Seven Bad Reasons Not to Study Manuscripts

Seven bad reasons not to study manuscripts

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Citation Darnton, Robert. 1994. Seven bad reasons not to study manuscripts. Harvard Library Bulletin 4 (4), Winter 1993-94: 37-42.

Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42663816

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Seven Bad Reasons Not to Study Manuscripts

Robert Darnton

am honored to join you in honoring Rodney Dennis and the mark he has left I on the field of scholarship. My charge, ifl understand it correctly, is to testify to the importance of manuscript (the ordered world of archives, where Rodney Dennis ruled supreme) for history (the messy world of books, where we get it written more often than we get it right). This is a more difficult assignment than you may think, because I face the danger of preaching to the converted. After all, who would ever doubt the importance of crossing the bridge that leads from Widener to Houghton in order to carry the study of history beyond books and into manuscript sources? To circumvent this danger, I have experimented with some devil's-advocate arguments, which I ROBERT DARNTON is Shelby offer in the hope that I will losethem so that Rodney Dennis may be properly feted Cullom Davis Professor of and the rest of us confirmed in our belief that history at its best is history based on European History at Princeton University. His latest book, The manuscripts-manuscript history, which I will refer to as ms.-his. in the hope of Forbidden Hest-Scllers of Prcrevo- offending no one. l11tio11aryFrm1ff, was published by I warn you, however, that the devil sometimes gets the upper hand in devil's W.W. Norton injanuary 1994. arguments. To keep him at bay, I would like to restrict his brief to seven counts. As the devil secs it, ms.-his. opens the door to seven deadly sins: snobbery, episte- Professor Dart on' s essay was de- mological na"ivete, pseudo-heroism, uselessness, infeasibility, inconsistency, and livered on 30 April 1992 at a symposium on the uses of manu- Pyrrhonism. scripts in honor of Rodney G. Dennis, retiring Curator of I. SNOBBERY Manuscripts in the Harvard Col- lege Library. The first item in the devil's indictment of ms.-his. is the most obvious. All of us have run into manuscript snobbery; many of us are manuscript snobs ourselves. When we open a book, we first look through the footnotes. If they don't contain an impressive array of manuscript references, we conclude that the history isn't serious. The worst manuscript snobs tolerate only the right sort of references. Among French historians in the 1960s, it was the F7 and the Q series of the Ar- chives Nationalcs (the favorite of Albert Soboul); today it is the series X and Y (those preferred by Arlette Farge). The cure for this disease is simple: stay in Widener, stop reading manuscripts, take up post-modernism. This, of course, is the devil speaking. He would have us believe that ms.-his. represents a revival of empiricism, either the seat-of-the-pants English variety or its abominable French cousin, positivism. A post-modernist knows that manuscripts do not provide any more direct access to raw history than do books. He scorns the ms.-historian for the naive notion that manuscripts offer a transparent window to the past, "Bloss wie es eigentlich gewesen ist." The old 38 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

Rankean formula fails to recognize that everything is discourse; it makes us inca- pable of being dialogic; it leads straight into essentialism; it is epistemologically naive (item 2 in the devil's repertory of arguments).

2. EPISTEMOLOGICAL NAIVETE

I don't want to spoil an occasion meant to honor an eminent archivist by loading this lecture with any more jargon, and I must have piled on enough by now for you to spot the deviltry behind the argument. We cannot make direct contact with the past, the devil says. We can only play with the shards that it has left behind- inscriptions, ecriture,printed or manuscript, it makes no difference: in either case we use those fragments to construct a history that may never have happened, that is nothing more than an object of our discourse. Manuscripts themselves have been inscribed by discourse. So we fabricate history out of prefabricated materials. Why struggle to ground it in the archives? As discourse pervades everything, why not study it at its densest, in great texts? That line of argument leads out of Houghton and back to Widener, indeed to only a few shelves ofWidener, because this kind of post- modernism often turns into a history of ideas, ideas embodied in great books. I cannot meet the devil's argument on the high ground of epistemology, because I would defend historical research at the low level of grubbing in archives. Archival work has some affinity with the cognitive archaeology advocated by Fou- cault. But in practice, it means digging through one box of manuscript after another, getting your hands dirty. The excavation of archives raises the possibility of surprises. You may come up with material that does not fit into the accepted picture of how things were. That picture resembles a gigantic mosaic with most of its parts missing, or a kaleidoscope that keeps changing shape as one adds new ingredi- ents. Insert some unexpected material extracted from the archives and the pattern suddenly changes-not that it permits one to see directly into the past, but rather that it helps one to deepen, freshen, and rethink a vision of the human condition. Having delivered myself of that homily, I realize that I must face another post- modernist objection: I am abusing a trope, pitting the honest, rugged, down-to- earth historian of the archives against the pretentious, esoteric historian of ideas. Paradoxically, therefore, manuscript snobbery has a populist ring: while the high- brows were reading Derrida, we lowbrows were swatting through old paper, getting dirt under our nails.

3. PSEUDO-HEROISM

At its worst, this braggadocio degenerates into pseudo-heroism. When the manuscript historians gather for shop talk, they sound like veterans of World War 1-les anciens de Verdun-boasting about the hardships of hands-on research down in the trenches. Richard Cobb tells of confronting a reactionary archivist armed with a deadly pair of scissors, which she used to cut the hated heading "Republique frarn;:aise" from the top of documents. He also describes being locked into some municipal archives at the end of a hard day's work, so that he had to "emerge, backwards, from a third floor window, and make a difficult descent to the street, via the letter A in Mairie, cornice, flagstone, and drainpipe."'

1 Richard Cobb, A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (Oxford, 1969), 55. Seven Bad Reasons Not to Study Manuscripts 39

I have had to face similar dangers myself. Once while looking for the papers of a naval family in an old chateau, I opened a closet door and a stuffed alligator came crashing down on my head. On another occasion, I worked in some municipal archives stored next to a run-down museum of natural history. The museum fea- tured a collection of live snakes kept in glass cases and fed live mice every after- noon at teatime, to the delight of some schoolchildren whose classes emptied onto the same floor. One day a pregnant viper escaped during this tea ceremony and disappeared into the stacks, where she distributed her eggs throughout the manuscript section. To get at the documents (I had a key and helped myself), I imagined myself confronting a baby viper around every corner. This sort ofbragging may be good for the ego but bad for the profession. It casts one in the role of anciende Verdunat the expense of one's role as historian. Why not avoid ego-trips entirely, and remain safely behind the front lines in Widener? That brings me to the devil's fourth argument: supererogation, or, to put it plainly, uselessness.

4. USELESSNESS

Robert Palmer, my predecessor at Princeton, used to tell his graduate students: "You can go to the archives in France afteryou have read all the books in Firestone Library." 2 So much excellent history already exists in printed form, why not con- centrate on digesting it instead of gathering still more raw material? If you think this is only a provincial, Princetonian argument, I would remind you that Firestone Library contains 3.5 million items (5 million campus-wide), at last count, whereas the libraries of Harvard contain 12 million. You have a greater problem than we do. With so many books to read, why study manuscripts? I remember my first ex- posure to a manuscript. It occurred right here, on this side of the bridge of sighs, in Houghton. As a freshman, on my way back from breakfast at the Union, I strayed into Houghton and asked to see Hermann Melville's copy of Emerson's essays. Within five minutes, I had it in my hands and, by following the marginalia, I imagined I was reading Emerson as Melville had read him. All I can remember today is the sensation of holding the book and one margin note-an angry scribble next to an Emersonian metaphor about the World Soul rounding Cape Horn. "He's never sailed through the Straits of Magellan," Melville wrote (or words to that effect). Was this useful information? Three years later, I faced a team of very grand in- quisitors at my oral examination for a degree in American history and literature: Oscar Handlin, Kenneth Lynn, and Alan Heimert. Their first question was: "Dis- cuss the relation between Emerson and Melville." "One could begin," I replied, "with Melville's marginalia." Suddenly they seemed to sit up in their chairs and to look at me hard (it had been a long day and we were a motley group of seniors suffering from fuzzy-mindedness and spring fever)-and just as suddenly the page on which I could once see Melville's hand went blank. The oral was a disaster, and I later fled to French history. So you see the devil was right: there is no marginal utility in studying manuscripts. He forgot, however, that I also had a happier experience with manuscripts at Harvard. It, too, concerned marginalia, and it did turn out to be useful. Toward the end of my undergraduate years, the librarians in Lamont tried to stop us from defacing books by exhibiting the worst examples of our graffiti in glass cases by the

I take this quotation from the table talk of Palmer"s students. He may never have uttered it himself. 40 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

lower-level exit of the library. I stood transfixed before my classmates' comments: passages underlined, margin notes next to them objecting that they were not im- portant passages at all, objections to the objections, and so on in a wonderful dia- logue festooned across the pages. Years later, I joined a pack of historians trying to trace the scent of readings in the past, to develop a veritable history of reading, one of the most difficult and elusive varieties of the so-called "new cultural history." How can we recapture the mental processes by which readers appropriated texts? How can we avoid anachronism, the fatal sin of most historical research? One of the best strategies leads through marginalia, and I feel grateful to Houghton and Lamont for showing the way.

5. INFEASIBILITY

That is all very good, says the devil, but the history of reading-in fact, the whole field of the history of books-never really got off the ground, because it simply isn't feasible. It promises a great deal, but it doesn't deliver: sin number five. Here the use of manuscript sources seems to be decisive. Consider the case of seventeenth-century France. Book historians such as Henri-Jean Martin have tried to piece together a general picture of the literature that actually circulated-la litteraturevecue-during the grand siecle. In order to map it, they have relied on printed sources, primarily the catalog of the Bibliotheque Nationale. But it now appears that the B.N.'s holdings represent less than half of the titles produced in the seventeenth century. It contains very few of the popular chapbooks, known as the bibliothequebleue, because they were read to pieces and, in any case, librarians did not consider them "literature" and therefore did not include them in their stock. Erotic books were banished to the enferof the Bibliotheque Nationale until quite recently. So a history based on printed sources will exclude the most banal and the most sizzling, the very stuff of which much current cultural history is made. To get closer to la litteraturevecue, we must cross the bridge of sighs and enter the world of manuscript. Franc;ois Furet made the crossover in the 1960s, when he waded through a great stretch of manuscript: requests for royal privileges, or per- missions to publish a book, stretching through the entire eighteenth century. He found that innovative literature-the novel, for example, and the tracts of the philo- sophes-looked trivial in comparison with the classics, the devotional literature, the old-fashioned historical and legal works that formed the bulk of most readers' reading. Furet's research carried conviction because it conformed perfectly to the formula for Annales history, old style: it traced the play of structure and conjuncture, over a long time-span, by marshaling statistics; and it proved that inertia out- weighed innovation in the culture of the past. My own work has led to opposite results. By studying the demand for books in thousands of letters of eighteenth-century booksellers, I have found a wild and woolly market for the works of the Enlightenment-and more daring books as well, such as Venus in the Cloisteror the Nun in a Nightgown and The Private Life of Louis XV. Clearly, different archives lead to different conclusions. Both Furet and I contested a standard view ofliterary history as a canon of classics, but we came up with incompatible revisionisms. Furet had the French reading nothing but Themiseul de Saint Hyacinthe, and I had them reading only Moufle d'Angerville. 3

3 Fran~ois Furet, "La 'librairie' du royaume de France France du XVllle si<'cle (Paris, 1965), and Robert au 18e siecle,'" in Furet et al., Livre ct societe dans la Darnton, Edition et sedition. L'Univers de la litterature clandestine au XVII/e siecle (Paris, 1991). Seven Bad Reasons Not to Study i\famJScripts 41

6. INCONSISTENCY

So here I am, nearly at the end of my lecture (if you are counting, we have arrived at point six, inconsistency), and I have painted myself into a corner, exactly where the devil wants me. Instead of producing a triumphal argument worthy of Rodney Dennis, I am lapsing into Pyrrhonism. Is it not true, the devil asks, pressing his advantage, that you manuscript historians become victims of your sources? You think you can reach behind, beyond the printed word, but you really wall yourselves up in narrow runs of documents and make yourselves prisoners of the arbi- trary structure of the archives. Consider the greatest case of all: Alexis de Tocqueville. He argued that France became subjected to the centralizing power of the state. From the intendants of Louis XIV to the prefects of Napoleon, not a sparrow fell, not a steeple was re- paired without recourse to the centralized bureaucracy. How did Tocqueville know? He studied the C series in the archives of Tours, a splendid run of documents, which showed the intendants exchanging voluminous memos about church towers with their subdelegates and the Controller General. Now, the administrative unit around Tours covered an enormous area with about a million inhabitants, including one intendant and five subdelegates. How could those half dozen men possibly direct the civic affairs of the entire region? They seem to have everything in hand when seen through the series C; but study them from another perspective, and you will conclude that France was undergoverned. That is the conclusion reached by another devilishly clever ms.- historian, who wrote another book with the title L'Ancien R~1time: Pierre Gaubert. For Gaubert, French history takes place at street level and in the barnyards of peasants who never saw an intendant and literally did not speak his language. In- stead of succumbing to the power of an overweening state, they gave in to malnu- trition and the plague. Gaubert studied parish registers, where he could follow the struggle oflife against death by reconstituting families. While Gaubert was preparing his masterpiece, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis, Ernmanuel Le Roy Ladurie was working on his: Les Paysans de Languedoc.The two young researchers used to take trains from opposite ends of France, Beauvais and Montpellier, in order to compare notes in Parisian cafes. Those were great moments in the history of history, as great in their way as the moments when Gibbon sat on the steps of the Forum and stared across the centuries at the decline and fall of Rome. But there was a third person supping with Gaubert and Le Roy Ladurie: the devil. He saw to it that they came up with utterly incompatible results. Seen from the parish registers of the Beauvaisis, the seventeenth century was black, a time of demographic crises and economic depression. Seen from the cadastral manuscripts of Montpellier, it was a century oflight-economic and demographic expansion. 4 Were the devil to provide a moral to this tale, he would say it demonstrates that social history, even when pursued by the most gifted scholars in the most abun- dant archives, inevitably ties itself up in a bundle of contradictions. Instead of free- ing us from a narrow, bookish view of the past, ms.-his. has made us prisoners of the very manuscripts from which we expected liberation.

-1- Pierre Goubert, Bc(11/l'aisct le Bca1111aisis de 16ao (11730, (Paris, 1 y<,o). and Emmanuel Le Roy Lad uric, Les m11trib11ti(111a !'liist()ire sori(de de la Fra11rcdu )\Vile sihlc Pay.~·a11sde L111,(!t1cdor(Paris, 1966). 42 HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN

No doubt you have already anticipated my rebuttal: Gaubert and Le Roy Ladurie were both right. There were two Frances, one in the north and one in the south-and two seventeenth centuries as well, one somber and the other sunny. Ms.-his. forces us to rethink basic categories, such as the nation and the century; that is one of its strengths.

7. PYRRHONISM

Very well, says the devil. Let us take the work of Ernest Labrousse and Michel Marineau, two top economic historians studying the direction of the French economy as a whole throughout the eighteenth century. Choosing grain prices as an index of economic activity, Labrousse produced spectacular graphs, which showed the economy expanding upward in a pattern of undulating cycles. Marineau concentrated on yields of the tithe, and came up with graphs that re- mained absolutely flat for more than a hundred years. 5 Ms.-his. is condemned to Pyrrhonism, sin seven. We should give the devil his due: these contradictions are disturbing. By digging into manuscripts, historians expected to see history "from below," to take in the experience of the ordinary and the unwashed, to formulate a general picture of the human condition, an histoire totale, as the French put it. But even when they shared the same objectives and methods, they arrived at different conclusions by pursuing different runs of documents. There is no getting around it: ms.-his. has led to a crisis of confidence. We are surfeited with archival research. We are overstuffed with documentation. We are suffering from a kind of elephantiasis, a blockage of the digestive tract that I would call monographism. If we are ever to assimilate all the incompatible material we have extracted from the archives, we need some general organizing ideas. Should we therefore turn our backs on Houghton and trudge the wrong way through the bridge to Widener, heaving great sighs? I think not. After all, even Thucydides suffered from occasional indigestion, and no one in recent memory has believed in the possibility or the desirability of tying up the past in one neat package-no one except some gatekeepers in the school of Marx and the school ofBraudel. Only the devil would try to herd us into schools, tempting us with tidiness. Beelzebub alone holds out the prospect of packaging, as if the past could be squeezed into a program or compressed onto a microchip. I say, get thee behind me, Satan. Brothers and sisters and admirers of Rodney Dennis: resist the evil one. Accept your lot. Know that you stand condemned to inhabit a world of messiness, strewn with inconsistencies, overgrown with contradictions, and stuffed with manuscript. Thanks to the abundance of parchment and paper, you can follow the attempts of your forebears to find a way through the confusion and make some headway yourself. That, I believe, is the historian's calling. But historians could never pick up the scent of vanished humanity without collaborators who have tended to the manuscript. In the end, therefore, our thanks go to Rodney Dennis and his fellow workers in the vineyards of the Lord at Houghton, for without them there would be no paper chase at all.

5 C. E. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des agn'cult11reet demographicen France au XVII!e sihle (Paris, rcvenusen Francea11 XVI!Ie sihle (Paris, 1933), and Michel 1970). Marineau, Les Faux-semblants d'un dbnarragel?co11omique: