Writing vs. Time History and Anthropology in the Works of Lafitau.

Writing vs. Time: History and Anthropology in the Works of LafitauAuthor(s): Michel de Certeau and James HovdeSource: Yale French Studies, No. 59, Rethinking History: Time, Myth, and Writing (1980), pp.37-64Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2929814 .Accessed: 24/04/2011 03:19

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Michel de Certeau

Writing vs. Time: History and Anthropology in the works of Laflitau

From seeing to book, and vice versa

In 1724, Joseph-Frangois Lafitau published Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains comparees aux moeurs des premiers temps, 2 Vol., in 40, 1100 pages. 1 Although the author was "one of the precursors of social Anthropology,"2 and his work "the first blaze on the path to scientific anthropology,"3 its publication is but a dot in the immense constellation of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, only a detail of his work will retain my attention here; the frontispiece chosen by Lafitau for his book. An image. An almost nothing. And yet this emblem operates as a mirror of a new "science of mores and of customs"4 where is perhaps already sketched (is it an effect of perspective?), the anthropology which Boas will define as "the reconstruction of history," a history for which the "inquiries are not confined to the periods for which written records are available and to people who had developed the art of writing." "

'Moeurs des Sauvages . . . , 2 vols. in-8' (Paris: Saugrain l'ain6 et Charles Etienne Hochereau, 1724). I will quote this edition (volume in roman numerals; page in arabic numerals). Another edition in 4 vols. in-8' appeared simultaneously at the same publisher.

2A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, quoted in W.N. Fenton and E.L. Moore, "Introduction" (cf. note 3), p. XXIX.

3W.N. Fenton & E.L. Moore, in J.F. Lafiteau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1974), p. XXIX. This translation of the first volume has one hundred pages of historical and critical introduction (pp. XIX-CXIX), and is the best existing study of Lafitau. Cf. also Michele Duchet, "Discours ethnologique et discours historique: le texte de Lafitau," Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century, CLI-CLV (1976), 607-623, also, Edna Lemay, "Histoire de l'antiquit6 et decouverte du nouveau monde chez deux auteurs du XVIIIe siecle" (i.e., Lafitau and Gaguet), ibid, pp. 1313-1328.

4Lafitau, op. cit., I, 4. 5Quoted in A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Method in Social Anthropology, ed. M.N.

Srinivas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1958), pp. 128 and 157.

37

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Michel de Certeau

The representation given by Lafitau sets forth the image of writing and of time. In the frontispiece of 1724, their encounter takes place in the interior of a closed space wherein are littered "vestiges" coming from Classical Antiquity or from the Savages of the New World. "A person in the posture of one writing" faces "time," an old man who has the wings and gesture of an angelic messenger.6 The one holds the pen, which creates the text, and the other, the scythe which destroys beings. But these symbols, which are weapons as well, approach each other without joining; the straight line of the pen is the asymptote of the curve traced by the scythe:

They do not meet. A minimal distance separates the partners. A fortiori the man-time does not touch the woman-writer. Only their glances cross. But she does not look at what she is doing, and he does

6Cf. the frontispiece reproduced here, and the "Explication of the Plates and Figures," in Lafitau, op. cit., I, non-paginated.

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not see what he is pointing to. Mediators exiled from their actions, the two are there to permit the vision to become a text. The "mysterioUs vision"7 ravishes the ecstatic genitrix who writes it unawaredly, and she escapes time, who is its index. Hence the composition pivots toward the upper part, a painting within the painting. This regulates a movement which goes from seeing to writing. It is an Annunciation, but one which concerns the "system" ("my system," says Lafitau), painted in the clouds.

The importance which we must attach to this "representation" of scientific discourse is attested by forty-one other "plates," filled with various "figures. " Although carefully selected ("the plates which I had engraved," he repeats), loaded with meticulous bibliographical references, with erudite commentary at the beginning of each volume, they were, however, insufficient according to Lafitau, who would have liked more8 or better ones9; these plates form an iconic discourse which traverses, from one section to another, the mass of the written discourse. They punctuate it with "monuments," whose essential value is in their belonging to the order of the visible. They permit a reseeing. Or they allow the belief that one can see the beginnings once again. This basis is essential to the production of the text. A visual counterpoint sustains and foments the writing. The entire work obeys the structure posited by the frontispiece as a relationship between the "seeing" and the book.

In his "Explication des planches," Lafitau himself becomes ecstatic before the "figures" he collected and which he alternately refers to as "mysterious," "very singular," "among the most magnificent of their kind," etc. '0 He conforms here to a very old ethnological tradition. From Lery or Thevet to De Bry, things seen and seeable mark off the writing, engendered by distance. White pebbles in the dark forest of the text. Signs of a presence to these distant nations, and therefore of

7The word is Lafitau's, ibid. 8"I would also have had a Medallion of Commodus engraved, if I had had the

space ...." "I could also have had engraved here three very curious medallions...." "I also could have had Roman Standards engraved," etc. ("Explication of Plates . . . ," op. cit., I, non-paginated).

9He notes, for example: "This Medallion was badly done by the Engraver; it is better in Vaillant, Vol 2, p. 353," ibid.

'0Ibid.

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the origin that is supposedly to be found there, the "figures" of the Savage, from the sixteenth century on, were adorned with an ambiguous beauty which contrasted with the "vices" amply described in the books. " I Was writing expected to limit and even to exorcise the prestige of seeing? Assuredly, the written demystified these images. It detached the glance from them. But it did this as a textual commentary twists the visual authority. In fact, in the manner of glosses engendered by a juridical Code, by biblical documents or by a poem, the text comments on these figures which have the force of "authorities," inasmuch as they conserve a visibility of origins. It is only necessary to assure the "authenticity" of these iconic sources-the classic question carefully treated in each case under the double aspect of the ancientness (of the documents or of the savages), and of the exactness of the reproduction. The written, therefore, refers to these "authorities," which have the status of quotations; it compares them to others in order to be disseminated around these pieces of evidence. However "ethnological" it may be, it uses the procedures, therefore, of law or of exegesis. But from this point the "monuments" are those which render the beginnings visible. Relative to another conception of history, they remain archeological; they make the Arche readable, the beginnings of Time. It would also be an inversion of the function of these texts to detach them from what we consider today as an "illustration," that is, a commentary on the written.

Lafitau borrows a number of his tableaux of Americans from Lery, Thevet, or De Bry, and he views these pieces-ancient or savage-as fragments of the "vision," whose entirety is hidden from him by Time, but whose scattered and precious "vestiges" remain. These are "allusions," "symbols," "allegories," or "types." The Origin appears once again. It insinuates itself into contemporary visibility as the initial Big Bang of the cosmos can still be heard, a sound trace, surplus and relic of the Origin, in the noises of today. To recall the expressions tirelessly repeated by Lafitau, these "figures" allow us to "see" or to

" Cf. Bernadette Bucher, La Sauvage aux seins pendants (Herman, 1977); Frank Lestringant, "Les representations du sauvage dans l'iconographie relative aux ouvrages du cosmographe Andre Thevet," Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, XL (1978), 583-595; or, earlier, the observations of Gilbert Chinard, L'exotisme amiricain dans la littirature francaise au XVIe siece (Paris: 1911), p. 102.

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"glimpse" the beginnings of history. As bizarre as they may be, they are not placed under the sign of that "monstrosity" and "absurdity" for which fables or behaviors are criticized. On the contrary, they seduce the writer. They emerge from an eroticism of the origin. They offer that which one can still see of the "first times," as if through a keyhole-according to the schema which is a primal scene of "modern"' 2 ethnology.

There is, however, in these images something that should not be seen: the nudity of the body. "These figures being too nude, decorum has obliged me to have them dressed, as well as many others." ' 3 This Jesuit brings order to his ancient figurines just as his colleagues of the period dress the Indian women of the Reductions of Paraquay. The beautiful Isis breast-feeding the bull is covered with a sackcloth.'4 Gods and goddesses, clothed, take ridiculous if not unrecognizable postures. On the other hand, the engraver gives them a head when Time had scythed it from them. 15 Symptomatic details. What Lafitau wants to see are objects pregnant with meaning (insignias, cross, star, crowns, coded gestures, etc.), and no longer, as had Lery, beautiful bodies who continue the dances of the Golden Age as if they were still ignorant of the avatars and the sin of history. He is looking for a lexicon. He wants to read signs. In front of these vestiges, he is possessed by a passion for meaning. He needs "figures that speak. " 16 And indeed, where those of antiquity are silent, destroyed by Time, he turns toward the Savages, "monuments" too of the primeval age, and still "speaking." Hence, they are readable. 17

The "word" (parole) which interests him is not voice (vox). It is "teaching" (documentum). It is a bit of the truth of the "first times."

'2It is already so in the work of Jean de LUry. Cf. M. de Certeau, L'Ecriture de 1'histoire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp. 215-248: "Ethno-graphie."

'3Lafitau, op. cit., I, "Explication of the plates . . . ," non-paginated. Lafitau and his engraver are more scrupulous with regard to the ancients than with regard to the savages, who are often left naked or clothed with the simplest covering.

140p. cit., I, p. 236, plate XII, fig. 2. 15 Cf., regardingplateXVII (op. cit., 1, 444): "The Vestalisheadless, buttheengraver

judged it appropriate to add one in his own way." '6Lafitau, op. cit., I, 241. '7Concerning this frontispiece, cf. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Les jeunes, le cru,

l'enfant grec et le cuit," in J. Le Goff and P. Nora, eds. Faire de 1'histoire, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).

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But if the document has the force of presence (it is visible), it is only a fragment (a "vestige"). In constituting the privileged quotation (as before, the biblical verse or the article of the Code in the glosses), it fosters a text, it calls, by what is missing there, for a discourse where all of these primitive bursts of light are to be ordered in a "system." What the eye sees is only the scatterings of what the book must produce. Furthermore, from the seen to the written, the movement returns inward. As a rule, the "mysterious vision" should cause the writing; in fact, these are innumerable visual debris of inaccessible origin. And is not the vision or the "system" finally but the mirror of the scholarly writing? The sky which appears on the wall is a painting, not a day (the light comes from the left). The woman-writer reads there, in ecstasy, what she creates herself. Her book is projected on the laboratory screen in a spectacle of meaning which is the narcissistic double of the work. From seeing to writing, and from writing to seeing, there is circularity in the interior of a closed space.

The Production Workshop

The frontispiece describes the operation involved in "recon- structing history" in the laboratory. It depicts the history of a fabrication, and not its discursive result. It is technological and not speculative. Divided in two jointed spaces (the writer's room and the painting of her vision), the engraving first represents, in the workroom, the three elements destined to fight against depredatory Time: an archival institution, the collection; a technique for manipulating the material, the comparison; an author and generator of the product, the woman writer.

1. A Locus: the Collection. The "archives" are strewn on the floor: medallions and statuettes, maps and books, and a globe of the Earth. The majority of these remains come from the ancient world. They are disposed at the feet of the writer. Like a garden uniting plants from all sorts of lands, the heteroclite museum appears encyclopedic. But it presents a broken image from the past: a corps morcek, disseminated fragments. The ravages operated by Time can be read in this landscape of ruins. The frame of the work undertaken by Lafitau is

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an anthology of degradation. The signs of degeneration and of death, a vocabulary of ruin, spell a primary experience of history. Now the reverse of what had happened in the sixteenth century, the voyage, encounter and marvel at different societies, no longer provides either the object or the form to the discourse. No living person inhabits this learned man's cell. All corps-a'-corps has disappeared. Nor is there anything to hear; the only givens are these remains to be seen. Apart from the angels and Time, the writer stands alone to (re)make a world out of relics.

Nonetheless, the collection is an institution. It results not only from the "conservative" gesture, genealogical and familial, which fights the effects of time, but also from a relation, "scientific" in nature, between an abstract model (the idea of a totality), and a pursuit of objects capable of realizing it. Apursuit (collating all the variants), is articulated upon a selection (the definition of the series). The connection of these two elements is the basis for the establishment of sources. In the case of Lafitau, his "gallery" attests to the fashions among collectors who, from 1700 to 1750, preferred the "ancient" to the medallions of the seventeenth century and, from 1750, valued pieces related to "natural history. "18 Here these three generations of collections are stratified: to the medallions (Syrian, Egyptian, etc.), are added "several monu- ments from antiquity" (statues of Isis, of Diane, of Horus, etc.), and finally, adjacent, some "curiosities from America" (Iroquois tortoise, Indian calumet). Each of these pieces is coded and commented according to the best scholarship on antiquity or on numismatics: J. Spon, Justus Lipse, La Chaussee, T. Hyde, J. Vaillant, etc., through the Antiquite expliquee et representee en figures of B. de Montfaucon (1717). 19 This apparatus of objects and of references has an autonomous function. It has a system of its own. Into the solitary chamber it insinuates interests of the present, economic as well as intellectual, which impose themselves silently on the Work of the writer. The debris of long ago arrives already selected and transformed by a present which makes it the code of a contemporary history. Erudition is not a robinsonade.

18 Cf. Krzystof Pomian, "Medailles/coquilles = 6rudition/philosophie," in Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century, CLIV, VI (1976), 1677-1703.

'9Cf. the "Explication of the plates . . ," I, non-paginated.

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However, Lafitau's personal museum circumscribes a field of its own. The material posited there, set apart, composes the scaffolding for a text. They are instruments with which to write in a loose grouping, like notecards in disorder before the arranging to be brought about by the book. The frontispiece presents a selection of them wherein one can recognize the "plates" of the work. At the bottom, from right to left, we have a medallion figuring Isis and Osiris as serpents;20 another medallion representing the goddess Astarte of Syria with a cross;2' a sistrum22 on top of a map;23 a stone Hermes24 on top of a "curious" medallion dating from Alexander II of Syria and also representing Astarte carrying a cross;25 a medallion of Isis Mammosa surrounded by symbols of the four elements;26 another map and a book; a Diane of Ephesis with multiple breasts27 on top of a Hermes;28 then another map and a pile of books indicating the very numerous sources utilized by Lafitau (Kalin has counted 210), travel narratives, works from antiquity, from the Middle Ages and modern times through Bacqueville de la Potherie, Labat, Casaubon, Grotius, etc.29 After the globe (placed in the axis of Time), we have, a little higher, from left to right: another Hermes;30 a Horus Apollo with his "hieroglyphic" symbols,3' before two stones, one pyramidal and the other conic;32 and finally, a Canopus upon a griffon.33 The prestige of Egypt, the Middle East, and late Hellensim, hence of a mythological, historicized and edited antiquity, haunts this museum.34 The landscape is constructed with what the seventeenth century considered

20I, 228; plate 10, fig. 5. 2 1. 444; pl. 17, fig. 10. 22J, 212; p. 8, fig. 3. 23Cf. the "map of America," I, 26. 241, 136; pl. 4, fig. 4. 251, 444; pl. 17, fig. 12. 261, 136; pl. 4, fig. 3. 271, 136; pl. 4, fig. 2. 281, 136; pl. 4, fig. 1. 29 Cf. K. Kahin, Indianer und Urvolker (Freiburg, 1943), p. 19, and the list in Fenton

& Moore, op. cit., pp. LX-LXII. 301, 136; pl. 4, fig. 1. 31J, 444; pl. 17, fig. 1; and I, 236; pl. 12, fig. 1. 321, 136; pl. 4, fig. 1. 33J, 444; pl. 17, fig. 7. 34Cf. Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition

(Copenhagen: 1961).

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as an index of primitiveness. Antiquity itself is a modern product. The frieze of documents refers exclusively to the first volume, and

only concerns the plethoric chapter "On Religion,"35 one of the author's obsessions. Of the three series which are interlaced there- archeology, books, cartography-only the first is individualized; its objects are like gems among the anonymity of texts and maps. These jewels, relics for the eye and substances of the past, form the privilieged instance. They show only things from antiquity, whereas in his book Lafitau allots more than half of his plates to the Savages, especially, and to China. The index is revealing. The "alteration" of ancient monuments and the obscuring of their sense as a result of their distance compels the use of the "supplement" furnished by the Savages; Algonquins, Hurons, Iroquois come at a second level, as a substitute for the first. They "supplement," that is to say they take the place of, that which is lacking in the ancient treasures.36 They fill the holes and "clarify" the obscurities.

But there is a difference of function between the ancient things and the savage customs. The first have primarily the value of relics, the second primarily that of "clarification" (lumieres). Archeology presents to be seen what ethnology permits to be explained. Lafitau writes: "I admit that if the ancient authors gave me some light to support various happy conjectures concerning the Savages, the Customs of the Savages gave me some light to understand more easily and to explain several things which are in the ancient Authors. 37 The comparison here points to the informative or explanatory value of the "ancient Authors" and of these living texts which are the savage customs; in Lafitau, the comparison is often favourable to the Savages, who bring more "clarification. " With the ancients, on the con- trary, (that is, not the books, but the monuments) one has less meaning and more realp resence, i. e. the privilege of being able still to see the origins if compensated by a lack of sense. Also, in the frontispiece, what we are

351, 108-455. 36Concerning the idea of "Supplement," cf. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie

(Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1967), pp. 203-204: "Ce dangereux supplement." 371, 3-4. Hence the numerous observations of the sort: "It is therefore

necessary to explain Herodotus on the custom of the Lycians of taking their mothers' names by that which the Hurons and the Iroquois observe still" (I, 74; my underlining).

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given to see are the ancient medallions and statuettes, as if the ''savage" supplement were either hidden behind them to fill the gaps in them, or localized in the comparativist operation which allows access to their explication. An effect of time, the division between seeing (yet without understanding), and understanding (yet without seeing), makes their combination necessary.

2. A Technique: Comparison. Two "genies" hold in their hands, one a calumet of peace and a caduceus of Mercury, and the other, an Iroquois tortoise and an ancient sistrum. They play with two objects extracted from heterogeneous totalities. They "bring these monu- ments together" and, says the Explication, they "help" the writer "make this comparison."38 Furthermore, the "helpers," technical mediators between the collection and the writing, perform before us two comparativist "turns" which Lafitau did himself in his book, "turns" of which he is rather proud.39 The "manipulation" they represent consists in drawing from the stock of monuments, piled up without chronological order, elements which are susceptible of being formally compared and which fit together symbolically as general categories. "Also," declared Lafitau, "in the comparison that I must make, I'll not take it as a difficulty to cite customs of any land whatever, without claiming to draw any consequences other than the relation of these customs with those of the earliest Antiquity."40 Hence, the elements used belong to everyone and to no one. In the end, they belong only to the origin, and to the writer who produces it. To an historical problem (knowing origins), corresponds a method which is not of the same order and which seeks to construct "similitudes." The historical question receives a formalist treatment.

