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land-dwelling mammals. Such information only becomes history when nar-
rative form is brought into play, a “story type or mythos,” as White puts
this, “which the historian has chosen to serve as the icon of the structure of
the events.” 48 Thus, for example, while the scientific materials compiled in
Dawkins' Ancestor's Tal e do not make it a history, the form of the “epic pil-
grimage” into which he orders them does. 49 The narrative form of the quest
romance that he lays over evolutionary science operates metaphorically, as
White would say, to construct “a relation of similitude between such events
and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the
events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings.” 50
Events, in other words, derive historical meaning from the literary
forms that order them. Most Americans remember the Vietnam War as a
tragedy, not merely because of its terrible human costs and failed objectives,
but, more fundamentally, because public memory has fashioned it in imita-
tion of traditional literary tales of moral failure rooted in the overbearing
pride that the ancients called hubris. The most familiar versions of this
tragedy recount the deeds of a great but flawed hero, an American govern-
ment so swelled by a sense of invincible power and global destiny that arose
from its recent triumphs in World War II that it became blind to the folly
of supposing it could win a ground war in the jungles of southeast Asia. Of
course, countless variations on this narrative are possible, simply because
of the range and diversity of elements a narrator may choose to include or
exclude. The tragic hero, for instance, might be an individual like Lyndon
Johnson or Richard Nixon in some renderings, in others a faceless Wash-
ington bureaucracy or perhaps an American public so softened by postwar
affluence that it had lost its nerve. But so long as the form remains more
or less stable, it will always be a tragedy, a story about a great protagonist
brought low by the insurmountable limitations of human nature.
The factual material incorporated into historical accounts will often
cause us to lose sight of their narrative derivations. For this same reason,
evolutionism often gives the impression of being scientific. Because credible
findings from evolutionary biology and paleontology are included in its nar-
ratives, audiences are less likely to notice the vital literary properties of these
accounts. Documentary histories, such as those of Bronowski and Sagan, in
other words, will always have a sense of scientific authenticity that audiences
would never attribute to the two tales of science fiction that I discussed
earlier in this chapter. We would categorize “The Sixth Finger” and 2001: A
Space Odyssey as science fiction romances and The Ascent of Man and Cosmos
as documentary histories, but in narrative terms all four are romances. All
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