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.
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. ;)
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. ;)