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Narratives of Triumph and Rituals of Submission: Charlemagne's Mastering of Bavaria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Stuart Airlie
Stuart Airlie
Affiliation:
The University of East Anglia
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Abstract

Among the more striking literary creations of Herman Melville is a short story entitiled ‘Bartleby’. The eponymous hero is a law-clerk who gradually withdraws from his employer's power, and ultimately from the world, by meeting all requests – to copy texts, to quit the premises, to co-operate with the authorities of the prison to which his intransigence finally leads him – with the phrase, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Melville's existential fable is disquieting on all sorts of levels and it has, perhaps, a special resonance for historians. The story's narrator is Bartleby's employer, a tranquil elderly man baffled by the latter's stubbornness. One of the problems the narrator faces is the shortage of sources: ‘this man … was one of these beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except trom the original sources and … those are very small’. After Bartleby's death, the narrator learns that he had worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, and the story ends with a vision of piles of lost ‘dead’ documents and artefacts whose texts and meanings remain unread and beyond recall. As a text haunted by notions of unknowability and by the crushing weight of dead letters, ‘Bartleby’ seems to speak directly to some of the pre-occupations of historians in a post-modernist era.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 9 , December 1999 , pp. 93 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1999

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References

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73 Garrison, M., ‘The emergence of Carolingian Latin literature and the court of Charlemagne (780–814)’, in Carolingian Culture, ed. McKitterick, , 128Google Scholar; see also her ‘English and the Irish’, 100, and, for daring and context, Ebenbauer, A., Carmen Historicum: Untersuchungen zur historischen Dichtung im karolingischen Europa (Vienna, 1978), 18–29, esP. at 28–9Google Scholar.

74 Said, E., The World, the Text and the Critic (1984), 4, 31–53Google Scholar; on the ‘active’ nature of ninth-century Carolingian historical writing, see Nelson, J. L., ‘History-writing at the courts of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald’, in Hisloriographie im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Scharer, A. and Scheibelreiter, G. (Vienna and Munich, 1994), 435–42Google Scholar.

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77 Annales Regni Francorum, a.745, a.772, a.775, a.778, a.787, a.788, 4, 34, 40–2, 50, 76–8, 80.

78 Lex Baiwariorum, Titulus II.9, 302–3. On Einhard's description of wars, Wallace-Hadrill, J. M., Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), 30–1Google Scholar.

79 Annales Regni Francorum, a. 788, 80; Schieffer, , ‘Ein politischer Prozess’, 175Google Scholar.

80 Annales Regni Francorum, a.788, 80; cf. n. 87 below.

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