Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel

Abstract

'Scientific people/ proceeded Time Traveller, after pause required for proper assimilation of this, 'know very well that Time is only a kind of Space' (The Time Machine 268). What is at stake in treating time a kind of space, politically, philosophi cally, and narratologically? While time travel has often been dismissed as merely a popular science-fictional gimmick, it seems far more productive to regard it as an in scription of a specific ideology of temporality. The roots of this ideology are in evolutionary debate of fin-de-siecle but its contemporary offshoots have become part of postmodernity's problematic relationship with time and history. The post modern trouble with time finds its expression in turn in narrativity, which includes topos of time travel (Smethurst 37). In this essay, I will trace development of time travel, from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine to postmodern science fiction as a brief history of a-historicity. As opposed to most narrative conventions, time travel originates in a single text, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895).1 In his first novel, Wells invents not just a new plot but a new chronotope. Chronotope, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is spa tial-temporal configuration of narrative text, the intrinsic connectedness of tem poral and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature (15). The