Abstract

Chapter 4 discusses the way in which time travel fictions manipulate the narratological pairing of fabula (underlying story material) and sjuzhet (reorganization of story material in plot). Focusing chiefly on Samuel R. Delany's novella Empire Star, the chapter shows (a) how narratives generally presume the "truthful" or "historical" priority of the fabula over the sjuzhet-Wittenberg terms this presumption a "postulate of fabular apriority"-and (b) how time travel paradox stories subvert such a postulate, literalizing what Delany calls a "multiplex" perspective on potentially incompatible narrative lines. In turn, a time travel story reveals that the "natural" ordering of fabula and sjuzhet relies essentially on paratext, the physical or visual medium in which narrative lines are laid out or juxtaposed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some illustrated editions of Empire Star, showing how the reader/viewer's multiplexity both requires and suppresses the diagrammatic layer of paratext; once again, time travel stories are a "narratological laboratory" for testing such theoretical categories.

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