Hayden White philosophy of history position paper

Four different emplotments and interpretation

It is truly interesting to know the different ways that are possible to interpret a single event of history. According to Hayden White’s philosophy of history, we can interpret a single even in four different ways categorizing it in four different emplotment.

To White, history is poetically constructed. And for White, any historical text should take a form of narrative prose. He uses the word “mediating” which refers to the narration process that I will discuss in next few paragraphs.

The first element is the historical field. Historical field refers to the unprocessed past which is just past by itself. The history that we learn in school is a processed past that we can gain knowledge and understanding from it but in the case of historical field it is unprocessed therefore it is hard or nearly impossible to understand before it has been processed.

The second element is historical work mediating between the historical field and unprocessed historical record. This refers to documents and data, historical artifacts that hasn’t been processed and hasn’t been formulated in anyways.

The third element is historical accounts. In order for a historian to come up with a correct interpretation of given set of documents from the past, the historian should first locate the primary source and read all of the important things that the historian is setting his foot on. In this way, the historian can clarify his own interpretation with the preceding authors and other primary sources in order to know the accuracy of his own interpretation.

The forth and the last element, the historical work mediates with all the elements stated above, historical field, the unprocessed historical record, and other historical accounts, and finally the audience.

According to White, this historical work that mediates with other narration processes has five levels, chronicle, story, motive emplotment, motive argument, and motive ideological implication.

I will begin to explain these five levels briefly yet understandably. The first level is chronicle. Chronicle is basically the ordering of events that have occurred. We use historical timeline in order to arrange the past data that has been found.

The second level is story. Story is a chronicle which is of course organized by historical timeline and consists beginning, middle, and the end using words like “at first,” “then,” and “finally.”

The third level is motive emplotment where I got my idea for the title of this position paper. Motive emplotment already has the chronicle which means it is organized according to the historical timeline and has different kinds of stories.
And there are four modes of emplotment.

The first mode is romance. Romance is a story of a hero who has difficulties yet achieves the triumph. This triumph is always good over evil. For example there are many movies in Hollywood nowadays dealing with heroism. Pearl Harbor in the view of American is a Romance. Japanese is portrayed as the evil ones and the dropping of the atomic bomb announces the victory of America over Japan. This mode of emplotment leads to an optimistic view of history.

The second mode is tragedy. In this mode, the hero faces difficulties yet not like romance fails to overcome the problem. But during the narration of the story, audience learns many things through the hero’s fall.

The third mode is comedy. In comedy, conflict occurs between the players and at the end they reconcile and live happily ever after. This conflict sometimes seems very hideous and unsolvable yet at the end it is solved and everyone is happy.

The fourth mode is satire. In satire the bad always wins. There are problems and the problem is solved yet nothing really happens. No changes occur drastically and nothing is gained nor learned.

Going back to five levels of narration process, the fourth level is the motive argument which White calls it the mode of formal argument. After reading the narration which was for example a comedy, historian can stop and argue about the emplotment of the history or the interpretation of the history itself. There are four forms of argumentation and they are formism, organiscist, mechanist, and contextualist.

The fifth and the last level of narration process is the motive ideological implication. White suggests that every ideology has some kind of history involved in it. For example when we talk about the WWII as a comedy then the ideology is emphasizing that it was just laughable and everything went perfectly fine.

To conclude the philosophy of White’s history, in my opinion, White has much similarity when it comes to history as a story with Danto. But I think White took a more creative approach in order to make the readers of the history excited.

Every historical events cannot fit into the philosophy of White therefore I somewhat disagree if someone says that White’s philosophy is the ultimate tool to interpret the history. But I think as I’ve stated in the beginning of this paper, that it is truly interesting to see how one event in history can actually be interpreted as a romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire.

White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University.
Wikipedia [Website]. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org.