July 25, 2006
Time, Life, Books II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:15 AM EST I couldn’t agree more with Fred Schwarz about letting the reader know where he is in time as well as in space.
A few years ago a movie called The English Patient won every Oscar in sight. I hated it.
It begins with a biplane flying over the desert. I knew it was about war, and I immediately assumed, given the biplane, that it must be World War I. For the next hour I sat in the theater becoming ever more confused until something finally clued me in that it was World War II we were dealing with. A simple caption (The Western Desert of Egypt—1937) would have done the trick and allowed me to enjoy the movie. Actually I doubt that, as the movie was endless and a great example of a director (Anthony Minghella) so in love with every frame he shoots that he makes the audience watch them all. His later movie Cold Mountain had exactly the same problem, with whole sections that were completely irrelevant to the story he was telling.
One movie that famously if quite unnecessarily tells its audience when as well as where it takes places is Star Wars, which begins with a crawl saying “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Of course, that distant galaxy was technologically so far ahead of planet earth today, that the fact that the movies takes place “a long time ago” is completely irrelevant. Oh, well, it was a great beginning to a great movie anyway.
An author who was notorious for not setting his books in a particular time was Charles Dickens. With a few exceptions, such as A Tale of Two Cities, his novels are quite free of time references. And technology seldom helps. Dickens did not like the “heaving, tumbling age” (his contemporary James Gordon Bennett’s phrase) in which he lived, with its rapid technological change (even, apparently, the technologies that made Dickens the richest author who had ever lived). He seldom mentions things like railroads, telegraphs, steamships, indoor plumbing, etc. Instead his novels exist in a sort of temporal limbo.
Of course, being the storytelling genius that he was, it doesn’t matter. For less celestial talents, it usually does.
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