While much of this book focuses on the history of his native country of Haiti, Trouillot's goal is broader: an epistemological re-evaluation of how our perceptions of history are formed. Of how we understand history to be true. Of how opinions come to be historical fact. It's not light reading, but easy enough to absorb when he moves from the theoretical to the specific. He goes beyond the commonplace "History is written by the victors" to demonstrate by example the four stages leading to this end result.

Those four stages are the moments when decisions are made, intentionally or otherwise, that affect what we come to perceive as history: at the time original records are (or are not) created; at the time those records are selected for retention; at the time they are retrieved and put into a narrative; and at the time that narrative is evaluated for significance. Omissions ("silences") at any point can alter our interpretation of past events.

Silences result not just from disdain or prejudice, but from the fact that the reality is "unthinkable" to the recorder/archiver/narrative developer/evaluator. The Haitian revolution of 1791-1804 provides a vivid example: that the slaves could have, on their own, desired, organized and successfully concluded their own revolutionary war was an idea inconceivable by the French or most others interpreting the record. This section brought to mind a book I read not long ago, [b:Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia|40536236|Sea People The Puzzle of Polynesia|Christina Thompson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1542039373l/40536236._SY75_.jpg|19226650]. The reality of how the South Pacific was colonized remained unknown (at least outside Polynesian oral history) for hundreds of years because Europeans simply couldn't accept that the Polynesian outriggers could have travelled the distances it has since been proved that they can.

The book is a brilliant framework, illustrating the inherent reasons that the true histories of blacks, women, native populations, and others have been omitted from history. Since we continue to struggle with the ways in which these perceptions mold actions and opinions in the 21st century these are ideas that bear thinking about. ( )

Even if you aren't interested in the historiography side of things, the case study on Haiti's missing history is worth picking up the book. It's short and accessable. ( )

It was very good and informational and interesting I was just very bored at times. It was like a textbook. But also not. I really liked the ending the most. ( )

Talked about enticingly here.

An important book in the history of writing and thinking about history. Trouillot -- and Hazel Carby in her excellent introduction to this edition -- make the point that power and prejudice often determine historical "truth." Trouillot, through meticulous use of sources, demonstrates how events are forgotten, misinterpreted, just plain lied about, to serve a larger narrative.

Besides being a landmark work of historiography, Trouillot tells great stories about Haiti and its revolutions, ones you may not be familiar with if you haven't seriously studied the period. I highly recommend this book. ( )

History may be written by the winners, but it is also written by those in power. Often, they are one and the same. So, who is to say what becomes “history” and what does not? Who controls what is recorded as history and what is forgotten? What events are ignored or left silent? That is the premise of this book.

The author focuses mainly on Haitian history, since he is Haitian. However, the ideas are useful in analyzing all of history, from any place in the world. How do the events we live become history? Who chooses which to include in history books? What is left out and why? What becomes worthy of being recorded and passed down to future generations?

Details and events are often left out of historical accounts. Simply, there is no way to record everything, so some incidents or details are left out. The choice of what to include falls to those in power. That may be a nation, or an individual, or a society. Some facts are not recorded for posterity and some are just ignored. The silences are the people, events and happenings that get left out of the historical narrative.

The premise of this book is something to keep in mind whenever reading historical accounts. We need to consider that some things may have been “silenced” or simply left out of the narrative we read. This book provides a foundation for all readers and students of history to make a more thoughtful analysis of the historical accounts they read. Are those accounts complete, or was something important left out, either deliberately or through emphasis on the tale those in power wished to pass on to future generations?

It is thought-provoking material and a book that I recommend for all students of history. The language is a bit over-the-top at times, so it is something I would recommend for college students rather than high school history students. However, the information presented, and the author’s analysis of various historical events, and their written accounts, is fascinating reading.

