A Historicity in Contemporary Pseudohistorical Narratives: Typological Permutations in Matt Ruff’s The Mirage (2012)

Abstract

This essay examines Matt Ruff’s “The Mirage” (2012), which relies on theoretical resources related to the typological and generic expectations of the alternate-history genre. Written in the years following the events of 9/11, the novel incorporates the event into the popular genre of pseudohistorical novels. The paper explores how the counterfactual developments of history presented in the novel not only introduce an alternative to the event and its aftermath―thus, succeeding to narratively normalize them―but also exemplify attempts in contemporary pseudohistorical narratives to deconstruct the genre’s poetics. As a mirror satire, the text focuses mainly on the transposition of temporal and spatial dimensions of contemporary historical evolutions while the deformation of the past becomes a complex, multifaceted phenomenon; however, despite the apparent presentist character, the irrelevance of the deformed past, the novel fails to exert a normative force for the future in its world-building since the narration does not present history in terms of determinism and contingency, rather it collapses past, present, and future in the form of ahistorical postmodernism.