Emplotment

Emplotment is a method for historical narration posted in the works of Hayden White, an American postmodern historian. In his work Metahistory, Hayden White argued that history is a literary artefact and defined history as ‘verbal fictions’. Philosophers of history Louis Mink and William B. Gallie have also held the view of history as a narrative.

White maintains that, in historical explanation, historian emplotes the strategies used in literature, along with facts and ideologies. When historian place events in a particular order (‘this happened, then that, because . . .’) he is emplotting their sequence. In this process, the historian uses our culture’s main forms of emplotment – romance, tragedy, comedy and satire.

1. A romantic emplotment, gives prominence to the power of the historical agent or hero as ultimately superior to circumstances.
2. Satire emplotment is the opposite in that the agent or hero is a subject of their context, destined to a history of difficulty and rejection.
3. In tragedy emplotments the hero struggles to beat the difficulties and fails, eventually being dissatisfied by fate or their own personality defects. The end result is usually death.
4. In a comedic emplotment there is progress and hope of at least a temporary victory over circumstance through settlement.

White argued that historical situations are not fundamentally tragic, satirical, comic or romantic. The historian transforms a tragedy into a comic situation to shift his point of view or change the scope of his perceptions. The type of emplotment that the historian chooses is determined by the power of the hero of the plot over her/ his or its environment. In historical narration, historians try to explain the facts by giving them a priority. Establishing that priority is part of the emplotment process and it usually demands ideological, social and cultural decisions. In the majority of cases, events can be emplotted in a number of different ways in order to give different meanings.