About Hayden White:

Born in Martin, Tennessee, in 1928, White received his undergraduate degree from Wayne State
University in Michigan in 1951, his M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1952, and his Ph.D. in
1956. He served as an instructor of history and later worked as an assistant professor of history. A
prominent American historian, White is known for his analysis of the literary structures of the works
of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians and philosophers. White published an early essay,
“The Burden of History” (1966), which raised many of the questions about the discipline of history
that would be the focus of his later works. In 1973, White accepted a position as director for the
Centre for the Humanities at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he was named
Kenan Professor from 1976 to1978. While at Wesleyan, White produced his first major work,
Metahistory, and continued to publish essays about problems of historical knowledge and the
relations between history and literature in journals and edited volumes. In Metahistory (1973) , he
presents a detailed outline for the study of the different narrative and rhetorical strategies found in
the works of nineteenth-century European historians such as Leopold von Ranke and Jacob
Burkhardt. Influenced by eighteenth-century scholar Giambattista Vico and literary critic Kenneth
Burke, White proposes a theory of tropes, or symbolic modes, that constitutes the deep structure of
historical thought. White elaborated and modified his arguments from Metahistory in two
collections of essays, Tropics of Discourse (1978) and The Content of the Form (1987). Although his
work has drawn criticism from historians and literary critics alike, White is widely respected for
raising vital questions about the latent assumptions that informall kinds of historical interpretation.

The essay “The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact,” is a revised version of a lecture given before the
Comparative Literature Colloquium of Yale University on 24 January, 1974.

A Critical overview of the essay

In his essay “The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact,” theorist Hayden White tries to answer
metahistorical questions by exhorting historians to embrace rather than deny the literary origins and
confinement of historical narratives. One of his basic ideas is that historians operate much like
narrative writers.

White challenges the idea that there can be a completely objective historian, devoid of bias or a
theoretical underpinning that details his narrative of history: "Yet it is difficult to get an objective
history of a scholarly discipline, because if the historian is himself a practitioner of it, he is likely to
be a devotee of one or another of its sects and hence biased." White makes the argument that the
true focus of history should be to examine the "meta- history" that exists within the historical
narrative. He defines this as the ability to study the study of history. White views that in general
there is “a reluctance to consider historical narratives” as “verb alfictions, the contents of which are
as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in
literature than they have with those in the sciences”. He then explores various philosophers'
analyses of the historical narrative, including Northrop Frye, R.G. Collingwood, and Claude Levi-
Strauss. White builds upon Northrup Frye's view "that the historian works inductively",
distinguishing this position with his by introducing the idea of "emplotment." White defines
"emplotment" as the stories made out of chronicles and "the encodation of the facts contained in
the chronicle". In history, there is a set of narrative called tropes. Any historical narrative is a set of
tropes. The selection and combination of tropes is called emplotment, that is, the sequential
arrangement of tropes. This notion foregrounds the literary action of constructing narrative out of a
set of events. It is a product of "constructive imagination” and draws attention to the multiplicity of
stories that a historian could conceivably tell with different emplotments — sometimes even with
the same set of facts. Emplotment depends on the subjectivity or the ideology of narrator or
historian. Thus we can say that history is multi- perspective and subjective.

Building on R.G. Collingwood's idea of constructive imagination, White explains, "The events are
made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of
others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative
descriptive strategies, and the like…” White suggests that historical events themselves have no real
meaning to them. They are "value neutral," because they are perceived different by the people who
experience them. White argues this in the historical retelling of revolutions, which will look different
to a person who is not in power than to one who is. Such an idea demonstrates how historical events
themselves are "value neutral." White argues that the way they are interpreted is reflective of the
historian's bias or his own understanding. For instance, he suggests that "historical situations are not
inherently tragic, comic, or romantic. They may all be inherently ironic, but they need not be
emplotted that way. All the historian needs to do to transform a tragic into a comic situation is
to shift his point of view or change the scope of his perceptions." The ability to "make sense of sets
of events in a number of different ways" is a critical point in White's analysis. White suggests that
the way in which a certain set of events is configured and presented reveals an ideology concerning
those events.

