Narrative and

History

Alun Munslow
Narrative and History
Theory and History
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Empiricism and History Stephen Davies

Social Theory and Social History Donald M. MacRaild and Avram Taylor
Narrative and History Alun Munslow
Marxism and History Matt Perry
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Narrative and
History

Alun Munslow
© Alun Munslow 2007
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As always, for Jane
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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
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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
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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
 Narrating the Past 17

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, reli-
gion 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 reconstruc-
tionists 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 philo-
sopher 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,
18 Narrative and History

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 experi-
mental 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. 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,
1890–1917’9 ) 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 gener-
ally 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
 Narrating the Past 19

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 inven-
tion, 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 construc-
tionist 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 prolet-
ariat. 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 Amer-
ican Left.13 This story space was created out of several smaller story spaces of
previously published journal articles brought together intending, presumably, to
20 Narrative and History

provide a coherent but different story of the American Left. For Lasch, however,
the time period is slightly different to that of Diggins as are the topics covered. Not
surprisingly, the theoretical and ideological compulsions behind his story space
also differ. Is this the same New Left past? What we have now are two competing
story spaces using roughly the same body of data (primarily relating to the New
Left). However, the function of each story space is to give a form to and a meaning
for the past for reasons that have little to do with the past itself, but everything
to do with history as an authored narrative creation for current, political reasons.
So, these two story spaces, though labelled ‘New Left’, inevitably contain different
meanings because two different historians build the story space with selective refer-
ence to agency/action, character and setting, and not simply to the whole universe
of past events, decisions, beliefs, intentions and structures.14 It is an inadequate
understanding of what is going on here to simply say they are different or revised
interpretations.
Our rethinking of history as story space using the examples of Diggins and
Lasch makes it easier to acknowledge what flows from the critical distinction,
noted briefly in the Introduction, between the content, the story of the past, its
expression and the process of narration. Though the distinction will be discussed
in much greater detail in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, it is important to understand
how the difference between content, story, narration and expression is central to
the narrative making logic of history. Through examining these differences we
can more clearly identify and locate the author-historian’s role in the process of
constructing history ‘story space’ representations. To understand how this works,
we need to begin with a brief introduction to the theory of narrative.
The text Narrative Discourse by Gérard Genette and his response to criticisms of
the book in his 1983 (published in English in 1990) Narrative Discourse Revisited
provides us with what is the best-known and still the most comprehensive and
systematic theory of narrative available. Derived from the analyses of Genette but
also drawing on Seymour Chatman’s commentary, we can loosely combine the
two to consider the theory of narrative in terms of the story (what is to be told)
and discourse (how it is told) distinction already noted.15 Some line diagrams may
be useful in the exposition that follows.

Story What content to be told

Narrative
Discourse How content is told/narrated

The story consists of content which refer to ‘things’ called existents such as historical
agents/characters/physical location/context/setting and events brought about by
 Narrating the Past 21

the actions of characters. Usually this turns out to be, as one might expect, a
simple, graphic summary of the reality of human existence – things happened to
people at certain times in certain places. So, the story – essentially a chronology of
happenings in time and place – looks something like this:

Events Actions/Happenings

Story
What
Existents Characters/Location
Narrative

Discourse
How

Turning now to discourse, here we find this encompasses a variety of aspects

or elements of the narration or communication of the story by the narrator.
These narrational devices are essential to the telling of the story and giving it a
meaning.

Story
What

Narrator’s Voice
Multiple Narrators/Grammatical Person

Narrative Plot
Story as Discoursed/Stories of a Particular Kind

Mood Theory and Focalisation

Provision of Information via a character/narrator
Discourse
How
Modes of Narrative Expression
Mimésis/Diegesis

Narration of Thoughts Character Intentionality

Tense/Time Duration/Order/Frequency

According to Genette and Chatman, narrative theory discourse consists of the

six elements sketched in the diagram above. These shape our insight into, and
22 Narrative and History

understanding of, a/the story of what happened. I will examine these elements
in subsequent chapters though they will be, as we shall see, modified to meet
the specific needs of history narrative making. Plot, for example, will be removed
entirely from discourse and re-located in the new content/story element (see
pp. 29–43). For the moment, however, it is only necessary to understand the
general structure of narrative upon which the logic of history relies.
Now, it follows that the history narrative is built in conformity to this logic
because the structure of prose narrative is universal. It is universal in that, as
Genette suggests, there are three fundamentals common to all narratives including
realist ones such as history. These common fundamentals are, of course, story,
narrating and narration.16 Genette’s comments on these are worth quoting in full
because he immediately notes how they all work together. He says,

I will not return to the distinctions, which today are generally accepted, between story
(the totality of narrated events), narrative (the discourse, oral or written, that narrates
them), and narrating (the real or fictive act that produces that discourse – in other words
the very fact of recounting)    conceptually, it seems to me that [the]    triad gives a
better account of the whole of the narrative fact.17

Note that Genette uses an alternative term for discourse; namely ‘narrative’.
However, for him the three key elements in every realist or fictional narrative
remain story, narrating and narration. But, also note, he uses the term ‘fictive’ too.
It is these elements and their fictive organisation we need to recognise to grasp the
essential logic of history thinking and practice for, as we shall see in Chapters 2, 3
and 4, no single element can operate in isolation from the other two. Genette goes
on to gloss the triad by noting a common error that has to do with the distinction
between the real and the fictional.

The greatest defect of that triad is its order of presentation, which corresponds to no real
or fictive genesis. In a non-fictional (for example, historical) narrative, the actual order is
obviously story (the completed events), narrating (the narrative act of the historian), [and]
narrative (the product of that act, potentially or virtually capable of surviving it in the
form of a written text, a recording, or a human memory).’18

Here Genette is describing the usual chronological understanding of history as

story first, then its narrating and, finally, the narrative, which is the product of
story and narrating. But he immediately and very significantly qualifies this:

As a matter of fact    Narrative in its earliest occurrence – oral or even written – is wholly
simultaneous with narrating, and the distinction between them is less one of time than
of aspect: narrative designates the spoken discourse (syntactic and semantic aspect    )
and narrating the situation within which it is uttered (pragmatic aspect). In fiction, the
real narrative situation is pretended to – and this pretense, or simulation (which is perhaps
 Narrating the Past 23

the best translation of the Greek mimésis) is precisely what defines the work of fiction.
But the true order is instead something like

story
narrating
narrative

with the narrative [narrating] act initiating (inventing) both the story and its narrative,
which are then completely indissociable. But has a pure fiction existed? And a pure
non-fiction?19

I will unpack what Genette is saying here. He is suggesting that regardless of

whether the narrative is fictional or non-fictional, while both seem to start with
the story to be told, this is never the case because it is impossible to have
any kind of narrative without the three elements combined together (though
they have to be separated out for reasons of explanation). But more than this,
for Genette the narrating element initiates (note Genette says ‘inventing’) both
the story and its narrative, and then the three become irretrievably mixed
(indissociable).
Consequently, in history, he says, the narrative is supposed to begin with the
story of the ‘real events’, while in fiction there is only the pretence that it starts
with the ‘real story’. Obviously we all know the story (in fiction) originates with
the author, which is the fulfilment of the narrating function. But once done, the
three components cannot be separated out. Genette concludes by asking what
happens to this model once we face the fact that no pure fiction or non-fiction
has existed – the effect of the indissoluble nature of the triad. This is an important
point given the epistemological status of history as a ‘literature of fact’ that is then
supposed to be ‘written up’.
Genette concludes that there never has been a pure fiction or non-fiction. He
does this in the context of Marcel Proust’s 1934 A la recherche du temps perdu
(Remembrance of Things Past) and which is the subject of Genette’s book Narrative
Discourse. He says,

The answer in both cases [pure fiction or pure non-fiction] is obviously negative, and the
semi-autobiographical text of the Recherche illustrates fairly well the mixture that forms
the standard fare of our narratives, literary or not. Nonetheless the two pure types can be
conceived of; and literary narratology has confined itself a little too blindly to the study
of fictional narrative, as if as a matter of course, every literary narrative would always be
pure fiction. We will return to this question, which at times is very definitely apposite.
For instance, the typically modal query ‘How does the author know that?’ does not have
24 Narrative and History

the same meaning in fiction as in non-fiction. In non-fiction the historian must provide
evidence and documents, the auto-biographer must allege memories or secrets confided.
In fiction, the novelist, the storyteller, the epic poet could often reply, off-fiction, as it
were, ‘I know it because I’m making it up’. I say off-fiction as we say off-mike because
in his fiction, or at least in the normal and canonical system of fiction    an author is
not supposed to be making [it] up, but reporting. Once again, fiction consists of that
simulation that Aristotle called mimésis.20

Genette is pointing here to the fact that history appears to be a matter of a report
of the findings and not an invention (making it up). Even today historians occa-
sionally refer to the ‘findings’ in the archive in their narratives, but virtually never
to how the narrating activity goes all the way through the process – the important
point to which Genette alerts us. This raises the issue not of ‘discovering history’
but ‘making history’. It is never a wasted effort to know about the research dead
ends, errors, subjective decisions, permanent prejudices, hindsights, publisher and
editor pressures, figurative choices and so on that go into making a history. But
what is still all too rarely explained is how the triad of story, narrating and narra-
tion incorporates every aspect of the history production process. Narrative is, as
we know, conventionally viewed as the end product after all the referential and
inferential ingredients have been blended. But history does not work that way in
practice, as the concept of story space hopefully makes clear.21
For, plainly, apart from the referential element, everything in the story space
creation process is a simulation based upon the notion of mimésis, where art
imitates (note: not corresponds to) reality. The concept of mimésis is significant in
any understanding of the narrative making logic of history. As we shall see, Paul
Ricoeur’s analysis of mimésis is that it is more than simple imitation of an appear-
ance; more substantially, it constitutes a representation of an action in the past
precisely and exclusively in the form of a history narrative. (In the next chapter,
I will argue this becomes the essence of the historian’s emplotment of the past).
Meanwhile, Genette is suggesting that only through realist convention do we
assume the content of events cast as a story begins the narrative making process
which then ‘reflects’ the data. In practice no historian works in the ‘hit and miss’
way that generates the ‘discovery’ of where they end up. Archival research can be
‘hit or miss’, but ‘history’ is narrative artifice all the way through from the initial
figuring of the past to the finished history. No historian, for example, comes to
the data cold without some knowledge of a pre-existing narrative in their minds.
All historians start with the texts of other historians. They can, and they often do,
come across fresh data, but it is always processed within a pre-existing narrative
understanding (just as the eventual history is) – though the data may indeed
suggest there are alternative stories to be created.
Genette next goes on to address the nature of narrating (narratology). This is
the manner in which the story is told in different media (film, comic strip and
 Narrating the Past 25

photographic magazine). I will henceforth refer to this media choice as a history

mode(s) of expression. Genette recognises this when he suggests that the specific
nature of narrative

   lies in its mode and not its content, which can equally well accommodate itself
to a ‘representation’ that is dramatic, graphic, or other. In fact, there are no ‘narrative
contents’. There are chains of actions or events amenable to any mode of representation –
the story of Oedipus, which Aristotle more or less credited with the same tragic quality
in narrative form as in dramatic form – and we call them narrative only because we
encounter them in a narrative representation.22

The important point here is that there is nothing in narrative’s essential form
that can be deployed theoretically to differentiate stories. The practical difference
lies in the functions each is expected to perform. This is very important when
considering the history narrative because in addition to the elements of content,
story, narrating and narrative there are these varieties of modes of expression avail-
able to historians. The history narrative is expressed in many different modes and
forms – text, visual, graphic, digital, performative, experiential, ideational and
cultural. The history narrative is at once a memorial and a remembrance, but it is
also anticipatory and emancipatory. All histories have very practical present, and
future-orientated dimensions are always situated in its mode of its expression. It is
because of this that the triad of story, narrating and narrative requires modification
to take this into account. The modification is the addition of the new category of
expression.
For even if one gives the factual or the referential elements primacy it cannot
disguise the fact that the explanatory structure of history is fundamentally that of
story, narrating, narrative plus an expression. In a history we expect referentially based
truth, while in fiction we do not. It is indisputable that there is reference to the real
in the one and not the other. But this has nothing to do with ‘meaning creation’,
which is entirely the product of the narrative that connects story, narrating, narrative
and expression. In so far as truth is claimed to be central to history (at least some
sort of empirical truth) I will examine that claim in more detail in Chapter 7
(see pp. 111–122). And as we shall see, truth (as well as reality, objectivity and
meaning) must be considered as part – a function – of the narrative making
exercise.
Despite that (and using Genette’s terminology as appropriate), historians still
tend to view the logic of history as being, you will recall, something like this:

reference to events historian’s explanation/meaning the history

(usually
textual)
26 Narrative and History

However, by viewing history as a narrative representation (of the past) it becomes

story (reference to events)

narrating (historian’s explanation/meaning)
narrative (the history)
expression (form/s of
representation)

This means that through Genette’s analysis of narrative we have learned four
things and reached an important conclusion about history. The first thing we have
learned is that the history narrative shares the same three fundamental elements
as fictional narrative – they are, after all, universals. Second, in fictional narrative
the order is something like this:

story
narrating
narrative

Third, the above three elements cannot be disassociated from each other. Fourth,
it is more realistic to view the relationship of these elements in both fiction and
history as one of over-determination. This is despite the apparently determining
role of documentary attested data in history.23 And the conclusion is that history
is a complex narrative making discipline that incorporates referentiality but it is
not controlled by it in the sense that it works according to epistemological notions
of correspondence.
By understanding the over-determining relationships between the narrative
elements of content, story, narrating, narration and expression, we are alerted to
history defined now as the story space relationship existing between

• Past events – the content of the past explained as a story, and which I will
conflate and call content/story.
• The author-historian’s act of narrating (in which I will henceforth include the
concept of narration).
• The past represented as a ‘history narrative’ of a particular kind – the mode of
expression as a kind of history narrative – textual, film, performance, comic strip
and so on.
 Narrating the Past 27

Thus, I suggest that the relationship between narrative and history construed as
a mutually determining narrative making exercise can be graphically represented
now as

content/story [the past]

narrating/narration
[authorial function]

expression [narrative mode of historical

representation – the history]

Note the directions of the arrows. Now, there are three further things to note
about how this model of narrative has now been turned into a mechanism for
explaining the logic of history. Given that history deals with the reality of the
past it is necessary to explore the way in which the historian establishes the
content/story of the past primarily through the function of plot (the historian’s act
of emplotment). Following the works of Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur, rather
than being a function of discourse, the plot decisions of the historian are now re-
located as part of the construction of the content/story. In history, the ‘story/how’
and ‘discourse/what’ distinction is much less clear-cut than in non-history. So,
we need to acknowledge how historians transform a set of historical events (the
chronicle of ‘what happened’) into a sequence organised through the structure of
the four primary plot typologies, which, White [and literary theorists] maintains,
are romance, tragedy, comedy, satire. What I am saying is that organising the data
of the content of the past can only be accommodated as a storied narrative act.
In summary:

• First, the past has to be storied, but the story (emplotment) does not pre-exist
in the content of past events. The content/story element is the location for
the creation of beginnings, middles and ends, moral statements, the empirical
reference and inference/analysis.
• Second, the nature and functioning of the historian, as a narrator (the authorial
voice) probably requires a far more detailed analysis than it has hitherto
received. Though a highly self-conscious group of people, historians are not
generally aware of the functioning of the elements of discourse such as voice
but also, as we shall see, the narrative concepts of tense/time, mood and
focalisation.
• Third, the fact that history can be expressed in many different modes (verbal,
textual, filmic, digital, performative, etc.) requires a basic understanding of how
each mode is at once constrained by and, in turn, influences the epistemological
28 Narrative and History

status of the history produced. In other words, the story space is governed by
its mode of expression.

What I am suggesting, then, is that to understand the nature of history we need to

know what happened but not then assume that this is the basis for knowing what it
means: facts and values do not live in the form of logical entailment. Thus we need
to address how the meaning of the past is created beyond the empirical facts and
analysis. As we shall see, this has many implications for what we understand by the
terms ‘meaning’, ‘representation’, ‘explanation’, ‘realism’, ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’.
Of course, the relationship between narrative and history described here has no
more (but hopefully no less) claim to being ‘the way to look at the logic of history’
than any other rational approach. What it does do, however, is accept that history
is a narrative making exercise rather than solely an empirical-analytical one.

 Conclusion
In this chapter, I began by confronting the reconstructionist and constructionist
belief that reference, explanation and meaning are merely re-presented in the form
of a narrative. I argued that as a representation – as a story space – history is
categorically different from the past and there can be no translation between the
two by the methods of empiricism. While empiricism is a significant element in
history, it should not obscure what happens in the ‘telling’ process. Thus, I have
argued that the story space, as the site of the historian’s narration, is the location
for her or his various strategies for narrating. For this reason, if for no other, we
ought never to assume that reference equates with truthful meaning.
My analysis so far has been indebted primarily to Gérard Genette, Seymour
Chatman, Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur. I have construed history as a mode of
explanation and meaning that results from the relationship between content/story
(the past), narrating/narration (historian as author) and the mode of expression
medium (of representation). Rather than the narrative being merely a medium of
report, it is the organising principle for the aesthetic turning of the past into what
it patently is: the-past-as-history. It is now necessary to turn to a more detailed
analysis of content/story, narrating/narration and history as a mode of expression.
I begin in the next chapter with content/story.
2 History as Content/Story

Plainly, while it aims to be an accurate representation, history is not a replication

of that which is past and gone. The implication is that for the notion of replication
to make any sense we would have to assume that the historian could pass through
the textual veil of historiography and be able to get back to ‘historical reality’.1
As noted, this is not feasible and, hence, history remains a fictively determined
attempt at recovering (whether it is reconstructing, constructing or deconstructing)
the past in the only way possible – through the creation of a narrative about it.
Given its fictive, ‘substituting’ nature, then, as Frank R. Ankersmit argues (and
I agree), history is never as good as the original it represents.2 We should not
forget that epistemology works on the principle that ‘things’ (reality) and ‘words’
(cognitive language) can be tied together via a tertium quid. But a representation
connects the represented (a thing) only to its representation (another thing). This
is, by definition, only ever connect things to things. Thus a representation of
President Ronald Reagan can only be compared to another representation of Ronald
Reagan. Consequently, we cannot cross-reference our narratives as representations
with past reality, but only against other narratives or, to use Ankersmit’s term,
other ‘narrative substances’.3 Remember that while our historical narratives may be
overflowing with factual sentences, these do not of themselves entail meanings. In
spite of empirical-analytical arguments, the history text cannot provide a knowable
reality that is independent of the history text.4
You will recall that I said in the Introduction that we could define history as
that set of relationships that exists between a discourse/narrative and the real
events it recounts/explains. I did this by invoking the Genette model of story,
narrating and narration. I also noted how, given the peculiar needs of history as
a realist literary discourse, we must take into account what it is that historians
actually do beyond gathering data and inferring what it most likely means. Using
Genette’s narrative model I argued that history is a story space which, informed
by its content, constitutes the structure of a storied (histoire) sequence of events
and actions. This conception is rooted in Gallie’s as well as Genette’s notion of
story. The narrative theorist Seymour Chatman also suggests that the process of
narrating has substantial consequences for the expressive medium chosen for the
narration, and the medium itself ‘reflects’ back on, or resonates with, the process
of narrating according to the demands it makes for explanation and meaning

29
30 Narrative and History

creation.5 So historians are recognising that both history’s storied content (as well
as its reception by the reader/viewer) and its mode of expression are authored
activities working together.6
Now, before explaining more fully what comprises the past defined in terms of
content and story, authorial functioning (the narrating process) and expression
(the narrative medium of representation) I should explain the assumptions I have
made about history and its production so that we can proceed on this basis. The
seven assumptions I have made are

(1) Like all human made objects, history is always subject to the question ‘how was
it made?’ and such questions are normally answered through an explanation
of its formal structure.
(2) In the case of the historical narrative, I have assumed that we need to distin-
guish the content of the past (that story which is to be narrated) from the
ways in which it is expressed (its narrative form).
(3) This narrativism now allows us to construct the-past-as-history. Here its logic
is not that of detection and discovery (although detection and discovery prob-
ably has a role in scouring the archive), but the logic of story space.
(4) Any model of the narrative logic of history must be functional in that it must
have an explicit and orderly arrangement of discrete elements – what I will
call narrative choices. These are found in all history texts. At the same time
we have to acknowledge the boundless diversity of ways in which narrative
choices can be meaningfully arranged. So, while all histories work within
a common (and formal) functional narrative structure, their meanings will
always be different.
(5) Any narrative model of history must acknowledge the question of authorship
(the authorial function). ‘How was it made?’ must always sit alongside ‘what
does it tell us about past reality?’ Without this, history remains just an exercise
in data gathering plus inference.
(6) No history model (narrative or otherwise) can ignore values and ideology. This
means our judgement of the ‘worth’, ‘utility’, ‘value’ or ‘quality’ of a history
should be concerned not just with the question of ‘how it was written or
constructed?’, but also why. In other words, what ‘persuasive message’ does it
carry?
(7) If the work of history is to be defined adequately as an authored referential
literature, its aesthetic shaping must be considered as prior to its empirical
authority vis-à-vis the meaning of a history at the level of the fact.

What follows from these assumptions is that the three elements of content/story,
narrative/narration and expression constitute the historian’s key narrative choices.
The notion of a narrative choice is derived from a variety of theorists including
Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, A.J. Greimas
 History as Content/Story 31

and Tzvetan Todorov, as well as history theorists like Louis Mink and Paul Ricoeur.7
Vladimir Propp, for example, noted over 30 narrative functions in his analysis of
the Russian folktale. He argued they were required to make sense of the story (at
a simple level the ‘hero leaving home’ is a story function that comes before ‘their
return’). Clearly Propp’s narrative functions were intended to make explicit the
orderly and plausible development of the story of the content.
As we shall see, the narrative model of content/story, narrative/narration and
expression provides a vocabulary of concepts for understanding how a history
narrative ‘realises’ the past. As we know, the arrangement, priority and operation of
the narrative choices are dependent upon the individual historian’s epistemological
preferences (reconstructionist, constructionist, deconstructionist or even postist
or anti-history). How the historian displays their awareness of and deploys their
narrative choices allows us to determine the nature of their epistemological judge-
ments. Thus, for example, Eric Hobsbawm’s and Charles More’s understanding of
the British ‘industrial revolution’ differ dramatically in terms of their respective
epistemological choices as reflected in both data selection and level of theorisa-
tion (and not forgetting their radically divergent ideological positions). But neither
reflects on the issue of representation nor on the nature of the story they are
creating.8 And this is central to the interpretation/creation of meaning.

 Following a story
As you will recall, Gallie said that a history is a sequence of the actions of people,
which provides the content of the story.9 Thus, to follow a story as a form of histor-
ical explanation is to understand the content of the past as a series of successive
actions and thoughts that seem to possess ‘directedness’ that pulls us forward to
‘the conclusion’. This is the narrative function of followability. This is why every
history story space must possess both content and story. Seymour Chatman agrees
that the ‘what’ of narrative is content ‘storied’ as a chain of events, actions and
happenings.10 A story is a sequence of events based on the mechanism of ‘this
happened, then that    ’ as opposed to chronicle – a mere listing of events.11
Moreover, as the narrative theorist Jerome Bruner argues, only by considering
action itself as a text can we understand history or, indeed, action itself. Paul
Ricoeur concurs understanding action demands telling a story. Without the story’s
‘telling’ the content of the past remains just things that happened in time and space
and literally has no meaning. What is required is something beyond sequence –
a way of constituting meaning through an explanation of the story (assumed to
exist?) in the content of events.12 For Ricoeur this constitution of meaning emerges
from knowledge of the historical agent’s intentions (agency). For Frank Ankersmit,
however, meaning emerges from the historian’s construction of a story (of which
agent intentionality is only one feature).
32 Narrative and History

It is probably worth emphasising at this point that facts in themselves are not
relevant to the process of following a story. By this I mean that individual events
carry no inherent followability. This is because events function as narrative units
akin to Propp’s narrative units (a birth, a death, a discovery, a victory, a decision, a
mistake, good then bad weather in the English Channel    ). This is most obvious
in the manner in which some historians prefer a thematic approach to the past as
with Charles More’s industrial revolution (which is a different industrial revolution
to that of any other historian). In other words, events are subsumed within a class,
and the classification creates the meaning.
But this logic means that the ‘ending’ of the history, in effect, ‘writes’ the ‘begin-
ning’ and ‘middle’ of the emplotment. Compare More’s thematic story with Eric
Hobsbawm’s who emplots British economic development chronologically taking
events as they occurred. Another useful recent example is Women in Italy, 1350–
1650: Ideals and Realities by Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli.13 Subtitled ‘a source-
book’ the authors’ narrative is cast as ‘the other voice’, which is a thematic device
that attempts to recapture the experiences of Italian women from the fourteenth
to the seventeenth century. Collecting together a range of sources to ‘illuminate’
the civic and courtly culture of Renaissance Italy ‘    as it affected women’ is their
forming of such a story in order to make it followable.14 Indeed, even the sources
are collected thematically – nature of women, life cycles and the variety of women’s
roles.
Clearly, the concept of the story space requires that we must understand the
nature of content/story.15 So what explanatory strategies organise a history’s
content/story? There are six key narrative functions or authorial decisions that
constitute the content/story element of all history. From what I have already said,
it should be no surprise that the first on the list is that of the historian’s epistem-
ological choice. But the full list is as follows:

• epistemological choice(s)
• aesthetic/figurative/tropic predispositions
• emplotment inclinations
• mode of cognition and analytical argument
• ethical preferences
• selection of factual references to events that took place and what happened to
the historical agent.

Prior to explaining each of these decisions, we need to note that they impact on
each other in a reciprocal (over-determining) fashion and also that they operate
differentially as between historians. Thus, the historian’s narrative choices create
the explanatory coherence that we sense in each history (or lack of it in ‘poor’
histories). An example would be when the historian makes an ethical or ideological
 History as Content/Story 33

judgement about the decision of an agent in the past and this ‘leads’ the historian to
make a choice about the priority of agency over structure. This may then influence
further decisions about how they choose to narrate, and eventually their preferred
mode of expression. In this way every historian establishes a unique ‘signature’ of
narrative choices as they work within their chosen epistemological tradition.
But because the historian’s decisions are personal they are always subject to
priorities and preferences. As White has pointed out in his model of the historical
imagination, there are always ‘elective affinities’ between narrative choices, which
in his case are generated not by epistemological preferences but tropic/figurative
choices. Whether epistemological or figurative (maybe they are the same?), the
narrative choices of reference and emplotment, for example, will generate a
different explanatory coherence for a reconstructionist than for a deconstruc-
tionist. I will now turn to the individual functional decisions. The first of the six,
as noted, is the historian’s epistemological choice.

 Epistemological choice
Epistemology is that area of philosophy that explores the foundations, theory,
nature, possibilities, conditions and limits of knowledge. Today, philosophers of
history ask three epistemological questions:

• What is the proper structure of historical explanation?

• Can the study of the past be objective and truthful?
• What is the function of narrative in communicating historical knowledge?16

The lack of an agreed answer to each question reflects the fundamentally uncer-
tain nature of history as a way of knowing. As children of the Enlightenment,
reconstructionist and constructionist historians have answered the first question
by endorsing an empirical-analytical epistemology. They have collectively said
‘yes’ to the second question (with certain reservations), and to the third generally
maintain that it is a matter of reporting their inferences.
As should be clear by now, historians do not universally agree on the most
suitable methods to be employed in the pursuit of the-past-as-history given their
epistemological choices. Before making an epistemological choice all historians
face two questions. First, how does the notion of reference connect to the narrative
that is assumed to have existed in the past? And second, if they have a mech-
anism in mind that explains that connection (usually called ‘a theory of historical
change’), how then can they then claim the data tells its own story? In other words,
what mechanism is there that automatically connects knowing what happened
with what it means as a true story? So, what third element or tertium quid exists
34 Narrative and History

that permits the faithful translation of the facts of the past into ‘the true’ mean-
ingful history? What is it that makes the ‘past world’ and the ‘present historical
world’ correspond to each other? Why do most historians believe that their general
interpretative conclusions are true, defined as what they must mean, as opposed
to being merely references to happenings?
While every history text is an instance of this, the inventions associated with
gender history are particularly illustrative. John Tosh’s Manliness and Masculinities
in Nineteenth Century Britain (2005) is a self-acknowledged (constructionist) case
in point.17 The author begins by saying the making of manhood ‘    suggests
something new and challenging’, and he hopes ‘    to show that the history of
masculinities is just that’.18 As a constructionist historian, Tosh makes his history
in order to constitute a new historian’s consensus (as a particular story space), but
the important epistemological point is that it is a creation intended to provide
a meaning for the past. Epistemologically, Tosh has made his decision to create
what he believes is a new (hi)story founded on the tertium quid of a particular
theorisation of masculinity.
In pursuit of the matter of epistemological choice we should also note that
much Western continental philosophy in the past 50 years has turned away from
empirical-analytical philosophy. The challenge to, and occasionally the outright
rejection of, empiricism, inference, objectivity, truth and representation (as under-
stood at the relatively uncomplex level of most epistemologists) produces what is
for some an anti-realist and for others an anti-representational intellectual stance.
The broad elements associated with these positions vary: from a willingness to
accept the collapse of the distinctions of epistemology (the nature of knowing)
and ontology (the nature of being), or of reversing them, or of overturning the
priority of content over form, or of acknowledging the practical fusion of observer
and observed, and/or happily accepting the auteur (author) theory of history. This
is a situation that has generated much angst among reconstructionists and only a
little less among constructionists.19 Reconstructionist’s high anxiety has not been
dampened by the philosopher Frank R. Ankersmit’s effort to persuade them to
end their fixation with epistemology in favour of the ontology of the historical
narrative as the locus of historical knowledge.20 However, the most radical step
appeared to have been taken by Hayden White and his emphasis upon the determ-
ining role of figurative choice.

 Aesthetics/figuration/trope
There is no doubt that the model of the historical imagination offered in the
early 1970s by Hayden White (building on the insights of Roland Barthes) remains
the significant point of departure for all debates on the narrative logic of history.
 History as Content/Story 35

Certainly his work provides an original analysis of the essential functions that
organise content/story. White’s own epistemological choice is to adopt a decon-
structionist position in as much as he argues that the ultimate determining
narrative choice (though ‘narrative choice’ is not a term he uses) is vested in the
historian’s aesthetic preferences – specifically in the power of figuration.
White insists (as does Ricoeur) that all historians unavoidably aestheticise the
past. What this means is that the historian’s vision of the past is always cast in
categories that derive their meaning ultimately from the process of narration (see
also the functioning of voice, Chapter 3) – or in White’s case specifically the process
of troping.21 So when a historian characterises world-wide consumerism in terms
of ‘the global city’ this is an aesthetic decision (as much if not more than it is
referential because it establishes a metonymic or correspondence notion).22
Troping is a basic human intellectual faculty through which we ascribe meaning
to events (past and present) in terms of similarity or difference. Substituting
constituent parts for the whole or the other way around often accomplishes this.
Thus for ‘US domestic/foreign policy’ a historian may substitute ‘the (Western)
frontier’ with the one part representing the essence of the other, usually connected
in some way through the tertium quid of ‘democracy’. As just noted with ‘the global
city’ this is, in its effect, the creation of a complex metonymy. Metonymy is,
unsurprisingly, the most favoured trope of historians as it establishes a (figurative)
relationship between entities based on similarity and contiguity suggesting cause
and effect. This is the figurative basis of the correspondence theory.23
White, specifically, is saying that tropes (the basic kinds are metonymy, meta-
phor, synecdoche and irony) are essential for understanding how the content of
the past is ‘prefiguratively grasped’ by the historian, that they are, in effect, prepar-
atory to the organisation of our content/story. By virtue of being human, historians
cannot ‘turn off’ this prefigurative act though they do have a choice (whether
consciously or unconsciously is never going to be clear) of the trope (to create a
mental-visual figuration) in which they predominantly wish to cast content/story
as history. Glossing White, Ricoeur believes that what is important about meta-
phors is that they are the mechanism that forces us to interpret reality. Ricoeur
claims metaphor is that aspect of language which allows historians to undertake
their hermeneutic activities. Indeed, it is with and through metaphor that reality
meets meaning and truth.
The philosopher Stephen Pepper’s analysis of what he calls ‘root metaphors’ is
that all hypotheses about the nature of the real world (and in this sense, historical
proposals are always hypotheses) emerge through the process of analogy.24 What
this means is that equivalence, resemblance and difference is the linguistic mech-
anism for explanation and meaning. History owes its very nature to the fact that
language is an incredibly rich medium for describing and explaining the meaning
of objects in the world. In metaphor, for example, the analogical process takes the
36 Narrative and History

form of transfer (either as similarity or as difference) to create meaning often as

an extended simile. This is most obvious in history book titles though they are
embedded in full-scale historical narratives.
Thus, while many book titles are bland and intended to be simply descriptive
of their contents such as Gender and American History Since 1890 or A History
of the British Isles, others do tend to be analogical from the outset.25 Examples
would include The Many-Headed Hydra subtitled The Hidden History of the Revolu-
tionary Atlantic, or Jumpin’ Jim Crow subtitled Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil
Rights.26 But even in blandly entitled histories, authors cannot escape their analo-
gical thinking. In Barbara Melosh’s edited Gender and American History Since 1890,
biological conceptions of ‘difference’ are rejected and the cultural determination
of sex difference explored from a variety of competing figurative perspectives.27
Gender history is invariably cast as an exploration centred upon the tensions
between metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche as ‘gender difference’ is configured
in terms of distinct conceptions of ‘the other’ and ‘othering’ though these terms
are not necessarily deployed.
Beyond epistemological choice and figuration, it is the view of both White and
Ricoeur that a further choice for the historian is the constitution of ‘a story of
a particular kind’ about the past. As should be clear by now, it is a fundamental
of historical explanation and meaning creation that a story is being told to the
reader/viewer/listener. This is an explanation through another aesthetic choice –
specifically that of emplotment. What is crucial is that it does not matter to their
construction whether the stories are fictional or non-fictional. Bracketing off refer-
ence to past reality for the moment, the inner workings of stories are universal.
While reconstructionist author-historians in evidencing ‘past reality’ will claim
that there cannot be any ‘story invention’ on their part, the logic of the story
demonstrates that the choice of emplotment is also a major element in creating
historical meaning.

 Emplotment/story
Emplotment works by endowing events with the structure of one of the four
archetypal emplotment types.28 This is a belief held by most narrative theorists,
even realists like Paul Ricoeur.29 He notes ‘    that history imitates in its own
writing the types of emplotment handed down by our literary tradition’.30 To be
honest, the reason for the particular choice of the historian is not always very clear.
But, as I noted in the last chapter, Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of mimésis is significant
and helpful. Taking his cue from Aristotle, Ricoeur makes the crucial connection
between figuration (specifically metaphor), mimésis and human action. Defining
metaphor as ‘seeing-as’ (seeing one thing as another in the sense of substitution)
 History as Content/Story 37

leads Ricoeur to defining mimésis as an imitative substitution of human action

through the mechanism of an emplotment/story.
In other words, Ricoeur believes that in order to make past action meaningful
history works as a substitute for past action through the process of emplotment.
Thus, mimésis translates as the emplotment of it (defined as the narrative organ-
isation of human action) and not just an imitation of the past (as data). Hence
Ricoeur’s argument is that history is the figurative (in this case metaphoric) imit-
ation of human action. This is a judgement supported by a substantial range of
literary and historical theorists – Vladimir Propp, A.J. Greimas, Northrop Frye,
Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette, Louis Mink, Hayden White, Keith Jenkins, and
others.31
Historians have ‘heroes’ (a person, class, race, nation, idea, political orientation,
etc.) and the characterisation of a story of events and actions into a mode of
emplotment is normally defined by what happens to the ‘hero’.32 So, ‘the English
king died. His consort went on holiday. She met a foreign prince. She subsequently
married him’ is just a series of events. But if we said ‘the English king died and then
his consort went on holiday because she was so happy where she met a foreign
prince who exploited her state of mind in order to woo and marry her’, this is an
emplotment (of which kind you decide). In other words, to penetrate cause and
effect (assuming we can do that) the historian will call upon what are the four basic
forms as a way or organising the otherwise dissonant events in the past. These
are tragedy, romance, satire or comedy. For example, in The American Radical, a
collection of mini-biographies of 46 dissenting radicals in American history, the
authors tend to navigate between the poles of romance and tragedy.33
Neither realist nor non-realist narratives are simply a listing of events. This is
because both work by establishing causal connections. The key differences between
history and non-histories are two. First, there is the nature of emplotment. It is
not merely that in history the events are real, but in (conventional) history the
author-historian does not create the ordering of events (they are given as they
occurred according to the data stream) unlike the writer of fiction. And second, in
a non-history the writer is not trying to spell out why one explanation is better
than another. However, what both modes of narrative do have in common –
as we shall see in the next few chapters – is that they are emplotted narratives
constructed from a range of available data founded through a range of competing
epistemological assumptions and expressed in a variety of different modes. The
significant difference between realist and non-realist narrative is, as Ankersmit
insists, the balance between the compulsions of the real and the fictive.
While in the history story we can fairly assume that ‘what happened’ actu-
ally did happen, the process of explanation and meaning through emplotment
is an aesthetic and mimetic artifice all the way through.34 The reason is very
simple and we have already come across it. It is founded on the authoring of a
38 Narrative and History

beginning, middle and end to the story (though as we shall see, in experimental
history or as Jean-Luc Godard said famously about film, they do not necessarily
have to be in that order).35 White rejects the notion that the historian ‘finds’
or ‘identifies’ emplotments in ‘this happened, then that’ adding ‘    because    ’.
White is unconcerned about the extent of ‘invention’ in the historian’s opera-
tions observing how the same event can provide for different purposes in different
stories depending on whether it is located as a beginning, middle or end (or noted
briefly only to henceforth omit it). The corollary to this is that the meaning of the
past does not lie in the absolute significance of a single event but how that event
is fitted into an appropriate story narrative.36 So, if a history is emplotted as a
tragedy it is ‘explained’ as a tragedy. Often events are said to be ‘crucial’, ‘pivotal’,
‘determining’ or ‘central’. But they only become so when fitted into a story of a
particular kind.
It would be irresponsible to insist that an emplotment is always a free choice
for the historian. History, as a referential literature, works under the impress
of past reality (and often it can make sense to view it in a mimetic way) (see
Chapter 3, pp. 44–63) – as well as being a narrative construction and the product of
dominant metanarratives (usually ideological or ethical, or both). Thus a narrative
that connects religion with the rise of capitalism will have to emplot reference to
Puritanism into it in some way or another.37 Of course, every historian is obliged
to weave a variety of emplotments within their history in one overall or archetypal
story form assuming that they wish to generate a dominant meaning in their
history (of a set of events). As we shall see, experimental history is often provocative
because it may not do this.
Of course the (non-experimental) historian can experiment with different
emplotments to examine the process of the creation of historical meaning itself.
Thus, Donald McCoy in his Coming of Age: The United States During the 1920s and
1930s offered a history deploying the notion of continuity and change that is asso-
ciated with a youth emerging into adulthood.38 Offering a history of an event from
different perspectives – and with, perhaps, different heroes and villains – is always
a possibility for historians.39 In spite of their unavoidable emplotment activities,
any vagueness among historians about the narrative functionality of emplotment
is almost invariably the result of their conventional epistemological investment in
what is usually called ‘argument’ and almost as often ‘analysis’ or ‘explanation’. So,
what is the role of argument, analysis and explanation in organising content/story?

 Argument/analysis/explanation
Historians, particularly constructionists, use hypothetical models (hypotheses
about the likely meanings of the past) that are imagined and then tested in the
 History as Content/Story 39

evidence. This is known, technically, as the hypothetico-deductive method. When

the evidence does not fit, the hypothesis is modified while, at the same time, more
evidence is sought. The logic is ‘theory → evidence → modified theory → more
evidence → theory → evidence    ’. In this way it is assumed the pursuit of ‘true
knowledge’ is edged forward. If intuitively you feel that history is not quite so
scientific in its practice as this description suggests (after all, at what point does this
process produce ‘true knowledge’? When the historian decides enough is enough
or the book contract deadline approaches?), there are many hard-core construc-
tionist historians who would disagree. Nevertheless, given the chronological nature
of events, it seems the past has to be explained in terms of ‘this happened,
then that, because    (    insert the appropriately theorised referent at this
point)’.
This demonstrates why narrative is the essential mode of historical explanation
for it is only within a narrative that cause and effect can be grasped, let alone
demonstrated. Remember what William Gallie said, that to explain the meaning
of the past is to discover the story or, as White has it, offer one that is plausible
(according to the available evidence). Hence, Tosh’s concept of ‘manliness’ as a
mechanism through which to examine the history of men is as much invented as
it is found. Similarly, in the case of John Y. Simon and Michael E. Stevens’ brave
attempt at sorting out the myths from the realities of the American Civil War,
while they can clarify the data, they cannot do it without creating new stories,
new arguments and fresh explanations.40
Of course, none of this impairs the historian’s effort to demonstrate that some-
thing happened/did not happen, much less their ability to infer what it probably
signifies (means). As a constructionist (though with heavy reconstructionist lean-
ings) the historian Richard Evans says, historians ‘    have always been obliged to
get their hands dirty’ in the archives before they can draw appropriate inferences.41
Deconstructionists would probably agree not only with Evans, but also with history
theorists Louis Mink and Hayden White. Deconstructionists maintain that while
all past actions, processes and events have to be located in time and space according
to the evidence, they must then be rendered (narrated) into a story, and that telling
such stories is itself a cognitive act.
While this does not do away with the need for empiricism and analysis, only
a doctrinaire and dogmatic belief in objectivity would be the reason for not
addressing the narrativist nature of argument and analysis. This, by the way, has
nothing to do with, for example, ‘telling lies about Hitler’, which is entirely a
matter of false data and spurious inferences. That anti-deconstructionists occasion-
ally imply otherwise has much to do with their equating knowing the actuality
of the data stream with a ‘proper’ moral position. That this is an invalid belief
demands we examine the narrative function of ethical, political and ideological
choice.
40 Narrative and History

 Ethical/political/ideological choices
Historical representations always have moral/ethical and political/ideological
dimensions. Moreover, the matters of subjectivity and relativism demand
important decisions by the historian. But we do not simply want to under-
stand what moral assumption(s) historians bring to their study of the past.
More important is why some historians still imagine they can be morally
neutral/objective? Most historians do, of course, accept that they are influenced
by their ethical and/or ideological affinities. Of course they may not think imme-
diately in terms of what Martin Kreiswirth calls ‘storied knowledge’, which is
particularly effective in packaging ideology, especially in telling the narratives of
marginalised groups (gender, race, class, etc.).42 However, for most historians the
notion of an overtly ideological (and for some a ‘moral’) history remains a worrying
notion especially when associated – as it has to be – with the idea of an ‘authorial
voice’ (see Chapter 3, pp. 44–63). This is because it seems to drive a wedge between
the idea of the knowing and honest historian, and truthful and objective history.
This can readily be witnessed in the debates of some 30 or so years ago over the
economic efficiency of American chattel slavery, as historians then debated the
balance of economic efficiency and morality.
While this issue of morality in history will arise again, for now we need only to
note that historians always consider the ideological, ethical and moral dimension
of what they do. Indeed, the history theorist Beverley Southgate goes so far as
to suggest that historians have to make moral choices about what they want to
see their history leading to in the future. For Southgate, history is unavoidably
an ethical activity.43 In arriving at a judgement on the determining power of
ideology, ethics and moral choice in explaining the meaning of the past, there are
two issues of which all historians are aware. First, how reasonable is it to argue
that the ideological and ethical narrative choices historians make can be ‘set aside’
and subordinated to their experience of the archive? And second, what is the
relationship between ideology, ethics and aesthetics?
The first issue can be dealt with very briefly if you think it odd that we can
separate our life from being a historian. Airline pilots may be able to do because,
presumably, they are not making moral judgements when they land a plane in a
crosswind. Further, would it not be serious waste of time to pursue the argument
that the recognition of the historian’s ethical choice(s) may weigh to some extent
against scholarship? The historian of biography and autobiography Jeremy D.
Popkin’s belief that an academic’s ideological choice does not necessarily discredit
scholarship also misses the point though in a different way.44 What is missed by
both arguments is the spurious nature of the belief (a) that we can separate ‘the
self’ from ‘the historian’, and (b) that some historians can do a better job of it than
others can and, as a result, they will be ‘more objective’.
 History as Content/Story 41

As for the second issue, while a few historians will narrate history that is very
obviously self- and/or cause-serving, the point is all history is situated, positioned
and for some thing or someone. By merely writing a story we are destined to
make ethical decisions. ‘The other’, ‘the forgotten’ and ‘the institutions for funding
research’ are always lurking either in or behind the history narrative. In this sense,
history is a liminal activity. It is always on the edge of something else. Feminist
history, for example, aims to bring the object of study (for feminists it is the female)
into view.45 Equally, doing ‘experimental history’ has a purpose, as does nationalist
or racial history. Even not doing history has a purpose. Indeed, invoking one set
of data rather than another has an ethical purpose. So, what is the role of the data
in producing a history narrative?

 Reference/sources
Empiricism holds that the ultimate compulsion in history is reference to the past.
Normally this wisdom is anthropomorphised in the self-effacing empirical sceptic.
Many historians agree that we may start by doubting what our sources tell us, but
not accepting that eventually we will be forced to believe in demonstrable truth
is dangerous. Deconstructionists – as epistemological sceptics – might call this the
‘empiricism effect’. The pursuit of the humility that accompanies the empiricism
effect also creates the image of the historian as a humble toiler – a kind of empirical
gleaner.46
Concomitant with all this is the notion of evidence being subject to certain ‘craft
principles’ similar to those rules of evidence in a civil court of law with the case
‘proved’ according to the balance of probabilities though never beyond reasonable
doubt as in a criminal court. The way historians use evidence, as we shall see,
also hinges on the issues of contextualisation and comparison. To reject these two
principles would substantially redefine, as one historian claimed recently,

   the relationship between the historical account and the actual past in a manner that
made reality (understood as objective entity) either minimally or not at all accessible to
any inquirer.47

Most historians would accept, then, that evidence can be ‘converted into facts’
thanks to the use of ‘critical methods and rules’.48 The problem with this emerges
when it is used to bolster the bigger epistemological argument that this enables
a correspondence of ‘consciousness to reality’ that gives ‘the facts’ the central
functional role in historical inquiry.49 This is, of course, the primary claim of
reconstructionist historians.
The constructionist would agree that the accumulation of data yield a ‘greater
approximation to the truth by revealing the structures and forces at work’ in the
42 Narrative and History

past as facts.50 Hence, Arthur Marwick, the British social historian and author of a
best-selling defence of empiricism, while generally agreeing with these sentiments,
puts his emphasis upon sources. He argues that facts ‘    come from the traces
that have been left by past societies, that is, the primary sources’.51 He rejects
what he calls ‘the postmodern fantasy’ of ‘the facts’ offering instead the notion of
knowledge derived by inference.52 Only such knowledge can guarantee objectivity
because it is built-in to the empirical and analytical equation. Marwick makes this
explicit in his 1980 book on class when he examines the representation of class in
films and then explicitly returns to ‘    the realities of class’.53
As the self-proclaimed voice of empiricist sanity, Marwick argues that while
sources alone do not make history, without them ‘there is no history’.54 For
Marwick only continuous archival research will remove the historian’s misconcep-
tions, which will in turn foster more convincing interpretations (meanings). So,
for Marwick the reconstructionist the history equation would seem to be like a
wheel with reference the hub. But it is important to note that while Marwick sees a
constant interrogation between reference, explanation and meaning, the narrative
representation of such interrogations is ignored. The reconstructionist assump-
tion remains that the narrative is essentially a self-regulating report of empirical
findings extrinsic to it.55
This is reinforced with Marwick’s evaluation of what he calls ‘the communication
of historical knowledge’.56 For Marwick, historical knowledge is presented largely
outside language. Even though he notes the complexities of dealing with past
language use, he has no sense of the nature of history as a totality that is empirical-
analytical and narrative-linguistic. And Marwick is not alone. Kevin Passmore’s
recent defence of empiricism and analysis uses Marwickian logic by which use he
(thinks) he sees off a clutch of poststructuralist historians or fellow travellers. These
include Hayden White, Patrick Joyce, Joan W. Scott, Keith Jenkins, Simon Schama,
Robert Berkhofer, Robin Bisha, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault because such
people clearly do not exercise any empirical self-control.57
Despite Passmore’s and Marwick’s arguments, what an understanding of history
as a narrative making activity addresses is not reference itself, but the belief that it
is the fundamental regulator of historical explanation and meaning. What viewing
history as a narrative representation does is correct Marwickian epistemological
myopia – the failure to see reference as only one element within the structure of
history.

 Conclusion
In this chapter, I began by stating seven assumptions about the narrative repres-
entational nature of the historical enterprise. Following on from this, and based
 History as Content/Story 43

on Genette’s analysis of narrative, I pursued the notion that content/story is one

of three key elements in historical thinking and practice. I suggested that the
element of content/story is composed of several narrative decisions the historian
must make to explain what happened in the past as a story and what it means as
history. I suggested that for the content/story, narrative decisions initially comprise
the historian’s preferred epistemological orientation, which is then followed by
the aesthetics of figuration, the creation of an emplotment, the role of argu-
ment/analysis, ethical/ideological choice and the role of referentiality. Most
importantly, what follows from this analysis is that the notion of what happened
in the past must be placed on the same level as its telling. I will now examine
how that telling can be undertaken because, as should be coming clear, for every
content/story there is an author-historian speaking to us.
3 Narrating and Narration

Key to any understanding of the authorial act of narrating and narration is

the analyses of Gérard Genette in his Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse
Revisited.1 Genette, with the narrative theorists Roland Barthes and Michel
Foucault, has identified several categories through which we can understand
what authors are doing when they narrate.2 Whereas Genette evaluates the
speaking function in narratives, Barthes asks us to consider the prior question
of ‘who is speaking’, claiming that we cannot ever be sure given the nature
of writing and language. This led him to his (in)famous announcement of
the ‘death of the author’ suggesting that there is an unavoidable pluralism in
the meaning of every text beyond the ‘fixing’ of the author. Hence reading
history is not about trying to set the meaning (the interpretation or the story
of the past) of the author; rather the act of reading itself (the destination or
consumption of the text, film or museum display) becomes the centre of meaning
creation.3
Foucault’s contribution is, however, to ask if it matters who is the speaker?
Foucault says ‘yes’, but only if we ask that question. More important for
Foucault is what is the consequence of the ‘disappearance of the author’. For
Foucault the concept of an author suggests they are the origin of meaning. This
applies to history where it is the function of the author-historian to create
a story space even though they are/become self-effaced. While this is not so
in every case, generally history is assumed to provide us with the security of
the omniscient and impersonal ‘news from nowhere’ narration of the past.
However, as Foucault pointed out and as we shall see, while the historian’s voice
may appear to be impersonal, it remains ubiquitous. Like an absent God, the
historian, through their non-appearance, becomes the originator of meaning and
explanation. For Foucault the author is not dead but just like the historian, is
hiding.
While I will return to Barthes and Foucault later, first I need to ask how meaning
and explanation provided through the authorial functioning of the historian are
derived from Genette’s analysis of voice and focalisation. I also need to examine
Ricoeur on the connection between time and narrative. As I will demonstrate,

44
 Narrating and Narration 45

the following structure of (the act of) narrating and narration seems universal in
history:

• The Historian as Author.

• Voice and Focalisation.
• Tense/Time (Order, Duration, Frequency).
• Intentionality, Action and Agency.

When taken together, these four elements provide an analysis of the historian’s
narrating and narration function.

 The historian as author

Historians make numerous narrational decisions about the representation of
the-past-as-history although most remain a little queasy about being regarded
as an author because of the subjectivity such a description is supposed to
entail.4 Thus, in The Soviet Century the author Moshe Lewin makes no overt
appearance in what he calls ‘the immutable reality that cannot be altered by
successive interpretations    ’ of Soviet Russia.5 This is, presumably, because of his
epistemological intention to be realistic and let the sources tell their own true
story of ‘Soviet Russia’.6 In this sense Lewin is making a claim to being a ‘reliable
narrator’ who can offer an authoritative account ‘according to the sources’. Indeed,
all ‘realist’ historians make this claim though usually less explicitly than Lewin.
Conversely, in his Mirror in the Shrine about the early American ‘opening up’ of
Japan, Robert A. Rosenstone has created a story space in which he explores the kind
of history he has written and why.7 This is presumably because of his belief in the
essential discontinuity between life and art. Similarly Richard Price in his Alabi’s
World offers multiple voices.8 The lack of realist fundamentalism in the work of
Rosenstone and Price contrasts starkly with that of Lewin. This does not necessarily
make Rosenstone an ‘unreliable narrator’ (and, therefore, quite unlike Lewin).
Unreliable narrators have strictly limited knowledge, may be ethically suspect and
may be personally involved, though not in Rosenstone terms but, rather, in terms
of ideological axes to grind.
This brief introduction does not exhaust the nature of history authorship. It
is also necessary to acknowledge the role of the ‘implied author’.9 Every history
story space is produced through a set of narrating decisions (the history’s tacit and
often ‘unspoken’ norms) that create the text as it turns out to be. Implied author-
ship is increasingly less implied and more apparent, as history becomes a kind of
‘instrument of policy’ with an overt purpose. Thus, in her editor’s introduction to
Haunted by Empire (2006) Ann Laura Stoler is clear that her collection is intended
46 Narrative and History

to ‘    carve out a common ground of conversation between United States history

and postcolonial studies’.10 As she acknowledges, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
Bay ‘haunt the edges of these pages’.11
So, to be clear, what is an ‘implied author’? For the literary theorist Wayne
Booth, the ‘implied author’ is the governing consciousness that directs the work
as a whole. While the author is a flesh and blood person open to all the incon-
sistencies of being human, the implied author is a fixed, coherent and consistent
directing force. So the historian is not simply the anthropomorphisation of the
‘implied’ author who is ‘behind’ the ideational structure of the history text. Thus,
for example, the name E.P. Thompson may refer to a person subject to all human
vicissitudes, whereas the implied author behind his texts is primarily a construc-
tionist humanist Marxist worldview. The name Keith Jenkins implies a ‘postist’
epistemological ethical orientation. The name Patrick Joyce could imply a left-
liberal deconstructionist position.
But more than this, it is important to note that the implied author encompasses
not just a world-view but also produces the design of the text. Inevitably it becomes
even more complex than this once we acknowledge the arguments of Barthes and
Foucault. It is complicated further by the author-historian should they attempt
to divorce themselves from the concept of authorship: here they may (like all
‘realist’ historians) deny ‘implied authorship’ in favour of objectivity or realism.
But texts are never absolutely coherent or synchronous as any detailed reading can
reveal. Derrida is famous for his poststructuralist theory of deconstruction, which
is mindful of the innate impermanence of and contradictions within all written
texts. The implication is that meaning is always constructed again and again, as we
read, re-read and re-write in our own minds the writing (what Derrida calls écriture,
which is the French for ‘writing’). Clearly this undercuts the ideal of truth as the
equation of word and world.
The fond hope of truth, objectivity and realism apart, the narrative choices of
the ‘implied’ author are normally directed towards a ‘narratee’ who is the agent,
person or audience for whom the narrative is intended.12 This ‘implied reader’ (the
narratee/addressee) is the reading counterpart of the implied author. For narrative
theorists like Gerald Prince the narrator/narratee relation is highly structured.13
But, conscious of the Barthes–Foucault argument, poststructuralists and many
deconstructionist historians are doubtful. This strict communication model has
the unfortunate consequence of separating out the ontological distinction (the
‘separate being-ness’) of historian and narratee. The reason for their concern is
that such a model simplifies what is a highly complex process of writerly meaning
creation and reception – the reader in effect creating/re-creating the text’s meaning
as it is re-written in their own minds.
Most deconstructionist historians argue that the reception of the text in terms
of what it means has much to do with the intertextual nature of the exchange.
 Narrating and Narration 47

The foundational belief that history is a report (though be it interpretative) has

the consequence of ignoring the reciprocity between history text and its reader.
By its nature as a virtual representation there must be a degree of freedom for
the reader to interpret the (already interpretative) text. The notion of a ‘readerly
realist’ text even at the simple level of statements of justified belief is not to be
dismissed. Reading realist texts is always an uncertain activity not only because
of the nature of language as a mode of meaning creation, but also because the
author-function is connected to the ‘institutional system’ that encompasses the
discourse that supervenes (exerts a control over) the text.14
When the historian Moshe Lewin shows us the immutable reality of his subject
in his realist text, he is endorsing a belief in events utterly constraining the story.
Rosenstone, on the other hand, tells us about his role in creating a story. Lewin
is, consequently, an example of an extradiegetic narrator (who exists essentially
outside the story and its telling), and Rosenstone an intradiegetic one (a part
of both the story and its telling). Rosenstone constructs his story space this way
presumably because he believes his presence directly affects how the narrative is
produced and that it is important to acknowledge it especially in a universe where
history is writerly as well as readerly.
Using this text as an example, I am an intradiegetic author-narrator. This is
because I openly wish to encourage you to rethink your ideas about the nature
of history and, given my particular arguments (about writerly texts at this point),
I want to acknowledge your power over my intervention. Having said all this, it
seems reasonable to ask why any historian should assume an extradiegetic posi-
tion. Why do so many historians still prefer not to acknowledge in the text their
existence as the author of the history and also the power of the reader? As we
shall see, it is because of the epistemological hold of the concept of mimésis (see
pp. 51–59). Such anonymity even stretches to the single sentences of justified belief
that, as Jenkins says, are always derived, selected and written into evidence by the
author-historian. As we shall see, rather than distance and non-engagement, it is
authorial interventionism that is crucial to understanding the nature of history.
This, consequently, necessitates an understanding of the two fundamental narra-
tional concepts of voice and focalisation.

 Voice and focalisation

Voice is concerned with the audibility of the historian-author ‘who tells the story’
and which is sometimes called ‘point of view’. The historian has a particular voice
or point of view, which is made explicit in and through their narrative choices.15
The US women’s historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has called on women’s history to
develop ‘a historical practice that turns on partiality, that is self-conscious about
48 Narrative and History

perspective, that releases multiple voices rather than competing orthodoxies    ’.16
As this comment implies, voice cannot be considered in the history text without
reference to the concept of focalisation. In Hall’s analysis the voice is that of
the historian while the agent of focalisation, as determined by the historian (as
a focaliser herself), is the discourse of the historical female. Clearly, given Hall’s
comment, the history narrative is a megaphone for a moral commitment for the
focaliser in much the same way as any other narrative. Historians of gender can
choose, for example, to voice the discourse of inclusion, exclusion, complaisance
or resistance.
Specifically, focalisation refers to the author’s choice, regulation and organisa-
tion of information in the story space in terms of ‘seeing’ events and existents
from someone’s point of view, usually a historical agent, narrator or one through
the other, and in so doing establishing a focal point for the history. If voice deals
with ‘who speaks’ (the subject of the history narration, i.e., the narrator), focal-
isation is concerned with ‘who sees’ (the subject of focalisation/the focaliser as an
agent/character/gender/class/race) within the story space. As the narrative theorist,
Mieke Bal reminds us, it is important to understand that the focaliser is also a
narrator.17
Historians do not have a choice in this. They must adopt a perspective or point
of view (which is not at all the same as either a pre-formed or referentially unin-
formed opinion) in order to see the past as a whole. Who it is that sees is, therefore,
a fundamental choice for the historian and it is possible to distinguish three focal-
isation types – internal, external and zero. In other words, the historian as narrator
focalises by choosing a point of view through a particular historical agent, but the
agent then becomes the/a focaliser. The historian is thus both the voice and the
focaliser of the discourse (who works through the historical agent).
The historian thus establishes a communication with the narratee by determ-
ining how to tell and from what focal perspective. Despite the variety of thinkers
from Bakhtin to Genette, there is common agreement on the existence of four
basic kinds of narrating voice. They are as follows:

1 A character/historical agent may tell their story in the first person (first-person
or homodiegetic narrator with internal focalisation as with an autobiography).
2 A character/historical agent can tell a story they observed but still in the first
person (first-person observer who is also a homodiegetic narrator with internal
focalisation as with a witness).
3 The author-historian can tell what happens without exploring the minds of
the characters/agents and not offering any commentary (author-as-observer or
limited heterodiegetic narrator with external focalisation).
4 The author-historian can tell the reader what happened, explore the
minds of the characters/agents and provide explanations/commentary/analysis
 Narrating and Narration 49

(omniscient author narrator or unlimited heterodiegetic narrator with zero

focalisation).

Obviously these are not sealed from each other and there can be mixed modes
(especially in experimental history), but type 4 above exemplifies what has been
the conventional reconstructionist but now challenged view of the audibility of
the voice of the historian.
Briefly, a homodiegetic narrator is one of the characters/agents in the story
and a heterodiegetic narrator is a narrator who is not. These voices are not to be
confused with an extradiegetic narrator and an intradiegetic one. In conventional
histories the historian is always a heterodiegetic narrator. This appears to limit the
historian’s voice to types 3 and 4. Internal focalisation refers to the presentation
of events from the perspective of a focal character/agent in the story (this is a
choice of the historian). External focalisation refers to the presentation of events
as perceived by an observer who knows less than the focalised character/agent
knows. This would also appear to further foreclose on type 3 as a likely form
of focalisation for the historian who, we would assume, knows everything. Zero
focalisation refers to the heterodiegetic narrator who does not limit him or her
to the ‘real-life’ and ‘at the time’ restricted points of view and knowledges of the
agents. The zero focaliser is omniscient. Theorists as diverse as Louis Mink, Hayden
White, Paul Ricoeur and Seymour Chatman all agree that historians can only
construct the past by deploying mechanisms such as voice and focalisation.18 What
should by now be becoming clearer is the parallel between historical/factual and
fictional narratives in terms of how they are created rather than the nature of their
content.19
Reacting against reconstructionist conventions, Paul Ricoeur opposes the idea
that events can tell themselves without the effective intervention of both voice and
focalisation decisions. Ricoeur asks, can past events

   whether real or imaginary, be presented without any intervention of the speaker of

the narrative? Can the events simply appear on the horizon of the story without anyone
speaking in any way? Does not the absence of a narrator from historical narrative result
from a strategy by means of which the narrator makes [my italics] himself absent from
the narrative?20

Frank R. Ankersmit has also noted the significance of focalisation, offering

the insight that it is its apparent absence that conventionally distinguishes
history from the novel.21 By implication, voice and focalisation are primary
mechanisms through which historians apprehend past reality rather than only
or simply through scientific-like hypothesis testing.22 This can most readily
be seen (literally seen) when we express history on film, as we see shifts in
focalisation from the zero focalisation of the narrator (narrator-focaliser) to
50 Narrative and History

an internal focaliser via the perception of a character in the content/story

(character-focaliser). Initially we see from a perspective that floats above the
scene in its entirety. Then the perspective changes to focus on an agent with
the camera offering the agent’s acuity and awareness of situation (as they run
or hide, smile or frown, or die or live while holding the flag of revolution).
The camera readily changes our audience perspective from zero to internal
focalisation (when the agent becomes the focaliser). Thus, focalisation changes
meaning, understanding and explanation. The same effect is achieved in textual
(verbal) narratives with the ‘historical overview’ focussing down to individual
elements.
This technique is most obvious in history texts where quotation is used. In the
following quotation the historian-author Richard J. Carwardine shifts from a posi-
tion of zero focalisation to internal focalisation for explanation and interpretation
purposes. Thus Carwardine says,

Lincoln’s rhetoric galvanised republicans    the young stenographer Robert Hitt, judged
the Alton speech Lincoln’s greatest: its moral clarity captivated this son of a Protestant
minister. He was not alone in pointing to the effect on Lincoln’s audiences at Alton and
elsewhere of his ‘melting pathos’.23

Is this simply an inference by the historian backed up by evidence? While it may

embody an inference, the shift in focalisation from zero to internal is as important
to meaning production and explanation as is the quotation offered ‘in evidence’.
I do not know if Carwardine realised that he was shifting focalisation. In a way it
does not really matter. The point is that history works in this respect like any other
kind of literature – factual or non-realist. The omniscient narrator (Carwardine)
can not only narrate outside the story, but also (and invariably does) invoke and
adopt the limited point of view of one historical agent/character (Robert Hitt in
this example). Most importantly, focalisation works in the loop of ‘theory → evid-
ence → modified theory → more evidence → theory → evidence    ’ with which
we are familiar. That Lincoln was an able rhetorician is deemed by Carwardine
to be significant in Lincoln’s life. Obviously Carwardine will have reached this
conclusion by examining the theory and the data, but the meaning of that process
is only facilitated when Carwardine constructs his narrative – in this example
shifting focalisation.24
This leads us to a further and extremely important dimension of historical narra-
tion. This is the way in which the historian constitutes and constructs time. The
above short extract was taken from that part of the biography of Abraham Lincoln
covering the period of Lincoln’s life from 1854 to 1858. Not only did the extract
provide a straightforward example of shift in focalisation but, as we shall see, it
was also an element in the larger process of the author-historian’s organising of
tense/time within the text.
 Narrating and Narration 51

 Tense/time: Mimésis, order, duration

and frequency
The function of tense/timing in ordinary language is to organise the temporal
locations of situations and events in the content/story.25 According to Suzanne
Fleischman, narration is the linguistic representation of experience viewed from a
retrospective vantage point. Experience is, by definition, ‘past’ whether it occurred
‘in reality’ or ‘in fiction’. Hence history does not have exclusive possession of
‘the past tense’ because the prototypical tense of narration as a mode of reporting
information is ‘the past’ (the preterite expressing a past action or state).26 Histor-
ians, by and large, still tend to ignore the question of tense/timing in what they do.
This is surprising given that Paul Ricoeur has explained at great length that
what he calls the unavoidable ‘interweaving of history and fiction’ results from
the similarities of their aims through the appropriation of time. Ricoeur argues
that history ‘reinscribes the time of narrative within the time of the universe’.27
Without doubt the ‘temporal turn’ is central to historical narrative thinking and
practice.28 Given that the past cannot be re-lived as it actually was (because it
no longer exists), all the historian can do is ‘manage’ recorded memories of it by
putting them into a narrative and regulating ‘real time’ in the process. This can be
done in many different ways with the same general topic. Take the issue of black
identity in American slave history and compare the approaches of Lawrence W.
Levine and Eugene D. Genovese.29 While both their story spaces reference similar
empirical material, the histories produced are entirely different in respect of their
‘time signatures’. Levine thus tends to ignore time as an organising concept using
themes (about song and oral cultural development). On the other hand, Genovese
deploys a much stronger sense of change over time because of his (Marxist-inspired)
insistence on slavery as a form of class control which evolved inexorably over time.
For Ricoeur (and, earlier on, for Dilthey) the work of the historian centres (as
a comparison of Levine and Genovese demonstrate) on the temporal turn from
‘real time’ as it is culturally understood and ‘narrated history time’ which is manu-
factured for purposes of explanation and meaning creation. Though normally
conceived of in terms of centuries, decades, years, seasons and days, real time is also
perceived to be both cyclical (weeks, seasons, genealogical) and also linear as with
a life, a presidency, a Royal House or a dictatorship. Historians do not only have
to do justice to the referential nature of the past chronologically, but (primarily
in the West) also re-organise real time in terms of order, duration, frequency and
tempo in order to create meaning.30 In this respect the history narrative is a story
space (and what Dilthey called ‘a nexus’) in which all that constituted the past is
made to connect by the historian.31
So, just how do historians deploy order, duration and frequency to ‘time’ the
past? We need to start with Seymour Chatman and Paul Ricoeur. Agreeing with
52 Narrative and History

Ricoeur, Chatman maintains the temporal turn suffuses every aspect of writing,
noting the timing in emplotment (with which we are already familiar), of a
beginning, a middle and an end.32 Though, he says, this works very well in fiction
it cannot usefully organise reality – even past reality – because ‘the real’ can never
know where it is or was between beginning, middle and end. As Chatman says,
beginning, middle and end

   apply to the narrative, to story-events as imitated rather than to real actions them-
selves, simply because such terms are meaningless in the real world. No end in reality is
ever final the way ‘The End’ of a novel or film is.    such a term marks out plot, the story-
as-discoursed. It is strictly an artifact of composition, not a function of raw story-material
(whatever its source, real or invented).33

When the (author-historian) Carwardine says, ‘Thus Lincoln, through his life and
death, bequeathed an enhanced and ambitious nationalism to his successors’;
according to conventional empirical-analytical history logic, he is simply offering
an attested and, therefore, an informed, fair and balanced interpretation of the
meaning of the life of Lincoln. But, in terms of creating a history, the author-
historian has provided an interpretation that is founded on a ‘classic realist’
(though) constructed metonymic (mimetic) continuity or contiguity between the
real and its representation. In this case it is in terms of a beginning, a middle and
an end to the life and meaning of Lincoln.34
This is an example of the classic realist notion (of contiguity) where we
move from event to event, and the narrative replicates this realistic progression.
Metonymy functions in such a way that some ‘thing’ stands in for another ‘thing’
as with ‘Lincoln’ and ‘ambitious nationalism’. The problem is that in this example
we cannot know if this is the actuality of the meaning of Lincoln’s life because of
the uncertainty of where to locate its interpretative closure in terms of a linguistic
connection between events and meaning.
Despite it being a bedrock assumption of many historians, the problem with
mimésis is that it can only work linguistically (usually as a text of some kind)
which ensures that language can only assert that it ‘imitates’ the past as a history
narrative (as a mode of language use). Despite this assertion, history cannot actually
be imitative (of the past) because it (is a category that) ‘tells’ rather than ‘shows’.
The best historians can hope for is an illusion of mimésis through the use of direct
speech representation (the quotation bolstered by the ‘knowledge power’ of the
reference).
While recognising the problem of mimésis, following Chatman, Ricoeur offers
a detailed and complex analysis of the temporal turning of the past (as spatial
human action) into our (historical) appreciation and understanding of it through
his own definition of mimésis. Following the meditations of St. Augustine on time,
 Narrating and Narration 53

Ricoeur accepts the paradox that we cannot know the past, present or future. The
past is gone and unknowable, the present is ‘now’ but is instantaneous so we can
never ‘know’ the ‘now’, and the future is unknowable because it is the future.
So, now following Heidegger, Ricoeur argues the human mind experiences time
mediated by memory (of things past) and expectations (of things to come) within
an imagined continuous now. This is Ricoeur’s notion of ‘distension’ and it is the
essence of his thinking about our timed condition of existence. So, our human
understanding of time is a product of the mind rather than ‘reality’ (which, as
indicated, is unknowable except as memory or expectation – as mental states).
To ‘know’ time we would have to step outside it into eternity. But we cannot do
that so we human beings have to live with the intention. Ricoeur summarises this
process as intentio (intention) in distentio (distension of the mind seeking meaning
in time). The upshot is that meaning in history (and everything else for that matter)
emerges from the movement through the primary facilitation of thinking, which
is language (the disclosure of words in sentences in narratives) that allows us to
‘translate’ time. The means Ricoeur deploys for understanding this translation of
time through narrative is mimésis.35
Ricoeur talks about ‘    the definitively aporetic character of the phenomenology
of time’, by which he means that our conception of time is always beyond our
understanding and it is the overcoming this ‘aporia’ (the un-decidable decision)
that Ricoeur points to that is the key function of our narrative making.36 Ricoeur
thus moves us beyond naïve correspondence where the past world matches the
present historical word, into the more complex world of narrative making defined
as the necessary abstraction of past experience and its ‘real time’. He also moves us
to a definition of the logic of history as being essentially analogical (denoting the
past by analogue). This suggests that any coherent intelligibility we derive from
the past results only in part from our understanding of time as a given feature of
the way the universe is.
Consequently, and specifically, Ricoeur argues that the aporetic and discordant
nature of time is made ‘understandable’ through the intervention/invention of
what we already know as the emplotment (he uses the term ‘plot’). Using the
Lincoln example again, emplotting the President’s life (emplotting action) is under-
taken by turning real time into narrative time by the historian’s intentio in distentio.
Ricoeur explains the full complexity of this process through his own detailed
analysis of mimésis. From the Greek mimésis, or ‘imitation’, the concept is trouble-
some, as we saw in the Introduction (see pp. 10–15), if only because most historians
(certainly all reconstructionists and constructionists) assume that the narrative
they write imitates (mimes) past reality (which is possible thanks to empiricism
and its analysis) including its ‘real time’. Hence it is that ‘fiction’ is the term usually
reserved for those narratives that do not, unlike history, purport to tell the ‘real
time’ story. But Ricoeur argues that what fictional and historical narratives have in
54 Narrative and History

common is that they both stem from a more complex threefold mimetic process
that he defines as mimesis1 , mimesis2 , and mimesis3 . What does this mean?
Well, Ricoeur defines mimesis1 as that set of basic concepts we must have before
we can produce a narrative. These are concepts such as ‘action’ (what it is ‘to
act’ and its characterisation), agency and structure, causation and, of course, the
fundamental notion of ‘change over time’. We must understand these basic (so
called historical) concepts so we can use them to produce a believable historical
(textual) representation. For the historian then, mimesis1 is the understanding she
or he has of the past that must be possessed before they can progress to the creation
of their history story space. Knowing these things enables the historian to move
to mimesis2 .
Mimesis2 is the stage of configuring the-past-as-history (the history story space).
For Ricoeur, history works after the fashion of an analogue becoming the ‘as’ of
the past.37 Specifically Ricoeur is theorising the turning of past events, actions,
time periods, objects and descriptions of physical locations into the emplotment
of the history, which, as a mediated re-presentation, necessitates a re-timing of the
past. For Ricoeur, emplotment is the essential characterising aspect of the history
story space. The translation or linguistic turning of past events/actions into a story
of a particular kind by means of emplotment is undertaken by the significance
of their arrangement by the historian. The aim is to produce a ‘followable’ story
constructed in time and space (hence story space) in line with the historian’s belief
in the translatability of human action into a verisimilitudinous narrative.
Mimesis3 addresses the extent to which the reader is an elemental part of the
refiguring process of meaning creation, specifically how she or he receives the truth
claims that are built into the representational narrative. The reader can achieve
satisfaction in ‘finding out’ the ‘true meaning’ provided by the historian. The
reader can also enjoy the formal nature of the representation (the narrative turn
and the temporal turn), or be convinced by the plausibility and persuasiveness of
the argument. They can take pleasure in the range of data and be persuaded by the
appeal of the figuration (the aesthetic turn). They can have their prejudgements
and/or prejudices confirmed (the ideological turn). The intertextual nature of their
reading also constitutes the meaning they derive. Equally, they can dislike the text
because it does none of these and so may engender contrary emotions and beliefs.
This echoes the reader reception theory with which we have become familiar.
Mimesis3 is the world after it has been narrated. Clearly there is a mimetic loop
in the creation and revisioning (revising) of the-past-as-history.
As Ricoeur says, ‘    the world that narrative refigures [my italics] is a temporal
world’ and the aporetic nature of time (its unknowability and indeterminate
nature) can only be come to terms with through the historian’s narrational act.
Throughout all this, reference to the real remains untouched. But the real time of
the past must become storied time and in the process the inevitable discordances
 Narrating and Narration 55

between real and narrative time have to be resolved. As a result, in history we

can only have what Ricoeur calls the ‘fictive experience of time’ in which ‘    the
discordances between the temporal features of the events in the diegesis and the
corresponding features in the narrative’ are resolved.38 Even in heavy-duty empiri-
cist history texts, the fictive experience of time is a textual temporal ‘virtual reality’.
It is also a reversal of ‘real time’ where the ‘now’ anticipates the future as mediated
by our knowledge (memories) of the past.
The most obvious management of time by historians is when they turn ‘real’
time – as measured in years, months and days – into the historical (or fictional)
‘story time’ and ‘discourse time’. Here, Ricoeur, like Genette, explores the relation-
ship between the time of the narrative and the narrated time in the narrative. Ricoeur
calls this a ‘game with time’.39 This is the serious game all historians have to play
if they want to be historians because there is no time in the history except that
which is borrowed metonymically. In other words, our only access to the time
of the past is through the type of timing in the narrative we write. This history
analogue of ‘real time’ has, according to Genette, three aspects. These are order
(when/chronology), duration (how long) and frequency (how often). Given their
significance in creating history, we need to examine each in turn.

Order
While the act of narration may be intended to be an analogue – the-past-as-
history – it is always a distortion or anachrony of ‘real time’. Plainly, unlike ‘real
time’, ‘history time’ (discourse time) is measured in words, pages of text or even
how long it takes to read (or view or experience) it. This invariably produces a
divergence between the order in which events in the past (story) happened, and
the order in which they are offered in the emplotted content/story. Normally, of
course, we anticipate that history will be told chronologically, but this is not the
same as order. This is a crucial distinction: the actual chronology may be imitated
in the discoursed story, but the concept of order requires that there are many
‘anachronological’ contraventions demanded to create meaning.
The most obvious characteristic of order in the history narrative is what Genette
calls the ‘figure of analepsis’ (i.e., retrospection or narrating backwards in time). In
a film this would be called a ‘flashback’. Thus a historian regularly refers back to
events prior to those already told. Another figure is that of prolepsis (anticipation
or narrating ahead of events) or what in a film would be the ‘flash forward’.
Crucially, historians also anticipate events. Indeed, as Ricoeur notes, prolepses can
be inserted in analepses.40 The point of all this is not just for style or rhetorical
‘effect’ but to give a meaning to the work as a whole.
This bears out Ankersmit’s insistence that historical meaning is not the result of
the accretion of factual statements, but rather is that which is opened to us through
56 Narrative and History

our narrative understanding of time – specifically the overall anachronic (synthetic)

nature of its narrative. The examples of prolepses and analepses are legion in history
writing. But a typical example of analepsis is a statement by the American economic
historian Louis Hacker. He says, ‘movement into the public lands synchronised
with upturns in the business cycle and not the reverse’ in reference to the occupa-
tion of the north-west and southwest of the United States in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.41 As Ricoeur also concludes (after commenting on Genette’s
analysis),

But must we not then say that what narratology takes as the pseudo-time of a narrative
is composed of the set of temporal strategies placed at the service of a conception of time
that, first articulated in fiction, can also constitute a paradigm for redescribing lived and
lost time?42

Duration
Timing is also about the distortion of duration, which further serves to create
historical narrative understanding (beyond the simple level of correspondence).
Duration is the sum of ‘real time’ elapsed in the content/story and the total of
discourse time (space allocated to it in the history text) taken up in presenting it.
The duration techniques historians deploy are intended to either speed up or slow
down the narrative in relation to the events told in order to make sense of them.
Genette offers five kinds of duration that all author-historians use: ellipsis, pause,
summary, scene and stretch.

• Ellipsis is omission (in effect deploying time as an erasure by not offering data
‘in evidence’), leaving out events/agents/actions to speed up the narrative. This
may be for mundane reasons like keeping to the 75,000-word book limit or
emplotment, argument or reference reasons directed, as always, towards explan-
ation and meaning creation.
• Pauses are points of ‘natural reflection’ within the text that offer opportunities
for recapitulation, preparation and commentary (on an act, event or agent).
Conclusions to chapters are good examples (so are comments in parentheses –
like this one) of pauses for reflection and digestion.
• Summary is that narrative choice where real time is much greater than discourse
time, hence the historian has to speed up (accelerate) the whole telling process.
Survey texts are examples, but summaries can be as short as sentences (an
extreme form of compression) such as ‘The Thirty years War can be considered
to be    ’ .
• Scene is the narrative choice reflected most usually in the historian’s selection
of and deployment of agent dialogue. It can be longer or shorter in the text
 Narrating and Narration 57

than in reality, but (by definition of it being a direct dialogue quotation) it will
be approximately the same.
• Stretch is where content/story time (reality time) is less than discourse time.
Histories are replete with examples when the historian muses over events that
took only seconds or an hour or two in real time, as with agent intentions,
decisions or events for example.

Now, one can obviously find an incalculable number of illustrations of each form of
duration. But take summary as an example. It can be seen at work in David Hackett
Fischer’s treatment of the famous 18 April 1775 ‘midnight’ ride of Paul Revere
to warn the American colonists of the imminent arrival of the British. Fischer’s
reference to when Revere was briefly captured is illustrative. Fischer says, ‘In the
time that Paul Revere remained a prisoner, his message travelled rapidly across the
countryside.’43 Summary is so obviously a form of explanation as to pass unnoticed.
But it is language itself that provides the necessary structure for this process.
Other examples might include Fernand Braudel, who, in his A History of Civil-
izations, moves effortlessly through Indian history of, as he says, ‘yesterday and
today’ to create his particular realisation of the past. In a single paragraph he visits
India in the 600s, 1200s and 1900s, configuring an interpretation by deploying
summary, ellipsis and pause.44 Also, the historian of sixteenth-century Europe
Andrew Pettegree provides an example of summary in the first chapter of his book
Europe in the Sixteenth Century (2002), in which he moves from theme to theme
and time to time following his own particular temporal order (and dis-order).45
F.R. Bridge and Roger Bullen’s analysis of European international history between
1814 and 1914 also illustrates duration in all its forms.46

Frequency
The third important aspect of temporal ordering and timing is frequency. This
is concerned with the concept of ‘repetition’.47 In any narrative timing of the
past the notion of frequency is important and, like duration, it has several forms.
Frequency is the relationship established by the historian between the number
of times an event actually occurred and the number of times it appears in the
discourse. Once again Genette offers a comprehensive analysis noting four kinds:
singulative, repetitive, iterative and irregular.

• As the term suggests, the singulative tells us once (in the narration) something that
happened once (in reality), or happened twice and gets told twice and so on.
• The repetitive re-tells the same real event several times in the narrative. Obviously
this is the common form in histories of single events/decisions/actions where
the event is re-told from the perspective of different agents.
58 Narrative and History

• The iterative is the single telling in the narrative of something that happened
several times (possibly n times) in reality. Historians would not want to bore
the reader with repeated references to the tedious aspects of someone’s life, or
the rise and setting of the sun.48
• The irregular is the telling of something that really happened several times,
but which is now told a different number of times in the narrative. Nelson’s
victories at sea may be an example or, more complexly, agent motivations.

Where an event or agent decision is noted only once, it is usually done to constitute
or ‘build up’ an explanation of, say, Eisenhower’s presidency under the explana-
tion of either ‘consensus’ or ‘conflict’. Lots of examples of the singulative mode
of repetition of different single events or individual historical agent decisions are
deployed to generate a critical mass of explanation in favour of, in this example,
either consensus or conflict. In history it is not just an event that is constantly
referred to, but what several iterations are claimed to represent in terms of explan-
ation and meaning creation.
Again, although every history text contains countless examples of temporal
control through order, duration and frequency, space here (note my management
of time even in a ‘theory’ text limited to 75,000 words) permits addressing only
one. In his 1989 book Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile
City, 1914–1960, Gary Gerstle sets about redefining the concept of ‘working-class
Americanism’ as an explanation for the rise of industrial unionism. He does this
by referring to several key concepts that resonate in several major events some
of which he notes once and others a number of times. Thus the ‘language of
Americanism’ is iterated many times but especially in the life of Belgian worker
émigré Joseph Schmetz.49 Gerstle presumably selects this historical character for
reasons that are referential (and for focalisation and voice reasons) but necessary
to turn the past into the time of the history. Using the example of a single life is a
common timing mechanism in history texts.
But time, of course, is also related to space. A concept useful to understanding
how historians organise time and space is that of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’
(chronos = time; topos = space).50 The notion of time and space is plainly central
to producing history. Based on Einstein’s notion of the time–space continuum (that
time and space are indissoluble), Bakhtin explored how time and space are made
to interconnect in literary texts. Perhaps the most famous and enduring example
is Frederick Jackson Turner’s analysis of the culturally formative and nationalising
power of the opening of the frontier in American history.
Bakhtin suggested (though it has to be said this is not a major insight in itself)
that making time tangible in narrative is the only way to make events corporeal.
Tense/timing is the key to constituting the reality of the past. Specifically he
describes how the lives (in time and space) of real people in the past can be
expressed in literary and forms other than simply the empirical, like emplotment
 Narrating and Narration 59

for example. But what is especially useful in his concept of the chronotope is how
it can be fashioned to express many different political, ideological and ethical
world-views within the history story space. Thus, a historian can create a Whig
chronotope, a Marxist chronotope or a gender chronotope. Or in F.J. Turner’s case,
when he said that the ‘    existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession
and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development’,
a geographical chronotope.51 The crucial point is that Bakhtin offers us another
way of thinking about how we can connect past reality and present history in a
fashion that is essentially Kantian (using the categories of time and space).52
It should be clear by now how historians create their chronotopes as they
construct the content/story (within the story space) and, as we shall see in the
next chapter, as they choose a particular mode of expression. Through epistemo-
logical choice, aesthetic preference, emplotment choice, preferred ethical orienta-
tion, selected (but never biased!) referencing, the use of voice, the different forms of
focalisation, the speed inventions of order, duration and frequency, every history
story space has its own chronotope. That every history makes its own peculiar
connections between temporal and spatial elements can be seen in histories as
divergent as those of Fernand Braudel, Tacitus, A.J.P. Taylor or Frederick Jackson
Turner. So Braudel’s Mediterranean, Tacitus’s Germania, A.J.P. Taylor’s Origins of the
Second World War and Turner’s ‘Frontier’ (in American History) are all chrono-
topes – translations of the reality of time and space into a literary form that is
specifically historical – a timed story space created to explain in a desired way.
In all this, however, a further debate exists which concerns the relationship
between the historical agent or character and their physical, social, economic, polit-
ical, cultural, intellectual and temporal world – the relationship between agency,
characterisation and structure to change over time. In its essentials this is not a
debate about which is dominant (agency, character or structure) but how they
relate ‘in’ time and space. This debate raises three very important concerns. First,
how can we define the agent’s power to act – action? Second, how can we determine
their intentions to act – intentionality? And third, how are the intentions of agents
in the past filtered and understood through the attitudes towards agency, structure
and intentionality as held by individual historians?

 Intentionality: Text, action, agency,

characterisation and the historian
According to Ricoeur, the analysis of intentionality

   should be combined with that of narrative voice considered as that which presents the
text. The narrative voice is the bearer of the intentionality belonging to the text, which is
actualized only in the intersubjective relationship that unfolds between the solicitation
from the narrative voice and the response of reading.53
60 Narrative and History

Ricoeur’s point is clear, narrating and narration is a complex totality, which, by

bringing us back to author, voice and focalisation, before examining intentionality,
clarifies the latter. In a history narrative all those issues concerned with agent
intentionality and the existents of action and agency begin with the distinction
between authorial ‘showing’ and ‘telling’: in other words, every historian possesses
a philosophy of action (their preferred theory of agency). In a ‘showing’ form of
historical representation – which is essentially that imagined by reconstructionists
and constructionists – there is little or no authorial voice (it is there but covert)
and consequently attention is not paid to the historian’s narrative choices such as
focalisation or tense/timing. The reader (or a viewer or listener) is expected simply
to witness the past cast in terms of discoverable rational intentions and causation.
In ‘telling’, on the other hand, the narrator is an overt controlling voice who self-
consciously makes all the narrative choices of voice, focalisation, order, duration
and frequency. The narrators also self-consciously decide how to present actions,
describe historical characters, explore their intentions and, throughout all this,
express their own views as to the nature of action and agent intentionality. All
historians have their own views on intentionality. These are then ‘read’ by the
reader (or not – by the particularly obtuse reader – as may be) as they negotiate
their own meaning(s).54
The role of the historian in defining the significance of action and agency results
from their belief in the extent to which action and agency contribute to cause
and effect in human affairs.55 For example, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
has tried to understand agency and structure through his concept of habitus. He
argues that agents inhabit a social space built out of power relations and reinforced
by social practices that are usually (economic) class based.56 Any historian is free
to deploy the theory of habitus in their history. But what complicates matters is
conveying such concepts in the story space without the process apparently being
influenced by the assumptions of the author-historian about the determining rela-
tionship between action, agent intentionality and structure.57
Central to understanding agent and historian intentionality, then, is the
historian’s own attitude towards one concept in particular – characterisation.
Conventionally, in classic realist terms, the character/intention of the historical
agent is taken to be a discoverable given. Lyndon Johnson, the thirty-sixth pres-
ident of the United States, was a knee-jerk anti-communist or, perhaps, he was not,
or he was at certain times but not others dependent on circumstances?58 Surely the
evidence will ‘tell’ us which is the most likely correct interpretation? Unhappily
it will not because the data has no independent voice. Even ‘explanation to the
best fit’ is not that much help for there is always more to the discursive construc-
tion of characters and characterisation in history – and their intentions – than the
attempted reading of their nature from the evidence.
For – to continue with the Johnson example – the historian makes all the decisions
as to what agents (characters) get put into the story space we call ‘the history of
 Narrating and Narration 61

President Lyndon Johnson’. These decisions are not made only according to the
criterion of reference. You will recall all the issues associated with focalisation.
In part because of that choice, the question of what ‘character functions’ they
will serve immediately arises. So we need to ask what decisions do historians
make about the historical agents they choose to inhabit their histories? How the
historian constitutes a historical character is certainly and plainly influenced by
the evidence, but it is also given effect by the historian’s voice, focalisation, the
refiguration of time and the relative importance ascribed to agency, structure and
the nature of knowable intentionality.
Because we know that histories are authored, in addition to reference what
underlies the narrative choices historians make about what historical agents to
include/exclude entails processes of presupposition. Presupposition happens every
time one piece of evidence is preferred over another, or when one theme or topic
is pursued rather than another. There is, thus, presumption when Oswalt and
Neely asked the question how the native North American influenced US history.
Or when E.P. Thompson said he was ‘    seeking to rescue the poor stockinger,
the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and
even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension
of posterity’.59 These are simple examples of historians seeking out historical agents
as characters so – paradoxically – they can be provided with a ‘voice of their own’.
There are two main models of characterisation that apply equally to history and
non-history: the mimetic and non-mimetic.60

Mimetic historical character

The mimetic is the ‘common-sense’ everyday representational version with which
we are all familiar. The historical character/agent was a person who existed in
time and space and is represented as such. Briefly there are two forms of mimetic
characterisation: semantic and cognitive. A semantic characterisation requires that
a character (in accord with the available empirical evidence) is described with a
name and personality in space and time. This is usually a human being but it can
be a class, race, idea, gender, nation, animal or a period of time. This is deemed to
be a straightforward referential description that assumes the historical agents once
shared the same sort of ontological existence we do now and, therefore, they can
be known in the same way as we know ourselves and other people alive today. It
is a perspective that relies directly on the correspondence theory of knowledge.
The cognitive mimetic form is when the historian attributes to the character a
strong (or weak) sense of their knowledge of themselves and/or their situation. This
is done for explanatory reasons and often undertaken through direct quotation if
available. But, dependent upon the mode of expression (such as, say, a historical
encyclopaedia entry), this is not always the case. In this example, a characterisation
is usually broad brush and simply stated. The variety in this form of characterisation
62 Narrative and History

is truly immense. Thus one historian says about John Reed, the early-twentieth-
century American writer and political radical, that he was a romantic figure who
ended his life as a martyr to the Russian Revolution, while another says he was
generally regarded as a playboy and was politically undistinguished.61 While it
seems in history that the historical agent characterises themselves (through their
own words and actions) and their co-agents (what other people said about them),
in actuality the historian as narrator always does the job by blending the mimetic
(in its two main forms) with the non-mimetic.

Non-mimetic historical character

The non-mimetic model of character is more abstract because the character though
real also functions as a textual feature of meaning creation. Thus a historical agent
can be understood as the carrier of an idea (such as strength, deceit, liberalism,
conservatism, menace, etc.). Or they can be taken to represent a theme (success,
failure, honour, etc.), or they can be used simply as a literary device for creating an
effect (pleasure, pain, fear, hope, amusement, etc.). A real historical person can also
serve as an element of emplotment (to effect success, constitute an action, generate
change and be the archetypal American or be the voice of emergent nationalism)
or some more or less complex blend of all these effects.
The intellectual role of John Locke in the American Revolution is just one
example. There is little agreement among historians whether Locke’s Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was important to the founding of the
nation. The evidence seemingly cannot resolve this interpretative question of its
significance. It tends to come down to the preferences of the historian, for example,
viewing Locke’s Essay in a particular epistemological light as to how ‘the char-
acter’ John Locke can or should be deployed in either a mimetic or a non-mimetic
fashion as the carrier of an idea of which they approve.62 That a historical agent
can be both mimetic and non-mimetic goes some way to explaining the nature
and uses of characterisation in history narratives in as much as historians asso-
ciate historical characters/agents with subject/dominant positions, with striving or
failure, flawed genius or cretin.63 To put this as clearly as I can, reference is never
the ultimate determinant of the uses of characterisation.

 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have introduced and elucidated aspects of Genette’s and Ricoeur’s
analyses of narrating and narration as the second of the three fundamental
elements of the history narrative. All the narrator’s choices – the nature of
their authorship, ‘who speaks’ and ‘who sees’, tense/timing, the understanding
 Narrating and Narration 63

of agency/action, intentionality and characterisation – are central to turning the

past (and unavoidably ‘de-forming’ or ‘re-shaping’ it) into a historical narrative.
While insisting that referentiality remains a benchmark of historical work, once we
venture to ask ‘what does it mean?’ we have passed into the realms of content/story
and narration. However, to complete the explanation of this process we must now
turn to the third element in the triad that constitutes the narrative logic of history.
As we are now aware, a content/story and the act of narrating/narration require
a mode of expression. And, of course, there is also the question of how modes of
expression reflect back on to the other two elements.
4 History as Expression

History modes of expression can vary widely in their substance and function.
Because they are narratives, they can be spoken, or written, a fixed or moving
image, or a gesture, a myth, a legend, a fable, a tale, a novella, a history, an epic,
a mime, a stained glass window, a film, a comic, a postcard, a performance, a
street theatre, a conversation or a painting.1 Because they are the result of the
content/story and narrating/narration decisions of their author, all history modes
of expression are, therefore, prefigured like any textual history. They are also subject
to the epistemological decisions of their authors/creators.
As expressive forms, modes of expression can both refer and also exemplify
meaning. Thus, a mode of expression such as the painting by Frédéric Bazille of his
studio Studio in the Rue La Condamine (1870) expresses its predicate metaphorically
rather than literally. Where the painting exemplifies in its colour, brush strokes
and composition (grouping and distance between figures) the working friendships
between painters Bazille, Manet, Monet, Renoir and the writer Zola who are in the
picture, it also expresses metaphorically their camaraderie and common concerns.
The painting not only ‘portrays realistically’ (as much as any painting can ‘portray’
‘realistically’) but also metaphorically.2 This is an important feature not merely of
paintings and other visual forms, but also of written texts (which also use their
own kinds of colour, spacing, composition, etc.).
So, why is the textual so widely regarded as history’s prime form? In Western
culture and philosophy there has been a traditional emphasis upon speech as the
vehicle for the knowing self to grasp meaning. This was eventually translated into
the belief that writing simply reflected speech. Indeed, writing was perceived to be
the ultimate mechanism for representing our engagement with reality. However,
thanks to the impact initially of structuralism, then poststructuralism and even-
tually Derrida’s deconstructionism, writing has now been rethought as a mech-
anism for creating meaning. Of course, the notion of transparent meaning and
correspondence also came under attack (whether in speech or writing). The result
has been to de-throne writing as the mechanism for carrying ‘true meaning’.
Nevertheless, the ascendancy of textual history is still maintained because of the
conventional practitioner-historian’s insistence upon its apparent ability to fulfil
the ‘meaning function’ through the mechanism of the numbered references and
the justified inference that can be properly located in the scholarly monograph.

64
 History as Expression 65

The theory is that textual citations, footnotes and a comprehensive bibliography

allow for reference to the sources so, should the reader wish, they could repeat the
analysis for themselves like repeating a ‘scientific experiment’ to test and verify
the assertions of the author. While this might still seem to be the basis of proper
history, its effect is now less convincing simply because it overemphasises the
authority of empiricism and the role of citation.3 And, of course, it reinforces
the authority of the textual mode of expression. But things are changing. There
is, indeed, a growing recognition that some history modes like TV can manage to
convey ‘    a whole series of often quite complex arguments without losing their
audience’.4 Such a judgement, though helpful, is still too often made grudgingly.
But this is not the argument followed by the historian Robert A. Rosenstone who
has long argued in favour of breaking the textual epistemological straightjacket, in
favour of film.5 As Rosenstone notes, the connection between a mode of expression
and the nature of truth and meaning raises all kinds of issues about the character
and purpose of representation. In order to explore new forms of history, I will
summarise the key modes of historical expression as

• written texts – books and dissertations

• film and photography
• television and radio
• graphic novels, comics, history magazines
• public histories: museums, heritage and memorials
• performance: re-enactment, ‘first-person’ history, games
• digitised representations.

I will briefly comment on each while addressing the important question of the
epistemic relationship between form and content.

 Written texts
The mode of expression (form) selected by the historian for the representation
of their history reflects their epistemological, methodological and professional
orientation towards how they think they can best know the truthful meaning
of the past (content). As I suggested in the previous chapter (when I had print-
based history in mind), the process of narrating/narration is as important as the
content/story to the history production process. However, written texts have also
tended to reflect a conventional wisdom that helps bring both historians and their
readers into a state of epistemological obedience which, as I have just suggested,
is a function of their textual nature.
66 Narrative and History

For the realist-representationalist professional academic historian (working in

either the reconstructionist or the constructionist genres usually in a school, a
university or a museum) the past is made flesh in ‘professionally approved’ ways
and, primarily, in textual modes of expression. The consequence for history as a
discipline is to reinforce an officially sanctioned view of what is ‘proper history’,
the mode of expression for which is essentially the single-authored book. And,
moreover, they should be published by a small number of elite university presses,
or journal articles that ‘do history’ according to established empirical-analytical
procedures and which are published in the ‘leading’ journals.
The history profession is complicit with this through its key institutional
centres where a particular way of ‘thinking about history’ is systematically incul-
cated in undergraduate and postgraduate training. Although an illustration of
Michel Foucault’s definition of ‘governmentality’ – of a dominant discourse real-
ised as social practice – there are variations in North America and Western
Europe. However, the pattern of the taught History Master’s degree and the
PhD by a combination of courses and/or research strengthens reconstructionist
and constructionist empirical-analytical methods and their epistemological philo-
sophy. Despite this will to conformity, according to one recent commentator,
Oliver Daddow, the discipline of history likes to depict itself as open-minded,
tolerant and inclusive.6 One manifestation of this inclusiveness is that competing
interpretations reasonably exist side by side as a diversity of historians access, read
and infer the meaning of the past in different ways.
As Daddow concludes, however, the fact that differing interpretations coexist is
because they appear to have met the essential scholarly standards in the use of
evidence: honesty, veracity, a critical reading of the data and an obligation not to
misinform the reader. He then goes on to note the ideology and politics of such
‘proper history’ noting how the discipline is in effect a socially constructed set of
rules and norms for the control of its own production.7
Such academic history is defined primarily, then, in terms of the heavyweight,
textual monograph. This is produced in strict conformity to the basic epistemo-
logical precepts of reference, justified belief, incisive inference, apposite concep-
tualisation and lucid insight. But above all it is the result of the promotion of
history as a mimetic (in the sense of imitation) form that is based on the corres-
pondence theory of knowledge as opposed to the diegetic (narrative). In our
predominately empirical-analytical historical culture the interpretative (yet also)
mimetic/analogue is the most highly esteemed form of history. But also approved
(for the same reasons) are postgraduate dissertations where the ‘basic training’ is
demonstrated. Equally, journal articles are highly regarded, especially if published
in professionally approved (and) epistemologically sound journals. Finally, confer-
ence papers published in ‘influential journals’ or part of book collections are also,
generally, ‘safe and sound’ professionally. Of course, if the cognitive orientation
 History as Expression 67

of the historian is anti-realist or anti-representationalist then, clearly, the history

produced will be framed in terms that are at variance with that of the ‘realist’
or ‘representationalist’ historian. As always, historians make their choice and live
with the consequences in terms of professional esteem and its ‘rewards’.

 Film and photography

As suggested, film and photography are starting to confront the epistemological-
cognitive investment in approved textual representations. Of course neither comes
with their references sliding across the bottom of the screen or written alongside
it. Neither form is expressed as themed chapters. Neither offers a gloss on the
existing historiography. Film and photography are also ‘directed’ and ‘produced’ –
though we can suspend our sense of this as we gaze at them. But the important
epistemological point is that film and photography are clearly creations not mimes
or correspondences – in much the same way as a written text is not.8
But this is often forgotten – that the textual historical representation is as much
invented, directed and produced as any film. There is always, for example, the
textual narrational equivalent of Mise-en-scène or the staging of the action. But, just
as importantly, film cannot, and is never intended to be, mimetic in the sense that
a text is believed to be. What textual historians, therefore, seemingly misunderstand
is that film is at once both closer and different to texts. This is because what they
have in common is that filmic and textual histories are both metonymic narrative
devices with the film director/producer making as many (and similar) narrative
choices as any historian does.
With this in mind, Robert Rosenstone, the leading historian and analyst of film,
has argued that ‘traditional history’ has now run its course in terms of textual
representation and that the next step is to create a new kind of history.9 Indeed,
different modes of expression are even eschewing old notions of narrative in favour
of narrative ‘self-reflexivity’, ‘partisanship’, ‘self-conscious authorship’, and the
novelty of exploring representation rather than just assuming it. No longer for
Rosenstone can film be seen as just another source (documentary visual repres-
entations of past events) rather than a legitimate mode of history in itself. He
also thinks that one can explore the nature through films of history as a form of
representation.
Like Rosenstone, Michel de Certeau (somewhat earlier) also effectively destroyed
the epistemological argument when he used the illustration of documentary film
as the analogy for traditional historiography. As he says, in both forms the social,
political, economic and technological mechanism remains undiscernible to the
viewer. Reflecting the views of Barthes, de Certeau suggests there is an epistemo-
logical sleight of hand because the historian portrays what happened through the
68 Narrative and History

narrative functions employed. Hence it is that the past is turned into a histori-
ography that self-consciously imagines the-past-as-history.
Photography and film as historical modes of expression are, consequently, much
misunderstood. Even today there is a widespread belief that, apart from when they
are ‘doctored’, photographs are mimetic and realist-representational. However,
photographs are best regarded as a verisimilitudinous form (an artistic illusion
of truth). This is because, while they generally refer through resemblance (the
image of the data), they also carry with them a narrative – minimal though it
may be. Indeed, photographs can be ordered to create complex narratives (photo
narratives, montages, photo collage) and thus become subject to content/story,
narrating/narration and mode of expression choices just like any other manufac-
tured, cultural artefact.10
The historian and analyst of film and photography Siegfried Kracauer has argued
that historians work from two tendencies – the realist tendency that prompts the
pursuit of data, and the formative tendency that delivers an explanation of the
material in hand. For Kracauer, the historian is both a recorder and a creator.11 To
assume that there is a priority for either one is to obscure the nature of history.
There has to be ‘the right balance’ between the realistic and what Kracauer calls
‘the formative’. He even suggested there is a fundamental analogy between histori-
ography and the photographic media. To grasp the nature of reality as depicted in
modes of expression other than print, Kracauer believed (as does Ankersmit today)
that we need to understand that, like the photographer, the historian is always
trying to balance the empirical with the creative with all the preconceptions and
choices that involves.
Both ‘camera-reality’ and ‘history-reality’ share the hallmarks of what Kracauer
calls Lebensewelt or ‘life-world’ (borrowing the term from the German philosopher
Edmund Husserl [1859–1938]).12 In effect, Kracauer was suggesting history had
more in common with, and indeed, had the job of, organising our life-world –
which as he says is ‘    for long stretches inchoate, heterogeneous, obscure. Much
of it is an opaque mass of facts. It is up to the historian to chart a course through
these expanses.    [hence history is about] fact finding and exegesis    ’.13 The
only way it can undertake these tasks, he argued, is for the historian ‘    to tell a
story’ and it is in this process that history has much in common with film and
photography.14 History, to coin a phrase, does not come camera ready.

 Television and radio

The growth in TV and radio history programming has, it seems, catered for a
perceived popular interest in history as a leisure activity and also to supplement
the range of materials available for its more ‘serious’ study.15 The popularity of
 History as Expression 69

the History TV Channel illustrates this development. In the United Kingdom, for
example, the enormous number of programmes on the Nazis and Hitler reflects
the centrality of the subject to advanced level school syllabuses as well as feeding
a cultural fascination with horror presumably under the guise of ‘learning from
history’. But when addressing how the mode of expression resonates with the
epistemological choices of historians, the question of how such content is offered
becomes the significant issue. As with film and the documentary, the effort of
TV and radio at historiographic analysis is unavoidably marginalised, being either
cut down or just omitted in favour of maintaining the flow of the story being
told. Unavoidably this generates the notion of reproduction for (or to create)
memory.
What is of particular significance with TV and radio history is that it actually
supplies what Pierre Nora in his Les Lieux de mémoire referred to as collective
national memory (mainly through the function of memorials).16 A recent assess-
ment of this (though it concentrates on memory as a contrivance of a mass culture,
and which is, therefore, somewhat anti-history) is Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic
Memory.17 Although Landsberg does not evaluate the role of TV and radio in
creating ‘prosthetic’ or ‘false’ memories, her argument is important. Her analysis
reminds us of the way in which different historical modes of expression function
in constituting memories as history that are not ‘natural’, not the result of ‘lived
experience’ but which result from the ‘    engagement with a mediated represent-
ation (seeing a film, visiting a museum, watching a television miniseries)’.18
Providing this kind of experiential history is done most effectively in TV and
radio programmes because they are visual and aural. Voiceovers reading from
primary source documents or micro-exchanges between historical actors create an
aura of truthfulness, especially if the TV or radio historian stitches it all together
by talking directly to the camera or offering a detailed oral description with
sound effects. Standing where, or close to where, the past action occurred creates
a powerful truth-effect (standing on the grassy knoll by the book depository in
Dallas, or on the deck of HMS Victory where Nelson fell, standing in Clay Street
in San Francisco where the first cable car ran).
The audience can also identify more readily with the past through the use of
aesthetic devices (visual metaphors and aural references) and filmic techniques
(Mise-en-scène). This is also facilitated through an overt ideological commitment
of the TV/radio historian that audiences seem eager to embrace. Popular history
appears to require ‘commitment’ by its presenters. Emotion is no bad thing in TV
and radio history, just as gloss and glamour are not either.19 Of course, none of
this addresses and certainly does not resolve the major ‘issue’ with TV and radio
history: the assumption of the story and the seamless way in which the narrative is
told. Even the self-doubts and musings to camera of Simon Schama do not break
this mould.
70 Narrative and History

To understand the nature and uses of TV and radio history, we, therefore, have
to ask how (and why?) these expressions are constructed and for what purposes.
Almost regardless of whether they are TV or radio productions (though obviously
the visual nature of the one is a major difference) both modalities rely on the
construction of a narrative. The intention of such is to arouse or, more likely,
implant real memories (such as the real story of Auschwitz). TV history narration
and the resulting narratives vary considerably dependent upon subject matter,
production values, target audience, cost-to-profit curve, available technology, and
so on. Thus, history TV programming market research acknowledges its audience
cross-hatched by gender, class, age, geography, educational level and economic
power.20 TV history has to be carefully tailored to meet the needs of its ascribed
consumers and the financial bottom line.21
Popular media history relies, like its textual counterpart, on chronology and
narrational temporal choices like order, duration and frequency but deployed
more self-consciously as ‘effects’. Much favoured for such programmes is to start
with an introduction that is in medias res (in the middle of things). Often the
narration begins at a decisive point in the content/story, which is itself close to
the dénouement, but does not quite give away the ending. Unlike much print
history where perhaps the majority of readers have a prior idea of content/story, TV
and radio (and to a lesser extent filmic) history demands a degree of ‘ambiguity’.
The narrative strategies adopted by TV and radio historians are to offer a set of
statements about the past situation being referred to and the potential readings
(stories) we can have of it. These will be linked to each other in a way akin to a
decision about which explanation is most convincing. The historian offers (usually
just two) competing explanatory narratives. There may be a brief note of the
uncertainty among historians (though usually there is not) as to, for example, the
truth of ‘the life of Elizabeth I’ or of ‘Hitler’s intentions toward European Jewry’.
The unstated implication is that this TV or radio narrative will be more revealing
than any other. Indeed, it may claim to provide ‘the truth at last about    ’. There
is usually only a limited sense of ongoing debate.
Radio history can also take many forms, but as a mode of expression it has
great utility as part of a ‘nationalising’ (implanted national memory) function.
But whatever its aim, because radio works only by sound, history programming is
constrained by three elements integral to the mode: sound effects (including music
but primarily background effects), the absence of sound (silence) and dialogue
(mainly the speech of a narrator or character). These constraints directly influence
the construction of the content/story via the emplotment, argument, historical
references and so on, and the nature of the narration including voice, focalisation,
timing (with all its anachronic features), and action/agency issues also still apply.
But because of radio’s nature, aural clues abound, as do styles of speech and selected
dialogue. Although the evidence has to be translated into these radio narrative
 History as Expression 71

elements there is a strong fictive and dramatic character to radio history, which is
similar to that of TV and film.22 The alternative on radio is the ‘history talk’ which
is not that different to a history lecture (though, hopefully, more interesting).

 Graphic novels, comics, history

magazines
As Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys have acknowledged, the graphic novel and
comics ‘    are not generally considered to be legitimate objects of cultural
analyses’ and yet they forcefully raise the question of what is a legitimate mode
of historical analysis and meaning creation.23 The use of the term ‘graphic novel’
has been an attempt at justifying itself as an expression in an academic envir-
onment that is uncongenial to such modes of representation. As Frey and Noys
maintain, the graphic novel ‘    has been the site for some sustained and soph-
isticated engagements with the problems of representing historical events’.24 As
has often been the case the representation of specific and usually unimaginably
horrific events – particularly the Holocaust – has been the focus for debates over
the ability (and the right?) of historians to imaginatively figure and narrate the
past in non-textual ways. However, Hayden White, the metahistorical thinker, was
impressed by Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, which represents the experi-
ences of Spiegelman’s father in the Holocaust, as an example of how aesthetics,
figuration and allegory can generate historical meaning while at the same time
being critically self-conscious.25
The vast range of graphic expressions reflects the fact that such forms of repres-
entation have been around almost since the invention of our print-based culture. So
it should not be surprising that today, when that print culture is being confronted
with the range of new media and the creation of new historical representations
and sensibilities, historians can and will elect to use these new modes. From the
invention in the nineteenth century of the ‘comic strip’ through to the rise of
the ‘comic’ in the early part of the last century, up to the practices of the ‘co-
mix’ (Spiegelman’s term to describe the graphic novel) we now have a plurality of
modes including digitised ones (see pp. 76–78). However, it seems clear that the
key narrating functions that define the mode of expression remain pretty much
the same despite the translation from text to image. There is, however, a greater
complexity in the process of inference from comic image to meaning.
This inferential complexity arises from the existence of both textual and graphic
elements in the box panels. Over 20 years ago Will Eisner detailed how the use of
style and the framing of the box panels and the gap between them created voice,
point of view, timing (flashback and flash forward) and so on.26 Few people today
doubt that pictures (photographs, paintings, doodles) tell stories. W.J.T. Mitchell
72 Narrative and History

has called this the ‘pictorial turn’.27 Pictorial or visual history is as complex in its
content/story and narration as any other mode of expression. If we can discuss
the nature of the pictorial in a literary narrative (emplotment, trope, chrono-
topic signature, focalisation, etc.) then, equally, we can address the nature of the
narrative/narrativity in the pictorial.
Thus, as Eli Bartra and John Mraz argue, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s most
famous painting The Two Fridas (1939) possesses a historical narrative that, specific-
ally, explores the issue of identity.28 There are two Fridas sitting holding hands, but
one is in Mexican traditional attire, the other in a Victorian-era white dress. The
women’s hands touch but what connects them is the exposed artery that connects
the healthy heart of Mexican Frida and the diseased heart of European Frida. Blood
from the diseased heart drips on to the white dress. Straight-laced and exploit-
ative Europe is bleeding authentic Mexico; a metaphor for the entwined histories
of Frida Kahlo of Mexico and the developed world. Bartra and Mraz’s entwined
‘narrative in the visual’ and the ‘visual in the narrative’ carry them towards their
interpretation about the need for passion, social conscience and gender conscious-
ness in the past. They are also self-conscious of the process of its translation into
history.
The graphic novel, graphic histories and comics are examples of the figure/trope
of metalepsis. This is the extension of reference through multiple representations
towards the inference of meaning. An example is the figure of a goat wearing what
appears to be Hussar’s military cap taken to represent Captain Alfred Dreyfus in
the graphic history Fascism For Beginners.29 The representation/meaning is Dreyfus
as the scapegoat for the anti-Jewish sentiments of the 1890s French establishment.
Metalepsis means several leaps of imagination are required to ‘get the meaning’.
Textual historians use metalepsis regularly and it has the (usually unintentional
and invariably unacknowledged) effect of effacing the line between the histori-
ographically fictive and reality.
Metalepsis is particularly obvious in graphic representations, but we also need
to be alert to the way in which its use has the same effect in more ‘conventional’
textual narratives. Thus when a historian says changes in the economic structure
of Britain in the 1840s constituted ‘the hungry forties’ then this is a metaleptic
collapse of the levels of events and their narration. The description ‘Elizabethan
England’ is metaleptic. The fact that such a description seems highly referential
and innocuously realistic should not blind us to the process of meaning creation
through literary functionality in creating a sense of time and place.
The most vexed and vexing representations of the past today are to be found in
popular history magazines. They seem to be neither fish nor fowl. It is not serious
academic history and yet it has the aim of being trustworthy (which in itself tells
us much about history). The leading UK history magazine the BBC History Magazine
claims on its masthead that it ‘    was established to publish authoritative history,
 History as Expression 73

written by leading experts, in an accessible and attractive format’. It continues,

‘We seek to maintain the high journalistic standards traditionally associated with
the BBC.’30 But would any serious university student of history get past a tutor by
referencing the magazine?
Magazines will, of course, claim and should encourage scholarship, but it is
a mode of scholarship that always serves the epistemological status quo. There
are few instances of a ‘popular history magazine’ that address issues of truth,
reality, or narrative understanding from a deconstructionist position. Narrative
constructivism, questions of relativism, revisionism and epistemology are rarely,
if ever, addressed. Similarly, TV and radio programmes do not make problematising
epistemological forays. ‘Enjoyment’ and knowledge about ‘what really happened’
are the hallmarks of popular magazine history. It is no surprise that such modes
of expression generate their own readership both real and implied. Any defamili-
arisation that challenges the epistemological status quo is prohibited.

 Public histories: Museums, heritage and

memorials
Museums, heritage sites and memorials are more obviously narrative construc-
tions than a textual or filmic history.31 While some public history is complex,
it all reflects the same process of translating what we want to believe about the
past into a story: turning national mourning, for example (as with a cenotaph or
commemorative plaque), into telling the story of nationalism.32 As Roland Barthes
said, narrative is there like life itself and we cannot escape it.33 Hayden White
has also argued that narrative is central to the representation of reality, specific-
ally the ‘fashioning of human experience into a form assimilable to structures of
meaning’.34 These structures of meaning are potent in direct relation to the effects
they have on the lives of ‘ordinary people’ – as Landsberg has argued.
White has provocatively suggested that professional historians are the least qual-
ified to police how the past is used for present and public projects.35 His reasons
for saying this are twofold: first because they are ethically unqualified (for the
earlier brief discussion of the narrative function of ethical choice, see pp. 40–
41); and second, their collective efforts to see history as a scientific pursuit of
‘the truth’ means avoiding the ‘    temptations of literary writing, the excesses of
philosophy of history, and the seductiveness of ideology    ’. For these reasons
White suggests professional historians will become increasingly irrelevant not just
to how the content of the past is organised but also to how it is expressed in the
public realm.36 This view is, of course, at variance with that of most professionals
in the world of galleries, archives, museums and heritage who want even more
input from professional historians.37
74 Narrative and History

However, the ‘temptation of literary writing’ I just mentioned continues to do its

tunnelling work because narrative crosses time, place and all academic disciplines.
It is readily seen in the huge variety of public histories, even those that appear
not to ‘tell a story’ (like collections of relics in glass-topped display cabinets).38 In
all this the key issue remains the epistemological assumption that proper, that is,
objective or scientific history will shine through in proper modes of expression,
and if it does not then it is because the expression is a tainted medium. And in the
case of experiential history it is tainted by virtue of its popularity and ‘good fun’
element.39
Of course, the only connection most people have with the past is through media
such as TV, radio, publicly narrated history such as museums, heritage sites and, as
we shall see in the next section, other modes of spectacle and pageant such as role
play and first-person interpretation. Following the example of Raphael Samuel,
Ludmilla Jordanova claims museums and heritage sites illustrate the complexities
of public history but they also raise the question of what epistemological purpose
museums, heritage sites and collections of relics and memorials serve.40 Here again
the issues of narration come to the forefront as we endeavour to define the chro-
notopic signature of any individual museum. That some museums are experiential
and others are not tells us a great deal about the epistemological awareness and
beliefs of their ‘managers’!
Normally a great deal of public history investment is required to create and
cement national narratives in the shapes of ‘national galleries’, folk museums and
memorials to major events. They are sites deliberately associated with a variety of
senses such as nationhood and also, as appropriate, mourning. Most are emplotted
as romance or tragedy. As Jordanova surmises, these modalities represent genres of
history defined in terms of topoi or motifs (nostalgia, ‘seize the day’, ‘nationhood’,
‘co-operation’, ‘class’, ‘race’ or ‘gender’ consciousness). Matters like the connection
between truth and reference rarely arise in these narratives although memorials
to politically divisive events can, like the proposal for an Enola Gay exhibit in
Washington in the mid-1990s memorialising the atom bombs dropped on Japan
in 1945, generate extensive debate. However, the variety of ways in which public
history narratives are constituted means that the historian who elects to work in
those environments has to constantly face the larger question of the relationship
between reference, truth, narrative making, revisionism and socially useful myths.

 Performance: Re-enactment, ‘first-person’

history, games
There is growing interest in what Peter Burke has called the ‘performative turn’ in
historical studies – history theorised as drama, ritual, festival, theatre, pageant and
 History as Expression 75

even architecture.41 While most historians probably still think of this in terms of
Hayden White’s notion of historians emplotting the past as some kind of drama,
the notion of history as theatre or symbolic action is most obvious in histor-
ical re-enactment; historical role-playing is popular in schools. But there is also
history gaming and ‘first person historical interpretation’ – as in folk museums and
what I will call ‘histouric’ sites. Examples of the latter include the Black Country
Living Museum in the West Midlands in Britain, Colonial Williamsburg in the
United States, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Ulster-American Folk Park
near Omagh, Northern Ireland, or any historically preserved buildings virtually
anywhere.
All this raises important questions about how history is shaped through the range
of narrative choices (the aesthetic, emplotment, ethical, voice, timing and other
choices) by the historian (as well as the stately home administrator, the curator
and the museologist) and for what purposes. Moreover, as with other forms of
publicly consumed and participatory history, what do such ‘historical experiences’
do with and to concepts such as ‘reality’, ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’? Indeed, are these
concepts of any relevance given that many aspects of performance history invite
the contribution of those who would otherwise be simply spectators?
As noted in the previous section, the ultimate in historical experience is affective
in the shape of talking to someone from the past – even though we ‘know’ they
are retired teachers or students in their vacation and that they are all working from
a character script. The factual learning experience is largely irrelevant. ‘Talking to
the first person interpreter’ about whether there will be a revolt in the American
colonies or what it was like to work in an early-nineteenth-century iron foundry
in the Black Country in England is less about ‘finding out the factual truth’ and
more about having fun. History thus becomes play and often literally ‘re-creation’.
The awareness among historians of the epistemological consequences of first-
person interpretation is now well established with a growing number of analyses of
its practice and the impact it is having on a nation’s (and a class, race or gender’s)
historical consciousness.42 In one sense this is not surprising given the influence
of the British historical thinker R.G. Collingwood – though he was writing some
60 years ago.43 Placing the historian squarely at the centre of the historical process
asks how and from who do people derive the meaning of their lives? His answer for
the historian is to understand the intentions of people in the past by endeavouring
to ‘re-think’ their thoughts. As noted, this is now almost a staple activity in history
classrooms, and role-playing as an empathic act is its favoured form.44
Of course there are at least two dangers with such re-enactment (empathy).
Collingwood’s historical approach imposes a philosophy of history that perhaps
focuses too much on the actions of agents (agency). This, as we saw in the
last chapter when I discussed intentionality, action and agency, is fraught with
problems. Specifically, Collingwood’s historical procedure emphasises what are
76 Narrative and History

‘common sense’ (i.e., under-theorised) notions of human nature. Indeed there is no

questioning of the assumption of such a thing as ‘human nature’. But the second
danger might be more important. What Collingwood called the ‘plain method’ of
history was to look to thoughts in the context of dominant ideas and events. This
meant if we know the facts the historian should be able to work out their meaning
via a kind of ‘history of thought’ mechanism. In other words, facts have their
rationale fixed in them. So, while first-person interpretation is undoubtedly a way
to rethink the expression of history, it remains freighted with the epistemological
assumption that while it is not proper history it still conforms to the epistemolo-
gical model for ‘discovering’ historical knowledge. It brings once again to the fore
the issue of ‘telling’ and ‘showing’.45

 Digitised representations
In 2004 the journal Rethinking History hosted a forum entitled ‘History and the
Web’. In introducing it, the editor, David Harlan, argued that Roy Rosenzweig’s
2001 suggestion that the web might ‘    reshape the ways we research, teach
and write history’ could happen, but that it had not yet.46 While we have an
almost unlimited library of data, both primary and secondary, literally at our
fingertips, it has not yet changed how we ‘research, teach and write history’.47
From developments so far it seems it will not. Commentators like David J. Staley
are sure, however, that digitising history should generate new thinking as well as
practice by replacing the conventional notion of linear prose storytelling with the
mental equivalent of scientific collection and discovery, cutting all the verbiage
down to the minimum. Here history would turn into the reporting of data, which
will increasingly be visual, re-enactments, atlases, and so on.48
However, the ‘digitisation turn’ continues to grow in historical practice. The
allure of making history aural, written, visual and apparently ‘interactive’ is perhaps
too strong in our Westernised culture, hooked on technology and sensory grati-
fication. As to whether it directly influences historical thinking, it is only likely
if, as David Harlan suggests, it fosters a new historical sensibility but one, I would
add, that must fundamentally confront the epistemological equation of reference,
explanation, meaning which is then summarised and delivered in a narrative.
The epistemological issue apart, however, the novelty of digitised representations
of the past is that history is no longer shaped in the form of an analogue.49 What
seems to be new is the way in which the consumer (reader, viewer) can break
down the order in which the narrative and the events described therein can be
consumed. It is true that the emergence of the ‘graphical user interface’ whereby
the user can move objects on the screen is an important element. Indeed, it is a
commonplace belief that the nature of the expression of digitised representations
 History as Expression 77

allows the reader to dispense with the author’s preferred textual structure assuming
they have one, and derive a meaning from it different to the one of either the real
or the implied author.
Yet the underlying logic of digitisation remains firmly that of the constructed
narrative – even though it may be ‘virtual’. The simple rule seems to be that you
get the narrative the originator of the virtual digital history wants if the choice
available on the screen interface (choices of icons, buttons, etc.) is directed towards
a specific end. Often users will not realise that they are being ‘narratively managed’.
This is no different to a print text. The print author ‘directs’ the reader down
a particular narrative path using the range of narrative choices with which we
are now familiar – emplotment, argument, ideology, focalisation, order, timing,
agency choices and so on. The Burkean performative and Landsberg’s prosthetic
are elements that work just as powerfully as in the ‘old print based history’.50
Nevertheless, the problems of epistemology will not go away. When the ‘hyper-
text’ is claimed to be radically different in epistemological terms, it is because it
makes more complex the issue of intertextuality. Normally intertextuality has no
meaning in history – it is not a term historians use. We prefer instead the notion
of contextuality. This refers to both the historiography and the placing of events
in the context of other events. Historiography is that to which reference can be
made for the confirmation or the rebuttal of an argument. The context of the
event is ‘the historical background’. But, as I have suggested, in a hypertextual
historical representation, the problem of extracting ‘the meaning’ is actually no
more complex than it is with printed text because of the ease with which the
text consumer can jump about, dip into, skim, use the index and so on. The
form of hypertextual expression only appears to provide the ultimate in the self-
construction of historical meaning. Thus, regardless of whether we read printed or
hypertexts, we are always thrown into a world of intertextual as well as intratextual
relations (not forgetting context). Historical meaning is something we extract not
from one single text (intratextually) but from both the text and the other texts to
which it refers and with which it communicates (intertextually).
The ‘hype’ normally associated with ‘hypertextual’ history should not, therefore,
be swallowed wholesale.51 Hypertext history does have certain formal advantages.
It provides huge amounts of material from which teachers can select for classroom
purposes. Presentation can have sound, video clips, a glossy presentation and so
on. However, all this does not allow the student to control his or her own ‘learning
experience’ as is often claimed. This is not necessarily a bad thing if we believe
that maintaining a narrative thread is useful, and lesser abled students need careful
coaching. Indeed, most digital histories merely translate mimetic materials like
journal articles and books to the new medium – simply becoming more accessible
and providing deeper ‘archival troughs’. The advent of e-books is pedagogically
useful as well as being student friendly in terms of advanced search facilities. But
78 Narrative and History

the practical result is that hypertext historical thinking is probably less innovative
in format than either a film or in many museums. This is because of the continued
iron grip of epistemology. It is certainly too strong a claim to say that the new
media requires the re-invention of the discipline. Indeed, digitised representation
gives the lie to the notion that all new modes of expression must automatically
disrupt our epistemological expectations.

 Conclusion
What I have explored so far is the logic of history as an authored narrative repres-
entation defined in terms of its content/story, narrating/narration and mode of
expression. I have argued that the content/story of history cannot be exclusively
limited to reference to ‘what happened’. This is because the listener, reader or
viewer expects followability in the story, which is provided by a series of epistem-
ologically driven and connected narrative functions that knit the sequence(s)
together. This provides it/them with both explanation and meaning – as we
shall see in the next two chapters. Hence, the truth (as the result of explanation
and meaning) that we seek in any narrative arises through the coherence of the
story that the historian has imposed on those sequences of content selected for
their story world. Epistemological historians (a.k.a. empirical-analytical) expect,
of course, that there is always truth to be ‘found’ because it is assumed the story
must be back there and it is discoverable and verifiable according to the evidenced
sequence of events and actions. And even when data is slim, following sound
epistemological thinking and practice, the constructionist feminist, for example,
will invoke theory to make up the empirical slack.
I have suggested that because the relationship between content/story, narrating/
narration and mode of expression is ultimately the result of an epistemological
decision on the part of the historian, explanation and meaning, rather than
simply following on from reference, derives, therefore, from the narrative drive
towards coherence. This is, of course, the product of the figurative, emplotment,
ethical and ideological choices and narrational decisions made by the historian.
Moreover, the mode of expression selected by the historian is constituted by
another set of narrative choices, which both reflect and at the same time modify
content/story and narrational decisions. At its most basic the logic of history lies in
the historian making content/story, narrational and expression decisions through
the continuous loop of reciprocity and aesthetic over-determination between the
past and the mode of expression selected for the history.52 The choice made
between alternative and perhaps competing modes of expression is a fundamental
decision made by all historians. Because, seemingly, the textual choice is made
for most historians it only serves to hide what is still a choice that has crucial
 History as Expression 79

epistemological consequences. That epistemological, cultural and especially profes-

sional forces push historians towards this decision in no way diminishes the signi-
ficance of that choice – or the fact that it is a choice.
It is now time to turn to the implications and practicalities of this history
narrative model. This involves re-addressing several ‘fundamental beliefs’. These
include the distinction between historical reality, reference and representation, the
nature of the relationship between narrative, explanation, meaning and the utility
of experimental history. And finally we need to examine the consequences of the
narrative logic of history in the matter of objectivity, truth and relativism. These
issues will be examined in the next three chapters.
5 The Past, the Facts and
History

As Frank R. Ankersmit noted over 20 years ago, epistemological approaches to

history have always been concerned with the criteria historians deploy for truth,
the accuracy of historical descriptions, explanation and meaning.1 Narrativist
approaches to history, however, focus on the linguistic instruments deployed
by historians in understanding and interpreting the-past-as-history. Epistemo-
logy is concerned with the correspondence between historical statements and
their referents. Narrativist history is concerned with history as a story–discourse
connecting activity. But this does not mean that epistemological history is
‘realist’ and narrativist history is non-realist or idealist – or fiction. For narrativist
approaches to history are, as I will explore in this chapter, concerned with the
relationship between reality, reference and representation.
Briefly, I will examine how this rethinking of the logic of history affects seven
key historical concepts:

1 reality
2 reference/facts
3 representation
4 explanation
5 meaning
6 objectivity
7 truth

In this chapter I will examine the first three concepts. These are normally cast in
terms of a commitment to the knowable historical reality of the past, the belief that
the past must be empirically available in the form of reference and, the practice of
representation in the historical text.

 Historical reality
The commitment to ‘reality’ might appear to be unproblematic in history. It seems
reasonable to assume the past was once real and as such should be amenable to

80
 The Past, the Facts and History 81

‘being known’ through its empirical verification. This means its epistemological
connection to history ought to be trouble-free. According to conventional thinking,
the only genuine problem can be a lack of evidence, which may make ‘knowing
exactly what happened’ just a bit difficult at times. But even then by the compar-
ison and verification of the evidence that is available, and with the use of inference
and clever theorising, historians can get pretty close to the story of what happened
especially if the evidence is well attested and is never (or hardly ever) in dispute.
But we are all very well aware that capturing the past as it was is not exactly that
straightforward. This is exemplified in Sue Morgan’s The Feminist History Reader
(2006), in which over two dozen feminist historians collectively demonstrate that
historical categories do not necessarily have to be part of the past to be part
of history. As Morgan says, ‘The recovery of women as subjects of, and agents
in, the making of history, and the simultaneous decentring of the male subject
has prompted widespread re-examinations of the most fundamental of historical
presumptions, not least through vastly democratising the vision of who and what
constitutes historical discourse.’2 As feminist history demonstrates, the reality of
the past is only the starting point for the creation of a culturally significant history.
So, how do historians cope with the now unreality of the reality of the past
(it was once real but is not anymore)? Ricoeur expends much effort in defending
the survival of the past in what he calls ‘the trace’. This is composed of data,
which are re-worked by the historian through a sense of duty to the past. His
argument is at its least convincing when he says that though ‘constructing the
past’ the historian’s intention is to ‘reconstruct it’. He seems to acknowledge the
epistemological inadequacy of this argument when he says history and fiction are
‘interweaved’, with history making use of fiction and fiction history to figure time
via a variety of narrative functions like emplotment, voice, implied reader.3
Understood in terms of the-past-as-history, ‘the trace’ has to be turned into a
narrative discourse to be ‘knowable’. This is why virtually every philosopher of
history, apart from Ricoeur, at some point is concerned about it. Realist philo-
sophers of history have followed in the footsteps of early-twentieth-century logical
positivists like Bertrand Russell and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, who limited
their idea of truth to that which can be validated by empirical research into the
trace. These, like Gardiner, McCullagh, Bunzl, Searle, Zagorin, Carr, Dray, Norman,
Zammito and so on maintain there is an epistemological continuity between the
real past and the present history of it.4 This means historians can pretty much tell
it like it was – they can get the story straight. Of course even the most realist of
philosophers know that it can only be done in and through language. As G.W.F.
Hegel famously noted, history records what actually happened (res gestae or the
content) and it is always a representation as a narrative or verbal account (historia
rerum gestarum or its form). So the notion of history as reference and representation
is hardly new.5
82 Narrative and History

But what is still often forgotten is that Hegel pointed out that the past and its
historical representation are produced synchronously. The congruence of historical
reality – things that actually happened – and their narrative clearly complicates
the status of both. However, the realist position maintains that the world exists
separately of our representations of it. It is, of course, hard to disagree with this.
By way of illustration, I feel pretty confident (like you?) that the present is real
and so, in all likelihood, was the past. But I am far from secure in believing that
past reality can be regarded as ultimately knowable for what it really or even most
likely means.
Reconstructionist historians, as realists, assume historical knowledge is largely
independent of how they narrate and write. Indeed, they argue, it is dangerous to
maintain the past cannot be reconstructed pretty much as it actually was, even
though it is in the form of a narrative. While few reconstructionists would say the
past was as history says it is, the category error with which we are familiar is ignored.
Hence for reconstructionists and even the most sophisticated constructionists
(because ultimately they also endorse some version of correspondence theory), the
reality of the past does not change as we represent it. But this is not and never has
been the case. As we shall see when I discuss the nature of representation, there is
confusion between the concept of description and representation that derives from
the false assumption that history is about description, empiricism and analysis, but
is not about representation. The claim is then made that historians, who question
whether what we say or write can correspond with past reality as it actually was,
are anti-realists. In fact we are all anti-representationalists.
The realist philosopher John Searle recognises this situation when, he says, there
is nothing epistemic about reality.6 Although Searle does not go on to pursue this
point, historians should not equate a belief in reality with the correspondence
theory of knowledge. Realism, in other words, is not a theory of truth (see pp.
116–121). Indeed, to assume that knowing what happened defines truth is simply
wrong. Reality is about our ontological existence – our ‘being’ (past and present)
but is not about epistemology – our knowledge. Historians, like most people, get
confused because they tend not to see beyond the situation where correspondence
theory (working backwards, as historians tend to do) implies a belief in realism.
But it is perfectly possible to endorse a belief in reality (as I do) and yet also have
grave doubts about correspondence theory as a way of accessing the truth. As
the leading philosopher of truth Donald Davidson has argued, being labelled as a
realist or anti-realist is pointless. This is because he sees no difference between a
correspondence view of truth, and the idea that what we say/write ‘represents’.7
In other words, realism does not entail correspondence with ‘truth’ because truth
is not the name of a relationship of correspondence between language statements
and reality. That the notion of the ‘true representation’ of past reality is a contra-
diction is suggested by the fact that there are a large number of modes or systems of
 The Past, the Facts and History 83

representation and expression for the ‘same’ reality. This is why we have different
modes of expression. This is not to say reality changes with its form of expression.
But its nature, such as we can ‘know it’, does.
The major contemporary critics of the concept of reality entailed as correspond-
ence are the pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty and Frank Ankersmit. Like all
anti-representationalists Rorty denies that reality causes language to work as it
does. In terms specifically of history, Frank Ankersmit argues there are two compul-
sions – reality and language.8 This position, I think, means we can argue in favour
of what we might call the process of narrative supervenience. In broad terms the
philosophical concept of ‘supervenience’ refers to the ordering of a ‘dependency
relationship’ between properties in the world. To be precise, a group of properties
is supervenient on another set when a change in the first set creates change in the
second, but not vice versa.
Historians, though not used to this nomenclature, actually use the concept
of supervenience all the time especially when they imagine, for example, that
complex social, economic and cultural structures (classes, races, nations, levels
of technology, etc.) are supervenient over (the lives of) individual human
beings/agents. Historians do, of course, regularly deploy organising concepts in
their story space like class and race (and more detailed constructions like subal-
ternism). Given this, we should be able to understand how history – as a narrative
making activity – supervenes (imposes on) the past.
But what about ‘the real’? The concept of realism is as much an artistic endeavour,
as it is anything else. Modes of expression such as writing, film or the visual can
and no doubt will continue to emphasise ‘truth’ and ‘be authentic’. Film can be
‘realist’ in just the same way as written history claims to be. But, like history, this
is because film relies on complicated compositional rules to which the consumer
is habituated and which makes their contrived nature invisible. Thus, because
both written and filmic history narratives rely on devices like linear plots, closure,
omniscient narrators (who deliberately ignore their act of narration) and so on,
realism is only ever understood as reflecting the world, and is never grasped as
a discursive creation. In order to unmask realism, its narrative rules have to be
confronted.
Consequently, narrative supervenience, as a way of explaining the relationship
between the reality of the past world and the history we devise to represent it, is
as cognitive as any statement of justified belief or analytical conclusion. As the
Philosopher Louis Mink famously observed over 30 years ago, historians would
be ill-advised to relegate narrative to the level of ‘a merely literary grace’ for, as
he said, the narrative is ‘    a primary cognitive instrument’.9 Taken together,
each function within what is now well-known to us as the triad of content/story,
narrating/narration (such as epistemological choice, emplotment, ethical choice,
factualism, authorship, focalisation and time order) and mode of expression
84 Narrative and History

enables the historian to map and explain in an intelligible way the connections
between actions and events.10 At this point a few historians will no doubt say ‘yes,
but what about the facts?’ Surely the only proper link between the reality of the past
and history is inference from the sources (factualism). I shall examine that now.

 Reference/facts
The belief in reference is a narrative function that we first came across in Chapter 2.
It should be very clear by now that ‘reference’ is not just literally a referring to the
past. It is also the belief that we can accurately represent an object or event that
was once located in space and time. In other words, empiricism cannot work its
way around the situation that past reality can only be accessed as a language. This
is the problem with facts. Facts carry the connotation that they exist ‘outside of
narrative’. Phenomenologically this is not the case. In narrativist thinking, facts
are events under a description (representations of reality). As the poststructuralist
feminist historian Joan Scott famously said, experience is always contested and
contingent. So, even such seemingly neutral concepts like reference and experience
are themselves ‘produced’ as concepts. Reference, after all, refers to some ‘thing’. It
is not that ‘thing’. Equally, though perhaps less obviously, ‘experience’ can only
be understood as we process it conceptually.
First, facts are similarly constituted entities. They are ‘hand built’ from the raw
data. And second, because of this, facts have no voice of their own. Data can refer
to ‘what happened’ but that is all it does. This is obviously important if you want
to know ‘what happened’. But it has little utility in any other way. No matter how
detailed and precise is the data, or that it took 5 years of working in an archive to
‘discover’, such material has no utility until it is encoded and given meaning (a
signification) in an explanatory narrative. This confronts us with the fact that ‘the
past’ does not exist except in the form of ‘the-past-as-history’: this is why there
are, in other words, only histories.11
What is more, the existence of different histories has much to do, as Claire
Norton has pointed out, with the protocols of academic history writing and
reception.12 Using examples of sources that have been variously construed as both
history and fictive stories, Norton raises again the question of what White calls ‘the
fictions of factual representation’ in history.13 However, asking how historians can
verify the accuracy of the correspondence between reality and perception is only
half the issue. The other half is how audiences construct and recognise ‘histor-
ical reality’. Norton offers, following Rorty and others, ‘    a pragmatist theory of
justification’ based, as she claims, on actual practice.14
In essence Norton argues it is less strict reference and analysis and rather more
the beliefs of communities of competent historians that creates the relationship
 The Past, the Facts and History 85

between past, the facts and history (deploying the apparatuses of footnotes,
acknowledgements, the voice of the well-known historian, etc.). Her analysis leads
to the conclusion that until we also acknowledge the problematic nature of the
relationship between historical reality and reference the situation whereby refer-
ence and realism are not at all the same thing will remain obscure to us. Now,
while recognition of this should lead us away from confusing past reality with refer-
ence and reference with knowable reality, it leads us on to a particularly significant
feature of reference.
This is that reference is normally defined and used by historians in such a way
as to suggest that both the narrator and the story/discourse is entirely reliable in
an empirical and, therefore, a truth-acquiring sense. The very concept of reference,
in effect, constitutes the reality–representational connection or correspondence.
Thus a historian may offer several evidentially attested statements of justified belief
but this act in itself does not necessarily carry within it ‘the conclusion that    ’?
Certainly ‘the weight of evidence’ can suggest a proposal for a likely and plausible
meaning but the act of reference itself only ever establishes a relation between
a ‘referring expression’ and the referent it purports to represent. This is where
narrative becomes central to history thinking and practice.
The explanatory and interpretative history narrative – though factually heavily
laden – is still more than the sum of its referential parts. Thus, for constructionist
historians it has independence in terms of the concepts that always accompany
factual statements. Statements that are offered ‘in evidence’ are always used by
constructionists, in support of some theory or another as the American historian
Lee Benson famously acknowledged in the Preface to his distinguished early social
scientific history The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case.15
Although his book examines the impact of egalitarian ideas on New York politics
between 1816 and 1844, he conceived it to be an essay on the clarification of
historical concepts. Specifically, he said he was attempting to resolve two ques-
tions, namely what empirical data could be ‘logically’ designated by the concept
‘Jacksonian Democracy’, and does the concept help historians to understand the
course of American history after 1815?
Benson concluded his book with a chapter entitled ‘Jacksonian Democracy –
Concept or Fiction’.16 Explicitly rejecting the concept (the fiction?) of Jackso-
nian Democracy he replaced it with ‘a more adequate and realistic concept’.17 His
more realistic conceptualisation was to disassociate the democratic tendency of the
period from the party of Jackson by looking at the role of individuals (as he said
‘who caused’ the egalitarian revolution rather than ‘what were the causes’). This is
not to doubt that Benson did not exhaustively sift evidence and modify his theory
in the process. But at some point he had to fish or cut bait and he fished with the
theory of historical agency. Eventually Benson reached the point when he thought
‘the evidence’ matched ‘the theory’ and vice versa. But most importantly – as the
86 Narrative and History

category distinction between the past and history amply demonstrates – Benson’s
narrative about Jacksonian Democracy still differed in kind from his factual state-
ments even when they are considered as empirical propositions about the likely
nature of past reality.
Recognising that historians invariably deploy narrativism, Frank Ankersmit uses
the word to refer to the analysis of the historical text as a whole and, in the
process, endorses the judgements of Hayden White and Louis Mink that there is
always a cognitive gap between ‘what happened’ and the ‘historical text’.18 That
this is the case has little impact on those (few) empiricists who insist that such an
argument must entail historians ignoring evidence, or retaining a theory despite
the evidence, or must end up failing to recognise the difference between useful and
less useful data. The other implication is that epistemic sceptics in particular deny
the rationality of analysis.19 The reconstructionist historian and archivist David
Henige says we historians cannot

   evade our responsibilities to test evidence    before we draw conclusions. Nor does
it [epistemological scepticism] warrant putting ourselves constantly at the centre of our
enterprise, forcing critics to sight in on an ever-moving target. Least of all does it allow
us to pontificate on the fragility of knowledge in order to excuse indolence in addressing
loose ends, elusive sources, or irksome discrepancies.20

Implicitly rejecting the position of archivists like Bernadine Dodge, Henige implies
that what he calls ‘postmodern’ historians are feckless and afraid of hard work in
the archive. But in saying this he is not really answering the key question raised by
most philosophers of history today: how does the relationship between reference
and narrative work?
Philosophers of history as diverse as Ankersmit, White and Mink agree that
historians are in error if they believe history is ‘concealed’ in the facts and that
telling a history is a matter of digging out and making explicit what is already there.
It follows that, like works of art, historical story spaces can only be compared with
each other, and not some original reality. This is most obvious in autobiographies
and biographies when the author-historian imposes a construction on the data of
their own or others’ lives. It becomes even more obvious when, like Lee Benson,
historians crank up (or down) from agents and historical characters to entities like
classes and nations.
To understand the nature of reference, therefore, we have to take what seems
to be the counter-intuitive step of detaching it from the concept of ‘knowable
reality’. Reference suggests an existential correspondence to past reality. But yet it
is a linguistic sign. It follows, therefore, that a concept like ‘The American Civil
War’ is not a vast chunk of historical reference that was ‘discovered’ by historians –
which it forever corresponds to and which shaped US history between 1861 and
1865. Most historians will acknowledge that it is an interpretative tool of cognition
 The Past, the Facts and History 87

and as such its meaning and our understanding of it change as it is revised or, to
be more accurate, re-visioned over time. Indeed, the data from that period of the
American past has had different meanings for historians at different times and in
different places. As William Pencak argues, the triumph of the term ‘Civil War’
‘as the dominant signifier of the events of 1861–1865’ was a complex and slow
historical process.21
Northerners at first talked of ‘rebellion’ or ‘the War for the Union’. Southerners
talked of ‘The War for Southern Independence’. Then during the late nineteenth
century ‘the War Between the States’ emerged (and which is still the preferred
term among many Southerners). From the 1920s the term ‘Civil War’ became the
most popular description. The Civil War is thus a sign intended to grant equality
between the combatants and to signify contemporary unity. The term is only
understandable when it is historicised. It is then understood perhaps as less a
description of events than an interpretation of them. The interpretation that uses
the term is deployed, arguably, as an effort to debunk the Southern mythmaking
process of contented slaves, states rights and the peaceful re-unification of the
federal state.
In effect the American Civil War as a description of events did not take place –
what did was a victory for Southern racism? As Pencak concludes, the Civil War
did not take place and the South won it. We should always remember that there
is never any determinate meaning in the past. Over time the meaning of reality,
what is now ‘reference’ and what is likely to become conceptualisation and then
representation are increasingly difficult to distinguish. To deploy another paradox,
words do not always mean what they say. Just what do the terms ‘the Alamo’, the
‘sands of Iwo Jima’, the ‘American Revolution’ or the ‘War on Terror’ really mean?
We can never know.
This much we learn from the ‘postmodern’ approach to the referent, which
emphasises the structuralist insights of Ferdinand de Saussure. In the early years of
the last century Saussure pointed to the lack of a ‘natural correspondence’ between
the world or content (in history terms res gestae) and word or form (historia rerum
gestarum). More recently Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth has noted how language operates
differentially.22 Like Saussure, words for Ermarth are only ‘signs’ defined by their
difference from other words in a sentence. These signs have three elements. First,
they are composed of the signifier (the word) and the signified (the concept the
word represents). Second, the signifier is the linguistic sign and the signified is the
concept represented by the sign. And the third is, of course, the referent to which
the sign and the signifier connect and which – in structural terms – is the least
important element. This structuralist view of language notes only the structure of
the connections between signifiers that are culturally generated (see the definition
above of the American Civil War). Although we use words as though they are
referential, such usage is based on conventional social meanings and/or values.
88 Narrative and History

Saussure’s primary insistence on langue means rejecting the historical or diachronic

dimension of language in favour of the structural, or ‘synchronic’ as he calls it.
Saussure’s ideas concerning the relationship between words and their
constructed meaning result first in the belief that language works according to its
own rules and is unrelated to the ‘real world’: past or present. And second, words do
not automatically or naturally correspond to the their referents. The relationship
is therefore arbitrary, being fixed by social convention (or, in the case of the Amer-
ican Civil War, the arguments of people, politicians, journalists and historians over
generations). The poststructuralist movement of the last 30 years or so has further
emphasised the problematical, aporetic connections between reality, reference and
representation by emphasising the nature of texts (sources and history books) as
being replete with gaps, silences and hesitation over of meaning(s) and significa-
tion. None of this implies a denial that certain events occurred or that we cannot
refer to them. That, as I hope is clear by now, is not the issue.
You will recall that in the Introduction to this book I noted briefly what the
French cultural theorist Roland Barthes called the ‘referential illusion’ by which
we ascribe to one category (history) features that are only attributable to another
(the past). You will remember Barthes’ point that historians tend to combine
that which is signified (the representation) with its referent thus constituting an
arbitrary signifier–referent association. Barthes insisted that in ‘objective history’
the ‘real’ is never more than a hazy signified. Hence we have history defined as a
textual ‘realistic effect’ whereby reference only attains meaning when it becomes
representation. I called this a ‘category mistake’ because the category of reference
does not belong to the same category of that of a connected prose narrative.
It is worth considering further at this point Barthes’ concept of the ‘reality
effect’ because of its centrality to understanding the disputed status of history
as a referential undertaking.23 He argued that that which historians take for the
real past in their writings can, as it is a narrative, only be a reality-effect (in the
narrative) generated by their belief in the correspondence theory of knowledge
and truth. The logic of his argument was that history has no privileged access to
reality through reference because its overall constitution makes it no different –
in the process of that constitution – from fiction. The turning of the past object into
a historical subject of study is an inevitable deformation of that object despite its
direct reference to events and existents in the past. It is the deliberate omission of
the narration function in history that creates this effect. As I tried to demonstrate
in Chapter 3, the narrating function is one of the central pillars of history creation.
As Barthes claims,

On the level of discourse, objectivity – or the deficiency of signs of the utterer – thus
appears as a particular form of imaginary projection, the product of what might be called
the referential illusion, since in this case the historian is claiming to allow the referent to
speak all on its own.24
 The Past, the Facts and History 89

The epistemological status of history as a discourse is thus exposed and deflated; the
empirical can now be prioritised above other narrative functions only by virtue of
its self-proclaimed claim to truthfulness. Barthes is arguing that this is an epistem-
ological ruse by which the referent is placed beyond the artifice of the narrative
elements of content/story, narrating/narration and mode of expression. The past,
in effect, has no continuing identity except as history. In other words, the past
only ‘exists’ when it is narrated (and read, viewed, performed and/or witnessed).
In rejecting this Barthesian argument, empiricists insist that the essence of
referentiality has less to do with language than a detailed empirical knowledge.
Put simply, we can know history is truthful because (a) reference is not an illusion
just because it is a representation and (b) people in the past were pretty much
like us. So, if we can figure out what people are thinking and doing today then
we can do the same for people in the past. This is based on the principle that
human beings act intentionally to achieve objectives. Thus the realist philosopher
of history Frederick Olafson argues that the essence of history is the translation
into narrative of the real action in the past.25
For Olafson, history is nothing more than the narrative reconstruction of the
chain of past human actions in a cause and effect relationship. More recently Mark
Bevir has supported this position arguing that the historian can have objective
knowledge of the past by reconstructing individual human volition (in the history
narrative).26 This rational action theory (even if weak – as in Bevir) accepts not only
that people act purposefully but that their actions can be mirrored in the structure
of the narrative (as in Ricoeur’s rationale for emplotment). The implication is that
the story (of intentionality and action) generates events and these can be revealed
in the history.
Certainly reconstructionist historians view the past as working according to the
logic of action and agency. For them explanation is built quite simply on the
direct reference to the agent’s motivations and intentions that produced outcomes
(events). This is the mechanism that provides the story of the action. Consequently
the narrative provided by the historian can mimic the action-story of past events
through reference.27 Hence we have the central principle of reconstructionist
history: ‘to know the action (truth) is to understand the story (its meaning)’. Unfor-
tunately this fails to address the central issue of history: representation.

 Representation
In the nineteenth century the question and practice of the representation of ‘the
real’ emerged as an issue with both ‘the novel’ and ‘the history’. It is not a coin-
cidence that they became the two dominant modes in Western bourgeois culture
for connecting reality and reference. The novel developed as a realist mode of
90 Narrative and History

expression from Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot and Stendhal through to the realist novel
and naturalism (with its scientificist pretensions), and in history via the efforts
of Enlightenment-inspired Gibbon (history as example) and Ranke (history as
demonstration). Eventually, in the twentieth century, a plethora of ‘varieties of
history’ developed. Both ‘the history’ and ‘the novel’, as modes of expression, were
developed through the conviction that they could comprehend and represent ‘the
real’ by examining the social relations of agents and the structures that shaped
their lives in time and space.28
Both ‘the history’ and ‘the novel’ attempted to describe and explain the turning
points and climacterics of human existence in terms of economics, society, politics,
culture and technology. As it worked out, whichever was ‘most realistic’ in their
apprehension of ‘reality’ could then lay down the ground rules for that knowledge.
Although the novel has been described in terms of a ‘classic realist’ text, actually
it was history that embodied that description. Mimésis became history’s key char-
acteristic while the voice of the author (the poet’s voice) diminished in audibility.
However, like the realist novel, history fed on the false impression that it gave that
the documentary references or trace(s) (the direct quotation in particular) were
somehow the essence of realism.
What was neglected was how the trace ‘stood for’ the past. But this did not
last very long into the twentieth century with the rise of situated history – social
history from below – and the attack on the bourgeois concept of agency because
of the experiences of capitalist industrialisation. As the aims of history changed
so did the understanding of reference. Moreover, despite the artifice of the silent
narrator it became clear very quickly that the historian was actually the omniscient
voice. Only the profound prejudice that flew in the face of the constructed nature
of the history text could maintain the fiction of its pure referentialism.
Perhaps the major twentieth-century development concerning the nature of
representation was the realisation that the analogue effect of the text was crucial
to the constitution of its meaning. In terms of a history text the reader may
be convinced by reference to that which happened, and consequently they may
‘believe’ they have read ‘the truth’. Nevertheless, history is also all about persua-
sion (poetic effect). Thus, as Ricoeur suggests (following Aristotle), a ‘compelling
impossibility’ is often preferable to that which, though possible, is unpersuasive.29
Thus, the convincing metaphor (the literally impossible) is preferable to the simple
factual statement that in itself carries no meaning. It seems increasingly plausible
to more and more historians that the truth (strictly the truth-effect) of any history
is the product of its textual construction and reception of the content, as much as
reference itself.
The narrativist theory of history thus acknowledges reality, reference and repres-
entation as working reciprocally. It also accepts that our reader-response to the text
will, among other considerations of an intertextual nature, be to the content/story
 The Past, the Facts and History 91

such as emplotment (tragedy, romance, comedy or whatever combination) that

the author-historian has deployed. As Ricoeur insists, the fear, happiness, loathing
or indifference readers experience is inscribed in the events by the composition as it
moves through the sieve of the representation.30 Of course reader-reception theory
as espoused by Barthes suggests that the ‘literary competence’ of the reader, as well
as the nature of intertextuality, also directly creates meaning. This is exemplified
in the distinction between the first-year undergraduate’s ‘historical competence’
compared to that of the PhD candidate. The meanings they get from the same
history text will always be different.
Now it is these sorts of considerations which prompted the historian Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht to suggest that to ‘to think seriously’ about our historical knowledge
we should keep an open mind about the relationship between reality, reference
and representation.31 This is what Hayden White prefers to think of as issues
of ‘presentation’.32 Gumbrecht suggests what we imagine to be past reality may
turn out to be only an intertextual cultural or social construction that has been
incarnated as historiography. As we shall see, this raises a number of questions
about explanation, meaning, objectivity, subjectivity and relativism. As I noted in
Chapter 2, the concept of historical representation can best be approached through
Ankersmit’s concept of ‘narrative substances’ and the notion of story space. By
acknowledging these, our attention is shifted from the absolute primacy of research
and referentiality to their role within the narrative construction of the whole text.33
It is here that issues relating to the modes of expression also become significant
and the matter of ‘realist representation’ emerges.
Of course for many contemporary thinkers, representation is the crucial element
in knowledge creation because reality is something we cannot ‘know’. As Jean
Baudrillard has argued – perhaps too radically for most historians – reality is an
invention of modern Western reason ‘    unknown to other cultures’.34 His reas-
oning is that once we reflect upon the idea that even if objects exist outside of us
‘    we can know absolutely nothing of their objective reality’ for ‘    things are
given to us only through our representation’.35 He maintains that arguing about
the objectivity of external things is, therefore, a hollow exercise. In this sense
history becomes ‘pointless’. He calls this activity – so basic to what historians do –
a ‘definitive illusion’.36 He concludes that whilst human consciousness claims the
privilege of being the mirror of reality this is an impossible situation because a
mirror is part of the object it reflects. And this is the trap from which history
cannot escape.
However, if Baudrillard remains unpalatable (though increasingly not for all
historians) the logic of narrative supervenience prompts us to have sympathy
for Ankersmit’s notion of narrative substance and its connection to reference.37
Uncontroversially Ankersmit argues that the historical text is composed of many
statements of justified belief that offer an accurate description of events and
92 Narrative and History

happenings in the past. These evidential traces are derived from the sources and,
when processed and arranged appropriately by the historian, constitute the ‘facts’
of the past.
But, as Ankersmit goes on to point out, while single statements of justified belief
can be verified the history itself cannot be because it has the epistemic status of an
interpretative narrative – not a singular statement. Histories are not just collections
of statements (descriptions of events), plus analysis (inference as to what those
descriptions of events might mean). History is a highly complex representational
structure of narrative functions of which empiricism and inference are but two
technical elements. Hence, as Ankersmit argues, the historical narrative can never
provide a site for the ‘testing’ of truth and objectivity in conventional empirical
and analytical senses. A history, as a complete text, cannot be reduced to the level
of an analysis that can only work with statements. To repeat, history is not a
statement, but an aesthetic, figural representation.
So narrative interpretations fulfil the function of organising knowledge, which
means as narrative substances they can never be true or false according to refer-
ential criteria alone. Hence ‘historians’ debates’ over the meaning of Athenian
democracy, or ‘the causes of the English Civil War’ are not over the actuality of
the past but about narrative interpretations of the past. What this means is that
statements of justified belief can maintain their ‘truth-acquiring’ status in respect
of their correspondence to each other, but that quality does not translate to the
overall epistemological nature of the narrative. The narrative remains a (category
of) representation and aesthetics and the facts remain (a category of) data and their
reference.
Thus, to give an example, I pluck at random from my bookshelves, A People’s
History of the United States and A History of Australia.38 Both of these titles constitute
a story space and any number of individual narrative substances that result from
the narrative function decisions made by their authors. Indeed, the fact that there
are so many different histories of the United States and Australia (and any other
historical topic you can think of) is because there never was such a ‘thing’ as a
people’s history of the United States until the historian created it. The same applies
to a history of Australia. Or, for that matter The Mind of the South, Working Class
Americanism or An Economic History of the USSR.
One is thus tempted to say that any symmetry between the reference (to reality)
and its representation in a narrative history is purely accidental. Hence, ‘a people’s
history of the United States’ never existed ‘back there’ to be detected and rescued.
As Ankersmit reminds us, narrative substances are representational proposals about
the past. If this seems like bad news, it should not be. We are not abandoning the
faithfulness of reference to past actuality. That remains. Historians like everyone
else want to know what happened. There is no room for the denial of the reality
of the past nor our referential-based beliefs. But what I am saying is that acknow-
 The Past, the Facts and History 93

ledging the problems concerning the relationship between reality, reference and
representation actually makes us better historians. It also frees us (or it should)
from the tyranny of those people (not just historians) who would take chunks
of ‘reality’, designate them as ‘facts’, then claim they automatically connect and
then can only ‘mean one thing’. Only by grasping the nature of representation
can we achieve some understanding of the connections we make between reality,
reference and representation. This also has the added benefit of making historians
epistemologically sceptical – as well as being sceptical empiricists.39
That history is about the past is a convenient way to recall all of these argu-
ments. In history, if we seek ‘genuine truth’ or ‘the real meaning’ we will remain
disappointed. An important consequence of this is that we cannot actually learn
‘from the past. We can certainly learn different things from ‘history’, but not the
reality of the past’. Understanding this reduces the confusion that results from
insisting there is a determinant relationship between reality, reference and repres-
entation. In other words, as epistemological sceptics we must continue to rethink
the ‘reference → explanation → meaning → narrative’ formula.

 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have suggested that recovering the past is complex because ‘the
real’ has to be converted into a narrative that by its nature cannot correspond
directly to ‘what happened’. But this does not produce a conflict between the
referential function of the content/story and the processes of narrating/narration.
I have argued that past reality, reference and representation must be viewed as
a coherent whole. In so doing I suggested, noting the contributions particularly
of Barthes and Ankersmit, that the two compulsions of reality and language must
be viewed together as producing a ‘historical reality’ rather than ‘the reality of
the past’.
I claimed that historians do not work with given historical objects like ‘the
American Civil War’ about which they then try to offer an accurate representation. I
suggested, rather, that ‘historical reality’ is the reality effect of the history narrative.
In other words, ‘past reality’ and ‘historical reality’ are different. In none of this
have I suggested that tried and tested historical skills are inappropriate. Indeed,
referentiality demands that those skills remain intact. However, my conclusion is
that there can be no ‘realistic representation’ that can be generated by reference
alone.
So, how can historians explain the meaning of the past under these circum-
stances? I turn to this in the next chapter.
6 Understanding [in]
History

We have now begun to confront the primacy of that form of explanation that
connects reference (evidence) with meaning and explanation exclusively through
the process of inference. In this chapter, I will describe how the conventional
definitions of historical understanding in terms of the two key concepts of explan-
ation and meaning need to be re-thought.1 As we shall see, one of the most
significant results of the narrative turn has been the emergence of a new approach
to the-past-as-history derived from the emerging and growing compulsion to
undertake experimental history.

 Explanation
Pared down to its essentials, ‘historical explanation’ means disclosing why certain
historical events occurred (and, by implication, not others), understood as a succes-
sion of statements of justified belief that are causally connected and which
together will provide the explanation that best fits the evidence.2 This procedure of
‘best fit’ provides the ‘argument behind the explanation’ starting with the historian
scouring the sources ‘looking for’ potential explanations of change over time.
This ‘best fit’ process of ‘historical analysis’ inclines to be one of two kinds. First,
the process may be quasi-scientific in nature, tending to impose law-like regu-
larities on past events. This is the preferred orientation (though not exclusively)
of constructionist historians. Reconstructionist historians reject this ‘scientific’
or ‘structural’ approach in favour of ‘human agency’, maintaining that the way
to explain past events is to explore the human reasoning and intentionality of
action behind them whilst acknowledging there may be larger social, economic
and political structures within which agency operates.
It is here that we see that the concept of the given story of the past, as opposed
to the fictively derived emplotment of ‘historical reality’, has little relevance
to history. For most of those historians who believe the narrative carries the
explanation (usually understood to start and end with an objective account of
the facts) derived by non-narrative means, the ontology of the text is irrelevant

94
 Understanding [in] History 95

to knowledge creation and is only pertinent when the explanation needs to be

delivered. This process is reinforced for those historians who endorse ‘scientific
historical explanations’ by the thinking of Karl Popper and Carl Hempel with their
beliefs that explanation implies a law-like mode of explanation.3 This ‘science-like’
mode of explanation is cause and effect in nature, being specifically hypothetico
(propositional)-deductive (inferential). It is realist, referential and verifiable. It is
built on the correspondence theory of knowledge. This form of historical thinking
is usually formulated via the notion of the covering law. This is a generalised
explanation for events that presupposes a universal law of human behaviour (as
evidenced by observation).
An example of this would be Joel Perlmann’s book Ethnic Differences, which is a
detailed assessment of 12,000 members of four ethnic groups in Providence, Rhode
Island, the intention being to explain the (covering law) relationships between
ethnicity, education, and economic and social advance during the period 1880–
1935.4 Perlmann uses a wide range of empirical data drawn from school records,
census data, tax books, occupational data and city directories plus a research design
that deployed the statistical analysis of multiple regression. For example, school
variables were regressed on parent occupation, property values, family size and
ethnicity. His conclusion is that historians cannot readily generalise in a covering
law fashion. In fact Perlmann thinks that to explain ethnic differences found
in American social history it is better to explore individual ethnic experiences
‘    with a comparative perspective and an eye on theory    ’.5 So, even the most
sophisticated statistical analysis cannot produce ‘scientific history’ even if the
desire was there.
Even the most sophisticated constructionist forms of interpretation and explana-
tion tend to be viewed by reconstructionists as crude inventions. Reconstructionist
targets have included the Marxist school of history (that seeks class as the explan-
atory variable in change over time) and the Annales school of history that has
argued for a scientific approach to the study of the past since the 1920s. Another
is the hard-core social science and economic history that spawned a variety of
forms starting with the New Social History of the 1960s and cliometrics (statist-
ical histories). Yet another is the latest wave of poststructuralist-inspired feminist
history. Despite reconstructionist opposition, the last 30 years has seen the emer-
gence of a new and richly complex set of histories indebted to social science
disciplines especially sociology and anthropology.6
The most recent development in this debate is the rise of the ‘new empiricism’
or ‘practice theory’. According to Gabrielle Spiegel this is a historical practice
that acknowledges the impact of the linguistic turn but which ‘seeks to move
beyond its initial formulation’ to ‘focus on questions of how society undergoes
constant transformations in both its material and conceptual realms’.7 Whether
new empiricism or practice theory they have tried (largely unsuccessfully) to return
96 Narrative and History

to ‘the real’ while acknowledging the role of language in history writing. Arguably
the new empiricism is neither fish nor fowl and like all such efforts will presumably
fail to square the circle of epistemological and narrativist theories of history.8
How can historians explain anything convincingly given all of these problems?
Well, most historians, even though they are fairly well assured that history can
never be a ‘true interpretation’ of the past, continue to plough their empirical-
analytical furrow. This is because they believe that only through that method can
they inch closer to the true nature of the past. They believe in the progress of
history as a discipline because of their faith in the four basic principles of classic
realist historical explanation:

1 Empiricism can justifiably constitute history as an epistemology.

2 The evidence will allow the fair-minded historian to discover the story within
(hence the process ends up as being objective).
3 The judicious use of inference, social theory and concept can provide for histor-
ical explanation.
4 The composition of the history narrative is a function of the first three beliefs.

However, if we assume history is a historicist, authored, literary representation

then historical explanation (and meaning, objectivity and truth as we shall see)
can only be constituted through the narrative functions that I have outlined. As
I have suggested, viewing history as a content/story, narrating/narration activity
places empiricism and analysis within the much bigger framework of the narrativist
philosophy of history.
The founding principles of the narrative logic of history should by now be
starting to very clearly emerge. Briefly, we can summarise them as six principles:

1 History is an unavoidably historicist undertaking.

2 The historical narrative is an interpretative act that supervenes the empirical
and inferential through the principle of inclusion.
3 The act of narrative making in history shares the same characteristics as any
other realist narrative mode of literature.
4 History narratives impose a meaningful structure of explanation on the past.
5 The history narrative tells a story by ‘showing a’ rather than ‘demonstrating
the’ correspondence to the past.
6 Historical narratives are built out of statements that describe the past which,
through their precise configuration, define the narrative explanation.9

Confusingly the first principle – historicism – has acquired several different mean-
ings over time. But its definition here emphasises the presentist manner in which
reality, referentiality and representation are fictively ‘made’ to connect by the
 Understanding [in] History 97

historian (in a text, a graphic novel, a museum exhibit or whatever other mode of
expression). To view history as a historicist exercise is to recognise its uncertain
epistemological status. It is because of its historicist nature that we have debates
over ‘what is history?’ and why history after ‘the modernist event’ (events that
apparently defy adequate description and explanation) has been an issue that
shows no sign of disappearing from the agenda.10
As the philosopher of history William Dray said half a century or more ago,
the key to historical explanation is telling a story (not necessarily the story)
explaining how some thing could have happened rather than why it did.11 He
thus compared the concepts of ‘how-possibly’ and ‘why-necessarily’. The former is
the logic of narrative, the latter the logic of covering law positivism. For example,
when explaining the economic impact of the development of the railroads in
nineteenth-century America (an old favourite of hard-core social science/cliometric
conceptually constructionist ‘why necessarily’ historians) the story is in effect told
in terms of ‘how-possibly’ connections. Of course, there is never going to be a
resolution to the conflict between ‘how-possibly’ and ‘why-necessarily’ modes of
historical explanation. Indeed, a ‘new empiricist’ would probably say they could
be compromised or different circumstances that dictate one or the other should
be employed. But if we assume we cannot clone past action as textual history,
then narrative explanations of ‘why-possibly’ do tend to make more practical
sense.
Today, historical explanation is essentially a debate about narrativism under-
stood, I think, in terms of content/story, narrating/narration and mode of
expression. But this does not mean narrativism should be viewed as some sort of
alternative to ‘proper’ empirical-analytical history. Only if historians believe they
can escape ‘back to the past’ would they seriously doubt that they write explan-
atory narratives in the here and now and that they involve epistemological choice,
emplotment, figuration, argument, ethical decisions, and so on. Because the vast
data set that is ‘the past’ cannot be rendered in all its richness, it has to be select-
ively raided and presented, and the only mechanism for that is narrative. Only
once we acknowledge this can we gain a better insight into the complexity of
historical explanation and meaning – to which I now turn.

 Meaning
Historians normally start with the evidence of past actions and events which
are usually (though not invariably) incarnated as texts. Thus an article in The
Times in late January 1924 reporting the death of Lenin might be used as evid-
ence of the attitude of the British press to Lenin’s demise. This relic of the past
could be deployed (depending on the epistemological orientation of the individual
98 Narrative and History

historian) to reconstruct or construct the historical object in which they are inter-
ested (the death of Lenin as received by the British press).12 This would be done
to reconstruct (or construct), as Mark Bevir says, ‘    ideas or meanings from the
past’.13 But, as Bevir rightly notes, historians tend to have incompatible views
about what constitutes a historical meaning. One historian might, for example,
dismiss another’s object of study as unimportant so that the history that results
is meaningless. So, what (according to Bevir and others) is the generally accepted
nature of historical meaning?
At the risk of oversimplification, it is widely acknowledged that deriving the
meaning of an act or event ultimately depends on discovering the intention-
ality (of who is) behind the action. In an exchange between Mark Bevir and
Frank Ankersmit in 2000 it became clear that Ankersmit had doubts about Bevir’s
assumption – held by most practitioner historians – that meaning is knowable
intention. In other words, Ankersmit doubted historians are in possession of the
meaning of the past when they know the intentions of agents in the past. He
questioned the definition of meaning as knowable intentionality as based on the
common-sense belief that knowing the intentions of people in the past is no
more difficult than knowing the intentions of people in our present everyday life.
For Ankersmit it is always going to be an open question as to whether inten-
tions are ‘discoverable’ and even then capable of becoming ‘objectified’ in a text.
As well as Ankersmit more recently, linguistic, narrative and ethical turners are
also indebted (among others) to Hans-Georg Gadamer who maintained language
could not be ‘used’ as a form of instrumentality like a tool, but rather language
directs or even controls us. Indeed in the 1930s, the literary theorist I.A. Richards
argued words have no meanings that can be said to belong to them.14 Because
words possess no intrinsic meaning it is always up to the reader to create specific
definitions.15
The implication of this long-standing debate is that the agent-author (and also
the author-historian) is no longer the centre or origin of meaning (knowable
intentionality). To grasp the range of meanings available in texts we must under-
stand their relationships to other texts or, more accurately, the discursive form-
ation in which they (all) exist. The authority of the author is lost (their voice is
drowned out) in the larger discourse in which their intentions are understood
(misunderstood?) by the historian as/and reader. So, is there any ‘realist determin-
ation’ of meaning in history, especially given the free-play of the signifier–signified
relationship, the referential illusion and reader-reception theory?16
You will recall from Chapter 2 White and Ricoeur’s argument that metaphor is
fundamental to interpretation and meaning creation. I suggested there that the
role of metaphor in language was to provide the site where the world met the word
(where reality meets meaning). Consequently, we always see the-past-‘as’-history.
I argued that history is a linguistic substitute ‘standing-in’ for the past. This suggests
 Understanding [in] History 99

the ‘literal meaning’ of the past is hardly a straightforward concept in interpreta-

tional and meaning-generating terms. Indeed, the notion of ‘literal meaning’ has
no place in history thinking and practice. So, while we tend to assume that the
historical text is an example of literal meaning because it is (apparently) made
up of facts (statements of justified belief), philosophers of both ‘continental’ and
Anglo-American ‘analytical’ kinds have been long concerned with the complexity
of the connection between language and reality. The philosophy of language has
long been the battleground for what ‘meaning means’.17
It can be argued that words generate meaning in two ways. First, in terms of
what they directly signify. The meaning of ‘Henry VIII’ in a sentence in a history
of the Tudor dynasty is fairly clear. ‘Henry VIII’ was a particular person who did
certain things. But words do not just refer to objects in the real world. They also
create meaning through their relationship to other words in a sentence. So a word
can be a reference – what it stands for like ‘Henry VIII’ stands for a person. But
for a more complete picture of meaning creation we need both reference (by a
word to an object) and we need to ‘make sense’ out of the reference. An important
part of this is that the meaning of the historian’s statements are always offered
with the aim of encouraging a particular belief in the reader’s mind. Here again
we have the perennial conflict between author intention/reader reception, implied
author/implied reader.
Now, a brief acquaintance with the speech act theories of the mid-twentieth-
century English philosopher J.L. Austin makes it clear that doing things with words
is much more complicated than we might think pointing to what he regards as
the performative nature of language.18 Thus, when we say something, and this
includes historians (such as I am doing at this precise moment), we perform speech
acts that work at different levels. The single sentence Austin called the locutionary
act. But in producing such a sentence we are not, as I just noted, simply making
a statement of fact. For example, a historian may say, ‘The wartime situation
of African–Americans contradicted the ideals of equality and justice for which
Americans were fighting’ thereby referring to that group of people in the American
Revolution (1776–1783). This is not simply a factual statement of justified belief
but is (as I read it) also a warning to the reader that the ideals of the American
Revolution were being subverted just as they were being established?19
This additional level Austin called the illocutionary act, and history, of course,
works on both the locutionary and the illocutionary levels. Hence there is no defin-
itive single and exhaustive meaning even when making what appear to be factual
statements. But it does not end with the illocutionary act. The sentence I just
quoted also possesses a third perlocutionary order or level, which is the consequence
of the warning implicit in the illocutionary act. This is another level of meaning
that might, for example, persuade the reader to behave/believe differently. Increas-
ingly historians are becoming aware of the misleading simplicity of much history,
100 Narrative and History

writing not least because of the empiricist investment in simplistic polarities such
as ‘true or false’, ‘fact or value’, ‘meaning or no meaning’.
For, as I hope I have made clear, there is still an immense professional invest-
ment in empirical or sense-data knowledge (reference) among historians. But this
investment ignores the fact that every statement concerning the given nature of
past reality is always located within a much broader historical narrative story space
constructed from content/story, narrating /narration and mode of expression. So,
to know ‘the meaning of what happened’ can only be pursued in ways that are
strictly controlled by a process of knowing that is a complex mix of the past, the
personal, the cultural and the linguistic. Hence the beliefs held by historians are
never simply warranted by reference.
Despite many historians still finding this notion hard to take, the philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously argued that perceptions without concepts
do not constitute knowledge. Consequently, the primacy of ‘empirically derived
meaning’ lives on only because we still fail to see how our ontology affects our
understanding of meaning creation. So, beyond Austin and his speech act analysis,
what can we say about the nature of the relationship between language (history)
and experience (the past) in terms of meaning creation? Well, we can accept, for
example, the observation of Richard Rorty that reality and language are inescapably
coupled, but not in a correspondence, a cloning or a representationalist way. This
is because of the functioning of the story space, the non-existence of the tertium
quid and the role of ‘as’ in the-past-as-history.
To complicate matters further there are also the well-known problems associ-
ated with hermeneutics to consider. The first problem is concerned with what
are the ‘rules’ for understanding what the author ‘really means’. The second and
directly related issue concerns how we interpret the rules and how we apply
them. Clearly, applying a rule changes what we wish to know. Martin Heide-
gger, though not the first to note the problem, describes it as the understanding
of (past) existence being dependent on understanding the effects of the world
of existence. Unlike science – which assumes we can effectively step outside the
‘hermeneutic circle’ to locate the foundation of meaning via ‘hypothesis testing’ –
history is always trapped.20 The reason is the historicist one that historians cannot
step outside history (the act of interpretation). Thus, one historian’s interpreta-
tion of class (or ‘the war on terror’) is another historian’s denial of it. Histor-
ical understanding only exists in history. From this we can thus legitimately
infer that history is neither scientific nor objective. It also means that histor-
ical interpretations proceed from other interpretations. In other words, explan-
ation and meaning starts with the process of explanation and meaning. H-G
Gadamer reinforces this idea when he claims that truth emerges from the traditions
(histories) through which ‘things’ like the past are understood (hence the-past-as-
history).
 Understanding [in] History 101

However, this does not convince realists like C. Behan McCullagh, who has long
provided the clearest exposition of the conventional understanding of ‘historical
meaning’.21 McCullagh argues that if we can justify our historical descriptions we
can know the most likely meaning of the past. McCullagh, sustained by his belief
in knowable intentionality and action theory, argues the meaning of a past text
can usually be grasped and represented accurately if we look for its ‘conventional
meaning’ as derived through a knowledge of its context.22
Prior to disposing with them, McCullagh notes seven possible problems that
epistemological sceptics offer to rebut his realist analysis of meaning.

1 Languages are not uniform so there is no ‘conventional’ reading of any text.

2 Contextuality gives way before intertextuality.
3 Texts may be seen as products of discourses (the ‘real’ is not the measure for
accuracy, etc., but other texts; consequently, the intentionality of the author
cannot be known).
4 Only the reader can create the meaning of a text (hence there cannot be a
conventional meaning).
5 All summaries of texts must be subjective.
6 Textual readings can be biased.
7 The meaning of text is to be judged by its coherence not its credibility.

McCullagh answers each of these criticisms by upping the dosage of empiricism

and increasing the voltage of inference. In effect, he pursues a thoroughgoing
hermeneutic agenda and methodology. He does this as follows:

1 The first criticism is answered by historians’ extensive knowledge of the relevant

language as used by the relevant group in the past.
2 The second answer is to contextualise through comparison with other texts by
deploying more evidence (more texts).
3 The third is to question the notion of the displaced author and that it is feasible
to know the author’s intentions again through context and comparison and by
‘finding the best explanation of all the relevant evidence’.
4 McCullagh argues there can be ‘objective meanings’ in texts and they can be
discovered through his responses to the first three criticisms.
5 The fifth criticism can be rejected if the historian provides ‘general summaries
of texts’ which are ‘    both accurate and comprehensive’.
6 The sixth criticism can be resolved by ensuring inferences are justified and the
practice of other historians to point out biased inference (personal, cultural,
class, race, gender, or whatever) when it appears.
7 The seventh criticism is answered by turning to the evidence and the processes
of contextualisation, verification and comparison.23
102 Narrative and History

So, based upon the premise of

1 the honest historian

2 as large a range of evidence as possible
3 contextualisation
4 comparison
5 sound summaries
6 verification
7 the circling shoals of other historians.

the explanation of actions and events in the past can be undertaken satisfactorily
in terms of locating their most likely meaning.
McCullagh’s analysis, though clearly sophisticated, reveals the limits of any
positivist orientation. This is not just because he deploys a ‘when did you
stop beating your wife’ approach (when did you stop contextualising, veri-
fying, evidencing    ), but because it pays insufficient attention to the logic of
content/story, narrating/narration and mode of expression considerations. In other
words, there is no sense in McCullagh’s analysis that a historian can still believe in
justifying historical descriptions while also accepting that it is only one element
in a process of historical knowledge creation.
Like Ricoeur before him, Frank R. Ankersmit in his book Sublime Historical Exper-
ience (2005) questions McCullagh-type hermeneutic approaches to meaning. He
starts with the argument (rehearsed by a number of other thinkers not least and
perhaps most famously H-G. Gadamer) that historians (like everyone else) start
with language and move to experience – the reverse of McCullagh’s position. In
Gadamerian mood (experience is understood in language) Ankersmit argues that
we understand the meaning of the past only in as much as it has ‘obligingly taken
on a linguistic appearance’ and what is outside this ‘house of language’ of necessity
‘    exceeds our comprehension’.24 Ankersmit thus forces us to consider the argu-
ment that cause and effect do not connect reference and meaning. The concept of
the ‘sign’, so beloved of structuralists, reminds us that the signifier may ‘stand for’
both what is represented by the sign and its meaning.
Thus the notion of intertextuality (competing with contexuality) holds that the
(linguistic) meaning of history texts and relics is always intertextual because their
meanings mutually and reciprocally determine (over-determine) each other. Thus,
the meaning of one historian’s interpretation of ‘the origins of the Cold War’ is
not only dependent on her/his representation (interpretation) but also on other
representations of the ‘the origins of the Cold War’. One of the most interesting and
challenging aspects of history is its comparative (intertextual) nature. As Ankersmit
argues, when we want to know what ‘historical meaning’ is we always have to start
with ‘representation’ and the reader’s experience of the text.25
 Understanding [in] History 103

We should not infer from this that we cannot have generally satisfactory under-
standings of events, texts or actions. We can readily make do with ‘probable
authorial meaning’ as Terry Eagleton describes it.26 But to accept this is not to
swallow the much more doubtful hermeneutic notion that trails it, which is that
the meaning of history exists entirely outside its powers of narrative representation.
Unless we are wary we can easily fall into the trap of believing that facts have a
built-in ‘historical meaning’. Following the argument of Hayden White, I suggest
they can only attain such a meaningful status when fitted into a story.27 Or, to
put the same argument slightly differently, bearing in mind the metonymic nature
of historical thinking and practice, establishing the meaning of the past is never
simply dependent upon a naïve notion of correspondence.
Does this automatically mean being a realist is a pointless waste of time, as
Baudrillard maintains? Well, no. Being ‘realist’ usually works to our advantage
so long as we do not extend it beyond what it can usefully do. For the
deconstructionist historian this means a belief in realism does not entail confid-
ence in knowable meaning through correspondence theory. Equally, it does not
mean epistemological doubts require one to be an anti-realist. An anti-realist
refuses to accept there is a mind/language-independent reality. The deconstruc-
tionist historian is not anti-realist but, as we shall see in the next section, an
anti-representationalist, and it is this that permits her or him to explore the past in
new and experimental ways. In other words deconstructionists believe past reality
cannot be (a) explained exhaustively in empirical terms and its meaning thereby
discovered because (b) our only access to it is a complex and ultimately a failing
form of representation. Rather than foreclosing on history, this opens up all kinds
of exciting and challenging possibilities for engaging with the past.

 Experimental History
Part of the twentieth-century critique of realism, especially in literature, is that
it deceives by masking its status as art. It does this, as we have seen, through
the category error of suggesting it is a facsimile of the story. However, once we
acknowledge that there is no given meaning defined as the knowable real story in
the past we can, if we wish, develop new ways for acquiring a meaning for the-
past-as-history. But this is fraught with problems. As the literary theorist Wolfgang
Iser maintained, there are always ‘indeterminacies’ that in every narrative (real,
fictive or fictional) are represented by gaps that directly affect both the processes of
explanation and meaning creation.28 Not everything in a history can be explained.
It is normal that such gaps must be left to the reader to ‘fill in’ as part of the
meaning creation process (you will again recall Barthes and reception theory,
the readerly text, the implied author, the implied reader). All histories are, by
104 Narrative and History

definition, unfinished and crude even though the reconstructionist and (only
to a slightly lesser extent) the constructionist are both driven by the desire for
closure (through an empirically driven certitude that is meant to short-circuit any
reciprocity between the text and its reader).
The nature of the-past-as-history ought to make historians more amenable to
open-ended history: that the past is ultimately lacking in meaning – or, to be more
precise, ‘knowable’ meaning. Closure is, after all, only the yield of the history
narrative (regardless of whether it is expressed as the historical text, graphic novel,
experiential museum or whatever), and so what we are confronted with is that
‘historical explanation and meaning’ is a property of the history text. Of course the
past remains the empirical material with (upon) which the historian works (even
in experimental history there is normally reference to a once real past). But the
upshot is that as there is no direct correspondence between the past and history.
There is no ‘natural’ epistemic continuity between them despite bulky reference
and even direct quotation from sources.
This is the understanding of Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Arthur Danto and
Louis Mink unlike that of David Carr and Paul Ricoeur – who argue for a continuity
or extension between the past and history. Carr says he is not claiming ‘    that
second order narratives (like history)    simply mirror    the first order narratives
that constitute their subject matter’29 , but he disagrees that the narrative form
is what is produced in literary genres in order to be imposed on non-narrative
reality.30 The Carr and Ricoeur position is the safety net for all new empiricists/
practice theorists.
Eventually the historian has to choose between accepting that our explanation
of the meaning of past reality results from the functioning of narrative (including
the element of reference), or it does not. Perhaps the only way to make a choice
is to think of a narrative as a cultural and linguistic activity that transforms one
state of affairs into another. In the case of history this is the transformation from
a subject of existence (in)to an object for representation. This is the narrative turn
that takes us from the empirical knowledge of the real past to the ontology of
the historical text and its narrative functions. The narrative turn is not, of course,
a dangerous descent into discourse that deforms the reality of the past. Such a
conception both oversimplifies and misconstrues the process of representation.31
As should be clear by now, realising that history is a mode of representation
draws our attention to the underlying epistemological assumptions that shape our
knowledge and understanding of both the past and the limitations of history. It is
commonly asserted that ‘knowledge is power’. This is only a partial truth. It might
be more accurate to say that understanding how knowledge is created is power.
Using the term ‘historiographic metafiction’, Linda Hutcheon argues that we get
multi-levelled, pluralistic histories rather than the history – a history that is self-
consciously fictive rather than unknowingly so.32 This situation is most obvious in
 Understanding [in] History 105

experimental history, where the narrativisation of past events is not buried and the
past no longer appears to speak for itself. Experimental history requires that the
reader participate in fashioning meaning by engaging with the creative authorial
process. Indeed, in this sense all history is experimental. This is because history
is always constructed as narratives made up of emplotments from sequences of
events with preferred beginnings, middles and ends.
Take a question such as ‘how representative and legitimate a spokesman for
American values and interests was Woodrow Wilson during the Great War?’ The
data alone cannot answer this question because it requires the emphases and
narrative making decisions of the historian. This is probably why there is a different
answer from every historian. In this example it depends upon how much signi-
ficance a historian places on Wilson’s religious commitment or, say, his beliefs in
American exceptionalism – a concept which itself can be emplotted in different
ways.33 So, there are no answers in the past only probabilities or, more usually,
possibilities. This is why an increasing number of historians are exploring the ways
in which they can connect content and form. And once a historian does that, then
experimentation emerges.
To start with, experimentalism welcomes plausibility in its narratives over more
narrow empirical justification. Thus, one of the most disputed kinds of history
available today is that of ‘creative non-fiction’. This is writing that may be factually
accurate and, therefore, not strictly fiction, but is overtly written for aesthetic as
well as explanatory reasons (and even for ‘pleasure’). Most often critical non-fiction
history is manifest in modes of expression that are non-textual, like film and TV,
but cartoons, postage stamps and pop-up books are relevant here too. Perhaps the
most infamous recent book-length textual example is Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald
Reagan by Edmund Morris, which was populated with fictional characters within
what was otherwise a conventional biography. Many historians and readers were
self-righteously upset by this act of epistemological betrayal, as the author did not
tell the readers what he was doing.34 In other words, he ‘pretended’ to be writing
a strictly mimetic history, ignoring his own diegetic voice.
Most historians tend to recognise the work of writers and filmmakers like Alice
Walker, Tom Wolfe, Studs Terkel, Joan Didion, Thomas Keneally, Alexander Kluge
or Milcho Manchevski as unhistorical. This is because reference to the past is unat-
tributed, or not offered according to conventional referencing criteria or, if it is, it
tends to be fictionalised. Or they may well mix the diegetic and the mimetic. But
what all these writers and filmmakers have done is seek meanings not solely defined
by the referential. This is an argument offered regularly by Frank R. Ankersmit and
Robert A. Rosenstone, who complain that most historians still subscribe to a classic
realist conception of the writing of history intending their accounts to be copies
(mimes) of what actually happened in the past.35 Once that idea is dismissed,
historians are free to invest in a vast range of possibilities. If we genuinely wish to
106 Narrative and History

engage with the concept of ‘what the past means’ we have to take on board the
central importance of the ontology (the being, nature and functioning) of narrative
(and how it changes in its mode of expression at the behest of the author).
Robert A. Rosenstone, arguably the leading advocate and exponent of experi-
mental history, summarises all this when he says

Experiments in writing history? An oxymoron surely? No writers have clung more firmly
(desperately, even) to traditional forms than those academic historians whose professed
aim is to accurately reconstruct the past. While the discipline has in the past century
undergone an enormous expansion in methodologies of research    opening up fields and
topics little dreamed of by earlier generations    the means of presenting the findings of
historical research has altered little. The monographs and synthetic works that historians
produce continue, for the most part, to tell the past as stories narrated in the third person,
linear stories with a clear sense of cause and effect, and a beginning, a middle and an
end.36

Most historians would still not accept what Rosenstone is saying for reasons
familiar to us from the discussion of modes of expression. Rosenstone points
out that twentieth-century challenges to realistic representation (impressionism,
cubism, constructivism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction, the New Wave,
postmodernism    ) have generated new ways of seeing, telling and creating
meaning. Historians, arguably, cannot be isolated from these developments. What
Rosenstone is saying is that an understanding of ‘writing history’ has opened up
an intellectual space for innovative history thinking and practice.
Thus, he noted in 2004 that for ‘    the past three decades, the possibility of
innovative historical writing, the notion of playing with new forms of narrative,
has floated around the edge of the profession’.37 But he had to acknowledge that
‘    little innovative historical writing has appeared in print’.38 The major outlets
for experimental narrative have been in other modes of expression. Indeed, other
modes of expression have often been claimed to be the cutting edge of experiment –
graphic, digital, film and TV. But, as we know, more often than not such modes
remain epistemologically unchallenging. Of course, for many (most?) historians
epistemological challenge is not what they signed up for. As a result experimental
history cannot yet be accommodated, much less the effort made à la new empiri-
cism to sanitise and domesticate it. And, of course, sanitisation and domestication
are essential precursors to ‘measurement for research funding purposes’.
So, why experiment with history?
Experimental history is about different ways of seeing and telling. It is often
happily opaque rather than miserably clear. It is not always referential but is poetic.
It is rarely an exercise in theory, but it is never under-theorised. It can illustrate
paradoxes such as ‘subjective realism’, which is no more of a paradox than ‘empir-
ical reality’ (except that does not acknowledge itself as such). Perhaps the key facet
 Understanding [in] History 107

of experimental history is that the experimentalist narrator intervenes for overt

purposes. Indeed, in practice, experimentalism often emerges from the disharmony
between the narrative voice of the author-historian and the way in which the text
is focalised as, for example, with Rosenstone’s intervention with the lives and
voices of his characters in Mirror in the Shrine. But, in the end, no listing of the
attributes of experimentalism will exhaust what it is. Indeed, different historians
at different times (in their careers) will experiment for many different reasons –
and they may/will return to empiricism and analysis (for what are usually secular
epistemological reasons and purposes). There are as many different intentions
behind experimenting as there are kinds of experiment.
Some experiments will engage with different modes of expression like experi-
mental film, the graphic novel, dramas or pantomime. Written texts may employ
different typefaces, or stream of consciousness textual effects, or produce literary
pastiche, montage and even sur-narrative. Indeed, reading fiction such as Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (a novel that re-arranges beginnings middles and
ends) or Martin Amis’s Times Arrow can tell us more about the nature of history
than reading hundreds of full metal jacket empirical texts. As might be expected,
self-reflexivity has a strong appeal for experimentalists. As Greg Dening suggests,
history can be seen as the rejection of reification in order to make the past live by
its (unavoidable) transformation into words, paint and dance (to ‘trans’ ‘form’ but
also to transgress forms).39 History is, in this sense, the transfiguration of the past.
Or, as Hayden White described it in the late 1990s, a ‘figural realism’ – a series of
studies in the ‘mimésis effect’.40
While analogies are not necessarily helpful I am tempted by the impressionist
movement that began in mid- to late-nineteenth-century France when the likes
of Cézanne, Bazille, Cassatt, Degas, Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, and so on
were hostages to innovation and who confronted institutionalised aesthetic ortho-
doxies. The parallel with history experimentalists appeals to me. But are exper-
imentalists really that innovative? After all, as an advocate of experimentalism
I am not suggesting deposing all extant conceptions of history. Is experimental
history, then, just an extension of the possibilities that already exist in the
empirical-analytical orthodoxy? Equally, is experimentalism an inevitable devel-
opment given our postmodern cultural and epistemologically sceptical condition?
Indeed, is experimental history not a rupture but a confirmation of our own place
in time? Or is it an underground terrorist movement intent on blowing up the
railway lines of empiricism? All this suggests, I suppose, that there are as many
narratives about experimental history as there are narrators.
But the impressionist analogy niggles. It is still unsatisfactory. We can see this
when we consider experimental history in terms of the nature of its experiments.41
Plainly, while the authorial function cannot be excised from experimental history
any more than it can be from traditional approaches, different voices can be
108 Narrative and History

employed. The autobiography of Henry Adams is an early if rather constrained

example of experimentalism written as it is by its subject in the third person.42
The convention of hidden and omniscient narration can be explored by self-
consciously using it. Self-conscious playing (ludic history) with the timing of
the text to defamiliarise the reception of the past is always permissible and is
to be encouraged. There can be acrostic history, cryptic history and anagram
history. Thus a crossword, properly constructed, can be a mode of historical
understanding.
Chopping up the linear narrative is increasingly common, its origin is in
modernism’s self-consciousness – as with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project written
between the end of the 1920s and unfinished in 1940. Using the arcades of Paris as
an analogy, in the main section of 36 elements with titles like ‘Mirrors’, ‘Flâneur’
and ‘Fashion’, Benjamin tried to resolve the problems he saw with his Marxist
philosophy of history and its organisation of the past. He believed, for example,
that the process of montage would serve his aim of explaining the movement and
purpose of historical time.43
The numbers of examples of experimental history has grown substantially in the
past decade with the publication of texts like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In 1926:
Living at the Edge of Time. Ignoring the conventional ‘beginning, middle and end’
formula, Gumbrecht pieced together 51 entries or fragments of reference to the
past and, avoiding totalisation, offered a picture of 1 year – 1926. Gumbrecht’s
objective was to confront the verities of correspondence and linearity saying the
reader should not ‘    start from the beginning’ as there was no beginning. As he
said the point of the exercise was to make ‘    at least some readers forget, during
the reading process, that they are not living in 1926’.44 And, most pertinently,
he asked what could we do without knowledge ‘    about the past once we have
given up the hope of “learning from history” ’? In abandoning the classic realist
narrative with its omniscient and silent author, linear cause-and-effect modes of
explanation and meaning, we are suddenly open to any form of imagining and
representing history – even synchronically as in his book. There is no coherent
‘picture’ of the past anymore – not even an ‘impression’. This lack of sequentiality
in deranging our sense of agency and action (cause and effect) demonstrates we
are, perhaps, moving towards a postist kind of history.
Synthia Sydnor’s article ‘A History of Synchronised Swimming’ published in the
Journal of Sport History over 10 years ago, and creating quite a stir at the time, is
an arresting history experiment that utilises Benjaminian thinking and which is a
self-conscious experiment in making a history narrative.45 Sydnor offers a heavily
referenced and epistemologically realist ‘modern text’ with, as she says, ‘post-
modern concerns’ that are semiotic specifically that in, as she says, ‘    through,
and out of language we create, discover, invent and signify our world’.46 Deploying
a pastiche narrative form, Sydnor defamiliarises the conformation of history
 Understanding [in] History 109

thus promoting greater freedom than is conventionally allowed for the reader to
construct their own ‘history’ of, in this case, synchronised swimming.
Robert Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine is a recounting of cultural contact that is
a commentary upon the smoothing out function of conventional history.47 Sven
Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing also confronts the smooth narrative making of
history, defining his experiment as a book that is a labyrinth with 22 entrances
and no exit, where readers choose their own pathway through the text.48 Meaning
is entirely – or so it seems – in the mind of the reader. As far as I am concerned,
there is an implied author in this experiment and (according to my reading) it is
the West’s holocaustal and genocidal character. But it does not have to be.
What experimental history does through its fresh emphasis upon the nature
of representation and expression is not just force the issue of explanation and
meaning but also challenge empirical-analytical concepts of objectivity and truth.
In this sense experimental history is primarily political. Indeed, we have reached
a point where we might wish to do away with the term ‘experimental history’ and
adopt a term like ‘expressionist history’. Such a change in terminology would not
only acknowledge the connections between content/story, narrating/narration and
mode of expression but it would turn our attention from ‘representation’ towards
‘knowledge through expression’. I suggested when I discussed different modes of
expression in Chapter 4 that they do not necessarily reflect a radical epistemological
choice. But new modes of expression can result from epistemological choices, and
allow us to pursue them.
Expressionist historians could thus, perhaps, render ‘the truth’ of the past as a
presentation of expressive possibilities that acknowledge the horizon of expecta-
tions of the consumer of the history.49 Presumably for the reconstructionist whose
horizons of expectation are empirical-analytical, expressionist history makes no
sense, and similarly for the constructionist. For the deconstructionist the history
experiment’s expressive deployment of its narrative functions is as much the centre
of attention as its ostensive engagement with the past. So, experimental history
is not really in the business (necessarily) of giving a new impression of the past.
While experimental history makes no sense to conventional reconstructionist and
constructionist thinking, it does in deconstructive terms if only because it draws
our attention to ‘sublime historical experience’ that Ankersmit notes, or what I
would call the ‘malleability of expression’.50

 Conclusion
Today histories that deliberately explore their own literary constructedness
with their intentionally authored and voiced character are more common.
Consequently, there is no longer a single, utterly convincing answer to the
110 Narrative and History

question: What is History Today? Thus, for some historians it is not an absolute
requirement that prospecting in the sources and deploying new methods, theories
and conceptualisations is the only and professionally authorised route to engaging
with the-past-as-history. Historical explanation and meaning can also be achieved
through the recognition of history’s artifice, located in its timing and ordering,
the re-situation of its referentiality, the ontology of its textuality, and its political
purposes and expressions. The great and giddying fear among the rump of the
empirically absolutist consequent upon such an answer is that the history that
results deviates from their accepted notions of explanation and meaning (produ-
cing the history equivalent in art of Fauvism [the wild beasts)]?).51
But the question has now been posed. Henceforth, can history still only be
‘judged’ according to the classic realist empirical-analytical calculus? The charge is
often levelled that experimental history, in particular, obscures explanation and
meaning and is, consequently, at best a conceited and at worst a pointless activity.
Experimentalists/expressionists would respond that the greater hazard and most
dangerous recklessness are the belief in constancy of explanation and that the
meaning that supposedly flow from it. Experimental/expressionist history acknow-
ledges the discordant in our own lives, its ironies, and most of all the inadequacies
of realist representation. But, perhaps most disconcerting for conventionalists is
the undermining of the notion of certainty in our understanding of the past.
Nevertheless, explanation and meaning is now challenged in textual history as it
is in other modes of expression and, clearly, they cannot all be judged according to
the same set of arbitrary empirical and analytical rules. But if our epistemological
scepticism has confronted explanation and meaning, then what happens to truth
and objectivity?52 I turn to this in Chapter 7.
7 The Oar in Water

Since Plato the notion of ‘the oar in water’ – the way the oar seems to bend/break
in water – has reminded us that, when considering issues of objectivity, truth
and relativism, the circumstances of seeing affect our perception. This suggests
rethinking the connections between explanation and meaning in history. The
realist will say that an object will not necessarily be perceived identically at all
times, but this does not affect the reality of its true nature. So, while the past must
be cast in a ‘historical’ narrative that does not alter the shape of the past. The
anti-representationalist response is that if the object can only be understood in
a medium that refracts its reality (the past can only ever be represented through
narratives about it – see the hermeneutic circle) then knowledge is always relative –
in the case of history to the process of narrative making.
With the nineteenth century, however, came the ‘age of positivism’ (the victory
of science in terms of objective and method) which broadened the gap between
literature and history even though in both the greatest ‘author-ity’ remained the
writer and their style.1 But so powerful was the cultural force of science and
scientific explanation even in literature that by the end of the nineteenth century,
literature itself had succumbed to the power of the real through the literary move-
ments of ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’. In effect, the banality of (primarily middle-
class) reality and existence edged out what, since Aristotle, had been assumed to
be the ‘revelatory nature’ of literature.
But historians generally were not interested in revelatory universal truths and
insights into human existence (notable exceptions were Marx, Spengler, Toynbee,
etc.). The vast majority of historians were interested in the limited knowledge of
‘what happened’ through empiricism, specifically factualism. Eventually, empir-
icism was joined to social theory, which then crushed all before it. Indeed, even
the notion of authorship was quietly disposed of. Authorship was taken to mean
subjectivity rather than objectivity, and relativism rather than truth. Dreaming
about the possibilities in the past was not something historians did anymore.2
In the first 60 years of the twentieth century, history was worked through a
variety of empirical and analytical grinding machines. These included economic
and social history, the Annales School, Marxist constructionism (in almost all
its forms), cliometrics and cultural history, and empiricism coupled to analysis
reached its peak in the first phase of women’s history. Literature and history were

111
112 Narrative and History

now totally separate disciplines with, it was claimed, distinctive epistemologies.

However, through the early 1950s Paul Ricoeur offered an important brief analysis
of history, truth, objectivity, relativism and subjectivity in which he questioned
this notion though he eventually fell back on the side of the empiricist angels.3
But it was the intellectual revolution of the 1970s and especially the publication of
Hayden White’s Metahistory that produced the breakthrough (or disaster depending
on your point of view) that ushered in the narrative turn in historical studies. In
effect, what White was proposing was a narrative return. Employing the work of
literary scholars like Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye on archetypal emplotments
and Stephen Pepper on root metaphors (tropes), White demonstrated how major
nineteenth-century historians produced history (creating story spaces) in the same
way as literary scholars.
Up to the present day this thesis has generated a continuous and often
rancorous debate about what historians do and think. The claim that history
was a literary form occurred against the background of a variety of European
philosophical developments such as structuralism, poststructuralism, new histor-
icism, deconstruction, postmodernism and a variety of ‘turns’ like the linguistic,
narrative, aesthetic, ethical, and most recently the compensatory efforts of the
new empiricist re-turn. With issues like explanation, meaning, objectivity and
truth in the melting pot the stakes are still high.
During this period most historians clung to the philosopher David Carr’s judge-
ment (as shared with Paul Ricoeur) that the historical narrative must retain the
structure of the events described. This is the fundamental basis of the belief that
the historical narrative can be objective and truthful. In other words, the history
narrative aims to be – ultimately – symmetrical with past reality. White’s judge-
ment was that historians should no longer (naively) believe that statements about
the past ‘correspond’ to a pre-existing body of ‘raw facts’. He argued that what
constitutes the facts themselves is the problem which, in his view, could only
be resolved by the act of figuration/aesthetic choice. Moreover, because the gap
between the past and the history is unbridgeable via the story, if we want to retain
a notion of truth, we need to seek out its mechanism in our narrative making. But
this produces a new definition of ‘objectivity’ and ‘historical truth’. This is why
White became, and remains, such a controversial historian. It is also why he is
probably the most famous historian-philosopher of his generation.
White’s argument suggested a lack of neutrality that deconstructionist history
openly acknowledged, believing empiricists had not demonstrated objectivity
and truth in their accounts despite the testable statement of justified belief.
Concomitant with this has been the general failure to understand the nature
of content/story, narration/narrating and modes of expression. Conventional
history thinking generally had rejected the significance of the relationship in
history between form and content by concentrating on empiricism and inference.
 The Oar in Water 113

In effect, however, what the Whitean revolution has produced is a new history
in which increasing numbers of historians produce experimental history in new
modes of expression. So what happens to the primal claim that history must be
objective? Let us see.

 Objectivity
As we know, reconstructionists and constructionists seek to be objective in their
knowledge acquisition through the mechanism of explanation that best fits the
available evidence. The response of the narrativist is to say that is fine as far as
it goes, but the definitions of objectivity (and truth) implied by this mechanism
do not sit well in an interpretative (hermeneutic) discipline that is about far more
than just getting the facts straight. And, moreover, to our cost we forget the nature
of history as a conduit between the self as a subject and the past as an object.
But what do most historians mean when they talk about ‘objectivity’. Basically,
objectivity has been understood in four related ways. First, it is acknowledged to be
a state of mind of the honest, fair-minded and judicious historian who is steeped
in and led by the sources. The second understanding concerns methodology and
representation. The honest and judicious historian deploys a method and a form
of representation in which ‘(objectively derived) discoveries’ (in the archive) are
described fairly (as history). And, third, as C. Behan McCullagh puts it echoing the still
widely accepted view of E.H. Carr, we have objective knowledge when we know what
a text means. From this historians can legitimately claim that their professionalism
and procedures for understanding the evidence and thereby objectively delivering
‘truthful interpretations’ of past texts control the boundaries of ‘proper history’.
Objectivity is also generally thought of as being the opposite of bias. There is a sort
of inverse ratio between them. It is usually claimed that if we can minimise bias we
maximise objectivity. The fallacy in this is the unjustified belief that a given body of
data will contain its own ‘given story’ from which any deviation constitutes a bias.
Discover the story, and the history will be objective. This is akin to a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Apart from exaggerating the likelihood of ‘knowing the story’, the concept
of bias/objectivity (as polar opposites) demands that we raise ourselves from any
normal state of ontological commitment. So we are required to step outside our
beliefs, ideologies, arguments, emplotments, theories and authorial decisions.
To do this we must never take any evidence at face value.4 Historians are also
aware that when they enter the archive they carry political baggage with them. But,
as they go through the methodological procedures of comparison and verification
they are self-conscious about being the honest historian who only ever strives (but
in all modesty rarely achieves) explanations to best fit. If pressed every historian will
tell you their own ‘archive story’, which ranges from the exhilaration of Deborah A.
114 Narrative and History

Symonds when trapped in the Scottish Record Office to Durba Ghosh’s account of
her feelings of exclusion and alienation as an ‘Indian’ woman in colonial archives.5
It is no doubt right to be aware of the problems historians have with their exper-
ience of the archive, as well as recognising their efforts to be fair, even-handed
and painstaking in establishing accurate reference. But, of course, being self-
conscious and following ‘objective procedures’ cannot resolve Ankersmit’s point
about the epistemological distinction between a justified belief and a created
history narrative. The ‘objective procedures argument’ assumes, in effect, that
nothing of significance happens between ‘knowing the data’ and ‘creating the
history’, maintaining that if the evidence is adequate one explanation will be
superior to any other and, by definition, it is likely to be the one objectively derived
(and true) narrative.6 But, taking the opposite tack, as the feminist historian Joan
Scott has long argued, the absolute appeal to reference is never enough. Indeed
it is misleading given that it does not break the epistemological stranglehold of
which objectivity and truth are central planks. For Scott, to better understand the
nature of the (gendered) past it needs to be ‘read’, as it can only be read, within the
textual substance we call history with all the authorial assumptions and narratives
choices that go into making it.
Despite the respect for objectively derived data, the history of history in the
West amply demonstrates that gender and cultural bias has existed in male, white,
metropolitan, bourgeois history from the seventeenth through to most of the
twentieth century. Historians created the history of those aspects of the past in
which they were/are personally interested (and often which their publishers have
suggested they write about). Unfortunate though it might be, the desire to see
historians counter personal and cultural biases is a counsel of perfection. Though
bias is deplorable when it leads to the omission or ‘invention’ of data, the ontolo-
gical commitments of an individual or a culture make dispositions and proclivities
inevitable to some degree. In reply to this latter argument the empirical-analytical
trump card is the historian’s commitment to rationality. But, desirable though
rationality is, this is a red herring because it is rational thinking that has produced
the doubts many historians hold about the exclusivity of empirical-analytical
history. To acknowledge and work within the human condition is not to be irra-
tional or endorse irrationality.
What I am saying, I suppose, is that ‘bias’ (positioning) exists from the outset
in the initial epistemological choices of historians. While epistemological sceptics
will never be certain about the status of knowledge, non-epistemological scep-
tics will be sure that objectivity is within their grasp if not always absolutely
achievable. The epistemologist who believes in objectivity will – by definition –
have an ontological commitment to justification. The epistemological historian of
nineteenth-century British foreign policy who wants to discover the most appro-
priate explanation for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire will presumably, at
 The Oar in Water 115

some point, examine the evidence of Disraeli’s contempt for Slav nationalism. She
or he may then feel justified that they have inched ‘forward’ in an objective way
towards an objective conclusion. This is a belief that can only be justified by the
outcomes: a circular argument indeed.
Paul Ricoeur has summarised some of our understandings of objectivity when he
argued that we expect ‘a certain objectivity which is proper to it’ in and through
the methods of history.7 His argument not only stressed the objectivity of method
but also acknowledged ‘the role of the historian’s subjectivity    ’ in the ‘elabora-
tion of history’.8 The terms of the historian’s subjectivity, as Ricoeur acknowledges,
encompass many choices. These include data, the appropriate theory (including
the preferred theory or sense of causality), the imposition of the historian’s imagin-
ation on the past and, of course, the distance between the historical agent as ‘the
other’ and the historian. But Ricoeur hoped that recognising all this would generate
a ‘good’ subjectivity whereby the ‘historian’s craft educates his subjectivity’.9
Ricoeur concludes, importantly, by also noting the subjectivity inherent in the
reception of the history by the reader who ultimately provides the historical
meaning.
The deconstructionist historian holds that historians always live in a state of
subjective or relativist knowledge, because, as Ricoeur argues, that is just how we
exist. The past cannot be ‘known’ except through an immensely complex variety
of different story space and narrative making strategies of which reference is only
one. The others include those with which we are now very familiar: methods
but also arguments, emplotments, aesthetic choices, ethical beliefs, the ordering
of the timing of the narrative, voice and focalisation, and the constraints of
different modes of emplotment. In addition to the fictive structuring process there
are also personal orientations related to gender, class, race, nation, culture, the
desire for research funding, promotion, publication, peer respect and so on. No
doubt getting the facts straight is crucial, but this has to be viewed within a much
bigger framework, not least that the past has to be (re-)created as an ‘object’ of the
historian’s mind. The reading of the textual relics of the past means constituting
them as an object of study by the historian, and this is unavoidably a subjective
activity. This only becomes a radical claim if it is assumed that there can be an
objective reading derived by other means.10
So, if we dismiss objectivity from our vocabulary, what are we left with? Well, I
have constantly stressed that it does not mean historians are no longer concerned
with the evidence of past events or have automatically lost all sense of right
and wrong. Events can be described accurately as having happened and, by that
measure, not every interpretation is as good as any other. But the crucial point
is that because the historian takes past reality and explains its meaning in a way
that makes us experience it, it can only be undertaken through the creation of
a particular story space. Subjectivity can be defined, therefore, in terms of the
116 Narrative and History

process of narrative making that allows us experience the past. Every literary act is
subjective because it is authored.
It is the function of the reader to determine for herself or himself why some
views of the past are plausible, satisfactory or convincing and others are not. All
historians and consumers experience the past differently and this forces us to
represent it differently. If we simply try to describe the past (as objectivity demands)
we do not get very far (this happened, then that    ). Description allows us to
refer and predict (the subject and predicate of statements of justified belief). But
we do not only do that in history. What we actually do is represent or, as I prefer,
express the past. You will recall the basic argument here, which is that the historical
narrative does not distinguish between subject and predicate – represented and its
representation are not the same as subject and predicate.
So, to cope with history as a narrative we have to rethink the primacy of the
empirical-analytical notion of objectivity. In a universe where historians have to
construct the question to which the answer is the text before us, we have to
acknowledge how we (as historians) have expectations about both the forms of
explanation and the meaning derived therefrom. But, if we accept that our defin-
itions of explanation, meaning and objectivity may never be agreed upon, what
happens to the concept of truth? Certainly for the reconstructionist and probably
also for most constructionists, if we dismiss objectivity in hermeneutics (the science
of interpretation) then surely we are destroying the firewall that protects history
from lies and a variety of viruses such as poststructuralism, relativism, postmodern
theory and empirical denial? Without objectivity don’t we lose all grip on truth?

 Truth
The subjective nature of history (as an authored narrative making activity that
attempts to reconstitute, reconcile and explain past reality) means re-orientating
our thinking from epistemological to ontological terms.11 In the understanding
of truth this means rejecting the belief that there is an epistemological hierarchy
between a subject and an object and replacing that notion with a sense of conti-
guity. In other words, the historian as a subject and the-past-as-history as an object
need to be viewed hermeneutically – as sharing the same ontological space. Hence,
as Jacques Derrida so famously pointed out, there is no directly accessible authority
beyond the text.12 Because the historian quotes the references this does not place
her or him ‘outside’ or ‘above’ history. This is because she or he is an active parti-
cipant in its creation. What this means is that we cannot generalise from ‘the fact’
to ‘the history’ in terms of ‘truth’. This is because of the metonymic nature of
language and the reader’s inevitable (to some degree) re-writing of all texts. Hence,
the way truth is regarded by empiricists (as the correspondence of experience to
 The Oar in Water 117

its description) has to be modified. Instead of regarding attested evidence as akin

to truth, it is merely evidence for the possibility of truth.
But first, just how does the empirical-analytical historian define truth? You will
recall that the assumption is that communicating the truth in history is essentially
re-telling its story. The history must be pretty close to the truth of the past because
it is honestly undertaken ‘best fit’ history. So, re-telling the story starts with the
laudable desire to be truthful. Here again partiality on the part of the historian
must be avoided – hence the need for objectivity of approach. Clearly, however,
this definition does not exhaust the nature of ‘historical truth’. Nevertheless,
as the foremost ‘philosopher of truth’ in history, C. Behan McCullagh defines
objectivity as knowledge of what a ‘text’ means defined in terms of the justified
statement of historical belief.13 Upon this basis we can reasonably assume that
historical descriptions are probably true. In addition, McCullagh defends the belief
in representationalism – that reality (reference) can be represented accurately in
language. This argument forms the basis of the four major theories of ‘historical
truth’ that historians are free to deploy.
The first theory of truth is the one with which we are most familiar: corres-
pondence. These days even the most unreconstructed reconstructionist accepts
that correspondence in a facsimile or full-blooded mimetic sense is unlikely. They
accept that a complete linguistic picture of past reality is impossible. But ultimately
correspondence results from the bedrock belief that the real world exists beyond
our selves and how we describe it. So, the reasonable option must be to accept that
we can provide explanations and meanings that are fairly and objectively derived
and which reasonably fit the data. This is all well and good but plainly correspond-
ence starts to fail beyond the factual level. In other words, if correspondence fails
at the level of the narrative substance then a different kind of truth is created in
the narrative. This is no longer a correspondence form of truth.
The second version of truth is correlation and it is the one favoured by most
historians. This is actually a moderated correspondence theory. Still believing that
sentences will ultimately connect with past reality, the assumption now is that
our perceptions are caused by reality. In other words what we reasonably believe
about the past does not have to correspond precisely with reality but is gener-
ally caused by it. We know this to be the case as our perceptions actually make
sense because they co-relate to and with each other. By cross-checking our sources
(through comparison and contextualisation) we can determine how reasonable
are our beliefs. Thus the mindset of the historian is to believe that the evidence
‘strongly supports’ their descriptions. So when the historian John Burnett claims
that in the late 1870s in England and Wales beer consumption rose to 40.5 gallons
a head, this is ‘suggested’ by the evidence.14
The third form of truth is coherence as found in constructivism/constructionist
history. This further loosens from the grip of correspondence and also correlation
118 Narrative and History

but is still firmly realist in orientation. Because the past(-thing-in-itself) is not

knowable (as Baudrillard argues) correspondence (even if it worked) cannot be
known (to work), and even correlation will not do more than imply the likeli-
hood of a meaningful connection between the past and its description, so there
is a need for a more flexible theory of truth. This tips the balance towards those
historians who wish to inject a sense of the constructed nature of history into
their understanding of the past. The philosopher-historians Michael Oakeshott
and Leon Goldstein both argued (following the logic of the hermeneutic circle)
that knowledge cannot be separated from the knower and their experience of life.
The result is a situation in which, notwithstanding correspondence and correla-
tion, the historian literally makes history and the most they can hope for is to
do it plausibly, rationally and coherently and with appropriate deference to the
empirical.15 Essentially coherence/constructivism holds that the evidence can only
clue us to likely hypotheses as to the nature of the past but neither the evidence
nor the hypothesis can be identified (in either a correspondence or a correlation
sense) with the past itself. So the best historians can do is to construct (place a
construction on) the past.
In many respects the constructivism/constructionist search for truth is the most
convincing account available for most historians.16 Certainly of the three forms
or theories of truth I have described the narrativist theory of history (which I am
explaining in this book) is a literary elaboration of the constructivist position. But
it is one that, by acknowledging the authorial and narrative function activities of
the historian, doubts the constructionist belief that theories can prise open the
truth of the past. In other words, history constructs a truth; it does not re-tell it.
The fourth kind of truth and perhaps the most unsatisfactory is the consensus
theory. Surely, you may think that correspondence–correlation–coherence is a
potent truth-acquiring brew – good enough to see off all epistemological sceptics –
so why do we need another? Essentially, the consensus theory of truth holds that
if historians as a group of honest, fair-minded, reasonable, objectivity and truth-
seeking individuals agree on something then it must be a virtual guarantee that
it is right. But while this may work at the level of confirming a justified belief
(that the Battle of Crecy was fought on August 13, 1346), it patently does not
apply at the level of interpretation. An interpretation might be that Edward III of
England won the Battle of Crécy because of the power of the English Longbows
sending thousands of arrows a minute with each hit equivalent to a shot from a
powerful handgun. It may not be universally agreed. But if it were so agreed then
the consensus theory of truth would be operating at its most forceful.
Of course it is all much less clear-cut than this four-truth model suggests. This
is because the question remains: if truth in history does not take the form of
correspondence, correlation or coherence then its truth must result as much from
the metonymic organisation of the history narrative as it does from anything else.
 The Oar in Water 119

In effect we have a deflated variety of truth in which meaning is prior to truth.

For the sake of brevity we can call this narrative truth. As Michael Lemon argues,
history is always an account.17 He says ‘by true’ we do not mean all the facts in the
history are true (which we will ask at some point of course) but that the account as
a whole is ‘true’; that it does not omit things which are clearly relevant or includes
things which are not. So, all the facts in a history can be accurate and carefully
chosen for their relevance and significance, but the account itself need not end up
being ‘true’. It seems that, because history is a form of realist literature, its truth
claims need to be judged by criteria beyond the four versions we have just noted.
So what is the best way of approaching the nature of truth in history?
As will be clear by now, we need to begin by acknowledging the functioning of
narrative. What we should call ‘narrative truth’ or ‘historical truth’ (always placed
in inverted commas) does not reject empirical-analytical methods for finding out
what happened and offering explanations that best fit the evidence. But, unlike
the restricted empirical-analytical notion of truth so elegantly described by Richard
Rorty as the ‘mirror of nature’, increasing numbers of historians are shifting
towards a concept of ‘historical truth’ derived from an understanding of narrative
constructivism.18
Jerome Bruner has argued we all make the world (past and present) through our
capacity to create narratives.19 We are also aware, from our reading of Gadamer,
White, Ricoeur and Ankersmit, that the aesthetic is where we must look for truth in
its broadest meaning beyond ‘this happened, then that, because    ’. This suggests
that ‘historical truth’ is a form of truth in which empirically attested statements
do not exist independently but that their meaning derives from their functioning
within the narrative.
Therefore, attested data – empirical factualism – does not in and of itself consti-
tute truth in history. Truth in history is much more complex because it is that
yield of its authorial functions (of which reference is only one). Hence it is that
truth in history is part ideological, part emplotment, part aesthetic choice, partly a
function of authorial voice and focalisation, in part the result of the timing of the
text, intentionality (of both the agent and the author-historian) and so forth.
Put at its simplest truth in history is a function of content/story, narrating and
narration and mode of expression as the author-historian poses questions, creates
expectations and offers conclusions.
The fear that accompanies this definition of ‘historical truth’ is that it will
become a function of ‘good stories’ that in themselves have little to do with
what actually happened. That this fear is unwarranted is because the narrative
logic of history retains reference within the content/story function maintaining
all its compulsions and authority at the level of statements of justified belief.
Having said that, the mode of expression selected by the historian will dramatically
confront textualised empirical-analytical assumptions about truth. But, as the
120 Narrative and History

pro-film history theorist Robert Rosenstone has argued, when dramatic history
films like Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989) create a history, they still communicate
important and valuable information about the past and how we deal with it.20
Nevertheless, the fear that constantly lurks in the minds of empiricists concerns
the existence of competing narratives that refuse to accept the authority of the
data with its one given story. This apparently terrifying situation is actually
very common, as one would expect in a constructed narrative. For example,
the narrative in Genesis is irreconcilable with that of evolutionism or, even
more confusingly given that the dispute is rarely over statements of justified belief,
the narrative of economistic Marxism is incompatible with that of post-Marxism.
This incompatibility will never be resolved for the simple reason that the different
narratives are generated, in this example, by competing sets of historicist epistem-
ological assumptions.21
It can be argued that knowing how ‘historical truth’ works requires under-
standing and accepting history as a performative act. In Seymour Chatman’s
analysis ‘the story’ (what he calls the fabula, a term he borrows from Russian
formalists) is where the truth of the history (as opposed to the truth of single state-
ment of justified belief) emerges.22 The content/story contains the references to
the events in the past but that is no more important than, for example, the emplot-
ment. Indeed, for Hayden White, viewed as verbal artifacts, histories and novels
are indistinguishable. So, it follows that, for ‘historical truth’ defined as ‘knowing
what happened and what it most likely means’, results from the operation of all
the elements within the content/story (which includes reference).23
Of course in practice the operation of the other two elements in the triad, namely
narration/narrating and mode of expression, complicate all this. Dependent upon
the historian’s epistemological choices, the ‘truth’ of the history may be retained
as it shifts through a variety of modes of expression (ballet, formal history text,
film, painting, comic, website, and first-person museum interpretation) because
the story remains coherent and essentially the same one. Events and actions remain
what they were/are even if they are words, gestures or images. But there is always
a degree of deformation and transformation as the content/story is imaginatively
translated into different modes of expression if only because each mode has its
own particular physical demands.
Because, as we know, textual and filmic history both possess analepsis or ‘flash-
back’ and prolepsis or ‘flash forward’, their cognitive truth-effects will be different.
The justifiably famous textual history of African-Americans by John Hope Franklin
From Slavery to Freedom (first published in 1947) cannot be rendered in film and
possess the same kind of ‘truthfulness’. This is not because of the ‘failings’ of film
but the nature of Franklin’s history cast in a different mode of expression and
produced for that expression. The fact that many ‘history stories’ are transposed
between modes of expression is, perhaps, the best reason for arguing that ‘the
 The Oar in Water 121

history narrative’ is a structure that is not reliant on any particular one. And,
most importantly, it is important to remember that, as I have already suggested,
the textual is not and never should be privileged relative to other forms. It seems
appropriate, therefore, to conclude this chapter with a brief comment on the issue
of relativism.

 Relativism
I hope it is clear now that the historical narrative encompasses much more than
the single statement of justified belief. ‘Historical truth’, on the other hand, as I
have argued, refers to truth experienced and engineered by the narrative and story
space logic of history with all its content/story, narrational authorial intrusion and
modes of expression demands. Consequently, the idea that truth in narrative is
only a kind of rhetorical persuasion through the cunning use of metaphors should
be dismissed for the misunderstanding it is.24 It is worth noting that relativism is
not the same as subjectivism. By relativism is meant the belief that what is true
(or desirable for that matter) depends on external circumstances. This does not
entail subjectivism, which follows from the principle that truth or un-truth do
not depend on the actual state of reality – hence ‘historical truth’ is a function of
‘history’.
Another misunderstanding is that relativism is an obstacle to discovering the
‘true origins’ of, say, baseball, or ‘the causes’ of the American Civil War. Rather,
I would define it as the acknowledgement of there being many points of view,
cultural locations, authorial creativities, ‘historical truths’ and the arbitrary nature
of signs and significations. I have no problem with ‘situated knowledge’ in the
arts and humanities, or with that relativism which makes absent the concept of
certainty. Nevertheless the notion of relativism as being integral to the historical
enterprise – because of the latter’s narrative construction – is still widely feared as
interrupting the current of meaning between the past and its history.
But such angst flows only from a failure to understand history as an authorial
act that makes the connection between subject and object. The ‘relativist model
of history’ is the one that the experimentalist will certainly feel most at home
with, but all historians should be able to cope with it as well. History viewed as
a historicist and relativist undertaking is a liberated intellectual activity because
it is no longer exclusively tied to notions of positivist/scientific reliability. The
pragmatist philosopher Hilary Putnam argues that as fact dissolves into values,
relativism in history opens up more possibilities than it closes down.25 Henceforth
we can explore history as politics, as parable, as experiment, as allegory and above
all, acknowledge it as the constructed story it is.
122 Narrative and History

Indeed, can it be anything else if we accept that the historian is at once a creator
and creation of an ideology, culture, gender or whatever? Ontologically we exist
relative to place, time, concepts, circumstances, personal ambition, race, language
and so on. Our knowledge of the past is situated relative not only to the data or
its construction as a narrative, but also to its intertextuality and to the discursive
formation(s) in which we exist. Historians, by and large, are not metaphysical
relativists who believe there is no independent reality back there outside our minds.
However, epistemological sceptics are relativists who accept that knowledge of the
past is constrained by forces they cannot control but which they can recognise.
Such historians take issue with crude empirical notions of objectivity and truth and
are willing to engage with history as a socially useful meaning-creating activity. It
is not a matter of ‘what the past tells us’, but what we think it is ‘good to believe’
as we create history.26
In acknowledging the inherent relativism of history thinking and practice – from
epistemological choice to the timing of the text through to the selection of mode
of expression – epistemological scepticism permits the examination of subjectivity
and the identity of the author-historian while still telling us what happened. The
empirical specificity of history can still be there to be explored in the ‘conventional
ways’, but – and this is the crucial point – it does not have to be, to still ‘qualify’
as history. In rethinking the conventional definition of history to acknowledge its
triadic structure of content/story, narration/narrating and mode of expression, the
historian has a new freedom in creating knowledge and understanding.

 Conclusion
The issues of objectivity, truth and relativism remain central to historical analysis.
But, if we assume history is a narrative representation created by an author-
historian about the past, we need to understand how she or he creates the-past-
as-history despite the empirical-analytical insistence that historians are ciphers
and the past is somehow using their minds as conduits. I have noted how this
epistemological position produces the peculiar notion that history can be (must
be) an objective discipline that deals only in truth or falsity. To adhere to the
‘auteur theory of history’ is supposed to promote subjectivity, deny objectivity,
is an admission of relativism and is a perverse rejection of the accepted stand-
ards of historical method.27 Happily this is not the case. No longer is reference
more important than, say, emplotment or argument. Indeed, without applying the
concept of ‘the author’ to the process of creating history all we would be left with
is a crude and stultifying epistemological conception of where history comes from
and, worse, where it is going.
Conclusion

In this examination of the state of historical knowledge, I have argued that our
understanding of the structure of the work of history demands the recognition
of the nature and cognitive significance of its content/story, narrating/narration
and mode of expression. I have explored this in terms of the epistemological
choice of the historian, specifically their attitude to the narrative turn. Deploying
the familiar reconstructionist, constructionist and deconstructionist epistemo-
logical choices or genres open to historians, I noted how the conventional equation
for reconstructionists and constructionists relies on the determining authority of
empirical reference (evidence or sources) which leads to explanation and then
meaning. This process claims to be undertaken with analytical objectivity aimed
at producing the truth of the past. The results of this conventional thinking are
then reported in the form of a narrative cast as ‘the story of    ’. Although a few
historians today will argue they are perfectly well aware that they cannot locate the
story, the plan remains to find it. As Ricoeur pointed out, beneath every history
construction there is a reconstructionist aim.
My position has been that of the deconstructionist who argues that this conven-
tional empirical-analytical epistemological approach fails to take adequate account
of the narrative logic of history. This, in turn, raises issues concerning reality,
reference, explanation, meaning objectivity and truth. In the analysis of the
narrative logic of history offered in this book, I have tried to account for the
mix of Genette’s three elements of story, narrating and narrative by translating it
into a structure that reflects the epistemologically challenged thinking and prac-
tice of historians. It is central to Genette’s analysis of narrative that the process
of narrating is, in effect, the author’s production of ‘    narrative action and, by
extension, the whole of the real or fictional situation in which that action takes
place’.1 This, the story space created by the historian out of the action of the
historical agent, is, plainly, not a replication of the past. It is the past narratively
turned into history: the-past-as-history.
Following the work of Genette, and other leading narrative and history thinkers
like Ricoeur, Chatman, White, Mink and Ankersmit, I suggested understanding
narrative opens up the relationship between the real, reference and representation.
Using the three-tier model of mimésis of Ricoeur, I argued that history is always

123
124 Narrative and History

subject to a mimetic loop through which the past is turned into history. In arguing
for this logic I suggested that the arc that takes historians from the archive to
meaning is fraught with the kinds of issues and difficulties that are ignored in the
histories of reconstructionists and constructionists. While there is no doubt decon-
structionist historians accept and deploy reference and inference, they address a
wide variety of other narrative choices that are made by the historian.
I have suggested that rather than examine narrative as a cognitive instrument,
all reconstructionists and too many constructionists still tend to argue that decon-
structionists do not give enough credit to them for their levels of sophistication,
self-consciousness and narrative awareness.2 In response to that, and the claim
that narrativists abandon the truth-claims of history, I argued that the deconstruc-
tionist recognition of the fictive and aesthetic nature of the historical narrative is
a corrective only to the absolutism of the statement of justified belief.
For reconstructionists and constructionists, history (history defined as the form
of the past) is inferior to the past (content). This exemplifies the fallacy that,
for all its referentiality, the historical narrative is not a linguistic copy of the
past. As semiotic and symbolic representations, histories cannot, by definition, be
‘discovered’ or be ‘truthful’ in any sense that does not acknowledge their fictively
constructed nature. Though they possess referential, sentence-length descriptions
(statements of ‘fact’), histories are premeditated discourses and literary construc-
tions all the way through. Hence, the ‘reality of the past’ can only be engaged
via the aesthetic turn. Even reconstructionists must make narratives. Even for
them history is an experience and activity produced by the ontological conti-
guity between author-historian and the past. In other words, historians are an
unavoidable part of the history they produce.
In most circumstances (apart from when the demands of experimentalism
dictate otherwise) it continues to be important that factual statements can be
demonstrated to be empirically true/false. Although there is a potent ethical turn
to be found in all histories, there is also a cultural imperative that we get the
facts straight and do not deny the well-attested evidence. Deconstructionist histor-
ians do not downplay the functioning or the difficulty of research. Nor do they
deny that there are many sophisticated historians who recognise the problems
of the silent archive, or that there is no useful role for high-powered theorising.
But, fundamentally, history is historiography and historicist. In other words, the
correspondence situation, while generally desirable, is irrelevant to the diegetic
process of writing history.
The issue, therefore, is not one of the facts (or lack of them), or potential dishon-
esty on the part of the historian, but of how we use what we have according
to the conventions and rules of engagement of a particular historical practice.
So, there may well continue to be a cultural need to believe in ‘truthful history’
rather than what I have called ‘historical truth’. But if truth is conceived only in
 Conclusion 125

empirical-analytical terms we will continue to misunderstand how the narrative

constructivism of history works and how it provides for our historical cognition.
Because the historian cannot deliver the reality of the past through statements of
justified belief alone, it is imperative that we understand the nature of narrative
supervenience.
It is no surprise, then, that the central issue in historical thinking and practice
today is the question of representation and the performative nature of history
rather than questions of positivism and covering laws. Historians are now aware as
never before of the aesthetic as well as the classic realist dimensions to history. As
has been famously observed, probing the limits of representation is now the key to
understanding the nature of history. This has been heightened by the postmodern
and specifically the poststructuralist avowal of the crisis in representation along
with the ‘death of the author’, the failings of the signifier–signified relation, and the
problematic connection between form and content. But to this list must be added
reader-response theory, relativism, the role of trope/figuration, intertextuality,
the consequences of the linguistic turn, and the emergence of epistemological
scepticism. Indeed, the overall effect has been to reject crude mimetic historical
thinking in favour of a new history that acknowledges its fictive nature and
the absence of the tertium quid. This is despite the rearguard action of the new
empiricism. The benefit has been to place the relationship between the sources,
reference and representation on a new footing. This is the enduring legacy of
many history theorists, most notably Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes,
Hayden White, Louis Mink, Arthur Danto, Robert Rosenstone, Keith Jenkins and
Frank Ankersmit.
Each in their different way has argued that historical representations only
become plausible as they are narrated. Creating followability in a story is the central
processing aspect of historical cognition. To argue there is cohesion in a history
is not, of course, the same as saying that as we recognise it we are grasping the
cohesion of the past. All that history can do – as with all narratives – is represent
or impose an order through interpretation. I pointed out that this is different to
description (what happened or ‘factualism’), which has no investment in follow-
ability and understanding, explanation, meaning or truth. How we conceptualise
past reality as a representation is the most significant element in determining
what we will ‘find’ on the level of the represented. This is the consequence of the
revolution wrought by the metahistorical approach to history.
Following the logic of Genette, I suggested a story is constructed out of past
events and existents (the content). I described this as the content/story dimension
of history. I noted that the historian functioned as an author who narrates the past
by making a number of decisions concerning a range of narrative functions, the
specificity of which arise from their initial epistemological choice. These include
decisions about aesthetic/figurative, emplotment, mode of argument/explanation,
126 Narrative and History

ethic/political/ideological strategies of explanation and appropriate referential and

causation judgements. Next, historians make authorial decisions about the process
of their narrating and narration. These decisions centre on voice, focalisation,
tense/timing (order, duration and frequency), intentionality (text, action,
agency, characterisation). Finally, the author-historian has to determine the nature
of the mode of expression to work with and in. The primary modes I noted
were written texts, film and photography, television and radio, graphic novels,
comics, history magazines, public histories including museums, heritage sites and
memorials, various forms of performance and digitised representations.
Content/story, I maintained, was a category derived from Hayden White’s model
of historical writing and the representation of the past. However, rather than
only stressing figuration, argument, ideology and emplotment as White did, I
argued that it was necessary to include epistemological choices, story followability
and reference. Content/story is thereby defined as the locus for the organisation
of any set of events and the decisions and actions of historical agents by the
historian founded on the principle of a followable story about such past events.
This notion was outlined by William Gallie, although for him knowledge of events
would generate the story. Defining the story as the discovery of the most likely
meaning of the past (which is also a workable empirical-analytical definition of
truth) prompted Hayden White and Louis Mink to argue in a fashion similar
to Gallie. Of course they suggested there was nothing in the past to constitute
anything other than a story. But all were agreed that the content of the past
could only be grasped when storied. Hence we arrive at the implication that the
conventional notion of reference → explanation → meaning → narrative is, in
effect, challenged. The narrative functions within the category of content/story
that I briefly described included the initial epistemological choice of the historian,
aesthetic or figurative decisions, emplotment choices, argument ethical decisions
and empirical referentiality.
Given that the determining feature of history is its logic as a narrative cognitive
instrument, I argued that the function of ‘telling’ demands an understanding
of how the author-historian narrates. I suggested that the historical narrative is
experienced (subjectively) by the consumer (implied reader) and, arguably, this
generates a meaning that is ambiguous, not always being the same as that intended
by the author (implied author) or, for that matter, the past. The delivery (the
narration) of the text by the author I characterised as the creative force behind the
explanation, meaning and truthfulness of the-past-as-history narrative. Inevitably
this re-situates the role of referentiality. I noted this had a twofold consequence.
First, it becomes necessary to reconsider the idea that it is ‘the past’ that invari-
ably and ultimately produces history and, second, I suggested we need to note
that history is a fictive construction. I noted two consequences of this. First, the
historian is not a conduit for the past. And second, we should not be comparing
 Conclusion 127

‘history non-fiction’ with ‘literary fiction’. I have argued that there are two types
of narrative – the ‘non-history narrative’ and the ‘history narrative’. But, as I have
tried to demonstrate, the authorial functions for both are identical. If, therefore,
we wish to argue that ‘history’ is a different kind of narrative than ‘fiction’ just
because its content once really existed, then we will have to demonstrate that the
authorial functions for each are fundamentally different. But, regardless of whether
it is a historian or a non-historian writing, the fundamental mechanics and rules
of authoring a narrative do not change.
Further, I argued that the fundamental operating procedure in ‘doing history’
was not one of strict determination but reciprocity or over-determination. In
other words, history’s commitment to referentiality and truth are not primal, but
equally they are not impaired or impugned by its status as a narrative. The implica-
tion for history and historians is that the ‘what’ of the story is located in the events
and existents of the past, but the historian-author generates meaning as she or
he narrates the-past-as-history. But I also noted that because the process of telling
is never simply limited to the textual, there are many different forms or modes
of expression available to the historian. Further, I suggested that although what
happens to history in terms of its explanatory value is less determined by its mode
of expression than the initial epistemological decision, different modes of expres-
sion would over-determine and re-orientate the content/story, narrating/narrative
relationship.
In consequence, the belief that history and fiction are polarised is false. It is false
because it is the result of an irrelevant comparison. I said this is irrelevant because
it follows from the failure to acknowledge how the historian has to create a history
story space (the universe created by the historian about the past). Moreover, it is
the nature of narrative to encompass all forms such as history (and non-history
whatever form that takes – magic realism, autobiographical fiction, graphic novels,
ballet, diaries, etc.). The whole point of narrative is that it substitutes itself for
the real and its memory. As Ricoeur suggests, not only can memory not retain
that which is to be remembered ‘pure’ but the act of retaining a memory means
transforming (literally trans-form) that which is remembered into a narrative (form)
which will make the memory ‘memorable’. Through the process of content/story
creation and the functions of narration the past is trans-formed into a form – a
mode of expression – that becomes the physical and intellectual incarnation of
the-past-as-history.
The model of historical thinking and practice offered in this book is based, then,
on the notion that history cannot connect knowing what happened with what it
means without understanding the nature of representation and the constitution
of the historian’s story space. We have seen that this entails an acquaintance with
the mechanisms whereby writing and telling include the established practices of
empirical investigation and analysis. Without question, the reality of the past is a
128 Narrative and History

fundamental constraint on the nature of the history. But, invoking the work on
the nature of narrative primarily of Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman I have
argued that all historians will gain in their understanding of the connections
between ‘what is told’ and ‘how it is told’.
I suggested that Genette’s analysis of non-realist literature was significant for the
logic of history thinking and practice. I explained how for Genette the order of
precedence in fiction is story then narrating but – in a way that is significant for
the logic of narrative historical explanation – how content and story, narrating and
narrative are simultaneous activities. As a fundamental and highly practical insight
into historical thinking and practice, this argument reveals how the narrative does
not follow on from the discovery of the story. In other words, it is impossible to
have a history narrative in isolation from a story and its narrating. As a result of
this logic, I argued that history could only start with the decisions of the author
whose job is to connect content/story with and through the processes of narrating
and narrative.
While I argued that ultimately the process and nature of this transformation is
determined by the epistemological choices of the historian, I also suggested the
mode of expression in itself would not necessarily alter that initial choice. Hence
it is quite wrong to imagine that the chosen expression will automatically ‘change’
the nature of the history (after the ‘expressive turn’ as it were). The mode of expres-
sion reflects the epistemological choice (for or against) of the historian. Thus digital
history will be reconstructionist in form and content if it is created by a reconstruc-
tionist. Of course, all media of expression are flexible and open to a huge variety
of forms and contents hence my argument that the mode of expression and what
was done with it may feed back upon the other key narrative elements. It is always
possible that, as with Robert A. Rosenstone, working within a particular mode of
expression (in his case, film) will directly influence the historian’s awareness of
the epistemological potentialities and possibilities within the discipline. Indeed,
this is clearly the case with Rosenstone, whose study of film made him rethink the
nature of history which then fed back into how he saw history on film, and film
on history.
The consequence of all this, in terms of the twin functioning of reference and
representation, is that they over-determine each other. I argued that the nature of
that over-determination derives from the principle that the representation (history)
has the same ontological status as that which is being represented (the reality of
the past as reference). In other words, following Gadamer, I suggested that the
aesthetics of any history is the product of the contiguity of author-historian and
the past; hence the-past-as-history. As we know, it can be legitimately argued that
a detailed knowledge of the past is of no value whatsoever. If the first philosophy is
ethics, then empirical knowledge cannot generate it. At best it can illustrate it and
then usually in a highly selective manner. If, however, we want a discipline that
 Conclusion 129

can guide us (though not help in predicting the future) then we need to endorse
a history that welcomes experimentalism, the first principle of which is that the
historian, the history narrative and the past are ontologically and self-consciously
connected.
For me, the future of history involves rethinking the ontological connections
between the past and the understanding of it through a reconsideration of
objectivity, truth and relativism. Conceived in terms of the logic of narrative,
history’s objective and truth-seeking character demands an acknowledgement of
the immanent relativism in our engagement with the past. As we have seen, the
truth of the past can only emerge through its representation and is not produced
exclusively through reference and inference in any correspondence type of way. In
producing history we can still be faithful to the established rules of source analysis,
method and appropriate theorising. However, I have argued that it is only due to a
history viewed in all its rich variety of content/story, narration and expression and
by acknowledging our epistemological choices that we can we derive a meaning
for the past that is socially useful.
There seems little doubt that in Western societies history is highly regarded.
But the paradox, still hardly acknowledged, is that we cannot move outside its
story space to gain entry to the past in order to fulfil our many expectations.
Understanding the ‘real’ nature of the past is always going to fail because history
cannot escape its own act of creation. While it can refer to past ‘reality’, that
reference is tied to the experience of its own narrative construction. So, while the
past can be approached and, arguably, become a subject of study, it can never
be known except through the narratives we create about it. This leads to the
conclusion that it is the limits of our narrative making that constitute the ultimate
confines of our understanding of the past.
Glossary

 Aesthetics/aesthetic turn
The understanding and examination of the space between the representation and
what is represented. See also the narrative turn.

 Agency (structure)
Often polarised as two distinctive approaches to historical explanation, historians
can elect to favour one over the other: agency or structure. Equally they can attempt
to understand the past as the interaction of agency and structure. Structures can be
political, social, economic, ideological or whatever the historian wants them to be.

 Author-historian
The individual whose function it is to generate narratives within which reference,
explanation and meaning are created. The author-historian creates a story space
as the location of their content/story, narration and mode of expression choices.

 Characterisation
The historian characterises stories, events and historical agents (often through
the emplotment of action) for purposes of explanation and meaning creation.
Characterisation is a major fictive undertaking. See also voice.

 Constructionist history
One of the three primary genres of history (cf. reconstructionist and
deconstructionist history). Constructionist historians cover a vast range of
interests and methodologies. However, they all tend to propose relationships

130
 Glossary 131

between events in the past, which will then be validated through empirical
research. For constructionists, history results from the conceptual interface consti-
tuted between empiricism and explanation.

 Content/story
One of the three elemental features of history (see also mode of expression).
Content/story is the content of the past explained as a story. It is impossible to
conceive of a history where content and story are separated out.

 Correspondence theory
This is a theory of truth that equates empirical knowledge (see reference, reality)
with meaning, assuming the adequacy of the representational medium (usually
natural language). See representation/representational. The debate over corres-
pondence theory centres on whether the one-time existence of a past reality does
or does not validate the notion that the truth of past events can be found in the
agreement between the word and the world. The majority of historians accept
correspondence theory to some extent. See reconstructionist, constructionist and
deconstructionist history. The latter group dissent from this belief.

 Deconstructionist history
A genre of history defined by the adoption of several postmodern assumptions
about the study of the past. By definition, this means questioning a number
of key modernist beliefs which underlie reconstructionist and constructionist
approaches to the past. See correspondence theory, content/story, fictive,
experimental history, narrative supervenience, form and content, story space,
relativism and tertium quid.

 Diegesis/diegetic
This refers to the telling aspect of history specifically (a) to the story in history.
There are two levels in every hi-story (as in all literature) the intra-diegetic (in
the story) and extra-diegetic (above the story). Another use of the term (b) is to
designate the mode of narration or discourse. Diegesis is usually compared with
mimesis. Whether it is acknowledged or not, all historians work within this written
representational narrative structure.
132 Glossary

 Discourse
A discourse is broadly defined as a language terrain (written, spoken, filmic or
whatever) that is concerned with how a story is told (see aesthetics/aesthetic
turn, author-historian, diegesis/diegetic, focalisation, story space, tense/timing
and voice). Discourses encompass a vast range of concerns and come in many
kinds – history, gardening, cookery, aerodynamics, epistemology and, of course,
linguistics (the analysis of discourse as a language system). A key figure for histor-
ians in understanding discourse is the theorist Michel Foucault who suggested
a discourse is a mechanism for establishing and organising power. Thus a
reconstructionist history discourse will prohibit certain historical activities that
will be insisted on by deconstructionist history practitioners. The concept of
discourse is useful if only because it reminds historians that their product (as a
kind of history discourse) – how they tell the-past-as-history – is a creation for
disciplinary purposes. See experimental history as a dissenting mode of historical
discourse.

 Duration
Historians have to make decisions about the speed at which they will narrate their
history. Duration is the ‘real time’ elapsed in the content/story (of the past) and
the amount of discourse time (space and time allocated to it) in the history. The
duration choice historians make regulates the speed of the narrative in relation
to the events told. This is a significant feature of the narrative construction of all
histories.

 Empiricism
The acquisition of knowledge by means of sensory input, which is then turned out
as statements of justified belief based on inference. See sources, explanation,
meaning and truth.

 Emplotment
This is the author-historian’s mode of organising the evidence of the past to
explain it as an archetypal story type (tragic, romantic, farce, epic). See agency,
aesthetic turn, empiricism, explanation, form and content, linguistic turn,
narrative supervenience, narrative turn and representation.
 Glossary 133

 Epistemology/epistemological/epistemological
choice
Epistemology addresses the foundations, theory and nature of knowledge and its
acquisition. There is no single epistemological mode for history and historians
although each historian after they have made their epistemological choice is likely
to insist theirs is the most appropriate one. See reconstructionist, constructionist,
and deconstructionist history. While most historians are wary about insisting on
certainty in interpreting the sources, they are less deferential or modest about their
epistemological choice.

 Ethical turn
This is the recognition that all histories are extended ethical statements. The reverse
argument begins with the epistemological choice that opts for the empirical-
analytical model with its self-proclaimed demand for objectivity over relativism.
This requires the rejection of the notion of history being an overtly ethical activity.
From this position, history is defined as a search for the truth rather than a moral
intervention. The ethical turn, however, accepts history as a more complex activity
of authorial intervention which demands strategies for explanation that include
the ideological, political and moral. See narrative choices.

 Experimental history
This is any form of history that expressly confronts the nature of the connection
(as a representation) between reality of the past and its correspondence in the
text (or in any other mode of expression). By definition, experimental histor-
ians make epistemological choices that challenge those of reconstructionist,
constructionist (and maybe also) deconstructionist historians. Like the art move-
ments of impressionism, naturalism, surrealism and cubism, experimental history
is not necessarily anti-realist but it is anti-representational.

 Explanation
This is the process whereby historians tell us what, how and why things in the
past happened. There is no single avenue to historical explanation given the avail-
ability of the variety of epistemological choices open to the historian, although
reconstructionist and constructionist historians would tend to say there is no
legitimate choice. Deconstructionists would be equally insistent there is. The
134 Glossary

modes of explanation thus differ markedly. The primary forms are scientific (see,
for example, facts, empiricism) and non-scientific (see, for example, aesthetic
turn, content/story, emplotment, followability, narrative and trope).

 Facts
Facts are assumed to be true statements about the reality/realism of the past.
In effect they are the products of statements of justified belief. Facts do
not, therefore, pre-exist in the sources or evidence. Facts are constituted but
are understood by most historians (see reconstructionist and constructionist
history) to be essentially reflective of the state of how things were. For the
deconstructionist, facts are defined somewhat differently as events/happenings
under a description. This is not just nit-picking. Facts – as statements of
justified belief – have to be described and presented in a narrative to have any
meaning.

 Fictive
The fictive is often defined in terms of what it is not – it is not factual. But
this is a definition of fiction, which is what history is not. Fiction is inten-
tionally not true (see truth; ‘historical truth’) whereas history is meant to
be true. Hence, while works of fiction can have true statements (of justified
belief) in them, histories cannot have fictional statements that are unconnected
to evidenced past reality. In these senses, history and fiction are not compar-
able. By fictive is meant a discourse that is imaginatively created (as opposed to
being an empirical reconstruction). Perhaps the whole point of acknowledging
history as resulting from the triadic structure of content/story, narration/narrative
and mode of expression is to recognise that it is imaginatively – fictively –
constructed.

 Focalisation
Associated with the concept of voice, focalisation is a primary function of
the author-historian. It is the telling of past activities of agents and events,
thereby producing meaning by regulating the flow of appropriate information
usually in terms of ‘seeing’ from the point of view of the subject of focalisa-
tion or the focaliser. There are three types of focalisation – internal, external
and zero.
 Glossary 135

 Followability
This term refers to the quality of a (hi-)story as a ‘directed’ series of
successive actions and events that draws the history reader/viewer/listener to the
explanation. Followability is a central feature of the content/story.

 Form and content

This term defines the relationship between the form/design of the history text
and the content of the real world events, agents and existents represented in it.
How an individual makes that connection is the result of their epistemological
choice. Hence, reconstructionist historians see content determining form (reality
produces empirical-analytical history). The constructionist is not quite so empir-
ically determining allowing for the interventionist role of concept and theory. The
deconstructionist would ask whether the two concepts do, in fact, constitute a
duality much less that form is the function of content.

 Frequency
A further significant feature of the temporal organisation of the timing and
duration is frequency. This is concerned with the ‘repetition’ of events for explan-
atory purposes. There are four modes of telling: the singulative, repetitive, iterative
and the irregular.

 Hermeneutics
This is a process that can be defined as either a methodology for interpreting the
meaning of texts or, more broadly, as the philosophy of interpretation. See also
relativism and mimetic loop.

 ‘Historical truth’
The subject of a variety of definitions, it can be defined in empirical-analytical
terms or as that which results from narrative constructivism. It may best be
thought of more broadly as the intention of the historian to be honest and say
honest things about the-past-as-history.
136 Glossary

 Historicism/historicist
For the majority of historians, historicism is the understanding of historical periods
in their own terms. What for reconstructionist and (for many though not all)
constructionist historians is a major problem is judging the past not in its
own terms but by our own presentist – historicist – terms. Deconstructionists
are not particularly worried about this, believing it is to be in some degree
unavoidable.

 History
That narrative representation intended to provide a coherent and ordered body
of explanations and meanings about the past produced by the historian.

 Inference
The activity of arriving at a conclusion (the inference) from a set of premises/
assumptions. Most historians have premises/assumptions which they ‘test’ in the
empirical data. A collection of inferences can add up to an argument. The inference
acquires legitimacy once it achieves the status of justified belief.

 Intentionality
The connection between (a) a human state of mind (see agency), (b) its
representation (see mode of expression) and (c) its referent (see reference/
referentiality). Knowing the nature of intentionality is a central aspect of histor-
ical explanation. The inference and interpretation of intention from evidenced
human action is a notoriously difficult activity.

 Intertexuality
This is the notion that meaning derives not simply from a single text in
isolation, but from the situation of the text among others – literally as a
text-inter-text. Intertextually, therefore, texts have no completely independent
meaning.
 Glossary 137

 Justified belief
A belief justified according to a range of acceptable criteria such as empirical
reference, adequate inference, truth conditions, ethics and so on. Justified belief
needs to be distinguished from truth.

 Linguistic turn
This is the move in historical explanation to an emphasis on the functioning
of language (see poststructuralism, deconstructionist history, meaning and
trope). The shift has substantial implications for concepts such as objectivity,
truth, relativism, meaning, justified belief and, ultimately, the definition of
history.

 Meaning
The notion of meaning starts with the way words (in language) hook onto both
reality and to other words. Thus, the meaning of a word such as ‘revolution’
cannot only refer to ‘the real’ but also to other words with which it also connects
to create meaning (understanding). Thus to know ‘what happened’ – empirically
or as justified belief – can at best only provide partial meaning. Indeed, it is always
also possible to construct different meanings for the language–word connection
(see intentionality, semiotic/semiotics).

 Mimésis/mimetic/mimetic loop
This is the activity of imitation. In history mimésis is usually defined as the
textual imitation of past human action. From a deconstructionist perspective (as
opposed to a reconstructionist or constructionist one) history is not mimetic
because mimésis assumes the one-time presence of the past can be imitated in
that completely different form called history. The problem with mimésis (showing)
is that a narrative is unable to imitate the past because texts are linguistic in
their form, and language can only duplicate itself. Historians cannot escape the
mimetic loop as described by Paul Ricoeur which is the over-determining process
inherent in his model of mimesis1 , mimesis2 and mimesis3 . See form and content;
hermeneutics.
138 Glossary

 Mode of expression
This is the medium or form in which the author-historian depicts their history.
There is a clear reciprocity between the form chosen for the representation and
what is being represented (see form and content and content/story). Modes of
expression vary – film, ballet, sculpture, literary texts, photographs, digital repres-
entations and so on.

 Narrative/narration
Not limited to any discipline, narrative (a.k.a narration) is the communica-
tion (telling, recounting) of a sequence of happenings or events by estab-
lishing a meaningful connection between them. The connection between
author and consumer via the structure of the narrative (see content/story
and mode of expression) is central to the process of narrative making and
understanding. See fictive, focalisation, history, intertextuality, explanation,
narrative choices, narrative constructivism, narrative supervenience, narrative
turn, representation/representational, story, story space, tense/timing and
voice.

 Narrative choices
The recounting of a series of past events with the intention of understanding and
explaining their meaning results from the author-historian’s individual powers
of fictive narrative construction. In effect this means the history narrative is the
product of a substantial-range complex and (in varying degrees) (un)self-conscious
choices made by the historian as they construct their narrative about the past.
The historian ‘makes sense’ of the past through those narrative-making decisions
and turns (see linguistic turn, narrative turn and ethical turn). That history’s
logic is that of making narratives – so all histories work within a common (and
formal) functional narrative structure – explains why their meanings are invariably
different.

 Narrative constructivism
This is the product of a radical constructivist approach to writing history which
assumes that historical knowledge is a mediation of the historian’s experience of
engaging with the past, as opposed to the epistemological notion of the past itself
producing its own history. See objectivity, relativism and subjective/subjectivity.
 Glossary 139

 Narrative supervenience
Supervenience (referring to the ordering relationship between properties in the
world) explains how historians elect to argue that certain forces in the past
supervened over (or determined) others. The logic also applies to the construc-
tion of history. Historians use the concept of supervenience all the time
when they prioritise certain narrational organising concepts and especially when
deconstructionists claim that history (as a narrative) supervenes the past.

 Narrative turn
One of the many turns in history (see linguistic turn, ethical turn and aesthetic
turn), the narrative turn challenges the priority of reference, explanation and
empirical and analytically derived meaning over narrative construction. After the
narrative turn, for deconstructionists in particular, questions of representation
become central to historical understanding.

 New empiricism/ist
A recent move to rehabilitate empiricism and analysis (see inference) under
the presumed anti-realist onslaught of the versions of historical explanation
that have been influenced by continental philosophy and poststructuralism.
See deconstructionist history. The main aim of new empiricism is to domest-
icate and then, perhaps, commit to obscurity all metanarrative understandings of
the-past-as-history.

 New history
It seems that every generation of historians produces a new history. These are
usually reactions to conventional beliefs and practices. Thus at the start of the twen-
tieth century in the United States a new history emerged that was self-conscious
and supposedly relativist. The Annales School was self-proclaimed to be a new
history in the 1920s and 1930s; similar is the cliometric and social science (stat-
istical/measurement/social theory orientated) history of the 1960s. The 1990s and
2000s produced yet another new history (see narrative turn). Deconstructionist
historians would claim their new history is the most substantive to date because it
confronts basic epistemological assumptions.
140 Glossary

 Objectivity
Possessed of a confusing number of differing meanings, objectivity is commonly
assumed to mean knowledge of the past thing-in-itself for what it is without any
embellishment or the intrusion of a false consciousness, bias, ideology or other
deviations from honest representation. While there are formal methods for the
(hoped for and intended) objective acquisition of justified belief, this does not
automatically mean history is an objective mode of inquiry. The reasons are legion,
not least because history is selective of its data, fictive in its creation, is a narrative
construction, is not mind-independent, is culturally relativist, is authored and
so on.

 Ontology/ontological
This refers to the branch of metaphysics that deals with the state and nature
of being (of people, places, contexts, narratives, the past) and existence. It also
explores how the human mind constructs structures and categories for organising
reality. All humans have ontological choices. Thus knowledge of the ontology of
the narrative is of particular interest to deconstructionist historians and has little
appeal (or value) to reconstructionists.

 Order
This has two meanings. It can refer to the order in which the historian under-
takes the tasks of content/story, narrating and narration. As Genette suggests the
narrative (narrating) act initiates both the story and its narrative, which then
become indistinguishable. The second meaning refers to the distortion between
the order in which events in the past occurred and the order imposed upon them
for explanatory purposes. Thematic and problem-orientated histories are obvious
examples in which anachronisms such as analepsis and prolepsis are deployed.

 Performance/performative
Because history is a mode of realist narrative, its effects in terms of explanation,
interpretation, understanding, and meaning creation can only be judged through
its performative effects upon the narratee. Such effects are inevitably broad and
will encompass the expectations of the consumer in terms of the genre of history.
Performance can also refer to physical actions as in first-person narration.
 Glossary 141

 Postmodernism
Postmodernism describes the present condition of knowledge acquisition. Suffused
by its anti-Enlightenment epistemological scepticism, postmodern history works
playfully to expose the presumptive and yet utterly contingent nature of the
primacy of empiricism and analysis that is essential to the intellectual terror
machine of modernism. As you may judge from this definition, postmodernism
is also inflected with irony and hyperbole as mechanisms of defamiliarisa-
tion. See experimental history, deconstructionist history, author-historian and
relativism.

 Poststructuralism
This is an epistemically sceptical, late-twentieth-century intellectual and
philosophical movement that is a central pivot of postmodern analysis
(see deconstructionist history, epistemology/epistemological/epistemological
choice and postmodernism). Because poststructuralism confronts the full range
of modernist and Enlightenment history thinking as encapsulated in the
empirical-analytical epistemological model, the vast majority of historians have
little time for it or its practitioners (see reconstructionist and constructionist
history).

 Reader-response
This refers to a variety of wide-ranging theories of reading meaning into and from
texts. See discourse, intertextuality, hermeneutics and intentionality.

 Reality/realism
Reality is assumed to be ‘how things are’. There are two corollaries. The first
is that how things appear does not constitute reality or realism (the real can
be different to what it seems). Second, how things appear is irrelevant to the
nature of how things are. Reality is mind and language independent. This
produces a dual concept much favoured by reconstructionist historians, that
(a) there is objective reality (back there) and (b) such an objective reality
can be adequately represented (in the here and now). At this point, what
deconstructionist historians like to point out is that (b) does not automatic-
ally follow from (a). If deconstructionists are correct, this raises all kinds of
problems about what is truth in history. See linguistic turn, all the glossary
142 Glossary

entries relating to narrative, and also reference/referentiality, relativism,

representation/representational, story, story space, subjective/subjectivity and
tertium quid.

 Reconstructionist history
An epistemological approach or genre, which views history in realist,
referential, empirical, truth conditional, objective, correspondence (transpar-
ency of narrative) and non-theory, terms.

 Reference/referentiality
The reference a historian makes in an expression stands for the subject/object to
which it refers. Or, to put it in semiotic terms, a referent is the subject/object
designated in language by a signifier (a sound/mode of expression/ concept) and
which together constitute a sign (which is to all intents and purposes a meaning).
When placed in a sentence with a predicate, the reference can possess a truth-
value. However, deconstructionist historians are fond of pointing out that the
referent and, by implication, reference/referentiality are cultural and ideological
constructions. Hence there is no ‘natural’ connection or correspondence between
reference/reality and meaning.

 Relativism
Often confused with bias, relativism acknowledges the ‘situatedness’ of know-
ledge. This ranges from the rejection of the notion of the representational
correspondence between the world and the word, through situational ethics,
to the linguistic and narrative creation of historical constructions such
as gender, race, class and nation, as well as the constructions histor-
ians place on the sources. See also objectivity and reference/referentiality,
representation/representational and tertium quid. Deconstructionist historians
would argue that relativism is in some degree unavoidable and, rather than
explaining how it can be ‘overcome’, understand and work with it, using it to
advantage in engaging more fruitfully with the past. Reconstructionists and many
constructionists would regard this as dangerous nonsense.
 Glossary 143

 Representation/representational
The central issue in historical understanding today, representation forces historians
to address how the past is turned into history. Because history is a narrative
written about the past it is necessary to understand its cognitive functioning as
a form of representation. Essentially, a representation is not ‘the thing in itself’
but a ‘stand-in’ for it. This suggests we cannot know the meaning of an object
except through its representation. In this sense a historical narrative is a highly
complex and radically constructivist representation of the past. Hence historians
cannot ‘tell the truth’ in strict correspondence terms about the past because of
the narrative turn. See deconstructionist history, linguistic turn, mimesis and
all entries relating to narrative.

 Sceptical/scepticism
Essentially scepticism can be defined in terms of lacking and acquiring know-
ledge (see epistemology). History is an activity founded on scepticism in
that reconstructionist and constructionist historians tend to work on the
principle that they believe they can gain knowledge only through what
is evidenced to them and then explored via a variety of ‘assumptions’
and/or concepts. Such knowledge is then ‘tested’ in its detailed verification
and comparison (see empiricism, sources). Knowledge not so provided is
unjustified belief and, therefore, epistemologically unsupportable. Epistemolo-
gical scepticism (generally favoured by postmodern and/or deconstructionist
historians) is the position that there are narrow and strict limits to the
empirical-analytical mechanism for gaining knowledge such that its outcomes
like truth and meaning are never vouchsafe. The limits to knowledge arise not
merely from the contingency, situatedness and the relations of power implic-
ated in its acquisition but also in its transmission as a representation, espe-
cially as a narrative. See hermeneutics, historicism/historicist, reality/realism,
relativism, representation/representationalism, objectivity, poststructuralism
and subjective/subjectivity.

 Semiotic/semiotics
This refers to the study of signs, how they are created and the nature of (the
resulting) signification (meaning can be defined as the inter-relationship of signs).
Thus, all languages and discourses such as history are symbolic representations
of reality and constitute our ‘meaningful’ access to it (‘the past’ in the case of
144 Glossary

‘history’) by creating expressions as descriptions, ideas and so on. A basic grasp of

semiotics reveals there are no given meanings.

 Sources
Those referred to as ‘primary sources’ are evidential relics or any vestigial remains
left from the past. Secondary sources constitute historiography. Sources are not the
origin of historical meaning. Though clearly highly important and necessary given
the realist literature of history they remain only an element within the overall
narrative-making process. They are not of themselves sufficient for history.

 Story/stories
Conventionally distinguished from discourse, story refers to what is told – the
narrated events, existents and so on (discourse refers to how it is told). Story
is directly implicated with discourse in terms of style, mode of expression and
content/story.

 Story space
The story space is the author-historian’s fictively constructed narrative model of
when, why, how, what and to whom things happened in the past. Story spaces,
whether ostensibly realist or overtly fictional, operate according to the precise
rules of narrative making and are shaped by the author-historian’s experience of
the past and how they imagine it to have been. The history story space, though
referential, is contrived according to the narrative choices the historian makes.

 Subjective/subjectivity
A term that refers to the character of the concepts, mechanisms or methods for
acquiring knowledge being dependent upon the manner in which they are applied
(usually determined by the person applying them: see objectivity). Regarded as
something to be avoided by most historians, deconstructionists would, however,
say it cannot be avoided, but should be explored and, finally, incorporated into
‘doing history’. See experimental history.
 Glossary 145

 Tense/time/timing
A key author-historian function, tense/time refers to the turning of the real
time of the past into the story time of the history. It is one of many strategies
of explanation deployed by the historian. According to Seymour Chatman this
temporal turn saturates every aspect of writing.

 Tertium quid
An undefined ‘thing’ that is related in some indefinite way to two other defined
and definite things but distinct from them. The tertium quid in reconstructionist
history is the ‘empirical correspondence’ presumed to exist between language (the
‘word’) and reality (the ‘world’). For constructionists it would (more complexly) be
the ‘empirical-analytical correspondence’. Deconstructionists doubt the existence
of the tertium quid and are happy to live with the consequences. See ‘historical
truth’; truth.

 the-past-as-history
This is a neologism that describes the deconstructionist sense of the relationship
between the past and history. Specifically it describes how, given that the past
and history are different ontological categories, the former, which is now beyond
our contact, can only be grasped through the latter, which is our construction.
Hence it is that our knowledge about the time before now is only possible through
the-past-as-history.

 Trope/figuration
Figures of speech that work by deploying words in such a way they create and
change meaning. Deconstructionists regard troping as an important cognitive
device in turning the past into history. The notion of trope/figuration does not,
of course, create the past but it does have a role in shaping how we understand it.

 Truth
Although an immensely complex concept, generally truth is taken to be
the match between a proposition and the reality to which it refers (see
referentiality; justified belief). However, because history is a mode of narrative
146 Glossary

representation it has no absolutist epistemological meaning. See correspondence

the-past-as-history tertium quid, ‘historical truth’, facts and meaning.

 Voice
A key concept defined as ‘who tells the story?’ and, importantly, which also
encompasses the ‘speech acts’ of the narrator, thus influencing every aspect of the
creation of the history understood as a narrative. This includes the creation of
the triad of content/story, narration and mode of expression.
Notes

 Introduction
1 Prose refers to ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ ‘non-verse’ language. It is usually written.
Prose, unlike verse, has no formal metrical arrangements. There are a great many
‘historical explanation’ texts available. Useful as a starter is Paul Veyne, Writing
History, Essays on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1984 [1971]); R.F. Atkinson, Knowledge and Explana-
tion in History (London: Macmillan, 1978); Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy
of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); and two books by
W.H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1984 [1967]) and Substance and Form in History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1981). See also William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957) and ‘Philosophy and Historiography’,
in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997),
763–782. A comprehensive introduction to history as a discipline and practice is
Michael Stanford’s A Companion to the Study of History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1994), and up-to-date and collected from the pages of the journal History and
Theory is History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, ed. Brian Fay, Philip Pomper
and Richard T. Vann (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
2 One of the best examples of how this works is in Dennis Dworkin’s excellent
analysis of the historiography of class in Class (Harlow: Pearson, 2007).
3 E.H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 1987 [1961]); Geoffrey Elton,
Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and The Practice of History
(London: Methuen, 1967). This debate and the future direction in which history
was moving (and has moved) was described in great detail by Keith Jenkins
in his On ‘What is History?’: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London
and New York: Routledge, 1995). All students of history are strongly advised to
seek out this text for what is probably still the very best introduction to the
fundamental developments in historical thinking.
4 William Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1964), 105.

147
148 Notes

5 For an excellent short introduction to many of the issues concerning narrative

and history that have exercised the minds of historians in the past 20 years,
see Hans Kellner, ‘Narrativity in History: Post-structuralism and Since’, History
and Theory 26 (1987): 1–9.
6 See Martin Kreiswirth, ‘Narrative Turn in the Humanities’, in Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and
Marie-Laure Ryan (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005), 377–382
and Martin Kreisworth and Thomas Carmichael, eds, Constructive Criticism:
The Human Sciences in the Age of Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1995). The interest in narrative grows apace. See Jürgen Straub, ed.,
Narration, Identity and Historical Consciousness (New York: Berghahn Books,
2005).
7 George B. Tindall, America: A Narrative History (New York, London: W.W.
Norton, 1988).
8 Paul S. Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 1.
9 Ibid.
10 Perhaps the best introduction to issues of representation in what is for many
an age of scepticism about our ability to ‘know’ in the arts and humanities,
and especially in history is Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism
(Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2005 [1989]). Though not as useful, see
also Alun Munslow, The New History (Harlow: Pearson, 2003); Alun Munslow,
Deconstructing History, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006
[1997]); Alun Munslow, Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 2nd ed.
(London and New York: Routledge, 2006 [2000]).
11 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 59.
12 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1992) and ‘Beyond the Subject: Individuality in the Discursive Condi-
tion’, New Literary History 31, no. 3 (2000): 405–419.
13 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Time’, in On Narrative, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 168–186; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative,
trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984), 3–51.
14 Gérard Genette, Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 258.
15 Hayden White’s key text is his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973);
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3–51.
16 Kalle Pihlainen, ‘The Confines of the Form: Historical Writing and the Desire
That It Be What It Is Not’, in Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the
History/Literature Debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen (Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi, 2006), 55–67.
 Notes 149

17 Among the leading analysts of history as a conceptual literary undertaking

is Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time,
trans. and with an Introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004); see also Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Linda
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge,
1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism. A recent examination of the rela-
tionship between history and fiction is offered by Ann Curthoys and John
Docker, Is History Fiction? (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press,
2006).
18 Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, 15.
19 Ibid., 156.
20 Sande Cohen, History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
21 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988 [1972]), 6.
22 Callum G. Brown, Postmodernism for Historians (Harlow: Pearson Education,
2005).
23 Martin McQuillan, ed., The Narrative Reader (London and New York: Routledge,
2000), 18–21.
24 Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory (London
and New York: Routledge, 2004); Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory
(Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1998).
25 As an introduction to the matter of epistemology I recommend all historians
read at least one of the following: Jonathan Dancy, An Introduction to Contem-
porary Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); Linda Alcoff, Epistemology: The
Big Questions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998); Robert Audi, Epistemology: A
Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (New York: Routledge,
1998), and David Cooper, Epistemology: The Classic Readings (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1999).
26 J. Appleby, L. Hunt and M. Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York
and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994), 1.
27 David D. Roberts, Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Meta-
physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
28 Roland Barthes, ‘Le Discours de l’histoire’, Information sur les Sciences Sociales
(1981 [1967]), 6: 65–75, Comparative Criticism – A Yearbook, trans. with an
introduction by Stephen Bann (1981); Stephen Bann, ‘Analysing the discourse
of history’, Renaissance and Modern Studies (1983), 27: 61–84.
29 See Murray Phillips, ‘An Athletic Clio: Sport History and Television History’,
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice (forthcoming, 2008); also
Munslow, Deconstructing History.
150 Notes

30 David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,

2002); see also Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical
Writing in the United States (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1980); Juliet
Gardiner, ed., What is History Today? (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988); Peter
Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991);
Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, eds, Making History: An Introduction to the
History and Practices of a Discipline (London and New York: Routledge, 2004);
Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography.
31 Having said that, every history student is probably well aware of the ‘learning
outcomes’ they are expected to demonstrate in their history assessments,
which seems to suggest there is only one officially approved way – one genre
to employ – in thinking about and doing history. This is certainly the situ-
ation in the United Kingdom, where it has become official government policy
to make them and their teachers aware of the preferred ‘skills and qualities
of mind’ they must demonstrate. These are based upon a nationally imposed
History Benchmarking Statement (there are such statements in all disciplines).
Student historians are expected to understand basic research techniques, the
nature of ‘historical inquiry’ including the detailed knowledge of a specialist
topic, demonstrate an understanding of the ambiguity and limits of historical
knowledge, deploy established techniques of historical research and analysis,
be aware of current debates on interpretations, and be able to critically eval-
uate arguments, assumptions, concepts and data in order to make reasoned
judgements. But there is little in all of this about understanding the epistem-
ological connections between reference, explanation, meaning and narrative.
I suppose that is why historians like me write books like this. That you, as
a history student (or even an academic historian), has been recommended
this book to read suggests lines of communication are opening up and we are
moving towards a more secular understanding of the nature of history.
32 See Douglas Booth, The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History (London and
New York: Routledge, 2005), for an excellent examination of the three epistem-
ological orientations.
33 As we shall see, the factual statement is not the unproblematic connection to
the past reality it is usually supposed to be. The reason is that such statements
only derive their meaning in a larger narrative understood as a representation
of the past. This does not necessarily deny the utility of factual statements or
cast doubt on the requirement to be empirically accurate. Without entering
into a debate about what philosophers call ‘truth-conditional semantics’ it is
worth noting that not all sentences are either true or false, as with statements
about morality, taste or probability. See Max Kölbel, Truth Without Objectivity
(London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Also see Chapters 6, 7 and 8
passim.
 Notes 151

34 C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective

(London and New York: Routledge, 2004); C. Behan McCullagh, ‘Bias in Histor-
ical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation’, History and Theory 39, no. 1
(2000): 39–66.
35 John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allan Lane, 1995), xiii.
36 Geoffrey Roberts, ‘Postmodernism Versus the Standpoint of Action’, History
and Theory 36, 2 (1997): 249–260.
37 Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language
(Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 29.
38 Jerzy Topolski, ‘The Role of Logic and Aesthetics in Constructing Narrative
Wholes in Historiography’, History and Theory 38, no. 2 (1999): 198–210.
39 D. MacRaild and A. Taylor, Social Theory and Social History (Houndmills:
Palgrave, 2004), 3.
40 Ibid.
41 Aviezer Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
42 John Belchem and Neville Kirk, eds, Languages of Labour (Aldershot: Ashgate
Publishing, 1997), 3.
43 Ibid.
44 Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the
Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (Harlow: Pearson Education,
2007).
48 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).

1 Narrating the Past

1 Frank R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2005), 245.
2 Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1986).
3 Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998); Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn:
Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992 [1967]); Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical
Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Richard Rorty,
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1979); Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford
152 Notes

University Press, 1984); Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980). As a pragmatist, Davidson does not deny know-
ledge given the generally accepted and universal nature of language – even
though it is the mechanism through which we engage with the real – arguing
all language relations are based on an ‘interpretative charity’.
4 Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works III: The Formation of the Historical World in the
Human Sciences, ed. with an Introduction by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof
Rodi (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 54.
5 Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Indeed, Hayden White may in
this sense be regarded as an anti-narrativist.
6 C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective
(London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 194.
7 Ibid.
8 It is useful to note that when we talk about the nature of history we
are also bound to make judgements about its cultural functioning. See, for
example, Martin L. Davies, Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary
Society (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005). But a history may also
examine the nature of that functioning and this inevitably raises the issue of
the relationship between story and discourse. See for example Alun Munslow,
Discourse and Culture: The Creation of America, 1870–1920 (London and New
York: Routledge, 1992). See also Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial
Intelligence and Narrative Theory (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press,
1991); Catherine Emmott, Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); David Herman, Story Logic: Problems
and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
9 David W. Noble, The Progressive Mind, 1890–1917 (Chicago: Rand McNally,
1970).
10 A recent attempt to rescue ‘knowledge’ from constructivism is Paul Boghossian,
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2006).
11 John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York and
London: W.W. Norton, 1992 [1973]).
12 Ibid., 15–16.
13 Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (London: Andre Deutsch,
1970 [1966]).
14 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), 96–145.
15 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986 [1972]) and Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin
 Notes 153

(Ithaca: New York, Cornell University Press, 1990 [1983]); Chatman, Story and
Discourse.
16 Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 13–20.
17 Ibid., 13.
18 Ibid., 14–15.
19 Ibid., 15.
20 Ibid., 15.
21 C. Ginzburg and A. Prosperi, Giochi di Pazienza: Un Seminario sul ‘Beneficio di
Cristo’ (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). This book is examined by Jonathan Walker and
the nature of the ‘research and writing’ process in generating history in his
‘Let’s Get Lost: On the Importance of Itineraries, Detours and Dead Ends’,
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 10, no. 4 (2006): 573–598.
22 Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 16–17.
23 Ibid., 15.

 2 History as Content/Story
1 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 35.
2 Frank, R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2001), 81.
3 Ibid., 135–138.
4 This is a position argued for with great skill by Kalle Pihlainen. See his ‘The
Confines of the Form: Historical Writing and the Desire That It Be What It Is
Not’, in Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate, ed.
Kuisma Korhonen, 55–67.
5 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), 19.
6 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
7 Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’ in Style in
Language, ed. Thomas Seboek (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts of Techno-
logy Press, 1960); Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings edited in six volumes
by Stephen Rudy (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1971–1985); Vladimir Propp,
Morphology of the Folk Tale (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Research centre in
Anthropology, 1958); Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis
of Narratives’, in Barthes: Selected Writings, ed. Sontag (Oxford: Fontana Collins,
1983), 251–252; Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986 [1972]) and Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans.
Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990 [1983]); A.J. Greimas,
154 Notes

Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology, trans. Milda Newman

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1992 [1985]); Tzvetan Todorov, ‘La
description de la signification en littérature’, Communications, vol. 4 (1964):
33–39; Mink, ‘Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument’ reprinted in The
History and Narrative Reader, ed. Roberts (London, New York: Routledge,2001),
211–220; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and
David Pellauer, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
8 Compare Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983 [1968]); with Charles More, Under-
standing the Industrial Revolution (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
9 William Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1964), 21.
10 Chatman, Story and Discourse, 19.
11 Michael C. Lemon, The Discipline of History and the History of Thought (London
and New York: Routledge, 1995), 43.
12 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text’,
Social Research 38, no. 3 (1971): 529–562.
13 Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli, Women in Italy, 1350–1650: Ideals and Realities
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006).
14 Ibid., 2.
15 White, ‘An old question raised again: Is historiography art or science?’
(Response to Iggers), Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 4
(2000): 391–406; White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); White, The Content of the Form:
Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987); White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism; White, Metahistory.
16 W.H. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (n.p.: Harvester
Press, 1970 [1951]); Leon Goldstein, Historical Knowing (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1976); Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985) and Analytical Philosophy of History; Dray,
Laws and Explanation in History; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (vol. 1); White,
Metahistory; Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Ankersmit, Historical
Representation.
17 John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain (Harlow:
Pearson Longman, 2005).
18 Ibid., 13.
19 Marwick, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language, pp. 38–50.
20 Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor and Ankersmit,
Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
 Notes 155

21 Over the years, many historians have been evaluated in terms of the aesthetic
(especially the figurative) character of their writings. A useful example is Maura
B. Nolan, ‘Metaphoric History: Narrative and New Science in the Work of F.W.
Maitland’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 118, no. 3 (2003):
557–572.
22 Saskia Sassen, ‘The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo’, in The Global
History Reader, ed. Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye (New York and London:
Routledge, 2005), 116–124.
23 Eelco Runia, ‘Presence’, History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 1–29.
24 Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 1942), 84–114.
25 Barbara Melosh, ed., Gender and American History Since 1890 (London and New
York: Routledge, 1993); Jeremy Black, A History of the British Isles (Houndmills:
Palgrave, 1997).
26 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden
History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London and New York: Verso, 2000); Jane
Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Bryant Simon, eds, Jumpin’ Jim Crow:
Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2000).
27 Melosh, ed., Gender and American History Since 1890, 1–13.
28 White, Metahistory; N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four essays by Northrop Frye
(New York: Atheneum, 1967 [1957]).
29 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 1), 1; (Vol. 3), 185.
30 Ibid.
31 Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale; Frye, Anatomy of Criticism; Greimas, Of Gods
and Men; Todorov, Communications, 33–39; Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse,
trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cornell, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980 [1972]);
Mink, The History and Narrative Reader; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 1);
K. Jenkins and A. Munslow, eds, The Nature of History: A Reader (London and
New York: Routledge, 2004).
32 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 1); White, Metahistory; Mink, The History and
Narrative Reader.
33 Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Harvey J. Kaye, eds, The American Radical (New
York and London: Routledge, 1994).
34 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953).
35 White, Metahistory; Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. Godard quote: courtesy
of Robert Rosenstone’s introduction to Alun Munslow and Robert A.
Rosenstone, Experiments in Rethinking History (New York and London:
Routledge, 2004), 1.
36 White, Metahistory, 7.
156 Notes

37 R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books, 1966 [1926]).
38 Donald R. McCoy, Coming of Age: The United States During the 1920s and 1930s
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973).
39 Bryant Simon, ‘Narrating a Southern Tragedy: Historical Facts and Historical
Fictions’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 1, no. 2 (1997):
165–187.
40 John Y. Simons and Michael Stevens, New Perspectives on the Civil War: Myths
and Realities of the National Conflict (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2002 [1998]).
41 Richard Evans, Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David
Irving Trial (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 23.
42 Martin Kreiswirth, ‘Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the
Human Sciences’, Poetics Today 21, no. 2 (2000): 311.
43 Beverley Southgate, ‘ “A Pair of White Gloves”: Historians and Ethics’,
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 10, no. 1 (2006): 49–62.
We should also remember Ricoeur’s distinction between ethics and morals.
The former aims for the good and the just. Morals, however, concern sticking
to rules of behaviour. The former always has priority over the latter.
44 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians and Autobiography (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005), 208.
45 Sue Morgan, ed., The Feminist History Reader (London and New York: Routledge,
2006).
46 David Henige, Historical Evidence and Argument (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2005), 242–243. Another modest historian is Richard Evans
whose defence of history is troped in a humble fashion. Though unassuming
before the data, he is, like Henige and Arthur Marwick, scrupulous and self-
critical. All his conclusions are always less than final. See Evans’ In Defence of
History (London: Granta, 1997).
47 Ernst Breisach, On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its
Aftermath (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 74.
48 Ibid., 75.
49 Ibid., 107.
50 Ibid., 75.
51 Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History, 153.
52 Ibid.
53 Arthur Marwick, Class: Image and Reality in Britain, France and the USA Since
1930 (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1980), 283.
54 Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History, 156.
55 Ibid., 201.
56 Ibid., 195–240.
 Notes 157

57 Kevin Passmore, ‘Poststructuralism and History’, in Writing History: Theory and

Practice, ed. Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (London: Hodder
Arnold, 2003), 118–140.

 3 Narrating and Narration

1 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Basil Black-
well, 1986 [1972]) and Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1990 [1983]).
2 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Authorship: From Plato to Postmod-
ernism: A Reader, ed. Sean Burke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995),
125–130; Foucault, ‘What Is An Author?’, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in
Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Harari (London: Methuen, 1979), 141–160.
3 Bernadine Dodge, ‘Re-imag(in)ing the Past’, Rethinking History: The Journal of
Theory and Practice 10, no. 3 (2006): 345–368.
4 Marwick, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language, 41. See also
Foucault, Textual Strategies. Helpful to those who need a basic grounding in the
theory of authorship is Andrew Bennett, The Author (New York and Abingdon:
Routledge, 2005).
5 Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (London: Verso, 2005), vii.
6 This is like saying we can tell the truth about our pet cat or our neighbours
simply by describing them in excruciating detail.
7 Robert A. Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan
(Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988).
8 Richard Price, Alabi’s World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
9 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961).
10 Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North
American History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 1.
11 Ibid., 4.
12 As we shall see, each mode of expression will potentially have a different
narratee (sometimes called ‘an addressee’). Also, when writing history books
historians have to agree the market level for their audience with their
publisher.
13 Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin:
Mouton, 1982).
14 Foucault, Textual Strategies, 153.
15 E. Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
158 Notes

16 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall quoted in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, Unequal
Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in US Women’s History (New York and London:
Routledge, 2000), xiii. All histories are voiced. A recent example of an overt
authorial voice is the collection edited by Phillips Deconstructing Sport History
that was deliberately constructed to explore developments in one particular
form of history (sport) from a deconstructionist perspective. The contributors
are overt narrators who openly voice their interventions.
17 Mieke Bal, ‘Notes on Narrative Embedding’, Poetics Today 2, no. 2 (1981): 41–
59; Mieke Bal, ‘The Narrating and the Focalizing: A Theory of the Agents in
Narrative’, Style, trans. Jane E. Lewin, 17 (1983): 234–269; Mieke Bal, Narrato-
logy: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: Toronto University Press,
1985); Monika Fludernik, ‘New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalisation and
New Writing’, New Literary History 32, no. 3 (2001): 619–638.
18 Hayden White, ‘The Structure of Historical Narrative’, Clio 1 (1972): 5–19
and ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, in Tropics of Discourse, 81–100;
Mink, ‘Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument’, reprinted in The History
and Narrative Reader, ed. Roberts, 211–220; Chatman, Story and Discourse,
147; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 64–65, 88–99.
The debate between Berel Lang and Hayden White on the most appro-
priate voice for the historian to take when talking about the Holocaust is
only the most famous example of what is a common activity. See Berel
Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990) and Hayden White, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem
of Truth’, in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solu-
tion’, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992),
37–53.
19 Hayden White has examined how humanist Marxist historian E.P. Thompson
voiced and focalised (though White did not use these specific terms) in the
‘Introduction’ to his Tropics of Discourse, 15–20.
20 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 2), 64–65; see also Roland Barthes, ‘To Write:
An Intransitive Verb?’, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989); Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes (New York:
Hill & Wang, 1977).
21 Frank R. Ankersmit, Encounters: Philosophy of History After Postmodernism,
ed. Ewa Domanska (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998),
86–87.
22 The historian always has a perspective on the past – an angle from which
events are refracted before they can be understood. As I have suggested, every
history assumes a narratee – the readership – for whom the text is intended.
This text, for example, is substantially driven by my (the narrator’s) desire to
be ‘accessible’ and not ‘difficult’. I do not wish (partly at my publisher’s behest)
 Notes 159

to produce a ‘monograph’ that would be ‘student unfriendly’. So I focalise

diegetically as an overt narrator intervening within this narrative through my
asides and direct speech to you. I am trying to create a mood of authorial
interventionism but not omniscience that gives the impression that this is the
way ‘it is’. But, clearly, I have a point of view.
23 Quoted from Richard J. Carwardine’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln
(Harlow and Essex: Pearson Longman, 2003), 83–84.
24 Ibid., p. 311.
25 Suzanne Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern
Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990).
26 Ibid., 24.
27 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 3) (1987), 181.
28 The question of time is being investigated afresh by historians like Philip J.
Ethington, who argues that historians need to acknowledge the relationship
between space and time in their work. See Philip J. Ethington, ‘Presenting
the Past: The Places of History in the Spaces of Time’, Rethinking History: The
Journal of Theory and Practice (forthcoming).
29 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought From Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977);
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York,
Vintage Books, 1972 [1974]).
30 William Gallie, History and Religion (Harlow and New York: Pearson, 2007),
forthcoming.
31 Wilhem Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. III, The Formation of the Historical World
in the Human Sciences, ed. with an Introduction by Rudolf A. Makkreel and
Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 9.
32 Surprisingly, perhaps, an analysis of the history of time in the work of histor-
ians managed to completely ignore the functioning of narrative in the ‘timing’
of history. See Dan Smail, ‘In the Grip of Sacred History’, American Historical
Review 110, no. 5 (December 2005): 1337–1362.
33 Chatman, Story and Discourse, 46–47. And it is not good enough for historians
to say history is a never-ending story. The movement of the past into the
present and future might be the case (for all we know) but the history narrative
is an artificial construction that imposes synthetic narrational structures and
decisions on the past.
34 Metonymy is most usually associated with history prose because it is the
trope that establishes contiguity between things – in this case Lincoln and
an ‘    enhanced and ambitious nationalism’. According to the attested data,
although Abraham Lincoln was born, lived and died, no historian starts and
ends with this. Historians take this temporal reality and turn it into a narrative
that can only ‘explain’ through a contrived and ‘fictive’ timing process. As
Kuisima Korhonen notes, historical time is ‘by definition’ the time of writing,
160 Notes

‘the time of written time and written documents’. See Korhonen, ed., Tropes
for the Past, 9.
35 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 1), 3–86.
36 Ibid., 83–84. Aporia is a figure of speech in which a speaker is in doubt about
what to say or decide. It is now increasingly taken to refer to the undecidability
of the act or impasse where meaning cannot be resolved.
37 Munslow, The New History, 37–38.
38 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 2), 6, 100–152.
39 Ibid., 80; Genette, Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited.
40 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 2), 83.
41 Louis M. Hacker, The Course of American Economic Growth and Development
(New York and London: John Wiley & Sons, 1970), 98.
42 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 2), 84.
43 David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994), 138.
44 Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 1993 [1987]),
226.
45 Andrew Pettegree, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers
Ltd., 2002), 1–18.
46 F.R. Bridge and Roger Bullen, The Great Powers and the European States System,
1814—1914, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2005 [1980]).
47 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 113–160; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 2), 85.
48 The history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte) and mundane cultural practices
might require a use of iteration.
49 Gary Gerstle, Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City,
1914–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
50 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 1981), 84–85.
51 Quoted in Munslow, Discourse and Culture, 73.
52 Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian thought: An Introductory Reader (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997).
53 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Vol. 2), 187.
54 A recent analysis of historian’s intentionality deploying the role of news-
papers in sport history is provided by Jeffrey Hill ‘Re-Reading the Sporting
Press’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (2007)
(forthcoming).
55 Bal, Style.
56 Pierre Bourdieu, An Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
 Notes 161

57 Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999); Ankersmit, Historical Representation.
58 Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
59 Wendell H. Oswalt and Sharlotte Neely, This Land Was Theirs: A Study of
North American Indians (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company,
1996 [1988]); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 [1963]), 13.
60 Not be confused with Ricoeur’s process of mimesis1 , mimesis2 and mimesis3 .
61 Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘John Reed’, in The American Radical (New York and
London: Routledge, 1994), 143–149; Eric Homberger ‘Reed, John, 1887–1920’,
in Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan
Georgakas (Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1990), 648.
62 See, for example, the characterisation of John Locke and his Essay Concerning
Human Understanding in the work of Carl. Becker, The Declaration of Independ-
ence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922); Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Birth of the
Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968) and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation
of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York and London: W.W. Norton,
1972 [1969]).
63 Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004);
Jonathan Culpeper, Language and Characterisation (Harlow: Longman, 2001);
James Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989).

 4 History as Expression
1 Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, in Barthes:
Selected Writings, ed. Sontag, 251.
2 The notion of ‘realistic portrayal’ is a classic realist oxymoron.
3 The fact that I am still using the printed book should not be taken as evidence
of the incorrect nature of the argument. E-books are now making inroads and
who can predict how soon printed pages will disappear entirely? Of course, as
we shall see, digitised books remain locked into an epistemological world-view.
4 Richard J. Evans, ‘Prologue: What is History Now?’, in What is History Now?,
ed. Cannadine (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 13.
5 Undoubtedly the leading analyst of the epistemological relationship between
film and history, Robert A. Rosenstone has produced an essential body of
work. See ‘The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings of Postmodern
History’, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event,
ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 201–218; ‘Does a Filmic
162 Notes

Writing of History Exist?’, History and Theory 41, no. 4 (2002): 135–144; Visions
of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995); Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New
Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) and History on Film/Film
on History (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006).
6 Oliver Daddow, ‘Still No Philosophy Please, We’re Historians’, Rethinking
History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 9, no. 4 (2005): 491–495.
7 Ibid.; see also Alun Munslow’s ‘Getting on with History’, Rethinking History:
The Journal of Theory and Practice 9, no. 4 (2005): 497–502.
8 See Rosenstone, ‘The Future of the Past’; ‘Does a Filmic Writing of History
Exist?’; Visions of the Past; Revisioning History; History on Film, Film on History;
Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988)
and ‘Does and Filmic Writing of History Exist?’, Film and History 17, no.
4 (1987): 81–89; Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the
Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); see also
a series of articles in the 1988 American Historical Review Forum on film
and history: Robert Brent Toplin ‘The Filmmaker as Historian’, American
Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1210–1221; John E. O’Connor, ‘History in
Images/Images in History: Reflections on the Importance of Film and tele-
vision Study for an Understanding of the Past’ American Historical Review
93, no. 5 (1988): 1200–1209; Hayden White, ‘Historiography and Historio-
photy’, American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1193–1199; David Herlihy,
‘Am I a Camera? Other reflections on Films and History’, American Histor-
ical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1186–1192 and Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘History
in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting
History onto Film’, American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1173–1185;
Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and
Noble Imports, 1980); Mark C. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect: History According
to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995); Tony Barta, Screening
the Past: Film and the Representation of History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998);
Roland Barthes, ‘The Realist Effect’, Film Reader No. 2 (Wisconsin: North
West University Press, 1978), 131–135; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘ “Any Resemb-
lance to Persons Living or Dead”: Film and the Challenge of Authenti-
city’, Yale Review 76 (Summer 1987): 477–502; Chatman, Story and Discourse:
Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within
Us: Media. Memory and History (London and New York: Verso, 2005); Siegfried
Kracauer, History: The Last things Before The Last (Princeton: Marcus Wiener
Publishers, 1995 [1965]); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1973); Robert Brent Toplin, History By Hollywood: The Use
and Abuse of the American Past (Illinois: Illinois University Press, 1996); Robert
A. Rosenstone, ed., ‘Film and History’ themed issue of Rethinking History: The
 Notes 163

Journal of Theory and Practice 4, no. 2 (2000): 123–238; Willem Hesling, ‘The
Past as Story: The Narrative Structure of Historical Films’, European Journal of
Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2001): 189–205; Marcia Landy, ed., The Historical Film:
History and Memory in Media (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
See also Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British
Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
9 Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘The Future of the Past’.
10 The literature on the epistemological character of the photographic image
is substantial, but not to be missed are Roland Barthes, Image, Music,
Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); J.J. Long,
‘History, Narrative and Photography in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten’,
Modern Language Review 98, no. 1 (2003): 117–137; Marie-Laure Ryan,
‘The Modes of Narrativity and Their Visual Metaphors’, Style 26 (1992):
368–387.
11 Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last things Before the Last, completed by Oskar
Christeller (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995 [1969]), 47.
12 Ibid., 46.
13 Ibid., 46–47.
14 Ibid., 32.
15 Of course shareholder profit remains a fixed point of reference as it does with
films and as it does with history books as well.
16 Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire/Realms of Memory: The Construction of the
French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997).
17 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remem-
brance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
18 Ibid., 6.
19 TV historians also like to make a style statement – a long black overcoat, or
jeans, or duster coat, or ill-conceived multi-coloured clothing.
20 Tuija Virtanen, ‘Issues of test-Typology: Narrative – A “Basic” Type of Text?’,
Text 12 (1992): 293–310.
21 In much the same way global publishers today serve the undergraduate market
by matching the intellectual demands of the text with a price.
22 A flavour of the range of radio history can be gauged from the description in
the BBC History Magazine of a programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 22
December 2005, entitled ‘The True and Inspirational Life of St. Nicholas’ as
an attempt to ‘    restore Santa to his original identity – as a fourth century
Christian hardliner, battling heretics and toeing a fiercely orthodox line. David
and Caroline Stafford’s rollicking drama suggests that the ascetic Nicholas
would struggle to recognise himself in today’s well-padded Father Christmas’,
BBC History Magazine 6, no. 12 (2005): 65.
164 Notes

23 Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys, ‘History in the Graphic Novel’, in Rethinking
History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 6 (2002): 255–260.
24 Ibid., 255.
25 Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My father Bleeds History (New York:
Pantheon, 1986); Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My
Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1991) and Art Spiegelman, Comix, Essays,
Graphics and Scraps (New York: A Raw Book, 1998); White, ‘Historical Emplot-
ment and the Problem of Truth’, in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism
and the ‘Final Solution’, ed. Friedlander, 37–53.
26 Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art (Tamarac: Poorhouse Press, 1990
[1985]).
27 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
28 Eli Bartra and John Mraz, ‘Las Dos Fridas: History and Transcultural Iden-
tities’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 9, no. 4 (2005):
449–457.
29 Stuart Hood and Litza Jansz, Fascism for Beginners (Cambridge: Icon Books,
1993), 15.
30 BBC History Magazine, any issue.
31 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1995]); Nora, Les Lieux
de mémoire/Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Kerwin Lee Klein,
‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations 69
(Winter 2000): 127–150; Max Page and Randall Mason, eds, Giving Preservation
a History (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
32 Ian Tyrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
33 Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ in Barthes:
Selected Writings, ed. Sontag, 252.
34 White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’ in The Content
of the Form, 1.
35 Hayden White, ‘The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to Dirk
Moses’, History and Theory 44, no. 3 (2005): 333–338. His claim is, of course,
only provocative to those who are provoked.
36 Ibid., 335.
37 Susan Davies, ‘History and Heritage’, in Making History: An Introduction to the
History and Practices of a Discipline, ed. Lambert and Schofield, 280–289.
38 Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Briar and Roy Rosenzweig, eds, Presenting the
Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1986); Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998); Randolph Starn, ‘A Historian’s Brief Guide
 Notes 165

to New Museum Studies’, The American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (2005):
68–98.
39 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), 141. See also
the special issue of the Journal of American History on ‘The Practice of American
History’, 81, no. 3 (1994): 933–1217, which deals at great length with many
aspects of public history in the United States.
40 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 2 vols (London: Verso, 1994, 1998); Starn,
The American Historical Review, 91.
41 Peter Burke, ‘Performing History: The Importance of Occasions’, Rethinking
History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 9, no. 1 (2005), 35–52. See also
Alexander Kozin and Katharina Draheim, ‘A Standoff with History: At the Site
of the “Bad River Gathering” ’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and
Practice 12 (forthcoming, 2008), which addresses the making and re-making
of history at the site of performance.
42 Deborah Gilbert, ‘Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins: Reformer, Activist and
Educator: Teaching Western History in the First Person’, Journal of the West 43
(Fall 2004): 24–31; Stacey F. Roth, Past into Present: Effective Techniques for First
Person Historical Interpretation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999).
43 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994 [1946]); W.H. Dray, History As Reenactment: R.G.
Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See also Karsten R.
Stueber’s argument that reenactment is the primary way to explain the reality of
the past, ‘The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation: Reenactment, Simu-
lation, and the Fusion of Horizons’, History and Theory 41, no. 1 (2002): 25–42.
44 Anthony E. Pattiz, ‘The Idea of History Teaching: Using Collingwood’s Idea
of History to Promote Critical Thinking in the High School Classroom’, The
History Teacher 37, no. 2 (February 2004): 239–250.
45 There is also the not-so-small problem with first-person interpretation of the
mock-heroic – an ironic burlesque style on the part of the interpreter – that is
amusingly incongruous and ahistorical.
46 David Harlan, ‘Editorial’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice
8, no. 2 (2004): 186.
47 Ibid., 187.
48 The reason David J. Staley thinks history will be radically altered in its thinking
as well as its practice by digitisation is that it will make history (again) like
science. Briefly, new technological practices will open up new modes of cogni-
tion mainly by doing away with conventional notions of storytelling which are
linear and artificial. See David J. Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History:
How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 2002).
166 Notes

49 Mark Poster, ‘Manifesto for a History of the Media’, in Manifestos for Historians,
ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow (London and New York:
Routledge, 2007), forthcoming.
50 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, 2001); Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Arti-
ficial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana
Press, 1991); Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in
Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997).
51 Michael J. Guasco, ‘Building the Better Textbook: The Promises and
Perils of E-Publication’, The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003),
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/89.4/guasco.html (accessed
September 5, 2005).
52 Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990); White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, The
Content of the Form, 1–25; Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology
(London and New York: Routledge, 1996).

 5 The Past, the Facts and History

1 Frank R. Ankersmit, ‘The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy
of History’ in History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 44–74.
2 Morgan, ed., The Feminist History Reader, 1.
3 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 (1988), 181.
4 Patrick Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (Oxford, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1952); C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (London and
New York: Routledge, 1998) and The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism
into Perspective; Martin Bunzl, Real History (London and New York: Routledge,
1997); Searle, The Construction of Social Reality; Perez Zagorin, ‘History, the
referent, and narrative. Reflections on Postmodernism now’, History and Theory
38 (1999); David Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for
Continuity’, History and Theory 25 (1986): 117–131; David Carr, Time, Narrative
and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991 [1986]); David Carr,
‘Getting the Story Straight: Narrative and Historical Knowledge’, Historiography
Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Contributions to the Methodology of the
Historical Research, ed. Jerzy Topolski (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994),
119–134; William H. Dray ‘Narrative and Historical Realism’ reprinted in
Roberts, ed., The History and Narrative Reader, 157–180; Dray, Laws and Explan-
ation in History; Andrew P. Norman, ‘Telling it Like it was: Historical Narratives
on their Own Terms’ reprinted in Roberts, ed., The History and Narrative Reader,
 Notes 167

181–196; John Zammito, ‘Ankersmit and Historical Representation’, History

and Theory, 44, no. 2 (2005): 164.
5 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956), 60–61.
6 Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 154–155.
7 Donald Davidson, ‘Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Discussion with Rorty’, Donald
Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge, ed. Urszula M. Zeglen (Abingdon and
New York, 2006 [1999]), p. 17.
8 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Ankersmit, Historical Representa-
tion; Ankersmit, ‘The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of
History’, in History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 44–74.
9 Mink, ‘Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument’ reprinted in Roberts, ed.,
The History and Narrative Reader, 211–220.
10 Jerome Bruner, ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, Critical Inquiry 31
(1991): 1–21; Danto, Narration and Knowledge; Mink, ‘Narrative Form as a
Cognitive Instrument’ reprinted in Roberts, ed., The History and Narrative
Reader, 211–220; Frank R. Ankersmit, ‘Six Theses on Narrativist Philosophy of
History’, in History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 33–43.
11 David Harlan, ‘Intellectual History and the Return of Literature’ AHR Forum,
American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (1989): 581–609.
12 Claire Norton, ‘Fiction or Non-fiction? Ottoman Accounts of the Siege of
Nagykanizsa’, Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate,
ed. Korhonen (Amsterdam, New York: Rodophi, 2006), 119–130.
13 Manuscript accounts generated over 200 years of a Habsburg siege of the
Ottoman-held castle of Nagykanizsa in present-day Hungary. Ibid.
14 Ibid., 127.
15 Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case
(New York: Atheneum, 1964 [1961]), vii. Reconstructionists would say they
are testing their ‘assumptions’.
16 Note the implicit opposition between ‘concept’ and ‘fiction’.
17 Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case, 335.
18 Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 6.
19 A view expressed by David Henige as a ‘characteristic of postmodern argu-
ment’, Historical Evidence and Argument, 24.
20 Ibid., 25.
21 William Pencak, ‘The American Civil War Did Not Take Place: With Apologies
to Baudrillard’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 6, no. 2
(2002): 217–221.
22 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, ‘The Closed Space of Choice: A Manifesto on the
Future of History’, Manifestos for Histories, ed. Jenkins, Morgan and Munslow
(London, New York: Routledge, 2007), forthcoming.
168 Notes

23 Barthes, ‘Le Discours de l’histoire’, Information sur les Sciences Sociales (1981
[1967]), 65–75.
24 Ibid.
25 Frederick A. Olafson, The Dialectic of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979).
26 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999).
27 Geoffrey Roberts, ‘Narrative History as a Way of Life’, Journal of Contemporary
History 31 (1996): 221–228.
28 Arguably the two central myths of nineteenth-century bourgeois society were
the knowing subject and, consequently, their agency.
29 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 1 (1984): 49.
30 Ibid., 50.
31 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
32 Hayden White, ‘Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Histor-
ical Reality’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 9 (2005):
147–157.
33 Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 113–115.
34 Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner
(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005 [2004]), 39.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 41.
37 An extremely lucid description of and commentary on the concept of narrative
substance is provided by Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity,
132–160.
38 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: From 1492 to the Present
(London and New York: Longman); C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia, 6 vols
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1962–1987).
39 Hélène Bowen Raddeker, Sceptical History: Postmodernism, Feminism and the
Practice of History (New York and London: Routledge, 2007).

 6 Understanding [in] History

1 I have written about this process previously. For a far more detailed treatment
see Munslow, The New History.
2 Still the best introduction to issue of historical explanation is William Dray’s
famous account Laws and Explanation in History. By far the most access-
ible, short and lucid recent study of historical explanation from a classic
empirical-analytical position is that of the realist philosopher of history
 Notes 169

C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective.

See Chapter 8 for his incisive analysis. See also Stephen Davies, Empiricism and
History (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003).
3 Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press,
1965); Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books,
1959). See also Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation for the classic
defence of the covering law model.
4 Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish,
Italians, Jews and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
5 Ibid., 219.
6 An excellent introduction to developments in historical thinking and practice
is MacRaild and Taylor, Social Theory and Social History.
7 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After
the Linguistic Turn (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 1–2.
8 Carla Hesse, ‘The New Empiricism’, Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): 201–
207.
9 A brief examination of the concept of historicism and what it means to histor-
ians can be found in Alun Munslow, ‘Historicism’ in The Routledge Companion
to Historical Studies, Second Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2006),
140–142.
10 White, Figural Realism; Markku Lehtimäki, ‘History as Crazy House: Norman
Mailer, Hayden White, and the Representation of a Modernist Event’, Tropes
for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate, ed. Korhonen,
135–150.
11 Dray, Laws and Explanation in History, 156–169.
12 Chris Ward, ‘Lenin’s Death in the British Press’, Rethinking History: The Journal
of Theory and Practice 10, no. 4 (2006): 599–630.
13 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 31.
14 I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1936), 3.
15 As Wittgenstein argued in the latter part of his career, meaning can only be
grasped as part of the larger set of rules that govern its creation. Arguably, only
the briefest acquaintance with history as a narrative-making activity confirms
the truth of this. This suggests that the variety of turns, linguistic, narrative,
aesthetic, cultural and even ethical, are incommensurate with the empirical-
analytical unless the latter can be incorporated within them.
16 It is a fundamental error, though one still regularly made by a few classic
realist historians, that those colleagues they refer to as ‘epistemological scep-
tics’ are saying that it is impossible to understand not just the meaning of
the past, but derive any meaning. This is neither a new argument nor any
170 Notes

less spurious because its central assumption is false. This is that there must be
two opposite and necessarily hostile approaches to the past – either you know
what it means epistemologically or you don’t. The Italian historian Benedetto
Croce (1866–1952) and the British idealist-influenced philosopher of history
R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943) disposed of this odd notion a good while ago.
Both agreed it is only because we all share the same constituent of thought and
cognition, that is, language, that we can possibly provide a culturally useful
(and factually based of course) meaning for the past. See also Antoine Prost,
Republican Identities in War and Peace: Representations of France in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002). See also Raddeker,
Sceptical History, op. cit.
17 The list of potential references here is huge. The following are merely indic-
ative. See, for example, Donald Davidson’s collection Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation; Bruner, Acts of Meaning; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-
disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny
(London and New York: Routledge, 1994 [1978]); Gottlob Frege, Collected
Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature; White, ‘The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact’, Tropics of Discourse,
81–100; Perez Zagorin, ‘History, the Referent, and Narrative. Reflections on
Postmodernism now’, History and Theory, 38 (1999): 1–24; John E. Toews,
‘Intellectual history after the linguistic turn: The autonomy of meaning and
the irreducibility of experience’, American Historical Review 92 (1987): 879–
907; Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis and Cambridge:
Hackett, 1978).
18 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975
[1962]).
19 Paul S. Boyer et al. The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 205.
20 Science claims to escape this – which leads to the grotesque notion that truth
is what science tells us it is.
21 C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), The Truth of History and The Logic of History: Putting
Postmodernism in Perspective, pp. 18–42.
22 Ibid., 19.
23 McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective, 18–36.
24 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 79.
25 Ibid., 96.
26 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 68.
27 White, An Old Question Raised Again: Is Historiography Art or Science (Response
to Iggers), 391–406; White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect; White,
The Content of the Form; White, Tropics of Discourse; White, Metahistory.
 Notes 171

28 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore,

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
29 David Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’,
History and Theory, 131.
30 Ibid., 117–131.
31 Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of
Social History.
32 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 63.
33 Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War 1 and the American Experience
(Boston and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 230–232.
34 Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House,
1999).
35 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 55; Robert A Rosenstone, ‘Introduc-
tion: Practice and Theory’, Experiments in Rethinking History, Munslow and
Rosenstone (eds), 1.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 2.
38 Ibid.
39 Greg Dening, ‘Writing, Re-writing the Beach: An Essay’, Experiments in
Rethinking History, ed. Munslow and Rosenstone (London, New York:
Routledge, 2004), 30–55.
40 White, Figural Realism.
41 Sumiko Higashi, ‘Not a “Kodak Moment”: Picturing Asian Americans’, Experi-
ments in Rethinking History, ed. Munslow and Rosenstone (London, New York:
Routledge, 2004), 77–83.
42 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: The Modern Library,
1931 [1918]).
43 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1999). See also ‘Walter Benjamin: The Arcades
Project’ in The Nature of History Reader, Jenkins and Munslow (eds),
135–141.
44 Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time, x.
45 Synthia Sydnor, ‘A History of Synchronised Swimming’, Journal of Sport History
25, no. 2 (1998): 252–267.
46 Ibid., 260.
47 Robert A. Rosenstone, The Man Who Swam into History (Bloomington, IL, 1st
Books, 2002).
48 Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003 [2001]).
49 Hans-Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
50 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience.
172 Notes

51 Fauvism was the first major aesthetic movement of the last century founded
on a belief in the absolutism and intensity of colour (form) and represented
by painters like Matisse and later Dufy and Braque.
52 There can be histories that combine both.

7 The Oar in Water

1 Resulting from the narrative decisions they make, every historian has his or
her own style of course.
2 Tamsin Spargo, ed., Reading the Past: Literature and History (Houndmills and
New York: Palgrave, 2000).
3 The key articles are collected in Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. and
introduced by Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1965 [1955]).
4 Antoinette Burton ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005)
5 Deborah A. Symonds, ‘Living in the Scottish Record Office’, Reconstructing
History, ed. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York and
London: Routledge, 1999), 164–175; Durba Ghosh, ‘National Narratives and
the Politics of Miscegenation: Britain and India’, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions
and the Writing of History, ed. Burton, 27–44.
6 C. Behan McCullagh, ‘Bias in Historical Description, Interpretation, and
Explanation’, History and Theory, 39–66.
7 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Objectivity and Subjectivity in History’, in Ricoeur, History and
Truth, Kelbley, 21–40.
8 Ibid., 25.
9 Ibid., 31.
10 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 98–105.
11 Ibid., 197–198.
12 More radically, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has explored the
notion of ‘symbolic order’ whereby, as he argues, for human beings the world
(of things) is created by (the world of) words. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A
Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977).
13 McCullagh, The Truth of History, 5, 13–57.
14 John Burnett, England Eats Out: 1830-Present (Harlow: Pearson Longman,
2004), 108.
15 Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990 [1933]); Goldstein, Historical Knowing.
16 I have dealt with these theories of truth in more detail elsewhere. See Munslow,
The New History, 80–98.
 Notes 173

17 Lemon, Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students, 339.

18 E. Guba, and Y. Lincoln, ‘Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research’, Hand-
book of Qualitative Research, ed. N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (London: Sage, 1994),
105–117.
19 J. Bruner, ‘Life as Narrative’, Social Research 54, no. 1 (1987): 11–32.
20 Glory tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, an early
African American military unit in the American Civil War largely through the
documented voice of its abolitionist colonel.
21 Gadamer, Truth and Method; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J.
Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962); Michel Foucault,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1877, ed. Colin
Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and
Truth: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1; Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.
22 Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, 96–145.
23 Although White’s position has been roundly attacked by the realist philo-
sopher Bernard Williams. See Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An
Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
24 Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpreta-
tion in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1982).
25 Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, James Conant, ed. (Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1990), 15.
26 While it should by now not be necessary, I feel obliged once again to reassure
reconstructionists and constructionists by reiterating that this does not mean
the exclusion of the existence of evidentially justified belief.
27 Marwick, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language, 38–50.

 Conclusion
1 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 27.
2 Peter Gay, Style in History: Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, Burckhardt (New York and
London: W.W. Norton, 1988 [1974]), 217; Chris Lorenz, ‘Can Histories be
True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the Metaphorical Turn’, History and Theory
37 (1998): 309–329.
Further reading

 Introduction
If there is one fundamental argument in this book, it is that the nature of
history depends on the historian’s epistemological choice(s). This necessitates
some idea about the theory and nature of knowledge itself. This is well provided
in three books: Jonathan Dancy, An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology
(Oxford, 1985), Robert Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the
Theory of Knowledge (New York, 1998), and David Cooper, Epistemology: The
Classic Readings (Oxford, 1999). Historians do not have to be philosophers
but we need a basic understanding of the epistemological connection between
past existence and present knowledge. This is why we also need an under-
standing of the ontology of the history narrative and also the historian’s own
ontological commitments. I recommend Reinhardt Grossmann, The Existence
of the World: An Introduction to Ontology (London, 1992), and Chapter 2 in
Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Oxford, 1981). A recent examination
of epistemological scepticism is to be found in Hélène Bowen Raddeker, Scep-
tical History: Postmodernism, Feminism and the Practice of History (London and
New York, 2007).
Several texts provide a good starting point for the understanding of the rela-
tionship between narrative and history. These include William Gallie’s Philosophy
and the Historical Understanding (London, 1964), W.H. Walsh, An Introduction to the
Philosophy of History (Place of publication unknown, 1970 [1951]), Leon Goldstein,
Historical Knowing (Austin, 1976), Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New
York, 1985) and Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965) and William
Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford, 1966 [1957]). Of crucial importance
is Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Time’ in On Narrative, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago,
1981), pp. 168–186. See, in addition, Paul Ricoeur’s essential three volumes Time
and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Vols 1 and 2) and
Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Vol. 3) (Chicago, 1983–1985). The classic
texts on narrative and history remain Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973) and Michel de Certeau,
The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, 1988). See also the more

174
 Further reading 175

basic introductions (which also assume a broad epistemologically sceptical stance)

by Alun Munslow, The New History (Harlow, 2003) and The Routledge Companion
to Historical Studies (London and New York, 2006 [2000]). Although it has omis-
sions, the best-collected introduction to narrative and history is Geoffrey Roberts
(ed.), The History and Narrative Reader (London and New York, 2001). Also useful is
Martin McQuillan (ed.), The Narrative Reader (London and New York, 2000). The
indispensable survey of narrative thinking and practice is the Routledge Encyclopedia
of Narrative Theory edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan
(Abingdon and New York, 2005).
On the broader impact of narrative thinking and practice see Jerome Bruner,
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA, 1986), Martin Kreiswirth, ‘Narrative
Turn in the Humanities’ in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory edited
by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (Abingdon and New
York, 2005), pp. 377–382 and Jürgen Straub (ed.), Narration, Identity and Historical
Consciousness (New York, 2005). The nature of representation is well addressed
in Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (Abingdon and New York, 2005
[1989]).
The work of Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman are, of course, pivotal
to understanding the nature of narrative and history. See Genette’s Figures
(Paris, 1966), Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford, 1986 [1972]) and
Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, 1990 [1983]) and Seymour
Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and
London, 1978). The range of work on history and narrative has grown substan-
tially in the past 10 years. Representative are Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction
(Baltimore and London, 1999), and Sande Cohen, History Out of Joint: Essays on the
Use and Abuse of History (Baltimore and London, 2005). The major figure working
today on narrative and the representational nature of history is undoubtedly
Frank R. Ankersmit. His main texts are Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the
Historian’s Language (The Hague, 1983), History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall
of Metaphor (Berkeley, 1994), Historical Representation (Stanford, 2001) and most
recently Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, 2005) and with Hans Kellner (eds)
A New Philosophy of History (Chicago, 1995).
The conventional understanding of history as an empirical-analytical endeavour
is nowhere better examined than in C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History:
Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (London and New York, 2004), and ‘Bias in
Historical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation’, History and Theory, 39, 1
(2000), pp. 39–66. The notion of reality is addressed accessibly by John Searle, The
Construction of Social Reality (London, 1995), and the wide-ranging study of Aviezer
Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (New York, 2004).
A substantial application and critical appraisal of the reconstructionist, construc-
tionist and deconstructionist epistemological model can be found in Douglas
176 Further reading

Booth, The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History (London and New York, 2005).
See also the collection edited by Murray G. Phillips, Deconstructing Sport History: A
Postmodern Analysis (Albany, 2006).

 Chapter 1 Narrating the past

The nature of history as a representation, as already noted, is well served by
Frank R. Ankersmit, but the philosopher Richard Rorty has famously cast doubt
on the notion of unproblematic representation in Truth and Progress: Philosoph-
ical Papers Vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1998). See, in addition, his edited The Linguistic
Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, 1992 [1967]), and his most
famous work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979). For those who
wish to pursue the philosophical debates in greater detail see Donald Davidson,
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1984) and his Essays on Actions and
Events (Oxford, 1980). On history as a cultural representation see Martin L. Davies,
Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society (Abingdon and New York,
2005) and Alun Munslow, Discourse and Culture: The Creation of America, 1870–
1920 (London and New York, 1992). Almost alone in the United Kingdom, Keith
Jenkins has confronted conventional historical thinking and practice. Essential
reading for all historians is his re-issued Rethinking History (London, 2002 [1991]),
On ‘What is History?’ (London, 1995), The Postmodern History Reader (London,
1997), Why History? Reflections on the Possible End of History and Ethics under
the Impact of the Postmodern (London, 1999) and Refiguring History (London and
New York, 2003).

 Chapter 2 History as content/story

The narrative model of history thinking and practice relies on the work of a variety
of thinkers outside history. Among them are Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in
General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (Glasgow, 1974), Louis Hjelmslev, Proleg-
omena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison, 1963 [1943])
and Language: An Introduction, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison, 1970). In
addition see A.J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans.
Danielle McDowell, Ronald Schleifer and Alan Velie (Lincoln, 1983 [1966]),
Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale (Bloomington, 1958), Roland Barthes,
‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ in Susan Sontag (ed,
Barthes: Selected Writings (Oxford, 1983), Jacques Derrida, Writing and Differ-
ence trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978) and Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak
(Baltimore, 1976).
 Further reading 177

Now a classic is Louis O. Mink, ‘Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument’

reprinted in Roberts (ed.) op. cit., pp. 211–220, and Peter Munz, ‘The Historical
Narrative’ in Michael Bentley (ed.) Companion to Historiography (New York and
London, 1997). In addition to Metahistory, Hayden White’s major texts include
Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, 1998), The Content of the
Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London, 1987)
and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978). Useful in
addressing the literary nature of the historical enterprise is Keith Jenkins and Alun
Munslow (eds), The Nature of History: A Reader (London and New York, 2004). More
specialised but invaluable is Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays by
Northrop Frye (New York, 1967 [1957]).

 Chapter 3 Narrative and narration

The texts already noted by Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman remain central
here but see also Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), and
Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin, 1982).
The work of Mieke Bal is significant. See ‘The Narrating and the Focalizing: A
Theory of the Agents in Narrative’, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Style, 17 (1983), pp. 234–
269, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, 1985). Equally
important is Monika Fludernik, ‘New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalisation
and New Writing’, New Literary History, 32, 3 (2001), pp. 619–638, and Suzanne
Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction
(Routledge, 1990). The work of Roland Barthes on the process of narration is
essential. See his ‘The Death of the Author’ in Sean Burke (ed.) Authorship: From
Plato to Postmodernism: A Reader (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 125–130. To be read in
tandem is Michel Foucault, ‘What Is An Author?’ in J.H. Harari (ed.), Textual
Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (London, 1979), pp. 141–160.
Hayden White’s analysis of focalisation is usefully introduced in the ‘Introduc-
tion’ to his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 15–20. Of central importance once again
is the Ricoeur trilogy. Still worth the effort is Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (ed.), trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 1981). More generally see Phil-
ippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to
Chartier (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). A basic
introduction to the theory of authorship is available in Andrew Bennett, The
Author (New York and Abingdon, 2005). For an exemplary application of the
theory and practice of the author-historian see Robert A. Rosenstone, Mirror in the
Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan (Cambridge and London, 1988). For an
178 Further reading

original and influential analysis of tense/time see Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth Sequel to
History (Princeton, 1992). Also important is Kuisima Korhonen’s edited collection,
Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate (Amsterdam
and New York, Rodopi, 2006), and Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln, Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 2004). For the technically minded narrative historian
see Jonathan Culpeper, Language and Characterisation (Harlow, Longman, 2001),
and James Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1989).

 Chapter 4 History as expression

The literature on history modes of expression is growing at what seems to be
an exponential rate. The key analyst of the epistemological relationship between
film and history remains Robert A. Rosenstone. See his ‘The Future of the Past:
Film and the Beginnings of Postmodern History’ in Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The
Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event (New York, 1996),
pp. 201–218; ‘Does a Filmic Writing of History Exist?’, History and Theory, 41, 4
(2002), pp. 135–144, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
(Cambridge MA, 1995), Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past
(Princeton, NJ, 1995), History on Film, Film on History (Harlow, 2006). See, in addi-
tion, Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit, 1988) and ‘Does and Filmic Writing
of History Exist?’, Film and History, 17, 4 (1987), pp. 81–89, and Richard Allen,
Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge, 1995).
The series of articles in the 1988 American Historical Review Forum, 93, 5 (1988),
on film and history is also a landmark. Once again Roland Barthes has made a
contribution with ‘The Realist Effect’, Film Reader No. 2 (Wisconsin, 1978), pp.
131–135. See also Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last things Before The Last (Prin-
ceton, 1995 [1965]). On photography see Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York,
1973), and J.J. Long, ‘History, Narrative and Photography in W.G. Sebald’s Die
Ausgewanderten’ Modern Language Review, 98, 1 (2003), pp. 117–137. Of interest is
Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘The Modes of Narrativity and Their Visual Metaphors’, Style, 26
(1992), pp. 368–387. A wide-ranging analysis is offered by Alison Landsberg’s Pros-
thetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture
(New York, 2004).
On the graphic novel see Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys, ‘History in the Graphic
Novel’, in Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 6 (2002), pp. 255–
260, and Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My father Bleeds History (New
York, 1986), Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York, 1991)
and Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps (New York, 1998). Another contribution by
Hayden White is his ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth’ in Saul
 Further reading 179

Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 37–
53. On remembrance and memorialisation see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites
of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1998 [1995])
and Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (New York, 1997), and Susan Davies, ‘History and Heritage’ in Peter
Lambert and Phillipp Schofield (eds) Making History: An Introduction to the History
and Practices of a Discipline (London and New York, 2004), pp. 280–289. On public
history see Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Briar and Roy Rosenzweig (eds) Presenting
the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia, 1986), Ludmilla Jordanova,
History in Practice (London, 2000), and Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 2 vols
(London, 1998).
On digital representation see David J. Staley, Computers, Visualization, and
History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (Armonk,
2002), Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory
(Bloomington, 1991), Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of
Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, 1997), and Mark Poster, ‘Manifesto for a History
of the Media’ in Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow (eds), Manifestos
for Historians (London and New York, 2007).

 Chapter 5 The past, the facts, and history

There are many ‘classic’ texts in this area. One could do worse than start with
Patrick Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (Oxford, 1952), C. Behan
McCullagh, The Truth of History (London and New York, 1998) and his The
Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism into Perspective (New York and London,
2004). In addition see Martin Bunzl, Real History (London and New York, 1997),
Perez Zagorin, ‘History, the Referent, and Narrative. Reflections on Postmod-
ernism now’, History and Theory, 38 (1999), David Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real
World: An Argument for Continuity’, History and Theory, 25 (1986), pp. 117–
131. See also his Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington, Indiana University
Press, 1991 [1986]) and ‘Getting the Story Straight: Narrative and Historical
Knowledge’ in Jerzy Topolski (ed.) Historiography Between Modernism and Post-
modernism: Contributions to the Methodology of the Historical Research (Amsterdam
and Atlanta, 1994), pp. 119–134. Another text by William Dray worthy of
attention is ‘Narrative and Historical Realism’ reprinted in Roberts (ed.), op.
cit., pp. 157–180, and Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford, 1966 [1957]).
Andrew P. Norman’s ‘Telling it Like it Was: Historical Narratives on their Own
Terms’ reprinted in Roberts (ed.), op. cit., pp. 181–196, and John Zammito,
‘Ankersmit and Historical Representation’, History and Theory, 44, 2 (2005),
pp. 155–181.
180 Further reading

 Chapter 6 Understanding [in] history

An excellent introduction to historical explanation is William Dray’s Laws and
Explanation in History (Oxford, 1966 [1957]). The classic texts remain Carl G.
Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York, 1965), Karl Popper, The Logic of
Scientific Discovery (New York, 1959), and Patrick L. Gardiner, The Nature of Histor-
ical Explanation (Oxford, 1961 [1952]). More recently see Mark Bevir, The Logic of
the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999). A solid introductory survey of historical
thinking and practice is Donald M. MacRaild and Avram Taylor, Social Theory and
Social History (Houndmills and New York, 2004).
On language and explanation see J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words
(Oxford, 1975 [1962]), C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions
(Cambridge, 1984), Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
(Baltimore, 1978), Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of
Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990). A book-length
example of experimental history is Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald
Reagan (New York, 1999). On experimental history more generally see the ‘Intro-
duction: Practice and Theory’, Experiments in Rethinking History, Alun Munslow
and Robert A. Rosenstone (eds) (London and New York, 2004). In that collec-
tion are a number of experimental histories but in particular see Greg Dening,
Writing, Re-writing the Beach: An Essay, pp. 30–55. A further book-length experi-
mental approach is to be found in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the
Edge of Time (Cambridge MA: London, England, 1997).
The-past-as-history notion, which acknowledges the postmodern epistemologic-
ally sceptical understanding of history, can be approached through two early edit-
orials in the journal Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 1 (1997), pp.
1–20 and 111–123. See, in addition, Alun Munslow Deconstructing History (London
and New York, 2006 [1997]), The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies (New
York and London, 2005 [2000]), and Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow, What is
History? A Reader (London and New York, 2004). Also of importance is Hans-Robert
Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, 1982).

 Chapter 7 The oar in water

Historians do not, in the normal course of their activities, read much on objectivity,
truth and relativism especially in the context of the narrative-making logic of
history. Nevertheless, it becomes necessary to break this habit if we are to more
fully understand the nature of history. An essential start is with a comparison
between the approaches to history through the polarised perspectives of Hayden
White and C. Behan McCullagh (see the texts already noted). But there are a
 Further reading 181

number of other texts which are valuable, not least Michael Oakeshott, Experience
and Its Modes (Cambridge, 1990 [1933]), Leon Goldstein, Historical Knowing (Austin,
1976), and Michael C. Lemon, Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students (London
and New York, 2003). For those of a more philosophical bent the following are
essential: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1975), Martin Heide-
gger, Being and Time trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford, 1962), Michel
Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited
by Colin Gordon (Harvester Press, 1980), and Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism
and Truth: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1991). See also Donald Davidson,
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1984), and Patrick Finney, ‘Ethics,
historical relativism and Holocaust Denial’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory
and Practice, 2 (1997). For one of the most sophisticated recent understandings
of relativism in all its manifestations see Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the
Postmodern (Oxford, 2004).
Index

action, 3, 11, 12, 16, 20–1, 24, 25, 29, 86, 91, 98, 107, 119, 122, 124,
31, 36, 37, 39, 45, 51–63, 67, 69, 126, 128, 130, 134, 138, 141, 144,
70, 75, 78, 84, 89, 94, 97–8, 101–3, 145, 177
108, 120, 123, 125–6, 130, 135,
136, 137, 140, 151, 152, 154, 168, Bakhtin, M., 48, 58–9, 160, 177
176 Bal, M., 48, 158, 160, 177
Adams, H., 108, 171 Barta, T., 162
aesthetics/aesthetic turn, 8, 17, 28, 30, Barthes, R., 5–6, 9–10, 30, 34, 44, 46,
32, 34–6, 37, 40, 43, 54, 59, 69, 71, 67, 73, 88–9, 91, 93, 103, 125, 149,
75, 78, 92, 105, 107, 112, 115, 119, 153, 157, 158, 161–4, 168, 176,
124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 177, 178
139, 151, 155, 169, 171, 172, 180 Bartra, E., 72, 164
agency (structure), 11, 12, 14, 18, 20, Baudrillard, J., 91, 103, 118, 167, 168
31–3, 45, 46, 48–50, 54, 56–63, 70, BBC History Magazine, 72–3, 163, 164
75, 77, 81, 83, 85, 86, 89, 90, 94, Becker, C., 161
97, 98, 108, 115, 119, 123, 126, Belchem, J., 13, 151
130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 158, 168, Benjamin, W., 108, 171
177 Bennett, A., 157, 177
Alcoff, L., 149 Benson, L., 85–6, 167
Allen, R., 162, 178 Benson, S.P., 164, 179
Alltagsgeschichte, 160 Bentley, M., 147, 150, 177
American Civil War, 10, 36, 39, 86–9, Berger, S., 157
121, 155, 156, 167, 173 Bevir, M., 89, 98, 161, 168, 169,
Analepsis’, 55–6, 120, 140 180
Ankersmit, F.R., 16, 29, 31, 34, 37, 49, biography/autobiography, 13, 14, 40,
55, 68, 80, 83, 86, 91, 92, 93, 98, 48, 50, 105, 108, 156, 159
102, 104, 105, 109, 114, 119, 123, Black, J., 155
125, 151, 153, 154, 158, 161, 166, Boghossian, P., 152
167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176, Booth, D., 150, 176
179 Booth, W., 46, 157, 177
Appleby, J., 149 Bourdieu, P., 160
Armstrong, N., 163 Boyer, P., 148
Atkinson, R.F., 147 Braudel, F., 57, 59, 160, 177
Audi, R., 149, 174 Breisach, E., 156
Auerbach, E., 155 Bridge, F.R., 57, 160
Austin, J.L., 99–100, 170, 180 Brown, C., 149
author-historian, 3, 18, 20, 26, 36, 37, Bruner, J., 16, 31, 119, 151, 166, 167,
43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 56, 60, 170, 173, 175

182
 Index 183

Buhle, M.J., 155, 161 correspondence theory, 10–15, 26, 35,

Bunzl, M., 81, 166, 179 41, 53, 56, 61, 64, 66, 67, 80, 82–8,
Burke, K., 112, 165 92, 95, 96, 100, 103, 104, 108,
Burke, P., 74, 77, 150 116, 117–18, 124, 129, 131, 133,
Burke, S., 157, 177 142, 143, 145, 146
Burnett, J., 117, 172 Croce, B., 170
Burton, A., 172 Culpeper, J., 161, 178
Bush, B., 151 Currie, M., 149
Curthoys, A., 149
Czerny, R., 170
Cannadine, D., 150, 161
Carnes, M.C., 162 Daddow, O., 66, 162
Carr, E.H., 2–4, 81, 113, 147 Dailey, J., 155
Carr, D., 104, 112, 166, 171, 179 Dallek, R., 161
Carrard, P., 177 Dancy, J., 149, 174
Carwardine, R., 50, 52, 159 Danto, A.C., 104, 125, 147, 154, 167,
characterisation, 20–1, 35, 37, 48–50, 174
53, 54, 55, 58–63, 70, 71, 75, 86, Davidson, D., 16, 82, 151, 152, 167,
105, 107, 109, 126, 130, 161, 176 170, 176, 181
Chatman, S., 20–21, 28, 29, 31, 49, Davies, M.L., 152, 176
51–2, 120, 123, 128, 145, 152–3, Davies, S., 164, 179
154, 158, 159, 162, 173, 175, 177 Davis, C., 149
Clark, C.M.H., 168 Davis, N.Z., 162
class, 2, 13–14, 32, 37, 40, 42, 48, 51, de Certeau, M., 7, 67, 149, 174
58, 60–1, 70, 74–5, 83, 86, 92, 95, de Saussure, F., 87, 176
100, 101, 111, 115, 142, 147, 156, deconstruction/deconstructionist
160, 161 history, 10, 14–15, 17, 18, 29, 33,
Cohen, S., 149, 152, 175 35, 39, 41, 46, 64, 73, 103, 109,
Cohn, D., 6–7, 149, 175 112, 115, 123–4, 130–7, 139, 140,
Collingwood, R.G., 75–6, 165, 170 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149,
comics/comic strip, 1, 24, 26, 64, 65, 158, 175, 176, 180
71–3, 120, 126, 164 Dening, G., 107, 171, 180
construction/constructionist history, 3, Dentith, S., 160
10–15, 18, 19, 28, 33, 34, 38–9, 41, Denzin, N., 173
46, 53, 60, 66, 70, 78, 82, 83, 85, Derrida, J., 42, 46, 64, 116, 125, 176
90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 104, 109, 111, diegesis/diegetic, 21, 47, 48–9, 55, 66,
113, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122, 123, 105, 124, 131, 132, 159
124, 126, 130–1, 133, 134, 135, Diggins, J.P., 19–20, 86, 152
136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, digital/digitised representation, 25, 27,
145, 151, 157, 159, 162, 163, 164, 65, 71, 76–8, 106, 126, 128, 138,
167, 173, 175, 179 161, 165, 179
content/story, 22, 26–43, 50, 51, 55, Dilthey, W., 51, 152, 159
56, 57, 59, 63, 64, 65, 68, 70, 72, discourse, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 15, 17,
78, 83, 89, 90, 93, 96, 97, 100, 20–3, 27, 29, 44, 47, 48, 52, 55,
102, 109, 112, 119–22, 123, 126–9, 56–7, 66, 80, 81, 85, 88, 89, 98,
130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138, 140, 101, 104, 124, 131, 132, 134, 141,
144, 146, 153, 176 143, 144, 149, 151, 152–5, 157,
context/contextual, 41, 77, 101–2, 117 158, 159, 160, 162, 164, 170, 171,
Cooper, D., 149, 174 173, 175, 176, 177, 180
184 Index

distentio, 53 74, 76–8, 84, 87–9, 91–2, 94–5, 97,

Dodge, B., 86, 157 102–3, 105, 112, 115, 120, 125–7,
Dowd Hall, J., 47, 158 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138, 140,
Dray, W., 81, 97, 147, 154, 165, 166, 144, 152, 158, 176
168, 169, 174, 179, 180 evidence, 3–4, 10, 13, 17, 19, 24, 39,
duration, 21, 45, 51–60, 70, 126, 132, 41, 47, 50, 56, 60–2, 66, 70, 78, 81,
135 85–6, 94–7, 101–2, 113–15,
Dworkin, D., 147 117–19, 123–4, 132, 134, 136, 143,
151, 154, 156, 157, 161,
Eaglestone, R., 181 167, 173
Eagleton, T., 103, 170, experimental history, 17–19, 38, 41,
Eisner, W., 71, 164 49, 65, 79, 94, 103, 104, 105,
ellipsis, 56–7 106–10, 113, 121, 124, 129, 131,
Elton, G., 2–4, 147 132, 133, 134, 141, 144, 155, 171,
Emmott, C., 152 180
empiricism, 2–4, 6–10, 12–14, 16–17, explanation, 1–3, 6–9, 11, 13, 17–18,
25, 27–30, 33–4, 39, 41–2, 51–3, 23, 25–6, 28, 29–31, 33, 35–9, 42,
55, 58, 61, 65–6, 68, 78, 80–6, 89, 44, 48, 50–1, 56–8, 60, 63, 68, 70,
92–3, 95–7, 100–1, 103–7, 109–12, 76, 78–80, 91, 93, 94–7, 100–4,
114, 116–20, 122–8, 132–9, 141–3, 108–14, 116–17, 119, 123, 125–6,
145, 150, 168–9, 175 128, 130–40, 145, 147, 150–1,
emplotment, 11, 24, 27, 32, 33, 36–8, 154, 165–6, 168–9, 172, 174–5,
43, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 179–80
70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 83, 89,
91, 94, 97, 105, 112, 113, 115, facts, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 18, 22–5, 27–8,
119, 120, 122, 125, 126, 130, 132, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 41–2, 49, 50, 55,
134, 158, 164, 178 68, 75–6, 79, 80–95, 99, 100, 103,
English Civil War, 92 105, 111–13, 115, 116, 117, 119,
Enola Gay, 74 121, 124–5, 134, 135, 146, 150,
epistemology/epistemological/ 156, 166, 170, 172
epistemological choice, 8, 10–15, fauvism, 110, 172
16–18, 23, 26, 27, 29, 31–8, 41–3, Fay, B., 147
45, 46, 47, 59, 62, 64, 65–7, 69, Ferro, M., 162, 178
73–9, 80–3, 86, 89, 92, 93, 96, 97, fiction, 4, 6, 8, 17, 22–6, 36–7, 49,
101, 103–10, 112, 114, 116, 118, 51–3, 55, 56, 80, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90,
120, 122, 123, 125–9, 132, 133, 103, 104–5, 107, 123, 127–8, 134,
135, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 146, 144, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156, 157,
149, 150, 161, 163, 169, 170, 174, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 167, 168,
175, 178, 180 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178
Ermarth, E.D., 5, 87, 148, 167, 178 fictive, 6, 17–18, 22, 29, 37, 55, 71, 72,
ethics/ethical turn, 8, 18, 19, 32, 38, 94, 96, 103, 104, 115, 12–6, 130,
39, 40–1, 43, 45–6, 59, 73, 75, 78, 131, 134, 138, 140, 144, 159
83, 97, 98, 112, 115, 124, 126, figurative/prefigurative, 1, 6, 24, 32–7,
128, 133, 137, 138, 139, 142, 156, 78, 125, 126, 155
168, 169, 176, 181 film, 8, 24, 26, 27, 38, 42, 44, 49, 52,
Ethington, P., 159 55, 64, 65, 67–71, 73, 78, 83,
Evans, R.J., 39, 156, 161 105–7, 120, 126, 128, 132, 138,
events, 2–4, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18–29, 31–2, 152, 153, 158, 161, 162–3, 173,
35–9, 47–9, 51–2, 54–8, 67, 71–2, 175, 178
 Index 185

Finney, P.B., 181 Goodman, N., 170

first person history, 48, 65, 74–6, 120, Gordon, C., 173, 181
140, 165 graphic novel, 65, 71–3, 97, 104, 107,
Fischer, D.H., 57, 160 126, 127, 164, 178
Fleischman, S., 51, 159, 177 Greimas, A.J., 30, 37, 153, 155, 176
Fludernik, M., 158, 166, 177 Grossman, R., 174
focalisation, 2, 21, 27, 44–5, 47–50, Guasco, M.J., 166
58–61, 70, 72, 77, 83, 107, 116, Guba, E., 173
119, 126, 132, 134–5, 138, 158, Gumbrecht, H.U., 91, 108, 168, 171,
159, 177 180
followability, 31, 32, 78, 125, 126, 134,
135
form and content, 6, 65, 112, 125, 128, habitus, 60
131, 132, 135, 137, 138 Hacker, L., 56, 160
Foucault, M., 42, 44, 46, 66, 132, 157, Harlan, D., 76, 165, 167
173, 177, 181 Hegel, G.W.F., 81, 82, 167
Fox-Genovese, E., 172 Heidegger, M., 53, 100, 173, 181
Franklin, J.H., 120 Hempel, C., 95, 169, 180
Frege, G., 170 Henige, D., 86, 156, 167
frequency, 21, 45, 51, 55, 57–60, 70,
heritage and memorial/s, 25, 65, 69,
126, 135
73–4, 126, 164, 179
Frey, H., 71, 164, 178
Herlihy, D., 162
Friedlander, S., 158, 164, 179
Herman, D., 148, 152, 175
Frye, N., 37, 112, 155, 177
hermeneutics, 35, 100–3, 111, 113,
116, 141, 143
Gadamer, H-G., 15, 98, 100, 102, 119,
Hesling, W, 163
128, 151, 173, 181
Hesse, C., 169
Gallie, W., 3–4, 29, 31, 126, 147, 154,
Higashi, S., 171
159, 174
games, 1, 65, 74–6 Hill, J., 160
Gardiner, J., 150 Himmelfarb, G., 12
Gardiner, P., 81, 166, 169, 179, 180 historical truth, 112, 117, 119–21, 124,
Gay, P., 173 134, 135, 145, 146, 173
gender, 2, 13–14, 34, 36, 40, 48, 59, 61, historicism/historicist, 11, 87, 96–7,
70, 72, 74, 75, 101, 114–15, 122, 100, 112, 120, 121, 124, 136, 143,
142, 155 169
Genette, G., 5, 7, 20–6, 28, 29, 30, 37, history, (glossary definition) 136
43, 44, 48, 55, 56, 57, 62, 123, history magazines, 65, 71–3, 126, 163,
125, 128, 140, 148, 152, 153, 157, 164
160, 173, 175, 177 history narrative, 1, 5–8, 10, 11, 14, 17,
Genovese, E.D., 51, 159 22, 24–6, 31, 41, 48, 51, 52, 55, 60,
genre, 10–15, 66, 74, 104, 123, 130, 62, 68, 74, 79, 83, 85, 89, 93, 96,
131, 140, 142, 150 104, 108, 112, 114, 118, 121,
Gerstle, G., 58, 160 126–9, 138, 169, 174
Ghosh, D., 114, 172 Hobsbawm, E., 31, 32, 154
Gilbert, D., 165 Homberger, E., 161
Ginzburg, C., 153 Hood, S., 164
Glory, 120, 173 Hutcheon, L., 4, 14, 104, 148, 149,
Goldstein, L., 118, 154, 172, 174, 181 171, 175
186 Index

ideology/ideological, 3, 12, 20, 30–2, Lang, B., 158

38–43, 45, 54, 59, 66, 69, 73, 77, Lasch, C., 19–20, 152
78, 113, 119, 122, 126, 130, 133, Lasch-Quinn, E., 172
140, 142 Lemon, M., 119, 154, 173, 181
imperialism, 13–14, 151 Levine, L.W., 51, 159
inference, 1, 6, 10–11, 16, 24, 27, 30, Lewin, E., 152, 153, 155, 157, 158, 175,
33, 34, 39, 42, 50, 64, 66, 71–2, 81, 177
84, 92, 94, 95–6, 101, 112, 124, Lewin, M., 45, 47, 157
129, 132, 136, 137, 139 Lindqvist, S., 109, 171
intentio in distentio, 53 Linebaugh, P., 155
intentionality, 20, 21, 31, 45, 53, 57, linguistic turn, 8, 16, 54, 95, 125, 132,
59–63, 70, 75, 81, 89, 94, 95, 98–9, 137, 138, 139, 141, 143, 151, 169,
101, 107, 109, 119, 126, 134, 135, 170, 176
137, 138, 141, 160 Loades, D., 12
intertextuality, 46, 54, 77, 90–1, 101–2, Locke, J., 62, 161
122, 125, 136, 138, 141 Long, J.J., 163, 178
irregular, 57–8, 135
Iser, W., 103, 171, 180
iterative, 57–8, 135 MacRaild, D., 12, 151, 169, 180
Manovich, L., 166
Jakobson, R., 30, 153 Marwick, A., 12, 42, 151, 154, 156,
Jameson, F., 153 157, 173
Jauss, H-R., 171, 180 McCoy, D., 38, 156
Jenkins, K., 3, 37, 42, 46, 47, 125, 147, McCullagh, C.B., 17, 81, 101–2, 113,
155, 166, 167, 168, 171, 176, 177, 117, 151, 152, 166, 169, 170, 172,
179, 180 175, 179, 180
Jordanova, L., 74, 165, 179 McQuillan, M., 149, 175
justified belief, 11, 17, 47, 66, 83, 85, meaning, 1–4, 7–12, 14, 16–18, 20–1,
91, 92, 94, 99, 112, 114, 116, 24–6, 28, 32, 34, 35–40, 42, 44,
118–21, 124–5, 132, 134, 136, 137, 46–7, 50–6, 58, 60, 62, 64–6, 71–9,
140, 143, 145, 173 80, 87–93, 94, 96–110, 111–12,
115–19, 121–9, 130, 131, 132,
Kammen, M., 150 134–46, 150, 160, 166, 167, 169,
Kelbley, C.A., 172 170, 173
Kellner, H., 148, 175 Melosh, B., 36, 155
Kirk, N., 13, 151 metonymy, 35–6, 52, 159
Klein, K.L., 164 mimésis/mimetic/mimetic loop, 21,
Kölbel, M, 150 23–4, 36–8, 47, 52–4, 61–3, 64, 66,
Korhonen, K., 148, 153, 159, 160, 167, 67–8, 77, 90, 105, 107, 117, 123–5,
169, 178 131, 135, 137, 143, 154, 155, 161,
Koselleck, R., 149 170, 177
Kozin, A., 165 Mink, L., 31, 37, 39, 49, 83, 86, 104,
Kracauer, S., 68, 162, 163, 178 123, 125, 126, 154, 155, 158, 167,
Kreisworth, M., 40, 148, 156, 175 177
Mitchell, W.J.T., 71, 148, 164, 174
Lacan, J., 172 mode of cognition, 16, 32
Lambert, P., 150, 164, 179 mode/s of expression, 15, 26, 28, 30,
Landsberg, A., 69, 73, 77, 163, 178 33, 59, 61, 63–79, 83, 89, 97, 100,
Landy, M., 163 102, 106, 109, 119–20, 122, 123,
 Index 187

126–8, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, O’Connor, J.E., 162

138, 142, 144, 146, 157 Oakeshott, M., 118, 172, 181
Moore-Rinvolucri, M., 147 objectivity, 2–3, 5, 8–11, 25, 28, 33–4,
More, C., 31–2, 154 39–42, 46, 74, 75, 79, 80, 88–9,
Morgan, S., 81, 156, 166, 167, 91–2, 94, 96, 100–1, 108–18,
179 122–3, 129, 133, 137, 138, 140–4,
Morris, E., 105, 171, 180 150, 152, 172, 173,
Morris-Suzuki, T., 162 180, 181
Munslow, A., 148, 149, 152, 155, 160, Olafson, F.A., 89, 168
162, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, ontology/ontological, 11–12, 15, 16,
175, 176, 177, 179, 180 34, 46, 61, 82, 94, 100, 104, 106,
Munz, P., 177 110, 113–14, 116, 122, 124, 128–9,
Murray, J.H., 166, 179 140, 145, 174
museum/s, 44, 65, 66, 69, 73–4, 75, 78, order, 4, 21, 37, 38, 45, 51–60, 68, 70,
97, 104, 120, 126, 164–5 76, 77, 83, 110, 115, 125–6, 139,
140
Oswalt, W.H., 61, 161
narrative choices, 30–3, 35, 40, 46, 47,
56, 60, 61, 67, 75, 77, 78, 124,
133, 138, 144 Page, M., 164
narrative constructivism/
Palmer, A., 161, 178
constructionism, 7, 17–18, 38, 73,
Palmer, B.D., 13, 151, 171, 180
91, 119, 121, 125, 129, 132, 135,
Passmore, K., 42, 157
138, 139, 140, 167
Pattiz, A.E., 165
narrative making, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11,
20–8, 42, 53, 74, 96, 105, 109, 115, pause, 56–7
116, 129, 138, 144, 169, 180 Pencak, W., 87, 167
narrative supervenience, 83, 91, 125, Pepper, S., 35, 112, 155
131, 132, 138, 139 performance/performative, 8, 25, 26,
narrative turn, 3, 7, 17, 54, 94, 104, 27, 64, 65, 74–6, 75, 77, 99, 120,
112, 123, 130, 132, 138, 139, 143, 125, 126, 140, 159, 165, 177
148, 175 Perlmann, J., 95, 169
narrative/narration, 4–7, 9–10, 16–28, Pettegree, A., 57, 160
29–31, 35, 44–63, 64–5, 67–8, 70, Phelan, J., 161, 178
72, 74, 78, 83, 88–9, 93, 96–7, 100, Phillips, M.G., 149, 158, 176
102, 108, 109, 112, 119–22, 126–7, photograph/y, 25, 65, 67–8, 71, 126,
129, 130, 131, 134, 138, 139, 140, 138, 162, 163, 178
146, 148, 154, 157, 159, 167, 174, Pihlainen, K., 148, 153
175, 177 Popkin, J.D., 40, 156
new empiricism/ist, 8, 95–7, 104, 106, Popper, K., 95, 169, 180
112, 125, 139, 169 positivism/positivist, 81, 97, 102, 111,
new history, 113, 125, 139, 148, 160, 121, 125, 173
172, 175, 177 Poster, M., 166, 179
Noble, D.W., 18, 152, 162 postmodern/ism, 2, 7, 13, 14, 42, 86,
Nolan, M.B., 155 87, 106–8, 112, 116, 125, 131, 141,
Nora, P., 69, 163, 164, 179 143, 148, 148, 151, 152, 156, 157,
Norman, A.P., 81, 166, 179 158, 161, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170,
Norton, C., 84, 167 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179,
Nozick, R., 174 180–181
188 Index

poststructuralism, 7, 14, 42, 46, 64, 84, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141,
88, 95, 112, 116, 125, 137, 139, 142, 143, 151, 152, 173, 180, 181
141, 143, 149, 157 repetitive, 57–8, 135
Price, R., 45, 157 representation/representational, 1, 2,
Prince, G., 46, 157, 177 4– 6, 8–17, 20, 24–31, 34, 40, 42,
prolepsis, 55, 120, 140 45, 47, 51–2, 54, 60–1, 65–9, 71–3,
Propp, V., 30–2, 37, 153, 155, 176 76–9, 80–5, 87–93, 96, 100, 102–4,
Prost, A., 170 106, 109–10, 111, 113, 116, 117,
public history/ies, 65, 73–4, 126, 165, 122, 123–9, 130, 131, 132, 133,
179 136, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146, 148,
Putnam, H., 121, 173 150, 153–8, 161, 162, 164,
166, 167, 169, 170, 175–7,
179
race, 2, 13–14, 37, 40, 48, 61, 74, 75, Richards, I.A., 98, 169
83, 101, 115, 122, 142 Ricoeur, P., 5–6, 9, 16, 24, 27, 28, 31,
Raddeker, H.B., 168, 174 35–7, 44, 49, 51–6, 59, 60, 62, 81,
radio, 65, 68–71, 73, 74, 126, 163 89–90, 98, 102, 104, 112, 115, 119,
Radway, J., 153 123, 125, 127, 137, 148, 154, 155,
reader-response, 90, 125, 141 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 166, 168,
Reagan, R., 29, 105, 171, 180 170, 172, 174, 177
reality/realism, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10–15, 16–18, Roberts, D.D., 9, 149
21–8, 30–2, 34–6, 38, 39, 41–3, Roberts, G., 12, 151, 154, 158, 166,
45–7, 52–9, 62, 64, 66–8, 70, 72–3, 167, 168, 175, 177, 179
75, 77, 79, 80–93, 94–6, 98, Rogers, M., 32, 154
99–101, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, Rorty, R., 16, 83–4, 100, 119, 147, 151,
111, 112, 115–25, 127–9, 131, 132, 167, 170, 173, 176, 181
133, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 141, Rosenstone, R.A., 45, 47, 65, 67, 105–7,
142, 143, 144, 145, 150, 151, 152, 109, 120, 125, 128, 155, 157,
154, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 163, 161–2, 163, 171, 177, 178,
164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 180
171, 173, 175, 177, 178, 179 Rosenzweig, R., 76, 164, 179
reconstruction/reconstructionist Roth, S.F., 165
history, 2–3, 10–15, 17–18, 28, 29, Royle, E., 12
31, 33, 34, 36, 39, 41, 42, 49, 53, Ruiz, V.L., 158
60, 66, 81, 82, 86, 89, 94, 95, 98, Runia, E., 155
104, 106, 109, 113, 116, 117, Ryan, M-L., 148, 152, 163, 166, 175,
123–4, 128, 130, 131–37, 140, 141, 178, 179
142, 143, 145, 149, 167, 173, 175
re-enactment, 65, 74–5, 76
reference/referentiality, 2–3, 6–12, Samuel, R., 74, 165, 179
16–18, 20, 24–8, 29–36, 38–9, Sassen, S., 155
41–3, 48, 51–2, 54, 56, 57, 59, 63, scene, 56
64–7, 69–70, 72–4, 76–9, 80–93, sceptical/scepticism, 41, 86, 93, 101,
94, 95, 96, 98–100, 102, 104–6, 107, 110, 114, 118, 122, 125, 141,
108, 110, 114–20, 122, 123–9, 130, 143, 148, 168, 169, 170, 174–5,
131, 136, 137, 139, 142–5, 150, 180
163, 166, 170, 179 Schama, S., 42, 69
relativism, 14, 40, 73, 79, 91, 111, 112, Schlesinger, A.M., 161
115, 116, 121–2, 125, 129, 131, Searle, J., 81, 82, 151, 166, 167, 175
 Index 189

semiotic/semiotics, 9, 108, 124, 137, television, 65, 68–9, 126, 149, 161,
142, 143–4 162, 178
sign/signifier/signified, 8, 10, 39, 84, tense/time/timing, 21, 27, 45, 50–62,
86–8, 98–9, 102, 121, 125, 142, 70–1, 75, 77, 108, 110, 115, 119,
143, 154 122, 126, 132, 135, 138, 145, 159,
Simon, B., 155, 156 177, 178
Simon, J.Y., 39, 156 tertium quid, 16, 29, 33–5, 100, 125,
singulative, 57, 58, 135 131, 142, 145, 146
Smail, D., 159 the-past-as-history, 8, 9, 10, 28, 30, 33,
Sobchack, V., 161, 178 54, 68, 80, 81, 84, 94, 100, 104,
Sontag, S., 153, 161, 162, 164, 176, 110, 116, 123, 126–8, 132, 135,
178 139, 145, 146, 180
Sorlin, P., 162 Thompson, E.P., 46, 61, 158, 161
sources, 1–2, 4–5, 7, 11, 17, 32, 41–2, Tindall, G.B., 4, 149
45, 52, 65, 67, 69, 84, 86, 88, 92, Todorov, T., 31, 37, 154, 155
94, 104, 110, 113, 117, 123, 125, Toews, J.E., 170
129, 132, 133, 134, 142, Tonkin, E., 157
143, 144 Toplin, R.B., 162
Southgate, B., 40, 156 Topolski, J., 151, 166, 179
Spargo, T., 172 Tosh, J., 34, 39, 154
Spence, D.P., 173 trace/s, 42, 81, 90, 92
Spiegel, G.M., 95, 169 trope/figuration, 16, 32, 34–6, 72, 112,
Spiegelman, A., 71, 164, 178 125, 134, 137, 145, 148, 153, 154,
Staley, D.J., 76, 165, 179 156, 158, 159, 160, 166–70, 175,
Stanford, M., 147 177, 178
Starn, R., 164, 165 truth, 2–3, 7–9, 12–15, 25, 28, 33–4,
Stevens, M.E., 39, 156 40–1, 46, 54, 65, 68–70, 73–5,
Stoler, A.L., 45, 157 78–83, 85, 88–90, 92–3, 96, 100,
story space, 6–7, 18–20, 24, 26, 28–32, 104, 109–14, 116–27, 129, 131–5,
34, 44–8, 51, 54, 59–60, 83, 86, 137, 141, 142, 143, 145–6, 149,
91–2, 100, 112, 115, 121, 123, 127, 150–1, 157, 158, 164, 166, 167,
129–32, 138, 142, 144 169, 170, 172–3, 176,
story/stories, 4, 7, 17–28, 36, 38, 70–1, 178–81
84, 106, 119–20, 144, 149, 156, Tucker, A., 151, 175
172 Tyrell, I., 164
Straub, J., 148, 175
stretch, 56–7
Stueber, K., 165 Veyne, P., 147
subjective/subjectivity, 3, 11, 13, 15, Virtanen, T., 163
24, 40, 45, 59, 91, 101, 106, 111, voice, 2, 8, 21, 27, 32, 35, 40, 42, 44–9,
112, 115–16, 121, 122, 126, 138, 58, 59–62, 70–71, 75, 81, 84–5, 90,
142–4, 172 98, 105, 107, 109, 115, 119, 126,
summary, 56–7 130, 132, 134, 138, 146, 158, 173,
Sydnor, S., 108, 171 177
Symonds, D., 113–14, 172
Walker, J., 153
Tawney, R.H., 156 Walsh, W.H., 147, 154, 174
Taylor, A.J.P., 59 Ward, C., 169
190 Index

White, H., 5–6, 16, 18, 27–8, 33–9, 42, Wood, G.S., 161
49, 71, 73, 75, 84, 86, 91, 98, 103, writerly, 2, 6, 46, 47
104, 107, 112–14, 119–20, 123, written text/s, 22, 46, 64, 65–7, 107,
125, 126, 147, 148, 152, 153, 154, 126
155, 156, 158, 162, 164, 166–74,
177, 178, 180 Zagorin, P., 81, 166, 170, 179
Williams, B., 173 Zammito, J., 81, 167, 179
Winter, J., 164, 179 Zieger, R.H., 171
Wittgenstein, L., 81, 169 Zinn, H., 168