UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA Sede Amministrativa: Università degli Studi di Padova Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Anglo-Germaniche e Slave SCUOLA DI DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN : Scienze Linguistiche, Filologiche e Letterarie INDIRIZZO: Linguistica, Filologia e Letterature Anglo-Germaniche CICLO XXI THE PLOT AGAINST THE PAST: AN EXPLORATION OF ALTERNATE HISTORY IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN FICTION Direttore della Scuola : Ch.ma Prof.ssa Paola Benincà Supervisore : Ch.ma Prof.ssa Paola Bottalla Dottorando : Giampaolo Spedo 1 Fig. 2. Cover of the first German edition of Fig. 1. Cover of the first edition of Philip K. The Man in the High Castle (Munich: Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962). König, 1973). Image retrieved from Image retrieved from <http://www.jokers-buecherboerse.ch/ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:TheMa jokers_ch/app/detail.php?id=444414474&se nInTheHighCastle(1stEd).jpg> [accessed 9 tMediaType=0&&sortOrder=&zid=ac722c4 November 2008]. 8340c629ccab1333932bd1f99> [accessed 26 November 2008]. Fig. 3. Cover by Steven Vincent Johnson for Fig. 4. Cover by Arndt Drechsler for a German edition of The Man in the High another German edition of The Man in the Castle (Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei-Lübbe, High Castle (Munich: Heyne, 2000). Images 1989) 3 and 4 retrieved from <http://fictionfantasy.de/article6493.html> [accessed 29 November 2008]. 2 Fig. 5. Cover of the first edition of Robert Fig. 6.Cover of the first German translation Harris, Fatherland (1992). Image retrieved of Fatherland (Zurich: Haffmans, 1992). from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image: Image retrieved from RobertHarris_Fatherland.jpg> [accessed 9 <http://www.kapaza.be/Boeken/Oorlog/227 November 2008]. 1578/VATERLAND_FATHERLAND_HA RRIS_Robert.html> [accessed 8 November 2008]. Fig. 7. Cover of a recent German edition of Fig. 8. Cover of a Polish edition of Fatherland (Munich: Heyne, 2008). Image Fatherland (Katowice: Ksišżnica, 2008). retrieved from <http://www.buecher-nach- Image retrieved from isbn.info/3-453/ 3453721802-Vaterland- <http://www.inbook.pl/a/produkt/id/196951 Robert-Harris-3-453-72180-2.html> /ksiazki_vaterland_harris_robert.html> [accessed 9 November 2008] [accessed 9 November 2008]. 3 Fig. 9. Cover image of Philip Roth‘s The Fig. 10. Cover image of German edition of Plot Against America (2004). Image The Plot Against America (Munich: Hanser, retrieved from <http://en.wikipedia.org/ 2005). Image retrieved from: wiki/File:Plot_against_usa.jpg> [accessed <http://www.hanser.de/buch.asp? isbn=978- 28 November 2008]. 3-446-20662-5> [accessed 30 November 2008]. 4 CONTENTS Introduction p. 7 1. The Pigeon Is Not Holed: The Quest for a Definition of the AH (Sub)Genre p. 15 1.1. Preliminary Definition and Brief History of AH p. 15 1.2. Boundaries of the (Sub)Genre and Relations to Other Genres p. 25 1.2.1. AH, Fictionality, and Possible Worlds p. 25 1.2.2. AH, Historiography, and Historical Fiction p. 42 1.2.3. AH and Historical Counterfactuals p. 54 1.2.4. The Once and Future History of the World As It Isn‘t: AH in Broader Literary Context p. 93 2. Scraps of a Tainted Sky: Thousand Year Reichs that Never Came to Pass p. 119 2.1. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle p. 125 2.2. Robert Harris, Fatherland p. 147 3. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America: Alternate History or Postmodern Divertissement? p. 175 3.1. Yet another Yid Kid‘s Memory: Antecedents in Roth‘s Narrative p. 177 3.2. Great Men Make History, Little Men Are Undone by It: The Agential Costellation of TPAA p. 183 3.2.1. Walter Winchell: Citizen Kane Reloaded p. 196 3.3. The Story Is Extant: Roth‘s America That Never Was p. 200 4. A Little More than Kin and Less than (a) Kind: Alternate History Goes Mainstream p. 225 Bibliography p. 235 Appendix: Main Authors Analyzed p. 249 5 6 Introduction Alternate history [AH] is generally considered a subgenre within science fiction [SF]. However, while SF proper explores one of the possible alternatives to actuality set either in a distant world or at a future time, AH posits a counterfactual version of history which is presented as actual in the narrative, but is contradicted by the records. For this reason, texts describing future history or other, parallel worlds should be kept distinct from AH, as they can —theoretically — coexist with history as we know it and describe either the independent reality of another world or dimension, or one of the many, possible futures. The analysis of AH involves the question of the referential content of the text. Traditional literary theory assumes a willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader of fiction, whereas philosophers have often tended to deny any referential value to literary texts. More recently, however, there has been fruitful cross-disciplinary fertilization, and fictionality is now seen as a pragmatically decided feature of texts, which can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of Possible Worlds theory. Possible worlds describe alternative states of affairs, analyzed in terms of their modal relationship to the actual world, which is usually taken as the world of reference and whose states of affairs are described by true propositions. However, fictional worlds exist only on the authority of the texts describing them, whose incomplete descriptions cannot be validated or supplemented by access to alternative sources or to reality itself. The worlds created by AH are not as autonomous from reality as are other fictional worlds, as the historical alternative they posit is inevitably compared to the actual timeline so that its plausibility may be tested. AH is written as if it were historical fiction, containing characters and events partly or totally invented, set against a real historical background, but it is read as absolutely fictional, as it describes events that never happened. In contrast, historical fiction [HF] is written and read as essentially realistic, if not necessarily real in all its parts. The delusion of a clearcut distinction between facts and fiction has been exposed, 7 most famously, by Hayden White, who has pointed to the common discursive practices adopted by both historians and novelists, and analyzed the emplotment of historiographic discourse according to narrative forms borrowed from fiction. The ramifications are also momentous for counterhistorical discourse such as AH. If the form of emplotment encodes the narrative of past events so as to predetermine, to a large extent, its reception and interpretation, the same events may be understood to tell each time a different history. Indeed, the next logical step is the modification of the content itself, which is already, to some extent, an interpretation, an artificial representation of an object — the past — that cannot be experienced directly. The writing of AH operates through the double selection that is common to all narratives: of the object of the text, and of a meaningful order in which its parts will be subsequently arranged. However, it requires another, intermediate process of selection: from the actuality of history one possible alternative will be extrapolated and developed. In this respect, AH or allo-history inherently recovers one of those forms of otherness that official historiography, in its rationalizing furore, tends to obliterate. AH is thus a challenging form: rhetorically, all but indistinguishable from other historical fictions; referentially, more fundamentally fictional than any realistic fiction, which does not contradict the received version of history. AH is also different from historical counterfactuals [HC], speculative texts written by professional historians that usually present the alternative timeline as merely hypothetical. This argumentative form has been practiced unobtrusively by great historians of the past such as Livy and Gibbon, but only recently has it acquired some respectability as a powerful analytical tool overcoming the limitations of deterministic historiography and correcting the hindsight bias that prevents one from examining possible alternative outcomes for the events analyzed. HC are subject to stricter plausibility constraints than is allohistorical fiction [AF] in the concoction of a nexus event, the turning point in history on which the alternative timeline is based; professional historians will confine themselves to those 8 alternatives which could have obtained, given the same initial conditions that produced actual history. Favourite turning points are wars, revolutions, and events affecting key historical figures, in accordance with Carlyle‘s Great Man theory, which holds that history is shaped by exceptional personalities. Even when the hypothesis is not pursued and developed until the present day, both HC and AF often reflect presentist concerns, for example in the exploration of possible alternatives to the rise of the West to world dominance. In rejecting the received version of history, both forms of AH recognize the play of necessity and contingency in human events, as does Chaos theory in science: we do live in a universe governed by laws, but lack the instruments to measure and predict their workings adequately. Generally speaking, the longer the temporal span considered, the harder it is to make inferences with a reasonable degree of reliability, as too many factors come into play. After defining the boundaries inscribing AH within the general field of discourse — whether referential or fictional — about history, some attention has been devoted to the distinction between AH and conspiracy theory: the latter is a type of discourse claiming that an alteration to past records (rather than events) did take place and some crucial information has been kept secret as a consequence. Consideration has also been given to the space allotted to AH as distinguished from non-fictional extrapolation about future history or more or less static descriptions of alternatives to contemporaneous society, as in utopia/dystopia. There follows a discussion of the relationship between AH and the more general postmodernist play with a past no longer taken for granted.