{"id":208,"date":"2016-11-17T23:56:51","date_gmt":"2016-11-18T04:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/?p=208"},"modified":"2016-11-17T23:56:51","modified_gmt":"2016-11-18T04:56:51","slug":"entering-the-theater-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/essay-2\/entering-the-theater-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Entering the Theater of History"},"content":{"rendered":"

You are perhaps more familiar with the movie: G\u00e9rard Depardieu, lumbering, blond, and sporting the most unfortunate bowl cut, is the (or, as it ultimately turns out, one<\/em> of the) eponymous sixteenth century peasant, returning home after a long ten-year absence to his small French village amidst the cheers of his neighbors and the loving acceptance of his belle<\/em> wife, played by Nathalie Baye. All goes well for a while, the couple living in wedded bliss, but as time passes suspicions increasingly mount and a shocking secret is finally revealed, tearing the two apart. It is a romantic story, and a tragic one, but most of all it is it is an unlikely one, fantastical enough to be taken as more of a legend or a myth than as a real, it-truly-did-happen historical event.<\/p>\n

But that is exactly what le retour de Martin Guerre <\/em>is: an extraordinary fact of history, a remarkable but true happenstance. The details are simple enough, if hard to believe: In 1548, a young peasant by the name of Martin Guerre stole a small quantity of grain from his father, and for his crime had to flee his hometown of Artigat, leaving behind his newborn son and his young wife Bertrande de Rols. He was gone for ten years, journeying to Spain and fighting his homeland in its armies. In the meantime, another peasant from a nearby village, Arnaud du Tilh, learned of his resemblance to Martin, and decided to impersonate the former and take his identity, property, and wife. Martin Guerre alias Arnaud du Tilh was initially warmly welcomed by everyone in Artigat, even fathering a daughter with Bertrande, but a quarrel with his \u201cuncle\u201d over issues of the estate led to mounting suspicions over his true identity. One murder plot, one burned building, and one false testimony later, Martin Guerre alias Arnaud du Tilh was hauled up before the court at first Rieux, then Toulouse. Quick of tongue, a born trickster, Arnaud du Tilh almost succeeded in convincing them of his ruse when the real Martin Guerre, minus one leg from war, returned to reclaim his life. He was tearfully received by Bertrande and the rest of his family, and Arnaud du Tilh was hanged, admitting his wrongs and asking God for mercy on his way to the gibbet.<\/p>\n

The case was, of course, a sensation, and in the years afterwards innumerable accounts were published recounting or at least referencing its events, among them Arrest Memorable<\/em> by Jean de Coras, the bestselling record of the presiding jurist of the court at Toulouse; an essay by Montaigne; and a chapter in a book by Leibniz. Martin Guerre\u2019s tale has been told and retold so many times over the years, traded around endlessly around the Basque region in which he had lived so many centuries ago, that it has long since passed from the annals of history into the realm of imagination and creativity. It was while working as a consultant and co-writer on the set of yet another adaptation of this famous tale, the aforementioned Depardieu vehicle, that historian Natalie Zemon Davis grew concerned about how far the story had strayed from the historical record, and thus set out to return it to its factual roots, reconstruct the events as they \u201cactually happened\u201d (Davis, viii). \u201cI would give this arresting tale its first full-scale historical treatment, using every scrap of paper left me by the past\u201d (Davis, ix). This is her stated intent, but the results of her forays into the past, another work entitled The Return of Martin Guerre<\/em>, is as far from a concrete, definitive, cut-and-dry historical tract as any I have ever encountered\u2014it is history, but it reads like a novel, like a movie. She begins by delving into the past, trying to uncover its \u201ctrue face,\u201d but she ends instead by showing that the pure facts of life are unattainable, always obscured as they are by layers of language, literary language, operating on both sides of the discourse: the one of those who tell the story, and the one of those whose stories are being told (Davis, 125). Left in Davis\u2019s hands, history approaches literature, and deliberately so\u2014the impression she ultimately leaves us with is not of history as true, unitary and objective, but rather of history as elusive and changeable, a story to be crafted that transforms every time it is told.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

