The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007

by Hayden White, Robert Doran (Editor)

Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. Since the publication of his groundbreaking monograph, Metahistory , in 1973, White’s work has been crucial to disciplines where narrative is of primary concern, including history, literary studies, anthropology, philosophy, art history, and film and media studies. This volume, deftly introduced by Robert Doran, gathers in one place White’s important—and often hard-to-find—essays exploring his revolutionary theories of historical writing and narrative. These texts find White at his most essayistic, engaging a wide range of topics and thinkers with characteristic insight and elegance. The Fiction of Narrative traces the arc and evolution of White’s field-defining thought and will become standard reading for students and scholars of historiography, the theory of history, and literary studies.

Genres: History, Criticism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Literary Criticism, Essays

424 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2010

About the author

Hayden White was a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). He was professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and held position of professor of comparative literature at Stanford University.

White received his B.A. from Wayne State University in 1951 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan (1952 and 1956, respectively). While an undergraduate at Wayne State, White studied history under William J. Bossenbrook, who inspired several undergraduates who later went on to achieve academic distinction in the field of history, including White, H. D. "Harry" Harootunian, and Arthur C. Danto (The Uses of History).

Hayden V. White has made contributions to the philosophy of history and literary theory. His books and essays analyze the narratives of nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians and philosophers, suggesting that historical discourse is a form of fiction that can be classified and studied on the basis of its structure and its use of language. White ultimately attacks the notion that modern history texts present objective, accurate explanations of the past; instead, he argues that historians and philosophers operate under unarticulated assumptions in arranging, selecting, and interpreting events. These assumptions, White asserts, can be identified by examining the form and structure of texts themselves, providing valuable information about the attitudes of the author and the context in which he or she has written. Furthermore, as White postulates in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, historical discourse can be classified into the literary patterns of tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony.

In a review in the Journal of Modern History, Allan Megill wrote: "Taken together, White's books and essays have done much to alter the theory of history. Although his focus on trope and narrative is far from what most historians are interested in, they are all aware of his work." The critic added that White "is able to speak fluently and interestingly on an astonishingly wide variety of matters."

Most scholars agree that White's most important work is Metahistory. The book grew out of its author's interest in the reasons why people study—and write—history. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Frank Day observed that in Metahistory White "adapted ideas from Giambattista Vico and other students of rhetoric and literary history to produce an intricate analysis of nineteenth-century historians in terms of their methods of emplotment. . . . White's broad purpose in Metahistory is to trace how the nineteenth-century historians escaped from the Irony that dominated Enlightenment historiography and from the 'irresponsible faith' of the Romantics, only to lapse back into Irony at the end of the century." The implications for historians and literary theoreticians lay in the "application of rhetorical tropes to narrative discourse," to quote Day.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Fiction of Narrative, Hayden White, essays
Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957-2007


This book was hard. Really. That’s the first thing to say. Some of the concepts were so over my head I didn’t even know where to begin. So I put it down, and did some research on Hayden White, the author of this collection of essays. Turns out he’s a rock star in the world of narrative theory and literature. Born in 1928, he produced these essays independently, before Robert Doran, the editor, compiled them as one unit for Johns Hopkins Press.


I needed to learn a few things first. “Tropes”, for one. These are figures of speech that allow for metaphors, irony, and allegory to fit in with a narrative. For example, saying that a policeman is “the long arm of the law” is a trope. Get it? When a news outlet says, “The White House reports that…” we know that they mean a representative of the White House stated something, not that the building itself spoke. White discusses these tropes at length, and it appears that he asserts that you can identify a period in history by the tropes used to describe the time. I’m way too dumb to analyze that.

However, I did continue with the book and I have what I hope is a basic grasp of White’s theories on literature and history. He takes to task those who say a history book is a neutral text, and that history can be described without any political leanings or personal slant. And the use of tropes is just one way to reveal the subtle motives an author may have within his text.

In terms of history, the editor Robert Doran noted, after discussing the literary technique of foreshadowing, that “and so with history: to confer meaning retrospectively, to see one event in light of another as narrativistically connected (if not constructed), is precisely what history does. Obviously, the French Revolution would have a very different significance if the Axis powers had prevailed during World War II…And how could the election of the first black president of a nation founded by slave owners not be regarded as the figural and ultimately ironic fulfillment of the national ideals as set forth in this nation’s constitution.” So in viewing a past via present knowledge surely changes how that past is interpreted, and how it is explained.

Of the essays included, my favorite was “The Structure of Historical Narrative” that White wrote in 1972. Partly because of recent research on de Tocqueville and partly because of how he explains literary conventions in a historical setting, I found this essay fascinating. He takes two iconic works of history and contrasts their styles. One is de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (remember Parrot & Olivier?) and the other is Leopold von Ranke’s History of Germany during the Age of the Reformation (other works are mentioned as well). White states that Ranke’s work “tells a story with a beginning, a middle, and end….its subject is an entity that is undergoing a process of change from one condition to another while remaining identifiably what it was all along…it “explains” what happened during the process of change.”

Contrasting this is Democracy in America, which has an indeterminate style that lacks the framework of Ranke’s book. Instead “it can be said to have a kind of beginning, consisting of a background sketch of how democracy was born in Europe” and then goes on to give “an account of the institutions and forces in play in American democracy at the time of the writing of the book.” So it doesn’t fit the story model that Ranke uses, and instead leaves the conclusion to be drawn from what the reader knows. This of course, changes by who the reader is, as well as the fact that future readers in succeeding generations will be able to apply to it what they’ve seen occur in history since.

What I took from this, both as a reader and a wannabe author, is that structuring a narrative is far more than throwing in a few twists, some clues, some memorable characters, and a stunning denouement. Instead, leaving options open for the reader to insert their own perceptions would likely lead to a more appealing and insightful novel.

Additionally, in researching White I found a remarkable story about a legal battle he had with the Los Angeles Police Department in 1975, one that went all the way to the California Supreme Court. In it, he asserted as a professor at UCLA that the LAPD were posing as students to gather information on campus about teachers and other students. Tax money was being spent to support this illegal surveillance. He won the case, where the Supreme Court determined that without a specific crime to investigate, the police couldn’t simply troll for information on the UCLA campus** White is now retired, having taught at UCSC and Stanford.

[Basilius · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my view, history as a discipline is in bad shape today because it has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination. In the interest of appearing scientific and objective, it has repressed and denied to itself its own greatest source of strength and renewal.

[Disclamor: This review is of one essay in particular: The Historical Text as Literary Artifact]

Does history accurately represent reality? Or simply the bias of its authors? If the latter, should it be discouraged, with renewed effort at being ‘objective’? Hayden White, a philosopher of history (why not) takes a look at this age-old question and offers what I think is the most eloquent answer. That yes, history is simply a fiction with ‘true’ source material, but in fact this isn’t a bad thing. It’s what makes history valuable in the first place.

When investigating what it means to ‘do history’ there’s a desire to have the subject seem scientific. Historians will claim a distinct difference between fiction writers and themselves: the latter look at the facts of history and try to explain their coherence/significance, while the former create entertaining narratives from purely their imagination. White teases this insecurity, and tries to look at the subject honestly. It’s irrelevant where each author gets their subject material, it only matters how they use it. While poets are aware of the apparatus in their work, historians pretend to actually represent reality. The issue here is that history has no inherent significance; any value is applied from a human perspective. Thus whatever significance applied to historic events reveals a bias or agenda. Here White uses Northrop Frye’s four types of narrative (for simplicity) to illustrate how a historian chooses which story structure to apply to his work: romantic, comical, tragic, or ironic. This isn’t to say that all of history can only be divided in those four categories, but that in order to instill ‘relevance’ in history its events must be made digestible through figurative literature.

Why figurative? History doesn’t have a technical language like the sciences, and naïve prose would be considered worthless (who simply reads a list of facts and dates?). Thus in order to cohere historical events they must be arranged in a narrative. That narrative categorically uses literary, or figurative elements in its construction. This means that the process of an author and poet are effectively identical, despite their source material. While it’s true an author uses ‘real’ events as that source material (White calls this process emplotment—the use of facts to create plot), and the poet uses imaginary, this should not suggest history has any kind of authority on reality. What happens is that an author cherry-picks what fits his agenda and suppresses what doesn’t. Again, this isn’t wrong—it allows multiple perspectives—but it doesn’t make these constructions any less fictitious. Evidence of this is everywhere: just look up how many different histories exist of the French Revolution. How can any one of these claim privilege? They all use the same ‘facts’ but emphasize different elements to create entirely different works.

This is also not to say those works can’t be criticized, but it should focus on ‘objective’ aspects: accuracy of sources, do other facts counter this narrative, logical consistency, etc. What we can’t do is say one perspective is ‘wrong.’ Evidence of this can be seen in history’s artistic cannon, which mirrors literature and not the sciences. Historical paradigms don’t negate each other because older works can still be valued for how they arrange events, even when they are no longer considered ‘up to date.’ This is why historians like Gibbon, Thucydides, Marx, and others are still studied. We don’t read them for accuracy but because the narratives they created imbue meaning and beauty to their material. In fact a historian is often commended for his ‘constructive imagination’: history is fragmentary and historians are left to fill in the gap. But while his claims cannot be verified, they are assessed for their induction and logic. In other words, does his work break our suspension of disbelief? The only reason this works is because the audience already has an expectation of a plot structure. I stress: no historical work has ever created or discovered a new story structure; they have ALL used pre-existing structures within the respective culture. The fact that reality fits into literary modes, and not the other way around, is a red flag for the ‘authenticity’ of history.

The revelation here is how history accomplishes many of the same goals as fiction. Organize events into a 3-act structure, ripe with characters, climax, and moral? Check. Introduce the reader to unfamiliar vistas, and reconcile the differences with their own culture (relevance)? Check. Point towards icons and metaphors in the real world? Check. Adopt contemporary cultural tropes, styles, and criticisms (histories referencing other histories)? Check. Even the entire premise of history—to highlight how a given state of affairs transforms through conflict—is exactly what stories are designed to do. The only, and I mean only difference is that history claims to reflect reality, aka mimesis. See the irony? We don’t even have an objective history to compare all alternative histories to. We can’t say ‘this view does not reflect the accepted record’ because there is no accepted record. We ceaselessly generate new histories not because new facts arise, but because new perspectives want to be explored. This is also an important component of psychotherapy by the way: it’s not that we erase negative memories, or simply suppress them, but reorder the chronological events into something empowering. Historians are the therapists of time.

White ends on this key note of empowerment. He argues that history should embrace its literary elements. The best historians are not the ones we feel best reflected reality, but like any good artist they created reality. They’re important to us because we want our reality to matter, and having it arranged like a good story is what instills meaning. To say it’s harmful for history to be fiction is to suggest fiction itself is harmful. History is just as culturally significant as literature, and it’s also more complex. It’s ironic that we turn to historical context to understand literature when there’s infinite historical narratives and only one text. Which do we choose? Another irony is that the more histories we consume the less we can generalize about an epoch. The Historical Text as Literary Artifact presents a brilliant case for the subjectivity of history, and I’m eager to see opposing arguments. I agree that ultimately literature should inform historians on how to do their work, and they should be aware (and own) their bias. Don’t try and purport ‘objectivity,’ it’s impossible and boring. Give us a good story, and watch the constellations of the past align.

[Kwan Qi Xiang · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good start, great end, but White was smoking some sttong stuff in the middle, maybe because those were times of which it was hard to make head or tail out of anything.