Bricolage

Maruyama Masao. Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, Mikiso Hane, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974)

Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan was Maruyama Masao’s first effort in his overall attempt to find an explanation of the modern history of Japan which did not depend wholly on Marxist theory, nor give all of the credit for Japan’s modernization to the West. In his introduction he makes clear the environment in which he was writing: Japan in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The context Maruyama gives, including the war in Asia, the conference at Kyoto University on “Overcoming Modernity” and the general intellectual climate make it quite amazing that a critical analysis of Tokugawa era thought could be written at all. Maruyama’s book, however, does the job well.

In the first part of the book, Maruyama attempts to explain the success of Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan by likening that period to the Hegelian “static history” of China. The relatively stable nature of Tokugawa society and its rigid, reified social structure make this period, unlike others in Japan, perfect for the growing popularity of Confucianism that Maruyama wants to talk about.

After setting the stage, Maruyama discusses the dominant school of Confucian thought in Tokugawa Japan, Chu Hsi Confucianism, discussing how early philosophers including Fujiwara Reika and Hayashi Razan uncoupled Confucianism from Buddhism, with which it had been closely related in Japan, and how it provided the thesis of Tokugawa social and intellectual organization. Maruyama does an excellent job of showing how Chu Hsi Confucianism amalgamates other traditions in Chinese philosophy, including yin/yang ideology, among others, and creates a unique place for itself in Chinese intellectual history. This very uniqueness, though, according to Maruyama, makes Chu Hsi Confucianism very inflexible, so that its followers really cannot evolve without punching irreparable holes in the overall system.

This sets up well the direction and target of the book: an explanation of the development of the Kokugaku school of thought in the late Tokugawa, which, Maruyama says, turned Chu Hsi Confucianism on its head, and yet never escaped the feudal beginnings of the Tokugawa political economy.

Maruyama’s discussion of the tenets of Chu Hsi Confucianism is thorough, coherent, and lucid. The organization of his essay takes a reader easily through a complex set of ideas. The only critiques possible here are that Maruyama’s description is a little too coherent, giving the reader a sense that he has encapsulated the universe of Japanese intellectualism in Chu Hsi philosophy, which sends a false message that Confucianism was the only stream of thought in the Tokugawa era that mattered. In fact, he makes special note of this fact later in the book when he shows that the Kokugaku scholars located the beginning of their own ideas in the 17^th century, so that the Chu Hsi thinkers of the Tokugawa period could not have been its intellectual progenitor.

Maruyama makes a case that the majority of Chu Hsi scholars were unable, because of the closed nature of Chu Hsi philosophy, to do anything more than reiterate the basic tenets of the founding thinker. This means, though, that the rigidity of Chu Hsi thought was bound to change as the Tokugawa political and social system changed over their course of existence. In a way, this is the antithesis of his original point – that Chu Hsi Confucianism was successful in Tokugawa Japan because of its feudal rigidity, which made it a static society analogous to that of China. However, he also uses this idea of slow change in the Tokugawa period to underpin a history of the subtle variations in Chu Hsi thought that evolved over the course of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, as Tokugawa society evolved. He discusses the objections to Chu Hsi orthodoxy of such figures as Yamaga Sōkō, Ito Jinsai, and Kaibara Ekken, each of whom put a crack in the foundation of the Chu Hsi school, either through innovative ideas, or through rigid adherents to the fundamental tenets.

Maruyama locates the real revolution in Japanese Confucian thought, though, in Ogyū Sorai, whose ideas, he says, led to a “complete collapse of the Chu Hsi school.”[1]

Maruyama then goes into the characteristics of the Sorai school, while acknowledging that there were still other Confucian lines of thought in existence, and that the Chu Hsi line was not completely gone by any means. He gives an account of Sorai’s interest in philology, or kobunji-gaku – the investigation of the meaning of words and ideas in the context of their own time, and explains the secular, political leaning of Sorai’s ideas.

Using his system of uncovering the ancient meanings of words, Sorai cam to emphasize the Six Slassics, rather than the Four Books that were so important to the Chu Hsi scholars. He devalued any works later than these as being essentially polemical – reactions against the thought of others in the Hundred Schools period, and thus impure ideas already changed by the changing meaning of words. He also carefully defined The Way as belonging specifically to the Early Kings as human beings, and consequently, even though they were for him sages, they were also human, and not gods. This made his thought both universal, and heavily political in focus. Maruyama even compares Sorai here to Machiavelli.

In keeping with his own goals, Maruyama in chapter four makes the link between the Sorai School and Kokugaku, contending that the two were linked, if not in intellectual genealogy, at least in terms of association, common interests, and similar approaches to the problems they set themselves.

Maruyama’s first point here is that Sorai’s ideas were in two general directions, one secular and political, the other secular and social. After his death, according to Maruyama, his students split along these lines, with the social/literary line moving more and more toward literary criticism, and the political line becoming increasingly uncompromising and inflexible in its application of Sorai’s ideas.

Both Sorai’s school and the Kokugaku school of Motoori Norinaga. , he says, were interested in The Way as essentially political, but where Sorai and his followers saw The Way, and the examples of the Early Kings as universal, Norinaga made them specific, saying that there is no one Way, but that the Way is different depending on one’s cultural and political context. Thus, the Way for Japanese must be different from the Way for Chinese.

What is important here is Maruyama’s method of analyzing this connection. In a very Hegelian way, he sees the Kokugaku scholars as the antithesis of the Sorai school. He emphasizes the connection between the two in order to juxtapose their ideas. Since both are in fact dealing with The Way of Confucianism, even if one is in the process of rejecting it, neither has escaped it. This is the way toward a synthesis which will bring a new paradigm according to the Hegelian model of historical change. Maruyama is here trying to show that Japanese intellectuals, while they were still trapped in a feudal mode of thought (or perhaps because they were so trapped), were developing an indigenous kind of modernity. His careful discussion of the development of political and philosophical differentiation of national morality and religion, as when he shows that Norinaga was able to use Sorai’s personalization of the Confucian Sages to make them human, and thus subject to error. This allowed Norinaga to claim that Japan’s emperors were related to gods, and for the Kokugaku scholars, this made Japanese belief systems in fact more real than those of Chinese Confucianism, since the sages were humans reacting to social context, while Japan’s emperors were descended from the creators.

Ultimately, Maruyama comes back to his own reasons for doing the history that he has undertaken. In his conclusion, he makes it clear that he sees an intellectual history of Tokugawa era Japan as legitimate in part because it does not fit within the political chronology, but shows a development of its own, and in part because, he admits, he is looking for the growth of a modern consciousness in Japanese thought. He apologizes for concentrating solely on the disintegration of Confucianism by way of noting that Confucianism was at the beginning of the Tokugawa period the main stream of Japanese philosophical thought, and that its disintegration was unexpected. Once again, in his conclusion, he turns to the Hegelian construction of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, by suggesting that the pre-modern consciousness of the early Tokugawa period had to be erased through a process by which Confucian rationalism was replaced by the irrational and the subjective (Kokugaku), and then the synthesis of the two would create a new modern paradigm.

What Maruyama leaves unsaid, but implicit in his formulation, is that this movement toward modernity was interrupted by the arrival of Commodore Perry and those who followed from the West, and necessity and contact forced a Western modernity on Japan, and that this uncomfortable modernity led to many of the problems that would become the cause of the Second World War.

Maruyama’s thesis is compelling, and his analysis and command of ideas and history superb. However, the entire book is more complete than I expected it to be, with all loose ends tied up, even though, by his own admission, Maruyama fails to deal with other streams of political, moral, and religious thought that were available in the same period. Such neatly tied up ends seem to suggest, and evidence Maruyama presents support this, that in many cases, the theory here has driven the evidence rather than the other way around. Maruyama is searching for an alternative “Japanese Modernity,” and in the sophistication and concreteness of Kokugaku ideas, he finds what he is looking for.

[1] Maruyama, p.67.

Platt, Brian.  Burning and Building:  Schooling and State Formation in Japan,

1750-1890.  Cambridge, MA & London: 2004.

In Burning and Building, Schooling and State Foundation in Japan, 1750-1890 Brian Platt is trying to find “The Local in the Nation-State.”[1]  Platt’s question arises primarily from his reading of earlier treatments of the rise of Japan’s Meiji State, and the role of education in that rise, particularly Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman’s edited volume Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji.  While praising this body of work, the chief fault that Platt finds in that volume and other secondary literature on this topic is twofold: a general lack of attention to the developments in education, as if they were dictated by the state without contest, and a sense that the educational and intellectual changes that occurred during the Tokugawa Period created the “preconditions” for modern education which allowed a smooth transition from premodern to modern (read ‘Western’) educational organization.

