Time Travel. A History

Not anymore. We have evolved a more advanced time sense—freer and more complex. In a novel there may be multiple clocks, or no clocks, conflicting clocks and unreliable clocks, clocks running backward and clocks spinning aimlessly. “The dimension of time has been shattered,” wrote Italo Calvino in 1979; “we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.” He doesn’t say exactly when the hundred years ended.

Forster might have known he was oversimplifying, with modernist movements rising self-consciously all around. He had read Emily Brontë, who rebelled against chronological time in Wuthering Heights. He had read Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy had “a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestic misadventures crowding in upon me thick and threefold” and threw off the shackles of tense—“A cow broke in (tomorrow morning) to my uncle Toby’s fortifications”—and even diagrammed his temporal divagation with a timeline of squiggles, back and forth, up and around.

Credit 13.1

Forster had read Proust, too. But I’m not sure he had gotten the message: that time was busting out all over.

It had seemed that space was our natural dimension: the one we move about in, the one we sense directly. To Proust we became denizens of the time dimension: “I would describe men, even at the risk of giving them the appearance of monstrous beings, as occupying in Time a much greater place than that so sparingly conceded to them in Space, a place indeed extended beyond measure…like giants plunged in the years, they touch at once those periods of their lives—separated by so many days—so far apart in Time.”^*2 Marcel Proust and H. G. Wells were contemporaries, and while Wells invented time travel by machine, Proust invented a kind of time travel without one. We might call it mental time travel—and meanwhile psychologists have appropriated that term for purposes of their own.

Robert Heinlein’s time traveler, Bob Wilson, revisits his past selves—conversing with them and modifying his own life story—and in his way the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, sometimes named Marcel, does that, too. Proust, or Marcel, has a suspicion about his existence, perhaps a suspicion of mortality: “that I was not situated somewhere outside of Time, but was subject to its laws, just like the people in novels who, for that reason, used to depress me when I read of their lives, down at Combray, in the fastness of my wicker chair.”

“Proust upsets the whole logic of narrative representation,” says Gérard Genette, one of the literary theorists who attempted to cope by creating a whole new field of study called narratology. A Russian critic and semioticist, Mikhail Bakhtin, devised the concept of “chronotope” (“time-space,” openly borrowed from Einsteinian spacetime) in the 1930s to express the inseparability of the two in literature: the mutual influence they exert upon each other. “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible,” he wrote; “likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” The difference is that spacetime is just what it is, whereas chronotopes admit as many possibilities as our imaginations allow. One universe may be fatalistic, another may be free. In one, time is linear; in the next, time is a circle, with all our failures, all our discoveries doomed to be repeated. In one, a man retains his youthful beauty while his picture ages in the attic; in the next, our hero grows backward from senescence to infancy. One story may be ruled by machine time, the next by psychological time. Which time is true? All, or none?

Borges reminds us that Schopenhauer asserted that life and dreams are pages from the same book. To read them in their proper order is to live, but to browse among them is to dream.

The twentieth century gave storytelling a roisterous temporal complexity like nothing that had been seen before. We don’t have enough tenses. Or rather, we don’t have names for all the tenses we create.^*3 “In what was to have been the future”—that simple clause is the opening of Madeleine Thien’s novel Certainty. Proust lines a temporal path with mirrors:

Sometimes passing in front of the hotel he remembered the rainy days when he used to bring his nursemaid that far, on a pilgrimage. But he remembered them without the melancholy that he then thought he would surely some day savor on feeling that he no longer loved her. For this melancholy, projected in anticipation prior to the indifference that lay ahead, came from his love. And this love existed no more.