ABSTRACT
In the margins of the short history of the theatre on fire, where guilt and recrimination flare in equal measure, the work of the poor historian is muted. For already this site is a place where the ‘other’ is responsible. The gesture which attaches ideas to places is, de Certeau explains, precisely the historian’s gesture. If history is the relations between a place, analytical procedures and the construction of a text, which it palpably is, the historiographical process becomes one of delimiting place, the practices therein and their conversion into writing. But fire so fundamentally affects us as to drive all reason from that place, for often the writing of the history of fire is the writing of the dead, literally. And witnesses become in this legal world, accomplices, their speaking is prejudice. It is just such prejudices that instantiate poor history.
