The Narrativization of Real EventsAuthor(s): Hayden WhiteReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Summer, 1981), pp. 793-798Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343152 .Accessed: 13/08/2012 02:43

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Critical Response

III

The Narrativization of Real Events

Hayden White

In their commentaries on my "Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Marilyn Waldman and Louis Mink raise issues having to do with the scope of my examples, on the one side, and what might be called

my categorical confusion, on the other. Waldman suggests that if I had not depended so heavily on European materials but had examined other traditions of historical writing, I would have been better able to make the case for the annals form as a kind of narrative and would not have

slipped into the error of regarding the kind of narrative favored by modern Western historians as the model against which all other kinds of historical representation are to be measured. I must, in my ignorance of matters Arabic, accept what she has to say about the cultivation of the annals genre in Islamic centers which boast of both a high degree of

literacy and a manifest consolidation of political and social authority. She is certainly right in suggesting that the decision to use the annals or list form of historical representation should not be taken as evidence either of ignorance or stupidity in all cases but may well be, in those cases in which prospective audiences possess the appropriate level of reading competence, a sign of the establishment of conventions for conveying meanings that are every bit as full and sophisticated as anything pro- duced by modern Western historians.

I am less sanguine about the prospects of resolving the problems raised by narrative theory by collapsing the distinction between discourse and narrative on the basis of their shared status as acts or transactions between authors and their readers governed by different kinds of con- tractual obligations. While this kind of "speech-act" approach to the

? 1981 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/81/0704-0013$01.00

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794 Critical Response Hayden White

problem of narration, narrativization, and narrative may no doubt lead to greater understanding of the social conventions that render different kinds of discourse appropriate or inappropriate ("felicitous" is the term favored by speech-act theorists), it will not, I surmise, give us much insight into the psychological, aesthetic, or moral appeal of different forms of discourse. Above all, this contextual, conventionalist, or situa- tional approach to the problem of discourse offers no prospect at all of accounting for the appeal of those forms of discourse that are manifestly infelicitous vis-a-vis the normal expectations of audiences but are none- theless effective for changing the rules under which different kinds of discourse are construed to be felicitous or infelicitous. Speech-act theory, like the theory of evolution before the advent of modern genetics, can tell us a great deal about why genres persist but virtually nothing about variations or changes in generic formations.

I believe, conversely, that the study of narrative as a form of dis- course preeminently suited to mediate between alternative notions of what the moral order should consist of offers the prospect of accounting, at least in part, for changes in what audiences regard as the appropriate modes of discourse as well as the appropriate contents or referents of different modes of representation. One can find any number of possible meanings in a given genre by imputing to real or imagined audiences a competence to do with a text whatever it takes to make that text

meaningful. Thus when considering what can or should count as a nar- rative per se, the use of a contextual, historical, or empirical approach can only result in the conclusion that anything can so count as long as the social context in question decides that it is a narrative and not some-

thing else. One can confidently predict, I think, that the prosecution of the speech-act or reader-competent approach to the problem of genre will only result in a list of examples as long and as lacking in order as the list of different contexts identified. As Roland Barthes points out in his "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," the path of empiricism can lead only to confusion. Why not, as Barthes suggests, follow the lead of linguists (who, in their study of languages, have taken a resolutely deductive approach) by first postulating hypotheses and then seeing what insights and understanding result from their application to specific cases.1

Since I have taken this deductive path in my own consideration of the value of narrativity in the representation of (historical) reality, I am

1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 80-82.

Hayden White, professor in the program in the history of con- sciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe.

Critical Inquiry Summer 1981 795

perfectly willing to entertain the notion that my suggested model may contribute nothing to the understanding of any specific kind of narrative practice. The question is, Does ascribing to narrative a moralistic or moralizing function, rather than a primarily cognitive or aesthetic func- tion, yield any insight into some narrative practices and specifically into the narrative practices of historians in the West? And because I have taken the deductive rather than the empirical path (the examples I gave of annals, chronicles, and histories being illustrative of the principles informing my hypotheses, not universal paradigms), I am especially vul- nerable to the criticism Mink has made of my essay. For the thrust of Mink's criticism, as I understand it, has to do with a confusion of cate- gories, on the one hand, and a failure to demonstrate the "necessity" or "universality" of the linkage between "narrativization" and "moraliza- tion," on the other.

I assume we agree that narrativization is what Fredric Jameson calls "the central function or instance of the human mind"2 or what Mink himself calls, in an essay on "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," "a form of human comprehension" that is productive of meaning by its imposition of a certain formal coherence on a virtual chaos of "events," which in themselves (or as given to perception) cannot be said to possess any particular form at all, much less the kind that we associate with "stories."3 The question is, With what kind of meaning does storying endow those events which are products of human agency in the past and which we call "historical events"?

Mink believes that the transformation of events into stories endows them with cognitive meaning. In fact, as he has argued, the very notion of event is so ambiguous that it makes no sense at all to speak of an event per se but only of events under description.4 In other words, the kind of descriptive protocol used to constitute events as facts of a particular sort determines the kind of fact they are considered to be. For Mink, nar- rativity is a mode of description which transforms events into historical facts by demonstrating their ability to function as elements of completed stories. Thus the question he must address in this context is why this demonstration of an event's capacity to function as an element in a completed story should constitute grounds for claiming its cognitive authority rather than its moral suasion or aesthetic satisfaction.

This question has more significance for modern philosophy of his- tory than for modern historiography since modern historiography (un- like its classical prototypes) unfolds under the imperative to provide

2. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y, 1981), p. 13.

3. Louis O. Mink, "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison, Wis., 1978), p. 132.

4. See ibid., pp. 145-47; all further references to this essay will be included in the text.

796 Critical Response Hayden White

more than the aesthetic satisfaction of its rhetorical clothing. In its as-

piration to the status of a kind of science, again unlike its medieval

prototypes, it specifically eschews the impulse to be morally edifying, except of course to the extent that truth is conceived to be morally edifying in itself-the "the truth shall make you free" syndrome. At the same time, however, those who defend historiography as an instrument of cognition (rather than a product of cognition) have had to admit that if history is a science, it is a damned strange science and possibly not even a science at all in any modern, and theoretically established, sense of the term. This is why modern philosophers of history generally insist that historical knowledge is the province of the understanding rather than of reason, where true science takes its rise. In their view, under-

standing is a kind of knowledge which, while not having the rigor, test-

ability, and precision of scientific knowledge, nonetheless yields insight into the way things-and especially things human-really are. And if we are to give a name to the ground in consciousness of this kind of knowl-

edge which, while not exactly rational and not exactly scientific, is none- theless real knowledge, we may call it "common sense."

It is not surprising, then, that Mink argues for common sense as the kind of cognition the narrative form serves. Thus he writes:

Both historians and writers of imaginative fiction know well the problems of constructing a coherent narrative account, with or without the constraint of arguing from evidence, but even so they may not recognize the extent to which narrative as such is not just a technical problem for writers and critics but a primary and ir- reducible form of human comprehension, an article in the consti- tution of common sense. ["Narrative Form," p. 132]

And on the question of the kind of truth to which historical narratives

lay claim, he writes:

Inseparable from the question of how narratives aggregate is a second problem about the sense in which a narrative may be true or false. This question arises only if a narrative as such does have holistic properties, that is, if the form of the narrative, as well as its individual statements of fact, is taken as representing something that may be true or false.... It is an unsolved task of literary theory to classify the ordering relations of narrative form; but whatever the classification, it should be clear that a historical narrative claims truth not merely for each of its individual statements taken dis- tributively, but for the complex form of the narrative itself. ["Nar- rative Form," p. 144]

I find nothing in these quotations with which to disagree; in fact, I could have cited them as buttresses to my own argument on the mor-

Critical Inquiry Summer 1981 797

alizing function of historical narrativity. For it seems illuminating to me to construe narrative as a form which, as used in historical representa- tions, "represent[s] something that may be true or false"; and this "some-

thing,"' I would agree, is nothing other than that set of commonplaces comprised of beliefs about the meaning or ultimate nature of reality, shared by the average members of any given culture-what we call com- mon sense. But I would also contend that what we must mean by common sense (if the term is not to be construed so generally as to include science, art, philosophy, religion, and everything else that we normally contrast with it) is more particularly that sense which we have in our function as members of particular cultures; that is, I would contend that the world has a specifically moral, as well as a determinative physical, meaning. Story forms, or what Northrop Frye calls plot structures, represent an

armory of relational models by which what would otherwise be nothing but chains of mechanical causes and effects can be translated into moral terms. They are not, as Mink suggests in his response to my essay, merely devices allowing us to accommodate the notion of human intentions, aims, and purposes in our representations of human affairs. Story forms not only permit us to judge the moral significance of human projects, they also provide the means by which to judge them, even while we

pretend to be merely describing them. And Mink suggests as much when he remarks:

Only by virtue of such [narrative] form can there be a story of failure or of success, of plans miscarried or policies overtaken by events, of survivals and transformations which interweave with each other in the circumstances of individual lives and the development of institutions. ["Narrative Form;' p. 144]

If this were only a technical matter (this business of "failure or of success, of plans miscarried or policies overtaken by events," etc.), if only a contribution to our understanding of the instrumental and operational difficulties involved in realizing plans, executing projects, and the like, narrativization could not claim a cognitive authority different in kind from, although every bit as important as, the sort of authority claimed by disciplines that do not utilize its techniques. It is only by virtue of what it teaches about moral wisdom, or rather about the irreducible moralism of a life lived under the conditions of culture rather than nature, that narrative can claim cognitive authority at all. As Mink points out, precisely because the same set of events can be plausibly narrativized as either tragedy or comedy, either romance or farce, narrative has the power to teach what it means to be moral beings (rather than machines endowed with consciousness) more or less capable and shrewd enough to carry out our intentions as we conceive them. Nobody ever learned to be more efficient in carrying out intentions or realizing goals by reading

798 Critical Response Hayden White

historical narratives. What can be learned from them is what it means to have intentions, to intend to carry them out, and to attempt to do so; and this meaning, or our sense of it, may well find a place in our com- monsensical notions of the way things really are. However, that place is not presided over by the cognitive but by the moral faculty; that is what makes it common.

Of course all I have said, I have said on the authority of common sense; accordingly, rather than offer arguments in defense of it, I should rest content with the conviction that since "everybody knows this," only those with uncommon sense will disagree with me. One of the conso- lations of common sense is that it signals its validity by the anticipated agreement accorded by "persons of goodwill." Indeed, one of its virtues is the conviction that informs it: agreement with its dicta is the very mark of goodwill. And so it is with the narrativization of real events: this conviction, like all convictions, can only be a moral one.

Space prohibits here a lengthy comment on Mink's discussion of annals as "unsolicited memory." I agree that the list of events he has summoned up from his own memory can tell us much about his personal interests, values, and beliefs but very little about his conception of his- torical reality. But this is not due to the list form but to the fact that the list is comprised of items drawn from personal rather than public mem-

ory. The fallacy in considering a historical account as a kind of collective

autobiography derives from a confusion of personal with public memory. So, too, the moral sense that is conveyed by the representation of past public events differs from that conveyed by the representation of per- sonal memories. The reason why a narrativization of personal memories tells us little about one's conception of history is that it is too full of one's

personal moral beliefs. An annalistic account of public memories, by con-

trast, tells us a great deal both about the annalist's conception of history and about his or her conception of public morality. It is the "publicity" that makes the difference.