海登·怀特与历史叙述的“事件转向”

Hayden White and the“Event Turn”of Historical Narration

语言论转向之后,叙述主义历史理论正迎来“事件转向”,强调历史叙述中生成、动变的不稳定性,以及对结构主义旗下文本理论之悖反。海登·怀特是其中值得关注的案例。怀特的事件思想可分为事件本体与事件性两条研究路径。前者通过区分事实与事件,将二者分别划归实在—陈述和文本—叙述领域,一定程度上缓解了泛文本主义与历史客观性论者的争论。后者强调“现代主义事件”对传统再现话语的颠覆与超越,并通过“喻象阐释”说明事件的“预表—实现”关系,将事件从文本问题还原为诠释学与生存论问题,从而赋予事件思想以现实和伦理关怀。但怀特并从语言结构本身考察叙述与叙述之关系,这也限制其事件论的深入发展。考察怀特的事件思想,有利于把握其理论转向的内在逻辑,也为时兴的事件理论开辟了新的研究视域。

Following the linguistic turn,narrativist historical theory is ushering in an“event turn”,emphasising the instability of generation and flux in historical narration,and refuting the theory of text under structuralism.Hayden White is one of the notable cases.White’s event theory can be divided into two research paths:the ontology of the event and the eventness of the event.The former,by distinguishing facts from events,assigning them to the realm of the real-statement and the text-narration respectively,has to some extent alleviated the debate between pan-textualism and historical objectivity theorists.The latter emphasises the subversion and transcendence of the’modernist event’over the traditional representation discourse,and illustrates the“prefiguration-implementation”interrelationship of events through'figural interpretation’,restoring events from a textual issue to a hermeneutical and existential one,thus giving reality and ethical concern to the idea of events.However,White does not examine narration and the relationship of narrations from the perspective of language structure itself,which also limits the further development of his event theory.Examining White’s thought on event help us grasping the deep logic of his theoretical turn,meanwhile opens up a new horizon for the popular theories of event.