Robert Darnton
An Early Information Society
Online Discussion Archive: Topic and Reply 1
Topic: Expanded Considerations
Conf: Discussion of Darnton's Article
From: Raymond J. Jirran western-civilization@home.net
Date: Monday, March 13, 2000 10:15 PM
Robert Darnton offers perspective on the information age in his
Presidential Address. Developing his amorphous subject, Darnton almost
gratuitously finds an appropriate place for white sexual
licentiousness in Africa (p. 14). Two points are pertinent. First,
though racism in the United States is gratuitous and without reason,
we practice racism anyway. That irrationality is what makes racism so
frustrating. Noting (p. 35) that Darnton wrote Gens de lettres, gens
du livre (1992) before Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary
France (1995), might his essay have profited from some editorial
guidance about Africa for the AHR readership?
In developing the codes of the Parisian French, Darnton does
"demonstrate the promise of a new subdiscipline, the history of
communication, which can be applied to research in virtually any field
of study" ("In This Issue," AHR 105 [February 2000]: xiv). There were
similar codes in black America. The black spirituals offer not only
one meaning for whites but also other meanings for blacks, at certain
times. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Coming for to Carry Me Home" is not
exactly about going to an unearthly heaven when the Underground
Railroad is running north. Even hanging out the quilted bedspreads had
significance for the Underground Railroad. If we are going to portray
Africa as an acceptable place for sexual licentiousness, why not also,
as a second point, look to Africa as a place for the type of
communication examined in Darnton's France?
Racism leads to the antithesis of racism in the following manner.
Racism is about the politics of race determining truth. Because
Western civilization is about truth determining politics, racism is
fundamentally incompatible with Western civilization. Is what Darnton
describes as "News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris" also
about the incongruity between regal politics determining the truth
about how France was run? When that incongruity became too severe, did
France blossom into revolution that continues to inspire Western
civilization?
Darnton's address places us back in touch with one of the wellsprings
of Western civilization, the French Revolution. Darnton connects the
current masses via the media explosion of the Third Millennium with
the masses of the French Revolution two centuries earlier. As Darnton
words it, "I think the Paris of Louis XV may help us gain some
perspective on the Washington of Bill Clinton" (p. 35). Indeed.
As wonderful an opportunity as this is for a worldwide discussion, my
attempts to generate a similar discussion on Western civilization at
http://www.blackboard.com/ HIS101and102 have come to naught. For that
reason, thank you, AHR. Let us see if we cannot get something going
here.
Raymond J. Jirran
Topic: Re: Expanded Considerations
Conf: Discussion of Darnton's Article
From: Robert Darnton darnton@princeton.edu
Date: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 02:16 PM
Raymond Jirran detects a germ of racism in the fact that I chose
Africa as a setting for a story about sex, Louis XV's love affairs
with the three daughters of the marquis de Nesle. By way of reply, I
should explain something about the rhetorical strategy behind my
essay. The essay, in fact, was a lecture, the presidential address
delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical
Association. I tried to maintain the informal tone of a talk by
addressing my readers as an audience and using the first person
singular. On page 14, I interrupted my lecture-essay with a remark
designed to signal a shift in the exposition from analysis to
narrative: "Let me tell you a story." By doing so, I also meant to
convey the gossipy tone of story telling in Parisian cafs and to
suggest the character of an actual story about the king's sex life
that was told by a certain Jules Alexis Bernard in the shop of the
wigmaker Gaujoux, according to a report of a police spy in 1749.
Although the spy did not recount the story, he said enough to indicate
that it conformed to many such stories that were circulating about the
notorious scandal at that time. I could have told the story straight,
as I started to do in the second paragraph on p. 14. But I wanted to
make a further point, without changing the tone and preaching ex
cathedra at my audience: I deplore the tendency of historians to pass
off fiction as fact, using vulgar varieties of so-called postmodernism
to justify themselves. As I indicated in a footnote on p. 16, I had in
mind the faking of situations in Edmund Morris's _Dutch: A Memoir of
Ronald Reagan_. This tendency also exists in subtler forms, suggested
by the vogue for titles that begin with "inventing," "constructing,"
or "fabricating." I wanted to use the presidential address as an
occasion to reaffirm a professional ethos, which I described as an
implicit contract between historians and their readers: we don't
fabricate facts.
Yet there I was, telling a story that sounded like a fabrication. I
therefore changed gears in paragraph three and set the story in the
African kingdom of the Kofirans. Why Africa? Not because of any
subconscious, racist association of Africa and sex, but because the
story I told was a synopsis of a roman clef, which took place in
Africa and recounted Louis XV's love affairs with the daughters of the
marquis de Nesle: _Les amours de Zeokinizul, roi des Kofirans_,
Zeokinizul being an anagram for Louis Quinze and Kofirans for
Franais. This device made it possible to adhere closely to the
evidence and at the same time to get across the ludic, puzzle-solving
quality of reading narratives in the form of romans clef, my next
topic, which I raised on page 16. In fact, I think I could have kept
to a straight version of the story without violating the rules of
evidence, and I have done so in an abridged version of the essay,
which will appear in the _New York Review of Books_. But the extended
version opened possibilities of developing a richer, more complex
narrative.
What puzzles me in Raymond Jirran's letter is his claim that I
referred to Africa "almost gratuitously," as if he had caught a
subconscious slip into racism and "irrationality", something that
needed correction by "editorial guidance" at the _American Historical
Review_. I explained the source of the story explicitly on page 16 and
cited similar romans clef that were set in Asia, in fairyland, and
on an exotic island. Perhaps racism is so rampant in the United States
that as soon as a reader finds Africa linked with sex, he reaches for
his gun. I can only ask that my readers read attentively before they
fire off accusations.
As to Raymond Jirran's points about black spirituals and quilting, I
think they are well taken. I had hoped that my essay would stimulate
further work on communication networks and the transmission of
information beyond the range of the printed word.
Robert Darnton
Princeton University
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