Barthes The discourse of history.pdf

ROLAND BARTHES

THE DISCOURSE OF HISTORY

Translated by Stephen Bann. Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981): 7-20. Pagination,

superscripts, and accents are not preserved. Please see source for the final three notes.

The formal description of sets of words beyond the level of the sentence (what we call for

convenience discourse) is not a modern development: from Gorgias to the nineteenth

century, it was the special concern of traditional rhetoric. Recent developments in the

science of language have nonetheless endowed it with a new timeliness and new methods

of analysis: a linguistic description of discourse can perhaps already be envisaged at this

stage; because of its bearings on literary analysis (whose importance in education is well

known) it is one of the first assignments for semiology to undertake.

This second level of linguistics, which must look for the universals of discourse (if they

exist) under the form of units and general rules of combination, must at the same time

obviously give an answer to the question whether structural analysis is justified in retaining

the traditional typology of discourses; whether it is fully legitimate to make a constant

opposition between the discourses of poetry and the novel, the fictional narrative and the

historical narrative. It is the last point which gives rise to the reflections set down here.

Does the narration of past events, which, in our culture from the time of the Greeks

onwards, has generally been subject to the sanction of historical 'science', bound to the

unbending standard of the 'real', and justified by the principles of 'rational' exposition - does

this form of narration really differ, in some specific trait, in some indubitably distinctive

feature, from imaginary narration, as we find it in the epic, the novel, and the drama? And

if this trait or feature exists, then in what level of the historical statement must it be

placed?(1) In order to suggest a reply to this question, we shall here be looking, in a free

and far from exhaustive fashion, at the discourse of a number of great classic historians:

Herodotus, Machiavelli, Bossuet and Michelet.

I. THE ACT OF UTTERING

First of all, we may ask under what conditions the classic historian is enabled -or authorized

- himself to designate, in his discourse, the act by which he promulgates it. In other words,

what, on the level of discourse - and not of language, are the shifters (in Jakobson's sense of

the term)(2) which assure the transition from the utterance to the act of uttering (or vice

versa ) ?

It would appear that historical discourse involves two regular types of shifters. The first

type comprises what we might call the shifters of listening . This category has been

identified by Jakobson, on the level of language, with the term testimonial, according to the

formula CeCa1/Caa2: in addition to the event reported (Ce), discourse mentions at the same

time the act of the informer (Ca1), and the speech of the utterer which is related to it (Ca2).

This form of shifter thus designates any reference to the historian's listening , collecting

testimony from elsewhere and telling it in his own discourse. Listening made explicit

represents a choice, for it is possible not to refer to it at all; it brings the historian closer to

the anthropologist, in so far as he mentions the source of his information. Thus we find an

abundant use of this shifter of listening among historian/anthropologists like Herodotus.

The forms vary: they range from phrases of the type of as I have heard , or to my

knowledge , to the historian's use of the present tense which testifies to the intervention of

the utterer, and to any mention of the historian's personal experience. Such is the case with

Michelet, who 'listens to' the History of France as a result of an overwhelming personal

experience (of the Revolution of July 1830)and takes account of this in his discourse. The

listening shifter is obviously not distinctive to historical discourse: it is found frequently in

conversation, and in certain expository devices used in the novel (such as anecdotes which

are taken from fictional sources of information mentioned in the text).

The second type of shifter comprises all the explicit signs whereby the utterer - in this case,

the historian - organizes his own discourse, taking up the thread or modifying his approach

in some way in the course of narration: that is to say, where he provides explicit points of

reference in the text. This is an important type of shifter, and there can be many different

ways of 'organizing' discourse accordingly; but these different instances can all be

subsumed under the principle that each shifter indicates a movement of the discourse in

relation to its matter, or more precisely a movement in relation to the sequence of its matter,

rather like the operation of the temporal and locational deictics 'here is/there is'. Thus we

can cite as cases where the shifter affects the flow of utterances: the effect of immobility

(comme nous l'avons dit plus haut), that of returning to an earlier stage ( altius repetere,

replicare da piu alto luogo ), that of coming back again ( ma ritornando all'ordine nostro,

dico come . . . ), that of stopping dead ( sur lui, nous n'en dirons pas plus ), and that of

announcing ( voici les autres actions dignes de memoire qu'il fit pendant son regne ). The

organizing shifter poses a problem which is worthy of attention, though it can only be

lightly indicated here: this is the problem arising from the coexistence, or to be more exact

the friction between two times - the time of uttering and the time of the matter of the

utterance. This friction gives rise to a number of important factors in historical discourse, of

which we shall mention three. The first relates to the many ways of producing the

phenomenon of acceleration in a historical account: an equal number of pages (if such be

the rough measure of the time of uttering) can cover very different lapses of time (the time

of matter of the utterance). In Machiavelli's History of Florence the same measure (a

chapter) covers in one instance a number of centuries, and in another no more than two

decades. The nearer we are to the historian's own time, the more strongly the pressure of

the uttering makes itself felt, and the slower the history becomes. There is no such thing as

isochrony - and to say this, is to attack implicitly the linearity of the discourse and open it

up to a possible 'paragrammatical' reading of the historical message.(3) The second point

also reminds us, in its we, that this type of discourse - though linear in its material form -

when it is face to face with historical time, undertakes (so it would appear the role of

amplifying the depth of that time. We become aware of what we might call a zig-zag or

saw-toothed history. A good example i Herodotus, who turns back to the ancestors of a

newcomer, and the returns to his point of departure to proceed a little further -and the starts

the whole process all over again with the next newcomer. Finally there is a third factor in

historical discourse which is of the utmost importance, one which bears witness to the

destructive effect organizing shifters as far as the chronological time of the history

concerned. This is a question of the way historical discourse is inaugurated, of the place

where we find in conjunction the beginning of the matter of the utterance and the exordium

of the uttering.(4) Historical discourse is familiar with two general types of inauguration in

the first place, there is what we might call the performative opening for the words really

perform a solemn act of foundation; the model for this is poetic, the I sing of the poets. So

Joinville begins his history with a religious invocation ( Au nom de Dieu le tout-puissant, je,

Jehan, sire, Joinville, fais ecrire la vie de nostre Saint roi Louis ), and even the socialist

Louis Blanc does not disdain the purificatory introit, (5) so evident is it that the beginnings

of speech always carry with them a kind of difficulty, perhaps even a sacred character.

Then there is a much more commonly found element, the Preface, which is an act of

uttering characterized such, whether prospectively in so far as it announces the discourse

come, or retrospectively in that it embodies a judgement on the discourse. (Such is the case

with the Preface which Michelet wrote to crown his History of France , once it had been

completely written and published.) Bearing in mind these different elements, we are likely

to conclude that the entry of the act of uttering into the historical utterance, through these

organizing shifters, is directed less towards offering the historian a chance of expressing his

'subjectivity', as is commonly held, than to 'complicating' the chronological time of history

by bringing it up against another time, which is that of the discourse itself and could be

termed for short the 'paper-time'. To sum up, the presence in historical narration of explicit

signs of uttering would represent an attempt to 'dechronologize' the 'thread' of history and to

restore, even though it may merely be a matter of reminiscence or nostalgia, a form of time

that is complex, parametric and not in the least linear: a form of time whose spatial depths

recall the mythic time of the ancient cosmogonies, which was also linked in its essence to

the words of the poet and the soothsayer. Organizing shifters bear witness, in effect --

though they do so through indirect ploys which have the appearance of rationality - to the

predictive function of the historian. It is to the extent that he knows what has not yet been

told that the historian, like the actor of myth, needs to double up the chronological

unwinding of events with references to the time of his own speech.

The signs (or shifters) which have just been mentioned bear solely on the very process of

uttering. There are other signs which refer no longer to the act of uttering, but to what

]akobson calls its protagonists (Ta): the receiver and the sender. It is a fact worthy of note,

and somewhat mysterious at the same time, that literary discourse very rarely carries within

it the signs of the 'reader'. Indeed we can say that its distinctive trait is precisely that it is -

or so it would appear - a discourse without the pronoun 'you', even though in reality the

entire structure of such a discourse implies a reading 'subject'. In historical discourse, the

signs of the receiver are usually absent: they can be found only in cases where History is

offered as a lesson, as with Bossuet's Universal History , a discourse which is explicitly

addressed by the tutor to his pupil, the prince. Yet in a certain sense, this schema is only

possible to the extent that Bossuet's discourse can be held to reproduce by homology the

discourse which God himself holds with men - precisely in the form of the History which

he grants to them. It is because the History of men is the Writing of God that Bossuet, as

the mediator of this writing, can establish a relationship of sender and receiver between

himself and the young prince.

Signs of the utterer (or sender) are obviously much more frequent. Here we should class all

the discursive elements through which the historian - as the empty subject of the uttering -

replenishes himself little by little with a variety of predicates which are destined to

constitute him as a person , endowed with a psychological plenitude, or again (the word

hasa precious figurative sense) to give him countenance .(6) We can mention at this point a

particular form of this 'filling' process, which is moredirectly associated with literary

criticism. This is the case where the utterer means to 'absent himself' from his discourse,

and where there is in consequence a systematic deficiency of any form of sign referring to

the sender of the historical message. The history seems to be telling itself all on its own.

This feature has a career which is worthy of note, since it corresponds in effect to the type

of historical discourse labelled as 'objective' (in which the historian never intervenes).

Actually in this case, the utterer nullifies his emotional persona, but substitutes for it

another persona, the 'objective' persona. The subject persists in its plenitude, but as an

objective subject. This is what Fustel de Coulanges referred to significantly (and somewhat

naively) as the 'chastity of History'. On the level of discourse, objectivity - or the deficiency

of signs of the utterer - thus appears as a particular form of imaginary projection, the

product of what might be called the referential illusion, since in this case the historian is

claiming to allow the referent to speak all on its own. This type of illusion is not exclusive

to historical discourse. It would be hard to count the novelists who imagined - in the epoch

of Realism - that they were 'objective' because they suppressed the signs of the 'I' in their

discourse! Today linguistics and psychoanalysis have made us much more lucid with regard

to privative utterances: we know that absences of signs are also in themselves significant.

To bring this section which deals with the act of uttering to a close, we should mention the

special case - foreseen by Jakobson and placed within his lattice of shifters, on the

linguistic level - when the utterer of the discourse is also at the same time a participant in

the process described in the utterance, when the protagonist of the utterance is the same as

the protagonist of the act of uttering (Te/Ta): that is, when the historian, who is an actor

with regard to the event, becomes its narrator, as with Xenophon, who takes part in the

retreat of the Ten Thousand and subsequently becomes its historian. The most famous

example of this conjunction of the I in the utterance and the I in the act of uttering is

doubtless the he of Caesar's Gallic War. This celebrated he belongs to the utterance; when

Caesar explicitly undertakes the act of uttering he passes to the use of we (ut supra

demonstravimus ). Caesar's he appears at first sight to be submerged amid the other

participants in the process described, and on this count has been viewed as the supreme sign

of objectivity. And yet it would appear that we can make a formal distinction which

impugns this objectivity. How ? By making the observation that the predicates of Caesar's

he are constantly pre-selected: this he can only tolerate a certain class of syntagmas, which

we could call the syntagmas of command ( giving orders, holding court, visiting, having

things done, congratulating, explaining, thinking ). The examples are, in effect, very close

to certain cases of the performative, in which speech is inextricably associated with action.

Other instances can be found for this he who is both a past actor and a present narrator

(particularly in Clausewitz). They show that the choice of an apersonal pronoun is no more

than a rhetorical alibi, and that the true situation of the utterer is clear from the choice of

syntagmas with which he surrounds his past actions.

II. THE UTTERANCE

It should be possible to break down the historical utterance into units of content, which can

then be classified. These units of content represent what is spoken of in the history; in so far

as they are signifieds , they are neither the pure referent nor the discourse as a whole: their

wholeness is constituted by the referent inasmuch as it has been broken down, named and

rendered intelligible, but not yet made subject to a syntax. We shall not attempt to go

deeply into the investigation of these classes of units in this article. Such an effort would be

premature. We shall confine the discussion to a few preliminary remarks.

The historical utterance, just like the utterance in sentence form, involves both 'existents"

end 'occurrents', that is beings or entities, and their predicates. Now an initial examination

enables us to foresee that both of these categories, in their different ways, can form lists that

are to a certain extent closed, and therefore accessible to comprehension: in a word, they

can form collections , whose units end up by repeating themselves, in combinations that are

obviously subject to variation. Thus, in Herodotus, the existents can be reduced to

dynasties, princes, generals, soldiers, peoples, and places, and the occurrents to actions like

laying waste, putting into slavery, making alliances, organizing expeditions, reigning, using

stratagems, consulting oracles etc. These collections, in so far as they are (to a certain

extent) closed, should observe certain rules of substitution and transformation and it ought

to be possible to structure them - a task which is obviously more or less easy according to

the historian. The units found in Herodotus, for example, depend largely on a single

lexicon, which is that of war. It would be an interesting question to investigate whether, for

more modern historians, we should expect to find more complex associations of different

lexicons, and whether, even in this case, historical discourse would not turn out to be based,

in the last resort, on strong collections (it is preferable to talk of collections , rather than of

lexicons , since here we are discussing only the level of the content). Machiavelli seems to

have had an intuitive understanding of this type of structure: at the beginning of the History

of Florence, he presents his 'collection', that is to say the list of juridical, political and

ethnic objects which will subsequently be mobilized and set in combination in his narrative.

In the case of less well defined collections (in historians who are less archaic than

Herodotus), the units of content may nonetheless receive a strong structuring which derives

not from the lexicon, but from the personal thematic of the author. These (recurrent)

thematic objects are numerous in the case of a Romantic author like Michelet, but we can

also find them without any difficulty in authors who are reputedly more intellectual. In

Tacitus, fama is such a personal unit, and Machiavelli establishes his history on the

thematic opposition between mantenere (a verb which refers to the basic energy of the

statesman) and ruinare (which, by contrast, implies the logic of affairs in a state of

decline).(7) It goes without saying that, by means of these thematic units, which are most

often imprisoned within a single word, we can find units of the discourse (and not of the

content alone). So we come to the problem of the naming of historical objects. The word

can convey with economy a situation or a sequence of actions; it aids structuring to the

extent that, when it is projected on to the level of content, it forms in itself a small-scale

structure So it is with Machiavelli's use of the conspiracy to save having to make fully

explicit a complex datum, which designates the sole possibility of struggle remaining when

a government has vanquished every form of opposition that can be displayed in the open.

The very act of naming, which enables the discourse to be strongly articulated, is a

reinforcement of its structure. Strongly structured histories are histories which give an

important place to the substantive: Bossuet, for whom the history of men is structured by

God, makes abundant use of substantives in sequence as a short-cut.(8)

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