10.13125/CH/3871
This essay examines what remains of the Linguistic turn (LT) after Hay-den White, in the two meanings of the preposition “after”: “subsequent to” and “according to”. For White, the LT (under the umbrella of post-modernism) has made it possible to transcend a number of distinctions, such as those between text and context, fact and fiction, and history and literature. Those distinctions, however, are still defended by a large part of the historical community, including by scholars involved in exper-imental works, such as I. Jablonka. Furthermore, some philosophers hold the debates about the LT to be irrelevant. The specificity of history, for them, does not reside in its formal aspects (e.g., its use of narra-tive), but in its relations to evidence. History, like all scientific disciplines, must validate its statements, namely, establish that they are well founded and justified.
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Philippe Carrard
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Critical Hermeneutics
Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguis-tic Turn
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2019-11-11
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Philippe Carrard
2019/11/11
10.13125/CH/3871
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urn:nbn:it:unica-25532
Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguis-tic Turn
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Critical Hermeneutics, 3 (2019)                        Articolo presentato il 08/07/2019
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ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/3871




              Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties,
                           and the Linguistic Turn


                                    Philippe Carrard




Abstract
This essay examines what remains of the Linguistic turn (LT) after Hayden
White, in the two meanings of the preposition “after”: “subsequent to”
and “according to”. For White, the LT (under the umbrella of postmodern-
ism) has made it possible to transcend a number of distinctions, such as
those between text and context, fact and fiction, and history and litera-
ture. Those distinctions, however, are still defended by a large part of the
historical community, including by scholars involved in experimental
works, such as I. Jablonka. Furthermore, some philosophers hold the de-
bates about the LT to be irrelevant. The specificity of history, for them,
does not reside in its formal aspects (e.g., its use of narrative), but in its
relations to evidence. History, like all scientific disciplines, must validate
its statements, namely, establish that they are well founded and justified.
Keywords: linguistic turn, postmodernism, constructivism, relativism,
fact


1. Introduction
The issue of knowing what now remains of the Linguistic Turn (LT) has
been widely debated over the past twenty years. François Hartog (2013:
111), for instance, in the chapter of Croire à l’histoire he devotes to the
“disturbing strangeness” of his discipline, deems that the approach is “no
Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




longer but the theme of a funeral oration: it appeared, seduced (some
people), opened (at times) new questions… and then receded: historians
moved to something else”. This fate, Hartog continues quoting Péguy, is
common in intellectual history: scholars “hammer away at a question for
fifteen or twenty years”, then suddenly “turn their back to it”: they “no
longer know what they were talking about, and for that matter no longer
talk about it”. Frank Ankersmit (2013: 424), at the other end of the spec-
trum, takes the LT to be the “third and last stage” in the philosophy of
history since World War I. Succeeding the discussions about the covering
law model and then hermeneutics, the LT gained in the 1970s a “quick
and easy victory” over its opponents, bringing the philosophy of history
“in line with contemporary philosophy of language”. Since then, according
to Ankersmit, “not much has changed” “One can safely say that the par-
adigm of the linguistic turn is still the dominant one”, and “we should be
happy with this”. Indeed, “many aspects of the use of language in histor-
ical writing still need to be explored”, an inquiry that can be productively
conducted through a “cross-fertilization between the philosophy of history
and the philosophy of language”. Returning in an essay initially published
in 2011 to topics he had dealt with in the 1980s and 1990s, Peter Schöt-
tler (2018: 153) adopts an intermediate position. For him, some of the
challenges (“Provokationen”) issued by the LT are still valid. The main one
is of a “scientific-methodological” nature. It consists of the reliance on
“discourse and language analysis” to examine historiographic texts, a re-
liance that makes facts “look different”, even though it does not “dissolve
them into discourse” (155). Schöttler is more skeptical toward the con-
tinuing legitimacy of the LT’s “philosophical challenge”, namely, “relativ-
ism” (153). That all truth can be “doubted”, for Schöttler, does not mean
that there is no “scientific truth” (157). Disciplines have a specific view of




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what may count as true in their area of scholarship, and they have devised
procedures that – if followed – will warrant the veracity of their findings.


2. The Linguistic Turn According to White
My purpose, to answer one of this journal’s editors’ suggestions in their
call for papers, is to examine the status of the LT after Hayden White, in
the two meanings of the preposition “after”: “subsequent to” and “accord-
ing to”. In so doing, I am appropriating the title structure of, and some of
the issues discussed in, Philosophy of History After Hayden White, a col-
lection of essays edited by Robert Doran (2013). The phrase “LT” may
have different meanings, which historians interested in the theory of their
discipline (e.g., Delacroix, 2010; Munslow, 2006; Müller, 2006) have
sought to chart. White himself (2013: 38), in his contribution to Doran’s
anthology, describes the LT as the shift of “analytical attention” from “the
object (or referent) of historiological research to the products of that re-
search, the written texts in which historians present their findings”; or, in
more abstract terms, as the idea of history as a “constructivist enterprise
based on a textualist conception of the relation between language and
reality” (40). I will, as White does, use LT in the sense of “analytical at-
tention lent to the formal aspects of historical studies”. Still, I am aware
that the term, more radically, may refer to the idea that “there are no
‘facts’ outside language, and no ‘reality’ other than that which presents
itself under some linguistic description” (Norris, 2005: 524). It is this ex-
treme meaning that is attributed to the LT by British historians such as
Gareth Stedman Jones, Keith Baker, and Patrick Joyce, for whom “class”,
for example, is but “an effect of theoretical discourse on relations of pro-
duction and distribution” (Stedman Jones, 1983: 7). White, to my
knowledge, has never situated himself with respect to this drastic version




