February 20, 2004

Wie es eigentlich gewesen

Posted by Henry

Timothy Burke has a fascinating short post on Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver as a Foucauldian genealogy. As Burke says, Stephenson succeeds in looking at history from a skew angle, making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Read the piece - it’s an example of the very best kind of academic blogging. All that I can add is to point out one of the ways in which Stephenson (and Thomas Pynchon in Mason and Dixon) tries to defamiliarize the past; the use of anachronism. At various points in the narrative, Stephenson introduces modern ideas or inventions into the margins of his historical narrative (he can get away with this more easily, because Quicksilver is an alternative history of the world, a history that never happened). He does this so as to make a tiger’s leap into the past.

Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities. It could have developed in many different directions. In Quicksilver, the past and the present are related not because the one has led to the other, but because they are both the same thing at different stages; vortices of possibility. Even if Quicksilver isn’t really a historical novel, it’s a novel of history, which to my mind is a much rarer and more interesting thing.

Posted on February 20, 2004 09:22 PM UTC
Comments

“Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities.”

Beautifully put. That’s what I’m always looking for in historical fiction.

Posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden · February 20, 2004 09:47 PM

Oops on the permalink. It’s actually at http://www.swarthmore.edu/socsci/tburke1/perma22004.html, but I forgot to put it at the bottom of the regular scroll. Something that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Posted by Timothy Burke · February 20, 2004 10:58 PM

Surely you mean, “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”.

Posted by leo · February 21, 2004 04:24 AM

Strictly speaking, yeah, but for some weird reason it’s gotten popularized among English speaking historians in the shorter version. I hummed and hawed a bit before deciding not to include the ‘ist’ - but in my defence, I did know that it’s not very good German grammar before sticking it up (my German is mediocre but not that mediocre).

Posted by Henry · February 21, 2004 04:51 AM

I’m about 75 pages nto Quicksilver and enjoying it very much. the anachronisms are subtle and slip in unnoticed, especially if you aren’t a historian. I’m looking forward to the second book in the cycle coming out this spring.

Posted by Keith · February 21, 2004 10:45 PM

but for some weird reason it?s gotten popularized among English speaking historians in the shorter version

Weisst Du warum, eigentlich?

Posted by Doug · February 23, 2004 12:16 AM

Dunno Doug - like yerself, all I know about German historiography, I learned from Roger Chickering.

Posted by Henry Farrell · February 23, 2004 01:41 AM
for some weird reason it’s gotten popularized among English speaking historians in the shorter version.

One reason, slightly weird:

[Gombrich] slightly misquotes Ranke’s much-misunderstood, marvelously modulated phrase “how it actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). This, moreover, was not intended as “an injunction to the historian.” Rather it was his youthful, modest assertion in his very first book, written when he was still in his twenties, that his work was aspiring not to the “high offices” that had previously been assigned to history: “It wants only to show what actually happened” (er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen).

So it’s an accurate quotation which happens not to stand alone grammatically. (My German still aspires to execrable, though, so I wouldn’t have noticed.)

Posted by des · February 23, 2004 01:36 PM

Hmm. Chickering notwithstanding, a little googling appears to show that this is an accurate quotation, with citations in French, Danish and Norwegian as well as English. And no shortage of German quotations either.

I’d only guess that German grammar was less fixed in 1824, because today you’d definitely need an ist, war or sei to round out the clause. Maybe we need a historian to tell us how it really was.

Posted by Doug · February 23, 2004 05:35 PM

Working link. Gombrich counters by calling the ist he added “redundant but harmless”, and this was surely not in 1824.

Posted by des · February 23, 2004 05:52 PM
Followups

→ Stephenson.
Excerpt: Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber links to an excellent post (scroll down) by Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted about Neal...Read more at scribblingwoman
→ Stephenson.
Excerpt: Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber links to an excellent post by Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted about Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver...Read more at scribblingwoman

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.