SOURCE: “Narrativity and Historical Representation,” in Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 591–605.

[In the following excerpt, Rigney examines questions of narrativity in The Content of the Form and concludes that White's historiographic interpretation does not sustain a persuasive argument.]

In an exuberant passage written in 1966, Roland Barthes celebrated the universality of narrative (le récit). Narrative may be manifested in any number of different forms, he wrote, and may be communicated through any number of different media (film, painting, theatre), but it is to be found in every culture, at every period, in every place: “international, transhistorique, transculturel, le récit est là, comme la vie” (1977 [1966]: 8). The recognition that “narrative” is a cultural phenomenon extending far beyond the realm of literary genres opens up exciting prospects for narratological exploration. But the price of such narratological expansionism may be a corresponding difficulty in defining the specific object of study. If narrative is as pervasive as human life itself, then where does one draw the line between what belongs to the phenomenon “narrative” and what does not? …

Hayden White, author of Metahistory, 1973, and Tropics of Discourse (1978), is the theorist who has done more, perhaps, than anyone else within the English-speaking world to stimulate the narrativist recognition that historical representation, since it takes place through language, is always a semiotic activity and not merely a reproductive one (see Ankersmit 1986). With the Rankean myth as his principal opponent, he has argued forcefully and successfully that historical works are not mirrors held up to reality, but “verbal artifacts” which generate new meanings (White 1978: 122). A key figure bridging two disciplines, White has helped to open up history-writing as a field of discursive studies. At the same time, he has undoubtedly played an important role in what Berkhofer (1988) calls the “challenge of poetics to (normal) historical practice,” contributing to the greater awareness shown by present-day historians of language's role in the writing of history and in the constitution of the primary record (see, e.g., LaCapra 1985; Struever 1985).

Central to White's approach to historical works as “verbal artifacts” is his controversial claim in Metahistory that historical interpretation is always “tropologically” grounded in one of the four principal tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or irony). But another important aspect of his approach is its concern with the semiotic function of narrative structures or, more precisely, of “modes of emplotment.” White has argued that nineteenth-century historians, in representing chronologically related events, gave them the aspect of stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, and furthermore, shaped them into one of the four master plots which, according to Frye, are dominant in our literary culture (tragedy, comedy, romance, satire). It is this question of narrative form which has taken center stage in White's most recent collection of essays: The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation.

The eight essays making up this collection reflect the evolution in White's thinking over the past ten years and his response to theoretical developments in both historiography and literary studies. Some of the essays are reviews of particular works (e.g., Ricoeur's Temps et récit, 1983–85, or Jameson's The Political Unconscious, 1981); others take the form of a critical introduction to a particular theorist (e.g., Droysen or Foucault) or to a theoretical debate (“The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory”); still others are original discussions of particular theoretical issues (“The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” and “The Politics of Historical Interpretation”). The dialogic form of many of the essays makes it difficult to disentangle White's own standpoint from that of the other theorists whose work he is considering, and not much has been done to streamline the different essays for republication in book form. As a result, it is difficult to outline a single argument or thesis in the book as a whole, and the reader is sometimes left to struggle with shifts of terminology and perspective.

But what undoubtedly links the different essays together is a recurring concern with the nature and, above all, the ideological function of narrative form in the representation of historical processes. As White explains in his preface, he starts from the fact that historical works are “semiological apparatuses” (p. x) and that narrative representation offers particular means for the production of meaning. He goes on to suggest, furthermore, that narrative offers a particularly effective means for the production of ideology; in other words, that when narrative is used in the writing of history, it is not only a way to produce meaning of a specifically social kind, but it also has a particular rhetorical force that guarantees the individual subject's acceptance of that meaning. It is this specifically ideological function of narrative which White sets out to investigate under the umbrella title, “the content of the form” (p. xi). Adapting Althusser's definition of ideology and invoking the authority of semiological theories of discourse (especially Kristeva's), White proposes that narrative is

a particularly effective system of discursive meaning production by which individuals can be taught to live a distinctively “imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence,” that is to say, an unreal but meaningful relation to the social formations in which they are indentured to live out their lives and realize their destinies as social subjects.