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




of the LT, a version that many historians reject because, as Roger Chartier
(1998: 96) puts it, they deem it illegitimate “to reduce the practices of
the social world to the principles that control discourse”.
       Because White’s theories about the types of plots and tropes that
historians use to represent the past are well known, I won’t rehearse them
once again. To account for White’s intervention into the debates about
the LT, I will look closely at “Postmodernism and Textual Anxieties”, a text
originally given as a lecture at a 1996 colloquium in Sweden, and then
published in the anthology The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History,
Literature, and Theory 1957-2007 (2010). Although White does not turn
to the label “LT” in “Postmodernism and Textual Anxieties”, this piece can
be viewed as representative of his position in the late 1990s toward the
debates about the role of language in the historical endeavor. More pre-
cisely, it can be taken as representative of what White thinks the LT has
unquestionably established, of the changes that historians should now
take for granted if they want their profession to remain relevant.
       White (2010a: 312) proceeds in this essay by identifying seven “dis-
tinctions” that postmodernism has supposedly “transcended”. I will ex-
amine them as he lists them, linking at times White’s explanation of what
postmodernists “believe” with similar theses developed by other theorists.
According to White, the distinctions that postmodernism has overcome
are:


       1.      Between “events and their representation in discourse”. Post-
       modernists “believe that events exist and have existed in the real
       world” (312), but that the real world does not tell what should count
       as an event, nor how they should be recounted. That decision is up
       to the historian, and it is a matter of both scale and relevance. The




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fall of the Berlin Wall, to take an example in White’s own essay, will
count as one event in a short history of Germany. But it will be broken
into several events in a study of German reunification, even into
more events in a book devoted to 9 November 1989. In other words,
as one of White’s most vocal allies, Keith Jenkins (1995: 36), puts it
when advocating the postmodernist position, “[e]vents are singled
out for attention not because of their intrinsic interest, but because
of the logic of the text; they are not material realities, but the organ-
izing units of historical discourse”.
2.     Between “documents and (literary) texts”. Postmodernists
“believe that all documents… are texts, and that this means that they
must be submitted to the same explicative techniques as those used
on literary texts” (White, 2010a: 312). White’s point here is that his-
torians tend to read documents for their explicit content, neglecting
textual features that may be part of the information. White finds in
this area a supporter in Dominick LaCapra (2000: 21), who, having
defined the LT as the “recognition of the problematic nature of lan-
guage”, goes on to argue that documents must “be read textually”,
applying “critical scrutiny” to “the manner in which they construct
their object in an institutional and ideological field” (26). In other
words, for LaCapra as for White, documents should not be treated
differently from other texts. They should not be the object of what
LaCapra (34) calls a “synoptic reading” focused on contents, but of a
“deconstructive reading” (42) attentive to possible tensions between
what the text states expressly and some aspects of its language.
3.     Between “(literary) texts and their social context”. Postmod-
ernists “do think that the social context is itself a text or is appre-
hended only by way of text” (White, 2010a: 312). White here makes




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




      two moves. First, he defends what he had called earlier “textualism”:
      the idea that “the written text constitutes a paradigm of culture, that
      cultural production can be best understood on the model of textual
      production, and that the interpretation of culture is best carried out
      by practices of reading exactly analogous to those used in the reading
      of texts” (310). Then, he objects to the notion of the context as a
      fixed and coherent entity, against which the complexity of a text can
      so-to-speak be measured. Since the context “is itself a text”, it is not
      “immediately accessible to commonsensical procedures of reading
      and interpretation” (313). It must be “read” carefully, keeping in
      mind that its constituents are not necessarily stable and homogene-
      ous. The intellectual background here is the celebrated exchange be-
      tween Jacques Derrida (1977a, 1977b), and John Searle (1977) on
      – among other things – the very topic of the “context”. White here
      implicitly stands with Derrida, since he denies that the context of a
      statement can ever be comprehensively described.
      4.       Between “literal and figurative speech”. Postmodernists “think
      that any attempt to represent reality in language must run against
      the fact that there is no literal language, that all language is in its
      ‘essence’ figurative” (White, 2010a: 313). At the level of the individ-
      ual sign, White here endorses one of the chief tenets of Saussurian
      theory, namely, the idea that linguistic signs do not “represent real-
      ity” in a manner that makes them physically resemble the objects to
      which they refer. At the level of the discourse, the assertion that
      language is basically “figurative” extends the point White had made
      about documents: a text should not be reduced to its explicit content,
      since it “is always saying something more or other than what it seems
      to be saying” (Ib.). Historiographic texts can thus be the object of




