What History Is Made Of

Nicola Chiaromonte's The Paradox of History

I am not well-read in political theory, but have become engrossed with a collection of essays of literary criticism by the 20th century Italian writer Nicola Chiaromonte titled The Paradox of History. The collection investigates how some of the great novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Pasternak among them, have grappled with the problem of history and whether it’s ever possible to grasp the true causes and meanings of historical events. Chiaromonte’s life story makes me wonder if he was one of the inspirations for Professor Quadri in Moravia’s The Conformist — he was a writer, activist, and anti-fascist intellectual who fled Mussolini’s Italy for Paris.

In each of the essays, he examines how novels have coped with one of the central mysteries of modernity: history is made up of a mass of decisions and actions made by individual humans, along with an accompanying mass of individual experiences of events. Yet, what we call “historical forces” transcend the will of any individual — they are forces that obey a logic of their own. But if we describe it as a force, what power is exercising this force, and to what end? Explanations have ranged from metaphysical (the will of God) to psychological (human nature, the unconscious) to systemic/economic (history might be game theory writ large, or simply a symptom of unstable or broken systems).

Associated questions, on which many, many thinkers have written: does history follow any laws, and if it does, can we use them to predict future events the way we can predict the trajectory of a falling apple? What role do chance and contingency play? Is it ever useful to speculate about counterfactuals? Can a single individual alter the course of history, or do “historical forces” mean that the ultimate outcome is the same even if the path is slightly different? If historical forces are inexorable, can we say that we have free will?

The grand ideologies often claim to bring certainty to these questions, promising a new superstructure of beliefs and systems that can bend history toward a desired, ideal outcome. Novels, with their emphasis on individuals and subjective experience, act as a counterpoint. They present a specific perspective on the world through a limited pair or pairs of eyes, and though they typically aim to express truths about the world, they rarely offer certainties. Typical advice for aspiring novelists focuses on giving the characters agency — some power to make things happen in the world of the story. But things also have to happen to them, things they can’t control.

Chiaromonte begins with an essay on a scene from The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal. The protagonist, Fabrizio, is a young admirer of Napoleon who decides to leave home and join the French army. He finds them on the eve of the battle of Waterloo, and is eager to participate. But his experience of the battle is hardly a grand one: he sees a dead body on the road, he follows a group of men on horses without knowing quite who they are, he is shot at and sees some soldiers around him fall, he sees Napoleon riding by but can’t tell which of the men is his hero. Then his horse is taken from him, and out of discouragement and drunkenness he finds shelter and falls asleep. When he wakes up, the battle is over.

Chiaromonte:

Napoleon, the Napoleon of those Grande Armée communiqués that nourished Fabrizio and Julian Sorel in Le Rouge et le Noir does not exist; the great saga does not exist; even history does not exist. All that exists are single incidents, single individuals, the fleeting impressions of the mind, and — what is very important — the youthful dream of the Napoleonic saga.

Of course the battle of Waterloo, viewed from a distance in all its magnitude, as in a painting by David or Gros, is undeniably real, but Stendhal makes us feel that despite its grandeur it is utterly insignificant.

That does not, however, make Fabrizio’s illusions any the less illusory. It is in the captivating “arias” of our hero’s soul that the reader hears the voice of truth. For it is in these “arias” that the meaning of Fabrizio’s experience is expressed, not in the incidents of the grandiose event, and certainly not in any supposedly total significance of the event, which cannot be experienced by any one individual, because everyone from Napoleon down to the lowest soldier is part of that event and overwhelmed by it.

For Stendhal the ground of truth and meaning is in the encounter and clash of the individual soul with an event, a confrontation that always takes a more or less absurd form.

Stendhal tries to deflate the idea that we can ascribe any grandeur at all to historical events like the battle of Waterloo, even as his characters are driven by the idea of this grandeur. “Stendhal’s special magic lies in his ability to balance gaily on the paradox that denies reality not only to events and people in the external world of society but to the feelings and fantasies of the private world of the individual as well. What is ‘real’ for him is the collision of the two worlds and the comedy of errors that ensues.” For Chiaromonte, Stendhal is trying to tell us that it’s fruitless to try to ascribe any rational process to history since doing so requires fitting real events in all their messiness and specificity into abstractions that can’t account for individual experiences like Fabrizio’s. Even though his experience is just as real as Napoleon’s, his will never be part of “history.”

The thread continues into the second essay, on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which also concerns the Napoleonic wars (sometimes I think that most of the 19th century’s intellectual culture was about trying to make sense of Napoleon). Tolstoy was direct in his philosophizing, including philosophical sections in the novel where he tries to lay out his ideas about whether history can be understood “rationally.” I suspect many readers skip over these parts, but they make the project of the novel very explicit.

Chiaromonte:

The aim of War and Peace was to show “what really happens,” the true relation that exists between the individual fact and the global, “historical” one. What in the end Tolstoy discovers is an irretrievable duality. There is on one side “peace,” the real life of individuals, made up of a succession of feelings, impulses, and everyday occurrences. On this level of “real life,” historical events — wars, battles, the decisions of rulers — appear as a series of happenings that have neither meaning nor rationality, insofar as they do not spring directly from the “normal” existence of individuals, and have no clear connection with their ordinary motives. On the one side, above and beyond all this, there is history, the great movement that carries individuals and peoples away as if they were completely necessitated by it. The true cause of the great movements of history eludes both the individual who is subject to it and the historian who observes it from the outside. The only truth that can be affirmed about it is, according to Tolstoy, that events are determined by a “power” which dominates everything and everybody, from Napoleon to the nearest soldier.

One thing that felt missing to me in the Tolstoy essay was how the idea of “power” operates even in the “peace” sections of the novel. I’m thinking of the episode of Natasha’s attempted elopement with the seducer Anatole: if I’m remembering correctly, he describes Natasha as subject to forces beyond her control, by which she’s carried away. It’s not in her nature to be sexually reckless, but her unprotected state leaves her vulnerable to Anatole and his sister’s manipulations and charisma.¹ He is a force that acts upon her in an almost impersonal way, and she is overcome, the way an ordinary person is subject to the whims of people in power.

Chiaromonte describes how the personal sphere feels more “real” to us because within it we feel more free:

For the Russian writer, according to Mr. Berlin, only the private lives of individuals, made up of feelings, passions, thoughts, and “natural” relationships are real. Public life and history are abstractions, if not lies. The sphere of private life, however, is also the sphere of illusion. It is precisely because in his personal life the individual has the experience of spontanaity and freedom that, when he is confronted with the collective event — with history — be he commander in chief, simple soldier, or historian, he is incapable of recognizing the necessity that governs individual wills and eludes all reason. What binds him is precisely the feeling of his own freedom, the reality of his own motives and projects.

He draws a distinction between people who live in “natural life,” and the history-makers like Napoleon who believe they move in the unnatural, abstract realm of causing history rather than being subject to it. In War and Peace, even Napoleon discovers that there are limits to his will.

It occurs to me that this concept of history is something like the stock market. Stock prices go up and down, not because of mathematical laws, but because of the aggregation of a mass of decisions by individuals (or algorithms designed by individuals) to buy or sell the stock. There’s a lot of fancy math you can do, and there are supposedly underlying principles governing stock pricing. But there’s no escaping that each of these tiny decisions making up the price is determined by a combination of individual speculation about the future, personal circumstances, careerism, emotion, ideological belief, luck, mistakes, judgment calls about ambiguous circumstances, and so on. We’ve put all the trappings of rationality on top of it, and made it look a lot like algorithms and math, but it wouldn't be profitable if it were truly rational.

Probably no one wanted the stock market to crash in 1929, but the same people who didn’t want it also caused it to happen. What force was this?

The third essay is about the novel Les Thibault by Roger Martin du Gard, which is less commonly read than the preceding two, at least in English. It concerns the diverging fates of two brothers raised in a bourgeois family: one becomes a respectable doctor, and the other a socialist and radical, but both ultimately die in WWI, a senselessly destructive conflict that, from the perspective of the characters, erupted not because of the will of a person like Napoleon but seemingly of its own accord, or as the result of a game or a machine. The question of conscience is paramount: what does individual responsibility mean in the face of the automaticity of WWI, the result of an implacable force greater than oneself? To rebel, or conform — does it make a difference, except for in one’s own self-regard?

Your conscience might demand rebellion, but it will sever your communal ties. Large societal disruptions, when we’ve lost the ability to believe in their rationality, have the power to destroy one’s moral convictions, one’s social bonds, or both:

Confronted with organized and sanctified Raison d’Etat, the individual finds himself more helpess than he us under the eye of the jealous God of the bible, since Jehova dwells in heaven, but Raison d’Etat is present in the most prosaic details and everyday life, holding the individual in its power by the same threads that connect him to his neighbors. To the extent to which one’s neighbors obey the orders that come from above, to rebel would mean to separate oneself from others and remain alone. A small number of individuals may certainly prefer to remain alone than say or do what they don’t believe; and it may well be that those few will be the ones who not only keep alive an ideal truth, but preserve what is most precious in the social bond. The majority, however, cannot help but resign themselves; and, while resigning themselves, accept the conforts of religion — of raison d’etat, that is.

While Stendhal shows history as an illusion created in the minds of idealists, and Tolstoy identifies it as a mysterious unnatural power with unexplainable causes, Les Thibault gives it back its reality, but in the form of horror. WWI becomes a society-dissolving machine that doesn’t inspire myth or optimism but destroys it, and allows no one to feel heroic or even maintain their basic moral integrity.² The obedience demanded by the machine is less meaningful, but more powerful, than the loyalty to someone like Napoleon.

I’m very much looking forward to the final two essays in the collection.

1. This episode appears in War and Peace adaptations far more often than any other scene — perhaps because these individual dramas appear more “real” to us than the doings of Napoleon, who is also a character in the book. It was dramatized in the Broadway musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, which I viscerally and passionately loathed past the point of reason.

2. I’m mulling over how the current fantasies and fears about AI fit into this. Its boosters and doomers seem to think of it like either (idealized) Napoleon — ushering in a new utopia! — or the WWI war machine (has no human morality and destroys us all!). They all seem convinced that AI will take the place of human history. I am deeply skeptical.