Hayden White, move over

As a historian who deals with very little literature (though still a fair few fictions) and who, if he must deal with the intellectual élite of his period, does so mainly so as to find whom they were bossing around, I do not have to deal too much with the so-called critical turn and post-modernist critical theory by which medieval studies, especially in the USA where literature forms a larger part of such courses, has been colonised. Its proponents would of course argue that `do not have to' is not the same as `shouldn't', and that all human knowledge is affected by some of what they have to say. And I'm open to that, I hope, because I'd rather be right than wrong when I talk about my material. Occasionally, however, as readers of A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe may have observed, some of what I am therefore asked to take seriously makes me irate. What I need is not so much more exposure to what this stuff can be made to do in medieval spheres (I know where to go for that) but a tool, with which to distinguish what is sane critique and what is useless froth. And thanks to one of our Cliopatria contributors I've found a good one.

A few posts ago at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe I highlighted the blog The Edge of the American West, familiar perhaps to Cliopatria readers. Most of its posts, I confess, are out of my range—I mean, had I but world enough and time, and so on, I would give them full attention and learn a lot but as it is I have to keep my Internet faff rationed. But, they are almost always very well written and I keep reading because occasionally it comes up with something I can use. Such a thing is this. You may—no, by now you must have come across the post-modernist idea that there is no such thing as a fact. This is justified by saying that, as all human information has to come to use and out of us through the filters of our own conceptions, preconceptions and prejudices, we can't step outside ourselves far enough to give anything but our own version of the truth; someone else may see it very differently. Nothing therefore can really be known, only asserted. Where I have seen this used most fiercely (a particularly virulent example here), it has usually been attributed to Hayden White and his book The Content of the Form, and obviously there is something in it.¹ Perception is so limited. However, it seems to me a better argument for literature than for history. With literary criticism there is no sure recovery of the author's intent or lack of it; but with history, even though our texts are authored, biased, partial (in both senses), prejudiced, under-informed or all of the above, we have this single epistemological advantage that we are attempting to reach things that actually did happen. I mean, whether or not we can in fact know it, people in the past did things, and history's business is trying to recover, describe and understand them. In that sense we don't have to worry so much, because the object of our enquiry is genuine, and even if it cannot be reached exactly with our messy biochemical thinking apparatus, to say nothing of the experience of the other messy biochemical thinkboxes that the whole enterprise is based upon, we can get closer, and there is an idea of right and wrong in play that is not itself subjective, though its evaluation must be. And we can say things that there is no point denying are factual: Charlemagne was in Rome on Christmas Day 800, there was a Benedictine monastery at Cluny, the Dorset Inuit met Europeans in Greenland, and so on. (OK, the last one might be contested, but it sounds good.) So I do protest about this every now and then, and generally like to be ready to argue with it. But sometimes it is so well put that I can't argue effectively. I mean:

Consider the trained historian, intent on studying the sixteenth century. Before him are the analyzed sources—the `facts'—neatly arranged in cases. He begins thumbing the cards, reading the statements, taking in the facts. Doubtless he says to himself:—

This fact is unique, important because unique, causally connected; I will therefore set it aside to be wrought up into my final synthesis.

No such thing. As he goes over and over his cards, some aspects of the reality recorded there interest him more, others less; some are retained, others forgotten; some have power to start a new train of thought; some appear to be causally connected; some logically connected; some are without any perceptible connection of any sort. And the reason is simple: some facts strike the mind as interesting or suggestive, have a meaning of some sort, lead to some desirable end, because they associate themselves with ideas already in the mind; they fit in somehow to the ordered experience of the historian. This original synthesis ... is only half deliberate. It is accomplished almost automatically. The mind will select and discriminate from the very beginning.

I don't think I've ever seen the idea put so sharply and clearly. Is this why everyone cites Hayden White, because he's so irrefutable? Well, no, because this isn't he. He wrote in 1987 but this is from 1910, by a historian called Carl Becker.² That's how old post-modernism is, is it? Actually, maybe not: note that he doesn't go to the end now popular where every viewpoint is as valid as any other because all are subjective. On the other hand, as you can tell from the above, I don't go there either. A friend of mine recently pointed me at a piece of Tom Stoppard, in which the point is made with cricket bats, verbally I assure you:

This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle... What we're trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might... travel... Now, what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you'll drop the bat and dance about shouting 'Ouch!' with your hands stuck into your armpits. This [the cricket bat] isn't better because there's a conspiracy... It's better because it's better. You don't believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on.³

Becker's article was about engagement. He was saying that not only was true detachment plainly impossible, it was also undesirable for some sorts of history; there were some sorts of work for which caring about the subject deeply was not only an advantage, but absolutely necessary. I think that too is a strawman; nobody but paid researchers and journalists work on something about which they care nothing. Anyone doing serious research must be at least partly invested in their subject, or if they can still manage that kind of work without, they would be far better employed on something in which they were interested. The discussion of these points at Edge of the West is lengthy and far-reaching. But for me that isn't the point, so much as being able to cite something sensible for this point and avoid identifying myself with a school of thought of whose conclusions I want no part, because they undermine the idea of expertise and thus all our study. Becker's critique leaves us room to know things, and it is as far as this idea needs to be batted.

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1. Hayden V. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore 1987, repr. 1990).
2.Carl Łotus Becker,"Detachment and the Writing of History" in The Atlantic Monthly Vol. 106 (Washington Boston 1910), pp. 524-536, repr. in idem, Detachment and the Writing of History: essays and letters of Carl Ł. Becker, ed. Phil L. Snyder (Ithaca 1958), pp. 3-28.
3. Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing (London 1982), with thanks to said friend, who knows who he is.