Metahistory, so Meta

Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Hayden White, 1973

When I began reading this I was tempted to jump right to looking at reviews rather than the text itself, because it’s so absurdly unreadable. As an example, it began with a quote from Bachelard’s (who?) The Psychoanalysis of Fire (what?) that said “One can study only what one has first dreamed about.”

I had picked this book up because I’d read articles by White that made sense and that I liked. And because I was aware he was a pivotal figure in the battle over post-modern historiography. I. was disappointed that he was apparently unable to write in plain English. Either he believed his insights were too complicated for non-specialist language or he was too infected with the jargon of the academies where he spent his time. White’s writing was as dense as the that of the French postmodernists, without having the excuse of being a translation.

But he did say some things that are important. In the Preface, he tossed off a definition of history that bears looking at, calling it “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse…[that] combine[s] a certain amount of ‘data,’ theoretical concepts for ‘explaining’ these data, and a narrative structure for their presentation…of events presumed to have occurred in times past.” History is a verbal artifact, constructed using the tools available to writers. These include not only grammar and syntax, but since history is presented as a story of the past, narrative structures (plots, themes, archetypes) that might carry (or hide) meanings of their own, based on the reader’s level of literacy, sensitivity to these subtle hints, etc. So in addition to the choice of data and the explanations the historian advances, the way the story is plotted and presented may communicate historians’ interpretations and even their philosophies of history.

White went farther, claiming that a historian’s philosophy of history “prefigures the field” of study, and that histories can be decoded for their philosophical content by analyzing the rhetorical “tropes” the historian uses in their presentation.

The book’s structure is built on an introduction where White lays out his theory, and nine chapters of examples where he reviews the work of nineteenth-century historians and philosophers of history. In White’s theory “the historical work represents an attempt to mediate among what I will call the historical field, the unprocessed historical record, other historical accounts, and an audience”. The “historical field” remains fuzzy—I’ve yet to find where White completely pinned this down. The other elements were interesting, since they pointed to the historian’s thought processes in searching for data, thinking about other historians’ interpretations, and trying to communicate something relevant and new to readers. White didn’t mention the historian’s overriding motivation to find something new to say, and thus justify the new history. This is a major concern for the current generation of historians, and I see no reason to suppose it wasn’t relevant in the past.

White went on to point out that the historian “invents” history in a way that shares some of the elements of fiction. A particular historical fact like “The death of a king may be a beginning, or an ending, or simply a transitional event in three different stories” The act of binding a set of historical facts into a story is itself interpretation. This is obvious on reflection, and it’s amazing that conservative historians like Arthur Marwick (we read White and Marwick as an opposed pair in my first graduate historiography course) have allowed themselves to be viewed (or characterized) as trying to deny it. Even a list of data, completely lacking narrative, has been chosen from a much larger possible set. That choice is either completely random, or it’s more likely based on some principle, some question, some pre-existing idea that sent the historian to the data in the first place.

In addition to the recognized forms of explanation (White called them “explanation by argument” and “explanation by ideological implication”) emplotment itself is explanation, White said. And because it is, White made his big jump and claimed that the meanings of histories (and the philosophies of historians) can be analyzed using ideas from rhetoric. For the most part, White seemed to be claiming that these processes were consciously chosen by historians (in contrast to others, who say the historians are unconsciously preconditioned by their language/culture). “Before the historian can bring to bear upon the data of the historical field the conceptual apparatus he will use to represent and explain it,” White says, “he must first prefigure the field—that is to say, constitute it as an object of mental perception. This poetic act is indistinguishable from the linguistic act in which the field is made ready for interpretation as a domain of a particular kind.” The problem is, if this means anything at all (and I have my doubts), it’s an issue that should be addressed by looking at the most advanced epistemology/cognitive science. Not by applying Northrop Frye’s literary theory and rhetorical ideas dating back to Aristotle.

