Appeared in Chinese translation in The World History Review 7(3): 24-46.

Hayden White: A Portrait in Seven Poses

Herman Paul

Abstract
This article sketches a portrait of Hayden White (1928-2018), partly by analyzing his work,
partly by interrogating him in interview form (drawing on a conversation held back in 2005).
Although this mixture of genres – commentary and interview – may seem unusual, it serves
two purposes: it makes this introduction to White’s thinking as accessible as possible,
especially for readers not yet familiar with Metahistory or The Content of the Form, while at
the same time allowing for a multiplicity of voices. These voices include not only those of
interviewer and interviewee, but also, more importantly, those of the several ‘Whites’ that
this article proposes to distinguish. White, after all, was not the kind of author who can easily
be captured in a single frame. This article therefore portrays White in several poses, on
different moments in time: as a historian, a philosopher of history, a literary theorist, a cultural
theorist, an essayist, a teacher, and, last but not least, an existentialist humanist. In
distinguishing these seven (partly overlapping) poses, the article seeks to offer an
interpretation of White that is fundamentally multivocal, trying to do justice to a variety of
genres, poses, and voices found in White.

Keywords
Hayden White, philosophy of history, historical theory, metahistory, narrativism

Introduction
‘What is the title of my lecture?’ It is a Monday morning, a few hours before Hayden White
will treat his audience in Groningen, the Netherlands, to a virtuous specimen of improvised
lecturing. ‘Ah, the utopia thing!1 Not the piece about figure and fulfilment? That will interest

1 Hayden White, ‘The Future of Utopia in History’, Historein 7 (2007), 11-19.

1
you: it’s about the problem of “beginning.”2 I claim that Augustine’s notion of modernitas is a
concept we can begin again with if we have been defeated by history, or if history has slipped
out of our hands. You know that hodie means today and nunc means now. But modernitas is
a qualitative moment, a moment of decision. It’s a Jetztzeit, as Walter Benjamin calls it.
Obviously, this goes back to the Christian idea of incarnation, the moment when history breaks
into two parts. This break allows people to answer the question that, in a sense, all modernist
literature from Virginia Woolf and James Joyce to Ezra Pound is about: how do you make a
tradition into something new? The pagan classics didn’t have an answer. They couldn’t escape
from Giambattista Vico’s eternal cycles. But the early Christians, long before Immanuel Kant
and the Frankfurt School, invented a concept by which they could transform –
transubstantiate, if you like – their Jewish past in such a way that the old became new. Moses
became a foreshadowing of Jesus; the Jewish people a figura of the Christian Church. That
was sheer genius!’
White laughs soundlessly and winks at the waitress, who puts two cups of steaming
coffee on the table. He cannot help lecturing, even here, in this almost empty café. His hoarse
voice easily reaches the wooden ceiling. But as soon as he hears himself talking, he changes
the subject, asks questions, listens briefly, and quickly comes back with an anecdote or an
objection. ‘I’m afraid that historians aren’t too keen on my views – they’re still suspicious of
my ideas. Who are you expecting at the lecture this afternoon?’ The interviewer answers, but
meanwhile is trying to figure out who is sitting opposite him, in a grey jacket and turtleneck
pullover. Hayden White, the much-praised, much-criticized humanities scholar, who is he?
What makes him so controversial, so fascinating, so elusive? Is he a historian, a philosopher
of history, a literary theorist? Where does he stand, what does he think, what does he believe
in?
The pages that follow try to portray Hayden White, partly by analyzing his work, partly
by interrogating him in interview form. Although this mixture of genres – commentary and
interview – may seem unusual, it serves two purposes: it makes this introduction to White’s
thinking as accessible as possible, especially for readers not yet familiar with Metahistory or
The Content of the Form, while at the same time allowing for a multiplicity of voices. These

2An earlier version of this talk was published as Hayden White, ‘The Metaphysics of Western
Historiography’, Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 1 (2004), 1-16.

2
voices include not only those of interviewer and interviewee, but also, more importantly,
those of the several ‘Whites’ that I would like to distinguish. White, after all, was not the kind
of author who can easily be captured in a single frame. In what follows, we will encounter
White in different identities as well as on different moments in time – as an emerging historian
who explored the world of medieval Christianity in Rome, as a celebrated theorist who
challenged rationalist worries about the human imagination, and as a 76-year-old emeritus
professor who looked back on his work.3 The result is a portrait in seven poses, or an
interpretation of White that tries to do justice to a multiplicity of disciplinary identities and
theoretical stances that White adopted over the course of a career that stretched from the
1950s until his regrettable death in March 2018.4

1. Historian
Who was Hayden White? Once upon a time, White was a historian. As a student at Wayne
University in Detroit he had discovered the Middle Ages. A world populated by popes and
priests, who in the name of God seemed to control the whole of society – what a foreign
country this was for a working-class boy who had converted to atheism as a teenager! In the
1950s, White stayed as a Fulbright scholar in Rome, where he scoured the Vatican libraries to
investigate the role of Bernard of Clairvaux in the papal schism of 1130. Rome also brought
White other things, which seem more interesting in light of his later development. He
purchased a sizeable collection of early modern printed books – nowadays The Hayden White
Rare Book Collection in de University of California Library in Santa Cruz – corresponded with
Ezra Pound, the modernist writer, and met the art critic Mario Praz, for whose journal English
Miscellany he wrote his first essays on philosophy of history. These articles, like his panegyric
on Benedetto Croce (1963), reveal how deeply White must have breathed in Italian cultural
life shortly after the Second World War. Nonetheless, the doctoral dissertation he produced
in Rome showed few signs of his later objections to the academic historical profession. The

3 The interview took place in Groningen, the Netherlands, on 18 April 2005. A written
account, from which all the quotations used here are taken, was published in Dutch as
Herman Paul, ‘Een beslissend moment van geschiedenis: Hayden White en de erfenis van
het existentialisme’ [A decisive moment in history: Hayden White and the legacy of
existentialism], Groniek 38 (2005), 581-591.
4 My analysis of White’s work builds on Herman Paul, Hayden White: The Historical

Imagination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

3
thesis was a true medievalist exercise: detailed, copiously documented, and by the author’s
own account intended as an ‘objective’ interpretation of the papal schism.5
Although White in the 1960s expanded his field of research to include European
intellectual history in the early modern and modern periods, most of his work remained
academic in style and tone. Nonetheless, existential questions started to surface in his
writings, cautiously at first, but increasingly more emphatically. What is the purpose of
studying the past? How do societies relate to their pasts? Typical are the introductions that
White wrote to the book series Major Traditions of World Civilization, which he edited for
Harper & Row. In almost every volume, on traditions as varied as the Enlightenment, Fascism,
and Islam, White asked: What elements of this tradition do we recognize in our own time,
what does this tradition have to say about democracy and technology, and how does it help
us promote humane values in an increasingly technological world? White’s ideas about such
humane values emerged from the Western Civilization courses that he taught at Rochester
University in the 1960s. They also found their way into a two-volume textbook on European
humanism since the Renaissance that he co-authored with Willson H. Coates. Committed to
humanism of the kind embodied by Albert Camus, the book offered an unashamedly Whiggish
account of the rise of liberal humanism in Europe, which White and Coates declared to be of
vital importance to the future of the West. Tellingly, their second volume ended with an
epilogue in which ‘exemplary humanists’ like Camus were put on a pedestal for embodying
humanist values in totalitarian times and, more specifically, for their unbroken faith in the
creativity of the human will.6 Grumpy reviewers were thus given plenty of ammunition. Could
this be called ‘objective’ writing of history? Could this qualify as historical scholarship?
White’s impatience with such voices and his growing eagerness to call the conventions
of the profession into question were apparent from ‘The Burden of History’ (1966) – a youthful
diatribe and utopian program worthy of the roaring 1960s that appeared in History and Theory
(the only article without footnotes ever included in the pages of this journal). ‘Down with
history!’ White cried in this pamphlet, referring to what he called the modernist revolt against
history. Hadn’t George Eliot, in her Middlemarch (1874), painted a true-to-life portrait of

5 Herman Paul, ‘A Weberian Medievalist: Hayden White in the 1950s’, Rethinking History 12
(2008), 75-102.
6 Willson H. Coates and Hayden V. White, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual

History of Western Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 443-468.

4
academic historiography in the figure of Edward Casaubon, a historian indifferent to sunlight?
Hadn’t history moved as far away from life as Jørgen Tesman, the husband of Hedda Gabler in
Henrik Ibsen’s play (1890), who failed to understand the difference between a honeymoon
and an archival research trip? Didn’t the twentieth-century historian bear some resemblance
to Antoine Roquentin, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s La nausée (1938), who was incapable of creative
historical work because he lacked the courage and the desire to lead a life of his own?
Modernist authors like Eliot, Ibsen, and Sartre, like Friedrich Nietzsche before them, had
understood that history can be life-threatening if historical research is no longer conducted
out of a desire to understand the present and embrace the future. ‘In the world in which we
daily live, anyone who studies the past as an end in itself must appear to be either an
antiquarian, fleeing from the problems of the present into a purely personal past, or a kind of
cultural necrophile, that is, one who finds in the dead and dying a value he can never find in
the living.’7 This, then, is a harsh judgement on the historical studies that White had pursued
so diligently in the 1950s. If historiography fails to place itself in the service of dreams, ideals,
and orientation in a confusing world, it is doomed to die.
Forty years later, White still supports this view. ‘There’s no point denying it’, he says.
‘Things are not looking very bright for the profession these days. The average article in The
American Historical Review or The English Historical Review is deadly boring. A lot of historical
writing is nothing more than an archival report along the lines of, “I spent half a year in the
archives in Florence, studied local house-building there, and can now state the following…”
People fail to realize that historical writing is also interpretation, from the moment they select
between what is and what is not important in the Florentine archives. Just as people fail to
recognize that historiography needs more interpretation, if you take into account the flood of
historical information we are inundated with, and that we have to adopt an attitude to the
past for our personal orientation in the world. Historians are strongly opposed to all this, and
especially to theories about it.’

2. Philosopher of history
All this helps explain why, in the years around 1970, the phrase ‘we medievalists’ in White’s
prose made way for ‘those historians’. White no longer saw himself as a member of the

7 Hayden V. White, ‘The Burden of History’, History and Theory 5 (1966), 111-134, at 125.

5
historical guild and came to be regarded primarily as a philosopher of history – a second
answer to the question who White was. For better or worse, ‘philosopher of history’ is an
unprotected title: anyone who thinks about history can claim to be a philosopher of history.
Consequently, the term ‘philosophy of history’ encompasses a broad variety of genres and
practices. By the early 1970s, however, American philosophers of history generally
understood their activity to revolve around questions of historical explanation. Initially, White
joined this debate, elicited by Carl G. Hempel’s so-called covering-law model. At Wesleyan
University, where he taught from 1973 to 1978, White became close friends with Louis O.
Mink, editor of History and Theory and a notable contributor to the debate on historical
explanation. This friendship turned out to be intellectually productive. When in 1970 Mink
wrote a pioneering article on historical explanations in narrative form, White was quick to give
a lecture in which he distilled from Mink’s insights an ambitious model for historiographical
analysis.8 Together, Mink and White developed the idea that not explanations but stories are
most characteristic of historians’ work. What distinguishes historical writing is not an appeal
to universal patterns, but an attempt to capture the individuality of the past in narrative form.
This fascination with narrative representation soon earned Mink and White the name of
‘narrativists’.
White’s magnum opus, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (1973), is often read as the flagship of narrativist philosophy of history. At first sight,
the book was a history of nineteenth-century thought, conceptually reminiscent of Erich
Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). Just as Auerbach had selected key figures to discuss the
development of ‘realism’ in European literature, White showed how men like Jules Michelet,
Alexis de Tocqueville, G. W. F. Hegel, Leopold von Ranke, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Benedetto
Croce had approached the past from widely divergent perspectives. Characteristic of these
nineteenth-century figures is that they were committed to different styles of historical
representation, from highly romantic to deeply ironic. That is to say that their work was based
on different ‘metahistorical’ (metaphysical) premises regarding the nature of historical reality
and the task of the historian. Whereas Tocqueville and Ranke, for instance, viewed the past
as a realm of colliding forces, Tocqueville was less optimistic than Ranke about the possibility

8Richard T. Vann, ‘Louis O. Mink’s Linguistic Turn’, History and Theory 26 (1987), 1-14. See
also Samuel James, ‘Louis Mink, “Postmodernism”, and the Vocation of Historiography’,
Modern Intellectual History 7 (2010), 151-184.

6
of reconciliation between such forces. Nietzsche, for White, rejected ‘the burden of history’
in the name of human well-being, whereas Croce, from his ironic position, refused to take a
political stance in his work.
However, this classification of nineteenth-century ‘styles of history’ was not the only
ambition of White’s book. Metahistory also offered a model of how historical writing can be
analyzed. Just as Northrop Frye, the Canadian literary theorist, had distinguished a number of
archetypal forms of literary representation in The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), White claimed
that historical writing comes into four forms: romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. Why are
there only four basic plot types? White’s answer was that historians have only a limited
number of story forms to their disposal. Tocqueville’s and Ranke’s colliding forces can
continue to fight each other (tragedy), be overcome by a heroic individual (romance), reach
some form of reconciliation (comedy), or be represented as a spectacle to be consumed from
afar (satire) – without many other options being available. Inspired by structuralist theorists
like Claude Lévi-Strauss, White even went so far as to state that this fourfold typology provides
an exhaustive survey of how people can tell (historical) stories: there are no other forms of
narrative representation. Interestingly, this also applied to the other foursomes presented in
Metahistory: four types of argument, four forms of ideological commitment, and, most
importantly, four ‘tropes’ or figures of speech that indicate the kind of actors that historians
see at work in history (individuals, classes, divine powers?), the kinds of things that historians
expect to encounter in the past (revolutions, miracles?), or , in short, what they understand
history to be. For White, the four tropes – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony –
were the ‘four principal modes of historical consciousness’, ‘the deep structural forms of the
historical imagination’, or, as he later would put it, the four dominant ‘modes of human
consciousness’.9
Mainly because of the book’s introduction, in which White laid down his structuralist
program, Metahistory quickly became the single most influential book in philosophy of history
after Robin Collingwood’s The Idea of History (1946). Not least through its juicy one-liners (‘it

9Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), xi, 31; White, ‘Introduction:
Tropology, Discourse, and the Modes of Human Consciousness’, in White, Tropics of
Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978),
1-25, at 12-13.

7
is possible to view historical consciousness as a specifically Western prejudice’), Metahistory
became a book to which friend and foe had to relate. Historiography as ‘a verbal structure in
the form of a narrative prose discourse’ – was that a legitimate way of looking at texts that
aimed at giving an adequate representation of historical reality? White’s thesis that ‘the best
grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic
or moral rather than epistemological’ – was that a declaration of war on the search for ‘truth’,
a bomb under the traditional self-image of historical studies? Did Metahistory offer useful
insight into modern, Western presuppositions underlying the study of history? Or was the
book primarily a manifesto for alternatives to a scholarly praxis in which everything seemed
to revolve around epistemological certainty? Although most of the storm has blown over by
now, Metahistory still plays a significant role in debates over historical narrative, truth, and
representation.10
And this was not yet all. Against the background of ‘The Burden of History’,
Metahistory can also be read as a passionate plea for a historiography that wants to question
the modern boundaries between science and art, history and myth, or fact and fiction. A
reader who manages to read the entire book instead of merely the introduction – ‘a piece that
explains what I should have done, not what I actually did in Metahistory’, as White once
confided to me – discovers that the four tropes also correspond to four ways in which ‘reason’
and ‘imagination’ can relate to one another. Although, in White’s reading, historians with
scientific ambitions typically play off the two against each other (metonymy), with the result
that reason and imagination can no longer be meaningfully connected (irony), it is also
possible to deny the difference between the two (metaphor) or to see reason and imagination
as mutually dependent dimensions of the human mind (synecdoche). Especially the final
chapter, on his former hero Croce, showed White’s disappointment in Croce’s irony, that is,
his partition of rationality (the study of history) and irrationality (the politics of Benito
Mussolini). Metahistory inquires to what extent this irony can be overcome. Can the original
unity of imagination and reason be restored? This is not exactly a trivial question, as White
warned that an ironic incapacity to mediate between reason and imagination, or between

10White, Metahistory, 2, ix, xii. For the book’s impact, see Richard T. Vann, ‘The Reception of
Hayden White’, History and Theory 37 (1998), 143-161; Wolfgang Weber, ‘Hayden White in
Deutschland’, Storia della Storiografia 25 (1994), 89-102; Philippe Carrard, ‘Hayden White
and/in France: Receptions, Translations, Questions’, Rethinking History 22 (2018), 581-597.

8
history and myth, can bring about nothing less than the end of Western civilization. So, for
White, the pressing question was: Can historians rehabilitate the imagination? Can they help
save Western civilization through a ricorso from irony to metaphor?11
Interpreted in this way, Metahistory was a contribution to philosophy of history in a
much broader sense of the word than American philosophers of history in the 1970s were
used to. Metahistory was not an analysis of traditions within the academic discipline of history
– let alone, as some have argued, an argument about the rationality of historical studies that
significantly downplays the importance of research. When White discussed the moral and
aesthetic reasons that historians have for choosing a ‘perspective on history’, he was not
claiming that research does not matter. He rather posed the question whether, in view of the
world’s needs, we might prefer to relate to the past through other means than meticulous
archival research. White’s guiding question, in other words, was why on earth we would prefer
professional historical studies as found in, for instance, The American Historical Review when
romantic histories in the style of Michelet or emancipatory historiography à la Marx could
mean so much more to a world at risk. Metahistory was therefore not a book on professional
standards of judgment that historians use in determining whether, for instance, Jonathan
Israel’s books on the early Enlightenment are more convincing than Peter Gay’s The
Enlightenment. Metahistory rather raised the more fundamental question whether we should
practice academic historical writing at all. Metahistory was a book about mental patterns,
conventions of thought, and ‘metahistorical’ assumptions. It sought to demonstrate on formal
grounds that history can be legitimately practiced in several ways. Most importantly, however,
it passionately argued for a creative, non-ironic, morally committed form of historical writing
in which reason and imagination enrich each other. As the book concluded, on a utopian-
nostalgic note:

If it can be shown that Irony is only one of a number of possible perspectives on

history, each of which has its own good reasons for existence on a poetic and moral
level of awareness, the Ironic attitude will have begun to be deprived of its status as
the necessary perspective from which to view the historical process. Historians and

11Herman Paul, ‘Hayden White and the Crisis of Historicism’, in Re-Figuring Hayden White,
ed. Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domańska, and Hans Kellner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009), 54-73.

9
 philosophers of history will then be freed 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 own moral and aesthetic aspirations.
And historical consciousness will stand open to the re-establishment of its links with
the great poetic, scientific, and philosophical concerns which inspired the classic
practitioners and theorists of its golden age in the nineteenth century.12

3. Literary theorist
‘Yes’, White smiles, ‘it was naive of me to think that historians would take any notice of this. I
was naive to hope that the historical discipline could change. On this point – as on so many,
by the way – I have changed my mind. I now hold higher expectations of what is happening
outside of the historical profession. For historians do not have a monopoly on the past.
Journalists and writers engage in it too – often in more original and relevant ways than
historians do.’ For this reason, White increasingly turned his attention to modernist novelists
of the sort already discussed in ‘The Burden of History’: writers like Proust, Woolf, and Mann.
This fascination for modernist literature went so far that, after retiring from the University of
California in Santa Cruz in 1995, White taught comparative literature at Stanford University
for a few years. We therefore also encounter him as a literary theorist – his third professional
pose.
Obviously, literary theory had been a source of inspiration to White long before the
1990s, especially when White was looking for concepts with which to analyze historical texts.
For instance, Roland Barthes, alongside Kenneth Burke, was a major source of inspiration for
the kind of discourse analysis championed in Tropics of Discourse (1978). Building on the
problem of Metahistory – how can reason and imagination reunite? – White claimed in this
collection of essays that discourse cannot be reduced to either reason or imagination.
Oscillating between these poles, discourse creates some kind of bridge between the two. Is it
necessary to add that White classified the various ways in which discourse can do this in terms
of his tropology (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony)? In classical Greek, tropos
already meant ‘movement’. For White, a tropological analysis of discourse therefore provided
an answer to the question how imagination and reason can find each other:

12 White, Metahistory, 434.

10
 The tropological theory of discourse gives us understanding of the existential
continuity between truth and error, ignorance and understanding, or to put it
another way, imagination and thought. For too long the relationship between these
pairs has been conceived as an opposition. The tropological theory of discourse helps
us understand how speech mediates between these supposed oppositions, just as
discourse itself mediates between our apprehension of those aspects of experience
still ‘strange’ to us and those aspects of it which we ‘understand’ because we have
found an order of words adequate to its domestication.13

Literary theory moved center stage when White started to explore the narrative features of
historical representations. Whereas kindred spirits like Louis Mink and Arthur Danto tried to
develop a philosophy of narrative representation, White became increasingly interested in the
rhetoric of narrative texts – novels no less than historical monographs. Following up on Tropics
of Discourse, White analyzed this rhetoric initially through a tropological prism. In an essay on
Karl Marx and Gustav Flaubert (1979), for instance, he showed that a tropological analysis of
narrative discourse can lay bare similarities between texts that at first sight belong to rather
different genres. What Der achtzehnte Brumaire (1852) and L’Éducation sentimentale (1869)
have in common is that their protagonists – in Marx the bourgeoisie, in Flaubert a young man
called Frédéric Moreau – undergo a development that corresponds stylistically to a transition
from metaphor via metonymy and synecdoche to irony. ‘[W]hat begins as an epic or heroic
effort at the implementation of values . . . progresses through a series of delusory triumphs
and real defeats, to an ironic acceptance of the necessity of abandoning ideals to the
accommodation to realities in the end.’14
Although White remained fascinated by this type of tropological analysis,15 essays from
the 1990s and early 2000s added a second argument for comparing history and literature.
Novels, White claimed, are better at unraveling the intricacies of how people relate to their

13 White, ‘Introduction’, 21.

14 Hayden White, ‘The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx and Flaubert’, in
The Concept of Style, ed. Leonard B. Meyer and Berel Lang (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 213-229, at 216.
15 Hayden White, ‘The Rhetoric of Interpretation’, Poetics Today 8 (1988), 253-274.

11
pasts than historical articles or monographs. Whereas historians try to historicize the past in
such a way as to keep it at arm’s length from the present, novels like War and Peace (1869)
give us a sense of how much is lost in this process of professional distancing. Leo Tolstoy not
only gives his readers ‘the “feel” of war’, he also allows them to experience how the battlefield
in the perception of a frontline soldier is much more chaotic and morally ambiguous than in
the stylized stories that historians tell afterwards.16 Here, then, we see a significant shift in
White’s interests. Whereas White’s tropological work had primarily stressed the similarities
between history and literature, from the 1990s onwards he started to draw attention to what
makes novels more suitable for reflection on complicated historical themes.
In my conversation with White, I therefore bring up two novels which I know he has
read: Austerlitz (2001) by W. G. Sebald, on the insatiable desire to get as closely as possible to
a past that no longer exists, and The Plot Against America (2004) by Philip Roth, a novel that
tries to think through the counter-factual reality of an American presidency of Charles A.
Lindbergh. Do these books embody something of White’s ideal? Do they raise the great
questions about history and historicity that historians professionally avoid?
White slowly stirs his sweetened double coffee. ‘Roth’, he begins, ‘shows the fascist
possibilities implicit in America in the 1930s. He reminds his readers of a contingency of history
that is systematically erased by historians. But Roth has a problem: he suggests that history
after the Second World War would not have been different if Lindbergh had held power for
two years. For him, the Lindbergh period is a side road which in due course rejoins the highway
of history. Which is, of course, not realistic. Austerlitz by Sebald is a much better example. I
don’t know of any other book that deals so intensely with the problematic relation between
history and memory. Memory has become an urgent theme in the twentieth century. There
are so many people with traumatic memories of the Second World War and there is so much
witness literature – a typical modern genre, by the way, made possible by the moral status of
victims in our culture. We need to come to terms with all these testimonies and stories. Sebald
has shown with unrivaled skill how difficult that is.’17

16 Hayden White, ‘Against Historical Realism: A Reading of War and Peace’, New Left Review
46 (2007), 89-110, at 108.
17 Hayden White, ‘The Practical Past’, Historein 10 (2010), 10-19. White’s fascination with

witness literature (books like Se questo è un uomo by Primo Levi) is apparent from Hayden
White, ‘Figural Realism in Witness Literature’, Parallax 10 (2004), 113-124.

12
 ‘Generally speaking, I believe that novels – not in principle, but in practice – are more
successful in addressing such great questions than historical monographs. Consider the
immigration issue in Europe. Historians can write about the cheap workers who were
exploited in Western Europe for two generations. But what it means that the third generation
does not want to go away, because they speak German and feel German instead of Turkish,
that is something historians prefer not to comment on. What this problem means, how we
can deal with it, do you know any historian who has an answer to that?’

4. Cultural theorist
What this question illustrates is that the three poses distinguished so far – historian,
philosopher of history, and literary theorist – do not yet fully cover White’s work. His interests
were never confined to issues of historical and literary representation. This is perhaps most
visible in the ‘history of consciousness program’ that White ran from 1978 to 1995 at the
University of California in Santa Cruz. The program’s broad name testified to its ambition of
transcending disciplinary conventions and compartments. ‘It was a field of research that did
not exist, that had to invent its own existence, so that we ourselves could happily figure out
what to do, how to do it, and who to recruit for it.’ In his own work, White shows a similarly
broad range of interests. When we meet in Groningen, he has just spent time in Berlin, where
according to the newsletter of the American Academy he conducted research on ‘questions
of exemplarity, sequencing, spatial placement, contextualizing, presentation, and
dramatization’ in German museums.18
White laughs ironically. ‘If you want to call my walking through museums “research”,
well, yes, then I do research on historical conceptualization in museums. Don’t forget that I’m
retired, I’m not obliged anymore to do anything… Interestingly, Berlin is working hard to come
to terms with its past. It is thinking in all kinds of ways about how to represent the past. This
happens in a fairly traditional sort of historiography, but also, in more interesting ways, in
novels, plays, and museums. Think of the new Jewish Museum, the Holocaust monument, or
the Topografie des Terrors. What interests me is how people use the spatial, visual,
multimedia possibilities of a museum or public space to represent temporal relations. What
can they do differently or better in space or images than they can in words? To what extent

18 ‘Fellow Profile: Hayden White: A Historian for the Present’, The Berlin Journal 6 (2003), 28.

13
do new genres generate new forms of self-reflection and self-criticism? What moral or
aesthetic ideals, if any, do they want to serve?’
To capture these kind of questions, we might want to call White not only a historian,
philosopher of history, and literary theorist, but also a cultural theorist. If ‘cultural theory
involves the analysis of culture in its broadest sense: from culture as a way of life to culture as
the result of aesthetic practices’,19 then White was a cultural theorist who connected both
elements from the definition just quoted by showing that ‘ways of life’ are always shaped by
aesthetic practices of representation. White was happy to extend this argument to the
political sphere. Invited to speak about representations of European identity, he emphasized
that ‘“Europe” has never existed anywhere except in discourse’ – that is, in a discourse that
has always excluded non-European ‘others’ and thus has given political legitimacy to military
interventions aimed at increasing Europe’s economic power.20 Likewise, when arguing that
political loyalty is modeled after the affective bond between children and their father, he was
trying to understand a political phenomenon in terms of an aesthetic practice (representations
of father-child relationships that are deeply rooted in ‘the history of consciousness’).21 White
was therefore an author who sought to understand not only historical or literary texts but also
political phenomena in terms of aesthetic practices of representation.
The label of cultural theorist, however, is not only warranted because of the broad
range of cultural practices that White liked to comment upon. The label is also a fitting one
because of the ideology-critical connotations of ‘theory’. Although the English words ‘theory’
and ‘theorist’ have complicated, sometimes even contradictory connotations, intellectual
analysis for cultural theorists is never an end in itself. Cultural theory wants to expose ‘social
pathologies, wrong ways of living’, for instance by exposing power structures and hidden
agendas.22 In particular, cultural theorists seek to unmask the ideological meanings and

19 Rhiannon Mason, ‘Cultural Theory and Museum Studies’, in A Companion to Museum

Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 17-32, at 17.
20 Hayden White, ‘The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity’, in

Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, ed. Bo Stråth (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000),
67-86, at 67.
21 Hayden White, ‘The Problem With Modern Patriotism’, 2b 13 (1998), 119-130.
22 Karen Ng, ‘Ideology Critique from Hegel and Marx to Critical Theory’, Constellations 22

(2015), 393-404, at 393.

14
political implications of ‘traditional’ notions of progress, continuity, teleology, causality,
agency, and authorship – concepts that all figured prominently in White’s work.23
Although White’s entire oeuvre may be characterized as a contribution to cultural
theory, his fourth professional pose became most manifest in essays and interviews about the
evil that is called ‘capitalism’. White did not hesitate to claim that ‘Corporate America’ was on
a par with totalitarian regimes like Fascist Italy and the Communist Soviet Union inasmuch as
it forces people into ideological loyalty. Although the leaders of Corporate America – not
elected politicians, but CEOs of large companies – pretend to treat the customer as king, in
fact they are always forcing citizens into consumerist straightjackets, that is, into the persona
of someone who derives his or her identity from the stuff that he or she buys. Capitalism
encourages people ‘[to] live the American dream of consumer capitalism’, indifferent about
the ever-growing mountains of waste which this consumer behavior produces. As a cultural
theorist, White was at his best when examining how defenders of capitalist consumerism try
to tackle this problem through an ‘ideology of recycling’. According to White, this is nothing
but a modern variant of alchemical thinking (‘that we’re going to turn shit back into gold’), all
the more attractive for allowing people to buy yet another new pair of shoes at Amazon.com
without feeling guilty about it.24
It is especially in addressing ‘the inherent contradictions of capitalism’ that White, to
the surprise of some of his readers, liked to present himself as a Marxist. This does not mean
that he sought to rethink his philosophy of history in light of Marxist notions like ‘class
struggle’ and ‘class consciousness’ or that he wanted to dust off his Lucien Goldmann, the
humanist Marxist whose work he once admired.25 White made abundantly clear that he had
little use for Marxist categories of history. What fascinated him in Marxism was rather its
tradition of ideology critique, which he regarded as indispensable in a cultural context where
‘fundamental changes in our social system – by which I mean, of course, the capitalist social
system – are . . . necessary for survival’. If we want to prevent the nightmare of ‘a life lived on

23 Warren Breckman, ‘Times of Theory: On Writing the History of French Theory’, Journal of
the History of Ideas 71 (2010), 339-361, at 342.
24 White, ‘Problem With Modern Patriotism’, 124, 130; Frederick Aldama, ‘Hayden White

Talks Trash’, Bad Subjects 55 (2011), 12-17, at 13, 16.

25 Hayden V. White, ‘The Tasks of Intellectual History’, The Monist 53 (1969), 606-630.

Together with Robert Anchor, White translated Goldmann’s Sciences humaines et

philosophie (1952) into English (1969).

15
the garbage dump’ from becoming a reality, then we will have to expose the contradictions of
capitalism. And what tools are better suited to this end than those developed in the rich
tradition of ideology critique that is known as Marxism?26
It is worth noting that White fashioned himself as a Marxist primarily in genres like the
interview, in which he could improvise on topical issues, or in classrooms settings in which he
could challenge an audience with provocative statements. Precisely to the extent that they
allow for improvisation, association, and provocation, these were genres and occasions dear
to a thinker who liked to teste out new ideas or unsettle conventional knowledge claims. In
addition to the four poses that I have associated with White so far – historian, philosopher of
history, literary theorist, and cultural theorist – I will therefore argue that White was an
essayist and, related to this, a teacher who tried to cultivate a certain kind of attitude in his
students.

5. Essayist
White has been called ‘perhaps the premier academic essayist of our time’.27 This refers not
only to essay-like review articles of the sort that White wrote for periodicals like The Times
Literary Supplement and The New York Times Book Review, but also, more broadly, to the fact
that White had a clear preference for the literary form of the essay. As his many think pieces,
commentaries, forewords, and afterwords attest, White was an author who liked to present
a creative idea in ten pages rather than spell out an argument in three hundred pages. He
preferred the essay because it enabled him to try out ideas and also, perhaps, because it is
was strictly bound to disciplinary conventions. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Metahistory
– basically a long essay – was the only book White ever wrote: Tropics of Discourse (1978), The
Content of the Form (1987), Figural Realism (1999), and The Practical Past (2014) are all
collections of articles.
Since the days of Michel de Montaigne, the essay has pre-eminently been a genre for
authors who want to provoke. White, too, liked to stir up discussions, preferably about deeply
ingrained or broadly accepted ideas. He enjoyed experimenting with unconventional points of
view – often by saying that these are just as legitimate as the orthodoxies he challenges – and

26 White, ‘Future of Utopia’, 16.

27 Vann, ‘Reception of Hayden White’, 144.

16
liked to phrase his arguments a little more provocatively than others would do. Unsurprisingly,
this lead to incomprehension, to irritation, and to a steady flow of critical commentary. If such
responses are indicative of an essayist’s success, White can be counted among the most
successful academic essayists of his generation.
This mechanism is perhaps best illustrated by White’s essays on Fascism and the
Holocaust. As early as 1970, in an article on German Idealism, White asserted that Johann
Gottlieb Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel, despite their work notoriously being abused by National
Socialists in Germany, was more refreshing and inspiring than American philosophers would
be ready to admit. Although politically dangerous, this German Idealist philosophy, for White,
was a source of inspiration to the extent that it dared to dream. As such, it was to be preferred
over a rationalist type of thinking that, ‘in the face of technological means to alleviate human
suffering, contents itself with piecemeal planning and sets a Scandinavian sharing of the
wealth as the outer limits of its oneiric aspirations’.28 In its plea for visionary politics – it was
the time when White joined left-wing demonstrations, signed petitions against the Vietnam
War, and took the police to court – this essay foreshadowed Metahistory’s claim that it is
better to give the historical imagination free rein than to curtail it on rationalist grounds. In
1982, White appeared unimpressed by the counter-argument that this might legitimize
politically unwelcome interpretations of history:

The kind of perspective on history that I have been implicitly praising is

conventionally associated with the ideologies of fascist regimes. . . . But having
granted as much, we must guard against a sentimentalism that would lead us to
write off such a conception of history simply because it has been associated with
fascist ideologies. One must face the fact that when it comes to apprehending the
historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for
preferring one way of construing its meaning over another.29

28 Hayden White, review of George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics, and History: Sources
of Hegelian Thought, History and Theory 9 (1970), 343-363, at 362.
29 Hayden White, ‘The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation’, in

White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 58-82, at 74-75.

17
Ungenerous readers have read this passage as implying that White saw no difference between
solid historical research and Holocaust revisionism. In a society where the Holocaust functions
as a negative moral benchmark, this naturally counts as an unforgivable sin. At a conference
organized by Saul Friedlander, White was therefore attacked as if he were a crypto-Fascist.30
Though this accusation was off target, it shows what kind of effects White’s provocations
could have.
White’s response – an exception to his habit of not replying to critics – has been
understood as compliant, as searching for a compromise.31 In fact, however, it contained a
new provocation. White claimed that the Holocaust can best be represented, not in the kind
of historical story so dear to Friedlander, but in the register of the ‘middle voice’. That is to
say that stylistic devices like the stream of consciousness in the modernist novel, in which the
separation between subject (narrator) and object (reality) largely evaporates, are most
suitable for representing catastrophic events (‘modernist events’) like the Holocaust. Precisely
to the extent that they allow for multiple voices to be represented, or different experiences
to be articulated, they befit the ‘unspeakable’ realities of the Holocaust much better than the
simple kind of story lines associated with romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire.32
Does this imply that White gave up on the tropes and plots from Metahistory? Or that
he distanced himself from his earlier claim that all historical writing fits his typology of
‘historiographical styles’? In a sense, these are questions mal posées. White was not the kind
of author who tried to be consistent over time. Hence his preference for essays, which in the
words of his friend and colleague Richard Rorty are no contributions to a ‘self-conscious,
rigorous, and coherent area of inquiry’, but ‘a kind of writing’ that explores and tries out
positions without taking responsibility for all their possible implications.33 White’s fondness of
the essay form illustrates just how little he cared about a systematic body of though. His

30 Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, ed. Saul Friedlander
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); esp. Carlo Ginzburg’s chapter, ‘Just One
Witness’ (82-96).
31 Martin Jay, ‘Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgments’, ibid., 97-107.
32 Hayden White, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical

Representation’, ibid., 37-53, at 41-42.

33 Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida’, New Literary History

39 (2008), 101-119, at 102, 103.

18
writings were always occasional pieces, written for specific audiences, intervening in existing
debates.
Negatively, this means that interpretations of White that try to distil a ‘system’ out of
his writings are of limited value. It may be useful to argue that ‘irony’ in Metahistory has no
fewer than twenty different meanings, as long as this exercise does not imply that White
should have been more consistent in his terminology.34 Likewise, it may be refreshing to
inquire to what extent White’s tropes function as equivalents of Kant’s Anschauungsformen,
as long as the disciplined style of argumentation of the German Enlightenment philosopher is
not invoked as a standard that White should have met.35 Positively, this is to say that
interpretations of White must be contextually sensitive, always in search of the question
which White’s intervention wanted to answer, and attentive to the premises that White
sought to challenge.

6. Teacher
Judging by his students’ memories, this is exactly how White operated as a teacher. ‘White
was then, as now, the embodiment of the credo of the Sophist Gorgias, answering his
opponent’s seriousness with humor, his humor with seriousness’, Hans Kellner recalls when
looking back on his student years at Rochester University.36 White tried to open up new points
of view, partly by taking up unexpected standpoints, partly by impressing on his students that
independent, critical thought is a requirement not only for intellectuals, but for everybody
who wants to take the moral life seriously. According to White, living in thrall to custom or
tradition – what Kant called the ‘self-inflicted immaturity’ of pre-enlightened existence – is a
flagrant repudiation of the moral responsibility that every human being bears for his or her
own life (‘a terrifying gift but one eminently worthy of its recipient’).37
Ewa Domańska is therefore right to draw attention to the pedagogical dimension of
White’s work. When White challenged his listeners or readers with provocative remarks, he
did so in the hope of promoting ‘a model of a certain kind of intellectual work’. When he

34 John S. Nelson, review of Metahistory, History and Theory 14 (1975), 74-91, at 81.
35 Frank Ankersmit, ‘White’s “New Neo-Kantianism”: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics’, in Re-
Figuring Hayden White, ed. Ankersmit, Domańska, and Kellner, 34-53.
36 Hans Kellner, ‘Introduction: A Distinctively Human Life’, ibid., 1-8, at 2.
37 Hayden V. White, ‘Religion, Culture and Western Civilization in Christopher Dawson’s Idea

of History’, English Miscellany 9 (1958), 247-287, at 287.

19
depicted historians as a bunch of conservatives or, conversely, joined the conservative
Michael Oakeshott in arguing for a rehabilitation of ‘the practical past’, his goal was not
historical accuracy, but a training of independent critical thinking. As Domańska puts it: ‘White
does not only want to study the past. He wants to shape the future by educating new
generations of scholars.’38 For this reason, I have elsewhere called White a ‘liberation
historian’: someone who wanted to encourage a critical attitude to the past, not with the aim
of fostering the study of history, but in the hope of enabling people to break the bonds of
convention and tradition.39 (Does this explain why White is especially popular in Eastern
Europe and South America, where political circumstances lend some urgency to the question
how new generations want to relate to the past?)40
In an important article, Ian Hunter has further characterized White as a ‘psychagogue’
– an originally Greek term that can be translated as ‘guardian of souls’ or ‘shepherd of souls’.
Just as Pierre Hadot showed in his Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995) that philosophy in Greek
Antiquity was not all about intellectual systems, but about spiritual exercises intended to mold
human selves, Hunter argues that the kind of ‘cultural theory’ we encountered in section 4
consists of ‘work of the self on the self’. It is not enough for critics of ideology to possess a
certain skill in using abstract concepts or theories. First and foremost, they should have a
critical attitude, consisting of abilities, sensibilities, and dispositions that they have nurtured
for extended periods of time with help of what Michel Foucault calls ‘technologies of the
self’.41 Hunter has two reasons for interpreting White’s work in ‘psychagogical’ terms.
Negatively, he discerns a pedagogical agenda in the often caricatural portraits that White liked
to draw of ‘conventional’, ‘naïve’ historians, in our time or in centuries past:

If White’s account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historiographies bears

little resemblance to those that we find in specialist histories of historiography, that

38 Ewa Domańska, ‘Hayden White: An Academic Teacher’, in Re-Figuring Hayden White, ed.
Ankersmit, Domańska, and Kellner 332-347, at 334, 335.
39 Paul, Hayden White, 55-56. Following up on this is Ewa Domańska, ‘Hayden White and

Liberation Historiography’, Rethinking History 19 (2015), 640-650.

40 See Ewa Domańska et al., ‘Globalizing Hayden White’, Rethinking History 23 (2019), 533-

581.
41 Ian Hunter, ‘Hayden White’s Philosophical History’, New Literary History 45 (2014), 331-

358, at 349-351.

20
 is because his divided and chaotic ‘premodern’ historical field is not an object of
investigation and description. Rather, it is an intellectual condition that is invoked as
the trigger for a particular kind of intellectual performance: the suspension of
empirical attention to documents and contexts, and the reorientation of attention
‘inwards’...42

In this passage, Hunter does not so much accuse White of misrepresenting historiographical
traditions with which he felt little affinity – for it is quite obvious that White never made much
effort to understand uncongenial figures like Leopold von Ranke.43 Hunter’s point is rather
that White needed ‘bad guys’ with whom he could contrast ‘good guys’ such as Vico, Tolstoy,
Camus, and Sebald. Writing about Ranke’s epistemological naiveté or the conservatism of the
historical discipline, White did not make well-warranted knowledge claims, but rather tried to
exhort his readers to develop a ‘higher self’. Positively, this commitment to fostering critical,
self-critical, self-reflexive kinds of selves is apparent from the thinkers that White singled out
as role models – and from his own attempt to practice what he preached. White, according to
this students, tried to be ‘a desirable model of intellectual work’ for his students, ‘teaching
students to be responsible for their existential choices’.44 In each of the poses I have
distinguished above, in each of the genres to which he contributes, White was a psychagogue
who saw it as his vocation to turn young people into critically thinking individuals.

7. Existentialist humanist
If we examine, finally, what normative commitments this psychagogical program displayed,
we encounter White in a seventh pose. Can we call it the pose of ‘a deeply religious thinker’?
This phrase comes from David Harlan, who interprets White’s work as a quasi-religious
project:

42 Ibid., 341.
43 As illustrated by White’s derogatory tone: ‘Ranke, poor soul, spent a lifetime in his study
and ruined his sight attempting to “tell how it really happened”’. Hayden V. White,
‘Translator’s Introduction: On History and Historicisms’, in Carlo Antoni, From History to
Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking, trans. Hayden White (Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 1959), xv-xxviii, at xxiii-xxiv.
44 Robert Pogue Harrison, ‘“We’re Here to Discuss the Meaning of Life”’, The Chronicle

Review 65, no. 31 (26 April 2019), online at https://www.chronicle.com/article/We-re-Here-

to-Discuss-the/246047; Domańska, ‘Hayden White: An Academic Teacher’, 333, 335.

21
 He conceives of history as a quest for ultimate reality and an act of personal
transcendence. He is a theorist of redemption in an age of simulacra. He wants to
save us from irony, from unbelief, from the fall into Nietzsche’s pasteboard world of
skepticism and artifice. Cast adrift in a postmodern world that has come to doubt the
notion of reality itself, he longs to touch bottom, to find some absolute truth, some
ultimate reality. And he thinks he has found it…45

As long as we define religion as an equivalent of ‘idioms for dealing with whatever is most
important – with ultimate questions of life and death, right and wrong, chaos and order,
meaning and meaninglessness’ – it does not seem inappropriate to call White ‘a deeply
religious thinker’.46 His abiding concern, after all, was meaning, moral choices, or a life worth
living. But in our café in Groningen, a stone’s throw away from the old St. Martin’s Church,
White himself frowns at these words. ‘Meaning is not the same as religion’, he lectures,
spreading his hands left and right. ‘All the differences you mention – right and wrong, chaos
and order, and so on – are conceptual distinctions we can only make in a linguistic system. If
structuralism taught us one thing, it is that meaning is generated by language. The association
of George W. Bush with “born again” presupposes a language in which a distinction can be
made between being born again and not being born again. My interest in how such a language
functions does not make me religious. To the contrary, my commitment to reading ideological
discourses “critically” – right-wing Christian discourses, too – clearly shows my detachment
from religion. I believe that religion robs people of everything that makes their lives human:
freedom, responsibility, individuality…’
It makes more sense, therefore, to argue that White was a humanist: someone who
identified with a tradition that encourages people to take control of their own lives. More
specifically, we might argue that White was an existentialist humanist insofar as he argued
that human life is worth living only to the extent that people dare to take responsibility for

45 David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997), 123.
46 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age

(London: SPCK, 1984), 40.

22
it.47 What this means is apparent, first of all, from his aforementioned 1963 article on Croce,
in which White almost completely identified with the Italian historian and philosopher. What
made White so enthusiastic? It was, in White’s own words, ‘Croce’s essentially humanistic
outlook’, which consistently viewed reality – the political reality of his own day no less than
historical reality – as a product of human hands, for which humans can only hold themselves
accountable. In Croce’s words, cited with approval by White: ‘By liberating itself from
servitude to an extramundane will and blind animal necessity, by freeing itself from all
transcendence and all false immanence . . . thought begins to conceive history as the work of
man, as a product of human intelligence and will; and we arrive at that form of history called
humanistic.’48
To what extent White continued to identify as a humanist – despite his far more critical
assessment of Croce in Metahistory, ten years later – is evident from his response to Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who in the 1970s became popular ‘French thinkers’ in many
American literary studies departments. White sharply rejected what he called the ‘absurdism’
in their thinking. White knew Foucault’s work well: he wrote several essays on it and reviewed
a couple of English translations. However, for all his affinity with Foucault’s genealogy and
discourse analysis, White took issue with his indifference to the human subject (‘the end of
humankind’ in the concluding passage of Les mots et les choses). In words perhaps sooner to
be expected from White’s critics, he blamed Foucault and Derrida for pushing the boundaries
of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s adage ‘if God is dead, everything is permitted’. In their eagerness to
demythologize all human culture – for instance by metonymically placing history and myth
opposite each other – the two French writers threatened to kill human life. By preferring the
desolate plains of a disenchanted world to a world bestowed with human meaning, they
effectively robbed individuals of the hope to create a humane society. In White’s words: ‘For
the Absurdist, criticism’s role is to take the side of “nature” against “culture.”’49 (Readers

47 Hans Kellner, ‘A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White’s Linguistic Humanism’, History and
Theory 19, no. 4 (1980), 1-29.
48 Hayden V. White, ‘The Abiding Relevance of Croce’s Idea of History’, The Journal of

Modern History 35 (1963), 109-124, at 112, 116, quoting Benedetto Croce, Teoria e storia
della storiografia.
49 Hayden White, ‘The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory’, Contemporary

Literature 17 (1976), 378-403, at 388.

23
inclined to lump White, Foucault, and Derrida together would do well to reread this essay on
absurdism.)
Rather than with Foucault and Derrida, White identified with other Frenchmen: Albert
Camus, one of the heroes championed by Coates and White in the final pages of their history
of humanism, and his existentialist soulmate Jean-Paul Sartre.50 When I ask him about these
French existentialists, White takes exception to his habit of disagreeing with the interviewer.
‘I was young when I became acquainted with existentialism, mainly in the Sartrean variant.
For people my age it was a philosophy of liberation, a view of life that helped us distance
ourselves from the social and religious conventions we had grown up with. My parents, for
instance, were deeply religious people who believed that their tough working-class life was
divinely ordained and therefore had to be accepted. I have never been able to understand
their resignation to the social injustice in the Detroit factories. Like Marxism, existentialism
provided us, young people in the 1940s, with a philosophy of resistance. And in a certain sense
I have remained stuck in the left wing of existentialism. I don’t think you find anywhere else a
better view of the contingency of the world and of the responsibility that we have to take for
our lives – that, as Sartre would say, there is no god to whom we can pass on that task. So, for
us modernists, history is not something trivial, as some of my critics think. Far from it, if there
is no god, history is all we have.’
This brings the interview full circle and explains why White started our conversation
by talking about Jetztzeit – precisely at a time when the political debate in the United States
is hardening and fanaticism seems on its way of becoming a political virtue. White, urgently:
‘Existentialism, as I take it, does not incite fanaticism. The fanatic has lost a sense of the
provisional that I find characteristic of existentialism. We have to judge what our moral
responsibility implies in a particular situation, here and now. That is the great thing about the
rebel figure of Albert Camus: he does not have a philosophy for eternity, but responds to the
challenges of his own time, fully aware that things may look differently tomorrow. It’s about
now, about the Jetztzeit, about the decisive moment of history in which we have to affirm our
own humanity.’

50White’s indebtedness to these existentialist authors is an important theme in Paul,

Hayden White, 11-12, 47-48, 151-152.

24
Conclusion
So is White a Camusian rebel? He blinks and is silent for a couple of seconds. His eyes twinkle
as he reaches for his scarf. ‘You know that I don’t believe in interviews, don’t you? No more
than in reading to adults, for that matter. Apart from being terribly boring, reading out a paper
always assumes too much concentration and prior knowledge in the audience. A lecture, I
think, is a rhetorical genre. It doesn’t want to teach, it wants to strike a chord. A lecture should
be spontaneous, an attempt to make the audience think, to question their certainties. They
can read the rest. So, again, what is the title you have announced for my talk?’
The waitress smiles as she watches us leave – the Camusian rebel who firmly pulls
opens the door and the interviewer who is trying to understand White. There are four
keywords in his notebook: historian, philosopher of history, literary theorist, and cultural
theorist. The margins contain scribbles, with exclamation marks: essayist, teacher,
existentialist humanist! When the interviewer shakes White’s hand in parting, he believes that
his conversation partner could be fairly portrayed in these seven poses.51

51 White’s death on 5 March 2018 elicited a great many obituaries, memoirs, and other
(online) pieces devoted to his life and work. Apart from a theme issue of Práticas da História
6 (2018), edited by José Neves, I only mention Ethan Kleinberg, ‘Hayden White: In
Memoriam’, The Historian 80 (2018), 691-704 and Carolyn J. Dean, ‘Metahistory and the
Resistance to Theory’, The American Historical Review 124 (2019), 1337-1350. I myself
offered some additional reflections in Herman Paul, ‘A Loosely Knit Network: Philosophy of
History after Hayden White’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 13 (2019), 3-20.

25