(P. x)

In thus proposing that there is a privileged link between the use of narrative in historical representation and the production of ideology, White places enormous weight on the “content of the form” of narrative communication. As initially formulated in the preface, then, his proposal raises a number of related questions to which the rest of the book could be expected to provide an answer: (1) How does narrative in general, and historical narrative in particular, function as a system of meaning production? (2) If narrative is a “particularly effective means” for the production of ideology, then how is this effect to be explained, that is, on the basis of its subject matter, the form of the content, the form of the representation, or a combination of all of these? (3) To what extent is this effect endemic to the use of narrative as such, or to what extent is it bound up with the application of narrative conventions to the representation of real events of collective significance? (4) Are all narrative histories necessarily effective in the same way or to the same extent? (5) If so, then what alternatives, if any, are open to historians?

Echoing a number of other theorists (notably, Mink 1978), White insists that events in themselves are “meaningless” and without structure, that they “do not offer themselves as stories” (p. 4) which naturally form coherent, temporal wholes with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, he argues, the same set of events may be emplotted in any number of ways, depending on the repertoire of story types available to the historian (p. 44). If a partnership between “narrative” and “historiography” is inevitable, then, this cannot be due to the “story-like” nature of the events which are the historian's object; any such partnership would seem to spring from the conventions of historiographical discourse or from what White sees as our natural “impulse to narrate” (p. 1). Yet, if we have a natural impulse to narrate, the evidence presented by White also suggests that this narrative impulse has not always been exercised in relation to real events or put to the service of the historiographical function (a function which White, along with Ricoeur, seems to link to our making sense of temporality). For, in the opening essay, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” some alternative modes for making sense of temporal experience are considered: namely, the annals and chronicles which preceded the development of modern narrative history (“history proper”). In the same essay and in the following one, White also briefly refers to certain modern historians and modern “annalists” who have looked for other alternatives and “refused narrative” (p. 2).

Although White thus seems to suggest that alternatives to narrative were possible in the past and are theoretically possible in the future, he is generally not very clear on the real nature of the choices open to the historian. And at least part of the problem lies in the uncertainty surrounding White's central category, “narrative.” As White uses it, the term's meaning seems to range from the very general and inclusive to the very specific: from meaning production in general (“a refusal of narrative indicates an absence or refusal of meaning itself” [p. 2]), to the representation of a well-made story (see p. 24), to the representation of a well-made story emplotted according to one of the master plots or story types (see p. 44). The uncertainties surrounding the term “narrative” can perhaps best be illustrated by his treatment of those historians who “refused” narrative:

Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Huizinga, and Braudel, to mention only the most notable masters of modern historiography, refused narrative in certain of their historiographical works, presumably on the assumption that the meaning of the events with which they wished to deal did not lend itself to representation in the narrative mode. They refused to tell a story about the past, or rather, they did not tell a story with well-marked beginning, middle, and end phases; they did not impose upon the processes that interested them the form that we normally associate with storytelling. While they certainly narrated their accounts of the reality that they perceived, or thought they perceived, to exist within or behind the evidence they had examined, they did not narrativize that reality, did not impose upon it the form of a story. And their example permits us to distinguish between a historical discourse that narrates and a discourse that narrativizes, between a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it and a discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story.

(p. 2)

What are the defining boundaries of “narrative” here? Although Tocqueville et al. are introduced as examples of those who rejected “narrative,” the actual object of their refusal—and hence the nature of narrative—becomes less and less clear in the subsequent elaboration of this idea. In refusing narrative, these historians refused “to tell a story” or, more specifically, to tell “a story with well-marked beginning, middle, and end.” In fact, White goes on, they did “narrate,” but they did not “narrativize”; that is to say, they did not feign “to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story.” The conclusion which this passage suggests to me is that if all historical representations are narratives, then some are more narrative than others; in other words, that the “narrativity” of certain texts might be conceived of in quantitative terms according to the degree to which they are dominated by those features considered typical of fully formed “narrativizing” narratives: a well-made story (i.e., a set of closely connected events forming a temporal whole with a well-marked beginning and end), presented as if “telling itself” without the mediation of a retrospective narrator. White himself, however, does not explicitly draw these conclusions, with the result that his discussion leaves those historical works which do not tend towards a maximum degree of narrativity hanging in a sort of theoretical limbo, between narrative and non-narrative. Leaving Tocqueville et al. on the periphery of his discussion, White's general consideration of historical representation is centered on the way historians have catered to our persistent desire to have real events seem to take the form of stories: “to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (p. 24). This desire, he suggests, was institutionalized in the ideals of nineteenth-century professional historiography, where a maximum degree of narrativity came to function paradoxically as a sign of the realism of a representation and of the “discipline” of the historian; where narrative order served to reassure the public and distract it from the sublime contemplation of historical meaninglessness.

By insisting that events are in reality meaningless, White stimulates reflection on the means through which events can actually be invested with an imaginary coherence. How is the desire to have real events display coherence, integrity, and closure actually realized in the practice of representation? The coherence is “put there by narrative techniques,” White writes (p. 21), pointing the way toward research into how those narrative techniques function in practice. (It would also be interesting to know the extent to which the choice of topic is important in this production of coherence.) White's argument further stimulates reflection on the question of whether real events can ever actually be invested with the same degree of developmental coherence that we are accustomed to find in the imaginary events of fictional narratives, at least of the traditional kind. White himself acknowledges the fact that the historian, unlike the fiction writer, is constrained by his claim to speak with the “authority of reality itself” (p. 20); yet his general treatment of narrative representation leaves one with the impression that the historian can quite freely impose his own structure on events, without much resistance either from the events themselves or from rival historians. At one point, he does make the interesting suggestion that historians “test” historical reality against the ability of traditional plot genres to give form to them (p. 44), but he does not elaborate on the way in which this “testing” is actually perceptible in the final communicative product or “semiological apparatus.”

In practice, White's primary concerns are less with the specific discursive means through which real events are invested with coherence and meaning for a reader than with the ideological and rhetorical function of that coherence once it has been achieved or approximated. In addressing this topic, White takes into account not only the specificity of historical discourse as a representation of real (vs. imaginary) events, but also its socializing function as a representation of the collective heritage, however broadly or narrowly defined: “our history.” His discussion of Droysen's Historik is of particular interest in this regard, in that it shows a nineteenth-century historian self-consciously reflecting on the socializing function of historical representation and its role in the education of citizens. That historical representation does fulfill an important socializing function has been recognized by other theorists (Lübbe 1979; De Certeau 1982: 23; Rüsen 1987: 89); the originality of White's contribution lies in his attempt to link this socializing function to the narrativity of the representation: more precisely, to what he sees as narrative's moralizing function and its rhetorical appeal.

Provocatively reinterpreting a traditional issue in historiography, White explains the emergence of “proper” narrative history from annals and chronicles not as a function of an increasingly complex awareness of time (Topolski 1987), or as a topological change (Scholes and Kellogg 1966: 210f.), but as a function of the development of both the modern state and the belief in the existence of a central collective subject with a continuous past, present, and future. But why should this ideological change have led to the adoption of narrative? In a leap-frogging argument (which he himself presents more as “an enabling presupposition” than as something verifiable or falsifiable [p. 13]), White suggests (a) that the choice of narrative form for the representation of collective history was motivated by the need to resolve disputes over authority within the state, since (b) it may be impossible to separate narrative from questions of legitimacy: “The reality that lends itself to narrative representation is the conflict between desire and the law. Where there is no rule of law, there can be neither a subject nor the kind of event that lends itself to narrative representation” (pp. 12–13).

