The Voices of Hayden White

By Amy J. Elias

APRIL 22, 2018

From the OED: “Mentor: after ancient Greek Μέντωρ, the name of a character in the
Odyssey, in whose likeness Athena appears to Telemachus and acts as his guide and
adviser. The origin of mentor embedded the notion of multiple voices/personas.”

AFTER I HEARD about Hayden White’s death, I wanted to hear his voice, so I pulled out
his books and began to read. I saw my graduate school marginalia in Tropics of Discourse
(1978), the notes to self in The Content of the Form (1987). I spent time with the preface to
Figural Realism (1999), the collection featuring essays from the late 1980s and 1990s,
because though short, it is a small compendium of Hayden’s voices — ironic, self-assured,
modestly deflationary, and then a claim like a punch to the head: “To think that one can
think outside or without theory is a delusion.” I had never read all of White’s last text, The
Practical Past (2014), so I went to that last book, which one would expect to be a summa
by a world-renowned eminence and is instead essentially a new foray into the question of
the ethical meaning of literariness. And then I hit the sentence: “As Linda Hutcheon and
Amy Elias have demonstrated (to my satisfaction, at least) the dominant genre of
postmodernist writing is ‘historiographic metafiction’ (Hutcheon) or simply ‘metahistorical
romance’ (Elias).” And the pages blurred for a time.

Hayden White is recognized as one of the great humanist minds of our time, defining the
key questions of 20th- and 21st-century philosophy of history and the ethical import of
narrative discourse. White’s biography is well documented: born in 1928 to working-class
parents in Tennessee; undergraduate education at Wayne State University in Detroit after
his parents moved there for work; a stint in the US Navy in the late 1940s; graduate work at
the University of Michigan in 1955 with a thesis on Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the
papal schism of 1130 — then teaching at Wayne State, the University of Rochester, UCLA,
Wesleyan University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The legendary career in philosophy of history began with a shot over the bow. In the mid-
1960s, he was asked to write an essay for the journal History and Theory about the value of
professionalized history, and this became the essay “The Burden of History,” which led to
his writing of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(1973) and catapulted him to international academic stardom for the next 45 years.

Richard Vann and others have written that there were many Hayden Whites, and that may
be true of the man, but there are consistent through lines in White’s work. “The Burden of
History” was the start: a polemic in which White claimed that literary artists, philosophers,
and the public at large had lost interest in history because of historians’ professionalized
reverence for the study of the past “as an end in itself” — because of history’s belief that it
could be a scientific investigation of the past and that its purpose was merely to tell us
accurately “what happened.” Mourning the loss of the grand synthesizing historical
narratives (such as those by Marx or Vico), White proposed that history reengage both with
the questions raised about the present by the contemporary arts and sciences and with
modernist narrative styles that spoke to contemporary reality. The last section of the essay
told much about his historical positioning: “we require a history that will educate us to
discontinuity more than ever before, for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot.”

Over the course of his career he used different tactics to critique history as it was practiced
in the academy. One was to lambaste ossified disciplinary practices by professional
historians. Another was to finely explicate the work of writers who produced what he
considered relevant models for doing and theorizing history — writers as diverse as
Giambattista Vico, Benedetto Croce, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, Paul Ricoeur, Fredric
Jameson, and Michel Foucault. White also engaged with a wide swath of midcentury
critical theory, sometimes performing structuralist or poststructuralist analyses of
theoretical or literary texts as examples of new method (such as his tour de force analysis of
The Education of Henry Adams reprinted in The Content of the Form). He was primarily an
essayist, and his literary voice is that of a maestro, unpacking arguments and positions with
formidable erudition and precise logic. White was a master of diagnostic analysis,
particularly good at analyzing the methods and claims of other theorists and at synthesizing
thought. He drew from multiple language traditions and the full historical range of
philosophy of history, and his work might be compared usefully with that of Erich
Auerbach, which he much admired.

