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Wesleyan University

The Reception of Hayden White


Author(s): Richard T. Vann
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 37, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 143-161
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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THE RECEPTION OF HAYDEN WHITE

RICHARDT. VANN

ABSTRACT

Evaluationof the influence of HaydenWhite on the theory of history is made difficultby


his preferencefor the essay form, valued for its experimentalcharacter,and by the need
to find comparabledata.A quantitativestudy of citations of his work in English and for-
eign-language journals, 1973-1993, reveals that although historians were prominent
among early readersof Metcahistory, few historicaljournalsreviewed White's two subse-
quent collections of essays and few historians-except in Germany-cited them. Those
historianswho did tended still to cite Metahistorvand often the partsof it devoted specif-
ically to nineteenth-centuryhistorians.
Literarycritics, on the otherhand,were relativelylate to discoverWhite, but duringthe
"narrativeturn"of the 1970s and 1980s his work was importantfor studentsof the novel
and the theater.Recognition of it was especially markedin Spanish-speakingcountries
and in Germany.
As a result, salient themes of White's later work-the ideological and political import
of narrativization,the "historicalsublime,"and writingin the "middlevoice"-have large-
ly gone unremarkedby historiansand philosophers.Both these groups have tended to be
irritatedby White's bracketingof questionsof historicalepistemology;some have accused
him of effacing the line between fiction and history,while White's numerousliteraryread-
ers have generally applaudedhis tendencies in this direction.White however has consis-
tently maintainedthat there is a difference, althoughnot the one conventionallypostulat-
ed. His explorationof writing in the "middlevoice" brings his work full circle, in that it
promises a "modernist"realism appropriatefor representingthe "sublime"events of our
century.

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

1. Editorialintroductionto Conteomporcar Histoty and Theory: The Linguistic Turn.and Beonid,


ed. Brian Fay, Philip Pomper,and RichardT. Vann(forthcomingfrom Blackwell).
2. Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene 0. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca, 1987),
22.

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144 RICHARDT. VANN

A quartercentury later, we can see to what extent Mink's mandatehas been


heeded. White's challenge to conventional academic history, however, was not
confinedto Metahistory,thoughit is the work most often quoted.He firedoff his
first salvo in "The Burden of History" (1966)1 and as late as 19924 was still
expandingon and in fact changing some of his views. White is perhapsthe pre-
mier academic essayist of our times, and he uses essays in the fashion of
Montaigne,the inventorof the genre to try things out no less thanto informand
to provoke.Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978)
reprints "The Burden of History" and eleven other essays, some like "The
Forms of Wildness:Archaeology of an Idea" and "The Noble Savage Theme as
Fetish" moreor less unrelatedto the theoryof historicalwriting,and some con-
temporary with and closely related to Metahistory. "The Historical Text as
LiteraryArtifact,"one of three most often cited articles, is the best short state-
ment of the theoretical import of Metahistory;but in the introductionwhich
White wrote for the collection, he gives intimationsof moving beyond the stance
he offered there. In particular,the moral stance of existential humanism, so
markedin "The Burdenof History"and still implicit in Metahistorv,5 seems to
have receded, and while there is still much about tropes and narrative,there are
now also discussions of narrativityand of discourse.These become more impor-
tant in the eight essays republished in The Content of the Form: Narrative
Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), of which the first
three and the eighth are entirely devoted to theoreticalissues in historiography.
(The other four, theoretically informed to be sure, are devoted to Droysen,
Jameson, Ricoeur, and Foucault.)6In this collection the fruits of a decade of
reflection since Metahistory are presented, with new emphasis, in particular,
falling on the ideological and political importof historicalnarrativesand on what
White called "thehistoricalsublime."
Apparentlynot all White's essays turnedout to his satisfaction, since some
were omitted from the collections. One of these, however, "The Problem of

3. In History and Theon, 5 (1966), 111-134.


4. Most notably in "HistoricalEmplotmentand the Problem of Truth,"in Probing the Limits of
Represenitation,ed. Saul Friedlinder (Cambridge,Mass., 1992), 37-53, in part a response to Carlo
Ginzburg, "Just One Witness," in ibid., especially 88-94. See also Ginzburg, "Ekphrasis and
Quotation,"TPjdschriftvoor Filosofie 50 (1988), 4.
5. Hans Kellner was especially perceptive to detect this in Metahistorv;see his "A Bedrock of
Order:HaydenWhite's Linguistic Humanism,"Historyand Theorn,Beiheft 19 (1980), 1-29.
6. White's two essays on Foucault, "FoucaultDecoded: Notes from Underground,"History and
Theory112 (1973), 23-54 (reprintedin Tropics) and "Foucault'sDiscourse: The Historiographyof
Anti-Humanism,"in Stlucturalisni and Since: FronmLevi Str-aussto Derrida, ed. John Sturrock
(Oxford, 1979), 81-115 (expandedand reprintedin Content)have been frequentlycited. Allan Megill
credits him with the major role in introducingFoucault to American historians, with a review of
Surveiller et punirt in the Anmerican Histo-ical Review in 1977 ("The Reception of Foucault by
Historians,"Jour-nalof the History of Ideas 48 [1987], 127). Judgingfrom the influenceof these arti-
cles, the same might be said for large sections of the Americanacademygenerally.It must be said that
White provides a ratheridiosyncraticview of Foucault.

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THE RECEPTIONOF HAYDENWHITE 145

Change in LiteraryHistory,"7has had a long afterlife.And he has continuedto


publish, with undiminishedenergy, since 1987, although there has not been a
thirdvolume of collected essays.8
White's oeuvre is thus various and extensive, so any consideration of the
reception of his work raises the prior and insistent question: "Which White?"
Although (I would argue)he is generally free of the crudersorts of inconsisten-
cy and incoherence,his thought has always been on the move. Furthermore,in
stating his basic positions in a number of different contexts and to different
implied readers, he has avoided repeating himself verbatim, with the conse-
quence that various formulationsof these positions and not always cautious
ones have appeared.White has given much less attentionto this than have his
would-be exegetes, as he almost invariablydeclines invitationsto explain what
he meantby a given passage and as a rule does not defend against attackson his
views (or what are taken to be his views).

One way to study the receptionof HaydenWhite is to make a quantitativestudy


of the reactions,by historians reflective or otherwise and others, to the vari-
ous pieces which White has written about historiographyand the theory of his-
tory over the past thirty-oddyears. My Rezeptionsgeschichteis based on citations
of these works in the journalslisted in the Social Science CitationIndex and the
Arts and Humanities Citation Index for the period 1973 to 1993.9 This essay
reportson those citations,suggests what they can tell us aboutWhite's work, and
concludes with some of the importantand still unresolvedquestionswhich White
has raised.
To be truly comprehensivesuch a study would have to include all the com-
ments made aboutWhite in books, but this is not feasible. There is of course no

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.

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146 RICHARDT. VANN

way to discoverwhat views, if any,were held by people who nevercited or wrote


about him. This has not prevented several writers from characterizingsuch
views. Most of them say that White has persuadedonly a few eccentric histori-
ans.Amusingly,it is social-science-orientedhistorians,who shouldbe most wary
of venturing generalizations unsupportedby comprehensive survey research,
who are willing to say, as does Eric H. Monkkonen,"I suspect that only the tini-
est handfulof historianswould concur"with White."0Only Hans Kellnerdetect-
ed the "enthusiasticreceptionMetahistoryhas had among many historians."1It
is a good deal easier to find such commentsas thatthe book is "irritatingand pre-
tentious"and amountsto "a systematicdenudingof the historicalconsciousness"
which constitutes"the most damagingundertakingever performedby a histori-
an on his profession."12
Nobody has attemptedto estimate how many philosophersor literarycritics
White has persuaded.It seems clear, though, that the sample constitutedby ref-
erences in journals must overstate the extent and favorabilityof responses to
White's work, at least among historians and literary scholars. These are much
more likely to make reference to works they generally approve of, whereas
philosophersdo theirjobs by criticizing the views of those they cite.

There are well over a thousandcitationsof White's work in philosophy of histo-


ry in those twenty years. That averagesover fifty a year;but the series startsvery
small (only one in 1974, and still only eighteen in 1978) and rises to close to a
hundredper year in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Carl Schorske has pointed
out that Metahistory"generated"no fewer than fourteen articlesjust in Histori
and Theory, and a Beiheft as well.'3 Although this work was mentioned more
often in History and Theoty than in any otherjournal,yet, as might be expected
from such a largenumberof citations,the diversityof journalsin which the work
of White has been cited is extraordinary.Clio and, more recently,the American
Historical Review are the obvious ones, but also ELH, ESQ, and MLN; Arcadia,
Belfagor, Chasqui, and Fabula; Paragraph, Poetica, Salmagundi, Seineia, and
Semiotica-not to forget Crane Bag, Sur, and Neophilologicus. There are quite
a few comments in German (into which all three of White's books have been

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).

