Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative by David Wittenberg (review)

Although there are many essays on individual works and short surveys of time-travel fiction, there are surprisingly few book-length studies of the genre: Bud Foote’s The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel in the Past in Science Fiction (1990) and Paul J. Nahin’s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction (1993). To that short list can now be added David Wittenberg’s erudite and provocative Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. Wittenberg’s ambitious study rewrites the early history of time-travel fiction and forces us to rethink the fundamental aspects of the genre. This challenging work synthesises insights from cultural studies, film theory, narratology, historiography and the philosophy, physics and psychology of time to offer a grand theory of time-travel narratives as ‘exercises in narratology and the theorization of temporality – they are in essence “narrative machines”’ (2).

Wittenberg employs the distinction of the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky between fabula (the story material or history) and sjuzhet (the narrative re-presentation – the plot). In normal narrative, the underlying fabula is regular, a sequence of chronological events, whereas the sjuzhet, in telling the story, may rearrange the temporal sequence. But in time-travel fiction, there is no such chronological regularity in the fabula, which introduces a ‘radical structural ambiguity’ into the narrative (7). Time-travel stories then function as a ‘narratological laboratory’ (2). The reader or viewer of such stories becomes perforce ‘a practicing narrative theorist or a practical experimenter in the philosophy of time’ (8). Hence the book’s subtitle.

He begins by offering readings of three time-travel fictions to show how they destabilise narrative, raise questions about how we reconstruct history and reveal the arbitrariness of our notions of reality. First is Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line (1969), in which the hero is a tour guide for travellers to the past who uses his godlike abilities to jump back and forth over sections of the past, from centuries to years to a matter of a few days. Wittenberg argues that the protagonist’s skipping through time simply literalises what all narratives do in playing with time, in their ellipses, flashbacks, stretching or shrinking of time and rearrangement of temporal sequence. Thus, time-travel fiction ‘automatically exposes and destabilises some of the conventions of story construction’ (6).

Wittenberg’s second illustration of the power of time-travel narrative comes from Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man (1969), in which the protagonist travels from the twentieth century to AD 29 to search for the historical Jesus. When his search turns up no messiah, he assumes the role himself, even allowing himself to be crucified to fulfil the myth. For Wittenberg, the story illustrates how, ‘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 person seated in a vehicle or machine’ (14).

His third reading considers the alternate universe or alternate history through Larry Niven’s short story ‘All the Myriad Ways’ (1968), in which pilots fly their machines to parallel universes. But ‘if all narrative lines are equally possible, then the logical or naturalistic basis for realism … can no longer be used to distinguish better from worse narratives’ (17). Even more, ‘Niven’s Crosstime pilots disclose a situation in which the arbitrary and tenuous conditions of the ostensible coherence of our “normal” world are quite literally exposed’ (19). Niven’s story is ‘a “Schrodinger’s cat” of narration’ (13). Ultimately, such a story becomes ‘self-conscious narratological self-depiction … a literalization of structural conditions of storytelling, and eventually … a diagramming of even a “filming” of such conditions’ (29). Wittenberg emphasises ‘the primacy of the visual in time travel narrative’ (32), which leads him later in the book to focus on time travel in film and television.

Perhaps the most controversial section of the book is...