ABSTRACT
In Connie Willis’s Blackout and All Clear, time-traveling historians witness public trauma. They engage as individuals in a struggle with a personified sense of history, while they, in turn, become trapped in the past and seemingly personally responsible for protecting the established events of the historical record, namely the Allied victory in World War II. In Stephen King’s time-travel novel 11/22/63, Jake Epping accesses a “rabbit hole” to 1958. Jake travels back to prevent the Kennedy Assassination. Like the Oxford historians, he comes to view history as an antagonistic force, stubborn and unwilling to change. With each change he brings to public events, proportionate trauma is relocated elsewhere in society, and the damage to individual lives (including his own) expands. History itself is solid, public trauma largely unchangeable. In the work of both Willis and King, characters may have their desires, but history always gets the last word. Willis’s and King’s characters come to see history as a systemic and at times sentient force, and because they are individuals engaged on a human scale, they ultimately understand the history that they visit or somehow repeat can only be experienced and restored as realism on a personal level.
