The Historian's Bias
The forgery hidden inside every honest account
Somewhere in the fourth year of this work, a turned itself, uncomfortably, back upon me.
If Fournel had made Auberon more admired than the real master deserved, what was I doing to Fournel?
I had begun to write of him with something dangerously close to , even affection.
The criminal was becoming, in my pages, a kind of tragic philosopher, misunderstood by a shallow age.
But this portrait, I had to admit, rested on very thin and carefully chosen evidence.
I had quoted his most eloquent letters and quietly passed over the cruelty in the plainer ones.
Had I been writing a defence, I could hardly have selected my materials more favourably.
Every , I now saw, performs a kind of forgery, signing a life with a it never had.
We take a scatter of documents, half of them accidental, and compose from them a satisfying shape.
The shape feels like truth precisely because we, and not the messy past, have designed it.
Fournel had signed other men's names; I was signing his, and calling the result history.
Had my sources been different, I might well have written him as a mere , and believed that too.
The unsettling truth is that the evidence does not fully determine the portrait; the portraitist does.
This does not mean that all accounts are equally false, for some do far more violence to the record than others.
But it does mean that is a direction one travels toward, never a place at which one arrives.
Every selection, every emphasis, every sentence I compose leaves some other version of him unwritten.
The honest historian, then, is not the one who has no , for no such person has ever lived.
The honest one is merely the one who confesses the shape of his and shows his workings on the page.
So let me confess mine here, plainly: I am drawn to Fournel because his crime resembles my craft.
We both make convincing wholes out of fragments, and we both ask you to trust a name at the corner.
The difference, I want to believe, is that I am telling you exactly what I am doing as I do it.
Yet even that may be another elegant device, a confession performed to earn your trust.
I cannot step outside my own account to check it, any more than an eye can see itself directly.
This is the at the centre of all history, usually hidden beneath a calm and confident prose.
I have chosen, in this chapter at least, not to hide it, whatever that choice may cost my .
Perhaps the truest thing a historian can offer is not , but an honest map of his own doubt.