Anachronism and Antiquity

Tim Rood, Carol Atack, Tom Phillips

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350115217
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Historia
• Sous-sujet: Historia antigua

This book is a study both of anachronism in antiquity and of anachronism as a vehicle for understanding antiquity. It explores the post-classical origins and changing meanings of the term 'anachronism' as well as the presence of anachronism in all its forms in classical literature, criticism and material objects. Contrary to the position taken by many modern philosophers of history, this book argues that classical antiquity had a rich and varied understanding of historical difference, which is reflected in sophisticated notions of anachronism. This central hypothesis is tested by an examination of attitudes to temporal errors in ancient literary texts and chronological writings and by analysing notions of anachronistic survival and multitemporality. Rather than seeing a sense of anachronism as something that separates modernity from antiquity, the book suggests that in both ancient writings and their modern receptions chronological rupture can be used as a way of creating a dialogue between past and present. With a selection of case-studies and theoretical discussions presented in a manner suitable for scholars and students both of classical antiquity and of modern history, anthropology, and visual culture, the book's ambition is to offer a new conceptual map of antiquity through the notion of anachronism.

1

Inventing Anachronism

Modern anachronisms

The title of this section might strike the reader as paradoxical. The grouping of anachronism with modernity jars with the type of perception encapsulated in the pronouncement of one of Oscar Wilde’s characters in his dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to medievalism.’ This claim owes much to a striving for epigrammatic wit: it follows the brazenly anachronistic claim that ‘the Greeks chattered about painters just as much as people do nowadays … even the theatrical managers of travelling companies brought their dramatic critics with them … and paid them very handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices’.¹ Wilde’s character, then, is enacting his professed Hellenic modernity even as he offers a fictionalized past as the basis of this enactment. But, for all that, his soundbite does capture a common perception that anachronism is opposed to modernity.

The sense in which Wilde was using ‘anachronism’ was quite recent at the time he wrote his essay. The word was applied in English first as a description of textual phenomena, typically allusions to institutions or places that were not yet in existence at the time of the events being described. It was subsequently used of errors in the fixing of dates. It was only in the early nineteenth century that the word started to be used of people or practices thought obsolete or out of date. Like all words, anachronism has a history, and this history has continued since Wilde’s time. The word has continued to acquire new resonances – and in the process the division Wilde created between the medieval and the modern has been profoundly reconfigured.

‘What does it feel like to be an anachronism?’ is the question posed at the start of a discussion of medieval temporalities by Carolyn Dinshaw, a leading exponent of Queer Theory. One of the goals of Queer Theory is to disrupt the normative assumptions of ‘straight’ time, that is, a view of time as linear and oriented around transgenerational reproduction. To answer her question, Dinshaw turns to the mystic Margery Kempe (c. 1373–c. 1440). In her autobiographical writings, Kempe describes herself overcome with weeping before an image of Christ on the cross. At odds with her powerful sense of the immediacy of Christ’s death is the detached figure of her priest, who tries to console her by saying that Jesus died long ago. On Dinshaw’s reading, the priest, proud in the institutional power of the church, dismisses the emotional Kempe as a ‘pathetic anachronism – a creature stuck in the past’. That is, he rejects Kempe’s emotionalism with the same disdain with which Wilde rejects the medieval.²

As her essay progresses, Dinshaw starts to use ‘anachronism’ in a different sense. Rather than being applied to a sense of belonging to an earlier period, it becomes a sympathetic vehicle for expressing Kempe’s spiritual and bodily absorption in the dying Christ. This broader use allows Dinshaw to connect her own subjective experience of time with the experiences of Kempe and of Kempe’s twentieth-century editor, Hope Emily Allen. In effect, it is used as a synonym of ‘asynchrony’, to express the multitemporality of experienced life (and Dinshaw did indeed start a later version of her essay with the less snappy ‘What does it feel like to be asynchronous?’).³

Recuperation of anachronism as a sort of disturbed temporality that runs counter to the hegemony of straight time has also been a feature of postcolonial criticism (notably Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe). Anachronism or ‘the recurrence of being out of time’ is defined by one postcolonial critic as ‘a condition produced by the British Empire’s definition of time as a linear progression’. But this critic also attributes to ‘anachronistic methods’ the capacity to ‘disrupt the way in which colonial history is written’.⁴ Notions of anachronism are central, too, to some ecocritical attempts to think about human damage to the environment in what has been termed the Anthropocene period. An understanding of humanity’s influence on the climate has led to an awareness that ‘previous norms become uncertainly anachronistic’. Long-standing human practices such as wood-burning are now subject to a ‘retrospective derangement of meaning’,⁵ and literature composed prior to knowledge of climate change has taken on hitherto unavailable meanings (as in J. Hillis Miller’s ‘anachronistic reading’ of Wallace Stevens’ 1942 poem ‘The Man on the Dump’⁶).

