Anecdote and History

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Anecdote and HistoryAuthor(s): Lionel GossmanSource: History and Theory, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 143-168Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590879 .

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Historyand Theory42 (May 2003), 143-168 C WesleyanUniversity2003 ISSN: 0018-2656

ANECDOTE AND HISTORY

LIONELGOSSMAN

Eine Anekdote ist ein historischesElement-ein historischesMolecule oderEpigramm.-Novalis'

ABSTRACT

Althoughthe term"anecdote" nteredthe modemEuropean anguagesfairly recentlyand

remains o thisdayill-defined,the short,freestanding ccountsof particularvents,trueor

invented,that areusuallyreferred o as anecdoteshave been around rom time immemor-

ial. Theyhave also alwaysstoodin a close relation o the longer,moreelaboratenarratives

of history,sometimes in a supportiverole, as examples and illustrations, ometimes in a

challengingrole, as the repressedof history-"la petite histoire."Historians'relationto

them, in turn,variedfromappreciative o dismissive in accordancewith theirown objec-tives in writinghistory.It appearsthat highly structuredanecdotesof the kind that are

rememberedandfind theirway into anecdotecollections dependon and tend to confirmestablished views of history,the world, andhumannature.In contrast, oosely structured

anecdotesakin to the modemfait divers have usually worked to undermineestablished

views and stimulatenew ones, eitherby presentingmaterial knownto few and excluded

fromofficiallyauthorizedhistories,orby reporting"odd"occurrences or which the estab-

lished views of history,the world,and humannaturedo noteasily account.

I. WITTGENSTEIN'SOKER

How are anecdotes related to history and to the writing of history? The question

was raised in an unusually vivid way by David Edmonds and John Eidinow's

recent,highly successful book Wittgenstein's oker: The Storyof a Ten-Minute

Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. The kernel of the book is a fairly

well-known anecdote about the encounter of two celebrated Viennese philoso-

phers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, at a meeting of the Moral Science

Club of Cambridge University on October 25, 1946. Before the end of Popper's

talk, according to some, Wittgenstein became so incensed by the visitor's delib-

erately provocative rejection of his own view that there are no philosophical

problems, only language puzzles, that he rose to his feet, brandishing a red-hot

poker in Popper's face before storming angrily out of the room; according to oth-

ers, Wittgenstein, having used the poker "in a philosophical example" before

dropping it on the tiles around the fireplace, then "quietly (left) the meeting and

1.Novalis,Schriften,d.PaulKluckhohnndRichardamuel, ol.2:"Dasphilosophische erk,"ed.Richardamuel,Hans-Joachimdihl,ndGerhardchulz Stuttgart:ohlhammer,960),567.



144 LIONELGOSSMAN

(shut) the door behindhim."2The competing versions of the anecdote told by

those who witnessed the scene raise one of the oldest and most fundamentalof

allhistoriographicalproblems:

how to determinewhatactuallyhappened

when

eyewitnessreportsareat variance.The problem s aggravated n this instanceby

the fact that all the eyewitnesses in questionwerephilosopherspresumablyded-

icated to the disinterestedsearchfor truth.

Intriguingas this aspectof Wittgenstein's oker mightbe, it is hard not to be

disappointedby the basic strategythe authorsadoptedfor the writing of their

book. This consistedin expandingthe dramaticanecdoterecountedat the begin-

ning into a complex, circumstantial,novel-like story. Edmonds and Eidinow

draw on standardntellectualbiographiesof WittgensteinandPopper,as well as

publishedhistoricaltestimonies

by personsclose to them, histories of Viennese

society andculture,and accounts of modem philosophy, o painta broadtableau

of the two principalcharactersand their world and to explaintheirintenserival-

ry.We learn aboutthe competing philosophicalpositionsof the two protagonists

andthe largerbackgroundof earlytwentieth-centuryViennesephilosophyfrom

which they both emerged;we learn aboutthe families in which they grew up-

bothhighlyassimilatedJewishfamilies, one fabulouslywealthyand almostaris-

tocratic,the other solidly bourgeois;we learn aboutthe differentlayers of the

Viennesesociety they belongedto and in particularabouttheirdifferentexperi-

ences,as Austrians of Jewish

descent,in a

pervasivelyanti-Semitic culture;

abouthow each was affected by and respondedto National Socialism and the

incorporation f Austria into the ThirdReich; about their differentconnections

with English philosophersand English society; and so on. The anecdote thus

unfoldsintosomethingclose to a culturalandintellectualhistoryof an important

partof Europe n the firsthalfof the twentiethcentury."Thestoryof the poker,"in Edmonds'sandEidinow's own words,"goesbeyondthe characters nd beliefs

of the antagonists. t is inseparable rom the storyof theirtimes, openinga win-

dow on the tumultuousand tragic history that shaped their lives and brought

themtogether

nCambridge."3As the representationof a dramaticencounter of two rival philosophers,the

original anecdote had a stripped-down,almost abstractcharacterwhich left

room-a typical featureof manyoral forms-for variationsof detail. Its focus,

besides the competitionbetween two particularways of looking on the world-

"theschismin twentieth-century hilosophyover the significanceof language,"

as Edmondsand Eidinowputit4-was perhaps he moregeneral,comic contrast

betweenthe ostensiblenatureof philosophy,as the disinterestedanddisembod-

ied pursuitof truth,and the intensepersonalconflict of thetwo philosophers,cul-

minating in an apparentthreat of physical violence; between the tranquil,unworldly ocus of the event-a shabbyroomin a quiet Cambridge ollege-and

2. David Edmonds and John Eidinow,Wittgenstein's oker: TheStory of a Ten-MinuteArgumentBetweenTwo GreatPhilosophers(London:Faber andFaber,2001), 16-17.

3. Ibid.,5.

4. Ibid.



ANECDOTEAND HISTORY 145

the passionsthat were unleashed n it.5The particularphilosophicalviews of the

rivalprotagonistswere barelyalluded to in the anecdote,which-fairly typical-

lyas it turnsout-

supposesthatthe audience

alreadyhascertainnotionsof them.

EdmondsandEidinow,in contrast,fill out the anecdote'selementary,essentiallydramatic tructure, utflesh on its bones,and deck it out in colorfulclothing.The

300-page historyto which it gives rise is an intelligentlyconductedamplificatio,but it contains no surprises.The antithesisat the core of the anecdote continues

to structure he history, providingthe frameworkon which the authorsarrangeanddisplaytheirrich but familiarborrowings.

II. DRAMATICAND NOVELISTICCONSTRUCTIONSOF REALITY

The relation of the epic and dramaticgenres, and the implications,in terms of

ideology or Weltanschauung, f narrativeversus dramaticrepresentations f the

world, have been a major topic of reflection on literaturesince Antiquity.As

anecdotes,I now believe, may favoreither--they mayreducecomplex situations

to simple, sharplydefined dramaticstructures,but they may also, if more rarely,

priseclosed dramaticstructuresopen by perforating hem with holes of novelis-

tic contingency-a brief discussion of this topic is in order.

The developmentof narrative n the eighteenth centuryseems to have been

partof the

generalcritical

approachof the

Enlightenmentandits

questioningof

the normsandbeliefs about the natureof humanbeings and the world enshrined

in the content andthe formof Frenchclassical literature.Thesenormsand beliefs

had the undeniable meritof facilitatinga common recognitionand understand-

ing of particularactions, situations, and personalitiesand thus of reinforcingsocial cohesion. The novels of Marivaux,Sterne, and Diderot,in contrast,car-

ried-again both formally and thematically-a deliberately disorientingmes-

sage: thatif we examine particularactions, situations,andpersonalitiescloselyand in individualdetail, we will find that they are not neatly orderedandpre-dictable n themanner

suggestedbythelimited

repertoryof actionsandthewell-

defined,often antithetical ets of charactersold man/youngman, master/servant,

and so on) to which they arereducedin classical drama,or by the equally gen-eral antitheticalcategories(appearance/reality,ubstance/accident,mind/matter,

andso on) to which they arereducedin classical philosophy.6What Marivaux's

La Viede Marianneand Diderot'sJacques le fataliste imply is thatrealityis a

process of unpredictableandcontinuousmutations,not somethingalreadypre-

5. In his essay on the structureof thefait divers,RolandBarthes considers"disproportion"nda

"slightlyaberrant ausality"to be a featureof the "genre"--if thefait divers can be designateda

genre. ("Structuredu fait divers,"in Essais critiques [Paris:Seuil, 1964], 188-197) Most of whatBartheshas to say aboutthefait diversholds equallyfor certaintypesof anecdote.In thepresentcase,the disproportionmightbe said to arise from the spectacleof philosophers,who are meant to argue,to use words,resorting o physicalviolence,andfromupsetting he "normal" elation,among philoso-

phers,of body andmind.

6. Therepertoryof gesturesandexpressionscodifiedfor paintersby CharlesLe Brun,Directorof

Louis XIV'sAcad6mieRoyalede Peinture, s another xample, alongsidethe"emplois"or stock char-

acters of the theater,of a view of the world in which the generalwas deemed more real and funda-

mental than the particular.



146 LIONELGOSSMAN

formed and simply waiting to be elaboratedand unfolded (literally divelopped,with local variations,as in classical comedy, the classical nouvelle or, for that

matter,Cartesianmechanistbiology).7In the greateighteenth-century arratives,

life is an adventure,not the actingout of a dramaticpart.It is probablynot for-

tuitous that the heroof Rousseau'sgroundbreaking utobiographical arrative s

a thoroughlyuprootedbeing, orthat the centralcharacters f key eighteenth-cen-

tury novels, such as La Vie de Marianne and Fielding's Tom Jones, are

foundlingsor persons of unknownorigin.To such individuals the worldhas no

obvious markersbut is an enigmawhose workingsthey have to explore. They in

turndo notpresentthemselvesto the world withobvious markers,but mustcon-

stantlyinvent and reinventthemselves in a complex negotiationwith the world

and its expectations. Appearanceandreality,

truth and fiction, virtue and vice,

body andsoul, masculine andfeminine turnout, in much of the literatureof the

eighteenthcentury, o be not nearlyas clearlydistinguishableas readersof clas-

sical literatureandphilosophy might have been encouragedto suppose.Human

behavior and the humanpsyche no longer appearreducible to the clearly bal-

anceddesigns andcategoriesof the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.

Writing n the secondhalf of theeighteenthcentury,Chamfort, orone, did not

believe matterswere so simple. "Thingsaremiscellanies,"he declared;"menare

patchworks.Ethics andphysics are concernedwith mixtures.Nothingis simple,

nothingis

pure."8Tothe authorof Maximes et Pensees, Caract&restAnecdotes,

the anecdoteitself, by situating moralityin a narrativecontext, however slight,

representeda much-needed correction to the abstractformal structureof the

maxim as practiceda centuryearlierby La Rochefoucauldand a challengeto its

seemingly incontrovertible ruths."Moralists, ike those philosopherswho have

constructedsystems of physics or metaphysics,have overgeneralized,and laid

down too manymaxims,"he wrote.

