On Anachronism 9781847793515

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On anachronism

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On anachronism JEREMY TAMBLING

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York

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Copyright © Jeremy Tambling 2010 The right of Jeremy Tambling to be identified 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

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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

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Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction Deliberate anachronism Anachronism and historical writing ‘Pierre Menard’ Death sentence

1 1 6 9 14

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Seven types of anachronism: Proust The Gozzoli frescos À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs Paris and Venice Homosexuality and anachrony ‘The Intermittencies of the Heart’ Jealousy Matters of chronology

23 23 25 27 29 38 45 50

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Fools of time: Michelangelo and Shakespeare Michelangelo’s sonnets Time and Shakespeare’s sonnets The history plays: ‘Richard’s time’ Falstaff

54 54 59 65 75

3:

Chronicles of death foretold Archival anachrony King Lear: fortune’s bastards Fearing anachronism: All’s Well that Ends Well

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85 85 90 108

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4:

Contents

Future traces Memory traces Blanchot and Derrida Anarchronoristics Time and passivity Disappointments: 2046 Trauma and the future anterior

119 119 125 131 135 138 142

Last words Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde

149 149

Notes Index

158 181

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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 defining the discussion and forms of anachronism, if it is possible to find examples of that which, in principle, has the ability to distort all forms of ordering. The book was never intended to be a complete survey of texts which use anachronism (many have offered suggestions of specific 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 associated 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 fiction: 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 Alfie 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 anachronistic 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 defines 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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2

On anachronism In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say ‘See!’ to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing . . . We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which jolts us around and along . . . Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.3

Hardy sees the anachronistic as negative, blames delay, desires a punctual chronology which is nonetheless blamed for excluding and exploiting the rural poor, and women, in its progress. Hardy’s unwillingness to let the heterogeneous – the anachronistic – help him critique modern life makes him radical and conservative together: the writing affirms the order it nonetheless despises. Usually used as a term of criticism from those who consider themselves happily within chronology – which Hardy is not – being anachronistic has the potential of unsettling readings of history which see the times as moving forward steadily. Hardy mourns inability to change chronological development, but does nothing with the anachronism, as when in Jude the Obscure (1895) the children, led by the boy called Father Time, an anachronous contradiction, hang themselves. Jude quotes the doctor: there ‘are such boys springing up among us – boys of a sort unknown in the last generation – the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.’4 The children kill themselves, believing that there can be no future, or that future times were unchangeable: they see no power in anachrony. Dread of being out of time, irrelevant or mad comes in the German lyric poet Hölderlin (1770–1843), in the elegy ‘Brod und Wein’ (Bread and Wine).5 This contrasts the daytime of the Greeks, when the gods seemed to present themselves, with the night, the time of the absence of the gods, the time of absence. While, on closer reading, it seemed that the gods had never been so present as they

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Introduction

3

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seemed to be – they disappeared in the moment of being named – the seventh strophe creates a state of being anachronistic: But my friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living, Over our heads they live, up in a different world. Endlessly there they act and, such is their kind wish to spare us, Little they seem to care whether we live or do not. For not always a frail, a delicate vessel can hold them, Only at times can our kind bear the full impact of gods. Ever after our life is dream about them. But frenzy, Wandering, helps, like sleep; Night and distress make us strong Till in that cradle of steel heroes enough have been fostered, Hearts in strength can match heavenly strength as before. Thundering then they come. But meanwhile too often I think it’s Better to sleep than to be friendless as we are, alone, Always waiting, and what to do or say in the meantime I don’t know, and who wants poets at all in lean years? But they are, you say, like those holy ones, priests of the wine-god Who in holy night roamed from one place to the next.6 [Aber, Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter, Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt. Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten, Ob wir leben, so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns. Denn nicht immer vermag ein schwaches Gefäss sie zu fassen, Nur zu Zeiten erträgt göttliche Fülle der Mensch. Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben. Aber das Irrsaal Hilft, wie Schlummer und stark machet die Noth und die Nacht, Biss dass Helden genug in der ehernen Wiege gewachsen, Herzen an Kraft, wie sonst, ähnlich den Himmlischen sind. Donnernd kommen sie drauf. Indessen dünket mir öfters Besser zu schlafen, wie so ohne Genossen zu seyn, So zu harren und was zu thun indess und zu sagen, Weiss ich nicht und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit? Aber sie sind, sagst du, wie des Weingotts heilige Priester, Welche von Lande zu Land zogen in heiliger Nacht.]

