Voyager: Disturbing the Ecosystem of the Past?

So in the interest of pressing on, I am choosing to leave behind individual instances of themes I established in previous books.  There are things to be said here about ghosts--Roger and All Hallows' Eve, Claire and Jamie appearing as ghosts to each other in their absence, stressing that ghosts aren't really gone from us.  There are also things to be said about Jamie's printing business tying into the literacy theme by showing the subversive potential of print.  But I've gotten hung up on the small moments.  And this goes back to the ease of reading and marking on the Kindle.  I read on, which is what I needed to do at the time, and instead of stopping to linger over moments, or lingering over them in my head rather than on the blog, I left the moments behind to come back to later.  Meanwhile, I marked them indiscriminately.  That is one explanation.  The other explanation is that, since this is the third book, I have too many threads to follow.  The threads have been accumulating, and the author has had all of the strands that she built up over two books to weave together in the third... and the fourth... and so on.  So I find myself notating something on every other page... in a 1000+ page book.  This is the beauty of having a thesis--it forces us to be selective.  I have several theses, and a few loosely affiliated ideas.  And for now, it is too much, though other times, it works out for me.  My brain is simply in a different mode right now, which happens.

So I'm trying out "being more selective."  And in being more selective, I wanted to point to a moment in Voyager that my friend Melanie of the Wine Dark Sea (whom I don't think is embarrassed to have read the Outlander books) cited as something that bothered her.  So here it is, as Claire returns to the past, armed with several resources for her journey, including... wait for it... a peanut butter and jelly sandwich:

     I pulled it out and carefully unwrapped it. Peanut butter and jelly on white bread, it was considerably the worse for wear, with the purple stains of the jelly seeping through the limp bread, and the whole thing mashed into a flattened wedge. It was delicious. (309)

In honor of National Peanut Butter Day (January 24th--didn't you know that?  Yeah, neither did I...), The Huffington Post published a piece on the history of peanut butter--which, incidentally, places its invention in 1884 at the earliest, and debunks the attribution of peanut butter to George Washington Carver (whom I greatly admire), and emphasizes its New World origins.

So over 100 years before the invention of peanut butter, Claire sits in Edinburgh eating a peanut butter sandwich.  Yes, you should read that sentence with a tiny bit of incredulity.  The narrative continues:

     I swallowed the last rich, sweet bite of my old life, and crumpled the wrapper in my hand. I glanced around, but no one was looking in my direction. I opened my hand, and let the bit of plastic film fall surreptitiously to the ground. Wadded up, it rolled a few inches on the cobbles, crinkling and unfolding itself as though alive. The light wind caught it, and the small transparent sheet took sudden wing, scudding over the gray stones like a leaf.
     The draft of a set of passing wheels sucked it under a drayman’s cart; it winked once with reflected light, and was gone, disappearing without notice from the passersby. I wondered whether my own anachronistic presence would cause as little harm. (309)

Melanie recounted her own horror? dismay? at the plastic wrap, and I have to concur.  It's disturbing.  Particularly in this post-environmentalist world, where we know about interconnectedness, we understand the risk plastics pose to wildlife and how long it takes a diaper to decompose.  But Claire easily shrugs it off:  "I wondered whether my own anachronistic presence would cause as little harm."

On the one hand, Claire's dismissal of the importance of the plastic wrap might be another reactionary moment.  As certain key tenets of feminism--or at least certain feminist revisions of the past--are dismissed in the Outlander novels, as, say, Jamie justifies corporal punishment of his wife in reasonable-sounding terms, perhaps an over-sensitivity to environmental concerns is being lightly critiqued.

Another possibility, however, is that we are supposed to feel a little bit outraged as readers, that Claire, our heroine, is introducing 20th Century trash to the 18th Century environment.  Perhaps we are supposed to think about what the possible consequences will be--the poor duck that tries to eat it and ends up suffocating, or just the problem of litter anticipated by this faux pas.  One thing is certain--the reader is supposed to register this moment, and not simply to shrug it off.  Once we have become a bit outraged, we think about Claire's statement about her "own anachronistic presence... caus[ing] little harm," and wonder... perhaps that statement points to something to come!  Perhaps Claire's presence will cause harm--as much as, or more than, the introduction of 20th Century trash!

Admittedly, I resist this reading.  The plastic wrap disappears from sight.  It disappears from the narrative, from Claire's mind, and from the reader's mind.  Whatever effect it might have fails to matter in the grand scheme of things.  And so, we might extrapolate, does Claire's presence in the past.  Perhaps.

The plastic wrap is the vehicle, here, for reintroducing the dilemma of time travel.  Clearly, this is something that is on the character's mind--it is real on some level to Claire.  And clearly, as a reader, I am supposed to be concerned about this on some level.  Except that... perhaps I'm not.

Time travel does continue to be a dilemma in the novels.  Even after Culloden--Claire's attempts to alter history--the possibility that if Jamie and Claire had any influence on Culloden, they might have helped precipitate the uprising, and to insure it's failure, thus bringing about the outcome that was more or less predetermined according to Claire's future perspective on history, we will come back to time travel.  But why?  How is it that this question hasn't been definitively answered at this point in the series?

Well, perhaps it's just too huge a motif--too huge a metaphysical question--to let rest, even after 2500 pages or so.  Perhaps it could be that, as humans, we not only recognize the cosmic oddity of time travel, we also want, desperately, to know that we have influence on the world around us.  Isn't that, after all, what environmentalism is about?  Certainly, environmentalism acknowledges that nature should be more important than us, but ultimately, it grants us the power to upset... well, everything.  And maybe that's also what we want from time travel.  Validation--even of our disruptive destructiveness.

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Voyager (Outlander). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Voyager: Denial yields... Ghosts

It was a moment that I drifted over the first time I read the novel.  And the second.  And as I looked through my notes, I overlooked it again.  And then I started actually reading the chapters to recover a sense of the scenes I was analyzing, I lingered for a moment on the word, "ghosts":

     Grey breathed deep, and let it out slowly. “I am sorry for your loss,” he added formally.
     They were both quiet for a moment, alone with their ghosts. Then Fraser looked up and drew in his breath. “Your brother was right, Major,” he said. “I thank ye, and I’ll bid ye good e’en.” He rose, set down his cup and left the room. (174)

I had to work backward a bit to find the reference, and about what Lord Melton was right.  It was obvious... and not, because the references were separated by a couple of dense pages:

     “He made me go and look at the body— Hal did, my brother,” Grey blurted. He looked down at his hand, where the deep blue of Hector’s sapphire burned against his skin, a smaller version of the one Fraser had reluctantly given him.
     “He said that I must; that unless I saw him dead, I should never really believe it. That unless I knew Hector— my friend— was really gone, I would grieve forever. If I saw, and knew, I would grieve, but then I should heal— and forget.” He looked up, with a painful attempt at a smile. “Hal is generally right, but not always.” (172)

And perhaps it is a function of quick reading--and also why I enjoy reading and rereading a book, because I notice new things each time--but it seems that there is a bit of a puzzle.  With what ghost was Jamie alone?  Claire, of course, but the fact is that Jamie did not ever see her dead.  And so, as an earlier incident indicates to Jamie and the reader, he has difficulty believing that she is... gone from him.

This might be clear, or not seem to require the analysis that I have given it, but ghosts are a common theme in the novels, and one I have set out to tackle.  When we think of the figurative meaning of "being alone with one's ghosts," the reference is not necessarily to someone who is dead, but to someone who is removed from one--who cannot be recovered.  With Hector, the novel treats the phrase literally.  He is one of Grey's "ghosts."  At this point, we also know that Jamie has ghosts, including his brother William, who are still real to him.  Claire may be like a ghost to him, but she in fact still does exist.  In this, she actually resembles Jamie's other ghosts, who also exist--and seem to occupy a "space apart" in a very real afterlife.  But Claire occupies a different--a virtual--space for Jamie--the one from which she came to him in the first place.  Because he knows that when he left her, she was alive, and knows that it was his intention to keep her alive, he can never believe that she is gone.  And he will grieve forever.  Or so he assumes.

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Voyager (Outlander) . Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

Time-Traveler as "Other"?

One of the interesting ideas that surfaces when Claire is back in the 20th C is the "difference" of the time traveler.  Before Dragonfly in Amber, the only other time traveler besides Claire is Geilie Duncan--late of 1968.  She and Claire recognize each other by means of their vaccination scars.  In Dragonfly, two others with time travel potential are added to the roster, notably Claire's daughter Brianna.

Brianna is striking, first and foremost, because of her physical appearance, which strongly favors her 18th Century father, Jamie.  When the narrative describes Brianna, most often through the consciousness of Roger Wakefield, her strangeness is emphasized--she is savage, and timeless, and Other.  The timeless quality is particularly interesting, since Brianna is a 20th Century/18th Century hybrid who carries forward a lineage that otherwise had died out in the 19th Century (Voyager ).

But Brianna is characterized by something a bit less visible--her immediacy:

She and her mother both gave that odd impression of having been outlined somehow, drawn with such vivid strokes that they stood out from their background as though they'd been engraved on it.  But Brianna had that brilliant coloring, and that air of absolute physical presence that made Bronzino's sitters seem to follow you with their eyes, to be about to speak from their frames. (Dragonfly 16)

Compared to Claire and Brianna, the 20th C is muted, somehow.  Here, Claire shares in the strangeness--either because she has experienced the 18th Century, which, as emphasized by the contrasts between 20th Century and 18th Century men in particular, is more vital, or because this immediacy is a characteristic of a time traveler.

When I read this, my initial reaction is to think--a man comparing a woman to a painting.  How cliché.  So cliché that it was an indictment of Gabriel Conroy's pretention and lack of imagination in "The Dead" by Joyce.  And it might be that this reflects badly on Roger's imagination.  But what about this particular 16th Century painter?  A quick Google search points to the likely image:  Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi.  She is Italian, not Scots, but here is as long and straight a nose as one could wish, red hair, brilliant coloring, and that sense that she will "follow you with [her] eyes, [and] be about to speak from [her] frame." From the metaphor, the reader is asked to take away a few crucial details:  that "they stood out from their background," and that Brianna has an air of "absolute physical presence" that is not characteristic of her 20th Century background.

In an ironic gesture, Roger realizes Brianna's Scots savagery as she defends Frank Randall as the father of her body as well as her heart:

The girl that stood on the hearthrug, hissing and spitting in defense of her paternity, flamed with the wild strength that had brought the Highland warriors down on their enemies like shrieking banshees.  Her long, straight nose lengthened sill further by the shadows, eyes slitted like a snarling cat's, she was the image of her father--and her father was patently not the dark, quiet scholar whose photo adorned the jacket of the book on the table. (Dragonfly 898)

Certainly Brianna's difference is related to her real parentage--an 18th Century Highland warrior rather than a 20th Century English scholar.  But these descriptions that single out Brianna for her difference also tap into the question of why some people are time travelers and some aren't.  In Voyager, Geilie posits an answer-- that time travelers have the ability to travel through time so that they can change things.  Her own insanity--which undermines her credibility--and Claire's experience suggest otherwise.

But descriptions of Brianna tap into what the essence of the difference is.  Heredity is a factor.  But time travelers are. . . well. . . timeless.  Like a painting, or an illuminated manuscript:

     Fiona laughed up at Brianna, who towered over the small Scottish girl by nearly a foot. Fiona was nineteen, prettily charming and slightly plump; next to her, Brianna looked like a medieval carving, strong-boned and severe. With her long, straight nose and the long hair glowing red-gold beneath the glass bowl of the ceiling fixture, she might have walked out of an illuminated manuscript, vivid enough to endure a thousand years unchanged. 

    Roger was suddenly conscious of Claire Randall, standing near his elbow. She was looking at her daughter, with an expression in which love, pride, and something else were mingled— memory, perhaps? He realized, with a slight shock, that Jamie Fraser too must have had not only the striking height and Viking red hair he had bequeathed to his daughter, but likely the same sheer physical presence. 

    It was quite remarkable, he thought. She didn’t do or say anything so out of the ordinary, and yet Brianna undeniably drew people. There was some attraction about her, almost magnetic, that drew everyone near into the glow of her orbit. (Voyager 43)

Brianna has Jamie's charisma, but more than that, she demonstrates that time travelers are different--timeless--and gives further evidence that something important--vital, "vivid"--is missing from the 20th Century that did (or does) exist in the 18th.

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Voyager (Outlander) (p. 43). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Dragonfly: Where is God in Time Travel?

There are definitely questions about which I'm not interested in speculating. These are mostly questions that resolve themselves within the novels, or questions that do not resonate outside of the novels.  They are interesting, but there is no need to elaborate.  One such question asserts itself in Dragonfly in Amber, in the chapters titled "Untimely Resurrection" and "The Royal Stud": the question of Jamie's vengeance upon Jack Randall, and whether Claire is right to make him postpone that vengeance.  It could be that I think Claire is more wrong about preventing Jamie from killing Jack Randall on this particular occasion than she is to make him betray his country and kin to prevent the Battle (and devastation) of Culloden.  I'll never tell.  But it's also true that Gabaldon brings the matter around very neatly, giving Jamie the ability to reclaim some of his own by determining his own reason for postponing vengeance (and getting in some nice foreshadowing as well).  It's a lovely narrative card that she plays, and well worth giving a nod.  (See pp. 401-403 in the small, Dell paperback version with the orange cover.)  But--it is part of the narrative, and in terms of Jamie's justification, what he does or does not owe Claire, the question of conscience, or anything involving their feelings about other characters, it works itself out, and doesn't really require speculation or further analysis of motivations.  I like to leave the characters to themselves, and allow their motivations to emerge through the action of the story rather than through my own suppositions and psychoanalysis.  It's why criticism is (or should be) sort of the anti-fan-fiction.  (Just for fun, check out Diana Gabaldon's Fan Fiction Policy.)

What is interesting in the maneuverings of Claire to prevent Jamie from killing Jack Randall too soon is (first) that the question is never the morality of the vengeance.  That is taken for granted, and I'm glad.  Moralistic posturing would do no one any good in this case.  Claire's conscience is evoked, rather neatly, to turn the guilt of preventing Frank's birth (indirectly, by the death of Jack Randall) to Claire's decision to abandon Frank for Jamie--at least, that is how Jamie casts Claire's decision not to pass again through the stones: "it's one thing to abandon a man, and another to condemn him to death" (401).  Non-birth/prevention of conception is not quite death, but we'll let that go for the moment.  Jamie's conscience is never an issue, except insofar as killing always leaves a mark:  "I remember the face of every man I've killed, and always will" (400).  And that's just fine.

But the deeper implications of the maneuverings leave some room for consideration.  If this novel is instrumental to the series, it may well be--first and foremost--the working out of what a time traveler can and can't accomplish with reference to history that gives it it's highest value in the big picture.  (I have other considerations of time travel here and here.)  The reason I drag God into it in my title is because the question of conscience was right in front of me in the narrative.  Brother Anselm and his theology, the moral implications of preventing someone from being born.  But a larger question emerges:  could anything Jamie and Claire have done prevent the beginning of the bloodline that eventually produces Frank Randall, Claire's husband in the year 1943?

It's something like the question my son asked of his 4th grade teacher at the fourth-rate Catholic school that he went to for most of that year:  if Adam and Eve hadn't sinned, would any of us exist?  Need I say that the teacher didn't know how to answer the question?  I consulted a deacon friend of mine, and came up with the response that our existence in God's plan didn't depend on sin.  We simply don't know how things would have worked out without it.  There is something tangentially related to this question happening in Perelandra, the second book of C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy.  An alien world is experiencing its own Creation, and Lewis's Ransom is a spectator and intercessor, preventing the successful temptation of the newly-Created female of the alien species so that the world might emerge without the taint of Original Sin.  The idea is--Sin or no Sin, our existence as individuals is part of God's plan.

So is this worldview somehow reflected in Gabaldon's novel?  At first glance it may seem not to be.  Clearly, it is absent from the Back to the Future movie trilogy--things change, people disappear.  But there's nothing about God in those films.  Religion is simply not part of the picture(s).  By contrast, there's Catholicism all over the place in the Outlander series.  You can't get around it, the novels have a Catholic consciousness, whatever their orthodoxy.  You might say that it proceeds from what has been called "the Catholic imagination," though I wouldn't quote Andrew Greeley for orthodoxy's sake...

Without saying how, I will say that Frank's bloodline works itself out.  It works itself out with Jack Randall alive, but it does so in a way that his survival has precious little to do with the birth.  Clever.  So does that mean Predestination?  I'm not sure.  Although there is implied argument between Predestination and Free Will in the novels (especially with reference to Roger Wakefield in some of the later books), there seems to be quite a bit of room for Free Will--or really, would readers enjoy the books so much?  But characters' Free Will seems to feed directly into what they know to have been going to happen.  (I'm absolutely playing with verb tense there.  Too bad I'm not writing in a romance language!)  In other words, the characters end up proving their own instrumentality to the events that will unfold--or have unfolded--or will have unfolded.  Everything fits neatly into place.  Some would consider this as evidence for God in the Outlander worldview--or in its representation of time travel.  I think there's evidence, at least, that the man who was Frank Randall was "meant" to exist--which does, in fact, suggest some greater intentionality beyond the machinations of Claire and Jamie.

The Thing About Time Travel - Pt. 2

This discussion of time travel is continued from The Thing About Time Travel - Pt. 1.

I've already mentioned that it was hard for me to read Dragonfly in Amber the first time.  Let me qualify that--it was hard for me to reconcile myself to the beginning of the novel and its implications.  Once I was reading, I was zipping through.  However, it was very difficult for me to suspend my disbelief--specifically with reference to the time travel.  What was the problem?--you might wonder.  It clearly wasn't an issue with Outlander.  Stepping through standing stones into the 18th C--why not?  But hindsight-is-not-quite-20-20 with a time traveler transported the 18th C?--not so much.  Even so, there was a lot to keep me zipping through, and I will continue to chronicle those things.  But the whole premise--"should we change the course of history?"--grated on me.

It seems to me that the whole question of "changing the future" by the time traveler's actions is a fruitless question.  It's something akin to the "chicken and the egg."  Sure--the act of time travel changes something.  It must, right?  If we believe that even the smallest thing affects everything else, and we want to believe this.  George Bailey knows it to be true, whatever the dark, Walmart-facilitating, community-destroying implications of his progressive endeavors.

But here's the thing...  In the future from which the proverbial time traveler departs, it is not necessarily clear whether the time traveler's experience in the past has already happened.

Now, I don't know anything about Dr. Who, so perhaps the creators of the Dr. Who series (both of them) deal with this issue better.  But as a child of the 80s, I was raised on the logic of Back to the Future, so I know a thing or two about how time travel is supposed to work--when you go to the past, you either have to stay out of the way to prevent crucial events from being interrupted, or you have to engineer a way to get them back on the right track again--hopefully with better results than the first go-round.

These days, the time travel motif--its groundwork firmly laid by Back to the Future--can be casually employed without over-explanation (that whole "space-time continuum" thing) in the Disney children's series Phineas and Ferb.  Though the show is generally a stroke of genius, I nevertheless quibble a bit with their elimination of "alternate universe" Candace.  In the manner of Heinlein, in The Cat who Walks through Walls, I would like to see the alternate histories existing as parallels.

Heinlein employs agents in The Cat who Walks through Walls (O! Wikipedia, how I hate thee!) to alter history in a way that will be favorable to their cause--possibly the Lunar Revolt.  Each altered timeline creates a parallel universe in which events continue along their logical paths.  Long before I read the (somewhat convoluted) Cat who Walks through Walls, I remember seeing ads for a short-lived TV-show called Voyagers!, in which time-traveling agents are sent to correct historical events that were somehow disrupted.  Given the dates, I am surprised that I remember the commercial so vividly, but I do: a boy's shrill voice intones, "Moses was found by the pharaoh's daughter--" [pushes basket] "--in the Nile!"  We can only be grateful that the constraints of the TV show did not allow for the creation of parallel timelines.  There was only one, and its events were either correct or incorrect.

The Outlander books deal with time travel as a dilemma more or less frequently, depending on the novel.  The question hangs over Dragonfly in Amber like the sword of Damocles--(I stand by the metaphor)--because the actions of Claire and Jamie (which include multiple counts of betrayal) hinge on the question of whether one (or two) mere mortals might prevent the disastrous Battle of Culloden--or the entire Jacobite Rising of 1745.

George Bailey notwithstanding, I don't believe in the ability of one person or two to make that kind of impact, even with the benefit of limited hindsight.  It seems the height of arrogance for them to make the attempt, particularly since Claire, in so doing, completely sacrifices Jamie's personal honor.  So my own skepticism limits my enjoyment--and it's pretty important to be able to admit to these biases when reading.  It's part of the "rhetorical situation" of the reader.

Literarily speaking, if the characters accomplish what they set out to do, the books would change from historical fiction to alternate history.  So if we know what genre we're reading, it's a foregone conclusion.  Watching machinations that are doomed to failure makes me glaze over a bit, right up to the point when political intrigue becomes personal tragedy.  Consider the classic Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever," which crosses personal and political destinies as Kirk is forced to sacrifice the woman he loves to prevent Hitler from winning World War II.

A far more interesting question to me--and perhaps what I think we should be asking--is whether history as the characters know it (which is also how the reader knows it) depends on time travel itself.  In Outlander, there is implicit suggestion of this very question in Claire's instructions to Jenny of what she should do to prepare for impending doom:

     "Plant potatoes," I said. 

     Jenny's mouth dropped slightly open, then she firmed her jaw and nodded briskly. "Potatoes. Aye. There's none closer than Edinburgh, but I'll send for them. How many?" 

     "As many as you can. They're not planted in the Highlands now, but they will be.  They're a root crop that will keep for a long time, and the yield is better than wheat.  Put as much ground as you can into crops that can be stored.  There's going to be a famine, a bad one, in two years.  If there's land or property that's not productive now, sell it, for gold.  There's going to be a war, and slaughter.  Men will be hunted, here and everywhere through the Highlands." (Outlander 672)

In preparing Lallybroch for the aftermath of Culloden, which in the 20th Century is historical fact, Claire might raise a question in the mind of the reader--when were potatoes introduced to the Highlands? Is the introduction of potatoes--and the survival of Lallybroch--a fact in Claire's 20th Century as well?  It is impossible to know, since Lallybroch was not on Claire's radar when she was in the 20th C (the first time--sigh).

The question of how time travel influences personal history is a little easier--both easier to accept change and easier to see the influence that has already occurred.  Would, for example, characters not exist had someone else not traveled back in time?  Well, no.  In fact, some characters would not exist if a time traveler had not traveled to the past.  So there are clues that the things Claire will go back and do in the 1740s will have already affected the future/present of1945 or 1965...  The very existence of Roger MacKenzie Wakefield--descendant of a woman who went from the 1960s to the 1740s (and arrived before Claire, our traveler from 1945)--strongly implies that history as we know it depends on the activity of time travel.  That's a little bit mind blowing, but not unprecedented!

Re-enter pop culture.  The Futurama episode "Roswell that Ends Well" actually has a nice treatment of the paradox of time travel--Professor Farnsworth's warning to the crewe is "You mustn't interfere with the past.  Don't do anything that affects anything.  Unless it turns out that you were supposed to do it; in which case, for the love of God, don't not do it!"  Fry takes the advice to heart, and when he inadvertently places his (presumed) grandfather in the way of nuclear testing, he assumes that his grandma must not, in fact, be his grandma, and assures his own existence by yielding to her advances.  History--and thus, the future--depend on time travel.

Meanwhile, H. G. Wells' time traveler plays it safe--he leaves the past alone and only meddles in the future, where he can't jeopardize his own existence or the history of the world.

I'm not going to touch Time Bandits.  After all, it proceeds from the warped mind of Terry Gilliam.

For me, having the characters actions explain history, or tie neatly into it, is preferable.  When there is a neat intersection, I can sit back and admire the cleverness of it all.  If changing history is going to be a valid possibility in a time travel novel, go big with it.  Have the Americans lose the Revolutionary War--I dare you!  But accept the consequences, and show me what would have happened. It never really is a possibility in the Outlander novels.  We know that from Roger's date with Brianna to view the Culloden battlefield in the beginning of Dragonfly in Amber that Jamie and Claire do not succeed.

So at the end of the day--and the novel--it really is the personal tragedy that is most important, and the impulse to change history, the hubris that propels it.  The function of the fantasy element, then?  Perhaps to reveal that hubris for what it is, and to justify Claire's suffering when she returns to the 20th Century.

The Thing About Time Travel - Pt. 1

     "And you, my Sassenach?  What were you born for? To be lady of a manor, or to sleep in the fields like a gypsy? To be a healer, or a don's wife, or an outlaw's lady?" 

     "I was born for you," I said simply, and held out my arms to him. (Outlander 650)

Admittedly, I couldn't resist this quote.  The beautiful thing about a blog post as compared to, say, an academic paper, is that you can quote simply for the sake of quoting, without heavy justification.  Not that academics don't quote because they feel like it--they simply load on the justification afterwards.  I do in fact have a reason for quoting this particular exchange--and it has to do with the complexity of who one is meant to be--one's vocation if you will--to which I will no doubt return when the question of Claire's doctoring becomes a narrative "big deal."  But here, the question of vocation is bound to marriage, and to what kind of man Claire is meant to be joined.  There is a strong sense of destiny that is very romantic, but not particularly Catholic--perhaps more pagan, or a hint of Scots Presbyterian predestination?

These lines also show Claire leaving behind a husband she chose--in the 20th Century--for one she did not choose in the same kind of conscious act of will, reversing a trope of Celtic music that is represented by such songs as "Mattie Groves" (one of the Child ballads) and "Raggle Taggle Gypsy" (which I first heard performed by the Jolly Rogues on the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast).  In these songs (and many more), the woman leaves or betrays the man she has married or been forced to marry for money or status for a man with only his charms.  Jamie is like those ideal men because he is less strictly "civilized" and does, in fact, have only his charms to offer.

And there is yet another question embedded here--can one be born in the future for someone who exists in the past?

The time travel post has been long in coming.  I'm posting now, in part, because we're heading into the new year, and it seems appropriate.  I am also posting now because I'm rereading Dragonfly in Amber, and in some ways the notion of time travel is more important to this particular novel than to Outlander--though for me, less satisfying, as it brings up more of the frustrations of the time travel motif.

If you ask "why time travel?" in reference to Outlander--which you might, considering that it could have been a perfectly satisfying historical novel without time travel--what do you get?  Well, a change in genre, for starters, and a whole fan base of druid-wannabes who will be stalking stone circles all over the British isles in the hopes of finding Jamie.  The kind of fan base that I belonged to in my Mists of Avalon days back in high school.  But that change in genre is important, because the addition of a fantasy element suggests that there's something more to the story than meets the eye.  Fantasy functions rhetorically to turn the reader's mind to difference, or to wonder.

In Outlander, the time travel difference throws into sharp relief the difference between the men--Frank and Jamie--and all they represent to Claire.  If there wasn't a suave, sophisticated, worldly, experienced Frank to calmly ask whether Claire had had an affair during the war (in not so many words) and reassure her that it would be okay (whether sincerely or not), then Jamie's sexual inexperience and more physical, rough worldliness would not have a foil.  The reader would only have his or her (let's just say "her," shall we?) experience of the Twentieth- and Twenty-first centuries to draw on for comparison, and with only a historical novel, neatly contained in the Eighteenth Century, would the reader make the comparison?  Some might.  I venture to say, though, that most wouldn't.  The novel's representation of the past would reflect only on the past, and the reader would remain quite comfortably in her own present, content to believe her current circumstance preferable in everything except the lack of a 6-foot Scot with rippling muscles and flaming red hair.  Oh, and a kilt.  Commando.

Time travel, as the "fantasy element,"functions as a means of turning the reader's attention to the contrast between the two time periods--and it does so admirably well, for the reader who is open to it.  Now, for my sister, who had regrettably read Outlander before I gave it to her for Christmas, the dilemma of whether Claire should return to Frank was a false one, given the (to her) obvious choice of Jamie.  But (Catholic understanding of faithfulness, Sacrament, and marriage vows notwithstanding), the choice of 20th Century husband vs. 18th Century husband, possible only because of time travel, underscores the differences between the men who are constructed by the centuries they inhabit.  And if the decks are stacked a bit against Frank, well... they just are.  But they're stacked against the 20th Century as well.

Now, none of this touches what I find bothersome and irritating about time travel.  And for that, because I'm being conscious of the length of my posts, you will have to wait for part 2, due after New Year's so that we can do a little time traveling ourselves.  (I know, I know.)

Happy New Year, friends!

Dragonfly: Things

The novel Dragonfly in Amber opens with Roger Wakefield clearing his deceased foster-father's house of the latter's possessions.  The first time I read the novel, I was trying to overcome the trauma of the transition between book 1 and book 2--and it was traumatic.  It took me a while to work up the will to read it because I didn't--DIDN'T--want to hear that what had (apparently) happened, happened.  So as Roger looks through the later Reverend's possessions, I didn't particularly notice what the possessions were, though I did catch the general significance of the Reverend's Jacobite artifacts, and his interest in the eighteenth century.  Nothing is placed by accident in a novel, so just for the record:

He moved toward one of the tables and picked up a smal china dish.  It was filled with small metal rectangles; lead "gaberlunzies," badges issued to eighteenth-century beggars by parishes as a sort of license.  A collection of stoneware bottles stood by the lamp, a ramshorn snuff mull, banded in silver, next to them.  (4)

The snuff mull calls to my mind Claire's attempt to spring Jamie from Wentworth prison.  Murtagh uses attempted theft as an excuse for knocking out the guard, but when Claire suggests that he take something--a snuffbox--to make it convincing, he scoffs--actual theft is a capital offense, while attempted theft is a much lighter sentence (maiming or flogging).  The snuff mull is further described as having inscriptions, "the names and dates of the Deacons and Treasurers of the Incorporation of Tailors of the Canongate, from Edinburgh, 1726" (4), but this is a detail that I can't fit into place at this point.

The "gaberlunzies" recall Jamie's friend Hugh Munro from Outlander, who gives Claire the dragonfly in amber that provides the novel's title.

I admit to having been a bit perplexed at the title otherwise.  However, there is an explanatory moment when the sense of self that a child possesses from birth, that develops during the toddler years, puts up defenses during the teen years, and then hardens itself against the world through adulthood is described as that dragonfly (69-70). The narrative voice of Claire explains:

I had thought I was well beyond that stage, had lost all trace of softness and was well set on my way to a middle age of stainless steel. But now I thought that Frank's death had cracked him in some way. And the cracks were widening, so that I could no longer patch them with denial. (70)

By this early analogy, the formation of Claire's self in relation to--and through--Jamie, and the whittling away of the amber, are the subjects of the novel.  And yet, in some ways, I would argue that the true subject of the novel is the reconstruction of Jamie--and especially, of Jamie's manhood--in Claire's image.  And it takes, in my opinion, the next few novels for Jamie to recover his own sense of self in relation to his time-traveling wife--and time travel itself is very much to blame.