[In the following review, Tambling finds shortcomings in The Content of the Form.]

In this compilation of essays from 1979 onward [The Content of the Form], Hayden White engages four recurrent themes, though they are not set out as such: the relationship between history and narrative, the relationship between historical and fictional narrative, the place that interpretation has within the writing of history, and the Nietzschean theme of the uses and disadvantages of history for life, considering, predominantly, its political and ideological uses. The essays include four on specific theorists—Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Paul Ricoeur, and the post-Hegelian Droysen—and four on questions involving textuality, narrativity, and history.

The essays on Jameson and Ricoeur declare White's belief in narrativized history—narrative considered, in Jameson's Political Unconscious, to offer something utopian, a possibility of moving forward out of our present discontents. Literature attests to “the reality of the desire for redemption” and provides “justification for the vision of its possible realization” (p. 144). Jameson adheres to a Lukacsian model—a realist text with firm narrative form. White would agree with Jameson that there can be an understanding of events outside the framing of ideology, that, as Jameson says, “History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise,” that it “needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them” (quoted on p. 147). Nietzsche might call this a reactive statement, coming from the exploited objects of history rather than from the exploiters who make and suppress history. Although White's position establishes history as a site of conflict, it does not help to establish a sense of the past outside the text, where it can be appealed to. Indeed, by the end of White's essay the point seems almost conceded, as history appears to be (again as in Jameson, though one might also cite Stephen Dedalus) “one White, as there is in Jameson, of the alternative: of postmodernism, of Lyotard's “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Utopian possibilities there remain unexplored, and White appears almost antimodernist in his belief in narrative—however aware he might be of Barthes's arguments on the force of ideology underlying the nineteenth-century realist narrative text.

If History embodies ideological struggle, a necessary question for White is “to what is the historian responsible, or rather, to what should one be responsible?” (p. 188), considering how even the events of the Holocaust have been doubted by “revisionist” historians (pp. 76–82). But the discussion of further implications remains inconclusive here (like much of the book, written as it is in stiffly dignified, rather dulled, safe prose) as White wrestles (contra Jameson) with the issue of nontextual history and history—even of the Holocaust—as perhaps “morally domesticating” (p. 78). The point recapitulates an interesting discussion (pp. 68–75) on the articulation of the beautiful and sublime with history in Burke and Schiller or Hegel, showing that the erasure of the “sublime” as a way of understanding reduces history to a succession of well-ordered, comprehensive processes that serve to blunt the radical or horrifying edge of events, to soften the visionary element needed in radical politics. Thus while he argues that history's professionalization entraps, White also sees historical thinking as a function of the political unconscious. He yokes to Jameson's notion a sense of the power of narrative, following Ricoeur: “a meaningful life is one that aspires to the coherency of a story with a plot” (p. 173), for a plot “imposes a meaning on the events that make up its story level” (p. 20).

In arguing that narrative rises when an interpretation of events is contested (p. 19), White underestimates writings such as the eighth-century Annals of Saint Gall (pp. 6–11). Here the citation of events and dates, with gaps going against certain years in which “nothing happened” (p. 11), is taken as an absence of narrative representation. When it originally appeared, White's position was rightly disputed by Marilyn Robinson Waldman, using Islamic historiography.¹ The main problem is that White's thesis about narrative function fails to account for non-Eurocentric models. But how would a feminist history—also an apparent record of silence—read, on White's basis? Such a question opens up the kind of issues addressed by Derrida against Foucault's attempt in Madness and Civilization to write the archaeology of the silence of the “mad.” Derrida makes problematic Foucault's narrative text, seeing it as itself oppressive, a voice from the point of a dominant ideology. White does not point this out in his reading of Foucault. Meanwhile, deconstruction, like feminism and psychoanalysis, is ready to trouble White's rather assured sense of mainline history. White hardly refers to Derrida, and then not in contexts that suggest the power of the play of the text. He thus misses the whole issue of the failure of interpretation to stay still, to preserve its monologic character.

White's limitation is linked with his voluntaristic sense of the subject's relation to ideology. Such a relation involves “a specific kind of reading … subject capable of inserting himself into the social system that is his historically given potential field of public activity” (p. 86; my italics). White takes his account of ideology from Jameson (p. 232, n. 14), whose reading of Althusser nevertheless reduces it to “a kind of false consciousness.”²

But it is unnecessary to bring back all Althusser to see that White's account of ideology, involuntarily positioning the subject, results in a consideration of discourse that frames and creates the subject, making the split between narrative representation and the real event nontenable. Assuming the possession of choice of narrative method or guiding trope—the “alternative ways that one might legitimately write different accounts of the same set of historical events” (p. 88)—also assumes the free subject, i.e., the ideal historian, one not caught within a discursive formation. It emphasizes what White called the “Kantian element in my thought,”³ seriously limiting any use a historian could put to poststructuralism, and very seriously underestimating discourse theory.

Notes

1. “‘The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711’: A Reply to Hayden White,” CritI, 7 (1981): 784–92.

2. To use Jerry Aline Flieger's term (in “The Prison House of Ideology,” Diacritics, 12 [1982]: 54). Flieger's article appeared with White's essay in an issue of Diacritics that was devoted to Jameson. To agree with Flieger's position (or with that of Terry Eagleton, who also appeared in this issue) is to suggest that ideology in White reduces to a system of beliefs that obtain in a given society—beliefs that may be dispelled in the name of a purer historicism.

3. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 22.