SOURCE: “Hayden White (And the Content and the Form and Everyone Else) at the AHA,” in History and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 4, December, 1997, pp. 102–10.

[In the following essay, Partner relates her observations and experiences during a January 1997 meeting of the American Historical Association devoted to the subject of Hayden White.]

I had received the invitation to speak at the Humanities Center of Wesleyan University some weeks before the January meeting of the American Historical Association where I was going to read a paper at the session on the work of Hayden White organized by Richard Vann.¹ Since the choice of topic for this evening was entirely mine, I decided to do myself a favor and piggyback my Wesleyan paper on the AHA session—not by merely repeating that paper, which I had no intention of doing, but by using the experience to report on the “state of the art” in metahistorical theory as it would emerge in the course of the proceedings at the conference. This struck me as a singularly happy idea combining, as it did, guaranteed interesting material with gross opportunism in a highly professional manner. All I had to do was show up at the AHA, read my own paper, and then take copious notes on what everyone else had to say. I had never done anything quite like this before but it felt risk-free. I knew ahead of time that Dick Vann was going to trace the influence of Hayden White through reviews and citations, which was perfect for my purpose; and Frank Ankersmit (the other scheduled speaker) is always original and provocative, and I guessed that he would contrast his latest conception of the direct historical experience with White's ideas of linguistic mediation. Hayden White, the main attraction of the event, was going to have ample time to comment and reply as he chose, and of course the audience would supply whatever had been neglected. I was counting on questions raising the topic of postmodernism, or identity politics and national narratives, or White's views on Foucault and the historicizing of the “self”—generally bringing narrative theory up to speed with postmodern critical debates. I had no anxieties about encountering challenges to my own views; with Hayden White there, no one would ask me anything at all. I was confident in the knowledge that, thanks to Dick Vann's good planning, an unusual degree of coherence and intellectual focus was built into the structure of this session (so unlike all those shambling events at the AHA where speakers who might as well be from different planets huddle together under some tattered umbrella-rubric like “Crime and Cuisine in Premodern France and Poland: A Comparative Perspective”). All I had to do was listen, take enough notes, and then come here and report on “where we are now” in historical theory. That was the plot I intended to hold together all my material. Not a progress report, certainly, in any fatuous sense of a Whig history of theory; what I had in mind was what I provisionally planned to term a “critical taxonomy” of the state of the larger question of history as cultural artifact and as cultural practice, understood self-consciously or self-critically through the linguistic turn optic by historians themselves.

Our event began promisingly on a note of personal drama. One of the participants, Frank Ankersmit, injured himself ice-skating and was unable to travel to New York from the Netherlands where he lives; but amazingly, a substitute speaker was found at the conference with an erudite paper about Metahistory, and she sportingly agreed to step in at the last minute. The session itself, considered in its various parts, was quite good. It certainly met a fairly high professional standard for the AHA, all of the papers being on the announced subject; the honored guest-commentator handled the tricky pitfalls of tone and manner built into such occasions with good humor, bringing forward important matters without being self-important; we had attracted a noticeably “upscale” audience (an idea I leave to your competent imaginations to fill in), and a large enough one (maybe 150 people). We ran at least half an hour over our scheduled time without people surreptitiously streaming out of the room. All went pretty well by an objective measure.

So … where is it “where we are now” in historical theory as an aspect of practice and consciousness? Don't ask me. I went to that session as if to the first day of school with an entire new pad of paper, the pen I made sure would write, and came away some two and a half hours later with a few illegible doodles on the margin of one page which I seem to have lost. I'm afraid that I've had to replace the high-concept “critical taxonomy” with something more like an autopsy report.

The three papers arrange themselves logically, from empirical to philosophic analysis. Starting the session with the most empirical research paper, Dick Vann stated baldly and with complete supporting evidence that Hayden White's work had had virtually no discernible influence on its most salient intended audience—historians—as measured by the only objective criteria we have: reviews and citations. Maintaining a courteous and sympathetic tone (a diplomatic tour de force in the circumstances), Dick Vann traced a relentless course of obscurity for all of Hayden White's work among professional historians. Inadequately read, rarely reviewed in journals read by historians, infrequently cited, little discussed, and then routinely and grossly misunderstood, is the short version of Dick Vann's well-supported research on the White corpus. Most notable is the fact that what minuscule attention White has been given by his fellow historians has been devoted entirely to Metahistory, even now, with the far more nuanced, subtle, and historically pertinent formulations of his later essays in Tropics of Discourse and The Content of the Form remaining massively and impassively neglected. Casting as it did a shadow of unreality and grotesque humor over the occasion, Dick Vann's paper was a revelation and total surprise to me, I admit, and made me feel rather uneasy, or disconcerted is the more precise word, about what I had come prepared to say.

