DARNTON, Robert. The - Symbolic - Element - in - History

The Symbolic Element in History
Review by: Robert Darnton

The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 218-234
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Review Article
The Symbolic Element in History
RobertDarnton
Princeton University
A funny thing happenedto me on my way home from the semiotics seminar.

As I rounded a corner on C floor of the library, I noticed an advertisement
from the New YorkTimes pasted on the door of a student's carrel: "Fiji
$499." Primed by a discussion of Charles S. Peirce and the theory of signs,
I immediately recognized it as -well, a sign. Its message was clear enough:
you could fly to Fiji and back for $499. But its meaning was different. It was
a joke, aimed at the university public by a student grinding away at a thesis
in the middle of winter, and it seemed to say: "I want to get out of this place.
Give me some air! Sun! Mehr Licht!" You could add many glosses. But to
get the joke, you would have to know that carrels are cells where students
work on theses, that theses requirelong spells of hardlabor, and that winter
in Princeton closes aroundthe students like a damp shroud. In a word, you
would have to know your way around the campus culture, no great feat if
you live in the midst of it, but something that distinguishes the inmates of
carrels from the civilian population gamboling about in sunshine and fresh
air. To us, "Fiji $499" is funny. To you, it may seem sophomoric. To me,
it raised a classic academic question: how do symbols work?
The question had been worrying me in connection with some criticism of
a book I had published in 1984, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes
of French Cultural History. In the book I had tried to show why a ritual
slaughter of cats was hilariously funny to a group of journeymenprintersin
Paris around 1730. By getting the joke, I had hoped to "get" a key element
in artisanalculture and to understandthe play of symbols in culturalhistory
in general. My critics raised some questions, which clung to "Fiji $499" in
my thoughts as I trudged home through the dark. I would like to discuss
those questions, not as a rebuttalto the criticism, for I still thinkmy argument
stands, but as an informal way of wanderingthroughsome general problems
concerning the historical interpretationof symbols, rituals, and texts.
In a long review of The Great Cat Massacre, Roger Chartierargues that
the book is flawedby a faultynotionof symbols.' Accordingto him, symbolism
l RogerChartier,"Text,Symbols,andFrenchness,"Journalof ModernHistory
57 (1985): 682-95. Forotherobservationsaboutthe theoreticalissues raisedin
The Great Cat Massacre, see the essays by Philip Benedictand GiovanniLevi
publishedtogetheras "RobertDarntone il massacrodei gatti," QuaderniStorici,
n.s., no. 58 (April 1985), pp. 257-77. I have attemptedto answerthe criticism
in a debatewith PierreBourdieuand RogerChartierpublishedas "Dialogue a
propos de l'histoire culturelle" in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales,
no. 59 (September1985), pp. 86-93.
The Symbolic Element in History 219
involves a direct "relation of representation"between the signifier and the
signified, as in the example cited in the eighteenth-century dictionary of
AntoineFureti6re:"The lion is the symbolof valor." I agreethatcontemporary
dictionaries can be useful for tracing meanings attached to words by the
literate elite. But I do not think a sophisticatedwriterlike Fureti6recan serve
as a "native informant" about the conception of symbolism among illiterate
working people. Nor do I believe thatFuretiereprovides an adequateconcept
of symbolism for ethnographicanalysis.
Ethnographerswork with a very different notion of symbolic exchange.
Actually, they favor competing notions;but whatevertheir theoreticalstripe,
they do not generally expect their native informants to use symbols of the
lion = valor variety.Instead,they findthatsymbolsconvey multiplemeanings
and that meaning is construed in different ways by different people. As
Michael Herzfeld puts it, "Symbols do not stand for fixed equivalences but
for contextually comprehensibleanalogies."2In his work amongGreekpeas-
ants, Herzfeld found that symbols signified many things, most of them un-
expected and all of them impenetrableto anyone who could not pick his way
throughthe multiple associations attachedto crows, crocuses, pebbles, and
otherobjects in the local culture. Several generationsof anthropologistshave
had the same experience. Wherever they go, they find natives construing
symbols in complex and surprisingways: thus the harpand rattle among the
Fang in Gabon according to James Fernandez,butterflies and carrionbeetles
among the Apache in Arizona according to Keith Basso, trees and trails
among the Ilongot in the Philippinesaccordingto RenatoRosaldo, and houses
and flowers among the Tamil in southern India according to E. Valentine
Daniel.3 One could go on and on citing examples, but it might be more useful
to take a look at a few case studies.
Loring Danforth applied Herzfeld's concept of symbolism to a study of
death rituals in rural Greece.4 He found that funerals worked as a negative
transformationof marriageceremonies and that the symbols used in funeral
2
MichaelHerzfeld, "An IndigenousTheoryof MeaningandIts Elicitationin
PerformativeContext,"Semiotica34 (1981): 130; see also pp. 135-39.
3 James W. Fernandez,"Symbolic Consensusin a Fang ReformativeCult,"
AmericanAnthropologist67 (1965): 902-29; Keith Basso, "'Wise Words'of
theWesternApache:MetaphorandSemanticTheory,"inMeaninginAnthropology,
ed. Keith Basso and Henry Selby (Albuquerque,N.M., 1976), pp. 93-122;
RenatoRosaldo,IlongotHeadhunting,1883-1974:A Studyin SocietyandHistory
(Stanford,Calif., 1980); and E. ValentineDaniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person
the Tamil Way(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984). For furtherexamples and
different varieties of symbolic anthropology,see the following collections of
essays: Basso andSelby, Meaningin Anthropology;J. DavidSapirandJ. Chris-
topherCrocker,eds., TheSocial Use of Metaphor:Essays on theAnthropology
of Rhetoric(Philadelphia,1977);andJanetL. Dolgin, David S. Kemnitzer,and
David M. Schneider, eds., SymbolicAnthropology:A Reader in the Studyof
Symbolsand Meanings(New York, 1977).
4Loring M. Danforth,TheDeath Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton,N.J.,
1982).
220 Darnton
laments helped peasantscope with their grief by metaphoricallytransforming

death into life. Throughouttheir mourning, women dressed in black gather
at the graves of their dead and improvise songs. They often rebuke the dead
for causing them pain: "You have poisoned us." The poison takes the form
of bitter, burningtears. But tears also water the grave, restoring fertility to
the soil and providing the dead with water to drink, cook, and bathe. So in
the laments, the dead reply to the despair of the bereaved with affirmative
metaphors:
Strangers,kinsmen, and all you who grieve, come near.

Say a few wordsto me and shed a few tears.
So thatthe tearsbecome a cool spring, a lake, an ocean,
and flood down into the underworld;
so that the unwashedcan wash, and the thirstycan drink;
so that good housewives can kneadand bake bread;
so thathandsomeyoung men can comb andparttheirhair.5
According to Danforth, water has great power as a metaphorin the arid

hinterlandof Greece. Wetness suggests fertility and life; dryness, barrenness
and death. By seeping throughthe dry earth of graveyards, water is thought
to quicken the dead. Widows pour water on the graves of their husbandsand
describe themselves as burned by their grief: hence the blackness of their
dress and the "poison" of their tears. But the tears also flow as water to the
dead. They combine the attributesof water and poison and therefore mediate
the opposition between life and death. The mediation takes the form of a
graduated series of binary opposites, which become progressively weaker
until they are fused in the symbol of tears (see fig. 1).
If poetry cannot dissolve death, it can remove its sting, at least for a few
moments of suspended disbelief. How does poetry work? Not by setting up
mechanical "relations of representation," but by making things flow into
each other across the boundariesthat divide them in the prosaic world. His-
torians feel more comfortable in prose. They order things sequentially and
argue from effect to cause. But ordinarypeople in everyday life have to find
their way througha forest of symbols. Whetherthey try to turna profit, tote
a barge, or lift a bale, they manipulate metaphors. That is not to say that
economic and power relations have no independentexistence but that they
are mediated through signs. Money itself is a sign and cannot be made by
someone who cannot read the code of his culture. When we face the funda-
mentals of the human condition, the contradiction between life and death,
the mystery of suffering and love, we draw on symbols that give off many
meanings. Some may be directly representational-blackness stands for
death-but others will drift free from their sensory moorings and will float
up against each other, converging in configurationsthat embody many ideas
at once.
S Ibid., pp. 110-11.
Life
Wet
Water
Tears
Poison
Dry
Death
FIG. 1
A few cultural historians have seen metaphoricalrelations at the heart of

what they study. Thus Huizinga on religious experience in the late Middle
Ages:
The vision of white and red roses blooming among thornsat once calls up a
symbolic assimilationin the medieval mind: for example, that of virgins and
martyrs,shining with glory in the midst of their persecutors.The assimilation
is producedbecause the attributesare the same:the beauty, the tenderness,the
purity, the colors of the roses, are also those of the virgins, theirred color that
of the blood of the martyrs.But this similaritywill only have a mystic meaning
if the middle termconnectingthe two termsof the symbolic conceptexpresses
an essentiality common to both; in other words, if redness and whiteness are
somethingmore thannamesfor a physical differencebased on quantity,if they
areconceived as essences, as realities. Themindof the savage, of the child, and
of the poet never sees them otherwise.6
Like Danforth,Huizingainsists thatsymbolismworksas a mode of ontological

