Hayden White: Beyond irony

A crisis of our age that is usually identified with the loss of the sacred was one of the causes of the fall into irony in the nineteenth century. In the case of historians, as Hayden White has shown in Metahistory, this irony was caused by a "bitterness" stemming from the failure of reality to fulfill their expectations. An ironic apprehension of the world arose in an atmosphere of social breakdown or cultural decline. A current stage of irony manifests itself in a doubt as to the capacity of language to grasp reality. Thus we live in a "prison house of language." An intellectual parlor-game produces "second-hand knowledge" that cannot satisfy the needs of post-postmodem men and women still looking for another metanarrative. Therefore, the main purpose of this essay is to answer the question: how can we go beyond irony? This text is a "post-postmodern post mortem to postmodernism." I am grateful to postmodernism for many things, especially for giving me an alternative apprehension of the world in terms of difference and continuity rather than binary oppositions, but I am tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos. I need order. I miss metanarrative. In trying to break with some modern/postmodern "principles" and retain within my discourse the premodernist perspective, I follow the current trend in the humanities. We observe at present the breakdown of methodology and the rise of a more poetic approach in the human sciences. Evidence of this phenomenon is the more autobiographical form of writing in anthropology (James Clifford, Clifford Geertz) and a more literary style in historical writing (Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Simon Schama). This trend is associated with a revaluation of the subjective aspects of research. Perhaps, and I would welcome it, it also could be identified with a reappearance of a Collingwoodian idea of history as human self-knowledge, knowledge about human nature, knowledge about "what it is to be a man⋯ what it is to be the kind of man you are⋯ and what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is."1.