Kathleen Singles Alternate History Narrating Futures Edited by Christoph Bode Volume 5 Kathleen Singles Alternate History Playing with Contingency and Necessity The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement no. 229135. Dissertation, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 2012. ISBN 978-3-11-027217-8 e-ISBN 978-3-11-027247-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de . © 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Content 1 Introduction | 1 1.1 Contexts: Alternate Histories and Future Narratives | 1 1.2 Methodology | 4 1.3 Proceedings and Theses | 6 1.4 Selection of Primary Sources | 10 1.4.1 Medium vs. Genre | 10 1.4.2 The International Spectrum | 11 2 The Poetics of Alternate History | 14 2.1 ‘History’ in Alternate History | 26 2.1.1 The Postmodern Challenge to History | 26 2.1.2 Referentiality: Possible-worlds Theory | 33 2.1.3 ‘History’ as the Normalized Narrative of the Past | 43 2.1.4 The Selection and Emplotment of Historical Events in Alternate History | 48 2.1.5 Nineteenth-century Paradigms of History in Alternate History | 56 2.2 Alternate History and Other Kinds of Past Narrative | 58 2.2.1 The Epistemology of History: Alternate History in the Context of Postmodern Historical Fiction | 58 2.2.2 Alternate Histories versus Secret History, “Plot-type” Counterfactual Histories, and Historical Fiction with “neokausale Verfremdungsverfahren” | 73 2.2.3 Alternate Histories versus ‘framed’ Alternate Histories | 81 2.2.4 Alternate History versus Counterfactual History | 85 2.2.5 Hybrids and Overlap | 96 2.2.5.1 The ‘Y’: Structure vs. Reception Models | 96 2.2.5.2 Alternate History as Fantasy | 99 2.2.5.3 Alternate History as Science Fiction | 103 2.3 Alternate History and Future Narrative | 109 2.3.1 Activation of the Reader: Text Strategies of Alternate History | 109 2.3.2 Alternate History as Non-interactive game: Points of Divergence versus Nodes | 119 2.3.3 Bifurcation vs. Divergence from History | 121 2.3.3.1 Alternate History versus Forking-paths Narratives | 121 2.3.3.2 Alternate-history FNs | 124 2.3.4 The Paradox of Alternate History: Contingency and Necessity | 129 VI Contents 2.3.5 The ‘Open’ Alternate History? | 134 2.3.5.1 The Open Artwork | 134 2.3.5.2 The Closed Alternate History | 138 3 Case Studies | 147 3.1 Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle | 147 3.1.1 The Alternate History | 147 3.1.2 Piecing It All Together: the Exposition | 148 3.1.3 The Alternate History within the Alternate History | 155 3.1.4 The Nature of Reality | 161 3.1.5 Human Agency | 165 3.2 The ‘Flawed’ Alternate History: Philip Roth’s The Plot against America | 169 3.2.1 Roth’s Novel as Alternate History | 169 3.2.2 The Alternate-history Autobiography: the National/Political and the Familial/Personal Stages | 173 3.2.3 Undermined Authenticity | 179 3.2.4 The Question of Causal Logic | 184 3.3 Of Dead Messiahs and Alaskan Dreams: Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union | 189 3.3.1 Alternate History Integrated | 189 3.3.2 The Detective Game | 191 3.3.3 “Strange times to be a Jew”: in Search of a Homeland | 197 3.3.3.1 Yiddishland | 197 3.3.3.2 Trouble in Yiddishland: “No future here for any Jew” | 200 3.3.4 The Chess Metaphor | 204 3.3.4.1 Zugzwang | 204 3.3.4.2 Landsman Plays | 205 3.3.4.3 Others Play: Saviors and Holy Lands | 208 3.3.5 Stories Already Told | 212 3.4 Time Travel and “to the present”: Stephen Fry’s Making History | 215 3.4.1 A New Take on a Popular Premise | 215 3.4.2 “The true story of what never happened”: Making Sense of Making History | 219 3.4.3 The Meisterwerk and Mastering Academia | 223 3.4.4 The Historian as God? Agency, Free Will, and Determinism | 226 3.4.5 Historical Sensitivity | 230 Contents VII 3.5 An Exceptional Hybrid: Dieter Kühn’s N | 233 3.5.1 Alternate History as FN | 233 3.5.2 The Structure of a ‘True’ Forking-paths Alternate History | 235 3.5.3 The Historiographical Shortcomings of the Past Narrative | 237 3.5.4 Big Plans, Little N | 241 3.5.5 The Narrator as ‘Great Man’? | 244 3.6 The Mock Alternate History: Inglourious Basterds | 247 3.6.1 A New Kind of World-War-II Movie, a New Kind of Alternate History | 247 3.6.2 Contingency and the Point of Divergence | 249 3.6.3 Metacinema: Competing Director-figures in the Film | 253 3.6.4 The Art of Direction: Authority and Authorization of the Film | 260 3.7 Alternate History as Apotheosis of Representation: Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten | 263 3.7.1 Krachtian Alternate History | 263 3.7.2 School of KrachtKracht, Christian (Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten) | 265 3.7.3 Hyperreality and Alternate History | 267 3.7.4 Rauchsprache – Krachtsprache | 269 3.7.5 Literary Evolution? | 272 3.7.6 Regress and Dissolution | 275 4 Conclusion | 279 4.1 What if this study had never been written? | 279 4.2 The History (and Future) of Alternate History | 282 Works Cited | 285 Primary Literature | 285 Secondary Literature | 289 Studies on Indivudual Works | 296 Index | 310 1 Introduction 1.1 Contexts: Alternate Histories and Future Narratives The purpose of this study is to investigate a corpus of texts known as ‘alternate history’ in the cooperative pursuit of defining a new field of narratology, future narratives (FNs). No less important is the endeavour to offer insights into the nature of alternate history to enrich an already existing, dynamic field of scholar- ship. Since the objectives presented here should be understood in the framework of the umbrella project Narrating Futures (hereafter: “ NAFU ”), it is fitting to begin with some contextualization. Alternate history is a recognizable term, not only for scholars of literature, but also for many readers in general. Especially since the 1960s, ¹ alternate histories have steadily gained popular status as the ‘what-if’ tales of history. Among the most well-known examples are Philip Dick ’s classic The Man in the High Castle , in which Nazi Germany and Japan are victorious in World War II, or Michael Cha- bon ’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union , in which a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees is set up in Alaska after Israel’s collapse in 1948. Such works have become veritable pop-cultural phenomena, along with countless other literary explorations of the question ‘what if?’. Nowadays, readers can even search on websites like www.uchronia. net² for an alternate history of their choice – not only by author, language or date of publication, but also by ‘divergence’, or the histori- cal period and/or event chosen as the focus of the alternate history –, or discuss their favourite alternate histories online with enthusiasts on www.alternatehis- tory.com . Personal websites of amateur alternate-history authors have begun to populate the web as well, including “Black Shuck’s Alternate History Page”, run by a former history major, or “The Tony Jones Alternate History Page”, branded by a translated quote from Konrad Adenauer: “History is the sum total [sic] of things that might have been avoided” (R. Brown; T. Jones). The daily blog “Today in Alternate History” collects the best of alternate-history journal-style articles from the web, and readers can follow the latest posts on Twitter. Several years ago, in 1995, a kind of critical promotion of the genre was instituted as well: The 1 For a comprehensive list of alternate histories published in the United States and England dur- ing the 1960s, see Helbig 78–86; cf. Gavriel Rosenfeld : “Since the end of World War II, and espe- cially since the 1960s alternate history […] has gained both in popularity and respectability” ( The World Hitler never made 5); cf. Korthals 157–169; cf. Otten. 2 There is a comparable site for French, Italian, and Spanish alternate histories: “Utopia / Ucro- nia”, http://www.fmboschetto.it/Utopiaucronia/index.htm Otten also makes the point that alter- nate history has a large internet fan base (cf. Otten). 2 Introduction Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were created to recognize “the best allohis- torical genre publications of the year”.³ That alternate history has achieved a degree of respect among readers outside of a specialized fan base is evidenced, for example, by the fact that Philip Roth ’s alternate-history novel The Plot against America made bestseller lists in the United States in 2004 and has since been translated into Danish, French, German, Italian and Spanish, or that many more recently published alternate histories are adver- tised as such (for example the works of Harry Turtledove , who has made a career for himself as the “master” of alternate history (Castro)). Stephen King ’s newest book, 11/23/63 , in which a teacher travels back in time to prevent the assassina- tion of John F.