'What If ?' and Beyond: Counterfactual History in Literature

What if Roosevelt had been assassinated in 1933? What if Spain had defeated the British navy in 1588? What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo? Such counterfactual premises are the basis for works of literature, often called 'alternate histories', that have gained in both popularity and scholarly attention in the past few decades. Among the best-known examples are Philip Dick's classic The Man in the High Castle, in which Nazi Germany and Japan are victorious in the Second World War, Philip Roth's bestseller The Plot Against America, in which Charles Lindbergh becomes president in 1940, and Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, in which a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees is set up in Alaska after the collapse of the State of Israel in 1948. Such works have become veritable pop-cultural phenomena. Nowadays, enthusiasts can even search on websites like www.uchronia.net for an alternate history of their choice, or discuss their favourite alternate histories online at www.alternatehistory.com. That alternate history has achieved a degree of respect among readers outside a specialised fan base is evidenced, for example, by the fact that Stephen King's newest novel 11/23/63 (to be published in November 2011), in which JFK's assassination is prevented, is even marketed as an alternate history.

Those less familiar with alternate history may have heard of 'counterfactual history' as promoted and practised by high-profile historians such as Niall Ferguson (Virtual History, 1999) or Robert Cowley (What If ? The World's Most Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, 1999) or, for that matter, as discussed by cognitive scientists such as Ruth Byrnes (The Rational Imagination, 2005), philosophers from David Lewis (Counterfactuals, 1973) to John Collins, Ned Hall, and L. A. Paul (Causation and Counterfactuals, 2004), political scientists such as Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, 1996), and even geographers such as David Gilbert and David Lambert ('Counterfactual Geographies', Journal of Historical Geography, 36/3 (2010) pp. 245-52). Scholars in various disciplines have contributed to our understanding of the uses, problems, and paradoxes of postulating alternative outcomes to past events.

Especially given the popularity of literature that makes use of counterfactual premises, it is not surprising that the 'what if ' tales of history have received a good deal of attention from literary theorists as well. Perhaps as a result of the interdisciplinary interest in the subject, the most successful English-language studies do not focus on, but rather contextualise, alternate history as a phenomenon of either postmodernism or counterfactuality more broadly: Paul K. Alkon's The Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1987), Hilary Dannenberg's Coincidence and Counterfactuality (2008), and, most recently, Christopher B. Smith's dissertation 'The Development of the Reimaginative and Reconstructive in Historiographic Metafiction: 1960-2007' (2010). Such studies, like those dealing with alternate history in cultural-historical terms (for example Gavriel Rosenfeld's The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (2005), or Catherine Gallagher's 'War, Counterfactual History, and Alternate History Novels', Field Day Review, 3 (2007) pp. 53-66), are less focused on pursuing questions of poetics than on other (equally fascinating) topics related to historical fiction as a whole, the reception of historical events in literature, or notions of collective memory.

By contrast, critical discourse on what exactly constitutes an alternate history remains superficial and fraught with fundamental disagreements. Tellingly, even the term 'alternate history' is not a matter of consensus among English-language studies: allohistory, alternative history, uchronia, parallel-time novel, 'what if ' story, quasi-historical novel, counterfeit world, and parahistory are some of the terms in practice. Among the studies on alternate history that have been published in English are those by William Joseph Collins ('Paths Not Taken: The Development, Structure and Aesthetics of Alternative History', 1990), Aleksandar Nedeljkovi...