Anyone who has read philosophy and still chooses to write history has either come to grips with these issues, or is trying to bamboozle people who aren’t aware of them. This is where White left himself a possible “out” by saying that “In order to figure out ‘what really happened’ in the past…the historian must first prefigure as a possible object of knowledge the whole set of events reported in the documents. This prefigurative act is poetic [a term he uses interchangeably with “figurative”] inasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian’s own consciousness” There seems to be an implication of naïve literalism in the beginning of White’s statement, as if historians (or at least un-enlightened ones) believe they’re finding “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” But worse, there’s a weird sense in which the history becomes the historian. A historian might hold a set of beliefs about the nature of knowledge in general and historical knowledge in particular, before beginning a given history. But that doesn’t make them “precognitive” or “precritical” for the historian; just for the particular work at hand. White didn’t seem to want to be pinned down: are historians deliberate agents, using these tropes and devices consciously? Or are they the unwitting dupes of poetic prefiguartion?

White went on to populate his three explanatory forms (emplotment, argument, and ideology) with four “modes” that combine in particular ways according to their “affinities” to create historical styles. Emplotment can take the form of Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, or Satire. White admitted there were legitimate combinations (the Romantic Comedy or Romantic Tragedy) and others that were not allowed (the Romantic Satire), suggesting the “modes” may not all be of the same type. Argument can be Formist, Mechanistic, Organicist, or Contextualist, and ideology can be Anarchist, Radical, Conservative, or Liberal. The precise meanings of these terms as White uses them depend on extensive reference to Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke, Karl Mannheim, and his own earlier articles. In some cases, notes went on for two or more pages in small type, but the categories still failed to seem definitive or convincing.

White associated these various modes with particular historians and philosophers of history, and also with the “tropes” of classical rhetoric: Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecodoche, and Irony. He reminded the reader of Nietzsche’s warning that “by such reductions…the phenomenal world can be populated with a host of agents and agencies that are presumed to exist behind it” It was a warning that seemed amazingly apt in this context!

I have to admit, I can’t stand this style of writing. I don’t see how it contributes anything to the content and I suspect that it’s intended partly to browbeat the reader into accepting the argument in order to simply follow it. For example, White sneaked in a claim that “there are no extra-ideological grounds on which to arbitrate among the conflicting conceptions of the historical process and of historical knowledge…since these conceptions have their origins in ethical considerations, the assumption of a given epistemological position by which to judge their cognitive accuracy would itself represent only another ethical choice” Ah, no.

The introduction concluded with a short sketch of nineteenth-century historiography, which White described as a sort-of spiral of eternal return. The ironic stance of the Enlightenment (Hume, Kant, Voltaire, Gibbon) gave way to pre-romantic idealism culminating in Hegel’s organicism and Comte’s (organicist) positivism. This led to mechanism in the form of Marx. Ultimately, “the consistent elaboration of a number of equally comprehensive and plausible, yet apparently mutually exclusive, conceptions of the same sets of events” led back to an ironic loss of confidence in the ability to know anything, “freeing…historical consciousness from the impossible ideal of a transcendentally ‘realist’ perspective on the world”. That’s quite enough of that, I think. I decided not to closely read the nearly 400 pages that separated this introduction from White’s concluding remarks in which he says that “if we wish to transcend the agnosticism which an Ironic perspective on history…foists on us, we have only to reject this Ironic perspective and to will to view history from another, anti-Ironic perspective,” because, in the end, it’s a moral or an esthetic choice.

I do think White called attention to questions about the way “emplotment” carries implicit or explicit interpretation. I think there may even be something to the idea that we look for archetypal stories and story-forms in history. Our culture prepares us to some extent to see the world in a particular way. But I don’t think we need to be victims of this. Even if this interpretation of the past begins as “precritical and precognitive” (which I don’t accept), we’re not uncritical and we can be cognitive. So we can apply that thought and criticism to these questions, and examine them adequately.

I also don’t buy the idea that epistemological stances are essentially esthetic or moral in nature. Even in a world where reality is mediated by perception and conception (our senses and our mental training/language/etc.), some models of the world are more accurate than others. So it’s not okay to embrace teleology or dialectical materialism just because it feels more comfortable or satisfies our yearning for beauty and meaning (or panders to our prejudices and justifies the status quo). White continually said his analysis was formalist (in the sense he defines formalism in his theory) and ironic. But I suspect (not having closely read his narrative chapters) it was actually organicist, with a generally upward/forward momentum. So I wonder, was he unaware of this? Or did he choose to hide it, as he chose to obscure so much else, in this maze of words?