The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact

Hayden White

This is a really interesting article about the connections between history and literature. It is also very dense, and does not deal directly with shame, trauma, or the events covered in the course. I will go through a couple of the article's main points, then speak to its place within Trauma and the Shame of the Unspeakable.

Beginning by exploring various philosophers' analyses of the historical narrative, including Northrop Frye, R.G. Collingwood, and Claude Levi-Strauss. Through a rather repetitive style, White stresses that while history is traditionally thought of as a representation of true facts, as opposed to fictional literature, it is in fact also a constructed narrative.

Historians, White writes, work to fit history into a number of pre-existing plot paradigms, highlighting some facts while suppressing others to create a narrative that is, for example, romantic, or tragic. There is, White writes, no event that is intrinsically tragic, in keeping with the similar claim about trauma that is a theme in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity.

This process is called "emplotment," according to White. This name is easy to understand - it is a process of assigning a plot to a chronicle, or series of events on a time line.

At one point, White makes the very interesting comparison from this process of historical emplotment to the work of psychotherapy. In psychotherapy, the afflicted patient has "overemplotted" their life events, causing them to obsess over or repress them. It is the job of the therapist to guide the patient towards reemplotting these events, changing their meaning and significance to better support the patient's wellbeing.

Going into a more dense discussion of mimesis on historical narrative, White points out that the historical narrative is not just a reproduction of events, but it is also a set of symbols that allows us to consume the history and find the icon of those symbols in our literary tradition.

I would recommend "The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact" be assigned as reccommended reading, but also that we are sure to discuss the main points in class or in section (I could do that, I took EXTENSIVE notes) because White's points are not referred to or explained in any other reading for the course.

I think that especially as an American Civilization class, a discussion of the connections, indeed the bridge between history and literature is really important. Especially because of our focus on trauma, a place where history and literature converge and facts become confused and difficult to navigate, White's claim that "there is an element of the historical in all poetry, [and] there is an element of poetry in every historical account of the world" is especially important to keep in mind.

That said, the reading is repetitive and difficult to get through. I think that if it was assigned as a required reading, it would take a lot of a 50-minute class period to really work through all the questions that would arise from it.