Literature Is the Theoretical Representation of History: Michel de Certeau's Discourse on History, Psychoanalysis, and Literature

Michel de Certeau, in his own peculiar way, deeply expounds the relation of history, psychoanalysis, and literature. Certeau holds that history is not the “stating” of facts, but the “setting-up” of facts; it is itself an “operational” act, while what psychoanalysis reveals is the covered and repressed “other”—both of them depart from literary fiction, both lie between science and fiction. Therefore, from this angle, “the historian is also a novelist,” (1) and “literature is a ‘logical’ representation of history; literary fiction makes history able to be thought.” (2)

I

Certeau explains the work of historiography by way of “playing cards.” He says that the historian treats historical material like playing cards, manipulating it as object; according to the corresponding operational rules and interpretive procedures, he decomposes, cuts, and reclassifies the material. In this process of “card-playing,” the “past” is regarded by the historian as a heap of disordered elements, which must be “sorted and prepared” by him. As for the “signified” of those “cultural relics” scattered in culture, the historian “divides” them according to some relatedness, arranges them in a certain order, and thereby turns them into objects available for processing. Through this series of operations, they are endowed with “story-plot” and a certain “meaning,” so that they can be understood and received by people. The historian cannot but employ “fiction,” establishing a relational system among the various units, adopting in the space of the past the scientific suppositions of the present, and thereby establishing all manner of different social models.

Although history claims, on the surface, to maintain a “neutral” objective standpoint, in fact it is closely related to the author's identity and social position. “The problem of history lies in the position of the subject; the subject itself has a differential action, and there is a historiographical character difficult to identify with one's own self.” (3) The social position the knowledge-subject occupies, his identity, the focus he attends to, his relation to the historical subject—all influence and even determine where his interest lies; his selection, interpretation, and organization-classification of historical material influence and even determine the production of historical knowledge. For example, at the end of the eighteenth century, theories of sentiment and interest were still the core of social analysis; by the nineteenth century, this theory was gradually washed out by an objective economy, replaced by a rational explanation of production-relations, the old theory leaving only a residue, and sentiment serving only as a “need” to provide a foothold for the new theoretical system. Among these, the change of the knowledge-subject creates the change of the object of historiography and the change of historical representation.

For Certeau, history cannot reproduce reality. So long as there is a time-interval, human understanding cannot avoid divergence, because the concrete context has changed, the conditions and rules of the event's generation have changed, the present reader and the past transcriber, as well as the beliefs and notions of the historical participants, are all different; to view past events with present eyes necessarily involves error. In the flowing process of history, the interpretation made by each transcription is a kind of understanding (misreading); it is both the transcriber's understanding of history and our understanding of the transcription, and at the same time it is our cognition of the present through the “relation” to the past. History can only be continually re-read and revised; it cannot “represent” the fact itself.

History does not develop linearly; it has no continuity. The culture of each historical stage is a pluralistic coexistence; this is precisely the reason that, behind the structural order organizing social meaning, there lurks another “otherness” structural order; and once cultural change leads the “otherness” structural order to replace the position of the original order, the discontinuity in the continuation of history occurs. History cannot avoid having fault-layers; between human and history there is always inevitably estrangement and misunderstanding. Certeau speaks of writing seventeenth-century religious history: on the road of research, facing the residue, fragments, and manuscripts that have nothing rational to speak of in the “trash can” of history, he can only, like a scavenger, by the help of the dishes or the discarded clothes picked out of the trash can, imagine the mansion, the banquet, and the private life he has never met. History is the world he can forever never enter; the only thing he can do is to activate imagination, find back the past of the “other,” and construct a life he himself never actually lived. Once our gaze changes, our thought changes, the past world too changes accordingly. In the continuation of history there exists what Foucault called “radical discontinuity”; this time-fault does not allow anyone to truly reflect the past. Therefore, as a historian, he must face two forms of “hiding”: on one hand, behind the old days is “hidden” something structured that resists our comprehension; on the other hand, another structured thing is “hidden” in our own prejudices or intentions, and determines the gaze we initially cast upon historical events. History is born precisely in the mutual conflict of the content of these two forms of “hiding”; it can only, by means of imagination, mediate and compromise them, building them into discourse, sewn together into the gorgeous garment of Penelope. The structuralization hidden in the past differs from the present, and, as a kind of resistance, relativizes the present. This resistance is always the discourse that forces historical discourse to become “otherness.” In view of this, the historian cannot ignore “history no more”; this irrevocable “history no more” determines the rewriting, and at the same time also determines the fictionality and fragility of historiographical work.

