Historians Tell Tales: Of Cartesian Cats and Gallic Cockfights

Transcription

Historians Tell Tales: Of Cartesian Cats and Gallic Cockfights
Review by: James Fernandez
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 113-127
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Review Article
Historians Tell Tales: Of Cartesian Cats and
Gallic Cockfights*
James Fernandez
{Jnilersits of Chicagv
GETTING INTO INTERTEXTUALITY
One is always at risk when entering into a family dispute, even when it is
one between two separated brethren of the annales fraternite. But when
one's own discipline and method is a bone of contention, then one is
compelled to comment even though it means taking one's life into one's
hands. Besides? both parties-particularly Robert Darnton-have read the
anthropological literature with care. We owe Darnton and Roger Chartier's
argument at least as much. And if Darnton and Chartier have learned from
anthropology, surely anthropology can learn from social history. At least,
one can hope to add something useful to materials already abundantly
discussed. Many years of work in the equatorial forests do not place an
anthropologist at an Archimedean point, but they do give a certain perspective perhaps even a ''critical distance'' on Francofilial narrations,
which is to say, the kinds of tales typically told in the core countries of
Western Europe as part of their ''coreness.''
The texts before us, of course, are Darnton's book, The Creat Cat
Mblssacre,and the subsequent exchange between Chartier and Darnton. I
agree with Chartier that it is really the first two chapters of that book,
''Peasants Tell Tales'' and ''The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue St. Severin," that raise crucial issues about the interpretation of texts and about
the relation of texts to ''social facts'' and to ''culture.'' They are, at any
rate, the chapters most interesting to an anthropologist. The first of these
is a discussion of peasant folktales and peasant mentalities and is surely
* The works discussed in this essay are Robert Darnton, The Creat Cclt Massacre
rIndOther Episohlcssof French CulturczlHistry (New York, 1984); Roger Chartier, "Texts,
Symbols, and Frenchness,'' Journczlof Modern History 57, no. 4 (December 1985): 68295; and Robert Darnton, ' 'The Symbolic Element in History,'' Journal of Mo(lern History
58, no. 1 (March 1986): 218-34. (Page citations in the text refer to the articles.) I wish
to acknowledge the perceptive comments made by Janet Morford both on this debate
and on the manuscript of this paper. I also want to thank Luke Oliver Fernandez for
illuminating discussions of the postmodern condition.
[Jollrnbllof Modern Historv 60 (March 1988): 113-I27]
<'1988 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/88/6001-0005$01.00
All rights reserved.
4
14
j
1
rernanvez
of anthropologicalinterest for that reason. The second chapter has a strong
"intertextual relationship" with a now widely referenced anthropological
work that is something of a "master text" at this point. This is Clifford
Geertz's long essay on the Balinese cockfight.l Such "intertextuality" to
a key piece of our literature is bound, also? to interest anthropologists.
THE USESANDRISKSOFETHNOGRAPHY
It seems clear thatther
than his having the advantage of having worked
in compagnonagewith a master craftsman(Geertz) what attracts Darnton
to ethnography and what "legitimizes" his employment of that approach
is first, that ethnography is experienced in deciphering "opaque texts"
and "entering into alien mentalities," and, second, that ethnography seeks
to see social life from "the native's point of view." In particular, ethnography is accustomed to deciphering complex, overdetermined things based
on various kinds of symbolism that are weak in words but strong in gestural
meaning, such as the rough music of charivari, or in meanings that repose
in objects, such as cats and wolves. Such powers of decipherment clearly
give a historian added powers of interpretationover his archival materials,
so embedded are their meanings in words. It is meaning-oriented or symbolic anthropology that is particularly revelatory to Darnton, then, and
whose authority he evokes.2 But how secure, how legitimate, is that authority? How free is it from modern and postmodern vicissitudes?
As historians, particularlysocial historians, have moved away from l'histoire evenementiellelite history that took place over the heads of the
common people3 toward a history that seeks to enter into their very lives,
the discipline of anthropology, which has usually aimed at the common
people and rejected the elite, must prove congenial. In addition, as Darnton
remarks several times, the conditions of life and the cultural modes of the
old regimes of early modern Europe, in which many social historians specialize, seem to be so different and distant from our own as to appear quite
alien; a turn to the discipline that has regularly tried to cross over into the
alien thus seems natural. Indeed, peasants and artisans of a quite different
time and place seem as much an anthropological subject as a historical
one.
But can anthropologicalmethods developed for situations, however alien,
of face-to-face encounter and direct interrogationbe legitimately applied in
any appropriateway to subjects so far from us in time and space as artisans
or peasants of the mid-eighteenthcentury? And are there risks in doing so?
l CliffordGeertz, "Deep Play:Notes on the BalineseCockfight,"in The Interpretation
of Cultures, ed. CliffordGeertz(New York, 1973),pp. 412-53. Indeed,giventhe libidinal
subtext, the sexual readingat one level of the Geertz text recalls the sexual innuendo
present in the French term "la chatte" (or "pussy") pointedout by Darnton.
2 of course, it is this kind of symbolicallyattunedethnographythat is most attractive
to me and that seems, in my view, most revelatoryof local points of view.
3 Darnton,The Great Cat Massacre) p. 24.
Historians Tell Tale*
115
As Chartier suggests, such ''borrowings from anthropology do not in themselves resolve all uncertainties. They may even create afew problems oftheir
own by destroying the 'textuality' of texts'' (Chartier, p. 690).
OFTEXTS
THEAUTHORITY
Darnton and others who practice ethnographic history4 seem, then, to
intend a ''refiguration''5of the historian's method and thought. It is understandable that the particular figures or metaphors that are attractive
here are the ''text" and ''reading" metaphors of Ricoeur6 elaborated with
such fertility by Geertz given the fact that the historian's main materials
always have been texts (and how could it be otherwise?) and their main
method of data extraction, reading. It is even more understandable with
Darnton, whose speciality has been the culture and society of printing and
reading in the eighteenth century. But putting new glosses on this perennial
activity and conflating it with what ethnographers danthropologists,
after all, can ''be there" operating on all sense modalities as historians
cannot raises questions. And these questions arise even though it is clear
that this conflation can liberate the social historians, like Darnton, who
practice it and can produce a catalytic release of insight and confident
narrative verve that cannot fail to attract interest and be instructive. It is
often quite amazing how uncannily such historians manage to ''be there"
even though they were never there.
Let us, in any event, say several introductory things from the anthropological perspective about this catalytic conflation of archive work and
fieldwork brought about by the figurative mediation of the texts that result
from both anthropological and historical effort. For one thing, the ''text"
and ''reading'' metaphors are not the only ones that have been put forth
in anthropology in recent years out of a need felt among anthropologists
themselves to refigure anthropological thought. We need not mention the
long-standing etic/emic, hard science/soft science debate in anthropology
as to whether we should be concerned with local meaning construction
and local lexicon at all. Nor need we mention the competing metaphors in
anthropology of social life as game and social life as drama.7
For Levi-Strauss, for example, we might better speak of ''listening''
rather than ''reading." The music or symphonic metaphor is profoundly
organizing in his argument, and he is concerned both to deny radical alterite
1740-1790 (Chapel Hill,
4 For example, Rhys Isaac, The Tralnsformation of Vir,s,}inia:
N.C., 1982). As far as questions of ''legitimation'' being raised here, it is to be noted
that ''ethnographic history'' can win Pulitzer Prizes, as this book has. This is more than
plain ethnography can do.
5 The term is Clifford Geertz's. See ''Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social
Thought,'' in his Local Knoetled,s,Je(New York, 1984).
6 Paul Ricoeur, ''The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,''
Social Reselrch 38. no. 3 (1972): 73-101. As Darnton says, "We never meet pure idiom.
We interpret texts'' (The Greclt Calt Masselcre, p. 262).
7 Which are compared in Geertz, ''Blurred Genres.''
116
Fernandez
and to affirmthat there is a fundamental atunement between minds savage
and civilized: we hear that is, realize ourselves in each other. And more
recently the trope has changed from reading to talking. Under the influence
of Bakhtin and others we have refigured ethnography as a dialogic process-which, of course, it always has been, though the text model may
tend to obscure the fact. With this "talking," or colloquial, model, we
become aware of the creative and constitutive processes of talking and
being talked back to and listening and of the way in which dialogy produces
texts and is antecedent to them. That is, from this view, texts have no
existence independent from the dialogy that produced them and that is
always reflected in them.
While reading as a method of data extraction is, of course, available to
the historianjust as it is to the anthropologist or to any literate member
of any literate society, for that matter- listening to and talking with one's
subject is not. The point is not that ethnographic history prefers that figuration of ethnography that is congenial to its long-established materials
and method; that is understandableenough (plus Sa change). Indeed, there
are many examples and not only in Darnton's work-of how evocative
in all the sense modalities historians can be.8 Indeed, Darnton- following
Bloch claims in a pungent metaphor that he is not just seeing. He follows
his nose and trusts to a kind of cannibalistic sense of smell the smell of
human flesh in the archives.9 But this rhetorical claim aside, the text
metaphor ignores the synesthetic nature of ethnographic experience the
degree to which it is, or should be, consensual in all modes of seeing,
hearing, tasting, touching, and hearing. The point is that such figuration
ignores the way that our obligation as anthropologists to the "totality of
the senses" and to the challenge of synesthesia may make us recurrently
uncomfortable with any singular figuration of our work, whether it is listening, talking, reading, or smelling. Indeed, the challenge of "being there,"
8 One thinksof, JUSt to mentiontwo examples, CarlSchorskessFin-de-SiecleVienna:
Politics and Culture(New York, 1981), in which the author steeped himself in all the
sense modalities,lookingat the picturesand listeningintentlyto the music of the period
before writing;or, for a much earlierdate, JonathanSpencess The MemoryPalace of
MatteoRicci (New York, 1985),in which Spence creates a sensible world largelyout of
the evidence of picturesand images. A paragraphin the conclusion is a tellingexample
of the consensualevocation of which the imaginativeculturehistorianis capable: "He
sees the eunuchMa Tang,suffusedwith anger,graspthe cross of carvedwood to which
the bleeding Christ is nailed. He hears the shouts of warningand the howling of the
wind as the boat keels over, flingingboth him and Joao Barradosinto the water of the
River Gan. He smells the incense that curls up around his triptych as he places it
reverentlyupon a paganaltarin the luxuriousgardentemple of Juyung. He tastes the
homely food preparedfor him by the poor farmersin the country dwellingnear Zhaoquing.He feels the touch of cheek on cheek as the dying Franciscode Petristhrowshis
:
arms aroundhis neck" (p. 266).
