History Bump

White relies heavily on the work of Levi-Strauss, who suggests that the relationship between historical thought and the imagination is found in the nature of language itself (104). Levi-Strauss argues that the coherency of history is actually myth—narrative strategies to construct effective stories (103). In other words, stories, mythic stories, are the basis of history, which is nothing more than a human construction. For Strauss, the delineation of all fields is arbitrary, and he locates history within a mythic Western epistemological frame (103). Further, history is never of but is rather always for particular ideological purposes and directed to particular audiences through language (104). A conflation of the concepts of prose and poetry within a theory of language/discourse carries with it several implications for historiography, particularly in “proper history” (104).

Historical writing must be subject to rhetorical analysis in an effort to test its objective claims because historicists cannot escape the power of figurative language use. What “figurative” historians say is always bound up in how they present their versions of reality (105). Clues to meaning of history are located in both the rhetoric of the description as well as the logical argument, although traditionally historical discourse is viewed in terms of a fact/analysis dichotomy (106). Rhetorical analyses, what White deems as most pertinent, could: classify different discourses based on their use of figurative language; transcend assumptions of objectivity/current mutually exclusive; and finally, reveal the attitude reader’s should assume before both levels of interpretation (105).

Historical discourse consists of two levels: the surface level (literal) and the figurative (deep-structural) (110). Latent meaning consists of the generic story-type of which the facts themselves are the manifest form (110). This latent meaning of an historical discourse consists of the story-types in which the facts fit (110). Story, an essential element of a historical discourse, functions as an image of the events. The historian, as literary artist, chooses particular techniques to construct truth of the historical event; thus, there are positive (arrageing) and negative (omitting) consequences (112).

Because every figurative discourse has a figurative level of meaning, White believes that various conventional problems of historical theory can be resolved. For example, distinctions between philosophy of history and historiography become more a matter of presentation and explicitness. In addition, his analysis permits a conceptualization of the possible types of historical representations through tropes; and finally, new perspectives of historical relativism are revealed (115-116).