Although the “events” that history narrates claim to have objectively “represented” a certain segment of “facts” that have already happened, behind the representation of the past is hidden the present organizer, hidden the “institution”: a certain state organ, academic body, professional position, and so on; therefore, historical narration cannot break free of the constraint of socio-economic structure. As Popper points out, the scientific community corrects the subjective effect of the scientific researcher. The scientific community has a certain budget; it is closely related to policy, and is increasingly limited by complex tools such as archive facilities, computers, and editing methods; it inherits certain social-cultural premises and conventions, and these conventions in turn depend on such factors as personnel composition, research situation, vested interest, and the mainstream current of the age. Therefore, learning is no longer merely the individual behavior of marginal significance; it is a kind of “collective industry.” The so-called “representation” of facts can in essence only be the reality “set up” by the organizing institution hidden behind it; it replaces, with the “set-up” reality, those historical facts that have already passed us by, fills the space left by the departed, and, by the help of modern technology, makes the “past” rise from the dead ashes, thereby breaking the clearly-demarcated state between “past” and “present” and artificially mending the rupture of the ancient-modern relation. “In a society or community, the re-presence of history has an indispensable action; it continually repairs the rupture-wound between past and present, transcends the separation and violence of time, and produces a certain ‘meaning’; it creates a reference-stage possessing a common context, guaranteeing the cohesion of the group and the communicability of the symbolic. In a word, in Michelet's words, history is the work of the living ‘comforting the dead’; it gathers the scattered multitudes into a seemingly-real space, and this itself is representation.” (4) The reason historical narration is necessary lies precisely in its being an important path by which the academic institution uses the “story” of the old days to organize the social exchange and social life of the present.

Certeau also makes a deep analysis of “broad history,” that is, the news media, pointing out three of its attributes. First, the news media, taking the representation of reality as a means, conceals the conditions of history's own generation. News reportage has from of old never frankly admitted that it itself is the specific socio-economic institution, and the reportage it carries is in fact commanded by a certain industry, even commanded by political power, and at the same time constrained by the contract between that industry and the client, constrained by the logic of a certain technology itself. The information of the reportage appears clear and transparent on the surface, but precisely conceals the complex contriving work behind it. Second, the statement in the name of reality is imperative; it gives an “indication” like a pointer. Current affairs (daily reality) reportage's action is equivalent to the divine intent from the priest: the priest, the witness, and the organizer are only, in the so-called “fact,” hinting at and even authorizing the crowd, indicating to people what to say, what to believe, what to do. “Facts” are undeniable; speaking with facts, history, in instructing and teaching people how to think and how to act, fundamentally needs no explanation. Third, the media, while silently stating facts, is at the same time manufacturing facts. The various media, by the help of the power and credit already established, deliberately confuse people, incite people, cultivate followers, and instigate them to act. The historical narration on the media adopts similar operational techniques in theme-selection, focus-topic, material, and mode; it can ignore, disparage, or acknowledge, focus on, or magnify certain practices; it can arouse various contradictions and conflicts, ignite the fire of populism and nationalism, and can also incite or organize certain behaviors to manufacture history. The various news media, with their bewitching voice, transform and control social space; they are a voice possessing infinite power. “On the blank paper, a circulating, gradually-advancing, and regulated practical activity (one step) composes the counterfeit of another ‘world’; it is no longer the broadly-accepted world, but the manufactured world.” (5) Yet this manufactured “counterfeit of the world” is taken by people as the real world, as the authoritative voice.

In analyzing the relation between Hawaiian myth-legend and historical legend, Sahlins expounds such a principle: there is by no means a clear-cut distinction between “the real” and “the fictional”; those statements called “fictional” may, in content or mode of utterance, on the contrary be regarded as “real”; yet in those “historical facts” needing no argument and verification, there is always interwoven a “metaphorical myth.” (6) History and fiction are originally hard to separate, and the reason historical narration is held to have represented reality is, in Certeau's view, rooted in the fact that history is expounded in the name of “reality.” It, according to its own standard, distinguishes two kinds of discourse: one is scientific discourse, the other is fictional story; since the opposite of history, “fiction,” is held to be false, then the reality-related history becomes a real and credible statement. Therefore, the historian in fact devotes himself only to clearing away falsity, and not to establishing the authentic. They restore truth in the process of identifying error. This mutual-defining contains a double difference: on one hand, once error is distinguished, history becomes “seemingly true”; on the other hand, “exposing falsity” makes the statement appear all the more credible. The assumption of all this is: the non-false is the real—as though, when the ancients exposed the “false” gods, it was only to make people believe in the true God.

A more important reason is that the distinction between “the real” and “the fictional” cannot do without the operation of power. As Foucault points out: “What is important is that truth is not outside power, nor does it lack power… Truth belongs to this world. Thanks to all kinds of constraints, it can be produced. It has a regular power-function. Every society has its regime of truth, has its general policy concerning truth—that is, concerning the various discourses that each society accepts and makes function as real things; has its mechanisms and institutions for distinguishing true from false discourse, its ways of confirming true and false discourse, its techniques and procedures for obtaining truth; and has the status of those who are charged with speaking the discourse that functions as the real thing.” (7) The credibility of historical statement is inseparable from the authority of the historian and his institution. The historian occupies his own peculiar academic-power position in the field of knowledge; this position is selectively opened up, and through a series of ceremonies is decomposed, screened, and conscripted; from this, his discourse has legitimacy and authority. It is precisely with legitimacy and authority that discourse becomes credible. Authority conceals the missing thing, the distorted thing, and the narrator's subjective fiction; it conceals the historical manipulation of the fact, endows historical statement with reliability, even with an ideology valid everywhere under heaven. With the guarantee of authority, the reader need not worry that he will risk losing reality and truth. The academic institution, in turn, by the help of its social resources and power, confers on the historian legitimacy and authority by its own authority, and at the same time confers on the facts he states legitimacy and credibility. The institution almost magically manipulates all this, using the force of authority to fill the gap of knowledge, to cover up the void of historical fact. Therefore, “the so-called ‘reality’ is precisely that the discourse, by the help of ‘the thing it refers to,’ becomes legitimate. First the author proposes a certain ‘reality’; because the author is acknowledged by the industry and society, this ‘reality’ is transferred from the author to his article, and finally the article, because of the events it itself describes, gains acknowledgment.” (8) And “the historian, once he loses the title of professor, is at most no more than a novelist.” (9) It is precisely for this reason that Certeau advocates the “re-politicization” of history, re-stressing, at the moment when the historiography circles declare their own “objectivity” and “neutrality,” the need to reveal the power-manipulation in historical statement.

II

Certeau holds that psychoanalysis and historical research arrange the space of “memory” in different ways. Historical research intends to draw near the “past”; it uses fragmentary records to return to the historical scene, restore historical events, and reconstruct the original appearance of fact. Psychoanalysis, in turn, awakens the memory of the “past” in another way. In the horizon of psychoanalysis, the “past” still stubbornly stays; on the surface, the “present” seems to have driven away the “past” and replaced it; yet those repressed “pasts”, without leaving a trace, return to the “present” that does not allow them, and arise in a changed face. Those excluded notions lurking there—that “wild,” “dark” thing, those “trashes” that are forsaken and lost, that resistance to reason and “superstition”—record the law of the “other”; all this evades the subject's detection, and also ignores his intention, while psychoanalysis again makes an effort to summon them back. Therefore, psychoanalysis and history both intend to find back the past; “psychoanalysis acknowledges that the past exists within the present, while historical research places the past beside the present.” (10)

