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Thesis Hayden White was right: the historian chooses the plot before the facts mean anything

Parisa Moghaddam Fellow
· 6 replies
HistoryAmericanIslamicLatin AmericanHayden WhiteIbn Khaldun#documentary#emplotment#historical-truth#narrativism
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Where it stands

Last year I worked on a documentary about a factory closure, and I made two rough cuts from the same footage for the director. In one the closing of the gates is a tragedy: a community undone by forces it could not see. In the other it is closer to satire: a management that announced “restructuring for the future” three months before selling the land. Every shot was real. Every interview was accurate. The films meant opposite things.

That is Hayden White's argument in Metahistory (1973), and I think it is correct. White says historians give their accounts coherence by casting events in one of a small set of plot forms (he borrows romance, tragedy, comedy and satire from literary criticism), and that the evidence does not choose among them. The structure is brought by the teller, not found in the past.

White insisted that this does not make history fiction, and I agree. The facts constrain what can be said. But they underdetermine what it means, and meaning is what people actually take from a history.

So my thesis: the meaning of a historical account comes from its emplotment, and emplotment is chosen. Historians who claim to let the facts speak are just not noticing their own choices.

Objections welcome, especially from people who think events have a shape of their own.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Valentina Ríos

    For Fellow

    In Mexico we live inside this. The conquest has been told as a founding romance, as a tragedy, as the birth of a new people. Vasconcelos's “cosmic race” is an emplotment, and a very political one. Each version rests on documents. Choosing between them has never been settled by more documents. Parisa's point seems to me just obviously true of national histories.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Mona Fathy

    For Fellow

    From the archive side, I'd push Parisa's case further. Before any historian chooses a plot, someone chose what to keep. The catalogue I work on is shaped by which families donated, what survived damp and fire, what a cataloguer in 1930 thought worth recording. The shape of the past reaches us already edited.

Against the thesis 3

  1. Youssef Berrada

    Against Fellow

    I'll take the other side. Ibn Khaldun thought events do have shape. Dynasties founded on strong group solidarity tend to soften in luxury, and he says a dynasty rarely outlasts three generations. That is not a plot he chose; it is a regularity he claimed to observe across many North African dynasties, and he used it to predict. You can disagree with his regularity, but then you are arguing about the past, not about narrative forms.

  2. Andrés Zuluaga

    Against Fellow

    I worry about where this leads. Some emplotments are simply lies: calling a massacre of civilians a “combat” is not a different genre, it is a falsehood. White was pressed hard on this in the debate collected in Probing the Limits of Representation (1992), about the Holocaust, and I don't think his answers were fully satisfying. Victims need the shape of what happened to be something we can be wrong about.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Parisa Moghaddam

      Fellow

      Andrés, I accept that, and I want to revise the thesis. Calling a massacre a combat is false at the level of the events themselves, and White never denied that events can be misdescribed. So: the plot is chosen, but not every plot is permitted. The evidence rules some out. My claim is that among the permitted ones, the evidence does not pick.

      Helpful · 3
  3. Hugo Marchetti

    Against Fellow

    From the docks: the cranes were automated whatever plot anyone put on it. Material conditions changed, wages changed, the union shrank. You can tell that as tragedy or comedy, but the direction of the change was not up to the teller. Marx's point was that the engine is in production, not in the story, and I think that survives White.

    Helpful · 1