The untenanted places of the past: Thomas Carlyle and the varieties of historical ignorance

History and Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 338-356

  Rigney, Ann ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61049175268     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2505453     Document Type: Review

References (98)

1. Ariette Farge, Le Cours ordinaire des choses dans la cité du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1994), 151
2. Norman Hampson, "History and Fiction: Where does the Difference Lie?," Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 106 (1963-1964), 4
3. Thomas Carlyle, "On History" [1830], in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 7 vols. (London, 1872), II, 255
4. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller [1976], transl. John and Anne Tedeschi (Harmondsworth, 1982), 128
5. Carlo Ginzburg, "Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian," Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 87
6. For a more extensive, critical discussion of the applicability of the term "fiction" to historical writing, see Ann Rigney, "Semantic Slides: History and the Concept of Fiction," in The Past of History, ed. R. Torstendahl and I. Veit-Brause (forthcoming)
7. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature; With an Appendix on the Functions of Language in the Theater [1965], transl. , with an Introduction, by George G. Grabowicz (Evanston, Ill. , 1973), esp. 246-254
8. On the incompleteness of fictional worlds, see Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge, Eng. , 1994), esp. 114-122. I am referring here to the ontology of fictional beings and to the attitudes which logically follow from their recognition as fiction (see on this point, Ronen, 143). This is not to deny the fact that writers may combine invented and non-invented elements in the production of a novel or that readers of particular novels may seek to read these in part or as a whole as history. I have discussed the phenomenon of reading novels as representations of historical reality in my "Where Invention and Representation Meet," in The Search for a New Alphabet: Literary Studies in a Changing World, ed. H. Hendrix, et al. (Amsterdam, 1996), 182-186. Conversely, on the place of fiction in the writing and reception of historical works, see my "Semantic Slides. "
9. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994), 259
10. On the idea that history (as inquiry, as discourse) is grounded in the existence of an object which cannot "be made entirely to bend to the historian's will," see also Gabrielle Spiegel, "History and Post-Modernism IV," Past and Present 135 (1992), 196
11. See, on this point, Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l'histoire; suivi de Foucault révolutionne l'histoire (Paris, 1978), 141-155
12. Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (Including the Integral Text of "Analytical Philosophy of History") (New York, 1985), 149-181
13. "le dicible fabrique de l'indicible, la lumière secrète l'ombre. Le non-dit, l'inconnaissable. " Michelle Perrot in Histoire de la vie privée, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols. (Paris, 1985-1987), IV, 12-13. Translation mine
14. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution", ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass. , 1992)
15. see also Hans Kellner, "'Never Again' is Now," History and Theory 33 (1994), 127-144
16. Robert Braun, "The Holocaust and Problems of Historical Representation," History and Theory 33 (1994), 172-197
17. For Hayden White's argument, see "The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation," in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), 58-82
18. More generally, Qu'est-ce qu'on ne sait pas?, ed. Ayyam Sureau (Paris, 1995), the proceedings of a UNESCO-sponsored conference held in 1995, reflects the current interest among philosophers in the limits of knowledge
19. In this emphasis on ignorance, Carlyle echoes some of the preoccupations of his contemporary William Hamilton who argued in 1829 that a "learned ignorance" was "the most difficult acquirement of knowledge"; Edinburgh Review (October, 1829), 221
20. On Hamilton's concept of nescience, see also his Discussions on Philosophy and Literature (New York, 1853), 591-597. I am grateful to Ralph Jessop for having drawn my attention to the background of Carlyle's preoccupations in the Scottish Enlightenment
21. Fritz Stern, for example, summed up Carlyle's views with the adage "history is biography"; The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, ed. F. Stern (Cleveland, 1956), 90
22. Veyne, Comment on écrit, 21-33
23. Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations [1845], ed. Thomas Carlyle, 5 vols. (London, 1871-1872), I, 6
24. "On History," 257, 258. On this passage, see also Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 147-149
25. Johann Beckmann, Beyträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1786-1805). Carlyle's reference to this work is in "On History," 263
26. "On History," 263
