Postmodern Historiography in the Alternate History Genre

Abstract

Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, creates an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh is elected the President of the United States by defeating Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election. Roth’s adoption of the alternate history genre adds a new dimension to the tradition of historical novels and novelistic historiography in which a history, among many possible plotlines, is rendered a product of writing and representation. Reflecting the arbitrary process of history-writing, the counterfactual history of The Plot foregrounds the possibilities for change lurking in the course of history that can take unexpected turns at any given moment. Here, “alternate” does not mean simply “unreal” or “counterfactual” but connotes “virtual,” “probable,” and even “real.” The novel’s realism originates from two points. Firstly, Roth germinates an imaginary terror from seeds that existed in the actual past of the 1940s when the undercurrents of fascism and anti-Semitism were prevalent. Secondly, the virtual holocaust in turn evokes the long but often obscured history of institutionalized violence and racism against Jewish-, Native-, African-, and Asian-Americans. In so doing, he poses criticism of American exceptionalism and the official rhetoric of the American Dream. The novel’s ending implies that there is no Puritan origin for Americans to return to, since American innocence is a myth, an image retrospectively constructed just like one’s “childhood” or “history.” Accordingly, The Plot can be read as a bildungsroman portraying the growth of the nation that provides an alternative to Benjamin Franklin’s origin myth of the American Dream.