Abstract
Connie Willis’s time-travel fiction imagines that in the not-too-distant future, Oxford University students will perform historical ethnography by literally traveling bodily to the past. Whether depicting the Black Death or the London Blitz, Willis proves an enthusiastic consumer of dark tourism, incorporating museum sites into her plots and historical interpretations. Using detailed descriptions, counterfactuals, and the genres of fairy stories and farce, Willis immerses her readers in catastrophic moments in the British past. She borrows Barbara Tuchman’s notion that the past is a “distant mirror” for those in the present and future. For people trapped in time, commemoration and deep empathy offer salvation—both for those whose time has passed and those whose time has yet to come.
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Notes
- 1.
Connie Willis , “Fire Watch,” Fire Watch (New York: Blue Jay International, 1985), 39–41.
- 2.
Willis has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards. Each of the books in the time-traveling historians series has won a Hugo, and among them all but To Say Nothing of the Dog received the Nebula.
- 3.
Willis, “Fire Watch,” 2–45. Willis, Doomsday Book (New York: Bantam Books, 1992). Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1998). Willis, Blackout /All Clear (New York: Ballantine Books, 2010).
- 4.
Both are quoted in Richard Sharpley, “Shedding Light on Dark Tourism: An Introduction,” The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, ed. Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone (Buffalo, NY: Channel View Publications, 2009), 14–15.
- 5.
Philip R. Stone, “A dark tourism spectrum: Towards a typology of death and macabre related tourist sites, attractions and exhibitions,” Tourism 52, no. 2 (June 1, 2006): 145.
- 6.
Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978).
- 7.
C. L . Moore, Vintage Season (Street & Smith Publications, Inc., 1946). Also published under the pseudonym Lawrence O’Donnell.
- 8.
Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog , 7–8.
- 9.
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), 175–176.
- 10.
Willis, Blackout, 220.
- 11.
St. George is the patron saint of England. Choosing this name reinforces the strong English connection Willis makes: those sheltering in the church represent a microcosm of the whole country, embattled but noble—and perhaps doomed.
- 12.
Willis, Blackout , 191–192. This improvised performance cycles through several Shakespeare plays to end with Henry V: “‘This story shall the good man teach his son, from this day to the ending of the world,’ he said, his voice ringing through the cellar, ‘but we in it shall be remembered—we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ His voice died away on the last words, like a bell echoing into silence.” Note that protagonist-historian Polly Churchill changes her last name to Polly Sebastian for this journey , a reference to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; Kingsman refers to her commonly as “Viola,” as a direct reference to the role-playing twin of the play, stranded and in disguise.
- 13.
Richard Cobb, “Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian,” Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 43–47, as excerpted in Historians on History, second edition, ed. John Tosh (Harlow: Pearson, 2009), 42–43.
- 14.
Lucy Noakes, “Making Histories: Experiencing the Blitz in London’s Museums in the 1990s,” War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, ed. Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 94–96.
- 15.
The time-traveler Bartholomew also regards the Communist with suspicion; in the world of this story, St. Paul’s Cathedral was destroyed in the early 2000s by a pinpoint bomb carried by a Communist terrorist. This is not a political association mentioned in the parts of this series written post-Cold War. Bartholomew must overcome his own (future) prejudices to keep St. Paul’s secure in 1940.
- 16.
Willis, Blackout, 471–473.
- 17.
Noakes, “Making Histories,” 97.
- 18.
Willis, Blackout , acknowledgements. (Also appears in All Clear , acknowledgements).
- 19.
Connie Willis, “Dorothy Parker, Primeval, Little Nell, Robert Heinlein, Emma Thompson, Reports of My Death, Shakespeare, and Other Thoughts on Comedy,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 22, no. 3 (2011): 316.
- 20.
Willis, Blackout , 188–121.
- 21.
Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 20–64.
- 22.
Susan Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 297.
- 23.
Note that Kivrin’s last name “Engel,” is also quite similar to “Angel”; the village priest refers to her as an “Angel of the Lord.”
- 24.
