WILSON, A. Sobre Hayden White

History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 1-23
Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656 DOI: 10.1111/hith.10692
THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

ADRIAN WILSON1
ABSTRACT
This paper assesses Hayden Whites Metahistory through the test of reflexivity; that is, it asks whether the books general theory of the structure of that mode of thought which is called historical applies, as it should, to its own history of nineteenth-century historical consciousness. Most components of the theoretical apparatusthe various concepts invoked in the theory of the historical work and in the theory of tropesfail the reflexivity test; further, it emerges that those same components are also seriously flawed on other grounds. The sole and partial exception is the concept of emplotment, which passes the reflexivity test, albeit with qualifications, but more particularly has the virtue of illuminating the traditional history of history against which Metahistorys own story was pitched; and this result provides an ironic and unexpected vindication of Metahistorys underlying vision. Thus the books fundamental insightthat the form of historical writing is epistemologically consequentialcan be retained, even though its two theories should now be set aside. Keywords: emplotment, Hayden White, metahistory, reflexivity, rhetoric, tropology
Does the theoretical apparatus of Hayden Whites Metahistory apply to the book itself? Or to put this question the other way around, does the books substantive content (its history of nineteenth-century historical consciousness) exemplify its theory of the historical work and/or its theory of tropes? We should certainly expect so, given that Metahistory announces itself on its opening page both as a history and as offering a general theory of historical knowledge; and indeed White himself had just hinted that the two enterprises were connected, remarking as he did at the end of the preface that the book was cast in an Ironic mode2a comment that alluded to his tropology. Yet no one has taken up that hint (Herman Paul is uniquely candid in saying that he leaves aside the problem3); the rela1. For advice, help and encouragement with this paper I wish to thank Mike Beaney, Mike Finn, Morris Jagodowicz, Keith Jenkins, Mark Jenner, Sarah Kattau, Gerald Lang, Greg Radick, Roger White, Julian Wilson, and participants in discussions of preliminary versions presented at the Universities of Leeds and York. I am particularly grateful to readers for History and Theory for penetrating comments on earlier versions. 2. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), xii. 3. Herman Paul, Hayden White and the Crisis of Historicism, in Re-figuring Hayden White, ed. Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 72, n. 33. Very few other scholars have referred to this remark at all, and those who have done so have been commenting not on its reflexive implications but rather on what White went on to claim, namely that the Irony which informs [Metahistory] is a conscious one whose purpose was a rejec-
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tionship between Metahistorys theory (or theories) and its own story has seldom been discussed; and the little that has been said on the matter is inconsistent and unconvincing.4 Thus it remains unclear whether, or in what ways, Metahistory passes the test of reflexivity that its own project invites, a test that can be expressed as follows. If the theory is truly general, then its concepts must apply to Metahistorys own narrative; conversely, any of those concepts that fail so to apply have thereby fallen short of what is required of them. It is to applying that test that this essay is devoted. It will first be necessary to summarize the rather complex array of concepts that White deploys, and in particular the structure of that array. I shall then survey the reflexive possibilities of those concepts; this preparatory exercise will be significant in itself, for clarifying the putative theoretical content will reveal conceptual weaknesses that run wider and deeper than has ever been suggested. Further, a consistent pattern will emerge: concepts that are inherently flawed fail the reflexivity test, and vice versa. So widespread are these difficulties that in the end, only one of the books candidate concepts survives this twofold scrutiny, namely emplotment. The key theme thus becomes Metahistorys plot; I shall explore that plot, bringing out its two-layered structure and its complex relationship with the preceding standard account of historys history. I conclude by suggesting that the troubles attending Metahistorys two theories stem ultimately from a failure to grasp what is distinctive about the historical discipline, and yet that the books fundamental vision (as distinct from its specific conceptual apparatus) is paradoxically vindicated by what we have discovered along the way.
I. THE THEORETICAL APPARATUS
Metahistorys theme, the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe, consists of the fusion of two genres of nineteenth-century writing, namely proper history (a tradition depicted as beginning with Michelet) and speculative philosophy of history (Hegel to Croce). The theoretical apparatus, laid out in the books Introduction, has the double task of elucidating those genres and of estabtion of Irony itself (cf. note 44 below): see, for instance, Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices, transl. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 30-31. 4. Fredric Jameson sees the body of Metahistory as the application of Whites methodological thesis, whereas Frank Ankersmit conversely regards the introduction and conclusion as presenting a codification of the readings offered in the body of the book; neither offers any supporting evidence (and Jameson claims that access to Whites methodological thesis is encumbered by the presence of his substantive application to his texts, an assertion that Richard Vann has rightly contested). Paul argues that the linguistic preoccupations of the introduction and conclusion represent a later stage of Whites writing than does the body of the book; yet as we shall see, the (supposed) linguistic basis of prefiguration was actually more explicit in the body of Metahistory than in either the introduction or the conclusion. See Fredric Jameson, Figural Realism or the Poetics of Historiography (an essay review of Metahistory), Diacritics 6 (1976), 4; Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 107; Richard Vann, Hayden White, Historian, in Ankersmit et al. eds., Re-figuring Hayden White, 319; Herman Paul, Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), 58-59; Adrian Wilson, Hayden Whites Theory of the Historical Work: A Re-Examination, Journal of the Philosophy of History 7 (2013), 47-48; below, at n. 16.
lishing the grounds of their putative synthesis into the historical imagination or historical consciousness. This is achieved through two theories: first the theory of the historical work, which is effectively limited to proper history, and then the theory of tropes, which applies both to proper history and to speculative philosophy of history and marries these together. Between them the two theories bring into play some eleven distinct but interconnected concepts, whose mutual relationships are sketched in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Schematic view of Metahistorys theoretical apparatus
The theory of the historical work departs radically from previous commentary upon historiography, taking a new and indeed opposite direction. Hitherto, historians and philosophers of history alike had focused on epistemological themes such as the nature of historical inference and the justification of historical knowledge-claims, effectively ignoring the literary form of historical writing; but Whites theory is all about literary form, and pays only token attention to historys epistemological basis. Thus the active concepts of the theory are those that are exclusively concerned (either actually or notionally) with literary form, comprising what White calls the three modes of explanation: explanation by emplotment, by formal argument (that is, conceptions of the nature of the historical process), and by ideological implication. At the opposite extreme are those concepts that refer to external reality, whether past (the historical field, Whites term for the past itself), present (the unprocessed historical record, other historical accounts), or future (an audience), all of which are marginalized both in the introductory exposition and in the body of the book. An intermediate layer consists of chronicle and story, which jointly link the interior modes of explanation with the exterior points of reference: these have a brief, formal life in the introduction but wither away in the course of the book. Thus of the nine concepts that make up the initial conceptual array, only three need concern us, to wit, emplotment (whose categories are derived from Northrop Frye), formal argument (Stephen C. Pepper), and ideological implication (Karl Mannheim). These have mutual elective affinities based on structural homologiesa given mode of
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emplotment (say, Comedy) tends to be associated with a specific mode of formal argument (Organicism) and ideology (Conservatism); and as each of the three notionally take four different forms, those affinities could be set out in the form of a 3x4 table.5 The theory of tropesintroduced by means of the concept of linguistic prefiguration6adds another conceptual layer. Each historical work, it now emerges, displays not only a specific plot, formal argument, and ideology but also a grounding in one or another of the four principal rhetorical tropesmetaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and ironywhich act not as mere verbal forms but on the contrary as modes of thought, deep structures of consciousness that constrain and constitute what passes as knowledge in any prescientific discipline such as history. Thus, as White had already asserted in the Preface, in any field of study not yet reduced (or elevated) to the status of a genuine science, thought remains the captive of the linguistic mode in which it seeks to grasp the outline of objects inhabiting its field of perception.7 In the case of historical consciousness, the tropes are said to provide the ground of interpretation by prefiguring its object of knowledge (to wit, the historical field), this prefiguration embracing the kinds of relationships envisaged to hold between elements of the field: for example, the trope of metonymy steers interpretation in the direction of causal relationships. This picture combines three distinct claims, of which the first is a post-Kantian truism but the second and third are radically novel: (1) that historical knowledge is structured by prior conceptual frameworks; (2) that those conceptual frameworks are specifically linguistic, since the historian confronts the historical field in much the same way that the grammarian might confront a new language, entailing that prefiguration comprises a linguistic protocol, complete with lexical, grammatical, syntactical, and semantic dimensions; and (3) that this preconceptual protocol is characterizable in terms of the dominant tropological mode in which it is cast,8 or in other words, that it is specifically the tropes that confer the overall shape and meaning of prefiguration. The practical corollary of (2) and (3) is that the various elements of linguistic prefiguration can be taken to be mirrored in the historical work, putatively enabling White to read directly the historians prefigurative act from such a work.9 Two final steps remain in the elaboration of the theoretical apparatus. First, the tropes are held to govern not just proper history but also speculative philoso5. White, Metahistory, 29. 6. Prefiguration itself is introduced by way of what White calls the problem of historiographical styles, which arises from the relationship among the three modes of explanation insofar as their mutual affinities are merely elective, rather than fixed. See ibid., 29-31. 7. Elsewhere, however, White posits that from the seventeenth century onwards physics was conducted always within the metonymical mode (ibid., 33). Thus it would seem that all knowledge is tropologically constituted and is therefore constrained by the interpretive possibilities offered by the tropes. (For a counter-argument about science, see David Konstan, The Function of Narrative in Hayden Whites Metahistory, Clio 11 [1981], 74.) 8. White, Metahistory, 30. 9. See Wilson, Hayden Whites Theory, 48-49.
phy of history; and it is this shared ground that enables White to fuse the two into what he calls the nineteenth-century historical imagination. Second, the tropes are said to be linked, in an additional relationship of elective affinity, with emplotment, formal argument, and ideological implication.10 The full array of these affinities is set out in Table 1, which adds a column for the tropes to the table that White had presented in the context of the theory of the historical work.
Mode of Emplotment Mode of Argument Mode of Ideological Implication Trope Metaphor
Satirical
Comic
Tragic
Romantic
Contextualist
Organicist
Mechanistic
Formist
Liberal
Conservative
Radical
Anarchist
Irony
Synecdoche
Metonymy
Table 1. Elective affinities among modes of argument, and between these and the tropes
II. METAHISTORYS REFLEXIVE POSSIBILITIES
As we have seen, White alludes in Metahistorys Preface to the books reflexive aspect by remarking that it would be cast in an Ironic mode (Irony of course being one of the tropes); yet this is all that he has to say on the matter, and the import of that comment is far from clear, as is indicated by the silence that has greeted it. For the moment I shall bracket that cryptic reference to tropology; in order to appreciate its significance we need to examine the other reflexive possibilities that Metahistory presents, pertaining to the three modes of explanationemplotment, formal argument, and ideological implicationand to linguistic prefiguration. (a) The Introduction makes it clear that Metahistory is offering a story, and goes on to outline its plot: thus emplotment is clearly a reflexive aspect of the book. (b) In contrast, it is left to the reader to work out just what mode of formal argument (that is, historical ontology) the book is positing. Insofar as its topic is consciousness or the historical imagination, the book could be seen as Idealist in conception, but such a designation is so broad as to have little concrete force. Nor can Whites own categories of formal argumentderived from Peppers World Hypotheses11be applied in any simple way to Metahistory itself. It seems very unlikely that the book was intended to exemplify either formism or contextualism, since White depicts these, in a hostile tone, as the accepted academic modes whose dominance reflected merely a bias on the part of the professional establishment.12 What, then, of organicism and mechanism? The determinist bearings of mechanism bring to mind the often-observed point that Whites historiographical project in general, including Metahistory, reveals
10. This emerges piecemeal throughout the book. See, for emplotment, White, Metahistory, 67-68 (Enlightenment historiography), 122 (Hegel), and chaps. 3-6, passim; for formal argument, 30, 36, 38, 426-427; and for ideological implication 38, 121-122, 426-427. 11. Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 12. White, Metahistory, 20.
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a tension between a structuralist portrayal of constraints and a voluntarist underlying impulse;13 perhaps, then, we might think of Metahistory as embodying both mechanism and organicism, representing constraint and freedom respectively. Yet this would be strained, for organicism corresponds poorly if at all to freedom; and in any case, such a picture would be so broad-brush as to shed little light on the book. (c) Nor does ideological implication have much in the way of concrete application to Metahistory. We can be certain that Conservatism is not in play, and of the three progressive ideologies, Radicalism surely comes closer to Whites own allegiances than do either Liberalism (with its loyalty to existing institutions) or Anarchism (with its kinship to romanticism);14 yet as with formal argument, this is telling us more about White himself than about Metahistory. Thus both formal argument and ideological implication fail the test of reflexivity. And it also turns out that (as I have shown elsewhere) each of these categories is conceptually flawed.15 In the case of formal argument, what we find is that one and one only of the four modes that White adapted from Pepper, namely Contextualism, is specifically fitted to history, because its root metaphor (Peppers key term-of-art) is the historical event, whereas it is much less easy to apply Organicism and Mechanism historically, and impossible to do so in the case of Formism. This, of course, entails that Whites 3x4 table of elective affinities is nonsense, since its supposedly integrated structure has a gaping hole (Formism) and two weak points (Mechanism, Organicism). In fact, what White calls formal argumentthat is, the historical ontology that the historian positsis very probably fruitful and relevant, but it would be better developed by phenomenological analysis (asking what ontologies are deployed by specific historians or in particular works) than by the mechanical application of an external resource such as Peppers World Hypotheses. As for ideological implication, although this is notionally a mode of explanation, it is not in fact described in Metahistory as performing any explanatory work. Rather, and in keeping with its very name, its actual function (as distinct from its official role in the theory) is to convey to an audience the implications of the historians explanations, and those explanations are constituted on the basis of emplotment and formal argument; ideological implication itself, far from being explanatory, merely conveys a tone or mood. The formal mis-classification of ideological implication as a mode of explanation is no mere accident, but reflects the structure and priorities of the theory as a whole, which as we have seen privileges literary form over every aspect of the historical works real-world referencethe aspect relevant to ideology being audience. (In addition, ideological implication as it is actually deployed in the book confirms that the supposed 3x4 elective affinities are illusory, in this case because a fifth ideologyNietzsches nihilismhas to be added.) Again, just as with formal argument, ideology is surely relevant to historical writing,
13. Hans Kellner, A Bedrock of Order: Hayden Whites Linguistic Humanism, History and Theory 19 (1980), passim, esp. 4, 11, 13, 27, 20-21, 23, 27; Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff, 29-32, and references there cited; Paul, Hayden White, 11 and passim. 14. White, Metahistory, 24-25. 15. Wilson, Hayden Whites theory, 42-44, 55.
