1 István M. Szijártó (Eötvös University, Budapest) Puzzle, fractal, mosaic. Thoughts on microhistory Puzzle I would like to explore three metaphors about microhistory and their explanatory force. Let me take a thought of Richard J. Evans as my starting point. (It is not about microhistory specifically but about history in general.) As several others have done earlier, he suggests that the activity of the historian is like doing a jigsaw puzzle - one that is both incomplete and damaged. i The problem with this metaphor is that it tacitly suggests the previous existence of a round and complete past. I would not like to suggest that there was no past at all. But I think that the past is chaos, from which only a retrospective mind can make sense. To quote Oscar Wilde “Any fool can make history, but it takes a genious to write it.’ Evans’s typically reconstructionalist approach has been standing under heavy fire in the last decades, in the sign of the ‘linguistic turn’, attacks coming especially from representatives of postmodernist views. Although the publication of White’s Metahistory in 1973 can be seen as the starting point of these debates, relativist scepticism had attacked the empiricist theoretical foundations of mainstream history much earlier: from Croce, Collingwood, Becker and Beard. And not even Metahistory was a postmodernist attack: Hayden White consequently rejects the allegations that he might be a postmodernist and Metahistory is a purely formalist book ii , clearly a product of modernism. I have the impression that the heat of the debates of the ‘linguistic turn’ is due to the fact that the impact of postmodernism (articulated from the 1960s and 70s) and the belated impact of modernist theories (present already from the early years of the 20th century) arrived at the same time to the theory of history, amplifying the effect of each other. (Earlier modernist impact remained rather on the surface.) Conveniently, we can distinguish between modernist and postmodernist positions on the basis of their views about language. Historians could have learned long ago from Saussure or Wittgenstein that language cannot be avoided, it is not just a tool but the form of human existence. iii Modernism argues that language is not mimetic but generative, it does not reflect the world but forms it. Postmodernism goes further and claims that language cannot be dominated, the author is ‘dead’, not even he or she is in control of meaning. iv On these contrasting views about language the cardinal difference is based as for the theory of history: whether there is correspondence between past reality and the historical text. A third view has emerged in the debates of the ‘linguistic turn’, one that claims to occupy a middle position between the two extremes. For example Appleby, Hunt and Jacob claim that the correct position is neither postmodernist negation nor naive realist affirmation of correspondence, but their ‘practical realist’ answer: there is a poor correspondence, but the historian has still to aspire to this. Their ‘practical realism’ tries to give an answer to the