This is an important and classic work of historiography. It is pretty out of place in the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, since it is the only book I can recall seeing here that is academic. And yes, this is an academic book, and not popular non-fiction. That being said, I think it deserves a wider reading audience than the purely academic, since it deals with issues that are of profound and vital interest to everyone, and not just scholars. To a certain extent, it is actually more vital for non-academics to read this, since many of its lessons are taken for granted by scholars these days. As long as you know what to expect when you pick this book up, I think you will be fine. If you are looking for a quick or easy read, this is not the book for you. If you are willing to struggle a bit to have your mind blown, then give Trouillot's book a try. We have all heard that history is written by the victors, but Trouillot's book puts this into concrete terms that show just how real and devastating the effects of this truism are. ( )

This book starts out with an interesting notion: There are two aspects of history (1) the sociohistorical process, that is, "what happened" and (2) the historical narrative, that is, "that which is said to have happened".

In the first few pages my thoughts immediately turned to the Bible, a book of fables, fairytales, and hearsay, definitely a book that, from start to finish, is an historical narrative. The writing of the New Testament Book of Matthew was begun some 90-100 years after the so called "birth of Christ" which is said to have occurred as a result of an impossible (in humans) one-sex conception with a bright star shining overhead and wise men visiting with gifts of spices. In fact, brilliant and sane astronomers have attempted to recreate the sky during that ancient time and have pronounced that the star in the East could have been an "alignment of planets". Some feat given that the opposition of planets and the appearance of closeness from Earth lasts only two weeks at most.

Another Historical narrative that comes to mind is the George Washington cherry tree myth. Historian and Washington's first biographer, Mason Locke Weems, felt that the American public should be apprised of Washington's "Great Virtues" so he invented some virtues and the "I cannot tell a lie" fabrication entered American history in his book "The Life of Washington". I learned this myth as fact in my grade school history class in the 1950s.

Of course Trouillot delves into historical distortion with many examples of his own: How did my (Lost) generation learn about the American west? The Saturday afternoon matinee featuring such "cowboys" as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Randolph Scott, et al, and the "Indians", war-painted white actors on horseback who dressed in ceremonial head feathers and made strange "wee-ow" sounds as they were attacking god-fearing American pioneers on the front-line of Manifest Destiny. The sociohistorical fact of the last quarter of the 19th century is that true cowboys were only a phenomenon for about 15 years and were replaced by barbed wire.

The central thrust of Silencing is slavery in the Western Hemisphere, especially the Caribbean and primarily Haiti. Interesting is the central role slavery plays in US history when millions of slaves existed in "slave countries" of the Caribbean and Brazil.

As Trouillot plows ahead it became apparent to me that he was repeating the original premise (two aspects of history) in 1000s of unnecessary and sometimes obscure English words. When I got to the following I'd had about enough: "...any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly." I'm sorry but that point I had to give up reading this book in its entirety. Instead I skipped ahead to Ch 4, "Good Day, Columbus" which is fascinating.

This book is for historians and other intellectuals who delight in trying to make sense of obscure works. In fact, you may want to look up a review or synopsis of this book that has broken down Trouillot's cogent points in readable fashion. It could save a headache. ( )

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Beacon Press
March 2015
978-0807080535

At a time when educational “reformers” push to reduce not only the sciences, but also the humanities towards quantifiable, or more accurately testable, quanta of knowledge, the study of historical production is an increasingly important counter-balance to ideological efforts to constrain and sanitize historical knowledge. These reductions, far from just a banal attempt to analyze student performance, are part of the process of historical production themselves, playing out in school boards across the United States. Recent reactionary consternation to the revamping of the AP History curriculum demonstrates the jejune nature of the well-worn aphorism, history is written by the victors.

In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot encourages us to unmask this aphorism to interrogate a number of productive forces. Far from the victors, as modern school boards and states have shown, history is written by the living for reasons so often disconnected and distantly related to the event. From the act of labeling—did Columbus “discover” or “encounter”—to establishing the importance of the event—was the landing important to those living in 1492—Trouillot focuses the reader on the many considerations involved in the construction of historical narratives. From Columbus’s journey through the Haitian Revolution and the Alamo to the Holocaust, he uses these historical events to push the reader to recognize historical actors who, removed from the events they narrated, gave life to historical lore in ways and for reasons that so often served themselves and the present.

Silencing the Past is an encompassing examination of these productive forces backdropped mainly by the Haitian Revolution. Trouillot strikes an impressive middle-ground between an academic text, useful and piquant for those who already have a passing familiarity with postmodernism and ideas of historical construction, and an evocative read for a lay audience, who at most would need a cursory Google search over a few theoretical concepts of which they might be unfamiliar. ( )

How does power influences the production of history?

Michel-Rolph Trouillot sharply questions historical narratives, historical myths or creations.

From the historical significance of the story of the Alamo in Texas to the heroism of Davy Crockett, tirelessly, Trouillot questions and asks the reader to think about who controls the narrative.
How "Remember the Alamo" when defeating Mexican General Santa Anna supersedes the victory narrative of the later at the Alamo when, truthfully or not, it is uttered by Americans at the battle of San Jacinto in 1836.
Trouillot questions the methods used by revisionist analysis of the Jewish Holocaust when revisionist pundits, appointed officials or historians try to empirically reduce the number of victims from 6 million to 1 million who were slaughtered because of their religion. The revisionists also doubt the existence of an Holocaust altogether because of their belief in objectivism as an historical methodology just like they doubt at first the veracity of the colony of St Domingue slave rebellion. To the contrary for moral constructivists, one victim is, by itself, enough to demonstrate such a morally unbearable crime and therefore one can posit the Holocaust as a mental construct that can explain what many experienced during WWII: mass deportation, gas chambers, systematic extermination and the German death machinery. Trouillot, who authored the first history of the Republic of Haiti in the creole language, denounces attempt to bury the facts under insignificant details to create an atmosphere of banalization, ignore or silence the uniqueness of historical events such as the Jewish holocaust, the Haitian war of independence or African slavery.

He also examines how the narrative of Slavery is most famously commented upon in the Southern United States a debate that morphs into the apex of a Civil war being thus collectively more vividly remembered throughout the world, as a dreaded institution and as the shared experience, by both North and South, that forged a nation.
Evidence, however, shows that slave numbers were much higher in the Caribbean slave societies or that the institution itself survived the 13th amendment by twenty three long years in Brazil. Facts that are less commented than the dominant narrative of Slavery in the world's shared collective memory, as the memory of the sugar plantation system in the Caribbean islands or in Brazil fade away due to them dying down when the world economy moved away from these regions and this mode of coerced production. Looking at individual or collective, implicit or explicit memory, Trouillot asks the reader to question these silences and how unequal is the appropriation by one Nation of collective memories.

As he senses that we are inundated with competing narratives, he ultimately finds it is being somewhat misguided to analyze these narratives to make sense of history without also recognizing when a fact is not told or, supreme expression of power, political or economical, when facts are kept, deliberately, under a cloak of silence.

The author reminds us that for each fact sourced, archived or retrieved, a silence is also created. One of many such striking examples given in this book is how several historians miss the significance of Congo guerillas like Colonel Sans-Souci whom during the "war within the war" of Haitian independence, is ultimately killed twice, once by being physically eliminated during a fight and then Dahomey style, by King Christophe I, who names his favorite residence after the name of his worst and most efficient enemy; a fact that is missed by historians who only see in the Millot castle named Sans-Souci, an example of Haitian Enlightenment, counterpart and inspired by the most famous Potsdam Germany "Sans-Souci" built by Frederic the Great. From this specific example of historical silence Trouillot then extrapolates to how the whole unthinkable Haitian independence, which he names as being the only successful slave rebellion giving birth to an independent nation, was also silenced by the mainstream producers of history.

Very important book for anyone armed with critical thinking and emotional intelligence of the past. ( )

I missed Michel Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History the first time around. I'm glad I had a chance to see it in its twentieth anniversary edition. Trouillot is inspiring in his passion, clear in his terminology, exquisitely precise in his explanations of facts and theories, and straightforward in his examples. And inspiring. I want to go back to reading and analyzing history.

The book takes the adage “history is written by the winners” and expands it with a challenge. “History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility, the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.” [xxiii] Each historical narrative has its own unique silences; issues and people left out of the history. These are created when a singular concept had to be addressed / repressed / silenced. Because of these differences, the methods of researching and reversing the silences need to be specially tailored to each, so voices can be investigated and exposed.

The points where “silences” most often enter the records and narratives are made apparent and I think I now have tools needed to see these silences in any history book or article I read.

I need to research the facts and find access to tools to help me find where my own thoughts are blinded by the “impossibilities” he discusses. “When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse.” [72] This is what happened during the precursors to the Saint Domingo / Haiti slave rebellion. The slave-owners, the local government leaders, and the European governments which depended on slaves simply could not see the facts that we see as showing stronger rebel slaves. Slaves simply do not rebel. Period. It was unthinkable. “How does one write the history of the impossible?” [73]

The Notes section of the book is helpful, and it has an index, but because Trouillot died in 2012, Beacon Press's characteristic “resources for further study” could not be appended. I really miss that, as I want to go on, and am not sure how. ( )

I understand what Trouillot is trying to say in this book. The idea is important. There is a relationship between power and the history that we receive, and accordingly power has a subtle impact on our belief systems. There's no doubt about the truth of that. It's a very simple and profound truth. It is something that I have had to keep in mind constantly when writing my own histories, especially in the Essays on the Classics! series.

The problem is that Trouillot is, like many of his era, a completely incompetent writer. He buries ideas under complex, in many cases meaningless, language. This language is used to obfuscate the fact that he does not have much to say, and it results in overthinking. A simple mind might be blown away by the appearance of intelligence; but a serious thinker cannot take this book seriously. Take, for example, the following quotes:

1) 'History, as social process, involves peoples in three distinct capacities: 1) as agents, or occupants of structural positions; 2) as actors in constant interface with a context; and 3) as subjects, that is, as voices aware of their vocality.'

2) 'By actors, I mean the bundle of capacities that are specific in time and space in ways that both their existence and their understanding rest fundamentally on historical particulars.'

3) 'In other words, peoples are not always subjects constantly confronting history as some academics would wish, but the capacity upon which they act to become subjects is always part of their condition. This subjective capacity ensures confusion because it makes human beings doubly historical, or, more properly, fully historical.'

What the hell? The problems with 1) are several-fold. First, what are 'structural positions'? Dear God. And what in God's name are 'actors in constant interface with a context'? Are these historical actors or computers? Moreover, what makes it so special that people are 'voices aware of their vocality'? The phrasing is annoying (or in Orwell's words, 'barbarous') and I am not sure how this in any way helps me to understand history.

Passages 2 and 3 are nonsense on the surface. They are such complete hogwash as to leave me dumbfounded.

Of particular concern to Trouillot is the Haitian Revolution, which he claims has been silenced by Western historiography. While I am sympathetic to Trouillot as a Haitian, I have a deep distaste for the implication that the West would need to silence the story of Haiti since Haiti has made itself into the basket case of the Western Hemisphere. Haiti has, in essence, silenced itself. This has nothing to do with an abuse of power by Western historians. I do not see how studying anything relating to Haiti can help me live my life in the 21st Century United States; it is of no value to me whatsoever.

Here's what I know about history: it is a process of conflict and resolution wherein some pieces of data are more important than others. Much of this data is not recorded but must be inferred from what is recorded and from observations in our own lives on the assumption that we, as people, are similar to those about whom we are commenting. By studying history we can come to a greater understanding of our own time and place, we can learn from past failures, we can figure out a variety of possible ways to resolve our own problems. Trouillot's book teaches me nothing in this light and, as such, deserves the fate he so abhors: silence. ( )

Trouillot in his Silencing The Past, presents a excellent work on examples of historiography. His use of the example of the Haitian revolution and how the history differs from the Haitian to French to American views. He cites examples of this all through the first half of the work. He then uses other examples such as the Chicago exhibition of 1893 and how the world rewrote the history of Columbus and his discovery of America. He then finishes with a side bar of the proposed Disneyland that was never built in Virginia. He however, was attempting to show how the underlining use of race had been the central point of his entire work, he had wrote it to show that race had affected how history was written by the winners and losers of events. In his use of silences(26) and all through the work he cites those types of examples. His end-notes carry the work even deeper so that the reader can explore the sources of his statements if they desire. If I had had this work during my Master's degree Historiography class it would have made the class much easier, however, the way that Trouillot presented the main case of Haiti was somewhat lessened by the use of trying to insert the other cases of late 19th century and the Columbus case, he was well on his way to showing how the Americans had wanted the Haitian revolution to go away because it did cause events to take place in the history of the United States but he failed on that effort. I was sure he was headed that way and off he went on the raise of the Italians and Irish, which took away from the Haitian history. For that reason I felt a little disappointed in the work in its entirety. I would like to have seen more illustrations. Also I would have liked to have seen more examples of the way that both the French and the Americans reacted in their press and social works to describe the events instead of secondary sources that he used. But if I taught a class in historiography I highly consider using this as a text. ( )

An excellent work lookng at hownthe production of history colors and is colored by our understanding of thenpast ( )

I found Silencing the Past (published in 1995) both fascinating and illuminating, still new, while at the same time anchored in the scholarly discourse of the 1990s. Since the January, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Trouillot’s book seems to have appeared on every bookseller’s recommended shelf. But I wonder why I didn’t know about or read it fifteen years ago. Back then, I was a graduate student in English. Although my focus was Creative Writing, I had a special interest in what was/is called postcolonial literature and theory. Trouillot was not on my reading list in 1998, however, at least not at Sonoma State University.
Although he talks about particular events (the Haitian Revolution, Columbus’s landfall in the Bahamas in 1492) and historical characters (Christophe, Sans Souci, Columbus), the author’s primary concern here is with the production of history and the relation of power to that production with its consequential silences: “Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”
Trouillot’s stance is neither that of the positivist nor the constructivist. He states rather that “Whereas the positivist view hides the tropes of power behind a naive epistemology, the constructivist one denies the autonomy of the sociohistorical process.” He rejects “both the naive proposition that we are prisoners of our pasts and the pernicious suggestion that history is whatever we make it. History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous.”
I particularly appreciated and remain intrigued by Trouillot’s reminders to his readers regarding the materiality of history, “that history begins with bodies and artifacts: living brains, fossils, texts, buildings” as well as his discussion of the “ethical differences between scholars and intellectuals.” Silencing the Past is nothing less than (and what could be better?) a thought-provoking read.
( )

The single best theoretical work I have read about writing history. Upon first reading, Trouillot instantly became the historian I most admire. ( )

I remember this as somewhat of a difficult read but one that opened my eyes in a big way to the truth that history is a tale told by the winners...and of how that process comes to pass. I think it is a really important book and would like to reread it. ( )

To explain this book in the simplest terms I would simply say that Trouillot explains how we get holes, or as he calls them silences, in our historical narrative. It is simple, he writes, silences occur at “the moment of fact creation (making the sources), at the moment of fact assembly (making the archives), at the moment of fact retrieval (the making of the narratives), and that the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)” As he explains those four moments he also manages to teach a good bit of Haitian history, he demonstrates the difficulty in recording the history of “impossible” events, and examines the evolution of Columbus from a hired shipmaster who did not even make a log entry for October 12, 1492 to an immortal icon celebrated across three continents on October 12, 1992.

I feel humbled after reading Trouillot’s book. He explains concepts with such clarity that I am embarrassed I did not already know them. Even the one idea that I can claim to have already understood, that two historians with different world views can make honest use all the available data and come to differing conclusions, he explains so much better than I ever could. Without even mentioning Watergate the Tea Party he explained to me how so many adults at the time believed that Nixon did nothing wrong and now believe that Obama was not born here.

