[In the following review of The Content of the Form, Thomas finds shortcomings in White's rhetorical style and habit of positing significant questions that he has not fully resolved and cannot adequately answer.]

Although a historian, or perhaps because he is a historian, Hayden White has gained authority with literary critics, especially students of the novel, because his explorations into the relationship between narrative and historical representation have forced them to reconsider traditionally accepted distinctions between literary and historical discourse. Indeed, his work has been most consistently praised for its capacity to force historians and literary scholars alike to consider important questions. The Content of the Form is topical in that it touches on many prominent questions that shape current critical squabbles. The book consists of eight essays, four on specific topics and four on individuals, three contemporary figures (Foucault, Jameson, and Ricoeur) and the nineteenth-century historian Johann Gustav Droysen. White's main concern remains narrative and historical representation, but he also takes up questions about the politics of interpretation, questions about what constitutes a classic in intellectual history, and questions about the relation between text and context. The questions he raises about historiography should speak not only to historians but to those intent on rewriting literary history by making them more self-conscious about their own narrative strategies.

Questions abound in White's work. His answers, unfortunately, are not as satisfactory as we would expect from a scholar with his reputation. I'll focus on one example of interest to readers of Novel. In the essay on Droysen and “The Politics of Historical Interpretation” White provocatively combines a Foucauldian analysis of disciplines with a Barthean notion that realism supports bourgeois ideology in order to link the nineteenth-century's “disciplinization” of historical studies with the rise of realistic discourse. This occurs because “historical reflection is disciplined to understand history in such a way” that “it is removed from any connection with a visionary politics and consigned to a service that will always be antiutopian in nature” (73). Providing “nothing less than an explication of the theoretical principles of bourgeois ideology in its national-industrial phase” (86), Droysen's Historik offers a case study in “realist” ideology.

For Droysen, White argues, history becomes a science when it can produce a “realistic” representation of facts, realism being determined by the “criterion, not of truth, but of plausibility” (93). The realism produced by the disciplinization of history “promotes a feeling of satisfaction for ‘things as they are’ in any given ‘present’ by showing that whatever they are, they have their necessary reasons for being this way and not another” (98). White goes on to declare that “the authority of this model of discourse is surely what underlies the assertions made by a host of nineteenth-century realistic novelists, of which Balzac and Flaubert were foremost, that they were writing ‘history’ in their novels. It was the historical discourse that they emulated that made them ‘realistic’ in their own eyes” (101).

What, then, are we to make of White's argument in the same essay that “Art and literature become ‘revolutionary’ or at least socially threatening, not when they set forth specific doctrines of revolt or depict sympathetically revolutionary subjects, but precisely when they project—as Flaubert did in Madame Bovary—a reading subject alienated from the social system of which the prospective reader is a member” (87)? How can Flaubert be so “revolutionary” when he emulates realism, which according to White is a “writing activity” that engenders a “reading subject who will identify with the moral universe incarnated in ‘the Law'” (86) of bourgeois society?

It is possible to explain this seeming contradiction, but not if one retains White's formalist assumptions that make an inevitable link between realism and bourgeois ideology. Further, White does not even seem aware of the potential contradiction he has raised. For instance, after summarizing Barthes’ argument about realism's ideology, he concludes, “This seems plausible to me” (81), a statement that would seem to undercut itself given White's connection between realism and the criterion of plausibility.

But perhaps I am asking too much. Maybe all we can ask of a critic is that he raise important questions. Indeed, in the last essay of Tropics of Discourse, White distinguishes between Absurdist critics (Foucault, Barthes, Derrida) and Normal critics (most others). His final paragraph lists a series of questions and concludes, “The Absurdist critics ask these questions, and in asking them, put the Normal critics in the position of having to provide answers which they themselves cannot imagine.” In The Content of the Form, the raising of questions becomes part of White's style. Three essays end with questions; three other with implied questions. The humility implied by this rhetoric of questioning is, however, at odds with another noticeable aspect of White's style—a rhetoric of finality. Relentlessly bombarded by “must,” “only,” “always,” “never,” I begin to suspect that all too often White's rhetoric of questioning is actually a device for presenting rhetorical questions. For instance, look at the use of “always” and “finally” in this concluding question: “Is it not possible that the question of narrative in any discussion of historical theory is always finally about the function of the imagination in the production of a specifically human truth” (57)?

I might be nit-picking by looking closely at White's style, but he invites such scrutiny. “No more vexed—and mystifying—notion appears in the theory of historical writing than that of the historian's ‘style'” (227, n. 19). The tension between White's styles of questioning and authoritarian assertion is, I think, a symptom of a historical dilemma facing critics today. On the one hand, we recognize and even celebrate “the death of the great ‘master narratives'” (xi). On the other, we feel compelled to display our mastery over a field of knowledge, in White's case, a mastery over theories of narrative. This need to display mastery over the field of theory, which Paul de Man argued resists such mastery, too often produces awkward moments like the following. “For all of these [Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault]—as well as for Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva—history in general and narrativity specifically were merely representational practices by which society produced a human subject peculiarly adapted to the conditions of life in the modern Rechtsstaat. Their arguments on behalf of this view are too complex to be represented here, but …” (35; my emphasis except for Rechtsstaat).

If the need to assert mastery over the field of theory manifests itself in White's style, the fear of master narratives manifests itself in the form of the book. As is increasingly the case in the field of theory, White's book is a collection of essays. Rather than presenting a sustained elaboration of a central thesis as in Metahistory, White presents us with a variety of attempts to try out ideas. The tentative form of the essay allows White to suggest a number of provocative possibilities. The problem, however, has to do with the tentative nature of the collection as a whole, for it puts on display a critic trying out ideas before he has taken the proper time to integrate them with past assumptions. White's early work drew first upon Northrop Frye and then French semiotics. That influence, especially the latter, remains. As my citations indicate, he seems to share Barthes’ almost anarchistic distrust of narrative. Frequently, we hear about narrative “imposing” a formal coherence on events that are represented as real. But in parts of The Content of the Form White has, belatedly, seriously engaged the competing tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics. He is especially taken with Ricoeur. If in one essay he finds Barthes’ position “plausible,” in another he declares that Ricoeur's “seems right to me” (183). Thus, creeping into White's discourse are phrases that challenge the notion that narrative is merely a code imposing form upon history that may be “meaningless ‘in itself'” (82). Instead, White entertains the possibility that “It is the success of narrative in revealing the meaning, coherence, or significance of events that attests to the legitimacy of its practice in historiography” (54, my emphasis).

From my point of view, White's engagement with Ricoeur is welcome, and I recommend his essay on Ricoeur. What is not welcome is a collection of essays in which the tensions between White's earlier assumptions and what seem to be new ones are merely set before us rather than systematically pursued. My dissatisfaction is reinforced by White's attempt to define a classic in the last essay. Using The Education of Henry Adams as an example, he relies on his earlier semiotic model to declare that for intellectual history a text is important insofar as it “fixes us directly before the process of meaning production” (209). So, whereas some critics have faulted The Education's narrative gaps, its switching of codes, its hesitancies and duplicities, White argues that such “flaws” make it a classic by drawing attention to its own processes of meaning production and making “of these processes its own subject matter, its own ‘content'” (211).

Developed this far, White's definition, which emphasizes the number of a text's codes and levels of encodation (42), reminds me of what a freshman composition student once told me. Having never been taught the notion of a thesis, she had been instructed that the best essay was one that packed in the most ideas. What is missing in White's definition is something to which Henry Adams paid great attention. Conscious of the impossibility of his task—to “mix narrative and didactic purpose and style”—Adams, nonetheless, believed that “the form is never arbitrary” and struggled to get the form of his Education right. That impossible struggle to find the proper form to weave together competing codes has evoked various labels in contemporary criticism. Paul de Man called it “rigor,” Bakhtin the “artistic” rendering of heteroglossia. Without it, The Content of the Form has its share of codes, switching of codes, and gaps, but it will not, I think, despite suggestive moments, achieve classical status.