Truth in Time Travel: Subversions of Time in An Adventure

Abstract

This article explores how Frances Lamont and Elizabeth Morison’s An Adventure (1913) disrupts temporal and spatial dichotomies through its supposed representations of time travel. An Adventure presents time as a shifting force that aligns with Bergsonian notions of temporality – specifically the concepts of objective and subjective time as defined in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1911) and “Time and Free Will” (1913). This article also considers how Freudian notions of “condensation” further outline the subjective rendering of time in An Adventure’s surreal journeys back in time to the French Revolution and how the narrative’s subjective presentation of time aligns with Ford Madox Ford’s later theories of literary impressionism, particularly his idea that modernist narratives are composed of “various unordered pictures”. This article ultimately argues that Lamont and Morison’s book benefited from the temporally minded scientific and social climate of the time and used the theoretical groundwork of thinkers like Henri Bergson, Ford Madox Ford and Sigmund Freud as starting points from which they could tell their tale as truth. Specifically, their formal construction of the text as scientific research seeks to consciously obscure the differentiation between fact and fable, effectively positing their nonlinear time slip as truth. If that truth is humored, Lamont and Morison are proposing a more radical conception of time than Bergson – a nonlinear conception of time – a proposition that sits in tension with their use of scientific diction and discourse.