Silencing the Past is a first rate historiography and one of the few that I would recommend to non-historians. ( )

A fascinating meditation on the relationship between history and power focusing primarily on the Haitian revolution. ( )

For most of the general public, the production of history is an apparently simple task: research, discover what happened, and then write it down. And, in a way, this simplistic description encompasses the work of many historians (though perhaps few would use this description themselves). Michel-Rolph Trouillot, a prominent Haitian scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University, asserts that the process is far more complicated than everyone supposes. Unlike many historiographies, Trouillot does not focus merely on the methods of history, but in how history is produced. While the distinction between these two topics may not be apparent to the novice scholar, Trouillot succeeds admirably in clarifying his thesis: that power is involved in almost all aspects of historical production that affects how history is portrayed, and, indeed, what is included in history and what is neglected.
Trouillot sets out the distinction not usually noticed by consumers of history: the facts of the matter versus how those facts are reported: "what happened" as compared to "that which is said to have happened" (2). He asserts that there is often a large difference between the two, and that this difference can be ascribed to one concept, a concept that might be manifested in many ways but boils down to one word: power. "History is the fruit of power," according to Trouillot, and this power is reflected in the "ways in which the production of historical narratives involved the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production" (xix).
This is reflected in the tension between what happened and what is said to have happened. Conceptually this makes "historian as revealer and discoverer of truth" somewhat troublesome. What actually occurs and how it is reported can differ, sometimes to a troubling degree. If we accept Trouillot's assertion that history—both 'what happened' and 'what is said to have happened'—is always a product of its own time, then "historical actors are also narrators and vice versa" (22).
To focus this problem further, Trouillot focuses on two specific issues. First, that process and narrative are both distinct and blurred. Second, there is a sense that the 'process of historical production' is more important than some esoteric debate about the 'nature of history' (24-25). This second concern is by far the most important debate as far as Trouillot is concerned, and it is this issue that occupies the bulk of his book. It is by focusing on how history as narrative is created we can see the role of power in creating and silencing facts and events (26).
Trouillot uses several examples to probe this issue of 'mentions' and 'silences,' most of which concern the Haitian Revolution, which has been strangely neglected by Western history. The Haitian Revolution, arguably one of the most unique occurrences in world history, has been afflicted by a 'cycle of silences' (26). Trouillot identifies these silences as occurring at every step of historical production: the "moment of fact creation, moment of fact assembly, moment of fact retrieval, and the moment of retrospective significance" (26). At every step of the way, from the making of sources to the making of history, power has been exercised to diminish or silence the revolutionary nature of the events in Haiti.
In the historical arena (as in other arenas), Haiti has been too poor and impotent to ensure that its history is treated equally. Thus, the story of the Haitian Revolution (an "unthinkable event" even as it was occurring [73]), became insignificant. The insignificance of this 'non-event' was represented at every aspect of historical production, from sources to archives to narratives (27). From primary documents to creation of archives to final historical narratives, the Haitian Revolution has been neglected; its true importance has been denigrated. Because its very occurrence was 'unthinkable' because of the racist climate of the time, its ultimate success was also 'unthinkable.' So, the facts were reassembled to "fit [the] world of possibilities" as it existed in the minds of both onlookers and participants (96). Instead of becoming the catalyst that forced Napoleon's sale of Louisiana, or a test of the ideals of the French and American Revolutions (88), the Haitian Revolution became an anomaly. It became a dusty, seldom considered, corner of history.
Trouillot considers next the legacy of Christopher Columbus, from explorer of new worlds to destroyer of worlds. His analysis of the perspectives of these events is astute. He shows us how Columbus's exploits created a narrative that shifted and changed to fit the needs of the narrators, from American history textbooks to Spanish and American exhibitions in the 1890s to modern examinations of his negative impact. This chapter is successful, but less groundbreaking than his analysis of Haitian history. Perhaps this is because the average person is more familiar with Columbus than with Sans Souci. Or, perhaps, it is a testament to Trouillot's theory: we are familiar with the event, but unfamiliar with the non-event.
Trouillot's Silencing the Past is ultimately successful, despite the occasional difficulties with language that can be expected to plague an author writing in a second language. The examples from Haitian history seem tailor-made to demonstrate the role that power—the uneven distribution of power—plays in the writing of history in the Western world. "Silences are inherent in history" (49), and these silences are instructive. How many peoples and things remain unrepresented in our history? Why do they remain absent? Trouillot's answer is that those with unequal power, or even an unconventional or unpopular story, can be neglected by those with the power to "create" and "write" history. Most modern historians, undoubtedly, commit these sins unwittingly. Or perhaps we accept it to prevent shattering an illusion, an "illusion of truth: what happened is what must have happened" (107).