Hayden White and Metahistory

Hayden White and his take on Post- Structuralism is an attempt to explain the events of the past and that there is a nature to reality. In his work Metahistory, White was able to present history in different facets. There is historical thought for an event and that there is also a way to present it depending on the historians. A historical work is a verbal presentation of events. There is a sense a sort of poetic approach to it.

A historical work is of course poetically constructed. We reconstruct the past in a way that is understandable to the audience. Thus, we drop of some lines that are not as important as the event itself. It is poetic because we are in a way trying to make history as interesting as we want it to be. For White, every historical work takes the form of a narrative prose and I cannot oppose it. History is indeed, a narrative prose essay. To present history, we take a look at unprocessed history. We have documents, evidences, and all those that have something to do with the historical field that we are interested in. We may include in our study of the past, historical accounts. By carefully merging these issues – historical accounts, records and evidences – a historian can present it to an audience. By this, we mean the reader of the work. It will in some way affect the historical writing because the audience should be taken in to consideration. By this, we mean readership. So, history is not just the retelling of the past, it has to deal with a lot of elements and a lot of features. And that is not an easy task. Hayden White in his Metahistory was able to explain the more important elements on history writing. He mentioned five important elements and these are chronicle, story, motive emplotment, and motive argument and motive ideological implication.

The first element being the chronicle is the retelling of an event in a chronological manner. The second element of course is the story. In history, it is the event. Historical writing centers on an issue or an event and that is the story. The retelling will require a beginning, middle and an end. In between there are words such as first, then, finally, ultimately and those transition words differentiate a chronicle from a story. A chronicle is just a chronological timeline while history is different because it takes in a chronicle, put a motif and initiate the events. White mentioned four different modes of emplotment to be the third element. By emplotment, we mean of the manner that a certain story is presented. We have an event and it has a particular undertone or a mood. White mentions four emplotments and these are – romance, satire, comedy and tragedy. The first mode is romance. It is a straight forward narrative of a hero who won over adversity. This is the emplotment that tells us of a hero and how he was able to beat all the odds. It is a sense of spectacle of how a certain person became victorious after all those struggles and in the end he triumphed over all these. The second mode is tragedy satire which is the opposite of romance because it is the evil that has prevailed. This mode is an account of an event that has caused evil in some way. Then we have the third mode and that is comedy. By comedy, we have the adversities and the struggles but in the end, the conflict is resolved by reconciliation. It’s a happy ending. That no matter how painful the struggles have been, the end is always on a positive note. Now, the fourth mode is what we call as satire. Here, we mean that the hero or the antagonist for that matter faced struggles and fail. This shows that in history, the hero is not always victorious. There are struggles that a hero is not able to be victorious. It is tragic.

White’s four mode of emplotment is in itself already a great explanation. Besides these four emplotment, he was able to employ the so-called modes of arguments. These are explanatory techniques and also got four variations – formist, organicist, mechanist, contextualism.

Now, I will turn to the discussion of the four modes of argument. Formism has something to do with form. It is an idiographic take on the historian because it tells of an event and what makes it particularly interesting or different. There is always in some way a particular uniqueness to an event. Organicist on the other hand tells us of events that are probably separate but is seen as unified whole. Some events may be united in one or more of principles. We have the mechanist view that talks about the mechanisms or the elements that has to do with an event. The contextualist view on the other hand is about the context of the event or the contextual background of the event that is being examined.

White also employs the so-called motive of ideological implications in history writing. It is a reflection of ho an event affects life, an individual or even the civilization. By these we mean four ideologies – conservative that tells us that history evolves; liberal that is explains that a change in law or government would mean a change in the present state of affairs; radical that explains that only radical means can effect a change; and anarchist saying that the state is corrupt that a new community must pave the way for change.

To sum up, I see White as a great historian, a great narrative writer and a great philosopher. It is not easy to employ those means in historical writing but he was able to explain and note those mechanisms. As a historian, we can extract one event and make use of the four types of emplotment. There is a lot of method in the retelling of history but as always there is a reason behind the historians mind. His belief may quite be a form of an art but history is more than just writing but it includes explaining and trying to effect change. Over all his work is interesting with all its art and the method that he presented history. He was able to note some of the philosophers view and make an analysis of their works. I believe in so far as presentation and analysis is concerned, White was able to present history as a fun and light. I agree with him and I believe that White did a great job.

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Sources:

Staloff, Darren (2000) “The search for a meaningful past,philosophies,theories, and
interpretation of human history”. New York: The Teaching Company.

White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe.

Baltimore: John Hopkins University.