The Erotics of Retrospection: Historytelling, Audience Response, and the Strategies of Desire

Abstract

T _HE RESEMBLANCE between historiography and literature invites contrary interpretations. We may assume that life itself has such qualities as epic breadth and tragic depth and that, therefore, the structure of history has given rise to literary genres. Or else we may assume that all narratives follow the generic patterns of myth and literature and that, therefore, the structures of historiography ultimately stem from the human imagination. I will sidestep the question of temporal priority between stories and histories. Why argue which came first and smash both the chicken and the egg under the spinning wheels of just another history that may turn out to be fiction? Concerning logical priority, however, I wish to suggest that storytellers and historytellers alike are agents of the erotics of retrospection and that, ultimately, similar strategies of desire may determine how we react to the past and act upon the future. A central theme in Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) will serve as my point of departure. This highly stimulating (and highly controversial) book adopts Northrop Frye's map of the literary landscape with its four familiar points of generic compass: tragedy, comedy, romance, and satire. White claims that historians use one of these four types of plot structure as part of their explanatory strategies. As he puts it in a more recent book, Tropics of Discourse (1978), the reader of a historiographical narrative experiences the effect of having the events in the story explained to him . . . when he has perceived the class or type to which the story that he is reading belongs. I think White could have correlated historical and literary works more persuasively if he had tried to explore just how we come to perceive the genre of a particular narrative. In other words, he could-and, I think, should-have pondered the typical audience response to each of the four mythoi or plot structures that he has adopted from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Now, it is no secret that critics radically disagree about what constitutes the objective generic traits of literary works. Their best hope