A Higher Thing than History

Zach Gibson reviews Hayden White’s second volume of “The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory.”

By Zach GibsonSeptember 2, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• History

• Literary Criticism

DURING A 2017 lecture in Springfield, Missouri, late historiographer Hayden White asked, “Is my life a story?” This question places a self-referential twist on the one that drove more than five decades of White’s application of literary theory to historical narration.

The talk is an apt bookend closing out the second volume of The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, a posthumous collection of White’s essays, lectures, and errata from 1998 to 2017, published by Cornell University Press in 2022 and 2023. White, originally trained as a medieval historian, taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he played a decisive role in shaping the school’s History of Consciousness Department. The anthology is edited by Robert Doran, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Rochester, where White began his teaching career in 1958.

White opens the Missouri lecture by remarking on the provisional nature of antemortem, autobiographical conclusions—we experience our lives from the standpoint of an open-ended present. Absent the closure and structural coherence that we find in stories, there is no act of narration that does not carry with it a small residue of fictive fabrication. For White, this poses a peculiar challenge. The explanatory power unique to narration, which draws meaning from a story’s beginning, is predicated on the privileged vantage of its ending. Because autobiographers must turn to imagined (and ultimately unknowable) endings, White then asks whether such acts of invention undercut the idea of a “true story,” or, conversely, whether this might instead “tell us something about a kind of truthfulness to be found in certain kinds of fiction.”

Similar questions made for White’s intellectual bread and butter beginning in the 1960s. Over the 50 years preceding this talk, White tirelessly argued that all acts of narrative “emplotment,” no matter how exhaustively true to the facts, are “contaminated by representational practices of a distinctively fictionalizing and mythicalizing kind.” Such contamination is an irresolvable, inescapable condition of representation. Narrative emplotment, he wrote in 1980, is a solution to “the problem of how to translate knowing into telling.” Meaning does not inhere in the raw material—isolated, unconnected, prenarrative facts and events—of a story. Rather, the historian confers it through the process of emplotment.

With this lecture, White turns his historical insight inward, teasing out the fraught task of autobiography, which assigns meaning from within. Interiority poses a host of challenges distinct from those of historical narrative. The first-person point of view may appear to offer direct access to motivations, emotions, and other intangibles, but the insight it offers is also compromised by memory’s fallibility, and verifiable external documentation is likely to be thin.

Even more difficult, however, is the fact that one must decide for oneself what kind of truth to tell, White explains,

especially when it is a matter of forging one’s own story, the story of one’s own life course and the value it can claim for itself […] Where do you begin? Where do you end? How do you choose the most significant events of your life, especially those that mark significant turning points in the development of the real “me”? And what, or rather where, is the “real” me? What is that substance that remains the same while undergoing not only the aging process but those events that have determined the attributes of an essential self?

White’s appeal to an “essential self” should not be taken as something like a transcendental soul. Considering his consistent engagement with existentialism, his invocation of essence demands an ironic reading; it does not exist as a thing but instead in consciousness or language. The short answer to where the “true self” lies is simply that it resides in discourse. The longer, more difficult answer is to be sought in figuring out which discourse—which story, which beginning, which ending, what “combination of story elements”—will express an “essential self” that best fulfills its beginning with an appropriate ending?

Because narrative form carries with it an implicit outlook on the world, a story’s structure has as much, if not more, bearing on its ultimate meaning than its so-called content does. A historical account that charts a heroic figure’s (or civilization’s) meteoric rise and hubristic fall takes its cues from tragedy. By contrast, historical narratives that celebrate human triumph, the resolution of conflict, or the overcoming of tragic division tend to align themselves with a comic narrative structure.

Throughout the collection of White’s late-career essays, articles, and lectures, he asks whether the real sets of events necessarily demand tragic or comic structure, or whether, as Paul Ricœur suggested, we might live our lives as narratives and “self-emplot” them according to our generic—and, by extension, our moral—preferences.

To make sense of our lives, we must make narrative choices about where to begin, what to include, what to discard, where turning points lie, and when to place section breaks. These decisions are acts of poetic imagination that determine the shape that both histories and life stories take on. Though it is rare that the final product will follow the structure of either classical mythic archetype, the swerves, turns, jumps, and cuts between registers carry with them explanatory and ideological freight.

The act of shaping a story, as White has it, is never innocent.

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The publication of the second volume of The Ethics of Narrative in 2023 coincided with the 50th anniversary of White’s best-known work, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). White offers a magisterial survey of 19th-century historiography that stages the “historical imagination” of that period as contested territory, rather than settled terrain.

Metahistory was a partial outgrowth of White’s 1966 essay “The Burden of History,” which signaled a shift toward the writing of history over and above the study of history itself. This pivot was driven by White’s realization that history as an “autonomous and self-authenticating mode of thought” was an aberration from the place it traditionally held among the intellectual disciplines. Twentieth-century science, philosophy, and aesthetics laid bare the subjective constructedness of historical work. For White, this meant that the most pressing task for historians was a reflexive, inward turn toward a better understanding of what distinguished their line of inquiry from that of art and science.

Metahistory is an attempt to meet the challenge that White set to historians in the “Burden” essay. It is not so much a work of history, nor a history of histories, as it is a history of philosophies of history. It draws out the conflicting worldviews that informed how Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche (among others) believed that history should be researched and presented, what conclusions we may draw from events of the past, what (if any) “laws” govern history’s progression, and how (if at all) past events relate to our lives in the present. In doing so, White hoped to upset the comfortable assumption that history and historical consciousness are objects of empirical, value-neutral knowledge.

White’s most noted contribution to historiography is the hard line that he draws between historical reality and its narration. The past itself, as an amorphous mass, is wholly distinct from historical narrative, which “endows this reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.” The meaning of events in the past derives from their narration, which White contends is always an act of interpretation. He continues: “Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened.”

The upshot here is the inextricable bond between the interpretation of a historical event, and its emplotment, or “the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind.” White turns to Northrop Frye to identify four main modes of emplotment: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. To narrate in a given mode is to implicitly bestow a worldview upon the narrated events, serving as an explanatory gesture on the historian’s part.

Romance dramatizes heroism, staging Manichaean struggles between good and evil, virtue and vice, or light and darkness. Comedy holds out hope for triumph and reconciliation; at its most basic, a comic view of history tends to favor a progressive outlook of gradual improvement. Tragedy, meanwhile, sees the human condition as one of irresolvable division—a state of affairs that humankind cannot overcome—but offers consolatory revelations about humanity’s limited agency. Finally, satire “presupposes the ultimate inadequacy” of the visions held forth by the other three modes, and instead ridicules all three for their failure to comprehend the world in its complexity. For the satirist, the past’s romantic heroism holds no relevance for the present day, comic resolution remains forever out of reach, and tragic epiphany amounts to illusion.

“Explanation by emplotment” is not the sole preserve of world-shaping historical events. We see it every day in the narratives that our polarized media landscape uses to craft historical events into coherent stories. For example, accounts of Luigi Mangione’s alleged 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson cover White’s entire spectrum: romantic accounts frame Mangione as a folk hero who took arms against an unjust system; the tragic view focuses on Thompson’s family, stacking his rise to the C-suite from a working-class childhood against Mangione’s wealthy upbringing; the comic sensibility frames the shooting as a rupture that might lay bare social contradictions about systemic violence and pave the way for their resolution; satirical readings focus on how Mangione’s incoherent ideological motivation reflects an equally incoherent societal background. All four draw from a nearly identical pool of facts; all four break along political or ideological lines.

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Though the questions that Metahistory posed would continue to undergird White’s subsequent work, he later expressed frustration that the book’s monumental stature cast a long shadow over his subsequent writing. In a 1993 interview with Hans Kellner, he dismissed the book as “passé.” During a conversation with Ewa Domanska the same year, White reminded graduate students and fellows that he was working “in a different milieu” and “for different purposes” at the time of its writing. He went on to emphasize that he did not see Metahistory as a work of theory but, instead, as a “historical project” organized around ideas originally put forth by Frye, Kenneth Burke, and Stephen C. Pepper.

However, White goes beyond simply using Pepper, Burke, and Frye as a schematic template. His synthesis of their ideas amounts to an innovated interpretive method to unpack the deep, ideological structures that guide historians’ narrative decisions.

While he is overmodest in devaluing his first book, White’s exasperation at its overhasty association with poststructuralism’s linguistic turn in the 1960s and ’70s is justified. It bears a close resemblance to the anti-foundationalism of a contemporary like Michel Foucault, but White’s sympathetic stance toward postmodernism was a destination he reached by an alternate route. His relationship to history, as he explains to Domanska, had “much more in common with the kind of aesthetic of the sublime which derives from Romanticism than with postmodernism.”

In his introduction to the second volume of Ethics, Robert Doran writes that “White can be considered, variously, as a structuralist, a poststructuralist, or a postmodernist, depending on which aspect of his work is being described.” While it is often tempting to place his work beneath the banner of late 20th-century postmodernism, this is a misplaced overemphasis on a limited block of White’s work. The essays compiled in both volumes of The Ethics of Narrative clarify White’s divergence from the milieu where his writing made its debut. The differences separating White from Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard are far more remarkable than their similarities.

Where many of his French counterparts developed their thought in reaction to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, White’s key influence was Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Italian historian known for the Latin aphorism “verum esse ipsum factum”—truth itself is something made. Vico believed that only God could understand the natural world because he alone created it. Drawing on Vico’s idea that the proper subject-matter of history was the “process of human self-making,” White, in his later work, approaches how historical representation depicts reality as “an object of desire worthy of the human effort to comprehend and control it.” He treats how we choose to represent ourselves as an inextricable part of the process of self-creation.

In The Practical Past (2014), the final book that White saw to press during his lifetime, he clarifies the stakes of his mythopoetic historiography. This grew from a close engagement with the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, which, as Doran explains in the book’s introduction, “refocuse[d] his thought in a more explicitly ethical direction.” Among Doran’s most helpful editorial gestures is his clarifying glance toward White’s late-career adoption of Oakeshott’s distinction between a “historical past,” which stands apart from lived experience as an object of contemplation for professional scholars, and a “practical past,” which is a usable, personal past that we feel and remember in day-to-day life.

This approach clarifies a stable continuity between the past and the present moment. Many of the essays in Ethics demonstrate a practical awareness of the present moment as history—a popular sensibility that White sees as spillover from the modernist novel. To approach the present historically, he writes, entails the recognition that the world remains “in constant evolution and development.” Without the privileged vantage point of an ending, he writes, the only recourse we have to make sense of the present will be poetic in its attempt to capture “the form of the whole in images and, at the same time, forc[e] awareness of the inadequacy of any image to the faithful presentation of its ineffable ‘content.’”

White’s resolution lay in establishing a relationship between the past and the present as an ongoing process of figuration and fulfillment, a doubly articulated sense of time akin to the resonance between events in the Old and New Testaments explored by early biblical scholars. Figurative causation demands that we look backward to establish what the present might owe to the past, where the former’s values lie, how it might attain its goals, and how it will use its historical inheritance. At the same time, the anticipation of a future fulfillment means that we must forgo determinism and accept the burden of ethical accountability that goes hand in hand with existential freedom.

To anticipate fulfillment is not to give oneself over to historical necessity but to put forth a “challenge to time [and the] denial of change” that Paul Ricœur saw in the act of making a promise. Where he is more flexible than Ricoeur, who saw the keeping of promises as a preserve for self-constancy against a backdrop of change, White maintains that promises remain morally fraught gestures that attune us to how our actions in the present will be responsible to others in the future. Promise-making not only embodies the mutually dependent relationship between figuration and fulfillment but also illustrates the leap into the unknown that accompanies ethical action.

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Where many of the essays in the first volume of Ethics demonstrate how White’s intellectual inheritance distinguishes him from his contemporaries, much of the second volume works toward putting his ideas to work. Where he lays out several comparative surveys of traditional, modern, and contemporary metaphysical accounts of temporality and historiography in the first book, White underscores in the second the actionable, practical value of a figurative understanding of the past and the moral dimension of the sublime aesthetic he prefers in historical representation.

Both volumes in Ethics are marked by where White situates mythology within the interrelationship between history and fiction. White built his reputation on unveiling the imaginative residue that saturates even the strictest “just the facts” historical accounts, which say more than they claim by way of latent formal meaning, as fictive and mythic elements inevitably creep into historical narrative. Doran sees this as an attempt by White to reveal historical “doxa”—meanings assume “a seemingly perfect correspondence between subjective structures and objective reality.” From this perspective, historical narrative simply reflects a hidden narrative structure beneath guiding history itself.

When writers move from the historian’s initial question (“What happened?”) toward concluding questions of causation (“Why did it happen?”) or ethical import (“What should I do?”), the look for significance goes beyond “scientific meaning,” making truth and meaning coterminous with the “determination of ‘what is the case.’”

However, White did not seek to collapse historical knowledge into meaningless relativism; the revelation that “science becomes ideology” was never his final aim. Rather, it was his starting point. White hoped to underscore how storytelling (of all stripes) stands as a distinct form of knowledge from scientific empiricism. Primo Levi’s book on Auschwitz, for White, embodies the particularity of narrative meaning, which he praises for juggling “facts experienced, as it were, from outside himself,” alongside “other kinds of materials—opinions, considerations, beliefs, and judgment—which are not fictions so much as simulacra, because they are not given to sense and must be invented on the basis of inner experiences.”

In his Poetics, Aristotle situates history, which deals only in particulars, below poetry. Poetry, he wrote, “is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history” because it speaks in universals and relates “what may happen.” This is true of scientific, reproductive history, but the productive task that White assigns to historical narrative—not the search for meaning in the archive but the production of meaning through emplotment—blurs Aristotle’s disciplinary line. Figurative causality makes it possible for a storyteller to fill the role of the Aristotelian poet and historian at the same time.

The “wager” that White places on the imagination in the “Is My Life a Story?” lecture rests on “the possibility that commitment to an ideal life is in the end both more realistic and more authentic than any simple or complex choice to affirm ‘things as they are.’” White’s unremitting critique of scientific historiography can be seen as an attempt to shake off the constraints imposed on historians. Together, his essays seek to shed the discipline’s superficial commitment to reproduction and move toward the elevated intellectual duty that White assigned to historians in his 1966 “Burden” essay: the productive power of mythos.