Historiography between scholarship and poetry: Reflections on Hayden White's approach to historiography

The paper critically examines the radical epistemological relativism of Hay den White's thought from the structural approach to historical narration in Metahistory (1973) to what White characterizes as his 'post-Saussurian' or semiological turn. There are two basic premises on which White and I agree , that history in contrast to literature requires a factual basis and that any attempt to go from historical 'facts' to an historical account involves imaginative, in White's language 'poetic acts'. Yet I question White's ass ertion that there are no criteria by which 'competing narratives' can be as sessed, that hence 'history and novels are indistinguishable from one anoth er' and 'the oppostion between myth and history . . . is as problematical a s it is untenable'. This position makes it difficult for White to distingui sh between history and propaganda and confronts him with the dilemma when o n the one hand he emphatically repudiates the Holocaust deniers, but on the other hand is forced to maintain that all accounts of the Holocaust, provi ded they do not violate the facts, have equal explanatory value. This overl ooks that although a multiplicity of interpretations of any series of event s is possible, these are not arbitrary products of the historical imaginati on, but can be tested as to their factual validity and coherence. Faced wit h differing perspectives, historians can seldom reach a final consensus on historical problems, but are engaged in an ongoing dialogue following at le ast minimal agreement on what constitutes rational discourse. The paper fur ther questions whether White in fact in his chapters on the master historia ns in Metahistory examined the great historical narratives of these histori ans but instead relied on a limited number of theoretical statements by the se historians which were external to these narratives and left out of consi deration the role which research and method played in the composition of th eir works.