Last month, at the end of a nearly month-long east-coast research trip, I had the privilege of attended a splendid graduate-student conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, titled “The Power of Stories: Authority and Narrative in Early America.”[1] The weekend was filled with spectacular papers, wonderful networking, and I came away invigorated and excited to dig into my own dissertation research. But, not surprisingly, the most provoking paper of the conference was the plenary presentation given by respected Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore. Her paper, “Telling Histories: Or, What Narrative Does,” poses important questions to American scholars in general, and may be of similar importance to practitioners of Mormon studies.

Lepore began her comments with an incisive observation: while the conference’s theme was focused on stories and narratives, every paper was devoted to deconstructing these stories and narratives of the past rather than recreating our own. We as historians are obsessed with deconstructing our sources and stories, leaving coherent and touching narratives to authors of fiction. When we do attempt our own story-telling, we almost feel ashamed and feel it necessary to apologize to our readers. (Lepore noted how she grimaced recently when glancing through her first book and seeing how she literally apologized in her introduction for the narrative segments of her book.) In short, we feel that telling a story is inferior to making an analytic argument. We love nuance, paradox, irony, deconstruction, conception, comparison, but rarely narrative. Any time someone ventures out in an attempt to break this mold, they are often shot down by voices amongst the academy.[2]

But Lepore fears that such a bifurcation between story-telling and historical practice begets some unfortunate results. First and foremost, it can cause intellectual paralysis: by framing our works in such a degree that it only interests other specialists in the field, we lose our opportunity to reach a broader audience and make a bigger impact on the culture at large. In her The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party Revolution and the Battle over American History, Lepore made a similar argument and claimed that much of the fault for the American public’s lack of historical understanding falls squarely on the shoulders of historians for their inability to present coherent and interesting history for the masses; at America’s bicentennial, when the nation (reeling from the Watergate scandal) ached for a comprehensible and meaning narrative of their country’s founding, the historical community celebrated Edmund Morgan’s epic American Slavery, American Freedom—a book founded on depressing paradox and intent on deconstructing any clear or seamless narrative of America’s glory.[3] I would argue that our scholarship has improved over the years, but has that improvement come at the cost of over-specialization and irrelevance to the outside public?

Looking back over her first decade of scholarship, Lepore has found that her books have been her own attempt to overcome much of these problems of historical narrative. Indeed, looking over her first three books now, she expressed shock at how much she seemed to reintroduce narrative structures that were originally stripped out during grad school. In her first book, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998; winner of the Bancroft Award), was an attempt to explore the importance of narrative scenes; her second book, A is For American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2002), was a series of character sketches, an approach generally eschewed by historians in favor of conceptual structures; her third book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005; finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), focused on introducing literary plots within a historical narrative.[4] While her work has garnered praise and acclaim from many circles, that praise has also been met with hesitation and critiques.[5]

In further explaining this issue, Lepore outlined how the historical profession developed in contrast with the birth of the novel. In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, history and literature were difficult to differentiate. (Think Thomas Carlyle.) Yet as the scholarly profession of history further matured, practitioners understood themselves as fundamentally different from the then-burgeoning field of novelists. Where authors of the novel wrote compelling narratives with emotion, historians were to write disinterested tales of fact and structure. But Lepore wonders if we may have taken things a bit too far: In forfeiting invention to novelists, have we also forfeited imagination? “We are good at reading a story and finding the argument,” Lepore concluded. “What we need to do better is making an argument in the form of a story.”

Now granted, there are several potential problems with this approach. Most especially, and especially since the advent of post-structuralism, most historians claim that it is simply impossible to reconstruct these past narratives, and that to do otherwise entails leaving the facts behind and filling in with our own imagination; there is a reason most scholarly history is written the way it is. And there are very few historians who can pull such a feat, even if it were possible, and thus such an approach would open the doors for many poorly-written narratives rather than gripping and responsible stories. Not all of us are as talented as a Jill Lepore.

But these are important questions to ask, especially when considering how narrative-based approaches have the potential to reach a much broader audience. Do academic historians have an obligation to write a gripping narrative so that your average citizen will have a better understanding of our nation’s past? Is the scholarly community really eligible to scorn an American public that devours authors like David McCullough when we don’t provide anything as pleasing to read?

And I think these issues are especially relevant to Mormon studies. We as Mormon scholars love to tear apart the narrative-based works that grace the shelves at Deseret Book, just as much as we love to bemoan the generally ignorant state of our fellow congregants’ historical knowledge. But these are the facts: most would rather read The Work and the Glory than [insert prominent academic history book on Mormonism]. Is this solely the fault of the populace, and thus destined to perpetuate a generally bifurcated view of scholarly history and general history, or do we also have an obligation to present something more digestible, perhaps even narrative-based?

I apologize that this post is overly-long, [very] disjoined, and likely incoherent. But I hope there’s enough here to start a discussion.

What role, if any, does narrative play in Mormon historiography?

[Part II of this series will explore a very recent book that touches on Mormon history and attempts a radically new approach to historical narrative.]

_________________________________________________________

[1] Seriously, they did a spectacular job with this conference, and I’ve heard that’s the norm for this biannual event. If any of you ever have a chance to attend/participate, do your self a favor and take advantage.

[2] Many examples could be given, but I’ll just point to the general recent outcry over the Oxford History of the United States series, a project conceptualized to present coherent narratives and overviews for a general educated audience, but has suffered some blistering critiques of late. (See here and here, for instance.)

[3] This should not be taken in any way as a knock on Edmund’s classic work—it is one of my favorite books ever written, and should be read by any student interested in American history. It just serves the purpose of showing how the two audiences—academic and popular—yearned for two fundamentally different types of books.

[4] In perhaps her most imaginative and extreme attempt along these lines, she co-authored a work of historical fiction titled Blindspot: A Novel. While she notes how fun it was to write with her good friend, she concluded it was not the best avenue to take as a scholar.

[5] See Gordon’ Woods’s review of The Name of War here, where Woods basically condemns the book as the acme of what is wrong with postmodern history.