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RICHARDT. VANN
ABSTRACT
The publication in 1973 of Hayden White's Metcahistoiy, Brian Fay has recently
written, marked a decisive turn in philosophical thinking about history.' White
might demur that he has no "philosophy of history," since he, notoriously, has
bracketed considerations of historical knowledge, as he has bracketed treatments
of the referentiality of language. More plausibly, he might repeat his argument
that there is no essential difference between history and metahistory; thus all
practicing historians and White still practices occasionally have a philosophy
of history whether they know it or not. However this may be, Louis Mink, writ-
ing only a few weeks after the publication of Metahistory, declared it was "the
book around which all reflective historians must reorganize their thoughts on his-
tory."2
7. New Literary Histoty 7 (1975), 97-111. Other essays which failed to make the cut are "The
Structureof HistoricalNarrative,"Clio 1 (1972), 5-20; "TheTasksof IntellectualHistory,"TheMonist
58 (1969), 606-630; "The Politics of ContemporaryPhilosophy of History,"Clio 3 (1973), 35-53
(with critiqueby W. H. Dray, ibid., 53-76); "TheProblemof Style in Realistic Representation:Marx
and Flaubert,"in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Philadelphia,1979), 213-229; (with Frank
Manuel), "Rhetoricand History,"in Theories of History: Papers of the Clark LibrarnSeminar, ed.
Peter Reill (Los Angeles, 1978), 1-25; and "HistoricalPluralism,"Critical Inquity 12 (1986), 480-
493.
8. Among these later essays are "TheRhetoricof Interpretation," Poetics Today9 (1988), 253-279;
"New Historicism:A Comment,"in TheNew Historicism,ed. H. AramVeeser(New York, 1989), 293-
302; "'Figuringthe Natureof the Times Deceased': LiteraryTheory and HistoricalWriting,"in The
Future of Literaty Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York, 1989), 19-43; "The Metaphysics of
Narrativity:Time and Symbol in Ricoeur's Philosophy of History,"in On PFal Ricoeur, ed. David C.
Wood (London, 1991); "Emplotmentand Truth,"in Probing the Limnitsof Representation, ed.
Friedlinder; and "Writingin the Middle Voice," in Schrift, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrechtand Karl
Ludwig Pfeiffer (Munich, 1993). Some of these are consideredin Wolf Kansteiner,"HaydenWhite's
Critiqueof the Writingof History,"History and Theoty 32 (1993), 273-295.
9. The SSCIbegan publicationin 1973, the year in which Metahistorywas published;the AHCI in
1976. For historical articles there is considerablebut unfortunatelynot perfect overlap in the cover-
age of the two indexes, so both must be utilized. The terminaldate, 1993, is somewhatarbitrary,but
assuresthatall journalscited are accessible. Coverageof foreign-languagejournalsin AHCIandespe-
cially SSCI is incomplete,but has steadily improvedin more recent years.
10. "The Challenge of QuantitativeHistory,"Historical Methods 17 (1984), 86-94. But then the
propositionwith which so few would concur is "Thereis no differencebetween history and fiction."
Monkkonengoes on to note that"in the philosophicalliterature,only a handfulhave actuallyput forth
a counter-argument." The view he attributesto White could much more appropriatelybe located in
Barthes; but, bizarrely, Monkkonen does not believe that Barthes questions "the epistemological
belief of the historian."
11. Kellner,"White'sLinguistic Humanism,"13.
12. Phyllis Grosskurth,review of Metahistorv in Canadian Historical Review 56 (1975), 193;
Andrew Ezergailis, review of Metahistonrin Clio 5 (Winter 1976), 240. Grosskurthwas not totally
hostile, althoughshe believed thatWhite wished to impose "exigent artisticlaws" on historicalwrit-
ing, while Ezergailis, who called the work a tour de force, was on the whole favorable.
13. "Historyand the Study of Culture,"Newi,LiteratiyHiston, 21 (Winter,1990), 417; (reprintedin
History and . . .: Histories within the Husnan Sciences, ed. Ralph Cohen and Michael S. Roth
[Charlottesville,Va., 1995], 382-395).
14. A peculiarityof the Germanreceptionof White is thathis books were not translatedin the order
in which they originally appeared;the orderwas Auch Dichtet Klio oder die Fiktion des Faktischen
(Stuttgart,1986) followed by Die Bedeutungder Formin:Erzahlstruktur-enin der Geschichtsschreibung
(Frankfurtam Main, 1990) and finally Metahistor7: Die historische Einbildungskraftimn19.
Jahrhundertin Europa (Frankfurtam Main, 1991).
15. Metahistory (in its German translation) was reviewed as late as 1991 in Zeitschriftflit
Geschichtswissenschaft, which was the official East German historical periodical. Although it had
been mentionedin previous articles in thatjournalwhile it was directedby the MarxistEast German
academicestablishment,this lengthy and fair-mindedreview is one small indicatorof glasnCostin the
formerDDR.
16. Journal of ModernHistori 52 (1980), 124.
24. Kenneth Burke, one of the two authors most influential in White's thinking about tropes,
acknowledges this difficulty (A Gr-annnar- of Motives [1945] [Berkeley, 1969], 503), cited in David
Carroll,"On Tropology:The Forms of History"[a review of Metahistorv],Diacritics 6 (Fall 1976),
58-64.
25. The best discussion of these issues is Hans Kellner,"TheInflatableTropeas NarrativeT heory:
Structuresor Allegory,"Diacritics (Spring 1981), 14-28.
26. See JohnS. Nelson, "TropalHistoryandthe Social Sciences: Reflectionson [Nancy] Struever's
Remarks,"Histori and Theory,Beiheft 19 (1980), 80-10 1. Struever'sessay was "Topicsin History,"
ibid., 66-79.
27. Metahistory,372.
28. Carroll,"OnTropology"arguesthatthe four levels are nested as follows: firstemplotment,then
mode of explanation,by which the historianexplains in a deductive-nomologicalargumentwhat the
point of the emplotmentis. Then comes ideological implication,which combines elements of the first
two. The tropes are on the deepest level.
29. "AMetatheoreticalAnalysis: HaydenWhite and FourNarrativesof 'Russian'History,"Clio 19
(1990), 215-235. Ostrowskithinks it a "lapse"in the response to White's book that nobody had tried
such an empiricaltest before.
affinities"in showing that the theory "works"for three of the four historians
"tested."30
Inevitably,historicallymindedcritics were temptedto speculate,as did Fredric
Jameson,aboutwhat "mechanismsof historicalselection"assurethat some com-
binationsof elements in his combinatoire,but not all, come into existence.31Such
speculations seem to be authorizedwhen White presents what look for all the
world like historicalexplanationsfor developmentsin nineteenth-centuryhisto-
riography,especially the effect of the professionalizationof history. He also
traces a cycle of tropesfrom eighteenth-centuryirony (with Gibbonas chief rep-
resentative),throughmetonymy (Marx),metaphor(Nietzsche), and finally irony
again (Croce).While philosophersexemplify the succession of tropes (except for
synecdoche, for which no representativewas found worthy), the historiansare
treated in terms of emplotments: Michelet (Romance), Ranke (Comedy),
Tocqueville (Tragedy),and Burckhardt(Satire). These are hard to arrayin neat
chronologicalorder,since Ranke was born three years before Michelet, but both
were writing a decade before Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America was
written some twenty-five years before the publication of Burckhardt's
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. White's decision not to present the his-
toriansin termsof their determiningtropesfurthercomplicates the questionhow
they are relatedto emplotments,explanation,and ideology.
Another,eventuallymore fruitful, approachto explaining the tropes was sug-
gested by historian Philip Pomper. Pomper, surveying the uncertainties sur-
roundingthe choice and succession of tropes, arguedthatWhite must have had
an implicit psychological theoryaccountingfor the occurrence(or recurrence)of
tropes. If this trope were to be made explicit, he suggested, it would be found to
rest on the trope of irony.32White never denied that his own stance was ironic,
but he did suggest a psychological version of the origin and succession of tropes.
The theory he adaptsis Piaget's account of the stages of the intellectual devel-
opment of children. Vico, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, he reminds us, felt that a
kind of "poeticlogic" was typical of childrenand "primitive"people. In the first
year and a half of life, Piaget asserted, infants have a sensorimotorexistence
which, although it could not be characterizedas metaphoricalthinking, never-
theless constituted"living of the mode of similitude."After this "metaphorical"
experience,the developingchild conceives the world successively in ways which
could be seen as metonymical,then synecdochic, and finally reaches the stage of
rationalthought, which is inevitably ironic. "If Piaget has provided an ontoge-
netic base for this pattern"of the succession of tropes,White concludes, "he adds
anothermore positivistic confirmationof its archetypalnature."But, lest White
be thoughtto be seeking positivistic supportfor his position, he quickly adds that
30. Ibid., 227. The four historians include Richard Pipes and the "ShortCourse" of the Soviet
CommunistParty.
31. "FiguralRelativism, or the Poetics of Historiography[review of Metahistorv],"Diacritics 6
(1976), 2-9.
32. "Typologiesand Cycles in IntellectualHistory,"Historyand Theory,Beiheft 19 (1980), 30-38.
he only claims for it "the force of a convention in the discourse about con-
sciousness and, secondarily,the discourse about discourse itself, in the modern
Western tradition."33 And this is the last systematic word he has to say about
tropes.
The other set of claims by White, about what "facts,""events,"and "data"
mean in historical discourse, althoughobviously relatedto the theory of tropes,
could more readily be understood, and attacked, by analytical philosophy,
whether wielded by historiansor philosophers. Some quickly noted that a pre-
supposition of Metahistory is that what White once called the "raw" or
"unprocessed"historical record bore a striking resemblance to the "powderof
facts"which Langlois and Seignobos in the heyday of positivism called upon the
historianto fit to the laws governingthem-unless sociologists had to do this job
for them.34White, while rejectingthe positivistprogramfor endowingthis absurd
welter of facts with meaning, was just as convinced that "the historical record"
had no meaning in itself. However, one of the first reviews of Metahistory
already suggested that White was thus treating the "data"of history-a word
which he does frequentlyuse, in spite of its being a translationof "givens"-as
analogous to those of science. But, says Andrew Ezergailis, the data of history
have alreadybeen "touchedby the purposesof men [andwomen]."Even though
these purposes sometimes miscarry,so that history is litteredwith the unintend-
ed consequencesof actions, Ezergailisregardsthese purposesas already"prefig-
uring"the data.35This rathercryptic statementforeshadows much more devel-
oped argumentsby David CaiTand Paul Ricoeur.
A similar point was made by Dominick LaCapra, who drew attention to
White's "at times" lending credence to the idea of an unprocessed historical
record presentedas "an inert object to be animatedby the shaping mind of the
historian."This, he claims, ignores the degree to which the historical record is
alreadyprocessed and simply substitutesan idealistic event for a positive one.36
Eugene 0. Golob remarkedthat one of White's most notoriouscontentions,that
different historianscan stress different aspects of "the same historical field" or
the "same set or sequence of events,"suggests a quasi-positivistsense of events
"out there"to be "observed"by the historian.37
These criticisms come from quite different philosophical stances. Golob
chides White for not having sufficiently attended to the philosophy of R. G.
Collingwood; LaCaprabelieves that in Tropicsof Discourse White was repress-
ing knowledge of discoveries by Derrida which were actually "inside"him.38
The years after the appearanceof Tropicsof Discourse in 1978 saw the remark-
able extensionof White's influencefarbeyond the relativelysmall numberof his-
torians,philosophers,and literarycritics who had quickly recognized its impor-
tance. In the years from 1973 to 1980 serious critiquespredominated;from that
time onwardWhite's turn towardsnarrativityand his demonstrationof the fea-
tures sharedby histories and novels were picked up by hundredsof literarycrit-
ics and othersinterestedin whatbecame a veritable"narrativeturn"in the human
sciences. A good many of these references were extremely superficial;
Metahistory,in particular,would be listed among "workscited" in a bibliogra-
phy at the end of an article-but it wasn't. Quite a few of his readersevidently
were introducedto NorthropFrye's plot-types and KennethBurke's and Vico's
tropes throughWhite. The titles of his articleswere mixed up (granted,many do
sound similar); his first name was misspelled (Haydn being my favorite); and
more seriously,he was characterizedboth as a structuralistand a post-structural-
ist and put into the same bed as all those "absurdist"critics he had criticized in
the last essay of Tropics of Discourse.
Much of the interest in White's later work has focused on two essays in The
Contentof the Form.:"TheValue of Narrativityin the Representationof Reality"
and "The Politics of Historical Interpretation:Discipline and De-sublimation."
The first, in spite of its title, gave rise to renewed charges that White does not
believe in a "real"past or "realevents."44 The second placed such an emphasison
the political or ideological importof narrativeform, withoutprovidingany foun-
dation for rejectingany interpretation,thatWhite was attackedfor licensing odi-
ous interpretationsof history,and condemnedfor inattentivenessto the relation-
ship of emplotmentand truthin historiography.
White's discussion of the referentialityof historicalnarrativesled some read-
ers to concur with Gabrielle Spiegel that he, like Barthes and FrankKermode,
"sees historical narrativeas intrinsically no different than fictional narrative,
except in its pretense to objectivity and referentiality."45 This was not White's
position in 1975, when he wrote that "historicaldiscourse should be viewed as a
sign system which points in two directions simultaneously:first, towardthe set
of events it purportsto describe and second, toward the generic story form to
which it tacitly likens the set in orderto disclose its formal coherence...46 A
year later he was even more explicit, beginning "The Fictions of Factual
Representation"by grantingthathistoricalevents differ from fictionalevents "in
the ways that it has been conventional to characterizetheir differences since
Aristotle."47 As for the reality of the past, of course thereis no conclusive answer
to BertrandRussell's famous argumentthat the cosmos might have come into
existence five minutes ago, complete with fossils and yesterday's copy of The
Times;however this is an argumentthat only solipsists could love. But the "real
past"cannotbe known to be such by unmediatedacquaintance;"in any narrative
account of real events . . . these events are real not because they occurred but
because, first, they were rememberedand second, they are capable of finding a
place in a chronologically orderedsequence."48Had White inserted "just"after
"not"in this sentence, it would have been a truism.We could neverhave any evi-
dence of something nobody remembered(at least long enough to write down
something aboutit) and in a historicalnarrativethere must be at least an implic-
it chronological sequence. However, as it stands the sentence leaves open the
possibility that an event need not have occurredto figurein a historicalnarrative.
This raises again the specter of textual or linguistic determinism(or else utter
relativism) which White in his early work usually tried to guard against. In
"HistoricalPluralism"(1986) White sketches a "pantextualistpluralist"position
in which "the whole problemof truthis set aside in favor of a view of historical
representation which leaves it virtually indistinguishable from fiction."
Characterizationssuch as "virtuallyindistinguishablefrom fiction"readily slide
into the position that there is no difference at all; but White takes pains to deny
that he is saying that certain "events" like English Romanticism!-never
occurred; their occurrence is "hardly to be doubted." However, he argues,
"specifically historical inquiry is born less of the necessity to establish that
events occurredthan of the desire to determinewhat certain events might mean
for a given group."49 For "events"like English Romanticism,this is surely true,
but not for all investigations.Yet despite his lack of interest in the question of
how historiansmight establish that events occurred,White has never abandoned
the view that the contents of historicalnarrativesare as much inventedas found
(which also means as much found as invented).And the more obvious the fact
thrownin the face of the relativist-"You surely can't deny that John Kennedy
was assassinatedon November 22, 1963?"-the more weight falls on the mean-
ing of that event for differentgroups.
"The Value of Narrativity"is the most often cited of all White's essays. It
affordeda splendidintroductionto narratologywhile at the same time stakingout
a provocative set of propositions. It also left many questions for historians to
think about.How is the ideological productioneffected by narrative the central
theme of Contentof the Form-achieved? (By subjectmatter?By the form of the
content, or the content of the form? By the form of the representation?Or all of
these?)Are all narrativehistoriesequally effective? If not, what groundsare there
for preferringone to another-a judgmenthistoriansmake all the time? How do
systems of meaning production in historical narrativesget "tested against the
capacity of any set of 'real' events to yield to such systems"?50White's attitude
a coin toss, or to a choice that can only be arbitrary?A visionary politics, which
White obviously prefers,"can proceed only on the latterconviction."54
At this point White takes the argumentfurther,confrontingthe hardestchal-
lenge historianscould pose againsthis theories:Nazism and its politics of geno-
cide as "a crucial test case for determiningthe ways in which any human or
social science may construeits 'social responsibilities'as a discipline productive
of a certainkind of knowledge."He admitsthat ideas of historicalsublimitylike
those of Schiller and Nietzsche are conventionally associated with fascist
regimes-with philosophers like Heidegger and Gentile and the "intuitionsof
Hitler and Mussolini."But this should not lead to rejecting it through guilt by
association, since "[o]ne must face the fact that . . . there are no grounds to be
found in the historicalrecorditself for preferringone way of construingits mean-
ing over another. "55
White then proceeds to state the questions about formalism and relativism
which some of his critics were quick to pose.56How, for one, to counterthe "revi-
sionist" argumentthat the Holocaust never occurred-"a claim . . . as morally
offensive as it is intellectually bewildering [because the "revisionists"used all
the apparatusof historical scholarship]"?Despite the claims of Pierre Vidal-
Naquet, not by following the same "rules of historical method"that the "revi-
sionists"ostentatiouslyimitate,nor by stigmatizingas an "untruth"ratherthan a
lie the "quitescandalousexploitation"of the HolocaustthatVidal-Naquetattrib-
utes to Zionist ideologists, who representthe Holocaust as the inevitable result
of living in the Diaspora, thus claiming that its victims would have become
Israeli citizens. Vidal-Naquetcalls this an "untruth"instead of a lie because it
leaves the "reality"of the Holocaust intact.White defends it as true as a histori-
cal conception, because it justifies policies conceived by Israelis as crucial to
their security and even survival.Who is to say that the "totalitarian,not to say
fascist, aspects of Israeli treatmentof Palestinianson the West Bank"is a result
of a distortedconception of Jewish or Europeanhistory?It is a morally respon-
sible response to the meaninglessnessof history,just as an effective Palestinian
54. Ibid., 73. In fn. 12 to this article (p. 227) White registers"an item of personalbelief: that rev-
olutions "always misfire"(an apparentcovering law) and that in advancedindustrialsocieties, they
are likely only to strengthenoppressivepowers. The "sociallyresponsible"interpreter,he continues,
"cando two things:(1 ) expose the fictitiousnatureof any politicalprogrambased on an appealto what
'history' supposedly teaches and (2) remain adamantly'utopian' in any criticism of political 'real-
ism."' Commennting on a shorter version of this paper (and others) at the AHA meeting in New York
in January 1997 White declared himself a Marxist (perhapsutopian after 1989) certainly a moral
commitmentratherthan an endorsementof the Marxianmasterhistoricalnarrative.
55. Ibid., 74-76.
56. Besides Ginzburg(fn. 4) see Aviezer Tucker,"A Theory of Historiographyas a Pre-Science,"
Studies in Histoiryv and Philosolphy(of Science 24 (1993). 656, fn. 48 and Gregory F. Goekjian,
"Genocide and Historical Desire," Semnioticca83 (1991), 212-215. Jean-FranqoisLyotardraises the
ante in this debateby concluding,aftera discussion of "revisionist"historians,thatthe historian"must
then breakwith the monopoly over history grantedto the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he must
venture forth by lending his ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge....
[Auschwitz's]name marksthe confines whereinhistoricalknowledge sees its competenceimpugned."
("TheDifferend, the Referent,and the ProperName,"Diacr-itics 14 [1984], 4-14.)
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