Possible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual Historical Fiction

Riyukta Raghunath

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030534523
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Psicolinguistica

This bookoffers a comprehensive Possible Worlds framework with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is a literary genre that comprises narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of our world, usually speculating on what would have happened had a significant historical event (such as a war) turned out differently. The author develops a systematic critical approach based on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory supplemented by cognitive concepts that account for the different processes that readers go through when they read counterfactual historical fiction, a genre which relies heavily on pre-existing knowledge about history and culture. This book will be of interest to anyone working with Possible Worlds, including within the fields of philosophy, literary studies, stylistics, cognitive poetics, and narratology.

© The Author(s) 2020

R. RaghunathPossible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual Historical Fictionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53452-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Genre of Counterfactual Historical Fiction

Riyukta Raghunath¹

(1)

New College of the Humanities, London, UK

End Abstract

1.1 Rationale

The primary purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive methodology with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. In short, counterfactual historical fiction is a genre in literature that comprise narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of our actual world. They often tend to focus on changed outcomes of wars and battles owing to their prominence in our history. The most common themes explored within the genre are: ‘What if Hitler won the Second World War?’ and ‘What if the South had won the American Civil War?’.

As I will show in this chapter, previous studies of counterfactual historical fiction have focused on various aspects of counterfactual histories—some research focuses on developing a formal typology for the genre and others examine the genre’s poetics or offer interpretive literary analyses of particular counterfactual historical fiction. While there is some research that engages with how readers process such fiction, this is an area that is largely underdeveloped As such, worked examples of counterfactual historical fiction that address the reader’s role and more specifically, focus on how they interact cognitively with the worlds built by these texts are significantly lacking. I argue that a methodology with which to effectively analyse counterfactual historical fiction must focus on the genre’s poetics as well as account for reader experientiality. This monograph will therefore offer a cognitive-narratological methodology with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. According to Herman (2013) “[a]pproaches to narrative study that fall under the heading of cognitive narratology share a focus on the mental states, capacities, and dispositions that provide grounds for—or, conversely, are grounded in—narrative experiences” (paragraph 1). As such, what this book more specifically offers is a systematic critical approach based on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory taking into account the narrative, its structure as well as the mental processes facilitating world-building. Additionally, this is supplemented by cognitive concepts modelling the different processes that readers go through when they read counterfactual historical fiction.

I will analyse three texts in this monograph to both show the need for a revised Possible Worlds model, and to demonstrate the dexterity of the subsequent model. Owing to its dominance within the cannon, counterfactual World War II novels, that construct fictional worlds in which the Axis Powers have won the Second World War, have been chosen for analysis. In particular, Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1992), Sarban’s The Sound of His Horn (1952), and Stephen Fry’s Making History (1996) have been chosen because they each portray a different kind of counterfactual world. Nonetheless, the model that I offer is one that can be replicated and applied across all narratives within the genre.

This chapter explores the literary genre of counterfactual historical fiction in detail. In the first section of this chapter, I briefly introduce the concept of counterfactuals before explaining counterfactual historical fiction as a literary genre. In the next section, I review the existing scholarship on this genre to show how it has been previously examined. In doing so, I also highlight gaps in current scholarly research that this book aims to fill.

1.2 Counterfactual Writing—The Genre of Counterfactual Historical Fiction

“Cleopatra’s nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered” (Pascal 2003 [1670]: 48). This quotation from Pascal expresses the concept of counterfactuals rather remarkably—it conveys the idea that a slight alteration could lead to highly changed outcomes. The Oxford English Dictionary (2020) defines the word counterfactual as “[p]ertaining to, or expressing, what has not in fact happened, but might, could, or would, in different conditions”. For example, in social psychology, and in what is a more appropriate definition, Neal Roese and James Olson define the term counterfactual as something that “literally, runs contrary to the facts” (1995: 1–2). Therefore, a counterfactual expresses what has not happened, but as Roese and Olson point out, this is done by creating alternatives to facts. According to narratologist Hillary Dannenberg, a counterfactual is “generated by creating a nonfactual or false antecedent. This is done by mentally mutating or undoing a real-world event in the past to produce an outcome or consequent contrary to reality” (2008: 111, italics original). Dannenberg here explains how a counterfactual scenario is created when a particular event in our actual world is changed, thereby producing a new version of the actual world. Based on this, my own example of a counterfactual statement is: if I had watched Game of Thrones last night, my friends couldn’t have spoiled the cliffhanger for me, where ‘I watched Game of Thrones last night’ is the false antecedent that produces the outcome—‘couldn’t have spoiled the cliffhanger’.

Simply stated, a counterfactual historical description is an exploration of a what-if scenario with some speculation on the consequences of a different result. That is, what if some major historical event had gone differently? How could that have changed the world? Within the context of literary fiction, narratives that explore such what-if scenarios are called counterfactual historical fiction. Duncan (2003) describes counterfactual historical fiction as “not […] history at all, but a work of fiction in which history as we know it is changed for dramatic and often ironic effect” (209). Counterfactual historical fiction can thus be considered a genre of fiction that is rich in possibilities. Inevitably, all fictional narratives are rich in possibilities because they present a what-if scenario in the sense that they imagine a world where such and such event or series of events take place, but they differ crucially from counterfactual historical fiction where the worlds created posit what-if scenarios based on rewriting the history of our actual world. In the words of Ryan (2006), “[a]lternate […] history fiction creates a world whose evolution, following a certain event, diverges from what we regard as actual history” (657).

Spedo (2009) defines the genre by differentiating it from historical fiction stating that the key difference between counterfactual historical fiction and historical fiction lies in the way each of these genres is written and perceived by readers. He suggests that although counterfactual historical fiction is written as if it were real in that such fiction include historical characters and events presented within a historical context, readers tend to think of such fiction as made-up because they are aware that they are being presented with a historical timeline that never happened. Historical fiction, on the other hand, Spedo maintains is also written as though it is real, but unlike counterfactual historical fiction, readers consider historical fiction as being a representation of actual history.

What is interesting about the genre of counterfactual historical fiction is that it is a kind of thought experiment where the author takes as their starting point an existing historical situation and changes it to explore the world of what-if scenarios. This starting point where the fictional history diverges from actual history is known as the ‘point of divergence’. Singles (2013) defines the point of divergence as “the moment in the narrative of the real past from which alternative narrative of history runs a different course” (7). According to her, the point of divergence is also the chief characteristic that distinguishes counterfactual historical fiction from other related genres.

The genre of counterfactual historical fiction is often seen as part of a larger category that also includes some types of science fiction and fantasy. Hellekson (2001) reminds us:

Science fiction asks, ‘What if the world were somehow different?’ This question is at the centre of both science fiction and the alternate history. Answering this question in fictive texts creates science fiction or other fantastic texts, including fantasy and magic realism. One important point I wish to stress is that the alternate history is a sub-genre of the genre of science fiction, which is itself a sub-genre of fantastic (that is, not realistic) literature. (3)

Here, Hellekson addresses the long-standing question of whether or not counterfactual historical fiction is a sub-category of science fiction and firmly concludes that it is. I do not agree with the argument that merely having a world that is different from our actual world makes it science fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is not always science fiction and fantasy. Though some texts have science fictional elements (for example, Bring the Jubilee [1953] by Ward Moore involves the protagonist travelling back in time using a time machine) and some have fantastical elements (for example, Temeraire [series] by Naomi Novik that imagines a world during the Napoleonic War fought using dragons), there are also others that contain neither (for example, SS-GB [1978] by Len Deighton is set in a world where England is occupied by Germany after Nazi Germany won the Second World war and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union [2007] by Michael Chabon presents an alternate world where during the Second World War, the Jews were relocated to a city named Sitka which in the present day is a large Yiddish metropolis). While some counterfactual historical fictional texts are set against science fictional contexts, there also exists a broad body of work in counterfactual historical fiction that is not science fiction, and at this point counterfactual historical fiction needs to be considered a genre on its own.

Jeff Prucher in his Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (2006) notes the preferred usage of the term ‘Alternate History’ by literature scholars to refer to texts that construct worlds based on historical what-ifs. Hellekson (2001) points out that other terminology such as alternative history, alternate universe, allohistory, uchronia, and parahistory is also used to refer to this particular form of fiction (3). In addition to these terms, Charles Renouvier (1876) uses the term ‘Uchronie’ from French which denotes a fictionalised historical time period to refer to this genre and Gallagher (2007) proposes to call these texts ‘alternate world...