4.3.2008
Time travel is undeniably an ingredient in our popular culture. There is
a seemingly endless chain of novels and short stories, movies and TV programs
using it, in one of its many forms, as a dramatic device. Tales of time
travel abound. (Among my personal favorites are Robert Heinlein's short
story By his bootstraps, the novel To say nothing of the dog
by Connie Willis, and the movie Twelve monkeys, directed by Terry
Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeleine Stowe and
Christopher Plummer. Each of them would deserve a separate review.)
There is also a vast amount of literature documenting reflection on time
travel - discussing whether the idea is coherent, whether it is consistent
with modern physics or not, and what it would mean to be in the position of
a time traveler. While much of that reflection is serious analytical work
(normally focused on very basic concepts in philosophy and science, such
as time, space and causality), there is also a less serious, more
sensationalist streak in writing about time travel that focuses on the hope
that it 'may be possible after all' (much of it to be found in popular
science journalism).
Time travel stories prompt us to ask intriguing questions about causality
(can an object brought backwards from the future be instrumental in its
own creation?) and identity (what does it mean for me to travel to the past
and prevent my own birth?); others relate to cognition (how do I know I
have arrived at a different time?) or even ethics (supposing we could -
should we be allowed to take actions that change the past?). All such
questions have their origin in a paradoxical feature of the idea of time
travel, which I'm going to analyze in what follows.
1) There is one function of time travel in fiction that I want to
mention only briefly, just to get it out of the way: it is often used as
a vehicle for social criticism and negative utopia; sometimes it is just a
phantasy device for its own sake. The very first time travel book, H.G.
Wells's The time machine: an invention is an example for the former.
The novel portrays a world where humanity has degenerated into two different
branches, one of which lives underground, controls a sinister machinery and
practices cannibalism; the other branch lives an emotionally immature,
apathetic live above ground, not unlike that of grazing cattle. Obviously,
in order for humans to have changed so much, a long time had to be passed
since Wells's own day, so he needed some special literary technique to
plausibly present his version of a possible future. He solved this,
ingeniously and very originally, by inventing the time machine: an instrument
that carries his hero to any temporal location he chooses.
There are other possible solutions which we know from countless instances
of negative utopia in literature: the time traveler might have been a sea
traveler and found the described populations on a far island which had not
been discovered yet (think of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels);
he might have been a space traveler and found them on another planet; he
simply might have slept through a few thousand years in some magical place
(think of the Legend of the Seven Sleepers). So nothing in Wells's set-up
really requires time travel, as compared to other techniques, to achieve
the intended motivation for his scenario.
But there are works of fiction that must use time travel, because
they rely on the inherent paradoxes in that idea. In the rest of this post,
I will focus on examples that exploit these paradoxes; I shall analyze in
which ways they do so, and how they achieve their effects. In order to get
there, however, we need some basic materials from literary theory in
place.
2) Plot and story. Any novel, film, or stage play, in general: any
work of fiction tells a story. Sometimes that story begins at the same time
as the book, sometimes it doesn't. In Casino Royale (the novel by
Ian Fleming, not the recent movie), the opening scene is a night at the
casino, introducing the main characters (Bond and Le Chiffre), and situating
us directly in one of the main locations of the action:
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The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the
morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling - a compost of
greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses
awake and revolt from it. James Bond suddenly knew he was tired. [...] Le
Chiffre was still playing and still, apparently, winning.
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Both players are there for a reason, and in due course we will learn a
lot about these reasons. They are part of the story of the novel. But
Fleming doesn't tell them at the beginning, before he launches into the
actual events of the action. Instead, he chooses to relate them in a series
of flashback scenes that make up the next few chapters.
In literary theory, the events that actually happen in a text (i.e. a
book, play or movie) are called the plot of that text. As we have
just seen, the plot is not necessarily congruent with the story that
is told. It is often arranged differently, to achieve some special effect.
In Casino Royale, the initial scene generates much of the atmosphere
of the spy novel genre: expensive locations, emotional and physical stress,
high-stakes adventure and double-faced characters. So Fleming doesn't tell
the story from the beginning - instead he arranges the plot so that it gets
us into his world first, and only then he delivers the necessary bits of
background understanding.
Plot and story are seldom congruent. In the (very simple) cases where they
are, there is only a story, which is told in correct order, from the
beginning to the end. Much more frequently however, there is a plot which
presents the events of action in a separate time structure.
