Anachronism (2)

The term “anachronism” is derived from the Greek prefix ana- meaning “against” and the Greek word chronos which means “time” and it is generally used to refer to a thing found in a period in which it does not belong, oftentimes a thing that is old-fashioned. Jacques Rancière expands the concept of anachronism in compliance with the principle that “belonging to a time is strictly identical to belonging to a belief” (33). What this means is that the conditions of a given time allow for certain possibilities of thought and action while forbidding others. To accuse someone of committing the sin of anachronism is to claim that person has attributed some thought or action to a certain moment that could not have been imagined or performed at that time. In order to identify anachronism, he contends, we have to ask “is it possible that this could have happened?” and not “is it true that this happened?” Should the event not meet those conditions of possibility, then we are dealing with anachronism, and the thought or action in question cannot be considered faithful to the time that it is supposed to represent. In short, anachronism escapes the logic of verisimilitude, it is incompatible with its surroundings, unsuitable, a detail that does not fit. This term is also used by historians to identify an author’s location of a fact, a use of certain terms, or a character type in the wrong time period in order to identify a mistake in successive time. Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence displays such a detail in the German-made clock on a wall in the home of the protagonist’s beloved. This type of large chiming clock with a pendulum was popular at the end of the 19th century and has no place in the Istanbul of the late 1970’s, where time is governed by modern wristwatches and television programming. Given that “the device by which the Keskin family actually kept time was the television,” we must consider the clock in conspicuously anachronistic (286). Its survival into the world of the television set encapsulates the conflict of traditional Turkish life with the Western modernity that has displaced it.

Successive time: Rancière describes Aristotle’s temporal paradigm as the time of mere succession, in which events occur one after another as particular and contingent facts. This form of time follows the laws of succession and is limited to the chronological sequence of events which operates, in his view, in opposition to what Rancière calls “epochal time.” Epochal time marks specific regimes of truth, order, and power–a coagulation of times that ignore succession. Jameson specifies the concept of successive time as “the regime of the past-present-future” (25), the familiar tripartite system to which “the ignorant man” belongs, namely the man so circumscribed by his time that he cannot be occupied with anything other but his own affairs. In the capitalist mode of production, Rancière maintains (after Lukács), the working man is supposed to remain ignorant and focus his energies entirely on the labor at hand rather than consider how things might be otherwise. Workers, he contends, do not “have” time to think beyond the limits of their moment. The Museum of Innocence problematizes Rancière’s notion of people whose thought is restricted to their moment in history.

At first glance, it would appear that character of the beloved (Füsun) is just such a person insofar as she subscribes to the conservative morals and values of traditional Turkish society and submits to an older man who later marries her in order to preserve her honor. Her economic situation prevents her from scaping the limits of family obligations and social norms that subjects her to the condemnation of traditional Turkish society. At the same time, however, she is acutely aware of the fact that her social position and financial resources have limited her options. To appease her jealousy over his relationship to the woman his family intends for him to marry, her lover contends she is superior to the other woman. “She’s studied in Europe, he claims, but she’s not as modern and courageous as you are,” to which Füsun retorts, “Actually, I’m not modern or courageous!” (51). She reveals, in other words, that she is quite aware of the powerless position she occupies in relation to an older and wealthy man who happens to be engaged to another woman. Fusün understands herself as an anachronism.

Kemal’s close friend and social equal, Zain, on the other hand, is far a better candidate for Rancière’s category of the ignorant man. “You-Deserve-It-All Zaim”, so dubbed by Kemal’s intended, Sibel, is consumed by the idea of thriving among the rich Istanbul bourgeoisie. His major concerns in life are his affairs with models and actresses, the success of his business with the urban rich, and Western innovation. The slogan for his Meltem brand soft drink, Kemal’s family business, “You Deserve It All,” encapsulates his proclivity for wealth and luxury. Blinded by capital, he is stuck in a glitzy money-making loop to which he devotes his energy.

