Sisyphean storytelling

In Narration and Knowledge, professor of philosophy Arthur C. Danto contends that the task of the historian is to find meaning in history by mapping or describing the relationship between events. Danto calls these descriptions narratives. Without these narratives, these stories connecting the dots of history, we'd never be able to find any meaning at all. As such, narratives are to events what generalisations are to objects.

Without generalisations, everything would be particulars. That is, there wouldn't exist any trees, just a lot of similar-looking thick, brown trunks covered by a collection of green leaves. Or. Without generalisations, there wouldn't be trunks and leaves either, or colours. So instead of trees, we would have a lot of objects it would be hard to understand.

One example are leaves in the fall. Say that I owned a tree, and the leaves suddenly started falling off. I would probably be heartbroken because my tree was dying. Also, seeing that the exact same thing happened to other trees wouldn't help a bit, because I didn't know all the other trees were the same species and that it was perfectly natural for trees to loose their leaves each fall.

Danto continues his theory of narratives by claiming that as time goes by, previous events will have to be continually redescribed in a way that incorporates all the new events. The reason is that new events never can be fully understood without knowing what preceded them, while old events never can be fully understood without knowing what followed them.

Now, it should be said that this redescription is not only a task of historians, it is a task of everyone. This is because every new thing that doesn't fit into an old narrative giving it meaning, has to be put inside a new narrative before we can understand it. Naomi Klein writes about this in The Shock Doctrine:

[I]n North America, the September 11 attacks were, at first, pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative of anything that could bridge he gap between reality and understanding. Without a story, we are, as many of us were after September 11, intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a new narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make sense once again.

At the same time, the narratives we have can be wrong. For example, my tree could be an evergreen, and its «leaves» falling could really be because it was dying. In that case, believing the narrative that trees drop their leaves in the fall would have led me astray. Furthermore, the frightening narrative of 9/11 being the «Pearl Harbour» of a «huntingtonian» Clash of Civilizations was wrong, and has been proven so over the last few years as, with Klein's words, the «shock wore off».