Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema 3031523156, 9783031523151

Table of contents :
Preface
About the Cover Picture
Reference
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes (1963): From Novel to Screenplay
Introduction
Pierre Boulle’s Life and Work
The Novel
Sources of Inspiration and Literary Influences
Inspiration
Literary Influences
Science Fiction?
Le Micromégas (1752)
Les Animaux dénaturés (1952)
Summary of the Novel
Main Characters
Time Travel and Science Fiction in Planet of the Apes
Social Equality
A Reverse World Led by Apes
Human Experimentation and Science
From Novel to Screenplay
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Alisa in a Futuristic Wonderland: Traveling Through Time and Space with a Girl from Tomorrow
Introduction
Traveling in Time: A Scientific Viewpoint
Chronofiction: Origin, Development, and Basic Peculiarities
Chronofiction for Children
Kir Bulychev as a Science Fiction Writer
Alisa from the Future
One Hundred Years Ahead: The Devil Is in the Details
Time Objective and Subjective and Time as Children Perceive It: Alisa, Are You a Child?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: El anacronópete (1884, 1887), the First Journey in a Time Machine in Hispanic Literature
Introduction
Science: Time Travel
Literature: The Time Travel
El anacronópete
El anacronópete Versus The Time Machine
The First Trip to China in a Time Machine
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: The Ice People (1968), a Story of Humankind’s Auto-destruction
Introduction
René Barjavel’s Life and Work
The Novel
Summary
Main Characters
A Transcendence of the Ideological Science Fiction
Technological and Machinic Warfare
The Downfall of a Futuristic Civilization
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: “Job Done, History’s Safe”: Doctor Who and the Wibbly Wobbly Lessons of the Past
Introduction
“Ain’t gonna change”: Resisting Historical Amnesia and White Ignorance in ‘Rosa’
“I have such stories I could tell you”: Memorialising Trauma and Collective Memory in ‘Demons of the Punjab’
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Time Travel in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Novel The Master and Margarita
Introduction
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Novel: Between Genres
Social-Historical Context of the Novel’s Creation
The True Theme of the Novel
Acquaintance at the Patriarchs’ Ponds
Arrival of the Black Magic Professor
The Journey to Judea
Chasing
The Sinister Apartment No. 50
In the Variety Theater
Margarita’s Visit to Woland
Flight to the Witches’ Sabbath
Acquaintance with the Devil
Satan’s Great Ball
To Eternal Peace
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Black Time Travel, Chronotopicity, and the Reparative Desire for Beauty in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self
Time Travel Fiction and Bakhtin’s Concept of the Chronotope
Plot Summary and Dominant Chronotopes in Hopkins’s Of One Blood
Out of Time, Out of Space, Out of Self: Time Travel as a Social Necessity
Dianthe’s Journey into the Past: Time Travel, Slavery, and Intergenerational Trauma
Reuel’s Journey to Ancient Telassar: Black Time Travel as a Reparative Strategy
Conclusion: The Failure of Reparative Racial Justice in Black Time Travel
References
Chapter 9: Time Travel and Social Values in Femi Osofisan’s One Legend, Many Seasons
Introduction
Time Travel and Drama (Cinema)
Femi Osofisan: The Man, His Works, and Influences
Synopsis of One Legend, Many Seasons
Theoretical Consideration
Spirit of Christmas Past
Spirit of Christmas Present
The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come
Time Travel and Social Value in One Legend, Many Seasons
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Time Travel Novels in Japan and Yasutaka Tsutsui’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1967)
Introduction
Plot, General Interpretation, and Historical Background
The Plot
General Interpretation and Historical Context
Rebellion: There Is a Road of Time Travel Behind Him
An Avant-Garde Author Against Traditional Girl Fiction
An Avant-Garde Author Against Traditional Science Fiction
The Trend of Time Travel Novels in Japan
The Significance and Meaning of Time Leaps
A Girl, Science, and Time Leaps
Adaptations
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema Edited by Bernard Montoneri

Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema “Time travel is an important theme in literature and other arts, especially in science fiction and films. This excellent collection introduces readers to some of the most innovative and influential works and offers insightful discussions of works from different literary traditions and in different forms, both famous classics and new discoveries. For anyone interested in this theme and its various manifestations, reading this collection will be remarkably rewarding.” —Professor Zhang Longxi, Xiaoxiang Chair Professor of Comparative Literature, Hunan Normal University and author of World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon (Routledge 2023). Foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and also of Academia Europaea. Email: [email protected] “This book consists of fascinating chapters that explore in depth various themes related to time travel. Each chapter focuses on a different literary work or medium and discusses how time travel has influenced different cultures, literature, and philosophies. Below are some brief impressions of some of the chapters. Chapter 2 offers a captivating analysis of Planet of the Apes, delving deep into the core of the narrative. The author meticulously examines Pierre Boulle’ work, providing profound insights into the reverse world and the societal equality between apes and humans. Furthermore, the intriguing comparisons between the film adaptations and the original novel add an extra layer of interest to this chapter. It stands as an essential read for enthusiasts of time travel and science fiction. Chapter 8 shines a spotlight on Pauline E. Hopkins’ work, exploring the impact of time travel on the formation of human character. The author scrutinizes Hopkins’ dramatic piece, One Legend, Many Seasons, with precision, revealing how time and space profoundly influence character development within the narrative. This chapter showcases how Hopkins’ work effectively employs time travel as a means to address societal issues and focus on love and humanitarianism, earning well-deserved praise for its uniqueness. Both of these chapters provide profound insights into their respective topics, offering readers deep insights and stimulating ideas for those fascinated by the theme of time travel and science fiction. The book is highly engaging for readers interested in time travel and science fiction, and is an excellent resource for exploring this interesting topic from the perspectives of different literary works and cultures.” —Professor Yoriko Ishida, National Institute of Technology, Oshima College, Japan. Email: [email protected]

“In this wonderful collection, time travel is read under the temporal gaze of capitalism and imperialism, history and modernity, and across the undulating sheets of time past and present. Taking in over 150 years of literature and film and television, its comparative, national and transnational reaches enable the reader to understand time travel as an intense ‘machine’ that questions and resists dominant ideology, the coordinates of race and social class, and the governmental processes and practices that define one’s identity and social and political structures. With highlight chapters on Planet of the Apes, Doctor Who (the Rosa, and Demons of the Punjab, episodes), and Of One Blood, this volume is not only an essential edition to the field of time travel studies but is itself a form of revelatory chrononautics. One enters the book and moves across the great and small histories of time and space.” —Professor Sean Redmond, Deakin University, Australia; author of Liquid Space: Science Fiction Film and Television in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2017). Email: [email protected]

Bernard Montoneri Editor

Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema

Editor Bernard Montoneri Independent Researcher Taichung, Taiwan

ISBN 978-3-031-52314-4    ISBN 978-3-031-52315-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

Dear Readers, It is our great pleasure and my personal honor as editor to introduce this book titled Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema. The introduction (Chap. 1) is followed by nine chapters on time travel, written by scholars teaching/doing research in various countries, including Taiwan, Japan, Germany, Australia, the US, Ukraine, South Africa, and Qatar. Most of the contributors are members of the IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship team (Scopus). Many of us have already published together, notably in 2022, with the publication of a book published by Lexington Books titled Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel. While our previous work focused on utopias and dystopias, this study concentrates on time travel stories as well as their adaptations in performing arts, especially cinema and TV series. Even though time travel is a very popular and ancient trope, there are relatively few scholarly books discussing it. I am very grateful to Ms. Allie Troyanos, Palgrave USA, Senior Editor, Literature Studies, and to Ms. Sasikala Thopu, Project Coordinator for Springer Nature. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues who agreed to write a chapter in this book and who trusted me with their valuable work. All the chapters in this book have been peer-reviewed, revised, and proofread by the contributors of this book and also by Dr. Jillian Marchant, James Cook University, Australia, and by Professor Yoriko Ishida, Oshima College, Japan. We appreciate their valuable feedback and we would like to thank them for their support. v

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PREFACE

We are also very grateful to Professor Zhang Longxi, Professor Yoriko Ishida, and Professor Sean Redmond for writing endorsements for this book. Best regards, Dr. Bernard Montoneri, associate professor, editor, researcher, Taiwan

About the Cover Picture Daleks at the Glasgow Science Centre (Date taken: 11 August 2008). Daleks are fictional extraterrestrial mutants featured in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who (1963–present). Taichung, Taiwan

Bernard Montoneri

Reference Credit: Stephen Lipton/Alamy Stock Photo. https://www.alamy.com/ stock-photo-daleks-at-the-glasgow-science-centre-111606895.html

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Bernard Montoneri References   3 2 P  ierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes (1963): From Novel to Screenplay  5 Bernard Montoneri and Murielle El Hajj Introduction   5 Pierre Boulle’s Life and Work   6 The Novel  11 Time Travel and Science Fiction in Planet of the Apes   18 Social Equality  22 A Reverse World Led by Apes  25 Human Experimentation and Science  28 From Novel to Screenplay  32 Conclusion  36 References  38 3 Alisa  in a Futuristic Wonderland: Traveling Through Time and Space with a Girl from Tomorrow 43 Iryna Morozova and Olena Pozharytska Introduction  43 Traveling in Time: A Scientific Viewpoint  44 Chronofiction: Origin, Development, and Basic Peculiarities  46 vii

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Contents

Chronofiction for Children  47 Kir Bulychev as a Science Fiction Writer  48 Alisa from the Future  51 One Hundred Years Ahead: The Devil Is in the Details  53 Time Objective and Subjective and Time as Children Perceive It: Alisa, Are You a Child?  60 Conclusion  62 References  64 4 El anacronópete (1884, 1887), the First Journey in a Time Machine in Hispanic Literature 67 Rachid Lamarti and Fernando Darío González Grueso Introduction  67 Science: Time Travel  69 Literature: The Time Travel  71 El anacronópete  74 El anacronópete Versus The Time Machine   77 The First Trip to China in a Time Machine  80 Conclusion  83 References  84 5 The Ice People (1968), a Story of Humankind’s Auto-­ destruction 87 Murielle El Hajj Introduction  87 René Barjavel’s Life and Work  88 The Novel  89 A Transcendence of the Ideological Science Fiction  93 Technological and Machinic Warfare  99 The Downfall of a Futuristic Civilization 103 Conclusion 110 References 112 6 “Job  Done, History’s Safe”: Doctor Who and the Wibbly Wobbly Lessons of the Past115 Alyson Miller and Ellie Gardner Introduction 115

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“Ain’t gonna change”: Resisting Historical Amnesia and White Ignorance in ‘Rosa’ 120 “I have such stories I could tell you”: Memorialising Trauma and Collective Memory in ‘Demons of the Punjab’ 128 Conclusion 134 References 135 7 Time  Travel in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Novel The Master and Margarita137 Anna Toom Introduction 137 Mikhail Bulgakov’s Novel: Between Genres 138 Social-Historical Context of the Novel’s Creation 140 The True Theme of the Novel 142 Acquaintance at the Patriarchs’ Ponds 143 Chasing 146 The Sinister Apartment No. 50 149 In the Variety Theater 151 Margarita’s Visit to Woland 154 Satan’s Great Ball 160 To Eternal Peace 163 Conclusion 165 References 167 8 Black  Time Travel, Chronotopicity, and the Reparative Desire for Beauty in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self171 Michaela Keck Time Travel Fiction and Bakhtin’s Concept of the Chronotope 173 Plot Summary and Dominant Chronotopes in Hopkins’s Of One Blood  180 Out of Time, Out of Space, Out of Self: Time Travel as a Social Necessity 182 Dianthe’s Journey into the Past: Time Travel, Slavery, and Intergenerational Trauma 188 Reuel’s Journey to Ancient Telassar: Black Time Travel as a Reparative Strategy 191

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Contents

Conclusion: The Failure of Reparative Racial Justice in Black Time Travel 198 References 199 9 Time  Travel and Social Values in Femi Osofisan’s One Legend, Many Seasons203 Oyewumi Olatoye Agunbiade and Sone Mirabeau Enongene Introduction 203 Time Travel and Drama (Cinema) 205 Femi Osofisan: The Man, His Works, and Influences 207 Synopsis of One Legend, Many Seasons  210 Theoretical Consideration 211 Spirit of Christmas Past 213 Spirit of Christmas Present 218 The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come 222 Time Travel and Social Value in One Legend, Many Seasons  224 Conclusion 228 References 228 10 Time  Travel Novels in Japan and Yasutaka Tsutsui’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1967)231 Akiyoshi Suzuki Introduction 231 Plot, General Interpretation, and Historical Background 233 Rebellion: There Is a Road of Time Travel Behind Him 237 The Trend of Time Travel Novels in Japan 242 The Significance and Meaning of Time Leaps 247 Conclusion 253 References 254 Index257

Notes on Contributors

Oyewumi Olatoye Agunbiade  holds a PhD in English (Literature) from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the exponent of the concept “Inverted disillusionment,” an alternative engagement paradigm for reading African literature of the postcolonial era. His research and teaching focus on followership and post-­independence disillusionment, African and world literature, magic realism, and literary journalism. He was a Principal Reporter/Editor with Radio Nigeria. He teaches literature and creative writing and has written two short stories. His works have appeared in Africa Today (Indiana University, USA) and Critical Stages (France). His current research conceptualizes Ponzi schemes as Shylocks in Africa. Sone Mirabeau Enongene  is Professor of African Literature, Folklore, and Orality Studies. He is a C2-rated scholar and researcher by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and a Catalyst Fellow of the Centre for African Studies and the Institute for Advanced School in the Humanities (IASH) of the University of Edinburgh in the UK.  He has taught at many universities in Africa. His collaboration with leading world and African folklorists led to the publication of The Challenge of Folklore to the Humanities (2021) and The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore (2021). Ellie Gardner  is a scholar and teacher at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on representations of the antiheroine in contemporary Gothic and crime fiction novels, with a specific interest in abjection, liminality, and gender studies. Ellie’s scholarship has been xi

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published in international journals Critique, Papers on Language and Literature, and IAFOR: Journal of Literature and Librarianship, and she is working on a critical monograph of her PhD thesis. Fernando Darío González Grueso  holds a PhD (Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature) from the Autonomous University of Madrid and is an associate professor at the Department of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Tamkang (Taiwan). He has published four peer-reviewed books and more than fifteen indexed articles and is co-editor-in-chief of the series of peer-­reviewed books “Estudios Hispánicos in Taiwán.” He is Associate Editor to IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship and member of the editorial committee to SinoELE. His research interests include science fiction (SF), theory of genres, fear in literature, and traditional oral literature, including urban legends. Murielle El Hajj  holds a PhD in French Language and Literature from the Lebanese University, Lebanon. Her domain of research focuses on the psychoanalysis of literature, the perspective on the unconscious in literary study, the roles of the instances involved in analytical/critical praxis, and the relation between literature and psychoanalysis. She has published book chapters, original articles, academic interviews, translated articles, book reviews, and analyses, as well as poems. She has also authored a contemporary theater book titled Fragments chaotiques and published by Les impliqués Éditeur, France. Michaela  Keck  is a senior lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany. She received her doctorate degree in American Studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt and has taught at universities in Taiwan, Holland, and Germany. Her research foci include nineteenth-century American literature and culture at the intersections between literature, visual culture, gender, the reception of myth, and the environment. Further research interests include captivity narratives and African American literature and culture. She is the author of Deliberately Out of Bounds: Women’s Work on Classical Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (2017). Rachid Lamarti  holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology from the University of Barcelona and is an associate professor at the Department of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Tamkang (Taiwan). His main research areas are metaforology, cognitive linguistics, sinology,

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literature, and poetry. He has published the poetry collections Hacia Kunlun (2013), Poemario del agua (2017), and Múltiplo de verde (2023), the book of short stories Té de tucán (2019), and the study of poetry The Tao of Poetry: Theory of Poetic Experience (2022). He has also translated Taiwanese poets Chen Li (陳黎) and Chen Kehua (陳克華). Alyson  Miller teaches writing and literature at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research, which focuses on a literature of extremities, has appeared in both national and international publications and includes a monograph, Haunted by Words: Scandalous Texts, and an edited collection, The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections. Bernard  Montoneri is an associate professor and an independent researcher; he holds a PhD in History and BA in Chinese from the University of Provence, Aix-­Marseille I, France. He began teaching in Taiwan in 1996. He is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship (Scopus). He is the founder and former editor of the IAFOR Journal of Education (Scopus). He recently edited a book titled Science Fiction (Utopias, Dystopias, Time Travel), Lexington, August 2022, and published a paper titled “A Treatise on the Unpublished Manuscript of The Little Prince Discovered in 2012,” June 2023. Iryna  Morozova  is a full professor (Doctor of Philological Sciences, Grand PhD) of the Chair of English Grammar, Romance-Germanic Faculty, at Odessa Mechnikov National University, Ukraine, and the author of over 150 academic papers. Having defended two theses—a candidate one (PhD) and a doctoral one (Grand PhD)—she was the first in Ukraine to suggest applying the Gestalt approach to the theory of syntax and literary semantics. Today, Morozova is mainly interested in communicative linguistics, psycholinguistics, narrative studies, and literary semantics. Olena Pozharytska  is the author of over fifty articles in the fields of linguistics, literary semantics, narrative, and media studies. In 2014, she defended her candidate thesis (PhD) “The Author’s Concept of the Positive in the Main Character’s Speech Portrait: A Communicative and Paradigmatic Analysis (Based on American ‘Western’ Novels)” and is now a PhD in Linguistics. She is an associate professor working at the Chair of English Grammar, Romance-Germanic Faculty, Odessa Mechnikov National University, Ukraine. Her focus is on narrative studies and digital linguistics combined with ludonarrative studies.

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Akiyoshi  Suzuki is Professor of American Literature and World Literature at Nagasaki University, Japan. He has held positions such as guest professor at Suzhou University of Science and Technology in China and so forth, and now he is president of the Katahira English Literature Society, president of the Silphe English and American Literature Society, and others. Suzuki has published around fifty books and book chapters, and his current project is to examine the nature of literature and promote peace in the world by finding affinities of expression and imagination in world literature. Anna Toom  is Associate Professor of Psychology and Education in the Graduate School of Education at Touro University, USA, working as a researcher and psychology teacher. She holds an M.S. in Computer Science (1972) and a PhD in Psychology (1991). Within the last fifteen years, Toom’s primary scientific interest has been education in a virtual environment, and her pedagogical interests focus on creating a new methodology for teaching psychology online with the use of fiction and film arts. She is the author of forty-seven publications in psychology, education, and literary criticism, presented in refereed journals, monographs, conference proceedings, and educational video clips.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Bernard Montoneri

Before the end of the nineteenth century and the publication of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), which popularized the idea of a vehicle able to go forward or backward through time, the only way to time travel in literature were through supernatural/mystical means. For instance, in The Mahābhārata, the story of King Kakudmi and his daughter Revati, who visit the home of Brahma, on Mount Meru (Montoneri 2022, 2), or through sleeping/dreaming: In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, King Muchukunda sleeps in a cave for a long time and when he wakes up, he is shocked to see that all beings are much smaller in size (Bhāgavata Purāṇa n.d.). Among other famous tales are the story of Epimenides of Cnossos, who sleeps in the cave for fifty-seven years (Diogenes Laërtius 1688), and the story of Honi ha-M’agel, who sleeps for seventy years (in the Talmud, Ta’anit 23a, see Koren Talmud Bavli 2014). However, early time travel adventures do not mention the possibility of making changes to the timeline. One of the first tales to introduce the idea that one might change the future is told in “What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo” or “De lo que contesçió a un deán de Sanctiago con Don Yllán, el grand maestro de Toledo,” a short

B. Montoneri (*) Independent Researcher, Taichung, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_1

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story inserted in Don Juan Manuel’s Tales of Count Lucanor (1331–1335), or Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio, in which Don Yllán, a necromancer, takes a Dean of Santiago de Compostela with him to the future in order to establish if the latter would be grateful for his teachings. One day, the Dean becomes Pope, but as expected, he does not show any appreciation or gratitude to his master; he even wants to send him to prison, and when they come back in time, the master refuses to be his teacher; he therefore changes the timeline and his student does not become Pope. One of the most influential tales to introduce the idea that the future is not fixed is told in A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens (1843): when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows his future to Ebenezer Scrooge, he is shocked to learn that nobody mourned him when he died. He finally decides to show generosity and treat people with compassion. The second half of the nineteenth century was a turning point for time travel stories because time travelers commenced to go backward or forward intentionally, through a man-made object. The Clock That Went Backward, written by Edward Page Mitchell and published in the New York Sun (1881), can be considered the first work of fiction to use an antique clock to go back in time. As to El Anacronópete written by Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau, it is probably the first novel to feature an inventor-built time machine (1887). One year later, H. G. Wells published his first time travel story in which the protagonist, Dr. Moses Nebogipfel, builds a machine to travel in time (The Chronic Argonauts, published in 1888). The concept of time travel is truly fascinating. If it is possible to travel in time, accidentally or purposefully, will time travelers be able to make changes and have a significant impact, or will they be mere tourists? That is, is the timeline fixed or flexible? Surely, the most important theme in time travel literature is that of free will. Are the past and the future immutable? If one tries to change events that have already occurred, what about time paradoxes? David Lewis defined time travel thus: Time travel, I maintain, is possible. The paradoxes of time travel are oddities, not impossibilities … I shall be concerned here with the sort of time travel that is recounted in science fiction. Not all science fiction writers are clear-headed, to be sure, and inconsistent time travel stories have often been written. But some writers have thought the problems through with great care, and their stories are perfectly consistent. (Lewis 1976, 145)

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In his article, Lewis notably discussed the problem of the grandfather paradox. Many are convinced that it is not possible to change what has already happened: “Could a time traveler change the past? It seems not” (Lewis 1976, 149). Asimov (1920–1992) considered that time travel is impossible and the timeline fixed: The dead giveaway that true time-travel is flatly impossible arises from the well-known “paradoxes” it entails. The classic example is “What if you go back into the past and kill your grandfather when he was still a little boy?” … the easiest way out of the irrational chaos that results is to suppose that true time-travel is, and forever will be, impossible. (Asimov 2003, 276–277)

American electrical engineer and author Paul J. Nahin wrote that “even though the consensus today is that the past cannot be changed, science fiction writers have used the idea of changing the past for good story effect” (Nahin 1999, 267). Nowadays, in almost every fantastic/science fiction movie or TV series, the protagonists experience time travel. From Harry Potter (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 1999; Hermione’s Time-Turner) to Back to the Future (time-traveling DeLorean automobile) and more recently Avengers: Endgame (2019; quantum realm time travel), time travel stories have proven to be highly successful and popular. This book will explore novels and stories from around the world that had a significant and lasting impact and will discuss various relevant themes, such as questions of race, freedom and free will, social equality, fear of the apocalypse, the end of civilization, human and social progress, and hope for a better future.

References Asimov, Isaac. 2003. Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection. New  York: Harper Collins. Bhāgavata Purāṇa. online version, n.d. Canto 10: The Summum Bonum, SB 10.52.2. https://vedabase.io/en/library/sb/10/52. Accessed 09 October 2023. Diogenes Laërtius. 1688. The Lives, Opinions, and Remarkable Sayings of the Most Famous Ancient Philosophers. Vol. 1. Translated by Fetherstone, T. et  al. (2 ­volumes ed.). London: Edward Brewster. Story of Epimenides of Cnossos retrieved July 07, 2023 from https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A3603 7.0001.001/1:19.11?rgn=div3;view=fulltext. Accessed 07 October 2023.

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Koren Talmud Bavli. 2014. Noé Edition. English from The William Davidson, with commentary by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz. Vol. 12, Taanit 23a. https://www.sefaria.org/Taanit.23a.15. Accessed 09 October 2023. Lewis, David. 1976. The Paradoxes of Time Travel. American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (2): 145–152. https://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/merlinos/paradoxes%20of%20time%20travel.pdf. Accessed 07 October 2023. Montoneri, Bernard. 2022. Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel. USA: Lexington Books. https://rowman.com/ ISBN/9781666918137/Science-­F iction-­a nd-­A nticipation-­U topias-­ Dystopias-­and-­Time-­Travel. Accessed 07 October 2023. Nahin, Paul J. 1999. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. 2nd ed. New York: Springer.

CHAPTER 2

Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes (1963): From Novel to Screenplay Bernard Montoneri and Murielle El Hajj

Introduction This chapter introduces Pierre Boulle (1912–1994), a French author born in Avignon, who, along with Jacques Spitz (1896–1963; La Guerre des Mouches, 1938; War of the Flies) and René Barjavel (Montoneri & El Hajj, 2022), is a pioneer of contemporary French science fiction. Despite being the author of two renowned novels adapted into blockbusters and Oscar-­ winning movies, Boulle has not enjoyed the international recognition he deserves. His novel Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (1952; The Bridge over the River Kwai, 1954) should have secured his fame: he was awarded the Best Adapted Screenplay in 1958 for such in Hollywood, even though he spoke and wrote very little English. Language barriers were a pattern in his life, as he was also a “British” spy during World War II (WWII), under the cover name Peter John Rule. When Boulle published La Planète des singes

B. Montoneri (*) Independent Researcher, Taichung, Taiwan M. El Hajj Lusail University, Lusail, Qatar e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_2

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in 1963, the novel caught the eye of Hollywood producer Arthur P. Jacobs, and after a few years of struggle to adapt the book into a movie, Planet of the Apes became a blockbuster in 1968, and then one of the most successful franchises in the history of cinema. This chapter examines the literary contribution of Pierre Boulle, with a particular focus on his renowned work, Planet of the Apes. The discussion includes an in-depth analysis of the novel’s main characters and its historical context. Moving beyond conventional utopian or dystopian themes, the analysis focuses on a reverse world where apes reign, and humans find themselves as subjects of scientific experiments. Moreover, the discussion revolves around the social inequality demonstrated among the three ape races: the gorillas, the orangutans, and the chimpanzees. This simian hierarchy reflects the complexities of human social dynamics. It does so through what Miner (1956) would term “making the familiar strange”, and it is in this way, works such as Planet of the Apes permit us to freshly perceive the familiar by being able to observe things “not as they are known” (Shklovsky 1965, 2). It is from this new perspective that an audience may explore social structures that were previously hidden or poorly defined. Notably, since the novel’s publication, several film adaptations have emerged in the United States. The analysis highlights the alterations made to the characters and the story in these adaptations, comparing them to the original 1968 masterpiece starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall and the subsequent reboot film series in 2011. This chapter emphasizes how Planet of the Apes raises pertinent questions about human superiority, the divide between species, and even among humans themselves, studying the distinction between an animalistic existence and a conscious, intelligent one.

Pierre Boulle’s Life and Work Today few people have heard of Pierre Boulle. He was the French author who first had the brilliant idea of humans travelling in time and stumbling on ape civilisation. It was in his 1963 novel La Planète des Singes (Planet of the Apes). (Schofield 2014)

Eugène Jean Baptiste Boulle (1880–1926) and Juliette Marie Thérèse Seguin (1883–1942) married in 1908. Pierre François Marie Louis Boulle, born in Avignon on February 20, 1912, was raised in a Catholic bourgeois

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family; he was reserved and enjoyed a comfortable and simple childhood. He was the third of four children, all born in Avignon. With regard to his siblings, Suzanne, born May 11, 1909, married twice, to Pierre Georges Arnal in 1933 and later to Albert Jacques Léopold Ratié in 1939. She died in 2002. Maurice was born on September 14 and died on October 22, 1910; Madeleine (1920–2002) married and became Madeleine Perrusset (Wikitree 2022; see Boulle-38 to Boulle-42). As a young man, Pierre Boulle was close to both nature and literary circles in Provence. In his 1990 memoir, L’îlon (the name of a small and remote house bought by his father near Avignon), Boulle recalls his solitary, but happy life in Provence and his memories of his father, a brilliant and eccentric lawyer who defended local poachers, and his uncle, a musician (Association des amis de l’œuvre de Pierre Boulle 2022, 3, 31–32). Pierre had a great connection with his father: they both loved books, games, and hunting. Pierre Boulle’s mother was the daughter of Marie César François Seguin, a printer and publisher (Geneanet 2022). The Seguin had been librarians and printers in Avignon for generations. They notably published Frédéric Mistral’s Mireille (Mirèio, a poem in Occitan written in 1859 and adapted into an opera by Charles Gounod in 1863). Frédéric Mistral, who received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature, was the founder of a literary and cultural association called the Félibrige founded in 1854 and its first “capoulié” from 1876 to 1888 (head of the association; the 2022 head is Paulin Reynard; website of the association: https:// www.felibrige.org). The Seguin supported the association and helped promote the Occitan language. Pierre Boulle’s father died in 1926 when he was 14 years old and L’îlon was sold. He attended school at the Lycée d’Avignon and then studied at the École supérieure d’électricité (Supélec), a prestigious French graduate school of engineering founded in 1894. He received an engineer’s degree in 1933. He worked as an engineer for a short time and then accepted an offer in 1936 to work on a rubber plantation near Kuala Lumpur, in British Malaya (states on the Malay Peninsula and Singapore). Malaya remained British until the Japanese invasion, which began in December 1941; the imperial army surrendered in 1945. Pierre Boulle lived and worked in Malaya twice, for a total of five years. Three of his novels are set there, including Le sacrilège malais (Sacrilege in Malaya; 1951), Les voies du salut (The Other Side of the Coin, 1958), and Le malheur des uns (The Misfortune of Others; 1990). In a 1966 short autobiography titled Aux sources de la rivière Kwaï (translated by Xan Fielding: My Own River Kwai;

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1967), Boulle described his life during WWII.  Therein, Boulle explains that after France declared war on Germany in September 1939, he was called from Malaya to be mobilized in Indochina. After the French defeat (Armistice signed by Pétain in June 1940 and establishment of Vichy France in July), Pierre Boulle was demobilized; he joined a Free French cell in Singapore in August 1941, following Charles de Gaulle’s appeal from London to resist and continue fighting. There were several Free French cells in Malaya, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Ipoh (Embassy of France in Kuala Lumpur 2020). Boulle took the English cover name Peter John Rule and participated in missions in Burma and China: At a place called The Convent, he was put through a training course in which “serious gentlemen taught us the art of blowing up a bridge, attaching explosives to the side of a ship, derailing a train, as well as that of despatching to the next world—as silently as possible—a night-time guard”. (Schofield 2014)

During the summer of 1942, Boulle reached Hanoi in French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), which had passed to Vichy France after the defeat and was controlled by Japan (Japanese troops began to occupy the region in 1940). He was arrested after revealing his identity to a French commander, believing he was on his side, court-­ martialed and sentence to forced labor. Boulle managed to escape prison in 1944. He became a Special Forces soldier and continued his mission in Calcutta. He returned to Malaya after the end of WWII and then to France in 1947. His heroism did not go unnoticed: Captain Pierre Boulle was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance (Resistance Medal), the Croix de Guerre (War Cross), and he was made a chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight of National Order of the Legion of Honor), among the many honors he received after the war. After the war, Boulle had an “epiphany”, according to Loriot, and dedicated the rest of his life to writing. He came to Paris, where he lived with his beloved sister and niece. Loriot is the widowed husband of Boulle’s niece. (Schofield 2014)

After the war, Boulle ended his military career and abandoned engineering in favor of writing: “One night I had a revelation of a certain

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truth—that I had to be a writer” (Kirkup 1994). Despite the previously bestowed honors, he was not rich and rented a small room in Montparnasse, Paris. Being “profoundly Anglophile” (Schofield 2014), he wrote his first book on William Conrad in 1950 (Not the Glory, 1955), and the second one, Le Sacrilège malais in 1951 was influenced by The Casuarina Tree published by William Somerset Maugham in 1926 and translated into French as Le Sortilège malais. Of course, his semi-fictional story, Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (1952; The Bridge Over the River Kwai, 1954) was influenced by his adventures and missions during WWII.  The novel received the Prix Sainte-Beuve in 1952 (French literary prize created in 1946 by renowned thinkers and authors such as Raymond Aron and Raymond Queneau). The book became a worldwide bestseller and was adapted into a movie in 1957. The Bridge on the River Kwai directed by Sir David Lean won seven Academy Awards, including the Best Adapted Screenplay for Pierre Boulle, even though he did not speak English, despite being an anglophile and using an English cover name during the war: Boulle accepted the writer’s Oscar at the 1958 ceremony, but it was an open secret that he had not written the screenplay based on his 1952 novel. “Everyone knew Boulle couldn’t speak English, let alone write it,” Hollywood historian Larry Ceplair told The Times years later. (Oliver 1994)

The award was given to Boulle because the writers of the script, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilsons, suspected of being communist sympathizers, got blacklisted by Hollywood. Boulle did not attend the ceremony; Kim Novak (star of Vertigo in 1958) accepted the Oscar on his behalf. Pierre Boulle left his room in Montparnasse and lived with his widowed sister Madeleine Perrusset and her daughter, Françoise-Caroline Perusset. Pierre Boulle wanted to adopt Françoise, but it never became official. Célibataire, Pierre Boulle vit chez sa sœur, Madeleine Perrusset. Il se consacre exclusivement à la littérature, gardant toutefois ses valises toujours prêtes pour un éventuel départ. Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï a été suivi de six autres romans. Avant de les écrire, Pierre Boulle les a racontés à sa nièce Françoise. (Association des amis de l’œuvre de Pierre Boulle 2022, 9; 1958 photo of Pierre and his niece) Translation of the authors: Single, Pierre Boulle lives with his sister, Madeleine Perrusset. He devotes himself exclusively to literature, keeping his suitcases always ready for a possible departure. The Bridge on the River

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Kwai was followed by six other novels. Before writing them, Pierre Boulle told them to his niece Françoise.

Boulle published many novels following the success of Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï, including La Face (1956; Saving Face), Les Voies du salut (1958; The Other Side of the Coin), and Un métier de seigneur (1960; A Noble Profession). The most famous of his novels and certainly the most influential is La Planète des singes (1963; Monkey Planet in 1964; then Planet of the Apes). Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall, Planet of the Apes was released in 1968. The Oscar-winning film was both critically acclaimed and a commercial success; it quickly became a classic. Several of Boulle’s works were adapted on the silver screen, including Le Point de mire (1977, with Annie Girardot), based on Le Photographe (1967) or made into TV films, such as William Conrad in 1973 (based on his first novel from 1950) and The Dark Side in 2016 (based on La Face from 1956). A Noble Profession is now in development (based on Un Métier de Seigneur; 1960). Pierre Boulle died in Paris, France, on January 30, 1994. He was cremated and his ashes were deposited for a short time in box 40 598 of the columbarium of Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. In November 2002, his ashes were transferred to the family vault of the Saint-Véran cemetery in Avignon (Find a Grave 2022). L’Association des amis de l’œuvre de Pierre Boulle (Association of Friends of Pierre Boulle’s Work) was founded in 1998 by his sister Madeleine Perrusset, her daughter Doctor Françoise-Caroline, and her husband Professor Jean Loriot. After the death of Madeleine in 2002, Françoise-Caroline and her husband became the heirs of Pierre Boulle’s estate. They donated the complete set of his manuscripts and a series of sound recordings to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF, in Paris), which include The Planet of the Apes (Bibliothèque nationale de France 2007). Professor Loriot became the legal heir of Boulle’s estate after the death of his wife. The discovery of manuscripts found in a cellar of the former Parisian residence of Pierre Boulle was followed by the posthumous publication of several works, including L’Archéologue et le Mystère de Néfertiti (The Archaeologist and the mystery of Nefertiti; 2005), and a collection of seven short stories.

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The Novel Sources of Inspiration and Literary Influences Inspiration According to Librairie Walden (2020), Boulle explained how he came up with the idea to write Planet of the Apes, after a visit to the zoo in Paris in 1962. He said about gorillas: J’étais impressionné par leurs expressions quasi-humaines. Cela m’amena à imaginer ce que donnerait une relation homme/singe. Certains croient que j’avais King Kong en tête lorsque j’ai écrit mon livre, mais c’est totalement faux. (Librairie Walden 2020, 33) Translation of the authors: I was impressed by their quasi-human expressions. This led me to imagine what a human/ape relationship would look like. Some people believe I had King Kong in mind when I wrote my book, but that is totally wrong.

Boulle also added that he was shocked by a visit to the Paris Stock Exchange; he shared that one scene in his novel is a reference to his experience (« dans beaucoup de manifestations, en particulier une dont j’ai parlé dans mon livre, il s’agit d’une visite à la Bourse »; Translation of the authors: “in a lot of demonstrations, especially one I wrote about in my book, a visit to the Stock Exchange”; INA 1963). The scene Boulle alluded to can be found in Part III, Chapter IV (Boulle 1963, 151–152). Here is one extract: « Aucune lueur d’intelligence ne brillait dans les regards et, ici, tous se ressemblaient… Tous habillés pareillement, portaient le même masque, qui était celui de la folie » (Boulle, 1963, 152; Translation of the authors: “No glimmer of intelligence shined in the eyes, and here they all looked alike… All dressed in the same way, wore the same mask, which was that of madness”). Literary Influences In a signed autograph letter, Pierre Boulle wrote about his literary influences: Joseph Conrad, Edgar Poe, Anatole France, Dickens, Stevenson, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway, and Henry de Régnier. He also disclosed that he knew little about contemporary literature and that only writers such as French author Antoine Blondin (Un singe en hiver; A

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Monkey in Winter) and Canadian astrophysicist Hubert Reeves interested him (Boulle 1986). Science Fiction? Boulle insisted during various interviews that his novel was not science fiction. Interviewed by Pierre Desgraupes in 1963 on Lectures pour tous (Reading for All; first French television show discussing Literature, created in 1953), Boulle mentioned his observation of apes and insisted that his novel was more satire than science fiction, notably because all the characters are humans or behave like humans: La science-fiction, en général, fait passer au second plan l’Humain alors que là, les personnages sont tout à fait humains. La planète que je décris ressemble tout à fait à la Terre, et les personnages ce sont des singes, c’est entendu. Mais, ils ont des réactions humaines (…) de ce point de vue-là, je ne crois pas qu’on puisse dire que c’est de la science-fiction. (INA 2020, online) Translation of the authors: Science fiction, in general, puts the Human in the background while here, the characters are quite human. The planet I am describing looks exactly like Earth, and the characters are apes, it is understood. But, they have human reactions (…) from that point of view, I don’t think we can say that it’s science fiction.

Boulle acknowledged that Planet of the Apes was unique among his writings. He previously wrote short story collections and published several science fiction stories notably influenced by Wells, Poe, and Swift. Among the most interesting, in Contes de l’absurde (1953, Tales of the Absurd; published in the UK as Time Out of Mind in 1966), is a story about time travel: An Endless Night, in which the hero, Oscar Vincent narrates his encounter in La Coupole, a famous brasserie in Montparnasse, with two travelers, one from the past, the other from the future. When Oscar uses the time machine to go back in time 12 hours earlier, he is “condemned” to relive the same encounter with the two travelers forever. Later, in 1973, Boulle explained why Planet of the Apes was different from his previous works: « Parmi mes romans, la Planète des singes est une exception. D’ailleurs, je ne le considère pas comme un livre de science-fiction : mes singes ne sont pas des monstres, ils ressemblent aux hommes comme des frères » (Boulle 1973, 7; translation of the authors: Among my novels, Planet of the Apes is an exception. Besides, I don’t consider it a science

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fiction book: my apes are not monsters, they resemble men like brothers). Director Franklin Schaffner too agreed with Boulle; talking about the 1968 movie, he said: “I had never thought of this picture in terms of being science fiction… it was a political film” (Hughes 2003, 34). Bréan (2015) highlights the influence of Jules Verne. After all, Pierre Boulle, who originally titled his novel « La planète mystérieuse » (The Mysterious Planet), included the same type of crew members as in Verne’s novel (L’Île mystérieuse, 1875; The Mysterious Island): un professeur, Cyrus Smith/Antelle, un apprenti, Harbert/Arthur Levain, un domestique, Nab/Émile, un journaliste, Gédéon Spilett/Ulysse Mérou; seul manquerait le marin Pencroff, à moins qu’il ne faille voir en Hector, le chimpanzé domestique, une image déformée de ce personnage. (Bréan 2015, note 6) Translation of the authors: a professor, Cyrus Smith/Antelle, an apprentice, Herbert/Arthur Levain, a servant, Nab/Émile, a journalist, Gédéon Spilett/Ulysse Mérou; only the sailor Pencroft would be missing, unless we should see in Hector, the domestic chimpanzee, a distorted image of this character.

It should be noted that there is no character called Émile in the published version of Planet of the Apes. Professeur Antelle’s servant only appeared in an early typewritten version of the novel. It was removed by Pierre Boulle before publication. It is more probable that Hector, the domestic chimpanzee, is a reference to Cyrus’s dog called Top. Interestingly, in Verne’s novel, when the crew is on the island, they domesticate an orangutan they call Jupiter. In the published version of Planet of the Apes, there are only three crew members and Hector; there is no need for servants or other crew members as everything on the spacecraft is taken care of by robots. Planet of the Apes was influenced by a large number of stories and writers, from The Odyssey (see Main Characters section below) to science fiction novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Goimard (1998, 1003), Planet of the Apes is a « science-fiction sarcastique » (sarcastic science fiction), in the style of British writers such as Wells, Stevenson, and Huxley. Among the stories that influenced Pierre Boulle are eighteenth century philosophical tales and Les Animaux dénaturés (1952). Pierre Boulle repeated many times that he considered his novel to be satire (INA 1963) and a « conte philosophique » (a philosophical tale):

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« La Planète des singes, oui, je crois plutôt au conte philosophique, encore mieux que science-fiction » (Bourin 1969, 07:49; translation of the authors: “Planet of the Apes, yes, I rather believe in philosophical tales, even better than science fiction”). Roy (1970) discussed the influence of La Rochefoucauld (Maximes; 1665), Montesquieu (Lettres persanes; 1721), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels; 1726), and Voltaire (Le Micromégas; 1752).  e Micromégas (1752) L Le Micromégas is a philosophical tale published by Voltaire in 1752; it tells the story of a banished inhabitant of a planet orbiting around Sirius (the name of the son of Ulysse and Nova) who visits Saturn where he befriends the secretary of the Academy. Together, they travel from planet to planet and arrive on Earth in the year 1737. After being able to communicate with human beings, the two aliens are shocked by their arrogance, egocentric views, and constant quarrels.  es Animaux dénaturés (1952) L Jean Marcel Bruller (1902–1991) was a French writer who, like Pierre Boulle, fought during WWII and then joined the Resistance. He was the cofounder of Éditions de Minuit (1941) and published novels under the pseudonym Vercors. Among his most famous works are Le Silence de la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) and Les Animaux dénaturés (1952; translated as You Shall Know Them in 1953 and The Murder of the Missing Link). In the novel, a team of anthropologists discovers ape-like creatures in New Guinea; they call them Tropis. When a businessman wants to use these creatures as cheap labor, scientists discuss ethics and whether they are humans or animals. While the 1953 English translation became a bestseller, the cinematographic adaptation starring Burt Reynolds was a critical and financial failure (Skullduggery, 1970). Summary of the Novel Planet of the Apes is formally divided into three parts: Part one begins with Jinn and Phyllis, a rich couple traveling in space, who find a floating bottle containing a manuscript written in the language of Earth. The message tells the story of journalist Ulysse Mérou who, in the year 2500, embarks on an intersidereal expedition with Professor Antelle and physician Arthur Levain to reach the star Betelgeuse. They

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land on a temperate and habitable planet they name Soror. The crew explores the planet and finds a cascade where they meet a pretty young girl they call Nova; she emits strange sounds and has a disturbing empty expression in her eyes; later, more people arrive and wreck the crew’s clothes, weapons, and their precious shuttle. Ulysse, Antelle, and Arthur are taken to a rudimentary camp which is attacked by Gorillas riding horses and carrying firearms. Ulysse is put in a cage and taken to the village of the apes. Ulysse and Nova end up in a research facility where they are supposed to mate. Zira, a chimpanzee researcher takes interest in Ulysse; Ulysse wants to impress her and speaks a few words of their simian language. He realizes that communication with the apes is key to his survival on Soror. In part two, Ulysse feels comfortable in his cage in the company of Nova and the benevolence of his captors until he begins to blush at his cowardly resignation and decides to show Zira that he is smart. Zira is astonished; she decides to learn French and Ulysse learns Soros’s simian language. Zira later introduces Ulysse to Cornelius, a learned academician and her fiancé. Ulysse is granted the right to speak to the congress. Astonished, but convinced, the apes set him free and gave him the right to wear clothes. In part three, Cornélius becomes the scientific head of the institute, with Zira as his assistant. He invites Ulysse to join a mission to an archeological site. They find a well-preserved doll of a little human girl that says “papa”. When Ulysse goes back to the institute, he learns that Nova is pregnant. News of the discoveries in the lost city are leaked to the public, and Ulysse begins to feel unsafe, especially after the birth of his son, Sirius. Cornélius believes Ulysse and his family are in grave danger and helps them escape and go to Earth. During the voyage back to Earth years later, Nova and Sirius have learned to speak. They land near Paris at Orly Airport. Main Characters The protagonist of the novel is a young French journalist named Ulysse Mérou. The allusion to Homer’s Odyssey and the adventures of Ulysses is obvious. Moreover, his family name is Mérou, which is a reference to the grouper genera of fish (Becker 1996, 72). Mérou possesses several qualities of the legendary hero: he is smart, curious, and knowledgeable; he can be cunning and uses his brain as well as communication skills to save and

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free himself; he also tries to help people he cares about but with little success. He manages to leave Soror with Cornelius and Zira’s help, and pilots his ship back to Earth, even though, like Ulysses, he lost his crew (one more reference to the Odyssey, Pierre Boulle named the crew’s chimpanzee Hector; he sadly suffered the same tragic end as the Trojan hero and was brutally killed). In the novel, at least, Ulysse is able to rescue his “wife” and his son. While Mérou is attracted to Nova at first sight because of her beauty, he only falls in love with her after she begins to show signs of intelligence; at the beginning, he often compares Nova to an animal, sometimes pitiful, sometimes scary: Mon sommeil fut cependant coupé de cauchemars fiévreux, où le corps de Nova m’apparaissait comme celui d’un monstrueux serpent enroulé autour du mien. (Boulle 1963, 59) Translation of the authors: My sleep, however, was cut off by feverish nightmares, where Nova’s body appeared to me as that of a monstrous snake wrapped around mine.

Ulysse is “casting the female as a serpentine seductress with echoes of Eve” (Scott 2020, p. 29). Another reference to Genesis is the fact that he baptizes her Nova: “he posits Nova as a temptress who leads him astray, implied in the very name he gives her, Nova, like Adam naming Eve: ‘je l’avais baptisée “Nova”’” (Scott 2020, 28). According to Bréan (2015), Pierre Boulle first called her Amia (“en jouant sur la racine d’« aimer »”; online, 9. Translation of the authors: “by playing on the root of ‘To love’”) and later Stella (“« Stella » renvoie assez nettement à l’idée d’« aventures spatiales », puisqu’elle est littéralement une étoile dont Ulysse Mérou fait la conquête”; online, 9. Translation of the authors: “Stella” refers quite clearly to the idea of “space adventures”, since she is literally a star that Ulysse Mérou conquers). When Ulysse learns that Nova is pregnant, he still considers that, while she looks human and is physically attractive, she has the brain of an animal. He is faithful to her and does his best to protect her, with Zira’s help. Zira is probably a reference to Calypso, the nymph attracted to Ulysses after he drifted into her island (Ogygia/Soror). In the end, Ulysses decides to go back to Ithaca/Earth and be in the company of Penelope/Nova and his son Telemachus/Sirius. Interestingly, there is a Franco-Japanese anime series from 1981 called Ulysse 31 in which Ulysses, his son Telemachus, and the companions leave the planet of Troy on the spaceship Odyssey to go back to the Earth of the thirty-first century.

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Cornélius could be a reference to Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, who persuades Calypso to let Ulysses go. In Boulle’s novel, Cornélius famously says to Ulysse: « pour elle [Zira] comme pour moi, il est préférable que vous disparaissiez de cette planète » (Boulle 1963, 185; “For her as for me, it is better that you disappear from this planet”). Zira is a female chimpanzee. She is smart and Ulysse admires her; he notably thinks: « Quelle belle âme possède cette guenon ! Quelle femme serait capable d’une telle délicatesse ? » (Boulle 1963, 162; Translation of the authors: “What a beautiful soul this guenon has! What woman would be capable of such tact?”). What Zira says when she and Ulysse have a moment before he leaves the planet is both stunning and hilarious: « Mon chéri, c’est impossible. C’est dommage, mais je ne peux pas, je ne peux pas. Tu es vraiment trop affreux ! » (Boulle 1963, 185; Translation of the authors: “My darling, it’s impossible. It’s a shame, but I can’t, I can’t. You are really too hideous!”) Interestingly, she does not say that it is impossible because she is with Cornélius or because he is a human. One might consider what she says as a reference to Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris: Esmeralda is very thankful to Quasimodo and recognizes the quality of his noble soul, but… « Souvent elle se reprochait de ne pas avoir une reconnaissance qui fermât les yeux, mais décidément elle ne pouvait s’accoutumer au pauvre sonneur. Il était trop laid » (Hugo 1831, online; Translation of the authors: “Often she reproached herself for not having a recognition that closed the eyes, but she could definitely not get used to the poor bell-­ ringer. He was too ugly”). The thought of never seeing Zira again is probably the only reason why Ulysse is sad to fly away from Soror, besides the fact that he is unable to help his fellow “humans” and must leave them to their fate. Zira’s fiancé, Cornélius (Cornelius in English), is a young academician and archaeologist. He is smart and enthusiastic. He acknowledges that he is highly motivated to save him because he loves Zira and does not want to disappoint her. Moreover, letting Ulysse die would make him an accessory to murder and Zira would never forgive him for that. It is probable that the name Cornélius is a reference to the first Roman/Gentile to be baptized and to convert to Christianity. Cornélius was a God-fearing centurion who had visions he later shared with Peter the Apostle (New Testament, Acts 10; online: https://www.newadvent.org/bible/act010. htm#vrs22). Interestingly, Ulysse considers himself invested in a divine mission to save the human race on Soror, and he converts Cornélius to his cause. The birth of Ulysse’s son Sirius (the brightest star after the Sun, as

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observed from Earth) is considered both a sign of hope and a liability: once the boy begins to speak, he will be considered a threat to Simian civilization. The other reference regarding the name Cornélius is more obvious: he is torn between his duty as a chimpanzee and his desire to help Ulysse to please Zira, a typical dilemme cornélien (Cornelian dilemma), that is, an inner conflict between love and duty present in the tragedies of French dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606–1684), notably in his most famous play, Le Cid (performed in 1636; The Cid). Dr. Zaius is an authoritative figure who represents the official simian science; he is powerful. Zira doesn’t appreciate him at all; she says to Ulysse « Il est têtu comme une mule et stupide comme un homme ! » (Boulle 1963, 101; Translation of the authors: “He is stubborn as a mule and stupid as a man!”). She complains that almost all the orangutans are like him. Dr. Zaius is a threatening figure who is worried about the presence of a talking human on Soror. He is dismissed after Ulysse’s speech to the congress and replaced by Cornélius, but the prospect of the orangutan coming back to power at the end of the novel is the main reason why Ulysse resigns himself to leaving the planet.

Time Travel and Science Fiction in Planet of the Apes Planet of the Apes raises thought-provoking questions about the nature of humanity, intelligence, the fragility of civilizations, the dangers of a society divided by species, and the potential consequences of mankind’s actions. The novel focuses more on the themes of evolution and the reversal of roles between humans and apes, rather than on time itself. However, the presence of humans on the planet Soror is not explained through time travel, but rather through space travel. When Ulysse Mérou and his companions embark on their space expedition, their spacecraft encounters a time dilation effect due to the immense speeds involved in their journey. Therefore, while only a few years pass for the crew on board, centuries pass on Earth. The spacecraft crash-lands on the planet Soror, where they discover a civilization dominated by intelligent apes. This revelation leads Mérou to believe that they have traveled to a distant planet where apes have evolved to be the dominant species, with humans reduced to a primitive and subservient status.

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The absence of time travel in the novel is an important factor. Instead of humans physically traveling through time, it is the passage of time on Earth that creates the disparity between the evolutionary development of humans and apes. In their interstellar journey, the crew did not manipulate the time itself, which emphasizes the effects of space travel and the relativity of time. This is stated by Mérou when he says: As for me, Ulysse Mérou, I have set off again with my family in the spaceship. We can keep going for several years. We grow vegetables and fruit on board and have a poultry run. We lack nothing. One day perhaps we shall come across a friendly planet. […] It was in the year 2500 that I embarked with two companions in the cosmic ship, with the intention of reaching the region of space where the super gigantic star Betelgeuse reigns supreme. It was an ambitious project, the most ambitious that had ever been conceived on Earth. Betelgeuse—or Alpha Orionis, as our astronomers called it—is about three hundred light-years distant from our planet. (Boulle 1964, 5)

However, “[…] a time traveler is as much a traveler between universes as they are a traveler between times” (Bigliardi 2020, p. 3), thus, by traveling through space, Mérou and his companions were also traveling through time. In this regard, the novel explores three different philosophical perspectives on time travel, each offering a unique understanding of the nature of reality (Bigliardi 2020, 4). Such perspectives shed light on the concept of time travel and its implications within the story. The first dimension, known as presentism, asserts that only the present moment holds reality. In this perspective, life on Soror, the current world in the novel, is considered the sole existence that is genuine and tangible. Past and future events are seen as mere illusions or constructs of the mind. When Mérou and his companions crash-land on the planet Soror, they believe that only the present moment on Soror is real and that their previous lives on Earth were left behind in the past. They perceive their current existence as the only tangible reality, dismissing the possibility of time travel or alternate timelines. The second dimension, known as possibilism, expands the scope of reality to include both the present and the past. According to this perspective, life on Soror and life on Earth, the planet from which time travel occurs, are considered real and valid. The past is regarded as a concrete reality alongside the present, while the future remains uncertain and open to possibilities. Possibilism becomes evident as Mérou and his companions encounter the evolved society of intelligent

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apes dominating the planet Soror. They gradually recognize that not only the present on Soror but also the past on Earth hold validity. The existence of the apes, their civilization, and their scientific advancements challenge their understanding, expanding their concept of reality to include both Soror and Earth as interconnected dimensions of existence. The third dimension, eternalism, takes the broadest approach by attributing reality to not only the past and the present but also the future. In this perspective, all moments in time, whether they have already occurred, are currently happening, or are yet to happen, are considered equally real and substantial. The past—life on Earth, the present—life on Soror, and the future— return to Earth are interconnected and coexist, forming a timeless existence where every moment holds significance. Eternalism is subtly explored in the novel when Mérou delves deeper into the ape society and discovers that the apes possess knowledge and records of a past civilization that existed on Earth. This realization implies that the past is not lost or merely illusory but has an impact on the present. It also suggests a continuity of time that connects the past, the present, and potentially the future that alludes to the concept of eternalism. The idea of time travel in the novel explores the complexities of temporal paradoxes, alternate timelines, and the potential for altering history between Earth and the planet Soror. However, the discovery of a planet like Soror, resembling Earth, is purely within the realm of science fiction. Upon their arrival, Mérou and his companions find themselves on a planet that can be considered a “sister planet” (Boulle 1964, 11) to Earth, with the presence of life and water. Observing the civilization that had already shaped the planet’s landscape, they refer to its inhabitants as rational beings, refraining from calling them humans. They chose to name the planet “Soror” due to its striking resemblance to Earth (Boulle 1964, 11). Nevertheless, despite being categorized as a science-fiction novel, the emphasis in the story is not on the paradox of utopia and dystopia. Instead, it highlights the theme of speculative evolution, a common element in science fiction. This theme is depicted through a world where apes have evolved into intelligent beings, whereas humans have regressed into primitive creatures. This alternate reality challenges the traditional notion of human dominance and indicates the implications of reversing the roles of humans and animals. It also sheds light on the impact of scientific progress and its possible effects on humanity, drawing inspiration from the apes’ advanced civilization, scientific achievements, and social systems. This is reflected in Mérou’s speech, as follows:

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Thus on Earth the intellect is embodied in the human race. This is a fact and I can do nothing about it. Whereas the apes—and since discovering your world I am deeply upset about this—whereas the apes have remained in a state of savagery, it is the men who have evolved. It is in man’s cranium that the brain has developed and flourished. It is man who invented language, discovered fire, made use of tools. It is man who settled my planet and changed its face, man, in fact, who established a civilization so refined that in many respects, O Apes, it resembles your own. (Boulle 1964, 72)

Moreover, through its exploration of themes, which we will discuss later in this chapter, such as social hierarchy, animal rights, and the dangers of scientific hubris, Planet of the Apes subtly critiques not only our contemporary society but also political concerns. The novel reminds us of the negative consequences of our capitalist society and its detrimental effects on our well-being and mental health. According to Greg Conley, capitalism is an inherent and unchangeable characteristic not only of humans but of any conceivable social structure, even in different worlds. In line with this perspective, anything that impeded the unrestricted functioning of the market was considered an “inefficiency” that needed to be eradicated. This clash of ideologies would become more pronounced in the subsequent significant phase of science fiction, known as the cyberpunk era. In this era, a vision emerged in which humanity would either be liberated or destroyed as a result of the emergence of a completely independent economic and industrial empire, often referred to as the rise of machines (Conley 2018, 459), and here “the rise of the apes”. The multinationalization of most industries nowadays has led to increasing competition and precariousness. Amidst these broader global processes, the colonization of the social world and the self, ... as well as the worsening of social, economic, and environmental crises, have resulted in enormous suffering, implicitly and explicitly. Economic and political spheres create social and individual pathology, and we can read and observe clear links between work, work cycles, and psychologically disintegrative effects (Smith 2015, 11–12). Moreover, through the concept of time travel, the story invites us to think about the uniformity of time. This topic is highlighted in The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism (Part Two), in which Pascal Gielen emphasized that the last two decades of globalization have brought about a shift from a local chronotopy, where our perception of time was tied to a specific geographic location, to a global chronotopy. He further states that:

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time is accelerated under the influence of the booming creative and cultural industries, while cultural geography disappears in the background. In a corporate world, society is losing its time to dig deep. Not obstinacy, stubbornness and steadfastness, but adaptability, flexibility and mobility allow people to survive in a global network configuration. Today, we have to take the witticism “Time is money” literally. […] This leads to the speeding-up of fast changing connections, in which we not only lose depth, but also height. Consequently, having “no time” means that you don’t have the time to stand still by yourself. Time for (self)reflectivity is shrinking, also the time to stand above yourself, looking at yourself while you operate in the world. (Gielen 2013, 195–196)

In the Planet of the Apes, time has progressed differently, and the apes have developed a sophisticated civilization with creative and cultural industries at its core. As Mérou navigates Soror’s fast-paced global network, he discovers that flexibility and mobility are crucial for his and his peers’ survival in this transformed world. The apes, like humans in the corporate world, also embody the phrase “time is money” quite literally. Their society values efficiency and productivity, leading to a constant rush for quick results and immediate connections. However, as we examine with Mérou this evolved society, we notice a similar trend as in our world: the erosion of profound understanding as well as the diminishing capacity for introspection and self-reflection. In the pursuit of progress, the apes and humans alike find themselves immersed in responsibilities, leaving little time for contemplation. In his journey to uncover the truth behind the new apes’ civilization, Mérou realizes that the quest for success has compromised the apes’ ability to consider the broader implications of their actions. The apes’ rapid pace of life on Soror also prevents them from addressing the systemic inequalities that persist in their society.

Social Equality The society of intelligent apes reflects human civilization, with its own complex and rigid social structure. As Mérou explores this evolved world, he discovers a society where apes have evolved into different species, each occupying distinct roles and positions within the hierarchy. He finds that “the apes are not divided into nations. The whole planet is administered by a council of ministers, at the head of which is a triumvirate consisting of one gorilla, one orangutan, and one chimpanzee” (Boulle 1964, 63).

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This government operates alongside a parliament, which comprises three chambers: The Gorilla Chamber, the Orangutan Chamber, and the Chimpanzee Chamber. Each chamber represents the interests of its respective members. Notably, this three-fold racial division is the only one in existence. While all species theoretically possess equal rights and can hold any position, they generally adhere to their specific areas of expertise. The gorillas, renowned for their physical strength and fierceness, assume the role of police force. “From far back in the past, when they used to reign by force, the gorillas have preserved a taste of authority and still form the most powerful class” (Boulle 1964, 63). With their imposing presence and abilities, they are the enforcers of law and order in ape society (Boulle 1964, 63). They are responsible for maintaining peace and security, and they play a crucial role in upholding social order. In contrast, the orangutans occupy the position of intellectuals and scholars. Gifted with keen intelligence and a natural inclination for learning, they serve as the thinkers and decision-makers in this evolved society. They contribute to the governance of ape communities and are responsible for shaping policies and laws that govern their world (Boulle 1964, 64). Almost every orangutan is backed by either a gorilla or a council of gorillas who support him and ensure he holds a respected position. They ensure that the orangutan receives the titles and honors he desires until he no longer performs satisfactorily. At that point, he is ruthlessly removed and replaced by another orangutan. There remain the chimpanzees. Known for their curiosity and inquisitive nature, they excel as scientists and researchers. Their thirst for knowledge and their propensity for experimentation make them indispensable in advancing the technological and scientific frontiers of Soror. They are the individuals pushing the boundaries of understanding about their world and unraveling its mysteries (Boulle 1964, 64). Within this societal framework, each ape species complements and relies on the others, leading to a balance in their civilization. The apes understand the importance of their interdependence and have developed a sense of unity in their diversity. However, as Mérou engages in a deeper examination of the fabric in this society, he notices its imperfections. Despite the impressive advancements and the semblance of harmony, there are underlying tensions and inequalities between the species. Some gorillas view themselves as superior due to their role in enforcing the order, while some orangutans perceive themselves as the intellectual elite, wielding substantial influence over the decision-making process. The chimpanzees, despite their invaluable

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contributions, sometimes struggle to gain the recognition they deserve in the hierarchical structure. Mérou is intrigued by this societal setup, as it echoes certain aspects of human history and social dynamics. As he continues his exploration, he finds himself drawn into the complexities of the apes’ social structure, uncovering not only its strengths but also the challenges that come with such a system. Moreover, he finds that humans are relegated to the role of a subjugated and primitive species. On planet Soror, they are no longer the dominant beings they once were on Earth, but instead, they are subjected to a position of inferiority, treated as mere animals in the eyes of the ruling apes. Within this dystopian world, a stark dichotomy emerges between the two species, where intelligence becomes the defining criterion for an individual’s social standing. The apes, with their advanced intellectual capabilities, wield the reins of power, using their mental prowess to assert dominance over the humans who are deemed intellectually inferior. This highlights that social hierarchies are not based on an individual’s intrinsic worth or merit. Instead, the novel suggests that societal structures are shaped by arbitrary factors such as intelligence, race, or other attributes, leading to vast disparities in power and status. According to Austin Sarat (2007, 357), the science-fiction genre’s “imagined and imaginative worlds” hold immense value precisely because of their radical distinctiveness from our reality. This otherness presents a challenge to our conventional thinking, pushing us to go beyond our present circumstances and question our unquestioned assumptions and understanding of law. It is important to note that not all science-fiction worlds are futuristic, and not all possibilities explored in the genre are limited to the future. He further states that: the world of science fiction reminds us of the contingencies of our legal and social arrangements. It always casts what the literary critic Saul Morson calls a “sideshadow” on “realities” outside itself. The world of science fiction is not just a mirror in which we see legal and social realities reflected in some more or less distorted way. Instead, it projects alternative realities and invites us to them. (Sarat 2007, 357)

In this regard, Planet of the Apes raises questions about the nature of societal systems and the potential for inherent biases to perpetuate inequality. It serves as a reminder of the consequences that arise when a single characteristic, such as intelligence, becomes the determining factor for an

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entire group’s fate. The novel emphasizes how Soror’s fictional world mirrors real-world societies, where similar arbitrary criteria often underpin disparities and unequal treatment among individuals. Moreover, the novel goes beyond merely depicting a world ruled by apes, as it subtly suggests that the apes’ rise to power is, in part, a reflection of humanity’s flaws and failings. This implication pushes us to acknowledge that societal inequality is not confined to the ape civilization but is also an intrinsic part of our human existence. However, as mentioned earlier, the world depicted in Soror is not limited to a vision of the future, but it presents a reverse world existing simultaneously alongside our Earth’s world.

