“A Symptom of History:” The Traumatic Form of the Alternate History

This project contends with an understudied literary genre: the alternate history novel. I attempt to delineate the boundaries of this literary category as scholars have come to understand them, and then push on its parameters to include works that we might not have thought to consider. I look at the alternate history as a literary form that attends to the relation between history and trauma in its various constitutions. Novels of alternate history tend to focus on the aftermath of catastrophic historical traumas, and attune themselves to the ways that such big traumatic histories beget very ordinary, individual traumas that structure and condition subjectivity. These novels understand trauma much as Cathy Caruth does, as “not so much a symptom of the unconscious,” but as “a symptom of history.” In Chapter One, I look at Philip K. Dick’s paradigmatic example of the form, The Man in the High Castle, attending to its interest in the cultural status of the alternate history as a literary genre, and its correlative emphasis on reading and writing as interpretive acts that beget alternate histories and multiple worlds. Chapter Two engages Philip Roth’s counterfactual sensibility, not only by looking at his very straightforward alternate history, The Plot Against America, but by looking at his early work on Anne Frank, and at a 1972 draft of American Pastoral, housed at the Library of Congress, that centers on an alternate history for this singular historical figure. In Chapter Three, I read Octavia Butler’s Kindred as a variant of the alternate history, with all the particular ways that the genre interrogates not only our ideas about history and historical narrative or historical representation, but also how we think about and relate to the narratives that govern our own present moment. Ultimately, I argue that alternate histories, with their peculiar derangements of time and knowledge, foreground the power of narrative not only in constructing our sense of history (be it personal or collective), but also in constituting our sense of ourselves as subjects in history. They show us that history isn’t in the past; it’s an unfolding of days, a present moment to be interpreted later on, an unknowable, conditioning, durational force. They offer up ruptured histories, fractured narratives as a means and a mode of contending with the “master narratives” that still have us in their grip. They remind us that we are the stories we tell