Words

Fewer people are probably familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” than they are with the reversed-time novels by Martin Amis, Kurt Vonnegut, or Lewis Carroll. But don’t worry, you will be!

In this case, the protagonist is born as an old man who grows younger with time, eventually dying as a baby. His father, not to mention the hospital staff, are somewhat nonplussed at his birth.

Mr. Button’s eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.

“Am I mad?” thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving into rage. “Is this some ghastly hospital joke?”

“It doesn’t seem like a joke to us,” replied the nurse severely. “And I don’t know whether you’re mad or not—but that is most certainly your child.”

The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button’s forehead. He closed his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. There was no mistake—he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten—a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing.

No word of what Mrs. Button had to say about the whole affair.

Fitzgerald’s story takes a different approach to running the arrow of time backwards: Benjamin Button has experiences and memories that are completely conventional (although, for expository purposes, he is born with a full vocabulary), while his physical body ages backward.

The reason why I know everyone will be hearing about the story is that “Benjamin Button” is being made into a feature film, directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Major photography has been completed, and it’s currently in post-production, scheduled to be released late in 2008. Major Oscar buzz.

Leaked photos seem to indicate that the film will portray Benjamin as being born baby-sized (albeit old and wrinkly), rather than as a full grown human being. Different actors will be used to portray Button’s reverse aging at different stages of his life, while CGI effects insert Brat Pitt’s face onto each body.

As far as I know (and I’d love to hear otherwise), one of the earliest examples of literary characters with incompatible arrows of time (as opposed to a simple reversed-chronology narrative) is from Lewis Carroll (no relation), in Through the Looking Glass. When Alice first meets the White Queen, she learns that the Queen experiences time backwards.

`I don’t understand you,’ said Alice. `It’s dreadfully confusing!’

`That’s the effect of living backwards,’ the Queen said kindly:

`it always makes one a little giddy at first —

`Living backwards!’ Alice repeated in great astonishment. `I never heard of such a thing!’

` — but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.’

`I’m sure MINE only works one way.’ Alice remarked. `I can’t remember things before they happen.’

`It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.

I agree, and I wish someone would do something about that. Carroll doesn’t emphasize this device much in the book, but does offer one classic illustration of the phenomenon.

Alice was just beginning to say `There’s a mistake somewhere-,’ when the Queen began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. `Oh, oh, oh!’ shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it off. `My finger’s bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!’

Her screams were so exactly like the whistle of a steam-engine, that Alice had to hold both her hands over her ears.

`What IS the matter?’ she said, as soon as there was a chance of making herself heard. `Have you pricked your finger?’

`I haven’t pricked it YET,’ the Queen said, `but I soon shall – – oh, oh, oh!’

`When do you expect to do it?’ Alice asked, feeling very much inclined to laugh.

`When I fasten my shawl again,’ the poor Queen groaned out: `the brooch will come undone directly. Oh, oh!’ As she said the words the brooch flew open, and the Queen clutched wildly at it, and tried to clasp it again.

`Take care!’ cried Alice. `You’re holding it all crooked!’ And she caught at the brooch; but it was too late: the pin had slipped, and the Queen had pricked her finger.

`That accounts for the bleeding, you see,’ she said to Alice with a smile. ‘Now you understand the way things happen here.’

`But why don’t you scream now?’ Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.

`Why, I’ve done all the screaming already,’ said the Queen. `What would be the good of having it all over again?’

Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass rely on nonsense to tell a gripping story. Reversing an individual arrow of time is sufficiently nonsensical to qualify as automatically amusing, but also provocative. Why does everyone remember the same direction of time, anyway? (Actually that one’s not hard to answer. If two systems with incompatible arrows were to noticeably interact, the one with more degrees of freedom would swamp the other one and quickly “correct” its arrow of time. No being that “remembered the future” would survive very long in the real world.)

As Richard mentions in comments, another famous example of temporal reversal is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unmoored in time, and finds himself experiencing wildly disconnected moments of his life in an unpredictable order. At one point he becomes unstuck in time and watches a movie played backwards. The movie shows the firebombing of Dresden, which Pilgrim had witnessed in person.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

In the Afterword to Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis credits a “famous paragraph” by Vonnegut in inspiring his work; it is generally thought that this is the paragraph, although others have suggested something from Mother Night.

Besides incompatible arrows of time, Slaughterhouse-Five explains the temporal viewpoint of the intelligent beings on the planet Tralfamadore, who can see all of time at a single glance:

The Tralfamadorans can look at all different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

The Tralfamadorans are “eternalists,” who buy into the block time view of the universe — that the past, present, and future are equally real. They are so convincing, indeed, that Slaughterhouse-Five is quoted by Scholarpedia as an illustration of the concept.

Reverse chronology — narrating a story, or parts of one, backwards in time — is a venerable technique in literature, going back at least as far as Virgil’s Aeneid. Much more interesting is a story with incompatible arrows of time: some characters live “backwards” while others experience life normally.

Probably the most famous contemporary example is Martin Amis’s chilling novel, Time’s Arrow.

Eating is unattractive too… Various items get gulped into my mouth, and after skillful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon. That bit’s quite therapeutic at least, unless you’re having soup or something, which can be a real sentence. Next you face the laborious business of cooling, of reassembly, of storage, before the return of these foodstuffs to the Superette, where, admittedly, I am promptly and generously reimbursed for my pains. Then you tool down the aisles, with trolley or basket, returning each can and packet to its rightful place.

The narrator of Time’s Arrow is a disembodied consciousness who lives inside another person, Odilo Unverdorben. The host lives life in the ordinary sense, forward in time, but the homunculus narrator experiences everything backwards – his first memory is Unverdorben’s death (although, for expository purposes, he comes into existence as a full, speaking intellect). He has no control over Unverdorben’s actions, nor access to his memories, but passively travels through life in reverse order. At first Unverdorben (going under the name of “Tod Friendly”) appears to us as a doctor, which seems like a morbid occupation – patients shuffle into the emergency room, where the doctors suck medicines out of their bodies and rip off their bandages, sending them out into the night bleeding and screaming. But near the end of the book, we learn that Unverdorben was an assistant at Auschwitz, where he created life where none had been before – turning chemicals and electricity and corpses into living persons. Only now, thinks the narrator, does the world finally make sense.