Narrative

Here is my entry on Narrative, question 2:

Upon reading William Cronon's article, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," Keith Jenkins would promptly classify Cronon as an "undecided or nuanced" historian, one who recognizes the positive and negative qualities of postmodernism and has adopted a hybrid vein of historical scholarship. (Jenkins, 24) First, Jenkins would agree with Cronon's assertion that historians "can achieve no neutrality in writing" historical narratives, that history itself is an "endless struggle among competing narratives and values." (Cronon, 1370) This assertion fits nicely into Jenkins's belief that "history is theoretical 'all the way down.'" (Jenkins, 1) But second, Jenkins would take serious issue with Cronon's belief that historical narratives should "describe an action that begins, continues over a well-defined period of time, and finally draws to a definite close." (Cronon, 1367) In this way it is not difficult to imagine Jenkins accusing Cronon of ascribing to an ideological, and therefore "unsustainable," view of history, primarily because it entails limiting narrative to the arbitrary confines of a beginning, middle, and an end. (Jenkins, 6)

Upon hearing Jenkins's mix of praise and admonition, Cronon would agree that he is indeed "nuanced" in his approach to history, but not so much "undecided." He readily acknowledges the inherent failings of historical narrative – that "it hides the discontinuities… and contradictory experiences that would undermine the intended meaning of its story" – but he differs from Jenkins in his belief that structured narrative, though imperfect, is still the best method for acquiring human meaning from the past (Cronon, 1349-1350). Certainly, according to Cronon, narrative should have a didactic quality, or at least serve to do what he feels postmodernism finds abhorrent: to "keep us morally engaged with the world by showing us how to care about it and its origins." (Cronon, 1375) It follows then, in response to Jenkins's criticism, if narrative did not have a beginning, middle, and end, the audience could not be morally engaged in the story, which Cronon insists is the most important characteristic of history. (In reply, Jenkins would label Cronon a troubled, but not altogether untenable, adherent to "history articulated in the upper case" (Jenkins, 6) There is some truth to Jenkins's hypothetical claim that arbitrarily structuring narrative to conform to a didactic role is itself a metanarrative, and therefore the bane of postmodernism.)

In the end Jenkins and Cronon would find similarity in their belief that history should be contemplated and understood through multiple narratives, not through so called "objective" histories that purport to study the past "for its own sake." Their divergence is how much control the historian should muster on the narrative form in order to effectively relate the past.