Romancing the Stone: History-Writing and Rhetoric

Author(s): Antony Easthope

Source: Social History , May, 1993, Vol. 18, No. 2 (May, 1993), pp. 235-249
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

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 ARGUMENT

Antony Easthope

Romancing the Stone: history-

writing and rhetoric

Since the second half of the nineteenth century history has become increasingly the
refuge of all those 'sane' men who excel at finding the simple in the complex and the
familiar in the strange.
Hayden White'

The Aristotelian tradition divided rhetoric into five activities (invention, disposition,
elocution, memory, delivery).2 In 1546 in Training in Dialectic Peter Ramus subsumed all
these to two opposed categories, logic and rhetoric. Today we continue to inhabit a
discursive universe in which content is opposed to form, fact to value, truth and
knowledge of the real to rhetoric and means of representation. Arguably, we are now
witnessing the slow extinction of Ramist oppositions, a demise signalled by Thomas Kuhn
who, in his well-known book of I962, showed the dependence of 'hard' scientific truth on
humanly constructed paradigms (nature, after all, does not do science).3 Kuhn's work,
which is not seriously contested, frames all the recent polemic around what is named as
post-structuralism and post-modernism.
How far and in what respects is the study of history a deployment of rhetoric and the
abilities of a writer, how far and in what respects does it transcribe a truth existing
independent of discourse? These questions, widely discussed in the United States mainly
through magisterial intervention of Hayden White's work, has only recently taken on an
edge in debate in Britain, in terms of what has been called 'the linguistic turn' or 'semiotic
challenge' to the writing of history.4 After reviewing some of the theoretical issues at stake
in the question of how far history-writing should be understood as a form of rhetoric, I aim

I H. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in for many constructive criticisms and sug-
Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), 50. gestions.
2 An earlier version of this essay was given as a3 T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
paper at a colloquium on 'History, post-modern- Revolutions (Chicago, I962).
ism and post-structuralism' organized by Steve 4 Keith Jenkins in Re-Thinking History
Rigby at Manchester University for 20 May (I99I) gives a somewhat glib but provocative
1992. I am grateful to the other speakers - polemic for the view that history-writing is
Patrick Joyce, Rob Lapsley and Steve Rigby - mainly a form of rhetoric, that is ideology.

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 236 Social History VOL. i8: NO. 2

to test the argument through extended and detailed discussion of a single article. In doing
so I shall draw on techniques for rhetorical analysis more familiar to literary critics than
historians. These rest on two related procedural assumptions, namely (I) that pro-
visionally everything in a text may be treated as significant, including metaphors and
apparently incidental turns of phrase, and (2) that significance is evidenced when effects
and meanings are repeated'.'

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUESTION

'At Stalybridge Wakes in I850, a vendor of gingerbread, as the

dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an angry mob': as we all know in Manchester,
Stalybridge can be a rough place, though this was not E. H. Carr's concern in What is
History? when he mentioned this fact.6 His point is that whether a fact gains currency in
history-writing depends upon whether 'the thesis or interpretation in support of which'
this incident is cited becomes 'accepted by other historians as valid and significant'.7
Widely accepted among historians, Carr's claim is that the value and significance of a fact is
established on the grounds of interpretation rather than the other way round, that
interpretation 'precedes' data rather than the data determining interpretation. This, for
three reasons:

i. A fact is selected from a myriad of what might come to count as historical facts.
2. Since fact and value cannot be separated a fact is always interpreted by the language in
which it is expressed (one historian's 'angry mob' is another's 'incensed proletariat').
3. As Gareth Stedman Jones explains in a comment on Carr, it is only theory that can
constitute facts 'as facts in the first place', just as 'events are only meaningful in terms of a
structure which will establish them as such'.8 So Carr's hapless vendor of gingerbread
might figure in many histories, such as ones concerned with nineteenth-century crowd
behaviour or leisure activities or East Lancashire or food adulteration, and so on, in each of
which narrative the 'same' item of information would take on different force and
significance.

The position taken in What is History? is congruent with that of the Swiss linguist,
Saussure, whose work has become a crucial framework for post-structuralist and
post-modern thinking. Taking the everyday concept of 'the word' Saussure showed it had
to be discriminated between two sides, the signifier (or sound) and the signified (or

Lawrence Stone attacked post-modernism and
'the linguistic turn' in 'History and post-
modernism', Past and Present, cxxxi (May
1991), 2I7-I8. As support Stone endorsed an
essay on post-modernism by Gabrielle M.
Spiegel, 'History, historicism, and the social
logic of the text in the Middle Age', Speculum,
LXV (1990), 59-86. Spiegel aims to resist the
semiotic challenge by showing that a text can
only be understood in the light of a 'social and
political context' (83, 85). She assumes that this
sense of 'context' can be available to us apart
from a particular historical narrative able to
construe a situation as an appropriate context.
' I have considered the protocols of modern
literary analysis in Literary into Cultural
Studies (I99}), especially 3-21.
6 E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmonds-
worth, 1964), I2.
ibid.
8 G. Stedman Jones, 'History: the poverty of
empiricism' in R. Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in
Social Science ( 972), 113.

