Hayden White > Quotes

“The closest that either Voltaire or the other historical geniuses of the age -- Hume and Gibbon -- came to understanding unreason's creative potentialities was in their Ironic criticism of themselves and in their own efforts to make sense out of history. This, at least, led them to view themselves as being as potentially flawed as the cripples they conceived to be acting out the spectacle of history.”
― Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

“In order to qualify as historical, an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence. 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 authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows the reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.”
― Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

“facts are themselves constructed out of evidence of past events by description.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“belied the myths of progress, enlightenment, and humanism sustained by professional historians in the service of the state and bourgeois society since the time of the French Revolution.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“The historical account thus pretends to two kinds of truth: (1) truth as fact; and (2) truth as story.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“Ethics, or the development of, awareness of, and compliance with general norms of what is right or wrong,”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“build into their narratives signs of the difficulties of narrativization,”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“stories have to be invented; they are not found.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“there are as many different “ways of seeing” (to cite John Berger’s popular book and television series) as there are perspectives on the world, and that in order to mediate among different ways of seeing, we need to think theoretically about seeing, which means, above all, that we must not take the naturalness of seeing for granted.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“Tolstoy is dealing with a caste of aristocrats with which he had completely identified, which he admired, and whose ideals he shared.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“it is the later that not only reveals the historical meaning of the earlier as precursor but also derogates the earlier as merely a precursor—”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“Sartre, in his autobiography, Les mots (The Words), limited his life story to the period between ages four and eleven.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Now, I want to make clear that I am myself using these terms as metaphors for the different ways we construe fields or sets of phenomena in order to 'work them up' into possible objects of narrative representation and discursive analysis. Anyone who originally encodes the world in the mode of metaphor, will be included to decode it – that is, narratively 'explicate' and discursively analyze it – as a congeries of individualities.”
― Hayden White

“plot-type that allows what might appear as only a series of events to be grasped as a complex interplay of sequentiation and equivaluation.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“there is a reality, but it possesses no meaning apart from that which is imposed upon it by human agency.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“it is the later that not only reveals the historical meaning of the earlier”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“The real issue in assessing a given emplotment of historical reality is the relative adequacy and ethical import”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“how art can complement, rather than undermine, science.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Any effort to reassess the historical significance of “the Sixties” in US society must entail a reassessment of what is meant by a specifically “historical” assessment in the first place.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“These qualities—Chanel-ness, classic-ness, little-ness, red-ness, and jacketness—become elements of the jacket’s identity.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“As Foucault has pointed out, history, or, more specifically, the work of constructing a specifically “historical past,” has “performed a certain number of major functions in Western culture: memory, myth, transmission of the Word and of Example, vehicle of tradition, critical awareness of the present, decipherment of humanity’s destiny, anticipation of the future, or promise of a return.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Tolstoy in fact notes that there are no beginnings or endings in history, only a stream of happenings that historians break up in different ways, and out of which they make stories, quite arbitrarily.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“Far from providing us with grounds for choosing among different conceptions of history, the human and social sciences merely beg the question of history’s meaning, which, in one sense, they were created to resolve. Therefore, to appeal to sociology, anthropology, or psychology for some basis for determining an appropriate perspective on history is rather like basing one’s notion of the soundness of a building’s foundations on the structural properties of its second or third story.”
― Hayden White , The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

“What is the status of real events presented as describing the plots of the kinds of stories found in folklore, myth, and literature?”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“This means that history is not a science in the modern, physical sciences sense of the term, that it does not explain by the discovery and application of causal laws to bodies of empirical “data,”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Where do you begin? Where do you end? How do you choose the most significant events”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“A narrative was considered to be a form of discourse peculiarly suitable to the representation of series of events of the kind called “historical” (rather than “natural” or “supernatural”).”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“determined by the narrator’s need to show figural aptness”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007

“Kermode rejects the idea that historians “find” the stories they tell in the events they study.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“For the telling of a story one needs not so much a set of concepts as, rather, some organizing metaphors.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007