REVIEW-ESSAY
Stephen Dougherty
History in a Minor Key
Ben Carver. Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xviii+292 pp. $109.99 hc, $84.99 ebk.
Ben Carver’s Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature examines the byways of the historical imagination at a time when the study of history was presumably turning into a science. The simple question motivating the literature he surveys is what were the best ways to study the past. This became an acute question as the homogeneity of time started breaking up under intense, multiple social-historical pressures through the nineteenth century: “Once ... common chronology was dispersed into the heterogenous temporalities of economics, geology, evolutionary time, and human society, mankind was compelled to discover the ‘historicity’ to which it belonged” (5). Reimagining the past became an important way of interrogating the operations of history in the wake of this fracturing of time.
The alternate histories that Carver investigates predate the institutional consolidation of alternate history as such. Since there was no consensual awareness of the field in the nineteenth century, its production was not generically delimited, nor constrained by discipline. Alternate history was practiced in political writing, in emerging sciences, as well as in philosophy, poetry, short stories, and novels. Furthermore, these works were not bound by the precepts of “plausibility” that would only later help to delimit and define the field of alternate history. Since such a singular rule did not yet exist, as Carver argues, we must consider nineteenth-century alternate histories as vital to the constitution of modern historical understanding, and thus they “reward an approach that treats them as more than passive indicators of contemporary historical attitudes” (13). They were not all fun and games: they were not based strictly on divergence from a pre-established understanding of “real history.” In their dialogical and dialectical relations with other, non-counterfactual historical writings, as well as natural philosophy, theology, evolutionary theory, cosmology, anthropology, and archaeology, alternate histories helped to shape the contemporary understanding of history.
Carver kicks off his survey with a chapter titled “Napoleonic Imaginaries,” which considers, among other texts, “[t]he first full-length work of alternate history ever written” (22), Louis-Napoléon Geoffrey-Château’s Napoléon apocryphe (1836, 1841). In Geoffrey’s work, Napoleon defeats the Russians at Moscow and goes on to establish a global empire. It is not merely counterfactual speculation, examples of which predate the book, but something else too. As Carver writes, “Geoffrey’s work recreates the overheated atmosphere of news and hyperbole generated by the culture of writing about Napoleon in the press” (23). What especially distinguishes Napoléon apocryphe is its meditation on the iconic qualities of Napoleon himself, the first great military and political leader to “go viral,” to become phantasmal through his dissemination in and through mass print technologies. The real issues in Napoléon apocryphe were the distortions that seemed to constitute history itself. What does history mean in an age of lightning-speed, sensationalist journalism? In his pamphlet Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (1819), Richard Whately half whimsically and half seriously suggests that Napoleon never existed, and that the prejudice toward belief in his existence is due primarily to the proliferation of newspaper stories about him. For Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace (1869), the great historical error built into the cult of Napoleon was the core belief in his world-historical significance: only fools could think that the infinite complexities of human history were reducible to the actions of a single man, powerful though he may be. It is merely a species of “magical thinking,” “a delusion,” as Carver wonderfully channels Tolstoy, “in whose dumb embrace atrocities were ordered” (54).
Part of Carver’s argument in the early chapters of his study is that alternate history possessed a distinctively corrective function, designed to interrogate critically the most widespread and deleterious habits of mind encouraged by certain influential varieties of history writing through the nineteenth century. In “Inheriting Antiquity: Political Genealogy in Disraeli and Renouvier,” Carver considers the legacy of antiquity for contemporary Europeans through the lens of two little-known alternate histories, Benjamin Disraeli’s The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833) and the philosopher Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire) [Uchronia (utopia in history), 1876]. In his early novel Alroy, presented in the guise of a lost historical document, Disraeli seemed to be writing about himself, although, according to the critical consensus that consolidated itself almost immediately upon the novel´s publication, he was not very successful at it. Mashing up registers and modes and over-using absurd archaisms did not do Disraeli’s writing career any favors, but Carver’s interest is in how the novel’s rather unbearable stylistic anomalies helped to forge (in multiple senses of the word) an ancient lineage to be (re-)inherited in the nineteenth century. Alroy reworks the story of David Alrui, a minor twelfth-century Jewish messiah claimant who was run out of Baghdad after having led a short-lived revolt. Disraeli’s counterfactual Alroy hears God speaking to him. He assembles an army and achieves great military victories for the Jewish people before final defeat and a martyr’s death. Disraeli’s aim was “to implant a legacy (of messianic politics) into the history of western culture, to be recuperated in Britain” (71). The predominant racial “Anglo-Saxonism” of the age was to be replaced by a Judaic legacy whose take-up would fundamentally change the British understanding of its own past as well as its sense of present purpose. Political polemic and historical romance would mutually support one another in the name of national renewal. The alternate-history lesson is one with which we are intimately familiar today, after the provocations of Marx, modernism, and postmodernism: history is molded and shaped by human hands, and it can always be reshaped too. Ultimately, the issue that Carver raises in his Disraeli and Renouvier chapter is about human responsibility in history, and for history: “[c]ounterfactuals were used, repeatedly, to isolate and illustrate the errors in historical thought of their historical moments....” (54).
Carver’s long section on Renouvier’s Uchronie is especially provocative. Uchronie narrates an imagined history of Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the eighth century, which corresponds to the period from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries in the uchronic, alternate historical timeline. In the alternate history of Uchronie, the Christian Church is successfully suppressed by the reinstatement of Roman republican principles under Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius chooses Avidius Cassius as his adopted heir, and their joint rule is marked by progressive politics and general peace. The most distinctive aspect of Renouvier’s alternate history is that our world history of chronic conflict and violence always lies in wait, ready to engulf the counterfactual, uchronic world. (Think of the permeability between the Muggle and Wizarding worlds in J.K. Rowlings’s Harry Potter series.) The first such takeover of chronic history occurs after Marcus Aurelius commits suicide and Avidius Cassius is murdered. Marcus Aurelius’s son Commodus is declared the new emperor and thousands of Christians are slaughtered, thus helping to forge a militant and violent Christian identity grounded in the experience of persecution. In Renouvier’s alternate history, however, Roman republican principles of liberty and civic virtues ultimately reassert themselves, and religious militancy is successfully checked. Over an eight-hundred-year period the two timelines occasionally converge and then diverge again, in a peculiar game of cat and mouse between the factual and the counterfactual, chronic violence and imagined peace. This is not historical romance, such as Disraeli’s Alroy. It does not represent a synthesis of romance and polemic. Instead, Uchronie is a richly textured vision of a European history largely free from religious conflict, and free from religion too. Nevertheless, it is still haunted by the chronic history which periodically threatens to undermine it, as if “our” history was the uchronic world’s collective nightmare it could never quite shake.
As Carver sees it, Renouvier’s alternate historical imagination was designed to help contemporary Europeans see through the lies of progress ideology. For Renouvier, historical laws of human development such as those postulated by Hegel, Bousset, Vico, and Comte were utterly spurious, and dangerous too, since they stripped personal responsibility from history. Contemporary Europe was not the inevitable outcome of iron-clad historical laws. There was no universal march of human progress—as if that simply happened by divine proclamation—and there were no hidden springs and cog wheels to ensure that history kept moving in “the right direction.” Carver memorably writes: “history for Renouvier is a set of concepts relating to identity, time, and change that arise from the capacity of humans to study themselves” (86). The study of history, in other words, demanded a critical self-reflexivity that alternate history was especially designed to cultivate.
Part of Carver’s lesson is that alternate history was serious stuff. Still, this serious self-reflexivity that Renouvier demanded was made up of equal parts critical acumen and good old-fashioned imagination. In fact, one can intuit through Carver’s book a persistent, though also partly surreptitious, thread of argument about the mutual necessity of critique and imagination in nineteenth-century historical writing. The fear that imagination could unhinge reason in historical writing was indeed palpable throughout the nineteenth century. Yet the power of imagination could not be dispelled, even as the belief in objective historical laws became more firmly entrenched. In my mind, the greatest achievement of Carver’s book is his unexpected pivot to the field of astronomy in order to investigate this issue of imagination and vision in history. I suspect this part of the book will be of special interest to sf fans, given how it bears on the development of mainstream sf writing in the twentieth century.
When it came to filling out the image of the night sky, the increased powers of observation allowed by newer telescopes helped, but it was never enough. The things the eye could see with increased clarity required a supplement in order to see better: looking at the disk of a distant planet demanded seeing further or deeper than the telescope itself would allow, which is why, as Carver puts it, “[t]he practice of and responses to nineteenth-century astronomy did not pitch observation against imagination....” (108); “the enhanced but limited information provided by the telescope and other optical equipment stimulate[d] conjecture, an ‘irresponsible’ urge to imagine the topography of other worlds” (109). In this manner, the other worlds of astronomical science were analogous to those of historical science. Some writers, such as Thomas Chalmers in an 1817 essay on the plurality of worlds debate, or Thomas Webb in an 1882 Nature article, may have warned against wild and unverifiable astral speculations in the name of both science and theology, but as with history, there was something about the very nature of the phenomena that demanded speculation. First of all, Pierre-Simon Laplace’s nebular hypothesis eroded belief in the uniqueness of the Earth and encouraged the concept of multiple worlds. This concept of “other worlds,” or a plurality of worlds dispersed through an incomprehensibly large universe, possessed a distinctly alternate historical dimension, resonating with the counterfactual image of history as a garden of forking paths. Second, the new technique of spectrum analysis established that heavenly bodies were made up of the same chemicals that composed the Earth—which meant that terrestrial physical laws applied throughout the universe. Third, the discovery of light’s finite speed (or rather, the keener appreciation of its significance) turned planets and stars into projectors of images of the distant past. Light became history. These developments “reinforced a tendency in astronomy to work by analogy, and invigorated the imagination of counterpart worlds whose inhabitants might also be imagining us” (126; emphasis in original).
All of this had huge implications for the development of science fiction. One might argue that the sturdy analogical frame constituted by these interconnecting developments provided the first shelter for sf. Slap a roof over this analogical framework and you have sf’s “home,” the place where it grows up and forms its identity. As for time of birth, it is the point at which “the recognition of light as history transform[s] the temporality of the universe into a disaggregated, heterogenous time-web in which all visible objects belonged to different historical moments” (126). I am using Carver’s words in a slightly different context than he intended them, though my purpose is merely to tease out a point that is central to his astronomy chapter: the other-worldly scenes we conventionally associate with sf were originally built out of alternate-historical materials. Thus Carver introduces a few nineteenth-century alternate histories set in outer space, including Edward Everett Hale’s “Hands Off” (1881), and Camille Flammarion’s Lumen (1872) and La Pluralité des mondes habités [The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds, 1862]. Hale’s story is a bit of a cheat, since it turns out that the alternate human history it surveys is set in a child’s sandpit rather than another world. It is a “shadowy” yet very convincing copy of the world designed for play which reinforces the lesson of the uniqueness of the Earth in God’s providence. Whereas Hale’s story “constitutes a rearguard action in support of a single historical trajectory for Earth” (131), in Flammarion’s long fiction the titular character Lumen deduces that “[t]here is a very high probability in favour of the existence of one or several worlds exactly resembling Earth, on the surface of which the same history is taking place....” (132). In the earlier Flammarion text, La Pluralité des mondes habités, multiple worlds exist in utter isolation from one another, and Earth possesses no special significance.
The cosmic plurality of worlds also had the power to neutralize alternate history, however, as in Louis Auguste Blanqui’s L’Éternité par les astres [Eternity by the Stars, 1872]. With echoes of Nietzche’s eternal recurrence, Blanqui envisioned a universe replete with alternate worlds where everything that could possibly happen does happen. The radical potential of alternate history is exhausted, which for Blanqui signaled the necessity of new weapons against the ideology of progress. Jacques Rancière suggested that Blanqui’s lesson is for more contingency (140), though it is difficult to tease out the logic of his argument. What is clear is that with Blanqui, as Carver writes, “the plurality-of-world’s debate in the nineteenth century reached a point where it both reflected the advance of optical technologies that could inform astronomical knowledge, and was able to use this scientific culture to subject historical assumptions to critical scrutiny” (141). As for sf, Carver suggests it was born out of this crucible where science and history are mutually transformed in fiery fusion.
As both cosmic and geological/archaeological sciences developed apace, time was being reconceptualized in profound ways, and the ancient idea of connection between cosmic and social orders was being reforged along lines that were both scientific and mythic. Alternate history stood at the crossroads, and as the penultimate chapter in Carver’s study examines, its evolutionary theoretical inputs allowed it to question “prevailing norms of social organization ... particularly in terms of gender” (152). Here, Carver has feminist-utopian “lost world” fictions in mind, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy (1881). Just as potently, however, speculative adventure fictions such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) helped to reinforce masculinist-imperialist ideologies that underwrote European colonial policies and practices. Alternate Histories concludes with a final chapter on nineteenth-century American literature and trans-Atlantic cultural anxieties, featuring analysis of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Castello N. Holford’s Aristopia: A Romance History of the New World (1895). Although it is interesting in its own right, the line of argument here does not really cohere productively with the rest of the book.
Alternate Histories deals primarily with the traffic between empirical sciences and the philosophy of history, and in the process of staking its claims on this wide ground, it communicates a great deal more about the shape and texture of the nineteenth-century intellectual and literary landscape. It is an intelligent and admirably comprehensive study that is sure to find an appreciative audience among scholars in and around the humanities. It will be a special treat for sf fans eager to learn about the complex conditions out of which the genre arose. Indeed, I would argue that it offers a compelling alternative to the “origins of sf” story rooted in the reception of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Carver’s nineteenth-century origins story is connected to dizzying recalibrations of time and space. It emerges out of a new cosmological perspective that encouraged philosophers, scientists, political theorists, and literary artists to think of humankind as adrift, but also possessed of imaginative powers that could help us find our bearings.
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