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A Sense of Occasion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
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- Essay Review III
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- Copyright © 1981 by History of Education Society
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Notes
I owe special thanks to Brad Burke and Paul Mattingly for their patient and helpful criticism of an earlier draft of this essay.Google Scholar
1. The epigraph is from Barthes, Roland, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” Image-Music-Text, essays selected and translated by Heath, Stephen (New York, 1977), p. 85. Compare Hayden V. White's opening remarks in “Tropology, Discourse and the Modes of Human Consciousness,” the introductory essays to his collection Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978). On “discourse” itself as an object of understanding, his “Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination” and “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” both reprinted in Tropics, are very useful. Although the emphasis of this review has been inspired by the spirit (and a good deal of the letter) of Hayden White's work, the foolishness here is my own. White's Tropics as well as his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973) is among the most prominent and most accessible expressions of what is by now a lively and in many ways perplexing quarrel over “representation” and the activities of reading and writing. Readers interested in pursuing these matters might find the essays and the suggestions for further reading assembled by Canary, Robert H. and Kozicki, Henry in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding (Madison, 1978) very useful, as well as Munz, Peter, The Shapes of Time: A New Look at the Philosophy of History (Middletown, 1978). For a wider focus, Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, 1975) is a good place to start, along with Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore, 1975); and Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1978). See also the essays by Blair, John G., “Structuralism, American Studies and the Humanities,” and Pace, David, “Structuralism in History and the Social Sciences,” both of which appeared in The American Quarterly's “Bibliography Issue,” 1978 .Google Scholar
All of the quotations from Butts and Clifford are taken from their prefaces unless otherwise indicated. We dwell on the prefaces here because that is where the occasion is declared, and in that declaration we find cues not just to the what of Public Education and The Shape but the how. The late Roland Barthes put the matter somewhat differently. “In any type of discourse,” he wrote “the exordium poses one of the most interesting problems of rhetoric, in that it codifies breaches of silence and combats aphasia.” See his “Historical Discourse” in Introduction to Structuralism, Land, Michael, ed. (New York, 1970), pp. 145–155, and Notes, , p. 443.Google Scholar
2. Adkins, Arthur W. H., Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values (Oxford, 1960), p. 6.Google Scholar
3. On the sentence as “an order, not a series” see Barthes, Roland, “Structural Analysis of Narrative,” Image-Music-Text, p. 82; Gass, William H., “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” Fiction and the Figures of Life (Boston, 1971), p. 14. On ‘narrative’ as order and ensemble and the particular problems this poses for Verification' in history, see Mink, Louis, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument,” in Canary, and Kozicki, , The Writing of History, p. 144.Google Scholar
4. One can't help but wonder here if the conditions that made Cubberley's “domination” possible have been effaced from modern academic life. As the writing piles up, perhaps no one text could command the sort of authority Public Education did in the 1930's. Perhaps we have a “positional economy” in academic life now too? Cf., Hirsch, Fred, The Social Limits of Growth (Cambridge, 1976). But this is just the sort of literal-minded consideration that never comes up in Butts' Public Education. His attitude toward writing is one token among several others in his work (e.g., the “adventure quest” at the center of the dramatic action, action which is symbolic or ritualistic in its emphasis; the loss of identity and the restoration of memory; an heroic ideal which emphasizes the virtues of stamina and patience, and so on) paradigmatic of the narrative conventions of Romance and its “anti-representational ethos.” See Frye's, Northrop Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, 1976). “Reality for Romance,” Frye observes, “is an order of existence most readily associated with the word identity. Identity means a good many things, but all its meanings in romance have some connection with the state of existence in which there is nothing to write about. It is an existence before ‘once upon a time,’ and subsequent to ‘and they lived happily ever after.’ (p. 54).Google Scholar
Hayden White combines the typology of plot worked out by Frye (Comedy, Tragedy, Satire as well as Romance), the typology of ideological implication worked out by Karl Mannheim, and the typology of “world hypotheses” worked out by Stephen Pepper as a means of addressing the problem of “historiographical style.” In White's view, these represent the various axes along which a “tropological wager” implicit in the language of a piece of history is distributed across its “surface.” I have deliberately avoided a consideration of plot structure here. For a brief account, see White's, “Interpretation in History,” Tropics, pp. 51–80. On narrative conventions, see Google Scholar
Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), pp. 158–239, and on the Romance in particular, see his Secular Scripture. Of course on the assumptions we ordinarily bring to scrutinizing a piece of historical writing (which is to say, we look through it, not at it) “romance” is epistemologically impeachable. From White's point of view, and the point of view adopted here, narratives of a romantic form are no less sober than the comedy, the tragedy or the satire. What is important about them is that each offers explanatory valences of its own. These story forms are not ‘found’ in the archives, but issue instead from a tradition of making synoptic sense out of the beginning, the middle and the end of things. See, for example, Kellner, Hans, “Disorderly Conduct: Braudel's Mediterranean Satire,” History and Theory 2 (1979): 197–222.Google Scholar
