Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  By contrast, in a time travel fiction, even a relatively normal one, no such underlying coherence in the fabula may be assumed. A time machine potentially alters the chronology of story events themselves, making it impossible to presuppose or determine any single consistent relationship between fabula and sjuzhet, and requiring, therefore, more or less artificial or narratively supplemental mechanisms of coherence. In Silverberg’s Up the Line, the interval over which Jud jumps using the time machine cannot, in principle, be recovered or reconstructed in the mode of three days that really passed in the fabula while only the reader jumped over them in the sjuzhet. Here it is no longer possible at all to decide whether these three days have really taken place without first selecting a privileged viewpoint other than Jud’s (for instance, that of Metaxas), or without explicitly adopting some further metanarrative frame within which the several actual or potential views of the story’s chronology might be contrasted and adjudicated. It would not even be possible to declare that Jud’s three days are “gone,” excised altogether from the fabula, since any time travel story necessarily offers multiple interpretations of the existence or nonexistence of such durations and of the agents who experience or witness them. We must say instead that the ontological status of these three days, as well as their partial or quasi assimilation by the domains of either fabula or sjuzhet, has been rendered radically ambiguous. Such radical structural ambiguity becomes even more obvious as soon as time travelers begin to do more unusual things, such as relive their own pasts, meet or duplicate themselves, retroactively eliminate slices of history, reexperience those same slices in altered versions or “lines,” and so on. What “normal” narratives can bring about only in the form of fantasy, allegory, or formalistic experimentation, time travel narratives accomplish in the mode of unfussy realism, a literal or mimetic description of characters, events, and machines. Hence “anachrony” in a time travel story can never be either dismissed as provisional or finessed as a mere artifact of retelling; it belongs ineluctably to the fabula itself, and remains fully present in all its potentially paradoxical provocation.

  In this sense, time travel fiction directly represents, on the level of straightforward content, not only the processes by which narratives are formed, but also the experimental conditions under which controlled narratological inquiry might take place, and “normal” or “classical” narrative procedures and techniques be manipulated and productively malformed. Even the naïve reader or audience of a time travel fiction becomes, by default or exigency, a practicing narrative theorist or a practical experimenter in the philosophy of time. As I show in more detail beginning in Chapter 3, all narratives, even “normal” ones, can be read only in a kind of hyper-space or metaverse, a quasi-transcendental “space” in which the relation between always potentially divergent lines of narration is negotiated and (usually) brought back to coherence and synchrony. The reader of time travel fiction, even in its most mainstream or adolescent-literary modes, is entirely familiar with this hyperspatial or metaversal realm of narratological negotiation. It is the very medium through which the time-traveling protagonist, who is de facto never either fully in or fully outside of the plot, realistically travels. Narratology is the very mise-en-scène of time travel fiction, and time travel itself the machinery by which narrative is manufactured.

  Second reading: Psychohistoriography in Behold the Man

  In my second reading, from Michael Moorcock’s 1968 novel Behold the Man, the sorts of eccentric plot twists encountered in Silverberg’s humorously narcissistic and oedipal adventure are considerably dampened, even as Behold the Man contrives to maintain in more polemical tension much of the potentially paradoxical relation between its fabula and sjuzhet. Indeed, Moorcock inflects this relation with a pathos engendered by the difficulty of interpreting and retelling, with any real precision and consistency, our most elemental or influential stories and histories. Overall, Moorcock is considerably more interested in the underlying psychological motivations of such temporal and historical manipulation, which for Silverberg remain largely a formalistic game.

  Moorcock’s protagonist, Karl Glogauer, an alienated and melancholic late-modern subject, exhibits an unhealthy obsession with two types of historical questions: first, his own recurring self-destructive relationships with women, and, second, the apparently more objective or pedantic theological question of the divinity of Christ. Being keen to circumvent the former question by way of pursuing the latter, and having become acquainted with the inventor of a time machine, Glogauer offers himself as test subject for a time travel experiment, on condition that he be sent back to a.d. 29 in order to witness the crucifixion of Jesus. Following a crash landing in the desert outside Jerusalem, in which Glogauer’s delicate, liquid-filled time machine bursts open and he is stranded in the past, he soon acclimates very nicely to the first century, even given his limited knowledge of the local dialect of Aramaic. He gradually adopts the superstitious and self-mortifying culture of John the Baptist and his sect of Essenes. However, despite a determined search, Glogauer has difficulty turning up any evidence of Jesus of Nazareth, or even of Mary or Joseph. When he finally does track down the “holy family,” he discovers that Joseph has deserted his wife, Mary herself is anything but virginal, and, to his greatest disappointment, the adolescent Jesus is misshapen and mentally disabled, an unpromising candidate for a messiah.

  However, by the time Glogauer gets around to making these unsettling discoveries, his odd and repeated inquiries about a Nazarene carpenter named Jesus, along with his own anachronistic quirks of character and his apparent ability to predict impending events with uncanny detail, have attracted attention in Nazareth and Bethlehem. The locals begin to consider him a prophet.8 As the novel proceeds toward its conclusion, Glogauer embraces the prophetic role into which his incongruity has thrust him, and willingly acts the part of Jesus of Nazareth. He then sets about to orchestrate the series of events that he knows, with an ironically detailed retrospect, to have made up the end of Jesus’s life. Ultimately, he arranges to have himself crucified by the Romans, all the while scrupulously duplicating Jesus’s specific gestures and expressions, which he recalls from the Gospels and histories he had obsessively studied in his “earlier” life two millennia hence.

  Unlike Silverberg, Moorcock is not concerned with creating suspense about the paradoxical twists in his plot. Relatively early in the novel, it becomes clear what is going to happen to Karl Glogauer, although, in proportion to the strength of his own delusions, Glogauer himself is slower than the reader to figure it out. Here, for instance, is his initial conversation with John the Baptist just after crashing in the desert and being rescued by the Essenes:

  “So you are from Egypt. That is what we thought. And evidently you are a magus, with your strange clothes and your chariot of iron drawn by spirits. Good. Your name is Jesus, I am told, and you are the Nazarene.”

  The other man must have mistaken Glogauer’s inquiry as a statement of his own name. He smiled and shook his head.

  “I seek Jesus, the Nazarene,” he said.9

  What Glogauer seeks, however, is both the actual man Jesus and, in a sense that is not yet apparent to him, a more complex amalgam of theological and psychological cathexes, which in a more straightforwardly modern theological vocabulary might be described as the “sense of Christ within” him, or, in a psychoanalytic vocabulary, as an ego-ideal. In short, Glogauer himself now gradually evolves into the person or archetype he seeks, a halting and uncanny change for him because he remains unaware of the full range of his own motivations:

  Karl Glogauer grew his hair long and let his beard come unchecked. His face and body were soon burned dark by the sun. He mortified his flesh and starved himself and chanted his prayers beneath the sun, as [the Essenes] did. But he rarely heard God and only once thought he saw an archangel with wings of fire.

  One day they took him to the river and baptized him with the name he had first given John the Baptist. They called
him Emmanuel.

  The ceremony, with its chanting and its swaying, was very heady and left him completely euphoric and happier than he ever remembered.10

  In Behold the Man, the mechanics of time travel, now in the hands of a more contemplative and psychologically incisive writer than Silverberg, readily permits complex intersections between a number of the book’s themes: Glogauer’s neurotic obsessions with certain sexual objects (for instance, crucifixes between women’s breasts); Glogauer’s half-hearted efforts to do away with himself, his “martyr complex”; Glogauer’s obsession with the theological problem of Christ’s divinity; Glogauer’s sense of dislocation or alienation in the present day, his feeling that he would be more at home in the past; the philosophical or psychological significance of Jesus as a paragon of self-sacrifice or self-mortification; the variety of sexual subtexts of Christian doctrine; the question of the relation between Christ’s godliness and an individual person’s inherent divinity; the psychical and sociological motivations of the actual historical Jesus and his followers; and the significance of fate (e.g., in Jesus’s prediction of Judas’s betrayal) and its ironic correlation with the “predictions” of the time traveler. Of course, with the exception only of the last one, these are all themes raised in any number of other literary, philosophical, and theological works. However, a time travel narrative, because of the way in which its literal devices bear upon or even directly affect the basic structure of the narrative itself, may be more likely than most popular literary forms to raise several such issues simultaneously. In that sense, presumably, the value of a book such as Behold the Man might be its capacity, within a relatively accessible generic medium, to address problems that are usually relegated to “higher” literary types, or at least to more self-consciously experimental and philosophically oriented ones.

  But the more substantial difference that the time travel story makes, as I also wished to show in the Silverberg example, is not the specific theoretical or philosophical issue at hand, nor its ostensible or unusual level of complexity, but rather the mode in which that issue is woven into the substance of the narrative itself—namely, in the form of literal or realistic plot events. In this sense, the most interesting problem in Moorcock’s novel is neither psychological nor theological per se, but rather historiographical or, in a term I promise not to reuse, psychohistoriographical. It concerns the meaning of the individual historical event and its capacity to affect and define the broader historical record, as well as, alternatively, the capacity of that historical record to define and characterize the individual event. In turn, the various psychological issues raised in Behold the Man are tethered to a larger, more central historiographical question, as Moorcock himself indicates superficially through his frequent allusions to Jung’s theory of archetypes; what tendencies or forces motivate the historical event or are motivated by it? This question of the relationship between event and history is perhaps the central problem of modern historiography, dating back at least to Hegel. It concerns what Hayden White calls the fundamental “ambiguity of the term ‘history,’” which “unites the objective with the subjective side” and “comprehends not less what has happened than the narration of what has happened.”11

  Moorcock, pursuing this historiographical inquiry within the terms of his own narrower interest in Jung, composes a series of subtle jokes about the “inevitability” of the story of Christ and about Glogauer’s ironic attempts to co-opt or reinforce that inevitability:

  “There must be twelve,” he said to them one day, and he smiled. “There must be a zodiac.”

  And he picked them out by their names. “Is there a man here called Peter? Is there one called Judas?”12

  Later, as Glogauer singles out Judas to help him—foretelling, in some ambiguous sense just as Jesus himself did in the Gospels, which one of the disciples will betray him—the ironic juxtaposition between historical fact and archetype or allegory is perfectly apparent:

  “Judas?” said Glogauer hesitantly.

  There was one called Judas.

  “Yes, master,” he said. He was tall and good looking with curly red hair and intelligent eyes. Glogauer believed he was an epileptic.

  Glogauer looked thoughtfully at Judas Iscariot. “I will want you to help me later,” he said, “when we have entered Jerusalem.”

  “How, master?”

  “You must take a message to the Romans.”

  “The Romans?” Judas looked troubled. “Why?”

  “It must be the Romans. It can’t be the Jews. They would use stones or a stake or an axe. I’ll tell you more when the time comes.”13

  A consideration of the inevitability of the past summons an ambiguity so basic to the problem of history that it cannot be contemplated without opening up, even within the course of the popular fiction, an inquiry into the ontology of the event itself. Is the “must” that accompanies the story of the crucifixion—“it must be the Romans”—constituted by (a) the sheer empirical facticity of the historical event itself (i.e., in the actual past it really was the Romans who crucified Jesus); or (b) the mythological or suprahistorical inexorability of the conflict that the crucifixion represents, a conflict between allegorical figurations of imperial-bureaucratic force and individualistic (or monotheistic) subjectivity; or (c) the weighty exigency of the two millennia of subsequent historical events and trends, in light of which the crucifixion has been ceaselessly, but of course retroactively and even circularly, interpreted as an essential, archetypal cause? We could phrase the trilemma this way: is the historical event, in and of itself, a blankly preliminary cause, an overdetermined revisionist effect, or a mere component or signifier of some even larger story or allegory?14 Or, yet again, to insert some of the language of time travel back into the three possibilities I have suggested: is the inevitability of the crucifixion the result of the somehow unalterable pastness of that event, the result of the deliberate intervention of the time traveler from out of the present (the historian? the Church?), or the result of a powerful inertia or causelike weight of history itself?

  In Chapters 4 through 6, I will have occasions to discuss in greater detail the “conservative” characteristic of time travel fiction, which, perhaps surprisingly, tends to restore histories rather than to destroy or subvert them. This tendency toward historical conservation, like the ambiguity of the relation between present and past more generally, is a fundamental philosophical problem, opening up questions about the tendentiousness of events themselves and of the momentum or inertia of their histories. Most important, the time travel story efficiently conjoins questions of form, psychology, and history within the context of a fundamental historiographical query presented straightforwardly on the level of plot: How, quite literally, is the past event reconstructed by or from the present? How is it discovered, or made, to be “real”? When is it caused?

  The time travel paradox initiated by Karl Glogauer—that the presence and significance of the story of Jesus within cultural history result from a temporal intervention out of the present—is a tale about how psychological motivations or, more concretely, masochistic and obsessive fixations, cathect, repeat, and continually reestablish the larger historical record, in essence preserving it or rendering it history in the first place. Moorcock’s novel thus compels a question about the conditions within the present that drive us toward certain segments of the historical past—that is, to history’s ostensibly crucial moments. This is a radical formulation of historiography, a formulation that oversteps any lukewarm inquiry into the present’s effect on the past—indeed, shortcuts the whole fraught philosophical question of “presentism”—and advances directly to the basic structure of the past itself, its reality, as well as the connection of that reality to the ways in which stories are retold. In time travel fiction, the fundamental historiographical question—how is the past reconstructed by or within the present?—becomes a literal topos, is told as a tale, or is enacted by a real person seated in a vehicle or machine.


  Third reading: The ontology of the event in “All the Myriad Ways”

  My third reading belongs to the science fiction subgenre sometimes referred to as the alternate universe or alternate history story, in which the time machine transports its rider not into the past or future but rather into alternate timelines—or, to use a term from physics that also works for narrative theory, worldlines. In Larry Niven’s 1968 short story “All the Myriad Ways,” pilots flying for a company called Crosstime, Inc., take their vehicles to parallel universes, or “branching” worlds, and then return to the primary world of the story, bringing back exotic artifacts and information about alternate histories. Part of the story focuses on the trouble that Crosstime pilots encounter when they must distinguish the innumerable alternate worlds from one another, and their invention of technological controls for accurately determining which worlds they are traveling to or from. “In those first months,” Niven writes, “the vehicles had gone off practically at random,” but now, since the engineers at Crosstime have improved their machinery and also refined their archival and commercial goals in exploiting alternate timelines, “the pinpointing was better”:

  Vehicles could select any branch they preferred. Imperial Russia, Amerindian America, the Catholic Empire, the dead worlds. Some of the dead worlds were hells of radioactive dust and intact but deadly artifacts. From these worlds Crosstime pilots brought strange and beautiful works of art which had to be stored behind leaded glass.15

  Here, as in many other examples of the alternate universe subgenre, the language of a much older type of speculative romance—“Imperial Russia, Amerindian America, the Catholic Empire”—is directly appended to the generic language of science fiction (“dead worlds,” “radioactive dust”) in order to form a kind of fable about historical evolution and variation. As I discuss in Chapter 1, in older speculative fiction, especially in utopian or dystopian romance written before the turn of the twentieth century, the scientific machinery of travel itself would more likely have remained incidental or subordinate to the writer’s presentation of an alternative sociopolitical milieu. However, in a science fiction alternate universe story such as Niven’s, something like the opposite is true: history, culture, politics, religion, and so forth remain the background for a speculation about the specific mechanisms of movement and travel.