The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

295 Pages·2022·2.137 MB·English

by  Hayden White, Robert Doran, Judith Butler

THE ETHICS OF NARRATIVE, VOLUME 1
ESSAYS ON HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND THEORY, 1998–
2007
H W
AYDEN HITE
E
DITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION
R D
BY OBERT ORAN
F J B
OREWORD BY UDITH UTLER
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
C
ONTENTS
Foreword by Judith Butler
Editor’s Note
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Introduction
1. The Problem with Modern Patriotism
2. Symbols and Allegories of Temporality
3. The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity
4. Catastrophe, Communal Memory, and Mythic Discourse: The Uses of
Myth in the Reconstruction of Society
5. Figura and Historical Subalternation
6. The Westernization of World History
7. On Transcommunality and Models of Community
8. Anomalies of the Historical Museum, or, History as Utopian Space
9. Figural Realism in Witness Literature: On Primo Levi’s Se questo è un
uomo
10. The Elements of Totalitarianism: On Hannah Arendt
11. The Metaphysics of Western Historiography: Cosmos, Chaos, and
Sequence in Historiological Representation
12. Historicality as a Trope of Political Discourse: Rhetoric, Ethics,
Politics
13. Exile and Abjection
14. The Dark Side of Art History: On Melancholy
15. Against Historical Realism: A Reading of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace
Index
F
OREWORD
H W , M , P
AYDEN HITE ODERNISM RACTICAL
K
NOWLEDGE
J B
UDITH UTLER
Hayden White’s contributions to the humanities and
social sciences are not easy to summarize. And even though he is no longer with us, his
texts continue to act. One of the central features of his work is that it raises what appear to
be existential questions in the midst of modern historical realities, such as, “How am I to
live?” or, “What is the right way to act?” Anyone who knows his work knows that the
answers to such questions are neither simple nor direct, and that abiding with the
complexity is part of what ethical thought demands. This kind of thinking does not demand
complexity for its own sake but because an ethical reflection within history must orient
itself in a field of coordinates. Hence, the question, “What are the ethical pragmatics of
Hayden White’s work?” requires a turn to a prior question: “How did the question of ethics
emerge within literary modernism—what forms did it take?” I can answer neither in full,
but I want to show that as much as White was claimed by the Kantian problem of the
Second Critique—“What ought I to do?”—he understood that this question could only be
asked and answered within a specifically historical configuration of space and time that
assumes specific narrative and textual dimensions in the historical documents and literary
fictions he considered. His view speaks perhaps to our own situation to the extent that we
are not only asking what to do, but we are asking it in a context in which our sense of
planet, earth, history, and politics is undergoing radical and devastating change. In a sense,
the political syntax of the ethical question is now saturated and dis-oriented by climate
change, the rise of authoritarianism, the intensification of administrative forms of violence
in prison and along the borders. In a time of political despair and occasional hope, in a time
of deep disorientation and continuing constraints, where people wonder what they can do,
Hayden White has something to say to us. I do not have a single answer to what we should
do, but neither am I simply helpless before the question. Many of us are surely engaged in
deliberate forms of social transformation. At the same time, however, new forms of spatial
and temporal disorientation scatter the horizon within which we pose and pursue ethical
action. Even the earth that bears our weight is less the stable ground upon which we stand
than a crisis both made and in the making, one that enters into the form of the ethical
questions we now pose. White’s question might be rephrased this way: “From what
historical resources do we draw sustenance and orientation, or have those lines of
transmission from the past been so fully broken that we have only fragments on hand for
thinking in the present?”
White’s last book, The Practical Past, concludes with a well-known chapter, “Historical
Discourse and Literary Theory,” in which he considers the proposition that the past can
yield knowledge of both a practical and theoretical kind. He suggests that we might
understand the “practical” knowledge that history yields in the sense that Kant intended in
his Second Critique, The Critique of Practical Reason. There Kant interrogates the conditions
and limits of that kind of “knowledge” intended to answer the question “What should I
do?” or “What should we do?” or “What should any of us do?” Despite what some critics
imagine, White would surely agree with the slogan popularized by contemporary climate
activists that “facts matter”: he argued that the facts that come to matter are to some
degree conditioned by the questions that one brings to the facts, the way they are
approached and narrated; the way we treat them as mattering is already part of the matter
at hand, sorting between facts that matter and those that do not. This does not mean we
make them up, or that they are readily deniable. It means only they always appear in some
form, through some media, and that the form has its own content, and contributes to what
is presented—this is why some realities can be communicated through some forms better
than others. With regard to Primo Levi, White focuses on a wide range of figures in his
work, arguing that the use of the rhetorical features of language more powerfully conveys
the emotional reality of the concentration camp, thus running counter to the positivist
demand for language to act only and always transparently with regard to the facts.
The facts of atrocity have to be presented: every memorial museum knows this—or
should. A fact can only be shown to be a fact if the presentation works with the fact in the
service of communicating a reality (a reality is minimally a relationship among facts, not
simply a random collection). It would be an error to conclude that a fact is nothing other
than its presentation; it is only a necessary condition for its formulation and
communication, a condition for understanding its reality. Pounding the table and
repeating, “a fact is a fact” makes use of a principle of identity and constitutes a gesture of
relentless repetition of what is supposedly obvious, but the repetition also concedes that
the case has to be made, and it implies that there are skeptics in the audience who have to
be overcome and defeated. Even still, neither the rhetoric nor the rhetorical repetition
simply falls away as the content of the claim comes into view. In what form does the fact
appear such that we can, and do, affirm its reality? The rhetoric is not external to the
content: we require it to make the content clear, to establish the conditions of
communicability for that content or those facts.
Call it a Kantian turn, as many have, but Marx is in the picture as well. In White’s view,
a specific set of temporal pasts rises up and bears upon the present when the question, the
ethical question, is asked: “What ought I to do?” He took Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire
seriously because present questions are haunted and burdened by past temporalities that
are not always consciously registered, ones that surge up in new form within the present.
The sense of the past that White wrote about is not the same as the documented past
delivered by professional historians and chronicled in the library. Indeed, for history to
become practical in the Kantian sense, argues White, it has to depart to some extent from
the version of history accepted by the discipline of history. The discipline of history cannot
by itself furnish practical knowledge. In other words, it has to become unprofessional and
to a certain degree undisciplined, that is, willingly contaminated by inter-disciplinarity for
the promise of its future life.
For instance, a distinctly unprofessional sense of history comes into play when the
ethical question is posed: “What should I do?” “What should we do, or what should anyone
do?” This is different from the Leninist question, “What is to be done?” since that demand
emerges from the direction of an objective field. The first person “I” or the plural “we”
remains as the site of a lived disorientation, one that is orchestrated by historical
conditions that are not reducible to the subjective moment in which they are endured.
When we deliberately turn to the past for a practical or ethical orientation, we tend to
expect to find a rule, a maxim, or a model that will help us to orient ourselves toward
action in the present; we turn to a version of the past that we already believe will be most
relevant to our situation and our question. A principle of selection is built into that turn.
That does not mean that we predetermine the answer that will be found. It means only that
we tend to seek out a narrative, a story that might first connect the present to the past, so
that we can then discern what the past has to say to us, as it were, in the present, as we
fathom a course of action now. It is a way of prompting the past to speak to the present,
striking the chords of an instrument to register a reverberation. White’s point is not simply
to say that every such version of the past will be partially delimited by the question posed
(which is a more straightforward hermeneutic proposition), but that narrativizing the past,
giving it story form, or giving formal shape to a sequence, has an ethical valence that is
largely undervalued by both narratology and professional history, especially under
conditions where there is no discernible plot or when ellipsis becomes a central feature of
the narrative.
The view that an ethical life requires the capacity to give a coherent story of that life is
a popular view, one that has also registered in various psychoanalytic theories, including
that of Roy Schaefer (who did take narrative seriously). Such a view is espoused by Fredric
Jameson as well, who claimed that without a narratable story an ethical life cannot be
lived. Jameson calls for “an idea of history responsible to the lived ‘temporality’ within
which a historically responsible life can be lived”—that is a tough sentence, but perhaps
not quite as bad as some of mine (!). Jameson’s worry, one inherited from Lukács, is that
literary modernism runs the risk of separating art from ethics by contesting the narrative
conditions of responsibility. Hayden White responded to his close friend by suggesting that
the kinds of literary modernism that contest narrativity can be seen as reconfiguring the
relation between art and ethics, and precisely not as its destruction. For White, modernist
events are “overdetermined” (as Stefan Ernst says) by a wide number of historical
processes and investments, and so cannot be emplotted (rendered through a plot) in the
usual way. One requires neither realism nor a clear form of emplotment in order to convey
an ethical orientation; accordingly, one requires neither realism nor a clear form of
emplotment for a literary work to contend with a practical past and to be involved in a
practical and ethical dilemma. White understands all too well the claims made on behalf of
realism, especially the view that realism is required to defend against falsifications of
history, especially forms of negationism and revisionism that diminish or deny the
atrocious Nazi destruction of life. And yet, as White argues in his essay on Primo Levi,
“Figural Realism in Witness Literature” (chapter 9 of this volume), sometimes only a fiction
can convey the emotional reality of a historical catastrophe: “The most vivid scenes of the
horrors of life in the camps produced by Levi consist less in the delineation of ‘facts’ as
conventionally conceived than of the sequences of figures he creates by which to endow
the facts with passion, his own feelings about and the value he therefore attaches to them.”
And then again about Levi, he writes: figures are needed in order to “grasp” “a real
situation.” Levi’s turn away from realist representation, he argues, “has the effect of
actually producing the referent rather than merely pointing to it—and much more vividly
than any kind of impersonal registration of the ‘facts’ could ever have done.” Perhaps we
can say that the production of the referent is not its fabrication, but its reproduction or
enactment within the story, laden with the emotional reality that a non-figural
representation could not possibly convey. In other words, the facts are conveyed along with
their status as atrocity. The figure is not a lie, but a composite form of truth, one that delivers the
emotion with the fact as a way of establishing the ethical horror of the fact itself. If we think that
the threat of revisionism demands that we accept positivism, we miss the point that the
reality denied is at once an emotional reality, a horrific history, and that horrific histories
remain alive within historical consciousness, depending, in part, on how they are relayed,
understood, and registered.
When White refers to “the practical past,” he means that “archive of experience,” or
what Reinhart Koselleck called “the space of experience,” in which one gains orientation
and finds resources for posing and answering the basic questions of the Second Critique:
“What ought I to do?” and “What grounds do I have for my judgment about what is best to
do?” The problem, of course, is that this kind of archive may be remote or absent, or arrive
only in a confused or fragmented form. (See, for example, Saidiya Hartman’s challenge in
her Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, 2019.) Multiple
directives may converge that make it even more difficult to identify that dimension of the
past that is relevant for the practical or ethical question at hand. The Kantian scene is still
in some sense structuring the problem: “What ought I do?” “How do I follow the law?” or
even, “What is the best action under these circumstances?” But also: “What are the
conditions of possibility for action when destruction is taking place so quickly and
irreversibly?” For White, the practical past, which might furnish the coordinates for moral
action, includes memory, dream, fantasy, experience, and imagination, and specifically
works of literature that register and give form to the breakdown of the very coordinates of
time and space, the ones we apparently require in order to honor any moral dictum
derived from Kantian grounds. All of these have a pragmatic dimension because they are
still oriented toward the question, “What to do?” without being able to ground the
question in a space-time that is fully graspable. Thus, both history and literary form
intervene in the transcendental sphere. When we ask what to do because we do not know
what to do, we are also asking about an orientation in and toward space and time, the
condition of possibility of knowledge and rational deliberation, the transmission of
directives from those who are wise or who are, at least, our predecessors in some sense;
indeed, in his view, literature can convey that practical dimension of reality better than the
works of disciplinary historians.
For White, literary modernism in particular is concerned with the practical past
because, in White’s view, it is preoccupied with the question of finding an orientation toward
action in the midst of a history whose temporal coordinates are difficult to determine. An action I
will take is one that would appear to be possible within the future, presuming or invoking a
sense of futurity. But sometimes the action I am obligated to take is one that breaks the
horizon open, seems impossible from the outset, but has as one of its aims the expansion of
the sense of the possible. A sense of the possible is no ordinary sense. In some ways, it is
required; in other ways, it is what one madly fights for precisely because it is a requirement
of life itself. The point of White’s reflection is thus not to answer the question, “What to
do?” but to reflect on the historical conditions that give rise to the question, to the horizon
of possibility invoked for the question even to be posed. We expect orientation to ground
action, that the “I” who would take that action must be capable of deliberation and
movement, must know the map within which action is possible, must establish an
orientation within the world in order to take that action. Sara Ahmed puts it this way in
her introduction to her Queer Phenomenology: in an orientation, “we tend toward, where the
‘toward’ marks a space and time that is almost, but not quite, available in the present.”
Some space-time is opened up, or seeks to be opened up, through orientation. Thus, the
conditions of movement, moving forward, situating oneself within a recognizable
environment, receiving the past for pragmatic purposes, which in turn requires the
historical transmissibility of instruction manuals, law, and/or stories meant to convey
wisdom, all become pertinent to the possibility of knowing what to do and then doing it.
And yet, in a world that is structured for the able bodied or where checkpoints and walls or
military force block the freedom of movement, the conditions of deliberate action are