Narrative and History

Reviews Narrative and History PAMELA MC CALLUM Hayden White. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1987. 244- us $26.50 No one who has read Hayden White's two previous books - Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe and Tropics of Discourse - can doubt his contribution to the reconceptualization of history. In Metahistory White drew on the formulations of narrative tropes in the literary theories of Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke to examine the discursive strategies which underpinned a series of nineteenth-century histories by such divergent writers as Carlyle, Michelet, Marx, and Ranke. Tropics of Discourse expanded and extended these investigations into an engagement with the post-structuralist theories of Michel Foucault andJacques Derrida. White's new book, The Content ofthe Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, brings together a number of essays which are generally thematized around the problem of narrativity in the writing of history. It both re-engages his previous work and takes up the ongoing debates about the status of historical discourse. According to White, the study of historiographical narration is a particularly crucial area for investigation because the writing of history will inevitably generate tension or conflict between the imaginative coherence of the storytelling form and the disparate fragmentation of historical contingencies. 'It is here,' he comments, 'that our desire for the imaginary, the possible, must contest with the imperatives of the real, the actual.' Thus, for White, these tensions can be located in even such rudimentary forms of historical narration as The Annals ofSt. Gall, an account of the eighth century. To a modern reader the annalist's cryptic notions of a world of scarcity, floods, famine, wars - 'Hard year and deficient in crops' is the entry for 710 - seem hardly to comprise a narration of history. No connections are drawn, no explanations given, no characters delineated. However, in White's analysis, the coherence of the narrative inheres in the succession of dates: the list of the years, anno domini, designates, over and against the earthly world of deprivation, a time filled with the promise of Christ's second coming. The narrative which White discovers within The Annals of St. Gall is the conflict UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 NARRATIVE AND HISTORY 539 between the suffering of life on earth (the 'events' recorded by the annalist) and the promise of spiritual fulfilment (the 'desire' implied by anno domini). Seen in this way, there can be no resolution between the narrative which the historian creates and the occurrences which are narrated. As White puts it in a striking formulation, 'this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary.' The content, then, will always exist in, atbest, an uneasy compromise with the form. Indeed, in White's view, the ideology of nineteenth-century historiography is to be situated in the refusal to acknowledge such a gap, in the claim that narrativity is implicit in both events and discourse. He therefore welcomes the increasing self-consciousness about the 'tissue of ambiguities and equivocations' in which history and its narration are inevitably entangled. The Content of the Form offers no solution but rather tries to think through the implications of the various discursive strategies presented by narratives of history. One of the most suggestive and intriguing chapters of the book is White's analysi~ of Fredric Jameson's provocative study, The Political Unconscious. As he views it, Jameson's book (and, indeed, the whole of his oeuvre) is an attempt to restore to Marxism the utopian vision which had been gradually eroded by the pressures towards more 'scientific' and 'economistic' theories in the twentieth century. What The Political Unconscious emphasizes is the secret longing for a collective, transindividual moment which lies inscribed in the unconscious of narrative. In such a formulation, Jameson can be seen to articulate a contradiction between narrative and history that is strikingly similar to the tensions White describes in the opening chapters of The Content ofthe Form: narrative...