Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (11 page)

There is only one problem with the narrative revival, and it is the perennial problem of applying literary forms to history. Literary genres are to some extent predictable: indeed, that is part of their appeal. Often, we read a favourite novel or watch a ‘classic’ film knowing exactly how it will end. And even if a piece is unknown to us - and there is no dustjacket or programme to give us the gist of the story - we can still often infer from its genre roughly how it will turn out. If a play is from the outset a comedy, we subconsciously rule out the possibility of carnage in the final act; if it is clearly a tragedy, we do the opposite. Even where an author notionally keeps the reader ‘in suspense’ - as in a detective whodunnit - the outcome is to some extent predictable: according to the conventions of the genre, a criminal will be caught, a crime solved. The professional writer writes with the ending in mind and frequently hints at it to the reader for the sake of irony, or some other effect. As Gallie has argued: ‘To follow a story ... involves ... some vague appreciation of its drift or direction ... and appreciation of how what comes later depends upon what came earlier, in the sense that but for the latter, the former could not have, or could hardly have occurred in the way that it did occur.’
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The same point is made by Scriven: ‘A good play must develop in such a way that we ... see the development as necessary, i.e. can explain it.’
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Martin Amis’s novel
Time’s Arrow
thus merely makes explicit what is implicit in all narratives: the end literally precedes the beginning.
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Amis tells the life story of a Nazi doctor backwards, in the guise of a narrator within him who ‘knows something he seems unable to face: ... the future always comes true’. Thus the old man who ‘emerges’ from his death bed in an American hospital is ‘doomed’ to perform experiments on prisoners in the Nazi death camps and to ‘depart’ the world as an innocent infant. In literature, to adapt a phrase of Ernst Bloch, ‘he true genesis is not in the beginning but in the end’: time’s arrow always implicitly points the wrong way. Amis makes the point well when he describes a chess match in reverse: beginning in ‘disarray’, and going ‘through episodes of contortion and crosspurpose. But things work out. ... All that agony - it all works out. One final tug on the white pawn, and perfect order is restored.’

To write history according to the conventions of a novel or play is therefore to impose a new kind of determinism on the past: the teleology of the traditional narrative form. Gibbon, for all his awareness of contingency when considering particular events, subsumed a millennium and a half of European history under the supreme teleological title. If he had published his great work as A
History of Europe and the Middle East, AD 100-1400
rather than
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, his narrative would have lost its unifying theme. Likewise Macaulay: there is an undeniable tendency in the
History of England
to present the events of the seventeenth century as leading to the constitutional arrangements of the nineteenth. This was the form of teleology which Collingwood later saw as integral to history: the assumption that the present was always the end-point (and implicitly the only possible end-point) of the historian’s chosen narrative. But (as with fiction) history written in this fashion might as well be written backwards, like the backwards history of Ireland which the writer ‘AE’ imagined in 1914:

This, as AE himself joked, was merely the nationalist ‘mythistory’, mistakenly bound back to front.

The past - like real-life chess, or indeed any other game - is different; it does not have a predetermined end. There is no author, divine or otherwise; only characters, and (unlike in a game) a great deal too many of them. There is no plot, no inevitable ‘perfect order’; only endings, since multiple events unfold simultaneously, some lasting only moments, some extending far beyond an individual’s life. Once again, it was Robert Musil who put his finger on this essential difference between history proper and mere stories. In a chapter in
The Man without Qualities
entitled ‘Why does one not invent history?’, Ulrich - who, symbolically, is on board a tram - reflects on:

Ulrich rejects the possibility that ‘world history was a story that ... came into existence just the same way as all other stories’, because ‘nothing new ever occurred to authors, and one copied from another’. On the contrary, ‘history ... came into existence for the most part without any authors. It evolved not from the centre, but from the periphery, from minor causes’. Moreover, it unfolds in a fundamentally chaotic way, like an order transmitted in whispers from one end of a column of soldiers which begins as ‘Sergeant major to move to the head of the column’ but ends as ‘Eight troopers to be shot immediately’:

The law of world history was thus simply ‘muddling through’:

This line of argument disconcerts Ulrich - so much so (and as if to prove the point) that he loses his own way home.

In short, history is not a story any more than it is a tram journey; and historians who persist in trying to write it as a story might as well follow Amis or AE and write it backwards. The reality of history, as Musil suggests, is that the end is unknown at the beginning of the journey: there are no rails leading predictably into the future, no timetables with destinations set out in black and white. Much the same point was made by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. The author imagines a labyrinth-cum-novel devised by an imaginary Chinese sage, Ts’ui Pen, in which ‘time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures’:

The work’s imaginary translator goes on:

Variations on this theme recur throughout Borges’s work. In the idealists’ imaginary world described in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, ‘works of fiction contain a single plot with all its imaginable permutations’.
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In ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, an imaginary ancient lottery evolves into an all-embracing way of life; what begins as ‘an intensification of chance, a periodical infusion of chaos into the universe’ becomes an infinite process in which ‘no decision is final, all branch into others’.‘Babylon is nothing less than an infinite game of chance.’
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The metaphor is changed, but the same theme developed, in‘The Library of Babel’ and ’The Zahir’. Similar images can also be found in Mallarmé’s poem ‘Un Coup de dés’
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or Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’:

For the historian, the implications of this are clear. As even Scriven has conceded:

There is a close (and far from accidental) parallel between the questioning of narrative determinism by writers like Musil and Borges and the questioning of classical Laplacian determinism by twentieth-century scientists. This is something which, regrettably, historians have tended to ignore (as E. H. Carr did when confronted by the theory of black holes), or simply to misunderstand. Thus a great many of those philosophers of history who have argued in this century about whether history was a ‘science’ seem not to have grasped that their notion of science was an out-of-date relic of the nineteenth century. What is more, if they had paid closer attention to what their scientific colleagues were actually doing, they would have been surprised - perhaps even pleased - to find that they were asking the wrong question. For it is a striking feature of a great many modern developments in the natural sciences that they have been fundamentally historical in character, in that they have been concerned with changes over time. Indeed, for this reason it is not wholly frivolous to turn the old question on its head and ask not ‘Is history a science?’ ‘but Is science history?’

This is true even of the relatively old second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases - that is, that disorder will tend to increase if things are left to themselves, and that even attempts to create order have the ultimate effect of decreasing the amount of ordered energy available. This is of profound historical importance, not least because it implies an ultimate and
disorderly
end to the history of human life and indeed the universe. Einstein’s theory of relativity too has implications for historical thinking, since it dispenses with the notion of absolute time. After Einstein, we now realise that each observer has his own measure of time: were I to rise high above the earth, it would seem that events below were taking longer to happen because of the effect of the earth’s gravitational field on the speed of light. However, even relative time has only one direction or ‘arrow’, principally because of entropy and the effect of entropy on our psychological perception of time: even the energy expended in recording an event in our memory increases the amount of disorder in the universe.

Disorder increases. Nothing travels faster than light. Contrary to the expectations of nineteenth-century positivists, however, not every process in the natural world can be summed up in such clear-cut laws. One of the most important scientific developments of the late nineteenth century was the realisation that the majority of statements about the relationships between natural phenomena were no more than probabilistic in nature. Indeed, the American C. S. Peirce proclaimed the end of determinism as early as 1892 in his book
The Doctrine of Necessity Examined
: ‘Chance itself pours in at every avenue of sense: it is of all things the most obtrusive,’ declared Peirce. ‘Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third.’
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Decisive evidence for this came in 1926 when Heisenberg demonstrated that it is impossible to predict the future position and velocity of a particle accurately, because its present position can only be measured using at least a quantum of light. The shorter the wavelength of light used, the more accurate the measurement of the particle’s position - but also the greater disturbance to its velocity. Because of this ‘uncertainty principle’, quantum mechanics can only predict a number of possible outcomes for a particular observation and suggest which is more likely. As Stephen Hawking has said, this ‘introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness in science’ at the most fundamental level.
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Indeed, it was precisely this which Einstein, faithful as he remained to the ideal of a Laplacian universe, found so objectionable. As he put it in his famous letter to Max Born: