Author: William Williamson IV
The meaning of anachronism varies with the discourse where it occurs, but these meanings share in common a preoccupation with the chronology of relationships in time. In criticism and philosophy, an anachronism is generally regarded as an error, but for historians, says Jacques Rancière, it is an “unforgivable sin (21). For historians and critics, it entails the intrusion of another, usually contemporary, framework within a time not our own, the assumption being that what we take for granted today will necessarily differ in important respects from a moment in the past which must be assessed in its own terms. Thus the commonsense definition of anachronism is a faulty assessment of the past through the lens of the present, which reflects the reader’s lack of sophistication. In literature or art, too, anachronism can be seen as an infelicity or even a mistake, some reference to an object or use of language that would not have been available within that timeframe.
Occasionally though, anachronism is excused as inevitable or necessary, particularly in literature, and especially in the novel. Retrospective narration, for instance, might be considered a necessary rather than infelicitous use of anachronism, whereby the present tense of narration inevitably shapes the past narrated, filtering that moment through perspective not native to it. In other words, we have a spectrum of anachronisms—from the necessary anachronism of memory that we barely notice to historical investigations framed by an obviously incongruous perspective.
In the hands of a historian or literary critic, anachronism carries out a disciplinary purpose as the standards and protocols that ensure scholarship remains consistent in distinguishing the present attitudes, assumptions, and practices from those of the time period being examined. Before we can screen them out, this implies, we must identify which of our attitudes, assumptions, and practices are strictly products of the present. Novels confront the difficulty of identifying such anachronisms, insofar as the form itself depends on having the time of narration intrude in that of the events narrated. This fundamental anachronism in the novel indexes the moment of time, or chronotope, that limits how the novel can imagine events unfolding in time, and this chain of events in turn acquires flexibility in and through its narration that allows any number of digressions to be introduced and expand certain moments beyond their respective spaces in sequential time. We might indeed say that the novelist uses anachronism to make visible the existence of alternative chronotopes, while allowing both plot and reader to move between them.
The chronotope, as formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin, describes the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). It is the means by which “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole” that “defines genre and generic distinctions” (84) Bakhtin identifies the ancient chronotopes that culminate in the novels of Rabelais, which opens up a world in which the novel can come into being as the means of giving this boundless network of natural systems a human form that distinguishes it from matter: “[Chronotopes] are the organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative” (250). For Bakhtin, the chronotope is “plot-generating.” While poetic images also have “chronotopicity,” the chronotope is especially necessary to the novel in that it provide the in which plots become legible as they materializing the world of the novel (251).
At the same time, he acknowledges that anachronism unavoidably attends nearly any narrative endeavor:
If I relate (or write about) an event that has just happened to me, then I as the teller (or writer) of this event am already outside the time and space in which the event occurred. It is just as impossible to gorge an identity between myself, my own “I,” and the “I” that is the subject of my stories as it is to lift myself up by my own hair. The represented world, however, realistic and truthful, can never be chrontopically identical with the real world it represents where the author and creator of the literary work is to be found. (256)
Bakhtin here describes the anachronistic, disjointed relationship between the chronotopes of the narrative and the spatial framework in which events are narrated. The narrative, though, or the novel, contains within it a number of different chronotopes and complex interactions among them, specific to the given work or author; it is common moreover for one of these chronotopes to envelope or dominate the others (such, primarily, are those we have analyzed in this essay). Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist and may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another (252). The chronotopes of earlier literatures provide the material out of which the novel unfolds its version of the modern world.
Anachronisms signal this interaction, in that they tell us where and when chronotopes coexist, are interwoven, replace, or contradict one another. In so doing, anachronisms register the forms of time the novel considers possible within its timeframe and which are not. In a more positive sense, anachronisms point out alternative timeframes that might materialize. Such anachronisms can always be regarded as mistakes on the author’s part for the critic to correct, lest alternative ideologies seem reasonable. Whether corrected or enjoyed, however, anachronisms in the novel disclose the instability of the present. They multiply and illuminate the different temporalities that compose the present, offer alternatives to disciplinary worktime, and so expose the modes of discipline that help to maintain the hold of the present on accounts of past events and future possibilities. The novel form seems uniquely able to produce these tensions between temporal frameworks that anachronism exposes and the one that dominates the present moment.
