Hayden White borrows the title for The Practical Past from philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who used the term to describe the accessible material and literary-artistic artifacts that individuals and institutions draw on for guidance in quotidian affairs. The Practical Past, then, forms both a summa of White's work to be drawn upon and a new direction in his thinking about the writing of history.
White's monumental Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) challenged many of the commonplaces of professional historical writing and wider assumptions about the ontology of history itself. It formed the basis of his argument that we can never recover "what actually happened"in the past and cannot really access even material culture in context. Forty years on, White sees "professional history" as falling prey to narrow specialization, and he calls upon historians to take seriously the practical past of explicitly "artistic" works, such as novels and dramas, and literary theorists likewise to engage historians.
Hayden White borrows the title for The Practical Past from philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who used the term to describe the accessible material and literary-artistic artifacts that individuals and institutions draw on for guidance in quotidian affairs. The Practical Past, then, forms both a summa of White's work to be drawn upon and a new direction in his thinking about the writing of history.
White's monumental Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) challenged many of the commonplaces of professional historical writing and wider assumptions about the ontology of history itself. It formed the basis of his argument that we can never recover "what actually happened"in the past and cannot really access even material culture in context. Forty years on, White sees "professional history" as falling prey to narrow specialization, and he calls upon historians to take seriously the practical past of explicitly "artistic" works, such as novels and dramas, and literary theorists likewise to engage historians.
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Overview
Hayden White borrows the title for The Practical Past from philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who used the term to describe the accessible material and literary-artistic artifacts that individuals and institutions draw on for guidance in quotidian affairs. The Practical Past, then, forms both a summa of White's work to be drawn upon and a new direction in his thinking about the writing of history.
White's monumental Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) challenged many of the commonplaces of professional historical writing and wider assumptions about the ontology of history itself. It formed the basis of his argument that we can never recover "what actually happened"in the past and cannot really access even material culture in context. Forty years on, White sees "professional history" as falling prey to narrow specialization, and he calls upon historians to take seriously the practical past of explicitly "artistic" works, such as novels and dramas, and literary theorists likewise to engage historians.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810130067 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2014 |
| Series: | FlashPoints , #17 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 158 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Hayden White is currently professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, having recently retired from the position of professor of comparative literature at Stanford University.
Read an Excerpt
The Practical Past
By Hayden White
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2014 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3006-7
CHAPTER 1
The Practical Past
Near the beginning of W. G. Sebald's "novel," Austerlitz, we are introduced to the book's eponymous protagonist, "Jacques Austerlitz," by the narrator who has journeyed to "Belgium" and specifically to "Antwerp"—"partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear"—and has ended up in the waiting room of the central railway station (the "Salle des pas perdus") where he encounters Austerlitz taking pictures of the waiting room and engages him in conversation about the history of architecture, which happens to be Austerlitz's profession. Thus began, the story has it, in the year 1967, a series of encounters between the narrator and Austerlitz who, it turns out, is searching for information about his family who, he had discovered only at the age of sixteen, were Czech Jews who may (or may not) have perished in the death camps of the Third Reich. The novel relates the many accidental and planned encounters between the narrator and Austerlitz from that first meeting in the "Salle des pas perdus" in Antwerp's Central Station down to a final meeting in Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris where Jacques Austerlitz relates to the narrator the ways by which the past is able to hide its secrets from the living, even to the point of destroying the monuments attesting the existence of a past (as in the newly built Bibliothèque nationale in Paris: "this gigantic new library, which, according to one of the loathsome phrases now current is supposed to serve as the treasure house of our entire literary heritage, proved useless in my search for any traces of my father who had disappeared from Paris more than fifty years ago.") It is not clear whether Austerlitz objects to the inutility of the new Bibliothèque nationale or is simply lamenting the loss of the old one. In any event, Jacques Austerlitz's quest for the identity and traces of his parents takes the form of a journey in space, from one "lieu de memoir" to another; each of them manifests another aspect of how what had once been presented as a "heritage" can be shown to be a kind of impediment to useful knowledge of the past. The ultimate destination (or rather the penultimate one) is Theresienstadt's famous Potemkin village concentration camp where the transit point to the death camps was given the public face of a vacation spa like Marienbad. This masquerade of a concentration camp as a fancy retirement community provides a kind of image of fulfillment for all of the places of Europe wherein the good old values of humanism and Christianity, of the nation and the community, of the state and the church are allowed to appear as little more than "zoological gardens" in which hapless captured animals look out listlessly at the human visitors who think they occupy zones of freedom and responsibility.
Right at the beginning of Austerlitz, the narrator (before encountering Austerlitz in the Central Station in Antwerp) visits the "Nocturama" of the Antwerp zoo. The Nocturama is an enclosure for animals which sleep during the day and come out only at night and whose eyes are unseeing in daylight but percipient in darkness. The narrator opens his account of his meeting with Austerlitz in a meditation on the eyes of animals which can see only in the dark and likens them to the eyes of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein (a picture of whose eyes appears in the text), who teach us to see in images rather than in concepts. This section is followed by a long account, first of the proportions and decorations of the waiting room in Antwerp's Central Station, and next of the structure, appearance, and history of a series of military fortifications built around Antwerp which went from being utterly ineffectual in defense of the city (and being expanded and augmented with every failure until they became so extensive that they could not be manned) to their use as a Gestapo prison and torture facility during the Second World War. The fortifications of Fort Breendonk serve as a kind of master metaphor of Sebald's narrator's report of Jacques Austerlitz's journey across post-World War II Europe in his effort to use his expert historical knowledge to establish his own identity or at least that aspect of it that might come with knowledge of his origins.
If Austerlitz is, as the cover of the German edition informs us, a "Roman " (novel), it is one in which nothing very much happens, which lacks anything remotely resembling a plot or plot structure (the "failed quest" novel?), and in which everything would seem to turn, in Henry James fashion, on "character," except that, in the cases of both Austerlitz and his narrator, the notion of "character" itself explodes into the shards and fragments of "men without properties." And yet, the book is chock-full of interesting not to say fascinating historical information, lore, and knowledge. The narrator stages Austerlitz's expertise in his professional field (art history) in a convincing manner, and his descriptions of the various historical monuments and sites (lieux) of famous historical events are utterly "realistic" in the common meaning of that term. The meaning of this Roman emerges in the interstices of the successive descriptions of places and edifices that attest to the ways in which "civilization" has been built on the structures of evil, incarceration, exclusion, destruction, and the kind of humiliation endured by that little raccoon which, in the pale light of the Nocturama, "sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped ("als offe er") that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness ("weit über jede vernünftige Gründlichkeit"), would help it to escape the unreal world ("aus der falschen Welt") in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own ("ohne sein eigenes Zutun")." (English ed., p. 4 / German ed., pp. 10–11)
The predominance in Sebald's book of real-world—which is to say, historical, empirical, and documentable—"fact" makes it difficult to classify it as "fiction." "Literature" or literary writing it certainly is; it is as self-consciously "fashioned" and assertive of its "techniques" as any recognizably "poetic" artifact could be. At the same time, all this artifice is being used to give access to a real, historical referent: what Benjamin might recognize as an account of what our vaunted "civilization" owes for its benefits and advantages to modern man's peculiar forms of cruelty to its own kind. In other words, the literary devices disposed by Sebald in Austerlitz serve to produce a literary lens by which to justify a judgment (ethical or moral in kind) on a real world of historical fact. It has to be said that there is no "argument" that we might extract from the book regarding the "true" nature of the historical world thus displayed before us by means of the narrator's account of the "fictional" quest of Jacques Austerlitz for information about his "fictional" parents. Or rather that, if there is an argument to be extracted from it, it is one that can only be inferred from the way the events reported over the course of the (non) action are encoded figuratively. To be sure, every narrative or every account of a series of events related in a narrativizing manner, which is to say, given the shape and form of a story, can be translated into an apparatus purely conceptual in nature, after the manner in which George Lakoff treats all metaphorical statements (i.e., as masked concepts).2 But it has to be stressed that what gives to Sebald's account of a real historical world the aspect of fictionality is precisely the way he resists any impulse to conceptualize either his narrator's role or the "meaning" of his protagonist's "imaginary" journey in search of a lost origin.
On the other hand, this book is manifestly not a history even though its "content" and its ultimate referent are manifestly "the historical," which means, one might argue, that the book, quite apart from the melancholy which arises from the suggestion that a merely "historical" knowledge of "history" will raise more problems than it solves, is less than helpful when it is a matter of seeking a meaning for an individual life or existence. Again, as with Walter Benjamin, the story of Jacques Austerlitz's inquiry into the recent past of Europe seems to reveal only that the people who have "made history" were—like the Nazis—as much interested in hiding evidence of their deeds as they were in celebrating and monumentalizing their intentions. It turns out that, if we can draw any lessons from contemplation of the Austerlitz story, there is no such thing as a "history" against which we could measure and assess the validity of what Amos Funkenstein calls "antihistory," by which he meant "mythifications" intended to cover over and obscure the "truths" of proper historiography. It is all antihistory, always written as much "against" as well as on behalf of the (official) "truth."
So maybe we might classify Austerlitz as a historical novel, a kind of postmodernist version of the genre invented (so the legend has it) by Sir Walter Scott and brought to consummation in Tolstoy's War and Peace, which, so it seems to me, at once consummates and "deconstructs" the genre of the historical novel as it had been cultivated at the hands of Scott, Manzoni, Dumas, Hugo, Dickens, George Eliot, Flaubert, and God knows how many others in the nineteenth century in Europe. We could say that, except for the fact that Austerlitz can be read as an allegory of the impossibility of—or, to cite Nietzsche—the disadvantage (Nachteil) of history "für das Leben." As thus envisaged, Sebald's "novel" can be viewed as a contribution in a peculiarly postmodernist mode to that discussion over the relation between history and literature, or factual and fictional writing, or realistic and imaginative writing, or rational and mythical writing opened up by the so-called "crisis of historism" (Historismus) in the early twentieth century. And if our purpose were to enter into that discussion we would have to account for the fact that the genre of the historical novel in the time of Scott, Goethe, and Byron enjoyed virtually universal popularity among the literate public while, at the same time, enduring universal contemnation at the hands of professional historians who regarded its mixture of fact with fiction, its constitutive anachronism, and its attempt to examine the past by the instruments of imagination as a crime not to say a sin of Mosaic amplitude—"Thou shalt not mix the kinds." The fact is that the authority and prestige of this literary genre waned with the constitution of a new kind of science in the late nineteenth century, underwent a mindbending transformation at the hands of the great literary modernists (Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Stein, Proust, Kafka, Woolf, etc.), only to be revived in a different mode and register by virtually every writer that we might wish to praise or condemn with the label "postmodernist." As Linda Hutcheon and Amy Elias have demonstrated (to my satisfaction, at least) the dominant genre of postmodernist writing is "historiographic metafiction" (Hutcheon) or simply "metahistorical romance" (Elias).
It has to be said that the rebirth of the historical novel in the forms given it by writers as different as Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49,V.,Mason &&&; Dixon), Don DeLillo (Libra, Underworld), Philip Roth (American Pastoral, The Plot against America), the Israeli writer Michal Govrin (Snapshots), Robert Rosenstone (King of Odessa), Norman Mailer, William Gass (The Tunnel), Cormac McCarthy, Pat Barker, J. M. Coetzee, Jonathan Safran Foer, and so on has to be set within the context of the post–World War II discussion of Nazi crimes against humanity, the genocide of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the mentally disabled—the whole question of the meaning and significance of the Holocaust, the felt need to "come to terms with the past," not only in Europe but also in the rest of the colonial world, the demand by the casualties, victims, and survivors of new kinds of events made possible by the very science and culture that had allowed the West to destroy what it could not colonize, incarcerate, domesticate, intimidate, or otherwise humble and humiliate. This widespread effort to "come to terms with the past" involved not only the uncovering of what had been ignored, suppressed, repressed, or otherwise hidden from view in the past of nations, classes, races, and, yes, genders, too. It also entailed or seemed to many to entail the necessity of thinking once more about the utility, the worth or value, the advantages and disadvantages of the kind of knowledge of the past produced by the new cadres of professional historians that had been established in the late nineteenth century for service to the European nation-state but which also laid claim to the status of a "science" (Wissenschaft) and were charged with determining what kinds of questions could be asked by the present of the past, what kind of evidence could be adduced in any effort to ask the proper questions, what constituted properly "historical" answers to those questions, and where the line was to be drawn for distinguishing between a proper and an improper use of historical "knowledge" in any effort to clarify or illuminate contemporary efforts to answer central questions of moral and societal concern: what Kant called the "practical" (by which he meant the ethical) question, what should I (we) do?
Now, it is here that I come to the subject of "the practical past." I had to approach it through a discussion of the historical novel, of postmodernist literary writing, and of Sebald's particular take on history and the historical, in order to be able to say something worthwhile about that statement of de Certeau that I have used for my epigraph: "Fiction is the repressed other of history." My argument will be that one of the ways that history in the early nineteenth century succeeded in constituting itself as a scientific (or parascientific) discipline was by detaching historiography from its millennial association with rhetoric and, after that, belles lettres, an activity of amateurs and dilettantes, a kind of writing that was more "creative" or "poetic," in which the imagination, intuition, passion, and, yes, even prejudice were permitted to take precedence over considerations of veracity, perspicuity, "plain" speech, and common sense. So, à bas a la rhetorique ! This, Victor Hugo's sentiment, was shared by the proponents of what would come to be called "the realist novel," most prominently by Gustave Flaubert whose own brand of realism took the form of a disparagement of rhetoric on behalf of what he called "style." But the exclusion of rhetoric (considered as a theory of composition by which a certain body of information was worked up for different practical uses, persuasion, incitement to action, inspiration of feelings of reverence or repulsion, etc.) from historiology had an effect on historical studies quite different from what a similar exclusion of rhetoric from "literary writing" will have had on "literature."
The older, rhetorically structured mode of historical writing openly promoted the study and contemplation of the past as propaedeutic to a life in the public sphere, as an alternative ground to theology and metaphysics (not to mention as an alternative to the kind of knowledge one might derive from experience of what Aristotle called the "banausic" life of commerce and trade), for the discovery or invention of principles by which to answer the central question of ethics: "What should (ought, must) I do?" Or to put it in Lenin's terms: "What is to be done?"
The professionalization of historical studies required in principle at least that the past be studied, as it was said, "for itself alone" or as "a thing in itself," without any ulterior motive other than a desire for the truth (of fact, to be sure, rather than doctrine) about the past and without any inclination to draw lessons from the study of the past and import them into the present in order to justify actions and programs for the future. In other words, history in its status as a science for the study of the past purported to purge the study of the past of any ethical content—while, at the same time, serving the nation-state as custodian of its genealogy. Thus, while purporting to study "the historical past," historiography in its scientific form was serving the needs and interests of "the practical past."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Practical Past by Hayden White. Copyright © 2014 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceOne: The Practical Past
Two: Truth and Circumstance: What (if anything) can properly be said about the Holocaust?
Three: The Historical Event
Four: Contextualism and Historical Understanding
Five: Historical Discourse and Literary Theory
Appendix: Narration, Narrative, Narrativization
Afterword
Notes