The Weird and the Eerie

Templeton sits immobile in his attic room, immersed in the deceptively erratic ticking of his old nautical clock, lost in meditation upon JC Chapman’s hermetic engraving. It now seems that this complex image, long accepted as a portrait of Kant, constitutes a disturbing monogram of his own chronological predicament. As if in mockery of stable framing, the picture is surrounded by strange-loop coilings of Ouroboros, the cosmic snake, who traces a figure of eight — and of moebian eternity — by endlessly swallowing itself.

— CCRU, “The Templeton Episode”

One is […] tempted to see in the ‘time paradox’ of science-fiction novels a kind of ‘apparition in the Real’ of the elementary structure of the symbolic process, the so-called internal, internally inverted eight: a circular movement, a kind of snare where we can progress only in such a manner that we ‘overtake’ ourselves in the transference, to find ourselves later at a point which we have already been. The paradox consists in the fact that this superfluous detour, this supplementary snare of understanding ourselves (‘voyage into the future’) and then reversing the time direction (‘voyage into the past’) is not just a subjective illusion/perception of an objective process taking place in so-called reality independent of these illusions. The supplementary snare is, rather, an internal condition, an internal constituent of the so-called ‘objective’ process itself: only through this additional detour does the past itself, the ‘objective’ state of things, become retroactively what it always was.

— SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, The Sublime Object of Ideology

Is there not an intrinsically weird dimension to the time travel story? By its very nature, the time travel story, after all, combines entities and objects that do not belong together. Here the threshold between worlds is the apparatus that allows travel between different time periods — which may be a time machine, or which could actually be a kind of time-crossing door or gate — and the weird effect typically manifests as a sense of anachronism. But another weird effect is triggered when the time travel story involves time paradox(es). The time travel paradox plunges us into the structures that Douglas Hofstadter calls “strange loops” or “tangled hierarchies”, in which the orderly distinction between cause and effect is fatally disrupted.

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers is a fabulously inventive take on the time travel paradox story, on the model of Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” and “By His Bootstraps”. But perhaps the predecessor to which The Anubis Gates is closest is Michael Moorcock’s 1969 novella Behold the Man, in which Karl Glogauer time-travels back two thousand years from the 1960s and ends up re-creating — or living for the first time — the life of Christ, including his crucifixion.

The Anubis Gates is in effect an extended weird tale. Although it is stuffed full of references to sorcery, bodily transformation and anomalous entities, the main source of the novel’s weird charge is the twisting of time into an infernal loop. In The Anubis Gates, the academic Brendan Doyle is lured into a time-travel experiment by the eccentric plutocrat Clarence Darrow. Darrow is dying, and, whilst undertaking the prodigious and apparently deranged research he has pursued in a desperate bid to prolong his life, he comes upon the story of “Dog-Face Joe” amongst the folklore of early-nineteenth-century London. By a process of diligent scholarship and daring supposition, Darrow determines that Joe was a magician capable of transferring his consciousness from body to body, but whose body-stealing had an unfortunate side-effect: almost immediately as Joe enters it, the purloined body grows profuse, simian-like hair, so that its new owner is forced to discard it very soon after switching into it. For obvious reasons, Darrow wants to acquire the secret of this profane transmigration, and he seems to have the means to make contact with the body-switching magician since his research has uncovered “gaps” in the river of time, gates through which it is possible to pass into the past. Doyle’s role is to act as a kind of literary tour guide for the ultra-wealthy time travellers Darrow has assembled, attracted by the possibility of seeing a lecture by Coleridge, and whose million dollar fee will finance the trip.

Very soon after arriving in the nineteenth century, Doyle is abducted into a rhizomic under-London that is part Oliver Twist, part Burroughs’ The Western Lands (if you will permit the anachronism — The Western Lands was actually published after The Anubis Gates). Powers’ phantasmagoric London — the apocalyptic vividness of whose rendering led John Clute to describe The Anubis Gates as “Babylon-on-Thames punk” — is the site of a war between the forces of Egyptian polytheistic sorcery and the grey positivism of British empiricism, involving romanys, magical duplicates, poets, beggars, costermongers, male impersonators...

After a while, Doyle comes, reluctantly, to accept his Fate — which in literary-generic terms is to be propelled, by means of SF, into the nineteenth-century picaresque — and more or less gives up any hope of returning home. He resigns himself to make the best of his nineteenth-century life and decides that his most realistic hope of an escape from beggary is to make contact with William Ashbless, the minor poet in whose works he has specialist knowledge.

Doyle goes to the Jamaica Coffee House on the morning in which, according to Ashbless’ biographer, the American poet will write his epic poem, “The Twelve Hours of the Night”. The appointed time arrives, but there is no sign of Ashbless. While he waits, at first agitated and then deflated, Doyle idly transcribes “The Twelve Hours of the Night” from memory.

He is soon caught up in more intrigue and, for a while, forgets about Ashbless. In a moment that is more eerie than weird, Doyle hears, or fancies he hears, someone whistling The Beatles’ “Yesterday”. It is only after he catches the refrain being whistled again a day or so later that he is able to confirm that there are indeed a group of twentieth-century temporal emigres living in this nineteenth-century London. They turn out to be Darrow’s people, given the task of helping in the search for Dog-Face Joe. Doyle meets with one of them, his former student, Benner, who by now is a paranoid and grizzled wreck, convinced that Darrow is out to kill him. He and Doyle agree to meet again a few days later, but when they do, Doyle finds his former friend’s behaviour is even odder than before. Doyle discovers the reason for this too late. Benner’s body has been acquired by Dog-Face Joe. This becomes clear to Doyle only when he finds himself in Benner’s body, after it has been discarded by Joe.

Everything is now in place for the revelation that shocks Doyle but which is, by now, no surprise at all for the reader: Doyle is Ashbless. Or rather: there is no Ashbless (except for Doyle). Doyle only begins to process the full implications of this when he contemplates the peculiar (a)temporal status of the “Twelve Hours of the Night” manuscript:

It hadn’t […] come to too much of a surprise to him when he’d realised, after writing down the first few lines of ‘The Twelve Hours of the Night’, that while his casual scrawl had remained recognisably his own, his new left-handedness made his formal handwriting different — though by no means unfamiliar: for it was identical to William Ashbless’. And now that he’d written the poem out completely he was certain that if a photographic slide of the copy that in 1983 would reside in the British Museum, they would line up perfectly, with every comma and i-dot of his version perfectly covering those of the original manuscript.

Original manuscript? He thought with a mixture of awe and unease. This stack of papers here is the original manuscript… it’s just newer now than it was when I saw it in 1976. Hah! I wouldn’t have been so impressed to see it then if I’d known I had made or would make those pen scratches. I wonder when, where and how it’ll pick up the grease marks I remember seeing on the early pages.

Suddenly a thought struck him. My God, he thought, then if I stay and live out my life as Ashbless — which the universe pretty clearly means me to do — then nobody wrote Ashbless’ poems. I’ll copy out his poems from memory, having read them in the 1932 Collected Poems, and my copies will be set in type for the magazines, and they’ll use tear sheets from the magazines to create the Collected Poems! They’re a closed loop, uncreated! … I’m just the… Messenger and caretaker.

Like his unhappier time-displaced fellow, Jack Torrance in The Shining, Doyle has always been the caretaker. The mise-enabyme here produces a charge of the weird, both because of the scandal of an uncreated thing, and because of the twisted causality that has allowed such a thing to exist. (Perhaps all paradoxes have a touch of the weird about them?)

The Ashbless Enigma that Doyle encounters is comically deflated once he realises that — at some level — the solution is only him. “I wouldn’t have been so impressed to see it then if I’d known I had made or would make those pen scratches.” But the deflation is immediately followed by a profound dread and awe (the poems are uncreated!) that far exceeds his original fascination with the poet.

Once Doyle realises that he is destined to be Ashbless, which is to say, that he always-already was Ashbless, he is faced with a dilemma: does he act in accordance with what he characterises as the will of the universe (it is the “universe” that “wants” him to live in Ashbless’ shoes), or not? The problem that Doyle faces is that the determinism is much more invariant than a will, even a will that belongs to “the universe”. It is impossible for him to process that everything he will do as Ashbless has already happened. The barrier that means that this cannot be faced is transcendental: subjectivity as such presupposes the illusion that things could be different. To be a subject is to be unable to think of oneself as anything but free — even if you know that you are not. What sustains Doyle’s presupposition is the apparently spontaneously emerging hypothesis of an “alternative past”: in order to hold open the possibility that things might go against the already-recorded Ashbless biography, Doyle is forced to consider the possibility that he has somehow crossed into a “different past” to the one he has seen documented. But the full paradox is that it is only Doyle’s positing of such an “alternative past” that ensures that he acts in accordance with what has already happened. Ashbless becomes the hero he already was, the restorer of an order that was never threatened. Everything is at it always was; only now, as Doyle and the reader know, something weird has happened.