The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind

The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind

Roger Chartier

Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane

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Copyright © Roger Chartier 2014

The right of Roger Chartier to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

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Contents

Preface vi

PartI:ThePastinthePresent 1

1 ListentotheDeadwithYourEyes 3

2 History:ReadingTime 27

3 HistoryandSocialScience:AReturntoBraudel 44

PartII:WhatisaBook? 57

4 ThePowersofPrint 59

5 TheAuthor’sHand 73

6 PausesandPitches 87

7 Translation 98

PartIII:TextsandMeanings 121

8 MemoryandWriting 123

9 ParatextandPreliminaries 135

10 PublishingCervantes 150

11 PublishingShakespeare 158

12 TheTimeoftheWork 172

Notes 181

Index 221

Preface

“Escuchar a los muertos con los ojos” [Listen to the dead with your eyes]. Quevedo’s injunction, which provided the title for my inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, seems to me to indicate not only the poet’s respect for his former masters but also the relationship that historians cultivate with the men and women of the past whose suf-ferings and hopes, rational decisions and extravagant dreams, freedom and constraints they strive to understand – and to help others to understand. Only the historians of very recent times, thanks to the techniques of oral inquiry, can offer a literal hearing of the words of those whose history they write. The others – all the others – have to listen to the dead with their eyes alone and recover the old words in archives in which written trace of them has been preserved.

To the despair of historians, those traces, left on papyrus or stone, parchment or paper, usually record only silences: the silences of those who never wrote; the silences of those whose words, thoughts, or acts the masters of writing thought unimportant. Only in rare docu-ments, and in spite of the betrayals introduced by the transcription of scribes, judges, or lettered men, can historians hear the words of the dead who were moved to tell of their beliefs and their deeds, recall their actions, or recount their lives. When these are absent, all that historians can do is to take up the paradoxical and redoubtable chal-lenge of listening to mute voices.

But can our relationship with the dead who inhabit the past be reduced to reading texts that they composed or that speak of them, perhaps unintentionally? In recent years, historians have become aware that they have no monopoly on representing the past, and that its presence can be communicated by relations to history infinitely

Preface vii

more powerful than their writings. The dead haunt memory – or memories. Searching for those memories does not mean “listening to the dead with one’s eyes,” but finding them, without the mediation of the written word, in the immediacy of remembrance and the search for anamnesis, or the construction of collective memory.

Historians also need to admit, whether they like it or not, that the force and the energy of fables and fictions can breathe life into dead souls. That demiurgic will may be typical of all literature, before or after the historic moment at which the word began to designate what today we call “literature,” and which supposes a connection between notions of aesthetic originality and intellectual property. Even before the eighteenth century and the consecration of the writer, the literary resurrection of the dead took on a more literal meaning when certain genres reached out to the past. This happened with the inspiration of the epic, with the narrative and descriptive detail of the historical romance, or when history’s actors were tem-porarily reincarnated by dramatic actors on a stage. In this fashion, works of fiction – or at least certain of them – and collective or individual memory gave a presence to the past that was often stronger than the one that history books could provide. A better understand-ing of these competing elements is one of the prime objectives of the present book.

It contains twelve essays that I have written over the last ten years. The reader will recognize questions and debates that have mobilized historians during the first decade of the century, such as the relations between morphology and history, between microhistory and global history and between the event and long time-span processes. Once historians and the non-historians who aided them in their reflection grew less obsessed than they had been by the challenge to the status of their discipline as knowledge and acknowledged the kinship between the figures and formulas of the writing of history and those governing fictional works, they were better prepared to confront more serenely the challenge launched by the plurality of representa-tions of the past that inhabit our age. This explains the emphasis given in this book to major works of literature that, through the centuries, have worked to fashion the ways in which those who read them (or who listened to someone reading them) thought and felt, according to Marc Bloch’s expression.

Works such as Don Quixote or Shakespeare’s plays were created, performed, published, and appropriated in a time that was not our own. Replacing them within their own historical settings – their his-toricity – is one of the aims of the present book. To do so, it attempts to identify the basic discontinuities that transformed the circulation

viii Preface

of the written word, both literary and nonliterary. The most essential of these discontinuities may not be the most obvious one. It was, as is known, a technical invention: that of printing by Gutenberg in mid-fifteenth-century Mainz. Noting its decisive importance should not allow us to forget, however, that other “revolutions” had as much if not more importance over the long term of the history of written culture in the West. One of these was the appearance, during the early centuries of the Christian era, of a new form of book, the codex, made up of folded and assembled sheets. On several occasions over the centuries, changes in the ways in which people read have been qualified as “revolutions.” Moreover, the vigorous survival of manu-script production in the age of the printing press obliges us to reevalu-ate the power of the printed word and situate it somewhere between utility and disquietude.

Less spectacular, but perhaps more essential for our purposes, was the emergence, during the eighteenth century but with local variation, of an order of discourse founded on the individualization of writing, the originality of the literary work, and what Paul Bénichou has called le sacre de l’écrivain (the consecration of the writer). The con-nection between those three notions, which was decisive for the defi-nition of literary property, reached its apex at the end of the eighteenth century with the fetishization of the autograph manuscript and an obsession with the author’s handwriting as a guarantee of the authen-ticity and the unity of a work dispersed in a number of publications. That new economy of the written word broke with an older order based on quite different practices: frequent collaboration between authors, reuse of content that had been used previously, familiar commonplaces, and traditional formulas, along with continual revi-sion and continuation of works that remained open. It was within that paradigm of the writing of fiction that Shakespeare composed his plays and Cervantes wrote Don Quixote.

Pointing this out is not to forget that, for both of those authors, the canonization process that turned their works into monuments began quite early. That same process, however, was long accompa-nied by a strong awareness of the collective dimension of all textual production (and not only theatrical works) and a weak recognition of the writer as an author. His manuscripts did not merit conserva-tion; his works were not his property; his life experiences were not recorded in any literary biography but only in collections of anec-dotes. The situation changed when the affirmation of creative origi-nality wove together the author’s life and his works, situated works within a biographical framework and made the writer’s sufferings and moments of happiness the matrix of his writing.

Preface ix

Some readers may find it surprising that a historian would risk venturing into literature. The text that opens this collection of essays will explain that audacity. It is based on the idea that all texts – even Hamlet or Don Quixote – have a material form, a “materiality.” Whether destined for the theatre or not, they were read aloud, recited and performed, and the voices that spoke them gave them a corporeal sonority that carried them to their hearers. That sonority is out of the reach of the historian who “listens to the dead with his eyes,” however. What comes down from the past is another “body”: a typographical one. Hamlet or Don Quixote (for which no autograph manuscripts exist) offer us the materiality of their printed inscription in books (or booklets) on the pages that made them available to readers of their day. Several of the essays that follow attempt to decipher the significations constructed by the various forms of those inscriptions.

Texts are linked to several kinds of materiality. That of the book, first and foremost, which gathers together or disseminates, according to whether it includes different works by an author or distributes citations from his works in collections of commonplaces. In the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries, a book did not begin with the text that it was intended to publish: it began with a series of preliminary pieces that expressed the multiple relations implied by the power of the prince, the requirements of patronage, the laws of the market and relations between the authors and their readers. The significations attributed to works depended in part on the textual “porch” that led the reader into the text itself and that guided (but did not absolutely constrain) the reading to be made of them.

The materiality of the book is inseparable from that of the text, if what we understand by that term is the ways in which the text is inscribed on the page, giving the work a fixed form but also mobility and instability. The “same” work is in fact not the same when it changes its language, its text, or its punctuation. Those major changes bring us back to the first readers of works: translators who inter-preted them, bringing to bear on them their own lexical, aesthetic, and cultural repertories and those of their public; correctors, who established the text to prepare it for printing, dividing the copy they had received into sections, adding punctuation and establishing the written form of words; compositors or typographers, whose habits and preferences, constraints, and errors also contributed to the mate-riality of the text; without forgetting the copyists who produced fair copies of the author’s manuscripts and the censors who authorized the printing of the book. In certain special cases, the chain of inter-ventions that shaped a text did not stop at the printed pages, but

x Preface

included readers’ additions, in their own hands, to the books they owned. In the present book, the process by which works are given their particular form is analyzed on the basis of individual examples suggested by the French translators of Spanish authors, by an English actor burdened with the heavy task of interpreting the role of the prince of Denmark and by the correctors and typographers employed by the master printers of the Spanish Golden Age.

It is the very complexity of the process of publication that has inspired the title of this book, which involves both the author’s hand and the printer’s mind. This perhaps unexpected chiasmus is intended to show that although every decision made in a printing shop, even the most mechanical one, implies the use of reason and understand-ing, literary creation always confronts an initial materiality of the text – that of the page that awaits writing. This fact justifies the attempt to create a close connection between cultural history and textual criticism. In part, it also explains the strong and repeated presence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain in the essays that make up this book.

That connection is not due uniquely to my fondness for works of the Spanish Golden Age or to studies that I have previously dedicated to Quevedo’s Buscon, to Lope de Vega’s Arte nuevo de hacer come-dias en este tiempo or to certain chapters of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in particular, the visit of the hidalgo to a Barcelona printshop. It is rooted in historical realities. During its Golden Age, Spain was, as Fernand Braudel wrote, a “land laughed at, belittled, feared, and admired, all at the same time.” It was a land whose language was considered the most perfect and that had produced shining examples of the most seductive literary genres of imaginative writing: the chiv-alric romance, picaresque autobiography, the new comedia, as well as Don Quixote, a work that fell within no established genre. If Spain captures my attention in several chapters of this book, it is also because the printers in the printshops used metaphors that make the book a human creature and God the first printer, while writers con-structed their tales using the humblest and most concrete aspects of writing and publication, novelties that had arisen in a world still dominated by the spoken word, conversation (both popular and let-tered) and the legacy of memory. It is the difficult encounter between the illiterate memory of Sancho Panza and the reader’s memory library that was Don Quixote that lends force to the Sierra Morena chapters of Don Quixote, read here in light of the distinctions elabo-rated in Paul Ricoeur’s great book.

The essays that make up this book, inhabited as they are by great shadows from the past, also hope to contribute to the questions raised

Preface xi

by contemporary mutations in written culture. Digital textuality shakes up the categories and practices that were the foundation for the order of discourses and the books in the context of which the works studied here were imagined, published, and received. The ques-tions that it raises are many: What is a “book” when it no longer is both and inseparably text and object? What are the implications for the perception of works and the comprehension of their meaning of an ability to read individual text units radically detached from the narration or the argument of which they are a part? How are we to conceive of the electronic edition of older works such as those of Shakespeare or Cervantes, given that such techniques permit us, paradoxically, to render visible the plurality and historical instability of the texts, which we normally ignore because of the choices that a printed edition imposes on us, while at the same time these techniques provide a form of inscription and reception of the written word that is completely foreign to the form and the materiality of books as they were offered to readers in the past (and, for some time to come, in the present)?

Such questions are not discussed directly in the present work. Others will do that task better than I could. They are present, however, either explicitly or implicitly, in all of the essays. This may be because the digital world is already modifying the discipline of history by proposing new forms of publication, by transforming the procedures for demonstration and techniques of proof and by permitting a new, better informed, and more critical relationship between the reader and the text. Or it may be because emphasizing the categories and the practices of the written culture that we have inherited may author-ize us to situate better the mutations of the contemporary age. Between apocalyptical judgments that identify those changes as the death of writing and optimistic evaluations that note reassuring con-tinuities, another route is both possible and necessary. It relies on history, not to offer uncertain prophecies, but to reach a better under-standing of the current (and perhaps durable) coexistence of differing modalities of the written word – manuscript, print, and electronic – and, above all, to note with greater rigor how and why the digital world challenges the notions that supported the definition of the work as a work, the relationship between writing and individuality and the idea of intellectual property.

For an author, even a historian-author, rereading one’s own work is always a trial. The essays assembled here have been carefully reviewed in order to correct errors, avoid repetitions, and add the necessary references to works and articles that have appeared after these essays were first published. If I rewrote them today, they would

xii Preface

probably be quite different, but they remain within the basic project that placed them in a certain trajectory of research and reflection. I have always thought, and I still do think, that the historian’s labors follow two needs. He or she should propose new interpretations of clearly defined problems, but also enter into a dialogue with fellow scholars in the neighboring disciplines of philosophy, literary criti-cism, and the social sciences so as to be better armed to reflect on his or her own practices and the directions in which the discipline is going. It is on that condition that history can aid in the construction of a critical knowledge of the present that is our own.

Full bibliographic details of each chapter are given below:

1 “Ecouter les morts avec les yeux,” inaugural lecture for the chair, “Écrit et Cultures dans l’Europe moderne,” 11 October 2007, Collège de France, Collège de France/Fayard, 2008.

2 Unpublished and corrected version of the Postface to the new edition of Roger Chartier, Au bord de la falaise. L’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude, Paris: Albin Michel, Bibliothèque de l’Evolution de l’Humanité, 2009.

3 Unpublished lecture, “Histoire et science social: Retour à Braudel,” given in French at Iasi, Romania, in 2002.

4 Published in French as “Les pouvoirs de l’imprimé” in Ricardo Saez (ed.), L’imprimé et ses pouvoirs dans les langues romanes, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010.

5 Unpublished lecture given as Lord Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at Oxford University, May 2010.

6 Unpublished lecture given at Cambridge as Clark Lecture in May 2009.

7 The French original text of this essay was published in Spanish as “La Europa castellana durante el tiempo del Quijote,” in Antonio Feros and Juan Gelabert (eds), España en tiempos del Quijote, Madrid: Taurus Historia, 2004, pp. 129–58.

8 Published in French as “Mémoire et oubli. Lire avec Ricoeur,” in Christian Delacroix, François Dosse and Patrick Garcia (eds), Paul Ricoeur et les sciences humaines, Paris: La Découverte, 2007, pp. 231–48.

9 The French original of this essay was published in Italian as “Paratesto e preliminari. Cervantes e Avellaneda,” in Marco Santoro and Maria Gioia Tavoni (eds), I Dintorni del testo, Rome: Edizioni dell’ Ateneo, 2005, pp. 137–48.

10 Published in French as “Les auteurs n’écrivent pas les livres, pas même les leurs. Francisco Rico, auteur du Quichotte,” Agenda de la pensée contemporaine 7, Spring 2007: 13–27.

Preface xiii

11 Published in French as “Editer Shakespeare (1623–2004),” 2004, Ecdotica 1: 7–23.

12 Published in French as “Hamlet 1676. Le temps de l’oeuvre,” in Jacques Neefs (ed.), Le temps des oeuvres. Mémoire et préfigura-tion, Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2001, pp. 143–54.

R. C.

Part I

The Past in the Present

1

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes

“Listen to the dead with your eyes” [Escuchar a los muertos con los ojos].1 This line of Quevedo’s comes to mind as we inaugurate a chair devoted to the roles of the written word in European cultures between the end of the Middle Ages and the present day. For the first time in the history of the Collège de France, a chair is dedicated to the study of writing practices, not in the ancient or medieval world, but in the long time span of a modern age that may be unraveling before our eyes. A course of studies of this sort would have been impossible without the works of all those who have profoundly transformed the disciplines that form the base of this new field: the history of the book, the history of texts, and the history of written culture. It is in recalling my debt to two of those scholars, no longer with us today, that I would like to begin this lesson.

There are few historians whose names are attached to the inven-tion of a discipline. Henri-Jean Martin, who died in January 2007, is one of those few. L’Apparition du livre, the book he wrote at the urging of and with Lucien Febvre, published in 1958, is justly held to be the founding work in the history of the book, or at least a new history of the book. As Febvre wrote, Martin made texts descend “from heaven to earth” by a rigorous study of the technical and legal conditions of their publication, the combined factors of their produc-tion, and the geography of their circulation. In works that followed that book, Henri-Jean Martin never stopped enlarging the question-naire, shifting his attention to the trades and the milieus of the book, mutations in the ways in which texts were displayed on the page, and the successive modalities of readability. I was his disciple without being his student. I would have liked to be able to tell him this evening

4 The Past in the Present

how much I owe to him, and also what happy memories I have of our joint intellectual pursuits.

There is another absence, another voice that we need to “listen to with our eyes” – Don McKenzie’s voice. He lived between two worlds, Aotearoa, his native New Zealand, where he was an untiring defender of the rights of the Maori people, and Oxford, where he held the chair in Textual Criticism. An expert practitioner of the erudite tech-niques of the “new bibliography,” he taught us to go beyond its limits by showing that the meaning of a text, whether it was canonical or ordinary, depends on the forms that make it available to be read, that is, the different characteristics of the materiality of the written word. For printed objects, this meant the format of the book, the layout of the page, how the text was divided up, whether or not images were included, typographic conventions, and punctuation. In founding the “sociology of texts” on the study of their material forms, Don McKenzie did not ignore the intellectual or aesthetic significations of works. Quite the contrary. And it is within the perspective that he opened up that I shall situate a course of study that hopes never to separate the historical comprehension of writings from a morphologi-cal description of the objects that bear them.

To these two bodies of works, without which this chair would never have been conceived, I must add a third: that of Armando Petrucci, who is in Pisa and unfortunately cannot be with us today. By focusing on the practices that produce or mobilize the written word and by shaking up the classic divisions – between manuscript and print, between stone and the page, between ordinary writings and literary works – his work has transformed our comprehension of written cultures that have succeeded one another over the very long time span of western history. Petrucci’s works, which are devoted to the unequal mastery of writing and the multiple possibilities offered by the “graphic culture” of an age, are a magnificent illustration of the necessary link between a scrupulous erudition and the most inven-tive kind of social history. What I want to stress here is his basic teaching, which is always to associate in the same analysis the roles attributed to writing, the forms and supports of writing, and ways to read.

Henri-Jean Martin, Don McKenzie, and Armando Petrucci: each one of them would have been about to take or should have taken the place that I now occupy before you. Happenstance or the hazards of the intellectual life decreed otherwise. Their works, constructed in very different fields (the history of the book, material bibliography, paleography) will be present in every moment of the teaching that I shall begin today. By following in their footsteps, I will attempt to

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes 5

understand the place that writing has held within the production of knowledge, in the exchange of emotions and sentiments, in the rela-tions that men and women have maintained with one another, with themselves, or with the sacred.

Present-day mutations, or, the challenges of digital textuality

That task is perhaps urgent today, at a time in which the practices of writing have been profoundly changed. Today we face simultaneous transformations in the supports for writing, the techniques for repro-ducing and disseminating works, and ways of reading. That simulta-neity is unheard of in the history of humanity. The invention of printing did not modify the fundamental structure of the book, which was composed – both before and after Gutenberg – of quires, leaves, and pages brought together in one object. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the codex, this new form of the book, gained popu-larity over the roll, but it was not accompanied by a transformation of techniques for the reproduction of texts, still carried out by hand-copying. If reading went through several revolutions, which histori-ans note and discuss, those revolutions occurred during the long-term development of the codex. Among these were the medieval conquests of silent and visual reading, the rage to read that seized the age of the Enlightenment, or, beginning in the nineteenth century, the arrival of new readers from the popular strata of society, from among women and children both in and out of school.

By breaking the earlier connection between texts and objects and between discourses and their material form, the digital revolution introduced a radical revision of the gestures and the notions that we associate with the written word. Despite the inertia of a vocabulary that attempts to tame novelty by designating to it familiar words, the fragments of texts that appear on our computer screen are not pages, but singular and ephemeral compositions. Moreover, unlike its pred-ecessors, the roll and the codex, the electronic book no longer stands out by its evident material form from other kinds of written texts.

Discontinuity exists even within apparent continuities. Reading facing a screen is a dispersed, segmented reading, attached to the fragment more than to the totality of the work. Is this not, by that token, in a direct line of descent from the practices permitted and encouraged by the codex? The codex invited the reader to leaf through texts, either using the index provided or else reading à sauts et gam-bades, as Montaigne put it. The codex invites us to compare passages, as does a typological reading of the Bible, or to extract and copy

6 The Past in the Present

citations and examples, as demanded by a humanistic compilation of commonplaces. Still, a morphological similarity should not lead us astray. The discontinuity and fragmentation of reading do not have the same meaning when they are accompanied by a perception of the textual totality contained by the written object and when the lighted screen that enables us to read fragments of writing no longer displays the limits and the coherence of the corpus from which they are extracted.

Our interrogations spring from those decisive ruptures. How can we maintain the concept of literary property, defined since the eight-eenth century on the basis of an identity perpetuated in works that are recognizable whatever their form of publication, in a world in which texts are mobile, malleable, open, and in which everyone about to begin writing, as Michel Foucault would have it, can “connect, pursue the phrase, lodge himself, without causing any disturbance, in its interstices”? How are we to recognize an order of discourse, which has always been an order of books or, to put it better, an order of the written word closely associating the authority of knowledge and the form of publication, when technical possibilities permit, without controls or delays, the universal circulation of opinions and knowledge, but also of errors and falsifications? How are we to pre-serve the ways of reading that construct signification on the basis of the coexistence of texts in one object (a book, a journal, a newspa-per), whereas the new mode of conservation and transmission of writings imposes on reading an analytical and encyclopedic logic in which every text has no other context than the one derived from its placement under a certain heading?

The dream of the universal library seems today to be closer to becoming a reality than it ever was, even in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies. Digital conversion of existing collections promises the constitution of a library without walls in which all the works ever published – all the writings that make up the patrimony of humanity – may be accessible. This is a magnificent ambition and, as Borges writes, “When it was proclaimed that the Library included all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness.” The second reaction may well be a question about what is implied by this violence done to texts, given to be read in forms that are no longer those in which readers of the past encountered them. It might be objected that a shift of the sort is not without precedent, and that it was in books that were no longer the rolls of their first circulation that medieval and modern readers appropriated the ancient works – or at least those among such works that they could or wanted to copy. That may well be true. But if we want to understand the significations that

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes 7

readers gave to the texts that they appropriated, we need to protect, conserve, and understand the written objects that bore them. The “extravagant happiness” aroused by Borges’s universal library threat-ens to become an impotent bitterness if it comes at the price of the relegation – or worse, the destruction – of the printed objects that, through the ages, have nourished the thoughts and dreams of those who read them. The threat is not universal, and incunabula have nothing to fear, but the same is not true for humbler and more recent publications, be they periodicals or not.

These questions have already been treated incessantly in innumer-able discourses that attempt to conjure away, by their very abun-dance, the announced disappearance of the book, the written work, and reading. The marvel of some before the unheard-of promises of navigation among the archipelagos of digital texts stands opposed to a nostalgia for a world of the written word that we have supposedly already lost. But must we really choose between enthusiasm and despair? In order to situate more accurately the grandeurs et misères of the present mutations, it may be useful to call on the unique com-petence of the historian. Historians have never been good prophets, but at times, recalling that the present is made of layered or entangled pasts, they have been able to contribute a more lucid diagnosis of novelties that seduce or frighten their contemporaries. It is that auda-cious certitude that gives me courage as I stand at the brink of this course of studies.

The historian’s task

Lucien Febvre was imbued with a like audacity in 1933 when, in a Europe still wounded by war, he gave the inaugural lecture for the chair of “History of Modern Civilization.” His vibrant plea for a history capable of constructing problems and hypotheses was not separated from the idea that history, as with all sciences, “is not done in an ivory tower. It is done in the midst of life, and by living beings who bathe in the century.” Seventeen years later, in 1950, Fernand Braudel, who succeeded Febvre in that chair, again insisted on the responsibilities of history in a world upset and deprived of the certi-tudes it had painstakingly reconstituted. For Braudel, it was by dis-tinguishing the articulated temporalities characteristic of each society that it becomes possible to understand the permanent dialogue between the longue durée and the événement or, in his words, the phenomena situated “outside the reach and the bite of time” and the “profound breaks beyond which everything changes in the life of men.”

8 The Past in the Present

If I have cited these two intimidating examples, it is probably because the propositions of those two generous giants can still guide the work of a historian. But it is also in order to measure the distance that separates us from them. Our obligation is no longer to recon-struct history, as a world twice left in ruins demanded, but rather to better understand and accept that historians today no longer have a monopoly on representations of the past. The insurrections of memory and the seductions of fiction provide strong competition. That situa-tion is not totally new, however. The ten plays written by Shakespeare that were brought together in the 1623 Folio edition under the heading “Histories” may not have conformed to Aristotelian poetics, but they clearly fashioned a history of England stronger and more “true” than the history recounted by the chronicles from which Shakespeare took his inspiration. In 1690, Furetière’s dictionary reg-istered, in its fashion, that same proximity between true history and likely fiction when it designed history as “the narration of things or actions as they occurred, or as they might have occurred.” In our own day, the historical novel, which has profited fully from that defi-nition, assumes the construction of imagined pasts with an energy as powerful as the one that inhabited theatrical works in the days of Shakespeare or Lope de Vega.

The demands of memory, individual or collective, personally expe-rienced or institutionalized, have also attacked the claims of historical knowledge, judged to be cold and inert by the standard of the lively relation that makes us recognize the past in the immediacy of its recollection. As Paul Ricoeur has shown in magnificent fashion, history does not have an easy task when memory takes over the representation of the past and opposes its force and authority to the “discontents of historiography,” a phrase that Ricoeur borrows from Yosef Yerushalmi. History must respect the demands of memory, which are necessary to heal infinite wounds, but, at the same time, it must reassert the specificity of the regime of knowledge that it com-mands. It supposes the exercise of critical analysis, the confrontation between the reasons of history’s actors and the constraints of which they are unaware, and the production of a knowledge that permits operations controlled by a scientific community. It is by marking its difference in relation to powerful discourses, fictional or memory-based, that also make present what is no longer, that history is in a position to assume its responsibility, which is to render intelligible the accumulated heritages and the founding discontinuities that have made us what we are.

It is perhaps somewhat paradoxical to evoke, at the start of a course of historical studies devoted to the written word, an inaugural

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes 9

lecture – that of Lucien Febvre – the point of which was, precisely, to liberate history from the tyranny of the texts and its exclusive connection to writing. Have we forgotten the warnings of that master when he declared war on a poor history of textuaires (the term is his)? I dearly hope not. And, first, because my aim will be always to link the study of texts, whatever they may be, with a study of the forms that confer existence on them and a study of the appropriations that invest them with meaning. Febvre laughed at historians whose “peasants, when it comes to fertile land, seemed only to plow old cartularies.” Let us not make the same mistake by forgetting that the written word is transmitted to its readers or its hearers by objects or voices, the material and practical logic of which we need to under-stand. That is what this chair, the title of which I must now justify, proposes to do.

Writing and cultures in early modern Europe

The limits of my competence – or, rather, the immense extent of my incompetence – define the geographical space of this program of research: Europe. But treating Europe, and Western Europe in par-ticular, does not forbid comparisons with other civilizations that also have used writing and, in some cases, have known printing. There is no institution more favorable for an approach of that sort than this one, which brings together scholars that institutions tend to keep separate. Europe, then, but modern Europe. Do I dare state that the ambiguity of the term works to my advantage? In the jargon of his-torians, “modern” applies to a span of three centuries or more. The “modern age” goes from the fifteenth century (should we say from the discovery of America, the fall of Constantinople, or the invention of printing?) to the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the most important of which being, evidently, the French Revolution, whether we hold it to have been an end or a beginning. My teaching will be inscribed within that first modern age, which was decisive for the evolution of western societies and the study of which has never been interrupted within these walls, beginning with the creation of the chair of “History of Modern Civilization,” occupied by Lucien Febvre, then Fernand Braudel, and continuing with the teachings of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jean Delumeau, and Daniel Roche, who was the master with whom I learned the historian’s trade just as apprentices did in the old workshops. But for us, who believe we are or would like still to be “modern,” the term is also a way of designat-ing our own times. I find that definition equally acceptable because