Abstract
In the beginning was the story Or rather: many stories, of many places, in many voices, pointing toward many ends.
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man—let me offer you a definition—is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall or when he’s about to drown he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.
—Graham Swift, Waterland
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References
Paul Bonnifield, The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression (Albuquerque. 1979): Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979). On Dust Bowl historiography in general. see the collection of essays in Great Plains Quarterly 6 (Spring 1986).
For a wide-ranging discussion that explores the emerging intellectual agendas of environmental history See “A Round Table: Environmental History”. Journal of American History,76 (March 1990), 1087–1147.
Much of the reading that lies behind this essay cannot easily be attached to a single argument or footnote. Among the works that helped shape my views on the importance and problems of narrative are the following: William H. Dray, Philosophy of History (Englewood Cliffs, 1964); Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Natureof Narrative (New York, 1966); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (NewYork, 1967); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore,1973); Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essalt in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978); Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki, eds., The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding (Madison, 1978); W. J. T Mitchell, ed.. On Narrative (Chicago, 1981); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981); Jonathan Culler; On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, 1982); Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory An Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983); Paul Ricocur, Time and Narrative (3 vols., Chicago, 1984, 1985, 1988), trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer; Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History. Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, 1983); Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge: Including the Integral Text of Analytical Philosophy of History (New York, 1985); James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986); Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca. 1986); Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding (Ithaca. 1987); Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987); and Kai Erikson,“Obituary for Big Daddy: A Parable,” unpublished manuscript (in William Cronon’s possession).
This distinction between chronicle and narrative is more fully analyzed in White, Metahistory,5–7: White, Tropics of Discourse,109–11; Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Intrument,” in Writing of History,ed. Canary and Kozicki, 141–44; David Cart, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, 1986), 59; Danto, Narration and Knowledge; and Paul A. Roth, “Narrative Explanations: The Case of History,” History and Theory,27 (no. I, 1988), 1–13.
I have written about the rhetorical structure of Turner’s work in two essays: William Cronon, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly, 18 (April 1987), 157–76; and William Cronon, “Turner’s First Stand: The Significance of Significance in American History,” in Writing Western History: Classic Essays on Classic Western Historians, ed. Richard Etulain (Albuquerque, 1991), 73,101. See also Ronald H. Carpenter, The Eloquence of Frederick Jackson Turner (San Marino, 1983 ).
William Robert Hare, ca. 1887, as quoted in Howard R. Lamar, “Public Values and Private Dreams: South Dakota’s Search for Identity, 1850–1900”; South Dakota History,8 (Spring 1978), 129.
Luther B. Hill, A History of the State of Oklahoma (Chicago, 1909 ), 382, 386, 385.
Josephine Middlekauf, as quoted in Joanna L. Stratton, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (New York, 1981 ), 204.
Kenneth Burke,.1 Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, 1969), 6–7.
Walter Prescott Webb. The Great Plains (New York. 1931).
These terms appear, for instance, in Malin’s magnum opus, James C. Malin, The Grassland of North America: Prolegomena to Its History (Gloucester, Mass., 1967), but this basic notion informs virtually all of his work on the grasslands. See also James C. Malin, Grassland Historical Studies: Natural Resources Utilization in a Background of Science and Technology (Lawrence, Kan., 1950 ); and the collection of essays, James C. Malin, History and Eology: Studies of the Grassland, ed. Robert P. Swierenga (Lincoln, 1984 ).
The Future of the Great Plains. Report of the Great Plains Committee (Washington, 1936), L On this report,see Gilbert E White, “The Future of the Great Plains Re-Visited,” Great Plains Quarterly,6 (Spring 1986), 84–93.
On the role of the Dust Bowl in reshaping the science of ecology itself, see Ronald C. Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1893–1955 (Berkeley, 1981 ).
Ibid., 509. For a similar use of the bison story as the symbol of an earlier Indian world that in some sense “vanished” during the last third of the nineteenth century, see William Cronon,.Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 213–18.
Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, 1983). 147–211.
Frank Linderman, Plenty-coups: Chief of the Crows (1930; reprint, Lincoln, 1962), 311.
Aristotle, Poetics,in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation,ed. Jonathan Barnes (2 vols., Princeton, 1984), 11,2321.
Ibid. On the importance of a story’s ending in determining its configured unity, see Kermode, Sense of an Ending; this can be usefully combined with Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975 ).
See White, Tropics of Discourse; White, Metahistory; Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument”; a less extreme position that ultimately leads toward a similar conclusion can be found in Ricocur, Time and Narrative, For a useful, if biased, explication of these debates, see Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory,23 (no. 1, 1984). 1–33. A valuable survey can be found in Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative
Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument,” 148. See also Richard T. Vann, “Louis Mink’s LinguisticTurn,” History and Theory,26 (no. I, 1987), 14
David Cart, “Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity,” History and Theory,25 (no. 2, 1986), 117
See Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review,97 (Nov. 1983). 3–68. Can’s argument that all human experience is narrated does not address a deeper relativist claim, that there is no necessary correlation between the stories people tell in their own lives and the stories historians tell in reconstructing those lives. On this issue, see Noel Carroll. review of Time, Narrative, and History by David Cart, History and Theory,27 (no. 3. 1988), 297–306.
This question, in a somewhat different form, is the chief topic of Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession ( Cambridge, Eng., 1988 ).
An extraordinary example of such stories about stories, set within the boundaries of a single Kansas county?on the eastern Plains is William Least Heat-Moon PrairyErth (a deep map) (Boston. 1991).
The shifting meanings of the Plains as “Great American Desert” are explored in Martyn J. Bowden, “The Great American Desert in the American Mind: The Historiography of a Geographical Notion,” in Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geography,ed. David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden (New York, 1976), 119–47 See also William E. Riebsame, “The Dust Bowl: Historical Image, Psychological Anchor, and Ecological Taboo,” Great Plains Quarterly,6 (Spring 1986). 127–36.
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Cronon, W. (1999). A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative. In: Buttimer, A., Wallin, L. (eds) Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective. The GeoJournal Library, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2392-3_14
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