[In the following review, LaCapra offers a positive assessment of The Content of the Form.]

The present book might be considered the third part of a trilogy whose two earlier installments were Metahistory (1973) and Tropics of Discourse (1978). Metahistory took the form of a systematic treatise that laid down the principles for Hayden White's poetics of historiography. Tropics of Discourse was a collection of essays that played significant variations on those thematic principles. The Content of the Form is another collection of essays in which still further and at times more significant variations are in evidence.

The essay may be the best form with which to investigate the complex, controverted methodological and theoretical bases of historiography. In any case White is clearly a master of this form. In the present collection he examines such important topics as the value of narrativity in the representation of reality, the role of narrative in contemporary historical theory, the political dimensions of historical interpretation, Johann Gustav Droysen's Historik, Michel Foucault's discursive style, Fredric Jameson's Marxist rehabilitation of narrative, Paul Ricoeur's metaphysics of narrativity, and the general issue of method and ideology in intellectual history. The essays, written over the last seven years, have all appeared elsewhere, but it is extremely valuable to have them assembled between the covers of one book. One hopes that a paperback edition will soon appear to make the book more available for use in courses.

Narrative is the obvious leitmotif of these essays, but it is complemented and supplemented by a strong concern for ideological and political dimensions of historical inquiry. White's role has been central in focusing attention on the problem of narrative in historiography and literary criticism, and he has provided one of the most influential and provocative theories of narrative in contemporary thought. It is impossible to do justice to the richness of White's reflections in a short review. I would simply indicate what would seem to be some significant developments or even departures with reference to his earlier views.

In partial contrast to his well-known earlier emphasis on the conditioning if not determining role of tropes, White's recent insistence on the axial role of ideology in the writing of history is especially prominent in his essay on Droysen, which is subtitled “Historical Writing as a Bourgeois Science.” Somewhat ironically, White praises Droysen's Historik as being “unique among nineteenth-century tracts on historical thinking inasmuch as it openly embraces this ideological function as an aim or purpose” (p. 88). The ideological function in question, which “dominant social groups will … favor,” is the fundamentally legitimating one of producing a reading subject who is imbued with the mentality of a “law-abiding” citizen. Thus, White focuses attention on the problem of the kind of reading subject a form of discourse may be argued to produce. Historiography—at least historiography of a conventional sort—is for White particularly adapted to the production of the “law-abiding” citizen “because in its featuring of narrativity as a favored institutional practice, it is especially well suited to the production of notions of continuity, wholeness, closure, and individuality that every ‘civilized’ society wishes to see itself as incarnating, against the chaos of a merely ‘natural’ way of life” (p. 87). When this ideological function becomes covert or is simply institutionalized in the operating assumptions of a profession, it becomes less open to question and more insidious than it was in Droysen. The obvious issue White leaves to his readers is that of the extent to which historiography in our own time embodies the ideological function that he has analyzed with the aid of Louis Althusser's conception of ideology as crucial in the production of a certain kind of society, particularly in and through the role of conventional narrative.

White's discussion of Ricoeur's recent work on narrative may be challenged as an interpretation of Ricoeur. But it is significant for what it indicates about mutations in White's own views. Earlier, White, in rather familiar “existential” terms, conceived of a sharp divide between “life” and “narrative” whereby life itself was considered to be intrinsically chaotic and meaningless while narrative was viewed as a purely fictive reconstruction that endowed life with meaning and value. The historical record was taken to be an unprocessed datum more or less analogous to life itself.

In his discussion of Ricoeur, White emphasizes precisely what diverges from the conception of the relation between life and narrative White himself at one time espoused, and by implication he indicates the general but differential role of ideology as a mediating force. Now narrative codes, which are in White's conception favored conduits for ideology, are seen to be common to both life and discourse, and “actions are in effect lived narrativizations” (p. 54). A focus of attention is “transcoding,” a process whereby overdetermined complexities are introduced into a specific text or artifact. Conversely, a chronicle, which may seem to be close to a mere reflection of the unprocessed documentary record, is itself a product of representational procedures that are now argued to be protonarrative in nature. Hence, White tends to stress the continuity between elements that he earlier saw in terms of a sharp dichotomy. He also becomes more nuanced and more urgent in stressing the role of ideological forces in the way we represent the past. Particularly forceful (and controversial) is “The Politics of Historical Interpretation,” in which he treats the problem of representations of the Holocaust in terms of the role of ideological or political constraints and commitments.

One may argue with certain of White's emphases and specific interpretations. But he has clearly made significant advances in laying a foundation for a better understanding of the intricate interaction between narrative representation and what it purports to represent in both history and literature. Although he may at times both exaggerate the role of the narrative imagination in history and underemphasize the way certain approaches to narrative may contest as well as convey ideologies, White has enabled us to appreciate better not only the significant place narrative indeed has but also the broader network of ideological forces in which it is implicated. More generally, he has helped raise historiography to a point where it may enter more fully as a critical “voice” in the contemporary debate over discursive and interpretive issues of interdisciplinary importance.