On Anachronism

193 Pages·2010·0.853 MB·English

by  Tambling, Jeremy

On anachronism
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On anachronism
JEREMY TAMBLING
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
dis trib uted in the United States exclu si vely
by Palgrave Macmillan
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Copyright © Jeremy Tambling 2010
The right of Jeremy Tambling to be identifi ed 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 82443 hardback
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
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Deliberate anachronism 1
Anachronism and historical writing 6
‘Pierre Menard’ 9
Death sentence 14
1: Seven types of anachronism: Proust 23
The Gozzoli frescos 23
À l’ombre des jeunes fi lles en fl eurs 25
Paris and Venice 27
Homosexuality and anachrony 29
‘The Intermittencies of the Heart’ 38
Jealousy 45
Matters of chronology 50
2: Fools of time: Michelangelo and Shakespeare 54
Michelangelo’s sonnets 54
Time and Shakespeare’s sonnets 59
The history plays: ‘Richard’s time’ 65
Falstaff 75
3: Chronicles of death foretold 85
Archival anachrony 85
King Lear: fortune’s bastards 90
Fearing anachronism: All’s Well that Ends Well 108
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vi Contents
4: Future traces 119
Memory traces 119
Blanchot and Derrida 125
Anarchoronoristics 131
Time and passivity 135
Disappointments: 2046 138
Trauma and the future anterior 142
Last words 149
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde 149
Notes 158
Index 181
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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 defi ning the discussion
and forms of anachronism, if it is possible to fi nd examples of that
which, in principle, has the ability to distort all forms of order-
ing. The book was never intended to be a complete survey of texts
which use anachronism (many have off ered suggestions of specifi c
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 associ-
ated 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 fi ction: 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
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viii Preface
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 Alfi e
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.
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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 anach-
ronistic 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 defi nes 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:
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