Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History

Abstract

This essay analyzes development of Hayden White's work from Metahistory to present. It compares his approach to Roland Barthes's study of narrative and historical discourse in order to illustrate differences between White's structuralist methods and poststructuralist forms of textual analysis. The author puts particular emphasis on interdependence between development of White's work and criticism it has received during last twenty years. Whereas historians have dismissed White's relativism, literary theorists and intellectual historians have criticized his formalist methods. White's attempts to counter these critiques have gone mostly unnoticed and have been unsuccessful in that they destabilized his original position without proposing a coherent alternative. The question about adequate representations of Nazism, White has recently addressed, highlights theoretical problems have not received enough attention by White or his critics. Recently, in pages of this journal, F. R. Ankersmit has developed a postmodernist perspective on writing of history.' He argues that history always displays some postmodern characteristics because it is based on unsolvable paradoxes. Despite claim to one single truth, historical writing only arises from competition between different versions of past are simultaneously supported and called into question by the other within same discipline. Ankersmit also holds that traditional dichotomy of language versus reality has become untenable. Language has acquired same opacity as objects in reality themselves have become more and more language-like. Because of this convergence, assumes a fundamentally aesthetic character based on interplay between different codes which nowhere intersect domain of past.2 For Ankersmit, Hayden White is foremost advocate and self-reflexive practitioner of postmodern historiography. 1. F. R. Ankersmit, Historiography and Postmodernism, History and Theory 28 (1989), 137153; Perez Zagorin's critique and Ankersmit's reply in History and Theory 29 (1990), 263-296; compare to Peter De Bolla, Disfiguring History, Diacritics (Winter 1986), 49-57. 2. Ankersmit, Historiography and Postmodernism, 145. Ankersmit concludes his essay with conciliatory statement I am not saying that historical truth and reliability are of no importance or are even obstacles on road to a more meaningful historiography (152). This, however, is difficult to reconcile with notion that language of never intersects with past. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 06:21:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms