Can histories be true? narrativism, positivism, and the "metaphorical turn"

History and Theory

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 309-329

  Lorenz, Chris ^a  

^a LEIDEN UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0040616400     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00056     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978)
2. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987)
3. F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language (Groningen, 1981 and The Hague, 1983)
4. Denken over geschiedenis: Een overzicht van moderne geschiedfilosofische opvattingen (Groningen, 1984)
5. De navel van de geschiedenis: Over interpretatie, representatie en historische realiteit (Groningen, 1990)
6. History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, 1994)
7. De Spiegel ran het verleden. Exploraties I: Geschiedtheorie (Kampen, 1996)
8. De macht van representatie. Exploraties II: Cultuurfilosofie & esthetica (Kampen, 1996)
9. Macht door representatie. Exploraties III: Politieke filosofie (Kampen, 1997)
10. For the discussions on White cf. L. Kramer, "Literature, Criticism and Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hay den White and Dominick LaCapra," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), 97-128
11. Noël Carroll, "Interpretation, History and Narrative," The Monist 73 (1990), 134-167
12. Paul Roth, "Hayden White and the Aesthetics of History," History of the Human Sciences 5 (1992), 17-35
13. Wulf Kansteiner, "Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History," History and Theory 32 (1993), 273-296
14. John Zammito, "Are We Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophy of History and 'Practicing' Historians," Journal of Modern History 65 (1993), 783-814
15. Paul Ricoeur, "Geschichte und Rhetorik," in Der Sinn des Historischen: Geschichtsphilosophische Debatten, ed. H. Nagl-Docekal (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 107-126
16. Richard T. Vann et al., "Forum: Hayden White: Twenty-Five Years On," History and Theory 37 (1998), 143-194. For Ankersmit cf. Hans Kellner, "Narrativity in History: Post-structuralism and Since," History and Theory, Beiheft 26 (1987) (The Representation of Historical Events), 18-22
17. Perez Zagorin, "Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations," History and Theory 29 (1990), 263-296
18. "Het masker zonder gezicht. F. R. Ankersmit's filosofie van de geschiedschrijving," Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 97 (1984), 169-194
19. White, "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," in Tropics of Discourse, 91.
20. See T. Mormann, "Ist der Begriff der Representation obsolet?," Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 51 (1997), 349-366
21. hite, "The Fictions of Factual Representation," in Tropics of Discourse, 121-134.
22. The presupposition that the past is just a chaos of phenomena is an important one in metaphorical narrativism. In this way the radically constructive element of the "narrativization" of the past is made plausible. For criticism of this presupposition and a more realistic approach see my "Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for Internal Realism," History and Theory 33 (1994), 297- 327
23. Cf. B. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Oxford, 1983), 16-25, esp. 18: "Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos." An "anything goes" skepticism, therefore, is the only alternative for foundationalism
24. Carroll, "Interpretation, History and Narrative," 147-148. I think Carroll's reference to the "empiricist residue" (147) in White is therefore incorrect.
25. White sometimes comes close to admitting this paradoxical consequence of his position. See H. White, "A Rejoinder: A Response to Professor Chartier's Four Questions," Storia della Storiografia (Geschichte der Geschichtsschreihung) 27 (1995), 65: "One cannot transform a 'real' event, person, process, relationship, or what have you into a 'function' of a discourse without 'fictionalizing' it, by which I mean 'figurating' it. The translation of the stuff of reality into the stuff of discourse is a fictionalizing." In "Literary Theory and Historical Writing" White, however, explicitly denies that he obliterates the distinction between fact and fiction, although it is not clear on what grounds (35). Now he defends tropological analysis to the point of almost equating it with an epistemological position one could derive from E. H. Carr's What is History? In the same move, however, the emphasis is now shifted from the fictionality of figuration to its factuality, thus adding to the existing ambiguity in this matter: "If there is no such thing as 'raw facts,' but only events under different descriptions, then factuality becomes a matter descriptive protocols used to transform events into facts. Figurative descriptions of real events are not less 'factual'-or, as I would put it, 'factologi- cal'-in a different way. Tropological theory implies that we must not confuse 'facts' with 'events.'" "Who would confuse them in 1990?" seems to me a legitimate question. For criticism of this type of use of the term "fiction" cf. Ann Rigney, "Semantic Slides: History and the Concept of Fiction," in History Making: The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline, ed. R. Thorstendahl and I. Veit-Brause (Stockholm, 1996), 31-47
26. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 230-231.
27. It should be noted that Ankersmit acknowledges the complementarity of the philosophy of historical narrative and the philosophy of historical research, but he remains silent about their relationship. Cf. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 6-9
28. and his History and Tropology, 2-6
29. See, however, Gorman's critique of Ankersmit's textual holism in J. Gorman, "Philosophical Fascination with Whole Historical Texts," review of Ankersmit's History and Tropology, in History and Theory 36 (1997), 406-415
30. Cf. Carroll, "Interpretation, History and Narrative," 141-143
31. Ricoeur, "Geschichte und Rhetorik," 121. Another remnant of Positivism may be located in White's monistic presupposition that every historical narrative is "explained" by just one plot structure. McCullagh's objections in this case seem legitimate. See C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (London and New York, 1998), 127: "As a whole, the French revolution and the life of J. F. Kennedy is neither a romance nor clearly a tragedy. Because an interpretation of these events is meant to characterize them as a whole, neither plot is appropriate."
32. White, Metahistory, 7.
33. Cf. White, "Historical Text as Literary Artifact," 99: "In my view, we experience the 'fiction-alization' of history as an 'explanation' for the same reason that we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world we inhabit along with the author. In both we recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the world it seeks to inhabit comfortably."
34. Cf. Paul Roth, "How Narratives Explain," Social Research 56 (1989), 460: "White's concern is not logical but typological," and 461: "White has title to being called, perhaps, the Linnaeus of narrative explanation. However, his typology reveals nothing with regard to explanatory logic; about what makes a story type an explanation White has nothing to say." See also Roth, "Narrative Explanations," 1-13
35. G. R. Elton, Review of E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Mind and Method of the Historian, London Review of Books 18 (1981), 3, 8
36. T. Rockmore, "Epistemology as Hermeneutics," The Monist 73 (1990), 116
37. Keith Jenkins, "Introduction: On Being Open about Our Closures," in The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (London and New York, 1997), 1-36
38. and K. Jenkins, On "What is History?": From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London and New York, 1995)
39. Cf. White, "Interpretation in History," 55, where he describes his competitors in philosophy of history as theorists who grant that "interpretation may enter into the historian's account of the past at some point and recommend that historians try to distinguish between those aspects of their accounts that are empirically founded and those based on interpretative strategies."
40. see W. Salmon, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation (Minneapolis, 1990)
41. Cf. White, "The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory," in Tropics of Discourse, 261-183. Cf. Kramer, "Literature, Criticism and Imagination, 97-128
42. In this respect David Cooper's remarks on metaphor and truth are important. Cooper criticizes those theories of metaphor and truth that fail to elucidate why truth is a fundamental value guiding our cognitive activities. See his 'Truth and Metaphor," in Knowledge and Language, ed. Ankersmit and Mooij, 37-49
43. Cf. L. Gossman, "The Rationality of History," in Between History and Literature, 313, 315
44. See also A. Megill and D. McCloskey, "The Rhetoric of History," in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public affairs, ed. J. Nelson, A. Megill and D. McCloskey (Madison, 1987), 228, 235
45. I have analyzed this relationship and the dynamics of a historiographical discussion in "Beyond Good and Evil? The German Empire of 1871 and Modern German Historiography," Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995), 729-765
46. See also Kansteiner, "White's Critique of the Writing of History," 290-293.
47. White, "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," in Probing the Limits, ed. Friedländer, 40
48. For the conception of Lakoff and Johnson see C. Forceville, Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising (Wageningen, 1994), 27-32; for Hesse's conception, see M. Hesse, "Models, Metaphors and Truth," in Knowledge and Language, ed. Ankersmit and Mooij, 50-67
49. Hesse, "Models, Metaphors and Truth," 54.
50. In "Literary Theory and Historical Writing" White is moving in this direction by relativizing the differences between the literal and the figurative uses of language without spelling out the consequences for his original position
51. Cf. Megill and McCloskey, "The Rhetoric of History," 235: "The need is not to abandon epis-temological standards. These too are part of the discipline and of its conversation. They mark out a successful attempt to make history, like science, cumulative. Yet at the same time they create an obstacle. History that tries to do without rhetoric loses its contact with the wider conversation of mankind." See also J. Nelson, A. Megill, and D. McCloskey, "Rhetoric of Inquiry," in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, ed. Megill and McCloskey, 3-18