Hayden White: The form of the content

Hayden White's perhaps richest and most profoundly argued book, The Content of the Form, touches many nerves in the American historical profession. The entirety of the book, from its premises through its most thoughtful exegeses of historical writing, insists that linguistic form is the primary carrier of content in historical writing, indeed, in historical knowledge. This insistence on a respectful and careful attention to the formal usages of nonfiction prose, truth-claiming language, goes well against the grain of American tastes. As de Tocqueville presciently and correctly predicted, when Americans take to literature in a serious way, they won't have much patience with precise matters of form. Hayden White's narrative theory has had uphill work to penetrate this pervasive indifference, especially among historians. He has been joined in recent decades by Paul Ricoeur, whose Time and Narrative, beginning from different premises and a slightly different question, arrives at a sympathetic and complementary analysis of historical narrative. In spite of White's published hesitations about the political/philosophical tendencies of Ricoeur's work, I am convinced that their books are mutually supporting and, in an important cultural sense, belong together. Altogether, however, I do feel that the main import and justification of this present essay must rest on my quite serious reading of Hayden White's best joke, a profound shaggy dog story about the historian monk of St. Gall.