Archives and Will-o’-the-Wisps

There is no essential reason why history should be set apart from literature. Quintilian once described it as “carmen solutum,” poetry in prose. With no metrical restraint, with no preestablished formal framework, historical research is the gradual construction of an artificial memory: it involves untying the strings around endless numbers of cardboard boxes in the archives. Each file, like a room in a memory palace, contains a psychic essence which history releases. History comes into its own when it allows the sources simply to speak for themselves—and when it understands that sources can be anything whatsoever. It is Burckhardt’s Griechische Kulturgeschichte that identifies this necromantic character in history. This is the course taken by historiographers over recent decades in their thirst for the most irrelevant details, in their capacity to absorb shelf-loads of papers about to disintegrate, examining interrogations that had perhaps never before been read, not even by the person who had recorded them. Often, though, they were deceiving themselves as to their motives. Armies of researchers imagined that by digesting mountains of paper they were getting close to the truth. Some even believed that, by using numbers and tables, they were approximating science. And yet, the more they were surrounded by raw data, the clearer it became that every scrap of history is a silent enigma. Behind those names, those legal documents, those judicial proceedings, stretched the immense aphasia of life that closes in on itself, that has no contact with a before and with an after. History offers its own identifying marks to guarantee its own personal disappearance. The true historian, then, is one who crosses the eloquent desert of archives and, with an element of luck, shaking the dust off the right file, he experiences one of those moments in which names begin to chime and resonate against the silent background, building up a unique personal profile, like that of a neighbor we have occasionally passed in the street who happens to leave his door ajar, giving us a glimpse of his disastrous private life.

Richard Cobb recalls his “favorite uncle,” a country doctor whom he accompanied frequently on his rounds: “He was a tremendous gossip, and endlessly inquisitive about people, indeed, I think he only practiced medicine in order to get into other people’s houses; I would sit waiting in his car while he did his rounds, and, after each visit, he would come back to the car triumphantly with some new item of malice, rather like a researcher after a good day in the Archives Nationales.”³⁴⁶ In the same way that his doctor uncle loved entering the houses of others, Cobb found pleasure in his family’s frequent moves: “On the whole, I rather enjoyed them, because in this manner I was able to see the inside of a very wide range of houses; and, all my life, it has been an almost obsessive urge with me to get my foot in the door, to get behind the façade, to get inside.³⁴⁷ That, after all, is what being, or becoming, a historian is all about—the desire to read other people’s letters, to breach privacy, to penetrate into the inner room.” But his “almost obsessive urge” was quite the opposite of those people who collect stories to show how familiar they are with the Great. The true historian is the prime enemy of every souvenir hunter. First of all, the prey he is searching out is one that is forgotten, and has every reason to be forgotten. After lengthy training in this combat with opacity, he can then compete with Plutarchian figures, those who have become invisible through too much testimony, a solid carapace secreted by history to distance them from us. At that extreme of his obstinate pursuit, the historian wants to encounter Napoleon as a stranger. Then he unites with the visionary and, like Léon Bloy, can have the impudence to start a book with the words: “The story of Napoleon is certainly the least known of all stories.”³⁴⁸