Chapter 10: In Which I Ponder Time Travel and Discuss the Impact of a Minor Surgical Procedure

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest.

I love a good time travel story, particularly one that loops back on itself in ways that make the mind spin. It can be a movie—like Star Trek IV (the one with the whales) or Looper; it can be a television show—like Quantum Leap (seriously underrated, by the way) or The Time Tunnel;  or it can be written words—like Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, or Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I even like clever references to time travel, as when the nerd quartet populating apartment 4A on The Big Bang Theory jointly purchase a replica of the time machine used in, well, The Time Machine.

As it turns out, though, you don’t need to read a time-travel story to find yourself reading a time-travel story. In a somewhat sudden epiphany I’ve realized that most books—if not all—are, in their own way, time-travel stories. I say “somewhat sudden” since part of said epiphany actually emerged while I was writing about Laughing Boy and The Color Purple; I just didn’t realize it at the time as I’d been so unilaterally focused on the more resonant themes of race and privilege. The epiphany shouted aloud, however, during a recent sprint during which I hurtled through eight books in ten days.

A bit of explanation is required here, lest you think that I’ve either recently completed an Evelyn Wood speed-reading course, or that I’ve suddenly become the world’s foremost erudite slacker. In fact what happened was a bit of minor surgery—again. This time my right hand went under the knife—specifically the thumb and middle finger (which doctors apparently prefer to call the “long finger,” supposedly, I can only assume, to avoid numerous instances of crude adolescent humor). I had developed a couple of odd-shaped growths, one on each of the aforementioned digits, and basic flexing called forth rivulets of decidedly unpleasant pain. Since I have a fondness for most of the tasks allowed an opposable thumb (and since I still had occasional need for my middle finger), removal beckoned. And, in case I hadn’t mentioned it, I’m right-handed.

And so it goes.

Facing two weeks or so of nearly non-existent right-handedness meant that I couldn’t write or type. That seems somewhat minor until you realize that even a business conference call requires a bit of note-taking—and I couldn’t do even that. (Nor could I cook or clean or weed-whack or write checks, all to my wife’s chagrin.) Television beckoned, but having recently marathoned all five seasons of The Wire (not to mention the previous surgery’s Doctor Who immersion), I thought I would try to minimize hours spent before the big screen. That left books.

I don’t know how many of you have ever read so many literary examples so quickly, but it is an entirely different experience than the more conventional and casual approach, particularly when your selections are predetermined—as they are with me during this Pulitzerian experience. I had certain books at hand—so to speak—and those were the ones awaiting.

Here’s where the time traveling comes in: When you quickly pass through numerous books written at numerous times about numerous times, it all gets rather jumbled. The mind comes unstuck now and then as you try to remember what you’re reading, when it was written, and  how that compares to another book you’ve just finished that was written about the time you’re now reading about, though it’s about another time altogether.

Whenever we read a book, we enter into a world with three types of prejudice. The first of these is the prejudice of narrative, necessary because it represents, accurately one hopes, the time in which the story is set. Martin Dressler, the 1997 winner written by Steven Millhauser, offers a solid example. While written in the last twenty years, the book’s tale exists in the early days of the 20th century and reflects those times: women have their assigned roles, as do blacks; the attitude towards immigrants is largely unflattering; and the separate attitudes and ethics of those with wealth and those without are nearly two-dimensional. And yet, as I read the book, the writing inadvertently brought me back out of those times, largely through the second form of prejudice: the prejudice of author.

Authors bring their own values and voices to everything they write; the concept of a neutral writer is no more than impossible phantasm: no writer can leave his or her own time behind no matter the eras they travel into with their pens. Millhauser, try as he might to maintain the proper aura of a New York City unused to buildings more than six stories high, gives us a too-independent woman, and judges her well, and a too-dependent woman, and judges her harshly. Immigrant roots are ennobled, then ignored, and those who exhibit cautious conservatism are painted as backward while those with vision are those who forge forward, seeing progress much as the author must have when he wrote the book: as inevitable.

And then there is the prejudice of reader. My prejudices. Everything I’ve written about Martin Dressler betrays them. Here I am, in the 21^st century—a time of global warming and global strife, of terrorism and cataclysm, a place from which I can look back and worry that progress may be nothing more than a one-word oxymoron, something from which we would do well to recover. And from this perspective I read the words of an author some twenty years distant writing about a time some one hundred years distant. I feel both stuck and unstuck in all three times, a Billy-Pilgrimage of the oddest sort.

This is both a strength and weakness of the best books: I’ve come to find that we can never completely free ourselves to enter them, never thoroughly encounter the worlds they contrive and, yet, at the same time we are offered a deeper look at ourselves and our own worlds, our own times, our own travels.

Read Since Last Post:

• Tinkers, Paul Harding (2010)
• Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser (1997)
• The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1995)
• The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
• A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor (1987)
• Ironweed, William Kennedy (1984)
• In This Our Life, Ellen Glasgow (1942)
• Now in November, Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935)

  

Currently Reading:

• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2005)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 43 read, 44 to go.