I've been reading a number of articles by Hayden White recently, which have gotten me thinking once again about a question that I pondered about, piecemeal, a while ago: What are the relationships that bind fiction, history, and myth together? In particular, four of his articles really got my attention: "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" [1], "Interpretation in History" [2], "The Rhetoric of Interpretation" [3], and "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory" [4].
To superficially summarize my superficial readings of White: to value the form as well as the content, as White wants us to do, is not the same as insisting that the form is in fact the content. White's point, as the title of one of his books amply illustrates, is that the form of a historical work itself has content, and that the content of the form is distinct from the content of the work. To put it differently, a text comprises of a content and a form (setting aside questions about context for now); the content is often heavily governed by structures that may or may not be culture-specific; the form possesses an additional level of content that is related to the content of the text in a complicated fashion. Furthermore, this form has a history of its own, independent of the history of the content of the work or of the history being narrated in the content of the work; and this is intimately connected to the literary production of the particular culture and social setting in which this work came to be written.
If an example helps: humans are inveterate story tellers. I think it would be fair to say that there are, and have been, and will be, no cultures where stories are not told. But the stories that are told are highly culture-specific (in regard to details; as Vladimir Propp showed, folk stories have structures that are astonishingly similar across dissimilar cultures), and the ways in which they are told, which can be independent of the story itself, are also highly determined by culture. The same story can be recited in verse or written out in prose or acted out or whatever—and of course, you could argue that it's not the same story any more (but I don't buy that).
Another work that I read a while ago, Textures of Time [5], a complex reading of histories in South Indian texts by Velcheru Narayana Rao (a "literary scholar with a long additional investment in the study of oral performance traditions"), David Shulman ("a philologist, with a specialization in the history of literature and poetics"), and Sanjay Subrahmanyam ("a historian of South India, who has also spent considerable time studying the Mughal empire and early modern Europe (especially Iberia)") [6], offers an interesting illustration of some of White's points. [NEED TO EXPAND]
And finally, this article by Neil Postman, enticingly titled "Social Science as Theology" [7], makes the seemingly still bolder claim that it's not just history but essentially all of the social sciences (or at the very least, "psycholog[y], sociolog[y], anthropolog[y], or media ecolog[y]") that are structured around story-telling.
I call the research of [Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Lewis Mumford, Bruno Bettelheim, Carl Jung, Margaret Mead, Arnold Toynbee, Stanley Milgram, and the like] story-telling because the word implies that its author has given a unique interpretation to a set of human events, that he has supported his interpretation by providing examples in a variety of forms, and that his interpretation cnnot be proved or disproved but draws its appeal fro the power of its language, the depth of its explanations, the relevance of its examples, and the credibility of its theme. And that all of this has an identifiable moral purpose … [T]here is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no postulates in which they are embedded. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher. Quite like a piece of fiction. (p. 28)Postman's terminology differs from White's, but they are arguably making the same point.
While I am not as convinced by Postman's argument as I am by White's, I think that both of them have a serious point. [EXPLAIN WHAT] Furthermore, neither of these arguments descends into the morass of postmodernist postcolonialist relativist constructivist obscurantism; what they do is challenge naïve positivist accounts of the field of human action (or "practices," to use the Oakeshottian terminology that Postman employs) without necessarily rejecting (a) the existence of an objective, shared set of events that occur in spacetime, or (b) the possibility, and I dare say the importance, of moral purposes (even if they are "merely" constructed). It is possible, in other words, to accept the general thrust of White's argument without having to admit that there is nothing outside the text. [NEED TO EXPAND]
References
[1] Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative (Autumn, 1980), pp. 5-27. From JSTOR.
[2] Hayden White, "Interpretation in History," New Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 2, On Interpretation: II (Winter, 1973), pp. 281-314. From JSTOR.
[3] Hayden White, "The Rhetoric of Interpretation," Poetics Today, Vol. 9, No. 2, The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric (1988), pp. 253-274. From JSTOR.
[4] Hayden White, "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory," History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 1-33. From JSTOR.
[5] Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing
History in South India 1600–1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001: New York: Other Press,
2003).[6] Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "4. A Pragmatic Response," History and Theory 46 (2007), pp. 409–427.
[7] Neil Postman, "Social Science as Theology," Et cetera (Spring 1984), pp. 22–32.
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