Above, about and beyond the writing of history: a retrospective view of Hayden White's Metahistory on the 40th anniversary of its publication

Abstract

Since its publication 40 years ago, Hayden White's Metahistory has been recognized as a foundational work for the literary analysis of historical writing. Long thought to be primarily concerned with questions of narrative, new interpretations have recently revised our understanding of White's principal aims as a theorist and philosopher of history. What has emerged from these works is a novel view of the status and meaning of tropes in Metahistory, the underlying existentialist engagements that guided White's thinking about them, and the ways in which both served his encompassing goal not only to critique the reigning Rankean paradigm of ‘history’ but to free contemporary historians and historiography altogether from the ‘burden of history’ for the sake of a morally responsible future. The article analyses the ways in which these new interpretations of White alter our understanding of the corpus of his work, from his early article on the ‘burden of history’ to his most recent writings on ‘the practical past’, with a principal focus on the re-readings of Metahistory itself.

Keywords::

• White
• existentialism
• Metahistory
• tropes
• Irony
• practical past

Notes

^1. See, for example, the group of articles published around Arthur Marwick's consideration of White: Marwick (1995, 5–35). For White's response to Marwick see White (1995, 233–246). Further discussion can be found in Kansteiner (1996, 215–9); Lloyd (1996, 191–207); Roberts (1996, 221–8); and Southgate (1996, 209–14).

^2. One's view on whether or not White belongs among those espousing the ‘linguistic turn’ depends in part on how one defines that term and conceives of the theories of language – semiotic, structuralist, poststructuralist – that it is construed to cover, with all the differential implications each had on major issues such as referentiality, relativism, linguistic mediation and the like that were being considered anew with the rise of critical theory but, in 1973 at least, had not yet congealed. Although White at points seemed to adopt a semiotic understanding of language, Metahistory owed more to the formal literary and rhetorical theories of Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke and, above all, Vico. As I have argued elsewhere, for a ‘theoretician of historical narration as a fundamentally linguistic and literary art, White was and long remained disconcertingly vague about his precise understanding of how language, as such, functioned and what he believed to be its intrinsic nature – which is only a way of saying that he was fairly disinterested in linguistics’ as such (Spiegel 2013).

^3. For example in the interview with White published by Ewa Domanska, where White proclaims himself a structuralist (Domanska 1998, 27). But, as Robert Doran has pointed out, ‘Though White sometimes calls himself a “structuralist,” this nomenclature is somewhat misleading when applied to White's work. White's point of departure is not Saussurean semiology but Vichian rhetoric’ (Doran 2010, xvii). Nonetheless, several interpreters of White have insisted that, at least until recently, ‘White's has remained a structuralist project’, as averred, for example by Kansteiner (1993, 274). On White's ‘structuralist adventure’, see Paul (2011, 10).

^4. On White as a postmodernist see Ankersmit (1989, 137–53).

^5. For a discussion of the ambiguities that abound in White's use of the term ‘constitute’, see Spiegel (2013) as well as Vann (1998, 143–61). Whereas in Metahistory, White seemed to hold out the possibility that such a thing as ‘data from the unprocessed historical record’ existed independently of the tropological selection and processing of such ‘data’, the ‘constitutive’ role of language now seemed to extend to the very construction of the past itself, at the very least in terms, as he stated in ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, of serving as ‘an instrument of mediation between human consciousness and the world that consciousness inhabits’ if not in the actual linguistic construction of reality as such, a position embraced by some forms of structuralism and poststructuralism at the time (White 1978c, 126). For the ways in which such ambiguities in his work led to charges of relativism at the 1990 conference organized by Saul Friedlander at the University of California, Los Angeles, on ‘Probing the Limits of Representation’ see Spiegel (2013).

^6. White had already acknowledged the degree to which the philosophy of history represented a threat to historiography as normally practiced, ‘because philosophy of history is characteristically a product of a desire to change the professionally sanctioned strategies by which meaning is conferred on history’ (White 1973, 276).

^7. See also the reviews of Paul by Cohen (2012, 443–58) and Timmins (2011: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1149).

^8. That White intended tropes to indicate forms of historical consciousness as well as modes of historical realism is evident from his statement in the conclusion to Metahistory, that ‘I have discussed modes of consciousness in which historians can implicitly or explicitly justify commitment to different explanatory strategies on the levels of argument, emplotment and ideological implication’ (White 1973, 426).

^9. For White's persisting belief that the realisms ensconced in conventional historiography were anti-utopian and his equally persisting conviction of the importance of utopian dreams, see his recent ‘The Future of Utopia in History’ (White 2007, 11–19).

^10. One could easily multiply examples on both sides of this view of the relation of tropes to reality and linguistic determinism, but anyone who has ever read more than a few books or articles by White surely knows that consistency on theoretical issues has never been his strongpoint. Once again, Hans Kellner anticipated this understanding of White in stating that ‘Metahistory is a moral text which can authorize itself only by declaring the freedom of moral choice in the face of the great determinisms of our time. It reaffirms human freedom by pointing to the creative force of language. Ironic, because the rules of discourse in this century place any such affirmation under erasure […] It is this willed Nietzschean forgetting that gives Metahistory its power’ (Kellner 1980, 29).

^11. To be sure, if one followed Vico, Irony would ultimately be displaced by the cyclical return to myth, but it is unlikely that White was advocating history as myth at this point.

^12. In this, I agree with A. Dirk Moses's statement that ‘the experience of autonomy in surveying the wreck of history and opting for a better life is the ethical for White’ (2005b, 347).

^13. Moses makes a similar point in critiquing White when his says that White's ‘Nietzschean-inspired vision of history is inadequate because it cannot gainsay that a genocidal vision of history is immoral’ (Moses 2005b, 339). Kalle Pihlainen has recently argued that ‘White's thinking does not lead to a moral relativism even if similar positions are held to do so […] Placing responsibility for choices at the door of each individual can be an effective way of achieving social responsibility, even if it involves risk’ (2008, 34). But is this a risk we are or should be willing to take?

^14. Gavriel Rosenfeld apparently believes such a move is afoot (2009, 150).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Gabrielle M. Spiegel is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a past president of the American Historical Association. She has written extensively on historical writing in the Middle Ages in Latin and Old French and on the implications of contemporary critical theory for the practice of historiography.