9 The quote is taken from Marc Bloch: "A good historianresembles the ogre of the
legend. Whereverhe smells humanflesh, he knows that there he will find his prey."
(Apologiepour l'histoireou metier d'historien[Paris, 1974],p. 35).
Hi*toriclns Tell TelleKs 117
of face-to-face ethnographic experience, regularly obliges us to mix metaphors in the figuration of our task.
It is not just texts or even just language, then, that provide the data of
complete ethnography and that constitute the result and the advantage of
''being there.'' To focus too much on texts is a logocentrism that ignores
the synesthetic nature of ethnography and the degree to which it records
much that exists outside language per se; the record need not take only
the form of texts, as the vast archive of Folkways recordings shows. It
may be that it is the reality of synesthesia that periodically provokes anthropologists themselves to refigure their work away from reading or writing to listening or talking or touching.'° The anthropologist has proved
always willing to put his texts and his organizing tropes at risk. That means
putting language itself at risk. It is doubtful that the historian would want
to so hazard the ''textuality'' of texts.
The real virtue, to be sure, of the elevation of the text model in anthropology perhaps its main virtue lies in the reflexivity it produces by its
focus on the act of ''inscription.'' It focuses our attention on the way texts
emerges how they are constructed in themselves and between themselves
and by both informants and ethnographers. Such reflexivity is also present
in the model of dialogue, for it causes us to reflect on how and to what
purpose cultural meanings are produced, negotiated, and enforced in dialogue and the degree to which they have only reified meaning outside it.
It is this reflexivity, this ''textuality'' built into the text model, that Chartier
finds unsatisfactorily realized by Darnton, who would seem to buy into
the authority of ethnographic treatment of his texts without accepting the
liabilities to that authority that come from reflecting on the various purposes politicals material, and others that ethnography, as selective inscription of a far vaster synesthetic experience, serves. " We may consider
this point further by looking at Darnton's discussion of ''Frenchness."
FRENCHNESS:
CARTESIAN
CATS
Anthropologists make a distinction between the "replication of uniformity'' as a consequence of their studies and the understanding of the ''or"' See Malinowski's well-known argument that language use among humans is really
''phatic'' communication that is to say, a form of touching (B. Malinowski, ''The
Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,'' in The Meaning of Meanins,},ed. C. K.
Ogden and 1. A. Richards [London, 1923], pp. 451-510). There have been plenty of other
arguments that touch is the fundamental human sense modality and that touching and
being touched is what life is all about. For example, see Ashley Montague, Tvuching:
T}leHlonan Significanceof the Skin (New York, 1971).
" There has been a great deal of reflection in recent anthropology on the claims to
authority not to mention the claims to truth-of ethnography. See, e.g., J. Clifford,
''On Ethnographic Authority,'' Representations1, no. 2 (1985): 118-46. And much of
the recent work of Renato Rosaldo has been devoted to this reflection; see ''From the
Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor,'' in WritingCulture,ed. J. Clifford
and G. Marcus (Berkeley, 1986).
118
Fernundez
ganization of diversity" as a more desirable consequence. 12 In more recent
years we have talked about the penchant for ''essentialism'' in our studies
and the need to avoid it because, as in the ''replication of uniformity,'' it
is the kind of argument that so often predisposes the investigator to select
confirming facts out of a much more complex picture. Moreover, it is an
argument liable to the influence of preexisting ethnocentrisms and of parti
pris. The identification of something that can be called "Frenchness'' in
Darnton's first essay in The Creat Cat Massacre, ''Peasants Tell Tales,"
and its contrast with ''Germanness, Italianness and Englishness" is a good
example of the ' 'replication of uniformity'' of "essentialism." The burden
of argument in our discipline over the last twenty-five years would cause
us to share Chartier's discomfort with such ''essences." This is in part
because there seems to be, as Chartier points out, a paradox in Darnton's
argument: he maintains that there was a significant change in ''mental
worlds'' between the Old Regime and the present, while at the same time
he argues for a persistence in Frenchness. It is also because essentialism
ignores the multiplicity of contemporary voices in struggle, in negotiation,
and in play within a culture. It is a multiplicity, as Chartier points out, too
easily lost sight of in the ''culture as shared symbols'' idea. Thus on two
countsz diachronic and synchronic, essentialism fails our understanding.
Chartier argues that the first two chapters of The Creat Cat Massacre
should be the focus of our attention because they are alike in contrast to
the last four chapters. They ''aim at recreating a situation on an anthropological terrain; hence they take the written texts only as a means of
access to the spoken tale or to the act of the massacre'' (Chartier, p. 686).
In the last four chapters, the texts are those of the personages themselves
whose social worlds and cultural stratagems are under investigation. They
are primary evidence. Chartier is skeptical that the texts of the first two
chapters are so transparent as to easily lead to knowledge of the situation
they purport to represent.
One can agree that the first two chapters are subject to much greater
caution, as they are at a greater remove from new subject matter. But it
should be emphasized that, from the anthropological view, there is a crucial
distinction between these two chapters in precisely the terms we have
presented. The first chapter seeks to replicate uniformities while the second
is a much more satisfying account particularly as enriched by Darnton's
rebuttal to Chartier of the organization of diversity.
Now admittedly there is a disarming hesitation, or perhaps ''wary reasoning'' (the French might call it malinite'), in the first chapter and in the
conclusion. Darnton, while not ceasing to promote his ''essentialism,'' also
'' These differences were first conceptualized by Anthony Wallace in his Cllltlare clnX
P^r.s0n01itx, 2d ed . (New York, 1970), introduction .
Historians Tell Tales
119
expresses honest misgivings about the consequences of such an effort.'3
Nevertheless, he has his cake of custom and eats it, too. The result of the
chapter is to use the comparison of these folktales to confirm clear differences between these nationalities. Here are some representative quotations. ''Where the French tend to be realistic, earthy, bawdy, and comical,
the Germans veer off toward the supernatural, the poetic, the exotic, and
the violent.'' ''Where the German tales maintain a tone of terror and fantasy, the French strike a note of humor and dome$ticity.'' ';Although each
story adheres to the same structure, the versions in the different traditions
produce entirely different effects-comic in the Italian version, horrific in
the German, dramaticin the French, and droll in the English." ''The French
version turns on trickery . . . the German counterpart [survives] by hard
work, obedience, and self-degradation.''14 In general, the French tales evidence ''cunning and Cartesianism" that is to say, ''Frenchness."
So ''Frenchness exists.''lS An anthropologist would have no doubt that
it does! It surely existed for Charles de Gaulle, as for most patriots and
nationalists. But we would doubt that it really exists in peasant folklore in
such a clearly distinguishable way as Darnton maintains and, moreover,
that it is easily distinguishable from Germanness or Italianness or Englishness. For one thing, the quite severe conditions of peasant life that Darnton
describes as being reflected in French folklore were by no means limited
to French peasants of the period. They were widespread throughout Europe. Take this passage about Puss'n Boots as a Cartesian cat.
In Puss'n Boots a poor millerdies, leavingthe mill to his eldest son, an ass to
the second, and only a cat to the third. ''Neither a lawyer nor a notary were
called in,'' Perraultobserves. "They would have eaten up the poor patrimony.''
We are clearly in France, althoughother versions of this theme exist in Asia,
Africa, and South America. The inheritancecustoms of French peasants, as
well as noblemen, often prevented the fragmentationof the patrimony by
favoringthe eldest son. The youngest son of the miller,however, inheritsa cat
3 On p. 47 of The Great CCItMassclere, e.g., Darnton says ''it would be absurd to
draw conclusions about national character by comparing variations of a single tale"
although that is the main import of what is being done, particularly in the appendix of
the chapter where he compares a French and German version of the ''three gifts'' tale.
On p. 52 he says, ''It would be abusive to take this tale'' that included in the appendix''as evidence that anticlericalism functioned in France as the equivalent of anti-Semitism
in Germany,'' although that would seem to be the most obvious conclusion to draw from
the comparison. On p. 50, with respect to the formula for comparing national versions
of the same tales, he cautions that ''the formula hardly does justice to the variety of
themes that would emerge from a more thorough comparison of the French and German
tales.'' And in the concluding chapter Darnton is forthcoming in expressing his misgivings
about the problems of proof and representativeness in the first chapter. It is "distressingly
imprecise in its deployment of evidence'' (p. 261).
14 Ibid., pp. 50, 22, 46, 48-49.
'5 Ibid., p. 61.
120
Fernandez
with a genius for domestic intrigue. Everywhere around him, this Cartesian
cat sees vanity, stupidity,and unsatisfiedappetite; and he exploits it all by a
series of tricks, which lead to a rich marriagefor his master and a fine estate
for himself, althoughin some of the pre-Perraultversions the masterultimately
dupes the cat, who is actually a fox and does not wear boots.'6
But we could as easily be in many other parts of Europe or elsewhere
where primogeniturewas practiced for the same purposes and with similar
tales. Primogeniture does not locate us exclusively in France at all.
There are several other points to be made. First of all, as Darnton himself
notes, there are always many local versions of any tale. Thus one is faced
with making a choice of a representative tale to be compared with, let us
say, a representative German tale. How is that selection to be made?
Darnton does not tell us his criteria. But there is some indication that he
is using other than purely intellectual criteria, for the metaphors of gustatory understanding are very frequent in his argument. He tells us that
the French elements in a given tale "stand out as distinctly as the garlic
and mustard in a French salad dressing"; that the French Tom Thumb (Le
Petit Poucet) "has a strong French flavour"; and that French tales generally
have a ''peculiar flavour."'7This may be all metaphor, but as no criteria
of selection are offered one must presume that something as intuitive as
taste and smell may have, in fact, influenced the selection. After all, remember that Darnton claims it is the "smell" of human flesh that guides
him through the archives.
But just here one has to be careful that one's intuition, one's sense of
things, is not operating in the service of certain geopolitical forces. One
must not inadvertently become an ''agent of nationalism"'8 of a set of
stock and usually ethnocentrically conceived qualities that nationalists ascribe to themselves and their nation in contrast to other nations for geopolitical, esprit de corps purposes. The French and German qualities that
Darnton finds in his folktales do come perilously close to well-known stock
national characters assigned from a Francophile point of view. The French
do come off better than the Germans in Darnton's interpretations. At the
least, Chartier does not much protest Darnton's version of Frenchness,
nor would he have much reason to.
So it is not only the illusive employ of "gustatory" rather than "intellectual'' criteria that is bothersome here; it is also the regrettable simplicity
of such a portrait of the French. Of course, such a "portrait'' has an
evident appeal for an American (perhaps even a French) public, who would
find both Darnton's ''gustatory" criteria of selection and the national char'6 Ibid., p. 29.
7 Ibid., pp. 17, 21, 52.
'8 Compare J. W. Fernandez, ''Folklorists as Agents of Nationalism: Legends Asturian
Mountaineers Tell Each Other and the Problem of Local, Regional, and National Identity,''
in Fairy Tales and Society, ed. Ruth Bottigheimer (Philadelphia, 1987).
121
acter traits they identify quite recognizable in terms of the prevailing stereotype of who and what French people are.'9 In a word, such traits are
not alien to us at all. And it might be suggested that we would come closer
to a more adequate, less simple, portrait of the French if we would focus
on how they organize diversity. Differences there may be more revealing
about the mentalites of nations.
Second, national character should not be confused with folk character.
The trait of cunning and craftiness that Darnton ascribes to Frenchness
has often been ascribed to peasants generally. And in any event, since
folklore and its distribution long antedates the creation of national boundaries and national identities, it would be an unusual and unexpected isomorphism if the distribution of that lore neatly conformed to these much
more recent boundaries and thus, as Darnton would have it, that lore could
be so easily discovered to confirm national character.
isFrenchness exists,'' then, but it exists as the French nation and, perhaps, the French language and a long series of French texts written in it
exists, and not as the folklore told within French national boundaries exists.
No doubt consensus-building within nations and consciousness-raising in
political movements has had an impact on local folklore. It has even created
much folklore itself, which anthropologists and folklorists prefer to call
isfakelore.'' Probably Darnton's piece will have an impact on our understanding of French folklore. And no doubt there is something we could
call a French style. But whether that is anything more than an aristocratic
or upper-middle-classcreation a product of intertextuality in that milieuis questionable. In short, Frenchness is likely to be a constituent of the
'icultural capital'' of a particular, literate social class.20
Darnton challenges the reader, as Chartier makes clear, to collapse ''the
canonical separation between the popular and the learned" (p. 688), and
that is an important objective. But an anthropologist would still exercise
the utmost caution in attempting to discover national style or to impose it
on peasants and proletarians. That is because of the considerable cultural
diversities within European nations and the discrepancy between political
boundaries and cultural boundaries. One would be cautious also because
of the standardizingeffect of the middle-class, literate filter through which
so much folklore passed in being inscribed.
So Frenchness and French style exist, but that does not make this folklore chapter any less an exercise in intuitive interpretation that dubiously
replicates uniformities. It risks being an exercise in mythmaking, in building
esprit de corps on a narrow basis. But I want to turn now to a different
kind of cat than this Cartesian one and a chapter an anthropologist can
9 I owe these points to observations by Janet Morford.
'(' The concept of ''cultural capital,'' as it happens, is a very French one, though
perhaps not an instance of ''Frenchness,'' having been developed by Pierre Bourdieu
and his colleagues (P. Bourdieu and J. C. Passeron, eds., Reprendlxctin in Educcition,
Societs, cind Clxitlxre[French ed., 1970; Beverly Hills, Calif., 1977]).
122
Fernandez
like a lot better: Darnton's Gallic cockfight, ''The Great Cat Massacre.''