What, orinstance, ecomesof thesayingof Tacitus, Awomanwho has losthermod-

estywillnotbeable o refuseanythingfterward,"henconfronted ith heexamples fso

manywomenwhoma moment f weakness asnot

preventedrom

practicingnum-

berof virtues. haveseenMadame eL_, afterayouthwhichdifferedittle rom hatofManonLescaut,onceive n herriper earsa passionworthy f Heloise.9

7. A weakeningof classical models of compositionis also visible in historiography.n one of myfirst attemptsto study the structureof a historical text ("Voltaire'sCharlesXII:History into Art,"Studieson Voltaireand the EighteenthCentury25 [1963], 691-720), I tried to show that Voltaire's

early Histoire de Charles XII could be seen as the filling out of an essentiallydramaticstructure r,in rhetorical erms,as the elaborationof an antithesis(Peterof Russia versus Charlesof Sweden,mod-

em calculationandruthlessnessversusold-fashionedchivalryandhonor,etc.) or a chiasmus(thevic-

tor is vanquished, he vanquishedvictorious).The informingantithetical tructure f thework,I held,is reinforcedby thepervasivenessof parallelsandantithesesatthe textuallevel andepitomized n the

prolepticembeddedanecdote of the CzarafisArtfchelou n Book 2. I contrasted his earlyhistoricalwork of Voltaire'swiththe laterSihclede LouisXIV andtheEssai sur les moeurs,both of which I saw

as less dramatic,moretrulynarrative,moreopen-ended, ending away fromthe paradigmaticoward

the syntagmatic despitethe recurrent ntitheticalstructure f enlightenmentversussuperstition).8. "Dans es choses, tout est affairesmldees;dans les hommes,tout estpieces de rapport.Au moral

et auphysique,tout est mixte. Rien n'est un, rien n'est pur."9. "Les Moralistes, ainsi que les Philosophes qui ont fait des systhmes en Physique ou en

Mdtaphysique nt trop generalise,ont tropmultipli6les maximes.Que devient,parexemple, le mot




Though only evoked and not recounted, he anecdote about Madamede L_ (its

claim to reality signaledby the deliveryof the first-person estimony in the per-

fect, not the past tense), does not providea concreteparticularnstance to illus-

tratea generalrule; rather,t bolsters a propositionchallenginggeneralrulesand,

along with them, the view of the worldimplied andcommunicatedby classical

drama, he classicalmaxim,theclassicalcaract&re, ndsome of the basic figuresof classical rhetoric.As Chamfortput it, it is necessaryto pay attention o peo-

ple's actual behavior"afinde n'etrepas dupede la charlatanerie es Moralistes"

("inordernot to be fooled by the quackeryof ourtheoristsof humannature")--

such as La Rochefoucauldand La Bruybre.

III. DEFININGTHEANECDOTE

These preliminaryobservations eave the anecdote stillundefined.In fact, schol-

ars cannot even agree whether there is anything definablethere, whether the

anecdotecan properlybe considereda particular orm or genre, like the novel,

the maxim,or the fable. The scholarly iteratureon the topic, moreover, s scat-

teredandfairlythin,as thoughthe anecdote were thought o be too trivial a form

to deserve serious consideration.While much has been written aboutthe essen-

de Tacite:Neque mulier,amissapudicitia, alia abnueritaprds 'exemple de tant de femmes qu'unefaiblessen'a pas emp&ch6ese pratiquer lusieursvertus?J'aivu madamede L. .., apresunejeunesse

peu diff6rentede celle de Manon Lescaut, avoir, dans l'age mfr, une passion digne d'Hdloise."

Sdbastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort,Productsof the Perfected Civilization:Selected Writingsof

Chamfort, ransl. W. S. Merwin (New York:The MacmillianCompany,1969), 130 (chap. ii), 160

(chap. v). OriginalFrench texts in Maximes et Pensdes, Caractureset Anecdotes, ed. ClaudeRoy

(Paris:UnionG6ndraled'Editions,1963),56, 88. Cf. the firstmaximof chap. : "Maximsandaxioms,

like summaries,are the worksof personsof intelligencewho havelabored,as it seems, for the conve-

nience of mediocre andlazy minds.The lazy arehappyto find a maximthatsparesthem the necessi-

ty of makingfor themselves the observations hat ed the maxim'sauthor o the conclusionto which

he invites his reader.The lazy andthe mediocre maginethatthey need go no further,and ascribeto

the maxim a generality hatthe author,unless he was mediocrehimself,as is sometimes thecase, has

not claimed for it. The superiormangraspsatonce theresemblances, hedifferences,which render he

maximmore or less applicable n one instanceor another,or notat all. It is much the same with nat-

uralhistory,where theurgeto simplifyhasled to the imaginationof classificationsanddivisions.Theycould not have been framedwithoutintelligence for the necessarycomparisonsandthe observingof

relationships;but the greatnaturalist,he man of genius, sees that nature s prodigalin the invention

of individuallydifferentcreatures,andhe sees the inadequacyof divisions andclassificationswhich

are so commonlyused by mediocre andlazy minds"(109). ("LesMaximes,les Axiomes, sont,ainsi

que les Abrdg6s,l'ouvrage des gens d'esprit, qui ont travailld, ce semble, 'a 'usage des esprits

m6diocresou paresseux.Le paresseuxs'accommoded'une Maximequi le dispensede faire ui-meme

les observationsqui ont mend l'Auteur de la Maxime au r6sultatdontil fait partie'ason Lecteur.Le

paresseuxet l'homme m6diocre se croient dispens6s d'aller au-deli, et donnentA a Maxime une

g6ndralit6que l'Auteur,Amoins qu'il ne soit lui-meme m6diocre .. .n'a pas pr6tendu ui donner.L'hommesup6rieuraisit toutd'un coup les ressemblances,es diff6rencesqui font quela Maxime est

plus ou moins applicablea tel ou tel cas, ou ne l'est pas du tout.Il en est de cela comme de l'Histoire

naturelle,oil le d6sirde simplifiera imagind es classes et les divisions.IIa fallu avoirde l'esprit pourles faire. Car il a fallu rapprocher t observerdes rapports.Mais le grandNaturaliste,I'hommede

g6nie voit que la Natureprodiguedes dtres ndividuellementdiff6rents, t voit l'insuffisancedes divi-

sions et des classes qui sontd'un si grandusageauxespritsm6diocresou paresseux..." (Maximeset

pensdes,33).



148 LIONELGOSSMAN

tial natureof tragedy,comedy,the epic, the novel, the shortstory,the maxim, I

have been able to findonly a few works,almostexclusively by Germanscholars,

thatattempt o define the nature,form, andfunction of the anecdote.10Valuable

as these studies are, they focus mainly on a particular pecies of anecdotethat

was elevatedin the firsttwo decades of the nineteenthcenturyto the status of a

recognized and admired,if minor, literaryform in Germanyby the Prussian

dramatist ndshortstorywriterHeinrichvon Kleistand the Basel-bornSwabian

preacherand popular dialect poet Johann Peter Hebel. (The conjunction of

drama,short-story orm,andanecdotein the case of Kleist does not, as we shall

see, appear o be fortuitous, nasmuchas the dramaand the shortstoryare,like a

certain kind of anecdote, condensed forms representinga critical moment in

which the "essence" of a situationor characters supposedto be made visible.)

The word"anecdote"tself was and is used to describea wide rangeof narra-

tives, the definingfeatureof which appears o be less theirbrevity (thoughmost

arequiteshort)thantheir lack of complexity.As the OED putsit, an anecdote s

the "narrative f a detached ncident,or of a single event, told as being in itself

interestingand striking.""That general dictionarydefinition,which obviouslyaims to distinguishthe anecdotefrom morecomplex narrative orms like histo-

10. In particularKlaus Doderer,"Die deutscheAnekdoten-Theorie"n his Die Kurzgeschichte.

IhreFormund ihreEntwicklung1953] (Darmstadt:WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft,1969);Hans

Franck,DeutscheErzdihlkunstTrier:FriedrichWinter,1922);RichardFriedenthal,"VomNutzen undWertderAnekdote," n SpracheundPolitik:Festgabefiir Dolf Sternberger um60. Geburtstag,ed.

Carl-JoachimFriedrichand BennoReifenberg (Heidelberg:LambertSchneider,1968), 62-67; Heinz

Grothe, Anekdote, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart:Metzler, 1984); Robert Petsch, Wesen und Formen der

ErzdhlkunstHalle/Saale:Max Niemeyer, 1934); Rudolf Schifer, Die Anekdote:Theorie,Analyse,Dialektik(Munich:Oldenbourg,1982); WalterErnstSchhifer,Anekdote-Antianekdote: um Wandel

einer literarischenForm in der Gegenwart(Stuttgart:Klett-Cotta,1977). In addition, n English,are

the hard-to-come-byDissertation on Anecdotes(1793) of Isaac D'Israeli (himselfno mean compilerof anecdotes),and the Introductionby Clifton Fadiman to the Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes

(Boston/Toronto:Little, Brown & Co., 1985). Most of these works attemptto define the essential

characteristics nd functions of the anecdote.Themore historicalapproachadoptedby VolkerWeber,

Anekdote-Die andere Geschichte (Tiibingen: StauffenburgVerlag, 1993) and Sonja Hilzinger,

AnekdotischesErzdhlen im Zeitalter der Aufkldirung:Zum Struktur-und Funktionswandelder

GattungAnekdote nHistoriographie,Publizistikund Literaturdes 18. JahrhundertsStuttgart:M&P

Verlagfir Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1997)-provide an invaluablecomplement to these other-

wise preeminently ormal studies of the anecdote.In French,in additionto RolandBarthes'sessay

(see n. 5 above), several articlesdevoted to the ait diversinAnnales 38 (1983), 821-919, throwmuch

light on the closely related, sometimesindistinguishable orm of the anecdote,notablyMarcFerro,

"Pr6sentation"821-826) and Michelle Perrot,"Faitdiverset histoireau XIXeme sihcle"(911-919).11. TheOED definitioncorresponds emarkablyo Roland Barthes'sdefinitionof thefait diversin

"Structure u fait divers":"Le faitdivers ... est une informationotale .. .; il contient en soi toutson

savoir:pointbesoin de connaitre ien dumondepourconsommerun faitdivers; l nerenvoie formelle-

ment a rien d'autrequ'a lui-meme; bien sur, son contenu n'est pas dtrangerau monde: ddsastres,

meurtres, nlevements,agressions,accidents, vols, bizarreries,outcela renvoie i

l'homme,ason his-

toire, h son alienation,ta es fantasmes." "The ait divers ... is a complete piece of information n

itself...It containsall its knowledgewithinitself: consumptionof afait diversrequiresno knowledgeof theworld; trefers formallyto nothingbutitself;of course,its contentis not unrelated o the world:

disasters, murders,abductions,robberies,and eccentricities all refer to humanbeings, theirhistory,their conditionof alienation,theirfantasies.")But it contains its own circumstances,ts own causes,

its own past, its own outcome. It is "sansdur6eet sans contexte"(It has "neither emporalduration

norcontext") (189).




ry andthe novel, still accommodatesa wide varietyof verbalpractices,bothoral

andwritten,bothpopularandcultivated: hejoke or the tall story;thejewel-likeshortnarrative,with its witty punchline, thatwas

developedin the salons of the

elite in the eighteenthcentury; he shorttale, usually containinga moral lesson,of the type composed (or adapted)by JohannPeter Hebel for Swiss andGerman

popularalmanacs or Kalender;the highly stylized, now classic anecdotes of

Heinrichvon Kleist.12 The later,carefullycraftedworks, entitledAnekdoten,byWilhelm Schifer, and the so-called Kalendergeschichtenof Bert Brecht-a

sophisticatedkind of anti-anecdote ntendedto undermine the sharedassump-tions thatthe traditionalanecdotedependson for its intelligibilityandeffective-

ness-must also be regardedas productionsof high literaryart.Moreover,the

anecdotemay be fairlydetached andfree-standing,

as in anecdote books or col-

lections.13 Or it may be integrallyconnectedwith andembedded n a largerargu-ment or narrative,as in sermonsand most historicalwritings.

As to its form,whatmostpeople wouldconsidertheclassic anecdote s a high-

ly concentratedminiaturenarrativewith a strikinglydramatic hree-actstructure

consistingof situationor exposition,encounteror crisis, andresolution the last

usuallymarkedby a "pointe"or clinchingremark,often a "bonmot."l4 But rel-

atively unstructured hort narrativesof particularevents, such as the miscella-

neous murders, rials, and naturalcatastrophesrecorded in Smollet's late eigh-

teenth-centuryHistory of Englandrom

theRevolution o theDeathof George

II,as a kind of addenda o the principalpoliticalevents,'5or thefaits diversreport-

12. ThoughKleist firstpublishedhis anecdotes in a newspaperwith which he was associated,the

BerlinerAbendbldtter,t is fairto assumethat the readership f the paper,unlike thatof almanacsor

Kalender,was the educated middle and upper class of the Prussiancapital. See HeinrichAretz,Heinrich von Kleist als Journalist: Untersuchungenzum "Phdbus,"zur "Germania"und zu den"BerlinerAbendbldttern"Stuttgart:Hans-DieterHeinz, 1983).

