Tuesday, June 08, 2004
(12:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Alternate History
Mike Hancock, when he was still alive, once loaned me a volume of alternate history short stories entitled Hitler Victorious. I did not read it in its entirety. The only thing that I've ever read on his recommendation is Stranger in a Strange Land, which I enjoyed. (The only music I've listened to on his recommendation is Daisies of the Galaxy by eels, one of my all-time favorite albums.) According to the introduction, the alternate history genre is pretty well-established, and particular points keep coming up: for instance, what if the Reformation had never happened? What if the French Revolution had never happened? What if Wolverine had never encountered the Incredible Hulk? What if Jubilee had undergone puberty early? That kind of thing.
My question is this: Why always momentous events? Why not explore what would have happened if the designers of telephone networks had chosen different tones for the busy signal and the dial tone? What if they had chosen a different woman to be the archetypal phone voice -- or a man? Can we imagine a world with a keyboard layout other than the standard QWERTY? What if the Beatles had condensed the White Album into one superlative record? Imagine being transported in such a world, with just one thing off, one self-evident thing, and being completely unable to communicate it to someone: "The dial tone just sounds wrong to me somehow...." Would you always remain a foreigner? Would you fixate on that one small detail that you otherwise would never have become conscious of? How much is enough to make a world a different world?
And another thing: As many of my readers know, I am constantly tormented with regret. Why not write a short story that places me at one of the thousands of junctures at which I have definitively rejected happiness and meaning, but in which I somehow miraculously do the right thing? New occasions to definitively reject happiness and meaning take place in rapid succession, and I dodge each and every one of them, increasingly improbably -- until it becomes clear, as in the Ambrose Bierce story, that this is all a fantasy. We return to reality, where I finally, inexorably -- ineluctably -- do that stupid thing:
"Oh, by the way," I say to the woman of my dreams....
"Do you want to go out Friday night?" "Absolutely," she says, "what do you want to do, shop for wedding rings?" "Sure, sounds great. It's a good thing I've been saving up!"
....I say to the woman of my dreams, "um... man, I forgot what I was, um, going to say. Oh, yeah: did you see The Simpsons last night? The 6:00 one?"
That's a lot shorter and less well-executed than the real story would be.
Today I plan on expanding my paper for my Empire seminar into a piece of publishable academic prose. So expect an instant response to all e-mails or comments, and at least five other posts.
