BOOKS
THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION
THE CONTENT OF THE FORM. NARRATIVE DISCOURSE AND
HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION. By Hayden White.
Johns Hopkins Univer–
sity Press. $26.50.
Hayden White established his reputation with a large
book,
Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). This was an am–
bitious attempt to discuss nineteenth-century historiography as a
form of fiction. White, however, sensibly recognized that there is
history outside of historiography, often preserved, for instance, in
artifacts. Still, he argued that all history writing is a linguistic crea–
tion which reflects not only the attitude of the author but conforms to
predilections for specific literary genres and tropes_ White character–
izes, for instance, four great historians of the nineteenth century:
Michelet as romance, Ranke as comedy, Tocqueville as tragedy,
and Burckhardt as satire, obviously modeling his classification on
Northrop Frye's
Anatomy of Criticism.
Besides, the main philosophers
of history are discussed as writing like Marx in the metonymical
mode, like Nietzsche in the metaphorical mode, and like Croce in
the ironic mode. We may object to some of his analyses; I, for one,
am puzzled by the harsh treatment of Croce, but whatever one's ob–
jection may be, the book is a great achievement, the only substantial
American contribution to the history of historiography I know.
Since then, White has published a collection of essays,
Tropics
of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism
(1978), and now a new collec–
tion, called somewhat puzzlingly,
The Content of the Form.
This
paradoxical title seems to mean only that White will discuss the con–
tents of historiographical writings, conceived as a form. The series of
essays here collected move from very general, abstract considera–
tions on the question of narrative in contemporary historical theory,
and of narration as representation of reality, to a discussion of the
politics of historical interpretation . These three excellent theoretical
essays are followed by essays on indiv.idual writers: the nineteenth–
century historian Gustav Droysen's book
Historik,
Foucault's enor–
mous work, Jameson's
Political Unconscious,
Ricoeur's philosophy of
history in
Time and Narrative,
and finally, an essay titled "The Con–
text in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History,"
which uses
The Education of Henry Adams
as a test case, in order to
