Lost Pasts

[steepholm]

I've long been interested in stories that take place in futures that were anticipated (by author and characters alike) but never came to pass in reality. Indeed, a couple of years ago I wrote what I think quite a good article on the subject. There, I concentrated on the First World War and its relationship to Golden Age children's fiction, because it's a rich source of such instances, but of course it's not unique. Around the same time I enjoyed reading my friend and colleague Christopher Hood's thriller, Tokyo 2020, topically set at the Olympic games that (at the time of original publication) were set to take place imminently. I think Chris may have since published a slightly amended version that moves the events of Tokyo 2020 to 2021, much as the IOC itself did, but I'll always have a fondness for the story as it was set in that liminal lost future, caught between anticipation and reality.

Lost futures are always fascinating, but I've recently noticed a complementary phenomenon, namely lost pasts. For example, I've just started watching Why Didn't I Tell You a Million Times? on Netflix, a series set partly in 2023 Japan, but with numerous flashbacks to 2021 and 2022 (as well as other times). But this isn't 2021-3 as they actually existed. This is a version of the very recent past in which Coronavirus is simply not a thing. No one wears masks, for one thing - even though pretty much everyone in Japan was wearing masks in reality (and most still are).

It would have been very easy to set the story just a few years earlier, to a point where this would not have been an issue, but the makers have decided to make it ultra-contemporary. They presumably did this with the intention of accentuating its relevance - but it's relevance to a life that Japanese people would like to have been living, not the one they actually did live.

I've noticed the same phenomenon in a few other programmes, such as The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House - but this is the first one where they've been so emphatic about the dates, with the constant flashbacks and flashforwards necessitating precise dates being displayed on screen every few minutes.

Have you noticed any other examples of this phenomenon, perhaps outside a Japanese context?

Comments

[steepholm]

Thanks for those thoughts, especially the link to In the Earth and your review of same!

[sovay]

Thanks for those thoughts, especially the link to In the Earth and your review of same!

You're welcome! It did occur to me to wonder whether the current generation of lost pasts is related to the phenomenon of films and novels from the '40's and '50's in which WWII is mysteriously elided—Jo Walton has written about it in context of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar (1949) and its effect on her own writing, but I have run into examples on my own time and they are genuinely weird, in that like Jo's experience of Brat Farrar they seem to be running along fine until you do the math. Obviously it would help if I could remember any titles, but maybe by tomorrow.

[steepholm]

Yes, that's a very apt comparison. There's a sort of "The national/world crisis is over now and we'd rather not think about it thank you very much" mood at work.

[sovay]

There's a sort of "The national/world crisis is over now and we'd rather not think about it thank you very much" mood at work.

Do you see it in children's books in a way that's as traceable as the unrealized futures of your article? Is Narnia with its Blitz evacuees an outlier or more of a norm?

[steepholm]

Another example might be something like the early The Famous Five books, with their world of plentiful food, freedom, barbed-wire free beaches, etc. But of course it may be that those early books are set pre-War - I don't think there are any slam dunk clues either way. What is noticeable, if only by its absence, is literature about the war being written in the years immediately following the war.

[sovay]

What is noticeable, if only by its absence, is literature about the war being written in the years immediately following the war.

This reminds me (because I learned it recently) that John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle (1943), which at the time of its West End transfer in 1947 was still running to critical and commercial success on Broadway, completely failed transatlantically because it turned out that London audiences did not want to see the reminder of an explicitly wartime play.

[ethelmay]

I Capture the Castle (1947) occurred to me as another possibility, but the Wikipedia article says there's a reference to it taking place in the 1930s, which I must admit I have never noticed despite having read the book dozens of times. I thought Rose borrowing the crinoline for her party dress was a reference to the New Look, for instance. But I am not quite sure where my copy is at the moment.

[sovay]

I Capture the Castle (1947) occurred to me as another possibility, but the Wikipedia article says there's a reference to it taking place in the 1930s, which I must admit I have never noticed despite having read the book dozens of times.

Huh. I also have it set mentally in the interwar period, but not because I can remember any sociopolitical references to that effect. I wonder if it could be internally dated by its book—Jacob Wrestling is explicitly described as post-war literature, one of the forerunners of Ulysses, and Simon is supposed to have read it at university, and this would be a lot easier if my copy weren't in storage, too.

[edit] No, it's right there in the text: "I suppose no normally intelligent person living in the nineteen-thirties can fail to have some faint inkling of what psycho-analysis is, but there are few things about which I know less." I didn't remember that, even though it's directly part of the plot; Cassandra and Thomas wouldn't have locked up their father without it.

[ethelmay]

I guess I do remember that but somehow thought she meant she was born in the 1930s, or something. Or just didn't process the date. Wasn't Ulysses written during WWI?

[sovay]

Wasn't Ulysses written during WWI?

It was published in 1922, written between 1914 and 1921, and selections from it were published in magazines during the period of its composition, which is how I believe it first ran into censorship, but if Jacob Wrestling made it into print first, it could still have the same kind of relationship to Joyce as Mirrlees' Paris: A Poem (1919) to Eliot's The Waste Land (1922).

(I may care about the chronology of modernism a lot more than Dodie Smith did.)

[ethelmay]

Simon says that Jacob Wrestling was "one of the forerunners of post-war literature," and that "other writers have gone far ahead of him on rather similar lines: James Joyce, for instance." I think I assumed Simon was referring to Finnegans Wake, which I had actually tried to read in middle school, but he can't have been if that was published in 1939.

Oh, and Simon has to have been born by World War I, because he remembers his uncles from when he was seven. So if they were killed sometime between 1914 and 1918 he has to be born before 1911, probably closer to 1907 or even earlier. Cassandra thinks he's under thirty, but if it's 1935 or before he could be 28 or so easily. Of course that would mean he was in a Wall Street office in 1929, which must have been interesting (the Cottons don't seem much affected by the Great Depression).

[sovay]

Simon says that Jacob Wrestling was "one of the forerunners of post-war literature," and that "other writers have gone far ahead of him on rather similar lines: James Joyce, for instance."

(a) I said my copy was in storage!

(b) Okay, since my memory seems to have smashed two different statements together, does that mean that Jacob Wrestling was published pre- or during the war, in that sense a forerunner of post-war developments, and I should be thinking of it more coeval with the Imagists?

(the Cottons don't seem much affected by the Great Depression)

Hey, speaking of things which may or may not turn up in books or movies depending on the level of escapism.

[ethelmay]

Oh, and there was something about Simon and Neil Cottons' father having two elder brothers who were killed in the war, and then another brother killed in a car crash with his son "about twelve years ago." When I first read I Capture the Castle at age twelve or so I would have assumed that was World War II, and that "post-war" literature meant 1940s-1950s. But I don't think I noticed the actual publication date. Later I guess I realized it must be WWI, but the chronology can work either way depending on when Simon and Neil were born.