Time travel and Vincent van Gogh
WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUT THE DOCTOR WHO EPISODE ABOUND IN THIS POST
I found it interesting to compare the Gansovsky story Vincent van Gogh with the recent Doctor Who episode “Vincent and the Doctor.” In particular, I found the two works’ differing stances on the possibility of changing history very interesting. Gansovsky presents us with a reality in which it is extremely easy to change the past, as our protagonist finds out again and again. Doctor Who, on the other hand, is a show that has long argued that, no matter how you might try to change the past, the universe will generally course-correct, either by changing other events subtly to mimic the effect of whatever was changed, or, in at least one case, by sending in giant time-spiders to repair the timeline.
In the “Vincent and the Doctor” episode, the titular Doctor and his companion, Amy, travel back in time and meet Vincent van Gogh, very soon before he kills himself. The Doctor and Amy want to prevent Vincent from killing himself (and they want to help him kill an invisible space monster, but that’s not really relevant to this discussion), so they take him to the 20th century, to a Van Gogh exhibit at the Musee D’Orsay, in an attempt to show him that he will be well-known and appreciated one day. They make Vincent very happy, and eventually drop him off in his own time. Then they return to the 20th century, expecting to see that van Gogh lived much longer; however, they (especially Amy) are saddened to discover that he still killed himself.
There are a lot of topics discussed in this episode, including mental illness, artistic inspiration, and the importance of listening to the man going on about invisible space monsters; however, the main theme is one that recurs often in Doctor Who, which is that it is extremely difficult to change the past. This is in many ways the opposite message of Vincent van Gogh, the message of which is that it is very easy to change the past, but very difficult to know why you shouldn’t change the past. I don’t really know what this contrast means, or even if one story is more optimistic about human nature than the other (although, on the whole, Doctor Who is fairly optimistic about human nature, and Gansovsky really isn’t), but I think it’s something really interesting to talk about.
One thing I find very interesting about the whole idea of time travel in Sci Fi is that it is invariably taken for granted that changing history is either impossible or impractical. Why is it that we find it necessary to create a barrier between ourselves and the past, guarded by whatever time travel paradoxes and time traveller rules are assumed? It is very hard to think of an instance of time travel science fiction that does not in some way include an anti-meddling clause, paradox, puzzle, or at the very least expresses doubts about the possibility of changing history.
The exception is of course that we have no qualms about going into the future and meddling. For some reason it is fine to go ahead in time and muck about in people’s lives, in their politics, etc. But for one in that future’s future it would be unacceptable for a “past traveler” to go back, meet our “future traveler” and participate in the same way. The only explanation I can think of for this is that we are at the same time both selfish and cautious about our own history, while we desperately grasp at the notion of free will in our futures. What I mean by this (if that didn’t make the slightest bit of sense) is that as humans we are instinctively protective of what is already ours, and what can be more personal a possession than our past, and also instinctively optimistic that anything can be ours in the future. Therefore we create a time paradox that makes our history unchangeable. What was ours in the past can’t be taken away, at least not easily. The future however is not ours yet so it is more than acceptable to venture forth, like H.G. Wells’ Time Traveler does, and mess about, saving strange female humanoids and such. The Time Traveler is creating rather than editing the history of the world. Maybe that is an important distinction.
I personally think that if time travel into the past is possible (we know future travel is possible) then changing the past must also be possible. We are just missing some key piece of knowledge or understanding about time that prevents us from allowing for it’s possibility.
Justin, your comment is really interesting. I hadn’t thought about the reasons why authors are reluctant to allow the changing of history. For me, I had always assumed it was for practical reasons – sooner or later, you run into paradoxes such as the Grandfather Paradox when you try to change your own past, and that’s always incredibly difficult to deal with. Best just to come up with a reason why such paradoxes wouldn’t arise, right? It makes writing the story much easier, especially if you want the story to primarily focus on other ideas. Also, it explains why we don’t see a bunch of time travelers all around us right now. So handy!
I always figured that being able to change the past would be too much like a deus ex machina or “it was all a dream,” not satisfying to the reader. The interesting works that suppose that the past can be changed may be the ones where the change is negative (unintentional, or tragically at variance with the intentions of the changer), or where the changes blur into a web of change and counter-change – which is sort of the case in “Vincent Van Gogh.” Our narrator learns his lesson, though, and in the end inserts himself firmly into history, joining the Right Side during WWII and coming down on the side of the artistic canon as well.
Justin, I like your point about our sense that our past is our own most intimate possession, and I guess in a sense memory erasure or psychem (to move forward to Lem) work like changing the past, because they obscure it and steal it from its owners. So maybe the reason why the topic of changing the past isn’t more widespread is not just the Grandfather Paradox but also the threat it presents to the reader. – Or the fact that it seems to be proven impractical by our own experience, in a way that psychem is NOT disproven?
Technically, there is no way of proving that time travel isn’t happening all the time. If someone were to keep changing the past, we would still have all coherent memories coming up to the future, as they did in the Van Gogh story. So the idea that our own experience negates it doesn’t work.
However, I am fascinated by Justin’s comments on the future. And I think that you hit on something when you mentioned the sense of free-will and indeterminacy. We want to think that the future is indeterminate, and that our actions actively shape the future in a way that would make it almost impossible to time travel into the future. So when we are faced with the future, it is easier to just pretend that just because we are in the future and seeing it, doesn’t mean that it is determined, and needs to be respected the same way that the past does. I mean, even without time machines, we are constantly making decisions that will change our future, so it doesn’t feel like it is that different. Just because we have a machine does that change anything? Are we only supposed to be able to make changes whose effects we have to live in a linear progression towards?
When you think about time, and the flow of time, as less of a linear pattern and more as many simultaneous possibilities, then it almost doesn’t matter what you do at any point. Yes, you will be changing things, but the world where you didn’t change anything continues moving on for infinity, and the world where you did does as well. What matters to us, is which world our consciousness inhabits and luckily, I don’t think that we have to worry about that. Go back, prevent the harsh version of the Treaty of Versailles, and just because your Polish Jewish mother won’t go to the US in time to meet your Italian father doesn’t mean that you don’t exist. Just that you weren’t born in that world. Your consciousness will continue with your brain, and I see no reason why, if you can move into that world, making a change in the past should change whether you exist. It only becomes an issue when you think of time in the way that we perceive it: a straight line.