Clio's Laws: On History and Language

Abstract

This University of Texas Press book is a translated collection of revisited pieces previously published in Spanish in various places. This collection includes ten chapters, seven “on history” and three “on language.” In the author's words, these chapters, or rather essays, constitute “a veritable mess” of weighty “divertimentos” on the “serious matter” of History that seek to incite “annoyance, indifference, doubts, and laughter” in the reader (pp. vii–viii). As such, readers will find that this book is of a kind with the author's recent rambles on “Latin Americanism” (Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea [2017]), insomuch as it is an eccentric assortment of writings that play, mostly in an ironic and irreverent mode, with the transnational topoi of Latin Americanist historiography as the author has lived and performed them over his notable career trajectory from Mexico to Barcelona and Chicago.Those sufficiently annoyed or patient enough to wade through the mess will be rewarded, or not. “Doubt” is certain here. As Marcel Schwob, one of the author's preferred historians, noted, “the science of history leaves us uncertain about individuals” (p. 139). This book can only heighten that sense of uncertainty. The “laws of history” are likewise certain in their uncertainty: “History's increasing tendency (which is empirically verifiable) not to obey laws is irrefutable proof of the scientific character of historical knowledge: when history is obedient, it does obey laws, but when it isn't, that is because it's obeying history, which is to say, the law prior to the law. QED” (p. 13).Since Tenorio-Trillo is rarely “obedient” in this collection, one must assume that most of the time we are in the realm of “the law prior to the law.” In this realm, the author is by turns licensed to write “by heart” buttressed by some notes and quotes and with little patience for the details, sources, or complexities of historical theory that characterize academic discourse on these subjects. In short, this is history according to Mauricio's law, although, perhaps fortunately, it is not always clear that he obeys his own law.This play of obedience and disobedience, or of poetics and historics, the author wants us to know, is inseparably built into history and language since at least, if not before, Aristotle and is today perhaps nowhere more palpable than in the torsions of living, translating, and publishing between one or another manner of Spanish and English. Indeed, this tension animates the entire collection and may be taken to be its primary insight. The author returns to the point again and again in his personal reflections on his historical career, but it comes across best when he casts it onto “imaginary” but at the same time very “real” characters or intellectuals, mostly historians or philosophers of history, with whom he identifies or, at turns, takes issue (p. 139). One of the more illuminating examples cited is that of Ignacio Merlina y Rapaport, plucked from the 1970s community of Spanish Civil War exiles living in Mexico, who reflected “on the irony that had earned him a living for decades: selling in English what he had read, written, and thought in Spanish” (p. 212). For Merlina y Rapaport, “thinking and writing in Spanish” was “a form of trifling exhibitionism” because “what is thought and said in Spanish counts for little or nothing. . . . Whoever writes in Spanish within the confines of Anáhuac should consider himself to have been well served if he is read by two or three intrepid readers in Madrid or Barcelona” (p. 212). But things had changed. English had long since inhabited literary Mexican Spanish, much as German had taken up its abode in peninsular and Mexican philosophy of history. “Writing good essays, good thoughts, good literature in Spanish” was now “impossible without loading up on English reading” (p. 213). Of course, one could say the same about writing bad essays, bad thoughts, and bad literature in Spanish, or in Spanish translated to and peddled in English. As the author insists, readers will decide which adjective better applies to this collection. In this regard, the author's last word of thanks and farewell to his readers bears repeating here: “Many thanks, and much luck to you all” (p. 237).