[In the following positive review, Engebretsen summarizes White's theoretical analysis and assertions in The Content of the Form. ]

The eight essays in this book will be familiar to White's readers, since all have appeared previously. Together, however, they provide more than a convenient collection of White's recent writing; they continue the argument developed in Tropics of Discourse and applied so successfully in Metahistory that history (and the human sciences generally) is thoroughly rhetorical. Rather than stylistic embellishment, the rhetorical code we employ is indistinguishable from our interpretation of events. But these essays focus the issues more particularly. The typologies of trope, emplotment, argument, and ideology from the earlier works here give way to the argument that “narrative, far from being merely a form of discourse that can be filled with different contents … already possesses a content prior to any given actualization of it in speech or writing.” That prior content turns out to be ideological. White quotes Hegel approvingly on the connections between politics and nineteenth-century narrative history: “It is the state that first presents a subject matter that not only is adapted to the prose of history but involves the production of such history in the very progress of its own being.” These essays illustrate the connection between narrative history and ideology—particularly nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology—and also examine the role of narrative and ideology in the work of three major contemporary theorists.

The first three essays in the collection demonstrate the political significance of narrative in the writing of history. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” examines the biases that have led modern historians to treat both annals and chronicles as deficient, pre-historical forms of historical writing because they fail to achieve narrativity. White argues that both annals and chronicles reflect radically different world views from the world view shaping nineteenth-century historiography. The reason historians have not detected the “plot” in the annals or chronicles is that neither form focuses on the growth and development of the state. In the annals the mysterious forces of nature, the droughts, the floods, the harvests, count for as much as foreign invasions and the deaths of princes. Only the orderly march of years gives the annals coherence, and only Christ's return at the end of time can provide closure for the annalist. The chronicles, in which events are given a clear plot, fail to provide narrative closure because they fail to provide a moral judgment on the events. Only narrative history, with the state as its reference point, gives narrative closure to the events.

Though earlier historical writing has been judged deficient in so far as it lacks narrativity, the status of narrative in contemporary historiography is by no means clear. In “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” White traces the outlines of the debate. Members of the Annales school reject narrative—seen as novelistic, dramatizing and, therefore, pre-scientific—for the “scientific” analysis of long-range political, demographic, and economic trends. Semiotic theorists see narrative as merely one code among a number of possible codes that might be deployed in a discourse. Analytical philosophers, especially Paul Ricoeur, have sought to establish the “epistemic” value of narrative. Questions about the role of narrative in historical studies may be, White notes, “about the function of imagination in the production of a specifically human truth.” For White, narrative is a source of legitimate knowledge of the world.

But if narrative is a source of knowledge, it is not a neutral source. In “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” White demonstrates the specific ideological content of historical narrative and the role of narrative in allowing history to achieve the status of a discipline. The discipline of history arose to assess the claims of radical and reactionary ideologies by evaluating the philosophies of history that justified them. First, however, history had to separate from rhetoric since, as a branch of rhetoric, history could be made to bear any interpretation wit could devise. To effect this separation, historians imposed stylistic limitations on the imagination: the aesthetic of the sublime was excluded in favor of the aesthetic of the beautiful. Narrative eliminated the mysterious and the uncontrollable from history. Since, White argues, utopian ideologies of both the left and right require a sublime view of history, the disciplinization of history had already neutralized them; sublime interpretations appear unrealistic, and “realistic” interpretations are anti-utopian. Even Marxism, so far as it relies on an understandable, orderly philosophy of history, is no more utopian than its bourgeois counterpart.

Having clearly established the epistemological value and ideological content of the narrative form, White turns, in the next four essays, to theorists who confront the problem of narrative in history. The article on Droysen continues the argument advanced in the previous essay by providing a careful analysis of the theory of historical practice Droysen offered in Historik (1858). Alone among the great nineteenth-century theorists, Droysen argued that historical writing not only constructed the historical record but also was shaped profoundly by present concerns. More important, Droysen's analysis of historical narrative led him to recognize that historical discourse served an ideological function, inserting “readers within the circle of moral conceptions” that impelled them “to affirm this circle of moral conceptions as the reality that they could offend only at the risk of their ‘humanity.’”

For contemporary theorists whose political purposes are at odds with bourgeois values, the theory and practice of narrative history have once again become a problem. White begins his discussion of the problem of narrative in contemporary theory with an essay on Foucault. “Foucault's Discourse” provides a companion piece to White's earlier essay on Foucault, “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground.” In that earlier essay, White analyzed Foucault's characterization of the four epistèmes. Each epistème can, White shows, be characterized by one dominant tropological strategy, and the development from the seventeenth century (a development characterized by a series of ruptures rather than by smooth progress) as a move from metaphor, through metonymy and synecdoche, to irony. In the essay included here, White analyzes the figurative strategy that characterizes Foucault's own discourse. Rather than emplotting his histories as conventional narratives, Foucault structures his discourse by catachresis. This analysis of Foucault's style is important for two reasons. First, the style is intimately related to the stories Foucault's histories present. Second, style is the only ground of authority that Foucault has not rejected, according to White.

“Getting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption of Narrative” demonstrates how Jameson's analysis of narrativity, together with the interpretative model he proposed in “On Interpretation,” the introduction to The Political Unconscious, help to heal the split in Marxist theory between the scientific Marxists, whose goal is to explain history, and the visionary Marxists, whose concern is to transform the future. As scientific Marxism has gained the ascendancy, the utopian side of Marxism has been left to artists and critics. But scientific history can only illuminate the necessity that governs the present. Narrative returns to history its utopian and moral power by adding to mechanical causation another level of causation—the present as fulfillment of the potential of the past and as potential for future fulfillment. In addition, by relating events to the larger master narrative (in this case, the Marxist philosophy of history), narrative endows history with moral meaning as part of the struggle to wrest a realm of freedom from the realm of necessity. The breakdown of narrative, then, signals a culture's exhaustion, its attempt to repress politics. White admires Jameson's theory and his “strong” readings of texts charting the decline of the bourgeois world view, yet White questions Jameson's master narrative. The Marxist narrative provides a way into history (from false history to a true one). But the history Jameson recommends, and the return to politics it implies, may, White suggests, be outdated. Rather than returning to narrative history and politics, we may need to escape from them. Narrative history and classical, bourgeois politics are still intimately connected, and perhaps both need to be transcended.

The essays on major theorists culminate in White's essay on Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative. Ricoeur's “magisterial” work provides the first theory of historical narrative that takes into account the variety and complexity of narrative while providing a detailed argument for the epistemological value of narrative. For Ricoeur, narrative is a “true allegory” of temporality. Human intentionality causes individuals to strive to give their lives meaning by giving them the coherence of a plot, and the historian's narrative is meaningful because it mirrors the productive activity of human agents. In this respect it is different from fictional narrative which is the product of “imaginative freedom.” But all narrative, both historical and fictional, reflects the human experience of temporality and symbolically suggests that the human experience of time is essentially tragic. Eventually, as his plan for the work demonstrates, Ricoeur will go on to argue that historical narrative provides an allegory of “deep temporality,” our experience of the link between death and eternity.

The collection's final essay can be seen as a practical application of the arguments developed earlier in the work, although this essay deals less explicitly than the others with the problems of narrative. In this essay White demonstrates how a semiotic reading of the codes and the code shifts within a text provides one way of handling the major methodological problems in intellectual history. Currently, intellectual history is beset by three interrelated theoretical problems: the breakdown of the text-context relationship, the breakdown of the distinction between the classic and the merely documentary text, and the breakdown of the distinction between the transparent and the ideological text. Using as an example The Education of Henry Adams, White suggests the ways a careful semiotic reading can illuminate the text and then argues that this careful semiotic analysis provides a response to the methodological problems he has outlined. The classic text continues to fascinate us because it shows clearly the human attempt to produce meaning. And by focusing on the use of semiotic codes and code shifts within the text's narrative, White argues that the historical and ideological contexts are made a part of the text.

Individually, the eight essays in this book offer much to the reader: analyses of major theorists like Jameson and Ricoeur, a perceptive reading of The Education of Henry Adams, and insights into the history of narrative in historical writing. Together they build a convincing argument that narrative history (as well as the rejection of narrative in historical writing) is ideological; the choice to emplot an historical account as a narrative becomes itself a significant part of the content of the historical interpretation. Once again, White has convincingly demonstrated the connection between contemporary theory and historical practice, reminding his readers that the structure and style of the historian are not neutral vehicles for conveying an objective content. The Content of the Form makes an important contribution to contemporary historiography. Even readers unwilling to accept White's central argument should find this work well worth reading.