[In the following excerpt, Raval offers a positive assessment of The Content of the Form.]

Contemporary narrative theory is concerned with the analysis of narrative discourse and narrativity in order to explain the many forms and structures of storytelling in world literature and their implications. It also focuses on possible relations existing among mythic, historical, and fictional narratives, and it reflects on the possibility and implications of reconceptualizing these relations for literary, cultural, and historiographic theory. The books under review here are too diverse to allow for an integrated account that would make possible a hierarchical or some other larger context in which to place precisely and without distortion the theory presented, or the theories criticized, by each of the books in relation to one another. My attempt in the limited space here is to identify some of the central threads in each book in order to remark rather generally and all too briefly on their usefulness to narrative theory. …

In Metahistory, Hayden White sought to elaborate the strategies of what he calls tropological analysis, and in Tropics of Discourse he sought to refine those strategies so as to show, for instance, by an analysis of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, that even the most self-consciously antitheoretical historical study can be shown to deploy certain enabling tropological strategies that make possible, in this instance, Thompson's study as a coherent, intelligent, and defensible totality. Now, in his latest book, The Content of the Form, White seems to be less concerned with pressing the claims of a systematic tropological analysis than with radicalizing the essential metahistorical and poetic insights underlying his studies of historical narratives and historical theories. This radicalizing interest figures prominently in his discussions of the value of narrativity in realistic representation, the politics of interpretation in modern historiography, and narrativity in historical theory. His essays on Droysen, Foucault, Jameson, and Ricoeur are models of rhetorical and conceptual deconstruction that, although employing the resources of tropological analysis, are no longer concerned with identifying dominant tropes constituting the work of these writers. The final essay on The Education of Henry Adams is a splendid critical exercise combining the strategies of semiotics and ideological analysis.

White makes a threefold distinction among the chronicle of events, their explanation given in direct discourse as commentary, and the narrativization of the events provided by allegoresis, a process that enables a particular historical narrative to generate patterns of meaning not ascribable to a literal representation of facts in that narrative. Historical narrative, in other words, attempts a poetic troping of “facts” in order to endow them, in the very process of their description, with elements of the story form known as tragedy, romance, comedy, or farce, codes provided by Western literary culture. Consequently, what logical grounds there are for characterizing a historical narrative in terms of any one of these codes are provided by the logic of figuration White calls tropology. It is by probing the implications of these strategies that we can acquire a grasp of the process by which consciousness and narration enfigure specific past events into particular historical accounts invested with meaning and value.

One of the most interesting arguments I believe undergirds many of White's analyses is that the terms history and narrative are ambiguous and thus complicate all theoretical discussions of historiography. Just as history can mean an object of study and discourse about this object, narrative can mean a mode of discourse and the product resulting from the adoption of this mode of discourse. White criticizes analytic philosophers of historiography for bringing to their investigation the notion of explanation that rules out the importance of figurative discourse in the production of genuine knowledge. Their discussion fails to confront the process of narrativization by which a chronicle is transformed into a historical narrative. The book provides many superbly worked out illustrations to stress the point that it is important to pay attention to the narrative aspect of historical discourse, the story it tells about the events, and that it is misguided to dismiss the story a historical narrative tells about the events as mere adventitious and ornamental matter rather than an essential aspect of the discourse as a whole. The Content of the Form shows Hayden White at the top of his form, marshalling the resources of rhetoric, semiology, ideological analysis, and historiographic theory. Like Ricoeur's volumes on Time and Narrative, White's book is a major contribution to the current advances in interdisciplinary inquiry in the humanities. …

For all their extraordinary diversity in viewpoint, the books reviewed here all seem to underline the centrality of the act of interpretation, however different their particular emphases by which this act is to be carried out. Both Ricoeur and White are in agreement on the importance of the interpretive act in the sense of the hermeneutics of understanding as against the scientistic aspirations underlying the concept of explanation; and both underline the notion of emplotment, though Ricoeur explicates it by linking it with a notion of deep temporality of experience, and White explicates it by disclosing the operations of rhetorical and ideological elements or codes in narrative discourse and historical theory.