to avoid trying to make it conform with the canonical forms of carnival
festive culture or of the charivari. When they do away with the cats, the
mistress's pet in particular, the compagnons make a clear statement of their
animosity toward the people who use them badly. They do so by wreaking
their violence on the animal who best symbolically (in the sense given above)
represents the household and the lady of the house. But although it is probable
that urban artisan culture attached to the cat the significance that is manipulated
in the narrative and in the macabre ceremony (if it indeed took place), it is
more doubtful that this culture was really playing with the full repertory of
diabolical and carnival motifs that Darnton attributes to it. This would suppose
that the collective action that takes place on the rue Saint-Severin carries
with it an entire set of beliefs, rites, and behavior difficult to imagine as
simultaneously inhabiting the mind of urban printshop workers of the eighteenth
century.
This analysis of Contat's text which is itself open to dispute is intended
only to point out three ineluctable demands on anyone who sets out to decipher
the symbolic system that underlies a text: first, to take the text as a text and
to try to determine its intentions, its strategies, and the effects produced by
its discourse; next, to avoid supposing a stable, full value in its lexical
choices, but to take into account the semantic investment or disinvestment
of its terms; finally, to define the instances of behavior and the rituals present
in the text on the basis of the specific way in which they are assembled or
produced by original invention, rather than to categorize them on the basis
of remote resemblances to codified forms among the repertory of Western
folk culture. If we keep these injunctions in mind we can measure the risk
involved in a linguistic comparison that designates as a "general idiom" the
symbolic system of a certain culture and as particular statements localized
uses varying from one given set of circumstances to another. It is not a simple
task for the historian to situate the statement in relation to the idiom or to
measure the gap, the amount of "play," existing between the forms held to
be characteristic of a culture and the individual actions or sayings written
or spoken he finds before him. We need rigorous verification of the signs
considered to be sure and clear indices of manners of thinking and feeling,
and we need an explicit description of the operation by means of which a
singular event is accepted as revelatory of a totality. In this sense Darnton's
book, and the essay on the massacred cats in particular, brings a welcome
addition to the ongoing reflection on both the nature and the status of historical
proof and the relationship between the exception and the normal, or, as
Edoardo Grendi writes, "the normally exceptional."9
This discussion of Robert Darnton's book is perhaps a bizarre way to do
justice to his talents. His is not a book on theory or epistemology but, as is
Darnton's wont, a work in which the society of Ancien Regime France springs