SOURCE: “The Reception of Hayden White,” in History and Theory, Vol. 37, No. 2, May, 1998, pp. 143–61.

[In the following essay, Vann provides a quantitative analysis of White's critical reception among professional historians and discusses aspects of White's work that have drawn criticism, notably his terminology and alleged relativism.]

The publication in 1973 of Hayden White's Metahistory, Brian Fay has recently written, marked a decisive turn in philosophical thinking about history.¹ White might demur that he has no “philosophy of history,” since he, notoriously, has bracketed considerations of historical knowledge, as he has bracketed treatments of the referentiality of language. More plausibly, he might repeat his argument that there is no essential difference between history and metahistory; thus all practicing historians—and White still practices occasionally—have a philosophy of history whether they know it or not. However this may be, Louis Mink, writing only a few weeks after the publication of Metahistory, declared it was “the book around which all reflective historians must reorganize their thoughts on history.”²

A quarter century later, we can see to what extent Mink's mandate has been heeded. White's challenge to conventional academic history, however, was not confined to Metahistory, though it is the work most often quoted. He fired off his first salvo in “The Burden of History” (1966)³ and as late as 1992⁴ was still expanding on and in fact changing some of his views. White is perhaps the premier academic essayist of our times, and he uses essays in the fashion of Montaigne, the inventor of the genre—to try things out no less than to inform and to provoke. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978) reprints “The Burden of History” and eleven other essays, some—like “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea” and “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish”—more or less unrelated to the theory of historical writing, and some contemporary with and closely related to Metahistory. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” one of three most often cited articles, is the best short statement of the theoretical import of Metahistory; but in the introduction which White wrote for the collection, he gives intimations of moving beyond the stance he offered there. In particular, the moral stance of existential humanism, so marked in “The Burden of History” and still implicit in Metahistory,⁵ seems to have receded, and while there is still much about tropes and narrative, there are now also discussions of narrativity and of discourse. These become more important in the eight essays republished in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), of which the first three and the eighth are entirely devoted to theoretical issues in historiography. (The other four, theoretically informed to be sure, are devoted to Droysen, Jameson, Ricoeur, and Foucault.)⁶ In this collection the fruits of a decade of reflection since Metahistory are presented, with new emphasis, in particular, falling on the ideological and political import of historical narratives and on what White called “the historical sublime.”

Apparently not all White's essays turned out to his satisfaction, since some were omitted from the collections. One of these, however, “The Problem of Change in Literary History,”⁷ has had a long afterlife. And he has continued to publish, with undiminished energy, since 1987, although there has not been a third volume of collected essays.⁸

White's oeuvre is thus various and extensive, so any consideration of the reception of his work raises the prior and insistent question: “Which White?” Although (I would argue) he is generally free of the cruder sorts of inconsistency and incoherence, his thought has always been on the move. Furthermore, in stating his basic positions in a number of different contexts and to different implied readers, he has avoided repeating himself verbatim, with the consequence that various formulations of these positions—and not always cautious ones—have appeared. White has given much less attention to this than have his would-be exegetes, as he almost invariably declines invitations to explain what he meant by a given passage and as a rule does not defend against attacks on his views (or what are taken to be his views).

One way to study the reception of Hayden White is to make a quantitative study of the reactions, by historians—reflective or otherwise—and others, to the various pieces which White has written about historiography and the theory of history over the past thirty-odd years. My Rezeptionsgeschichte is based on citations of these works in the journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index for the period 1973 to 1993.⁹ This essay reports on those citations, suggests what they can tell us about White's work, and concludes with some of the important and still unresolved questions which White has raised.

To be truly comprehensive such a study would have to include all the comments made about White in books, but this is not feasible. There is of course no way to discover what views, if any, were held by people who never cited or wrote about him. This has not prevented several writers from characterizing such views. Most of them say that White has persuaded only a few eccentric historians. Amusingly, it is social-science-oriented historians, who should be most wary of venturing generalizations unsupported by comprehensive survey research, who are willing to say, as does Eric H. Monkkonen, “I suspect that only the tiniest handful of historians would concur” with White.¹⁰ Only Hans Kellner detected the “enthusiastic reception Metahistory has had among many historians.”¹¹ It is a good deal easier to find such comments as that the book is “irritating and pretentious” and amounts to “a systematic denuding of the historical consciousness” which constitutes “the most damaging undertaking ever performed by a historian on his profession.”¹²

Nobody has attempted to estimate how many philosophers or literary critics White has persuaded. It seems clear, though, that the sample constituted by references in journals must overstate the extent and favorability of responses to White's work, at least among historians and literary scholars. These are much more likely to make reference to works they generally approve of, whereas philosophers do their jobs by criticizing the views of those they cite.

There are well over a thousand citations of White's work in philosophy of history in those twenty years. That averages over fifty a year; but the series starts very small (only one in 1974, and still only eighteen in 1978) and rises to close to a hundred per year in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Carl Schorske has pointed out that Metahistory “generated” no fewer than fourteen articles just in History and Theory, and a Beiheft as well.¹³ Although this work was mentioned more often in History and Theory than in any other journal, yet, as might be expected from such a large number of citations, the diversity of journals in which the work of White has been cited is extraordinary. Clio and, more recently, the American Historical Review are the obvious ones, but also ELH, ESQ, and MLN, Arcadia, Belfagor, Chasqui, and Fabula, Paragraph, Poetica, Salmagundi, Semeia, and Semiotica—not to forget Crane Bag, Sur, and Neophilologicus. There are quite a few comments in German (into which all three of White's books have been translated),¹⁴ Italian (the first language into which Metahistory was translated), and Spanish (also based on a Spanish translation of Metahistory). There are also a few in Dutch, Russian, Portuguese, and—thanks to the indefatigable Paul Ricoeur—in French, into which none of White's books has been translated. The array includes journals in administration science, anthropology, art history, biography, communications, film studies, geography, law, psychoanalysis, and theater. But to arrange the journals by discipline is misleading, not only because there are so many comments on White's work in journals of general interest (like Partisan Review) but also because the writers are seldom readily classifiable by their own disciplines. In fact it was usually necessary to look them up in various academic directories in order to find out in which departments they were officially rostered. Philosophers conversant with literature, the occasional historian interested in philosophy, and—especially—literary scholars disposing, or purporting to dispose of, all these fields were the ones who found reason to draw on White's writings. Furthermore, scholars interested in White have shown a tendency to migrate from one department to another—as indeed White himself did. The out-migration from history departments has been particularly noticeable; a tabulation of commentators by discipline would look somewhat different if Hans Kellner, who has written more about White than has anyone else, is classified as a historian—as he started out being—or as a professor of English—as he now is.

