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 19th 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 19th 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.