[In the following review of The Content of the Form, Flores provides an overview of White's conceptual assertions, which he then applies to examples of White's own stylistic phrases in the book.]

For most cultures, narratives are relatively unproblematic vehicles for transmitting honored traditions, and the critique or rejection of narrative (by recent historians, novelists, or theorists) may signal a cultural crisis of epochal proportions. In The Content of the Form Hayden White offers eight analytic essays on the work of several eminent theoreticians of narrative, work which both addresses and may contribute to such a crisis. Among the theoreticians are Paul Ricoeur, Johann G. Droysen, Frederic Jameson, Michel Foucault, and the French Annalistes. White is particularly sympathetic to the work of Paul Ricoeur (whose as yet unfinished Temps et Récit in several volumes he acclaims as our century's “most important synthesis of literary and historical theory) and to what he calls Jameson's “redemption of narrative” (170, 142). With considerable insight into their epistemological shortcomings, however, White is unable to give unqualified allegiance to either of these efforts. His main endeavor, which is separate from (but constantly indebted to) that of the specific theoreticians he discusses, is to think endlessly about “narrativity,” about how narratives work and what they might have to say.

In his opening essay White interestingly shows what narrativity accomplishes by examining the medieval German Annals of St. Gall. These Annals consist of a list of years followed by very brief entries for some (but not all) years: “709. Hard Winter. Duke Gottfried died. / 710. Hard year and deficient in crops. / 711. / 712. Flood everywhere” (6–7). Such a scheme, according to White, is merely chronological, offering no high or low points, no explanations. What the annalist does not consider (and what later writers would consider to be “missing” in his account of events) is the question of the social context, the authority of and threats to the legal and moral system in which he writes. In other words, for St. Gall there is nothing problematic about the reality or status of the events; they are simply listed. Richerus of Rheims, by contrast, seems to write his History of France (ca. 998) in order “to represent … an authority whose legitimacy hinged upon the establishment of ‘facts’ of a specialized historical order” (19). Here, then, is an instance of rhetorical and semiotic force in historical narrative, a force that White will repeatedly stress: “unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened” (20). What “really happened” is in other words arguable. Indeed it is precisely the desire to prove a point that leads a historian to the believed assumption of neutral objectivity; the ideological agenda, to be most effective, is hidden. Historians are thus advocates or rhetoricians, even when claiming the opposite; for “the appeal of historical discourse … [is that] it makes the real desirable, makes the real into an object of desire, and does so by its imposition, upon events that are represented as real, of the formal coherency that stories possess” (21).

Having established this much, White in his next chapter is able to attack the naive view, still held by many, that “the form of the discourse, the narrative, adds nothing to the content of the representation; rather it is a simulacrum … of real events” (27). This naive paradigm is no longer widely accepted, and White lists several types of theoreticians who problematize such a paradigm: the Anglo-American analytic philosophers (who critically assess the “epistemic status” of narrative), the Annalistes (who would substitute “scientific” studies for ideologically-loaded narrative), the semiologists (who view narrative as one code among others), the hermeneuticists (who consider narrative as a verbal manifestation of “time-consciousness”). Making use of the work of these schools, White insists, against conventional historians, that historical discourse is always more than the “literal, truth-value” level with which most historians believe themselves to be concerned. Such historians contend that tropes are mere decorations, but White argues on the contrary that to omit the figurative element from an analysis of narrative “is to miss not only its aspect as allegory but also the performance” of chronicle being transformed into narrative (48).

The notion of “performance,” particularly of a communal sort, is developed by Paul Ricoeur (and closely parallels Vico's New Science): emplotment symbolically repeats and continues actions by past human agents who, in their actions, made worthy stories. There may thus be a making-doing-plotting-writing connection relevant to a number of disciplines. Quite relevant, too, may be White's fine analysis (in a chapter entitled “The Politics of Historical Interpretation”) of the relations between politics and aesthetics. White shows how “the sublime” in Kant and Edmund Burke posed dangers to historians (including Burke himself) and thus had to be domesticated or exorcised in the interests of “practical” political and educational projects. By the same token, the notion of history as “senseless” often was and is prelude to a predictably apocalyptic, if not always sublime, visionary discourse about the future. Is “senseless” history, broken by the sublime, any more or less preferable to history as “sense”? White's conclusion is that it is not:

One must face the fact that when it comes to apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another. Nor can such grounds be found in any putative science of man, society, or culture. …

(75)

The term “grounds” here seems crucial, and if one notices the first phase of this passage, one might wonder how rigorous White will be in maintaining his thesis. For his work slips back into the assumption of some sort of grounds for historical tropology, and elsewhere, when he deals with Foucault, he begins by seeking—even while admitting the impossibility of the quest—for “the grounds for [Foucault's] point of view” (34).

White needs or assumes, let us venture, some sort of ground. Consider for instance his title concept, “the content of the form.” The form/content binary is a grounding concept in the history of metaphysics, and White's stress on this concept suggests a strong bias, despite disclaimers, in favor of traditional “history.” To be sure, White adds a twist to the dichotomy with his content-of-the-form formula, articulated in a respectful chapter on Droysen's Historik:

Droysen makes clear that he regards the content of the historian's discourse, not as the facts or events that comprise his manifest referent, but as his understanding of these facts and the moral implications he draws from their contemplation. … Droysen's analysis … allows us to speak of the ‘content of the form.’ …

(90)

Whether form and content be separated or taken together, however, the form/content concept itself is never put into question, and it enables White's readings to remain comfortably ensconced within the horizon of traditional “meaning.” “All the concepts,” Jacques Derrida has argued, “by means of which eidos or morphē have been translated or determined refer to the theme of presence. … Formality is whatever aspect of the thing in general presents itself, lets itself be seen, gives itself to be thought” (Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982], p. 158). When White contends that the content is the form, he assumes its unproblematic intelligibility, its clear visibility. Indeed, in his endeavor of locating of tropes and emplotments, he is solidly traditional and in many ways Aristotelian.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that White's form/content formula is useful. What, we might then ask, is the content of the form of The Content of the Form? White's prose style, while clear and interesting, is cautious, humorless, and strictly academic. With regard to what is usually called “content,” White's essays, despite their devotion to history and culture in a wide context, are at no point formed or “informed” by, say, Eastern cultures, feminist, minority or third world historians or theorists. On a more specific level, White's style is marked by a number of telling phrases. Two in particular recur with great regularity. One is “proper” taken in conjunction with “history” as a “discipline”: “properly disciplined historical consciousness”; “discipline proper to itself”; “proper object of historical study”; “the socially responsible historian properly assumes”; “a historical discipline properly assessed”; “an appropriate performance in the discipline” (63, 64, 66, 71, 45, 188). The other phrase, or a version of it, usually follows a short list of names or ideas: “Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, … and so on”; “Gissing, Conrad, Dreiser, and so forth”; “Machiavelli and Erasmus, and so forth”; “Comtean, Hegelian, Marxist, and so on”; “‘nature,’ ‘atoms,’ ‘genes’ and so forth” (143, 164, 187, 188, 187; also 112, 189, 194, 197, 204, 210). What might these stylistic turns have in common? What is the content of their forms? Granted that by “proper” White refers mostly (but not always; see p. 188) to the “discipline” as conceived by conventional historians, his repetition of the phrases betrays a certain fascination. He at any rate by no means favors a “history” or “discipline” which is much other than “proper,” but instead seems to argue for a discourse that, with some reservations, would not be far from that of Paul Ricoeur (interestingly, perhaps, White has not as yet worked out a theory of his own). The second phrase, “and so on,” or “and so forth,” is a gesture of easy totalization or casual categorization, a suggestion of something he assumes himself to hold in common with the reader (“you know what I mean”; or “that sort of thing”). It could also suggest, however, that some readers are excluded and that the writer has a right to be not only vague but at the same time classificatory. The space of “the proper” which White's text assumes, especially if we attend to what that very text says about the strategies of power (as style) could be construed as a space of arrogance and usurpation. The “and so on” phrase is a presumption of categories, and is one indication among others of a certain Aristotelianism; often White simply reprocesses categories (for instance Droysen's) rather than questioning the possibility or function of the categorizations.

Despite a concern with figuration, for instance, White rarely hesitates in classifying a given text according to some basic trope, genre, or emplotment; he rarely if ever notices the complexities of texts and his readings never lead to the sorts of aporia noted by Paul de Man (whose work, incidentally, despite its relevance to White's, is never mentioned). The commentary on Foucault is typical of much of White's work. As in Metahistory (1973), where White attempted to apply four basic master tropes, in conjunction with other categories, to the texts of several nineteenth-century historians, here he argues for a master trope by which to comprehend Foucault's texts. He offers no references to the extensive and often quite intelligent secondary material on Foucault, as if he wanted to “take on” Foucault's texts directly and to test out the master trope.

