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By choosing the technique of the cut-up (as Leeson notes, the cut-up was already a surrealist exercise long before William Burroughs introduced it to the mainstream American avant-guard) to explore the possibilities of using nontraditional narrative procedures for a historical account, David Leeson provides his readers with a fine confirmation of perhaps the single most important argument of Hayden White's work, namely that the fundamental mode of historiographical explanation consists in the historian's construction of a plot. Since the cut-up is a surrealistic technique precisely intended to defeat meaning and to free the resulting narrative from the author's own interpretative control, Leeson's essay functions as a rather elegant reductio ad absurdurn that demonstrates the absolute identity of meaning and plot structure in history. As Paul Veyne has convincingly argued, historical explanation is not at all analogous to classical scientific theory, for historical inquiry has nothing to do with the search for the articulation of a general law (along the lines of "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" or c2=a2+b2) that would subsume a group of superficially unrelated individual phenomena such that each individual phenomenon could be construed as an illustration of the law. Rather, historical explanation aims to understand a singularity not all battles but the attack by the fourth Guards Brigade on the afternoon of 18 May, for example, or the Battle of Festubert, or even World War 1. Each are singularities; each is capable of being taken as a whole object of historical knowledge. And to do this, a historian offers a narrative account, one that proceeds as thickly as the evidence will allow, to show the interplay of chance, deliberation, material conditions and their intended and unintended consequences. The historian, that is, creates within a given medium typically prose a narrative representation of some segment of the past, and what we call the meaning is the result of very deliberate intellectual activity addressed to each of the key terms in the preceding clause. How to deal with the constraints of the medium, the decisions about where and how to segment time, the sort of questions that the historian addresses to the documentation, indeed what the historian takes to be adequate documentation in the first place, all play a role in determining the properties of the representation that the historian creates. In "The Burden of History," Hayden White observed that in offering such narrative accounts, historians have overwhelmingly relied on the protocols of nineteenth-century realistic fiction even as writers of fiction in the twentieth

Fictional Plots and Historical Explanation: A Response to David Leeson's "Cutting Through History"