history consists of a swarm of narratives, narratives that
are passed on, made up, listened to and acted out; the
people does not exist as subject; it is a mass of thousands
of little stories that are at once futile serious, that are
sometimes attracted together to form bigger stories, and
which sometimes disintegrate into drifting elements, but
which usually hold together well enough to form what we
call the culture of a civil society.