Overkill, or History that Hurts

Toward the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain takes leave of the king and the duke, who are carried off his comic stage:

Here comes a raging rush of people with torches, and a awful whooping and yelling, and banging tin pans and blowing horns; . . . and as they went by I see that they had the king and the duke astraddle of a rail—that is, I knowed it WAS the king and the duke, though they were all over tar and feathers, and they didn't look like nothing in the world that was human—just looked like a couple of monstrous big soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn't ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings CAN be awful cruel to one another.

Buffoons they may be, but unlike Huck, a good-hearted rapscallion, the king and duke are also rogues and reprobates. No one, not even these scoundrels, deserves such punishment: Twain's comic vision is generous enough in its ascription of humanity to make victims of villains. And he invites us to participate in his generosity of spirit.

It would be interesting to trace the history of such expressions of sympathy, even empathy, with malfeasants in torment. The observer is invited to participate in judgment but also to put him- or herself in the uncomfortable position of the condemned. Among the first such figures that come to mind, since I am a medievalist, are Dante's Paolo and Francesca, whom the poet encounters in the first circle of hell. To what extent is our sympathy for them the product of our post-medieval sensibility? Can we imagine medieval viewers ever having responded in similar ways to depictions of saints and sinners in torment? Could we bring ourselves to be so generously inclined toward figures whom we regarded not simply as devious, cowardly, even despicable, but as outright evil? In light of recent world events, such questions are not abstract, though here they are prompted by my reading of a recent work of scholarship, Robert Mills's Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture.¹ Mills's provocative study inserts itself at the junction of debates over power, sexuality, and victimhood that have lately focused attention on groups previously written off as marginal. This focus has radically reshaped the writing of history: victimology is now a discipline unto itself.² Few of us feel any urge to reconsider the merit of emphasizing groups previously neglected; but, in the context of a symposium on relativism, we should perhaps rethink our methods for doing so. Antirelativists tend to assume the existence of a common human nature, across cultures and historical epochs. To what extent can historians of victimization predicate their investigations on this assumption? To what extent do demonstrations of historical difference and of cultural construction—demonstrations in which "anti-anti-relativists" (as Clifford Geertz memorably termed them) tend to specialize—render the assumption of common humanity moot?³ Is Twain's appeal to generosity of spirit, his humanistic tolerance, a form of relativism? What is the role of difference per se in historical studies or, for that matter, in historical anthropology?

On the one hand (to use an expression characteristic of relativists), relativism makes an inquiry such as Mills's possible. I do not mean that an antirelativist (such as Joseph Ratzinger, when cardinal or when pope) would by definition oppose redress for victims, but rather that it takes a relativist to cast a sympathetic eye on forms of behavior—in the case of Mills's book, masochism—that might otherwise be branded deviant.⁴ Is this the kind of "libertinism" that Cardinal Ratzinger had in mind when, in his homily "Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice," he observed how "the small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been . . . flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism."⁵ Thus relativism, though...