History - 2023 - Vinale - Hi Story Telling An Introduction To Italian Alternate and Counterfactual History
History - 2023 - Vinale - Hi Story Telling An Introduction To Italian Alternate and Counterfactual History
History - 2023 - Vinale - Hi Story Telling An Introduction To Italian Alternate and Counterfactual History
I
The dilemma of the history of the defeated is certainly not a novel topic
for political and historical enquiry. The experience of the unspeakable
forced the Auschwitz generation to question the meaning of historical
memory. Walter Benjamin posed this question very early on, when he
wrote in 1940 that ‘The only historian capable of fanning the spark of
hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead
will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious’.1 The nagging for the
memory of the unspeakable obviously ran through the writings of Primo
Levi, who immediately recognised the fallacy and falsifiability of memory,
both personal and historical. ‘The memories which lie within us are not
carved in stone; not only they tend to become erased as the years go by, but
often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features.’2
Years before the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt also put the question of
memory and its manipulability. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),
she reflects on the relationship between narrative and politics in these
terms: ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule – she argues – is not the
convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the
distinction between fact and fiction […] and the distinction between true
and false […] no longer exist’.3 Collective memory is hence a recurring
question in the aftermath of the Second World War and in particular after
the unaccountable experience of the concentration camp. The memory of
the drowned is never safe, firstly because the real witnesses of Auschwitz
are the ones who did not survive it, and secondly because the memory of
the past is always exposed to its posthumous falsification.4
1
W. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in id., Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940
(Cambridge MA, 2013), pp. 389–400, at p. 391.
2
P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York, 2017), p. 13.
3
H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, 1973), p. 471.
4
See G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York, 1999), p. 12,
where he writes: ‘The aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-
coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension’.
© 2023 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is
non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
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356 (HI)STORY-TELLING
5
H. White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore, 1973),
pp. 6–7. On White, see: F. Ankersmit, E. Domanska, and H. Kellner (eds.), Re-figuring Hayden White
(Stanford, 2009).
6
On postmodern history, see: B. Southgate, ‘Postmodernism’, in A. Tucker (ed.), A Companion to the
Philosophy of History and Historiography (Chichester, 2009), pp. 540–49; N. Partner, ‘Postmodernism:
The “Crisis of Narratives” and the Historical Discipline’, in Ch. van den Akker (ed.), The Routledge
Companion to Historical Theory (London and New York, 2022), pp. 332–46.
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ADRIANO VINALE 357
7
See, most recently, L. McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge and London, 2018).
8
Partner, ‘Postmodernism’, p. 337.
9
See: V. Tozzi Thompson, ‘Narrativism’, in van den Akker, The Routledge Companion to Historical
Theory, pp. 113–28; K. Pihlainen, The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past
(London and New York, 2017).
10
A. C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965); Narration and Knowledge (New
York, 2007), pp. 1–284, at p. 168.
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358 (HI)STORY-TELLING
11
L. O. Mink, ‘History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension’, Historical Understanding (Ithaca,
1987), pp. 42–60, at p. 60.
12
H. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), p. 84.
13
See K. Jenkins (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader (New York, 1997).
14
F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The Hague,
1983), p. 226.
15
F. R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology (London, 1994), p. 238.
16
K. Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London, 1999), p. 151.
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ADRIANO VINALE 359
II
On these premises, it is not surprising that alongside the historiographical
debate, the so-called alternate history proliferated during the second half
of the twentieth century. Although it has to be considered literature in the
strict sense, alternate history closely investigates the very conception of
historical time, trying to question its deterministic linearity.18 The problem
alternate history deals with may be posed in a rather simple way: could
history have gone differently?
Karen Hellekson has defined this literary subgenre as follows: ‘The
alternate history (also known as alternative history, alternate universe,
allohistory, uchronia, and parahistory) is that branch of nonrealistic
literature that concerns itself with history turning out differently than
we know to be the case.’19 In brief, the narrative peculiarity of alternate
history is to identify a specific point on the past timeline – indifferently
referred to as nexus point, nexus event, Jonbar hinge, or Jonbar point – from
which a different development of the (hi)story is hypothesised.20 The point
of divergence from the acknowledged historical timeline is located in a
moment considered particularly significant for the future development of
events: Hitler’s rise to power, the Allies’ victory in the Second World War,
Kennedy’s assassination, and so forth. From this standpoint, one may say
that the main aim of alternate history is to show the precariousness of
historical time as such: it really could have happened that the Axis Powers
won the war, just as it could have happened, on the contrary, that the
Nazis did not rise to power at all, that Hitler was not born or that JFK
was not assassinated. On the other hand, though, narrating an alternative
history induces a critical reflection on the present. In this sense, we may
agree with Charles Renouvier when he defined uchrony as a ‘utopie dans
l’histoire’, imagining a more auspicious progress of Western civilisation
with its non-Christianisation.21 But we may also define it as a dystopia in
history when the alternative course of history presented to the reader has,
in reverse, frightening traits.
17
C. Ginzburg, ‘Description and Citation’, in Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive (London,
2012), pp. 7–24.
18
K. Singles, Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity (Boston, 2013).
19
K. Hellekson, ‘Alternate History’, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (New York,
2009), pp. 453–57, at p. 453. In the following pages, we will use univocally the term ‘alternate history’.
20
The term Jonbar comes from John Barr, the main character of the novels The Legion of Time
(1952) by Jack Williamson. On the other hand, Stephen King – in 11/22/63 (2011) – speaks about a
watershed moment.
21
See Ch. Renouvier, Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe du
développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être (Paris, 1876).
© 2023 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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360 (HI)STORY-TELLING
III
Although it is often associated with it, the so-called counterfactual
history does not actually have much to do with alternate history. In
his extensive introduction to Virtual History, Niall Ferguson starts
from some epistemological assumptions – mainly related to Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle and Lorenz’s butterfly effect – to promote the use
of simulation in historical research. Assuming the aleatory nature of
historical phenomena, which are subject more to the laws of probability
than to those of causality, Ferguson proposes the use of counterfactual
conjecture in historiographical reconstruction as a virtual stress-strain
analysis of a research hypothesis. In epistemological terms, this means
to adopt what in criminal law is called the but-for test, which is the
hypothetical exclusion of certain causes that are supposed to have
provoked a certain event in order to determine its actual causation.23
Would this specific event have happened if there had not been that specific
cause?
As a matter of fact, all the essays collected in Virtual History aim to
verify specific what-ifs of history: What if there had been no American
War of Independence?24 What if England had remained neutral during
the First World War?25 What if the Wehrmacht had defeated the Red
22
K. Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent, 2001), p. 29.
23
See H. Weber, ‘The ‘But For’ Test and Other Devices: The Role of Hypothetical Events in the Law’,
Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 34/2 (2009), pp. 118–28.
24
J. C. D. Clark, ‘British America: What if there had been no American Revolution?’, in N. Ferguson
(ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York, 1999), pp. 125–74.
25
N. Ferguson, ‘The Kaiser’s European Union: What if Britain had ‘stood aside’ in August 1914?’,
in id., Virtual History, pp. 228–80.
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ADRIANO VINALE 361
26
M. Burleigh, ‘Nazi Europe: What if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union?’, in Ferguson,
Virtual History, pp. 321–47.
27
D. Kunz, ‘Camelot Continued: What if John F. Kennedy had lived?’, in Ferguson, Virtual History,
pp. 368–91.
28
N. Ferguson, ‘Virtual History: Towards a ‘Chaotic’ Theory of the Past’, in Ferguson, Virtual
History, pp. 1–90, at p. 86.
29
See: E. Weinryb, ‘Historiographic Counterfactuals’, in Tucker, A Companion to the Philosophy of
History and Historiography, pp. 109–19; G. D. Rosenfeld, ‘Counterfactuals’, in van den Akker, The
Routledge Companion to Historical Theory, pp. 462–80.
30
R. Cowley (ed.), What If? The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have
Been (New York, 1999).
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362 (HI)STORY-TELLING
IV
It is probably for these same reasons that alternate history and
counterfactual history have not had much editorial or academic success in
the Italian scene. Apart from Se Garibaldi avesse perso31 and La storia con
i se,32 there is not much other Italian research in this field. This silence has
been recently broken by a special issue of Rivista di Politica.33 The essays
written by Federico Trocini34 and Emiliano Marra,35 in particular, analyse
the parable of the so-called fantafascismo. Their detailed reconstruction
of a part of Italian uchronic literature, however, indirectly shows the
main reason for its poor fortune: the ideological compromise of some
Italian allohistory writers with fascism and neo-fascism. Starting from
these general coordinates, it is possible to show the main research aims
of the special section of the present issue of History. The three articles
that follow are the result of a lengthy discussion between the authors. Our
aim is to show how a tradition of alternate and counterfactual history
exists in Italy as well, although it is not easy to detect. This difficulty in
tracing alternate and counterfactual Italian writings, in our opinion, is
due to the non-explicit adoption of the rules and methods of these genres
of (hi)storytelling. As a matter of fact, writers such as Camillo Pellizzi,
Delio Cantimori, Corrado Alvaro, Guido Morselli, Luigi Malerba, Wu
Ming, and Antonio Scurati preferred to apparently assume the canon of
historiography, future narrative, or historical novel in order to produce a
hidden or implicit counterfactual effect.
From this standpoint, Patricia Chiantera-Stutte’s opening article
analyses some examples of narratives that present some of the typical
features of counterfactual history. Her article analyses the ante litteram
emergence of the counterfactual in historiographical discourse and in
particular in the literature on the so-called ‘missed revolutions’ during
Italian fascism. In this way, Chiantera-Stutte investigates the origins and
common motives of the political revolt of the young generation who
lived during Mussolini’s regime. More specifically, her essay considers
the interpretations of the ‘unfinished revolution’ given by Pellizzi and
Cantimori. She considers the topic of the ‘missed revolution’ as a cluster
of questions that the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century
had to face. The main aim of her reconstruction is to observe the
mutual connection of antifascist and fascist perspectives and, at the
same time, to understand the different attitudes towards politics and
political ideals, illustrating the different ways of being fascists during the
31
P. Chessa, Se Garibaldi avesse perso. Storia controfattuale dell’Unità d’Italia (Venice, 2011).
32
A. Benzoni - E. Benzoni. La storia con i se. Dieci casi che potrebbero cambiare il corso del Novecento
(Venice, 2013).
33
F. Trocini (ed.), What if: la letteratura ucronica tra realtà storica, finzione e politica, Rivista di
Politica, 1 (2022).
34
F. Trocini, ‘What if Hitler and Mussolini…? Il mondo dell’ucronia all’ombra della svastica e del
fascio littorio’, Rivista di Politica, 1 (2022), pp. 41–55.
35
E. Marra, ‘Mussolini nella letteratura ucronica italiana’, Rivista di Politica, 1 (2022), pp. 83–93.
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ADRIANO VINALE 363
© 2023 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd