Abstract

ZERMENO, Guillermo. Back to Hayden White: Some Thoughts. Hist. graf [online]. 2020, n.55, pp.17-49.  Epub Sep 07, 2020. ISSN 1405-0927.  https://doi.org/10.48102/hyg.vi55.329.

This essay is, in essence, about the theoretical transformation of historiography. It deals with the changes that have occurred since 1960 in the self-understanding of academic history. When his Metahistory book appeared in 1973, the historiography medium was, indeed, not prepared to receive it, as his discussion was transferred mainly to the field of literary theory and criticism. Only after its translation into other languages in 1990, his work began to be discussed and taken seriously by historians. In particular, his discussion focused on knowing whether or not White accepted that the discourse of historians, in addition to its literary form, was able to refer to the past, as it had been postulated since the origins of scientific-academic history in the XIX century. Rather, this paper contends that White’s main interest in his criticism of the historiographic establishment is meant to reveal the unity that underlies the classical oppositions upon which the identity of historiography was constituted; between history and literature, history and philosophy, history and science, fiction and reality, theory and empirics, and so on. In particular, we try to observe two points in which White argues in favor of this intersection: between philosophy and history, on the one hand, and between history and literature, on the other. One of the consequences of this “de-concealment” is to show that modern historiography (a discourse that “simulates” linking the past, the absent, with the present) is a fundamentally metahistorical activity. That is why we will stop to examine the content of the conceptual form, “metahistory”, to unveil what the historian produces when writing history. Thus, the question will be to focus attention on some “details”, by observing their relevance in the understanding of temporality assisted by two discursive strategies: literary and historiographic. So, in order to “understand” White, it is necessary to place his reflections, not the context of enemy poles, but in an intermediate place (between the extremes); as a preamble to the design of a transdisciplinary space (neither exclusively historiographic nor exclusively literary, nor exclusively historical nor exclusively philosophical), and thus to be able to imagine a plausible reconceptualization of historiography after the crisis of nineteenth-century historicism. There is talk then of “reconsidering” to go back to White in order to gauge one of the thinkable possibilities for the future of historiography.

Keywords : Hayden White; Theory of History; Historiography.