[In the following positive review of Tropics of Discourse, LaCapra provides a close analysis of White's theoretical assertions and directs constructive criticism toward problematic aspects of White's philosophical assumptions.]

No one writing in this country at the present time has done more to wake historians from their dogmatic slumber than has Hayden White. One cannot over-emphasize his importance for contemporary historiography in general and intellectual history in particular. In the recent past, intellectual history has departed from the rigorous if formalistic approach followed by Ernst Cassirer and Arthur O. Lovejoy. The result has often been its reduction to superficial contextual reportage of little interest to those in related disciplines. One might, without undue hyperbole, say that White's writings have helped to reopen the possibility of thought in intellectual history.

The collection of essays in Tropics of Discourse constitutes an invaluable supplement to White's masterwork of 1973, Metahistory, where he elaborated and applied the theory of tropes that serves as a leitmotif in the current volume. The range of the essays is ambitiously broad: problems of historiography and the related disciplines of literary criticism and philosophy; the notions of the wild man and the noble savage in Western thought; Vico; Foucault; structuralism and poststructuralism. The tense unity of the book is provided by the recurrent concern with interpretation in history and with the need for historians to become apprised of more modern, experimental developments in literature, literary criticism, and philosophy. White's far-ranging hermeneutic interests transcend disciplinary boundaries and his critical observations apply beyond professional historiography, for they address more traditional methods in related areas, e.g., in the writing of literary history. Indeed White often looks to literary criticism for interpretive methods that may illuminate problems in historiography. This gesture is altogether in keeping with his insistence upon the importance of the problem of language, of rhetoric, and of theoretical self-reflection in the writing of history. His purpose is to question the invidious distinction between those who write history and those who write about writing history—a distinction that functions to reinforce theoretical “know-nothingism” among historians.

Allowing for the necessary leaven of exaggeration in all committed polemic, one will find White's criticisms of powerful tendencies in the historical profession to be quite telling. The following pastiche of quotations gives some sense of the nature of his comments about the great commonplace book of conventional historiography:

The ‘proper historian,’ it is usually contended, seeks to explain what happened in the past by providing a precise and accurate reconstruction of the events reported in the documents (p. 52). History is perhaps the conservative discipline par excellence. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, most historians have affected a kind of willful methodological naiveté (p. 28). What is usually called the ‘training’ of the historian consists for the most part of study in a few languages, journeyman work in the archives, and the performance of a few set exercises to acquaint him with standard reference works and journals in his field. For the rest, a general experience of human affairs, reading in peripheral fields, self-discipline, and Sitzfleisch are all that are necessary (p. 40). Since the second half of the nineteenth century, history has become increasingly the refuge of all those ‘sane’ men who excel at finding the simple in the complex and the familiar in the strange (p. 30). It may well be that the most difficult task which the current generation of historians will be called upon to perform is to expose the historically conditioned character of the historical discipline, to preside over the dissolution of history's claim to autonomy among the disciplines, and to aid in the assimilation of history to a higher kind of intellectual inquiry which, because it is founded on an awareness of the similarities between art and science, rather than on their differences, can be properly designated as neither (p. 29).

In more specific form, White's critique is addressed both to positivism and to the unself-conscious employment of traditional narrative in the writing of history. The more elaborate positivistic understanding of science, in terms of causal “covering laws,” had little effect upon the practice of historians. But the attraction of a more loosely understood “scientific” model has been of paramount importance in contemporary historiography. The comprehension of history as art—art itself being equated with traditional narrative—is still very much alive, but it exists on sufferance in the shadow of the scientific ideal. White points out a number of highly significant similarities between scientific and narrative history as they are generally practiced. 1) Both are largely pre-modern in inspiration. The paradigm of science is late nineteenth-century, and that of art is the pre-Flaubertian novel. “When historians claim that history is a combination of science and art, they generally mean that it is a combination of late-nineteenth century social science and mid-nineteenth century art. … Historians continue to act as if they believed that the major, not to say the sole, purpose of art is to tell a story” (p. 43). 2) Both share a pre-critical conception of “facts” as the indubitable, atomistic base-line of history—the ultimate “givens” of an account. 3) Both reduce interpretation to marginal status, conceiving of it as a more-or-less plausible way of imaginatively filling in gaps in the historical record. For both, metahistory is much too speculative to live in the same neighborhood as “proper” history. 4) Both rely in relatively unreflective fashion on tropologically based sense-making structures—the one on schematic models and metonymic causal mechanisms and the other on the emplotment of events in a chronologically arranged story.