13. Inthe well knownPercyAnecdotes, ndividualanecdotesaregrouped n thirty-eightcategories,

accordingto the themes they are held to illustrate,such as "Humanity,""Eloquence,""Youth,"

"Enterprise,""Heroism,""Justice," "Instinct," "Beneficence," "Fidelity,""Hospitality,""War,"

"Honor,""Fashion." ThomasBeyerley and JosephClintonRobertson[pseud.Reuben and Sholto

Percy], The Percy Anecdotes, revised ed., to which is added a valuable collection of American

Anecdotes[New York:HarperandBrothers,1843]).14. There is still work to do to explore the relationof the anecdote to the joke, the Renaissance

facitie or Schwank,and the apophtegm.One of the chief repositoriesof apophtegms,the De vita et

moribusphilosophorumof Diogenes Laertius,a favorite work of Renaissancescholars (it was print-ed in Baselby Frobenius n 1533),became the object,in the last thirdof thenineteenthcentury,of the

scholarlyattention of the young Nietzsche, whose own disruptive,fragmentaryphilosophicalstylehad a good deal in common with collections of apophtegms.

15. Book III, chap. xiii (covering the year 1760) may be consideredfairly typical of Tobias

Smollet's practice."Beforewe record the progressof the war [the Seven Years'War]," he author

announces,"itmaybe necessaryto specify some domesticoccurrences hat or a little while engrossedthe

publicattention."Therefollows a series of anecdotesof murders, rials,etc. only loosely connect-ed by the generalproposition para.12) that"Homicide s thereproachof England:one would imag-ine thatthere s something n theclimate of thiscountry, hatnot only disposesthenatives to thisinhu-manoutrage,buteven infects foreignerswho resideamongthem."These more or less extensive nar-

ratives,alongwith themanynarratives f individualsandparticularpisodesinterspersedn the"pub-lic" history,should doubtless be distinguished rom more generalreports(reminiscentof traditional

Annals), such as that (para.42) of "the horrors and wreckof a dreadfulearthquake,protracted n

repeated hocks,"that struckSyriaand"beganon thethirteenthdayof October,n the neighbourhood



150 LIONELGOSSMAN

ed in the newspapers,have also often been referred o, since the eighteenthcen-

tury,as anecdotes.16

In addition,the term "anecdote"waswidely

used in the lateeighteenth

and

earlynineteenthcenturiesto designatea species of historicalwritingthatdelib-

eratelyeschewed large-scale"narrativization,"o borrowHaydenWhite'suseful

term.These anecdote-histories--Anecdotesdes Republiques(1771), Anecdotes

arabes et musulmanes(1772), Anecdotesespagnoles et portugaises depuis l'o-

riginede la nationjusqu' nosjours (1773), Anecdotes ameiricaines1776), and

so on--seem to be definedby their ostensible refusal of systematization, otal-

ization, and ideological interpretation ndby theirreportingof only particular,

relatively solatedepisodes,often enoughin simplechronologicalorder,as in the

annals and chronicles of the MiddleAges (interest

n which revived, as ithap-pens, around he same time).17

of Tripoli."The report s a list rather han a narrative: Agreatnumberof houses were overthrownn

Seyde, andmanypeople buriedunderthe ruins ... an infinite numberof villages ... were reduced o

heapsof rubbish.At Acra,or Ptolemais,the sea overflowed ts banks andpoured nto the streets.The

city of Saphetwas entirelydestroyed,and the greatestpartof its inhabitantsperished.At Damascus

all the minarets were overthrown, and six thousand people lost their

lives." (TheHistory of England rom the Revolution n 1688 to the Death of George the Second,6

vols. [London:J. Walker,1811],VI, 189-216, 261).

16. "VermischteAnekdoten"was the headingunder which the writer ChristianFriedrichDaniel

Schubart 1731-1791) gathered ogethera greatvarietyof reportsof events andpersonalities n hisbi-weekly newspaperTeutscheChronik(1774-1777; under other names until 1793). The term aitdivers datesonly from 1863 andappears o have no equivalent n otherlanguages,which simplybor-

row the French erm. What s nowunderstoodbyfait divers used to be designated n Frenchas "anec-

dotes,""nouvellescurieuses,singulibres,"or "canards."See MichellePerrot,"Fait divers et histoire

au XIXeme siecle" [as in note 9]).17.Thecatalogueof Princeton'sFirestoneLibraryists well over 200 volumes undertitles such as

Anecdotesafricaines,Anecdotesamdricaines,etc. Most were publishedbetween 1750 and 1830, but

thegenrecontinueswell into the nineteenthcentury.Thesetextsvaryin character. ome authors nsist

on the fragmentary, eyewitness character of their work. Thus the author of Anecdotes and

CharacteristicTraitsrespectingthe Incursionof theFrenchRepublicans ntoFranconia in the Year

1796, byan Eye-Witness translatedromtheGerman London:J.Bell, 1798]) declares n his Preface:

"I do not herepresentthe publicwith a complete historyof the French ncursion nto Franconia;but

supplythe futurehistorianof thatmemorableevent with a few facts andincidents,of which I was an

eye-witness,collected within the district whereI reside.Every circumstancerelatedhere is genuine.I endeavouredo be an attentiveobserver, o collect with fidelity,and to delineatewithoutprejudice."

George Henry Jennings, the author of An AnecdotalHistory of the British Parliamentfrom the

Earliest Period to the Present Time(New York:Appleton,1883), aims to "bring ogether n anecdo-

tal formsome of the most striking acts in the historyof ourParliaments,andthe publiclives of dis-

tinguishedstatesmen" n orderto returnto the "original"of certain statementsand episodes which

have suffered,he says, from what Gladstone called "mythicalaccretion." L. A. Caraccioli's brief

Anecdotespiquantesrelatives auxEtats-Gindraux 1789) retail how the news of the Estates General

was received in various European capitals (Rome, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Stockholm,

Constantinople,Vienna,London), n Paris andatVersailles,andin manyFrenchprovincialtowns. Incontrast,GuillaumeBertoux's Anecdotes espagnoles et portugaises depuis l'origine de la Nation,

jusqu' nosjours, 2 vols. (Paris:Vincent, 1773) and his earlierAnecdotes ran!aises depuis l'dtab-

lissment de la monarchiejusqu'au rkgne de Louis XV (Paris: Vincent, 1767), the anonymousAnecdotes des Rdpubliques,2 vols, (Paris:Vincent, 1771), divided into "Anecdotes G6noises et

Corses,""AnecdotesV6nitiennes,""AnecdotesHelv6tiques,"etc., the Anecdotes arabes et musul-

manesdepuis l'an de J.-C. 614, edpoque e l'dtablissementdu Mahomitanismeen Arabiepar lefaux

ProphkteMahometjusqu'dl'extinction du Caliphaten 1578 of J.F. de Lacroix andA. Harnot Paris:




IV. EARLYUSES OFTHETERM"ANECDOTE"

Thoughanecdoteshave been around n one formor another or a

very long time,as long, no doubt,as rumorandgossip, it was not untilfairlylate-around 1650

in French,a few years ater n English-that the term"anecdote"tself entered he

European anguages.Its introductionwas probablya result of the discoveryand

publicationby the VaticanLibrarian,n the year 1623, of a text referred o in the

Suda,an eleventh-centuryByzantineencyclopedic compilation,as Anekdota lit-

erally"unpublishedworks")andattributed o Procopius, he sixth-centuryauthor

of an officially sanctionedHistory in Eight Books of the EmperorJustinian's

Persian,Vandal,and Gothicwars andof a laudatoryaccountof Justinian'sbuild-

ing program,De Aedificiis.At

first,he termretained n the modem

languagesthe

purely echnicalmeaningof "unpublished"hat t had hadbothfor thosewho used

it in antiquity Cicero,DiodorusSiculus)andfor the eleventh-century ompilersof the Suda. In the mid-eighteenth century,Dr. Johnson'sDictionary defines

"anecdote"as "somethingyet unpublished."Accordingto the Encyclopidie arti-

cle (by theAbbe Mallet),"anecdote"designates"tout6critde quelquegenrequ'il

soit,quin'apasencore6t6publie" "anypiece of writing,of whateverkind,which

has not yet been published").18From this literal meaning of "unpublished"

springs, n all likelihood,the meaningof "an item of news orfait divers" that s,

somethinghitherto unknown or

unpublished)which seems

quicklyto have

attached tself to theterm"anecdote," nd which is mostprobably hemeaningof

the word in the rarelycited subtitle of BenjaminConstant's amousearly nine-

teenth-centurynovellaAdolphe:"Anecdotetrouveedansles papiersd'un incon-

nu" ("Anecdotefound among the papersof an unknown").Constantno doubt

intended t to convey the impression hat his tale describeda "real" vent.

Its associationwithProcopius's extalsoprovided heword "anecdote"withyetanothermeaning n the modernEuropean anguages.The Anekdota,now usuallyreferred o as Procopius'sSecretHistoryor Storiaarcana,turnedoutto consist of

instancesof the mostbrutalexerciseofdespotic power,

as well as scurrilousales

of palaceand family intrigue,that were completelyat odds with the celebratorynarrative f Procopius'sofficialHistory.The secondmeaningof the word "anec-

dote"listed in Johnson'sDictionary-"secret history"--reflects his influenceof

Procopius's ext. In the Encyclopddie t is alreadythe firstmeaning given: "his-

Vincent, 1772), and the Anecdotes am6ricaines, ou histoire abrigee des principaux eve'nements

arrives dans le Nouveau Monde depuis sa dicouverte (Paris:Vincent, 1776) are all essentially

chronologies,though only those years are included n which somethingoccurred hat, n the authors'

view, can be told as a story.Numerous collections of "Episodes"and"Curiosities" eemclosely relat-ed to "Anecdotes."There was a curious revivalof "anecdotehistory" n theperiod followingtheFirst

WorldWar n Germany,n responseto another risisof historicalunderstanding;ee the discussion of

the prolificAlexander von Gleichen-Russwurm'sWeltgeschichte n Anekdotenund Querschnitten

(Berlin:MaxHess, 1929)inVolkerWeber,Anekdote--DieandereGeschichte,152-167(as in note 10).18. When the ItalianEnlightenment cholar Ludovico Muratoripublishedsome of the Greek and

Latinmanuscriptsn theAmbrosianLibraryn Milanbetween 1697 and 1713, he entitledhis collec-

tions AnecdotaLatinaandAnecdota Graeca.



152 LIONELGOSSMAN

toires secretesde faitsquise sontpassesdansl'int6rieur u cabinetou des coursde

Princes,& dans les mystbresde leurpolitique" "secrethistoriesof what hasgoneon in theinnercounsels or courtsof Princesand in themysteriesof theirpolitics").

From its earliest usage in the modern European languages, then, the term

"anecdote"hasbeen closely related o history,and even to a kindof counter-his-

tory. Procopius'sAnekdota cover exactly the same years as his History of the

Wars:527-553 CE.But in the unpublishedwork,the secretaryandcompanionof

Belisarius,Justinian's amous general, exposes the censored, seamy underside,

the chroniquescandaleuse,of thereignhe himself hadpresented n noble colors

in his official history.The Justinianof the Anekdotais a tyrant,the EmpressTheodoraa vindictive, cruel, low-bornformer harlot.Belisarius is venal, avari-

cious, proneto acts of gross violence andinjustice, spineless anddisloyal in his

personallife, and enslaved to his scheming, licentious wife Antonina.Like an

ideal humanform when it is inspectedclose up througha microscope,the hero-

ic andorderlypublic narrativeof the History is undercutby a ragbagof stories

of depravityandabuse of power.