Fear of belatedness is subjected to different ways of reading, by an oscillation of feeling or attitude within the verse: the gods are still there, which is good, but little they seem to care whether we live or not. Another translation intensifies lines 3 and 4: they ‘seem to care very little / Whether we live, so well do they spare us’.7 The stanza wavers between acceptance, excusing the gods’ absence, and feeling desolate, a sense picked up in and after ‘But meanwhile’. It

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On anachronism

produces the despair that poetry is anachronistic: who wants poets in lean years, or in a time of dearth? But the last two lines respond to another person saying that poets are like the priests of Dionysus, wandering in night, which would make Hölderlin’s poet unnecessary, a vagrant, like King Lear’s Fool, subject of Chapter 4, out of time. For Maurice Blanchot, central to On Anachronism, Hölderlin lives doubly in distress. ‘His time is the empty time when what he has to live is the double absence of the gods, who are no longer and who are not yet.’8 Outside one time-scheme, another, which might have been brought in by the French Revolution, is not yet. The first ‘absence’ means that Hölderlin’s language, relative to the gods who are no longer, bears no relation to his time; while he is too early in relation to another time, which may not come. Poetic language becomes anachronistic in being unrelated to the ‘homogeneous empty time’ (Benjamin’s phrase) wherein he exists; Hölderlin lives, says Blanchot, the time of the ‘and’ which never had beginning, which may never have end: the ‘and’ is anti-anachronicity, between the gods who were, and will be, anachronous.9 Perhaps art is belated. The modernist film-maker Alexander Kluge argues that literature and music have gone as far as possible in modernist practices: ‘there is no avant-garde when the avant-garde has done everything . . . If we have to lead something, we lead it both as the avant-garde and the arrière-garde. The avant-garde is a concept valid for the early bourgeois period, but not for the end of the bourgeois. At this stage, it may be necessary to be behind and to bring everything forward.’10 To consider the necessity of being arrière-garde may be a way of thinking about anachrony’s relevance within art. Anachronism counters a reading where events happen within a definable historical framework, with ‘before’ and ‘after’, cause and effect. The word appears in the 1640s: ‘dating something too early for it to have happened’. Shakespeare’s plays appear just when anachronicity becomes noticeable. An essay of Francis Douce (1757–1834), ‘On the Anachronisms and some other Incongruities of Shakespeare’, searches Shakespeare for signs of ‘medley’, ‘whimsicalities’ and ‘errors’, finding most anachronisms in the Henry IV plays, discussed in Chapter 2, and instancing Julius Caesar (2.1.191–192): Clock strikes BRUTUS: Peace! Count the clock. CASSIUS: The clock hath stricken three.11

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Introduction

5

For the New Arden, ‘the anachronism of a striking clock in 44 BC is distressing to those shut off from imaginative time. The dramatic action is more “here and now” than “then” and the bell-notes signal a change from ethical debate to urgently deciding what to do, when.’12 Anachronism, in literary terms, starts with Shakespeare: in Ulysses, discussing Shakespeare, John Eglinton says that the equivalent of Shakespeare’s plots and subplots – derived from different moments and genres – being spatchcocked together is combining a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. ‘He puts Bohemia on the seacoast [The Winter’s Tale] and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.’ Stephen Daedalus says, in reply, he is like God, ‘the playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us the light first and the sun two days later)’.13 So Shakespeare figures in my Chapter 2 through the Sonnets, the history plays (Richard II and the Henry IV plays), and in chapter three, through one tragedy, King Lear and one comedy, All’s Well that Ends Well. Anachrony arises from the disparity between events and their narration. In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson and Shreve, in Harvard in 1910, discuss the American South, and the history of Thomas Sutpen, whose ‘trouble was innocence’ and who suddenly discovered ‘what he just had to do’ when he was fourteen: ‘Because he was born in West Virginia, in the mountains –’ (‘Not in West Virginia’, Shreve said. ‘Because if he was twenty-five years old in Mississippi in 1833, he was born in 1808. And there wasn’t any West Virginia in 1808 because –’ ‘All right’, Quentin said. ‘– West Virginia wasn’t admitted –’ ‘All right all right’, Quentin said. ‘– into the United States until –’ ‘All right all right all right’, Quentin said.)14

Thomas Sutpen was born into what became West Virginia, but there was no state of West Virginia in 1808. On 15 April 1861, Lincoln’s proclamation blockaded southern ports, followed by Virginia’s secession from the Union, alongside Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. This produced the split of the western part of Virginia from Virginia, and a new state admitted to the Union. Quentin and Shreve, discussing the American Civil War, itself highly anachronistic, and recalling how West Virginia was created, consider events a century earlier. Historical reconstruction means that to describe events or places they must use terms unrecognisable to the people in those situations. If history is what happened, and what we say happened, the first only knowable through the second, history can only

