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Wesleyan University
A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism

Author(s): Hans Kellner
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 19, No. 4, Beiheft 19: Metahistory: Six Critiques (Dec., 1980),
pp. 1-29
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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A BEDROCK OF ORDER: HAYDEN WHITE'S LINGUISTIC
HUMANISM
HANS KELLNER
Avbpa toL E'VVEJTE,[Lovcya, tokktpotov

(Tell me, 0 Muse, of the man of many turns)
The invocation of the Muse which opens the Odyssey does not, like that of
the Iliad, identify its hero by name. He is called only polytropos, which is
literally (although rarely) translated as "[the man of] many turns" - other
renderings include "the adventurous man," "that ingenious hero," "the man
of many devices" or (my own favorite) "skilled in all ways of contending."
It was Odysseus who proposed the horse, given as a tribute, which opened
the gates of Troy and ended a decade of futile, if glorious, slaughter. Poly-
tropos seems an apt characterization of Hayden White, and polytropic of
his book Metahistory. The issues raised by this book are bewildering. A
language is scarcely available that will allow direct confrontation with a book
so fully and openly about language. The historian, who is accustomed to more
or less frontal attacks on his subject in the manner of Achilles, is frustrated
by the "many turns" of the book, and by its ability to evade or absorb
thrusts. In rhetoric, style of argument, authorial pose, and subject matter
itself, Metahistory seems to dominate and control any discourse which might
address it.
The book we are to consider is titled Metahistory: The Historical Imagina-
tion in Nineteenth-Century Europe, its subjects are historians, its course is
diachronic; yet it specifically addresses literary criticism, philosophy, and his-
tory. The politics of academic discourse reflected in this situation must be
the proper subject of preliminary inquiry, because cultural politics - the
politics of historical, literary, and philosophical thought in America - have
shaped both the book itself and responses to it. Furthermore, because Hayden
Whitet's own career as an historian and cultural critic has turned again and
again to matters of cultural politics, the historian considering Metahistory is
virtually compelled to examine the text as a political event and its writing as
a political act.
2 HANS KELLNER
This is not simple to do. The book is elaborately defended against inter-
pretation because as a book about interpretation it not only gives a system of
rules by which it might itself be interpreted, but it also at many points carries
out such an interpretation. One has scarcely begun to read Metahistory before
learning that it is "cast in an Ironic mode" (xii), and that its method is
"formalist" (3).1 A few pages from the end of the book, we note that White
takes this "purely formal way" of characterizing the interpretative strategies
of the historians he discusses as a "value neutral" methodology (431). The
strategy is explicitly announced shortly thereafter: "When it is a matter of
choosing among these alternative visions of history, the only grounds for
preferring one over another are moral or aesthetic ones" (433). By thus
drawing its hermeneutic wagons into a circle Metahistory assumes the posture
of the "master-text" by forcing any prospective critic to address it - that is,
to name it - on its own terms. It is perfectly possible to assault the text on
a variety of grounds, and it is certainly possible to disagree with the conten-
tion that a "purely formal" approach (or any other) is "value neutral."
White is clearly aware of all this, but he is also aware that any possible
criticism of his text is already named and placed by the text itself. A con-
frontation with Metahistory cannot begin from without because the book and
its theory claims to comprehend and neutralize any such assault before it is
made.2
Although the book is apparently impossible to outflank, it teaches a
definite suspicion about the claims of any text and that there is no escape
from "indenture," whether to literary, epistemological, ideological, or lin-
guistic forms. Despite the inoculation that Metahistory carries out on any
critical reader by naming and placing itself within its own self-contained
system, and equally by implicating possible readings of it within its own
compass, the book also demands that it be mistrusted. It is perhaps even
willing to authorize - to name and accept as classifiable - the grounds for
its own rejection. If this is the case, "reading" in the classical sense of a
voluntary communication between a fixed text and a relatively free mind be-
comes impossible: this permanent indenture seems to require either that one
not read the book (by which I mean, not to follow its premises to their con-
clusions, but rather to reject the exercise in advance), or to be read by it
(to enter the text only to find oneself already in it.) To escape this apparent
impasse, or at least to avoid it for a while, one may proceed by indirection
(as Odysseus rather than Achilles) to consider questions oblique to the text,
choosing to forget that this polytropic attitude is also that of Metahistory.
The various assertions of Metahistory exist along two axes: one, an his-
1. All citations in this Beiheft of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nine-

teenth-CenturyEurope (Baltimore and London, 1973) are placed in parentheses.
2. On "master-texts,"see Hayden White, "Review Essay: Leon Pompa, Vico: A
Study of the "New Science" in History and Theory 15 (1976), 186.
WHITE S LINGUISTIC HUMANISM 3
torical tradition which bequeaths and authorizes the basic direction of the
book; and the other, a discourse of current cultural politics which shapes
the tack of the book, its strategies and defenses, by enforcing certain prohibi-
tions and presenting unavoidable confrontations. My intention in the first two
sections of this essay is to fix firmly the interaction of these axes, the tradi-
tional and discursive. This done, I shall turn later to the relation of the book
to its subject, the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe.
I
Valla is one of a long line of analysts of language who appear at that stage of
any intellectual movement when it begins to question its values and termi-
nology. He was an iconoclast who, in the interest of an intuited higher con-
sistency, exposed the inconsistency in every contemporary form of cultural
expression. As such, he is the prototype of the modern philologist as moral
reformer.
Willson Coates, Hayden White, J. Salwyn Schapiro,
The Emergence of Liberal Humanism
Metahistory is a book with no dedication or personal acknowledgments; its

author makes few references to his own earlier works. The result is to obscure
the relation of the book both to an intellectual tradition and a professional
career. But each of these extrinsic factors is of considerable importance in
defining the meaning of Metahistory, either as an individual text or as a call
for a reformation in historical studies. The discontinuity which seems to
place Metahistory in a different category from White's earlier work is illusive.
To start with, the career itself has been filled with apparently discontinuous
leaps. Beginning as an historian of the medieval Church, White turned to
nineteenth-century thought in the early 1960s, and by the end of that decade
his published work was ranging widely throughout Western cultural history:
from the Greco-Roman tradition to contemporary philosophy of history, from
Ibn Khaldoun to Foucault. The incoherence of this field of material is broken
by repeated returns to two figures, Vico and Croce; but the interest that they
hold for White does not in itself solve the problem. Nor does the fact that an
interest in historical theory has been a part of this corpus of work from the
beginning: not only does too much of White's work deal with other matters
("structuralism and popular culture," Darwin, the Noble Savage, literary
theory) for historical theory to serve as the theme that unifies such a diversi-
fied field of inquiry, but historical theory itself is such an inchoate, unformal-
ized concept that it seems as dispersive as White's thematic and chronological
travels.
Two themes, nevertheless, consistently emerge throughout White's work.
To name them is to define the intellectual path which leads to Metahistory,
the "unacknowledgments." The first theme of White's work is how a tradition
elicits assent, and what happens when a tradition ceases to define the rules
by which important judgments are made. White's early writing notes how the
4 HANS KELLNER
Gregorian tradition of papal authority, with its emphasis on worldly power

and canonical legalism, gave way to the new spirituality of the twelfth century,
represented by Saint Bernard and his new set of criteria for papal authority.
The two-volume intellectual history which White co-authored traced the
emergence and ordeal of the tradition of "liberal humanism"; his interest in
"cultural politics," the ways in which a tradition constrains the struggle of
conflicting forces within it, has not flagged. At least a dozen articles deal
with the subject in one form or another.
However, if the first of the major themes in White's work is an interest
in cultural politics - how a tradition censors the debate it makes possible-
the second is a pronounced fixation upon the force confronting the weight of
tradition, human choice. Throughout White's work on the philosophy of his-
tory, he has consistently condemned pessimism and fatalism; the Ibn Khal-
douns, Burckhardts, Spenglers, who see mankind walking a treadmill through
time, the direction of which is occasionally reversed by forces outside human
control, have struck him as antihumanistic, and consequently as wrong. His
criterion is clear and simple: whatever reinforces the human sense of the
possibility of mastery, the sense that the game has rules which make it worth
playing, constitutes for White the precondition for a valid philosophy of his-
tory. Proper philosophy of history is thus humanistic because it provides the
"tentative hypotheses necessary for action"; cyclical patterns of history,
whether Greek, Arab, or tropological, are to be judged by whether they sug-
gest some "essentially cumulative character of the human experience."3
White's insistence that historical writing should reinforce the sense of
human mastery is complemented by an assertion that the greater course of
history itself (as lived and as written) is based upon human choice. Men
choose who they are by choosing who they were. Thus, Rome "fell" when
"men ceased to regard themselves as descendents of their Roman forebears
and began to treat themselves as descendants of their Judaeo-Christian
predecessors."4 In this view, the true "fall" was an event in the minds of
millions of men and women who "act as if they could choose their own
ancestors." To choose a tradition is to belong to it; the same is not true
of genetic constitution. "And no amount of 'objective' historical work point-
ing out the extent to which this chosen ancestry is not the real ancestry can
prevail against the choosing power of the individuals in the system."5 The
tradition, then, is the arena within which the battles of cultural politics are
fought, but the nature of the tradition is not a dead hand of the past (a
3. Hayden White, "Ibn Khaldoun in World Philosophy of History," Comparative

Studies in Society and History 2 (1959), 122, 123.
4. Hayden White, "What is a Historical System?" in Biology, History and Natural
Philosophy, ed. Allen D. Breck and Wolfgang Yourgrau (New York and London, 1972),
239.
5. Ibid., 241.
WHITE'S LINGUISTIC HUMANISM 5
hereditary set of traits), but rather a continually chosen set of possibilities.
If the tradition is exhausted or morbid, this too is a matter of human choice.
Metahistory is a consistent step in this study of tradition and choice, but its
identity remains obscure until we identify the tradition that it has implicitly
chosen for itself.
The image of the Renaissance humanist as founder of the modern and
most fully "human" world-view is a topos of modern cultural historiography
(shadowed, to be sure, by its counter-topos, which presents the Renaissance
humanist as a fundamentally medieval mind), but its particular appearance
in White's work suggests his strong identification with the principal concerns
of humanism. In White's vision of modern history, the Renaissance begins
"the culture of criticism," which is both that of the humanists and of the
humanities which derive from them. The collapse of religious restraints on
various discourses during the Renaissance liberated the "study of cultural
artifacts as specifically human creations," as phenomena rather than as epi-
phenomena of some deeper religious or metaphysical force. This process of
secularization - from the "divinities" to the "humanities"- entails "the
global process of demystification of culture which culminated in the founda-
tion, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the social sciences."6 Lorenzo
Valla, as the quotation at the head of this section suggests, is seen as the
prototypical humanist. Valla's best-known exploit was his exposure of the
Donation of Constantine as a forgery through philological and textual
criticism. Valla, the "philologist as moral reformer," attacked scholasticism
where he found it most vulnerable, in its language, and like Ramus much of
his most important work was a philological reconsideration of Aristotelian
categories. Paul Kristeller has noted that the sixteenth-century humanists
effectively reduced logic to rhetoric;7 and White, in Metahistory, takes this
sixteenth-century rhetoric as his authority for using a four-trope paradigm
instead of the Metaphor/Metonymy dyad employed by the binary struc-
turalists like Jakobson, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss (3 1-33, n.13).
The replacement of a logic with a rhetoric in the interest of eliminating
a host of false problems has been the task of a series of thinkers. Each of
them reconfronts the same opponent - a spirit-deadening scholasticism which
refuses innovation and leads discourse again and again into a series of debates
which are in advance impossible of resolution. Valla is the type, but Giambat-
tista Vico is the incarnation of a more self-conscious philologist; the latter
has more than the former's "intuited higher consistency." In the fourfold
theory of tropes, Vico forged the tools of a human science that could make
sense of events without an appeal to divine will. Nietzsche is another appari-
6. Hayden White, "The Culture of Criticism," in Liberations: New Essays on the

Humanities in Revolution, ed. Ihab Hassan (Middletown, 1971), 55.
7. Paul Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist
Strains (New York, 1961), 101.
6 HANS KELLNER
tion of this type and was thus wrong when he wrote of himself: "For the
first time in history somebody had come to grips with scholarship" (cited in
Metahistory, 333). This procession of "philologist-reformers"includes Hayden
White. White treats historical theory respectfully in Metahistory, but else-
where has referred to "the trivia of my own discipline's internecine squab-
bles,"8 and has often maintained that "the conventional canons of historical
scholarship" are unsuitable for judging work which he considers importantly
innovative. Reading White and Metahistory into this tradition reveals that
the nineteenth century plays a special role for it, acting out or "working
through" its principal problems. White has identified the program of the
sixteenth-century humanists with the formalization of the "human sciences"
(from history to sociology, from historical philology to structural linguistics)
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Vico, whose profession was
the study of Renaissance rhetorical forms, not only seems a crystallization
of these forms, but also "the nineteenth century in embryo," as Croce put it.9
Untimely Nietzsche, embedded in his century, was struggling to get out, to get
"above" it and its bewildering nihilism. And White makes of the nineteenth
century an allegorical play, in which the tropes have finally learned their
lines and delivered them properly, only to forget them at once.
Adrian Kuzminski has skeptically pointed out that Metahistory implicitly
shares with Vico's work the claim to be the foundation of "a new science,"
a science that stresses the human power of institutional creativity against the
oppressive force of sacred ordination. From Vico, White takes his tropology
- the tools of "gentile," human creation. Vico, however, faces a human as
well as a sacred barrier to his "new science"; the claims of logic to a truth
beyond human power must be eliminated before Vico's science may operate.
"Logic" comes from logos, whose first and proper meaning was fabula, fable,
carried over into Italian as favella, speech. In Greek the fable was also called
mythos, myth, whence comes the Latin mutus, mute. For speech was born in mute
times as mental [or sign] language, which Strabo in a golden passage says existed
before vocal or articulate[language];whence logos means both word and idea. It
was fitting that the matter should be so ordered by divine providence in religious
times, for it is an eternal property of religions that they attach more importance
to meditationthan to speech. Thus the first language in the first mute times of the
nations must have begun with signs, whether gestures or physical objects, which
had naturalrelationsto the ideas [to be expressed][225]. For this reason logos, or
word, meant also deed to the Hebrewsand thing to the Greeks. ...10
8. White, "What is a Historical System?" 233.

9. Hayden White, "What is Living and What is Dead in Croce's Criticism of Vico,"
in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. G. Tagliacozzo and H. White
(Baltimore, 1969), 389.
10. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, transl. T. G. Bergin and M. A. Fisch
(Ithaca, 1948), paragraph401.
That Vico's etymological deconstruction of "logic" is typically fanciful only
underscores his desire to make the point that logic is not a truth behind
events, but rather an event itself, a deed, a created thing. Before the advent
of logical discourse is the age of "poetic" discourse, "the first wisdom of the
gentile world."" The logic of ancient jurisprudence was a severe poem; the
traces of figural residues are everywhere in Vico's creative etymology.
In Nietzsche's version of this tradition, the distinction between "truth and
lie" (and even such uncontroversial notions as the principle of noncontradic-
tion) is the result of a failure of nerve, a "peace pact" which man made with
himself.
This peace pact brings with it something that brings with it the first step toward
the attainmentof this enigmaticurge for truth. For now that is fixed which hence-
forth shall be "truth";that is, a regularlyvalid and obligatorydesignationof things
is invented, and this linguistic legislation also furnishes the first laws of truth: for
it is here that the contrastbetween truth and lie first originates.12
Nietzsche, the professional philologist, lectured on Greek and Roman rhetoric
(and tropes) at Basle. (He notes: "only two students enrolled, one of Ger-
man and one of law.") His most frequently quoted words these days are his
definition of truth as "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropo-
morphisms." Language, for Nietzsche, is the basic creative expression of a
world of chaos; but when language congeals into a "legislation" that obscures
its made nature, the way is clear for a tyranny of logic, "illusions about
which one has forgotten that this is what they are.'3 And history, as White
makes plain, is equally a made object, which becomes a "burden" when it
claims a privileged weight of truth.14
That White belongs to this tradition is attested to by nearly every page
of Metahistory. His initial (enabling) definition of the objects of his study
makes the point.
I will consider the historical text as what it most manifestly is -that is to say,
a verbal structurein the form of a narrativeprose discoursethat purportsto be a
model or icon of past structuresand processes in the interest of explaining what
they were by representingthem. (2)
Representation (argument from similarity) subsumes explanation (argument
from contiguity), which becomes a "moment" of representation, an attribute.
White, in fact, suggests that explanation may well be an illusion, "a specifi-
cally Western prejudice." In his discussion of "Explanation by Formal Argu-
1 1. Ibid., paragraph 375.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Of Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense," in The Por-
table Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1954), 44.
13. Ibid., 47.
14. Hayden White, "The Burden of History," History and Theory 5 (1966), 115-116.
8 HANS KELLNER
ment," the logical component of his quadruple tetrad,15 White describes the
nomological-deductive arguments that constitute the "laws" of historical
explanation.
This argumentcan be analyzed into a syllogism, the major premise of which con-
sists of some putatively universal law of causal relationships,the minor premise
of the boundary conditions within which the law is applied, and a conclusion in
which the events that actually occurred are deduced from the premises by logical
necessity. (11)
That this entire field of logical operations is undercut and subsumed by the
rhetorical structure which authorizes it is made clear in White's characteriza-
tion of Metonymy, which he presents as reductive in precisely the same way
that formal arguments are.
Once the world of phenomena is separatedinto two orders of being (agents and
causes on the one hand, acts and effects on the other), the primitiveconsciousness
is endowed, by purely linguistic means alone, with the conceptual categories
(agents, causes, spirits, essences) necessary for the theology, science, and philos-
ophy of civilized reflection. (35)
For White to italicize the already tautological phrase, "by purely linguistic
means alone," is indication enough of its importance to him. The laws of
formal historical explanation may be "putative," but there is nothing in
White's case to suggest that the "purely linguistic means" that authorize
them are anything but genuine. The tropological structures of rhetoric con-
sistently swamp the explanatory strictures of logic; logic is subsumed to
Metonymy, a figure of rhetoric as figure of thought.
White has recently described the move from literary theory to philosophy
of history as a reflection of "the apprehension of imminent apocalypse."",
His own move in just the opposite direction equally bespeaks a despairing
apprehension of no apocalypse - that little if any important change is likely
to occur in historical reflection. To examine formalized historical reflection,
or "philosophy of history," is to confront a literature without a field.
II
One can study only what one has first dreamed about.
Bachelard; epigraph of Metahistory
Doctrines must take their beginnings from that of the matters of which they
treat.
Vico; epigraph of Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method
White makes it clear that the trope is a beginning, that it happens before
other things. He writes:
15. By "quadrupletetrad" I refer to White's schema of Emplotment, Argumentation,

Ideology, and "Deep Structure"- each containing four elements. Cf. Metahistory, 1-42.
16. Hayden White, "Ethnological 'Lie' and Mythical 'Truth,'" Diacritics 8 (1978), 2.
I have maintainedthat the style of a given historiographercan be characterizedin
terms of the linguistic protocol he used to prefigure the historical field prior to
bringingto bear upon it the various 'explanatory'strategieshe used to fashion a
'story'out of the 'chronicle'of events containedin the historicalrecord. (426)
This summary of the thrust of Metahistory identifies its major difference from
the traditional images of history. These images name a variety of "begin-
nings" - the document itself, the ideological concerns of the historian, or
his psychological predeterminations. "The linguistic protocol," however, is
an odd point of departure; it cannot be naturalized by the discourse of his-
torical thought.
Metahistory can scarcely be classified with works in the philosophy of
history because it seems an implicit denial of the utility of the conclusions
and disputes of recent philosophy of history. Since most philosophy of his-
tory is written by philosophers for an undefined audience, that genre has a
strange, ethereal quality: indexes are almost entirely devoid of references to
historians. When historians are cited, it is generally to focus on a well-known
controversy or an explanatory vignette; "epistemic criteria," "decision pro-
cedures," "probabilistic concepts," "perceiving under a description" appear
as members of the constituent set of historical procedures, but the set does
not admit entire historical works, let alone the entire oeuvre of master his-
torians. The philosophers of history prefer to discuss the literature of the
philosophy of history, so the names of Collingwood, Danto, Dray, Gallie,
Mandelbaum, and Morton White appear again and again. Historical argu-
ments are cited as fragments to be analyzed piecemeal; their historicity seems
an embarrassment to an Anglo-American tradition that feels most confident
when confronted with a rather simple statement in common language. When
historians write of the theory of history they sometimes succumb to the
temptation to be philosophical by reducing the problem at hand to the limited
"common language" complexities of, for example, an athletic contest. In
short, work in the philosophy of history tends to deal with neither philosophy
nor history, but rather with other works in the philosophy of history.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I should note that if we judge
such matters pragmatically, there is in fact no such field as philosophy of
history, theory of historical narrative, or any such area within the historical
profession. Although nearly every history department, graduate or under-
graduate, offers courses in historiography, philosophy of history, or intro-
duction to historical thought, such courses are invariably taught by an his-
torian from another area, often an intellectual historian or a senior scholar
assumed to have a magisterial overview. I cannot recall seeing any history
department advertise a job opening for any sort of historical theorist (while
"U. S. Southern or South Carolina history" or "U. S. quantitative/behavioral,
period not stipulated" and a surprising number of similar jobs appear regu-
10 HANS KELLNER
larly in the Employment Information Bulletin of the American Historical

Association). If such an opening in historical theory, however defined, has
escaped my notice, it is certain to attract applicants who were trained in
other areas, and who simply reverse the first two lines in the "Fields of
Specialty" section of the resume; "Philosophy of History" falls invariably in
second or third place in this rubric, a sideline that may attract the attention
of some department. To note the marginality of historical theory to the his-
torical profession calls to mind that the situation is little better in departments
of philosophy, and that nonfiction prose criticism remains a poor relation in
comparative literature as well. In other words, despite the large number of
works published in the philosophy of history, the power of that discourse is
slight - it has few jobs to award, little direct influence on any other his-
torical endeavor, and a set of conceptual concerns unique to itself (or bor-
rowed from an equally problematic discourse, the "philosophy of science").
White's tactic has been to ignore both the principal problems of the
philosophy of history since Collingwood and the debates carried on in the
vast secondary literature on the individuals he discusses. The former problems
(of the sort found in the standard anthologies of Meyerhoff, Dray, and
Gardiner) White tends to dismiss as "essentially contested"; the latter writ-
ings he sets aside as too deeply implicated in the forms of thought which it
is his purpose to characterize, and as being too remote from the texts them-
selves. The texture of Metahistory is implicitly that of Erich Auerbach's
Mimesis; extensive citations of texts are used directly to elicit a fully formed
reading not visibly resting upon any secondary literature. Since White was
not stranded, like Auerbach, in Istanbul without a research library, nor
ignorant of the concerns of post-World War II philosophy of history, his
tactic points to itself as an explicit move- the refusal of a discourse. By
renaming a field and reclassifying its objects, White has, like the Renaissance
humanists, declared the existing edifice to be largely "scholastic," a round-
robin of unresolvable questions and "merely" ideological debates.
The first move in White's rejection of the discourse of philosophy of his-
tory is his dismantling of the series of distinctions which have "enabled"
that literature and its disputes. I have noted the subsumption of Explanation
by Narration; a similar operation takes place with Tenor/Vehicle, Non-Fic-
tion/Fiction, Science/Art, and History Proper/Philosophy of History. In each
case, the first term of the paradigm becomes a "moment" of the second.
White grants the distinction between "the historian's investigative functions
on the one hand and his narrative operation on the other" (12) early in
his text, but it quickly becomes clear that this distinction is not privileged.
Since the basis of investigation is a preliminary naming of the field, a process
which is poetic in its origin, the separation of research and writing also
collapses.
WHITE S LINGUISTIC HUMANISM 11
White's second step in liberating himself from the discourse of Anglo-

American philosophy of history is his sweeping use of W. B. Gallie's notion,
"the essentially contested concept." Without honoring Gallie's qualifications
of this term, White declares the essence of most historiographical discourse
beyond debate. For example, the great historians "cannot be 'refuted,' or
their generalizations 'disconfirmed' " (4); nor can the "questions which arise
when two or more scholars, of roughly equal erudition and theoretical so-
phistication, come to alternative, though not necessarily mutually exclusive,
interpretations of the set of historical events" (13), be resolved; nor are
there "extra-ideological grounds on which to arbitrate among the conflicting
conceptions of the historical process" (27).
With these two basically defensive strokes, White has managed to evade
the discourse of the philosophy of history since 1950, although in doing so
his own discourse has been considerably affected. This theoretical ground-
clearing reenacts Lorenzo Valla's hope "to sweep the boards of culture clean
and to show that beneath all contemporary confusion there existed a bedrock
of order reflected in, and knowable through, formally pure language."'57 For
White, this "bedrock of order" is the theory of tropes. But the matter of
tropology itself is deeply implicated in the politics of discourse; White's
quick deflection of the claims of binary structuralist tropology (31-32, n.13)
cannot dispel the internecine conflict of the contemporary tropological tradi-
tion. Furthermore, there is evidence of an anxiety of tropological influence
throughout Metahistory. White is not Vico, in the simple sense that the dis-
course he enters with the four-trope Vichian tropology is thoroughly different
from the Neapolitan's. Their circular strategy, however, is essentially the same.
First, trope is inflated from a figure of speech into a figure of thought, making
it "useful for understanding the operations by which the contents of experience
which resist description in unambiguous prose representations can be pre-
figuratively grasped and prepared for conscious apprehension" (34). Thus,
a surface structure (figure of speech) becomes a deep structure (figure of
thought), while remaining on the surface and immune to the vagaries of
"interpretation." A tropological reading is not an interpretation. It asserts
with Oscar Wilde that "the mystery of the world is the visible, not the in-
visible."
Metahistory, therefore, challenges the discourse of both the philosophy
of history (by impatiently brushing aside its distinctions and debates), and
of history itself (by dismissing the notion that the true causes of things are
hidden or secret). But there are other matters at issue as well. The first
is a matter of decorum, or "the appropriateness of style to content."''8 The
17. Willson Coates, Hayden White, and J. Salwyn Schapiro, The Emergence of
Liberal Humanism (New York, 1966), 18.
18. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), 269.
12 HANS KELLNER
epistemological and tropological tetrads of Metahistory are difficult for his-

torians accustomed to the antijargon rule of traditional historiography; but
the historical profession has of late welcomed both psychoanalytical and clio-
metric vocabularies and methods with relatively little struggle. "All this lan-
guage stuff," however, is different. While econometric or psychoanalytic
contributions to historical scholarship function exactly like other elements
of the field, adding bits of insight or information to the ongoing process of
amassing and digesting data, they do not make demands that have the uni-
versal scope of "deep" linguistic analysis as practiced by White. One can
leave cliometrics or psychohistory to the specialists since their research does
not touch the bases of one's own work. Insofar as Metahistory is a work of
intellectual history, containing interpretative readings of a set of nineteenth-
century figures, the historians can respond normally, praising or condemning
the various sections ("brilliant on Marx," "unfair to Burckhardt," or the
reverse). But, if the book is read as a "theory of the historical work," with
nearly four hundred pages of illustrative material appended, then all are
touched, including those who cannot identify Ranke or Croce. The anxiety
of feeling oneself on trial in a court that, rather pointedly, uses a foreign
language leads often enough to dismissal: "not historical."
Another matter of decorum derives from Metahistory's choice of the largest
issues involved in writing history - the "great" historians, the deep structure,
emplotment. Most of what historians do is minute and rather tedious, as
White is well aware. To find that the basic element of historical knowledge
since Ranke is characterized as an "archival report" seems to suggest that
whatever Metahistory is about, it is not about what historians really do.
Furthermore, while historians have come to terms with "ideological skepti-
cism" of the sort represented by psychological or sociological theory, "lin-
guistic skepticism" is entirely another matter. Objectivity is not a fashionable
term among historians today because of their sensitivity to the ideological
implications of any position within an historical context. Once "value neutral"
social science itself came under examination as a tool of domination, the
universality of ideology came to be taken for granted. Yet, this is not a
disabling blow to historical writing; in fact, it has added to the feeling of
security. Since ideological demystification of any given text or artifact is basic
to both the Marxist and non-Marxist practice today, and since the position
of the scholar within society is also continuously scrutinized ideologically,
the "ideological skepticism" really becomes a confrontation between two or
more reasonably knowable positions. This dialectic is potentially unending
(as suggested by the last chapter of Frederic Jameson's Marxism and Form)
but it is secure in a (Newtonian) way that "linguistic skepticism" is not. In
fact, the loss of willed objectivity which followed the ideologizing of all
thought and action offers the sense of a firmer grasp on a "reality," however
complex and elusive that reality may be.
White addresses dialectics like the other surface elements of a text by

subsuming it to language; any ideology which claims to represent some
reality principle becomes epiphenomenal.
In my view, it is no accident that the outstandingphilosophers of history of the

nineteenth century were, with the possible exception of Marx, quintessentially
philosophersof language. Nor is it an accident that Hegel, Nietzsche, and Croce
were all dialecticians.For, in my view, dialectic is nothing but a formalizationof
an insight into the tropologicalnature of all the forms of discoursewhich are not
formally committed to the articulationof a world view within the confines of a
single modality of linguistic usage- as the natural sciences became after their
commitmentto Metonymicalusage in the seventeenthcentury. (428)
In White's view, history is a form of discourse without a "single modality of

linguistic usage," as Metahistory fully demonstrates. He thus finds historical
discourse inherently dialectical within its possible (four) fundamental modes
of discourse. However, since language pulls the other levels of discourse into
its own field - that is, since ideological forms may be resolved into lin-
guistic forms, but linguistic forms are irreducible - dialectic between levels
of discourse is impossible.
White has often maintained in his writings and especially in Metahistory
that sciences are constituted by their vocabularies, and that history will re-
main at the level of a protoscience as long as it lacks such a vocabulary, a
sort of "periodic table" of historical thought. What constitutes the bedrock
vocabulary of a scientific discourse is the choice of a common language by
its practitioners. Despite the enthusiastic reception Metahistory has had among
many historians, it seems doubtful whether tropology will become the periodic
table of a new science of history (although a tropological science of language
is quite conceivable). Historians mistrust language; to speak of it is disturbing.
It is tempting to reject this strain of criticism as old-fashioned, resistant
to change, or just lazy, but that would be to miss an important point. Con-
servatives (as Eugene Genovese has shown of slaveholders) foresee the
consequences of change more clearly than others because their "antennae"
sense things before they can articulate them. This uneasiness before "the
language thing" is a genuine fear of losing the heavy, but comforting "burden
of history" which has told us Westerners who we are for quite a while. Irenic
readers, like Peter Munz, who cite Metahistory as an attempt to revive his-
torical writing or to open the path to new ideas, fail to sense the issues as
strongly as the troglodytes. Following a sort of tropological historicism
which demonstrates the structural necessity for the existence of differing his-
torical protocols and performances, White never challenges the bases of any
significant past historical enterprise. He acknowledges both masterpiece and
"archival report"; history is many things, but it is not bunk. However, his
work is deeply subversive of professional historical endeavor in one important
14 HANS KELLNER
way - it replaces the traditional question, "Why write history?" with a very
different question, "Why write?"
Historical events do not represent themselves, they are represented; they
do not speak, they are spoken for. White asserts the freedom of the speaker,
but leaves no basis for a responsibility to the subject (or, I should say, to the
subject's voice, for it has none). This is a clash of ethoi; both see them-
selves as moral positions, and sources of hope. Freedom is writing and rhet-
oric; the burden is event and logic. The ease (and credibility, at least to me)
of White's subsumption of event and logic to writing and rhetoric and his
quick glide over the vexed questions of traditional historical thought offend.
They are indecorous.
Since history cannot begin with documents (the process is already well
under way before a document is confronted), what is at the bottom of White's
system? Where is its beginning? I have cited at the head of this section the
epigraphs of both Metahistory and Edward W. Said's recent work Beginnings:
Intention and Method. To compare these two works, which both deal in their
ways with how (or where) texts begin, is to note the point of obscurity, the
mystery, of White's text. Said's book confronts the problem posed by post-
structuralist thought and foreshadowed by Vico and Nietzsche: how can one
make or identify a beginning within a discourse that is always already begun?
His approach is to stress the act of will. "The beginning, then, is the first
step in the intentional production of meaning."19And, "beginnings inaugurate a
deliberately other production of meaning - a gentile (as opposed to a sacred)
one."20 White's theory, on the other hand, for all its emphasis on will and
engagement, invokes an essentially sacred (that is, undialectical) source.
His epigraph from Bachelard, cited at the beginning of this section, evokes
"primary process" in the Freudian sense, but there are no corresponding
gestures in Metahistory toward any psychoanalytic comprehension of the
origin of the ethical or the moral. "A trope," as Disney's Cinderella might
have put it, "is a wish your heart makes." But the refusal of a psychoanalytic
dimension is, in my opinion, not merely a lack which can be remedied by
simply referring to other tropologies that offer a dialectical dimension by
relating tropes (if not precisely reducing them) to the processes of the dream-
work. In other words, we cannot fill in the gaps of Metahistory by reading
Jacques Lacan, or even Harold Bloom. To do so would make White's
tropes "gentile" rather than "sacred," by deferring the origin to a set of
processes from which the tropes may differ in order to establish the otherness
of their status. This, I repeat, is what White has refused to do, not what he
has neglected to do.
19. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975), 5.
20. Ibid., 12.
III
Geschrieben steht: "Im Anfang war das Wort!"
Hier stock ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort?
Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmbglich schdtzen,
Ich muss es anders Ubersetzen,
Wenn ich von Geiste recht erleuchtet bin.
Geschrieben steht: Im Anfang war der Sinn.
Bedenke wohl die erste Zeile,
Dass deine Feder sich nicht ubereile!
Ist es der Sinn, der alles werkt und schafft?
Es sollte stehn: Im Anfang war die Kraft!
Doch, auch indem ich dieses niederschreibe,
Schon warnt mich was, dass ich dabei nicht bleibe.
Mir hilft der Geist, auf einmal seh ich Rat
Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat!
Goethe, Faust21
One thing is certain: Faust knew his tropes. To translate logos ("das heilige
Original") into a natural language ("mein geliebtes Deutsch"), Faust re-
quires special aid ("Wer hilft mir . . ."). The fourfold articulation of the
figures of thought displayed in this famous passage culminates in the ironic
solution that die Tat governs the beginning, was always already there. The
exhaustion of the metaphoric "word," of the metonymic "sense," and of the
synecdochic "force" reveals the constructed nature of any reality; conse-
quently, no image of a given, nonconstructed reality exists in which to act.
Any possible "background" of the "deed" (die Tat) is already a "deed,"
already deeded, already owed to the logos.
But Faust does not stop with this momentous irony, the mention of which
brings forth physical metamorphoses in the poodle that has followed him to
his study. To the fiery-eyed hippopotamus that arises before him, Faust uses
"the spell of the four" ("Spruch der Viere"); but to no avail ("Keines der
Viere/Steckt in dem Tiere"). With the ultimate appearance of Mephis-
topheles, dressed as a "travelling scholar" ("wie ein fahrender Scholastikus"),
we must infer that Faust's command of troping, his unquestioned mastery
of language protocols, has escaped him, gotten out of hand. The irony within
the system calls forth the irony of the system itself; "the spell of the four"
may exhaust the elements, but not their interplay.
21. Goethe, Faust, transl. Walter Arndt (New York, 1976), I, 1224-1237: "In the
beginning was the Word"-thus runs the text./Who helps me on? Already I'm per-
plexed!/I cannot grant the word such sovereign merit,/I must translate it in a different
way/If I'm indeed illuminated by the Spirit./"In the beginning was the Sense." But
stay!/Reflect on this first sentence well and truly/Lest the light pen be hurrying unduly!/
Is sense in fact all action's spur and source?/It should read: "In the beginning was the
Force!"/Yet as I write it down, some warning sense/Alerts me that it, too, will give
offense./The spirit speaks! And lo, the way is freed,/I calmly write: "In the beginning
was the Deed!"
16 HANS KELLNER
White preserves his figures of thought from dissolution into structures

which claim to be deeper, but he also prevents the tropes themselves from
freely displaying their uncanny metamorphic power. In other words, Meta-
history defends itself against both an external and an internal enemy. To
identify tropology as the deep structure of historical writing, a depth whose
foundations cannot be delved, is to confront the combined challenge of the
fundamental determinism of this century, psychoanalysis and Marxism. Meta-
history permits the priority of neither class nor libido. "The best reasons for
being a Marxist are moral ones, just as the best reasons for being a Liberal,
Conservative, or Anarchist are moral ones" (284). By "best" here, White
cannot mean morally preferable, or the statement becomes a tautology; he
must mean "true" or "real," but as I have shown, "truth" and "reality" have
already been unmasked as world choices, created and revealed through rhet-
oric. These well-intentioned "reasons" for being a Marxist are inherently
anti-Marxist; and Marx turned his phrase of dismissal aptly in the Manifesto:
"Bourgeois socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it
becomes a mere figure of speech."22
Parallel to Marx's dismissal of trope ("a mere figure of speech") are
the Freudian strategies of the dream-work, strategies which clearly reduce
the "turnings" of tropes into primal workings of the Unconscious. Against
Freud's claim to have unearthed a deeper irreducible "beginning," White
unleashes Nietzsche, whose work as "historical psychologist" surpasses Freud's
because it does not require a postulated "before."
I say, "if not greaterthan Freud himself" because in his account of the origin of
conscience in humanity, Nietzsche does not require, as Freud did in Totem and
Taboo, the postulationof a generalizedprimal "crime"by which a socially condi-
tioned experience such as the Oedipus complex is lived through by the entire
species. He found the basis for the emergence of conscience in a purely aesthetic
impulse in the strong and the similarly aesthetic response of the weak to this
impulse, both of which were expressionsof the single, shared will to power of the
species. (365)
In Nietzsche, White finds a psychologist whose "depths" are always present
in aesthetic, surface, impulse -no depths, either in the past or the mind,
are needed here. The will to power is, after all, a will.
Thus, White has defended himself against the claims of the two contending
powers in modern thought which confront structuralism, Marxism and
psychoanalysis. Each of the latter strategies names a "beginning"- the
psychological unconscious, or the economic infrastructure. One of structural-
ism's adaptive strengths has been its flexibility in accommodating the re-
22. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in K. Marx,
Political Writings, Vol. 1, The Revolutions of 1848, ed. D. Fernach (New York, 1973),
43.
quirements of psychoanalysis (by tropologizing the dream-work), or of
Marxism (as in the work of Goldmann or Althusser). White's tropology is
obviously not accommodationist. His emphasis on choice (presented as both
an aesthetic and a moral act) is repeated unmistakably; despite his full
awareness of the claims of Marx and Freud, White persistently asserts human
freedom. In this assertion, if I am not mistaken, an invisible presence, cur-
rently somewhat in eclipse, appears. In Jean-Paul Sartre, White finds the
element of choice coexisting with necessity; he further finds an Ironic
(absurdist) vision that requires a continuously present choice of a future.
Existentialism,Sartre argues, is essentially an analytical philosophy that disposes
aroundthe individualthe various "possibles"open to him in his peculiar situation,
enlivens the individualto the impossibilityof not choosing, and then asks him to
choose as if he were choosing for all mankind. The besetting sin of humanity, or
rather the one crime that the individual can commit against himself, is that of
"badfaith," which is unwillingnessto accept responsibilityfor his acts and ascrip-
tion of this personal responsibilityto something outside the self as the "cause"of
its own servile condition.23
White's implicit use of the Sartrean "absurd" as his own privileged vision
derives from its emphasis on paradox, and its admission of "both contingency
and freedom within the same system."24 The careful tacking and yawing in
White's use of tropes reveal his desire to obscure this existential paradox and
its absurdity; these are the costs of his resolve to retain control of his lin-
guistic weapons.
While historians may chafe at the excessive recognition of the power of
language in Metahistory - a recognition that threatens to dissolve their basic
categories and the entire syntagmic machinery that can be built from them -
the student of poetics may well sense quite the reverse. For example, a very
appreciative reviewer in Comparative Literature notes the "procrustean"
character of the tropological discussion; another critic has privately ques-
tioned the idea of a "dominant trope," suggesting instead that it is the nature
of tropes to twist this way and that, changing kaleidoscopically. In short,
if historians fear that White's move into the structural or "turning" depths
of language draw him too far away from the intentional and extrinsic levels
of his texts, critics may find his poetics too schematic. The consequences
of this criticism are considerable; for, in suggesting that White has not gone
far enough, or, in my own view, that he has drawn back from the conse-
quences of his own work, this line of criticism delineates the path forward
rather than backward from Metahistory. Since most of the historical citations
of the book have been accommodative, using it either as a treatise on his-
23. Willson Coates and Hayden White, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism (New York,
1969), 370-371.
24. Ibid., 370.
18 HANS KELLNER
toriography or as a mere plea for free-form creativity in historical writing,

it may be difficult to recognize just what "a new science" departing from
Metahistory might look like. But we should try.
In the first place, one must come to terms with the power of tropes to
spatialize time, and to temporalize space; in structuralist terms, tropes seem
to collapse paradigm and syntagm into one another, leaving a deconstructive
undecidability at the heart of things. In "Foucault Decoded: Notes from
Underground," White notes that Foucault's characterization of modern
cultural history (or archaeology of knowledge) makes each episteme the
embodiment of a trope - the "classical episteme" is "dominated" by Me-
tonymy and so forth.25Within each episteme the consequences of each trope's
authorized strategy of order are worked out; and Foucault goes so far as to
include in his schema ideas that were authorized by the trope, but which were
never in fact produced. Unlike Aristotelian "history," Foucault's "archae-
ology" includes "the kinds of things that might happen." But the course of
these tropological strategies, for Foucault implicitly as for Vico explicitly, is
strictly prescribed: Metaphor gives way to Metonymy, Metonymy to Synec-
doche, and Synecdoche to Irony. Thus, the system gels into the very form
that has given "speculative philosophy of history" a bad name in Anglo-
American circles: a law of "stages." In Metahistory White backs away from
this schematism but cannot escape it.
The theory of tropes provides a way of characterizingthe dominant modes of

historical thinking which took shape in Europe in the nineteenth century. And,
as a basis for a general theory of poetic language, it permits me to characterize
the deep structure of the historical imagination of that period considered as a
closed-cycle development.For each of the modes can be regarded as a phase, or
moment, within a traditionof discoursewhich evolves from Metaphorical,through
Metonymical and Synecdochic comprehensionsof the historical world, into an
Ironic apprehensionof the irreduciblerelativismof all knowledge. (38)
This passage seems designed to frustrate certain questions. What is outside

the "closed-cycle"? If the tropes are moments "within a tradition of discourse,"
what is the nature of such traditions? If Irony is the fulfillment of the develop-
ment, why is it not, for all its "apprehensions," the highest and final attain-
ment, the end of history and of discourse? In short, how is it that tropes
operate within such a safely circumscribed set of parentheses? Hegel had
described the course of history, both Western and Oriental, as tropological
stages (125-130); Marx had done the same thing in his tropological analysis
of the course of economic history from Primitive Communism to the Ironic
capitalism of his day. White, however, avoids the use of tropology as a philos-
ophy of history in the speculative sense, despite all the open indications in
25. Hayden White, "Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground," History and
Theory 12 (1973).
VVHITES LINGUISTIC HUMANISM 19
the text that such a use lies at the heart of his method. White does not choose
to recognize and exploit the available perception that the "tradition of dis-
course" which Metahistory describes is dominated by an Over-Trope, a trope
which shapes and regulates the tropic differences and combats within it. It is
a striking absence, striking because its place is clearly framed by the adjoin-
ing "moments." White points out that "the thought of the Enlightenment as
a whole" is primarily "a paradigm of historical consciousness in the mode of
Metonymy, or of cause-effect relationships" (66-67), which are served by
the other tropes in their various ways. He also notes that historical study
since the end of the nineteenth century, including his own, has been Ironic.
Metahistory, then, might well be subtitled "The Rise and Fall of Historicism
in the Age of Synecdoche." Instead, the tropes remain a "closed-cycle"
functioning "within" a tradition; this definition tends to focus attention away
from the central historical issue of the book, which is "the crisis of historicism
into which historical thinking would be plunged by the very success of nine-
teenth-century historiography" (270). The fundamental problem of nine-
teenth-century historians was to create a picture of the past which would be
"realistic," to be sure; but it would be realistic in a broadly Synecdochic
sense, by seeing into the life of things through some form of what has come
to be called Verstehen. Although Foucault, in White's readings, makes it
clear that "the human sciences," as they developed in the nineteenth century,
are Synecdochic in their fundamental strategies, White avoids more than-a
hint that the age he is describing might have an Over-Trope that would place
it within a larger syntagm of historical tropic stages. Similarly, in Part II of
Metahistory, describing the work of four master historians, the chapter titles
identify modes of emplotment, out of sequence but complete as a set of four.
Part III identifies Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce by trope; the set is again out
of sequence, but this time incomplete. Synecdoche is omitted, tempting the
tropological reader to imagine a chapter between 9 and 10, perhaps titled
"Dilthey: The Psychological Defense of History in the Synecdochic Mode."
But the philosopher of Verstehen and the Over-Trope of the century are
missing; to have emphasized the importance of Synecdoche or of Historicism
itself in any explicit form would have forced White to press the status of
tropology farther than he wants to. White is willing to consider Synecdoche
as the dream of Comedy, of which Michelet and Ranke are variations (190);
but he has not gone forward to show how the specifically anti-Comedic his-
torical visions of the Golden Age are regulated in their Tragic and Satirical
realizations by Synecdoche-as-Over-Trope. By converting a trope (Synec-
doche) into a mythos (Comedy), White has in effect eliminated the possibility
that this figure may serve as a higher force. Of Tocqueville:
The Comic conception of history, with its sanctioningSynecdochic consciousness,
he could not accept at all, because he did not inhabit a world of putatively rec-
onciled social forces. The Comic vision was not even considered as a possible
20 HANS KELLNER
option by him, and, as his remarkson Fichte and Hegel suggest, to him it would
have been immoral to foist such an idea of history onto an age as distracted as
his own. (203)
This is a reduction of Synecdoche, a Metonymic rather than an Ironic aware-
ness of the power of tropology. A more explicit example of confusion as to
the level of trope being invoked is found in the Conclusion: "As thus en-
visaged, the history of nineteenth-century historical thinking can be said to
describe a full circle, from a rebellion against the Ironical historical vision
of the late Enlightenment to the return to prominence of a similar Ironic
vision on the eve of the twentieth century" (432). It is clear (at least to me)
that these Ironic visions are in a basic sense not similar at all: the Irony of
the late Enlightenment is a "moment" within a discourse that is broadly
Metonymic; the Irony of the twentieth century is the broad trope of the dis-
course itself, the Over-Trope, within which differing tropic visions may
operate, including an Ironic moment within the Ironic discourse (which is,
almost, Metahistory).
One can imagine a number of reasons why White might have avoided this
neo-Vichian philosophy of history. The determinism of the system seems to
contradict the sense of human freedom which I have suggested in the first
section of this essay is White's primary goal in Metahistory. Further, the
ingrained hostility of the professional historical community to such schemes
would be a great hindrance to White's hope, described in the second section,
to develop or at least suggest a vocabulary for historical thought that might
eliminate the conceptual controversies of a proto-science. At the same time,
it is clear that the very "dominance" of a dominant trope would be a seriously
reductive force impeding anyone wishing to offer a fully figured image of the
tropological possibilities of a given episteme; White's decision to play down
(or forget, in Nietzsche's sense) the pressures of a dominant trope (Synec-
doche), philosophy (historicism), psychology (Verstehen) seems tactically
justified - by an aesthetic and moral choice.
At a deeper level, White's ambivalence on the question of whether the
tropes offer a set of "stages" of mind knowing itself through time (that is,
as a diachronic syntagm related by contiguity), or a spatial "grid" of lin-
guistic possibilities always already inherent in natural languages (a synchronic
paradigm organized poetically) takes us back to a point made earlier. The
traditional task of linguistic humanism since the Renaissance has been to
transform a deadening scholastic logic into a rhetoric offering a freer and
more vital form of thought. The theory of tropes offers White the means to
do this. But the tropes may be construed Metaphorically, as the voice of
Renaissance rhetoric, or Metonymically, as the logic (albeit a poetic logic)
of an Enlightenment philosophy of history (albeit a Neapolitan Enlighten-
ment). To avoid the danger that a logic of tropes would reconquer a rhetoric
of tropes, White has carefully avoided the broad scheme of Foucault and the
particular significance of Synecdoche, historicism, and Verstehen.
White's rhetorical use of tropes is complex and closely intertwined with
the other elements of his quadruple tetrad. At certain points, for example,
tropological and epistemological terms seem interchangeable. In the sentence,
"Marx's thought moved between Metonymical apprehensions of the severed
condition of mankind in its social state and Synecdochic intimations of the
unity he spied at the end of the whole historical process" (285) we may read
Mechanistic for Metonymic and Organicist for Synecdochic with little loss
of meaning. Plot and trope seem confused at times, as when White writes,
"Tocqueville began in an effort to sustain a specifically Tragic vision of his-
tory and then gradually subsided into an Ironic resignation . . ." (192).
On the whole, however, White's tropological readings proceed by identifying
a dominant trope in the thought of any writer or text, then demonstrating
how the other, servile tropes order and marshal aspects of linguistic perfor-
mance in order to form the structure of thought found in the writer or text.
These aspects of language are the four levels of conceptualization: lexical,
grammatical, syntactic, and semantic. That these are analogues of the tropes
is no surprise; they offer White another perspective. For example, to say that
Michelet's work is authorized by Metaphor is to say that the lexical process
of naming (creating new identifications within the historical field) takes
precedence over and exacts tribute from the grammar, syntax, and semantics
of historical processes; the role of these latter aspects of language is to shape
and carry along the mobile Metaphors that are predominant in Michelet's
vision. Similarly, to say that Ranke repudiated Romanticism (163) denotes
his turning away from a lexical treatment of language through his famous
emphasis on documentary factuality; for Ranke, the proper role of the his-
torian is that of the grammarian and syntactician. To place in the foreground
either lexicographic or semantic aspects - that is, either the naming of
elements or the extraction of meaning from the whole - would be to spoil
the "reality effect" he wanted so hard to create. Both Michelet and Ranke,
after all, ruined their eyesight in archives. In spite of this evidence that tropes
may absorb and usurp the place of elements of argument, or of plot, or of
linguistic structure, White maintains his scheme of levels as though it were
stable; he presents his tropes as canny, structural, static. But they are not so
easily controlled.
The passage from Faust which opens this section dramatizes the issue of
Trope and Over-Trope; Goethe's position as a turning point, culminating
eighteenth-century reflection on historical matters, and shaping the nine-
teenth-century pattern, is noted by Meinecke, whose classic Historism ends
with a 120-page chapter on Goethe, who wrote no history at all. "Without
22 HANS KELLNER
Goethe, we should not be what we are."296Meinecke's interest in Goethe

derives from Goethe's resolution of the problem of individual and universal.
"His great idea was that of a creative divine nature, combining eternal being
and eternal becoming, 'self-sufficient, living, creating from the highest to the
lowest according to regular law,' disclosing itself in productive primal forms,
types and individuals."27This constitutes a Synecdochic Irony, the "no-fault"
tropology, as found in Faust. Although the Irony of Mephistopheles ("Ich
bin der Geist, der stets verneint!") handily manipulates Faust's Synecdochic
striving, as well as the pedantic Metonymy of his assistant and the Metaphoric
innocence of his beloved, this Irony within the world of discourse is not
supreme. It serves a higher power, which is the system itself: the Synecdoche
of the system is Der Herr, The Lord, who as Over-Trope makes a Comedy
of the world. None can escape salvation, because all are part of a discourse
in which each part is necessary to the whole, and cannot be lost. Thus even
Mephistopheles is "Ein Teil von jener Kraft,/Die stets das B6se will und stets
das Gute schafft."
That particular evil is a part of universal good is certainly a facet of the
historicist vision. But Goethe's ability to fashion a tropological - that is,
linguistically aware - picture of reality within the regulative discourse of
Synecdoche demonstrates an awareness of the ability of a moment within the
system to function as the moment of the system itself - as the Over-Trope.
Goethe's tropological comprehension of the world is the Synecdochic, thus
ultimately Comic, union of the One and the Many, the Universal and the
Particular, the Tropology and the Tropes. The success of Goethe's answer to
what Adrian Kuzminski has called "the paradox of historical knowledge"28
makes him the capstone of Meinecke's Historism. White will not accept this in
Metahistory; it would transform a rhetoric of choices within a discourse into
a logical development of figural epistemes in history. Perhaps this represents
for him the bad sort of cyclicality condemned in his essay on Ibn Khaldoun.
However, since White has suggested that Levi-Strauss and his followers
founder upon the dispersive "paradoxes" of their enabling postulates, by seek-
ing a universal science of mind while asserting the uniqueness of all the
forms of human meaning,29we might expect that he would follow the course
of the other branch of the Structuralist movement, whose integrative aim is
to find the "structure of structures." White, I believe, has tried to avoid the
dispersiveness of the former group; but he cannot do so and still accept the
full implications of his structure of structures, at least not in Metahistory.
26. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, transl.
J. E. Anderson (London, 1972), 373.
27. Ibid., 493.
28. "The Paradox of Historical Knowledge," History and Theory 12 (1973).
29. Hayden White, "Foucault Decoded," 53; "The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary
Literary Criticism,"ContemporaryLiterature 17 (1976), 397.
WHITES LINGUISTICHUMANISM 23
So he ultimately sides with the "religionists of language" like Valla,30 who
today preach Mallarme's gospel of the "Flesh made Word."'3'Yet by choosing
to "forget" the dissolving force of trope (signaled as diabolical as early as
the 1587 Faust Book), he refuses the fatalism of the modern idolaters of the
text. For him they have lost the true religion of language, which preaches
freedom through human mastery. If language is irreducible, a "sacred" begin-
ning, then human freedom is sacrificed. If men are free to choose their lin-
guistic protocols, then some deeper, prior, force must be posited. White
asserts as an existential paradox that men are free, and that language is
irreducible.
IV
Consequently, "will to truth" does not mean "I will not allow myself to be
deceived" but - there is no alternative- "I will not deceive, not even my-
self"; and with that we stand on moral ground. For you only have to ask your-
self carefully, "Why do you not want to deceive?" especially if it should seem
- and it does seem! -as if life aimed at semblance, meaning error, decep-
tion, simulation, delusion, self-delusion, and when the great sweep of life has
actually always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous
polytropoi. Charitably interpreted,such a resolve might perhaps be a quixotism
- a minor slightly mad enthusiasm; but it might also be something more
serious, namely, a principle that is hostile to life and destructive.- "Will to
truth"- that might be a concealed will to death.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Nietzsche, according to White, conceived the historian as "the master of

Metaphorical identifications of objects that occupy the historical field" (353).
I have identified Nietzsche and White metaphorically with a tradition of
humanism represented by Lorenzo Valla, and characterized by the reduction
of logic to rhetoric. Nietzsche, who claimed that even the most primitive
unarticulated utterance was already at least twice a metaphorical translation
(from neurological perception to mental image, from mental image to neuro-
logical response), even before "the mobile army" of tropes could begin their
campaigns, had lectured on classical rhetoric at Basle; if Burckhardt's com-
ment, "fundamentally of course you are always teaching history," is correct,
we must conclude that history offered Nietzsche an escape from philology,
once history itself had been liberated from the "prison" (or indenture, as
White often puts it) which is language and the logic of signification. The
fundament of logic, the principle of noncontradiction, is itself as completely
subsumed by Nietzsche in metaphoric rhetoric as is human neurological
response.
The conceptual ban on contradictionsproceeds from the belief that we can form
concepts, that the concept not only designates [bezeichnen]the essence of a thing
but comprehends it [fassen] . . . in fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic)
30. Coates, White, Schapiro, Emergence of Liberal Humanism, 19.

31. White, "Foucault Decoded," 53.
24 HANS KELLNER
applies only to fictitious truths [fingierte Wahrheiten] that we have created. Logic
is the attemptto understandthe actual world by means of a scheme of being posited
[gesetzt]by ourselves, more correctly:to make it easier to formalize and compute
[berechnen].32
This passage suggests many things. Obviously, it states that logic is a tyran-
nical moment within the human power of rhetorical play. Designation must
not take itself for comprehension, nor rhetoric for logic, since "comprehen-
sion" and "logic" are fictions. White notes that Nietzsche "held all 'truths'
as perversions of the original aesthetic impulse, perversions insofar as they
took the dream for the formless reality and tried to freeze life in the form
provided by the dream" (332). Let us assume with White that neither the
eternal recurrence nor the Dionysiac-Apollonian dualism is central to Nie-
tzsche's task, but that this task begins with "a prior critique of historical
knowledge." Valla and Vico had as their tasks the criticism of Aristotle, the
New Testament, Homer - the privileged texts of their day. But Nietzsche,
in White's view, aimed at history to save himself from "all forms of thinking
that are not Metaphorical in nature" (337).
In his discussion of Nietzsche's attack on logic (and especially the principle
of the noncontradiction of identities) as an adequate criterion of truth, Paul
de Man turns Nietzsche's own strategy of tropological deconstruction back
on its source.
What has and will be shown, within the confines of this particular fragment, is
the possibility of unwarrantedsubstitutions leading to ontological claims based
on misinterpretedsystems of relationship (such as, for example, substituting
identity for signification). The possibility of arousing such a suspicion suffices
to put into question a postulate of logical adequacywhich might well be based on
a similar aberration.And since this aberrationis not necessarily intentional but
groundedin the structureof rhetorical tropes, it cannot be equated with a con-
sciousness,nor proven to be right or wrong. It cannot be refuted, but we can be
made aware of the rhetoricalsubstratumand of a subsequentpossibility of error
that escapes our control.33
The relevance of this passage to Metahistory is clear enough. White, to be
sure, is all too aware of his own position within language and points out
unmistakably the "aberration" of his own Ironic vision, a vision that points
out the misinterpretation ineluctably built into language. He cheerfully stresses
that rational refutation is futile at all levels of analysis - that is, Romance
is as valid a mythos as Tragedy taken at the level of emplotment; or, an
Anarchic vision is as "realistic" as a Radical one, given one's ideological
position in a social group. Irony, although "self-conscious" (or "sentimental"
in Schiller's sense) compared to the other tropes, is not, for all that, superior
32. Nietzsche, cited in Paul de Man, "Action and Identity in Nietzsche," in Graphlesis,
Yale French Studies 52 (1975), 17-18.
33. Ibid., 20.
to them, and in fact is seen as inherently debilitating, a trope to be overcome
as quickly as possible. (Hegel is the model here.) However, the lack of a
principle of disconfirmation, which is the price Irony pays for its enormous
analytical strengths, leads us to the "substratum"of Metahistory, a substratum
where much that is troubling lies forgotten.
That any tropology is basically Ironic, studying as it does the "turns"
by which linguistic structures create meaning, is obvious; and the current
interest in tropes is a clear indication of the Ironic stance of the structuralist
endeavor. However, it should also be noted that tropology's Ironic position
within the system of hermeneutic engagements (epistemological, ideological,
and the like) has itself been influenced (as influenza flows from the stars) by
Over-Tropic hegemonies. Renaissance rhetoric, for which the tropes are iden-
tifying categories used in naming the figures of speech and learning their uses,
plotted its field metaphorically, providing a tropological vocabulary (rather
too vast for later tropologies to exploit fully), but dominated by the level of
identification. Vico, by extending the figure of speech to the status of a
figure of thought, was able to use the system of tropes (carefully numbered
at four) as cognitive categories through which the history of thought itself
could be reduced to a series of stages which constitute the foundation of the
"new science." This dispersive, reductive, "scientific" tropology - which for
all its power and depth, ignores the wholeness of the tropological system
is a Metonymic use of the Ironic potential of the tropes. In the age of Goe-
the, implicit tropological visions of the world of human meaning become
fully aware that an individual trope and its claim to dominate a text or dis-
course is part of a system itself, which is variable and which shapes the
possibilities of any tropological "choice" within it. This Synecdochic aware-
ness of an Over-Trope, however, stops short of a truly Ironic view of the
Ironic nature of tropologies. Although Goethe arrived at the consciousness
of one-in-manyness which Meinecke felt culminated in the rise of Historismus,
the Synecdochic security of this view redeems both Faust and every historical
happening. The existence of the system within which any meaning may be
expressed is the justification of that meaning - this is an Olympian, or
Synecdochic, Irony.34 But the security of trope comes under question only
34. Meinecke notes in Historism (48): "Goethe was to be the first to acquire some
deeper understanding of the relationship between the type and the individual, that
mysterious problem of historical life that can never receive an entirely logical solution.
The human mind produces an abundance of recurring structures in state, society,
religion, economics, and even in the human character; and these types partake of the
essence of individuality to the extent that they, too, only reveal themselves through
development. They do not remain static, but are constantly changing, either advancing
or decaying. A man like Vico, who showed such power to break through the static
thought based upon Natural Law and displayed such a deep and intensive grasp of
the genesis, growth and decay of a type, clearly also had the necessary background and
capacities for understandingthe individual in history. Why did he never give his talents
26 HANS KELLNER
when its "turning" nature is asserted, when the structures emergent from an
imaginary, stable tropology are dissolved by unnaming, releasing the original
deconstructive fluidity of the figure of speech. In the essays of Jacques
Derrida and Paul de Man, among others, reading is declared impossible, and
writing too; the Mephistophelian Geist, der stets verneint is let loose with no
back-up. This is the "absurdist moment."
The tendency of the syntagmic logic inherent in the four-trope system to
swallow up other levels of analysis, which I have pointed out above, leads to
an interesting unfolding of the quadruple tetrad. If we take tropology as the
irreducible solvent, it becomes clear that the four levels of analysis are them-
selves tropological: Emplotment is a primarily Metaphoric process; Argument
is inherently Metonymic; Ideology extracts coherent world-views in a Synec-
dochic manner; while Tropology is dissolutely Ironic. Furthermore, in ex-
tending this simple perception, we notice that each mode of explanation has
privileged moments within it, related to its tropological analogue. Thus,
Plot (mythos) Argument Ideology Tropology
(Metaphor) (Metonymic) (Synecdochic) (Ironic)
Romance Formist Anarchy Metaphor
Tragedy Mechanist Radical Metonymy
Comedy Organicist Conservative Synecdoche
Satire Contextualist Liberal Irony
A different set of elective affinities emerges here, unsurprisingly. That
emplotment is a fundamentally Romantic vision is the enabling premise of
much of Northrop Frye's work. White alludes to the Metonymic mechanics
of Argument, and the Ironic essence of troping. And Mannheim places Ide-
ology as the conservative opposition to Utopia. I do not mean this unfolding
of the scheme to be a Metonymic elaboration of its logical potential; rather,
I want to suggest one of a host of further "affinities" to be unpacked from
within the workings of the scheme. The tropes can be "turned" onto each
other within as well as from without the closed-cycle of the system, creating
a poetics of nonfiction prose discourse as heady and unstable as any.
It is characteristic of White's safe tropology that his readings of texts
are canny, secure in their extraction of meaning -- these texts do not "differ"
full play in this direction?"In my opinion, it was because of the Metonymic Over-Trope
of his episteme. Vico's tropological rhetoric would "break through" the static logic
based upon Natural Law, but the epistemological tenor of the age forced his rhetoric
to become itself a logic. Thus, he could handle types, their rise and decline, but his
tropology, unlike Goethe's or Hegel's, was Metonymic, truly a new science. Goethe's
grasp of type and individual found in Faust leads him to a comic Irony, a tropology
above the tropes, found in the vision of Der Herr. In this vision, evil is only a part of
the whole which is good; there is no real division. "Alles Vergingliche ist nur ein
Gleichnis." Faust must be saved, because everything must be saved. In this Synecdochic
tropology, even Mephistopheles (Irony) works for the Over-Trope, "The Lord," the
Synecdoche.
from themselves, in the sense, say, that Nietzsche's texts do in Paul de Man's
readings. The single tension in the system is provided by the "elective
affinities" (29) among the elements of the quadruple tetrad; violations of these
affinities provide the individuality and complexity we expect from "classics."
But who ordains these "elective affinities"? A hidden hand is at work here
which seems to make the linguistic "level of engagement" as secure as the
epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical. Perhaps this, White's sole allusion to
Goethe, is motivated by a Goethean impulse to save all from loss; for without
the "elective" modifier, the "affinities" of tropology are indefinite, decon-
structive, turning, uncanny. Derrida has put this with uncharacteristic clarity:
This stratumof "founding"tropes, this layer of "first"elements of philosophy (let
us suppose that scare-quotesare sufficientprecaution here) cannot be subsumed.
It will not allow itself to be subsumed by itself, by what it has itself produced,
grown on its soil, or supportedon its foundations. It is therefore self-eliminating
every time one of its products (here the concept of metaphor) vainly attemptsto
include under its sway the whole of the field to which that product belongs. If we
wanted to conceive and classify all the metaphoricalpossibilities of philosophy,
there would always be at least one metaphor that would be excluded, or, to cut
the argumentshort, the metaphorof metaphor.35
In the face of this abyss, in which the trope of trope has always already
escaped one's grasp, the electorate of affinities becomes clear: it is White's
choice. His refusal of the "absurdist moment" lurking within his system,
asking questions whose answers seem unimaginable, is a voluntarist rhetoric
restraining a deconstructive antilogic.36
To write good history is a moral act because, as Kant wrote, to choose a
past by constituting an image of it is to choose a future, to describe a model
of how men ought to live, and to invoke an active sense of will. Good his-
tory is thus apocalyptic, an implicit vision of a world of desire, a release from
"burdens." Following Plato, Richard Weaver has noted that "one's interest in
rhetoric depends on how much poignancy one senses in existence."37 White
has identified both the myth of secure historical signification and the myth of
"absurdist" deconstruction as elitist products of Western cultural and social
life - that is, of a tradition that must be redefined, and thus rechosen. Meta-
history, it seems to me, is his redefinition and rechoosing.
The paths from Metahistory will be quite divergent; on the one hand, the
more canny historians will naturalize the elements of the quadruple tetrad,
and incorporate them without difficulty into the tradition of professional dis-
course; on the other, the deconstructors will trope the turns and turn the
tropes, unfolding their texts until they have arrived at their nondestination.
35. Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy"

["La mythologie blanche"], transl. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History 6 (1974), 18.
36. Hayden White, "The Absurdist Moment," 403.
37. Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (New York, 1954), 23.
28 HANS KELLNER
What will not happen is a close approximation of White's own way. Its back-
ground, choices, and tradition are shaped by a constellation of influences that
are unique. We may use the superb readings found in Metahistory, but to
try to follow its method would be futile. It is the possibility of that method,
of a "new science," that follows from the book. The existential center of
Metahistory, however, the stress on human freedom quand meme, "sous
nature," will be much harder to retain; I suspect that it cannot be "naturalized"
by the discourse of historical studies in the late twentieth century. And if it
cannot, the message of Metahistory will be lost, despite any flowering of
tropological sophistication.
V
Socrates: Rhetoric is in the same case as medicine, don't you think?
Phaedrus: How so?
Socrates: In both cases there is a nature that we have to determine,
the nature of body in the one, and of soul in the other,
if we mean to be scientific and not merely content with
mere empirical routine when we apply medicine and diet
to induce health and strength, or words and rules of
conduct to implant such convictions and virtues as we
desire.
Phaedrus: You are probably right, Socrates.
Plato, Phlaedrus
It has been the single basic contention of this essay that Metahistory repre-
sents an aggressive move to turn historical thought from a logical to a rhet-
orical form, and a defensive entrenchment against any counter-movement
from rhetoric to logic. The reasons for this move from logic to rhetoric are
moral ones, stemming from a long tradition of linguistic humanism that
stresses the ethical dimensions of rhetoric, and buttressed by an unspoken
existentialist consciousness of human absurdity and the need to affirm choice
against psychological and socio-political determinisms. A good deal of the
evidence I have used to define these intellectual traditions has been drawn
from Hayden White's earlier work, which shows a continuity with his writing
of the 1970s only if seen, first, as a broadly based inquiry into the ways in
which traditions gain assent and, second, as an ongoing study of human
choice as the basis of both historical existence and historical writing.
Metahistory begins by denying the cogency of almost all of the basic
distinctions, terms, and problems of "the philosophy of history" since the
Second World War: these problems seem "trivial" and "essentially contested"
to White, since their basis is a logical separation of "explanation" and "tell-
ing," however these two factors are weighed. By refusing this distinction in
order to assert that the "telling" is the "explanation" (rather than its vehicle),
White sets the stage for a rhetoric of historical writing - indeed, for writing
of any sort. This rhetoric of historical writing in its deep structure is based
upon Vico's tropology, but unlike Vico (and Foucault, and many others
implicitly), White uses the "master tropes" synchronically (as a rhetoric)
rather than diachronically (as a tropo-logic). Evidence of this defensiveness
is apparent at many points of Metahistory, most notably in its refusal to
place the entire period of its subject within the episteme (or Over-Trope, as
I have called it) of Synecdoche. This omission, and the defense it reveals, is
part of a willed "forgetting" of the sort that Nietzsche prescribes as necessary
for any history that will not be another burden to humanity. By declaring the
tropic structures irreducible to mind or society, and by denying that tropology
entails a logic as well as a rhetoric, White has assumed his consistent, if
absurd, stance. Metahistory is a moral text which can authorize itself only by
declaring the freedom of moral choice, in the face of the great determinism
of our time. In this final sense, White further resembles Lorenzo Valla, whom
I have selected as the type of "philologist as moral reformer." Valla's asser-
tion in his Dialogue on Free Will that God's foreknowledge (the great deter-
minism of his time) does not preclude human freedom, foreshadows White's
Ironic stress on choice.
At the beginning of this essay I noted that Metahistory "places" any com-
mentary on it, so that that commentary cannot attain an independent status,
being always already present within the master text. I suspect that my posi-
tion, although I have ignored it, is that of Metaphoric Ironist - Metaphoric,
because I have placed Metahistory as one moment in a chain of recurring
moments of liberation, reaffirminghuman freedom by pointing to the creative
force of language; Ironic, because the rules of discourse in this century place
any such affirmation "under erasure." To pose the issue of freedom is "to
write [the] word, then cross it out, then print both word and deletion."38 It
is this willed Nietzschean "forgetting" that gives Metahistory its power. With-
in the tradition of linguistic humanism, the ethics of rhetoric emerge as the
basis of philological moral reform. White's choice of tropology as a "bedrock
of order" rather than a mise en ablme is his own elective affinity. It will be
interesting to see who will follow him in this, and how they will manage to do
so.
Michigan State University
38. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translator's Preface" to Derrida, Of Gramma-

tology (Baltimore and London, 1976), xiv.

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A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism

Avbpa toL E'VVEJTE,[Lovcya, tokktpotov

1. All citations in this Beiheft of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nine-

Metahistory is a book with no dedication or personal acknowledgments; its

Gregorian tradition of papal authority, with its emphasis on worldly power

3. Hayden White, "Ibn Khaldoun in World Philosophy of History," Comparative

6. Hayden White, "The Culture of Criticism," in Liberations: New Essays on the

8. White, "What is a Historical System?" 233.

1 1. Ibid., paragraph 375.

15. By "quadrupletetrad" I refer to White's schema of Emplotment, Argumentation,

larly in the Employment Information Bulletin of the American Historical

White's second step in liberating himself from the discourse of Anglo-

epistemological and tropological tetrads of Metahistory are difficult for his-

White addresses dialectics like the other surface elements of a text by

In my view, it is no accident that the outstandingphilosophers of history of the

In White's view, history is a form of discourse without a "single modality of

White preserves his figures of thought from dissolution into structures

toriography or as a mere plea for free-form creativity in historical writing,

The theory of tropes provides a way of characterizingthe dominant modes of

This passage seems designed to frustrate certain questions. What is outside

Goethe, we should not be what we are."296Meinecke's interest in Goethe

Nietzsche, according to White, conceived the historian as "the master of

30. Coates, White, Schapiro, Emergence of Liberal Humanism, 19.

35. Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy"

Michigan State University

38. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translator's Preface" to Derrida, Of Gramma-

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