27. On contemporary fragmentation, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question"and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, Eng. , 1988)
28. That these questions are still relevant is illustrated by Jacques Revel, "L'Histoire au ras le sol, " in Giovanni Levi, Le Pouvoir au village: Histoire d'un exorciste dans le piémont du XIIe siècle (Paris, 1989), i-xxxiii
29. Giovanni Levi, "Les Usages de la biographie," Annales 44 (1989), 1325-1336
30. Jacques Le Goff, "After Annales: The Life as History," Times Literary Supplement 4489 (14-20 April 1989), 394-405
31. Thomas Carlyle, "On Biography" [1832], in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 7 vols. (London, 1872), IV, 60-61
32. Jules Michelet, Journal: Texte intégral, ed. Paul Viallaneix and Claude Digeon, 4 vols. (Paris, 1959-76), I, 378
33. Augustin Thierry, Essai sur l'histoire de la formation et des progrès du tiers état; suivi de deux fragments du recueil des monuments inédits de cette histoire [1853], (Paris, 1867), 200
34. Thomas Babington Macaulay, "History" [1828], in Complete Works, 12 vols. (London, 1906), I, 304
35. see also Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second [1848-1861], 2 vols. (London, 1883), I, 2
36. Most recently, Jacques Rancière in his Les Noms de l'histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris, 1992)
37. On this tradition, see further Ann Rigney, "De stiltes van de geschiedenis: De grenzen van de historische kennis als romantisch erfdeel," in Romantiek & historische cultuur, ed. Jo Tollebeek, Frank Ankersmit, and Wessel Krul (Groningen, 1996), 129-146
38. Twentieth-century advocates of a nouvelle histoire have largely ignored their precursors in the nineteenth century; in his survey of the "fathers" of the new history, Jacques Le Goff limited himself to the theoretical statements of a few isolated figures; see La nouvelle histoire, ed. J. Le Goff and R. Chartier (Paris, 1978), 222-226
39. Eric Hobsbawm has described Brecht's "Who built Thebes of the Seven Gates?" as a typically twentieth-century question; "History from Below - Some Reflections," in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology, ed. F. Krantz (Oxford, 1988), 13
40. As Linda Orr writes, Michelet was one of the first historians to be obsessed with the "unreadable" and "unthinkable" nature of his profession's objects; Jules Michelet: Nature, History, and Language (Ithaca, N. Y. , 1976), xi
41. Michelet's undoubted concern with the obstacles in the way of historical knowledge went together, however, with a belief in his own powers to mediate between past and present; see on this point Lionel Gossman, "Jules Michelet and Romantic Historiography," in Between History and Literature (Cambridge, Mass. , 1990), 152-200
42. On the attempts made by the Romantic historians to write cultural history, see further Ann Rigney, "Relevance, Revision and the Fear of Long Books," in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (London, 1995), 127-147
43. Thomas Carlyle, "On History Again" [1833], Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 7 vols. (London, 1872), IV, 212-213
44. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present [1843] (London, 1960), 43
45. "On History Again," 216
46. On the concept of fait divers, see the section devoted to "Fait divers, fait d'histoire," Annales 38 (1983), 821-919, especially Michelle Perrot, "Fait divers et histoire au XIXe siècle (Note critique)," 911-919
47. On the function of the anecdote as an indicator of what a narrative has ignored, see also Joel Fineman, "The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (London, 1989), 49-76
48. "On Biography," 60
49. Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, I, 7
50. Novick, That Noble Dream, 583. At times the "more-is-less" principle also seems particularly appropriate to describe Carlyle's own writing, where the lucidity of individual passages can become clouded by the discursive excess in which it is embedded
51. For a contemporary account of the lamentable state of the archive, see Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Observations on the State of Historical Literature and on the Society of Antiquaries, and other Institutions for its Advancement in England (London, 1830)
52. On the attempts made in this period to make research materials available, see Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838-1886 (Cambridge, Eng. , 1986), 101-134
53. On Carlyle's research methods, see especially D. J. Trela, A History of Carlyle's "Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches" (Lampeter, Dyfed, 1992), 178-179
54. See also G. P. Gooch's comment that, when Carlyle began his historiographical career, "the study of the archives had not begun, and it never occurred to him that he ought to begin it"; G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century [1913], rev. , with a new Introduction (London, 1952), 303
55. In one of the earliest drafts of his book on Cromwell, he warned the reader against going back to the original records: "much I have read which no following son of Adam will ever more read; and in all this there is nothing visible but an indecipherable universe filled as with dirty indecipherable London fog"; quoted in "A Preface by Carlyle and by the Editors," in Carlyle Past and Present: A Collection of New Essays, ed. K. J. Fielding and Rodger L. Tarr (London, 1976), 18
56. Carlyle's dislike of archival spadework in the less-than-ideal conditions of his time should not blind us to the amount of information he managed to gather from printed sources for his work on Cromwell, and also for The French Revolution (1837) and the History of Friedrich II of Prussia called Frederick the Great (1858-1865); nor should it be forgotten that Carlyle was interested in non-textual evidence, making a point of visiting the relevant battlefields while working on his Frederick the Great
57. see Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Cambridge, Eng. , 1983), 389, 416-419
58. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution [1837], 2 vols. (London, 1903), II, 30
59. See Trela, A History, 14
60. On the laborious and protracted writing of the biography of Frederick, see John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History (Oxford, 1985), 159-163
61. A work of some 4000 pages, Gooch described it as "too long for its readers, as it was too long for its author"; History and Historians, 309
62. See, for example, Abbé de Mably, "De la manière d'écrire l'histoire" [1783] where he commented on the fact that although nothing was more important than order in a historical work, the historian was always in danger of getting lost in a labyrinth of details; Oeuvres complètes, 15 vols. (Paris, 1794), XII, 520
63. See also Augustin Thierry's comments on the perilous balancing act he had to perform as a historical writer between emphasizing details and losing the coherence of the whole: "je faisais et je défaisais sans cesse: c'était l'ouvrage de Pénélope; mais, grâce à une volonté inébranlable et à dix heures de travail chaque jour, cet ouvrage ne laissait pas que d'avancer"; Dix ans d'études historiques [1835] (Brussels, 1839), 554
64. French Revolution, II, 131
65. Also Carlyle's "Parliamentary History of the French Revolution" [1837] in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 7 vols. (London, 1872), VI, 1-20: "Each individual takes up the Phenomenon according to his own point of vision, to the structure of his optic organs . . . And the Phenomenon, for its part, subsists there, all the while, unaltered; waiting to be pictured as often as you like, its entire meaning not to be compressed into any picture drawn by man" (2)
66. "The history of the Irish War . . . does not form itself into a picture; but remains only as a huge blot, an indiscriminate blackness; which the human memory cannot willingly charge itself with! . . . All these [factions], plunging and tumbling . . . have made of Ireland and its affairs the black unutterable blot we speak of," Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, II, 141
67. To be sure, the 1640s posed notoriously intractable problems for historians; see on this point, Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising, ed. Brian Mac Cuarta (Belfast, 1993)
68. esp. Toby Barnard, "1641: A Bibliographical Essay," 173-186
69. Elsewhere, however, Carlyle suggests that this intractability is paradigmatic of Irish history as a whole; in conversations with Charles Gavan Duffy, for example, he claimed that post-Viking Ireland "presented to one's mind only interminable confusion and chaos, or if there might . . . be a ground-plan more or less intelligible, it was not worth searching for. " The only period of Irish history worth writing about was the early medieval period when Ireland "was a sort of model school for the nations, and in verity an island of saints"; Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle (London, 1892), 102
70. In 1849 Carlyle did seriously consider writing his next book on Ireland and for this purpose undertook a tour of the island; see Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle, 334-347
71. All that came of this plan were his rather desultory, dyspeptic, and posthumously published Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849 (London, 1882)
72. As Kaplan puts it, "no one and nothing allowed him to make 'cosmos' out of the 'chaos' of his ideas and feelings about Ireland" (351). It is interesting to note here that Irish writers of this period tended to agree with Carlyle that Irish history was formless - "a dream-like succession of capricious and seemingly unconnected changes, without order or progress," as the Wills brothers put it - but that they interpreted this chronic disorder in the light of the need for national autonomy; see on this point, Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996)
73. See, for example, his account of the encampment of women around Versailles on 5 October 1789: "Insurrectionary Chaos lies slumbering round the Palace, like Ocean round a Diving-Bell," French Revolution, I, 222
74. Thus Cromwell's policies in Ireland are described as "the truth" and as "a Gospel of Veracity," while "Ireland is still a terrible dubiety, to itself and to us!," Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, II, 260
75. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History [1841], ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel, introduction by Michael K. Goldberg (Berkeley, 1993), 15
76. The Great Man as biographical subject provided a starting point for writing about Puritanism, while the theory of the Great Man provided a teleological principle with which to structure his account of the French Revolution, ending as it does with the restoration of order by Napoleon. On the popularity and limitations of biography as a model for writing history, see also Ann Rigney, "Mixed Metaphors and the Writing of History," Storia della Storiografia 24 (1993), 149-159
77. Instead, he enjoyed immense prestige during his lifetime as a general commentator or "Prophet," a status reflected among other things in the place accorded him in the National Portrait Gallery; see G. B. Tennyson, "Carlyle Today," in Carlyle Past and Present: A Collection of New Essays, ed. K. J. Fielding and Rodger L. Tarr (London, 1976), 27-50
78. The assessment among professional historians has been equivocal, with the impression given that, like the curate's egg, Carlyle's work as a historian is good in spots. Although his scholarship in certain works is found to be very much at fault and his style is found indigestible in large quantities, he is nevertheless allowed by some to have written passages of insight; his history of the French Revolution continues to be praised for the vividness of its portraiture (see, for example, Richard Cobb's introduction to the 1989 Folio edition); he is also generally considered to have been a major influence in the emergence of a revised view of Cromwell - see, for example, T. W. Mason, "Nineteenth-Century Cromwell," Past and Present 40 (1968), 187-191
79. P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890-1930 (The Hague, 1978), 145-146
80. On "narrativity" as an attraction borrowed from imaginative literature, see Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in The Content of the Form, 1-25
81. For a historical overview of theories of the sublime, see Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, 1960)
82. For an overview of recent discussions, see the special issue of New Literary History 16 (1985)
83. and Das Erhabene: Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Grössenwahn, ed. Christine Pries (Weinheim, 1989)
84. On the sublime as a feature of Romantic historicism, see Karl Kroeber, "Romantic Historicism: The Temporal Sublime," in Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities, ed. K. Kroeber and W. Walling (New Haven, 1978), 149-165
85. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful [1757], ed. Adam Philipps (Oxford, 1990), 55
86. Challenging the assumption that aesthetic and political preferences are necessarily linked, Ronald Paulson criticized the correlation between beautiful/repressive politics, on the one hand, and sublime/subversive politics, on the other: "Versions of a Human Sublime," New Literary History 16 (1985), 427-437
87. For the reiteration of this same basic criticism from a different perspective, see Pries, Das Erhabene, 12
88. Paul Crowther, "Les Immatériauxand the Postmodern Sublime," in Judging Lyotard, ed. A. Benjamin (London, 1992), 192-205
89. White, The Content of the Form, 74; his quotation from Carlyle's essay "On History" is on 229
90. White, Metahistory, 148
91. For a comparable case, see Friedlander's comments on the deceptively fragmentary composition of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland, in Probing the Limits, 14-16
92. More generally, it appears that the deliberate evocation of sublimity sits oddly with the function of discourse in making sense of the world. In his review of her Fragile Lives, for example, David Garrioch rejects Arlette Farge's stated reluctance to draw conclusions as "disingenuous," since in fact she does interpret the past and define it under the guise of not trying to do so; Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), 725
93. Also pertinent to this discussion is Hans Kellner's analysis of the unintentional sublimity of Simon Schama's Citizens; "Beautifying the Nightmare: The Aesthetics of Postmodern History," Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics 4/5 (1991), 289-313
94. Quoted in Herbert Butterfield, Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge, Eng. , 1955), 218
95. Past and Present, 39; further references in the text
96. In his narrative of the quarrel in 1199 between the abbot and the monk, for example, Jocelin explicitly criticizes Samson for taking action ill-calculated to promote harmony in the community, criticism which is left out of Carlyle's account. See The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, concerning the Acts of Samson, Abbot of the Monastery of St. Edmund, transl. from the Latin with Introduction, Notes, and Appendices by H. E. Butler (London, 1949), 103-106
97. Jocelin, Chronicle, 137
98. On the composition of Past and Present, see also Grace J. Calder, The Writing of Past and Present: A Study of Carlyle's Manuscripts (New Haven, 1949)