Functionally, the plot structure helps establish for the reader the gravity and respect he should appropriately asume before the material reported in the narrative, while as far as the writer is concerned, we can say that one way in which he explains is by telling a story of a particular kind. Thus it could be shown that Bledstein's, Burton Culture of Professionalism (New York, 1976) is, formally speaking, a “satire” of the “romantic” (“vertical”) vision of the Mid-Victorians and all who share in it, while the narrative trajectory in Schooling in Capitalist America (New York, 1976) is, by contrast, classically “comic” in its construction and direction. The difficulties Christopher Lasch has experienced with The Culture of Narcissism (New York, 1979) are instructive here. Although a comic emplotment would undoubtedly be more consistent with Lasch's radical political commitments, formally speaking once again, The Culture of Narcissism is largely “tragic” in its outline. Although Lasch repeats time and again that his intent is not conservative, his readers' linguistic competence tells them otherwise. Could we imagine anyone being similarly perplexed in the face of Bowles and Gintis' work, or that of Ivan Illich? Google Scholar
“Genre” and “Narrative” are contested concepts, of course. Frye, Contra, see Culler, , Structuralist Poetics, pp. 189–238, and Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre , Howard, Richard trans. (Ithaca, 1975), pp. 3–23.Google Scholar
5. “If anything, this rhetorical element is even more important than the logical one for comprehending what goes on in the composition of a historical discourse. For it is by figuration that the historian virtually constitutes the subject of his discourse; his explanation is little more than a formalized projection of qualities assigned to the subject in his original figuration of it.” White, , “Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination,” Tropics, p. 106. See also “Interpretation in History,” p. 73 and his reference to Foucault. It is for this reason, I take it, that Roland Barthes has spoken of narrative as a ‘performative,’ which is to say what we call ‘content’ is a parameter of its performance. Against this view, see Hirsch, E. D. Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago, 1976), pp. 50–73.Google Scholar
6. On the “tropes,” see White's Introduction to Metahistory, “The Poetics of History,” and his “Tropology, Discourse and the Modes of Consciousness” in Tropics. See also Burke, Kenneth, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, 1960 ed.), Appendix D, “Four Master Tropes;” Bloom, Harold, “The Breaking of Form,” in Bloom, Harold, et. al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York 1979) and his Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973). Sacks, Sheldon, ed., On Metaphor (Chicago, 1979), a collection of papers originally published in Critical Inquiry 1 (1978), is also very helpful.Google Scholar
7. White, , “Interpretation in History,” Tropics, p. 64.Google Scholar
8. Pepper, Stephen, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley, 1942), p. 142.Google Scholar
9. Pepper, , p. 143.Google Scholar
10. White, , “Interpretation in History,” p. 65.Google Scholar
11. Eliot, T. S., “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Collected Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York, 1952), p. 6. Vitzthum's, Richard C. essay on what he calls “The E Pluribus Unum Approach” invites comparison with Butts. See Vitzthum's American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories of Bancroft, Parkman and Adams (Norman, 1974).Google Scholar
12. These “ways of taking,” of course, have a history. Cf., for example, Gossman, Lionel, “History and Literature; Reproduction or Signification,” Canary, and Kozicki, , ed., The Writing of History, pp. 3–39.Google Scholar
13. The “idea of knowing” as always exhibiting a “From/To Structure” is taken from Polanyi, Michael, The Tacit Dimension, (Garden City, Anchor Books Edition, 1967). See also Meaning by Polanyi, Michael and Prosch, Harry, (Chicago, 1975).Google Scholar
14. Gass, William H., “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” Fiction and the Figures of Life (Boston, 1971), p. 49.Google Scholar
15. On “aspect-blindness”, Cf., Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (New York, 1979), pp. 354–372.Google Scholar
16. “The conventional technique for assessing the validity of prose discourses … is to check them, first, for their fidelity to the facts of the subject being discussed and, then, for their adherence to the criteria of logical consistency as represented by the classical syllogism. This critical technique manifestly flies in the face of the practice of discourse, if not some theory of it, because the discourse is intended to constitute the ground whereon to decide what shall count as a fact in the matters under consideration and to determine what mode of comprehension is best suited to the understanding of the facts thus constituted.” (White, , “Tropology,” Tropics, p. 3.) Particularly in light of White's work, two recent examples of the “conventional technique,” interesting in different ways, are Anyon, Jean, “Ideology and United States History Textbooks,” Harvard Educational Review 3 (August, 1979): 361–386; and Feinberg, Walter, “Educational Studies and the Disciplines of Educational Understanding,” Educational Studies 4 (Winter, 1980): 375–391.Google Scholar
For a sample of the quarrel over what we can learn from books as objects and books as instruments, see Graff, Gerald, “The Politics of Anti-Realism,” Salmagundi (Summer-Fall, 1978): 4–30, with replies by Christopher Lasch and others. For a more detailed look at Graffs argument, see his Literature Against Itself (Chicago, 1979), and his exchange with Mitchell, W.J.T. in Salmagundi (Winter-Spring, 1980). In his rejoinder to Mitchell, , Graff takes out after Hayden White.Google Scholar
17. Gass, William, “The Imagination of An Insurrection,” Fiction and the Figures of Life, p. 263.Google Scholar
18. See Louis Mink's remarks on the consequences of our subscribing tacitly to the ideal of “universal history” in his “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument,” in Canary, and Kozicki, , The Writing of History, p. 135–141. If, as White suggests following Kenneth Burke, the tropes “deal in relationships that are experienced as inhering within or among phenomena, but which are in reality relationships existing between consciousness and a world of experience calling for a provision of its meaning” (“Interpretation in History,” p. 72), would this help us understand why “the world, mindless, regularly refuses to become a text analogue”? Rieff, Philip, Fellow Teachers (New York, 1973), p. 4.Google Scholar