In this chapter with some misgivings we anthropologists can see our
work reflected in a more gratifying way, and in a way from which we can
all learn.
A GALLICCOCKFIGHT
S1GNSANDSTRUCTURES:
Darnton, in his reply to Chartier's criticism of his book, cocks something
of a (just slightly mulin) snoot at his French colleague: he does not directly
respond to much of Chartier's critique, and he dismisses Chartier's representation theory of symbolism as "mechanical'' and not adequate to the
"ontological flow" of symbolic action. For example, Chartier gives an
extended critique of Darnton's dedication to ''symbolic analysis,'' and
Darnton responds indirectly by a much more ambitious structural analysis
of the cat massacre than in his book. He hoists the French dwellers in
the land of structuralism, after all by their own petard.
Darnton's resistance is not surprising, insofar as Chartier wants Darnton
to (I) consider the matter "from the native's point of view" and take into
account the recondite definitions of symbolism by Antoine Furetiere, an
early eighteenth-century grammarianof the Port Royal School and (2) to
submit his discussions of symbolic meaning to ''rigorous verification'' of
the kind that only an experimental "subject-present" kind of discipline,
which history is not, could come anywhere close to fulfilling.
Chartier argues in respect to the first point that ''anyone concerned
primarily with reconstructing the way in which men of the eighteenth
century conceived of and expressed their relations with the world should
pay strict attention to the definitions that they themselves gave'' (p. 689).
But as desirable as it may be to cast doubt on the ''canonical separation
between the popular and the learned," in this case it seems plainly unwise.
It is unlikely, as Darnton says, that printing shop apprentices of the time
had any inkling of the Port Royal semiotic. Of course, what is also involved
here is an enduring misunderstanding between Anglo-American (Peircian)
and French (Saussurian) schools, in which each accuses the other of borrowing without really understanding the appropriate discourse on these
matters. Chartier seems to be trying to corner Darnton on his inadequate
understanding of sign theory. Darnton replies with a Peircian cum Anglostructuralist (Douglas, Leech, Tambiah) salvo.
The second point involves the more profound issue of the strategy and
intention of disciplines of the working definitions they can accept and
still maintain a sense of proportion and a sense of diminishing intellectual
returns. How much of an analytic superstructure can be deployed without
alienating or otherwise overriding the subject matter? If one is interested
in as full a picture of native activities as possible in and on their own
terms which is surely an ethnographic ideal and one, it seems clear, important to Darnton one wants appropriatebut not overmastering working
definitions of these matters. That is, one wants definitions that will enable
HistoriblnsTell Tclles 123
an understandingof how symbols carry meaning and constitute experience
without requiringa disproportionate commitment to the very cumbersome
terminological baggage that semiotics as a discipline (or set of disciplines)
has elaborated. Too great an involvement with the precisions of semiotic
discussion is bought very often, as far as ethnography or ethnographic
history is concerned, at the expense of the materials that one is seeking
to illuminate and to bring to life. Such a possibility seems to be the cause
of Darnton's hesitation and the source of his resistance to Chartier's demand for greater precision in his symbol theory.2' Darnton seems to be
motivated to a high degree by a sense of diminishing intellectual returns
and by a sense of the proper proportion between commitment in his discussion to the use of elaborate semiotic theory, on the one hand, and
elucidation of the archival data, on the other. From this sensitivity to the
data itself on the historian's part, anthropologists can surely learn.
At the same time, Chartier does apparently goad Darnton into a rather
more formulaic and chart-oriented indeed, mechanical structural analysis of his ''cat massacre'' materials than he permitted himself in the book.
These formulations and charts based on (usually binary) oppositions of
categories and their mediations are carried out, to be sure, with fertility
of application. It is also true, howeverSthat what he gives us is mainly the
anthropology of the sixties, which, under the sign of structuralism, was
intensely concerned with such ''schematizable'' matters and particularly
with how anomalous? not easily categorizable, entities such as cats could
operate as mediators and transformers of structures.
What is most impressive in Darnton's response, however, is the way
that he analyzes again, as he did in the book, the interpenetration of domains of experience, the "ontological flow'' of the cat massacre and the
ensuing farcical rites. FIereis truly an ethnography oriented to explain the
i'organization of diversity' and not the ''replication of uniformity.'' For
Darnton shows us how the diverse domains of worker-master relations,
witchcraft and sorcery fears and beliefs, and sexual relations are all bound
into this farcical and bawdy mix of carnival, charivariSwitchhunt, and trial.
Here Darnton also makes fruitful and appropriate use of folklore (in
contrast to his use of it in the first chapter). For it is folk sayings and
proverbs that give Darnton insight into the sexual meaning of ''la chatte''
and other elements in the ritual farce. This is a much more satisfying
exegesis (and still more as enriched in his response to Chartier) for being
attuned to the multivocal interrelationships of the symbolic action present
in his text.
