On Anachronism

By Jeremy Tambling

On Anachronism joins together Shakespeare and Proust as the great writers of love to show that love is always anachronistic, and never more so when it is homosexual.

Drawing on Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and Levinas and Deleuze, difficult but essential theorists of the subject of ‘being and time’ and ‘time and the other’ the book examines why speculation on time has become so crucial within modernity. Through the related term ‘anachorism’, it considers how discussion of time always turns into discussion of space, and how this, too, can never be quite defined. It speculates on chance and thinks of ways in which a quality of difference within time – heterogeneity, anachronicity – is essential to think of what is meant by ‘the other’.

The book examines how contemporary theory considers the future and its relation to the past as that which is inescapable in the form of trauma. It considers what is meant by ‘the event’, that which is the theme of all post-Nietzschean theory and which breaks in two conceptions of time as chronological.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847797728

Jeremy Tambling

Jeremy Tambling is Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester

Book preview

On anachronism

On anachronism

JEREMY TAMBLING

Copyright © Jeremy Tambling 2010

The right of Jeremy Tambling to be identified as the author of this work has been

asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK

and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Distributed in the United States exclusively by

Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,

NY 10010, USA

Distributed in Canada exclusively by

UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,

Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 8244 3

First published 2010

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for

any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does

not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or

appropriate.

Typeset in Times

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Printed in Great Britain

by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Deliberate anachronism

Anachronism and historical writing

‘Pierre Menard’

Death sentence

1: Seven types of anachronism: Proust

The Gozzoli frescos

À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs

Paris and Venice

Homosexuality and anachrony

‘The Intermittencies of the Heart’

Jealousy

Matters of chronology

2: Fools of time: Michelangelo and Shakespeare

Michelangelo’s sonnets

Time and Shakespeare’s sonnets

The history plays: ‘Richard’s time’

Falstaff

3: Chronicles of death foretold

Archival anachrony

King Lear: fortune’s bastards

Fearing anachronism: All’s Well that Ends Well

4: Future traces

Memory traces

Blanchot and Derrida

Anarchoronoristics

Time and passivity

Disappointments: 2046

Trauma and the future anterior

Last words

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde

Notes

Index

Preface

I began thinking about this book soon after Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies appeared in 2002. The anachronistic, as a way of thinking about what is out of time, the heterogeneous within time, was intended to develop from thinking about posthumous writings, in Shakespeare, Dickens, Nietzsche and Benjamin, and I wanted it to be equally simple, with chapters on Shakespeare and Proust defining the discussion and forms of anachronism, if it is possible to find examples of that which, in principle, has the ability to distort all forms of ordering. The book was never intended to be a complete survey of texts which use anachronism (many have offered suggestions of specific anachronisms which have been useful, but not used) but even so it has not proved possible to be as short or essayistic as I would have liked.

A draft was complete by mid-2005, and I thank colleagues associated with my time in Hong Kong, when I was teaching there, Ackbar Abbas and Jonathan Hall for much stimulus to the ideas which appear here, and David Clarke, unfailingly helpful and encouraging throughout, and Giorgio Biancorosso and Paul Smethurst there for encouragement and suggestions; and my now very ex- PhD students who were then working on topics related to Nietzsche, Blanchot and Derrida, Proust and Latin American fiction: Ian Fong, Chan Wai Chung, Louis Lo, Isaac Hui, Paul Kong. Other ex-students I have supervised on Proust I also thank, Louis Dung and Regine Fang. For several reasons, though I kept thinking about it, I returned to writing on the book only in 2009, in Manchester, this time with help from Helen Wilcox, then editing the new Arden All’s Well that Ends Well, Charles Forker, who edited the new Arden Richard II, Roger Holdsworth, Daniela Caselli and David Alderson, and many others who have helped with comments: Paul Fung, Ben Moore, James Smith and Sam Jenkins, who gets my eternal thanks because working on Proust he spotted two anachronisms I had missed. I thank Matthew Frost, for his enthusiasm in taking the book on for Manchester University Press, the two anonymous readers who reported on the book for the press, John Banks, a copy-editor to die for, with whom I have had a long and grateful association, and Alfie Bown for proof-reading. Members of my immediate family know how much I owe them each, and thanks to them. This book is for Pauline.

Introduction

Deliberate anachronism

Being made to feel anachronistic may be equivalent to feeling dumped, but it gives opportunities, and allows for irony. Thinking about ‘anachronism’ means considering what is out of time, what resists chronology. Some people try ensuring punctuality by setting their watches a few minutes fast, so they are mentally aware of two readings of time at once: watch-time and real time. Anachrony starts with such a double perception of time. The time on the watch-face, whether analogue or digital – analogue showing a narrative from moment to moment, digital time severing each moment from each other, as if denying continuity – is acknowledged and disavowed whenever the watch is consulted.

With mobile phones, an imaginary time may be set, but proper time is recorded for incoming phone calls: no room for the anachronistic there. The ruling class uses anachrony: Dickens’s Bleak House (1853–1854) describes the aristocracy as comprising elements who are alarmed at the vulgar people’s loss of faith, and ‘would make the Vulgar very picturesque and faithful, by putting back the hands upon the Clock of Time, and cancelling a few hundred years of history’.¹ This evokes the Gothic Revival, the Oxford Movement of the 1840s and Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ movement: turning the clock back may be an act of the hegemonic culture, the deliberateness making it not anachronistic. Who defines what is anachronistic is crucial: Nazi Germany’s use of advanced technology produced that strange hybrid: ‘reactionary modernism’.² Thomas Hardy disliked both the sense of being locked within history and equally, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), anachronism. Tess is wooed by the wrong man:

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say ‘See!’ to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing … We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which jolts us around and along … Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.³

Hardy sees the anachronistic as negative, blames delay, desires a punctual chronology which is nonetheless blamed for excluding and exploiting the rural poor, and women, in its progress. Hardy’s unwillingness to let the heterogeneous – the anachronistic – help him critique modern life makes him radical and conservative together: the writing affirms the order it nonetheless despises. Usually used as a term of criticism from those who consider themselves happily within chronology – which Hardy is not – being anachronistic has the potential of unsettling readings of history which see the times as moving forward steadily. Hardy mourns inability to change chronological development, but does nothing with the anachronism, as when in Jude the Obscure (1895) the children, led by the boy called Father Time, an anachronous contradiction, hang themselves. Jude quotes the doctor: there ‘are such boys springing up among us – boys of a sort unknown in the last generation – the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.’⁴ The children kill themselves, believing that there can be no future, or that future times were unchangeable: they see no power in anachrony.

Dread of being out of time, irrelevant or mad comes in the German lyric poet Hölderlin (1770–1843), in the elegy ‘Brod und Wein’ (Bread and Wine).⁵ This contrasts the daytime of the Greeks, when the gods seemed to present themselves, with the night, the time of the absence of the gods, the time of absence. While, on closer reading, it seemed that the gods had never been so present as they seemed to be – they disappeared in the moment of being named – the seventh strophe creates a state of being anachronistic:

But my friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living,

      Over our heads they live, up in a different world.

Endlessly there they act and, such is their kind wish to spare us,

      Little they seem to care whether we live or do not.

For not always a frail, a delicate vessel can hold them,

      Only at times can our kind bear the full impact of gods.

Ever after our life is dream about them. But frenzy,

      Wandering, helps, like sleep; Night and distress make us strong

Till in that cradle of steel heroes enough have been fostered,

      Hearts in strength can match heavenly strength as before.

Thundering then they come. But meanwhile too often I think it’s

      Better to sleep than to be friendless as we are, alone,

Always waiting, and what to do or say in the meantime

      I don’t know, and who wants poets at all in lean years?

But they are, you say, like those holy ones, priests of the wine-god

Who in holy night roamed from one place to the next.⁶

[Aber, Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter,

      Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt.

Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten,

      Ob wir leben, so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns.

Denn nicht immer vermag ein schwaches Gefäss sie zu fassen,

      Nur zu Zeiten erträgt göttliche Fülle der Mensch.

Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben. Aber das Irrsaal

      Hilft, wie Schlummer und stark machet die Noth und die Nacht,

Biss dass Helden genug in der ehernen Wiege gewachsen,

      Herzen an Kraft, wie sonst, ähnlich den Himmlischen sind.

Donnernd kommen sie drauf. Indessen dünket mir öfters

      Besser zu schlafen, wie so ohne Genossen zu seyn,

So zu harren und was zu thun indess und zu sagen,

      Weiss ich nicht und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?

Aber sie sind, sagst du, wie des Weingotts heilige Priester,

Welche von Lande zu Land zogen in heiliger Nacht.]

Fear of belatedness is subjected to different ways of reading, by an oscillation of feeling or attitude within the verse: the gods are still there, which is good, but little they seem to care whether we live or not. Another translation intensifies lines 3 and 4: they ‘seem to care very little / Whether we live, so well do they spare us’.⁷ The stanza wavers between acceptance, excusing the gods’ absence, and feeling desolate, a sense picked up in and after ‘But meanwhile’. It produces the despair that poetry is anachronistic: who wants poets in lean years, or in a time of dearth? But the last two lines respond to another person saying that poets are like the priests of Dionysus, wandering in night, which would make Hölderlin’s poet unnecessary, a vagrant, like King Lear’s Fool, subject of Chapter 4, out of time. For Maurice Blanchot, central to On Anachronism, Hölderlin lives doubly in distress. ‘His time is the empty time when what he has to live is the double absence of the gods, who are no longer and who are not yet.’⁸ Outside one time-scheme, another, which might have been brought in by the French Revolution, is not yet. The first ‘absence’ means that Hölderlin’s language, relative to the gods who are no longer, bears no relation to his time; while he is too early in relation to another time, which may not come. Poetic language becomes anachronistic in being unrelated to the ‘homogeneous empty time’ (Benjamin’s phrase) wherein he exists; Hölderlin lives, says Blanchot, the time of the ‘and’ which never had beginning, which may never have end: the ‘and’ is anti-anachronicity, between the gods who were, and will be, anachronous.⁹

Perhaps art is belated. The modernist film-maker Alexander Kluge argues that literature and music have gone as far as possible in modernist practices: ‘there is no avant-garde when the avant-garde has done everything … If we have to lead something, we lead it both as the avant-garde and the arrière-garde. The avant-garde is a concept valid for the early bourgeois period, but not for the end of the bourgeois. At this stage, it may be necessary to be behind and to bring everything forward.’¹⁰ To consider the necessity of being arrière-garde may be a way of thinking about anachrony’s relevance within art.

Anachronism counters a reading where events happen within a definable historical framework, with ‘before’ and ‘after’, cause and effect. The word appears in the 1640s: ‘dating something too early for it to have happened’. Shakespeare’s plays appear just when anachronicity becomes noticeable. An essay of Francis Douce (1757–1834), ‘On the Anachronisms and some other Incongruities of Shakespeare’, searches Shakespeare for signs of ‘medley’, ‘whimsicalities’ and ‘errors’, finding most anachronisms in the Henry IV plays, discussed in Chapter 2, and instancing Julius Caesar (2.1.191–192):

For the New Arden, ‘the anachronism of a striking clock in 44 BC is distressing to those shut off from imaginative time. The dramatic action is more here and now than then and the bell-notes signal a change from ethical debate to urgently deciding what to do, when.’¹² Anachronism, in literary terms, starts with Shakespeare: in Ulysses, discussing Shakespeare, John Eglinton says that the equivalent of Shakespeare’s plots and subplots – derived from different moments and genres – being spatchcocked together is combining a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. ‘He puts Bohemia on the seacoast [The Winter’s Tale] and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.’ Stephen Daedalus says, in reply, he is like God, ‘the playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us the light first and the sun two days later)’.¹³ So Shakespeare figures in my Chapter 2 through the Sonnets, the history plays (Richard II and the Henry IV plays), and in chapter three, through one tragedy, King Lear and one comedy, All’s Well that Ends Well.

Anachrony arises from the disparity between events and their narration. In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson and Shreve, in Harvard in 1910, discuss the American South, and the history of Thomas Sutpen, whose ‘trouble was innocence’ and who suddenly discovered ‘what he just had to do’ when he was fourteen:

‘Because he was born in West Virginia, in the mountains –’ (‘Not in West Virginia’, Shreve said. ‘Because if he was twenty-five years old in Mississippi in 1833, he was born in 1808. And there wasn’t any West Virginia in 1808 because –’ ‘All right’, Quentin said. ‘– West Virginia wasn’t admitted –’ ‘All right all right’, Quentin said. ‘– into the United States until –’ ‘All right all right all right’, Quentin said.)¹⁴

Thomas Sutpen was born into what became West Virginia, but there was no state of West Virginia in 1808. On 15 April 1861, Lincoln’s proclamation blockaded southern ports, followed by Virginia’s secession from the Union, alongside Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. This produced the split of the western part of Virginia from Virginia, and a new state admitted to the Union. Quentin and Shreve, discussing the American Civil War, itself highly anachronistic, and recalling how West Virginia was created, consider events a century earlier. Historical reconstruction means that to describe events or places they must use terms unrecognisable to the people in those situations. If history is what happened, and what we say happened, the first only knowable through the second, history can only be anachronistic. It approaches the logic of the dream, anachronistic, anachoristic. Freud comments on logical connections in dreams being reproduced by simultaneity in time, instancing Raphael’s reproduction in a single group of all the philosophers or poets on Parnassus. Freud’s imagination makes the example an instance of anachronism (not using the word) when saying that these people ‘were never in fact assembled in a single hall or on a single mountain-top’.¹⁵ Yet Raphael is not anachronistic, since Parnassus is an ideal space; he can include, fairly, all historical periods in one: Freud draws Raphael’s dream-vision into anachrony. Spatial relationships, as in a dream of a platform moving towards the incoming train, rather than the train arriving at the platform, also show the interchangeability for Freud of time and space within the dream (SE 5.408). The reversal is also of cause and effect: dreams, as anachronistic and anachoristic, disallow narrative causality.

Anachronism and historical writing

For Peter Burke, anachronism as a concept was created within, and informed, the Renaissance.¹⁶ Thomas Greene argues that the Renaissance was fascinated by anachronism, fastening on its awareness of differences of language between the classical and the modern, and discussing the then literary interest in ‘imitations’. Greene discusses Dante (1265–1321) as the first writer for whom ‘linguistic drift’, languages changing or going out of date, becomes significant: he notes that Dante’s Virgil, when first seen, appeared ‘hoarse from long silence’ (‘per lungo silenzio parea fioco’ – Inf. 1.63).¹⁷ For Dante to bring Virgil into the Commedia is anachronistic, as is everything in that text: it is no coincidence that the question in Dante of what happens to language is comparable with demonstrating the power of the afterlife, with the sense that everything in the present life is subject to postponement, that it exists now in figural reality and will after death become more real. But for Dante there is no anachronism, since nothing is ever lost to time. That is because there is no simple chronology.

Burke makes the concept of anachronism synonymous with a sense of historical distance, or perspective, or sense of change. He discusses to what extent earlier periods, such as the medieval, possessed a sense of historical distance. He says the medieval laid greater stress on historical continuity than change, giving three examples of this. The first: medieval commentators on the ruins of Rome did not see them as markers of an earlier and different period. Ruins were seen as a given: it was not enquired how they marked an earlier period: the exception to this sense, Burke argues, was Petrarch, whom he takes as the first antiquarian, defined (by Arnaldo Momigliano) as having ‘the idea of a civilization recovered by systematic collection of all the relics of the past’ (Renaissance Sense of the Past, 139). The second comes from Biblical interpretation: the fourfold method of Biblical exegesis (literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical) did not read events in terms of their historical content or difference. Events and their structure could be lifted out of context and made to seem free-standing, able to be applied in completely different circumstances, encouraging anachrony. The third example is that Roman law was applied without a sense of the difference between the circumstances of its being laid down and then present-day circumstances. Burke thinks the medieval period could not, psychologically, recognise historical change. He argues that Protestantism, Lutheranism particularly, included a new distancing of the past, setting it apart from the present. The new attention to philology in Lorenzo Valla (1405–1457), and the attention to Rome’s ruins of Flavio Biondo (1388–1463), produces, in the Renaissance, a sense of historical difference. OED gives 1579 for the word ‘obsolete’ (in Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar). Burke sees antiquarianism appearing in Britain in the 1580s, with William Camden (1551–1623) – whom he compares with Biondo – and in John Selden (1584–1654), compared with Valla. The word ‘synchronism’ is first cited in 1589. Its use means deciding that there may be a coherence between disparate events happening at the same time. Burke concludes The Renaissance Sense of the Past with the nineteenth century and Lord Acton discussing ‘the documentary age which will tend to make history independent of historians’, though Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) initiates ‘the real originator of the heroic study of records’. For Burke, there has been a displacement in history writing from ‘narrative sources or ‘chronicles’ to documentary sources (p. 144), showing an increasing attention to objectivity emanating from awareness of anachronism. I refer to the idea of the chronicle in Chapter 3.¹⁸

But Burke remains bound to a ‘history of ideas’, making his procedure duplicate his argument: the Renaissance became aware of historical change, and so of anachronism; and so built itself on a ‘history of ideas’. Perhaps any modern history writing is premised on being able to exclude the anachronous, though public, monumental (in Nietzsche’s sense) forms of history often require the anachronous in them. Burke instances the American Benjamin West (1738–1820), whose controversial picture Death of General Wolfe (1771), according to West’s biographer John Galt, had Sir Joshua Reynolds coming to see West before the picture’s completion, to tell him that the modern dress, the coats, breeches and cocked hats of the men who fought against the French at Quebec in 1759 were inappropriate for the grand style. For West, ‘the same truth which gives law to the historian should rule the painter’.¹⁹ Hence the hero is dressed in modern style; a contrast to Wolfe’s classical, nude memorial in Westminster Abbey. Yet, if West’s work is modern, it adds in other forms of incongruity: Wolfe is surrounded by supportive figures whereas he died with only two or three attendants; the presence of an American Indian watching the death of the Englishman adds in a ‘noble savage’ who is inherently an anachronism within the scene, because the ‘noble savage’ permits two time-schemes, the modern Western and something else more primitive. No American Indians were involved at Quebec. Distance from Canada makes modern dress possible; the sense of another place frames the scene and provides a sense of historical difference. West remains anachronistic, as in his Death of Nelson (1806), following hard on Trafalgar, and styled on Wolfe, and on John Singleton Copley’s Death of the Earl of Chatham (1781).²⁰ Nelson dies on deck, not below; with Hardy present, as he was not, and, as with Wolfe, in a framing like a pietà. ‘Historical painting’, as paradigmatic for historical representation, substitutes one anachronism for another.

That the medieval world did not see historical distance, but syncretised past and present, Burke giving several examples, is problematic. It has