History and Theory 47 (February 2008), 19-30 Wesleyan University 2008 ISSN: 0018-2656

Forum:Historical Explanation

1.

NARRATIVE EXPLANATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS

DAVID CARR

ABSTRACT

In this paper I look at narrative as a mode of explanation and at various ways in which the explanatory value of narrative has been criticized. I begin with the roots of narrative explanation in everyday action, experience, and discourse, illustrating it with the help of a simple example. I try to show how narrative explanation is transformed and complicated by circumstances that take us beyond the everyday into such realms as jurisprudence, journalism, and history. I give an account of why narrative explanation normally satisfies us, and how or in what sense it actually explains. Then I consider how narrative is chal-lenged and rejected as a mode of explanation in many scientific and other contexts and why attempts are made to replace it with something else. I try to evaluate the nature and sources of these challenges, and I describe this controversy over narrative against the his-torical background of its emergence. My paper ends with a pragmatic defense of narrative explanation against these challenges.

Narrative became a hot topic sometime in the late 1960s, and it has been ex-amined from many perspectives since then. Its role as a literary genre has been central, of course, where it was long discussed by literary theorists, and then sub-jected to the careful analysis of the structuralists. It has been seen as a universal form of human expression found in folk tales, novels, films, plays, paintings, and comic strips; its ubiquity and transcultural character led to attempts to found a new discipline called narratology, which would seek out and articulate what was common to all these manifestations. While the concept turned up fitfully in early, that is, postwar, analytical philosophy of history, it was closely tied to standard causal explanation. Through all this the idea of a distinctively narrative form of explanation was largely unexplored. Do narratives explain, and if so how? Does narrative explanation differ from other forms of explanation, and if so how? This paper is an attempt to answer some of these questions.

Let us begin with an example. Suppose that on a busy city street we see a young man carrying a large potted plant that almost obscures his view, running so fast that he risks colliding with other pedestrians, and shouting the name of a woman in a very loud voice. When someone like this attracts our attention, his action puzzles us. We want to know why hes behaving in this strange way. We seek an explanation.

We learn that he has returned home to find a note from his girlfriend with whom he shared his apartment, but with whom he had been quarreling; indeed she had

DAVID CARR20decided to leave him and move out, and in fact had removed her belongings and is gone. The man was shaken and distraught. Then he noticed that she left behind her favorite plant, and learned from a neighbor that she had left only a few minutes ago and is walking in the direction of a friends apartment. Seizing on the plant as a pretext to find her and beg her to return, he picks it up and runs into the street, hoping to catch up with her.

Most of us would be satisfied with this account as an explanation of the mans action. We might ask for more details, but we dont really need them. Our per-plexity goes away; our question has been answered. We now know why he did what he did.

What we have given is a typical narrative account. We have explained an ac-tion by telling a story about it. The narrative has all the standard elements of a good story: it has a central subject or protagonist. It has a beginning: we need not go any further back than his return to the empty apartment, though it helps to learn that the two had been quarreling before that. That sets the scene. The story has a middle, in which our hero reacts emotionally to the opening scene, assesses the situation with the help of some new information (that she had just left), and decides to take action. What he does then, running with the plant through the street and shouting his girlfriends name, is where we came in, as it were. There is an element of suspense here: will he succeed? And the story has an end, even though we dont yet know exactly what it will be. Hell catch up with her or he wont. If he does, hell be successful in winning her back, or he wont. But this range of alternatives, even though we dont know which of them will occur, is determined by the story so far. They belong to the story.

One thing to be noted about this explanation is that it is probably the same one that the man himself would give for his own action. Though we could have gotten this explanation from someone else, we could also have gotten it from him, if we had occasion to ask. This rather obvious fact suggests that the narrative mode is very close in form to the structure of action itself, from the agents point of view. An action emerges from the agents awareness of a situation, a desire to reach a certain goal, and the choice of means to achieve it. In this case the agent is de-scribing the situation as he perceived it, his reaction in forming the plan to catch up with and plead with his girlfriend, and his decision to pick up the plant and rush into the street to carry out his plan. All of these elements are part of the ac-tion, whether or not the man tells anyone about it. So its not the case that the ac-tion receives its structure from the story thats told later about it. Whether he tells the story, or I tell it about him on the basis of information received elsewhere, the action is there beforehand and the story neatly corresponds to and recounts or renders the action in explicitly narrative form. The story seems to borrow its form from the very action it is about. It may be objected that people often act impulsively and only afterward give structure to their action by telling a story that reconstructs the reasons for the action in retrospect. This may be true in some cases, but certainly not all. And even when it is true, it does not follow that the re-construction is somehow incorrect or disingenuous. Again, it may sometimes be so, but to argue that it is always so would require a theory of motives that would have to be justified on terms that take us far beyond ordinary discourse.

