Time Travel. A History

Galchen’s narrator falls into a friendship with two older men, philosophers maybe, scientists, it’s all a bit vague. The relationships are not well defined. The narrator feels that she is a bit undefined herself. The men speak in riddles. “Oh, time will tell,” one of them says. And: “Time is our tragedy, the substance we have to wade through as we try to move closer to God.” They vanish from her life for a while. She watches the obituary pages. An envelope appears mysteriously in her mailbox—diagram, billiard balls, equations. She thinks of an old joke: “Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana.” One thing becomes clear: everyone in this story knows a lot about time travel. A fateful loop—the same paradox as ever—begins to emerge from the shadows. Some rules are explained: that “contrary to popular movies, travel into the past didn’t alter the future, or, rather, that the future was already altered, or, rather, that it was all far more complicated than that.” Fate seems to be tugging at her, in a gentle way. Can anyone evade destiny? Look what happened to Laius. All she can say is, “Surely our world obeys rules still alien to our imagination.”

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WE BEGIN AGAIN. A woman stands at the end of a “pier”—the open-air observation platform at Orly Airport (la grande jetée d’Orly), overlooking a sea of concrete on which the great metal jetliners rest, pointed like arrows toward the future. The sun is pale in a charcoal sky. We hear shrill jet blasts, a ghostly choir, murmuring voices. The woman almost smiles as the wind ruffles her hair. A child holds on to the railing, watching the planes on a warm Sunday. He sees the woman raise her hands to her face in horror and sees also, out of the corner of his eye, a blur, a falling shape. Later, he knew he had seen a man die, the narrator intones. Not long afterward, World War III begins. A nuclear holocaust destroys Paris, and the rest of the world, too.

This is La jetée, a 1962 film by Chris Marker—the pen name of Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, born in 1921, a philosophy student, a resistance fighter with the Maquis, and then a roving journalist and photographer.^*9 He was rarely photographed without a mask and lived to be ninety-one. In the fifties, after he worked with Alain Resnais on his Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, Resnais said: “A theory is making the rounds, and not without some grounds, that Marker could be an extra-terrestrial. He looks like a human, but perhaps he could be from the future or another planet.” Marker called La jetée a “photo-novel”: it is composed of still photographs, fading and dissolving, shifting points of view, to create, as one critic observed, the “illusion of a time-space continuum.” We are told that it is the story of a man marked by a memory from his childhood. The sudden roar, the woman’s gesture, the crumpling body, and the cries of the crowd on the jetty blurred by fear. The memory—and the marking—make him a candidate for time travel.

Now the world is dead and radioactive. Ruined churches, cratered streets. Survivors inhabit the tunnels and catacombs under Chaillot; a few men rule over prisoners in a camp. They despair. Their one hope lies in finding an emissary to send back to the past. Space was off limits. The only link with the means of survival passed through Time. A loophole in Time and then maybe it would be possible to reach food, medicine, sources of energy. Camp scientists experiment cruelly on one prisoner after another, driving them to madness or death, until finally they come to the nameless man “whose story we are telling.” What makes this man different from the others is his obsession with the past—with a particular image from the past. If they could imagine or dream of another time, perhaps they would be able to reenter it. The camp police spied even on dreams. The message here is that time travel is for the imaginative: an idea that recurs in the literature, for example in Jack Finney’s Time and Again. Time travel begins in the mind’s eye. Here, in La jetée, it’s a matter not just of transportation but of survival. The human mind balked. To wake up in another time meant to be born a second time, as an adult. The shock would be too much.

Credit 11.1