L’effet d’histoire: Historiography in C. F. Meyer’s Novella The Amulet

C. F. Meyer’s 1873 historical novella The Amulet begins with a short preface that masterfully interlinks the referential and poetic functions of language.² This precedent framing³ allows for access to history—in the two-fold sense of the history that takes place (res gestae) and the history, the “story” that is narrated (historia rerum gestarum)—by staging historical transmission as a problem of representation and interpretation: “Pages yellowed with age, documents from the beginning of the seventeenth century, lie before me. I am translating them into the language of our time.”⁴ While in the first sentence, local deixis and objective description dominate, in the second sentence, the linguistic constitution of this object appears as a question of translation. Put differently: In contrast to the first sentence, the second does not evoke the reality of the object denoted (“pages”) as the basic matter of ‘authentic’ representation; instead, detached from an objective support, “documents” enter into language. The reality of representation shows itself in the mode of linguistic translation, in a translation, moreover, that has nothing to do with differences between national languages but instead unfolds as a process of transfers both across historical distances and, we may infer, within one and the same language.

Accordingly, in this passage, time plays the decisive role: “Pages yellowed with age, documents from the beginning of the seventeenth century, lie before me;” they lie exactly where the question is one of rereading distant “documents” in the here and now of the concrete situation. The first-person speaker, insofar as he takes on this reading and translates “documents” into “our time,” brings historically remote writing up to date, “into the language of our time.” In so doing, not only does tradition reveal itself to be an intervention, a rewriting of what is different; it simultaneously repeals its limitations in a dynamic that is peculiarly indifferent to place as well as to time. While “the beginning of the seventeenth century” indicates precisely the historical measure of reference, the exact point at which translating-rewriting sets in remains conspicuously undetermined. No date, no datum is given to anchor this translating. What remains open is not only the time of this translating-reading—“translated” from the first person singular to the plural, from I to our—the time of its being read by others remains open as well. For the address of the other starts from the date. Through dating, a text “recalls a date, calls itself back to its date, to the date on which it writes or of which it writes, as of which it writes (to) itself.” Dating marks that difference into which readers of this translation and “we” enter when we, on the other date of our reading, do not share “the knowledge of the singularity thus dated.”⁵ Yet since we are not told to what to refer “our time” of translating, how the “our” of the preface is to be distinguished from us, the readers, we experience ourselves to be continuously co-addressed by this updating function. This speaking (which addresses us) does not seek to translate from “the beginning of the seventeenth century” to a second, narrowly confined period of time; it translates in sustained fashion as temporalization continuously unfolds. What is sought, then, is a speaking that with this our confronts every new reading with the question of how to translate “documents” from historically remote times “into the language of our time.” This time would thus be the time of reading itself insofar as this as-yet pending reading, in retranslating anew every time it picks up the novella, renews [novelliert] both the novella and itself.⁶

The fact that this renewal first of all concerns language (“I am translating them into the language of our time”) calls up, in Peter Szondi’s terms, the hermeneutic intention of the sensus litteralis. This literal meaning is investigated by the philologist, who acts as a “translator” or “mediator” of ancient writings. He “uses his linguistic knowledge to make intelligible what is not understood, what is no...