|
Article Excerpt
In the third book of his epic science fiction series that began with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams addresses some of the more peculiar consequences of time travel. (1) In his narrative, time travel technology has altered the fabric of human existence in the same manner as any other mode of transport. He succinctly states the problem: "Time travel is increasingly regarded as a menace. History is being polluted" (Adams 389). He draws attention to this danger with an example of literary production. Among the greatest works of literature in his galaxy is a collection of poems known as the Songs of the Long Lakes, written on an obscure planet by a nearly unknown author. Discovered long after the author's death, they are regarded as some of the most beautiful verse ever composed.
With the advent of time travel, an intrepid correction fluid company wondered if this author's work could have been improved by the use of their product, and if so could he be persuaded to say a few words to that effect. So, they utilized this new technology to travel back in time, discuss this with the author, and convinced him to sign a very lucrative endorsement deal. Subsequently, the opportunities and the wealth afforded to him by this arrangement removed him from both the environment and the adverse circumstances that had fired his poetic imagination, and he never actually wrote the poems that had first spurred the correction fluid company to seek him out. In order to correct this unfortunate oversight, the company gave the 'author1 an old edition of his poems, locked him in a room, and had him copy the work.
This of course introduces something of a moral dilemma: whether these poems are the same as the original, which technically they are, or, have they lost their intrinsic value because of the altered circumstances of their creation? This particular discussion, however, spawned the creation of a Green Peace-like organization known as the Campaign for Real Time, whose goal was to combat such abuses of temporal continuity, namely to fight the pollution of history, since:
... a lot of history is now gone forever. The Campaigners for Real Time claim that just as easy travel eroded the differences between one country and another, and between one world and another, so time travel is now eroding the differences between one age and another. "The past" they say, "is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there." (390)
The dissolution of temporal distinctions and historic causality produces a narrative crisis in Adams's fantastic universe. The present/future begins to affect just not the reception and interpretation of past events, but also their actuality, altering how or even if they occur. Does the past then lose all authority, or can it resist and assert some sort of historic determination? The trope of time travel allowed Adams to explore this interpretive problem in new and interesting ways, but issues of authority and historical certainty are not new topics by any means.
The Greek biographer Plutarch exhibits a similar obsession with issues of origins and the effects of later interpretive schemes in his Life of Romulus. Plutarch shows an intense preoccupation with the Roman foundation, which, while perhaps logical in a biography about the founder of the city, nevertheless introduces a number of unique problems. Plutarch is faced with a number of difficulties that are absent in his other biographic endeavors, which for the most part have ample historical material for him to work with. One of the most daunting problems that Plutarch faces is the distance in time between the biographer and his subject, since Romulus is something of a semimythic character, and is appropriately paired with the mythological Athenian foundation figure of Theseus. It is in the introduction to the The-seus, the companion biography to the Romulus, that Plutarch associates the distanced, mythic past with fantastic and unexplored lands. He compares periods whose historical accuracy cannot be fully established to "'sandy and waterless deserts full of wild beasts,' or 'blind marsh,' or 'Scythian cold,' or 'frozen sea.'" (2) Like a cartographer, the historian must map out the limits of his knowledge, and establish sure boundaries between reality and myth, and those periods which cannot be verified are "full of marvels and unreality, the land of poets and mythographers, where nothing is believable or certain" (Plut. Thes. 1.1).
The distance in time is compounded by a cultural distance, as Plutarch is a Greek living as a Roman citizen in the first and second centuries CE. There is an essential gap between Plutarch and his Roman subjects, both culturally, although Plutarch himself was intimate with a number of high-ranking Roman senators, as well as in scholarly terms. C. P. Jones has described how Plutarch's political and philosophical career brought him into contact with a number of Romans, even to the point that the Lives seem to be dedicated to a Roman friend of his, Q. Sosius Senecio. (3) Christopher Pelling describes how the scholarly activity in the preparation of his biographies may have differentiated the writing of the Roman Lives from the Greek. (4) Pelling works from the position that "whatever the case with some of the Greek Lives, he (Plutarch) would not be able to write these Roman biographies simply from general knowledge" ("Plutarch's," 1). The writing of the Greek biographies was a process of recollection, (5) the writing of the Roman ones a process of discovery and reinvention.
The Romulus contains a number of temporal and physical irregularities that invite further consideration. Foundational to my discussion of Plutarch's narrative techniques in the Romulus is the chronotopic theory of narrative as put forth by Mikhail Bakhtin. Plutarch shows a concrete interest in both the physical and temporal landscapes of this biography and utilizes them to create, in Bakhtin's words, a chronotopic narrative. (6) For Bakhtin, the chronotope is a specific intersection of time and space coordinates in a literary work that are the prime determinants of its generic qualities. According to Pam Morris, at the center of this chronotopic perception is "the aesthetic visualizing of a human being in relation to their temporal and spatial world" (180). She points out that this is "ultimately an ideological perception; a way of comprehending human life as materially and simultaneously present within a physical-geographic space and a specific point of historical time" (180). It is a way of understanding experience.
This theory of the chronotope operates under the premise that all contexts are necessarily and fundamentally shaped by the kinds of space and time within which they operate. This is discussed by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson: "Bakhtin's crucial point is that time and space vary in qualities; different social activities and representations of those activities presume different kinds of time and space. Time and space are therefore not just neutral 'mathematical' abstractions" (367). Since Plutarch is first and foremost writing narrative accounts of his subjects' lives, his process is susceptible to the vagaries of Bakhtin's chronotopic theory. Of course, Plutarch is...
|
