History Telling Alternatives

History is usually written and described in narrative form. I heard this very interesting podcast on the pros and cons of that approach, as well as the alternatives to narrative history. But, first here’s how narrative history works:

1)    Pick a historical character, based on importance. Then make him/her the central character of the story. This is the story of kings and queens, generals and strategists, presidents and prime ministers.

2)   Base it on heroic or tragic events, or vice and virtue. This too inevitably becomes individual based story telling.

 

While the story feels coherent, this approach has its well-known problems. “Speedbumps” in the narrative becomes problematic e.g. a good king who does evil things. And since everyone is grey, this applies to every single instance of narrative history. Include the speedbumps and the story loses its coherence; exclude them and it appears incomplete, or worse, biased. Another issue is that narrative format often appears to be a dumbing down of history.

 

One alternative, says the podcast, is to base history on a theme, not an individual e.g. enlightenment or capitalism or globalization or race. Another approach is to pick a character from the era based on role e.g. a bureaucrat or a common man, and write the story of the “forces (of history) swirling around him”.

 

Regardless of the approach though, there’s the problem that historians are “not taught to write”. So their books turn out to be too dry, too dense. As the podcast says, perhaps historians need to learn the art of story-telling from those better than them: (shudder) TV writers and fiction writers!

 

Or you could even try the Game of Thrones approach of writing a “complex, multi-person perspective” narrative. And given the insane popularity of GoT, there is a probably a big audience for that format. In fact, there is an audience for that format: just think of Freedom at Midnight with the views of Nehru, Mountbatten, Gandhi and Jinnah thrown in. This format is probably the best: it’s nuanced, it’s grey, it’s complicated, it has its share of blunders, it’s based on partial/incomplete information available to the actors (and writers) and it makes you understand multiple perspectives, even the characters you dislike.

 

Which is why the podcast talks of the need for historians to write for the popular audience, not just fellow academics. There might be a whole new genre waiting to be created a la Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking (popular physics), or Richard Dawkins (popular biology).

 

Otherwise, we are probably doomed to keep repeating history.