A diachronic analysis reveals which disciplines confronted White's work, and when. There were, by my count, seventeen reviews of Metahistory, half of them in such eminently respectable journals as the American, Canadian, and Pacific Historical Review, History, and the Journal of Modern History, as well as interdisciplinary journals with a substantial historical content like Clio, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and History and Theory.¹⁵ On the other hand, there were fewer than half as many reviews of Tropics of Discourse, and these appeared in MLN, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Virginia Quarterly Review, Notes & Queries, Southern Review, and Contemporary Sociology. The Journal of Modern History was the only historical journal to review it (in a joint review with a book called Culture as Polyphony: An Essay on the Nature of Paradigms, which the reviewer judged as the more important of the two books).¹⁶The Content of the Form was more widely reviewed, but once again, in such serials as British Journal of Aesthetics, Yale Review, University of Toronto Quarterly, Political Theory, Modern Languages Quarterly, Novel, and Partisan Review. The only historical journals to review it were the American Historical Review and (bundling it with several other books) the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Historians took a particularly active part in the early response to Metahistory. About forty percent of the earliest notices of it and the early articles were made by historians, who were most of the earlier reviewers; but as these works began to attract the attention of others, especially literary scholars, the relative and even the absolute numbers of mentions by historians began to decline. Over all, fewer than fifteen percent of the comments on White that I found were made by historians, while the majority were made by literary scholars—more in English, as might be expected, but a surprising number in Spanish and German.

The purely statistical picture, then, would suggest that some historians read Metahistory and some of the earlier articles and found occasions to refer to them, but few indeed devoted the same attention to Tropics of Discourse or The Content of the Form. They would have had little opportunity to hear of these books, since there were so few reviews in professional journals. White became much less of a presence in historical circles, regularly preferring to attend Modern Language Association conventions rather than those of the American Historical Association (these used to be held at the same time). In 1987 Allan Megill referred to him as “something close to a bête noire within the [historical] discipline”; in later years some people began to refer to him as “outside of the profession” or as a “literary critic.”¹⁷

German historians were less inclined to excommunicate White, and once his three books were translated, a number of them wrote appreciatively about him. Even an English historian, Antony Easthope, acknowledged that discussions of the “linguistic turn,” largely owing to White's “magisterial intervention,” had begun there.¹⁸ Easthope's article is primarily about an old article by Lawrence Stone called “The Inflation of Honours.” This reading of Stone informed by White dramatizes how abstract the discussion of his views has become in the almost complete absence of any historically informed participants. If historians have missed out on White's work, it has also missed historians.

The statistically inclined may wonder whether my figure for the declining, indeed almost disappearing, percentage of historians citing White is not in part a statistical artifact. Since there are so many more literary scholars than historians, there are that many more people “at risk,” as statisticians say, of having read and cited White. I cannot think of any statistical technique to eliminate this possibility, but neither can I think of a plausible argument that what the statistics suggest is not real. The work of Hayden White has had a remarkable influence outside the profession, making him perhaps the most widely quoted historian of our time. But historians have almost entirely tuned out, especially historians in the United States (if it were not for the interest in White in the German historical profession from the late 1980s, the anemic figures for historians would have been even more unimpressive). Furthermore, even when American historians have quoted White in the last few years, they are still quoting Metahistory, rather than the essays which make up Tropics of Discourse and especially The Content of the Form. And within Metahistory, they are disproportionately attracted to those bits which discuss the great nineteenth-century historians.

Except for those who take particular pleasure in tabulations or catalogues, the main interest in surveying the reception of Hayden White is observing the variety not just of responses, but of borrowings, adaptations, and attempted paraphrases. The first review of Metahistory enunciated a position, if not an argument, that recurred frequently in the observations of historians.¹⁹ Its author was Gordon Leff, the author of The Tyranny of Concepts (University, Ala., 1969). Leff begins, a bit surprisingly, by saying that “few would now dispute” that there is an “indispensable metahistorical foundation in all historical thinking.” He identifies the novelty and interest of the book as White's location of this, beyond any particular ideological standpoint, “in the very linguistic or poetic image which ‘prefigures’ all conceptualization.” Historical discourse thus “owes its modes to the particular linguistic imagery in which historical events are initially depicted.” This sentence is not free of difficulties, but we may assume that “linguistic imagery” is a translation of “tropes” and that the “initial depiction” here is that of historians rather than the evidence about the events with which they must work.²⁰ Leff here avoids a common tendency to emphasize White's adaptation of Northrop Frye's four plot-types, often to the exclusion of his more radical view of the underlying tropes. Leff then gives his critique: “the historical reader” will find in confronting White's treatment of actual nineteenth-century historians that “latent skepticism” will likely “turn to manifest disbelief.” The problem is that White has taken a good idea “beyond what most historians would regard as its legitimate limits” and “reduced history to a species of poetics or linguistics.” Even as a formal analysis, he concludes, Metahistory leaves out too much, “not least the criteria which govern historical knowledge and what is peculiar to it.”

