Two collections of articles by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, recently translated into French, extend his reflection on the specificity of history, an approach to truth based on traces, which forges a path between the false and the fictitious.
Book after book, Carlo Ginzburg continues his construction of history through a work whose singularity becomes more striking each time, at the same time as it is accompanied by a general reflection which leads the reader back to the big questions of our time. If we are accustomed to invoking literature to describe this very particular art which is ours, in reference to its filiation with the novelist Natalia Ginzburg, we could just as easily borrow from the musical metaphor to describe architecture of a work that alternates studies of micro-history with essays on epistemology apparent in counterpoint writing. The Thread and the Tracessubtitled True false fictitioushis latest work translated into French, follows in the wake of From a distance, nine essays on point of view in history (1998) and Myths, emblems and traces (1986), now reissued in paperback in an expanded version of a conference given in Lille and which returns, twenty-five years later, to the hypothesis of “ indexical paradigm “.
Like the scholars he places in dialogue here, Erich Auerbach, the famous literary critic author of Mimesisor the great historian of Antiquity, Arnaldo Momigliano, Carlo Ginzburg deploys a knowledge that belongs only to him, daring analogies and comparisons whose fortuitous exterior masks the prodigious erudition on which they are based. Ginzburg thus goes from Livy to Stendhal, from Fénelon to Moses Finley, but he also opens to us a library where the rarest scholars appear, bringing to life the debates which shook Paduan scholarly circles there in the XVIe century, here the observations of the Milanese Girolamo Benzoni returning from the island of Hispaniola.
As with Auerbach and Momigliano, Jews like him, who also experienced persecution, Ginzburg’s quest suggests the personal tension that drives him. And if there is a jubilant side to the walks he offers us – making us rediscover through this “ euphoria of ignorance » a story that is ours – the idea that science is essential to the image we have of our fellow human beings gives its humanism a character of urgency ; which is corroborated by the historiographical tone of certain articles (for example “ Witches and shamans “). This duality of Carlo Ginzburg’s books is at the same time their diversity – everyone can enter through the door they wish, conceptual or formal – and their great unity. We will choose to enter it through the gravity and political reflection which orders and echoes the texts gathered here.
Against historical neo-skepticism
One of the possible readings of Wire and traces would place at the center of the collection, composed of fifteen articles and an appendix, the one entitled “ Unus testis » (a single witness), which combines in a moral perspective the question of the writing of history and testimony, the truth and the regime of proof. Ginzburg designates his opponent, the “ historical neo-skepticism » conveyed by the work of Hayden White, inspired by the linguistic turnthe dangers of which he shows. In Metahistorypublished in 1973 and still unpublished in French, the American historian assimilates history to a simple narration, thus calling into question its claims to restore a scientific truth.
Applied to the Shoah, nothing distinguishes this relativism (as it is a story, history is not intended to restore a truth) from the negationist attitude of Faurisson, opposed by the historian Pierre Vidal -Naquet in A paper Eichmann. If the post-modernist position is in decline today, even in the American academic world where it was most influential, its conclusions are taken up through the treatment of the question of memory, since it is assimilated to a story like any other. However, based on traces and evidence, the historian’s investigation – which Ginzburg designated through the expression “ indexical paradigm ” In Myths, emblems and traces – designates a specific relationship to reality, and not a story as the novelist practices it.
The most powerful weapon of the neo-skeptics » consists of identifying the forms of discourse and history. Ginzburg demonstrates here, by means of historical investigation, the existence of a double rhetoric. To the discourse denounced by philosophers, Nietzsche first, as purely formal and self-referential, he opposes what according to him refers to the true meaning of rhetoric, a discursive tradition dating back to Aristotle and Quintilian, taken up during the Renaissance by Lorenzo Valla, and relating to evidence to distinguish truth from falsehood. Just as he reinstalls the texts in a chain of authors, Ginzburg discovers himself in his fight against the skepticism of little-known predecessors, like Francesco Robortello d’Udine, antiquarian historian of XVIe century, which, from a direct reading of the skeptical tradition of Sextus Empiricus, resorted to inscriptions to combat this current and demonstrate the validity of historical knowledge (“ Description and quote “).
Between history and literature
The multiplicity of points of view that Ginzburg likes to present cannot lead us to conclude that there is any relativism. The singularity of his investigation lies in the fact that, while explicitly rejecting relativism, he engages in a third path, between relativism and positivism, defined by this triangle of “ true false fictitious » separated by no punctuation. History and literature are complementary in a certain sense, if only through the spur that each represents for the other in its desire to account for reality. Therefore, some of the articles proposed are intended to allow us to explore the shifts, the comings and goings that occur between literature and history in the restitution of the world.
We can cite, on the historians’ side, the text of Jean Chapelain who, in 1648, searched in the poems of Homer or a novel from the Middle Ages, Lancelot, for testimonies intended to inform his contemporaries about the events and customs of the ‘Greek antiquity (“ Paris 1647: a dialogue between fiction and history “). Fiction thus becomes a reservoir for the historian. ConverselyIn The Red and the BlackStendhal becomes the historian of French society at the time of the July Revolution, giving us a portrait of the time as sure as that of Michelet, even anticipating narrative techniques, such as the free direct discourse that historians still disdain to use (“ The bitter truth. A challenge from Stendhal to historians “). Thus Ginzburg reconstructs, for the delight of his readers, a fictional dialogue between writers and historians across the centuries.
Literature like history are constructions. This is undoubtedly one of the main lessons to be learned from Ginzburg’s books. The document is therefore at the center of the investigation, both for what it tells us about itself, but also for what it reveals to us about the era which produced it. Each document therefore involves a different analysis. Hence the precariousness which characterizes our relationship to the past, even if it is expressed in historiographical operations. Ginzburg follows here the continuation of the analysis that his master Arsenio Frugoni sets out in Arnaud de Brescia in the sources of XIIe century. Frugoni tore apart the reconstruction of the figure of Arnaud de Brescia obtained through the philological method, showing how the unity of the portrait thus obtained did not resist internal analysis. Ginzburg sees in this operation “ restoration » of the figure of the heresiarch, revealing gaps and ruptures without abandoning his object in the face of the gaps in history, the ideal of the historian’s method.
The historian must not fill in all the gaps. Unlike art, where the restorer is asked to hide the traces of his intervention, the good historian will be the one who makes visible the tricks of his trade. This is the response that Ginzburg brings to the quarrels that our era brings to history. Thus history conquers a new freedom under his pen. It sees its field of intervention being redefined, blurring the old lines of force such as that which separated historiography from judicial investigation. The historian himself asserts himself to be both more present and freer in his story, without his object of study being discredited. Ginzburg’s little essays evoke these dramaturgies of XVIIe century where the marvelous was served by large machines.