The language of anachronism pervades many other modern discourses, notably memory studies, cognitive science and the history of art. In this last discipline, the historicizing iconological method of Erwin Panofsky has been challenged by Georges Didi-Huberman as well as by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood in their 2010 book Anachronic Renaissance. While these scholars applaud Panofsky’s erudition, they suggest that he uses his learning to shut down the meaning of images. In Didi-Huberman’s reading, Panofsky (a German Jew forced into exile in the United States in the 1930s) reacted against the unreason of Nazism, but in the process ‘exorcised the anachronisms and labilities specific to the world of images’ by rejecting the approaches found in German Jewish writers such as Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin.⁷ While Didi-Huberman celebrates anachronism as ‘the temporal way of expressing the exuberance, complexity, and overdetermination of images’, Nagel and Wood prefer to speak of the ‘anachronic’ on the grounds that anachronism is ‘a judgmental term that carries with it the historicist assumption that every event and every object has its proper location within objective and linear time’.⁸ But the anachronic does similar work for them in resisting the notion that the circumstances of any artwork’s production provide a sufficient explanation of its creation.⁹

The recuperation of the anachronic has been accompanied by a transformation in attitudes towards artistic and literary anachronisms. Features formerly ignored or regarded as flaws are now valued for challenging the constructedness of linear narrative. ‘Creative’¹⁰ or ‘productive’¹¹ anachronisms are widely celebrated – while paradoxically the attempt to avoid anachronism in historical reconstruction is condemned as itself a pernicious anachronism.¹²

The origins of anachronism

The way ‘anachronism’ is generally used in the modern world would have meant nothing to the first exponents of the word in English. To understand its history, we need to probe into its roots in Ancient Greek and the transmission of those Greek roots (via Renaissance Latin) to vernacular languages.

Scholars outside the discipline of Classics have tended to approach the etymology of ‘anachronism’ rather adventurously. A monograph on Modern Antiques proposes the meaning ‘against time’.¹³ Joseph Luzzi, a scholar of comparative literature, suggests that the word derives from ‘a fusion of the Greek compound meaning “late in time”’, while Nagel and Wood split the Greek anachronizein into ‘ana-, “again”, and the verb chronizein, “to be late or belated”’ (they speak of artworks ‘anachronizing’ in the sense of being ‘belated again’).¹⁴ These two explanations root the modern English word in an intransitive use of the Greek verb anachronizein that is attested, as we shall see, only once, in a short papyrus letter that was dug up in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century – and even here the sense must be ‘delay’ rather than ‘be late again’ (the prefix ana-, like English re-, is used in this sense only with telic verbs, that is, with verbs expressing an accomplishment). But to criticize the etymology offered by Nagel and Wood may be to miss their point. They offer a creative redefinition to suit their view of the temporal dynamism of art: they explain that the anachronic artwork ‘is late, first because it succeeds some reality that it re-presents, and then late again when that re-presentation is repeated for successive recipients’.¹⁵

The prominent French philosopher Jacques Rancière (to whose thought we will return) comes closer to the etymological truth in his important discussion of anachronism when he recognizes that the ana- prefix means ‘up’. But, like Nagel and Wood, the way he develops his reflections on the word owes more to the work he wants it to do than to its linguistic history. He first claims that the prefix ana- refers to ‘a movement from the rear toward the front’. While this is a possible sense of ‘up’ in Ancient Greek, he fails to explain why this should be seen as a movement ‘from one time toward an earlier’ (perhaps he associates the front line with an earlier time because it is first to advance). He complicates the picture further with a complex play on the literal meaning ‘up’: anachronism, he suggests, involves ‘a vertical problem of the order of time in the hierarchy of beings’; that is, the concept serves to connect human time with ‘what is above it’ – namely eternity. As we shall see, Rancière thinks that anachronism has typically been cast out by historians as a sin because it is the dark side of correct historical time, a time that is itself a modern surrogate for divine immanence.¹⁶

From a philological perspective, a better interpretation of the prefix ana- is that ‘up’ implies ‘back’. Among the Ancient Greeks, as in many cultures, the past could be conceived as lying above. The Greeks also at times used the image of time as a river flowing downwards.¹⁷ The basic sense of anachronizein, then, is to date something back in time. Exactly the same idea of a backwards projection was sometimes expressed by the same prefix in the words anagein ‘bring back’ and anapempein, ‘send back’.

The Greek verb a...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Prelude: Look to the End
• 1 Inventing Anachronism
• 2 Anachronistic Histories
• 3 Anachronism and Philology
• Interlude: Dido versus Virgil
• 4 Anachronism and Chronology
• 5 Anachronistic Survivals
• 6 Anachronism and Exemplarity
• Interlude: Ariadne on Naxos
• 7 Anachronism Now: Multitemporal Moments
• Interlude: Aeneas in the Underworld
• 8 Anachronistic Dialogues
• Epilogue: Crowning the Victors
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright