4.5.2008
As we have seen, time travel narratives imply that a certain event may be
experienced by a single character multiple times. People are not just
observers, however - we also act. This adds an interesting twist to
time travel narratives.
1) Here is a minimalistic time travel story:
|
Yesterday, shortly after seven o'clock in the morning, Fred stood in
front of his house for about five minutes. During this time, Fred's
neighbor walked by, saying a few words about the weather.
Today Fred has the opportunity to test-drive a new time travel machine.
It transfers him to a location somewhat near his own house, where he can
observe the space in front of the house using a telescope (without any
chance of being seen himself). Shortly after seven, Fred notices his own
earlier self stepping outside, having a chat with his neighbor who just
walks by, and disappearing in the house again.
| |
In the terms of my earlier post, we
have here a story knot (a period of time which appears twice in the
plot) and perspective fusion (the same event is experienced from the
point of view of two instances of the same person). However different their
perspective is, the experiences of the two 'selves' of Fred are nevertheless
experiences of one and the same situation, the same place, at the same
time.
2) Consistency Consider a variation of the story. Suppose the last
sentence of the first part of the story would be this: 'During this time
Fred didn't see any people.'
If the story went like this, we'd produce an inconsistency: we are
saying, about one and the same situation, two different and in effect
contradictory things. We must keep in mind that the story knot which is
lived through by Fred twice is the same situation, the same spacetime
location. What could happen in this situation can be either the
version narrated above, or a fully modified version (i.e. modified in
both paragraphs), but not a version with a modified first paragraph,
the second being left as it is.
But we must keep the story consistent. (Or else it wouldn't be much
help for whatever you want
to learn from it, be it about the possibility of time travel, or
something about our notions of action and will.) However, it gets more
difficult to maintain consistency if we let characters act freely at story
knots. Sooner or later, the restrictions resulting from the story knot
constellation collide with the freedom of will we assume in them.
3) Let's now alter our minimalistic time travel story. Let's say
Fred is not directly transferred to his observation post, but instead to
a location somewhere between it and his house.
|
When he walks up to the observation post, he notices his neighbor on
the other side of the street. Luckily, just when the neighbor looks over,
a bus passes by, blocking his view, so he cannot see Fred.
| |
(This is luck, because the neighbor would be surprised to see Fred a
few minutes later stepping out of his house.)
|
Fred could walk over the street - but he doesn't this time. Instead,
he steps into a shop for a moment. When he leaves it, his neighbor has
vanished, and Fred proceeds to the observation post.
| |
In order to keep consistency, we must describe it so that the story is
self-correcting in a sense. It must be arranged so that the events at the
story knot under the description from each of the perspectives fit together.
Of course, a time travel story well told will smooth all this out so that
it doesn't look unrealistic or implausible to its audience. (If that seems
to be an exaggerated demand, think about what an audience would have to
make of an inconsistent story.)
4) Frustration of the will What happens when a player decides to
'play against the game', to act deliberately so that the situation turns out
different from what he remembers of it (may be out of playfulness or from a
real interest - there might be painful consequences if he fails)? Well, he
can't. He cannot bring it about that things happen the second time different
from how they happened the first time. Otherwise there would be a
contradiction in the story.
(Actually, there are two entire categories of time travel fiction where one
can act contrary to one's knowledge of the events at a story knot. One sort
is that of simply inconsistent time travel stories, and as I have argued,
there is nothing interesting to learn from these. The other sort makes use
of the rather obscure idea of 'parallel courses of history', or 'alternative
courses of events'; I shall have something to say about this category of
time travel fiction later on.)
Again, we have to tell the story in a way that no inconsistency arises.
But this time, this means even to do this in the face of directly contrary
intentions of a character. We have to let them fail in carrying out their
intentions; and often so in situations in which they normally wouldn't
fail. The story has to resort to (sometimes less than plausible) coincidences
in order to achieve that. In all such cases, a character is unable to carry
out his intention. (And one can easily construct cases in which this can look
totally inexplicable to that character.) I call cases of that sort
frustration of the will.
Suppose, for instance, that Fred has decided to prevent his neighbor
from showing up in front of his house at the story knot. When Fred, the
time traveler, i.e. his second instance, meets the neighbor in the street,
he may try to persuade (or even force) him to take a different route. But all
these attempts must fail: the neighbor will perhaps have some urgent
business near Fred's house, or for some reason distrust Fred's second
instance. However hard the latter tries, he cannot prevent the neighbor from
coming near his house and enacting the scene at the story knot - because
that's already happened in Fred's past.
And by the way, Fred knows that. Of course, it is not in general Fred's
knowledge which causes the events to happen (although it may - in a
self-fulfilling manner, as in the movie Twelve Monkeys). Rather, we
have to make the story consistent, and therefore we cannot allow it to
contradict something that a character knows (which means that it is true,
else it would'nt be knowledge at all).
5) Crucially, in order to experience frustration of the will, even
to form the intention that leads to it, the character has to understand
herself that she is (or will be) at a story knot, and that her perspective
on the events is a second perspective to the former one she had on
them (i.e. during her first living through the story knot).
I have used these concepts so far for analysis of time travel narratives
from the outside (i.e. from the position of a reader, or observer). But of
course, a character could equally use them, in the story, to reflect on her
own situation. (Note that interestingly the character has to take her own
history as a time travel narrative, then.) She will understand then that she
is living through the same events as before, but is experiencing them from
another perspective. In other words, she applies the concepts of a story
knot and perspective fusion (even though she doesn't have to use the same
terms, of course). Only then she can decide to act deliberately in a way that
would make the outcome different from how she knows it will be.
Take a moment to reflect on how that knowledge is founded. A character
recognizes a situation as one in which she has been before. Of course, this
can happen only in time travel stories, i.e. where it is acceptable (to the
character as to the reader) that someone may travel backward or forward in
time, thus being at the same place and time multiple times. So the character
is aware of this possibility, and recognizes a certain situation as an
instance of it. She also recalls (more or less accurately) what has happened
at this place and time when she visited it before. (We may take a certain
degree of inaccuracy into account here, e.g. because of failing memory, or
because the character's perceptions have been blurred in the first place.
Again, Twelve Monkeys provides a nice illustration for this.) Only
by insight into the nature of a story knot (it's the same spacetime location
as before) and perspective fusion (she's seen what happens at that spacetime
location) she can infer what she will experience (and what it will look like
from the perspective she will take now). Without accepting the ideas of time
travel, story knot, and perspective fusion, her idea of what will happen is
at best an educated guess. (And to act counter to that is not too
remarkable.) To produce the phenomenon of frustration of will, what she acts
against is her knowledge of what will happen; and that knowledge (and
the certainty that it actually is knowledge) she can only have from
her grasp of these notions.
Bob Wilson (the main character in Robert Heinlein's By His
Bootstraps) also experiences frustration of will. The central scene of
the first half of the story is a story knot involving five (!) different
instances of Bob; three of them having an argument with each other inside the
same room. When he lives through the events the second time, Bob realizes
that he is at a story knot, and that what he experiences now (and what he
experienced before) constitute perspective fusion:
|
[...] the realization that this was not simply a similar scene, but the
same scene he had lived through once before - save that he was
living through it from a different viewpoint. [...]
| |
When he understands this, he tries to play against the game:
|
Wait a minute now - he was under no compulsion. He was sure of
that. Everything he did and said was the result of his own free will. Even
if he couldn't remember the script [of the previous conversation at the
story knot], there were some things he knew "Joe" [his previous
instance] hadn't said. "Mary had a little lamb," for example. He would
recite a nursery rhyme [...]
But under the unfriendly, suspicious eye of the man opposite him he
found himself totally unable to recall any nursery rhyme. His mental
processes stuck on dead center. He capitulated.
| |
So Bob decides to act in a way that 'stops this whole sequence' (as he
puts it later in the story) - he doesn't see that this is impossible (nor is
there anything to gain for him from it, so probably we should take this
primarily as an expression of his uneasiness with the situation he finds
himself in; and out of which he wants to break). And it is this error that
is a condition for the frustration of will he now runs into.
To summarize: frustration of the will (in the technical sense
discussed here) can only happen if a character gains insight about story
knot and perspective fusion in his situation. That gives him not only
knowledge in advance, but also supplies evidence that it actually is
knowledge. Time travel gives the missing element to have knowledge
about some future event, by supplying evidence via the concepts of story
knot and perspective fusion (actually, the best sort of evidence there
could be: seeing things with one's own eyes, having first-hand
experience).
We have now a more precise formulation of what frustration of will means:
despite of knowing (and knowing that it is knowledge) how things will work
out, someone tries to make them happen differently. This is a conflict
between his knowledge in
intention and his knowledge of the scenario. So one of these can't
be knowledge, and therefore, one of them can't be true. Thus the character
must fail in his attempt to make things happen differently. (Any other
option would, again, make the story inconsistent.)
6) As we have seen in the example above from By His
Bootstraps, frustration of will is not only dependent on the insight
into story knots and perspective fusion, but also on an incompleteness
in this understanding. Fully understanding, Bob Wilson would see why there
is no chance of 'playing against the game'.
The idea that he should be able to speak a nursery rhyme is incoherent; he
can stick to it only as long as he has not fully realized that the events he
is about to experience have happened before, in his past, and have been
already experienced by him.
Imagine you are talking to someone who tells you that you will fall asleep
in a few minutes. You think you should be able to control that, shouldn't
you? So you decide to try and not fall asleep. But, unknown to you,
you have been given a sleeping drug just a minute ago which was put in your
drink, and your counterpart has seen you swallow it. So, although you don't
know yet, you will fall asleep.
Imagine further he tells you now about the sleeping drug; and assume that
you have no reason not to believe him. So you have now fairly good evidence
that you'll be asleep in under a minute. Unless you think you can fight
the sleeping drug, it now starts to look as if it doesn't make sense anymore
to think you can decide what will happen - you know that already.
Whether you can believe that you will be able to take some given action
depends on what you can expect about the circumstances. Many of them are
not yet determined, so you have some freedom. But as soon as you have good
evidence from which you can infer what will happen, that freedom is reduced,
and the range of actions you can reasonably try to take is limited.
Now, in a world in which time travel happens, and (crucially) where you
know yourself to be at a story knot at which you have been before, your
knowledge of what happens at that story knot constitutes evidence as good
as the that about the sleeping drug in the example above. Given your
insight in the nature of the story knot and the perspective fusion, you
cannot coherently think you will be able to perform certain actions -
actions which have an effect that is inconsistent with what you already
know of the events at the story knot (because you have seen it from the
perspective of your earlier self).
Frustration of will, then, always results from an undertaking done with
inconsistent motives. In this respect, it is similar to the frustration that
results if you were trying to change the past. Given the time travel
constellation, the story one would have to tell about oneself when acting
to as to change the events at a story knot is as inconsistent as trying to
change what has happened in the past. (Which, in a sense, is exactly what
it is!)
7) "But," some of my impatient readers might exclaim at this point,
"this all assumes that we are talking only about time travel fiction.
What about the real thing? Supposing time travel will be invented at some
future time, surely people won't be failing to carry out their intentions
because of some requirement of consistency that applies to story-telling?
After all, the real world isn't a story, and there's nobody just narrating
it. And it takes more to prevent real people from doing things than
philosophy."
Well, always taking into account that there is really no better reason
to believe in this than there was more than a hundred years ago (when H.G.
Wells first invented the time machine as a literary vehicle); and not taking
the somewhat rash conclusion that time travel will never be possible because
of this difficulty: even so, I don't think this is right.
Characters (or people, if you like) who experience frustration of the
will in a time travel context do so because of their inconsistent intentions:
they attempt to do something of which they already know they won't
achieve (in the strong sense that they have justified, true belief, which
many philosophers take as a fairly good definition of 'knowledge'). They
don't fail because of some strange narrative requirement; but because they
don't understand their own situation, and the consequences of time travel.
True, I have explained these in the context of literary analysis; this is
because, as far as we know, time travel only happens in fiction (and not in
the real world). But were it to happen in reality, I think, this analysis
would still apply to it.
