Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (review)

Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect. By Hayden White. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xii + 205 pp. $40.00

Hayden White's Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect, his most recent collection of essays, is both modest and ambitious. Modest in its mode of presentation, in tone and style, and in the brevity of the texts, yet ambitious in its underlying principles and scholarly demands. An unshakable principle of White's work is the belief in the undiminished value of what he calls, simply, theory. As this book, the last in a row of impressive and influential publications on historiography, on narrative and tropological patterns of discourse, demonstrates, he is one of the most self-assured and elegant practitioners of theoretical thinking in the humanities. For someone who has persistently stressed the rhetorical nature of all discourse, he spends amazingly little time on close readings. Instead, he is a master of translating particularities into more general patterns of knowledge. In this respect, he belongs to the tradition of "grand theory," a term that has, for him, no condescending connotations, but, rather, signifies the lasting contributions of thinkers as grand as "Hegel, Marx, Weber, et. al." (vii). Fully aware of his share in such a desire for "grand theory," he concedes the right of a certain resistance to theory in a brief preface, in which he writes that such a turn away from theory is, "in my view, healthy and morally justified" (viii). However, the flight from grand theory to the seemingly more real particularities of history or society does not make theory superfluous. On the contrary, White emphasizes that all thinking which wants to be more than mere impression cannot do without theory; theory, one could say, is the mode of thinking as relation.

White's insistence on the indispensableness of theory is, of course, more than mere self-affirmation of his own work. With the fate of theory, White intones, the welfare of humankind is at stake. One rarely finds such youthful sounding, emphatic affirmations in White's usually very carefully crafted prose; yet he leaves no doubt that there is good and bad theory (he is, of course, on the good side). "Good theory" is theory that promotes good ends "for the human species at large" (viii). Such strong affirmations of the universal value of theory are not particularly frequent in today's university departments, either, not only because "theory" is not such a hot commodity any longer (although it certainly still sells), but also because such statements are impossible to prove.

So how persuasive is White's rhetoric? In the essays collected in this book, White's theoretical machine, assembled over a long period of sustained examination of the tropological structure of discursive knowledge, works smoothly and eloquently. This is perhaps not surprising, for White has a talent of faithfully re-examining a set of similar questions without seeming too repetitive. His studies are methodologically disciplined but not without a certain essayistic ease. Much of the writing in this volume responds to current scholarly debates and theoretical tendencies in the academy. Therefore, it is inherently polemical and will be of interest especially to those familiar with such debates, although White's treatment of, for example, some of the premises of the New Historicism provides a good introduction to some of its inherent problems. A more innocent reader, however, might turn to one of the more strictly exegetical exercises in the book, such as the tropological reading of a paragraph from Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe. Yet even here White does not forget to underscore that his tropological reading of a short sequence will "provide insights into the nature of interpretation in general and of interpretation by narration specifically" (142).

The same claim is true also for the only previously unpublished piece in the volume, on "Freud's Tropology of Dreaming." Here, White demonstrates in detail how Freud's description of...