Time Travel. A History

Everyone seems to agree that our imaginations liberate us in the time dimension, even if we can’t have a Wellsian time machine. But not Samuel Beckett. The young Dubliner, who had not yet written any of his novels or plays, studied Proust in the summer of 1930 when he was at the École Normale in Paris, in order “to examine in the first place that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation—Time.” Freedom is not what he saw. In Proust’s world he found only victims and prisoners. Not for Sam “our pernicious and incurable optimism,” “our smug will to live,” averting our eyes from the bitter fate that lies ahead. We are like organisms of two dimensions, he suggests, like the inhabitants of Flatland, who suddenly discover a third dimension, height. The discovery avails them nothing. They cannot travel in their new dimension. Nor can we. Beckett says:

There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from to-morrow nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us….Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a drystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, heavy and dangerous.

Beckett will leave to others the pleasures of time travel. For him time is poison. It is a cancer.

At the best, all that is realized in Time (all Time produce), whether in Art or Life, can only be possessed successively, by a series of partial annexations—and never integrally and at once.

At least he is consistent. We can wait, that’s all.

VLADIMIR: But you say we were here yesterday.

ESTRAGON: I may be mistaken.

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ANY BOOK—bound and sewn, with a beginning, middle, and end—resembles the Universe Rigid. It has a finality lacking in real life, where we can’t expect all the threads to tie together when we’re done. The novelist Ali Smith says that books are “tangible pieces of time in our hands.” You can hold them, you can experience them, but you cannot change them. Except that you can and do: the book is nothing—inert, waiting—until someone is reading it, and then the reader, too, becomes a player in the story. Reading Proust entangles your memories, your desires, with Marcel’s. Smith retranslates Heraclitus: “You can’t step into the same story twice.” Wherever the reader is, on whatever page, the story has a past, which is gone, and a future, which has not yet come.

But surely the reader is capacious, with memory big enough and reliable enough to take in an entire book. (A book is only a few megabytes, after all.) Can’t we hold it in the mind all at once—past, present, and future all in our possession? Vladimir Nabokov seemed to think that was the ideal of reading: to possess a book entire, in memory, rather than to encounter it in a state of ignorance or innocence, experiencing it page by page, word by word. “A good reader,” said Nabokov in his Lectures on Literature, “a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”

And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.

Ideally a book should be like a painting, which we comprehend (said Nabokov) all at once, outside of time. “When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact of a painting.”

But can a book really be comprehended whole, all at once, apart from time? Surely a painting is not absorbed in one fell swoop. The eyes roam, the viewer sees this and then that. As for books, they play with time, as music does. They thrive on anticipation, they flirt with expectation. Even if you know a book well—even if you can recite it entire, like the Homeric poet—you cannot experience it as a timeless object. You can appreciate its echoes of memory, its tricks of foreshadowing, but when you read a book you are a creature living in time. The novelist and translator Tim Parks points out the essential role of forgetting. “Nabokov does not mention forgetting,” he writes, “but it’s clear that this is what he is largely talking about.” Remember: Memory is not a tape recorder. Not “a stereotype or a tear-sheet.” Memories, as Parks says,

are largely fabrications, re-workings, shifting narratives, simplifications, distortions, photos replacing faces, and so on; what’s more, there is no reason to suppose that the original impression is intact somewhere in our heads. We do not possess the past, even that of a few moments ago, and this is hardly a cause for regret, since to do so would severely obstruct our experience of the present.