JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I was working on a paper by H.C.Corben on time dilation ("Time Dilation Effects in Space Travel" 1959) and the clock paradox and thought about just time moving backwards, in whole or in part, and went poking around the edges of things a little bit to see a few examples in the arts.
One story--or a piece of one story--is in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969), where we are introduced to backwards WWII narratives of B-17's getting bullets sucked out of them by Germans while going in to retrieve their bombs to return to base. Martin Amis' Time's Arrow (1991) is another good one, though the end result was very troubling, where a doctor brings people back to life through his life though we are disgusted to see how much life he “gives back” as a medical doctor at Auschwitz. There's Philip K. Dick , Counter-Clock World (1967) , with the charming idea of “old-birthing” in the grave and emerging from wood and dirt (don't know about cremation); Fitzgerald's Benjamin Button (1922) in which only one character lives in a reverse chronology; WR Burnett’s Goodbye to the Past (1934), which is a standard story except that it moves continually from 1929 to 1873; and Iain Banks' Use of Weapons (1991) which tells one story going forwards and the other backwards, together. Remember, this is just a little taste of the literature, a ramble.
A few examples from the stage: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s play, Merrily We Roll Along ( 1934 ), which is a narrative told in reverse order. Here's an interesting theatre example: Harold Pinter's Betrayal and Seinfeld's “The Betrayal” episode, in which the later pays homage to the former, maybe, going so far as to name a principal character in the story “Pinter”--no doubt this is toxic to post-structuralists.
In cinema, Jean Epstein ‘s The Three Sided Mirror (1927) features a sequence where the events happen in reverse, while more modern examples include Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, 1997), Christopher Nolan (Memento, 2000), Jean-Luc Godard’s short (From the Origin of the 21st Century for Me, 2000), and many others.
Then there's the not-quite reverse storytelling line of the nonlinear story, which can go back and forth, or partially this or that, in movies like Citizen Kane (1941), Once Upon a Time in the West (1984), and Gance's Napolean (1927); and in books like Ulysses (1922), Finnegan's Wake (1939), and Flann O'Brien At Swim Two Birds, and many many others. It seems this category (and anachronism and parachronism) are much larger than the reverse time story, and seems to be initiated a little earlier as well.
I'm not going anywhere with this one, just making notes...
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