[In the following excerpt, Gunn discusses trends in contemporary historical theory and issues raised by White in The Content of the Form.]

Theory has become ubiquitous in literary and cultural studies, and it is sometimes difficult not to feel under siege. The study of verbal texts, like the study of cultural forms of almost any kind, has in many ways become a beleaguered enterprise in which the establishment of methodological and theoretical credentials now often takes precedence over all other intellectual procedures. “The aim of interpretation,” as E. D. Hirsch once termed it, is more often than not to validate the system of thought that presumably serves as its premises. No longer are texts, for example, or things that can be “read” as “texts,” always studied as intentional forms whose meaning can be inferred from a reconstruction of the putative conditions to which they are a response and the cognitive and affective associations to which they give rise; more and more they are being converted into “sites” for the testing of theories. What was once assumed to yield a “conflict of interpretations,” in Paul Ricoeur's phrase, has given way to something that looks more like a contest of concepts, where the object is not to see what can be learned from the debate but to determine how completely the terms of discussion can be subsumed within a single discourse. The text is in danger of being displaced not by context but by metacritical templates.

Such aggressions, even if exaggerated in their depiction, have proved daunting to interpretative traditionalists of almost every stripe. The omnivorousness of theory has taken on for many humanists the enormity of a moral offense, even of religious blasphemy. So much of what earlier generations of literary and cultural interpreters once held sacred about the integrity of the object under investigation—the object, to quote Matthew Arnold, “as in itself it really is”—is now felt by many to have been profaned by this new enculturation of theory or, worse, actually desecrated, and the victims are not just texts themselves but whole traditions, indeed the entire canon of Western literature. …

In other words, history, too, “writes off” as well as writes in or writes down the self. If some contemporary new historicists paid closer attention to the referential subtexts of their materials, to “the context in the text”—as Hayden White calls it in his important new book, The Content of the Form—rather than to the rhetorical tactics that often mask such matters, they might perceive, as White observes in a discussion of Paul Ricoeur, how the “historical” (or better, “historicality”) is a response or rejoinder to the tragedy of temporality. To historicize, as the better new historicists like Buell and Stephen Greenblatt have always acknowledged and as White confirms, is not to reinscribe the self in more “realistic” contexts so much as to show how those contexts are sedimented with past “forms of life” that once contributed to their realization but are now lost to us except through the text itself.

To historicize is thus to be brought up against all that the self is exposed to within time because of time—that is, to confront the odds, as Berthoff expressed earlier, against the self's continuance beyond time. No historicism, new or old, that does not acknowledge the ultimate pathos of this predicament—for example, in the social and political contexts of human resistance to it—deserves, on White's account, to be taken seriously. In addition, even if historicism is only another way of trying to get into as well as out of history, as White says of Fredric Jameson's “political unconscious,” no historicism that glosses over the different tactics of historicization by which we try to do so can be regarded as other than frivolous. There are real differences, in other words, between justifying what Mircea Eliade once called the “terror of history” in the name of the kind of anti-humanism with which Foucault, in his earlier writing, attacks the collusion between modern representations of historical discourse and the reconstitution of man as a field of study and, say, Ricoeur's attempt to uncover the deep structures that compel or at least control our need to render experience narratively in order to cope with the paradox it compels us to face but cannot help us wholly overcome: the paradox of temporality and its continuance, of time and eternity.

We are thus brought back to Bishop's paradox of our knowledge of experience as historical, as “flowing, and flown.” The hesitancy enforced by her comma registers the self's comprehension of the difference, a difference that makes all the difference. “Historicality,” “historicity,” “historicism,” White suggests in a book far too subtle for me to do it full justice here, all refer merely to one (or more) among a variety of discursive practices for defining the odds against us, and offer us another set of terms—what Kenneth Burke would call “critical coordinates”—for, at the very least, calculating our chances, and at the most, attempting to enhance them. But the real issue isn't what we calculate our chances to be—different critical systems furnish us with different sets of calculations—or whether we can improve our margin; the crucial issue is how we go about our calculations. It all boils down—here Poirier and Berthoff oddly agree with White, Jameson, and Ricoeur—to a question of something like virtue, that is, to the “expense of spirit,” to use Blackmur's phrase, that is being wagered in the process. Those works of literature that raise the stakes to the highest levels of cultural risk before making such measurements, and then make them in the face of formal and conceptual obstacles that would normally be conceived to thwart, or at least to threaten, their success, we call classics. “What the classic achieves,” White says with the help of certain formulations from Jameson, “is an instantiation of the human capacity to endow lived contradictions with intimations of their possible transcendence.”

Thus White is prepared to claim that what distinguishes the classic at any given time from all other similar works with which it might be compared is not the universal truths that it is sensed to contain about, say, the “human condition,” but the models it provides for investigating the “human condition” and other such matters, both within the text and beyond it, when the “human condition,” and the procedures for investigating it, have been rendered particularly problematic or hazardous. Hence the literary classic furnishes a particular opportunity for the expression of virtue, “not because (or only because),” to quote White again, the classic's “meaning-content is universally valid or authoritative (for that is manifestly impossible; in any event, it is a profoundly unhistorical way of looking at anything), but because it gives us insight into a process that is universal and definitive of human species-being in general, the production of meaning.” But it does so, White insists with Poirier, no less than with Jameson and Ricoeur, in its own way. The difference between literary texts and all others is a function of their ability “to work up a certain knowledge (not merely a certain intuition) of the conditions of their own production and render those conditions intelligible.”

It is this knowledge of literary texts not only as products of meaning but also as processes and models for producing it that is now at issue in the kingdoms of theory. How do we obtain such knowledge? Why does such knowledge matter? What does such knowledge do to our previous conceptions of literature? White's answer to this last question may not be the only answer, but it nicely converges with Poirier's thinking as well as with Jameson's, with Graff's as with Buell's and Ricoeur's:

Insofar as art and literature, across whatever local differences in their contents occasioned by their production in concrete historical conditions, not only instantiate the human capacity for imagining a better world but also, in the universality of the forms that they utilize for the representation of vision itself, actually provide us with models or paradigms of all creative productivity of a specifically human sort, they claim an authority different in kind from that claimed by both science and politics.

Thanks to the interventions of recent theory, the critical issue that the institutions of literary study in America can no longer gloss or repress, as they once did, is what that authority amounts to, and what sorts of empowerment it makes possible.