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Virtual histories and counterfactual myths: Christopher Priest's The Separation.

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Among the consequences of the ongoing crisis in academic historical studies provoked by postmodernist and poststructuralist theories (see Evans) has been the rise of both popular and counterfactual history. These developments can be seen simultaneously in the recent success of collections such as Virtual History (1997) edited by Niall Ferguson and the two volumes edited by Robert Cowley, What If? (1999) and More What If? (2001). The UK editions of these books all feature Adolf Hitler prominently on their covers with swastikas variously draped over the Houses of Parliament or superimposed on Union Jacks. The idea of Nazi triumph has long held a popular currency, reflected in the success of thrillers such as Robert Harris's Fatherland (1992) and Len Deighton's SSGB (1978). The idea even predates the Second World War, with the 1937 Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin (writing as Murray Constantine) depicting Europe after seven centuries of Nazi domination. It is a staple enough theme in science fiction to have a detailed entry by John Clute, "Hitler Wins," in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and, of course, the idea is central to the classic alternate history, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962). The best account of the illicit pleasure involved in this potentially seamy sub-genre was written by George Orwell in 1940:



I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler ... The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs ... It is a pathetic, doglike face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs ... He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handedly against impossible odds ... One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme. (117-18)

While Christopher Priest's The Separation deserves to be widely read and acknowledged as a classic alternate history, it does not simply replay the populist trope of Nazi victory and barely mentions Hitler. Instead, the key counterfactual scenario is the signing of an armistice between Britain and Germany in May 1941. By contrasting The Separation with some of the examples of recent popular history given above, I hope to draw some conclusions about the pleasure and the pain inherent to the counterfactual form.

In Niall Ferguson's introduction to Virtual History he suggests that there are "two distinct forms of counterfactual which have been used by historians: those which are essentially the products of imagination but (generally) lack an empirical basis; and those designed to test hypotheses by (supposedly) empirical means" (18). While Ferguson is arguing that modern counterfactuals can transcend this division, it is still possible to employ these distinctions in a revised form. For example, in More What If?, the historical novelist Cecelia Holland speculates on the Danish-Saxon Harold winning the Battle of Hastings. If the broader Scandinavian civilization had been able to retain its links to wealthy England in this manner, she speculates that it would have remained powerful enough to maintain and expand its North American settlements by trade and co-operation (Vikings not possessing the technological superiority over the Native Americans that future European colonists would exploit) so that "perhaps a blended culture might have arisen in the dark forests and lakes of the New World--a Viking-Mohawk republic" (Holland 79). A republican trade-based commonwealth would have become the dominant global form and not the European absolutist model of the state, which has plagued the world for hundreds of years. This is clearly an exercise in counterfactual imagination, but one only has to think of the frequency with which the trope of the "Norman yoke" appears in British Marxist history to realize how central this type of imagination is to history in general.

On the other hand, in the first What If? volume, Victor Davis Hanson claims to consider the consequences of the Persians defeating the Greeks at Salamis in 480 BC, but his conclusion concerns our history and not the counterfactual one:

What later philosophers such as Hegel, Nietzsche and Spengler would deplore about Western culture--its rampant equality, uniform sameness, and interest in crass material bounty--in some sense started at Salamis, an unfortunate "accident," Aristotle said, but one that nevertheless shifted forever the emphasis of Western civilization toward more egalitarian democracy and a more capitalistic economy. (34-35)

Here, imagination remains subordinate to the primary aim of confirming the hypothesis that the West is the best. Indeed, Hanson has also written a full book-length...

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