Hayden White and/in France: receptions, translations, questions

Rethinking History The Journal of Theory and Practice ISSN: 1364-2529 (Print) 1470-1154 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrhi20 Hayden White and/in France: receptions, translations, questions Philippe Carrard To cite this article: Philippe Carrard (2018): Hayden White and/in France: receptions, translations, questions, Rethinking History, DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2018.1464745 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2018.1464745 Published online: 04 May 2018. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrhi20 RETHINKING HISTORY, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2018.1464745 Hayden White and/in France: receptions, translations, questions* Philippe Carrard University of Vermont and Dartmouth College, Lebanon, NH, USA ABSTRACT The work of Hayden White has been discussed in France starting in the 1980s. The scholars most responsible for its introduction have been the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the historian Roger Chartier. Several historians and literary theorists have followed in Ricoeur’s and Chartier’s footsteps, praising White for having opened new ways of looking at history, while criticizing some aspects of his work, especially his relativism and his categorization of history as fiction. These debates, however, had not led to translations of White’s work into French, the sole exception being the introduction to Metahistory, published in 2009 in the journal Labyrinthe. By translating several essays, interviews, and reviews written or given by White between 1966 and 2014, I sought to fill this lack. Rendering White’s writing into French did not raise major difficulties. The process, however, did make visible a few problems related to Anglo-American classifications, as well as to the fact that the participants in the conversation do not always seem to be talking about the same subject matter. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 13 March 2018; Accepted 6 April 2018 KEYWORDS Hayden White; fiction; literature; narrative; pluralism; relativism Stephen Bann (2009, 145), in an essay on the contributions of Roland Barthes and Hayden White to reflections on history, speaks of the ‘general embargo’ of which White’s work had seemingly been the victim in France. It is telling, for Bann, that White should frequently invoke Barthes, whereas Barthes never refers to White in his writings and apparently never read him. Bann does not mention that White’s name is similarly absent from the works of several French scholars interested in the philosophy of history that White discusses on various occasions and at different lengths, such as Michel Foucault, Paul Veyne, and Michel de Certeau. The case of Certeau is especially perplexing, since he was teaching at the University of California at San Diego between 1978 and 1983, that is, at a time when White’s Metahistory (1973) and Tropics of Discourse (1978) were heatedly debated in the history and literature departments of CONTACT Philippe Carrard [email protected] * This article was completed before the author learned of White's death on March 5, 2018. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 P. CARRARD American universities. Yet Certeau does not engage with White in his work on space, everyday life, and otherness, and he does not return—in the light of White’s theses—to the views on the ‘writing of history’ he had expressed earlier (1975) in his book with the same title. That said, given the fact that Bann writes in 2009, the word ‘embargo’ to describe White’s reception in France is certainly too strong. While that term— as we will see—applies to the lack of French translations of White’s writings, it does not account for the fact that White’s Metahistory and the texts subsequently published in Tropics of Discourse and The Content of the Form had been discussed in French intellectual circles starting in the 1980s. The purpose of my essay is to provide a survey of these discussions. Proceeding in two steps, I will look first at the ways French philosophers, historians, and literary theorists have responded to White. (Because there is no French equivalent of the Social Science Citation Index and the Humanities Citation Index, I won’t be able to include the quantitative data on which Richard Vann [1998] based his study of the reception of White in mostly English-speaking countries.) Then I will address some of the issues I had translating White into French, issues that are not just linguistic, but cultural. I will, in particular, look at problems related to Anglo-American dichotomies and periodization, as well as to the difficulties raised by the fact that some key terms in the conversation between White and his critics do not, at this point, have a stable, commonly accepted definition. Responding to White If we look retrospectively at French responses to White, it is obvious that the scholar most responsible for the diffusion of White’s ideas in France is the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Indeed, Ricoeur devotes to White’s work several sections of volumes 1 (1983) and 3 (1985) of Temps et récit, coming back to it in the chapter of La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000) on ‘The Historian’s Representation’ (I will quote from the 1990 and 2004 English-language translations of these works). Ricoeur (1990a, 161, 162) gives White credit for the ‘lucidity’ with which he makes explicit the ‘presuppositions’ that underlie his theses, namely, that ‘fiction and history belong to the same class as regards their narrative structures’; that ‘writing’ is not ‘external’ but ‘constitutive’ of the historical ‘modes of understanding’; and that the ‘boundary between historians’ history and philosophy of history’ must be ‘called into question.’ Ricoeur (1990b, 154) also emphasizes that White’s tropological theory has helped him to clarify the difficult issue of the relations between the past and its representations, specifically, bypassing the dichotomy of the ‘Same’ and the ‘Other,’ to define these relations in terms of the ‘Analogous.’ Ricoeur’s (1990b, 154) reservations, frequently shared by historians, concern the risk that the reliance on formalist procedures erases the ‘boundary between fiction and history,’ covering over the ‘intentionality’ that characterizes historical discourse and the ‘constraints’ RETHINKING HISTORY 3 that the past exercises on it ‘by way of documents.’ Commenting on ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,’ White’s essay on the representations of the Holocaust, Ricoeur (2004, 257) also questions White’s advocacy of writing strategies that would be more appropriate than the current forms of the novel, the memoir, and the scholarly investigation. According to Ricoeur, neither the recourse to the ‘middle voice,’ nor to the adoption of ‘modernist’ narrative techniques, would ‘fill the gap between the representative capacity of discourse and what the event demands’ (260). Though French professional historians were slower than Ricoeur in taking up White’s writings, they were not unaware of them and even demonstrated desire to know more. In 1992, Roger Chartier and François Hartog thus invited White to spend six weeks at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.1 While at the EHESS, White taught courses and attended Hartog’s seminar on Herodotus. He also took part, at the Collège de philosophie, in a seminar on Auerbach, as well as—with Ricoeur, Rancière, Hartog, and Chartier—in a roundtable on the ‘metaphysics of narrativity.’ White mentions a long lecture given by Ricoeur on the relations between history and narrative, and he remembers that his own theses about the constructed nature of facts, the relativism inherent in the historical enterprise, and historiography as a literary genre, had not been particularly welcomed by the other participants. Whether his theories were well received or not, White’s stay at the EHESS resulted in two of the most significant essays written about him by French historians. The first one is Bernard Lepetit’s ‘L’historicité d’un modèle historiographique,’ initially read at one of the seminars held during White’s visit and later published in Carnets de croquis [Handbook of Sketches]. Grounding his argument in the very history of historiography, Lepetit (1999, 83) allows that ‘history is writing and that there is no boundary between history and philosophy of history.’ However, he insists, history has changed; it has moved from the humanities to the social sciences, and its practices and rhetoric have correspondingly diversified. As a result, the types of emplotment analyzed by White are no longer applicable to some of the most representative works of twentieth-century historiography. Singling out studies in microhistory such as Giovanni Levi’s Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist, Simona Cerutti’s La Ville et les métiers [Towns and Trades], and his own The Pre-industrial Urban System: France, 1740–1840, Lepetit writes: None of these studies juxtaposes temporal cross sections to account for processes. But none of them is structured as a chronicle, either; 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… that shapes the development—I was about to say the plot. (85–86). In other words, Lepetit does not dispute—as White mentions that several participants in the seminar did—the idea that historians construct their object and that their writings fall under fiction. Moving the debate to White’s own 4 P. CARRARD turf: the formal structure of historiographic texts, Lepetit merely explains that White’s models of emplotment—while suited for the works of the nineteenth century analyzed in Metahistory—do not fit contemporary studies whose textual organization is no longer that of a narrative.2 The other important essay written in the aftermath of White’s visit to the EHESS is Roger Chartier’s ‘Four Questions for Hayden White,’ first published in 1993 in Storia della Storiografia and later reprinted in Au bord de la falaise (I will quote from the 1997 English-language translation). Grounding his well informed analyses in Metahistory, Tropics of Discourse, and The Content of the Form, but also in discussions of White by such scholars as David Harlan, Hans Kellner, and Gabrielle Spiegel, Chartier—as his title indicates—poses four questions that in fact challenge White’s theses more than genuinely engage them. The first one (Chartier 1997, 32) concerns the possibility to link, ‘without contradictions,’ the constraints inherent in ‘post-Saussurean linguistics’ with the ‘freedom of the historian as a literary creator’; the second one, the legitimacy to apply the tropological model without taking into account the ‘place of rhetoric’ and its use to ‘codify discourse,’ which have been ‘neither consistent nor stable between the Renaissance and the twentieth century’ (33); the third one, the value—if the knowledge that history produces is not different from that provided by fiction—of going through the ‘demanding operations of gathering a documentary corpus, verifying information, testing hypotheses, and constructing an interpretation’ (35); and the fourth one, the feasibility to combine a formalist approach that permits ‘to pass over the question of the text’s “honesty” and “objectivity”’ with the historians’ reliance on ‘research techniques and critical procedures’ whose function is precisely to confer such qualities upon their discourse (38).3 Chartier’s critique is thus more comprehensive than Lepetit’s. It bears not just on the historicity of White’s models of analysis, but also on White’s theory of knowledge, with its implications for the validity of the historical enterprise. Frequently revisiting these ‘questions,’ Chartier has steadily maintained his stand while seeking to better describe his discipline’s claims and assumptions. In the entry ‘Narrative and History’ of the Dictionnaire des sciences humaines (2006, 971), for example, asserting once again the difference between factual and fictional discourse, he argues that ‘history is shaped by an intention and a principle of truth, that the past it investigates is a reality external to discourse, and that the knowledge it provides can be verified.’ To be sure, Chartier admits that research at some point must be written up. However, as he contends in the ‘Postface’ to the reedition of Au bord de la falaise (2009, 346), ‘recognizing the rhetorical and narrative dimension of historical writing does not imply denying it the status of a true knowledge, grounded in the search for evidence and procedures of testing.’ In other words, for Chartier, abandoning the idea of a gapless coincidence between the past and the text that represents it should not lead to rejecting the historians’ claim that they are making true statements, and statements that can be verified. RETHINKING HISTORY 5 Continuing the discussion started by Ricoeur, Chartier, and Lepetit, several French historians and literary theorists have since the 1990s commented on White’s theses in the texts they have devoted to historical discourse. To be sure, they have not written or edited books comparable to those of Kuisma Korhonen (2006), Herman Paul (2011), and Robert Doran (2013). Similarly, no French journal has published a Beiheft or a special issue to commemorate the publication of Metahistory, as History and Theory did in 1980 and 1998, Storia della Storiografia in 1993, and Rethinking History in 2013. Still, French scholars have discussed White’s work in articles and book chapters, showing various degrees of sympathy and understanding for the theses offered from Metahistory to The Practical Past. A specialist of social history with an interest in the epistemology of his discipline, Antoine Prost (2006 [1996], 257–261) provides in his Douze leçons sur l’histoire a very clear summary of the models of analysis offered in Metahistory. White’s merit, according to Prost (2006, 261), consists in showing that historians always work ‘from presuppositions,’ and that they ‘preconstruct’ their object through choices bearing on types of ideology, explanation, and emplotment that they ‘rarely make explicit.’ In this respect, Prost adds, historians exercise an activity than can only be labeled ‘poetic,’ in the etymological sense of the term: they ‘create,’ insofar as they ‘produce a world in which their histories are possible and intelligible’ (261). As Chartier does, however, Prost blames White (and more generally the practitioners of the linguistic turn) for ‘focusing exclusively on the texts,’ thus ‘bracketing off ’ procedures that are ‘specifically historical,’ such as the ‘search for evidence’ and the ‘construction of explanations’ (284). Historians, Prost argues, may disagree on issues of interpretation, but none of them will accept the version of the past according to which ‘Guernica was burned by Spanish republicans’ (287). All interpretations are not equally acceptable, and any model of what Certeau calls the ‘historiographic operation’ must account for the way their range is constrained by the nature of the evidence. Gérard Noiriel (2003, 109), an authority on immigration who also writes about the state of history as a discipline, acknowledges like Prost that White’s examination of historical discourse has allowed the ‘spawning of a new field of research that explores the different facets of historical writing.’ In his report on the ‘crisis’ of history (2005 [1996], 171), he similarly admits that the adoption of the ‘techniques of discursive analysis’ by White and the advocates of the linguistic turn have contributed to ‘the enrichment of intellectual history.’ Yet Noiriel strongly objects to White’s erasure of the ‘distinction between “realist” discourse and “fictional” discourse,’ an erasure that makes history into ‘another literary genre, which must be apprehended using the tools of literary criticism’ (171). There is no epistemological reason, for Noiriel, that the study of ‘discourse’ should become more important than the study of the ‘social’; privileging one over the other falls within the kind of ‘personal preferences’ that are ‘impossible 6 P. CARRARD to prove,’ even with the help of such prestigious philosophers as ‘Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard’ (171). A historian of Antiquity who—like Prost and Noiriel—is interested in theoretical issues related to his profession, François Hartog first recognizes the validity of what he calls, in his monograph on fellow classicist Pierre Vidal-Naquet (2007, 104), the ‘narrativist challenge.’ White, according to Hartog, has properly reacted against the ‘positivism of American history,’ and his way of focusing on the rhetorical and textual dimensions of history, though at times ‘destabilizing’ (105), has been productive. Hartog goes as far as rejecting the view, expressed for example by Noiriel (1998, 124), that White’s relativism, ‘if defended to the end, can only lead to considering that historical studies about Nazism and gas chambers fall under “fiction,” too.’ For Hartog, there is no link between ‘the revisionists’ hare brain ranting and the interrogations about historical narrative,’ as the ‘latter do not give credibility to the former or, worse, lead to the former’ (106). Moreover, Hartog insists, Holocaust deniers are not postmoderns but ‘hyperposivists’ (106). They do not believe—to use Barthes’s celebrated formula taken up by White as an epigraph to The Content of the Form—that ‘facts only have a linguistic existence.’ Deniers have no doubts that there are such things as brute facts, in this instance, ‘Nazi documents’ that establish—among other things—that the Germans never built gas chambers (106). Hartog’s reservations about White are similar to Ricoeur’s. They concern, to pose the problem in linguistic terms, White’s difficulty in dealing with ‘reference,’ that is, with the fact that language is (also) about the world out there. Leaving out reference, for Hartog, leads White to a ‘dead end,’ making his rhetorical theory incapable of drawing ‘a clear line between historical narrative and fictional narrative’ (108). French literary critics and theorists have also entered the debate, contributing their specific expertise. Defending the ‘legitimacy’ of formalist, ‘textual’ approaches to history, the professor of comparative literature Fiona McIntoshVarjabédian (2008, 1) has thus bemoaned the fact that such approaches in general, White’s work in particular, should have ‘bad press’ in France. Viewing, as White does, historiographic discourse as a ‘construction’ that depends on ‘language’ and on the historian as ‘subject’ of the ‘representation of the object,’ does not imply that ‘proven falsifications’ have the same status as ‘honest reports’ (2). As a literary theorist, McIntosh-Varjabédian adds that there is a need to clarify the meaning of some key terms that constantly recur in the debate, beginning with ‘fiction.’ That term, she explains, must be taken in its ‘etymological sense’ when applied to historical discourse; deriving from the latin verb fingere, it refers to activities of ‘composition and representation’ (10). When White, in other words, titles one of his essays ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation,’ he does not take ‘fiction’ in the sense of ‘pure invention’ (14); he merely (though provocatively) reasserts one of his familiar theses, namely, that the materials the historian has gathered must at some point be fashioned into a text. McIntoshVarjabédian agrees with White about the fact that those materials do not speak RETHINKING HISTORY 7 for themselves and can be interpreted in different ways. Yet, as White does, she holds the fact that the archives can be revisited as something positive, specifically, as one of the most beneficial aspects of ‘democratic pluralism’ (14): the past, in a democracy, can be periodically reexamined, leading to new versions of events that the community deems worth investigating and remembering. While McIntosh-Varjabédian mostly agrees with White, her fellow literary theorist and historian Françoise Lavocat has questioned some of White’s theses, beginning with the way he frames the distinction between factual and historical discourses. A specialist of early modernity, Lavocat is especially concerned with White’s periodization of these relations, specifically, with his idea that history was part of rhetoric up to the early nineteenth century, when it became a science whose goal was to represent the past ‘as it really was’ and to do so in a language as plain as possible. According to Lavocat (2016, 101), the fact that history was regarded as a ‘literary art’ in the seventeenth century does not mean ‘that this situation was without debates.’ To the contrary, the seventeenth century was a ‘battle field’ (101), the theorists of history and of fictional genres such as the theater (e.g. Corneille, d’Aubignac) and the novel (e.g. Sorel, Huet) ‘charting with perfect lucidity the territory of their field’ (110). The ‘serene confusion of history and fiction,’ Lavocat concludes, ‘is a golden age already bygone, or one that never existed’ (101). Lavocat also insists that the ‘boundary’ between factual and fictional discourses she strives to define throughout her book holds even when the former includes ‘literary’ devices, such as metaphors and ironies. Factual narratives, she argues, can have a ‘high level of rhetorical and stylistic elaboration’ without losing their ontological status; such texts as Saint-Simon’s Memoirs and—to turn to a contemporary example—Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million are certainly highly ‘ornate,’ but they cannot be taken as fictions because their paratexts designate them as factual and their authors steadily reaffirm their ‘referential aim’ (71). The French historians and literary theorists whose comments I have analyzed thus far occasionally distance themselves from White, but they do so after a thorough engagement with his theses. Some of their colleagues, however, do not show the same scruples: they attack White by means of massive assertions, which they do not ground in the attentive reading of specific texts. The most expeditious is probably François Bédarida, a specialist of British history and the Vichy regime who also ran from 1978 to 1990 the prestigious Institut d’histoire du temps présent. In his postface to an overview of historical research in France from 1945 to 1995, Bédarida (1995a, 422) thus expresses his ‘delight’ at the fact that French history has remained ‘impervious to the theses of postmodernism,’ more precisely, that it has upheld, ‘against Hayden White, who turns history into a “fiction-making operation” that shares with literature the same ways of constructing discourse,’ the principle of the ‘quest for truth as fundamental intention of the construction of knowledge.’ Taking a similar position in an article on the responsibility of the historian as ‘expert,’ 8 P. CARRARD Bédarida (1995b, 142) denounces what he calls White’s ‘relativist logic,’ a logic that has ‘liberated itself from the fetishism of facts,’ and for which the ‘only reality is the one that historians construct in function of their sensitivity, their ideology and their culture.’ Summing up his indictment, Bédarida states: ‘As the stability of the text is rejected in literature and the stability of language in philosophy, the stability of the past is banned in history, since an “unassailable relativity” derives from the resort to narrative as a means of representing that past; any “text,” then, becomes a “pretext”, and any history, a fiction.’ Bédarida does not bother to clarify whether his quotation marks around terms such as ‘relativity’ mean that he is citing White (then, which text?), or merely distancing himself from a discourse that is not his. Whatever the case might be, it remains that his positions are those of a conservative who believes in such things as the ‘objectivity of the facts’ (1995b, 139) and the ‘stability’ of the past; of a conservative, moreover, who is proud of reasserting one of his country’s supposed qualities: its intellectual independence, in this case, its resistance to such dangerous fads as the (Anglo-American) postmodern view of history. Whereas Bédarida’s hostility toward White is predictable because of the historian’s known attachment to a traditional conception of his discipline, Ivan Jablonka’s is more surprising. A historian at the University Paris-XIII-Nord, Jablonka (2014, 249) has indeed written a whole book to claim that history offers the possibility of literary experimentation (italics are his), and supported his views with two works of his own: Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus (2012), in which he reconstructs the life of his grandparents, while telling—as anthropologists do at times—the story of his research in the most scholarly way (the book includes no fewer than 494 footnotes); and Laetitia (2016), in which he recounts—using ‘literary’ means such as dialog—the killing of a young woman in Western France, as well as the events that preceded and followed that fait divers. (Jablonka provides a few references in an appendix, but he does not footnote his text.) Yet, despite White’s frequent calls to historians to be more daring, specifically, to emulate some of the strategies of modernist writing, Jablonka does not regard White as an ally. To the contrary, Jablonka (2014, 106) sees in him a dangerous representative of the linguistic turn, who ‘reduces history to a pure literary object’ that ‘no longer has any epistemological status of its own.’ This ‘skeptical relativism,’ Jablonka adds, ‘influenced by the idealism of the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, provides weapons to those who affirm that gas chambers are only “discourse”’ (109). Jablonka here seems to have read Carlo Ginzburg (1992), who in ‘Just One Witness,’ his celebrated contribution to Saul Friedlander’s anthology Probing the Limits of Representation, discusses the influence of Italian idealism on White, though without implying, as Jablonka does, that there is a connection between relativism and fascism. Jablonka, however, does not seem to be familiar with White’s own contribution to that same anthology, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,’ in which White—far from denying the reality of the RETHINKING HISTORY 9 Holocaust—merely asks about the most appropriate ways of representing it, calling for the very type of ‘experimentation’ that Jablonka advocates in his book on writing in the social sciences. Placing White Are the debates surrounding White and the linguistic turn still relevant in France? In the chapter of Croire en l’histoire he devotes to the ‘troubling strangeness’ that some works currently confer upon his discipline, Hartog (2013, 111) states that the doubts which the linguistic turn had cast have now been dispersed. Indeed, that turn has known the fate of many subjects in intellectual history: scholars ‘frantically focus on an issue for fifteen or twenty years,’ but then they ‘move on to something else’; eventually, they ‘no longer talk about it.’ Hartog ends this chapter with the same formula: historians have now ‘moved on to something else’ (152), but not before devoting over forty pages to revisiting some aspects of the discussion: in this instance, the meaning that Aristotle, Ricoeur, Ginzburg, and White give to such terms as ‘poetics’ and ‘rhetoric,’ as well as to the way they use them when they take up the subject ‘historical discourse.’ If Hartog deems that the issues related to White and the linguistic turn are no longer current, the chapter he grants to the ‘troubling’ moments his discipline has lived through shows that those issues were still worth consideration. This chapter, in other words, shows that White’s theses—while no longer the spark for passionate controversies—can now become the object of historical investigations that trace their origins, describe their nature, and assess their influence. Besides Hartog, other French historians have looked retrospectively at White’s work, placing it in its intellectual context and reviewing the polemics that it has brought about. At the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, for example, Jacques Revel and Sabina Loriga have between 2011 and 2014 run a seminar devoted to the linguistic turn, and they are now preparing a book on that very subject.4 Loriga, for that matter, has already revisited it in the chapter of the work that she, Antoine Lilti, and Jean-Frédéric Schaub have written about the ‘historiographic experience.’ Focusing on White, Loriga does in this text what few critics in France have bothered to do: she traces White’s evolution from Metahistory to Figural Realism (White 1999), that is, from what she describes as a focus on language to a concern with ideology and finally an interest in ethics. Assaying White’s work as a whole, Loriga articulates only a few restrictions; similar to Lavocat’s, they bear on White’s periodization and the dichotomies that it involves. For Loriga (2016, 59), it is simplistic to see history and literature as having shifted, in the nineteenth century, respectively from the ‘sublime’ to the ‘beautiful’ and from ‘realism’ to ‘modernism.’ This way of contrasting ‘large, supposedly homogeneous wholes’ is ‘debatable’ (60), since several works written in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries (Loriga mentions 10 P. CARRARD Dostoievsky’s Notes from the Underground and Hofmannstahl’s Letter of Lord Chandos) could be regarded as falling under either realism or modernism. Loriga’s senior at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, and one of the French historians most interested in epistemology, Jacques Revel has engaged with White, too, though not as explicitly as his colleague. In ‘Historical sciences,’ his important contribution to Jean-Michel Berthelot’s anthology Epistémologie des sciences sociales, Revel includes a few direct and several indirect allusions to White’s positions and the issues that they still raise. In the section ‘Narrative and model’ (2001, 70), he thus describes the theory that White expounds in Metahistory as ‘extreme,’ since it ‘refers all historical discourse to a stylistics and to a poetics, without holding it as necessary to account for the operations of knowledge that are usually associated with it.’ To discard these operations, he argues (echoing Ricoeur and Chartier), would make it impossible to explain why some versions of the past should be retained, and others, rejected; on these matters, ‘choices are not aesthetic or stylistic, but rather, cognitive’ (71). Yet Revel also implicitly sides with White on several points, even turning at times to White’s very vocabulary. Revel, for example, describes the historians ‘going to the archives’ not as ‘discoverers,’ but as ‘inventors’ who ‘bring into existence [font exister]’ data that before had ‘neither form, nor meaning’ (50); who, in other words, ‘do not find their facts in the sources,’ but ‘bring them into existence from the sources [les font exister à partir de sources], and then label them as historical facts’ (51). The idea that historians do not ‘find’ but ‘invent’ their data is of course one of White’s favorites, and the phrase ‘bring into existence,’ used twice, evokes without attributing authorship Barthes’s infamous statement, endorsed by White and mentioned earlier, that facts ‘only have a linguistic existence.’ Similarly, while Revel rejects the ‘skeptical relativism’ (72) that may result from the view that historians do not uncover their narratives and rather construct them, he recognizes that historical knowledge is necessarily perspectivist; the ‘observer’ is always historically situated, a position that makes it impossible to provide a ‘permanent, stable description of the social world’ (59). Finally, Revel tacitly concurs with the thesis, expounded at length in Metahistory, that ‘historical narrative is never pure narration,’ but comes with ‘arguments’ and ‘reference models’ that are not necessarily made explicit (73). Like Hartog’s and Loriga’s interventions, Revel’s analysis of ‘historical sciences’ thus testifies to the fact that White is now part of the conversation in France; in short, that even though his theses are no longer the subjects of angry disputes, they must be accounted for in any comprehensive overview of the current state of historical research. Discussed by major French historians in important articles and book chapters, White, once ignored in France in this type of publication, is now also present in several recent anthologies and encyclopedias. In 1993, for example, Ecrire l’histoire du temps présent, an anthology devoted to the subject ‘writing contemporary history’ published under the auspices of the Centre national de RETHINKING HISTORY 11 la recherche scientifique (CNRS), made no mention of White. In contrast, such reference books published in the 2000s as Historiographies (Delacroix et al. 2010), Dictionnaire de l’historien (Gauvard and Sirinelli 2015), Dictionnaire des sciences humaines (Mesure and Savidan 2006), Epistémologie des science sociales (Berthelot 2001), and Les mots de l’historien (Offenstadt 2009) all discuss White’s work, or at least mention his name. White even has his own entry (assigned to one of his longtime explicators, Hans Kellner [2006]) in Dictionnaire des sciences humaines, and the editors of Historiographies turned to him (White 2010b) to write the entry ‘Postmodernism and history.’ White’s name, for that matter, is cited twenty-seven times in nine entries in Historiographies, specifically, in ‘Intellectual history,’ ‘Linguistic turn,’ ‘New Historicism,’ ‘Philosophy of history,’ ‘Causality/Explanation,’ ‘Discourse,’ ‘Writing of history,’ ‘Narrative,’ and ‘Truth.’ These inclusions show that for the French historians and philosophers of history who edited these collections, White’s contribution must definitely be reckoned with. Among the ‘foreigners’ whose names appear in Historiographies, significantly, only Marx and Weber have more citations than White. Translating White My project of translating some of White’s essays (White 2017) shared the same goals as Loriga’s, Revel’s, and the editors’ of the reference books I have just mentioned. On the most basic level, I wanted to fill a lack. Whereas White had been discussed in France since the 1980s, his work—to return to Bann’s economic metaphor I quoted at the beginning of this essay—had been the victim of a ‘general embargo’ on the part of the French publishing business. In his biography of Pierre Nora, a major figure of the French historical establishment, François Dosse (2011, 255) asks why Metahistory, a book that since its publication in 1973 had engaged ‘the whole historical community on an international level,’ had not become part of the renown, Nora-edited series ‘Bibliothèque des Histoires.’ According to Dosse, Nora admitted in one of their conversations that he ‘should have had that work translated,’ but he added that his main regret lay elsewhere: in having ‘let Philippe Ariès escape to Le Seuil’ (255), that is, in having allowed a brilliant though unconventional scholar to join the roster of a major competitor. As a result of this slight, the only sample of White’s work available in French in the early 2000s was the introduction to Metahistory, translated by Laurent Ferri and commented upon by David Schreiber and Marc Aymes (2009)in issue 33/2 of the journal Labyrinthe. Though this text, to be sure, remains important, it dates to 1973. White, since then, has published five collections of essays (one edited by Robert Doran) (White 2010a), not counting the many articles, book reviews, and lectures that have not (yet) been gathered in volumes. Obviously, there was a need for a translation that would provide a comprehensive survey of White’s production, doing justice to the numerous 12 P. CARRARD scholarly activities in which White has been involved since the 1960s, and still is at the time I am writing (2018). Besides offering an idea of White’s abundant output, my project aimed to address a few misunderstandings, beginning with an issue of identity and qualifications: White is not a ‘professor of comparative literature,’ as Jablonka (2014, 10) claims in the passage, quoted earlier, in which he takes on the ‘skeptical relativism’ of the promoters of the linguistic turn. Far from being the intruder that Jablonka’s remark makes him out to be, White—as readers of this journal know—is a trained historian who spent most of his career in departments of history; the only position he had in a department of comparative literature is the one he took for a few years at Stanford, after his retirement from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a spell at Berkeley.5 Of course, my main goal was not to provide the correct information about White’s background; it was to offer a selection of texts that would exemplify White’s positions on some of the topics that have raised the most controversies, such as historical pluralism, the construction of the facts, and the relations between history and fiction. For this purpose, in addition to classics like ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation,’ I chose to translate lesser-known though substantial texts that figure in the latest collections of White’s essays, The Fiction of Narrative (White 2010a) and The Practical Past (White 2014), or have only appeared in journals. Taking the French-speaking audience into account, I also included some of the several texts in which White deals with French literature, philosophy, and historiography: in this instance, his response to Chartier’s ‘Four questions,’ the essay in which he uses Marx and Flaubert to illustrate ‘the problem of style in realist representation,’ and his reviews of books by Foucault, Kristeva, and Ricoeur. Translating White did not raise major problems of vocabulary or syntax. The few challenges I encountered are related more to language and culture than to White’s idiosyncrasies. ‘Romance’ as a literary genre and ‘late capitalism’ as a historical period, for example, do not have precise, widely accepted equivalents in French. With the translator of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, I rendered ‘romance’ with ‘romanesque,’ specifying that this adjective is used in this instance as a noun. As for ‘late capitalism,’ the French historians I consulted suggested ‘capitalisme contemporain’ rather than the more literal ‘capitalisme tardif.’ Anglo-American dichotomies and periodizations raised other issues. French theorists, for instance, do not ask whether history falls under ‘art’ or ‘science.’ When White speaks of an historian’s wealth or lack of ‘artistic’ talent, I thus chose to turn ‘artistic’ into the more restrictive ‘littéraire.’ Similarly, White often points to ‘modernism’ as the post-World War One literary movement whose strategies historians should seek to emulate. Yet ‘modernism,’ in French, does not refer to a distinct period, as the term merely points to some specific qualities of any object (e.g. building, painting, sculpture) recently made in a new, non-customary manner. I still translated ‘modernism’ as ‘modernisme,’ reviewing matters of this type in the introductions I wrote for each text and RETHINKING HISTORY 13 in an glossary where I listed some of White’s key terms (emplotment, etc.), explaining their meaning and the choices I had made when rendering them into French. While translating White did not pose major problems, reading him and his many commentators exposed some of the issues that are still open in historical theory. In order to bring this discussion to an end, if not to a close, I want to point to one aspect of the debates I have surveyed that is particularly obvious : to the fact that the participants do not seem to always speak the same language, especially when they use vocabulary that they borrow from other disciplines. Viewed from my own corner of literary theory, several of the disputes between White and his opponents thus originate in three terms that are never precisely defined: ‘fiction,’ ‘literature,’ and ‘narrative.’ Does ‘fiction,’ for example, have for White and his critics the etymological meaning that derives from the latin verb fingere (to fashion, to mold)? The current meaning of ‘imaginary narrative’ (as in the ‘fiction’ section of most bookstores and of a magazine like the New Yorker)? Or even the more general meaning of ‘anything imaginary’ (as in Caïra and other theorists)? Similarly, does ‘literature’ refer to ‘works of imagination’ (including drama and poetry in addition to narrative), or, as it did originally, to ‘anything written with letters or printed on a page?’ As for ‘narrative,’ does the term have the strict signification assigned to it by narratologists (e.g. Phelan [2007, 203], ‘somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened’), or is it used as a mere synonym of ‘text’? With Ricoeur and McIntosh-Varjabédian, I suggested in the introduction to my translation that White took ‘fiction’ in the sense of ‘something fashioned.’ The indignation of several critics, however, shows that the word meant for them ‘imaginary narrative,’ White being then guilty of erasing the boundary between history and the novel. Likewise, I understood White’s description of the ‘historical text’ as a ‘literary artifact’ to mean that research does not spontaneously transform itself into books or articles; at some point, it has to be ‘manufactured’ like any other object. Yet making ‘history’ fall under ‘literature’ raised the same outrage as making it fall under ‘fiction’; several critics charged White with insisting that the knowledge status of history has nothing specific to it, in other words, that it is of the same order as that of poetry or drama. ‘Narrative’ raised issues that are not limited to the quarrels between White and his detractors. What Martin Kreiswirth (2005) and other cultural critics have labelled the ‘narrative turn,’ that is, the migration of the term ‘narrative’ from literary theory and the humanities to the social and even the theoretical sciences, has led to the widening of that term’s definition. As literary theorist Gerald Prince (2012, 23) has shown, ‘narrative’ may now be substituted for such words as ‘explanation,’ ‘argumentation,’ ‘ideology,’ ‘hypothesis,’ and ‘message.’ Thus, when Chartier (2006, 970) writes that ‘the acknowledgment that history is narrative’ has led to different types of analysis, does he take the term in Phelan’s narrow narratological sense? Or, more likely, does he allude to the 14 P. CARRARD fact that he and his fellow historians have come to ‘acknowledge’ that their findings, in most cases, are presented in the form of a text? I do not want to conclude by giving the impression that literary theory in general, narratology in particular, can offer definitive solutions to some of the problems still debated in historical and more generally cultural theory. However, such controversies as the ones surrounding not just White but the supposed ‘revival of narrative,’ or the evils of ‘storytelling,’ could be reframed using a definition of narrative, or pointing to the competing definitions of the term. The same thing, of course, could be said of ‘fiction,’ ‘literature,’ and several other terms that Gallie (1964) might have added to his list of ‘essentially contested concepts.’ Notes 1. Information provided by Hayden White and François Hartog in email messages of February 20 and 24, 2017. 2. For the linguist and literary theorist Régine Robin (2003, 296, 297), the problem of White’s models is different: they fall under ‘1970s structuralism,’ and White has not significantly adjusted them over the years. 3. White responded to Chartier in ‘A Rejoinder: A Response to Professor Chartier’s Four Question,’ Storia della Storiografia 27 (1995), 63–70. Reprinted in Chartier 1997, 28–38. 4. According to the email message I received from Loriga on 11/25/2017. 5. Kalifa (2015, 582) makes the same error when he writes, as part of the entry ‘Narrative’ in the Dictionnaire de l’historien: ‘1973: the American Hayden White, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, publishes Metahistory…’ In 1973, White was at Wesleyan University, in the state of Connecticut. On the contribution of White to ‘history’ strictly speaking, see Vann 2009. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Philippe Carrard is Professor of French Emeritus at the University of Vermont and currently a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth College, in the U.S.A. His research has mainly concerned conventions of writing in factual, non-fictional discourse. In this area, he has published Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), The French Who Fought for Hitler: Memories from the Outcasts (Cambridge UP, 2011), and History as a Kind of Writing: Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography (U of Chicago P, 2017). Under the title L’Histoire s'écrit (Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne, 2017), he has also published the first book-length French translation of essays, reviews, and interviews by Hayden White. RETHINKING HISTORY 15 References Bann, Stephen. 2009. “History: Myth and Narrative: A Coda for Roland Barthes and Hayden White.” In Re-Figuring Hayden White, edited by Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska and Hans Kellner, 144–161. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bédarida, François. 1995b. “Les responsabilités de l’historien expert.” In Passés recomposés: Champs et chantiers de l’histoire, edited by Jean Boutier and Dominique Julia, 136–144. Paris: Autrement. Bédarida, François. 1995. “Postface.” In L’histoire et le métier d’historien en France 1945–1995, edited by François Bédarida, 415–422. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Berthelot, Jean-Michel, ed. 2001. Epistémologie des sciences sociales. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Centre national de la recherche scientifique, ed. 1993. Ecrire l’histoire du temps présent. Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Chartier, Roger. 1997. “Four Questions for Hayden White.” In On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, 28–38. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chartier, Roger. 2006. “Récit et histoire.” In Dictionnaire des sciences humaines, edited by Sylvie Mesure and Patrick Savidan, 969–972. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Chartier, Roger. 2009. Au bord de la falaise: L’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude. New revised ed. Paris: Albin Michel. Delacroix, Christian, François Dosse, Patrick Garcia, and Nicolas Offenstadt, eds. 2010. Historiographies: Concepts et débats. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Doran, Robert, ed. 2013. Philosophy of History After Hayden White. London: Bloomsbury. Dosse, François. 2011. Pierre Nora: Homo historicus. Paris: Perrin. Gallie, Walter. 1964. Philosophy and the Historical Understanding. New York: Schocken Books. Gauvard, Claude, and Jean-François Sirinelli, eds. 2015. Dictionnaire de l’historien. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1992. “Just One Witness.” In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, edited by Saul Friedlander, 82–96. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartog, François. 2007. Vidal-Naquet: Historien en personne. Paris: La Découverte. Hartog, François. 2013. Croire en l’histoire. Paris: Flammarion. Jablonka, Ivan. 2012. Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus: Une enquête. Paris: Seuil. Jablonka, Ivan. 2014. L’histoire est une littérature contemporaine: Manifeste pour les sciences sociales. Paris: Seuil. Jablonka, Ivan. 2016. Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes. Paris: Seuil. Kalifa, Dominique. 2015. “Récit.” In Dictionnaire de l’historien, edited by Claude Gauvran and Jean-François Sirinelli, 581–583. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Kellner, Hans. 2006. “Hayden White, 1928.” In Dictionnaire des sciences humaines, edited by Sylvie Mesure and Patrick Savidan, 1230–1231. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Korhonen, Kuisma, ed. 2006. Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/ Literature Debate. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kreiswirth, Martin. 2005. “Narrative Turn in the Humanities.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 377–382. New York: Routledge. 16 P. CARRARD Lavocat, Françoise. 2016. Fait et fiction: Pour une frontière. Paris: Seuil. Lepetit, Bernard. 1999. “L’historicité d’un modèle Historiographique.” In Carnets et croquis, 80–87. Paris: Albin Michel. Loriga, Sabina. 2016. “Au-delà du langage.” In L’expérience historiographique : Autour de Jacques Revel, edited by Antoine Lilti, Sabina Loriga, and Jean-Frédéric Schaub, 51–65. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. McIntosh-Varjabédian, Fiona. 2008.“L’écriture de l’histoire et la légitimité des études textuelles : Peut-on encore parler de linguistic ou de cultural turn en littérature générale et comparée ?” Accessed 2/2/2017 VoxPoetica.org/sflgc/biblio/mcintosh. htlm. Mesure, Sylvie, and Patrick Savidan, eds. 2006. Dictionnaire des sciences humaines. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Noiriel, Gérard. 1998. Qu’est-ce que l’histoire contemporaine ?. Paris: Hachette. Noiriel, Gérard. 2003. Penser avec, penser contre: Itinéraire d’un historien. Paris: Belin. Noiriel, Gérard. 2005. Sur la ‘crise’ de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard. Offenstadt, Nicolas, ed. 2009. Les mots de l’historien. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail. Paul, Herman. 2011. Hayden White: The Historical Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Phelan, James. 2007. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus, GA: Ohio State University Press. Prince, Gerald. 2012. “Récit minimal et narrativité.” In Le récit minimal, edited by Sabrinelle Bedrane, Françoise Revaz, and Michel Viegnes, 23–32. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle. Prost, Antoine. 2006. Douze leçons sur l’histoire. Paris: Seuil. Revel, Jacques. 2001. “Les sciences historiques.” In Epistémologie des sciences sociales, edited by Jean-Michel Berthelot, 21–76. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Ricoeur, Paul. 1990a. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1990b. Time and Narrative. vol. 3. 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Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 2010a. The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007. Edited and with an introduction by Robert Doran. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. RETHINKING HISTORY 17 White, Hayden. 2010b. “Postmodernisme et histoire.” In Historiographies. vol. 2, edited by Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, Patrick Garcia and Nicolas Offenstadt, 839– 844. Paris: Gallimard. White, Hayden. 2014. The Practical Past. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. White, Hayden. 2017. L’histoire s’écrit: Essais, recensions, interviews. Translated and introduced by Philippe Carrard. Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne.