Metahistory Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

Hayden White defines the historical work as a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that classifies past structures and processes in order to explain what they were by representing them as models. A historian takes events that have happened and makes a story out of them. Chronicle -- narrative prose discourse A historian doesn't just find history but also makes it by arranging events in a certain order answering questions: what happened? when? how? why? deciding which events in the chronicle to include and exclude stressing some events and subordinating others

A historian answers questions by three different types of explanations: Emplotment Argument Ideological implication For each of these three explanations, there are four types of forms from which the historian can choose : Emplotment -- "every history, even the most 'synchronic' of them, will be emplotted in some way" The four types of emplotment are romance, satire, comedy, and tragedy. Romance = drama of self-identification, including a hero's triumph over evil Satire = the opposite of romance -- people are captives in the world until they die Comedy = harmony between the natural and the social; causes for celebration Tragedy = a hero, through a fall or test, learns through resignation to work within the limitations of the world, and the audience learns as well Romance and comedy typically represent forms emerging in the world; satire and tragedy the return of the same forms in a different situation Argument = the historian's view of what history ought to be The four types of argument are formalist, organicist, mechanistic, and contextualist.

Formalist = identification of objects by classifying, labelling, categorizing: "any historiography in which the depiction of the variety, color, and vividness of the historical field is taken as the central aim of the work" (White, 14)

Organicist = individual part of the whole is more than the sum of the parts; goal oriented, the principles are not laws but are an integral part of human freedom Mechanistic = finding laws that govern the operations of human activities Contextualism = events explained by their relationships to similar events; traces threads back to origins

Ideology: reflects ethics and assumptions the historian has about life, how past events effect the present, and how we ought to act in the present; claims the authority of "science" or "realism" (There were ideologies which didn't claim science as an authority before the Enlightenment; they are authoritarian. According to White, there is no possibility of authoritarian ideology now.)
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Conservative = history evolves; we can hope for utopia, but change occurs slowly as part of the natural rhythm Liberal = progression of social hisotry is the result of changes in law and government Radical = utopia is imminent and must be effected by revolutionary means Anarchist= the state is corrupt and therefore it must be destroyed and a new community must be started

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The historian also "prefigures" the act of writing history by writing within a particular trope, one of four deep poetic structures: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. "[Tropes] are especially useful for understanding the operations by which the contents of experience which resist description in unambiguous prose representations can be prefiguratively grasped and prepared for conscious apprehension." (White, 34) metaphor = means "transfer"-- one phenomena is compared or contrasted to another in the manner of analogy or simile synecdoche = use a part of something to symbolize the quality of the whole; for example, "He is all heart" metonymy = substitution of the name of a thing for the whole, eg., "sail" for "ship" irony = literal meaning makes no sense figuratively--examples are paradox (oxymoron) or the "manifestly absurd expression" (catachresis)

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Metaphor is representational, metonymy is reductionist, synecdoche is integrative, and irony is negational.

This is not as confusing as it seems. White has broken down each of the four modes into four categories. All we have to do is fill in the slots when we want to determine the structure of a particular history. emplotment romantic tragic comic satirical argument formist mechanistic organicist contextualist ideology anarchist radical conservative liberal poetic structure synecdoche metaphor metonymy irony

These are the most common combinations among the modes (excluding the poetic structure). However, mixture among elements is what provides "dialectical tension," which is part of the work of master historians. The above information is taken from Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.
Now, let's go for a test run, trying to figure out a particular historian's historiographical style. This is an interesting method to use to determine the differences between the method of telling a history in a movie as opposed to a written text. For example, I have graphed Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion (1544) and the film Cabeza de Vaca (1991) based on it like this:

Relacion Cabeza de Vaca Emplotment Romance Satire Argument Formal Organicist Ideology (No modern category) Liberal / Radical Poetic Structure Metaphorical Synecdoche Emplotment: I have chosen romance for Relacion because Cabeza de Vaca relates in this history the unfolding of a new self in relation to the Native Americans and his emergence back into his own nation. I think that the film is a satire in comparison, because its focus is on the vindictiveness of the Spaniards at the end. It seems no matter what Cabeza de Vaca has learned, it will make no difference in the scheme of things. Argument: I think the argument for Relacion is formal because of the nearly obsessive remembrance of particular objects-- for instance, the focus on prickly pears or whatever was available to eat and the nature of the variety of tribes he met. In contrast, I think that the film focused on one part of the chronicle, the healings, and consolidated the sum of his experience into this particular mamifestation of power. The film is oriented toward the end goal of showing the integration of de Vaca's Spanish character with the Native American character. Ideology: The ideology of the written history is based on an authoritarian system. Cabeza de Vaca is reporting to superiors on whom his future rests. However, the ideology of the film is either liberal or radical. The end scene certainly depicts an apocalyptic event, with the darkening of the sky and the silver cross, and in this sense it might be considered radical. The process of change in the "real" world, however, is not explicitly made imminent but rather
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seems to be a result of a progression based on the laws of human nature and extraordinary humans like Cabeza de Vaca. Poetic Structure: I classified the poetic structure of the written history as metaphorical because Cabeza de Vaca's mission is analogical to the suffering Christ of the New Testament. Although the movie could also be classified this way, I chose synecdoche as more indicative of its style, since the qualities of the healer becomes the whole tenor of the discourse. Assignment Believe it or not, Hayden White's major thrust is that historical style can be explicated, just like a poem. This is why he calls the writing of history a poetic act. Make a table like the one above for the movie Pocahontas and selections from John Smith's General History, the historical basis for her story. Provide short justifications for each of your choices. Remember, there may not be one right answer for some of the categories. Rather, your particular reading of the structure of the historical texts, including especially the differences between them, is an important key to discussion about them. Often, we think about the structure without being aware of it. So, let's make each other aware, and then let's discuss the significance of our findings. DID GREEKS BELIEVE IN THEIR MYTHS? And herein lies the problem: while this is a slim book (129 pages, plus another 22 pages of small-font notes), without the repetition and meandering it cd have been slimmer still: I think Veyne cd have said everything he had to say worth saying in twenty pages or so. Here are a few of his main points: (1) the Ancients thought mythical time had been different from the contemporary time they themselves lived in. So there might have been monsters in the time of Hercules or Odysseus, but not anymore. This reminded me v. much of Kordecki's dissertation, which concluded that folks in the Middle Ages believed in dragons because they had so much evidence (in the form of old stories, including multiple mentions in the Bible, now re-translated away today) that dragons had once existed. But they didn't think they still existed as something you could run into 'nowadays', in their equivalent of modern times. Similarly, I know of some Xian denominations that believe the Age of Miracles ceased with the death of the last of Christ's original disciples, John, at Patmos around 100 AD. Veyne draws the demarcation line as about the time of the Trojan War, after which Gods ceased to appear and epic monsters died out. (2) Disbelief took the form not of rejecting myths but of trying to rationalize them. For example, by late Hellenic/early Roman Empire times writers and thinkers didn't believe in the Minotaur but instead thought it'd been a person named Taurus who held an important post under Minos (pretty much the solution Mary Renault came up with in her Theseus novel). They didn't doubt that there had once been a king named Minos, just that the supernatural stories connected with him were exaggerations beneath which lay historical facts, recoverable to the sharp-witted. I was reminded of people who try to prove scientifically that the Star Over Bethlehem was some sort of nova or Velikovsky's account of the Parting of the Red Sea. As I understand it (second-hand, never having read Velikovsky), he never doubted that the sea opened up and let Moses and the Israelites pass, then came rushing back and drowned the
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Egyptians, but instead of a miracle thought it had been caused by a catastrophic planetary alignment (Venus passing too close to the Earth), which occurred again a generation or so later, causing the sun to stand still in the sky (that is, the Earth to stop rotating for a few hours). A modern skeptic wd simply doubt that the Red Sea miracle occurred at all; a nonliteralist Xian wd be closer to Veyne's Romans and latter-day Greeks, believing in the people but not the specific events. Perhaps Veyne's most interesting point is that the Greeks (and Romans) simply cdn't conceive it was all just made up. There must have been a Romulus, a Theseus, and so forth. I'm told there's exactly as much archeological evidence for the existence of King David and Solomon as there is for King Arthur (i.e., none), so perhaps we're not so v. different in what we choose to believe. His passage on the psychology motivating "sincere forgers" -- i.e., folks who at some point made up detailed geneologies out of whole cloth -- is also interesting. Unfortunately, Veyne's methodology is somewhat suspect. For example, when someone like Aristotle introduces a reference to a myth with "it is said" or some such phrase, Veyne asserts that this means Aristotle is revealing that he doesn't believe a word of it. Well, maybe. But maybe not. It's too subjective a claim to settle such a fundamental point essential to his argument. Oddly enough, I'd recommend skimming this book and then reading the Endnotes, which are wonderfully detailed and much better written than the main text, which loves to say and unsay and re-say and assert and retract and generally mull out loud over the same points time and again. So, a fascinating topic, and it'll make you think, but in the end it doesn't really satisfactorily answer its own question. --John R.

