CHAPTER 1

HISTORY AS NARRATIVE

Postmodernism marks a shift in the perspective of epistemology that

has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art,

architecture, literature, fashion, communications and technology.

Postmodernism can also be associated with a parallel shift in the power

structure of the world and dehumanization brought out by the Second World

War and the emergence of consumer capitalism. Largely influenced by the

Western disillusionment induced by World War II, postmodernism refers to a

cultural, intellectual or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or

organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction,

ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality. Postmodernism

questions the specific notions of monolithic universals and encourages

fractured, fluid and multiple perspectives. Challenging the social basis of

assertions, postmodernist philosophers attack unities seen as being rooted in

the Enlightenment philosophy. Postmodernism was originally a reaction

to modernism. Modernism made the Enlightenment the pivot of its critical

enquiry. So this attack on modernism amounts to an indirect attack on the

establishment of modernism itself as a movement that subverts fragmentation

and celebrates unity and coherence.

After World War II postcolonialism contributed to the idea that one

cannot have an objectively superior lifestyle or belief. This idea was taken
15

further by the anti-foundationalist philosophers: Heidegger and Derrida, who

have examined the fundamentals of knowledge. They argue that rationality is

neither as sure nor as clear as modernists or rationalists assert. It was with the

end of the Second World War that recognizably postmodernist attitudes began

to emerge.

The growing anti-establishment movements of the 1960s can be

identified as the constituting event of postmodernism. It was in the French

academia that the theory gained some of its strongest ground in its early

development. The Arab-American theorist,  Ihab Hassan, is one of the first to

use the term in its present sense in his book The Dismemberment of Orpheus:

Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971). In this work, Hassan traces the

development of what he calls “literature of silence” through Marquis de

Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, and a few others,

and classifies new genres such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau

roman.  Richard Rorty enumerates the characteristics of postmodernism in

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature(1979). Jean Baudrillard, Michel

Foucault and Roland Barthes are also influential in developing and

popularizing the postmodern theory in the 1970s. Jean Francois Lyotard and

Jean Baudrillard have provided the philosophical framework for

postmodernism.

Baudrillard’s book Simulations (1983) theorizes the “loss of the real.”

According to Baudrillard, “the real” is now defined in terms of the media in

which it moves. He contends that social “reality” no longer exists in the

conventional sense, but it has been supplanted by an endless procession of

simulacra. The mass media and other forms of mass cultural production

generate constant reappropriation and re-contextualization of familiar cultural

symbols and images. This shifts human experience away from “reality” to

“hyper reality.” The pervasive influence of images from television and

advertising has led to a loss of the distinction between the real and the

imagined. The same is true of the distinction between reality and illusion, and

between surface and depth, which have also disappeared.

Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche can be called

the precursors to postmodernism. For the postmodernists, the three, with their

emphasis on skepticism, especially concerning objective reality, social morals

and societal norms, represent a reaction to modernism. Postmodernists often

express a profound skepticism regarding the Enlightenment quest to uncover

the nature of truth and reality. Modernist authors moved away from the

nineteenth century “realist” notion that a novel must “tell a story,” from an

“objective” and “omniscient” point of view. Instead, they began to embrace

subjectivism and fragmentariness in narrative and attempted to bring

coherence out of fragments. Modernism, with its belief in the primacy of

human reason, values realism in fiction and logical narrative structures.

Postmodernism stretches and breaks away from the idea that man can

achieve understanding through a reliance on reason and science.

Though objectivity is the primary test of knowledge, all kinds of experiences

cannot be subjected to the litmus test of objectivity. There is an element of

subjectivity in at least some kind of knowledge. Postmodernism envisages

that knowledge is not exclusively objective: at times, knowledge is subjective

and intuitive. This opens up the possibility of a metaphysical level of human

experience.

The term “history” is difficult to explain; it is one of the most complex

and problematic term in postmodern theory. In referring to a discourse and the

object of that discourse, the term history encapsulates a posited reality and its

representation. The problems of the term are not just related to the efforts of

historians, but to the issues of representation and reality. Most of the attempts

to explain the discourse of history revolve around the question of its

representational strategy or narrative. Most of the debates on history focus on

the plurality of history and the problematic of its narrativization.

The word “history” refers to two things: narration of past events, and

the events themselves. Frederic Jameson exhorts in The Political Unconscious

“Always historicize!” (9) The process of historicizing of events is a perennial

concern for students of literary studies. The relationship between literary

writing and historiography has been the subject of debate from Aristotle to the

present day. History as a specifically textual concern has entered the domain

of literary studies for the past twenty five years. Historicism, in some form or

other, has dominated the early development of literary studies until

New Criticism turned literary studies towards textual analysis in the 1940’s.

According to the New Critics, history is something from which literary

analysis need be protected. New Criticism explicitly divorces literary texts

from their historical moments of production and condemns contextual or

historicist approaches as distractions or “fallacies.”

In the 1980s, the dominant textualism of the Western critics gives way

to the trend, “return to history.” As a result, history is no longer what it used

to be- a background of ideas or a field of empirical facts. Heavily influenced

by Foucault, the New Historicists argue for a view of history that emphasizes

the role of representation and discourse in life and art. They take a position

that neither history nor literature offers a firm ground from which the other

can be independently studied. The term “New Historicism” refers to all those

historicist theories of both history and literature which are informed by

textualist and poststructuralist ideas which break with traditional historicisms.

In this context, J.N.Cox and L.J.Reynolds, observe in their work,

New Historical Literary Study:

For most part new historicism can be distinguished from ‘old’

historicism by its lack of faith in ‘objectivity’ and ‘permanence’

and its stress not upon the direct recreation of the past, but

rather the processes by which the past is constructed or

invented. Unsettling, transgressive, at time contradictory, new

historicism tends to regard texts in materialist terms, as objects

and events in the world, as a part of human life, society, the

historical realities of power, authority, and resistance; yet at the

same time, it rejects the idea of ‘history as a directly accessible,

unitary past’, and substitutes for it the conception of ‘histories’,

an ongoing series of human constructions, each representing the

past at particular present moments for particular purposes.(1)

They mean that historical text is not simply a narration of events and objects

or persons, but a representation of the intricate relations of power, authority

and resistance. New Historicism rules out a direct, simple unitary past: history

is replaced by “histories,” each of which is reconstructed or re-invented from

a distinct political perspective.

New Historicism (sometimes referred to as Cultural Poetics) emerged

in the 1970s and 1980s, largely as a reaction to the lingering effects of New

Criticism and its ahistorical approach. “New” Historicism’s adjectival

emphasis highlights its opposition to the old historical-biographical criticism

prevalent before the advent of New Criticism. In conventional school of

historicism, literature is seen as a (mimetic) reflection of the historical world

in which it is produced. In historicism, history is viewed as a stable, linear and

recoverable narrative of fact. In contrast, New Historicism views history as a

broadly skeptical discourse since historical narrative is inherently subjective;

history includes all the cultural, social, political and anthropological

discourses at work in any given age. These various “texts” are unranked;
20

that is, any text may yield valuable information in understanding a particular

milieu. Rather than forming a backdrop, many historical discourses at work at

any given time affect both the author and his/her text: both are inescapably

part of a social construct. Stephen Greenblatt analyses “Commonwealth

Literature” from a historical perspective. Michel Foucault’s intertextual

methods focus on issues like power and knowledge.

With New Historicism, all texts are created equal: anything written,

any piece of discourse, is treated as a text/narrative open to interpretation and

analysis. New Historicism, as used in the disciplines of history, anthropology

and literary studies, starts with the assumption that rather than a set of

provable facts, history is a story which a culture tells itself about its past.

New Historicism examines texts as narratives, using many of the same

assumptions and techniques developed in literary analysis. This includes an

examination of the narrator’s point of view, the author’s social position,

influences and motivations, the rhetorical devices employed, and the implied

audience for whom writing is meant to persuade. New Historicism assumes

that any text can be deconstructed to reveal its own ideological assumptions,

contradictions and limitations.

Like New Historicism, postmodern fiction by E.L.Doctorow,

Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter have also forced a

rethinking of the writing of history. As Paul Ricoeur observes about narrative,

the writing of history is actually “constitutive of the historical mode of

understanding” (Time and Narrative: Vol I 162). Historical facts are normally

established by historiography’s explanatory and narrative structures of past

events. Hayden White’s insistence on historiography as a process of

constructing a meaningful historical past challenges the idea of direct

correspondence between representation and reality, and the traditional notions

of the historian’s role. The ideas of the poststructuralist thinkers, including

Derrida, Lacan and Foucault, have transformed the popular understandings of

the relationship between texts and the world, and of critical practice.

Poststructuralists insist that truth is not something that exists independently

and can be discovered conclusively, but it is an effect of politically charged

systems of knowledge production. Truth or reality exists within the text; it can

be discursively constructed and critically analysed as analogues of power or

knowledge. In this regard, Foucault remarks: “Truth is linked…with systems

of power which produce and sustain it” (Power/Knowledge, 131- 3). He

means that truth or the factual nature of events is an analogous construct of

power.

Postmodernist theories transcend the boundaries of the fabricated

literary world into the supposedly objective and scientific discipline of

history. Postmodern historians and philosophers question the representation of

history and cultural identities: history as “what ‘really’ happened” (external to

representation or mediation) against history as a “narrative of what

happened,” or a “mediated representation” with cultural/ideological interests.

History requires representation and mediation in narrative, a story-form

encoded as historical. The issue of representation in both fiction and history

has been dealt with in epistemological terms: how the past is constructed and

understood. We have access to the past only through its traces: its documents,

the testimony of witness, and other archival materials. In other words, we

have only partial representations of the past from which we have to construct

coherent narratives or convincing explanations. According to Barbara Foley,

the postmodern situation is that a “truth is being told with ‘facts’ to back it up,

but a teller constructs that truth and chooses those facts” (67). In fact, the

teller- of story or history- also constructs those very facts by giving a

particular meaning to the events. Facts do not speak for themselves in either

form of the narrative: the tellers speak for them, making these fragments of

the past into a discursive whole. In this regard, Linda Hutcheon remarks:

“… all past ‘events’ are potential historical ‘facts,’ but the ones that become

facts are those that are chosen to be narrated” (73). Facts are not ascertained

like sense impressions and they do not speak for themselves. They are not

entirely the creation of historians. Facts exist apart from the historians, but

they become “historical facts” only when they are judged as historically

significant by selection and interpretation. In this context, E.H.Carr, in his

What is History? observes: “The facts speak only when the historian calls on

them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order

or context” (11). Historians select, interpret and present facts according to

their interests and experiences, but the facts that they study may also lead

them to change their views. Historians are thus engaged in what Carr calls

“an unending dialogue between the past and the present” (30). The past does

not present itself ready packaged in narratives that historians have only to

transmit. Rather, historians approach the past with present-day beliefs and

aspirations that cannot be put aside. Histories, in short, are statements of the

historian’s present rather than studies of the past. Histories are best described

not as “empathetic” descriptions of the past, but as readings of the past that

serve particular present-day ideological and material interests. Similarly,

readers cannot put aside their own beliefs and aspirations when they approach

histories. The past that we know is always contingent on our own views, our

own present. Just as we are the products of the past, the known past (history)

is an artifact of ours. History written in the present pretends to operate in the

domain of the past, but in reality it fabricates that past in its own present. In

this context, Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life) remarks:

“…the past is the fiction of the present” (10). So, history is of the past as

fiction is of the present. Clearly, this perspective has important ramifications.

Considering history as a form of fiction justifies a literary analysis of

historical records; it allows the historical document to be read as a novel,

thereby making its machinations more visible and its content less verifiable.

A remarkable critical work, which raised a problematic of historical

narrative is Roland Barthes’s article “The Discourse of History.” In this

article, he seeks to dissolve the distinction between fictional discourse and the

writings of historians; he argues that a signified (the real) is occluded or made

illicit throughout a historical discourse. A past is only known as its telling (a

signifier, narrative). However, by replacing the subjective persona of the

narrator with an objective persona, an effacement of this problem is effected

by representing the past (the signified) as telling (signifying). It becomes

obvious that there is no neutral narrative or ‘scientific’ (objective) narrative;

for the narrative is in itself a subjective persona.

History is first and foremost a literary narrative about the past, a

literary composition of the data into a narrative where the historian creates a

meaning of the past. This implies that in producing historical narratives we

must no longer suppress history’s character as literature. If so, the

philosophical assumption that history can correspond with the reality of the

past through a knowledge of its content is no more possible. Paul Ricoeur

also endorses this view: “…history is intrinsically historiography… a literary

artifact” (162). He underlines the view that history is a literary construct:

history and fiction are identical as narratives.

There are several problems connected with the representation of

history. The first one is a question of perspective. In this matter, History (the

academic discipline) is different from histories (narrated forms). The former

deals with the epistemology, representation, narration and mediation of

history.The latter deals with different represented forms of history. The

representation of history as a grand narrative is already challenged by

postmodern epistemology. So the narration of history becomes problematic.

From the point of view of narration, there are different kinds of history.

The mainstream history is narrated from the perspective of the power

structures that govern the society either by force or by consent. This

mainstream history is called empirical history. It is often used as an indirect

form of politics perpetuated through forms like education. The type of history

narrated from the perspective of the marginalized communities/groups is

called genealogy. So, there are different histories narrated from the

genealogical points of view of the cultural communities. The process of

narration always brings in an element of subjectivity. Thus, genealogical

history may also be called a representation of marginalized subjectivity. The

element of subjectivity brings in the question of mediation. As a form of

narrative, history undergoes mediation. The extent of mediation depends on

the politics of the perspective and the degree of subjectivity. So, any type of

history is a mediated narrative with elements of subjectivity and political

perspective. The discipline History deals with the epistemological challenges

of histories.

For the modernists, unlike the postmodernists, “reality of facts” or the

content of the past determines the form of history in the pattern of the

historical narrative. This means that modernist history prioritizes content over

form. But postmodernists have reversed the priority of content over form.
26

This reorientation has produced a linguistic turn that has moved historical

explanation to a discussion about the role played by language in producing

and shaping the meaning of historical events. This is what the American

philosopher Richard Rorty calls “making true” (4). The argument is about the

extent to which truth, objectivity, and justified descriptions are feasible once

the priority of content over form is reversed. The result of the rethinking on

the priority of content over form is the dissolution of the divisions among

history, fiction, perspective and ideology. Placing form above content means

that what is highly significant in creating a sense of the past are the ways in

which historians organize, configure and prefigure the historical events. What

becomes important is how we constitute those informing concepts,

classifications, theories, arguments and categories that we use to organize and

explain historical evidence and generate meaning from it.

Traditionally, history is regarded as an independent, impartial and

objective body of knowledge. Now it is recognized as a literary performance.

It is first and foremost a deliberate and calculated written act on the part of the

historian rather than a neutral reflection or correspondence. There are

important parallels between the process of history-writing and fiction-writing.

Among the most problematic of these are their common assumptions

about narrative and about the nature of mimetic representation. In this regard,

Frederic Jameson remarks: “History is only accessible to us in narrative

form” (20). The form of narrative can be graphic or written or oral. Arthur
27

Marwick also remarks: “History is simply a branch of literature, in which

the ‘narratives’ of historians do not significantly differ from the novels of the

novelists” (12). He says that the historian’s task is similar to that of the

novelist’s. Marwick argues that “historical writing must in some sense tell a

story; it must contain narrative, a sense of movement through time” (235).

A narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format that describes a

sequence of fictional or non-fictional elements. Narratives show us that we

draw together past, present and future: our experiences are shaped by our

hopes and previous experiences, and which in turn shape future experiences

and hopes.

The works of the American historian Hayden White, and those of

others including Dominick LaCapra, Frank Ankersmit and Patrick Joyce, are

often described as part of a shift or movement called “the linguistic turn” that

explores the textuality of history. The historians who have initiated the

linguistic turn work with ideas from literary theory and argue that, far from

seeing literature as the fictional opposite of factual history, historians should

acknowledge their intimate relationship as two forms of writing that create,

rather than find, meaning.

Although earlier thinkers, notably Paul Ricoeur and Roland Barthes,

explored the relationship between narrative and history, it is the works of

Hayden White that have had a particularly dramatic effect on many

historians’ sense of the role and future of their discipline. White argues that
28

historians do not find the meaning of the past by examining the facts,

they invent or make meanings through their use of language. They do not

reconstruct or translate lived stories into prose stories, but create meaningful

narratives. According to Hayden White, histories offer “a kind of order and

fullness in an account of reality” turning the past into a story (Tropics of

Discouse 12). These stories or narratives have five important qualities:

They have plots

They have social centers

They moralize

They are allegories

They have aesthetics. (Tropics of Discouse 12)

In order to give the past “continuity, coherency, and meaning,” histories turn

the past into stories with well-defined plots. White believes that Western

historians, like Western writers of fiction, use five basic plots. Historians

write romances, tragedies, comedies, satires, or epics. Histories have social

centres. They tell the stories of particular human communities from a

particular point of view. According to him, “Narrativity . . . is intimately

related to . . . the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the

social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (Tropics

of Discouse 14). Histories, however accurate they may be, however faithful
29

they are to the evidence and to the experiences of people in the past,

are always allegories. They are stories not only about the past but also about

the present. They are stories not only about the particular experiences of

particular people at a particular time and place in the past, but about the

human experiences in all times and at all places. Symbolic characters, actions,

and settings connect stories about the past to the present, as do the mythic

plots through which those stories unfold. Every history has an aesthetic. It has

a theory of what is beautiful or sublime in societies, characters, and actions.

In short, historians turn the past into “histories” by writing stories that impose

order, structure, and coherence onto the past.

Hayden White underlines some similarities in the form and objective

of the fictional and historical discourses:

All written discourse is cognitive in its aims and mimetic in its

means. And this is true even of the most ludic and seemingly

expressivist discourse, of poetry no less than of prose, and

even of those forms of poetry which seem to illuminate only

‘writing itself’. In this respect, history is no less a form of

fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation.

(Tropics of Discourse 122)

According to Hayden White, historical work is a verbal artifact. It is a

narrative discourse, the content of which is as much imagined or invented

as found. He explains this point in the essay “The Historical Text as

Literary Artifact”:

In general there has been a reluctance to consider historical

narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the

contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms

of which have more in common with their counterparts in

literature than they have with those in the sciences. (Tropics of

Discourse 82)

He is of the opinion that in the construction of their historical narratives,

historians inevitably combine known or found parts (facts) with ultimately

unknown and thus imagined/invented wholes. White, in the essay,

“The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” applies theories of fiction to

historical writing. The essay raises questions about the disciplinary

boundaries between history and literature or logical boundaries between fact

and fiction. He coins the term “metahistory,” to represent histories or stories

about history, which attempts to blur the disciplinary distinctions between

historiography and literature. He argues that when depicting the past,

historians employ historical imagination. The historian relies on the narrative

strategies of a literary writer. So history is narrative prose shaped by literary

conventions and the historian’s imagination.

White argues that historical narratives are more closely linked with

literature than with the sciences. This is not because historical narratives are
31

fictional, but because historical narratives employ tropes to configure

historical events in ways that the audience can relate to. Historians re-emplot,

re-describe, or re-code past events so that contemporary cultures can make

sense of their past. Histories, then, are similar to fiction because figurative

language is used in both genres to help readers come to know the a

ctual by “contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable” (Tropics of

Discourse 98). Both historical narratives and fictional narratives employ

similar strategies in making sense of past events whether they are real or

imagined. His concept of history as narrative, states that historical works in

general take the form of a narrative, in the sense of a coherent and ordered

representation of events or developments in sequential time. He says that all

historical explanations are rhetorical and poetic by nature.

White’s concept of “history as narrative” has led to the postmodernist

debate about historiography. Postmodernism is skeptical towards any claims

of certainty in sciences including history. In historiography, postmodernism is

identified with the linguistic turn, which refers to the priority given to

language. White wants historians to have linguistic skepticism and to question

their use of language. His defense of this idea appears very controversial:

“…the techniques or strategies that historians and imaginative writers use in

the composition of their discourses can be shown to be substantially the same,

however different they may appear on a purely surface, or dictional level”

(Tropics of Discourse 121). White argues that historical studies are best
32

understood not as accurate and objective representations of the past, but as

creative texts structured by narrative and rhetorical devices that shape

historical interpretation. He proposes a theory of tropes, or symbolic modes

that constitutes the deep structure of historical thought.

White has developed his argument through the cases of four historians-

Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, and four philosophers of

history- Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Croce. Arguing for a sustained

examination of the figurative features of historiographical texts, White asserts

the importance of four tropes of consciousness that shape the works of a

historian at every stage. He identifies four rhetorical styles through which the

authors presented their interpretations: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and

irony. He also identifies four corresponding literary genres by which the

historians figured historical processes in their works as stories of a particular

kind: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy and Satire. Each of these figures has its

own characteristic way of organizing pieces of information into a larger

whole. In Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century

Europe, White extends the use of tropes from linguistic usage to general

styles of discourse. He believes that histories are determined by tropes, in as

much as the historiography of every period is defined by a specific trope. For

him, metaphor is the most useful trope, and historical explanation “can be

judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its

sequence of articulation” (Tropics of Discourse 46). The greater the

imagination of the historian, or the greater is his poetic talent, the greater will

be the literary quality and readability of the historical narrative. In this regard,

White remarks, in The Content of Form: “A true narrative account… is less a

product of the historian’s poetic talents, as the narrative account of imaginary

events is conceived to be, than it is a necessary result of proper application of

historical ‘method’” (27). It is an evidenced fact that he was strongly

influenced by Paul Ricoeur. White echoes Ricoeur in the same work: “plot is

not a structural component of fictional or mythical stories alone; it is crucial

to the historical representations of events as well” (51). Here, White

underlines Ricoeur’s contention that plot forms the fundamental structure of

fiction as well as history.

Postmodernists believe that history is qualified with subjective

elements because the historian has his own choices. His processes of selection

are personal and subjective. The historian takes some past events and makes

story out of them. The events selected will be his personal choice. In that

selected events he makes his preferences as to which element should be given

prominence.

Writing history involves selecting evidence and filling in gaps.

Histories are “not only about events but also about the possible sets of

relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figure” (Tropics of

Discourse 94). For example, the chronological sequence a,b,c,d,e,…n may be

endowed with different meanings, such as:

A,b,c,d,e,…n;

a,B,c,d,e,…n;

a,b,C,d,e,…n;

a,b,c,D,e,…n and

a,b,c,d,E…n

and so on. In these sequences, capital letters indicate the privileging of a

certain event or set of events. These sets of relationships are not inherent in

the events themselves. Rather, they are a part of the language that the

historian uses to describe them. Historians use the conventions of figurative,

not technical, language.

According to White, the historian begins his work by constituting a

chronicle of events which is to be organized into a coherent story. These are

the two preliminary steps before processing the material into a plot which

expresses an ideology. Thus the historical work is “a verbal structure in the

form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of

past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by

representing them” (Metahistory 2).

White defines historical work as a verbal structure in the form of a

narrative prose discourse. It classifies past structures and processes in order to

explain what they were by representing them as models. A historian takes

events that happened and makes a story out of them. In order to make a story

intelligible and meaningful as history, historians, consciously or

unconsciously, make it conform to their preferences. A historian does not just

find history, but makes it by arranging events in a certain order: deciding

which events in the chronicle to include and which to exclude; answering

questions like what happened? When? How? Why; stressing some events and

subordinating others. Emplotment, Argument and Ideological implication are

the three ways in which he answers these questions.

Emplotment is the literary genre into which the story falls. According

to White, every history, even the most “synchronic” of them, will be

emplotted in some way: “Histories gain part of their explanatory effect by

their success in making stories out of mere chronicles; and stories in turn are

made out of chronicles by an operation which I have elsewhere called

emplotment. And by emplotment I mean simply the encodation of the facts

contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures,

in precisely the way that Frye has suggested is the case with “fictions” in

general” (Tropics of Discourse 223). Emplotment is the act of giving

something a plot, of putting it within a narrative structure. This is what

authors do when they tell stories, but this is also what historians do when they

write reports. They do not just report the facts - they create a narrative, a story

in an attempt to give their data meaning. Creating a plot for something

inevitably means leaving some things out and emphasizing others.

Emplotment is mediation of pre-understanding, event and story. And a plot

is one among many alternative plots. Barry and Elmes have applied the

concept of narrative plot to organizational strategy.

Accordingly, a narrative approach can make the political economy of

strategy more visible: Who gets to write and read strategy? How are reading

and writing linked to power? Who is marginalized in the writing/reading

process? (Barry and Elmes 430) They point to the possibility of having many

alternative/ equivalent stories. There are as many stories as writers/readers.

Each story aims at to strengthen or weaken a power structure. “A story the

strategist tells is but one of many competing alternatives woven from a

vast array of possible characterizations, plot lines, and themes” (Barry and

Elmes 433). In emplotment, the plot is not just a chronology of events or the

schematic arrangement of a causal chain that links events and episodes

together into a narrative structure. Emplotment is also the intertextual

arrangement of events within the text, and the epistemology of time and

being-within-time.

There are three mediations to accomplish emplotment. The first is the

mediation between individual events and story as a whole. A diversity of

events or succession of incidents are constructed and grasped together into a

meaningful story. An event has meaning in its relation to other events and

incidents in the development of a plot within the meaningfulness of the whole

story. Stories are more than a chronology of events in serial order because of

plot, which organizes and (re) configures event networks into an intelligible

whole. The second is the mediation between heterogeneous factors. Factors as

heterogeneous as agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances,

unexpected results get emploted and embellished. Plot (re)configures

heterogeneous events and factors into a whole story and into one grand

“thought,” “point,” or “theme.” Mediation allows a synthesis of the

heterogeneous. The episodic dimensions of narrative are chronological while

the narrative of time is not. Plot (re)configures chronological time into storied

and teleological time. Emplotment grasp together configuration from mere

succession. The synthesis can occur in the conclusion of a story where all the

contingencies, factors, and events are given a point of view and formed into a

whole understanding.

The four types of emplotment are romance, satire, comedy and

tragedy. Romance celebrates the triumph of the good after trials and

tribulations. Comedy is socially integrative and it celebrates the conservation

of shared human values against the threat of disruption. Tragedy stresses the

irreconcilable element of human affairs, and laments the loss of the good

necessarily entailed when values collide. Satire sees only meaningless change

in human life; human affairs display no pattern, and for the most part they are

governed by folly and chance.

Argument is the historian’s view of what history ought to be. The four

types of arguments are formist, organicist, mechanistic and contextualist.

The formist mode of argument sees individual historical units or entities

as self-contained and relatively autonomous. The organicist mode assumes

that individual units are determined by their place in a larger whole and by a

common spirit; for example, the zeitgeist. The mechanistic mode looks for

laws of cause and effect connecting historical phenomena. The contextualist

mode relates units to each other against a common background or frame of

reference.

Ideology reflects ethics and assumptions which the historian has about

life, how past events affect the present, and how we ought to act in the

present. There were ideologies which did not claim science as an authority

before the Enlightenment. According to White, there is no possibility of

authoritarian ideology now. Conservative, liberal, radical and anarchist are the

four types of ideologies that exist now. White thinks that in principle any of

the modes of emplotment can be combined with any of the modes of

argument and any of the modes of ideology. Thus, in principle one can have a

history written as mechanistic anarchist comedy.

Most historical writings define itself by reference to these categories.

This has the important corollary that there is no further, scientific, correct,

neutral way of writing history which can be found outside this grid. Rather,

historians are “indentured to a choice” among these options, and cannot

choose. Within the grid, no one mode has a closer relation to truth than any

other; thus, a sequence of events can be narrated as a tragedy or as satire

or as romance, and there is no way to prove that one of these is the right way

of narrating it.

Underpinning the narrative combinations of emplotment, argument and

ideological implication are tropes, the linguistic figures with specific

rhetorical functions. The historian “prefigures” the act of writing history by

writing within a particular trope. In this regard, White observes: “Tropes are

especially useful for understanding the operations by which the contents of

experience which resist description in unambiguous prose representations can

be prefiguratively grasped and prepared for conscious apprehension” (Tropics

of Discourse 34). Prefiguration in historiography is the relation between a set

of patterns in an epoch to an identical set of patterns in another epoch. This

relation makes us bewilder whether history can repeat, irrespective of space

and time. For White, the tropes are:

…deviations from literal, conventional, or, ‘proper’ language

use, swerves in locution sanctioned neither by custom nor logic.

Tropes generate figures of speech or thought by their variation

from what is ‘normally’ expected, and by the associations they

establish between concepts normally felt not to be related or to

be related in ways different from that suggested in the trope

used… Thus considered, troping is both a movement from one

notion of the way things are related to another notion, and a

connection between things so that they can be expressed

otherwise. (Tropics of Discourse 2)

Tropes help historian to make his language metaphoric, which enables them

to construct meanings, obtuse and vicarious. In other words, tropes create the

possibility of polysemic contexts in historical narratives.

White thinks that the way the “historical field,” or the given set of

events, developments, structures and agents, takes shape in the historian's

mind is ultimately determined at a deep level, deeper than that on which the

modes operate. Each person's mind is biased towards a certain way of making

links between data. White borrows terms from rhetoric to describe them:

metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy and irony. These four correspond to the

“master tropes” identified by Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives.

The metaphorical imagination makes connections by seeing likenesses; the

metonymic, by making a part represent or stand for any other part of a whole;

the synecdochic, by making the part represent the whole. The ironic mind is

skeptical about whether making connections is possible at all. Romantic

narrative is founded on metaphor, tragic on metonymy, comic on synecdoche,

and satiric on irony. White’s tropes are not turns of speech in the sense of

decorative flourishes, but dominant strategies by which known and unknown

phenomena are made meaningful within language.

The historian gathers data and assembles them toward a form. Part of

the success of histories in explaining events of the past to readers in the

present is due to the story-making ability of the historian, or “emplotment.”

R. G. Collingwood views historians as story-tellers, but does not make the

distinction between the elements of a story and the story itself. The story takes

shape by “the suppression or subordination” of some events and the

“highlighting” of others (Tropics of Discourse 84). But the form is not

implicit in the events, as Collingwood suggests. Rather, the form comes from

the combination of the historian’s choices in telling the events and the

reader’s familiarity with the forms of tragedy, comedy, romance, or irony.

Telling history is in this way a literary form. By encoding the events so as to

reflect a familiar form, the historian “refamiliarizes” readers with events.

Historical narratives serve not only as a “reproduction” of the events but also

as a “complex of symbols” assisting readers to find an “icon” of those events

(Tropics of Discourse 88). Form limits the coherence of the story, which is

the coherence of the events. The facts must be tailored to the form, while

preserving the chronology or sequence. This happens both by emphasis within

the sequence and by the omission of some events from the sequence. The

choices of emphasis and omission come from the historian’s sense of possible

sets of relationships among the events. The historian begins with “ordinary

educated speech” as his communication method, leaving figurative language

to construct meaning. The “dominant figurative mode” available can

determine the type of emplotment to be used (Tropics of Discourse 94). The

mode of figuration determines the mode of emplotment. Ultimately,

construction of meaning depends on the mode of figuration.

In Metahistory, White sets out the interpretive framework that guides

much of his later work. Arguing for a sustained examination of the figurative

features of historiographical texts, White asserts the importance of four tropes

of consciousness that shape the work of the historian at every stage.

Following Vico’s work on rhetoric, White associates these four modes of

historical consciousness with four figures of speech: metaphor, metonymy,

synecdoche, and irony. Each of these figures has its own characteristic way of

organizing pieces of information into a larger whole. White argues that this

poetics of history, and not historical evidence alone, determines a historian’s

perspective and interpretation. Thus, for White, the power of these different

modes of representation highlights the non-scientific nature of the discipline

of history. If one assumes a base level of honesty and skill on the part of the

historian, White finds no reason to privilege one historical account over

another based only on historical evidence. White asserts that the kind of

history one chooses to tell is based on moral and aesthetic values that stand in

sharp contrast to some objective, neutral understanding of historical evidence

alone. White’s Metahistory reveals a relativism that dissolves the distinctions

not only between historiography and the philosophy of history but also

between fiction and historiography. For White, fictitious and historiographical

events are both conveyed through similar representational strategies and

hence, at this formal level, no differences exist between these two kinds of

discourse. White’s challenge to history is that it is not a science, or a story

told only in facts; but rather it is a form of discourse that relies on

conventional narrative forms and imagination.

It is necessary to recognize the fictive element of historical narratives

and to reconnect history with its “literary basis.” This allows the incorporation

of theories of language and narrative to make a “more subtle presentation” of

historical events. Such recognition and reconnection would guard against

“ideological distortions” and develop a theory that would revitalize the

discipline of history (Tropics of Discourse 99). History can sustain itself with

the theories of language and narrative embedded in its texture.

As both Foucault and White suggest, historians are epochal as well as

textual creatures and as such they can prefigure the historical field

accordingly. Historians are, therefore, influenced by the ontological and

epistemological assumptions of the present. These assumptions are

established and made manifest as the historian brings his narrative, and the

conceptual and ethical explanatory strategies to bear on the content of the

past. This is managed through the activity of the historical imagination in the

initial process of troping. The historical imagination composes the historical

narrative through the deliberate sequencing of events to effect an explanation.

This ordering of events is the imaginative process of emplotment.

The function of historical imagination not only establishes connections

between the documents but also couples the past, the present and the future.
44

In this regard, White observes:

Historical imagination is often described as putting oneself in

the place of past agents, seeing things from their point of view,

and so forth, all of which leads to a notion of objectivity that is

quite different from anything that might be meant by that term

in physical sciences. (Tropics of Discourse 67)

The historical imagination, working through the troping process of analogy

and difference, creates casual links in the form of metaphorical descriptions.

White’s major contribution is his suggestion that historians interpret the

cultural history of any period by reference to its dominant tropic

prefiguration, while bearing in mind the epistemic signature of their own

epoch.

As language shows the direction and relationships between the “facts”

presented, rather than a grand narrative which tells us ultimately what

happened, history becomes a way of understanding the social relations

between the past/present, powerful/weak, conscious/subconscious. White

asserts that all of these relationships can be ascertained through the analysis of

the language in which histories are written, and the gaps or contradictions

present in that language, rather than the content of the histories themselves.

White’s concept of history as narrative, as a literary genre, questions the

claims of truth and objectivity in historical works. As historical narratives

proceed from empirically validated facts or events, they necessarily require

imaginative steps to place them in a coherent story; they represent only a

selection of historical events. Thus, truth is limited. Narratives explain why

events happened, but they are, according to AlunMunslow,

…overlaid by the assumptions held by the historian about the

forces influencing the nature of causality. These might well

include individual or combined elements like race, gender,

class, culture, weather, coincidence, geography, region,

blundering politicians, and so on and so forth. So, while

individual statements may be true (or) false, narrative as a

collection of them is more than their sum. (Deconstructing

History 10)

He means that the effect created by a historical narrative is more than the total

effects created by individual historical events. White argues that the

distinction between historical and fictional narratives is too narrow to be

defined:

Narrative historiography may very well, as Furet indicates,

“dramatize” historical events and “novelize” historical

processes, but this only indicates that the truths in which

narrative history deals are of an order different from those of its

social scientific counterpart. The relation between

historiography and literature is, of course, as tenuous and

difficult to define as that between historiography and science.

In part, no doubt, this is because historiography in the West

arises against the background of a distinctively literary (or

fictional) discourse which itself took shape against the even

more archaic discourse of myth. (Metahistory 44)

White states that history fails, if its intention is the objective reconstruction of

the past because the process involved is a literary one of interpretative

narrative, rather than objective empiricism or social theorizing. By denying

universal truths, White’s concept criticizes Western scientific and rationalistic

worldviews. These ethnocentric perspectives are considered the justifications

for the use and abuse of power and authority. In this context, Mark T.

Guilderhus remarks: “History devoted exclusively to the activities of white

male elites of European extraction is no longer the standard” (History and

Historians 136). White questions the Eurocentric notion of history as a form

of narrative. His theory calls for emerging models in the realm of historical

narration. History constructs sense of the past events in the present through

emplotting events, troping contents, prefiguring narratives and inventing new

models.

All of White’s works share a concern with combining literary criticism

and historiography in order to develop a deeper understanding of historical

discourse and cultural perspective. In Metahistory, White sets out the

interpretive framework that guides much of his later work. Arguing for a

sustained examination of the figurative features of historiographical texts,

White asserts the importance of four tropes of consciousness that shape the

work of the historian at every stage. In Tropics of Discourse, White strives

to develop a less relativistic stance by arguing that the deep structures that

define human consciousness have a certain stability that allows for the

creation of sound representations of human perceptions of reality. He also

suggests that it is not possible for some pieces of historical evidence to be

represented within particular tropological structures, and hence the historian

needs to rely only on those modes of discourse that will most accurately

reflect the evidence in question. Although White’s arguments in Tropics of

Discourse place some distance between his works and those of

poststructuralist theorists with whom he has been associated, they also raise

tensions within his own approach. White’s next collection of essays, 

The Content of the Form, places less emphasis on the existential separation

between life and narrative found in his early works, emphasizing instead the

role ideology plays in the representation of historical processes and events.

In Figural Realism, White again employs his theory of tropes to examine the

works of Proust and Freud, arguing that history cannot serve as neutral

ground for the interpretation of varied texts. White also examines the

difficulties and ethical problems posed in finding effective ways to represent

the Holocaust.

The concept of history as narrative has wide implications; it leads

among other aspects, to the postmodernist debate on historiography.

White’s view of historical texts as literary artifacts erases the distinction

between history and story. According to him, authors have other messages

that they want to convey so that the historical past is the medium but not the

message of the historical work. As he states, comparable to good narratives,

historical works carry the reader smoothly but directly to the conclusion the

author has in mind.

White’s text contains a radical critique of historical methodology and

the consciousness of historians. His concept of history as narrative, as a

literary genre, challenges the claims of truth and objectivity in historical

work. According to White, historical narratives are verbal fictions; their

contents are as much invented as found and their forms have more in common

with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.

As he states, while historical narratives proceed from empirically validated

facts or events, they necessarily require imaginative steps to place them in a

coherent story; they also represent only a selection of historical events. His

insistence that history is as much how you narrate as what you narrate, opens

up the possibility of demonstrating the past’s relevance to the present.

Moreover, his central thesis that historical writing may be understood as a

system of tropes, such as the metaphorical and the ironic, allows for the

beneficial expansion of historical thinking into the realm of literary and

critical theory.
49

The visualization of history can be analysed with the help of visual

semiotics. Semiotics is a branch of communication theory that investigates

sign systems and the mode of representation that humans use to convey

feelings, thoughts, ideas and ideologies. It is the study of signs and signals,

sign systems and processes. Jakobson defines semiotics as “the exchange of

any messages whatever and the system of signs that underlie them” (42).

Semiotic analysis looks for the cultural and psychological patterns that

underlie language, art and other cultural expressions. Umberto Eco jokingly

suggests that semiotics is a discipline for studying everything which can be

used in order to lie (Eco 7).

  The term semiotics has its roots in Greek semeiotike. Although it has

become the word most commonly used to designate this area of study,

ironically, it was employed by neither of the two great theorists who most

decisively shaped modern semiotics. The American philosopher Charles

Sanders Peirce preferred “semiotic” (parallel to terms like logic and rhetoric)

as a label for the study of the doctrine of signs, or frequently semeiotic to

indicate its derivation from the Greek. And the French structuralist Ferdinand

de Saussure conceived of language as a particular system of signs, linguistics

itself as being one part of the comprehensive science of signs that he

called semiology.

Semiotics has sometimes been understood as a specific discipline, with

its own method and determinate subject matter. In this case, the semiotician
50

will attend most directly to the basic structure of the sign relation, the

conditions of possibility for anything functioning as a sign of anything else.

Here semiotics is closely related to philosophy, especially to inquiries in

formal logic, and to theoretical linguistics. More typically, semiotics has been

portrayed as a complex, interdisciplinary field of study, drawing not only

upon philosophy and linguistics but also with vital links to literary and

communication studies, hermeneutics, the history and theory of art,

anthropology, sociology, psychology, and even biology and the natural

sciences.

There are two major traditions in modern semiotic theory. One is

grounded in the European tradition led by the Swiss-French linguist

Ferdinand de Saussure, and the other from the American pragmatic

philosophy led by Charles Sanders Peirce. Saussure sought to explain how all

elements of a language are taken as components of a larger system of

language in use. This led to a formal discipline which he called semiology.

Peirce’s interest in logical reasoning led him to investigate different

categories of signs and the manner by which we extract meaning from them.

Saussure’s thesis was that language is the instrument which enables

human beings to achieve a rational comprehension of the world in which they

live. Instead of seeing words as subordinate to our grasp of reality, Saussure

saw our understanding of reality as depending essentially on our social use of

the verbal signs which constitute the language we use. He saw language as
51

central to human life. Human existence is linguistically articulated. Saussure

laid the foundation for the structuralist school in linguistics and social theory.

A structuralist looks at the units of a system and the rules of logic that are

applied to the system, without regard to any specific content. The smallest

unit of analysis in Saussure’s semiology is the sign made up of a signifier or a

sensory pattern, and a signified, the concept that is elicited in the mind by the

signifier. Saussure emphasized that the signifier does not constitute a sign

until it is interpreted. He emphasized the arbitrary association between a word

and what it stands for. The link between the sign and what it stands for is

understood by convention. This arbitrariness is true in most spoken and

written languages; they may not be so for other types of signs such as visuals

that provide cues to stimulate recognition through resemblance or mimesis.

Pierce shared the Saussurian observation that most signs are symbolic

and arbitrary, but he called attention to iconic signs that physically resemble

their referent and indexical signs that possess a logical connection to their

referent. To Peirce, the relationship of the sign to the object is made in the

mind of the interpreter as a mental tool which he called the interpretant.

According to him, semiosis, the process of sign interpretation, is a process

involving multiple references. The signifier elicits in the mind an interpretant

which is not the final signified object, but a mediating thought that promotes

understanding. In other words, a thought is a sign requiring interpretation by a

subsequent thought in order to achieve meaning. This mediating thought

might be a schema, a mental model, or a recollection of prior experience that

enables the subject to move forward towards understanding. This interpretant

itself becomes a sign that can elicit yet another interpretant, leading the way

toward an infinite series of unlimited semiosis. By this analysis, Peirce shifts

the focus of semiotics from a relational view of signs and the objects they

represent to an understanding of semiosis as an interactive, mediational

process.

A sign, as defined by Peirce, is “something that stands to somebody for

something in some respect or capacity” (99). He states again: “A sign is an

object which stands for another to some mind” (141). In other words, his

triadic model of a sign identifies the word or image sign that stands for some

other object or concept. In line with his philosophical focus, the most basic

premise of his semiotic theory states that all we can know is mediated by

signs. This very important “stands for” process is the point where meaning is

generated both through encoding by the source (production) and decoding by

the receiver (reception), and this relationship is the focus of the process of

interpretation. The importance of interpretation is apparent in the definition

given by the Italian semiotician, Umberto Eco, who further defines a sign as

“something that is interpreted” (Eco 15). Eco defines a sign as anything which

may be interpreted to “stand for” (or substitute for) something. A sign is a

unit consisting of an expression and a content which are connected with each

other by a mutual correlation or “sign function.”

Peirce’s most important contribution is in the area of interpretation.

According to him, the meaning making process is an infinite process of

interpretation. This process of interpretation involves the consideration of the

meaning of a sign in terms of all possible signification possibilities- a sign can

be a signal, or an iconic, indexical or symbolic sign, all at the same time.

Interpretation is done by puzzling out the inferences from these multiple

levels of signification. This type of search for meaning is infinite, in Peirce’s

view, because every signifier can be translated into other signifiers and

interpretants through an endless process of inference chaining.

Peirce’s concept of interpretant is very important in visual

communication because visual meaning is more open for interpretation than

verbal. Contrary to conventional wisdom which suggests that if you can see,

you can understand (that is, meaning is transparent), the interpretation of

many visual messages may be more complex and more demanding on the

decoder because of the inferential dimension on which visual interpretation

rests. Visual interpretation involves more than simple inference. Eco suggests

that a viewer goes through a process of “synthetic inference” which involves

both denotative (realism, representation) and connotative (associations,

attitudes, emotions) processes. Association, in particular, unlocks this

chaining process. In this complex inferential process where information is

being actively synthesized, an involved audience extends and fills in meaning

as well as decodes the meaning.

According to Eco, the meaning of signs is determined by the objects

(things or events) to which they refer, and he rejects the notion that “iconic”

signs must be likenesses of their objects. He argues that the meaning of signs

is not necessarily determined by whether they refer to actual objects.

He explains that the existence of objects to which signals or signs may

correspond is not a necessary condition for their signification. Eco defines

signification as the semiotic event whereby a sign “stands for” something, and

he defines communication as the transmission of information from a source to

a destination. Communication is made possible by the existence of a code, or

by a system of signification. Without a code or a system of signification, there

is no set of rules to determine how the expression of signs is to be correlated

with their content. The use of a code or a system of signification is necessary

to establish any form of communication. According to him, a “code” is an

instrument for connecting the expression of signs to their content, and is a

correlational device which generates “sign-functions.” A “code” is also a rule

for sign production and interpretation in that it determines how the expression

and content of signs are to be correlated.

Eco also argues that the content and not the referent of a sign is the

location of the sign’s meaning. The meaning of a sign is a “cultural unit” in

that the meaning of every sign is culturally defined. “Semiosis,” the term

borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce, is expanded by Eco to designate the

process by which a culture produces signs and/or attributes meaning to signs.

Although Eco argues that meaning production or semiosis is a social activity,

he admits that subjective factors are also involved in each individual act of

semiosis. This notion is then pertinent to the two main emphases of current or

poststructuralist, semiotic theory. One is a semiotics focused on the subjective

aspects of signification and strongly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis,

where meaning is construed as a subject-effect: the subject being an effect of

the signifier. The other is a semiotics concerned to stress the social aspect of

signification, its practical, aesthetic, or ideological use in interpersonal

communication, here, meaning is construed as semantic value produced

through culturally shared codes. 

Peircean semiotics allows us to discuss all signs, whether verbal or

non-verbal, as components of all forms of meaning. He explains: “All the

universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs”

(Peirce, 258). According to Peirce, signs are not just words and meaning is

not necessarily a product of convention or language. He has developed a

tripartite system to classify the complex world of signs as icons,

indexes and symbols. Peirce defines an icon as similar to its subject; in other

words, iconic signs carry some quality of the thing they stand for as a portrait

stands for a person. Most often an iconic sign is a representation such as a

drawing or a photograph where likeness or resemblance is a determining

characteristic; early picture writing or pictographs, also had iconic elements.

An index is physically connected with its object, an indication that something

exists or has occurred; a footprint means someone just walked by or smoke

that means there is a fire. Symbolic signs arbitrarily stand for something

through a process of consensus as a word stands for a concept. A symbol,

such as a leaf on a flag, is linked by convention with its object. We learn that

a maple leaf stands for the country of Canada. Symbols, therefore, are

conventional like most spoken and written words and subject to a more closed

than open interpretation process.

Although symbols are arbitrary, icons and indexes are “motivated;”

that is, they are more likely to resemble their object in some way rather than

being created by convention. In this regard, John Fiske and John Hartley

explain in Reading Television: “…the greater the motivation, the smaller the

role played by socially based convention; and the weaker the motivation, the

more constraining is the convention” (39). Icons and indexes are also more

open to interpretation since they are not based on arbitrarily determined

relationships of meaning, but on personal experience. Symbols may be

complex, but once the meanings are understood, they are less subject to

idiosyncratic interpretations. A stop sign is a stop sign, but a rose is not

always a rose.

The distinctions between and among icon, index and symbol are not

rigid boundaries. In fact, a rose can be an icon (a picture), an index (sign of

summer), and a symbol (the War of Roses). Photographs are indexical as well

as iconic because they are reality grounded. In communication production

and reception, the meaning may shift from one to another as the

communication act progresses. For example, a study of Sinead O’Conner’s

iconoclastic tearing up of the picture of Pope Paul illustrates how conflict can

be generated when an iconic representation is turned into a symbol.

Saussure explains a sign and the process by which it is interpreted as a

two-part construct which he describes as containing first a sound or image,

called the signifier, and the concept for which it stands, called the signified.

This is similar to Peirce’s sign and object. For linguistic-oriented theorists

who work in the Saussurian model, the “stands for” relationship is often seen

as arbitrary. In other words, the link between the sign, or expression, and what

it stands for is understood by convention. This arbitrariness, which leads to a

more closed model of communication, is true in most spoken and written

languages. Obviously, with language, there is room for interpretation, but the

space for idiosyncratic interpretation is more tightly drawn through the

process of realized meanings and dictionary definitions.

The concept of open and closed texts, which originated with linguistic,

but can be applied to visuals as well. A murder mystery, whether a book or a

movie, for example, is a closed text where the code is known and the cause

and effect chains are not open. All that the reader does is to supply a sense of

the rules of the game. “Open” texts, on the other hand, such as most poetry

and tales like Finnegan’s Wake make complex demands on the reader.

Such texts are seen differently by different readers at different times.

The metaphor holds for visual communication as well. The stop sign is a

relatively closed text, but a news photograph, an advertisement, a Renaissance

painting, or our perceptions of the natural environment are much more open

to individual interpretation.

The idea that visuals are primarily open texts and subject to

idiosyncratic interpretation is an important point. In this context, Robert

Rutherford Smith points out in a review of works by Eco and Sebeok: “It is in

the field of open texts, from the work of Joyce and Brecht to the music of

Berio and Stockhausen, that the important work of the twentieth century is

being accomplished” (209). He points out that Eco’s notion that the reader

plays an important role in the interpretation of “modern,” open texts, corrects

the historic imbalance in communication theory that has focused on the

sender. It corrects another historic imbalance: the lack of recognition of visual

communication as generating a complex and highly sophisticated process of

interpretation. 

Peircean semiotics is much broader than theories of linguistic

processing. Eco’s definition of the boundaries of semiotics, for example,

includes a variety of natural communication systems from zoosemiotics

(animal communication) to biosemiotics (all biological signaling systems).

Deely’s book, Basics of Semiotics, follows Peirce’s suggestions that semiosis

should be divided between cognitive- zoosemiotics (animal),

anthroposemiotics (human), and non-cognitive physiosemios (the broad

physical universe), and phytosemiosis (plant life). The two dominant strands

of thought in modern semiotics, the Saussurean and the Peircean, began to

intersect late in the twentieth century as poststructuralist thinkers, steeped in

the Saussurean tradition, increasingly began to draw on Peircean concepts and

arguments.

In Fiske’s critique of Jensen’s work, he suggests that semiology is a

richer arena than Peircean semiotics because it is more “generative.” Peirce’s

theory opens up a much broader interpretation of sign systems in contrast to

much of the work of traditional communication theory which is grounded in

language. Semioticians are interested in any system that uses signs to create

meaning and most of them argue that communication should include sign

systems other than language. Only a percentage of human communication is

verbal, there being a vast amount of communication on the non-verbal level.

One of the most important sign systems used to communicate

non-verbally is that employed in visual communication where signs are used

to stand for experiential knowledge as well as ideas. We perceive information

visually from nature and the reality around us; we also perceive visual

information from mediated forms of communication. Both forms of visual

perception are grounded in observation, a neglected area in most language-

based theories of meaning.

Some scholars argue that movies, television and advertising are

dominated by visuals rather than language. The reality-grounded perceptual

process used in understanding these media is largely untutored and mastered

through experience rather than education. This is a fact that apparently makes

the process seem suspect and less sophisticated than language-based meaning

systems. Almost a hundred years ago, Peirce made a plea that scholars ‘not be

in haste to deride a kind of thinking that is evidently founded upon

observation” (258).

Visual communication scholars would argue that driving on a freeway

or watching an MTV program involves a very complex set of interpretive

skills, even if they are grounded in observation, rather than language. In other

words, visual communication is complex and the information processing

facility is sophisticated, even if much of it is self-taught. The interpretation of

visual information, as it uses more open communication codes, is highly

subjective and it puts more demands on a viewer/observer than on a receiver

of language-based communication which operates within the more restricted

space of convention.

At the most basic level, the meaning of a sign is internalized by the

process of perception- the intersection of our senses with reality-based data as

information from the perceived world is “registered.” Two important factors

are personal observation and individual experience. We understand a great

many things from experiences with reality.

The idea of non-verbal perception of meaning contrasts with the work

of language-based theorists who believe that converting perception into

knowledge happens only through language. Visual communication scholars

argue that it is possible to apprehend signs and make sense of them without

the mediation of language. According to them, we naturally make sense of

visual information without language. Language is used for interpreting some

kinds of information, particularly abstract and theoretical concepts; but a great

deal of what we process visually is managed without stopping to find a word

for it.

As perception is active, the individual selects the information and

modifies it depending on the individual's previous experiences. It takes

repeated observations for us to make sense of the patterns around us and that

is where perception interacts with cognition through the processes of

recognition, organization, and discrimination. In other words, visual

interpretation involves both the eyes and the brain: what we understand is

moderated by what we know or have experienced in the past and how we

have made sense of these experiences and recorded them in memory.

Meaning can be internalized as much of what we learn through visual

processing of reality-based information. But it can also be socially or

culturally driven which creates an externalized dimension in interpretation. In

other words, much of what we know from language or code based signs

including most visual symbols is derived from social learning. For example,

the way we dress is derived from a socially determined code of fashion.

This is where Peirce’s notion of interpretive communities or communities of

inquirers is useful. This suggests a continuum of interpretation factors moving

from internal to external. So we understand things not only by using both the

eyes and the brain but also by using internally derived information learned

from experiences combined with externally based conventions. Thus,

meaning of signs is constructed through a complex interaction of perception

and cognition as well as individual and conventional factors.

Roland Barthes’s semiotic theory focuses on the social phenomena of

signs, specifically photographs. His theory emphasizes how signs constitute

culture and ideologies in particular ways. According to Barthes, these

messages are constituted in two ways: through denotation, the literal meaning

and reference of a sign, and connotation, the meanings that are suggested or

implied by the sign. For instance, “Hitler” denotes historical individual.

Meanwhile, Hitler connotes evil, genocide, racism, and so on. Therefore, a

photographic image by itself without a code is pure denotation. But Barthes

claims that the denotative status of a photo “has every chance of being

mythical.” (15). Barthes uses mythical as a way of describing the

characteristics that are associated with common sense, or the characteristics of

a photograph that have the opportunity to represent and convey ideological

norms of a culture. Consequently, a photograph can also connote cultural

meaning. But Barthes explains: “The press photograph is an object that has

been worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to

professional, aesthetic or ideological norms which are so many factors

of connotation” (31). Thus, there is a photographic paradox in which there is a

co-existence of denotative and connotative messages.

In order to understand the connotative messages within a photo,

Barthes suggests the awareness and ability to recognize the connotative

procedures: trick effect, pose, objects, photogenia, aestheticism and syntax. 

Although the photo itself holds many connotative messages, the text around

the photo also contributes to its connotation. Barthes describes the text as

“parasitic” on the image. In other words, the text borrows the objectivity of

the image, while at the same time loading the image with hidden

connotations. Thus, words are not merely duplicating messages within the

photo but always add to the meaning.

Ultimately, it is not the photo that is significant, but the historical and

cultural elements of the photo. Accordingly, there are modes of connotation

that one uses to identify the ideologies and messages. The first is perceptive,

where an individual automatically categorizes what they perceive. The second

is cognitive, where an individual recognizes elements that they personally

know about. For example, they identify with a particular place and time of an

event. Thus, connotation relies on the reader’s or viewer’s knowledge. The

last is the ideological or ethical mode when one recognizes a certain value

that is being depicted such as beauty. Through such modes of connotation

Barthes’s semiotic theory frames problems through shared meaning.

Misunderstandings are then a result of different meanings whether it is of

unconscious cultural differences or hidden ideologies.

Barthes wants to create a way for people to deepen their understanding

of language, literature and society. Specifically, he focuses on non-verbal

signs. His greatest concern is occidentalism - the French bourgeoisie

considers its culture and mores universal. He feels that society is a

construction, perpetuated by signs of the dominant values within its culture.

Barthes begins to study the subject of semiotics not as a process but as an

attitude. He believes that the importance of semiology resides in its

functionality. Semiology provides Barthes with an opportunity to denunciate

“the self-proclaimed petit-bourgeois myths... This means was semiology- the

close analysis of process of meaning by which the bourgeoisie converts its

historical class-culture into a universal nature” (Mythologies 5).

According to modern semiology, the benefit of culture resides in the

differences (mores, bases, and attitudes) of groups. Without these differences,

choices would be limited. He feels that occidentalism is like a set of blinders,

providing only one tool for understanding - namely, rhetoric. Rhetoric was

created in ancient Greece as a tool for persuasion. Truth is not a goal of

rhetoric. Barthes observes that rhetoric is a technique, an art in the classical

sense of the word, the art of persuasion. Rhetoric operates as the truth,

co-opting an existing denotative system and making it the signifier of a

secondary system.
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Levi-Strauss, an anthropologist who applied Saussure’s theory to

cultural anthropology is another structuralist who influenced Barthes.

Levi-Strauss has accepted Saussure’s idea: “Language (langue), on the

contrary to speech (language), is a self-contained whole and a principle of

classification. As soon as we give language first place among the facts of

speech, we introduce a natural order into a mass that lends itself to no other

classification the norm of all other manifestations of speech” (29). He goes

further by conceptualizing language itself as the production of society.

Like Saussure, Levi-Strauss focuses on the structure of language, and

seeks to find the hidden structures that he believes to exist in archetypes.

Based on the laws of language underlying the speech, he specifically tries to

uncover the underlying substructure of various cultural phenomena such as

customs, rites, habits, and gestures- phenomena which themselves said to be

intrinsic to the creation of language. He also examines the underlying

structure of the myth. In this regard, Levi-Strauss remarks:

Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its

syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language,

functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds

practically at ‘taking off’ from the linguistic ground on which it

keeps on rolling. (Adams and Searle 811)

In Mythologies, Barthes offers a sense of the subtle potential and ideological

impact of myth embedded in popular culture. With the enormous influence

of mass communication, cultural myths have been reified and taken-for-

granted in their everyday presence as a mediated form of reality. Semiotics

can serve as a tool to deconstruct myths embedded within popular culture.

In his Mythologies, Barthes frequently interrogates specific cultural

materials in order to expose how bourgeois society asserts its values through

them. For example, the portrayal of wine in French society as a robust and

healthy habit is a bourgeois ideal that is contradicted by certain realities like

that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating. He has found semiotics, useful in

these interrogations. Barthes explains that these bourgeois cultural myths are

“second-order signs,” or “connotations.” The picture of a full, dark bottle is

a signifier that relates to a specific signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage.

But the bourgeoisie relate it to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust,

relaxing experience. Motivations for such manipulations vary, from a desire

to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo.

The process of myth analysis lies in articulating the relationship

between all aspects of a sign system that constructs meaning around cultural

assumptions embedded in the form. The process necessarily begins with the

recognition of an ideological objection or an awareness that the sign system

carries assumptions that appear at once natural and historical. Myth blends in

with a message and denies its own existence through its apparent

subordination to the content of the first and second order signifiers. When we

become aware of myth, it shifts. We can look at an example of two moments

that shift between watching a play and watching someone in the audience

engaged in reading the play. The play constructs an internal narrative, but

watching the reader shifts attention away from the story content to the form of

play and its relationship to its audience. Myth is related to associated concepts

of culture: it refers to an unarticulated chain of associated concepts by which

members of a culture understand certain topics. Myths assume a logical form

within speech, folklore, stories, ritual and tradition. Myths are, according to

Silverstone, “the attempt to identify a basic level of cultural experience,

manifested in words and deeds throughout history, and concerned principally

with the articulation of the core concerns and preoccupations of their host

cultures” (23). Myths represent the perennial concerns and preoccupations of

our culture.

In Mythologies, Barthes theorizes that myth carries an order of cultural

signification where semiotic code is perceived as fact (131). Therefore,

assuming a degree of power and authority in order to distinguish myth from

connotation, it can be stated that myth appears as natural or universal in its

signification: “myths are connotations which have become dominant-

hegemonic” (125). There is an already assumed connotative meaning of the

sign that seems natural from a particular context of cultural consumption.

Thus, myth maintains an influential power through a quality of appearing self-

evident.
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Barthes’s methods still play an important role in the development of

film theory. But it is Christian Metz, one of the giants of French film theory,

who is best known for the use of semiology as a method to analyze cinema.

In Film Language, Metz argues that cinema is structured like a language.

Adopting Saussure’s models, Metz makes the distinction between “langue,” a

language system, and “language,” a less clearly defined system of

recognizable conventions. Metz contends that film cannot be regarded as

comprising a “langue,” in the sense of having a strict grammar and syntax

equivalent to that of the written or spoken word. Unlike the written word,

film’s basic unit, as Metz argues, is the shot, which is neither symbolic nor

arbitrary but iconic, and is, therefore, is laden with specific meaning. Metz

suggests that film is a language in which each shot used in a sequence works

like a unit in a linguistic statement. In his theoretical model, known as the

“grandesyntagmatique,” Metz argues that individual cinematic texts construct

their own meaning systems rather than share a unified grammar.

These ideas were developed and expanded by a wide range of theorists,

including Raymond Bellour who, in The Unattainable Text, has largely

supported Metz’s views. Metz’s ideas are controversial and they become the

catalyst for the heated debate among the theorists during the 1970s and the

1980s, especially among Left Wing cultural theorists in Britain and the United

States. In this regard, Umberto Eco argues in “Articulations of the Cinematic

Code,” that the photographic image is arbitrarily constructed, just as the

linguistic code is arbitrary. Stephen Heath challenges Metz’s arguments,

suggesting in Questions of Cinema that all cinema is concerned with

representation and that representation itself is a form of language equivalent

to Saussure’s linguistic model of “langue.” In a similar vein, Sam Rohdie

takes issue with some of Metz’s key statements while calling for a continued

investment in the systematic textual analysis that semiology makes possible.

Metz’ cinesemiotics leans heavily on linguistic models. The enterprise

of semiotics arises out of the methods of structural linguistics, formulated by

Saussure in the early part of the century. Linguistics has become one of the

most rigorous and fruitful sciences of this century. Metz ultimately discards a

theoretical model for film based on verbal language, although he still believes

that cinesemiotics can learn much from linguistics. His primary reason for

rejecting rigid analogies to language is based on his claim that the image,

unlike the word, is not a discrete unit that can be reduced into smaller basic

units and analyzed. According to him, the image discourse is an open system,

and it is not easily codified, with its non-discrete basic units (the images), its

intelligibility, its lack of distance between the significate and the signifier.

Metz sees the image as being too close an analogue of the thing in the real

world; it is not an indication of the thing but the actual “pseudo-presence of

the thing.” The mechanical nature of the basic filmic operation (photographic

and phonographic duplication) has the consequence of integrating into the

final product “chunks of signification whose internal structure remains

afilmic, and which are governed mainly by cultural paradigms”

(Film Language 18-19). This mimetic notion of the image is the opposite of

that held by Umberto Eco, whom Metz cites as responsible for many of his

later changes. Eco proposes the rather startling idea that the iconic

(photographic) image is, like the verbal sign; it is “completely arbitrary,

conventional and unmotivated” (“Articulations of the Cinematic Code” 2). 

He points out that the object undergoes many transformations when it

becomes the object of representation, so the image retains none of the

properties of the object represented; still the iconic sign reproduces some of

the conditions of perception. Eco analyzes the codes of the image which allow

us to perceive and understand it. They include perceptual codes, codes of

recognition, of transmission, iconic, iconographic, rhetorical, stylistic,

unconscious, and so on.

The difference between Metz’s notion of visual representation and that

of Eco’s is a very important one: for Metz, there is little distinction between

“inside” the film and “outside” the film. He precludes an analysis of the ways

such that a given ideology in the film may be mediated through the codes of

visual representation. Metz’s concept of visual representation allows ideology

as something existing only at the level of the content and can be

easily extracted from the film. The idea that ideology cannot be separated

from the cinematic codes which mediate, transform and deform it, can be

used to argue against the political efficacy of “popular radical” films like
71

Costa-Gravas’ State of Siege. This film has a “correct” ideology at the level of

content but its message must pass through the sieve of bourgeois codes of

representation- causal linear narrative, lenses that preserve Renaissance

perspective, seemingly unbroken, diegetic reality, and so on, which deflect or

even negate the radical intention of the film.

Metz, considers photographic images too “natural” to be subjected to

analysis. So he looks to larger units in the film text and decides that the

essence of cinema and the units most amenable to study are the large units of

the narrative. He says that there is a methodological urgency that favors the

study of the narrative film. He attempts to ground this in a rather ideologically

biased version of film history. He goes back to the Lumiere brothers’

invention of the camera in 1895 and states that of all the possibilities that

cinema could have evolved into (as a means of preserving records, as for use

in research and teaching, as a new form of journalism or as a way to keep

the memory of dead loved ones), it evolved into a “machine for telling

stories... it was a historical and social fact, a fact of civilization..,” and

because of this “fact,” the “inner semiological mechanism” of cinema became

narrativity.(Film Language 18-19)

It is illuminating to contrast Metz’s stance and theory with that of

Umberto Eco’s. Eco sees semiology as a tool for revolutionary activity and

talks about “semiotic guerilla warfare.” If you cannot seize or change the

institutions of production, you can at least change the way they are perceived.
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The comparison of these two theoreticians is a good argument against the

ideology that maintains that a “political” analysis is always and necessarily a

reduction of the aesthetic object under study. 

A language, by definition, is a semiotic process through which a

thought may be conveyed, but a language system (or linguistic system)

enables a response to that thought using the degrees and kinds of signs and

signifiers produced by the language. Film uses not only words but also

different kinds of shots, angles and speeds. Therefore, the audience can react

to a film’s semantic intent, but cannot address its concerns regarding the film

in the same language that the film used to convey its argument. For the same

reason, Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis advance

Christian Metz’s argument that while the means by which film expresses

itself to its audience constitute a language, it cannot constitute a linguistic

system. In this regard, Metz argues:

…one might call ‘language’…any unity defined in terms of its

matter of expression…Literary language, in this sense, is the set

of messages whose matter of expression is writing; cinematic

language is the set of messages whose matter of expression

consists of five tracks or channels: moving photographic image,

recorded phonetic sound, recorded noises, recorded musical

sound, and writing…Thus cinema is a language in the sense that

it is a ‘technico-sensorial unity’ graspable in perceptual

experience. (Stam 37)

The language of cinema, as a result, cannot be answered or analysed by the

language of literature because the two systems use different modes of

expression. In support of this point, Raymond Bellour argues that film is the

‘Unattainable Text’:

The film-text, unlike the literary text, is not ‘quotable.’ Whereas

literature and literary criticism share the same medium – words

– film and film analysis do not. While the film medium entails

five tracks – image, dialogue, noise, music, written materials –

the analysis of the film consists of a single track – words.

Critical language is therefore inadequate to its object; the film

always escapes the language that attempts to constitute it.

(Stam 56)

In order to appropriately respond to a film, one would have to generate a film

of his or her own, using the same methods employed by the director in a

manner dialogic to the film being addressed. But this is problematic for most

of the viewing audience. In spite of our inability to respond to a film in its

language through natural means of discourse, understanding the nature of film

semiotics makes us critically aware of the language being used. This results in

an enhanced understanding of the way in which film is representative of the

cultural and counter-cultural values.

The question which orients Metz’s works is whether the cinema is

Langue (language system) or Language (language). His well-known

conclusion is that the cinema is not a language system but that it is a

language. His argument is that “langue is a system of signs intended for

two-way communication, while the cinema allows only for deferred

communication” (Stam 34). In contemporary context, this assertion need be

reviewed because it does not allow for interactive cinema or Internet

conference calling where role play is being done by either party- either of

which can be technically considered film-making, especially if the parts of

dialogue and imagery are manipulated to produce a contrived result. Metz

further argues that cinema is not a language system because “it lacks the

equivalent of the arbitrary linguistic sign,” replacing it instead with a

“motivated” sign. So, the relationship between signifier and signified differs

from literature to film (Stam 35). Metz argues against the idea that the

camera/cinematic shot is like the word while the sequence is like the sentence.

He states as evidence that “(1) shots are infinite in number…(2) shots are the

creations of the film-maker…(3) the shot provides an inordinate amount of

information…(4) the shot is an actualized unit (meaning that it generates an

exact representation of its intended meaning)… (5) shots, unlike words, do

not gain meaning by paradigmatic contrast with other shots that might have

occurred in the same place on the syntagmatic chain” (Stam 35-36).

Also, cinema “does not constitute a language widely available as a code;” for,

while all speakers of English can produce English, not all can produce
75

the talent, training and access produced by filmic utterances (Stam 35). Again,

this would have to be qualified in respect to advances in technology that put

Internet cameras on everyone’s desktops or enabled lightweight camcorders

to be used in independent film-making efforts like The Blair Witch Project.

Stam argues further that language and film are both discursive “through

paradigmatic and syntagmatic operations” (Stam 37).

By the mid 1980s, the version of semiology that Metz developed

increasingly lost favour and became largely replaced in film studies debates

by an interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis. This shift is due to a range of

factors, including the waning interest in the radical leftist politics espoused by

most structuralist thinkers and the emerging interest especially among

feminist academics within film studies or in psychoanalysis as a theoretical

paradigm. Indeed, Metz himself moved away from his investment in

semiology to emphasize psychoanalysis during the mid1970s.

While Saussure is hailed as the founder of semiotics, semiotics has

become increasingly less Saussurean. Teresa de Lauretis describes the

movement away from structuralist semiotics which began in the 1970s:

In the last decade or so, semiotics has undergone a shift of its

theoretical gears: a shift away from the classification of sign

systems - their basic units, their levels of structural organization

- and towards the exploration of the modes of production of

signs and meanings, the ways in which systems and codes

are used, transformed or transgressed in social practice. While

formerly the emphasis was on studying sign systems (language,

literature, cinema, architecture, music, etc.), conceived of as

mechanisms that generate messages, what is now being

examined is the work performed through them. It is this work or

activity which constitutes and/or transforms the codes, at the

same time as it constitutes and transforms the individuals using

the codes, performing the work; the individuals who are,

therefore, the subjects of semiosis. (167)

The cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard also argues that postmodern culture

with its rich, exotic media is a world of signs that have made a fundamental

break from reality. Our contemporary mass culture experiences a world of

simulation having lost the capacity to comprehend an unmediated world.

Baudrillard has coined the term simulacra to describe a system of objects in a

consumer society distinguished by the existence of multiple copies with no

original (166). We experience manufactured realities: carefully edited war

footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, and the destruction of cultural values.

In an age of corporate consolidation where popular culture is

influenced by an elite few with very powerful voices, semiotic analysis is

deemed essential for information consumers. Semiotics informs us about a

text, its underlying assumptions and its various dimensions of interpretation.

Semiotics offers us a lens into human communication. It sharpens

the consumer’s own consciousness surrounding a given text. It informs us

about the cultural structures and human motivations that underlie perceptual

representations. It rejects the possibility that we can represent the world in a

neutral fashion. It unmasks the deep-seated rhetorical forms and underlying

codes that fundamentally shape our realities. Semiotic analysis is a critical

skill for media literacy in a postmodern world.