Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

Hayden White defines the historical work as a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that classifies past structures and processes in order to explain what they were by representing them as models.

A historian takes events that have happened and makes a story out of them.

                                        Chronicle  --»  narrative prose discourse

A historian doesn't just find history but also makes it by

    arranging events in a certain order

    answering questions: what happened? when? how? why?

    deciding which events in the chronicle to include and exclude

    stressing some events and subordinating others

A historian answers questions by three different types of explanations:

    Emplotment

    Argument

    Ideological implication

For each of these three explanations, there are four types of forms from which the historian can choose :

Emplotment -- "every history, even the most 'synchronic' of them, will be emplotted in some way"

        The four types of emplotment are romance, satire, comedy, and tragedy.

Romance = drama of self-identification, including a hero's triumph over evil

Satire = the opposite of romance -- people are captives in the world until they die

Comedy = harmony between the natural and the social; causes for celebration

Tragedy = a hero, through a fall or test, learns through resignation to work within the limitations of the world, and the audience learns as well

Romance and comedy typically represent forms emerging in the world; satire and tragedy the return of the same forms in a different situation

Argument = the historian's view of what history ought to be

        The four types of argument are formalist, organicist, mechanistic, and contextualist.

• Formalist = identification of objects by classifying, labelling, categorizing:


"any historiography in which the depiction of the variety, color, and vividness of the historical field is taken as the central aim of the work" (White, 14)
 

• Organicist = individual part of the whole is more than the sum of the parts; goal oriented, the principles are not laws but are an integral part of human freedom
• Mechanistic = finding laws that govern the operations of human activities
• Contextualism = events explained by their relationships to similar events; traces threads back to origins

Ideology: reflects ethics and assumptions the historian has about life, how past events effect the present, and how we ought to act in the present; claims the authority of "science" or "realism"

(There were ideologies which didn't claim science as an authority before the Enlightenment; they are authoritarian.  According to White, there is no possibility of authoritarian ideology now.)

• Conservative = history evolves; we can hope for utopia, but change occurs slowly as part of the natural rhythm
• Liberal = progression of social hisotry is the result of changes in law and government
• Radical = utopia is imminent and must be effected by revolutionary means
• Anarchist= the state is corrupt and therefore it must be destroyed and a new community must be started


The historian also "prefigures" the act of writing history by writing within a particular trope, one of four deep poetic structures:  metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony.

"[Tropes] are especially useful for understanding the operations by which the contents of experience which resist description in unambiguous prose representations can be prefiguratively grasped and prepared for conscious apprehension." (White, 34)
 

• metaphor = means "transfer"-- one phenomena is compared or contrasted to another in the manner of analogy or simile
• synecdoche = use a part of something to symbolize the quality of the whole; for example, "He is all heart"
• metonymy = substitution of the name of a thing for the whole, eg., "sail" for "ship"
• irony = literal meaning makes no sense figuratively--examples are paradox (oxymoron) or the "manifestly absurd expression" (catachresis)


Metaphor is representational, metonymy is reductionist, synecdoche is integrative, and irony is negational.

This is not as confusing as it seems.  White has broken down each of the four modes into four categories.  All we have to do is fill in the slots when we want to determine the structure of a particular history.

These are the most common combinations among the modes (excluding the poetic structure).  However, mixture among elements is what provides "dialectical tension," which is part of the work of master historians.

The above information is taken from Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

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    Now, let's go for a test run, trying to figure out a particular historian's historiographical style.  This is an interesting method to use to determine the differences between the method of telling a history in a movie as opposed to a written text.  For example, I have graphed Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion (1544) and the film Cabeza de Vaca (1991) based on it like this:
 

	Relacion	Cabeza de Vaca
Emplotment	Romance	Satire
Argument	Formal	Organicist
Ideology	(No modern category)	Liberal / Radical

Poetic Structure

Metaphorical

Synecdoche

Emplotment:  I have chosen romance for Relacion because Cabeza de Vaca relates in this history the unfolding of a new self in relation to the Native Americans and his emergence back into his own nation.  I think that the film is a satire in comparison, because its focus is on the vindictiveness of the Spaniards at the end.  It seems no matter what Cabeza de Vaca has learned, it will make no difference in the scheme of things.

Argument:  I think the argument for Relacion is formal because of the nearly obsessive remembrance of particular objects-- for instance, the focus on prickly pears or whatever was available to eat and the nature of the variety of tribes he met.   In contrast, I think that the film focused on one part of the chronicle, the healings, and consolidated the sum of his experience into this particular mamifestation of power.  The film is oriented toward the end goal of showing the integration of de Vaca's Spanish character with the Native American character.

Ideology:  The ideology of the written history is based on an authoritarian system.   Cabeza de Vaca is reporting to superiors on whom his future rests.  However, the ideology of the film is either liberal or radical.  The end scene certainly depicts an apocalyptic event, with the darkening of the sky and the silver cross, and in this sense it might be considered radical.  The process of change in the "real" world, however, is not explicitly made imminent but rather seems to be a result of a progression based on the laws of human nature and extraordinary humans like Cabeza de Vaca.

Poetic Structure:  I classified the poetic structure of the written history as metaphorical because Cabeza de Vaca's mission is analogical to the suffering Christ of the New Testament.  Although the movie could also be classified this way, I chose synecdoche as more indicative of its style, since the qualities of the healer becomes the whole tenor of the discourse.

Assignment

Believe it or not, Hayden White's major thrust is that historical style can be explicated, just like a poem.  This is why he calls the writing of history a poetic act.

Make a table like the one above for the movie Pocahontas and selections from John Smith's General History, the historical basis for her story.  Provide short justifications for each of your choices.  Remember, there may not be one right answer for some of the categories.  Rather, your particular reading of the structure of the historical texts, including especially the differences between them, is an important key to discussion about them.  Often, we think about the structure without being aware of it.  So, let's make each other aware, and then let's discuss the significance of our findings.