#1, September 3, 2003

Narrative is Theft

There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The-things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.

– Toni Morrison, Jazz (NY: Knopf, 1992), p. 7.

“– I create my first principle.” Narrative is theft.

I will demonstrate this principle by adapting an old formula, thus: narrative = property = theft.

Some historians have a special attachment to narrative, so much so that they label themselves “Narrative Historians.” These people range from the immoderate (those who think professional historians should always tell a good yarn) to the moderate (who feel that historians should use whatever methods they can to tell their histories, and one of these may involve telling stories). Of course, calling oneself a Narrative Historian does rather situate one in the immoderate camp, because one is cutting off the possibility of using other methods of approaching a subject that might be more useful. So, a moderate Narrative Historian is an oxymoron to some extent; a historian who employs narrative is pretty much standard issue.

We all, as historians, use narratives of different sorts. There will be moments when we turn to give an account of some event (whether or not we involve ourselves in the telling of this story). This may take the form of recounting a discussion, telling the story of the event from a particular perspective, or the use of any number of other narrative devices. But the extent to which a historian relies on narrative will depend on several things – audience, politics, and pragmatism.

If a historian is writing primarily for fellow members of the profession, with the intention of persuading such people to think more in line with how that historian feels they ought to think, then the analysis will move pretty steadily into the historiographical, the theoretical, and the tendentious. Such historians will employ narrative along the way to make some points, but unless they are going to rely heavily on footnotes to make their arguments, narrative will not predominate. If, by contrast, a historian is writing for the lay person, from dentist to anxious patient sitting in the waiting room, hoping also that the book will be picked up by the browser at Barnes and Noble or Borders, then narrative is more likely to predominate over theory.

Politics may also affect the use of narrative. Even James Goodman, who promotes narrative history with great persuasiveness, will have a radically different understanding of narrative from that of a narrative historian like James MacPherson. In Stories of Scottsboro, for example, Goodman provides many narratives, examining a particular set of events from the many actors’ different vantage points. This is not, as he would be quick to point out, the classic nineteenth-century narrative typical of the novel in its early years. And many, wedded to this earlier narrative form, would even dispute Stories of Scottsboro’s claim to be narrative history. And to some extent, this dispute would be framed by politics. Goodman is aware that the classic narrative structure is one that provides aid and comfort to the conservative historian. It seems to suggest a degree of certainty about historical events with which the radical historian ought to feel uncomfortable. Consequently, Goodman argues that by using narratives, and playing these off against each other, he may be able to emulate the post-modern novelist, using multiple vantage points, sometimes even questioning the position of the author, thereby destabilizing the singular, positivistic, sometimes reactionary, historical account. But perhaps such an assertion misses the fact that often the literary figures using these techniques have themselves been trying to disrupt the narrative, and so emulation of such methods, might more justifiably be called Anti-Narrative History.

And then there is the pragmatic attachment to narrative forms. As historians, we may have political objections to narrative. We may find it deeply problematic when we see simple narrative used from textbooks to museums, restating imperial or nationalist mythologies, but we continue to write textbooks and consult with museums. We may sometimes feel that we should be making a historiographical argument, but, hey, this is a neat story that seems worth the telling. We may, in our darkest moments as historians, yearn to communicate with others through the telling of nifty anecdotes, especially those that have spiced up some dinner party conversations of late. We may have a great screenplay within us, and after finishing up some historical tome, weighed down by impressive footnotes, we now want the release of reaching for a wider audience. We may even want to reap the financial benefits of story-telling, which if it brings the browser to the checkout desk, will also improve our bank balances immeasurably (and attract the possibility of a film producer snatching up the film rights). We toil in the classroom trying to raise students’ consciousness; is it not time, we ask ourselves, that we do something that will enable us to enjoy our leisure time? We imagine the cameras zooming in for the close-up:

Voice-over: “Struggling History Professor, now that you have written your best-selling book, what are you going to do next?”

Struggling History Professor: “I am going to the Colonial Theme Park.”

The fact is there are many reasons for turning to narrative, a lot of them perfectly reasonable. Few historians will, in the final analysis, akin to the Monty Python skit, plead again and again, “No, not the bestselling book. No, not the comfy chair!”

This said, however, there are certain things that need to be remembered about narrative, which returns us to our original proposition or formula. How might the narrative be stealing? Here are a number of aspects of the theft.

Anyone who has read about photographers from the wealthiest nations of the world going to less economically prosperous regions will know of the quite common reaction of people to being photographed. Many people are reluctant to have their photograph taken, not because they know little about this magical technology and fear its powers, but because they object to the kind of control that is being placed over their image (even narrative) by some unknown person or organization. It is not necessary to capture “indigenous” peoples and cart them back to the Old World, or build a display for them in the Natural History Museum. Now all you need is to snap a few shots and put them in some photographic display or album, or place them straight onto the web. You have captured the subject of the photograph and turned him or her into an object of your narrative. Generally speaking it is your creation, it becomes your narrative. You, the itchy-fingered one holding the camera obscura, have almost total control over when you will load your instrument, what you deem important enough to shoot, and how many snapshots of the thing or person you will take. You then have almost total control over what you consider a good picture, worthy of inclusion in your album or on your site, or a bad one, which you discard. All these things will be shaped by your assumptions and your understanding of ‘proper’ narrative structure. The right of the ‘subaltern to speak’ will be denied, stolen from him or her. You may promise to send a photograph to the individual through the agency that escorts you around the slum or village, if that is where you happen to be. But you will probably forget, or believe the picture wasn’t that good so it isn’t worth sending, or any number of things (“will they really be able to find that poor young person?”), and so not do so.

