A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism

Abstract

The invocation of Muse which opens Odyssey does not, like of Iliad, identify its hero by name. He is called only polytropos, which is literally (although rarely) translated as [the man of] turns other renderings include the adventurous man, that ingenious hero, the man of devices or (my own favorite) skilled in all ways of contending. It was Odysseus who proposed horse, given as a tribute, which opened gates of Troy and ended a decade of futile, if glorious, slaughter. Polytropos 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 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 manner of Achilles, is frustrated by many turns of 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 Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, its subjects are historians, its course is diachronic; yet it specifically addresses literary criticism, philosophy, and history. The politics of academic discourse reflected in this situation must be proper subject of preliminary inquiry, because cultural politics politics of historical, literary, and philosophical thought in America have shaped both 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, historian considering Metahistory is virtually compelled to examine text as a political event and its writing as a political act.