Philosophy of History After Hayden White by Doran Robert

Author:Doran, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

7

Hopeful Monsters or, The Unfulfilled Figure in Hayden White’s Conceptual System

Hans Kellner

To study the career of Hayden White is to study a series of concepts. His work is not primarily a sequence of monographs about one period, or one thinker, or one problem. It is, rather, driven by the force of the conceptual proposals he has offered. The first major proposal was that we consider the formal and ideological structures of historical texts from a standpoint that was based, at bottom, on the organizational force of rhetorical tropes in the construction of a coherent account of the past. Certainly, White’s desire to see things from a higher point of view, his tactic of moving up to a higher level of abstraction to grasp and better characterize a complex field of phenomena, found its first major expression in the tropes. Operating at a higher level than the field of historical discourse they were meant to clarify, the tropes could serve other discursive forms as well, and White was not reluctant to extend his ideas to narrative in general, by focusing on the level of narrative discourse where the tropological strategies came into play. And so, in time, the language of the tropes virtually disappeared from White’s work, to be replaced by a discussion of emplotment. No longer simply a way of categorizing plot-forms, such as the forms he had found in the work of Northrop Frye, emplotment became an ideological device of narrative, always forcing coherence (even by giving form to incoherence) on the events it presents. In this sense, emplotment, with its suppression of any sense of sublime chaos in history, is far from being a neutral medium for the representation of human events; it is rather, as White recognized, the ideological content of narrative form and the fulfillment of the promise provided by the tropes as narrative structures.

From the study of emplotment, White moved on to the mechanism by which emplotment, and narrative discourse in general, produced meaning and overcame non-meaning. This happens by way of a special form of explanation, a form that was neither genetic, nor logical, nor physical, but rather uniquely humanistic. It is called figuralism. Figuralism, as White describes it, is a special form of explanation, in which a later event calls forth and names an earlier one, which is then deemed to have somehow “caused” the later phenomenon. This is how emplotment functions: the conclusion of the narrative establishes and fixes the plot of the work, as romance, comedy, or whatever, and that emplotted outcome will not only establish the meaning of the whole, but will also assign to each of the parts of the story its significance as a figure to be fulfilled by a later event. These core concepts of the figural basis of emplotted narrativity have guided White’s work.

White begins as a young medievalist who quickly allied himself with older colleagues in publishing projects—appealing in the publishing world of the 1960s, when history was an important academic major—that took him into much wider areas than the medieval Church, his academic beginning.

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