The Girard Reader (21 page)

imaginary element, but it is the very specific imagination of people who crave violence. As a

result, among the textual representations there is a mutual confirmation. This correspondence

can be explained by only one hypothesis. The text we are reading has its roots in a real

persecution described from the perspective of the persecutors. The perspective is inevitably

deceptive since the persecutors are convinced that their violence is justified; they consider

themselves judges, and therefore they must have guilty victims, yet their perspective is to

some degree reliable, for the certainty of being right encourages them to hide nothing of their

massacres.

Faced with a text such as Guillaume de Machaut's, it is legitimate to suspend the general rule

by which the text as a whole is never worth more, as far as real information goes, than the

least reliable of its features. If the text describes circumstances favorable to persecution, if it

presents us with victims of the type that persecutors usually choose, and if, in addition, it

represents these victims as guilty of the type of crimes which persecutors normally attribute

to their victims, then it is very likely that the persecution is real. If this reality is confirmed by the text itself then there is little scope for doubt.

When one begins to understand the perspective of the persecutors, the absurdity of their

accusations strengthens rather than compromises the informational value of the text, but only

in reference to the violence that it echoes. If Guillaume had added stories of ritual infanticide

to

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the episodes of poisoning, his account would be even more improbable without, however, in

the least diminishing the accuracy of the massacres it reports. The more unlikely the

accusations in this genre of text the more they strengthen the probability of the massacres:

they confirm for us the psychosocial context within which the massacres must have taken

place. Conversely, if the theme of massacres is placed alongside the theme of an epidemic it provides the historical context within which even the most precise scholar could take this

account of poisoning seriously.

The accounts of persecutions are no doubt inaccurate, but in a way they are so characteristic

of persecutors in general, and of medieval persecutors in particular, that the text can be

believed in all the areas in which conjectures are prompted by the very nature of the

inaccuracy. When potential persecutors describe the reality of their persecutions, they should

be believed.

The combination of the two types of characteristics generates certainty. If the combination

were only to be found in rare examples we could not be so certain. But its frequency is too

great to allow doubt. Only actual persecution seen from the perspective of the persecutors can

explain the regular combination of these characteristics. Our interpretation of all the texts is

confirmed statistically.

The fact that certainty is statistically verifiable does not mean it is based only on an

accumulation of equally uncertain documents. All documents like Guillaume de Machaut's

are of considerable value because in them the probable and improbable interact in such a way

that each explains and justifies the presence of the other. If there is a statistical character to

our certainty it is because any document studied in isolation could be forged. This is unlikely,

but not impossible, in the case of a single document. And yet it is impossible where a great

number of documents are concerned.

The modern Western world chooses to interpret "texts of persecution" as real, this being the only possible way to demystify them. This solution is accurate and perfect because it makes

allowance for all the characteristics found in this type of text. Solid intellectual reasoning is

the basis, rather than humanitarianism or ideology. This interpretation has not usurped the

almost unanimous agreement granted it. For the social historian reliable testimony, rather

than the testimony of someone who shares Guillaume de Machaut's illusions, will never be as

valuable as the unreliable testimony of persecutors, or their accomplices, which reveals more

because of its unconscious nature. The conclusive document belongs to persecutors who are

too naïve to cover the traces of their crimes, in contrast to modern persecutors who are too

cautious to leave behind documents that might be used against them.

I call those persecutors naïve who are still convinced that they are

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right and who are not so mistrustful as to cover up or censor the fundamental characteristics

of their persecution. Such characteristics are either clearly apparent in the text and are

directly revealing or they remain hidden and reveal indirectly. They are all strong stereotypes

and the combination of both types, one obvious and one hidden, provides us with information

about the nature of these texts.

We are all able today to recognize the stereotypes of persecution. But what is now common

knowledge scarcely existed in the fourteenth century. Naïve persecutors
are unaware of what

they are doing
. Their conscience is too good to deceive their readers systematically, and they present things as they see them. They do not suspect that by writing their accounts they are

arming posterity against them. This is true of the infamous "witch-hunts" of the sixteenth

century. It is still true today in the backward regions of the world. We are, then, dealing with the commonplace, and my readers may be bored by my insistence on these first obvious facts.

The purpose will soon be seen. One slight displacement is enough to transform what is taken

for granted, in the case of Guillaume de Machaut, into something unusual and even

inconceivable.

My readers will have already observed that in speaking as I do I contradict certain principles

that numerous critics hold as sacrosanct. I am always told one must never do violence to the

text. Faced with Guillaume de Machaut the choice is clear: one must either do violence to the

text or let the text forever do violence to innocent victims. Certain principles universally held

to be valid in our day, because they seem to guard against the excesses of certain

interpretations, can bring about disastrous consequences never anticipated by those who,

thinking they have foreseen everything, consider the principles inviolable. Everyone believes

that the first duty of the critic is to respect the meaning of texts. Can this principle be

sustained in the face of Guillaume de Machaut's work?

Another contemporary notion suffers in the light of Guillaume de Machaut's text, or rather

from the unhesitating way we read it, and that is the casual way in which literary critics

dismiss what they call the "referent." In current linguistic jargon the referent is the subject of the text; in our example it is the massacre of the Jews, who were seen as responsible for the

poisoning of Christians. For some twenty years the referent has been considered more or less

inaccessible. It is unimportant, we hear, whether we are capable or not of reaching it; this

naïve notion of the referent would seem only to hamper the latest study of textuality. Now the

only thing that matters is the ambiguous and unreliable relationships of language. This

perspective is not to be rejected wholesale, but in applying it in a scholarly way we run the

risk that only Ernest Hoeppfner, Guillaume's editor in the venerable
Société des anciens

textes
, will be

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seen as the truly ideal critic of that writer. His introduction does in fact speak of courtly

poetry, but there is never any mention of the massacre of the Jews during the plague.

The passage from Guillaume provides a good example of what I have called in
Things

Hidden since the Foundation of the World
"persecution texts."
 4. B
y that I mean accounts of real violence, often collective, told from the perspective of the persecutors, and therefore

influenced by characteristic distortions. These distortions must be identified and corrected in

order to reveal the arbitrary nature of the violence that the persecution text presents as

justified.

We need not examine at length the accounts of witch trials to determine the presence of the

same combination of real and imaginary, though not gratuitous, details that we found in the

text of Guillaume de Machaut. Everything is presented as fact, but we do not believe all of it,

nor do we believe that everything is false. Generally we have no difficulty in distinguishing

fact from fiction. Again, the accusations made in trials seem ridiculous, even though the

witch may consider them true and there may be reason to suspect her confession was not

obtained by torture. The accused may well believe herself to be a witch, and may well have

tried to harm her neighbors by magical proceedings. We still do not consider that she

deserves the death sentence. We do not believe that magic is effective. We have no difficulty

in accepting that the victim shares her torturers' ridiculous belief in the efficacy of witchcraft but this belief does not affect us; our skepticism is not shaken.

During the trial not a single voice is raised to reestablish or, rather, to establish the truth. No

one is capable of doing so. This means that not only the judges and witnesses but also the

accused are not in agreement with our interpretation of their own texts. This unanimity fails

to influence us. The authors of these documents were there and we were not. We have access

to no information that did not come from them. And yet, several centuries later, one single

historian or even the first person to read the text feels he has the right to dispute the sentence

pronounced on the witches
. 5.

Guillaume de Machaut is reinterpreted in the same extreme way, the same audacity is

exercised in overthrowing the text, the same intellectual operation is in effect with the same

certainty, based on the same type of reasoning. The fact that some of the details are imagined

does not persuade us to consider the whole text imaginary. On the contrary, the

____________________

4. Girard,
Things Hidden
, 126-38.

5. J. Hansen,
Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter und die Entstehung

der grossen Hexenverfolgung
( Munich, Leipzig: Scientia, 1900); Delumeau,
La Peur en

Occident
, vol. 2, chap. 2. On the end of the witchcraft trials, see Robert Mandrou ,

Magistrats et sorciers
( Paris: Plon, 1968). See also Natalie Zemon Davis,
Society and

Culture in Early Modern France
( Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975).

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incredible accusations strengthen rather than diminish the credibility of the other facts.

Once more we encounter what would seem to be, but is not, a paradoxical relationship

between the probable and improbable details that enter into the text's composition. It is in the

light of this relationship, not yet articulated but no less apparent to us, that we will evaluate

the quantity and quality of the information that can be drawn from our text. If the document is

of a legal nature, the results are usually as positive or even more positive than in the case of

Guillaume de Machaut. It is unfortunate that most of the accounts were burned with the

witches. The accusations are absurd and the sentence unjust, but the texts have been edited

with the care and clarity that generally characterize legal documents. Our confidence is

therefore well placed. There is no suspicion that we secretly sympathize with those who

conducted the witch-hunts. The historian who would consider all the details of a trial equally

fantastic, on the excuse that some of them are tainted by the distortions of the persecutors, is

no expert, and his colleagues would not take him seriously. The most effective criticism does

not consist in rejecting even the believable data on the ground that it is better to sin by excess

rather than lack of distrust. Once again the principle of unlimited mistrust must give way to

the golden rule of persecution texts: the mind of a persecutor creates a certain type of illusion

and the traces of his illusion confirm rather than invalidate the existence of a certain kind of

event, the persecution itself in which the witch is put to death. To distinguish the true from

the false is a simple matter, since each bears the clear mark of a stereotype.

In order to understand the reasons behind this extraordinary assurance evidenced in

persecution texts, we must enumerate and describe the stereotypes. This is also not a difficult

task. It is merely a question of articulating an understanding we already possess. We are not

aware of its scope because we never examine it in a systematic fashion. The understanding in question remains captive in the concrete examples to which we apply it, and these always

belong to the mainly Western historical domain. We have never yet tried to apply this

understanding beyond that domain, for example, to the so-called ethnological universe. To

make this possible I am now going to sketch, in summary fashion, a typology of the

stereotypes of persecuti
on. 6.

____________________

6. This sketch of stereotypes of persecution, chapter 2 of
The Scapegoat
, is presented in the next chapter of the Reader. -
J. W.