Very common are plots that skip stretches of the storie's time: a character
leaves his home in the morning, and in the next paragraph arrives at work;
nothing is mentioned about the time in between (which may have been a long
drive through the rush hour - or just a five minutes' walk). The amount of
time that goes by between the events of the plot differs: it may just be an
hour, or it may be an entire decade. That way, a story can cover a long
time, however few events the plot may have.
Another frequently used technique is telling a story in flashbacks. The
actual story has happened long ago, and comes gradually to our knowledge
during the plot, which happens much later. Here's a neat example: the 2001
movie Spy Game starring Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. In the opening
sequence, CIA agent Tom Bishop (played by Pitt) undertakes an unauthorized
attempt to rescue someone from a prison in China; the operation fails, and
the rest of the movie shows his supervisor Muir (Robert Redford)
documenting Bishop's career in long flashback sequences (all the while
devising a rescue plan for Bishop on his own). Most of the story that
unfolds is already past; still it is narrated in perfect linear order by
Muir, strictly following the chronology of the events. (Another film that
follows the same pattern is Interview with the Vampire; there are
many others.) Even in these cases the events told are still in their natural
order; but there is of course no necessity that they have to be. A plot
can present events in an entirely confusing order.
To sum up, in fiction there is normally a plot (the events that happen)
and a story (everything we come to know) - and they have potentially
divergent time structures. Sometimes that is just a narrative device to
skip uninteresting parts of a story, but very often the events of the
plot happen in a different order and arrangement, often with different
density, compared to those of the story, and in these cases this is
deliberately done by the author to achieve certain dramatic effects.
(You will find a much better introduction to these matters than I will
ever be able to give in Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional
Woods[1].)
3) Perspective. Many stories are told from the point of view of
one of the characters. We (as reader) see what they see; sometimes we are
also given insight into what they think and feel. The most strict version
of this narrative style is in literature that is entirely written from
the first-person perspective. The narrator is (we are supposed to believe)
identical with one of the characters, and recounts the events as he or she
experienced them.
Even when a novel is written in the third person, it may be very focused
on a main character. Take again Casino Royale: with only a few minor
exceptions, everything in the book is centered around Bond; there are no
scenes where he doesn't appear; events that take place without him
participating are not directly described, but only when they come to his
attention or have some effect on him or his plans. Moreover, although we
learn a lot about his thoughts and feelings, we cannot look into other
characters - we are left in the dark about anything that may go through the
heads of Le Chiffre or Vesper Lynd. (The only exception is a brief passage
where we learn what the first impression is that Bond makes on Vesper; and
even that passage seems to be really more about him rather than about
her.)
When a text is less focused on a single character, we may learn about
the events of the plot from changing perspectives: one situation we
witness in the company of one character, another one is seen through the
eyes of another one. Depending on the situation, we see the inner life of
varying persons involved in the plot. (Sometimes authors reveal the inner
lives of multiple characters who take part in a scene at once during the
narration of that scene. The point of view may switch between them, or there
may be no discernible perspective from which a scene is depicted. However,
I want to focus on texts where such a perspective can still be
recognized.)
In texts of that sort, it is possible that we learn about a particular
event in the plot twice (or even more often), as related by different
characters involved. Normally, of course, the author of a book won't tell
you about a situation more than once. But there are instances.
Stephen Fry's novel The Hippopotamus consists in some parts of
letters written by various characters; much of the plot is mediated to us
via these letters (thus it is partly what is called an 'epistolary novel' in
literary science). Early in the book there is a dinner which is described and
commented on by the main character, a writer called Ted Wallace, in a letter -
which is how we come to know about it, what happened and what was said. But
then immediately follows another letter, written by another character by the
name of Patricia (but addressed to the same recipient). That second letter
tells us about the same events, but, being formulated from another point of
view, is naturally quite different, highlights different details, and gives
different judgments. There are some details that appear in only one of the
two versions.
By telling us the same portion of the story twice, from different
perspectives, the author gives us not only more detail about what happened
(he could have done this using other techniques); he also tells us a lot
about the persons whose point of view it is. Giving both Ted and Patricia
the opportunity (so to speak) to deliver a full account of the events, he
allows us to learn about their way of looking at the world: what things are
important enough to them to notice and describe them, what they seem to
feel at the events, and what expression they choose to retell them.
In what follows, I will call this technique a fusion of
perspectives, just to have a shorthand to refer to it. As we will
see, this narrative technique will undergo some new sort of application in
time travel stories.
4) Let us now briefly recount where we are: I have promised an
analysis of time travel stories that accounts for their particular use of the
features and paradoxes that can only be found in the idea of time travel. I
have so far introduced the (conceptual) distinction between the plot
and the story of a text (take 'text' as a very general term covering
novels, short stories, movies, plays, or anything else that may use time
travel as a literary device); and I have explained how sometimes a situation
can be presented by an author by perspective fusion, that is, by
presenting it multiple times from the different perspectives of different
characters, who all participate in the situation.
I will now go on to show how these elements play together in time travel
stories of a common sort. (There are different sorts of time travel stories,
and not all of them exhibit the characteristics I'm going to describe; later
on I will have to say something more about those sorts which don't.)
5) Story knots. A very common pattern in time travel fiction is
this: a character experiences some situation or event, then later on gets
the chance to travel back in time to that very situation, often with the
intention to change it somehow. Let us call such a situation (or event)
a story knot. Many of the strange and confusing features of
time travel stories are directly related to story knots.
Here are a few examples. In Twelve Monkeys, the central event is
a scene at an airport in which a man is shot. The main character, James Cole
(Bruce Willis), has witnessed that scene as a child, and it haunts him as a
nightmare since then. While the plot develops, we get to see more and more
details of what happened at the airport. Cole, however, is a time traveler
who has been sent back from the future, and we come to understand that at
the time when most of the plot happens, the airport scene is still in the
future. For us (the audience) it actually happens at the end of the movie.
Cole himself is there twice: both as a child and as a grown-up person. The
airport scene is the story knot in Twelve Monkeys.
More complex, but still following the same pattern, is By his
bootstraps (Robert Heinlein's short story). The main character, called Bob
Wilson, meets past and future 'versions' of himself several times; each of
these occasions appears in the plot multiple times (once for each version).
Thus, a situation where actually three different Bob Wilsons talk to each
other is lived through three times. These situations are also story knots.
To simplify the analysis, let's look at a more condensed version of a
time travel story that contains a story knot. The article about
Time Travel and Modern Physics in the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy has exactly what we need. (If you're interested in the topic,
I'd recommend to also read the whole article.) Here is the full story,
entitled A Botched Suicide:
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You are very depressed. You are suicidally depressed. You have a gun. But
you do not quite have the courage to point the gun at yourself and kill
yourself in this way. If only someone else would kill you, that would be a
good thing. But you can't really ask someone to kill you. That wouldn't be
fair.
You decide that if you remain this depressed and you find a time machine,
you will travel back in time to just about now, and kill your earlier self.
That would be good. In that way you even would get rid of the depressing
time you will spend between now and when you would get into that time
machine.
You start to muse about the coherence of this idea, when something
amazing happens. Out of nowhere you suddenly see someone coming towards you
with a gun pointed at you. In fact he looks very much like you, except that
he is bleeding badly from his left eye, and can barely stand up straight.
You are at peace. You look straight at him, calmly. He shoots. You feel a
searing pain in your left eye. Your mind is in chaos, you stagger around
and accidentally enter a strange looking cubicle. You drift off into
unconsciousness.
After a while, you can not tell how long, you drift back into
consciousness and stagger out of the cubicle. You see someone in the
distance looking at you calmly and fixedly. You realize that it is your
younger self. He looks straight at you. You are in terrible pain. You have
to end this, you have to kill him, really kill him once and for all. You
shoot him, but your eyesight is so bad that your aim is off. You do not
kill him, you merely damage his left eye. He staggers off. You fall to the
ground in agony, and decide to study the paradoxes of time travel more
seriously.
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This story consists of a story knot (a shooting scene) - and practically
nothing else. The first important thing we can learn here is that a story
knot is a situation which happens only once in the story. In A
Botched Suicide, it is described twice, so it features two times in the
plot. But none the less, we are talking about a single event.
To see this more clearly, ask yourself how the same story would have
to be told from the third-person perspective. Think of yourself as an
uninvolved observer watching the course of events. You would first see
a person (absorbed in thought), who is approached by another person with a
gun and a bleeding eye. The latter person shoots the other and then falls
to the ground; the former, severely wounded, staggers around and finally
enters a strange-looking cubicle, vanishing without a trace. (I encourage
you to read this again and really compare it to the original story.)
Told like this, the story ceases to create the impression of a 'loop'. It
doesn't seem any longer as if there is an eternal repetition of events.
That effect is strongly tied to telling it from a first-person perspective.
