A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism
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A BEDROCK OF ORDER: HAYDEN WHITE'S LINGUISTIC HUMANISM HANS KELLNER Avbpa toL E'VVEJTE, [Lovcya, tokktpotov (Tell me, 0 Muse, of the man of many turns) The invocation of the Muse which opens the Odyssey does not, like that of the Iliad, identify its hero by name. He is called only polytropos, which is literally (although rarely) translated as "[the man of] many turns" - other renderings include "the adventurous man," "that ingenious hero," "the man of many devices" or (my own favorite) "skilled in all ways of contending." It was Odysseus who proposed the horse, given as a tribute, which opened the gates of Troy and ended a decade of futile, if glorious, slaughter. Poly- tropos seems an apt characterization of Hayden White, and polytropic of his book Metahistory. The issues raised by this book are bewildering. A language is scarcely available that will allow direct confrontation with a book so fully and openly about language. The historian, who is accustomed to more or less frontal attacks on his subject in the manner of Achilles, is frustrated by the "many turns" of the book, and by its ability to evade or absorb thrusts. In rhetoric, style of argument, authorial pose, and subject matter itself, Metahistory seems to dominate and control any discourse which might address it. The book we are to consider is titled Metahistory: The Historical Imagina- tion in Nineteenth-Century Europe, its subjects are historians, its course is diachronic; yet it specifically addresses literary criticism, philosophy, and his- tory. The politics of academic discourse reflected in this situation must be the proper subject of preliminary inquiry, because cultural politics - the politics of historical, literary, and philosophical thought in America - have shaped both the book itself and responses to it. Furthermore, because Hayden Whitet's own career as an historian and cultural critic has turned again and again to matters of cultural politics, the historian considering Metahistory is virtually compelled to examine the text as a political event and its writing as a political act. This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 2 HANS KELLNER This is not simple to do. The book is elaborately defended against inter- pretation because as a book about interpretation it not only gives a system of rules by which it might itself be interpreted, but it also at many points carries out such an interpretation. One has scarcely begun to read Metahistory before learning that it is "cast in an Ironic mode" (xii), and that its method is "formalist" (3).1 A few pages from the end of the book, we note that White takes this "purely formal way" of characterizing the interpretative strategies of the historians he discusses as a "value neutral" methodology (431). The strategy is explicitly announced shortly thereafter: "When it is a matter of choosing among these alternative visions of history, the only grounds for preferring one over another are moral or aesthetic ones" (433). By thus drawing its hermeneutic wagons into a circle Metahistory assumes the posture of the "master-text" by forcing any prospective critic to address it - that is, to name it - on its own terms. It is perfectly possible to assault the text on a variety of grounds, and it is certainly possible to disagree with the conten- tion that a "purely formal" approach (or any other) is "value neutral." White is clearly aware of all this, but he is also aware that any possible criticism of his text is already named and placed by the text itself. A con- frontation with Metahistory cannot begin from without because the book and its theory claims to comprehend and neutralize any such assault before it is made.2 Although the book is apparently impossible to outflank, it teaches a definite suspicion about the claims of any text and that there is no escape from "indenture," whether to literary, epistemological, ideological, or lin- guistic forms. Despite the inoculation that Metahistory carries out on any critical reader by naming and placing itself within its own self-contained system, and equally by implicating possible readings of it within its own compass, the book also demands that it be mistrusted. It is perhaps even willing to authorize - to name and accept as classifiable - the grounds for its own rejection. If this is the case, "reading" in the classical sense of a voluntary communication between a fixed text and a relatively free mind be- comes impossible: this permanent indenture seems to require either that one not read the book (by which I mean, not to follow its premises to their con- clusions, but rather to reject the exercise in advance), or to be read by it (to enter the text only to find oneself already in it.) To escape this apparent impasse, or at least to avoid it for a while, one may proceed by indirection (as Odysseus rather than Achilles) to consider questions oblique to the text, choosing to forget that this polytropic attitude is also that of Metahistory. The various assertions of Metahistory exist along two axes: one, an his- 1. All citations in this Beiheft of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nine- teenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London, 1973) are placed in parentheses. 2. On "master-texts," see Hayden White, "Review Essay: Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the "New Science" in History and Theory 15 (1976), 186. This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms WHITE S LINGUISTIC HUMANISM 3 torical tradition which bequeaths and authorizes the basic direction of the book; and the other, a discourse of current cultural politics which shapes the tack of the book, its strategies and defenses, by enforcing certain prohibi- tions and presenting unavoidable confrontations. My intention in the first two sections of this essay is to fix firmly the interaction of these axes, the tradi- tional and discursive. This done, I shall turn later to the relation of the book to its subject, the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. I Valla is one of a long line of analysts of language who appear at that stage of any intellectual movement when it begins to question its values and termi- nology. He was an iconoclast who, in the interest of an intuited higher con- sistency, exposed the inconsistency in every contemporary form of cultural expression. As such, he is the prototype of the modern philologist as moral reformer. Willson Coates, Hayden White, J. Salwyn Schapiro, The Emergence of Liberal Humanism Metahistory is a book with no dedication or personal acknowledgments; its author makes few references to his own earlier works. The result is to obscure the relation of the book both to an intellectual tradition and a professional career. But each of these extrinsic factors is of considerable importance in defining the meaning of Metahistory, either as an individual text or as a call for a reformation in historical studies. The discontinuity which seems to place Metahistory in a different category from White's earlier work is illusive. To start with, the career itself has been filled with apparently discontinuous leaps. Beginning as an historian of the medieval Church, White turned to nineteenth-century thought in the early 1960s, and by the end of that decade his published work was ranging widely throughout Western cultural history: from the Greco-Roman tradition to contemporary philosophy of history, from Ibn Khaldoun to Foucault. The incoherence of this field of material is broken by repeated returns to two figures, Vico and Croce; but the interest that they hold for White does not in itself solve the problem. Nor does the fact that an interest in historical theory has been a part of this corpus of work from the beginning: not only does too much of White's work deal with other matters ("structuralism and popular culture," Darwin, the Noble Savage, literary theory) for historical theory to serve as the theme that unifies such a diversi- fied field of inquiry, but historical theory itself is such an inchoate, unformal- ized concept that it seems as dispersive as White's thematic and chronological travels. Two themes, nevertheless, consistently emerge throughout White's work. To name them is to define the intellectual path which leads to Metahistory, the "unacknowledgments." The first theme of White's work is how a tradition elicits assent, and what happens when a tradition ceases to define the rules by which important judgments are made. White's early writing notes how the This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 4 HANS KELLNER Gregorian tradition of papal authority, with its emphasis on worldly power and canonical legalism, gave way to the new spirituality of the twelfth century, represented by Saint Bernard and his new set of criteria for papal authority. The two-volume intellectual history which White co-authored traced the emergence and ordeal of the tradition of "liberal humanism"; his interest in "cultural politics," the ways in which a tradition constrains the struggle of conflicting forces within it, has not flagged. At least a dozen articles deal with the subject in one form or another. However, if the first of the major themes in White's work is an interest in cultural politics - how a tradition censors the debate it makes possible- the second is a pronounced fixation upon the force confronting the weight of tradition, human choice.