2. What would Keith Jenkins say about Cronon's essay? How would Cronon respond?
In his essay, “A Place for Stories,” William Cronon explores the importance of “narrative” in the telling of history, to which historian Keith Jenkins might take issue.
According to Cronon, history is more than just a list or “chronicle” of events: it includes “narrative,” or that literary devise that binds historical facts together and has a beginning, middle and end (metanarrative). Cronon contends that narrative fills in the gaps of knowledge by hiding the “discontinuities, ellipses and contradictory experiences that would undermine the intended meaning of its story,” it gives humans perspective and is “essential to our understanding of history and the human place in nature” (1350). But Cronon acknowledges a flaw in narrative, albeit one that he believes is important and is willing to forgive. Using two stories about the dust storms that plagued the Great Plains in the 1930s, written by two different authors, Cronon shows how two people can arrive at two different conclusions regarding the same event. How could their conclusions “hardly have been more different,” Cronon asks (1347). Well, the answer is narrative. While narrative is the glue that binds historical events together, it also allows the storyteller the option of putting his or her own spin on events. In Cronon’s dust bowl examples, one author’s plot was “progressive,” finding good in a bad event, saying the dust storms were natural disasters that humans met head-on and through which they ultimately persevered through adaptation. The other author’s plot was declensionist, where the plot spiraled down to a not-so-happy ending. While the dust storms were a natural event, humans failed to adapt to the changing environment; this failure ultimately lead to their collapse. Inherent in both these stories were the authors’ use of narrative to convey two different outcomes and interpretations of the same event. But, to Cronon, this is acceptable: “To try to escape the value judgments that accompany storytelling is to miss the point of history itself, for the stories we tell, like the questions we ask, are all finally about value”(1376). So for Cronon, the only bad story is the one not told.
Taking a postmodernist and antithetical approach to Cronon and the subject of narrative is Keith Jenkins. In his essay, On Being Open About Our Closures, Jenkins argues postmodernists, like himself, “construct” the past, not just describe it (9). For Jenkins, the narrative that Cronon embraces tends to distort and distill historical fact. While admitting that there are no postmodern examples of history to site, Jenkins still contends that historians (like Cronon) are too traditional in the way they tell stories. They focus in on metanarratives and fail to consider postmodern theory, which attempts to reconsider the story from new perspectives. Jenkins would find that the “metahistorical constructions,” that Cronon subscribes to, “are actually just theories about the past and how it should be appropriated” (8).
Cronon, however, would counter by saying that narrative is the best “tool” for conveying “meaning” and that without it, the past would become “infinitely malleable, thereby apparently undermining the entire historical project.” Cronon would contend that the postmodernist approach to deconstructing history that Jenkins and others espouse is “profoundly unsatisfying and ultimately self-deluding.” It leads to chronicling the past rather than telling history and, in the end, takes away the most “compelling” aspect of history -- its ability to make people “care” about the subject (1374).
Who’s philosophy will win? Only time will tell.
Works Cited:
Cronon, William. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Mar., 1992), 1347-1376.
Jenkins, Keith. “Introduction: On Being Open About Our Closures,” found in Post Modern History Reader, pp 1-30.