By
Dr Alun Munslow, Staffordshire University
An Electronic Seminars in History Presentation
In the year I began teaching - 22 years ago in 1974 Hayden White published in Clio his article "The Historical
Text as Literary Artifact." Drawing on much of the material in the
Introduction to Metahistory published
a year earlier, White posed his now famous question, why do historians persist
in failing to consider historical narratives
as what they most manifestly are - verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in science. [1]
Thanks to this article in particular, the succeeding
22 years has seen a revivifying of interest in the narrative basis of history
as a discipline - the list of philosophers of history who have engaged in this
debate as well as the practitioners is too long to note here Gallie, Danto,
Mink, Ankersmit, Ricoeur, Polkinghorne, Furet, Dray, Carrard, Joyce, Jenkins,
Lemon, Berkhofer, Stone, Stanford, McCullagh - but for most historians the past
22 years' of debate on narrative has been a side show - something a few
oddities have engaged in while they get on with the business - a view expressed
most forcefully of course by the back to basics school of Marwick, Elton,
Himmelfarb, Tosh, Hexter, etc. A few moderates, like Appleby, Hunt and Jacob
are willing to engage in the debate.
There is a debate to be found in history today, viz., the extent to which history as a
discipline, can accurately recover and represent the content of the past,
through the form of the narrative, or literary structure of its written texts -
both primary and secondary - this is the debate stimulated by White. Put at its
most basic White maintains historical narrative cannot carry the reality of the
past because its story form is not discovered, but imposed by the historian. I
would like to revisit this issue. In doing this I will argue that the genuine
nature of history can only be understood when it is viewed not as an
objectivised empiricist enterprise, but rather as a literary project which must
self-reflexively take account of the imposition by historians of a particular
narrative form on the past. White's challenge to narrative as a distinct form
of historical understanding poses the question most recently addressed by
Robert Berkhofer, do historians re-tell the
story of the past, or impose a story
on it?[2]
This raises several key questions.
*Some Basic Questions About the Nature of History*
Questions that flow from White's argument that
history not as it is lived but as written is as much structured by its form as
its content. Although we can distinguish these questions for the purpose of
listing, in practice it is very difficult to keep them separate. The four
issues inspired by White's narratological model of historical understanding are
posed as questions:
·
can
empiricism legitimately constitute history as a separate epistemology?
·
what
is the character of historical evidence
and what function does it perform?
·
what
is the role of the historian, social
theory, and the construction of explanatory frameworks in historical
understanding?
·
how
significant to historical explanation is its narrative form?
I will speak very briefly to each in turn.
*Can empiricism legitimately constitute history as a
separate epistemology?*
This first question confronts White's basic concern
about history as a form of knowledge. The fundamental function of the historian
is to understand, and explain, in writing, the connections between events and
occurrences in the past - working out a relationship between knowledge and
explanation, and as White points out explain that relationship in the form of a
narrative.
One way to explain that relationship would be to
imitate the natural sciences, and although there has always been a substantial
following among historians (especially among those with a positivist or social
science training) for this form of flattery, it has never achieved a dominant
methodological status. The lapsed Marxist E.H. Carr famously argued over forty
years ago history cannot claim to be straightforwardly scientific in the sense
we understand the physical sciences to be: it does not share the protocol of
hypothesis-testing, does not employ deductive reasoning, nor is it an
experimental and objective process producing incontrovertible facts.[3] The
historian selects data because of her interest in a unique event or historical
agent acting intentionally in response to circumstances. Evidence is chosen for
what it can tell us about that unique event or agent, rather than explain any
and every event within a general category.
Question. What particular consequences flow from
this for history as an epistemology?[4] Can we gain genuine and
"truthful" historical descriptions by simply following the historians
literary narrative - her or his invented story? This is certainly the opinion
of the pronarrative (but anti- deconstructionist) British philosopher-historian
M.C. Lemon, who in his recent book on history and narrative The Discipline of History and the History of
Thought considers that the "...very logic" of history as a
discipline revolves "...around the rationale of the narrative
structure."[5] The special character of narrative which makes it so useful
to historians is, as Lemon points out, its "this happened and then that" structure which is the
essence of historical change. It is a process that also saturates our lived
experience.
What is the epistemological relationship then of
history to its closest neighbour, literature? The bottom line seems to be one
of referentiality. By this I mean the accuracy and veracity with which the
narrative relates what actually happened in the past. While literature is not
devoid of referentiality it is not referential in the same way as the history
text. It follows that, like literature, "the past and written history
are not the same thing." Not recognising this permits us to forget the
difficulties involved in recreating the past - something after all which does
not exist apart from a few traces and the historian's imagination. Because we
cannot directly encounter the past, we employ narrative as the medium of
exchange in our transactions with it. Indeed, we ought to be open - as White is
- to the sublime- the possible meaninglessness of the past. As I have already
suggested, given there cannot be any unmediated correspondence between language
and the world again we must ask whether history unfolded as a particular kind
of narrative the first time around or are we, as White would have it, selecting
and imposing an emplotment or story line derived from our own present? Are
stories lived or just told? Do we explain our lives to ourselves like the
unfolding of a story?
Just as it is impossible to have a narrative without
a narrator we cannot have a history without a historian. What is the role of
the historian in recreating the past? Every history contains ideas or theories
about the nature of change and continuity held by historians.[6] Epistemologically,
for White the discipline of history is best viewed as a literary artifact
producing knowledge as much by aesthetic as by any other criteria. While we
acknowledge history's literariness and fabricated character, we are not
forbidden from addressing the past as a
narrative as well as our capacity to describe it in narrative
*What is the character of historical evidence and what function does it
perform?*
It should be clear by now that I endorse White's
view that our understanding of the past is viewed as much the product of how as well as what the historian writes. Because we cannot escape the formative
structures of language when we write history, the so called raw
"facts" of history are likewise always processed in a written or
literary form. If we as students of history, were asked to give an example of a
historical "fact" the normal response is to quote an incontrovertible
event or description that every recognised (published?) historian agrees upon.
That slavery was the ultimate cause of the American Civil War is clearly not
such a "fact" it is a complex interpretation based on the relating of
disparate occurrences, events and human intentions translated as actions
involving outcomes. But if we say the American President James Madison was
short, slight, bald with a squeaky voice, does this incline us toward an
interpretation that he was weak, could not therefore hold his cabinet together,
and eventually became a dupe of Napoleon?[7] History is about the process of
translating evidence into facts. The historian does this. Even when straight
from the dusty archive, the evidence always preexists within narrative
structures and is freighted with cultural meanings (who put the archive
together, why, and what did they include or exclude?), "facts" then
are never actually raw or brute without inherent meaning.
The historian invests evidence with meaning by
correlating and placing it within a context (sometimes called the process of
colligation or as William Dray calls it configuration) which then leads her to
generate the "facts."[8] This process of contextualisation is
undertaken by the historian as part of her process of interpretation by
relating masses of apparently unconnected data with a consequent constitution
of meaning. The evidence of the past is processed through the mechanism of
inference: historians construe meaning employing categories of analysis
determined by the nature of the evidence. The traces of the past are still
generally viewed as providing objects from which to mine the meaning, or as sources from which social theories of
explanation can be constructed - or the
story. We could, of course, always regard evidence as the signifier of
something else. This positioning of the evidence is where the historian's own
views, cultural situation, and intellectual preferences may emerge through the
social theories selected for deployment, but most importantly because of the
narrative structure assembled to facilitate explanation. This is not, then,
merely a matter of subjectivity - it is rather the need to understand the role
of traces and their representation or construel by the historian in the
creation of historical knowledge via their organisation in the narrative form.
*What is the role of the historian, social theory, and the construction of explanatory
frameworks in historical understanding?*
In order to escape impositionalism hard core
empiricists usually deny its legitimacy as a practice by suggesting the
historian must be not only impartial and objective in her treatment of the
evidence, but withal also reject the overt use of social theory or narrative
models in interpreting the past[9] - notably White's fictive invention of the
past.
In spite of the doubts of Marwick and Elton, since
the 1920's social and cultural history has been popular precisely because it
has demanded the construction of explanations of how post-industrial society
has been able/unable to cope with the massive social changes which have
occurred in the train of capitalist industrialisation. The modernisation
process is inexplicable without recourse to a utilitarian kind of history in
which historians do actually play quite an active role in its construction.
They play this role either by empathically re-thinking the thoughts of past
historical actors, or by constructing explanations (hypotheses?) based on the
facts rather than just waiting for them to suggest themselves. It is difficult
for such empiricists to accept what has now become a commonplace, that
historical knowledge is not objective but is grounded either in a whole series
of originating subjects or, from a postmodern perspective, has no author at
all!
Questioning the past by sociological and
anthropological constructionism in the second half of the twentieth century has
become transmuted into what has become known since the late 1980's as the New
Cultural History. As a variant of constructionism New Cultural History works on
principles derived not only from anthropology but also the broader intellectual
movement of post-structuralism which as we know itself emerged from literary
critical theory in the 1970's. The modernist notion that understanding emanates
from a centre - the independent knowledge-centred individual subject which we
designate variously as Man, the author, or the evidence - is in crisis because of
the objection that meaning may be generated by socially encoded and constructed
discursive practices. This situation is compounded when language is considered
as recalcitrant and a subversion of meaning rather than a pure medium of
representation. Is it any longer possible to write history when not only are we
looking at it through our constructed categories of analysis, but the narrative
medium of exchange itself confounds the realist and empiricist dependence upon
the correspondence between history as narrative and "the past" as it
once existed?
White's formalistic construction of history with its
emphasis on the literary artifice of interpretative narrative rather than
either objective empiricism or social theorising means writing history requires
the emplotment of the past not just according to the evidence, but taking into
account the rhetorical, metaphorical and ideological strategies of explanation
also employed by historians.[10] It is to this I now turn.
*How significant to historical explanation is its
_narrative_ form?*
Given the central role played in writing the past by
historians, history, to be viewed accurately, must be understood to be a
cultural product existing within
history, rather than an objective methodology outside history. This places the truth claims of historical
knowledge under the most searching inquiry and brings us to the fourth key
question - posed by White along with Collingwood, and more recently Louis Mink,
Arthur Danto, and William Dray - what is the peculiar significance of narrative
in generating historical knowledge, and what is its relationship to the
previous three questions posed? The modernist empiricist historical method
insists the explanation of what actually happened in the past emerges in a
naturalistic fashion from the archival raw data, its meaning discovered and offered as interpretation
in the form of the story related
explicitly, impersonally, transparently, and without resort to any of the
tricks and bookish devices used by writers of literary narratives. Style is
thus deliberately expunged as an issue, or relegated to the level of a minor
problem of presentation.
For most analytical philosophers of history the
essence of historical understanding is the ability to recognise, construct and
follow a narrative-story based upon the available evidence. A historical
narrative is a factual version of "this happened then that" i.e., an intelligible sequence of individual
statements about past events and/or the experiences of people or their actions,
capable of being followed by a reader while he or she is pulled along by the
author toward the known conclusion. All narratives possess the basic power to
make over events and explain why they happened, but historical narratives are
overlaid by the assumptions held the historian about the forces influencing the
nature of causality.
The common-sense version of the general empiricist
and reconstructionist position on the utility of narrative is well described by
pro-narrative philosopher W.B. Gallie
Historical understanding is the exercise of the capacity to follow a story, where the story is known to be based on evidence and it put forward as a sincere effort to get at the story...[11]
Gallie is suggesting here that the actual events as they really occurred in the
story of the past have a striking resemblance to the shape of the narrative eventually produced by the
so called narrative historian - the narrative is found (discovered?) by the
historian in the events themselves. That narrative is reproduced through the
process of referentiality. In a view rejected by Hayden White (and Keith
Jenkins, Louis Mink, and Paul Ricoeur) that we do not live stories, but only
recount our lived experience in the story form, the American philosopher of
history David Carr holds there is a basic continuity or correspondence between
history as it is lived (the past) and history as it is written (narrated).
Narrative and history are homologous to each other.[12] Are we justified in
claiming, like David Carr and in distinction to White, that because our lives
are narrativised and written history is a text, then surely the past itself
conforms to the structure of narrative? White's alternative to this view, while
still emphasising the importance of narrative in historical understanding, reverses
the argument - the narrative does not
preexist but a narrative is invented and provided by the historian.
Consequently, there are many different stories to be told about the same
events, the same past. While still constrained by what actually happened (historian's
do not invent events, people or processes) as the French historian Paul Veyne
suggests, the meaning of history as a story comes from a plot, which is
imposed, or as Hayden White insists invented, as much as found by the
historian.[13]
The argument runs therefore just as there are no
grounds for believing that an empiricist methodology can guarantee an
understanding of the past as it actually was, neither is there a discoverable original narrative emplotment. Put
plainly, White holds that we cannot replace the foundationalism of empiricism
with a narrative equivalent. However, the deconstructively selfreflexive and
self-conscious historian may, while accepting it is she who authors the past,
may feel it is possible to legitimately offer an interpretation that although
it does not claim to the true narrative is nevertheless a plausible
rendering of it. As White himself points out, the range of emplotments upon
which the historian draws though wide, because of the combinations possible, is
formally limited to the four main kinds - romance, tragedy, satire and comedy -
and is in this respect no different to that of other narrators who operate in
the realm of fiction. Of course of equal significance to the narrative
emplotment is the dimension of figurative description - the role of metaphor,
trope, style, etc.[14] All this suggests something of a return to Aristotle's
view of a continuity between observer and observed, mind and knowledge, rather
than accepting the modernist Kantian notion of a gap between them and the real
possibility of truthful knowledge.[15] Narrative may be regarded as explanatory
only to the degree one sees its function as fixing the past as it actually happened or what is tellable about it?
*Conclusion*
White has spent 22 years labouring to persuade us
that our access to the past is always constituted textually as when, for
example, historians create a context within their text in order to develop an
interpretation. Our sources are not the same as the past. The sources' meaning is arbitrary because of the lack of
absolute meanings and the opaque character of language, and the arbitrary and
socially provided relationship between the signifying word and the concept it
signifies. Language cannot generate absolute correspondences between things and
their description.
Hayden White follows other historians interested in
the cognitive role of narrative, like Louis Mink, D.G. Polkinghorne, W.B.
Gallie and Paul Ricoeur among many others, and like them he questions the
cognitive function of narrative.[16] Written history is more than merely
innocent storytelling. He claims the act of organising historical data into a
narrative constitutes the illusion of reality and coherence, and in lending a
spurious tidiness to the process ultimately may serve as a mechanism for the
exercise of power within contemporary society. As White suggests, even when
acknowledging and describing the messiness of the past, the very act of
narration imposes an unavoidable "...continuity, wholeness, closure and
individuality that every `civilised' society wishes to see itself as
incarnating..."[17] All historical narrative for White is thus subject to
the demands of ideology, and in its turn gives effect to it.
Viewing history as literary artifact is not a
debilitating nor less a terminal complaint. Rather, recognising the importance
of narrative explanation in our lives as well as in the study of the past could
liberate historians as we acknowledge and try to narrate the disruptive
discontinuity and chaos of the past for and in the present. This desire is, in
itself, a product of our own age's pre-occupation with understanding the nature
of our seemingly chaotic lives. History is itself historical - its methods and
concepts as well as the debates about its nature are the products of historical
time periods. The rediscovery in the past 22 years of the importance of
narrative as an access to the tellable worlds of the past is very much, I would
suggest, the result of White's purposeful and formalistic rhetorical constructionism.
1 Hayden White, "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," in Tropics
of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism
(1978), pp. 81-100.
2 Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story:
History as Text and Discourse
(1995)
3 E.H. Carr,
What Is History? (1980 Edn. First published 1961) passim ; Arthur Marwick, The
Nature of History (1970), p. 21.
4 A lucid though unsympathetic introduction to this
issue is to be found in Alex Callinicos,
Theories and Narratives:
Reflections on the Philosophy of History
(1995), Introduction, pp. 2-4. See also Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking
History (1991), pp. 1013.
5 M.C. Lemon,
The Discipline of History and the
History of Thought (1995), p. 131.
6 Lemon, Ibid. p. 133. See also Philip Stewart,
"This is Not a Book Review: On Historical Uses of Literature," Journal
of Modern History , Vol. 66, No. 3, September 1994, pp. 521-538.
7 This description is to be found in Thomas A.
Bailey and David M. Kennedy, The American Pageant (Tenth Edition, 1994), p 225.
8 William H. Walsh, "Colligatory Concepts in
History," in Patrick Gardiner (Ed.)
The Philosophy of History (1974), p. 136. William Dray, Philosophy
of History (1993 Second Edn.), pp. 89-113.
9 R.G. Collingwood,
The Idea of History (1946, Revised Edition 1994), pp. 302,
395-395.
