Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain

alternate history, contingency, necessity

Sometimes I teach courses on the historical novel in English since 1945. I do this more or less in order to create an entry point for students of literature to begin to grasp the sorts of questions Marxists might ask about literature, about the relationship between history and the novel, and the bewildering predicates “history” takes on in such a conjunction. We read Lukács because he is great and because his writing on the historical novel is some of the finest Marxist literary criticism ever written, making the only possible argument for realism and the realist tradition against would-be Marxist modernists. Lukács as some will know finds in the bourgeois historical novel—War and Peace is his great exemplar—a machine for progressive historical consciousness that, he implies, will have been necessary for the rising proletariat in its revolutionary struggle against capitalism. He is writing from Moscow in the 30s, with all the hopes and horrors one might imagine, and in part his aim is prescriptive, a two-pronged attack on both the modernist novel championed in Paris and New York and the social realist one promoted in Moscow. The historical novel that he imagines has not been written, and none of the 20^th century novelists he assesses quite manage to put it all together. Perry Anderson summarizes Lukacs prescriptive model as follows:

Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose lives are reshaped by sweeping social forces. Famous historical figures will feature among the dramatis personae, but their roles in the tale will be oblique or marginal. Narratives will centre instead on middling characters, of no great distinction, whose function is to offer an individual focus for the dramatic collision of opposing extremes between whom they stand, or more often waver. What Scott’s novels then stage is a tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of social life, in a vision of the past that honours the losers but upholds the historical necessity of the winners. The classic historical novel, inaugurated by Waverley, is an affirmation of human progress, in and through the conflicts that divide societies and the individuals within them.

Historical typicality of characters; encounter with historical subjects who are not the narrative protagonists; a dialectics of protagonicity in which the contradictions of class society are internalized as character and externalized as action; a treatment of history as the unfolding of a two-sided necessity, where historical suffering is the concomitant of progress; and a treatment of history that looks forward to the moment of its writing, not attempting to capture the past as it really was but the past as prehistory of the author’s present. In his essay for the LRB, Anderson, who is notorious for the wideness of his reading, tells us that few novels in the 20^th century lived up to this model. He can find only a few, mostly from the peripheries of the world system: from the 1950s “Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairene Trilogy . . .and in Indonesia and Arabia two remarkable cycles of nationalist fiction that can be regarded as, in their way, cousins of Mahfouz: Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, composed between 1975 and 1985, and Abdelrahman Munif’s quintet, Cities of Salt, written in the 1980s and already much freer in its handling of time and probability.” The problem, it turns out, is the necessity for a progressive historical consciousness—if one relaxes the criterion, then there are more candidates, for example, Giovanni Di Lampedusa’s exquisite The Leopard which fulfills Lukacs model completely except that it is pointedly anti-progressive, treating history as the slow unfolding of a bourgeois world which erases all traces of the aristocratic past. I would add, also, James Welch’s brilliant Fools Crow, which confronts squarely the genocide of Native Americans and Welch’s own ancestor with a consciousness of the future that is not progressive but seeks to preserve his ancestry and the historical past of the Americas.

What is lost for the most part after 1945 and this is certainly true of American literature is not just the sense of history as progressive but also the notion of historical necessity itself. This is a key element in what Jameson diagnosed as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” and to which he gives the name “waning of historicity.” Communism is our antiquity, as I’ve said. Whereas Marx, Lukacs, most socialists and many liberals alike once thought communism the certain future of humanity, it now seems uncertain that humanity even has one, and certainly few today feel that communism is the only future for humanity – indeed too few believe it is a future all for reasons that ultimately originate in the stagnation of capitalism and its senescence. For me this doesn’t mean that Lukacs is wrong about the historical novel as machine for historical consciousness—in fact, I believe the historical novel is perhaps the only form of the realist novel that has life left in it. What it does mean is that the kind of historical consciousness compatible with the communist prospect today is entirely different than Lukacs imagines.

This is a very long preamble to my main topic, which is Terry Bisson’s alternate history novel Fire on the Mountain. This is quite simply an excellent, beautiful, and deeply revolutionary book. I am tempted to say that it is a shame it is not better known—and it is—but there is a sense in which the book is simply too revolutionary. If you are a communist and you know something about American history this book will blow you away, but unfortunately that is a very small reading demographic and perhaps readers who lack these predicates find it bewildering. For me it's like discovering an old friend, if something is even possible. What’s interesting is that Bisson manages to produce, in my mind, a deeply hopeful and furthermore believable vision of historical progress whose ultimate bequest is to the optimism of revolutionaries in the  bleak 1980s. Bisson apparently began writing this novel, in which John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry succeeds, while imprisoned for refusing to testify to a grand jury. He was part of the John Brown Anti-Klan Action Committee and May 19^th Committee, groups connected to the Weather Underground. The grand jury was likely connected to a series of bombing in the early 80s, for which Marilyn Buck and others were later convicted. The JBAKC put antiracism and antifascist work front and center, counterprotesting white supremacist rallies and are a point of contact between the Weather Underground networks and 80/90s antifascism. Bisson dedicates his novel to Kuwasi Balagoon and the Black Liberation Army, and the PM press re-issue of the book contains a glowing preface from Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Jameson has said that science fiction and the historical novel are mirror images of each other, and the alternate history novel is perhaps the clearest testament to this connection. Bisson embeds a historical novel within his alternate history—the characters in 1950s Nova Africa, in a universe where world socialism is triumphant, encounter a manuscript retelling the events of Brown’s victory at Harper’s Ferry, and the subsequent guerrilla war, from the perspective of a slave who eventually joined Brown and Tubman’s army and went on to participate in the socialist revolutions of the 19^th century. Here is a perfect middle character—a slave who has more freedom than many freedmen, living at the very edge of slave society in West Virginia who encounters Brown himself obliquely and does not participate in many of the central battles and events, which remain murky. Bisson also writes, I must say, one of the most unselfconscious black characters by a white writer I can think. It is as if this alternate timeline allowed Bisson to liberate himself of the writerly burden of white guilt.

But what I wanted to say is that this novel recovers the progressive historical consciousness that Lukacs idealizes in perhaps the only way possible, not by narrativizing necessity but by exploring contingency. Here is the world which Marx and Engels expected, a world where there is no Lukács because the revolution begins in the late 19^th century, as expected. Bisson’s book is marvelously engaged with the history of socialism and abolition and 19^th century revolutionaries. He knows his history, and the novel might be read as an extended meditation in novel form on the potencies within W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction. This is a universe where Brown and Tubman rout Lee from the Blue Ridge, threatening to sweep through the cotton belt in a socialist version of Sherman’s march, where  “there is talk of an international detachment of Garibaldini gathering in Mexico to aid the rebels and, some say, recapture Texas and even California” and “German socialists, veterans of ’48 are openly drilling with arms in Union Square,” where “in St. Louis street fighting has erupted between the Socialists and the Know-Nothings and local Copperheads.”

I am trying to reserve some details for the reader, since this post is a recommendation and the novel is full of surprises. The treatment of Lincoln is a delight as is the handling of 1950s socialist world, its pro-ecological technology and projects of reconstruction. What is remarkable is how little Europe seems to figure in this world—Africa has become a center of world development, and people travel by airship from Nova Africa to Africa. This is of course a vision of American and world revolution, for readers who know, that derives directly from the 1920s and 1930s CPUSA, where the US would be ripped apart by various national liberation movements, establishing a Black nation in the black belt of the South. This model was influential upon the 60s and 70s Marxist-Leninist groups that came out of the Weather Underground such as the May 19^th Organizing Committee, which was fully oriented toward national liberation movements and people’s war as the revolutionary horizon in the US and elsewhere. The novel maps 60s and 70s guerrilla insurgencies back into the past. I am of course critical of these programmatic politics, and ambivalence about nationalism and the state within Leninism. But this is a world in which, just as there is no Lukacs there is also no Lenin or Stalin—the dialectic of socialism and communism unfolded differently, so who knows what there is or isn’t to criticize. In a way, the novel asks me to consider the contingency of many of these positions, the fact that their meaning derives from the whole of a history that is here wholly different. I’m not a flag guy but this moment in the novel, where the protagonist sees Brown’s army and their red black and green flag, gives me chills:

There were sixteen of them, mounted on fair-to-good horses, with one mount doubled. They all held identical Sharps carbines at the ready, blackened with soot so that they wouldn’t gleam; and they were all masked. They all had black faces but several had white hands showing through the laid on soot…I had never seen so many black men on horseback, carrying such weapons. But the most astonishing thing all was, they carried a flag—a new flag, an unknown flag. It was big as a sail, and green and black and red in broad stripes, like Ahmad’s of the Sudan or Garibaldi’s flag of Italy (though I had seen neither at the time); all I knew was that it was not the American flag and the man carrying it was black like me.

If this were a moment in a realist novel, it would likely make Lukács shout for joy—inasmuch as The Historical Novel is also an engagement with Stalinist popular front politics --but what would he say about Bisson’s novel? I think it’s clear he would hate it from the outset, linking the entire genre of the alternative history novel to a reactionary probabilistic and ultimately Nietschzean (or perhaps Benjaminian) ontology of history. There is a beautiful moment in Mumia Abu-Jamal’s preface—reading from confinement a book begun in confinement and against, among other things, confinement—where he mentions many-worlds theory:

According to classic multi-dimensional theory, there are thousands (millions?) of alternative universes where every probability has its potential fruition. If that is so, there is one where Fire on the Mountain is not sci-fi but a history book on what was.

No doubt L. would link this view to Nietschze on the eternal return, if not Blanqui’s Eternity by the Stars, also written from confinement and which advances a similar philosophy, perhaps, as response to the despair of a failed revolutionary. I’m not so sure, however, and don’t think the novel encourages a passive acceptance of one’s place among an infinity of possible timelines. I think it focuses the reader on the real tasks of revolution and that we do not really know what will or will not work. In fact, I think it’s one of the finest novelistic treatments of revolution I’ve read.