It would be unfair to demand substantiation of these claims from a short book review, but its rhetorical moves do require some notice. The most obvious is the invocation of “the historical reader” and “most historians” as authoritative. Then there is the reference to the unspecified supplement that history has which species of “poetics” and “linguistics” do not. White's application of the word “poetic” to historical thought, as we shall see, caused considerable offense; Leff is however unusual in claiming that history was thus “reduced” to poetics (rather than poetry). It is perfectly fair to note that White has omitted reference to “criteria governing historical knowledge”—and apparently only historical knowledge. However, even supposing that White or anyone else knows exactly what these are, his manifest purpose was to understand the great historical works of the nineteenth century not as bundles of truth claims (many of which have long since been falsified) but as books still worth reading, having “died into art.”

Two other early reviewers, John Clive and Peter Burke, added a count to historians’ indictments of White: obscurity. It is very unlikely that these were the only ones who had difficulty understanding Metahistory; but Burke went so far as to claim that White was writing “like his heroes Vico and Frye [!] … in what is very nearly a private language.”²¹ Clive complained that its style “lacks lucidity and elegance to a degree” and calls its frequent neologisms “monstrosities.”²² What is remarkable in Clive's review, however, is its openness to White's case. Whereas Burke had asserted that for White “the historical work” was “essentially the same as a work of fiction, in that it is a verbal structure which represents reality,” Clive warned against too rash a rejection of the book's principal thesis, that “what is crucial to works of history, no less than works of fiction, is the mode of ‘emplotment’ chosen by the author,” which in turn depends on the prefigurative language—once again the word “trope” is avoided—that historians “bring to facts and events as they seek them out, that is, before they even begin the task of casting them into a finished narrative.” This is surely a better account of White's thesis than that offered either by Leff or Burke. Clive goes on to make more concessions: that historians have to use language to relate the results of research; that there is a relationship (perhaps partly unconscious) between form and content; and even that “ordinary as well as great historians” are “quite capable of presenting ‘the same events’ not only from different ideological points of view but also from different literary modes—as for example, tragically or ironically.” Other than treatments by historians who were White's students, this is probably the most sympathetic account he received from his fellow professionals.

We may admire Clive's generosity while wondering whether he had either time or space in a timely short book review to spot some of the tensions and difficulties in Metahistory—tensions and difficulties which historians, as well as philosophers and literary critics, began to investigate. The most problematic areas were White's view of the tropes and his conception of facts and events, which led Louis Mink to characterize his position as “the New Rhetorical Relativism.”²³

One reason why early reviewers may have avoided using the word “tropes” is they did not understand what they were. If so, they had plenty of company. Scholars as well acquainted with literary theory as Fredric Jameson and Dominick LaCapra confessed themselves uncertain about how “deep” in consciousness the tropes are; their relationship to emplotments, modes of argument, and ideological implications; and whether they form any necessary historical or logical sequence. Others wondered whether the tropes are really analytically distinguishable. Metonymy and synecdoche, for example, can slide into one another,²⁴ and both can be seen as species of metaphor. Irony always threatens to burst any bounds and become a “super-trope,” either engulfing the others or undercutting the entire typology.²⁵ John Nelson has argued that tropes as White saw them were not mere linguistic figures (as most early reviewers assumed) but modes of consciousness. If this is so, are they attitudes or artifacts of psychology? Moods—in both the grammatical and psychological sense of this word? Directions of imagination? Or are they overtly tied to actions (and thus not entirely distinguishable from ideologies)?²⁶

No one doubts that whatever their depth, tropes as White conceives them are deeper than emplotments, modes of explanation, and ideological implications. It was not clear to his readers, however, whether the tropes operate largely or entirely unconsciously. If not, is it appropriate to characterize them as forming a “deep structure”? If so, how can White's emancipatory program, urging the historian to act as a “free artist”²⁷ and choose some trope other than irony, be implemented?

White's version of a Fourfold Path allows sixty-four possible combinations; but some have an “elective affinity” with one another and others appear unfeasible. It appears to be impossible to deduce the operative trope from the mode of emplotment, which may indeed be the most superficial level of a historical text.²⁸ The reason for this is that only the least imaginative historians (such as Ranke) line up everything according to the elective affinities. It is apparently the element of tension introduced by discordant elements which accounts for the literary power of the greatest historical texts; but inevitably this makes any claim about the relationships among them, or the priority of the tropes, tenuous. This is curiously illustrated by an attempted “empirical” test of tropology by Daniel Ostrowski in respect of four Russian historians.²⁹ Ostrowski had great difficulty with the tropes, since “the rhetorical devices do not provide any clue to the trope.” He nevertheless succeeds by lining up the tropes with their “elective affinities” in showing that the theory “works” for three of the four historians “tested.”³⁰

Inevitably, historically minded critics were tempted to speculate, as did Fredric Jameson, about what “mechanisms of historical selection” assure that some combinations of elements in his combinatoire, but not all, come into existence.³¹ Such speculations seem to be authorized when White presents what look for all the world like historical explanations for developments in nineteenth-century historiography, especially the effect of the professionalization of history. He also traces a cycle of tropes from eighteenth-century irony (with Gibbon as chief representative), through metonymy (Marx), metaphor (Nietzsche), and finally irony again (Croce). While philosophers exemplify the succession of tropes (except for synecdoche, for which no representative was found worthy), the historians are treated in terms of emplotments: Michelet (Romance), Ranke (Comedy), Tocqueville (Tragedy), and Burckhardt (Satire). These are hard to array in neat chronological order, since Ranke was born three years before Michelet, but both were writing a decade before Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America was written some twenty-five years before the publication of Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. White's decision not to present the historians in terms of their determining tropes further complicates the question how they are related to emplotments, explanation, and ideology.

Another, eventually more fruitful, approach to explaining the tropes was suggested by historian Philip Pomper. Pomper, surveying the uncertainties surrounding the choice and succession of tropes, argued that White must have had an implicit psychological theory accounting for the occurrence (or recurrence) of tropes. If this trope were to be made explicit, he suggested, it would be found to rest on the trope of irony.³² White never denied that his own stance was ironic, but he did suggest a psychological version of the origin and succession of tropes. The theory he adapts is Piaget's account of the stages of the intellectual development of children. Vico, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, he reminds us, felt that a kind of “poetic logic” was typical of children and “primitive” people. In the first year and a half of life, Piaget asserted, infants have a sensorimotor existence which, although it could not be characterized as metaphorical thinking, nevertheless constituted “living of the mode of similitude.” After this “metaphorical” experience, the developing child conceives the world successively in ways which could be seen as metonymical, then synecdochic, and finally reaches the stage of rational thought, which is inevitably ironic. “If Piaget has provided an ontogenetic base for this pattern” of the succession of tropes, White concludes, “he adds another more positivistic confirmation of its archetypal nature.” But, lest White be thought to be seeking positivistic support for his position, he quickly adds that he only claims for it “the force of a convention in the discourse about consciousness and, secondarily, the discourse about discourse itself, in the modern Western tradition.”³³ And this is the last systematic word he has to say about tropes.

The other set of claims by White, about what “facts,” “events,” and “data” mean in historical discourse, although obviously related to the theory of tropes, could more readily be understood, and attacked, by analytical philosophy, whether wielded by historians or philosophers. Some quickly noted that a presupposition of Metahistory is that what White once called the “raw” or “unprocessed” historical record bore a striking resemblance to the “powder of facts” which Langlois and Seignobos in the heyday of positivism called upon the historian to fit to the laws governing them—unless sociologists had to do this job for them.³⁴ White, while rejecting the positivist program for endowing this absurd welter of facts with meaning, was just as convinced that “the historical record” had no meaning in itself. However, one of the first reviews of Metahistory already suggested that White was thus treating the “data” of history—a word which he does frequently use, in spite of its being a translation of “givens”—as analogous to those of science. But, says Andrew Ezergailis, the data of history have already been “touched by the purposes of men [and women].” Even though these purposes sometimes miscarry, so that history is littered with the unintended consequences of actions, Ezergailis regards these purposes as already “prefiguring” the data.³⁵ This rather cryptic statement foreshadows much more developed arguments by David Carr and Paul Ricoeur.

A similar point was made by Dominick LaCapra, who drew attention to White's “at times” lending credence to the idea of an unprocessed historical record presented as “an inert object to be animated by the shaping mind of the historian.” This, he claims, ignores the degree to which the historical record is already processed and simply substitutes an idealistic event for a positive one.³⁶ Eugene O. Golob remarked that one of White's most notorious contentions, that different historians can stress different aspects of “the same historical field” or the “same set or sequence of events,” suggests a quasi-positivist sense of events “out there” to be “observed” by the historian.³⁷

These criticisms come from quite different philosophical stances. Golob chides White for not having sufficiently attended to the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood; LaCapra believes that in Tropics of Discourse White was repressing knowledge of discoveries by Derrida which were actually “inside” him.³⁸ Carr and Ricoeur (and perhaps Ezergailis) write from a phenomenological standpoint. From yet another, and in some ways opposite, position Alfred Louch argued for the existence of historical “facts” independent of any discourse or theory about them or of any narrative presentation of them. These would seem to be the very facts “out there” which other critics detected as a lingering vestige of positivism in White's thought. For Louch, however, White is a consistent believer that historical “facts” are shaped by the structure of historical discourse and thus historical writing is not to be judged by its representation but by its “form of execution.”³⁹ For White, the importance of the tropes is that through them the historian “prefigures the historical field” and decides what shall count as facts. But, Louch objects, this is to conclude that “facts are theory-dependent because our theory makes it clear what counts as relevant evidence.” However this doesn't account for the existence of the fact or evidence. He illustrates the point as follows: “If we are working on a murder and have a theory about the gun involved, and then find the gun, it counts as evidence because of the theory, but doesn't exist because of the theory. ‘Pass the salt’ doesn't bring a salt-cellar into existence, nor is passing the pepper just a linguistic error.”⁴⁰

On a certain level this seems undeniable, and White would surely not be so daft as to deny it. He might have made it clearer that he does not suppose any such silly thing. But—leaving aside the obvious consideration that guns and saltcellars pose different hermeneutic challenges than the texts historians usually have to deal with—Louch starts his analysis at a point when a murder investigation has already been decided upon (inadvertently making a perfect connection between narrativization and power). White can afford to stop his analysis at that point, because his interest is in what makes historians decide what sort of investigation they are embarked upon; and Louch cannot claim that seeing guns always implies murder investigations.

The most under-analyzed term White uses is “event.” Although he talks about “the same set of events” ensconced in different narrative accounts of them, he does not clarify what he means by “event.” Louis Mink asks what an event is: “A horse throws a shoe, which cannot be nailed on quickly enough, and a kingdom is lost. Are both of these ‘events’? Is the Renaissance an ‘event’? Are there basic or unit events, which cannot be divided into smaller events?” He goes on to recapitulate Arthur Danto's point that “we cannot refer to events as such, but only to events under a description.”⁴¹ But if this is so, it is hard to see how historians could be equally well-warranted in writing about the very same “event” in different ways. White is apparently saying that there are indefinitely many ways of redescribing events, but he has not produced any argument that there is a substrate of unit or basic events that can exhibit some sort of sameness no matter how variously they are redescribed.

I know of no example where more than one account has ever been offered of exactly the same set of events—no matter how events are conceived. Ann Rigney has offered an analysis of various historical treatments of what she defines as a single event—Louis XVI's flight to Varennes in 1791. Aware of Mink's treatment of this topic, she notes how different historians have included more or less detail (about “events” that made up the larger event). Though events could figure in different stories, there was no consensus on the redescription of even this one “event”; and the historians were constrained not only by the evidence, but also, importantly, by what previous historians had said about the subject. This makes the likelihood of historians emplotting differently the same set of events even more remote.⁴²

Few historians would be surprised by this outcome; but most would also wish for some escape from the relativistic conclusions that White draws. The problem with his position is that although there may be indefinitely many redescriptions of events, how do we determine the criteria for discrimination among them—an activity in which historians frequently engage? But the problem for the historical realist, or the advocate of “faithfulness to the facts” as a criterion, is how to defend the position that there is only one accurate description or redescription of events and only one way to select all the pertinent evidence and exclude everything else. The problem of the historian's selectivity, and its relationship to the issue of objectivity, has been curiously neglected in the philosophical literature.⁴³ If he had done nothing else, White would be notable for the boldness with which he thrust this to the center of his work.

The years after the appearance of Tropics of Discourse in 1978 saw the remarkable extension of White's influence far beyond the relatively small number of historians, philosophers, and literary critics who had quickly recognized its importance. In the years from 1973 to 1980 serious critiques predominated; from that time onward White's turn towards narrativity and his demonstration of the features shared by histories and novels were picked up by hundreds of literary critics and others interested in what became a veritable “narrative turn” in the human sciences. A good many of these references were extremely superficial; Metahistory, in particular, would be listed among “works cited” in a bibliography at the end of an article—but it wasn't. Quite a few of his readers evidently were introduced to Northrop Frye's plot-types and Kenneth Burke's and Vico's tropes through White. The titles of his articles were mixed up (granted, many do sound similar); his first name was misspelled (Haydn being my favorite); and more seriously, he was characterized both as a structuralist and a post-structuralist and put into the same bed as all those “absurdist” critics he had criticized in the last essay of Tropics of Discourse.

There is an undercurrent of satisfaction among White's literary readers to see history among the mighty cast down from their seats. Its epistemological privileges and scientific pretensions seemed to be exposed; literature's truth claims were at last taken as seriously as those of history. Some, it is true, were peeved that historians had to be recognized as imaginative and the literary artist put on the same footing as the grubber in the archives. However the overwhelming impression from these hundreds of citations is that students of the novel in many languages—and to a much lesser extent, of the theater—found White's work comprehensible, provocative, and useful. For everyone whose attitude towards Metahistory seems to have been “Here is a book about narratives that I ought to show people that I know about” there were several who gave evidence of thoughtful reading and judicious appropriation. And even the namedroppers, on the periphery of White's influence, testify to the degree to which his work had become a cultural icon (except of course to historians).

Much of the interest in White's later work has focused on two essays in The Content of the Form: “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” and “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation.” The first, in spite of its title, gave rise to renewed charges that White does not believe in a “real” past or “real events.”⁴⁴ The second placed such an emphasis on the political or ideological import of narrative form, without providing any foundation for rejecting any interpretation, that White was attacked for licensing odious interpretations of history, and condemned for inattentiveness to the relationship of emplotment and truth in historiography.

White's discussion of the referentiality of historical narratives led some readers to concur with Gabrielle Spiegel that he, like Barthes and Frank Kermode, “sees historical narrative as intrinsically no different than fictional narrative, except in its pretense to objectivity and referentiality.”⁴⁵ This was not White's position in 1975, when he wrote that “historical discourse should be viewed as a sign system which points in two directions simultaneously: first, toward the set of events it purports to describe and second, toward the generic story form to which it tacitly likens the set in order to disclose its formal coherence. …”⁴⁶ A year later he was even more explicit, beginning “The Fictions of Factual Representation” by granting that historical events differ from fictional events “in the ways that it has been conventional to characterize their differences since Aristotle.”⁴⁷ As for the reality of the past, of course there is no conclusive answer to Bertrand Russell's famous argument that the cosmos might have come into existence five minutes ago, complete with fossils and yesterday's copy of The Times; however this is an argument that only solipsists could love. But the “real past” cannot be known to be such by unmediated acquaintance; “in any narrative account of real events … these events are real not because they occurred but because, first, they were remembered and second, they are capable of finding a place in a chronologically ordered sequence.”⁴⁸ Had White inserted “just” after “not” in this sentence, it would have been a truism. We could never have any evidence of something nobody remembered (at least long enough to write down something about it) and in a historical narrative there must be at least an implicit chronological sequence. However, as it stands the sentence leaves open the possibility that an event need not have occurred to figure in a historical narrative.

This raises again the specter of textual or linguistic determinism (or else utter relativism) which White in his early work usually tried to guard against. In “Historical Pluralism” (1986) White sketches a “pantextualist pluralist” position in which “the whole problem of truth is set aside in favor of a view of historical representation which leaves it virtually indistinguishable from fiction.” Characterizations such as “virtually indistinguishable from fiction” readily slide into the position that there is no difference at all; but White takes pains to deny that he is saying that certain “events”—like English Romanticism!—never occurred; their occurrence is “hardly to be doubted.” However, he argues, “specifically historical inquiry is born less of the necessity to establish that events occurred than of the desire to determine what certain events might mean for a given group.”⁴⁹ For “events” like English Romanticism, this is surely true, but not for all investigations. Yet despite his lack of interest in the question of how historians might establish that events occurred, White has never abandoned the view that the contents of historical narratives are as much invented as found (which also means as much found as invented). And the more obvious the fact thrown in the face of the relativist—“You surely can't deny that John Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963?”—the more weight falls on the meaning of that event for different groups.

“The Value of Narrativity” is the most often cited of all White's essays. It afforded a splendid introduction to narratology while at the same time staking out a provocative set of propositions. It also left many questions for historians to think about. How is the ideological production effected by narrative—the central theme of Content of the Form—achieved? (By subject matter? By the form of the content, or the content of the form? By the form of the representation? Or all of these?) Are all narrative histories equally effective? If not, what grounds are there for preferring one to another—a judgment historians make all the time? How do systems of meaning production in historical narratives get “tested against the capacity of any set of ‘real’ events to yield to such systems”?⁵⁰ White's attitude towards these questions, however, seems to be “Quod scripsi, scripsi”; his interests have moved on.

His critics, however, have not. To them White's emphasis on the real elements in historical narratives—shouldn't it be 90٪ found and only 10٪ invented?—and indeed his growing suspicion about narrativizing could assume alarming implications in the light of what White was saying about the ideological and moral import of historical interpretation. Narrativizing, he argues, is necessarily associated with the exercise of political power and inherently moralizes historical discourse.

In a complex and unusually adventurous argument, White draws out the political implications of much of his previous work. Part of the “Politics of Historical Interpretation” is, among other things, a historical explanation of what happened to historical thought once history was naturalized in the academy. The politics of this “disciplinization” consisted of a “set of negatives” operating to repress any sort of utopian thinking and thereby any revolutionary politics, of either Left or Right, insofar as it made any claim to authority from a knowledge of history. (It goes without saying that rhetoric was also repressed in the disciplinizing process.⁵¹)

In terms of eighteenth-century aesthetics, this development represented the suppression of the “sublime” in the interests of the “beautiful.” The “beautiful,” in historiography, is the construction of histories so well emplotted that they give intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure to the reader. The “sublime” is the point of view towards history which Schiller describes as arising from contemplation of “the uncertain anarchy of the moral world.” He evokes “the terrifying spectacle of change which destroys everything and creates it anew, and destroys again” and “the pathetic spectacle of mankind wrestling with fate, the irresistible elusiveness of happiness, confidence betrayed, unrighteousness triumphant and innocence laid low; of these history supplies ample instances, and tragic art imitates them before our eyes.”⁵² Evidently only tragic art is capable of representing the historical sublime. For White the sublime is the sheer meaninglessness of history, and any historiography that deprives history of that meaninglessness—whether Marxist or bourgeois—deprives history “of the kind of meaninglessness that alone can goad living human beings to make their lives different for themselves and their children, which is to say, to endow their lives with a meaning for which they alone are fully responsible.”⁵³

Here again is the Nietzschean White. It is often overlooked, he says, “that the conviction that one can make sense of history stands on the same level of epistemic plausibility as the conviction that it makes no sense whatsoever.” Now if each conviction is equally plausible, should commitment to one be simply left to a coin toss, or to a choice that can only be arbitrary? A visionary politics, which White obviously prefers, “can proceed only on the latter conviction.”⁵⁴

At this point White takes the argument further, confronting the hardest challenge historians could pose against his theories: Nazism and its politics of genocide as “a crucial test case for determining the ways in which any human or social science may construe its ‘social responsibilities’ as a discipline productive of a certain kind of knowledge.” He admits that ideas of historical sublimity like those of Schiller and Nietzsche are conventionally associated with fascist regimes—with philosophers like Heidegger and Gentile and the “intuitions of Hitler and Mussolini.” But this should not lead to rejecting it through guilt by association, since “[o]ne must face the fact that … there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another.”⁵⁵

White then proceeds to state the questions about formalism and relativism which some of his critics were quick to pose.⁵⁶ How, for one, to counter the “revisionist” argument that the Holocaust never occurred—“a claim … as morally offensive as it is intellectually bewildering [because the “revisionists” used all the apparatus of historical scholarship]”? Despite the claims of Pierre Vidal-Naquet, not by following the same “rules of historical method” that the “revisionists” ostentatiously imitate, nor by stigmatizing as an “untruth” rather than a lie the “quite scandalous exploitation” of the Holocaust that Vidal-Naquet attributes to Zionist ideologists, who represent the Holocaust as the inevitable result of living in the Diaspora, thus claiming that its victims would have become Israeli citizens. Vidal-Naquet calls this an “untruth” instead of a lie because it leaves the “reality” of the Holocaust intact. White defends it as true as a historical conception, because it justifies policies conceived by Israelis as crucial to their security and even survival. Who is to say that the “totalitarian, not to say fascist, aspects of Israeli treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank” is a result of a distorted conception of Jewish or European history? It is a morally responsible response to the meaninglessness of history, just as an effective Palestinian political response, entailing a new interpretation of their history, would be equally morally responsible.⁵⁷

Would it, however, be morally responsible (rather than offensive) to impute a meaning to history that justified Nazi racial politics and found the Holocaust either desirable or nonexistent? The essay concludes without offering more than a hint of what the answer might be. Conventional academic history is whacked again; the alternative to it, which “seems plausible” to White, is a refusal to attempt a narrativist mode for the representation of its—history's?—truth. Such an approach might recuperate the “historical sublime” and conceive the historical record “not as a window through which the past ‘as it really was’ can be apprehended but rather a wall that must [be] broken through if the “terror of history” is to be directly confronted and the fear it induces dispelled.”⁵⁸

What source of terror lurks behind this wall? Why would it be easier to confront and overcome without any knowledge which we might gain from the historical record? The rhetorical questions and metaphors which crowd the last page and a half of this essay suggest an argument in the embryonic stage of formulation, not to mention substantiation. Suggestive as they are, it is scarcely surprising that they would hardly satisfy those who demanded firmer grounds from which to refute the “revisionists.” These demands amount to the most recent episode in the reception of Hayden White—not because they raised any new arguments or ones not anticipated by White himself, but because they elicited from him, for the first time, reflection on the relationship between emplotment and historical truth.

This, however, was carried out with his usual élan. Those who stopped reading after the fourth page of his essay “Emplotment and Truth” would note that he had added pastoral and farce to the possible emplotments, and that “We would be eminently justified” in rejecting a pastoral or comic emplotment of the events of the Third Reich by “appealing to ‘the facts’ in order to dismiss it from the list of ‘competing narratives.’”⁵⁹ To that extent they would be justified in speaking of a retraction of some of his previous claims. White however seems to have little interest in this issue, which is soon dropped. His chief effort is to evaluate the position that the Holocaust cannot be represented in a narrative at all, or only in a narrative which somehow totally avoided figurative language. He recasts the problem, using works by Barthes and Derrida, as a question of what voice historians’ prose should use in writing about such events; and he argues that it is not impossible to make a realistic representation of them, if it is a modernist realism employing a “middle voice” (neither active or passive), and requiring a narrative without a narrator of objective facts, not taking any viewpoint outside the events it describes, exhibiting a tone of doubt about the interpretation of events seemingly described, open to a wide variety of literary devices (like interior monologues) and reconceiving conventional notions of time so that, for example, events can be seen not as successive episodes of a story, but as random occurrences. Such a modernism “is still concerned to represent reality ‘realistically,’ and it still identifies reality with history. But the history which modernism confronts is not the history envisaged by nineteenth-century realism. And that is because the social order which is the subject of this history has undergone a radical transformation. …”⁶⁰ This is hardly the “realism” that realists are seeking; for White it is both very new and very old. He is now clearly trying out a post-modernist idea; yet this is much of what he called for twenty-six years earlier in “The Burden of History.”

So the question “Which White?” remains salient in the story of his reception. Historians who read him may find little that assists them in the practice of their everyday “craft.” Extracting from him—or imposing upon him—a systematic philosophy of history is impossible, and it may seem that he is only ushering the flies into new fly-bottles. His forte is fecundity, not fixity, of thought; as Stephen Bann has written, “White's techniques of analysis are not beyond criticism; indeed their fertility in generating argument and counter-argument must be held to be strongly in their favour.”⁶¹ But nobody looking back at what was available to the “reflective historian” in 1973 can miss the great sea-change which White, more than anybody else, has created. One measure of White's impact can be seen in two statements. In 1980 John Cannon, editor of The Historian at Work (London, 1980), recommended Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History as “perhaps the best introduction to modern historiography.”⁶² And an eminent philosopher of history, Leon Goldstein, could discuss history purely in epistemological terms; all that mattered was for historians to find out what happened. After they had done that, all that remained was the unproblematic process of “writing up.” If nobody, even in England, could write that way today, we have Hayden White to thank.

Notes

1. Editorial introduction to Contemporary History and Theory: The Linguistic Turn and Beyond, ed. Brian Fay, Philip Pomper, and Richard T. Vann (forthcoming from Blackwell).

2. Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca, 1987), 22.

3. In History and Theory 5 (1966), 111–134.

4. Most notably in “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 37–53, in part a response to Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” in ibid., especially 88–94. See also Ginzburg, “Ekphrasis and Quotation,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 50 (1988), 4.

5. Hans Kellner was especially perceptive to detect this in Metahistory; see his “A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism,” History and Theory 19 (1980), 1–29.

6. White's two essays on Foucault, “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground,” History and Theory 12 (1973), 23–54 (reprinted in Tropics) and “Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism,” in Structuralism and Since: From Lévi Strauss to Derrida, ed. John Sturrock (Oxford, 1979), 81–115 (expanded and reprinted in Content) have been frequently cited. Allan Megill credits him with the major role in introducing Foucault to American historians, with a review of Surveiller et punir in the American Historical Review in 1977 (“The Reception of Foucault by Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 [1987], 127). Judging from the influence of these articles, the same might be said for large sections of the American academy generally. It must be said that White provides a rather idiosyncratic view of Foucault.

7. New Literary History 7 (1975), 97–111. Other essays which failed to make the cut are “The Structure of Historical Narrative,” Clio 1 (1972), 5–20; “The Tasks of Intellectual History,” The Monist 58 (1969), 606–630; “The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History,” Clio 3 (1973), 35–53 (with critique by W.H. Dray, ibid., 53–76); “The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx and Flaubert,” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Philadelphia, 1979), 213–229; (with Frank Manuel), “Rhetoric and History,” in Theories of History: Papers of the Clark Library Seminar, ed. Peter Reill (Los Angeles, 1978), 1–25; and “Historical Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986), 480–493.

8. Among these later essays are “The Rhetoric of Interpretation,” Poetics Today 9 (1988), 253–279; “New Historicism: A Comment,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989), 293–302; “‘Figuring the Nature of the Times Deceased’: Literary Theory and Historical Writing,” in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York, 1989), 19–43; “The Metaphysics of Narrativity: Time and Symbol in Ricoeur's Philosophy of History,” in On Paul Ricoeur, ed. David C. Wood (London, 1991); “Emplotment and Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Friedländer; and “Writing in the Middle Voice,” in Schrift, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer (Munich, 1993). Some of these are considered in Wolf Kansteiner, “Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History,” History and Theory 32 (1993), 273–295.

9. The SSCI began publication in 1973, the year in which Metahistory was published; the AHCI in 1976. For historical articles there is considerable but unfortunately not perfect overlap in the coverage of the two indexes, so both must be utilized. The terminal date, 1993, is somewhat arbitrary, but assures that all journals cited are accessible. Coverage of foreign-language journals in AHCI and especially SSCI is incomplete, but has steadily improved in more recent years.

10. “The Challenge of Quantitative History,” Historical Methods 17 (1984), 86–94. But then the proposition with which so few would concur is “There is no difference between history and fiction.” Monkkonen goes on to note that “in the philosophical literature, only a handful have actually put forth a counter-argument.” The view he attributes to White could much more appropriately be located in Barthes; but, bizarrely, Monkkonen does not believe that Barthes questions “the epistemological belief of the historian.”

11. Kellner, “White's Linguistic Humanism,” 13.

12. Phyllis Grosskurth, review of Metahistory in Canadian Historical Review 56 (1975), 193; Andrew Ezergailis, review of Metahistory in Clio 5 (Winter 1976), 240. Grosskurth was not totally hostile, although she believed that White wished to impose “exigent artistic laws” on historical writing, while Ezergailis, who called the work a tour de force, was on the whole favorable.

13. “History and the Study of Culture,” New Literary History 21 (Winter, 1990), 417; (reprinted in History and … : Histories within the Human Sciences, ed. Ralph Cohen and Michael S. Roth [Charlottesville, Va., 1995], 382–395).

14. A peculiarity of the German reception of White is that his books were not translated in the order in which they originally appeared; the order was Auch Dichtet Klio oder die Fiktion des Faktischen (Stuttgart, 1986) followed by Die Bedeutung der Form: Erzählstrukturen in der Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main, 1990) and finally Metahistory: Die historische Einbildungskraft im 19. Jahrhundert in Europa (Frankfurt am Main, 1991).

15. Metahistory (in its German translation) was reviewed as late as 1991 in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, which was the official East German historical periodical. Although it had been mentioned in previous articles in that journal while it was directed by the Marxist East German academic establishment, this lengthy and fair-minded review is one small indicator of glasnost in the former DDR.

16. Journal of Modern History 52 (1980), 124.

17. Megill, “Reception of Foucault,” 127.

18. “Romancing the Stone: History-Writing and Rhetoric,” Social History 18 (1993), 235–249.

19. Review of Metahistory in Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974), 598–600.

20. Another difficulty is the ambiguity of “initially depicted.” As Arthur Danto usefully reminds us, historical events always come to us already “under some description.” This would make the “initial depiction” reside in the sources, rather than in the historian's poetic imagination.

21. Review of Metahistory in History 60 (1975), 83.

22. Review of Metahistory in Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 642–43. Sometimes yesterday's monstrosity quickly becomes acceptable, like White's coinage “emplotment.”

23. “Philosophy and Theory of History,” in International Handbook of Historical Studies, ed. Georg Iggers and Harold T. Parker (Westbrook, Conn., 1979), 25.

24. Kenneth Burke, one of the two authors most influential in White's thinking about tropes, acknowledges this difficulty (A Grammar of Motives [1945] [Berkeley, 1969], 503), cited in David Carroll, “On Tropology: The Forms of History” [a review of Metahistory], Diacritics 6 (Fall 1976), 58–64.

25. The best discussion of these issues is Hans Kellner, “The Inflatable Trope as Narrative Theory: Structures or Allegory,” Diacritics (Spring 1981), 14–28.

26. See John S. Nelson, “Tropal History and the Social Sciences: Reflections on [Nancy] Struever's Remarks,” History and Theory 19 (1980), 80–101. Struever's essay was “Topics in History,” ibid., 66–79.

27. Metahistory, 372.

28. Carroll, “On Tropology” argues that the four levels are nested as follows: first emplotment, then mode of explanation, by which the historian explains in a deductive-nomological argument what the point of the emplotment is. Then comes ideological implication, which combines elements of the first two. The tropes are on the deepest level.

29. “A Metatheoretical Analysis: Hayden White and Four Narratives of ‘Russian’ History,” Clio 19 (1990), 215–235. Ostrowski thinks it a “lapse” in the response to White's book that nobody had tried such an empirical test before.

30. Ibid., 227. The four historians include Richard Pipes and the “Short Course” of the Soviet Communist Party.

31. “Figural Relativism, or the Poetics of Historiography [review of Metahistory],” Diacritics 6 (1976), 2–9.

32. “Typologies and Cycles in Intellectual History,” History and Theory 19 (1980), 30–38.

33. “Introduction,” Tropics, 7–13. White acknowledges that Piaget “would not appreciate being put in this line of thinking.”

34. The reference to the “raw, unprocessed” record is from “Structure of Historical Narrative.”

35. Review of Metahistory in Clio, 245.

36. Review of Tropics, MLN 93 (1978), 1037–1043, especially 1042.

37. “The Irony of Nihilism,” History and Theory 19 (1980), 55–68. He refers to Metahistory, 274.

38. LaCapra refers specifically to the essay “The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory,” which criticizes—he says “caricatures”—the thought of Georges Poulet, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida.

39. “The Discourse of Subversion,” Humanities in Society 2 (1979), 34.

40. Idem.

41. Historical Understanding, 23.

42. “Toward Varennes,” New Literary History 18 (1986), 77–98, especially 87.

43. An exception is the remarkable article by J.L. Gorman, “Objectivity and Truth in History,” Inquiry 17 (1974), 373–397.

44. L. B. Cebik in “Fiction and History: A Common Core?” International Studies in Philosophy 24 (1992), 47–63 treats this as White's true position, disregarding all his qualifications and disclaimers. The article is a tirade against White.

45. “Social Change and Literary Language: The Textualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century Old French Historiography,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987), 139 n. 2.

46. Tropics, 106.

47. Ibid., 121.

48. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in Content, 20.

49. “Historical Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986), 484–487.

50. “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” in The Content of the Form, 44. Several of the questions I have asked are pointed out by Ann Rigney in her excellent “Narrativity and Historical Representation,” Poetics Today 12 (1991), 591–605.

51. “Politics of Historical Interpretation,” Content, 62–63.

52. Quoted in ibid., 68–69.

53. Ibid., 72. It is curious that children seem to be capable of inheriting the meanings for which their parents “alone are fully responsible.”

54. Ibid., 73. In fn. 12 to this article (p. 227) White “registers” an item of personal belief: that revolutions “always misfire” (an apparent covering law) and that in advanced industrial societies, they are likely only to strengthen oppressive powers. The “socially responsible” interpreter, he continues, “can do two things: (1) expose the fictitious nature of any political program based on an appeal to what ‘history’ supposedly teaches and (2) remain adamantly ‘utopian’ in any criticism of political ‘realism.’” Commenting on a shorter version of this paper (and others) at the AHA meeting in New York in January 1997 White declared himself a Marxist (perhaps utopian after 1989)—certainly a moral commitment rather than an endorsement of the Marxian master historical narrative.

55. Ibid., 74–76.

56. Besides Ginzburg (fn. 4) see Aviezer Tucker, “A Theory of Historiography as a Pre-Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24 (1993), 656, fn. 48 and Gregory F. Goekjian, “Genocide and Historical Desire,” Semiotica 83 (1991), 212–215. Jean-François Lyotard raises the ante in this debate by concluding, after a discussion of “revisionist” historians, that the historian “must then break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he must venture forth by lending his ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge. … [Auschwitz's] name marks the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned.” (“The Differend, the Referent, and the Proper Name,” Diacritics 14 [1984], 4–14.)

57. Content, 80.

58. Ibid., 80–81.

59. “Emplotment and Truth,” 40.

60. Ibid., 50–51.

61. “Towards a Critical Historiography: Recent Work in Philosophy of History,” Philosophy 56 (1981), 370.

62. Cited by Bann, ibid., 367.