In Review
FOCAL POINT: Hayden White, a former chair of Rochester鈥檚 history department, listens to a presentation during a two-day colloquium focused on his work. The event took place this spring as part of the Humanities Project (Photo: Richard Baker).Why do we write history?
If you had asked the question in a college history classroom 50 years ago, the chances are good that the professor and students alike would have cited the need to show how our society came to be as it is, or the need to extract lessons from the past.
Both responses assume historians can portray the past as it truly was. But can they?
Hayden White, a former chair of Rochester鈥檚 history department who taught at the University from 1958 to 1968, raised just that question鈥攆irst, in a 1966 essay called 鈥淭he Burden of History,鈥� and in 1973 in a book, Metahistory, that established his place as one of the most provocative thinkers in the humanities in the past 40 years.
In April, White, who now teaches at Stanford University, returned to the River 人妻少妇专区 for a celebration of his work鈥攁nd his 80th birthday.
鈥淏etween History and Narrative: Colloquium in Honor of Hayden White鈥� was a two-day event carried out as part of the Humanities Project, a series of lectures, exhibitions, panel talks, and other initiatives designed to showcase, and share with the public, the work of Rochester faculty in the humanities. Twelve Rochester faculty members from six disciplines joined scholars from across the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, and Poland in presenting papers that reflected White鈥檚 influence in the fields of art history, literature, visual culture, and history. Robert Doran, an assistant professor of French who joined Rochester鈥檚 faculty last fall, organized the event with the help of colleagues in the modern languages, English, and history departments. Doran studied under White at Stanford and is the editor of a forthcoming book of White鈥檚 essays.
John Michael, the chair of Rochester鈥檚 English department, remembers the excitement he felt when he discovered White鈥檚 work in the late 1970s. 鈥淚t was stunning,鈥� he says. 鈥淚n looking at the great 19th-century historians, what White focused on was not what they had to say about the French Revolution, or the history or future of class struggle. He focused on the way in which they developed narrative structures to tell their story,鈥� Michael says. 鈥淭hose turned out to be very similar to the forms of the聽novel.鈥�
White argued that in amassing historical information and organizing it into a narrative, historians followed well-established modes of storytelling. This process of 鈥渆mplotment,鈥� as he called it, necessarily shaped historical content in ways that made any given account a reflection of the author鈥檚 interests and concerns.
White has had plenty of critics who, he says, have called his work 鈥渄angerous, nihilistic, anarchistic,鈥� and 鈥渞elativistic.鈥� But, he concludes, such critics find his work 鈥渄angerous usually to their ideas.鈥�
鈥淸P]hilosophy of history鈥攐r critical historical thinking鈥攚hich is what I do is concerned with such questions as Why are we doing this? What should we be doing? How can we know what we ought to do in this situation, here and now? Historical inquiry鈥攁mong other things鈥攍ooks into the ways in which people like ourselves in different times and places and other circumstances answered such questions.鈥�
Some critics still want 鈥渃ertainty鈥� in history, White concedes. But, he adds, 鈥渢here is no certainty in human affairs.鈥�
鈥淢ankind is always in the process of inventing itself anew鈥攁lways therefore 鈥榬evising鈥� itself and along with that, revising its history of itself. To think of history this way is to return it to its place among the humanities, where it should reside content with knowing only something, not everything.鈥