The Refraction of White

The Primary Colors of Hayden White’s Tropological Theory of Discourse

Ulrich Timme Kragh

Volume 60, Number 4 (2021)

There has been sustained discussion of the narrativist approach in the Western tradition of theory of history, and it has focused especially on the work of Hayden White. While the reception of White’s work in the non-West has resulted in multiple translations of his oeuvre into Chinese and other languages, there has, as of yet, been no attempt to apply his tropological theory of discourse in a detailed study of non-Western historiography. Any such future endeavor would require assessing the extent to which White’s theory is culturally specific to the inside of the Western cultural tradition and determining which elements may be applicable to the outside of non-Western discourse. In this vein, the article pries open a possibility for an outside in the narrativist study of history. It establishes a European family tree of White’s tropological theory of discourse by first tracing its acknowledged intellectual ancestry to Peter Ramus’s rhetorical reductionism and Giambattista Vico’s poetic logic. It then extends the genealogy of White’s tetragrammatical analysis further back into a European ancestry by identifying its roots in the patristic and medieval exegetical traditions of the four senses of scripture and the four words of Saint Paul. The analysis reveals that White’s narrativist method of tropology belongs to a particular refraction of mythic consciousness having an identifiable beginning, middle, and end in the Western cultural tradition. Any methodological step beyond this consciousness would require reading the tropological spectrum of another cultural lineage of myth.

Image: by Tara Winstead (12 March 2021)