Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (review)

Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. By Hayden White. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xii + 205 pp.

Ever since the publication of Metahistory in 1973, Hayden White's important analysis and categorization of the rhetorical styles of historical writing have challenged the fantasy of a value-free historiography. While it is doubtful that historians themselves succumb to this fantasy—R. G. Collingwood precedes White in pointing out such problems—it has been of great interest to literary scholars, for whom stylistic analysis is key to understanding authors' motives and using them in the service of ideological critique.

White's latest book continues his project of tropological analysis: the categorization of both literary and historical writing into the four rhetorical tropes—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony—as the guiding principles of any narrative. Figural Realism is a collection of essays published or papers given that are loosely grouped under his formalist method, especially as it applies to the concept of realism as both a literary mode and a construction of historical reality. Here we find essays on literary versus historical writing, the debate between New Historicism and cultural materialism, problems of Holocaust narrative, Freud's dream analysis, Proust's style, and ideological readings of musical form.

Critics have faulted White for his tendency to identify historical with literary style so as to reduce referential truth to rhetorical "truth effects." Insofar as he claims that the essential features of narrative are the same for fiction and history, he cannot tell these apart in terms of their referential truth values. He is correct in continuing to insist—with caveats—that narratives by historians involve forms of emplotment and rhetorical tropes fundamentally identical to those employed by fiction writers. But White is not so radical a skeptic of the truth value of historical writing as some of his interpreters suggest. Comments scattered throughout the book, often following an intensive description of the rhetorical, figural/fictional nature of historical writing, reassert the truth of historical events, persons, and processes. Still, the sketchily acknowledged distinction between fact and fiction needs clearer definition.

In "Literary Theory and Historical Writing," his most sustained response to his critics, White confronts the objections, first, that tropological theory undermines any appeal to facts as justifications for historical interpretation, and second, that the theory itself is self-refuting, insofar as it is just another tropology. White answers with a confidence in semantic indeterminacy that is designed to subvert the epistemological faith of his critics: "These objections will appear more or less compelling to the degree to which one has confidence in the conventional distinctions between literal and figurative speech, referential and nonreferential discourse, factual and fictional prose, the content and the form of a given type of discourse, and so on" (16). He then qualifies this statement: "Tropological theories of discourse do not so much dissolve these distinctions as reconceptualize them. . . . modern language and literary theory tends to view them as the poles of a linguistic continuum between which speech must move in the articulation of any discourse whatsoever, serious or frivolous" (17). Referring to these distinctions as "the poles of a linguistic continuum" is the most White ever does in the book to reconceptualize them. He gives no clues how one can conclude that something is more referential than nonreferential, more literal than figurative, or more factual than fictional. In fact, tropological analysis is situated at the very center of this continuum, where the distinctions are most indeterminate, which does indeed result in relativism.

I have no quarrel with identifying fiction with history writing at the merely narratological level, and White may be correct about the impossibility of making a distinction between them at that level. But he seems unconcerned about what it takes to distinguish between them outside this framework, except to imply that one can. What is missing is any notion of intentionality, of conventions of scholarship and research, or of measuring the plausibility of narratives...