10 The term used by the philosopher of history
Michael E. Hobart to describe this attention to the role of narrative in
writing history is rhetorical constructionism, while White describes it
variously as the "metahistorical" or "...essentially poetic
act" in which the historian "...prefigures the historical
field." See Hobart, "The Paradox of Historical
Constructionism," History and Theory , Vol. 8, No. 1,
1989, pp. 43-58 and Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth Century Europe (1973),
pp. ixx. The main engagements with White in Europe have been Gregor McLennan,
"History and Theory: Contemporary Debates and Directions," Literature
and History Vol. 10, No. 2, Autumn
1984, pp. 139-164; Jenkins, ReThinking History , op it. and On
"What is History? " (1995); Wulf Kansteiner, "Hayden White's
Critique of the Writing of History,"
History and Theory , Vol. 32,
No. 3, 1993, pp. 273-295; Paul A. Roth, "Hayden White and the Aesthetics
of Historiography," History of the Human Sciences , Vol. 5,
1992, pp. 17-35; A. Marwick, "Two Approaches to Historical Study: The
Metaphysical (Including Postmodernism) and the Historical," Journal
of Contemporary History , Vol. 30, No. 1, January 1995, pp. 5-36. The only
full application and critique of White's methodology of history is to be found
in Alun Munslow, Discourse and Culture: The Creation of America, 1870-1920 (1992). The most recent assessment of the
role of narrative in writing the past and other issues concerning the
postmodern condition of history is to be found in Robert F. Berkhofer, op cit.
11 W.B. Gallie,
Philosophy and the Historical
Understanding (1964), p. 105,
author's italics. See also Louis Mink, "Narrative Form as a Cognitive
Instrument," in R. Canary and H. Kozicki (Eds.), The Writing of History:
Literary Form and Historical Understanding
(1978), pp. 129-149.
12 David Carr, "Narrative and the Real World:
An Argument for Continuity," History and Theory , Vol. 25, No. 2,
1986, pp. 117-131.
13 Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essays on
Epistemology (1984); Hayden White,
"The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," in Tropics
of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism
(1978), p. 82.
14 Hayden White,
The Content of the Form: Narrative
Discourse and Historical Representation
(1987), p. 81. F.R. Ankersmit, "The Dilemma of Contemporary
AngloSaxon Philosophy of History,"
History and Theory , Beiheft , 25 (1986).
15 F.R. Ankersmit,
History and Tropology: The Rise
and fall of Metaphor (1994), pp.
25-28.
16 Louis Mink, "Narrative Form", op cit.;
Gallie, op cit.; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (3 Vols., 1984, 1985, 1988); D.G.
Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1988).
17 White, Content of the Form , op cit., p. 87. History , op it. and On "What is History? " op cit.; Wulf Kansteiner, "Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History," History and Theory , Vol. 32, No. 3, 1993, pp. 273-295; Paul A. Roth, "Hayden White and the Aesthetics of Historiography," History of the Human Sciences , Vol. 5, 1992, pp. 17-35; A. Marwick, "Two Approaches to Historical Study: The Metaphysical (Including Postmodernism) and the Historical," Journal of Contemporary History , Vol. 30, No. 1, January 1995, pp. 5-36. The only full application and critique of White's methodology of history is to be found in Alun Munslow, Discourse and Culture: The Creation of America, 1870-1920 (1992). The most recent assessment of the role of narrative in writing the past and other issues concerning the postmodern condition of history is to be found in Robert F. Berkhofer, op cit. 13 W.B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (1964), p. 105, author's italics. See also Louis Mink, "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," in R. Canary and H. Kozicki (Eds.), The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding (1978), pp. 129-149. 14 David Carr, "Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity," History and Theory , Vol. 25, No. 2, 1986, pp. 117-131. 15 Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essays on Epistemology (1984); Hayden White, "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), p. 82. 16 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987), p. 81. F.R. Ankersmit, "The Dilemma of Contemporary AngloSaxon Philosophy of History," History and Theory , Beiheft , 25 (1986). 17 F.R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and fall of Metaphor (1994), pp. 25-28. 18 Louis Mink, "Narrative Form", op cit.; Gallie, op cit.; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (3 Vols., 1984, 1985, 1988); D.G. Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1988). 19 White, Content of the Form , op cit., p. 87.