Narrative and History

Alun Munslow

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350307483
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Historiographie

Based on the assumption that reality, reference and representation work together, this introductory textbook explains and illustrates the various ways in which historians write the past as history. For the first time, the full range of leading narrative theorists such as Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Seymour Chatman and Gérard Genette have been brought together to explain the narrative-making choices all author-historians make when creating historical explanations. Combining theory with practice, Alun Munslow expands the boundaries of the discipline and charts a new role for unconventional historical forms and modes of expression. Clear but comprehensive, this is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on history and theory, history and method, and historiography.

1Narrating the Past

Representation

Human beings are story tellers who exist ontologically in a universe of narrative making.¹ Narrativist thinkers like Jerome Bruner hold that narrative making is wired into the human brain as the key mechanism for representing reality (i.e., not added on after we have analysed, explained and produced meaning). For Bruner, narrative is the a priori concept through which we apprehend reality.² This suggests narrative is the mode of cognition. Moreover, in acknowledging this we are forced to consider Hayden White’s famous metahistorical argument concerning the functioning of the trope, which is the metaphorical (linguistic) turning of one thing into another in order to create meaning. As Bruner suggests, narrative is a form of cognition (knowing), one that is particularly applicable to storytelling disciplines like history.

Moreover, as the Dutch philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit maintains, history is not and never can be simply a report of events, even though it contains empiricism supported by inference. This is because, as Paul Ricoeur also pointed out, history is the representation of change over time, and as a form of narrative it enables temporal creatures like us to create meaning. Not to accept this would be to embrace the rather odd epistemological belief that reference somehow insulates the historian against his or her own existence as temporal and narrative making creatures. It is important, therefore, to understand how the data is always embedded within and accessed as a representation of human actions rather than the other way around.

As Ankersmit suggests, then, taking history seriously requires that we confront the epistemological view of it as a ‘re-presentation’. This means asking (along with anti-representationalist philosophers like Richard Rorty and even the more epistemologically conservative Donald Davidson) if there really is some kind of tertium quid (or ‘third thing’) that connects the word and the world.³ Normally, for epistemologically inclined historians this tertium quid is an accurate and unproblematic device that by its nature allows us to discover the story. Unfortunately, the idea of adequate representation can only work when it is confused with description. Description is defined as a ‘subject term/reference’ plus the ‘predicate term’ that is asserted about it. This definition underpins the notion that the past can be described (re-presented), thereby delivering its given meaning. However, representation is entirely different to description. Representation is a picturing process categorically different to the notion of subject and predicate.

So what I am supporting is a position of narrative constructivism. Although there are different forms of narrative constructivism, it is my contention that history is a narrative representation of past reality that specifically recognises the sequential and temporal relationships that exist in and between ‘the real’, ‘the story’ and ‘its telling’. This, of course, also allows for self-conscious, insightful and shrewd history making. Such history, as we shall see, may be experimental in its form as the historian explores, for example, the turning of ‘real time’ into ‘story time’. In this way explanation and meaning can also be proposed within history. History does not, in other words, just re-tell stories about the past; it is itself a storied form of knowledge. This is the situation even though it contains statements of justified belief based on sources and evidence.⁴ Historians always have a duty of care (to themselves and their readers) not to lie about the evidence and to make reasoned and balanced judgements. But in itself that is simply not enough. We need to know how and why we construct our narratives.

There are philosophers of history, of course, who have a profound interest in narrative but who may be described as being anti-narrativist. Such philosophers believe that history narratives tend only to replicate large-scale belief narratives – sometimes called discourses – such as neo-conservatism, liberalism, fascism, religion and Marxism.⁵ Of course most of the theorists and historians who are critical of the narrative turn endorse epistemology first, last and always. For them any story imposed on the past means it must be at least anachronistic or, worse, just a fiction. The irony here of course is that constructionists can be and are accused by reconstructionists of anachronistically imposing ‘theory and concept’ on the past. Perhaps the greatest irony is the reconstructionist belief that ‘the past’ imposes itself on ‘history’. In their rush to empiricism, the fictive and the discursive nature of history is ignored. In other words, being a deconstructionist historian does not mean regarding as unimportant our ability to provide, in the words of the leading realist philosopher of history C.B. McCullagh, ‘. . . credible, intelligible and fair history’.⁶ But what it does mean, again to quote McCullagh, is that it is ‘. . . incumbent upon serious students of history, to know how they should justify their conclusions’.⁷ To be even-handed in responding to this entreaty I think we must understand the narrative logic of history. This is because it is only as we narrate a story that we justify our conclusions.

Story, narrating and narration

Given its status as a narrative representation, the notion of history as an aesthetic undertaking requires us to modify the epistemological hierarchy of reference, explanation, meaning and narrative.⁸ I will start by considering the concept of story space (which I have already mentioned briefly a couple of times) in more detail. The argument goes like this. Every author-historian has to imagine, as White suggests, that part of the past with which they wish to engage. The story space is the world of the once real past (or not as the case may be in some experimental history) as imagined (i.e., fictively constructed) by the historian and which the history consumer is invited to visit through the history. The story space clearly references a part of the once real world, but in that reference the historian chooses to invoke who said what, who did what, assumes there are mechanisms which will explain to us why they did it, what agencies and structures operate(d), what events were significant and which were not, and which theories and arguments will be applied to explaining the meaning of it all. Moreover, new information can be added and old information reconsidered.

The historian’s story space is a universal space. History can only be presented ‘in’ it. It is the only means through which we project the past into our perpetual present. How and why we do it depends ultimately on our epistemological choices. For the reconstructionist, for example, it will tend to be a catalogue of events within a time sequence the story of which speaks for itself. Indeed, the very concept of a story space as an intellectual building site where elements of the past are situated to create ‘a history’ will be anathema to such a historian. They will reject the very concept because it smacks of heavy-duty narrative constructivism. Thus, the notion that historians construct the past (as, say, David W. Noble constructed The Progressive Mind, 1890–1917⁹) is claimed to be an error because of the logic of the discovery of the story. Unfortunately this ignores the situation that all facts are constructed (as is this one).¹⁰

But one reason why there are so few reconstructionists around is that the vast majority of historians acknowledge that they never just reconstruct chunks of time together with their ‘contents’. Most historians are constructionists (though not narrative constructivists) because their historical story spaces are as much the ethical, emotional and intellectual products of themselves, their agendas and their theories as they are reflections of and on ‘what happened’. Indeed historians generally acknowledge that ‘what happened’, though important, is no more important than any other feature of the story space. The constructionist’s story space is a rich intellectual as well as a referential environment in which social theory and concept are freely used to assemble (though the aim may be to re-assemble) the past. There will remain a strong belief that the story space reflects upon the actuality of the past while acknowledging the intellectual commitments of the author-historian to their particular story space vision for the past.

For the deconstructionist, though, the history story space is the site of all kinds of possibilities and imaginaries. First and foremost they will be concerned with the way in which historians can create story spaces, also why, for what purposes (practical, ethical or whatever), for whom and, most importantly, how they can change it to meet the demands of different modes of expression. They will view their own self-consciously made story space for what it is – an invention, a tool for doing things with the past that impacts back upon how we think about it and what we want out of it. There will probably be a desire to know useful things about the past but, equally, perhaps also the wish to experiment.

By definition there are as many story spaces as there are histories and re-visions. Indeed, story spaces are often re-constituted by the same historian (think of Claude Monet and the dozens of painting he did of haystacks, though for historians it is likely to be new editions of books). By way of illustration, take the constructionist historian who wishes to provide a history of the American Left. Because there is no given or inherent story of the American Left as might be provided by an Ideal Chronicler who knows everything as it really was, a story space has to be created. The historian John Patrick Diggins created a story space that he turned into a book called The Rise and Fall of the American Left.¹¹ But he actually created two story spaces: one for the first and another for the second edition of the book.

The second story space (edition) was changed to add new topics and, as he says, the ‘. . . story has now been brought up to 1990’. In this fresh New Left story space Diggins pursues the notion that the American Left, having been defeated in the factories and the fields, is now continued (up to 1990) by carrying the fight for cultural hegemony into the classroom.¹² The artifice of this story space is well illustrated by Diggins who expanded the time frame and extended the concept of cultural hegemony given, as he says, that his history was the product of his being politically ‘to the left of the right and to the right of the left’. None of this has anything to do with the events of the past per se, but everything to do with the decisions that went into creating a fresh story space within which the past can be put to new uses.

Apart from being brought up to 1990, Diggins’ second story space is also constructed out of three elements the author refers to as ‘theory’. This is devoted to the historical background and theory issues, and the lack of an American proletariat. Second, there is a ‘history’ that deals with the Lyrical Left, the Old Left and the New Left. And the third is constructed around the idea of ‘anomaly’, which addresses the vestigial remains of the Left in academe. By definition neither of the two story spaces existed in the past. Of course all the details are honestly researched according to the available evidence, but the past has never been fitted into this particular story space before.

Take another example, this time of Christopher Lasch’s The Agony of the American Left.¹³ This story space was created out of several smaller story spaces of previously published journal articles brought together intending, presumably, to provide a coherent but different story of the American Left. For Lasch, howeve...