[In the following review of The Content of the Form, Dray commends White's book, but objects to his view of history as political propaganda.]

This book brings together eight of White's essays published between 1979 and 1985, all concerned in one way or another with theory of narrative and the problem of representation in the human sciences. It is thus a sequel to, or an updating of, his reflections on the same range of topics in Tropics of Discourse, and earlier in Metahistory. Four of the essays deal directly with problems raised by the nature of narrative: its epistemic authority, its cultural function, and its general social significance. The other four approach the same issues more obliquely through discussions of the work of Droysen, Foucault, Jameson, and Ricoeur. Only three of the papers have been substantially revised. For readers familiar with White's earlier work the collection offers few surprises. It does, however, provide welcome elaboration on a number of controversial points, a few changes of emphasis, and even an occasional retraction; and its more serene tone suggests the increasing satisfaction of a daring and original, if also highly syncretistic, thinker with the intellectual habitation he has been constructing over a number of years. The general impression one gets is nevertheless one of being made privy, not to a finished system, but to work still enthusiastically in progress; and even those who find themselves with serious reservations about much of what White has to say may take considerable pleasure in being swept up, if only momentarily, in the intellectual currents through which he navigates with such elan.

As might be expected with a group of essays written at different times and for different purposes, there are some overlaps in content, some incongruities of style, and more issues addressed than can conveniently be noted in a short review. Of special interest are a lengthy discussion of annals as an historiographical form in its own right, to be contrasted with chronicle as well as with narrative proper, and an exploration of the different approaches to the question of narrative legitimacy taken by Annales historians, certain analytic philosophers of history, linguistic theorists holding structuralist and post-structuralist views, philosophers with an interest in hermeneutics, and traditional historians who see narrative as essentially a craft. Much to be welcomed also is White's probing, yet respectful, critique of Ricoeur's attempt to ground narrative in human time-consciousness—here he is at his best as an interpreter of another's text. The central thrust of the book, however, like that of much of White's previous work, is the elaboration and defense of an extreme constructionist view of narrative in historical writing, the real function of which, he insists, is moral and political, not epistemological, and certainly not representational. This central position—although it may seem ungrateful to say it of a book which is so wonderfully well-informed, always thought-provoking, and frequently illuminating—seems to me to be frustratingly underargued.

A recurring problem is White's tendency, when his constructionist thesis is put in question, to let rhetoric rather than logical argument assume too much of the burden of its defense. “What wish is enacted, what desire is gratified, by the fantasy that real events are properly represented when they can be shown to display the formal coherency of a story?” he asks early in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (4)—as if the explanation of someone's holding such a belief were alone problematic, not the claim that the belief is in fact a fantastic one to hold. That history “may be” meaningless is “a possibility that should never be ruled out,” he cautions us in “The Politics of Historical Interpretation” (82)—going on then at other points simply to take the realization of this possibility for granted. Transitions are too easily made from what certain considerations allegedly lead one to “suspect” to what can be taken undoubtedly to be the case; the idea that the real world could, like narrative, exhibit a coherent structure is repeatedly written off as “illusion”; and sheer paradox is treated as almost magically supportive, as when a social attitude is said to be “present” in a narrative “by virtue of its absence.” White's penchant for rather figurative modes of expression also makes it difficult at times to elicit a clear structure of argument from what he has to say. Nor is he above occasionally caricaturing the realist position he wishes to attack, as when he interprets the notion of events speaking for themselves as implying that, like the mythical column of Memnon, they actually give tongue (3).

Any sober assessment of White's case for claiming that narrative cannot represent reality must look carefully at what, in his view, does succeed in representing it. The contrast which he sometimes seems to have in mind is between offering full-blown narrative and merely reporting discrete events—perhaps with all the cultural, or even human, significance strained out of them, as seems implied by his remark that “a refusal of narrative indicates an absence or refusal of meaning itself” (2). More characteristically, non-representational narrative is set over against representational annals or chronicle. In fact, in conceding the claims of realism with regard to the latter, White considerably undermines the case for denying a representative function to narrative; for he admits that it incorporates these simpler forms. In any case, reports of discrete historical events seldom strain away all the human meaning of what is said to have happened, even annals, as illustrated by White himself, containing humanly meaningful claims like “Hard year, deficient in crops.” This makes it implausible to claim, as White sometimes seems to do, that narratives go “beyond” reality merely because they typically express distinctively human perspectives, for example, value judgments. Clearly, for him, the allegedly non-representational character of narratives must be traced to features making possible a contrast with annals and chronicles. The feature he most emphasizes in this connection is their displaying “closure”: a beginning-middle-end structure. By contrast, he says, chronicles simply terminate; and annals do not even record continuities capable of termination except in the sense of being structured by a continuous series of dates.

Why does White believe that closure opens an impassable gulf between the way the world—the human world—was, and the way narratives represent it? A consideration which he seems to think relevant is that no sequence of real events “actually comes to an end” (23), it following that “real events do not offer themselves as stories” (4). The way the objection is put, however, surely begs the question. It is true that the events which we might normally refer to collectively as the First World War do not come to an end in the sense that the end of the war is the end of the world; things go on happening. The point, however, is that none of these further happenings can be regarded as further events of the war. The sequence of events which it would make sense to regard as constitutive of the First World War does come to an end. Is that because to conceive events as First-World-War-constituting is to “impose” upon them (White's term) an interpretive concept which simply expresses the historian's “poetic” judgment? Are events rendered “imaginary” (again White's own term) by being brought under colligatory concepts which, like “First World War,” ensure their being considered from a standpoint that takes account of their human meaning and value? Even if this were conceded, it could not be the point White really wants to make, since it would leave unsupported his contention that it is closure as a formal feature of narration that opens a hiatus between events as narrated and a real historical past. It would trace the problem for realism not to narratives’ (necessary) form but to its (accidental) content. Some attention by White to beginning-middle-end structures in natural history might have been salutary in this connection, since he seems generally to assume that the study of nature is free from the problems supposedly raised for realism by the employment of narrative in human history. But more attention to some kinds of human history might also have been useful. A history of the bow and arrow as an implement of warfare, for example, or of the stagecoach as a means of transportation, would require closure as much as, say, a history of a revolution-turned-farce (White's example). It would be a good deal harder to discern the role of “poetic” judgment in its determination, however.

White's overdependence on rhetoric shows itself in many other ways: for example, in remarks he makes about the connection between narrative and politics. He does make it clear, in criticizing the “jejune” way narrative was rejected by Annales historians, that he doesn't think that writing narrative commits historians also to writing political history. Where Annales historians apparently envisaged a necessary connection between the two types of enterprise, White sees only an historical one. Yet he insists that narrative, as such, has a political function—that, by virtue of its very form, it is bound up with the support of authority. Indeed, he goes so far as to say at one point that narrative history “is, by its very nature, the representational practice best suited to the production of the ‘law-abiding’ citizen” (82), this apparently because it necessarily searches out continuity and wholeness in a subject matter. From an author who concedes that Marx, for example, wrote narrative history, neither the aim nor the actual effect of which was the encouragement of political and social quietism, this is surely a far-fetched judgment, which might have seemed less tempting if the question had been asked: “Continuity and wholeness of what?” But White does not always take the position that narrative is by its very nature conservative in the ordinary political sense of the term. He sometimes contends only that its aim is always to shore up some authority or other: in the case of professional history, perhaps only the authority of the discipline. Since he explicitly links the idea of the political with that of power, and even of force (58–59), he might easily be taken here as having in mind a literally coercive, professional use of narrative paradigms. In a concessive footnote, however, he observes that all this may be interpreted “metaphorically” (225). In the end, not much seems to be left of his stress upon narration as a political enterprise beyond the idea that typical historical narratives express, and thus may help to entrench, the systems of values (conservative or otherwise) held by those who construct them. Why it seemed necessary to make such heavy weather with the idea of “the politics of narrativity” in order finally to make such a widely accepted point is not easy to see.

White is to be admired for the breadth of his interest and for his willingness to range across diverse authors, traditions, and disciplines, driven, it seems, by a genuine belief that something of value may be learned from all of them. Not all those to whom he pays compliment in this way, however, will be satisfied with the use he makes of their work; and analytical philosophers of history, in particular, may well feel that, both on particular points of doctrine and in matters of philosophical technique, White does not always learn from them what they intended to teach. For example, although he gives the impression of wishing to give due consideration to well-known analytical discussions of the logical structure of explanation in history, the view of such explanation which he generally incorporates without argument into his own broader theory of narrative understanding is the crudest version of the nomological theory. To cite a single instance, when he lists what he considers the chief structural features of narrativity, he includes “necessary connection” (6)—as if Morton White's conception of explanatory narrative as, ideally, the tracing of a causal chain had been the only paradigm of connectedness to emerge from four decades of dispute. Those familiar with recent analytical writings on narrative will also be puzzled by the friendliness shown by White towards a retrospective “narratological” (150) idea of causation, derived from Jameson, and discussed as if some such idea were an obvious product of the emphasis placed on hindsight by analytical narrativists like Danto and Mink. The idea of retrospective significance is easy enough to grasp, with its implication that the actual significance of a past event, and not just people's judgments about it, may change with the passage of time. But is White here suggesting that narrative historians should accept the idea of past causal relations similarly changing with time? If so, a good deal more needs to be said about how precisely such an idea can coherently be entertained.

The need for more extensive analysis may also be illustrated by White's claim that a narrative which really conveys understanding must show a story's ending to have been “immanent” (20) in its beginning. If all this means is that a narrative account may, from the outset, draw attention to a significance that events will attain with the passage of time, and which, by courtesy of hindsight, both narrator and reader may know in advance, no objection need be raised beyond impatience with a rather misleading mode of expression. But if it means that a fully satisfactory narrative must represent its beginning in such a way that its ending can be seen to follow from it necessarily, two senses in which an ending may be said to be “necessary” need to be clearly contrasted: that of causal inevitability, given certain antecedent conditions, and that of accomplished and therefore unchangeable fact (even if belonging to a future that is now past). Greater willingness to employ analytical modes of argument might also have discouraged White from claiming that the “ideological” nature of narrative history is to be discovered both by studying what historians have written and by analyzing the character of narrativity. For if its possessing such a nature is a conceptual truth of narratology, what room is there for asking whether it is an empirical fact?

What will give most of White's critics pause, however, is less what he says on such points of detail than the position he appears to take on the central issue of the book. He comes very close indeed to claiming that everything in an historical narrative that goes beyond sheer chronicle (or even, perhaps, beyond the mere statement of discrete facts) is somehow “invented” (ix) by the historian. In resisting such a view, there is no need to argue that, on the contrary, everything is “read off” past reality, veridical narrative simply recording what was originally perceived, as it was perceived, if not by the historian, then at least by the historical agents. Indeed, White himself would seem to concede more to historical realism than he should when, in contrasting full-blown narrative with mere chronicle, he sometimes allows that chronicle, unlike narrative, does convey what is or might have been perceived. Neither in chronicling nor in narrating, however, is it the historian's job to add something invented to something perceived; it is to think about something perceived with a view to discovering forms which it exemplifies. Since there is no analogue of this in the construction of fictional narrative, it is difficult to understand White's insistence that narrative history and fiction can no more be contrasted with respect to their content than they can with respect to their form (27).

In constantly emphasizing the supposedly poetic rather than factual nature of narrative emplotment in history, White seems to want to represent the historical imagination as free—as having “the facts” very much at its disposal. According to him, for example, “any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways,” no sequence of such events “is intrinsically tragic, comic, farcical, and so on” (44). As in previous writings, candor nevertheless forces him to admit that it may not be possible to emplot a given series of events in just any way at all. He even speaks at one point of the need for “testing” emplotments. Without a good deal more on what he thinks such testing would consist in, however, and a much more extensive analysis of narrative form itself than is offered in the present book, White is all too easily read as holding that historians can emplot the past pretty much as they like. They can have better or worse reasons for emplotting as they do, but since these, ex hypothesi, cannot be theoretical reasons, they must be practical, that is, “ideological,” ones. What White offers in the end is a version of the pragmatic theory of history, the awful consequences of which he honestly, if somewhat chillingly, accepts in a remark he makes about a Zionist interpretation of the Holocaust. The truth of such an interpretation, he says, “consists in its effectiveness in justifying a wide range of current Israeli political policies.” Such a reduction of history to the status of political propaganda ought surely to be resisted, no matter how worthy the cause ostensibly served. White's book, for all its many merits, offers too few resources for resisting it.