Anecdote and history

History and Theory

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 143-168

  Gossman, Lionel ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 1542300395     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2303.00237     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, vol. 2: "Das philosophische Werk," ed. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Gerhard Schulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), 567
2. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 16-17
3. The repertory of gestures and expressions codified for painters by Charles Le Brun. Director of Louis XIV's Académie Royale de Peinture, is another example, alongside the "emplois" or stock characters of the theater, of a view of the world in which the general was deemed more real and fundamental than the particular
4. Richard Friedenthal, "Vom Nutzen und Wert der Anekdote," in Sprache und Politik: Festgabe für Dolf Sternherger zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Carl-Joachim Friedrich and Benno Reifenberg (Heidelberg; Lambert Schneider, 1968). 62-67
5. Heinz Grothe, Anekdote, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984)
6. Robert Petsch. Wesen und Formen der Erzählkunst (Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer. 1934)
7. Rudolf Schäfer, Die Anekdote: Theorie, Analyse, Dialektik (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1982)
8. Walter Ernst Schäfer, Anekdote-Antianekdote: Zum Wandel einer literarischen Form in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977)
9. and his earlier Anecdotes françaises depuis l'établissment de la monarchie jusqu'au règne de Louis XV (Paris: Vincent, 1767)
10. the anonymous Anecdotes des Républiques, 2 vols, (Paris: Vincent, 1771)
11. and the Anecdotes américaines, ou histoire abrégée des principaux événements arrivés dans le Nouveau Monde depuis sa découverte (Paris: Vincent, 1776) are all essentially chronologies, though only those years are included in which something occurred that, in the authors' view, can be told as a story. Numerous collections of "Episodes" and "Curiosities" seem closely related to "Anecdotes." There was a curious revival of "anecdote history" in the period following the First World War in Germany, in response to another crisis of historical understanding; see the discussion of the prolific Alexander von Gleichen-Russwurm's Weltgeschichte in Anekdoten und Querschnitten (Berlin: Max Hess, 1929) in Volker Weber, Anekdote-Die andere Geschichte, 152-167 (as in note 10). 18. When the Italian Enlightenment scholar Ludovico Muratori published some of the Greek and Latin manuscripts in the Ambrosian Library in Milan between 1697 and 1713, he entitled his collections Anecdota Latina and Anecdota Graeca
12. Voltaire, Histoire de Charles XII (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), 30-31
13. "Tant de détails pourraient rebuter un philosophe; mais la curiosité, cette faiblesse si commune aux hommes, cesse peut-être d'en être une, quand elle a pour objet des temps et des hommes qui attirent les regards de la postérité." Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 1, 307, 379
14. "Où en serions-nous si chacun s'arrogeoit le droit d'écrire et de faire imprimer tous les faits qui l'intéressent personnellement et qu'il aime à se rappeler?" Année littéraire 4 (1782), 150-151, quoted in Franco Orlando, "Rousseau e la nascità di una tradizione letteraria: il ricordo d'infanzia," Belfagor 20 (1965), 12
15. See Christopher Todd, "Chamfort and the Anecdote," Modern Language Review 74 (1979), 297-309, especially the opening pages
16. Christoph Daxelmüller, "Narratio, Illustratio, Argumentatio: Exemplum und Bildungstechnik in der frühen Neuzeit," in Exempel und Exempelsammlungen, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991), 79. In Plutarch -still Rousseau's favorite historian -"past events only become history," that is they enter the narrative of history, only "when their exemplary character, their capacity to offer (the present) models to imitate, releases them from the sphere of the irrevocably vanished" (Eginhard Hora, "Zum Verständnis des Werkes," in Giambattista Vico, Die neue Wissenschaft [Hamburg, 1966], 232
17. On the Chronica, see Andreas Urs Sommer, "Triumph der Episode über die Universalhistorie? Pierre Bayles Geschichtsverflüssigungen, " Saeculum 52 (2001), 1-39, at 15-23
18. Sommer points out that as the Chronica approached modern times and the historical material became overwhelmingly abundant, it became increasingly difficult to reduce it to the simple terras required by exemplary history. "Confronted by the sheer mass and extent of the material of modern history, the historian cannot control it or establish anything but the most imperfect connections. As moralist, he has to capitulate before the complexity of the material" (22), According to Volker Weber the "Histörchen" of Wilhelm Schäfer (Hundert Histörchen [Munich: A. Langen, G. Müller, 1940]) are a modern case of the use of anecdotes to suggest the underlying similarity of different situations. (Volker Weber, Anekdote - Die andere Geschichte, 173-174 [as in note 10])
19. See on the important transition from allegory to symbol, Bengt A. Sorensen, Allegorie und Symbol: Texte zur Theorie des dichterischen Bildes im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1972)
20. Sommer, "Triumph der Episode über die Universalhistorie," 23
21. "Life of Alexander," in The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, transi. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 252
22. In the same vein, more recently, Arthur Schnitzler: "By drawing on three striking anecdotes from his life, we may be able to take the measure of a man's character with the same precision that we measure the surface of a triangle by calculating the relation among three fixed points, whose connecting lines constitute the triangle" ("Das Wesen eines Menschen lässt sich durch drei schlagkräftige Anekdoten aus seinem Leben vielleicht mit gleicher Bestimmtheit berechnen, wie der Flächeinhalt eines Dreiecks aus dem Verhältnis dreier fixer Punkte zueinander, deren Verbindungslinien das Dreieck bilden"). (Arthur Schnitzler, Buch der Sprüche und Bedenken, in Aphorismen und Betrachtungen, ed, Robert O, Weiss [Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1967], 53.)
23. Cf. Nietzsche: "Three anecdotes may suffice to paint a picture of a man" (quoted by Clifton Fadiman, Introduction to The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [Boston/Toronto: Little. Brown and Company. 1985])
24. "Préface de 1869," Histoire de France, Book III, Oeuvres complètes, ed. P. Viallaneix, 21 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1971-), VI, 11
25. See L. Gossman, "Jules Michelet: histoire nationale, biographie, autobiographie," Littérature 102 (1996), 29-54
26. Chamfort, "Caractères et anecdotes," in Products of the Perfected Civilization, appendix 1, 272. A somewhat similar point is made, more benignly, by an anecdote in which Madame du Châtelet admits a manservant into her bathroom while she is naked. There was no more shame in this, to an aristocratic woman, than being seen naked by a dog
27. A Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX in The Writings of Prosper Mérimée, introduction by George Saintsbury, 6 vols. (New York: Croscup & Holby, 1905), VI, v-vi
28. In the middle of the eighteenth century a similar argument had been proposed by the antiquarian La Curne de Sainte-Palaye as a justification for scholarly study of the Old French romances. According to Sainte-Palaye, the very anachronisms and errors of the old romances were historically revealing (L. Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968], 247-253)
29. "Über das wissenschaftliche Verdienst der Griechen" (lecture given in Basel on 10 November 1881 ), in Jacob Burckhardt, Voträge, ed. E. Dürr, 3rd ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 1919), 188-89. Burckhardt goes on to describe the process of creation of an anecdote in terms reminiscent of his defense of myth in the Griechische Kulturgeschichte: "In the meantime, of course, the narrators have also filled out the story as it passed from mouth to mouth, not only by drawing on other information but by drawing on the general nature of the situation in question; they have added color to it and recreated it; they have in short attributed to the most celebrated representatives of certain human situations and relations what happened in them at one or another time. Thus the lives of most of the well-known Greeks are full of traits that have been observed in others like them and are then transferred to them-on ne prête qu'aux riches - and modern critics have an easy time of it exposing such fictions .... Yet this typical, anecdotal material is also history in its way - only not in the sense of the singular event, but rather in the sense of what might have happened at any time ("des Irgendwann vorgekommenen"), and often it is so beautifully expressive that we would on no account want to do without it." During the First World War a similar justification of the anecdote was offered by the editor of a German collection of anecdotes devoted to the War and doubtless designed to raise morale. (It was one of a series of fourteen immensely popular anecdote books put out in the early twentieth century by Lutz of Stuttgart, each one devoted to a particular subject, such as Bismarck, the Hohenzollems, the Habsburgs, Bluecher, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Schiller, etc.) Like Burckhardt, the editor claimed not that the stories were true (in fact these "Anekdoten" are a mixed bag of anti-English poems and songs, newspaper reports, supposed letters from or to the front, as well as classic anecdotes), but that they gave an authentic picture of the spirit of the German people at the time, its gritty energy in adversity, its pride, its humor, its capacity for laughter and for tears, its ability to celebrate triumphs and to mourn losses: "ein getreues Seelengemälde des deutschen Volkes" (Der grosse Krieg, Ein Anekdotenbuch, ed. Erwin Rosen, 9th ed. [Stuttgart: Robert Lutz, n.d.])
30. John Buchan, The Causal and the Casual in History (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 19-20
31. See, for instance, Richard N. Coe, "The Anecdote and the Novel: A Brief Inquiry into the Origins of Stendhal's Narrative Technique," Australian Journal of French Studies 22 (1985), 3-23: "In the remoter origins of all narrative literature there may be discerned two fundamental elements: history, which creates out of 'real life' a model of quasi-arbitrary, but strictly chronological development, retailing facticity from day to day; and the anecdote which, starting from a factual-historical 'happening,' proceeds to refashion it in terms of structural coherence, endowing it with a beginning, middle and end, and imbuing it with significance and point. History may well be haphazard and shapeless, and yet command attention nonetheless because 'that's how it was'; the anecdote depends, for its viability, entirely on its formal structure - a fact which in no way contradicts its necessary dependence upon a profound substructure of historically, socially or psychologically verifiable truth" (3). In his study of Brecht's "anti-anecdotes," Walter-Ernst Schäfer highlights the structured dramatic form of the anecdote and its dependence, like the drama, on stereotypes and shared assumptions.These are what Brecht set out to deconstruct. "Eine 'epische Anekdote' muss diese Gattung überhaupt sprengen und Erzählung oder Roman an ihre Stelle treten lassen" ("An 'epic anecdote' should explode the very genre of anecdote and replace it with an extended narrative or a novel") (Schäfer, Anekdote-Anti-anekdote, 29)
32. Journal littéraire, 25 frimaire, an XI (16 December 1802), in Oeuvres complètes, XXXIII. 31
33. "On Microhistory," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed, Peter Burke (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1991), 93-113
34. Raymond Queneau, Les Fleurs Bleues (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 85
35. Alain Corbin, Les Cloches de la terre: paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes auXIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel. 1994), 9-13
36. Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th Century French Countryside, transi. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), ix
37. Corbin, the life of an unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog-Maker in Nineteenth Century France, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), viii, ix, x
38. Marc Ferro, "Présentation," Annales 38 (1983), 824-825