Ben's Thoughts on Narrative Questions

I have chosen to respond to both questions (1) and (2).

Commentary on Cronon essay:
The story that Cronon tells in his essay is on one level a "story about storytellers who express their own times and political visions." But it is also a story that reflects another naraative, "one about [his] struggle to accommodate the lessons of critical theory without giving in to relativism" (1374). The goal of his story on this second level is to "acknowledge the immense power of narrative while still defending the past ... as real things to which our storytelling must somehow conform lest it cease being history altogether" (1372). He succeeeds in this goal and in the process points out the flaws in the postmodernist critique of history.

The two biggest problems I have with the postmodernist critique of history:
(1) Postmodernists view history as nothing more than fiction. This a critique that Cronon does a good job of refuting
I would add the following:
History is an art - something the postmodernists in the zeal of their critique loose sight of. Facts ground history and make it nonfiction. But facts give no meaning - that is the job of the art of history. The art is interpretation, narrative, and the aesthetic judgements involved in writing history. And as Cronon points out that historical art is read and judged by other historical artists and my art exists in the body of past art on the subject. I am bound by that body of art: I must fit my art into the framework other artists have constructed.

(2) Postmodernists seek a history without value judgements. But such "history" would divorce history from humanity since humans place value on everything. In their zeal to include every possible viewpoint and voice in history as equallly legitimate the postmodernists loose sight of one of the most important purposes of history: to give meaning to the past, which means that to some degree that it is a value judgement because we necessarily judge the consequences of human actions. (This value judgement, as Cronon points out, raises the epistemological question: can the historian then be "objective?" The answer that he gives and that I agree with is that, although the historian strives to be fair and (I would argue though he does not) a degree of objectivity can be approached, no completely neutral objectivity can be attained because in in our quest to make the past meaningful "we cannot escape struggling over the values that define what meaning is" (1370).
I agree with Cronon that there "is something profoundly unsatisfying and ultimately self-deluding about an endless postmodernist deconstruction of texts that fails to ground itself in history, in community, in politics, and finally the moral problem of living on earth." Narrative, as Cronon says, gives history its "moral center" and is "our best and most compelling tool for searching out meaning in a conflicted and contradictory world" (1374).

What I believe Jenkins would say about Cronon's essay and how Cronon would respond:

Jenkins would say that Cronon's assertion that all narratives are not equally legitimate is flawed. Jenkins would say as he does in his article that postmodernism gives historians the freedom "to tell many equally legitimate stories from various view points, with umpteen voices, emplotments and types of synthesis" and that thus "we can interpret the past 'anyway we like'" (20). Cronon would counter that because narratives are grounded on facts, because they are judged by knowledgeable scholars, because they must take into account a historiographical tradition, and because they should be coherent they are bounded and constrained and thus cannot be written "anyway we like" - one narrative can be better, or more historical, than another.

Jenkins would also say that Cronon's argument that narrative history makes us care about the subject and helps us search out the meaning of past events is flawed because such narrative privileges certain versions of events. Cronon would respond that without narrative to give history meaning it is just a recitation of happenings with no connection- a chronology - that does not engage the mind and thus inhibits the search for understanding and value.