The idea that a narrative text can represent past events accurately begins with a primitive impulse, and a socio-political power play. What I say happened *IS* what happened. Any defense of that view is a defense of authoritarian culture. That is my starting point for this post and I will not further defend it.
What is more surprising is that professional hermeneuticists who have still yet to discover (or stubbornly refuse to consider) that linguistic reference breaks down somewhere at or above the level of individual propositions, or more accurately, complete sentences. That is, a given linguistic system can maintain a workable semiotic correlation between labels and objects but not between labels and actions. We can mitigate the ambiguity of particular objects (chair, tree) by adding modifiers (the old blue director's chair, the 30 foot tall well groomed fir tree) but we cannot modify verbs in a way that narrows down the referential specificity. Action, especially human behavior, is far too variable. Events simply cannot be made to conform to our words.
Moreover, no collection of sentences can ever be designated as the one agreed upon way to "label" a known past event (Ankersmit, 2012). There is no "one correct narrative" of the battle of Waterloo and no committee could ever select one from all the possible entries that it might solicit. In the same way, we cannot select one single portrait of Napoleon that captures his likeness more accurately than all the other portraits of him. Nor is there any single biography of Napoleon that could ever be judged the most accurate among all the others. In all three cases, we have leapt past the bounds of precise reference and entered into an effort that can only be undertaken artistically.
The narrative representation of historical events is necessarily an aesthetic undertaking.
I suspect people resist this because daily life requires us to be micro-authoritarians.
To survive in the world we must each trust our own mental capacities. To maintain good faith with others we must all make some effort to describe actions we personally witnessed. That is, we observe something, we remember something, and we talk about what we remember. In most cases, for most people, we may feel we are doing all of these things with complete honestly. Unfortunately, our capacity for accurate reporting is restricted by the natural limitations of (A) memory and (B) language.
From our own internal perspective, it is only natural that we should all feel competent in these areas, but a fish cannot climb trees and a bomb cannot comb hair. Likewise, memory and language and narrative simply cannot achieve quite as much as our own culture may have conditioned us to believe that they can.
Once we accept that memory and language are limited, we must then reconfigure our understanding of the proper relationship between history and narrative. Fortunately, that is quite easy to do. First, we must cease to behave as if the goal of narrative composition was to put down an accurate account. We have archives and chronicles for accuracy. The proper goal of a narrative is to communicate complex dynamics in a way that is coherently retainable. Notice I did not say accurate.
The "coherent" version of past events is not the accurate version but it can make an excellent starting point for additional learning. The version of things we can hold in our mind can do good work as educational scaffolding. We can take that simplified (*cough* distorted *cough*) narrative into the library and start doing serious research. Or, just as well, we can choose not to do further research but in choosing to rest at that point we can maintain our awareness that the version in our head, and the story we heard, is an imperfect representation of whatever did really occur in the actual past. We can know the story version and hold it loosely in mind. That distorted version, retained in our memory, can be far more useful than a perfectly accurate version that we could never remember.
The distorted nature of that story can also encourage us to be humble about what it is good for, and what it is not.
For instance, do you really want to argue tooth and nail about the linguistic context of something Jesus said when the end result is that you excuse yourself from caring about millions of poor people? Or do you want to prioritize the gist of the story: that Jesus was amazing and he has challenged all of us to love all of our neighbors.
In every field of study, we must stop writing narratives as if they could stand as the final authoritative reference on whatever events they address. We must, instead, start writing narratives that serve as mnemonic accommodations for additional learning. Finally, we must stop reading stories as if they were accurate transcripts of the past.
Anon.
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