participationratherthanas a relationof representation.Insteadof representing
the virgins and martyrs, the roses are them, belong with them in the same
order of being.
This notion of symbolism, which Huizinga formulatedwithout benefit of
linguistic philosophy or semiotics (but with a remarkableknowledge of San-
skrit), has become a dominant theme in currentanthropology. It stands out
especially in the work of Victor Turner.In many years of fieldwork among
the Ndembu, a Zambian people given to elaborate rituals and enthusiastic
discussion of them, Turner found symbols everywhere-embodied in the
landscape, floating throughthe air,.fixed for an instant in one ceremony and
then spilling into another. At the center of this world, brimming over with
meaning, stood the mudyior milk tree. The Ndembuused it to say a thousand
things on as manydifferentoccasions. Afterelaborateinvestigation,confirmed
in every detail by nativeexegetes, Turnerconcludedthatthe meaningsattached
to the tree stretched across a spectrum, ranging from the normative to the
sensory:
6
JohanHuizinga, The Waningof the MiddleAges (GardenCity, N.Y., n.d.;
originaled. in Dutch, 1919), pp. 203-4.
222 Darnton
The mudyi tree . . . at its normative pole represents womanhood, motherhood,
the mother-childbond, a novice undergoinginitiationinto maturewomanhood,
a specificmatrilineage,theprincipleof matriliny,theprocessof learning"woman's
wisdom," the unityandperduranceof Ndembusociety, andall of the values and
virtues inherentin the variousrelationships-domestic, legal, and political-
controlledby matrilinealdescent. Eachof theseaspectsof its normativemeaning
becomesparamountin a specificepisodeof thepubertyritual;togethertheyform
a condensedstatementof the structureandcommunalimportanceof femaleness
in Ndembuculture. At its sensorypole, the same symbol standsfor breastmilk
(the tree exudes milky latex) . . . mother's breasts, and the bodily slenderness
and mentalpliancy of the novice (a young saplingof mudyi is used). The tree,
situated a short distance from the novice's village, becomes the center of a
sequence of ritual episodes rich in symbols (words, objects, and actions) that
express importantculturalthemes.7
This kind of ethnographic exegesis may seem too good to be true or, at
least, to be useful outside the bush. But it should help us sort out symbolic
encounters in everyday life. When I ran into "Fiji $499," I found to my
surprise that the Peircean categories fit. The "sign" consisted of the letters
printedas an advertisement. The "object" or ostensible message concerned
the fare to Fiji. And the "interpretant"or meaning was the joke: "I want to
get out of here." In fact, the meanings multiplied at my end of the commu-
nication circuit. "This Peirce stuff really works," I concluded andthen added
afterthoughts: "We make our students spend too much time in carrels."
"Students are getting wittier." Were my interpretationsvalid? Yes, as far as
I was concerned, but did they correspondto what the student had intended?
Unable to resist the chance to question a native informant, I knocked at the
door of carrel C 1 H9 on the following day. It was opened by Amy Singer,
a graduate student in Near Eastern Studies. "I put it up two weeks before
generals," she reported. "It was the bleakest moment of the winter, and the
New York Times offered this piece of solace, a warm place, far away." But
Amy seemed to be a sunny, upbeat type. (I'm happy to report that she did
very well in her general examinations.) She said that she thought of the sign
more as an escape fantasy and a joke than as a lament. "It's like a bumper
sticker," she explained. I had not thoughtof the door as a bumper.My ideas
did not coincide perfectly with hers, but they were close enough for me to
get the joke and to feel reinforced in my admirationfor Peirce.
Now, I do not want to argue for Peircean as opposed to other systems of
semiotics. I want to make a simpler point: we think of the world in the same
way as we talk aboutit, by establishing metaphoricalrelations. Metaphorical
relations involve signs, icons, indices, metonyms, synecdoches, and all the
other devices in the rhetorician's bag of tricks. Philosophers and linguists
sort the tricks into different definitions and schemata. For my part, I feel
7 Victor W. Turner,"Symbols in African Ritual," Symbolic Anthropology,
p. 185. For furtherdiscussion and documentation,see Turner,The Forest of
Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1967), esp.
chaps. 1, 3, and 4.
hesitant about subscribing to one system rather than another and prefer to
use the term "symbol" broadly, in connection with any act that conveys a
meaning, whether by sound, image, or gesture. The distinction between
symbolic and nonsymbolic acts may be as fleeting as the difference between
a wink and a blink, but it is crucial to understandingcommunication and
interpretingculture. So cultural historians might stand to gain by rejecting
the lion-valor view of symbolism and by thinking of symbols as polysemic,
fluid, and complex.
But why do certain symbols possess special powers? What makes them
unusually rich in meaning? An answer to those questions might begin with
Levi-Strauss's observation that just as some things are good to eat, others
are "good to think." People can express thought by manipulating things
instead of abstractions-by serving certainslices of meat to certainmembers
of the tribe, by arrangingsand in certain patternson the floor of the hogan,
by lying at the foot of the mudyi tree, and by killing cats. Such gestures
convey metaphoricalrelations. They show that one thing has an affinity with
another by virtue of its color, or its shape, or their common position in
relation to still other things.8
Those relations cannotbe'conceivedwithoutreferenceto a set of categories
that serve as a grid for sorting out experience. Language provides us with
our most basic grid. In namingthings, we slot them into linguistic categories
that help us order the world. We say that this thing is a fish and that a fowl,
and then we feel satisfied that we know what we are talking about. To name
is to know-to fit something in a taxonomic system of classification. But
things do not come sorted and labeled in what we label as "nature." And
just when we feel confident that we have found a way throughthe undiffer-
entiated continuum of the naturalworld, we may stumble upon something
startling, like a snake, which produces a brief momentof terror-zero at the
bone-by slicing across the categories and spreading static throughoutthe
system. Snakes are neither fish nor fowl. They slither on land as if they were
swimming in water. They seem slimy. They cannot be eaten. But they are
good for snide remarks:"Stephen is a snake in the grass." Things that slip
in betweencategories,thatstraddleboundaries,or spill beyondbordersthreaten
our basic sense of order. They undermineits epistemological ground. Such
things are powerful and dangerous. They, too, have a name, at least in
anthropology:they are taboo.
Anthropologists have encounteredtaboos in every cornerof the world and
have discussed them in a vast literature.The most recent roundof discussion
began with MaryDouglas's observationthatdirtwas "matterout of place"
that is, something that violated conceptual categories.9 Thus the prohibition
8
ClaudeLevi-Strauss,The Savage Mind (Chicago,1966;originaled. in French,
1962), esp. chap. 1.
9 MaryDouglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo (London, 1966), p. 35. The next two paragraphsare based on this
book.
224 Darnton
on eatingporkamongthe ancientIsraeliteshadnothingto do withthe seemingly
"filthy" habits of the pig. It derived from the categorical imperatives of
Leviticus, which separatedanimalsinto the cud chewing (like cows, nontaboo)
and the cloven footed (like goats, also nontaboo). Because they did not chew
their cud but did have separated hooves, pigs threatenedthe purity of the
biblical order and had to be abominated. Similar hybrids-shellfish, which
have legs like land animals but live in the water, and insects, which have
legs like land animals and live in the air-were to be avoided for the same
reason. They violated distinctions that began at the Creation, when God
separatedthe earth, the sea, and the firmament.To the Jews, therefore, diet
served as a way of worshiping their God and maintainingtheir cosmology;
and pigs, in being bad to eat, were good to think.
Douglas's biblical exegesis might seem too clever to be convincing, but
it spoke to a crucial question posed earlier by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown: why
do some animals have special ritual value? Levi-Strausshad pointed the way
towardan answerby shiftingthe discussionfrom social functionsto conceptual
categories. Douglas showed that the danger of collapsing categories was
linked with the notion of taboo. In her fieldworkin central Africa, she found
thatthe Lele people orderthe animalworldby meansof an elaboratetaxonomy
and that they maintain order by punctilious dietary restrictions. Yet in their
most sacred rituals, they consume an animal, the pangolin or scaly anteater,
that contradictstheir most importantcategories. The pangolin has scales like
a fish, climbs trees like a monkey, lays eggs like a chicken, suckles its young
like a pig, and gives birthto single offspring like a human. To ordinaryLele
under ordinary circumstances it is hideously monstrous. But in rituals it
becomes good to eat and produces fertility. Like other holy substances, it
dissolves categories and puts the initiate in contact with an order of being
where divisions disappear and everything flows into everything else.
Having caughtthe scent, anthropologistshave trackedstrangeanimals into
all sorts of exotic cosmologies. They have bagged enough by now to make
a whole menagerie of monsters. I cannot do justice to their findings here,
but I would suggest a quick tour, which leads from Douglas's pangolin to
Ralph Bulmer's cassowary, Edmund Leach's bitch, and S. J. Tambiah's
buffalo. The animals are abominated, isolated in taxonomies, invoked in
swearing, avoided in diet, or eaten in rituals by different people in different
ways. The anthropologists have shown that those animal folkways make
sense because the taboos belong to a system of relations within a general
cultural frame.
Bulmer observed that the Karampeople of highland New Guinea put the
cassowary in a taxonomic class by itself, unlike other highlanders, who
classify it as a bird. The Karamalso surroundit with unusual taboos. While
huntingit in the mountainforestsabovetheirsettlements,they speak"pandanus
language," a rituallanguageof avoidancethatthey also adoptwhile gathering
nuts from the pandanus palms in the same forest. They dare not shed the
cassowary'sblood becausethey fear it will harmthe sacredtarocrops growing
near their homes. So they kill the cassowary with clubs, in hand-to-hand
combat, as it were. After killing it, they eat its heart and then avoid going
near the taro for a month. Bulmer found analogues of these practices in
Karam views of kinship, a matrilineal system based on cross-cousins and
emblematized in the forest by pandanuspalms that belong to particularlines.
When kin fight, they must use clubs, not sharpweapons, which they reserve
for outsiders. And when one kin kills another, he dispatches its spirit to the
forest by eating the heart of a pig. In their main myth about their origins,
the Karamrelatethat a brothertrappedhis sister, who turnedinto a cassowary.
Outsiders lured her away and ate her. The brotherthen killed the men and
took theirsistersas wives, foundingthe Karamkinshipsystem. WhenBulmer's
informants told him that they called cassowaries "our sisters and cross-
cousins," the penny dropped. They thought of the creatureas metaphorical
cognates, and their way of thinking involved far more than taxonomy. It
inhered in the way they orderedthe world, a matterof drawing distinctions
between kin and outsiders, forest and garden, nature and culture, life and
death.10
Edmund Leach discovered a similar system of relations within his own
backyard. Among the Anglo-Saxon tribes, we, too, have taboos. We feel
horrifiedat the notion of marryingour sister or of eating our dog. We insult
one another by saying "bitch" or "son of a bitch." But why not "son of a
cow"? What do these dangerous categories-the incestuous, the inedible,
the obscene-have in common?Leach, like Douglas, sees them as ambiguous;
andlike Levi-Strauss,he attributestheirambiguityto theirpositionas mediators
between binary opposites. Pets make particularlygood mediators because
they straddle opposed spheres, the humanand the animal, the domestic and
the wild. One can align them with congruentcategories in a diagram, which
expresses oppositions according to distance from the self (see fig. 2). Just
as I cannot marrymy sister, I cannoteat my dog; but I can marrymy neighbor
andeat my cattle. The categories conjugateinto each other, andthe mediating
term carries the taboo. To us, therefore, dogs are not only good for swearing;
they are good for thinking.1'
Tambiah's buffalo occupies a critical position in a set of categories on the
other side of the world, in ruralThailand, but it can be thought in a similar
way. A Thai identifies with his buffalo just as an Englishmandoes with his
dog. As a child, he guards it in the fields and spends long hours sleeping on
its back in the hot sun. As an adult he swears by it-literally, because the
words for buffalo and penis are close enough in sound to provide splendid
10 RalphBulmer,"WhyIs the CassowaryNot a Bird?A Problemof Zoological

Taxonomyamongthe Karamof the New GuineaHighlands,"Man, n.s., no. 2
(1967), pp. 5-25.
1' EdmundR. Leach,"Anthropological Aspectsof Language:AnimalCategories
and Verbal Abuse," in New Directions in the Studyof Language, ed. Eric H.
Lenneberg(Cambridge,Mass., 1964), pp. 23-63. I have simplifiedLeach's
diagramand his argument,which extends to a complex set of relationsand is
not entirely consistent.
226 Darnton
Self House Field
Self Sister Neighbor
Self Pet Livestock
FIG. 2
opportunitiesfor punning. He attributesan ethical existence to his buffalo,

for he will not work it, unlike other animals, on the Buddhist sabbath. And
he will not eat it. Buffalo make good eating on ritual occasions, but they
must come from other households or other villages.
Buffalo fit into Thai households in a peculiar way, for the houses are
peculiarplaces. They arebuilt on stilts accordingto a strictorderingof space.
The sleeping room is located to the north, separatedfrom a guest or reception
room by a threshold and divided internally into a western section, allotted
to daughters or a marrieddaughterand son-in-law, and an eastern section,
reserved for the parents. (Male children sleep with their parents until ado-
lescence, when they move to the guest room.) The father sleeps to the left
of his wife at the most eastward section of the sleeping room and at the
opposite extreme of the son-in-law sleeping at the far west. The arrangement
reinforces sexual taboos, for the son-in-law must never cross over into the
eastern section or sleep beside his wife's sisters. And the taboos coincide
with spatialvalues, for the east is consideredsacred,auspicious,andmasculine
in opposition to the impure, inauspicious, and feminine west. A washing
place is located on a low level at the extreme western side of the house, and
the space under it is considered especially filthy. The buffalo are tethered
under the sleeping area. Should one break loose and wallow in the muck
under the washing place, it would bring great misfortune upon the house,
and a special ritual must be performed to remove the bad luck.
In Thai taxonomy, buffalo coexist with all mannerof beasts, some good
to eat (the forest rat, which belongs unambiguouslyto the wilderness), some
not (the otter, which slips back and forth between land and water). Tambiah
surveys them all, maps the space of the household, and runs through rules
of etiquette and marriage.Then he arrangesthe data in a diagram, which can
be read horizontally and vertically for homologies. It shows that the taboos
form a congruent series: incest corresponds to a son-in-law crossing over
into the parents'sleeping areaand to a buffalo wallowingbeneaththe washing
place. The series can be transposedinto positive equivalences: recommended
marriagecorresponds to entertaining kin in the guest room and to feasting
on buffalo rearedby anotherhousehold. The spatial, sexual, anddietaryrules
belong to the same system of relations; and the diagramworks as a cultural
grid. 12
Now, structuraldiagramsin anthropologyhave a way of looking more like
the instructions of a radio kit than the anatomyof a culture. Anthropologists
sometimes flounderin formalism. But when the diagrammaticimpulse gives
12
S. J. Tambiah,"AnimalsAreGoodto ThinkandGoodto Prohibit,"Ethnology
8 (1969): 423-59.
shape to ethnographicdata, they can wed formalismwith fieldworkand teach
the rest of us a lesson: symbols work not merelybecause of their metaphorical
power but also by virtue of their position within a cultural frame.
These considerations-the polysemic characterof symbols, the ritualvalue
of animals, and the cultural frame that makes symbols and animals mean-
ingful-can help one make sense of that strangeepisode, the ritual massacre
of cats by workers in a printing shop in Paris around 1730. I do not want to
belabor a subject I have already discussed, but I think it might be useful to
look once more at the cat massacrein orderto see how anthropologicaltheory
can help in the analysis of a historical problem.'3
The problembegins with difficulties of documentation.We can only know
the massacre from an account written many years later by one of the men
who organized it, Nicolas Contat. Although we can trace Contatto an actual
printing shop and can confirmmany of the details in his narrative,we cannot
be sure that everything happenedexactly as he said it did. On the contrary,
we must allow for stylized elements in his text. It belongs to a genre of
working-class autobiography made famous by two of his contemporaries
from the printing trade, Benjamin Franklinand Nicolas Edme Restif de la
Bretonne. And it includes elements from two other genres: the misere, or
burlesque lament about the hard life of workers in certain trades, and the
technical manual, a variety of "how-to" literaturepopular among printers.
Because Contat shaped his text according to generic constraints, we cannot
treat it as if it were a window, which provides an undistorted view of his
experience. 14
But after generations of struggle to discover "what actually happened,"
historianshave learnedto cope with documentaryproblems. And if they want
to understandwhat a happening actually meant, they can take advantageof
the very elementsthatmay distorta text as reportage.By situatinghis narrative
in a standard way, drawing on conventional images, and blending stock
associations, a writer puts across a meaning without making it explicit. He
builds significance into his story by the way he recounts it. And the more
ordinary his manner, the less idiosyncratic his message. If he adopts an
13
Foran analysisof the massacreandreferencesto the ethnographicdataused
to interpretit, see RobertDamton, TheGreatCatMassacreand OtherEpisodes
in French CulturalHistory (New York, 1984), chap. 2. The episode itself is
recountedin NicolasContat,Anecdotestypographiques, ou'l'on voit la description
des coutumes, moeurs et usages singuliers des compagnonsimprimeurs,ed.
Giles Barber(Oxford,1980),pp. 48-54. All quotationsin thefollowingparagraphs
come from that source.
14 As an example of a misere, see "La Misere des ApprentifsImprimeurs,"
printedby Giles Barberat the end of his edition of Contat's Anecdotestypo-
graphiques,pp. 101-10. The manualscontaina greatdeal of informationabout
the folkways as well as the technology of printing, and they go back to the
sixteenthcentury.Two manualsthathave muchin commonwith Contat'stext,
althoughthey come from a slightly later period, are S. Boulard,Le manuelde
l'imprimeur(Paris, 1791);andA.-F. Momoro,Traite'e'letmentaire de l'imprimerie
ou le manuelde l'imprimeur(Paris, 1793).
228 Darnton
excessively sibylline style, he will not be understood; for understanding
depends on a common system of meaning, and meanings are sharedsocially.
Therefore we can read a text like Contat's not to nail down all the whos,
whats, wheres, and whens of an event but ratherto see what the event meant
to the people who participatedin it. Having worked out a tentative interpre-
tation, we can go to other documents-contemporary collections of proverbs,
folklore, autobiographies,printingmanuals,andmiseres-to test it. By moving
back and forth between the narrativeand the surroundingdocumentation,we
should be able to delineate the social dimension of meaning-to "get" the
cat massacrejust as we can get "Fiji $499."
Without wading through all the material once again, I think it important
to point out that Contat's account of the massacre takes as its starting point
the miseres of the two apprentices,JMrome (the fictionalcounterpartof Contat)
and Leveille. The masteroverworks them, sleeps them in a cold and clammy
lean-to in the courtyardof the shop, and feeds them on such rancid, rotten
meat that even the house cats will not touch it. As in most miseres, the tone
is humorous ratherthan angry. Apprentices were supposed to be the butt of
jokes and ill treatment, a kind of hazing considered appropriateto their
position between childhood and adulthood. Contat fills his story with de-
scriptions of the initiation rites that marked off the apprentices' arrival in
the shop and their final integration into the world of the journeymen. Like
other liminal characters, they test the boundariesof adult norms by playing
tricks and getting into trouble. When they bamboozle the master into inad-
vertently ordering the slaughter of his wife's favorite pet cat, la grise, the
incident has all the ingredients of a standardfarce.
But Contat's way of telling the joke sets it in the context of a deeper
animosity between the workers and the master. At the beginning of his nar-
rative, he invokes a mythicalpast, when printingshops were true "republics"
where masters and journeymen lived together as equals, sharing the same
food and work. In the recent past, however, the masters, or bourgeois as
they were called, had excluded the journeymen from masterships and had
drivendown their wages by hiring semiskilledworkmen(alloues). Documents
from the archives of the Parisianbooksellers' guild confirmthat the position
of the journeymen did indeed deteriorate during the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries. But Contatgoes beyond the question of wages to
the development of incompatible subcultures. He shows at many points that
thejourneymendid all the workwhile the masterslept late, dinedextravagantly,
adopted airs of affected gentility and bigoted piety, and generally withdrew
into an alien, bourgeois way of life.
Cats epitomized this parting of the folkways. To the bourgeois they were
pets. In fact, Contat claimed that a rage for keeping cats had spread among
the masters of the printing shops. One master had twenty-five of them. He
gave them the finest morsels from his table and even had their portraits
painted. Workersdid not think of animals as pets. To them, domestic cats
were like alley cats -good for bashing on festive occasions like the feast of
Saint John, when they were burnedby the sackful, or duringcharivaris, when
they were torn limb from limb ("faire le chat" it was called in Dijon). Cats
also had a satanic quality. They went about at night as familiars of witches
and copulated hideously during nighttime witches' sabbaths. A standardde-
fense if one crossed you was to maim it with a club. On the following day,
a suspicious old hag would be seen with a broken limb or covered with
bruises. Many superstitiouspracticesandproverbslinkedcats with households,
especially with the mistress of the house and specifically with the genitals
of the mistress. Pussy (le chat and particularlythe feminine la chatte) meant
the same thing in the slang of eighteenth-centuryFranceas it does in colloquial
English today. A girl who got pregnant had "let the cat go to the cheese."
And men who liked cats had a special way with women: "As he loves his
cat, he loves his wife."
Contatevokes these commonplaces of Frenchfolklore throughouthis nar-
rative. He makes the connection with sorcery explicit, links care for la grise
with "respectfor the house," and suggestsa sexualelementin the identification
of the mistress with her cat. She appears as a lusty wench who combines a
"passion for cats" with a penchant for cuckolding her husband. After the
apprentices have killed la grise, Contat notes what the "murder" meant to
husband and wife: "To her they had ravished a cat [chatte] without a peer,
whom she loved to the point of madness; and to him, they had attemptedto
sully his reputation."The whole episode demonstratedthatcats were extremely
good to think.
It also showed that they had great ritual value, for the massacre followed
a scenario that combined a whole series of rituals. It began as a typical prank,
which the apprenticesdevised in response to a typical misere: sleeplessness.
They have to get up at the crack of dawn in order to open the gate for the
firstjourneymen who arrive for work. And they have great difficulty falling
asleep at night, because a collection of alley cats has taken to wailing near
their miserable bedroom. The bourgeois, who gives himself over to grasses
matinees as much as to haute cuisine, sleeps throughit all. So the boys decide
to turnthe tables on him. L6veill6, a "perfectactor"who can imitateanything,
scampers across the roof "like a cat" and caterwauls outside the master's
window so raucously that the old man cannot sleep any more.
The master is as superstitious in religion as he is despotic in the running
of the shop. He decides that some witches have cast a spell and commissions
the boys to get rid of the "malevolent animals." After arming themselves
with bars from the presses and other tools of their trade, Jeromeand Leveille
lead the workers on a gleeful cat hunt. The mistress has warnedthem not to
frighten la grise, so they dispatch it first and stuff its body in a gutter. Then
the entire work force sets to, smashing through the cat population of the
whole neighborhood and piling up the half-dead bodies in the courtyardof
the printing shop. The workers name guards, a judge, a confessor, and an
executioner, and proceed to try and condemn their victims. Then they hang
them, roaringwith laughter.The mistresscomes runningand lets out a shriek,
as she thinks she sees la grise dangling from a noose. The workers assure
her they would not do such a thing: "They have too much respect for the
230 Darnton
house. The bourgeois arrives. 'Ah! The scoundrels,' he says, 'Instead of

working they are killing cats.' Madame to Monsieur: 'These wicked men
can't kill the masters, so they have killed my pussy.' " As the workersguffaw,
the masterand mistress withdrawin humiliation, he mutteringaboutthe time
lost from work, she lamenting her lost chatte. "It seems to her that all the
blood of the workers would not be sufficient to redeem the insult."
In the succeeding weeks, Leveilld repeats the farce over and over again
by staging pantomimes, known as "copies," in the shop. He can improvise
numbers as skillfully as the vaudevillians in the street theaters of the Foire
Saint Germaina few blocks away. Thejourneymenapplaudin theirtraditional
manner, by beating their tools and bleating like goats. They aim this rough
music, standardfare in charivaris, at the bourgeois. For he is the butt of the
joke. They have got his goat. Again and again he falls victim to a kind of
shop vaudeville called joberie in the workers' slang. He is repeatedly tried
and condemnedin a mock triallike the burlesquecourtscenes thatthe workers
stage on the feast of SaintMartin,when they squareaccountsfor infringements
of their shop code. The whole proceduretakes place in a spirit of carnival
revelry. As at Mardi Gras, when young men make rough music in mockery
of cuckolds, the apprentices take charge: "Monsieur L6veille and Jerome,
his comrade, preside over the fete." And they double the hilarity by trans-
forming the carnival into a witch hunt. The maiming of the cats passes as a
standarddefense against sorcery. But the boys have faked the witching in
the first place; so they can exploit the master's credulity in order to insult
his wife. By bludgeoning her familiar, they accuse her of being a witch and
then compound the insult by playing on the sexual associations of pussy-a
case of metonymic rape, the symbolic equivalent of murder, even though
she cannot accuse them of anything more than horseplay because they have
disguised their meaning in metaphor.
Of course the metaphoralso drove their meaning home, and it conveyed
different messages to different persons. Contat recounts the massacre from
the viewpoint of the workers, so it appearsprimarilyas a humiliation of the
bourgeois. To them, nothing could be more insulting for the boss than an
attack on his most prized possession, his wife's chatte. The wife's reaction
suggests she recognized that the aggression carriedover from her cat to her
person and her husband. Hence her remark,which otherwise would be a non
sequitur: "These wicked men can't kill the masters, so they have killed my
pussy [ma chatte]." But the master was too obtuse to realize how badly he
had been had and merely raged at the loss of work caused by the buffoonery.
Although the humormay not survive too much analysis, I think it valid to
conclude that the joke worked because the boys were able to play so many
variations on standardculturalthemes. They staged a virtuoso performance:
polysemic symbolism compoundedby polymorphicritualism. The symbols
reverberated up and down a chain of associations-from the cats to the
mistress, the master, and the whole system of law and social orderparodied
by the trial. The rituals fit into one another, so that the workers could move
back and forth among four basic patterns.They turneda roundupof cats into
a witch hunt, a carnivalesque festival, a trial, and a bawdy variety of street
theater. True, they did not execute any one of the rituals in complete detail.
To do so would have excluded the possibility of invoking the others. Had
they burnedthe cats instead of hanging them, they would have stayed closer
to the festival tradition of Mardi Gras and the feast of Saint John, but they
would have sacrificed the ceremonial legalism attachedto criminaltrials and
the feast of Saint Martin. Had they abandonedtheir rough music, they would
have created a more authentic court atmosphere,but they would have failed
to express the idea of getting the master's goat (making him "prendre la
chevre") and of turning the shop into a theater. In short, they played with
ceremoniesjust as they did with symbols, and to understandtheirlegerdemain
we should avoid heavy-handednessandliteral-mindednessin our own attempts
to make sense of theirjoking. If we insist on findinga completeandunabridged
charivari or witch trial in Contat's text, we will miss the point. For Contat
showed that the workersquoted bits and pieces of rituals, just enough to get
their message across and to exploit the full range of meanings by associating
one traditionalform with another. The massacrewas funny because it turned
into a game of ritual punning.15
Now, this kind of open-ended interpretationmay make the readeruneasy.
Historians like to nail things down, not pry them loose. It goes against the
professional grain to argue that symbols can mean many things at the same
time, thatthey can simultaneouslyhide andreveal theirmeanings, thatrituals
can be conjugatedinto one another,andthatworkerscan quote them, playing
with gestures as poets play with words. Doesn't this raise the danger of
overinterpretation?Of making unwashedartisansinto intellectuals? By way
of an answer, I should point out that I do not mean to imply that all the
workersextracted all the meaning from the incident. Some of them probably
enjoyed the cat bashing and left it at that, while others read all sorts of
significance into it. I think the massacre of the cats was like a performance
of a play: it could be construedin differentways by differentpersons, players
and spectators alike. But it could not mean anything and everything, just as
The Wizardof Oz cannotcommunicatethe whole gamutof ideas andemotions
in King Lear. For all their multivocality, rituals contain built-in constraints.
They drawon fixed patternsof behaviorand an establishedrangeof meanings.
The historian can explore that range and map it with some precision, even
if he cannot know precisely how everyone made use of it.
But how can he compensatefor the imperfections in the evidence? I cannot
take Contat's text as proof thatthe master'swife actuallysaid, "These wicked
men can't kill the masters."Those wordsrepresentnothingmore thanContat's
version of her response to the massacre, long after the fact. But the exact
phrasing does not matter so much as the associations it evokes. Contat's
narrativemay be inaccurate in detail, but it draws on conventional notions,
15
In this respect,thejoke illustratesthe notionof switchingframesandventing
aggressiondeveloped by ArthurKoestler. See the essay on "Wit and Humor"
in his Janus: A SummingUp (New York, 1978).
232 Darnton
House Cats
Human Animal
FIG. 3
which connect cats with sorcery, domesticity, and sexuality and which can
be confirmed from a variety of other sources. Those connections belong to
a system of relations or, if the term may still be used, a structure. Structure
frames stories and remains constant, while the details vary in every telling,
exactly as in narrationsof folk tales andperformancesof ritualsamongGreek
peasants, African bushmen, Thai villagers, and New Guinea highlanders.16
I thinkone can put the argumentformallywithoutsubscribingto an elaborate
and perhaps outdated variety of structuralism.The story concerns a set of
oppositions -between humans and animals, masters and workers, domestic
life and wild life, culture and nature. In this schema, the apprentices and
house cats are mediating terms. The apprentices operate on the boundary
between the shop and the outside world. As gate tenders, they let the workers
in from the street; and as errandboys, they scramble aroundthe city during
the day but sleep in the house at night. They are treated as children in some
respects and as workers in others, for they are liminal creatures, passing
between childhood and adulthood. The pet cats also belong in part to the
outside world, the sphere of alley cats and animality, yet they live inside the
house and are treatedmorehumanelythanthe boys. As a betwixt-and-between
creature of special importance and the favorite of her mistress, la grise is
especially taboo. The mistress warns the boys to keep away from her, and
Contatdescribes her killing as a "murder."She occupies an ambiguousspace
like that of many ritually powerful animals on many ethnographicdiagrams
(see fig. 3).
The apprentices occupy the same space. In fact, it is disputed territory,
for the story begins with the rivalry between the boys and the cats. They
compete for food (the boys get cat food, the cats get human food) and also
for a positionclose to the masterandmistresswithinthe household.If abstracted
from the narrativeand spreadout diagrammatically,the positions would look
16
See Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale (Austin, Tex., 1968);
and Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
Master-Mistress Apprentices Pet cats Alley cats
human + human + animal - animal -
humanfood + animalfood - humanfood + animalfood -
FIG. 4
like those in figure 4. Actually, the cats have displaced the boys in the
privileged position next to the master and mistress. In the old "republic" of
printing, the apprenticeswould have sharedthe master's table. But now they
are shunted off to the kitchen, while the pet cats enjoy free access to the
dining room. This inversion of commensality was the injustice that set the
stage for the massacre. By hanging the cats (a humanpunishmentapplied to
animals), the boys reversed the situation and restored order in the liminal
zone, where the danger of confusing categories was greatest.
The little domestic dramatook on greatsymbolic weight because it became
linked with the serious matter of labor relations, which the workers also
expressed in a symbolic idiom. In a glossary appendedto his story, Contat
noted usages that can be confirmedin many printers' manuals. The workers
applied animalterms to themselves: pressmenwere "bears" andcompositors
"monkeys." When they made rough music, they bleated like goats. And
when they fought, they rearedback, let out defiant"baas" (bais) and grappled
like goats (to fall into a fury was to "prendre la chevre"). The workers
belonged to the untamedworld of the street, the world inhabitedby the alley
cats, who represented animals at their rawest, a caterwauling, copulating
animality, which stands in the story as the antithesis to the domestic order
of the bourgeois household. So the dramaset in motion a system of relations
that can be reduced to a final diagram (see fig. 5).
Domestic
(Household)
Master----------------------------Mistress
Culture Apprentice-----------------------PetCat Nature

(Work) (Sex)
Worker---------------------------AlleyCat
Wild
(StreetLife)
FIG. 5
234 Darnton
Read horizontally,the diagramdepicts relationsof identity;readvertically,
relations of opposition. The apprenticesand pets still operate as mediating
terms, but they occupy a larger field of contrastingcategories: the domestic
or household world versus the world of wildness and street life, the sphere
of culture and work versus the sphere of natureand sex. The corners of the
diagramdefine positions where the dimensions arejoined. The masterstands
at the juncture of work and domesticity, the mistress at that of domesticity
and sexuality, the alley cats at that of sex and wildness, and the workers at
that of wildness and work. Owing to the danger of open insubordination,
the workers channeled their aggression throughthe most roundaboutroute:
they attackedthe mistressthroughthe cats andthe masterthroughthe mistress.
But in doing so, they mobilized all the elements of their world. They did not
merely tweak the boss's nose. They staged a general uprising-of workers
against masters and of the whole sphere of untrammeled,violent, libidinal
nature against the disciplined order of work, culture, and domesticity.
I realize thatdiagramslook mechanical. They seem to striphumanitydown
to a skeleton. But they can reveal structure;and if we want flesh and blood,
we can turn back to the story or try to imagine the massacre as it actually
occurred, with all its fur and gore, screaming and laughter. In that case,
however, we have nothing morethanour imaginationsandContat's narrative
to fall back on. In orderto sustain a rigorous interpretation,we must attempt
to work through the details to the cultural frame that gave them meaning,
combining formal analysis with ethnographic material. If my attempt has
failed, I hope at least that it may open the way to something more successful.
And if all this chasingaftersymbolshas led into a blind alley, the ethnographic
historianmay console himself with the thoughtof escape to greenerpastures
of fieldwork: "Fiji $499."

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The Symbolic Element in History

Review by: Robert Darnton

A funny thing happenedto me on my way home from the semiotics seminar.

laments helped peasantscope with their grief by metaphoricallytransforming

Strangers,kinsmen, and all you who grieve, come near.

According to Danforth, water has great power as a metaphorin the arid

S Ibid., pp. 110-11.

A few cultural historians have seen metaphoricalrelations at the heart of

Like Danforth,Huizingainsists thatsymbolismworksas a mode of ontological

10 RalphBulmer,"WhyIs the CassowaryNot a Bird?A Problemof Zoological

opportunitiesfor punning. He attributesan ethical existence to his buffalo,

house. The bourgeois arrives. 'Ah! The scoundrels,' he says, 'Instead of

Master-Mistress Apprentices Pet cats Alley cats

human + human + animal - animal -

humanfood + animalfood - humanfood + animalfood -

Culture Apprentice-----------------------PetCat Nature

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