and White deserves credit for seeking to mobilize it; but the framework of his own theory actually distorts its role and obscures its significance. (d) Similar difficulties, but in more severe form, attend linguistic prefiguration. In order to assess this concepts reflexive application, we first need to ascertain its content; but the attempt to do so reveals no substance, merely a tissue of confusions at three levels, pertaining to basis, content, and application. In the first place, the claim on which the concept was foundedthat the historian confronts the historical field in much the same way that the grammarian might confront a new languageis simply asserted, without supporting evidence, and no notice is taken of the obvious objection that language is present and observable whereas the object of historical knowledge (the historical field) can only be inferred, never observed. Second, the putative content of linguistic prefiguration, namely its lexical, grammatical, syntactical and semantic dimensions, remains undefined throughout the introduction, and indeed well into the book; and when that content is finally elaborated systematically (that is, in the chapter that introduces the philosophy of history), it proves to be vacuous.16 Specifically, each element of the fourfold linguistic grid is held to correspond to some aspect of the theory of the historical workfor instance, lexical to chronicle, grammatical to formal argumentbut both the mapping as a whole and the individual correspondences are profoundly unsatisfactory. As to the whole, the respective conceptual arrays fail to match both numerically (five categories to four, a disparity that is accommodated by quietly omitting story from the mapping) and structurally (in that the linguistic categories are ordered strictly hierarchically, the historiographical ones only partly so).17 As to the individual correspondences, these are bedeviled by the problem that three of the pertinent components of the earlier theory (chronicle, emplotment, formal argument) are characterized by a temporal aspect, which of course the linguistic categories entirely lack. Third, the concrete applications of the linguistic grid are haphazard (it is invoked in connection with Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt but not Michelet), usually incomplete (grammar is mentioned only seldom, lexis just once), and inconsistent both with the supposed correspondences (lexical : chronicle, etc.) and with each other.18 In sum, prefiguration has no coherent content. In this case, therefore, the reflexivity test cannot even be applied; if we were to ask, for instance, what is the lexical aspect of Metahistorys (or Whites) prefigurative act, the question lacks any identifiable meaning. At this stage, then, we are left with emplotment and tropology as the only concepts that command our attention as being possibly constitutive of the books own substantive contentemplotment certainly so, because it passes the reflexivity test, tropology potentially so, in that we have yet to examine its content and appli16. White, Metahistory, 274-275; cf. Wilson, Hayden Whites Theory, 47-48, n. 49. 17. For instance, emplotment and formal argument are independent of each other, whereas syntax is dependent upon grammar. 18. Thus lexis in its one appearance (to wit, in the discussion of Enlightenment historiography) corresponds not to chronicle but to the actors in the story; under Ranke those actors (comprising churches, states, and peoples) are instead treated as part of the grammar of historical analysis; in the account of Marx, the syntax of historical process embraces not only emplotment but also formal argument; and so on. See White, Metahistory, 65-66 (Enlightenment historiography), 169-173 (Ranke), 208-211 (Tocqueville), 247-251 (Burckhardt), 297-317 (Marx).
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cation. It might be expected that tropology would serve, so to speak, as the senior of these two partners; yet as we shall see, tropology is harnessed as a subordinate resource to emplotment, which plays the master role. Furthermore, emplotment has a remarkably rich significance in the book, embracing two explicit aspects and two additional subplots at the edges of the argument. In order to appreciate this, we need first to review the forms of emplotment and the characteristics of the tropes. Emplotments four possible modes, adapted from Fryes Anatomy of Criticism, are Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire. A romance, White explains, is a story of progress and redemption, in which hopes are realized; comedy lays more emphasis on the forces which oppose such redemption, yet still reveals possibilities; tragedy dashes both hopes and possibilities, while nevertheless revealing truths; and satire treats all these visions as ultimate[ly] inadequa[te], and thus regards hopes, possibilities, and truths alike in an ironic light.19 Of these, it is romance and satire that are in play in Metahistory itself, as the next section will explain. The master tropes as deployed in Metahistory are both relational and linguistic in character. Metaphor, White explains, is essentially representational, for it assigns particular qualities to the object that it designates: my love, a rose.20 Metonymy and synecdoche both involve the use of a part to name a whole, but in complementary ways. Metonymy is reductionist, for here part and whole are distinguished from each other and are conceived to be related by some causal process or mechanism: the thunder (the cause) roars (the effect).21 But synecdoche is integrative, apprehending the whole as a unified totality whose essence is the very quality designated by the naming part: He is all heart.22 Finally, irony is negational, representing as it does a deliberate mis-naming: the expression He is all heart becomes Ironic when uttered in a particular tone of voice or in a context in which the person designated manifestly does not possess the qualities attributed to him by the use of this Synecdoche.23 Thus metaphoric representation is the language of identity; metonymic reduction and synecdochic integration comprise the languages of extrinsicality and of intrinsicality respectively;24 and ironic negation represents a stage of consciousness in which the problematic nature of language itself has become recognized.25
19. Ibid., 8-10. 20. On metaphor, see Roger White, The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), which (to speak metaphorically) puts in the shade all previous discussions of the subject. 21. On metonymy, see Hugh Bredin, Metonymy, Poetics Today 5 (1984), 45-58, and David Reid, Euro-scepticism: Thoughts on Metonymy, University of Toronto Quarterly 73 (2004), 916933 (Reid takes issue with White at 925, n. 10); on the trope and its historiographical relevance, see Eelco Runia, Presence, History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 1-29 (Whites view is discussed on 28-29). 22. For a helpful gloss, see Vann, Hayden White, Historian, 321. 23. For discussions of the multiple meanings of irony in Metahistory, see John S. Nelson, essay review of Metahistory, History and Theory 14, no. 1 (1975), 82-83, 84-86 (cf. note 42 below), and Herman Paul, An Ironic Battle against Irony: Epistemological and Ideological Irony in Hayden Whites Philosophy of History, 195573, in Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/ Literature Debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 35-44. 24. White, Metahistory, 36. 25. Ibid., 37.
III. THE CENTRAL CHARACTER AND THE PLOT
It will be recalled that White fuses proper history and speculative philosophy of history to create Metahistorys object of study, the nineteenth-century historical imagination or historical consciousness. What we now need to observe is that this constructed entity plays the role of the central character in the books plot: that is, it is no accident that the historical imagination appears in the subtitle, for it is the forms and fortunes of the historical imagination that are traced in the body of the book. And just as tropology is the basis of that characterfor as we have seen, it is specifically the tropes that place history and philosophy of history on the same footingso too tropology supplies the basis of the plot, to which White devotes the final section of his Introduction, entitled The Phases of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness.26 As he there summarizes it, that plot has two distinct yet connected layers, which can be seen in Whites own terms (though he does not himself make this fully explicit) as comprising (i) a subordinate romance, enframed and negated by (ii) a larger, commanding satire. White has already explained that a romance is a tale of progress; more particularly, it is a story in which an individual hero struggles against a series of adversitiesthemselves the manifestations of an underlying embattled condition that besets not only the hero but humanity itselfand eventually triumphs over these difficulties, finally attaining a state of redemption or transcendence.27 But in satire (White goes on to suggest), there is no progress but only an endless series of returns and recapitulations,28 and for this very reason, satire perfectly negates romance:
The archetypal theme of Satire is the precise opposite of [the] Romantic drama of redemption; it is, in fact, a drama of diremption, a drama dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the world rather than its master, and by the recognition that, in the final analysis, human consciousness and will are always inadequate to the task of overcoming definitively the dark force of death, which is mans unremitting enemy.29
26. The plot of Metahistory is seldom discussed, but see Nelson, essay review of Metahistory, 84, 86, and Vann, Hayden White, Historian, 319-326. Brief references to this theme (without mentioning Whites categories of emplotment) are made by David Carroll, On Tropology: The Forms of History, Diacritics 6 (1976), 61-62; Jameson, Figural Realism, 8; Kellner, A Bedrock of Order, 18; Maurice Mandelbaum, The Presuppositions of Metahistory, History and Theory 19, no. 1 (1980), 49; Philip Pomper, Typologies and Cycles in Intellectual History, History and Theory, Beiheft 19 (1980), 31-32; Konstan, The Function of Narrative, 76; Wulf Kansteiner, Hayden Whites Critique of the Writing of History, History and Theory 32, no. 3 (1993), 277. 27. White, Metahistory, 8-9. 28. Ibid., 230 (this with particular reference to Burckhardt). 29. Ibid., 9; cf. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 223. Here White is (quite legitimately) substantially adapting Fryes categories. Frye had conjoined satire and irony, while nevertheless distinguishing between these as different variants of the mythos of winter; thus in Fryes terms irony is a sub-species of a particular mythos (rather than a trope). Whites rendition subsumes Fryes irony and satire under the single term satire, reserving irony for tropological purposes.
