1. History is a narrative, written by God. A historian simply has to ferret out the true tale and present it.
2. Narrative is added to history, like a garnish of salt. It disguises the taste of rotten meat.
3. Narratives are embedded in history like crosses on a tiled floor. They're really there, but to see them you have to isolate them, focusing on some things and ignoring others.
4. Narratives are a way of presenting history, like lighting a scene to be photographed. It doesn't change it, it just shades it so others can see it.
5. Just a spoonfull of sugar helps the medicine go down.
6. Narratives are our eyeballs: as with Kant's categories, we see it everywhere, because it is what we see with. Asking if there are "really" narratives in history is pointless, because we can, in principle, have no access to the thing-in-itself.
7. Narrative is causation. "The king died, then the queen died" is not a narrative, but "the king did, then the queen died of grief" is. When we say we tell stories, what we mean is that we see causes.
8. Narrative is character. We understand people as clusters of narrative: our identity is the story we tell ourselves, others are interpreted as stories which intersect our own. To the extend that history is about people, it naturally contains narrative. If it's about systems, structures, landscapes -- then narratives don't fit.
9. Narratives are old fashioned. We used to believe in them, but now we know better.
10. Everything is a narrative. Asking for a history without narrative is like asking for a history without time. It's a nonsensical idea.
11. Narratives are only history of elites. Kings and ministers have narratives: their impoverished and enslaved victims do not.
12. Everyone has a story. We must uncover the suppressed stories that have been hidden by those who don't want us to see them.
13. Narratives are a tool, like a microscope. They enable you to see some things better, but only some. Microscopes are useless for examining the stars.
Post Scriptum. Yes, that’s it. I said, in prefacing my first substantial essay, that I would not shy from long essays (and I think I have proved it). But I never meant to glamorize length for its own sake; I believe in letting things find their own length. And this essay (and I do call it one) works best working briefly.
This is the thirteenth piece I have posted on Attempts 2.0. I have moved around the schedule, a move which resulted in it landing here; but I had entirely different motives for moving it around. Its being the thirteenth is only by chance (as we say in middle Earth).
For similar reasons, however—which is to say, similar to the reason I moved this, not similar to chance—I will break pattern next week and present another substantive essay, before returning to your irregularly scheduled off-week bricolage. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it:
Also, if you haven’t done so yet, please check out my ongoing story series, Retcon (a narrative which will be, particularly in the second movement, deeply entwined with notions of history):
What about one which recognizes that narratives may always be there, but there are competing ones at different times and from different perspectives? Narratives are teller- and audience- dependent.
For example, a king makes a decision to go to war as the consequence of where he sees himself in his own narrative. A peasant sees the king's decision as part of another story that is a limited story that ignores the larger stories of his subjects. A later historian sees both as part of another bigger story that neither had access to in their own time. Are all of those narratives equally real? At what point? To whom? Is there a hierarchy of the reality of these stories? Are they all equally "causal" or are they all retrospectively created, like patterns found in long dead and forgotten scripts?
The tricky bit is that I think most of your theories of narrative are true, even when they're contradictory. But that also means that deciding which story is most true depends on the story you're in (or telling yourself) at any moment. But when you get to that point, do we really know how to distinguish any one story from any others anymore? I tend to think that it's stories all the way up and all the way down but that saying that doesn't really clarify much of anything, either. ;)