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THE RECEPTION OF HAYDEN WHITE

RICHARD T. VANN

ABSTRACT

Evaluation of the influence of Hayden White on the theory of history is made difficult by

his preference for the essay form, valued for its experimental character, and by the need

to find comparable data. A quantitative study of citations of his work in English and for-

eign-language journals, 1973-1993, reveals that although historians were prominent

among early readers of Metcahistory, few historical journals reviewed White's two subse- quent collections of essays and few historians-except in Germany-cited them. Those

historians who did tended still to cite Metahistorv and often the parts of it devoted specif-

ically to nineteenth-century historians.

Literary critics, on the other hand, were relatively late to discover White, but during the

"narrative turn" of the 1970s and 1980s his work was important for students of the novel

and the theater. Recognition of it was especially marked in Spanish-speaking countries

and in Germany.

As a result, salient themes of White's later work-the ideological and political import

of narrativization, the "historical sublime," and writing in the "middle voice"-have large-

ly gone unremarked by historians and philosophers. Both these groups have tended to be

irritated by White's bracketing of questions of historical epistemology; some have accused

him of effacing the line between fiction and history, while White's numerous literary read-

ers have generally applauded his tendencies in this direction. White however has consis-

tently maintained that there is a difference, although not the one conventionally postulat-

ed. His exploration of writing in the "middle voice" brings his work full circle, in that it

promises a "modernist" realism appropriate for representing the "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. Editorial introduction to Conteomporcar Histoty and Theory: The Linguistic Turn. and Beonid,

ed. Brian Fay, Philip Pomper, and Richard T. Vann (forthcoming from Blackwell).

2. Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene 0. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca, 1987),

22.

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144 RICHARD T. VANN

A quarter century later, we can see to what extent Mink's mandate has been

heeded. White's challenge to conventional academic history, however, was not

confined to Metahistory, though it is the work most often quoted. He fired off his

first salvo in "The Burden of History" (1966)1 and as late as 19924 was still

expanding on and in fact changing some of his views. White is perhaps the pre-

mier academic essayist of our times, and he uses essays in the fashion of

Montaigne, the inventor of the genre to try things out no less than to inform and

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" more or less unrelated to the theory of historical writing, and some con-

temporary with and closely related to Metahistory. "The Historical Text as

Literary Artifact," one of three most often cited articles, is the best short state-

ment of the theoretical import of Metahistory; but in the introduction which

White wrote for the collection, he gives intimations of moving beyond the stance

he offered there. In particular, the moral stance of existential humanism, so

marked in "The Burden of 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 narrativity and 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 theoretical issues in historiography.

(The other four, theoretically informed to be sure, are devoted to Droysen,

Jameson, Ricoeur, and Foucault.)6 In this collection the fruits of a decade of

reflection since Metahistory are presented, with new emphasis, in particular,

falling on the ideological and political import of historical narratives and on what

White called "the historical sublime."

Apparently not all White's essays turned out 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 "Historical Emplotment and 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," TPjdschrift voor Filosofie 50 (1988), 4.

5. Hans Kellner was especially perceptive to detect this in Metahistorv; see his "A Bedrock of

Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism," History and Theorn, Beiheft 19 (1980), 1-29.

6. White's two essays on Foucault, "Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground," History and

Theory1 12 (1973), 23-54 (reprinted in Tropics) and "Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of

Anti-Humanism," in Stlucturalisni and Since: Fronm Levi Str-auss to Derrida, ed. John Sturrock

(Oxford, 1979), 81-115 (expanded and reprinted in Content) have been frequently cited. Allan Megill

credits him with the major role in introducing Foucault 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-nal of the History of Ideas 48 [1987], 127). Judging from the influence of these arti-

cles, the same might be said for large sections of the American academy generally. It must be said that

White provides a rather idiosyncratic view of Foucault.


THE RECEPTION OF HAYDEN WHITE 145

Change in Literary History,"7 has had a long afterlife. And he has continued to

publish, with undiminished energy, since 1987, although there has not been a

third volume 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 cruder sorts 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 formulations of these positions and not always cautious

ones have appeared. White has given much less attention to this than have his

would-be exegetes, as he almost invariably declines invitations to explain what

he meant by a given passage and as a rule does not defend against attacks on his

views (or what are taken to be his views).

One way to study the reception of Hayden White is to make a quantitative study

of the reactions, by historians reflective or otherwise and others, to the vari-

ous pieces which White has written about historiography and the theory of his-

tory over the past thirty-odd years. My Rezeptionsgeschichte is based on citations

of these works in the journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index and the

Arts and Humanities Citation Index for the period 1973 to 1993.9 This essay

reports on those citations, suggests what they can tell us about White's work, and

concludes with some of the important and still unresolved questions which White

has raised.

To be truly comprehensive such a study would have to include all the com-

ments made about White 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

Structure of Historical Narrative," Clio 1 (1972), 5-20; "The Tasks of Intellectual History," The Monist

58 (1969), 606-630; "The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History," Clio 3 (1973), 35-53

(with critique by W. H. Dray, ibid., 53-76); "The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx

and Flaubert," in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Philadelphia, 1979), 213-229; (with Frank

Manuel), "Rhetoric and History," in Theories of History: Papers of the Clark Librarn Seminar, ed.

Peter Reill (Los Angeles, 1978), 1-25; and "Historical Pluralism," Critical Inquity 12 (1986), 480-

493.

8. Among these later essays are "The Rhetoric of Interpretation," Poetics Today 9 (1988), 253-279;

"New Historicism: A Comment," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989), 293-

302; "'Figuring the Nature of the Times Deceased': Literary Theory and Historical Writing," 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); "Emplotment and Truth," in Probing the Limnits of Representation, ed.

Friedlinder; and "Writing in the Middle Voice," in Schrift, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl

Ludwig Pfeiffer (Munich, 1993). Some of these are considered in Wolf Kansteiner, "Hayden White's

Critique of the Writing of History," History and Theoty 32 (1993), 273-295.

9. The SSCI began publication in 1973, the year in which Metahistory was published; the AHCI in

1976. For historical articles there is considerable but unfortunately not perfect overlap in the cover-

age of the two indexes, so both must be utilized. The terminal date, 1993, is somewhat arbitrary, but

assures that all journals cited are accessible. Coverage of foreign-language journals in AHCI and espe-

cially SSCI is incomplete, but has steadily improved in more recent years.


146 RICHARD T. VANN

way to discover what views, if any, were held by people who never cited or wrote

about him. This has not prevented several writers from characterizing such

views. Most of them say that White has persuaded only a few eccentric histori-

ans. Amusingly, it is social-science-oriented historians, who should be most wary

of venturing generalizations unsupported by comprehensive survey research,

who are willing to say, as does Eric H. Monkkonen, "I suspect that only the tini-

est handful of historians would concur" with White. "0 Only Hans Kellner detect-

ed the "enthusiastic reception Metahistory has had among many historians."1 It

is a good deal easier to find such comments as that the book is "irritating and pre-

tentious" and amounts to "a systematic denuding of the historical consciousness"

which constitutes "the most damaging undertaking ever performed by a histori-

an on his profession."12

Nobody has attempted to estimate how many philosophers or literary critics

White has persuaded. It seems clear, though, that the sample constituted by ref-

erences in journals must overstate the extent and favorability of 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

philosophers do their jobs by criticizing the views of those they cite.

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

ry in those twenty years. That averages over fifty a year; but the series starts very

small (only one in 1974, and still only eighteen in 1978) and rises to close to a

hundred per year in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Carl Schorske has pointed

out that Metahistory "generated" no fewer than fourteen articles just in Histori

and Theory, and a Beiheft as well.'3 Although this work was mentioned more

often in History and Theoty than in any other journal, yet, as might be expected

from such a large number of citations, the diversity of journals in 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 Quantitative History," Historical Methods 17 (1984), 86-94. But then the

proposition with which so few would concur is "There is no difference between history and fiction."

Monkkonen goes on to note that "in the philosophical literature, only a handful have actually put forth

a counter-argument." The view he attributes to White could much more appropriately be located in

Barthes; but, bizarrely, Monkkonen does not believe that Barthes questions "the epistemological

belief of the historian."

1 1. Kellner, "White's Linguistic Humanism," 13.

12. Phyllis Grosskurth, review of Metahistorv in Canadian Historical Review 56 (1975), 193;

Andrew Ezergailis, review of Metahistonr in Clio 5 (Winter 1976), 240. Grosskurth was not totally

hostile, although she believed that White wished to impose "exigent artistic laws" on historical writ-

ing, while Ezergailis, who called the work a tour de force, was on the whole favorable.

13. "History and the Study of Culture," Newi, Literatiy Histon, 21 (Winter, 1990), 417; (reprinted in

History and . . .: Histories within the Husnan Sciences, ed. Ralph Cohen and Michael S. Roth

[Charlottesville, Va., 1995], 382-395).



translated),14 Italian (the first language into which Metahistory was translated),

and Spanish (also based on a Spanish translation of 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

array includes journals in administration science, anthropology, art history, biog-

raphy, communications, film studies, geography, law, psychoanalysis, and the-

ater. But to arrange the journals by discipline is misleading, not only because

there are so many comments on White's work in journals of general interest (like

Partisan Review) 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 directories in order to find out in which departments they were offi-

cially rostered. Philosophers conversant with literature, the occasional historian

interested in philosophy, and-especially-literary scholars disposing, or pur-

porting to dispose of, all these fields were the ones who found reason to draw on

White's writings. Furthermore, scholars interested in White have shown a ten-

dency to migrate from one department to another as indeed White himself did.

The out-migration from history departments has been particularly noticeable; a

tabulation of commentators by discipline would look somewhat different if Hans

Kellner, who has written more about White than has anyone else, is classified as

a historian-as he started out being-or as a professor of English-as he now is.

A diachronic analysis reveals which disciplines confronted White's work, and

when. There were, by my count, seventeen reviews of Metahistory, half of them

in such eminently respectable journals as the American, Canadian, and Pacific

Historical Review, History, and the Journal of Modern History, as well as inter-

disciplinary journals with a substantial historical content 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 Tropics of Discourse, and these

appeared in MLN, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Virginia Quarterly

Review, Notes & Queries, Southern Review, and Contemporary Sociology. The

Journal of Modern History was the only historical journal to 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).16 The Content of the Form was 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 peculiarity of the German reception of White is that his books were not translated in the order

in which they originally appeared; the order was Auch Dichtet Klio oder die Fiktion des Faktischen

(Stuttgart, 1986) followed by Die Bedeutung der Formin: Erzahlstruktur-en in der Geschichtsschreibung

(Frankfurt am Main, 1990) and finally Metahistor7: Die historische Einbildungskraft imn 19.

Jahrhundert in Europa (Frankfurt am Main, 1991).

15. Metahistory (in its German translation) was reviewed as late as 1991 in Zeitschrift flit Geschichtswissens chaft, which was the official East German historical periodical. Although it had been mentioned in previous articles in that journal while it was directed by the Marxist East German

academic establishment, this lengthy and fair-minded review is one small indicator of glasnCost in the

former DDR.

16. Journal of Modern Histori 52 (1980), 124.


148 RICHARD T. VANN

Review. The only historical journals to review it were the American Historical

Review and (bundling it with several other books) the Journal of the History of

Ideas.

Historians took a particularly active part in the early response to Metahistory.

About forty percent of the earliest notices of it and the early articles were made

by historians, who were most of the earlier reviewers; but as these works began

to attract the attention of others, especially literary scholars, the relative and even

the absolute numbers of mentions by historians began to decline. Over all, fewer

than fifteen percent of the comments on White that I found were made by histo-

rians, while the majority were made by literary scholars-more in English, as

might be expected, but a surprising number in Spanish and German.

The purely statistical picture, then, would suggest that some historians read

Metahistory and some of the earlier articles and found occasions to refer to them,

but few indeed devoted the same attention to Tropics of Discourse or The Content

of the Form. They would have had little opportunity to hear of these books, since

there were so few reviews in professional journals. White became much less of a

presence in historical circles, regularly preferring to attend Modern Language

Association conventions rather than those of the American Historical Association

(these used to be held at the same time). In 1987 Allan Megill referred to him as

"something close to a bete noire within the [historical] discipline"; in later years

some people began to refer to him as "outside of the profession" or as a "literary

critic." 17

German historians were less inclined to excommunicate White, and once his

three books were translated, a number of them wrote appreciatively about him.

Even an English historian, Antony Easthope, acknowledged that discussions of

the "linguistic turn," largely owing to White's "magisterial intervention," had

begun there.18 Easthope's article is primarily about an old article by Lawrence

Stone called "The Inflation of Honours." This reading of Stone informed by

White dramatizes how abstract the discussion of his views has become in the

almost complete absence of any historically informed participants. 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, percentage of historians citing White is not in part a

statistical artifact. Since there are so many more literary scholars than historians,

there are that many more people "at risk," as statisticians say, of having read and

cited White. I cannot think of any statistical technique to eliminate this possibil-

ity, but neither can I think of a plausible argument that what the statistics suggest

is not real. The work of Hayden White has had a remarkable influence outside the

profession, making him perhaps the most widely quoted historian of our time.

But historians have almost entirely tuned out, especially historians in the United

States (if it were not for the interest in White in the German historical profession

17. Megill, "Reception of Foucault," 127.

18. "Romancing the Stone: History-Writing and Rhetoric," Social Histoty 18 (1993), 235-249.



from the late 1980s, the anemic figures for historians would have been even more

unimpressive). Furthermore, even when American historians have quoted White

in the last few years, they are still quoting Metahistory, rather than the essays

which make up Tropics of Discourse and especially The Content of the Form.

And within Metahistory, they are disproportionately attracted to those bits which

discuss the great nineteenth-century historians.

Except for those who take particular pleasure in tabulations or catalogues, the

main interest in surveying the reception of Hayden White is observing the vari-

ety not just of responses, but of borrowings, adaptations, and attempted para-

phrases. The first review of Metahistory enunciated a position, if not an argu-

ment, that recurred frequently in the observations of historians."9 Its author was

Gordon Leff, the author of The Tyranny of Concepts (University, Ala., 1969).

Leff begins, a bit surprisingly, by saying that "few would now dispute" that there

is an "indispensable metahistorical foundation in all historical thinking." He

identifies the novelty and interest of the book as White's location of this, beyond

any particular ideological standpoint, "in the very linguistic or poetic image

which 'prefigures' all conceptualization." Historical discourse thus "owes its

modes to the particular linguistic imagery in which historical events are initially

depicted." This sentence is not free of difficulties, but we may assume that "lin-

guistic imagery" is a translation of "tropes" and that the "initial depiction" here

is that of historians rather than the evidence about the events with which they

must work.20 Leff here avoids a common tendency to emphasize White's adapta-

tion of Northrop Frye'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 confronting White's treatment of actual nineteenth-century

historians that "latent skepticism" will likely "turn to manifest disbelief." The

problem is that White has taken a good idea "beyond what most historians would

regard as its legitimate limits" and "reduced history to a species of poetics or lin-

guistics." Even as a formal analysis, he concludes, Metahistory leaves out too

much, "not least the criteria which govern historical knowledge and what is pecu-

liar to it."

