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Wesleyan University
The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory
Author(s): Hayden White
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 1-33
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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THE QUESTION OF NARRATIVE IN CONTEMPORARY
HISTORICAL THEORY
HAYDEN WHITE
I
In contemporary historical theory the topic of narrative has been the subject
of extraordinarily intense debate. Looked at from one perspective, this is surprising; for on the face of it there should be very little to debate about narrative.
Narration is a manner of speaking as universal as language itself, and narrative
is a mode of verbal representation so seemingly natural to human conscious-
ness that to suggest it is a problem might well appear pedantic. ‘ But it is precisely because the narrative mode of representation is so natural to human consciousness, so much an aspect of everyday speech and ordinary discourse, that
its use in any field of study aspiring to the status of a science must be suspect.
For whatever else a science may be, it is also a practice which must be as critical
about the way it describes its objects of study as it is about the way it explains
their structures and processes. Viewed from this perspective, we can trace the
development of modern sciences in terms of their progressive demotion of the
narrative mode of representation in their descriptions of the phenomena which
comprise their specific objects of study. And this explains in part why the
humble subject of narrative should be so widely debated by historical theorists
in our time; for to many of those who would transform historical studies into
a science, the continued use by historians of a narrative mode of representation
is an index of a failure at once methodological and theoretical. A discipline
that produces narrative accounts of its subject matter as an end in itself seems
methodologically unsound; one that investigates its data in the interest of
telling a story about them appears theoretically deficient.2
1. As R. Barthes remarks: “narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply
there, like life itself.” See his essay, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” in Image,
Music, Text, transl. S. Heath (New York, 1977), 79. The narrative mode of representation is, of
course, no more “natural” than any other mode of discourse, although whether it is a primary
mode, against which other discursive modes are to be contrasted, is a matter of interest to historical
linguistics. See E. Benveniste, Probkemes de linguistique geine’rale (Paris, 1966); and G. Ginette,
“Frontieres du recit,” Figures II (Paris, 1969), 49-69. E. H. Gombrich has suggested the importance
of the relationship between the narrative mode of representation, a distinctively historical (as
against a mythical) consciousness, and “realism” in Western art. See Art and Illusion: A Study in
the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York, 1960), 116-146.
2. Thus, for example, M. Mandelbaum denies the propriety of calling the kinds of accounts
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Within professional historical studies, however, the narrative has been viewed
for the most part neither as a product of a theory nor as the basis for a method,
but rather as a form of discourse which may or may not be used for the representation of historical events, depending upon whether the primary aim is to
describe a situation, analyze an historical process, or tell a story.3 On this view,
the amount of narrative in a given history will vary and its function will change
depending upon whether it is conceived as an end in itself or only a means to
some other end. Obviously, the amount of narrative will be greatest in accounts
designed to tell a story, least in those intended to provide an analysis of the
events of which it treats. Where the aim in view is the telling of a story, the
problem of narrativity turns on the issue of whether historical events can be
truthfully represented as manifesting the structures and processes of those met
with more commonly in certain kinds of “imaginative” discourses, that is, such
fictions as the epic, the folk tale, myth, romance, tragedy, comedy, farce, and
the like. This means that what distinguishes “historical” from “fictional” stories
is first and foremost their contents, rather than their form. The content of historical stories is real events, events that really happened, rather than imaginary
events, events invented by the narrator. This implies that the form in which his-
torical events present themselves to a prospective narrator is found rather than
constructed.
For the narrative historian, the historical method consists in the investigation
of the documents in order to determine what is the true or most plausible story
that can be told about the events of which they are evidence. A true narrative
account, on this view, is not so much a product of the historian’s poetic talents,
as the narrative account of imaginary events is conceived to be, as a necessary
produced by historians “narratives,” if this term is to be regarded as synonymous with “stories.”
