E Pluribus Unum?: Disintegrating the Melting Pot Myth in American Science Fiction Narratives of National Fragmentation

Abstract

The main aim of this chapter is to explore a series of alternative history novels that challenge the main narrative of the United States of America as a unified nation by envisioning inverted, divided or fragmented (hi)stories of the nation-state. The key implication will be that these novels act as narratives that contest and undermine the prevailing notion of the US as an exceptional nation with a manifest destiny, as a melting pot where preceding ethnicities merge to forge a radically new egalitarian national identity, and present the country instead as the site of ideological, political and racial fragmentation. The analysis will use the well-known notions delineated by Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, who claim that nations rely intensely and continuously on narratives of unity, uniformity and conformity which produce a necessarily reductive image of national identity, in order to read the reversed, disjointed Americas presented in the novels as discursive confrontations with received conceptions, and to contend that racial politics is a common ghostly appearance whenever the predominant narrative of the US nation-state is antagonized. In this sense, it is revealing that the novel that first uses national fragmentation as a literary motif is Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1952), where the Confederacy seceded from the Union as a result of its victory in the American Civil War. The motif has continued to be revisited often, as this chapter will show, and the novels that have imagined the US as a country divided into different independent (and often incompatible) states or confederations include, among others, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which presents a nation divided into three different states after the US lost the Second World War, or J.G. Ballard’s Hello America (1981), which completely inverts US geographical features and political landscape, and the more recent The Disunited States of America (2006) by Harry Turtledove and The Divided States of America (2020) by Aithal. 

History? […] It is a noble study. But what is history? How is it written? How is it read? Is it a dispassionate chronicle of events scientifically determined and set down in the precise measure of their importance? Is this ever possible? Or is it the transmutation of the ordinary into the celebrated? Or the cunning distortion which gives a clearer picture than accurate blueprints?

—Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee

How that man can write, he thought. Completely carried me away. Real. Fall of Berlin to the British, as vivid as if it had actually taken place. […] Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke. No wonder it’s banned within Reich territory.

—Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

However, once the seeds of separation were sown in people’s mind, they gave up on the willingness to coexist. Many believed that the only solution to survive would be to go their own way.

—Aithal, The Divided States of America