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Narrative and
History

Alun Munslow
Narrative and History
Theory and History
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Narrative and
History

Alun Munslow
© Alun Munslow 2007
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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As always, for Jane
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

The past and history/the-past-as-history 9

Three genres of history 10
Conclusion 15

1 Narrating the Past 16

Representation 16
Story, narrating and narration 17
Conclusion 28

2 History as Content/Story 29

Following a story 31
Epistemological choice 33
Aesthetics/figuration/trope 34
Emplotment/story 36
Argument/analysis/explanation 38
Ethical/political/ideological choices 40
Reference/sources 41
Conclusion 42

3 Narrating and Narration 44

The historian as author 45

Voice and focalisation 47
vii
viii Contents

Tense/time: Mimésis, order, duration and frequency 51

Intentionality: Text, action, agency, characterisation and
the historian 59
Conclusion 62

4 History as Expression 64

Written texts 65
Film and photography 67
Television and radio 68
Graphic novels, comics, history magazines 71
Public histories: Museums, heritage and memorials 73
Performance: Re-enactment, ‘first-person’ history,
games 74
Digitised representations 76
Conclusion 78

5 The Past, the Facts and History 80

Historical reality 80
Reference/facts 84
Representation 89
Conclusion 93

6 Understanding [in] History 94

Explanation 94
Meaning 97
Experimental History 103
Conclusion 109

7 The Oar in Water 111

Objectivity 113
Truth 116
Relativism 121
Conclusion 122
 Contents ix

Conclusion 123

Glossary 130
Notes 147
Further reading 174
Index 182
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgements

The completion of any book is an opportunity to thank those who have been a
part of its creation. My thanks, therefore, to Robert A. Rosenstone, Keith Jenkins
and Beverley Southgate, who gave me the benefit of their thoughts on earlier drafts
of this book. I also thank them for showing me, in their different ways, how it
is possible to rethink history. More recently I have benefited from working with
David Harlan as the US co-editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and
Practice. There are also many other friends and colleagues with whom, for over 30
years of teaching, I shared the academic grind. My thanks to them all. However,
I wish particularly to acknowledge the collegiality and the friendship of Owen R.
Ashton.

xi
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

The aim of this book is very simple. It is to explain how historians make, and
specifically, write history. By that I mean what ‘rules’, ‘procedures’, ‘figurative’ and
‘compositional techniques’ do historians follow and what decisions do they make
in order to turn ‘the past’ into that narrative about it we choose to call ‘history’?
It follows from what I have just said that the basic assumption behind the book
is that history is a form of narrative written by historians. Professional historians
are generally well aware of the construction of historical explanations – especially
the basics of hunting out the sources and the most appropriate ways to work
out what they mean. Indeed, many historians have written at length about the
techniques of source analysis and inference. However, discussions of the nature of
history as a narrative-making exercise have primarily been left to a few philosophers
of history who have an interest in what seem to be matters largely irrelevant to
practitioners who actually do the job. Because of this deficiency, I offer in this
book an introduction to the nature of the history narrative. That requires that I
outline the rules of, and functional relationships that exist in, the actual writing of
history as a narrative form. I will be illustrating this mainly from twentieth-century
historiography.
Clearly, there are many kinds of written as well as non-written narratives. There
are novels, films, comics, digital games, university lectures, church windows, ballet,
dramatic play, annual reports of accounts and, of course, histories. It is because
history is a species of narrative that it is useful to examine how it is created and how
it relates to the claims usually made that history explains and offers meaningful
interpretations about the past. When we have a general guide to the writing of
history, we are better placed to understand how individual histories work and can
assess their claims to understanding the nature of the past.
Precisely because history is a form of literature the rules of historical writing or,
to be precise, historical authorship are derived from the nature, production and
operation of narrative. Though occasionally modified according to the peculiarities
of the discipline, the history narrative – as with all narratives – is concerned with
the general process of representation. While, no doubt, a few historians remain
blissfully unaware of the status of historical writing as a mode of representation,

1
2 Narrative and History

happily most understand that their fundamental task is the construction of a

narrative about the past. It is for this reason that all students of history should
have access to a primer that describes that activity. Though this book is neces-
sarily brief, my approach is holistic because I address the theory and practice of
historical authorship and historical representation within which the empirical,
the analytical and all other aspects of historical study are encompassed.
As you will probably be aware, most ‘what is history?’ texts still tend to begin
with how historians find out what happened in the past according to the sources.
They then explain why events occurred as they did and, most important of all,
interpret ‘what it all means’ with the ‘results’ or ‘findings’ of this complex activity –
the explanation and meaning – then being put into a prose narrative.1 In other
words, this simple mechanism is said to reproduce the ‘coherent reality’ of the
past, which is then rendered with analytical objectivity as a historical narrative
that conveys the most likely truth of the past. This is why in such texts we have
the strong sense of ‘    here is the true story of    ’.
Most if not all historians write history to correct what they view as the short-
comings of previous generations to open up hitherto neglected facets of the past.
Moreover, they acknowledge that certain aspects of the past such as race, class,
gender and women’s experiences are often silent in terms of sources, and this
requires the application of fresh conceptualisation and theorisation.2 It is clear that
most historians have a highly developed sense of what constitutes their disciplinary
theory and practice. Nevertheless, because they continue to regard the notion of
reference as absolutely fundamental, most tend to ignore the significance to gener-
ating explanation and meaning of their ‘poetic’ or ‘writerly’ processes. So, while
historians understand what they mean by sources, events, reference, the nature of
explanation, objectivity, meaning and so on, there is still a tendency to be less
clear on concepts like authorship, story, expression, voice, focalisation and, most
importantly, the nature of narrative itself.
This is indicated by the debates within mainstream historical thought. Until the
so called postmodern revolution in historical thinking and practice of the past
15–20 years or so, the conventional view of history was often summarised in the
debate between E.H. Carr and Geoffrey Elton over the nature of history.3 Carr
described the essence of history as causal analysis stiffened with substantial doses
of theory as judged appropriate by the historian. This is a classic view of history as
a faithful construction of the past. Carr claims that the study of history is a study
of causes. His advice, when faced with past events (data) and the need to explain
them is to initially apportion several possible causes and then work out a hierarchy
that suggests a set of causal relationships. Only once the historian determines
long- and short-term causes can the next stage – interpretation – present its self.
Rather than a construction (though it is faithful to the data), for Geoffrey Elton
this Carr ‘data-theory’ approach places the historian too centrally in the process of
 Introduction 3

working out the meaning of the past. Preferring to view history as a reconstruction
(rather than a construction), Elton favours empiricism over the ‘probable’ history
theorising of constructionism.
For Elton, Carr’s approach was too theoretical and because theory came from
the mind of the historian, this meant the history thus produced was liable to
be too much of a subjective rather than an objective interpretation. Elton was
suspicious that theory was probably just an excuse for idleness in the archive
and, anyway, invariably begged too many questions of the evidence. However,
as Keith Jenkins has pointed out – and why he is justifiably regarded as a major
contributor to the debates over the nature of history – both Carr and Elton were
asking the wrong questions and debating irrelevant issues. For Jenkins no history –
whether it is a Carr construction or an intended Elton reconstruction – is innocent.
No historical interpretation springs forth either ‘objectively’ or ‘subjectively’. For
Jenkins, who was writing then in the early to mid-1990s, history was plainly a
textualised discourse that was unavoidably ‘positioned’. I endorse this judgement
today. It is never possible to empty ‘history’ of the author-historian and/or his or
her theories, attitudes, values, arguments, ideologies and so forth. But in this book
I am going to explain how history is an authored narrative. Consequently, I argue
that this moves us even further away from the misguided Carr–Elton debate in the
disputes over the nature of history.
Now, despite the intervention of Jenkins and the many other theorists that we
will come across, the majority of historians also assume that telling the truth about
the past (even if it cannot be fully realised) requires the re-telling of the most likely
story of the action and events of the past as accurately as possible by deploying both
theory (Carr) and empiricism (Elton). This conflation of theory and empiricism
means, in effect, the past and history can become one. But this will not work
in practice. Even the most scientific of social science histories are still a form of
‘telling’. This has long been summarised as ‘this happened, then that, because    ’.
As the philosopher of history William Gallie said,

   the exercise of the capacity to follow a story, where the story is known to be based
on evidence and is put forward as a sincere effort to get at the story so far as the evidence
and the writer’s general knowledge and intelligence allow. (italics added)4

Since Gallie said this, over 40 years ago, what is called the narrative turn in
history has posed two fundamental questions. First, does the story of the past
actually exist to be ‘found’?5 And second, does the order of priority of (1) reference,
(2) explanation, (3) meaning and (4) prose narrative presentation tell us all we
need to know about ‘doing history’?6
Before getting to those two basic questions it is worth noting that the concept of
narrative is in itself nothing new to historians. Narrative, however, has generally
4 Narrative and History

been defined as the presentation of ‘a story’ about the past. Even occasionally
described as ‘a narrative history’, there are still examples about today, like George
B. Tindall’s America: A Narrative History.7 But from the eighteenth through to the
present century, histories were and still are often regarded as the story about a
particular past. Thus one well-known contemporary US history text describes the
efforts of Hiawatha to restore peace among his own tribe and the outcome of his
meeting with the holy man Deganawidah which facilitated it, as ‘the (my italics)
story of Hiawatha and Deganawidah    ’.8 This might be just a slip of the mind
by the authors of this text or it might not. But the point is that the concept of
a history as a narrative form is known, if not always well understood. Although
the matter of narrative as a philosophical question was acknowledged in the 1960s
when it first began to be distinguished from just telling ‘a story’, even today the
conflation of ‘history’ with ‘a narrative of the past’ remains common especially in
‘popular histories’ and survey texts.9
Yet, before we can address the two questions noted above, we have to be clear
not just about the difference between ‘a story’ and ‘narrative’, but ‘a story’ and its
‘narration’ (the act of creating a narrative). Essentially a story is the recounting of a
sequence of events. This is what is told. Narration, on the other hand, refers to the
manner in which a story is told. It is in not recognising this distinction that one
can be led to the belief that the historian does not really do anything other than
carefully recount the given story of the past (remember ‘the story of Hiawatha and
Deganawidah    ’). But, because the process of ‘telling’ or narrating constitutes a
complex system of representation, how a history is told is as important as what is
being told. To put this in the context of Carr and Elton, it is not just a matter of
theory and/or empiricism.
Though it passed Carr and Elton by, since the early 1960s when Gallie was
writing, this distinction between story and its representation has been at the centre
of a major debate over how historians view historical thinking and practice.10
Given that history is the representation of something in the past (it might be the
Crusades or US Second World War Japanese internment camps), what is repres-
ented (told) as history is the historian’s choice. For clearly, if there is no given story
to discover in the sources that relate to past events, then there is no ‘natural’ or
unmediated connection between ‘the chosen past’ of the historian and the histor-
ical narrative she or he writes about it. So it follows that while the past existed in
the time of the past (hi)stories only happen when they are told.
While historians ‘refer’ to the past through the evidence of change over time
(temporal change), because this is done in a narrative constructed by the historian,
then historical meaning is as much the result of the act of narrative making as it
is of anything else. As Linda Hutcheon famously noted, whether it is in ‘fictional’
or ‘historical’ literature, the notion of a story with a beginning, middle and end
‘    implies a structuring process that imparts meaning as well as order’.11 So, while
 Introduction 5

the past defined as a period of time during which many things happened is not
invented, history, on the other hand, is a constructed narrative representation (a
narration) of it or, to be more precise, about it.
I will summarise what I have said so far. First, I have been suggesting that the
history narrative is a totalising (bringing together) procedure of representation.
Second, this makes problematic the notion of discovering ‘the story back there’.
And third, the central organising factor in representing the past is the historian as
the author who narrates the history. Indeed, as the French philosopher of history
and literature Paul Ricoeur has argued, we can only engage with what he calls
‘temporality’ (specifically the past in our case but also the present and future) in
the form of an authored narrative. This is recognition of the fundamental state of
our existence as narrative making creatures or what the theorist of time, history
and literature Elizabeth Ermarth calls our ‘discursive condition’.12 Ricoeur’s and
Ermarth’s arguments have liberated many historians to now ‘speak’ for themselves
as much as the past, and to become less constrained by the customs of conventional
objective non-partisanship that only a belief in recovering the story can produce.13
Now, while the notion of history as a representation may not exactly be new,
many historians continue to dispute and debate the significance of its implications.
The comment made by the French literary theorist Gérard Genette about literature
is pertinent to history. He said that like any other activity of the mind, literature
(think history) is based on conventions of which, with some exceptions, it is
not aware.14 To be sure relatively few historians today remain preoccupied with
discovering the story existing back there (as ‘found’ in the data or made up for
its absence in some other way); most historians acknowledge that they present a
story. Yet this story is one that is always primarily – and for some it will always
be solely – the product of the sources (or the lack of them). But, the distinction
between story and narrative raises the problem of how the sources can be made to
speak in a narrative. Indeed, as we shall see, many influential history theorists do
not believe narrative is actually built to access reality, even though it refers to it in
terms of facts.
Undoubtedly the foremost advocates of history viewed as a narrative represent-
ation are Roland Barthes, Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur. Heavily influenced by
Barthes, White specifically has examined what he calls the metahistorical struc-
ture of history, but all, during the past 40 years, have explained in substantial
detail the nature of literary and historical writing and have explored the struc-
ture of narrative as a vehicle that can represent the past.15 Barthes’ (followed by
White) famous insight is that the similarities between history and other forms of
non-realist narration are manifested in the figurative nature of both discourses.
As Barthes asked over 40 years ago, is there actually any real difference between
factual and imaginary narrative? What, if any, linguistic aspect distinguishes the
two modes?
6 Narrative and History

Those who have challenged the Barthes–White analysis in particular claim their
comparison of historical narratives with ‘fictional’ ones obliterates the differences
between them because they are said to share the same literary form.16 This is a
misunderstanding especially of White as he has great respect for the data and never
claims history is a fictional literature. The point is that ‘history’ cannot be equated
with ‘fiction’ once it is understood that history is a narrative representation that
pays its dues to the agreed facts of the past. The point White is making is very
straightforward. It is that history is history and fiction is fiction, but that both
are narratives, which are as much written by the reader as the author (history
narratives are in this sense ‘writerly’). Hence history and fiction, as well as writing
and reception, are imaginatively organised. In this sense both sets of activities are
fictive because both are authored. By acknowledging this as well as the relationship
between narration and story – in effect form and content – we can move on in
understanding the nature of history.
For, although historians are aware that they create narratives there still remains
a need to explain how they use literary techniques in so doing.17 This field of
study, called ‘historiographic narratology’ by Dorrit Cohn, is now well established.
Cohn’s view, however, is that of the ‘physicalist’ who operates, as does Ricoeur, on
the history and fiction distinction. Cohn argues that historical and fictional narrat-
ives work according to different rules about our understanding of physical reality,
and that this produces a difference of kind rather than degree in distinguishing
the two literatures of history and fiction.18 Cohn maintains the writer of fiction
is entirely in control (omniscient) whereas the historian is in a state of ignorance
(nescience).19 In other words, fiction is an emancipated discourse, unlike history
that is always in thrall to ‘what happened’. Ricoeur agrees that what distinguishes
history from fiction is the former’s referential and documentary dimension (its
physicality), and also agrees with Cohn that it deals more with groups and struc-
tures than with individuals. The Cohn position (and Ricoeur’s on this) seems to
still place too much emphasis upon the claims of empiricism and inference, which,
in effect, hold that the historical narrative is ultimately an interpretative report of
what happened.
Historians today still generally accept that empiricism and analysis are the two
key strategies of explanation. However, among the many other concepts we come
across in creating the history narrative is that of story space (a notion only
a few empirical historians actually ever entertain as we shall see). This is the
authored model of what, how, when, why and to whom things happened in the
past, which the reader/consumer enters into when they read, view or ‘experience’
the past, constituted as history. Naturally, every story space possesses authorial
premises and hypotheses as well as data. Historians constantly re-work, over-
haul and amend their story spaces (often as ‘revised’ editions of books) so it is
important to understand story space creation in order to grasp history’s construc-
 Introduction 7

tedness and its ability to absorb consumers and engage them with the past in a
meaningful way. Recognising history as a story space permits historians not only
to understand how narrative is instrumental in creating meaning and truth; it
also disabuses us of the notion that the historian is a cipher (the ‘historian as
midwife’) in the sense which Cohn suggests. Rather we need to see historians
as what they are – authors – and thus central to the history narrative making
process.
Because of its story space character, the historical narrative is not a recording
instrument for knowledge derived by non-narrative means. For this reason I
do not endorse the Cohn view of history. While Cohn has made a significant
contribution to debates, his analysis remains essentially a retread of the ‘classic
empirical-analytical model’ as provided by most ‘what is history texts’. But, as a
narrative, history cannot be a report of ‘findings’, that is, explanations and meanings
discovered in the archival sources that have enabled us to sniff out the real story –
only authors tell stories in narrative forms.20
In this text, to more fully understand history as a narrative making activity I
will deploy the thinking of several narrative history theorists starting with Gérard
Genette. I shall begin (in Chapter 1) by noting what he has described as the triad of
story, narrative and narration. He also recognises the ‘how’ or the expression that the
story and its telling takes through the intervention of the historian-author. Thanks
primarily to the work of Genette, in most analyses of the structure of narrative
and narration the ‘what happened’ is referred to as the story told, and ‘how it is
narrated’ is referred to as the discourse. As will become plain, this story–discourse
duality is central to an understanding of history as a narrative form of knowledge.
It is also necessary to explain a range of other concepts that clarify the nature
of the connection between story, narrating and narration/narrative in creating
history. Some of these ideas were noted many years ago by the French history
thinker Michel de Certeau when he argued in his The Writing of History that the
writing of history is not outside the conception and composition of history. He
was saying that the past (the ‘what happened’) is not translated but is transformed
(or turned) into a narrative construction and only through that ‘narrative turning’
can the past be explained and given meaning.21
Since de Certeau wrote, the ‘narrative turn’ in historical studies has been facilit-
ated by a number of significant developments in continental philosophy, mainly
structuralism and poststructuralism. This is reflected in several new kinds of
history that usually carry the prefix ‘post’: post-Marxist, postcolonial, postmodern,
postfeminist and so on. This ‘postist’ narrative turn has often been summarised,
largely incorrectly, as a battle between postmodernism and classic empiricist
history.22 But this is misleading because it suggests that there is an ‘alternative’
and a ‘conventional’ history. This is a false distinction because history has always
been a narrative making activity.
8 Narrative and History

As with all forms of narrative, a key feature of history is its interpretative nature,
which means there is always a constant deferral of meaning and closure.23 If we fail
to acknowledge that language and narrative are ‘empty’ signifiers until ‘filled’ with a
meaning through their construction, we misunderstand the nature of history.24 What
this means is that because history is a narrative making activity, the four principles
of (1) reference, (2) explanation, (3) meaning and (4) prose narrative presentation
presumed to work in a particular epistemological way (epistemology is the theory
and study of knowing and knowledge) are now being fundamentally rethought.25
The various ‘turns’ that started with the narrative and the post structuralist
inspired linguistic turn, then, have challenged the foundational epistemological
arrangement of reference, explanation and meaning. It is now widely acknow-
ledged they are not insulated from the role of narrative, language and the historian
as an author who possesses a voice. This has, nevertheless, generated the most
intense arguments and produced a variety of other ‘turns’ such as the ‘ethical
turn’, ‘aesthetic turn’ and ‘cultural turn’ as historians have acknowledged the
challenge to epistemology.
We must note, however, that very recently there has been a counterblast, which
might be called the ‘empiricist re-turn’ or the ‘new empiricism’. This re-emphasises
the belief that while language and, therefore, the discourse (a.k.a. the narrative) we
call history mediates the past as a narrative representation of it, it is still possible
to engage meaningfully, truthfully and objectively with the true (or most likely)
story of the past. Of course this attempt to harmonise what for a few historians
are still two separate approaches (empirical-analytical and narrative-linguistic) is
complicated by the fact that every act of empiricism and analysis is, by its nature,
a narrative-linguistic (a literary) performance. It is, in other words, not a matter
of determining how history and narrative differ in terms of text types (fiction or
fictive, or narrative and non-narrative) but how history looks when considered only
as a narrative making activity (though it includes empirical-analytical elements).
What also distinguishes new empiricists is a seeming confusion in their minds over
the distinctions of story and narrative.
Whatever the peculiarities of these turns and re-turns, understandings and
misunderstandings, the debates have always ended up with the same ‘big ques-
tion’. That is, can we really tell the truth about the past when we can only ‘know’
it as a constructed history narrative (see Chapter 7, pp. 111–122)? Many of these
debates might disappear if we were to forget the word ‘history’ in favour of, say,
‘the-past-as-history’. At least this would remind us that the past exists now only as a
form of a created (written, physically built, filmed or whatever) phenomenon. As we
shall see, the notion of ‘as’ is central to understanding the narrative nature of history.
In Telling the Truth About History three American historians noted that history,
as an organised mechanism for truthful and objective knowing, had ‘    been
shaken right down to its scientific and cultural foundations    at the very time
 Introduction 9

that those foundations themselves are being contested’.26 As the authors said, there
was much uncertainty about the creation of historical knowledge, and specifically
the ability of being able to ‘turn’ our knowledge of the past into an objective
written representation. The implication the authors were circling around was that
reference, explanation and meaning might not actually precede the narrative.
To use the noun ‘history’ as a synonym for ‘the past’, as the authors of Telling the
Truth About History did in the title of their book, both illustrates and perpetuates
the problem I have been exploring. So, we are required to ask not how we can
render the past empirical world into its own historical narrative, which corresponds
to it, but what happens if we become convinced we cannot? To accept that the
story does not exist back there or, if it does, that it remains unknowable to us
because of the problem of turning data into narrative actually revolutionises our
understanding of the nature and practice of history.

 The past and history/the-past-as-history

In everything I have said so far it is important to understand that ‘the past’
and ‘history’ are separate entities or categories. The past is what once was, is no
more and has gone for good. History, on the other hand, is a corpus of narrative
discourses about the once reality of the past produced and fashioned by historians.
While it may seem odd to stress this, we do need to realise three important implic-
ations. First, that the past is a category of content (real events); second, that the
significance of how it is told is crucial (the issue of discourse or narration of a story);
and third, that history is a category of expression (varieties of narrative represent-
ation) has to be stressed. These ‘implications’ are central to the understanding of
history as argued for in this text.
In writing a history for the past we create a semiotic representation that encom-
passes reference to it, an explanation of it and a meaning for it. So we have a
situation whereby because of the absence of the past (for that is by definition a
phenomenon which is inaccessible), as the historian David D. Roberts has argued,
we have ‘nothing but history’.27 And this, plainly, is a textual or other form of
substitution – the ‘as’ – as already noted. For, even though this references what
happened and can demonstrate according to the rules of comparison and veri-
fication that certain things very probably occurred, its meaning is created as we
narrate (and express) our history. In other words, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, the
past can only meaningfully exist in the narrative we write about it.
It is, therefore, pertinent to note here what the French cultural theorist Roland
Barthes noted as the referential illusion in which he analysed the error of ascribing
to one category (call it history) a feature or features that are really only attributable
to another (call it the past).28 Unfortunately those (admittedly now very few)
10 Narrative and History

historians who believe history is the past rebuilt have been committing what
philosophers identify as a ‘category mistake’. Barthes’ point is that historians who
commit this error collapse that which is signified (representation) into its referent
to create an invalid signifier–referent association. Barthes summarises this category
error by claiming that in the so-called ‘objective history’ the ‘real’ is never more
than a nebulous signified, hiding behind the all-powerful referent.
Only by making this category error could a historian say that ‘according to the
available evidence the meaning of the French Revolution was    ’ or ‘    the cause
of the American Civil War was    ’. There is, as most historians acknowledge, no
one history of anything if by that we mean ‘the true story of it’. Nevertheless,
we must ask why some historians do still claim that a narrative representation is
close to being the thing to which it refers? After all, a narrative description of the
Eiffel Tower is not the Eiffel Tower no matter how detailed is our description of its
dimensions and structure. This category mistake leads to the referential illusion if
we believe that a history narrative and the past can correspond at any level beyond
simple sentence length statements that refer to the available evidence.
Though history can contain the element of reference, its nature does not flow
from that alone. Moreover, as we shall see, there are many different ways the
category of history can be expressed. Consequently, more and more historians
recognise that there are competing approaches to the-past-as-history. This can
be seen in the existence of three such approaches that encourage a variety of
legitimate modes of expression and forms of narration. These three approaches
to the past may be considered to be ‘genres’ of history as they work in a very
similar fashion to their literary counterparts. The three genres are reconstructionist
history, constructionist history and deconstructionist history.29 Essentially they
reflect the enduring epistemological debate over the relationship between empiri-
cism, analysis and narrative.

 Three genres of history

Epistemology is about understanding the theory and fundamentals of knowledge
acquisition. Historians in the West, as the progeny of the seventeenth-century
Cartesian Revolution and the subsequent Enlightenment, have traditionally held
to a view of history derived from analytical philosophy. This suggests that historical
knowledge is acquired through an essentially scientific and rational process that
employs an evidence-based method. This reflects the realist demand that histor-
ical statements will correspond (see the correspondence theory of knowledge) to
evidence that is independent of mind and culture.
According to this theory, historians arrive at their conclusions in terms of argu-
ments that best fit the data. Evidence of real experience, plus reason (inference
or inductive argument) will generate true knowledge of reality. So influential has
 Introduction 11

this theory of knowledge become that it has actually hijacked the general term
for the study of knowledge acquisition – epistemology. However, in the twentieth
century this definition of epistemology was challenged as the way to engage with
the real. This challenge has been translated in the world of history in the variety
of ‘turns’ (noted above) which have moved historians away from the supremacy
of epistemology. This move against epistemology has produced the three genres I
have mentioned as different approaches to the past.
Why are these three genres in conflict given my argument that there is only one
kind of history defined in terms of being a narrative making activity? Well, first, we
need to understand that historians make epistemological choices. They choose how
to gain knowledge about the past. The epistemological choice historians make can
be detected – basically – in how they view the role of narrative making in what they
do, and how the history narrative is constituted as a form of knowledge through
the relationship between reference, explanation and the creation of meaning.30
There is a clear difference in this relationship within each genre.31
As an epistemological choice, reconstructionist historians believe they gain true
knowledge through the primacy of referentiality and delivering its inherent story
as the true narrative.32 The issue of history as a mode and structure of representation
does not arise. Reconstructionists hold two basic beliefs. First, they reject the idea
that there is a choice in thinking about and doing history. Second, they believe
history exists outside the here and now, which means it should not be any way
subject to the ontological demands and pressures of the present. In other words,
it must not be historicist.
Apart from referentiality, which is defined as the single factual statement
of justified belief, the touchstone of reconstructionism is inference and the
accurate demonstration of the historical agent’s actions (agency) (see construc-
tionist history below).33 This means that the past can be ‘located’ by well-informed
historians who suspend their personal judgements and any personal desire to ‘tell
the story’ in ways that deviate from what they read it to be in ‘the sources’. This is
despite the long-standing argument, as we shall see, that the reader is as important
as what they read in creating meaning. The ultimate basis of the reconstructionist
realist-referential epistemology that permits ‘fair descriptions’ of the past is the
correspondence theory of knowledge and the objectivity (the ‘thereness’) of histor-
ical data.34
This ‘realist’ position depends on the twin beliefs that the historian’s mind can
engage (largely unproblematically) with knowable reality and that that engagement
can be transcribed without too much difficulty onto the page (for reconstructionists
it is still primarily the printed page). Only through this practice can historical
knowledge be emancipated from the hazards of subjectivity if not entirely freed of
cultural bias. Proper knowledge that is fair and even-handed thus depends on the
reality of a knowable world that is independent of both our minds and our narrative
making. Hence, the concept of a story or, more accurately, an emplotment is
12 Narrative and History

rejected. In other words, it means that truthful statements are what they are because
of how things were in the world.35
This naive realism wins over very few historians these days. Nevertheless, the
reverse seems also to be unconvincing – that all we can know about the past is
what we learn through our a priori best guesses, or our biases, our private onto-
logical beliefs and our constructed narratives. Most historians try to steer clear of
these two apparent extremes. Most accept the ‘common-sense’ or practical realist
position that there is a reality beyond us, and, fortunately, we possess a capacity
to satisfactorily represent (re-present) it. Hence we can produce truthful historical
statements because they match or correspond to the facts of known reality.
What this means for reconstructionist historians like Arthur Marwick, Geoffrey
Roberts, David Loades, Edward Royle and Gertrude Himmelfarb (a few selected at
random from the ever-diminishing tiny group) is that narrative is the end result of
their description of events and their analysis. They would certainly not accept that
their narrative is the medium through which their historical knowledge is fashioned.
Reconstructionists view narrative like a wire that transmits the current of meaning
from the past to the history page. As Geoffrey Roberts says, (my italics) ‘    telling
the story, explaining the action, and reconstructing the experience of people in the
past    ’ is what historians do, and it is no more (or less) complex than that.36 The
trick is simply to recognise that the story exists in the action of the human actors,
and then to describe it acknowledging cause and effect. In this way description
equals history and history equals the past.
Indeed, the British social historian Arthur Marwick insists that historians do not
reconstruct the past. He says, ‘    it is knowledge    about the past that historians
produce’.37 Despite saying this, the Marwickian makes the epistemological assump-
tion that there is a direct correspondence between reference and representation
which is ultimately located in (the writing up of) the narrative. So triumphant has
this ‘common-sense’ realist-representationalist position become that the history-
consuming general public and amateur historians alike see it as the only way
to engage with the past and its knowable truth. Indeed, the reconstructionist
approach has become the culturally acceptable way of producing past reality (how
many TV history programmes either explicitly or implicitly offer the ‘real story
of    ’?). But even in Marwick’s definition you will note that he uses the verb
‘produce’. He also acknowledges the product is ‘about’ the past. As you can tell, it is
actually very difficult to be an unreconstructed reconstructionist.38 This is because
while the historian’s narrative will always be constrained by what happened in
the past, it is also going to be subject to their preferred ways of connecting the
individual historical agent to the larger structures that created change in the past.
Indeed, as the historians Donald N. MacRaild and Avram Taylor have explained,
the data always come loaded with theories, concepts and ideologies.39 Although
most historians would never reject the referential bedrock of empiricism, the
 Introduction 13

majority do acknowledge that there is more to history than just finding out what
happened. Hence, a second kind of history shifts us dramatically beyond the
limited reconstructionist approach. The constructionist genre of historical knowing
is a highly complex conceptual and theory-laden social science approach which,
while it is empirical, nevertheless acknowledges that explanation demands ‘a body
of knowledge that is usually referred to as ‘theory’.40 History is not just empirical –
it is also analytical and deploys a priori thinking.
Basically this means hypothesising about the causes of regularities in the past
and explaining them, rather than operating at the level of individual historical
actors.41 Biography, for example, is not a constructionist exercise in this sense. Of
course biographers acknowledge that structures and powers beyond their control
(class, race, gender, imperialism, technology, nationalism, war, etc.) ‘influence’
individuals. The overt use of theory, while it is claimed to substantially enhance
explanation, is still intended by its constructionist practitioners to maintain a firm
and direct contact with past reality.
But the level of sophistication of constructionist history is such that the vast
majority of historians working today fall into this broad category. Two British
constructionist historians John Belchem and Neville Kirk explained in the late
1990s the central tenet of realism to which they as historians both adhere. It is that
‘    aspects of culture, such as words, consciousness, and norms and values, coexist
and interact with political, economic, social and other structures and processes
which come into being    ’ ‘out there’.42 In other words, past reality demands
a ‘    dialogue between concept and evidence, and    due attention to context
and chronology    especially along the lines of race, gender and class    ’.43 Other
hard-core materialists like Bryan D. Palmer declare anything other than a thor-
oughgoing realist epistemology (influenced by, in his case, a humanist Marxist a
priori constructionism) are simply a ‘descent into discourse’.44
Belchem and Kirk were prodded into their defence of constructionism by the
dangers, as they saw them, of the so-called postmodern historians. As they
said, ‘    epistemological and methodological credentials and procedures [are]
diametrically opposed to those employed by postmodernists who see nothing
beyond subjectivity, no lurking or hidden external material and other struc-
tures and interests beyond what is captured by self-referential and more or less
autonomous languages and discourses’.45 Clearly, they are endorsing an epistemo-
logical approach to knowledge prompted by the fear that ‘postmodernists’ not only
dissolve the ‘link’ between ‘representation’ and the ‘real’ and between ‘language’
and the ‘social world’, but the ‘real’ becomes merely a ‘representation’.46 While
this is a parody of ‘postmodernist’ views, the constructionist position remains an
intellectual advance on the naivety of reconstructionism.
However, because of their belief in the correspondence theory (of truth), the
majority of constructionists still think that they can access the story, the pattern
14 Narrative and History

of (race, gender, imperialism and class?) structures in (behind and determining)

the events of the past. Narrative making is not really on their radar either, even
though they are very much aware that they are intervening in the past on behalf
of some present constituency or another. As I just noted, constructionist history is
the most popular form of history practised today, ranging from biography to (one
or more of many varieties of) cultural and economic history. Its practitioners are
constantly innovating and assembling novel ways of explaining the empirical by
resort to theorising about its assumed and often ‘apparently hidden’ structures.47
Sophisticated constructionists are keen to explain not just why individuals did
what they did or how they exercised their powers of agency, but how their decisions
were influenced by the deeper structures that controlled their lives. Addressing
race, class, imperialism and gender has, in fact, become a major historical industry.
Indeed, it often seems that ‘new approaches’ to the past are now as important as
‘the past’.
The third epistemological choice is that of deconstructionist historians. Essen-
tially, the deconstructionist historians hold that past events are explained and
acquire their meaning as much by their representation as by their ‘knowable actu-
ality’ derived by conventional (empirical-analytical) epistemological means. Their
history is different for five reasons.

• First, deconstructionist history rejects the fundamental(ist) epistemological

belief in the correspondence between literary word and empirical world that is
claimed to create meaning.
• Second, deconstructionist history acknowledges the poststructuralist rejection
of essentialism that holds that knowledge is ‘out there’ rather than created.
• Third, given the first two reasons, the history narrative is the only site available
for the construction of historical knowledge and, for those reasons, such history
makes different kinds of truth claims.
• Fourth, deconstructionist historians are willing to work with and explore the
notion that all knowledge in the arts and humanities is in some degree relativist
(see relativism).
• And fifth, this rethinking encourages the possibility of radical and
experimental history practice (see pp. 103–109).

One general consequence of these five assumptions is the acknowledgement of

the authored nature of historical knowledge. This immediately casts doubts on
the notion of the discovery of the story in favour of understanding the nature
of the past through the logic of their own narrative making and all that which
goes with it. Indeed, the way we achieve understanding is part of the nature of
understanding. This also generates questions concerning what Linda Hutcheon
has called ‘postmodernist representation’.
 Introduction 15

Briefly, as a representation of the past, history is not capable of knowing the

thing-in-itself and, moreover, as a discourse, it can be expressed in many different
modes or forms (see mode of expression). This is not really a major claim given
that it follows much accepted thinking on realism by many philosophers. So, while
a deconstructionist would claim all we have is history, to be more precise, all we
really have is representation with all its attendant problems. And not least among
these is what happens to questions of truth. Indeed, for each epistemological choice
there is, as we shall see, a different definition of what is truth in history. Those
deconstructionist historians who wish to continue to accommodate a notion of
truth do so by addressing the ontological situation of the historian as an author.
As the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has suggested, the connection
between the historian (subject) and the past (object) has to be understood not as
an obstacle to truth but as an element in its creation (see Chapter 7).48
The deconstructionist investment in recognising the authorial function of the
historian means doubting the epistemological belief that separates the knowing
subject from the observed object. From an epistemological position (both recon-
structionist and constructionist) ‘subjective knowledge’ or ‘textually constructed
knowledge’ is not just undesirable, it is dangerous. But, as Gadamer suggests, this is
precisely what you get with historical knowledge. It cannot be any other way. The
historian either goes into denial or gets on with it by acknowledging history is not
‘the real thing’. Not least, the process of the acquisition of knowledge about the
past implies and acknowledges the determining role of the historian as a creator –
and author – of history. To put this as plainly as I can, the deconstructionist
historian writes history through the acknowledgement that its logic derives from
the way she or he creates a narrative representation.

 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have introduced the relationship between narrative, history and
the past. This has meant confronting the nature of epistemology and meeting
head-on the epistemological belief that history can be made to correspond with the
past even though the past no longer exists. I have suggested that because history is
not the same as the past, the notion of correspondence has to be replaced with the
logic of narrative representation. I explained how we get to this position through
a consideration of the three primary epistemological orientations available today:
reconstructionism, constructionism and their challenger deconstructionism. I will
now move to the consequences of our narrative epistemological decision by starting
the task of outlining the basic choices all historians make in creating a narrative
about the past.
1 Narrating 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 story telling
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 unprob-
lematic 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,

16
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number 98

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75

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LETTER

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disciples

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