'If it had been me, if I'd been the father, I wouldn't have allowed him to die, up there hanging on that cross'. By contrasting a desirable world to the existing one, and by claiming that it is only by accident that it did not come into being, the uchronic hypothesis allows the narrator to 'transcend' reality as given and to refuse to identify himself and be satisfied with the existing order. Through uchronia, these speakers say that the most desirable of possible worlds - which to them was still identified with Communism - could be created some day, if the right chances are seized. And the old textile worker with the appropriate name of Maddalena carries uchronia to a further and more radical point when she says that, had she been God - had God been a woman - the most crucial event in our history might also have gone differently. And who knows what the world would be.
'Uchronic Dreams', Alessandro Portelli, from Raphael Samuel (ed.) 'The Myths We Live By'.
