[In the following review of Figural Realism, Megill finds flaws in White's rhetorical approach and the interpretative “multiplicity” of his historical perspective.]

Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect is the fourth book by Hayden White in a series that began with the raw, ungainly, and brilliantly suggestive Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973). Taken together, White's books and essays have done much to alter the theory of history. Although his focus on trope and narrative is far from what most historians are interested in, they are all aware of his work. This does not mean that it has been carefully read, but it does mean that in some slightly perverse way it now registers as part of the discipline's “cultural capital,” getting cited in such otherwise unlikely contexts as American Historical Association presidential addresses. Who would have figured it in 1973? But it seems to be so, and perhaps in retrospect it is not surprising.

Most of the essays in Figural Realism will be of only marginal interest to most historians, although parts of the book ought to be of interest at some level to all. White's preoccupations in the collection are heavily literary. The book is best approached if one sees it for what it mainly is—an attempt to make sense of literary modernism's apprehension of history. Of least interest for historians are chapters 6, 7, and 8. Chapters 6 and 7 analyze, respectively, Freud's theory of the dream-work and a passage from Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, in the light of the four “master tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony; chapter 8 reflects on the applicability (or not) of literary theory to music. More interesting for historians is chapter 1, “Literary Theory and Historical Writing,” which amounts to an excellent brief overview and defense of White's approach to the theory of history. Chapter 2, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation,” is the one essay in this collection that many historians will already be familiar with: it was originally published in Saul Friedlander's collection, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Here White discusses the problem of how the Holocaust is to be represented in language. Chapter 3 discusses formalist and contextualist strategies of explanation. Chapter 4 explores the alleged tendency of literary modernism to “derealize” the notion of the singular, specific event, which, White suggests, melts away under the combined pressure of modernist narrative techniques and a surfeit of documentation. Chapter 5 brilliantly discusses Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), which White regards as an exemplification of a specifically modernist historicism.

I shall content myself with making two general points. The first has to do with White's nimbleness and daring (some would say foolhardiness). Time and again White has undertaken to investigate intellectual objects and materials lying far beyond any technical field of competence that he might claim. He is able to do so because he has mastered a nontechnical field of expertise: he is a rhetorician, in the classical sense of a person who has learned how to produce speech that is appropriate to every particular occasion. The rhetorician holds in mind sets of rhetorical commonplaces or topoi (e.g., the master tropes) that are potentially available to be brought to bear on whatever matter lies at hand. The rhetorician also generally does not reject but, instead, works within the conceptual framework of the audience that he or she is addressing. Thus the distinction between formalism and contextualism in chapter 3 came from conference organizers. In chapter 4 White begins with a “commonplace” of contemporary literary criticism, namely, that modernism dissolves away the event. In chapter 6 psychoanalysis is never questioned. And so on. With his topoi and with his willingness to meet his audiences far more than halfway, White is able to speak fluently and interestingly on an astonishingly wide variety of matters.

This way of proceeding has both defects and virtues. On the one hand, rhetorical topoi do seem to embody an inherited wisdom: at any rate, one is quite often surprised at how much they actually do illuminate the objects and discourses to which they are applied. One can also learn from exploring the discursive structure of positions without questioning the positions themselves. On the other hand, one is here engaged in the pursuit of something close to what Giambattista Vico called “vulgar wisdom” (in the sense of “common” or “popular” wisdom). Admittedly, White's vulgar wisdom is often the wisdom of modernist intellectuals, but it is still “vulgar” in the sense that the question of its validity is more or less self-consciously held in abeyance. Thus White proceeds as if the formalist/contextualist distinction were adequate, as if what modernists say about the dissolution of the event were true, and as if Freud's theory of the dream-work actually holds up under empirical scrutiny. White sometimes expresses reservations about these conceptions, but he does not throw them out, because if he did that the speech-generating machine would grind to a halt.

My second point has to do less with White's project than with historiography. White sees historiography itself as an embodiment of vulgar wisdom. Another way of putting this is to say that White is concerned with historiography in its interpretive aspect (and with its descriptive and explanatory aspects insofar as they are matters of interpretation). He leaves aside the argumentative or justificatory aspect, whereby historians, engaging in extended dialectical debate, seek to infer to the best descriptions or explanations. At one point White notes offhandedly that “the precise nature of the relation between arguments and narrativizations in histories is unclear” (p. 182, n. 1). White is interested in the narrativizations (or interpretations) of the past that we offer from the perspective of our constantly changing present perspectives. These narrativizations are multiple, for they involve a continual and potentially infinite “retroactive re-alignment of the Past,” to use Arthur Danto's phrase (Analytical Philosophy of History [New York, 1965], p. 168). White helps us to see both the possibility and the interest of the multiplicity. But on both epistemological and ethical grounds such multiplicity also needs to be winnowed down. One of the roles of the historian (which White, in his sunny optimism and sublime exuberance, is not much interested in exploring) is to engage in such a winnowing.