Community and Narrativisation: A Contrubution to Critique of Hayden White’s Constructivism

Abstract

In the essay “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”, Hayden White, considering the epistemological status of historical narrative, distinguishes between the annual, the chronicle, and other, more explicitly historical types of writing. He indicates that the condition for the latter is the emergence of a social entity that can occupy both subjective and objective modes of history (both of these aspects being contained within the German word Geschichte). Such an entity, assuming responsibility for its own history, is authorized to narrate the events of its own existence. White believes that this narration takes on one of the forms of presentation available within the culture in question. This paper calls into question White’s constructivist thesis, drawing attention to trauma as a key aspect of the formation of narrative as such. Trauma is a “blind spot” around which narrative arises, with the trauma itself unable to be narrativized. Trauma dates from the prehistory of the subject (individual or collective) and reminds us that, although the trauma may seem to be an isolated phenomenon, it has a cause outside itself. The article supplements this criticism with a commentary on Man of Iron, a film depicting the striving of a society for autonomy in the telling of their own stories; these narratives are characterized by a certain excess indicative of the magnitude of the trauma.