History Bump

In his 1966 essay, "The Burden of History," Hayden White speaks of at least two burdens: the burden felt by the historian who works awkwardly from the middle-space between the imaginative, creative arts and the hard sciences, and the burden of history itself, bearing its conditionally drawn lessons on contemporary thought and action (41). From the outset, White seeks to account for the domains of art and science which have openly expressed contempt toward the historian's enterprise because of its soft methods, crude metaphors and ambiguous suppositions about the human sciences (27). He cites a literary tradition that culminates with Joyce's Stephen Dedalus who, in Ulysses, refers to history as the "'nightmare' from which Western man must awaken if humanity is to be served and saved" (31). This Nietzschean disavowal (32) of concerns about establishing a record of the past extends directly to the philosophical climate of post-WWI Europe, when, though clashing in gross juxtaposition, Hitler's nihilism and French existentialism--figured primarily through Camus and Sartre--held similar views toward the prospect of history-making: it was worthless. The inexplicable surrounds of war-torn civilization pointed to history's limited explanatory power; as historians sought to account for what happened, their failure to explain widespread destruction and atrocity was exposed (36). Only in rare cases, such as the work of Norman Brown (39, 45), do we find historiography set on sorting through the influence of "outmoded institutions, ideas, and values" on the current "way of looking at the world" (39). Consequently, historians, who, according to White, can be distinguished by their methods (42), deserve a share of the credit for the proliferation of ahistorical attitudes; accountability extends particularly from history's privileging of a limited range of artistic forms, such as the 19th century realist novel and, on the other hand, the rigidly positivistic proofs associated with the physical sciences--both of which mistakenly regard recorded history as an end in itself (41). To correct this quandary, White contends that historians might rethink their procedures in terms of the literary artist's use of metaphor and the scientist's use of hypothesis, both of which are tentative, experimental schemes used to guide ideas beyond tentative speculation (47). Resolved as such, the historian could negotiate the truthful/imaginary binary (46), and, drawing upon the orders valued by literary artists and scientists, the "historical account could be treated as a heuristic rule which self-consciously eliminates certain kinds of data from consideration as evidence" (46, emphasis in original). Furthermore, White argues that historians need to learn how to take seriously and engage contemporaneously with the questions driving other fields. He also urges reconsideration of narrative bias (43) toward "an awareness," conveyed by Hegel, Balzac and Tocqueville, "of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from the present to the future" (49), underscored by "dynamic elements" (49) and "the essentially provisional character of the metaphorical constructions" (50).

Burr-words: cultural palingenesis (41), hypostatized (48), Fabian tactic (27), heuristic rule (46)