Extreme Events: Scott's Novels and Traumatic History

Extreme Events: Scott's Novels and Traumatic HistoryEverett Zimmerman Historians of extreme events sometimes conceive of their subject matter as exceeding the boundaries of history. Historical explanations appear to them to diminish their subject matter, bringing it within normalizing or conventionalizing limits. They fear that bringing these extreme events within the parameters of the comprehensible may also tend to make them acceptable. History thus rejects its own explanatory methods in the interest of affirming norms. Notable examples of this process are found in treatments of the Holocaust, and, earlier, in treatments of the period of "terror" during the French Revolution.1 In this paper, I shall examine passages from both novels and histories in which descriptions of extreme events function to demarcate the human from the monstrous. Descriptions of extreme events are thus a rhetorical device to assert a perspective that remains unanalysed, analysis by implication eroding the putatively clear boundaries that divide humanity from the inhumane. In the eighteenth century, the imagery of cannibalism often functions to in1 Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), says prefatorily, "Suggesting the comparability of the Final Solution to other genocides opens the way to apologetics. It facilitates a literature of evasion. But in terms ofhistorical method, some comparisons must be possible. Not only German nationalists but all social scientists must venture comparisons to understand even single events" (p. 1). François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), suggests that only now does the "cooling off" of the "object 'French Revolution'" make "less spontaneous and therefore less compelling the historian's identification with the actors, his commemoration of the founders, or his execration of the deviants" (pp. 10, 11). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 1, October 1997 64 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION dicate the crossing of such boundaries.2 My examples are mainly from Scott, both from his novels and from his Life ofNapoleon Buonaparte, and I also provide comparative examples from the histories of England by David Hume and Catherine Macaulay. Scott's Life ofNapoleon (1827) provides in its first two volumes a direct account of the events of the French Revolution and reveals areas of concern that mesh with those adumbrated in his earlier novels on British history. Scott calls the French Revolution the "period of history, the most important, perhaps ... which the annals of mankind afford."3 He designates the Roman Empire as the Revolution's nearest competitor in brutality, but even Rome was unable to equal Parisian cruelty: "The quantity of blood which [the Revolution] caused to be shed was something unheard of even during the proscriptions of the Roman Empire " (2:285). He finds the French to be "animated ... with the rabid fury, of unchained wild beasts," an image that is soon resolved into an account of their "emulation of literal cannibals," willing not only to destroy their victims but also "to eat their hearts, and drink their blood" (1:157). In the "fatal triumvirate" of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre he finds that "the same degree of cannibal cruelty existed under different aspects" (2:29). But what appears most to excite his loathing or fear is not so much the manifestations of sudden fury but cruelty performed in deliberation, especially in relation to a semblance of a legal process. He says that the massacre of the third of September was "perpetrated , with a quietness and deliberation, which has not its parallel in history" (2:40). The revolutionary ruffians held "the form of a trial" after which the victim was "dispatched by men and women, who, with sleeves tucked up, arms dyed elbow-deep in blood, hands holding axes, pikes, and sabres ... showed that they occupied their posts as much from pleasure as from love of hire" (2:42). The participation of women appears to make the episode especially abhorrent to Scott: "There were places arranged for the male, and for the female murderers, for the work had been incomplete without the intervention of the latter" (2:45). Scott gives no explanation of the nature of this potential incompleteness; presumably the incompleteness is the possible gap in symbolic meaning if the final...