Hayden White

Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning - its production, distribution, and consumption - in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in the content of the form, in the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded.

Intellectual history—the attempt to write the history of consciousness-in-general, rather than discrete histories of, say, politics, society, economic activity, philosophical thought, or literary expression—is comparatively new as a scholarly discipline; but it can lay claim to a long ancestry. It is arguable that intellectual history has its remote origins in the sectarian disputes of ancient philosophers and theologians, who, by constructing “histories” of their opponents’ doctrines, sought to expose the interests that had led them into error or to locate the precise point at which they had strayed from the path of truth or righteousness. An especial interest in the history of thought and expression is, of course, characteristic of transitional ages in the lives of cultures; it arises when received traditions in thought and mythic endowments appear to have lost their relevance to current social problems or their presumed coherency, as in the Hellenistic age or the late Middle Ages. During such times, thinkers may try, by means of what is usually called “historical perspective,” to gain some purchase on their cultural legacy and to distinguish between “what is living and what is dead” within it.

Adam Smith and the philosophy of anti-history, by J. Weiss.--Towards a dissolution of the ontological argument, by A. C. Danto.--Romanticism, historicism, realism: toward a period concept for early 19th century intellectual history, by H. V. White.--History and humanity: the Proudhonian vision, by A. Noland.--Hintze and the legacy of Ranke, by M. Covensky.--Objections to metaphysics, by J. Cobitz.--The term expressionism in the visual arts, by V. H. Miesel.--Karl Löwith's anti-historicism, by B. Riesterer.--Antonio Gramsci; Marxism and the Italian intellectual tradition, by J. Cammett.--Traditional Chinese historiography and local histories, by E. H. Pritchard.--From principle to principal: restoration and emperorship in Japan, by H. D. Harootunian.--National development and the evolution of the legal-rational bureaucracy: the prefectural governor in Japan, 1868-1945, by B. Silberman.

White's dense article on narrative discusses the ways that different groups of 20th century historians, particularly historical theorists (see pp.8-9), have constructed and deconstructed narrative as a means of communicating history. White himself acknowledges that narrativity challenges the scientific of history, but suggests that narrativity is not only unavoidable, but also offers a form of literary or allegorical truth.\n\nWhite first discusses the critiques of narrative as a means of communication--it focuses too heavily on political players, it is "unscientific," it is inherently limited because narrative itself cannot be objective (although it's authors sometimes claim it to be).\n\nHe then moves on to discuss other, heavily theoretical, takes on why narrative is still useful as a means of historical communication: that narrative works because it performs as a trope which readers can easily recognize from myth and fiction, or, that narrative works because it allows us to transform events from the present to a synthesized past.\n\nWhite's article is difficult to read, but important background for anyone who wants to see what people have said about narrative in the past 100 years--and why it is still important

It is as if [W. J. T.] Mitchell, who in his stance as a literary theorist is willing to admit of a plurality of equally legitimate critical modes, were unwilling to extend this pluralism to the consideration of history itself. By this I do not mean that he would be unwilling to view the history of criticism as a cacophony or polyphony of contending critical positions, as a never=ending circle of critical viewpoints, with no one of them being able finally to declare itself the winner for all time, but rather that he must feel that this is the only legitimate perspective on that history. Such a perspective on history has a name, and it is historicism—the perspective associated with Ranke and Goethe in Friedrich Meinecke’s great book on this subject, the perspective which, in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, is identified with the fate of literary realism in the West. Although the name given to this perspective by Meinecke suggests that it is the historical perspective, contemporary historical theory and practice deny it that claim. In point of fact, if we look at contemporary historical theory and practice, we must admit that there are as many perspectives on history as there are modes of critical practice in literary studies. And this for a very good reason: the referent of the term “history” is as indeterminable, is as much a matter of principled contestation, as the term “literature” itself. So that, if one wished to “correct” certain critical positions by reminding their proponents of the necessity of a proper “sense of history,” it would be just as legitimate to correct the corrector by reminding him that the history of historiography displays the same kind of confusion over the “sense of history” that the history of criticism displays over the “sense of literature.” When Mitchell characterizes the current schism in criticism as another enactment of the quarrel of ancients and moderns, he is surely right; but he fails to note that this reenactment takes place within an atmosphere made more murky by the fact that there is no generally agreed upon “sense of history” to which one can appeal in order to characterize the differences between the two camps. It is not as if the ancients and the moderns agree on some body of fact from which they draw different implications regarding the attitude that one ought to assume vis-à-vis modern as against ancient literature. For what is at issue is not the interpretation of the facts but the nature of historical factuality itself. Hayden White is Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Historical Interpretation” , “The Narrativization of Real Events” , and “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”

I am grateful to Dirk Moses for taking the time to study my work so assiduously and to comment on it so perspicuously. His essay is eminently well-informed and even-handed, and I have little to add to or correct of his characterization of my many, long on-going, and admittedly flawed attempts to deconstruct modern historical discourse. He understands me well enough and I think that I understand his objections to my position. We do not disagree on matters of fact, I think, but we have different notions about the nature of historical discourse and the uses to which historical knowledge can properly be put