From the very moment she embarks on her pursuit of the past, Davis reveals her acute awareness of the tension that exists between literary representation and the writing of history. In the introduction to his book Metahistory<\/em>, the \u201clinguistic turn\u201d historian (according to my professor, a historian who has basically defected over to the side of literature) Hayden White writes that \u201cthe difference between \u2018history\u2019 and \u2018fiction\u2019 resides in the fact that the historian \u2018finds\u2019 his stories, whereas the fiction writer \u2018invents\u2019 his\u201d (6). For Davis, however, her first encounter with the story of Martin Guerre is evidently a mix of the two: \u201cWhen she first read the judge\u2019s account,\u201d Davis writes, her immediate thought is that rarely \u201cdoes a historian find so perfect a narrative structure in the events of the past or one with such dramatic popular appeal\u201d (vii). On the one hand, she maintains that she found the story of Martin Guerre sifting through the chronicles; on the other hand, her observation of the perfection of the story\u2019s \u201cnarrative structure\u201d for historical and popular means demonstrates a heightened consciousness of the ways<\/em> in which these stories are told that is quite in keeping with White\u2019s theories about the \u201cfictions of factual representation.\u201d[2]<\/a> And the deeper Davis goes into the case, the more the friction between literature and history, fiction and fact, bears on her work: She is troubled by the departure of the film from the \u201chistorical record,\u201d but at the same time she is inspired to come up with \u201cnew ways\u201d of thinking about and understanding the past in general and about Martin Guerre in specific (Davis, viii). She feels she is in a \u201chistorical laboratory\u201d of her own, \u201cgenerating not proofs, but historical possibilities,\u201d an image that at once connotes the scientific nature of her work (history as a \u201csocial science\u201d) and the imaginative, inventive nature of it.<\/p>\n

To resolve this \u201cproblem of invention\u201d posed to her as a historian, Davis initially finds recourse in the archives (Davis, viii). She returns to her \u201coriginal m\u00e9tier,\u201d and \u201ceven from location in the Pyrenees I was running off to the archives in Foix, Toulouse, and Auch\u201d to gather all sorts of sources, everything from Coras\u2019s and Montaigne\u2019s texts on the case to registers of Parliamentary sentences to notarial contracts of all the surrounding villages (Davis, ix). She gathers every piece of evidence, and in doing so she attempts not only to finally catch ahold of Bertrande and Arnaud, but also to \u201cdiscover the world they would have seen\u201d (Davis, 5). If she has to fall back on invention in her writing, it is only \u201cin part,\u201d \u201cheld tightly in check by the voices of the past\u201d (Davis, 5). Perhaps some construction of the literary sort is unavoidable in writing history, but the final result will still be objectively true in the sense that it is borne out by the facts of the past.<\/p>\n

But what to do when even those \u201cvoices\u201d are literary constructions, other texts already encrusted with rhetorical devices and linguistic turns? Archival documents, it must be remembered, are not pure, unvarnished facts, but rather recordings or accountings of the facts. Channeling Nietzsche, they are not the object, not the truth, but a specific representation of the object, the truth, in the form of words. Language, then, is the barrier that stands between the historian and his subject, the \u201cinstrument of medication<\/em> between the consciousness and the world that consciousness inhabits\u201d that moreover is inherently contaminated with a whole host of ideological, political, ethical, and so on and so forth meanings\u2014according to White, the idea that a \u201cvalue-neutral description of the facts, prior to their interpretation or analysis\u201d is possible is nothing more than an \u201cillusion\u201d (White, 126-134). Language is never neutral, and because language is never neutral all archival documents\u2014the most personal of letters, the driest of legal, the most sensational of news articles\u2014are not neutral either, and so a historian searching for the realities of the past starts from a position of having already, unknowingly, lost touch with that past. All archives are simply another sort of fiction, another type of literary or linguistic mode.<\/p>\n

The problem of the archives as a truth-teller is exacerbated when studying sixteenth century peasants who could not write at all, and so have \u201cleft us few documents of self-revelation\u201d (Davis, 2). To gain access to the lives of these individuals, the historian is forced to take a round-about route via secondary accounts written by others far removed from the actual peasantry. Literature is one option, but it exists, it is so often conventional, following \u201cthe classical rules that make villagers a subject of comedy\u201d (Davis, 2). The literary corpus abounds with stories of \u201chappy, pleasant, and agreeable\u201d peasants and their \u201chappy, pleasant, and agreeable\u201d adventures, but to take that for reality is to run together fiction and fact. As Davis herself admits, a learned poet might describe Arnaud\u2019s country with extravagant literary terms like \u201crich in grains, rich in wines\u201d and \u201cabounds in men, as brave fighters as could be,\u201d but it would be hard to say if Arnaud would have said it similarly (Davis, 35). The other option Davis puts forth is records of court proceedings, but these too are not exempt from literary sleight-of-hand. For example, an excerpt of a document recording the testimony of a young Lyonnais villager seeking a pardon for the murder of his wife (who did not live long enough to tell her side of the story, which just serves to highlight the erasure of voices in the archives and the problem of recovering them) is sprinkled with \u201cphrases urged upon him by his attorney\u201d that are designed to paint a vivid \u201cportrait of an unhappy marriage\u201d: The wife, \u201cwithout rhyme or reason, took it into her head to kill him, and in fact beat him and threw stones at him\u2026The suppliant accepted this peaceably\u201d (Davis, 3). Criminal cases like Martin Guerre are especially rich in drama and narrative, and also \u201climited as a means for faithfully recounting history,\u201d the judges always having \u201cthe power to shape the official version of the truth\u201d (Bienen, 496) White says that \u201cthe facts do not speak for themselves, but that the historian speaks for them\u201d (125). We see here, however, that the relationship is a step further removed\u2014the historian doesn\u2019t speak for the facts, but for texts that purport to speak for the facts.<\/p>\n

