Narrative Trouble, or Hayden White's Desire for a Progressive Historiography Refigured by Judith Butler's Performativity Theory

Abstract

This paper poses the question of what possible desires expressed in Metahistory remain ungratified for Hayden White. In engaging the relationship between White’s later writings on figural realism, middle-voice writing and the practical past, I claim that these more recent topics are concerned with thinking ways for a community to retrospectively appropriate a past for its own project of self-making. Moreover, they also deal with the unavoidably figurative nature of any attempt at historical interpretation as narrativization. In other words, the three topics discuss the poetics of history, the constitution of a link between past, present and future, as a critical shifting between discourse and agency. Within this context, I want to suggest that these later issues are elaborations of something that was already present in Metahistory forty years ago: a desire for a progressive historiography, a writing of history that ironically accepts both the free and conditioned nature of our cultural discursive means for giving ourselves a past that still romantically seeks to transcend its own irony and to imagine a future to call our own. In pursuing this aim, I will claim that a performative theory of (historical) identity inspired by Judith Butler’s work may well be where White’s desire can best be heard.