Natalie Zemon Davis and Ludwig Holberg
'What is History For?'
The prestigious Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for 2010 was awarded in the twelfth-century Katedralskole in Bergen, Norway, on the 9th of June. The prize went to one of history’s pioneering and exquisite practitioners, and one of its most gifted and generous teachers: Natalie Zemon Davis.
Amidst her honourary titles and doctorates, I believe that during the "retirement" she enjoyed with her beloved Chandler Davis in Toronto, Canada, Natalie held a Adjunct Professorship of History and Anthropology, and was also Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, as well as that of Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. As a friend and colleague over a number of years at Princeton and then Toronto, and in my capacity as the Chair of History at the UofT, I had the honour of attending the Holberg Prize ceremony in Bergen, as well as the Holberg Prize Symposium the day before.
I did not know Natalie Zemon Davis and her investigations nearly so well as many others. But in the wake of her passing, I want to pay a tribute in my own way, and not by discussing all her books and essays, or even by noting her exceptional generosity to me, other colleagues and to students (a good number of the latter my own). I’ll draw instead on my unruly notes from those days in Bergen and just after. Seeking after a little something, to set up an understanding of how excellent a fit Natalie was not only for that particular recognition in Bergen but also for the complex role and privilege she embraced, that of a historical interpreter in her and our time.
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Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) was quite a scribbler in his own right. He wrote a universal history, a general history of the Church and a history of the Jews. His cluster of plays featured actors from all walks of life, and it’s the servants who consistently steal the show – sounding the moral alarm, offering wise counsel, puncturing pretension, seeing most clearly.
In Holberg’s novel The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground (1741)1 he recounts an imaginary voyage in the manner of Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire Comique de la Lune and of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. From a cave atop a mountain near Bergen, Norway (where Holberg was born), Niels Klim begins a journey through the bowels of the earth. Klim’s subterranean experiences orbit around experiences of disorientation and incomprehension. In the land of Potu, for instance, Klim discovers entirely reasonable beings in the shape of trees. As was the case with Swift’s Gulliver – who sought to counteract his smallness among the Brobdingnagian giants by harping on about the greatness of his native country – it is Klim’s overweening pride that becomes his downfall. Self-impressed, he both tries too hard and cannot be satisfied. Try as his leafy hosts, the Potuans, might to consider him a rational being, they are forced to conclude that this human Klim is superficial. They give him a lowly job as a messenger, admitting his greater locomotion. But Klim, the ever-ambitious-university-graduate utterly, is offended. Unable to see himself as others might, unable to abide being "undervalued," he begins to scrutinise his hosts' society and its institutions for flaws.
These Potuans, he discovers, believe in consultation – a process that sees only the best and most roundly tested ideas carry the day. Any citizen suggesting a change in the laws of this land is required to make their case in a public market place, and rather dramatically too. The initiator of change is invited to stand on a gallows, a rope around their neck, as their proposal is considered by the plenary body. If it is rejected, the proposer hangs; but if the proposal is accepted, this citizen is celebrated as a local hero. Holberg's Klim also puzzles over the fact that in this land of wise and reasonable trees, the highest judge is a woman, and that women, in general, expect all the opportunities of men. Overcome by both his early eighteenth-century Norwegian cultural self-referentiality and, again, by his bubbling ambition, Klim cannot resist having a go. He proposes that all women hereby be removed from public office. And when Klim’s innovation falls flat, only the graciousness of the king before the prospect of summarily executing so clearly pitiful a visitor saves his neck. Another of Holberg’s thinly veiled critiques of his own society through Klim and his journey alights upon the detachment of the contemporary European university from contemporary reality. Unlike in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe where debates about theology and philosophy were still often conducted only in Latin, the most significant intellectual discussions in Potu are open to all comers. Intelligence and originality are valued. Discussions are held in a popular sporting arena, with betting allowed on each outcome.
Klim embodies humankind, then as now: his ambition and pride impede him, he is constantly fooling himself, and he never learns. It all leads to an eventual exile from Potu to the Firmament, a further subterranean zone, where his plight is only amplified.
In Quama, for instance, he finds another set of beings, the Quamites, whom he judges to be unceasingly primitive. He is encouraged in his withering views and self-centredness when these, his latest hosts, seem impressed at first, treating their early modern Norwegian visitor as a god. Wishing to lead them, Klim soon raises an army, training those he hopes will be "his people" in contemporary European strategies and technologies of war. He somehow manages to usurp the throne, and as divine emperor, then leads everyone into what all concerned can see will be a brutal war of subjugation against their neighbours in the Firmament. It isn’t long before the Quamites have had enough of vainglory, and rebel against their tyrant. Klim manages to flee, and his only consolation is to find a decidedly un-imperial hole in which to hide. This hiding place of a hole leads into the cave, which he follows until it opens back on the earth's surface, in his native Norway. There, a finally humble adventurer attempts to repent. While it all proves much, much too late for Niels Klim, for Holberg’s reader a set of realisations have been mounting, arriving —one might say— just in time to do something about it.
Holberg’s Niels Klim traverses strange lands and confronts bizarre beings and challenges, but his most telling encounter by far is with the predicament of himself, of his own society, and ultimately of us all. His travels —his “awayness”— become an ability, a channel, for others to see. As for Klim, so for Holberg himself, who wrote in his memoirs about a love of walking about and observing people and things in different cities, of life becoming an opportunity to “expatiate free o’er all this scene of man.”
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One of the aims of the person for whom the Holberg Prize was named brings to mind Natalie Zemon Davis, a kindred spirit and investigator across time and space. A career of innovative teaching and path-breaking writings, as well as exemplary stints of leadership of intellectual communities, were what revealed Natalie’s nature and talents. There is a penchant for vivid, textured story-telling and historical analysis shot through it all, a yearning for multiple points of view on the human condition, and for dynamic, mobile, multi-faceted pasts that continue to pose challenging questions for our particular presents.
In Bergen on the 8th of June of 2010, the Holberg symposium which the hosts called “Doing De-centred History – the Global in the Local” memorably underscored the point. Natalie joined Professor Bonnie Smith (Rutgers University), Professor Joan Scott (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) and Professor David Abulafia (Cambridge) in making some remarks, all with NZD as their touchstone. Thank goodness for even my dreadfully idiosyncratic notes.
Smith emphasised the ultimate instability of human identities, which become a function of where they have been and who and what they’ve met. Exploring especially the ways in which contact with Asia shaped the metaphors and messages of the Romantic literary movement, she contended that “empire [in particular] produces different selves.” Scott, for her part, contended that every story worth telling is a travel story, taking us somewhere, making us alien, proving that “difference is the very commonness of humanity,” and generating a kind of hunger, a struggle to understand. Abulafia explored his favoured theme, the Mediterranean Sea as a connective medium within which conflicts occurred but also through which people and stories and information flowed, and were transformed; port cities loom large, he urged, as the sites of particularly innovative convergence, places which “made a profession of [what he called] cosmopolitanism.”
In her own address, as in the free-flowing discussion which followed, Natalie pressed on a what might be said to have been her favourite and fundamental question: “what," she asked with a pause, brightly watchful, seated, with one foot tucked beneath her, "is history for?” Those of us fortunate enough to be there in Bergen heard several answers emerge and no real consensus. But nothing seemed more persuasive than those who —it seemed to me— collectively underscored how illuminating it could be to put unexpected people and events at the very centre of carefully, artfully, contextualised narrative. How useful it can be to notice and explore the generative power of people's interactions and relationships, however accidental and unconscious. And, finally, how powerfully the historical interpreter’s aspirational state of being might be described as Natalie Zemon Davis was: alert and restless, reflective before a continuous and necessarily incomplete negotiation between our subjects and ourselves.
If Ludvig Holberg could have surveyed the 2010 ceremony in his native Bergen —the events held in his name to honour the contributions of Natalie Zemon Davis— he would have smiled broadly indeed.
Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum, translated as The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground and originally published in Lincoln, NE, by the University of Nebraska Press, 1960. See now the re-edition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973) by James I. McNeils Jr. Holberg’s memoirs are translated as Lewis Holberg, Memoirs (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827).
Fantastic, Kenneth, this was so interesting. “How useful it can be to notice and explore the generative power of people's interactions and relationships, however accidental and unconscious.” Amen!