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Precisely for this reason, a satire requires a romance as its foil; and as we shall now see, this is indeed the very role that Whites own romance plays within the larger satirical plot that he now announces. (i) As White describes the master tropes, these are ordered hierarchically: from the naive simplicity of metaphoric representation, through the interpretive yet still-naive strategies of metonymic reduction and synecdochic integration, to the sophistication of ironic mis-representation, that is, the language that questions language itself.30 Consequently, in a picture apparently adapted from Vico,31 the historical imagination tends to progress (or, as White put it, to evolve) toward irony.32 Thus the tropes, unlike any other element of Metahistorys theoretical apparatus, are endowed with a principle of movement;33 and this supplies the romantic layer of Whites plot. For although realist historiography and speculative philosophy of history followed different paths in the nineteenth centurya point to which I shall returnthey both arrived at this common telos:34 the ironic historiographical style that became established after mid-century (thanks partly to Tocqueville but especially to Burckhardt) eventually found its philosophical echo in Croces explorations from 1893 onwards.35 This story is obedient in every particular to the romantic mode of emplotment, for all that White does not himself remark upon the fact. Its hero was of course the nineteenth-century historical imagination; the heros struggles had been with the seductions of metaphoric, metonymic, and synecdochal apprehensions of language or styles of thought; the larger condition that these dangers manifested was the problematical nature of language itself;36 and the final redemption consisted in the recognition of that very condition, a recognition attained by adopting an Ironic stance.
30. White, Metahistory, 34, 36-38. 31. Ibid., 32; cf. Hayden V. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 80, 72, n. 42. 32. White, Metahistory, 28; cf. 359-360, on Nietzsche. Thus it is not the case that Whites theory of the succession of styles lacks a dynamic principle, nor that White introduces such a principle (in the form of the trope of irony) surreptitiously (Pomper, Typologies and Cycles, 32, 34). 33. This, taken together with the affinities between tropes and modes of explanationemplotment, argument, ideologyraises a puzzle, which so far as I am aware has not been discussed either by White himself or by any commentator: should not emplotment et al. display a corresponding progress? Such progress seems difficult to sustain in the case of ideology, and though one could imagine it in principle with respect to formal argument, Pepper did not suggest that his world hypotheses displayed any such development. That leaves emplotment as the only possibility, but it is an ambiguous and problematical one. At one point Frye hinted that his four mythoi were episodes in a total quest-myth (Anatomy of Criticism, 215), but he did not develop this any further. Had he done so, the structure of the result would have been satisfactory (see note 41 below), but the content would not, because the sequence of Fryes mythoi (comedy, romance, tragedy, irony-and-satire) is not quite the same as that of the corresponding tropes in Whites schema (cf. Table 1). 34. According to the original formulation (White, Metahistory, 40), proper history began with metaphor (Michelet) and proceeded through synecdoche (Ranke) and metonymy (Tocqueville) to irony (Burckhardt)though this picture is subsequently modified, for Tocqueville is also characterized as having deployed a form of irony, one that was metonymically informed (201-203). Philosophy of history began in synecdoche (Hegel), and passed through metonymy (Marx) and metaphor (Nietzsche), on its way to irony (Croce). Cf. also 378. 35. An era presaged, at least, by Tocqueville (cf. the previous note): ibid., 42, 220 and chaps. 6, 7, 10. Whites interpretation of Burckhardt is criticized by Albert Cook, History/Writing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 243, n.1. 36. White, Metahistory, 37.
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(ii) But this romance is negated by embedding it within a larger narrative frame cast in the form of satire. For in fact, White explains, the ironic approach attained in the late nineteenth century was itself merely a return to an earlier condition: a century before the labors of Burckhardt and Croce, Enlightenment historians and philosophers such as Gibbon, Hume, and Kant had already come to view history in essentially Ironic terms.37 Thus Burckhardts historiography is depicted as the fall once more into that Ironic condition from which realism itself was supposed to liberate the historical consciousness of the age;38 and Croces philosophy of history, it emerges, represented another form of the same relapse into irony.39 The ironic viewpoint attained in the late nineteenth century differed from its late Enlightenment counterpart, White concludes, only in the sophistication with which it was expounded in philosophy of history and the breadth of learning which attended its elaboration in the historiography of the time.40 Thus the apparent romance of nineteenth-century tropological progress was merely a trick of fate, an episode within what was in fact a closed-cycle development;41 as Whites remark about Burckhardt exemplifies, the supposed Vico-esque triumph of irony turned out to be no triumph at all, but rather a fall.42 And this larger plot-structure, governed as it is by the theme of a recapitulative return, follows precisely the form of satire as White describes that mode. This makes intelligible at last Metahistorys hitherto puzzling prefatory hint, which I mentioned at the outset, that the book would be cast in an Ironic modesince White posits that satire corresponds to the trope of irony.43 (It is perhaps appropriate, too, that Metahistorys dominant satirical mode of emplotment is thereby more or less explicitly avowed, whereas its subordinate romance is presented without any such metahistorical comment.) But this exhausts the reflexive content of tropology, for no further application of the theory of tropes to Metahistory itself is suggested. Thus the reflexive force of tropology is exerted, so to speak, at one remove, that is, by way of the satiric plot-structure; in itself the theory of tropes has no reflexive application at all.44
37. Ibid., 38. 38. Ibid., 40. 39. Ibid., 41-42. 40. Ibid., 42; also 40, on Burckhardt. This assimilation of late-nineteenth-century Irony to lateeighteenth-century Irony is criticized on tropological grounds by Kellner, A Bedrock of Order, 20. 41. White, Metahistory, 38. Although White does not remark upon it, this structure is compatible with Fryes conception of his four mythoi as modeled on the seasons (Anatomy of Criticism, 163-239), since the seasons are of course cyclical; or more accurately, it would have been compatible with that conception if Frye had stressed its developmental aspect, which in fact he had not (cf. note 33 above). 42. The tendency in Metahistory to depict the turn to irony as a fall or relapse is brought out well by Nelson, essay review of Metahistory, who points out that the book invokes several different mechanisms for such relapse (84-85), just as it depicts irony as taking four different forms and operating at five different levels (81; these five are properly four, since the historical materials are surely the same thing as the historical record). 43. White, Metahistory, xii. 44. Indeed, White immediately goes on to say that the books own irony is different from the irony of Burckhardt, Croce, and their twentieth-century successorsdifferent in being a conscious one that represents a turning of the Ironic consciousness against Irony itself. This formulation creates difficulties of its own, not only because its corollary seems implausible (how can any form of irony be unconscious?) but also because it seems to indicate that Metahistory has somehow escaped from the framework deployed in the theory of tropes, which would eliminate even the minimal reflexivity that the previous sentence had sketched.
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Now this double-layered plot-outlinewhich serves as the culmination of Metahistorys Introductionentails a twofold puzzle, associated with the storys beginning and its end. (a) In view of the putative superiority of irony, the attentive reader might wonder how the ironic stance achieved by late-Enlightenment philosophers and historians had collapsed in the first place. In the Introduction itself this conundrum remains largely implicit,45 but it is resolved in chapter 1,46 chiefly by resort to the figure of Johann Gottfried Herder. As White there explains, the historical philosophizing of Herder and his fellow pre-Romantics represented a retreat from irony to metaphor-and-synecdoche, a retreat that opened the way to realist history and speculative philosophy of history alike.47 Thus it was Herder et al. who launched that entire process of quasi-development that would end, a century later, with an ironic return to irony itself.48 (b) A complementary difficulty arose at the storys terminus: for late-nineteenth-century irony was depicted first as a triumph (in the romantic layer) and then as a fall (in the satiric layer). Unlike the initial conundrum, this contradiction is left unresolved; I shall return later on to this problem, and to the other troubles attending Metahistorys tropology.
