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December 09, 2005
White, Chapter 3, Summary
originally posted to HistoryBump 8 Feb 2005
White, Hayden. "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact." Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 81-100.
Metahistory asks questions intended to disrupt the types of inquiry employed by practitioners in a field to discover underlying assumptions and possible alternatives ways of knowing or questioning. Although the field of history has been questioning its disciplinary success, the problem of the fictive quality of "historical narratives" has not been taken up seriously (82). These narratives have more structural similarities to literature than to documents in science. Though Northrop Frye found history and myth to be binary opposites, he also allowed that historian's narratives reflected the four categories of myth: Romantic, Comic, Tragic, and Ironic (82). The historian gathers data and assembles it toward a form, and part of the success of histories in explaining events of the past to readers in the present is due to the story-making ability of the historian, or "emplotment" (83). The success of historical narrative requires both elements of Frye's binary, the "facts" of the events, and the explanatory and associative effects of the myth.
R. G. Collingwood also viewed historians as story-tellers, but did not make the distinction between the elements of a story and the story itself. The story takes shape by "the suppression or subordination" of some events and the "highlighting" of others (84). But the form is not implicit in the events, as Collingwood suggests. Rather the form comes from the combination of the historian's choices in telling the events and the reader's familiarity with the forms of tragedy, comedy, romance, or irony. History telling is in this way a literary form. By encoding the events so as to reflect a familiar form, the historian "refamiliarizes" readers with events, in a process similar to psychotherapy (88). Historical narratives serve not only as a "reproduction" of the events but also as a "complex of symbols" assisting reader's to find an "icon" of those events. Symbols, icons, and signs are based on C.S. Peirce's philosophy of language. As sign systems, historical narratives point both to the events and the story type or mythos that serves as the "icon," thus "mediating" between the events and the "pregeneric plot structures" of the culture (88). In this system the "plot" serves the iconic function.
The coherence of a series of events is the coherence of the story, which is limited by the form. The facts must be tailored to the form, while preserving the chronology or sequence. This happens both by emphasis within the sequence and by the omission of some events. The choices of emphasis and omission come from the historian's sense of possible sets of relationships among the events. The historian begins with "ordinary educated speech" as his communication method, leaving figurative language to construct meaning. The "dominant figurative mode" available can determine the type of emplotment to be used (94).
It is necessary to recognize the fictive element of historical narratives and to reconnect history with its "literary basis" in order to allow for the incorporation of theories of language and narrative and thus a "more subtle presentation" of historical events. Such recognition and reconnection would guard against "ideological distortions" and come to a theory that would revitalize the discipline of history (99).
See also Becky Howard's comment on double conformity.
Posted by cageyer at December 9, 2005 11:04 AM