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 May 1993 Romancing the Stone 237

meaning). In doing so, he effectively bracketed the real, the thing or referent to which a
meaning may refer. The shaped sound /cat/ can give rise to the meaning 'four-footed
feline', a meaning almost equivalent to that which French designates by chat and Italian by
gatto, etc. And /cat/ can be used to refer to an object in the real. There are, however, plenty
of perfectly coherent and comprehensible meanings for which no referent exists, for
example, witch, Centaur or, so some would say, God.
So, as speaking subjects human beings start, as it were, from within discourse and move
from sound (or signifier) to meaning (or signified) and only then, on and from this
pre-existing basis, refer to the real (if they have to). The implication drawn from Saussure
is that the relation between discourse and the real may be understood in one of two ways.
An ancient tradition, enormously reinforced and extended at the time of Peter Ramus,
holds that we proceed from the real to discourse and that discourse should reflect the real as
perfectly as it can, a view well caught in the title of Richard Rorty's book, Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature.9 In contrast, the tradition arising with Saussure asserts that we
proceed from within discourse towards the real of which we construct a version or
interpretation. According to this second view: (ii) the real is there; but (2) the real always
remains outside discourse, outside representation, and can only be known or experienced
in its discursive constructions.
Far from being novel topics, these epistemological questions entered the discussion of
history-writing some time ago. In an essay, 'The discourse of history', published
twenty-five years ago, Roland Barthes pointed out that history-writing generally thought
of a meaning (signified) as if it were a copy of a referent (the real) and on this basis
presented a meaning as if it were 'the real itself'. 10
Alas, the epistemological question cannot be avoided here, though I enter into it only
with reluctance. Most would agree that the real is real and discourse is discourse, that
things do not talk; many would accept that the real can only be known and experienced as it
appears within discourse. But neither position is generally felt to be crucial. What is in
dispute is the question of correspondence or adequacy between discourse and the real as
though this were needed to discern whether a fact is accurate or not. I want to move past
the epistemological question as soon as I can here because I think ( I) it is insoluble and (2)
it is not very interesting, in fact displaces much more important topics.
Philosophic or epistemological realism, we might say brusquely, assumes that a
discourse of knowledge corresponds to the real, anti-realism says it does not. When,
following Nietzsche, Heidegger in Being and Time reaches the issue of realism versus
anti-realism he cannot decide at first which least incurs his sympathy, cannot decide
between the two."1 His reason is this. Human beings are always already thrown into the
middle of Being contingent on a world we have not and could never choose. So for us there
is simply no position available from which to inspect and so assess the possible validity of
correspondence or non-correspondence between our discourse and the real. God could do
it, but we cannot because we are inside it, always already part of it.

9 R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of bridge, 1981), I7.

Nature (Oxford, I980). " M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J.
'0 R. Barthes, 'The discourse of history', Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford, I962),
trans. S. Bann, in E. S. Schaffer (ed.), 63-148.
Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook III (Cam-

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 238 Social History VOL. i8: NO. 2

Realism is untenable because there is no way to establish the validity of such

correspondence, however defined. Someone might try to put forward criteria by which
adequate or inadequate correspondence might be assessed. But in that very gesture the
question immediately arises as to the validity of these criteria. Further criteria are needed
to validate these, and so on in infinite regression. Once you step onto this escalator you
cannot get off: as Jean-Frangois Lyotard puts is so succinctly: 'What proof is there that my
proof is true?'12
It is for this kind of reason that anti-realism or the 'semiotic challenge' has attained
plausibility. Nobody argues its case better than does Stanley Fish.13 Fish's manoeuvre
works as follows. Whenever anyone tries to establish that a discourse corresponds to the
real and can refer to it, Fish points out that the very act of attempted demonstration takes
place within discourse. To deny reference (anti-realism) is to take a position of radical
scepticism and this is impossible to refute because no one can demonstrate reference
without at some point using referential statements that assume just what they are trying to
prove (the reason again is that we are inside, not outside). As Rorty explains, the
epistemological quest for a way of refuting sceptical anti-realism 'is for some transcende
tal standpoint outside our present set of representations from which we can inspect the
relations between those representations and their object'.'4 Both realism and anti-realism
presuppose a point at which Knowing might stand outside Being. There is no such point,
therefore this epistemological debate is not resolvable.
John says truth is humanly constructed, and Jane replies: 'No, it's a way of referring to
the real.' Much harmless fun can be had by going round and round this hermeneutic circle
but I would be happier if we could avoid this loop and accept that truth cannot escape
participation in both fact and fiction, both a form of reference and a discursive construct,
both logic and rhetoric. 1
This having been said, there is no serious problem about distinguishing between
accurate and inaccurate data. There are all kinds of tests and criteria we use all the time to
decide whether an item of data is accurate or not. The range of such protocols is immensely
wide and varied, and those used in contemporary history-writing are not at all like those
used in car mechanics or particle physics or psychoanalysis. Literary criticism, to take a

12 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, from the 'prison house of language' (63), her
trans. G. Bennington (Manchester, I984), 24.
13 S. Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?
(Cambridge, Mass., i980).
'4 Rorty, op. cit., 293.
'5 Both Gabrielle Spiegel in 'History', op. cit.,
and Lawrence Stone in 'History and post-
modernism', op.. cit., define the semiotic chal-
lenge on the basis of an imposed either/or, that a
discourse is a matter either of fact or of fiction,
either a form of reference or merely a discursive
construction. Thus when Spiegel summarizes
the semiotic challenge as the view that 'social life
is essentially a play of discursive behaviour . . .
cut off from any purchase on a world exterior to
language' (6z) and paraphrases Derrida's 'il ny
a pas de hors-texte' as proposing there is 'no exit'
definition assumes a binary opposite to what is
deemed as the semiotic challenge, that forms of
social life exist which are not essentially a play of
discursive behaviour and that there is an exit
from the prison house of language. Similarly,
Lawrence Stone epitomizes post-modernism as
the view that texts are 'a mere hall of mirrors
reflecting nothing but each other' (217), assum-
ing that in opposition to this there are texts
which perfectly reflect the real. His fear, as
expressed in 'History and post-modernism 1II',
Past and Present, cxxxv May, 1992, 193, is that
post-modernism 'destroys the difference be-
tween fact and fiction' as though such a
difference couldfound opposed discourses.

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 May 1993 Romancing the Stone 239

germane example, has its own flexible p

which would be to assume that if a feat
significance to the overall meaning and f
of 'cohesion'). History-writing also has its own procedures for deciding what counts as a
historical fact and, since the nineteenth century, has been established as a kind of writing
which contains a very high proportion of accurate data. The tests and protocols for ruling
on ways to discriminate accurate from inaccurate or irrelevant data vary so widely across
different discourses of knowledge that it is very doubtful there can be any general criteria
for such discrimination which are not so general as to be useless. And it has to be added
that practices and conventions for distinguishing carefully between accurate and
inaccurate data are not current in all societies or at all historical epochs. We inherit these
institutions, protocols and habits of mind from the Enlightenment tradition. This way of
finding out the truth (logic) also turns out on inspection to be dependent on consensus and
social construction (rhetoric).
All of this is at some distance from what is really of interest over the issue of rhetoric and
history-writing. We are trapped in a mental set which, particularly in the English
tradition, invites us to read history-writing as though it were a more or less transparent
reflection of the real and to read literary texts as pure fantasy whose only aim is to please.
As a prelude to the attempt to move beyond Ramus by breaching the habitual oppositions
between logic and rhetoric, fact and fiction, literal and metaphorical, history-writing and
literature, indeed between truth and pleasure, let me point out that literature is replete
with entirely accurate facts. It is hard to find a novel in which Paris is not the capital of
France and people have two heads and one leg rather than the reverse. It is mainly because,
as well-bred followers of Ramus, we privilege an inherited opposition between reading for
fact and reading for fiction that we are not more obviously struck by the close similarities
between literature and history-writing.
Jacques Derrida, notoriously, has become associated with the claim, 'il ny a pas de
hors-texte'. 16 But if Derrida is read carefully, as Dominick LaCapra shrewdly remarks, it is
clear 'there is no inside-the-text either'. 17 It is hard to know what a world would be like in
which the sign was absolutely free, life consisted simply of an unconstrained play of
discourses, and textuality was determined only by textuality. This is certainly not the
position of Jacques Derrida as he made explicit, for example, in an interview in Edinburgh
in 1980. 18 What post-structuralist writing insists is that there can be no absolute opposition
between fact and fiction. Further, it is the discourse most certain of telling the truth and
nothing but the truth which is most likely to be betrayed by its own unacknowledged
ideological, emotional and imaginative commitments, liable to what psychoanalysis terms

16 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. have this indeterminacy'. Asked if he would

Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), I58. (Derrida repeats reject the view 'that meaning is any response
the sentence elsewhere.) whatever to a sign' he replied, 'Yes, of course.
17 D. LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory Meaning is determined by a system of forces
(Ithaca, I989), 157. which is not personal. It does not depend on the
8 Asked 'how does one decide that certain subjective identity but on the field of different
terms are "undecidable"'? Derrida replied, forces, the conflict of forces, which produces
unequivocally, that it was 'not a matter of interpretations.' See 'An interview with Jacques
decision' but rather that in 'certain historical Derrida'
and in Antony Easthope, British Post-
theoretical situations, some terms can appear Structuralism
to (I988), 236-40.

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 240 Social History VOL. i8: NO. 2

rationalization. History-writing, especially in the English empiricist tradition, has most to

learn from these discomforting assertions, as an example will hope to show.

ROMANCING THE STONE

Whether to use an example or not? If I do not use an example, the accusation can be made
that my argument comprises mere generalities without particular application; if I do use
an example (and I shall), the objection can be made that what I say pertains only to this
example and not to anything else. It is very hard to choose a typical example, some classic
piece of history-writing that every historian will identify with. It had to be short, not a
book, because I aim to give it a very close reading. It could not be from Edward
Thompson, for example, because his particular stance is so overt. My example is selected
because it is recalcitrant, and sufficiently like a kind of sociology.
'The inflation of honours I 58-i 64I' by Lawrence Stone was published in 1958.19 Since
then enough time has elapsed for the immediate occasion and excitements surrounding it
to have faded from view so that it can now be regarded with an appropriate detachment.
Although I shall refer for convenience to 'Stone' I shall mean by this not an author and a
person but the intention of the words of the text as they may be construed.
One way to summarize its narrative might run like this. 'Kings and queens are always
short of money, but then, isn't everybody? Once upon a time there was a mean old queen
who was short of money so she started letting people call themselves "Lord Jim" and "Sir
John" if they gave her money. She was followed by a rather foolish King, whose name was
James, and he did the same. His son Charles was even more foolish, and when he came to
the throne he did just the same again. Well, children, in the end people got pretty sick of all
this, but that's another story.'
'The inflation of honours' tells its story in six sections. It opens with a sociological
generalization, 'Perhaps the most immediately obvious feature of a society dependent
upon monarchy is the existence of titles of honour'w and, in its introduction,21 sets up a
conception of society as a synchronic system. Between IS58 and I64I titles were
increasingly sold to finance state expenditure: in the order of exposition this narrative is
repeated at four levels, concerning the College of Arms, Knights, Baronets, Peers, leading
into a conclusion.72 This conclusion finally admits the article has been telling a story and
makes two moves to fasten it onto other narratives. First, it claims its story is the same as
that narrated by royalists who, during the long years of the Interregnum, looked back over
the previous half-century and agreed with Gervase Holles that 'that way of merchandise
. was one cause (and not the least) of [the] misfortunes . . . of our last martered King'.23
The second is a rhetorical tour deforce.
Throughout, the text refuses to admit that it is a text, preferring instead to advance itself
as merely a detached and transparent perspective on an aspect of English history,
I558-i641. It is therefore with something of a shock at the end when we discover that this
apparently neutral view, as though from a train window, is nothing of the kind. In a fine

19 L. Stone, 'The inflation of honours I558- ' ibid., 45-7-

I64I', Past and Present, xiv (November 1958), 2ibid., 47-8, 48-52, 52-5, 55 ff-, 5965-
45-70. 23 Cited in Stone, ibid., 6o.
2 ibid., 45.

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 May 1993 Romancing the Stone 241

effect, like that at the end of the class

detective, the last sentence of 'The infla
honours between I558 and I641 is 'proof of the truth of what has been described as
"Tawney's Law"' regarding wealth and titles, and second, that 'it is compelling evidence of
the rise of the gentry'.24 With dramatic force, in its last sentence, the text is dovetailed into
the I950S debate over whether there was a gentry and whether their rise led to the Civil
War. What had previously acknowledged itself only as a neutral record (logic) suddenly
declares itself to be an intervention (rhetoric).
In The Content of the Fonn Hayden White cites a passage from the Annals of Saint Gall:

709 Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died.

7I0 Hard year and deficient in crops.
7" I
712 Flood everywhere.
713

7I4 Pippin, mayor of the palace, died.

715

716

717

7I8 Charles devastated the Saxon with great destruction.

7I9

720 Charles fought against the Saxons.

72I Theudo drove the Saracens out of Aquitaine.
722 Great crops.
723

724

725 Saracens came for the first time.

726

727
728
729

730
73I Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.
732 Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday.
733
73425

None of the annalist's facts are seriously in dispute (though, notably, the Battle of
732 is not mentioned while Poitiers is). Following Croce's modern view that 'Where
is no narrative, there is no history',26 White's argument is that history-writing
traces of facts from the past to construct a narrative in the present. It does so, as

24 ibid., 65 . reprinted, Stuttgart, I963), vOl. I, 72 ff., cited

25 Annales Sangallenses Maiores, dicti Hepi- Hayden White, The Content of the Form
danni, ed. Ildefonsus ab Arx, in Monumenta (Baltimore, I987), 6-7.
Gennaniae Historica, series Sctiptores, ed. z B. Croce, Primisaggi (Bari, I95I), 38, cited
George Heinrich Pertz, 32 vols (Hanover, I826; White, The Content of the Form, op. cit., 28.

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 242 Social History VOL. i8: NO. 2

Barthes shows in his account of narra

over into a consecutive story by impos
transforming the story into a narrat
which not merely links events causally
later answered, a sense therefore of t
events.27
Essex created 8i knights in Ireland
Queen's favour:28 that would be one o
linking events by simple cause and ef
mere cause and effect by offering us an interpretation of events (White terms this
'emplotment'). Stone's Whig narrative conducts from the bad old days of absolutism via
the rise of the gentry towards their triumph in the society we now have. Although tinged
with irony at human folly, it is an essentially comic narrative, culminating in a happy
ending: us. Shakespeare does give a version of this story in the play we have decided is his
best, Hamlet. Out of the corruption of a Jacobean court there rises a representative of the
gentry, Hamlet, and though he is too entrammelled with the past to survive himself, his
dying word heralds the domination of that class in Fortinbras (admittedly a sinister and
uncertain figure in the play). Shakespeare more often, as Brecht said, 'takes a tragic view of
the decline of feudalism'29 and in King Lear gives a very different reading of the inflation of
honours, showing great sympathy with a man who foolishly retains the name and title of
monarch while divesting himself of its powers. Stone's narrative, in contrast to this tragic
mode, conforms to and finds support for itself in the familiar Enlightenment story of
demystification, a narrative of the defeat of supernaturalism and the triumph of reason. In
its English version, originating in the seventeenth century, this becomes the overthrow of
Catholic superstition by the inborn moral virtue of Protestant common sense. Since Stone
and his discourse is saturated with the culture of the English gentry his narrative is one told
from the side of the winners. (Later I shall make much of this complicity between subject
and object, observer and observed.)

THE OBJECT

According to the hermeneutic code a narrative finds a coherence in a conc

events. This coherence is not simply of a narrative kind for it depends up
interpretation (in this respect the diachronic relies upon the synchronic).
events attain coherence not in terms of what has happened but through a
typical, the kind of thing people do (what Aristotle calls ELK6O, 'likely'). St
this well, for he conceives the social formation as operating through a mec
causality. It is a 'system'30 with a 'function'31 working through 'forces'32 w
is to cause 'pressure' (seven times altogether).33 This system, the moto

27 See R. Barthes, SIZ, trans. R. Miller 30 Stone, 'The inflation of honours', op. cit.,
(I97), I6-21. 45 (three times), 58, 6o.
' Stone, 'The inflation of honours', op. cit., 31 ibid., 45 (twice).
32 ibid., 45.
49.
29 B. Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, 33 ibid., 45, 46, 50, 5I, 56, 57, 63.
trans. J. Willett (I965), 59.

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 May 1993 Romancing the Stone 243

delightfully simple and absolutely familiar: people are 'socially ambitious' and driven by
the desire for 'solid material advantages';34 this exerts 'pressure' which can cause 'strain'35
unless it is relieved. For Stone society is a machine, and in fact it is not too hard to identify
exactly what sort of machine is in question. It is a mill, powered either by water or steam,
as becomes almost explicit in the following sentence: 'By I6oo the wheels of government
were ceasing to turn without the sweet oil of bribes and gratuities at every revolution.'36
This is a metaphor, one of the six explicit or visible metaphors I count in the whole text.
The others refer to 'floodgates', something being 'dammed up' or 'swept away in the tide',
the tip of the 'iceberg' and the 'symptom of the disease'.37 The conventional distinction
between form and content would rule that these six metaphors are merely formal, a
rhetoric decorating the logic of the text and therefore easily removed or substituted.
Although they could be removed my argument will be that they are entirely consistent
with other less visible metaphors latent in such habitual and common sense words as
'forces', 'pressure', 'strain'. Further, I shall hope to show that this rhetoric grows out of a
set of oppositions structuring the text and equating within it: fact/value, real/apparent,
objective/subjective, social/personal.
Stone's narrative is organized according to this mechanical and reductive notion of
causality, society as a water-mill. That notion in turn implies and is supported by an
epistemology and an ethic. Since this objective and mechanical system - what the text
refers to at one point as 'established socio-economic fact'38 _ is equated with the real, no
problem arises in trying to represent it. Simply there, it needs no representation. A whole
vocabulary repeats this idea: something is 'obvious', 'immediately obvious', 'all too
obvious', 'obvious enough';39 or something is 'clear', 'clear enough' (twice), 'comes out
very clearly';40 or something is 'evident', appears 'evidently', there is 'clear evidence' for
it;4 it is 'difficult to see' what else someone could have done, there 'can be no doubt' of
something, a 'theoretical position' can be immediately contrasted with what happens 'in
fact'.42 According to this empiricist epistemology the real is simply given and yields
knowledge of itself to the objective and unprejudiced observer.
The same conception provides Stone with an ethic. To recognize the real objectively is
right, to act out of subjective motives (fantasy, self-deception and the desire for pleasure)
is to fail to recognize the real and so is wrong (in England this calculation of self-interest is
often referred to as 'morality'). Knowing how the social machine works, a good ruler reacts
to maintain 'balance' and preserve 'stability 43 while a bad ruler will let the social pressure
rise dangerously by failing to 'recognize an established socio-economic fact'. Elizabeth is
wrong because personal reasons cloud her judgement, her 'parsimony',44just as James errs
in the opposite direction, through 'prodigality'.45 A difficulty lurks here.
To assert one thing means denying another. In order to enforce the notion of society as a
water-mill, Stone has to account for what is excluded from it, people who do not recognize
'socio-economic fact' and are willing to swap money for titles. Now I can think of all kinds

14 ibid., 62. 40 ibid., 50, 51, 57, 55-

35 ibid., 45. 41 ibid., 55, 59, 56.
36 ibid., 46. 42 ibid., 46, 6o, 52.
37 ibid., 5o, S6, 59, 64, 64- 41 ibid-, 45, 47.
38 ibid., 64. " ibid., 49, 63.
39 ibid., 63, 45, 46, 59. 45 ibid., 49-

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 244 Social History VOL. i8: NO. 2

of reasons why you might want a tit

help in interesting the opposite sex, because you fancy yourself in ermine, because you see
it as your religious duty to serve the anointed monarch. Each of these expressions of desire
- Oedipal submission, sexual drive, narcissism, obedience to the superego - could be
argued to perform through different temporalities in the social formation.46 There is no
such sense of dispersed temporality in Stone. In order to stabilize the chosen topic by
presenting it as a unified object of knowledge 'The inflation of honours' must compress
multi-temporality into a single centre. It does so through two manoeuvres, reduction and
exclusion. It reduces the potentially various and contradictory desires of title-seekers to a
single form, 'the socially ambitious'47, consistent with the idea of society as motivated by
desire for material advantage. Yet a residue remains, and the text excludes this by counting
it as unreal. The system of honours is one of 'fundamental artificiality' ;48 people who seek
titles are the kind who have 'forged' their genealogy and trust in 'make-believe'.49 In
Stone's text, the desire for 'solid material advantages' is real, the desire for any other form
of pleasure is'make believe', merely apparent.
Mapped onto objective/subjective and social/personal, the binary of real/apparent works
at three stages in theme and narrative, at each of which a layer can be discarded, a skin
sloughed as an accidental outside so the essential inside may be retained and consolidated.
Thus:

i. What people were doing between I558 and I641 was recognizing the real, that is, the
functioning of the water-powered engine driving society, or indulging in fantasy,
'make-believe';
2. What these people were really doing can thus be contrasted with what they thought
they were doing;
3. Since we as readers can discriminate perfectly between real and apparent motives and
action by assessing them in relation to the real of the social engine, these narrated events
can stand as an unmediated, unconstructed and unified real to which we may have direct
access.

In sum, the only problem this world poses is for us to look and see what they are doing - th
textuality and narrative are as good as transparent.

MEANS OF REPRESENTATION

In terms of textual operation the real/apparent distinction is enforced as

between an object language and metalanguage, the discourse which becomes itself the
object of inspection by another discourse posing itself outside the object language and
capable of knowing it as it cannot know itself. The text/footnote distinction is shared
widely by discourses other than history-writing in our culture. History-writing, however,
deploys the rhetoric of the text/footnote opposition as vehicle for the metalanguage/object

46Louis Althusser develops the concept of 4 Stone, 'The inflation of honours', op

differentiated temporalities in the social for- 48.
mation in his work with Etienne Balibar, 48 ibid., 45.
Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster (1972), 49 ibid.
96-iO5.

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 May 1993 Romancing the Stone 245

language opposition. Thus, in Stone, the heap of accurate data accumulated from
so-called 'primary sources' is annotated for brevity in the notes. So 'these Marks of
Honour, called Arms, are now by most people grown of little esteem', cited in the text, is
referred by number, superscript7, to the footnote, '7W. Dugdale, The Antient Usage in
Beaing. .. Arms, i68z, preface.'.50 Footnotes stand to text as the listing of annals does to
history-writing, which is as facts do to narrative, and apparent to real. Citations appear in
the text only to give corroborative support or to be refuted. The footnotes shorthand an
object language discourse which does not understand itself but whose real meaning as well
as its own failure to understand itself is fully explained in the text, the metalanguage. And
while the discourse of the sources, the object language, is marked as textual (no one now
says or writes things like 'are now by most people grown of little esteem'), the text or
commentary through contrast can pass itself off as unwritten, not textuality at all.
Whatever local commitments it took on during the revolutionary period, after i66o, as
Stanley Fish asserts in his book on seventeenth-century literature: 'The plain style wins
the day.'51 And that is the style Stone reproduces, consistent in tone, evenly varied in
sentence-form and sentence-length, seemingly obvious in choice of vocabulary, in a word,
unremarkable, a style which invites its style to be overlooked. Since Stone's represented
world is supposed to be just there, a given, the representation of it may be offered as
weightless. The effect is to provide us with a window through which to watch
Elizabethan-Jacobean people and see exactly what they are doing.
In this respect seventeenth-century folk appear in Stone very much as 'natives' do in
colonial discourse: they are charming, amusing, naive, slightly sinister, occasionally
unintentionally acute. But the same gesture which treats them as exotically other also
reduces them to an essence of Man (it is man) common to us and them. In Stone (it is a
condition for the real/apparent opposition applied to their motives) seventeenth-century
people are presented in emphatically twentieth-century discourse. Adopting a deliberately
sardonic and demystificatory tone the text re-describes what they are doing in harshly
contemporary language. Obliged by 'financial necessity' Charles takes a 'major policy
decision';52 titles are 'put on the market', prepared for 'auction', knightage drifts into an
'inflationary condition';53 there is a problem over 'the sale price of baronetcies, owing to
the excess of supply over demand' while titles are sold 'for cash' because they promise
54
'social status'.
There are several issues here. One is that 'The inflation of honours' reduces difference to
the same, these strange people into our own image, and does so with complete insouciance:
if they are not like us, then they should be. Second, I think I could easily tell a very
different story about the period 1558-I64I, Stone has to assume (it follows from the very
structure of his oppositions) that it is only wish-fulfilment and make-believe which could
delude them about what they were really doing, selling titles for cash, using the real to get
the apparent. It would be a literary-critical commonplace to remark that an opposition
between 'deeds' and 'words' echoes through Marlowe's Tamburlaine of I587 or that
Hamlet thinks it well worth writing down that one may smile and smile and still be a

50 ibid., 48, 65- 52 Stone, 'The inflation of honours', op. cit.,

5' Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: SI, 5I-
The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Litera- 53 ibid., 52, 52, 52.
ture (Berkeley, I974), 379. 51 ibid., 53, 56, 59.

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 246 Social History VOL. i8: NO. 2

villain. My story would recount how they go on and on about the opposition between
reality and appearance because it was disturbingly new to them and they were having
trouble living into it, that they just could not operate with the radical opposition Stone
imposes on them. And the third issue is the finally insoluble problem of what vocabulary
you use to talk about this past other. It is the colonial question again. If we use their
language they sound quaint and other, if we use ours they come out just like us. 'The
inflation of honours' does not hesitate to transform them into us. Their alterity is not really
at stake for it at all because it assumes the culture of the gentry is the condition all others
aspire to.

THE DESIRE OF THE HISTORIAN

For speaking subjects there is no escape from subjectivity, and where the
there is desire, whether admitted or denied. Of the self-ascribed task o
present facts in the form of a narrative Hayden White asks, 'What wis
desire is gratified, by the fantasy that real events are properly represente
shown to display the formal coherency of a story?'55 My question might
than this, particularly with the example of Stone to hand: what curren
the historian? I am aware that in posing this to historians, especially in England, I am
confirming some of their worst nightmares about literary people, but it has to be asked
nevertheless. What is the nature of this nostalgia to relive the past, this impossible desire to
breathe life into the disjecta membra and scattered bones of our ancestors, to find the ashy
traces of the long-dead and bring them together when the only unity or meaning they may
have is what we lend them now? It is, surely, like the Nekuia in Book i i of The Odyssey,
when Odysseus calls up the spirits of the dead. He gives them blood now so they may
empower his future. Thus the desire of the historian may be to produce 'a past from which
one would wish to have descended',56 in part a utopian project reflecting on human
possibility in the present. (I would venture the opinion that Edward Thompson, despite a
certain sentimental humanism, deserves to be named England's greatest contemporary
historian because his writing shows he has realized this.)
Traces or not, we can be sure our ancestors were different. History-writing, then, by its
nature confronts an alterity that resists any reduction, as Michel de Certeau has
proposed.57 In this respect, inevitably, the historian's narrative expresses a drive to master
the otherness of a past, the drive for mastery Freud terms Bemachtigungstrieb. But 'The
inflation of honours', at least in my account, seeks to give itself over to that desire, one the
more powerfully active for being unacknowledged. In presuming it is simply a
transcription of the 'immediately obvious' in a transparent language, refusing to admit it
own operation as textuality, Stone's text offers to share with its reader a position of

ss White, The Content of the Form, op. cit., is4.lacking', a lack history-writing aims to make
56 Nietzsche, cited ibid., 149. good by means of narrative: The Writing of
17 Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and History, trans. T. Conley (New York, I988),
the semiology of Christian Metz, de Certeau 8B. Like the Symbolic Order theorized by
argues that 'the past' is always a 'means of Jacques Lacan, the past must 'indicate alterity'
representing a difference' because it must through 'a staging of the other', by the same
construe the present as provisional in compari- necessity always 'making a place for a future'
son; so the past is capable 'of representing what (ibid.).

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 May 1993 Romancing the Stone 247

absolute mastery and superiority, to see and understand the real as it really it. And in
believing it can communicate truth outside power and desire it reveals a passionate desire
to be rid of desire. That wish, the desire excited for us when we read that text, is the more
insidious because it masquerades under the guise of truth, indeed a claim to scientificity,
well instanced in the sociological tables of Appendices I-4.58
Stone's text is most precisely characterized in terms of denial: it denies that the real is
available only in its constructions, it denies its own status as rhetoric and history-writing, it
denies that it is subject to desire. Denial combines 'sour grapes' with 'the dog in the
manger' as though to say: 'I don't want what I can't have and so you can't have it either.'
The operation of that psychic mechanism, perceptible both as an emotional attachment
and a moral affirmation, emerges in the way 'The inflation of honours' decries fantasy as
indulgent self-deception while asserting its own engagement with the other as objective
and clear-sighted, an opposition which once again coheres firmly with that between the
apparent and the real. In Stone the desire for pleasure in having a title is dismissed as
'artificial' and 'make believe'. Later, the honours system is spurned with angry contempt as
'a romantic and increasingly unrealistic wish'.59 A long section begins by describing how
'an indolent king' had to finance 'his day to day pleasures', how George Villiers sold titles to
provide these, and it concludes with the ferocious satisfaction that all of this 'was put to an
end by Felton's knife'.60 The text, one might say, is tempted by fantasy but denies it in the
belief it is self-deceptive and unreal; thinking it refuses pleasure for itself, it enjoys
refusing it to others.
How typical is this? Sufficiently so, I believe, for me to risk a tentative opposition of my
own, between literary study and historical study, one which draws on Freud's contrast
between the reality principle and the pleasure principle. In the act of writing about poetry,
novels and plays literary critics tend to confess their submission to the pleasure principle,
that they like to roll a text round the tongue. Historians think they have acceded to the
sterner demands of the reality principle; they therefore scorn anyone who does not submit
to the hard discipline of facts but instead plays with their own fantasies. It is, however, a
misrecognition to think the desire for discipline, mastery, certainty and facts is not itself an
expression of desire.
There is something wonderfully English about all this, not a pointless remark if one
thinks of how intimate Stone's text is with the culture of the gentry. At a deeper level,
however, it shares a misrecognition with broad areas of European culture. Mapping onto
all the other oppositions in it is a repeated opposition between the solid and the liquid. In
contrast to 'solid material advantages' and 'stability' on the one hand, there is on the other a
constant deliquescence. Besides the 'oil of bribes' there is 'flow' (twice), open 'floodgates',
a 'flood' (twice), a 'spate' which gets 'dammed up', a 'tide' which sweeps things away (one
remembers all that 'pressure') 61 And there is constant anxiety about a 'breach' (twice),
'gap' (twice) or 'cleavagej62 opening up in the solid so that fluid leaks through it. Except for
an allusion to 'fluidity'63 to mean social change, in every case material interest is equated
with the solid and titles with fluidity; a gap is what appears in the difference between the

5 Stone, 'The inflation of honours', op. cit., 61 ibid., 48, 45, 46, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59-
67-70. 6 ibid., 55, 56, 52, 52, 6I.
59 ibid., 55. 63 ibid. 45 C
' ibid., 57, 58.

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 248 Social History VOL. i8 NO. 2

two. In sum, the solid is uncreated, substantial, self-identical, undivided, true, essential,
extra-discursive, real and, I hazard, masculine. Fluidity is forged, make-believe,
duplicitous, ambivalent, fictitious, unnecessary, textual, unreal and, I guess, feminine.
Flow is what the solid seeks but always fails to exclude from itself.
This provocative suggestion clearly invites Felton's knife, here an incisive remark to the
effect that all these metaphors are themselves artificial and not real, not essential to Stone's
truth-telling but merely a 'form' for his 'content'. My defence would be twofold. Although
you could cut out these metaphors, they are fully consistent with the real/apparent
opposition which structures the text and its narrative. And, second, in a book published in
I972, Dissemination, Derrida argued that the western tradition relied on an opposition
between a masculinized logocentrism which thought of itself as solid and self-present, and
an other, the flow of textuality whose excess threatens all the boundaries logocentrism
claims for itself." I do not think Derrida had been reading Lawrence Stone.
I have been accusing'The inflation of honours', in perhaps tiresome detail, of practising
a certain kind of rhetoric, one which arguably reproduces the traditionally empiricist
discourse and 'plain style' of the English gentry. It would be naive of me not to consider
that my own discourse in this present article could be accused of a similar complicity.
Equally, I would acknowledge that in pointing the finger at Stone's text for its unreflecting
claim to address us from a metalinguistic position about the object language of these
seventeenth-century people I have myself set up 'The inflation of honours' in the place of
an object language for which I have undertaken to provide a superior knowledge and
metalanguage, in other words doing to Stone what I said he did to the monarchs, courtiers
and title-seekers. Of course one always inhabits the language and culture of one's own
time, and there is nowhere else to go. Even so, however, suppose my harsh remarks based
on 'The inflation of honours' are taken to be not merely particular but to have some general
application to the state of history-writing? Suppose one wished to be cured from this
overmastering obsession with the logic of the real and to move towards a writing of history
which admitted it took the form of rhetoric? Suppose further that these changes might
make it easier to recognize that our choice of ancestors is also a decision about what future
we desire? For brevity's sake my response is aphoristic:

i. If the object of historical investigation is recognized as decentred, a bundle of different

temporalities, then it cannot be treated as an object, a given, the real.
2. If the narrativization of facts in history-writing is admitted to be a construction rather
than a transcription, the textuality of such writing, now repressed, might once again
become manifest and admitted.
3. If history-writing came to accept its dependence on rhetoric, the reader would be
offered a position by the text other than that of would-be absolute mastery.

Contemporary history-writing was developed essentially in the Victorian period with a

mode of discourse very like that of the nineteenth-century realist novel. A way forward
might be for history-writing to take on board some of the principles, insights and
techniques associated with Modernist fiction, to move away from George Eliot and
become a bit more like James Joyce. At present, at least on the evidence of the Stone

i See J. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (I98I).

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May 1993 Romancing the Stone 249

example, the historian's approach to Clio is that of a man after one thing: to penetrate her
otherness. Perhaps if we had greater respect for her alterity, we might find she welcomed
other forms of writing and relationship, including the possibility that you give blood to the
past in order to nourish posterity.
Manchester Metropolitan University

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