Time Flies Like a Socratic Dialogue: On Paul Levinson’s The Plot to Save Socrates

Paul Levinson’s The Plot to Save Socrates has been out in a paperback trade edition for a while and so it is an appropriate time to consider how the metaphor of time travel has been expressed in literature and the media. The Plot to Save Socrates offers a new way of telling time travel stories, one that is very much bound in the current communication environment of the Internet and encompasses role-playing games, multitasking, and hypertext. In order to appreciate this change we must first put aside the language we use to describe time change narratives.

Just as our continuing use of the word “station” to signify radio and television frequencies betrays the original conception of “communication” as physically moving from one train station to another, the use of the term “time travel” suggests that we move through time the way we travel through space. It uses a linear metaphor to describe movement through the fourth dimension. Since you can go forward and backward in space, why not the same in time?

For want of a better term, let’s replace “time travel” with “time shift.” We then can see how portrayals of time shifting in our literature and mass media have been bound by this linear, spatial metaphor.

Time shifting has been accomplished by self hypnosis, pimped-up horseless carriages, rays of light, phone booths, portals of various types, FTL space ships, and getting hit on the head. The usual technique is to employ some device to move physically from Time A to Time X. A protagonist travels to the past or future the way he would travel to Bejing or Poughkeepsie. He stays a while, either can or cannot change the future or betray the past, and then he returns to his point of origin to survey the results. Sometimes he becomes his own grandfather. Sometimes he falls in love with a contemporary resident, but then looks at a penny and returns involuntarily to his own era. Sometimes he steps on a butterfly.

Article Author: Robert K. Blechman

An experienced information technology executive, I am currently Associate Director in the Office of Information Technology at a major medical school. As an adjunct professor at Fordham University, I have taught courses in communication theory, mass media and society and media industries. …

Visit Robert K. Blechman's author page — Robert K. Blechman's Blog