'' ''Philosophers and linguists sort the tricks (of rhetoric) into different definitions and
schemata. For my part I feel hesitant about subscribing to one system or another and
prefer to use the term 'symbol' broadly in connection with any act that conveys a
meaning'' (Darnton, p. 222).
124
Fernandez
Nevertheless-- putting myself at risk in these Anglo-French semiotic
wars-I would like to suggest a desirable sharpeningof definition that might
still function within Darnton's posture of resistance to overly complex
working definitions. This would also make his analysis less of a sixties
exercise. It concerns the need for clearer distinction between symbol and
metaphor as well as the need for more clearly defined relations between
metaphor and other tropes. This is particularly the case as the massacre
and ensuing scenario (as with all ritual scenarios) are more easily understood as elaborated metaphoric assertions with allegorical import-that is,
with characteristic thematic preoccupations. This carries us further and
deeper than the sixties notion of rituals as vehicles for symbols. Indeed,
Darnton does (with the aforementioned hesitation) employ the vocabulary
of such analysis and speaks with some frequency of metaphors and metonyms. Basic to his entire argument is the idea of a "system of relations"
that is played out in these ritual episodes. "We think of the world by
establishing metaphoricalrelations," he tells us (p. 222), adding that "people can express thought by manipulatingthings . . . such gestures convey
metaphorical relations" (p. 223). But not only does he conflate metaphor
and symbol, using the terms virtually indistinguishably; he also fails to
evoke any of the more recent post-sixties theories about metaphor-driven
scenarios and transformations.22These would tie the episodes he examines
more securely into the formulatinganalogies of local worldview as well as
into historical change from one structure of analogies, say that of the Old
Regime, into another, say something more modern.
In other words, as able as Darnton is in showing us the playful organization of diversity in his cat massacre materials, a clearer idea of the "play
of tropes" would give him a better grasp of the "system of relations"
thereby acted out than is given by the relatively free-wheeling but ultimately
22 For history, there is of course Hayden White's work anchored in Vicwhich,
however, from an anthropological view is cast at a very overarching level of generalization; see White's "The Tropics of History: The Deep Structure of the New Science,"
in his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Culture Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 197-217.
See also the use of metaphor in the ethnographic history of Isaac (n. 5 above). For
anthropology, these developments come in several related strands, most o7fwhich can
be traced back to Vico if not to classical rhetoric. More immediately, there is the seminal
formulation of R. Jacobson and M. Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956),
which influenced Levi-Strauss and Barthes. For the seventies and early eighties, there
is the work of K. Basso, "Wise Words of the Western Apache," in Meaning in Anthropology, ed. K. Basso and H. Selby (Albuquerque, N.M., 1976); J. Fernandez, "The
Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture," Current Anthropology 15, no. 2 (1974):
119-45; S. Ortner, "Key Symbols," American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): 133846; M. Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981);
D. Sapir and C. Crocker, The Social Use of Metaphor (Philadelphia, 1977); and R.
Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago, 1975). The more recent work of G. Lakoff
adds considerable understanding of the role of implicature and prototype ideas in the
"systems of relations" in culture (see his Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What
Categories Reveal about the Mind [Chicago, l9X71).
125
schematic unpackingof free-floating multivocal symbols. The more current
view is that symbols and signs are constituents of expressive scenarios
that are themselves anchored-in, or enactments of, the various tropes that
express underlying thematic preoccupations. To be sure, these "thematic
preoccupations" may well be our key to the "mentalities" of cultures. But
such themes, in other than ethnocentric form, are only discoverable on
the other side of the complexity posed by the organization of diversity.
Darnton's essentialism in "Peasants Tell Tales'+attempts to discover them
well this side of the complexity. "The Great Cat Massacre" points us to
the other side. The understanding of these scenarios as "systems of relations," in any event, rests first on analyses of the enactment of tropes
in clear distinction from the accompanying symbols with which they are,
to be sure, associated.
TELLTALES:MID_EIGHTEENTH_CENTURY
HISTORIANS
FRANCE $7 .95
In large measure the critique I advance here of a recent debate in "ethnographic history" has sought not only an appropriate "symbolically oriented" perspective on ethnography but also an "equatorial" perspective.
By the latter I mean the attempt to anchor oneself in the field of investigation and to seek to maintaina "critical distance" on ethnography itself
to try to understand it not as a given but as a method having its own
figurativevicissitudes and its own struggles with legitimation. Darnton and
other ethnographic historians legitimate their enterprise by invoking a
method, the ethnographic one, that seems to give them added grasp of and
interpretive power over their materials. But that method itself must face
problems of legitimation.
From such an "equatorial" perspective, in any event, it can be clearly
observed that Euro-Americanintellectuals- anthropologists and historians
alike live in a postmodernperiod in which there is a "crisis of legitimacy"23
concerning their enterprises. In part this crisis is provoked simply by a
felt inadequacy of method. But it is also provoked by the "incredulity
towards grandnarratives" - toward the overarchingsystems of explanation
to which methods are attached that serve to reproduce these narratives.
There is at the present moment a certain can we call it "fin-de-siecle"9.
skepticism toward "Newtonian anthropologies" of any kind.24
The debate before us is not immune to that crisis or to the fact that these
two historians can both be seen to be committed to metanarratives of a
kind that is, that behind their contesting projects they are telling versions
of the same master tale about which the postmodern condition requires
them and us all to reflect. Intellectual contests such as these, from the
23 Compare Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condation: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1984).
24 Ibid., pp. xxiv.
126
Fernandez
postmodern perspective, are not so much contests over facts and the best
methods of ascertaining them as contests over preferred narratives.
With important differences, to be sure, both contestants would seem to
be telling the same tale of a grand system of structural cum semiotic explanation. This is a tale of the "speculative unity of all knowledge'' and
of the possible ''perfection of understanding.''25If the materials of the
archives are submitted to this ethnographic system of knowledge, the story
goes, we will understand them much better than heretofore and may even
come to perfectly understand them. Of course, both Darnton and Chartier
have too much of the historians' caution about an overload of theoretical
baggage and too much of the historians' commitment to evocative narrative
to systematize in a "Newtonian" way. Nevertheless, the struggle over
how best to "tell" this underlying master narrative and intricate questions
of appropriate systematics in the telling seem to be driving the argument.
It is an argument in which I freely join (and a narrative, among other
narratives, that I feel ought to be told), for I share the view that we can
be more systematic than we are about understanding the human capacity
to organize diversity. At the same time, there is another master narrative
that is, we are sometimes told, a very French one and, perhaps, the only
other European master narrative that concerns the "liberation of humanity." In my view, the search for the essentials of national characterthe search to replicate uniformities such as "Frenchness" works, unless
undertaken at the other side of the complexity, not in the service of liberation at all but rather in the service of constriction through usually selfserving stereotypes. Such narratives may serve purposes of French esprit
de corps or even some wider ''liberation," particularly if one prefers
"French'' values in the world to "German'' ones. But it is doubtful that
they serve any larger, transcending sense of humanity the kind of transcending sense that ethnography is in important part trying to be about.
Perhaps I am too solemn in my reading of Darnton here or even too
sobersided in my preference for the metanarrative ''myth of the liberation
of humanity." But, in fact, such seriousness is not an idiosyncrasy of this
argument. Eminent historians do take quite seriously their responsibilities
toward this myth and toward the vitality of public belief and public esprit
de corps. Some seek explicitly, like William McNeill, or implicitly, as
perhaps is the case with Darnton, to ''liberate" their readers from the
'5 See Fredric Jameson's introduction to Lyotard, in which he argues, summarizing
the author's views, that there are two great legitimizing myths, or metanarratives, of
modern man, ''that of the liberation of humanity and that of the speculative unity of all
knowledge (qua philosophical system).'' The former he labels a French myth, the myth
of the French Revolution, and the latter a Germanic or Hegelian myth, organized around
the value of totality rather than commitment (p. ix). I would, according to my argument
here, object to the ''essentialism'' of these national assignments and would regard it as
a kind of metanarrative that has long served the geopolitical purposes of the European
''core'' countries ''esprit de core'' purposes, in this case.
127
prevailing disintegrations of or burdens on belief and to restore confidence
in their fellow humans.)6 In my view this will now be saying it one time
too many that liberation is not found in the identification of Frenchness!
But then there's ''Darntonness." Robert Darnton's work is always so
lively so full of another, better kind of ''esprit" (jeu d'esprit)-that one
should rather end on that note. In his response to Chartier he gives us a
vignette of an entombed college senior thesis writer putting on her carrel
door the ''transcendent" sign, ''Fiji $499.'' Anyone who has taught at
Princeton with its long wet winters, its culture of heavy thesis seriousness,
and its librarywhere academic carrels, student and faculty alike, are buried
underground in antlike catacombs of embalmed knowledge, will immediately sense the transcendent multivocality of that sign. ''Mehr Licht,''
indeed.
But that sign has even more transcendence. All of us these days, moderns
and postmoderns alike are more or less confined, antlike and disenchanted,
in Weber's "iron cage." We all need more light! And if more light is needed
on the human condition, if transcendence is wanted above all our anxious
immediacies, we can easily, with Robert Darnton as our guide, be transported to mid-eighteenth-century France for only $7.95. Caveat emptor,
to be sure, and particularly beware if you are not French! But still, and
all in all, it's a marvelous bargain.
rh See William H. McNeill's article on the historian's obligation toward the kind of
broad perspectives that will instill optimal collective sentiments about the human career:
iiThe Care and Repair of Public Myth,'' Fl)ri,gn Afftlirs 61, no. 1 (Fall 1982): 1-13. Its
makes it difficult
appearance in a journal of national interests such as Fvris,}n Affclir.sM
for his ponderable charge to historians not to seem nationally self-serving.

Historians Tell Tales: Of Cartesian Cats and Gallic Cockfights

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