To study the writings of the "unravelers," the opponents of the extensive and totalizing forms of reading which information technology has made into the tacit current model of knowledge, is to suspect that the debate over narrative history is a good deal more complex than the recent debates among historians might suggest. My purpose here is to present an image of post-structuralist thinking on narrative and its intricate relationship with history and to sketch the work of three writers on historical narrativity. I am looking for common threads which might serve as guides for those studies of historical writing which desire neither to dissolve history into the area of pure textuality in which it will have little or no identity, nor to accept the representationality of historical writing on its own traditional terms of "getting the story straight."
At the risk of bringing down on my head the objection that "argument by selective example is philosophically unpersuasive, a rhetorical device not a scientific proof,"[1] I shall sketch an image of post-structural thought about narrative and history by discussing briefly a few quotations from prominent figures. These figures might reject the term post-structuralist, which is a term current primarily in the United States; even the small group of writers sampled here differs in more ways than they might agree. A properly post-structuralist reading might well find important ways in which each passage differs from itself, offering a play of contending voices repressed by readings that stress their meaning and their essence. This said, I can only add that a survey of post-structuralist thought is a project that runs against the grain of post-structuralism. What follows is meant, therefore, as a point of departure, not a conclusion.