From Fuad Bey to Monsieur Chartier:

Seven decades, three thousand kilometers and a horde of books

Some questions and rubrics for discussion:

1) Definitions and categorical/terminological issues; fields of academic study:

Histoire des mentalités (HDM, henceforth to denote “histoire des mentalités,” or “historiens des mentalités, depending on the context) was conceived as a historiographical reaction (against the pseudo-conscious and individually-oriented approach of intellectual history, as well as the dry vulgarity of economic and social history).

Thus Febvre's rhetorical question:

[C]an one reduce the frequently contradictory, often composite, and at any rate always changing ideas of a man or a milieu to the traditional categories used by the history of ideas (renaissance, humanism, reformation, and the like)? Such retrospective and classifying terms are bearers of contradictions, and they are not faithful to the lived psychological and intellectual experience of the time. (Chartier, 16)

To the extent of my understanding, HDM's viewpoint was thus fundamentally based on the historical and geographical specificity and the rejection of universal categories of thought, as the mental instruments (outils mentaux) available to certain groups of people in a particular geography and at a particular time determine, without their knowing it, the ways in which they perceive the world around them and the kinds of thoughts (and imaginations) they produce. These intellectual products, in turn, informs the kinds of transformations that will occur in such “mentalities.”

Unlike for historians of the intellectual, what is important to understand for historians of mentalities “is no longer the audacities of thought but the limits of what is thinkable.” (Chartier, 21 – my emphasis) [This seems to have influenced Bourdieu in conceptualizing the “habitus.”] Mentality is, in other words, what is “automatically,” immediately or intuitively (i.e. apparent without a thought process) possible or imaginable to the inhabitants of a certain time and space. The process described here is so immediate and “unthought” that it “escapes the individual subjects of history.” (Chartier, 22) It is thus also very impersonal, and, in that sense, very collective.

Real versus fictional:

HDM's most refreshing innovation was its claim that everything can and should be used as historical sources. This brings into question one of the fundamental distinctions between “factual” and fictional documents (i.e. archival sources versus literary texts). Chartier argues that even when a text is “documentary,” it should not be taken at face value, simply because it is textual. He argues that “[n]ever can the literary or documentary text deny itself as a text – that is, as a system constructed according to categories, schemas of perception and appreciation, rules of functioning that go back to the very conditions of its production. (Chartier, 39) To the contrary, Köprülü builds his argument on the need to distinguish between history and literary history based on a distinction between factual and literary. He states that “the subject with which historians are preoccupied is the past. There is such a past for which there are no historical works and only certain indirect traces and documents survive. By means of them, the historian will try to bring a scene from that past back to life. Our subject, however, deals not only with the past but also with the present; in other words, a past that has not finished but is continuing and flourishing before our very eyes.” (Köprülü, PN)

Is Köprülü's distinction a convincing one here? In other words, what is the difference between the different types of texts (literary and non-literary) in terms of the level of engagement it creates among its readers at different historical points. Is it as he claims it to be that documentary texts are more prone to “stay in the past,” whereas the “literary texts” are more likely to leave an impact on people across generations (and perhaps, even nations)? How should one connect this discussion to the concept of historical specificity at the core of HDM?

2) Historical specificity and accounting for the possibility of a “mental transformation”:

In relation to the notion of historical specificity (i.e. the fact that the historical period one lives in is a determining factor in one's actions and productions through the invisible yet eminent force of collective mentalities), one can discuss more in depth certain characteristics of “mentalities,” especially ones having to do with the ways in which they transform.

While Chartier draws attention to the notion of the “imaginable” or the “thinkable” in triggering slow and gradual transformation (Chartier, 41), LeGoff underlines the fact that, unlike technological advances, mentalities are slow to change. (LeGoff, 167) According to HDM, then, while mentalities are in constant, albeit slow, flux, there is not much room for sudden and bigger scale transformations. Köprülü, on the other hand, argues, decades earlier, that “Darwin's theory of evolution [claiming the prevalence of gradual change rather than unexpected actions in the history of the development of societies], after dominating all the natural and social sciences, with the support of Spencer and Karl Marx, and even after having truly important and continuous effect on sociology, has recently been somewhat shaken.” (Köprülü, 60) Instead, he suggests Bergson's notion of vital impetus (elan vital), and argues that there may be sudden and radical jumps in history. Can we then argue that Köprülü's point of view is in irreconciliable contradiction with the approach of HDM in terms of how the two perceive social change? If so, which one seems to be more convincing?

3) Geographical/national specificity:

Both Köprülü and HDM seem to argue for the significance of national specificity when writing history, in particular, of ideas. In fact, Chartier starts off his article pointing to the intranslatability of certain concept between different languages, forcing one “to recognize the inevitable rigidity of a given nation's way of considering historical questions.” (Chartier, 14) Similarly, Köprülü states that “just as there are certain differences in method, despite similarities and identities, on many points studying French history, for example, and Turkish history, the same differences in method will definitely also be seen between the study of the history of French literature and the history of our literature.” (Köprülü, 56) Does the emphasis on national specificity mean that a (synchronically) comparative history of mentalities cannot be done? [Note: On a purely practical/methodological level, HDM's care for detail (since mentalities are “concealed” in details) would orient it towards close readings of texts, contradicting Moretti's notion of “distant reading,” which the latter sees as the method to do comparative literary study. - Would it be fair, then, to say that Moretti and Annales are incompatible?]

4) Experimentation versus quantification versus epistemology

It is clear that quantification is very important to HDM, as an anti-elitist method. Statistics enable them not only to get beyond (and below) the upper classes, but also to better grasp “the collective, the automatic, the repetitive.” (Chartier, 24) While in the later generations of the Annales school, the heavy presence of quantification seems to slightly have subsided, it still remains in place. As for Köprülü, while his penchant for the scientific spirit leads him to consider the value of statistics in social sciences, where, unlike in natural sciences, experimentation is not possible (or not valuable), he is much more cautious about this strictly sociological method: he refers to Guyau (or Guyot?) who “rightly asserted that 'to attribute an absolute reality to statistics is to be ignorant of the entire method.'” (Köprülü, 63) This is also in line with Chartier's criticism of earlier generations of HDM who did not listen to epistomologists [like Koyre] and thus who have not picked up “the deep processes of transformation, which can be understood only by examining together the dependence and autonomy of the different fields of knowledge.” (Chartier, 31) Based on this discrepancy of opinions, how would one formulate the use of statistics (widely used in sociology) in the field of literary scholarship? Is it to be dismissed entirely or is there some benefit to it? What are the pitfalls of the works, like that of Bourdieu, that have applied quantification to literary studies?

5) Masterpieces versus “mediocre works”

Jacques LeGoff describes “the mentality of an individual” to be “what he has in common with other men of his time,” “although he may be a great man.” (qtd. in Chartier, 22) This was, in fact, one of the distinguishing aspects of HDM, one of its challenges against the intellectual history, which went on putting the emphasis on the “great men” of a certain period, as representatives of the “maximum possible consciousness of the social group” they belong to (Chartier on Lucien Goldmann, 27). One question that results from this contradiction is the function of “masterpieces” in literary history: While evaluating a period and going into its “mentalities,” are the literary historians going to look primarily at the “great works of art” produced by “great men” (whatever this may mean), or are they deliberately going to focus on the mediocre work of art, since the latter is more representative of the mentality of its time (although, according to LeGoff, masterpieces also do)?

According Köprülü, masterpieces are important in the sense that they represent the “national genius and the great personalities who opened the paths to the future, because a genius collects and represents within himself all the capabilities of the nation and all its hidden potentialities and prepares and reveals the shape of future.” In other words, while being inevitably impacted by the “mentalities” of its own time, a masterpiece would help constitute a relatively new set of mentalities. Can Köprülü's argument on masterpieces (i.e. "literary products that a class of readers at a certain time found to express their own spirit and inclinations and that they imitated and repeated") be interpreted as arguing (albeit within a nationalistic perspective) for the transformative power of “good” literature, seeing “masterpieces” as mental paradigm shifters?

6) Personal taste and historical taste (or, consumption versus production):

Chartier argues that the binary opposition between consumption and production is not only false but also misleading for literary analysis – he argues that “[t]o act as if texts (or images) had autonomous internal significance, beyond the readings that construct them, forces us, whether we like it or not, to trace texts back to our own intellectual (and sensorial) field. Thus, we are led to decode them through categories of thought whose historicity is never perceived and which present themselves implicitly as being permanent.” (Chartier, 36) In other words, as long as we perceive literary/artistic production and consumption as two incompatible phenomena, we, as literary scholars, are bound to read our own historically and geographically specific mentality into the works we analyze. Köprülü, on the other hand, argues that this phenomenon is inevitable anyway; the personal taste of the analyzer is bound to “creep into” his/her analysis; it is therefore better to be aware of it and to embrace it in order to be able to control it. Not only conscious of his/her own personal taste, the literary historians should also be able “to return to the life and biases of that period by thinking of the ideals that the artist served. In other words, the historian of literature should have not only personal taste, […] but also historical taste.” (Köprülü, 73) How would these two views (seemingly contradictory, but complementary to a certain extent) inform the literary studies that focus on perception and readership?

7) High literature versus low literature:

Another binary opposition Chartier argues against is that of “savant” versus “populaire,” or “high culture” versus “low culture.” He poses a series of questions that lead us to doubt the soundness of this distinction and claims that “the elite culture itself constituted in large measure by an operation on materials that do not properly belong to it.” (Chartier, 34) Yet, according to Köprülü, the differentiation between the court culture and the popular culture is an indispensable one for the Turkish context: “Among the Anatolian Turks,” he asserts, “literature, especially after Süleyman Çelebi (d.1411), […], was completely separate from the mass of the people and took the form of a special court literature for a very limited class under Byzantine and Persian influence. In other words, the creation of one literature among artists, another for the popular masses and another for the tekkes (dervish lodges), that is, prominent Sufis, begins to show the influence of cultural development.” (Köprülü, 65) Although elsewhere, he seems to be sharing HDM's whollistic (i.e. across classes) approach towards intellectual/literary history, he enthusiastically endorses the disconnectedness of the court. Does this constitute an awkward spot in his argumentation at all? Could we say the collective mentalities of the time affected him in certain ways, one decade before the foundation of the republic?

A final question on sources to be used:

LeGoff argues that “[t]he specificity of the history of mentalities lies rather in the approach than in the material, and any source can be useful. (173) But what kind of sources would lend themselves better to a history of mentalities? Why?