NARRATIVE EXPLANATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS 21A second thing that stands out about this explanation is that it is perfectly in

line with everyday discourse and common sense. These are slippery terms, but I mean by them to say that the explanation reflects the way we talk about our own actions and those of others as we deal in the ordinary way with the world around us. For most purposes, such an account of an action would be accepted at face value and we would not be inclined to inquire further. Of course, questions might arise about whether the man was telling the truth, especially if his story conflicted with another storysay, his girlfriends storyof the same events. Here we would indeed have a legitimate reason to question the agents narrative account of his own action. If it became important for some reason to settle the discrepancy, we might have to call in other witnesses and ask for their accounts of the same action.

This could take us from the everyday into the world of legal or juridical institu-tions, where someonea judge or jurywould have to decide which account of the action to believe. A journalist might have similar concerns, wanting to recon-struct what really happened out of the varying accounts of the original events. Historians, too, often see their task as reconstruction of the past along these lines. Here the value of hindsight is that from its perspective it can reveal elements that augment the original story. Those looking back can assess the importance of unin-tended consequences ranging far beyond the perspectives and aims of the original participants. The actions of political leaders during the Cold War, for example, look very different to us after its conclusion than they did to agents, participants, and observers while it was going on. The assassin of Archduke Ferdinand at Sa-rajevo in 1914, or Martin Luther in 1519, would have recounted their actions in terms very different from the ones we now use to tell the story of what they did, knowing as we do the vast consequences of their actions.

But even if we leave the original story behind, or place it alongside other stories, in search of the truth about the action in question, we have not departed from the kind of account we started with: a story that recounts the action by starting from its meaning for those involved: its initiation in a perceived set of circumstances, its execution according to plan and means, and its arrival at its conclusion. Even in the juridical, journalistic, and historical contexts, this kind of account is usually judged perfectly adequate. It ends an inquiry that began with a puzzle or an anom-aly, an event we can describe (a man running wildly through the street, a generals withdrawal of his troops just when they have an advantage, a risky political tactic) but which initially doesnt make sense to us. In keeping with this description, we can say what happened, but we want to know why. The story answers the question and provides us with the sense we need, often in such a way that the original act is re-described in a manner derived from the larger story in which it is now embed-ded. As a result of an investigation into discrepancies and inconsistencies, we may end with a story that is different from the one we started with, but its still a story, in the sense that it has all the standard features we described above.

Two important questions arise out of the account so far: why is a narrative ac-count generally satisfying? And how does it explain?

We might say that the narrative explanation is satisfying precisely because it never strays far from ordinary discourse. The content of the story may in the end depart considerably in content from that of the surface-story we began withsay,

DAVID CARR22the agents own accountbut its proximity in form and style to our day-to-day dealing in human situations lends it an air of familiarity that we may find com-forting. Familiarity is reassuring, especially when contrasted with the prospect of veering into the hidden and the arcane. The familiarity of the narrative context also opens up immediately recognizable strategies for dealing with the situation, if indeed we are called on to intervene. In other words, the kind of understand-ing we achieve through telling a story is also the kind that can lead, if need be, to action.

The familiarity of the context of narrative helps answer our second question: how does narrative explain? If we start from a puzzling action, as we did in our example, the story we tell places that action in a temporal continuum, relating it to previous actions and events that led up to it; and it places the action also in relation to a future scenario or set of possible futures. The original action was puzzling in part because we didnt have its temporal contextwe didnt know, literally, where the young man was coming from and we didnt know where he was going. The story doesnt have the character of a mere chronicle, however; it selects the relevant and leaves out the irrelevant, and it does this, I would say, by appealing to the familiar. A lovers quarrel, a feeling of distress and a desire to remedy an emotionally fraught situation, even an impulsive action like running into the street: these are all feelings, actions, and situations we can recognize right off, and our narrative performs the function of placing the puzzling action not only in a temporal context but also within a familiar repertoire of actions, emotions, and motives. These are things weve seen before, and we illuminate the unfamiliar by relating it to the familiar. No doubt some version of the so-called covering law enters in here, since we tacitly appeal in part to general tendencies and patterns, repeatable instances of the way people are and the ways they act.

Causality, however, with which the early covering-law theorists tried to link the elements of a narrative, is totally out of place here. A perceived situation, an emotional reaction, taking on a goal and initiating a plan for reaching itthese do not cause the action but serve to motivate it. Whats the difference? Its not just that the laws in question are so tenuous and of such limited application, or that we could never deduce the action from their conjunction with the antecedents, as Hempels early critics pointed out. Its that the causal account leaves out a conscious agent whose relation to the antecedent situation is at least a subjective and practical, if not a deliberative, one. Consciousness and at least some degree of reflection are elements of the initiation of the action.

These are some of the elements, then, of how narratives explain and why for the most part they satisfy us.

But its another matter if we leave the context of the everyday and enter the domain of the scientific. In one way or another, any account of an action that aspires to scientific status will likely not be satisfied with such a narrative explanation. The term scientific is itself very broad, of course, as we shall see, but a common element of most approaches that bear this name is precisely their departure from common sense or ordinary discourse. It is the vocation of science, historically and culturally, to go beyond the surface of things, to pen-etrate behind what Wilfred Sellars called the manifest image of the world, to

NARRATIVE EXPLANATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS 23cast off appearance and arrive at reality. Modern physical science serves as the paradigm: according to most accounts, it began when the common sense explana-tions inherited from Aristotle were rejected. Copernicus overturned our everyday observations of the heavens, and physics has never looked back, taking us ever further from common sense.

Those bent on establishing a science of human action claim that as soon as our search for knowledge of this sort of event gets serious, narrative explana-tion is simply not satisfying. Storytelling, after all, does not seem intellectually respectable, much less scientific. It leaves too many questions open. Given the initial situation, for example, why did the man react in the way he did, rather than some other way? Does the narrative provide sufficient conditions for the action in question, or even necessary ones? There are too many possible why questions left unanswered, questions that would have to be answered by adopt-ing a different approach. Further, the narrative explanation seems to require that we depart from observation and engage in some dubious speculation, such as attributing thoughts, motives, and intentions to the agent. Science, by contrast, supposedly requires that we stick to what we can derive from observable events. The same patterns of inquiry that have been so successful in dealing with other observable phenomena should work for these human events too. They are, after all, just part of the observable world. This world obeys laws that are everywhere the same. Motives and intentions are ruled out; they dont belong in physical or biological accounts.

Here we are getting at the origins of a very old and familiar debate, and I want to relate this discussion of narrative to its antecedents in the history of reflection on explanation. The early positivists wanted to find in human events the same relation between observations and laws found in non-human events. The emerg-ing idea of social science proposed to find in the human world the laws that governed its behavior in the same way that physical laws governed the behavior of inanimate objects. From the nineteenth century down to Hempels covering-law model of the 1940s, hopes and demands were high for a genuinely scientific approach to human behavior and for a convergence of all sciences around a single model of explanation.

Those unconvinced by this development allowed the term explanation to be co-opted by the reductionists and contrasted it with what they called under-standing. The point was not to explain but to understand an action, and attempts were made to describe the process of understanding in terms of a method that had its own rigor and even scientific character. It was here, beginning with the work of Dilthey and the neo-Kantians, that the idea of the Geisteswissenschaften was born; in this way, though they relinquished the goal of explanation, they still wanted to be scientific in their own way. But the point was to understand the ac-tion from the agents point of view, and this meant discerning by empathy and analogy what was going on in the agents mind. Language had to be interpreted, which brought the notion of hermeneutics into play. To what extent was the in-terpretation of language, whether in texts or in the statements of individuals about their actions, capable of following a clearly defined method? The battle between the models of Erklren and of Verstehen continued unabated into the twentieth century and reproduced itself in debates among philosophers of social science

DAVID CARR24and philosophers of history. (Interestingly, the advocates of Verstehen did not initially employ the concept of narrative, which entered the scene somewhat later. We shall return to this point in a moment.)

The mid-twentieth-century unity-of-science movement, to which Hempel be-longed, was only one manifestation of these debates. At the time it was linked to a behaviorist psychology that was at odds with other models, such as the psychoanalytic, which also claimed the dignity of scientific status. For the psy-choanalytically inclined too, our straightforward narrative account was deemed insufficient; a scientific explanation has to penetrate beyond the surface of things, in this case by dealing in unconscious motives. For example, why did the girl-friend leave the plant behind? Was this not an unconscious message that her de-parture was not a complete break and that the outcome was still negotiable? Did the man not unconsciously realize this when he took the plant as his pretext for chasing after her? To this behaviorists would object that such explanations do not leave the language of motives, reasons, and narrative behind, but just replace the common sense story with a farfetched second-level story based on speculatively constructed unconscious reasons and motives.

Nowadays, of course, both the behaviorist and the psychoanalytic approaches have long since largely gone out of fashion, and any scientific explanation wor-thy of the name would have to employ neurological concepts. Once again the common-sense level of discourse, where we find narrative explanations, would be replaced by sophisticated accounts centered on the brain and nervous system. Neurobiology and cognitive psychology would provide the conceptual repertoire, rounded out in the end by concepts derived from evolutionary biology as the ma-trix for all explanation of behavior. Common-sense accounts, including narrative explanations, have meanwhile been provided, from this perspective, with a new name: folk psychology, they are called, on the analogy of folk medicine, which has long since been superseded by scientific medicine. Common-sense discourse about human behavior is thus seen as a kind of aspiring but deficient explana-tory endeavor, trying hard but failing to do what real science is now presumably ableor soon will be ableto do, namely to explain, predict, and control human behavior. Neurophysiological explanations are at least conceivable even if they are not immediately available. But the distance between these and evolutionary explanations is still so great that the whole enterprise has the character of a prom-issory note pending a great deal of future research. It is not clear in any case how an evolutionary account could ever get beyond the explanation of general traits or dispositions and descend to the level of particular motivations and reasons.

On the other side of the debate, the concept of narrative started being taken seriously in the 1960s as a supplement, or even as an alternative, to such no-tions as Verstehen, empathy, and hermeneutics. One reason for this is that these concepts are too much centered on individual actions and the reasons given for acting. Even interpretation, at least in its pre-Gadamerian sense, seems to focus on recapturing an act of thought that lies behind and gives meaning to a linguistic expression. The idea of telling a story about what people do seems broader and richer in its scope than that of simply understanding their actions by means of their intentions, though it may involve this too. A story seems capable of encom-

NARRATIVE EXPLANATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS 25passing multiple actions and events, as well as longer-term actions, sub-actions, and reactions to events; it calls attention to the narrators retrospective point of view, introducing the ironic element of viewing actions in relation to their un-intended as well as their intended consequences; and it appeals to a logic of the flow of actions through time, a structure of events that gives them a distinctive form. These features make it seem especially appropriate for history, which is interested in individual actions but only as they fit into larger patterns of events that range far beyond particular persons and particular events.1 Thus many his-torians and philosophers of history, who had reacted negatively to Hempels covering-law approach to history because it seemed to be so at variance with the way historians actually think and write, embraced the concept of narrative as the key to historical knowledge.

To be sure, the emphasis on narrative in history was opposed by another cur-rent within the discipline, the turn to social and economic explanation that started with the Annales school in France and soon spread far and wide in the historical profession. This development was directed against the focus on individuals and their actions in traditional political history, whose accounts had typically been presented in narrative form. Again, the move away from storytelling was repre-sented as making history more scientific and less literary. But there was more to it than that. Underlying the work of Fernand Braudel in his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, usually considered the outstanding and characteristic work of this school, is not just an epistemological but also a metaphysical view of history. His well-known extended metaphor, drawn from the sea itself, places traditional history at the level of surface agitations, the brief, rapid, nervous oscillations of histoire vnementielle. These are the events that individuals have felt, described, lived according to the rhythm of their lives, brief as our own. But this level is moved, unbeknown to these individuals, by the deeper-lying and slower-moving currents of social history, those of peoples and groups and their economic and cultural forces. This second level, however, presupposes a third, even deeper and almost immobile history of the relations of humans with their environment, the geographical time of climate, sea, soil, and agriculture.2

Here we can say not that men make history, but that history makes men and fashions their destiny. This is the longue dure, the anonymous, profound, and often silent domain that covertly determines everything above it.3 This view is metaphysical in the sense that it is an expression of what history essentially is, of what has ontological priority and what is secondary and derived.

This metaphysics of history has its epistemological consequences, of course, and they lead inevitably to the measurable, the countable, and the statistical. Thus history for Braudel is one of the social sciences whose method is increasingly that of mathematical models.4 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, another Annales historian,

1. On this account the explanation of individual actions retains a crucial role in historical nar-ratives, as Karsten Stueber argues in Reasons, Generalizations, Empathy, and Naratives: The Epistemic Structure of Action Explanation, his contribution to this Forum (History and Theory 47 [February 2008], 31-43).

2. These passages are from Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur lhistoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), 11f. 3. Ibid., 21.4. Ibid., 61.

DAVID CARR26is well known for stating that history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.5 But some historians, French and British, who have followed the lead of the Annales school, have developed a more modest view of what is to be gained by the quantitative approach. Franois Furet, in a now-classic study from 1975, describes the move from narrative history to what he calls the problem-oriented history of demographics and statistics. He thinks that history has un-doubtedly gained by opening up new topics and new methods, but he doubts that history has in the process become more scientific. It is incorrect to believe, he writes, that the passage from narrative history to problem-oriented history . . . suffices to enter ipso facto into the scientific domain of the demonstrable.6 Nor will narrative history ever be supplanted. But it will, he thinks, be enriched and improved by the new developments.

Lawrence Stone, the British historian who had himself contributed to the rise of social history, is in the end more skeptical than Furet. In a well-known 1979 paper, though he praises the work of the major social historians like Braudel, he thinks that the findings of much quantitative history are a smokescreen meant to bedazzle their audience, often expressed in so mathematically recondite a form that they are unintelligible to the majority of the historical profession.7 The focus was on population, birth and death records, food supply, prices and other such quantifiable items, to the neglect of the values, customs, culture, and actions of groups and individuals. Moreover, the sources that provide data to the mathemati-cally inclined historians are often sketchy and unreliable. Stone concludes that quantification has not fulfilled the high hopes of twenty years ago.8 Economic and demographic determinism has collapsed in the face of the evidence, he writes,9 and finds much evidence for a return to narrative in the historical profes-sion at large. Like Furet, he values the better contributions of quantitative history, but rejects the scientistic pretensions often advanced by their authors. In the end, the whole dispute seems to have been downgraded to a difference in emphasis.

When we think of narrative as it has functioned in history, how close are we to the idea of common-sense narrative explanation with which we began? On the whole those who have championed narrative have been reluctant to think of it as a form of explanation, continuing in the practice of reserving that term for causal accounts. Understanding still seems the preferred term, even though it has clearly been extended beyond its original association with ideas of empathy and interpretation.

One of the interesting features of the turn to narrative, however, at least in relation to history, is that it soon intersected with the theory of literature, where narrative had long been a topic of interest. In the process, its significance as a mode of explanation or understanding changed considerably. Hayden White was a key figure here, of course. In keeping with structuralist theories of narrative,

5. Quoted in Lawrence Stone, Reflections on a New and Old History, in The Narrative and History Reader, ed. G. Roberts (London: Routledge, 2001), 283.

6. Franois Furet, From Narrative History to Problem-Oriented History, in Roberts, ed., The Narrative and History Reader, 279.

7. Stone, in Roberts, ed., The Narrative and History Reader, 283.8. Ibid., 288.9. Ibid. 293.

NARRATIVE EXPLANATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS 27storytelling was associated primarily with creative fiction, and the emphasis was on the patterns and conventions of constructing narratives, not only in novels but also in films, theater, and even comic strips. White is primarily a philosopher of history, but he sees historical writing as a literary artifact. The link to com-mon-sense discourse is severed, or at least neglected, and the difference between narrative and the everyday world becomes more important than what they have in common. From Barthes and Foucault, White picks up the idea that narrative structures in history are imposed on the past by those in power for the sake of domination and control.

Paul Ricoeur was very much influenced by Hayden White, but takes this line of reasoning in a slightly different direction. For Ricoeur narrative is an essential feature of human existence by which we humanize and thus deal with time. It gives our individual and social existence sensible contours and projects, and thus gives meaning to life. It does this in both fiction and history, and also in religion. The biblical narrative is never far from Ricoeurs mind, as he discusses the role of narrative in the creation of the self. Ricoeur never went so far as to collapse the distinction between fiction and history, but he did talk about the ways in which they are interwoven, and he was more interested in these than in the differences. In the end his theory of narrative was focused on its literary productions, whether fictional or historical, and he was more interested in how these affect and trans-form everday life than how they arise out of it.

In short, at the hands of these two important authors, the putative explanatory role of narrative was not an issue. They both had a great deal to say about nar-rative, and about history, but the idea that storytelling could serve a role in the social sciences or in history, answering our questions about social events and about the human past, was not their concern. The gap they opened up between narrative in its literary guise and the everyday world of action and experience made it seem unlikely that this connection could be reestablished. The perhaps unwitting irony of this development, however, is that these authors join hands with the positivistically inclined social scientists in not taking narrative seriously as a candidate for explanatory significance. For White narrative is imposed on a non-narrative world, distorting it and thus concealing rather than revealing it. For Ricoeur narrative takes up certain features of the prenarrative world, but its primary function is to transform it into something new rather than to discover its truth. In the end, its function is ethical rather than epistemological.

Thus we can see that for various reasons narrative, which seems to function very well in ordinary life as a mode of explanation, has not fared very well in this regard at the hands of theorists who are concerned in various ways with human actions and events. After examining some of the contexts in which this rejection of narrative has occurred, it might be useful to examine some of the motives behind it. It would seem that narrative is judged as providing either too little or too much.

We have mentioned the motives that go along with moving beyond common sense to science. Here it would seem that a story-type explanation can seem inadequate. But it is important to distinguish here between what we might call ideological and skeptical reasons. A healthy skepticism regarding common sense

DAVID CARR28and received opinion may be said to belong to any genuine inquiry worthy of the name. An explanation, or even a mode of explanation, can be unsatisfying because it has the air of being superficial or incomplete. There can be reasons for rejecting it or regarding it as insufficient. But it is altogether different to reject a mode of explanation because it does not fit an a priori metaphysical conception of reality. We saw this in the case of Braudels views on history. He had a very broadly conceived metaphysical view of the essence of historical reality, and he presented it with the help of some very striking metaphors. We can also assume that this view is informed by long years of historical research; Braudels view is supported by his eminence in the profession. But we cant say that he actually gave us arguments for it. His metaphysical views would have to be supported by metaphysical arguments, and these he did not provide. So his theory of historical layers has the character of an a priori framework governing his research. Only on the assumption of this framework does his disparaging view of ordinary historical events and the closer-to-common-sense explanations that seek to illuminate them have any justification.

Something similar seems to be going on in the move to neurological-evolution-ary explanations. The reductionist unity-of-science movement seems alive and well among the practitioners of this approach. According to this view, because human action belongs to physical reality, and the workings of physical reality are supposed a priori to be everywhere the same, any genuine explanation must be in keeping with a causal-scientific approach borrowed from physical science. Today, of course, it is biological reality that serves in this role. As weve seen, the reduction of all reality to physical reality goes hand in hand with a reduction of all science to physical science as the preferred model of scientific explanation. The disparaging term folk psychology, applied to all inquiry that does not follow this path, is really a bit of what we might call persuasive terminology designed to achieve by rhetorical means what it does not attain by argument. This strategy shows us better than anything else that we are dealing here with an a priori com-mitment to a certain worldview rather than with the results of scientific inquiry. This view is that the common-sense world of social interaction, from which many of our concepts of motivations, reasons, and even stories are drawn, is really an outdated and failed, or at least inadequate, form of explanatory social science. One thing that seems not to be considered is that the context of everyday interac-tion might have other motivations than the search for laws, causal explanations, prediction, and control that we associate with the ideas of natural and biological science.

Perhaps the conclusion to be drawn is that it belongs to the spirit of inquiry to be skeptical of common-sense and easy explanations, both in general and in particular; but discarding a mode of explanation simply because it does not fit an a priori ontological mold is not truly scientific. Thus if we depart from a common-sense mode of explanation, such as narrative explanation, in favor of another model, we had better have good reasons for doing so. It may be that in some instances narrative explanation leaves us unsatisfied, and we need to go deeper, and in some cases shift conceptual frameworks. But I would maintain, in good pragmatist fashion, that conceptual frameworks are meant to serve inquiry, and not the other way around. In other words, skepticism works both ways, and

NARRATIVE EXPLANATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS 29should apply equally to all unquestioned and unargued theoretical commitments, whether they be common-sense or scientific-reductionist in character.10

If narrative explanation has seemed to the advocates of a reductive idea of sci-ence to offer too little, to the theorists of literary narrative it has been thought to offer too much. Telling a story about an event in order to make it comprehensible is likened to a literary creation that embellishes and restructures the events rather than illuminating them. Depending on whom one reads, literary values, rhetorical tropes, or unconscious cultural patterns take the place of inquiry, and we are left to judge the resulting narrative according to aesthetic and ethical rather than epis-temological criteria. Because retrospective narrative has in some cases been used to distort the facts for propaganda purposes in the interests of power, it is thought that all narrative accounts must to some degree be guilty of this, consciously or unconsciously. The assumption behind this is that narrative structures are at odds with the real world such that any attempt to apply the one to the other will result in distortion. Narrative is thought to issue from an autonomous mental or cultural realm that has no roots or connections beyond itself.

I hope that the previous exposition has shown up the fallacy in this mode of reasoning. Storytelling obeys rules that are imbedded in action itself, and narra-tive is at the root of human reality long before it gets explicitly told about. It is because of this closeness of structure between human action and narrative that we can genuinely be said to explain an action by telling a story about it.

I have been making this argument for a long time. It does not mean, as some of my critics have assumed, that the true or only explanation of an action lies in retrieving and stating the motives of the agent just as they were involved in the action at the time it was performed. That account of explanation would be closer to the classic idea of Verstehen, empathy, or the rational reconstruction theories of Collingwood and Dray. Telling the story of an action, as weve seen, involves more than just finding the motive, thought, or intention behind the action. It ties the action to its background circumstances, its antecedent events, and its subse-quent results. Telling a more extended story, or contrasting the agents original story with other accounts of the same event, often involves questioning the prima facie reason and revising it. The explanatory story, in other words, may be very different in many respects from the initial agents story. But the point of empha-sizing the sameness of form between narrative explanation and what it explains is to show that the narrative explanation does not inhabit a different conceptual universe from the narrated, and hence explained, original scene. In fact, the busi-ness of revising motives, reassessing the reasons for actionthat is, changing the storymay occur in the course of the action itself. As agents acting in the world we try to understand our own actions and experiences as we go along, often revising our own story in the course of the action. So the narrative account of the

10. Thus I agree with Tor Egil Frlands resistance to what he calls the explanatory imperial-ism of methodological individualism in Mentality as a Social Emergent: Can the Zeitgeist have Explanatory Power?, his contribution to this Forum (History and Theory 47 [February 2008], xx-xx). Though I am not arguing here for plural subjects and social entities such as the Zeitgeist as elements in narrative explanations, I have done so elsewhere. I thus agree with his pragmatic defense of what he calls an explanatory ecumenism, which would allow the careful and circumscribed use of such notions.

DAVID CARR30action, far from moving into a different universe of discourse from the events it depicts, is located on a continuum of repeatedly revised explanations, understand-ings, and interpretations that is part of life itself.

Not only is it narratives all the way down, then, but the storytelling never ends. That is, there is no definitive story. As theorists as different as Dilthey and Danto have pointed out, because of their hindsightful character narratives need to be revised in light of later developments, and at the limit the full significance of any event would have to await the end of history, or the end of time. This is per-haps an aspect of narrative explanation that sometimes makes it frustrating, rather than satisfying, to those in search of definitive answers. Narrative can satisfy most of the time, as long as we do not expect too much of it. The satisfaction we normally feel with a narrative explanation should not be taken at face value, nor should it close off further inquiry. But there is no reason why we should not take it for what it is, a valuable and useful implement for understanding human action.

Emory University