Hayden White, History, and Literary Artifacts

In his essay “The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact,” theorist Hayden White tries to answer metahistorical questions by exhorting historians to embrace rather than deny the literaryorigins and confinement of historical narratives.  He critiques what he views as “a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they 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 the sciences” (82). White’s comment is not
so much a value judgment as a call to re-evaluate historical narratives with heightened attunement to the degree to which poetic and mythic construction play into historical narratives.

White builds upon Northrup Frye's view "that the historian works inductively" (82),
distinguishing this position with his by introducing the idea of "emplotment." White defines "emplotment" as the stories made out of chronicles and "the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle" (83). This notion foregrounds the literary action of constructing narrative out of a set of events. It is a product of "constructive imagination” and draws attention to the multiplicity of stories that an historian could conceivably tell with different emplotments—sometimes even with the same set of facts.

Building on R.G. Collingwood's idea of constructive imagination, White explains, "The
events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like--in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or play" (84). Much like a master storyteller might decide the trajectory and telos of his or her narrative by deliberately plotting the events of a story in a certain order, an historian recounts "value-neutral" historical events in such
a way as to impart not only value but genre on those events. White gives the example of the various accounts of the French Revolution, from Michelet to de Tocqueville, as examples of different stories from more or less the same data; however, the constructive emplotment of each narrative suggests different narrative arch or even genre: "They sought out different kinds of facts because they had different kinds of stories to tell[...]Simply because the historians shared with their audiences certain preconceptions about how the Revolution might be emplotted, in response to imperatives that were generally extra historical, ideological, aesthetic, or mythical" (85). White suggests that the way in which a certain set of events is configured and presented reveals an ideology concerning those events. The historian "emplots his account as a story of a particular kind. The reader, in the process of following the historian's account of those events, gradually comes to realize the story he is reading is of one kind rather than another: romance,
tragedy, comedy, satire, epic, or what have you" (86).

Like many before him, White argues that history can never be a mere reproduction of
events; but his original take on this view is that neither should it be, for "an historical narrative is not only a reproduction of the events reported in it, but also a complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the structure of those events in our literary tradition" (88). Semiotically, history’s reproduction necessarily implies a set of symbols which convey complex meanings in the same way as professedly literary texts. Furthermore, "The historical narrative thus mediates between the events reported in it on the one side and pregeneric
plot structures conventionally used in our culture to endow unfamiliar events and situations with meaning on the other." In other words, in order to explain an unknown a telos either unknown or known, an historical narrative must emplot an event in a generic structure which encodes how a writer interprets those facts. This process of ποίησις not only includes but also excludes events,another decision which reveals the constructed  meaning of even historical narratives. White adjures us to read history properly, "as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that 'liken' the
events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar in our literary culture" (91).
         

The discussion which concludes his essay includes an extended analysis of the play of
figurative language—especially metaphor and metonymy—in concretizing historical narratives. His understanding of the historian’s role is to familiarize the reader with the “unfamiliar” face of history; with that as his goal, the historian “must use figurative, rather than technical language” because technical language implies commonality and shared experience whereas figurative language seeks to convey the unfamiliar. To White, history is suffering today “because it has lost
sight of its origins in literary imagination”(99).

To conclude, I would speculate as to whether White’s paradigm only holds true for
generically simplistic historical narratives in which the author’s ideology is less ambiguous and his act of construction more heavy-handed. And what would White have to say about texts that overtly and consciously blur history and myth and not just implicate the weaving of such threads?