Anthropologists worry about these things constantly, I believe, partly I suppose because they are reliant on ‘native informants’ to a great extent. But it seems to me that historians ought to be equally concerned about those they are describing. Which images will they decide are too blurred to be incorporated into the narrative? Which ones will seem to tell the story so well that they should be accentuated, blown up to five times the size of all the others, and placed on the front cover?

What this points towards is the idea of narrative as a bundle of silences, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued in Silencing the Past – those silences around the edges of the narrative that give it shape and (often political) meaning. In this light, the creation of narratives becomes an act of stealing from silences to add to a particular noise, stealing from darkness to give to the light. And as historians’ role become more mercenary or “propagandist” (however legitimate) we find them stealing narratives from history to create something to which readers in abundance can relate -- that they find satisfying, uplifting, cathartic.

Can the Subaltern speak through narrative history? Generally historians have a hard time ‘rescuing’ particular kinds of experience from the historical record. They can, as E. P. Thompson showed for the English working class, recover the life experiences and political aspirations of certain artisans. But recovering the thoughts of the woman who is being subjected to the experience of widowhood in India, or rape, or any number of other indignities that have occurred in history, may be more difficult. The weight of the “recovered” narrative will most likely bear down on the narratives of those beneath it. These narratives, in effect, will become the silences that give that recovered narrative its form.

Another related aspect of this is the idea of narrative as a property. There is something very Anglo-American about the obsession over agency and narrative. The Anglo part is probably something post-colonial. What does it mean to be English when the tide has gone out on the British Empire? Is there something that can be learned from the “peculiar” history of the English, when their position in the world has diminished? If it is to be found in working-class history also, in “a liberty tree” (what, according to some, the English-speaking peoples brought to the world), how has it been expressed through the agents of that history?

This line of thinking (derived from E.P. Thompson) has also had particular appeal for those who have written about immigrants in American history. One reason for this is, in my view, the fact that some earlier immigration narratives, particularly that presented by Oscar Handlin in the Uprooted, made immigrants appear altogether too much like slaves and their descendants. In response to this “lack of respect” for the immigrant, social historians tended to make agency into a tag that they could attach to a particular group indicating that it had somehow achieved success. There is something slightly anachronistic about this: a particular group made it, so it must have had agency. It is the marker of movement out of, away from the ghetto – the historical equivalent of a nicely landscaped suburb. Narrative, the agent of agency, becomes property. The historian accentuates the right decisions made, the purposeful sacrifices, and everything (like property itself to the property holder) makes a lot of sense. Those who died through misfortune on the boat going over to the United States are not summoned up to characterize the larger group. Nor are others who became prostitutes, starved on the street, or died in a mining accident (except as martyrs in the larger narrative of industrial protest).

If, then, narrative is a property, how might it be a theft? It is theft, because history is relational and comparative; a suburb cannot exist without a city to make it distinctive. There is no meaningful statement that can be made about one group (or section thereof) that does not, implicitly or explicitly, rely on a comparison with others. The very construction of “the group”, in fact, relies on a comparison of members within that group with other members, privileging one set over another. Moreover, the group comparison will depend on one group being configured positively (accentuating the successful over the unsuccessful, or the “moral” over the “immoral” in a veritable felicific calculus) and another being configured negatively (inverting the above). Through particular use of narratives, some will be accorded greater cultural capital while others will be left at the level of the dysfunctional or pathological. In this process, narratives are taken from one group and given to another, historians robbin’ one ’hood to provide for another.

If narrative is a property is a theft, how important is this? Should we not eschew narrative altogether? This is rather like the question whether we should opt out of engaging in political activity because a political system is corrupt and undemocratic. The puritans among us will decide to do so, no doubt. But the rest of us live in the real world and are continually making compromises of one sort or another. There is no categorical imperative that will lead us to be cast into the hell fire for making such compromises. But we do, surely, have to recognize the limits of our analysis, the limits of our narratives, their sometimes self-serving aspects? Recognizing that our narratives are suspect – that they steal from the poor to give to the rich, from the inner-city to the suburb, from Brewster Place to Linden Hills, from the slum to Malabar Hill, from third world to first, from South to North, and so on – should give us pause, especially as we make that leap from historical analysis to public policy.

This is not a recipe for quietude. It is a call for more comparison and interrogation of narratives as well as of ourselves. Introspection can be quiet, certainly for the observer looking on, but the noise of self-examination is loud indeed. Recounting narratives can be loud to those listening, but it will often be the kind of noise that silences other narratives and other voices.