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THE RECEPTIONOF HAYDENWHITE 147

translated),14 Italian (the first language into which Metahistorywas translated),


and Spanish (also based on a Spanishtranslationof Metahistory).There are also
a few in Dutch, Russian, Portuguese, and-thanks to the indefatigable Paul
Ricoeur in French,into which none of White's books has been translated.The
arrayincludesjournalsin administrationscience, anthropology,arthistory,biog-
raphy,communications,film studies, geography,law, psychoanalysis, and the-
ater. But to arrangethe journals by discipline is misleading, not only because
thereare so many commentson White's work in journalsof generalinterest(like
PartisanReview) but also because the writers are seldom readily classifiable by
their own disciplines. In fact it was usually necessary to look them up in various
academic directoriesin order to find out in which departmentsthey were offi-
cially rostered.Philosophersconversantwith literature,the occasional historian
interested in philosophy, and-especially-literary scholars disposing, or pur-
portingto dispose of, all these fields were the ones who found reasonto drawon
White's writings. Furthermore,scholars interestedin White have shown a ten-
dency to migratefrom one departmentto another as indeed White himself did.
The out-migrationfrom history departmentshas been particularlynoticeable; a
tabulationof commentatorsby discipline would look somewhatdifferentif Hans
Kellner,who has writtenmore aboutWhite than has anyone else, is classified as
a historian-as he startedout being-or as a professorof English-as he now is.
A diachronicanalysis reveals which disciplines confrontedWhite's work, and
when. There were, by my count, seventeen reviews of Metahistory,half of them
in such eminently respectablejournals as the American, Canadian, and Pacific
Historical Review, History, and the Journal of Modern History, as well as inter-
disciplinaryjournalswith a substantialhistoricalcontent like Clio, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, and History and Theory.15 On the other hand,
there were fewer than half as many reviews of Tropicsof Discourse, and these
appeared in MLN, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Virginia Quarterly
Review, Notes & Queries, Southern Review, and Contemporary Sociology. The
Journal of ModernHistory was the only historicaljournalto review it (in a joint
review with a book called Culture as Polyphony: An Essay on the Nature of
Paradigms, which the reviewer judged as the more important of the two
books).16The Contentof the Formwas more widely reviewed, but once again, in
such serials as British Journal of Aesthetics, Yale Review, University of Toronto
Quarterly, Political Theory, Modern Languages Quarterly, Novel, and Partisan

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.

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148 RICHARDT. VANN

Review. The only historicaljournals to review it were the American Historical


Review and (bundling it with several other books) the Journal of the History of
Ideas.
Historianstook a particularlyactive partin the early response to Metahistory.
About forty percentof the earliest notices of it and the early articles were made
by historians,who were most of the earlierreviewers;but as these works began
to attractthe attentionof others,especially literaryscholars,the relativeand even
the absolutenumbersof mentionsby historiansbegan to decline. Over all, fewer
than fifteen percentof the comments on White that I found were made by histo-
rians, while the majoritywere made by literary scholars-more in English, as
might be expected, but a surprisingnumberin Spanish and German.
The purely statisticalpicture, then, would suggest that some historiansread
Metahistoryand some of the earlierarticlesand found occasions to referto them,
but few indeed devotedthe same attentionto Tropicsof Discourse or The Content
of the Form.They would have had little opportunityto hearof these books, since
therewere so few reviews in professionaljournals.White became much less of a
presence in historical circles, regularlypreferringto attend Modern Language
Association conventionsratherthanthose of the AmericanHistoricalAssociation
(these used to be held at the same time). In 1987 Allan Megill referredto him as
"somethingclose to a bete noire within the [historical]discipline";in later years
some people began to refer to him as "outsideof the profession"or as a "literary
critic."17
Germanhistorianswere less inclined to excommunicateWhite, and once his
three books were translated,a numberof them wrote appreciativelyabout him.
Even an English historian,Antony Easthope, acknowledgedthat discussions of
the "linguistic turn,"largely owing to White's "magisterialintervention,"had
begun there.18Easthope's article is primarilyabout an old article by Lawrence
Stone called "The Inflation of Honours."This reading of Stone informed by
White dramatizeshow abstractthe discussion of his views has become in the
almost complete absence of any historically informedparticipants.If historians
have missed out on White's work, it has also missed historians.
The statistically inclined may wonder whether my figure for the declining,
indeed almost disappearing,percentageof historiansciting White is not in parta
statisticalartifact.Since there are so many more literaryscholarsthanhistorians,
there are thatmany more people "atrisk,"as statisticianssay, of having read and
cited White. I cannot think of any statisticaltechniqueto eliminate this possibil-
ity, but neithercan I thinkof a plausible argumentthatwhat the statisticssuggest
is not real.The work of HaydenWhite has had a remarkableinfluenceoutsidethe
profession, making him perhapsthe most widely quoted historianof our time.
But historianshave almost entirely tuned out, especially historiansin the United
States (if it were not for the interestin White in the Germanhistoricalprofession

17. Megill, "Receptionof Foucault,"127.


18. "Romancingthe Stone: History-Writingand Rhetoric,"Social Histoty 18 (1993), 235-249.

