Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction

by Catherine Gallagher

Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t, Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She doesn’t take a moral or normative stand on the practice, but focuses her attention on how it works and to what ends—a quest that takes readers on a fascinating tour of literary and historical criticism.Gallagher locates the origins of contemporary counterfactual history in eighteenth-century Europe, where the idea of other possible historical worlds first took hold in philosophical disputes about Providence before being repurposed by military theorists as a tool for improving the art of war. In the next century, counterfactualism became a legal device for deciding liability, and lengthy alternate-history fictions appeared, illustrating struggles for historical justice. These early motivations—for philosophical understanding, military improvement, and historical justice—are still evident today in our fondness for counterfactual tales. Alternate histories of the Civil War and WWII abound, but here, Gallagher shows how the counterfactual habit of replaying the recent past often shapes our understanding of the actual events themselves. The counterfactual mode lets us continue to envision our future by reconsidering the range of previous alternatives. Throughout this engaging and eye-opening book, Gallagher encourages readers to ask important questions about our obsession with counterfactual history and the roots of our tendency to ask “What if…?”

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Political Science, Alternate History

367 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 18, 2018

About the author

Catherine Gallagher is an American historicist literary critic and Victorianist, and Professor Emerita of English at UC Berkeley. She has authored influential works including Nobody’s Story, The Body Economic, and Telling It Like It Wasn’t. Gallagher has received the Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Jacques Barzun Prize, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2020.

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A literary history of counterfacticity, focused on how modern concepts of war are the site for the first formalized theoretical efforts at counterfactual thinking, and then moving on to counterfactual narratives, both speculative and fictional about how wars might have gone differently and what impacts these differences would have made — ranging from American narratives about the Civil War to British narratives about WWII.

What becomes apparent is that for all the unfashionability of counterfactual history writing in mainstream professional history (it’s mostly ghettoized in economic and military history), thinking in terms of implied counterfactuals is essentially impossible when trying to assess any history concerning decision-making. What different decisions could have been made? And what difference would this have made to the outcomes?

A limitation of the book is its exclusive focus on Anglo-American counterfactual traditions. I’d have liked at least some glances at how counterfactuality has been expressed in either literary or historiography terms in other countries — Germany, France, Russia, China…

[Mike Kanner · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book, although more academic than I expected.

Gallagher starts by establishing a difference between counterfactual (an event change, but actual individuals) and alternate (whole new timelines with fictional characters) histories. She then traces the use of counterfactual history in military history, political propaganda, law, and public policy. However, she stops short of discussing the work on counterfactuals and causal inference that has been done in political science, especially the work by Judea Pearl.

The last half of the text consists of three chapters where she does a deep dive on alternate histories of the American Civil War, World War 2 England, and the possibility of a Nazi Britain. Here there may be cause for selection bias, but the bulk of her arguments is how specific novels traded on the political culture and politics of the US and England during and immediately preceding the two periods.

I would have liked to see a discussion on whether counterfactual and alternate histories hold similar positions in other countries. However, this may be the focus of another text by someone whose specialty is comparative literature.