More Hayden White

“History in general is neither memory nor recollection, but the story of their relationship.  The indiscriminate cultivation of recollection, the conscious effort to remember everything, is a threat to memory’s power to restore consciousness’s original relationship with it’s world.”

Hayden White, Literary History: The point of it all, p.182

Filed under: hayden white, history , hayden white, history, memory, recollection

A sign of a world grown old

“Texts do not become “classics” because they are self decoding, as H.G. Gadamer believes; or because they do not conflict with a set of linguistic codes … .  They seem familiar to us because the question for which they provide answers is in the marrow of the modes of both thinking and acting that make up our civilisational endowment.  They are familiar to us because we have chosen them; we are a realisation of their potentialities for conceptualising the world.  When they become “strange” to us, it is a sign of a world grown old.  They become strange to us when they address themselves to questions that we no longer find compelling.”

Hayden White, Literary History: The point of it all, NLH, 2.1. 173-185, (1970).

White goes on to say, later in this essay, that writing good history is “a moral act”, and you can see it at work in the quote above.  The historian or critic who says, this, this should be compelling, is saying in effect, it is good to remember this thing, this way.  But this is not to say that the historian annoints themselves – this itself is one in which the reader has an equal hand, be they a scholar, a student, or simply someone on a bus somewhere, reading as they go.  The historian might require the courage to write, but the reader also requires the courage to judge, is this compelling?

Filed under: Historiography, hayden white, literature , hayden white, literary history, literature, reading, texts

The orthodox historian

“The orthodox historian is strongly committed … to the view that there is a clear distinction between getting things right and getting things wrong. In his elementary concern with getting things right, the orthodox historian signals his adherence to a view that has dominated the historical profession since its birth in the nineteenth century – namely, the view that history is at bottom a science, capable of realistically apprehending the world and of discovering a truth that is more than relative. Admittedly, historians are today less confident about the scientific status of history. Indeed, one of the most striking features of recent historiography has been its increasing scientisation as historians have come more and more to draw on the concepts and methods of the social sciences. It is true that some historians, most notably Hayden White, have argued that history is founded on a poetic apprehension of the world that is entirely prescientific in nature. But this is very much a minority position which, in its assertion that the historical fact is really a poetic factum, is in contradiction to the ingrained realism of the vast majority of historians. For the orthodox historian, the evidence that he has so laboriously discovered and assessed has a reality of its own reflecting the reality of the past itself, and he sees his task as the construction of a historical account that will explain and interpret this actual past.”

Allan Megill, ‘Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 51.3 (September, 1979), p458.

The narratives that historians tell about themselves and their own industry frequently appear – like this quotation here – incredibly naive. I find that in the reconstructions of their own discipline, its methods and the description of its work, they sell themselves short. I realise that this piece is nearly 30 years old now, and despite perhaps an increasing sophistication in descriptions about history as a discipline, prompted by new work in philosophy and literary theory, cultural studies, and new movements within history itself, many of the comments here can still be heard in contemporary debates.

Historians may have dropped the talk of ‘the past as it really was’ these days, but this isn’t my point. My point is to ask why they ever told themselves this story in the first place? Much more sophisticated – and I would say more accurately true to life – descriptions of historical work and thinking was certainly in circulation earlier than this. Perhaps less so in English, (but I doubt it – probably simply less obviously) – German speaking scholars had a rich tradition of historical thinking to draw upon through Dilthey, Husserl and Heidegger, just to mention a few.

History is always a site of contention, dialogue, debate – the very idea throws up contradictory urges and directions to pursue – enigmatic questions that go to the very core of what it means to be here, now, this body, living, with you. They can no more be resolved than some meaningless question like ‘the meaning of life’. However, they will always be pursued, precisely because we are who we are.

But the question still remains – why do historians tell themselves these deeply unhistorical stories? When Megill remarks “Derrida['s] De la Grammatologie reads like an absurdist parody of everything that has ever gone under the name of intellectual history”, how – supposing he has read the book at all – has he arrived at this view? How, when it has its roots in the deeply historical thinking of Husserl and Heidegger? What forces were at play that contributed to not only a pathetic representation of Derrida’s work, but that helped draw such a pathetic representation of Megill’s own, supposedly opposing, view?

Filed under: Derrida, Foucault, Historiography, hayden white, history, quotations