HAYDEN WHITE: PERFORMING IRONY I don’t even believe in interviews. What are you getting from me? You are not getting any definitive statement. You’re getting another version. I would say that what I do stems from the fact that, as with most historians, the past has always been a problem for me.
Young people now come and read Metahistory and they think it is something helpful to them. They sometimes act as if it had been written yesterday. And then they write me letters and say, “You say so and so. What did you mean?” I say, “I don’t know. I was writing in a different milieu at that time and, by the way, for different purposes, than I would write for today and for a different audience.” I mean, I certainly wouldn’t write this book again.
Hayden White. Interviews
Svitlana Matviyenko: The last lines of 1973 Metahistory reveal your expectation that the ironic attitude “will free historians to conceptualize history, to perceive its contents, and to construct narrative accounts of its processes in whatever modality of consciousness is most consistent with their moral and aesthetic aspirations”. What would your response to the author of these lines be today?
Hayden White: I have no idea. Over the last few decades, since the publication of Metahistory, I have not studied, re-read, or even taught it. I believe books of this nature—metahermeneutical works—are sent out into the world and if someone finds them useful or in some way liberating, then they find their own audience. Recently, I have been at conferences where two or maybe three people said publicly, Metahistory was liberating for me; it allowed me to do what I had wanted to do. As far as I am concerned, that is the best I could hope for: not that someone might adopt my views but that my views help someone to articulate his or her own.
SM: Among the tropes of your topology in 1973 Metahistory, irony seems to be the most problematic. Unlike other tropes, irony is not always an author’s choice. It may function or it may happen as an effect of language.
HW: Again, I am not sure. First of all, being tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos can either be depressing or liberating. Or both. As for irony, it is built into language itself—in any distinction between literal and figurative, proper and improper speech, or, in metaphor itself, in the distinction within metaphor of tenor and vehicle. Irony is what anyone who uses language creatively, poetically, comes to in (or near) the end. When it becomes a dominant trope in a given discourse, it shows that skepticism is nearby—and that, for me, is a good thing. We have enough of myth.
SM: I remember you saying that your notion of tropic as a “continuum of logic, dialectic, and poetic” was influenced by Jakobson’s idea of the impossibility to distinguish between poetic language and non-poetic language.
HW: Did I say that? Well, obviously, Jakobson meant something like this: there are various functions present in the communication act. These might be called referential, metalinguistic, affective, expressive, phatic and poetic. In given discourses, one or more of these functions may be dominant and the other recessive or subdominant. But all of the functions are present in any given speech event, more or less latent, more or less manifest. This amounts to saying, among other things, that the notion that we can have a perfectly “literalist” speech is a delusion. Freud said: there is a little madness in the most rational of minds and a little rationality in the most insane mind. So too with language: there is figure in every utterance. The poetic function is present in prose. All you have to do is look for it.
SM: I am not sure it is an entirely adequate comparison, but I think of Jacques Lacan’s theory of four discourses, with a place of truth in each of them, occupied by different agents. Similarly, in your 1973 Metahistory, you claim that there are four master plots (Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire) and tropes (Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony).
HW: This is a complex question. Let me address each element seriatim. Language occupies the place of truth insofar, I would say, that “truth” is an attribute or quality only of utterances (statements, propositions, assertions), not of things. It makes no sense to ask if a thing is true or false. Statements made about things can be assessed as to their truth or falsity according to stipulated criteria. Things simply are what they are. And it is the universe of things that is evoked or called up or presented in discourse. Lacan’s four discourses, as I recall, are those of the Master, the University, the Psychoanalyst, and the Patient. I do not take this as being a serious assertion but as only suggestive. These four discourses do not line up with the four tropes and the four master plots of Metahistory. I did not invent the four tropes or the four plots but found both in the tradition of rhetoric and narratology. There is nothing magical about four. But dual-binaries are the basis of complex systems of classification. For example, a dual binary system admits of the generation of something like 264 items in a system of classification. That is better than the kind of thing that a ternary system (with three variables, a la Hegel) provides. Actually, Lacan’s four discourses are a function of his application of the Greimasian (semiotic) square to the kinds of possible discourses. I might mention that this semiotic square is to be found in Aristotle’s work on interpretation. There is nothing modern about it at all.
SM: You were, probably, asked a lot whether one can move beyond irony, metalanguage, beyond the “prison house of language.”
HW: First, I do not consider language a “prison-house” but as setting limits on what can be said in a given community. But also language provides a model of how to break through limits. This is what I take to be the function of tropes. Irony is an instrument, like any other trope. There is a time to use it to liberate and a time to use it to confine and destroy. Perhaps we should be asked to take a license to use language, in the same way that we are asked to take out a license to use a gun.
SM: And, by the way, if 1973 Metahistory is passé, is metahistory passé as well?
HW: “Metahistory” was coined on the analogy of “Metaphysics.” Just as metaphysics is what comes “after” physics (in Aristotle’s corpus), so too metahistory is what comes after history. What does this mean? Is it the supplement? Is it “the last things after the things in history”? I have no idea. The term was not coined by me. It was coined, as near as I can tell, by a Canadian scholar named Underhill—or so Northrop Frye, who borrowed the term from him, says. Then, Collingwood used the term in a derogatory sense in his work. I wanted to use the term as the title of my work, which was meant to study metahistory from a structuralist perspective. I did not think that I was doing metahistory, only studying it.
SM: Do you distinguish between the author’s intention and the unintentional?
HW: In any event, do I distinguish between what the said (or enunciated) in uttering a certain phrase and what he or she might have “meant” to say? I do not think that it is possible to find what the author meant to say as different from what he actually said. What I think is that any utterance comes with so much connotation built into it that we are justified in distinguishing between denotative significance and connotative significance of an utterance. In other words, quite apart from intention, any author in uttering any sentence generates a distinction between what the sentence literally (or denotatively) says and what the sentence connotes. I study texts, not psyches. I am interested in what was said or written, not what an author intended to say. I leave that to biographers. It is the text circulating within a culture that interests me.
SM: What if the latter and the former don’t match?
HW: You mean, what if the utterance and the intention don’t match? They never do.
SM: In your view, is it fair to say that the language of history due to the “formalizations of poetic insights” is not transparent?
HW: Nothing is transparent, not even a lens. Especially not a lens.
SM: Do you believe in interviews?
HW: Do you mean, do I believe in interviews in the way I might believe in miracles or God? In that sense, I would have to say that I believe in them because I have seen and experienced them. But do I have faith in the interview as a means of finding out the truth about something? Not particularly. Interviews tell more about the interviewer than about the interviewee. I have been studying you asking me questions rather than pondering what I ought to say to you in answering them. I have found out quite a lot about you in the process.
*Hayden White (1928-) is an historian in the tradition of literary criticism , perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). He is currently professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and professor of comparative literature at Stanford University.
[This interview was translated into Ukrainian by Zoriana Rybchynska and published in a collection of essays on irony: Іронія. Збірник статей. Соло триває... Нові голоси. Лекція на пошану Соломії Павличко. Львів: Літопис, 2006. ]
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