SubStance

In our day a child preparing for a spelling bee might be prone to confuse an anecdote with an antidote. The two words have such a similar ring that the speller might be tempted to find a hidden truth in the difference between the –ti– and –ec– that distinguish their middle syllables. In the age of analogy, in what might be the childhood or adolescence of the printed book, interpreters of the former would somehow find within its meaning and essence the virtues of the latter. An anecdote must be an antidote for something, but for what? Or else, if an antidote is an anecdote, what would be the medical cause inspiring the telling of an offhand tale in the drift of pleasant conversation? According to the logic of association, an anecdote can be a gentle remedy to a strong proposition or, in itself, in its own wit, a reflection that needs to be countered, corrected, or tempered by an antidote. In the medical realm of the same age a good story or a lively narration inspired by the force of debate would have both social and medicinal virtue.¹ Or too, it could be, in a paradoxically oblique sense, an antidote to melancholy or a means of diverting the pain of a chronic illness.

If the speller stumbles on the resemblance of the two words, the etymological dictionary offers a clear and true corrective: in French antidote is borrowed from the medical Latin antidotum and the Greek antidoton. The word becomes a substantive, following the path of pharmacon, from the adjective antidotus or “given against.” The history of anecdote is far less noble and of more recent vintage. Dating to 1751 and attributed to Voltaire, it is said to be taken from a work by Procope in the seventh century (and perhaps at the same time spoken about over dinner at a table in the Parisian restaurant of that name, the oldest of the city that dates to the time of Voltaire and the philosophes): “en grec Anecdota, plur. Neutre puis substantiv., propr. ‘choses inédites’),” a work full of details on the history and character of his time, to be compared to the imitation of the title Anecdotes de Florence by the same historian Varillas, [End Page 5] 1685. Sometimes anecdote is an adjective, after the Greek aneckdotos, as in Fontenelle. Derivations include anecdotier (Voltaire, 1736) and anecdotique (1781).²

In the sixteenth century the term would be affiliated with memorial literature, generally of the grist of the courtly gossip of Brantôme’s Dames galantes, or even of the bon mot, the witty tale told off the cuff or on the run in Bonaventure Des Périers’s Nouvelles recreations et joyeux devis (1558). It would be of the order of “la jeune folle qui ne vouloit poinct de mary, pource qu’il avoit mange le dot [dos] de sa premiere femme” (nouvelle 43) or “De Messire Jehan, qui monte sus le maréchal, pensant monter sus sa femme” (nouvelle 60). For Des Périers and other adepts of Erasmus, the anecdote would be a tale that comes to mind in the flush of conversation; a fable or a story, designed to pique, entertain, divert, amuse, or even edify, perhaps like an antidote, at once by example and counterexample. Belonging so much to an oral tradition, in its printed form the anecdote would become an inert fiction to be remembered and retrieved for future use in conversation of the kind that Mikkaïl Bakhtine, thinking of Nicholas de Cholisres’s Après-disnées and Béroalde de Verville’s Le Moyen de parvenir, once called les propos de table licentieux (97).

Its proximity to the conte and the fable de table cannot be underestimated, especially in those myriad works that simulate verbal combat in which a story is invented, told, inverted, and exploded in the excitement of dialogue. Anecdotes proliferate where, as Montaigne noted of lively conversation, “[l]es contradictions donc des jugements ne m’offencent, ny m’alterent,” and where “elles m’esveillent seulement et m’exercent.” They are where, he avows, “[j]’ayme entre...