HAYDEN WHITE and the QUESTION of HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

This article aims to survey Hayden White’s thoughts on the nature and uses of historical narrative. White has been the first historian to draw upon the linguistic turn to problematize historical narrative, emphasizing that it is not only an empty form used to communicate the results of research and analysis, but something that contributes its own content as well. The study is divided into four sections. In the first section, it dwells on White’s comparative analysis of different forms of historiography extending from the annals to a chronicle and thence to a fully emplotted narrative. In the next section, it focuses on White’s revelation of other fictive components of historical narrative, including the conceptual and figurative framework underlying it. In the third section, the study discusses White’s comments on the implications of this fictive aspect of historical narrative for such issues as the links of history with past reality, the nature of the knowledge it produces, and its similarities with and differences from literary fiction. In the fourth section, it examines White’s criticisms against traditional historical narrative. In particular, it focuses on his observation that narrativizing historical events leads to the aestheticization and domestication of past reality by providing it with a false coherence, integrity and completeness, and therefore proves inadequate and morally objectionable when faced with modernist events like the Holocaust. In the epilogue, the study suggests some other topics which, although not discussed by White himself, could be subjected to his line of analysis with fruitful results