History in a Minor Key

Abstract

386 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) 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, noncounterfactual 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 387 HISTORY IN A MINOR KEY 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...