Psychoanalysis, in seeking and retracing the memory of the old days, states another “other” history utterly different from the discourse of Western Enlightenment. Certeau points out that the rational subject and the developmental-ethical view established by Enlightenment consciousness endow history with continuity. Individualism becomes the historical image of Western modern society; the individual's rights and duties are stressed, and this is regarded as a kind of full freedom and responsibility, a knowing independence, which can let the human walk out of the state of “minority.” It is precisely the individual as stage that expresses the history and cognition of Western modern society, becoming the basis of capitalist economy and democratic politics. Freud's doctrine was born in, and exists in, the Enlightenment idea, yet inversely it reverses Enlightenment consciousness. Contrary to Enlightenment's making the human walk toward adulthood, psychoanalysis intends to return to the impulse-mechanism hidden behind the “minority” state, to make knowing freely return to the law of the unconscious, and to make it progressively return to the originary event. Psychoanalysis opens up a new “natural” history; what it reveals is the history shielded by the history since the Enlightenment, the history subjected to neglect and even repression. This history has no hero, no name; it is diffuse, fragmented, nameless; what it embodies is the “behavior” and “movement” that, in “Brownian motion,” organize and constitute the social background—and this in turn is the “otherness” history that cannot be ignored and is all the more basic.

Certeau makes a new exposition of Freud from the angle of historiography. He says that psychoanalysis holds that memory hides the experience and desire repressed by the human, distorted and sunk into the unconscious; these memories cannot be analyzed by general scientific means, and so Freud borrows the “literary mode,” using rhetoric such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and paronomasia, as well as psychological symptoms. In these rhetorical figures, Freud discovers many techniques that reveal the “other,” such as the Oedipus complex, the castration complex, and transference, and endows them with historical value. To understand the truth behind the distorted memory-fragments, psychoanalysis must, by the help of conjecture and supposition, re-interpret the fragments, use fiction to recompose the fragments, and organize the obscure and hard-to-understand material into an understandable “story.” The “passion” that literature is good at is likewise valued by Freud. In Freud's view, it is precisely passion that determines human activity, constituting the strong driving force of social-historical development. The more those “blind” passions are repressed by rational and technological activity, the more they exert a determining action on the socio-economic state. The mode of “literature,” long excluded by science, is again received by Freud into his exploratory activity of reconstructing the “past,” constituting another formal logic distinct from the mainstream scientific logic. “It is precisely the attention to historical fact that makes Freud return to the form of fiction, and even return to a poetic art.” (11)

In Certeau's view, Freud not only adopts the literary mode to do psychoanalysis; for him, literature itself is in fact the “theoretical representation” of history. Literature and history originally had no clear boundary. In ancient China there was the saying of “collecting poetry” to observe the popular customs and supplement the examination of governance; in the ancient West, “poetry” and “history” were undistinguished. Until the seventeenth century, when “story” and “memoir” appeared in a state of sharing the honors equally, did the two disciplines of literature and history begin to draw a faint boundary; by the eighteenth century, because of the division of labor between “literature” and “science,” the boundary of literature and history became clear; by the nineteenth century, by the help of university education, this disciplinary division became an institution. The “objective” and the “imaginary,” because of the development of positivist science, established an insurmountable boundary, and this is the basis on which history and literature are distinguished. What history values is the content that scientific method can control, while literature receives the “surplus” that is excluded, receives the thing that history regards as the “other.” And so, literature, by the help of the rhetoric, fictional stories, and passions that make historiography feel ashamed and lacking in legitimacy, finds back, through statements stripped of seriousness, the language forgotten by scientific reason and repressed by social norms, in order to express those things denied and rejected by history, and to establish a unique position that lets the “other” be able to slip in. The social behavior that history does not allow and acknowledge gains a legitimate existence in literature; literature opens up a “space of innocence” to receive the past; it harbors the unacknowledged history of the human. Those “others” washed out by the history that prides itself on pursuing “objective fact” finally return to the illusion of reality, and reappear in the literary face of “fiction.” Based on this, Certeau says: “The literary work frames the vicissitudes of the historian into a certain convention.” (12) Those histories unreachable by reason are thus able to be reconsidered by people. On the other hand, the fictional world that literature creates is separated from the real world, just like a dream-world. “In the dream, when he is free from ‘noise’ and is alone, listening only to his own impressions and feelings, he can make a judgment more acute and true than in his waking state.” (13) It is precisely for this reason that Freud especially values literary biography and tragedy, and takes them as important material for reconstructing the past, only that what Freud attends to is not the figure of the character, but the intention to identify the hidden force that triggers behavior, to interpret the past concealed by representation, and to reveal the action it exerts in the manner of latent history. Certeau once spoke of a latent force. He said: usually the spread of a novel phenomenon is silent, but once a crisis comes, it is enough to let the novel phenomenon spread without legs, like a flood overflowing and lifting the manhole-cover of the sewer, gushing wantonly, drowning everything. This undercurrent is always beyond people's expectation; what it reveals is the underground existence, a ceaseless resistance, and this kind of force will permeate the whole society and threaten the whole society. “The force this undercurrent possesses will break through layer upon layer of barriers, overflow from the original channel of society, open up a new passage, and leave behind a completely different new landscape and order.” (14) From this angle, literature and psychoanalysis are likewise intent on revealing this covered and repressed underground undercurrent.

