Hayden White in Bucharest

Published in Dilema veche, no. 357, 16-22 Dec. 2010

http://www.dilemaveche.ro/sectiune/polul-plus/articol/onoarea-dezonora-istoria

Bogdan Ștefănescu

On the Honor of Dishonoring History.

Hayden White in Bucharest

This may well be the first time that the University of Bucharest grants a doctor honoris causa to a troublemaker. For that is what Professor Hayden White is, an eternal troublemaker.

Many questioned the merits and accomplishments of this sparkle-eyed, prestigious 82-year-old critic with a teenager’s appetite for inflammation, yet none has been able to shake the stature of this provocative and renowned personality of postmodern theory.

In the conferences and roundtables he has attended in Bucharest at the Central University Library and the New Europe College, the voice of the venerable Professor White picked up in scherzando the staid ideas of the greenhorn White, the young critic who, almost half a century ago, looked back in anger at the tradition of historiography. After all, he owes his fame to his pioneering work in the late 60s and early 70s when Hayden White started causing havoc among historians.

The door was opened by ‘The Burden of History’, his revolutionary 1966 article in History and Theory, vol. 5, no 2, 1966, pp. 111-134 (later included in Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Here is a brief and plain list of his claims in that legendary text.

First, that historians are rigid, yet lacking rigor, that they are impressionistic, yet devoid of sensitivity, that history has become a second-hand art and a third-hand science (after the exact and the natural sciences). Here White scratches open old scars by recollecting scornful portraits of historians by Nietzsche’ (The Birth of Tragedy and ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’), George Eliot, Ibsen, Gide, Th. Mann, Camus, Sartre etc.

Then, that historians are hypocrites and theoretically infantile when they profess to be exempt from both the requirements of experimental science and the standards of stylistic excellence and artistic intuition, while claiming that theirs is both a scientific and an artistic endeavor. In fact, historians insist on operating within an outdated Romantic schism between artists who despise science and scientists who ignore art. White demands of historians that they acknowledge history to be no more than a nineteenth-century historical accident which needs to be radically reconsidered in the middle of the twentieth century.

Not the least of White’s accusations in ‘The Burden of History’ is that historians are content to mouth governmental slogans and patriotic platitudes while failing to prepare us for historical catastrophes (much less foresee them), as the world wars demonstrate. He proclaims that history has become a morbid burden for his contemporaries as it merely perpetuates and legitimizes anachronistic institutions by means of an antiquarian discourse replete with necrophiliac fixations.

White offers that historians should adopt the emancipated stance of the modern art critic. Unlike the traditional historian, the art critic acknowledges several versions of reality. Constable’s representation of life is neither more ‘correct’ nor less than that of Cézanne, it simply relies on a different figurative principle of internal cohesion. For history, the dominant metaphor of a text selects and organizes the historical material in accordance with a certain style of representing the past.

It may well be that ‘The Burden of History’ was the germinating prelude of an emerging work. The article put forth the main themes of a philosophical path that was unfolding.

Metahistory

The next and carefully prepared stride for White was the take-off step for his legendary jump into posterity. History recorded the event as Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

Here the American theorist tackles an illusionist’s act as spectacular and scandalous as the magic of the old alchemists. Under the suspicious eyes of the experts, White materialized a convict whose sentence had been life transparency: the language of history. Hitherto, historians had cried treason whenever the manner of narrating would distract the reader’s attention and had deported the culprits to the realm of belletrism.

White dares us embrace a doctrine as shocking as alchemic transmutation, to wit, that any history is at heart a poetic text. That narrating fact or fiction is no more than story-telling and, like any story, it can be told in various ways. He instructs us that there are four styles of historical thought grafted on four master tropes produced by a tradition that yokes together such improbable peers as Vico and Kenneth Burke, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. White is not talking of mere decorative embellishments, but of organizing principles of our representations of the past. When touched by the magic wand of one of these four modes of discourse coagulation, the narrative assumes one of the corresponding archetypes of emplotment taken from Northrop Frye: romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. An initiate into the mysteries of the universe of discourse, White summons a table of correspondences invisible to the profane. Behind the four master tropes and the four narrative archetypes, loom Stephen C. Pepper’s four epistemological modes (formism, organicism, mechanism, and contextualism) and Karl Mannheim’s four ideological utopias (anarchism, radicalism, liberalism, and conservatism).

The theoretical groundwork is then followed by seductive accounts of the historical narratives of Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville şi Burkhardt and of the tropical manners of philosophers of history like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. All of these surveys rest on the intuition that the style of these diverse authors consists in the tension between the tropological, narrative, epistemological, and ideological choices.

Most of his critics and fans have been smitten by Hayden White’s pioneering courage: he was a neo-historicist a decade before Stephen Greenblatt, he assumed a postmodern condition before Lyotard described it, he practiced poststructuralist discourse analysis before the Derrida and Foucault craze hit America, and he proposed the pluralism of interpretations and ironic perspectivism a few years before Rorty did.

 White has done more than swim against the traditional tides. He has remained the opponent of any form of theoretical monotheism, of any inflexible critical jargon, even the revolutionary ones. An ironist through and through, White pushes irony to an act of ultimate lucidity by turning it on itself. Whenever he seemed to be an advocate of relativism, he proclaimed the need of moral imperatives, and whenever he seemed the champion of historiographic variations, he invoked transhistorical archetypes. This explains how he has managed to irritate the traditionalists and disappoint the postmodern. Free from any dogma, White holds that antidogmatic freedom is sacred. He is still eager to break the windows of any museum of ideas and allow the latter to breathe the open air again—live and grow once more.

A maverick of the interpretation of history, Hayden White has made history even outside his discipline. In 1972, one year before the publication of Metahistory, White helped inaugurate the age of academic autonomy and freedom of conscience when he won a Supreme Court lawsuit against the LA police, whom he accused of having undercover officers register for classes to infiltrate the campuses and spy on academics and students. Forty years later, White talked in Bucharest about the illegal nature of certain laws and about historians who learn nothing from history. Once again, he did what he has always been good at, scandalize and galvanize his public in the name of the freedom of thought and of human dignity.

This is most likely how Hayden White will always be remembered in postmodern culture, as a seducer and a subtle debater—and as an eternal troublemaker.

Bogdan Ştefănescu is associate professor at the Department of English, University of Bucharest, editor-in-chief of University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, and literary translator.