Retcon Game & Revising Reality

In his 2017 Retcon Game: Retroactive Continuity and the Hyperlinking of America, Andrew Friedenthal explores the role played by retconning in popular culture, before turning in his final chapter to Wikipedia and its perpetually revisable entries. Friedenthal focuses on Paul Revere’s Wikipedia entry, which was revised (and revised and revised) in 2011 after former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin made erroneous comments that her supporters then inserted, until the editors blocked further revision by freezing the page.

“Our own, real-world continuity,” concludes Friedenthal, “is constantly retroactively changing, and the fact that increasingly we accept this as the way of the world (and of the past) goes to show just how well our media and escapist entertainments have prepared us for this important moment.”

Of course, our own, real-world continuity is not retroactively changing. History in the sense of past events doesn’t change. The stories we tell about it, the history of history, does. Exploring that interplay is the focus of Nat Goldberg’s and my new book Revising Reality.

Because we are not culturally accustomed to thinking about revisions in the real world—or rather we are accustomed to only one kind of real-world revision, sequels—understanding revisionary changes in the history of history requires the tools of fictional revision. While the taxonomy is helpful, the concepts are essential. We can best understand reality through the lens of sequels, remakes, retcons, and rejects.

Revising Reality is available at the end of May. Because our research builds on his (the above paragraphs appear in the intro), I reached out to Andrew Friedenthal to offer him a copy. He revealed that not only did he know about our book but he had already read it as an external reviewer for Bloomsbury and given it a rave review (which I posted in “Some Extremely Nice Things That People I Don’t Know Said About What Will Now Be My Next Book“).

Since Andrew is arguably the world expert on retcons, he was an ideal reviewer. The Retcon Game is all about “retroactive continuity,” which he defines as: “a narrative process wherein the creator(s) and/or producer(s) of a fictional narrative/world—often, but not always, the same person or people—deliberately alter the history of that narrative/world such that, going forward, future stories reflect this new history, completely ignoring the old as if it had never happened.”

He subdivides retcons into a three-part taxonomy:

“reinterpretation, changing how an earlier work is seen and interpreted, but in a less-than definitive way, allowing for some choice on the part of audience members to determine which history is still considered canonical to the narrative.”“reinscription, which is a more solidified change to how an earlier work is viewed, concretely and canonically changing that work’s meaning going forward.”“revision, wherein an older work is not only viewed differently, but even altered through republication, editing, new editions, and so forth, such that the material text itself is now different in the physical world, not just in the minds of characters and/or audience members.”

After offering a painstaking definition in our previous book, Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith, Nat and I are simpler in Revising Reality: “While a prequel fills in past information, a retcon does the same while also causing an audience to reinterpret and discard some previous impression.”

And I think we look mainly at Andrew’s first subcategory, “reinterpretation,” and possibly “reinscription” too, but “revision” we would move into the reboot bin.

The terms aren’t important, but what they describe is. Like Andrew, Nat and I also look at Paul Revere (who I originally blogged about over a decade ago in “Paul Revere: Superhero or Jihadist?”, a post which has since received a surprising 4,300 views). Nat and I write in Revising Reality:

Paul Revere died in 1818 but was reborn—or remade—in fictional form in 1861. That (fictional) rebirth gave him the strength of three men and the power of bilocation: on the evening of April 18, 1775, he was both in the church tower swinging a lantern and on his horse across the river receiving the message. Fellow riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, stumbled and vanished into the white space between the stanzas of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” the poem that created the larger-than-life American hero. When the actual, human-sized Revere died, his obituary didn’t even mention that not-yet-legendary midnight ride.

In the case of Revere, fiction replaced fact—or, more specifically, mythology replaced history. While any account of a historical figure differs, sometimes significantly so, from that figure’s actual life, historical myths do more than misreport. They are works of fiction. They are fictional histories, or stories, of actual histories, or past events. Longfellow knew he was not reporting on Revere correctly, and not incorrectly either. He was creating a new and different Revere, inspired by the actual person, but also distinct.

If Revere were Batman, we would call Longfellow’s poem a “remake” or “reboot.” Except in the Batman case, the original was fictional also, while in Longfellow’s, the original was factual. Remakes of Batman remake stories about him, which, because Batman’s fictional, amount to remaking the character too. Christopher Nolan’s 2005 Batman Begins remakes Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, each telling a story about a similar but ultimately distinct Bruce Wayne’s superheroic adventures in a similar but ultimately distinct world. More recent DC movie installments do the same. Remakes of Revere also remake stories about him, but, because Revere’s factual, they don’t actually remake the historical figure. Longfellow read historical accounts of the historical Revere, selecting, discarding, and altering details to create his own, fictional version.

All historical fiction remakes actual historical accounts—stories of past events, not the events (or individuals) themselves—into fictional historical ones. Longfellow wasn’t trying to pass his poem off as fact, but some authors of fictional remakes do. They’re called hoaxes.

In 2016, social-media users claimed Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile sex ring in the basement of a DC pizzeria. The Pizzagate conspiracy theorists convinced other people, including a gunman who entered the building planning to liberate the children, that what they said was true, even though those who initiated the false alarms must have known otherwise.

Andrew’s analysis of Paul Revere instead stems from Sarah Palin, who said while campaigning:

“he warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure, as he is riding his horse through town, to send those warning shots and bells, that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.”

Andrew writes:

“Pundits and analysts—particularly liberals who were opposed to Palin’s views and her close association with the conservative Fox News network—were quick to point out that Revere had actually rode carefully and quietly through the Boston area, warning colonists as to the arrival of British troops without alerting either Loyalists or the British themselves. In response, Palin’s supporters visited the Wikipedia page for Paul Revere, editing it so that it related her statements, rather than the research of credited historians, as the truth. Palin encouraged these changes by doubling down on her inaccuracy.”

Applying Andrew’s taxonomy, that looks like a “revision retcon,” since the facts about Revere are “not only viewed differently, but even altered through republication, editing, new editions, and so forth, such that the material text itself is now different in the physical world.”

Nat and I call that a kind of “remake” or “reboot,” because Palin’s supporters altered the Wikipedia entry with false information that they were passing off as true. It was a hoax. Perhaps Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” is too. Worse, unlike Palin’s supporters, his fictional remake has successfully replaced facts about the actual person.

Palin said: “I didn’t mess up. I answered candidly and I know my American history.”

She must have meant Longfellow’s rebooted American history, where, unlike the actual Revere, his more famous fictional counterpart rode very loudly:

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!

“Just like in our fictional universes,” concludes Andrew, “our historical reality does not continually stay the same.”