Creating an imaginary world or preserving the truth of history?

Are these lost worlds just a play of the imagination, or do they hold some of the truth of history? Nazman starts from this question, in this book, Emmanuel Carrer is not trying to rewrite the past, nor is he trying to create an imaginary world. What he explores is our relationship with history; The long-standing belief that the past, once realized, is only the past, was also possible.

Iranian Ambassador of Arjan's History Service (Ambassador of Arjan) - Anahid Khazeer: The book "Nazman: Alternative History" written by Emmanuel Karrer and translated by Qasim Momeni was published by Charkh Publishing House. Carrer's book is a reflection on the fragility of the past, the past is not a solid and solid building, it is a series of possibilities, only one of which has been realized. Maybe that's why sometimes you have to dare to understand what really happened and think about what never happened.

Worlds that could have been and never were

History is not something that must inevitably happen; That is what happened. But behind every event lies a world of muted possibilities: worlds that could have come about and never did. Are these lost worlds just a play of the imagination, or do they hold some of the truth of history? Nazman starts from this question, in this book, Emmanuel Carrer is not trying to rewrite the past, nor is he trying to create an imaginary world. What he explores is our relationship with history; The long-standing belief that the past, once realized, is only the past, was also possible. Nazman turns this certainty into doubt. By opening a small crack in the heart of the past, it suddenly becomes clear that what is obvious today could never have existed; Borders of countries, victories and defeats, revolutions, political systems and even the way we understand the world now, therefore Nazman is not an escape from history but another way to think about it.

Emmanuel Carrere is one of those writers of contemporary French literature that is difficult to include under common literary categories. Carrer began with film criticism, wrote a treatise on Werner Herzog, and the most detailed biography of Philip K. Dick, author of science fiction, was evident from the beginning with a deep interest in the slippery boundaries between reality and fiction. His special style, which many have called "non-fiction novel", is a mixture of essay, autobiography, autobiography and investigative journalism; A continuous effort to get to the truth and question the nature of the book you are holding, although it is one of his first works, it can be considered as the cornerstone of the mentality on which his later works were based.

Cruelly substituting another history for the real one

Emmanuel Carrere is a French writer, producer, screenwriter and film director. He has also won awards such as Femina Award and Renaud Award. He is the son of Louis Edouard Carrere, often known as Louis Carrere after his mother, the historian and member of the Académie française, Helene Carrere. He is also the cousin of the philosopher Francois Zourabivishvili. Carrer first published the book in 1986, when he was still an almost unknown author, under the title Bering Strait, and it won the Grand Prize for Speculative Literature. The same book was republished in 2025, nearly forty years later, with a more straightforward name. This republishing itself is a proof of the transformation of the subject of the book, what was once a marginal idea, today it has become a cultural and comprehensive logic.

Karrer borrowed the book's initial title from a poignant anecdote that he says offers a fundamental insight into the nature of the "incident": after Stalin's death and his secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, became distraught, a notice was sent to subscribers of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. They were asked to cut out the page related to the entry "Beria" ("Ardent Comrade of the Proletariat") from the book with a razor blade and replace it with a new entry that was attached to the notice: an entry about the Bering Strait. This anecdote is more than a clever story a powerful metaphor for the function of "Nazman": the genre of "Nazman" is not just a kind of entertaining literary game, but can be a tool of violent and totalitarian elimination Mob; replacing Mercifully, another history instead of real history." This is where Nazman, or in a more popular term, "alternative history" connects to the political horrors of the 20th century and Orwellian "Big Brother" surveillance.

A kind of deep melancholy and dissatisfaction with the present

Nazman, in the simplest expression, is the time that governs us when we try to answer the question "What if...?" What would happen if oil was not nationalized? What would happen if Iran also had artillery in Chaldaran? What would happen if Shah Sultan Hossein's troops became invisible by eating broth cooked by Fath Ali Khan? And then, imagining the rest of the time, "as if" that "if" had come true. Nazman is the Utopia, which this time is imagined in time instead of place, and its imagination is realized in the imagination of the writer. However, Carr emphasizes a key distinction between these two concepts: "The work of utopia is to change what is; Or at least, it is not in vain to draw the maps of this change and this work: both the builders of civilization and the dreamers of better civilizations are engaged in this in their own ways. Nazaman's work, but it is scandalous to change what it has been.

But what motivates us or Nazman Novis to ask the question "What if?" Carr considers the main motivation to be a kind of deep melancholy and dissatisfaction with the present. Nazman Novis cannot bear a historical failure - for example, Napoleon's defeat in Waterloo - and he finds himself forced to correct this gross historical error. Carrer proposes two hypotheses for the flourishing of the Nazman genre: first, the continuous expansion of melancholy in our societies; And secondly, the increasing difficulty of understanding that tipping point where the potential becomes the actual.

Alternate history is about the past that did not happen

This study of youth period is not just a marginal work in Emmanuel Carrer's career, but it can be considered as the key word or the cornerstone of understanding his intellectual world. Concepts such as the splitting of the identity of illusion and the fluid boundary between reality and fantasy, which are theoretically presented in Nazman's book, find a terrifying embodiment in all his subsequent works. The most direct and strongest link between this book and Carrer's later works is the story of the rival; The story of Jean-Claude Roman, who, after failing his medical exams, lived for eighteen years as if he were a doctor accredited by the World Health Organization. In this book, Carrer takes the reader on a journey among the most prominent examples of this genre and through their analysis, he outlines the course of "timeless" intellectual development, but all this is an excuse to propose subtle and novel views about the most important bricks of the palace of literature. If what is not real is imaginary, then what is it that is not timeless? Nazman?

Nazaman: Alternate History is about a past that didn't happen, but could have happened. What if Napoleon had not been defeated at Waterloo? If Christ was not crucified, what other path would European history take? And on a more personal scale, what other life might begin if someone we saw on the bus yesterday returned our smile? From these counterfactual questions, Carrer enters the realm called "Uchrony": the rewriting of history from the point where an event changes and another world emerges from the same change.

The book moves between history, literature and psychology of longing

The book was first published in 1986 under the title Bering Strait, and nearly four decades later, Carr republished it under the title Ucroni and a new text. This interval is particularly important, because a work that was once written about a marginal genre is now being reread in a world where alternative history has gained a much wider presence in novels, cinema, television series, and popular culture. What was a kind of literary curiosity for Carrer in the eighties, today has become one of the common ways of imagining history.

The word "ocrony" is made from the same pattern as "utopia": if utopia is a place that does not exist, then an ocrony is a time that did not exist. In the 19th century, Charles Renouvier used the term for a history that could have happened, but did not. Carr goes beyond this simple definition and asks why people want to rewrite the past at all. His answer is not just curiosity. Behind many alternative histories is a kind of dissatisfaction with reality: a desire to fix what can no longer be fixed, to imagine a world in which no particular failure occurred, or to reconstruct a moment in which personal or collective life took a different course. For this reason, the book moves between history, literature and psychology of longing.

Carrer looks for examples from Renovier, Jorge Luis Borges, Roger Caiva, Philip K. Dick and other writers go on to show that Ochrony is not the only mind game with history. Each alternative history points to a point of reality that the author cannot be indifferent to. If one imagines a world in which Nazism has triumphed or another has failed, the choice of this historical point carries with it a certain judgment, fear, or aspiration.

Behind the gap are seen lives we have never lived

One of the memorable pictures of the book explains the origin of its old title. After the fall of Lavrenty Beria in the Soviet Union, the subscribers of the "Great Soviet Encyclopedia" were ordered to remove the entry about him from the book and replace it with an article about the "Bering Strait". The past should be corrected as if Beria never had that position. From this, Carrer arrives at another form of ochrony: the rewriting of the past not in literature, but as an instrument of power. Here, alternative history is no longer the freedom of imagination; It is an attempt to capture memory.

Today, the book is important from another angle, because it already contains many of Carrer's later literary obsessions. How solid is reality? If one small detail changes, can the whole life collapse? Where is the distance between reality and the narrative we create about it? The same questions were later, in much more complex forms, in works such as Mustache, his book about Philip K. Dick and then his documentary narratives return. In this sense, "Ocronie" is not a marginal work in Carrer's career; The younger version represents one of his enduring concerns. However, one should not expect from the book a comprehensive research on the history of counterfactual literature.

The text is a product of a period when Uchronic literature did not yet have the scope it has today, and the selection of examples is sometimes personal, scattered, and more a function of the author's curiosity than a complete academic classification. This limitation is now more obvious. But Carrer's prose and his ability to turn a theoretical issue into a personal question make the book still alive. Perhaps the most fascinating result of Ochrony (nominal: alternate history) is that alternate history is not always about another history. Sometimes it is about our inability to accept the history that has happened. Every little "if" opens a gap in reality; And behind that gap are lives that we have never lived.

An escape that comes to life with a spy adventure

At the end of the book, Emanuel Carrer writes: In concluding this short essay, I was looking for a way to explain two things. First, what brought me to this issue; Second, my reasons for turning my back on the inherently gloomy picture of the literature associated with this topic. It was at this time that, on the recommendation of a friend, I came to know about the existence of a novel published by Belgian poet Marcel Nommerer in 1978, entitled Bering Strait.

This novel is neither Nazman nor a story about parallel worlds. It is more like an implicit retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson's Lord of Balantra. At that time, two hostile and mismatched brothers are separated after a tragic divine test. They chase each other around the world in divergent paths and finally destroy each other without revealing their identity, however, the memory of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde leads us to consider them as only two potential and opposite aspects of a single human being. Numerer's novel, even though it is full of adventures, lacks this color and smell of moral allegory. His hero, who is an engineer on a business trip to Southeast Asia, is only happy to suddenly deviate his path and indulge in a long and arbitrary escape; A fugitive who lives with a spy adventure and drags him to the ice of the Bering Strait.

But as he deviates from the predetermined path of his company and, by extension, his family, position, and entire past life, he is careful to recreate all the steps of that original journey as well. He arranged for postcards and telexes to be sent from every hotel he was going to stay at. In this way, he masters both possible journeys, both the journey he is actually on and the journey he traces without experiencing it to prove that he has traveled it. The further these two paths diverge and the relentless events follow, the shakier this dominance becomes. But instead of dealing with the disastrous end of the story, I would like to limit myself to a quote from the first third of the book; The part right at the beginning of his escape sheds light on my motivations to wash my hands of those adolescent daydreams that Nazman gives life to.

The book "Nazman: Alternative History" written by Emanuel Karer and translated by Qasim Momeni was published in 153 pages at a price of 460,000 Tomans.

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