5. Time and Narrative

Central to Ricoeurs defense of narrative is its capacity to represent the human experience of time. Such a capacity is an essential requisite for a reflective philosophy. Ricoeur sets out his account of human time in Time and Narrative, Volume 3. He points out that we experience time in two different ways. We experience time as linear succession, we experience the passing hours and days and the progression of our lives from birth to death. This is cosmological timetime expressed in the metaphor of the river of time. The other is phenomenological time; time experienced in terms of the past, present and future. As selfaware embodied beings, we not only experience time as linear succession, but we are also oriented to the succession of time in terms of what has been, what is, and what will be. Ricoeurs concept of human time is expressive of a complex experience in which phenomenological time and cosmological time are integrated. For example, we understand the full meaning of yesterday or today by reference to their order in a succession of dated time. To say Today is my birthday is to immediately invoke both orders of time: a chronological date to which is anchored the phenomenological concept of birthday. Ricoeur describes this anchoring as the inscription of phenomenological time on cosmological time (TN3 109).
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These two conceptions of time have traditionally been seen in opposition, but Ricoeur argues that they share a relation of mutual presupposition. The order of past-present-future within phenomenological time presupposes the succession characteristic of cosmological time. The past is always before the present which is always after the past and before the future. The order of succession is invariable, and this order is not part of the concepts of past, present or future considered merely as existential orientations. On the other hand, within cosmological time, the identification of supposedly anonymous instants of time as before or after within the succession borrows from the phenomenological orientation to past and future. Ricoeur argues that any philosophical model for understanding human existence must employ a composite temporal framework. The only suitable candidate here is the narrative model. Ricoeur links narratives temporal complexity to Aristotles characterization of narrative as the imitation of an action. Ricoeurs account of the way in which narrative represents the human world of acting (and, in its passive mode, suffering) turns on three stages of interpretation that he calls mimesis1 (prefiguration of the field of action), mimesis2 (configuration of the field of action), and mimesis3 (refiguration of the field of action). Mimesis1 describes the way in which the field of human acting is always already prefigured with certain basic competencies, for example, competency in the conceptual network of the semantics of action (expressed in the ability to raise questions of who, how, why, with whom, against whom, etc.); in the use of symbols (being able to grasp one thing as standing for something else); and competency in the temporal structures governing the syntagmatic order of narration (the followability of a narrative). Mimesis2 concerns the imaginative configuration of the elements given in the field of action at the level of mimesis1. Mimesis2 concerns narrative emplotment. Ricoeur describes this level as the kingdom of the as if Narrative emplotment brings the diverse elements of a situation into an imaginative order, in just the same way as does the plot of a story. Emplotment here has a mediating function. It configures events, agents and objects and renders those individual elements meaningful as part of a larger whole in which each takes a place in the network that constitutes the narratives response to why, how, who, where, when, etc. By bringing together heterogeneous factors into its syntactical order emplotment creates a concordant discordance, a tensive unity which functions as a redescription of a situation in which the internal coherence of the constitutive elements endows them with an explanatory role. A particularly useful feature of narrative which becomes apparent at the level mimesis2 is the way in which the linear chronology of emplotment is able to represent different experiences of time. What is depicted as the past and the present within the plot does not necessarily correspond to the before and after of its linear, episodic structure. For example, a narrative may begin with a culminating event, or it may devote long passages to events depicted as occurring within relatively short periods of time. Dates and times can be disconnected from their denotative function; grammatical tenses can be changed, and changes in the tempo and duration of scenes create a temporality that is lived in the story that does not coincide with either the time of the world in which the story is read, nor the time that the unfolding events are said to depict. In Volume 2 of Time and Narrative, Ricoeurs analyses of Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and Remembrance of Things Past centre on the diverse variations of time produced by the interplay of a three tiered structure of time: the time of narrating; the narrated time; and the fictive experience of time produced through the conjunction/disjunction of the time it takes to narrate and narrated time (TN2 77). Narrative configuration has at hand a rich array of strategies for temporal signification. Another key feature of mimesis2 is the ability of the internal logic of the narrative unity (created by emplotment) to endow the connections between the elements of the narrative with necessity. In this way, emplotment forges a causal continuity from a temporal succession, and so creates the intelligibility and credibility of the narrative. Ricoeur argues that the temporal order of the events depicted in the narrative is
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simultaneous with the construction of the necessity that connects those elements into a conceptual unity: from the structure of one thing after another arises the conceptual relation of one thing because of another. It is this conversion that so well imitates the continuity demanded by a life, and makes it the ideal model for personal identity and self-understanding. Mimesis3 concerns the integration of the imaginative or fictive perspective offered at the level of mimesis2 into actual, lived experience. Ricoeurs model for this is a phenomenology of reading, which he describes as the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader(TN1 71). Not only are our life stories written, they must be read, and when they are read they are taken as ones own and integrated into ones identity and selfunderstanding. Mimesis3 effects the integration of the hypothetical to the real by anchoring the time depicted (or recollected or imputed) in a dated now and then of actual, lived time. Mimesis is a cyclical interpretative process because it is inserted into the passage of cosmological time. As time passes, our circumstances give rise to new experiences and new opportunities for reflection. We can redescribe our past experiences, bringing to light unrealized connections between agents, actors, circumstances, motives or objects, by drawing connections between the events retold and events that have occurred since, or by bringing to light untold details of past events. Of course, narrative need not have a happy ending. The concern of narrative is coherence and structure, not the creation of a particular kind of experience. Nevertheless, the possibility of redescription of the past offers us the possibility of re-imagining and reconstructing a future inspired by hope. It is this potentially inexhaustible process that is the fuel for philosophy and literature.