For White, the rigid opposition of history “proper” and metahistory obscures more than it illuminates. The distinctive criterion of metahistory for him is the attempt to make interpretive and explanatory strategies—which remain implicit in traditional historiography practiced as a craft—explicit, self-conscious, and subject to criticism. In this sense, his own approach is militantly metahistorical. Interpretation is not a necessary evil in the face of an historical record that is always too full (hence the need for selection) and too empty (hence the need for auxiliary hypotheses to stop gaps). Interpretation is at the heart of historiography, for it relates to the way in which language prefigures and informs the historical field. Historians should not attempt to escape the need for interpretation through an illusory “positivistic” purity or experience this need as an exile from objective truth. On the contrary, they should inquire into its nature, implications, and positive possibilities in the reconstruction of the past.

As White develops his own program for the understanding of history, however, certain difficulties arise. In putting forth the following sympathetic criticisms of White, I would stress that my intention is to bring out and even to force certain tensions that exist in his own writings. For I think that White's own relation to traditional historiography and, more generally, to traditional philosophical assumptions is at certain points not fully thought out.

White continues to write what he conceives of as a history of consciousness (rather than, let's say, a history of texts or of uses of language in various contexts). Language and discourse are seen predominantly as instruments or expressions of consciousness. “A discourse is itself a kind of model of the process of consciousness by which a given area of experience, originally apprehended as simply a field of phenomena demanding understanding, is assimilated by analogy to those areas of experience felt to be already understood as to their essential nature. … This process of understanding can only be tropological in nature, for what is involved in the rendering of the unfamiliar into the familiar is a troping that is generally figurative” (p. 5). This movement through the figurative toward the familiar is basic to White's own systematic effort in providing a theory of language in historiography. It is contested by the less predictable movement through which tropes move from the familiar to the unfamiliar—a process White recognizes and at times defends as necessary for renewal.

White's own systematic theory of language as an expression of consciousness is necessarily reductive of its object. It is much more indebted to Vico, Kant, and Hegel than it is to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. (Indeed, the latter are interpreted at times quite negatively in the light of the former.) White's theory is also “constructivist” in that it affirms a “making” function of consciousness, identified with poiesis, in contrast to the “matching” function stressed by the mimetic epistemology common to positivism and traditional narrative. The title, Tropics of Discourse, itself refers to the pre-figurative and projective function of tropes in constituting a field of discourse. In articulating this function, White's metahistory becomes a metalanguage for historiography. The problem is that, in the systematic understanding he attempts to provide of figurative language, White assumes the mastery of “logocentric” philosophy over rhetoric. In other words, he writes from a position itself constituted and secured after an important battle has seemingly been won and without inquiring into the causus belli. In the process, he provides what Derrida would see as another version of White Mythology and Heidegger, as a subjectivist and voluntaristic distortion of the poetic.

For White, as for Vico, there are four Master Tropes (which function theoretically as masters of troping): metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. These tropes are presented as the origin or fundamental ground that structures discourse and gives rise to other discursive levels (emplotment, argument, and ideology). Modal patterns further coordinate the relationships among the primary tropes and the other typological levels of discourse. White's own thought is here close to a genetic structuralism. Although the tropes are originative and basic, they are nonetheless seen as informed by narrative and dialectical patterns in a directed process of “encodation.” Metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche are related to one another cyclically as beginning, middle, end and as identity, difference, higher identity. (Thus the traditional patterns, shown out through the front door, re-enter through the back.) Irony has a paradoxical position as both one trope among others and as a trope-killer that—coming at the end of an era—effects a generalized displacement of the “tropics of discourse.” White more than recognizes the importance of irony for any critical self-consciousness. But the primary sense of irony in White (especially in Metahistory) is what one might call epigonal irony—negative, decadent, dissolving, and destructive. This is the serious and even pious understanding of irony in Vico (although Vico himself is not without internal contestations on this, as on other counts). Given this understanding, one's ultimate goal must be to transcend irony with its cold and deadly effects. White even sees Nietzsche as attempting to transcend an ironic apprehension of the world in order to arrive at a restored metaphoric contact with reality that seems dangerously close to blind faith or mythologizing. But this very partial and largely misleading interpretation of Nietzsche is itself “prefigured” by White's own placement of irony in a narratively and dialectically informed cycle of the tropes. This placement of irony renders impossible a relationship between it and figuration that is repetitive, carnivalesque, contestatory, and affirmative—the relationship Nietzsche sought in his gaya scienza. It also renders White incapable of seeing the way in which Derrida's strategy of deconstruction and double inscription of traditional assumptions may be understood in the light of a “gay science” not reducible to Vico's “new science.”

In fact, the only serious lapse in the high level of argument in Tropics of Discourse is to be found in the last essay. “The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory.” Here figures as diverse as Poulet, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are lumped together, labelled absurdist, and discussed in a way that is at best caricatural. They have merely symptomatic significance as the most recent manifestation of Western self-doubt and the final blow-up of the modern crisis. White's harshest comments are reserved for Derrida who is presented as little more than an irresponsible “wild man.” The interesting problem, I think, is how a writer of White's intelligence and perspicacity could possibly have arrived at these analyses and conclusions. There is, of course, a point at which everyone feels inclined to become Horatius at the bridge. The question is where one locates that point. I would suggest that one way to see White's reaction is as a turn toward secure “sanity” and conventional irony in the face of the “other” who actually articulates things that are “inside” White himself—but an “other” whose articulation is perhaps too disconcerting or at least too alien in formulation to be recognizable. One need not be an awe-struck Derridean or blind to the excesses of mindless “derridoodling” to recognize Derrida's importance. Derrida has raised the problem of the text and renewed the problem of rhetoric in a manner that both acknowledges the desire for systematicity, as well as the importance of the classical tradition, and furnishes the basis for a critical response to them. (It is significant that White himself observes of Vico's “new science”: “The internal dynamics of the system represents a projection of the theory of the tropes and of the relationships between them that he took over entire from classical poetics” [p. 216].) Just as the romances of chivalry would have been more easily forgotten (or repressed) had it not been for Cervantes’ battles—both mock and real—so the assumptions and hopes of the metaphysical tradition would have been more peacefully laid to rest (or covertly resurrected, faute de mieux) had it not been for Derrida's contestation of them in both their ancient and modern forms. But Derrida's enterprise requires genuine respect for the tradition, which must be confronted in its most forceful expressions (or “inscriptions”)—even reinvigorated and made more engaging through “reinscription”—for the contest to be possible. Derrida has made it less plausible to indulge in a falsely complacent oblivion of classical forms in philosophy and poetics. Indeed, through a fruitful paradox, the “founding fathers” of the tradition have taken on renewed interest because of Derrida's critical inquiry into their work and its legacy.

Another reading of Derrida might have provided White with the means to investigate more fully certain of his own internal tensions. For the things Derrida discusses are inside White. They relate to the problem of the relationship among history, discourse, and the text. It is curious that White's own constructivist tendencies, which construe the tropes as the informing forces of a creative consciousness, lead him at times to lend credence to the idea of an unprocessed historical record. The record is presented as the inert object to be animated by the shaping mind of the historian. This gesture, however, simply reverses the positivistic mythology of a mimetic consciousness and substitutes for it an idealistic mythology which converts the former meaningful plenum of the “record” into dead matter or even a void, thereby giving rise to another avoidance of the problem of interplay between structure and play in the text and in one's relation to it. But, at other times, a second view emerges in White's own approach to this problem. Then White astutely notices the way in which the historical record is itself a text “always already” processed in a manner that makes the historian begin as situated in the context of more-or-less vital or exhausted traditions of discourse. The very notion of an unprocessed historical record may in this light be seen as a critical fiction. What we perceive as unprocessed is actually the chronicle level in historiography. The chronicle itself is, however, not a pure, primary “given.” It is derived through a critical process that attempts to disengage “facts” from their implication in story, plot, and myth. It is for this reason that chronicle may appear as both the most naive and the most ironically sophisticated level in historiography—why there may be a certain paradoxical resemblance between a medieval chronicler and Burckhardt (or, to switch genres, Beckett).

The latter understanding of the historical record contests any rigid categorical opposition between fact and fiction or between “matching” and “making” (“mirroring” and “lamping”) functions in the writing of history. In addition, it points to a notion of discourse as other than the projection of consciousness, and it raises the problem of the actual uses of language in the text—or rhetoric in a sense not reducible to the four Master Tropes but certainly involving the question of figurative language. This different understanding of discourse is formulated by White himself:

[Discourse] is both interpretive and preinterpretive; it is as much about the nature of interpretation itself as it is about the subject matter which is the manifest occasion of its own elaboration. … Precisely because it is aporetic, or ironic, with respect to its own adequacy, discourse cannot be governed by logic alone. Because it is always slipping the grasp of logic, constantly asking if logic is adequate to capture the essence of its subject matter, discourse tends toward metadiscursive reflexiveness.

(p. 4)

White tends to resist an understanding of the text as the scene, in writing and in life, where discourse in this sense takes place. Indeed, he identifies the text with the book and accuses Derrida of fetishizing or mystifying the text. Yet what he writes of Foucault's conception of the text could be applied to his own often dominant understanding of it: “The names of individuals that do appear are merely shorthand devices for designating the texts; and the texts are in turn less important than the macroscopic configurations of formalized consciousness that they represent” (p. 238). What one at times misses in White is an analysis of the way in which the formalized schemata and patterns he elicits actually function in texts. In Metahistory, there was a Procrustean tendency to see texts as embodiments of patterned variables or modal sets of tropes, emplotments, arguments, and ideologies. Yet, in the present work, he himself says something which would indicate that the tense interplay among elements in the language of the text should be a focal point of historical and critical investigation:

Now, in my view, any historian who simply described a set of facts in, let us say, metonymic terms and then went on to emplot its processes in the mode of tragedy and proceeded to explain those processes mechanistically, and finally drew explicit ideological implications from it—as most vulgar Marxists and materialistic determinists do—would not only be very uninteresting but could legitimately be labelled a doctrinaire thinker who had ‘bent the facts’ to fit a preconceived theory. The peculiar dialectic of historical discourse—and of other forms of discursive prose as well, perhaps even the novel—comes from the effort of the author to mediate between alternative modes of emplotment and explanation, which means, finally, mediating between alternative modes of language use or tropological strategies for originally describing a given field of phenomena and constituting it as a possible object of representation. … This aim of mediation, in turn, drives him [White is discussing Tocqueville here] toward the ironic recognition that any given linguistic protocol will obscure as much as it reveals about the reality it seeks to capture in an order of words. This aporia or sense of contradiction residing at the heart of language itself is present in all of the classic historians. It is this linguistic self-consciousness which distinguishes them from their mundane counterparts and followers, who think that language can serve as a perfectly transparent medium of representation and who think that if one can only find the right language for describing events, the meaning of the events will display itself to consciousness.

(p. 130)

The question raised in this passage is precisely that of the text. I think that White is right in believing that formalized schemata are necessary for interpretation. The problem is how one is to understand them and their relation to actual discourse and texts. In this respect, one has a great deal to learn from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. The linkage of irony and aporia invariably evokes the threat of infinite regress in discourse. But this linkage is itself related to a negative understanding of irony, which is of course a threat. The more affirmatively contestatory understanding of irony might be related to the possibility of endless egress and renewal, which is implied in Nietzsche's notions of Heiterkeit and gay science. Indeed, one sign of the intellectual vigor of White's own work is that it stimulates this kind of contestation. Tropics of Discourse is a book that engages one on every page. It should be of immense interest to literary critics, historians, and philosophers.