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the “deconstructive reading” advocated by LaCapra, a reading that
will seek to identify the “more” or the “other” that they may include.
White’s insistence on the figurativeness of language also leads to his
well-known theory of tropes, a point to which I will later return.
5.     Between “the referent of a discourse and the subject of a dis-
course”. Postmodernists “believe that the subject of a discourse is
always substituted for its apparent referent” (Ib.). The intellectual
background here is Roland Barthes’s (1984: 175-176) analysis of the
“referential illusion” at work in historical discourse: the “elimination
of the signified from ‘objective’ discourse”, an elimination that “ap-
parently leaves the ‘real’ face to face with its expression”. Postmod-
ernists, according to White, reject the idea of a direct link between
the referent and the signifying. Instead, they claim that historio-
graphic discourse always originates in a “double construction” (313):
historians first decide on a subject (say, again, the Fall of the Berlin
Wall), then on the facts that are relevant to that subject. For White,
this double construction takes the historian “further and further away
from the referent rather than closer and closer to it” (Ib.). Postmod-
ernists historians, however, are aware of this “process of alienation”
(Ib.), and they now make it into a part of the self-reflexive compo-
nent that they regard as a requisite of their discourse.
6.     Between “fact and fiction”. “Since facts are themselves lin-
guistic constructions, ‘events under a description’, facts have no re-
ality outside of language” (Ib.). The intellectual background here is
again Barthes (1984: 175), in this instance, the (in)famous state-
ment “le fait n’a jamais qu’une existence linguistique”, a statement
that White (1987) already had put opposite the front page of The
Content of the Form. Often misunderstood, the phrases “linguistic




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




      constructions” and “linguistic existence” do not deny the reality of
      the past; they only mean that facts (just like events) are not “out
      there”, ready to be picked up; they are constructed in history as they
      are in any scientific discipline, the historian singling out traces of the
      past and giving names to them in accordance with an hypothesis
      about what should count as a fact. I will return later to the issues
      raised by the polysemy of the term “fiction”.
      7.       Between “history and literature”. Postmodernism “presumes
      that since historical writing is a kind of discourse, and especially a
      narrative discourse, there is no substantial difference between rep-
      resentations of historical reality and representations of imagined
      events and processes” (White, 2010a: 313). The key here is the ital-
      icization of the term “representation”. White does not claim that
      there is no epistemological difference between real and imagined
      “events and processes”. He merely rehearses the thesis he had ex-
      pounded in Metahistory, namely, that at the level of the discourse,
      historical and literary “representations” may follow similar patterns.
      On the plane of the emplotment, in particular, historical narratives –
      at least the nineteenth-century narratives analyzed in Metahistory –
      conform to the models described by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of
      Criticism: their structures are those of the tragedy, the comedy, the
      romance, and the satire, a kinship which does mean that their cog-
      nitive program is similar to that of literature.


3. A Dialogue of the Deaf?
Is White’s suggestion that postmodernism has definitively erased “distinc-
tions” that traditional scholarship took as well established now accepted
by most historians? According to the intellectual historian Elizabeth Deeds




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Ermarth (2007: 53), this is far from being the case. “Decades after Hay-
den White’s Metahistory”, she writes, “it still is taboo to suggest that his-
torical writing is not basically objective; that its methods are fundamen-
tally literary, or that historical conventions belong to a historically limited
phase of Eurocentric culture, or that historical writing functions to produce
a ‘reality effect’, or that narrative of ‘the’ past is ‘just us back there throw-
ing our voices’”. On the list of the “taboos” that White aims to challenge,
the idea that the textuality of historical productions links them to “fiction”
or “literature” has particularly angered a whole part of the historical com-
munity. François Bédarida (1995: 422), for example, founder and for a
long time head of the prestigious Institut d’histoire du temps présent,
indignantly rejects the idea that history should be a ‘fiction-making oper-
ation’”, which resorts to “the same techniques of construction of discourse
as literature”. What reassures him is the fact that White’s theories origi-
nate in a specific intellectual environment, and thus are not universally
accepted. In France, at least, according to Bédarida, “the principle of the
search for truth as fundamental intention of the construction of
knowledge, has firmly held in the historical endeavor”. Georg Iggers
(1997: 118) makes the same point when, in a chapter of his Historiog-
raphy in the Twentieth Century emphatically titled “The Linguistic Turn:
The End of History as a Scholarly Discipline?”, he describes the “basic idea
of the postmodern theory of history” as being “the denial that history
refers to an actual past”. Similar to Bédarida, Iggers also vehemently
condemns the notion that “historiography does not differ from fiction but
is a form of it”. Such stance, according to him, can only lead to the view
that “there are no criteria for truth in historical narrative”, a view that
would mark “the end of history as a scholarly discipline”.




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




      From my own corner of scholarship, literary theory, the issue is not
to decide whether historical and fictional discourses should be collapsed;
it is to agree on the terms of the debate, in this instance, on the sense of
the phrases in dispute. The precise meaning of “fiction” is a case in point.
According to the specialist of comparative literature Fiona McIntosh-Var-
jabédian (2008: 10), for example, “fiction” must be taken in its “etymo-
logical sense” when applied to historical writing; deriving from the verb
fingere, it refers to activities of shaping, molding, and figuring. Thus,
when White titles one of his essays “The Fictions of Factual Representa-
tion”, he does not for McIntosh-Varjabédian suggest that “fiction” is syn-
onymous with “pure invention” (14); he merely states the thesis he briefly
rehearses in the essay I am considering (entry # 6), namely, that the
data the historian has gathered must at some point be fashioned into a
text. “Fiction”, however, may also in the current classification of dis-
courses refer to “narrative works of imagination”, or even, to quote the
subtitle of the book Olivier Caïra (2011) has devoted to this subject, to
anything imaginary “from the novel to chess”. Bédarida and Iggers obvi-
ously take the term in the sense of “narrative works of imagination” when
they indict White for asserting that history is a “fiction-making operation”.
That claim, for them, implies that historical studies have the same epis-
temological status as novels, and are thus unable to reach “truth” or to
account for the “real past”.
      A similar remark can be made about the controversies bearing on
White’s inclusion of history under “literature”, an inclusion he reasserts in
point # 7 of “Postmodernism and Textual Anxieties”. In this instance,
again, it is indeed obvious that the participants in the dispute are involved
in a dialogue of the deaf. Deriving from the Latin literature, “literature”
originally referred to “any body or written works”, or even to “all written




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works”. It thus admitted history, with which it has maintained relations
too long to trace here, all the more so since they have been the subject
of several authoritative studies (e.g., Gossmann, 1990; Lavocat, 2016).
It will suffice to say that the term “literature” today seems to have at least
four meanings. It can refer (1) to all written works, (2) to all written works
of imagination, (3) to all “good” written works, and (4) to all “good” writ-
ten works of imagination. (Issues raised by oral literature cannot be ad-
dressed here). Bédarida clearly takes the term in meaning (2) when he
blames White for stating that history uses “the same techniques of con-
struction of discourse as literature”. Whether White gives “literature”
meaning (1) or (2) when he states that postmodernism has transcended
the distinctions between history and literature does not really matter. In-
deed, the level at which he locates the similarities between historical and
literary texts is that of the “deep structures” that both discourses have in
common. In “The problem of style in realist representation: Marx and
Flaubert” (2010b), for example, White argues that Le Dix-Huit Brumaire
de Louis Bonaparte and L’Education sentimentale have the same plot line:
both are organized on the model of the Bildungsroman, as they follow
characters whose evolution can be described in terms of tropes: the con-
sciousness of the heroes (the French bourgeoisie in Le Dix-Huit Brumaire,
Frédéric in L’Education) move from a “metaphorical” to an “ironic” under-
standing of the relations they have to reality. White, however, does not
suggest that the two texts make similar truth claims. L’Education may say
“something true” (and conservatively usable by historians) about French
society around 1850, but only Le Dix-Huit Brumaire stages situations and
characters whose existence can be verified in the archives – a specificity
of historical discourse that White has never thought to question.




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




4. Jablonka’s Intervention
White’s call for history to (re)claim membership in literature has recently
received an unlikely support in an essay that also constitutes a major
contribution to the debates about the LT: Ivan Jablonka’s L’Histoire est
une littérature contemporaine. Manifeste pour les sciences sociales. I am
saying “unlikely” because Jablonka only mentions White to attack him as
a dangerous representative of postmodernism, and does not enlist him as
an ally who could help advance the provocative thesis already stated in
the title of the book: history should not be defined against literature, as
Bédarida and Iggers do, but as being part of it. Jablonka (2014: 243-246)
takes most explicitly “literature” in meanings (3) and (4). The term for
him only refers to “good” works (of imagination and others), that is, to
works which have an “aesthetic intention” evidenced in their “form” – their
display of such characteristics as “imagination, “polysemy”, and “singu-
larity”. History, as long as it includes attributes of this kind, can be ad-
mitted into literature, which Jablonka here is not afraid to take in its most
institutional sense: a “set of canonical texts, canonized, gathered by a
tradition, acknowledged by a culture, made familiar by a teaching” (246).
“Fiction”, on the other hand, defined as “an imaginary narrative in which
characters, places, and actions do not exist” (240), does not for Jablonka
necessarily have a place in literature. Novels in the “Harlequin series thus
cannot be viewed as “literary” (248), because they lack the properties
(imagination, polysemy, etc.) that would make them worthy of this qual-
ifier.
         Close to White in his advocacy for the inclusion of history in literature,
Jablonka also shares – though he does not mention the kinship – White’s
diagnosis of the state of history writing. Starting with the oft-quoted essay
“The Burden of History” (1966), White has not ceased to deplore that his




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discipline never underwent a modernist revolution: that the works of writ-
ers such as Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Kafka, Musil, and Woolf have no equiv-
alent in history, whose practitioners continue to abide by textual conven-
tions set in the nineteenth century. Although he does not use the term
“modernism”, which seems to be reserved for the Anglo-American peri-
odization of cultural history, Jablonka makes the same case. He, too, re-
grets that historians have not been bolder, that they have not striven to
emulate – Jablonka’s list is close to White’s – the experiments of novelists
such as “Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Céline”
(275). Arguing that history can become the site of “literary experimenta-
tions” (249, Jablonka also makes several suggestions. Historians could
thus “tell a story in regressive manner”; “follow a character” while re-
specting “the futures that open themselves to him”; start a narrative with
“several beginnings”, but “without providing an end (or vice-versa)”; put
“slices of life face to face”; trace “the history of an incoherence”; and “mix
verbatim interviews, images, and video documents” (279).
    Jablonka devotes his last chapter to explaining the principles that
have guided his own attempt at “experimentation”: Histoire des grands-
parents que je n’ai pas eus (2014). In this book, he does two things: he
reconstructs the history of the grand parents “he did not have” because
they were deported in 1943 and he was born thirty years later, and he
tells the story of his own research of their lives and times. The “literary
and epistemological experiment”, according to Jablonka, consist here in
“recounting the method” (283). That is, in describing “the researcher’s
position” (284); in explaining the way “research is conducted” (291); in
“narrating the investigation” (295); and in accomplishing these various
tasks while turning systematically to the first person singular – both an
“epistemological liberty” and a “writing choice” (Ib.). Most important,




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




L’Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus includes the component
that Jablonka holds as essential if history is to move beyond the belief
that scholars can be absent from their endeavor: “self-reflexivity” (301).
Showing “how things are done” (302), the book spells out the decisions
the investigator had to make when it came to choosing a point-of-view,
advancing hypotheses, finding examples, and laying out evidence. Para-
doxically, Jablonka’s election of the “self-reflexive mode” (301) would
make him into a postmodernist historian, at least by White’s definition.
Indeed, after arguing (point # 5) that the realization of the constructive-
ness of their discourse leads historians “further and further away from the
referent”, White (2010: 313) states that postmodernist scholars, “taking
this process of alienation of the referent into account”, feature it “as an
element of [their] own discourse”. In brief, self-reflexivity for White is ,a
key component of postmodernist historiography; its representatives, just
like Jablonka, are eager to show “how things are done” in this instance,
to be as explicit as possible about the way their research is shaped by an
ever present researcher.
      While Jablonka deplores the current state of history writing and
makes suggestions for changes, he does not trace his interest in the for-
mal aspects of historiography to the issues raised by the LT in general,
nor by White in particular. To the contrary, joining in this respect with
Iggers and Bédarida, he insists that making history into a “verbal fiction”
deprives the discipline of “any cognitive regime of its own” (106), and
that viewing facts as “only having a linguistic existence” turns history into
a “semiological machine that produces meanings without relation to the
real, a verbal construction that is untied to any context” (107). In sum, a
mix of “nihilo-dandyism and paranoid skepticism”, the LT remains dan-
gerous since it gives weapons to the “those who state that gas chambers




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are only ‘discourse’” (108-109). Jablonka deems relevant to add that
White has been “influenced by the idealism of the fascist philosopher Gio-
vanni Gentile” (109), an allegation that – while not expressly turning
White into a fascist – links him and the LT with right-wing ideologies after
labeling them accomplices of Holocaust deniers.
    Jablonka’s charges cannot be discussed here in detail. To keep with
my topic, the LT “after” Hayden White, I will only mention that Jablonka
takes “fiction” to mean “imaginary narratives” and does not consider, as
McIntosh-Varjabédian suggests, that it might be understood in its etymo-
logical sense when applied to historiography: historical texts do not write
themselves, but rather must at some point must be “fashioned”. Similarly,
Jablonka does not consider that Barthes’s phrase about the “linguistic ex-
istence” of facts could be taken as an endorsement of a basic form of
constructivism: data for Barthes and White are not out there, but must
be identified and tagged. Jablonka, for that matter, does not state any-
thing different when he writes that “the historian ‘invents’ the facts, inso-
far as he looks for them, establishes them, orders them, ranks them, and
links them along explanatory chains” (248). Jablonka here does not just
agree with White but resorts to White’s own vocabulary; terms such as
“invention”, together with “imagination”, recur frequently in White’s writ-
ings to describe the activities that historians deploy when they go about
their job of researching and representing the past.
    Although Jablonka thinks that the LT “today is dead” (109), the vio-
lence of his attacks shows that some historians may still regard it as a
threat to the integrity of their discipline. White has long answered the
charge that constructivism leads to relativism, and that relativism means
that anything goes. Constructivism indeed comes with constraints, which
White has described – among other places – in his intervention at the




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




often discussed 1990 Los Angeles colloquium about the Holocaust and the
limits of representation. Asked how he would deal with “competing nar-
ratives” of the Shoah, White (1999a:28) answered that such narratives
could be “assessed, criticized, and ranked on the basis of their fidelity to
the factual record, their comprehensiveness, and the coherence of what-
ever arguments they may contain”. Thus, for White, a study of the Third
Reich emplotted “in a comic or pastoral mode” could be dismissed from
the “competing narratives” of the period at the most basic level, in “ap-
pealing to the facts” (30). But constraints can also be of an aesthetic
nature. Among studies of World War II, White is especially critical of An-
dreas Hillgruber’s Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des deutschen
Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums, in which the historian
emplots the Wehrmacht’s defense of the homeland in early 1945 as a
“tragedy”. In tragedies, White argues, “even villains are noble, or rather,
villainy can be shown to have its noble incarnations” (33). Yet the Wehr-
macht, however courageously it fought in 1945, could not be qualified as
“noble” because of all the crimes it had committed earlier. Hillgruber’s
book, for White, must thus be removed from the list of legitimate com-
peting narratives of the Third Reich, and viewed as an attempt to “redeem
at least a remnant of the Nazi epoch in the history of Germany” (Ib.).
      One of the earmarks of White’s constructivism and relativism that
has been most often discussed in the context of the LT is his idea that
plots are not found in the evidence, but imposed upon it by the historian.
To return to point # 1 on the list of the distinctions that for White post-
modernism has transcended: historians, upon deciding on a subject, se-
lect the events they want to represent, and then dispose them along the
organizing scheme that best fits their purpose. Commenting on this
model, critics have objected that it does not accord with the way




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historians actually go about the job of sorting out and textualizing their
materials. According to the philosopher William Herbert Dray (2001: 176),
for instance, White makes the mistake of separating the historical inquiry
into two stages: first “an investigative, empirical part which establishes
what actually happened in a certain region of the past”, and second “an
inventive, literary part, in which the historian takes on the task of arrang-
ing his discoveries into stories”. If defined as “set of relationships” (177),
however, stories can also for Dray be identified during the first stage of
the investigation. Indeed, what historians may “find” is not just data; they
may also hit upon “unknown narrativizable configurations – 'tellables’ –
already there for the discovering” (Ib.). In short, White for Dray is wrong
to push his constructivism and relativism to the point of claiming that
historians decide from the start on a plot model that will both determine
the selection of the data and their disposition. Stories can be found as
well as invented, and one of the goals of history is precisely to uncover
new, yet untold stories.


5. Further Explorations
Ankersmit (2013, 424), as I mentioned earlier, delights at the idea that
the LT is still “dominant”, a dominance that for him implies that scholars
will soon set out to identify and analyze “the many aspects of the use of
language in historical writing [that] still need to be explored”. Since An-
kersmit does not provide a wish list, I will now go through some of these
“aspects”, focusing – from an “after White” perspective – on a few attrib-
utes of historical discourse which White himself has hardly dealt with. I
will again proceed from my own institutional place, literary theory, a dis-
cipline from which several upholders of the LT have often selectively bor-
rowed – and been praised or blamed for doing so.




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




      The first issue I want to take up concerns the disposition of the data,
specifically, the assumption that historians always resort to narrative
when they textualize their materials. This assumption is currently shared
by numerous historians, philosophers, and cultural theorists, whether
they commend narrative for being a legitimate cognitive instrument
(Mink, 1987; Ricoeur, 1983), or indict the genre for what they hold to be
its artificial homogeneity and political conservatism (Cohen, 2006; Jen-
kins, 2009). This consensus is best illustrated by Chartier (2006: 969),
who – long associated with the French New History and its distrust of
narrative – now states that history, “even the most quantitative, even the
most structural, is a member in the category ‘narrative’”; and by Hartog
(2005: 173), who writes that from antiquity history, however configured,
has consistently “recounted the doings of men, told not the same story,
but stories of different types”. White himself has at various moments in
his career defined historiography as a “species of the genus narrative”
(2010c: 112), going as far as asserting that what the “interpretations”
produced by historical discourse have in common is their “narrative mode
of representation”: “where there is no narrative, there is no historical dis-
course” (1999b: 3).
      To test what has become some kind of doxa in the poetics and phi-
losophy of history, and possibly identify the domains that scholars in the
legacy of the LT may want to explore, it seems necessary to first define
narrative. Literary theory, specifically narratology, can on this point con-
tribute to the analysis of historiography, since one of its aims is to char-
acterize narrative by distinguishing it from other modes of textual dispo-
sition. Turning to narratologists, I will with Gerald Prince (2012: 25) de-
fine the genre as “the logically consistent representation of two asynchro-
nous events, or a state and an event, which do not presuppose or imply




