Review

Reviewed Work(s): Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

by Hayden White
Review by: Carl A. Rubino
Source: MLN, Vol. 91, No. 5, Centennial Issue: Responsibilities of the Critic (Oct., 1976), pp.
1131-1135
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2907121
Accessed: 13-06-2017 01:24 UTC

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 1132 REVIEWS

phy, literary criticism, and linguistics: most prominent among those texts
not from the nineteenth century are the writings of Northrop Frye, Karl
Mannheim, Stephen C. Pepper, Giambattista Vico, and a group of struc-
turalists. Metahistory, itself an embodiment of a radically interdisciplinary
method, is an heroic attempt to set historical writing firmly within the
domain of the human sciences by undermining its pretenses to a privileged
objectivity and by arguing against any claims it might make to essential
uniqueness of method and presentation. Like so many others, White's
attempt at a "deconstruction" involves the paradigm of language: he ar-
gues that historians and philosophers of history differ only in their aware-
ness of what they are doing, since both projects are informed by the same
"deep structure of the historical imagination." All historical writing of
scope, according to White, has a metahistorical foundation in the poetic act
that prefigures all conceptualization; history is first and foremost a linguis-
tic activity, one in which the voice of language can never be silenced.
White begins by noting that histories are verbal constructs which take the
form of narrative prose discourse. A work of history not only combines
raw data and a conceptual framework meant to organize and explain such
data but also contains a narrative structure that will determine its mode
of presentation: thus the positivist notion of history is joined to the philos-
ophy of history and to poetics. To that amalgam White seeks to add lin-
guistics, arguing for the presence of a deep structural content that forms
the precritical paradigm of what historical explanation should be: thus
every historical writing that is more than a monograph or an archival
record is marked by the presence of a metahistorical element.
It is important to observe that White locates the theoretical concepts that
historians employ to explain their data not at the deep level of historical
discourse but at its surface. Furthermore, he treats those concepts in poetic
rather than ideological terms: for him, they are rhetorical strategies that
historians use to create different kinds of "explanatory affect." White dis-
tinguishes three such strategies, which he calls emplotment, formal argu-
ment, and ideological implication. Each of those in turn has four possible
modes of articulation: for emplotment, following Frye, there are the ar-
chetypes of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire (which Frye defines as
"militant irony"); for formal argument, following Pepper, there are the
modes of formism, organicism, mechanism, and contextualism; and for
ideological implication, following Mannheim, there are the tactics of
anarchism, conservatism, radicalism, and liberalism. The "historiographi-
cal style" of an individual historian is constituted by a specific combination
of those modes, as White attempts to demonstrate in his chapters on the
development of "realism" in the great historians of the nineteenth century:
Michelet's writing is characterized by the mode of romance, Ranke's by the
mode of comedy, Tocqueville's by the mode of tragedy, and Burckhardt's
by the mode of satire.

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 M L N 1133

But the nineteenth century was more than a mere passage of years; it
was a grand tradition, in historical writing as well as in other areas of
human endeavor. In order to preserve a unified tradition amidst a welter
of specific differences, White argues for a deeper level of historical dis-
course at which those differences can be rendered accidental. This is the
level of the poetic act that prefigures the historical field and thus informs
all historical writing. White continues to use his favorite number in distin-
guishing four modes of prefiguration: this time he follows Vico and the
structuralists (Jakobson, Uvi-Strauss, Lacan, and Benveniste are cited) in
identifying them as the tropological modes of metaphor (representation),
metonymy (reduction), synecdoche (integration), and irony (scepticism,
relativism). Each of those is a mode of consciousness that produces a dis-
tinctive linguistic protocol by which the historical field is prefigured and on
the basis of which specific strategies of historical interpretation can be
employed to explain that field. White contends "that the recognized mas-
ters of nineteenth-century historical thinking can be understood, and that
their relations to one another as participants in a common tradition of
inquiry can be established, by the explication of the different tropological
modes which underlie and inform their work." It is evident, then, that the
deep structure of the historical imagination not only founds the work of
the historical thinkers of the nineteenth century but also makes it possible
for us to write historical works about them.
All that forms the theoretical basis for White's history of nineteenth-
century historical writing. In his view, by the end of the Enlightenment the
ironic mode had triumphed as the dominant form of historical conscious-
ness; and a crisis in historical thought resulted when Herder and the
romantics who came after him attacked the sceptical attitude of the
philosophes and argued for the primacy of the metaphorical mode. That
crisis, dialectical as it was, naturally attracted the attention of Hegel, who
attempted to move historical thought forward by proposing synecdoche
(for Hegel, the incarnation of Geist in great historical figures) as a way
beyond irony. White maintains that Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and
Burckhardt failed to advance beyond Hegel, their work being primarily an
attempt to develop the various explanatory strategies mentioned above.
The philosophy of history was reborn in the second half of the century
with Marx, whose reduction of the historical process to a superstructure
that reflects a base proceeded from the metonymical mode of historical
consciousness. Nineteenth-century historical thought ended as it began,
with a crisis: though the century's great historians had succeeded in pro-
ducing scientific histories of considerable scope, it was perceived that their
equally plausible versions of the same events were too often mutually ex-
clusive. Thus history's claim to be an "objective science" was seriously un-
dermined, and the ironic consciousness once again emerged triumphant.
This loss of confidence led Nietzsche to make his impassioned "poetic

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 1134 REVIEWS

defense of history in the metaphorical mode," which in turn engendered

Croce's attempt to locate historical thought in the realm of aesthetics. But
Croce succeeded only in emphasizing the force of irony, leaving history
mired in a crisis from which it has yet to emerge. White's book is an
ambitious attempt to get history moving forward again, to liberate histori-
cal thought by depriving the ironic attitude "of its status as the necessary
perspective from which to view the historical process." White urges his
readers to recognize that irony is only one of several legitimate perspec-
tives; and his book ends on a note of hope:

Historians and philosophers of history will then be freed to conceptualize history,

to perceive its contents, and to construct narrative accounts of its processes in
whatever modality of consciousness is most consistent with their own moral and
aesthetic aspirations. And historical consciousness will stand open to the re-
establishment of its links with the great poetic, scientific, and philosophical con-
cerns which inspired the classic practitioners and theorists of its golden age in the
nineteenth century.

I have tried to indicate that Metahistory is an exciting and important book

that deserves careful reading and much discussion. It remains certain that
specialists of various stripes will find much to dispute; and, though it is
obvious that I find much to admire in the book and am quite partial to
White's enterprise, I must note certain reservations of my own about the
manner in which he advances his argument, particularly in his crucial
theoretical introduction, with its groups of categories borrowed from other
thinkers. I do not mean to suggest that such generously acknowledged
borrowing is somehow illegitimate; but it does seem to me that White has
not taken enough trouble to work the ideas of Frye, Pepper, Mannheim,
Vico, and the structuralists into a coherent system of his own. The detailed
mediation that is essential to true integration is missing; instead, the bor-
rowed categories seem to be rather crudely abstracted from their native
contexts, cut off from the detailed arguments that gave them conceptual
flesh and blood. Such excessively violent uprooting and hasty replanting in
a soil not made ready for them deprives those "tender plants" of much of
their force and beauty, creating a disordered intellectual landscape where
it is often difficult to follow the path of White's argument. To leave Plato's
metaphor for a musical one, a kind of conceptual cacophony results; and
we can only regret that White has failed to form a truly euphonious compo-
sition from all those borrowed themes. The regret is made more intense by
a related failing: White's often tortuous style, together with his failure to
correct some embarrassing typographical errors, makes his book needlessly
difficult and even painful to read. Thus damage is done to the force of
White's argument; and we might well suspect that his failings will prove
convenient for those who seek a way to avoid confronting the issues he
raises. It would be a savage irony indeed if deficiencies that White could

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 M L N 1135

have remedied serve to reinforce the ironic attitude that Metahistory sets
out to explode.

The University of Texas at Austin CARL A. RUBINO

Frank D. McConnell. The Spoken Seen: Film & the Romantic

Imagination. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1975), 186 pp.

This book ought to enjoy a large audience. Romanticists should find its
thesis, that film is "the direct incarnation of romantic aesthetics" (153), an
intriguing one. Movie buffs will find the directness of its value judgments
("Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? is a major film" [167] and Straw Dogs is
"more fascistic than any Leni Riefenstahl ever conceived of and more
ostentatiously amateurish than the worst recent production of a college
filmmaking course" [101]) refreshing. Serious film theorists should ap-
preciate the ingeniousness of this attempt to work out "a grammar which
may aid us in containing and preserving the curious experience of this
most real, unreal of the arts" (43). Indeed, all students of modern criticism
should profit from considering the worth of a book which, to quote the
proud blurb on the dust-jacket, "links Wordsworth, Byron, and Descartes
with Frankenstein, Tarzan, and Charlton Heston."
The Spoken Seen makes such bold connections over and over again. The
book may seem illogical and disorganized, but its structure is consistent: we
may call it the structure of conspicuous subsumption. Without the tra-
ditional baggage of footnotes or bibliography, McConnell's discourse flies
weightlessly from Saussure to Chomsky to Wittgenstein to Levi-Strauss, for
all of whom language "represents not only a prime form, but a prime
condition of consciousness" (57), then zips from Byron to Visconti to
Wordsworth to Chaplin to Stendhal to Renoir, evoking their common
concern with "the evolution of process out of the instantaneous" (96), then
zooms in on Blake, Shelley, Flaubert, Gide, Joyce, and Dryden, all of whom
"are in fundamental agreement that the relationship between artist and
form is one of contrariety" (121).
Obviously, McConnell is not picky about his rubrics. As long as a concept
is inclusive, it can be used; and the less clearly defined the rubric, the
greater its inclusiveness. This is the case above all with "romanticism,"
which McConnell never defines, but incessantly endorses. "Romanticism"
is something fathered by Descartes, prefigured by Milton, and repre-
sented not only by the poets and painters of the so-called "Romantic
period," but also by Dryden, Yeats, Wilde, Hemingway, Zola, Dreiser,
Andre Bazin, Max Beerbohm, Andrew Sarris, and James Fenimore

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