            Heavily informed by histories of education reform in the modern West, Platt’s primary question in this volume comes from Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, and is concerned with the contested nature of educational reform.  Platt here is deconstructing the binary opposition view of public education systems imposed by governments on unsuspecting and naïve populations for purposes of molding good citizens of the nation-state.[2]

            After posing this question, or rather, having Sayer and Corrigan pose it for him, Platt spends the rest of the book bursting the binary opposition bubble.  He takes as his first concept Gramsci’s thoughts on hegemony, and grants to readers that the purpose of the Meiji state in its early education reforms was, “hegemonic – it involved an attempt to secure the dominance of one particular vision of education over other visions.”[3]  However, Platt immediately refuses to accept that in a hegemonic system, the hegemon gains complete control, or even ascendancy.  Instead, he argues, in the case of Meiji education reform, the battle for hegemony was a cultural, not a physical battle, and that particularly the attempts by American Modernization theorists to view it in a binary way in the past have failed because they did not attribute agency to all of the players in the system.[4] 

            In fact, Platt wants to show the development of the Meiji Education system as a site of negotiation between the new government, which was engaged in a project of creating a nation-state, and national subjects, and local government, elites, and commoners who were the ones who had to attend school and pay for and carry out education reforms.  The fact that the Meiji government not only allowed space for, but saw the need to accede to local demands and contexts Platt argues shows that the achievement of hegemony was only partial.  In the same vein, Platt points out that the increasing use by commoners and local officials of designated government channels for their complaints, questions, and participation in education indicates an increasing acceptance of the central authority.  This is the contested space that Platt wants to explore.

            The book begins with a discussion of education in the late Tokugawa period in the province of Shinano (modern day Nagano), which remains Platt’s focus throughout the book.  In this Chapter, Platt is concerned with making two key points.  First, that literacy and education were not particularly uncommon in Japan of the Tokugawa Period, and second, that there is some continuity between educational goals and practices in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods in local areas.[5]

            In the second chapter, Platt is concerned, as he is throughout the book, with breaking down the binary oppositions with which historians have traditionally looked at education in Japan.  Platt begins here with an admonition to pay attention to more than just “the state” and “the People.”[6]  Instead, Platt dedicates the entire chapter to a discussion of the village elite and their position in the negotiation of education in late Tokugawa.  Beyond just this, Platt even problematizes historians’ view of Japan’s village elite by claiming that there was no standard set of ideas or actions that they followed.  Elites became education reformers, resisters of education reform, or even of general education.  Some elites became teachers and philanthropists, others reactionaries, and there was a gamut in between.  Since these people were critical in carrying out any reform of education, and in the politics that inevitably accompanied it, their positions, and activities, are important to analyze.

            In Chapter Three, Platt goes on to discuss the changes in education in the context of the immediate aftermath of the Restoration.  He looks at this period as a kind of liminal space – a time in which the old system was finished, and the new undecided, so that a plethora of ideas and policies could coexist, and compete for a share in the ideology and policy to come.[7]   This sense of endless possibility gave rise to various possible notions of education that eventually coalesced into the Meiji State’s policy by 1872.  the first was heavily influenced by “nativism” – the Kokugaku of Hirata Atsutane through his successor, Hirata Kanetane.[8]

            This did not, however, prevent the existence of alternative visions of education, some even responding to the same impulses.  Platt mentions a neat triad of individuals, whose names appear in nearly every history of early Meiji, and who had an impact on the education system, remolding it from the nativist vision to a nationalist one.  Iwakura Tomomi, who saw education as fulfilling two different purposes: “[first], we see the principle of schooling as a means of training men of talent for government service,” but, “[in] addition, Iwakura articulated the goal of achieving harmony and unity through moral instruction for the masses,” a very Confucian way of thinking.[9]   Itō Hirobumi echoed this call for education for the masses – a truly national education – but for purposes of national strength.[10]  Finally, Kidō Takahashi saw the goal of creating a system of national education for all Japanese for both economic and national strength purposes.[11]  These three, then, began articulating visions of the education system from the top center as a part of their visions of the modernization of the nation.  In some ways, Platt wants to show, their ideas resonated with nativist, Confucian, and Western ways of thinking about the nation and schooling that were already popular at the local level.  The final articulation of this vision was the promulgation of the Fundamental Code in 1872.  The main problem with this vision was that a national, centralized system of education came into contact with many of the education systems already built, or being built in the provinces.[12]

            The next three chapters of the book concentrate on the theme of negotiation/contestation at various points in the formation of the Meiji education system.  Chapter four is concerned primarily with early formation of local schools according to the Fundamental code, and the way in which the context in which local schools were created – both physical, in terms of geography, financial capability of villages, and available expertise, and ideologically, in terms of political and curricular organization.  Platt’s first point in this chapter is a claim that even the strongest state, in order to rule, has to negotiate terms with those it rules.  Platt wants to say that the Meiji state was neither strong nor stable at the point in which these reforms were being promulgated.[13]  In a way, what Platt is talking about here is a kind of extension of the liminal space found earlier in Meiji history.  He wants to set up a view of the 1870’s as an interstitial period, in which the opportunity for reinvention, liminal space style, coexisted with the growing stability and hegemony of the Meiji state in all areas of society.[14]  As education professionals (and those interested in education policy) redefined themselves, and as the Meiji state took for itself the ideas from that group that suited its needs, the possibilities remained numerous, and the realities fluid enough that rather than a simple imposition of hegemony, the Meiji state needed to negotiate its way to hegemony through accommodation of the needs and ideas of those whose services it required in order to carry out educational reform at all.  One excellent example that Platt gives is the fact that, as soon as the Fundamental Code was promulgated, education professionals in prefectural schools began to pepper the Ministry of Education with questions about application of the regulations.  The fact that the ministry took these questions seriously Platt says is an indication that just as the Meiji state was influencing local education, local elites and educators were influencing Meiji education policy.[15]

            In the fifth chapter, Platt addresses the fact that resistance, both to the Meiji government, and to its school reforms, existed in the same places, and often in the same people, as cooperation.  Not everyone signed on to the project of creating a new school system, and many who did, signed on at least in part to achieve other goals.[16]

            These goals were often personal, reactionary, or both, and in fact, one of the areas where Platt takes issue with the Modernization School is here.  Platt sees the 1870’s revolts in which schools were burned not as acts of demonstration against the Meiji reforms in general, but as having an element that specifically targeted schools.  He relates the general protest to the specific targeting of schools through the ideas of Herman Ooms, whose discussion of the naturalization of Tokugawa era cultural norms, including status hierarchy, and the perception of foreigners as dangerous and evil (and the idea of schools as catering to foreign needs) combined with local and individual concerns about how to pay for schools (everyone had to, not just parents of the students), and about the removal of children from work for school.[17]  For Platt, it is clear that schools were not on the periphery, incidentally related to local fear and anger over the reforms that were creating Meiji state hegemony, but were at the center of the question.

            In his final chapter, Platt uses the combination of the Nagano and Chikuma perfectural school districts (the prefectures were combined in 1876) as an example of the general set of problems, protests, and realities in the creation of a national education system in Meiji Japan.[18]  Ultimately, Platt’s conclusion is that the creation of a national education system was central to the Meiji state’s claim to hegemony in the creation of policy for Japan – and even in the creation of the concept of Japan, but that like other institutions, this process was not an imposition, but the product of a negotiation between local people and the state itself, with the participation of a very complex set of actors.  Elites, both supported and rejected the project.  Villagers protested, refused to pay, and yet agitated for local schools to be built close to them.  Teachers rejected the Meiji state’s vision and curriculum, but ended up working within it.  In fact, by 1890, according to Platt, controversy was not over, but protest and argument was conducted within the policies and pathways provided by the Meiji state.[19]  Hegemony had been achieved.  Still, contrary to the impression given by earlier books on the topic, attendance was never full, even in the so-called “education prefecture” of Nagano, nor were local schools prostrate before the central government.  Even when the basic shape of the education system was settled, the possibility for negotiation, compromise, and reform continued to exist.[20]

            Overall, with this nuanced treatment of educational reform through the early Meiji period Platt has achieved a useful synthesis of evidence and theoretical framing.  The book is influenced by Gramsci’s theories of hegemony, but not dominated by them.  Rather, Platt has done a nice job of finding complexity in the evidence, and then using Gramsci’s ideas to help him explain that complexity, so that he neither ignores his evidence and oversimplifies, nor becomes overwhelmed and incapable of making narrative judgments about it.  This is a sophisticated, and inspiring, book that has broadened my understanding of the early Meiji period substantially.

[1] Brian Platt, Burning and Building, Schooling and State Foundation in Japan, 1750-1890, (Cambridge, MA, and London:  Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), p 255.

[2] Ibid., p.7.

[3] Ibid., p. 6.

[4] Platt, p. 6

[5] Ibid., p. 57.

[6] Ibid., 66.

[7] Platt, p. 100.

[8] Ibid., p. 102.

[9] Ibid., p. 104.

[10] Ibid., p. 105

[11] Ibid., p. 105.

[12] Ibid., p. 130.

[13] Ibid., p. 144.

[14] For more on the idea of liminal space, see Victor Turner,  Dramas, Fields and Metaphors:  Symbolic Action in Human          Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1974, and Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 1960.

[15] Ibid. p. 149-155.

[16] Platt, p. 193.

[17] Ibid., pp. 190-195.

[18] Ibid., p. 216.  Platt here says that the combination of the two school districts created a microcosm of the problems and opportunities faced by the Meiji state and local entities in the early 1870’s.

[19] Platt, p. 258.

[20] Ibid., 254.

Tropics of Discourse

                Hayden White is emeritus Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Clara.  Given his specialization, it is no great surprise that he opens his collection of essays, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, by discussing how we reach consciousness in the first place.

                White begins by likening the path to human understanding of truth, reality, and  work to the stages of development of consciousness in childhood delineated by Piaget.   For White, all human inquiry into the nature of reality, including the practice of History, is governed by the stages that Piaget sets out, though White calls them by the linguistic terminology provided by Vico: the major tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. 

                The majority of the introduction is spent on describing Piaget’s development cycle, then likening  Piaget’s stages to White/Vico’s tropology.  According to White, a child’s earliest grasp of the world consists of a perception of everything as a unity, and all as appendages that respond to the whims of the child, so that a table might have the same value as an arm or leg. White wants us to see this as the developmental equivalent of metaphor.  As the child grows, it perceives objects as being separate from each other, and itself separate from all.  This stage of differentiation both stems from the realization of sameness in the earlier stage, and results in attempts to relate objects to each other and to the whole.  These attempts at differentiation and connection  make language and thought possible.  White calls this the equivalent of his own use of metonymy.  In the next stage, the child recognizes that the separate pieces of reality are all related to each other – that the whole is related to its parts, and that each part is a whole with other parts, all connected – this thought, which is an extension of metonymy, White and Vico call synecdoche.  Last in the cycle comes the ability to think by substituting one object for another in a never-ending system of puzzling through the skills and knowledge of the other three stages to fit together meaning in new patterns that illuminate the old.  This White connects to his own use of irony.

                White goes on to discuss Marxist thought according to the same basic paradigm – that it is a working out of stages of development, and that those stages correspond roughly to the stages of child development elucidated by Piaget,and by extension to hist own use of the four tropes.  White also makes the point that several other major thinkers have come up with four categories for understanding reality.  The point is that all of the terms for the categories are less important than the fact that all of the categories match, more or less, the meaning of the linguistic categories of the major tropes.  White’s plan is to both consciously use this pattern in his own critique, and to encourage the use of the pattern in  understanding history.  In fact, this first essay, in its process of creating equivalences in thought, is White’s own metaphor, on which he will base most of the rest of the book.  In fact, despite the fact that White claims not to privilege any of the tropes above the others, nor to suggest that the process of learning or consciousness

must come in the order in which he has presented them, White organizes the book, and each of his essays, according to the order he has described (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony).

                According to White, a trope is a figure of speech, used in thinking, reading, or speaking, which helps us to illuminate our relationship to the world by using set patterns of language which allow us to make an intellectual leaps that would be impossible using logic alone.  In fact, the systems of logic are themselves “tropological” in nature.  Facts themselves don’t convey meaning.  It is the way we relate them to each other that creates the meaning.  White says we do this through tropes, not through content or logic.  Since our inquiry, especially in history, is done essentially through language, it makes sense to use the all-encompassing terminology of linguistics, rather than the specialized categories used by the thinkers mentioned above.

                In the metonymic part of the introduction, White spends some time defining  the tropes.  Metaphor, is the equating of one thing with another, or with others, that makes it possible for us to see objects in direct relation to ourselves.  Here we do not distinguish part from whole, and thus we get a particular type of meaning, and a rudimentary (mythic) understanding. 

                In the act of metonymy, we then take that unity apart into its constituent pieces, perceiving reality now not as a whole, but simply as a collection of different things that are a part of the whole.  This differentiation allows us to see form and function separate from all other parts of reality, and is the basis of what we call “analysis”. 

                Synecdoche is the complex process of relating individual parts to the whole.  This trope functions in two interesting ways.  It makes it clear how the part relates to the whole, and allows us to preserve a part of the metonymy – giving a sense of what is important about that part in relation to the whole.  This allows us, finally, to reassemble the unity of metaphorical thought with the pieces of metonymical thought. 

                Once it is reassembled, though, there is a trope that still allows us to pick at it, and to discern meaning from it, by playing games with meaning (perhaps a nod to Barthes and the endless field of play that is the text).  This trope is irony – in which meanings get substituted for meanings, signifiers and signified switched around in a game that helps us to put meanings together, to test possible truths, and imagine alternate realities.

                White continues his metonymy in “The Burden of History,”  where he separates the historian from the artist and scientist.  According to White, history in the 19^th century acted as the middle ground between two views of truth that seemed unreconcilable – those of scientists and of artists.  The chapter goes on to describe the process over time by which history in this function has become increasingly irrelevant to both art and science as they have discovered more in common than was suspected in the early 19^th century.  Historians, White says, became stuck in their original role, neither recognizing the changes in artistic and scientific paradigms, nor being able to keep up with them, and in the process opening history to the criticism that its methods included the worst and most outdated of both.  White’s proposition is that the task of new historians is to make history relevant by using the best of both scientific and artistic methodology and theory – consciously – and thus bring history back to importance.  To do this, White suggests, historians might best reflect human consciousness, rather than pretend to be scientists, through the universally applicable linguistic tropes he mentioned in the introduction.

                In “Interpretation in History,” White wants to make it clear that historians do not work only from the facts, and are not, in fact, scientists.  One of the key differences between science and history is that scientists and historians have “different paradigms of the form that a valid explanation may take.”[1]   What he means is that while scientists have developed very specific vocabularies and jargon to act as containers for their data – specific systems of language with which to explain the shape of the data they get from experiments, the subject of history is both “not fully scientized” and beyond the possibility of becoming science.[2]  This in turn means that the only explanatory tool available to historians is language itself.  This makes history ripe ground for story-telling, since that is the most effective explanatory mode in language, and one which, he says, historians have always used unconsciously anyway.  In fact, he says, in defense of historiography against critics that claim it is “nothing but interpretations,” history is written with the facts, but those facts are assigned meaning through specific methods of interpretation of which we ought to be aware.  One is what White calls “emplotment” – that is, the placing of historical facts (thus, history is more than interpretation) within recognizable plot structures (recognizable because they come from the traditions of literature and myth themselves) in order to assign meaning to the narrative of those facts.[3]  In White’s own words, “it can be argued that interpretation in history consists of the provisions of a plot structure for a sequence of events so that their nature as a comprehensible process is revealed by their figuration as a story of a particular kind.”[4]  The other method of interpretation is the use of a paradigm,  or the way in which historian relate (or don’t) the events  being studied.  Some, he says, see the events within a set (or “domain”) as being unrelated, and simply describe each, while others make choices about the relatedness of events, and the direction in which that relation goes.[5]  Additionally, White says that there is another mode of historical explanation that affects the use of these two, and that is the mode of ideology.  No historian can escape having an opinion about events, and assigning that ideological position to the narrative.  Thus, for White, history is a literary project, bounded by facts which are given meaning by the plot, paradigm, and ideology chosen, consciously or unconsciously, by the historian.  This being the case, it seems that history is in fact a linguistic artifact, and is thus unavoidably tropological.  White seems to say that historians might best learn to accept this essentially literary nature of history, and embrace the use of story, and of tropes, to become both conscious of, and better at, the project of interpreting history.

                In “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” White begins creating a synecdoche of the processes he has so far delineated in what might be considered the metonymic part of his explanation – the previous two essays.  It this section of the book, he begins to bring his concepts together into a whole by asking a set of key questions: “What are the possible forms of historical representation and what are their bases?  What authority can historical accounts claim as contributions to a secured knowledge of reality in general, and to the human sciences in particular?”[6]  White contends that history is really a verbal artifact – an object of language, not of reality so to speak – a model of past structures, and so not subject to the possibility of scientific experiments or direct observation.[7]  We have to reconstruct these models out of sources that are themselves literary representations of the events they purport to represent.  He recounts his earlier idea of the explicit involvement of the historian in creating this reconstruction as a story through the active process of emplotment, and the fact that such emplotment requires that choices be made about what to include and not include, and what to emphasize and not emphasize, in the narrative.  History is, then, an essentially literary activity in that it is a “fiction-making operation.”[8]  White goes on to say that the process of emplotment, and the choices made about which events to emphasize and which to de-emphasize come from the two other literary activities described in the previous essay – paradigm, by which the historian chooses the direction and thrust of the narrative by assigning relationships between the events chosen to be a part of the plot, and ideology, the choice of general meaning that acts as a lens through which the historian makes many of these decisions.  The sum total of choices made using these three modes of interpretation result in a narrative that must be written, to be successful, in the major tropes White has described earlier in the book – to provide the meaning with which the historian wants to imbue the whole.  History, then, is as a whole a literary process, though its meaning seeks to be an interpretation of the human experience, rather than a scientific inquiry.  Ultimately, though, White’s position seems to be that science is also governed by linguistics, and human understanding of reality is fundamentally tropological.

                In “Historicism, History, and the Imagination,” White continues to bring together his ideas in a vast synecdoche which equates the study of history with the study of humanity and the human reality.  His main point, after analyzing a passage from historian A.J.P. Taylor’s discussion of the Wiemar Republic, is that there is present simply because of the use of language a subtext of historical description that is independent of the facts and the “explicit argument”, and that is constructed and poetic, resulting from the choices of plot, paradigm, ideology, and tropes by the historian writing the history.  It is fully interpretative, and acts as a kind of “supernarrative” that gives meaning through the cultural process of language. [9]  History, says White, is not them, apodictic, because the construction of the supernarrative is also the construction of the basket into which the data – the “facts” – will be placed.  Apodictic history – a narrative dictated by the data themselves, is impossible, and would, if it were possible, be nothing more than chronology without meaning.  Yet White has in other places made the argument that even such a chronology is impossible, since he agrees with Levi-Strauss that there are “hot and cold chronologies” – time periods in which there may be more or less distance between events with importance to the narrative.  So history must be constructed in order to have meaning at all. Further, there is no way to experiment on human populations over time or in history, or to observe the actual events themselves.  Also there is no way for a historian to shed  ideological or historical presuppositions.  Therefore, according to White, it is not only appropriate that history be a form of art – specifically literature – but that it must be, for this is the only way that historians can be explicit about the the plots, paradigms, and ideologies they have chosen, and the fact that they have chosen them.

                The final essay in the assignment (though not in the book) was titled “The Fictions of Factual Representation.”  This title goes to the heart of White’s intent, both in this essay, and in the book as a whole so far.  It is at once an irony, for it replaces reality with fiction, and fiction with reality in its analysis.  It is also the capstone of White’s overall argument that history is a literary artifact, but that recognition of it as such does not reduce its ability to tell us truths about the human condition.  In fact, White might argue that recognition of the essentially literary nature of history will make it more useful in that endevour, rather than less so.  This is, indeed, his introduction.  He begins by granting that historical events differ from fictional ones in that they “can be assigned to specific time-space locations,” and “are (or were) in principle observable or perceivable.”[10] White’s main point here, though, is that the construing of historical facts must be set in a fictional mode to be coherent, but that sets the writing of history against a nineteenth century assumption that to be true, historical writing must be exclusively factual.  White goes briefly over the early nineteenth century convention of creating an identity between truth and fact (here clearly showing how human understanding depends on metaphor).  However, White then goes on to show how enlightenment historians were well aware of the fictional nature of their narratives – that they were writing history to make a point, or support a position – and that this did not bother them, as they were in search of truth, and the use of facts as a part of a fictional narrative – that is, using the fiction to organize facts into a coherent narrative to make that point, was not considered counter to the truth they were trying to reveal.  The

revelation, White seems to be saying, comes from the ability of fiction to straighten out the curves – leave some facts out, ed-emphasize others, even cover others, until only the relationships that shed light on the issues that the historian wants to see are clear.  Such a history, White wants us to see, cannot be avoided and our horror of it, he wants to show, is a result of a phobia about fiction generated in outdated nineteenth century science and history which has since been shown to have no basis.  Art, fiction, literature are useful ways in which to gain access to truth, even if they rely only somewhat on the facts.

[1]    Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in cultural Criticism, (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 and 1985) p. 63.

[2]    Ibid., p. 63.

[3]    Ibid., p. 57.  Here, White uses the ideas of Northrop Frye and R.G. Collingwood, who claim that during the creation of a plot structure in which to place the facts of history, the story of historical events takes on the shape of a myth.

[4]    Ibid., P. 58.

[5]    Ibid., p.63

[6]    Ibid., p. 81.

[7]    Ibid., p. 82.

[8]    Ibid., p. 85.

[9]    Ibid., p. 110.  “even in the simplest prose discourse, and even in one in which the object of representation is intended to be nothing but fact, the use of language itself projects a level of secondary meaning below  or behind the phenomena being “described.”

[10]  Ibid., 121.

Hershatter, Gail. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Hershatter’s book on prostitution in Shanghai from the late 19^th century to the 1990’s is, as she admits on the first page of the introduction, frought with difficulties in reading and interpreting sources. The fact that She has had to get most of her information about prostitutes and courtesans not from the subjects themselves, but from those who have written about them, is problematic. Still, Hershatter is clearly aware of this problem, and is able to deploy theoretical constructs by which to discuss it with ease, while constantly bringing the reader back to the fact that she believes such history can be done. Rather than giving up, Hershatter tries to find the agency of prostitutes, to give them a voice by looking for the evidence of their lives and experiences where she can find it. To do this, she has consulted a wide variety of sources, from guidebooks on the pleasure quarters to news tabloids, public and political debates about whether to license prostitutes or ban prostitution, and literature, news, and opinion on the relation of prostitution and reactions to it to China’s move into modernity in the twentieth century. The variety of sources that Hershatter uses, her sincerity about the difficulty of using those sources and her willingness to try anyway lends to this book a feel of academic honesty and integrity that makes it an interesting read, and one which is meant to be read critically. It is revealing about gender relations in China on many levels.

Honig, Emily.  Sisters and Strangers:  Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949.

Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1986.

The genesis of Emily Honig’s Sisters and Strangers was inspiration from E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, and an opportunity to join a group of Chinese researchers interviewing women who had been factory workers in pre-revolutionary China.  Honig’s approach, though, came to differ from both Thompson and the research group she worked through, as she says herself, when the stories told by the interview subjects made it clear that their experiences were diverse, and not always consistent either with the search for a women’s revolutionary proletariat or the analysis of Thompson.  The complexity and diversity among women cotton mill workers in Shanghai that Honig reflects the diversity of lived experience that seems to be the subject of many articles and monographs on Republican China at this time, including differences between women based on their native place, on the factory in which they worked (and the culture/nation of the its owners), and even on the position of each woman within the factory.  Honig’s introduction makes her point that women workers were a large part of the factory workforce in Republican Shanghai, which makes their participation in a theoretical revolutionary proletariat a critical part of any historical cause investigation of the revolution.  However, she says, they don’t fit such a class-based view so simply.  The remainder of her book is dedicated to showing the working lives of these women in as much detail as possible.  Honig’s bibliography is extensive, but she relies primarily on interviews conducted by herself and others among surviving women in Shanghai.  While she does an excellent job with the sources themselves, she pays only scant attention to the problems of history and memory in her introduction, and presents the evidence she has in the other chapters as a kind of clear window onto the world of these workers.  In all this book is a fast and interesting read, though it presents some theoretical problems.