Just as the academic institution dresses historical narration to look like “science,” it also gives psychoanalysis the name of “scientificity.” Certeau points out: “People believe those things held to be real, and this so-called ‘reality’ is assigned to the discourse by a certain trust; the former gives the latter a body engraved by law.” (15) The psychoanalytic institution induces people to believe in the reality of the unconscious; it makes the theoretical “supposition” appear as a “fact” already verified and beyond doubt. Without the academic institution, the unconscious could only be like Thomas More's Utopia, no more than a new theoretical paradigm, providing only a space for fiction, tragedy, and rhetoric to display their talent. The academic institution, by the help of its authority, teaches people how to view history and psychoanalysis, like the guarantee made by a bank, respectively conferring on them scientificity and legitimacy. It is precisely in this sense that Certeau says: “In any case, history and literature have no great distinction; the distinction between the two lies only in two modes of understanding the document: either to regard the document as academic authority, or to hold that the article concerns only ‘the void.’” (16)

Against the background of the postmodern current of thought in which disciplinary boundaries are continually broken and filled in, Certeau re-thinks the relation of history, psychoanalysis, and literature, and reveals the fact that they cannot break free of the ghostly entanglement of “fiction.” In Certeau's view, psychoanalysis, like history, intends to draw near the past and restore the past, only that history is the past that has been rationalized, while psychoanalysis favors the past of the “other” repressed by reason, and it occupies the same space as literature. History and psychoanalysis both inevitably adopt the same mode—“literary fiction”—to return to the past and construct history. So Certeau says: “Fiction narrates the development of things, while myth displays structure; psychoanalysis lies precisely between fiction and myth, letting the analyst, by the help of the tragic mode, make a historical interpretation of the material.” (17) These views of Certeau's bring an enormous challenge and conflict to historiography, and at the same time bring an important enlightenment and influence to literary theory and literary writing, especially to the writing of “non-fiction literature.”

Certeau deeply reveals the dependence of history on literary fiction, and correctly expounds the connection between the two; but he does not adequately value the difference between history as a kind of truth-seeking activity and literature. Outside the historical text, there did after all once exist historical facts, although these facts have already been drowned by time, although historical narration therefore cannot avoid imagination and fiction; yet it cannot but take the pursuit of the truth of fact as its goal. When the facts discovered by archaeology or other research contradict the historical narration, the historical narration must make a correction accordingly. This is to say, historical narration is, in the last analysis, to continually draw near the truth of fact. Literature, in turn, has a different aim and law; it can disregard fact; literary imagination is specially exempted, and it need not be confined by fact. Toynbee, combining historical fact, once gave an example: “Someone said that for the Iliad, if you read it as history, you will find it full of fiction; if you read it as a fictional story, you will again find it full of history. All history resembles the Iliad to such a degree that they cannot be completely without a fictional component. Merely to select, arrange, and present facts is itself one of the methods used in the realm of fiction; the general view—that all historians, if they are not at the same time a great artist, cannot possibly become a ‘great’ historian—is correct.” (18) Here, although Toynbee points out that history cannot do without fiction, and that the historian should at the same time be an artist, he does not therefore equate history with literature, nor equate the historian with the artist. The age in which the Iliad was produced was an age in which history and literature were not yet differentiated. With the development of human activity and the difference of the aim of activity, the field of activity too underwent differentiation, and history and literature finally parted ways. Although the two still retain not a few common points, and even retain a common marginal zone, on the whole, because of the different aims of activity, they developed their own respective characteristics: literature is intoxicated with fiction, while history must strive to limit and clear away fiction.