Fables Agreed Upon：A Comparative Study of New Historicism and Alternate History

Li Feng Yitzhak Lewis

Abstract： New Historicism and alternate history raise similar questions regarding history and ideology.New Historicism reads every text as an alternate history narrative,while the narrative mode in alternate history can inspire a nuanced understanding of the critical positions promoted by New Historicism.The paper offers a comparative study of the two in terms of their conceptualizations of historical narrative,intertextuality,narrativity,non-linear structure and spatiality.It seeks to create dialogues between different voices in both the critical theory and the literary genre with respect to their attention to mundane matters,their allusions to the present and projections of the future,as well as their significance and problems.Through their shared emphasis on the interaction between history and present,and their conceptualization of “historical time” in relation to contemporary webs of signification,New Historicism and alternate history come together to highlight the poetic structures of historical narrative and politicize our appreciation for the aesthetic dimension of historical discourse.The goal of this comparison is to problematize the division between literature and criticism.Reconceptualizing alternate history,the paper attempts to point the way towards a “post-poststructural” position on issues of literature and history.

Keywords： New Historicism, alternate history, intertextuality, nonlinear narrative, spatial narrative, dialogism

New Historicism refers to a revival of interest in the 1980s among some North American critics in the historical and social contexts of literary work.It “politicized and stressed the intimate interrelationship between literature,culture and history” (Wolfreys 137),with an admission that “the investigation being conducted is not objective,that the nature of our interest in the past is dictated by our involvement in the present” (Peck 198).Alternate history (AH for short) refers to histories which “evidently have never taken place and therefore cannot lay any claim to historical truth” (Wessling 13).When it comes to the literary genre,AH fictionsare stories whose historical settings are different from those of normative historical narratives.The genre places emphasis on some key points of divergence in human history and speculates on alternate scenarios to those of history’s original tracks.It highlights the constructed nature of the historical genre and emphasizes its narrative form by diverging from both,thus calling for the reexamination of the past and its effect on the present.

New Historicism as a critical theory and alternate history as a literary genre both tend to read history as “ahistorical” by blurring the distinction between history and text.In the literary text,history is no longer a background,but an organic part (often the very subject matter) of the work,no less important than plotline and narrative structure.Furthermore,both New Historicism and alternate history question the traditional view of history as unitary,objective,linear,diachronic,and monophonic narrative.They recognize history’s multiplicity,subjectivity,nonlinearity,spatiality,and polyphony.Both pay particular attention to marginal individuals and everyday details,emphasizing their importance for theoretical inquiry and critical practice.New Historicism wishes to pluralize the reading of literature by embedding text in historical contexts,while AH wishes to pluralize the narration of history by embedding history within literary frames.

I.History as Intertext

The concept of “historical truth” has been the target of questioning in the West,at least since the Enlightenment.George Orwell declared that “all historical records are biased and inaccurate,or,on the other hand,that modern physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion,so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism” (Orwell 110).This statement expresses two of Orwell’s central challenges against the notion of “historical truth”：(1) the partial perspective of historical recorders,and (2) the unreliability of the world of phenomenon.The epistemological limitation indicated in Orwell’s first challenge is also a pivotal element in the work of Michel Foucault.Foucault argues the “partial” perspective of historical records in several important senses.First,historical documents are partial in that they capture only

part

of

the historical events they purport to preserve.Second,within the context in which historical documents are produced,the documents themselves are

partial

towards

the ideological and historical position of the individuals that produce them.Third,the later readers and researchers (the historians) of these documents cannot claim to be

impartial

either.From the perspective of New Historicism,Foucault’s departure from Orwell’s second challenge to historical truth is the most significant.Orwell’s challenge states that on the

ontological

level,the world is illusory and therefor our access to its “history” is limited and inaccurate.For Foucault,what matters is not the ontology of history,but the epistemological conditioning (the knowledge-power bind) through which we apprehend history.The plurality of historical narrative does not reflect on the ontological status of history so much as it exposes our

partial

access

to

such things as “historical truth”.In that sense,what concerns us here is Foucault’s claim that the discourse of history conditions the production of multiple historical “realities” in a sense similar to the way works of literature produce multiple literary realities.“Reality”

per

se

is plural and so too is “History”.To the New Historicist,history is not “a set of fixed,objective facts but,like the literature with which it interacts,a text which itself needs to be interpreted” (Abrams 183).If historical interpretation is multiple and open-ended,literary creation captures this through experimentations with various “Others” and “alternatives”.To be clear,history’s plurality does not imply radical relativism,or that all historical narratives are equal.Some histories,by virtue of their evidence,logic and narrative arc,have been in overwhelming advantage,while others (Holocaust denial,or denial of Japanese war atrocities in Asia) are quite obviously “partial” and consciously aim at distorting history.In that sense,it is important to distinguish AH fictions from historical distortion or denial.Although both are based on bold imagination and unfounded speculation,adherence to a measure of historical accuracy and feasibility is a requirement of the AH genre.If a narrative goes too far in its disregard for the touchpoints of conventional historical narrative,works in this genre can easily slip into the realm of fantasy literature or paranoid conspiracy theory.Moreover,AH fictions make no empirical claims about the “truth” of history.What they offer is an

aestheticization

of the epistemic mechanisms through which historical narratives are formed and by which they develop their grip on our imagination and discourse.The New Historicist outlook is particularly well suited to reading alternate history in that its theoretical impetus is to pluralize histories,paying critical attention to plotlines deviating from the normative historical narrative.Moreover,this theoretical outlook foregrounds the relationship between history and literature,even suggesting the primacy of literature over history.This outlook makes it quite natural for historical accounts to be analyzed with literary tools,as well as for historical content to be fictionalized in literary writing.In the broader theoretical sphere of post-structuralism,“texts are seen to refer to other texts (or to themselves as texts) rather than to an external reality” (Baldick 112); and history is no exception.History is no longer the stable background and context of text,but a text in itself,a story about the past with other stories as its intertext.This plurality gives rise to the inherent intertextuality of history,“since any historical situation is an intricate web of oftentimes competing discourses,...any interpretation of a text would be incomplete if we do not consider the text’s relationship to the discourses that helped fashion it and to which the text is a response” (Bressler 187).In this sense,History has always been made up of many discontinuous and even contradictory histories,conditioned by various “power relations composed of social contacts,economic activities,political struggles,state powers,literary arts and moral ethics” (Zhang 402).Such a proliferation of histories provides the backdrop for alternate history’s exploration “off the beaten path” of normative historical narrative.On this point,Julian Hanna straightforwardly states that “there is no single,authoritative,chronological narrative of history but many

alternate

and subjective histories or genealogies” (Hanna 126).In fact,some scholars see alternate history as an indispensable part of real history.Barney Warf,for example,gives a rather broad definition of “reality” — apart from what we are sure has happened,those “alternative trajectories” which never happened but were likely to have happened can be put into the category of “reality” as well (Warf 37).For that reason,in order to explore the formation of historical pasts and the grasp that our present episteme exerts upon them,it is not enough to rely on “objective” historical records alone.We must turn to highly subjective alternate history,which projects itself upon real history and aestheticizes for the reader the work of history-making.While delineating the hypothetical course of history,alternate history is always rooted in reality,and in thematic concerns and forms of expression.It keeps pace with the

Zeitgeist

and social climate.Thus alternate history offers a powerful representation of history,though this “representation” is usually achieved conversely.By imagining “what-if” scenarios from alternate angles,the works reflect the social trends and collective memory of the era in which the author is writing.This mechanism of history-making is not different from the way people remember “what really happened in the past” through normative narratives of history.In other words,though alternate history as a kind of “thought experiment” is unconventional in narrative content,it is by no means a simple distortion or denial of normative historical narratives.Rather,this genre offers a distinct mode of maintaining historical traditions and preserving memories,along the lines of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view that changing what is already established and defending it are both modes of linking to a chain of tradition (Gadamer 166).In terms of literary writing,AH fictions are particularly intertextual in that their narrative structures are far more intricate than that of historical fiction — the period reflected by AH texts includes at least two versions (the already-known normative history and the invented history in the narrative),which form a rich intertextuality of reference,comparison and contrast.Some AH fictions contain even more historical worlds,like the “alternate alternate history” (double twist) in Ward Moore’s

Bring

the

Jubilee

(1953) and the “book within a book” (embedded narrative) in Philip K.Dick’s

The

Man

in

the

High

Castle

(1962).In the latter example,while the reader compares “real” history against the alternate history of

The

Man

in

the

High

Castle

,the characters in

The

Man

in

the

High

Castle

are comparing their own history to that narrated in the embedded book,

The

Grasshopper

Lies

Heavy

.This is a compelling example of how the AH genre’s presentation of history draws the readers’ attention to the connection between the historical period

in

the text and the historical periodization

of

the text,in which the author and reader exist in relation to the AH narrative.

This strong intertextuality offers clues to the work’s thematic concerns,authorial intentions,and social climate.To borrow the terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism,only by contemplating the “Other” history can we have a clear understanding of normative historical narrative and its effect on our sense of self.Conversely,normative history,as the already known “pre-text”,conditions the intertextuality of alternate history — “the key point now is not given history,nor alternate history,but the gap and conversion between the two,and the discursive space where text can be produced” (Li 80).The end result is to produce a reading of history “as a changeable human creation rather than as a fated process to be accepted passively” (Baldick 4-5).Although the contradiction between “what could have been otherwise” in alternate history and “what actually was” in normative history is irreconcilable,giving rise to the “tension” between ideal and reality，the energy of such tension moves the narrative plot forward and triggers the reader’s own historical introspection.

II.History as Narrative

The pluralization and proliferation of histories under the lens of the New Historicist critic does more than derail the concepts of “historical truth” and “reality”.This lens exposes the important convergence between history and literature.The power of novelists,especially historical novelists,lies in their ability to break with the established frameworks and narrative arcs of normative history,in order to explore a variety of historical possibilities.In so doing they shed new light on readers’ understanding of history and human life at large.What New Historicism brings into view is a fundamental shift in the power relations,as it were,between history and literature：the subordination of historical writing to literary poetics and analysis.

To be clear,increased doubt in “historical truth” is not the invention of the literary school called New Historicism.Over the past half century,the border between history and literature has become less and less distinctive.Hayden White was perhaps the first historian to introduce this argument in his path-breaking book

Metahistory

(1973).John H.Arnold too argues that although the historians’ job is bound by what the evidence will support,when faced with “blind spots” in historical records and findings,they still rely on guesswork to fill in the blanks and bridge the gaps.Even if evidence is available,“history also involves imagination,in dealing with that evidence,presenting it,and explaining it” (Arnold 13).Such guesswork and imagination are very similar to the artistic creation of historical novels.Jonathan Culler,answering the central question of “What is literature”,similarly asserts that “The model for historical intelligibility ...is literary narrative” (Culler 19).Louis Montrose too proposes the notion of “textuality of history”,arguing that “no knowledge existed outside of the realms of narrative,writing or discourse” (Brannigan 170).As a text,history has inherent qualities of literary narrative.These concepts break the traditional wall between historical discourse and literary discourse,and undermine the basis of historical objectivity.Under these circumstances,the critic’s chief role in interpreting history is not to restore “what actually happened”,but to explain how it should be understood and “how cultural

meaning

emerges from historical events” (Klages 125).In other words,there shouldn’t be a presupposed framework for history and full play should be given to its inherent narrative potential,allowing history to perform its self-subversion and self-deconstruction.Obviously,AH fictions are an extreme version of such narrative potential in literary writing.New Historicism “makes for a more symbiotic relationship between literature and history than earlier literary historians allowed” (Padley 172-173).In the eyes of the New Historicist critics,history is not merely the background of a text,but permeates the entire process of textual analysis.To be more precise,history itself is a text,not essentially different from literary text,which holds no status or privilege over its literary counterpart.

With Postmodernist thought blurring the distinction between fact and fiction,and New Historicism blurring the distinction between history and text — in this intellectual context the AH fiction writer sets out to reconstruct history and reinvent its stories.Moreover,in the overlapping of literature and history,historical novels are not bound up by historical discipline or constraint,rather,they step into the domain of history,excavating various “possibilities” and “likelihoods” therein.In these endeavors AH authors are the most active.They overturn the normative history altogether and then lay a new historical track for their imagined narrative.The close connection between history and literature in alternate history (i.e.between AH assumptions and AH fictions) is incommensurable with any discipline or genre.Owing to alternate history’s inherent fictionality,its historical accounts and hypotheses inevitably contain a high degree of literary narrativity.On the other hand,literary works of this genre often involve necessary empirical investigation and reasoning.History and literature are so intertwined that the AH genre has even produced some works that are virtually impossible to categorize definitively.It is for this reason that the critical vocabulary seems content to label both the historical inquiry and the literary genre as “alternate history”,without further distinguishing between the two.

III.History as Non-linear

Corresponding to the plurality of history we must now reconsider its structures and forms as well.According to the classical disciplinary view of history,historical events have their causes and historical evolution its tendency.In studying history its general patterns of development emerge (Chen 671).This classical view of historical causality suggests a deterministic view of the normative historical narrative,in the sense that retrospectively identifying the causality behind historical events casts these events as somehow predetermined.New Historicist outlooks,however,pose a tremendous challenge to such a notion of linear and continuous grand narrative.Foucault,for example,points out that “history is not linear ...nor is it necessarily teleological ...Nor can history be explained as a series of causes and effects ...history is the complex interrelationship of a variety of discourses” (Bressler 185).Richard Lehan is more specific by arguing that New Historicism is “essentially resistant to history’s linear development and depth.When reading the text,understanding the world,and grasping the literary spirit,it always juxtaposes times,which means the spatialization of time” (Wang 213).In his book

Archaeologies

of

the

Future

(2005),Fredrick Jameson puts forth a similar idea about historical synchronicity and diachronicity：

Diachronic causality,the single string of causes,the billiard-ball theory of change,tends to isolate a causal line which might have been different,a single-shot effectivity ......which can very easily be replaced by an alternate hypothesis.But if,instead of this diachronic strand,we begin to posit causality as an immense synchronic interrelationship,as a web of overdetermination,a Spinozan substance made up of innumerable simultaneously coexisting cells or veins,then it is harder to object some causal alternative.(Jameson 88)

Jameson wishes to foreground the synchronic richness,alternative possibilities and complex interconnections at any given historical moment,to the point that any discussion of diachronic history would become reductive.Historical events do not come together to form a fixed linear structure.Rather,they exhibit a structure more akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s metaphor of a labyrinth.A similar argument is made by Reinhart Koselleck,who draws attention to the multiple futures that are possible at any given moment.Rather than recognize history as the process of an accumulation of precluded futures,we should read “historical time” as an ever-developing view towards a horizon of multiple futures — towards what he terms “future’s past” (Koselleck 1).From our vantage point in the present,it is hard to perceive the past outside of our knowledge of those precluded possibilities.But we must not,in consequence,ascribe an inevitability to this preclusion.The historians’ challenge is to read the past while ignoring their own knowledge of its future — this kind of “backshadowing” should remain in the domain of literature.

Indeed,it is a feat of imagination that is required of the historian.To narrate the past with a view to the horizon of multiple futures towards which it was oriented in its moment is to employ the very same poetics of the AH genre in the production of normative historical narrative.A new relation between literature and history comes into view through consideration of the AH genre.AH is not only a poetics for the writing of literary texts but,more importantly,it suggests an innovative poetics for the

reading

of historical texts.

In this sense,alternate history presents an anti-linear history — its point of divergence,also known as “nexus point”,can be a major historical event (like important political decisions or key battles) or the resultant force of several components.Change in any single component would lead to a deviation in the larger historical trajectory,a butterfly effect of sorts.Hence in the AH genre history ceases to be a unitary linear structure and is instead articulated as a complex network where any particular element is intricately related to numerous other elements.Events are not so much discernable points on a line as much as they are random (and often simultaneous) contingencies in an empirically seamless web (Mickelson 166).

For instance,Hodge,the protagonist of Moore’s

Bring

the

Jubilee

,is working in a bookstore before he travels back to the Civil War era,and Tyss,the proprietor of the bookstore,has profound influence over Hodge’s outlook on life.Tyss maintains that to human beings there is no such thing as “free will”,and all human actions are nothing but natural reactions to external stimuli; the world we know is only an endless cycle.When discussing philosophy and logic,Tyss questions Hodge：

“What makes you think time is a simple straight line running flatly through eternity? Why do you assume that time isnt curved? Can you conceive of its end? Can you really imagine its beginning? Of course not; then why arent both the same? The serpent with its tail in its mouth?” (Moore 39)

In place of a reductive sense of linear time,Tyss suggests the

circular

nature of time.His questions point to the diversity of temporal structures within which one may resolve to read history.Through the symbol of the ouroboros (the serpent with its tail in its mouth),Tyss invokes not only the cyclical nature of time,but also the Gnostic view of the hidden meaning of history — a view that can be seen as the complementary philosophical position to the literary position of AH.The ouroboros can be seen as the embodiment of the temporal structure of the AH narrative itself,and its invocation in

Bring

the

Jubilee

as a mise-en-scène,as it were,of AH temporality.While contemplating the nature of historical theories,Hodge weighs the relative importance of the key elements：“When and what and how and where,but the when is the least.Not chronology but relationship is ultimately what the historian deals in” (Moore 117).Such a claim subverts the traditional view of history as linear and highlights the inarticulability of its causality.Hodge’s later experience is the very manifestation of such a philosophy of history.As a result of time travel,his background world contradicts the chronological order of “natural” time (he switches between 1938—1952 and 1863—1877); his bodily and mental experiences,however,remain in accordance with logical causality (he is aging all the same and he can remember all his past experiences including his previous time travels).Hodge further reveals his dynamic and flexible conception of history in these words：“Were it possible to know fully the what and how and where one might learn the

why

,and assuredly if one grasped the

why

he could place the when at will” (Moore 118).Hodge asserts the constructed-ness and unreliability of historical narrative — the twin logical premises of alternate history.

In fact,what history has lost is not just its classical linearity and regularity,but together with them its moral absolute — Foucault states that “the abrupt and often radical changes that cause breaks from one episteme to another are neither good nor bad,valid nor invalid.Like the discourses that help produce them,different episteme(s) exist in their own right; they are neither moral nor immoral,but amoral” (Bressler 186).Such “amorality” of episteme (including historical knowledge) finds full expression in alternate history — “because everything literally happens,there is no moral imperative” (Helekson 457).History always involves contingency,its interpretation is plural and open-ended,and history-related literary writings (together with the moral concepts therein) follow no fixed imperatives.

IV.History as Spatial

Since history is not seen as linear in structure,questions regarding historical

temporality

inevitably lose center stage and questions regarding historical

spatiality

are highlighted.History has classically been considered as the temporal dimension of human existence.In literary narratives too it is usually depicted as a one-way temporal structure.In the modern and (to a greater degree) postmodern periods,increasing attention has been paid to the synchronicity and spatiality of history.

New Historicism in particular treats history as a “chronotope” (a “time-space”).This stance is akin to Jameson’s notion that historical causality is a kind of synchronic web structure,and,like New Historicism,he “emphasizes the structure’s non-centric paradigm and synchronic concept,dissolves the depth and meanings of history,and pays attention to the texts’ cross-referencing and intertextuality,thus breaking history’s continuity and turning history into a type of discourse pattern” (Wang 212).

For this reason,scholars such as Richard Lehan,have expressed concern for the danger of such “spatialization of time” in New Historicism — “when history becomes a spatial non-historical existence ...human knowledge could dress up,distort,or refashion history at will.This has disintegrated the concepts of history and literary work so much so that when people enter these domains,they will no longer pay attention to history or the literary work

per

se

,but instead,only to the elastic signifiers contained in the work’s metaphors” (Wang 213).Lehan thus objects to the pluralization,juxtaposition,and inter-textualization of history,calling instead for “a return to narrative itself and faithfulness to historical trajectory so as to find the traces of historical civilizations” (Wang 217).

And yet,with late 20century developments in the philosophy of history,it would be difficult even for such arguments to ignore the supra-temporal aspect of “historical time”.Koselleck,for example,has argued for a clear distinction between “natural time” and “historical time”.Natural time designates astronomical phenomena such as days,months and years determined by orbits and celestial revolutions,or it designates biological phenomena such as aging,determined by rates of cellular regeneration and decay.This type of chronology is not the same as “historical time”,configured of human-made temporalities such as workdays and weekends,holidays and election cycles,or the time it takes a person to get to the office on the subway.Koselleck concludes that “such preliminary observations make clear that the generality of a measurable time based on Nature — even if it possesses its own history — cannot be transformed unmediated into a historical concept of time ...historical time,if the concept has a specific meaning,is bound up with social and political actions,with concretely acting and suffering human beings and their institutions and organizations” (Koselleck 2).In other words,a critical notion of historical time recognizes that it is made up of precisely such “elastic signifiers” that implicate the spatial dimensions of human social and political action.

Shifting our attention to narrative as spatial,we may note that AH fiction explicitly or implicitly shows such properties.First,similar to the shift introduced by New Historicism,this genre embodies a transition from diachronicity to synchronicity.Since the linearity of narrative time is broken,the driving force of the story is greatly weakened.As a result,the process of reading is slowed or even halted.The narrative is no longer a diachronic “time-flow”,but a synchronic “space-field”,and such a change compels the reader to make correspondingly spatial associations and considerations.Second,the intertextuality between the normative and alternate historical narratives creates a psychological spatiality,in which the “attention is fixed on the interplay of relationships within the limited time-area” (Frank 231).Owing to the presence of such a sense of spatiality,readers of AH narratives are no longer compelled to follow the linear temporal structure (including chronological narration,flashback,interposition and foreshadowing).Instead,they are encouraged to think spatially about the world in the text,as a means to grasping and appreciating the proliferation of narrative dimensions.Third,be it vertical time travel or horizontal parallel universes,the juxtaposition and shifts between different timelines and parallel worlds are all spatiality plotted in the narrative web.

Stephen King’s novel

11

/

22

/

63

(2011) is a case in point.It is about Jake,a high school teacher’s time travel to 1958 and his attempts to save President Kennedy from assassination in 1963.The author intentionally weakens or distorts the flow of time in his work and,in so doing,foregrounds spatial elements that normally occupy the narrative background.Beyond the protagonist’s physical movement through space,this fictional world conveys a sense of spatiality derived from the protagonist’s movements through time as well as from the reader’s cross-association of temporal elements.

Spatiality

from

the

protagonist

’

s

shifts

in

time

： The shifting and juxtaposition of two worlds (i.e.the past and the present) create a sense of spatiality — to Jake who travels to the past (1950s and 1960s) the year 2011 (the “present” in the novel) has always been there as “another place”,and vice versa.The author shared his creative process in an interview,stating that “The more I worked,the more time that I spent in the past,the more things that I remembered ......What is it they say? ‘It was a great place,but I wouldn’t want to live there.’”Such a way of thinking about a point in the past as a “place” finds adequate expression in the novel.On several occasions,the protagonist-narrator refers to his time travel as a “trip” (or sometimes a “journey”) and even mentions feeling “jet-lag” before and after travel,which highlights the spatial gap between the two timelines.When he finishes his mission to save Kennedy,Jake provides a rather vivid description of his “critical condition” as he physically steps back into 2011 from 1963：

I took one more step,and although there was no stair riser,for just a moment I saw my shoe as a double exposure.......I took another step,and I was a double exposure.Most of my body was standing beside the Worumbo mill drying shed in late November of 1963,but part of me was somewhere else,and it wasn’t the pantry of Al’s Diner.(King 1027-1028)

Beyond the 1963 past and the 2011 present that exist along the same timeline,there is also the parallel existence of multiple timelines — the mysterious card-holder at the time portal warns Jake that time travel is far from simply a “reset”：“Each trip creates its own string,and when you have enough strings,they always get snarled” (King 1023).The “strings” here are divergent timelines resulting from time travel.These new timelines mean the emergence of parallel universes,which would supplant any notion of a simple and stable spatio-temporal structure,and make the spatial dimension in the narrative all the more striking.

Spatiality

from

the

reader

’

s

cross

-

associations

： AH fictions

per

se

encourage readers to think spatially.As readers move through the narrative along the rather linear trajectory of reading a text,the temporal disjuncture and redoubling invites speculation about the plot’s upcoming temporal movements and deviations from the familiar historical narrative.Such speculations produce a tension with the linear act of reading and further draw attention to the spatial dimensions of the text itself.Additionally,due to the frequent use of such techniques as retrospection,flashback,and foreshadowing,the normative flow of narrative time is replaced with fragmented and magnified segments of time.Accordingly,readers are no longer following the plotline based on chronological order or logical causality but,instead,allow their attention to be dispersed at any given moment over various lateral relations.As a result,on top of the vertical flow of time there arises a horizontal sense of space.Moreover,the protagonist of King’s novel meets the same images again and again in his repeated time travels (the pantry of Al’s Diner,the card-holder at the time portal,the recurrent namesakes,plenty of

deja

vu

events,etc.).The patterned recurrence of these images and scenarios obstructs the linear progression of the narrative.It compels the reader,trapped in a web of interrelated images,to recall (or even re-read) the previous text.Such cross-referencing and association are integral to the narrative’s sense of spatiality.

V.History as Dialogue

Closely related to intertextuality is the text’s dialogical property.The “dialogue” here refers to ongoing interactions among various narrative “voices” in the text.Bakhtin attaches great importance to “multiplicity of voices” in literary work.He borrows the notion of “polyphony” from music theory to refer to different viewpoints and voices in the narrative,including those of the narrator,character,and even the author.These voices sometimes coexist in harmony,and sometimes clash fiercely with one another.Together they form a scenario of “heteroglossia” in which the authorial voice,formerly autocratic and resistant to multiple interpretation,now loses its supremacy,becoming merely one voice in the polyphony.The meaning of a text thus emerges from the interaction,the dialogism,of multiple contexts and characters.To Bakhtin,a good novel is supposed to be dialogical,rather than filled with monologic authoritative views,and the author should encourage marginal voices apart from mainstream culture to challenge authority.In a word,polyphony offers the possibility of a text’s multiple interpretations.

New Historicism,as a “dialogic poetics”,applies such a notion to history,believing that history,like literary text,has inherent dialogical quality.History itself is composed of voices from various classes and groups,and paying attention only to the voice of the powerful while overlooking other suppressed voices,we cannot see the forest for the trees.The same can be said of text; the interpretation of any text involves the consideration of its relation to other discourses,so “a text becomes a battleground of competing ideas among the author,society,customs,institutions,and social practices that are all eventually negotiated by the author and the reader and influenced by each contributor’s episteme” (Bressler 187).In short,with various narrative and cultural forces competing with each other,the literary text becomes a site where different ideologies and concepts meet,mingle and clash.

Having asserted the multiplicity of voices in both literature and history,it becomes clear that historical novels exhibit the combination of these two genres.Many contemporary works,including those based on real history,attempt to examine historical events from new perspectives rather than indiscriminately copy the normative or official version.The purpose is to set free various voices,to facilitate their dialogues and even confrontations.Yet those techniques are merely moderate “trimming”,leaving the fundamental historical structure intact.AH fictions,in contrast,are far more subversive — they radically change the historical trajectory at the point of divergence and proliferate a rich imaginary narrative in a new alternative historical field.

Many AH fictions could be regarded as polyphonic novels with dialogical qualities — in these works the historical scenarios

per

se

are the author’s inventions,without the so-called “historical truth” (though they might have historical basis and a realistic presentation) and any accident in the story,even a minor one,may trigger a sequence of changes that result in derailing the historical narrative.In such a fictitious and acausal world,the author is not normally styled as a manipulative absolute authority,nor is there an objective authorial voice imposed on the narrative.Instead,the authorial function must allow a world in which “all characters,and even the narrator him- or herself,are possessed of their own discursive consciousnesses” (Allen 23).Furthermore,these discourses are usually of equal standing,so that “no individual discourse can stand objectively above any other discourse; all discourses are interpretations of the world,responses to and calls to other discourses” (Allen 23).Such an “equalization” of discourses usually finds expression in the intentional weakening and dimming of authorial and narrative voices,and the resultant subjectivity and openness of textual meaning.Relevant cases include unreliable first-person narrators (e.g.Hodge’s misty memories in

Bring

the

Jubilee

and Philip Roth’s forged autobiography in

The

Plot

Against

America

),multiple and conflicting viewpoints (e.g.different accounts of the same event as found in

The

Man

in

the

High

Castle

and

The

Difference

Engine

),“two negatives making a positive” in historical turn (e.g.the double twist of history in

Bring

the

Jubilee

and nested narrative in

The

Man

in

the

High

Castle

),etc.When reading these novels,readers can vividly feel the sound and the fury of various voices in the text.According to Bakhtin,in language there is always a centripetal force at work which aims at centralizing and unifying meaning.Alternate history,on the other hand,acts in an opposite way — with relatively strong centrifugal force,its discourse resists authority and dissolves the center,thus multiplying the meanings.Perhaps the world in AH fictions does not exhibit the filthy language,hilarious scenes,and deformed human bodies of François Rabelais’

Gargantua

and

Pantagruel

,yet by virtue of its bold subversion of normative or official histories,its ruthless mocking of authoritative discourse,and its emphasis on marginal individuals,it qualifies as a sort of “carnivalesque world”.One of the distinguishing features of the “carnivalesque” is to deny any authority in literary creation and to call for equal treatment of all literary genres,discourses,and styles,including ordinary voices.This provides flexibility and liberty to historical hypotheses in AH fictions.Of course,no matter how well-suited New Historicism is for reading outside the normative structures of historical narrative,it is after all impossible to except the permeation of mainstream ideology in the text; we can therefore find at once both resistance and dissolution,subversion and containment.Some historians admit that “these cultural and ideological representations in texts serve mainly to reproduce,confirm,and propagate the power-structures of domination and subordination which characterize a given society” (Abrams 184).Often “subversions” are reabsorbed by hegemonic forces,giving people an outlet to vent their dissatisfaction and anger.By incorporating these subversions into the cultural system,hegemonic forces maintain the

status

quo

.It is indeed ironic that the purpose of “giving voice” could actually be to silence it.

Alternate history can similarly serve as a hegemonic “safety valve” in the face of dissident voices — “In its very alteration of History,AH genre offers the Other against which the Self can be defined.That is,its alternate ‘fictional’ timelines reinforce the ‘real’ timeline of one master narrative of History ‘as we know it’” (Ransom 261).Some AH fictions,despite their apparent subversion of history,are in fact a faithful reflection of its normative perception and participate in consolidating its mainstream values.This is especially true of some dystopian AH novels whose nightmarish scenes reassure the readers that the world they are living in is actually not that terrible in comparison to what could have been.

VI.History as Mundane

In the New Historicist perspective,anything that happens before the “present”,no matter how recently,belongs to the category of the “past”,thus becoming the object of historical inquiry.As a result，the range of historical concerns is much widened,and New Historicism pays attention not only to important figures (e.g.political and military leaders) and events (e.g.key battles and controversial elections) but also to those formerly obscure ordinary persons and small narratives,in a bid to restore marginal voices concealed by dominant discourses and marginal texts overlooked by mainstream history.

The New Historicist seeks to “deemphasize the conventional privileging of the literary over nonliterary text” (Wolfreys 137) and devote themselves to the research of “cultural symptoms”.They “use historical anecdotes as a lead-in and pick out from biographies,diaries and unofficial histories the details seemingly irrelevant to literary work for close analysis in a bid to reveal their hidden connection with classic literary text and draw an intricate and ingenious socio-cultural picture” (Chen 674).That is to say,exploring the details of ordinary people’s everyday lives and customs,will reveal the inner power mechanism of history-making and excavate the cultural code therein.

It is well known that in the postmodern era “the Other” is given great critical significance — according to the New Historicist outlook,power relations are not simply a binary opposition of domination-submission but,instead,a complicated web structure.The common people at the periphery of this web,though apparently underprivileged as the subjects of power,possess tremendous force of subversion,thus worthy of critical inquiry and cultural exploration.This concept has become the guiding principle of New Historicism in reexamining historical documents and narratives,and in rereading literary classics.

Alternate history,often known as “allohistory” (literally “other history”),is a kind of historical narrative with emphasis on “the Other”.It is particularly true of AH fictions,which often take on highly symbolic historical events or contexts in order to throw into relief the voices of marginal individuals and display the unique role they played in historical processes.Any unitary sense of a grand history is dissolved into the trivial but lively experiences and feelings of each individual.In such a history,each person is not just changeable but also able to participate in the change.This change might be negligible in itself,but in its dissemination throughout the web of historical causality it may yet influence later history,casting it full of uncertainties and thus ascribing great power to the individual.In AH fictions,such tendency towards “subjectivization” often finds expression in the shift of narrative focus from “collective history” to “individual history”,and from “objective history” to “subjective history.”

An example of this can be seen in the common AH motif of time travel.Fictions of this kind often show grand national history through individual fates — the protagonists are usually insignificant persons,but their actions,especially those at the point of historical divergence,turn out to be crucially important.They end up exerting profound influence on the future world and even alter the historical trajectory.The value of such design lies in the fact that the author,by engaging the symbolic charge of selected historical moments,can give voice to those marginal individuals and show their unique function in historical development.This motif can have an ideological function as well,namely,emphasis on the subjectivity and autonomy of individuals.As Sean Redmond argues,“If the modern world is one where the individual feels alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies,then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history,to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out” (Redmond 114).Moreover,an individual’s travel back in time is like adding a variable to the historical equation,and through its change in value we can clearly see the relative importance of other historical elements.

One point at which AH novels often meet criticism is their tendency to exaggerate the role played by individuals,at the exclusion of social relations and networks.As Barney Warf says,“Implausibility and simplistic social analysis often plague alternative history through an exaggerated emphasis on the capacities of individuals to change social processes single-handedly” (Warf 27-28).In the design of alternate history for his novel

11

/

22

/

63

,Stephen King employed the following strategies to cope with such criticism.First,he selected a point of divergence great enough (preventing the death of such an important figure as John F.Kennedy) for the historical deviation to take place.As Al Templeton says in the novel,when persuading Jake to go back in time,“when it comes to the river of history,the watershed moments most susceptible to change are assassinations — the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed” (King 73-74).Second,the narrative presents many obstacles to the protagonist’s efforts to change history,a variety of difficulties Jake encounters after he travels back in time,so as to increase the plot’s credibility.

In addition to insignificant persons,alternate history gives equal importance to “small histories” (i.e.everyday life details) that accord with marginal persons or groups,and ensure the narrative credibility — the genre of AH,though somewhat like fantasy,is conditioned by reality in its imagination.The narrative credibility depends on its realistic elements,and this will determine its reception.As a result,in AH fictions,“realism and the impossible meet,producing a new hybridization of romance and realist impulses” (Dannenberg 199).Such a paradox poses significant challenges to the reader.On the one hand,because of the bold change to already-known history to the point of exposing its narrative status,there is inevitably an alienation effect and the reader will approach the text with suspicion.On the other hand,AH fictions don’t wholly repel the authenticity of historical documents and details.In an attempt to grant realism and credibility to the scenarios of time travel and historical derailing,it produces in the reader a strong sense of ambivalence,as the narrative navigates between “alertness to illusion” and “indulgence in reality” (Li 81).When depicting a certain historical period,authors often go out of their way to make every detail close enough to historical reality and compliant with logic,leading to a willing “suspension of disbelief” on reader’s part.Such coexistence of the “macroscopically counterfactual” and the “microscopically realistic” creates an unusual experience,the deferral of any clear determination between belief and suspicion.

This point can be found,again,in

11

/

22

/

63

.First,to be true to the historical facts,the author spent tremendous time making evidential investigations of the street layout,lifestyle,dresses,and even pop music in the 1950s and 60s America.The outcome has been a highly faithful representation of the then social life,widely acclaimed among readers and critics.These investigations by the author align well with the typical subject matter of New Historicist archaeology,in a sense placing King in the seat of the New Historicist critic as he prepared the materials for his novel.Second,to produce a logical and credible alternate history,the author made great efforts to speculate on and deduce various possible consequences after his invented point of divergence.He even specially asked Richard N.Goodwin,former Kennedy aide-de-camp,to deduce the worst scenarios if Kennedy had lived (King 1087).Only after Goodwin arrived at the conclusion that “George Wallace would be the 37President of the United States” did he feel reassured to put it into the novel.The purpose of striving for truthfulness in micro history while altering the course of macro history is not just to increase the narrative credibility for the reader.King’s work can be seen as making a broader theoretical statement — the alternative world in the text is not simply a “what-if” hypothesis out of thin air,but a historical probability of “what almost was”.The novel gives readers a thrilling sense of crisis while confronting them with the poetic mode that underlies the production of their own normative historical narratives.

VII.History as Present and Future

Despite its name as a sort of “historicism”,New Historicism gives much attention to the present,especially the

interaction

between history and present.To be more precise,with a distinctive turn of cultural criticism,it stresses “the effect of the past on today and today’s reinterpretation of the past” (Wang 232).In that sense,New Historicism reads its subject matter not in the grammatical tense of the “simple past”,but in the “present perfect”.

Besides warnings against the present problems,AH fictions also contain worries about the future,since from the AH perspective every choice made at present in fact precludes a future,including the people in that future.Jameson highlights this domino effect,suggesting that “Perhaps indeed we need to develop an anxiety about losing the future which is analogous to Orwell’s anxiety about the loss of the past and of memory and childhood” (Jameson 233).Such anxiety is not totally groundless.Its practical significance is to trigger people’s contemplation and critique of the current world.If the past is not “History,” perhaps the future is not causally determined — both are open and uncertain,and human beings will all take an active part (whether they mean to or not) in the narrative developments that create the future world.

It must be noted that both New Historicism and AH have drawbacks,especially in areas of literature and culture,which somewhat dim this prospect.Despite their shared avant-garde spirit in the late 20century,New Historicism and AH fictions,with the gradual change of intellectual climate and aesthetic inclinations (especially the increasingly firm establishment of postmodern notions and outlooks),are showing a sign of decline in their innovative momentum.New Historicism has rarely gone beyond its initial challenges to traditional historical discourse and grand narrative,and it has even grown into a kind of convention itself.AH fictions have developed narrative patterns that are highly predictable (i.e.invariably a historical setting divergent from the known track),which restricts the range of its imagination and poses difficulty to innovation in plot design.Of course,alternate history has also been reinvigorated over the recent two decades by the 21century turn to AH in film and television,like Quentin Tarantino’s

Inglourious

Basterds (2009) and the TV series The

Man

in

the

High

Castle

(2015) based on the aforementioned book by the same name.Also the “historical mockumentary” genre is a 21century version of AH,including alternative historical documentaries such as

C

.

S

.

A

.：

The

Confederate

States

of

America

(2004) and

Death

of

a

President

(2006).

Besides,both New Historicism and AH inevitably run the risk of historical revisionism and even nihilism.With New Historicism as an important part of their philosophical foundations,various unofficial histories have sprung up in academic research and documentary literature.While serving as effective supplements to the given historical findings,some of them are actually distorting history in the name of “deconstruction” and “reconstruction”,thus causing arbitrariness,bias,and overgeneralizations.Similar things could happen to alternate history (as both research method and literary genre) as well.Its significance is also its possible problems — by altering given history and emphasizing historical contingencies and individual awareness,AH also fictionalizes an “alternate philosophy” to the Marxist philosophy of history.According to Karl Marx’s historical materialism,social development is governed by the modes of material production as an inherent law.In alternate history,however,it is often the individual actions or accidental incidents that alter the course of history — an acausal and diffusely structured alternative to historical materialism.

This fact,however,is significant for the development of New Historicism,since some of its most prominent prefigurations in the 20century came from Western Marxists.While the AH genre breaks with traditional Marxist understandings of “consciousness” by focusing on individuals and the historical contingency of their actions,New Historicism in turn emphasizes and updates the Marxist critique of the discipline of “History” by developing methodological tools that historians can use to overcome the challenges of reading history only as written by the victors.A past proletariat history,which Marx only speculated upon (and for which he was criticized as creating a modern myth of the origins of labor),now comes into view as a narrative that is epistemologically on par with the histories of the victors.

Postscript：On the Historicity of this Argument

As literature scholars,surely,we believe that literature is also a mode of criticism and that texts can suggest their own methodology for reading,as Edward Said (following Foucault) argued in his book

Beginnings

(1975).It is true New Historicism has become commonplace in 21century literary and cultural thought.At the same time,alternate history has evolved into ever more critical positions,exposing that the scholarly divide between AH and New Historicism is as invested in the divide between literature and criticism as it is in the divide between “real” history and “fictional” history.To go beyond this divide requires that we be just as critical of both.Thus,the critical intervention of the present “comparison” is to question the division between literature and criticism,to problematize the very “comparability” of AH and New Historicism by demonstrating that alternate history is in itself both a literary genre and a mode of literary criticism.With this,we hope to point the way towards a “post-poststructuralist” position,as it were,on questions of literature and history.

Notes

① Actually in the English vocabulary,both the research approach and the literary genre are often referred to as “alternate history” without the affix of “fiction”.Here,the paper attaches “fiction” to the literary genre to facilitate discussion and avoid possible confusion.

② Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued that post-Enlightenment research methods in history condition the production of historical “truth” in his well-known study

Truth

and

Method

.③ For more on the first two claims,see Foucault’s book History of Madness.For more on the third claim,see his book

Archeology

of

Knowledge

.④ For more on Foucault’s concept of discourse,see his essay “The Order of Discourse.” For more on his notion of episteme,see his book

The

Order

of

Things

.

⑤ There are also scholars who use “counterfactual history” for relevant research and “alternate history” for relevant works of literature (Rosenfeld 4).

⑥ Such views of predetermined historical evolution are particularly typical of national-historical narratives.For an analysis and critique of these,see Benedict Anderson’s book

Imagined

Communities

.⑦ “Nexus point” is also known as “Jonbar point” or “Jonbar hinge” which is named after John Barr,the character in Jack Williamson’s novel

The

Legion

of

Time

(1938).

⑧ This novel contains a lot of irregular usages,especially the contractions without apostrophe (e.g.youll,isnt,couldnt,etc.),which seem to imply the illusoriness of the story.

⑨ NPR Author Interviews：“Stephen King Plots To Save JFK in 11/22/63” November 13,2011.

⑩ The concept of hegemony and its relation to the socio-political status quo has been explored with great depth and insight by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.For more on hegemony and its relation to conceptions of history,see Gramsci’s

Prison

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