The “Poetic” Nature of History: On Hayden White’s View of Fiction

Stephen Greenblatt, who first raised the banner of "New Historicism," practiced his literary-critical claims through Renaissance studies; entering from the juncture of literature and history—the field of Renaissance studies—he opened a new path for literary criticism. It was precisely the particularity of this research field that further stimulated people's interest in rethinking the relation between history and literature, between the real and the fictive. Among them, Hayden White, regarded as an important theorist of New Historicism, made the most profound theoretical exposition: he not only powerfully defended New Historicism but also re-examined the discursive foundation of history, and even of the entire human sciences, and put forward his own views.

In the essay "New Historicism: A Comment," Hayden White acutely points out that the reason New Historicists turn to history is not to seek the kind of literary materials they study, but to obtain the kind of knowledge that the historical method in literary studies can provide. (1) That is, the focus of New Historicism is what kind of historical method to use and how to use this method to handle literary materials. It was precisely in the deep examination of and reflection on the historical method that New Historicists discovered that there is no such thing as a historical method peculiar to historical research; historiography cannot do without imagination or the techniques of literary fiction; the discourse of the historian and the discourse of the literary writer overlap, resemble, and even coincide to a great extent; and the so-called particular "historical method," in its "poetic" nature, is by no means inferior to its "logical" and "grammatical" nature. On this recognition, they put forward the claims of constructing a "cultural poetics" and a "historical poetics."

Hayden White holds that historical materials are always fragmentary, scattered, even mutually contradictory; they do not themselves possess meaning. The historian must interpret these materials and construct various figurative modes of activity as the form for reflecting the historical process. In the narrative re-presentation of this historical process, on one hand, the manifold historical records often contain too much material; the historian cannot possibly include all of it and must discriminate and select among it, determining its causal relations and the order of priority and importance. On the other hand, to narrate these historical events fully, there is a lack of materials that could reasonably explain why these events occurred, a lack of the necessary links connecting the various facts and of the objective clues that could confirm the inner relations among them; this means the historian must "interpret" his materials, filling the gaps in the information with the aid of imagination and inference. "In history there is no beginning or end, only a flux of events that the historian divides up in different ways and uses to construct—quite arbitrarily—a story." (2) Therefore, any historical narrative is inevitably both a mixture of fully explained and inadequately explained events and a mixture of given facts and assumed facts, both a re-presentation and an interpretation. And once one admits that all history is in some sense interpretation, then the historian's explanation of past history cannot avoid subjectivity and the assumptive, and its objectivity is bound to be questioned.

Interpretation is the soul of historiography. Scattered, unfamiliar historical materials can be understood only when they are organized and given a certain plot structure. This process is what Frye calls transforming it, in form, into "myth"—constructing it as romantic myth, or comic myth, or tragic myth and ironic-satiric myth. Following Frye's line of thought, Hayden White reaches this conclusion: "How a particular historical situation should be shaped depends on the historian's subtle grasp in matching a particular plot structure with a set of historical events to which he wishes to give a particular meaning. This is essentially a literary, that is, a fiction-making, operational process." (3) Setting out from his own "pre-view," the historian uses a particular mythic structure to construct historical materials into a story type, making originally alienated, unfamiliar experience present itself in a familiar way, so that it is accepted by people and thereby possesses meaning. Without plot there is no story; without story there is no explanation, and it cannot be understood by people.

History is the interpretation of historical facts, and interpretation in turn depends on the historian's "pre-view," which is inseparable from the historian's ideological background. History can present itself only in the historian's discursive exposition and conceptual construction. On this basis, Hayden White points out that every historical narrative, whatever its breadth or depth, presupposes a particular set of ideological commitments through its concepts such as "science," "objectivity," and "explanation." Even those historians who claim to have no particular ideological commitments can in fact only write within an ideological framework, because they adopt a position opposed to the form that historical re-presentation ought to take. In the ideological domain, there are as many methods of historical interpretation as there are positional viewpoints. Hayden White further distinguished three interpretive strategies of history—the mode of emplotment, the mode of explanation, and the mode of ideological implication—and analyzed the structural homology among these three: the various modes within the three strategies of emplotment (romance, comedy, tragedy, satire), explanation (formist, organicist, mechanistic, contextualist), and ideological implication (anarchist, conservative, radical, liberal) have a relation of structural homology. From this angle, the choice of a historical interpretive strategy is often "not epistemological but aesthetic or moral." (4)

History is only the product of a particular historical situation. Hayden White summarily expounded the historical process of the formation of the discipline of history. He points out that during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, historiography was always regarded as a literary art, even seen as a branch of rhetoric, and its fictionality was on the whole acknowledged. By the eighteenth century, theorists distinguished quite strictly between "fact" and "imagination," but they did not, on the whole, regard historiography as a factual re-presentation free of any imaginative element. At this time, the key opposition was still between "truth" and "error," not between "fact" and "imagination." Scholars naturally held that many truths, even historical truths, could be conveyed only by using the fictional techniques of re-presentation. These techniques included rhetorical strategies, tropes, figures, and so on, and the narrative of the novel precisely provided a fitting model and reference for historical narration. Only by the early nineteenth century did historians begin to habitually equate "truth" with "fact" and treat "fiction" as the opposite of "truth," regarding it as an obstacle to understanding reality. History was finally set in opposition to fiction, especially the novel; history was seen as the re-presentation of fact, while literary fiction was seen as the re-presentation of "the possible" or "the imaginable." Thus an illusion about historical discourse was born: history contains only precise statements of solid facts, describes the observable and verifiable events of the past, and displays their true meaning and value. The poetic and the fictive were erased or concealed from historical statement. On the surface, history seemed to have gained a "scientific" character, to have entered the hall of knowledge, and finally to have parted ways with literature. And the modern university disciplinary system compulsorily, as it were, drew a boundary between the two, legitimating the distinction. Therefore, Hayden White says: "History is a contingency, the product of a particular historical situation, and as the various misunderstandings that produced that situation fade away, history itself may lose its status as an autonomous and self-validating mode of thought." (3) The discipline of history arose under particular historical conditions; it is in fact only the result of a historical "misunderstanding," has never cast off the shadow of literature, and cannot exclude rhetoric, metaphor, and fiction. Although history forgets that it was originally born of literary imagination and believes itself to be pursuing objectivity and scientificity, in the eyes of philosophers the discipline of history is either a "third-order form" of science or a "second-order form" of art; its epistemological value is unreliable, and its aesthetic value is uncertain. And for modern writers, the historian is seen as the representative of an extreme case of suppressed sensibility in fiction and drama. On the contrary, they insist: "As far as the conditions of England in the 1840s are concerned, the best historians were the novelists." (5)

Hayden White's exposition of the "poetic" nature of history is profound, but he did not stop there; he went further, deepening the analysis to the level of discourse. He holds that in the human sciences, whether "discourse of the real" or "imaginative discourse," the element of "troping" cannot be eliminated. Imaginative discourse goes without saying; even if discourse of the real tries to flee the shadow of troping, all its efforts will be in vain, because troping exists in all the processes by which discourse constructs objects. Troping is the soul of discourse, that is, a discursive mechanism; without this troping mechanism, discourse cannot function normally. Specifically, "troping is both a movement from one notion of the way things are related to another, and a relation between things that makes it possible to express them in one language while taking account of the possibility of expressing them in another." (3) That is, troping can, by establishing certain connections where people ordinarily think there are none, or by breaking the connections people are accustomed to and using a trope to suggest a quite different connection of another kind, thereby produce figures of speech or thought.

Hayden White's theory of discursive troping is built on the "rhetorical space" of the word discovered by Foucault. Foucault holds that in the process of language's emergence, a new relation between the verbal sign and representation must be established: they are both separate and convertible. Separation causes the derivation of the verbal sign; convertibility requires fixing the verbal sign on one element of this representation, or in some environment accompanying the representation, or on some absent thing—and this produces different connections between the verbal sign and representation (or thing), for it "alights on some inner element, on some adjacent point, on some similar figure," (6) and correspondingly constitutes relations of synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor. On this basis, Hayden White says: "For Foucault, all words derive from a 'tropological space,' in which the 'sign' can 'freely… alight' on any aspect of the entity it intends to signify, so that the distinction between literal and figurative meaning is entirely lost." (3)

Hayden White also analyzes "discourse" from an etymological angle. He points out that the word "discourse" comes from the Latin discurrere, meaning a "back-and-forth" movement or a "running to and fro." Discursive practice shows that this discursive movement is both dialectical and pre-logical or anti-logical. The aim of the anti-logical character of discourse is to deconstruct the conceptualization of a given experiential field, to resist conceptualization's hardening of experience into some essence such that it hinders living perception, and through formalization to break the habitual cognition formed in everyday life and open a new horizon. The aim of the pre-logical character is to mark out an experiential field so that logic-guided thought can analyze it. Discourse moves "back and forth" among the alternative schemes for encoding a certain reality; it is both interpretive and pre-interpretive. Hayden White's insight here is profound: he does not analyze discourse as a fixed, static object but fully recognizes the "movement" character of discourse. It is precisely from the angle of "discursive movement" that he discovers the multi-leveledness and multi-functionality of discourse.

Discourse can be analyzed at three levels: the first level is the depiction (mimesis) of the "data" in the field of study; the second level is argument or narrative (narration); the third level is the basis on which the above two levels are combined, namely dialectical arrangement. At this last level of discourse (dialectical syntax), certain rules are formed that determine the possible objects of discourse and the way description and argument are combined. Thus discourse itself is a model of the processes of consciousness, that is, with the aid of analogy, some originally to-be-understood phenomenal field is assimilated into those experiential fields whose nature is already understood. Viewed from the angle of discourse, this too is a kind of troping. This troping is generally figurative, and its main forms can be identified as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, and so on.

This troping of discourse and the processes of consciousness was already proposed by Vico in expounding the "poetic logic" of primitive peoples; Cassirer too gave a fine exposition of it, and Piaget made an in-depth analysis of it in his study of the development of children's cognitive abilities. Piaget holds that in the early modes by which children relate to the world there is a natural "metaphor" stage. As children's cognition develops, a "Copernican revolution" occurs, and a "proximate consciousness," or what may be called a "metonymic ability," begins to appear. The next fundamental turn is the formation of logical ability. But in the process of children's cognitive development, the early modes are not eliminated by cognitive development; they are preserved in the process of ontogenesis and assimilated into the subsequent modes. Therefore, whether the human's consciousness or discursive activity, they always contain various different modes simultaneously. Following Piaget's exposition, Hayden White further points out that the discursive process continually mediates between perception and conceptualization, between description and argument, between mimesis and narration, and at the same time indicates "a mixture of the poetic level and the cognitive level of consciousness; and for the purpose of 'understanding,' discourse itself seeks coordination between these two levels." (3)

However, once the troping character of discourse is revealed, then not only history but the entire human sciences that take discourse as their form of expression can hardly escape literary techniques such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony; they are shrouded under the enchantment of literary fiction. Thus the sharp boundary between the real and the fictive, between truth and error, is lost. So Hayden White says: "The theory of discursive troping enables us to understand the continuity between error and truth, ignorance and understanding—or, put another way, between imagination and thought." And he admonishes that one must change one's understanding of the oppositional relation between "objectivity" and "distortion": "This is less a matter of choosing between objectivity and distortion than a matter of choosing among different strategies for constructing 'reality' in thought; here, constructing reality is in order to deal with reality in different ways, and each strategy for constructing reality has its own ethical implication." (3)

Interpreting discursive troping from the angle of movement can indeed powerfully reveal the "poetic" nature of history, thereby reminding historiography to engage in self-reflection and strengthening the self-awareness of writing history and literary history. More importantly, it reminds us not to pass judgment on different historiographies simply and rashly but to deeply examine the ethical meaning implicit in the various construction strategies, as well as the power relations and ideological backgrounds behind them. At the same time, it also dissolves the rigid boundaries between literature and history and among the various human sciences, providing a new theoretical method for studying those marginal works such as biography, non-fiction novels, and reportage literature. Greenblatt says: "The work of art itself is the product of a series of manipulations by people, some of which are our own manipulations (most prominently, some works that were originally not regarded as 'art' at all but as something else—writings of thanks for favors, propaganda, prayers, and so on), and many of which are manipulations undergone in the process of the original work's formation. That is, the work of art is the product of a negotiation—on one side, a creator or group of creators who have mastered a complex, generally recognized set of creative conventions, and on the other, social institutions and practices. To reach agreement in this negotiation, the artist needs to create a currency recognized in meaningful, mutually beneficial transactions." (8) When we no longer regard literature and history as independent, closed fields but see the continuity between them, and further connect them with other fields, acknowledging that the distinctions among the fields are the product of "negotiation," then the richness, complexity, and many-sidedness of literature and history, as well as the relation of mutual interaction between them, are fully displayed.

There is no natural boundary between literature and history, or among the various human sciences; the differentiation of the different fields is the fruit of human practice and is manipulated by social institutions and human factors. Yet it is precisely in the process of disciplinary differentiation that the differences among literature, history, and the various human sciences are gradually formed. Even though the boundaries among them are always being continually broken through, and fusion and recombination may occur among the disciplines, one cannot on that account ignore the differences among them. When the theory of discursive troping clarifies the poetic nature of history and points out its inevitable fictionality, it in fact also implies a new theoretical crisis: historical truth is inaccessible; what people can come into contact with is only the historical text constructed by discourse, which cannot shake off discursive troping and cannot do without literary fiction. Any historical interpretation is merely a strategy adopted in response to "aesthetic" or "ethical" or "political" needs. The so-called restoration of historical truth is also only the human's misunderstanding or extravagant hope, even merely the human's arrogance, and thereby provides a theoretical basis for historical nihilism. Looking further, all the human sciences that take discourse as their mode of expression cannot escape "troping" and become a clamorous entertainment of many voices.

Proposing the theory of troping from the angle of discursive movement is Hayden White's powerful support for New Historicism and also an advancement of theory itself; it lets us recognize more soberly the relation between narrative discourse and historical re-presentation, and recognize that "I question the materials I possess—yet the nature of these materials is precisely governed by the way I question them," (9) thereby raising the self-awareness of historiography. But the theory of discursive troping has an important defect: it does not interpret discursive movement within human practice, does not see that the human possesses agency, that in different practical fields the relation between human and discourse changes, and that this thereby produces changes in the mode of discursive movement.

The different purposes and ways of using discourse in different domains of human activity constrain and shape discursive movement. Discourse itself is, to be sure, troping and possesses fictionality, but in different fields of activity the way and the possibility-space of discursive troping are treated differently—either restricted or encouraged—so that discourse displays different features. Even in the example Hayden White gives: the move from a major premise (all humans are mortal) to a minor premise (Socrates is human) is itself a tropological step, but it must conform to logicality. In cognitive texts such as history, discursive troping must proceed within a logical framework. In literary activity, by contrast, discursive troping has primacy; it can completely, even intentionally, break through the confines of logic, thereby stimulating the reader's imagination. Between the field of literary activity and other cognitive, ethical practical fields or the everyday-life field, although discursive movement has commonalities, the differences cannot be effaced. Literature is the field where discursive troping displays its splendor, while historiography, mainly as a cognitive activity, has discourse that cannot escape troping and metaphor, yet these are controlled by the cognitive purpose and the cognitive relation. Historiography has its own criteria; it must control the possibility-space of discursive troping and cannot tolerate discourse running wild.

Language is a chameleon. It both controls the human and is controlled by the human. At the same time, there is also the situation of escaping mutual control and coexisting, co-living, and co-flourishing with the human—that is, the mode of existence of literary discourse. The way discourse changes changes with the change of the human's field of activity and the change of the relation between human and discourse. In different fields of activity, the human uses discourse for different purposes and in different ways and establishes different intentional relations with discourse, and this leads to changes in discursive movement itself. In cognitive fields such as history or in other ethical practical fields, discourse is mainly treated as an expressive "tool"; the vagueness, equivocality, and fictionality that come with troping must be restricted and cleared away as much as possible, and except where they aid understanding, they are often treated as encumbrances compressed to the minimum, and metaphor too withers, whereby occurs what Gadamer calls "foreshortening." In literary activity, by contrast, discourse is no longer merely a "tool," nor even a simple "object"; it becomes another "subject," a "you" intimate with the human; it is itself the purpose, and so troping too gains ontological meaning, and those already aged and dead metaphors are thereby revived—under the poet's pen they can even "touch iron and turn it to gold," radiating the brilliant glow of life, and the fictional world constructed by discursive troping finally becomes the human's spiritual home.

Ignoring the controllable side of discursive troping must result in falling into Derrida's deconstructive theory, where discourse loses its ultimate signified and becomes the ceaseless drifting of the signifier. This in turn contradicts Hayden White's own analysis of the power and ideology of historiography: if discourse is always continually troping, continually drifting, and is uncontrollable, then it forever continually flees the human, cannot be manipulated by any power, and must deconstruct discourse's own ideological character. The reason Foucault proposed the "rhetorical space" of the word is precisely that the relation between the verbal sign and representation (or thing) is both arbitrary and manipulable, and the manipulation of discourse is based precisely on the arbitrariness of the relation between the two—that is, this "space" is "rhetorical." Therefore, power can seize the opportunity to covertly change the position where the verbal sign "alights" and change the relation between the verbal sign and representation (or thing) to smuggle in "private goods" and realize discursive manipulation. And once one admits that discourse can be artificially manipulated, one cannot but admit that in different fields of activity the human, for different purposes, can regulate discursive movement, and thereby produce differences in the mode of discursive movement among history, literature, and other practical fields.

The particular styles formed in different discursive-activity fields have certain particular "conventions," as Culler calls them; these "conventions" guide our way of viewing discourse and construct a certain dominant intentional relation with discourse, thereby determining the way and direction of discursive movement. The reason the laws of discursive change are hard to grasp lies not only in the differences among the various human practical fields but, still more, in the fact that within the same practical field there are always multiple modes of activity—for instance, both the field of literary activity and the field of historiography interweave cognitive activity, ethical activity, and aesthetic activity—and the diversity and changeability of the modes of activity determine the diversity and changeability of the intentional relation between human and discourse, which makes discursive movement unpredictable, just as Qian Zhongshu said, discourse is "cunning as a snake." But although the modes of activity are interwoven and changeable, within the same practical field there is always a certain dominant activity, and it is precisely this dominant activity that determines the character of this field of activity, determines the dominant relation between human and discourse, determines the direction of discursive movement, and determines the features of discourse itself.

Speaking of the limitation of New Historicism, Sheng Ning correctly points out: "This is mainly because the poststructuralist historical theorists represented by White reduce history merely to text; they thoroughly banish that event which solidly occurred and produced influence." (10) If we go deeper to the level of discourse, then it may be said that the poststructuralist theorists represented by Hayden White stress only discourse's control over the human and ignore the human's effective use of discourse, ignore the diversity and changeability of the relation between human and discourse, and expel the human from their own theoretical horizon. In Hayden White's metahistorical theory, the human is always controlled: at the level of historiography, the human can only choose an interpretive strategy among ready-made, pre-existing modes, and what strategy he chooses is determined by the ideological background and power relations to which he belongs; at the level of discourse, the human likewise cannot shake off discursive troping, so that the historical text falls into the trap of literary fiction. Thus the human need not bear responsibility for historiography, and history indeed ought to come to its end with the elimination of the "misunderstanding" about historiography. On the contrary, if we admit that, outside the historical text, there exists an "event that solidly occurred and produced influence," and admit that the human retains agency in practice, including discursive practice, then we cannot but bear the due responsibility for historiography. Frye once criticized "poetic determinism," saying: "It is foolish to try, with a view that reduces everything to rhetoric, to prove that theology, metaphysics, jurisprudence, the social sciences, or any one or set of them we dislike, have 'nothing but' metaphor and myth as their basis." (11) In fact, postmodernism's opposition to grand narrative and its advocacy of small narratives and oral history is not a denial of history either, but an effort to improve narrative method, attempting with various "one-sided views" to approach historical truth from their respective angles.

To a great extent, social life is organized by the human through discursive activity; the usefulness and effectiveness of discourse let social life run normally and gain order, while the troping, metaphoricity, fictionality, and entertainment of discourse make social life appear rich and colorful, full of vitality, and also let discourse itself ceaselessly generate. Discursive activity runs through and permeates all domains of human activity, and, shaped by the differences in the nature of activity in each domain, develops its own peculiar functions and displays different movement features. Only by viewing and analyzing literary discourse and historical discourse within this grand horizon do we have the possibility of finding the laws of each.