The eternal present: Rancière considers, “How does a time resemble eternity? In being a pure present” (34). This is time that has escaped the constraints of successive time and exists as a detemporalized present, or time without chronology. The eternal present materializes as a museum in Pamuk’s novel. Jameson explains “this absolute present [as] a new kind of freedom, a disengagement from the shackles of the past … as well as from those of the future” (710). Rancière in turn identifies the scholar as the historical agent who can break away from the restrictions of successive time and enter the atemporal spatial flow of the eternal present. The scholars are those who “cannot not think what their time alone presents as thinkable” and rupture the resemblance with their time. In other words, these men “do not resemble their time, insofar as they act in breach of their time, in breach of the line of temporality that puts them in their place by obliging them to use their time in some way or other” (46). Contrary to the ignorant man, the scholar is the one who has time and therefore the power to “make” history. In The Museum of Innocence, Kemal Bey appears, like Rancière’s scholar, acutely aware of “being outside Time” (355) at the Keskin house and he wishes to create a museum where his visitors can enter this similar state of “not really living in the present moment” (421). He believes that by harvesting the relics of enough happy moments he can overcome successive time and materialize timeless happiness in the present moment.

Anachrony.

Anachrony refers to a new link between disparate times. As Rancière describes it, “An anachrony is a word, an event, or a signifying sequence that has left its time and in this way is given the capacity to define completely original points of orientation to carry out leaps from one temporal line to another” (47). It “makes meaning circulate in a way that escapes any contemporaneity,” and in so doing it can travel freely between lines of temporal succession. Kemal materializes such time in assembling his museum. As he says, “It is through my reproduction of that enchanted space that museum visitors can wander, as if through Time” (355). While each museum visitor has his or her own experience of the museum, he or she assembles a narrative that transforms the materials in the museum into a world of happiness. For Rancière, the capacity to leap over and between temporal lines creates spaces for new possibilities. By contrast to anachronisms that find the possibilities of anachronistic thought as a “mistake” in understanding one’s moment in successive time, anachronies identify points of digression or deviation from the conventions that confine on to his or her time. Nor, in doing so, do anachronies violate the hierarchy of epochal time when they create new positions in time that operate like railway lines that switch our thinking to a different temporal track. Anachronies provide a way of circulating meaning that is free to make new connections and has the potential to “make” history. Scholars who “leave behind the strict obedience to belief similar to time” have the potential to make history (39), provided they establish a new temporal line that disrupts the truth regime prevailing at their moment in time.

In designing his museum, Kemal creates such pathways by displacing historical space and time by means if the arrangement of his collected “artifacts.” Indeed, he moves into the house that he transformed into a museum and lives among the objects in his collection. In a metafictional moment, the novelist himself appears as a character from whom Kemal seeks help in telling his story. In April 2012, this museum ceases to be simply a work of fiction, as Orhan Pamuk opens a museum based on his novel in Istanbul and fills it with objects that resemble those Kemal collected in the novel. It is fair to say that the creation of a four-story museum in Çukurcuma, a neighborhood originally populated by poor immigrants, “makes” history in that it created a tourist site that succeeded in revitalizing the neighborhood. In the Beyoğlu district where Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence is located “the buildings once inhabited by the Greeks and Armenians are now occupied by new minorities… now home to French, Italian and British writers and artists, drawn in part by its disheveled and haunting charms” (26). As it is featured in city guidebooks, the museum is the main attraction of a neighborhood that no longer belongs to its moment in time but fits into a gentrified neighborhood that appeals to cosmopolitan tourists.

The Past Made Present

Pamuk writes: “In Physics Aristotle makes a distinction between Time and the single moments he describes as the present. Single moments are – like Aristotle’s atoms – indivisible, unbreakable things. But Time is the line that links these indivisible moments together” (287). This understanding of time is troublesome given that Aristotle did not believe in atoms and he argues that “time does not exist independently of the events that occur in time” and reduces time to “temporal relations among things and events”. As carried out in his novel, Pamuk’s theory of time calls attention to certain inconsistencies, which serve as openings for the reader to examine at what cost Kemal’s collection transcends successive time. Pamuk mangles the Aristotelian theory of temporality in order to call attention to the discrete moments in time that escape the linear relationship of successive events.

