On Anachronism

Jeremy Tambling

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719082443
• eBook ISBN: 9781847797728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

On Anachronism argues that anachronism is basic to all literature and all history and further explores it in film and in music, and that it changes perceptions of time.

1

Seven types of anachronism: Proust

The Gozzoli frescos

References to anachronism in Proust (1871–1922) spread over four of the seven books of À la recherche dn temps perdu. Marking their occurrence is equivalent to introducing Proust, though, ironically, doing so chronologically. The novel was begun after 1907, the first volume appearing in 1913, the last, posthumously, in 1927. We start with Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way, in the older translation). There, the first chapter of the first Part, ‘Combray’, evokes the provincial town of Combray, outside Paris, the childhood summer home of the now much older narrator, called ‘Marcel’ twice in the entire work. He seems to be remembering, as a much older man, from a sanatorium where his lack of mental health has consigned him. He is suddenly enabled to remember: the second chapter becomes a meditation on childhood in Combray. One way for walking goes past Swann’s, and evokes his world; another goes past the Guermantes’, the aristocracy whose relations with Combray are feudal. The chapter’s narrative finally curls back to the narrator, still remembering from the point of view of the sanatorium (not his present abode, from where he writes). There follows a narrative, ‘Un Amour de Swann’ (‘Swann in Love’), also remembered from the sanatorium. It is of a story the narrator heard many years after leaving Combray, of an affair that Swann had had years before the narrator was born; the memory, then, comes from another person, of another, and different generation. This comprises Part 2, giving the love of the brilliant Jewish socialite Charles Swann, friend of the narrator’s parents, for Odette, a kept woman, and one whom his parents will not receive in their house at Combray.

The second book, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), begins chronologically, with a brief love-affair between the young narrator and Gilberte, daughter of Swann and Odette. It also shows the narrator’s entrance into the Paris world of Odette. In the first use of ‘anachronism’, the narrator listens to Swann comparing Mme Blatin, whose affectations appeared in the book’s first part, ‘At Madame Swann’s’, to the commemorative portrait of Savonarola by the Florentine artist Fra Bartolomeo (1472–1517). The picture, which shows Savonarola in profile, and hooded, is anachronistic (Savonarola in life after his burning), while Swann’s comparison reverses gender (to say that this cowled figure is a man depends on the picture’s inscription); it masculinises Mme Blatin, femininises Savonarola.¹ A commentary follows:

There was nothing implausible in this quirk of Swann’s, of seeing likenesses of real people in paintings: even what we call an individual expression is something general (as we discover to our chagrin when we are in love and wish to believe in the unique reality of the individual), something which may well have manifested itself at different periods. If Swann was to be believed, the Journey of the Magi, anachronistic enough when Benozzo Gozzoli painted the faces of the Medici brothers into it, was even more in advance of its time, as it contained, he said, the portraits of a host of people, contemporaries not of Gozzoli, but of Swann, dating not just from fifteen centuries later than the Nativity, but from four centuries after the time of the painter himself. According to Swann, not one notable Parisian was missing from the retinue of the Magi … (P.2.110–111)²

[Cette manie qu’avait Swann de trouver ainsi des ressemblances dans la peinture était défendable, car même ce que nous appelons l’expression individuelle est – comme on s’en rend compte avec tant de tristesse quand on aime et qu’on voudrait croire à la réalité unique de l’individu – quelque chose de général, et a pu se rencontrer à différentes époques. Mais si on avait écouté Swann, les cortèges des rois mages, déjà si anachroniques quand Benozzo Gozzoli y introduisit les Médicis, l’eussent été davantage encore puisqu’ils eussent contenu les portraits d’une foule d’hommes, contemporains non de Gozzoli, mais de Swann, c’est-à-dire postérieurs non plus seulement de quinze siècles à la Nativité, mais de quatre au peintre lui-même. Il n’y avait pas selon Swann, dans ces cortèges, un seul Parisien de marque qui manquât … (T.1.525–526)]³

This alludes to the 1459 frescos in the Florentine Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, by Benozzo Gozzoli (c.1420–1497). On the west wall is the oldest Magi, Melchior, on the south the black, middle-aged Balthasar, on the east the youngest, Caspar. Like a life, and suggestive for Proustian autobiography, the procession may be read as originating with the youngest, who brings up the rear, or with the oldest, who, fronting the procession, is nearest to Bethlehem. The compass positions in the chapel suit the provenance of these kings: Europe (West), Africa (South), Asia (East); and suggest time being read moving back, or forward. Caspar is accompanied by recognisable Medici family members, who thrust their importance into the life of the city: Cosimo and Piero, Carlo (Cosimo’s illegitimate son), and Piero’s sons, Lorenzo, then ten years old, and Giuliano. But Caspar may also be Lorenzo, in which case he is presented as older than he was, another anachronism; suggesting however that this shows that single identity within time, that which realist portraiture seems to establish, cannot be established. Similarly, the artist’s self-portrait appears twice, at the beginning and the end of the procession (but which is which?), in the east and west walls.

These frescos thus show something apparent in Proust: faces are both individual and general, historical and questioning what is meant by a historical period. Their reality is that of allegory. Gozzoli’s procession paints the Biblical journey of the Magi in then contemporary dress, and the processions made on the Feast of the Epiphany, wherein Cosimo took part; the Medici thus becoming the Magi. It is anachronistic, and an idealistic representation of an actual event. If Swann sees the Guermantes, and the inhabitants of the Faubourg de Saint Germain, as continuations of both the Magi and the Medici, and Paris as new Florence, that only continues the historical reading of the journey of the Magi which the Medici themselves performed; to these senses may be added another: that the procession which is enacted on the walls is a theatrical sense of power and identity which is undone by being related to another parade of power and identity in the persons within Proust, allegories of other situations, making memories of them also allegories.⁴ Do the people in Proust have their reality in themselves, or do they await another reality in which they will appear and which will absorb them, in the future?

À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs

In the second half of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the narrator turns from his failed love for Gilberte to a holiday at Balbec, on the Normandy coast. There he meets members of the aristocratic Guermantes dynasty who figure throughout the rest of the narrative. There is Robert de Saint-Loup, his brilliant contemporary and army-officer, whose affairs with women are legendary, but who is homosexual, something hinted at throughout but shown later. The second is Saint-Loup’s uncle, Palamède, i.e. Baron Charlus, who is the centre of what is homosexual in the book, though at this stage he too appears the opposite. At the beginning of this part, the narrator thinks he has put Gilberte behind him, but he has not. I cite the passage in two translations:

At the time, however, of my departure for Balbec, and during the earlier part of my stay there, my indifference was still only intermittent. Often, our life being so careless of chronology, interpolating so many anachronisms into the sequence of our days, I found myself living in those – far older days than yesterday or last week – when I still loved Gilberte. (E.2.299)

However, when I set off for Balbec, and during the first part of my stay there, my indifference was still only intermittent. Often (life being so unchronological, so anachronistic in its disordering of our days) I found myself living not on days immediately following the day or two before, but in the much earlier time when I had been in love with Gilberte.(P.2.221)

[Pourtant au moment de ce départ pour Balbec et pendant les premiers temps de mon séjour, mon indifference n’était encore qu’intermittente. Souvent (notre vie étant si peu chronologique, interférant tant d’anachronismes dans la suite des jours), je vivais dans ceux, plus anciens que la veille ou l’avant-veille, où j’aimais Gilberte. (T.2.3)]

It is not a question of a person being anachronistic, or a custom, habit or tradition: it is life itself, in the newer Penguin translation, which is so little chronological that it disorders our days; making being anachronistic structure life. The older translation responds to the French ‘notre’, making it our life which is careless of chronology and inserting anachronisms. That implies the power of the unconscious: there is something in the subject’s life that sets anachronisms going. But if it is impersonal ‘life’, as in the second translation, which is anachronistic, making the narrator say that he lived in those more ancient days when he loved Gilberte, then it seems that there can be no knowledge of what life is – it is that which is anachronistic. If the days are more ancient, that implies something else: that a love-affair also comes out of days which are older than personal experience; that any affair belongs to yesterday or the day before, but also to experience which is less easy to attribute to any personal or objective time. The anachronistic has to do with a time intermitting, more ancient, less attributable, lost, the ancient deranging, disordering, the present, and it asks in this case what it means to say that I am no longer in love with someone.

Paris and Venice

The third occurrence is cited through Kilmartin/Enright’s translation, since the Penguin misses the word. Elstir, the painter, is discussing Venetian yachts and lace, and how this has been rediscovered by Mariano Fortuny (1871–1949), the Spanish-born artist associated with Paris and Venice, so that soon women will be able to dress in brocades ‘as sumptuous as those that Venice adorned for her patrician daughters with patterns bought from the Orient’:

But I don’t know whether I should much care for that, whether it wouldn’t be too much of an anachronism for the women of today, even when they parade at regattas, for, to return to our modern pleasure-craft, the times have completely changed since ‘Venice, Queen of the Adriatic’. (E.2.553–554)

[Mais je ne sais pas si j’aimerai beaucoup cela, si ce ne sera pas un peu trop costume anachronique pour des femmes d’aujourd-hui, même paradant aux régates, car pour en revenir à nos modernes bateaux de plaisance, c’est tout le contraire que du temps de Venise, ‘Reine de l’Adriatique’. (T.2.253)]

These garments designed by Fortuny are worn by Mme de Guermantes (P.5.25–26, 36), and greatly admired by Albertine. The conversation with Elstir is remembered, with the reminder that, like the yachts, the gowns evoke the Venice of Carpaccio (c.1450–c.1525) and Titian (c.1490–1576); so the gowns evoke the boats. Evocation is of that which has not been seen, save in art-work. When the narrator buys six Fortuny gowns for the Albertine he keeps prisoner in Paris, the effect of the colours and the designs is to evoke the Venice he has never seen and which he desires. These clothes include a dressing gown and coats, one of blue and gold, which Albertine put on to go with him to Versailles (P.5.26, 35, 364–365, 374–375; T.3.543, 552, 895–896, 906). He speaks of the ‘old longing, recently awakened in me by the blue and gold Fortuny dress, which spread out before me another spring … “Venice”, a spring decanted’ (P.5.381). This is the occasion just fifteen hours before Albertine’s flight. The fashion, which plays on anachronism, prompts a revival of a desire he has had in the past; the text and memory loop backwards and forwards around Venice in the sixteenth century, and are never seen, except as represented in art; the fashions, revived in Paris, and the desire which is unattributable as to the time when it originated. And so, in Albertine disparue, the narrator and his mother visit the Galleria dell’ Accademia to see Carpaccio’s painting The Patriarch of Grado Exorcising a Demoniac, better known as Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross at Rialto, the painting of an episode of 1494.

The narrator describes Carpaccio’s painting, and recognises in the Compagnia della Calza (the hosiers’ guild) the cloak that Albertine wore to go to Versailles; Fortuny had taken the design from the picture, and it now drapes over the shoulders of Parisian women (the gender-change is significant) ‘who were doubtless as ignorant as I had been of the fact that the original could be found among a group of aristocrats in the foreground’ of the painting (P.5.611, T.4.226). The narrator has lost Albertine, but seen her trace through the Fortuny coat which derived from the painting he now looks at. The picture shows as synchronous different chronological moments: the procession passing over the Rialto, and then the Patriarch healing the man on the loggia of the Scuola della Santa Croce, where the relic of the true cross – surviving anachronistically, like all relics, like the garment of Albertine, new and old at the same moment – functions to imply one mystical time-scheme within the secularity of the rest of the picture which contains it.⁵

Elstir’s words resonate, and suggest how fashion is anachronistic; as Walter Benjamin says: ‘Fashion [meaning here the fashion created by Fortuny] has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past.’⁶ Fashion, even though under the power of capitalism, finds that moment in the past which is ‘topical’ with regards to the present; so it pinpoints a historical moment; in Proust, the narrator finds himself drawn back to Venice and to recognition of how the representation of an historical ‘incident’, whose questionableness is the point, has set up the present, including its fashions. These fashions remain unaware of the premises on which their existence was created. Discovering the Carpaccio picture becomes a memoire involontaire bringing the narrator back to his present: i.e. the loss of Albertine. When she wore the Fortuny blue and gold, he thought of Venice; when he sees Venice after her death, he thinks of ‘Albertine disparue’.⁷

The gown’s designs have risen from the ashes of time, from Carpaccio’s painting; ‘for everything must return, as it is written on the vaults of St Mark’s, and as the birds proclaim that we see drinking from the marble and jasper urns of Byzantine capitals, signifying both death and resurrection’ (P.5.341). That ‘tout doit revenir’ (T.3.871) is reaffirmed by the dress, ‘overrun with Arabic ornament, like Venice … like the columns whose oriental birds, signifying both life and death, were repeated in the shimmering of the fabric’ (P.5.365, T.3.896). The motifs of the phoenix are anachoristic (fabulous Oriental figures within Venice, and now within Paris, and depicted on garments) and intimate the mutuality of life and death. They break up any single chronology, and are significant for Albertine, whose death while horse-riding will come soon. But that everything must return suggests also Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’, theme of The Gay Science (section 341) and Thus Spake Zarathustra; Nietzsche’s abyssal thought, to be discussed in Chapter 4, becomes another instance of the anachronistic.⁸

Homosexuality and anachrony

The fourth ‘anachronism’ comes much later and, rather than its being developed implicitly through later sections of the book, like anachronisms two and three, Proust explicates it in its context, within almost discursive prose. In the third book, Le Côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way), the narrator now lives full-time with his parents in Paris, in apartments belonging to the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, and is attempting to enter that aristocratic world. Eventually he is introduced to the Duc and Duchesse, and moves up in their circle and that of the Faubourg de Saint-Germain, and re-meets the Duc’s brother, Charlus, whose homosexuality begins to become obvious to the reader in the way he tries to pick up the narrator, even if the narrator seems innocent about it. By the end of the book, the narrator has been invited to a party at the Prince de Guermantes’, which is as far up as he can hope to go; waiting for the Duc and Duchesse to return to their apartment in order to check up that this invitation is genuine, he makes a discovery which is not told then, but which, he declares at the opening of the short First Part of the next book, Sodome et Gomorrhe, he has postponed (différé) reporting.

Sodome et Gomorrhe is the novel’s most sustained treatment of male homosexuality -ascribed to the city of Sodom – and of lesbianism; which, in a quotation taken from Alfred de Vigny, and placed at the book’s front, is assigned to Gomorrah. The narrator, waiting in the courtyard of the Guermantes’, observes Baron Charlus picking up Jupien, the tailor who keeps a shop in the courtyard. The narrator sees that Jupien is one of a particular sort, ‘the man who loves only elderly gentlemen’ (P.4.11, T.3.9), and he sees the two men go off together for a homosexual experience, which he tries to witness, as far as possible. The men return and the narrator says that he now understood why, when he had seen Baron Charlus coming out of Mme de Villeparisis’s apartments, he had arrived at the conclusion that Baron Charlus looked like a woman. At that moment, when the Baron did not know he was under any inspection, he looked like a marble statue, already carved in stone, Palamède XV, in the chapel at Combray. His appearance was then anachronistic; he seemed to belong to a more ancient time. The Baron, when unaware of being under surveillance, appears neither touchy nor arrogant, but affectionate and defenceless:

I could not help reflecting how angry M. de Charlus would have been had he known he was being watched; for what he put me in mind of, this man who was so enamoured of, who so prided himself on, his virility, who found everyone hatefully effeminate, what he suddenly put me in mind of, so unmistakably did he ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: Seven types of anachronism: Proust
• 2: Fools of time: Michelangelo and Shakespeare
• 3: Chronicles of death foretold
• 4: Future traces
• Last words
• Notes
• Index