Is imagination a resource or a threat to the writing of history? ? An undeniable tool of knowledge, it above all allows us to make the link with other presentations of the past, such as novels, cinema or television series.
Combining historical, literary and cinematographic approaches, the collective work Imagination and History seeks as much to take stock of the many epistemological reflections that have crossed the discipline since the end of the 1970s, as to renew them. Avoiding returning head-on to issues linked to the plotting of the past, the relationship to fiction or the falsification of history, its main originality is to place the relationship to the imagination at the center of the investigation. This is in turn considered as a property intrinsically linked to historical writing of history or as a capacity specific to directors, directors, writers and other artists, who express a point of view on the past. Both a resource and a threat for the researcher, imagination allows the authors gathered here to ask anew the question of the cultural and political uses of the past, by carrying out a series of case studies relating mainly to films and novels, but also on plays and exhibitions.
Historian writings
The postulate of the work is that imagination “ cannot be simply opposed to reason, but that, placed at the service of the latter, it is the essential faculty which allows us to represent and think about history “. The French literature specialist Jérôme David and the philosopher Arianna Sforzini reinvest this idea, the one by highlighting the possible uses of the notion of radical imagination of Cornelius Castoriadis, the other by taking up a certain number of calls for invention launched by Michel Foucault. If the starting point is based on the principle that imagination allows us to better understand the past and to better convey what happened, it is clear, at the end of the reading, that the results are more mixed. Indeed, two conceptions, all in all quite classic, oppose each other throughout the three parts which make up the work.
One is based on the principle that imagination is a resource for the researcher, because it allows him to better represent the past ; the second sees it as something to be strictly regulated, in order to avoid sinking into an extravagant vision of the past corresponding to an unfounded invention. The cultural productions studied are thus caught in this dialectical tension that is difficult to resolve. As Agnès Delage writes, this is, in part, linked to the fact that “ fiction’s mission is to revise scholarly historiographical discourses perceived as hegemonic, in order to propose a counter-history » (p. 85).
These two trends are also based on distinct representations (not to say imaginaries) of the main objectives assigned to historical writing. Indeed, for most of the literary figures who took part in the work, the goal pursued by historians is to establish an objective account which is authoritative in the present on what the past was. These researchers try to challenge this conception, by showing how authors, directors and playwrights have managed to offer a more complex vision of the past.
It is then a question of showing that certain artists, when they make use of the resources of the imagination and assume the enunciation of a particular point of view, can create spaces capable of subverting History. For example, Laurent Demanze reports on the way in which the work of the writer Pierre Michon works to counteract historians’ pretensions to offering a stabilized representation of the past. The idea shared here is that artists create stories (with a little “ h » and in the plural) which can be appropriated in a more subtle way than History.
Imagination: tool or threat ?
The historians involved in this collection are more aware of the limits of their own discipline. Since the “ linguistic turn » which showed that history was first and foremost a story, the belief in the possibility of objective and totalizing writing has dissipated. Sandie Gauthier and Léonard Courbon write it very simply: we are no longer “ at the time when great models of intelligibility of history offered themselves as insurmountable tools for mediation between reality and our understanding of reality » (p. 193). Therefore, imagination is often seen as a resource. The medievalist Patrick Boucheron explains that “ imagination is one of the cognitive abilities which is used to construct hypotheses, causalities – if only in the implicitly counterfactual approach of any historical narrative » (p. 317). It is then a question of working at the margins of the discipline, in order to push the required common methodological base to its limits so that we can say: “ He writes history “.
However, imagination is also perceived as a threat, because, if the historian willingly recognizes that what he offers is nothing other than a story, it must maintain a specific relationship to the past . In the interview he gave to Éric Dayre, Carlo Ginzburg insists on this point: “ We must try to arrive at the truth, without quotation marks. It can be falsified, so it is by definition provisional – it is part of human knowledge. (…) We can formulate hypotheses, etc., but we can try to verify them » (p. 118). In short, if the history of historians is also a story, it is not above all a story. The paradigm that the historian seeks to subvert is the one that posits an equivalence between all the plottings of the past.
Indeed, the historian does not wish to be assimilated to the director, the novelist, nor the playwright. If this observation may have led, from the 1980s, to the return of biography, to games of scale and other attempts at microhistory, it is different in this work, several of whose contributors do not hesitate to denounce certain stories, which they consider too far from both the past and historical writing of the past. Artistic forms that adorn themselves with the trappings of history to better play with the codes of the discipline are criticized, sometimes quite harshly. For example, Pascale Mounier and Marie Panter consider that Alain Le Ninèze’s historical novel, Agla. The first gospelis a “ fine example of deception based on historical support “. “ Seeming to help separate historical precision and fictional freedom “, they add, “ the few notes ultimately serve to make the border of fabulation and imagination floating » (p. 106). Olivier Hanne notes about Joan the Captive (2011), the film by Philippe Ramos, of which he was an advisor, that “ the film wants to create meaning, while History seeks understanding of a certain past » (p. 176). Other contributors are content with analyzes relating to themes already very often discussed, such as those of the issues of narrativity or the relationships between fiction and documentary, as well as between “ real effects » and fidelity to the archives consulted. It happens, as O. Hanne notes with great honesty, that, “ confronted with the script or the film, the historian necessarily places himself in a position of litteratusof scholar, considering the vulgaristhe uninitiated », repeating here a factual error, there a culpable anachronism (p. 170).
Openings
A final point deserves to be discussed, that of the choice of objects studied. These relate almost exclusively to the so-called culture legitimate ”, while popular culture remains offstage. With the exception of an interview devoted to historical fiction A French Villagethe approach to audiovisual productions is limited to the seventh art and, within it, to authors Andreï Tarkovsky and Marco Bellochio. A questioning of the imagination could undoubtedly have opened up a reflection on more diversified types of productions, ranging from peplums to corporate films, from television series to productions broadcast on the web.
In addition, a reflection on the connections between history and anthropology would also have made it possible to discuss in a more detailed manner the issues linked to orality and cultural phenomena which do not produce material traces. Finally, the relationships between history and imagination are not limited to the analysis of productions offering stories (films, novels, plays) ; they also require an exploration of the public uses of the past, which can range from parody to homage, from DIY dear to Michel de Certeau to the culture of sharing and circulation defended by Henry Jenkins.
These remarks, which do not detract from the quality of the analyzes proposed and the theoretical density of the work, suggest that it would have been possible to understand in another light the links between historical writings and representations of the past in space. audience. Because, as Patrick Boucheron notes in the general conclusion of the book, “ learned history, those that they (historians) write, is only one of the modalities of bringing the past into presence » (p. 314).