IV. THE PLOTS UNSTATED TARGET
What gives point to Metahistorys plot is that both of its layers, the romance and the satire, are pitchedalbeit wholly implicitlyagainst another and quite different romance: namely the tale that twentieth-century historians had routinely been recounting about their own collective past. The modern historical professions own standard origin-story is consistently emplotted as a romance; this single, shared plot-structure governs the various accounts offered by G. P. Gooch, R. G. Collingwood, Marc Bloch, Herbert Butterfield, G. Kitson Clark, G. R. Elton, J. H. Plumb, and Arthur Marwicka roll-call embracing a remarkable range of political positions, which stretched from 1913 to the early 1970s,49 and which could indeed be extended into the 1980s and 90s.50 And although the emphases varied
45. Save for a few preliminary remarks about the pre-Romantics, including Herder (White, Metahistory, 38). 46. Hence the title of this chapter: The Historical Imagination between Metaphor and Irony (ibid., 45-80). 47. Ibid., 69-79, esp. 73-74; this move is foreshadowed at 38 (cf. note 45 above). The chapter also argues that Leibniz had paved the way for this development. See also 143-149 (Constant, Novalis, and Carlyle), 154-155, 161-162 (Herder vs. Michelet), 187 (Herder vs. Ranke; cf. note 65 below). 48. Comte is also given a role in this process: ibid., 39. 49. G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans Green, 1913)discussed in White, Metahistory, 269-270, but without reference to its emplotment or to its celebration of Quellenkritik; Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T. M. Knox; revised edition, ed. Jan van der Dussen, with Lectures 19261928 [1946] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939); Marc Bloch, The Historians Craft, transl. Peter Putnam [1949] (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1954); Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1959); G. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (London: Heinemann, 1967); G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967; London: Collins /Fontana, 1969); J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past [1969] (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973); Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History [1970] (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989). 50. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History [1984] (London: Longman, 1992), 14-15, 56-57; Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval,
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from one historian to another, Collingwood in particular giving the tale a rather different twist, all were agreed on the essentials of the story.51 The hero of this official, professional romance was of course the historical discipline itselfimplicitly conceived, in a highly paradoxical anachronism, as antedating its own institutional embodiment. The adversities that confronted the hero were all those obstacles that stood in the way of historical knowledge: obstacles such as anachronistic assumptions, disregard for documentary sources, and perhaps above all the symmetrical complement of such disregard, namely a naive trust in those sourcesthe attitude that treated documents as infallible testimony.52 Overcoming those obstacles entailed, therefore, not only that history detached itself from philosophical speculation and plunged into the archives, but also and especially that history developed the special skills that were required in order to exploit such archives: that is to say, the critical method. The technique and attitude of Quellenkritikforged gradually and through immense struggle by a long series of individuals, from Mabillon in the seventeenth century, through the French rudits along with Schlzer and other members of the Gttingen school in the eighteenth, to Niebuhr and Ranke in the nineteenthwas the trusty sword in the heros hand; armed with that sword, the hero eventually triumphed in the pursuit of historical knowledge. Appropriately enough, this victory coincided with the professions own institutionalization: it was specifically as history became an academic subject in the nineteenth century, a development first embodied in the person of Ranke, that it secured its own practical and technical basis in the rigorous and routine application of the critical method. The happy ending of the story, then, was the happy condition of those who were telling that story, namely modern professional historians. Even Collingwood, who in 193839 came to dispute the value of Quellenkritik, nevertheless adhered to the basic story even as he sought to modify it: for he continued to treat transactions-with-evidence as fundamental, and to emplot the history of history in romantic mode.53 Metahistorys projected plot departs from this standard tale not only in dissolving romance into satire, but also in deployingat both these levels of emplotmenta very different suite of story-elements. In place of the historical proand Modern [1983] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 194, 200, 229; Richard Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997), chap. 1 and passim. 51. The historical origin of this professional self-image, in the specific case of American historiography, has been brought out well by Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 1. 52. The Renaissance antiquary William Camden, quoted in Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 56. 53. In 1936, when he put forward the concept of the historical imagination, Collingwood endorsed the standard view, celebrating the achievements of historical criticism (that is, Quellenkritik): see, for instance, The Idea of History, 146-147, 237. But by 193839 he was dismissing historical criticism or critical history as merely a variant of scissors-and-paste history, that is, of the method that consists in the naive transcription of statements provided by authorities. Yet in justifying this novel claim he invoked a corresponding romance of his own: the rise of scientific or Baconian history, which had begun in the nineteenth century, and whose victory over scissorsand-paste history was now on the eve of completion. See Autobiography, chap. 11, and The Idea of History, 249-282, particularly 260. For the chronology of Collingwoods respective writings, see W. J. van der Dussen, History as a Science: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981); van der Dussens introduction to the 1993 edition of The Idea of History; and Adrian Wilson, Collingwoods Forgotten Historiographic Revolution, Collingwood Studies 8 (2001), 6-72.
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fession as hero, White installs in this role the historical imaginationa figure that erases the very identity of proper history by fusing it with speculative philosophy of history. According to historys own official history, the fundamental instrument of historical knowledge was Quellenkritik, which pertained to the interpretation of documents; but in Whites counter-history, that instrument consists of the rhetorical tropes, which function in the interpretation not of documents (the historical record) but of events (the historical field). The professional myth posited the critical and documentary labors of Schlzer and his ilk as the necessary preparative for nineteenth-century historiography; Metahistory, in contrast, assigns an equivalent credit to the philosophical efforts of Herder. And just as the conventional story always ignored or marginalized Herder, so Whites account of eighteenth-century historiography makes no mention of Schlzer and the Gttingen school.54 Indeed, even where these two stories draw on the same characters, they cast them in very different roles: thus Schlzers contemporary Edward Gibbon appears in the one tale as resting upon and respecting the sourcecritical labors of the rudits,55 in the other as a writer who had effectively dissolved the distinction between history and fiction.56 And whereas the historians story depicted Rankethe paradigmatic practitioner of Quellenkritikas the supreme historian of his age, Whites pre-announced story line introduces Ranke as just one nineteenth-century historian among others, and indeed as inferior to Burckhardt in embracing comedy rather than satire, synecdoche rather than irony.57 In short, Whites plot-structure is literally incommensurable with the official romance, differing as it does in both structure and content.58 This divergence over historys history is even wider than what White calls the congenital disagreements among historians over what counts as a specifically historical explanation of any given set of phenomena;59 for these two contending histories of history do not even agree as to a given set of phenomena whose explanation might be at stake. That is to say, although the two stories seem to share a common object, namely the history of historical knowledge as embodied in the written historical work, they actually construe that object in different terms. The standard professional view of the historians task privileges the putative real reference of the historical work and its basis in documentary sources. Essential to this picture is the claim that the historians transactions with those sources do actually yield knowledge of the past, and it is the practice of Quellenkritik that is typically invoked to justify that claim. Hence the fact that the disciplines picture of its own past is emplotted as the rise of Quellenkritik, and takes no account of the literary form of historical writing. In complementary fashion, Whites theory
54. However, token references are made to Schlzers Italian and French counterparts (Muratori and la Curne de Saint-Palaye) and to the rudits, including Mabillon (White, Metahistory, 51, 59-60). 55. Marwick, The Nature of History, 38; Plumb, Death of the Past, 103; Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 56. For a different appraisal (though once again incompatible with Whites), see Elton, The Practice of History, 14. 56. White, Metahistory, 48 (quoted), 53-55, 64. 57. Ibid., 27-28, 40, 42. 58. Metahistorys marginalization of the various elements of the standard story is mentioned by Vann, Hayden White, Historian, 319-320. 59. White, Metahistory, 13.