Foucault's work is at some distance from that of the other theorists in The Content of the Form, and there can be little doubt that White's tone is defensive or uneasy: Foucault's discourse is characterized by “capricious erudition, solemn disclosures …, aggressive redrawings of the map of cultural history” (107). The suggested tactic for reading such a text is as follows:

We will find a clue to the meaning of his discursive style in the rhetorical theory of tropes. … The authority of Foucault's discourse derives primarily from its style (rather than from its factual evidence or rigor of argument); … this style privileges the trope of catachresis. …

(105–06)

Note the unquestioned terms: “the meaning” (not meanings?); which “we” will “find”; “the rhetorical theory” (only one, namely “the” theory?); “derives”; “factual evidence” (earlier this was argued to be stylistic; here it is separated from “style”); “rigor of argument” (is rigor necessarily not stylistic?); and finally—the main insight—“catachresis.” But why catachresis? How have “we” decided upon it? Is it indeed Foucault's “dominant trope” (116)—assuming, that is, that he has one? Is it even (as many have wondered) a trope at all? Catachresis is also called, as White notes, abusio: the “abuse” of a trope, a metaphor with no “proper” level. Thus according to White “his own discourse stands as an abuse of everything for which ‘normal’ or ‘proper’ discourse stands” (115). But what, again, of White's style? Is it by comparison less abusive or more “proper”? If so, why “everything” or “his own”—as if to locate culpability or non-propriety? Why the repeated “stands”—as if to give the impression of intense conflict? We are told in an earlier part of the same sentence that “Foucault's style … displays a profusion of the various figures sanctioned by this trope, such as paradox, oxymoron, chiasmus, hysteron proteron, metalepsis, prolepsis, antonomasia, paronomasia, antiphrasis, hyperbole, litotes, irony, and so on” (115). Here is yet another “and so on”: the profusion must be extensive indeed, but at least the tropes have names and can be listed.

What White's list and the “and so on” fail to consider is that catachresis may be construed not only as a local abuse of tropes but as a subversion of tropology—indeed of “the” tropological system. If catachresis “sanctions” so many tropes (and our “and so on” leaves the question open), then perhaps it no longer “sanctions” anything. Indeed all tropes are to an indeterminate extent catachretic, unless “we” decide arbitrarily what is to count as the “proper”—or in this case as “the dominant trope.” The problem with such a decision, however, is its easy bypassing, in the interest of its own dominance, of the text's tropological complexity. What marks, after all, some of the most challenging texts, including Foucault's, is their very lack of a “dominant trope.” And to claim to “read” such a trope in the text is to fail, quite possibly, in the task of reading. It could be said, no doubt, that White is not a careful or close reader of texts. Long sections of his essays consist of paraphrases and summaries; even apart from that, he moves quickly among cited passages in order to establish or confirm some all too general thesis.

It is thus of some interest that in a concluding chapter he offers to read a text, The Education of Henry Adams, so as to demonstrate the shortcomings of a “‘content’-oriented method” (194). The semiological reading that emerges, however, is similar in crucial ways to the thematic readings it claims to displace. The method proposes to “provide a theoretically generated reading of this text, which would give an account for every element of it” (196), and the reading is recuperative: gaps in the narrative or shifts away from the narrative mode “themselves become meaningful as message” (204). White's semiology indeed shows how a text possesses something that is proper, or its own: the text “draws attention to … its own processes of meaning production and makes … [them] its own subject matter, its own ‘content'” (211). Perhaps most surprising about such a reading, explicitly modelled on Barthes’ S/Z (196), is that it is offered as though no critiques or refinements of structuralism had as yet appeared; curiously perhaps, what is lacking in this historian's essay (first published in 1982) is a sense that the heyday of structuralist semiotics may have passed, and that something, at least, might need to be said about that. Similarly, in an attempt to explain Ricoeur's notion of history as allegory, White cites Dante's distinction in the Convivio between poetic and theological allegory, concluding with respect to the allegorical status of the Commedia (on Charles Singleton's interpretation) that “something like this, I take it, is what Ricoeur is saying in his reflections on historical narrative” (183). But surely it is not “something like this”—unless, as with yet another “and so on,” we are willing to make do with a vague—and unhistorical—gesture.

White is of course under no obligation to provide a “sense of history” and on the contrary often debunks such a sense. The book, even so, is devoted to narrative theories and is sympathetic to notions of narrative as a socially significant force. Notice, then, that it would be nearly impossible to discern any sort of narrative or theoretical development in the essays in The Content of the Form; White's text seems to illustrate the very loss of narrative that it so articulately laments.