Willis, Blackout , 362. Willis, All Clear , 59. Michael continues this quest throughout the rest of the war, even years later when separated from Polly and Eileen. Interestingly, Michael plays the “Ernest” role among the covert operatives of Operation Fortitude South (among “Gwendolen,” “Moncrieff, and “Lady Bracknell”) and Willis has one of the contemps, who is looking for props for a production of The Admirable Crichton, collect a bottle for “Ernest’s message in a bottle” ( All Clear , 19). This connects the Ernest of Wilde’s play with that of Barrie’s and with our stranded time-travelers and their quest for rescue through coded written clues.
- 25.
Jo Walton, “The dove descending: Time as God in Connie Willis’s Time Travel universe,” Tor.com, http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/07/the-dove-descending-time-as-god-in-connie-williss-time-travel-universe (accessed February 25, 2015).
- 26.
Willis, Blackout, 151–156.
- 27.
Willis, Blackout, 156.
- 28.
In All Clear, Willis refers to this as the “Living Through the Blitz” exhibit (429).
- 29.
Willis, All Clear, 631–632.
- 30.
Willis’s husband was a long-time physics professor, and so it’s reasonable to think that scientific theories have influenced her thinking. Willis explicitly references the butterfly effect in Blackout (475).
- 31.
Dunworthy instructs Bartholomew that “Silence and humility are the sacred burdens of the historian.” Willis, “Fire Watch,” 6.
- 32.
Willis, Blackout, 475.
- 33.
Willis, Blackout , 104. Willis’s depiction of Dunkirk also fits into a mythologized view. See Nicholas Harman, Dunkirk: The Necessary Myth (London: Coronet Books, 1990).
- 34.
For an extended discussion of the development of counter-factual thinking among historians, with a full exploration of the ways physics and chaos theory have influenced historical ideas about contingency as well as its usefulness for historical analysis, see Niall Fergusson’s introduction to Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 1–90.
- 35.
Willis, Doomsday Book, 551–570.
- 36.
Ibid., 575–576.
- 37.
Willis, Blackout, 391–392.
- 38.
Shar pley, “Shedding Light on Dark Tourism,” 13.
- 39.
“Jenni” (June 6, 2012), comment on Adam Roberts, “Review: Doomsday Book, Connie Willis,” SF Mistressworks, https://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/doomsday-book-connie-willis/ (accessed February 25, 2015).
- 40.
See Roberts, “Review: Doomsday Book.” See also Jonathan McCalmont, “Review—Blackout/All Clear (2010) By Connie Willis,” Jonathan McCalmont’s Criticism, Ruthless Culture, http://ruthlessculture.com/2011/02/06/review-blackout-all-clear-2010-by-connie-willis (accessed February 25, 2015).
- 41.
See Raphael Samuel, “Heritage-baiting,” Theatres of Memory, 259–273.
- 42.
Adam Whitehead, “Blackout by Connie Willis,” The Wertzone: SF & F in Print & on Screen, http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2011/07/blackout-by-connie-willis.html (accessed February 25, 2015). See also Thomas M. Wagner, “Blackout/Connie Willis,” Sf Reviews, http://www.sfreviews.net/willis_blackout.html (accessed February 25, 2015).
- 43.
Kari Sperring, “Other people’s toes: a rant,” http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/304632.html (accessed February 25, 2015).
- 44.
The idea that historical sites provide a “time-travel” experience that has a theme-park quality is not new and has been explored in Colin Sorensen, “Theme Parks and Time Machines,” The New Museology, ed. Peter Vergo (London: Reacktion Books, 1989), 60–73. I’m suggesting that time-travel stories can provide a virtual historic site/theme park experience as well.
- 45.
J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays,” ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 109–161.
- 46.
Willis, Blackout, 133.
- 47.
Willis, “Dorothy Parker … And Other Thoughts on Comedy,” 317.
- 48.
Willis, All Clear, 594.
- 49.
See Walton’s analysis of Blackout / All Clear in “The dove descending” for a rebuke of Willis for having the forces of time go to such lengths to fix the Blitz and yet leave the Holocaust to happen as it did.
- 50.
Willis, “Dorothy Parker … And Other Thoughts on Comedy,” 319–320.
- 51.
Willis, All Clear, 639–640.
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McDaniel, K.N. (2018). Through the Looking Glass Darkly: The Convergence of Past and Present in Connie Willis’s Time-Travel Novels. In: McDaniel, K.N. (eds) Virtual Dark Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_4
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