Time Travel. A History

Aficionados have scoured the attics and basements of literary history for other examples—time-travelish precursors. In 1733, an Irish clergyman, Samuel Madden, published a book called Memoirs of the Twentieth Century: an anti-Catholic diatribe in the form of letters from British officials living two hundred years hence. The twentieth century as imagined by Madden resembles his own time in every respect except that Jesuits have taken over the world. The book was unreadable even in 1733. Madden destroyed almost all of the thousand copies himself. A handful remain. By contrast, a utopian vision titled L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante: rêve s’il en fût jamais (The Year 2440: A Dream If There Ever Was One) became a sensational bestseller in prerevolutionary France. It was a utopian fantasy published in 1771 by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, heavily influenced by the philosopher of the hour, Rousseau. (The historian Robert Darnton puts Mercier in the category of Rousseaus du ruisseau, or “gutter Rousseaus.”) His narrator dreams that he has awakened from a long sleep to find he has acquired wrinkles and a large nose. He is seven hundred years old and about to discover the Paris of the future. What’s new? Fashion has changed—people wear loose clothes, comfortable shoes, and odd caps. Societal mores have changed, too. Prisons and taxes have been abolished. Society abhors prostitutes and monks. Equality and reason prevail. Above all, as Darnton points out, a “community of citizens” has eradicated despotism. “In imagining the future,” he says, “the reader could also see what the present would look like when it had become the past.” But Mercier, who believed that the earth was a flat plain under an orbiting sun, was not looking toward the year 2440 so much as the year 1789. When the Revolution came, he declared himself to have been its prophet.

Another vision of the future, also utopian in its way, appeared in 1892: a book titled Golf in the Year 2000; or, What Are We Coming To, by a Scottish golfer named J. McCullough (given name lost in the mists). When the story begins, its narrator, having endured a day of bad golf and hot whiskies, falls into a trance. He awakens wearing a heavy beard. A man solemnly tells him the date. “ ‘It is’ (and he referred to a pocket almanac as he spoke) ‘the twenty-fifth of March, 2000.’ ” Yes, the year 2000 has advanced to pocket almanacs. Also electric lights. In some respects, though, the golfer from 1892 discovers that the world evolved while he slept. In the year 2000 women dress like men and do all the work, while men are freed to play golf every day.

Time travel by hibernation—the long sleep—worked for Washington Irving in “Rip Van Winkle,” and for Woody Allen in his 1973 remake, Sleeper. Woody Allen’s hero is Rip Van Winkle with a modern set of neuroses: “I haven’t seen my analyst in two hundred years. He was a strict Freudian. If I’d been going all this time, I’d probably almost be cured by now.” Is it a dream or a nightmare, if you open your eyes to find your contemporaries all dead?

Wells himself dispensed with the machinery in a 1910 novel, The Sleeper Awakes, which was also the first time-travel fantasy to discover the benefits of compound interest. Anyway, sleeping into the future is what we do every night. For Marcel Proust, five years younger than Wells and two hundred miles away, no place heightened the awareness of time more than the bedchamber. The sleeper frees himself from time, floats outside of time, and drifts between insight and perplexity:

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken….In the first minute of his waking, he will no longer know what time it is, he will think he has only just gone to bed….Then the confusion among the disordered worlds will be complete, the magic armchair will send him traveling at top speed through time and space.

Traveling, that is, metaphorically. In the end, the sleeper rubs his eyes and returns to the present.