Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

In The Content of the Form, the historian Hayden White explores the problematic relationship between narrative discourse and historical representation. Through a series of independent essays, previously published in academic journals, he examines how authority and meaning pose serious questions to historical thinking and writing, probing the convoluted methodological and theoretical foundations of historiography. Narrative, for White, does not merely reflect a neutral discursive form that historians may use to represent real events, but rather entails political and theoretical choices that the reader must deduce. The linguistic and narrative strategies that writers use—the presence of the narrator, the ordering of events, the use of metaphors or analogies—reveal their standpoint, the way they think historically. To show this, White explores the most extreme form of “objective,” straight-forward historical representation: the annals (the dry lists of annual facts). While they seem to record real events in a non-narrative manner, to document and report the pieces of a history without an author or subject, White reveals the content of their form:

709. Hard winter. Duke Gorrfried died.

710. Hard year and deficient in crops.

711.

712. Flood everywhere.

713.

714. Pippin, mayor pf the palace, died.

715. 716. 717.

Although this document appears to provide a clear record of the events, White argues, it entails an underlying narrative structure. The order of the list of years suggests a continuity, a meaningful succession of events—a beginning and an end. The “empty” years, the focus on environmental events and political figures reveal a coherent narrative structure. The arrangement of the symbols (numbers on the left, in order, and coinciding events on the right) reflect an order of meaning that the events do not possess as mere sequence. And these choices contribute to the making of historical authority.

Every narrative reflects judgement. The impossible task of collapsing reality into a coherent account leaves no other choice to the historian and her narratives. The things they omit or include, the arrangement of the symbols on the page, the devices that trigger historical imagination: these things make every account of the real. If readers wish to understand something about the underlying structures of historical writing, start with The Content of the Form.