Rereading narrative constructivism

Abstract

Since the 1960s, and especially after the appearance of Metahistory in 1973, the relationship between narrative and reality has been one of the most important questions in historical theory. Despite this, historians have generally taken the kind of narrative constructivism associated with Hayden White to hold no significance for them. Their justifications often miss the core point, however: What is in question is not how history could derive meaning from the facts of the past (which is an unsolvable problematic), but the responsibility historians have for the consequences of their work because of its unavoidably subjective or constructivist nature. Since Whitean constructivism emphasizes the independence of the meanings of historical stories from past reality, it necessarily also foregrounds the legitimation of interpretations. Hence the question becomes: Why ‘do’ history at all? By examining what narrative constructivism has had to say about the assumptions and rules that define history as a genre – as well as through an evaluation of what might so far have been missed but still needs to be considered – my goal here is to refocus the discussion so that this much more radical and far-reaching dimension might be better understood.

Keywords::

• Hayden White
• narrative constructivism
• historical narratives
• aesthetic impact
• presentism
• social responsibility

Notes

^1. I follow Alun Munslow (2007, 17) in employing the term ‘narrative constructivism’, which to me best helps distinguish White's particular brand of constructivism from those of R.G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, for example.

^2. For an example of White's detailed ‘tropology’, see Metahistory (1973); White (1978b); on Frank Ankersmit's idea of ‘narrative substances’, see his Narrative Logic (Ankersmit 1983, 1990, 279–80).

^3. In his controversial essay ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artefact’ (1978), White presented the idea of historical writing as a translation of ‘“fact” into “fiction”’; here ‘fiction’ was placed in scare quotes and in another version of the same essay in the same year it was presented as ‘fictions’ (see White 1978a, 53; 1978b, 92). Despite this care with formulations, many historians appear to think that White takes historical texts to be fictions that are ‘not subject to truth controls’ (Iggers 2000, 383); in this instance White has once again systematically answered and refuted such accusations (White 2000, 398).

^4. It should be noted that recent constructivist theory hardly ever problematizes the research carried out by historians. See e.g. White (1999, 7–8) and Jenkins (1999, 94), both of whom distinguish and set aside from discussion the ‘research phase’ in order to better focus on the process of narrativization.

^5. White often emphasizes that history (in order for it to be history) cannot be written freely; instead, historians need to consider the demands and limits set by the materials as well as by the institution (see e.g. White 1978b, 97). Compare this with Jenkins, who suggests that we simply decide to live ‘amidst the ample and agreeable imaginaries provided by postmodern-type theorists, […] theorists who can generate enough by way of emancipatory rhetorics such that we no longer need any kind of foundational – or non-foundational – past’ (Jenkins 1999, 10). It must be noted that the difference between White's and Jenkins' positions is not in the theoretical stand they adopt per se, but is rather based on their having quite different aims: White attempts to save history as a form of discourse whereas Jenkins hopes that it might be forgotten altogether.

^6. Hence it makes good sense to say, with White, that the best way to refute an unwelcome interpretation is to offer a better one: ‘The best counter to a narrative that is supposed to have misused historical memory is a better narrative, by which I mean a narrative, not with more historical facts, but a narrative with greater artistic integrity and poetic force of meaning’ (White 2005b, 336).

^7. On presence, see Gumbrecht (1997, esp. 417–9), and a theme issue of History and Theory from October 2006, particularly the article by Eelco Runia.

^8. And this is where experimental history comes in, of course (see e.g. Munslow and Rosenstone 2004; Munslow 2007, 2010).

^9. For more, see May (1995). Where poststructuralism frees people of traditional ideologies, it also binds them to personal responsibility regarding the consequences of their choices.

^10. A typical example of this kind of (careless) interpretation of postmodernism can be found in, e.g. Zagorin (1999, esp. 7). For a thorough response and clarification of the misunderstandings involved, see Jenkins (2000).

^11. As White argues: ‘Nothing is better suited to lead to a repetition of the past than a study of it that is either reverential or convincingly objective in the way that conventional historical studies tend to be’ (White 1987, 82).

^12. Compare this discussion about presence with the debate concerning memory in the 1980s and 1990s (see Klein 2000).

^13. Ankersmit spoke of this already in 1997. As he then said: ‘I've lately become interested in the notion of experience but that's a different problem from the problem of historical writing. It has to do with the problem of whether a direct access to the past is possible. And I have committed the folly – and I persist in committing this folly – of saying that such a direct access to the past is under certain circumstances indeed possible. But everybody says that I'm completely mad to argue for this […]. My interest began with Huizinga who has the notion of “historische sensatie” – historical sensation – which he describes as a direct and immediate contact with the historical past’ (in Pihlainen 1997, 368). In his Sublime Historical Experience (2005), Ankersmit engages with this controversial idea in much greater detail.

^14. The usefulness of speaking about phenomenology in historical research might be questioned, however. As noted above, the past is not and cannot be present in any real way. Hence our relationship to it cannot be based on its being a perceivable phenomenon, and ‘historical phenomenology’ needs to be something quite different. An ‘encounter’ with the past through its traces does not strictly speaking constitute contact with the past, then, but only with the present. Any historical phenomenology thus always only means an imagining of the past, not a picture formed on the basis of any real interaction. The nature of imagining in this case is thus quite different from our encounters with the present, where meanings are constructed in relation to pragmatic needs and with recourse to interaction and experimentation. Speaking of phenomenology in history is thus only an extension of our everyday approach: that specific ‘phenomenology’ has taught us something fundamental about the way the world is, and we use this understanding in describing events in the past. So how does this really differ from constructivism as presented by White, for instance?

^15. At the start of Figural Realism, White rehearses these arguments one-by-one, including historians' most common criticisms, as well as his own reasons for why these miss their target (White 1999, 1–26).

^16. On the other hand, White seems to often be too attached to the example of modernist literature to appreciate the inherent strengths that history possesses with regard to representational form precisely as a result of its referential commitment (for more on this, see e.g. Pihlainen 2002, 2009).

^17. This can be seen as reflecting Roland Barthes' idea of ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts, of course. See e.g. Barthes (1973). My argument is not the same as his, however, in that both of the (admittedly caricatured) textual dynamics I describe here would belong to the Barthean category of ‘writerly’. The difference between the kinds of texts I describe (both of them fundamentally ‘writerly’ or – a tad more familiarly to historical theory, perhaps – ‘worklike’) is more interestingly viewed as one between a modernist and a postmodern aesthetics.

^18. On the refusal of representation in Foucault and Lyotard, see May (1995); on Derrida and the aporetic moment of ‘undecidability’ required for a choice to be properly ethical, see e.g. Jenkins (1999).

^19. On White's existentialism, see Paul (2006, 2011). White seldom classifies his theory in any way; he has, however, explained his motives regarding postmodernism thus: ‘the anti-postmodernist handwringers are wrong when they say that the postmodernists are “against” history, objectivity, rules, methods, and so on. What we postmodernists are against is a professional historiography, in service to state apparatuses that have turned against their own citizens, with its epistemically pinched, ideologically sterile, and superannuated notions of objectivity’ (White 2005a, 152). As I see it, White's position seems to encompass the political aims of both existentialism and poststructuralism quite well.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kalle Pihlainen

Kalle Pihlainen is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow based at the Department of Philosophy, Åbo Akademi University, and Adjunct Professor in Philosophy of History at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Turku, Finland. He has published articles on narrative theory and the philosophy of history in various anthologies and in journals, including Rethinking History, New Literary History, Historein, Storia della Storiografia and Clio. His research interests are in cultural history, narrative theory, historical theory, embodiment and existential phenomenology.