(Hi)story-Telling: An Introduction to Italian Alternate and Counterfactual History

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

When Metahistory was published in 1973, the European historiographical debate had already been profoundly influenced by post-structuralism. As a matter of fact, in the preceding years, books such as Michel Foucault's Le mots et les choses (1966), Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie (1967), or Gilles Deleuze's Différence et répétition (1968) had powerfully occupied the public discussion in France and Europe. In those same years, Roland Barthes had published Le discours de l'histoire (1967) and L'effet du réel (1968), two essays destined to have a great echo in the reflection on historiographical methodology. It is perhaps superfluous to recall how the debate on the writing of history continued in the years following Metahistory. Nonetheless, it seems important to point out that works such as Lynn Hunt's The New Cultural History (1989) and Linda Hutcheon's The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) show that the discussion on the writing of history has gone far beyond the seventies. The interplay hypothesised by White between history and fiction, between historiography and literature, has in some ways forced the historiography of the second half of the twentieth century into a process of self-reflection, starting with the recognition of the problematic connection between reality and language, truth, and storytelling.6

Another relevant aspect of intellectual discussions over collective historical memory after the Second World War was denialism. The publication of Arthur Butz's Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (1976), David Irving's Hitler's War (1977), and Robert Faurisson's Le problème des chambres à gaz (1978) constituted an authentic cultural trauma for the generation of scholars formed after the Second World War. The very fact that the extermination of the Jews, the concentration camps, and the gas chambers could be questioned as real events – as historical facts – made Benjamin's admonition dramatically relevant: auch die Toten werden vor dem Feind, wenn er siegt, nicht sicher sein. The enemy, in fact, became threatening again, taking on the guise of the historian. If the condemnation of denialism has occurred first and foremost in politics and public opinion, it is the reaction of European and American intellectuals that is of particular interest to us. As a matter of fact, in the intellectual debate, the condemnation of denialism has often been accompanied by an equally severe condemnation of post-structuralism and post-modernism.7 The reasons are rather easy to understand. The idea that the writing of history is equated with any other process of narrative invention, that rhetoric is in the background of both reconstructions of the past and works of fiction, is considered the conceptual matrix that allowed denialism to arise. For denialists, if nothing escapes the domain of appearance, if everything is an effect of reality, then even the Shoah can possibly be considered fiction.

In the same years in which the negationist scandal broke out, Jean-François Lyotard published his groundbreaking work: La condition postmoderne (1979). As Nancy Partner has convincingly pointed out in a recent essay, the reaction to postmodernism in the historical debate was quite disproportionate. As a matter of fact, Lyotard, in his rapport sur le savoir, did not examine history as a possible example of the crisis of metanarratives, nor was history central to the reflections of Fredric Jameson or Linda Hutcheon. ‘Postmodernism's founding definers and observers – Partner has then concluded, not concludes – seemed indifferent to academic history, yet professional historians eventually recognised in postmodernism a critical force of unprecedented threat’.8 Lyotard's book impacted on the pre-existing debate on the writing of history which had its origins in narrativism.9 From the 1950s onwards, Arthur Danto had insisted on the relationship between history and storytelling, showing in particular the mechanisms by which retrodiction works in the writing of history. According to Danto, the historian composes their narrative through a ‘retroactive re-alignment of the Past’.10 In other words, from the narrativist's standpoint, the historian is inevitably posthumous, and the historical (re)construction of the past is a retrospective story. Similarly, in the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Mink had presented historical knowledge as an imaginative construction, outlining the inescapable and structural link between history and fiction: ‘We could learn to tell stories of our lives – he says in 1970 – from nursery rhymes, or from culture-myths if we had any, but it is from history and fiction that we learn how to tell and understand complex stories, and how it is that stories answer questions’.11 It is in this context of historical-philosophical discussion that reactions to Lyotard's arguments and to postmodernism took place. The liaison between epistemological reflection and historiographical debate is, of course, represented by White. ‘The events are made into a story – he wrote in 1978 – by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by […] all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play’.12 In short, by the time the English translation of La condition postmoderne was published in 1984, the discussion on the writing of history had already taken on rather broad dimensions.

As Partner rightly points out, from 1989 onwards it has been the journal History and Theory, in particular, that has hosted the debate on history writing. Frank Ankersmit and Perez Zagorin in particular are the ones leading the dance.13 It is impossible, nor perhaps useful, to go back to the discussion between the two historians. Here, in fact, it seems more important to recall some positions taken by Ankersmit in Narrative Logic, which will later be reiterated in History and Tropology. In the first place, he advocates for the total autonomy of narratio: ‘There are no translation-rules – he wrote in 1983 – enabling us to “project” the past onto the narrative level of its historiographical representation’.14 This is what Ankersmit calls ‘narrative idealism’. Another of his fundamental theses is that postmodernism is to some extent a radicalisation of historism. As a matter of fact, according to Ankersmit, they share the idea of a ‘fragmentation of the historical world’, although the historical object of postmodern narrativism ‘it is not part of a reified past but situated in the distance or difference between past and present’.15 Finally, in a similar direction seems to go Keith Jenkins, who in Why History? takes both White and Ankersmit to the extreme. In a perspective of radical narrativist presentism, Jenkins claims the superfluity of history tout court. That is, starting from the assumption that history is and has always been mythologised and ideologised, rhetorically represented, and emplotted, Jenkins concludes that we should all realise that we live in a post-historical world and take on its emancipatory aspects: ‘If Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Rorty, Ermarth et al. can do without a historical consciousness and especially a modernist upper or lower case one, then we all can’.16

In my view, the most balanced reaction on this issue is that of Carlo Ginzburg, who polemicised against the spread of a postmodernist fashion and, on the other hand, reconstructed some crucial steps in the history of writing history. In doing so, Ginzburg managed to show how historiography used ab origine the weapons of rhetoric to make the truths in its discourse effective. In this regard, Ginzburg spoke of an effect of truth – explicitly polemicising against Barthes’ effet du réel – meaning that truth in general, and historical truth in particular, has to do not only with reality, but also with its transposition into a persuasive narrative.17

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.

While historiography therefore uses logical arguments and documentary evidence, alternate history fiction, starting from real historical events, invents a deviation, sometimes even minimal – a bullet that misses its target (in the case of Kennedy) or, on the contrary, that hits it (in the case of Roosevelt) – to imagine a different historical reality and induce a critical reflection on the present.

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 Army?26 What if Kennedy had not been assassinated in Dallas?27 Here too, as in alternate history, the reader is placed before certain nexus points, from which the author of the article hypothesises an alternative development of events. The methodological difference is however very clear and is established in the introduction by Ferguson himself: ‘We should consider as plausible or probable – he argues – only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered.’28 For the virtual historian, it is therefore a matter of standing somewhere in between the pure literary invention of fictional narrative and historicistic determinism. In other words, according to Ferguson, it is a question of assuming the aleatoric nature of history, of showing its possible alternatives, in order to emphasise how a given event could easily have had opposite outcomes – for example, Britain could have stayed neutral in 1914; Operation Barbarossa could have succeeded. But, as we have outlined, the counterfactual hypothesis first and foremost aims to show the main determining causes of a given event – for example, the hung Parliament resulting from UK general election in January 1910; Hitler disastrous interference with his High Command's strategies in USSR in December 1941.

Although the book edited by Ferguson was met with a rather tepid academic reception, it can certainly be said that Virtual history represents an important moment in the historiographical debate at the turn of the century.29 A few other historians have since tried to systematically adopt the approach proposed by Ferguson. An example is the book edited by Robert Cowley – What If? – where in their respective essays Cowley himself and John Keegan show how the First World War could have been avoided and how the Second World War could have been won by Germany.30 Nonetheless, it cannot be argued that virtual history fully succeeded in establishing itself as a historiographical research method. The reasons for this are most likely to be found in the understandable suspicion, following the spread of anti-Semitic denialism, of any approach that claimed the use of imagination, or fiction, as a tool for historiographical investigation. Denying the existence of the Shoah and verifying the causes of the Nazi defeat by hypothesising their victory were seen as two dangerously similar approaches.

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 Ventennio. The reconstruction of the ‘missed revolution’ debate, occurring as it did in a period of crisis, shows to what extent history became a terrain of appropriation in the political and intellectual discussion. It reveals not only the uses of history by political adversaries, but also the interplay between history and politics in that specific genre of historical writing which was on the borderline between historical reconstruction and hypothetical narrative. From this perspective, Chiantera-Stutte aims to show that the literature concerning ‘missed revolution’ is a true historical genre, in which the personality, and the political and social values of the writers eventually come into the light more clearly than in other historical works.

Angelo Arciero's article analyses the various uchronic reverberations of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in the Italian literary context, trying to show their political implications. The author shows that Alvaro's novels L'uomo è forte and Belmoro, Morselli's uchronies Roma senza papa and Contro-passato prossimo, and Malerba's short story 4891 are grafted – albeit in different ways – onto the theoretical reflections and literary devices codified by Orwell. The comparison between Alvaro and Orwell is indirect and layered in time. On the one hand, L'uomo è forte represents a totalitarian dystopia by anticipating of several years the conceptual devices of Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the other hand, Belmoro – set after a hypothetical Third World War – is placed on a historical juncture similar to Orwell's last novel, developing in a science-fiction key the implications concerning the relationship between man, science, and technology. Arciero then outlines how the latent conceptual affinities with Orwell that can be traced in Morselli go side by side with Malerba's 4891 explicit reference to the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In both cases, he argues, allohistory and future narrative aim to show, in a critical form, the transformations that took place in the Italian society from the thirties to the eighties.

The third and last essay reconstructs the course of the European and Italian historical novel between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. The central hypothesis is that the historical novel, from its origins, has supported traditional historiography. In the specific case of Italy, then, the canon of the Risorgimento's historical novel gradually lost its epic and glorious traits, to be taken on as an instrument of indirect criticism of post-Unification Italian society. The same function it had in republican Italy, where the genre never completely disappeared, continuing to exercise a role of historical reconstruction and social critique. But it is at the turn of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries that the historical novel has experienced an unprecedented publishing fortune. From the publication of Luther Blissett's Q to Umberto Eco's Il cimitero di Praga, the Italian historical novel at the turn of the century has emerged as a renewed field of historical investigation on the transition from the First to the Second Republic. Finally, it is with Antonio Scurati's three historical-documentary novels – M. Il figlio del secolo, M. L'uomo della provvidenza, and M. Gli ultimi giorni dell'Europa – that the historical-reconstructive function becomes a perfect tool for a critical analysis of collective memory, in particular of the historical memory of fascism. If Scurati's operation succeeds in this intent – this is the author's hypothesis – it is precisely because he uses an innovative form of counterfactual narrative: the implicit uchrony.