History Bump

White demonstrates the ways in which history is already an interpretive framework that has never been pure fact or complete story (51), and therefore, he insists that academics should focus on the ways in which histories are told to extend our knowledge about societies past and present (72). In addition to explaining the interpretive features present in all histories, White charts the historical critiques made by those interested in fixing and/or abandoning the “burden of history” (Hegel, Droysen, Nietzsche, Croce) (52-53). All of these thinkers come from a position where interpretation is always present in history because of the choices that the historian consciously makes. His extended discussion of Levi-Strauss’ fraudulent outlines – structures which do not allow historians to see what does not fit into their preconceived charting of time and events, and thus, prevents “real” histories from being told (57) – reveal White’s concern with the belief that historians are always in control of their interpretive schema.

Instead of focusing on historical inquiry as a purely conscious activity, White is attempting to show how “the historian must draw upon a fund of culturally provided mythoi in order to constitute the facts as figuring in a story of a particular kind, just as he must appeal to that same fund of mythoi in the minds of his readers to endow his account of the past with the odor of meaning or significance” (60). In other words, the historian not only sets up his narrative based on his own assumptions which are often formed by the facts he finds, but he also must make sense of these facts by placing them into narrative structures that he recognizes. This may be an unconscious process because the historian is a member of his present social situation, so he may not be able to escape the stories that organize his world. In other words, the narratives which drive history are both disciplinarily and epistemically formed (57-8).

White defines the different schema of influence he sees operating in historical writing (70). Aesthetic – The type of story that is told/written (romance, tragedy, comedy, satire) (64); the Epistemological – the choice of a paradigm of explanation (idiographic, contextualist, organicist, mechanist) (66); and the Ethical – the ideological or moral influence on how and what is revealed (liberal, conservative, radical, and anarchist/nihilist) (68). White then attaches these modes of representation to language because “language provides us with models of the direction that thought itself might take in its effort to provide meaning to areas of experience not already regarded as being cognitively secured by either commons sense, tradition, or science” (73).

Because language shows the direction and relationships between the “facts" presented, rather than a grand narrative which tells us ultimately what happened, history, for White, becomes a way of understanding the social relations between the past/present, powerful/weak, conscious/subconscious (?). White asserts that all of these relationships can be ascertained through the analysis of the language in which histories are written, and the gaps and or contradictions present in that language, rather than the content of the histories themselves (74). Especially in disciplines, like history, that (cannot or?) have not achieved a fixed scientific methodologies it is important to look at the systems of language through which each practitioner presents his information rather than the “factual” content of the information itself.