Stone, Lawrence.  "The Revival of Narrative."  Chap. in The Past
     and the Present Revisited.  2nd ed.  New York: Routledge &
     Kegan Paul, 1987.

     Lawrence Stone's "The Revival of Narrative" is the
observation and explanation of a trend away from dry histories-
of-quantification toward the richer and less precise art of
writing narrative history.  Stone denies straight away that he is
trying to make converts ("No one is being urged to throw away his
calculator and tell a story (75).)  but rather is trying to
explain why there is some movement towards traditional history.
     First the reader is reminded of the "2,000 year-old
tradition of narrative" as the only form of history.  Ranke came
along in the late nineteenth century and demanded some degree of
scientific objectivity in his history.  This move towards a more
'scientific' history manifests itself, according to Stone, in
three major modern forms:  Marxist histories of economy, French
demography-pumped history, and the American data-intensive
'cliometric' methods.  Each of these historical platforms is
falling away from their previous extreme popularity.   Marxist
history is an unfortunate victim of politics:  the viability of
the material-economic model was tied to that of the political
systems that claimed to adhere to Marxist principles.<1>  The
French "Annale school" scientific (quantitative) historical
method and the American cliometric method are both in decline
because of an identical flaw.  Neither method produces readable,
worthwhile history.  As Stone points out, somewhat harshly, "The
results sometimes combine the vices of unreadability and
triviality (83)."<2>  This assessment compares unfavorably to
Stone's reminders that the traditional narratives are directed by
a "pregnant principle (74)" and that the authors of such "aspire
to stylistic elegance, wit and aphorism (75)."    
     The move towards a New Traditionalism in narrative history
is not left uncomplicated by modernity.  Stone notes (laments?)
that the modern narrator feels the tug of psychology and modern
literature when writing his history.  The modern narrator is also
interested in an intimate branch of intellectual history: 
mentalite.  This new style of narrator is a walker on extremely
slippery rocks.  It is difficult enough to understand the inner
life of modern (or current) man with his readily decipherable
intertextual environment.  The attempt to get inside a more
distant subject's head may be little more than a Rorschach-style
exercise in projection by the historian.<3>  
     The origins of scientific history in the nineteenth century
involves, of course, the acceptance of the Marxist economic model
and the concept of past events as a mantle thrown over an
politico-economic ('true' or 'real') substructure.  In this mode
of thought individuals, wars, and accidents are unimportant
except as they may fill determined positions in the advancement
of a particular social system.  Given this, the French
demographic models follows logically:  individuals are useful
only as data, plotted points on a graph that shows a larger, more
real, picture.  According to Durkheim and the individual, apart
from the bigger picture, has no real identity, no definition.<4> 
Ironically, this identity-giving social system, developed to it's
technologically, labor-divided end, reduces the individual once
again to a role, a position, a (pre)determined hollow existence. 
     Weber's diagnosis gives us little hope, either, of escape
from the problem of dehumanization in society.  Man moves from a
rich, mystic primitive religion to more formalized, rationalized
beliefs.  Rather than being a comfort, this reduction of
irrational religion traps man, makes him aware of his own
"thrown-ness", strips him of his position as the contender to
Olympus, the wrestler of angels.<5>  Perhaps this is the
seductive call of narrative, that it returns to man his hope, his
dignity, his ability to identify with heroes and villains.  
     Narrative history is the creation of new mythology.  Stone
tips his hand when he refers to the cliometric historians as
priests (77).  He uses the term somewhat derisively to distract
attention from the underlying truth of history-writing:  when
history is written in the narrative/mythic mode the historian
adopts the priestly habit.  The historian is a pagan priest,
responsible for the maintenance of memory, for the display of
social paradigms.  He performs a paradoxical operation not unlike
the oracle at Delphi.  He leans over The Past and inhales the
noxious fumes of events and personalities.  From the resulting    
vomitus he offers History to the supplicants.  The greatness of
the myth/history (not myth-history) lies in the ability of the
oracular historian to communicate human truths by arranging
little fragments of imagination and 'fact' into a coherent story
that transcends the historian's environment.
     This is precisely where the scientific historians miss the
point altogether.  Reams of paper and strings of computer tape
are wastes of resources unless the historian offers the past to
his reader in a compassionate, humanistic manner.  Stone realizes
the deadness of the scientific method in history; he refers to
the "decaying corpse of analytical, structural, quantitative
history 96)."  It is his hope that his essay may convince others
to reconsider both what modern social history is, and that
perhaps historians have strayed from their calling.  

Jason Carr

                              NOTES



<1>Revised only in 1987, the author could not have foreseen how
politically dysfunctional the Marxist states would soon become.

<2>Stone refers backhandedly to this strewing about of
information as the "cow-flop" method (75)!

<3>Stone also claims, on page 95, to be gravely concerned with
the possibility that the newfound emphasis on narrative might
lead to "pure antiquarianism, to story-telling for it's own
sake."  But given his doubt on whether or not history is a social
science at all (see his very last sentence of this chapter) he
probably would not object to artful, uplifting, morally guiding
story-telling.

<4>Just as nothing exists outside the nature-system, no one can
exist outside the social system.

<5>Apologies to Heidegger for this horribly out-of-context usage
of his term.  
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/