Vēstures rakstīšana literatūras laikmetā. Ieskats Heidena Vaita atziņās par historiogrāfiju

The article focuses on some ideas shared by notorious American historian and theorist Hayden White (1928-2018) about the essence of writing history during the second half of the 20th century. Although developed some fifty years ago, his concepts are still up to date in an era when the role of narrative in history science is being questioned among contemporaries. Publications like the monograph “Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe” (1973) and numerous essays related to history and literary writing comprise White’s intellectual legacy. These publications marked the beginning of the postmodern linguistic twist in Western historiography, so this article focuses on the concepts of metahistory, narrative and historical imagination as coined by White, as well as on some methodological problems with interpreting events and facts in history writing. Apart from the somewhat naïve perception of language as a ‘transparent’ media intended just to convey the ‘meaning’ inherent to events and processes captured in historian’s sight, the main difference White has made to alter the usual way of history writing is the one of seeing historiography as creating the image of past, i. e. discovery of the metahistorical dimension of history writing. Placing images instead of a mere description of past events, the concept of metahistory provides an understanding of the social contexts present in historiography, answering the questions of (1) what does the text produced by historian represent; (2) what kind of understanding of the past events does it provide; (3) what does this text tell about its era? Therefore, the approach to historiography White stands for encourages a shift from description to translation of the past reality to let it be spoken in its voice.