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On anachronism

be anachronistic. It approaches the logic of the dream, anachronistic, anachoristic. Freud comments on logical connections in dreams being reproduced by simultaneity in time, instancing Raphael’s reproduction in a single group of all the philosophers or poets on Parnassus. Freud’s imagination makes the example an instance of anachronism (not using the word) when saying that these people ‘were never in fact assembled in a single hall or on a single mountain-top’.15 Yet Raphael is not anachronistic, since Parnassus is an ideal space; he can include, fairly, all historical periods in one: Freud draws Raphael’s dream-vision into anachrony. Spatial relationships, as in a dream of a platform moving towards the incoming train, rather than the train arriving at the platform, also show the interchangeability for Freud of time and space within the dream (SE 5.408). The reversal is also of cause and effect: dreams, as anachronistic and anachoristic, disallow narrative causality. Anachronism and historical writing For Peter Burke, anachronism as a concept was created within, and informed, the Renaissance.16 Thomas Greene argues that the Renaissance was fascinated by anachronism, fastening on its awareness of differences of language between the classical and the modern, and discussing the then literary interest in ‘imitations’. Greene discusses Dante (1265–1321) as the first writer for whom ‘linguistic drift’, languages changing or going out of date, becomes significant: he notes that Dante’s Virgil, when first seen, appeared ‘hoarse from long silence’ (‘per lungo silenzio parea fioco’ – Inf. 1.63).17 For Dante to bring Virgil into the Commedia is anachronistic, as is everything in that text: it is no coincidence that the question in Dante of what happens to language is comparable with demonstrating the power of the afterlife, with the sense that everything in the present life is subject to postponement, that it exists now in figural reality and will after death become more real. But for Dante there is no anachronism, since nothing is ever lost to time. That is because there is no simple chronology. Burke makes the concept of anachronism synonymous with a sense of historical distance, or perspective, or sense of change. He discusses to what extent earlier periods, such as the medieval, possessed a sense of historical distance. He says the medieval laid greater stress on historical continuity than change, giving three examples of this.

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Introduction

7

The first: medieval commentators on the ruins of Rome did not see them as markers of an earlier and different period. Ruins were seen as a given: it was not enquired how they marked an earlier period: the exception to this sense, Burke argues, was Petrarch, whom he takes as the first antiquarian, defined (by Arnaldo Momigliano) as having ‘the idea of a civilization recovered by systematic collection of all the relics of the past’ (Renaissance Sense of the Past, 139). The second comes from Biblical interpretation: the fourfold method of Biblical exegesis (literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical) did not read events in terms of their historical content or difference. Events and their structure could be lifted out of context and made to seem free-standing, able to be applied in completely different circumstances, encouraging anachrony. The third example is that Roman law was applied without a sense of the difference between the circumstances of its being laid down and then present-day circumstances. Burke thinks the medieval period could not, psychologically, recognise historical change. He argues that Protestantism, Lutheranism particularly, included a new distancing of the past, setting it apart from the present. The new attention to philology in Lorenzo Valla (1405–1457), and the attention to Rome’s ruins of Flavio Biondo (1388–1463), produces, in the Renaissance, a sense of historical difference. OED gives 1579 for the word ‘obsolete’ (in Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar). Burke sees antiquarianism appearing in Britain in the 1580s, with William Camden (1551–1623) – whom he compares with Biondo – and in John Selden (1584–1654), compared with Valla. The word ‘synchronism’ is first cited in 1589. Its use means deciding that there may be a coherence between disparate events happening at the same time. Burke concludes The Renaissance Sense of the Past with the nineteenth century and Lord Acton discussing ‘the documentary age which will tend to make history independent of historians’, though Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) initiates ‘the real originator of the heroic study of records’. For Burke, there has been a displacement in history writing from ‘narrative sources or ‘chronicles’ to documentary sources (p. 144), showing an increasing attention to objectivity emanating from awareness of anachronism. I refer to the idea of the chronicle in Chapter 3.18 But Burke remains bound to a ‘history of ideas’, making his procedure duplicate his argument: the Renaissance became aware of historical change, and so of anachronism; and so built itself on a ‘history of ideas’. Perhaps any modern history writing is premised on

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On anachronism

being able to exclude the anachronous, though public, monumental (in Nietzsche’s sense) forms of history often require the anachronous in them. Burke instances the American Benjamin West (1738–1820), whose controversial picture Death of General Wolfe (1771), according to West’s biographer John Galt, had Sir Joshua Reynolds coming to see West before the picture’s completion, to tell him that the modern dress, the coats, breeches and cocked hats of the men who fought against the French at Quebec in 1759 were inappropriate for the grand style. For West, ‘the same truth which gives law to the historian should rule the painter’.19 Hence the hero is dressed in modern style; a contrast to Wolfe’s classical, nude memorial in Westminster Abbey. Yet, if West’s work is modern, it adds in other forms of incongruity: Wolfe is surrounded by supportive figures whereas he died with only two or three attendants; the presence of an American Indian watching the death of the Englishman adds in a ‘noble savage’ who is inherently an anachronism within the scene, because the ‘noble savage’ permits two time-schemes, the modern Western and something else more primitive. No American Indians were involved at Quebec. Distance from Canada makes modern dress possible; the sense of another place frames the scene and provides a sense of historical difference. West remains anachronistic, as in his Death of Nelson (1806), following hard on Trafalgar, and styled on Wolfe, and on John Singleton Copley’s Death of the Earl of Chatham (1781).20 Nelson dies on deck, not below; with Hardy present, as he was not, and, as with Wolfe, in a framing like a pietà. ‘Historical painting’, as paradigmatic for historical representation, substitutes one anachronism for another. That the medieval world did not see historical distance, but syncretised past and present, Burke giving several examples, is problematic. It has been argued that medieval anachronisms, in the French romances and lays of antiquity, are deliberate, rising from ‘the necessity of communication within adaptation’, or because of translation of older texts, which would require anachronisms to be humorous, as aids to communication, or out of a desire to secularise or desacralise figures of the past or ‘to actualise the past and secure its vitality’.21 But Gabrielle Spiegel quotes John Pocock that ‘the study of the past within a society or within a particular segment of society, originates when a traditional relationship to the immediate past has broken down’. A response to disturbance of traditional continuities is to create myth, ‘historicising or constructing a novel image of the past

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Introduction

9

in terms of some new continuity’.22 So perception of historical difference (which would entail awareness of anachronism) often requires its effacement, putting past and present together into a framework of eternally surviving universal values. Spiegel’s example is of Christian chivalry, which, as in Chrétien’s Yvain, was seen as continuing pre-Christian Greek and Roman soldiery. Perception of anachronism, then, comes from a society comparatively confident about its present. A society where anachronism was not recognised could be one where the past was a needed place of escape. ‘Pierre Menard’ Latin American fiction practises ‘the technique of deliberate anachronism’. So Borges says, but, before discussing it, we should note that one source for the technique is Don Quixote which simultaneously inaugurates realist fiction (if we follow Cervantes into Fielding), and makes anachronism inherent in texts which use it (as with Sterne in Tristram Shandy). Don Quixote builds anachrony into its structure with the hero who goes out as a knight errant, ‘to travel about the world with his armour and his arms and his horse in search of adventures, and to practise all those activities that he knew from his books were practised by knights errant, redressing all kinds of grievances, and exposing himself to perils and dangers that he would overcome and thus gain eternal fame and renown’.23 His mad choice is deliberately anachronistic, but, discussing the ‘culture of the Baroque’ in which Cervantes lived, and which makes Quixote, ‘a knight in the extreme’, baroque, the historian Maravall notes its anachronicity, singling out within that culture – which could not modernise itself – the nobility which failed to update itself.24 An early fiction within the first eight chapters of Don Quixote is that the writer is transcribing from other authors who have already written the hero’s history. After that, a regular, if imaginary, ‘source’ is found: Cid Hamet Ben Engeli. The hero, whose life as a hidalgo seems out-of-date, is fascinated by books of chivalry, romances, outdated fictions, which animate ‘the long since lost and as it were buried, order of knight errantry’ (1.28, p. 256), the fictitious life of which he describes to Sancho Panza in chapter 21. He seeks to live by such fictions, and by them he creates himself as Don Quixote, giving birth to himself as someone even more anachronistic. Living out the romances, he follows their absolute valuations of virtue and vice.25

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On anachronism

A life of anachronism in Don Quixote is madness, but the fiction shows a gradual identification with that: Quixote cannot be mocked, or kept at a distance. There must be a siding with madness, and the past, even with the Golden Age, with which Don Quixote identifies (chapter 11). Borges uses Cervantes in his first avowed work of fiction, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1939). The novella shows that to work on any text of the past is anachronistic, but there is no choice: no writing can be of the present. The prejudicial, reactionary narrator discusses how the now dead writer Menard – his memory, the narrator says, spoiled by the omissions and additions perpetrated by Mme Henri Bachelier’s catalogue of his writings – wrote chapter 9 and chapter 38 and a fragment of chapter 22 of Don Quixote. Menard sees the seventeenth-century Don Quixote as nonanachronistic: writing it ‘was a reasonable, necessary, perhaps even inevitable undertaking’ (93). But writing it in the twentieth century is almost impossible, anachronistic. Menard is inspired by texts of ‘distinctly unequal value’: one was that philological fragment by Novalis – number 2005 in the Dresden edition, to be precise, which outlines the notion of total identification with a given author. The other was one of those parasitic books that set Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannabière, or Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like every man of taste, Menard abominated those pointless travesties, which, Menard would say, were good for nothing but occasioning a plebeian delight in anachronism or (worse yet) captivating us with the elementary notion that all times and places are the same, or are different. It might be more interesting, he thought, though of contradictory and superficial execution, to attempt what Daudet had so famously suggested: conjoin in a single figure (Tartarin, say), both the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote and his squire . . .26

The passages in Cervantes make the idea of a single author impossible. Novalis’s passage, ‘Pflichtenlehre des Lesers’ says ‘I only show that I have understood an author when I can act in his spirit; when, without diminishing his individuality, I can translate him and transform him in many ways’.27 Menard wants ‘total identification’ with his author, as Don Quixote identifies with those chivalric texts he has read, which have driven him mad. Quixote thinks, as he rides out, of the future writer – a sage enchanter – who will chronicle his exploits. He will have to write in the styles of the past: ‘Scarcely had the ruddy Phoebus spread the golden tresses of his beauteous hair over the face

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Introduction

11

of the wide and spacious earth . . .’ (1.2.29). There can be no single author, and no single, uniform style. Hence, Don Quixote chapter 9, one of the passages Menard transforms, begins with the apparent hiatus of there being no more narrative of Don Quixote available. The unknown author who has been followed by the narrator, who calls himself the ‘second undertaker’ of the work, has left off: the second undertaker can transcribe no more. But, believing in the historicity of Don Quixote’s exploits, the second undertaker says he has been left with the conviction that the history could not lie buried in oblivion, but must exist somewhere. Aiming to find it, he discovers it in Cid Hamet Ben Engeli’s Arabic version, sold in Toledo streets. He gets it translated into Spanish, and transcribes that. This Arabic history – all Arabs, the text says, are liars – shows its plural nature since there appears written in the margins: ‘This woman Dulcinea del Toboso, so often mentioned in this book, is said to have had a dabber hand at salting pork than any other woman in La Mancha’ (Don Quixote 1.9.75). These lines (a) make the woman that Don Quixote has created out of his imaginative sense of the woman Aldonza Lorenzo real, as if his imagination has given her life, and (b) magic her into Circe. It seems from chapter 9 that it is impossible to get a single truth from a single history, when it is not even possible to decide whether the ‘history’ is inside the sphere of the factual or the fictional. The narrator feels that Cid Hamet has fallen short, as a historian, of truth: for where he could and should have launched into the praises of such an excellent knight, he seems to have been careful to pass them over in silence, which is something he shouldn’t have done or even thought of doing, because historians should and must be precise, truthful and unprejudiced, without allowing self-interest to turn them away from the path of truth, whose mother is history: the imitator of time, the storehouse of actions and the witness to the past, an example and lesson to the present and a warning to the future. (Don Quixote 1.9.77)

The ‘second undertaker’ thinks that poetic truth – which is rhetorical, praising Quixote – is the only truth here. Exaggeration by way of praise is sober truth; failure to exaggerate falls short of truth. Such ‘truth’ is the only ‘rival of time’, being anachronic. The narrator says that Menard’s ‘truth, the mother of history’ is not now, in Menard, rhetorical praise of history – where ‘history’ means something like

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‘fame’ – but has become a pragmatic statement: ‘history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”, it is what we believe happened’ (94). As Cid Hamet has discarded rhetoric for fact, so Menard has discarded truth as fact for truth as performance, as rhetoric, producing reality, in a reading which parallels, rather than opposing the earlier text. Similarly, Menard writes the section where Don Quixote discourses on arms and letters, praising the former so that people are amazed at his madness at doing so. While for the seventeenth century this praise was traditional, it now shows up a prevalent sophistry. The text is identical, but now has a new ironic structure, making it richer, more ambiguous. Reading a historical text must not underwrite the text in the pursuit of a presumed historical understanding which it is thought will escape anachrony. It will understand that the meanings of texts are contingent, not inevitable, including their meanings within their historical context, but which have no more privilege than a reading which works from the present can claim. The narrator calls the ‘“final” Quixote’ of Menard: a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces of our friend’s previous texts must shine through. Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard, reversing the labors of the first, would be able to exhume and revive those Troys.

A palimpsest is parchment designed to be written on again, where previous writings, though erased, remain visible. The ultimate text contains the previous versions of Don Quixote; it encourages reading a present-day text to discover not its present but the present as historical difference, marked by previous texts. This is a matter not of searching for ‘influences’ upon a present text but of finding within it the ‘trace’ of past differences. The narrator recalls Menard’s conviction, based on the necessity of entering into past thoughts and ideas which now seem impossible to lay hold of imaginatively and sympathetically, that ‘every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be’. This is not anachrony in the sense of playing with time for fun. It is not the ‘plebeian’ delight in anachronism, pretending that time can be abolished, that Christ, Hamlet and Don Quixote as eternal types may appear anywhere. It is rather a sense that the work of the present may donate something to the past, in reviving those Troys.

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There is an argument about authorship within ‘Pierre Menard’; Menard has not tried rewriting those sections of the text where ‘Cervantes’ speaks, as in the Prologue to Part Two, where he speaks of himself autobiographically, asserting his identity in contradistinction to the author of a spurious sequel to Don Quixote (by the Licentiate Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, published in Tarragona in 1614) (91). Menard attempts to distinguish the authentic from the non-authentic text, but to ‘author’ Don Quixote means paying attention to a weave of voices, which are so varied that, in the past text of 1605, it suddenly seems that a modern voice speaks. To be an author, as opposed to an authority, means accepting textual anachronisms, which make each moment of writing unstable in relationship to chronology, and destabilise chronology. No text can be either anachronistic or writing which is of its time: all writing is both. This makes the effort to speak of any author, including Menard, impossible, for there can be no punctual relationship between the writer and the work. Attempts to write a biography founder. Authorial intention cannot be spoken of: Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique – the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to read the Odyssey as though it came after the Aeneid, to read Mme Henri Bachelier’s Le jardin du Centaure as though it were written by Mme Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the calmest books with adventure. Attributing the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce – is not that sufficient renovation of those faint spiritual admonitions? (95)

Deliberate anachronism comes from reading: the Aeneid may be read before the Odyssey, so that the historically earlier and influential text is read soaked with the presuppositions of the historically later. Reading creates anachronistic thinking. Authorship and attributions disappear; the world becomes full of titles of non-existent books (anachronism thrives in the sphere of what on dit – ‘they say’), while it is always possible to imagine a text becoming attributed to someone else. Interest in author-attribution attempts to sort out an archive which is irretrievable in being so plural. Menard’s narrator speaks of ‘deliberate anachronism’, but actually, everything becomes anachronistic: nothing more so than the correct historical order. Reading Mme Bachelier’s text as if it was by her is one possible

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choice in a field of anachronies, which makes the ‘right’ chronological reality only one way of thinking about time, when all ways of thinking about it are attempts to think about what is heterogeneous, what cannot be reduced to order.

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Death sentence Derrida’s ‘Aphorisme Contretemps’, on Romeo and Juliet, makes writing and reading both ‘contretemps’. Sarah Kofman calls the aphorism ‘an invitation to dance: it is the actual writing of the will to power, affirmative, light and innocent’, the ‘task which requires one to elevate “reading to the level of an art”‘.28 ‘On Reading and Writing’ in Thus Spake Zarathustra declares that Zarathustra would believe only in a God who would dance; aphorisms resist the ‘spirit of heaviness’. Zarathustra refuses any equal relation between writer and reader, or presumption that a writer can communicate with a known readership. Writing must risk being out of time: Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart. In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks – and those who are addressed, tall and lofty. The air thin and pure, danger near, and the spirit full of sarcasm: these go well together. I want to have goblins round me, for I am dangerous. Courage that puts ghosts to flight creates goblins for itself: courage wants to laugh.

Derrida’s starts with Romeo and Juliet: 1. Aphorism is the name. 2. As its name indicates, aphorism separates, it marks dissociation [apo], it terminates, delimits, arrests [horizo]. It brings to an end by separating, it separates in order to end – and to define [finir – et définir]. 3. An aphorism is a name but every name can take on the figure of aphorism. 4. An aphorism is exposure to contretemps. It exposes discourse – hands it over to contretemps. Literally – because it is abandoning a word [une parole] to its letter. (Already this could be read as a series of aphorisms, the alea of an initial anachrony. In the beginning there was contretemps. In the beginning there is speed. Word and deed are overtaken. Aphorism outstrips.)29

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OED gives ‘definition’ as a first definition of aphorism. Every name, says Derrida, can take on the figure of aphorism, becoming writing. An aphorism can go in any one of several ways. Derrida makes aphorism ‘exposure to contretemps’, ‘contretemps’ meaning ‘an inopportune occurrence; an untoward accident; an unexpected mishap or hitch’ (translator’s note). In French, ‘contretemps’ means ‘out of time’ or ‘offbeat’ in the musical sense, adding to the sense of ‘bad, or wrong time’, ‘counter-time’ (416). Derek Attridge adds in ‘mishap’ and ‘syncopation’, saying that ‘the story of Romeo and Juliet has become a byword for love blighted by mischance and destroyed by unfortunate timing’ (414). ‘Contretemps’ as the offbeat associates with ragtime and jazz, being any impulse in a rhythmic pattern which is not the downbeat, a word which implies what is strong, and making the offbeat always weak. The offbeat is the weak, ‘the strange, the odd’ (OED). Strange behaviour implies being out-of-time. If the offbeat recalls how music and time associate, it indicates how difficult it is to think of anachronism in music. So there has been little ‘deconstruction’ of music, a topic hardly touched on by Derrida, just as music was the subject Freud could do nothing with. A musical anachronism might mean an orchestra-player coming in a bar late, which could be a joke. Haydn, who specialised in musical jokes, or surprises, altering expectations, wrote Symphony No. 101, called ‘The Clock’ (1794), with its clock ticking, before Johann Nepomuk Maelzel patented the metronome. Beethoven dedicated the ‘metronome’ section (the Allegretto) of Symphony No. 8 (1815) to Maelzel. In 1820, Spohr, conducting, began using a baton for giving time and making the orchestra keep it. But a good example of the offbeat (and the anachronistic) is John Cage’s 4´33´´ (1952), which sounds precisely limited, but goes on as long as it likes, being the sound of time itself. Aphorism is ‘exposure to contretemps’ because it exposes discourse, which has a temporal context, to the letter, as outside temporality. Derrida says that what he has written could be taken as a series of aphorisms, making the aphorism the dice-throw (alea = dice) of an initial anachrony. The throw of the dice affirms chance and multiplicity. The initial anachrony is contretemps: accident and chance are from the beginning. Derrida’s fourth aphorism links contretemps with speed, which, as it appears here, generates itself from the word ‘post’ (compare ‘post-haste’) which also suggests abandoning a word to its letter. A ‘post’ was a station, referring to the habit, which, in England, began in the sixteenth century, of placing posted

