This morning (at 7am my time!) I had the honor of being the opening speaker at the Encontro Internacional de Estudos Mitopoéticos (International Meeting of Mythopoetic Studies) event “O SENHOR DOS ANÉIS: 70 anos de A Sociedade do Anel” (LORD OF THE RINGS: 70 years of The Fellowship of the Ring). Here are my notes for the talk; it would be cool to turn it into an article some time, but I’d need a lot of your input on what’s missing and what’s unoriginal about it. 🙂 Enjoy!

A Time to Search:
Temporal Narratives in Fantasy Literature

I.       Intro

I once heard someone claim that all stories can be summarized as either “A stranger came to town” or “Someone went on a journey.” Of course, these two plots are arguably the same story, since the stranger who comes to town is on a journey from somewhere else. This generalization suggests that nearly all fantasy literature—indeed, almost all literature!—is driven by journeys, quests, and travels from one place to another, either physical or metaphorical (or both).

What is a journey, but a move through time and space? Someone starts out in one place at one moment and ends up in another place at a different moment—which is why the journey metaphor works so perfectly for mental, emotional, or spiritual changes as well as physical travels. In either case, the point is that the character develops; they are not the same at the end of the quest as they were at the beginning (even if the whole trip was in the mind while the body sat unmoving in a chair the entire time). Whether they passed through space, time, or both, they shifted, somehow. 

But of course, a journey through space need not be linear: we don’t always leave Point A and end up at Point B by going in a straight line across the shortest distance. We often take side quests, backtrack, get lost, or find ourselves stuck along the way. Similarly, stories don’t always present time as a simple chronology with everything happening in order.

In this talk, I’ll look at two theories about narrative structure: Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and Farah Mendelsohn’s taxonomy of fantasy. We’ll ponder how those approaches interact with chronotopes and whether they change a reader’s experience of moving through linear time. Next, I’ll briefly present some time-travel books by Tolkien and his friends in the Inklings, including a very important innovation by Charles Williams. Finally, I’ll end with some thoughts about the time-bound nature of narrative and consciousness but also their ability to transcend time to some extent.

II.     What is a story? What is time?

“Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren” (Greene). And on this fleeting material reality, as the hours and days rush by, we tell stories to try to catch something and hold it, to try to grasp an experience or person or place and make it last by putting it into words. We tell stories as a way to fight against death. 

Story

What are these “stories” that we tell inside of “time”? OED: “A narrative of imaginary or (less commonly) real events composed for the entertainment of the listener or reader; a (short) work of fiction; a tale” (“Story, n.”). But it’s more than that, right? Not just for entertainment: As historians and sociologists such as Joanna Macy, Chris Johnstone, and Yuval Harari tell us, stories are what people groups fight about today. Or, more accurately, what we argue about are narratives. As Brian Greene says: “We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill” (Greene).

 Narrative: “An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story, an account” or, more technically, “Literary Criticism. The part of a text, esp. a work of fiction, which represents the sequence of events, as distinguished from that dealing with dialogue, description, etc.; narration as a literary method or genre” (“Narrative, n.”). That’s what a book does: “takes an arbitrary path through space-time and turns it into a linear path” (Joe Hoffman, personal communication). It makes events into an artistic shape.

Time

A “chronotope” is “A term employed by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) to refer to the co-ordinates of time and space invoked by a given narrative; in other words to the ‘setting’, considered as a spatio-temporal whole” (Baldick). It’s “the warp and weft of space and time which forms the background tapestry of a fictional narrative” (Kyte). More:

the chronotope, as the complex nexus of realistic space and time, reaches directly into the narrative: locations and actions in time directly influence the foreground drama and the dynamics of character which take place against the backdrop of realistic space and time. It’s sort of like a spatiotemporal ‘archetype’ of setting that determines the kind of archetypal characters, situations, and stories that can realistically emerge from the matrix formed by the intersection of particular geographies and particular periods of time. (Kyte)

The kinds and structures of chronotopes are almost endless, from simple straight-forward tellings in order according to the classical unities (one plot, one place, one day) or to the convoluted, complex time-structures of postmodern novels. For example, some scholars searching for “a model for a ‘postclassical chronotope’” look at both “Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), confined to one day but structured through the characters’ movements in space, with Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), restricted to a single location but encompassing thirty-two years of time” (Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan). They use this term “to study the complexity of temporal and spatial relationships,” which is what I hope to do today in just a very basic way in relation to fantasy (Perrino).

And what, pray tell, is “time”? Among other things, it is (according to Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) apparently “the most frequently used noun in the English language” (Dowden). The OED has many, many definitions; the most relevant for today are these.

1.       “Duration conceived as beginning and ending with the present life or the material universe, or as the sphere within which human affairs are contained; finite duration as distinct from eternity; the duration of the world or universe.”

2.       “Indefinite continuous duration regarded as that in which existence, and the sequence of events, takes place; the abstract entity which passes, goes by, or is consumed as events succeed one another.”

3.       “Chiefly Science Fiction. Time viewed as a medium through which travel into the past or future is hypothesized or imagined to be possible.” (“Time, n., Int., & Conj.”)

According to physicists, it is the fourth dimension, it expands and contracts, it only moves in one direction (O’Callaghan).

Stories in time

When we read a story, we temporarily leave our own linear experience of time and plunge into the chronology of the POV character. We can cover 421 days in about five hours of reading time, as with The Hobbit, or as many as 40 hours reading time to get through the year and a half of the main events of LOTR (Tolkien, Hobbit; Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings). Or we can spend 27 hours listening to the audiobook of James Joyce’s Ulysses and only get through one day of the main character’s life (Norton). Or in only about 15 hours of fast reading, we can live 10,000 years in Sarum by Edward Rutherford (Sarum). When Rip van Winkle falls asleep for 20 years, we, the reader, skip ahead with him and miss those 20 years. When the main character in The Time Machine by H.G. Wells shoots ahead or goes back, we zoom ahead and back in time with him. I haven’t yet read Trilogia Padrões de Contato [Trilogy Patterns of Contact]—Jorge Luiz Calife, but in know that in it, the Triad has to go back in time to intervene in human evolution; we can go along with this alien being by reading the book, right? (Garcia)

Or do we? Really, we are sitting in a chair turning pages (or driving in a car listening to an audiobook) for only the real, actual, primary-world number of minutes it takes to get through the book. The mundane, perhaps depressing reality is that we do not travel in time while we are reading. Minutes pass as they always do, 8:14 am, then 8:15am, then 8:16 am, no matter how quickly or slowly time is passing in the book nor how much the main character may jump ahead to the future or back into the past. The fantasy of time travel is merely fantastical and totally unrealistic.

Or is it?

Time Travel

“In theory, it is possible for space-time to be folded like a piece of paper, allowing a tunnel to be punched through” (wormhole); “On our current understanding of the Universe, we could potentially travel into the future, but travelling into the past may well be a total no-no” (Marshall). There’s also Feynman’s idea that “positrons could simply be represented as electrons going from the future to the past in a back section of their world lines” (Feynman).

III.  Campbell’s hero’s journey & time

So time travel might be possible, theoretically, in the physical world, but what about within a story? What kinds of structures might those stories follow? You may all be familiar with the main idea of Joseph Campbell’s influential 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell). It postulates that stories follow roughly the same structure (“Hero’s Journey”):

And look: It can be described as “Someone goes on a journey,” so it fits one of those two archetypal plots I mentioned in the intro. But what if the character time travels at some point? Doesn’t that mess it up? No, because the time travel easily fits into the crossing of thresholds and the challenges the hero faces. In any case, he moves through time in a linear fashion from his POV, no matter how many eras he may visit.

A good question is whether this narrative structure is universal for fantasy stories or, indeed, for all stories.

Stories that try to transcend (Arrival) remembering the future (Chiang; Arrival). Godot, nothing happens, twice (Beckett). Galactic Sausage on Reddit wrote a great summary:

“the basic structure of:
·         there’s a character
·         they want something
·         some stuff happens
·         they do or don’t get the thing
·         there’s a denouement
is kind of impossible to avoid, or you don’t really have a story.” (TylerSehn)

IV.  Mendlesohn’s taxonomy of fantasy & time

So let’s talk about Fantasy in particular now. Mendelsohn is concerned with how the fantastic enters the text and what the reader’s relationship is to the secondary world. But I am interested in asking different questions: How does each present the sequence of events? Are there are particular chronotopes associated with each of Mendelsohn’s categories? If so, do they change a reader’s experience of moving through linear time? As Bakhtin noted, “time and space in literature are always elaborated differently depending on the cultural and historical development of society” (Ostaltsev 123), so another interesting question (which I won’t get into today) would be how fantasy literature displays time-space differently depending upon the time-space realities of its author. As Dimitra Fimi writes, “I suggest that one of the most fundamental things that fantasy literature does when presenting us with imaginary worlds or reconfigurations of our world is to challenge, to question, to redefine, to understand, to grapple and eventually come to terms with, concepts of space and time” and “fantasy literature distorts space and time in impossible ways” (Fimi 28). In any of them, the author can “build a coherent and fully-realized alternative world with its own chronology and geography” (FImi 28);

1. Portal Fantasy:

Someone from our world enters the fantastic through a door, and we ride on their shoulder. Usually quest narrative. It can always be described as “Someone goes on a journey,” so it fits one of those two archetypal plots I mentioned in the intro. The fantastic must be navigated. There’s a constant sense of wonder. LWW, The Hobbit, LOTR, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia Set; Tolkien, Hobbit; Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings; Grossman). All Medieval romances in which someone wanders into Faerie (fairyland).

Time: Forward-moving, linear, journey from our world through the portal, into the world, through the world, to achieving the quest and mastering/conquering/changing the secondary world. It can also “construct a doorway to an ‘other’ world or dimension, with a different concept of time” (Fimi 28), but then once there, we move through it quickly, with a forward momentum, trying to solve the puzzle or accomplish the quest or save the universe. 

2. Immersive Fantasy:

The fantastic is the norm. The reader is plunged in medias res, into “an irony of mimesis,” an assumed realism. The fantasy world is sealed and is immersive for the POV characters. Silmarillion, Wicked, Watership Down, Wheel of Time, The Broken Earth series by N. K. Jemisin. Whether it can be described as “A stranger came to town” or “Someone goes on a journey” depends upon each plot individually. Most have both. In Watership Down, for instance, the invasion of humans (strangers) into the home warren (their “town”) sends our heroes out on a journey (Adams). In the Quenta Silmarillion, the arrival of a stranger (Melkor) leads to Fëanor’s oath, which then sends him and his sons and others on a journe.

Time? It can “offer us a hidden, invisible world somewhere around us, with its own historical traditions and spaces we cannot access” (Fimi 28).

3. Intrusion Fantasy:

The fantastic invades our world, bringing chaos. There is a tone of constant and escalating amazement, awe, or skepticism. Needs lots of explanation. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (?), Charles Williams.

The invasion could mess with time: it could present “a version of our world in which supernatural forces erupt and challenge every sense of ‘here’ and ‘now’ we think we have” (Fimi 28).

4. Liminal Fantasy:

The reader is estranged from a fantastic that is familiar to the protagonist. There is a continued irresolution of the fantastic. We spend the entire work inside the portal, willing to believe (or suspend disbelief) but unsure what to believe in. The reader is disoriented, estranged. “The magic hovers in the corner of our eye” (Henderson). The tone is blasé. Little, Big (Crowley). Winter’s Tale.

“It has been argued that the Harry Potter books are an example of portal fantasy (Butler, 2012) with platform 9 ¾ as a ‘passageway’ to the magical world of Hogwarts. But I prefer Gamble and Yates’s classification of the Harry Potter series as a world-within-a-world, marked off by physical boundaries” (2008, p. 122).” (Fimi 29).

Now talk about journeys and time. “the vast, multi-layered, fluid, or slippery sense of space and time we get in fantasy literature” (Fimi 27). Time could be experienced differently than in our world: i.e., Narnian and earth time. Can allow a kind of time travel by having the other world in a different historical or technological era from ours; see the proliferation of faux-medieval fantasy books, movies, TV shows, and games. Any Renaissance Faire is this kind of “time travel.”

V.     Time-travel & the Inklings

Tolkien & Time Travel

The wager. The Notion Club Papers.

LOTR’s chronotope: Alex Ostaltsev writes:

Among the types of historical chronotopes presented in Bakhtin’s analysis, two in particular are worth special attention when considering Tolkien’s fantasy narrative. The first one is the folklore chronotope which, according to Bakhtin, exhibits “historical inversion.” It means that “mythological and artistic thinking locates such categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection, the harmonious condition of man and society and the like in the past” (“Forms” 147). […] The second one is the idyll chronotope, which is very static and characterized by the unity of place, the cyclical time tied to the cycles of nature and the main events of a human’s life (birth, marriage, labor, eating, death). The features of the idyllic chronotope are visible in the Tolkien’s Shire, where self-sufficiency, unity with nature, and the enjoyment of its benefits are cultivated.

We could think of LOTR as time travel story: According to Joe Hoffman, the Shire is Edwardian, Bree is Tudor, Arnor more broadly is medieval, Rohan is Anglo-Saxon, Minas Tirith might be Roman Egypt, the Dwarves cultures might be Neolithic, but then the Dead Marshes are the trenches of WWI, Orthanc is 20th-century industrial, Mordor is Mid-20th-Century Soviet bloc (Hoffman). Fimi writes brilliantly about this, surveying these apparent historical eras. She calls it a “palimpsest of chronotopes—from Anglo-Saxon heroic culture to an Egyptian/Byzantine/Roman mash-up, to the Victorian pastoral, all the way to the battlefields of WWI” and points out that they are all woven together skillfully “in a tapestry that feels coherent—it is only when you turn it around that you see the knots and disparate elements ‘sticking out,’ so to speak” (Fimi 28). “This sort of fantasy that plays with time and space by hybridising historical cultures to create a complex mosaic of geopolitical concerns is also evident in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (1996-2011)” (Fimi 28).

Lewis & Time Travel

Dark Tower:

‘Of course,’ said Orfieu, ‘the sort of time-travelling you read about in books – time-travelling in the body – is absolutely impossible.’ […] ‘time-travelling clearly means going into the future or the past. Now where will the particles that compose your body be five hundred years hence? They’ll be all over the place -some in the earth, some in plants and animals, and some in the bodies of your descendants, if you have any. Thus, to go to the year 3000 ad means going to a time at which your body doesn’t exist; and that means, according to one hypothesis, becoming nothing, and, according to the other, ‘becoming a disembodied spirit.’

‘But half a moment,’ said I, rather foolishly, ‘you don’t need to find a body waiting for you in the year 3000. You would take your present body with you.’

‘But don’t you see that’s just what you can’t do?’ said Orfieu. ‘All the matter which makes up your body now will be being used for different purposes in 3000.’ ‘You will grant me that the same piece of matter can’t be in two different places at the same time. Very well. Now, suppose that the particles which at present make up the tip of your nose by the year 3000 form part of a chair. If you could travel to the year 3000 and, as you suggest, take your present body with you, that would mean that at some moment in 3000 the very same particles would have to be both in your nose and in the chair – which is absurd.’ (Lewis, The Dark Tower, and Other Stories)

Chronoscope. And yet, he does show us into “Othertime” in the novel! We get to do what we could never do otherwise.

Williams

Many Dimensions

Wikipedia gives as the earliest example of someone stuck in a time loop The episode “The Man Who Murdered Time” in the radio drama The Shadow 1 January 1939 (“Time Loop”). However, in 1931, CW wrote a novel with a time loop, so he may very well have invented it! (Charles Williams)

Sir Giles has no qualms about subjecting the Stone to all sorts of ungodly experiments.  In one such diabolical trial, he informs an eager laboratory assistant by the name of Elijah Pondon that the Stone will allow him to travel back in time.  Giles then instructs Pondon to use the Stone and wish himself back to where he was twelve hours before the present moment.  The obedient assistant vanishes, and we learn that Sir Giles has unwittingly sent him into a never-ending time loop.  When the unfortunate Pondon relives the aforesaid twelve hours, he is sent back twelve hours to where he originally wished himself, only to relive the same twelve hours over and over ad infinitum. (Ezaki)

VI.  Narrative and consciousness both time-bound and time-transcendent

Time travel makes no sense. “most of the stories employing time travel in popular culture are logically incoherent: one cannot “change” the past to be different from what it was, since the past (like the present and the future) only occurs once” (Smeenk et al.). Must happen twice in order for there to be a plot: Harry Potter 3 movie.

Time-bound

“There is that personal sense of time that definitely feels linear – at least that is how most of us experience it: (Fimi 30). “Time, Borges notes, is the foundation of our experience of personal identity” (Popova), Doesn’t matter how much time travel, starting over, getting off the trajectory—for the protagonist, they’re still experiencing it one minute after another. There is no such thing as time travel for the viewer or for the character, no matter how many different times they may visit. All reading is linear; all experience is linear.

We are stuck in our own time: LOTR is “a story about a past inaccessible to the listener or reader and separated for ever from the present moment with the help of special spatio-temporal features” (Ostaltsev 124). Marching inexorably towards our own deaths: “The musician Hector Berlioz said, “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils’” (Dowden).

Time-transcendent

No reading maps on to lived time: “Bakhtin notes that this new spatio-temporal category [the chronotope] does not coincide with reality” (Ostaltsev 123)

Except in our minds, where we can experience two times at once. Re-reading transcends time? thinking of another part at the same time? Reading is always linear and non-linear: imagination and memory transcend.

Fantasy is ultimately an attempt to escape death? (Fimi 31). We read fantasy, among other reasons, for “escape, consolation, and recovery” (cite), to satisfy our longing to fly, to talk to animals, to exist in a world with dragons and unicorns and the phoenix, and to bring our loved ones back from death beyond all hope. But I think we also want to escape from the one-minute-after-another nature of linear time. No matter what we do, we always experience 8:40, then 8:41, then 8:42, on and on and on. But when we read, we can live in two times simultaneously: We are in the real time of our bodies, where we sit in a chair turning pages or drive in a car listening to an audiobook, and we are also in the time that is passing in the novel. Borges again: “I deny the existence of one single time, in which all things are linked as in a chain.”  (Popova). He does not feel tied down by the linear succession of moments that we think we experience, writing:

Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. (Popova).

Maybe that is because he is a writer, and a writer whose stories always play with time and refuse to be tied down by it. In them, whether “A stranger comes to town” or “Someone goes on a journey,” their path is rarely straight. And they often return transformed and transcendent, as we ourselves are when we read fantasy. While we’re reading it, we can live forever.

Works Cited

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Arrival. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Lava Bear Films, FilmNation Entertainment, 21 Laps Entertainment, 2016.

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—. The Lord of the Rings. 50th anniversary edition, William Morrow, 2004.

TylerSehn. “Stories That Don’t Follow ’The Hero’s Journey’ ?” R/Fantasy, 29 Apr. 2021, www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/n19gze/storiesthatdontfollowtheherosjourney/.