Historical Evidence and Argument

9. Sensing Incongruity

9 SENSING INCONGRUITY The vice of this method of handling the inscriptions lies here: that it involves a playing fast-and-loose with well-attested historical documents; hailing them eagerly when they say at once what you want them to say, but discrediting them with all your might when their utterances are troublesome to you; it means that you are unwilling to wait, unable to hold questions of harmony in abeyance, . . . I am president of an explorers’ club which meets once a quarter and tells each other stories, greatly embellished by imagination and wishful thinking. I The Library of Congress classification system is almost universally used in the world of academic libraries. It is not without faults—one of these is that the scheme originally separated “works of literature” from “works of history,” and that division ostensibly remains today. Thus the history of Classical Antiquity is covered by classes DE, DF, and DG, but sources for that history fall into the PA class. The Library of Congress’s attempt to distinguish between literary and historical works is not an isolated case. Cicero might be praised for his high latinity , but his writings are often as important to historians as the more clearly historical approach of his contemporary Sallust, and it becomes impossible to justify 91 drawing lines. This segregation of history and literature has other harmful sideeffects in the way in which texts are approached and assessed. II Johan Huizinga saw the writing of history and literature as all but mutually exclusive . In history writing “[t]here is an absolute craving to penetrate to the genuine knowledge of that which truly happened . . . The sharp distinction between history and literature lies in the fact that the former is almost entirely lacking in that element of play which underlies literature from beginning to end.”1 This hermetic boundary is being eroded, however. Modern literary criticism is increasingly an exercise in determining authorial intent, usually by comparing one version of a text with another. The opportunities to do this for sources from faraway times and places are much fewer, but knowing the results when it can be done alerts us to the dangers of assuming that our only source is also the rendition its author preferred above all others, as well as one that intermediate scribes have not manhandled too rudely. Frederic Holmes wrote about the evolution of Antoine Lavoisier’s ideas from one version of his writings to the next: “[w]e cannot always tell whether a thought that led [Lavoisier] to modify a passage, recast an argument, or develop an alternative interpretation occurred while he was still engaged in writing what he subsequently altered, or immediately afterward, or after some interval during which he occupied himself with something else; but the timing is, I believe, less significant than the fact that the new developments were consequences of the effort to express ideas and marshall supporting information on paper.”2 Holmes captures the notion that the process of writing and thinking, thinking and writing, should be studied as a dialectical whole. He can do this because drafts of Lavoisier’s works exist, from laboratory notes to final publications. Is this a luxury or a nuisance? Some historians would answer one way, some the other, depending on how much of a hurry they are in. Sometimes the temptation is to accept the final—usually the published—version of a text as authoritative, by assuming that the author rejected all previous versions ipso facto, but this deprives historians of an invaluable opportunity to assess sources dynamically, a chance that should never be missed. For literary and textual critics, changes are important because they often allow them to trace textual lineages and influences. Historians have less reason to be grateful, but dare not let ingratitude blind them to the issue. Texts that are deemed 92 ❖ Chapter 9 literary rather than historical tend to be categorized and treated differently, and by scholars with different kinds of training and temperament. It is hard to see the logic of this; all texts are inherently literary and many literary texts ultimately, and sometimes immediately, have historical significance. Uninterested in the techniques and theories of textual criticism, historians risk forgoing important insights into the production and influence of their sources. It is one thing to let textual critics set an example, but should historians let them do their work as well? III One of the great lessons to...