I’m not sure I understand your point. I’m afraid I may be strawmanning or misconstruing your position in my reply. If I do, please point it out.
Describing motifs in those narratives in a quasi-objective way isn’t. The very reason a stereotype is not a fact is that it doesn’t show up in everyone’s internal narrative in a given situation.
Certainly, different people can tell very different stories (both internal and external) about the same events. They can perceive different tropes or motifs at work. And when they talk about these events, each will describe them as he sees them.
Any one story can objectively contain a certain motif. Reality itself doesn’t contain motifs, because it’s not a story. And people can disagree about motifs because they tell different (internal) stories about the same set of facts. If that’s what you’re saying, I completely agree.
Also, sometimes it makes sense to try to be as objective as possible and describe facts without fitting any theory or story to them. That’s not the same as saying those stories don’t exist. We just ignore them some of the time.
However:
I don’t object to finding an example of, say, dramatic irony in William Schirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which explicitly is a narrative covering real events. I do object to saying the same thing about World War 2, the real one.
World War 2 did not exist in reality. All there was, was a huge amount of individual events. It takes human storytelling to join them into the story of a great global war. To say that the Japanese were part of the war, but it only started in 1939 even though they had been at war with China and the USSR for years before that, because Hitler’s invasion of Poland is more narratively important than his invasion of Czechoslovakia… That is pure narrative storytelling.
Facts from the territory are much smaller-scale than WW2; it exists only in our maps, and it’s inherently a human narrative, which means it can legitimately exhibit irony, although of course people can disagree about the irony in a particular story. The territory doesn’t contain irony, but nobody would say it does, because nobody would say an individual event local in space and time is ironic without reference to a larger narrative.
I see no relevant difference between Schirer’s book and anything you or I might say or think about “World War 2”; one is written down and the other is not, that is all.
I’m not sure I understand your point. I’m afraid I may be strawmanning or misconstruing your position in my reply. If I do, please point it out.
Certainly, different people can tell very different stories (both internal and external) about the same events. They can perceive different tropes or motifs at work. And when they talk about these events, each will describe them as he sees them.
Any one story can objectively contain a certain motif. Reality itself doesn’t contain motifs, because it’s not a story. And people can disagree about motifs because they tell different (internal) stories about the same set of facts. If that’s what you’re saying, I completely agree.
Also, sometimes it makes sense to try to be as objective as possible and describe facts without fitting any theory or story to them. That’s not the same as saying those stories don’t exist. We just ignore them some of the time.
However:
World War 2 did not exist in reality. All there was, was a huge amount of individual events. It takes human storytelling to join them into the story of a great global war. To say that the Japanese were part of the war, but it only started in 1939 even though they had been at war with China and the USSR for years before that, because Hitler’s invasion of Poland is more narratively important than his invasion of Czechoslovakia… That is pure narrative storytelling.
Facts from the territory are much smaller-scale than WW2; it exists only in our maps, and it’s inherently a human narrative, which means it can legitimately exhibit irony, although of course people can disagree about the irony in a particular story. The territory doesn’t contain irony, but nobody would say it does, because nobody would say an individual event local in space and time is ironic without reference to a larger narrative.
I see no relevant difference between Schirer’s book and anything you or I might say or think about “World War 2”; one is written down and the other is not, that is all.