A Reverse World Led by Apes Planet of the Apes examines the concept of parallel realities, where Soror and Earth coexist side by side, each with their distinct characteristics and inhabitants. This notion challenges conventional perceptions of time and space, inviting us to explore the complexities of multiple dimensions and the potential for alternate realities to intersect. While the Earth we know evolves on its trajectory, Soror unfolds with its unique history, society, and species of “intelligent” beings, notably the dominant apes. The apes’ city is “very, very old indeed. It is much more than ten thousand years old, and therefore constitutes a unique record, tending to show that simian civilization did not burst forth miraculously out of the void” (Boulle 1964, 84). Upon his arrival, Mérou caught only a fleeting glimpse of the town, which served as the capital of the simian region. He witnessed a town blasting with ape pedestrians, ape motorists, ape shopkeepers, ape businessmen, and apes in uniform tasked with maintaining law and order. Despite this unique spectacle, he admits that the town did not leave a profound impression on him. The houses resembled ours, the roads were fairly dirty, and the traffic appeared less congested than what he was accustomed to back home. However, what stood out most was the peculiar way pedestrians crossed the streets. Instead of designated crossings, they utilized overhead passages constructed from a metal frame, where they deftly clung on with all four of their hands. Additionally, they wore elegant leather gloves that did not hinder their grasping abilities (Boulle 1964, 55). This reverse world offers a fascinating contrast to our own, compelling us to consider the implications of such coexistence and how the choices made in one reality might resonate in another.

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According to Susan Bridget McHugh (2000, 57): “In addition to masking and language, cultural artifacts contribute to the visualization of race as species, drawing clearer links between future-ape and U.S.-human histories.” For example, the gorillas wear black leather riding boots and padded vests, which not only symbolize their dangerous job of using and controlling animals but also associate them visually with lesser animals like the black horses they ride, as perceived in ape culture. While the novel generally depicts ape clothing and other technologies as resembling those of mid-twentieth-century industrialized societies, the orangutans stand out with a distinctive feature—“a long black frock coat with a red star in the buttonhole and black-and-white-striped trousers” (Boulle 1964, 39)—reminiscent of communist culture in the ape outfit. In this reverse world in which apes have evolved into intelligent beings, humans are portrayed as primitive and animalistic. They have regressed in intelligence and are treated as a subservient species by the apes. Additionally, they are captured, hunted, and subjected to various forms of exploration by the dominant ape society. However, they “cannot but be regarded as wild animals because they are not only speechless but also unable to manage any means of complex communication” (Micali 2021, 30). When visiting the planet Soror, Mérou was surprised to see 50 individuals—men, women, and children—who were put on display for the amusement of the ape spectators. The humans inside the cage exhibited hysterical and excessive behaviors, eagerly engaging in various actions—jumping, shoving, and leaping in an attempt to entertain their ape observers. These young apes occasionally tossed pieces of fruit or cake, sold by an older female ape at the entrance, to those humans who performed the most impressive tricks. Climbing up the bars, walking on all fours or hands, the humans fought for these rewards. When the latter fell within a group, chaos ensued, with scratched faces and hair being yanked out, accompanied by harsh cries of frustration and anger (Boulle 1964, 66). This distressing exhibition sheds light on the degrading and exploitative treatment of the humans in captivity, subjected to the impulses and desires of their ape spectators. This unequal and inhumane relationship between the two species highlights the disturbing implications of power dynamics, where one group is subjugated and objectified for the pleasure of another. Another surprising matter observed by Mérou is seeing his traveling companion, the leader and mastermind of their expedition, the famous Professor Antelle, captured and sold to the zoo (Boulle 1964, 67). This reflects the hunting and use of animals by humans in the real world for various purposes, such as

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food, clothing, and entertainment. It also highlights the long-standing history of humans hunting animals for both sport and sustenance, often overlooking the potential impact on animal populations and ecosystems. Furthermore, the novel brings attention to the historical practice of capturing and showcasing animals in zoos and circuses for human amusement. The confinement of animals in unnatural environments can result in physical and psychological distress, thus raising ethical concerns about the exploitation of animals for entertainment purposes. However, the novel does not only present a reverse world but also a reversed evolutionary scale. “Humans regress and apes progress” (Chambers 2016, 112). Boulle employed the concept of evolution as a narrative tool, presenting his apes as intelligent and advanced beings due to their acceptance of this evolutionary process. In Boulle’s reverse and imaginary world, the simian race is portrayed as educated, and Mérou is questioned about his origins in an academic setting (Chambers 2016, 112). Moreover, the threat to human dominance does not come from an advanced alien civilization or unruly robots; rather, the novel’s humans face extinction following the rise of another species. Humans are used as test subjects in exploratory surgery and as a slave class by apes that consider themselves to be intellectually and ethically superior. The apes are shown to be technologically and culturally similar to the humans that preceded them, aping not only their achievements but also their arrogance. (Chambers 2016, 112–113)

Using a reverse world scenario, Boulle aims to critique various aspects of human society, focusing on anxieties surrounding power and the risks associated with complacency. Through Mérou’s lens, the narrative examines the nature of power and its inherent instability. The inversion of power dynamics—a society of highly intelligent apes dominates primitive human inhabitants—serves as a metaphorical representation of human civilization’s potential fate. By placing apes in positions of authority and humans in subservient roles, the novel explores how power can be arbitrary, shifting, and often in the hands of those who might not be best suited to wield it. The apes’ rise to power and subsequent rule over humans exemplify how authority can be gained through various means, including brute force, intellectual prowess, and manipulation. This notion reflects the real-world anxieties surrounding oppressive regimes and the abuse of power throughout history. By reversing the roles of humans and apes

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while underlining human experimentation and scientific exploration in the ape-dominated society, Boulle draws our attention to the darker side of scientific progress and technological advancement.

Human Experimentation and Science Planet of the Apes portrays apes as highly intelligent beings who have made significant scientific advancements. They have developed technologies, conducted experiments, and pursued scientific knowledge. Their scientific progress is evident in their ability to communicate, their understanding of complex concepts, and their exploration of the natural world. Additionally, they have a process similar to that of humans, involving deep-rooted principles of chemistry, physics, and geology (Boulle 1964, 84). Zira, a female chimpanzee researcher, confirms to Mérou that an ape’s brain is highly developed, complex, and organized in contrast to the minimal transformation observed in the human brain (Boulle 1964, 51). She adds that language played a crucial role in the ape’s brain development. She also questions why apes possess the ability to talk while humans do not. Then, she admits that scientific perspectives on this matter varied. Some attributed it to a mysterious divine intervention, while others argued that the ape’s advanced cognitive abilities were primarily a result of having four agile hands (Boulle 1964, 51). She further elaborates, saying that our [the apes’] being equipped with four hands is one of the most important factors in our spiritual evolution. It helped us in the first place to climb trees, and thereby conceive the three dimensions of space, whereas man, pegged to the ground by a physical malformation, slumbered on the flat. A taste for tools came to us next because we had the potentiality of using them with dexterity. Achievement followed, and it is thus we have raised ourselves to the level of wisdom. (Boulle 1964, 52)

Humans in the novel are subjected to various forms of experimentation by the apes. They are treated as objects of scientific curiosity and are used as subjects for scientific research and study. They are considered “handicapped at birth, incapable of progressing and acquiring a precise knowledge of the universe” (Boulle 1964, 51). The apes are particularly interested in studying human behavior, intelligence, and physical capabilities. For them, a human’s brain, like the rest of their anatomy, is the one that bears the closest resemblance to apes. They find it is fortunate that

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nature has put at their disposal an animal—the human being—on whom they can study apes bodies. In their encephalic research section, “they carry extremely tricky operations on the [human] brain: grafting, observation and alteration of the nervous centers; partial and even total ablation” (Boulle 1964, 58). Despite the apes’ intelligence and sophisticated society, their treatment of humans as research subjects shows a lack of empathy and respect for their rights. The apes’ pursuit of knowledge is driven by ambition, but it leads them to disregard the well-being and dignity of the human subjects. This is a reminder for us to consider the consequences of using power over vulnerable species for scientific exploration. It urges us to evaluate the potential repercussions of scientific progress and the risk of losing our humanity in the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Through its reverse world, the novel anticipates our present by depicting a society where humans have lost their power, and non-human apes lead an inhumane world. This fictional simian society mirrors our reality, where violence, warfare, exploitative technological advancements, and a mechanistic mindset are increasingly dominant. In this regard, Chambers observes that La Planète des Singes [Planet of the Apes] presents a future world that is the result of the rise to intellectual superiority by a non-human species. The strict division between animals and humans is obscured in this post-human future, with one species taking on the characteristics of another. Planet of the Apes actively subverts the definitions of being human by re-appropriating these terms to a wild animal species and placing non-humans in positions of power. The apes have ingeniously adapted the modern world to suit their unique abilities and requirements. (Chambers 2016, 113)

However, the “future world” depicted by Chambers is, in fact, our present-day reality, as foreseen by Boulle when he wrote the novel. The apes’ leadership in an unhuman society echoes the disturbing aspects of our reality, where violence and conflict persist, and technological progress is not always driven by ethical considerations concerning different species. Boulle’s vision of a world governed by apes, who mirror human tendencies toward domination and oppression, serves as a reminder of the need for empathy, compassion, and responsible stewardship of power and technology. According to Adam Jardine (2018, 8), science fiction offers a unique way to explore the current state of the world. Science-fiction

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works, such as Planet of the Apes, are set in worlds that resemble the author’s environment, with the addition of new contexts or situations that create a sense of otherness. These alterations can be as simple as allowing what is forbidden or vice versa. Even when the backdrop is in the distant future—and here in a reverse world—the issues tackled can be contemporary. “In its alternate realities, sci-fi ‘confronts contemporary problems in futuristic and sometimes fantastic settings … Through it, we can learn about ourselves and our times’” (Jardine 2018, 8). We join Mérou when he was trying to consider the possibility of a past civilization on the planet Soror that resembled our own. He asks if unintelligent creatures could have sustained it through simple imitation. Initially, this question might seem improbable, but upon closer examination and thinking, various arguments emerge, gradually reducing its implausibility. The idea that highly advanced machines might eventually surpass us is quite common on Earth, widely embraced not only by poets and romantics but people from all classes in society. However, this notion might trouble scientific minds due to its popularity and origin in the public’s imagination. Nonetheless, within this widely spread idea, there may be an essence of truth. Certainly, machines will always be machines, and even the most sophisticated robot will remain just that. However, what if we consider living beings possessing a certain level of intelligence, such as apes? And precisely, apes are known for their remarkable capacity for imitation (Boulle 1964, 87). The novel’s originality stems from its unconventional approach. Unlike typical science fiction, it does not portray a society led by robots, machines, or aliens. Instead, it presents a unique world governed by apes. What makes it even more fascinating is that this society is built through imitation, mirroring our real world in a reverse manner. Moreover, the apes’ imitation is not limited to the structure of their society. It extends to their use of language as well, as stated by Mérou, It is not essential that apes should understand what they are copying in order to produce a hundred thousand volumes from a single original. It is clearly no more necessary for them than it is for us. Like us, they merely need to be able to repeat sentences after having heard them. All the rest of the literary process is purely mechanical. It is at this point that the opinion of certain learned biologists assumes its full value: There is nothing in the anatomy of the ape, they maintain, that precludes the use of speech—nothing, that is, except the necessary urge. (Boulle 1964, 87)

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Furthermore, after initially examining the most advanced forms of intelligence, it became effortless for Mérou to apply his theory to other domains. The field of industry was a natural fit for his analysis. It became evident that industry did not necessitate the presence of a rational being for its functioning. Essentially, it comprised manual laborers, carrying out repetitive tasks that could easily be substituted with apes. At a higher level, executives simply followed predetermined protocols to generate reports and speak specific words under certain circumstances. It all seemed to be a matter of conditional responses. Even in the upper echelons of the administration, it seemed plausible to envision apes mimicking certain postures and giving speeches based on a set of patterns. Mérou “thus came to view the most diverse activities of our Earth with a new eye and to imagine them performed by apes” (Boulle 1964, 87). The only certain thing is that humans quickly became intellectually lazy allowing the apes to seize control without opposition. The pivotal moment in the apes’ uprising against humans was when they gained the capability to use human language. However, what is astonishing on the planet Soror is that human dolls, not human beings, can talk (Boulle 1964, 85). Science fiction plays a significant role in broadening our understanding of reality by presenting potential future developments or alternate worlds, which highlight, interpret, criticize, or shed light on aspects of our current world that are often overlooked or taken for granted. This is the case in Boulle’s Planet of the Apes. However, the novel goes beyond regular science fiction, using satire to show us a different world, reflecting our society, where apes rule. These humanized animals typically share common traits such as the unconventional use of language, evoking pathos, and having a disputed legal status. Such features indicate the broader category of the “subhuman” creatures that are perceived and outlined based on human standards but are deemed incomplete or undeveloped versions of humans—essentially not fully human yet. Intrinsically, complete humanization is never achieved, leaving the subjects—here the apes—in an ambiguous, intermediate state between humanness and animality. This state challenges the clear distinction between human and animal, disrupting what Giorgio Agamben refers to as “Anthropological Machine” through which the human is created with and against the animal. Contemporary versions of the machine function by dehumanizing individuals, placing some people into a category below full humanity. Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine comprehends both

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aspects of this process: the dehumanization of certain individuals and the elevation of others to a higher status within society. He says: If, in the machine of the moderns, the outside is produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman produced by animalizing the human, here [the machine of earlier times] the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form. (Agamben 2004, 37)

In the world of the apes’ planet, the anthropological machine operates differently from the modern version Agamben describes. In the modern machine, the distinction between inside and outside is created through exclusion, and the inhuman is produced by animalizing the human. However, in the ape-dominated society, the inside is established through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-human is produced through the humanization of an animal. On the one hand, the novel presents the notion of the man-ape, where apes have evolved to possess human-like characteristics, and they occupy a position within the society that is both inside and human-like. On the other hand, the non-man is represented by humans, who are seen as less than fully human, similar to animals in human form. Humans in this world become the figures of an animalized version of themselves, relegated to a lower status, much like slaves, barbarians, and foreigners in historical contexts.

From Novel to Screenplay According to SFE (2021), “From the earliest days of Proto SF, satire was its prevailing mode” and “The SF Cinema has flirted with satire quite often.” The encyclopedia cites the first adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel, Planet of the Apes (1968), as one of the “best-known examples.” Ironically, Boulle and many others considered the novel “unfilmable” (Vaux 2022). Moreover, 20th Century Fox approved the famous ending with Lady Liberty, but not Boulle: “I disliked somewhat the ending that was used, which the critics seem to like,” Boulle said. “But personally, I prefer my own” (Archbold 2023). King Brothers Productions hired famed US paratrooper and war hero Rod Serling (Bronze Star and Purple Heart; Lengel 2020), best known for

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The Twilight Zone, to adapt Boulle’s novel and provide a screenplay in 1963. After APJAC Productions acquired the rights to adapt the French novel to the silver screen, blacklisted writer Michael Wilson was also hired to work on the script. Wilson, born in 1914, served with the United States Marine Corps during WWII but was listed as a communist sympathizer after the war. He lived in France until 1964 and wrote scripts under a pseudonym for various movies, including The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); credit was changed after his death (1974), and he received his second Academy Award in 1984. Serling modified Planet of the Apes’ original story and replaced the French crew with a team of American astronauts under the leadership of Taylor, played by Charlton Heston. He also made a major change in the plot: in Boulle’s novel, the ship is safe in orbit around Soror, while in the movie, it crashes and sinks into a lake. Among the biggest differences between the novel and the movie are: 1. The fact that Taylor is shot and cannot speak for some time in the movie; when he recovers, he curses the apes and is considered a threat. 2. While Professor Antelle quickly becomes primitive like the inhabitants of Soror, his equivalent in the movie, Landon, loses intelligence through a lobotomy. 3. Ulysse and Nova have a son, Sirius, in the novel; not in the movie. 4. Ulysse spends a lot of time learning the Simian language and Zira learns French. In the movie, the crew and the apes speak English. 5. Serling’s vision of Simian cities was close to that of Boulle, but the movie was already very costly and the producers decided to replace the idea of a “technologically advanced ape society” with a much more rudimentary and primitive one proposed by Wilson (Webb 2005; Vaux 2022). In May of 1964 came the first version of the film’s ending: Serling proposed to have Thomas (later called Taylor) leave with Nova, and go back to Earth to find it inhabited by apes. 6. In December 1964, Serling changed the plot and mentioned for the first time an atomic holocaust and the Statue of Liberty. In 1965, Serling’s version changed again and Thomas was shot by apes after realizing he was on Earth. In May of 1967, Wilson proposed that “Thomas escapes on horseback with Nova, and riding up the beach he discovers the Statue of Liberty” (Webb 2005). Wilson and Serling shared screen credit when director Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes was released in 1968. Webb (2005) proposes that “the vari-

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ous writers’ work on the script occurred thousands of miles and many years apart”. It should be noted that Serling wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone titled “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” (season 1, episode 15; the title being a reference to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Arrow and the Song), in 1959, that is, four years before Boulle’s novel was published in 1963. Eight crew members of a spaceship crash on a desert planet; half of them die during the crash and the survivors turn on each other. Corey realizes that he has killed his companions for nothing when he sees a sign for Reno, Nevada. The biggest challenge for the movie was to make the apes look realistic and not ridiculous or awkward. “Richard Zanuck, the head of 20th Century Fox who had the final word on whether the original Planet of the Apes was made or not, correctly surmised that if the audience didn’t believe that the intelligent apes onscreen were real, the whole movie would fail” (Vaux 2022). Prosthetic makeup expert John Chambers, who served during WWII and later made prosthetic limbs for wounded veterans, was in part responsible for the success of the 1968 movie, along with the amazing performance from Roddy McDowell (Cornelius) and Kim Hunter (Zira). Chambers, famous for creating Leonard Nimoy’s pointed ears for the character of Spock in the original Star Trek TV series (1966–1969), also worked as a makeup artist/designer for the sequels of Planet of the Apes, but also for several films, such as Phantom of the Paradise (Brian De Palma; 1974), The Island of Dr. Moreau (Don Taylor; 1977), and TV movie Beauty and the Beast (Fielder Cook, 1976). The movie contains numerous jokes; one of the most famous being the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” reference in Taylor’s trial, which was improvised at the suggestion of Charlton Heston and Mort Abrahams (producer and co-writer of Beneath the Planet of the Apes). Allowing Taylor live offered the producers the golden opportunity to make sequels. Beneath the Planet of the Apes was directed by Ted Post and released in 1970. The story, focusing on the arrival on the planet of another human spacecraft, received mixed reviews. The only survivor astronaut Brent, played by James Franciscus (minor role in “Judgment Night”, 1959, The Twilight Zone), searches for Taylor (Charlton Heston, in a supporting role). Brent is able to meet Nova, then Zira and Cornelius, and finally Taylor. In the remnants of New York live mutant humans (telepaths) who have a nuclear bomb. By the end of the movie, Brent and

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Taylor are shot; Taylor detonates the bomb before he dies and the planet is destroyed. The film was disappointing. After the success of Planet of the Apes, producer Arthur P. Jacobs and 20th Century Fox contacted Pierre Boulle and asked him to write a sequel to the movie, not to the novel (Mauméjean 2015); at the same time, they asked Rod Serling to come up with a scenario. Boulle accepted despite his inexperience in writing movie scripts. He came up with a scenario titled La Planète des hommes (Planet of the Men) in June 1968. At the beginning of the story, Boulle proposes that Nova is pregnant. A human community, organized by Taylor and Nova, worries the apes. Sirius and all the humans learn how to use fire and to speak. Dr. Zaius becomes more powerful and wants to destroy the community. Zira and Cornelius try to warn Taylor. The humans fight against the apes and Sirius wants to lead. He does not recognize the authority of his father anymore and attacks the city of the apes, killing them all. Taylor is shot when he tries to defend Cornelius and Zira, who later commit suicide. Arthur P. Jacobs rejected both Boulle’s Planet of the Men and Rod Serling’s The Dark Side of the Earth, even though 1970 Beneath the Planet of the Apes copied entire sections of the two scripts (Mauméjean 2015). In 1972, Serling said of Boulle: as talented and creative a man as Boulle is, he does not have the deftness of a science fiction writer. Boulle’s book was… a prolonged allegory about morality more than it was a stunning science fiction piece. But it contained within its structure a walloping science fiction idea. (Ulin 2014)

The 1970 movie was followed by two films directed by J. Lee Thompson: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Both films received mixed reviews from critics. Roddy McDowall plays Caesar, the son of Cornelius and Zira, who leads a rebellion against mankind. Almost 20 years later, Tim Burton directed a new version of Planet of the Apes starring Mark Wahlberg (Leo Davidson), Tim Roth (General Thade), and Helena Bonham Carter (Ari). The 2001 movie was a disappointment and despite being a commercial success, the sequel was cancelled by Fox. Tim Burton, famously said, “The idea of doing a sequel—I’d rather jump out of the window, I swear to God” (Susman 2001). Ironically, many people, including some of the actors, were puzzled by the ending, showing that they did not read the novel. In Boulle’s Planet of the Apes as well as in Burton’s movie, when Ulysse/Davidson goes back to Earth, the apes have become the dominant species:

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“Screenwriter William Broyles Jr., at least, proved faithful to Boulle’s novel when it came to the twist ending, but this merely confused people rather than shocked them to the core of their beings” (Lifestyle Inquirer 2011). Archbold (2023) goes as far as to say that “Tim Burton’s 2001 remake killed that particular franchise relaunch.” It took ten years before a new prequel trilogy was successfully launched. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was directed by Rupert Wyatt and released in 2011. Starring Andy Serkis as Caesar and James Franco as pharmaceutical chemist Will Rodman, the movie was a big commercial success and received positive reviews, enough for 20th Century Fox to relaunch the franchise: the film was followed by Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) directed by Matt Reeves. English actor Andy Serkis, famous for his roles using motion capture, notably in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003; as Gollum), The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), and King Kong (2005), was praised for his performance. After ALZ-112, a viral-based drug tested to cure Alzheimer’s Disease, is given to a chimpanzee called Bright Eyes to enhance intelligence, it becomes violent and is shot. Bright Eyes was pregnant and Will Rodman decided to raise the infant named Caesar. The trilogy tells the story of Caesar from his birth to his death at the end of the third movie. Interestingly, when Caesar is captured, a mute girl named Nova gives him water (a reference to Nova in the novel and probably to Esmeralda and Quasimodo in Notre Dame de Paris). The de-evolution of humans in the trilogy is explained by the harmfulness of the simian virus. According to Professor Loriot, Pierre Boulle was not a millionaire, but he lived well: « Chaque fois que les Américains voulaient continuer l’adaptation du film, ils payaient des droits importants, répartis entre Pierre Boulle et l’éditeur du livre, Julliard » (Rastoll 2021; Translation of the authors: “Each time the Americans wanted to continue the adaptation of the film, they paid significant royalties, divided between Pierre Boulle and the publisher of the book, Julliard”). The franchise includes two television series, several comics, and video games (“Television, Comics, Toys and Comebacks” section, 146–187, in Greene and Slotkin 1998).

Conclusion Boulle, despite being an engineer and writing about time travel in the future, disliked the fact that Planet of the Apes was classified as science fiction: according to Professor Jean Loriot, he once said, “No, no, it’s not

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science fiction!” (Yanes 2019, online). He considered his novel to be more of a satire, greatly influenced by philosophical tales of the eighteenth century. Professor Loriot also shared Boulle’s last words: “On his deathbed, his last words to me and my wife were: ‘I hope they will not forget me’” (Schofield 2014). The recent Planet of the Apes trilogy (2011–2017) is without doubt a commercial success (US$2 billion worldwide so far for the reboot series). After Disney acquired the assets of 21st Century Fox in 2019, they announced that Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes will be released in 2024. It will be the tenth movie since 1968 Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston. These films focus on the rise of intelligent apes and the conflict between apes and humans, without explicitly involving time travel as a central plot device. However, both the novel and the film trilogy delve into a thought-­ provoking dystopian and satirical vision depicting the collapse of civilization. Moreover, the Planet of the Apes trilogy foresaw a grim future for humanity, predicting a regression into barbarism and savagery as other species rose to prominence. Even Taylor, the intelligent, independent, and strong protagonist, who initially landed on the planet as a cleanshaven astronaut in pristine NASA-style overalls, succumbs to the disintegration of his identity. As events unfold, he progressively transforms into a more primal and enraged figure, donning animal skins. A poignant symbol of hope, the Statue of Liberty makes a haunting appearance in the film, serving as a reminder of a lost and buried civilization. Furthermore, in the Planet of the Apes, Boulle sought to provoke a profound questioning of human identity. Through the lens of a world turned upside down, where apes have taken the place of humans as the dominant species, the novel and the screenplay challenge us to consider the essence of our own identity and what sets humans apart from other beings. The triumph of both the novel and the subsequent film adaptations lies in their ability to captivate audiences on multiple levels. At the core of this success is the compelling narrative that transcends the boundaries of traditional science fiction. Planet of the Apes serves as more than just an engaging futuristic tale; it acts as a potent social commentary, challenging our understanding of humanity and the flaws inherent in our society. By presenting a dystopian world, the story draws audiences into an exploration of power dynamics, ethics, and the consequences of our actions. It reflects our reality, prompting us to reevaluate our values and beliefs, making it a tale of relevance that resonates deeply with contemporary audiences. The franchise’s ability to adapt and remain relevant over

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the years has solidified its status as a timeless classic. Given this enduring success, it appears that there will be future endeavors to explore more of Boulle’s literary creations: February 7, 2022 Uri Singer and Aimee Peyronnet are teaming to acquire two works from the estate of French author Pierre Boulle, who wrote the novels Planet of the Apes and The Bridge Over the River Kwai, which both were turned into iconic Hollywood movies. The pair have acquired Boulle’s 1974 novel The Virtues of Hell, as well as Planet of the Men, an unproduced feature screenplay Boulle wrote after the first Planet of the Apes movie premiered in 1968 with Charlton Heston starring. The plan is to turn Virtues of Hell into a film, and adapt Planet of the Men for TV. (Hipes 2022)

Competing Interests  The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open; Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Archbold, Phil. 2023. The Untold Truth of Planet of The Apes. Looper. https:// www.looper.com/75828/untold-­truth-­planet-­apes. Accessed 31 May 2023. Association des amis de l’œuvre de Pierre Boulle. 2022. La vie de Pierre Boulle. Le Bono, France. https://www.pierreboulle.fr/images/Pdf/livret_pboulle.pdf. Accessed 31 July 2023. Becker, Lucille Frackman. 1996. Pierre Boulle. New York: Twayne. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 2007. Du Pont de la Rivière Kwaï à La Planète des singes, les manuscrits de Pierre Boulle entrent à la BnF. Communiqué de presse. https://www.bnf.fr/sites/default/files/2018-­11/Pierre_Boulle.pdf. Accessed 31 July 2023. Bigliardi, Stefano. 2020. Planet of the Apes and Philosophy: Great Apes Think Alike. Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy 3: 1–10. Boulle, Pierre. 1963. La planète des singes. Paris: René Julliard. ———. 1964. Planet of the Apes. Trans. Xan Fielding. New York: Signet. ———. 1973. « Pierre Boulle », entretien. In La Planète des singes, 4–17. Collection Bibliothèque du temps présent. Paris: Rombaldi. ——— 1986. Lettre autographe signée à propos de ses influences littéraires (5 février 1986). https://www.autographes.com/nos-­autographes/litterature/pierre-­ boulle-­l ettre-­a utographe-­s ignee-­a -­p ropos-­d e-­s es-­i nfluences-­l itteraires-­5 -­ fevrier-­1986.html. Accessed 31 July 2023.

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Bourin, André. 1969. Entretiens avec Pierre Boulle. INA. Enregistrement sonore. Entretien 4, diffusé le 29 mai 1969. https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ cb385757436. Accessed 31 July 2023. Bréan, Simon. 2015. De « la planète mystérieuse » à La Planète des singes: une étude des manuscrits de Pierre Boulle. ReS Futurae [En ligne], 6. https://doi. org/10.4000/resf.698. Chambers, Amy C. 2016. The Evolution of Planet of the Apes: Science, Religion, and 1960s Cinema. Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 28 (2–3): 107–122. Conley, Greg. 2018. Stagflation, New Wave, and the Death of the Future. In The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, ed. Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, 447–459. UK: Cambridge University Press. Embassy of France in Kuala Lumpur. 2020. A Little History of the French in Malaysia. https://my.ambafrance.org/A-­Little-­History-­of-­the-French-­inMalaysia#t10-­Pierre-­Boulle-­1912-­1994. Accessed 31 July 2023. Find a Grave. 2022. Memorial Page for Pierre Boulle (20 Feb 1912–30 Jan 1994), Find a Grave Memorial ID 12676771. Cimetière Saint-Véran, Avignon, France. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/12676771/pierre-­boulle. Accessed 31 July 2023. Geneanet. 2022. Pierre Boulle. https://gw.geneanet.org/ryvon1?lang=fr&n=bou lle&oc=0&p=pierre. Accessed 14 September 2023. Gielen, Pascal. 2013. A Chronotopy of Post-Fordist Labor. In The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism (Part Two), ed. Warren Neidich, 195–219. Berlin: Archive Books. Goimard, Jacques. 1998. La planète Boulle: Une science-fiction sarcastique. In Étrange planète, ed. Pierre Boulle, 1002–1021. Paris: Omnibus. Greene, Eric, and Richard Slotkin. 1998. Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Hipes, Patrick. 2022. Pierre Boulle’s ‘The Virtues of Hell’ and ‘Planet of The Men’ Rights Acquired for Film, TV. DEADLINE. https://deadline. com/2022/02/pierre-­boulle-­the-­virtues-­of-­hell-­planet-­of-­the-­men-­film-­tv-­ rights-­1234927716. Accessed 31 July 2023. Hughes, David. 2003. Tales from Development Hell: Hollywood Film-making the Hard Way. London: Titan Books. Hugo, Victor. 1831. Œuvres complètes de Victor Hugo Roman, tome II. Texte établi par Paul Meurice, Librairie Ollendorff, 1904 (extract from Livre IX, Chapitre IV). https://gallica.bnf.fr/essentiels/hugo/dame-­paris/gres-­cristal. Accessed 31 July 2023. INA Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. 1963. Pierre Boulle « La planète des singes » est une satire. Lectures pour tous RTF 06/02/1963. Archive INA. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHI3vXHKDsE. Accessed 31 July 2023.

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———. 2020. 1963, le livre La planète des singes, inspiré par des traders ! https:// www.ina.fr/ina-­eclaire-­actu/1963-­le-­livre-­la-­planete-­des-­singes-­inspire-­par-­ des-­traders. Accessed 31 July 2023. Jardine, Adam. 2018. The Pedagogic Value of Science Fiction: Teaching About Personhood and Nonhuman Rights with Planet of the Apes. The University of Notre Dame Australia Law Review 20 (1, Article 6): 1–42. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/undalr/vol20/iss1/6. Accessed 31 July 2023. Kirkup, James. 1994. Obituary: Pierre Boulle. Independent, UK. https://www. independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-­p ierre-­b oulle-­1 391376.html. Accessed 31 July 2023. Lengel, Edward G. 2020. Combat in Twilight: Rod Serling’s World War II. The National World War II Museum, New Orleans. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/rod-­serling-­twilight. Accessed 31 August 2023. Librairie Walden. 2020. Dix-neuf chefs-d’oeuvre adaptés au cinéma. 15 La Planète des singes. Cinéma. Catalogue no. 43. https://ilab.org/assets/catalogues/ catalogs_files_C43-­BD.pdf. Accessed 31 August 2023. Lifestyle Inquirer. 2011. French Sci-fi Novel Sparked ‘Planet of the Apes’ Mythology. https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/7989/french-­sci-­fi-­novel-­sparked-­planet-­of-­the-­ apes-­mythology. Accessed 31 August 2023. Mauméjean, Xavier. 2015. Planet of The Men, scénario de Pierre Boulle. ReS Futurae [En ligne], 6.https://doi.org/10.4000/resf.739. McHugh, Susan Bridget. 2000. Horses in Blackface: Visualizing Race as Species Difference in “Planet of the Apes”. South Atlantic Review 65 (2): 40–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/3201811. Micali, Simona. 2021. What If They Could Speak?: Humanized Animals in Science Fiction. In Mediating Vulnerability: Comparative Approaches and Questions of Genre, ed. A.  Masschelein, F.  Mussgnug, and J.  Rushworth, 19–37. UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1nnwhjt.5. Miner, Horace. 1956. Body Ritual Among the Nacirema by from American. Anthropologist 58 (3): 503–507. https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-­1956-­ BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf. Accessed 31 August 2023. Montoneri, Bernard, and Murielle El Hajj. 2022. Barjavel, Ravage: Roman Extraordinaire (1943). In Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel, ed. Bernard Montoneri, 119–143. USA: Lexington Books. Oliver, Myrna. 1994. Pierre Boulle; Wrote ‘River Kwai,’ ‘Planet of the Apes’. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­1994-­02-­03-­ mn-­18501-­story.html. Accessed 31 August 2023. Rastoll, Gwen. 2021. Sept choses étonnantes sur Pierre Boulle, le père de « La planète des singes ». Le Télégramme. https://www.letelegramme.fr/t-­plus/ sept-­c hoses-­e tonnantes-­s ur-­p ierre-­b oulle-­l e-­p ere-­d e-­l a-­p lanete-­d es-­ singes-­169450.php. Accessed 31 August 2023. Roy, Paulette. 1970. Pierre Boulle et son œuvre. Paris: Julliard.

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Sarat, Austin. 2007. Editorial. Law, Culture and the Humanities 3 (3): 357–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872107081423. Schofield, Hugh. 2014. The French Spy Who Wrote The Planet of the Apes. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-­28610124. Accessed 31 August 2023. Scott, Paul. 2020. Aliens and Alienation in Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des Singes. Romance Studies 38 (1): 26–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/0263990 4.2020.1766858. SFE. 2021. Satire. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. https://sf-­encyclopedia. com/entry/satire. Accessed 31 August 2023. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1965. Art as Technique. In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T.  Lemon and Marion J.  Reis, 3–24. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/first/en122/ lecturelist-­2015-­16-­2/shklovsky.pdf. Accessed 31 August 2023. Smith, C. Robert. 2015. Society and Social Pathology: A Framework for Progress. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Susman, Gary. 2001. Tim Burton Balks at an “Apes” Sequel. https://ew.com/ article/2001/08/22/tim-­burton-­balks-­apes-­sequel. Accessed 31 August 2023. Ulin, David L. 2014. The transformation of ‘Planet of the Apes,’ from book to movie legend. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-­et-­jc-­transformation-­of-­planet-­of-­the-­planet-­of-­the-­apes-­book-­to-­ movie-­20140710-­story.html. Accessed 31 July 2023. Vaux, Robert. 2022. Planet of the Apes Was Considered Unfilmable  – Even by Author Pierre Boulle. https://www.msn.com/en-­us/movies/news/planet-­of-­ the-­a pes-­w as-­c onsidered-­u nfilmable-­e ven-­b y-­a uthor-­p ierre-­b oulle/ar-­ AAYneS2. Accessed 31 August 2023. Webb, Gordon C. 2005. Mythbusting the Original Planet of the Apes. Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. https://rodserling.com/mythbusting-­the-­original-­ planet-­of-­the-­apes. Accessed 31 August 2023. Wikitree. 2022. Eugène Jean Baptiste Boulle (1880–1926). Boulle Family. https:// www.wikitree.com/wiki/Boulle-­38. Accessed 31 August 2023. Yanes, Javier. 2019. The Origin of the Origin of the Planet of the Apes. BBVA Openmind. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/humanities/arts/the-­ origin-­of-­the-­origin-­of-­the-­planet-­of-­the-­apes. Accessed 31 August 2023.

CHAPTER 3

Alisa in a Futuristic Wonderland: Traveling Through Time and Space with a Girl from Tomorrow Iryna Morozova and Olena Pozharytska

Introduction It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. (Carroll 1865)

Humans have always dreamed about visiting far distant lands, making eye-­ opening discoveries of new territories, investigating cosmic and ocean space. However, we think it is transference in time that might makes traveling the most fascinating, wonderful, and enticing adventure. Just to think of a chance to peep at one’s parents as young children or eye-witness some crucial historical events, like the fall of the Roman Empire, or battles of the American War for Independence. Different authors depicted for their readers possible twists of fate time travelers might have. They paved the way for a special type of science fiction, called chronofiction (or

I. Morozova (*) • O. Pozharytska Odesa Mechnikov National University, Odesa, Ukraine e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_3

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chrono-opera), which describes the adventures of time travelers (Wittenberg 2013). The concept of time travel has always captivated science fiction writers from all parts of the globe, leading to the appearance of diverse narratives influenced by their cultural backgrounds, philosophical perspectives, and personal preferences. This analysis aims to explore the unique characteristics of temporal science fiction written for children, focusing on the renowned novel One Hundred Years Ahead by Kir Bulychev (Bulychev 2020) who was a popular Soviet and post-Soviet writer and crafted numerous stories that exemplify Slavonic chronofiction (Yavorskaya 2018). There cannot be any discussion as to how fantastic or realistic chronofiction is as a genre without looking at the real possibilities of traveling in time, so our chapter will open with a brief rundown about what science says about time travel. Then we shall dwell upon the most typical means of time travel described in literature and, finally, focus on the literary persona of Kir Bulychev, whose book One Hundred Years Ahead (1978) is central in our analysis. We shall concentrate on the protagonist of the novel, the futuristic elements used for creating an atmosphere of the future, the type of society presented there, and the values treasured in it. Grounding on the information obtained in the process of our investigation, we shall also try to reveal the author’s message to his readers at the end of the chapter. While any fiction is, to a certain degree, a mind-shaping tool (Eileen 2021; Pozharytska 2012; Morozova and Pozharytska 2021), it is even more so when it comes to stories where the main character comes from the future and unveils the writer’s idea of a possible future of humankind for the readers. Thus, seeing the future as one of the famous Russian authors depicted it two decades back presents quite interesting material for analysis, taking into consideration the Russian political aggression to Ukraine now, and can give an insight about the real values of the people in contrast to politicians.

Traveling in Time: A Scientific Viewpoint The imaginary worlds described in any story written in the genre of chronofiction traditionally highlight hypothetical situations of time travelers’ possible visits to the past or future. So, what is actually meant by traveling in time, and how fantastic or scientifically grounded can chronofiction be? Modern understanding of time and cause-and-effect relationships comes from the general theory of relativity. The latter provides an accurate

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description of the causal structure of the universe. Altogether, scientists have been trying it for years to use general relativity theory and find out if it is possible to travel in time in real life. Today, certain theoretical research data prove that time traveling is, in fact, completely compatible and agreeable with the theory of relativity and can even be described by concrete mathematical equations. Thus, Barak Shoshany, Assistant Professor, Physics, from Brock University, whose research focuses “on the nature of time and causality in general relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as symbolic and high-performance scientific computing,” (Prof. Barak Shoshany’s Website n.d.) strongly believes that time travel may take place in reality and theorizes about it in his papers (Shoshany and Wogan 2023). According to a daring hypothesis of the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, space and time are united into a common entity, “space-time.” Einstein even suggests a logical explanation of this unity functioning at a qualitatively new physical level of the universe (Einstein 2016). This conception, grounded upon the causal structure of the universe, has been known for more than a century while various physicists have been trying to prove its validity experimentally. In particular, in 2020, Ron Mallet, an astrophysicist from the University of Connecticut (USA), managed to write an equation which may serve as the basis for creating a real time machine. Taking into account all the laws of physics known today, he admits that his creation is so far only a theory, but presupposes that, perhaps, someday people will be able to test it in practice (Mallett 2006). As surprising as it may sound, formally and technically, there is evidence of time traveling registered in reality. In his speech performed on the TED platform, the popular astronomer Colin Stewart disclosed the fact that the Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev actually traveled 0.02 seconds into his own future due to the slowdown of time spent on the International Space Station (Stuart 2022). Most researchers see the real obstacle for time traveling in the so-called time travel paradoxes. Kevin Bonsor and Robert Lamb in their article How Time Travel Works (2022) consider the hidden reasons for dubiousness of such travels, explaining it by the so-called grandfather paradox: You’re a time-traveling assassin, and your target just happens to be your own grandfather. So, you pop through the nearest wormhole and walk up to a spry 18-year-old version of your father’s father. You raise your laser blaster, but just what happens when you pull the trigger? (Bonsor and Lamb 2022)

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In other words, time travelers may be caught in a consistent causal loop. There’s also another possibility suggested by quantum theory. The future or the past the travelers want to visit exists as a parallel universe. Hence, traveling in time, in this case, may be possible on condition of co-­ existing multiple timelines in the universe, which is not absolutely nonsensical, taking into consideration the fact that the physicist Barak Shoshany admits having recently carried out a special investigation with his students which showed that multiple parallel timelines can actually resolve the paradoxes of time travel.

Chronofiction: Origin, Development, and Basic Peculiarities Traditionally, H.  G. Wells with his novel The Time Machine (1895) (a device that can move people into the past and the future) is considered to be a pioneer of this genre, introducing a new trend of the chrono-opera and giving a rational explanation of traveling in time (Hammond 2004). Though it is beyond doubt that H. G. Wells’s novel has in many aspects paved the way for what is known as chronofiction now, the idea of traveling to the past or to the future had been known long before it. For example, L.  Holberg from Norway published his Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum in 1741 and 1771 saw L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771) by L.-S. Mercier is, that will later be known as “proto science fiction” (Montoneri 2022). Even before that, time travel was a plot organizing element in Memoirs of the Twentieth Century by S.  Madden, dating back to 1733 and imitating diplomatic letters brought back to 1728 from 1997–1998. However, probably one of the earliest examples of chronofiction is the Seven Sleepers story, where the protagonists of the story spend (what seems to them) three days in a secluded place, but on returning home, find out that centuries have passed since their departure. The legend goes back to the fifth century AD and is believed to be the oldest chrono-opera (Liuzza 2016, 66). Dealing with personages’ traveling to the past and altering it, chronofiction is often inextricably linked with the so-called alternate history. After all, by changing something (even accidentally) the travelers in the past inevitably influence the present and the future of their epoch. In modern science fiction, temporal paradoxes often appear when a certain event leads to a change in the past, but the change itself will cause this event not

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to take place at all. Thus, grounding on the philosophical platform of immortality and the transcendental-kinetic theory of time, chronofiction writers try to create an alternate history of modern humankind, suggesting their original vision of temporal paradoxes that might be caused by traveling into the past or returning from the future to the present. Chronofiction writers are spoilt for choice when it comes to possible vehicles of transferring their travelers into different time periods: sometimes it is a machine, a gust of wind, a tunnel, or even a dream. In this sense, such fiction ceases to be scientific (or even goes into the realm of fantasy) since the mechanism of time travel here may be the most ridiculous or may not be described at all. The emphasis in such stories is not so much on the technical aspect of the transference of living beings in time, but on the peculiarities of the world, chronologically new to the travelers, their feelings and human relations exposed in the process of time traveling. Science fiction writers working in the genre of chronofiction can be classified in accordance with their approaches to the problem of time traveling and the audience they address their works to (Fitting 2010). Transference in time may require colossal energy (e.g. in Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity (2011), the indicator of the energy meter silently insisted that the energy consumption is still millions of megawatts), or chronofiction writers may describe the time machine itself in the form of a bicycle, a car, a well, a capsule, a remote control, or a spaceship. If the transport of time transference is not in the focus of the narrative, the protagonists of temporal fiction become “portal travelers” accidentally or intentionally sent to other eras and even universes. Sometimes, authors do not foreground the transport of time travel, which is mentioned only in passing, and concentrate more on other things that seem important to them, like their protagonists or characters from the future (as is done by Kir Bulychev in his One Hundred Years Ahead (2020), where the author is more interested in the character of Alisa Selezneva, a young school child from the future, than in the technical characteristics of the vehicle which takes her to another time period).

Chronofiction for Children Speaking about the target audience, most famous chronofiction authors, like H. G. Wells, I. Asimov, R. Bradbury, P. Anderson, and others, wrote for adult readers who are expected to be more prepared for time transference. Still, there are quite a lot of writers from different countries who

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offer time-traveling stories for children. Concentrating on the Slavonic children’s writers in our chapter, among those writing chronofiction for kids in Russian and Ukrainian, we shall mention V. Gubarev (The Clock of Centuries; 1965), Eu. Schwarz (A Story About the Lost Time; 1940), A. Zhvalevsky (The Time Is Always Good; 2007), T. Kryukova (Reviewing the Studied; 2008), A.  Bachynskyi (Zeus’s Triangle; 2020), D.  Matiyash (My Name is Varvara; 2021), Z. Shevchenko (Gate Guardian; 2021), and others. On the whole, such books in Russian outnumber their counterparts in Ukrainian and in general outweigh them in popularity with the readers, which may be accounted for both by political reasons (as Ukraine used to be part of the USSR where Russian was the language of international communication between the republics that made up the country) and simply by the number of Ukrainian and Russian native speakers. The reasons for our concentrating on children’s literature are as follows. To begin with, according to Hegel, the formation of national character starts at the stage of infantry and results in the national spirit of an ethnos, which determines people’s behavior in a variety of situations, personal relations, wars, etc. (Hegel 2004, 156–157). Then, literature for children largely depends on the existing ideological, religious, and cultural standards accepted in a given society. Children’s literature largely shapes a child’s values and worldview. It gives him/her a better understanding of how the world works, and a good book from childhood may even help in solving future problems (Emir 2016). It also goes without saying that children are real time-travelers who take a caravan of our ideas and emotions to the future. So, studying the literary peculiarities of national children’s books highlights not only universal ethical, moral, and political preferences but also human qualities reflecting their national identity, i.e. the facts allowing in the long-run to understand a certain national group’s mentality, mind-set, and aspirations.

Kir Bulychev as a Science Fiction Writer Our investigation is focused on the chrono-stories written by Kir Bulychev for children. His stories about the girl named Alisa Selezneva made the author famous in his country and motivated a release of the film-strip based on his books and titled Guest from the Future (1985). Kir Bulychev’s chronofiction about this personage is also interesting due to the time period it was written in. While the first books were published in 1965, the last one saw the world in 2003, and all of them describe the events of a

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rather distant future (2083–2092). Consequently, it does not seem to us an exaggeration to say that Kir Bulychev’s stories about Alisa reflect the mind-set not only of homo sovieticus but also of modern people as the books remain popular even after the writer’s death. Despite the fact that science fiction is becoming more and more productive today, there is no Ukrainian or Russian science fiction writer who can rival in popularity with Kir Bulychev, who had a rare insight into the future and whose plots one can often see coming true today. We would also like to point out that Kir Bulychev has always been considered a writer whose works never played into the hands of the ruling government. His books proclaimed commonly humane ideals but are believed to have nothing to do with the ideology imposed in the period of his writing (Ternopol 2021). The author’s real name was Igor Mozheiko, and his ancestors belonged to the Belarusian-Lithuanian gentry Mozheiko of the coat of arms of the Pipe. After finishing high school, Igor fell under the Komsomol order and entered Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages. He got his diploma in 1957 and was sent as an interpreter to Burma. Having worked for two years there, he returned to his native city to enter the Academy of Sciences, where he continued studying the culture of Eastern countries. After graduation, the young man remained in that educational institution as a teacher of History of Burma. It might be from his trip to Burma that Igor Mozheiko got his humanism and general open-mindedness that we see in his fiction. The writer kept his real name secret for many years and published his books under the pen-name Kir Bulychev for the fear of losing his position at the Institute of Oriental Studies. His pen-name represented a blending of his wife’s name and his mother’s surname, this way perpetuating in his works the names of two beloved women. The author wrote science fiction both for children and adults, and there are a lot of screen versions of his stories. In 1965, Mozheiko defended his Ph.D. thesis and in 1981, his second, doctoral thesis. In scientific circles, he is known as the author of works on the history of Southeast Asia. K. Bulychev’s literary legacy contains works for all age groups, with chronofiction occupying a special place there. In general, chronofiction in the USSR got far better chances for its development after Joseph Stalin’s death since before it, the existing conflict between “what is good” and “what is better” did not leave too much space for discussing the future much different from the present. After

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N. Khrushchev proclaimed his goal to build up Communism within the next 20 years at the XXII Congress of the CPSU in 1961, people started fantasizing about the future more, generally connecting it with the final victory of the reigning political ideas. It was not until the 1960s that Soviet science and technologies made great progress, and in 1961, Yuriy Gagarin became the first human in space, inspiring scientists and writers alike. New heroes were to be found, and the field of science seemed to be the most reasonable for it, since science “seemed to be a lever to turn over the Soviet society and change it into a utopia, built up with the help of exact sciences” (Vile and Genis 1998, 99). Thus, science fiction written by I.  Yefremov or the Stugatski brothers offered people plausible scientific stories and was growing in popularity. We agree with Olga Ilina about the predominance of male authors amongst Soviet writers and the reasons for it: In Russian science fiction, the ratio of male and female authors is such that the priority always belonged to men. According to researchers, this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the so-called “hard science fiction” was a priority in the Soviet Union, which told readers about the achievements and prospects of real science. Authors described technical details and the operation of various mechanisms, and wrote about exploring new territories. (Ilina 2023, 49)

At the same time, the reality around did not look as if a progressive world of the future would soon open up for common people and provoked depression. While people were trying to keep up the idea of a better life that was waiting for them round the corner, science fiction writers started describing other worlds and galaxies rather than the future of the given country. Their attention to outer space and cosmos, we suppose, is motivated by such factors as their inner wish to widen their personal space and to show everyone that the world is much bigger than the country around them. When Igor Mozheiko published his first story about Alisa The Girl with Whom Nothing Happens in 1965, it very quickly became a sensation, and “the popularity of books about Alisa could be compared with the popularity of Harry Potter in the 2000s” (Ilina 2023, 50). Though the book we focus on here, One Hundred Years Ahead, is not the first one published in the series, it opens the adventures of Alisa chronologically. The book was brought out in 1978 and covered both buzzing topics of its day, i.e. a

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happy and progressive future and space travel. It summed up the ideas of intellectuals that the future is granted by scientific discoveries and, at the same time, did not limit the readers with the Earth only. Altogether, the book had very good chances to succeed and turned out a success. Though intended for children, it was also liked by their parents (who still remembered the scientific success of the 1960s) and partly replaced traditional fairy-tales, having embraced them and dealing with the fairy-tale characters from a more practical scientific perspective, which was also in tune with the spirit of the day. During his long career as a writer, Kir Bulychev wrote mostly for children. His adult science fiction about Andrey Bruce, an agent of the Space Fleet (SSF Agent in 1984 and Witches’ Dungeon in 1987), enjoyed well-­ deserved popularity within grown-up readers. Another fairly recognizable character created by Kir Bulychev is Kora Orvat (an agent of the Intergalactic Police) who might have been taken for a grown-up reflection of his most famous character Alisa, as suggested by N. Svetlov (2008), but for the fact that these two characters come face to face with each other in one of the stories.

Alisa from the Future All the books by Bulychev enjoyed popularity in their due time and remain demanded by the readers today. Still, the girl Alisa Selezneva, an ordinary resident of the Earth, a girl who got into different situations from which she always found a way-out, enjoyed a special love of the author’s fans. Today, there exists a vast number of modern translations of “alisiana,” old books about Bulychev’s most famous protagonist keep getting re-issued, fanfics are written about her, and there is even a special encyclopedia dedicated to fiction about Alisa Selezneva (Alisa Selezneva Entsyklopediya 2005). This character has become so much favored with the fans that 2020 saw the computer game Alisa Selezneva in the World of Tanks which was launched to celebrate Cosmonautics Day and meet the demands of contemporary digital society: World of Tanks developers, together with the Soyuzmultfilm film studio, have prepared a joint project for Cosmonautics Day. Starting from April 12, the game will host a two-week space event based on the legendary cartoon The Mystery of the Third Planet. (Alisa Selezneva in World of Tanks. Karaspace n.d.)

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To sum up, the stories about Alisa were adapted into films, series, cartoons, comics, and videogames. For many Russian-speaking children of several generations from all over the world, Kir Bulychev’s books have become a window from their boring lives, predicted by the reigning political system, into a gripping world of fantasy. Everyone dreamed of being in the place of Kolya Naumov, who was taken by the time machine to a bright future and met its iconic model, embodied in the clever and beautiful Alisa Selezneva. The author’s choice of the name for his protagonist was not accidental. The name “Alisa” sounds quite distant and unusual, but not too foreign to the Russian-speaking audience (Morozova 2015), on the one hand, and is suggestive of another Alice, the girl who traveled to Wonderland, on the other hand, which motivates contrasting the two girls in our study. Alice in Wonderland is a well-known and universally loved fairy-tale written by the English mathematician, poet, and prose writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pen-name Lewis Carroll. Published in 1865, it tells us about a girl named Alice, who falls through a rabbit hole into an imaginary world inhabited by strange creatures. The main character had a real prototype—Alice Liddell, to whom the writer was very much attached. Carroll’s heroine is a little girl, smart beyond her years, awfully curious and reasonable. She has already begun her education, knows and uses a lot of “adult” words, though she is not always sure of their meaning. She can insert into her speech such words and expressions as “something like that,” “parallels and meridians,” “antipodes” (Carroll 1865), and many others. Alice is fond of reading, but she wouldn’t read books without pictures. She likes to read educative stories about children and loves to pretend to be an adult. She eagerly gives instructions to herself, but she does not always follow her own recommendations. She is a dreamer, enjoys inventing things and being in several images at once. The main character traits, literary critics note about Alice, are her eager mind, liveliness, non-­ standard way of thinking, and politeness (Ternopol 2021). So, what about Alisa Selezneva who is known to be Kir Bulychev’s favorite character? Likewise, Carroll’s Alice from Alice in Wonderland, this girl also had a prototype, the real girl Alisa, who was the writer’s daughter and, besides, got her name in honor of Carroll’s famous personage. Instead of the rabbit’s hole or a wonderful mirror, Kir Bulychev’s Alisa uses spaceships and a time-machine for cosmic and temporal journeys. Hence, it is certain that Alisa Selezneva and Alice in Wonderland are in a certain way related as literary characters. However, we do not think that,

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despite a certain closeness in age (Alice is about seven and Alisa is no more than 10 or 12 years old) and their non-standard way of thinking, these girls have too much in common. Alisa is a high school student, a member of the Young Naturalists’ Society. On her own, together with her father Igor Seleznev and their mutual companion with a funny name Gromozeka, or with her friends, she visits many distant planets, goes to the underground depths and even sees Atlantis (The End of Atlantis) (Bulychev 1994). She also travels to the distant past (including the “age of legends” 26,000 years ago) (Bulychev 2016) and comes to the twentieth century (1976) to take away the newest mind-reading device known as “mielophone” (Bulychev 2020). There is yet another “internal” cycle of stories, Alisa and her Friends in the Labyrinths of History, which tells about the adventures of the twenty-first-­ century children in the past. Bulychev’s Alisa is industrious, energetic, and demonstrates amazing super-human physical skills and cognitive abilities. The common traits of the girls’ personalities demonstrated by these two distant in time literary characters are obviously seen in their thirst for knowledge, encouraging them on their travels.

One Hundred Years Ahead: The Devil Is in the Details As was pointed above, stories about Alisa and her friends belong to children’s chronofiction literature, where the characters use the time machine as an ordinary means of traveling, as we would be bordering a plane or a ship. Kir Bulychev describes the time machine as nothing special: a time traveler comes onto the platform, grabs the handrails, and five minutes later finds him/herself in the necessary destination point (Bulychev 2020, 12). The first books about Alisa picture her as an only child in her family who lives amongst grown-ups. The story plot develops in the form of entrusted narrative. Alisa’s father is a cosmobiologist, Professor Seleznev, and while the name of the main protagonist, Alisa, coincides with that of Bulychev’s daughter, the author bestowed his real name—Igor—to Selezneva’s father. This fact alone shows that the virtual character of Alisa Selezneva meant to the author more than he may have realized it himself. We also support the statement made by O. Ilina (2023) that the book is

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“one of the few works of Russian teenage literature of the Soviet period in the genre of SF, in which the female character plays the main role.” In the sum total, more than five dozen stories and novellas written by Kir Bulychev are dedicated to Alisa’s adventures in the imaginary worlds of the past or future. Among them, One Hundred Years Ahead (Bulychev 2020) has become the most popular book, both with children and their parents. When the film about Alisa’s adventures was released in 1984, the streets became empty due to the fans watching the current series on TV screens (Yavorskaya 2018). One Hundred Years Ahead (Bulychev 2020) is actually a detective novel for children presented in the genre of chrono-opera. Already in the title of the story, the writer combines two time planes—the past and the future, preparing the reader for a fascinating plot and exciting adventures of his characters. The story concentrates on the loss of a “mielophone” (a new invention from the future, a gadget for reading other people’s thoughts) stolen by two space pirates, Kryss (Rattt) and Veselchak U (Jolly U). The book consists of two parts. In the first part, Kolya, an ordinary schoolboy living in the eighties of the twentieth century, finds in his neighbor’s flat a secret chamber with a time machine and accidentally leaps one hundred years ahead. He cannot resist the temptation of looking around and admires the technical progress and the changes in the surrounding world: “And if you refuse to walk through the distant future, then you will never forgive yourself for this in your life” (Bulychev 2020, 20). The author demonstrates his insight into the future describing new speaking devices (looking and functioning as nowadays mobiles), a new type of taxis (flips, flying in the air), people living over 100 years and feeling fit enough to ride bicycles, the Cosmo Zoo, and lots of other wonderful things. The boy nearly goes to the Moon in a spaceship where he witnesses a crime committed by the space pirates. Seeing it as the best idea to save the strange device, Kolya takes the mielophone from them back to his time of living and hides it there. Alisa’s adventures take place in a futuristic, partly space-opera world where FTL ships, videophones, robots, aliens, and time travels are commonplace. One Hundred Years Ahead is known as one of the author’s prophetic books since one can easily find predictions of modern technologies we use now in it. For example, describing the future, the author shows a new way of transporting different things: a pearlescent balloon flying

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through the air delivers a newspaper to a person in the street. This episode is very reminiscent of the now developing delivery system using drones: A black thing looking like a cigarette case fell into the palm of old Pavel. “Let’s read a newspaper,” said the old man. Kolya was looking askance at the old man Pavel, who meanwhile pressed some button on the side of the cigarette case, the cigarette case turned into a multi-coloured screen with changing film frames on it. (Bulychev 2020, 16)

It is beyond doubt that the device looks like a mobile phone, a universally known gadget of today, which proves how many of our everyday conveniences had already been thought through by different authors before these devices even came into being. Alisa’s home-country is described as a technically advanced, humane state where industry and agriculture are completely automated, and robots do household chores and dangerous work for people. The social structure of the Earth in the future is not specified. The Russian language is widely spoken, but “cosmolingua” (“galactic language”) is used to communicate with the aliens. The author mildly suggests that scientists who have supernatural powers occupy privileged positions in society, having exclusive rights to get access to some planets (for example, Uranus) or decide on the “neutralization of antisocial elements” (pirates) (Bulychev 2020, 54). Though the book is supposed to be written for kids, the author finds it necessary to foreground the ideas of an ecologically and morally progressive society, which is still not devoid of criminals. This approach paints the future quite optimistically, but gives the events a more plausible look and triggers the main adventure. The houses of the future have a more natural look than those in Kolya’s time, everything is very green and has fewer sharp edges, which we find quite symbolic: Just like them [other buildings], it [the house] was built incorrectly. It towered two stories, but because it was all rounded, like a sand cake, it was not clear whether they would build it higher or it was already possible to stop. The entrance of the house was semicircular, the windows were different, small and large, oval and square. A hump hung over the entrance, and a small fluffy tree grew on it. (Bulychev 2020, 117)

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The author’s pointing out the rounded, cake-like form of the new houses can be symbolically understood as a milder and less rigid social and political system of the future, which might explain the boy’s using the word “incorrectly” (and not, say, “interesting” or “strangely”) in how he perceives the break in the rules. In the future, people are supposed to be more open to new approaches and, to quote the author, it will not be “incorrect” to be different and live in more harmony with nature rather than within a certain frame, handed over by somebody in power, telling one the rights and the wrongs. The book One Hundred Years Ahead (Bulychev 2020) mentions a certain “Galactic Alliance” which coordinates the whole intra-galactic fight against space pirates. In their actions, the members of the “Alliance” are guided by the Law of the Galaxy. The social order can also be monitored by inspectors and “space patrol.” So, though hinting at the progressive role of Russian as a language, the writer does not come up with an idea of a new Russian Empire, but insists on everybody living in peace and alliance and fighting for the common good. The writer believes that in the future people will be much more reasonable and conscious about their actions than they were when the novel was written. This idea is illustrated, for example, by an episode within the Cosmo Zoo, where Kolya carved his name, school, and form number on a bench. Alisa, who accidentally saw that inscription, immediately realized that it was written by a person from the past. “Do you really think that in a hundred years it will be possible to find a person on the Earth who will cut a bench with a knife just to leave his signature?” the heroine says to her friend (Bulychev 2020, 83). This episode shows Kir Bulychev’s belief in the progress of society and, at the same time, encourages his young readers to follow the example of the girls from the future so as to look more progressive than their peers. Altogether, it proves a humanistic nature of the novel and the author’s talent to suggest a desired model of behavior to his young target audience. The second part of the story is dedicated to Alisa’s traveling to the twentieth century after Kolya. She gets acquainted with Yulia, a schoolgirl from Kolya’s class, meets Kolya’s other classmates, and demonstrates the skills and abilities unusual for ordinary people. The girl finally gets back the desired mielophone and tells the children about their future lives. This part of the story is also full of adventures and unexpected plot twists, but, despite the fantastic events described in it, Kir Bulychev focuses his story on ordinary people and their interpersonal relations. His book claims that

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even being put in difficult circumstances, most people remain kind, honest, and humane. Altogether, Kir Bulychev depicts the future in his novel as two parallel virtual realities: as a world for children where kids live and time travel exists, and an adult future, with strong people performing heroic deeds and conquering space and time, granting the children their happy tomorrow (How Kir Bulychev… 2020). By doing so, consciously or unconsciously, the author also touches upon the Soviet understanding of a happy future where strength and heroism are much appreciated which was promised to people by their government. However, in contrast to the Communist revolutionary ideas, Kir Bulychev always remains humane and believes in the power of science and humanism (symbolized by Alisa and her father) over the power of physical might (objectivized in the characters of space pirates). It is noteworthy that Alisa acts as an element linking the world of children with the reality of adults. In contrast to her peers, she has already visited other planets and “has connections on the space station” (Bulychev 2020, 23). Children look up to her (“I wish you could talk to Alisa” more than once says the boy Javad when he meets Kolya (22–25)), and adults respect her viewpoints. She is never tired, does not complain, and always knows what to do, which is reflected already in the title of another book from the saga—The Girl with Whom Nothing Happens (Bulychev 1965). And really, the girl is more than well-skilled in all possible ways—from making conversations with aliens to fighting pirates and knights. It is extremely interesting to follow the adventures of Alisa, Kolya, and Fima in the twentieth century. From these descriptions, the reader learns a lot about the life of common Soviet people in the 70 s of the previous century: about their studies, hobbies, and dreams. In fact, the story depicts it all through the eyes of children, making the perception even more keen and acute. It is the young readers of the book who are supposed to build the life of tomorrow, and Kir Bulychev kindly shows them the drawbacks of their time and offers his idea of a new world, teaching his readers to be responsible members of society from an early age. In the episode with schoolchildren from the future, the writer describes Arkasha, a boy keen on biology, and points out how important it is to find one’s place in life and one’s life goal at an early age: “A future genius in Genetics. He’s got a dream. It’s good when one has a dream, you know” (Bulychev 2020, 23). The author is very skillful at describing the space pirates who are vicious, treacherous, and ruthless. Veselchak U (Jolly U) and Kryss (Rattt) are ready to do anything to get a mielophone. Even their looks are disgusting.

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Kryss is an insect with a round body, furry legs, and thin sharp claws. Veselchak U is completely built up of fat balls. Kryss carries around a sleep gun with him, which the pirates disguise as a crutch in the hospital. The wicked pair aspire to steal the mielophone in order to take possession of the whole galaxy with its help. However, their coming into play provokes more laughter than fear from the readers. It should be noted that, to a certain degree, the space pirates function as embodiments of greed and foolishness. Satire with which Kir Bulychev describes them unearths the true enemy of a happy future which is not actually the pirates themselves, but the qualities they objectivize. Their actions bring at risk the whole planet, illustrating to the young readers how important it is not to be like Veselchak U or Kryss and how much in life may depend on just a handful of people (two of them only here). Laughter is a powerful weapon against the social behavior Kir Bulychev is trying to fight. Getting back to the titular character of the story, Alisa Selezneva, we believe it will be rather incorrect to treat her as a personage that readers will identify themselves with (the idea expressed in the papers by O. Chelyukanova ( 2011) V. Faritov, N. Balakleets (2018), and others). A closer analysis of the protagonist reveals that Alisa Selezneva is depicted in a somewhat ambiguous and not quite infant manner. She is a unique girl for the residents of the Earth in Kolya’s time and differs from the boys and girls of her epoch, too. Besides being intelligent and clever, the girl demonstrates physical and mental abilities which are more typical of special, military trained agents than of happy children, living in the well-organized colorful future. While her free command of several foreign languages, brilliant technical knowledge, and an unusual for common people understanding of the situation, that the 11-older demonstrates in the novel can somehow be accounted for, the girl’s practically superhuman physical skills and concentration may set the reader thinking about the reasons why a young girl should always be ready to fight back or is so much goal-­oriented and not too emotional. The reality around her in the future looks inviting and quite friendly, so it must be something hidden from the public eye that caused or asks for these qualities, which may even be suggestive of the grave consequences of some secret military actions of unknown character. A keen-sighted reader who is attentive enough to notice the oddities in Alisa’s behavior will more than once wonder at the cause of the girl’s actions. A shining example of Alisa’s behavior is her changing manner of communication in the second book. At the beginning Alisa gives way and gives the leading role to Yulia, keeping an alert eye upon other children’s

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actions. Having got adapted to the circumstances, Alisa seizes the initiative and severely interrogates Ishutin, doing that in the best traditions of a well-trained police officer. “Hush! Don’t scream! We know your every thought” (Bulychev 2020, 87). A couple of her pressing questions are enough to crack the coward. In this light, Alisa does not any longer look like a desired role model of a schoolgirl, but rather awakens awe and pity for the girl deprived of a normal childhood. Actually belonging to super power humans (or at least so in our eyes), Alisa prophecies the same perspectives to other residents of the Earth in the not so far future, which is rather bewildering if one comes to think what might have made a girl (not even a teenager yet) behave as a qualified military agent: “No, you are wrong,” said Alisa to the children, “I know better. I am from the future. In the future, there will be no ordinary people. Five billion exceptional, famous, gifted people will live on the Earth.” (Bulychev 2020, 68)

However, the young inhabitants of the Earth are not too happy with this foretold future: “It sounds rather strange,” Kolya Sulima interrupted Alisa. “Everyone, in your opinion, is to become famous and great. And who will be ordinary?” “He is hopeless,” said Alisa. You can’t re-educate him. Such people just need medical treatment.” (Bulychev 2020, 66)

Her verdict sounds too self-confident and even cruel for a girl of her age. No wonder that other children look up to her with more respect than at their own teachers. What is understood by “medical treatment” is also unclear. Is it a way people from the future keep others under control? The absence of any other hints as to what is meant by that detail might suggest an idea that the situation on the Earth of the future only seems optimistic at first sight, but actually represents a society Kir Bulychev believed would grow under the Communist supervision and cautiously warned against it. It is to be mentioned that Alisa does not grow up much in the book series. She is always described as being 11 or 12 years old, which might even suggest her not being human at all. However, nothing is told about other androids of the kind. Besides, Alisa is described as feeling pain at times or needing sleep and food. Thus, we believe that her at times robot-like nature can be interpreted as the author’s good humor and mild irony

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about the Communist concept of an ideal human the society of his day might like (unemotional, logical, and determined to realize their goal). More than once, Kolya Naumov, Fima, and Yulia find themselves in very serious danger, but their courage, as well as the children’s mutual assistance, decency, and sense of justice help them save not only their own lives but also the mielophone, and, with it, the future. Hence, while Alisa’s character may symbolize the future and the technical progress itself, it is kind hearts and high moral standards that the future is impossible without, and these concepts are universal and timeless.

Time Objective and Subjective and Time as Children Perceive It: Alisa, Are You a Child? From the point of view of physics, time is a continuous quantity, a priori characteristic of the world and which is not determined by anything. As a basis for measurement, a periodic sequence of events is used, recognized as the standard of a certain period of time (Appolonova 2023, 56). In simple terms, time is a measure of how the world around us changes. In fact, any human being undertakes a journey in time, from the day they are born till the day they die. From this standpoint, all people can already be regarded as time travelers, and children are special here for the changes happening to them are the most rapid and noteworthy. Still, it goes without saying that every human feels the time flow differently, depending on their individual biological “clock,” ticking off minutes, hours, and days as those are perceived and processed by the person’s cognition. C. G. Jung underlined that there exists an undoubtful dependency between an individual’s inner world and the outer world around them: “Our mental structure repeats the structure of the Universe and everything that happens in space repeats itself in the infinitely small and unique space of the human soul” (Jung 2011, 158). It is from Jung’s studies that time perception emerged as a special field of study in psychology and neuroscience in the late nineteenth century. The notion refers to a person’s subjective cognitive or instinctive experience regarding the changes taking place in the world surrounding the individual and including themselves. While physical time seems more or less objective, psychological time is, undoubtfully, subjective and can be perceived diversely and individually in specific situations, often described in sayings, like “Time flies when you are having fun” and “A pot you watch never boils.”

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Moreover, the so-called time-sensing may vary significantly for different nationalities, age and gender groups, following from their customs, traditions, habits, and daily routine. Entering the adult world, a child is forced to revise their understanding of time as a concept because it is the Clock and not the Human that determines the beginning, duration, or end of this or that event. The concept of absolute time, measurable and flowing at its own pace, changes the very perception of time in human brain. In their work, dedicated to the analysis of time perception by children, psychologists from the Federal University of Rio Grande noted that children and grown-ups use different verbal markers to describe the flow of time, and such markers may change within different age groups, together with and determined by the development of the child (Michel et al. 2011). Thus, in accordance with the results of the research, the word “family” appears to be a frequent temporal marker in children and teens in the 12–15-year-old age group as they see the changes in the family as the most specific temporal markers. While the concept of “family” can be traced with all children characters in the novel, the situation is different for Alisa and hints at her being psychologically much older her age. The very first lines of the novel run about Kolya’s parents: “Kolya’s parents are rather far from old—they have not struck forty yet” (Bulychev 2020, 4) and go on with the description of their hobbies. All through the book, Kolya Naumov thinks about his own or other people’s relatives, about his neighbors being single and having no wife or children, or his father telling him about Arbat Square. Julia in hospital talks about her mother and wonders about Alisa’s. Kolya’s friend Fima eats cutlets like his father, Kolya Sadovsky’s family problems get mentioned. Even a boy from the future talks about his brother. Alisa, the main female protagonist who is given quite a big share of the novel in terms of both actions and dialogues, never says anything about her family or associations with home. Very determined, clever, quick, and strong, the girl supervises and organizes other children not only due to her intellectual and super-human powers, but also due to the fact that she is mentally an adult, a child deprived of her childhood and of the most treasurable value for children—their family, which is hinted at by the lack of family associations the author attributed to her. Alisa cuts off Julia’s questions about her mother: “She won’t come” (Bulychev 2020, 128). And though she does comment on her school subjects, the girl from the future avoids any information about her relatives or home. It might be reasonable as she is in the past incognito, but she never mentions or thinks about her father,

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mother, cousins, or even friends during the events happening in her time period either. It is also important Alisa is never the first to mention her school. This concept, rather crucial for schoolchildren, also comes into play only if somebody else asks her about it, but she is never too eager to discuss it as if it is something she has grown out of and left behind. Thus, a girl from the future, Alisa Selezneva does not belong to the group of children mentally as shown by the author on all text levels and so, subjectively, she is a time traveler in different ways. On the one hand, she does not perceive time as a child, having got ahead of her age mentally. On the other hand, she travels in time literally. All that gives the character a symbolic and a metaphorical meaning. It looks like the author’s dark irony that the most successful girl from tomorrow, envied by her peers, is not a girl, but a grown-up locked in a child’s body, and her robot-like reactions could be understood as the result of Alisa actually lacking a childhood where even adults look back for comfort and safety.

Conclusion Close reading of the book under analysis permits to conclude that, likewise other stories by Kir Bulychev, One Hundred Years Ahead is easy to read, full of optimism, and well appreciated by both children and adult readers. On the other hand, the novel in question is far more complicated and has suggestive ideas than it may seem at first sight. A keen-sighted reader may wonder if Alisa really embodies a human model to follow, or if a future shown by the author is really the future the human society of the Earth aspires to live in. In the mid-1980s, Bulychev gained a reputation of a serious master of commercial sci-fi series (those about Alisa and about the Great Guslyar (Bulychev 2000)) who did not aggravate his relations with publishers or ideological authorities of the country he lived in by turning to “politics” (Ternopol 2021). Nevertheless, the facts mentioned do not reduce the accumulated literary level of Kir Bulychev in science fiction with his chamber stories about ordinary people who find themselves in incredible circumstances. Our study reveals the author’s mild warning against depriving children of their happy childhood and making them into super agents or soldiers for the common good. The author’s humanistic nature does not show Alisa as an unhappy girl, but depicts her as having an adult mind in a

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child’s body. For kids, it is to a certain degree an example to follow. For adults, a warning never to lose touch with their inner child or with their kids who might grow up into robot-like individuals. Moreover, though the girl is the plot vehicle in almost all the books in the series, she never discusses or supports Communism or the Soviet ideals and never travels to the Soviet times. The author himself stated: I didn’t believe in the victory of communism or its benefits. It’s not only that I didn’t want to join the [Communist] party, but my characters from the future didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t take part in any campaigns, seminars, or military actions, didn’t vote and didn’t cast anybody away. So, I was not to be cast away either. (Bulychev 2001, 23)

Thus, Alisa’s mission is to divert the readers’ attention from the reality around them to other periods in history, showing those as far more interesting than their present. And while Alisa is always responsible for logic, honesty, and common sense, there is always a sidekick or two that the author uses to stress the necessity of a kind heart and emotional generosity that are indispensable components of a progressive world of the future. One Hundred Years Ahead (Bulychev 2020) shows the author’s wonderful sense of humor, the accuracy of psychological patterns traced in the characters’ behavior, and his original descriptions of everyday details of “the Earth of tomorrow” which create a unique credibility of the most exotic worlds, opening to the readers. At the same time, as is shown above, we believe that the writer could not ignore the ideologically pressing reality around him, with its compulsory meetings, strict forbiddance of expressing any opinion deviating from what was officially imposed, general depression in all spheres of cultural and economic lives of people. Kir Bulychev tried to escape from the suffocating present by means of writing science fiction, which was always optimistic and inspiring hope. He dreamed in his books about a better organized state, where the ruling power belongs not to the political clique forcing their ideology upon people, but to the conscious scientists who can wisely orientate the citizens and stipulate the general development of society. The writer described the future of the Earth and not the future of the USSR or Russia, prompting it that the potential of the political state around him is quite weak. Hence, in his books, Kir Bulychev outlined the future desired by many of his fellow citizens, suggesting an alternate humane history not only to the people of his country, but also to the entire world around in general. Competing Interests  The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

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References Alisa Selezneva Entsyklopediya [Alisa Selezneva Encyclopaedia]. 2005. https:// alisa.romantiki.ru. Accessed 1 October 2023. Alisa Selezneva in World of Tanks. n.d. Karaspace. https://karaspace.net/world-­ of-­tanks. Accessed 4 October 2023. Appolonova, Yulia. 2023. Poniatiye vremeni: chto predstavliayet soboi schet vremeni. Zanimatelnaya fizika. [The Notion of “Time”: What Is Time Measuring. Entertaining Physics]. Kerch: Paradigma. Asimov, Isaac. 2011. The End of Eternity. Berlin: Orb Books; Reprint Edition. Bonsor, Kevin, and Robert Lamb. 2022. How Time Travel Works. Work How Stuff Works. https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-­vs-­myth/everyday-­ myths/time-­travel6.htm. Accessed 24 October 2023. Bulychev, Kir. 1965. Devochka, s kotoroy nichego ne sluchitsia. [The Girl with Whom Nothing Happens]. Moscow: Detstvo. ———. 1994. Konets Atlantidy. [The End of Atlantis]. Moscow: Armada. ———. 2000. Alisa v Gusliare. [Alisa in Gusliar]. Мoscow: Armada. ———. 2001. Kak stat’ fantastom? [How to Become a Sci-fi Writer?]. Moscow: Okolitsa. ———. 2016. Alisa i Chudovishche. [Alisa and the Beast]. Moscow: Meshcheryakov’s Publishing House. ———. 2020. Sto let tomu vpered. [One Hundred Years Ahead]. Moscow: Iskatel’. Carroll, Lewis. 1865. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. https://www.gutenberg. org/files/11/11-­h/11-­h.htm. Accessed 1 October 2023. Сhelyukanova, Olga Nikolaievna. 2011. Igra kak sterzhneobrazujushhij faktor v skazochno-fantasticheskom cikle Kira Bulycheva “Prikljuchenija Alisy”. [Game as the Plot-Organising Factor in the Fairy-Tale and Fantastic Cycle “Alisa’s Adventures” by Kir Bulychev]. Mir nauki, kul’tury, obrazovanija 5: 293–295. Eileen, John. 2021. Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction, by Gregory Currie. Mind 130 (520): 1393–1401. https://doi.org/10.1093/ mind/fzaa081. Einstein, Albert. 2016. Albert Einstein on Space-Time. In Encyclopedia Britannica. h t t p s : / / w w w. b r i t a n n i c a . c o m / t o p i c / A l b e r t -­E i n s t e i n -­o n -­S p a c e -­ Time-­1987141. Accessed 2 October 2023. Emir, Badegül Can. 2016. Literature and Psychology in the Context of the Interaction of Social Sciences. Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 19 (4) https://jhss-­khazar.org/wp-­content/uploads/2016/11/son.4._tURKEY_12.12.2016_1.pdf. Accessed 22 October 2023. Faritov, Viacheslav Taisovich, and Natalja Aleksandrovna. Balakleets. 2018. Ideja novogo srednevekov’ja v povesti Kira Bulycheva “Gorod bez pamjati” [The Idea of New Middle Ages in the Story City without a Memory by Kir Bulychev]. In Chetvertye Lemovskie chteniya: sb. materialov Vserossiyskoy nauchnoy konferen-

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CHAPTER 4

El anacronópete (1884, 1887), the First Journey in a Time Machine in Hispanic Literature Rachid Lamarti and Fernando Darío González Grueso

Introduction El anacronópete (Gaspar y Rimbau 2005) did not pass completely unnoticed by the contemporaries of Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau. For instance, the protagonist of Bertrán Rubio’s short story “Un invento despampanante” (1906) boasts that neither the phonograph, nor the wireless telegraph, nor the anacronópete of the ill-fated “Gaspar” could compete with his own instant and reversible psico-kinos-fono-fotocromógrajo (426). However, a few years later, El anacronópete and its author were forgotten. They did not reappear until the end of the twentieth century, rescued by Saiz Cidoncha (1988), Santibáñez-Tió (1995), and Ayala Aracil (1998), who also did not hesitate to call Gaspar y Rimbau the true inventor of the first time machine. Although his claim had some impact—the book was reprinted at the beginning of the twenty-first century—and other

R. Lamarti • F. D. G. Grueso (*) Tamkang University, New Taipei City, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_4

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academics studied this almost lost jewel,1 we should point out that the anacronópete travels toward the past. At the beginning of the “zarzuela”2 (Gaspar y Rimbau  1884)—published three years later as a novel—in order to shield himself from possible objections to his invention, the main protagonist, Don Sindulfo, argues that backward movement in time represents the most arduous problem recorded in scientific annals to that day and denies that forward movement is the key to progress (12). Such arguments, of course, do not invalidate the concept of a journey into the future or exclude it from the matrix of time. We argue that this is the only flaw of the anacronópete: Without a future, it is a “half” time machine. The rename “Go-back in Time Machine” might have been more consistent with its unidirectionality. It is noteworthy that the time machine in Wells’ novel is not finished either. His is the opposite of the anacronópete: a machine that advances in time. And he shares what it seems the impossibility of the opposite journey. The Spanish ship is for retrospection and the British one for exploration. Wells’ time travel allows him to satirize our world, and Gaspar y Rimbau’s machine parodies through irony and questions the nature of the causes of the events that have occurred. Only when by putting the two together one does obtain a complete time machine that allows to travel to both past and future; toward what we are, and what we have been, forming in a full circle. Thus, H. G. Wells and Enrique Gaspar share merits and a fictional patent. This chapter consists of several parts following this order: first, we examine the plausibility of the fact of time travel by means of physical, mathematical, and astrophysical arguments. Then, this subject is followed by a brief introduction to the beginnings of contemporary science fiction (SF) and the reasons for the distinction between the two literary currents of this genre represented here by Gaspar Ribau and Wells. Then we continue with the introduction to the work in question and its comparison 1  Such are the cases of Albaladejo (2012), Molinas Porras (2012), Hesles Sánchez (2013), Petričić (2015), Brina (2018), and Gomís-Izquierdo (2018). 2  Genre of musical theater emerged in Spain in the seventeenth century; zarzuela alternates spoken dialogue with singing and instrumental music. We dare to affirm that it is a father/ older brother to the operetta. It is designated by the term “zarzuela” by metonymic allusion to the Palacio de la Zarzuela, theater where the first performances of this genre were executed. In this regard, the first composers of zarzuelas were Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca. The latter was the first person who used the word “zarzuela” for his work El golfo de las sirenas, premiered in 1657.

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with the famous Wells’ novel. This investigation closes the circle with an analysis of the first time travel to China—the place from where, ironically, the first known literary texts regarding a journey through time were collected.3

Science: Time Travel Contemporary science fiction was born in the nineteenth century, encouraged by Darwinism, technological progress, and inventions such as the steamboat, the locomotive, the electric generator, the light bulb, the telephone, and so on. Literature and science not infrequently have gone hand in hand, run parallel, or influence each other. In the Hispanic world, we can note the close friendship between Albert Einstein and Leopoldo Lugones (Lugones 1996, 32), which clearly influenced the conception of music in the hard science fiction short story “La metamúsica” (1898) (González Grueso 2022, 33–34). Another example comes from the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who was an avid reader of Jules Verne, and even created a speculative short story entitled “La vida en el año 6000” (1878) (Hesles Sánchez 2013). On the other hand, Ramón y Cajal could think of no better vehicle than the dream to travel through time, as H. P. Lovecraft often employed later in his works. Science and literature practice illumination through imaginative intuitions. Such illuminations produce scientific theories and literary texts alike. Sometimes literature is ahead of science, like in De la Terre à la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (1865) by Jules Verne; other times science anticipates it. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, time was absolute, universal, and separated from space. Einstein put it into perspective, linked it to space, and, in a touch of lyricism, made it a river that meanders through the universe, speeding up and slowing down among planets, stars, and galaxies (Kaku 2009). Einstein was a great poet. It is not for nothing that an essentially poetic postulate underlies the theories of relativity: time is sensible. Deutsch and Lockwood (1994) assert that the laws of physics—sometimes contrary to common sense—allow time travel. Atomic clocks also 3  There are oral stories about time travel during the Qin dynasty, between 221 and 207 B.C. (Tatsumi 2005).

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confirmed that the distance between two events depends on motion: the faster the speed, the shorter the time. Traveling through space at 80 percent of the speed of light would slow time so much that an eternity would have passed when returning to Earth (Davies 2002). In practice, and consistent with other theories, the problem is that bodies with mass cannot travel at speeds close to—or even above—the speed of light The discovery of subatomic particles capable of traveling back in time led to speculation about the reversal of quantum-level physical processes that have been recorded. Such assumptions immediately ran up against the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (Navarro Faus 2012), namely, the impossibility of simultaneously predicting the position and linear momentum of a particle. Until this obstacle is overcome, there are no means to restore color and flavor to a rotten apple. According to known physics, Wells’ machine is more feasible than Gaspar y Rimbau’s within the limits of improbability inherent in the idea of time travel. Unknown and open, the future would also provide enough curvature to come and go; the past, on the other hand, fixed and final, without curvature, would not allow backward travel except, perhaps, through a wormhole (Davies 2002). Traveling into the past with the anacronópete, on the other hand, would lead to temporal paradoxes. The forever never-ending story of the “crononauta”—crononaut, or time traveler—who goes back in time and murders his grandfather before fathering one of his parents. Under these circumstances, the crononauta will not become his grandfather and shall not travel back in time to murder him. The grandfather is then in perfect condition to father a son or daughter with whom the time journeyer can travel back in time to murder his grandfather, and so on. A priori, only looking back, not prospecting would cause temporal paradoxes. Traveling to the future with Wells’ time machine would have no effect on the present, since the future has no dominion over the present time. After all, it is the future that descends from the present, not the other way around: traveling to the future would consist on arriving earlier or in a shorter time, i.e. accelerating the natural inertia of events by moving at, for instance, one hour per second. Now we should weigh the retroactive effects of the next trip into the future: the crononauta enters a bookstore, picks up a collection of poems, reads them, is fascinated, photographs them secretly, returns to his time, and copies the poems into a notebook. Decades later, his grandson finds the notebook in a chest in the attic. He reads it. He is amazed and decides

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to publish under a pseudonym the same collection of poems that his grandfather will one day discover in a bookstore. Stephen Hawking in A Briefer History of Time solves such aporias with determinism: “the past and the future are predetermined” (2005, 121). The present would assume the consequences of the trip to the past, or even more: it would be as it is because of that trip. Hawking had opted the theory of multiple universes: a new universe would be created traveling to the past, where the presence and actions of the time traveler would not reconfigure the original present, but would configure a new one. This subterfuge is consistent with the quantum theories of Richard Feynman, to whom the universe does not tell a single story, but all the possible ones and at the same time, although of variable probability (Mlodinow 2003). Maybe because of these reasons, Hawking, in 2010, retracted his statement and argued that it was possible to travel to the future, but not to the past. The professor explained in an article published by the newspaper Daily Mail that the real-life time tunnels were too small for a human being, one “billion-trillion-trillionths” of a centimeter across; therefore, the wormhole seemed to be the only option available. However, if humans intend to travel through a phenomenon like this, the wormhole will destroy itself. Therefore, until that date, the only possibility for real time travel to the future was to accelerate until 186,000 miles/second.

Literature: The Time Travel The causes of the emergence of SF refer to what Darko Suvin (1976, 66–67) calls a proto-science or pre-science approach. According to this author, everything begun with the satire and innocent social criticism and, little by little, with time and the development of modern sciences, such as Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology, certain aspects that alienated society started to be introduced. To this extend, models were extrapolated to an indirect or analogical fictional model. This analogical model is the essence of science fiction. Robert Scholes explains that when the narrative of fantasy deliberately confronts reality again, produces various forms of didactic narrative or fable, which are usually named allegory, satire, fable, and parable, among others. There are two varieties of fabulation or didactic narrative that correspond to the distinction between religious narrative and scientific narrative, which could be called “dogmatic” and “speculative” fabulation, respectively (1976, 47–48). He adds the examples of Dante’s La

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Commedia, as dogmatic fable, and More’s Utopia, as speculative (1976, 48). With the appearance of Jules Verne, and especially his travel novels, there was an important variation in the point of view from which one started to write scientific fiction: because all travels record the subordinating transition from fiction to the scientific point of view of literature, like the mimesis. From the subordination of physics to an aesthetic point of view of science—as imaginative construction (Martin 1985, 183). However, after the arrival of H. G. Wells, there is a diversion in the science fiction novel. Jules Verne himself conveyed the essential difference that separated the two great masters, arguing that they did not proceed in the same way. He points out that Wells’ works did not rest on very scientific bases and that he used physics, while Wells invented (Alkon 1994, 7). At this point of contrast of mentalities, we must remember that there were certain factors, as claimed by Roger Luckhurst, which motivated the massive and new appearance of SF from the 1880s. Those conditions, which merged during that period in the early Western industrialized societies, were: • The expansion of literacy and primary education to the population of England and USA [Netherlands, Germany, France, and other countries should we add to that list], including the working classes; • The displacement of the old forms of mass literature; • The arrival of scientific and technological institutions, which provided training as scientific workers, teachers and engineers to a generation of the lower middle classes; • And, the context of a culture visibly transformed by technological and scientific innovations that, for the first time ever, began to saturate the experience of daily life with machinery. (2005, 16–17) Half a century later, the temporal extrapolation in the literature and in the world focused on the sociological, such as socio-technological scientific cognition, and anti-cognitive social oppression (Suvin 1976, 67–68). Examples of this are global catastrophes, dictatorships, cybernetic advances, the atomic bomb, and many more. The effects of World War II led SF writers to examine the relationship of human life to scientific and technological progress. Moreover, the means used for this purpose was social criticism.

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According to Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, the worlds of SF can be divided into biological worlds and physical worlds. The biological worlds seek the meeting of races, and the physical worlds, on the contrary, are based on the very fact of the existence of these worlds, their composition, origin, and end (1977, 175). The design to get to these two types of worlds is, in many cases, the plot epicenter of the story. Imaginary trips can be made through teleportation, and this, in turn, can be: physical-­ mechanical, as in Ursula K.  LeGuin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), or psychic, by transmigration of minds, as in The Shadow Out of Time (1934), by H.P. Lovecraft (González Grueso 2013, 50). The latter is usually related to dreams or drug use, some escape mechanisms present in traditional literature since its inception (González Grueso 2013, 50). Trips can be made to places both known and unknown. The characters can travel in spaceships or other technical devices, looking for the exploration and colonization of space (Scholes and Rabkin 1977, 175–176). Relevant examples are Starship Troopers (1959), by Robert A. Heinlein, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), by Arthur C. Clarke. Works can also take us to an island, as is the case in the novels Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870), by Jules Verne, or The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), by H.  G. Wells; or to remote places that present characteristics similar to islands due to their intrinsic isolation, such is the “The Country of the Blind” (1904), by H. G. Wells; or even to the center of the Earth, as in Voyage au centre de la Terre (1868), by Jules Verne (González Grueso 2013, 50–51). There are also journeys to parallel universes, like the classic story “Night Meeting,” included in the novel The Martian Chronicles (1950), by Ray Bradbury, where the protagonist travels through a valley to a universe in which Martians have not yet been exterminated by humans. Finally, Scholes and Rabkin add the possibility of temporal alternatives or uchronies (1977, 177). A very prominent example of this historical variation is the work Pavane (1966), written by Keith Roberts, that offers the possibility of a world in which the “Armada Invencible” has taken England instead of being sunk by the storm; or the novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), by Philip K.  Dick, in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have won World War II and split the whole world between them. However, the option that most interest us is time travel, whose greatest international exponent is The Time Machine (1895), by H. G. Wells, but which, as we have already mentioned, has a precedent in Spanish science

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fiction literature: El anacronópete. These time travels often allow authors to satirize our world through the projection of the path that humanity follows (Scholes and Rabkin 1977, 176). Journeys into the past not only create irony but also question the nature of the causes of the events that occurred (1977, 175–176), as in the work Lest Darkness Fall (1939), by L. Sprange de Camp. Thus, SF links a past, a present, and a future, whether utopian or dystopian, and unites them in a timeline. In order to do this, writers use parallel worlds and even temporary alternatives or diachronies that normally focus on one or several social-scientific developments, as is the case of Ruled Britannia (2002), by Harry Norman Turtledove.

El anacronópete The publisher Daniel Cortezo printed El anacronópete in 1887  in Barcelona. The story recounts the experiences of an inventor from Zaragoza, Sindulfo García, who presented an iron machine capable of time travel, during the Universal Exhibition in Paris. Its author, Enrique Lucio Eugenio Gaspar y Rimbau (Madrid [1842]-Olorón [1902]), had to resort to publishing this book, because since 1881 he had been trying launch his zarzuela Viaje hacia atrás verificado en el tiempo desde el último tercio del siglo XIX hasta el caos—whose manuscript is preserved in the Spanish National Library. Gaspar y Rimbau himself was not an unknown figure, as he had achieved some success with dramatic works such as El estómago (1874) or Huelga de hijos (1893). Gaspar y Rimbau’s anachronopetic system and time theory are based on the ideas of the astronomer Camille Flammarion, whom he met as vice-­ consul in Saint Nazaire in 1874, and whose research dealt, mainly, with Lunar and Martian topography, star dynamics, and solar fluctuations. His words regarding this matter translated into English say: “The material universe produces measure and time with its movements” (Flammarion 1874, 117). In accordance with such claims, the inventor of the anacronópete, Don Sindulfo García, links premises, conclusions, and reasoning: the Earth moves to make time, distilling it in the opposite direction to its rotation, that is, from East to West; time is atmosphere and also incessant movement; in immobility there is no before or after.4 4  Needless to say that time is not related to the direction in which the Earth rotates and that turning the planet in the opposite direction, clockwise, rewinding time is only feasible in fiction. Uribe (1997) recalls that Superman, in Richard Donner’s first film (1978), uses a

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Although El anacronópete is governed by Flammarion’s laws, it was Jules Verne who inspired it. Spurred on by the success of his fantastic odysseys, Gaspar y Rimbau wanted to emulate him and compose his own version of Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, swapping dayfas, elephants, a hot air balloon, India and a trip around the world for French prostitutes, a mummy, the anacronópete, China and an even more spectacular adventure: a trip back in time: “Las hipótesis del famoso Julio Verne tenidas por maravillas eran verdaderos juguetes de niño ante la magnitud del invento real del modesto zaragozano” (8). Translation of the authors: “The hypotheses of the famous Jules Verne held to be wonders were true child’s toys given the magnitude of the real invention of the modest Saragossan”. Knowing that the musical Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours was triumphant in Paris at the time, Enrique Gaspar conceived El anacronópete as a zarzuela in two acts and three scenes (Uribe 1997). At the end of the nineteenth century, there was hardly a bolder work than a science fiction zarzuela. Unfortunately, no theater opened its doors to it. To Spanish theater producers, the piece was unheard of, unorthodox, and unpresentable. It also did not suit the tastes of the Spanish public at the time. A zarzuela about a machine that travels back in time was, ironically, ahead of its time. Nevertheless, Gaspar y Rimbau was not discouraged; he overcame himself and turned El anacronópete into a sui generis novel: a fictionalized zarzuela. The humor, some puppet-like characters, hilarious entanglements, and incidents, mixed with absurdity and satire, gave it away.5 Its pages are full of jokes worthy of the comedies of Jardiel Poncela or Alfonso Paso. –En los griegos se ha observado que, bien sea por los métodos de Pelasgo, de Cécrope o de Cadmo; participa aunque a lo oriental de dos especies; porque cuando escriben muchas líneas vuelven de derecha a izquierda. Esta dirección es la que empleaban los Hunnos. –¿Y los otros? technique analogous to that of El anacronópete to go back in time: he flies at the speed of light around the Earth. Both Richard Donner and Superman overlooked the fact that an object with mass cannot move at the speed of light. 5  The characters in El anacronópete reveal their lyric-dramatic origins: two lead singers (Don Sindulfo and Clara), a comic duo (Benjamín and Juanita), a male choir (the seventeen Spanish hussars), a female choir (the twelve French prostitutes), a satrap (Hien-ti), a polished private (Tsao-pi), a wayward soldier and seducer of maids (Pendencia).

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–Hablo de los Hunnos, hoy zikulos de la parte de la Transilvania. –¡Ah! Sí. Adelante, no los conozco. (185) Translation of the authors: “It has been observed in the Greeks that, either by the methods of Pelasgus, Cecrops or Cadmus; it participates, although to the oriental way, of two species; because when they write many lines they go back from right to left. This direction is the one used by the Huns.” “And the others?” “I’m talking about the Huns, today zikuls from Transylvania.” “Oh! Yes. Go ahead, I don’t know them.”

Gaspar y Rimbau’s sense of humor, related to the heritage of the Spanish sarcasm, oscillates between the sarcasm of Quevedo, the grotesque of Valle Inclán, the amphibologies of Gómez de la Serna, and the funny humor of comics. –Dominus vobiscum—le dijo al senador–. Brindo para que usiam reventatur como un perri de una indigestionem de morcillam. Salutem y sarnam (200). Translation of the authors: “Dominus vobiscum,” he told the senator. “Here’s to usiam reventatur like a dog from a indigestionem de bloodsausageam. Salutem and sarnam.”

To the ridiculousness of the situations, the plot itself joins some caricatured dramatis personae:6 Benjamín persuades Queen Isabel la Católica to listen to Cristóbal Colón and sponsor his enterprise; Don Sindulfo is spat out by the volcano Vesuvius—into whose crater he had been hurled—like a circus cannonball, and sneaks in through one of the anacronopete’s pneumatic pipes. The “anacrononautas” are on the verge of starvation when the manna and quails that God rained on the desert of sin enter through the ship’s hatches; in the third century, Don Sindulfo meets his wife Mamerta, whom he had made a widow years before—or later, depending on how we readers look at it—reincarnated as a Chinese empress.7 Special mention should be made of King-seng, the stately master of 6  Note that Don Sindulfo and Benjamín quixotically mimic the protagonists of Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, Phileas Fogg and Passepartout. 7  Empress Sunché loves Don Sindulfo because she loved him as Mamerta. This anecdote introduces one of Enrique Gaspar’s favorite subjects: metempsychosis, to whose mysteries he

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ceremonies of the court of Hien-ti,8 whom the protagonist addresses in Latin “in case the Humanities had reached the celestial Empire” (145). The mission of the anacronopete is also ridiculous, both the declared and false one, and the concealed and authentic one. The one that Don Sindulfo pretends in public recalls the elated crime of the builders of the Tower of Babel: “come closer to God” (16). It goes without saying that this main character continually lies showing his true nature: he is a villain. In fact, he and his assistant Benjamin pursue a different goal: his objective is to obtain the secret of eternal life. This is the great joke of the novel. This secret, immortality, is in the hands of a dead woman. Don Sindulfo and Benjamín absurdly hope to learn not to die from a third-century Chinese empress whose mummy they acquired cheaply at the liquidation of a private museum. In any case, Don Sindulfo hides other dishonest intentions. The inventor is driven by a lascivious desire for his niece, Clara. Rejected and knowing that she is in love with Luis, his nephew, and captain of the hussars, Don Sindulfo devises a crazy plan: he plans to go back as far as it takes to one of the times in which the man could impose his will on the woman he wanted.

El anacronópete Versus The Time Machine Imagining a machine in the nineteenth century that could travel to the past or to the future and reinventing it, as a literary work was a matter of time. The human kind has fantasized about time travel, flight, invisibility, teleportation, or eternal youth since we learned to dream. Time travel was not unknown in the nineteenth century, although most of the time artists employed magic, like the example XI from Libro del Conde Lucanor: “De lo que contesçió a un deán de Sanctiago con don Yllán, el grand maestro de Toledo”; or the help of the gods, such is the case of the Japanese legend Urashima Tarō [浦島太郎]; or even through sleep, like in the legend of dedicated the story La metempsychosis. Halfway between joke and aporia, someone who dies in the nineteenth century is reincarnated as someone who is born in the third century. 8  Emperor Xian of Han (漢獻帝). Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau transcribes Hien-ti, instead of Hsien-ti (in pinyin: Xiàn dì): Hien [sic] is the name (獻), and ti (帝), the dignity of emperor.

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the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus”. It is worth mentioning that those trips are usually accidental or unconscious: the traveler discovers the time jump retrospectively and with surprise. The greatest originality of Wells and Gaspar y Rimbau was that they envisioned a journey through time not by magical means, but by technology: aboard a machine. El anacronópete and The Time Machine thus fulfill one of the basic principles of science fiction: knowledge and technology take the place of magic; the sciences—not infused, occult, or supernatural—support the narrative (Ayala Aracil 1998). El anacronópete works with electricity, rather than witchcraft; automatic brooms rather than goblins keep the floor clean; and García’s fluid,9 administered by shock, counteracts the rejuvenating and numbing effects of time travel. The machines of H. G. Wells and Gaspar y Rimbau differ in construction and size as well as in complexity (64–65). In this “monstrous apparatus” (13), “immense mass” (32), “a kind of Noah’s ark without a keel” (65), the “anacrononautas” travel: Don Sindulfo, Benjamín, Clara, Juanita, twelve French prostitutes, and seventeen martial stowaways. Wells’ time machine, on the other hand, fits into a room, resembles an armchair, and has room for a single passenger: the Time Traveler. The inventory of parts, mechanisms, and devices is characteristic of literary SF, which deals much with gears, pulleys, turbines, valves, engines, kinetic gases, hibernation chambers, and so on. El anacronópete illustrates this tendency toward detailed description better than The Time Machine. Enrique Gaspar’s vernean attention to detail contrasts with the deliberate laconicism of H. G. Wells. On the other hand, the materials used to make Wells’ time machine—nickel, ivory, quartz, and so on—are more reminiscent of an elegant and fine piece of furniture than a mechanical device (Wells 2009, 7). El anacronópete began with an advantage over The Time Machine: it was published eight years earlier and was written in the style of the popular adventures of Jules Verne. However, the result was different, unfortunate: El anacronópete took on water and shipwrecked. H. G. Wells and The Time Machine have eclipsed Gaspar y Rimbau and El anacronópete. This is partly because of the fame and greater literary tradition developed by the former, but also because of the naturalness with which people associate the time machine with a novel entitled The Time 9  As its chemical composition is not detailed, the nature of the García fluid vacillates between technological ingenuity and magical elixir.

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Machine. Any artifact that travels back or forward in time is now referred to in Spanish as a time machine rather than an anacronópete. Gaspar y Rimbau could not resist the temptation10 to create a neologism with Greek roots.11 H. G. Wells preferred a more transparent title, less bombastic and more effective, which, when read, reveals the essence of the book. Despite all this, Gaspar y Rimbau was undoubtedly a pioneer in the field of science fiction in two respects: (i). he designed the first literary prototype of a time machine: a ship that travels back in time; and (ii). he described for the first time the leap into hyperspace, anticipating the coining of the term hyperspace long before John Wood Campbell created it for the SF story “Islands of Space,” published in 1931 in the journal Astounding Stories of Super-Science (Tuck 1974; Stableford 2006). Aquello era horrible; las alternativas de luz y sombra se sucedían como las vibraciones de un timbre eléctrico en que la transición del sonido al silencio no deja espacio perceptible (224). Translation from the authors: That was horrible; the alternations of light and shadow followed one another like the vibrations of an electric bell in which the transition from sound to silence leaves no perceptible space.

 Given the comedy of the work, in search of the maximum nonsense.  Aware of the opacity of Greekism, Enrique Gaspar exposes its etymology:

10 11

El Anacronópete, que es una especie de arca de Noé, debe su nombre a tres voces griegas: Ana, que significa hacia atrás; crono, el tiempo, y petes, el que vuela, justificando así su misión de volar hacia atrás en el tiempo; porque en efecto, merced a él puede uno desayunarse a las siete en París, en el siglo XIX; almorzar a las doce en Rusia con Pedro el Grande; comer a las cinco en Madrid con Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra -si tiene con qué aquel día- y, haciendo noche en el camino, desembarcar con Colón al amanecer en las playas de la virgen América. (26) Translation of the authors: The Anacronópete, which is a kind of Noah’s ark, owes its name to three Greek words: Ana, which means backwards; Chrono, time, and Petes, the one who flies, thus justifying his mission to fly back in time; because indeed, thanks to him one can have breakfast at seven in Paris, in the nineteenth century; lunch at twelve in Russia with Peter the Great; eat at five in Madrid with Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra—if he has anything to eat that day—and, spending the night on the road, disembark with Columbus at dawn on the beaches of the Virgin America.

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The First Trip to China in a Time Machine More by chance than by profession, his diplomatic career took Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau from here to there, finally landing in Asia. Between 1878 and 1885 he was consul in Macau and Hong Kong, regions then under Portuguese (Macau) and British (Hong Kong) rule. In Macau, in 1881, he wrote the failed zarzuela El anacronópete (Uribe 1997). He was fascinated by China, and this fascination not only led to the unsatisfied idea of translating the Quixote into Chinese, but also was reflected in both Viaje a China and El anacronópete. Gaspar y Rimbau was not content by traveling to the China of his time; he also undertook a journey to third-century China in a machine. Both literary journeys, the pretended one and the real one are based on the sinological culture of Gaspar y Rimbau, who knew China on the spot, and through his readings about Chinese history, religions, and thought. What is difficult to assess is the degree of his knowledge of the language. El anacronópete and Viaje a China collect Chinese vocabulary, though not always with a translation or clarification of meaning. In Macao and Hong Kong he could communicate in Portuguese and English, but the curiosity, enthusiasm for the exotic, and his immanent polyglot condition had to initiate him into at least one or more of the native Sinitic languages. The “anacrononautas” participate in memorable historical moments, each one more hectic: the battle of Tétouan in 1860, the fall of the Emirate of Granada in 1492, the shipwreck of Pompeii in the lava sea of Vesuvius, the Great Flood, and many others. Among these settings, third-century China, the fall of the Han Dynasty, and the beginning of the Warring States stand out. It is the only given destination before setting sail. To no other time and place does he devote as many pages in El anacronópete. The choice of China is not an accident. In addition to the fact that Gaspar y Rimbau lived there, to the Western countries, China had traditionally been the land of miracles, elixirs, flying carpets, and dragons. It amazed learned travelers like Ibn Battuta, inspired Rubén Darío to versify, and stories, dreams, and bestiaries written by Jorge Luis Borges. Al fin de las ciudades de China se conservaba en una gruta un tesoro fabuloso. Y lo más maravilloso era que en dicho tesoro había una lámpara prodigiosa.12 (Anonymous 2000, 122) 12  China was also a source of fascination for the Arabs, so much so that the most fabulous object that their imagination had fabricated, Aladdin’s magic lamp, was hidden inside one Chinese cave.

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Translation by the authors: A fabulous treasure was kept in a cave at the end of the cities of China. And, the most wonderful thing was that in said treasure there was a prodigious lamp.

A secret such as the eternal life could only be plausible in China. The journey to the Celestial Realm pursues Benjamín, who strives for immortality at any cost. It is likely that this character, if not his alter ego, was the “anacrononauta” with whom Gaspar y Rimbau more or less identified himself. Benjamín is an archaeologist, paleographer, and polyglot; he speaks Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Chinese, and he even dreams in the last of them. Throughout the novel, he translates knots and various other writings and serves as an interpreter’s companion when dealing with speakers of other languages. The Chinese inscription he deciphers on a mummy’s anklet kicks off the story: Yo soy la esposa del emperador Hien-ti, enterrada viva por haber pretendido poseer el secreto de ser inmortal. (36) Translation by the authors: I am the wife of Emperor Hien-ti, buried alive for having claimed to possess the secret of being immortal.

Don Sindulfo buys the mummy ipso facto and the characters run back home with the idea of building a time machine to travel to third-century China and become immortal. The anacronopete lands in China in the year 220, a fateful year for the Han Dynasty and a fateful year for the Kingdom of Ouei.13 With this date, Gaspar y Rimbaud provides relevant esoteric background, because during the Han dynasty, Confucianism had adopted the theories of yin and yang and the five elements.14 That offers him the expedition in search of eternal life and their first trip to China in a time machine. The description of the Chinese imperial court, based on the exoticism of the palaces of the Arabian Nights, accuses the same exaggeration, opulence, pomp, and wonder of travel literature: marble, precious stones, Tibor glasses, virgins, and luxury in abundance. In explaining the politeness and ceremonial of the Chinese, Gaspar y Rimbau quotes Cantú and paraphrases sinologists (126) whose names he does not mention.15 On the other hand, the  Kingdom of Wei (曹魏), one of the Chinese dynasties of the Three Kingdoms (三國).  Water (水), Earth (土), Fire (火), Metal (金), and Wood (木). 15  El anacronópete is one of the first works of fiction that include the technical word sinologist. 13 14

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struggle between China and the West, embodied by Hien-ti and Benjamin through the exchange of objects, incapacitates the “anacronautas” and administers them—especially Benjamín—a cure of humility. With Benjamin’s defeat, not only is El anacronópete’s retrograde thesis affirmed (all past times were better), but, in addition, the author ridiculed the belief in Western supremacy and Eurocentrism that was widespread at that time. Benjamín mediates between the time travelers and the Chinese natives— the reader of the book will have to admit here that the Chinese language of the third century is consistent with what Benjamín learned in the nineteenth century—and states unequivocally who they are: inhabitants of the Western regions; where and why they came: “in order to acquire the principle of the immortality so predicated by the Tao-ssé” (130). Hien-ti and his minion Tsao-pi,16 son of the hero Tsao-tsao,17 condemns the anacronautas as Taoist sectarians; however, since the emperor, a “man corrupted by this vicious condition” (125),18 has fallen in love with Clara, they decide to dispose of only Don Sindulfo and Benjamín. Once the inventor and the polyglot were executed, Hien-ti would marry the girl and make her his concubine. The mummy is Empress Sun-ché (or Sun-che or Sunché),19 whom Hien-ti had walled up alive after surprising her in her dealings with the tao-ssé. Thrown back to the moment of her mummification, without the insulation provided by the Garcia liquid, Sun-ché rises again and emerges from her sarcophagus. Luis and the hussars, presumed dead a few chapters ago, reappear in time to change history and finish off Hien-ti with arrows and a cry of “¡Viva España!” (158). Here the zarzuela reaches its climax. Back in the travel machine, Sun-ché has joined the expedition, forgotten the rebellion he led, and given herself over to love Don Sindulfo, with whom she already imagines sharing the throne of Fo-hi. Sun-ché informs Benjamín that the secret of immortality lies beneath a statue in Pompeii. They return to the city on Mount Vesuvius, hours before the eruption, and retrieve from under the statue of Nero the supposed formula of immortality, written in knots.  Cao Pi (曹丕), founder of the Wei dynasty.  Cao Cao (曹操), the last prime minister of the Han dynasty, a legendary strategist, and a major figure in the Three Kingdoms. 18  Given the lack of historical data that endorse the emperor’s depravity, it can be assumed that Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau’s description responds to a utilitarian purpose: the creation of a vile and caricatured character who arouses the antipathy of the public—in the zarzuela setting—and of the readers—in the novel setting. 19  In the novel, the name of the empress is written in these three modes. Such inconsistency seems to suggest the fictitious character of this empress. 16 17

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Conclusion Since the twentieth century, science fiction about time travel has challenged intelligence with temporal paradoxes. El anacronópete, or Wells’ The Time Machine, certainly does not play with such paradoxes, instead it does contain a sensational paradox: the novel parodies a burgeoning genre, that of SF. Whether intentional or not, El anacronópete parodies time travel and the machines built for that purpose. This is the point where the parody and the parodied converge on the same plane: El anacronópete. By ridiculing a genre that Gaspar Rimbau introduces or pretends to introduce, that of time travel aboard a machine, the author’s novel becomes a parodic caricature of itself. Every parody presupposes something already present, usually something solemn or serious, whose features are deformed and exaggerated in the spirit of mockery. Therefore, this parody goes around in circles, self-conscious thematizing of time travel, until it becomes a self-parody. Leaving aside the obvious distances, El anacronópete is to science fiction what the Quixote is to chivalric romances. To the last consequence: just as Don Quixote returns to reason, which is like waking up from sleep, Don Sindulfo wakes up from sleep to set things right, that is, to bring them to their senses and provide a reasonable explanation for what is happening. It was the last years of the nineteenth century and Gaspar y Rimbau, chastened by the fiasco of the theatrical El anacronópete, might have been intimidated or at least feared of suffering a negative reaction from the readers of his novel. Traveling back in time was not only impossible, but also threatened the usefulness of a technophobic and prudish society (Saiz Cidoncha 1988). Perhaps for this reason, in order to make sense of the story, he brought in Morpheus. The fruit of a dream would not bother anyone, or bother less, than assuming the full probability of the fact: Don Sindulfo had fallen into sleep and had dreamt (226). For Hesles Sánchez (2013), the inexperience of Gaspar y Rimbau ruined the novel. It is implausible, perhaps also illogical. Gaspar y Rimbau knew the trade. Before this, he had written numerous works, comic stories, satires, zarzuelas (Kirschenbaum 1944): El piano parlante (1863), Las circunstancias (1867), La can-canomanía (1869), El estómago (1871), Atila (1876), La resurrección de Lázaro (1878), and La lengua (1882), among others. Consequently, it seems unreasonable to conclude that he did not know how to settle or resolve the novel, especially having left written a magnificent, dazzling potential outcome, where science and faith, Darwin and God, wage a majestic arm wrestling—or perhaps a dance (224).

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Competing Interests  The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

References Albaladejo, Tomás. 2012. Imaginar la realidad, imaginar las palabras “Anacronópete” /“Time machine”. In Creación neológica y la sociedad de la imaginación, coord. Fernando Vilches Vivancos and Tomás Albaladejo, 15–36. Madrid: Dikynson. Alkon, P. K. 1994. Science Fiction before 1900. Imagination. Discovers. Technology. New York: Twayne Publishers. Anónimo. 2000. Las mil y una noches. Barcelona: Planeta. Ayala Aracil, María de los Ángeles. 1998. La obra narrativa de Enrique Gaspar: El Anacronópete (1887). In Del Romanticismo al Realismo: actas del I Coloquio de la Sociedad de Literatura Española del Siglo XIX, coord. Luis Felipe Días Larios and Enrique Millares, 403–411. Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona. Bertrán Rubio, E. 1906. Un invento despampanante. Hojas selectas 53: 10–21. Brina, Maximiliano. 2018. De la zarzuela a la ciencia ficción: El anacronópete, de Enrique Gaspar. Expansión de los límites de lo fantástico en la coyuntura del nacionalismo. Studia Romanica Posnaniensia 45 (2): 51–63. https://doi. org/10.14746/strop.2018.452.004. Davies, P. 2002. La máquina del tiempo. Difícil sería construir una, pero quizá no imposible. Revista de Investigación y Ciencia 314: 69–83. Deutsch, D., and M. Lockwood. 1994. Física cuántica de los viajes en el tiempo. Revista de Investigación y Ciencia 212: 48–54. Díez, J., and F.Á. Moreno. 2014. Historia y antología de la ciencia ficción española. Madrid: Cátedra. Flammarion, C. 1874. Narraciones del infinito. Lumen. Historia de un cometa. En el infinito. Narración sobre el tiempo y el espacio por un espíritu. Madrid: Gaspar edit. Gaspar y Rimbau, E. 1884. El Anacronópete [Manuscrito]: zarzuela: viaje atrás verificado en el tiempo desde el último tercio del siglo XIX hasta el caos y dividido en tres jornadas y trece cuadros. Identificador: bdh0000014484. BNE. http:// bdh-­rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000014484&page=1. Accessed 10 October 2023. ———. 2005 [1884]. El anacronópete. Barcelona: Minotauro. Gomis-Izquierdo, Vicente. 2018. La presencia de la mujer en “El anacronópete” de Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau. In South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL), 2018, Statesboro, 16. Statesboro: Georgia Southern University. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/seccll/2018/ 2018/16. Accessed 10 October 2023.

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González Grueso, Fernando Darío. 2013. La ficción científica. Género, poética y sus relaciones con la literature oral tradicional. Madrid: Ediciones de la Universida Autónoma de Madrid. ———. 2022. Origins of Hard Science Fiction: An Approach. In Science Fiction and Anticipation. Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel, ed. Bernard Montoneri, 31–44. Lanham: Lexington Books. Hawking, S. 2005. Brevísima historia del tiempo. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica. ———. 2010. Stephen Hawking: How to Build a Time Machine. Daily Mail OnLine, April 27. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-­ 1269288/STEPHEN-­HAWKING-­How-­build-­time-­machine.html. Sánchez, G. J. 2013. El viaje en el tiempo en la literatura de ciencia ficción española. Docta Complutense. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/37469. Kaku, M. 2009. Física de lo imposible: ¿Podremos ser invisibles, viajar en el tiempo y teletransportarnos? Madrid: Debate. Kirschenbaum, L. 1944. Enrique Gaspar and the social drama in Spain. Oakland: University California Publications in Modern Philology. Luckhurst, R. 2005. Science Fiction. Cambridge-Malden: Polity Press. Lugones, L. 1996. Las fuerzas extrañas. Madrid: Cátedra. Martin, A. 1985. The Knowledge of Ignorance. From Genesis to Jules Verne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mlodinow, L. 2003. Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search For Beauty In Physics And In Life. New York: Warner Books. Molina Porras, Juan. 2012. El Anacronópete de Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau y Francesc Gómez Soler (1887) (Primeras imágenes de la ciencia ficción española). In Literatura e imagen: La “Biblioteca Arte y Letras”, ed. Raquel Gutiérrez Sebastián, Juan Molina Porras, Angeles Quesada Novás, Montserrat Ribao Pereira, and Borja Rodríguez Gutiérrez, 207–224. Santander: PUbliCan. Navarro Faus, Jesús. 2012. Heisenberg: el principio de incertidumbre: ¿existe el mundo cuando no lo miras? Barcelona: RBA. Petričić, Mihaila. 2015. What’s so funny About Science Fiction? Interpreting Comedy in Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau’s El anacronópete. In Horizons de Recherche. Research Horizons II. 3, ed. Ana Paola Soncini Fratta, 185–190. Bologna: Il Libri di Emil. Saiz Cidoncha, C. 1988. La ciencia ficción como fenómeno de comunicación y de cultura de masas en España. Madrid: Editorial de la Universidad Complutense. Santiáñez-Tió, N. 1995. De la luna a Mecanópolis. Antología de la ciencia ficción española (1832–1913). Barcelona: Sirmio-Quaderns. Scholes, R. 1976. The Roots of Science Fiction. In Science Fiction. A collection of critical essays, ed. M. Rose, 46–56. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc. Scholes, R., and E.S.  Rabkin. 1977. Science Fiction. History. Science. Vision. London-Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press.

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Stableford, Brian M. 2006. Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. New York: Taylor & Francis. Suvin, Darko. 1976. On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre. In Science Fiction. A collection of critical essays, ed. M.  Rose, 57–71. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc. Takayuki Tatsumi. 2005. Japanese and Asian Science Fiction. In A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed, 223–250. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Tuck, Donald H. 1974. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Chicago: Advent. Uribe, A. 1997. El anacronópete de Gaspar fue antes que la máquina de Wells. BEM 55: 17–20. Wells, Herbert George. 2009. La máquina del tiempo. Madrid: Anaya.

CHAPTER 5

The Ice People (1968), a Story of Humankind’s Auto-destruction Murielle El Hajj

Introduction The Ice People is a romantic science-fiction novel written by René Barjavel in 1968. It recounts the tale of a French scientific expedition that ventures to Antarctica. During their expedition, the scientists stumble upon the remains of a highly advanced civilization known as Gondawa, which had existed around 900,000 years ago. The team discovers a slumbering couple nestled beneath the ice. After reviving the woman, Elea, the scientists employ a translating device to learn about her, her spouse Paikan, and the history of her world. Elea relates the tragic story of her civilization’s rise and fall, primarily due to a devastating war that led to its ruin. She alludes to her husband Paikan, who still lies dormant, possessing a groundbreaking equation capable of providing boundless energy and sustenance to humanity. This novel uniquely combines elements of romance, science fiction, and time travel. Set in the past, it anticipates the future, shedding light on the

M. El Hajj (*) Lusail University, Lusail, Qatar e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_5

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state of humanity. Gondawa coexisted on Earth alongside another nation, Enisor, both of which had attained remarkable technological advancements. While some weaker nations also existed, Gondawa and Enisor stood out. Regrettably, Gondawa’s prosperity came to a catastrophic end when it was obliterated by a nuclear assault from Enisor. The survivors sought refuge in subterranean cities, where they adapted bioengineered flora and fauna to their new underground habitat. This chapter aims to emphasize the narrative’s departure from the conventional paradigms of utopian and dystopian science fiction. It does so by harnessing the past through the mechanism of time travel to comment on the present and envision the future of humanity. Particularly, the author explores the pivotal role played by technological progress and machines in the context of warfare. Throughout history, humankind’s recurring mistakes are highlighted, serving as a warning of the future. Gondawa’s downfall, despite its advanced civilization that thrived eras ago, serves as a cautionary tale. The discussion concludes Gondawa’s story parallels our own world’s narrative, offering a predictive glimpse into the trajectory of humankind. The novel’s portrayal of Gondawa is steeped in pessimism, offering a critique of humanity’s tendency toward self-destruction across different temporal phases—past, present, and future. Moreover, The Ice People can be categorized within the genre of postmodern science fiction transcending the conventional utopian and dystopian themes that typically characterize “traditional” science fiction. It achieves this by intertwining elements of both past utopian and dystopian societies through the narrative tool of time travel. By connecting the threads of the past, present, and future, the novel effectively illustrates the far-reaching consequences of the present and envisions potential future scenarios. This narrative technique not only provides a compelling and multi-layered storytelling experience but also sheds light on the consequences of human actions and choices across different temporal dimensions, adding depth to the exploration of Gondawa’s story.

René Barjavel’s Life and Work René Barjavel, born in Nyons, France, had a challenging upbringing. Raised by his mother while his father served in World War I, he developed a deep interest in the world through exploration and reading. Tragedy struck when his mother died of sleeping sickness when he was just 11 years old. After her death, he attended a boarding school in Nyons, but financial

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difficulties interrupted his studies. He found a mentor in the school’s director, Abel Boisselier, who guided him in studying literature in Cusset until his funds ran out in 1927. Barjavel then explored various professions, from real estate to banking. In 1929, he turned to journalism, working for Progress Allier in Moulins. In 1935, he moved to Paris after a pivotal encounter with publisher Robert Denoël and became associated with Éditions Denoël. He married Madeleine de Wattripont in 1936 and continued working as a journalist, contributing film critiques to the weekly publication Le Merle Blanc. During World War II, he served in the Pyrenees but returned to Paris with the armistice and the reopening of Denoël’s publishing house. It was during this period that he published his first novel, Roland, le chevalier plus fort que le lion (Roland, the Knight More Proud than the Lion), with Denoël’s assistance. In 1943, he authored Le Voyageur imprudent (Future Times Three) introducing the well-known grandfather paradox in time travel. Barjavel became the literary director at Éditions Denoël in 1944, but Denoël himself was killed in 1945. After World War II, Barjavel shifted from novels to filmmaking due to the lukewarm reception of his work. Health issues and financial constraints hindered his initial film project. He later returned to Paris after a period of recovery in the south of France. He became a screenwriter in Paris and entered the world of science fiction in 1962, coinciding with the genre’s growing popularity in France. In 1968, he published La Nuit des temps (The Ice People), a highly successful and celebrated work that earned him the Prix des libraires. He also began writing a weekly column, “Les Libres Propos”, in the Journal du Dimanche (Sunday Newspaper) in 1969. In 1972, he co-founded the Prix de science-fiction Apollo and served as a jury member. Despite reaching the age of 70 in 1981, Barjavel stopped writing his columns for the Journal du Dimanche and returned to novel writing. His prolific career ended in 1985 when he passed away, leaving behind a legacy of more than twenty-five novels and numerous screenplays (Montoneri and El Hajj 2022).

The Novel Summary The success of The Ice People can be attributed to its own universal themes: the search for a lost world and eternal love. Thus, this work brought

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together all the elements that enabled it to become a modern classic. Regularly reissued, the novel, which achieved a remarkable success (2.6 million copies) upon its release, originally began as a film project. In fact, it was initially written at the request of André Cayatte, a film director. However, due to the considerable budget required, the cinematic adaptation was never realized. Dans une interview à la revue Trente ans de prix des libraires, Barjavel révèle qu’une fausse dépêche publiée dans un journal de l’été 1965 est en partie à l’origine de La Nuit des temps. “Les journaux annoncèrent en trois lignes qu’un satellite américain au-dessus du pôle Sud avait reçu et enregistré des signaux radio. Mais, extraordinaire coïncidence, je venais, dans les jours précédents, de prendre contact avec André Cayatte, qui avait envie de réaliser un film de science-fiction et m’avait demandé de travailler avec lui à construire un scénario d’après une idée qu’il avait eue.” (Chéry 2018) Translation of the author: In an interview with magazine Trente ans de prix des libraires, Barjavel reveals that a false dispatch published in a newspaper in the summer of 1965 is partly at the origin of The Ice People. “The newspapers announced in three lines that an American satellite above the South Pole has received and recorded radio signals. But, in an extraordinary coincidence, in the days before, I had just made contact with André Cayatte, who wanted to make a science fiction film and had asked me to work with him to develop a screenplay based on a idea he had.”

