[In the following review, Carrard provides an overview of the topics addressed by White in Figural Realism. Carrard expresses disapproval over White's decision to forego a unifying prefatory essay in the volume.]

Figural Realism collects essays written by Hayden White between 1988 and 1997, that is, after the publication of The Content of the Form in 1987. The oxymoronic title points to two of White's most basic theses: namely, that figurative language refers to reality “as faithfully and much more effectively than any putatively literalist idiom or mode of discourse might do” (vii); and, conversely, that seemingly “realistic” modes of representation like historiography include elements of “literariness” (ix), as they are grounded in the “four general types of trope” comprised of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (11). Let us recall that White's “tropes” differ from the “figures” of traditional rhetoric insofar as they do not pertain to the linguistic surface of texts. When Marcel Proust, in a passage that White comments on at length in chapter 7 of Figural Realism, describes the drops of water that become suspended at the top of a fountain in the Guermantes's garden as a “nuage humide” (literally: a wet cloud) (129), he connects two different realms through a metaphor in the “traditional” sense, substituting one phrase for another according to a technique he himself explains (and celebrates) in a famous section of “Le temps retrouvé.” For White, in contrast, “tropes” are among the models that provide texts with a configuration in their deep structures. Therefore, “tropology” does not concern itself with individual utterances; it focuses on ways of associating words and thoughts with one another “across an entire discourse,” allowing the critic to characterize the structure of that discourse “as a whole” in rhetorical terms (11). Thus—to return to the same example—White does not seek to identify the numerous figures of speech that Proust uses in his description of the fountain. Emphasizing the turns from one tropological “type” to the other, he argues that the passage unfolds in four successive stages, “cast respectively in the modes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony” (131).

Several of the essays in Figural Realism proceed along the same lines, advancing the view that tropes shape all discourses, whether they are referential or fictional. Chapter 1 thus argues for the relevance of literary theory to the analysis of the historiography, which—being written according to rhetorical conventions just like literature is—can no longer be regarded as an “unproblematical, neutral container of a content supposedly given in its entirety by a reality that lies beyond its confines” (25). Chapters 3 and 5 explore the notion of “context” in literary history and literary theory, showing how scholars (e.g., the new historicists, to whom White devotes an extensive analysis in chapter 3) have turned to history for the “kind of knowledge” it is supposed to provide (64), only to discover that there is not one but a “variety” of historical approaches (66). Focused on The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter 6 submits that Freud has “reinvented, rediscovered, or simply recalled” the theory of tropes found in nineteenth-century rhetoric (124), contributing a “terminology” for characterizing the moves of nonlogical thinking as well as a “psychology” of figurative discourse (125). As for the chapter on A la recherche du temps perdu, it demonstrates that rhetoric and narrative can have a theoretical function, Proust, at any rate, adopting them to “interpret” (141) things as diverse as sexual preference, social attitudes, social class, and works of art.

For the readers who have followed White's output since Metahistory (1973), the most provocative among the essays in Figural Realism are probably the ones in which White tests his conceptual apparatus in unfamiliar territories. Chapter 2, for example, is to my knowledge the only text in which White considers the representations of the Holocaust in historiography and literature. Addressing the issue of “truth” in those representations, White asks whether some styles, forms, or genres are more suited to the facts than others, and whether specific tropes or plots must be excluded because of the very nature of the subject. According to him, the Holocaust is not “any more unrepresentable than any other event in human history” (42), but archival and aesthetic constraints restrict the way(s) that it can be described. Thus, it is illegitimate to emplot it in a “comic” or “pastoral” mode, if that plot is presented as “literal” (rather than “figurative”), and as “inherent” in the facts (rather than “imposed” upon them) (30). On the other hand, there is nothing wrong about setting forth the Shoah in those modes, if the goal is to make a “metacritical comment not so much on the facts as on the versions of the facts emplotted in a comic or pastoral way” (30). White thus praises Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986) for casting the Holocaust in the medium of the comic book and in a mode of “bitter satire” (31). Indeed, by mixing a low genre with events of the utmost significance, Spiegelman successfully challenges the idea that a “serious theme … demands a noble genre” (31), and he manages to raise “all the crucial issues” regarding the limits of representation in general, of the representation of real, traumatic events in particular (32). The last chapter in Figural Realism, “Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse,” takes White even further away from his turf. A long comment about the papers edited by Steven Paul Scher as Music and Text: Critical Inquiries (1992), it deals with the relations between musicology and literary theory. White, to be sure, claims no expertise in the area of music, and he presents the essay as a “test case for assessing the critical grasp that discourse theory might provide for cultural critics working at the interface of two or more disciplines” (197). But he asks interesting layman's questions, for instance, while discussing a paper by Ruth Solie, whether it is documented that “major always denoted positive and minor negative,” or at least “was presumed to have been apprehensible as such,” at the time when Schumann composed his Frauenliebe songs (161). More generally, he brilliantly assesses the difficulties confronting “efforts to construe musical works on the analogy to literary texts,” also showing how attempts to relate both of these to their historical context(s)—White here returns to (for him) more familiar grounds—require “a full theorization of what is meant by history itself” (175).

In his preface, White signals that he intended to write a long introduction relating the essays in Figural Realism to one another as well as to essays he published earlier, but that he soon gave up, leaving the texts to “stand by themselves” (vi). Readers certainly can understand how attempts at synthesis might “bore” (as White puts it) even their authors (vi). They can also understand how theorists are now wary of “totalizing systems of thought” that privilege the whole at the expenses of the parts (viii). Yet they may still regret the absence of a preamble of some sort, in which White would if not defend the wholeness and coherence of his system, at least self-consciously define his current positions and look back at certain aspects of his work. To take just one example, it would be intriguing to see how White responds to the critics who challenge his thesis of the nondifferentiation between fictional and historical discourses from a formalist perspective. Indeed, White has made a specialty of refuting the views of the critics who oppose his conception of historiography as a “literary artifact” (the title of a chapter in Tropics of Discourse) in the name of “realism,” and he again devotes several pages (13–16) to answering those critics’ renewed attacks. Yet he does not engage with the theorists who—like Dorrit Cohn—argue that if fiction and historiography are both literary constructs, they do include textual features that unquestionably set them apart (Cohn's The Distinction of Fiction appeared like Figural Realism in 1999, but Cohn has been publishing on the subject since the early 1980s). As a friendly amendment to White's preface, we might thus add that there is nothing rhetorically or epistemologically objectionable to the fact that established scholars should periodically revisit—and reassess—their past productions. Such metacritical considerations, moreover, are not necessarily “boring.” Whether the reader is familiar with the author or just interested in the issues, they may be among the most inspiring elements of a study.