It would be unfair to demand substantiation of these claims from a short book

review, but its rhetorical moves do require some notice. The most obvious is the

invocation of "the historical reader" and "most historians" as authoritative. Then

there is the reference to the unspecified supplement that history has which

species of "poetics" and "linguistics" do not. White's application of the word

"poetic" to historical thought, as we shall see, caused considerable offense; Leff

is however unusual in claiming that history was thus "reduced" to poetics (rather

than poetry). It is perfectly fair to note that White has omitted reference to "cri-

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

20. Another difficulty is the ambiguity of "initially depicted." As Arthur Danto usefully reminds

us, historical events always come to us already "under some description." This would make the "ini-

tial depiction" reside in the sources, rather than in the historian's poetic imagination.


150 RICHARD T. VANN

teria governing historical knowledge"-and apparently only historical knowl-

edge. However, even supposing that White or anyone else knows exactly what

these are, his manifest purpose was to understand the great historical works of

the nineteenth century not as bundles of truth claims (many of which have long

since been falsified) but as books still worth reading, having "died into art."

Two other early reviewers, John Clive and Peter Burke, added a count to his-

torians' indictments of White: obscurity. It is very unlikely that these were the

only ones who had difficulty understanding Metahistory; but Burke went so far

as to claim that White was writing "like his heroes Vico and Frye [!] . . . in what

is very nearly a private language."' Clive complained that its style "lacks lucid-

ity and elegance to a degree" and calls its frequent neologisms "monstrosities.

What is remarkable in Clive's review, however, is its openness to White's case.

Whereas Burke had asserted that for White "the historical work" was "essential-

ly the same as a work of fiction, in that it is a verbal structure which represents

reality," Clive warned against too rash a rejection of the book's principal thesis,

that "what is crucial to works of history, no less than works of fiction, is the mode

of 'emplotment' chosen by the author," which in turn depends on the prefigura-

tive language-once again the word "trope" is avoided-that historians "bring to

facts and events as they seek them out, that is, before they even begin the task of

casting them into a finished narrative." This is surely a better account of White's

thesis than that offered either by Leff or Burke. Clive goes on to make more con-

cessions: that historians have to use language to relate the results of research; that

there is a relationship (perhaps partly unconscious) between form and content;

and even that "ordinary as well as great historians" are "quite capable of pre-

senting 'the same events' not only from different ideological points of view but

also from different literary modes-as for example, tragically or ironically."

Other than treatments by historians who were White's students, this is probably

the most sympathetic account he received from his fellow professionals.

We may admire Clive's generosity while wondering whether he had either

time or space in a timely short book 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 reviewers may have avoided using the word "tropes" is

they did not understand what they were. If so, they had plenty of company.

Scholars as well acquainted with literary theory as Fredric Jameson and

Dominick LaCapra confessed themselves uncertain about how "deep" in con-

sciousness the tropes are; their relationship to emplotments, modes of argument,

21. Review of Metahistoiy in History 60 (1975), 83.

22. Review of Metahistorv in Jolrunal of Modern History 47 (1975), 642-43. Sometimes yester-

day's monstrosity quickly becomes acceptable, like White's coinage "emplotment."

23. "Philosophy and Theory of History,"' in International Handbook of Historical Studies, ed. Georg Iggers and Harold T. Parker (Westbrook, Conn., 1979), 25.



and ideological implications; and whether they form any necessary historical or

logical sequence. Others wondered whether the tropes are really analytically dis-

tinguishable. Metonymy and synecdoche, for example, can slide into one anoth-

er,24 and both can be seen as species of metaphor. Irony always threatens to burst

any bounds and become a "super-trope," either engulfing the others or undercut-

ting the entire typology.25 John Nelson has argued that tropes as White saw them

were not mere linguistic figures (as most early reviewers assumed) 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 distinguishable from ideologies)?26

No one doubts that whatever their 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

entirely unconsciously. If not, is it appropriate to characterize them as forming a

"deep structure"? If so, how can White's emancipatory program, urging the his-

torian to act as a "free artist"27 and choose some trope other than irony, be imple-

mented?

White's version of a Fourfold Path allows sixty-four possible combinations;

but some have an "elective affinity" with one another and others appear unfeasi-

ble. It appears to be impossible to deduce the operative trope from the mode of

emplotment, which may indeed be the most superficial level of a historical text.28

The reason for this is that only the least imaginative historians (such as Ranke)

line up everything according to the elective affinities. It is apparently the element

of tension introduced by discordant elements which accounts for the literary

power of the greatest historical texts; but inevitably this makes any claim about

the relationships among them, or the priority of the tropes, tenuous. This is curi-

ously illustrated by an attempted "empirical" test of tropology by Daniel

Ostrowski in respect of four Russian historians.29 Ostrowski had 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, "The Inflatable Trope as Narrative T heory:

Structures or Allegory," Diacr itics (Spring 1981), 14-28.

26. See John S. Nelson, "Tropal History and the Social Sciences: Reflections on [Nancy] Struever's

Remarks," Histori and Theory, Beiheft 19 (1980), 80-10 1. Struever's essay was "Topics in History,"

ibid., 66-79.

27. Metahistory, 372.

28. Carroll, "On Tropology" argues that the four levels are nested as follows: first emplotment, then

mode of explanation, by which the historian explains in a deductive-nomological argument what the

point of the emplotment is. Then comes ideological implication, which combines elements of the first

two. The tropes are on the deepest level.

29. "A Metatheoretical Analysis: Hayden White and Four Narratives of 'Russian' History," Clio 19

(1990), 215-235. Ostrowski thinks it a "lapse" in the response to White's book that nobody had tried

such an empirical test before.


152 RICHARD T. VANN

affinities" in showing that the theory "works" for three of the four historians

"tested."30

Inevitably, historically minded critics were tempted to speculate, as did Fredric

Jameson, about what "mechanisms of historical selection" assure that some com-

binations of elements in his combinatoire, but not all, come into existence.31 Such

speculations seem to be authorized when White presents what look for all the

world like historical explanations for developments in nineteenth-century histo-

riography, especially the effect of the professionalization of history. He also

traces a cycle of tropes from eighteenth-century irony (with Gibbon as chief rep-

resentative), through metonymy (Marx), metaphor (Nietzsche), and finally irony

again (Croce). While philosophers exemplify the succession of tropes (except for

synecdoche, for which no representative was found worthy), the historians are

treated in terms of emplotments: Michelet (Romance), Ranke (Comedy),

Tocqueville (Tragedy), and Burckhardt (Satire). These are hard to array in neat

chronological order, 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-

torians in terms of their determining tropes further complicates the question how

they are related to emplotments, explanation, and ideology.

Another, eventually more fruitful, approach to explaining the tropes was sug-

gested by historian Philip Pomper. Pomper, surveying the uncertainties sur-

rounding the choice and succession of tropes, argued that White must have had

an implicit psychological theory accounting for 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.32 White 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 adapts is 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 "poetic logic" was typical of children and "primitive" people. In the first

year and a half of life, Piaget asserted, infants have a sensorimotor existence

which, although it could not be characterized as metaphorical thinking, never-

theless constituted "living of the mode of similitude." After this "metaphorical"

experience, the developing child conceives the world successively in ways which

could be seen as metonymical, then synecdochic, and finally reaches the stage of

rational thought, which is inevitably ironic. "If Piaget has provided an ontoge-

netic base for this pattern" of the succession of tropes, White concludes, "he adds

another more positivistic confirmation of its archetypal nature." But, lest White

be thought to be seeking positivistic support for his position, he quickly adds that

30. Ibid., 227. The four historians include Richard Pipes and the "Short Course" of the Soviet

Communist Party.

31. "Figural Relativism, or the Poetics of Historiography [review of Metahistorv]," Diacritics 6

(1976), 2-9. 32. "Typologies and Cycles in Intellectual History," History and 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, although obviously related to the theory of tropes,

could more readily be understood, and attacked, by analytical philosophy,

whether wielded by historians or 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 "powder of

facts" which Langlois and Seignobos in the heyday of positivism called upon the

historian to fit to the laws governing them-unless sociologists had to do this job

for them.34 White, while rejecting the positivist program for endowing this 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 frequently use, in spite of its being a translation of "givens"-as

analogous to those of science. But, says Andrew Ezergailis, the data of history

have already been "touched by the purposes of men [and women]." Even though

these purposes sometimes miscarry, so that history is littered with the unintend-

ed consequences of actions, Ezergailis regards these purposes as already "prefig-

uring" the data.35 This rather cryptic statement foreshadows much more devel-

oped arguments by David CaiT and 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 presented as "an inert object to be animated by the shaping mind of the

historian." This, he claims, ignores the degree to which the historical record is

already processed and simply substitutes an idealistic event for a positive one.36

Eugene 0. Golob remarked that one of White's most notorious contentions, that

different historians can stress different aspects of "the same historical field" or

the "same set or sequence of events," suggests a quasi-positivist sense 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; LaCapra believes that in Tropics of Discourse White was repress-

ing knowledge of discoveries by Derrida which were actually "inside" him.38

33. "Introduction," Tropics, 7-13. White acknowledges that Piaget "would not appreciate being put

in this line of thinking."

34. The reference to the "raw, unprocessed" record is from "Structure of Historical Narrative."

35. Review of Metahistory in Clio, 245.

36. Review of Tropics, MLN 93 (1978), 1037-1043, especially 1042.

37. "The Irony of Nihilism," History and Theon>, Beiheft 19 (1980), 55-68. He refers to

Metahistory, 274.

38. LaCapra refers specifically to the essay "The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary

Theory," which criticizes he says "caricatures" the thought of Georges Poulet, Barthes, Foucault,

and Derrida.


154 RICHARD T. VANN

Carr and Ricoeur (and perhaps Ezergailis) write from a phenomenological stand-

point. From yet another, and in some ways opposite, position Alfred Louch

argued for the existence of historical "facts" independent of any discourse or the-

ory about them or of any narrative presentation of 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 consistent believ-

er that historical "facts" are shaped by the structure of historical discourse and

thus historical writing is not to be judged by its representation but by its "form

of execution."39 For White, the importance of the tropes is that through them the

historian "prefigures the historical field" and decides what shall count as facts.

But, Louch objects, this is to conclude that "facts are theory-dependent because

our theory makes it clear what counts as relevant evidence." However this does-

n't account for the existence of the fact or evidence. He illustrates the 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-cellar into

existence, nor is passing the pepper just 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 consideration that guns and salt-

cellars pose different hermeneutic challenges than the texts historians usually

have to deal with Louch starts his analysis at a point when a murder investiga-

tion has already been decided upon (inadvertently making a perfect connection

between narrativization and power). White can afford to stop his analysis at that

point, because his interest is in what makes historians decide what sort of inves-

tigation they are embarked upon; and Louch cannot claim that seeing guns

always implies murder investigations.

The most under-analyzed term White uses is "event." Although he talks about

"the same set of events" ensconced in different narrative accounts 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 Renaissance an 'event'? Are there basic

or unit events, which cannot be divided into smaller events?" He goes on to reca-

pitulate Arthur Danto'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-warranted in writing about the very same "event" in dif-

ferent ways. White is apparently saying that there are indefinitely many ways of

redescribing events, but he has not produced any argument that there is a sub-

strate of unit or basic events that can exhibit some sort of sameness no matter

how variously they are redescribed.

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

40. Idein.

41. Historical Understanding, 23.



I know of no example where more than one account has ever been offered of

exactly the same set of events-no matter how events are conceived. Ann Rigney

has offered an analysis of various historical treatments of what she defines as a

single event-Louis XVI's flight to Varennes in 1791. Aware of Mink's treatment

of this topic, she notes how different historians have included more or less detail

(about "events" that made up the larger event). Though events could figure in dif-

ferent stories, there was no consensus on the redescription of even this one

"event"; and the historians were constrained not only by the evidence, but also,

importantly, by what previous historians had said about the subject. This makes

the likelihood of historians emplotting differently the same set of events even

more remote.42

Few historians would be surprised by this outcome; but most would also wish

for some escape from the relativistic conclusions that White draws. The problem

with his position is that although there may be indefinitely many redescriptions

of events, how do we determine the criteria for discrimination among them-an

activity in which historians frequently engage? But the problem for the historical

realist, or the advocate of "faithfulness to the facts" as a criterion, is how to

defend the position that there is only one accurate description or redescription of

events and only one way to select all the pertinent evidence and exclude every-

thing else. The problem of the historian's selectivity, and its relationship to the

issue of objectivity, has been curiously neglected in the philosophical literature.43

If he had done nothing else, White would be notable for the boldness with which

he thrust this to the center of his work.

The years after the appearance of Tropics of Discourse in 1978 saw the remark-

able extension of White's influence far beyond the relatively small number of his-

torians, philosophers, and literary critics who had quickly recognized its impor-

tance. In the years from 1973 to 1980 serious critiques predominated; from that

time onward White's turn towards narrativity and his demonstration of the fea-

tures shared by histories and novels were picked up by hundreds of literary crit-

ics and others interested in what became a veritable "narrative turn" in the human

sciences. A good many of these references were extremely superficial;

Metahistory, in particular, would be listed among "works cited" in a bibliogra-

phy at the end of an article-but it wasn't. Quite a few of his readers evidently

were introduced to Northrop Frye's plot-types and Kenneth Burke's and Vico's

tropes through White. The titles of his articles were mixed up (granted, many do

sound similar); his first name was misspelled (Haydn being my favorite); and

more seriously, he was characterized both as a structuralist and 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. "Toward Varennes," New LiterarN Historiy 18 (1986), 77-98, especially 87.

43. An exception is the remarkable article by J. L. Gorman, "Objectivity and Truth in History,"

Inquiry 17 (1974), 373-397.


156 RICHARD T. VANN

There is an undercurrent of satisfaction among White's literary readers to see

history among the mighty cast down from their seats. Its epistemological privi-

leges and scientific pretensions seemed to be exposed; literature's truth claims

were at last taken as seriously as those of history. Some, it is true, were peeved

that historians had to be recognized as imaginative and the literary artist put on

the same footing as the grubber in the archives. However the overwhelming

impression from these hundreds of citations is that students of 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 attitude towards

Metahistoty seems to have been "Here is a book about narratives that I ought to

show people that I know about" there were several who gave evidence of

thoughtful reading and judicious appropriation. And even the namedroppers, on

the periphery of White's influence, testify to the degree to which his work had

become a cultural icon (except of course to historians).

Much of the interest in White's later work has focused on two essays in The

Content of the Form.: "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of 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 "real events."44 The second placed such an emphasis on

the political or ideological import of narrative form, without providing any foun-

dation for rejecting any interpretation, that White was attacked for licensing odi-

ous interpretations of history, and condemned for inattentiveness to the relation-

ship of emplotment and truth in historiography.

White's discussion of the referentiality of historical narratives led some read-

ers to concur with Gabrielle Spiegel that he, like Barthes and Frank Kermode,

"sees historical narrative as 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 "historical discourse should be viewed as a

sign system which points in two directions simultaneously: first, toward the set

of events it purports to describe and second, toward the generic story form to

which it tacitly likens the set in order to disclose its formal coherence...46 A

year later he was even more explicit, beginning "The Fictions of Factual

Representation" by granting that historical events differ from fictional events "in

the ways that it has been conventional to characterize their differences since

Aristotle."47 As for the reality of the past, of course there is no conclusive answer

to Bertrand Russell's famous argument that 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?" International Studies in Philosophy

24 (1992), 47-63 treats this as White's true position, disregarding all his qualifications and dis-

claimers. The article is a tirade against White.

45. "Social Change and Literary Language: The Textualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century

Old French Historiography," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987), 139 n.2.

46. Tropics, 106.

47. Ibid., 121.



Times; however this is an argument that only solipsists could love. But the "real

past" cannot be known to be such by unmediated acquaintance; "in any narrative

account of real events . . . these events are real not because they occurred but

because, first, they were remembered and second, they are capable of finding a

place in a chronologically ordered sequence."48 Had White inserted "just" after

"not" in this sentence, it would have been a truism. We could never have any evi-

dence of something nobody remembered (at least long enough to write down

something about it) and in a historical narrative there 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 occurred to figure in a historical narrative.

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

"Historical Pluralism" (1986) White sketches a "pantextualist pluralist" position

in which "the whole problem of truth is set aside in favor of a view of historical

representation which leaves it virtually indistinguishable from fiction."

Characterizations such as "virtually indistinguishable from 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 occurred than of the desire to determine what 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 historians might establish that events occurred, White has never abandoned

the view that the contents of historical narratives are as much invented as found

(which also means as much found as invented). And the more obvious the fact

thrown in the face of the relativist-"You surely can't deny that John Kennedy

was assassinated on November 22, 1963?"-the more weight falls on the mean-

ing of that event for different groups.

"The Value of Narrativity" is the most often cited of all White's essays. It

afforded a splendid introduction to narratology while at the same time staking out

a provocative set of propositions. It also left many questions for historians to

think about. How is the ideological production effected by narrative the central

theme of Content of the Form-achieved? (By subject matter? By the form of the

content, or the content of the form? By the form of the representation? Or all of

these?) Are all narrative histories equally effective? If not, what grounds are there

for preferring one to another-a judgment historians make all the time? How do

systems of meaning production in historical narratives get "tested against the

capacity of any set of 'real' events to yield to such systems"?50 White's attitude

48. "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in Content, 20.

49. "Historical Pluralism," Critical Inquiry 12 ('1986), 484-487.

50. "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory," in The Content of the Form,

44. Several of the questions I have asked are pointed out by Ann Rigney in her excellent "Narrativity

and Historical Reoresentation." Poetics Todlav 12 (1991). 591-605.


158 RICHARD T. VANN

towards these questions, however, seems to be "Quod scripsi, scripsi"; his inter-

ests have moved on.

His critics, however, have not. To them White's emphasis on the real elements

in historical narratives-shouldn't it be 90% found and only 10% invented?-

and indeed his growing suspicion about narrativizing could assume alarming

implications in the light of what White was saying about the ideological and

moral import of historical interpretation. Narrativizing, he argues, is necessarily

associated with the exercise of political power and inherently moralizes histori-

cal discourse.

In a complex and unusually adventurous argument, White draws out the polit-

ical implications of much of his previous work. Part of the "Politics of Historical

Interpretation" is, among other things, a historical explanation of what happened

to historical thought once history was naturalized in the academy. The politics of

this "disciplinization" consisted of a "set of negatives" operating to repress any

sort of utopian thinking and thereby any revolutionary politics, of either Left or

Right, insofar as it made any claim to authority from a knowledge of history. (It

goes without saying that rhetoric was also repressed in the disciplinizing

process.51)

In terms of eighteenth-century aesthetics, this development represented the

suppression of the "sublime" in the interests of the "beautiful." The "beautiful,"

in historiography, is the construction of histories so well emplotted that they give

intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure to the reader. The "sublime" is the

point of view towards history which Schiller describes as arising from contem-

plation of "the uncertain anarchy of the moral world." He evokes "the terrifying

spectacle of change which destroys everything and creates it anew, and destroys

again" and "the pathetic spectacle of mankind wrestling with fate, the irresistible

elusiveness of happiness, confidence betrayed, unrighteousness triumphant and

innocence laid low; of these history supplies ample instances, and tragic art imi-

tates them before our eyes."52 Evidently only tragic art is capable of representing

the historical sublime. For White the sublime is the sheer meaninglessness of his-

tory, and any historiography that deprives history of that meaninglessness-

whether Marxist or bourgeois-deprives history "of the kind of meaninglessness

that alone can goad living human beings to make their lives different for them-

selves and their children, which is to say, to endow their lives with a meaning for

which they alone are fully responsible."53

Here again is the Nietzschean White. It is often overlooked, he says, "that the

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 commitment to one be simply left to

51. "Politics of Historical Interpretation," Content, 62-63. 52. Quoted in ibid., 68-69.

53. Ibid., 72. It is curious that children seem to be capable of inheriting the meanings for which

their parents "alone are fully responsible."



a coin toss, or to a choice that can only be arbitrary? A visionary politics, which

White obviously prefers, "can proceed only on the latter conviction."54

At this point White takes the argument further, confronting the hardest chal-

lenge historians could pose against his theories: Nazism and its politics of geno-

cide as "a crucial test case for determining the ways in which any human or

social science may construe its 'social responsibilities' as a discipline productive

of a certain kind of knowledge." He admits that ideas of historical sublimity like

those of Schiller and Nietzsche are conventionally associated with fascist

regimes-with philosophers like Heidegger and Gentile and the "intuitions of

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 historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its 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.56 How, for one, to counter the "revi-

sionist" argument that the Holocaust never occurred-"a claim . . . as morally

offensive as it is intellectually bewildering [because the "revisionists" used all

the apparatus of historical scholarship]"? Despite the claims of Pierre Vidal-

Naquet, not by following the same "rules of historical method" that the "revi-

sionists" ostentatiously imitate, nor by stigmatizing as an "untruth" rather than a

lie the "quite scandalous exploitation" of the Holocaust that Vidal-Naquet attrib-

utes to Zionist ideologists, who represent the Holocaust as the inevitable result

of living in the Diaspora, thus claiming that its victims would have become

Israeli citizens. Vidal-Naquet calls 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 treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank" is a result

of a distorted conception of Jewish or European history? It is a morally respon-

sible response to the meaninglessness of history, just as an effective Palestinian

54. Ibid., 73. In fn. 12 to this article (p. 227) White registers" an item of personal belief: that rev-

olutions "always misfire" (an apparent covering law) and that in advanced industrial societies, they

are likely only to strengthen oppressive powers. The "socially responsible" interpreter, he continues,

"can do two things: (1 ) expose the fictitious nature of any political program based on an appeal to 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 (perhaps utopian after 1989) certainly a moral

commitment rather than an endorsement of the Marxian master historical narrative.

55. Ibid., 74-76.

56. Besides Ginzburg (fn. 4) see Aviezer Tucker, "A Theory of Historiography as a Pre-Science,"

Studies in Histoiryv and Philosolphy( of Science 24 (1993). 656, fn. 48 and Gregory F. Goekjian,

"Genocide and Historical Desire," Semnioticca 83 (1991), 212-215. Jean-Franqois Lyotard raises the ante in this debate by concluding, after a discussion of "revisionist" historians, that the historian "must

then break with the monopoly over history granted to 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 marks the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned."

("The Differend, the Referent, and the Proper Name," Diacr-itics 14 [1984], 4-14.)


160 RICHARD T. VANN

political response, entailing a new interpretation of their history, would be equal-

ly morally responsible.57

Would it, however, be morally responsible (rather than offensive) to impute a

meaning to history that justified Nazi racial politics and found the Holocaust

either desirable or nonexistent? The essay concludes without offering more than

a hint of what the answer might be. Conventional academic history is whacked

again; the alternative to it, which "seems plausible" to White, is a refusal to

attempt a narrativist mode for the representation of its history's?-truth. Such

an approach might recuperate the "historical sublime" and conceive the histori-

cal record "not as a window through which the past 'as it really was' can be

apprehended but rather a wall that must [be] broken through if the "terror of his-

tory" is to be directly confronted and the fear it induces dispelled."58

What source of terror lurks behind this wall? Why would it be easier to con-

front and overcome without any knowledge which we might gain from the his-

torical record? The rhetorical questions and metaphors which crowd the last page

and a half of this essay suggest an argument in the embryonic stage 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

arguments or ones not anticipated by White himself, but because they elicited

from him, for the first time, reflection on the relationship between emplotment

and historical truth.

This, however, was carried out with his usual elan. Those who stopped read-

ing after the fourth page of his essay "Emplotment and Truth" would note that he

had added pastoral and farce to the possible emplotments, and that "We would be

eminently justified" in rejecting a pastoral or comic emplotment of the events of

the Third Reich by "appealing to 'the facts' in order to dismiss it from the list of

'competing narratives."'59 To that extent they would be justified in speaking of a

retraction of 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 represented in a narrative at all, or only in

a narrative which somehow totally avoided figurative language. He recasts the

problem, using works by Barthes and Derrida, as a question of what voice histo-

rians' prose should use in writing about such events; and he argues that it is not

impossible to make a realistic representation of them, if it is a modernist realism

employing a "middle voice" (neither active or passive), and requiring a narrative

without a narrator of objective facts, not taking any viewpoint outside the events

it describes, exhibiting a tone of doubt about the interpretation of events seem-

ingly described, open to a wide variety of literary devices (like interior mono-

logues) and reconceiving conventional notions of time so that, for example,

57. Content, 80.

58. Ibid., 80-81.

59. "Emplotment and Truth," 40.



events can be seen not as successive episodes of a story, but as random occur-

rences. Such a modernism "is still concerned to represent reality 'realistically,'

and it still identifies reality with history. But the history which modernism con-

fronts is not the history envisaged by nineteenth-century realism. And that is

because the social order which is the subject of this history has undergone a 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-

modernist idea; yet this is much of what he called for twenty-six years earlier in

"The Burden of History."

So the question "Which White?" remains salient in the story of his reception.

Historians who read him may find little that assists them in the practice of their

everyday "craft." Extracting from him-or imposing upon him-a systematic

philosophy of history is impossible, and it may seem that he is only ushering the

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 generating argument and counter-argument must be held

to be strongly in their favour." 61 But nobody looking back at what was available

to the "reflective historian" in 1973 can miss the great sea-change which White,

more than anybody else, has created. One measure of White's impact can be seen

in two statements. In 1980 John Cannon, editor of The Historian at Work

(London, 1980), recommended Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of

History as "perhaps the best introduction to modern historiography."62 And an

eminent philosopher of history, Leon Goldstein, could discuss history purely in

epistemological terms; all that mattered was for historians to find out what hap-

pened. After they had done that, all that remained was the unproblematic process

of "writing up." If nobody, even in England, could write that way today, we have

Hayden White to thank.

Wesleyan University

60. Ibid., 50-51.

61. "Towards a Critical Historiography: Recent Work in Philosophy of History," Philosophy 56 (1981), 370.

62. Cited by Bann, ibid., 367.


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