Showing papers by "Marie-Laure Ryan published in 2009"

Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative

Abstract: Our intuitive notion of time comprises tour fundamental beliefs: (1) time flows in a fixed direction; (2) you cannot fight this flow and go back in time; (3) causes always precede their effects and (4) the past is written once for all. This paper examines narratives that create alternative visions of time through the violation of one or the other of these four principles, focusing on the consequences of the violations for narrativity, The denial of (1) occurs in narrative that reverse the direction of time (Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World), but after reviewing several possible definitions of time's arrow, I argue that in order to maintain narrativity these stories should not invert the cognitive arrow. The violation of (2), constitutive of time-travel narratives, is shown to potentially result in causal loops (Audrey Nifenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife). Time travel can also lead to causes preceding their effects and rewriting the past, but here I discuss stories that create these paradoxes without the benefit of movement across time (D.M. Thomas' The White Hotel and Emmanuel Carrere's La Moustache.) Against logicians who claim that a single contradiction in a system results in the destruction of the entire system, I argue that temporal paradoxes do not completely block the construction of a fictional world, but rather, invite the reader to imagine a "Swiss cheese" world in which contradictions occupy well-delimited holes of irrationality surrounded by solid areas about which the reader remains able to make logical inferences. ********** When we confront the problem of time, most of us share the perplexity of St Augustine, who famously wrote: "What then is time? If no one asks me, [ know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I do not know" (qtd. from Morris 8). We may not be able to capture in words our sense of the nature of time, but we have a reasonably clear intuitive idea of what it is, an idea that generally includes the following beliefs: 1. Time flows, and it does so in a fixed direction. 2. You cannot fight this flow and go back in time. 3. Causes always precede their effects. 4. The past is written once for all. These beliefs correspond to life experience; but life experience, because it is limited to the perspective of an individual, is not the best guide for those who want to explore the breadth of the possible. Logic can survey a wider territory, and the imagination pushes the limits of the possible even further back, especially when its outlet is narrative. In this article I propose to examine stories that create alternative visions of time through the violation of some of the four principles listed above, focusing on the consequences of these violations for narrativity. 1. Time flows in a fixed direction As Nabokov (252) observed, "[n]obody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible." Yet several authors have attempted to construct worlds that invalidate this claim. The most notorious are Philip K. Dick in Counter-Clock World(1967), which I will discuss here, and Martin Amis in Time's Arrow (1991). Reversed time narratives should not be confused with narrative that tell stories in reverse chronological order, as does the famous film Memento (2000) by Christopher Nolan, or the play and movie Betrayal (1983) by Harold Pinter. As narratologists know full well (Genette, Chatman), stories are subjected to a double temporal order: the order of events in the storyworld, and the order in which these events are presented by narrative discourse. In a genuine reversed time narrative, the reversal affects not the level of discourse, as it does in Memento and Betrayal, but the level of story. In other words, these texts describe a world where time actually and objectively moves backwards. Reversing the direction of time presupposes that time is something that moves, and moves in a specific direction, as do the arrow and the river, its two most common metaphors. …