Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse by Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. (review)

Book Reviews 149 Book Reviews Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse . Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 381. With unintentional irony Robert Berkhofer, the author of a plea for empirical social scientific generalizations (A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis, [New York: Free Press, 1969]), now endorses a postmodern, multicultural , dialogic technique of writing history. Since 1969, of course, Berkhofer has written two books concerning white images of native Americans. Since then, too, the heavy intellectual artillery of Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Joan Scott, and Dominick LaCapra has punctuated the defenses of "normal" historical practise which aspired to use universal scientific truths and to attain quasi-objective authorial viewpoints. Berkhofer's new book is a litany of questions with very tentative answers (such as, "how best to represent the viewpoint of 'others' of different gender, race, ethnicity, or class?") which reveal not only the current disciplinary crisis but also the shaky underpinnings of the postmodern challenge. Berkhofer's work will be an excellent reference for historiography seminars because of its impressive research in narrative theory, the revival of rhetoric, and questions of voice and viewpoint. There is a superb exposition of the "degrees of intervention" of historians in constructing the past and an exemplary critique of the Turner thesis. Unfortunately, few graduate students will have the patience to read through the entire book because of its repetitious , laboured presentation. Postmodernists have convinced Berkhofer that no past referent or set of facts controls the historian's text. Historians' presuppositions lead to the use of literary tropes which code and create accounts of the past. Hence, all interpretations are underdetermined and in the last analysis arbitrary and political. In an extreme view which Berkhofer hesitates to endorse, "one person's truth seems, and must be, another person's propaganda" (140). 150 Canadian Review of American Studies Given "emplotted" stories and "situated" authors, objectivity is just a mystifying ideal concealing a political commitment to the status quo. Berkhofer intends historians to abandon the mirage of a single correct interpretation as a relic of a profession trying to legitimize its authority. Critics might turn around the indictment to ask in turn if there is any use for a discipline without authority. If narratives create facts, realism is a delusion, and interpretations prefigure the traces of the past, why not yield the field to fiction writers who could imagine historical truth? Berkhofer astutely points out the bias and figures of speech even in the quantitative history of Fogel and Thernstrom, and unearths the interpretive Great Stories underlying books such as Lockridge's account of seventeenthcentury Puritan Dedham and Cronon's study of New England ecology. Yet he tendentiously concludes that there are no valid criteria with which to judge the truthfulness of interpretations. Berkhofer would combine the narrow textual approach concentrating on rhetoric or emplotment with the contextualizing of "discursive practise," in the fashion of Foucault and Joan Scott. In his approach to multiple voices and viewpoints, Berkhofer is most original. He would argue for maximum effort to represent diverse historical voices. Historians of the American West, for example, should eschew Turner's ethnocentrism to include, as Patricia Limerick did, the experiences of women, natives, French Canadians, African Americans, and Asians. But Limerick, according to Berkhofer, still remained superior to her subjects by striving for a single integrating author's viewpoint . Berkhofer thinks historians should emulate the modern cultural anthropologists' aspirations to create ethnography together with their active subjects-to translate others' multiple viewpoints for the reader without an underlying Great Story. He fails to clarify how this enterprise could be more than a collection or a collage. This dialogic vision (based on Bakhtin's "polyvocality ") has only a few designated exemplars, such as David Farber's Chicago '68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Perhaps Berkhofer 's new technique would be better adapted to film and CD-ROM than to print. The difficult question even now is how effectively to translate others' voices. Commenting upon Ruth Roach Pierson's epistemic privileging of the oppressed rather than the hegemonic viewpoint, Berkhofer argues, "the historian's text upon otherness is tested less by standard historical...