Narrative is an important factor that makes history distinct from other social sciences and brings history closer to literature. Though historians cannot invent plots like novelists do, they can craft an alluring story by means of rhetoric, imagination, word presentation, plot design and even argumentation. Historians do not work against narrative devices. Instead, they expand and deepen the significance of historical works by adopting narratives. Even for those historians who oppose using narrative formats to represent the past, an unavoidable issue is still how to translate known objects into information that can be recounted to others.

Recession

In the mid-19th century, narrative history began to fade in the West. Historians were no longer interested in recounting stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end, but took a more scientific focus. Historical works became centered on evidence, uncovering truth from the past, and historical discoveries. Reexamining and verifying historical materials began to lead disciplinary agendas. Narrative history had transitioned into a more scientific form of history, which pursued objectivity, accuracy, and standardization. In the 1950s, cliometrics emerged, and rapidly became an effective tool for historians to reach into the past. Historical materials were streamlined and turned into numeric data and mathematical models. The regular repetition of data replaced unpredictable events in empirical studies and this data was visualized in statistical curves, charts, and formulas, which replaced narrative texts. In the early 21st century, cliodynamics, based on mathematics, social sciences, and futurology became a popular method to examine the past, test hypotheses, and attempt to foresee the future.

However, narrative history does not deviate from a focus on the past. Almost at the same time as cliometrics was in vogue in the Europe and North America, Lawrence Stone published “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History” in Past & Present, a flagship journal which once vigorously advocated for scientific history. The article gave a deep analysis on the revival of the narrative history. Since then, history has not been considered an exploration of laws, but an interpretation of the nature of history itself.

In this context, new research paradigms such as micro history, the history of mentalities, historical anthropology, which can fall into the category of new cultural history, rapidly emerged. They challenged economic history, which features structural analysis, and social history, which focuses on elite society, and turned the historical gaze to smaller moments in history which were once at the bottom, marginalized, fragmented and which were in urgent need of being gathered together. All these moments in history concentrated on descriptions of individuals and single events, and the depictions of individual experiences and the history of events were exactly where narratives could play a role and strengthen historical accounts.

Revival

Twenty years after Stone wrote about the revival of narrative, narrative and its idea to subvert scientific and analytical forms of history still play a prominent role in historical studies. As we move into the 21st century, especially in the most recent decade, new cultural history and the cultural transition it stirred, are beginning to recede. But narrative history has not entered another cycle of recession together with new cultural history. Instead, it maintains strong vitality, which can be attributed to two important factors. First, after the blow brought by micro studies, short-termism, and deconstruction, historians once again are showing interest in grand issues such as structures, laws, targets and significance. Reconstructing a type of grand narrative which blends the past, the present, and the future with internal coherence has become a most urgent task for historians. Moreover, from the perspectives of audiences and readers, historians also need to re-adopt story-telling modes to provide the public with a vivid and persuasive real sense in order to attract them into a dialogue with history, and draw them into realistic issues which must be faced, though these issues may not seem to impact their lives. In this way, history’s educational and guiding functions will play their due role.

The above two factors keep narrative lively in the arena of history, but obviously have no relationships with new cultural history or post-modernism. In an era which calls for more certainty than previous points in time, narrative remains perhaps the important way to deeply observe the past and seize the future. Therefore, the need for historians’ to shape the past through coherent narratives will never disappear.

Definitely, historians’ narratives must take evidence and historical materials as the basic building blocks for their work, outside of the limit of these methods, narratives may lose touch with truth. For example, some scholars who practice new cultural history are inclined to narrate individuals’ stories from psychological and emotional perspectives. However, without propping this up with historical materials and documentation, this type of scholarly work would easily pass the boundaries of historical narrative and become works of fiction or literary creation.

Perhaps for this reason, micro studies have increasingly become combined with macro studies in recent years. By integrating personal experiences within big events such as social transformations, fracture in narratives caused by deficits in historical materials can be filled. It is evident that narratives revived by means of new cultural history are narrative forms with preconditions. These clearly differ from the type of narrative which displays innate attributes of history.

History, or studies of the past, aims to reveal and interpret the process of historical changes. Narrative, as one of history’s inborn qualities, should also expound upon and demonstrate these changes. Therefore, we can say that historical narrative, especially historical narrative that is coherent and consistent, still deserves historians’ pursuits since it helps people better understand the depth and breadth of history.

Zhang Xupeng is a research fellow from the Institute of Historical Theory at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.