How do postmodernists avoid being relativist and other questions I can't answer

I just wanted to briefly discuss the readings since I found them highly interesting and felt we didn't really discuss them in a way that was satisfying for me in class, but that's probably because they simply compelled me to go on a massive tangent. Also because the claim has been made that postmodernists avoid being relativist, (I love the idea that relativist is a derogatory term) which intrigues me. I got the sense from everything I read about postmodernists before that they were as relativist as it gets (desert of the real and all that jazz) so while I thought many of their critiques were interesting and had a lot of explanatory power the fact that they seemed  relativist seemed very problematic. So when the claim was made that they weren't, I was hopeful but skeptical, and I am even more skeptical now that I have read the literature in the packets.
           To summarize (read grossly oversimplify) the arguments presented in the packet, "atomic facts" do not speak for themselves and to obtain meaning from them we must impose some sort of macro-structure, typically, and White might argue necessarily, narrative. In the example of the Medieval Annals we might consider the individual entries atomic facts and because there is no narrative constructed around it we don't really obtain any meaning from the list. We know that supposed atomic facts* happened but we don't know what that means without some sort of narrative** and therefore narrative should not be devalued in the field of history. We cannot have coherent discourse without narrative.
        Now this is where things start to be obviously relativist to me, let me just quote the conclusion of The Content of Form "what I have sought to suggest is that this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary". If real life lacks the coherence of fiction without the imposition of narrative which does not come from the "atomic facts" themselves but rather from an arbitrary imposed macro-structure then any sort of coherence in reality is just as imaginary as fiction. I think the platonic and modernist (don't hold me to the modernist part though" response to this would be to argue that there are inherent narratives in real life. To use a metaphor familiar to anyone taking freshman history with Mr. Vaughn the fact that it is impossible to ever produce a perfect circle does not mean that the concept of a circle is false and arbitrary, it simply means that the material world is irrational and the forms that it imperfectly copies are what is really real. Postmodernists would make the opposite argument, that the fact that it is impossible to ever produce a perfect circle means that the concept of the circle is arbitrary and false as it is an imposed concept.
         I also don't see how if you're arguing that reality being coherent is a product of arbitrary imposed narratives you could possible make a claim to morality being anything absolute, and without some sort of absolute grounds we can't have a non arbitrary morality and no one wants an arbitrary morality. So this argument seems to me to be the height of relativism as it claims not only that all moral systems are arbitrary but also any way of making coherent sense out of the world.
         When this topic was touched on in class the example of Holocaust deniers was used as an example of how the view that history consists only of arbitrary invented non real narratives makes it hard to definitively label a view of history we find problematic false and label our own understanding true. One of the responses that was given was that the narrative presented by Holocaust deniers lacks an persuasive power. But this is a totally relativist understanding, once could similarly say that narratives which advocate for racial equality would lack any convincing power to people living in the south during slavery and so would be false within that context, and historical narratives be rendered true or false by the context in which they are heard seems very relative to me.
        Another assertion could be that we can judge the validity*** of historical narratives based on their explanatory or predictive powers, this would seem to be the logic behind the idea that we develop the capacity to see things from multiple viewpoints rather then one correct viewpoint and so use whatever view or synthesis of views is the most enlightening in a specific situation. However to say that one historical narrative explains events more accurately then another means that we have to have a point of comparison, how can something be accurate without a target? We have to create a hypothetical objective narrative that these are being compared to, and we have already acknowledged that because facts do not speak for themselves such a thing does not exist. If we wanted to compare them based on predictive power we would have to be able to compare them to an objective understanding of what happens in the future which because we can't have an objective understanding of what happens is impossible. Thus when we make statements about the explanatory power of something we acknowledge to be an arbitrary constructed narrative we are implying the existence of another narrative which we believe to be objective, meaning we aren't being very good relativists as we believe that certain things are objective.
      One could argue that there is an objective meaning that can only be understood through narrative, though I don't get the sense from the reading that this is a particularly postmodernist view. The moment we acknowledge an inherent truth ,that though it may not be completely attainable is at least possible to approach (we may never be able to perfectly define morality but we still have logical grounds for labeling things moral and amoral), we have a responsibility to seek it out. If there is an objectively true historical narrative why concern ourselves with other narratives unless they in some way educate us about the objectively true narrative which makes them into something like parables or fables which doesn't seem to me to be a singularly postmodern type of storytelling.
       I think this is why Ragtime doesn't seem to be very radical to me, one could argue that Doctorow is providing us with a characterization of the early 20th century that is accurate even if the individual events are false. While he blurs the lines between history and fiction the only way in which the author/narrator seems to suggest that his portrayal of the early 20th century is false is that it is derived from fictional events. To use other terminology, the author seems to believe the macro-structure is true even if the atomic facts connected by the macro-structure are false. Doctorow doesn't seem to behave ironically towards what we would surmise to be the meta-narrative of Ragtime which indicates he is presenting it as truth, which seems at odds with White's idea that all coherence is imagined, and to try to characterize a time period is only the application of arbitrary narrative.
         Or maybe it's not, maybe he is unironic towards his meaning even though he is completely aware that it's only a constructed narrative because as a postmodernist he thinks that's what all meaning is and doesn't find that entirely problematic. But that seems strange because he seems to be quite ironic towards  another meaning , namely the nostalgic view of the 20's put forth by others in the 1920's. Anyway it just seems weird that he feels the need to correct someother interpretation if he, as a postmodernist, doesn't believe a correct interpretation is possible.
         Yeah so basically I'm skeptical that postmodernists can avoid being relativist if they use the arguments presented in the reading, and also confused as to why a postmodernist would present an unironic interpretation/characterization of the 1920's if they understood the coherence of reality and therefore the truth of that interpretation to only be imaginary.




* I'm beginning to wonder if it is even possible to articulate an atomic fact, since attaching language to a physical phenomena necessitates presupposing some meaning that is not self evident in the fact itself. The statement "Pippin died" presupposes the existence of Pippin as a conscious individual that is capable of dying rather then simply a collection of cells which ceased to be organized in a certain way. I could go on to talk about the way the idea of a cell itself is imposing an arbitrary concept on physical phenomena but I'm already being pretty reductive . What I'm trying to say is that it's impossible to articulate an atomic fact, if they even exist, because the only possible way to articulate it is in reference to concepts not present in the fact itself.


** Quick interjection here, isn't meta-narrative a totally redundant term? We are very close to asserting that any and all meaning consists of narrative (though that may just be me jumping to conclusions) or at least the typical way in which we create meaning is through the development of narrative. Trying to identify an individual narrative without some sort of other sub-narrative within it seems practically impossible unless we find some sort of atomic unit of narrative which can't be split into any further sub-narratives. And since most if not all narratives actually consist of many other narratives then aren't all narratives meta-narratives. Though postmodernists don't seem to be the type who would be bothered by the fact that their categories are arbitrary.  


*** I think we do have to judge the validity of historical narratives because we are necessarily adopt some and reject other and if we want to assert that we do this based off of reason we have to be able to make some sort of value judgement.  I think I talked long enough about why humans have to make value judgements back when I spewed words about The Stranger