Davis is not unaware of this linguistic and archival dilemma, which she proves by treating her sources like poets, subjecting their texts to an analysis of a basically literary kind. The primary source Davis uses in writing The Return of Martin Guerre<\/em> is the aforementioned Arrest Memorable <\/em>by Jean de Coras, whom she presents to us as \u201cThe Storyteller.\u201d As depicted by Davis, Coras was a brilliant jurist who could pour forth \u201cspellbinding oratory before two thousand people\u201d and whose legal publications were beloved by his students for their literary merits as much as their informational ones: \u201c\u2019Corasissima\u2019 one of them wrote in the margin next to an especially apt phrase on the subject of inheritance by minors\u201d (Davis, 97). These talents were applied to Coras\u2019s account of Martin Guerre\u2019s trial, and the result, in Davis\u2019s eyes, is a new style of law and crime writing that has never been seen before, an \u201cinnovative book of contradictory images and mixed genres\u201d (Davis, 104). She then proceeds to examine how this \u201cmixture in tone and mixture in form\u201d determines the story that Coras is telling (Davis, 108). On the one hand, Coras exaggerated and omitted aspects of this story to create a \u201cmoral tale\u201d in which the \u201cdiabolic art\u201d of the impostor is \u201cbuilt up by comparison with biblical, classical\u201d figures, thus exonerating Bertrande of any guilt and emphasizing Coras\u2019s \u201cexemplary\u201d execution of this satanic figure (Davis, 109). On the other hand, however, the lack of a proper hero, a requirement of a moral tale, in this version of the events\u2014the real Martin Guerre, Davis stresses, is portrayed as irresponsible, \u201cunforgiving and unrepentant\u201d\u2014allows Coras\u2019s account to be recast as a \u201ctragedy,\u201d a word he himself uses in a later edition (Davis 110, 111). And still another way to read Coras\u2019s text is as a \u201ctragicomedy,\u201d a story with a diverting beginning, a doubtful middle, and a sad ending in which Arnaud is cast as a kind of hero crucially helped by Bertrande who, \u201cnot at all deceived, decides to fashion a marriage with him\u201d (Davis, 112). Davis went into the archives a historian, but came out an English professor, well versed with the literary process, trying to find meaning not only in the sentences themselves but in the spaces between them, in their forms and structures, in the way this texts shifts between genres and \u201cis told in two ways at the same time\u201d (Davis, 108). The text that she ends up with as a result is not objective, not bare, unvarnished fact, but rather a complex and at times contradictory medley of voices and meaning.<\/p>\n

Davis herself advocates for the \u201ccomitragic\u201d version of the story of Martin Guerre, presenting to us in The Return of Martin Guerre<\/em> a reading of Arnaud as a hero, Bertrande as his willing and loving accomplice, and Martin Guerre as the cad who comes back and ruins everything at the last minute. This interpretation she arrives at not by grounding her arguments in the exact words of Coras\u2019s text, but by playing around and speculating into the ambiguities and contradictions that arise from the surface of his text once she subjects it to the kind of literary analysis mentioned above. Davis treats Arnaud, Bertrande, and the other historical figures in her book like they are characters in a Dostoyevsky play, wondering and hypothesizing on their emotions and psychology. For example, much of her assertion of Bertrande\u2019s complicity in Arnaud\u2019s deception (really the heart of her book) rests on what she imagines are Bertrande\u2019s feelings as a young and beautiful woman abandoned by her real husband: but surely, Davis says, \u201cBertrande dreamed of a husband and lover who would come back and be different\u201d (Davis, 34). She invents scenarios in her head as \u201cthought experiments,\u201d and places Arnaud and others in them, putting words into their heads\u2014if Arnaud du Tilh and Martin Guerre had ever met beforehand, she says, it surely must have been \u201cunsettling and fascinating,\u201d but once the shock wore off regarding their resemblance they likely would \u201cexchange confidences\u201d (Davis, 39). The real Martin expresses ambivalence about his wife, suggests to Arnaud that he \u201ctake her,\u201d and Arnaud would think, \u201cWhy not?\u201d (Davis, 39).<\/p>\n

Davis tries to justify her speculation by asserting that a historian has recourse to \u201cthe uncertainties, the \u2018perhapses,\u2019 the \u2018may-have-beens\u2019\u201d when the \u201cevidence is inadequate or perplexing,\u201d but her retelling of Martin Guerre goes far beyond that and approaches fiction (Davis, viii). The historian Robert Finlay, for example, criticizes Davis for bypassing completely the historical records \u201cin the service of an inventive blend of intuition and assertion,\u201d particularly in her characterization of Bertrande, whom she transforms in a stroke of the pen from the dupe of the traditional tale to an active and engaged accomplice in hers (Finlay, 569). This type of inversion of traditional women\u2019s history is very common in micro-history studies like The Return of Martin Guerre<\/em>, and, according to historian Marsha R. Robinson, has its roots in the idea that \u201chistory is constructed, historical narratives are rarely objective\u201d (Robinson, 1). Although Davis vehemently denies Finlay\u2019s claims that she ignored the historical record, certain elements of her book indicate her implicit recognition of the hold of fiction in history. First, she frames the entire book in terms of theatrical language\u2014Bertrande and Arnaud are consummate \u201crural actors,\u201d their ruse is compared to the donning of \u201cthe mask of the carnival player,\u201d the trial is a performance which Arnaud has to go into \u201crehearsals\u201d for and which is attended by spectating crowds (Davis 5, 41, 57). This obviously serves to call attention to the literary aspects of her writing, making transparent the ways in which she uses language and narrative structure to intensify the drama (Look! Arnaud takes \u201ccenter stage\u201d) and embellish her history (Davis, 69) And second, Davis leaves her book deliberately open-ended, ending: \u201cI think I have uncovered the true face of the past\u2014or has Pansette done it one again?\u201d (Davis, 125). Although Davis had set out to write the true history of Martin Guerre, in the end she can only she can claim that it is a face, not the true face, of Pansette, Arnaud\u2019s nickname\/stage name. She has not deciphered the story; it lives on, changing with every re-telling, whether it is another historian who takes a crack at it, or a grandmother in present-day Artigat who tells the it to a young mother complaining over her baby carriage that nothing ever happens in this sleepy town. \u201cPerhaps not now, but in the sixteenth century\u2026\u201d (Davis, 125).<\/p>\n

In many people\u2019s minds, there is a firm difference between historical writing and fiction writing\u2014one is true, and the other is not; one deals in facts, the other inventions; one is a science, interested in discovering and quantifying, the other an act of creativity, interested in creating and imagining. But as Davis shows in her search for the true, the right, way of telling the history of a legend like Martin Guerre, the boundary between fiction and history is much, much more fluid than most imagine. Language, literary schemes and modes, infiltrates every step of a historian\u2019s work, from the starting point of the archives to the end point of actually setting words down onto the page. It is impossible to get the truth of the past, because such a thing doesn\u2019t exist, and if it did, it is lost to us anyway. Truth is not objective, or unitary, or singular, but rather ever-shifting and ever-changing, a story to be crafted and told and re-told, every version, every interpretation, different, repeating ad infinitum. Davis\u2019s The Return of Martin Guerre<\/em> is but one of these stories\u2014there will be, and already are, many more.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> The idea for this essay grew out of two sources. First, a prompt my Literary Theory professor gave me for our second assignment that goes: \u201cHistorians take themselves to be reconstructing the truth about past events, but they are actually writing a kind of fiction. They bring to their understanding of earlier periods narrative schemes of a basically literary kind\u2014storytelling forms that help them organize bare historical facts into a satisfying shape, none of which can be said to be more right than any other. The choice of what kind of story you are going to tell cannot be made on empirical grounds.\u201d Second, a book (Davis\u2019s The Return of Martin Guerre<\/em>) that I read for my Theory of History class, and on which I led a discussion section.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Title of one of Hayden White\u2019s essays: \u201cThe Fictions of Factual Representation,\u201d compiled in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism<\/em> (Johns Hopkins UP, 1978).<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Bienen, Leigh Buchanan. \u201cReview: The Law as Storyteller.\u201d Harvard Law Review<\/em>, Vol. 98, No. 2, 1984, pg. 494-502.<\/p>\n

Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre<\/em>. Harvard UP, 1983.<\/p>\n

Finlay, Robert Finlay. \u201cThe Refashioning of Martin Guerre.\u201d The American Hsitorical Review<\/em>, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1988, pg. 553-571.<\/p>\n

Robinson, Marsha. Inverting History with Microhistory: Women Who Belong: Claiming a Female\u2019s Right-Filled Space<\/em>. Cambridge Scholar\u2019s Publishing, 2013.<\/p>\n

White, Hayden. \u201cThe Fictions of Factual Representation.\u201d Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. <\/em>Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.<\/p>\n

White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe<\/em>. Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You are perhaps more familiar with the movie: G\u00e9rard Depardieu, lumbering, blond, and sporting the most unfortunate bowl cut, is the (or, as it ultimately turns out, one of the) eponymous sixteenth century peasant, returning home after a long ten-year … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essay-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209-fall16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}