Sonnet CXVI, Redux

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
– William Shakespeare

So about two years after my cousin Katie recommended it to me, I finally picked up a copy of Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s an excellent and gripping story, an interesting exploration of the ramifications of time travel, and a moving romance. I can only pass on the goodness in the form of my own recommendation.

But that’s not what this blog entry is about.

What it is about is relationships, fate, and familiar characters as children. In case you think this has absolutely nothing to do with The Time Traveler’s Wife, here’s a quick plot summary: Clare and Henry are married, but Henry travels through time randomly and without warning. So, Clare first met him when she was six and he was an adult, but he first met Clare about twenty years later. The idea that intrigues me is that it is made very clear that Henry and Clare are compatible spirits no matter what their ages, and that there is something romantic about encountering your significant other when you have knowledge of your entire future relationship and he or she has never met you before.

This seems to be part of a general idea we – I – and you (I hope? Otherwise this will make no sense) have that people as children are themselves, only more so. That came out a little wonky, so I’ll try to explain with some examples.

There’s a genre of fanfiction that one can find in almost every section of fanfiction.net. I’m sure it has a real name, but for lack of a better term/motivation to search the internet to find it, let’s call it regresso-fic. In regresso-fic, one or more of the canonical characters is younger than he or she is in the show/movie/books/etc. This can either be because the fic takes place before the canonical story begins (“Lost during a trip to Vulcan with his father, eight-year-old James T. Kirk gets in a fight with another boy named Spock.”); because something magical has happened (“Snape comes back from a Death Eater meeting, and he’s thirteen again!”); or because the author is purposely creating an alternate timeline where he/she can meddle with characters’ respective ages (“What if all the characters from The X Files were in the same kindergarten class???”).

The plots of regresso-fic usually follow one (or more*) of three patterns:

1. They’re funny/adorable because the characters maintain the same dynamic they have in canon only in a new, silly context (eg. five-year-old House mooches five-year-old Wilson’s snack-time cookie)

2. They’re moving because the innocence of childhood allows characters to express emotions or deal with problems in a way that would be out-of-character for their adult selves (eg. itty bitty Sherlock Holmes is able to innocently share his feelings with grown-up Watson, and together they heal whatever trauma “made” him so emotionally cold)

3. They’re reassuring because they replicate whatever the author feels to be the most important canon relationships (eg. when teenage Archie Goodwin runs into teenage Nero Wolfe, Archie does the physical work, Nero does the mental work, and both become fast friends who snipe at each other a lot).

All three patterns work because we make two assumptions. The first is that people as kids are the same as people as grown-ups, except kids don’t have the same defense mechanisms or concern with social conventions as their elders.

The child character has the same feelings and aptitudes as the adult character (baby Phantom of the Opera is an amazing inventor and still loves Christine like his grown-up self) but child character is able to show those feelings in a way adult character cannot (baby Phantom can tell Christine he likes her and is sad because people are mean to him, but grown-up Phantom is too insecure to share this).

Moreover, this holds whether child character is a child due to some sort of magic transformation from adult to child (eg. adult character drinks a potion/walks through a portal/wakes up one day as a kid) or whether child character appears through some sort of magical transportation (eg. child character has become switched in time with adult character/the timeline of the story has changed/other characters travel to the past etc.) – in other words, whether or not child character shares adult character’s experience. Which brings us to the second assumption.

The second assumption is that real relationships are inevitable due to fundamental properties of individuals’ personalities. Maybe I can best explain what I mean by going back to The Time Traveler’s Wife.

In the novel, Henry and Clare are clearly meant for each other. Clare never thinks about being with anyone but Henry; Henry dabbles around sexually but never once dreams of giving up Clare once he’s met her. They’re well suited, and there’s never a question of one of them leaving the marriage: they need and want each other.

This is the case throughout time, no matter what their respective ages. When Clare is six and Henry is in his forties, they still get along. Henry still finds teenage Clare mentally and physically attractive; at later times, Henry is still compatible with versions of Clare older than himself. Likewise, when Clare meets Henry in the present for the first time, she still loves him, despite the fact that he’s about twenty years younger than the time-traveling Henry she first knew.

Both characters acknowledge that the other has changed over time. Clare’s disappointed to find that the younger Henry is a little coltish and rough around the edges; Henry amuses himself by contrasting child and teenage Clare’s current opinions with the ones he knows she’ll hold in the future as an adult. But, the narrative seems to be saying, what really matters doesn’t change. There is some core personality that is “Clare”, and that is the same whether Clare the person is six or sixty-six. That personality is compatible with Henry’s core personality by virtue of the traits both possess, and always will be.

Now, this idea is nothing new in romance. There are scads of stories where true love means still loving the other person – their core** – no matter what physical or mental changes take place. The romantic hero or heroine stays with his or her significant other even through changes like permanent disfigurement, complete amnesia, or total psychological turnaround. The part of the other person that true love is supposed to depend on is the part that is fundamentally them.

To bring it back to The Time Traveler’s Wife, it makes no sense to identify someone as Henry if that person is incompatible with Clare. Love for Clare is a necessary condition for being Henry: if three-year-old Henry detests Clare from the very core of his being, then, in some real sense, he’s not Henry.

The point of The Time Traveler’s Wife or regresso-fic is the same: what is most important about people doesn’t change. And what is most important about people are their feelings and patterns of thought – about things, about situations, and especially about other people. The most important part of Clare is the part that’s in love with and attractive to Henry; the most important parts of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are the ones that make them friends, heroes, and effective teammates.

Ultimately, these types of stories are reassuring because they tell us that the most important things don’t happen by chance. If Harry Potter had never been marked by Voldemort, he’d still be a Gryffindor and friends with Ron, Hermione, and Ginny. His character traits and relationships don’t depend on the vagaries of chance but on some inextricable thing that is him – and them.

It’s comforting to think our lives are like that – that we love our friends or significant others or family and they love us not because of chance circumstances that threw us together in the right way, but because of some fundamental truth about who we all are. And stories that boost this feeling, whether The Time Traveler’s Wife or “X Files: The Crayon-Eating Years” make us feel good: nothing is contingent on the vagaries of time, space, or chance. The only thing that matters is us, and as long as we’re there, everything will turn out the way it’s meant to be.

And yet… isn’t it also comforting to think that even if we wouldn’t like each other if we had met under slightly changed circumstances, or if we weren’t related, or if any one thousand tiny details had been different, we still are friends? Why should what might have been take away the power of what is? A relationship or talent or character trait isn’t worth less because it fails to measure up to the standards of fiction and myth. Maybe I wouldn’t have been your friend when we were both in kindergarten. Maybe I wouldn’t be your friend if we met at age ninety-two in a nursing home. But we’re friends now. Isn’t that what counts?

If this be error and upon me prov’d
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

* The patterns aren’t mutually exclusive. Regresso-fics can follow all three – like, in that first example, five-year-old House might mooch five-year-old Wilson’s cookie, but in the same story, he could also burst into tears whenever they’re separated. And part of what makes the story work would be that those events show that House’s relationship with Wilson doesn’t change. But that’s not the point.

** Call it a soul, if you want.