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Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel

2009; Ohio State University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nar.0.0029

1538-974X

Elana Gomel,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel Elana Gomel (bio) Trouble with Time "'Scientific people,' proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, 'know very well that Time is only a kind of Space'" (The Time Machine 268). What is at stake in treating time "as a kind of space," politically, philosophically, and narratologically? While time travel has often been dismissed as merely a popular science-fictional gimmick, it seems far more productive to regard it as an inscription of a specific ideology of temporality. The roots of this ideology are in the evolutionary debate of the fin-de-siècle but its contemporary offshoots have become part of postmodernity's problematic relationship with time and history. The postmodern trouble with time finds its expression in the "spatial turn" in narrativity, which includes the topos of time travel (Smethurst 37). In this essay, I will trace the development of time travel, from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine to postmodern science fiction as a brief history of a-historicity. As opposed to most narrative conventions, time travel originates in a single text, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895).1 In his first novel, Wells invents not just a new plot but a new chronotope. Chronotope, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is the spatial-temporal configuration of the narrative text, "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (15). The [End Page 334] chronotope of time travel is unique in not merely connecting but actually conflating time and space. This has a number of interesting formal, philosophical, and cultural consequences. Time is the foundation of narrative; it is "that structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity [while] narrativity . . . [is] the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent" (Ricoeur 35). Time, rather than space, shapes such salient features of narrative as directionality, causality, and agency. Space is isotropic while time is not: we can move in any direction in space but only in one direction in time. The past and the future are phenomenologically distinct in a way, in which, say, breadth and length are not; and this distinctness creates causal chains. Time travel enables agency, which is predicated on the ability to choose between several alternatives. But time travel, as Wells's protagonist points out, requires the equivalence of the past and the future, just as the three spatial dimensions are equivalent. The time-travel chronotope represents history as a frozen "space-time continuum," in which the future is as determined and immutable as the past (Kern 206). The spatiality of this chronotope generates logical paradoxes or "chronoclasms," which Stanislaw Lem describes as "a circular causal structure" (140). Chronoclasm is a Möbius strip of causality that may be illustrated by the famous "grandfather paradox," in which X goes back in time, kills his grandfather, thus prevents his own conception, making it impossible for him to go back in time and kill his grandfather, etc. Time travel results in "a real tautology becom[ing] a falsehood" (140–41).2 But the greatest paradox of time travel is its relation to narrative, and therefore social and historical, time. Lem argues that time travel dramatizes a "philosophy of history" (145). This is a philosophy of determinism, which implies that there is only one "true" narrative of history, and thus the seeming open-endedness of the future is an illusion. Since the possibility of choice between several future alternatives is effectively foreclosed, narrative agency falls apart. And yet, despite its narrative difficulty, time travel has become one of the most familiar science-fiction topoi. Moreover, its popularity has spiked in the last twenty years, transcending the generic boundaries of science fiction and cropping up in mainstream novels, blockbuster movies, and computer games. Something in the postmodern episteme seems to resonate with the Time Traveller's assertion that "time is space." This "something" is postmodernity's fraught relation with history. Postmodernity tends to be "dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time," partly because of its suspiciousness toward the idea that history can be adequately represented in...