At one point, White makes the very interesting comparison from this process of historical
emplotment to the work of psychotherapy. In psychotherapy, the afflicted patient has
"overemplotted" their life events, causing them to obsess over or repress them. It is the job of the
therapist to guide the patient towards reemplotting these events, changing their meaning and
significance to better support the patient's wellbeing. White then moves to the mimetic aspect of
historical narratives. “It is generally maintained— as Frye said — that a history is a verbal model of a
set of events external to the mind of the historian.” This led him to think that historical narratives
are not only models of past events and processes, but also metaphorical statements. Going into a
more dense discussion of mimesis on historical narrative, White points out that the historical
narrative is not just a reproduction of events, but it is also a set of symbols that allows us to
consume the history and find the icon of those symbols in our literary tradition. Semiotically,
history’s reproduction necessarily implies a set of symbols which convey complex meanings in the
same way as professedly literary texts. Linking history with literature White says that historians must
develop a historical consciousness. He explains that “like literature, history progresses by the
production of classics, the nature of which is such that they cannot be disconfirmed or negated…and
that it is their non disconfirmability that testifies to the essentially literary nature of historical
classics”

Hayden White then change his focus to Levi-Strauss who insists that we can construct a
comprehensible story of the past, only by a decision to "give up" one or more of the domains of facts
offering themselves for inclusion in our accounts. According to him, the "overall coherence" of any
given "series" of historical facts is the coherence of story, but this coherence is achieved only by a
tailoring of the "facts" to the requirements of the story form. White then compares a historical
narrative as an extended metaphor. As a symbolic structure, the historical narrative does not
reproduce the events it describes; it tells us in what direction to think about the events and charges
our thought about the events with different emotional valences. The historical narrative does not
image the things it indicates; it calls to mind images of the things it indicates, in the same way that a
metaphor does.
White proceeds further to discuss the process of emplotment in historical narratives. To illustrate
this he put forward a set of events,

(1) a,b,c,d,e, . . . . . . . ,n,

ordered chronologically. Now he gives number of different ways in which the series
can beemplotted:

(2) A,b,c,d,e, . . . . . . . , n

(3) a, B, c, d, e,. . . . . , n

(4) a,b,C,d,e,. . . . . . . , n

(5) a,b,c,D,e,. . . . . . . , n

And so on. The capitalized letters indicate the privileged status given to certain events or sets of
events in the series by which they are endowed with explanatory force. Hyden White doesnot mean
by this interference or change in the order of the historical events in the historical narrative, but
simply to a different construction of the same series of event in light of essentially literary
conventions and through different emphasis of different events. Hyden White lists four main types
of emplotment which are tragedy, satire, comedy and romance. If the series were simply recorded in
the order in which the events originally occurred, the result would be the pure form of the chronicle.
In Metahistory, White shows how such mixtures and variations occur in the writings of the master
historians of the nineteenth century.

The discussion which concludes his essay includes an extended analysis of the play of figurative
language — especially metaphor and metonymy — in concretizing historical narratives. White argues
historical narratives are more closely linked with literature than the sciences not because historical
narratives are fictional but because historical narratives employ tropes (metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche, and irony) to configure historical events in ways that the audience can relate to.
Historians, White explains, “reemplot,” redescribe, or recode past events so contemporary cultures
can make sense of their past. Histories, then, are similar to fiction because figurative language is
used in both genres to help us come to know the actual by “contrasting it with or likening it to the
imaginable;” thus both historical narratives and fiction employ similar strategies in making sense of
past events whether they are real or imagined. His understanding of the historian’s role is to
familiarize the reader with the “unfamiliar” face of history; with that as his goal, the historian “must
use figurative, rather than technical language” because technical language implies commonality and
shared experience whereas figurative language seeks to convey the unfamiliar. To White, history is
suffering today “because it has lost sight of its origins in literary imagination”