Procopius'sAnekdotaor secrethistorywas the explicitlyacknowledgedmodel

of several late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century istories, the barely

disguised target of which appearsto have been the new absolutist Europeanmonarchies. The best known of these is probablyAntoine de Varillas'sLes

Anecdotesde Florence,ou l'histoiresecrete de la maisondesMddicis,

publishedin 1685, supposedlyin The Hague. Likewise, Les Anecdotes de Suede,ou His-

toireSecretedes Changemensarrivdsdans ce Royaumesous le regnede Charles

XI, which appeared n Stockholmin 1716, took the lid off the officialhistoryof

CharlesXI of Sweden, the ally andemulatorof Louis XIV.19

Not surprisingly,he friends of power,those concernedwith maintainingpub-lic images anddecorum,have generallybeen fearful of anecdotesand have lost

no opportunity o denigratethem, while at the same time enjoying them in pri-vate and,when necessary,using themagainsttheirown enemies. "L'anecdote,"

the Goncourtbrothersassert,"c'est laboutique

aun sou de l'Histoire"20"The

19. Anecdotes continueto functionin thiswayin modernuse, as in the clandestinediaries n which

Ulrich von Hassell,GermanAmbassador o Romebetween 1932 and 1937, recordednot onlyhis and

his friends' efforts to organize a regime-changebut living conditions and popular attitudesin

Germanyunder National Socialism. Thus, to illustrate he unpopularity f the law requiringJews to

weara yellow star,he tells of a workerin NorthBerlin "who had sewed on a large yellow starwith

the inscription: My nameis Willy',"and of another"herculeanworker"who "said to a poorandagedJewess in the train: Here,you little shootingstar,takemy seat!' and when someone grumbled,said

threateningly:Withmy backsideI can do whatI like."' Anotheranecdote,more properlydefined as

a joke, "illustrates he stupidityof the Party. At a crossroadthreecars, each with the rightof way,

collide-Hitler, the SS, and the firedepartment.Who is to blame?'Answer: 'The Jews'" (Ulrichvon

Hassell, The VonHassell Diaries: TheStoryof the Forces againstHitlerinside Germany1938-1944[Boulder,CO andOxford:Westview Press, 1994], 227, 246-247).

20. EdmondandJules de Goncourt,Iddes et sensations (Paris:BibliothequeCharpentier-Eugene

Fasquelle,1904), 13. See MichellePerrot,"Faitdivers et histoireau XIXeme siecle," 912-913, on the

authorities' ear of anecdotes and "canards" nd their attemptsto suppressor domesticate them by

removingthemfromthe less controllablearea of oral circulation o the more controllablearea of the

press.Even so, seriousnewspapersrelegatethem to an inconspicuouspositionon aninsidepage, and




anecdoteis the dime store of history").But they themselves made abundantuse

of anecdotesin their Histoirede la socijtj frangaise pendant la Revolution,the

aim of which, in their own words,was "not to relateonce again" hegrand

polit-ical historyof the Revolution,but to "portrayFrance,manners,states of mind,

the nationalphysiognomy,the color of things,life, and humanityfrom 1788 to

1800" ("peindre a France, les moeurs, les ames, la physionomie nationale, la

couleurdes choses, la vie et l'humanitdde 1789 't 1800"). That meant, in this

instance,discrediting he heroicRepublicanaccountof the Revolutionand sub-

stitutingan alternative,unheroic,andoften petty counter-history.To write such

a history, heGoncourtssaid,"wehad to discovernew sources of thetrue,to look

for our documents in newspapers, pamphlets,and a whole universe of lifeless

paperhitherto viewed with

contempt,in

autographetters,

engravings,all the

monumentsof intimacythatanage leaves behind."21n short,theyhad to explorethe worldof the anecdoteand the anecdotal.

Voltaire had alreadyexpresseda similarlyambivalent view of anecdotes.In

his "Discourssurl'Histoirede CharlesXII"of the early 1730s, he lambastedhis

contemporaries for their "fureur d'6crire" ("mania for writing"), their

"ddmangeaisonde transmettrea la postdritddes details inutiles"("itchto trans-

mit useless details to posterity").This passionfor the allegedly trivial hadgottento the point, he alleged, that"hardlyhas a sovereigndeparted his life than the

publicis inundatedwith volumes

purportingo be memoirs,the

storyof his life,

anecdotes of his court."22In Voltaire's own view, only great public events and

events that had major consequences for the course of history deserved to be

recordedand remembered.23 wo decades later, somewhat apologetically,the

matureauthorof theSiecle de Louis XIVdevotedthe concludingfourchaptersof

the politicalpartof his historyto "Particularit6st anecdotesdu regne de Louis

XIV."Anecdotesmay be of interestto the public,he conceded, butonly "when

they concern illustrious personages"("quand ls concernent des personnages

illustres"). n general,however,modem historiography as no place foranything

the most serious, ike LeMonde,excludethemaltogether.The conservativeBarbeyd'Aurevillyantic-

ipatedthatthe newspaperwould destroythe book andwould in turnbe destroyedby thefait divers.

"Lepetit fait le rongera.Ce serason insecte, sa vermine" quotedby Perrot,913).21. "il nous a fallu decouvrirde nouvelles sources duVrai,demandernos documentsauxjournaux,

aux brochures,a out ce monde depapiermort et mrnpris6usqu'ici, aux autographes,aux gravures,'

tous les monuments intimes qu'une 6poque laisse derribreelle." Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,

Histoire de la socijtj frangaise pendant la Revolution (Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier-Eugene

Fasquelle,1904),v-vi. In a section of thebook devoted to the passionfor the gamingtableduringthe

Revolutionaryperiod,one reads,forinstance,the storyof an addictedgambler:"Mourant,e cheva-

lierBouju,le terribleponte,se fitporterau trenteet unet, dans es brasde ses amis,agonisant,crispant

ses mains sur le tapisvert,comme sur es drapsde son lit de mort, il se gagna,ce cadavre oueur,desuperbes undrailles""Ashe lay dying, thatformidablegambler,chevalierBouju,had himself trans-

portedto a gaminghouse to play trente-et-un.n the armsof his friends,at death'sdoor,clutchingthe

gamingtable like the sheet on his deathbed, hisgamblingcadaverwon a superb uneral or himself")

(26).22. "apeine un souverain cesse de vivre que le public est inond6 de volumes sous le nom de

memoires,d'histoire de sa vie, d'anecdotesde sa cour."

23. Voltaire,Histoirede CharlesXII(Paris:Garnier-Flammarion, 968), 30-31.



154 LIONELGOSSMAN

that cannot be properlyverified,and thatis often the case with anecdotes.Thus

Procopius'sHistoire secrete de Justinienis not, in Voltaire'sview, a model for

modem historians to follow. It is a satire "motivatedby vengefulness"which

"contradicts he author'spublic history"and"isnot always true."Seventy pagesof anecdotes ater,Voltairerelentshardlyat all.Anecdotes have value only when

they are at least plausible and concern prominent igures in world history."A

philosophermightwell be repelled by so many details. But curiosity,thatcom-

mon failingof mankind,ceasesperhaps o be one, when it is directed owardmen

andtimes thatcommand the attentionof posterity."24In part,Voltaire'sdisdain for anecdotes was consistent with his demand that

historynot be about individual monarchsbut about nations and civilizations. It

is the false view of historyas thestory

ofkings,

heargued,

thatencourages

the

presumptuousbelief that every detail concerningthem and those around them

must be of vast and enduringinterest. Voltaire'smostly negative judgmentof

anecdoteswas also determined,however, by the same classical, fundamentallyconservative esthetics (and politics) that later led the editors of the AnnieLitteraire o condemnRousseau'sConfessionsas an act of literaryarroganceand

presumption."Wherewould we be now,"they protested n 1782, "if every one

arrogatedo himself therightto write andprinteverythingthatconcernshimper-

sonally andthathe enjoys recalling?"25It is hardto read this indignantrejectionof Rousseau's claim thatthe humblest anecdotes

concerningthe

personalife of

an obscuresemi-orphanchild (albeitone who became a famous writer)arewor-

thy of interestas expressing anythingbuta classical (and conservative)desire to

controlthe knowledge of historyandto preserve hierarchy n historyas well as

in society by dictating what should count as importantand worthy of beingrememberedand what should not.

Admittedly, his is a complex matter.As is well known, the eighteenthcentu-

ry was a greatage of anecdotes.A considerablepublishing ndustrywas devoted

to anecdotes on every conceivablesubject--medicine, literature, he theater, he

arts. Voltairewas one ofmany

writers whodeplored

thisdevelopment

as asignof thedecadenceof taste andtheintrusionof thecommercialspirit ntoliterature,

with publishersrushingto please a growing readingpublic allegedly no longer

willing or able to engage seriously with literatureor history.26But that was

almostcertainlya simplificationof the issue. The taste for particulars ather han

extended formal narrativesor arguments,for the concrete privatedetail rather

thanthepublic generality,probablydid reflect a diminutionof traditional ulture

24. "Tantde detailspourraient ebuterun philosophe;maisla curiositd,cettefaiblessesi commune

aux hommes, cesse peut-&tre 'en &treune, quandelle a pour objet des temps et des hommes qui

attirent es regardsde la post6ritd."Voltaire,Siecle de LouisXIV,2 vols. (Paris:Garnier-Flammarion,1966), I, 307, 379.

25. "Otien serions-noussi chacuns'arrogeoit e droit d'dcrireet de faire imprimer ous les faits

qui l'int6ressentpersonnellementet qu'il aime a se rappeler?"Annde littiraire 4 (1782), 150-151,

quotedin FrancoOrlando,"Rousseaue la nascith di una tradizione etteraria: l ricordod'infanzia,"

Belfagor20 (1965), 12.

26. See ChristopherTodd, "Chamfortand the Anecdote,"ModernLanguageReview 74 (1979),

297-309, especially the opening pages.




in an expandedreadingpublic, a demandfor easy distractionandquickstimula-

tion. But it also had a good deal to do with Enlightenmentempiricism,distrust

of authorityand "authorized"xplanationsof things,andsuspicionof all-encom-

passing systems-in historiographyand ethics, as well as in politics, theology,andphilosophy.

V. ANECDOTESIN HISTORICALWRITING

As it happens,the most common use of anecdotesby historiansappearsnot to

have been especially subversive.Anecdotesusuallyfunctioned n historicalwrit-

ing not as puzzlingorunusual ndividualcases throwingdoubton notions of his-

toricalorder,but as particularnstancesexemplifying and confirminga generalrule or trendor epitomizinga largergeneralsituation.Theparticularn thisusagewas not, as Voltairefearedit might be, disruptiveor destructive of the general,but remained subordinate o the general.The detail or particular tory or anec-

dote was admittedwhen it illustratedhistorical situationsorpersonalitieswhose

generalcharacterandimportancehad alreadybeen established--that is, when it

illustrated, n Voltaire'sown words,"men and times thatcommandthe attention

of posterity."As magistra vitae, early modern history was often a collection of episodes

exemplifyinggeneralrules and lessons of behavior.27 husthe "histories" elat-

ed in the Historische Chronica,published by the celebratedengraverMatthaiusMerian n the 1620s andfrequentlyreprinted,were intendedto demonstrate hat

vice is punishedand virtue rewarded n the same way thatexamples in grammarbooks offer particular llustrationsof the generalrules governing noun declen-

sions and verbconjugations.As a result,particularnarrativesarerelated to each

otherin the Chronicafar more in termsof the virtues or vices they exemplifythanin terms of an internalhistoricalconnectionor relationamong them.Onlythe successionof datesin the margins calculated rom Creationor fromthe birth

of Christ)establishes a loosetemporal

connectedness-

somethingakin to the

connectednessHaydenWhite considers characteristic f annals,as distinctfrom

"narrativized"istories while also serving,atthe sametime, as a signalthatthe

events being narratedare not to be regarded as fables but as having trulyoccurred.Furthermore,f they were to function as exemplary, he stories had to

be relatively short, simple, and easily intelligible in terms of traditionalvalues

and a sharedunderstandingof human beings and the world. The relation of

part-individual short narrativeor anecdote-to whole in this kind of history

27. ChristophDaxelmiiller, "Narratio, llustratio,Argumentatio:Exemplumund Bildungstechnikin der frtihen Neuzeit," in Exempel und Exempelsammlungen,ed. Walter Haug and Burghart

Wachinger(Tiibingen:M. Niemeyer, 1991), 79. In Plutarch--still Rousseau's favorite historian-

"pastevents only become history," hat is they enter the narrativeof history,only "whentheirexem-

plarycharacter, heircapacityto offer (thepresent)models to imitate,releases them from the sphereof the irrevocablyvanished"(EginhardHora,"ZumVerstdindnises Werkes," n GiambattistaVico,

Die neue Wissenschaft Hamburg,1966], 232, quoted by Rudolf Schhifer,Die Anekdote:Theorie,

Analyse,Dialektik[Munich:Oldenbourg,1982], 12).



