White Mythologies: Writing History and the West by Robert Young (review)

Book Reviews275 domestic and political violence; the move, on the part ofa number ofheroines, toward independence rather than passivity; and the rich inclusion of historical and mythic allusions in their work. More significantly, Weekes also points out that many ofthese writers subtly deconstruct and reconstruct accepted, expected cultural myths. Molly Keane, for example, explores the idea of love and marriage as an exploitive fiction rather than the basis for female success. By extension, these writers also bring literary genres into question: Maria Edgeworth reverses the traditional romance pattern in Castle Rackrent, and Kate O'Brien reinterprets the bildungsroman to show the difficulty of being the artist as a young woman. Not only does Weekes chronicle a healthy history of Irish women writers, she also discerns a pattern of raising and exploring questions, and at times even a quiet disruption of the cultural status quo. Lucidly written and carefully researched, Weekes' book is not only a pleasure to read but makes an important contribution to the Irish literary canon. JUDY ELSLEY Weber State University ROBERT YOUNG. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990. 232 p. We have now for some time cheerily accepted the fact that what has passed for historical interpretation from the eighteenth century onward has been marked (many would say marred or vitiated) by two unconscious but strategic silences: the nonrealization that historical writing is tropic (cf. Borges' lovely dictum that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature) rather than descriptive (or, describing and troping are the same discursive practice); and the failure to comprehend that the historical project is a Western one, in the ideological service of Empire or its more modest local versions. We may not yet be reading Gibbon and Toynbee as clever novelists, but there are fascinating parallels between literary criticism and metahistory (or whatever term one uses to describe the analysis ofhistoriographie projects). History, like literature, has not been repudiated; rather, both cultural genres are simply bracketed as subject to an ideological analysis of their conditions of production and consumption. The new question, it would seem, to judge by Young's monograph, is the very idea of writing history in the first place, the concept of an historical consciousness (not ofthat ofthe subjects ofhistory, but ofthose who construct a discourse of/on the historical subject), the pretensions ofthe historiographie enterprise. As with questions ofwhether or not the categories ofthe humanities, culture, literature are meaningful for non-Western societies (or even for subaltern societies within the West), the question arises as to whether the very idea of writing history (and, therefore, proposing a historical consciousness to be written about) is not itself, for innumerable societies, a Western imposition. 276Rocky Mountain Review Young's monograph provides a careful examination of the "history of History," moving between the two poles of Marxism's expansive definitions of History (which become coterminus with marxian definitions of reality, whether viewed as unmediated or, as now must be the case, as already interpreted) and Postmodernism's seductive repudiations of history/History. From the perspective of one axis, historiography can be reconstructed in the service of the decolonization of the shambles of Empire; from the perspective of the other, it can be denied as a way of getting out from under imposition ofdeleterious Western ways ofthought. Organized around major figures who have intervened in the debate (Sartre, Foucault, Said, Jameson, Spivak), Young's monograph is important to literary critics struggling with the contradictions of literary historiography and canon construction and those interested in the analysis of metaphysics as fantastic literature. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State University ...