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of the historical work places its emphasis precisely upon that literary form, and omits Quellenkritik altogether. This very different vision sees the historical work as constructed by various modes of explanation, which, it subsequently emerges, are governed by the prefigurative operation of the tropes. Accordingly, White announces that his story will be emplotted as the ebb and flow of the tropes, with the effect that Quellenkritik finds no place in either of the two layers of its plot as he foreshadows it.60 Thus each story perfectly matches the theoretical conception from which it springs. The contrast between Metahistorys plot and that of the standard histories of history bears out the recent insights of Richard T. Vann and Herman Paul, that the book is an unprecedented history of historiography and that it offers an inverted disciplinary history.61 By a disciplinary history (a phrase of Stefan Collinis),62 Paul is referring to what I have describedusing Whites categoriesas a professional romance. The history of history that Metahistory offers is indeed without precedent (Vann), precisely because it quite literally inverts (Paul) the standard professional romance: for as we have seen, White marginalizes to the point of disappearance the epistemological motif of that romance, and brings to the fore what it had excluded, namely historys literary form. For the most part, the body of Metahistory adheres both to the plot-structure and to the repertoire of story-elements that have been set up in the Introduction and rounded off in the opening chapter. This can conveniently be illustrated by two of the books depictions of historical method: first in the particular case of Ranke, and second with respect to nineteenth-century historiography in general. (a) Whites brief discussion of the epistemological bases of Rankes historical method portrays Ranke not as critically assessing the veracity of the evidence, but rather as distinguishing between significant and insignificant historical evidence among the datathat is, as deploying a criterion not of truth but of relevance. Seen in this light, Rankes historical method is tacitly stripped of its putative basis in Quellenkritik. Here, of course, an active suppression is at work (as Arnaldo Momigliano observed in an essay of 1981), for the critical apparatus formed a constituent part of Rankes rhetoric; but in thus refiguring Rankes method, White is being entirely faithful to the priorities he has already laid down.63 So too the particular criterion ascribed to Ranke is consistent with the conceptual
60. Cf. Arnaldo Momigliano, The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden Whites Tropes, Comparative Criticism 3 (1981), 260-261. This suppression of the significance of Quellenkritik continued in Whites later essays; thus a paper published in 1989 claimed that there is no such thing as a distinctively historical method, and he had made a similar remark in an essay of 1982. See Hayden White, New Historicism: A Comment, in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (London: Routledge, 1989) 295; White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 230, n. 35. 61. Vann, Hayden White, Historian, 323; Herman Paul, Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (New York: Wiley, 2011), 59. 62. Stefan Collini, Discipline History and Intellectual History: Reflections on the Historiography of the Social Sciences in Britain and France, Revue de synthse 4, series 3-4 (1988), 387-299. 63. White, Metahistory, 164-167, quoted from 166. Cf. to similar effect 146, where (with reference to historiography in general) some critical standard is described as enabling the historian to distinguish between the insignificant and significant events in the record, and 148 (with reference to Carlyle). Cf. Momigliano, The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric, 261.
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schema outlined in the Introduction, for this criterion is depicted in tropological terms. Specifically, White indicates that Ranke prefigured the historical field in the mode of Metaphor . . . and then suggested the Synecdochic comprehension of it.64 And although Rankes tropological affinities thus prove to be more diverse than had originally been indicated,65 this addition of Metaphorthe most naive of the tropesto Synecdoche serves to underline the relatively lowly role that Whites formal plot has already assigned to Ranke. In fact it turns out that Rankes achievements, as depicted in Metahistory, merely echoed those of Herder. Rankes main contribution to the development of the historical discipline, White suggests, was his Organicist doctrine of historical explanation,66 yet chapter 1 of Metahistory has already credited that doctrine to Herders Ideen, published before Ranke was born; and furthermore (although this is nowhere pointed out explicitly), the characterization of Herder is identical with that of Ranke in respect of synecdochic comprehension, comic emplotment, and metaphoric prefiguration.67 The effect of these moves is to diminish Rankes importance and to eliminate from view precisely what had traditionally been seen as his main achievement, namely the development of the critical method. (b) Subsequently, in looking back over nineteenth-century realist historiography at large, White depicts it as comprising three elementsscientific, philosophical, and artisticand describes all of these as commonsensical and conventionalist in nature. As he goes on to explain:
It would not be too much to say that, insofar as history in the main line of nineteenth-century thought contained scientific, philosophical, and artistic elements, it remained locked in older, pre-Newtonian and pre-Hegelian, more specifically Aristotelian, conceptions of what these consisted of. Its science was empirical and inductive, its philosophy was realistic, and its art was mimetic, or imitative, rather than expressive or projective. 68
Nineteenth-century historys scientific element, then, was merely empirical and inductive.69 In utter contrast with the traditional story of historys history, which portrayed nineteenth-century historiography as embodying the new and heroic advance of source-criticism, Metahistory describes that historiography as having failed to advance beyond the inferential procedures of Aristotle;70 and the
64. White, Metahistory, 167; on synecdoche, cf. 177-178. 65. It would seem that this depiction of Ranke as both metaphoric and synecdochal is occasioned by Whites assigning to Ranke a putative layer of Formism in addition to his dominant Organicism, since metaphor is held to correspond to Formism. 66. This Organicist doctrine constituted Rankes principal contribution to the theory by which history was constituted as a separate discipline in the second quarter of the nineteenth century (White, Metahistory, 188). Curiously, this is in tension both with the characterization of Ranke as Formist (see the previous and next notes) and with the claim that Organicism was seen by the historical profession as heterodox (19-20). 67. Ibid., 69-79 and chap. 4 passim. Indeed, the only way that White manages to distinguish Ranke from Herder is by assigning a Formist dimension to Rankes mode of formal argument. 68. Ibid., 268; this is in chapter 7, a transitional chapter between historiography proper (chapters 3-6) and the philosophy of history from Marx onwards (chapters 8-10). 69. Cf., in a similar vein, ibid., 141. 70. This comparison is remarkably inept, since Aristotles methods were directed toward establishing generalized truths, that is, universals, whereas nineteenth-century historiography characteristically aimed to establish particular truths, as White himself has already remarked (ibid., 19-20). Why, then, is Aristotle invoked here (268) at all? The answer emerges soon afterwards, in the subsequent
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depiction of the scientific element of history as commonsensical is antithetical to the standard story, which took pains to point out that the critical method was heroic precisely because it transcended common sense.71 Thus, although neither here nor elsewhere does White confront the conventional romance explicitly, he constructs a story of nondevelopment that flatly contradicts both the structure of that romance (a story of progress) and its premises (the critical interpretation of documents as the site of that progress). And this picture of permanent methodological stasis is entirely consistent with the satiric plot-structure announced in Metahistorys Introduction.
V. THE PLOT UNDERMINED
Yet meanwhile, Metahistory also introduces two very different subplotsone of minor significance, but the other with devastating implications. These concern respectively the rise of the social sciences and the professionalization of the history discipline. Remarkably enough, Metahistory at various points depicts the rise of the social sciences as precisely a professional romance, with the same structure as the selfserving professional mythology of historians against which Metahistorys own plot is pitched. As we shall see in a moment, this picture of the history of the social sciences is not consistently deployed; but it predominates, and it harmonizes with the books polemical purposes. For instance, in discussing Croces pessimistic and aestheticist formulation of what historians could aspire to achieve, White writes that it is difficult not to think of Croces revolution in historical sensibility as a retrogression, since its effect was to sever historiography from any participation in the effortjust beginning to make some headway as sociology at the timeto construct a general science of society;72 and this move implicitly supports his case against historiographical realism, by hinting that there was available an alternative and scientific approach against which the discipline of history had irrationally closed its collective mind.73 Now as against this, White elsewhere suggests that what is true of history is also true of the social sciences;74 and in fact Metahistory leaves the status of the social sciences unresolved. The reason for this indeterminacy is that tropology is not applied to such thinkers as Weber and Durkheim; and the effect of this exemption is to tilt the balance in the direction of an implicit valorization of the social sciencesa stance that becomes explicit in Whites subsequent theoretical essays, which adopt a largely uncritical
discussion of Droysens Historik, which also accounts for the division into scientific, philosophical, and artistic elements (270-273, esp. 271). Here White remarks that the Historik was modeled on Aristotles theorizations of dialectic, oratory, and so on; but of course what is at issue in the passage under discussion is not one mans mode of theorization but an entire disciplines mode of practice. 71. See particularly Bloch, The Historians Craft; Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian; Collingwood, The Idea of History, 231-235. 72. White, Metahistory, 385, and also 19-20, 175, 386, 393-394. 73. The assumption that Croces writings had influenced the entire discipline of history in the early twentieth century seems surprising, but is perhaps intelligible given Metahistorys fusion of history and philosophy of history into the figure of the historical imagination. 74. White, Metahistory, 39, 140, 277, 429.
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attitude toward these disciplines, in sharp contrast with his view of history.75 We might sum up the significance of this marginal and minimally sketched subplot by saying that although it is surprisingly nave, following as it does the form of a romance, its role is intelligible as supporting Metahistorys critique of nineteenthcentury historys realist pretensions. In contrast, the other subplot is in every respect radically at odds with the main plot. For in an intensely paradoxical counterpoint, there repeatedly surfaces in Metahistorythough always in the interstices of the argumentthe central elements of the standard professional romance: the formation of the academic discipline;76 the link between this institutional development and the criticism of historical documents;77 the depiction of such source criticism as the characteristic method of Ranke;78 and, correspondingly, Rankes special status as the paradigm of academic historiography,79 that is, the fact that by the last three decades of the nineteenth century . . . the historical method was the Rankean method.80 Indeed, White subsequently underlines this pre-eminence of Ranke, indicatingthough yet again in an asidethat the official professional orthodoxy in historical thinking was represented by Ranke and his followers, whereas the work of Michelet, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt comprised the acceptable forms of deviationism from the orthodox norms.81 Still more unsettling is the tropological gloss that White here supplies. For he now suggests that the Rankean orthodoxy, as distinct from the deviationism of Michelet, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, was attended with Ironic implicationscontradicting Metahistorys announced plot, which depicts Rankes horizons as circumscribed by metaphor and synecdoche,82 and irony as arising with Tocqueville and attaining full expression in the work of Burckhardt.83 Not surprisingly, it is left unclear just what these Ironic implications of Rankean historiography are. And when this implicit puzzle is eventually supplied with an apparent resolutionthat is to say, at the beginning of the chapter on Croces philosophy of historythe results are even more troubling. For White now asserts that Irony is built into the historians task, precisely because of the practice of Quellenkritik itself:
I have noted the Ironic component in the work of all philosophers of history, and I have indicated how it differs from the Irony that is implicitly present in every historians attempt to wrest the truth about the past from the documents. The historians Irony is a function of the scepticism which requires him to submit the documents to critical scrutiny. He must treat the historical record Ironically at some point in his work, must assume that the documents mean something other than what they say or that they are saying something other than what
75. See especially White, The Content of the Form, chap. 3. 76. Cf. Carroll, On Tropology, 62 (who does not, however, notice the tension between this and the formal plot). 77. White, Metahistory, 136. 78. Ibid., 172. 79. Ibid., 140; cf. also 185. 80. Ibid., 175; this as distinct from the methods of the social sciences (cf. above). 81. Ibid., 277-278; this again in chapter 7 (cf. note 68 above). 82. Ibid., 167. 83. See the citations in notes 34, 35 above. Even Michelets historiography, it turns out, had an Ironic element (ibid., 161), but no such dimension has been hinted at for Ranke.
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they mean, and that he can distinguish between saying and meaning, or there would be no point in his writing a history. . . . 84
This little passage brings to a head Metahistorys persistent undermining of its own formal plot. For if the critical scrutiny of the documents is inherent in the historians task (as White is here suggesting), and if that method is specifically associated with Ranke and with academic historiography (as has already repeatedly emerged), it follows that the professionalization of history had achieved precisely what the standard romance was always claimingnamely, the systematic application of the techniques proper to the very nature of the discipline. Correspondingly, it now appears that nineteenth-century historians were not, after all, chained to the commonsensical, empirical, and inductive methods ascribed to Aristotle; on the contrary, their transactions with documents were critical, skeptical, and informed by the most sophisticated of the tropes, namely irony.85 Further, this invocation of irony disturbs the motific premises of Metahistorys official plot; for the trope of irony is here depicted as engaging with the documents, whereas tropic prefiguration is supposed to engage directly with the historical field. And last but not least, White unwittingly dismantles the figure of the historical imagination itself. For that figure of course represents the fusion of proper history and speculative philosophy of history; but he has now driven a wedge between these, explicitly characterizing them as entailing different forms of irony. Naturally, White hastens to reassure the reader that the historians Irony may be only a tactical tool, that once he thinks he has extracted the truth from the documents, he may then abandon his Ironic posture, and that thereafter, that is to say in writing his histories, the historian chooses freely among all four of the master-tropes.86 But this move merely compounds the damage, confirming as it does that the critical scrutiny of the documents intervenes between the putative act of prefiguration and the writing of the historical workan exigency that disrupts the original picture of correspondence between prefiguration and the content of such a work. And in similar fashion, Whites subsequent attempt to recuperate the former assimilation of history to philosophy of history only entangles his conception in further difficulties. For he is now forced to posit that the philosopher of history, as well as the historian, works upon the historical record87a claim that not only conflicts with everything that had been said about philosophy of history in the preceding chapters, but also once again interposes the historical record, this time as intruding between philosophy of history and the historical field. To sum up, this subplot effectively demolishes the historical imagination by splitting apart its two components, proper history and speculative philosophy
84. Ibid., 375. 85. Correspondingly, the image of post-Rankean history as anchored in the consensual use of Irony implicitly assigns to history precisely the scientific status that White is elsewhere concerned to deny (cf. above, at n. 7). 86. White, Metahistory, 375 (directly after the passage quoted above). 87. The philosopher of history assumes an Ironic (or, if one wishes, a sceptical) attitude, not only with respect to the historical record, but with respect to the whole enterprise of the historian as well (ibid., 376; my emphasis); this move is repeated in the Conclusion (428).
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of history. In the light of this finding it is appropriate to examine the precise way in which White articulates the supposed unity of the two at the end of the books Introduction. Here two contrasting features are in play, which I shall signal by italicization:
As thus envisaged, the evolution of the philosophy of historyfrom Hegel, through Marx and Nietzsche, to Crocerepresents the same development as that which can be seen in the evolution of historiography from Michelet, through Ranke and Tocqueville, to Burckhardt. The same basic modalities of conceptualization appear in both philosophy of history and historiography, though they appear in a different sequence in their fully articulated forms. The important point is that, taken as a whole, philosophy of history ends in the same Ironic condition that historiography had come to by the last third of the nineteenth century. . . .88
Although the shared ironic terminus of the story fits the claim being made, the contrasting sequences do not; and this contradiction is glossed over by means of the strictly rhetorical claim that the important point is the one that fits the argument. Clearly the same considerations could with equal justification be used against that argument, merely by transposing the rhetoric, for example: The important point is that, despite their shared terminus in Irony, philosophy of history and historiography had followed different trajectories in the nineteenth century. And this leaves Whites claim that the distinction . . . between proper history and philosophy of history is little more than a precritically accepted clich89the grand argument of Metahistorybereft of support. This in turn means that Metahistorys theory of tropes has not succeeded in its aim of unifying history and philosophy of historya result that adds yet another element to the mounting pile of troubles attending that theory. We have seen not only that the theory fails the test of reflexivity, but also that its formal basis, namely linguistic prefiguration, is incoherent, and that tropologys posited late-nineteenth-century terminus of Irony entails an inherent contradiction, being depicted both as a triumph and as a fall.90 It begins to appear, therefore, that here just as elsewhere in the theoretical apparatus, concepts that are found wanting by the reflexivity test are deficient on other grounds as well; and in fact Metahistorys tropological picture is dubious at every level. The initial move from the components of linguistic prefiguration (lexis, grammar, syntax, semantics) to the quite distinct linguistic space of the master tropes is given no justifying rationale;91 only the flimsiest grounds are offered for assigning those four tropes their master status,92 and none at all for their supposed cognitive associations (metaphor with representation, metonymy with reduction, and so on),93 nor for
88. White, Metahistory, 42. 89. Ibid., 427. 90. Above, at nn. 18, 44, 48. 91. All that is offered is this sentence (from which I quoted at n. 8 above): This preconceptual linguistic protocol (that is, the lexical-grammatical-syntactic-semantic prefigurative grid) will in turn beby virtue of its essentially prefigurative naturecharacterizable in terms of the dominant tropological mode in which it is cast (White, Metahistory, 30; his emphasis). 92. Specifically, first convention and then convenience are invoked: Both traditional poetics and modern language theory identify four basic tropes for the analysis of poetic, or figurative, language; Retention of the fourfold analysis has advantages and permits richer combinatorial possibilities than does Jacobsons binary scheme of metaphor versus metonymy (ibid., 31, 33). 93. Ibid., 33-38; cf. Wallace Martin, Floating an Issue of Tropes, Diacritics 12 (1982), 77-78.
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the assumption that those associations together exhaust the possible modes in which history can be apprehended;94 it is left unclear on what grounds individual historians and philosophers of history are each assigned a specific governing trope; and in several cases (for instance that of Ranke, as we have seen) the supposedly governing trope is later supplemented with an additional trope,95 a move analogous to the Ptolemaic and Copernican proliferation of epicycles.96 In short, the theory of tropes is a failure, just as are formal argument, ideological implication, and linguistic prefiguration.
VI. CONCLUSION
What went wrong? And in view of the wreckage of Metahistorys theoretical edifice, does the book have anything to offer to the would-be theorist of historical knowledge? The germ of an answer to the first question has already emerged in connection with linguistic prefiguration: that the categories in which historical knowledge is framed cannot in principle be mapped onto a linguistic grid, because linguistic categories are empty of the temporal aspect that is inherent in the discipline of history. Temporality is built into the historical discipline (as Michelet put it, Lhistoire, cest le temps),97 because its project is constituted by the distinction between past and present; thus any adequate theorization of historical knowledge must deploy categories that have at least the possibility of a temporal dimension. Another way of making the same point is to say that the task of elucidating the nature of historical knowledge cannot be accomplished merely by importing theoretical resources from elsewhere, for the simple reason that no other discipline faces historys problem of aspiring to knowledge of that which is inherently unobservablefor the past, by definition, has gone.98 This is not to say that such external resources have no part to play in the theorization of historical knowledge, but their role can only ever be an ancillary one; by definition, they cannot solve the problem. And it is this that ultimately accounts for Metahistorys failure, for every
94. But the number of possible explanatory strategies is not infinite. There are, in fact, four principal types, which correspond to the four principal tropes of poetic language (White, Metahistory, 31). 95. Rankes synecdoche is supplemented with metaphor (above, at n. 65), and the depictions of Michelet as metaphoric and of Tocqueville as metonymic are both qualified by the addition of irony: see White, Metahistory, 167, 161, 201-203, and notes 34, 83 above. 96. In the astronomical systems of first Ptolemy and then Copernicus, epicycles (originally invented by Apollonius and Hipparchus) are the main devices by which the basic postulate of solely circular motion is accommodated to planetary movements. The planet is depicted as moving in a little circle (the epicycle) whose center rotates around the earth (Ptolemy) or the sun (Copernicus) in a larger circle (the deferent); by multiplying epicycles, and by varying such parameters as the relative periodicities, this system can produce very close approximations to the actual motions of the planets, thereby preserving the fundamental postulate. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 59-70, 170-171. 97. Histoire de le revolution franaise par J. Michelet, imprime pour le centenaire de 1789, 5 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie National, 1889), II, 19. 98. More precisely, the historical pastwhich is the historians object of knowledgehas gone, in contrast to what Oakeshott fruitfully denominates the practical past. See Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 16-19, 34-44, 106, and Adrian Wilson, What is a Text?, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43 (2012), 346-347, 351-353.
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ADRIAN WILSON
component of its theoretical framework comes from other disciplinesliterary criticism (emplotment), philosophy (formal argument), sociology (ideology), linguistics (the components of prefiguration), rhetoric (the tropes)while conversely, historys own key practical and conceptual resource, namely the criticism of sources, has no place in that framework. The partial exception that confirms the rule is emplotment, for emplotment, though like the rest in coming from outside, is unique within the theoretical apparatus in embodying a temporal aspect, since all stories unfold in the medium of time. It is thus no accident that emplotment is the only element of Metahistorys conceptual array that passes the reflexivity test, and the only one not marred by some inherent flaw. (To recapitulate: formal argument is inadequate because only one of its four categories is appropriate for history; ideological implication is presented as a mode of explanation but in fact performs no explanatory work; linguistic prefiguration is empty of content; and tropology floats on a raft of unsupported assumptions.) Yet even emplotment is a failure in its actual application, and this in two respects. In the first place, the books double-layered plot entails the irreducible contradiction that the culminating move to irony (in the historiography of Burckhardt and the philosophy of Croce) has to be presented both as a triumph and as a fall, in the romantic and satiric layers respectively: it is impossible to have it both ways, yet that is what the plot requires. Second, that official plot is fatally undermined by the intrusion of the very story against which both of its layers are pitchedto wit, the standard romance of historiographical progress as embodied in the professionalization of history and the associated rise of source-criticism or Quellenkritik, classically associated with the figure of Ranke. Nevertheless, the point just made entails an indirect and ironic vindication of emplotment; and what is more, this in turn leads to an unexpected confirmation of Metahistorys fundamental claim about historical knowledge. Surprisingly, then, my answer to the second question that was posed above will be positive: that is, for all the failings of its theoretical system, Metahistory is based on an insight that is profound, accurate, and fruitful. What we must notice is that it is specifically thanks to Metahistory, and this in three ways, that we are enabled to see the standard professional romance for what it is. In the first place, it is Metahistory that placed on the historiographical agenda the form of historical writing, including emplotment. Second, the book puts historys own disciplinary history in question, simply by offering an alternative to it. And third, by mobilizing Northrop Fryes categories, Metahistory makes available the concept of romantic emplotment that applies so precisely to that disciplinary history. In short, what vindicates Metahistorys category of emplotment is not the way that the concept is deployed in the book itself, but rather the light that it sheds on the story that historians had been telling about the history of their own discipline ever since they began to reflect on that theme in the early twentieth century. This result is doubly, and asymmetrically, ironic. On the one hand, it is ironic in a minor way for White himself, since he did not make this point but left his target wholly implicit. On the other hand, it is ironic on a far more serious scale for the historians who had been telling the traditional story, since their strenuous use of romantic emplotment in telling that story un-
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dermined their own premise as to the relation between historical research and writingthe assumption that writing was merely a transparent medium through which to convey historical knowledge, as distinct from an active form that constructs that knowledge. In paradoxically and unwittingly negating that premise, the disciplinary history of the historians actually constructed in advance an overwhelming argument for the central claim of Metahistory, and indeed of Whites subsequent oeuvre: thatas the title of one of his later essay collections neatly puts itthe form of historical writing itself has content.99 That insight is Metahistorys great strength; the baroque edifice of theory in which it is wrapped up is the books corresponding weakness.100 Though the theoretical apparatus has to be discarded, the underlying insight deserves to be cherished; indeed, it is tempting to suggest that once freed from that apparatus, the insight will prove capable of richer and more fruitful development than has yet been suspected. University of Leeds
99. White, The Content of the Form. 100. This disparity is relevant to the further theme of the books reception. At first glance it is surprising that most of the problems identified here have (so far as I am aware) entirely escaped notice in the literature; one might have expected, for instance, that the inadequacy of linguistic prefiguration would have been picked up long ago, yet this appears not to be the case. But this collective oversight may be intelligible if we posit that appreciation of the aptness of Whites insight has led readers to gloss over the gaps, contradictions, and errors in the theory itself.

WILSON, A. Sobre Hayden White

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History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 1-23

Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656 DOI: 10.1111/hith.10692

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

Figure 1. Schematic view of Metahistorys theoretical apparatus

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

III. THE CENTRAL CHARACTER AND THE PLOT

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITES METAHISTORY

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