156 LIONELGOSSMAN

mightbe described as allegorical.Each anecdote is a singular nstance of a gen-eral rulethat it exemplifiesandpointsto.28

Thelate EnlightenmentandRomantic nvention of Historyas a process,rather

than a simple diachronyor a playingout in varyingsuccessive guises of a limit-

ed repertoryof acts, implieda differentrelationof part o whole, and of anecdote

to history.In conformitywith the shift in literatureand art from Classicism to

Romanticismand fromallegory to symbol,29anecdotesceased to be allegorical,

exemplaryof essentiallyextra- or transhistorical niversal situations.In a world

in which it was held that, in Ranke's famous words,"jede Epoche ist unmittel-

bar zu Gott" ("every age of history stands in an immediate relationto God"),

theirrelationto a largercontextbeyondthem ceased to be conceptual,and came

to be understoodas an internalrelationto an evolving whole, of which the par-

ticularevent recounted n the anecdotewas a relativelyautonomousbut integral

part,as an organis partof a body.This change was underlinedby a new-more

thanmerelypicturesque--emphasison couleur locale and historicalaccuracy n

the representationof costume and mores, in contrastwith the free handlingof

these-the combiningof ancientfiguresand modernattributes, or instance-in

the engravingswith which Merian llustrated he Chronica.30n the new histori-

ography, n sum, the individual incident enshrinedin the anecdote came to be

more like a symptom,to borrowa termfrommedicine,than a sign.It had long been used in that way in

biography.In his "Life of Alexander"

Plutarchdeclaredfamouslythat "a chanceremarkor a joke may reveal farmore

of a man's character hanwinning battles in which thousandsfall, or ... mar-

shalling greatarmies,or laying siege to cities."31Therein,accordingto Plutarch,

28. On the Chronica,see AndreasUrs Sommer,"Triumph erEpisodefiberdie Universalhistorie?

PierreBayles Geschichtsverfliissigungen,"aeculum52 (2001), 1-39, at 15-23. Sommerpointsout

that as the Chronicaapproachedmodem times and the historical material became overwhelmingly

abundant,t became increasinglydifficult to reduce it to the simple termsrequiredby exemplaryhis-

tory."Confrontedby the sheer mass and extentof the materialof modem history,the historiancan-

not controlit or establishanythingbut the most imperfectconnections. As moralist,he has to capitu-

late before the complexity of the material"(22). According to Volker Weber the "Histirchen"of

Wilhelm Schifer (HundertHistbirchenMunich:A. Langen,G. Muiller,1940]) are a modem case of

the use of anecdotes to suggest the underlying similarity of different situations. (VolkerWeber,

Anekdote-Die andere Geschichte,173-174 [as in note 10]).29. See on the important ransition from allegory to symbol, Bengt A. Sorensen,Allegorie und

Symbol:Textezur Theoriedes dichterischenBildes im 18. und riihen 19. Jahrhundert Frankfurt m

Main:Athenium, 1972).30. Sommer,"Triumph erEpisode fiberdie Universalhistorie," 3.

31. "Life of Alexander," n The Age of Alexander: Nine GreekLives, transl. Ian Scott-Kilvert

(Harmondsworth:enguin,1973), 252. Inthe samevein,morerecently,ArthurSchnitzler:"Bydrawingon threestrikinganecdotes rom his life, we maybe ableto take themeasureof a man's characterwith

the sameprecision

hatwe measure he surfaceof atriangleby calculating

herelationamong

hree ixed

points,whoseconnecting ines constitute hetriangle""DasWeseneines Menschen isst sichdurchdrei

schlagkrdiftigenekdotenaus seinem Leben vielleicht mit gleicher Bestimmtheitberechnen,wie der

Flicheinhalteines Dreiecks aus demVerhiltnisdreier ixer Punktezueinander, erenVerbindungsliniendas Dreieck bilden"). (ArthurSchnitzler,Buch der Spriiche und Bedenken, in Aphorismenund

Betrachtungen,d. RobertO.Weiss [Frankfurtm Main:S. FischerVerlag,1967], 53.) Cf. Nietzsche:

"Threeanecdotesmay sufficeto painta pictureof a man"(quotedby CliftonFadiman, ntroductiono

TheLittle,BrownBookofAnecdotes[Boston/Toronto: ittle,Brown andCompany,1985]).




lay the differencebetween the historianor chroniclerof public events and the

biographer.To the degreethat,with the Romantics,historyitself came to resem-

ble a kind of nationalbiography-Michelet, it will be recalled,boastedof hav-

ing "been the first to presentFrance as a person"("pos6 le premier a France

comme une personne")32-Plutarch'sdistinction between the methods of the

biographerand those of the historianceased to hold. As early as the last thirdof

the eighteenthcenturysome of Chamfort'sanecdotesappearto have had such

symptomaticvalue. A story about the Duke of Hamilton, for instance-who,

being drunkone night,heedlesslykilled a waiter at an inn, and when confronted

with the fact by the horrified nnkeeper,calmly replied:"Add it to the bill"-

seems intended as more thanan allegory of the generalindifferenceof the rich

andpowerful

to thepoor

andpowerless;

it is alsosymptomatic

of the personage

described,the Duke of Hamilton,and--beyond himperhapsof the social rela-

tions of a particularhistoricalmoment,thatof the ancienr6gime.33This is the kind of anecdote we are most familiar with as modernreaders of

history.A couple of examples from Michelet will be enoughto call manyothers

to mind.In the Histoire de FranceMicheletpresentsan anecdote abouta change

in the relationsof d'Aubign6 and Henri IV as symptomaticof a fundamental

change in the political and culturalclimate in generalat the end ot the sixteenth

century.

D'Aubign6ellsof a sad event.TheKing,still haunted y hisbogeyman,he Calvinistrepublic,was determinedo puthim n the Bastille.TheHuguenot,who knewhisroyalmasterwell, nordero be leftinpeace,asked or thefirst ime o be rewardedorhis ser-

vices withmoney, pension.Fromhatpointontheking s sureofhim;he summons im,embraces im;suddenlyheyaregoodfriends.That ameevening,D'Aubign6was hav-

ingsupperwith wonoble-heartedomen.Suddenly, ithout word,oneof thembegantoweepandshedmany ears.

"Forgood, too good reason,"Micheletcomments,giving the sense of the anec-

dote. "Theday D'Aubign6 was obliged to accept a pension and ask for money

the great 16thCenturycame to an end and the otherbegan."34Likewise, in the

section on the Bastille (section IX) in the Introduction o the Histoire de la

32. "Pr6facede 1869,"Histoire de France, Book III,Oeuvrescompletes,ed. P.Viallaneix,21 vols.

(Paris:Flammarion,1971-), VI, 11. See L. Gossman,"JulesMichelet: histoirenationale,biographie,

autobiographie," ittirature102 (1996), 29-54.

33. Chamfort,"Caracteres t anecdotes," n Productsof the Perfected Civilization,appendix 1,

272. A somewhatsimilarpointis made,morebenignly,by ananecdote n which Madamedu Chatelet

admits a manservant nto her bathroomwhile she is naked. There was no more shame in this, to an

aristocraticwoman,thanbeing seen nakedby a dog.34. "D'Aubign6raconteun fait triste. Le roi, revassanttoujoursson 6pouvantail, a r6publique

calviniste,voulait

d6cid6mente mettre

Ba Bastille. Le

huguenot,quile

connoissait,pouravoirenfin

son repos,lui demandepourla premiere ois r6compensede ses longs services,de l'argent,une pen-sion. Des lors, le roi est stirde lui; il le fait venir, il l'embrasse; es voila bons amis. Le meme soir,

d'Aubign6soupaitavec deux dames de noble coeur.Touta coup, l'une d'elles, sansparler,se mit 'a

pleureret versa d'abondantes armes.Avec trop de raison.Le jour oii d'Aubign6avait6t6 forc6 de

prendrepensionet de demanderde l'argent, e grandXVIe siecle 6taitfini, et l'autre6taitinaugur6.""Histoirede FranceauDix-SeptibmeSiecle"(1858), in OeuvresCompletes,ed. PaulVillaneix(Paris:

Flammarion,1982), IX, 153.



158 LIONELGOSSMAN

RdevolutionFrangaise the essential arbitrariness Michelet considered characteris-

tic of the ancien regime is conveyed by means of an anecdote.

One day,Louis XV's andMadamede Pompadour'sdoctor,the illustriousQuesnay,wholodged with her at Versailles, sees the King enter unexpectedly and becomes

disturbed.The lever Madame de Hausset,the lady-in-waiting,who has left such curious

memoirs, asked him why he was so flustered."Madame,"he replied, "when I see the

King, I say to myself: There is a man who can have my head cut off." "Oh!" she said,"theKingis too kind."

Michelet again concludes the anecdote by explaining its significance. "The lady

in waiting summed up in a single word here all the safeguards offered by the

monarchy."35

35. "Le mddecinde Louis XV et de Madamede Pompadour,'illustreQuesnay,qui logeaitchezellei Versailles,voit unjour le Roi entreri l'improvisteet se trouble.La spirituelle emme de chambre,Madamede Hausset,quia laiss6de si curieuxMemoires, ui demandapourquoi l se d6concertait insi.

'Madame,'repondit-il, quand e vois le Roi, je me dis: Voila un hommequi peutme fairecouperla

t -te.'- 'Oh!,' dit-elle, 'le Roi est trop bon.' La femme de chambrerdsumait a1d'un seul mot les

garantiesde la monarchie."Histoire de la revolutionfrangaise,2 vols. (Paris:Editions de la Pl6iade,1952), II, 67. Manyotherexamplescould be cited. Describingthe drasticallydiminishedauthorityof

the monarchy n the years precedingthe Revolution,Philippede S6gurexpressesconfidencein his

Mimoires that"Onpeuten juger parune anecdote."He thenproceedsto tell how one dayhe raninto

the Comtede Laureguais,whose witty and cynical sayingsandwritingshad made him the objectof

countless "lettres de cachet"-referred to gaily by the Count as "ma correspondenceavec le roi."

Laureguaiswas strollingaboutopenlyin a placewhere there was horse-racingand to which members

of the Courthadthereforebeen attractedn largenumbers.Remembering hat hecounthadbeen exiled

far from Parisby a recent "lettrede cachet,"Sdgurwent up to him and warnedhim that his brazenly

showinghimselfthere was an imprudent rovocation hatcould have seriousconsequences or him.In

response,Laureguais implylaughed.His escapade, Segurobserves,could not havepassedunnoticed,"andyet it went unpunished."Mimoires,souvenirs et anecdotespar M. le Comtede Sigur, ed. M. F.

