Great Scott!! Heavy...
The first things I thought of when it became apparent that Kindred uses time travel as a major plot device were
a) Was Dana going to be able to change the future? And b) How is the time travel working?
I’m going to take a stab at answering both of these questions.
On the surface, the answer to question A should be fairly simple— Dana is only pulled back in time when Rufus’s life is in danger—therefore by saving his life, she must be changing the future, right? However, the only reason that we assume that the time travel is triggered by this mechanism is because Dana says so. Let’s consider a few things though: 1) in all of the situations that Dana has been pulled into, there has always been either not immediate danger to Rufus’s life, such as with the burning drapes; or another person present, such as Nigel, who could have helped Rufus in an alternate timeline. Additionally, we see towards the end of the book that Dana can be “summoned” by Rufus’s emotional distress, rather than him just being in physical danger. However we also see later that he is considering taking his own life, so maybe Dana was just summoned prematurely for narrative shock value.
Despite all of this, the results of Dana’s last trip to the past should be unequivocal proof that she has had some for of tangible impact on the past, right? I believe this to be false—I believe Rufus’s original fate and his fate in the final timeline are ultimately destined to be the same. The newspaper was always going to print the exact same article, the circumstances around the fire might have just changed. Instead of Nigel covering for Dana, maybe it was an accident in the original timeline, or maybe it was to cover for someone else killing Rufus that night. The space-time continuum in Kindred, rather than creating alternate futures, mends itself to retain its predetermined course.
So how is the time travel working? We’ve already established that Rufus is able to summon Dana when in severe/life threatening emotional/physical distress, and we know that Dana is able to return to the present by sustaining life threatening wounds. However, what is allowing Dana to travel between time periods, and why can Rufus see Dana’s surroundings when she’s coming? Why is the time dilation so massively different between the periods?
It would be easy to just explain the time travel as just magic, or as a plot device that Octavia Butler didn’t intend to fully flesh out. However, I want to look deeper than these surface level explainations. I believe that somehow a wormhole is opening up, creating a self contained black hole at Dana’s end and a white hole at her destination. How this would work without completely destroying our solar system as we know it, much less the world population, is unclear, but this would explain several things. This would not only explain why she is able to move through time and space, but the difference in time between the jumps, and why Rufus can see her surroundings but Kevin can’t see into the past when he’s just sitting there. The wormhole would be pinching a hole in space time, thereby letting her go wherever Rufus would be, her loss of senses as she traveles could be due to the fact that light and sound wouldn’t be able to escape a black hole, as well as why Kevin not being able to see anything in the past, however with the white hole producing matter Rufus should indeed have been able to see into the future when Dana was traveling to him.
a) Was Dana going to be able to change the future? And b) How is the time travel working?
I’m going to take a stab at answering both of these questions.
On the surface, the answer to question A should be fairly simple— Dana is only pulled back in time when Rufus’s life is in danger—therefore by saving his life, she must be changing the future, right? However, the only reason that we assume that the time travel is triggered by this mechanism is because Dana says so. Let’s consider a few things though: 1) in all of the situations that Dana has been pulled into, there has always been either not immediate danger to Rufus’s life, such as with the burning drapes; or another person present, such as Nigel, who could have helped Rufus in an alternate timeline. Additionally, we see towards the end of the book that Dana can be “summoned” by Rufus’s emotional distress, rather than him just being in physical danger. However we also see later that he is considering taking his own life, so maybe Dana was just summoned prematurely for narrative shock value.
Despite all of this, the results of Dana’s last trip to the past should be unequivocal proof that she has had some for of tangible impact on the past, right? I believe this to be false—I believe Rufus’s original fate and his fate in the final timeline are ultimately destined to be the same. The newspaper was always going to print the exact same article, the circumstances around the fire might have just changed. Instead of Nigel covering for Dana, maybe it was an accident in the original timeline, or maybe it was to cover for someone else killing Rufus that night. The space-time continuum in Kindred, rather than creating alternate futures, mends itself to retain its predetermined course.
So how is the time travel working? We’ve already established that Rufus is able to summon Dana when in severe/life threatening emotional/physical distress, and we know that Dana is able to return to the present by sustaining life threatening wounds. However, what is allowing Dana to travel between time periods, and why can Rufus see Dana’s surroundings when she’s coming? Why is the time dilation so massively different between the periods?
It would be easy to just explain the time travel as just magic, or as a plot device that Octavia Butler didn’t intend to fully flesh out. However, I want to look deeper than these surface level explainations. I believe that somehow a wormhole is opening up, creating a self contained black hole at Dana’s end and a white hole at her destination. How this would work without completely destroying our solar system as we know it, much less the world population, is unclear, but this would explain several things. This would not only explain why she is able to move through time and space, but the difference in time between the jumps, and why Rufus can see her surroundings but Kevin can’t see into the past when he’s just sitting there. The wormhole would be pinching a hole in space time, thereby letting her go wherever Rufus would be, her loss of senses as she traveles could be due to the fact that light and sound wouldn’t be able to escape a black hole, as well as why Kevin not being able to see anything in the past, however with the white hole producing matter Rufus should indeed have been able to see into the future when Dana was traveling to him.
I hadn't really thought about the mechanism of Dana's time travel. The idea that she is going through a wormhole is really interesting but that still leaves a ton of questions. Why does she travel at the times she does? Why do some things Dana is touching (her clothes, bag, and Kevin) travel with her but not other things (the ground she's standing on or Rufus)? I don't think there's a scientific way to fully explain the time travel but I also think that's the point. The mechanism of time travel is much less important than the results.
ReplyDeleteI think that although Dana's impacts on the past are virtually invisible she did still change the future. Although there is no record of it, Dana did kill Rufus and therefore did interact with and change history. Even though the metanarrative may stay the same, the narrative of Rufus and Dana was altered. In class we talked about how countless slave narratives weren't recorded and therefore disappeared into the narrative, but that doesn't mean that those narratives didn't exist/aren't important, and in a similar sense I think it is still valid to recognize that Dana did change history.
ReplyDeleteThis opens up all sorts of debate about whether Dana's changing history or is part of history. The only way to know for sure is if she did something that left proof behind that she had changed things, but that change could also be part of history. If Dana hadn't been pulled back, then Rufus would have died each time (except maybe when he fell out of the tree; he wasn't hurt that badly). There's just no way to tell, and that's part of the nature of time travel.
ReplyDelete-Reed