Alternate History: Travels to Elsewhen

Simona Micali

Alternate History: Travels to Elsewhen

What if the Nazis had won World War II? And if Columbus had not discovered the Americas? And how much would world history have been changed if Alexander the Great had not died so young? The answers to these and similar questions, whatever they are, imply an imaginary devia-tion from history as we know it; they compel us to speculate on a different historical development: what did not happen but could have happened. To define this kind of imaginative speculation, the French philosopher Charles Renouvier coined the term ‘uchronia’ from that of utopia: meaning – as the title of his work demonstrates1 – a utopia placed in time instead of in space, enclosing an imaginary portion of historical time instead of an imaginary portion of geographic space.

As a subgenre of literary utopia and science fiction, uchronia – also called ‘allohistory’, ‘counterfactual history’ or ‘alternate history’2 – offers

1 Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire), esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être (Uchronia [Utopia in History], an Apocryphal Sketch of the Development of European Civilization Not as It Was But as It Might Have Been, 1857 1st edn, 1876 2nd edn).

2 The most complete guide to literary uchronia is probably provided by the web-site www.uchronia.net (accessed 26 February 2014); on the origins of uchronia, see P.K. Alkon, ‘From Utopia to Uchronia: L’An 2440 and Napoléon apocryphe’, in Origins of futuristic fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 115–57; for a general outline and a history of the genre, see K. Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), and R.J. Evans, Altered Pasts: Conterfactuals in History (Lebano, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2013); for the role and features of uchronia within the general field of science fiction, see A. Duncan, ‘Alternate History’, in E. James and F. Mendlesohn, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 209–18. It is important to stress that counterfactual imagination has

112 Simona Micali

a particularly interesting starting point for a critical reflection on utopia. In fact, if spatial utopia sets up a world which is completely separate from the one we live in, temporal utopia – uchronia – links the imaginary world to the real one. This can be accomplished in two ways. In the first case, the imaginary world is envisioned as a possible future version of our own world, which gives rise to the many futuristic utopias and dystopias of sci-ence fiction – starting with L’An 2440 (1770) by Sébastien Mercier, who is generally considered the inventor of this subgenre.3 In the second case – which is the one I will discuss here – the new world is built through the speculative game of what if, meaning that, with a more complex imaginative leap, it is assumed to be the consequence of a key episode in the past, which turned out differently and thus gave way to a wholly different historical process. The new world is therefore set in a familiar place and rooted in our history, thus making it unfamiliar, or estranging it. Renouvier himself, for instance, asks his readers to imagine a world in which Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius is not succeeded by cruel Commodus but by the philoso-pher Avidius Cassius. As a consequence of this single what if, the Empire escapes its decline and resists the Barbarians, Christianity does not spread and the Middle Ages are avoided altogether.

Before Renouvier’s invention of the term ‘uchronie’, we can find a small number of counterfactual speculations included in larger historical works, such as the famous one contained in Liber IX (17–19) of Livy’s Ab urbe condita. More importantly, a first, proper uchronia had been writ-ten by Louis-Napoléon Geoffrey-Château in 1836. In his Napoléon et la

also been used as an instrument for proper historical investigation by scholars who analysed certain settings or key episodes of history by imagining alternatives or different outcomes. The first collection of such exercises in ‘allohistorical analysis’ was edited by John Collins Squire in 1931 (If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History); one of the most recent is Virtual History. Alternatives and Counterfactuals, edited by Niall Ferguson in 1997; on the features and the heuristic validity of these speculations, see L. Doležel, ‘Counterfactual Narratives of the Past’, in Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 101–26.

3 See B. Baczko, Lumières de l’utopie (Paris: Payot, 1978), 155–67.

Alternate History: Travels to Elsewhen 113

conquête du monde (also known as Napoléon Apocryphe),4 he nostalgically regrets the early downfall of Napoleon, and tells his readers of a world in which his hero won the Russian campaign, then continued on his course of action by conquering the whole world, including Asia and the Americas, and unifying it under French rule and Catholicism. The narrative acquires a fairy-tale quality for its rapidity and ease: enemy armies are quickly anni-hilated; the glorious nations of Europe lose their temper and their will to resist; Jews and Muslims spontaneously abjure and convert to Catholicism. But even more remarkable is the description of the Napoleonic era itself: the utopian world unified in a single Empire. In fact, Geoffrey argues that once men and women are united in peace and justice under the rule of a godlike and enlightened emperor, all their potentialities will be fulfilled. Politics, law and religion undergo a revolution, the arts and sciences pros-per, the mysteries of nature – from the North Pole to the North-Western passage – are clarified and technology and medicine make an incredible leap. Here are some examples of the miracles of this new world:

Medicine discovered marvels: a man whose death had been certain had been brought back to life; blindness could be cured; deafness found in artificial ears the energy to hear the most subtle of sounds; and more than curing, new means of bringing strength to the senses and developments up to then unknown, were discovered. […] A marvellous worthlessness, for a long time thought impossible, the squaring of a circle, was discovered in singular circumstances. […] Seawater was transformed into drinking water; an electrical charge, combined with a few other forces of physics, separated the water from the salts and from its bitter taste, and those terrible mistakes of mankind dying of thirst in the middle of ocean were corrected.5

4 Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812–32: histoire de la monarchie univer-selle [Napoleon and the Conquest of the World, 1812–23: History of the Universal Monarchy].

5 La médecine trouva des merveilles: un homme dont la mort avait été certaine fut rappelé à la vie; la cécité put être guérie; la surdité retrouva dans des oreilles factices l’énergie de l’audition la plus subtile; et faisant plus que guérir, des moyens nouveaux vinrent donner aux sens des forces et des développements jusque-là inconnus. […] Une merveilleuse inutilité, longtemps crue impossible, la quadrature du cercle fut découverte dans des circonstances singulières. […] l’eau de mer fut rendue potable; une décharge d’électricité, combinée avec quelques autres forces physiques, la dégagea

114 Simona Micali

The achievements of humanity in this new Messianic era are countless. To ensure the greatest equality among men, Napoleon even decides to elimi-nate all biological, psychological and intellectual diversity, in a disturbing corollary to the democratic ideals of universal liberté and fraternité: ‘This humanity in its different forms disturbed him, its shades of white, red, yellow and black, with such opposing intellect and thoughts; he would have wanted to make a single human being from this humanity’.6

Scientists and philosophers are consulted, but they reply that the enterprise would require seven generations: too many for Napoleon, who fortunately gives up the project. But this is the only defeat he meets in his triumphal march, at the end of which, alas, he discovers that God’s soli-tude is impossible to bear for a human being: ‘Having nothing left to do because he had finished everything, nor anything left to desire because there were no longer any possible desires for him, too distant from things and people, he found himself alone in the universe’.7 So the story of the universal Empire ends with the sudden death of the hero, which is reported in a short paragraph without any comment. Neither does the imaginary historian inform us on what eventually happens to the empire. However, from a few hints here and there in the chronicle we are led to suspect that the utopian world is doomed, and will dissolve after the end of the book: the preface laments the sad destiny of many great men who died before their time. But there is something even more striking about Geoffrey’s brilliant, eccentric book. In a curious episode, while coming back from one of his campaigns, the emperor is seized by a strange anxiety, just as his ship sails past the obscure island of Saint Helena. Finally, the narrator tells

de ses sels et de son amertume, et ce contresens affreus de l’homme expirant de soif au milieu de l’Océan fut corrigé. L.-N. Geoffrey-Château, Napoléon Apocryphe. Nouvelle édition, revue et augmentée (Paris: Paulin, 1841), 328–30 (my translation).

6 ‘Cette humanité à formes si diverses, à couleurs blanche, rouge, jaune, noire, à intel-ligences et à pensées si contraires, l’importunait; il aurait voulu faire de cette humanité un seul homme’. Ibid. 322 (my translation).

7 ‘N’ayant plus rien à faire, parce qu’il avait tout fini, ni rien à désirer, parce qu’il n’y avait plus pour lui des désirs possibles, trop loin des choses et des hommes, il se trouvait seul dans l’univers’. Ibid. 333 (my translation).


us that in the counterfactual world an outrageous book, a ‘horrible and detestable invention’,8 has been inexplicably successful. It is a book which denies Napoleon’s veritable epos as world emperor and tells instead of his downfall, his double defeat, his double exile and finally his obscure death in Saint Helena, while European leaders betray his work and restore the geopolitical situation as it was before the French revolution.

Geoffrey’s invention may seem a divertissement, a literary game inter-mingling the modes of historiography and fairy-tale, or maybe the childish fantasy of a nostalgic partisan of Napoleon,9 rather than an experiment in proto-science fiction. Yet, surprisingly, this first example of alternate history anticipates most of the features that will become typical of the genre, and which I will examine in the following pages, with the aim of illustrating the peculiarity and the meaning of alternate history in general.

1

Usually uchronia is a logical – or apparently logical – consequence of a different turn taken by a single key episode in history. This is not as obvi-ous as it may seem. Indeed, there are – to my knowledge- no allohistorical narratives which rely on a non-consequential idea of history, and which describe an alternative historical development deriving from the same major events that occurred on our timeline. For instance, in relation to Geoffrey’s theme, there are no stories of a parallel world in which Napoleon was ordinarily defeated, but where European nations did not restore the pre-revolutionary status quo but chose instead to establish a permanent political union, thus anticipating the European Union by more than one hundred years. Therefore we can say that alternate history, in its most

8 ‘ignoble et détestable invention’. Ibid. 256 (my translation).9 As it is regarded, among others, by Emmanuel Carrère: Le détroit de Behring: intro-

duction à l’uchronie: Essai (Paris: POL, 1986).

productiondepartment

Highlight

spaced N-dash

116 Simona Micali

common form, relies on a rational and causal idea of history, meaning that it describes the historical process as an orderly and rational development of a chain of causes and effects: the change of a single link provokes a radical change in a particular direction, yet this change, too, is always rational and comprehensible. Moreover, this idea of history avoids all teleological and finalistic implications, and focuses on the role of the individual who can change their own destiny and that of the world with their will and action. Here lies the main political value of alternate histories, even in their most playful and elaborate forms.

2

Generally, the key event with a different turn is a war episode (usually a battle with a different outcome from the ‘real’ one), which evokes the traditional assumption that war is the main factor in historical change; besides, this episode is usually connected to one or more so-called ‘great men’:10 adapting a famous sentence by Thomas Carlyle, we may therefore say that ‘The alternate history of the world is but the alternate biography of great men’.11

10 From Richard Evans’s perspective, the most credible and fruitful counterfactuals are those produced by different decisions taken by military or political leaders at crucial moments of history (Altered Pasts: 92–125).

11 A remarkable exception to this second point is Guido Morselli’s Contro-passato pros-simo: un’ipotesi retrospettiva (Past Conditional: A Retrospective Hypothesis, 1969–70). Morselli, in his typically irreverent and paradoxical style, fancies an alternate history in which Germany and Austria win the First World War; as a consequence of their victory, Walter Rathenau succeeds in founding a Socialist Mitteleuropean Federation, thus eliminating the premises which in our timeline led to the Fascist and Nazi regimes and ultimately to the horrors of the Second World War. The author derives such a happy historical change from a chain of a lucky combination of circumstances, but mostly from putting a series of minor characters into positions of power, characters who were gifted with a ‘tactical cleverness’ that the ‘great men’ governing Europe at


There are important exceptions to these general rules, and many pos-sible worlds, which take different routes to their alternative presents. The following short parenthesis, then, will further illustrate the functioning of alternate history as a genre.

Firstly, in many cases the different world derives from a minimal, apparently harmless event, as happens in the film Sliding Doors (1998) written and directed by Peter Howitt, which confronts us with two com-pletely diverging series of events resulting from the heroine either taking or missing a train. In this case, though, as in a number of similar stories, the change primarily concerns the private life of the protagonist, without any consequences for collective reality. Secondly, and more importantly for our purpose, consider the narrative device presented in Ray Bradbury’s famous short story A Sound of Thunder (1952), where the accidental killing of a butterfly by a time traveller in prehistory causes a complete change to the fictional present to which he returns. It appears that Bradbury’s story gave the name to the so-called ‘butterfly effect’, a metaphor describing a basic law of chaos theory (that of sensitive dependence on initial conditions),

