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  • Reflections on "Gendre" in the Discourses of History1
  • Hayden White (bio)

For where there is no law, there is no transgression.

—St. Paul, Romans 4:15

You are to keep My statutes. You shall not breed together two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment upon you of two kinds of material mixed together.

—Leviticus 19:19 (New American Standard Bible [©1995]; emphasis added)

Ever since I met him—in the spring of 1969—I have thought of Ralph Cohen as "master of genres." No one has been more assiduous in the cultivation of genre consciousness; no one has been more liberal in the entertainment of different conceptions of genre. Of course, as a literary scholar, Ralph Cohen has been especially interested in the concept and history of the genres of literary expression. But he has always treated literary genres as a special case of the more general social and cultural activity of identifying, classifying, and relating the classes and species of things both natural and unnatural.

Up until the end of the eighteenth century, conformity to the "law of genre"—which is supposed to have held that "thou shalt not mix the kinds"—was considered a matter of moral, as well as ontological and aesthetic, necessity. The domain of literary genres was only the most cultivated and sophisticated place where the law was applied, tested, and, when necessary, revised. The law of genre was also supposed to preside over the joining of forms with contents. In literary writing, it was forbidden to join a noble form (such as tragedy) with a base content (such as villainy). But in literature, as in life, Charles Darwin destroyed all that. [End Page 867] What Darwin showed, among other things, is that there is no such thing as "nobility" or "baseness," which is to say, no qualitative differences among the kinds that make up "nature." It followed, for Cohen, that genres had no "natures," which is to say, inherent substances or essences, but were or had to be seen as systems of practical classifications—open systems—subject to mixture, change, and displacement according to the exigencies of different social and cultural situations. Which was to say that although genres had no natures, they most definitely had histories. This meant, among other things, that the best way to study the forms and contents of any mode of cultural expression, and the ways in which forms and contents were fused in any given moment of a society's evolution, was historically. Whence, I take it, the origin of New Literary History. The history of genres provides the basis for a history of literature in a way that the other aspects of the literary work of art do not.

But what about "history" itself? If the history of genres provides us with a way of conceiving the history of literature in open and cosmopolitan ways, what happens if we extend this principle to the writing of history itself? Unlike those sciences which take nonhuman physical things as their objects of study and those human sciences which treat human phenomena as physical things, history studies those aspects of the human past which bespeak the differences between human and other kinds of being. It is perfectly fitting, therefore, for history to derive its methods and categories of analysis from that very "culture" which marks the principal difference between the powers of the human species and those of all other kinds. It is, however, difficult to know which aspects of the whole cultural endowment to draw upon for the conceptualization of a possible science of things human. And this is because the human species creates the instruments of knowledge production in the very process of taking the specifically human as its object of interest.

Historical knowledge is a case in point. A specifically historiological interest in the past appears to have been a product of a particular culture arising at a particular time and place and with the kind of mind set that made this particular kind of interest in the past worth cultivating. The modes of analysis and explanation utilized in the elaboration of a...

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