He insisted on an organic relationship between history and literature not only as sister arts
but as mutually revelatory investigations of reality, because he consistently asserted that
history didn’t exist as an object but as a concept, something that could only be accessed
through, and reconstructed as, narrative. In the magisterial Metahistory, a formalist analysis
of 19th-century historical narrative, he worked with the model of Vico’s tropological
history to show that every historical work was at least a much a poetical work as an
empirical one: every historical narrative is emplotted according to the rhetorical tropes of
metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and these are tied to specific ideological
attitudes. With this claim in mind, he dissected the style of a number of key 19th-century
writers of history — Hegel, Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Marx, Nietzsche,
Croce. The writing of history was not, White claimed, a science apart from the literary arts;
it was rhetoric of a special kind. The style amounted to content; the tropes of emplotment
constituted rather than merely illustrated the facts that they presented as historical.

With that claim he shot a cruise missile into the bunkers of academia, becoming a target for
40 years of disciplinary backlash but also becoming a rock star in philosophy of history, the
bad boy of demystification — a persona he seemed to relish. Writing with the sensibility of
the anti-establishment 1960s in the maelstrom of poststructuralist theory created by forces
such as Roland Barthes and Foucault, White was pegged by his critics as a postmodern
relativist intent upon destroying the historical profession. Certainly, he was a relativist in
relation to history, an anarchistic socialist in relation to politics, and a formalist/structuralist
in terms of method, but White was also a scholar in the Classical sense. He always believed
there was something at stake.
 ¤

The Alabama spring had burned off early. It was 1998 and I was working at home, a
displaced Yankee academic staggering in the heat with a book in hand, my dog snuffling
among the invasive ivy grown over the hard-packed clay of our steeply sloped backyard. I
was writing a book and was stuck at the place where the exact idea you need skits like a
taunting specter every time you reach your mind into the dark. And then I hit the passage in
White’s The Content of the Form.

[I]nsofar as historical events and processes become understandable, as conservatives

maintain, or explainable, as radicals believe them to be, they can never serve as a basis for a
visionary politics more concerned to endow social life with meaning than with beauty. In
my view, the theorists of the sublime had correctly divined that whatever dignity and
freedom human beings could lay claim to could come only by way of what Freud called a
“reaction-formation” to an apperception of history’s meaninglessness.

And suddenly the diaphanous idea had a name: the historical sublime.

The university where I had my first job was not a well-funded one, and I had to fight with
my dean to uphold his promise to pay my fee to Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory
that summer to work with Hayden White so I could talk with him about this idea. I was a
tenured associate professor and would be one of the oldest “students” at the SCT, and I
would keep pretty much to myself, churning out page after page in the mornings and
talking with Ewa Domańska, Dominick LaCapra, Marianne Hirsch, and others about
historiography and theory, desperate for intellectual conversation and too old to give a
damn about impressing anybody. When I first met Hayden, he was days away from his 70th
birthday; my first coffee meeting with him was a blazing 60-mile-an-hour confabulation.
He kept asking me questions and I kept asking him questions. We had a great conversation,
and we connected as somehow outsiders to the ivy clubbiness of academe, though he of
course had been a star for decades in that world. In the conversation, there seemed to be
something at stake.
We talked about White’s theory of the historical sublime, articulated most clearly in his
essay “The Politics of Historical Interpretation.” It was a fascinating but difficult idea.
White had claimed that in the late 18th and 19th centuries, history became a discipline by
aspiring to “science” rather than “art” and that historical consciousness thus was made
synonymous with empirical realism in political and social thought. A division was created
between utopian thought (as a precondition for revolutionary action) and political thought
(associated with realism and a precondition for professionalization). White argued that this
division “consisted in subordinating written history to the categories of the ‘beautiful’ and
suppressing those of the ‘sublime.’” He posited, however, that a visionary politics intent on
real social change needed the sense of sublime history that gave older religious approaches
their power. For White, the historical sublime — i.e., History itself — is the space of chaos
and event that can only be comprehended through narrative but that can never be reduced
to narrative, which is always shaped by rhetoric and ideology. I was running with this idea
to create a theory about postmodernist historical fiction, and he was intrigued.

White’s idea was easily mocked by cynics for its seemingly naïve utopian impulses, and it
was badly used by critics as an example of the relativistic “linguistic turn” of late 20th-
century poststructuralist theory. “History was just fiction!” they declared. But I knew that
White was building off of a Kantian notion of the sublime as much as a Lyotardian one —
the sublime as that which makes visible the limits of human perception of the real, makes
us feel the human limits of understanding. To put it pedagogically: facing the sublime (e.g.,
in a moment of magnificent natural beauty or chaos), one sensed that there was something
more than the self, something that was so capacious, complex, or Other that the human
mind could not process it in terms of its a priori logical categories. The sublime threw the
human back upon itself, making the limits of the mind’s logical categories apparent to a
person at the exact moment that it made the vastness of the Real somehow perceptible. The
sublime was the vast unrepresentable Real, registered as such by the human mind. White
transferred this idea to history: the past was unknowable, gone, available only in traces. To
try to reconstruct the historical sublime fully, thinking oneself impartial or scientific, was
an insult to the dead and an act of self-deluding hubris, always ideological, always in the
service of something. But we still needed history. It was part of us.
I spend time on this because I still think that this was one of the most important ideas that
White ever had. For White, writing to his peers in the historical profession, the site of
ethical value implied by the historical sublime was humility in the face of the past.
Conceiving of the past as sublime cast us back upon our own limitations of understanding;
it forced us to ask ourselves what good history does or does not do for humans locked in
time, space, and flesh, what elisions and erasures it contains and why. White insisted — in
the face of history’s pride in its ability to excavate the archive — that we recognize that
history is sublime and unknowable yet (paradoxically) key to an ethical relation to the past,
as a check on our desires for ideological closure and control.

What astounds me today is how White anticipated many of the turns to embodiment,
silence, and anti-history that appear in theory today as recuperative gestures — anything
but poststructuralist language games. For instance, White was writing with a different aim,
for a different audience, and in a different time than are writers such as Saidiya Hartman,
Christina Sharpe, and Fred Moten, but Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation” as a
method of care and recuperation in black diasporic history would, I think, have resonated
with him. Here is White:

Is narrativity itself an ideological instrument? […] And if this is or might be the case, is this
recovery of the historical sublime a necessary precondition for the production of a
historiography of the sort that Chateaubriand conceived to be desirable in times of
“abjection”? a historiography “charged with avenging the people”? This seems plausible to
me.

And here is Hartman:

Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of
this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise […] always in excess of legibility
and of the law and [hinting at and embodying] aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict
to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.

Hayden White reminded historiography that enlightenment goes only so far. Yet while he
may have been a relativist, he was not a nihilist: he was deeply and fundamentally
committed to Enlightenment principles, primarily those of unmasking and reflection in the
service of emancipation and freedom.

The turn to physical presence as a retort to idealism has of course its own historical
tradition and goes back at least to Diogenes, as Peter Sloterdijk and Michel Foucault both
remind us. In Critique of Cynical Reason (English translation 1988) — well before the
current assertions in literary criticism about the limits of critique — Sloterdijk defines
“enlightenment” as the unmasking of illusions, and he claims that the post-1960s in the
West is an era of cynicism as we practice “enlightened false consciousness”: enlightenment
has been degraded into pointless unmasking after unmasking and is now separated from
programmatic, courageous action toward utopian ends. In opposition to “enlightened false
consciousness,” Sloterdijk poses the “low philosophy” of the Greek Cynic anti-philosopher
Diogenes, who speaks the body back to Plato’s idealist abstraction. But of course what
Sloterdijk finds in Diogenes is a form of the trickster, one who enacts the rudeness and play
of trickster rebuke to authoritarian power, stultifying social rules, and idealist philosophy’s
repressions of the physicality of life.

Despite its unmitigated desires for transgression, pop culture is losing touch with the
trickster. Think of Marvel’s Thor films, where the god Loki is reduced to a petulant
narcissist. Loki’s liminality is decreed by his enemies rather than baked into ontology, and
his desire is not to unmask and undermine power but to usurp and own it. Though he is a
bad boy with rock-star hair who tempts our desire with fascist leather, there is no love of
life, challenge to power, or transformative vision here. Marvel’s Loki is the ultimate cynic,
the urbane interlocutor of negation.

Trickster, however, is the Hegelian negation of negation, understanding power to be a ruse

of discourse, a trap of idealism. Tricksters can be violent, crude, irresponsible; what they
aren’t is institutional. The trickster is sacrilegious and eccentric not by design but by nature,
an ontological principle of the crossroads, on the side of life. Coyote speaks back to power
by reveling in the appetites of the body, rebuking refined and cynical authority with the
vulgarities of the flesh. Prometheus sides with humans to unmask and unmake the gods’
authoritarian rule. Legba is the road of communication between levels of being, not a
political rhetorician, and he promotes intercommunication and transhistorical relation. The
misdeeds and impropriety of tricksters are not shape-shifting party tricks: they are the
embodiment of cosmic dialectic, championing eros, bringing power back down, literally, to
earth, and connecting parts of the cosmos to one another in a dialogue with flesh and being.
When humans take the part of the trickster, they remind idealist philosophy that the world
is all that is the case. They enter into the realm of Diogenes and of the carnivalesque, rudely
calling bullshit on institutional power and pretension.

I think Hayden White was in this line, playing trickster with professionalized history but
also with academe when it took itself, or him, too seriously. If his writing was life or death,
a battle with disciplinary institutionalism with the stakes being a meaningful history, his
speaking persona was that of trickster. Having moved for decades in the circles of the
deservedly and undeservedly venerated, Hayden had a radar for pretension. He targeted like
a laser any academic class prejudice or vanity. Dashing even at 80 years of age, with his
earring and Italian-cut clothes, he nonetheless had almost an instinct for acting puckishly in
the most “proper” of academic contexts. I have seen him tell offensively stupid knock-
knock jokes at a scholarly society banquet held to give him a lifetime achievement award,
stunning the room. I saw him at a lecture Q-and-A shut down the hubris of that guy with
the 20-minute question (you know the guy) not with a rebuttal but with a shrug and “Hey,
this is just a theory. Why are you taking it so seriously? Take it or leave it.” Invited for
talks and teaching seminars all over the world, he refused to put on the garb of the
venerable Great Man or the untouchable academic star. You had to know your shit cold to
go head to head with Hayden over a point of argument, but you could teasingly call him out
if he started to preen.

In 2008, we were both at the MLA convention in San Francisco and met at the book
exhibit, that road show of academic neuroses, before heading out for dinner. My first book
had been published and I had moved to a better job and was working on a new project that
would eventually turn out to be an international arts association. Hayden met me at the
Harvard booth and introduced me to peers who flagged him down, and then three or four
meteoric rising stars who immediately came over to say hello to Hayden and looked at my
nametag and nodded politely. I tried to look casually intelligent and recognized two
younger academics and introduced them to Hayden, who asked what they were working on.
One of the men took off on a jag about his recently published book, dropping academic
names like tacks on a road and puffing up with his own self-enthusiasm. Hayden listened
politely, then turned to me with a huge grin and said — in an amused voice perfectly
audible to everyone — “See? That’s what you need to learn to do.”

My favorite quote from White, which I used as a headquote in Sublime Desire, combines
his trickster voice with the kind of pronouncement that shows not only his confidence but
also his commitments: “Kant begins his logic, his last book, by saying that ‘the source of
all error is metaphor.’ Well, too bad. He is wrong. Metaphor is maybe the source of all
error but it is also the source of all truth, too.”

What is a mentor’s voice?

I don’t think Hayden knew my husband’s name; I still don’t know if he had a pet. While he
did write a blurb on Amazon.com for my first book (and I have no idea why he decided to
do this), he didn’t write me letters of recommendation; he didn’t read drafts of my writing;
and to my knowledge he didn’t serve as an external reviewer for anything I ever published.
Other people traveled with him, saw him more frequently, worked with him directly. But
Hayden championed work he thought interesting, and to know this made one want to work
better.

I don’t know if Hayden was great in the classroom, but he defended his students’ right to
learn and teachers’ rights to teach. While a professor at UCLA in 1972, he acted as the sole
plaintiff against the chief of police in a landmark California Supreme Court case regarding
covert activities by police officers registering as students and making police reports on
class discussions. The California Supreme Court found for White in a unanimous decision.
But even more recently on his Facebook pages, his interest in free discussion is apparent.
Hayden’s feed was filled not only by postings by former students and scholars who worked
with his theories but also with his own sometimes polemical observations about books,
issues, and political controversies. He kept trying to generate on online dialogue, as though
he thought that even on Facebook, there was something at stake.

And his last book reflected this belief. In The Practical Past, White discussed Michael
Oakeshott’s notion of the “practical past,” an ethics of history that recognizes that from the
archival facts of history we generate pictures of the past that are culturally meaningful
rather than “true” in an empirical sense. If professionalized history had become the space of
historical reconstruction by licensed academics, literature was the access-way to the
practical past. In his last book, White turned to literature as a human response to history
when there was something at stake in remembrance.

In 2009, Robert Duran at the University of Rochester organized a colloquium on the

writing of Hayden White, with White as the honored guest. The speakers list was
formidable — Fredric Jameson, Dominick LaCapra, Hans Kellner, on and on. When asked
whom he’d like to invite, Hayden gave Robert my name. I was one of the only literary
critics in the room, and nobody really knew who I was or what I was doing there; when I
was introduced, the speaker mispronounced my last name. In my talk, I discussed history in
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (a book that I found out afterward that Hayden loved as much as I
did, and which eventually earned a chapter in The Practical Past), to tease out the
relationship between ethics and history and flesh that I thought Hayden, too, understood,
and that most people missed in his theory of history. I talked about how Morrison’s novel
refuses the consolation of narrativist history when it reminds us what ghosts like Beloved
are: namely, bodies that by definition live in time and walk the earth. I noted how in this
novel, history is not a matter of words but of material embodiment: when history happens,
the world is made. The transfer of populations, the changes in landscape and environment,
the building and decay of place — these mark history as the passage of time, materialized.
This is the point of Beloved: that embodiment matters. And I asserted that History-with-a-
capital-H may have been meaningless for White, but its inscription was not; the body of the
text was the space where ideology took a shape and a form. White’s formalism is a
recognition of the textual body, of materiality, in the face of stronger and stronger claims
for writing’s (and history’s) transparency or analyses of the text as play, an end in itself.
Hayden White’s unique theoretical move was to return us to the body of the text, to the
content of the form, as well as to history as the practical, embodied past.

When I spoke the last line of my paper, I saw Hayden dip his head, start to smile. I heard
from him in an email a few days later: “Dearest Amy: I was so proud of you, the
consummate intellectual and critic, precise, eloquent, wide-ranging, a person who knew
what she knew and knew that she knew it. You were sensational. I am so–as they say–
looking forward to your next book. And thanks, too, for the kind words. I was touched. With
love, Hayden.”

What is a mentor’s voice?

White was a formalist in the tradition of Auerbach and Vico and Jameson and Said. He
insists that we attend to how texts work, to the tropes and metaphors and styles that govern
what they say and what they allow us, therefore, to think. Elegant, wondrously brilliant,
facile with language and languages, with an insatiable curiosity about ideas and a wicked
cheekiness, Hayden White moved among the academic elite but took underdogs and
oddballs under his wing.

I was one of them, and I will always be grateful.

Amy J. Elias is Lindsay Young Professor of English and director of the Humanities Center
at the University of Tennessee. She has published books and articles about the
contemporary arts, was the founding president of ASAP: The Association for the Study of
the Arts of the Present, and was the founding co-editor-in-chief of ASAP/Journal.

Los Angeles review of books

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