A Reader on Reading

For Cervantes, history, the faithful account of what has happened, can be “translated” in many ways in order to be better told. It can be revealed in a novel, it can purport to be the words of a mysterious Arab author, it can be told as a story of magic and violence and wonder. But however put into words, it must, in the deepest sense, be true. History, Don Quixote tells Sancho early in the book, is the mother of truth, “rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness of the past, example and pattern of the present, a warning to all future ages.” And Spain is only now learning the lesson Cervantes tried to teach it four centuries ago — though even today it is unwilling to recognize its full import. Although the existence of a Jewish and Arab Spain is, these days, for the most part acknowledged, the question of a fake national identity has come up once again in Spain’s refusal to recognize the crimes of the Franco era. Unconscionably, Judge Baltazar Garzón has been denied the request to have Franco’s mass graves opened and an inquiry set up into the atrocities committed by both sides, Nationalists and Republicans. But like the invention of Spain’s identity in Cervantes’s time, this too may perhaps one day be deemed worthy of a story.

Like Spain then and now, collectively, we find it difficult to acknowledge murky moments in our society’s history. Through cowardice, through ignorance, through arrogance, and, in fewer cases, through shame, most societies have at times denied or attempted to change certain culpable events in their past. In the first half of the second millennium B.C., the priests of the Temple of Shamash in Mesopotamia faked the date on one of their newly erected monuments in order to lend it eight more centuries of existence, thus managing to increase the royal allowance to their venerable institution. The Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi, in 213 B.C., commanded that all the books in his realm be destroyed so that history could begin with his accession. During the Third Reich, to prove that no Jewish inspiration had ever contributed to German Kultur, the propaganda minister, Paul Joseph Goebbels, proclaimed that Heinrich Heine’s celebrated poem “Die Lorelei” was an ancient German ballad of anonymous authorship. Joseph Stalin ordered that party members who had fallen from grace be deleted from official photographs so that no record of their political existence remain for future historians. Closer to our time, the Chinese Communist Party refused to acknowledge that the massacre at Tiananmen Square had ever taken place. The examples, alas, are endless.

Sometimes, the event denied concerns one single individual wished into oblivion; sometimes millions of men, women, and children deliberately and systematically murdered. In every case, the denial is a society’s attempt to do the impossible, to do that which medieval theologians concluded was impossible even for God: to alter the past. Alice, in Through the Looking-Glass, explaining her intention to climb to the top of a hill, is interrupted by the Red Queen, who says that she could show her hills “in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.” “No, I shouldn’t,” Alice answers bravely. “A hill can’t be a valley. That would be nonsense —.” Indeed, that would be nonsense. Over and over again, our societies insist on such nonsense, arguing that hills are valleys and that whatever has evidently and painfully taken place never really happened.

In the thirteenth century, the Armenian poet Hovhannès d’Erzenga, known as Blouz, wrote that “only the true sun gives light: let us distinguish it from the untrue one.” This obvious injunction is not easy to carry out. Not because, in a few cases, it is hard to distinguish truth from falsehood, the true sun from the untrue one, but because to do so would imply that a public fault has been committed, an unjustifiable deed performed, and most societies have a limited vocabulary of apology and repentance.