ABSTRACT
Starting from the Barthesean proposition that narrative 'is simply there like life itself international, transhistorical, transcultural', Hayden White sets out to analyse the value attached to narrativity in three forms of historical representation of reality: annals, chronicle and historical narrative. The annals form, needless to say, completely lacks this narrative component, consisting only of a list of events ordered in chronological sequence. The chronicle, by contrast, often seems to wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it. Where there is no narrative, Croce said, there is no history, and Peter Gay, writing from a perspective that is directly opposed to the relativism of Croce, puts it just as starkly: 'Historical narration without analysis is trivial, historical analysis without narration is incomplete'. The embarrassment of plot to historical narrative is reflected in the all but universal disdain with which modern historians regard the 'philosophy of history', of which Hegel provides the modern paradigm.
