ABSTRACT
Historians must search for a language that will allow us to bring unexpected new pieces of knowledge to light, while accepting that certain things will remain unknowable. Attempting to fashion history out of what might have happened is a perilous undertaking, as we try to discern the unstable order of things through the clutter of everyday events, which itself makes one or another scenario probable or improbable. There is surely a way to go beyond the drab restitution of an event or a historical subject, and mark the places where meaning was undone, producing gaps where certainty had once reigned. Stretched between the need to create meaning through a narrative that fits together, and the insistence that nothing should be reified, historical writing must chart a course between understanding and reason, passion and disorder.
