Catherine Gallagher's importance as a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture and a historian and theorist of the novel makes the appearance of a new monograph by her an event for Victorianists (among others). This is true even when few of the materials she discusses are, strictly speaking, Victorian, as is the case with her new book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Gallagher traces the emergence and development of analytic and narrative discourses premised on counterfactual-historical hypotheses. As the author explains, these hypotheses are past-tense, conditional conjectures “pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact,” such as, to take her two major examples, What if the South won the Civil War? and What if the Nazis had invaded Britain? Bringing together what Gallagher calls “counterfactual histories,” which are more analytical than narrative and typically consider multiple unrealized possibilities; works of “alternate history,” which describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record but draw their dramatis personae exclusively from that record; and “the alternate-history novel, [which] invents not only alternative-historical trajectories but also fictional characters,” Telling It Like It Wasn't explores the distinctive uses and dynamic interactions of these forms over the past two centuries and considers their implications for our understanding of more conventional fiction and historiography.

The Caribbean's middleness within anthropological literature has been recognized and progressively untangled by scholars like Sidney Mintz and David Scott. The dialectics that figure the Caribbean as a perennially contingent space, always embodying too little and too much of the values that bound discourses of colonial modernity, frame the arguments in both Victorian Jamaica and Empire of Neglect. Both books respond to the problem of an ill-fitting Caribbean, especially after the formal abolition of slavery gave way to apprenticeships and inaugurated an uneven process of gaining political freedoms. Victoria's six-decade reign over the British Empire witnessed the expansion of liberal capitalism, reformulations of state and planter relationships, and movements for political rights under empire. Insurgencies and rebellions dotted the landscape of empire, from India (1857–59) and Jamaica (1865) to the Zulu territories (1879) and Alexandria in Egypt (1879–82). Empire responded to subjects who exposed its shaky footings through greater repression, social reform, and ballasting the civilizing mission from above. From below, colonized subjects inhabited empire in resistant, calculative, and often contradictory modes that revealed the undoing of imperial ambitions in practice. The Caribbean's marginalization in post-emancipation political economy, as the British Empire occupied more territory in Africa and Asia, produced many such complex habitations of empire that superficially may appear, pace Mintz, to be culturally midway between there and here.

Historians of social science from Anthony Giddens forward have ably chronicled Erving Goffman's legacy. Goffman's resonant book titles alone hint at the Dickensian acuity of his social close-reading: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Behavior in Public Places (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). I envy newcomers the opportunity to read pieces like “On Cooling the Mark Out” (1952) and “Where the Action Is” (1967) with fresh eyes. Goffman, born in 1922 in Alberta, Canada, to Ukrainian parents, attended the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto before receiving a PhD in sociology from Chicago. His fieldwork was in the Shetlands, and Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) were both written after a period of ethnographic immersion at St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington, DC. It may help first-time readers to know that as an adolescent he had a “special aptitude for noticing details of people's interpersonal conduct”; also that “his Chicago classmates nicknamed him ‘the little dagger’ because of his talent for the pointed personal comment. Sometimes, they felt, he never knew when to stop.”

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) imagines the environmental consequences of two important Victorian horticultural trends: artificial selection and selective breeding. Victorian horticulturalists glorified these techniques as steps toward the subjugation of the natural environment. This horticultural narrative of environmental control seemingly reaches its apex in the novel's future world of 802,701: Wells's Time Traveller believes he has entered an environment perfectly engineered to suit human needs. While critical attention has typically focused on the novel's humans, I use its engagement with contemporary horticulture to describe a plant-centered plotline. Building on critical work that argues for the possibility of nonhuman narrative agency, I read the novel's plants as minor characters. I argue that Wells's novel pits its plant and human characters against one another in competing plotlines, in a narrative refraction of ecological competition. Earlier ecocritical analyses of Victorian works have pointed to the harmonious entanglement of humans with the nonhuman vegetal environment. I argue that ecological competition, as exemplified both in horticultural narratives’ descriptions of environmental subjugation and in Wells's competing plant and human plots, was also a significant source of inspiration for Victorian environmental depictions.

“To engage seriously with ordinary language philosophy,” Toril Moi tells us in the introduction to Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, “is a little like undergoing psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein assumes that we don't begin doing philosophy just for the sake of it, but because something is making us feel confused, as if we had lost our way.” As Moi begins her project of explaining to an audience of literary critics the insights of ordinary-language philosophy, represented primarily by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell, and making a case for the value of their ideas for the practice we usually call close reading, this psychoanalytic metaphor makes a sudden turn to diagnosis, or to the initiation of a kind of therapeutic address that can feel coercive even in its charisma. You must recognize your sickness, Moi insists, before you can be receptive to the treatment. “Who wants to undergo philosophical therapy,” she goes on to ask, “if they feel that everything in their intellectual life is just fine as it is? Paradoxically, then, the best readers of the reputedly ‘conservative’ Wittgenstein might be those who genuinely feel the need for a change” (12). What kind of therapeutic project does Moi want to pursue in this book, which begins by distinguishing the best readers (the readiest patients) from those who think, conservatively, that everything is “just fine as it is”?

“If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election …” Wouldn't it be nice to climb down into that imaginative rabbit hole and stay there for a while? The possibilities are so reassuringly normal—as opposed to the strange nightmare in which we find ourselves today. For the purposes of this roundtable, however, I wish to consider only one small potential consequence of a Hillary win: and that is what it would have been like to read Catherine Gallagher's new book if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. I would probably have experienced Telling It Like It Wasn't as a fascinating intellectual history of a mode or a discourse that has enormous political purchase today, largely as a result of its “affiliation with legal and political historical justice projects.” Although thinkers of all political persuasions use this mode, Gallagher explains, the political counterfactual has played a particularly prominent role in “the pressure exerted by the civil rights movement in favor of a Second Reconstruction, affirmative action programs, and claims for reparations” (124–25). It has served as a way to right the wrongs of history, in other words, and as such has served us extremely well. Or, at least, that is how I would have felt if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. But she did not. As a result, rather than simple intellectual pleasure and political hopefulness, reading Telling It Like It Wasn't filled me with a strong sense of dread.

In thinking about Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't, let us first consider three almost random, and definitely unrelated, examples:

In February 2003 my close friend Jeff Hubbard died in a car accident, taking the curve of an icy metro Detroit highway exit ramp too fast late one weekend night. He was twenty years old and had been living at home with his parents since we graduated from high school, working odd jobs—a host at a Mexican restaurant, a temporary letter carrier for the USPS—and helping take care of his young nephew. I was in college in New York, and a friend called to give me the news. I knew that I needed to go home to Michigan for the funeral to believe that it had really happened.

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.

Once asked his opinion on the appropriateness of irony to poetry, the poet Charles Olson reportedly answered, “I don't get the ‘iron’ in it.” There are few who have the ability to be as (delightfully) literal-minded as Olson in this quip, and then there's Elaine Freedgood: so literalist that she probably would get the iron in irony. Surely, if iron were to be found in figurative language, Freedgood would be the first to uncover it, track it to its sources, and tell us about its extraction, manufacture, and circuits of global exchange. Similarly, if we were to ask Freedgood to interpret Olson's meaning, she might first investigate the history of iron and steel production in the United States—discovering how the industry grew, peaked, and then sharply contracted during Olson's lifetime, with centers of production shifting from the Rust Belt to locations in Japan, the Soviet Union, and, later, China. She might also relate that steel was once the largest industry in Olson's hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, and the American Steel & Wire Company its largest employer, until the company withered and finally shuttered in 1977, just a few years after Olson's death. Through such a literalist lens, we would surely begin to see how, having lived his entire life in a world of steel, Olson could neither fail to notice the iron in irony nor allow it to stand as an abstraction. Becoming alert to these extended contexts, we might begin to hear, underlying the deadpan, the way Olson recalls his audience to working-class realities while commenting on the manner in which figurative and poetic language can alternately mask or reveal—make palpable or render abstract—the material foundations of our lives, caught up as they are in structures and movements of global capital.

One salutary effect of encountering the often bizarre materials—Leibniz's possible worlds theory, war-games played in Prussian military academies, books about the presidency of Jefferson Davis—that Catherine Gallagher has assembled in Telling It Like It Wasn't is that one obtains a better purchase on the deep weirdness that also informs normal realist novels. That weirdness is central to the realist tradition's historical fictions especially, by virtue of the peculiar manner in which they compound together fictional invention and referentiality and call on readers to traverse the ontological chasms between the two.

Even before I heard about this celebration of Elaine Freedgood's work and mentorship, I was already thinking about how I'd come to know her and about the numerous ways she has shaped my writing and my writing life. This reflection was prompted, inadvertently, by Elaine herself. A little while back, Elaine wrote me an email with the always-thoughtful subject line, “How are you, my friend?” Except, Elaine had forgotten the comma after “you,” so it read instead, “How are you my friend?” This message made me laugh, as did her subsequent response about leaving out that crucial comma. Elaine came to be an unusually generous mentor through the most usual of circumstances. I was first put in touch with her when she came to Berkeley to give a talk called “The Secret Life of Diegesis,” five years ago. I have a vivid memory of the emails we'd exchanged about booking flights and reserving hotel rooms and all that—usually these would be somewhat tedious issues to sort through, but Elaine's typically dry humor enlivened even the driest of topics. When asked if she wanted to “be a trooper” and take a red-eye over to the West Coast, she responded, “Thanks so much. I would be a trooper if necessary but of course would rather be a pathetic middle-aged person (i.e., myself).”

The occasion for this collection of responses to Telling It Like It Wasn't is a conference titled “Novel Theory.” Given this conjuncture, it seems only obvious to pose the question: What does a counterfactual theory of the novel look like? Of course, there is no single theory of the novel, but there is a book and a thinker most closely associated with the phrase, “theory of the novel,” and that is Georg Lukács. And while Theory of the Novel is the obvious text to revisit to counterfactually historicize and/or theorize, it seems more worthwhile for the history of Europe's counterfactual historical imagination to turn to Lukács's other great text, one that features somewhat prominently in Gallagher's book—namely, The Historical Novel.

The allusion in my title, of course, is to Marion King Hubbert's theory of “peak oil,” that moment in history when petroleum production reaches maximum output and then begins to decline. But Peak Freedgood is not Time's fool. It is an ever-fixèd mark: a quality or an intensity rather than a quantity; a stretch of Elaine Freedgood's work in which she is most like herself—when Elaineness production reaches maximum output. Such passages can be encountered in every book and article she's ever published, but the one I'll start with appears in a 2010 New Literary History essay called “Fictional Settlements” focused on Catharine Parr Traill's Canadian Crusoes (1852).

I want to begin my remarks by steaming, as a philatelist would a coveted stamp, a single word off the envelope of Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't. The word occurs in the introduction, where Gallagher is establishing the boundaries of her subject by offering a sample counterfactual-historical premise: “If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1963 and had lived to be a two-term president, the war in Vietnam would have been over by 1968.” The Kennedy premise, Gallagher goes on to say, “is not attempting to call the assassination into question or to imply that we should look into it more deeply; it is simply asserting that but for the assassination, history would likely have taken a different path. Insisting on this definition of ‘historical counterfactual’ at the outset should not only clarify the topic but also emphasize that the works under discussion are hinged onto the actual historical record, usually at a juncture that is widely recognized to have been both crucial and underdetermined.”