Published originally by Presses de la Cité in 1968, this science-fiction novel received the Prix des libraires—as mentioned earlier—in 1969. Long considered the “father of French science fiction”, Barjavel delivers to us in this novel the fear of technological progress and the destruction of civilization through dreamlike and poetic writing. In the fascinating story of The Ice People, a French scientific expedition embarks on an extraordinary journey to the South Pole, where they intercept mysterious signals beneath the icy surface. This discovery leads to the revelation of an ancient subglacial city dating back nearly a million years. Scientists worldwide join forces to decode its secrets, with their remarkable exploration broadcasted globally. Within the intricate remains of the subterranean city lies an awe-­ inspiring discovery: an enormous egg-shaped structure made of pure gold housing perfectly preserved bodies. These two bodies, a man and a woman, remain in a state of suspended animation in frigid blocks of solid

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helium at absolute zero. The team, including the dedicated physician Simon, endeavors to reanimate them. Upon awakening the woman, named Elea, her memories are broadcast through global television channels narrating the story of her world, Gondawa, a highly advanced civilization from 900,000 years ago, on the brink of war with the Enisor civilization. Elea’s world bears similarities to our own but from a different era. Her enduring love story with her husband, Paikan, forms a central part of her memories. The astonishing discoveries and their implications create a state of hysteria worldwide. Fears of sabotage heighten the security of the scientific expedition. Parallels between Elea’s world and our contemporary society become evident, especially as certain scientists, led by Coban, choose to preserve a man and a woman with exceptional attributes in a state of hibernation for their civilization’s future. This decision leads to a series of trials for Elea and her husband, who are unwillingly separated. Following Elea’s narrative, Simon and his colleagues decide to awaken the man in dire need of a blood transfusion. Elea offers her blood, but a tragic twist unfolds. She secretly poisons herself and the man, whom she believes is Coban but is, in fact, her husband, Paikan. Both die simultaneously, leaving Simon in uncertainty about an antidote. At the same time, a betrayal among the scientists leads to the sabotage of their base, necessitating evacuation. Simon returns home, indifferent to the global war, while students worldwide unite in protest, shouting “Pao! Pao!” against the ongoing conflict. Main Characters In The Ice People, there are two distinct groups of characters: those from the present and those from the past. The chapters separate the past events from the present events, even though the two main characters often transition between the past and the present. Nine hundred thousand years ago, the inhabitants of Gondawa—the Gondas—lived in a tropical Antarctica due to Earth’s different tilt. Indeed, at that time, the planet was tilted 40° more than its current position. The Gondas harnessed universal energy that provided them with everything they needed to their comfort. However, this also allowed them to create the Solar Weapon that destroyed all existing civilizations. Citizens received a universal income in the form of universal energy, which they could transform into matter to fulfill their desires. They were

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not obligated to work; however, non-workers received lower incomes. From birth, they were registered in databases and rationally paired with another Gonda. Elea is among the past characters of Gondawa. She symbolizes innocence and love. She was chosen as one of the most perfect women of Gondawa to enter the Shelter, a capsule allowing two individuals to survive the Solar Weapon. Long before this, the young woman was united with Paikan, and they loved each other with unconditional and pure love. However, the man who was supposed to accompany her into the Shelter was not her partner, but rather Coban, as he was the only one who knew what needed to be preserved at all costs. Against her will, she ended up in the capsule and awoke 900,000 years later in a completely different universe where Paikan no longer existed. Paikan is certainly not a character from the present, yet he holds a strong presence due to the love that Elea still harbors for him. She tried to save him from the Shelter by all means, but when he realized that it was ultimately the only way to save her, he persuaded her to enter the Shelter. When the Solar Weapon is activated, Paikan fights with the scientist Coban, kills him, and enters the Shelter himself. Unfortunately, the young man is severely injured, and he can only survive if his beloved helps him. Coban is another character from the past. He is a scientist and he embodies wisdom and knowledge. He is the most renowned researcher in Gondawa and the director of the university. Wanting to protect life in general, he built the Shelter and introduced Gondawa’s knowledge into it. Unlike Elea, he refuses to be guided by emotions. He is even willing to abandon his only daughter to her sad fate. Unlike the symbolism used for the characters from the past, Barjavel paid attention to the fact of grouping all countries for the characters from the present. Surely, he wanted to speak about humanity and not about race or nation. Doctor Simon is a 32-year-old man of slim build. He is the main character of the novel. His father, who is also a doctor, taught him the fundamentals of his profession. He hated his job and when the opportunity arose—to leave and treat very few people—he took his destiny into his own hands. Throughout the story, Simon reveals his most intimate feelings to the reader. Madly in love with Elea, the young man is torn and powerless. His love for this beautiful woman found under 1000 meters of ice consumed him and lead him to death.

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Joe Hoover is a chemist and the head of the American delegation. He is “a huge potbellied, red-faced giant of a man with an easy temperament and slow movements” (Barjavel 1971, 29). Over the course of the narrative, he has the opportunity to use his methods wisely. He ends up marrying Leonova, an anthropologist and the head of the Soviet delegation. At first, she seems to be the perfect Marxist activist, but she knows how to set aside her ideology in the interest of humanity. Lukos is another character from the present. He is a Turkish philosopher. He invented the Translator, but he betrays his colleagues by trying to steal the Equation of Zoran, the source of universal energy. The reader never knows why and for whom he was obeying, as he commits suicide after placing mines in the base. The Ice People represents a transcendence of conventional ideological science fiction, surpassing the confines of the utopia and dystopia paradigm. Barjavel’s narrative plunges into the depths of human experience, traversing themes that stretch far past simplified notions of idyllic societies or grim futures. The characters within the novel are meticulously crafted; their emotions are woven intricately within a world both complicated and ever evolving. Through the nuanced exploration of characters’ strife, aspirations, and the complexities of their relationships, the novel presents a story that eludes straightforward classification. Instead, it beckons readers to engage with the multifaceted facets of humanity and existence, transcending the confines of commonplace traditional science-fiction storytelling. The subsequent discussion will examine the novel’s innovative narrative approach that challenges established norms of utopia and dystopia, revealing how Barjavel’s work encapsulates a more profound understanding of humanity’s intricacies and the multifaceted nature of existence.

A Transcendence of the Ideological Science Fiction As previously mentioned, The Ice People was published in 1968. Barjavel captures the politician landscape of that time within the novel. The tensions between Gondawa and Enisor, geographically situated in the place of the United States, echo the East-West conflict. Enisor was bustling with activity. It possessed an understanding of Zoran’s equation and the application of universal energy. However, instead of using them to maintain stability, Enisor harnessed these concepts for expansion. In contrast, Gondawa focused on organization while Enisor concentrated on multiplication. Furthermore, Enisor aspired to extend its influence beyond its

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existing boundaries. Notably, its spacecraft became the inaugural ones to touch down the moon (Barjavel 1971). However, the peaceful student movements of the Gondas evoke those that took place against the Vietnam War before May 1968. A student was talking excitedly, saying: Peace! Preserve peace for us. There’s never any justification for war! Ever! But war has never been more barbaric and absurd than it is today, just as man is about to win the fight against death! Are we going to slaughter one another for the moon? Mars? Ridiculous! Let Enisor nibble away at the solar system. She won’t devour everything. Let her fight infinity! We are fighting a far more important battle here. (Barjavel 1971, 124)

Barjavel portrays Elea’s lost world as a utopian society. Wealth is distributed equitably through a key system: each citizen must work half a day every five days. Their knowledge far surpasses ours, but human nature remains just as destructive. In just one hour, the third war between Gondawa and Enisor resulted in over 800 million casualties. The Solar Weapon, likely a reference to the atomic bomb, completely obliterated their civilization. While The Ice People presents Elea’s vanished world as a utopian society, the novel’s primary focus lies not on utopia and dystopia, but rather on the concept of time travel. In this regard, Pierre Creveuil, President of the “Association des Amis de René Barjavel” (Friends of René Barjavel Association), stated in an interview conducted as part of an academic project on Barjavel (Immortality in René Barjavel’s Le Grand Secret Cleo Goethals—Ghent University, Belgium) the following: C’est que ce n’est PAS un auteur de science-fiction! Du moins pas uniquement; je considère que le voir comme tel est très réducteur, d’abord parce qu’il a écrit bien d’autre choses que de la science-fiction, il a même fait bien d’autres choses que d’écrire … et aussi parce que lui-même ne se revendiquait nullement comme auteur de science-fiction (voir ses différentes interviews). La science-fiction était pour lui un moyen d’expression, idéal pour passer un certain message, comme à d’autres époques ce furent l’épopée ou la fable ou le conte philosophique. Et il se voulait plutôt affilié à ces “genres”, à cette famille d’auteurs. (Goethals 2003) Translation of the author: It is just that he is NOT solely a science fiction author! At least, not exclusively; I believe categorizing him as such as overly simplistic. Firstly, because he has written many other things besides science fiction, and he has even engaged in activities beyond writing … and sec-

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ondly, because he himself never identified solely as a science fiction author (see his various interviews). Science fiction was for him a means of expression, ideal for conveying a particular message, much like in other areas where epic poetry, fables, or philosophical tales served that purpose. He saw himself as more aligned with these “genres”, within that authorial lineage.

First, time travel is reflected in the novel through the characters, notably Simon and Elea, who are from vastly different eras, yet their lives become intertwined through the exploration of time. This temporal displacement not only highlights the characters’ individual experiences but also serves as a vehicle to examine the contrasts and continuities between their respective time periods. Moreover, the novel employs alternating chapters that shift between the past and the present. This structure not only immerses readers in the character’s divergent timelines but also creates a dynamic narrative that encourages readers to piece together the puzzle of the story. In fact, Barjavel is outside of the story and uses the third person. He tells us about all the characters but only reveals the thoughts of a few protagonists—Coban, Elea, Paikan, Simon. The narrator remains neutral in relation to the narrative, although one senses a delicate weariness in the face of human reactions. However, when it comes to Simon’s speeches, the narrator shifts inside the narrative, using the first person and becoming Doctor Simon. It is as if the narrator is reading us the letters the young man would have written to Elea. His speeches, spoken exclusively by himself and with no other character intervening, are directed toward Elea. In every word of these speeches, one can increasingly feel how his feelings for the beautiful woman are both painful and immense, example: “Elea I’m with you—completely alone with you for the first time. And you don’t understand what I’m saying to you. Elea, my love, my dearest, I want to be beside you, on you, very gently in you, to reassure you, to warm you, to calm you, to console you. I love you” (Barjavel 1971, 188); “Elea. Elea, my love” (Barjavel 1971, 188); “You understood me, you had understood perhaps not all the words, but enough of them to know how much, how very much I loved you. You had understood. How could this have been possible? None of us had reckoned with the remarkable capacities of your intelligence. In spite of all the accomplishments of Gondawa that you had shown us, it never entered our minds that you might be superior to us. Your successes could have been no more than coincidence. You were inferior to us because you came before us” (Barjavel 1971, 188). Here, the narrator is no longer neutral;

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he is unable to remain impartial. The language used is highly emotional, with expressions like “my love”, “my dearest”, and “I love you”. The narrator’s—Simon’s—feelings for Elea are unmistakable and passionate. Therefore, time travel becomes a conduit for exploring emotions and relationships that transcend time. Simon’s profound love for Elea, despite the vast temporal chasm between them, reflects the enduring power of human connection and the persistence of emotions across ages. Regardless of the narrative challenges it presents, time travel has merged as a ubiquitous theme in science fiction. Furthermore, it extends beyond the confines of the genre itself, making appearances in mainstream literature, blockbuster cinema, and interactive video games. It appears that there is a compelling resonance within the postmodern intellectual framework with the assertion made by time travelers that “time is space” (Gomel 2009). Having said this, The Ice People features the element of time travel that is often associated with postmodern science fiction. First, the novel diverges from the traditional focus on the utopia/dystopia paradox, instead employing the concept of time travel as a narrative tool. Second, the novel is an attempt to explore some of the pressures, and some of the resistances to those pressures, which go into the constitution of the postmodern self, that dispersed, fragmented, processual, indeterminate, and problematized subjectivity which is in part the product of its own increasingly pervasive technology. (Hollinger 1995, 127)

Science fiction has taken on the task of repeatedly portraying a fresh concept: a being capable of directly connecting with and mastering the cybernetic technologies of the Information Age. These technologies, while simultaneously offering unprecedented freedom and imposing severe constraints, have elicited both profound fear and intense excitement. To put it differently, the individual’s encounter with the late twentieth-­century world is a blend of utopian and dystopian elements (Hollinger 1995). The Ice People appears to both celebrate and scrutinize this experience. One thing is certain, though: the humanist subject of modernism has become extinct, and today’s essence of a subject lies in its total absence of essence, its virtuality. Through the time travel approach, the novel transports the reader to various historical epochs, ranging from the idyllic civilization of Gondawa to the grim aftermath of Enisor. This multifaceted exploration not only

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highlights the shifting dynamics of societies, ideologies, and technological progress but also serves as an invitation for readers to ponder the continuous journey of human advancement. By introducing the dimension of time travel, the novel ignites profound philosophical inquiries, forcing us to contemplate the very essence of existence, the inevitability of destiny, and the intriguing possibility of altering the course of history. Additionally, “time travel enacts and encourages reflection, revisiting, a reinterpretation of one’s own position and life, of history and human development, a potential recuperation, clarification, settling, and understanding of events in a larger context and frame” (Wisker 2013, 473). Time travel “also produces an unmanageable disturbance, in that it suggests that actually there is no death because ‘all time is eternally present’” (Wisker 2013, 473). In the context of time travel, it becomes essential to distinguish between “external time” and “personal time”. External time refers to the progression of time as experienced by the entire world, whereas personal time refers to the passage of time as measured by the time traveler’s own clock, including their aging process, and so on. Typically, these two timelines coincide: for you and me, each day that passes in the world corresponds to a day of our own aging. What is in the past for us is also in the past for the world, and the same holds true for the future. However, in the case of time travel, these two timelines can become disjointed. If you were to journey back in time, you would arrive at a moment when the world was younger than when you initially left, yet your personal time would still be advancing into the future (Fulmer 1980). In The Ice People, a unique aspect of time travel is presented, different from conventional time travel narratives. In this story, Elea and Paikan do not journey into the past; instead, they embark on a voyage into the future. This distinctive temporal journey takes them through years and epochs. Importantly, this is not merely a transition from life to death but a transition from one civilization to another. It underscores the concept of eternity, emphasizing that time travel is not just a shift from one phase of life to another, but a transition between entire civilizations, highlighting the enduring nature of their journey. On the one hand, the concept of eternity is embodied in the novel in the frozen couple, Elea and Paikan, symbolizing not only the freezing of time but also the freezing of death, connoting a lasting, timeless existence. This is also endorsed by Leonova’s following statement: “Tribute must also be paid to Coban’s genius and to his pessimism, which together caused him to construct a shelter that could last through eternity” (Barjavel 1971, 183). On the other hand, and after the death of both

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Elea and Paikan by poison, the concept of eternity is substituted from the eternity of both characters to the eternity of their love. This is reflected in the novel through the following passages: “He [Simon] stopped speaking. She [Elea] spoke, and in French, ‘I understand you, Simon’. She paused briefly. ‘I belong with Paikan.’ From her closed eyes the tears were still running” (Barjavel 1971, 188); “I [Simon] too, my love, I understood. I knew. You [Elea] belonged with Paikan” (Barjavel 1971, 189). Moreover, the concept of time travel intricately weaves together the themes of fate and free will, placing the characters in a profound struggle with the interplay between these forces. As the characters navigate the fluidity of time, the novel portrays how their present actions can reverberate through history and, conversely, how the past can exert its influence on their future—the case of Gondawa and Enisor. This temporal dance underscores the complicated relationship between human agency and destiny, as the characters grapple with the realization that their choices in the present hold the power to reshape the course of history. In The Ice People, the narrative features two distinct time travels. The first is the journey from the past to the future undertaken by Elea and Paikan, highlighting their adventures through time. The second involves the movement from the present to the past by the present society that discovers Elea and Paikan and that gains insight into their past through the narrative shared by Elea herself. This narrative not only provides a window into the experiences of the time travelers but also offers the present society a profound understanding of the historical events and circumstances that shaped Elea and Paikan’s extraordinary journey. Both of these time travel scenarios serve as a means to underscore a profound message: the present actions of a society hold the power to shape its future, in terms of either prosperity or destruction. Within this dynamic narrative, the return to the past takes on a poignant significance as a symbol of human determinism. It conveys the idea that the past, in its own right, becomes a decisive and influential force that actively shapes the trajectory of the future. Through these two contrasting time travels, the story illustrates the intricate interplay of choices, actions, and consequences that impact the course of civilizations over time. Moreover, as the sense of historicity collapses, postmodern narrativity “registers a shift in sensibilities from a predominantly temporal and historiographic ­imagination to one much more concerned with the spatial and the geographic”. The chronotope of time travel inscribes the cultural “depthless-

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ness”, historical fatalism, and temporal fragmentation of the postmodern subject. In doing so, it exposes the paradoxical kinship between the postmodern denial of history and the extreme forms of historical determinism. (Gomel 2009, 335)

In The Ice People, the concept of time travel aligns with the notion that the past and the future possess a conceptual equivalence. Much like the time travel chronotope, which portrays history as an unchanging “space-­ time continuum” where both the past and the future remain fixed, the narrative employs time travel not as a tool to physically manipulate historical events. Instead, it serves as a literary device to delve into the intricate interplay of actions and decisions made in the past, illuminating how these choices resonate through time, molding the contours of both the present and the future. Barjavel’s narrative does not engage in the alteration of historical occurrences; rather, it meticulously scrutinizes the repercussions of those events on the characters and the world they inhabit. The narrative approach underscores a powerful message about the consequences of human innovation and progress. The Ice People highlights how technological advances were harnessed to realize machinic warfare, ultimately leading to the catastrophic destruction of an entire civilization.

Technological and Machinic Warfare Utilizing the concept of time travel, The Ice People intricately unravels the historical rivalry between two civilizations, Gondawa and Enisor. Rather than joining forces for the greater good, they engaged in a relentless power struggle, channeling their technological advancements not toward societal betterment or global progress, but solely for the pursuit of power and dominance. This perilous path eventually led to their mutual destruction, illustrating the catastrophic consequences of their unchecked ambition. Enisor possessed knowledge of Zoran’s equation and the utilization of universal energy, yet she harnessed these capabilities not to maintain balance but to further her expansionist goals. In contrast, Gondawa prioritized organization while Enisor focused on multiplication. Enisor harbored ambitions that transcended her own boundaries, exemplified by her pioneering moon landings. Gondawa swiftly followed suit to prevent any disadvantageous position. Logistically, the moon’s eastern face proved optimal for launching vehicles for system exploration, prompting both civilizations to establish bases there. Unfortunately, the third war erupted

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due to a dispute between the garrisons of these bases, as Enisor’s ultimate objective was lunar isolation. However, fear brought an end to this conflict. The Lampa Treaty partitioned the moon into three regions: one for Gondawa, one for Enisor, and an international zone to the east. Both Enisor and Gondawa concurred to establish a launch base in this region. Other nations took little interest in the moon, some falling under the protection of Enisor, and others under Gondawa. The more astute nations received aid from both adversaries, although the larger nations had also endured their share of bombing during the third war, albeit fewer than Gondawa and significantly fewer than Enisor. The latter’s population exceeded the capacity of any shelter system to protect it. Nonetheless, within a single generation, their fertility had managed to replace all the casualties of war. In accordance with the terms of the Lampa Treaty, Enisor and Gondawa committed never to employ “earth bombs” again. The unused bombs were launched into space, where they orbited the sun, while the major powers vowed never to manufacture such devastating weapons anew (Barjavel 1971). However, despite these vows, both Gondawa and Enisor secretly continued to develop substitute weapons for “earth bombs”, preparing for any potential resurgence of conflict. But then Enisor began to manufacture individual weapons that made use of universal energy. A single weapon could produce only a limited shock wave, but nothing could stand against a group of them. Enisor’s armies were growing larger every day as the density of her population reached and then surpassed its prewar level. At this point the Governing Council of Gondawa decided to sacrifice its central city, Gonda 1, for purposes of defense. The city was evacuated, its population resettled elsewhere, and machines went to work at what has been its subterranean site. The Governing Council of Gondawa let it be known that, if a new war with Enisor broke out, it would be the last. (Barjavel 1971, 117)

The conflict between the two nations did not stop. The Enisorians initiated nuclear bombardment on Gondawa’s lunar and Martian bases. However, the Enisorian government is aware that an attack on Gondawa will result in their own destruction. “A huge image of the battle on the moon hung above the entrance to the Thirteen Streets. Both Enisor and Gondawa were attacking the satellite with their nuclear bombs, creating gigantic craters, breaking apart its continents, vaporizing its seas, scattering its atmosphere into space” (Barjavel 1971, 154).

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This relentless drive for technological advancements in the realm of warfare serves as a central theme, offering a profound exploration of the multifaceted and often unpredictable consequences that stem from such ambition. In The Ice People this manifests through the creation of the “Solar Weapon” that became the catalyst for global catastrophe, unfurling environmental, societal, and political repercussions that reshape the world order. Moreover, “if the Solar Weapon operates even a few seconds more than is expected, the earth will be so shaken that the oceans will pour out of their beds and continents will be torn apart. No one knows where the disasters will stop” (Barjavel 1971, 135). Moreover, the story delves into the unintended emergence of adversaries, Gondawa and Enisor, born from the arms race sparked by cutting-edge weaponry, destabilizing the delicate balance of power and intensifying global tensions. Through these intricate scenarios, Barjavel invites the reader to contemplate the ethical, moral, and strategic complexities that arise when technology converges with the pursuit of military dominance, serving a poignant reminder of the necessity for responsible innovation and diplomacy in a world where unforeseen consequences can alter the course of history. Nevertheless, students within the story organized resistance movements against the use of advanced technology for warfare. Their struggle to resist the influence of powerful military-industrial complexes adds depth and tension to the plot. Both boys and girls, regardless of gender, had bare torsos and appeared exceedingly slender. Throughout their campaign, they had adopted a regimen of fasting every other day, followed by consuming only the most essential energy provisions on the alternate days. As a result, they had become as lean and agile as arrows (Barjavel 1971). The portrayal of student movements within the narrative of The Ice People draws clear parallels to the historical events of May 68. Just as the protests and demonstrations of May 68 in France were marked by student activism and a fervent desire for societal change, the students in the novel exhibit a similar spirit of rebellion and a shared aspiration for a better future. Both in the real historical context and within the fictional world of The Ice People, students become catalysts for social and political transformation. Their actions and collective struggle mirror the energy, idealism, and commitment to change that characterized the May 68 movements, serving as a powerful reminder of the enduring impact of youth-led activism in shaping the course of history and challenging established norms:

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The wedge of white guards continued through the Avenue’s gates and advanced on the students, whose many-coloured skirts were swirling in the streets and soon appeared in the trees. The students had a premonition of what was coming and fled towards every available exit. Blocked by the university guards at either end of the street, they fell back towards the entrances to the elevators and the Avenue. […] The students had formed a human pyramid, at the top of which a girl stood with her arms upraised. She screamed. Don’t listen to him [Chairman Lokan]! Don’t go to your posts! Refuse the government’s war. Say no! Force the Council to declare peace! (Barjavel 1971, 158–159)

Despite their valiant efforts, the student movements in the novel did not manage to prevent the outbreak of war, underscoring the complexities and challenges of effecting lasting change. However, [Barjavel] tient à préciser que cette histoire a été composée dans son ensemble pendant l’été 1966. Déjà, la révolte des étudiants y figurait. Sa rédaction définitive a été terminée le 10 mars 1968. Depuis ce jour, rien n’a été ajouté ni retranché. Les épisodes auxquels participent les étudiants, la conception de l’Université Indépendante n’ont donc pas été inspirés par les événements de mai 1968, mais leur sont antérieurs. (Sermet 2015, 47) Translation of the author: [Barjavel] wishes to clarify that this story was composed in its entirety during the summer of 1966. Already, the student protests were included in it. Its final drafting was completed on March 10, 1968. Since that day, nothing has been added or removed. The episodes involving the students and the concept of the Independent University were not, therefore, inspired by the events of May 1968 but predate them.

Nonetheless, the apparent coincidence appears too significant to be genuine, raising a strong possibility that the author has orchestrated it intentionally. Furthermore, the similarity between the delayed awakening of the Gondawan students and the youth uprising triggered by the destruction of EPI 2 is unmistakable. In both instances, societal class distinctions and national disparities break down, giving rise to a unified and homogenous collective, referred to as the youth. This resembles the dissolution of gender boundaries among the students at the Independent University. In both scenarios, the primary motivation is to protest against something, representing opposition not driven by desire but rather a declaration of what they reject (Sermet 2015).

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Furthermore and as previously mentioned, the concept of time travel in The Ice People’s narrative offers a unique perspective. Instead of depicting a typical journey from a utopian to a dystopian world, it unveils an initially utopian past society that gradually deteriorates into a dystopia. This past dystopian society plays a crucial role as it acts as a precursor, allowing the story to anticipate a dystopian future shaped by its own historical events. This future dystopian society is, in many ways, a reflection of our own world. The novel prompts us to contemplate the profound societal implications of technology and war machines. In essence, the narrative structure in The Ice People challenges conventional time travel tropes by exploring the evolution of a society from utopia to dystopia in reverse, all the while drawing unsettling parallels with contemporary issues related to technology, surveillance, and the dehumanizing consequences of warfare machinery. This thought-provoking approach invites the reader to reflect on the intricate interplay between historical events and the shaping of future societies, ultimately urging us to consider the real-world consequences of our own technological advancements.

The Downfall of a Futuristic Civilization In The Ice People, the notion of utopia functions as a bridge between a previously idyllic past and a future society marked by its own downfall. This utopian phase acts as a transitional period, serving as a connecting point between the paradisiacal past and the deterioration of society, which paradoxically also lies in the past. Gondawa serves as the utopian society portrayed in The Ice People prior to its downfall. In Gondawa, there was no distinction between the wealthy and the poor. The key system played a pivotal role in ensuring the equitable distribution of national wealth without compromising the equal rights of all Gondawans or disregarding their diverse temperaments. Each individual utilized their credit based on their personal needs and preferences. Once the factories were established and operational, they operated autonomously, requiring no human labor and relying on their own intelligence. However, despite the factories handling production, there were still tasks that demanded both physical and intellectual efforts. Every Gondawan was obliged to work half a day every five days, but they had the flexibility to choose how they distributed their working hours. If someone wished to work more, they were free to do so, while others could opt for reduced hours or even choose not to work at all. Work was not compensated monetarily. Those who worked less than

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the required minimum saw a reduction in their annual credit, but even those who chose not to work at all still received a basic income slightly above subsistence level. These factories were strategically located around the cities, both in their suburbs and deep underground. They were interconnected, forming an expansive super-factory that continually generated new subsections while absorbing those that became worn out. The products created in these factories were the result of synthesis, not assembly. The fundamental raw material always remained the same: universal energy. Thus, the underground city was constantly supplied with the necessities and pleasures of life, flowing in a continuous and diverse stream from the void. Essentially, in this world, the concept of non-existence became a form of existence (Barjavel 1971). Therefore, before its destruction in the war, Gondawa existed as an advanced, luxurious, and high-tech society. However, we question if Gondawa was a “real” utopian society. According to Chomsky (2002), an increase in social spending raises concerns because it poses a threat by potentially boosting public engagement in decision-making processes. For instance, if the government becomes actively involved in constructing essential infrastructure like hospitals, schools, and roads within a community, individuals are likely to become invested and desire a role in shaping these projects. This is because these developments directly impact their lives. Conversely, when the government announces plans to build something like a Stealth Bomber, it does not elicit much public interest or opinions. People care deeply about the location of schools and hospitals, but they have little to no interest in the specifics of aircraft construction, as it is an area they are not well-versed in. He further highlights that “[…] one of the main purposes of social policy is to keep the population passive, people with power are going to want to eliminate anything that tends to encourage the population to get involved in planning—because popular involvement threatens the monopoly of power by business, and it also stimulates popular organizations, and mobilizes people, and probably would lead to redistribution of profits, and so on” (Chomsky 2002, 71). The shift from utopia to dystopia within the context of Gondawa serves as a mirror to the transitional phases between centuries and the associated repercussions in our real world. Setting aside the problematic nature of the concept of transition, this perspective presents an inducing and reasonable viewpoint, especially in the context of early modern utopia during its significant expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also finds relevance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period

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when Western societies underwent profound changes due to urbanization and industrialization while still being governed by outdated political structures. However, this viewpoint challenges Frederic Jameson’s interpretation of the present. According to him, following the collapse of communism and the global proliferation of capitalism on an unprecedented scale and with notable intensity, we currently find ourselves in a transitional phase. This transition lacks the corresponding political frameworks needed to effectively manage the changes. With the failure of the socialist project in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the Left finds itself without a concrete agenda and a programmatic philosophy. As the emergent world market solidifies its position, it appears that we have no viable alternative to the status quo. What proves to be paralyzing is not the mere presence of a formidable adversary, but rather the widespread belief that historical alternatives to capitalism have been discredited and deemed unworkable, leaving us with no conceivable, let alone practically attainable, socio-economic system. Utopians not only propose the conception of such alternative systems; the very form of utopia serves as a contemplation of radical divergence, profound otherness, and the systematic nature of the entire social structure. This perspective holds that any fundamental change in our societal existence must first generate utopian visions, akin to sparks emanating from a comet (Kumar 2010). The novel translates Barjavel’s mistrust toward the scientific and political approach: he subtly emphasizes throughout the narrative the absence of common sense, capitalism, the pursuit of power, and the predominance of personal interests over scientific objectivity. Just like Lukos, the scientists seem destined to destroy the object of their study, as the love for knowledge and understanding is tainted and hindered by the impulses of international politics. Indeed, science, as depicted in The Ice People, is profoundly devalued: this extreme science is stripped of what should be its intrinsic driving force, a love of knowledge guided by common sense, only to become a tool that, at times, unintentionally contributes to the destruction of humanity. Ultimately, scientific and epistemological transparency, transformed into a capitalized image, leads to destruction rather than the utopian unity of nations for the common good. According to Baudrillard (1981), this issue has always been the deadly power of images, deadly to reality, and deadly to their own model. The role of science, both in the real world and in the fictional world, appears to be negatively connoted. Barjavel uses the conventions of the utopian genre—as mentioned earlier—adapting them to the fictional world—Gondawa and Enisor—by

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borrowing historical details. Hence, the conflict between Gondawa and its enemy city, Enisor, is based on a doctrine of nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction, reminiscent of the East-West tensions of the Cold War. The arms race, at the expense of any ethical conscience, and the transparency that characterizes this era are transported into Elea’s account of the destruction of Gondawa and Enisor. The way events gradually deteriorated, leading to the annihilation of the combatants on both sides, then sounds like a warning. Moreover, the unprecedented view from the well dug into the ice to reach the Egg containing Elea and her companion is transmitted to UNESCO members and the rest of the world in real time: “Above and behind Professor de Aguiar’s head, the world’s largest television screen almost completely covered the wall. It had been installed to display a live broadcast from the bottom of the shaft as transmitted by the antenna of EPI 1 and relayed by the Trio Satellite” (Barjavel 1971, 25). Not only does the author play with the double meaning of the word “broadcast” but the simultaneous nature of the scientific discovery and its televised reproduction gives it something akin to reality TV. The speech of Professor JoSo de Aguiar, Brazil’s representative in UNESCO and its current chairman, emphasizes the exclusive and particular nature of the event, as no one in the world has yet seen these images, which the entire world is about to discover in a moment (Barjavel 1971). He elaborates on each of his actions in a highly emphatic manner: “Through the miracle of electronics, this switch which I will press will turn on floodlights at the other end of the world, and we shall see the image of what was perhaps the world’s first civilization as it speeds into every modern household. It is not without great emotion” (Barjavel 1971, 26). Rather than focusing on the meaning of the events, attention is placed on a pre-packaged staging of meaning intended for a guided and conditioned audience in its understanding of the events. The image becomes political, transcending the question of historical significance, as reality and its profound meaning for human history lose their extraordinary nature and become almost fictional in the eyes of the public. This denaturalization of the reality of events is conveyed to the reader through the televised intervention but also becomes evident through the sensationalist press’s appropriation of the matter. Barjavel notably denounces the commercial use made of these images, a result of this process of banalization. Thus, by digging the well, the scientists find a bird preserved in translucent ice, whose image is instantly broadcast worldwide on television. Fifteen days later, in feathers, plush, silk, wool,

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down, plastic, wood, anything, it flooded fashion and toy stores (Barjavel 1971). The differentiation between real and unreal disappears, and the commercial approach ultimately transfers reality and reproduction to the field of the artificial, serving as a critique of consumer society. Additionally, the immediate broadcasting of events in The Ice People, where live news took precedence over regular TV programming, offers a striking parallel to the contemporary inundation of information in our daily lives. In today’s world, we are bombarded with an overwhelming volume of data and news, thanks to the advent of digital technology, social media platforms, and instant connectivity. This constant flow of information, while providing us with unprecedented access to knowledge and current events, has also introduced significant challenges to our mental health. The massive quantity of data we encounter daily can be mentally exhausting and emotionally draining. We find ourselves constantly processing news updates, social media feeds, emails, notifications, and more. Therefore, “communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting society entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative paths” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 347). According to Deleuze and Guattari: […] everywhere capitalism sets in motion schizo-flows that animate “our” arts and “our” sciences, just as they congeal into the production of “our own” sick, the schizophrenics. We have seen that the relationship of schizophrenia to capitalism went far beyond problems of modes of living, environment, ideology, etc., and that it should be examined at the deepest level of one and the same economy, one and the same production process. Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that the schizos are not salable. (2000, 245)

Deleuze and Guattari state that capitalism originates from the convergence of two types of flows: the unregulated streams of production in the form of money-capital and the unrestricted streams of labor represented by the “free worker”. Unlike previous social systems, the capitalist apparatus lacks the capacity to establish a universal code applicable to the entire social sphere. Instead, it has supplanted the concept of a code with money, resulting in an axiomatic system based on abstract quantities that continually gravitates toward the process of deterritorialization of the socius. Capitalism inclines toward a point of decoding where it may dismantle the socius to transform it into a body without organs, thereby unleashing

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desire flows across this deterritorialized terrain. In this context, schizophrenia emerges as a consequence of the capitalist machine, much like how manic-depression and paranoia stem from the despotic machine, and hysteria from the territorial machine (Deleuze and Guattari 2000). Moreover, our worth in the capital market is defined by the actions and activities we engage in, such as clicks, purchases, various online activities (including adult content), consumption patterns, messages, comments, as well as our creation and sharing of personal photos and videos on social networks, participation in online games, information-seeking behavior, and entertainment choices, among others. However, this value becomes even more significant when we consider what precedes and goes hand in hand with these actions: our cognitive processes. Because our behaviors are inherently rooted in cognitive foundations, they have become a primary focus for capitalist strategies that exploit addiction mechanisms to encourage limitless consumption. The concept of addiction, particularly to digital media, is a complex interplay of social and biological factors. On the social front, it is closely tied to emotional and behavioral contagion, influenced by a multitude of other elements. Factors such as individual susceptibility, the social environment, propaganda, and individuals who intentionally sow disorder actively contribute to the promotion of compulsive behaviors (Poenaru 2021). In essence, aside from the depiction of Gondawa, which existed in the past within the narrative, the society of the present moment in the novel also exhibits characteristics reminiscent of our own contemporary world. These resemblances include the overwhelming and, at times, destructive aspect of communication and consumption. It becomes evident that Barjavel endeavors to mirror our real-world complexities through various societies within the narrative: Gondawa and Enisor in the past, and the society existing in the present moment in the story. The society portrayed at the present moment in the novel is not confined to a single nation, as Barjavel incorporates numerous countries from around the globe into the scientific expedition. Never before had such a monumental international endeavor been undertaken, and people had eagerly embraced it as an opportunity to set aside their animosities and unite in a selfless pursuit of a common goal. France, as the host nation, had selected its language as the lingua franca. However, Japan had established a universal short-wave translation device in EPI 2 to facilitate communication. This device could instantly translate all conversations it received and broadcast them in seventeen languages on seventeen different frequencies. Every scientist,

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project leader, and key technician had been equipped with a small adhesive receiver, no larger than a pea, tuned to their respective language frequencies, which they wore constantly in their ears. They also received a transmitter in the form of a pin that could be affixed to their outer clothing, allowing them to isolate themselves from the cacophony of conversations in multiple languages and hear only the person they were communicating with. The atomic reactor was of American origin, the cargo helicopters hailed from Russia, the heavily insulated outerwear came from China, the boots were Finnish-made, the whiskey was Irish, and the culinary delights were prepared in the French tradition. A variety of machinery and instruments came from Britain, Germany, Italy, and Canada, while Argentine meat and Israeli fruits found their place among the provisions. The climate control and living accommodations within EPI 1 and 2 were designed and provided by American experts and offered remarkable comfort (Barjavel 1971). However, despite the temporal and contextual differences, all these societies in the novel seem to share similar destructive characteristics. Gondawa and Enisor highlight the detrimental aspects of science and technology, while the present society in the novel underscores the overwhelming and, likewise, destructive aspect of communication and consumption. This observation underscores the novel’s critique of societal flaws and serves as a thought-provoking commentary on the enduring and recurrent issues that transcend time and place. Furthermore, Gondawa and Enisor, along with the contemporary society depicted in The Ice People, stand out as advanced societies marked by remarkable social, economic, technological progress, and communication advancements. However, the tragic downfall of Gondawa and Enisor serves as a stark reminder that any society can crumble when technology and science are harnessed for warfare instead of welfare. These three societies collectively serve as mirrors reflecting our own real-world society, each symbolizing a distinct facet of it. Consequently, Barjavel’s work foresaw the potential destruction of human society, recognizing that technology and science could be wielded both to maintain power and to create devastating weaponry. In an interview with ACTUSF in 2019, Natacha Vas Deyres confirms: La chute du Gondawa dans La Nuit des temps renvoie non seulement [au sous-genre de l’apocalyptique ou du post-apocalyptique] mais s’inscrit également dans la mythologie eschatologique: la destruction de l’Atlantide,

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évoquée par Platon dans le Timée incarne déjà cette figure de la fin des temps, de la nuit des temps d’une cité trop avancée technologiquement. La fin d’Illa de José Moselli, en 1925, racontait déjà cette histoire. Barjavel s’inscrit donc dans une tradition littéraire très ancienne, où l’apocalypse sert tout d’avertissement quand l’homme veut remplacer la figure divine et manipuler la nature, l’humain, les machines. (Vas Deyres 2019) Translation of the author: The fall of Gondawa in The Ice People not only falls into [the subgenre of apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic fiction], but it also aligns with eschatological mythology: the destruction of Atlantis, as mentioned by Plato in Timaeus, already embodies this archetype of the end times, the twilight of a civilization that has advanced technologically too far. The conclusion of José Moselli’s Illa, in 1925, had already told this story. Therefore, Barjavel is part of a very ancient literary tradition, where the apocalypse serves as a warning whenever humanity seeks to replace the divine figure and manipulate nature, humanity, machines, and so forth.

Conclusion Barjavel’s science fiction blurs the line between the real and fictional worlds by reinventing the actual and the ordinary to better construct a utopian demonstrative purpose. In fact, the original title of the novel “La Nuit des temps” alludes to the expression “The Night of Ages” and, as a result, emphasizes the repetitive and therefore pessimistic nature of the events described. This repetition is evident not only at the formal level, with the embedded narrative, but also in the denouement and the student revolts, showcasing Barjavel’s recurring theme of worlds caught in an unstoppable circle of change. Barjavel’s writing style is distinguished by his satirical approach to conveying his ideas and reflecting upon reality and beliefs. In the novel, he skillfully employs satire to shed light on various aspects of society. Barjavel’s intense satire is accentuated when the explorers were trying to decide whether to awaken Elea or Paikan. This choice carried inherent risks, and it was, in a way, an exploratory process. Conversely, the second individual to be revived would benefit from the scientists’ accumulated experience. Hence, the question arose: which one of the two was less valuable? For the Arab, there was no debate; the man was the sole focus of importance. Conversely, the American believed that extra caution should be exercised with the woman, as the man’s life could be put at risk to save hers. The Dutchman held no specific preference in this matter. The Yugoslav and the

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Frenchman, despite their initial reluctance, leaned toward considering the man as the more precious of the two (Barjavel 1971). Barjavel creates utopias disguised as dystopias through a consistently ironic style. His satiric style serves to shed light on the grim truths of our reality in a veiled manner that, despite its pseudo-optimistic appearance, conveys pessimism and a dark underlying reality. In the context of postmodern science fiction, The Ice People transcends the typical focus on utopian and dystopian societies. It achieves this by featuring both a utopian and dystopian society in the past, using the approach of time travel to draw connections between the past, present, and future. This narrative technique allows the story to use the past as a means to explain the consequences of the present and predict the potential future outcomes. Moreover, the concept of “The Ice People”—individuals frozen in ice—serves as a powerful symbol of arrested time and the halting of human progress, particularly in the wake of Gondawa’s destruction in the distant past. This metaphor of suspended animation mirrors the broader theme of stagnation and regression throughout the centuries. In the context of our real world, this idea holds a mirror to certain aspects of human society. Just as the frozen individuals in the story are frozen in time, we too can find instances where progress seems to stall, whether due to political conflicts, societal divisions, or environmental challenges. The cautionary tale presented in The Ice People serves as a reminder of the potential consequences of not advancing collectively as a society. It urges us to reflect on how we can prevent such stagnation and instead foster a future of continual growth and progress. In addition to its postmodern science-fiction elements, The Ice People also embodies aspects of postmodern literature as it underscores the fragmentation and self-destruction of humanity across different temporal phases—past, present, and future. This fragmentation is a hallmark of postmodern literature, where narratives often shift in time and perspective, challenging traditional linear storytelling. Furthermore, the story exhibits other characteristics of postmodern literature, such as metafiction, intertextuality, and the blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction. Barjavel’s manipulation of time, the incorporation of various narrative layers, and the use of “The Ice People” as a symbol for humanity’s stagnation all contribute to the postmodern complexity of the work. We also recall the concept of “uncanny strangeness” explored by Baudrillard (1981) within modern science fiction. Baudrillard observes that science fiction

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evolves in an implosive manner, reflecting our contemporary understanding of the universe. It strives to breathe new life into and recontextualize fragments of simulation, which represent elements of the universal simulation that our so-called real world has now become. Competing Interests  The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

References Barjavel, René. 1971. The Ice People. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: William Morrow. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée. Chéry, Lloyd. 2018. Pourquoi il faut (re)lire La Nuit des temps de René Barjavel. Le Point.. https://www.lepoint.fr/pop-­culture/pourquoi-­il-­faut-­re-­lire-­la-­ nuit-­des-­temps-­de-­rene-­barjavel-­13-­11-­2018-­2271034_2920.php. Accessed 25 August 2023. Chomsky, Noam. 2002. In Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel. New York: The New Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2000. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane. USA: University of Minnesota Press. Fulmer, Gilbert. 1980. Understanding Time Travel. The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 11(1): 151–156. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43155487. Accessed 20 October 2023. Goethals, Cleo. 2003. Interview de Pierre CREVEUIL, président de l’Association des Amis de René Barjavel, conduite dans le cadre d’un travail universitaire sur René Barjavel. http://association.barjavel.free.fr/interview.html. Accessed 25 August 2023. Gomel, Elana. 2009. Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel. Narrative 17(3): 334–352. http://www.jstor. org/stable/25609374. Accessed 25 August 2023. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hollinger, Veronica. 1995. Review of Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, by S. Bukatman. Utopian Studies 6(1): 126–128. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719375. Accessed 20 October 2023. Kumar, Krishan. 2010. The Ends of Utopia. New Literary History 41 (3): 549–569. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40983884. Accessed 26 August 2023.

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Montoneri, Bernard, and El Hajj, Murielle. 2022. Barjavel, Ravage: Roman Extraordinaire (1943). In Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel, ed. Bernard Montoneri, 119–143. USA: Rowman & Littlefield, Lexington Books. Poenaru, Liviu. 2021. Psychopathologies du capitalisme cognitivo-­ comportemental. À propos de l’article ‘Les effets psychologiques de la propagande’ de D. Colon. Analysis, revue transdisciplinaire de psychanalyse et sciences 5 (2): 143–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inan.2021.06.002. Sermet, Tessa. 2015. Transparence utopique et scientifique: La Nuit des Temps de René Barjavel. Chimères 32 (1): 35–49. Vas Deyres, Natacha, and Estelle Hamelin. 2019. Ravage, La Nuit des Temps, pourquoi relire René Barjavel ? ACTUSF. https://www.actusf.com/detail-­d-­ un-­article/ravage-­la-­nuit-­des-­temps-­pourquoi-­r elire-­r en%C3%A9-­barjavel. Accessed 10 September 2023. Wisker, Gina. 2013. Starting Your Journey in the Past, Speculating on Time and Place: Daphne du Maurier’s “The House on the Strand”, “Split Second,” and the Engaged Fiction of Time Travel. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 24(3): 467–482. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24352971. Accessed 20 October 2023.

CHAPTER 6

“Job Done, History’s Safe”: Doctor Who and the Wibbly Wobbly Lessons of the Past Alyson Miller and Ellie Gardner

Introduction First airing on 23 November 1963—the day after the assassination of JFK—BBC’s Doctor Who is one of the longest running drama series in the history of television. Originally conceived “as a children’s semi-­educational drama about history and science”, the programme initially portrayed the eponymous Doctor as a “scientist-adventurer, travelling the universe to study it” (Orthia 2010, 209). The BBC viewed the series both as a way to teach multi-generational audiences about the past and as a vehicle through which viewers might consider as well as reflect on how history is “practised, produced, consumed and remediated” (Fleiner and October 2017, 5). Dene October observes how such an ethos followed “the spirit of John Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, whose vision of a national consensus included the use of television as an emergent public agency where broadcast awakened people to their point of view rather than absorb ‘the dictated and partial versions of others’” (2017, 15). Certainly,

A. Miller (*) • E. Gardner Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_6

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speculative fiction has long been recognised for its pedagogical and transformative possibilities, creating productive spaces in which traditional historical accounts might be challenged, for example, to reveal the paradigms of “ideological and ontological conservatism” (Charles 2007, 121) often responsible for shaping cultural memory. Arguably, the “logic of teaching history through television” (October 15) has been an enduring feature of programming for children in particular, based on ideas about the need for media entertainment to also inspire learning opportunities. Yet as October highlights in relation to the current boom in historical content more broadly, in a mediatised society, “most people experience memories of key historical events through television and social media” (25). In these terms, Doctor Who is located not only in the complexities of remembering the past but also in its (re)construction through time and, as such, can be neither apolitical nor ideologically neutral. That is, the quintessential and often nostalgic Britishness of the Doctor, the eccentric range of alien and robotic foes, and the ever-faithful companions are embedded within a series of anxieties about power, identity, and the remediation of history. As a British science fiction (SF) serial which appeared in the “turmoil of decolonial struggles in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean” (Loza 2017, 48), Doctor Who is deeply rooted in the principles and practices of the British Empire. Indeed, Susana Loza contends SF is the “literature of colonisation”, describing how it emerged as a “genre at the height of European imperialism” and how “many of its early narratives centre on the colonial encounter” (47). Functioning as a “key site where the ideological dream-work of imperialism unfolds”, the genre is nonetheless also positioned to critique the imperial fantasy, due to its entrenchment in the “philosophical and institutional operations” of the Empire (Higgins 2011, 331). Doctor Who has frequently reflected such tensions, particularly in the original series—referred to as ‘classic Who’—which ran from 1963 to 1989. Alec Charles notes that these early years “were often characterised by a yearning for British imperial dominance, as its elderly Edwardian hero turned back time to patrol the universe and the history of the world in his Metropolitan police telephone box” (2008, 452–3). The urge to insist on British supremacy reflects, as Lindy Orthia outlines, a period during which “formerly colonised people were migrating to Britain in larger numbers than ever before as well as reclaiming their cultural heritage and political independence elsewhere in the world, transforming conceptions of Britishness, the meaning of ‘race’ on the global stage, and the ways in which western media understand and deal with racism” (2013, 4). The

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image of the time-travelling Doctor toppling oppressive regimes and liberating the marginalised is repeatedly framed as denouncements of the “racist and eugenicist ideologies of Britain’s colonial past” (2017, n.p.), yet continued to perpetuate the power dynamics of white racial supremacy. As Saljooq Asif and Cindy Saenz observe, “in positing the Doctor as hero, the series fails to examine white saviorism and his connection to the same institutions he attempts to defeat” (2017, n.p.), the characterisation of which Loza likens to the image of a “quintessentially British dandy”: …he adores tea, the European aristocracy, and fashion. His costumes— Edwardian frock-coats, Victorian vests, smoking jackets, cricket whites, and Bohemian garb—visually ‘recall the period of the height of British imperial power’ (Charles 2007, 117). In terms of political disposition, the Doctor epitomises colonial liberalism. He is an objective, emotionally detached, saviour-explorer who thirsts for knowledge and technical mastery. (48)

Matthew Hughey posits that the white saviour is a critical “cultural device” during unsettled times, working to “repair the myth of white supremacy and paternalism” and reinforce, “in subtle and friendly terms, the archaic paradigm of manifest destiny, the white man’s burden, and the great white hope” (2014, 15). As a Timelord, the Doctor is identified as belonging to a ‘master race’, thus the heroics performed in each episode, in which the tormented, ignorant, and dispossessed are single-handedly rescued, are repeatedly figured in transcendental and god-like terms. Similarly, while ‘new Who’, launched in 2005, attempts to depart from past legacies by focusing on a “multicultural Britain” which “pokes fun at a ‘stodgy’ colonial past” (Mafe 2015, 447), critics such as Lindy Orthia (2010), Susana Loza (2017), Diana Mafe (2015), and Amit Gupta (2013) have argued that the post-imperial critique rarely succeeds beyond surface re-fashionings. Whiteness, maleness, and Britishness have persisted until as recently as 2017, fixed on rehabilitating an image of colonial benevolence under the guise of what has been referred to as utopic post-racial colour-­ blindness (Jowett 2018; Gupta 2013). Higgins posits that as a result of “science fiction’s focused treatment of imperial themes, the genre often moves beyond critique in order to extrapolate cosmopolitan alternatives to imperial domination” (332), a strategy evoked in new Who to insist upon a unifying vision of humanity in which sameness is privileged. For example, in the episode ‘The Shakespeare Code’ (BBC 2007a), set in London in 1599, the Doctor’s companion, Martha, expresses concern about her safety:

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Martha:

Oh, but hold on. Am I alright? I’m not going to get carted off as a slave, am I? The Doctor: Why would they do that? Martha: Not exactly white, in case you hadn’t noticed. Doctor: I’m not even human. Just walk about like you own the place, works for me. Besides, you’d be surprised. (Ahead of them, black women walk amongst the crowd, clearly at home and safe.) The Doctor: Elizabethan England—not so different from your time. According to Orthia, in its insistence that human diversity is “an unremarkable and timeless fact”, the scene presents “racist attitudes as threatening, but in the grand scheme of human history, anomalous” (2010, 215). Further, and perhaps even more insidiously, the Doctor’s inability to recognise the premise of Martha’s query—“why would they do that?”— exposes both the legitimising powers of whiteness and white ignorance, a position from which the minority experience is dismissed and distorted (Loza 2017, 53). The erasure of difference invalidates Martha’s fears of violence and forced imprisonment, whilst also implying persecution is a state of mind that might be overcome by attending to similarity—rhetoric of idealistic cosmopolitanism. The idea of there being such a level of heterogeneity in the social hierarchies of sixteenth-century London that a black woman might navigate the city without hindrance, however, is as unimaginable as suggesting the same might occur in the twenty-first century—the times may not ‘be so different’, but the Doctor’s optimistic coding is radically at odds with the realities of the ‘other’. In such a utopian vision of race, Orthia argues, there “are no deep power relations” but rather “only eternal humanity, different in colour but united in all other respects … The appropriate metaphor comes from Doctor Who’s most famous foodstuff: humanity is so many coloured jelly babies inside a colourless (white) paper bag” (215). Undoubtedly, Doctor Who has remained trapped in a quasi-romantic vision of the colonial past, a narrative of Empire and white saviourism caught within speculative fantasies and intergalactic adventure. Efforts to negotiate the horrors of imperialism via an insistence on sameness, the cosmopolitan beauty of the human race as diverse but inherently connected, have arguably only further problematised the realities of traumatic racial histories, at times even risking revisionist histories (Asif and Saenz 2017, n.p.). This chapter contends, however, that with the introduction of

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the first female Doctor in 2017, performed by Jodie Whittaker, a critical shift emerged in the representation of anxieties about race, power, and identity. While, as October notes, “there has been a decline in the Doctor Who historicals” (25), particularly those referred to as ‘pure’, in which there is little if any SF interference (beyond time travel), those which have emerged signify an important moment of transformation. In these episodes, specifically ‘Rosa’ and ‘Demons of the Punjab’ (BBC 2018a, 2018b), there is a return to the educational scope of the original series, but a shift in framing that rejects the notion of sameness in order to embrace more complex understandings of modern history, including the experiences of those whose stories are whitewashed, forgotten, or erased. Indeed, we argue that by troubling the borderlines of time and relative dimensions in space, Whittaker’s Who offers a critical reflection of key historical moments—namely, the story of Rosa Parks and the American civil rights movement, and the Partition of India—that moves both self-­ consciously and uneasily between subversion and romanticisation. In doing so, these episodes engage with ideas relating to identity, difference, and privilege, alongside the constant tension between the potential to revise problematic approaches to representing in addition to understanding history and the failure to successfully do so. In dealing with the novel and the strange, SF is an apt vehicle for inventing new and, at times, more nuanced ways to understand complicated political and social realities, central to the pedagogical scope that has characterised Doctor Who since its inception. While both ‘Rosa’ and ‘Demons of the Punjab’ offer less a speculative romp than a re-imagining of ‘real’ history, the portrayal of these historical events emphasises the contemporaneity of the past, making them ‘live’ for audiences increasingly distanced or detached from landmark occasions and their implications for the current moment. Importantly, in doing so, these episodes challenge what Caroline Guthrie terms the “historical imaginary”, which describes how “hegemonic forces in society have come to envision its shared history” and its collective knowledge of the past (Guthrie 2019, 340–1). Examining the ‘pseudo-histories’ of Doctor Who, we thus explore how time travel in SF emphasises the significance of not only re-living and remediating history to draw it ‘back’ to the present but of also continuously finding new ways, as Timothy Spaulding posits, “to intrude upon history as a means to reform it” (2005, 4).

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“Ain’t gonna change”: Resisting Historical Amnesia and White Ignorance in ‘Rosa’ The Thirteenth Doctor marked a significant change in the shape and direction of Doctor Who, with its eponymous hero appearing as a woman for the first time in the history of the series. Whilst other gender transformations had previously occurred, such as the Doctor’s long-standing nemesis, the Master, regenerating as Missy, the announcement of Whittaker as the new protagonist for the eleventh season provoked a predictably mixed reception, from celebration to outrage about the transgression of a gendered ‘tradition’: “Time LORD.  I repeat the Doctor is a time LORD. Not a time LADY” (as cited in BBC 2017a, n.p.). Anxieties about gender soon evolved into criticisms about the programme’s attention to identity politics more broadly, particularly its focus on addressing social issues via narratives less coded by way of speculative tropes, such as alien invasion and inter-world travel. Indeed, in addition to a female Doctor, the eleventh series also featured two black and Asian minority companions, Yaz and Ryan, and included two award-winning episodes noteworthy in a number of regards: ‘Rosa’, written by Malorie Blackman, the first non-white author to contribute a script for the televised version of Doctor Who, remains the only historical new Who storyline which centralises issues of race and racism (Matthews 2020, 8). Similarly, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ is the first historical new Who to “focus on a non-Western/non-European setting” (Matthews 2020, 8) and was scripted by Vinay Patel. According to Jack Hudson, the commitment to diversity meant “the show quickly found itself embroiled in a culture war, with talk of its apparent political correctness becoming commonplace” (2020, n.p.). Various social media campaigns railed against the changes being made, such as via the Twitter hashtag #notmydoctor, which have only intensified since the 2022 announcement of Ncuti Gatwa as the first black actor to play the Fifteenth Doctor. The viewer scandal associated with these transformations is in line with the often-conservative fan behaviour attached to any popular television or entertainment series, yet the vilification occurred in specifically gendered and racial terms and adopted a remarkable level of hostility. The desire for whiteness, maleness, and Britishness, at least among some audiences, still clearly defines ideas about the Doctor and the imperial fantasy offered by the series. But as we argue, while the arrival of the Thirteenth Doctor was certainly no cure-all for the problematic ideological messages of Doctor Who more widely (see Hudson 2020, for example), both ‘Rosa’

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and ‘Demons of the Punjab’ represent important shifts in the portrayal of historical moments which continue to shape and define contemporary discussions around race, power, and identity. In ‘Rosa’, the Doctor and her companions, Ryan, Yasmin (Yaz), and Graham, arrive in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 and must prevent a time-travelling criminal, Krasko, from changing the course of history by ensuring Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger. Parks’ refusal to move launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, an action central to the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, and has become a powerful symbol of the cultural imaginary, signifying the radical change that might stem from seemingly small acts of resistance. SF time travel narratives often focus on the notion of a ‘fixed’ point in time, where events cannot be altered or interfered with without risking “consequences within time-space itself” (Tranter 2015, 226). Kieran Tranter argues that creating these “legalities” offers an attempt to “prohibit the narrative instabilities of time-travel stories”, with the effect of emphasising not only that the story exists in the ‘real’, but also that its importance to history is immutable. That is, even in the fantasies and endless possibilities of the speculative, the event is anchored, a landmark or permanence that remains regardless of the spaces of play permitted by the genre. The Doctor repeatedly makes clear the criticality of staying “out of history’s way” and the delicacy of meddling in the past: “Now we know what our task is: keep history in order. Not changing it, just guarding it against someone who wants to disrupt it” (BBC 2018a). The framing of the historical in these terms is significant: even though the episode involves the Doctor, Yaz, Ryan, and Graham manipulating the day to ensure Parks gets on the bus, it also refuses to intervene in the moment of resistance itself. The discomfort of observing Parks sit alone, waiting to be arrested, is a powerful insistence that history cannot be rewritten to ease contemporary (white) anxieties; rather, it must be gazed upon or confronted to acknowledge the horrors of the past. The anguish of being witness to injustice is palpably expressed, with Graham, a middle-aged white man, visibly distraught at being compelled to watch, rather than exit before the instance of confrontation: Graham: [….] Yaz: Graham:

We can go, job done, history’s safe. We were here. We’re part of this. Part of history. No, no, no, no, I don’t want to be part of this.

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The Doctor: We have to. We have to not help her. (BBC 2018a) Loza observes how SF, and Doctor Who in particular, has often sought to absolve “white British subjects for the sins of their colonial ancestors”, frequently via storylines in which the Doctor or a white companion acts as a saviour to the oppressed (53). The desire for “well-meaning whites” (55) to make amends is less, Loza argues, about accepting responsibility than rewriting history to suggest a more promising or gratifying ethical vision— that is, by offering a fantasy for audiences to behave differently should the opportunity to right past wrongs arise. Time travel narratives thus often arguably expose the ameliorating compulsions of white guilt and the urge to prove a more principled or moral contemporary self who would act otherwise, and change history, if only it were possible. As Loza notes, “Doctor Who’s timeshifting of slavery into the present and the distant future deracialises an institution that was based on white supremacy and European colonialism and therefore relieves whites of their historical guilt for African chattel slavery” (55). By liberating alien species such as the Ood, for example, who are described as “born to serve”, the series reanimates “bondage in a different time and space”, thereby creating opportunities for white protagonists to “perform their antiracist outrage by valiantly saving the oppressed aliens from the true menace: evil, ignorant, and overly racist whites” (55). It is a narrative structure that functions as an ethical confidence trick and has been foundational to Doctor Who storylines in which the messianic protagonist seems to perform yet another post-imperial miracle to celebrate the diversity of the universe in all of its complexities. In ‘Rosa’, the figure of Krasko is, then, more pivotal to the episode than merely a trope through which to convey ideas about fixed points in time. Rather, Krasko offers an alternative, all the more disturbing, model of revisionism, one that echoes the work of white supremacists attempting to radically reshape history in the interests of power. Henry Giroux describes how former President Donald Trump, for instance, actively supported forms of historical amnesia, or “organised forgetting”, “in the interests of legitimizing racial bigotry and hatred” (2020, n.p.). The strategy was to “rewrite the history of racial injustice in the United States while eliminating the institutions that make visible its historical roots”, including removing education programmes designed to teach students about the legacies of American slavery (Giroux 2020, n.p.). As Krasko says to the Doctor, “history changes when tiny things don’t go

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to plan” (BBC 2018a), a horrifying reminder of how easily the past might be distorted or erased. While in both classic and new Who the Doctor is made complicit in the production of historical amnesia and even revisionism, suggesting Krasko also functions as a discomforting mirror, ‘Rosa’ insists on the accuracies of remembering, and the importance of retrieving lost histories, particularly from the dangers of misinformation. Following the pedagogical interests of the series, Jolie Matthews observes how “time travel stories mix history with sci-fi and/or fantasy elements and can offer unique ways for students to think about the past, diversity of perspective, and the disruption (or maintaining) of dominant narratives in media representations” (2020, n.p.). Fiction such as Doctor Who “allows for a study of how the past gets appropriated, recycled, challenged, reified, deconstructed, and/or regurgitated in popular culture and society more broadly, and it provides an engaging stepping-stone for students to conduct their own research on where fact and fiction diverge and blue” (Matthews 2020, n.p.), all the more pertinent following October’s point concerning the experience of key historical events in purely mediatised ways. Such engagement with the past is portrayed explicitly in ‘Rosa’, during a scene in which the protagonists gather to discuss their encounter with Parks: Yaz:

We were in Rosa Parks class in primary. Do you remember? All the Year 4, 5 and 6 classes were named after inspirational people. Ryan: She’s the bus woman, right? Yaz: You do remember what she did? Ryan: Yeah, first black woman to ever drive a bus. Yaz: No, Ryan. Ryan: What? Graham: Your Nan would have a fit right now. How could you have been in a class named after the woman and not know who she is? Ryan: She’s American. Yaz: She refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus to a white passenger, and got arrested for it. Her arrest started a boycott of the buses in Montgomery. The Doctor: Or rather, will start. Today is Wednesday, November 30th, 1955. Tomorrow, Rosa refuses to give up her seat.

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Ryan:

And all this basically kicked off the US civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King. See, I’m not totally ignorant. I just got confused by the whole bus thing. The Doctor: Martin Luther King is a minister here in Montgomery right now. Yaz: He and Rosa knew each other? The Doctor: Yeah. (BBC 2018a) The recitation of history, which bookends the episode, explores how forgetting might be subverted by an insistence on telling, figured as a responsibility of the collective to remind and repeat, to correct as well as to reiterate the significance of past events. Without such rituals, during which the historical imaginary is both adjusted and highlighted, or as Matthews notes, challenged or upheld (2020, n.p.), the specifics of time risk distortion and context: in these terms, Rosa Parks might, then, be remembered as the “first black woman to ever drive a bus”, rather than someone who “changed the world” by fighting for equality (BBC 2018a). Parks’ observation to Yaz that “an education makes you unstoppable” is a gesture towards the importance of learning but also poses an unspoken question about how history is taught, a reminder to look for the gaps and absences, and to be wary of what might be termed the Krasko influence, of the “tiny things” (BBC 2018a) that might come to alter how the past is recalled in the present. The link between Krasko, historical remembering, and the rhetoric of white supremacy is made much more explicit in the reactions of the Montgomery locals, who respond to Ryan, who is black, and Yaz, a woman of colour, with violence and disdain. After Ryan returns a handkerchief dropped by a white woman, for instance, her husband makes clear the realities of the time: “I don’t know what goes on where you folks are from, but your boy? He’ll be swingin’ from a tree with a noose as a neckerchief if he touches a white woman in Montgomery” (BBC 2018a). The evocation of Emmett Till, who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman, is a powerful reminder of the episode’s location in the ‘real’, which resists the playfulness of the fantastic to insist on the horrors of the recent past. Indeed, the pedagogical focus of the narrative is also about the contemporary nature of history, examining how events such as Parks’ refusal to move seats on the bus are not relegated to some kind of cultural vacuum but continue to impact upon present realities. Yaz and Ryan are repeatedly harassed in Montgomery,

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referred to as a “couple of mongrels” who must be forced from the town for “making folks uneasy” (BBC 2018a). There is a clear suggestion that any harm directed towards the pair is both reasonable and inevitable, a result of their refusal to comply with the rules of racial segregation. Compelled in one scene to hide behind a dumpster, Yaz and Ryan reflect on the complex nature of their involvement with Rosa Parks, and the acts of disappearance required by the ‘other’ in order to survive: Yaz: …to be here just as history’s taking place… Ryan: This ain’t history here, Yaz. We’re hiding behind the bins. I’m having to work so hard to keep my temper, every second we’re here… Thank god my Nan taught me how to keep my temper. The conversation makes clear the ongoing realities of racial prejudice, and how dominant parties ultimately seek to erase its violence, desiring to destroy understandings of historical reactions to the threat of difference. While Parks is recognised as a courageous freedom-fighter, Ryan also expresses frustration with the continued need to struggle, as the ideology of white supremacy stubbornly clings to an imperial vision of homogeneity: “Yeah, it’s not like Rosa Parks wiped out racism from the world forever. Otherwise, how come I get stopped by the police way more than my white mates?” As Yaz and Ryan share their experiences of discrimination, the episode insists on the contemporaneity of the past, in which progress is figured as both limited and inching hopefully towards transformation: “In fifty-three years they’ll have a black president as leader. Who knows where they’ll be 50 years after that, but that’s proper change”. Yaz’s optimism neatly articulates the tensions with which the narrative engages, shifting painfully between the horrors of racial segregation, and an image of the present as an only slightly improved version of the same systems and structures. As James Blake, the driver of the bus on which Parks enacts her resistance, notes, “it’s just the way it is. No matter how much they complain, ain’t gonna change” (BBC 2018a). The vacillations in tone, which repeatedly circle from terror to elation, are significant, refusing to promote a miracle moment in which racism dissolves, thus marking a departure from the tendency of Doctor Who to imply utopian solutions once agents of evil or corruption have been confronted. Graham’s discomfort is again critical here, reminding white audiences, for example, of their complicity in the history being confronted—and suggesting that the triumph being represented is not their own.

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Indeed, ‘Rosa’ actively subverts the need for absolution, resisting both saviourism and the centrality of white characters to the development of the storyline. Alternatively, both the Doctor and Graham are peripheral to the narrative, pushed to the margins in a rejection of the rhetoric of ‘good whites’ being abdicated from the transgressions of the past. The recency of the Civil Rights Movement emphasises the role of white ignorance and the privilege of being separated from race-based discrimination. Graham, for example, is aware of Parks’ activism and the details of the Montgomery Bus Boycott only because his wife, a black woman, taught him about these events, while the Doctor is forced to acknowledge her safety is not about being a supernatural force, but due to her whiteness: “Go back to the TARDIS and be safe … It’s easy for me here, it’s more dangerous for you” (BBC 2018a). There is a careful irony at play here, in which the Doctor-­ as-­alien nonetheless self-consciously recognises the identity politics that have always demarcated the character as belonging to and promoting the ideological structures of a ‘master race’. In both making apparent and attempting to challenge the portrayal of history through a white lens, Graham and the Doctor are relegated to the sidelines, a disruption of white saviourism, and an insistence that the trauma and suffering being explored are not theirs to co-opt. Rather, their roles work to expose the frequent meaninglessness of white intervention into spaces that can be only understood by those marginalised as ‘other’. In one moment of interference, for example, in which the Doctor invites Parks to participate in a prize designed to keep events on track, the response is revealing: “If I win your raffle, will that give me the right to sit anywhere I like on this bus?” (BBC 2018a). Parks’ retort is arguably indicative of the efforts of the ‘well-meaning white’, whose gestures towards an ethical allyship are not only empty but also place the other in a position of precarity and danger: Rosa:

[…] Ma’am, if you keep sitting there, we’re all going to have to move. Graham: What do you mean? Rosa: If white folks need seats, by law, I have to give mine up. This middle section is only for coloureds if white folk don’t need it. (BBC 2018a) The centralising of Yaz, Ryan, and Parks is, then, a focalisation that insists on events being about and for them, rather than an opportunity to absolve white guilt or to perform “anti-racist outrage” (Loza 55). In one

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scene, Ryan attends a gathering at the Parks’ home; meeting Martin Luther King, he is enthralled by the experience of encountering such  a luminary within the spaces of the family home. Critically, the audience is permitted only brief access to the intimacies of the assembly, forced to look on from the outside via a gentle visual reminder that not everything is to be gazed upon and that the right to witness is protected. It is a subtle detail, yet also a potent moment of subversion, denying the white assumption to occupy, for example, and an establishing of borderlines or a boundary traditionally denied to those without power. Speaking with Parks after the meeting, Ryan expresses gratitude, noting “it’s worth the fight. Thank you, from me and my Nan” (BBC 2018a), a comment which articulates a lineage of trauma and the ongoing implications of the battle for social justice. It is an intensely private moment, one which arguably counters the paradigms of both classic and new Who, in which the Doctor is ritually applauded for acts of greatness. Indeed, as she is escorted by police off the bus at the conclusion of the episode, Parks nods at Ryan and Yaz rather than the eponymous hero, a gesture which indicates their shared experiences of ‘otherness’, and their knowledge of an ongoing history of racism, violence, and exclusion. As noted, the final moments of ‘Rosa’ also evoke the pedagogical premise of the series, as the Doctor and the companions gather in the TARDIS to reflect on what happened to Parks and the implications of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The closing credits signify yet another departure from the traditions of the programme, as the episode is one of few that does not end with the characteristic musical theme, but rather with the single ‘Rise Up’ by Audra Day, based on the poem ‘Still I Rise’ by Maya Angelou. In its gathering of tensions between old and new, science fiction and the ‘real’, ‘Rosa’ offers a regenerative vision of change, one that recognises the colonial and imperial impulses which have previously defined the series, but also ways to move ahead. Jens Brockmeier argues that we “conceive of memory as a movement within a cultural discourse that continuously combines and fuses the now and then, the here and there” (2002, 21), a suggestion of the contemporary nature of history, and how it lives in the present. As ‘Rosa’ makes clear, it is only by re-living history, and insisting on its telling—in plural, complex, and remediated forms—that it becomes possible to learn, resist forgetting, and recognise how social injustice, for example, cannot be relegated to some convenient repository of ‘what used to be’. Indeed, as Dolly Jørgensen notes, “remembering the past becomes a way forward to the future” (2015, 131), an

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echo, perhaps, of the “wibbly wobbly” (BBC 2007b) nature of time and space, a rhetoric of repetition, the potential for difference, and lessons to be learned.

“I have such stories I could tell you”: Memorialising Trauma and Collective Memory in ‘Demons of the Punjab’ While ‘Rosa’ emphasises the importance of history and remembering in the context of continuing efforts against social injustice, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ focuses on personal histories, the legacies of trauma, and the transmission of stories via collective memory. Focalised primarily through companion Yaz for the first time in Whittaker’s series, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ opens at the Khan dining table, where Yaz, with her mother and sister, celebrates the birthday of their grandmother, Umbreen. Declaring herself the “first woman married in Pakistan”, Umbreen gifts each woman an heirloom from her past whilst remaining unwilling to discuss her personal history, despite Yaz’s insistence on knowing: “If you don’t tell us, we won’t know. Your life’s our heritage” (BBC 2018b). After receiving a broken watch, which Umbreen demands must “never be fixed” (BBC 2018b), Yaz persuades the reluctant Doctor to travel back to Pakistan at the time of her grandmother’s youth. Using the watch as a timestamp, the Doctor and her companions arrive in 1947 India, the day before the partition, which also happens to be the day Umbreen is due to marry her Hindu fiancé, Prem. The couple is believed to be ‘cursed’ by relatives, a sentiment shared specifically by Umbreen’s mother and Prem’s radicalised brother, Manish, who do not support the union. In his fight against such religious extremism, Prem is murdered shortly after their wedding, in yet another ‘fixed point’ in time to which the Doctor and her companions must bear witness, but not intervene. In some respects, Yaz’s curiosity despite her grandmother’s refusal to discuss her traumatic history epitomises what Isha Dubey, by way of Tzvetan Todorov, refers to as the West’s preoccupation with the “cult of memory”, whereby “traumatic memory … places the testimony of the victim at the centre of its claims of morality and legitimacy” (2021, 519). As Dubey continues, “collective traumas in South Asia such as the partition have till very recently been cloaked in layers of secrecy, denial and shame” (519), thus placing the ‘moral burden’ on survivors to share their histories and trauma. Comparatively, ‘Demons of the

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Punjab’ not only respects Umbreen’s trauma and her refusal to relive it but also positions Yaz as a conduit for and keeper of history. Framed by the importance of storytelling and remembering, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ allows for the transmission of generational histories without re-­traumatising its survivors, thus situating time travel as a powerful tool not for reinterpretation, but remembrance. Vinay Patel’s emphasis on the importance of collective memory and the memorialisation of history—a thematic focus that defines the “NuWho” (Matthews 2020, 8) era, but particularly Whittaker’s seasons—is nowhere better exemplified than in the function of the Thijarians, the terrifying ‘demons’ whose motivations are initially positioned as sinister and violent. Introduced by the Doctor as “the deadliest assassins in the known universe” (BBC 2018b), the Thijarians are revealed to have suffered a genocidal loss of their people, causing them to now “honour the lost, as we cannot honour our own”; mirroring the Doctor’s journey from warrior to peacekeeper, the Thijarians reveal that their “past is no more. We are no longer assassins. Now, we are witnesses”: Thijarian:

They [their people] died unwitnessed, unsaved. We were too late to grieve or honour them. But we who returned gave up 100 generations to sift, to remember the lost dead. The unmourned. In time it was all we knew. And now we travel beyond, seeking the unacknowledged dead across all of time and space. This is now the Thijarian mission. To bear witness to those alone. To see. To bear pain. Honour life as it passes. As each one passes, we commemorate union. The Doctor: That’s what Prem saw you do to Kunal. What you were doing to the holy man. But why here? Why now? Thijarian: Millions will perish, unseen, unknown, in the days to come here. The Doctor: The casualties of Partition. (BBC 2018b) Indeed, as Chris Allcock observes, “we expect predators, and we later [find] out that they’re historians” (2018), reminiscent of the “glass-­bodied aliens” in season ten’s ‘Twice Upon a Time’ (BBC 2017b) who “snatch people out of time and space in the instant before their death so that their lives can be recorded and preserved” (Allcock 2018). Just as Graham and the Doctor are forced to confront their whiteness in ‘Rosa’ through their witnessing of Parks’ arrest, so too is Yaz positioned as inextricably linked

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to the traumatic history of her family and, in this case, its autobiographical memory, through the acts of observing and remembering. This is significant in the context of partition remembrance, for, as Dubey contends, “despite the sheer magnitude of displacement and violence unleashed by the partition, it remains to this day, largely unmemorialized in any state sponsored, institutionalized manner in either India, Pakistan or Bangladesh” (2021, 516). The memorialisation of lives lost is further complicated by its overshadowing “by that of the larger, triumphant [narrative] of freedom from two centuries of colonial rule after a difficult but determined struggle” whereby “the voices of those who were the victims and perpetrators of partition violence remain muted or at best footnoted in the meta narrative of national liberation” (514). It is worth noting here, again, the arguments of Matthews, which detail that while the episode marks “the first historical episode of the NuWho era to focus on a non-­ Western/non-European setting”, Graham and the Doctor are “still not Othered in the narrative … [they] never question the acceptability or safety of their Whiteness as companions of colour do in other episodes” (2020, 8). Indeed, the episode grapples with the omission of England’s involvement in partition only briefly: Prem:

I don’t like this. Traipsing through forests alongside the British, looking for the enemy. I’ve done enough of that. Although maybe you’re my enemy now for the mess you just made of my country. Carving it up, slapdash, in six weeks. Gonna run home now, are you? The Doctor: I’ll make a note of your thoughts and pass ’em on to Mountbatten if I ever bump into him again. (BBC 2018b) It is this uneasy tension between historical accuracy and narrative impact that Doctor Who has always attempted to balance (often poorly), but the episode’s refusal to examine the British colonial history of partition may reflect Dubey’s point that in reframing partition outside the context of a liberation narrative, the voices of survivors are removed from the periphery and repositioned in the centre. By centralising a family torn apart by partition, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ relegates the narrative to the private sphere, not to underplay its significance or impact, but rather to emphasise these points. Through the Thijarians’ honouring of lives lost during the partition, the episode confronts the processes of remembering and

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forgetting, suggesting that both have roles to play in the healing of individuals and groups. In its rendering of the Thijarians as archivists of history, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ also challenges the traditional role of aliens as Other in SF with its representation of them as capable of “shifting in their identities” (Dixit 2012, 291), much like the eponymous Doctor. Priya Dixit notes the contradictions in Doctor Who in that aliens are often representative of external ideological threats, yet it is an alien (the Doctor) who is protecting humanity. While the series “transforms the self as human and other as alien formulation” by centralising “an alien standpoint (the Doctor’s)” (Dixit 2012, 300), episodes like ‘Rosa’ and ‘Demons of the Punjab’ instead centralise the voice of the historically Othered subject, relegating the Doctor to the margins. The effect is twofold: as discussed, it challenges the traditional white saviour trope so often capitalised upon in Doctor Who, thus reclaiming cultural storytelling and personal histories for those who have the right to share them; it also symbolises this shift into culturally sensitive storytelling via the Doctor’s own development as a (careful) wielder of extreme power. The ability of alien subjects to transform their identities, as suggested by Dixit, undoubtedly comments on the Doctor’s previous transgressions in the meddling of history, particularly in the Timelord Victorious era of David Tennant,1 where attempts to alter fixed points in time resulted in further catastrophes and the deaths of innocents. In a moment of poignant self-awareness for the series, the Thijarians tell the Doctor, “We are not Gods. Events sit as they will. We only witness. The fixed force of time cannot be stopped” (BBC 2018b). If Krasko serves as a discomforting mirror for historical amnesia and revisionism, the Thijarians reflect not only the Doctor’s misdemeanours and horrific past transgressions, but also the series’ problematic historical renderings of its God-like, white-saviour protagonist. Once again, this marks a significant shift away from the troubling revisions of history seen in episodes such as ‘The Shakespeare Code’ (BBC 2007a) towards a commemoration and remembrance of past experiences through the centralisation—not subjugation—of marginalised voices. It is radical, religious extremism, or, in the

1  This story arc took place across multiple episodes of Doctor Who, beginning with ‘The Waters of Mars’ (BBC 2009), as well as externally via multiple-platform narratives (short stories, audio dramas, etc.). It saw the Doctor claim supremacy over time and humanity in what was a significantly dark turn for the character in NuWho.

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case of ‘Rosa’, racial bigotry that form the antagonistic forces of the episodes, not the Othered alien representative of discriminatory ideologies. The ‘demons’ of Punjab, then, are not the reformed Thijarians but the human potential for violence and hatred, those confrontations with the “blurred boundaries between victims and perpetrators” in times of political upheaval and cultural turmoil (Dubey 2021, 518). While preparing for the ceremony, Prem reflects on the loss of his now-radicalised baby brother: Prem:

Graham:

… [there’s] nothing worse than when normal people lose their minds. We’ve lived together for decades. Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. And now we’re being told our differences are more important than what unites us. Like we learned nothing in the war. I don’t know how we’ll protect people when hatred’s coming from all sides. Well, all we can strive to be is good men. And you, Prem, are a good man. (BBC 2018b)

Prem’s watch acts as a symbol of this inherent goodness, but its breaking also serves as a reminder of his many losses: of his two brothers, Kunal and Manish; his marriage; his faith; and his life. It is a cursed talisman of sorts, imbued with the traumas of the past, the histories of which are then shared with Yaz as the new keeper of these memories. As Dubey contends: … it was easier for the generation that experienced it [partition] to attempt to forget it rather than remember its deep seated trauma … yet, it has in some way or the other found its way of being transmitted to subsequent generations who, temporally (and oftentimes spatially) removed from the original experience of the trauma are better able to engage, internalize, articulate and even add their own subjective layers to the narrative they inherit. (2021, 518–19)

In its use of time travel as a device for historical remembering, Doctor Who, in this instance, places descendants of trauma as active participants, thus shifting the burden of forgetting, as well as remembering, away from the traumatised survivor and onto those who can continue the process of memorialisation. Yaz struggles to understand her Nani’s reluctance in sharing her story, telling Graham, “I thought I knew my Nan’s story. She inspired me. But if this is true, if this is her life, then she lied to me” (BBC

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2018b). Graham’s response echoes the importance of privacy like the kind afforded to Ryan on meeting Martin Luther King, away from the gaze of the audience: “Yeah, but maybe she just didn’t want to tell you everything, you know? Woman’s allowed to have secrets, even from her granddaughter” (BBC 2018b). This is inevitably complicated by Yaz’s (and the audience’s) forcible involvement in Umbreen’s history, yet another moment of uneasy ethical tension with which the series and the Doctor herself seem to grapple, but the dominant effect of the episode remains centred on the witnessing of trauma in order to appropriately and accurately remember. While Prem, in his refusal of help when confronting Manish, asserts that “these are demons I have to face alone”, the Thijarians act as witnesses to such monumental instances of bravery amidst the many of “more than a million [who are] about to die” (BBC 2018b). Much like the ending of ‘Rosa’, the conclusion to ‘Demons of the Punjab’ functions pedagogically in its emphasis on the importance of respecting one’s rights to their own story, regardless of whether it is shared. In this instance, time travel not only has literally closed the vast distance between the past and present but also brings the past into the contemporary moment where it can be remembered. “I can’t even begin to imagine what you’ve dealt with” (BBC 2018b), Yaz says to Umbreen in the episode’s final scene, notwithstanding her bearing witness to Prem’s death. Here, the difference between observing and experiencing is exposed; “we will watch over him now” (BBC 2018b), the Thijarians announce at the moment of Prem’s death, taking part in the shared burden of gazing upon trauma. Yaz, now privy to her grandmother’s history, relieves Umbreen of relived experience: Umbreen: You want to know about the watch? Really? Yaz: No. Tell me another time. I love you, Nani. Umbreen: And I love you too, Bheti. (BBC 2018b) In its steering away from revisionism as a form of historical pedagogy, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ emphasises the contemporaneity of partition not only in how it “gives space to voices of victimhood, survival, even perpetration … but [also in how it] connects it to the larger narrative of post-­ colonial South Asia as a whole” rather than problematically situating the event as the “end of ‘South Asian history’” (Dubey 2021, 525). By politicising the personal, so to speak, the episode engages with notions of generational trauma in ways that respect and acknowledge the past without

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needing to reappropriate or reinterpret it for audience entertainment or understanding. At the start of the episode, the Doctor tells Yaz to “tread softly. You’re treading on your own history” (BBC 2018b), a warning that not only speaks to the logistics of time travel in one’s own timeline, but the omnipresent impacts of history via generational trauma, and the importance of carefully navigating this space.

Conclusion In their engagement with key historical moments, ‘Rosa’ and ‘Demons of the Punjab’ mark a significant shift in Doctor Who’s storytelling through their challenges to historical amnesia and problematic revisionism. As a quasi-marginal figure in these narratives, the Doctor is primarily relegated to the sidelines of the action in both episodes, emphasising the centrality of Ryan and Yaz, specifically, in culturally sensitive stories that resist both saviourism and the centrality of whiteness by directly confronting the horrors of colonial pasts. In its refusal to provide absolution for white audiences, ‘Rosa’ actively rejects acts of convenient forgetting or historical distancing, emphasising the importance of retrieving lost histories in an era characterised by the prolific dissemination of misinformation and organised forgetting. Similarly, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ shifts the moral burden away from survivors of trauma and uses time travel as a device to memorialise generational and personal histories accurately and appropriately. Through the Thijarian mission—to bear witness to and honour those who die alone—and the observing of racial prejudice by Graham and the Doctor, specifically, in ‘Rosa’, these episodes of Doctor Who make history contemporaneous and resist rewriting its most discomforting moments to ease the potential (white) guilt of viewers. Storytelling is thus positioned as a powerful tool for the remembrance and acknowledgement of the past. Rather than using time travel to disconcertingly rewrite histories, the new era of Doctor Who shifts its focus towards witnessing and accepting the past in order to move forward. It does so by confronting the horrors of imperialism and segregation and suggesting the possibilities for changed visions of the future. Competing Interests  The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

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References Allcock, Chris. 2018. Doctor Who Series 11: Demons of the Punjab review. Den of Geek, November 11. https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/doctor-­who-­ series-­11-­demons-­of-­the-­punjab-­review. Accessed 28 May 2023. Asif, Saljooq M and Saenz, Cindy. 2017. Colonial Pasts and Afrosurrealist Futures: Decolonising Race and Doctorhood in Doctor Who. Journal of Medical Humanities. New York: Springer. BBC 2007a. The Shakespeare Code. Doctor Who, Wales. ——— 2007b. Blink. Doctor Who, Wales. ——— 2009. Waters of Mars. Doctor Who, Wales. ——— 2017a. Doctor Who: Fans React to Jodie Whittaker Casting. BBC, July 17. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-­arts-­40626224. Accessed 4 May 2023. ——— 2017b. Twice Upon a Time. Doctor Who, Wales. ——— 2018a. Rosa. Doctor Who, Wales. ——— 2018b. Demons of the Punjab. Doctor Who, Wales. Brockmeier, Jens. 2002. Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory. Culture & Psychology 8 (1): 15–43. Charles, Alec. 2007. The Ideology of Anachronism: Television, History, and the Nature of Time. In Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on “Doctor Who”, ed. David Butler, 108–122. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2008. War Without End? Utopia, the Family, and the Post-9/11 World in Russell T. Davies Doctor Who. Science Fiction Studies 35: 450–465. Dixit, Priya. 2012. Relating to Difference: Aliens and Alienness in Doctor Who and International Relations. International Studies Perspectives 13 (1): 289–306. Dubey, Isha. 2021. Remembering, Forgetting and Memorialising: 1947, 1971 and the State of Memory Studies in South Asia. India Review 20 (5): 510–539. Fleiner, Carey, and Dene October, eds. 2017. Doctor Who and History: Critical Essays on Imagining the Past. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Giroux, Henry. 2020. Trump Aligns Ignorance with Bigotry as He Attempts to Rewrite History. The Conversation, September 13. https://theconversation. com/trump-­a ligns-­i gnorance-­w ith-­b igotr y-­a s-­h e-­a ttempts-­t o-­r ewrite-­ history-­145818. Accessed 4 May 2023. Gupta, Amit. 2013. Doctor Who and Race: Reflections on the Change in Britain’s Status in the International System. The Round Table 102 (1): 41–50. Guthrie, Caroline. 2019. Narratives of Rupture: Tarantino’s Counter-Factual Histories and the American Imaginary. Rethinking History 23 (3): 339–361. Higgins, David M. 2011. Toward a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction. American Literature 83 (2): 331–354.

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Hudson, Jack. 2020. Too Woke? Nope—Doctor Who is More Offensive Than Ever. The Guardian, January 9. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-­and-­ radio/2020/jan/08/doctor-­w ho-­m ore-­o f fensive-­t han-­e ver-­j odie-­ whittaker-­pc. Accessed 4 May 2023. Hughey, Matthew. 2014. The White Saviour Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jørgensen, Dolly. 2015. Remembering the Past for the Future: The Function of Museums in Science Fiction Time Travel Narratives. In Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games, ed. Matthew Jones and Joan Ormond, 118–131. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Jowett, Lorna. 2018. Doctor Who and the Politics of Casting. Journal of Popular Television 6 (2): 241–256. Loza, Susana. 2017. Remixing the Imperial Past: Doctor Who, British Slavery and the White Saviour’s Burden. In Doctor Who and History: Critical Essays on Imagining the Past, ed. Carey Fleiner and Dene October, 47–60. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Mafe, Diana Adesola. 2015. It’s the Master! (Step in Time): Hearts of Darkness and Postcolonial Paradoxes in Doctor Who. The Journal of Popular Culture 48 (6): 443–463. Matthews, Jolie C. 2020. Dominant Narratives and Historical Perspective in Time Travel Stories: A Case Study of Doctor Who. The Social Studies: 1–15. October, Dene. 2017. Journeys Through Cathay: Remediation and Televisuality in “Marco Polo”. In Doctor Who and History: Critical Essays on Imagining the Past, ed. Carey Fleiner and Dene October, 13–34. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Orthia, Lindy A. 2010. “Sociopathetic Abscess” or “Yawning Chasm”? The Absent Postcolonial Transition in Doctor Who. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45 (2): 207–225. ———., ed. 2013. Doctor Who & Race. Bristol: Intellect. Spaulding, Timothy. 2005. Reforming the Past: History, The Fantastic, and The Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University. Tranter, Kieran. 2015. Narrative and Paradoxes in Doctor Who “Time-Loop” Stories. In Time-Travel Television: The Past from the Present, The Future from the Past, ed. Sherry Ginn and Gillian I. Leitch, 223–232. Washington: Rowman and Littlefield.

CHAPTER 7

Time Travel in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Novel The Master and Margarita Anna Toom

Introduction The novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov (1891–1940) is a peculiar and original continuation of many fundamental traditions of world literature. It is one of the brightest religious literary works dedicated to the founder of Christianity. At the same time, it is a philosophical work that contributed to the literary world of Diaboliad. It is a historical creation that, with great accusatory power, showed the utopian nature of communist ideas. It is a biographical novel that portrays an eternal conflict between the artist and repressive authority. And, finally, it is a mystical and science-fictional work that not only responded to the new scientific ideas of its time but also anticipated the greatest discoveries of the future. The fate of The Master and Margarita seemed unlucky at first. The novel was published only a quarter of a century after the author’s death, first in his homeland (1966) and then in the United States (1967).

A. Toom (*) Touro University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_7

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However, this publication received an immediate and unprecedented resonance in the global community of readers. Today, the novel is still considered one of the most popular works of Russian literature. And for half a century, readers and researchers around the world have agreed that The Master and Margarita is “one of the most enigmatic novels of the 20th century” (Miyazazwa 1992, 1). Due to its versatility and multi-genre nature, the novel attracts many humanitarian researchers and allows for various approaches and interpretations (Bykov 2017). Surprisingly, the mystical-fantastic world of The Master and Margarita has been explored least of all. Perhaps the reason for this is the lack of adequate language among researchers to describe the phenomenology of Bulgakov’s novel. Meanwhile, it is hardly possible to understand the true cultural significance of the novel and explain the passion for it among people of different countries and generations without referring to its phantasmagoria. The mystical component of Bulgakov’s novel became the study subject in this work. In the novel, mysticism and fantasy are embodied in the character of Woland, who was the devil, Satan, “the Prince of Darkness” (Bulgakov 1967, 384), and “the spirit of evil and patron of shadows” (Bulgakov 1967, 368). With Woland’s appearance in the arena of events, mind-­ boggling metamorphoses of time and space, as well as other phenomena, occur that are inexplicable by common sense. In this study, an attempt is made to analyze Woland’s manipulations of time and space and interpret them, if possible, from the standpoint of scientific knowledge.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s Novel: Between Genres In world literature, the novel The Master and Margarita stands apart. Like such great literary works as The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1308–1321), Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605; 1615), Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1808; 1809), and Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol’ (1842), The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov (1929–1940) has no analogues. The novel is difficult to categorize; it breaks the basis of classification applied to it. It is not easy to determine its genre; it does not fit into the framework of some separate genre—something very significant always remains unembraced. Although time travel is one of the main attributes of Bulgakov’s novel, it cannot be categorized only as chrono-fiction. It is full of supernatural events and all sorts of miracles; thus, it is also a “mystical

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novel,” as M.  Bulgakov himself called it (Bulgakov 2002b, 8, 283; Кorablyov 2012, 27). The genre combination of fantasy and mysticism most adequately determines the nature of this literary work in the part of it that is analyzed in our research. And the presence of the devil among the human characters of the novel and the interaction of ordinary people with the inhabitants of the other world put the object of our study in a special position. The Master and Margarita is the contribution of the writer Bulgakov to the literary world of the Diaboliad. The supernatural and fantastic have always been inherent in Slavic literature, primarily Russian and Ukrainian literature. The devil is an invariable character in Slavic folklore and many authors’ literary works. The greatest mystic of Russian and Ukrainian classical literature was Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol’ (1809–1852), whom Bulgakov considered a pioneer in the genre to which he himself belonged, and he continued the theme that Gogol’ vividly embodied in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1832) and Viy (1835). We find a great interest in the irrational and fantastic in other outstanding classics of the Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: in the fairy tales by A.S. Pushkin, in M.Yu. Lermontov’s poem Demon (1842), in F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880), in A.K. Tolstoy’s story The Vampire (1841), and in L.N. Andreev’s play The Life of a Man (1907). Meanwhile, Bulgakov’s most mystical character, Woland, begins his lineage in nineteenth-century German literature. His main literary prototype is Mephistopheles from the poem Faust by Goethe; hence, the name Woland, his attire, and accessories are borrowed (Sokolov 1997, 1–2). Another Western European source of Woland is Satan’s Elixirs by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1815). All three works develop the theme of human weakness before the temptation of the devil. However, unlike the other two devils, Woland has more important social-historical tasks. Even in this, Bulgakov’s novel differs. Literary critics point to the commonality of descriptions of images and scenes in M. Bulgakov’s novel and other literary works (Кorablyov 2019, 65–78; Zerkalov 2004, 17). There is a portrait resemblance between Woland and the character of A. Bely’s symbolic novel The Moscow Eccentric (1925) (Sokolov 1996, 72–73). The majesty and royalty of Woland, the lord of otherworldly forces, are quite in the style of Lord George Gordon Byron. The opening scene of the novel is made in the tradition of Hoffmann’s philosophical and mystical fiction. And the climactic scene of

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the novel, although original, was inspired by the above-mentioned play by L. Andreev. Behind every storyline, behind every character in The Master and Margarita, there is, if not a whole literary tradition, then at least a single literary hero. This work by Bulgakov, exceptionally peculiar in execution, echoes many existing works and themes. Unique knowledge is encrypted in its text. Bulgakov’s novel has its roots in great Western European and Slavic literature. This makes its content exceptionally rich in information and magnetically attractive to readers. In the chrono-fiction genre (from the Greek χρόνος, which means time) telling about traveling in time, The Master and Margarita is on a par with such classic works as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Jack London’s Interstellar Wanderer (1915). Typically, their protagonists traveled through time in their bodies without the use of technical devices, which became so fashionable in the twentieth century. However, the heroes of M.  Twain and J.  London find themselves in another world or another time against their will and, unable to return home, build their new life there. Unlike them, Bulgakov’s Woland arrives in Moscow in the 1930s, pursuing quite conscious goals. He is the bearer of a mission of global order that no one except him—no one in the entire universe—can fulfill. And then he flies away, apparently to carry out some other mission in some other era. And so on, without end, because he is immortal. Speaking about Bulgakov’s work as a whole, one cannot fail to mention his undoubted and keen interest in chrono-fiction in its modern, technical version, for which an indispensable attribute is an apparatus that moves people in time. This was an influence of Herbert G. Wells’s Time Machine on his work. In the 1930s, simultaneously with writing The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov worked on plays, in the plots of which there were both machines that transported characters to the past and engineers who designed such machines. But in terms of their artistic and historical significance, those works concede to Bulgakov’s legendary novel.

Social-Historical Context of the Novel’s Creation Mikhail Bulgakov began writing his novel in 1929. By this time, in his country, a massive attack of proletarian ideology had taken place on all fronts. Scientific thought was expelled from Russia. In 1922–1923, the Soviet government ordered the exile of all scientists and university professors

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dissatisfied with the Soviet political regime. They were forcibly loaded onto ships and expelled from the country. Prominent philosophers, the pride of Russia, were among them. On one of these, as they are called now, “the philosopher’s ships or philosopher’s streamers” (Philosophers’ ships n.d.), the young doctor Mikhail Bulgakov was also supposed to leave his homeland. However, he fell very ill for a long time; the departure did not take place, and until the end of his days, the writer found himself locked in an environment hostile to him, in an atmosphere of life alien to him. Culture was driven from Russia. The country lost the elite of its literature. The future Nobel Prize winner, writer Ivan Bunin, as well as outstanding symbolists who represented the Silver Age of Russian poetry, emigrated to France: Vladislav Khodasevich, Konstantin Balmont, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Such names as Mikhail Chekhov and Fyodor Shaliapin graced the cinema and opera stages of the United States. This is far from the complete list of outstanding figures of Russian culture who did not reconcile themselves to the Soviet regime and were forced to leave their homeland forever. Religion was expelled from Russia. Atheism was spread aggressively and everywhere. OGPU, which is an abbreviation for the United Federal Political Directorate, became the main apparatus of political and ideological suppression, which exterminated the priests (OGPU n.d.). Throughout the country, the authorities destroyed churches. The explosion of the main temple of Russia, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, located in the center of Moscow, became the symbol of this struggle. In the early 1930s, Stalin’s “Great Terror” (Khlevnyuk 2017), unprecedented in its cruelty, began in Russia. The GULAG, an abbreviation for the Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps, was established. It became a colossal network of camps that covered the whole country where terror was practiced against their own people, and people were forced to do extremely hard physical work. A long period of mass political and ideological repression started. It was in such an environment that one of the greatest Russian writers, Mikhail Bulgakov, had to live and work. It was at that time when his most famous novel, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, was born. The novel The Master and Margarita was the writer’s response to the monstrous socio-political and ideological situation in Soviet society.

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The True Theme of the Novel The novel is called The Master and Margarita, but neither the Master nor Margarita is the central figure of the story; their names in the title rather look like a disguise. The main character in the novel is Woland, the devil. It is he who is the true engine of action. He is the main participant in all the key scenes of the plot. Without him, not a single dispute is resolved. His words are always last. Even when he is silent or remains aloof and his retinue is acting, he is still the initiator of what is happening: their pranks, outrages, and hooliganism. He is in charge, and his authority is absolute. In its first edition, the novel was exactly called The Devil in Moscow. Attempts to publish such a novel were unsuccessful. Being in despair of publishing it, Bulgakov tried to destroy it. Many years later, his widow and biographers restored the partially burned manuscript (Chudakova 2021). Another edition of the novel was called The Gospel from Satan. The Master was not yet among the characters. Here, the devil himself told the hitherto unknown story about the Roman procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, and of the execution of Jesus Christ, which he witnessed. By the way, Bulgakov brings into the story a certain Yeshua Ha-Nozri instead of Christ, but the plot is generally similar to the biblical one. The fact that the founder of Christianity is presented under an assumed name also looks like a disguise. M. Bulgakov had to be careful when living under Stalin’s rule. Why did the devil pay a visit to Moscow? The devil flew into the place where God was rejected. As the proverb says, “A holy place is never empty.” The traditional meaning of the saying is that in a holy place, where the Law of God is observed, purity and God Himself are present. And if, in the soul of a person, there is no place for God, this place is necessarily occupied by the devil and his minions. A holy place is for holiness or evil spirits, and no third option is given. Bulgakov’s devil has other goals as well, but he will not reveal them immediately. And here he is with his retinue in Moscow. This devil is unconventional. “Woland is not a classic devil!” (Zerkalov 2004, 44). He is not absolute evil; in a conversation with the atheists, he stands up for God; he cracks down on those of them who violate the norms of Christian morality: proud people, liars, opportunists, traitors, adulterers, swindlers, and thieves. True, he himself is no better: hypocritical and insidious. He brings horror and panic to the city dwellers, and his retinue, with his support, hooligans and commits acts of vandalism in stores and restaurants—real terrorists.

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Woland and his retinue stay in Moscow for only five days, but Muscovites will remember them forever. In the media, at rallies, and just on the streets for a long time, the rampancy of evil spirits will be discussed: the disappearance of the city’s inhabitants, turning them into vampires, their beheading, and other terrifying cases. Not to mention the damage inflicted by the uninvited guests on the capital’s economy.

Acquaintance at the Patriarchs’ Ponds Arrival of the Black Magic Professor At the Patriarchs’ Ponds, on a bench, two people are talking. One is Alexander Mikhailovich Berlioz, the head of MASSOLIT, which can be depicted as the Moscow Association of Writers, and the editor of the popular magazine Atheist; the other is the young and popular poet Ivan Homeless. Both deny the existence of Jesus Christ and God in general. A man passes by. He apologizes and asks their permission to take part in the discussion. The stranger’s name is Woland. This name comes from the Latin word volaticus, which means flying, and from the German faland, which means devil or Satan (Name Woland n.d.). He introduced himself as a foreign professor and a specialist in black magic, and he really works wonders. Having only appeared in Moscow, Woland already knows the names of his interlocutors and the names of their relatives. He reads their minds and predicts their future. He is sure, for example, that Berlioz will not get to the MASSOLIT’s meeting this evening, as he is planning, because he will be killed. “Interesting, in what way?” Berlioz asks ironically. “Your head will be cut off,” replies Woland (Bulgakov 1967, 13). Berlioz hurries to the nearest public telephone to report to the department in charge of visitors from abroad that he met a deranged foreigner in the Patriarchs’ Ponds Park. “But I implore you in parting, believe at least in the devil’s existence! I will not ask you for more,” says the professor of black magic to the editor of the Atheist journal in farewell (Bulgakov 1967, 47). In a few minutes, at the exit of the park, Berlioz will be hit by a tram, and his cut-off head will roll on the pavement. More than once in the following narrative, Woland will demonstrate his amazing ability to know events in advance or, on the contrary, to know the past that, based on the circumstances, he could not know. Such an astonishing skill cannot be explained otherwise than by his ability to see the

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past, present, and future at the same time. Indeed, he talks with the writers at the Patriarch’s Ponds (in the present), knows that Annushka, unfamiliar to him, already spilled sunflower oil on the stones near the park’s exit (in the past), and knows that Berlioz will slip on them and fall right under the tram (in the future). Moreover, he knows that the poet Ivan Homeless, trying to comprehend everything that happened in front of his eyes on this day, will eventually fall into a deep depression and become a patient in a psychiatric clinic. Especially impressive is that Woland easily moves from one era to another: from ancient Judea to Germany during the Enlightenment, and from there to Soviet Russia under Stalin’s dictatorship. Woland is omnipresent. To explain this phenomenon from the commonplace point of view is impossible because, according to the commonplace approach, time is linear. Metaphorically, time is like a flowing river that takes away into the distance, into the past, everything experienced by an individual, and leaves traces of what happened at best in his or her memory. Time moves by and disappears. At the end of the 1920s, when M.  Bulgakov began working on the novel The Master and Margarita, the European community of educated people found out about A. Einstein’s discovery. His special theory of relativity offered an innovative approach to the concept of time (Einstein 2017, 16–19; Hawking 1996, 23, 34; Miller 2018; Minkowski 2012, 30). According to this theory, space and time are inseparable from each other; they exist in unity, compounding a four-dimensional structure. Time behaves just like space; everything that has occurred has its own coordinates in this space-time. Therefore, time is not something that moves within the universe or apart from it. Time is woven into the universe’s fabric. This universe is a giant block that contains everything anywhere and anytime. In such a universe, the past, present, and future exist simultaneously, and all are real. This means that once an event has occurred, it continues to exist somewhere in space-time. What happened long ago is just as real as today’s events; it is simply inaccessible to our perception because now we are in a different part of space-time (Whitrow 1972, 138; Skow 2015, 4–5). This theory helps to explain why Woland easily reads the past of people he communicates with and just as easily predicts their future. The universe is open to Woland. He is in direct contact with this spatiotemporal reality that is inaccessible to us. His perception is different from the perception of

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ordinary people: he sees each event and each individual in the context of space-time related to them, that is, on a deeper level. The Journey to Judea Now let us return to the events preceding the death of Berlioz. Berlioz tactfully reprimands his younger colleague: the poem that Ivan has written for the Atheist magazine is not entirely ideologically correct, because Jesus Christ sometimes appears alive in his poem. But it is an erroneous point of view, as Berlioz states, and it has already been proven by many prominent scholars of the past. Moreover, everything written in the Gospel is not true, and Jesus was a fictitious figure. He, as well as God himself, did not exist. Woland, who is allowed to take part in their conversation, argues for the existence of God, and the more his interlocutors resist, the more irrefutable (from his point of view) arguments the stranger brings. He mentions that he discussed this issue with a German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, at breakfast in the eighteenth century and, more than 2000 years ago, saw Pontius Pilate, the fifth Roman procurator of Judea, who issued a decree on the execution of Jesus Christ, and even witnessed that execution on Bald Mountain. Since the interlocutors refuse to believe it, he shows them how it happened. The poet passed his hand over his face, like a man who had just regained consciousness, and saw that it was evening at the Patriarch’s Ponds. The water in the pond had turned black, and a light boat was gliding over it. […] “But how is it that I never noticed while he managed to spin out a whole tale?” thought Homeless with astonishment. “And suddenly this evening! … Or perhaps it was not he who told the tale, perhaps I simply fell asleep and dreamed it all?” (Bulgakov 1967, 44)1

Neither Ivan nor Berlioz understand what has happened to them. Actually, the stranger miraculously transferred them to the past, so they appeared in Judea and saw with their own eyes the one whose existence they refused to acknowledge. To explain this miracle, we can again turn to the knowledge that specialists have accumulated. 1  The quotations used in this chapter literally correspond to the original text of the translation by Mirra Ginzburg (1967). The rules of punctuation and syntax in them sometimes differ from today’s requirements.

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Woland has imperceptibly induced them into a hypnotic trance. He has impeccably mastered this method of influencing people—not only for the purpose of deception but also for the purpose of their speedy assimilation of knowledge. While in a deep trance, they can see Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate. Their journey to Judea is a travel through time, not just within external space but within the space of their individual selves, the space that stretches far back into the ages. In the mid-1920s, ideas of hypnosis and psychoanalysis became widespread among Russian intellectuals, to which the writer Bulgakov belonged. These ideas were that, in addition to consciousness, the human psyche contains the unconscious, the volume of which greatly exceeds the volume of conscious processes (as applied to the psyche, volume is a metaphor). The unconsciousness of each person is the richest receptacle not only for individual memory (Freud 1989, 425–428). It also stores the accumulated experience of all humankind (Jung 1969, 48). This storehouse of knowledge within us is not available to us in the ordinary state of consciousness, but in neurophysiological research or with the help of skillful regression hypnotherapy, one can reach the deep layers of the psyche (Harris 1969, 25–33; Newton 2004, 83, 280; Tart 1972, 1203). However, in the scientific world, the attitude toward regression hypnotherapy is ambiguous (Andrade 2017). In the second half of the twentieth century, already after the death of M. Bulgakov, neurophysiological methods, as well as new methods of hypnotherapy, confirmed the validity of psychoanalytic theories and the possibility of penetrating into the deepest layers of the human unconscious. Thus, the author of The Master and Margarita anticipated a discovery in the field of the human psyche’s functioning and expanded the very concept of time travel, which now is also a travel into the depths of one’s own psyche.

Chasing The ambulance takes away the headless body of Berlioz. Woland and his retinue are leaving the Patriarch’s Ponds. But Ivan Homeless, suspecting that the professor was somehow responsible for the catastrophe, decides to catch up with him. He runs after him through the park, down poorly lit deserted lanes, and finally along the wide central streets of Moscow. And although he runs quite fast, he fails to catch up with Woland.

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This episode is reminiscent of mathematical problems that schoolchildren around the world solved in large numbers in middle school. This is what the wording might look like: Two pedestrians, W and I, are moving along one segment of the path. W started his journey earlier and was already some distance away by the time I entered this path. W is moving at a constant speed, but I is accelerating all the time. Can I catch up with W? By setting the length of the path, W’s constant speed, and the nature of the acceleration with which I moves, as well as compiling and solving the corresponding algebraic equation, one can positively answer the question posed. By accelerating his running, I will catch up with W. However, there is an important difference between the novel’s episode and a standard mathematical problem. The fact is that Bulgakov’s characters move under changing environmental conditions, which does not happen in reality. Although Ivan speeds up, he doesn’t get an inch closer to his target. He runs, runs faster and faster, runs with all his might, but remains in one place. This pursuit is doomed to failure because time flows differently for Ivan and for Woland. Woland simply slows down, if not completely stops, the time of his pursuer. Thus, he has proven to the self-­ confident poet once again that not everything happens as planned. It is also noteworthy that, in pursuit of Woland, Ivan makes a long journey through the center of Moscow in an incredibly brief time. “Disturbed as he was, Ivan was nevertheless astonished by the unnatural speed of the chase. Twenty seconds had not elapsed …” (Bulgakov 1967, 54). That is how Woland teases him, demonstrating tricks with time and involving the already shocked poet in his game that drives one crazy. Subsequently, while in a psychiatric clinic, Ivan will tell the doctors, “Well, then, this dreadful character (and he is lying about being a consultant) possesses extraordinary powers!… For example, you chase him, but you can never catch up with him” (Bulgakov 1967, 100). They do not believe Ivan, taking the story as a manifestation of his sick imagination and delirium. They diagnose Ivan with schizophrenia, and the poet will remember that the professor of black magic also uttered this word on that ill-fated evening at the Patriarch’s Ponds. Meanwhile, the story that happened to Ivan does not look so fantastic in light of the scientific discoveries that happened much after the novel was finished. What looked absurd a hundred years ago may be given a scientific (to some extent) interpretation today due to the evolution of the concept of time and the discovery of the quantum world.

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It should be noted that new and unusual ideas about space and time were penetrating the works of the most prominent representatives of literature and art. Here are some examples. In the 1910–1920s, at European universities, the book Space and Time by a famous German mathematician and teacher of A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, was widely discussed. Soon, it was reflected in the poetry of M. Tsvetaeva, an outstanding Russian poet. In her poems, the theme of time appears in its new perspective and with new terms, such as “meter and measure,” “metric space,” and “fourth dimension” (Tsvetaeva 1928, 68). We also find the influence of a new vision of time on the artistic work of Salvador Dali, a great Spanish artist and one of the most famous representatives of surrealism. The clock as a symbol of time becomes one of the most significant objects, both artistic and philosophical, in his work. On his canvases, the clock is not a monolith—it is flexible, whimsically bends, and gently creeps along the surface of objects, conveying to us the artist’s idea about time as changeable and elusive. His paintings Persistence of Memory (1931) and Melting Clock (1954) are considered eternal masterpieces. However, in no other work of world literature and art have the ideas of the quantum nature of space and time been so widely embodied as in the novel The Master and Margarita. In the real world, time is objective and flows the same for everyone. It moves only in one direction—forward—and cannot turn back. The passage of time is inexorable, and it is impossible to influence it. These are the laws of the macroworld described more than 300 years ago by Isaac Newton, an outstanding English physicist and mathematician and a dominant figure of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century. However, the power of Newtonian laws ceased to be absolute with the discovery of the microworld at the beginning of the twentieth century. The microworld consists of atoms. The particles of an atom are the true and deepest foundation of our universe. They form an invisible, quantum world that has its own laws, and time behaves differently in it. What happened in this episode is dual: it has the authenticity of our lives as well as reflecting quantum life. The action is both realistic and unrealistic. Moscow is described as it was in the 1930s; Ivan and Woland are moving along the same streets in the same direction, one after the other, but time flows differently for them—everyone has their own. Since the professor of black magic controls time, Ivan will never catch up with him. In the years of the novel’s creation, Bulgakov could only endow Woland with such a privilege by the power of his own authorial imagination—quantum time was not sufficiently studied in those years. Only quite

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recently, in the third millennium, in a popular summary of an article published in Physics Review, contemporary scientists have informed readers that they have finally learned to change quantum time: speed up, slow down, and even reverse it (Navascues 2017).

The Sinister Apartment No. 50 In the room of Styopa Likhodeev, the director of the Variety Theater, everything is upside down: chairs with clothes are lying on the floor, shoes are on the table, and here are also dirty glasses and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. Styopa is sleeping heavily after drinking at the Griboyedov House, a writers’ restaurant. When he opens his eyes, he sees a stranger in his room. The stranger declares that he is a black magician and that Styopa signed a performance contract with him yesterday and even prepaid him. Styopa is at a loss; he does not remember this. He does not understand where these monstrous lapses of memory came from. He is scared and calls the Variety Theater. With a trembling voice, he appoints the performance of the black magician. From that moment on, strange things begin to happen. Suddenly, a huge black cat appears, which walks and speaks like a human being. Just as unexpectedly, another subject appears: he is long as a pole, wears a pince-­ nez, and talks about Styopa’s unworthy behavior at work: lazy, sexually abusive, irresponsible, and underqualified. Styopa is at a loss: “How could he find out about this?” Both guests ominously mock him: “Such a loser became a director?!!” “This is my retinue,” Woland explains to a speechless Styopa. “And the retinue needs to live somewhere. There are too many of us here. It looks like you’re the one who needs to leave” (Bulgakov 1967, 93). Then something incredible occurs. A small, red-haired, fanged man comes straight out of the mirror and with the words “Permit me, Messire, to throw him the hell out of Moscow?” (Bulgakov 1967, 92) clicks Styopa on the head. And then the bedroom began to spin around Styopa. His head stuck the doorpost and the thought flashed through his mind as he lost consciousness, “I’m dying. …” But he did not die. Opening his eyes a little, he found himself sitting on something made of stone. He heard a rushing noise. When he opened his eyes properly, he saw that the noise came from the sea and that the waves

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rocked at his very feet. In short, he was sitting at the very end of a jetty, with a dazzling blue sky over him and a white city on a mountainside behind him. (Bulgakov 1967, 92–93)

The apartment in which Woland settles with his retinue has a bad reputation. Residents have always disappeared from there. Let us turn to the real events in Russia in those years. These were the 1930s: political processes had already begun in the country; the authorities were getting rid of counter-revolutionary elements. So, maybe the vanished tenants were just arrested? Perhaps, but not in the case of Styopa being thrown out 850 miles from Moscow to the southern city of Yalta, near the Black Sea, and not in the case of his former neighbor, Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, who suddenly perished at the Patriarch’s Ponds. However, people from apartment No. 50 not only disappear, but they also appear in it in a strange way. Neither Woland nor his retinue needs a door to enter; they get in through the mirrors. In esoteric teaching, a mirror is a passage to the other world. Since all members of Woland’s retinue are natives of the other world, their arrival through the looking glass becomes clear. And even after the apartment was sealed by NKVD and the police, voices, noises, and the sound of glass were heard from there. In a word, there are no official residents, but life in their apartment continues. And this is not without the help of uninvited guests. Woland and his assistants got rid of Styopa Likhodeev when they skillfully teleported him hundreds of kilometers from Moscow. The word teleportation comes from the Greek τῆλε, which means far, and the Latin portare, which means carry (Teleportaziya n.d.). By definition, “it is the instantaneous movement of an object at any distance at a speed faster than the speed of light” (Kaku 2012, 122). Theoretically, teleportation is possible where space-time is bent and compressed, forming a tunnel through which an object moves from one point of the Earth to another and from one universe to another (QWERTY n.d.). However, in practice, according to scientists, human teleportation is impossible (Davis 2004). Humans simply would not physically survive (Kaku 2012, 139; 149–151). Nowadays, even in successfully developing quantum teleportation, it is not the object itself that moves, but its state (Hu et al. 2023, 339). The original is destroyed when moving. When teleporting a human being according to the quantum principle, only his clone will arrive at the endpoint (Polikarpov et al. 2015; Sharifov 2016).

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Meanwhile, in science fiction, of all the incomprehensible phenomena, teleportation of people and objects is one of the most common objects of depiction and one of the most attractive authors’ tricks for readers and spectators. In Bulgakov’s novel, Woland and his retinue now and then suddenly appear and then just as suddenly disappear. At the wave of their hand, various objects arise from the air, and then, due to uselessness, they dissolve into space. What is this, if not teleportation? And we observe such travels in space-time in every episode of the plot. As for apartment No. 50, by all indications, it is a portal to other dimensions. Soon, we will be sure of this.

In the Variety Theater The evening of the performance in a variety show has arrived. The foreign celebrity appears before the audience in a stylish long tailcoat and a black half-mask, accompanied by Koroviev-Fagot and the tom cat Behemoth, which amazes and greatly pleases the Muscovites waiting for him. Surprisingly, Woland does not perform that evening; his companions do. He is only present, occasionally instructing them. However, his mere presence is mystical. “An armchair for me,” Woland commanded in a low voice, and at the same instant a chair appeared on the stage, from out of nowhere, and the magician sat down in it. (Bulgakov 1967, 137)

Objects appear and disappear at his word, or even at will. He teleports them. Fagot and Behemoth demonstrate wonders, which they call simple tricks: Fagot and the tom walked away along the footlights to opposite sides of the stage. Fagot snapped his fingers, cried with a devil-may-care manner, “Three, four!” and plucked a deck of cards from the air. He shuffled it and sent the cards out like a ribbon to the tom. The tom caught the ribbon and sent it back—a hissing satiny snake. Fagot opened his mouth like a fledgling bird and swallowed it, card by card. (Bulgakov 1967, 137)

This is an extraordinary and very impressive card trick. According to all the laws of physics, no matter how simple or complex the trajectory is, cards flying in the space of the stage, sooner or later under the force of

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gravity, must fall down. But they don’t fall down. It seems that cards cannot stay in the air for so long while in motion, drawing a complex and ordered figure and heading to a precisely given end point in space. But they do it. For such a trick, sleight of hand is not enough; what is important here is that the gravity of the manipulated objects is overcome. The cards drawing the sign of infinity in the air arrive from Koroviev-­ Fagot to Behemoth, and the cat sends them on a return flight along the same complex trajectory. It is not just levitation, because, by definition, levitation (from the Latin levitas, which means lightness) is floating in the air and not caused by the initial push. However, Koroviev-Fagot gave the cards their initial movement. One can conclude that the effective card trick in The Master and Margarita is the fruit of the author’s fantasy stimulated by such a fabulous image, for example, as a magic carpet. But this solution to the problem would be too simple. Knowing Bulgakov’s ingenuity as a mystic from his other works (Heart of a Dog, Fatal Eggs), we dare to go further. It looks like Bulgakov endowed his characters with the ability of telekinesis. Telekinesis derives from the Ancient Greek τηλε, which means far off, and κίνησις, meaning movement, and can be defined as “the supposed ability to move objects at a distance by mental power” (Telekinesis n.d.). Studies conducted on prominent spiritualists of the past suggest that they had the ability to transform their power of thought into the electromagnetic energy of the body (Gnevka and Gang 2009, 46–47). Possibly, they could also create invisible rays and with them, like with hands, manipulate objects at a distance both on the ground and in the air. This is a way to make objects fly. In recreational tricks, telekinesis and levitation are often combined. Man has always dreamed of overcoming space in flight. One of the embodiments of this dream is the creation of aviation, rocket science, and astronautics. Another, more ancient, archaic, and, according to our current impression, somewhat mystical one, is levitation. The levitation of objects and technical devices has been a successfully developing area of science and practice for many decades. Magnetic levitation technology is used by engineers to create technical devices and high-speed magnetic levitation trains (Кusnezov 2019). Technology has been developed for the levitation of objects using invisible ultrasonic waves and a laser beam, which opens up great prospects for the use of levitation in medicine. Journalists claim that nowadays scientists are ready to start creating technology for human levitation (Khizhnyak 2018).

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But let’s get back to the variety show. When the stage trick is over, the deck of cards ends up in the pocket of one of the spectators. Koroviev-­ Fagot has teleported it there to the applause of an excited audience. The manipulation of the cards as well as banknotes pouring into the audience from the ceiling—all these inscrutable events captivated the spectators. Generally, it is worth noting that in the 1920s–1930s, an interest in magic was enormous among Soviet folks as well as in their government. At that time, the Soviet government headed the study of the occult sciences. In order to hold on to power, they wanted to put ancient civilizations’ knowledge at their service. In the early 1920s, by order of Stalin, a secret laboratory was created at OGPU, which began work on developing technologies for controlling the masses. The goal of the project was to provide total control and manipulation of the minds of millions of people. A secret esoteric society was being created, and a secret expedition was being equipped to the energy centers of ancient civilizations—to India and Tibet. Needless to say, how valuable in such a country specialists are who know the art of hypnosis. Moscow in those years was impressed by the sessions of mass hypnosis performed by Ornaldo.2 They prompted Mikhail Bulgakov, according to literary critics, to introduce the spectacular episode in the Variety Theater into the novel The Master and Margarita (Groznova 1991, 25). In the midst of the performance, Koroviev-Fagot invites the audience to open a shop for women. And the stage turns into a huge department store. The female spectators get the opportunity to exchange their old clothes and accessories freely for new goods that, as Fagot announces, “arrived from Paris” (Bulgakov 1967, 142). Women, fascinated by amazing dresses, shoes, and handbags, which they have never seen in a poor, half-starved, and half-ruined country, rush to the stage for gifts and return 2  Nikolai Alexandrovich Smirnov (his artistic pseudonym was Ornaldo, 1880–?) was a medical doctor, psychiatrist, and outstanding hypnotist who studied the occult sciences and practices with the monks of Tibet. In the 1920s, he performed in Russian circuses, demonstrating mass hypnosis as well as the phenomena of levitation, telekinesis, and telepathy. In the 1930s, he was recruited by the Soviet secret services to participate in the political trials of “enemies of the people” (with trumped-up charges and brutal reprisals against advanced members of society to intimidate the masses). Soon, he disappeared. His further fate is unknown; in the archives of the OGPU/NKVD secret services, information about him, as stated, has not been preserved. (In the opinion of the author, access to his data is still closed due to extreme secrecy.)

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to the auditorium in luxurious dresses, in formal office suits, in pajamas with dragons, and in fashionable shoes and hats. However, after the performance is over, all these wonderful Parisian clothes disappear, dissolve into space, and hundreds of women in underwear, accompanied by police whistles, rush through the streets of Moscow, try to hide, and find help. The trick with this shop is a hypnotic session, similar to that at the Patriarch’s Ponds; only in the variety show, a change occurred in the audience’s collective consciousness. It was mass hypnosis. Hundreds of spectators all traveled together into the world of their illusions and dreams. The return to reality was disappointing. The master of ceremonies who tried to prevent the audience from being deceived and publicly called that performance mass hypnosis was punished: Woland’s companions, at the request of the audience, tore off his head (true, then, at the request of the same audience, they put his head back on and revived the victim). Woland and his companions neutralize everyone who could expose them. These guests of the capital skillfully eliminate the administration of the Variety Theater: one is teleported, another is turned into a vampire, and the third flees, fearing for his life and career. Then they disturbed the peace and order in the city. For a long time, the police will investigate cases of fraud with women’s clothing, and the financial services of the city will calculate the losses from thousands of banknotes that have entered circulation and eventually turned into plain paper. The inhabitants of the capital are discouraged and frightened because there is no protection from the devilry. And now, Woland and his company will begin to fulfill the main task for which he arrived in Moscow.

Margarita’s Visit to Woland Flight to the Witches’ Sabbath On Friday evening, Margarita smears herself thickly with the cream prepared for her by Azazello, which makes her body weightless and invisible. When Azazello calls at 10 o’clock, she is ready for the agreed-upon travel. “Time to start out,” said Azazello […] “As you fly over the gate, shout ‘I am invisible!’ Fly a bit over the city, for practice, and then go south, out of town, directly toward the river. You are expected!” (Bulgakov 1967, 252)

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That night, Margarita becomes a witch. Now, she can be introduced to Woland. A flying automobile appears in the forest and speeds her off to Moscow. After all the wonders of the evening, she guesses to whom she is being taken. There are no doubts or fears. After all, Azazello has made it clear that she will be helped to see her Master again. For the sake of love, Margarita is ready to sell her soul to the devil. The flight over Moscow of a naked Margarita on a broomstick is one of the most extravagant episodes of the novel. In Slavic folk tales, the old, ferocious-looking, and vicious Baba Yaga flies on a broomstick. (In Slavic languages, baba usually means grandmother, and Yaga refers to an evil woman.) In Bulgakov’s novel, it is a young and beautiful woman. And the delight that she experiences, having broken away from the Earth, and the freedom that she feels seeing Moscow far below her involuntarily lead us to the thought that there is maybe something yet unknown to us in human nature. It seems that of all the fantastic and supernatural phenomena, levitation is the most controversial. If human teleportation is typically perceived by the human community as a science fiction phenomenon, then there is no unequivocal opinion about levitation. Levitation (from the Latin levitas, which means lightness) is a phenomenon in which an object floats in space without visible support and the surface of the earth or water does not gravitate toward it (Levitaziya n.d.). On the one hand, it is well known that under certain circumstances, some individuals have the ability to become weightless and levitate. There are many stories and testimonies about levitation and levitants. Some cases were recorded and preserved for posterity; others were not. But it is noteworthy that information about such an ability in some individuals comes from a wide variety of cultures and beliefs. Buddha and Jesus Christ, the founders of outstanding philosophical and religious trends, had the ability to levitate. An indirect evidence of Jesus Christ’s levitation is the famous painting Transfiguration (1516–1520) by Raphael (Raffaello Santi, 1483–1520), kept in the Vatican Pinacoteca nowadays (The Transfiguration n.d.). The great saints of the Catholic as well as Orthodox churches were levitants, among them the Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and the Russian hieromonk Seraphim of Sarov (1754–1833) (Gnevka and Gang 2009, 8). From ancient times to this day, Indian yogis and Tibetan monks have been levitating (Gnevka and Gang 2009, 9). Also, cases of levitation in quite ordinary people are known (Gnevka and Gang 2009, 50). It should be

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noted that some specialists well documented the cases of St. Giuseppe of Cupertino (1603–1663) and the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Hume3 by visual images (drawings, photographs) and texts (reports, memoirs) (Gnevka and Gant 2009, 45–47; Grosso 2016, 25; Makshakov 2023). One of the most famous writers of nineteenth-century England described the Hume phenomenon, and it went down in history as irrefutable proof of the existence of levitation—not a trick or an illusion, but a real human ability (Sir Conan Doyle 2021, 137–155). On the other hand, the modern scientific community is still pessimistic regarding human levitation—it is believed that there are no sufficient justifications for recognizing such a fact. In other words, levitation goes beyond the modern scientific picture of the world. Without going into the details of this dispute, let’s see what the author of the novel knows about levitation. Flying stimulates a feeling of space in Margarita. All she knows is that the river is somewhere in the southern direction. But there is more than one river in the southern suburbs of Moscow! Margarita has neither a map, nor a compass, nor a navigator, and yet she has unmistakably found the destination needed. Apparently, she is flying like a bird because the magnetic fields of the earth lead her (Wiltschko and Wiltschko 2002, 445). This innate compass is inherent in all living beings (as a medic and biologist, the author knew that). Only humanity, conquering nature for the sake of civilization, gradually loses such an ability. Flying returns the awareness of unity with nature to Margarita. Although she has arrived at the witches’ Sabbath, she does not take part in it. She is greeted warmly and treated with great respect. Everyone knows who she is and bows to her, but does not approach. Rites and rituals are performed for her but without her. She spends the whole evening in solitude, enjoying nature by swimming in the forest lake and wandering through the tall forest grass. This is her initiation into witchcraft. Flying brings a sense of inner freedom to Margarita, which she has almost lost living with an unloved husband in an unloved country and in 3  Daniel Dunglas Hume (1833–1886) became famous for his mysterious gift of clairvoyance, accurate predictions, reading people’s thoughts, and his outstanding ability to levitate. Among his admirers were the European monarchs of Spain, Portugal, France, Greece, Sweden, and Russia. Among the scientists who studied the Hume phenomenon were a famous Italian physician and criminologist, Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), and an outstanding Russian chemist, Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov (1828–1886) (Medium Daniel Dunglas Hume n.d.).

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constant fear. The years of Stalinist terror were passing when sincere manifestations of feelings could cost a person his life. People were afraid to interact and talk to each other because it was dangerous to express one’s opinion; any careless word or bold joke could lead to arrest. Feelings of space, nature, and inner freedom—it would seem not to be too much. However, these feelings, being stimulated by primeval mechanisms of the psyche, are so powerful that a rapid change of identity occurs. The ability to fly quickly transforms Margarita. Another, no less striking example of such a transformation is Natasha, Margarita’s housekeeper. Imitating Margarita, she also smears herself with magic cream and, following the hostess, arrives at the witches’ sabbath and then at the ball of Satan, where she serves her hostess, who performs the difficult mission of the queen of the ball. When the ball is over, Natasha comes to Woland’s residence. “Darling Margarita Nikolaevna,” Natasha said pleadingly and dropped to her knees. “Persuade them,” she looked sideways at Woland, “to let me remain a witch.” […] Margarita turned a questioning eye to Woland. He nodded. Then Natasha threw herself at Margarita’s neck, kissed her loudly, and flew out of the window with a triumphant cry. (Bulgakov 1967, 303)

Even if Margarita’s and Natasha’s flights are just fiction, then their ability to become invisible goes far beyond the scope of fairy tales. In 2019, the media reported that the Canadian company HyperStealth Biotechnology, known as a manufacturer of camouflage uniforms, had developed a special material for the military that refracted light around objects (tanks, fighter jets, and people), creating the effect of invisibility (Ageev 2019; Gayle 2012). Acquaintance with the Devil By midnight, Margarita arrived in apartment No. 50, that very sinister apartment that Styopa Likhodeev had teleported from the day before. What Margarita, a new and objective person, could think about and feel in that apartment is quite remarkable: The first thing that struck Margarita was the dense darkness she found herself in. It was as dark as in an underground cave, and she involuntary

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clutched at Azazello’s cape, afraid of stumbling. But then a tiny light, as of an icon lamp, blinked somewhere far above and began to draw nearer. […] They began to ascend a wide staircase, and it seemed to Margarita that the stairs would never end. She was astonished that a foyer of an ordinary Moscow apartment could contain this extraordinary, invisible, but quite palpable, endless staircase. But the ascent was finally over, and Margarita understood that she was on a landing. (Bulgakov 1967, 267)

Here, Koroviev-Fagot is waiting for them with a lamp in his hand. He invites Margarita to follow him. Margarita finds herself in a huge, vast hall with columns that are also dark, which she is able to see thanks to the Koroviev lamp. No less remarkable is the explanation that Margarita receives in response to her question about the strange apartment: “What strikes me most is where you found space for all of this.” She swept her hand to emphasize the immensity of the hall. Koroviev smirked sweetly, […] “The simplest thing of all!” he said. “Those who are familiar with the fifth dimension can easily expand a place to the required proportions. I’ll tell you more, dear madame, they can stretch space the devil knows how far!” (Bulgakov 1967, 268)

If earlier the interpretation of the novel from the standpoint of some postulates of the theory of relativity and quantum physics might still seem not entirely appropriate, then the last episode already leaves no doubt about the legitimacy of such an approach. Since the character knows about the fifth dimension, the author undoubtedly knew about it too. It can be stated that Mikhail Bulgakov knew about and used the scientific discoveries of his contemporaries when creating the plot of The Master and Margarita.4 According to all indications, apartment No. 50 is a portal connecting different points in space-time. Woland’s assistants led Margarita through a 4  There is more evidence of M. Bulgakov’s familiarity with the newest scientific theory of space and time. In his play Bliss (1934), an engineer-inventor of the time machine tells others that “time is a fiction, that there is no past, present, or future, but everything exists.” (Bulgakov 2002a, 7, 530). In his other play, Ivan Vasilyevich (1935), another engineer-­ inventor tries to explain to his neighbors, “I am just conducting my time travel experiment. However, how can I explain to you the concept of time? After all, you don’t know what four-dimensional space and movement are” (Bulgakov 2002a, 7; 587). (Translated from Russian by A. Toom.)

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tunnel connecting the world of the living with the world of the dead. In physics, such a tunnel is called a “wormhole,” which is a transition through the fabric of space-time (Britannica 2023). And at the very top, there is an immense hall, which, one must guess, is already the world of the dead. This tunnel for the transition from one dimension to another, as Bulgakov depicts it, is a metaphor. A wormhole is a theoretical phenomenon. Physicists state, “Wormholes are hypothetical entities that show up in theoretical analyses of Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity). Nobody has yet seen a wormhole, nor are we certain that they exist, but they seem to show up so easily when we do calculations that many physicists suspect that they might actually be” (Holman 1997). Scientists are unanimous that if a human being got into a wormhole, he could not survive. The electromagnetic forces that arise in such tunnels would simply tear a human apart or smear him along the walls. In scientific and popular articles, wormholes are depicted in a constructivist style and are very colorful. But no one knows what they actually look like because no one has been inside them. For Bulgakov, this is a huge, very dark space with a staircase leading up. The author made up for the missing knowledge with his imagination. Margarita finds herself at Woland’s residence. She sees amazing things there. First of all, Woland’s unusual appearance, especially his eyes, which are impossible to forget: “The right eye, with a golden spark in its depths, piercing anyone it turned on to the bottom of his soul; and the left one, empty and black, is like the narrow eye of a needle, like the opening to a bottomless well of darkness and shadows” (Bulgakov 1967, 271). Remarkably, Woland’s left eye, as it is described by Bulgakov, is also like a portal to other dimensions. One could lose the feeling of reality or dissolve into space and time just by staring into such eyes. When Margarita made her journey to Woland’s residence, she ended up in the world of the dead. According to everyday consciousness, this situation is strange and dissonant. However, this contradiction is easy to overcome if we look at what is happening from the standpoint of quantum science. According to the laws of the quantum world, Margarita, here as “Schrödinger’s cat,” is both alive and dead at the same time (Korjimanov 2017; Grey 2020, 59–64; Zeeya 2020). We are talking about an experimental model of quantum physics that allowed scientists to conclude that an object of the quantum world, being in quantum superposition, can be simultaneously in two different states.

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Some objects in Woland’s bedroom that struck the guest’s imagination are Schrödinger’s cats as well. The alive chessmen put on a performance after Behemoth lost the game to Woland. The alive globe that stands next to Woland’s bed on a heavy pedestal, with one side glowing in the sun. Yes, yes, in the world of the dead, that globe reflects the sun! This is what Woland says about his magical globe: “It’s a clever little artifact. Frankly speaking, I don’t like to listen to news reports on the radio. […] My globe is much more convenient, especially since I must have exact information on events. Take, for example, this piece of land, lapped by the ocean on one side. Look how it begins to glow. A war has started there. If you look closely, you will see the details as well.” Margarita bent over the globe, and the square of land expanded, became infused with many colors, and turned into something like a relief map. Then she saw a strip of river and a village beside it. A house, which at first had been the size of a pea, grew and became as big as a matchbox. Suddenly, its roof flew up into the air without a sound, together with a puff of black smoke, and the walls collapsed, so that nothing was left of the two-story box except a little pile of black smoke pouring from it. Bringing her eye still nearer, Margarita saw a tiny female figure lying on the ground […]. (Bulgakov 1967, 274)

Woland’s animated globe is an advanced analogue of today’s mobile communication. This globe allows its owner to travel in space-time, not physically but mentally and speculatively, to receive unusually extensive information at a distance. Woland is an eternal traveler in space-time. His unique globe informs him about where riots, revolutions, and wars are happening, and therefore, he is always on his way to one or the other side of the Earth. The planet of humans is like a toy for him. His power extends far beyond its borders.

Satan’s Great Ball Every year, in different cities around the world, on the day of the spring full moon, Woland gives a ball. Since Woland is not married, a hostess is needed. According to tradition, it should be a native of the city of royal blood named Margarita. Of all the Margaritas found in Moscow, only one is suitable—she is our heroine, and she has agreed to take on this responsibility. From that moment on, everyone calls her none other than Queen or Queen Margo.

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Preparing Margarita for the reception of guests, Koroviev comments that prestigious guests will come, whose power in their own time was extremely great. Koroviev explains to her the rules of etiquette for dealing with their guests: But suddenly something crashed below in the huge fireplace, and a gibbet jumped out of it, with a dangling corpse, one half of which had already crumbled away. The corpse broke from the rope, struck the floor, and an astonishingly handsome black-haired man in tails and patent leather shoes leaped out of it. Next, a half-decayed small coffin slid out of the fireplace, its lid fell off, and another corpse rolled out of it. The man stepped over gallantly and offered it his arm. The second corpse formed itself into a vivacious woman in black slippers and black feathers on her head. Then both hastened up the stairs. […] At this moment a headless skeleton with one arm torn off appeared from the fireplace, flung itself down and became a man in a dress coat. (Bulgakov 1967, 280–281)

Margarita hears that somewhere a clock is striking midnight, which expired a long time ago in her account. A river of guests flows from the fireplace below, and there is no end to this river. “Kings, dukes, chevaliers, suicides, poisoners, hanged men, procuresses, jailers, cardsharps, executioners, murderers, pimps, informers, traitors, madmen, spies, and seducers” (Bulgakov 1967, 284). In the huge hall, music is playing for them, everyone is dancing, and in the side rooms, waterfalls of champagne and pools filled with brandy are waiting for them. Some indulge in habitual vicious pleasures, and some settle scores. To them, the inhabitants of hell burning in eternal fire, Satan gives rest for one night a year. This ball is Woland’s game with time, unique in its ingenuity. Hosts and guests meet and greet each other, but time moves differently for them. Woland and his retinue are in all times and dimensions simultaneously. For Margarita, this is a journey from one dimension to the other and back to reality and the future. Having successfully completed her time travel, she will finally meet the Master. The guests at the ball are especially interesting from the point of view of their time perspective. Time flows for them into the past, when they turn from ashes, skeletons, and half-decayed bodies into human beings, as they were before death—like a film reel scrolled in reverse. However, their time flows into the future as well when they arrive every year at Satan’s ball. Thus, on the night of the spring full moon, they travel into the past

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and future at the same time. Such a paradox, as we already know, is possible only in the quantum world, which, with all its inexplicable phenomena, seems to be a suitable model for describing Woland’s phantasmagoric ball. Unlike our world, which is comparatively ordered, consistent, and predictable, the quantum world demonstrates other qualities. The existence of its elements is the subject of the other principles. Quantum objects do not have a definite position; it is not clear where they are or how they are moving. Also, if they have met and parted ways, they “entangle their tracks”, and it is impossible to determine which of them did what. Additionally, when they enter superposition, they acquire the ability to be in different states at the same time. Finally, they can pass through walls (Grey 2020; 60; Semikhatov n.d.). How it resembles the reality of Bulgakov’s novel, especially in its devilish part! Strange, paradoxical, and frightening events occur everywhere and always where Woland and his retinue are. But after all, the quantum world, according to experts, is deprived of peace as well. By applying quantum theory to the universe, scientists have concluded that the universe exists in many states simultaneously as well. This is how the theory of the multiverse and the hypothesis about parallel worlds, differing little from each other, appeared (Grey 2020, 73–79). And although Bulgakov did not know about the theory of the multiverse, since he died before scientists began to work on it, the fantasy of a genius was leading him along this path. Note that during their lifetime, the guests of the ball could not have had such a future. It was Woland who gave them such a chance. Only this chance happened already in the other, parallel world. The huge and long staircase along which guests climb to greet the queen of the ball and join the celebration is a portal, similar to the one through which recently came to the same parallel world “precious Queen Margo” (Bulgakov 1967, 293). Satan appears only toward the end of the ball in order to end his dialogue with Berlioz’s head (Behemoth prudently stole it from the coffin during the funeral). “Mikhail Alexandrovich,” Woland addressed the head in a low voice, and the dead man’s eyelids opened and Margarita shuddered to see those living, thinking, suffering eyes on the dead face. “Everything has come to pass, hasn’t it?” Woland continued looking into his eyes. “You were beheaded by a woman, the meeting was not held, and I

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am living in your apartment. That’s a fact. And a fact is the most stubborn thing in the world. But now we are interested in something else, and not in the already accomplished fact. You have always been a fervent proponent of the theory that, once a head is severed, a man’s life ceases, he becomes ashes and sinks into nonbeing. I am pleased to inform you, in the presence of my guests—though, indeed, they serve as proof of a very different theory—that your idea is both solidly based and witty. However, one theory, on the whole, is about as good as another. There is even a theory which says that every man will be given according to his belief. May it be fulfilled, then! You will sink into nonbeing, and I shall be delighted to drink from the vessel into which you are transformed—to drink for being!” (Bulgakov 1967, 287)

The ball starts at midnight and ends with the last stroke of the clock, but this negligible time seems to Margarita endlessly long. Woland dispels her bewilderment: “It’s pleasant sometimes to detain a holiday midnight for a while” (Bulgakov 1967, 306).

To Eternal Peace Satan’s ball is over. Margarita receives her reward for the assistance rendered; Woland returns the Master to her. Some time ago, the Master burned his novel in a fit of desperation. Woland returns it to him with the words “manuscripts don’t burn” (Bulgakov 1967, 300). The offenders, who persecuted the Master for daring to write about Yeshua Ha-Nozri (Jesus Christ) in their atheistic society, are punished. Woland’s mission in Moscow has been accomplished. Suddenly, the ghost of the messenger appeared and said that Yeshua Ha-Nozri read the novel and asked Woland to take the Master with him and reward him with peace. By order of Woland, Azazello poisons and resurrects the Master and Margarita—they become ghosts—and all three, riding ghostly horses, rush off to Woland. The devil is already waiting for them with the rest of the retinue on Sparrow Hills, which offers the widest and most picturesque panorama of Moscow, especially at sunset. “Then Woland’s awful voice rolled like a trumpet over the hills: Time!” (Bulgakov 1967, 382). The horses plunge forward, and the seven riders rise in the air and gallop. Throughout the history of mankind, people have believed that there are other, higher realms that gods and the souls of the dead inhabit. When God was taken away from the Russians, and this is exactly what happened

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during the years of Soviet power, they were deprived of the hope that life is not finite and its continuation is possible somewhere in other worlds. Maybe that’s why Bulgakov, in the last chapter of the novel, as if under a magnifying glass, shows the movement of characters from one reality to another. There is nothing unusual in this, nothing that strikes the imagination— nothing that Bulgakov has not already told his readers on the previous pages. The action is full of calmness, confidence, and the significance of what is happening. The riders fly in silence. They see cities below, then forests replace cities, and finally, the Earth disappears from their view. They fly, leaving bunches of stars behind and getting ahead of the night. Margarita notices how Woland’s retinue transforms in flight. In Moscow, they behaved like characters in a phantasmagoric play, but on the way to the other world, they acquired their true appearance. The joker Koroviev-Fagot turns out to be a gloomy knight; the fat Behemoth becomes a thin page demon; and Azazello is a waterless desert demon again. In flight, even the Master becomes purposeful and inspired again. And finally, Woland himself was also flying in his true shape now. Margarita would have found it difficult to say what his horse’s reins were made of. She thought they might be chains of moonlight, and the horse itself might only be a hulk of darkness, his mane—a cloud, and the rider’s spurs—white blurs of stars. (Bulgakov 1967, 384–385)

They arrive at that area of the world of the dead where the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, guilty of the execution of Yeshua Ha-Nozri, has been suffering from pangs of conscience for 2000 years. The Master has not finished his novel, and Woland gives him another chance. “Finish it now!” Woland commands, and the Master cries to Pontius Pilate, “You are free! You are free! He waits for you!” (Bulgakov 1967, 387). Immediately, a wide lunar road appears, and Pontius Pilate walks down it to meet the prisoner Ha-Nozri, who, as he insists, he never finished talking with. To the Master, as Yeshua Ha-Nozri asked, Woland grants peace and the opportunity to create and be with his beloved woman in the other world. Woland controls human destinies, and he completes them. Having completed his mission, with the words “Farewell, it’s time for me to go!” he flies away into the darkness (Bulgakov 1967, 388).

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From the epilogue, the readers learn that, having completed his main mission, Woland has disappeared forever. In Soviet Russia, nothing will ever be heard of him again, neither in the capital nor in the provinces. He will not appear in other countries either. Maybe he has moved to another era or another universe. It is quite in his nature. He appeared out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere.

Conclusion The Master and Margarita by M. Bulgakov is one of the most popular and enigmatic novels of the twentieth century. But despite the fact that the novel has been well studied by literary critics both at home and abroad, none of its interpretations is considered exhaustive nowadays. The current work also does not claim to be complete: its author focused on the least studied mystical and fantastic aspect of the novel and applied some scientific theories, both natural and humanitarian, to interpret the strange and inexplicable events of the plot—namely, metamorphoses of space and time as well as supernatural movements of the characters in space-time. The personification and symbol of mysticism in the novel is Woland, the devil, who arrives in Moscow with his retinue of demons. Each of their appearances in the arena of events is accompanied by miraculous transformations of time and space, as well as sudden and inexplicable appearances and disappearances of people and objects. All these inscrutable phenomena, absurd from the point of view of common sense, can be comprehended, however, from the position of our knowledge about the universe. Progress in science at the beginning of the twentieth century—physical experiments on the splitting of the atom and the discovery of the quantum world—did not go unnoticed by the world intellectual community, to which Bulgakov, a man of exceptional erudition, undoubtedly belonged. Physicists’ new approach to understanding time and the phenomenology of travel into the past and the future is reflected in The Master and Margarita. Having discovered relevant indications in the text of the narrative, the author of this study tried to interpret supernatural phenomena from the standpoint of some ideas from the theories of relativity and quantum science. The concepts of space-time block universe, wormhole, Schrödinger’s cat, and parallel world turned out to be quite fruitful for explaining the novel’s mystical characters and events, such as travel to another world,

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levitation, and teleportation. The mystical reality of Bulgakov’s novel is indeed similar to the quantum world: incomprehensible and disordered. The Moscow streets along which Ivan Homeless chases the devil after the catastrophe at the Patriarch’s Ponds are an analogue of the quantum world; time behaves unpredictably there: either stopping, then reversing, or slowing down and accelerating at the same time. The immense, long stairs along which Margarita rises to meet Woland and numerous guests come from hell to Satan’s ball are an analogue of a wormhole or a tunnel between parallel worlds, which, in turn, are considered hypothetical time machines. The Master and Margarita, dead and then resurrected, are Schrödinger’s cats, dead and alive at the same time. Bulgakov transferred the laws of the quantum world into the reality of his narrative, endowing the characters of Woland, his retinue, and, at the end of the story, the Master with Margarita, with abilities and behaviors unusual for humans and inherent to quantum objects. M. Bulgakov expanded the concept of time travel. In his novel, it is not only travel around the universe but also a journey into the world of one’s own unconsciousness. This is not only the ability to master other dimensions and realities but also the ability to dive into the depths of one’s genetic memory, where, according to psychoanalysts, the history of mankind is imprinted in a coded, symbolic form. The quantum microcosm is invisible; its phenomena are not reality. Physicists discovered them through experiments and mathematical calculations. The quantum theory, according to the scientists themselves, is something none of them fully understand, but the use of its discoveries has already led to unprecedented global technological progress. And in the present study, this theory served as an excellent metaphor for the interpretation of the most mystical novel of the twentieth century. “A miracle is not something that cannot happen; this is an unlikely event” (Semikhatov n.d.). If the whole world is quantum, and this is precisely the conclusion that scientists reached, then it is probabilistic, and there is a place for a miracle in it. That means that those individuals who create miracles are, in some incomprehensible way, able to interact with the environment at the quantum level. Modern physicists exploring the quantum world have come to this understanding. Remarkably, the writer Bulgakov told about it in his novel The Master and Margarita almost a century ago. Competing Interests  The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

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CHAPTER 8

Black Time Travel, Chronotopicity, and the Reparative Desire for Beauty in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self Michaela Keck

There is a common saying that “Black people cannot time travel” (Bennet qtd. in Harper 2022, 8) because they will find themselves forever in the thralls of slavery and its pernicious afterlife. Indeed, timelines with an exclusive focus on the literary phenomenon of time travel rarely include African American writings, and if they do, they tend to begin with Octavia Butler’s bestselling 1979 novel Kindred. So far, little attention has been directed to such early Black time travel phenomena as we can find them in Martin Robinson Delany’s Blake; or The Huts of America (1859–1862), Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self

M. Keck (*) Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_8

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(1902–1903), or W. E. B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” (1920).1 One reason for overlooking these late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-­century time travels and time slips might be due to the fact that none of these writings features a time machine that conspicuously “alters the chronology of story events themselves” (Wittenberg 2016, 7). Yet a time machine is not a necessary element of time travel, which can be initiated through magic, the supernatural, dreams, and the subconscious as well. In contrast to Delany and Du Bois’s much subtler temporal interventions, Hopkins’s Of One Blood unsettles the narrative coherence and chronology of events through her mixed-race protagonists’ pronounced dislodgement from time, space, and self. This displacement is inextricably tied to the psychic and intellectual pursuits of the medical doctor, Reuel Briggs, on the one hand, and the trauma and loss of memory of the soprano singer, Dianthe Lusk, on the other. Where Reuel traverses time and space between his contemporary life of passing as a white doctor in post-Civil War America and his Black kingship in the splendors of Ethiopia’s ancient past, Dianthe’s loss of memory triggers a journey that confronts her with slavery’s traumatic legacy. Through Reuel and Dianthe’s time slips, Hopkins’s popular “magazine novel” (Kassanoff 1996, 159) raises several profound, even existential, issues for African Americans simultaneously: the importance of psychology, identity formation, and knowledge; the quest for family and homemaking; the social necessity of gaining access to a collective memory; dealing with intergenerational trauma; and finding reparative strategies to balance out the experiences of trauma and displacement. Importantly, Dianthe and Reuel’s movement through time is at all times a journey through space.

1  Hopkins was a prolific, versatile, and innovative African American woman author, whose writings were published in multiple formats and media, ranging from journal articles to history, short fiction, fiction, and plays. Her first novel, Contending Forces (1900), was published in book form, whereas her subsequent three novels—Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (1901–1902), Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), and Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self (1902–1903)—were published serially in The Colored American Magazine. From 1900 to 1904, she was a major contributor to The Colored American Magazine, for which she also served as “literary editor” (Knight 2007, 42) from 1903 to 1904.

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Drawing, therefore, on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, this chapter examines the various timespace configurations in Hopkins’s novel as well as the ways in which they both present and counter the racialist logic that captivates Black subjects in marginalized social roles and a state of dislodgment in post-Civil War America. I am interested not only in those moments when “time thickens” (Bakhtin 1981, 84) in specific chronotopes but also in the cultural work that time travel performs in this turn-of-the-century African American novel. I argue that in Hopkins’s Of One Blood, Black time travel functions as a social necessity for and aesthetic restorative to the protagonists’ dislodgment in time, space, and identity. Where Dianthe’s journey into the past makes visible the intergenerational trauma of Black women’s experience of sexual violence in slavery and its afterlife, Reuel’s time slip into ancient Telassar enables access to indispensable resources that acknowledge the beauties and riches of Black life and history. Ultimately, however, the novel returns to a paranoid reading of questions of race, a reading that anticipates a time loop of Black dehumanization that necessitates renewed travels through time and space for both Black women and men.

Time Travel Fiction and Bakhtin’s Concept of the Chronotope In literary and cultural studies, time travel is typically associated with popular cultural texts and media, no matter whether scholars approach it as an autonomous genre, a subgenre (e.g., science fiction, romance, or the adventure novel), and a narrative device or motif. According to Matthew Jones and Joan Ormrod, time travels oscillate between such diverse genres and catalysts as “fantasy and science fiction, magic and technology” while also showing a vast and “disparate” (Jones and Ormrod 2015, 5) iconography. Despite its prominence among popular cultural texts, time travel is credited with negotiating profound philosophical questions about the narration of stories and histories, encounters between self and other, and the human knowledge of time itself, occupying literary theorists, philosophers, and physicists alike. In Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, David Wittenberg has constructed a first genre history. He identifies three distinct phases, each of which responds to a major paradigm shift regarding scientific

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notions about time and the universe. In the first phase, from the late 1880s until 1905 (the year Einstein published his first three papers about the theory of relativity), time travel remains mostly a secondary narrative device in utopian romances. The “evolutionary” (Wittenberg 2016, 30) or “macrological” (Wittenberg 2016, 33) narratives of this period still subscribe to and foreground Darwinian models of sociopolitical evolution situated in a mechanical, immutable Newtonian universe. Not until its second period, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and in the context of the popularization of Einstein’s theories of relativity and the new idea of a multidimensional, mutable universe, does time travel come into its own. As “an autonomous type” (Wittenberg 2016, 30) of storytelling, it now experiments with narrative form and temporal figurations in innovative ways. Time travel comes into full focus in this “‘paradox story’ phase” (Wittenberg 2016, 31), where narrative timelines and worlds multiply and challenge straightforward chronologies as well as the logic of cause and effect in the pulp fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. The third “‘multiverse/ filmic’” (Wittenberg 2016, 31) stage, which lasts from 1945 until the present, involves postmodern revision and parody as well as further explorations of the “psychological or narratological implications” (Wittenberg 2016, 32) of time travel and its paradoxes in film, television, and digital media. According to this genre history, Hopkins’s Of One Blood belongs to the first phase of evolutionary, macrological fiction whose utopian imaginaries point toward sociopolitical potentialities resulting from the inevitable processes of natural laws and principles. Exemplary for this first stage is Edward Bellamy’s bestselling novel Looking Backward (1888), in which social and biological developments are analogous to each other. Hopkins’s novel, however, is part of a body of Black fiction that decenters the characteristically white-dominated, alternative visions of an as yet unrealized polity and society by moving the experiences and perspectives of African American protagonists “from the margin to the center of utopian planning” (Fabi 2012, 115). While such a revisionary, oppositional stance complicates the genre-characteristic sociopolitical critiques that utopian writings generally articulate, Black utopias nevertheless engage with the dominant (racializing) discourses, an endeavor that entails its very own challenges and contradictions. Hence, and notwithstanding the general consensus regarding Hopkins’s deconstructions of

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dominant Western—and especially American—discourses of race, identity, history, and social progress in Of One Blood, her utopian countervision still partly relies on essentialist, albeit revaluated, notions of racial identity (Schrager 1996, 200; Reid 2011, 99), a “quasi-Darwinian logic” (Japtok 2002, 403) that justifies imperialist expansion, and a troubling “gendered memory and violence” (Davis 2019, 11). In short, Hopkins’s utopia is inexorably tied to its dystopian dimensions. Yet the striking manipulations in time and space that permeate Hopkins’s Of One Blood heavily strain against categorizing and reading the novel as an “utopian macrologue” (Wittenberg 2016, 30) alone. In fact, Wittenberg points to similar examples of early time travel fiction by white male authors, noting that some of the genre’s “most interesting aesthetic and theoretical” contributions derive from “the fits and starts of … types of fictional and scientific thinking” (Wittenberg 2016, 48) other than those pathbreaking epistemes that would become constitutive of the modernist time travel narratives and its paradox stories. In Of One Blood, such an important scientific discourse alongside that of race is the turn-of-the-­ century “‘new psychology’” (Otten 1992, 238; Schrager 1996, 183), which was discussed in Europe, England, and the USA from the mid-­1880s onward. The subtitle of Hopkins’s novel—The Hidden Self—in fact adopts the title of one of William James’s essays, “The Hidden Self” (1890), which was published in Scribner’s Magazine.2 Here, James introduced the American public to the pathbreaking advances of the French hypnotists Pierre Janet and Alfred Binet, whose most recent experiments he viewed as confirming his own theories about the unconscious, the coexistence of multiple selves, and the psychotherapeutic treatment of “the inner world of troubled lives” (Taylor 1996, 69). In contrast to many other experts in this still new and unregulated scientific field, however, James also considered the findings of all kinds of mental healers in his investigations, including the supernatural experiences of such popular alternative treatments as mesmerism, spiritualism, and mysticism. Not surprisingly, 2  Hopkins’s earlier short story “The Mystery Within Us” (1900) prefigures the interconnection between the new psychology and questions of African American identity, which are at the core of Of One Blood. Moreover, the protagonist of the short story, Tom Underwood, resembles Reuel, the protagonist of Of One Blood, in that they are both brilliant brain specialists and hypnotists plagued by a strong sense of alienation.

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Hopkins’s protagonist, Reuel, likewise combines academic brilliance in research with an expertise in the clinical therapeutical treatment through hypnosis and the popular healing practices of mesmerism.3 In the course of the novel, Reuel, as well as his sister and beloved, Dianthe, undergo a process of self-formation that confronts them with their subconscious as well as multiple selves and identities, all of which are inevitably shaped by their African lineage. According to Cynthia D.  Schrager, the particular achievement of Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self lies in Hopkins’s “translation of the notion of a hidden self from the intrapsychic field … to the social field” (Schrager 1996, 196) to explore the issue of subjectivity in post-Reconstruction America for both whites and Blacks. The novel’s “project of self-recovery” (Schrager 1996, 198) is, therefore, at once corrective and political, and concludes by fusing the two in a Pan-Africanist vision of Reuel as the watchful leader of the ancient, hidden Ethiopian city of Telassar. Thomas J.  Otten stresses the profoundly therapeutic work that fantastic tales, adventure romances, and science fiction stories—or a combination thereof—performed for African Americans at the turn of the century (Otten 1992, 236–237). By making “available alternative strategies for thinking about bodies and minds” (Otten 1992, 236), these literary genres facilitated the deconstruction and destabilization of racist assumptions, opening up ways of valorizing Black bodies and minds. Importantly, the cultural work performed by fantasy, adventure, and science fiction anticipated what would become some of the primary psychological concerns of time travel fiction in its autonomous paradox phase, namely the encounter with one’s self (or multiple selves) and one’s ancestors as well as the (re)negotiation of “one’s personal and historical origins” (Wittenberg 2016, 64). Even if the temporal and spatial journeying between these 3  Eric Sundquist notes a striking similarity between Hopkins’s protagonist, Reuel Briggs, and W. E. B. Du Bois, “who had already appeared in vague fictional form in Hopkins’s major novel, Contending Forces (1900)” (Sundquist 1993, 569). Although Hopkins and Du Bois never personally met or collaborated in their work as writers or editors, the relation of her protagonist, Reuel, with the work and thought of William James is based on Du Bois’s own life experience at Harvard, where he was one of James’s students. According to James Campbell, the personal relationship between the teacher and his African American student “was of more importance to Du Bois than it was to James” (Campbell 1992, 570). Still, Campbell points out several striking parallelisms in the thought of the two, among them Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness which, as Bernard R. Boxill demonstrates, draws on vocabulary that “can be found in … James’s writings on psychology and philosophy” (Boxill 2020, 2).

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psychologically charged encounters in novels like Hopkins’s Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self does not prefigure the relativity of time and space in terms of the hard sciences yet, it is a poignant example of how other scientific advances (like the new psychology) can prompt time travel as well. While Wittenberg’s genre history offers a helpful approach to time travel in literature and other media from the late nineteenth century onward, Jones and Ormrod further expand our understanding in meaningful ways by providing a brief “prehistory of time travel” (Jones and Ormrod 2015, 9) that dates back to antiquity and extends across different cultures and religions. Their prehistory delineates different notions, experiences, and representations of time which frequently sit alongside each other “as indicators of complex notions of temporality prior to the formal emergence of time travel literature,” and which “recur in many modern stories” (Jones and Ormrod 2015, 10) as well. Here, I will focus on those aspects that are relevant to the purpose of this chapter. One of the most common distinctions is that between cyclical and linear time. Cyclical time in particular has a special relationship to the cultural practices of myth and ritual. Drawing on Mircea Eliade, Jones and Ormrod explain that the invocation of myth and the re-enactment of religious and cultural rituals in the present offer a catalyst that transports participants “back to the sacred time,” enabling them to experience time “as circuitous and looping” (Jones and Ormrod 2015, 10). Such an experience is often represented through “forms of repetitive time,” which through “re-creation” and “re-enactment” (Jones and Ormrod 2015, 10) intermingles the past with the present and, vice versa, the present with the past. Myth and ritual can also involve the future, specifically through the narration of prophecies and other forms of “projection” (Jones and Ormrod 2015, 11) that reflect on the future. Indeed, in Hopkins’s novels and short fiction, projections into the future often make use of practices of divination—scientific, popular, and religious—which, at times, blend with “African-American traditions” (Otten 1992, 239). Finally, encounters with the supernatural as well as sleep, dreams, and altered states of consciousness, whether in myth and ritual or in oral storytelling traditions, belong to an existent repository of motifs and images of ancient and early modern time travel stories that present protagonists as “dislodged in time” and construct time as an altogether “fluid concept” (Jones and Ormrod 11). While this brief historical overview points to the difficulties of examining such an abstract concept as physical time, an additional analytical lens to grasp the dynamically shifting temporal and spatial configurations of

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time travel in an imagined literary universe is Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. Inspired by Einstein’s relativity theory, Bakhtin introduced the term, which is derived from the Greek chronus (time) and topos (space), into literary theory: “We will give the term chronotope (literally ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1981, 84). According to Bakhtin, rather than providing a mere backdrop to novelistic protagonists and events, the chronotope with its inherent hybrid fusion of time and space is, in fact, constitutive of literature and, therefore, “the primary means of materializing time in space” and “for concretizing representation” (Bakhtin 1981, 250). The chronotope, thus, gives shape and “flesh” (Bakhtin 1981, 84) to such abstract notions as time while also constructing space through specific temporal forms and experiences. It is the physical and spatial representation of the novelistic world that enables us “to ‘see’ time in space” (Bakhtin 1981, 247) and observe, as Bakhtin so famously stated, how time “thickens” and becomes “artistically visible” (Bakhtin 1981, 84). To him “[a]ll the novel’s abstract elements—philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect— gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work” (Bakhtin 1981, 250). In this way, novelistic worlds are established by numerous chronotopes that are always “specific to the given work or author” (Bakhtin 1981, 252) and related to each other in intricate ways. While it “is common for one of these chronotopes to envelope or dominate the others,” they can also be “mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships” (Bakhtin 1981, 252). These descriptions of the chronotope resonate with a universe conceived of as comprising, even being contingent on, multiple simultaneous possibilities, systems, and reference points with regard to timespace configurations. Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope, thus, acknowledges the subjective, changing, and changeable perspectives and experiences of “author, reader, and characters” (Stone 2008, 413), all grounded in a (literary) universe “composed of [multiple] independent, autonomous worlds” (Stone 2008, 415). At the same time, Bakhtin underlines that the chronotope is constitutive of identity and its cultural representations, given that “as a formally constitutive category [the chronotope] determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic” (Bakhtin 1981, 85). In more contemporary terms, we

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would explain this idea as the discursive social constructedness of the identities and sense of self of fictional characters (individual and collective), within specific timespace configurations and their sociocultural structures. In this context, chronotopes can produce and reproduce, explore and contest relevant heteronormative ideologies, values, and sociocultural scripts that regulate and enable, constrain and empower individuals and groups in the (literary) worlds they inhabit. To illuminate the crucial link between chronotopicity and issues of identity and subjectivity, Jan Blommaert and Anna De Fina point to Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s sociological study The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture (1979), a text that is also highly relevant for Hopkins’s Of One Blood, since the novel commences by situating its protagonist in a post-Civil War academic Boston modeled on Harvard Medical School and its environs. Key to the idea that identities are intrinsically chronotopic is Bourdieu and Passeron’s observation that “[s]tudents certainly live … in a special time and space” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979, 29). Against this seemingly simple observation, Bourdieu and Passeron unfold a fascinating study that shows how students’ lives are temporally organized according to the academic calendar with its semester courses, lectures, and exams, at the same time that, spatially, student life moves not only around the campus, between seminars, lecture halls, and libraries, but also around specific urban neighborhoods, their accommodations, coffee places, dance and concert halls, as well as cinemas. Indeed, Bourdieu and Passeron’s study details the specific “timespace of student life” (Blommaert and De Fina 2016, 3), including students’ common activities, social patterns and behaviors, tastes and shared experiences. But Bourdieu and Passeron also emphasize that student identity is only temporarily grafted onto more deep-rooted sociocultural individual and group identities that the students have already brought along with them to their life and time at university (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979, 35–36). For Blommaert and De Fina, the French sociologists’ study exemplifies social identity’s multilayered as well as dynamic chronotopicity as represented in novelistic “description[s] of the looks, behavior, actions and speech of certain characters, enacted in specific timespace frames” (Blommaert and De Fina 2016, 5). Moreover, chronotopic identities involve “specific patterns of social behavior [that] ‘belong,’ so to speak, to particular timespace configurations,” which, “when they ‘fit’ … respond to existing frames of recognizable identity, while when they don’t they are ‘out of place,’ ‘out of order’ or transgressive” (Blommaert and De Fina

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2016, 5). For the examination of time travel in Hopkins’s Of One Blood, these considerations are particularly pertinent given that the book’s novelistic chronotopes foreground an African American perspective in relation to the hegemonic white ideals of American life and culture. Before turning to the novel, I will recapitulate its “byzantine” (Kassanoff 1996, 166) plot while also briefly identifying its major chronotopes and their dialogic relationships.

Plot Summary and Dominant Chronotopes in Hopkins’s Of One Blood The time travel and time slips of Hopkins’s protagonists in Of One Blood involve three dominant chronotopes: the nineteenth-century American city, the slave plantation (as a revised version of the castle of the Gothic novel), and the African idyll of ancient Telassar. At the beginning of the novel, we encounter Reuel on a cold winter’s night in his student accommodation in Boston. Although he is excited about the most recent scientific advances in psychology, he is also deeply alienated from his present student existence, whose future hinges on his successful passing as a non-­ Black individual rather than on his extraordinary intellectual capacities. Reuel’s passing is a secret known only by his friend, the rich patron Aubrey Livingston. Moreover, Reuel is also estranged from Black life and culture, quite contrary to the Black singer Dianthe Lusk, with whom he falls in love. Like Reuel, Dianthe is of mixed race and light-skinned but, in contrast to him, she fully identifies as African American until she loses her memories and almost her life in a train accident. Thanks to Reuel’s superior psychoanalytical and hypnotic skills she survives, but loses the memories of her past identity as a Black woman artist. Reuel graduates and asks Dianthe to marry him. She accepts, albeit more out of friendship than out of love. Before the two can consummate their marriage, a career opportunity opens up: an archeological expedition to the ruins of the ancient Ethiopian city of Meroe (today in Sudan) needs a doctor. Reuel departs, believing that he owes the chance to join the expedition to Aubrey as a friend. Aubrey’s sole motivation, however, is his own desire for Dianthe, whom he and his wife, Molly, take into their home during Reuel’s absence. Here, Dianthe’s memories suddenly return. During a boating accident, Aubrey saves Dianthe but deliberately refuses to save his wife Molly. Claiming to be the sole survivor, he conceals Dianthe at his ancestral

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plantation home in the South, where he enforces his will upon her through his own mesmeric powers. Typical for the cliffhanger endings in the serialized magazine novel, Of One Blood then somewhat abruptly shifts from Reuel’s life in urban America (the chronotope of the city) to the archeological site of Meroe in the African desert, where Reuel eventually accesses the hidden splendors of Telassar’s ancient culture (the chronotope of the idyll) through a time slip. His time travel, however, is preceded by several other important events and minor chronotopes. Firstly, the expedition to Africa, which combines the chronotopes of the road and the encounter, sets out to re-­ discover an ancient, hidden city and treasure at Meroe. As the leading archeologist, Professor Stone, explains, such a discovery would revolutionize all knowledge about the West and its history, providing evidence that the culture of the Ethiopians, who are the forebears of the Afro-­ Americans, is the cradle of Western civilization. During the journey, Reuel meets the Professor, the Arab Ababdis, and when he encounters life-­ threatening dangers in the shape of both humans (Aubrey’s faithful Black servant Jim) and animals (a wild leopard among the ruins), Charlie Vance, the brother of Aubrey’s murdered wife, saves his life. Secondly, the Ethiopian ruins constitute a threshold chronotope of crisis and change in Reuel’s life, triggered by the false news that Dianthe has died. The threshold marks the site of his time jump to ancient Telassar, where he directly experiences Ethiopia’s superior culture and sciences. Reuel is initiated into his new role as Telassar’s long-awaited King Ergamenes and introduced to his future Queen, Candace, who appears to be a darker-skinned alter ego of his beloved Dianthe. The sciences available in this Black idyll reveal to him that she is alive and also Aubrey’s deceitful and murderous machinations. Swearing revenge, Reuel travels back to America with some of his fellow Telassarians. Meanwhile at the southern plantation (the revised chronotope of the castle with its hauntings), Dianthe likewise experiences a sort of time travel to the past of slavery and legacy of trauma and sexual exploitation. In the cabin of her grandmother, Aunt Hannah, which functions as a threshold chronotope for Dianthe, she learns about her own, Reuel, and Aubrey’s origins: the three are siblings, all begotten by Aubrey’s father, the former master of the slave plantation and his slave Mira, their mother. They all bear the birthmark of Ethiopia’s royal lineage—a lotus-lily on their breasts—but Aunt Hannah exchanged Mira’s baby boy, Aubrey, with the stillborn baby boy of the mistress. Dianthe, almost driven mad from this

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knowledge, returns to the great house and attempts to poison Aubrey who, in turn, forces her to drink the potion she prepared for him. Aubrey then leaves her. Reuel arrives just in time for a final reunion, and Dianthe dies in his arms. Reuel’s subsequent official demands for justice in an American court are thwarted so that, in the end, the Ethiopian descendants Ai, Aunt Hannah, and Reuel enact justice themselves: together, they hypnotize Aubrey into committing suicide. Reuel reunites with Candace in ancient Telassar, and in the final lines, the extradiegetic narrator stresses God’s mysterious “handiwork” and the titular divine proclamation: “‘Of one blood have I made all races of men’” (Hopkins 2004, 193). Scholars have duly noted and commented on the eccentric plot of Hopkins’s Of One Blood, and they often critique the novel for the formulaic exploitation of diverse popular genres and the abrupt changes from one to another. For Otten, however, these are no “random” shifts since each excavates “successive layers” of African American selves, which, at the beginning of the novel, are introduced as estranged and “displaced” (Otten 1992, 246). The timespace configurations as indicated here provide yet another—chronotopic—layer of these African American selves, whose emergence seems to call for, even necessitate, Black time travel.

Out of Time, Out of Space, Out of Self: Time Travel as a Social Necessity In what follows, I will examine in more detail the temporalities and timespace configurations that the major three chronotopes in Hopkins’s novel unfold. In the American city, time materializes in the “identifying traces” (Bakhtin 1981, 91) of Reuel’s student life in urban Boston after the Civil War; whereas in the African idyll, time stays aloof from the repetitive aspects of human life in a specific time epoch. Time in the African idyll becomes visible in the abstract temporal sequences of “adventure-time” (Bakhtin 1981, 90) with its journeys and trials as well as the sacred, mythical time of past Ethiopian life and culture. However, time travel in Hopkins’s Of One Blood features no simple chronotopic opposition between the city and the idyll, but is complicated by the third chronotope of the slave plantation (a revised version of the castle) as a space haunted by its legacy of the trauma of slavery and Black women’s sexual exploitation. While the chronotope of the city and the slave plantation are linked through Reuel and Dianthe’s dislodgment in time and space as well as the

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racial trauma of the past, Telassar’s idyll offers a regenerative recovery of a Black collective history and a reparative reversal of the construct of race. Notably, the reparative chronotope of the idyll is prepared and anticipated through a number of psychological phenomena that interrupt Reuel’s timespace in Boston. These instances of “extratemporal hiatus” (Bakhtin 1981, 90) signify moments of crisis that later initiate Reuel into the “valorized temporal categories” (Bakhtin 1981, 15; emphasis in the original) of Telassar’s foundational myth and past greatness. At the same time, Telassar’s sacred, mythical timespace is interrupted by hauntings from America while also displaying the knowledge to overcome the timespace continuum altogether. Looking at the nineteenth-century French realist novel, Bakhtin observes the emergence of the city as a new chronotope of encounter in the context of an industrialized, capitalist Western society, where time materializes in “parlors and salons,” “houses,” “streets,” and “cities” (Bakhtin 1981, 246–247). In these urban spaces, socio-public events are interwoven with personal, private life as people meet, converse, spin intrigues, and conduct business: [h]ere the graphically visible markers of historical time as well as of biographical and everyday time are concentrated and condensed; at the same time they are intertwined with each other in the tightest possible fashion, fused into unitary markers of the epoch. The epoch becomes not only graphically visible (space), but narratively visible (time). (Bakhtin 1981, 247)

Likewise, Hopkins’s Of One Blood situates Reuel in the American city of Boston after the Civil War, where his personal life follows the usual routine of academia until graduation. Thus, biographical and everyday time materialize in Reuel’s spatiotemporal moves between his own shabby domicile, the university hospital, concert halls, and other fashionable student haunts, including the rich homes and neighborhoods of his well-to-do fellow students Charlie and Aubrey. Importantly, at Harvard, Reuel passes for white. His passing tacitly implies that, regardless of his outstanding intellect and skills were his mixed race known, he would inevitably remain excluded from and be considered out of place in the educational world of Boston and ineligible for the career opportunities available for his fellow white students, including the “idle rich” (Hopkins 2004, 4). In fact, from the late nineteenth century until the Civil Rights era, racial segregation and white “exclusivity” determined “every facet” (Daher et al. 2021, 163) of

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those African Americans dedicated to a medical education and profession in America. Americans of African descent were generally despised and racially stigmatized by the social practice of the one-drop rule whenever they had any African ancestry which, during post-Civil War America, was corroborated by the combination of a “‘scientific racism’ and social Darwinism” (Jordan 2014, 115). Passing, then, secures Reuel equal opportunities in his professional medical training and career, but it fills him with a sense of self-loathing that negates any positive racial identity and identification. As one of America’s “unfortunates” (Hopkins 2004, 9), he feels lonely and alienated, which leaves him “vaguely [seeking] and yearn[ing]” (Hopkins 2004, 28) to belong and be part of a community. Generally, as Bourdieu and Passeron’s sociological study of French student life in the 1960s shows, being a student adds merely a superficial layer of shared biographical experience and identity. Hence, student life reproduces such fundamental, underlying intersectional identity markers as race, class, or gender, which are constitutive of identity constructions and processes of self-formation. For Hopkins’s protagonist, Reuel, the self-­ conscious performance of a white student identity has, therefore, momentous consequences. It estranges him all the more from the timespace of the student life in which he moves, while his passing, in turn, profoundly alienates him from Black life and culture. Hopkins underlines the intensity of Reuel’s experience of being out of place and dislodged from the time, space, and self that he presently inhabits, by directly introducing him in the middle of a life-and-death struggle over the existential “riddle of whence and whither for all time” (Hopkins 2004, 1). The reference to “all time” and, furthermore, to “the eternal movement of all things” (Hopkins 2004, 1) establishes the co-presence of another temporality alongside that of the chronotope of the city from the very beginning. In fact, Reuel soon discerns the vision of a sad, longing, yet also animated, appealing face—Dianthe’s face—against the wintry background of the evening. The vision of Dianthe momentarily suspends the time of his Boston student life in the form of the “ticking of the cheap clock on the mantel” and Reuel’s own “heart-beats”; whereas during the apparition Reuel finds himself in a trance-like “dreamy state,” from which he awakens as if from “a heavy sleep” (Hopkins 2004, 5). Similar visitations by inexplicable phenomena occur to Reuel throughout the novel at the same time as he himself is shown to possess supernatural and mystical powers with which he treats “brain diseases” (Hopkins 2004, 27). Typically, Reuel’s unaccountable visions mark moments of crisis and

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interrupt the chronotope of the city. More importantly, these dream- and sleep-like trances gradually push him toward the discovery of his biological, cultural, and historical lineage. They, thus, help him restore a sense of self and belonging, and even offer a place where he feels at home despite its location in the alien timespace of ancient Telassar. Indelibly interconnected with Reuel’s mind and psyche, the temporal interventions effected by these repeated visions are, therefore, life-affirmative and vitalizing. This is not to say that they ever fully erase the mental distress inherent in Reuel’s “double consciousness” (Du Bois 2003, 9)—the state of being both an African and an American in an oppressive, racializing sociopolitical environment—but in the case of Hopkins’s novel, the time travel to Telassar’s idyll counteracts Reuel’s debilitating dislodgement in time, space, and identity and leads to his final renunciation of the American city. But Reuel is not alone regarding the profound sense of being out of time, space, and self. Dianthe, whose “gift of music” (Hopkins 2004, 11) is in no way inferior to Reuel’s gift of mysticism (or the second sight that Du Bois considered such an essential aspect of double consciousness), becomes so violently dislodged from time, space, and her sense of self that she transforms from a celebrated “operatic diva” (Aljoe 2012, 282) in urban Boston into a slave on a former plantation in Maryland. Like Reuel, she is exposed to the racist practices of segregation; but unlike Reuel, gender adds an additional dimension to her racial oppression in American everyday life.4 At the beginning of the novel, Dianthe still shows power, agency, and a stable sense of self. Her masterful sublimation of the “anguish,” “horror,” and “degradation” of slavery into song spellbinds her Boston audience and carries Reuel “out of himself” (Hopkins 2004, 15). Moreover, despite her light skin, Dianthe firmly identifies as African American and uses her musical art to support the education of her Black brothers and sisters in the South. After the concert, she appears to Reuel again, projecting her future pain and suffering in America in gestures of “uncontrollable grief” and with the words: “You can help me, but not now; tomorrow” (Hopkins 2004, 24). As before, her visitation interrupts Reuel’s everyday time, 4  Jalondra Davis notes that the gender hierarchies that structure the timespace and construct Black identities of late nineteenth-century Boston are reproduced not only in Telassar’s intra-racial relationships but also in the Afrotopian imaginary of an “advanced African civilization untouched by the ravages of European colonialism and the traumas and humiliations of enslavement” (Davis 2019, 7) in Hopkins’s novel itself.

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which, in this instance, occurs on the estate of a haunted house that functions as a threshold chronotope. Bakhtin defines the threshold chronotope as “highly charged with emotion and value” and “connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life (or the indecisiveness that fails to change a life, the fear to step over the threshold)” (Bakhtin 1981, 248). At the threshold, time is “instantaneous; it is as if it has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time” (Bakhtin 1981, 248). With the motif of the haunted house, Hopkins links Dianthe’s extratemporal prophecy of her future sorrow and suffering with the slave plantation in the second part of the novel. The latter can be read as a revised version of the chronotope of the castle in Gothic fiction. Like the castle, the slave plantation is “saturated through and through” (Bakhtin 1981, 245–246) with the feudal past of the southern planter aristocracy and its traumatizing legacy of captivity and dehumanizing forms of violence. With the chronotopes of the haunted house and the slave plantation, Hopkins dramatizes Dianthe’s dislodgement in time, space, and self. At the same time, the chronotope of the slave plantation with its criminal legacy of enslavement, sexual abuse, and incest is countered by Queen Candace’s rule at Telassar, which combines joy, sexual purity, power, and a “rooted cosmopolitanism” that seeks to “reconcile human uniformity and ethnic particularity” (Pochmara 2019, 50) as well. Yet Dianthe’s traumatic displacement already begins before Aubrey re-­ enslaves her: a train accident separates her mind from her body. Where the other doctors first consider her as an “ordinary” (Hopkins 2004, 28) case and later assign her the role of a “hospital waif consecrated to the service of science” (Hopkins 2004, 39), for Reuel her case takes on a higher significance. Even so, he is unable to cure Dianthe’s “violated mind” (Hopkins 2004, 53) and she continues to suffer from a temporary loss of memory—she cannot remember her past, her racial identity, not even her name. In part, it is her amnesia that motivates her consent to Reuel’s marriage proposal, while Reuel appears to exploit her vulnerability—if not sexually, then still in terms of her “personhood” (Davis 2019, 12)—to gain her assent. To Reuel, revitalizing Dianthe is imbued with a greater, transcendental significance because it means the fulfillment of her prophesy. Bringing her back to life is to him a moment brought on by “destiny, not chance” (Hopkins 2004, 28) and, thus, a providential obligation. Moreover, he is convinced that marrying her will regenerate his own life and help him

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overcome his sense of alienation and isolation. Reuel’s distinction between destiny and chance is remarkable given that the novel insists on God’s purposeful intervention in human affairs (as opposed to chance) at the same time as its emphasis on an African American perspective and the science of the new psychology open up multiple circumstantial timespaces and selves. Therefore, the medical “miracle” (Hopkins 2004, 35) that Reuel performs by resurrecting Dianthe’s body imbues the hospital’s everyday time with a regenerative temporal dimension characteristic of sacred and mythical time that, according to Eliade, abolishes “profane time,” “duration,” and “‘history’” (Eliade 1959a, 35): Each man’s watch was in [Reuel’s] hand; one minute passed—another—and still another. The body remained inanimate … a tremor plainly passed over the rigid form before them. Another second—another convulsive movement of the chest! “She moves!” cried Aubrey at last carried out of himself by the strain of his nerves. “… Wonderful! Wonderful!” (Hopkins 2004, 34; emphasis added)

Aubrey’s ecstatic reaction and his exclamations of wonder mark the point where, for an instance, history ceases and sacred, mythical time materializes. Despite the sacred dimension that Dianthe and Reuel’s relationship assumes, Reuel’s attempt to marry and lead a life that is forgetful of or in denial of its Black history (individual and collective) means to continue inhabiting an identity that lacks a sense of belonging and remains out of place. In short, Reuel ignores what Ron Eyerman calls the “social necessity” of collective memory: “neither an individual nor a society can do without it” (Eyerman 2003, 6). I want to suggest that it is this very necessity for collective memory that lies at the heart of Reuel’s time travel. It can even be argued that both, Reuel and Dianthe, embark on a time travel into the Black collective past respectively: Dianthe slips into the past to confront the legacy of female enslavement and sexual exploitation that haunts the slave plantation of Aubrey’s family in Maryland; whereas Reuel’s journey into the past unfolds the reparative potential of a Black collective history in Africa and, thus, counterbalances the trauma of slavery and its afterlife—including the horrors of slavery that drive Dianthe to the brink of insanity. Rather than resulting from their own free will, however, both their time travels are presented as inevitable events in what Bakhtin calls “adventure-time” (Bakhtin 1981, 87), a time when

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“nonhuman forces … take all the initiative” (Bakhtin 1981, 95) away from the hero and the heroine even though, psychologically, Dianthe and Reuel’s experiences continue to develop alongside their biographical lives.

Dianthe’s Journey into the Past: Time Travel, Slavery, and Intergenerational Trauma In terms of length and detail, Dianthe’s journey into and confrontation of the past seems clearly subordinated to Reuel’s time travel. Temporally and emotionally, however, her experiences continue to interrupt his and the two remain connected in multiple ways: he hears her calling out to him across time and space—“Reuel, Reuel, save me!” (Hopkins 2004, 90)—, Telassar’s superior science allows him to overcome the timespace continuum to find out that she is not dead, and the two communicate with each other psychically. Despite these interrelations, their time travels differ markedly: where Dianthe has to face the horrors women endured due to their enslavement, Reuel is initiated into another fateful obligation, namely to take over the rule of Telassar and to convert his people to the Christian “belief in the Holy Trinity” (Hopkins 2004, 131). Dianthe’s travel into the past horrors of female enslavement is heralded by an apparition of her and Reuel’s mother Mira, who previously was the property of Aubrey Livingston Senior. Mira’s ghost visits Dianthe after she regains her memory and comes under Aubrey Junior’s mesmeric yet oppressive sway. He leads her to believe that Reuel is ignorant of her Black origins and claims that he, Aubrey, can save her by taking her to some place where nobody knows them, implying that, in the context of the one-­ drop rule, people will not recognize her as an African American and, therefore, will not abhor and debase her. Mira’s visitation presents another “extratemporal hiatus” (Bakhtin 1981, 90) that is derived from “the hand of mysticism” (Hopkins 2004, 73) and interrupts Dianthe’s biographical time, pointing her to the biblical projection that all will be revealed with Mira’s handwritten name next to it. Mira, the attentive reader will remember, is the name of the slave servant whom Aubrey’s father used to put into a trance for his and his visitors’ “amusement” (Hopkins 2004, 50) until one day she foresees the destruction of white supremacy and the upcoming rule of the slaves over their masters. Even though her prophesy radically destabilizes the slave-­ master relationship and threatens to reverse its hierarchy, it does not

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dissolve it, and Mira is sold to some other master. Mira’s visitation to Dianthe, thus, evokes what Eyerman describes as the “trauma of forced servitude and of nearly the complete subordination to the will and whims of another” (Eyerman 2003, 1). Mira’s apparition, thus, interlinks the timespace of the mother’s (Mira’s) trauma with the timespace of the daughter’s (Dianthe’s) trauma, giving shape to and making visible intergenerational trauma. From now on, Mira’s apparitions indicate moments of revelation to Dianthe: she learns that Aubrey sent the Black servant Jim on the expedition not to look after Reuel, but to kill him, and she finds Reuel’s letters that Aubrey intercepted. But Dianthe’s journey into the past is not over until she steps into her grandmother’s, Aunt Hannah’s, “Negro cabin” (Hopkins 2004, 174), which functions as a threshold chronotope that signals a twofold crisis: firstly, it leads Dianthe to her origins and, secondly, it initiates the events leading up to her death. Furthermore, Aunt Hannah resembles the Ethiopian Sphinx, which functions as the “primary symbol of African mystery” (Sundquist 1993, 557) and interconnects Dianthe’s travel into the past with Reuel’s. For Reuel, the Ethiopian Sphinx not only acts as time travel portal but also answers his existential questions of “whence and whither for all time” (Hopkins 2004, 1): “That which hath been, is now; and that which is to be, hath already been; and God requireth that which is past” (Hopkins 2004, 120; emphasis added). The Sphinx, too, insists on the necessity of knowing and remembering the past, individual and collective, while also underscoring the concurrence of past, present, and future. For Dianthe, this means the confrontation with the sexual domination of African American women, both enslaved and free. At her grandmother’s cabin, she experiences the eerie looping of time when it comes to the harrowing pattern of sexual violence against Black women during and after slavery. It is an experience that at once stretches across and coincides in three generations of women: Mira’s ghost, the old, Sphinx-like Aunt Hannah, and Dianthe herself. Characteristic of the threshold chronotope, Dianthe and Aunt Hannah’s encounter is “highly charged with emotion and value” (Bakhtin 1981, 248) as granddaughter and grandmother relive their traumatic experiences. While Aunt Hannah “moan[s] as though in physical pain” and “rock[s] herself to and fro” when she tells her story, Dianthe despondently wonders, “Was she never to cease from suffering and be at rest?” (Hopkins 2004, 175). Together, they confront, relive, and remember the past.

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The figure of the Sphinx is also associated with the revelation of the siblings’ lotus-lily birthmarks as signs of their royal Ethiopian descent. But where Reuel’s time travel makes available a restorative sense of self and belonging, for Dianthe there is no reparative counterbalance. Not only do the royal birthmarks, that she as Reuel and Aubrey’s wife has seen with her own eyes, affirm their siblingship, even worse, they also evidence her incestuous relationship with her own brothers. Her grandmother’s shocking disclosure, thus, reveals Dianthe’s implication in a pattern of racial violence that, as Hopkins’s extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narrator comments, destroys her life: “All hope was gone; despair was heavy on her young shoulders whose life was blasted in its bloom by the passions of others” (Hopkins 2004, 178). It is at this point that the “historical intensity” (Bakhtin 1981, 246) of the chronotope of the slave plantation ceases and adventure-time resumes with its densely strung-together series of events until Dianthe and Reuel reunite over her death. Dianthe’s time travel to the past and her origins, then, does not bring renewal or rebirth in the historical, biographical, and everyday time of nineteenth-century America. Only when she “passe[s] through the portals of the land of the souls” (Hopkins 2004, 188) does she leave behind the violence suffered from intergenerational trauma and the re-enactment of slavery. With death, her immortal “spirit” (Hopkins 2004, 28) enters sacred, “‘pure’” time which “abolish[es] … past time” (Eliade 1959b, 78) with its sins and violations, including those inflicted upon her and her foremothers “by the passions of others” (Hopkins 2004, 178). Given the emphasis that the novel places on Queen Candace’s chastity and purity, it stands to reason that she embodies a darker-skinned self into which Dianthe is reborn. According to Molly K. Robey, Queen Candace embodies a “complex temporality” of a “circular motion of history [that] unfold[s] backward, forward, and outward,” according to which the rule of Telassar’s Queen “produce[s] a state of continuous present” (Robey 2016, 200). At the same time, the matrilinear lineage from Queen Candace to Dianthe can be read chronologically and as signifying Queen Candace’s continuous rebirth in Dianthe’s foremothers, who are then enslaved and grossly violated, as is Dianthe herself. Reuel recognizes Dianthe’s voice when Queen Candace speaks and finds their facial “resemblance … so striking that it was painful” (Hopkins 2004, 137). Contrary to Dianthe, however, Queen Candace has “a warm bronze complexion, thick black eyebrows, great black eyes” and long “jet-black hair” that covers “her shoulders like a silken mantle” (Hopkins 2004, 137). There is no trace of

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Dianthe’s pain, sorrow, or mental distress. Instead, she combines beauty, “grace,” pride, “power,” and “strength,” and she appears as “the embodiment of all chastity” (Hopkins 2004, 137).5 I do not consider the figure of Queen Candace, when viewed as representing Dianthe’s darker, precolonial self, as necessarily downplaying or “eliding” (Davis 2019, 7) the sexual violence experienced by Dianthe and her foremothers. Rather, I suggest that we can also read the juxtaposition of the Ethiopian Queen with Dianthe, indeed the entire chronotope of the idyll of Telassar, as Hopkins’s employment of a reparative strategy that makes available ameliorative, even joyful and loving ways of knowing Blackness and being Black in a world dominated by white society and its racializing practices.

Reuel’s Journey to Ancient Telassar: Black Time Travel as a Reparative Strategy The paranoid and reparative reading strategies of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as Heather Love underlines, “clear intellectual and affective space for others” (Love 2010, 235). More specifically, Sedgwick’s reparative reading strategies aim to make available ways in which “selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture … whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (Sedgwick 2003, 150–151). She therefore calls for a critical position that combines paranoid with reparative reading strategies that, on the one hand, deconstruct social privilege and practices of dominance and, on the other hand, open up a range of positive affects such as joy, hope, nurture, love, and healing. In addition, Sedgwick alerts us to the fact that the paranoid investment in the exposure of social inequality and oppression is only one way of knowing among many others and, more often than not, relies on such negative affects as indignation, outrage, even cynicism, whereas reparative reading includes what scholars and intellectuals oftentimes decry as purely aesthetic and, therefore, naïve, apolitical responses to social inequality and systemic violence by drawing on, for example, an overindulgence in sentiment, beauty, and the imagination. Yet Sedgwick considers reparative impulses as absolutely indispensable because, as she emphasizes, they aim to “assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then 5  Hazel V. Carby points out that Hopkins here reconstructs “Western ideologies of beauty” into “a classic form of black beauty” (Carby 1987, 159) that aimed to instill a sense of pride and self-love in her Black readers.

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have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (Sedgwick 2003, 149) specifically within a culture unable, and often also unwilling, to provide any adequate means of sustenance to demeaned and marginalized groups. Sedgwick’s theoretical perspective, then, enables an interpretation of Hopkins’s Of One Blood as a novel that in itself combines paranoid with reparative reading strategies, especially regarding the discourse of race. Furthermore, Sedgwick’s reparative reading strategies prompt us to ask what pleasurable and “frankly ameliorative” (Sedgwick 2003, 144) ways of knowing Blackness and being Black in America around the turn of the century the novel offers. One of the main strategies with which Of One Blood deconstructs turn-­ of-­the-century notions of African Americans’ lack of intellectual, scientific, and artistic capabilities is the characterization of her protagonists, Dianthe and Reuel. Neither of them is shown to have a dark-skinned appearance and their intellectual, scientific, and artistic achievements are presented as outstanding. Their characters are repeatedly defined as noble, “unselfish” (Hopkins 2004, 32), and “desiring above all the well-being of humanity” (Hopkins 2004, 38) even though they do show profound human flaws (e.g., Reuel’s obfuscation of his racial origins or Dianthe’s desire for safety in her marriage with Reuel). By the same token, Aubrey, their brother and villainous antagonist, performs whiteness with all its social and financial privilege to perfection until, in the novel’s denouement, Mira reveals his Black origins. Hopkins’s ceaseless play with passing and various performances of whiteness, then, is perhaps the most paranoid of all reading strategies that she employs, or to use Otten’s terms: “To construct racial identity so that it can escape detection is to construct it so that it must constantly be worried about” (Otten 1992, 231). The paranoia resulting from the novel’s destabilizing of racial categories showcases perhaps most of all the arbitrariness inherent in scientific claims of hereditary, biological differences in race, as well as in religious interpretations of race as a category ordained and de/valued by God. Of One Blood situates its paranoid reading predominantly in the chronotopes of the late nineteenth-century American city of Boston where Reuel and Dianthe meet and in the slave plantation of Aubrey’s family with its traumatic legacy of slavery. While Dianthe’s journey into the past makes visible intergenerational trauma and the shared collective memory of Black women’s experience of sexual violence in slavery and its afterlife, it is Reuel’s time travel to ancient Telassar that unfolds the novel’s reparative reading strategies. This is not to say that the mental distress, from which both Dianthe and Reuel suffer

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during their journeys, ever ceases for Reuel either. Rather, his journey into Ethiopia’s past affords him consolation as well as new ways of knowing what it means to be African American. Indeed, the idyll of Telassar offers him the novel experience of lovingly embracing his Blackness, an idea that Hopkins reappropriates from the contemporaneous one-drop rule and the white American abhorrence of the Black race, which is then reconstructed into a Blackness providing “joy,” “wealth and ambition,” “rest and satisfaction” (Hopkins 2004, 138). In this, the chronotope of the idyll, that dominates Reuel’s adventures in Africa, is central. In the idyll, the protagonist typically moves through an alien space and a series of random events and encounters with both “enemies” and “benefactors” (Bakhtin 1981, 232) and into an enclosed, self-sufficient space ruled by a “cyclic rhythmicalness” (Bakhtin 1981, 225). Here, the protagonist finds family, love, stability, and material wealth. Bakhtin discerns various types of idylls—“love, labor or family” (Bakhtin 1981, 224)—that are often combined with each other, yet that are all “inseparable from [a] concrete, spatial corner of the world where the fathers and grandfathers lived and where one’s children and their children will live” (Bakhtin 1981, 225). Accordingly, Reuel’s adventures in Africa can be divided into two phases: (1) his encounters with Professor Stone as a supporter of a new science of race as well as with antagonists such as Jim or the wild leopard in the desert; and (2) his time slip to the Telassarian idyll, which contains the resources of an accomplished and advanced African past as well as those of a home and place where he belongs and fits. In the first phase of his adventures, the novel inverts dominant late nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century notions of white superiority and civilization; in the second phase, Of One Blood counters the detrimental effects of the dominant race ideologies and alleviates Reuel’s estrangement from the world and his own self by immersing him into the culture and knowledge of ancient Ethiopia. Notably, Hopkins places the reversal of racial hierarchies and civilizatory origins into the mouth of the white British archeologist, Professor Stone, whose knowledge and cultural mindset on questions of race in the history of Western civilization distinguishes him from his listeners, most of all Charlie, who embodies the common white American race prejudice of an innate Black inferiority. In fact, where Hopkins has the British Professor use the terms “Ethiopian” as opposed to “African” and “Afro-American” as opposed to the commonly used American term “Negro,” she has Charlie use the worst white racial slur when learning about ancient Africa

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and its history: “Great Scott! … you don’t mean to tell me that all this was done by niggers” (Hopkins 2004, 99; emphasis in the original). Printed in italics to underline Charlie’s utter disbelief in the capacities of Africans, and Blacks in general, the Professor counters the white American’s derision with a smile, as if talking to an unlearned child, before going into further detail. The Professor’s scientific elucidations about the Ethiopians as “the pioneers of mankind in the untrodden fields of knowledge” (Hopkins 2004, 98) and the African Americans as the certain descendants of Ethiopia’s prehistoric greatness prove wrong the scholarly and scientific argument that the Black race is unable to contribute to civilizatory progress or create a civilization themselves. By providing, thus, “a well-documented example of originary blackness that explode[s] the logic of racist accounts of civilization” (Nurhussein 2019, 5) the Professor shatters the knowledge of even the most incredulous among his listeners, including Charlie: “It is hard to believe your story. From what a height must this people have fallen to reach the abjectness of the American Negro,” exclaimed a listener. “True,” replied the Professor. “But from what a depth does history show that the Anglo-Saxon has climbed to the position of the first people of the earth today.” Charlie Vance said nothing. He had suffered so many shocks from the shattering of cherished idols since entering the country of mysteries that the power of expression had left him. (Hopkins 2004, 101)

Apart from the fact that, in this instance, Charlie and the other unnamed listener embody the “American ignorance of African history” (Sundquist 1993, 570), the Professor’s answer regarding the presumed “abjectness of the American Negro” (Hopkins 2004, 101) exemplifies the novel’s strategic reappropriation of the discourse of race. Rather than accepting the dominant culture’s debasing notion of Blackness, it retrojects all the negative assumptions onto white civilization to maintain and protect a valorizing Ethiopian history. Also, the Professor’s argument anticipates the idyll’s cyclic, sacred temporality, according to which empires inevitably rise and fall analogous to the natural cycle of life and death, yet he does so by eschewing the commonly demeaning, contemptuous attitude toward African life, culture, and history. Still, the Professor’s theories of a magnificent Black past remain highly abstract. With Reuel’s subsequent time slip, the novel deepens and taps the full potential of a reparative reconstruction

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of Blackness and African history into an aesthetically exhilarating, restorative, and sustaining experience. Hopkins represents Reuel’s time slip into ancient Telassar with a reappropriation of Blackness similar to that of the Professor’s revisionist history of Western civilization. Examining “the devilish countenance of the Ethiopian Sphinx” (Hopkins 2004, 111; emphasis added), Reuel comes upon “a space of unknown dimension” with “rows of pillars flickering drunkenly in the gloom” (Hopkins 2004, 112) before losing consciousness. Upon his awakening, Reuel’s initial moment of terror, which is symbolized in the emphasis on the Sphinx’s hideous Black features, transforms into articulations of great “amazement” (Hopkins 2004, 112, 117, 119, 141) at the wondrous and “kingly” (Hopkins 2004, 114) features of Telassar six thousand years BC. Slipping through the time portal of the Ethiopian Sphinx also means to enter the dominant cyclic temporality of the chronotope of the idyll, which is further entangled with the “valorized temporal categories” (Bakhtin 1981, 15; emphasis in the original) of Reuel’s ancestral past and the sacred, mythical time of ritual. The former is evoked when, upon his entrance into Ethiopia’s past, Reuel recites Milton’s lines about the Edenic Telassar from Paradise Lost. Although Ai, the ancient city’s political leader, quickly corrects Reuel that this is “[n]ot Telassar of Eden” (Hopkins 2004, 115), the reference to Milton is important because it evokes epic time with its emphasis on beginnings, ancestors, and a past “where everything is good” (Bakhtin 1981, 16). This epic past is “walled off … from all subsequent times” (Bakhtin 1981, 15), just as the ancient city is separated by insurmountable walls that seem to magically glide open only for its rightful, Black inhabitants and their descendants. Hopkins’s minute descriptions of Telassar’s temples, buildings, monuments, and its cultivated, flourishing gardens seem likewise arrested in time, perhaps because Hopkins copied most of these descriptions almost verbatim from nineteenth-­century travelogues like George Alexander Hoskins’s 1835 Travels in Ethiopia (Nurhussein 2019, 57–58), or from black histories like William Wells Brown’s 1874 The Rising Son; Or, the Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (Sundquist 1993, 570). Additionally, Reuel’s repeated wonderment at what he sees, hears, and learns as he is guided about Telassar signals a sacred, mythical quality of time that, like his own mesmeric performances on Dianthe in America, makes historical time cease. Sacred, mythical time materializes most of all during Reuel’s coronation as Ergamenes, the new and future King of

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Telassar. Throughout the crowning ceremony, a magnificent, artfully choreographed pageant unfolds around Reuel, during which “humanity” (Hopkins 2004, 121) hails him with ritualistic, mythologizing music, poetry, and dance in the midst of a lavishly decorated, lit-up, and movable scenery reminiscent of the elaborate court masques during the Italian and English Renaissance (Holbrook 2019, 161–162). He himself is robed in gorgeous silken clothes with golden accessories and bedecked with a crown of the most precious stones, all outshone by the “peerless” glory and “center ornament—the black diamond of Senechus’s crown” (Hopkins 2004, 121). This crowning black jewel likewise illuminates the novel’s strategic reappropriation of demeaning constructions of Blackness by seizing first on what dominant society construes as ugly, worthless, and despicable in order to, then, driven by a reparative desire for beauty, turning it into a priceless, splendid, and unique gem. “[I]ntended to amaze” and “dedicated to wonder” (Holbrook 2019, 162), the pageant indeed causes Reuel to be “astounded” and “startled” (Hopkins 2004, 121), while it affects others in an at times “soothing …, at times exciting” (Hopkins 2004, 127) manner. The splendor of the coronation ceremony with its sacred and mythical time, thus, lavishes an ameliorative “surplus beauty” (Sedgwick 2003, 150) on Reuel and his fellow Telassarians that follows the novel’s prophesy that Ethiopia’s “glory should again dazzle the world” (Hopkins 2004, 115). At first, Telassar proves to be at once alien and “perfectly familiar” (Hopkins 2004, 119) to Reuel. In contrast to the chronotope of the American city, however, Telassar’s strangeness does not entail the feeling of being out of place and out of time and, for once, Reuel feels that he belongs and fits without having to pass when he beholds the multiple complexions of the people surrounding him, and whose skin colors range “from a creamy tint to purest ebony” (Hopkins 2004, 113). Telassar’s alienness affords Reuel with the very affects that Sedgwick considers essential for a reparative reading: he is filled with a “dazzling awe” (Hopkins 2004, 112), he is “charmed” by the musical language of the city’s inhabitants, he is “perplexed” yet at the same time overcome by a “smile” (Hopkins 2004, 114), and he enjoys the “ancient luxury” (Hopkins 2004, 115) that appeals to him aesthetically as well as regarding its superiority to American standards. And, at the end of the first day, he lets “a feeling of delicious languor and a desire for repose” (Hopkins 2004, 116) overcome him. In only a single day at Telassar, then, Hopkins lavishes an aesthetic and material wealth on her protagonist that America forever denies him

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according to the one-drop rule. This excessive investment in beauty and luxury, which is characteristic of the “desire of a reparative impulse” and its “additive and accretive” (Sedgwick 2003, 149) workings, ameliorates the general “wrongs endured by the modern Ethiopian” (Hopkins 2004, 130) as well as the more specific feelings of “shame” (Hopkins 2004, 129) attached to passing when attempting to circumvent these wrongs. Likewise, it signals the insistence on, even admittance of, a beautiful and rich Black life and history contrary to the dominant racial prejudice and what Hopkins daringly calls Reuel’s “black stupidity” (Hopkins 2004, 119), that is, his own incredulity when he views Telassar’s Black beauty and riches. Hopkins’s reparative investment in “surplus beauty” (Sedgwick 2003, 150) also pervades Reuel’s introduction to the ruling matriarch of Telassar, Queen Candace. The encounter completes his initiation into the duties as future leader of the ancient Ethiopian city, which constitutes Reuel’s second fateful obligation after Dianthe’s revival. His reaction to uniting with this graceful, strong Black woman and openly living the life of a Black man is noteworthy in that his reflections on the different spacetimes and identities of his previous life alongside with his role and prospects in Telassar point to additional reparative sentiments. He feels “rest and satisfaction,” his “doubts” regarding the beauty and wealth of Black life and history disappear, and he no longer needs to constantly be on his guard as a Black man in a white-dominated world, which constitutes an entirely new sensation: “A sudden moisture filled his eyes; a curious vague softness and tenderness stole over him” (Hopkins 2004, 139). Still, his own paranoia of being Black in a white-dominated world does not seem to ever fully leave him, even in Telassar, and he asks himself: “[W]hy not accept this pleasant destiny which held its alluring arms so seductively towards him?” (Hopkins 2004, 139). Although at this moment Reuel’s reparative desires win over his paranoia and he actively chooses life in the ancient Ethiopian idyll over life in the nineteenth-century American city, the hitherto walled-off timespace of Telassar nevertheless becomes permeable as earlier timespaces and identities begin punctuating Reuel’s reparative experiences and his time travels begin anew. Haunted again by Dianthe’s calls from afar through his “power of second sight” (Hopkins 2004, 141), Reuel is introduced to Telassar’s ancient technology with which one can transcend time and space: a disk of unknown material with which he can look at the dead and into the past; and “a vessel like a baptismal font, cut in stone, full of water” (Hopkins

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2004, 144) that helps him to look at the living and into the future. Furthermore, by preparing “the mystical disk” (Robey 2016, 200) with a special “liquid,” he can gain a glimpse of Dianthe’s “present situation” (Hopkins 2004, 146). Mandy R.  Reid notes that vision is central to “Telassarians’ scientific technologies” and argues that these technologies “def[y] Western categorization” (Reid 2011, 99). However, Hopkins builds her time machine, as it were, from a combination of devices that amalgamate Western and Eastern material and spiritual science and culture. While the disk reminds of the ancient Ethiopian thought and spiritual practices associated with its solar cult (Gabolde 2020, 349), the water receptacle evokes Christian religious practices. Hopkins, thus, creates syncretistic instruments whose inner and outer light and vision enable overcoming the timespace continuum in ways consistent with Reuel’s previous travel through and experiences of time and space through his “power of second sight” (Hopkins 2004, 141) at the same time as she underscores the rich tradition of African knowledge and culture.

Conclusion: The Failure of Reparative Racial Justice in Black Time Travel At the very end of the novel, Hopkins briefly indicates one other desire, for which Reuel and his fellow Telassarians seek repair as they travel into nineteenth-century America again—the desire for moral and racial justice. Yet Of One Blood concludes with the disconcerting discrepancy between the workings of justice in the timespace of nineteenth-century America’s court system and the Telassarian understanding of what it means to mete out justice, when the Livingston family’s “wealth purchas[es] shrewd and active lawyers” (Hopkins 2004, 191) who bring about Aubrey’s acquittal. Considering Aubrey’s successful lifelong performance of whiteness, this outcome suggests that money and class, perhaps more so than skin color and “blood,” are central to the construction of race. Moreover, if, according to the one-drop rule, Aubrey is not white, how can the justice effected by the Telassarian time travelers—Aubrey’s suicide committed under their hypnotic influence—in any way amount to a satisfactory restorative for the “wrongs endured by the modern Ethiopian”? (Hopkins 2004, 130). Indeed, the novel gestures toward this very dilemma when it states that Ai’s promise that “[j]ustice will be done” satisfies Charlie, the white American, but fails to “sooth[e]” (Hopkins 2004, 192) Reuel, who remains silent.

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Reuel’s return to Telassar after the failure to obtain reparative racial justice in nineteenth-century America does not, however, dissociate him from the paranoid life of an African American in a white-dominated world. Although we are told that Reuel unites with Queen Candace and lives “peacefully” (Hopkins 2004, 193) in Telassar’s past idyll, the penultimate paragraph returns us to a paranoid reading of Blackness. Watching with “serious apprehension” the relentless forces of expanding white domination, Reuel anticipates yet another time loop of Black dehumanization that might bring about renewed Black time travels when he somberly asks: “‘Where will it stop?’” (Hopkins 2004, 193). Competing Interests  The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

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Magazine”. American Periodicals 17 (1): 41–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20770968. Accessed 30 September 2023. Love, Heather. 2010. Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading. Criticism 52 (2): 235–241. https://doi.org/10.1353/ crt.2010.022. Nurhussein, Nadia. 2019. Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.23943/ princeton/9780691190969.001.0001. Otten, Thomas J. 1992. Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race. ELH 59 (1): 227–256. https://doi.org/10.2307/2873425. Pochmara, Anna. 2019. “In the Tangled Lily-Bed”: Rhizomatic Textuality and Rooted Cosmopolitanism in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood. In New Cosmopolitanisms, Race, and Ethnicity: Cultural Perspectives, ed. Ewa Barbara Luczak, Anna Pochmara, and Samir Dayal, 43–58. Warsaw: De Gruyter Open Poland. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110626209-­003. Reid, Mandy A. 2011. Utopia Is in the Blood: The Bodily Utopias of Martin R. Delany and Pauline Hopkins. Utopian Studies 22 (1): 91–103. https://doi. org/10.1353/utp.2011.0009. Robey, Molly K. 2016. Excavating Ethiopia: Biblical Archaeology in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood. Studies in American Fiction 43 (2): 183–206. https:// doi.org/10.1353/saf.2016.0009. Schrager, Cynthia D. 1996. Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race. In The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, ed. John Cullen Gruesser, 182–209. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You. In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, and Performativity, 123–151. Durham: Duke University Press. Stone, Jonathan. 2008. Polyphony and the Atomic Age: Bakhtin’s Assimilation of an Einsteinian Universe. Modern Language Association 123 (2): 405–421. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25501862. Accessed 30 September 2023. Sundquist, Eric J. 1993. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Eugene. 1996. William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/ 9781400822195. Wittenberg, David. 2016. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. New  York: Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/ 9780823273348.

CHAPTER 9

Time Travel and Social Values in Femi Osofisan’s One Legend, Many Seasons Oyewumi Olatoye Agunbiade and Sone Mirabeau Enongene

Introduction Time travel is one of the weird but interesting motifs of the drama genre that creatively abuse the usual narratological and linear rules of storytelling tradition (Wittenberg 2013). A classic example of the use of this motif is in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol whose publication in 1843 as novella and theatrical version in 1844 continues to attract scholarly attention across the world and in theater parlance (Bloom 2011). Over the years, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been adapted by diverse authors to reflect the correspondence of Dickens’ ideology across race and continents (Hutchison 2021). One such adaptation is the play One Legend, Many Seasons (2001) (henceforth One Legend) written by the Nigerian playwright, essayist, and critic Femi Osofisan. Osofisan in One Legend ingeniously adapted the Victorian source text to an indigenous African theater in such a way that demonstrates the universality of human behavior, with his ability to draw

O. O. Agunbiade (*) • S. M. Enongene Department of Arts, Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_9

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correspondence between the English theater/audience and the African stage and people. However, the overwhelming aspect of time travel in the play and its social implication has not received adequate attention from prominent reviewers and critics of Osofisan’s plays. For instance, Abubakar (2009) explored and conceptualized Osofisan’s construction of actor/ audience interaction and participation in One Legend as a novel contribution of the playwright to Modern African Dramatic theater. On his part, Dunton (2022) examines Osofisan’s dramaturgy with regard to the process of adapting Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into One Legend. Dunton further appraises Osofisan’s introduction of a narrator and folktale which are not in the source text while noting his omission of the two wretched children brought in by the third spirit that visited Scrooge. None of the mentioned scholars have explored the surreal and paranormal nature of One Legend, neither have they considered its social value in the African (Nigerian) context where we have many Scrooges which Osofisan has recreated in Alowolodu. The current study seeks to investigate this lacuna in the study of One Legend on one part and on the other demonstrate the dynamics of time travel in African drama and cinema with the success of Osofisan in domesticating Dickens’ message of benevolence to Africa. It is to be noted that cinema and theater are used interchangeably in the study. This is so because there are few scholarly works on African theater and time travel while there exist a vast body of works on time travel and cinema across other continents. So, the study has tried in the review to see a marriage of theater and cinema to situate a place for the primary text which is a drama. This is however not strange because the main difference between cinema and theater is that while one is a recorded performance, the other is a live performance. The study begins with a survey of the emergence of the time travel motif in drama (cinema) with a perceptive inquest into the ideology of the playwright—Femi Osofisan. Using magic realism as a framework and interpretive design for analysis, the study explores the malleability and didactic value of time travel plot and concludes that One Legend has proven the motif as most invaluable in theater/cinema than other genres of literature.

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Time Travel and Drama (Cinema) Time traveling, which is one of the most popular ideas of science fiction, has considerably been embraced in the drama and film-making enterprise (Elder 2009; Petersson 2017). This development is not unconnected with the fact that time traveling mode is flexible and as Elder (2009) puts it that it “can open many different doors in storytelling.” Peterson further notes, It is an easy way for film-makers to create another universe where it is possible to invert values and intentions, to draw conclusions of our own way of life here and now and bring us to the probable future world, to get us to see, then and there, the consequences of our actions now. (Petersson 2017, 212)

Time travel therefore offers ample opportunity to the dramatist to restructure the linear chronological conception of time to achieve certain effect and convey the message he or she hopes to pass to the audience. This fictional feature according to Sherman (2017) has been the basis for more than 400 films and 1500 television series let alone large numbers of individual TV episodes. Sherman in his book Now and Then We Travel: Visiting Past and Futures in Film (2017) historically explores how the film industry now enjoys great influence from the time travel medium. To establish this influence further, Sherman notes that just about the time he was writing the book, which later got published in 2017, six American time travel series, two web series, and several films were released. Sherman traces this productivity to the sheer flexibility time travel offers to tell a story which makes it plausible for more producers and practitioners to use. This flexibility according to Sherman can range from the epic (What if Germany won World War II?), to the personal (can you regain the love you lost?), from the comic (you relieve the same awful day, over and over), to the tragic (You tried and prevent your best friend’s death, but you fail). (2017, 1)

Sherman further traces this development of the time travel movies to some classic fiction which has been adapted to the screen. Notable among these is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), the prototype from which the primary text of this study is adapted. Although Sherman contends that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is not exactly time travel, because the ghosts show Scrooge visions of past and future which he cannot interact with. Robert Zemeckis (2009) who had made the story into a 3D computer

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animated film however discountenanced such a position claiming Dickens’ self-published novella “is the greatest time travel story ever written” (A Christmas Carol—Featurette, 2009). Zemeckis’ deployment of modern technology and performance capture, which have been acknowledged by film critics, no doubt positions Zemeckis on a vantage position to x-ray and comment on the fictional prowess of Dickens. For instance, Gharib (2019) in “Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol” notes that technology and performance capture as deployed by Zemeckis “allows one to visualize Dickens’ story the way he may have imagined it.” Sherman (2017) however notes that Dickens’ play foreshadows many of the themes that time travel movies would develop. These themes include repenting your past, realizing your mistakes, and learning your future is going to turn out very bad indeed. Sherman (2017, 2) notes that “while Scrooge can’t change events in other times, his new knowledge lets him avert his tragic future and live a long, happy life.” On the history of time travel into the screen, Sherman recalls Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which he describes as unambiguously time travel as it involves a Yankee Engineer who gets hit on the head and wakes up in the age of King Arthur. Sherman juxtaposes Twain’s book with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and concludes “Like A Christmas Carol, Twain’s book contains same ideas future time travel writers would revisit repeatedly” (Sherman 2017, 2). According to Sherman, Twain’s book “mocks the ignorance of the past, satirizes the present and provides plenty of rollicking adventure and anachronistic humor” (2). Sherman further explains that the bloom of the time travel narrative in the twentieth century caught the attention of the movies whose practitioners got in on the action. He noted that the 1910 adaptation of A Connecticut Yankee debuted as the first time travel film, while in quick succession “two more adaptations followed in the next two decades, both employing an ‘it was just a dream ending’” (2). This ending was evident in Turn Back the Clock (1933) and Berkeley Square (1933), which according to Sherman (2017, 2) “gave filmgoers a story where the time travel was real.” While Sherman describes these earlier films as fantasy, he notes that screen travel by scientific means had to wait until 1947’s Brick Bradford movie serial which was followed by 1956’s World Without End. More scientific time travel movies were thus premiered in 1959, most of which enjoyed multiple adaptations of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). It

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has since then according to Sherman (2017, 2) become “increasingly common in movies and television, and now online films and series.” Sherman lists some of the recent TV series on time travel to include Hindsight, which depicts a woman correcting her life choices of 20 years earlier; Outlander, with a 1940 woman trapped in 1700’s Scotland; DC Legends of Tomorrow, with a team of superheroes and a couple of criminals traveling through time to stop an immortal villain (Sherman, 1). It is discovered that Sherman’s survey of the influence and history of time travel above only account for the American and English theater/ cinema. African drama and cinema nonetheless have experimented with time travel. The current study therefore seeks to occupy this lacuna with the distinction of the African version and demonstrate the universality of the motif through the primary text of the study. It will reveal the influential resource time travel offers the theater, just as a considerable number of directors have adapted classical time travel narrative in recent time. The reason for this is not unconnected with the versatility of the medium which Elder (2009, 18) describes as its “popular disregard for logic” and “broad spectrum that contains all themes and all genres for all audiences.” This is what Femi Osofisan experiments in One Legend, Many Seasons as he domesticates Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on the African stage. Osofisan like Zemeckis has transported Dickens’ narrative to action for the audience to really imagine what Dickens was thinking when he wrote his masterpiece. Osofisan thus captures in One Legend Dickens’ 1843 mood in such a way that the contemporary audience is electrified by the actions on stage, embarks on a self-reflexive and imaginary journey into the past and future time, and then returns to the present with a changed mindset. The current study therefore seeks to situate the place and imperative of the time travel plot in contemporary Nigeria and Africa.

Femi Osofisan: The Man, His Works, and Influences Femi Osofisan is a theater director, playwright, essayist, actor, critic, poet, novelist, editor, and newspaper columnist. Osofisan was born on 16 June 1946 at Eruwon, in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun state, Nigeria. He had his university education at University of Ibadan, where he was admitted to study French, Language, and Literature. His training in these subject areas at the University of Ibadan, Dakar, and Paris between 1966 and 1974 afforded his contact with French literary writers like Racine, Moliere, Sartre, Beckett, Giraudoux, Feydeau, and Artaud (Awodiya 1995). All these

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education and experience exposed him to both foreign and African cultures which have been central to his drama. He is Emeritus Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Ibadan, as well as a distinguished professor at Kwara State University, Ilorin, Nigeria. He has written and produced more than seventy plays, five volumes of poetry, four novels, and several collections of essays. Osofisan is an enigmatic literator who has taught across the world while his works have been performed in numerous universities around the world including Japan, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Lesotho, China, USA, Canada, UK, France, and South Africa (Olasope 2015). On achievement, Osofisan is the only African to have received the prestigious World Literary Prize in Drama—“The Thalia Laurel”—from the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) in 2016. He bagged the award based on his contribution to theater through critical writing. He has further been honored with Officiers de l’ordre national du Mérite, République française (1999); Nigerian National Order of Merit in the Humanities [NNOM] (2004); Fonlon-Nichols Prize for Literature and the Struggle for Human Rights (2006); and Fellow, Nigerian Academy of Letters [FNAL] (2006) (Olasope 2015). The African intellectual icon and Professor of African Studies, Toyin Falola, described Femi Osofisan as “the African icon of relatable literature … who has carved a niche for himself as a dexterous adapter of other works of literature—adaptations that reflect the beauty of the Yoruba culture and serve as relatable works of literature” (Falola 2021). According to Falola: One of the lessons that his adaptation of works has taught us is that everyone is first human, and human flaws, vices, or strengths are not unique to any one race. As women are often the most affected victims of war in Europe, so are they also the most affected victims of war in Africa, a point projected to light by Femi Osofisan’s narration of the Owu story, which has semblance to the story of Troy. (Falola 2021)

Osofisan, like Falola alluded, by responding to existential conditions of Nigeria and Africa like other African playwrights—Ola Rotimi and Wole Soyinka for instance—has committed his art to reinterpreting and reconstructing classical and foreign literary texts to speak to his contemporary society. Some of such plays which Osofisan has adapted include Who’s Afraid of Solarin? (1978) which is an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector ([1836] 1980), where he depicts the corruption

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and moral decadence ravaging Nigeria as reflected by Gogol in communist Russia in the source text. Osofisan has also adapted Shakespearian plays like Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice which he reconstructed in such a way that make them socially and politically relevant to the contemporary conditions of Nigerian society. Femi Osofisan in an interview with Olasope recounts his motivation and intentions with adaptations of foreign plays to the African theater. According to Osofisan, The adaptations that I have developed over the years fall into two categories. The first kind are those that are commissioned. In these, I am mostly responding to a given brief, to the specific demands of the sponsors. You know, they give you a certain agenda, which you more or less have to comply with, and so your freedom as an artist is somewhat curtailed. … It is the second category therefore, that excites me. These are the adaptations I am inspired to undertake from the impulse of a powerful and mutual recognition. … Hence the final product may not be an accurate ‘translation’ of the original work, taken that my own pre-occupations come into play. For me, this is one of the beauties in this kind of ‘adaptation’—the fact that as a dramatist I can select, decide to retain or excise some aspect or other of the original work in fulfilment of my own ideological pressures. … All the same, it is useful to remember that there are astonishing parallels in the different cultures of the world. It’s fascinating, and it just goes to show that humanity is the same everywhere. This is what allows our plays to travel with ease across borders. (2015, 2–3)

When one considers his motivation as detailed above, it becomes easy to tap into the well of messages Femi Osofisan unpacks in One Legend—an adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol which the current study examines. It will however be interesting to have an understanding of Osofisan’s ideology in the theater in order to be able to grasp his message in One Legend. Osofisan is an objective dramatist who is conscious of the social stratification in Nigeria his country and the African region (Agunbiade 2023). He has been vociferous in his diatribe to the rulers and oppressive government to the extent that critics have labeled him a Marxist. For instance, in such plays like Once Upon Four Robbers and The Chattering and the Song, the playwright has on different fora rejected such claims which he describes as not all-inclusive of his preoccupation with society and the theater (Agunbiade 2019). He has therefore written and dramatized the untoward actions of both the bad leaders and the idealized followers (masses) alike in his plays.

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Osofisan also takes his diatribe into the public service where he has condemned the working class who often are idealized as seen in Who’s Afraid of Solarin? While in Love’s Unlike Lading and Fires Burn and Die Hard we see the frank dramatist telling it just as it is with respect to greed in the market place and in business engagement among the masses. Rubin (2016) in a brief introduction on Femi Osofisan while conferring on him the 2016 Thalia Prize described him as an African playwright of the generation who followed Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka and the anti-apartheid activist Athol Fugard, noting that “his footprint is almost as large as theirs on the continent of Africa and it is growing in other parts of the world as well.” The playwright is still very much active as he continues to write plays, teach, direct, and perform his plays across the world. One Legend, Many Seasons as explored in this chapter introduces the reader to the theater and ideology of Osofisan as well the concept of time travel in the African space.

Synopsis of One Legend, Many Seasons As an adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, One Legend, Many Seasons is entirely mimetic of its original. The play, as in the source text, begins in the office of its protagonist—Alowolodu—who personifies Ebenezer Scrooge. The temporal setting is a day before Christmas with the last-minute shopping, harmony, and greetings conditioning the mood. The miserly Alowolodu is, however, seen in the clutch of his rusty office carefully counting his money. He is suddenly jolted out of this action with a knock on the door which makes him hastily cover the money. Rotimi (who is Fred in Dickens’ version of the play), his nephew, is the unexpected visitor who has come to extend the season’s greetings to his uncle. The meeting introduces the audience to the character of Alowolodu who has no regard for Christmas let alone the reason to be happy at such a period of the year. Their conversation on Christmas, which Alowolodu calls “Nonsense and ingredient!” (Osofisan 2001, 5), further introduces the audience to Alowolodu’s clerk—Dedeke (Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s Clerk in Dickens’ Christmas)—who unconsciously responded to Rotimi’s prayer of “God bless Christmas” (Osofisan 2001, 6). Dedeke is ill-treated and meagerly paid by Alowolodu and risks losing his job for saying “Amen” to Rotimi’s prayer. At the exit of Rotimi, two other visitors who are charity solicitors visited to request support for the poor during Christmas but are disappointed

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with Alowolodu’s remark. The tension of the play begins as he releases Dedeke at seven o’clock in the evening and returns to count his money. The atmosphere changes with terrific noise followed by the crashing of a door like an explosion. Clanging of chains and iron is heard as light goes off leaving a feeble gleam and suddenly the ghost of Makon (Jacob Marley in Dickens’ A Christmas), his former business partner, appears (Osofisan 2001, 11). Makon, in chains and agony, comes to tell of the consequences of his lifestyle while on earth which he now suffers and purposely to warn Alowolodu to repent from such a lifestyle. He concludes that Alowolodu will be visited by three spirits (just as in A Christmas Carol) and that without their visit Alowolodu will end up more agonized than himself. True to Makon’s words, the spirits visited after his departure and their encounter with Alowolodu further divided the play into three parts which earns the play the literary tradition of time travel. The three visits, which are three different encounters, happen in a night and by the time Alowolodu wakes up, it was Christmas Day. The story line ends with a new Alowolodu whose odyssey remains a recommendation for every mean-­ spirited human being. With regard to Osofisan’s inclination to adapt foreign plays to the African theater, a critical look at One Legend suggests that it belongs to the playwright’s second category of adaptations where he is “inspired to undertake from the impulse of a powerful and mutual recognition … taken that his own pre-occupations come into play” (Olasope 2015, 3). This is so because as a dramatist he chose to select, retain, or excise some aspect or other of the original work in fulfillment of his own ideological pressures. Hence, according to Dunton (2022), Osofisan has imported a folktale into One Legend, omitted some aspects of A Christmas while retaining most parts of the source text as they reflect the mutual recognition he has identified in both cultures. This goes to establish the playwright’s position that “it is useful to remember that there are astonishing parallels in the different cultures of the world. It’s fascinating, and it just goes to show that humanity is the same everywhere” (Olasope 2015, 3).

Theoretical Consideration The theoretical framework supporting this study is magical realism. Magical realism is a global phenomenon as well as a fictional mode or literary form coined and conceptualized by Franz Roh in 1925 and Alejo Carpentier in 1949 (Camayd-Freixas 1998). It has its origin in the art

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world (post-expressionism) and has come to be embraced in literary criticism as it offers a broad range of critical perspectives and theoretical approaches (Zamora and Faris 1995). Wendy B. Faris describes magical realism as “combining realism and the fantastic so that the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them” (Faris 2004, 1). On her part, Bowers explains that magical realism “relies upon the presentation of real, imagined and magical elements as if they were real” (Bowers 2004, 21). Magical realism as a mode of literature thus presents an approach to reading literary works where the magical or fantastic elements are infused into the ordinary and those elements are accepted as reality. Faris (2004) in Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative highlights five elements of magical realism which include irreducible elements, phenomenal world, unsettling doubt, merging realms, and disruption of time. The current study combines disruption of time (as evident in time travel narratives) and irreducible elements (something which cannot be explained by the laws of this universe) with Salman Rushdie’s critique of magical realism in the analysis of One Legend, Many Seasons. Rushdie’s critique of magical realism is based on his position that realism “can no longer express or account for the absurd reality of the world we live in—a world which has the capability of destroying itself at any moment” (Cited in Zamora and Faris 1995, 88). Rushdie thus advocates the combination of divinity and absurdity in representing and satirizing the contemporary world. The mindless life of the protagonist in the current study who aims at annihilating the poor, the time slip device that disrupts the chronological ideology of time, and the fantastic elements of spirits and ghosts in the play necessitate the deployment of magical realism. The protagonist and the surreal journey he is subjected to by the Spirits of Christmas past, present, and yet to come are examined in the study for hermeneutic purposes. Hence, magical realism is suitable for analyzing Osofisan’s text as he used literature to challenge wickedness and tightfisted lifestyle of certain individuals while also demonstrating the value of benevolence in contemporary African society. A textual and interpretive analytical technique is used in the study.

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Spirit of Christmas Past Femi Osofisan like Dickens in One Legend dramatizes time slips into the past, present, and future with the aid of Ancestral Spirits of Christmas past, present, and yet to come for didactic purposes. These spirits as conceptualized by the playwright disrupt time by facilitating time traveling of the protagonist—Alowolodu (who in this case is the time traveler)—into the varying realms of time for reformation. The odysseys of Alowolodu validate Sherman’s (2017) position that time travel stories can warn against a dark future, critique the present, or mock the past. The contemporary society of Osofisan is thus brought on stage in One Legend. A society where not only the corrupt leaders are stifling life out of the masses but also the middle/working class can be heartless. This is what Osofisan strives to put on stage to show that what is obtained in Dickens’ world is not an exclusive preserve of the West but human feature everywhere. He experiments with the critique of the past with the Spirit of Christmas past for his audience to see and rethink their relationship with their fellow human beings in order to avoid regret in the present and future. Alowolodu is therefore brought on stage for ridicule, for him to change from being miserly and wicked to a benevolent man. To achieve this, Alowolodu must first be visited by Osetura, the Ancestral Spirit of Christmas past. This event is preceded by the visit of Makon, the late business partner of Alowolodu, who is doomed to roam the spirit world for seven years for his erstwhile malevolent lifestyle. Makon is presented as less wicked for being thoughtful of salvaging his partner from the pains that awaits him after death, that is, if Alowolodu dies in his present disposition to life. Earlier before Makon’s arrival, a slice of that miserly life of Alowolodu is presented on Christmas Eve when conventionally everyone takes leave to prepare for the festivities of the following day. Alowolodu is seen counting money and when interrupted by the visit of Rotimi his cousin, he is outraged at Rotimi’s cheerfulness and invitation for a Christmas party. Alowolodu also maltreats his clerk, Dedeke, who he short pays and never compensates his overstay at work. Same day, he ridicules two philanthropists who request his contribution to support the needy and homeless during Christmas. Alowolodu while condemning the exchange of compliments of the season (Merry Christmas!), even wishes for total annihilation of the poor who he describes as pests to the society and rubbishes government effort to alleviate their plight:

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Alowolodu: The world is going mad! I pay this stupid clerk of mine less than a hundred naira per week. Hardly enough to feed himself and his family. And yet there he is saying ‘A happy Christmas!’ That’s why I blame the government! It doesn’t starve the citizens enough! All this SAP (Structural Adjustment Program) nonsense! What we really need instead is GRIEF and SUFFERING! SORROW, TEARS AND BLOOD, as the musician put it! May be then we’ll all learn to be sober! (Osofisan 2001, 7)

The philanthropists also persuade Alowolodu with gripping realities of the suffering poor people for him to support them; instead, Alowolodu calls the poor “nuisance” saying, “[L]et the numbers of the poor go down, and the city will become cleaner and safer. And people like you will no doubt find more respectable business to do” (Osofisan 2001, 10). It is on this premise that Makon visits, followed by the three Ancestral Spirits of Christmas. It is instructive to note that Africans value and revere their ancestors, as they see the ancestors as the intermediary between them and the supreme God (Enongene 2011). They are sought in the face of difficult situations and Africans believe communion and communications are possible between those who are on earth and the deceased. Hence, the importance Alowolodu attaches to the visit of the spirits and his readiness to follow their command. Osetura, the Spirit of Christmas past, which is the first spirit to visit Alowolodu, comes with the sole aim to illuminate Alowolodu with some realities from his past, especially his attitude and disposition to Christmas in the past; to instill in him compassion, benevolence, and regret; and to mock Alowolodu’s perceived intelligence through contrast with his past. This first time slip which is the first time disruption witnessed in One Legend takes Alowolodu into his childhood during one of his past Christmas. The trip, which begins with awe as Osetura’s appearance and aura arouses fear, shows Osetura declining to be addressed as ghost by Alowolodu but as Spirit of celebration past. The stage description which validates the irreducible element of magical realism in the play captures this moment: A song celebrates his passage. He looks strange indeed, both like a child and an old man at the same time. His face is very young, but he has long white hair. The arms and hands are long and strong, but beautiful … with a beautiful shining belt around his waist. He is also holding a long-pointed cap, and the bright

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clear light is coming from his head. (Osofisan 2001, 18–19; authors’ note: stage descriptions are written in italics in the play)

The audience is arrested with this image as the harmonic rhythm of the Christmas song “Long time ago in Bethlehem …” with a solemn percussion sustains the aura of Osetura’s arrival. He takes Alowolodu to the past after a brief introduction of himself and the first event is in the village where Alowolodu’s classmates are seen rehearsing their songs ahead of Christmas carol. We see one of the characteristics of the Spirit of the past here as Osetura mocks Alowolodu’s sudden feelings of mingling with his old school mates. Osetura quips: “Remember you never mingled with them. While they sang in the church, you were always elsewhere, brooding by yourself. Or have you forgotten? Let’s go on, perhaps we can find the young Alowolodu?” (Osofisan 2001, 21). Osetura, the Spirit of the past, further makes Alowolodu to go through some regrets which is one of Sherman’s (2017) highlighted theme of time travel. By this further journey into the past, Osofisan demonstrates that a miserly and wicked individual develops such an attitude over time. In other words, such characteristics do not just jump on individuals and could be better addressed from one’s childhood days. Osetura thus takes Alowolodu to his former school where he is found reading alone in a class during Christmas when everyone is on break and rejoicing. Another year he is seen in the same class and declines to follow his loving sister (Rotimi’s mother) when she comes to take him home. When Alowolodu sees these, he uncontrollably sheds tears of regret in reflection of his mean attitude to Rotimi the previous day: Alowolodu: [Tears in his eyes] Is that … is that really me? Osetura: It was. Alowolodu: I wish I could… But it is too late! Osetura: What’s the matter? What is it you wish? Alowolodu: Nothing, nothing. … Only, there was a boy at my door last night, singing a Christmas carol. I am sorry now that I did not give him something but drove him away instead. (Osofisan 2001, 22)

A contrast of Alowolodu’s wry disposition to his clerk and the positive atmosphere he enjoyed with his former boss during Christmas is further ignited by Osetura. This aspect of the drama undoubtedly is Osofisan’s surreptitious critique of entrepreneurs who maltreat their workers as

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against wanton criticism of leadership in Nigeria. Alowolodu personifies such bosses while his erstwhile boss is indicative of the authorial suggestion of an ideal entrepreneur. We are introduced to Pa Olasore who trained Alowolodu. Such a kind man he is that he closes work few hours to normal closing time on Christmas Eve and throws a party for his workers. Arriving the scene with Alowolodu, Osetura calls the audience to come see what Pa Olasore did: [Pa Olasore puts down his pen and looks at his watch. He rubs his hands together and calls out in a happy voice:] Olasore: Ebenezer (Alowolodu)! Kola! [Two young men come in quickly] Olasore: Hello my boys! No more work today! It’s Christmas! kola! Ebenezer! Let’s close the office! Now, let’s begin! Call everybody! Tell my wife and her friends to bring in the food and drinks! And set up the music! It’s Christmas. [The scene changes quickly. Many people, all gaily dressed come in, consisting of friends, neighbors, children and business associates] Alowolodu: During all these, behaves rather strangely, trying to join the dance, laughing, shouting out greetings. The fact that no one replies does not seem to dampen his enthusiasm. [But the voice of the spirit soon stops him]. (Osofisan 2001, 24)

Osetura at this point mocks Alowolodu with the reality that Pa Olasore spent only a little amount for the party, yet everyone was happy. This strikes the cord of reason in Alowolodu who uncontrollably said he wishes he could say a few words to his clerk Bode Dedeke who he maltreats even just some hours back. Osetura however replies him that “these are shadows of things in your past, my friend. I am showing you because you have not thought of them for a long time. But they are a part of you” (Osofisan 2001, 25). Osofisan obviously satirizes those entrepreneurs who overuse their staff and often short pays them. This is characteristic of some entrepreneurs in Nigeria who are only mindful of the profit they target and not the welfare of the employees who work for them. Such is Alowolodu who pays worthless salary that cannot suffice his hard-working clerk. Such workers at times fall sick and are psychologically drained but may not resign because of increasing unemployment. Ironically most of such villainous entrepreneurs were not exposed to such rigor as an apprentice as demonstrated in the past life of Alowolodu.

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The protagonist becomes overwhelmed by this past that he compels Osetura to show him no more of it, adding that “it is all too sad” (Osofisan 2001, 25). However before consenting, Osetura slips him further to the most touching one where his girlfriend Aduke dumps him owing to his greed for money over relationship. Aduke being unable to tolerate Alowolodu’s disrespect for their relationship approaches him to discuss their future, but Alowolodu further prioritizes money over his love for Aduke. He is not ready to spare time to advance the relationship to marriage. Aduke hence explains that he cannot love the man Alowolodu is turning to, gives him his engagement ring, and notes, “[Y]ou will grow rich one day, I can see. But I’m not sure you will still be a human being. So goodbye” (Osofisan 2001, 27). At this juncture Alowolodu becomes down casted and depressed that he shouted: Alowolodu: Oh God! That’s enough, spirit show me no more! [Reaching forward suddenly, he seizes the pointed cap and covers the spirit’s head. The spirit begins to drop to the floor, with a cry. As he falls, lights die off the scene.] (Osofisan 2001, 27)

This gripping experience is where Part two of the play ends. The foregoing therefore brings us to another characteristic of time traveling to the past which is therapy. Although we could not conclude at the end of the second part of the play that these slips into the past are therapeutic for the traveler, who in this case is wickedly sick as Alowolodu tries to hurt Osetura, who is sent to prevent his doom. It is however instructive to note Osetura’s position on the need for these slips into the past. Reacting to his plea to stop showing him slices of the past, Osetura just before slipping into the conversation that ends Alowolodu’s relationship with Aduke notes, “If you don’t remember, Alowolodu, then you cannot heal. No man or woman can be complete without love” (Osofisan 2001, 26). Osofisan therefore in this gripping moral story on kindness dramatizes the therapeutic power of the past on a villain through the screen. The slip into the past of the time traveler therefore gives occasion to reflect and realize where he or she has erred and bears in him or her a repentant spirit. Osofisan seems to wake that aspect of the memory of his audience where they have erred or have been hurt, not only for them to remember but also for them to overcome that past. Of course, this utterance births a change in Alowolodu’s perception of the purpose of these strange odysseys. The effect of the slips into the past is demonstrated so vividly by the stage

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directions in a way that validates the power of the stage and screen over narrative (prose). The sight of Osetura, the first spirit who ignites the irreducible element of the play, was overwhelming, absurd, and divine. This exactly is what Salman Rushdie means by advocating combination of divinity and absurdity in representing and satirizing the contemporary world (cited in Zamora and Faris 1995, 88). Osofisan therefore scores high in view of Rushdie’s position as Osetura invokes an aura that electrifies the stage and cascades the message of change of the playwright on the audience effortlessly. He leaves the audience thinking about their past with the slips into Alowolodu’s past. No doubt, Osetura (Ancestral Spirit of Christmas past) fulfills the mission Old Makon describes in his visit to Alowolodu with these slips into the past to justify the didactic power of the time past device of the time travel plot in theater.

Spirit of Christmas Present In furtherance of the didactic values of time travel, Osetura’s departure is relieved by the Spirit of Christmas present (Orekelewa). Her arrival intensifies the time disruption feature of magical realism as the audience are further amazed at the ability of Alowolodu to descend in the Spirit of his past. Orekelewa’s sole mission however is to bring the protagonist back to his present life and to criticize especially that closefisted and villainous lifestyle of Alowolodu. She will realize this by taking Alowolodu across five familiar scenes for didactic purposes. Her arrival like that of Osetura is also strange but due to the season she personifies, she only appears flamboyantly surrounded with lights, musicians, heaps of dishes of food, drinks, sweets, and bouquets which are characteristics of the Christmas festive season. She announces herself as the spirit of the season’s celebration who daily changes her appearance. Alowolodu acknowledges he has heard about her but does not know the spirit really exists. With Orekelewa, Osofisan kindles the existence of the spirit of benevolence behind Christmas and other festivities. This is obvious in Orekelewa’s response to Alowolodu: You knew when you were young! Everybody believes in me, until they lose their innocence. They see me at each festivity—at Easter for instance, or at the end of Ramadan. Then one day, they stop believing, stop seeing me, and that moment they begin to die. (Osofisan 2001, 30)

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The authorial vision is clear in this context as Osofisan criticizes the people’s departure from believing in values that help shaped their society but now embrace individualism as personified in the protagonist. Orekelewa is therefore sent to re-inculcate that lifestyle in Alowolodu just as the Ghost of Christmas present does for Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The first stop as he leads Alowolodu out of his sitting room is the market where we see people engaging in last-minute shopping for Christmas. We see mammoth crowd and ambulant traders all rejoicing because it’s Christmas season. As a way of depicting the mood of the season, the narrator paints that moment when everybody was in good spirit noting: Sometimes when they collided against each other and were about to be angry, Orekelewa would wave her whisk over them, and they would be laughing again, even rebuking themselves for being sour in the season of Christmas. (Osofisan 2001, 30–31)

Just like earlier incidences of Christmas past, Alowolodu begins to feel at one with these people and willing to dispense kindness and solidarity with them. However, just as he is to ask from Orekelewa why he is brought to the scene, the spirit takes him to the poorest part of the town where Bode Dedeke—his clerk—and his family live. We are introduced to a poor but happy and kind family who just finished their Christmas dinner. Dedeke has a dutiful wife and three children, the last born being in serious pain as one of his legs is in iron. The family cannot afford the medical bill due to the meager salary Alowolodu pays Dedeke and has refused to increase his pay despite Dedeke’s allegiance and productivity. Dedeke’s wife frowns at these and attributes their poverty to Alowolodu’s miserly lifestyle. Dedeke however brings the conversation to a stop saying, “No more of that, dear! It’s Christmas, and we mustn’t say a bad word of anybody” (Osofisan 2001, 32). The family further makes a toast of long life to Mr. Alowolodu and wishes him a happy Christmas. The effect of this scene is spontaneous on Alowolodu who bursts into tears, asking the spirit, “[W]ill he live, will the child survive?” (Osofisan 2001, 33). The dynamics of the time travel plot (Sherman 2017) is essentially strong at this scene as the spirit depicts a scary future for the child and unleashes his criticism of Alowolodu’s present life that precipitates that future. In his words:

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Orekelewa: No, I’m afraid, if there is no change in the immediate future, in the material circumstances of the family, the child will die! but why Alowolodu? If by next Christmas we do not find him here, what does it matter to you? Isn’t that what you want, that the wretched of the earth should die off. So that the city may be cleaner and safer? (Osofisan 2001, 33)

Orekelewa combines sarcasm with rhetorical questions in the prevailing context to make Alowolodu realize his mistakes and hence nauseates him to see the immediate consequence on the Dedeke’s family. This buttresses Sherman’s (2017) view that time travel makes one realize one’s mistake. This is however metaphoric to the spatial context of the play which is Nigeria where the playwright wants citizens to realize the consequences of their acts and be more generous, not only at Christmas but in identifying with the poor and less privileged affected by the dwindling economy. Osofisan is undoubtedly prophetic with One Legend when one considers the current harsh realities being experienced in contemporary Nigeria. The current Nigeria is a place where poverty has increased with the removal of oil subsidies. It is a place where hospitality, benevolence, and kindness have become more valuable than the currency, as increase in fuel price and rise in inflation have rendered households that were initially comfortable helpless. It is certainly a time to dispense kindness to families, employees, and neighbors. Osofisan therefore runs two scripts with the device of Spirit of Christmas present. That is, while engaging his present audience on stage, he also travels intuitively into the nation’s future to prepare them ahead of such a horrendous period. This is why One Legend will remain classic in Nigeria’s literary history and hermeneutics as it ceases to continue to engage emerging realities of the country and its people. In the next slip to Alowolodu’s present life, we see a plot development that is retrospective of the harm the protagonist has inflicted on himself by not enjoying life despite the wealth he has acquired over the years. We see Orekelewa bringing to life how Alowolodu denies himself of the little enjoyment of life that even those less affluent enjoy. By taking him into Rotimi’s family, Orekelewa shows Alowolodu what he misses by declining Rotimi’s invitation as the audience see how Rotimi treats his family to a picnic at Christmas. The family, as a way of unwinding, subjects themselves to two games which they joyfully participated. Like other odysseys, Alowolodu struggles to break through the other world to participate but could not, because he is invisible to them. The criticism is heartrending this time around as one of the games ended with a reference to Alowolodu,

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where he is described as a wild animal by the family. He is suddenly cut off by the spirit who takes him across many families to further have a feel of what Christmas means. The narrator puts it this way: They went far and saw much. They visited many homes, and there was always happiness when they arrived. The spirit stood by the side of people who were ill, and they became cheerful. She stood by the poor, and they felt rich. She went to the lonely, and they forgot their solitude. They went to many places. And in each place, she told a story. (Osofisan 2001, 37)

By taking Alowolodu to different people with different life issues, Orekelewa teaches him the power and value of kindness which he lacks. One of the stories which is a folktale that the spirit shares with Alowolodu is highly didactic as the audience is taken back into history of how the mouse remained the smallest of the animals in the animal kingdom. Orekelewa attributes this to Mr. Mouse’s selfishness of not contributing a portion of his ear to a drum project that the community of animals embark upon. This earns him a curse that doomed his generation to their current stature. The lesson for Alowolodu as explained by the spirit is that “all the good things that a community, or social organization, that we belong to, all the things they undertake to do to benefit everybody, we should put our hands into it and try our best there” (Osofisan 2001, 47). Here ends the travel to the present life of Alowolodu. Although Alowolodu cannot undo his past life, with the travel to his present life through a divine experience which offers a panorama of his awkward conception of life, we see a remorse man totally willing to alter his present life. Osofisan like Dickens demonstrates with the present time device of the time travel plot the indubitable value of the theater (cinema) in x-raying the immediate life conditions of human beings for criticism. The members of the audience in Osofisan’s theater who are symbolic of Alowolodu are therefore subjected to a mental and spiritual trip of their immediate life for moral purpose. Empowered by the Spirit of Christmas present, a make-­ believe of the divinity and benevolence of Christmas season is further entrenched in the audience. By the end of Orekelewa’s assignment with Alowolodu we are left with a conviction that the protagonist is remorseful and willing to rethink his lifestyle as he realizes his mistakes. Osofisan however seems to demonstrate that the slip into the past and present is not enough to transform an awkward being. He experiments deeper into the imaginary with the visit of the last spirit—the Spirit of Christmas yet to come.

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The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come The Spirit of Christmas yet to come (Orisanla) is the last of the spirits, which Makon tells Alowolodu will visit him to avert the dilemma that awaits him after death. Orisanla’s visit demonstrates the dynamics of the future time device of the time travel plot on stage. This device is also enhanced by the magical element of time disruption as it enables a character to live out his or her future. It is instructive to note that time slip into the future comes with polar implications. In other words, it either presents a fearful future to warn the time traveler against that future which is a consequence of the character’s past and present life or presents a beautiful future which sequels the present lifestyle. For the former, the traveler grapples with a bad future and possibly returns to amend the present life, while for the latter, the character falls in love with that future and wants nothing short of it. Literally, the character in the latter may not want to return to real life because of the idyllic future he or she has experienced. However, in the context under study, we are faced with the first instance as it applies to Alowolodu whose past life is nothing good to write about. The audience thus expects an awful adventure with the last spirit who chooses not to speak in the entire encounter. This silence is no doubt constructed for ideological purposes by the playwright, who seems to indicate that the future is silent, flexible, and malleable, compared to the past which cannot be relived. The playwright at the same time seeks to teach the audience that they have a chance to determine their future through their present lifestyle. Alowolodu is therefore set to see a dreadful future in consonance with his real lifestyle. Orisanla leads Alowolodu straight into moments after his demise when passersby mock his death in front of his office. They ridicule his inability to take with him his money. The conversation is intense between two of the men who jokingly said they thought Alowolodu will never die and conclude that none has indicated to attend his funeral because no one will cook, and since no food they will not be attending. The spirit further takes Alowolodu to another part of the stage, where it is revealed that all items in Alowolodu’s apartment including his clothes have been stolen by neighbors and ready to be sold as secondhand items to buyers. The traders explain with confidence that they are not ashamed

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of stealing Alowolodu’s items because “he was a mean, old fellow who gave nothing to anybody while he was alive” (Osofisan 2001, 52). One of them Baba Roju in a conversation with the buyer portrays the ill treatment given to Alowolodu’s dead body as he presents Alowolodu’s best shirt for sale, Baba Roju: And this is his best shirt. As good as new. I can tell you. In fact it was his best shirt, it got no hole or tear anywhere. See for yourself. If I hadn’t taken it, it would have been wasted. Trader: What do you mean by “wasted”? Baba Roju: Oh someone had put it on him, and he was going to be buried in it. Can you imagine! But I took it off him and replaced it with an old one. Where he is going, I’m sure he won’t be worrying about elegance there! (Osofisan 2001, 53)

Osofisan, like Dickens, conceptualizes the time travel plot as one of the best motifs to depict life after death. With time slip into the future in One Legend, we see an allusion to the biblical parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke chapter 16 verse 19, told by Jesus with regard to their reward. The two playwrights thus strike on stage scenes that validate the reality of life after death. This is in concert with Petersson (2017, 212) who submits that time travel offers filmmakers an easy way “to create another universe and to bring us to the probable future world, to get us to see then, and there, the consequences of our actions now.” This is evident in Baba Roju’s utterance that Alowolodu will not be worrying about elegance after life. To also indicate that the dead will be faced with varying surprises, the playwright presents a curious Alowolodu who desperately wishes to know the identity of the dead man who he describes as “friendless and unloved” (Osofisan 2001, 53). The spirit however declines to answer him as observed in the entire trip, but heads to a graveyard where we see the Dedekes paying last respect to their dead son. The gravestone is described as strewn with beautiful flowers while the family is seen praying for his soul to rest in peace. The playwright draws a contrast at the graveyard with respect to the young Dedeke and Alowolodu’s grave. Dedeke in an elegy before leaving the grave compares the good life of his son with the worthless life of Alowolodu. According to him, And now that he is gone, let us be comforted that at least he did not suffer for long. His life was short, but remember, it brought joy to all of us. I don’t

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wish to gloat over it, but his life was certainly happier and more rewarding than that of the poor soul lying over there. He had all the riches in the world but look at how alone he was when he died, and how lonely he stays there, with nobody to mourn him. But our son will always be part of us. Every Sunday, we shall come here to bring him flowers, and remember him. Let us go now. (Osofisan 2001, 54)

These powerful lines by Dedeke hit Alowolodu so much that [he steps forward, and at the same time, the gravestone seems to rise and turn towards him. In clear letters on it, Alowolodu reads: EBENEZER ALOWOLODU] (Osofisan 2001, 54). On seeing his name on the grave, Alowolodu loses his calm, becomes so fearful, and bursts out pleading with the spirit that he has changed. He promises to live a good life, love Christmas, contribute to everything good people are doing, and be happy with people. He pleads with the spirit to help him rub out the writing on the stone, adding that he will live in the past, present, and the future while also remembering the lessons they teach. This scene brings to the end Alowolodu’s encounter with the three spirits of the past, present, and future as Alowolodu falls and passes out. He will wake in the last part of the play to the pleasant reality of being able to witness another Christmas. It is however instructive to note that the Spirit of Christmas yet to come demonstrates the dramatic capacity of the time travel plot to invoke the human imagination of the future through paranormal means. The theater thus presents with the time travel device a matrix and feat so tall for science to beat in the space of time. This humanistic value of the theater is evident in the ensuing section of this study where a demonstration of the transformative effect of the time travel plot on Alowolodu (the people) is examined.

Time Travel and Social Value in One Legend, Many Seasons Having another chance after a reprimand for wrongdoing is always a delight for any human willing to change. The time travel plot device is such a motif that is readily available for any artist willing to explore this ideology in the arts. Femi Osofisan as a restless researcher engages this to the optimum in the play understudy as he constructs a metaphor aimed at social justice (equality of wealth) for his audience. The last part of the play therefore presents us the social value of the time travel plot as explored by

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Osofisan. The overwhelming implication of this plot becomes evident at the climax of the play as Alowolodu strives to rewrite his present life when he returns to consciousness. In other words, the entire three slips into the past, present, and future happen over the night with the aid of the irreducible and time disruption elements of magical realism deployed by the playwright. This sudden realization of another chance by Alowolodu is so electrifying that he exclaims, Alowolodu: What? It’s Christmas Day! I’ve not missed it! My God! My God! So those Spirits all came in one night! Ah thank you, God, for giving me this chance! I’m going to change my life! (Osofisan 2001, 56)

A moment after this exclamation, Alowolodu dresses up in his best, with his face glowing and smiling. “What an incredible transformation!” (Osofisan 2001, 56), says the narrator. Another authorial vision of the play is evident here as Osofisan seeks to compel his audience to immediately apply the lessons learnt. This is why Osofisan in an interview says, I want desperately to get close to the spectator, to each and every one I have trapped in the darkness or half-light, to penetrate very close and intimate, like a knife in the ribs. I want to make that spectator happy but uncomfortable. I want to turn open, guts and all, spice him, cook him in the filthy, stinking broil of history. I want him washed inside out, in the naked truth, and then I sew him back again a different man. I believe that, if we wound ourselves often and painfully enough with reality, with the reality all around us, if we refuse to bandage our sensitive spots away from the hurt of truth, that we can attain a new and productive awareness. (Awodiya 1993, 18)

Osofisan demonstrates this productive awareness as Alowolodu dashes out into the street and begins to affect lives of individuals he has been mean to in the past. The first boy he meets is Bodunde, the son of a ram seller, who he gives a hundred thousand to go buy the most expensive ram as a surprise Christmas gift to his clerk’s family—the Dedekes. He even tips the boy for the time and service of buying and delivering the ram to the Dedekes. Next, he stumbles on the philanthropists he earlier calls “nonsense and ingredient” (Osofisan 2001, 10). This time the fellows are not ready to interact with him as they are in a hurry, but he pleads to reconsider their earlier request. Amazingly, he counts several notes as his first installment, asking them to return the following week for more. The shocking conversation goes thus,

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1st Philanthropist: Sir! What … what’s the matter? Alowolodu: Something the matter? 1st Philanthropist: I mean … you’re all right then? Alowolodu: What do you mean? It’s Christmas, isn’t it? And all these poor fellows on the street who have no family to go to, the lonely babies abandoned in Motherless Babies homes, shall we forget them? 2nd Philanthropist: Good heavens! You sir! (Osofisan 2001, 58)

The philanthropists leave Alowolodu with prayers while still wondering about the unpredictable manners of human nature. Definitely, they would not have been surprised if they had an idea of the surreal experience Alowolodu just had. The narrator presents other changes in the lifestyle of Alowolodu which include attending church on that Christmas Day, praying, singing the hymns, and listening with rapt attention to the sermon. He also visits his cousin Rotimi where he is treated to a wonderful Christmas. The playwright demonstrates the essence of the period which includes generosity to the needy, celebrating the birth of Christ, and unwinding after a yearlong work. Alowolodu also raised the salary of his clerk, and for the first time they celebrated Christmas in the office after the holiday. The playwright also demonstrates the fact that being generous, happy, and kind has corresponding positive impact on humanity and the entire society. This is staged with the return of the ghost of Makon—former partner of Alowolodu—who comes to appreciate the obedience of Alowolodu to his earlier warning. Makon returns, still in chains just as Alowolodu is about to sleep, saying, “[Y]ou ’ve redeemed me, ransomed me from death! You’ve bought me a sparkling new life” (Osofisan 2001, 62). While Alowolodu turns down the compliment, saying he is the one to thank Makon for salvaging him from doom after death, Makon further requests Alowolodu to sing for him and we see the transformation that follows as presented by the narrator: [He begins to sing. Makon’s ghost joins in and begins to dance. As both men dance, the burden on Makon begins to fall off one by one—or the spirits dance in to strip him of them ceremoniously—till he is left standing in the midst of all the paper and iron, at the song’s climax. We now see a venerable old man]. (Osofisan 2001, 62)

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The play thus ends with a validation of life after death where the state of life there is determined by actions of human beings here on earth. Only a time travel plot as explored by Femi Osofisan in this play and its prototype by Charles Dickens proves capable of landing this ideology in the most appropriate and effective manner such that the spectator according to Osofisan is “washed inside out, in the naked truth, and then sewed back again a different man” (Awodiya 1993, 18). While morality plays tend to correct ill characteristics in the audience, the technique of time travel obviously helps fix this needed change in the audience. Makon’s last words with Alowolodu are instructive in this respect just as he notes, “I have become an ancestor at last! My penance is ended because of you. … I’m glad, because it is certain now that we will meet again, when you finally cross over to this side. … I shall keep a place warm for you” (Osofisan 2001, 62). One Legend, Many Seasons therefore is a holistic dramatic demonstration of the values of kindness as well as the consequences of wickedness. Osofisan has nonetheless shown in the play that wickedness is a shared human feature that cuts across continents with his ability to adapt Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to the African theater. He validates this authorial vision with the final words of the narrator who says, “[L]et this be a lesson to all of us, so we can live a happy and prosperous life, for there is an Alowolodu in all of us, whom we must expel” (Osofisan 2001, 63). The former Nigerian Tourism, Culture and National Orientation Minister, Chief Edem Duke, who watched the stage presentation of the play by the National Troupe of Nigeria at the National theater, Lagos, in 2013 extolled the social value of One Legend as he urged the audience to learn from the lessons of the play by loving their family and nation and loving their neighbors as themselves (Vanguard 2013). This comment becomes classic in contemporary Nigeria where the economic situation is unpleasant, and many families are finding it difficult to cope owing to the removal of oil subsidy and rising inflation. Kindness therefore becomes a currency that the haves must dispense to the have nots. It is a trying time when the metaphoric Alowolodu must learn from Osofisan’s villain by considering their past, present, and the kind of future they love to have. It is also a time for the leaders to have a rethink on economic policies that are negatively affecting the people in order to avoid such traumatizing surreal future experience which Dickens and Osofisan dramatized in this play. Osofisan therefore constructs a diatribe that spares not the leaders and at the same time the entrepreneurs who the masses are at their mercy in contemporary Nigeria. In other words, the message in

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One Legend is, if we can all purge the Alowolodu and Scrooge in us, no doubt a better world and society is bound to emerge. It is therefore concluded that the time travel plot offers the cinema and theater a very reliable medium of exploring human conditions than the conventional linear plot and more so flexible in teaching values that can transform the society.

Conclusion The play One Legend, Many Seasons in establishing the universality of human vices and virtues has proven Elder (2009, 18) position on time travel as a “popular disregard for logic” and “broad spectrum that contains all themes and all genres for all audiences.” Femi Osofisan in the play has therefore demonstrated the fact that time travel is a phenomenon in the theater and cinema that exists across all cultures. With the aid of the three Spirits of Christmas past, present, and yet to come, Osofisan anatomizes the miserly and greedy in Nigeria, especially in the private sector. The play also demonstrates the dynamics of the surreal when realism fails and validates the didactic value of time travel. This is further enhanced by the introduction of a folktale which is not in the source text, hence validating the creative ingenuity of Osofisan in adapting the text into the African theater. The social value of One Legend is therefore profound as it concludes that there is an Alowolodu in everyone which must be purged by our retrospective slip into the past and imaginary trip into the future for the world to become a better place. Competing Interests  The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

References Abubakar, Abdullahi. 2009. A New Concept of Actor/Audience Interaction and Audience Participation in Modern African Dramatic Theater: An Example of Osofisan. Research in African Literatures 40 (3): 174–185. http://www.jstor. org/stable/40468143. Accessed 10 October 2023. Agunbiade, Oyewumi Olatoye. 2019. Followership and Post-independence Disillusionment in Selected Plays of Femi Osofisan. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Ibadan. ———. 2023. The Ideology of an Objective Dramatist: Interview with Femi Osofisan. Critical Stages 27.

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Awodiya, Muyiwa. 1993. Excursions in Drama and Literature: Interviews with Femi Osofisan. Ibadan: Kraft Books. ———. 1995. The Drama of Femi Osofisan: A Critical Perspective. Ibadan: Kraft Books Limited. Bloom, Harold. 2011. Blooms Guide: A Christmas Carol. Landisville PA: Yurchak Printing. Bowers, Maggie Ann. 2004. Magic(al) Realism. New York: Routledge. Camayd-Freixas, Erik. 1998. Theories of Magical Realism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Dunton, Chris. 2022. Femi Osofisan and the Process of Adaptation. Journal of the African Literature Association 16 (1): 181–192. Elder, Ricki. 2009. Paradoxes of Human Freedom and Time Travel Film. Master thesis, University of Saskatchewan. Enongene, Sone Mirabeau. 2011. Symbolism of the Mountain in Bakossi-Cameroon Mythology. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,. University of Kwazulu-Natal. Falola, Toyin. 2021. Femi Osofisan at 75: Homage to a Literary Luminary and Statesman by Toyin Falola. Premium Times, June 16. https://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/468012-­femi-­osofisan-­at-­75-­homage-­to-­a-­literary-­ luminary-­and-­statesman-­by-­toyin-­falola.html?tztc=1. Accessed 10 October 2023. Faris, Wendy B. 2004. Ordinary Enchantments Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Gharib, Susie. 2019. Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol. Cinematic Codes Review 4 (3): 95–100. Hutchison, James. 2021. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. https://jameshutchison.ca/a-­christmas-­carol. Accessed 10 October 2023. Olasope, Olakunbi. 2015. The Playwright Is a Labourer of Love. Critical Stages 12. https://www.critical-­stages.org/12/the-­playwright-­is-­a-­labourer-­of-­love. Accessed 10 October 2023. Osofisan, Femi. 1978. Who’s Afraid of Solarin? Calabar: Scholars Press. ———. 2001. One Legend, Many Seasons. Lagos: Concept Publications Ltd. Petersson, Bodil. 2017. Waterworld: Travels in Time between Past and Future Worlds. In The Archaeology of Time Travel: Experiencing the Past in the 21st Century, ed. Bodil Petersson and Cornelius Holtorf, 201–212. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing. Rubin, Don. 2016. A Brief Introduction to Femi Osofisan. Critical Stages 14. https://www.critical-­stages.org/14/prof-­don-­r ubins-­brief-­introduction-­to-­ femi-­osofisan. Accessed 10 October 2023. Sherman, Fraser. 2017. Now and then We Time Travel: Visiting Pasts and Futures in Film and Television. North Carolina: McFarland and Company.

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Vanguard. 2013 National Troupe Preaches Love with One Legend, Many Seasons. https://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/12/national-­troupe-­preaches-­love-­ one-­legend-­many-­seasons. Accessed 10 October 2023. Wittenberg, David. 2013. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. New York: Fordham University Press. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris, eds. 1995. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. North Carolina: Duke University Press. https://doi. org/10.2307/J.Ctv11cw5w1.5. Zemeckis, Robert. 2009. A Christmas Carol—Featurette May 20, 2009. https:// youtu.be/FfMC3ApFVvs. Accessed 10 October 2023.

CHAPTER 10

Time Travel Novels in Japan and Yasutaka Tsutsui’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1967) Akiyoshi Suzuki

Introduction Translated, among other languages, into English, French, and Chinese, Yasutaka Tsutsui’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1967) is well known worldwide, due in part to its film adaptation. In Japan of course, it broke new ground as a popular time travel novel, greatly influencing the genre in various media. In spite of its popularity and impact, however, the novel’s story has frequently been improperly understood. First, although the 15-year-old female protagonist Kazuko Yoshiyama makes three leaps through time— or perhaps because she does not make the number of leaps the title might imply—the general meaning of her leaping through time and of each leap has not been clarified. Indeed, Akihiro Odanaka (2013) argues that because Kazuko simply repeats the same routine with minor differences

A. Suzuki (*) Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Montoneri (ed.), Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52315-1_10

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over a very short period, understanding the time leaps’ significance is difficult (151), and some critics (Arahara 2021) discuss a connection with Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu, 1913–1927). Nevertheless, in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, time travel’s meaning has not been clarified. Moreover, if we understand “running through time” as a story of memory, we may freely indicate its intertextuality with other stories, for example, the Benjy’s chapter in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1928). Certainly, the protagonist Kazuko leaps through time only when she loses consciousness, so her time leaping might impress the reader as dreaming or leaping through her memories. But eventually, after Kazuko regains consciousness, the main male character Kazuo Fukamachi has completely disappeared, thus proving her time leaping to be more than just a dream or a memory. In addition, the English translation (Tsutsui 2011), which has been most significant in gaining readers globally, differs from the original Japanese text in certain significant ways. In one notable typographical error or mistranslation, Kazuko and Kazuo are mistaken for each other. And even the titles differ. The original Japanese title Toki wo kakeru shōjyo translates to The Girl Who Leaps Through Time, not The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. The Japanese word “kakeru” does not mean “leapt” in the past tense but “leap” in the present tense, thus implying an ordinary state and also expressing a fact. Besides that, “leaps” implies repetition and therefore indicates the girl will (continue in the future to) leap through time. Additionally, the English translation’s tone might impress global readers as being aimed at readers younger than the novel’s 15-year-old protagonist. Further complicating the issue, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is strongly associated with content that has been variously adapted to film and other media, thus compounding the global audience’s misunderstanding of the original. For instance, in spite of the male character Kazuo’s lengthier time leaps, adaptations tend to emphasize only Kazuko’s leaps, at least partially because the title’s adjective phrases “leapt through time” and “toki wo kakeru” modify “girl.” Even so, the greater emphasis on Kazuko’s leaps is largely due to the influence of a popular film adaptation in which her time leaps increase from the original novel. Overall, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is an important work that to some extent determined the direction of science fiction and time travel fiction in Japan. Furthermore, its content has caused the story to occupy a unique place in American movies. Hence, this chapter first describes the

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original Japanese version’s plot so that readers properly and fully understand the story. Then, after confirming conventional views on the novel and its social conditions of production, the history of Japanese girl fiction (novels written of and for girls), the history of Japanese science fiction, and the history and tendencies of Japanese time travel novels are reviewed. Notably, the author Yasutaka Tsutsui employs postmodernist techniques in his novels, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time contains self-references to both girl fiction and science fiction. After that, the distance between girl fiction, science fiction, and Japanese time travel novels and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is analyzed. Based on this analysis and discussion of mysteries and narrative structure in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the meaning and significance of time leaping and of the novel itself, are considered. Finally, various television drama, film, and animated movie adaptations are briefly compared according to their themes and certain other attributes.

Plot, General Interpretation, and Historical Background The Plot Because the novel’s plot has been adapted and translated so variously and frequently, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time should first be explained and confirmed by reference to the original Japanese text. Composed in third person, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time features Kazuko Yoshiyama, a 15-year-old female Japanese junior high student. The story begins on a Saturday when Kazuko finishes cleaning the science classroom with her male classmates Kazuo Fukamachi and Gorō Asakura. Kazuko notices the sound of glass breaking in the science lab and thinks she sees a black figure, but no one is there. However, she smells a sweet aroma seeming to waft from the liquid in the broken test tube, and she vaguely remembers this aroma. Suddenly, however, she staggers, loses consciousness, and falls to the floor. Upon regaining consciousness, Kazuko thinks the aroma is of lavender; she remembers it from her mother’s perfume when she (Kazuko) was in elementary school. She has other memories of the scent as well—more significant—but cannot clearly recall them.

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On the next Tuesday, several incidents occur around Kazuko. A late-­ night earthquake causes a fire in the house next door to Gorō’s. The next morning, when she and Gorō narrowly miss involvement in a traffic accident, Kazuko travels back in time to the previous morning, repeating “yesterday.” She confides in Kazuo, Gorō, and Fukushima, their male science teacher, about this strange experience. Fukushima explains that Kazuko’s abilities are called “teleportation” or “time leaping” and that to discover the incident’s truth, Kazuko should time leap back to the science lab four days ago, that is, the previous Saturday. Now able to time leap at will, Kazuko awaits—actually, on the previous Saturday—an unidentified visitor to the science lab where she previously lost consciousness. This time, the black figure identifies himself as Kazuo Fukamachi, a futurist from 2660 A.D.  An 11-year-old chemist, he has developed a psycho-stimulant that simultaneously allows spatial body movement and time leaping. He explains to Kazuko that he has come to obtain lavender for the stimulant, no longer available in the future but essential for him to return home to 2660. Unknowingly, Kazuko inhaled this chemical in its vaporized form and began to use her psychic powers. However, in its gaseous state, the drug’s effects were only temporary. Kazuo also explains that all the memories of him that Kazuko and others have are hypnotic and that Kazuko has actually known him only about a month. According to his explanation, Kazuo leapt back from the future and imprinted on those around him the memory that he had been there long before. He has imprinted himself as the son of a childless middle-­ aged couple who raise lavender in their garden, but his real name is Ken Sogol. He confesses that he is not supposed to tell people in the past what happened, but he has now revealed all the details because he seems to have fallen in love with Kazuko. This is a sudden confession of love, and Kazuko is elated by this unexpected turn of events. Nevertheless, Kazuo says that he will erase the memory of himself from her mind because people in the past must not know the future. He also says that the next time he appears before Kazuko, she will not recognize him because he will no longer be Kazuo Fukamachi. Kazuko tries her best to endure the fading of her memories of Kazuo, but she loses consciousness. Then a scene similar to the novel’s opening scene, in which Kazuko was discovered unconscious in the lab, plays out. This time, however, it is not Kazuo and Gorō, but Gorō and the science teacher Fukushima who find and care for Kazuko.

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At the novel’s end, on her way to and from school, Kazuko passes by the middle-aged couple’s home that has a greenhouse in the garden. The scent from lavender flowers makes her dreamy, and she vaguely remembers their aroma. Seeing the home’s nameplate “Fukamachi,” however, sparks no memory at all. She recalls only the floral scent and feels that someday someone special will appear before her, someone she knows and who knows her. General Interpretation and Historical Context Especially because of Kazuko’s final, deeply heartfelt anticipation of someone special who promised to reappear in her life, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has been generally regarded, at least in its original Japan, as concerning pure and eternal love. Considering the novel’s conditions of production and reception in the 1960s, such a popularly accepted view is not surprising. The novel’s original conditions of production involved serialization in the November 1965 issue of Third Grade Course of Junior High School and the May 1966 issue of First Grade Course of High School, grade-specific general magazines for study published by the Japanese educational publisher Gakushū Kenkyūsha. Then, the novel was released as one volume in 1967 by the Japanese publisher Tsuru Shobō (Tsutsui 2020). Significantly, the story was written during the mid-1960s for 15- to 16-year-olds. During those postwar days of Japan’s rapid economic growth, a middle-­ class consciousness spread throughout the nation as, in fact, the middle class expanded. Along with this, the percentage of students continuing into higher education increased. In 1960, the national average of students who went from junior high to high school was 42%, but by 1965, when serialization of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time began, the national average exceeded 70%. The percentage of students going to college also increased from 17% to 24% during the 1960s. In other words, Japanese society began to require higher education, and as society began demanding its employees have more advanced knowledge, they took longer to acquire the needed expertise. As a result, competition in entrance examinations gradually intensified, and thus to make learning somehow more efficient, the method called “learning while sleeping” emerged and was promoted. In 1960s Japan, a product called a “device of learning while sleeping” that combined a pillow and a tape recorder was touted as a tool for memorization of content.

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Learners placed a cassette tape into the back of the pillow and “listened” as they slept, but the effect could not be confirmed. In the 2640 A.D. world of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the device is used effectively according to Kazuo Fukamachi (or Ken Sogol), who explains that the required higher levels of specialization take longer to acquire. At a minimum, people graduate from college at age 38, and some even at age 50. Thus for future youth, long periods of study are a matter of course. However, in the 1960s, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time seemed to be encouraging young readers to do their best by studying for their future life. For a magazine encouraging serious study, such content as that of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was appropriate, and the novel was first serialized in Third Grade Course of Junior High School, the magazine for junior high students preparing for high school entrance examinations. The female protagonist Kazuko is in the third grade of junior high school and lives in a house, indicating that her family is of the middle class. Therefore, although Kazuko has not yet decided on her future, she is certain to be studying hard for her high school entrance examination. In other words, magazine readers also doing such preparation can identify with her. Despite the female protagonist’s serious study, cultural authority in 1960s Japan decreed that men should follow a profession and that women should marry and raise children. Consequently, more men than women attended college, and most women graduated from high school or junior college and went to work. Then, in their early 20s, women married and resigned from their jobs; this was called kotobuki-taisha, meaning “retirement worth celebrating.” For many women in this male-centered society, high school or junior college and a short period of employment were a kind of marriage preparation. Then, in fact, many Japanese women prepared for marriage by taking popular, locally offered classes in cooking, sewing, and flower arranging. Besides those cultural imperatives, purity and virginity were required of women before marriage (although before World War II, young unmarried couples were both socially condemned just for being together). Especially in the 1960s, however, according to Etō (2001), the marriage of Akihito and Michiko, the current grand emperor and grand empress, popularized platonic love, as did Looking at Love and Death, a bestselling collection of correspondence (later adapted to film) between a boy and a dying girl. Against this socio-cultural background, it is not hard to understand why The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was received as a story about eternal love. The novel’s action suggests that although study may not help

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girls in future careers, it does suggest the importance of doing well in their studies as the main duty of a middle-class junior high school student. The line of thinking goes that if girls do their main duty properly, their seriousness will be recognized, they will meet a nice person, have a happy marriage, and live a happy life with their husbands and children. However, the author Yasutaka Tsutsui’s characteristics as a novelist and some of his discourses in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time do not allow full and frank acceptance of such a view.

Rebellion: There Is a Road of Time Travel Behind Him Since Tsutsui’s early career as an avant-garde and postmodern novelist, he has written experimental fictions. In 1992, for example, he published Professor Tadano, Department of Literature (Bungakubu Tadano Kyōjyu), a metafiction based on Terry Eagleton’s academic volume What Is Literature? In Japan, this novel spurred the popularity of literary theory, especially post-structuralist criticism, in literary studies. Indeed, Tsutsui’s postmodern tendency was evident from the very beginning of his career, when he started as a science fiction writer. Or perhaps it would be better to say that he wrote science fiction because of his postmodernist worldview and that he is a postmodernist because of his science fiction worldview. As a postmodernist and a science fiction writer, his interest in the existence of two or more worlds presumably led him to write time travel novels. Therefore, Tsutsui wrote a “cautionary tale” for girls: that is, they should live in a parallel world, or construct a life different from the ideal of womanhood that Japanese society demanded during the 1960s. In the next sections, therefore, I focus on authorial intervention in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the novel’s place in the history of girl fiction, and Japanese time travel novels, thence leading to the discussion of the novel’s time travel itself. An Avant-Garde Author Against Traditional Girl Fiction As a time travel novel with a teenage girl as a main character, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time contains self-reference or authorial intervention. That is, the young female protagonist Kazuko comments that her experience was like a sho ̄jo shōsetsu (a girl fiction; Tsutsui 1967/2021, 100). In

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addition, the young male protagonist Kazuo says his experience seemed like science fiction (Tsutsui 1967/2021, 86). The self-reference to “girl fiction” exists in the original Japanese text but was problematically translated to “the romantic novel” in David Karashima’s English version. As explained below, however, girl fiction is a uniquely Japanese genre. Furthermore, the self-references to girl fiction and science fiction indicate that Tsutsui attempted to distance The Girl Who Leapt Through Time from some types of novels featuring a girl, from some featuring boys and girls, and from some types of scientific novels. First, let us consider girl fiction based on Ō hashi’s (2014) explanation. According to Ō hashi, as opposed to “children’s literature,” which is treated as literary work, shōjo sho ̄setsu (girl fiction) refers to entertainment novels written with (teenage) girls as the intended audience. Unique to Japan, girl fiction is not found in the West, and the term generally refers to works written from about 1900 to 1990—works whose content changed with the times. Before girl fiction emerged around 1900, some magazines published novels for boys, but only a few novels were written about and for girls. However, the number of female students attending girls’ high schools increased rapidly along with promulgation of the Acts of Girls’ High School (1899), leading to the creation of a series of magazines for girls that featured novels with girls as main characters. As Ō hashi (2014) emphasizes, girl characters were depicted as seeming to live in the real world but, in fact, could never be found there. The stories contained girls’ romantic worldview, with no hint of physical relations, and friendships between girls unfolded in a fantasy space where men did not exist. During World War II (1939–1945), in contrast, these works contained strong war themes; postwar, they reverted to the earlier romantic worldview, with sisterly love between girls. From 1950 onward, however, stories of romances with men began to increase, coinciding with initiation of coeducational schooling. The Fundamental Law of Education, which declared that coeducation must be permitted, was promulgated in 1967. Girls who had previously attended sexually segregated schools, isolated from males, came under boys’ gaze in classrooms where romantic love was gradually becoming an everyday occurrence. According to Ō hashi (2014), magazines for girls offered new features and attempted to organize a romantic love ideology by emphasizing the importance of avoiding situations leading to sexual intercourse and of creating a spiritual bond between a boy and a girl through conversation. Conversely, the magazines sometimes ran special features arguing that sex

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was inevitable once a couple reached the “going-steady” stage. They asserted that this development was obvious in the sexually sophisticated West, and in this respect, the Japanese were comparatively childish. Given these circumstances, it was practically impossible for authors to continue writing only the old type of girl fiction, in which stories depicted sisterly love relationships. In the late 1960s, as an inevitable consequence of moving closer to real-life romances, girl fiction moved beyond spiritual or psychological ties between a man and a woman to include physical sexual relations. In The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, when Kazuo tells Kazuko that he seems to have fallen in love with her, she responds that this real-life incident imitates girl fiction. Kazuko’s acceptance of Kazuo’s unexpected declaration of love as “like girl fiction” (rather than dismissing it) reveals that she knows love and romance are real in everyday life, that novels of love and romance are girl fiction, and that she is familiar with such fiction. In other words, she has not read older girl fictions nor internalized the ideal image they promulgate. Moreover, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time does not refer to sexual intercourse. Hence, it lies at a turning point from real-­ life romance without physical sexual relations to their eventual inclusion; in other words, it constitutes a watershed in Japanese literary history. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Japanese children’s literature had seemed to follow children’s education closely. From the late 1970s to the 1980s, however, a new generation of literary works began to appear, depicting children’s realities, for instance, their experiences with sexual problems and various difficulties at home. Considered a paradigm shift in children’s literature, this new generation was called the “collapse of the taboo.” However, Ō hashi (2014) suggests that such a general framework of children’s literary history has, in a sense, been accepted as an ideology in “children’s literature as an academic discipline.” In a context differing greatly from children’s literary history, from the 1950s, girl fiction reflected girls’ romantic desires, and from the 1960s to the 1970s, fiction began to intervene in girls’ real sexual lives. In other words, children’s literature, presumed a “higher” culture than mere works of entertainment, had been eroded by a “lower” culture—the girl fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. This erosion destroyed the ideology of children’s literature contributing to children’s “ideal” education. Hence, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and the female protagonist Kazuko lie in a transitional period that denied the existing girl ideal and would further transform fiction from real-life (nonphysical) romance to

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include physical relations. As mentioned, although the novel was published against a social background in which platonic love was popular and purity and virginity were required of women before marriage (Etō 2001), as an inevitable consequence of moving closer to real-life romances, fiction also moved beyond spiritual or psychological ties between men and women to include physical sexual relations: in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Kazuko has the potential to break through society’s ideal for girls to become a liberated woman. Thus, the novel depicts the new era’s arrival metaphorically—through time leaping. However, it also depicts the new era factually, in that the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was very active in Japan. While in children’s literature, girl fiction aimed to educate women traditionally, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a girl fiction including an element of entertainment contrary to children’s education through literature. An Avant-Garde Author Against Traditional Science Fiction When The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was written in 1967, the science fiction genre itself was generally new to the Japanese, becoming popular during the 1960s when Yasutaka Tsutsui and others imported science fiction from the United States (U.S.). Interestingly, in an interview with Larry McCaffery (2007), Tsutsui states that he has a rebellious habit and rebels against science fiction even when he is writing it. He goes on to say that both science fiction and surrealism deconstruct reality (McCaffery 2007, III). In other words, Tsutsui wrote against existing American and Japanese science fictions, resulting in a novel in which a teenage girl who can actively break traditional womanly values leaps through time. As a context in which to analyze time leaps’ significance in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, let us generally survey science fiction’s history in Japan. After the samurai caused the Edo era’s (1603–1868) centralized feudal system to collapse, the new Meiji government (1868–1912) promoted a Europeanization policy (“leave Asia, enter Europe”) that allowed many foreign novels to be translated and published in Japan. These included Jules Gabriel Verne’s science fictions; then, following his ideas, Japanese authors wrote novels about near-futuristic societies. The intended audience for both the translated and Japanese-authored novels was well-­ educated men, and the stories were considered to describe the latest science as an academic discipline. Next, in the 1880s, entertainment novels for the general public began to be written; mainly popular were detective

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stories, adventure stories, and novels of good and evil. Eventually, under imperialism, maritime novels were written and became popular. Some adventure novels, based on Verne’s works, were written about, for instance, diving to the ocean floor or going to the moon. In Japan, science fiction was, and is, often thought of as incorporating “science” and gadgetry connected with “technology,” for instance, the development of space, robots, machines, and battleships. In fact, many works in this style have been imported, translated, and read by those who consider such works science fiction. In addition, since science fiction can be read as an introduction to science, the genre has become indispensable for children’s stories. After the end of World War II, many cautionary tales were written in which the main characters, boys, gradually grew up by caring for others and trying new things in their daily lives. The war was treated as a tragedy, and the boys who lived through it were portrayed lyrically. Such “educational” fiction developed into modern children’s literature. On the contrary, from the 1960s to the 1970s, many New Wave science fiction works with strong entertainment elements were imported from the U.S., translated, and then caused a science fiction boom. Additionally, the term “juvenile” became established for science fiction aimed at young readers through launches of the coterie science fiction magazines NULL (first published in 1960) by Yasutaka Tsutsui and NW-SF Quarterly (in 1969) by Kōichi Yamano. Thus, just as science fiction was positioned as “young adult” in American libraries, it became centered as “juvenile” in the Japanese publishing industry. In this sense, that Yasutaka Tsutsui’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was serialized as a juvenile novel in magazines for 15- and 16-year-olds is no coincidence. Beginning in the 1950s U.S. and moving to Japan in the 1960s, the New Wave movement insisted that science fiction authors should focus on ordinary citizens—not on adventurers, inventors, engineers, or scientists (Gunn 1975)—by turning away from interstellar travel, alien life, and galactic warfare (Ballard 1962). Believing that science fiction props such as spaceships, telepathy, robots, and time travel decline in value like coins in circulation (Aldiss and Wingrove 1986), authors looked outside traditional science fiction and imitated, for instance, the beat writer William S. Burroughs’s radical techniques, such as cut-ups that expanded the novel form’s possibilities. Yasutaka Tsutsui seemed to agree with the New Wave’s “ordinary citizen” idea, and that is probably what he meant by saying to Larry McCaffery

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(2007) that he rebelled against science fiction when he was writing science fiction (III). Certainly, his famous protagonist Kazuko is an ordinary middle-class teen moving through ordinary junior high life. Rebelliousness also likely caused Tsutsui to have Kazuo remark that his time leap from 2660 A.D. was like science fiction. The point is that in writing New Wave science fiction, Tsutsui knew that time leaping was considered outdated but still dared to include it as a narrative technique. In addition, Kazuo majors in science, and important scenes, for example, when Kazuo confesses to Kazuko, unfold in the school science lab. To depict a “new” Japanese girl, Tsutsui dared to use outdated methods, suggesting that Tsutsui believed some science fiction props (time leaps, a school science lab, and a scientist) did not decline in value during the circulation of fictions in Japan.

The Trend of Time Travel Novels in Japan In Japan, Tsutsui pioneered tales of time leaps to different times and spaces life like Kazuko’s. In fact, such novels have been popular in Japan since the publication of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Despite their widespread popularity, however, Japanese time travel novels have elements of entertainment, which means they have not been regarded as higher culture. Indeed, many are considered a genre for youth, and as previously mentioned, through coterie magazines edited by Tsutsui and Yamano, science fiction for youth became a central staple of the Japanese publishing industry. In addition, interestingly, many main characters of Japanese time travel novels are women or, especially, girls like Kazuko. In fact, Japanese time travel novels comprise too many to read or even to count. Thus, I consulted the largest Japanese website for time travel novels, Time Travel (n.d.), to discover all those published before 2023. I also consulted other websites specializing in such novels, for instance, Zatuyōshū (A Collection of Miscellanea, n.d.). After excluding unusual stories (e.g., with aliens differing completely in appearance from humans), I read and confirmed 237 stories’ plots and contents. Of these 237 stories, 126 break down as follows: novels for youth, written for and about boys and girls (juvenile novels and young adult novels that comprise a Japanese genre in the juvenile novel’s development, written with educational considerations, and popular among high school students and adults); light novels (an entertainment genre for young people in the young adult novel’s development, although readers stretch from late teens to 40s); and

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light literature novels (a Japanese genre between light novels and general literature, within light novels’ development). Additionally, 127 of the novels have female protagonists or female main characters who leap through time. One example is Kazuma Shinjyō’s Summer/Time/Traveler 1 (Samā/Taimu/Torabelā 1, 2005). One summer, in a town with no hope for the future, a high school girl leaps into the future for just three seconds; high school boys, the protagonists, then argue about this mysterious case. On the contrary, I did not include a story in which, although a woman is the protagonist, she does not leap through time: Yasuko Harada’s The Full Moon (Mangetsu, 1984) is a sad love story in which a samurai from the Edo period’s Matsumae domain travels forward through time to Sapporo during the Showa period and falls in love with a woman of the 1980s but then returns to the past. Since only the samurai, who is not the protagonist, time travels, this novel is not included in the 127 stories. In 90 of the 127 stories, the protagonists or main characters who time travel are female elementary, junior high, and high school students; those in the remaining 37 stories are women in their 20s. In summary, 53.2% of Japanese time travel novels are aimed at youth, 53.6% of their main characters are women, and 70.9% of female main characters (38.0% in all time travel novels) are students in elementary, junior high, and high school; these works are categorized as shōjo sho ̄setsu or girl fiction. Moreover, of female main characters, 29.1% (15.6% in all time travel novels) are 20 or older. Typically, in Japanese time travel novels, young girls, especially schoolgirls, travel solo through time. In contrast, women in U.S. novels do not travel through time as often, and if they do, they are often accompanied by a man. This trend is truly evident in movies. Although many time travel stories have been adapted to film in Japan and the U.S., Anna Smith (2013) observes that American time travel movies are aimed at a male audience, and most do not depict women leaving the present—except when they accompany men. Hence, the U.S. world of time travel tends to be a patriarchy where men are strongly in control. A few exceptions include the films Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Back to the Future III (1990), Timecop (1994), and 13 Going on 30 (2004). As exceptions in American novels, we can name Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline (2019). Among those few recent exceptions, Smith (2013) cites The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. In Japan, however,

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The Girl Who Leapt Through Time set the trend for later Japanese time travel novels in which young girls travel alone; besides that, the norm is for numerous young women to time travel. So what type of travel do women in Japanese time travel stories do? Regarding time direction, in the majority of Japanese time travel novels, a female teenager returns to the past. However, a detailed analysis shows the following results. Of the 237 stories, main characters in 29 (12.2%) travel forward in time from past to present and/or from present to future. Main characters in 13 of these 29 stories (46.4%; 5.5% in all time travel novels) are women, and three (10.7%; 23.0% of the women; 1.3% in all time travel novels) appear in novels for youth. Main characters in 52 (21.9%) stories travel back to the past and forward to the future through the present. Out of these 52 stories, 24 (46.2%; 10.1% in all time travel novels) have female main characters; 12 of these 24 women (23.1%; 50.0% of women; 5.0% in all time travel novels) appear in novels for youth. In the other 157 (66.2%) of the 237 stories, main characters travel back from the present to the past and/or from the future to the present. Ninety-four stories (59.9%; 39.7% in all time travel novels) have female main characters, and 75 of them (47.8%; 79.8% of women in the novels; and 31.6 % in all time travel novels) are female students in elementary school, junior high school, and high school. Kazuko in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the oldest fictional girl. The other 74 girls are her fictional lineal descendants. And why do these 127 women travel through time? Although mixtures of multiple elements in a single story make it difficult, if not impossible, to simplify, the following classification is based on each story’s most obvious characteristics: being missing or subject to observation (3 works); saving the world from evil or defeating a bad man (including tampering with history) (11); solving or helping solve a mystery or helping a man in trouble in the past (48); contributing to historical events (13); going to a historically different world (5); living in the same time period over and over again (8); starting over in life by returning to one’s child self or meeting one’s future self (9); changing the future (3); others (e.g., love romance, love comedy, and philosophical thinking about time, love, and a human) (26); and unclear (1). This last is Kazuko. When main characters are elementary schoolgirls, they tend to be adventurous. For instance, Ishin Nishio’s New Magical Girl Risca (Shin honkaku mahō shōjyo Risuka, 2004) contains a story about the battles and adventures of Risuka Mizukura, a fifth-grade elementary schoolgirl who uses magic, and an ordinary boy who cannot use it. When junior high or

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high school girls are protagonists, they tend to save the world from crises or meditate on their daily lives. For example, in Eiji Mikage’s The Empty Box and Zero Maria (Utsuro no hako to zero no Maria, 2009), the main character Ayaya Otonashi repeats the same leap more than 10,000 times. In vain, she struggles alone, as if she is running on a hamster wheel, to prevent a certain accident that inevitably happens in the time loop. This represents her feelings about daily life, the repetition of irreplaceable day after irreplaceable day. She seems to echo Macbeth’s soliloquy: “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day…”; she struggles with the never-ending problem of the pain of living. Moreover, middle-aged female characters tend to think about starting their lives over, love with their husbands, and what family is. For instance, in Miu Kakiya’s Reset (Risetto, 2008), three 47-year-old women with disparate ways of life, anxious and dissatisfied, return to their high school days and redo the lives they have regretted. Most common and prominent are stories in which girls time travel to save a man, defeat a bad man, or save the world on behalf of a man. Through fiction, Japanese girls are more autonomous, independent, proactive, and strong than adult American women, and they alone make the world a better place. The history of Japanese time travel fiction begins with Tsutsui’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Recent science fiction and time travel novels set in extraordinary worlds are exclusively for young people but stem from Tsutsui and others, although I have omitted them here. Many feature young girls and boys at war with each other. These novels are sometimes criticized as depicting self-sufficient and immature imaginations of young people with little life experience, but this is not actually the case. As Ken Maejima (2014) and others have observed, such war is metaphorical; a state of war with an unidentified enemy represents young people’s reality of not knowing what they are fighting and when the battle will end. The war with aliens becomes a metaphor for their battle with adults, who are others to them. Moreover, Hiroyuki Azuma (2007) argues that the metaphor of fighting symbolizes a new sense of reality called “game realism” in which youth live each day as a fictional character and, at the same time, as a player who manipulates that character. Such novels help tell the story of the reality of today’s young people. Incidentally, the frequent use of war in time travel novels is also a Japanese characteristic. Mitsuhide Kabayama (2017) posits that this has to do with Japan’s inability to fully process its military loss in World War II. Postwar Japan was a rather peculiar time and space, and therefore, the

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cultural crop from that soil has within it various distortions and kinks. Consequently, a wide variety of wars have been depicted, drawing on genre accumulations such as fictional war stories, historical science fiction, and allegorical fantasy. In fact, many of the Japanese time travel stories mentioned earlier, especially those featuring male protagonists, go back in time to change historical facts during and after World War II: Sakyō Komatsu’s Peace on Earth (Chi ni wa heiwa wo, 1963), Ryū Hirose’s Steady, New York, SF: The Pacific War (Nyuyōku Yousoro SF: Taiheiyō sensō, 2002), Ryū Uchida’s Shield of the Blue Sky: Imperial Air Defense 1945 (Sōkū no tate: Teito bōkūsen 1945, 2006), and Yūto Ramon’s Archipelago Wars NEO Japan (Rettō taisen NEO Japan, 2009), among many others. For the wish fulfillment of the people of defeated Japan, time travel is a useful novelistic tool, but Kabayama (2017) believes that a literary tradition embracing war seems a rare phenomenon deserving examination. Now, however, time travel and war are often used not to fulfill the heart’s desire of defeated Japanese but to depict a new reality through time travel: everyday battles with others (people in the adult world) and game realism. Stemming from Tsutsui’s work, science fiction and time travel have indeed been an indispensable narrative form in Japan for depicting young people’s reality. After arguments on time travel from various viewpoints in “The Theory and Practice of Time Travel,” science fiction author Larry Niven (1971) concludes that time travel is impossible, that authors need it to express or represent what they want to say, and that they use it competitively as a narrative strategy. The later authorial generation has written a variety of novels with minor changes in the style of science fiction that Tsutsui introduced to Japan. Of course, changes are necessary for narration of people’s contemporary, everyday problems, especially those of young people. Then, what about Tsutsui? He did not use World War II in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, probably because Japan was experiencing its period of rapid economic growth when he wrote the novel, and Japan was then more future- than past-oriented. If so, why did Tsutsui, the pioneer of Japanese time travel novels, include time leaping in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time? What is these leaps’ significance? While agreeing with the New Wave movement, why did Tsutsui use the time leaps, science, and scientists that the New Wave opposed? And, in doing so, why did he depict a girl in the third grade of junior high school as a protagonist? The next section considers these questions.

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The Significance and Meaning of Time Leaps A Girl, Science, and Time Leaps As mentioned previously, in the 1960s, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was written both as science fiction and as an entertainment novel that denied traditional girl fiction. While the girl fiction presented the traditional female ideal to be internalized by young women of the time, the protagonist Kazuko was no such woman. A novel’s characters are more or less internalized by readers, and Kazuko is portrayed not as the traditional ideal but as a “new woman” that should be internalized. Indeed, Kazuko is a new woman not only in Japanese literary history but also in ability. Unlike a traditionally passive Japanese woman, Kazuko actively uses her abilities to rescue herself from crises and solve issues. Interestingly, Kazuko’s few time leaps can be summarized under the theme of rescue from crises and solution of issues, rather than there being some significant relationship and meaning between the time transferable option and the actual option, like not only scholars but authors themselves, such as Larry Niven (1971), Shinji Neo (2003), Takashi Hirose (2016), Colin Marshall (2020), and others illustrate in detail. In addition to the small number of time transfers, the transferable option is not chosen; that is, the parallel world that should be possible is one in which people die, are forced to panic, or cannot solve issues: there is simply only one option. Thus, Tsutsui’s treatment of time leaps in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has more to do with the philosophy of life than the philosophy of time; rather than parallel worlds, time leaps have to do with the metaphoric significance of Kazuko’s rescue from crises and solution of issues. For example, after Kazuko feels a strong earthquake and sees her friend Gorō Asakura’s house nearly catch fire, she tells him the equivalent of “such things will happen.” The same result occurs, and Kazuko’s advance warning should have made Gorō brace himself. The next day, Kazuko and Gorō are nearly run down by an out-of-control truck whose driver has disregarded a traffic light. Kazuko, who knew about this from her time leap, saves them. Interestingly, even though Kazuko can use her prescience to save Gorō and herself from a likely fatal accident, she cannot use it to cheat in her studies. After the near accident, Kazuko goes on to school with Gorō. In class, she realizes that she knows the answer to the teacher’s question because she heard it “a day earlier.” When she opens her notebook, however, she sees that the notes she had taken previously have totally

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disappeared. As one might expect from a story serialized for students soon taking high school entrance examinations, even the main character with time leaping ability is not allowed to cheat in her studies. Next, Kazuko discusses these previous events with her science teacher, but as they leave school together, she makes a second time leap to avoid being trapped under a falling steel frame. Again, she saves herself in a crisis. Kazuko then walks to her house to see whether she is home or not and confirms from outside that she is not in her room because she wants to sleep there. In her third and final time leap, Kazuko goes back to just before her third-period class on Saturday. At this point, she is able to time leap of her own volition. After Saturday classes, she goes to the science lab to discover why she can time leap, thus proactively solving her own issue. Thus, by time leaping, Kazuko rescues Gorō from a potentially fatal accident, rescues herself from another, and solves her time leaping issue. These actions are possible due to the ability she acquires through Kazuo, the boy from the future. But why does she need his support? When Tsutsui wrote the novel, Japanese society demanded men for the workplace and women for the home. Tsutsui opposed such demands and encouraged young, especially common, women to avoid them. For instance, when Larry McCaffery (2007) asked about Nanase, the protagonist of Eight Views of a Family, Tsutsui stated that the composition of a woman’s struggle is, to his mind, very similar to the process of a person with a certain talent who comes into the world, is praised, goes on television, is beat up, then mocked, and falls down. Tsutsui goes on to state that Nanase has talent because she is a psychic, and this is the difficult part of Japanese feminism, for only a woman with talent can emerge at the forefront of feminism (McCaffery 2007, VIII). Certainly, Kazuko is a young, common girl, but she recognizes that she can rescue others and herself in crises and solve her issues. However, in mid-1960s Japan, depicting a common woman playing an autonomous role in an everyday scene was difficult. Perhaps coincidentally, the New Wave movement demanded science fiction focus on ordinary citizens and emphasize the commonplace. Ordinary women in autonomous situations could not be accepted in a realistic novel, only in a near-future novel. Probably because of such narrative difficulties, Tsutsui’s narrative structure organizes Kazuko’s realization of her potential through support from a male. However, Tsutsui did not merely reproduce male domination by creating a somewhat older man or a talented male classmate from the same society and time as Kazuko’s. Instead, Tsutsui created a precocious

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11-year-old boy from the future. Tsutsui made him so, although he is a scientist there and 15 years old in the present world, to somewhat undercut his “masculine power.” In addition, he exploited the preconceived notion that people of the future, regardless of gender or age, would have abilities superior to those of the present. By doing so, he could also indicate that, in the same society at the same time, no male more than 15-year-­ old at youngest is significantly superior to Kazuko. Tsutsui’s narrative sends a message of hope that women, too, through their scientific knowledge and efforts can develop medicines to save people. Incidentally, this is the same reason a male leaps back from the future to the present. Besides that, the story tells readers that a common 15-year-­ old girl might someday develop a chemical for time leaping through having learned about it from a man of the future. Moreover, romanticizing the story’s last part and preserving Kazuko’s faint memory of lavender leave open the possibility that she will attempt to develop the medicine that enables time leaping. Again, the original title The Girl Who Leaps Through Time indicates a normal state of affairs, likely extending into the future. Of course, this would require Kazuko to become a scientist, and in this sense, time leaps might make girl readers aware of certain potential professions, for example, earthquake prediction, fire prevention, traffic safety, and even the protection and rescue of men. When The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was written in the 1960s, the percentage of women going to college was on the rise, but most women attended liberal arts schools. Moreover, society then demanded that women marry, raise children, and relinquish their work, no matter how talented they were. In The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Tsutsui recommends science as a denial of liberal arts being the only option for women, a denial of the retirement worth celebrating, and, in contrast, as an expectation of women’s autonomy and their ability to save people and, by extension, society. To this end, the message also urges 15-year-old girls to work hard at their studies and develop their abilities because they do already have abilities with which they can build a better future. Probably because of this context, Tsutsui, while agreeing with the New Wave, included the scientists and time leaps that the New Wave opposed. In these ways, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a Japanese juvenile novel because it carries a message to youth from an adult, as the Japanese author Kazuma Shinjyō (2006) and Ishii et al. (2021) note, while a novel with a message to youth from a youth of similar age is classified in Japan as a light novel.

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The English version’s title The Girl Who Leapt Through Time should be changed; otherwise, the girl never leaps and will not leap through time. Hence, she surely waits for some nice man to appear and marries him. Consequently, the novel’s theme is regarded as eternal love, as Kazuo’s love of Kazuko suggests. Finally, I want to add an opinion on the conclusion. Kazuo, or Ken Sogol, tells Kazuko that she must not know the future, and so her memory around him is erased to preserve the possibility of an unlimited future. If the future were told, women would have limited choices, so this novel could not help liberate women. For Ken Sogol, on the contrary, erasure of knowledge from the mind restores the correct state of memory; that is, a person in the past has had knowledge of the future that she did not originally have. This is a rule of time travel fiction that prevents tampering with the past—a prohibition against changing history. This rule is also true of Kazuko’s time leaping because she cannot change an event to a way it never happened or change it to a different event. She can warn people in the past of an incipient fire, but she cannot change the fire to something that never happened. She can warn people in the past of an incipient earthquake, but she cannot prevent it from happening. The same is true when she and Gorō are about to be involved in the traffic accident. The reader does not know what happens afterward, but after her time leap, the two characters remain obviously uninjured. However, they did not escape injury because Kazuko saved them; they escaped injury in the first place. This does not mean that despite not being seriously injured, they were saved from the accident by the time leap. That would falsify history. For Kazuko, therefore, a time leap is a reliving of the past. In other words, Kazuko’s time leaps are not about helping others; they are about reliving herself helping others, being aware and confirming that she has the competence to save others from their plight, and/or that she has the ability to reveal the truth herself, and finally, that she is actually doing these things. Time leaping or scientific knowledge and skills are means of confirming her competence, autonomous actions, and activities. Without science, Kazuko would be unaware of her competence and assume that she is actually incompetent. The author Tsutsui and his male from the future want 15-year-old girls to acquire scientific knowledge and skills and to be active because they have the competence to save people and society; thus, they should study hard to develop and confirm their abilities.

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Adaptations Finally, adaptations are briefly discussed. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has been adapted multiple times to several media: including, by June 2023 in Japan, at least six television dramas, three live-action films, one anime film, four manga, one drama CD, and one play. In other words, Kazuko has continued to exist as “the girl who leaps through time,” repeatedly changing her appearance in a variety of media. However, since space does not allow for detailed discussion, I focus on major, well-known adaptations, briefly discuss their themes, and mention similarities with and departures from the novel version. First, the novel The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was dramatized under the title Time Traveler, with a script by Tōru Ishiyama, and aired by the Japanese national broadcaster NHK every Saturday for 30 minutes from January 1 to February 5, 1972. Due to this drama’s popularity, Tōru Ishiyama wrote a different story based on both the novel and Time Traveler; it aired from November 6 to December 2, 1972, under the title Sequel to Time Traveler. Since Time Traveler is no longer available, I summarize it according to Etō (2001, 78–116), who obtained the script and analyzed differences between it and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. In Time Traveler, the novel’s mysteries are solved episodically: the first is “The Mystery of Lavender,” the second “The Mystery of Ken Sogol,” and the third “The Mystery of Telepathy.” From the third episode, the content differs from the original. Kazuko interacts telepathically with Kazuo, or Ken Sogol, and in response to his request to deliver lavender flowers to Tokaribetsu, she identifies Tokaribetsu as Hokkaido and time leaps there. Other time leaps include Kazuko’s attendance at a Christmas party with her friends and her teacher’s wedding. In these stories, Ken tells Kazuko that human beings give meaning to life events, and by doing that well, they can grasp happiness. Subsequently, Kazuko fails to save a teacher who becomes blind and a cleaning lady who tries to alter the past disappears from history, suggesting that although we cannot change past events, we can overcome hardships or be happy, depending on our meaning-making. In the end, Sogol returns to the future, and Kazuko and the others’ memories around him are erased. This drama version illustrates human powerlessness over events and a way of life that receives events well through meaning-making. It is a lesson in accepting the traditional world as it is, rather than having expectations for women beyond social norms. As a conservative Japanese

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national broadcast, it seems to say women can be happy only by thinking as society allows and by following society’s gendered mandates. The other television drama versions (1985, 1994, 2002, 2016) are about romantic love. After the NHK drama was aired, director Nobuhiko Ō bayashi adapted the novel to film. Released in 1983, this film is purely a story of eternal love. In 1997, another film titled And Love and Loneliness (1987) directed by Haruki Kadokawa was released. In this film, a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems translated and edited by a Japanese scholar plays an important role as a metaphor for the entire story, which is also about love. In a 2010 film directed by Masaaki Taniguchi, Kazuko Yoshiyama, the original novel’s protagonist, has been married, and her only daughter, Akari Yoshiyama, is the main character. As a high school student, Akari time leaps from 2010 back to the 1970s to meet her mother’s first love, Kazuo Fukamachi, at the request of her mother, who is hospitalized after a car accident. Akari cries over the stipulation that she is not allowed to alter history. Kazuo also appears to Kazuko in 2010, promises to meet her in the future, and then disappears from her sight. This film’s theme is also eternal love. Previously, in a 2006 animated film directed by Mamoru Hosoda, the main character is Makoto Konno, Kazuko Yoshiyama’s niece. This story differs materially but is still closer to the original than the 2010 Taniguchi film above. In this animation, the niece Makoto suddenly acquires the ability to time leap and, once she becomes accustomed to it, uses it for personal gain. In a sense, this is a situation in which a woman’s abilities are blossoming, as expected in the original work, but unlike the original, Makoto lacks concern for others, in contrast to traditional women who live for others. The film depicts a girl who is free to act independently but also reflects teenagers’ various sufferings in the 2000s. Historically, Japanese women had certain things to do in the future: marry and rear children. Since the 1960s, however, women have more fully entered society; they are free to and must decide on a future path, giving rise to adolescent suffering about selecting a profession. Thus, Hosoda has proclaimed the film’s theme to be “youth.” The film, which ends with Makoto expressing her decision about her future profession, echoes the original novel in that it suggests the girl’s progress. At the same time, it depicts a protagonist who lives more freely than in the original, reflecting the changed times.

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Conclusion The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a Japanese novel well known globally, has been read as a story about memory, pure love, and eternal love. Its early English translation, however, has left readers with a childish impression partly because the English text has serious discrepancies from the original Japanese text. Even the title was significantly mistranslated. Besides those issues, the novel’s meaning of time leaping itself and of each leap had not yet been clarified. However, Tsutsui’s critical spirit, postmodernist taste, feminism, and alignment with science fiction’s New Wave movement clarify that the novel was first serialized in Japanese study magazines to encourage girls to live happily against traditional, oppressive norms for girls and women, and in furtherance of that life, to study hard. Conditions of production when Tsutsui wrote the novel required women to graduate from high school or junior college, work for a couple of years, and then marry and raise children. If women attended college, society expected them to major in liberal arts, not in science. Hence, Tsutsui recommends in this novel that teenage girls should study hard and acquire scientific expertise and skills to confirm their competence and capabilities that are already beginning to blossom. His recommendation is expressed through an ordinary, 15-year-old female middle schooler as the protagonist of a science fiction novel. While generally in agreement with the New Wave science fiction movement, Tsutsui’s narrative strategy included the science, scientists, and time leaps opposed by the New Wave. In his novel, however, time leaps have less to do with fictional time and space events than with metaphorical rescue from crises and solutions to various issues. His protagonist Kazuko confirms that she is fully capable of these actions. Yet now, she needs the special support of scientific knowledge and skills for her future. This reflects the Japanese society of the 1960s, in which depicting an everyday scene with an ordinary woman playing an autonomous role was not only difficult but considered unrealistic. Hence, Tsutsui used a narrative structure in which a woman’s potential is realized with some male support. To avoid merely reproducing male-dominated society, however, Tsutsui did not cast an older man or a talented male classmate of Kazuko’s but a futurist male who eventually leaves Kazuko to create her own future. In this sense, the “ordinary” Kazuko’s success demonstrates that any woman can emerge at the forefront of feminism—if not in the present, then in the future. Still, women already have competence, and science is

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merely a path enabling them to confirm their abilities. In a serialized novel published in a grade-specific study magazine from a Japanese educational publisher, Tsutsui attempted to convince girls, and boys as well, of their future competence by placing metaphorical incidents of time leaping into everyday life. This novel, written for student readers of study magazines, cheers girls on to leap through time into new roles, that is, to be autonomous and active, with a recommendation of studying hard to gain scientific expertise and skills and to live independently through their individual competence and ability. Competing Interests  The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this chapter.

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Marshall, Colin. 2020. A Concise Breakdown of How Time Travel Works in Popular Movies, Books & TV Shows. https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/how-­ time-­travel-­works-­in-­fiction.html. Accessed 13 September 2023. McCaffery, Larry. 2007. The Myth of Godard: Avant-garde Is Entertainment: Yasutaka Tsutsui and Larry McCaffery. In Avant-Pop Plus, ed. and trans. Takayuki Tatsumi and Yoshiaki Koshikawa, I–XIII. Tokyo: Hokuseido. Neo, Shinji. 2003. Time Travel Romance: An Invitation to a Love-Story That Spans Time and Space [Taimu toraberu romansu: Jikū wo kakeru koi-monogatari e no shōtai]. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Niven, Larry. 1971. The Theory and Practice of Time Travel. In All the Myriad Ways, 125–133. New York: Ballantine. Odanaka, Akihiro. 2013. Amnesia in Fiction [Fikushon no naka no kioku sos̄ hitsu]. Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha. Ō hashi, Takayuki. 2014. A History of Girl/Boy Fiction in Japan from the Light Novel Perspective [Raito noberu kara mita shoj̄ o/shōnen shos̄ etsuhi shi]. Kindle ed. Tokyo: Kasama Shoin. Shinjyō, Kazuma. 2006. Light Novel “Super” Introduction [Raito Noveru “Cho ̄” Nyūmon]. Tokyo: Softbank Creative. Smith, Anna. 2013, July 31. Why Can’t Women Time Travel? https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jul/31/why-­cant-­women-­time-­travel. Accessed 13 September 2023. Time Travel. n.d.. http://timesf.blog130.fc2.com. Accessed 13 September 2023. Tsutsui, Yasutaka. 1967/2021. Toki wo kakeru shoj̄ o [The Girl Who Leapt Through Time]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. ———. 2011. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Trans. David Karashima. London: Alma Books. ———. 2020. In A Collection of Interviews with Yasutaka Tsutsui: Tsutsui Talks about His Own Works [Tsutsui Yasutaka, jisaku wo kataru], ed. Sanzō Kusaka, Kindle ed. Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobō. Zatuyōshū. n.d.. https://goldwell.hatenablog.com/entry/00000102/ 1283175875#f-­10c26937. Accessed 13 September 2023.

Index1

A Adaptation, i, v, 6, 14, 32, 36, 37, 90, 203, 206, 208–211, 231–233, 251–252 Alice in Wonderland, 52 Auto-destruction, 87–112 B Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 173–180, 182, 183, 186–190, 193, 195 Barjavel, René, 5, 87–90, 92–95, 97–102, 104–111 The Ice People, 87–112 Black time travel, 171–199 Boulle, Pierre, i, 5–38 Bulgakov, Mikhail A., 137–166 Master and Margarita, 137–166 Bulychev, Kir, 44, 47–59, 61–63

C Capitalism, ii, 21, 105, 107 Children’s literature, 48, 238–241 Chimpanzees, 6, 13, 15–18, 22, 23, 28, 36 Chronofiction for children, 47–48 Chronotope, 98, 99, 173–186, 189–193, 195, 196 D Doctor Who, ii, 115–134 Double consciousness, 176n3, 185 Downfall, 88, 103–110 Dystopia, v, 20, 93, 94, 96, 103, 104, 111 F Fixed point, 121, 122, 128, 131 Future, 1–3, 12, 19, 20, 24, 25, 29–31, 36–38, 44–63, 68, 70, 71, 74, 77, 87, 88, 91, 93, 97–99,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

101, 103, 111, 122, 127, 134, 137, 141, 143, 144, 158n4, 161, 162, 165, 177, 180, 181, 185, 186, 189, 195, 197, 198, 205–207, 213, 217, 219, 220, 222–225, 227, 228, 232, 234, 236, 237, 243, 244, 248–254 Futuristic, 24, 30, 37, 43–63, 103–110 G Girl fiction, 233, 237–240, 243, 247 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, 231–254 H Heston, Charlton, 6, 10, 33, 34, 37, 38 Hopkins, Pauline E., i, 171–199 Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self, 171–199 Hypnosis, 146, 153, 153n2, 154, 176

L Levitation, 152, 153n2, 155, 156, 166 M Mechanized warfare, 29 Mystical fiction, 139 N New Wave (science fiction movement), 241, 242, 246, 248, 253 O One Hundred Years Ahead, 44, 47, 50, 53–60, 62, 63

J Japan, v, 8, 108, 208, 231–254 Japanese time travel novel, 233, 237, 242–244, 246

P Parallel world, 74, 162, 165, 166, 237, 247 Pedagogy, 133 Philosophical tale, 13, 14, 37, 95 Planet of the Apes, i, ii, 5–38 Postmodernist, 233, 237, 253 Postmodern science fiction, 88, 96, 111 Power, 18, 24–27, 29, 37, 55–57, 59, 61, 63, 96, 98–101, 104, 105, 109, 116–119, 121, 122, 127, 131, 137, 147, 148, 152, 153, 160, 161, 164, 178, 181, 184–186, 191, 194, 197, 198, 217, 218, 221, 234 Progressive society, 55

K Kosofsky, Sedgwick, Eve, 191 paranoid and reparative reading, 191

Q Quantum theory, 46, 71, 162, 166

I Identity, ii, 8, 37, 48, 116, 119–121, 126, 131, 157, 172, 173, 175, 175n2, 178–180, 184–187, 185n4, 192, 197, 223 Imperialism, ii, 116, 118, 134, 241

 INDEX 

R Racial identity, 175, 184, 186, 192 Racial trauma, 183 Racism, 116, 120, 125, 127 Real world/Real-world, 25, 26, 30, 103, 104, 108, 109, 111, 112, 148, 238 Remembrance, 129–131, 134 Reverse world, i, 6, 25–30 S School girl, 243, 245 Schrödinger’s cat, 159, 160, 165, 166 Science fiction/Science-fiction (SF), i, 2, 3, 5, 12–14, 18–22, 24, 29, 31, 35–37, 43, 44, 46–51, 54, 62, 63, 68, 69, 71–74, 78, 79, 83, 87–90, 93–99, 110, 111, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 127, 131, 151, 155, 173, 176, 205, 232, 233, 237, 238, 240–242, 245–248, 253 Selezneva, Alisa, 47, 48, 51–53, 58, 62 Serling, Rod, 32–35 Slavonic children’s literature, 48 Social equality, 3, 22–25 Space-time block universe, 165 Statue of Liberty, 33, 37 Subversion, 119, 127 Super-human/Super human, 53, 58, 61

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T Technological advances, 28, 29, 88, 99, 101, 103 Telekinesis, 152, 153n2 Teleportation, 73, 77, 150, 151, 155, 166, 234 Theory of relativity, 44, 45, 144, 158, 174 Time leap, 232, 234, 240, 242, 246–254 Time machine, 2, 12, 45, 47, 52–54, 67–84, 158n4, 166, 172, 198 Time travel, i, ii, v, 1–3, 12, 18–22, 36, 37, 44–47, 54, 57, 68–74, 69n3, 77, 78, 83, 88, 89, 94–99, 103, 111, 119, 121–123, 129, 132–134, 137–166, 171–199, 203–228, 231–254 Tsutsui, Yasutaka, 231–254 U Unconscious, 78, 146, 175, 234 Utopia, v, 20, 50, 93, 94, 96, 103–105, 111, 174, 175 W White supremacy, 117, 124, 125, 188 Witness, 54, 121, 127–129, 131, 133, 134, 224 Woland, 138–140, 142–151, 154–166 Wormhole, 45, 70, 71, 159, 165, 166