픽션으로서의 역사: 헤이든 화이트의 역사론

Abstract

Hayden White is the most prominent American scholar to unite historiography and literary criticism into a broader reflection on narrative and cultural understanding. Specifically, the publication in 1973 of Hayden Whites Metahistory marked a decisive turn in philosophical thinking about history. In this book, he offers an ambitious schema of the poetics of history, describing four structures of emplotment, four argumentative models, and four ideological strategies. He adds to this a fourth, deeper category of analysis, also comprising four modes — the theory of tropes. Hayden Whites tropology defines the deep structural forms of historical thought as the four literary figures metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, each possessing its characteristic means of organizing parts into wholes. White asserts that the vision of a given historian derives not from the evidence, since the vision decides in advance what will constitute the relevant evidence, but rather from conscious and unconscious choices made among the possibilities offered by the categories of his historical poetics. Thus, given a basic honesty and competence on the part of the historian studied, White can find no reason to prefer one account over another on historical grounds alone. The version of the past we choose depends rather on moral and aesthetic values, which ground both the historian and the audience and are beyond the call of historical evidence. According to White, all historical interpretation is fundamentally rhetorical because interpreting is what we do when we are uncertain how to describe or explain something. This uncertainty leads the interpreter to search for the available means of persuasion, which are figural in form and which can be successfully invoked only by working through the range of tropes. Thus, tropology forms a basic component in the study of historical narrative, which fashions a unity from the diverse elements of language. White maintains that the decision to narrativize real events as history serves the ideological function of asserting the beautiful, meaningful nature of the past (and present) and repressing any possible choice of encoding a sublime, chaotic, terrifying meaninglessness as reality. This de-sublimation made possible the professionalization of nineteenthcentury history by cutting its traditional ties to rhetoric, which emphasizes choices among possible forms of representation. Thus, history makes the past into an object of desire by giving it the same kind of coherence found in fictions. Whites theory of historical narrative and tropes problematicises any kind of realist empiricism and/or mimeticism, points to the inescapable presentcenteredness and positional nature of all historical interpretations, queries old distinctions between proper history and historicism by virtue of, for example, their common metahistorical status. Indeed, White maintains that historical study should show people how the past can be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from the present to the future in ways which prioritise the responsibilities of the individual by inducing in them an awareness that any given present condition is always, in part, a product of specifically human choices which can therefore be changed by further human action.