My own paper occupied a certain middle distance in approach. Partly contextual, partly interpretive, I proceeded on the confident assumption that Hayden White's work is important, is widely known, has had a pervasive impact in the historical discipline, and that its core insights and mode of analysis are far from being exhausted in their potential uses, especially for certain questions addressed to historical epistemology opened by postmodernism. I ignored Metahistory entirely, as an early provocative book which had done its work, as it were, choosing to concentrate on The Content of the Form whose refinement of insight into narrative structure I consider much more salient and suggestive for historians, especially in the wake of the epistemological upheavals of semiotics and deconstruction. I did note a certain persistent reluctance to pay serious attention to formal analysis among American academics who are endemically impatient with form, genre analysis, rhetoric, tropology, and the like, but I declared myself convinced that narrative theory, as offered by Hayden White, had somehow forced historians to acknowledge the superior potency of “textual intention” superseding the naive reading and writing strategies of authorial intention. I also proposed a clever and amusingly pointed rereading of what I took to be a patently well-known section from an essay in The Content of the Form which Dick Vann had just demonstrated might have been known by perhaps two people in the audience. (I hope they enjoyed it.)

The third paper, by a Polish graduate student, Ewa Domańska, who was in the United States on a Fulbright scholarship, was the most philosophical in method and presuppositions. She had written a densely reasoned argument based on a highly sophisticated encounter with Metahistory which assumed, as its deep premise, that White's ideas are part of a living, ongoing stream of intellectual life in which certain people (by implication, all historians and cultural critics) are fully and unapologetically engaged. She certainly spoke from a position which assumed that all contributions to this ongoing project of philosophic engagement with the foundational conditions of history are interesting and intelligible to the kind of people who might be, say, members of the American Historical Association, although I can't say that the polite audience gave much sign of it.

I cannot begin to speculate on what all this self-devouring discourse sounded like to Hayden White who exhibited an imperturbable courtesy or perhaps resignation throughout, but his practical decision to ignore all of it in his extended response struck me as a happy impulse. White began by proposing that his ideas not be regarded abstractly, but rather, that his work should be historicized, as we now say, or “situated,” his preferred term, in its “moment of production” (also his phrase, I think), and he started the process by acknowledging his early fascination with structuralism and suggested that Metahistory resulted from his experiment with applying structuralism to nineteenth-century historical writing. But he chose to devote the majority of his comments to variant restatements of his personal, long-standing, and continuing loyalty to Marxism which he regards as superior for its critique of social structures and for other reasons, although the relation of Marxist theory to all, or indeed any, of his work on historiography remains obscure to me. In fact, neglecting utterly by that time to take any notes, all of Hayden White's Marxist thought remains obscure to me. The only clear memory I retain of that part of the program is Dick Vann murmuring approval from his seat to my left.

Just time enough remained for audience interventions to tie up any loose ends. One person asked if the use of the first-person pronoun were acceptable historiographic practice. An eminent foreign professor made a lengthy and mysterious, albeit learned, speech obliquely related to the proceedings which someone later confided to me comprised about 20٪ of the paper he was scheduled to read the next day. Dominick LaCapra suggested that we might regard narrative as a neurotic compensatory reaction-formation, or perhaps we shouldn't. And finally Michael Roth asked an actual question concerning the historian's freedom to emplot events: namely, when or at what point in historical work the imposition of a plot, Marxist emplotment, for example, or any other, is possible. By this time (5:00 at least) we had run long past our schedule, the room was in demand, the audience restive, and so we ended in the traditional tidal surge to the nearest bars. I have so often fantasized that the life of the mind, in its performative aspects, bears a deep structural affinity to vaudeville.

So Hayden White never addressed the one question actually related to his work in narrative theory—but I would like to. One problem that historians encounter in trying to think cogently about emplotment is having nothing useful to think about. Thinking abstractly about hypothetical sequence-structures for unknown events is not productive (at least not for historians), and all the historical events we know about in common are always already firmly emplotted, which makes thinking about alternate “plots” feel overstrained and unreal. So I suggest we consider the events I have just narrated, in both their potential emplotments and the one I chose. Given the ordinariness and inconsequence of the episode “Hayden White at the AHA,” we (including myself) are better able to think freely about whether I was successful enough in my narrative strategy to make the plot I used feel “found,” not imposed, a convincing rendering of the meaning immanent in the event which I registered and recorded, not invented, as for a rather bad academic novel. [Note: the only version of the event most of you can know is the one I gave, but that is the case with all historical evidence at some level, and at the Center for the Humanities, I would, at least, have one other first-hand witness, as reliable or unreliable as myself, just as Thucydides required.]

Given that I had committed myself to narrating a certain public event of some modest complexity and finite duration, my task was to emplot the materials, use some criterion of selection that would allow me to produce the impression of sufficient fullness (the mimesis of real time) without reproducing the real-time two-and-one-half hours, and in the course of that narratio define a coherent idea or theme as the summary “meaning” of the conflated, multiplex event and make my audience (you) aware of it as if it inhered in, and emerged from, the events themselves, not as if it proceeded whimsically or tendentiously from me alone. And I had to do this within the implicit constraints of the protocol of historicity, that system of mostly unspecified but nonetheless specifiable permissions and denials (operating through syntax and semiotics via pronouns, verb tense, quotation, reference, and so forth) which constitute “truth-claim” in prose. I am not pretending to have done anything especially noteworthy or original here. Every narrative of an event has to be manipulated through the basic devices of selective inclusion, aroused expectation and foreshadowing, comparison and contrast, metaphor and other tropological shaping. Choices have to be made and basic decisions related to hypotaxis—giving or withholding priority to detail, indicating relations of causal or temporal subordination—determine what a narrative is “about.” (In contrast to parataxis in which all separate narrative elements are equal: A and B and C and D and then … and then …).

In this case, my little endeavor was to infuse a normally narrative-resistant event—the academic conference session which has its simple, well-known linear sequence but no particular story—with the tropological condensation required by “meaningfulness” and the “sense of an ending” (à la Frank Kermode) in its sequence logic that are crucial to what we mean by emplotment. And it doesn't much matter if you don't think I was very successful. In fact, bad books, or formulaic genres, are often better to think with about these matters than idiosyncratic brilliant writing. The non-story of one more AHA session had to borrow its narrativity from an outside source, by regarding it as a summary episode [alias: the trope of synecdoche, or condensation in the related terminology of dream interpretation] of the career of a unified protagonist: here, not exactly Hayden White himself, but White's narrative theory as embodied in his books, in its progress through the definable world of academic history. As we all know, once an array of data can be configured into a unified subject, a world with institutions and rules, and a goal-oriented sequence of actions, the elements of a plot are in place. But what plot? Pilgrim's Progress? (Comedy); Portrait of the Artist? (Romance); Portrait of a Lady? (Tragedy).

I used the rudimentary but dependable device of thwarted or reversed expectation (alias: ironic outcome) to give expressive significance to my micro-narrative. I sketched in the initial wished-for plot of coherence, my announced intention to discern in the proceedings some harmonious convergence of thought on its way (implicitly in a forward direction) toward some clearer resolution or refinement: the rather pretentious “critical taxonomy” of history as cultural artifact and self-conscious practice. That provisional structure resembles Romance, I think, but it doesn't matter because its plot function was to serve as a counterpoint, a projected shadow-structure against which the events I narrate acquire their meaning, in a kind of slow-motion pratfall of accumulating disappointments and reversals of expectation registered by myself, the somewhat faux-naif narrator. There seems to be no way to avoid a certain pretentiousness in discussing these simple maneuvers, but that is part of the reason that explicit narrative theory meets a pervasive resistance: it feels so “natural” to do or to register, and sounds so insultingly contrived (to both writer and reader/listener alike) when conceptually unpacked.

I have also forced myself into a corner by invoking irony. Irony—considered one of the major tropes because it is a large-scale figure of thought like synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor, not a small-scale ornament like anaphora, isocolon, or catachresis—is a problem. Irony is a trope of meaning expressed through verbal structure but without specified formal determinants. It always involves doubling of some sort, expressing two thoughts at the same time; and it is often reduced to some causal or intentional sequence of events having an outcome that is precisely what was to be avoided, eliciting the conversational punctuation: How ironic! The presence of irony is often indicated by tone or expression that comments on and renders the literal meaning of words self-defeating or self-deflating, or acknowledges that human behavior is a poor, inadequate lever for shifting the massive forces of malign reality. In those senses, irony can easily be a trope of cheap effect. On a large scale, irony resides in the mind of the observer who sees the many ways in which human endeavor grinds blindly toward unforeseen and undesired ends which yet express and expose the disguises of other kinds of desire. Rather messy as tropes go, irony suits modern and postmodern attitudes of coolness, knowingness, detachment, and self-observation. It certainly works well enough for an intellectual event approached with some optimistic expectation that is systematically undermined, even almost parodied, by its own unfolding reality.

The question I wanted to address, however, was Michael Roth's canny question about “when” this, or any, emplotment incarnates itself in and through the array of events “to be narrated?” Or to phrase this in the negative, with respect to the mind of the author, when do other potential choices get eliminated? If one is, as Hayden White insists of himself, “a Marxist,” does one consciously and always think Marxist thoughts, or are one's thoughts and feelings merely always colored by whatever it is on a deeper level that makes one “a Marxist” in the first place? I admit, for example, that my own thoughts about vaudeville in relation to aspects of academic life long predate the 1997 AHA meeting, and that this recurring fantasy, although one of self-satire, is also persistently colored by desire, not revulsion. Naturally enough I have never seen a vaudeville show but I associate such events with people like Jack Benny and Mae West, the Marx brothers (a Marxism I subscribe to), and a certain raw daring of self-exposure, a boldness and risk in life, and a certain kind of nervy and wild comedy, none of which describe academe. Therefore, I admit to a half-buried longing for the glamour of “vaudevillian” excess to manifest itself in the academic world I actually inhabit. And this may well explain in part my emplotment (the ironic pratfall) of the Hayden White session which I was only too willing to see as a prolonged semi-sane episode of imploding and self-satirizing intellectual intentions doing their acts—on a stage, before an audience, with an imagined scoffer in the wings with a hooked stick.

But at what point did I begin to conceive of this formulation? When did other formulations get discarded? I cannot remember. And that is a substantive and important answer, the answer any author would honestly give. A choice was made (was it during Dick Vann's paper? perhaps) but it did not feel like a choice but a recognition. It has to be obvious that the process of reducing an event stretching in uninterrupted articulate speech over two-and-a-half hours to a very few pages involves severe condensation and tropological manipulation. In its primary meaning, “emplotment” is not a term derived from narrative theory but from the process of writing in prose. I think there is still a massive confusion over how and when the process of emplotment takes place. Described after the fact (which is the only metaphorical “place” from which description can take place) emplotment is a rationalizing and organizing activity which follows logically upon the collection and contemplation of the “events to be narrated.” So described, any discussion of emplotment unavoidably suggests that authors do collect a mass of facts and then (in actual chronological sequence) consider what they mean in the set of relations we call narrative.

In actuality, this virtually never happens. The narrativizing process is in action prior to and all during the “research,” recognizing and recording what may count as salient “facts,” and it never feels as if anything so artificial as emplotment is taking place—although it is. The metahistorical process of analysis is an after-the-fact dissection of mental events that must feel spontaneous, inevitable, and self-generated while they are taking place. The act of emplotment is synonymous with the finding of meaning in reality, and thus reaches too far down into unconscious reservoirs of desire and fear (much deeper even, need I say, than vaudeville fantasies) for conscious recuperation. At a certain basic level plots are made from the same materials and using the same processes of symbolization as dreams are constructed: and plots feel “found” in the same way that dreams feel “given.” But both are made.

There are, of course, major differences. The plots of truth-claim narratives are subject to a severe and extensive reality-check, to modification and self-criticism, to enlightening or painful processes of rational correction or verification. That complicated behavior is where aspects of formulated adult mental life enter the process and modify its outcome. But emplotment never starts from a blank or amoebic state of unformed contemplation of discrete units of reality. The act of apprehension of narratable elements involves very complex and deeply informed mental responses, already well on their way toward larger configurations of meaning. Emplotment seems to take place exactly at the meeting point where unconscious demands on reality confront disciplined recognitions of the larger contexts and constraints that control meaning—a point of frequent unpredictable slippages and lapses of control, and also of originality, penetration, and mental discipline. I am describing the mental “place” where we think with what we have learned. Everyone has experienced this; it comes in the form of “discovering what I think as I write it” or “by writing it.” That common experience is our intuitive access to the mental fulcrum point between unconscious and conscious ideas. It is where narrative happens.

Anyone who has written any fiction (as I have privately, and would recommend to everyone interested in critical theory) knows the quite paradoxical feeling that fiction feels found. The actual mental experience of inventing words and gestures for non-existent characters is predominantly one of summoning those characters to mind and observing them, virtually eavesdropping on them, and recording their lives. Fictional invention feels like discovery. The classical rhetorical concept of inventio involves finding or discovering the specific contents of meaning, and that underlies our modern sense of “invention” as searching the imagination for meaning. Nonfictional discovery is a process closely related to fictional invention—but subject to multiple, public constraints under a protocol for truth-claim. It is no wonder that the theory of such a complex behavior of origination and revision participates in a certain slippage.

I felt that I would eventually have to introduce the explosive topic of fiction into a discussion of Hayden White's purported influence on the historical discipline. The issue here connected with my ironic plot for the AHA session is related to the occasional fictionality of reality, and the kind of decisions we make when hovering between realism and verisimilitude. In narrating the Hayden White session, I purposely omitted any description of its location—a room in the Sheraton Hotel called the Princess Ballroom. I decided to omit that description precisely because the actual physical circumstances seemed to conspire with my ironic emplotment to frame it in a spatial metaphor so perfect that it struck me as too “novelistic” for truth-claim persuasion.

Of course now I have to attempt it: this room called a ballroom was appropriately circular, and perhaps 50 feet in diameter, with a raised platform in front of draped windows. But no one would dare dance in this room, as the free circulation of even immaterial objects is thwarted by two rows of square columns, comprising eight columns, each four-feet square, trisecting the room. Furthermore, each of the eight columns is mirrored on its four sides, so that virtually every sight line in the room leads directly to a large mirrored surface. The ceiling was low and made lower by immense crystal chandeliers which seemed to absorb the dim ambient light and multiply themselves in the mirrored columns. From the speakers’ platform, one could look directly down the narrow channel of seats unobstructed by the mirrored columns or else look at oneself in a mirror; the acoustics and the microphone were dull; the lectern light was dead; the room seemed to be in shadow. The audience was unavoidably segmented, from itself and from the speakers, confronted with its own faces and the distant enhanced sound of sentences read by speakers many of them couldn't see.

What to do with this wealth of actuality clamoring to be rendered as spatial metaphor of noncommunication, intellectual disconnection, the inert absorption of ideas into a deadening atmosphere of obsessional self-regard and false light? In terms of truth-claim narrative, would I be going too far in the direction of a tropological fictionality if I described the Princess Ballroom as the material mirror-image frame for an event marked, as I perceived it, by intellectual frustration and the non-circulation of ideas? Even if I merely described the physical features of the room without comment, I would still be implicitly asking the audience to draw the significance of a ballroom where no one could dance. We are so adroit at these poetic registrations that life resolutely seems to imitate fiction. I actually found myself making the odd decision that actuality had not been subtle enough and that I wanted my ironic narratio modulated to a lower key. Verisimilitude demanded that I censor reality. And so I conclude on this note of superadded irony: that the chief conscious decision I was aware of making in the course of constructing a narrative involved filtering actuality through a standard of verisimilitude derived from realist fiction and finding reality in need of repair.

Note

1. This paper was written for the occasion of a lecture and seminar at the Wesleyan University Humanities Center (17–18 February 1997) and was intended to reflect on the Hayden White session in its entirety at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City on 4 January 1997. This account of my experience of the AHA session provoked some extremely interesting and characteristically sharp-witted discussion among Wesleyan faculty and Humanities Center visitors: I have not altered the paper I read to this very special audience, but their acute conversation has emphatically been “good to think with,” as we say.