Paul's posts with tag: time travel
Yesterday morning, in the aftermath of showing the Doctor Who "Blink" to a bunch of hapless victims, Oneal, Rej and I got to talking about time travel stories, and my darling Pigeon was wondering if there were any such stories written locally.
Let me pause a while as several of you gentle readers groan collectively, since this is a worm-can-opening question anyone can ask yours truly.
Offhand, I couldn't think of anything, of course. It didn't take long before I broke out Damiana Eugenio's book, Philippine Folk Literature: The Myths just to check if there were any time travel motifs in the stories there. Of course, I found nothing. And I'll spare you all the literary theory talk that we had yesterday (now I hear several groans of relief), since this is more an issue of production. You really can't theorize when there aren't any samples on which to base the theories. But I'll theorize anyway, or at the very least, ask annoying questions.
Say a Filipino writer produced some kind of time travel literature written in the canonical sense (like H.G. Wells's The Time Machine or Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). Will it end up as required reading, like most of the literature that's been produced to date? Will the text find admirers only in fellow writers, who are equipped with the tools with which to appreciate it? Writing for an international audience could increase the reader base, but that seems to me to be some kind of tourism literature approach: "Welcome to our country; this is how we view the concept of time."
Using time travel in other cultural media, like TV or film, may require some dumbing down (OK, a lot of dumbing down), as one may see from current televisions shows that are, in some way, watered-down versions of foregin shows. This, of course, calls originality into question; do time-travel stories reflect the how their cultures of origin view the concept of time? (Please take some time to let that last question sink in. The syntax took some time to arrange.)
If so, then do our copies of these stories reflect those foreign views of time, or our own? (I'd also like to ask exactly how Filipinos veiw time as a culture, but that's another can of worms altogether.) At this point, I'd like to offer a grain of salt: I really don't watch local shows, whether they're about time travel or not.
And then we have our own oral literature--or local legends, or what have you: the duende abduction. Of the stories I'd heard and read, some people lost time while in the custody of these entities, although it's not present in all stories. Some are possessed, and some just get lost. In the case of the latter, it's probably more of a spatial warp than a temporal knot.
Anyway, that's what happens when I get asked an innocent question the same way Oneal did. Feel free to argue, object, or answer the above questions. I won't mind, as long as it's constructive. Or, someone could offer the best response, which would be to write a time-travel story that's distinctly ours.
If not, we could just have Zsa-zsa Zaturnnah sweep us all back to the 80s by giving us tsunami hair.
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