If interpretive theory guides us to and through ‘the data’, if ethnographic methods provide the tools for collecting data, then White (1973, 1978 and 1987) provides the guide on how to use the data to construct and explain the story. Specifically, he deals with the question of whether the plot and language of our narratives prefigure the explanation. Narratives are the stuff of all the human sciences where narratives are 'as much invented as found' so there is an 'irreducible and inexpungeable element of interpretation' and 'there can be no explanation without a story, so there can be no story without a plot' (White 1978, 51, 82 and 62). Explanation is a multifaceted skill similar to understanding a song; it is about connections, whether between words and music, ideas and institutions, individuals and traditions. It is about comparing webs of interpretation. So, to the question of the correct approach to history, White (1973, 4) answers:
… it does not depend upon the nature of the 'data' they used to support their generalisations or the theories they invoked to explain them; it depends rather upon the consistency, coherence and illuminative power of their respective visions of the historical field. This is why they cannot be 'refuted', or their generalisations 'disconfirmed', either by appeal to new data that might be turned up in subsequent research or by elaboration of a new theory interpreting the set of events that comprise their objects of representation and analysis.
White's (1973, chapter 1 and 1978, chapter 2) argues the choice of language or tropes prefigures both the story (and its plot) and, therefore, the explanation. Lacking a shared technical language, politics and history rely on familiar figures of speech (or ordinary language) to create meaning. So, in telling their story, historians give it meaning by the type of story they tell — ‘emplotment’. White (1973) identifies four modes of emplotment or archetypal forms of storytelling — romance, tragedy, comedy and satire. We tell our stories by encoding them in one or other of these culturally recognised forms. This emplotment translates the past into a story and in the process explains to the reader what is happening.
Since no given set or sequences of real events is intrinsically tragic, comic, farcical, and so on, but can be constructed as such only by the imposition of the structure of a given story type on the events, it is the choice of story type and its imposition upon the events that endow them with meaning (White 1987, 44).
And in telling our story of an event, an institution, a person we confront the absurdity of the human condition and the importance of human aspiration. As White (1987, chapter 3) argues, we confront the nihilism of history by constructing shards of meaning from chaos. So, the historian, the biographer, and political scientists should abjure imposing order where there is none and instead focus on the notion of the sublime because human dignity and freedom emerge out of our reaction against the meaninglessness of history; we are transmuted into something higher, nobler, or more excellent.
These remarks are too brief to be described as even an introduction to White’s work. They do serve two useful purposes, however. First, they show that all historical works, whether of a person, period or events, are ‘constructed’. So, political biographies are often more about the author and his or her constructions than the ostensible subject. Second, White poses the question of the extent to which the choice of literary form predisposes the text to a particular form, of explanation. How we tell a life as a romance, a tragedy or whatever — becomes the explanation of that life.[3]