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The Practical Past The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/fl ashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Ju- dith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown Univer- sity); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) A complete list of titles begins on p. 118. The Practical Past Hayden White northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2014. All rights reserved. Digital Printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data White, Hayden V., 1928–, author. The practical past / Hayden White. pages cm — (Flashpoints) ISBN 978-0-8101-3006-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Literature and history. 2. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. 3. History, Modern—20th century—Historiography. I. Title. II. Series: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) PN50.W486 2014 809.93358—dc23 2014018902 To my beloved Margaret, without whom I could not have imagined a life in art Contents Preface ix 1. The Practical Past 3 2. Truth and Circumstance: What (if Anything) Can Properly Be Said about the Holocaust? 25 3. The Historical Event 41 4. Contextualism and Historical Understanding 63 5. Historical Discourse and Literary Theory 75 Afterword 97 Notes 105 Preface All my life I have been interested in the relationship between history and literature. This relationship has interested me since the time I fi rst became fascinated by history. Like many historians, I fi rst encountered the historical past in the stories of knights in arms, kings, crusades, and battles; tales of Robin Hood, Roland, and King Arthur; the Norse myths, Greek myths, and, of course, the history of Rome. In those days, the distinction between history and fi ction was dissolved in the thrill of narrativity and the magic of an animation which would later be found in the movies where, once again, “history” was presented in the images of heroes and heroines, nobility and villainy, magi and sorcerers, and, of course, love and passion. I did not mistake the tales told in books and fi lms (and of course, the comics) for reality, and now I think that this was because I understood, tacitly if not consciously, that, being tales about the past, they could not possibly be of the same reality as that which made up the present. I was fortunate enough to study history at university under one of the great teachers of his generation, William J. Bossenbrook, who taught us that history was primarily a story of the clash of ideas, values, and dreams (rather than of bodies and machines only), and that dialectical relationships obtain only between concepts, not things. Thus, while a radical politics may be related to a conservative politics in the manner of an opposition, in which the one defi nes its own positivity as the negation of what it takes to be the negativity of its opposite, the relationship ix x ❘ Preface between two things (a book, say, and a hammer) cannot be so con- strued. There is no way that one could conceive a hammer to be the con- trary, let alone the contradictory, of a book. And the same can be said of the relationship of equivalency out of which Marx made such grand hay in his discussion of the fetishism of gold in the introduction to Das Kapital. And so too for communities or societies. They may regard themselves as related by opposition or negation to some other community or society and indeed may act in such a way as to become merely an “other” of some “other,” but in reality they are only different from one another. In large part, Bossenbrook taught me, history is the story of communities— nations, social groups, families, and so on— defi ning themselves as opposed to their others, when in reality there are only differences among them. He taught me to value individuality over both difference and opposition; indeed, that insofar as there is “history,” there are only individuals—singular or collective, as the case may be. And that fi nally, insofar as there are only individuals in history, history itself must remain a mystery to be pondered more than a puzzle to be solved. As in Maimonides’s conception of the proper way to study Holy Writ, the aim of historical writing was to increase perplexity rather than dispel it. What has all of this to do with the relation between history and literature? Most immediately it has to do with the fact that the term “history” is the signifi er of a concept rather than areference to a thing or domain of being having material presence. This concept may have as its signifi ed either “the past” or something like “temporal process” but these, too, are concepts rather than things. Neither has material presence. Both are known only by way of “traces” or material entities which indicate not so much what the things that produced them were, as, rather, the fact that “some thing” passed by a certain place or did something in that place. What it was that had passed by or what it had done in that place will remain a mystery, the solution to which may be inferred or intuited, but the nature of which must remain conjectural— indeed, must remain a possibility only and therefore a “fi ction.” By fi ction I mean a construction or conjecture about “what possibly happened” or might happen at some time and some place, in the present, in the past, or indeed even in the future. Defense of this position would require forays into ontology and epistemology, not to speak of the ethics and aesthetics of historical writing for which this is not the occasion. My own position has to do with the familiar considerations about the conditions of possibility of a scientifi c knowledge of “the his- Preface ❘ xi torical past,” namely the fact that past events, processes, institutions, persons, and things are no longer perceivable nor directly knowable in the way that present or still living entities are. Thus, a correspondence theory of historical truth fails by way of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Secondly, although modern professional historians limit themselves to assertions about the past that can be derived from the study of documents, monuments, and other traces of the past’s reality, the kind of study of such evidence licensed by the historical profession is so ad hoc, merely commonsensical, and fragmentary that not even the criterion of coherence can be met without a great deal of patching up that is of a fi gurative (and therefore fiction- making) kind. The idea that the relationships among things (rather than concepts) are logically coherent and therefore refl ective of the reality of the things supposedly so related and of the relationships among them— all this is too meta- physically idealistic to be credited in modernity. Mine is a relativist position, I am quite aware. But I do not see how the truth of our knowledge of the past or more specifi cally the historical past— not to mention their meaning— could be assessed other than rela- tive to the cultural presuppositions of those who made them and in the light of the cultural presuppositions of those who wish to assess them. This is not an argument for universal relativism, since I am perfectly willing to accept the criteria of both correspondence and coherence as ways of assessing the truth of knowledge about entities still open to ostensive indication and direct perception and those which are in princi- ple “reproducible” under laboratory and experimental conditions. Since historical entities are by defi nition individuals, they are what in British English is called “one- off” entities, neither reproducible experimentally nor directly perceivable since, also by defi nition, they are “past.” (The trace of the past which perdures into the present is another matter. It is by defi nition not past at all even though it bears marks or indices of past actions or acts or processes.) So I accept the constructionist position with respect to historical knowledge for reasons both theoretical (given above in outline) and practical, which is to say, in the extent to which it allows me to provide an account— on pragmatist grounds— of the complex interrelationships among what is called historical reality (the past), historical writing, and what used to be called “fi ction” but which I now wish to call (following Marie- Laure Ryan) “literary writing.”1 Literary writing is a mode of language- use distinct from utilitarian or communicative (message) writing, by virtue of the dominance in it of the xii ❘ Preface poetic function of speech. The idea of literary writing (as against “literature”) permits me to refi ne the distinction between history (or historical writing) and fi ction (or imaginative writing) and overcome the belief that they are opposed to one another as mutually exclusive alternatives.

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