Switchback time resists the limits of perceiving a story from a single point of view. Tennessee Williams’ The Mysteries of the Joy Rio allows more than one perspective: Mr. Kroger and Mr. Gonzalez, and arguably a third POV, that of young Mr. Gonzalez, Pablo. By switching back and forth in time the reader benefits from insight in both perspectives with a sense of the stakes for both characters (insight into their mortality and emotional stirrings). It works like a mirror. Gonzalez is Kroger and vice versa destined to the same fate of loneliness (except for their rather brief time span of romance) followed by an untimely death due to illness. History or time repeats itself.
Williams shows mortality and the stakes of life and death by referring to the characters’ bodies on numerous occasions. He raises narrative questions of mortality, aging, and growing up through the element of time. I would encourage beginning writers to play on the page by exploring a similar approach in their own story by switching between timelines of their main characters mirroring their experiences that lead to each one’s transformation.
In The Art of Time in Fiction, Joan Silber states that, “Switchback time, though it makes the story more complicated, is as elemental as the process of associative thought. It is most useful when an added line of event can really clarify and expand what a story is about.” Williams fictionalizes the element of time by literally turning time into a character in the story. Gonzalez receives an earth-shattering diagnosis about his health (like Kroger). While the stakes are tied to his mortality, there is more. This is a story about love and lost love: love lost in time. The brief time span of actual romance Kroger and Gonzalez shared came and went. Yet, there is the permanence of love that defies the passing of time—a permanence that Gonzalez is only admitting to himself (his personal stakes):
“[…] and if in his waking hours somebody to whom he would have to give a true answer had enquired of him, Pablo Gonzalez, how much do you think about the dead Mr. Kroger, he probably would have shrugged and said, Not much now. It’s such a long time ago. But if the question was asked while he slept, the guileless heart of the sleeper would have responded, Always, always!”
In The Emotional Craft of Fiction, Donald Maass states that “the sense of movement in a story comes mostly from inside. It’s a tidal pull, an emotional tug.” Readers empathize with characters if they feel like they can identify with them. The use of time can shape a character’s inner need into a story that a reader can attach meaning to. In both stories (Gordimer and Williams) public and personal stakes are at play. In Gordimer’s story, the stakes are public and personal. In TW’s story, the stakes are largely personal until the end when Gonzalez is “exposed” by George in the most humiliating way imaginable.
“He rushed up to the slight figure waiting near the stairs and began to shout a dreadful word at Mr. Gonzalez,‘morphodite.’
Time elevates stakes. Both writers uses time to illustrate stakes of mortality (public stakes) and love (personal stakes.)