaning of history is ‘out there’ in the form of a story awaiting only a historian to
discern its outline and identify the plot that comprises its meaning” (230).
Modernism in literature is best described as having rejected the idea of objective
reality; so, indicates White, has history which is relativist.
The spirit of skepticism seeped into the discipline of history with the famous
“crisis of historicism”. George Iggers defines this crisis as that caused by
“relativism and loss of faith in the values of Western culture”
(http://cohesion.rice.edu/humanities/csc/conferences.cfm?doc_id=378). The crisis
focused on firstly, the methods of history, and was thus an “epistemological
intervention”; and secondly on the idea of historicity, and constituted an
“ontological intervention”. White locates this crisis in “the realization that what
constituted the dominant mode of consciousness of an age was the problem of
historical reconstruction, not a solution thereof” (White 235).

White’s theory of ‘emplotment’ qualifies the process of historical reconstruction

with respect to genre, and further blunts the divide between fiction and history.
White finds that “historical narrators often claim to find in the events of which they
speak the forms of one or another of the plot-structures typically met with in the
different genres of artistic fiction, myth, fable, and legend” (“Storytelling”,
283).This presupposes different, alternate and even mutually conflicting or
exclusive accounts of the same set of events, depending on the genre within which
these are plotted. What constitutes a tragic set of events for one historian could be
comic or farcical to another. This point is made by Guneratne who refers back to
Coras’ work [of 1565] where the author included an annotation to the effect that
his story “was a tragedy and not a comedy” (8), remarking further on the
inappositeness of such a plot-form or genre to the story of a peasant: in classical
tradition, tragedy was defined as appropriate to protagonists of high birth.
Guneratne glosses this by showing how the film “treats the events as a variation of
the detective story in which the sympathetic criminal is trapped by his own
cunning; Davis converts the story into something of a feminist romance in which a
woman, born into a restrictive patriarchal society, exercises the right to choose her
mates” (8).

Keywords: modernist, skepticism, knowledge, paradigm-shift, conjecture,

certainty.

Works Cited:

Coras, Arrest Memorable. Main text. Trans. Jeannette K. Ringold. Triquarterly 55

(Fall 1982): 86-103.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Harvard: University

Press, 1983.

---. “On the Lame”. AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre. The American
Historical Review. Vol. 93, No. 3 (Jun 1988): 572-603. JSTOR.

Dumas, Alexandre. The Works of Alexandre Dumas. The Two Dianas. Volume
Two. New York: PF Collier and son.
https://archive.org/details/worksofalexandre19duma 29th September 2015

Finlay, Robert. AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre “The Refashioning of
Martin Guerre”. Vol. 93, No. 3 (Jun 1988): 553-571. JSTOR.

Guneratne, Anthony. “Cinehistory and the Puzzling Case of Martin Guerre”.

Film &History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television
Studies, Volume 21, No. 1, Feb 1991: 2-19.
 PROJECT MUSE.

Lewis, Janet. The Wife of Martin Guerre. 1941. Intro. Kevin Haworth. Afterword,
Larry McMurtry. Ohio: Swallow Press, 2013.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Shiach, Morag. The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Cambridge:

University Press: 2007.
https://books.google.co.in/books?
id=rSAESpxOeo0C&pg=PA250&lpg=PA250&dq=the+cambridge+compani
on+to+the+modernist+novel&source=bl&ots=aSVol4GUwH&sig=FviFslX
oM0LBXQ6b8_KXp9BLNFM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDgQ6AEwBWoVC
hMItL-23P__xwIV5S2mCh1rPQgu#v=onepage&q=Rushdie&f=false.29th
September 2015.

Vigne, Daniel. Dir. Le Retour de Martin Guerre. 1982.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSKl2oKuui8. 29th September 2015.

White, Hayden. “Historical Pluralism and Pantextualism” (1986), The Fiction of

Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957-2007, Ed. and
Intro. Robert Doran, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010: 223-236.

---. “Storytelling: Historical and Ideological” (1996). The Fiction of

Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957-2007, Ed. and
Intro. Robert Doran, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010: 273-292.
Zammito, John H. ‘The Historicization of the Historical Subject’" “Historicism,
Metahistory, and Historical Practice”
http://cohesion.rice.edu/humanities/csc/conferences.cfm?doc_id=378
29th September 2015.

Sudha Shastri
Professor of English,
Dept of HSS, IIT Bombay, Mumbai