the time lacked. As the author explains in an imaginary dialogue with his publisher: ‘I Capi e i ‘Signori della Guerra’, in rendigote o in tunica, furono allora, non meno che 25 anni dopo, nella Catastrofe numero due, stolidi o folli, o semplicemente opachi e ottusi, inerti. Nella migliore ipotesi, alte impersonalità. Von Allmen ‘l’artista’, Tirpitz il Patriarca, Rathenau il Finanziere, il ragazzo Brokenleg [all heroes of Morselli’s alter-nate history] si differenziano. Non sovrumani, alla Nietzsche, non eroici alla Carlyle: soltanto attori delle loro azioni. Umanizzano la guerra, l’abbreviano o ne alleviano il costo, manifestando la loro individualità’: G. Morselli, Contro-passato prossimo (Milan: Adelphi, 1975), 121. [The politicians and the warlords, the fellows in tails and the fellows in tunics, then, no less than twenty-five years later in Catastrophe Number Two, were stolid or insane, or just dull-witted and obtuse, ineffectual. At best, great non-personalities. Von Allmen ‘the Artist’, Tirpitz the Patriarch, Rathenau the Financier, the boyish Brokenleg, are very different. Not superhuman à la Nietzsche, not heroic à la Carlyle: simply performers of their own actions. They humanise war, shorten it or reduce its toll, giving proof of their individuality. Guido Morselli, Past Conditional: A Retrospective Hypothesis, trans. Hugh Shankland (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), 113.] On the sources of Morselli’s novel and the relationship of historical truth and invention, see L. Weber, ‘“Guerra senza odio”: appunti per una lettura storica di Contro-passato prossimo’, Rivista di studi italiani, 27/2 (2009), 171–91.

118 Simona Micali

and the story certainly inspired a long series of tales and films on the sub-ject (including a celebrated episode of The Simpsons entitled ‘Time and Punishment’). And yet, in this case too, we cannot speak of proper alternate history. In fact, in the stories on the butterfly effect, the deviation is placed in a distant past, which makes it impossible to outline the causal chain lead-ing to the alternate present – according to chaos theory – on which these stories rely. We could even define them as stories based on a chaotic idea of history in which the causal chain takes on irrational and unpredictable features. Therefore, the responsibility associated with individual and col-lective action is much weaker, and the protagonists look like tragic heroes persecuted by an ironic fate. At the same time, the gap from the reader’s world must be as illogical and as unexpected as possible, it must be a con-sequence so sensational and irrational that it could neither be foreseen nor avoided: so it loses its function as an estranging device, and becomes instead an element of fictional surprise.

Another large group of texts instead demonstrates a deviation, which is eventually corrected, so that gradually or suddenly history goes back to its original path. This is the scheme of many fictions on time travel: the protagonists expressly or involuntarily change something in the past, and after returning they find out that the present has been changed into a very dystopian place; as a result they go back in time ‘to put everything back in order’. Two very successful examples are the series of stories in The Time Patrol by Poul Anderson (written between 1955 and 1995) and the film trilogy Back to the Future, written and directed by Robert Zemeckis (USA 1985, 1989 and 1990). The difference from alternate history is quite evident since the idea of history that this last typology of fiction relies on is fatalistic or even teleological, and the relationship between the real and the imaginary world tends to be apologetic: history as we know it is portrayed as a fixed path, and every deviation leads to terrible disasters which must be fixed. In short, the world we live in may not be a perfect world, but it is regarded as the best world, given the circumstances.

Finally, a peculiar case is that of texts in which the point of deviation is not a changed event but a scientific discovery or a technological invention. This type is best represented by the fictional works of so-called steampunk (an aesthetic movement connected with the more important cyberpunk),


which speculate on the possible social and political consequences of antici-pated scientific and technological innovation, and which are usually set in the Victorian era. For instance, the first steampunk novel, The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990), anticipated the invention of computers in the late nineteenth century. But the aim of steam-punk is very different from that of alternate history: steampunk originates from nostalgia for the themes, the setting and the general atmosphere of Victorian science fiction, best represented by the works of H.G. Wells. In other words, steampunk is an aesthetic instead of an ideological project. Therefore the strict historical coherence which characterizes alternate his-tory gives way to a mix of modern topics in a retro form, where the main rhetorical figure is anachronism, and the political and cognitive potential of alternate history is lost in metaliterary mannerisms.12

3

Let us proceed with the listing of the main features of alternate history as a fictional genre. With respect to the reality horizon of the reader, the uchronic text works very much like other kinds of science fiction, meaning that it moves away from the horizon but at the same time draws the reader’s attention to the mode and the meaning of that displacement, thus carrying out a mechanism which has been defined as ‘cognitive estrangement’.13 In other words, by staging an alternative to our historical present, and especially to the causes that have brought about that alternative, uchronia always expresses a more or less explicit evaluation – specifically a political

12 This does not mean that a steampunk setting cannot be used in more complex works – like in many of Terry Gillian’s films, for instance.

13 See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); the concept of ‘cognitive estrangement’ has been more recently picked up and developed by Fredric Jameson in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2005).

120 Simona Micali

evaluation – of that present. But such evaluation is not always given directly and mechanically: in fact not all utopias imply a negative evaluation of the present, and not all dystopias imply an apology of it.14 Two enlightening examples are worth mentioning in this regard.

The first case is the mockumentary by Kevin Wilmott CSA: The Confederate States of America (2004), which joins the long series of works that try to answer the question ‘what if the Confederate States had won the Civil War?’15 Wilmott imagines that, thanks to British and Russian support, General Lee defeats Grant in Gettysburg, thus granting victory to the Southern Confederation. The main consequence of this achieve-ment, according to Wilmott but also to most of the authors who have engaged in answering the same question, is the non-abolition of slavery, and a more general reactionary drift of North-American civilization: the country portrayed in CSA is a dystopian, racist and shabby version of the United States of the last 150 years, a country in which Nazi theories on racial purity find a rich soil, and JFK is killed for having proposed to concede women the vote. Therefore at first glance the film seems to be a celebration of the real American history and of its great achievements in the field of freedom and civil rights. But the structure and the meaning of Wilmott’s mockumentary are more complex than this, as is shown in the shocking summary with which the film ends: in fact we find out that the counterfactual fiction includes a good deal of stock footage from real history – commercials, interviews, documentary clips – which, displaced in such a different context, shows how American culture, despite the real outcome of the Civil War, has retained strong racist and sexist tenden-cies, well hidden under the progressive and libertarian surface which is

14 As is argued instead by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld in his ‘Why Do We Ask “What If ?” Reflections on the Function of Alternate History’, History and Theory 51/4 (2002), 90–103.

15 One of the first and most celebrated novels on the subject is Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953); it is also worth highlighting ‘If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg’, the essay that Winston Churchill wrote in 1931 for the already men-tioned collection If It Had Happened Otherwise. See P. Patton, ‘Lee Defeats Grant’, American Heritage 50 (1999), 39–45.


celebrated in official discourse. In this way the fake history turns out to be an emphasized and disturbing metaphor of real history, although latent and denied in the official reports.16

The relationship between actual and counterfactual history is even more subtle in The Plot against America (2004) by Philip Roth, one of the many uchronias related to the American participation in World War II: Roth imagines that republican Charles Lindberg, the popular aviation hero and sympathizer of the Nazi regime, decides to run for president in 1940 and defeats the democrat Roosevelt. As a consequence, the United States pursue a policy of non-intervention in what is presented as a European war, and the president, who appears to be controlled by the German regime, seems more and more inclined to join the Nazi political project, including the persecution of a four million strong Jewish community. What looks like a real plot fails thanks to opposition by the First Lady: after less than two years Roosevelt resumes his presidency and history turns back as we know it. Yet, this episode, filtered through the anxious perspective of the protagonists – peaceful middle-class Jews from Newark, a perfect sample of common people – is very disturbing. This temporary drift towards vio-lence and authoritarianism casts a sinister shadow on the American trust in the strength of democracy and the rootedness of its values. History, Roth says, seems an obligatory path to take only when it has come to an end and when we read it in school books, but not while it is taking place, when everything which did not happen could still happen. As the narrator – a Philip Roth who was a child in the alternate past – explains:

Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as ‘History’, harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the sci-ence of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.17

16 As Wilmott explains in an interview on his film, ‘My goal was not to speculate about what could have happened, but to show what did happen’ <www.villagevoice.com/2006-02-07/film/the-second-civil-war/> accessed 10 March 2014. CSA is online on YouTube, in nine instalments.

17 P. Roth, The Plot Against America (New York: Vintage, 2004), 113–14.

122 Simona Micali

Besides, even if Roth does not portray a different present but a pos-sible alternative enclosed within the past, behind this past we can easily read the estranged image of our historic present. In fact, the novel hints at the policy of the Bush administration after 9/11, and reflects the author’s concern for the menace of an authoritarianism disguised as ‘self-defence necessity’ and emergency system.18

With CSA and The Plot against America two dystopian uchronias emerge which do not imply an apology for our history, but rather its cri-tique, by pointing out some aspects which would otherwise be concealed behind official accounts. What follow are two works which proceed the other way round, two apparent utopias which question their own ‘desir-ability’ and propose instead a revaluation of the real world – or at least of some aspects of it.

4

Still with regard to the relationship between counterfactual tale and real history, it is interesting to note how some uchronic texts evoke within themselves a sort of specular image with the real version of history as a pos-sibility which has not come true or – more strikingly – as another text, an

18 Roth himself authorized such a ‘political’ reading of The Plot against America in an article he published in the New York Times on the occasion of its publication: ‘And now Aristophanes, who surely must be God, has given us George W. Bush, a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one, and who has merely reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else’s: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy. We are ambushed, even as free Americans in a powerful republic armed to the teeth, by the unpredictability that is history’. Philip Roth, ‘The Story Behind The Plot Against America’, The New York Times – Sunday Book Review (19 September 2004) <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/books/review/19ROTHL.html> accessed 10 March 2014.


image which is presented as mendacious. Thus the relationship between actual and counterfactual history is staged within the text.

We have seen the ‘ignoble et détestable invention’ in Geoffrey’s Napoléon Apocryphe. Another well-known example is The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick, probably the most celebrated among alter-nate histories which focuses on the question ‘what if the Nazis had won World War II?’19 In Dick’s novel the United States of the alternate 1960s are split into two colonies, respectively under German and Japanese control. Such an imaginary setting is obviously dystopian, even if the discomfort lies mostly in the East colony, under Nazi control, while the Japanized West is portrayed in a more ambivalent way. A major part of story revolves around a forbidden book entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by Hawthorne Abedsen, a scandalous book which narrates the incredible victory of the Allies over the Axis and therefore a completely different present. Not exactly our present, though, but still another one, identified by a few slight differ-ences from the timeline in which we readers have been living. Therefore we must acknowledge three different levels of reality implied in Dick’s novel: on the first level we have the reality in which the characters of the novel live; on the second level we have the upside-down world described by Abedsen’s Grasshopper; on the third level we have the reality horizon of the reader, which in turn is a reversal of the first level but at the same time does not coincide with the second level.20 The goal of Dick’s novel is not really to answer the above mentioned question on the outcome of World War II,21 but rather to conduct a metaphysical investigation on the soundness of the world we live in, the possibility of parallel universes and

19 On this very rich subgenre of alternate history, see G.D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 2nd edn).

20 On the different levels of the fictional manipulation of reality carried out by Dick in this novel, see Umberto Rossi, ‘Obscure Admixtures: The Man in the High Castle Considered as a (Cold) War Novel’, in The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 78–95.

21 For a more orthodox example of alternate history based on this particular what if, see the novel Fatherland (1992) by Robert Harris.

124 Simona Micali

the uncertainty regarding the correspondence between perception and reality. The clever mirror play between the enclosing and the enclosed novel aims at blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, and results in an altogether destabilising uncertainty – as usually happens in the best of Dick’s creations.

A similar relationship among these three levels of reality (that of the text, that of the enclosed text and that of the world we live in) is bril-liantly displayed in Ada (1969) by Nabokov. The novel is set in an alternate world, Demonia, whose features are hardly described over the course of the story.22 The timeline of Demonia is about fifty years out of sync with our timeline; electricity has been abolished as a dangerous invention, but there are various magical-technological devices such as flying carpets and an obscure communication system based on water pipes. The geopolitical map presents a multicultural North America where English, French and Russian immigrants live together peacefully, and language – the language they speak and the language the novel is written in – is a strange and very Nabokovian English with Russian and French inserts; meanwhile our Russia is ruled by Tartars, and a France where no Revolution took place is part of the British Empire.

The image of what we acknowledge as ‘the real world’ is again com-mitted to an enclosed text, the ‘philosophical novel’ Letters from Terra written by the protagonist Van Veen, and which eventually becomes a very successful film. However, Letters from Terra is not Van’s invention, it is but the account of a collective fantasy, a psychotic delusion shared by many Demonians, and whose details Van has collected in his work as a psychiatrist. This fantasy, which began to spread in the 1860s, has affected an increasing number of psychotics: the imagined world is different from

22 Critics of Nabokov usually focus mainly on the linguistic and formal peculiarities of Ada. For a general introduction to the many levels of ‘Nabokov’s longest and most ambitious novel’, see B. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 536–62; a particularly useful guide to the uchronic setting of the novel is the website <http://www.dezimmer.net/ReAda/ReAda.htm> accessed 10 March 2014, which provides a detailed timeline and a geographic description of Demonia.


Demonia not only for its anticipated timeline, a different technology and a different geopolitical map, but mostly because all ‘lunatics’ describe it as a utopian place, characterized by general happiness and harmony. In time, they have become convinced that the real world is in fact the other, and the one they live in is but an ‘Anti-Terra’, the product of a diabolical delu-sion – as Van explains:

Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us.23

If the psychotics’ equation ‘Demonia: Terra = dystopia: utopia’ is accepted, together with the assertion that that Terra is a projection of our world inside the novel, we should argue that Demonia is a dystopia created by Nabokov to celebrate the utopian quality of the world we live in – but such an inference sounds too easy, and will appear unconvincing to all habitués of Nabokov’s fiction. In fact, as we progress through the novel, we begin to suspect that the relationship between the two worlds evoked in Ada is not so clear and Manichean as it had seemed at first glance. On the one hand, the supposed hell of Demonia is revealed as a linguistic and erotic paradise with a démodée elegance, a paradise which has never known twentieth-century wars and genocide – that is, a perfect Nabokovian paradise. On the other hand, we come to understand that the alleged utopia of Terra is actually a world of violence and horror hiding behind a cunning web of propagandistic lies such as the description of the French Revolution as a ‘virtually bloodless revolution’, or the transformation of Hitler into ‘Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman’, a marvellous hero who ‘was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young’.24 Finally, an explicit although hasty

23 Vladimir Nabokov, Novels 1969–74 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 21.24 Ibid. 272.

126 Simona Micali

demystification of Terra – both the collective fantasy within the novel and the world of the reader outside the novel – is given in the last pages of Ada:

Tropical countries meant, not only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and death, and ignorance, and shamans, and agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and the beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago – they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary.25

In this case, then, the second and third levels identified in The Man in the High Castle finally coincide, and Terra is revealed as our world. Thus what is gradually reversed over the course of the novel is not the fictional-real axis, but the desirable-undesirable axis, that is to say, utopian-dystopian: Demonia turns out as a utopian projection of our Terra, despite the fact that the inhabitants of Demonia dream of Terra as a utopian projection of their own world. This ambivalence between reality and utopia leads to a fifth and final point.

5

From all the aspects I have been examining so far, alternate history appears particularly suitable for a reflection on the relationship between the world as it is and as it should be, and on the responsibility and the dangers in trying to make it a ‘perfect place’, or more precisely, in pursuing too rigid an idea of utopia. In this respect, I will close my survey of this subgenre of utopia with two science fiction novels which are not alternate histories proper – that is, stories set in an alternate world built according to the what if hypothesis – but rather two stories on the possibility and the legitimacy

25 Ibid. 473 (original emphasis).


of changing history; in a sense, we could define them as two examples of ‘meta-uchronia’, or ‘critical uchronia’.

In The End of Eternity (1955), Isaac Asimov imagines a sphere – ‘Eternity’ – placed out of time, whose occupants can move up and down along the centuries and change history in order to avoid wars, mass dis-eases, injustice, environmental catastrophes and so on. The goals of the Eternals are obviously benevolent: all they want is simply to gradually improve the world for the good of common people, the ‘Timers’. And yet, we discover in the end, this forced utopian drift is what will finally cause the downfall of humankind – as one woman coming from the distant future explains:

In ironing the disasters of reality, Eternity rules out the triumphs as well. It is in meeting the great tests that mankind can most successfully rise to great heights. Out of danger and restless insecurity comes the force that pushes mankind to newer and loftier conquests.26

The original destiny of humankind, she continues, was not a comfortable mediocrity and immobility, which killed its romantic spirit, but a space adventure – which the Eternals have always repressed, since it was too dangerous: orphans of the galaxy, humans are doomed to sterility and final extinction. Paradoxically, to give humans back their dream of space, the Eternals must change reality one last time: instead of inventing the utopia of Eternity, twentieth-century humankind must invent the horrors of the nuclear war:

‘A small Change, a little thing. […] It is only a letter to a peninsula called Italy here in the 20th. It is now 19.32th. In a few Centicenturies, provided I send the letter, a man of Italy will begin experimenting with the neutronic bombardment of uranium.’

Harlan found himself horrified. ‘You will alter Primitive history?’‘Yes. It is our intention. In the new Reality, the final Reality, the first nuclear

explosion will take place not in the 30th century but in 19.45th.’27

26 Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity (London: Panther Books, 1959), 184.27 Ibid. 187–8.

128 Simona Micali

Asimov’s critique on the responsibility of utopian action raises an important issue, and in fact is taken up and developed in one novel by Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971). The protagonist, George Orr, has the power to make his own dreams come true: when he wakes up the world has changed, but he is the only one to realize this and to remember the original reality. The source of such enormous power is not explained in any way (thus ascribing the novel to fantasy rather than to science fic-tion); besides, the alternative timelines produced by Orr’s dreams are so distant from the original world that they do not give rise to the effect of historical estrangement found in the works analysed thus far. The focus of the novel instead is a critical reflection on the possibility and the legitimacy of change itself: George is terribly scared by his own power, and consults a psychologist, Haber, to suppress it. However the doctor, realizing George’s incredible potential, decides precisely to change the world into a perfect place, by guiding George’s dreams through hypnosis and building a machine that records and reproduces his brain waves. Unfortunately, the oneiric unconscious proves very difficult to control, as George explains to Haber: ‘You are trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn’t suited for the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?’28 The dream that should solve overpopulation creates a worldwide plague in the past which kills off most of humankind; the dream of solving racial conflict results in the elimination of all physiological difference, leaving behind a single monochrome (grey!) human race – strikingly, this is the dream of godlike Napoleon in Geoffrey’s uchronia, which here becomes reality in just one night. Thus the conflict on which the novel is based is between different political perspectives: on the one hand, Haber’s will to change the world, based on the belief that the utopian end always justifies the means; on the other hand, Orr’s fear of any excessive power, and his belief that one does not have the right to impose one’s will on others. It is important to stress that the nature of the conflict on which the novel is based is indeed ethical and political, yet it does not have the Manichaean structure which is typical of fantasy: the conflict between Orr and Haber is not between absolute

28 Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (London: Granada, 1978), 76.


good and absolute evil; on the contrary, the more enlightened and progres-sive stance is that of the utopian psychologist, and Orr must concede that ‘Haber was a benevolent man. He wanted to make the world better for humanity’.29 Through this conflict, the reader is actually confronted with two opposed ideologies which are both politically and ethically accepta-ble.30 Here is one of the arguments between Orr and Haber:

‘[…] You can’t go on changing things, trying to run things.’‘You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative.’ He looked at

Orr with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. ‘But in fact, isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth – to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?’

‘No!’‘What is his purpose, then?’‘I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine,

where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are.’31

Haber is not convinced by what he calls Orr’s ‘Buddhist attitude’, and carries on his revolutionary action, but every dream causes new catastro-phes, requiring new dreams that could solve them and therefore leading the world almost to the brink of entropic apocalypse. It is very easy to read the novel as a parable of imperialism, and of the dangers connected to any excessive power – both political and technocratic. In this case, should we accept our history as it is, and give up any attempt to make the world a better place? That is not the moral of the novel, but neither does LeGuin offer a solution to the problem. Instead, we could define The Lathe of Heaven as a proper ‘critical utopia’: LeGuin indicates the utopian impulse as one of the basic motives of human action, and at the same time she warns us against all ‘easy’ utopias, all the shortcuts towards an assumed idea of

29 Ibid. 74.30 LeGuin’s mistrust of all progressive absolutism and any revolution led by the top,

together with her inclination towards humanitarianism and remissive pacifism are quite evident. On the ambiguity of the Taoist ideology on which LeGuin’s novel is based – as most of her works are – see again Jameson, Archaeologies, 76–81.

31 LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven, 73 (original emphasis).

130 Simona Micali

perfection and order that requires the suppression of freedom and richness of humankind – however defective and chaotic it may be.

In the end, we can summarize the central message of alternate history as a double call to individual and collective responsibility. On the one hand, uchronia declares in a loud voice that history is not a ‘fatal’ development, but a rational process in which the human species is responsible for every step; we also therefore have the power to change its course at any time. On the other hand, alternate history warns us more softly against the dangers connected to that power, even if driven by a genuine utopian impulse, when it is not balanced by the humbleness, the discretion and the humanity needed by all those who seek to make the world, and history, a better place.

Alternate History: Travels to Elsewhen

Documents