The comparison is a "relation" which plays upon other ones, indefinitely, in order to generate Lafitau's "system," that is, "a whole of which the parts sustain each other by the connections they have between themselves."''4 The "system" is defined exactly like a text.

38J, "Explication of the Plates." 39Concerning the calumet and the caduceus: II, 325-330; concerning the tortoise

and the sistrum: I, 216-219 (cf. I, 26). 401, 45. Concerning "comparison" in the work of Lafitau, cf. also Sergio Landucci, I

filosofi e i selvaggi 1580-1780 (Bari: Ed. Laterza, 1972), pp. 247-260. 41 I, 4.

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Also, each comparison's role is to be, in this laboratory, a textual "preparation" made by the writer's assistants. Little by little it transforms the collection into a text. The latter will not be "sustained" by the antiquity nor the social identity of the documents it treats, but by "the relation alone" that it establishes among them. In principle, therefore, it is the inverse of historiography, and it is not authorized by the objects it cites, that is, by legitimation through the intervention of the "referential" (it is the "real" which legitimates historiography, "description, narration of things as they are").42 The text is not authorized except by itself, inasmuch as it constitutes a distinct "language" or system of relations. There is a continuity between comparison and writing. The one produces the other.

The progressive production of the text through connections also produces sense or "explanation." The writer's operators appear to be angels as much as genies, and their message is born of comparison. Before the dumbness of "things" (which no longer "speak" in the epistemology of the eighteenth century), they are speakers, annun- ciators of meaning, because they are comparatists. In unifying silent vestiges, they compose the sentence of a message and, since the relation they establish between two disparate "monuments" is considered to be only one element of the system, they repeat, as they manipulate the objects, the demonstrative gesture of Time; they refer to an original "essential" which is, for Lafitau, a formal whole; they no longer pronounce its loss, but its promise.

They are the evangelists of Time, who no doubt shows with one hand what he destroys with the other, but who, on his deictic side, covers the entire series (the axis), of the totalizing construction, from the comparatist operations of the "genies" to the representation of the globe of the Earth. On this line we go from the globe to the book, from a system of places to a system of weaning, by the gesture which had detached the objects from their places ("from any land whatever"), and which poses a "sym-bolic" relation between these terms, just like judgment has, in the Logic of Port-Royal, the function of "comparing," "connecting," or "separating" unities or con-

42Furetiere, Dictionnaire universel (1690), art. "Histoire" (my italics).

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ceived "ideas," and, therefore, of affirming relations.43 The angel plays the role of a copula. He is the "action"; for, he puts and holds together objects or atoms of language detached from their respective sites, and affirms a signification for them through an operation (at once manual and intellectual), which in "bringing them together," transforms them into the terms of a proposition. The angel produces the basic unity of the book. The discourse will be made from all these angels.

3. A Genitrix: the Writer. The production cycle ends with "a person in the posture of one writing." The subtle ambiguity of the expression Lafitau uses in his text hides what in the image is manifest: this writer is a woman. To this sole historical character on the stage correspond many details of the frontispiece which specify the position of woman. In the collection there are Astarte, the Isis Mammosa, the Diane of Ephesis, covered with breasts, etc.; in the painting in the background there are Eve the mother of men and Mary the mother of God. Allusions to fecund maternity are strewn throughout the engraving. They form a network of references and of mirrors around the central figure. And so it is in the work of Lafitau, celebrated in particular for having identified a "gynecocracy" or "empire of women" in the Iroquois or Hurons like the Lycians, an originally matriarchal and matrilinear system, where the "matrons" exercise the "principal authority" (genealogical and political), and where men only have power "by way of procuration. "44 We also see repeated here the determination of the name via the mother in several societies (Lycian, Jewish, Huron). Everywhere it is the mother who appears in the woman. She is the master of political deliberation, of the family name, of children and of marriage: in short, master of the symbolic order, as well as of the "field" or of life. Lafitau himself adds writing to these powers described in relation to primitive societies, and writing no doubt recapitulates all of them.

Because if the mother/writing is in the center of the engraving, she

43A. Arnauld and P. Nicole, La logique ou I'art de penser, II, chaps. 2 and 3 (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), pp. 151-159.

441, 460-481. Concerning the debate provoked by this analysis, cf. Fenton & Moore, op. cit., CIII-CVII; John Ferguson McLennan, Primitive Marriage (London: 1865).

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is there as representative of the author. She marks the place of the speaker in his work. She is the signature of the speaker. It is he, and his generating power, who installs himself in this theater as the lone historical actor. But he is there as a transvestite: "a person," says the text; a woman in the frontispiece, a mother, according to the entire context. A dream of being a mother in order to engender? There is a "Schreberian" passion in Lafitau to write and to be a woman, and thus, to fill all the lacunae wherein are introduced the "nothing" of an emptiness, in order to oppose the production of the "system" to the avatars of history and to substitute a totality of meaning for ruins.45 This celibate priest will himself be the mother of an anthropology, the genealogical arche of a system. But, at the same time, what can he be but the travesty of the Other, that is, either he will play the "matron" who generates a real human order (whereas his book is only afiction of the world), or he will mime the divine installation of a totality of meaning (whereas his written work can only make believe that it represents the Beginning)?

Besides the confessions revealed in this frontispiece-Lafitau's dream about his book-one can read the new operation of writing emerging in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Writing alone remains productive at a moment when the presence of antiquity, paternal tradition, collapses, when the savage speakers are no longer anything but relics of an anthropophagous conquest, left in scientific museums. Absence of father. Absence of brothers. Only their debris remains, piled up together: the mother/writing, celibate machine, must generate another world and make a new beginning. The law of producing a text on the site of ruins imposes itself. Henceforth, it will be necessary to create writing with the debris of the Other.

In fact, this new importance of productive work also indicates the ambitions of an "enlightened" and "bourgeois" elite. Putting the writer on the stage replaces sixteenth and seventeenth-century engravings' representations of meetings between Europeans and Savages, and makes a star out of a new hero of history: the power of writing. In the text itself, the author always marks his place; he

45Cf. President Daniel Paul Schreber, Dendwdrdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Leipzig: 0. Mutze, 1903).

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underlines that which caused him "pain" or gave him "pleasure" ;46 he specifies his intentions, his methods or his successes. These notations make of the writer, or of his written production, an important, if not essential, actor in the "narration." Writing means telling one's own story. Thus, in the same period, the Canadian travel narratives (from Champlain to Lahontan), describe at length the heroic trials of the writer (where and when one wrote, in spite of the cold, during a brief stop, with the sap of a tree, etc.), just as the gazettes alter the "messenger" (just arrived from Naples or Amsterdam, contradicted by another, etc.), into an actor by whom is added to the text the irresistible epic of the text's construction.47 This structure is already narcissistic. The producer shows himself in his production, but altered, inverted into a woman and mother.

With the reintroduction of the speaker into the utterance, with the heroization of writer-conquerors (or Amazons?), a new operation of writing is indicated. Undoubtedly, it goes back to the sixteenth century. The Reformers then thought to remake (reform) the "corrupted" institutions, starting with the sacred Scriptures. The Scriptures seemed to them a recourse from the decadence of the times. But, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, erudition continuously showed that the Scripture too was corrupted, deter- iorated by history and rendered unreadable by distance.48 The original project was maintained only by displacing it. Another writing, artificially produced language, was to have the capacity to discipline the chaos introduced by the past and to create a present order. The impotence of Scripture against the depravity of institutions produced by time gave way to campaigns for writing systems (scientific, utopian, or political) to constitute a rational world. So to write is to make history, rectify it, educate it: "bourgeois" economy of power through

46He thus mentions the authors who "caused [him] the most grief" (I, 547), or those who brought him the most "pleasure" (II, 482).

47Cf., e.g., the research of Mme Claude Rigault (Univ. of Sherbrooke, Canada), on the Nouveaux Voyages of Lahontan (1703). On the gazettes, cf. Pierre Retat and Jean Sgard, eds., Presse et histoire au XVIIle siecle. L'annee 1734 (Paris: CNRS, 1978).

48Cf. Walter Moser, "Pour et contre la Bible: croire et savoir au XVIIIe siecle," Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century, CLIV (1976), 1509-1528; M. de Certeau, "L'idee de traduction de la Bible au XVIIe siecle," Recherches de science religieuse, 66 (1978), 73-92.

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writing; "enlightened" ideology of the revolution through the book; "progressist" postulate of the transformation of societies by scientific "languages."49

Theories and Scientific Legends

At the strategic focus of the frontispiece, the matron/writing engenders a bookish order. With the debris of heterogeneous pasts, she fabricates a text that enunciates the law of history. But this work obeys principles which are set apart in the upper part of the engraving. Between the workshop and the "vision," between the description of the operation and the painting of the theory, there is a disjunction permitting a connection. Lafitau's scientificity is organized upon the disjunction of these two spaces.

1. The non-lieu of theory: from Myth to Science. The separateness of the representation (that is recessed into the wall), the "vision," is strongly emphasized by its framing; it is set off from time, from that of past societies and from that of the writing operation. This "different" space is neither a landscape (the room is closed), nor an apparition, but a mural painting, a sort of "trompe-l'oeil": abstracted from the chronological order, it is an order of principles. Two superimposed circles of clouds surround two couples. One of them, Adam and Eve, is separated by the tree of knowledge; the other couple, the arisen Man and the Woman of the Apocalypse, is separated by the monstrance, an abstract tree marked with a central point, under the triangular emblem of the Hebrew script for Yahweh. This allegory of the theories of the work is an achronic tableau vivant.

From this point of view, the decisive difference between Lafitau and the comparatist tradition of Huet lies in replacing Moses with Adam and Eve. A "theoretical" figure of the origin is substituted for a historical character. The figure represents the monogenistic principle, postulate of the work. But this is at the lower level of the formal painting, as a corollary of the upper level, like a lock-chamber; in this way the theory posits inside itself its own relation to exteriority and to

49Cf. M. de Certeau, L'Ecriture de I'histoire, 2nd. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), and "Des outils pour 6crire le corps," Traverses, 14-15 (1979), 3-14.

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time. Lafitau takes care, furthermore, to mark his distance from his comparatist predecessors, a fundamental distance. Just as he sets aside Moses, from whom Pierre-Daniel Huel claimed all religions derived, Lafitau plays down the authority of the Bible because it is too "localized" (there were societies before Israel), too "positive" (general principles are needed), and too close to the "fables," whether savage or Greco-Roman, that he judged to be "absurd." 0

In the place of the Bible, there is a "system." An epistemological break is indicated by the fact that the theoretical tableau is detached from any historical positiveness. "Demonstration" will no longer be, as with Huet, based upon points of chronology. It ceases to be a war of dates, from which Moses always had to come out more ancient than his supposed descendants. It becomes the deployment of operations that a conceptual corpus is able to organize given certain materials. Defined by a group of principles and hypotheses, that is, by transparent, "clear ideas" which no longer permit the ruses of hermeneutics to play upon the opacities of an authorized text, theory has no place in time or space. It is a non-lieu. The origin is a form (a network of formal relations), and not a date, a personage, or a book of history. It consists more in what scientific research gives itself as work rules than in what it receives as the law of a history.

In fact, the setting apart of theory is a scientific gesture indissociable from a more global historical gesture that sets the writer apart, that cuts him from his social ties and attachments, and constitutes him as a proprietor of an autonomous workshop. It was necessary that a "clear" field be circumscribed where writing might claim the right to freely establish its rules and to control its own production-it was necessary that there be this gesture, alternately "Cartesian" and "bourgeois," founder of a science and of an economy-so that, in principle, cut off from its genealogical debts, the writer might give himself, in an ahistorical tableau, the whole of his postulates, criteria and theoretical choices. Then his work no longer

501, 10-60. Cf. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Demonstratio Evangelica (Paris: 1679); Alphonse Dupront, P. D. Huet et 1'exegese comparatiste au XVIle sikle (Paris: 1930); and the great synthesis of Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo. La nascita dell'anthropologia come ideologia coloniale: dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali (1500-1700) (Florence: La Nuova Italia Ed., 1977), especially pp. 544-613.

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depends on a particular tradition or on his fidelity to his first fathers. The rupture and the crumbling of the genealogical pressure go together with the establishment of a scientific insularity.

The "son" of a history is therefore replaced by an operator and an observer. There is no father in the frontispiece of Lafitau (1724), just as there is none on Robinson Crusoe's island (1734). That a Christianity received by "filial" tradition should have been altered into a producer with the intent to organize practical considerations was, for Lafitau and Defoe, the effect of this technical and individualistic isolation.51 The writer is the mother and the beginning of a world; he symbolizes the absence of the (genealogical) other on the productivist stage where man can play as a transvestite the role of the genitrix: he thus gives witness to a conquering bourgeoisie and to the science it rendered possible.52 He dehistoricizes the tradition upon which he claims he no longer depends and which is coming apart under his eyes, transformed on the one hand into a multiplicity of objects-vestiges, and on the other into fiction or a theoretical tableau. There is no longer workable historicity where there is denial of relationships of belonging.

Opposed to the disorder of the collected vestiges, the painting presents, according to theoretical importance, the "ideas," qualified as "clear and distinct," which regulate the production of the work and constitute together the equivalent of an "original writing. "52 Kalin distinguishes 1) two theories: (a) the physical and spiritual conformity between the Indians and the inhabitants of the old world, (b) the single origin of mankind and the peopling of the Americas across the Bering Straits; and 2) two hypotheses: (a) the initial revelation of a monotheistic religion, (b) the regulation of the sexes by marriage since the most distant times.54

These positions are summarized in an iconic "abstract": a lone

5 Cf. Homer 0. Brown, "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," ELH (1971), 562-590; Curt Hartog, "Authority and Autonomy in Robinson Crusoe," Enlightenment Essays (1974), 33-43; etc.

52J, 109, 116, etc. 53Cf. Margaret Hogden, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth

Centuries (Philadelphia: 1964), p. 268. 54K. Kahin, op. cit., p. 30; cf. Fenton & Moore, op. cit., pp. LXXIX-LXXX.

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original couple, man and woman. This emblem indicates the strategic role played by kinship systems in Lafitau's analysis-a role which has as a postulate, for Lafitau as for later ethnologists, an exclusion of genealogical dependence. It is as if kinship became an object of study when it was excluded from the scientists, as "subject," and no longer con- cerned Lafitau. The couple serves as a model of all sorts of "connections," "relationships," and "comparisons." It is given in two forms, one celestial and the other terrestrial. These forms also give shape, in the case of the clothed couple, to the old world and religious antiquity, while the other, almost nude, to the new world and savage primitive- ness. The one leads, by the monstrance, to the cipher of the Absolute; the other, by the serpent, toward temporal degradation. The hierarchy of places of meaning applies, therefore, to geographical places. The difference, however, "returns to the same." The same couple reproduces itself from a celestial cloud to the other, terrestrial cloud; the distinction between them resides only in accidental variants which introduce, into the model, heterogeneous spaces wherein oneness reproduces itself. The theory thus bears within itself the explanation of contingent diversities which are, as are diseases, structurally effected by the historical context. With her look fixed upon the models, the writer will know how to/will have to recognize them in their avatars.

By the rules that it gives to the analytical operation (postulating a reproduction of the same structure and functions, yet permitting the totalization of the variants and the reduction of differences to a unity), the painting of the principles also posits the conditions which render possible an anthropo-logy, that is, a discourse on Mankind in general. The form of this discourse remains "theological" while the content emerges as scientific. The mixture is the same; far from hiding it, Lafitau claims full responsibility for it. He is still a missionary. As an apologist, we find in his work the characteristic habit of furnishing a pre-established, accepted architecture in an apparently "modem" way. But scriptural modernity is not, for him, only an appearance. He takes it seriously, and it metamorphoses his discourse. Also, more important than the author's intentions, the question arises as to what status to give to a dogma transformed into theory. The process which produces this "laicization" is clear: to de-realize, that is, to de-historicize an

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economy of salvation is to change it into an allegory of a body of principles. But here we have a discourse (often the case since Plato) which makes of a belief the dwelling (or mythos) of a reasoning (or Logos), and which sketches the formalism of a science in space and expresses it in the vocabulary of a religion. It asks about the place of theory, or of this kind of theory.

According to Nietzsche, the wearing away of a metaphor alters it into a concept.55 Likewise, recognized beliefs, in "being worn," progressively cease to articulate the thinkable, and would be trans- formable into a rational system. The space occupied by the realities on which they depend is then changed into a "place" which modernity calls "mythic," that is, a place in which to write. The place is held by the beings (more or less incoherent and dominating) to which the believers were attached as to an insurmountable and historic place, an "alterity" which empties itself yet remains there, vacant in the middle of a world full of things, a place henceforth given over to writing, which indexes an absence in substituting for it a production. Principles can and must be attached at this place of the greatest emptiness (heaven, the origin, etc.), the principles of a scriptural autonomy (by choices, postulates, definitions, etc.), and the principles of readability or of a "seeing" (by "theory," which refers one to a "vision")-principles which replace the dependence and belief formerly articulated upon a "historic" existence of the Other (spirits, gods, in short, a Paternity).

This metamorphosis and occupation of the space of the Other by theoretical writing presents three characteristics which are to be found whenever reason transforms into a myth the real on which a belief depends; for the believable is substituted the readable/visible; for the historical, the speculative; and for the non-coherence of different wishes (or beings), the coherence of principles by which a thought gives itself, as in a mirror, its own project. Fundamentally, these three procedures of philosophical allegorization come back to the installa- tion, according to the norms of a new tenant (i.e., of a science), of the place where the evacuation of the Other furnishes writing with a site.

55Cf. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1972), pp. 249-273, regarding texts of Hegel and Nietzsche concerning this "wearing" (Abnutzung).

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In this place, disaffected and abandoned by belief, theory has, however, the form of a history which does not acknowledge itself. It is produced there as autonomous, but it denies the "believing" historicity, the place of which it has taken and upon which it still depends. Although there are multiple variants of this process,56 Lafitau himself makes us participate in the very moment of the transition. He says he is, he wishes to be, a believer. But whatever docility he manifests with regard to the religious authorities,57 relates to his "job" of priest, his social position, more than his thought. Not that he denies Catholic dogmas. On the contrary, he affirms them- but detached, transported to a theoretical level where they no longer have weight as "literal" history. His tableau is still a religious painting, and it is already the allegory of scientific principles. Neither entirely the one nor entirely the other, it is a double play of representation, an unstable moment. And Lafitau will appear too "credulous" to the "Atheists" he combats. Yet (after initial praise addressed by the Jesuits of the Journal de Trevoux to the work of their colleague before its publication), he is not safe enough for royal and ecclesiastical censors to authorize the publication of his second, more ambitious work on primitive religion.

Perhaps in this displacement of a theology toward an anthro- pology, his voyage to and sojourn among the Iroquois is inscribed into the text. The distance, separating him from the universalistic pretentions of his religious tradition, would translate itself for him by an internal uprooting that altered its locus and transposed "his" Christianity into scientific theory. Lafitau's discourse would be the writing of his story, the index of a non-lieu between two ideological pressures and two cultural worlds.

2. Time Dead. The last figure in the frontispiece is Time, mediator between the laboratory and the painting. Time points, yet by his

561n Freud (Totem and Taboo), or Durkheim (Les formes 66mentaires de la vie religieuse), this way of transforming "primitive" belief into a space in which to write theory (psychoanalytical or sociological), can be found.

57I, 13: "When it is a question of Religion, I profess to be so little attached to my ideas that I am ready to retract...."

580n the reactions of contemporaries and on the immobilisation, then disappear- ance of the manuscript, cf. Fenton & Moore, op. cit., pp. LXXXIII-CII, and XLI-XLII.

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presence he seems to prevent seeing. He indicates the Origin, but he turns his back to it. He serves as a shifter between the two halves of the frontispiece and he alone crosses the border separating them; but, at the same time, the view of the writer must cross this opaque body in order to contemplate the "vision." Uncertain guide, a path descending and climbing similar to Jacob's ladder, Time is a crossroads upon which the principles lower themselves to their "vestiges," and the scriptural operation rises up to the "system." Through Time is produced, equally, the historical deterioration and the theoretical reconstruction of the "same" Model.

Apparently, the edge of the space occupied by this figure is neutral-neither the one nor the other, but between the two. In fact, time has the attributes of death. It is not only because he, too, is a devastator. It is also because producton fights against him and aims in the end to kill time: a combat of the pen and the scythe. Between the formal painting and the book, there is this always reemerging gap to be reabsorbed, analogous to a permanent lapsus; history shatters the original writing and creates lacunae upon which the anthropological construction stumbles. This in-between space separates the pre- established model and the produced discourse.

A priori, the project sketched by this engraving is different indeed. Like former Utopias (that of Thomas More, for example), it has two halves whose difference must be overcome by the text. 9 It is certainly no longer a question of two "parts," one referring to the old world, and the other to the new, as was the case with More's Utopia, but rather of a division between the system of principles and the erudite practice. The resolution remains, however, fundamentally identical, even if the contents have changed; it consists of the making of two (spaces) into a single text, a single rationality. These two halves must coincide in order for the book to render the system readable in the vestiges, and in order for the shattered real to become, through the book, the visibility of the system. An adequation of sense (given by the painting) and of the visual (furnished by the collection), Lafitau's science ought to allow the exact juxtaposition of the two squares which compose its

59Cf. Louis Marin, Utopiques: jeux d'espace (Paris: Ed. de Minuit), especially chap. 1.

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engraved representation. Such would be the true anthropology. Yet nothing of the sort takes place. A spoiler, a diabolical tendency

of division, time will inscribe itself onto the anthropological text like a foreign law, by insufficiencies of information, by deficiencies of argumentation, by a demonstration that only appears coherent. There are alterations everywhere that oblige the proofs to be no more than "conjectures,"60 hazardous detours that trace the indiscreet inter- vention of an alterity in the scientific discourse, and punctuate it with shadows, with distortions, with approximations by which returns a third, repressed term, the disquieting familiarity of Time. This time- dead, posited as such by scientific work, appears as a phantom on the stage. It organizes the very discourse which had expelled it. Like the statue of the commander in Moliere's Don Juan, or the apparition of the murdered father in Shakespeare's Hamlet, it reintroduces, to the mother-writing, a law foreign to scientific production. Chronos is here the ghost, the devourer of children-books, the incongruous visitor in the celibate solitude of the work of reconstructing debris, fantasmaticof the Other in the middle of this insular laboratory. Thus the absence of the other is soon marked in Robinson Crusoe as the trace of a bare foot, troubling the rational order imposed by the productivist and scriptural activity of the conqueror without a father on his atopical island.

Perhaps the curtain bordering the engraving indicates the difference between the plan and the actual discourse. The space combining the painting and the workroom is, by this notion, changed into a stage. Lift the curtain. It is only a theater. It is destined to make us believe what the discourse will not make us see. Time is domesticated by the image, presented as though he were the Angel and the messenger of the System he shows. The two volumes of the Moeurs refer rather to his dark side, to his scythe, whose shadow overruns the pen and whose staff cuts the writer's table. The text does not give what the representation promises. Or rather, the representa- tion offers only what the writer Lafitau wanted to believe and to make us believe, what the public, also, wants to believe: an image of science-an image so enticing that it does not stop returning through the centuries with all kinds of gnosis which claim to kill time in order to

60i, 4; etc.

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produce the formal system of an absolute knowledge detached from history. From Plato to Levi-Strauss, models of this gnostic scientificity are not lacking. They have as common characteristics that they develop from a collection of fragments, bringing from the referen- tial the tableau of distinct and "clear ideas" by which the order of a reasoning is affirmed. But each time the insinuation of temporality into this articulation compromises the structuralist harmony of these two "halves" and reintroduces the relationship of a positive science with that which it must make believe about itself, that is, with that rhetorical power over its historical milieu in order to supplement the deficits of a rationality.

The Silence of the Space Between

The "space between" wherein resides a dead and ghostly time also indicates to us, as readers of the Moeurs des Sauvages, where we are to situate the springboard that lets the work function as a "system." A ruse is the condition of possibility of this science. This ruse is an art of playing on two places. Undoubtedly, we will thus find again, though in a different way, the comparatist technique of the "connection." The genies who combine a calumet with a caduceus or a tortoise and a sistrum illustrate the art of articulating reasoning (their angelic message) by the manipulation that creates a relation between two terms. In this regard, they are only the metonymies of the more general process generating Lafitau's book in the space between consti- tuted by various types of disjunction; for example, between the laboratory and the painting, or between the civilized "Atheists" and the religious savages. These oppositions, very different in nature, require the same tactical operation. The position of Time, analogous to that of the genies, but at a higher level, one which concerns the ordering not merely of pieces of the collection, but of the science, is itself a variant to be included in a strategy everywhere repeated. The manner of producing the discourse remains formally identical, despite the differences of terrain, of content, and of problems. Such is the case with Lafitau's method, like the monogenistic principle which it puts in functional order and which, it has been noted, remains "the same," however varied or altered its manifestations might be.

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This intellectual strategy is ultimately simple, in spite of the subtlety of its modalizations. On the basis of a binary given (the one and the other, the practices and principles, etc.), it plays one upon the other, but by a particular indirect means which consists of recognizing in the one what is lacking in the other. It thus makes possible the construction of a science which, filling the deficiencies of one with the positive aspects of the other, situates itself between them as their meaning. Because the discourse is neither the one nor the other (it is neuter), it enunciates the one and the other (it is totalizing).

We have seen how this procedure "compares" ancient activities and savage customs: the ones, visible and authentic relics of a past that is, however, difficult to understand; the others, more "illuminating" witnesses coming from a primitiveness that is, however, substitutive. In what relates to "the earliest times," each series of vestiges furnishes to the other what it lacks. Thus, the living (Savage) permits the dead (ancient) to "speak," but the Savages are not heard except as voices of the dead, echoes of mute antiquity. This complementarity defines the place of the work and emerges as a combination of an archeological history and an ethnology.6'

The same function projects the formal painting upon the laboratory and in the collection: the sense, which the accumulated debris lacks, has as a corollary the referentiality (factual proofs and a "real" vocabulary), which the principles lack. Between the two, the book presents itself as an utterance of principles in the lexicon, at first scattered about, of monuments and customs. It is located at the exact linking of the two formations, like the design of their "symbolic" overlapping.

This overlapping is presented in multiple forms, such as the relation of seeing and understanding, or the status of the text between a theology and a science. It derives from the historical conditions under which Lafitau worked. His book was born of a relation between "Savages" of Nouvelle-France and the "philosophers and sophis- ticated people" of France; that is, a link between the first, "barbarians," but witnesses to a primitive if "spoiled" religion, and

6I On the posterity of this problematic, cf. E. Lemay, op. cit., 1325-1327.

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the second, "atheists" but "civilized." He plays the ones against the others in such a way as to produce "the lesson" to be drawn from their complementary deficiencies. This "lesson" articulates the mono- genistic principle in "enlightened" language. By its nature, it is addressed equally to both worlds. Necessarily solitary in this position no longer belonging to one or the other (there is no institutional reference in the frontispiece) and establishing himself in a cell (with all the apparatus of eremitic insularity of olden days: angels, the phantom, the vision, the book of meditation), the writer is already the "Lazarus" to whom Levi-Strauss will compare the ethnologist, returned from the dead to the living, but endowed with a knowledge that is unparalleled and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.62 His discourse is supposed to fill the lacunae of both halves of the world by the chiasma of which he is the mediator.

The locus is unique and extraordinary. The theological ambition to say everything in the name of the founding Word takes on the scientific form of a writing that replaces the enunciating voice of a world by the indefinite sewing together of fragments and that is no longer authorized by a full Word but by the limits and the absences of pieces disseminated over a geography similar to a degenerated language. The curtain lifts to frame this feminine work with texture, necessary and possible because of the lacunae.

Silence reigns on this stage. How could it be otherwise, where the breaking apart of bodies (individual and social), creates the space and the condition of writing? This wordless production makes the difference of treatment between "customs" and "fables" understand- able. Some are "illuminating," the others "absurd," a Homeric adjective to designate them. Lafitau's lucid attention towards social, political, or religious practices contrasts with his "pain," and his "pity" and his scandalized irritation (he is "shocked"), before these "very ridiculous and very insipid fables," "gross and criminal superstitions" invented by the Greeks and Romans or by the Savages. 63 Altogether, he finds the silent to be significant and the spoken to be intolerable.

62Claude Levi-Strauss, "Diogene couch6," Les Temps modernes, (March, 1955), 1187-1220.

63Cf. I., 44, 93-95, 390, 454-455, etc.

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The mutism of monuments and customs allows writing to inhabit their silence. On the contrary, obscene and prolific, the fable (fari, to speak), encumbers with noisy subjects the stage where the text of sense can be produced only with objects; the fable disturbs and "shocks" the celibate operation. The voice is the other. With it, there is a return of an eroticism whose elimination conditions the scriptural work. For Lafitau as for Fontenelle, who in the same year published De l'origine des fables, a repulsion connotes the "mouth to mouth" of the oral tradition.64 What emerges from this mouth is only a regurgitated "alteration." The only "speaking" witnesses are silent monuments. The repression of bodies is the conditon of writing, which takes their place. And is the rejection of fables a sign not only of an incomprehension, of an erroneous judgment, but also the postulate of a science? The fables must be silent if enlightened knowledge is to make the vestiges "speak" in its way.

More generally, this silence of the living conditions the central and unique position of the writer-who occupies both the masculine and feminine roles-, and situates the ancient and the savage. It simultaneously uses "civilized" and "barbarous" nations, and silences the ancients or the savages so they, in turn, silence the "Atheists." This 'science of mores and customs" is established in a solitude where there is nothing other than its operation. The frontispiece already shows this by bringing together, asymptotically, the pen and the scythe, writing and death. To be sure, the same pairing concerns not only Lafitau, but "enlightened" knowledge about Mankind; by denying the historical conditions of man's production, by locating itself in the "neuter" of a between-the-two, this discourse postulates an end to history. The ambiguity of Lafitau's personal position made him a discoverer as well as a founder of this anthropological writing. He "betrayed" the

64Lafitau: "This tradition passing from mouth to mouth receives in each some alteration and degenerates into fables so absurd that one can report them only with extreme discomfort" (I, 93). Fontenelle: "It will indeed be worse when they (the first stories), will pass from mouth to mouth; each will take away some little bit of truth, and replace it with a bit of falseness...." ("De l'origine des fables," 1724), in Oeuvres compltes, ed. G.B. Depping (Geneva: Slatkine, 1968), vol. 2, p. 389. Also in Fontenelle, moreover, "history" is a writing which is installed in the place of the oral "story" and substitutes the production of a "verisimilitude" (a fiction of truth) for the -absurd" derivations of genealogical transmission (cf. ibid., p. 388ff., and "Sur l'histoire," in Oeuvres completes, op. cit., pp. 424-429).

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the presupposition of what he started. His emblem of a pioneer is equally the lapsus of a scientific ambition. Too obviously, no doubt. This embarrassing witness therefore had to be disowned by the intelligentsia that he hoped at once to serve and to conquer.

translated by James Hovde

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