This proclivity to bring alternatives to light, according to Jacques Ranciére, is the reason why such historians as Lucien Febvre consider anachronism the “unforgivable sin.” Febvre makes an example of Abel Lefranc’s argument that Rabelais was a covert unbeliever and that in his writing it is possible to detect this coded unbelief. If one way of defining anachronism for the historian is ascribing to historical figures motivations that come from the point of view of a different time, Febvre takes things a step further: he claims Rabelais could not have been an unbeliever because his time would not have allowed it.
Rancière argues that Febvre establishes the question of Rabelais’s belief or unbelief, and indeed the concept of anachronism that Febvre calls unforgivable, not through the terms or methods of history but through a set of “poetic procedures for the construction of historical narrative” (Rancière 22). The historian claims to work in a science; really historians construct their claims through a “techne for the construction of a plot, for the arrangement of its parts and its appropriate mode of enunciation.” Anachronism is part of an aesthetic organization of time and history, one that keeps everything and everyone in its time and place—in its chronotope—and that identifies the possible with the existent. The proscription on anachronism attempts to maintain a unified whole, an official time with an associated theology that tends towards progress and unification. Bakhtin identifies the novel—specifically the novel of Rabelais—as resisting this kind of official time, a reified “false picture of the world” consisting of “false hierarchical links between objects and ideas” (Bakhtin 169). He suggests a similarity between Rabelais’s time, which demanded a new chronotope, and our own: “In the era of developing capitalism, the life of society and the state becomes abstract and almost plotless” (Baktin 209). Rabelais suggests to him the possibility of “the re-creation of a spatially and temporally adequate world able to provide a new chronotope for a new, whole and harmonious man, and for new forms of human communication” (Bakhtin 169).
It is no accident that both Bakhtin and Rancière feature Rabelais so prominently—or that Febvre is at such pains to make him identical with his time, to suppress what Lefranc—and perhaps Bakhtin—identify as radical in his novels. The historian, says Rancière, works in a “truth regime . . . constituted in a specific connection between the poetic logic of a necessary or likely plot (intrigue) and a ‘theological’ logic of the manifestation of the order of divine truth in the order of human time” (26). In other words, the historian makes history look necessary—the events that make it up did not occur by chance but by “providence,” a theological rendering that tends, says Rancière, upwards, towards an eternity in which everything that occurs had to be (26). His historian works almost as a novelist would, making events cohere and eliminating what does not fit—unless, that is, we conceive of the novelist as Bakhtin does, bringing together in different, often conflicting, ways different chronotopes.
Rancière argues for a “positive sense” of the anachronism which he calls anachronies. These moments that do not try to make time more identical with itself, or to make a world that conforms to a fictional theology, he contends, are “events, ideas, significations that are contrary to time, that make meaning circulate in a way that escapes any contemporaneity, any identity of time with ‘itself’” (47). The word or event that has “left ‘its’ time, and in this way is given the capacity to define completely original points of orientation (les aiguillages), to carry out leaps from one temporal line to another” have the potential to disrupt an official time, or to conflict with the time of another character, or to move between or create new chronotopes (47). These anachronies, though, are also subject to discipline, the way that Lefranc’s claims come under attack by Febvre.
in Viriginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith comes under this variety of discipline under the care of Dr. Holmes, first, but particularly Sir William. Even as the novel, punctuated by regular chimes of the clock, establishes an emphasis on a shared, official time, traumatized Septimus flashes back to the battlefield, unable to coincide with himself. The problem, according to Sir William, is one of “proportion”:
health is proportion, so that when a man comes into your room and says that he is Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months’ rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve. (Woolf 99)
Proportion is Sir William’s “goddess,” the one that allows him and England to “prosper” (Woolf 99). He “secluded [England’s] lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion” (Woolf 99).
Sir William enforces Proportion through “a sister, less smiling, more formidable”: “Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace” (Woolf 100). Proportion and Conversion make up a regime of discipline that the novel implicates time in particularly:
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a ship in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one. (Woolf 102)
Septimus feels the full weight of the regime of Proportion and Conversion when he is hospitalized. Hugh Whitbread “ruminate[s]” on another form of the discipline when he hears the Rigby and Lowndes clock: “subconsciously one was grateful to Rigby and Lowndes for giving one time ratified by Greenwich; and this gratitude (so Hugh Whitbread ruminated, dallying there in front of the window) naturally took the form later of buying off Rigby and Lowndes socks or shoes” (Woolf 102). The ratified Greenwich time is heard all across the country simultaneously—it is the standardized time of industrial capitalism, regulated to keep the trains that connect the city and the country on time, and expanding from Greenwich throughout the British Empire. The ratified time both suppresses and generates anachronism—previously, locales were out of sync with each other, anachronistic in relation with each another, but Greenwich mean time defines a norm that, as the novel suggests, is often, even inevitably, deviated from. It suppresses, in other words, the particular relationship of time and place, in favor of a time that synchronizes heterogeneous spaces. Bakhtin identifies Einstein’s theory of relativity as source and example of this chronotope (Bakhtin 84). His theory necessarily involves the particularity of time to a space, a particularity that builds anachronism and disjointedness into any possible presence, and resists the power of an official, ratified time to subsume or determine the experience of time across spaces.
Clocks like the one Whitbread hears—reminders of the presence of an official time—chime on the hours and half- hours through Mrs. Dalloway, a novel that, from its first page, works regularly through anachronism:
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? (Woolf 3).
Multiple temporal lines, in Rancière’s phrase, open up here—Mrs. Dalloway, going out into the morning, hears (in the narrative present? Or in memory?) the French windows opening up at Bourton. Details of her perceptions are interrupted by the parenthetical reminder that the perceptions are those of “a girl of eighteen,” Clarissa, who is herself not identified entirely with that moment, but is anticipating “something awful” while looking at the flowers and the rooks. Anticipating, at least, until a further interruption, one that Mrs. Dalloway cannot completely recall.
Based on his reading of a scene in To the Lighthouse, Erich Auerbach would identify the technique through which Mrs. Dalloway’s consciousness collapses into her past, with its anticipations and interruptions, as she goes into the London midmorning, as “a transfer of confidence”:
the great exterior turning points and blows of fate are granted less importance; they are credited with less power of yielding decisive information concerning the subject; on the other hand there is a confidence that in any random fragment of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed. (Auerbach 547)
Auerbach here describes a subject, not one determined by decisive moments, but by the potential for anachronism, for the connections between and intrusions of disparate times and chronotopes that make up a subject. At the same time, though, like her counterpart Mrs. Ramsay, Mrs. Dalloway dramatizes the pressure on consciousness to cohere and the support it finds in a disciplinary structure: Proportion and Conversion; the subconscious gratitude that prompts you to buy new shoes.
To do so, a Woolf novel will exploit the necessary anachronism built into the form and its model of retrospective narration, as it registers the presence of an official time and the apparatus that enforces it. In this scenario, Sir William operates much like the historian Febvre. Where he would make sure each character observed the limits of his or her place and time, a novelist like Woolf will allow her characters to move through the discrepant times that have made up her life, ending up “there” in the novel’s final line, as Clarissa—a past self the novel makes present, and a present self the novel maintains even through the anachronistic reappearance of her teenage name. As the center of her own diminishing social world, Mrs. Dalloway takes for granted and deploys the “multiplicity of other temporal lines, even of senses of time, included in the ‘same’ time” that Rancière takes as the “condition of historical activity” (Rancière 47-48). The novel, though, brings these timelines under discipline—while some senses of time expand the subject and enrich the everyday, others confine will inevitably institutionalize that subject. Thus, while some anachronisms can be managed, others must be eliminated. Whitbread is aware of subconscious gratitude at being supplied with the ratified time, and worries that it compels him to buy new shoes. He “ruminate[s], dallying there in front of the shop window.”
So he ruminated. It was his habit. [. . .] He had been afloat on the cream of English society for fifty-five years. He had known Prime Ministers. [. . .] And if it were true that he had not taken place in any of the great movements of his time or held important office, one or two humble reforms stood to his credit; an improvement in public shelters was one; the protection of owls in Norfolk another; servant girls had reason to be grateful to him; and his name at the end of letters to the Times, asking for funds, appealing to the public to protect, to preserve, to clear up litter, to abate smoke, and stamp out immorality in parks, commanded respect. (Woolf 102-103)
Whitbread ruminates—he might not buy socks or shoes. He intervenes in public matters. Even as other times, other temporal lines, other senses of time, intrude on him and the other characters floating on the cream of English society, hosting parties, writing legislation, they do not disrupt the other time that Rancière invokes: the distribution of time that decides who has it and who does not.
Time thus assures the equivalence of a social distribution and an epistemic distribution. It separates the different ways in which to take part in the task of the city, thereby imitating the eternity of justice in the time of human affairs. On the one hand, there are those who have time to concern themselves with contemplation of the divine model and the forms of its temporal realisation. On the other hand, there are those who have not the time for this, and who, as a consequence, only imitate eternity passively, by the fact of not having the time to do anything but the work to which their nature predestines them. (38-39)
Can the novel intervene in this distribution, beyond identifying a multiplicity of temporal lines? In other words, can we read the novel for anachronies (and can novelists write it for them?)—with the attendant possibility of affecting the distribution of time—rather than just anachronisms—different regimes of time and its passing in the novel? Woolf reorganizes time, but her novel does not seem to redistribute it. Bakhtin, though, understands the reorganization of time in the novel as radical—that is, as intervening at the root of time and its distribution. He traces this potential in Rabelais:
Amid the good things of this here-and-now world are also to be found false connections that distort the authentic nature of things, false associations established and reinforced by tradition and sanctioned by religious and official ideology. Objects and ideas are united by false hierarchical relationships, inimical to their nature; they are sundered and separated from one another by various other-worldly and idealistic strata that do not permit these objects to touch each other in their living corporeality. These false links are reinforced by scholastic thought, by a false theological and legalistic casuistry and ultimately by language itself—shot through with centuries and millennia of error—false links between (on the one hand) good material words, and (on the other) authentically human ideas. It is necessary to destroy and rebuild the entire false picture of the world, to sunder the false hierarchical links between objects and ideas, to abolish the divisive ideational strata. It is necessary to liberate all these objects and permit them to enter into the free unions that are organic to them, no matter how monstrous these unions might seem from the point of view of ordinary, traditional associations. [. . .] On the basis of this new matrix of objects, a new picture of the world necessarily opens up—a world permeated with an internal and authentic necessity. Thus, in Rabelais the destruction of the old picture of the world and the positive construction of a new picture are indissolubly interwoven with each other. (Bakhtin 169)
Bakhtin identifies a positive and a negative task with Rabelais, both of which Rabelais “prosecutes” by means of anachronism: the return, in the positive, creative task, of “the contiguity of objects” with their natures before “other-worldly idealism” displaces and dematerializes them, through “folklore and antiquity,” and in the negative task, destroying reified relationships, through “Rabelaisan laughter—directly linked to the medieval genres of the clown, rogue and fool, whose roots go deep back into pre-class folklore” (170).
The anachronistic move back brings together what is otherwise kept “separate, in pharisaical error” (Bakhtin 170). Bakhtin, like Rancière, describes this error in terms of division. The chronotope, he insists, works through a “profoundly spatial and concrete” time that “is not separated from the earth or from nature” (Bakhtin 208). The “unified” space and time of the chronotope has an analogue in history: it corrects a situation in which there has “emerged one scale for measuring the events of a personal life and another for measuring the events of history” (Bakhtin 208). The social whole has “bifurcated”: “The plots (occasions) of history become something specifically separate from the plots of personal life (love, marriage)” (Bakhtin 208). Official time distributes between the levels of plot the events of history and the events of the personal life, the power to participate in plots: “There were not many personal plots to choose from, and these could not be transferred into the life of the social whole (the state, the nation)” (Bakhtin 208)
Rancière equates the violation of this distribution, the appropriation, in Bakhtin’s terms, of other plots determined by other chronotopes, with anachrony, the positive sense of anachronism. The city of Platonic philosophy, he says, is governed by a strict distribution of occupation and leisure, of “ways in which to take part in the task of the city” that are assigned according to who has the time to participate—people like Hugh Whitbread and Sir William—and who does not—Septimus Smith (Rancière 39). “What threatens the scientific city,” according to Rancière, “of history are words and thoughts that leave behind the strict obedience to belief similar to time”—words and thoughts that acknowledge alternatives to what already exists (Rancière 39). Plato’s city is a chronotope that hopes to avoid acknowledging its chronotopicity—that is, it aspires to organize space and time to the exclusion of other chronotopes, other dispensations of space and time, with other attendant potential organizations of “ways to take part in the city” and to divide leisure and work. Though the chronotope of Plato’s city aims for full power and discipline, it is a chronotope like others—waiting to be brought into anachronistic, contradictory, constructive, new relationships with other chronotopes.