Since one and the same event is told twice from the perspective of a single
character, we have, at the second instance, a feeling that 'this will repeat
all over again'. Presumably the reason is that we think that the first,
younger version of the character will now live through the same career as
the second, older one already did. The older version, so to speak, 'passes the
baton' on to the younger version. Then the younger one goes on the time
travel journey and arrives at the story knot again, having become the older
version now, and finds another younger version, ... and so on.
Why don't we have the same impression of a 'loop' when the story is
entirely told from the third-person perspective? I think it is because it is
generated by a switch from the first-person perspective to the third-person
perspective and then back. Here is what happens:
- We first follow the character through the story knot event (we're with
the younger version), as seen from the first-person perspective;
- then we follow her career, including the traveling back in time;
- we then experience the event at the story knot again, still with the
character (in first-person perspective), but now we are with the older
version;
- we switch to the third-person perspective for a moment and identify
the younger and older versions, ask ourselves what the younger version
will know do, and
- switch back to the first-person perspective.
Now, if this is then the first-person perspective of the younger
version, we're caught in a loop. (We're not if we choose the first-person
perspective of the older version.) And there seems to be a certain bias to
interpret a time travel story that way. This is because much of the story has
worked towards that insight: that at the story knot, we have a situation with
two versions of the same person, who are confronted with the respective other
version of themselves. So we are actually enticed, by the way the story is
told, into making the switch described above.
The particular way in which the perspectives are crossing at a story knot
generates some interpretation traps; this is one of them. The story is
told from a first-person perspective, but then switches quickly to a
third-person perspective to convey the insight that at the story knot a
character appears in multiple instances at once. This can trap us into
the impression that the story goes into a loop, whereas it in fact
doesn't. If we re-tell the story entirely from the third-person perspective,
we still have the unexplained time travel, but without the apparent endless
loop in the story.
(This doesn't mean of course that stories, including time travel stories,
never intend to picture a non-linear world that contains infinite loops.
An example for a loop in the fundamental structure of the world of a story
is the short film Prey alone. What I
am claiming is that the idea of time travel as such does not necessarily
involve any loops in the sequence of events.)
There is another interesting observation that you may have made: When
I re-told A Botched Suicide from the third-person perspective, the
end of the story was the vanishing of the younger 'version' of the main
character. If you are like me, you have probably felt a certain urge to
'follow' the character, plot-wise, i.e. you have perhaps felt that the
plot is somehow 'incomplete' here, that you would like to be told about
what happens further with that character (after she has vanished in the
strange-looking cubicle). Of course, we know exactly what happens: the
character is the younger version, is transferred back in time, and has
(there and then, in the past) gone through the events at the story knot.
But we don't naturally see it that way: we expect that character to undergo
now some events that we don't feel we haven't yet been told about. We
only find on reflection that we actually have been told about them.
This latter observation suggests that we have, especially with regard to
time travel stories, a tendency to focus on the first-person perspective,
to follow events, as it were, along the lines of the particular careers
of the main characters. This is not really surprising: we normally make sense
of a string of events mainly through the eyes of the involved people. But
this is another factor that has an effect on how we interpret time travel
fiction.
6) To sum up the two important lessons from this: first, time
travel fiction has a strong tendency to focus our interpretation on the
subjective series of experiences of a participant; secondly (as I said
above), a story knot is a single event in the story, although it may
correspond to multiple events in the plot.
The philosopher David Lewis has suggested a helpful image for thinking
about story knots:
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The time traveler's life is like a mountain railway. [...] Five miles down
the line from here is a place where the line goes under a trestle; two
miles further is a place where the line goes over a trestle; these places
are one and the same. The trestle by which the line crosses over itself
has two different locations along the line, five miles down from here and
also seven. In the same way, an event in a time traveler's life may have
more than one location in his personal time. [... ] he may be able to talk
to himself. The conversation involves two of his stages, separated in his
personal time but simultaneous in external time. [...] A time traveler who
talks to himself, on the telephone perhaps, looks for all the world like
two different people talking to each other.[2]
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Now, to re-formulate the main points from the previous section in terms of
Lewis's image: we strongly tend to think of the course of events as being
along some railway track. In fact, we might also have taken a seat in a
helicopter and have had a look at the exact layout of the entire track from
above. But instead, when telling and interpreting time travel fiction, we
usually think along the lines of the track. Our interpretation moves on
rails.
So when we follow the railway track, we will reach a certain point twice
- which is nevertheless a single point on the map. (That's the point where
the line goes both under and over the bridge.) In our terms, this is a story
knot, and we have seen that it has the property of being reached multiple
times during a plot, but is still a single, unique event in the story.
7) And we have seen that a story knot is a point where a character
may interact with another 'version' of himself.
Having to do with oneself (in some sense) is not as unusual as it may
look at first glance. In a trivial way, most of us come into something
like such a situation from time to time. Looking at oneself in the mirror
is a case of being confronted with oneself; a slightly less predictable
(and for many people a more surprising and irritating) form is when we watch
a video or audio recording of ourselves. But even so we learn only how we
looked, sounded and acted, but not what we experienced at the moment
when the recording was done - that we know only from memory.
Now imagine the following case: under the influence of certain light and
sound conditions, you tend to become drowsy and (as far as you can tell) go
to sleep after a short while. Afterwards, you can't remember what you
experienced, but people keep telling you that you talked to them. So you
start an experiment. You place a video camera at a location where you can
reproduce the lights and sounds necessary to get into that state, and when
they set in, you carefully describe you experiences. Later on, the video
recording shows you happily (if quietly) discussing a calm, peaceful mood
which you are in - you can't remember a bit of it yourself, but there's the
record proving that you have experienced and even described it. Strange
as it would be, a scenario like this seems possible. Try to imagine what it
would be like to be confronted with such a 'version' of yourself. In some
sense, you are watching yourself: a person who doesn't just look and speak
like you, but who also shares all your ideas and memories. (Suppose the
person on the video recording recalls certain events from your past that
likely only you yourself can know.) In some sense, though, you are watching a
stranger: a person doing and saying things you wouldn't really say you
did and said; a person who has an own will and agenda; also a person who
may decide what to tell you about himself (or herself) - and what to conceal
from you.
Suppose it gets even more strange. At some day, when watching an older
video with your 'other self', you noticed that the event you hear yourself
describing, which is an event in your past, had not yet happened when the
video was recorded! It is something that has occurred meanwhile, but
definitely nothing you knew anything about at the time when the video was
taken. How would you think about this?
We have not really reached a scenario yet that would resemble a case
where you meet a future 'version' of yourself. But you'll by now hopefully
have a feeling what it might be like.
8) Conversely, when (after having traveled to the past) the older
version of a time traveler meets her younger self, there is a similarly
confusing effect: this time, the time traveler normally recognizes the
situation, which means that she knows what is about to happen - not only
in the sense in which she knows the future events in the life of her
younger version, but in the much more direct sense that she already knows
exactly what will happen in their encounter at the story knot.
This is described in minute detail in By his bootstraps. Heinlein's
main character, Bob Wilson, is put through an entire series of story knots,
where he meets future versions of himself, past versions of himself, both
future and past versions of himself at once, ... Although the short story
is not written in the first person, it is another example of a narrative
style that follows a single character closely. We only see what Bob Wilson
sees, and we are told his feelings and thoughts. More precisely, we are
told the experiences of only one of the Bob Wilson instances at a time. So
when Bob Wilson goes through a story knot, we strictly see it with the eyes
of one of the versions who meet there; later on, when he goes through the
same story knot again, we see it from the other version's point of view.
Although the plot is deeply entangled, and crosses itself multiple times,
it is laid out with impressive accuracy.
This is an example of an excessive use of the technique which I have
called perspective fusion. I know of no genre of fiction where it seems more
suitable; on the one hand, it highlights the subjective character of what is
narrated (it is perspectives that are fused, that is, points of view
of a character in the story), while on the other hand there are necessarily
two different experiences to be recounted (since we have two
instances of the character, who differ in at least some of their
experiences) - but experiences still of one and the same situation (the story
knot).
Fusion of perspectives is an obvious instrument, a natural fit for time
travel fiction. If you look for it, you will find it everywhere. Let us
return for a moment to A Botched Suicide. We have seen that this
story consists of virtually a single story knot and nothing else. There are
two versions of the main character. We learn first how one instance
experiences the situation ("[...] you suddenly see someone coming towards you
[...]. In fact he looks very much like you [...]. You look straight at him,
calmly."), and then how the other one does ("You see someone in the distance
looking at you calmly and fixedly. You realize that it is your
younger self. He looks straight at you."). There you have it: one situation,
two points of view - highly characteristic for a time travel story.
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[1] Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Norton
Lectures 1992-1993. Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press 1994.
[2] David Lewis, "The paradoxes of time travel". In: American
Philosophical Quarterly 13 (1976), 145-152, 147.
