Jaroslaw Anders Caught in a dark history: review of Michael Andre Bernstein's Conspirators, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 11 April 2004, p. R3
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"A literary scholar and critic, Bernstein believes that our visits to the past are motivated less often by a curiousity about life as it was than by the fact that we have a priviledged, analytical relationship to it . . . Time has already assigned meaning to events, revealed their consequences, separated the substantial from the accidental. More often than not, it has already judged the past actors, which allows us to be a bit judgemental without appearing presumptuous.
"Though the present is mostly the domain of irony -since everything can still turn out a farce instead of a tragedy-the past appears to us as the last refuge of "moral seriousness" . . .
". . .
"This reticence seems a result of Bernstein's theory of historical fiction, which he presented in his 1994 book of essays, Foregone Conclusions. There he argues against "the sense-making authority of the future," which tends to limit our interest in the past only to what foreshadows the future and "implies a closed universe in which all choices have already been made." In Bernstein's view, the true homage to the past, especially a past irreversibly destroyed, is an approach he calls "sideshadowing." He describes it as "a gesturing to the side, to a present dense with multiple and mutually exclusive possibilities of what is to come."
". . . a writer's task is to look away and avoid the piety that the knowledge of the future imposes. Instead, the writer must pay attention to the odd, bizarre, disturbing and marginal, which . . . contain "the seed of diverse and mutally exclusive possible futures . . . "