Charif Majdalani and writing history

Charif Majdalani's A History of the Big House was some of the most fun I've had as a reader in the last five years. It’s centered on the more or less legendary history of one Wakim Nassar, who cultivates an orange grove outside Beirut at the end of the nineteenth century. There is a big house.

Aside from the drama of Nassar and his big house, The Big House also tells a clever story about how history gets told.

Telling history

How do you tell history? Here's one idea: You record the facts, the 'objective' states of affairs. Index them to a time and a place, and, voilà, all done.

This was more or less the ideal of German historiographers of the late-18th and early-19th centuries, in particular of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Leopold von Ranke. Their idea was, simply, that historians should stick to the facts, tell history ‘the way it actually happened’. But Humboldt was insistent, and Ranke conceded, that it was impossible to do this without the historian making use of their own ‘intuition’.

Their reasons for making this claim, and their degrees of accepting it, are different, but the core of the idea is this: Facts alone—because they are incomplete or partial—will not get history told. Beyond relaying the facts, the historian, to speak loosely for a moment, must make use of their own guesses about what it was like to be there.

One way to capture this idea—which is how Humboldt, for example, does—is to distinguish between the details of history, which are given entirely by source materials, and the broader arc or framework of telling history, which the historian supplies with their intuition. As an example, suppose you have one account, from sunrise to noon, of an event, and a second account, from 9:00am to 3:00pm, of the same event; and suppose the accounts are told from different perspectives. The historian converts these accounts into a single story, with a single perspective, lasting from sunrise to 3:00pm. The details come from the firsthand accounts; the broader arc and framework, the ‘sweep’, are the historian’s imposition.

One of the things that The Big House does so well is to demonstrate that details and framework are not always tidily distinct. One way Majdalani does this is by having the narrator, as it were, derive facts from the framework itself. The narrator will say, in so many words: Given the broader framework, such and such must have happened. What’s particularly entertaining about these sorts of episodes is the extreme minuteness of detail the narrator employs, all the while acknowledging the details are totally made up.

History in The Big House

I want to focus on one episode in the book, as it brings a certain mechanism to the surface in a particularly clear and comical way. Majdalani’s narrator tells of an evening at the titular big house as “one of those that my father and uncles told me most often”—so we are primed to accept it as genuinely fact-based. It has to do with the meeting of Nassar and a certain Émile Curiel, a foreigner and cultivator of eucalyptus trees.

The details of the narrative are profuse. The narrator begins the evening story, not in the evening, of course, but on a certain morning.

Let’s say that everything starts one morning when a horseman unknown in the area . . . .

The narrator then scrupulously relates a number of specifics: locals feeling anxiety about meeting Curiel, debating what they wear, what they plan to wear (and what they actually wear); what Curiel wears, how he feels in their company. They’re all details only the individuals themselves could have known (they are unknowable to the narrator, in other words), even though they fit the framework of what is known perfectly.

On the appointed evening, Curiel manages to insult his company, and everyone leaves except Nassar, who remains, “[l]eaning against the wooden panels with one shoulder.” (Of course, the narrator probably doesn’t know whether there are such panels, and certainly not whether Nassar leaned against them in one or another way.) We learn en passant that the narrator doesn’t know whether or where Nassar received an education, but he assumes he was educated, and so knew “French and Italian, maybe even Russian,” so should be capable of conversing with Curiel in French. Yet they speak through an interpreter anyway.

The conversation goes roughly like this: Curiel wants to know what he did wrong; Nassar tells him he offended the locals, but promises to help Curiel make good with them. Curiel mentions Nassar’s orange trees, and Nassar says he would like to “meet” Curiel’s eucalyptus trees. Then, writes Majdalani:

The two men laugh, and of course this dialogue is completely fictitious, but there is nothing to say that things didn’t happen in exactly this way. (97)

The abrupt turn here—the release of dramatic tension (“The two men laugh”) followed immediately by the narrator’s admission of invention (“and of course this dialogue is completely fictitious”)—is one of the funniest beats I’ve encountered in years. I laughed like a lunatic. But The Big House is so well told that it’s easy to forget Majdalani is doing something really fascinating with his narrator, and it’s really only in the rare moment such as this that you’re reminded of that.

History and The Big House

The Big House is what the historian’s intuition looks like at full tilt, and it’s absurd; it’s comical. Take the aside on Nassar’s supposed fluency in French, Italian, maybe Russian: completely fabricated and entirely irrelevant, since they speak through an interpreter. Or take the unknown horseman arriving in the morning: a totally unnecessary, and also imagined, detail. The details-framework relationship is thus completely inverted in The Big House. The broader arc is believable. Most of the details are not.

Majdalani’s narrator isn’t just inventing what must have been so. They’re also introducing merely plausible details, and in such volume and at such frequency, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that, by the narrator’s own description, everything is being made up. The Big House showcases well the fact that the fit of framework and details, which seems such an obvious canon of historical writing, is far from a guarantee of historical accuracy.

There’s no real history here that’s being distorted (it’s a novel). As novelistic details, all of these excrescences are perfectly delightful, and the read is pure pleasure from one end to the other. That delight might be exactly why The Big House is so successful at making the conceits of history-writing vivid. Majdalani’s narrator does in full view what the historian does under the table.