The houses of history by Anna Green & Kathleen Troup

Author:Anna Green & Kathleen Troup [Green, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

9

The question of narrative

The word ‘narrative’ must be one of the most-overused words in the English language. It can be found not only where you might expect, in literature and history, but also in politics and business. It is considered essential these days for political parties and large corporations to have a ‘compelling narrative’ with which to convince the public to either vote for them or buy their products, and this attests to the power that narratives have over our perceptions of the world around us. Telling stories is a fundamental part of human nature, possibly even a ‘deep structure’ hardwired into our minds.1 Some historians argue that narrative is also the defining feature of the discipline of history; François Furet, for example, has argued that ‘[h]istory is the child of narrative’ – that history is defined by its ‘type of discourse’ rather than its object of study.2 Narrative is central to the explanation of change over time, one of the most important dimensions of historical research and writing, and is also the principal means by which historians seek to achieve empirical ‘coherence’ or logical consistency (see chapter 1). But as the social psychologist Jerome Bruner warned, for all our familiarity with stories, we are ‘not very good at grasping how story explicitly transfigures the commonplace’.3 This chapter will identify the key questions posed by historians and philosophers of history concerning the narrativization of the past, with a particular focus upon a critical intervention made by Hayden White that continues to resonate in scholarly debates.

Central to story-telling is the construction of a narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end, structured around a sequence of events that take place over time. The following definition of narrative, by Lawrence Stone, might be taken as representative of the conventional understanding of narrative:

Narrative is taken to mean the organisation of material in a chronologically sequential order and the focusing of the content into a single coherent story, albeit with sub-plots. The two essential ways in which narrative history differs from structural history is that its arrangement is descriptive rather than analytical and that its central focus is on man not circumstances. It therefore deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical. Narrative is a mode of historical writing, but it is a mode which also affects and is affected by the content and method.4

There are two key phrases in this definition that require elaboration. The first concerns the idea that narrative is a single, coherent story, and the second is the suggestion that narrative is inherently descriptive, not analytical. Narratives require a high degree of coherence to work as a story. However, the scale of the narrative may entail quite distinct levels of conceptual coherence. Drawing upon Alan Megill’s categorization, these levels range from: the micro-narrative of a particular event; a master narrative which seeks to explain a broader segment of history; a grand narrative ‘which claims to offer the authoritative account of history gen-erally’; and finally a metanarrative which draws upon some particular cosmology or metaphysical foundation, for example Christianity.

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