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each other”; and with James Phelan (2007: 203), as “somebody telling
somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something
happened”. Whether they treat narrative as an object or as a transaction,
these definitions say basically the same thing: to count as a narrative, a
text must include at least two units located on a temporal axis, even if
the first one may remain implicit. Thus, the minitext “Berlin is the capital
of Germany” is not a narrative, because it does not involve the represen-
tation of an event; but the subsequent minitext “Berlin became again the
capital of Germany in 1999” is a narrative, because it represents a change
with respect to a state and could be parsed into “Berlin was no longer the
capital of Germany” and “Berlin became again the capital of Germany in
1999”.
    If we use Prince’s and Phelan’s definitions to ask whether today’s
historians rely on narrative, we cannot help noting that a large part of
their production does not fall under storytelling. White himself (2010d:
273) has acknowledged this disappearance, observing that “in modern,
‘scientific’ historiography, the tendency has been to suppress storytelling
in favor of synchronic representations of historical phenomena, structural-
functional analyses of long-term and for the most part ‘impersonal’ his-
torical processes, and model building as a means of explicating complex
forces and long-term trends discernible in the historical record”. Yet
White, to my knowledge, has not pursued this line of inquiry, focusing in
his essays about historiography on studies that have a narrative structure,
or at least a narrative component. I have (Carrard, 2017), on the basis of
a limited corpus, attempted to draw a map of the different textual models
now in use in French historiography, and I won’t rehearse my findings
here. I will only mention that the “all history is narrative” thesis has been
challenged on a few occasions, most interestingly by Bernard Lepetit in




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




the course of a seminar held during White’s visit in Paris in 1992. Com-
menting on the model of emplotment offered in Metahistory, Lepetit
(1999: 80) argues that it is characterized by its “historicity”: designed to
describe the works produced during a specific “historical moment” (82),
the nineteenth century, it fails to account for the “forms taken by histor-
ical sciences in the twentieth century”. Lepetit singles out a few studies
falling under microhistory, such as Giovanni Levi’s Le Pouvoir au village
(L’eredità immateriale), Simona Cerutti’s La Ville et les métiers (Giustizia
sommaria), and his own Les Villes dans la France moderne. These studies,
according to Lepetit, have a specific, non-narrative structure: “their goal
is to provide neither an exhaustive description, nor a linear narrative. It
is not the succession of episodes but that of analytical viewpoints and
modes of observation… which shapes the development – I was about to
say the plot” (85). Lepetit’s hesitation here is revealing; it shows that the
historian is ready to question the assumption according to which history
always comes in narrative form – ready to ask whether “development”,
in historical studies, is necessarily synonymous with “plot”. Issues of this
type must certainly be raised, for instance about works that claim to do
“world history”, escape eurocentrism, and/or to give to oppressed, subal-
tern, and forgotten groups their long overdue. Besides exploring unchar-
tered territories, do these works also experiment with new forms, specif-
ically, with bold, untested ways of disposing their materials?
      Other aspects of historical discourse that deserve further investiga-
tion because White has largely ignored them pertain to that discourse’s
surface structures. Busy uncovering deep structures such as modes of
emplotment, White indeed has lent little attention to formal features of
historiography situated at the surface level, beginning with “voice”: who
is speaking in historical texts? to whom? under what circumstances? Such




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questions are significant, all the more so since they point to one of the
basic distinctions between fictional and historical discourses. In the for-
mer, as literary theorists such as Gérard Genette (1991) and Dorrit Cohn
(1990) have shown, the narrator is generally not the author: Meursault is
not Camus, and the heterodiegetic narrator of Eugénie Grandet is not
Balzac, even though he may share views that are known to be Balzac’s.
In historiography, on the other hand, the narrator is also the author, and
the second must stand behind what the former is stating. This particular
situation raises several issues for current historiography. For one thing,
whereas historians traditionally were expected to absent themselves from
their text, they are now asked, and by people as different as White and
Jablonka, to be explicit about such things as their assumptions, their
choices, and their perspectives. Yet adding self-reflexive comments
comes with obvious problems of size, frequency, and relevance. Post LT
research could thus investigate how today’s historians satisfy the demand
to show, as Jablonka puts it, “how things are done”, though without
weighing down the text to the point of jeopardizing its readability.
    Another component of historical discourse’s surface structures that
White mostly leaves out is figurative language. I showed earlier how White
interprets the evolution of characters in Flaubert’s L’Education senti-
mentale and Marx’s Le Dix-huit Brumaire of Louis-Napoléon in terms of a
move from metaphor to irony, but his analysis bears on these works’ deep
structures; it deals with the tropes at the level of the text as a whole, not
at the level of the single utterance. White (1999c, 2004) has examined
how a novelist (Marcel Proust in Sodome et Gomorrhe) and a memorialist
(Primo Levi in Se questo è un uomo) rely on individual figures to describe
situations and characters, but I am not aware of essays in which he delves
at the same level into the work of historians. Yet historical discourse is