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horsemen at intervals on the road to carry speedily the king’s packet – the mail, the mail being a bag. By metonymy, the post becomes the courier.30 From hour to hour, a message travelled in a series of relays. England was – and is – gridded with forms of communication, networks, intended to prevent anachronism, the arrival of news too late, out of sequence. In Mahler’s Third Symphony (1893–1896, first performed 1902), third movement, ‘What the Forest Animals Tell Me’, the solo posthorn sounds as a relic of those days of the horn accompanying the mail, but simultaneously gives ‘the interruption of the post, a sign of rapid communication over great distances’ implying ‘the intrusion of modernity into the otherwise pastoral rhetoric’.31 A dialectical effect: the mournful tone suggests modernity. Whereas in Shakespeare, people ‘post’ (= hurry after, go behind) someone, in the ‘post-age’, the symmetry of names signed and sending and names receiving is foiled: e-mails get lost and out of sequence , unsurprisingly because ‘post’ also suggests that things are placed in an after position, after the event, or are postponed (‘post’ meaning also ‘after’, and ‘ponere’ meaning ‘to place’). Postponement means deferral; the postponed arrives out of time. Kafka’s The Trial (1925) discusses ‘postponement’ when Titorelli offers Joseph K three possibilities, ‘definite acquittal, ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement’. The latter is better than ostensible acquittal since ‘the future of the accused is less uncertain, he is secured from the terrors of sudden arrest, and doesn’t need to fear having to undergo – perhaps at a most inconvenient moment – the strain and agitation which are inevitable in the achievement of ostensible acquittal’.32 Yet what is ‘postponed’ is placed later in time, and appears as an anachorism. So jet-lag (1969: OED): décalage horaire in French (time-gap), combining the sense of anachronism and anachorism, places one time (that of the body) inside another, literally postpones it. The electric telegraph system came into being during the first part of the nineteenth century and became part of a culture of ‘simultaneity’, whereby many events are experienced at the same time.33 E-mail outstrips any chronology that can be devised; it is a culture of postponement, inciting, retarding. David Farrell Krell’s book Postponements discusses Nietzsche having planned to write a drama which would turn on questions of woman, sensual love and tragic death, plans which extended over the period 1870 to 1886. If such a drama had been written, it would have been an encounter with absolute presence. Between 1870 to 1872, Nietzsche was planning a

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drama entitled Empedocles, under the shadow of Hölderlin’s drafts for a play on the death of Empedocles: Krell says that the ‘leading female character embodies sensual love, plague, and death for the tragic philosopher’. While writing Thus Spake Zarathustra, Krell says Nietzsche was planning another drama, on Zarathustra’s death, an event forever postponed from the book. Krell quotes from near the end of Part 1 of Zarathustra, a section entitled ‘Voluntary Death’ and his translation may be quoted, noting from him the change of tense which envisages, executes and postpones death: Thus I myself want to die, so that you friends will love the earth all the more for my sake; and I want to become earth again, so that I find rest in her who bore me. Truly, Zarathustra had a goal; he tossed his ball. Now you friends are the inheritors of my goal: I toss the golden ball to you. More than anything, my friends, I want to see you tossing the golden ball! And so I linger a bit longer on earth: forgive my malingering. [Und so verziehe ich noch ein Wenig auf Erden: verzeiht es mir!]34

Zarathustra lingers: he has no Untergang (downgoing). Krell points to part 3, ‘The Vision and the Riddle’ and to ‘The Convalescent’, in both of which sections there is a withdrawal from death. Krell has no answer to explain these postponements of a confrontation with absolute presence, yet postponement makes Nietzsche’s text more prolific, as if the placing after or beyond that which is within and ghosting the text incites further writing. For Derrida, putting speed at the beginning puts aphorism at the beginning. Punning on ‘discourse’, which comes from ‘courir’ to run, and which also implies a courier, aphorism has the power to overtake word and deed, like three figures in an allegory. The letter does not arrive at its destination because of aphorism: the aphorism links with anachrony. The anachronism is against time, it is countertime, time contre time: as Derrida says later of Romeo and Juliet that the title’s copulative indicates ‘fortuitous contretemps . . . aleatory anachrony’.35 The anachronous incident comes to illustrate an essential truth. It confounds a philosophical logic which would like accidents to remain what they are, accidental. This logic, at the same time, throws out into the unthinkable an anachrony of structure, the absolute interruption of history as deployment of a temporality, a single and organized temporality.

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A logocentric desire banishes chance and accident in the name of order: but the effect of the argument is to ask what is meant by chance. In Mallarmé, the throw of the dice will never abolish chance. This, as a provocation, assigns to chance both the status of accident and destiny. Deleuze agrees, in saying, with relation to Nietzsche: ‘the dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity’.36 In the essay ‘My Chances’, Derrida thinks of chance, (a word – like ‘accident’ – deriving from ‘cadere’ – Latin: to fall), in two ways. He shows how words for chance or luck relate to a downwards movement – a throw (as a throw of the dice) or fall. Words whose etymology invokes falling include: ‘symptom, lapsus, incident, accidentality, cadence, coincidence, expiation date [écheance], luck, good luck, and méchance’ – a word which yields ‘méchant’ – naughty. Words implying chance link with fate, with what befalls; the implication being that chance exists within necessity, within fate, not as opposed to it, or that chance is not the exception, to causality, but that causality works by chance. Chance is also used to delimit and exclude: so Derrida concludes with the Bastard Edmund in King Lear, the subject of Chapter 3. Edmund blames Fortune for his exclusion from legitimacy; but the ruling class manipulate chance to secure the reign of that which is ‘proper’. But chance is not separate from what ‘Aphorism Contretemps’ calls ‘a system of marks’ (the iterable signs within a society) which: frame, organize, put in order, render possible a rendezvous: in other words, to deny, while taking note of it, non-coincidence . . . everything that renders possible a contretemps or the irremediable detour of a letter . . . the accidental contretemps comes to remark the essential contretemps. (420)37

Derrida puns on destiny and a letter’s destination, stressing that the letter Friar Lawrence writes to Romeo miscarries: Romeo never gets it. Chance here works against the totalizing implications within Paul Virilio, for whom speed – ‘escape velocity’ – is all that there is, in an ‘eternal present’, which, to recall the implications of the Biblical phrase, ‘it came to pass’, will never pass. Or, as Virilio puts it, ‘tomorrow the present will no longer pass’.38 All the past is made anachronous by that. For Virilio, globalization means that ‘real space’ has been lost to ‘real time’, which is that of a present, or a ‘telepresence’, inscribed in the Internet, a space with no origins, of time

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without memory, where the sense of the depth of the past has collapsed. All that is left is speed, which means the collapse of a before and after, collapse of chronology – which gives one history – along with anachrony, which gives another. In contrast, Derrida’s point about letters miscarrying stresses uncertainty, as with his critique of Lacan in ‘Le Facteur de la Verité’. This, discussing Lacan on Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, makes Lacan the postman in the post-age, when letters can have no single destination. Lacan finishes his analysis, which has shown how repetition structures the subject, by misquoting. Poe made Dupin sign the letter left for the Minister with the words of Crébillon, ‘un dessein si funeste’ ‘a design so fatal’. Lacan reads: ‘un destin si funeste’ ‘a destiny so fatal’. For Derrida, this is symptomatic: showing Lacan’s will to truth: ‘bringing a meaning to its destination . . . an alteration subtracting one letter and substituting another, in order to achieve its destiny while en route’.39 But it cannot be a question of Derrida point-scoring off Lacan. A symptom, as Derrida says in ‘My Chances’, has the sense of the accidental: OED gives the etymology of ‘symptom’ as ‘chance, accident, mischance, disease’. Lacan could say that his replacement of one letter for another was ‘the insistence of the letter in the unconscious’, itself the title of a Lacan lecture. Alan Sheridan uses ‘agency’ for ‘l’instance’. Bruce Fink renders it ‘instance’; his note saying that, while ‘agency’ translates Freud’s Instanz, used for the id, ego and superego, ‘l’instance’ also implies a power or authority, and an insistent, urgent force, activity or intervention.40 And ‘instance’ suggests a trial, or a process: Kafka’s ‘trial’ (Der Prozess) is also an insistence, where something asserts itself, perhaps only allowing the subject an ‘indefinite postponement’. Lacan’s reading of the end of Poe’s story makes the letter insist, be always in instance, literal, inscribed in writing. Against Lacan’s symptomatic idea of destiny, and a letter reaching its destination, Derrida evokes ‘destinerrance’, a neologism making chance and errancy (Hölderlin’s Irrsaal), part of destiny. Here, the chronological and the anachronistic are not opposed concepts. The anachronistic does not undo the concept of chronology, nor mean that there is nothing but the anachronistic, or the achronic: rather, chronology must include the anachronistic within it. Derrida’s Romeo and Juliet piece evoked a further text in saying: Because it traces, aphorism lives on, it lives much longer than its present and it lives longer than life. Death sentence [arrêt de mort]. It

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gives and carries death, but in order to make a decision thus on a sentence [arrêt] of death, it suspends death, it stops it once more [il l’arrête encore]. (421)

The text recalled is Blanchot’s narrative L’ arrêt de mort (1948), because Derrida takes the point that the aphorism lives on, or survives in relation to the play. The anachrony of events means that, whereas in love or a duel there is the understanding that one person will see the other die, Romeo and Juliet both survive the other’s death, both see each other dead. This evokes Derrida’s reading of Blanchot, called ‘Living On: Border Lines’. The essay, resulting from a request to discuss Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, morphs into Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort. There, two separate sections detail the relationship that the ‘I’ has with one woman (J) and another (Nathalie). The first woman dies, the second has made a plaster cast of her head and hands for him, so that she as it were offers him her death – offering him a time when she will no longer be there, a truly anachronous gift, whose effect is to empty the significance of time; the ‘I’ says that ‘everything could have happened at a much earlier time’.41 For Derrida, arrêt de mort means both ‘death sentence’ and ‘suspension of death’ (109), the triumph of life, and the triumph over life. An aphorism, as a name, like an anachronism, like a death sentence, ