OK, another moment of Shameless Self Promotion:
This site received a footnote on Wikipedia, a reference to my interview with Audrey Niffenegger about The Time Traveler’s Wife (it’s note number 6). And while Wikipedia isn’t always an accurate source, it’s still kind of cool.
The novel itself is one of my favorites, and just a few days ago I saw a trailer for the film. I only hope the film will turn out well.
The Time Traveler’s Wife (MacAdam/Cage 2003) explores an unusual relationship, that of Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire. Like many love stories, the novel develops the relationship from courtship to marriage, but, adds a twist. A genetic disorder causes Henry to time travel, thus interrupting the ordinary patterns of his and Clare’s life — the couple first meets when Clare is six, and Henry, as an adult, has traveled back thirty years — and challenging notions of free will (Henry is unable to change events, and the couple seems almost fated to develop their romance). The novel also diverges from some love stories, exchanging sappiness for a realistic, though sometimes dark, portrait of a relationship.
I invited the book’s author, Audrey Niffenegger, to discuss the novel, her current projects, and her recent reading.
Below is the interview:
You’ve mentioned that The Time Traveler’s Wife originated with the title. How did the story evolve from there?
I wrote the ending, then the scene in which Clare loses her virginity, then a prologue which I later ditched,
Audrey Niffenegger (Photo by Christopher Schneberger)
then I stopped and tried to think how to structure the thing. I made a sort of list of scenes, organized them into three acts, and then started randomly working them until there was enough to see what it might be. The manuscript leant itself to being repeatedly restructured.
How did you manage the novel’s structure?
Originally it was thematically organized, but early readers found that confusing. Several people suggested following Clare’s chronology, which is mostly what I ended up doing. The story itself is very simple: courtship, marriage, Henry’s death, Clare’s life after that. It seems complicated because it is told out of order.
Present tense seems perfect for this novel. To me the choice of present tense seems to indicate that every action is in the here and now or suspends time. Which certainly seems true for Henry. Why did you decide to use present tense?
I couldn’t figure out when the present was; there was no baseline, no now, no past. By putting it in present tense the reader experiences what the characters experience, so that resolved all sorts of problems.
My memory of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando from 17 years ago doesn’t really coincide with what I’m reading now. Mostly I remember being puzzled and confused by this novel in grad school, as I was often puzzled by Virginia Woolf in grad school, and sometimes still am. What I remember about the novel then I’ve captured in my marginalia, notes mostly taken in class, notes such as this: “Are men and women different?” And that is certainly a question Orlando faces, because she starts out as a man in Elizabethan England, but then transforms via deus ex machina into a woman.
This week I started reading Orlando again, this time interested in the theme of time travel— also a topic of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife — which Orlando also seems to do, given that she moves through time from the age of Elizabeth I to 1928, the year the novel was published.
Unlike Henry in The Time Traveler’s Wife, Orlando isn’t afflicted with a genetic disorder sending her through the ages. She just refuses to age, and moves through time with little effort, although there seems to be some supernatural influence over her gender- and time-bending: her transformation from male to female, for instance, takes place under while sleeping, when the gods or demigods Purity, Chastity, and Modesty visit and invoke the transformation. Time, like gender, seems relative, a state one moves through with little effort.
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Editor’s Note: This post has been written as part of Sunday Salon.
I’ve updated my 100-novels list, adding Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife to it. I hope to have more posted about this novel in the future. I’m following up Time Traveler’s Wife with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography; I feel there is a relationship between the two novels.
Here is a plot summary of Orlando from Wikipedia:
Orlando tells the story of a young man named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He does not, and he passes through the ages as a young man … until he wakes up one morning to find that he has metamorphosed into a woman — the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman’s body. The remaining centuries up to the time the book was written are seen through a woman’s eyes.
Here is the Booking Through Thursday prompt: “Name a favorite literary couple and tell me why they are a favorite. If you cannot choose just one, that is okay too. Name as many as you like . . .”
Hmmm . . . Initially I take this to mean a writer and his or her significant other — in that case it’s Henry Miller and Anais Nin, mainly because of the movie Henry & June (1990), which is one of my favorite movies. The love triangle between Henry (Fred Ward), Anais (Maria de Medeiros), and June (Uma Thurman) is intriguing and complicated. The film itself is gorgeous, though a romanticized version of Paris in the ’30s.
Given that the film was drawn from Nin’s published journals it’s not surprising the film registers such a romantic and stylized evocation of Paris in the ’30s. According to The Erotic Life of Anais Nin by Noel Riley Fitch, in her journals Nin created a stylized persona.
Arguably, of course, all writers — diarists, memoirists, novelists, etc.— create personae. Vivian Gornick argues in her wonderful little book on writing personal essays and memoirs The Situation and the Story that writers, even nonfiction writers — perhaps especially nonfiction writers— must create a persona when they write:
Out of the raw material of a writer’s own undisguised being a narrator is fashioned whose existence on the page is integral to the tale being told. This narrator becomes a persona. Its tone of voice, its angle of vision, the rhythm of its sentences, what it selects to observe and what to ignore are chosen to serve the subject; yet at the same time the way the narrator — or the persona — sees things is, to the largest degree, the thing being seen. . . .the creation of such a persona is vital in an essay or a memoir. It is the instrument of illumination. Without it there is neither subject nor story.
Now back to the subject of this post: literary couples (couples in a relationship, of course, also develop personae). After rereading the prompt, I also thought about literary lovers on the page, actual characters in a novel, and I’m really intrigued by the literary couple Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire in Audrey Niffenegger‘s The Time Traveler’s Wife. Such an interesting premise: A love story complicated by the fact that one of the lovers has a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel.
In the process of reading this novel, I’ve been pondering the idea of time travel. The whole what if of it. And so I have my own writing prompt for readers of this post:
What if you could time travel? What would you do? Would you try to influence the past or future in some way?
Post your answers either in comments or post a link to the answer. I’ll be posting my own answer later.
