Playing Against the Clock: the Metaphor of Time in the Forever War and the Dechronization of Sam Magruder

PLAYING AGAINST THE CLOCK: THE METAPHOR OF TIME IN THE FOREVER WAR AND THE DECHRONIZATION OF SAM MAGRUDER TED BAILEY University of Miskolc If sports reveal the values of a society, then America must be a nation with a terribly schizophrenic attitude towards time. Most countries have a single national sport, soccer, which is played over two forty-five minute peri- ods that are only rarely interrupted — and then only in the case of a major injury. Moreover, only one person in the entire stadium knows exactly when a period will end. In North America, by contrast, two of the three major national sports — football and basketball — are played with an almost fanat- ical obsession with time. A multitude of clocks strategically located through- out the stadium or arena make the time left to play visible from almost every perspective, and the sports themselves abound in rules involving two-minute warnings, twenty-four second clocks, and time-outs. Metaphors such as “fighting against the clock” and “conserving time” proliferate in the language of coaches, managers, and journalists covering these sports, where an athlete who can “work the clock” inevitably becomes a key play- er. Baseball, on the other hand, takes a different approach, with nothing allowed to interfere with the duration of the game except the rule dictating that each side gets an equal number of opportunities. Attempts to establish a time limit or to speed up the game are invariably decried as abominations that would ruin the purity of the game — witness the recent suggestion to enlarge the strike zone in order to speed up the game. If basketball and football are obsessed with controlling time and moving forward, baseball, by comparison, with its appeals to tradition and the denial of the power of time, offers a nostalgic retreat into the past. Similar cultural attitudes towards time find expression in literature as well. The obsession with either conquering time or ignoring the boundaries it imposes appears, respectively, in two late twentieth-century works, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1975) and George Gaylord Simpson’s The Dechronization of Sam Magruder (1996). The genre of science fiction, B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006 94 which these two novels represent, is about as distant from the world of sports as one can get; yet, although neither of these works relies on the images or language of sports, both employ metaphorical uses of time that are embodied in football, basketball, and baseball. Through these metaphors the novels gain a distinctively American flavor and reflect on American values. At the end of The Great Gatsby, one of the few works in literature to capture succinctly America’s contradictory relationship to time, F. Scott Fitzgerald embeds his final comments on the obsession with the lost American dream in the language of sports journalism. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (1992:189) Anyone familiar with the perennial cries of “Just wait till next year!” would find it difficult to overhear what Fitzgerald is saying: the desire to move forward towards a goal in the golden past is not just Gatsby’s obsession, but an integral part of the national psyche. Much of the power in this passage arises from the tension Fitzgerald creates in mixing two time metaphors which Lakoff and Johnson call Moving Observer and Moving Time metaphors (1999:141–46). On the one hand, the future “recedes” and “eludes us,” giving the impression that a game is being played and time is moving away while the speaker stands still. On the other hand, one needs only to move, to “run faster,” to try hard- er, and time — as is implied in sports language as well — can be overcome. Fitzgerald’s final sentence juxtaposes the two metaphors, the observer pad- dling while time bears him in the opposite direction, thus dramatizing the illusion of power over time that the Moving Observer metaphor can subtly imply. As Lakoff and Johnson point out, taking “metaphorical concept of time as literal” will lead to contradictory and “silly results” (1999:167), and this conflation is precisely what brings about Gatsby’s downfall. Just as football acts out its own “Time Is A Resource metaphor” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:161) in stadiums across the country every autumn weekend, Gatsby becomes a victim of the belief that man is an active agent who can control and manipulate time: “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously, ‘why 95 JOURNEYS INTO SILENCE of course you can!’” (Fitzgerald 1992:116) What Gatsby pays no attention to is that “[t]ime is directional and irreversible because events [. .] cannot ‘unhappen’” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:138). Naturally, the Moving Observer metaphor does not automatically mean that one is deluded as to one’s own control over time. Humans are, by nature, egocentric, and so placing oneself as the active agent in the center of a metaphor is not necessarily irrational or excessively narcissistic. In fact, the Moving Observer metaphor can be equally used to demonstrate and explore one’s powerlessness in the face of time. Both Joe Haldeman’s and George Gaylord Simpson’s novels do exactly this point by making the Moving Observer metaphor a literal fact, employing time travel to move their protagonists through time. These novels translate time into a metaphor for distance between people, thus providing a device to dramatize isolation and loneliness. Additionally, just as Fitzgerald used the tension between two attitudes towards time to critique the American dream, these novels use time to comment on various aspects of the American psyche and present a sharp contrast to traditional American beliefs about time that are embed- ded in sports metaphors. In order to realize time travel as a metaphor for loneliness and distance between individuals, two important restrictions are placed on the methods of travel in these novels. Whereas H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895; 1992) allows time travel both forwards and backwards in a machine the Time Traveller himself constructs, both Haldeman and Simpson send their protagonists on one-way trips over which they have no control. This themat- ic represents a marked change from traditional American attitudes to time as embodied in major sports. Football’s obsession with dominating time has already been noted, and baseball’s traditions encourage a dialogue between past and present that dissolves the barriers of time and provides the illusion of time travel. As David Halberstam has noted, “[i]n baseball more than anything I know, today is not merely today; it is yesterday as well” (qtd. in Skolnik 1994: 9). Loneliness, however, implies a loss of control over one’s situation, and so the observer moving through time cannot be allowed to call a time-out or to enter or to leave the ballpark at will. Central to both Haldeman’s and Simpson’s use of the metaphor of time travel is the modern understanding of time that has developed since Einstein formulated the theory of relativity. Wells also used time travel as an extension of the Moving Observer metaphor, but his concept of time, in the B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006 96 novel written ten years before Einstein published his theory, is based on the idea of an absolute time. This idea allows him to move his protagonist back and forth along a scale of linear time that does not move in relation to the protagonist. With the theory of relativity, however, “time became a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it” (Hawking 1998:143), and so — especially in The Forever War — the observer moves in relation to other people’s clocks, not to a grand, united sense of time. That we all perceive time in different ways is, of course, not a new or difficult concept. One of the factors that determine our relationship to time is our chronological age. The observation that time moves faster when one gets older is a common experience, attributable to the amount of time one has lived through. A day seems like forever to a small child, and since he has probably experienced only two-thousand other days it is literally a larg- er proportion of his life than a day is to a mother in her forties, who has already seen some fourteen-thousand days and to whom a day may appear to rush by in the wink of an eye. Similarly, the realization that the finite amount of time one has to live is rapidly drawing to a close will change one’s perception of this time, as it does for Peyton Farquhar, whose mind expands the few seconds left to him into a long hallucinatory sequence in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1998). The historical era one lives in and its technological accoutrements also influence one’s perceptions of time. As Don Gifford points out, the distance covered in three and a half hours by car in the late twentieth century would have meant a ten-day trip on foot or a four-day journey on horseback two hundred years earlier (1990:104). Our perception of what constitutes a long distance or a long time is dependent on the technology available to us. Looking forward, Joe Haldeman theorizes about future developments in technology in The Forever War and pushes his characters by varying degrees forward in time in order to dramatize differences between them.

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