Time Travel. A History

The House on the Strand appeared in 1969, a year before Time and Again, and Dick describes the feeling of both books’ narrators when he says, “I had walked about that other world with a dreamer’s freedom but with a waking man’s perception.” They are interlopers in history. They can witness, but they struggle to find out whether they can belong, intervene, or alter the timeline of events. “Could time be all-dimensional,” Dick muses, “—yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition?” Whatever that means. He’s a book publisher, not a physicist.

“Might it not be,” says W. G. Sebald in Austerlitz, “that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?” This Past, into which so many travelers launch themselves, is a misty place, perhaps even more so than the Future. It can seldom be remembered, must be imagined. Yet here in our information-rich present, the past seems more with us than ever. The more vivid it gets, the more real it seems, the greater the craving. Feeding the addiction are Ken Burnsian documentaries, Renaissance faires, Civil War reenactments, history cable channels, and augmented-reality apps. Anything that “brings the past to life.” Under the circumstances, time machines might seem surplus to requirements, but the practitioners of time travel show no signs of slowing down—not in fiction or in film. Woody Allen has explored time travel several times—into the future with Sleeper (1973) and then, in 2011, with Midnight in Paris, he throws the lever to the past.

His hero, Gil Pender, is a blond Californian and the ideal of the backward-looking obsessive. His friends tease him about his nostalgia, his “denial of the painful present,” his “obsession with ‘les temps perdus.’ ” He is writing a novel, and its opening lines both celebrate and mock the very genre that this movie so self-consciously joins:

“Out of the Past” was the name of the store, and its products consisted of memories. What was prosaic and even vulgar to one generation had been transmuted by the mere passing of years to a status at once magical and also camp.

His time-slipping portal is not a machine or a house but Paris itself, the whole city, its past so exposed, at every street corner and flea market. To 1920 he goes, and there the modernists understand his sense of dislocation. “I’m from a different time—a whole other era—the future,” he explains. “I slide through time.” The surrealist Man Ray replies, “Exactly correct—you inhabit two worlds—so far I see nothing strange.” The film’s central joke is slowly revealed, and it is recursive, time slips within time slips. Nostalgia is eternal. If the twenty-first century yearns for the Jazz Age, the Jazz Age craves the Belle Époque—every age mourning the loss of another age. Woody Allen is neither the first nor the last to see it this way. “The present is always going to seem unsatisfying,” Gil learns, “because life itself is unsatisfying.”

Travel to the past begins as tourism in the extreme. Complications soon arise. The sightseers start tinkering. We barely learn to read history before we want to rewrite it. Here come the paradoxes—cause and effect going around in loops. Even Nesbit’s child heroes see this. When they meet Julius Caesar at his tent in Gaul, peering across the Channel toward Britain, they can’t resist trying to talk him out of dispatching his legions: “We want to ask you not to trouble about conquering Britain; it’s a poor little place, not worth bothering about.” This backfires, naturally. They end up talking him into it, because you can’t change history, and we have just witnessed the birth of a time-travel joke that will evolve into higher and higher forms. Thus, a full century after Nesbit, Woody Allen’s time traveler in Midnight in Paris meets the young Luis Buñuel and can’t resist trying to inspire the director with his own future movie.

GIL: Oh, Mr. Buñuel, I had a nice idea for a movie for you.

BUÑUEL: Yes?

GIL: Yeah, a group of people attend a very formal dinner party and at the end of dinner when they try to leave the room, they can’t.

BUÑUEL: Why not?

GIL: They just can’t seem to exit the door.

BUÑUEL: But, but why?

GIL: And because they’re forced to stay together the veneer of civilization quickly fades away and what you’re left with is who they really are—animals.

BUÑUEL: But I don’t get it. Why don’t they just walk out of the room?