Kemal Bey’s obsession with Füsun leads him to make a series of highly questionable decisions, the most outlandish of which is his compulsive collection of artifacts that in some way recall how he feels in her presence. Ranging from china dogs to doorknobs, butterfly barrettes to a ’56 Chevrolet, there was no limit to what he would collect. Imbued with talisman- like properties, these artifacts initially served as a palliative to soothe the pain provoked by Füsun’s absence. As if he were taking care of an open wound, Kemal would stroke his neck, cheeks, and forehead with these objects, reveling in the powers of consolation they held. As his collection grows, he realizes he has become addicted to collecting relics of his moments that promise a future with Füsun that cannot materialize, and those relics start to take a new role. They serve as a bridge from successive time into the eternal present. The quality of the objects transforms as well. The actual objects that she had touched, seen, or worn so essential to Kemal’s ritualistic ceremonies (e.g., taking them to bed and stroking his skin with them) loses that cult value and acquires exhibition value as he opens his museum to tourists. Indeed, whatever value they might have had because Füsun had touched them vanishes, as Kemal replaces the objects he steals from Füsun’s home only to steal these substitutes in turn later on. The process of collecting these objects makes original and copy interchangeable.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin explains that ceremonial objects that maintain the identity of a cult will be emancipated from the ritual that gave them meaning if they are reproduced mechanically. As Benjamin explains this transformation, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Kemal seems to acknowledge as much when Füsun’s Aunt Nesibe asks him what has become of the china dog that was perched on the television. Kemal speaks as the modern man when he replies, “[t]hey say the Chinese used to believe that things had souls” (378). When, in the last chapter of the novel, he contemplates his entire collection, Kemal reflects, “like a shaman who can see the souls of things, I could feel their stories flickering inside me” (512). The essence of the artifacts or what Benjamin would call the aura may wither as they enter the museum to be viewed by crowds of visitors and later reproduced as objects to be bought in the museum gift shop. At the same time, he finds the objects necessary stimuli that provide him with personal life—one that he did not lead. These fetish objects serve as the substitute for the emotional investment in Füsun he never made.

As the number of evenings spent at the Keskin house increases, it becomes clear that the interior of the house is disconnected from the outside world where time observes the principle of linear succession. Kemal claims that these objects “seem to exist out of time”, isolated in a separate realm that they have created themselves. The objects are free from the constraints of successive time and exist in an “enchanted space,” another name for Rancière and Jameson’s eternal present. What is his preferred artifact but the 4213 cigarette butts in his collection, which illustrate the form as well as the content of the eternal present? One cannot tell when a cigarette had been smoked or who had smoked it. Kemal is well aware of Füsun’s various methods used to put out a cigarette, the way she hid her smoking from her father, how her mood affected her style of inhaling, and even the myriad shapes of the cigarette butts he gathered. To another person, however, they are indistinguishable. Their value rests entirely, he admits, on what he brings to these objects, “I sometimes think that our love of cigarettes owes nothing to the nicotine, and everything to their ability to fill the meaningless void” (98). Indeed, there is nothing particularly remarkable about any of the objects he hoards:

And so looking at any of the things gathered in the Merhamet Apartments, even only to remember them, was like looking at the cigarette butts: one by one, they would recall the particles of experience until I had summoned up the entire reality of sitting at the dinner table with Füsun and her family. (398)

The objects are the foundation upon which he builds an eternal present that promises to heal aesthetically what time has taken from him. As he puts it in a chapter titled “The Consolation of Objects,”

For a week, I had been aware that in the ashtray now resting there was the butt of a cigarette Füsun had stubbed out. At one moment I picked it up, breathing in its scent of smoke and ash, and placing it between my lips. I was about to light it, but I realized that if I did there would be nothing left of the relic. Instead I picked it up and rubbed the end that had once touched her lips against my cheeks, my forehead, my neck, and the recesses under my eyes, as gently and kindly as a nurse salving a wound. (156)

His fondling of old moist cigarette butts may seem nauseating, but the act has a remarkably soothing effect. To him, the cigarettes were expressions of her emotional life and licking the trace of her lipstick from the filter amounts to consuming that life (395). As such, the cigarettes mark important moments in the novel. Long uncertain as to whether his love reciprocated, he learns that it is until one afternoon in the İnci Patisserie: “Exuding self-assurance, she took out a cigarette. As I leaned forward with my lighter, I looked into her eyes and… I told her once again how much I loved her” (456), to which Füsun replied: “I feel the same way.” In that each object in his collection was linked to a specific moment of contact with his beloved, “it [now] seemed as if these remembered moments expanded and merged into perpetuity” (398). This new temporal present is not limited to artifacts, however, but fills a space within the city. While the Keskin house is located in the corner of Çukurcuma Avenue in the old section Istanbul and the story takes place during the period from 1975 to 1985, Kemal does not see it that way: “This realm’s defining property was timelessness” (286). Within this timeless space, he finds a curious form of “solace,” or compensation for the life not lived.

Before his affair with Füsun, Kemal visits the Merhamet Apartments, where his mother stored household objects that were no longer in use. Being there recalled moments from his youth and “it seemed as if these artifacts had the power to calm [his] nerves” (21). In that this apartment was where his father met his long-term mistress, we cannot be surprised that these relics embody a childish eroticism similar to the objects stolen from Füsun and distinct from the commodities that flooded into a modernizing Turkey. As their love blossoms, he stores these feelings in the Merhamet Apartments on the assumption that Füsun would return and enchant more objects with her presence. Having failed her university entrance exams the day after Kemal and Sibel’s engagement party, she never returns to the little paradise in 131 Teşvikiye Avenue. The objects thus become signs of her absence, from which Kemal extracts a form of gratification that she will never provide him directly. In other words, these objects become fetishes—he calls them “talismans”–that activate the erotic feelings he could no longer experience with Füsun herself.

On searching for her at her parent’s apartment house on Kuyulu Bostan Street, he receives the devastating news that she no longer lives there. Under the spell cast by her absence, he steals a standard lycée ruler he had once given her when helping her study for her exams. The ruler becomes the first of many pieces in his collection, all of which are distinguished by an addictive appeal “both healed me and reminded me of my affliction” (178). As the withdrawal symptoms reach an unbearable pitch, he returns to the Keskin’s apartment house to find the entire family gone, and proceeds to collect pieces of wallpaper, a door handle, the porcelain handle of the toilet chain, the arm of a baby doll, a large mica marble, and a few hairpins to enshrine in the Merhamet Apartments. Reestablishing relations on a new footing with Füsun, now a married woman, he spends his evening at her Aunt Nesibe’s home, eating dinner, watching television, and stealing objects for his collection. During his darkest days in the last months of 1979, he

…managed to see Füsun three or four times a week, and as happy as this made me, with each week I still took from her house three or four things, sometimes as many as six or seven, and during the most miserable phases, between ten and fifteen, and having got them to the Merhamet Apartments, I felt triumphant (372)

While the pair does reunite after Füsun’s father’s death and the departure of her husband, it is anticlimactic and momentary. She dies in a car accident, and the objects in the Merhamet Apartments acquire the power of relics.

During his visits to the empty museums in Paris, Kemal discovers his own future: “it was as if I had entered a separate realm that coexisted with the city’s crowded streets but was not of them; and in the eerie timelessness of this other universe, I would find solace” (495). By definition, museums are anachronistic. Their purpose is to remove objects from their original place in time and position them in a new—exhibition—time, so that they might artificially reproduce a sense of something that is no longer there. Finding that these museums put him in a state resembling intoxication, he thinks along what Rancière would call a new temporal line. Although his state of intoxication puts him in a past that he had not actually experienced firsthand, he experiences that moment as if it were in fact his personal memory, and with this feeling in mind, he starts building his own museum so that visitors will also “lose all sense of Time” (520).

Through the specific arrangement of otherwise unrelated artifacts, a multiplicity of situations belonging to different moments can coexist in a single moment. In doing so, in. my view, Kemal’s carefully curated collection of items provides a model of what the novelist does with anachronism. Pamuk joins different objects, facts, events, or thoughts that follow various temporal lines to create an artificial totality that defies successive time. In this artificial moment, different concepts of temporality interact. Readers witness an interplay of successive time (the moments of contact with Füsun that follow one after the other), of anachronism, (the sequential placement of artifacts in Kemal’s museum), and anachronies (the unity of moments out of time). As an artificial moment out of time, moreover, the museum progressively invades the modern world of sequential time, as Pamuk’s imagined museum generates a museum catalogue, and the catalogue inspires Pamuk to buy a building in the old section of Istanbul that meets the novel’s description of building that houses Kemal’s collection. Just as those objects are necessary for the museum, the concept of anachronism is necessary for the novel.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Underwood. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Penguin Books, 2008.

Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. Verso, 2015.

Jameson, Fredric. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 4, 2003, pp. 695–718.

Markosian, Ned. “Time.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 24 Jan. 2014, plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/.

Mazer Crummey, Nicholas. Cosmopolitan Facades: Historical Diversity as a Tool of Exclusion and Destruction in The Tarlabaşı Urban Renewal Project. 2016. Sabancı U, M.A.Thesis. http://research.sabanciuniv.edu/34814 /1/NicholasMazerCrummey_10158510.pdf

Pamuk, Orhan. The Museum of Innocence. Vintage International, 2010.

Rancière, Jacques (2015) “The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth.” InPrint: vol. 3, no. 1, article 3, 2015.

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