Barribre[Paris: Firmin Didot, 1859], 90-91). In his pathbreakingHistoire de la Conquete de

l'Angleterre ar les Normandsof 1825,AugustinThierry requentlyprovides"anecdotalllustration(s)of the life and mannersof the natives"andof the effect of the conqueston the haplessSaxons.A typ-ical introduction o one of those anecdotes(which tells of the persecutionand spoliationof a certain

Brithstanby the NormanprovostRobertMalartais)runs:"Acircumstancewhichoccurredsome time

before this may throw some light uponthese decrees,whichdespoiledthe unhappySaxons of every-

thing" Historyof the Conquestof England by theNormans, ransl.W. Hazlitt[London:Bohn, 1856],I, 362-363 [BookVII]).Guizot relatesananecdote, n his Historyof England,aboutArchbishopSharp

being setuponand,despitehis pleasformercy, stabbed o deathby Scottish Covenantersas he passedin a carriagewith his daughter hrough he environs of St.Andrews.The anecdote s intendedto epit-omize the cruelty and lawlessness of those "armedfanatics,"as Guizot calls the Covenanters(A

PopularHistoryof England rom the Earliest Timesto theReign of QueenVictoria New York:John

W.Lowell,n.d.],III,378 [chap.30]).DescribingQueenMary'spersecutionof theProtestants,he nine-

teenth-centuryEnglishhistorian,JohnRichardGreen,insertsa one-pagenarrative bout a single indi-

vidual,RowlandTaylor, he Vicar of Hadleigh,on the grounds hat t "tells us more of the work which

was nowbegun(thepersecutionandtheexecutions),and of theeffect it was likely to produce i.e. stiff-

enedresistance), hanpages of historicdissertation"AShortHistory of theEnglishPeople [NewYork,

Cincinnati,and Chicago:AmericanBook Co., n.d.], 365 [TheReformation.Sect. II, chap. 30]). The

same basic approacho anecdote s still evidentin Eileen Power's MedievalPeople (Harmondsworth:PenguinBooks, 1957), a successful work of modem social andeconomic history,firstpublishedin

1924. Powerchose to presenther accountof medieval society by means of six portraitsof "ordinary

people," n thebelief, as she putit, that"thepast maybe made to live againforthegeneralreadermore

effectively by personifying t thanby presenting t in the form of learnedtreatiseson the developmentof themanoror on medieval trade,essentialas these areto the specialist" Preface,7). Anecdotesplaytheircustomaryrole in the construction f Power's portraits;n addition,each portrait n itself mightbe regardedas a kind of extendedanecdoteepitomizinga largergeneralsituation.




VI. THETRUTH OF HISTORICALANECDOTES

Being passedaround

bywordof mouth orborrowed

byone writer rom

another,most often associated with the private sphere,and almost always unverifiable,

anecdotes were generally regardedas of doubtfulveracity by "modem"histori-

ans determined to apply to their work the critical methods elaborated at the

beginningof the eighteenthcentury.36n parallelsof HerodotusandThucydides,the Fatherof History did not usually come out well. But if the meaning of an

anecdotewere to be soughtless in its factualaccuracythanin what it conveyedabout states of mind andgeneraltrends,theneven when its factualveracitywas

in doubt it might still be thoughtof as in some way illuminatinghistoricalreali-

ty. Prosperde Barante, or instance, ustifiedhis method of closely following thechronicleaccounts,on whichhe basedhis immensely popularHistoire des Ducs

de Bourgognede la Maison de Valois n the thirddecade of the nineteenthcen-

tury,by claiming that the "naive"vision of the chroniclerswas in itself as his-

toricallysignificantas any fact, since it told a greatdeal abouthow the men and

women of an earlierage thoughtand felt. ProsperM6rim6e's ustificationof the

anecdotein the Preface to his Chroniquedu Regne de CharlesIX was similar.

"Anecdotes are the only thing I like in history,"he declared("Je n'aime dans

l'histoireque les anecdotes").Traditionalhistorians, o whom the only historyis

political, military,anddynastic,would doubtless consider this"not a very digni-fied taste,"buthe himself "wouldwillingly give Thucydidesfor some authentic

memoirsby Aspasiaor by a slave of Pericles."37

Somethingof the characterBurckhardtaterascribedto myth in his Cultural

Historyof Greece was thus attributedo the anecdote: thatis to say, it was seen

as an essentiallypopularor communalcreation, he validityof which resides not

so much in the accuracywith which it reportsparticularpositive facts as in its

abilityto reflectthe general realityunderlying hose facts or the generalview of

thatreality.It was thus the truerawmaterialof the culturalhistorian.Burckhardt

himself made the connection between anecdote and myth. "The oral traditiondoes not cleave to literalexactness,"he declared n a lectureon "TheScholarlyContribution f the Greeks,""butbecomes typical;that is to say that it does not

36. On hearing a string of anecdotes about a famous figure of the day, Kant is said to have

remarked: Itseems to me I recall similar anecdotes aboutothergreat figures.Butthat s to beexpect-ed. Greatmen arelike high church owers: aroundboth thereis aptto be a greatdeal of wind"(quot-ed by Fadiman,Little,Brown Book of Anecdotes).Investigatinganecdotesaboutlocal characters n

relatively small communities,SandraK. D. Stahl reports hat such anecdotes,"presumed o be true

by the local populace . . . are often made up of motifs found in otherregionsas well" ("TheLocal

CharacterAnecdote,"Genre 8 [1975], 283-302).

37. ProsperM6rim6e,Chroniquedu Rhgnede CharlesIX (Paris:Nelson, n.d.), 6; A Chronicleofthe Reignof CharlesIX in The Writingsof ProsperMdrimde, ntroductionby GeorgeSaintsbury,6

vols. (New York:Croscup& Holby,1905), VI, v-vi. Inthe middle of the eighteenthcenturya similar

argumenthadbeen proposedby the antiquarianLaCurnede Sainte-Palayeas ajustificationfor schol-

arly studyof the OldFrenchromances.Accordingto Sainte-Palaye, he very anachronisms nderrors

of the old romanceswere historicallyrevealing(L. Gossman,Medievalism and the Ideologies of the

Enlightenment:The Worldand Workof La Curne de Sainte-Palaye [Baltimore:Johns Hopkins

UniversityPress, 1968], 247-253).



160 LIONELGOSSMAN

cleave to a factuallyexact groundingof the events narrated,butbringsout their

innersignificance,what is characteristicaboutthem, whathas a generalhuman

or popularcontent. Often an anecdote is all that remains of a long chain of

events, circumstances,andpersonalities."38Infact,historiansdo not shrink,on occasion, frominvokinganecdotes,forthe

truthof which they freely admitthey cannotvouch. Voltairerelates an anecdote

about a priest who dared to take the King to task in a sermon he preachedat

Versailles.Theanecdoteculminates n a "pointe," hememorablypointedremark

characteristicof the classic eighteenth-centuryanecdote: "We are assured that

Louis XIV was satisfiedto addresshim thus: 'Father . . I am happyto accept

my share of a sermon,but I do not like being the targetof one.'"39Whether he

King actuallyspoke those words or not, Voltaireconcedes, they are instructive

andrevealing.In Burckhardt'swork, as one mightexpect, the "fictional"anec-

dote serves an unequivocally historical function. In Part I, Section 3 of The

Civilizationof the Renaissance in Italy"anold story,one of those which are true

andnot true,everywhereandnowhere," s recounted o illustrate"thethorough-

ly immoralrelation"between city governmentsandpowerfulcondottieri n fif-

teenth-century taly.Inthe following section Burckhardt ites another"legendary

history,"which,he says, "is simplythe reflection of the atrocities"perpetrated y

38. "Uberdas wissenschaftlicheVerdienstder Griechen"(lecturegiven in Basel on 10 November

1881),in JacobBurckhardt,Votriige, d. E. Diirr,3rd ed. (Basel:Schwabe,1919), 188-89.Burckhardtgoes on to describe theprocessof creationof an anecdote n termsreminiscentof his defense of mythin theGriechischeKulturgeschichte: Inthemeantime,of course,the narrators ave also filled out the

storyas it passedfrom mouth to mouth,not onlyby drawingon other nformationbutby drawingon

the generalnatureof the situation n question;they have addedcolor to it and recreated t; they have

in shortattributed o the most celebratedrepresentativesof certain human situations and relations

whathappened n them at one or another ime. Thus the lives of most of the well-knownGreeksare

full of traits hathave been observed n others ike themand arethen transferred o them--on neprete

qu'auxriches and modemcritics have aneasy time of it exposingsuch fictions. ... Yetthis typical,anecdotalmaterial s also historyin its way--only not in the sense of the singularevent,but rather n

the sense of whatmighthave happenedat anytime ("desIrgendwannvorgekommenen"),nd often it

is so beautifully expressive that we would on no account want to do without it." Duringthe First

WorldWara similar ustificationof the anecdotewas offeredby the editor of a Germancollection of

anecdotesdevoted to the War anddoubtlessdesignedto raise morale.(It was one of a series of four-

teen immensely popularanecdotebooks put out in the early twentiethcentury by Lutz of Stuttgart,each one devoted to a particularsubject, such as Bismarck, the Hohenzollerns,the Habsburgs,

Bluecher,Frederick he Great,Napoleon, Schiller,etc.) Like Burckhardt,he editor claimed not that

the stories were true (in fact these "Anekdoten" re a mixed bag of anti-Englishpoems and songs,

newspaperreports, supposedlettersfrom or to the front,as well as classic anecdotes),but thatthey

gave an authenticpictureof the spiritof the Germanpeople at the time, its grittyenergyin adversity,its pride, its humor,its capacity for laughterand for tears, its ability to celebrate triumphsand to

mourn losses: "ein getreues Seelengemdilde des deutschen Volkes" (Der grosse Krieg. Ein

Anekdotenbuch, d. ErwinRosen, 9th ed. [Stuttgart:RobertLutz, n.d.]). After the War, n the late

1920s,the anecdotewas

again justifiedas "the

onlyvalid artistic form of cultural

history"in the

Introductiono Egon Friedell's Kulturgeschichte er Neuzeit: Die Krisis der europdiischeneele von

derschwarzenPest bis zumersten Weltkrieg, vols. (Munich:C. H. Beck, 1927-1931), I, 18: "Pars

pro toto: this is not the least effective or vivid of figures.Often a single handmovementcan charac-

terize an individual,a single detail an entireevent, more sharply,more essentially,andwith greaterforce thanthe most detaileddescription."

39. "On assurequeLouisXIV se contentade lui dire: 'Monpere ... j'aime bien a prendrema partd'un sermon,maisje n'aime pas qu'on me la fasse."' Voltaire,Sihclede LouisXIV, I, 367.




the petty tyrantsof the fifteenthcentury.40mplicit n suchuse of anecdotes s the

ideathat,even if they arenot factuallytrue,theirvery fabricationandsuccess are

in themselves a kind of evidence.

VII. CRITICALUSES OFANECDOTESIN PASTHISTORIOGRAPHY

Alongside the predominantly onfirmatoryuses of anecdoteby historians,there

is also, but more rarely,a negativeuse. In additionto the histoiresecrete tradi-

tion, stemmingfrom Procopius41 and alludedto earlier,whatone might call the

"Cleopatra's-nose necdote"aims to debunkgrandgeneralargumentsabout his-

tory by finding the cause of major historical transformations n some minor

"anecdote" r"particularit6istorique,petit

fait curieuxdont le recitpeut

6clair-

er le dessous des choses" ("ahistoricalparticularity, small curious fact whose

telling can reveal the undersideof things"),to borrowone of the Dictionnaire

Robert's definitions of the word "anecdote."Several examples of this use of

anecdote are to be found in John Buchan's 1929 Rede lecture at Cambridge

Universityon "TheCausal andthe Casual in History."The defeat of the Greeks

in the Warof 1922, for instance,andthe resultingconsolidationof the revolution

of Kemal Ataturk n Turkey,are traced via a chain of causally connected inci-

dentsto thedeath, n the autumnof 1920, of theyoungKingAlexanderof Greece

from the bite of apet monkey

in thepalace gardens.

"Icannot,"

Buchan con-

cludes, "betterMr.Churchill'scomment: 'A quarterof a million personsdiedof

thatmonkey'sbite."'42

The Cleopatra's-noseanecdotedoes not producea richer and more complex

history than the grand narratives-of which the Marxist was probably the

grandest-that it purports o undercut;on the contrary, t presentsa drastically

simplified one. The opposite effect may be produced,however, by anecdotes

that offer themselves neither as links in a simple causal chain nor-in the styleof the Romantics-as partsof a whole, from which they derive their meaningand which

theyin turn

epitomize.Anecdotes as

fragmentsof some undeci-

pheredwhole, as instancesthatresist neat interpretation,arfromconsolidatingwhat we think we know, may cause us to question it and provoke inquiryinto

it. Such anecdotes will have to be different,however, from the classic, well-

designed anecdote, with its triadic structureof exposition, confrontationor

encounter,and "pointe"or punch line, since that form of anecdote works pre-

cisely to the degree that it can count, like traditionaltheater,on commonlysharedassumptionsto drive home its meaning despite, or even because of, its

brevity.If an anecdote is to be trulydisruptiveand disorienting,it cannothave

40. JacobBurckhardt,TheCivilizationof theRenaissance in Italy, ed B. Nelson and C. Trinkaus,2 vols. (New York:HarperandRow, ColophonBooks, 1958), 1,40, 49.

41. Now largely neutralized, f one can judge by a series of so-called "histoiressecretes"of theFrenchprovinces currentlybeing putout by the publishinghouse of Albin Michel in Paris.

42. JohnBuchan,TheCausal and the Casual in History(Cambridge,Eng.:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1929), 19-20.



162 LIONELGOSSMAN

the structural oherencethatthe classic anecdotepossesses in farhigherdegreethanhistoryitself.43

The disruptiveor negativeanecdotecan alreadybe foundin PierreBayle, and

a little laterDiderot took delightin demonstrating ow undecipherablehe real-

ity behind a seemingly transparent tory may be. The most ardentchampionof

the anecdoteas a disruptiveelementmay in fact be a novelist rather han a his-

torian. "Justthink,"wrote the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, itself developedfromafait diversreported n the newspapers,"Just hinkthat whatfools despiseas gossip is, on the contrary,he only historythat n this affectedage gives a true

pictureof a country. ... We needto see everything,experience everything,make

a collection of anecdotes."44Not the contrived narrativeof history,in short,but

onlythe anecdote,understoodas a naive, unreflected,andunvarnished

eportof

a fragmentof reality,offersreliableclues to the way things are (or were), unal-

tered by eitherideological or formal-estheticelaboration.As the only window

onto realityas it is, rather han as we have pre-shaped t, the anecdotevaluedbyStendhalcouldnot, obviously,be the polished productof salon wits that findsits

way into the anecdote books. Its chief meritbeing that it is "exactementvraie"

("exactlytrue"), t could not, in Stendhal'sown view, be "fortpiquante" "very

snappy").It could not, in otherwords, be literature.45t is because this kind of

anecdote is raw, unpolished,not "piquante,"hatit is more easily found in the

provinces, accordingto Stendhal,or in

legaldocuments or

newspapers,han in

the spoiled andcultivated circles of the capital.As anynarrative elling,howevernaive, involves a minimummeasureof shap-

ing according o a priori moral,psychological, epistemological, literary,and lin-

guistic categories,there was something inherentlyparadoxicalaboutStendhal's

43. See, for instance, Richard N. Coe, "The Anecdote and the Novel: A Brief Inquiryinto the

Originsof Stendhal's NarrativeTechnique,"Australian Journalof French Studies22 (1985), 3-23:

"In the remoteroriginsof all narrative iterature heremay be discerned two fundamental lements:

history,which creates out of 'reallife' a model of quasi-arbitrary,ut strictlychronologicaldevelop-

ment, retailingfacticity from day to day; and the anecdotewhich, startingfrom a factual-historical

'happening,'proceedsto refashion t in terms of structural oherence, endowingit with a beginning,middleandend,and mbuing t withsignificanceandpoint. History maywell be haphazard ndshape-

less, andyet command attentionnonetheless because 'that'show it was'; the anecdotedepends,for

its viability, entirelyon its formalstructure--afact which in no way contradicts ts necessarydepen-denceupona profoundsubstructure f historically,sociallyorpsychologicallyverifiable ruth"3). In

his studyof Brecht's"anti-anecdotes,"Walter-Ernst chifer highlightsthe structureddramatic orm

of the anecdoteandits dependence, ike the drama,on stereotypesand sharedassumptions.These re

what Brecht set out to deconstruct."Eine'epischeAnekdote'muss diese Gattung iberhaupt prengenundErzihlungoderRomanan ihre Stelle treten assen"("An'epic anecdote' shouldexplodethe very

genre of anecdote and replaceit with an extended narrativeor a novel") (Schhfer,Anekdote-Anti-

anekdote,29).44.

"Songez quece

queles sots

meprisentous le nomde

commerage,est aucontraire a seulehis-

toirequi dans ce siecle d'affectationpeigne bien un pays ... il faut tout voir, tout6prouver,aire un

recueil d'anecdotes."Stendhal,Mdmoiresd'un touriste, I, in Oeuvrescompletes,ed. Victor Del Litto

and ErnestAbravenel(Paris/Geneva:SlatkineReprints,1986),XV, 174 (datedLyon,24 May, 1837);Journallittiraire, 25 frimaire,anXI (16 December 1802), in Oeuvrescompletes,XXXIII,31.

45. "Le premiermrrite du petitnombre d'anecdotesqui peuventfaire le saut du manuscriptdans

l'imprim6 erad'8treexactementvraies,c'est annoncerqu'ellesne serontpasfortpiquantes"Mdmoiresd'un touriste, n Oeuvrescompletes,XV, 189, citedin Coe, "TheAnecdoteand theNovel,"9.




requirement. t is fascinating o follow his desperateattempts o protect he anec-

dotes he valued from such shaping-to the extent that he sometimes refrained

altogetherfromgiving them verbal form andconfined himself to a simple refer-

ence, such as "Mlle Camp's reply to her lover"("Rdponsede Mlle Camp ... .

son amant")or "heartbreakingnecdote this morning" "anecdoteddchirante e

matin").46 The preservationof authenticityat the expense of communicability

inevitably leaves the reader with an undecipherablenotation.47 It has taken

Stendhalscholarsover a centuryto track down and identify some of these enig-matic references.

Fromourpointof view, the most importantdifferencebetween the unliterary,

radicallyrealistanecdotethatseems to have been Stendhal'spreferenceand the

anecdoteas itappears

n most historical texts lies in the fact that, in traditional

historicalusage, the anecdoteis mainlyborrowed,not found. It hasalreadybeen

worked over andmadeinto literature. t does not lie at the beginningof a histor-

ical investigationor promptone, but is importedfrom a repertoryof anecdotes,

after the historical argumentis already in place, as an illustrative rhetorical

device. In that respect, the Romantic symbolical anecdote does not differ

markedlyfrom the Humanistallegoricalanecdote. In contrast,the anecdote as

Stendhalappearsto have imaginedit is not found after the historicalargumenthas alreadybeendrawnup, but,preciselybecauseit cannot be easily understood

in terms ofexisting

notions ofpast

orpresent reality,

becomes thestartingpointof a longerstory(fictionalor historical) hatexploresthatrealityand seeks a new

understanding f it. The Stendhaliananecdote,in short,disturbs ntellectualrou-

tines and stimulatesnew explorationsof history.

VIII.MODERNHISTORIANS,MICRO-HISTORY, ND THE ANECDOTE

In an essay outlininga proposed "Historyof theAnecdote,"a scholarof Englishliterature bservesthat,"as the narration f a singularevent,"the anecdote s "the

literaryform or

genrethat

uniquelyrefers to the real."

Bythe

veryfact that it

does notrefer to the realthroughdirectdesciriptionorostention,it inevitablyhas

a literarycharacter;nonetheless,Joel Finemaninsists, "howeverliterary,[it] is

neverthelessdirectly pointed towards or rooted in the real," and it is this that

"allowsus to thinkof the anecdote,given its formalif not its actualbrevity,as a

historeme, .e. as the smallestminimalunit of thehistoriographicact."Thefunc-

tion of the anecdote s thusessentiallydisruptive,according o Fineman.His the-

sis, he declares,is "that he anecdote s the literary orm thatuniquelylets histo-

46. Mimoires d'un touriste, n Oeuvrescompletes,XV, 224, cited in Coe, "The Anecdoteandthe

Novel," 9.47. See Coe, "TheAnecdote and the Novel," 8-10, 12, 13 [as in note 43]. Stendhaldid not, of

course,succeed in his endeavor o deconstruct he literaryanecdote.Indeed,he pursued he goal only

intermittentlyand also made use of familiar anecdote forms. In fact, he was not above the kind of

transpositionof anecdotal material from one subject to another to which Kant and Burckhardt

referred: husananecdoteaboutHaydn n Carpani'sbiography,whichStendhalknewinsideout, since

he made abundantuse of it for his own Vie de Haydn,reappearsn Stendhal'sVie de Rossini appliedto the Italiancomposer(Coe, 10-11).



164 LIONELGOSSMAN

ry happen[italics in text] by virtue of the way it introducesan openinginto the

teleological, and therefore imeless, narration f beginning,middle,and end. The

anecdoteproducesthe effect of the real,the occurrenceof contingency,by estab-

lishing an event withinandyet withoutthe framingcontextof historical succes-

sivity." To Fineman, the Hegelian type of historical narrativeis the "purestmodel" of the kind of "timeless"historicaldesign or grand recit that the anec-

dote disrupts by injecting contingency and thus real, open-endedtime into it.

ThoughI cannot agree with Finemanthat this is how the anecdote has alwaysfunctionedor must,by its very nature, unction, t is, I believe, a fairdescriptionof how Stendhalmay have wanted it to functionandhow it functions for a num-

ber of modem or,moreaccuratelyperhaps,"postmodem"historians.48

The collapse of confidencein the widely acceptedgrandsrdcits

or "metahis-

tories"(Jean-FranqoisLyotard)of the nineteenthandearlytwentiethcenturies s

also the context in which the ItalianhistorianGiovanniLevi49 situates the suc-

cess of "microhistory," modem, or perhapsone shouldagain say postmodem,formof historythatoften seems to start roman anecdote or a narrativeground-ed in a non-literarysource, such as a court or otherarchivalrecord. One thinks

of Natalie Davis's Returnof MartinGuerre(1983), RobertDarnton'sTheGreat

Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin(1984), Alain Corbin'sLe Village des

cannibales (1990) or, albeit the action takes place in a more elevated social

milieu, EdwardBerenson's The Trialof Madame Caillaux (1992). Whereasin

the heyday of FemandBraudel,"microhistoire"was a pejorativeterm-a char-

acter n RaymondQueneau'sLes Fleurs Bleues of 1965 applied t humorously o

the lowest, pettiestkindof history,"apeine de l'histoire6vdnementielle"50-bythe 1980s, it marked, ormanyhistorians, he discoveryof a new method,as well

as new objects andtopics, of historical nvestigationandanalysis.It did indeed

rejectthehierarchyof historicalobjectsstill adhered o in some measureeven by

Voltaire,but it was defined less by the small-scale and humble characterof its

objects than by its way of looking at all historicalobjects-through a micro-

scopiclens.

48. Joel Fineman, "TheHistoryof the Anecdote,"in The New Historicism,ed. H. Aram Veeser

(New YorkandLondon:Routledge, 1989), 49-76: "Governedby an absolute, nevitable, inexorable

teleological unfolding,so that n principle,nothingcan happen by chance,every moment thatpartic-

ipateswithin such Hegelianhistory,as the Spiritmateriallyunfoldsitself into and untoitself, is there-

by rendered imeless;suchmomentsexist ... outside of time,orin a timelesspresent,andthis because

theirmomentarydurativeappearances alreadybut the guaranteed oreshadow,the alreadyall but

realizedpromiseof the concludingend of historytowardwhich,as but thepassingmoments n a storywhose conclusion is alreadywritten,they tend"(57). Otherquotations rompage 61. One is remind-

ed of Karl-Heinz Stierle's comment that "Die Problematikder Konstitutionvon Geschichten ist ein

Beispiel jener Problematikder Relation von Allgemeinemund Besonderem,die in der Perspektive

Montaignesdie eigentlicheErkenntnisproblematikarstellt" "Theproblemof how historyis consti-tuted is an instance of the widerproblemof the relationof the generaland the particular,which in

Montaigne's perspective, is the essential problemof all knowledge")("Geschichteals Exemplum-

Exemplumals Geschichte,"in Geschichte-Ereignis und Erzdihlung, d. ReinhartKoselleck and

Wolf-DieterStempel [Munich:WilhelmFink, 1973], 375).49. "OnMicrohistory,"n New Perspectives on Historical Writing,ed. Peter Burke(Cambridge,

Eng.: Polity Press, 1991), 93-113.

50. RaymondQueneau,Les Fleurs Bleues (Paris:Gallimard,1965), 85.



ANECDOTE NDHISTORY 165

Instead of setting out with a set of establishedmacrohistoricalcategories--such as the individual,the family, the state, industrialization,urbanization,and

so on-the new history stayedclose to the ground.Typically,

t workedout from

some limited, often perplexing,incidentor person, in orderto investigate,con-

cretely and withoutpriorparti pris, networksof relations in the small Lebens-

welten in which people actuallylive, with the aim of discoveringunsuspected

patternsof action andinteraction,motivation,andbehavior.By openingup orig-inal fields andmodes of inquiry, t was hoped,the unusualor statisticallyexcep-tional case mightmake it possibleto look behind the well-mappedsurfaceof his-

tory to those "silences de l'histoire"to which Michelet famously referred n a

journalentryfor January30, 1842. One could say that the new historywas doingwhat innovative writers of fiction,

includingMarivaux,Diderot, and Stendhal,

have repeatedlydone, almost always in the name of "realism": hat is, it was

attempting o breakthrough categoriesthatmay once have led to betterunder-

standing,but hadbecome conventionsfacilitatingthe productionof a particularkindof institutionalizeddiscourse.Wherethatdiscourse oftenendedup actingas

a screen rather han a lamp, the new history hoped to serve as a kind of recon-

noissance flareilluminatinga darkenedlandscape.5'

Nothingcould be further rom the polishedminiaturemostly used by histori-

ans in the past, or closer perhaps o thepetit fait social of Stendhal's deally un-

literary anecdote, than thedeliberately

raweight-line recounting

of astrangeincident, followed by an equally brief, puzzlingly contradictorycontemporary

judgmentof it, with which, in a section with-in the originalFrench-the musi-

cal title "Prelude,"Alain Corbinopens Le Village des cannibales (1990; pub-lished in English as The Villageof Cannibals,1992).

Thedate s August16, 1870.Theplace s Hautefaye, communentheNontron istrict

(arrondissement) f the Dordognedipartement.On the fairground,a young noble is tor-tured ortwo hours,then burnedalive (if indeed still alive) beforea mobof threehundred

to eighthundredeoplewho haveaccusedhimof shouting Vive aRepublique!" hen

night falls, the frenziedcrowd disperses,but not withoutboastingof having "roasted"a

"Prussian."omeexpress egret tnothavingnflictedhesamepunishmentntheparishpriest.

The scenenow shiftsforwardn timeto February 871. TherepublicanournalistCharlesPonsacsuppliesdetails hat turn ragedyntohistorical bject:"Never n theannals f crimehastherebeenso dreadful murder.magine!thappenedn broadday-light, n themidstof merrymaking,eforea crowdof thousandssic]!Thinkof it!This

revoltingcrime lackedeven the cover of darkness or an excuse! Dante is rightto say that

man sometimesexhibits a lustmorehideous thanconcupiscence: helust forblood." Laterin the articlewe are told that"thecrime of Hautefaye s in a sense a wholly politicalact."

The enigma of Hautefaye... lies in this tensionbetween horrorandpoliticalrational-

ity.We must therefore urnto

history,to what it was that first

broughthorrorand

politics

51.Inquiringntoneglectandevendisdain f the aitdiversamonghistoriansntilquite ecently,MichellePerrotbserveshat"lechoixdu ong erme,'ambitionmacrostructurelle,esobsessionsusdriel .. nepouvaient u'end6tourner,ommeaussi e peud'indretport6 a 'histoire e la spherepriv6e""the ocuson the ongterm,he nterestnmacrostructures,heobsessionwithquantitativeseries,alongwith helackof interestntheprivatephere, ouldonlydistractrom he aitdivers")("Fait ivers thistoire uXIXeme iecle," 17).



166 LIONELGOSSMAN

together nd henprizedhemapart,norder oclarifyourunderstandingf whatprovedtobe,inFrance,he astoutburst f peasant age o result n a murder.52

The pointof departure f Corbin'sLes Clochesde la terre(1994; published nEnglish as VillageBells, 1998) is again anecdotal-in this case a series of three

anecdotes about heringingof bells. The firstrelatesanincident n whichagroup

of girls and unmarriedwomen repeatedly rang the bells of the commune of

Brienne in the departmentof Aube on the 4th Frimaireof the year VIII (25

November,1799), in flagrantviolationof laws passedin 1795 and 1796 restrict-

ing the use of bells to nationalfestivals, andin uncomprehending efianceof the

attemptsof the "authorities"o get them to desist.The second anecdotetells of a

riot that broke out in the same place in December 1832 following a decision by

the municipalcouncil to sell one of the village bells-the oldest, knownas the"great"bell-which was cracked,in orderto satisfya requestof the sub-prefect

of Bar-sur-Aube hatthe communepayfor the armingof the local nationalguard.

Finally,in the thirdanecdotewe learn of the uproarcausedin 1958 in the solid-

ly religious commune of Lonlay-l'Abbaye in Normandy by a decision of the

municipalcouncil to have the restoredbell of the local churchresume theancient

traditionof marking he noon hour, n place of the sirenon the roof of the town

hall to which thatfunction--important n a ruralcommunity--had been entrust-

ed afterthe destructionof the churchtowerby the Germans n 1944.53This text

is furtherpunctuatedby innumerable tories of disputesover bells. "Manywillbe astonishedat the idea of treatingbell-ringingas a subjectof historical nves-

tigation,"Corbinconcedes in a forewordto the English translation,"andyet it

offers us privilegedaccess to the world we have lost."54

A few years later,in writingthe life of an unknownclog-maker(Le Monde

retrouvi de Louis-FrangoisPinagot: sur les traces d'un inconnu 1798-1876,

1998;published n Englishas the life of an unknown:The RediscoveredWorldof

a Clog-Maker n NineteenthCenturyFrance, 2001), Corbinseems to havewant-

ed to distance himself even furtherfrom basing his own text on a previously

existing structurednarrative.His "hero" s chosen atrandom, he only conditionof selection being that not a single pre-shapedbiographicalor autobiographicalaccountof him, not even a criminalrecord,was to be found.55

Accordingto Corbinhimself, his storyof Louis-FranqoisPinagotis "notreal-

ly an exercise in micro-history."Whether t is or is not is of less interestthanthe

lengthsto which Corbinwent in order o make sure that the startingpointof his

investigationwouldbe as undeterminedas possible. Pinagothimself was select-

ed not simply by excluding any figurewho "left an unusual record of anykind"

52. Alain Corbin,The Village of Cannibals:Rage and Murder in France, 1870,transl. Arthur

Goldhammer Cambridge,Eng.:Polity Press, 1992), 1.

53. Alain Corbin,Les Cloches de la terre:paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnesau XIXesibcle (Paris:Albin Michel, 1994), 9-13.

54. Corbin, VillageBells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th CenturyFrench Countryside, ransl.

MartinThom (New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1998), ix.

55. Corbin, helife of an unknown:TheRediscoveredWorld f a Clog-Makern NineteenthCentury

France, transl.ArthurGoldhammer New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress, 2001), viii, ix, x.




or about whom any personalor family recollectionsremained,but by the histo-

rian'spicking out, eyes closed, "a volume from the inventoryof the municipal

archives... on which(his) handhappen(ed)

o fall"- which turnedout to be that

for the commune of Origny-le-Butin,"a nondescript ocality, a tiny cell in the

vast tissue of Frenchcommunes,"one, moreover,that "like so many othertiny

communes . . . has vanished from memory in the same way as its individual

inhabitants."Two names were finally chosen "atrandom" rom the decennial

tables of vital statistics for the late eighteenthcentury.Only here did the histori-

an intervene:one of the two was eliminated because he died young and thus

would have been of limited heuristicvalue.

It is hardto imagine a startingpoint more at odds with thatof Wittgenstein's

Poker, with which Ibegan

thispaper.

Corbin'staskwas not to fill in anexistingstructure,o elaboratean existing story,as EdmondsandEidinow do. Therewas

no such structure.His startingpointwas a cipher,a mysteryabout which every-

thing hadto be learned.Moreover,the aim was not to make Pinagothimself an

objectin his world,but to use him "like a filmmakerwho shoots a scene throughthe eyes of a characterwho (himself) remains off screen,"in order to "painta

portraitof his world as he mighthave seen it, to reconstitutehis spatialand tem-

poral horizon,his family environment,his circle of friends,his community,as

well as his probablevalues andbeliefs."56Between the historianandhis charac-

ter the distance remainsunbridged

andunbridgeable.

Unlike Edmonds and

Eidinow,Corbindoes not presenthimself as an omniscient narratordescribinga

world of readilyidentifiableandintelligibleobjects,relations,andpersonalities,

but as a historically imited subject engaging with otherhistoricallylimited and

deeply unfamiliarsubjects.Conjuringaway the strangenessof the otheris not

partof Corbin'shistoriographical roject.

Comparedwith the experimentaland exploratorywork of Davis, Darnton,

Corbin,andothers,Wittgenstein's okermust strikeone, in the end, as "potted"

history,skillfully cobbled togetherfrom other books by a couple of intelligent

andwell-readjournalists.

Like alarge

class of traditionalanecdotes anecdotes

of Napoleon,Bismarck,Churchill,De Gaulle, andso on-the openinganecdote

of Wittgenstein'sPoker is a well-structurednarrative nvolving a famous indi-

vidual about whom the reader can be expected to have the usual common

notions.Characteristicallylso, it has been borrowed romthepublicdomainand

is not itself the productof historical research or discovery.Not surprisingly, t

producesfairly predictableresultsand does not contribute o the opening up of

new historicalquestionsor lead to new areasof historicalexploration.

As a structuredorm,writtenor

oral,that is

passedfrom hand to hand or mouth

to mouthand, transcending he particular ircumstances t relates, thatpretends

to a broadersignificance, the anecdote depends on, epitomizes, and confirms

generallyacceptedviews of the world,humannature,andthe humancondition.

It may be invoked to illustratea problemor even a paradox,but it will not usu-

57. Ibid., 12.



168 LIONELGOSSMAN

ally lead to a rethinkingof the terms of the problemor paradox.In contrast,as

an unpublished,often secret record of events excluded fromthe official record,

anecdotesmay challengethe historian o expandand revise establishedor autho-

rizedviews of a historicalsituation, event, or personalityor of human behavior

generally.In the modern guise of thefait divers, thatis, as a rawjournalisticor

archivalreportof a striking, disturbing,or perplexingevent or behavior,anec-

dotesmay likewise provokea reconsideration f what we believe we know about

historyandsociety and lead us to considerpreviouslyunobservedaspectsof the

past.As Marc Ferronotes, the "fortuitous ncident"-dismissed as a non-event

by churches, governments, political parties, and similar established institu-

tions-is in fact a "necessityof (the writingof) history ... a privilegedhistori-

cal object" n that it serves as an "indicateurdesant6,"

a signalof trouble n the

textureof society, politics, the economy,or the prevailingvalue system.57

Princeton University

57. MarcFerro, "Presentation," nnales 38 (1983), 824-825.

Anecdote and History

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