This sweeping historical hypothesis implies a definition of narrative according to the nature of its story content (the conflict between desire and law) and not merely according to the form of its content (a coherent set of events with a beginning and an end). And it is on the basis of this story content that White goes on to propose that the desire to narrativize in history-writing stems from the desire to “moralize” reality, “that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (p. 14). The rhetorical appeal of narrativized/moralized reality is then explained by reference to its formal coherence and closure: we are willing to participate as social beings in a reality which seems so ordered.

All of this is highly suggestive, but also highly generalized and abstract, more thought provoking than actually persuasive. What precisely are we to understand, for example, by narrative “closure” and by the “moralization of reality”? To be sure, a historical narrative could close with the resolution of a conflict and the establishment of a new moral order; but a narrative “closure” might also signal the tragic failure of a particular moral order to come to power. And in that case, the narrative resolution could presumably lead to a sense of dissatisfaction with the actual course of events rather than to a willingness to participate in the “coherent” moral order which they established. In other words, White's “enabling presupposition” would need to be followed up by a more detailed consideration of the different possible relations of continuity and/or discontinuity between the past reality that is represented and the present social realities to which the historian's reading public belongs. A useful starting point here might be Jörn Rüsen's (1987) typology of historical narratives (traditional, exemplary, critical, genetical), classified according to the way they function in constituting latter-day social identities and in upholding or criticizing the existing order.

In considering the “appeal” of narrativity in historical representation, White refers almost exclusively to the imaginary coherence with which events are invested. This seems an overly formalistic approach—an impression reinforced by his assertion that a reader will have grasped the meaning of a historical narrative when s/he recognizes the genre to which its plot belongs (p. 43). Although coherence and approximation to literary models may indeed be appealing to the reader of a historical work, it would be interesting to consider other possible explanations for the rhetorical force of narrative representations. Narrativity, for example, may facilitate persuasion by encouraging a reader to suspend his or her critical disbelief in expectation of a story's outcome; or, if indeed narrative always involves a conflict between desire and law, it may also provoke the reader's empathy with particular actorial subjects. Turning away from the question of narrative form as such, it would also be interesting to consider the appeal of other aspects of historical representation—its aura of authenticity, for example. The fact that it focuses on the everyday life of “real-life” individuals is surely one of the reasons for the popular success of a work like Montaillou, where otherwise the story line is not very dominant and where the presence of the latter-day narrator is foregrounded (see Ankersmit 1989: 30–35; Bann 1981: 381–82).

The Content of the Form explores the seductions of narrativity for historians and their public and, in doing so, points to the social stakes involved in our understanding of the forms and functions of narrative. But, even more immediately, White's work points to the need to clarify the basic concepts on which such an understanding can be based. Do all representations of “sequences of nonrandomly connected events” involve the production of “well-made stories” or of “plots”? Do all plots involve a conflict between desire and law, or, to recall Scholes, do they involve issues of human value? Do all plots fit into one of four types? Or do all of the above simply represent features which are characteristic of fully formed narratives, but which may or may not be exploited in particular instances? If White is correct in attributing so much power to narrative, then it becomes all the more urgent to understand its particular semiotic mechanisms. In that way, we could also more clearly identify its limits and hence the nature of the choices open to the historian.

To write a history is necessarily to produce meaning: events may be meaningless, but a “meaningless” historical representation is a contradiction in terms. In their production of meaning, however, have historians no option but to feign “to make the world … speak itself as a story”? Although White explores the seductions of narrativity in historical representation, he is much less clear or assertive about the critical alternatives to it: his work is modelled on nineteenth-century historiography and tends to consider modern experiments negatively in terms of a refusal or a failure to narrativize reality. Yet, recent historiographical practices (and eighteenth-century ones) show that it is in fact possible to write histories with a lesser degree of narrativity, histories which may engage the critical faculties of the reader and not merely appeal to an uncritical desire for imaginary coherence.

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