When the protagonist returns to Europe at the end of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, he arguably submits to a chronotope with similar organizational power and aspirations. Back in Europe, Robinson finds that he is, surprisingly, not all that much of an anachronism, even though he has been away for many years: the property regime he reenters has provided, in the absence of his official death, for years of economic accumulation that smooth his reentry in a society based on exchange value. While Robinson produced and reproduced his life on the island, a legal zombie was profiting in Brazil, Portugal, and England. Though he returns to England as a “perfect stranger” and finds, except for a few sisters and nephews and nieces, “all the family extinct,” Robinson also finds that, “as there was no proof of my being dead, [his universal heir] could not act as an executor until some certain account should come of my death” (Defoe 269-272). Following a series of notarizations, affidavits, and procurements, to recollect his property in Brazil and the proceeds of that property abroad, Robinson finds “indeed, that the latter end of Job was better than the beginning [. . .] especially when I found all my wealth about me”:
I was now master, all on a sudden, of above £5000 sterling in money; and had an estate, as I might well call it, in the Brazils of above £1000 a-year, as sure as an estate of lands in England. And in a word, I was in a condition which I scarce knew how to understand, or how to compose myself for the enjoyment of it. (Defoe 275-276)
Robinson returns not as an anachronism—thirty years out of date after his life of near isolation on the island—but as the beneficiary of a transatlantic property scheme that has transformed the very ground on which people now tread. Although the ratified Greenwich time that Hugh Whitbread imagines has not yet been instantiated, Robinson returns to a world that has nevertheless maintained his estate across oceans and decades, one with the capacity to expand into new territories. By the end of the novel, Robinson has revisited “my new colony on the island” populated by the Spaniards who succeeded him and left them with “supplies of all necessary things, and particularly of arms, power, shot, tools, and two workmen” (Defoe 295). He finally divides the island into parts, “reserv[ing] to myself the property of the whole” but distributing tenants’ rights among the Spaniards and “engag[ing] them not to leave the place” (Defoe 295). By the end of the book, in other words, Robinson’s island has come to spatialize another moment in history than the one he left. The one to which he returns has been incorporated into a global system for distributing time and space, work and leisure, and money. Before he makes it back to the island, though, Robinson must traverse the intrusive space of “adventure time.” Taking a detour through the Pyrenees Mountains to avoid a riskier trip by sea, Robinson and Friday find themselves surrounded by wolves “in hopes of prey” (Defoe 290). Having killed “about threescore of them,” the pair are surrounded by the rest as they travel through the night to the sound of the “the ravenous creatures howl[ing] and yell[ing] in the woods” before they arrive at a village to find in “a terrible fright” that the wolves had attacked the night before (Defoe 291). The episode, says Robinson, surpasses anything he experienced on the island:
For my part, I was never so sensible of danger in my life; for seeing above three hundred devils come roaring and open-mouthed to devour us, and having nothing to shelter us or to retreat to, I gave myself over for lost; and as it was, I believe I shall never care to cross those mountains again. I think I would much rather go a thousand leagues by sea, though I were sure to meet with a storm once a week. (Defoe 292)
On his approach to the village in the Pyrenees, presumably just another stope on Robinson’s journey to England to reclaim and keep his “new discovered state safe about me,” the narrative jumps the guardrails of the modern chronotope. He enters a space fundamentally incompatible with the world of property, a change in the rules governing the disposition of space he finds more terrifying than any encounter since the anonymous footprint on his island he takes for the presence of cannibals (Defoe 292). His newly discovered and recovered estate is made possible by a chronotope that has not yet encompassed the entire present moment. Reading novels for the lesions in the chronotope, where anachronisms meet anachronies and times come out of joint, affords us exactly this understanding of the limits of the official hierarchies that organize time and space.
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Works Cited
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003.
Rancière, Jacques. “The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth.” InPrint 3, no. 1 (2015): 21-52.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 2002
