Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (review)

Abstract

Hayden White's Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect, his most recent collection of essays, is both modest and ambitious. Modest in its mode of presentation, in tone and style, and in the brevity of the texts, yet ambitious in its underlying principles and scholarly demands. An unshakable principle of White's work is the belief in the undiminished value of what he calls, simply, theory. As this book, the last in a row of impressive and influential publications on historiography, on narrative and tropological patterns of discourse, demonstrates, he is one of the most self-assured and elegant practitioners of theoretical thinking in the humanities. [End Page 173] For someone who has persistently stressed the rhetorical nature of all discourse, he spends amazingly little time on close readings. Instead, he is a master of translating particularities into more general patterns of knowledge. In this respect, he belongs to the tradition of "grand theory," a term that has, for him, no condescending connotations, but, rather, signifies the lasting contributions of thinkers as grand as "Hegel, Marx, Weber, et. al." (vii). Fully aware of his share in such a desire for "grand theory," he concedes the right of a certain resistance to theory in a brief preface, in which he writes that such a turn away from theory is, "in my view, healthy and morally justified" (viii). However, the flight from grand theory to the seemingly more real particularities of history or society does not make theory superfluous. On the contrary, White emphasizes that all thinking which wants to be more than mere impression cannot do without theory; theory, one could say, is the mode of thinking as relation.