See The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge (Baltimore, 1977), 25-26. In the physical sciences, narratives have no place at all, except as prefatory anecdotes to the presentation of findings; a physicist
or biologist would find it strange to tell a story about his data rather than to analyze them. Biology
became a science when it ceased to be practiced as “natural history,” that is, when scientists of
organic nature ceased trying to construct the “true story” of “what happened” and began looking
for the laws, purely causal and nonteleological, that could account for the evidence given by the
fossil record, results of breeding practices, and so on. To be sure, as Mandelbaum stresses, a
sequential account of a set of events is not the same as a “narrative” account thereof; the difference
between them is the absence of any interest in teleology as an explanatory principle in the former.
Any narrative account of anything whatsoever is a teleological account, and it is for this reason
as much as any other that narrativity is suspect in the physical sciences. But Mandelbaum’s remarks
miss the point of the conventional distinction between a chronicle and a history based on the
difference between a merely sequential account and a narrative account. The difference is reflected
in the extent to which the history, as thus conceived, approaches to the formal coherence of a
“story.” See my essay, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry
7 (1980), 5-27.
3. See the remarks of G. Elton, The Practice of History (New York, 1967), 118-141; and J. H.
Hexter, Reappraisals in History (New York, 1961), 8ff. These two works may be taken as indicative
of the view of the profession in the 1960s, on the matter of the adequacy of “story-telling” to the
aims and purposes of historical studies. For both, narrative representations are an option of the
historian, which he may choose or not according to his purposes. The same view was expressed
by G. Lefebvre in La Naissance de l’historiographie moderne [lectures delivered originally in 19451946] (Paris, 1971), 321-326.
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NARRATIVE IN HISTORICAL THEORY 3
result of a proper application of historical “method.” The form of the
discourse, the narrative, adds nothing to the content of the representation, but
is rather a simulacrum of the structure and processes of real events. And
insofar as this representation resembles the events of which it is a representation, it can be taken as a true account. The story told in the narrative is a
“mimesis” of the story lived in some region of historical reality, and insofar as
it is an accurate imitation it is to be considered a truthful account thereof.
In traditional historical theory, at least since the middle of the nineteenth
century, the story told about the past was distinguished from whatever explana-
tion might be offered of why the events related in the story occurred when,
where, and how they did. After the historian had discovered the true story of
“what happened” and accurately represented it in a narrative, he might
abandon the narrational manner of speaking and, addressing the reader
directly, speaking in his own voice, and representing his considered opinion as
a student of human affairs, dilate on what the story he had told indicated about
the nature of the period, place, agents, agencies, and processes (social, political,
cultural, and so forth) that he had studied. This aspect of the historical
discourse was called by some theorists the dissertative mode of address and was
considered to comprise a form as well as a content different from those of the
narrative.4 Its form was that of the logical demonstration and its content the
historian’s own thought about the events, regarding either their causes or their
significance for the understanding of the types of events of which the lived
story was an instantiation. This meant, among other things, that the disserta-
tive aspect of an historical discourse was to be assessed on grounds different
from those used to assess the narrative aspect. The historian’s dissertation was
an interpretation of what he took to be the true story, while his narration was
a representation of what he took to be the real story. A given historical
discourse might be factually accurate and as veracious in its narrative aspect
as the evidence permitted and still be assessed as mistaken, invalid, or
inadequate in its dissertative aspect. The facts might be truthfully set forth and
the interpretation of them misguided. Or conversely a given interpretation of
events might be suggestive, brilliant, perspicuous, and so on and still not be
justified by the facts or square with the story related in the narrative aspect of
the discourse. But whatever the relative merits of the narrative and the
dissertative aspects of a given historical discourse, the former was fundamental,
the latter secondary. As Croce put it in a famous dictum, “Where there is no
narrative, there is no history.”5 Until the real story had been determined and
4. The distinction between dissertation and narrative was a commonplace of eighteenth-century
rhetorical theories of historical composition. See Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles
Lettres [1783], ed. H. F. Harding (Carbondale, Illinois, 1965), 259-310. See also J. G. Droysen,
Historik, ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart, 1977), 222-280. For a more recent statement of the distinction,
see Peter Gay, who writes: “Historical narration without analysis is trivial, historical analysis
without narration is incomplete.” Style in History (New York, 1974), 189. See also the recent survey
by S. Bann, “Towards a Critical Historiography,” Philosophy 56 (1981), 365-385.
5. This was Croce’s earliest position on the matter. See “La storia ridotta sotto il concetto
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the true story told, there was nothing of a specifically historical nature to
interpret.
But this nineteenth-century view of the nature and function of narrative in
historical discourse was based on an ambiguity. On the one hand, narrative was
regarded as only a form of discourse, a form which featured the story as its
content. On the other hand, this form was itself a content insofar as historical
events were conceived to manifest themselves in reality as elements and aspects
of stories. The form of the story told was supposed to be necessitated by the
form of the story enacted by historical agents. But what about those events and
processes attested by the documentary record which did not lend themselves to
representation in a story but which could be represented as objects of reflection
only in some other discursive mode, such as the encyclopedia, the epitome, the
tableau, the statistical table or series, and so on? Did this mean that such
objects were “unhistorical,” did not belong to history, or did the possibility of
representing them in a non-narrative mode of discourse indicate a limitation
of the narrative mode and even a prejudice regarding what could be said to
have a history?
Hegel had insisted that a specifically historical mode of being was linked to
a specifically narrative mode of representation by a shared “internal vital
principle.”6 This principle was, for him, nothing other than politics, which was
both the precondition of the kind of interest in the past which informed historical consciousness and the pragmatic basis for the production and preservation
of the kind of records that made historical inquiry possible:
We must suppose historical narrations to have appeared contemporaneously with his-
torical deeds and events. Family memorials, patriarchal traditions, have an interest confined to the family and the clan. The uniform course of events which such a condition
implies is no subject of serious remembrance. . . . It is the state which first presents a
subject-matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the
production of such History in the very progress of its own being.7
In other words, for Hegel, the content (or referent) of the specifically historical
discourse was not the real story of what happened, but the peculiar relation
between a public present and a past which a state endowed with a constitution
made possible.
generate dell’arte” [1893], in Primi saggi (Bari, 1951), 3-41. Croce wrote: “Prima condizione per
avere storia vera (e insieme opera d’arte) e che sia possibile costruire una narrazione” (38). And:
“Ma si pu6, in conclusion, negare che tutto il lavoro di preparazione tenda a produrre narrazioni
di cio ch’e accaduto?” (40), which was not to say, in Croce’s view, that narration was in itself his-
tory. Obviously, it was the connection with facts attested by “documenti vivi” that made an historical narrative “historical.” See the discussion in Teoria e storia della storiografia [1917] (Bari, 1966),
3-17, wherein Croce dilates on the difference between “chronicle” and “history.” Here the distinc-
tion is between a “dead” and a “living” account of the past that is stressed, rather than the absence
or presence of “narrative” in the account. Here, too, Croce stresses that one cannot write a genuine
history on the basis of “narrations” about “documents” that no longer exist, and defines “chronicle” as “narrazione vuota” (11-15).
6. “[E]s ist eine innerliche gemeinsame Grundlage, welche sie zusammen hervortreibt.” Hegel,
Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 83.
7. Idem.
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NARRATIVE IN HISTORICAL THEORY 5
Profound sentiments generally, such as that of love, as also religious intuition and its
conceptions, are in themselves complete-constantly present and satisfying; but that
outward existence of a political constitution which is enshrined in its rational laws and
customs, is an imperfect Present; and cannot be thoroughly understood without a
knowledge of the past.8
Hence, the ambiguity of the term “history”; it “unites the objective with the
subjective side, and denotes quite as much the historia rerum gestarum, as the
res gestae themselves” and “comprehends not less what has happened, than the
narration of what has happened.” This ambiguity, Hegel said, reflects “a higher
order than mere outward accident.”9 It was neither narrative per se that
distinguished historiography from other kinds of discourses nor the reality of
the events recounted that distinguished historical from other kinds of narrative.
It was the interest in a specifically political mode of human community that
made a specifically historical mode of inquiry possible; and the political nature
of this mode of community that necessitated a narrative mode for its
representation. As thus considered, historical studies had their own proper
subject-matter, which is “those momentous collisions between existing, acknowledged duties, laws, and rights, and those contingencies which are adverse
to this fixed system”’10; their own proper aim, which is to depict these kinds of
conflicts; and their own proper mode of representation, which is the (prose)
narrative. When either the subject-matter, the aim, or the mode of represen-
tation is lacking in a discourse, it may still be a contribution to knowledge but
it is something less than a full contribution to historical knowledge.
Hegel’s views on the nature of historical discourse had the merit of making
explicit what was acknowledged in the dominant practice of historical scholarship in the nineteenth century, namely, an interest in the study of political history, but which was often hidden behind vague professions of an interest in narration as an end in itself. The doxa of the profession, in other words, took the
form of the historical discourse, what it called the true story, for the content
of the discourse, while the real content, politics, was represented as being primarily only a vehicle for or occasion of storytelling. This is why most profes-
sional historians of the nineteenth century, although they specialized in politi-
cal history, tended to regard their work as a contribution less to a science of
politics than to the political lore of national communities. The narrative form
in which their discourses were cast was fully commensurate with this latter aim.
But it reflects both an unwillingness to make historical studies into a science,
and, more importantly, a resistance to the idea that politics should be an object
of scientific study to which historiography might contribute.” It is in this
8. Ibid., 83-84.
9. [M]iissen wir fur hdhere Art als fur eine bloB dusserliche Zufdlligkeit ansehen.” Ibid., 83.
10. Ibid., 44-45.
11. Which is not to say, of course, that certain historians were not averse to the notion of a scien-
tific politics to which historiography might contribute, as the example of Tocqueville and the whole
“Machiavellian” tradition, which includes Treitschke and Weber, make clear enough. But it is im-
portant to recognize that the notion of the science to which historiography was to contribute was
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respect, rather than in any overt espousal of a specific political program or
cause, that nineteenth-century professional historiography can be regarded as
ideological. For if ideology is the treatment of the form of a thing as a content
or essence, nineteenth-century historiography is ideological precisely insofar as
it takes the characteristic form of its discourse, the narrative, as a content, that
is, narrativity, and treats “narrativity” as an essence shared by both discourses
and sets of events alike.
always distinguished from the kind of science cultivated in the study of natural phenomena.
Whence the long debate over the presumed differences between the Geisteswissenschaften and
Naturwissenschaften throughout the nineteenth century, in which “historical studies” played the
role of paradigm of the former kind of science. Insofar as certain thinkers, such as Comte and
Marx, envisioned a science of politics based on a science of history, they were regarded less as
historians than as philosophers of history and therefore not as contributors to historical studies
at all.
As for the “science of politics” itself, it has generally been held by professional historians that
attempts to construct such a science on the basis of historical studies gives rise to “totalitarian”
ideologies of the sort represented by Nazism and Stalinism. The literature on this topic is vast, but
the gist of the argument that sustains it is admirably articulated in the work of the late Hannah
Arendt. For example, she wrote:
In any consideration of the modern concept of history one of the crucial problems is to explain
its sudden rise during the last third of the eighteenth century and the concomitant decrease of
interest in purely political thinking…. Where a genuine interest in political theory still survived
it ended in despair, as in Tocqueville, or in the confusion of politics with history, as in Marx.
For what else but despair could have inspired Tocqueville’s assertion that “since the past has
ceased to throw its light upon the future the mind of man wanders in obscurity”? This is actually
the conclusion of the great work in which he had “delineated the society of the modern world”
and in the introduction to which he had proclaimed that “a new science of politics is needed
for a new world.” And what else but confusion . . . could have led to Marx’s identification of
action with “the making of history”? “The Concept of History” in Between Past and Future
(London, 1961), 77.
Obviously, Arendt was not lamenting the dissociation of historical studies from political thinking,
but rather the degradation of historical studies into “philosophy of history.” Since, in her view,
political thinking moves in the domain of human wisdom, a knowledge of history was certainly
necessary for its “realistic” cultivation. It followed that both political thinking and historical
studies ceased to be “realistic” when they began to aspire to the status of (positive) sciences.
The view was given another formulation in Karl R. Popper’s influential The Poverty of Historicism [1944-1945] (London, 1957); Popper concludes:
I wish to defend the view, so often attacked as old-fashioned by historicists, that history is
characterized by its interest in actual, singular, or specific events, rather than in laws or
generalizations…. In the sense of this analysis, all causal explanations of a singular event can
be said to be historical in so far as “cause” is always described by singular initial conditions. And
this agrees entirely with the popular idea that to explain a thing causally is to explain how and
why it happened, that is to say, to tell its “story.” But it is only in history that we are really
interested in the causal explanation of a singular event. In the theoretical sciences, such causal
explanations are mainly means to a different end-the testing of universal laws. (143-144)
Popper’s work was directed against all forms of social planning based on the pretension of a dis-
covery of laws of history or, what amounted to the same thing in his view, laws of society. I have
no quarrel with this point of view. My point here is merely that Popper’s defense of “old-fashioned”
historiography, which equates an “explanation” with the telling of a story, is a conventional way
of both asserting the cognitive authority of this “old-fashioned” historiography and denying the
possibility of any productive relationship between the study of history and a prospective “science
of politics.” See also Theorien in der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. J. Riisen and H. SUssmith (Dusseldorf, 1980), 29-31.
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NARRATIVE IN HISTORICAL THEORY 7
It is within the context of considerations such as these that we may attempt
a characterization of the discussions of narrative in historical theory that have
taken place in the West over the last two or three decades. We can discern four
principal strains in these discussions: first, that represented by certain AngloAmerican analytical philosophers (Walsh, Gardiner, Dray, Gallie, Morton
White, Danto, Mink) who have sought to establish the epistemic status of narrativity, considered as a kind of explanation especially appropriate to the explanation of historical, as against natural, events and processes. 12 Second, that
of certain social-scientifically oriented historians, of whom the members of the
French Annales group may be considered exemplary. This group (Braudel,
Furet, Le Goff, LeRoy Ladurie) regarded narrative historiography as a nonscientific, even ideological representational strategy, the extirpation of which
was necessary for the transformation of historical studies into a genuine science. 13 Third, that of certain semiologically oriented literary theorists and
philosophers (Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Todorov, Julia Kristeva, Benveniste,
Genette, Eco), who have studied narrative in all of its manifestations and
viewed it as simply one discursive “code” among others, which might or might
not be appropriate for the representation of “reality,” depending only on the
pragmatic aim in view of the speaker of the discourse.14 And finally, that of
12. The arguments set forth by this group are varied in detail, insofar as different philosophers
give different accounts of the grounds on which a narrative account can be considered to be an
explanation at all; and they run in diversity from the position that narrative is a “porous,” “partial,”
or “sketchy” version of the nomological-deductive explanations given in the sciences (this is Carl
Hempel’s later view) to the notion that narratives “explain” by techniques, such as “colligation”
or “configuration,” for which there are no counterparts in scientific explanations. See the anthologies of writings on the subject in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (London, 1959); and
Philosophical Analysis and History, ed. William H. Dray (New York, 1966). See, in addition, the
surveys of the subject by William H. Dray, Philosophy of History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964);
and, more recently, R. F. Atkinson, Knowledge and Explanation in History (Ithaca, 1978). For an
early response in France to the Anglo-American debate, see Paul Veyne, Comment on ecrit l’his-
toire: Essai d’epistemologie (Paris, 1971), 194-209. And in Germany, Geschichte-Ereignis und
Erzdhlung, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Munich, 1973).
13. The basic text is by Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur l’histoire (Paris, 1969). But see also, among
many other works in a similarly polemical vein, Francois Furet, “Quantitative History” in Histori-
cal Studies Today, ed. F. Gilbert and S. R. Graubard (New York, 1972), 54-60; The Historian
between the Ethnologist and the Futurologist, ed. J. Dumoulin and D. Moisi (Paris/The Hague,
1973), proceedings of a congress held in Venice in 1971, in which the statements of Furet and Le
Goff especially should be noted.
14. I stress the term “semiological” as a way of gathering under a single label a group of thinkers
who, whatever their differences, have had a special interest in narrative, narration, and narrativity,
have addressed the problem of historical narrative from the standpoint of a more general interest
in theory of discourse, and who have in common only a tendency to depart from a semiological
theory of language in their analyses. A basic, explicative text is R. Barthes, elements de Semiologie
(Paris, 1964); but see also: “Tel Quel,” Theiorie dcensemble (Paris, 1968). And for a comprehensive
theory of “semiohistory,” see Paolo Valesio, The Practice of Literary Semiotics: A Theoretical
Proposal (Urbino, 1978); and Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1980).
A generally semiological approach to the study of narrative has engendered a new field of
studies, called “narratology.” The current state and interests of scholars working in this field can
be glimpsed by a perusal of three volumes of papers collected in Poetics Today: Narratology I, II,
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certain hermeneutically oriented philosophers, such as Gadamer and Ricoeur,
who have viewed narrative as the manifestation in discourse of a specific kind
of time-consciousness or structure of time.”5
We might have added a fifth category to this list, namely that of certain historians who can be said to belong to no particular philosophical or methodological persuasion, but speak rather from the standpoint of the doxa of the
profession, as defenders of a craft notion of historical studies, and who view
narrative as a respectable way of “doing” history (as J. H. Hexter puts it) or
“practicing” it (as Geoffrey Elton would have it). 16 But this group does not so
much represent a theoretical position as incarnate a traditional attitude of
eclecticism in historical studies-an eclecticism which is a manifestation of a
certain suspicion of theory itself as an impediment to the proper practice of
historical inquiry, conceived as empirical inquiry.’7 For this group, narrative
representation poses no significant theoretical problem. We need therefore only
register this position as the doxa against which a genuinely theoretical inquiry
must take its rise -and pass on to a consideration of those for whom narrative
is a problem and an occasion for theoretical reflection.
II
The Annales group have been most critical of narrative history, but in a rather
more polemical than a distinctively theoretical way. For them, narrative history
was simply the history of past politics and, moreover, political history conceived as short-term, “dramatic” conflicts and crises which lend themselves to
“novelistic” representations, of a more “literary” than a properly “scientific”
kind. As Braudel put it in a well-known essay:
[T]he narrative history so dear to the heart of Ranke offer[s] us . . . [a] gleam but no
illumination; facts but no humanity. Note that this narrative history always claims to
relate “things just as they really happened.” . . . In fact, though, in its own covert way,
narrative history consists of an interpretation, an authentic philosophy of history. To
the narrative historians, the life of men is dominated by dramatic accidents, by the
actions of those exceptional beings who occasionally emerge, and who often are the
III (Tel-Aviv, 1980-1981), I and II. See also two volumes devoted to contemporary theories of
“Narrative and Narratives” in New Literary History 6 (1975), and 11 (1980); and the special edition
of Critical Inquiry, “On Narrative,” 7 (1980).
15. The positions are set forth in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Le probkme de la conscience historique
(Louvain, 1963); and Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, transl. C. A. Kelbley (Evanston, Illinois,
1965); “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” Social Research 38 (1971);
“Expliquer et comprendre,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 55 (1977); and “Narrative Time,”
Critical Inquiry 7 (1980).
16. J. H. Hexter, Doing History (Bloomington, Indiana, 1971), 1-14, 77-106. A philosopher
who holds a similarly “craft” notion of historical studies is Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of
Scientific History,” History and Theory 1 (1960), 11.
17. The defense of historiography as an empirical enterprise continues and is often manifested
in an open suspicion of “theory.” See, for example, E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory
(London, 1978); and the discussion of this work by Perry Anderson, Arguments within English
Marxism (London, 1980).
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NARRATIVE IN HISTORICAL THEORY 9
masters of their own fate and even more of ours. And when they speak of “general his-
tory,” what they are really speaking of is the intercrossing of such exceptional destinies,
for obviously each hero must be matched against another. A delusive fallacy, as we all
know. 1 8
This position was taken up rather uniformly by other members of the
Annales group, but more as a justification f
