Certainly your parents, teachers, grandparents, or an adult close to you, have already told you adventure stories, fantasy stories or even you presented books of literature that contained a very interesting plot, those that grab our attention and make us anxious to know the outcome. Well, historical research, developed by professional historians, who go to archives and libraries to collect data, its ultimate goal is to present to the audience a narrative whose plot can often be as pleasurable as a book literary.
The historical narrative, like any narrative, presupposes the articulation of events and characters, thus constituting a plot. The plot of the narrative refers to the image of a fabric; historical events and characters are “threads” that are entangled and build a “fabric”, a text (the term text comes from textile, which refers to fabric), endowed with meaning. This kind of narrative entanglement has existed in every kind of culture or civilization from the earliest times. The difference is that the narrative does not always appear in written form, that is, in books.
Primitive cultures, prior to the advent of writing, tried to explain reality and make sense of the experience they inherited from their ancestors through oral narrative, that is, the type of story that is told from generation to generation, in festivals or rituals, without the need for reading. The mythological narratives, which had the importance of suggesting satisfactory explanations for primitive and ancient peoples, developed in exactly this way, through orality.
In civilizations that developed writing, the great epic poems, such as those by the Greek Homer, began to organize narratives in the structure of verses and in a sequence of events. Therefore, while the spectacular stories of mythical heroes like Achilles were narrated, they tried to make sense of the history of the Greek people themselves. Epics were of great importance for the first explanations of the origin of civilizations.
Still with the example of the Greeks, history itself is born from a need to preserve great deeds, both of Greeks and foreign peoples, so as not to get lost in time. This is the definition of history bequeathed to us by Herodotus, considered the “father of history”. Great deeds, or great events, needed, according to Herodotus' intuition, to be entangled in a narrative so that they could be perpetuated and appreciated by future generations.
It is noticed that, since Antiquity, there has always been a concern with the importance of narrative for history. However, sometimes this importance is not evident today. Perhaps because of the boring impression that the study of history can give. To disentangle yourself from this bad impression, we suggest that you establish a comparison between historical narrative and literary narrative when studying history.
Liking a historical narrative is like liking a literary narrative and for the same reason: building a plot that makes sense
Think of historical characters as protagonists in a story full of adventures, tragedies, dramas, contradictions, various problems and everything else that we always find in a book literary. Face the fate of historical (and therefore real) characters such as Napoleão Bonaparte or Getúlio Vargas from the same way you would face the fate of fictional characters in the novels and tales that you most he likes. Of course, always being careful not to forget the fact that history deals with data from past reality while literature has imaginative freedom and builds its narrative without having to stick to the facts concrete.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes