History, Differential Equations, and the Problem of Narration

Bibliographic Data

ID5152964
AuthorsDonald N Mccloskey (corresponding author)
Year1991
Volume30
Issue1
Pages21
Publication date1991-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2505289
OpenAlexW2245964202
LanguageEN
Citations received16

The talk of engineers and the talk of historians connects in the way that metaphors connect with stories. Though both make use of both (because we cannot live otherwise in the world), engineers specialize in metaphors and historians in stories. In the abstract it is a matter of definitions. Take the essence of the metaphor to be comparison and the essence of the story to be time. (And let the definitions ride; they break down soon enough if they are wrong.) A comparison can be put as a law, such as that apples and the moon fall to earth or that imperial hubris usually gets punished. The moon is like an apple; Athens in the Peloponnesian War was like a proud man. A history, on the other hand, can be stated as a sequence of connected events. The moon was here on January 1, and therefore will be just so on April 2, eclipsing the sun; Athens overreached to Sicily in the sixteenth summer, and therefore only a few returned out of many. The engineer and historian do not deal in mere comparison or mere time, no more than poets or novelists do. Aimless comparison is bad poetry and bad engineering; one damned thing after another is bad fiction and bad history. The point is pointedness, which will vary with the purpose in mind. (The point, incidentally, need not be simple or realistic or of any other kind especially approved by the nineteenth century.) Comparing a pendulum to the wavering of the beloved's affection may have a point in a certain poem, but to have a point as engineering the pendulum needs to be compared with, say, an ideal falling body constrained by an ideal shaft. A bare chronology likewise makes no history, unless pointed by the context and the questions. The dated sequence of winning numbers on the Iowa lottery from 1987 to 1990 is a chronology, but can be read as history only in the imaginings of an numerologist. Metaphor and story, then, are two ways of arguing. Place pure metaphor at one end, containing no element of story, timeless as I have said. I shall compare thee to any old summer's day, not to the remarkable events of 21-28, 1595. At the other end place a mere listing of the events in order: May 23, midday, rough winds; at sunset, gold complexion dimmed. The two ends are linked by a theme. That is the first point here. A list of events in World War I or in the market for hogs is not much of a story; maybe it is not a story at all, a sheer chronicle. But when thematized -by God favors big battalions, for instance-the story can be told persuasively. Letting in a trace

Adversary · Affection · Ancient history · Art · Battle · Epistemology · Hubris · Literature · Metaphor · Narrative · Point (geometry) · Political science · Classics · Cognitive Science and Education Research · Computer Science · History · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy

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