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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 399
their alternate history novels. The “what if” scenario allows both
writers to speculate on the difficult questions that the Holocaust has
thrust upon human beings; namely, whether it could be possible for
the Holocaust to happen elsewhere, perhaps even in the United
States, and whether it is possible that humans may have failed to
learn the lesson of the Holocaust; that is, history, traumatic as it is,
maybe endlessly repeated, in different forms and guises. At the core
of these questions lies the desire to search for an alternative to, or
an exception from, what is perceived to be the norm of modernity
—
the pervasiveness of violence, a drive towards paralysis and death,
and a homelessness that leads only to dead-ends. In a sense, both
Roth and Chabon, in their different ways, believe in the possibility
of humankind’s finding a different way of conducting ourselves and
interacting with others, one that could lead to our intervening in,
and suspending the logic of identity at the heart of, both the modern
nation-state and liberal individualism. The concern of both these
authors is that fantasies of exceptionalism ultimately encourage and
endorse exclusionism and violence, even though they have trodden
on divergent pathways and propose different critiques of the
fantasies of exceptionalism.
In a way, both Roth’s and Chabon’s alternate-history novels
can be regarded as responses to the tyranny of History; that is, its
linearity and causality. At the root of what-if thinking, Adam Rovner
posits, is a “serious impulse: to reconcile the role of chance with our
‘search for a useful past’” (2011: 131). Catherine Gallagher, in her
seminal article, “Telling It Like It Wasn’t,” identifies two kinds of
counterfactual narratives, one of which is organized “around those
multiple forks or around repetitions with variations” (2010: 22) and
the other of which follows easily identifiable “bi-linear structures”
(23). It is the latter, with its highlighting the possibilities that
unrealized pasts are still alive and even shaping the future (19), that
largely accounts for the significant increase, both in number and in
popularity, of counterfactual fictions in the past two decades. With
its folding of multiple temporalities, counterfactual fiction proffers