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THE RECEPTIONOF HAYDENWHITE 149
from the late 1980s, the anemicfiguresfor historianswould have been even more
unimpressive).Furthermore,even when Americanhistorianshave quotedWhite
in the last few years, they are still quoting Metahistory,ratherthan the essays
which make up Tropics of Discourse and especially The Content of the Form.
And within Metahistory, they are disproportionatelyattractedto those bits which
discuss the great nineteenth-centuryhistorians.

Except for those who take particularpleasure in tabulationsor catalogues, the


main interestin surveyingthe reception of HaydenWhite is observing the vari-
ety not just of responses, but of borrowings, adaptations,and attemptedpara-
phrases. The first review of Metahistoryenunciated a position, if not an argu-
ment, that recurredfrequentlyin the observationsof historians."9Its authorwas
Gordon Leff, the authorof The Tyrannyof Concepts (University,Ala., 1969).
Leff begins, a bit surprisingly,by saying that"few would now dispute"thatthere
is an "indispensablemetahistoricalfoundation in all historical thinking."He
identifiesthe novelty and interestof the book as White's location of this, beyond
any particularideological standpoint, "in the very linguistic or poetic image
which 'prefigures'all conceptualization."Historical discourse thus "owes its
modes to the particularlinguistic imagery in which historicalevents are initially
depicted."This sentence is not free of difficulties,but we may assume that "lin-
guistic imagery"is a translationof "tropes"and that the "initialdepiction"here
is that of historians ratherthan the evidence about the events with which they
must work.20Leff here avoids a common tendencyto emphasizeWhite's adapta-
tion of NorthropFrye's four plot-types, often to the exclusion of his more radi-
cal view of the underlying tropes. Leff then gives his critique: "the historical
reader"will find in confrontingWhite's treatmentof actual nineteenth-century
historians that "latent skepticism"will likely "turnto manifest disbelief." The
problemis thatWhite has takena good idea "beyondwhat most historianswould
regardas its legitimatelimits" and "reducedhistoryto a species of poetics or lin-
guistics." Even as a formal analysis, he concludes, Metahistoryleaves out too
much, "notleast the criteriawhich governhistoricalknowledge and whatis pecu-
liar to it."
It would be unfairto demandsubstantiationof these claims from a shortbook
review, but its rhetoricalmoves do requiresome notice. The most obvious is the
invocationof "thehistoricalreader"and "mosthistorians"as authoritative.Then
there is the reference to the unspecified supplement that history has which
species of "poetics" and "linguistics"do not. White's applicationof the word
"poetic"to historicalthought,as we shall see, caused considerableoffense; Leff
is howeverunusualin claiming thathistory was thus "reduced"to poetics (rather
than poetry). It is perfectly fair to note thatWhite has omitted referenceto "cri-

19. Review of Metahistorvin Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974), 598-600.


20. Another difficulty is the ambiguity of "initially depicted."As ArthurDanto usefully reminds
us, historicalevents always come to us already"undersome description."This would make the "ini-
tial depiction"reside in the sources, ratherthan in the historian'spoetic imagination.

