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Bahrain Authority for Culture & Antiquities’ Transfer of Knowledge project has just launched another publication titled “The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation” by the American philosopher and historian, Hayden White. The book is a result of meticulous scientific research that lasted 7 years to decipher the relationship between narrative discourse and historical representation.

Hayden deals, through The Content of the Form, in one way or another, with the problem of the relation between narrative discourse and historical representation. This relation becomes a problem for historical theory with the realization that narrative is not merely a neutral discursive form that may or may not be used to represent real events in their aspect as developmental processes but rather entails ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifically political implications.

Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning—its production, distribution, and consumption—in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in "the content of the form," in the way our narrative capacities transform the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have descended.

Here, White continues and extends the influential analysis of historical writing he began in Metahistory (1974). He rejects the idea that history reports the past as it actually happened; narrative proceeds according to its own rules, and to use it is to adopt a certain conception of how events are organized. This conception arises not from the "facts" of history but from the nature of narrative: the "content of the form." White sees history as akin to fiction in its methods and tasks, and though he does not adequately address the status of his own works what he writes intended to be true in a stronger sense than he allows his subjects? This is a provocative work certain to be widely read by historians, philosophers, and literary theorists.

Given the vastness and diversity of White’s oeuvre, attempting to impose – dare we say form? – onto his work is a difficult task. White is a difficult figure to pigeon-hole. One of the terms most often associated with White is ‘tropes’; but as Paul notes, anyone who is content to label White as a tropologist has to deal with the anomaly of The Content of the Form, which hardly features the word (p. 9). If not a tropologist, then surely White can be categorized as a narrativist? This claim is on more solid ground, as White has always tended to favour dealing with the finished product of historians' labours over looking at actual historical practice. And yet ‘few commentators reading White through narrative lenses have been able to explain why White was so eager to emphasise the artificial, fictive and anti-realist nature of historical narrative’ (p. 10). Many modern historians hold that narrative discourse, far from being a neutral medium for the representation of historical events and processes, is the very stuff of a mythical view of reality, a conceptual or pseudo conceptual "content" which, when used to represent real events, endows them with an illusory coherence and charges them with the kinds of meanings more characteristic of oneiric than of waking thought.

This critique of narrative discourse by recent proponents of scientific historiography is of a piece with the rejection of narratively in literary modernism and with the perception, general in our time, that real life can never be truthfully represented as having the kind of formal coherency met with in the conventional, well-made or fabulist story. Since its invention by Herodotus, traditional historiography has featured predominantly the belief that history itself consists of a congeries of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principal task of historians is to uncover these stories and to retell them in a narrative, the truth of which would reside in the correspondence of the story told to the story lived by real people in the past. Thus conceived, the literary aspect of the historical narrative was supposed to inhere solely in certain stylistic embellishments that rendered the account vivid and interesting to the reader rather than in the kind of poetic inventiveness presumed to be characteristic of the writer of fictional narratives.

The idea that narrative should be considered less as a form of representation than as a manner of speaking about events, whether real or imaginary, has been recently elaborated within a discussion of the relationship between discourse and narrative that has arisen in the wake of Structuralism and is associated with the work of Jakobson, Benveniste, Genette, Todorov, and Barthes. This distinction between discourse and narrative is, of course, based solely on an analysis of the grammatical features of two modes of discourse in which the "objectivity" of the one and the "subjectivity" of the other are definable primarily by a "linguistic order of criteria." The "subjectivity" of the discourse is given by the presence, explicit or implicit, of an "ego" who can be defined "only as the person who maintains the discourse." By contrast, the "objectivity of narrative is defined by the absence of all reference to the narrator." In the narrativizing discourse, then, we can say, with Benveniste, that "truly there is no longer a 'narrator.' The events are chronologically recorded as they appear on the horizon of the story. No one speaks. The events seem to tell themselves."

In the 1980s, White turned his attention to narrative, developing a position succinctly expressed in the title of his second collection of essays, The Content of the Form. Narratives were not found; they were invented. Instead of ‘revealing the true essence of past reality, historical narrative imposes a mythic structure on the events it purports to describe’ (p. 113). However, whereas other anti-realist narrativists such as Louis Mink and Frank Ankersmit tended to present epistemological arguments, White’s reasoning was metaphysical, leading back from his humanism. To think of life as narratively structured would ‘deprive history of the kind of meaninglessness which alone can goad the moral sense of living human beings to make their lives different for themselves and their children, which is to say, to endow their lives with a meaning for which they alone are fully responsible’.

“The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation”is the 11th publication by Knowledge Transfer Project, which aims to translate 50 major and prominent publications from all over the world into Arabic. The first book was “ Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Simon Blackburn”, “Did Greeks Believe in their Myths?” by the French intellectual Paul Veyne, and Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century”, and “ Psychoanalysis as a Science, Therapy and Cause” by the Egyptian psychoanalyst living in France, Mustapha Safwan. and “Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity” by Marc Augé and Three ABCs by Clarisse Herrenschmidt, and “The End of the World as We Know it” by the American Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein published first in 1999 by the University of Minnesota, USA, titled “The Story of Art” by Ernest Gombrich and Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc by Arthur Miller.