Michelet-as-Oedipus
The
historian is not at all a ‘reader’ of the past, and if he reorganizes History,
it is not on the level of ideas, of forces, of causes or systems, but on the
level of each carnal death. The historian’s duties are not established in terms
of the general concept of historical truth, but only confronting each dead man
of history; his function is not of an intellectual order, it is at once of a
social and a sacred order. The historian is in fact a civil magistrate in
charge of administering the estate of the dead. This civil magistracy is
doubled of course by a priesthood: it is less a matter of keeping vigil over
the memory of the dead than of completing by a magical action what in their
lives may have been absurd or mutilated. The historian is an Oedipus ( he
retrospectively solves human enigmas). History’s dead never understand why they
have lived, for, according to the Sophoclean formula, life is intelligible only
when death has provided it with an irremissible goal. The historian is
precisely the magus who receives from the dead their actions, their sufferings,
their sacrifices, and gives them a place in History’s universal memory.
Truth of Assassinated Men
Caesar under Brutus’s knife, Becket under that of Reginald Fitzurse, the Duke of Orleans under those of
the Burgundians, the Duke of Guise under that of Henri III –each of these has been himself, achieved his true stature,
only once he was dead, lying at his assassin’s feet like a new man, mysterious,
unaccustomed, different from the old one by all the distance of a revelation,
that relation produced by the ultimate coherence of destiny. The new man is the
historical man. If these prone and still-warm dead men are saved from
nothingness, it is because Michelet was already gazing upon them, the historian
was already taking them over, already explaining their lives to them. He was
drawing from them a raw, blind, chaotic, incomplete, absurd life, and restoring
to them a clear life, a full life, embellished by an ultimate signification,
linked to the great (i.e. genetic) surface of History.
Thus, the historian is the man who has reversed Time, who turns back to the
place of the dead and recommences their life in a clear and useful direction;
he is the demiurge who links what was scattered, discontinuous,
incomprehensible: he weaves together the threads of all lives, he knits up the
great fraternity of the dead, whose formidable displacement, through Time,
forms the extension of History which the historian leads while walking backwards,
gathered within his gaze which decides and discloses.
To
Live Out Death
The
historian, funeral magistrate, must therefore approach death more closely than
others. He must live out death, i.e., he must love it; it is at this price
alone that, having entered into a sort of primitive communion with the dead, he
can exchange with them the signs of life. This ceremonial of the approach to
death is Michelet’s entire history.
And this approach is exorcism. Death becomes the necessary and sufficient
object of the historian’s life. Michelet devours the dead ( ‘I have drunk the
black blood of the dead’); he is therefore one of them. Under the moral
finality of Micheletist History, there is an intimate finality which designates
the entire past as Michelet’s nourishment. All of History discloses itself so
Michelet may live on. A magical relationship consecrates the world as the
history as the historian’s nourishment, marks it out as the goal of a
consummation. ‘The gods’, Homer had already said, ‘determine human fates and
decide the fall of men, in order that future generations can compose their
songs.’ At the heart of every resurrectional myth ( and we know too well this
ambition of Micheletist History), there
is a ritual of assimilation. The resurrection of the past it is not a metaphor;
it is actually a kind of sacred manducation
[eating], a domestication of
Death. The life Michelet restores to the dead is assigned a funereal
coefficient so heavy that resurrection becomes the original essence, absolutely fresh and virgin
of death, as in whose dream where one sees a dead person living, while knowing
perfectly well that the person is dead.
In the Micheletist resurrection of the
past, death is heavy. It is neither paradise nor grave, it is the very
existence of the dead person, but dreamed, reconciling in itself the familiar
(touching) features of life and the solemn knowledge of death. In this fashion,
every flaw is connected, every misstep conquered between life and death,
between the timorous solitude of the living historian and the communion of all
the dead who are no longer afraid. It is for this that Michele so readily
shifted his own organism to the countless people of the dead; constantly
touching death, like Antaeus his mother earth, he attached himself to History
as to the apprenticeship of his own death.
Death-as-Sleep
Unfortunately, not all deaths possess that revealing
virtue which discloses the style of an existence. Some are false deaths,
apparent deaths, half deaths, neither death nor life, and these are the worst,
for they cannot enter into the historian’s resurrectional system.
Michelet always had a panic terror of such death-as-sleep; not only for his own
family, whose death he always verified by systematic scarifications and
obsessive exhumation, but also for the
objects of History, whose subsidence into sleep he always described as an
irremissible death, to the very degree where the motionless escapes
transmutation ( the corruption of corpses, a favorite theme, (‘too-alluring
subject’). The sleep of Rome, that of Provence, even that of Christianity – so
many phenomena lost to History. To these sinister torpors, Michelet opposes the
frank deaths of India and of Egypt – honest deaths, ‘at peace and resting in their
graves –legible deaths, the regular nutrient of the historian.
Solar Death
Here, then, on one side is death-as-sleep, which stupefies the sites and
clogs the sense of history, and, on the other, death-as-clarity, which floods
the historical object with the very evidence of its signification. Michelet is
said to have desired this death-as-sun for himself and wanted his own body, upon
his death, to be exposed to the sun until dissolution. This wish has been
compared to Goethe’s last words : mehr
licht. Yet this desire for a solar death had nothing aesthetic or even
mythic about it. Michele could only demand an open death, i.e., a total death:
this dead historian could seek no other paradise than history itself.
We know that such a death was in part stolen from Michelet: not only is his
wish, apparently, apocryphal, but instead of the grave of flaming sunshine
which he was to have at Hyeres, Michelet’s widow chose to give him an official
and elaborate mausoleum at Pere-Lachaise. Here Jules Ferry spoke a now forgotten
oration: the radical-socialist subsidence into sleep was beginning, and
Michelet enter into that motionless enchantment of which he had always been
afraid.
Commemorations of Jules Michelet:
https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/33/3/399/5509324
No comments:
Post a Comment