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150 RICHARDT. VANN

teria governing historical knowledge"-and apparentlyonly historical knowl-


edge. However, even supposing that White or anyone else knows exactly what
these are, his manifest purpose was to understandthe great historical works of
the nineteenthcenturynot as bundles of truthclaims (many of which have long
since been falsified) but as books still worthreading,having "diedinto art."
Two other early reviewers,John Clive and Peter Burke, added a count to his-
torians' indictmentsof White: obscurity.It is very unlikely that these were the
only ones who had difficulty understandingMetahistory;but Burke went so far
as to claim that White was writing "like his heroes Vico and Frye [!] . . . in what
is very nearly a privatelanguage."' Clive complainedthat its style "lackslucid-
ity and elegance to a degree"and calls its frequentneologisms "monstrosities.
What is remarkablein Clive's review, however, is its openness to White's case.
WhereasBurke had assertedthatfor White "thehistoricalwork"was "essential-
ly the same as a work of fiction, in that it is a verbal structurewhich represents
reality,"Clive warnedagainst too rash a rejectionof the book's principalthesis,
that"whatis crucialto works of history,no less thanworks of fiction, is the mode
of 'emplotment'chosen by the author,"which in turndepends on the prefigura-
tive language-once again the word "trope"is avoided-that historians"bringto
facts and events as they seek them out, thatis, before they even begin the task of
casting them into a finished narrative."This is surely a betteraccountof White's
thesis thanthatoffered eitherby Leff or Burke.Clive goes on to make more con-
cessions: thathistorianshave to use languageto relatethe resultsof research;that
there is a relationship(perhapspartly unconscious) between form and content;
and even that "ordinaryas well as great historians"are "quite capable of pre-
senting 'the same events' not only from differentideological points of view but
also from different literary modes-as for example, tragically or ironically."
Otherthan treatmentsby historianswho were White's students,this is probably
the most sympatheticaccounthe received from his fellow professionals.
We may admire Clive's generosity while wondering whether he had either
time or space in a timely shortbook review to spot some of the tensions and dif-
ficulties in Metahistorv-tensions and difficulties which historians, as well as
philosophers and literary critics, began to investigate. The most problematic
areas were White's view of the tropes and his conception of facts and events,
which led Louis Mink to characterize his position as "the New Rhetorical
Relativism."23
One reason why early reviewersmay have avoidedusing the word "tropes"is
they did not understandwhat they were. If so, they had plenty of company.
Scholars as well acquainted with literary theory as Fredric Jameson and
Dominick LaCapraconfessed themselves uncertainabout how "deep"in con-
sciousness the tropes are;their relationshipto emplotments,modes of argument,
21. Review of Metahistoiy in History 60 (1975), 83.
22. Review of Metahistorvin Jolrunalof Modern History 47 (1975), 642-43. Sometimes yester-
day's monstrosityquickly becomes acceptable,like White's coinage "emplotment."
23. "Philosophy and Theory of History,"'in International Handbook of Historical Studies, ed.
Georg Iggers and HaroldT. Parker(Westbrook,Conn., 1979), 25.

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THE RECEPTIONOF HAYDENWHITE 151
and ideological implications;and whetherthey form any necessary historicalor
logical sequence. Otherswonderedwhetherthe tropesare really analyticallydis-
tinguishable.Metonymy and synecdoche, for example, can slide into one anoth-
er,24and both can be seen as species of metaphor.Irony always threatensto burst
any bounds and become a "super-trope," either engulfing the others or undercut-
ting the entiretypology.25John Nelson has arguedthat tropes as White saw them
were not mere linguistic figures (as most early reviewersassumed)but modes of
consciousness. If this is so, are they attitudes or artifacts of psychology?
Moods in both the grammatical and psychological sense of this word?
Directions of imagination? Or are they overtly tied to actions (and thus not
entirely distinguishablefrom ideologies)?26
No one doubts that whatevertheir depth, tropes as White conceives them are
deeper than emplotments,modes of explanation,and ideological implications.It
was not clear to his readers, however, whether the tropes operate largely or
entirelyunconsciously.If not, is it appropriateto characterizethem as forming a
"deep structure"?If so, how can White's emancipatoryprogram,urging the his-
torianto act as a "freeartist"27and choose some tropeotherthanirony,be imple-
mented?
White's version of a Fourfold Path allows sixty-four possible combinations;
but some have an "elective affinity"with one anotherand others appearunfeasi-
ble. It appearsto be impossible to deduce the operativetrope from the mode of
emplotment,which may indeed be the most superficiallevel of a historicaltext.28
The reason for this is that only the least imaginativehistorians(such as Ranke)
line up everythingaccordingto the elective affinities.It is apparentlythe element
of tension introducedby discordantelements which accounts for the literary
power of the greatesthistorical texts; but inevitably this makes any claim about
the relationshipsamong them, or the priorityof the tropes, tenuous.This is curi-
ously illustrated by an attempted "empirical" test of tropology by Daniel
Ostrowskiin respect of four Russian historians.29Ostrowskihad great difficulty
with the tropes, since "the rhetorical devices do not provide any clue to the
trope."He nevertheless succeeds by lining up the tropes with their "elective

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.

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152 RICHARDT. VANN

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.

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THE RECEPTIONOF HAYDENWHITE 153

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

33. "Introduction,"Tropics,7-13. White acknowledgesthatPiaget "wouldnot appreciatebeing put


in this line of thinking."
34. The referenceto the "raw,unprocessed"recordis from "Structureof HistoricalNarrative."
35. Review of Metahistory in Clio, 245.
36. Review of Tropics,MLN93 (1978), 1037-1043, especially 1042.
37. "The Irony of Nihilism," History and Theon>,Beiheft 19 (1980), 55-68. He refers to
Metahistory,274.
38. LaCaprarefers specifically to the essay "The Absurdist Moment in ContemporaryLiterary
Theory,"which criticizes he says "caricatures" the thoughtof Georges Poulet, Barthes,Foucault,
and Derrida.

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154 RICHARDT. VANN

Carrand Ricoeur(andperhapsEzergailis)write from a phenomenologicalstand-


point. From yet another, and in some ways opposite, position Alfred Louch
arguedfor the existence of historical"facts"independentof any discourseor the-
ory aboutthem or of any narrativepresentationof them. These would seem to be
the very facts "out there"which other critics detected as a lingering vestige of
positivism in White's thought.For Louch, however,White is a consistentbeliev-
er that historical "facts"are shaped by the structureof historical discourse and
thus historicalwriting is not to be judged by its representationbut by its "form
of execution."39 For White, the importanceof the tropes is that throughthem the
historian"prefiguresthe historical field" and decides what shall count as facts.
But, Louch objects, this is to conclude that "facts are theory-dependentbecause
our theory makes it clear what counts as relevantevidence."However this does-
n't account for the existence of the fact or evidence. He illustratesthe point as
follows: "If we are working on a murder and have a theory about the gun
involved, and then find the gun, it counts as evidence because of the theory,but
doesn't exist because of the theory. 'Pass the salt' doesn't bring a salt-cellarinto
existence, nor is passing the pepperjust a linguistic error."4'4
On a certain level this seems undeniable,and White would surely not be so
daft as to deny it. He might have made it clearer that he does not suppose any
such silly thing. But leaving aside the obvious considerationthatguns and salt-
cellars pose different hermeneuticchallenges than the texts historians usually
have to deal with Louch startshis analysis at a point when a murderinvestiga-
tion has alreadybeen decided upon (inadvertentlymaking a perfect connection
between narrativizationand power). White can affordto stop his analysis at that
point, because his interestis in what makes historiansdecide what sort of inves-
tigation they are embarked upon; and Louch cannot claim that seeing guns
always implies murderinvestigations.
The most under-analyzedtermWhite uses is "event."Although he talks about
"the same set of events" ensconced in different narrativeaccounts of them, he
does not clarify what he means by "event."Louis Mink asks what an event is: "A
horse throws a shoe, which cannot be nailed on quickly enough, and a kingdom
is lost. Are both of these 'events'? Is the Renaissancean 'event'?Are therebasic
or unit events, which cannotbe divided into smallerevents?"He goes on to reca-
pitulateArthurDanto's point that "we cannot refer to events as such, but only to
events under a description."41 But if this is so, it is hard to see how historians
could be equally well-warrantedin writing about the very same "event"in dif-
ferent ways. White is apparentlysaying that there are indefinitelymany ways of
redescribingevents, but he has not produced any argumentthat there is a sub-
strate of unit or basic events that can exhibit some sort of sameness no matter
how variouslythey are redescribed.

39. "The Discourse of Subversion," Humianities in Society 2 (1979), 34.


40. Idein.
41. Historical Understanding,23.

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THE RECEPTIONOF HAYDENWHITE 155
I know of no example where more than one account has ever been offered of
exactly the same set of events-no matterhow events are conceived. Ann Rigney
has offered an analysis of various historicaltreatmentsof what she defines as a
single event-Louis XVI's flight to Varennesin 1791. Awareof Mink's treatment
of this topic, she notes how differenthistorianshave includedmore or less detail
(about"events"thatmade up the largerevent). Thoughevents could figurein dif-
ferent stories, there was no consensus on the redescriptionof even this one
"event";and the historianswere constrainednot only by the evidence, but also,
importantly,by what previous historianshad said about the subject.This makes
the likelihood of historians emplotting differently the same set of events even
more remote.42
Few historianswould be surprisedby this outcome;but most would also wish
for some escape from the relativisticconclusions thatWhite draws.The problem
with his position is that althoughthere may be indefinitely many redescriptions
of events, how do we determinethe criteriafor discriminationamong them-an
activityin which historiansfrequentlyengage? But the problemfor the historical
realist, or the advocate of "faithfulnessto the facts" as a criterion, is how to
defend the position thatthere is only one accuratedescriptionor redescriptionof
events and only one way to select all the pertinentevidence and exclude every-
thing else. The problem of the historian'sselectivity, and its relationshipto the
issue of objectivity,has been curiouslyneglected in the philosophicalliterature.43
If he had done nothingelse, White would be notablefor the boldness with which
he thrustthis to the center of his work.

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.

42. "TowardVarennes,"New LiterarNHistoriy18 (1986), 77-98, especially 87.


43. An exception is the remarkablearticle by J. L. Gorman,"Objectivityand Truthin History,"
Inquiry 17 (1974), 373-397.

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156 RICHARDT. VANN

There is an undercurrentof satisfactionamong White's literaryreadersto see


history among the mighty cast down from their seats. Its epistemological privi-
leges and scientific pretensions seemed to be exposed; literature'struthclaims
were at last taken as seriously as those of history. Some, it is true, were peeved
that historianshad to be recognized as imaginativeand the literaryartistput on
the same footing as the grubber in the archives. However the overwhelming
impressionfrom these hundredsof citations is that studentsof the novel in many
languages-and to a much lesser extent, of the theater-found White's work
comprehensible,provocative, and useful. For everyone whose attitudetowards
Metahistoty seems to have been "Hereis a book about narrativesthat I ought to
show people that I know about" there were several who gave evidence of
thoughtfulreading andjudicious appropriation.And even the namedroppers,on
the peripheryof White's influence, testify to the degree to which his work had
become a culturalicon (except of course to historians).

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

44. L. B. Cebik in "Fiction and History:A Common Core?"InternationalStudies in Philosophy


24 (1992), 47-63 treats this as White's true position, disregardingall his qualifications and dis-
claimers.The article is a tiradeagainstWhite.
45. "Social Change and LiteraryLanguage:The Textualizationof the Past in Thirteenth-Century
Old FrenchHistoriography," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987), 139 n.2.
46. Tropics,106.
47. Ibid., 121.

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THE RECEPTIONOF HAYDENWHITE 157

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

48. "TheValue of Narrativityin the Representationof Reality,"in Content,20.


49. "HistoricalPluralism,"Critical Inquiry 12 ('1986), 484-487.
50. "The Question of Narrativein ContemporaryHistoricalTheory,"in The Contentof the Form,
44. Several of the questionsI have asked are pointed out by Ann Rigney in her excellent "Narrativity
and HistoricalReoresentation."Poetics Todlav12 (1991). 591-605.

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158 RICHARDT. VANN

towardsthese questions, however,seems to be "Quodscripsi, scripsi";his inter-


ests have moved on.
His critics, however,have not. To them White's emphasison the real elements
in historical narratives-shouldn't it be 90% found and only 10% invented?-
and indeed his growing suspicion about narrativizingcould assume alarming
implications in the light of what White was saying about the ideological and
moral importof historicalinterpretation.Narrativizing,he argues,is necessarily
associated with the exercise of political power and inherentlymoralizes histori-
cal discourse.
In a complex and unusuallyadventurousargument,White drawsout the polit-
ical implicationsof much of his previouswork. Partof the "Politicsof Historical
Interpretation" is, among otherthings, a historicalexplanationof what happened
to historicalthoughtonce historywas naturalizedin the academy.The politics of
this "disciplinization"consisted of a "set of negatives"operatingto repress any
sort of utopianthinkingand thereby any revolutionarypolitics, of either Left or
Right, insofar as it made any claim to authorityfrom a knowledge of history.(It
goes without saying that rhetoric was also repressed in the disciplinizing
process.51)
In terms of eighteenth-centuryaesthetics, this development representedthe
suppressionof the "sublime"in the interestsof the "beautiful."The "beautiful,"
in historiography,is the constructionof historiesso well emplottedthatthey give
intellectualsatisfactionand aestheticpleasureto the reader.The "sublime"is the
point of view towardshistory which Schiller describes as arising from contem-
plation of "the uncertainanarchyof the moral world."He evokes "the terrifying
spectacle of change which destroys everythingand creates it anew, and destroys
again"and "thepatheticspectacle of mankindwrestlingwith fate, the irresistible
elusiveness of happiness, confidence betrayed,unrighteousnesstriumphantand
innocence laid low; of these history supplies ample instances, and tragic artimi-
tates them before our eyes."52Evidently only tragic artis capableof representing
the historicalsublime.ForWhite the sublime is the sheermeaninglessnessof his-
tory, and any historiographythat deprives history of that meaninglessness-
whetherMarxistor bourgeois-deprives history "of the kind of meaninglessness
that alone can goad living humanbeings to make their lives differentfor them-
selves and theirchildren,which is to say, to endow theirlives with a meaningfor
which they alone are fully responsible."53
Here again is the NietzscheanWhite. It is often overlooked,he says, "thatthe
conviction that one can make sense of history stands on the same level of epis-
temic plausibility as the conviction that it makes no sense whatsoever."Now if
each conviction is equally plausible, should commitmentto one be simply left to

51. "Politics of HistoricalInterpretation," Content,62-63.


52. Quoted in ibid., 68-69.
53. Ibid., 72. It is curious that children seem to be capable of inheritingthe meanings for which
their parents"alone are fully responsible."

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THE RECEPTIONOF HAYDENWHITE 159

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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160 RICHARDT. VANN

political response,entailinga new interpretationof their history,would be equal-


ly morally responsible.57
Would it, however,be morally responsible (ratherthan offensive) to impute a
meaning to history that justified Nazi racial politics and found the Holocaust
eitherdesirableor nonexistent?The essay concludes without offering more than
a hint of what the answer might be. Conventionalacademic history is whacked
again; the alternativeto it, which "seems plausible" to White, is a refusal to
attempta narrativistmode for the representationof its history's?-truth. Such
an approachmight recuperatethe "historicalsublime"and conceive the histori-
cal record "not as a window through which the past 'as it really was' can be
apprehendedbut rathera wall that must [be] brokenthroughif the "terrorof his-
tory"is to be directly confrontedand the fear it induces dispelled."58
What source of terrorlurks behind this wall? Why would it be easier to con-
front and overcome without any knowledge which we might gain from the his-
toricalrecord?The rhetoricalquestionsand metaphorswhich crowd the last page
and a half of this essay suggest an argumentin the embryonicstage of formula-
tion, not to mention substantiation.Suggestive as they are, it is scarcely surpris-
ing that they would hardly satisfy those who demanded firmer grounds from
which to refute the "revisionists."These demands amount to the most recent
episode in the reception of Hayden White not because they raised any new
argumentsor ones not anticipatedby White himself, but because they elicited
from him, for the first time, reflection on the relationshipbetween emplotment
and historicaltruth.
This, however, was carriedout with his usual elan. Those who stopped read-
ing afterthe fourthpage of his essay "EmplotmentandTruth"would note thathe
had addedpastoraland farce to the possible emplotments,andthat"Wewould be
eminentlyjustified"in rejectinga pastoralor comic emplotmentof the events of
the ThirdReich by "appealingto 'the facts' in orderto dismiss it from the list of
'competingnarratives."'59 To that extent they would be justified in speaking of a
retractionof some of his previous claims. White however seems to have little
interest in this issue, which is soon dropped.His chief effort is to evaluate the
position that the Holocaust cannot be representedin a narrativeat all, or only in
a narrativewhich somehow totally avoided figurativelanguage. He recasts the
problem,using works by Barthesand Derrida,as a questionof what voice histo-
rians' prose should use in writing about such events; and he arguesthat it is not
impossible to make a realisticrepresentationof them, if it is a modernistrealism
employing a "middlevoice" (neitheractive or passive), and requiringa narrative
without a narratorof objective facts, not taking any viewpoint outside the events
it describes, exhibiting a tone of doubt about the interpretationof events seem-
ingly described, open to a wide variety of literarydevices (like interiormono-
logues) and reconceiving conventional notions of time so that, for example,

57. Content, 80.


58. Ibid., 80-81.
59. "Emplotmentand Truth,"40.

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THE RECEPTIONOF HAYDENWHITE 161
events can be seen not as successive episodes of a story, but as randomoccur-
rences. Such a modernism"is still concerned to representreality 'realistically,'
and it still identifies reality with history.But the history which modernismcon-
fronts is not the history envisaged by nineteenth-centuryrealism. And that is
because the social orderwhich is the subjectof this historyhas undergonea rad-
ical transformation...."60 This is hardly the "realism"that realists are seeking;
for White it is both very new and very old. He is now clearly trying out a post-
modernistidea; yet this is much of what he called for twenty-six years earlierin
"TheBurdenof History."
So the question "WhichWhite?"remainssalient in the story of his reception.
Historianswho read him may find little that assists them in the practiceof their
everyday "craft."Extractingfrom him-or imposing upon him-a systematic
philosophy of history is impossible, and it may seem thathe is only usheringthe
flies into new fly-bottles.His forte is fecundity,not fixity, of thought;as Stephen
Bann has written, "White's techniques of analysis are not beyond criticism;
indeed their fertility in generatingargumentand counter-argumentmust be held
to be strongly in their favour." 61 But nobody looking back at what was available
to the "reflectivehistorian"in 1973 can miss the great sea-changewhich White,
more thananybodyelse, has created.One measureof White's impactcan be seen
in two statements. In 1980 John Cannon, editor of The Historian at Work
(London, 1980), recommendedHerbertButterfield'sThe WhigInterpretationof
History as "perhapsthe best introductionto modern historiography."62 And an
eminent philosopherof history,Leon Goldstein, could discuss history purely in
epistemological terms;all that matteredwas for historiansto find out what hap-
pened.After they had done that,all thatremainedwas the unproblematicprocess
of "writingup."If nobody,even in England,could write that way today, we have
HaydenWhite to thank.

Wesleyan University

60. Ibid., 50-51.


61. "Towardsa CriticalHistoriography:Recent Workin Philosophy of History,"Philosophy 56
(1981), 370.
62. Cited by Bann, ibid., 367.

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