ABSTRACT
Densely storied cities are by their nature ineable. Too many narrative strains make their claims, promising to organize the disorderly pile of pictures in the archive into a comforting, clarifying order that will resolve the contradictions of the past, reassure the unease of the present, and promise a glorious future. Each narrative has its claimants; each declares itself the only possible interpretation of past, present and future; each one seeks by its very rhetoric to render the others trivial, incomplete, or even dishonorable. Yet the others remain: they, too, persuade.
