400 / 142
400
E
UR
A
MERICA
a platform on which a form of historical thought attuned both for
the contingency of the past and the plasticity of the future is
dialectically performed. Given its speculation on “roads not taken”,
as well as its increasing concern with possible roads that should be
taken in the future, Rovner
(
2011
)
points out, counterfactual fiction
is structured along two narrative possibilities, the “what could have
been” and the “what must have been.”
3
The interfusing of these two
narrative movements
—
a backward-looking movement and a
forward-looking one
—
thus demands the reading of the
counterfactual novel contrapuntally, recognizing in its insistence on
contingency a desire to free itself from the burden of historical
inevitability while simultaneously unearthing, behind its valorization
of the exceptional, both a nostalgia for a different now and a
yearning for a just future.
For Roth, however, the digression into the counterfactual
“then”
—
the possibility that the US could have elected as president
the arch-conservative and anti-Semitic Charles Lindberg and begun
to persecute Jews during WWII, seems marked by a nostalgia for a
factual “now”
—
world peace is only possible when the US assumes
its guardianship
—
that reinforces the sovereignty of the US in the
global power structure. In Roth’s novel, it is Americans’ collective
amnesia of the young country’s proclaimed exceptionality as the
“leader the free world” that constitutes its naïve child narrator’s
“perpetual fear” of the unforeseen. Chabon’s novel, in contrast,
challenges America’s image of itself as an ideal democratic nation,
while exposing the ideology of American exceptionalism as its
rationale for imposing and defending, through violent means, the
American way of life across the globe. Chabon’s rewriting of history,
3
While most scholars claim that counterfactual fiction explores the question of
“what may have happened” if a foundational event should have gone awry, Adam
Rovner argues that a serious impulse actually lies within this seemingly indulgence
in the “what if.” He points out that this body of literature “exhume[s] the it-could-
have-been-otherwise” that is buried “beneath an it-must-have-been-so” (2011: 149)
in order to reconcile “chance” with “determinism” as the determining force in the
making of history.