Class Notes

I first encountered Hayden White’s work as a master’s degree student in comparative literature, when I read The Content of the Form. I was entranced, particularly by his assertion that history writing creates and shapes historical reality through narrative form, rather than reflecting an already constituted past waiting to be discovered.

Many historians shunned him for his controversial idea that “all stories are fictions.” But he insisted that history isn’t science. Historical facts are scientifically verifiable, but historians make choices about plot—what Hayden called “emplotment”—that are ethical and political in nature. The very act of choosing a beginning, a middle, and an end is an imposition by the historian.

Hayden was my dissertation advisor at Stanford University, where he taught part time after retiring from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was for me the ideal mentor, allowing me great freedom to work out my ideas as I saw fit, restricting himself when offering advice to overarching themes and methodological issues. Although Hayden was without doubt the most influential historical theorist of the 20th century, beginning with the intense and widespread interest generated by his magnum opus Metahistory in 1973, he was never interested in creating a “school” or in defending himself from specific attacks (which were innumerable), even if he cherished dialogue and debate.

When I told Hayden that I was offered a tenure-track position at Rochester, he was thrilled, not least because of a happy coincidence: his own first tenure-track position had also been at the University, where he had been a member of the history department exactly 50 years earlier, from 1958 to 1968. In 2009, and with generous support from Rochester colleagues, I organized “Between History and Narrative: Colloquium in Honor of Hayden White.” The conference brought 12 distinguished outside speakers, including Hans Kellner ’72 (PhD), one of Hayden’s first students. Hayden was, as one of the invited speakers, Gabrielle Spiegel, wrote to me in a recent email, “characteristically humble and funny” amid the tributes. I know that it was an especially moving event for Hayden, who asked me to drive him and his wife, Margaret Brose, to the house where he lived during his decade teaching in Rochester.

I last saw Hayden just a year ago, at UCLA, and at age 88, he was still at the top of his game: never missing a beat, regaling his audience with his infectious charm and sharp wit. He passed away on March 5 at his home in Santa Cruz. I am unable to adequately convey here what Hayden meant to his colleagues and students. But suffice it to say that he was an inspiration not only as an intellectual, but also as a human being.

—Robert Doran

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Doran, a professor of French and comparative literature at Rochester, is the editor of Hayden White’s The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and of Philosophy of History After Hayden White (Bloomsbury, 2015).