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




rich in what might be called “surface tropes”. Fernand Braudel’s work, for
example, displays numerous instances of personification, which critics
from Lucien Febvre (1950) to Paul-André Rosental (1991) have com-
mented upon at length. Other historians (e.g., Arlette Farge, Alain
Corbin), following in the footsteps of Foucault, have endeavored to de-
scribe society not as a human being, but as a machinery whose function-
ing can be assessed drawing on figures coming from economics, admin-
istration, and commerce (e.g., “management”, “circulation”, “negotia-
tion”, “exchange”). Scholars eager to follow Ankersmit’s invitation could
carry out this type of inquiry. They could, for instance, ask whether re-
sorting to tropes must be self-reflexive, that is, whether (when, where)
historians must be explicit about the kind of figure they are about to use
(e.g., “to turn to irony…”). Critics could also ask whether new subjects
are treated with new figures, for example, whether the practitioners of
connected history have drawn on unusual metaphors to describe, say, the
incarnations at different places of specific cultural phenomena.


6. Are These Debates Irrelevant?
It must be mentioned, to conclude, that the debates I have just surveyed
are not unanimously regarded as relevant. Indeed, some philosophers
have declined to participate, because they deem issues of language to
have no bearing on the status of history as a scientific discipline. At the
time when the controversy mainly concerned the modes of explanation
available to historians, Leon Goldstein (1976:140-141) had already pro-
posed to distinguish between what he called the “superstructure” and the
“infrastructure” of historiography. The superstructure, for him, was the
finished product, the text as it is offered to readers in the form of a book,
an article, or any other configuration; the infrastructure, the process of




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research, the interaction with the evidence, that is, the bulk of the histo-
rians’ professional activities. Goldstein was especially troubled by the
“narrativist thesis” (title of chapter V in his book), in this instance, less by
the idea that narrative may provide valid explanations than by the fact
that formal features of historiography should become the subject of phil-
osophical discussions. Narrative, according to him, was nothing but one
aspect of historiography’s superstructure, and as such did not deserve the
attention lent to it by several theorists of history and literature.
     Avezier Tucker has argued along the same lines in one of the major
recent contributions to the philosophy of history, his treatise Our
Knowledge of the Past (2004). Like Goldstein, Tucker deems that the su-
perstructure of historiography is of little relevance. He will thus, as he
explains in his introduction, pay “little attention” to that component, and
“even less attention to the debate whether [historiography] has the struc-
ture of a narrative or not” (7). The “chief inquiry” of his book, Tucker
adds, “is into the relations between historiography and evidence” (8), an
emphasis that parallels a development in the philosophy of science. In-
deed, the “research program” of that philosophy has shifted to focus on
“issues of validation whether scientific theories are well founded and jus-
tified and how they change” (Ib.). In this regard, according to Tucker,
“relations between evidence and theory” are not basically different in his-
toriography from what they are in disciplines such as “biology, geology or
physics” (Ib.). For the fact that historians can no longer observe the phe-
nomena that they describe does not mean that history “can never be sci-
entific” (Ib.). Physicists cannot observe what they describe, either. The
object “electron” has in this respect the same status as the object “George
Washington”, since both entities, while being “unobservable”, provide “co-
herence” to the discipline in which they figure (8-9). We are here, of




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Philippe Carrard, Hayden White, Postmodern Anxieties, and the Linguistic Turn




course, very far from the concerns of the LT, a theory that Tucker does
not discuss as such in Our Knowledge of the Past and an entry for which
does not appear in this book’s index. The LT is equally absent from a
recent anthology edited by Tucker, A Companion to the Philosophy of His-
tory and Historiography (2011), an omission that reveals, on the part of
several philosophers, a lack of interest in the theories that deal with the
role of language in scientific endeavors.
      Let us observe, at last, that focusing on the function of evidence in
historiography does not necessarily exclude taking issues of textualization
into account. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, for example, in a major French con-
tribution to the debates about the legacy of the LT, has argued that
Barthes’s indictment of historiography’s “referential illusion” (point # 5 on
White’s list) was mistaken. Indeed, for Schaeffer (2016: 224-225), the
“specificity” of historical discourse does not reside in the fact that it aims
at “a reference that is external to it”, but in its bearing on “past, no longer
observable events”. In brief, the problem for historians is not to reach
“the exteriority as such”; it is to “gather enough evidence to justify their
assertions about the past existence of that exteriority” (225), to ensure
the “referential validity” of their discourse (226). Yet Schaeffer, though
he deems that the basic purpose of historiography is to produce “valid”
statement, does not regard as pointless the analysis of processes of tex-
tualization. He devotes several pages of his essay to the narrativist the-
ses, arguing that the LT had become at some point a narrative turn, and
asking whether “telling something is synonymous with turning it into a
fiction” (233). One could add that procedures of validation are themselves
susceptible to formal analyses, the inquiry bearing then not on the nature
of the validation, but on the means through which it is carried out. This
aspect of historiography is certainly among those that are worth exploring




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from an “after White” perspective, all the more so since White himself, as
several of his fellow historians have reproached him, has left it out of his
concerns.




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