SOURCE: “Tropology and Narration,” in History and Theory, Vol. 39, No. 3, October, 2000, pp. 396–404.

[In the following review of Figural Realism, Carroll explores the shortcomings in White's application of tropes to narrative history and objects to the suggestion that historical writing is essentially indistinguishable from literary fiction.]

Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect by Hayden White is a selection of his articles published between 1988 and 1996. Like his previous, frequently cited anthologies—Tropics of Discourse and The Content of the Form—it is primarily concerned with narrative and figural discourse (or tropes), especially as the latter appear in unexpected places, such as historiography. As in his other writing, Figural Realism shows White to be a person of great learning, at ease with the classics—of literature, history, and much else—as well as conversant with current debates within that interdisciplinary animal referred to as Theory (with a capital “T”).

After a very brief but extremely polemical Preface (more on that anon), White begins Figural Realism with an essay entitled “Literary Theory and Historical Writing.” This essay is probably the one that will attract the most interest from philosophers of history. In it, White sounds his oft-rehearsed leitmotif: inasmuch as history (historical writing in contrast to historical research) is a distinctive kind of written discourse, literary theory is relevant to the theory and practice of historiography and the philosophy of history. That is, history (history writing) is first and foremost a verbal artifact and, therefore, an apt object of scrutiny from the perspective of literary theory. Perhaps predictably for readers familiar with White's work, the dimension of literary theory that most preoccupies him is tropology, the study of figurative discourse (or figuration).

Given White's commitment to the notion that historical writing is, in important respects, both representational and figurative, and given his additional belief that the tropological nature of history entails that any event is susceptible to different forms of emplotment, White is particularly interested in certain claims about narrating the Holocaust, notably: that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, that it must be narrated literally (not figuratively or aesthetically), and that there should be one and only one narrative of it. Thus, in his second article—“Historical Emplotments and the Problem of the Truth in Historical Representation”—he critically examines these claims about the historical representation of the Holocaust. At the same time that he challenges these allegations, he also concedes that the Holocaust may confront the historian with special problems and, in order to solve them, he recommends that historians might negotiate them by adopting the literary form of the modernist antinarrative.

The modernist antinarrative also makes an appearance in the fourth article of the book, “The Modernist Event,” where White suggests that the appropriate literary form for treating the unique, unprecedented events of our times (so-called “modernist events,” such as the Holocaust) is the modernist antinarrative. Indeed, one comes away from Figural Realism with the impression that White is convinced that historical writing should catch up with the advanced techniques of twentieth-century fictional writing. Thus, Figural Realism is not only committed to the relevance of literary theory to history writing, but also to the relevance of the practice of literature itself to history.

The third chapter—“Formalist and Contextualist Strategies in Historical Explanation”—seems to me to be primarily concerned with New Historicism whose achievement White locates in its advancement of a cultural or historical poetics (61). That is, for instance, by juxtaposing information from arcane legal procedures with canonical plays, the New Historicist breaks with, revises, or weakens the prevailing ways of thinking about the historical record creatively in a way such that the emergent, contingent, exotic, abject or uncanny aspects of the historical record are disclosed (61). Insofar as the New Historicists are poetic (in the sense of creative), one surmises that White is favorably disposed to them as an example of scholars who make history writing more explicitly like literary writing (in a very broad construal of that term).

New Historicism, of course, is primarily a creature of literary history; and White is interested in exploring the relevance of the writing of literary history for the writing of history in general. Consequently, he includes a chapter entitled “Auerbach's Literary History” in which he interrogates Auerbach's concept of this practice, as exemplified by his masterpiece Mimesis. White argues that what is distinctively historicist and modernist about Auerbach's approach is the idea of figural causation (particularly the narrative of prefiguration and fulfillment), which White believes has ramifications not only for literary history but for history in general (87).

In “Freud's Tropology of Dreaming,” White unravels the relation between Freud's account of the transformative processes of the dreamwork—condensation, displacement, representation, and secondary revision—to the various tropes used by rhetoricians to catalogue the articulation of figurative language. White argues, persuasively I think, that Freud, in this case, rediscovered or reinvented neoclassical tropology in order to theorize the dreamwork, though, White points out, whereas tropes function generally to clarify thought in figurative discourse, their function in the dreamwork is to disguise it.

“Narrative, Description and Tropology in Proust” performs a very close reading of a segment of Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe—the scene of Marcel's interpretation of Robert's fountain. White is interested in this interlude for two related reasons: for what it reveals about the relation of interpretation in general to tropology (maybe unsurprisingly, he contends that interpretation, like narrative and interpretation-as-narrative, is tropological or tropic through and through); and for what it indicates about the ways in which tropes are concatenated in texts (how one trope leads to, yields to, or is connected to antecedent and subsequent tropes).

White rounds off the volume with “Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse.” In this article, White comments as an outsider (a nonmusicologist) on a series of papers by music theorists that explore the narrative dimension of music. The connection between this essay and the rest of the book is, of course, narrative, and White undoubtedly was invited to play the role of commentator here because, as a recognized narratologist, he is well-placed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of attempts to import narrative concepts to the study of music.

Though White, it seems to me, is usefully critical and reserved about many of the tendencies in the new musicology, nevertheless, I think that he is still not critical enough, especially when it comes to attempts to attribute a narrative dimension to pure instrumental or absolute music. For if we are speaking of pure instrumental music, there is the continuing issue of whether it makes sense to call music discourse, let alone narrative discourse. Unfortunately, White seems to presume uncritically that it does and as a result many of his claims in this chapter involving pure instrumental music appear simply to beg the most vexing theoretical question in this domain of inquiry.

As already indicated, “Literary Theory and Historical Writing” is probably the essay in the volume of greatest interest to philosophers of history. There White advances the view that history does not have a distinctive method, but rather is a distinctive kind of written discourse (1). It is an assertion that he iterates several times in this volume. Nevertheless, he does not really account adequately for what he believes is distinctive about historical writing, since, though he alludes to tropes and figures repeatedly, he also suggests that figuration is a feature of all discourse (17). So we are unfortunately left with the question of why White believes that historical writing is a distinctive mode of writing.

Surely White is right that most historical exposition is verbal and that, therefore, literary analysis might be pertinent to it. Nevertheless, the phrase White uses is “literary theory.” If this conjures up images of contemporary literary theory in readers’ minds, however, they are bound to be disappointed, since the literary apparatus to which White most frequently resorts is the tropology of neoclassical rhetoricians (which some might claim is less a theory than an arguably messy, though pragmatically serviceable, descriptive taxonomy). This, of course, is not really a problem, because everyone should be willing to admit that historical writing often involves figures of speech, such as metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. Were that White's claim, it would be unexceptionable.

However, the use of figures of speech or tropes in historical writing portends larger epistemological issues for White. The language of a historian is not, on his view, a transparent container, nor is the historian's use of tropes a neutral, dispensable form of ornamentation that can be paraphrased away without remainder. Tropes contribute to the content of historical writing—hence, White's notion of the content of form. White believes that tropes have content because he associates them with narrative structures.

Though White does not discuss the connection here at great length, readers familiar with his other writings will recall that the relevant narrative structures are of the order of comedy, tragedy, romance, epic, and so on. Since it makes an integral difference to the content (the meaning) of a piece of historical writing whether it emplots a sequence of events as a tragedy or as a farce, if we consider the structure of historical narration to be intimately connected to the historian's choice of tropes, then tropes contribute to the content of historical narratives.

Despite the fact that, to my mind, White has never satisfactorily spelt out in compelling detail the nature of the connection of tropes to narrative structure, nor shown that all historical narratives are, necessarily, tropological in form, the epistemological work he wishes these controversial presuppositions to do is quite clear. If historical narratives are inescapably tropic, if the choice of tropes renders the shape of any historical narrative figurative, and if said figuration is part of the content of a historical narrative, then there is a dimension of meaningful content in historical texts that remains to be assessed after all the fact-stating sentences in the historical discourse have been evaluated atomistically for their literal truth content. But how are we to assess this additional content?

