Literature treats time as one of the most fascinating sources for many authors’ imaginations. However passionately science tries to point out its possibility, actually, time travelling is only available within the extent of fictional stories so far. Authors can use, or even create, the concept of time freely as their stories require. Moreover, authors can philosophise the concept of time as groundwork for their own creations as well. For example, Thomas Mann summarises his opinions on the concept of time, relating to his creation of a story in its Foreword as following:
‘The story of Hans Castorp… belongs to the long ago; is already, so to speak, covered with historic mould, and unquestionably to be presented in the tense best suited to a narrative out of the depth of the past…In a word, the degree of its antiquity has noways to do with the passage of time — in which statement the author intentionally touches upon the strange and questionable double nature of that riddling element.But we would not willfully obscure a plain matter. The exaggerated pastness of our narrative is due to its taking place before the epoch when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and consciousness and left a deep chasm behind. It takes place — or rather, deliberately to avoid the present tense, it took place, and had taken place — in that long ago, in that old days, the days of the world before the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning. Yes, it took place before that; yet not so long before. Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls? More than that, our story has, of its own nature, something of the legend about it now and again.’ ( http://prosaicbytrinath.blogspot.com/2010/12/foreword-to-magic-mountain-thomas-mann.html)
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| Thomas Mann |
For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/time-in-science-and-literature/
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