An old question raised again: Is historiography art or science? (Response to Iggers)

This is a response, written especially for Rethinking History, to Georg Iggers' essay 'Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry: Reflections on Hayden White's Approach to Historiography'. The argument is that Iggers' critique of White's theories of historiography and conception of the history of modern historical writing is based upon an uncritical acceptance of the categories used since the mid-nineteenth century to justify history as a scientific discipline. Traditionally, these categories have been set up as a series of oppositions: history versus literature, fact versus fiction, reason versus imagination, science versus art, and so on. White questions the utility of these distinctions for the characterization of the ways by which historical writing enables not only the transformation of events into facts but also the translation of series of facts into stories. White holds that older histories of historiography have not taken seriously history's status as, first, a discourse as well as a scholarly discipline, and second a discourse which in, and by writing, produces specifically aesthetic effects on its readers. To concentrate on historiography as writing is to point attention to the role of the imagination in the 'invention' of historical figures and topics. White then goes on to defend his use, in Metahistory (1973), of a tropological model of discursivity in order to identify the specifically poetic-rhetorical elements in every historical discourse cast in the form of or depending upon the representational techniques of narrativization. He concludes that Iggers is mistaken in simply applying the categories of an older historiography instead of subjecting them to critique and problematization.