Not, according to White, in terms of literal truth, since the relevant content in question is allegedly always figurative. Thus, White suggests we might think of this dimension of the narrative history as being true in the way that metaphors are true, where it is understood that so-called metaphorical truths and literal truths are assessed differently from the epistemic point of view (6–9). In this regard, historical narratives would be evaluated in the standard, literal way with respect to their fact-stating sentences and by the criteria of metaphorical truth with respect to their emplotment.

This epistemic ploy, however, is not conclusive, since White has failed to scotch the still defensible view, first broached by Aristotle, that metaphors are just abbreviated similes, and, therefore, amenable, once expanded, to the same literal standards of truth that other fact-stating utterances are. Of course, White may be able to refute this view of metaphor, but, as of now, the burden of proof belongs to him, if he wants to continue using this epistemological gambit.

Another suggestion that White makes is that the putatively special kind of truth that pertains to the tropological content of historical narratives might be understood on the model of fictional truth (9–13). That is, we typically believe that fictions can disclose truths about the world, though not literal truths, since fictions are made up. At the same time, historical writing and fictional writing share many of the same tropological and narrative structures. So might we not say that in virtue of these shared devices that history has a fictional dimension—that the distinction between literal history and fiction is not as implacable as members of the AHA suppose—and that histories, as well as being, in part, literally true, are also, in part, fictionally true, that is, true in the way that fictions are true of the world?

White does not attempt to deconstruct utterly the boundary between the literal and the fictional with respect to historical writing, though he does suggest that historical writing has an inexpungible fictional dimension in virtue of its tropic structures, whose content is best assessed in the way that we assess what might be called fictional truth.

Many historians will be unhappy to learn that their writing is fictional, even if White attempts to console them epistemologically by reassuring them that fictions can tell us about the world. I share their misgivings. Moreover, I do not think that they should be swayed by White's argument, since I think that it rests on a mistaken view of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, the category to which historical writing belongs.

White appears to assume that since historical writing and fictional writing share tropological devices and narrative structures, one is entitled to say that history writing, or a dimension thereof, is fictional. This, in turn, presupposes that the way in which one distinguishes fiction is in terms of its formal devices and structures. But this is a view that has been abandoned by philosophers of fiction for the simple reason that, as White himself believes, fictions and nonfictions can share formal and narrative features. For example, the same point-of-view editing structure used in narrative fiction films can be used in a documentary film without compromising the nonfiction status of the documentary film.

What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction, according to theorists like Kendall Walton and Gregory Currie, is the intended stance that the author mandates the audience to take toward the propositional content of his discourse. With nonfiction, the author intends the reader to believe the propositional content of the discourse; with fiction, the author merely intends the reader to imagine or to entertain the propositional content of the work. Historians, it is fair to say, intend the audience to believe the content of their work—to believe that it applies to the historical past—and in that sense their writing is squarely nonfictional, even if it shares certain formal expositional structures with fictional writing. The realist political historian who projects a tragic viewpoint toward the history of the Balkans is not writing fiction in this sense, no matter how fond he might be of synecdoches, because he intends readers to believe literally the content of his discourse. Unless White can undermine this sort of approach to the identification of fiction, he is not warranted in asserting that history writing, or a dimension thereof, is fictional and, therefore, to be assessed in terms of a different epistemic standard than that appropriate to all literal nonfictions.

White's tropological/fictional approach to historical writing is well known and has, as one would expect, garnered its share of criticism. In “Literary History and Historical Writing” White addresses a number of those criticisms, some more successfully than others. Possibly the most threatening charge leveled at White is that his position is self-refuting. That is, White appears to believe that all discourse is tropological. Consequently, the critic suggests, White's own metahistorical discourse must be tropological. White appears to concede as much (17–18), but then goes on to respond that this is not a problem because it does not detract from the seriousness of a discourse that it has tropological features. The possession of figuration, and even of figurative content, does not, White insists, imply frivolousness.

True enough. But nevertheless I think that White has missed the point of his critic here. I take the critic to be charging that if White's theory is tropological in the way he concedes, then it is fictional. If it is fictional, then we are not intended to believe it. But surely White wants us to believe his theory. Therefore, his concessions are self-undermining. To protest, as White does, that his theories are serious—perhaps serious fiction—is simply to change the subject. For if they are fictional, then they are not presented as objects to be believed. But since, presumably, White intends them to be believed, then he does not intend them to be fictional. This is, I think, the trap in which White's critic wishes to ensnare him, and I do not see that White's invocation of seriousness sets him free of it.

Throughout White's writings, he seems to presuppose that all the plot structures or narrative connectives used in historical writing are figurative; that is why he attributes a metaphorical and/or fictional aspect to history writing, alleging that it is not straightforwardly reducible to assessment in terms of literal truth. I have never been convinced by this generalization. Rather, it seems to me that most often (typically) the narrative connectives in historical writings involve causal networks—though not necessarily fully deterministic ones—such as lines of influence, agent causation, and so on (which can be assessed in terms of a straightforward, literal conception of truth). Thus I, at least, do not feel the pressure White does to arrive at some alternative standard of truth for the assessment of the narrative linkages in historical writing.

White takes up the issue of literal causation versus figurative causation in his essay “Auerbach's Literary History.” For White, Auerbach's history of Western literature has the form of a prefiguration narrative. Just as theologians once found prefigurations of Christ in the Old Testament Adam, so, White maintains, Auerbach finds prefigurations of later developments in Western literature in earlier ones. Thus, it is the trope of similarity—metaphor—that supplies the connective tissue in Auerbach's story. For that reason, White dubs this connective “figural causation,” which contrasts with literal causation, since, for example, there need be no really significant genetic link between the prefiguring events or persons and the prefigured ones; the former may anticipate the latter without playing any literal role in the latter's actual causal history.

Whether White's interpretation of Auerbach is correct is, I conjecture, of less interest to readers of this journal than his notion of figural causation. How extensive is it and how important is it for the practice of historical writing, not only literary history, but history in general? Undeniably, some histories secure coherence tropically in the way that White suggests—by unifying their subjects by means of the narrative figure of prefiguration/fulfillment. But I suspect that most modern historians would be wary of narratives told this way, unless a line of influence can be traced between the earlier events and persons and the later ones.

Moreover, if a line of influence can be traced between, say, one author and an earlier one, then we are not dealing with figural causation, but with literal causation. That is, the work of the earlier author is a causal condition, though not a fully deterministic one, for the work of the later author. Furthermore, if we distinguish narratives of influence from prefigurative narratives, my guess is that the incidence of prefigurative narratives (and the accompanying reliance on figural causation), though perhaps not totally negligible, is not widely pervasive either in the practice of contemporary history writing, literary or otherwise.

Of course, one apparent deviation from my maybe overly confident estimate here is the tendency of history writers to analogize one period with another—to say things like the 1990s are just like the 1890s. Is this a matter of figural causation? One reason not to think so is that historians who speak this way often do so with the unstated presupposition that the similarities they note are underwritten by causal regularities, laws, tendencies, or probabilities.

That is, the events or periods in question are similar because they are thought to be subject to similar causal processes, and the comparison between them is warranted since the genesis and outcome of the earlier events and periods may illuminate causally the direction of the evolving events at a later time. This does not show a commitment to figural causation, but an attempt at a familiar type of causal explanation, rooted in the faith that we can glean some causal regularities—though not necessarily laws—in the historical process. But even if this faith were ill-advised, such attempts are not thereby matters of figural causation, but rather, at worst, misguided, though literal, essays in causal explanation.

My objections in this case are based on my sense of the contemporary practice of history writing. But in Figural Realism, White is not just concerned to limn that practice; he also wants to change it. He not only argues that history writing is already literary, in ways generally unacknowledged by practitioners, but that they should become self-consciously literary and avail themselves energetically of the strategies of modernist fiction writers. For example, he recommends that the most effective way for history writers to grapple with the supposedly unprecedented events of the twentieth century is to embrace the techniques of the modernist antinarrative.

Though I admit that the events of the twentieth century are often different from events of earlier times—frequently due to the hyper-organization and interconnectedness afforded by modern developments (for example, totalitarianism, globalization—including global war—and so on)—I do worry that uniqueness claims for modern times may be exaggerated. But even if White is right that we are today confronted by events of a different and historically distinctive order than anything confronted by past epochs, I still find troublesome his recommendation of the modernist antinarrative as the solution to the problem of how to represent modern events.

My primary reservation has to do with my feeling that White has not really given us much of an idea of what a modernist antinarrative historical text would be like. Almost all his examples are fictional, including not only literature and film, but also the cartoon novel Maus. But it is difficult for the historian to take up White's programmatic suggestion without concrete historical exemplars. The only example that White mentions that seems to approach historical writing is Primo Levi's Il Sistema periodico, but unfortunately White does not say enough about it to provide a working historian with an instructive model. Thus, White's advice for historians of our times is pretty thin and airy. One wonders whether White would count the recent Reagan biography Dutch as the sort of narrative that he has in mind, since it, like modernist writing, blurs the distinction between fiction and fact. But that, of course, would hardly be a rousing testimonial for White's program.

White does propose that we might think of Auerbach's Mimesis as a modernist text because Auerbach himself suggests that his method approximates Virginia Woolf's (100). However, White recognizes that at the manifest level of technique Mimesis does not satisfy even Auerbach's own list of modernist strategies. So even if Mimesis is truly a modernist text, it provides little guidance for the working historian in search of a new mode of writing.

White's own writing in Figural Realism is often dense. I think the reason for this is his preoccupation with tropology. He is out to find tropes everywhere. But in order to do this, his conception of figuration is rather loose. It can apply literally to figures of speech, though unfortunately White does not define them rigorously and, as a result, sometimes his application of the category of one figure rather than another seems arbitrary. Moreover, the notion of figures or tropes can be extended metaphorically (or associatively) to narrative structures and to modes of thought. Indeed, some figures can be used to explain other figures. Thus, at the level of writing, the reader, or, at least, this reader is often confused by the unmarked, shifting senses of how one is to understand White's central concepts.

This may also be a case, to steal one of White's favorite themes, where form becomes a matter of content. Because White's use of the notion of tropes is so slippery, it is no accident that he can pile up so many examples. But this then raises the question of whether the extent of troping he finds in historical discourse isn't really a function of the slackness of his category. In that case, White's discovery of troping in unexpected places is not as surprising as a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It is more like the magician moving the hat from one hand to the other.

Finally, some comment on White's Preface is in order. It is very short and it has the flavor of a “Here-I-Stand” manifesto. A number of White's pronouncements seem predicated on giving the faint of heart, like me, the jitters. Three especially stand out. First, White maintains that there is no active thought outside of theory; “to think that one can think outside of theory is a delusion” (viii). I can only think (actively) that White must have a pretty inflated idea of what counts as a theory. I thought that my car wouldn't start this morning, but I had no theory. Second, White contends that theory puts in abeyance the distinction between true and false, fact and fiction (viii). This hardly seems (dare I say it) true of scientific theory, most philosophical theory, social-scientific theory, and so on; White can't be advancing an empirical generalization. Also, as far as fact and fiction go, theoretical physicists are not likely to invite Arthur C. Clark to deliver a technical paper on plasma dynamics anytime in the near future.

Of course, if theories are not evaluated in terms of truth and falsity (or truth indicativeness and falsity indicativeness), how are they to be assessed? White suggests the criterion for evaluating theories should be their utility in promoting the moral and political aims, goals, and ends of the human species at large (viii–ix). Not only do I wonder how this will be done without considerations of truth and falsity, but I fear it mires White in the same kind of problems that bedevil classical utilitarians, namely, how can anyone conceivably perform these utility calculations?

Since these rather incendiary assertions do not seem to me to play a major or even explicit role in the essays that follow, I don't imagine that there is much point in making a big deal about them. Maybe the Preface is just White's way of getting unadventurous folks like me to sit up and take notice. Perhaps, following White's preferred mode of exegesis, we should read the Preface tropologically. It certainly sounds like hyperbole, and, I, at least, hope that it may be irony.