ELANA GOMEL
POSTMODERN SCIENCE FICTION AND TEMPORAL IMAGINATION
It seems to me, then, that time is merely an extension, though of what it is an extension I do not know. I begin to wonder whether it is an extension of the mind itself.
St. Augustine, Confessions
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Timeshapes
Introduction: Time Enough for World.
Chapter One. The Time Machines: H.G. Wells and the Invention of Postmodernity
Chapter Two. Strangled by the Time Loop: Paradoxes of Determinism
Chapter 3. 'My Name is Might-Have-Been': Contingency, Counterfactuals and Moral Choice.
Chapter 4. Everyday Apocalypse: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the End of Time
Conclusion. Beyond Millennium
Preface: Timeshapes
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity.
This is John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819). In the poem, time congeals into a material shape, permanent and palpable; the present becomes charged with eternity; and the flux of beginning, middle and end freezes into the perpetual "now.
In "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) Walter Benjamin writes: "A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop" (Benjamin 262). Historical flux becomes an object to be examined and evaluated.
In Alastair Reynolds ' science fiction novel Century Rain (2004) a "quantum snapshot" of Earth in 1940 in enclosed in a giant cosmic sphere, complete with all the people who existed at that point in time, as immobile and eternal as Keats' painted maiden. "Jolted" back into time, it begins to develop, acquitting its own history. But "are people in it any more real than "the images in a burning photograph" (Reynolds 284)? Do they feel anything? Is their transition back into time a deliverance or a fall?
A masterpiece of poetry; a longing for a new kind of history and a new kind of historian; a science fiction novel. As motley a collection of texts as one could assemble. And yet they share something: an image of time, which is tangible and material and yet paradoxical and elusive; time as an object in space; time as a shape.
It is not merely that all three texts wish time would stand still, as one often wishes when faced with a beautiful moment or a looming deadline. They intimate that time is already standing still; has always been standing still; that our perception of the evanescence of the presence and the non-existence of the past and the future is an illusion. Eternity is real; time is not. Whether this eternity is conceived as the world of Platonic ideas as in Keats; the Marxist pattern of history as in Benjamin; or a physical property of the quantum universe as in Reynolds can, for now, be set aside. What is important for my purposes is that underlying their texts, so different in meaning, address, and literary quality, is the same insight: that time is an illusion. The past, the present, and the future coexist. Time is not a flux, a flow, a rushing river, as it is so often envisioned in other texts, from Heraclitus to pop-songs
But then, what are the flux, the flow, and the rushing river if not another set of images linked by the concept of motion, just as the Grecian urn, the eternal present, and the quantum snapshot are linked by the concept of stasis?
All language is inherently figurative. But underlying the three quotes above is something more substantial than a metaphor: a form of experience, an embryonic worldview, the DNA of a philosophy or metaphysics of temporality. And at the same time, it has a clearly political dimension, most obvious in Benjamin who is writing in the inexorably shrinking crevice between his own Marxism and the fascist tide engulfing Europe, between Stalin and Hitler. The same great war over the future of (post)modernity is reverberating in Reynolds' novel of the quantum Paris of 1940, the year of Benjamin's death on the Spanish border after his escape from France. Keats urn holds not just the beauty of ancient Greece but also the ashes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. In the very stridency of these texts' denial of time one can hear the shriek of what Benjamin in another meditation called "a storm blowing from Paradise", the storm of history (257).
Something more than a metaphor and less than a concept: an image, a form of thought, an experience of time between public and private, between memory and history. I will call this something a timeshape.
A timeshape has similarities to Fredric Jameson's concept of ideologeme: the "smallest possible unit" of ideologically charged meaning (1981). Or it might be compared to Richard Dawkins' notion of "meme" – the unit of cultural memory analogous to gene, the unit of hereditary memory. But a timeshape has a strong narrative dimension which both ideologeme and meme lack. Memes, ideologemes, and timeshapes cross discursive boundaries that separate art from politics and sciences from the humanities. But if memes and ideologemes are genes of meaning, timeshapes are seeds of narrative, and consequently, seeds of time. We experience time through stories we tell, stories with beginning, middle, and end.
Time is simultaneously the most central aspect of human experience and the most elusive. We live in time, we cannot escape it, and yet we can neither define it with any certainty nor even agree on the object of definition. It is not just that cultures of the past had very different notions of temporality from our own. But even within contemporary postmodern culture there are many conflicting discourses of time, including the one that claims that time has come to an end. I disagree, as the rest of this book will make clear. But even if it were true, the end of time is articulated through yet another timeshape. Time is resurrected in its very denial, coming back to haunt postmodernity with ghosts of its disavowed history.
Time has been the subject of ferocious philosophical, scientific, and ideological battles, many of which will be referenced in this book. But more importantly, time has also been the subject of multiple narrative representations. And the forms of these narratives capture the essence of the cultural conceptualizations of temporality. This book is about the postmodern geography of time. It is a tour of the baroque shapes into which our perception of time has been hammered by history.
Looking back at the three quotes with which I begin, we can see that Reynolds' use of their common timeshape is different from the other two. He embodies it in a narrative, while Keats and Benjamin do not. And not just any narrative but a particular kind of it, a science fiction (SF) novel.
Narrative is what enables us to experience time as a lived reality, both individually and collectively. And SF is the narrative genre that at this particular historical juncture, postmodernity, offers us the best access to the clashing timeshapes that define the postmodern fragmentation of both public and private time. Or rather times, for while I believe that time is real, we can only apprehend it through its cultural inscriptions and conceptualizations, through the timeshapes of ideology, science, and religion.
SF, the genre that has given us the expressions "time travel" and "time machine", is the mirror of postmodern temporalities. But perhaps "the mirror" is a wrong word because it assumes a passive reflection of whatever already exists. Let us say, rather, that SF is a quantum snapshot of the multiple timeshapes of postmodernity. Or perhaps SF is a Grecian urn that "doth tease us out of thought" by the strange and mysterious images it contains. Or maybe it is a historical record of postmodernity's multiple pasts, presents, and futures; a key to the postmodern temporal imagination.