Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning - its production, distribution, and consumption - in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in the content of the form, in the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into (...) a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded. (shrink)

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal (...) fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Adam Smith and the philosophy of anti-history, by J. Weiss.--Towards a dissolution of the ontological argument, by A. C. Danto.--Romanticism, historicism, realism: toward a period concept for early 19th century intellectual history, by H. V. White.--History and humanity: the Proudhonian vision, by A. Noland.--Hintze and the legacy of Ranke, by M. Covensky.--Objections to metaphysics, by J. Cobitz.--The term expressionism in the visual arts, by V. H. Miesel.--Karl Löwith's anti-historicism, by B. Riesterer.--Antonio Gramsci; Marxism and the Italian intellectual tradition, by (...) J. Cammett.--Traditional Chinese historiography and local histories, by E. H. Pritchard.--From principle to principal: restoration and emperorship in Japan, by H. D. Harootunian.--National development and the evolution of the legal-rational bureaucracy: the prefectural governor in Japan, 1868-1945, by B. Silberman. (shrink)

White's dense article on narrative discusses the ways that different groups of 20th century historians, particularly historical theorists (see pp.8-9), have constructed and deconstructed narrative as a means of communicating history. White himself acknowledges that narrativity challenges the scientific of history, but suggests that narrativity is not only unavoidable, but also offers a form of literary or allegorical truth.\n\nWhite first discusses the critiques of narrative as a means of communication--it focuses too heavily on political players, it is "unscientific," (...) it is inherently limited because narrative itself cannot be objective (although it's authors sometimes claim it to be).\n\nHe then moves on to discuss other, heavily theoretical, takes on why narrative is still useful as a means of historical communication: that narrative works because it performs as a trope which readers can easily recognize from myth and fiction, or, that narrative works because it allows us to transform events from the present to a synthesized past.\n\nWhite's article is difficult to read, but important background for anyone who wants to see what people have said about narrative in the past 100 years--and why it is still important. (shrink)

Claims by historians that history is both an art and a science are used to avoid the rigor appropriate to the sciences and to remain blind to the imaginative innovations characteristic of modern art. Few modern historians have approached the intellectual courage of Burckhardt's "impressionist" view of the Renaissance; yet such courage--even to contemplate the dissolution of historiography as we now know it--is required before artists and scientists will be willing to take history seriously.

The politics of interpretation should not be confused with interpretive practices such as political theory, political commentary, or histories of political institutions, parties, and conflicts that have politics itself as a specific object of interest. In these other interpretive practices, the politics that informs or motivates them—“politics” in the sense of political values or ideology—is relatively easily perceived and no particular meta-interpretive analysis is required. The politics of interpretation, on the other hand, arises in those interpretive practices which are ostensibly (...) most remote from overtly political concerns, practices which are carried out under the aegis of a purely disinterested search for the truth or inquiry into the natures of things which appear to have no political relevance at all. This “politics” has to do with the kind of authority the interpreter claims vis-à-vis the established political authorities of his society, on the one side, and vis-à-vis other interpreters in his own field of study or investigation, on the other, as the basis of whatever rights he conceives himself to possess and whatever duties he feels obligated to discharge as a professional seeker of truth. This politics which presides over interpretive conflicts is difficult to identity because traditionally, in our culture at least, interpretation is thought to operate properly only as long as the interpreter does not have recourse to the one instrument which the politician per vocationem utilizes as a matter of course in his practice—the appeal to force as a means of resolving disputes and conflicts.11. I have followed the lead of Max Weber in defining the phrase “politics of interpretation.” In “Politics as Vocation,” Weber wrote that “ ‘politics’ means for us striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state” . Rather than discuss the age-old problem of the professional interpreter’s political responsibilities, I will consider that politics which is endemic to the pursuit of truth—the striving to share power amongst interpreters themselves. The activity of interpreting becomes political at the point where a given interpreter claims authority over rival interpreters. As long as this claim is not reinforced by appeal to the power of the state to compel conformity of belief or conviction, it is “political” only in a metaphorical sense. Of course, interpretation becomes political when a given point of view or finding is taken as orthodoxy of belief by those holding political power, as in the Soviet Union, Germany under Hitler, or any number of religiously puritanical regimes. But these are the easy cases. It is much more difficult to determine the political nature of interpretive practices which, as in literary criticism or antiquarian scholarship, appear to have no bearing upon political policies or practices.Hayden White is a professor and director of the program in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is coeditor of Representing Kenneth Burke and is currently working on a book on the rhetoric of realism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" and "The Narrativization of Real Events". (shrink)

It is as if [W. J. T.] Mitchell, who in his stance as a literary theorist is willing to admit of a plurality of equally legitimate critical modes, were unwilling to extend this pluralism to the consideration of history itself. By this I do not mean that he would be unwilling to view the history of criticism as a cacophony or polyphony of contending critical positions, as a never=ending circle of critical viewpoints, with no one of them being able finally (...) to declare itself the winner for all time, but rather that he must feel that this is the only legitimate perspective on that history. Such a perspective on history has a name, and it is historicism—the perspective associated with Ranke and Goethe in Friedrich Meinecke’s great book on this subject, the perspective which, in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, is identified with the fate of literary realism in the West. Although the name given to this perspective by Meinecke suggests that it is the historical perspective, contemporary historical theory and practice deny it that claim. In point of fact, if we look at contemporary historical theory and practice, we must admit that there are as many perspectives on history as there are modes of critical practice in literary studies. And this for a very good reason: the referent of the term “history” is as indeterminable, is as much a matter of principled contestation, as the term “literature” itself. So that, if one wished to “correct” certain critical positions by reminding their proponents of the necessity of a proper “sense of history,” it would be just as legitimate to correct the corrector by reminding him that the history of historiography displays the same kind of confusion over the “sense of history” that the history of criticism displays over the “sense of literature.” When Mitchell characterizes the current schism in criticism as another enactment of the quarrel of ancients and moderns, he is surely right; but he fails to note that this reenactment takes place within an atmosphere made more murky by the fact that there is no generally agreed upon “sense of history” to which one can appeal in order to characterize the differences between the two camps. It is not as if the ancients and the moderns agree on some body of fact from which they draw different implications regarding the attitude that one ought to assume vis-à-vis modern as against ancient literature. For what is at issue is not the interpretation of the facts but the nature of historical factuality itself. Hayden White is Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Historical Interpretation” , “The Narrativization of Real Events” , and “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”. (shrink)

I am grateful to Dirk Moses for taking the time to study my work so assiduously and to comment on it so perspicuously. His essay is eminently well-informed and even-handed, and I have little to add to or correct of his characterization of my many, long on-going, and admittedly flawed attempts to deconstruct modern historical discourse. He understands me well enough and I think that I understand his objections to my position. We do not disagree on matters of fact, I (...) think, but we have different notions about the nature of historical discourse and the uses to which historical knowledge can properly be put. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses correctly asserts that the attempts of the human sciences of the past five hundred years to represent the world in language have failed because these sciences did not recognize the opacity or thingness of language itself. Foucault pretends to have written a plotless anti-history of the human sciences which stresses the discontinuities that characterize the succession of one "'episteme" by another. In fact, he has explained these vicissitudes by the changes of tropological strategy (...) that underlie epistemic shifts. Although he disavows the movement, Foucault's interest in revealing the poetic basis of all linguistic representations of reality places him in the eschatological wing of the structuralist establishment. (shrink)

Historicism is often regarded as a distortion of properly "historical" understanding; but if one attends to the rhetorical aspects of historical discourse, it appears that ordinary historical narrative prefigures its subject by the language chosen for description no less than historicism does by its generalizing and theoretical interests. Descriptive language is, in fact, figurative and emplots events to suit one or another type of story. Rhetorical analysis shows even an apparently straightforward passage to be an encodation of events in the (...) form of pseudo-tragedy. Generic story-types constitute the latent meaning of narratives and are understood by readers, often subliminally, through the figurative language of the story. The acknowledgement of linguistic determinism resolves a number of problems of historical theory and entails a qualified relativism of historical accounts. (shrink)

A review of Memory, History, Forgetting. By Paul Ricoeur. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Intellectual history—the attempt to write the history of consciousness-in-general, rather than discrete histories of, say, politics, society, economic activity, philosophical thought, or literary expression—is comparatively new as a scholarly discipline; but it can lay claim to a long ancestry. It is arguable that intellectual history has its remote origins in the sectarian disputes of ancient philosophers and theologians, who, by constructing “histories” of their opponents’ doctrines, sought to expose the interests that had led them into error or to locate the (...) precise point at which they had strayed from the path of truth or righteousness. An especial interest in the history of thought and expression is, of course, characteristic of transitional ages in the lives of cultures; it arises when received traditions in thought and mythic endowments appear to have lost their relevance to current social problems or their presumed coherency, as in the Hellenistic age or the late Middle Ages. During such times, thinkers may try, by means of what is usually called “historical perspective,” to gain some purchase on their cultural legacy and to distinguish between “what is living and what is dead” within it. (shrink)

The first in a two-volume anthology of Hayden White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, revealing White as a public intellectual. It places White's thought in context, explaining its major themes, sources, and frames of reference, and features five previously unpublished lectures as well as more complete versions of several published essays.

Review: Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.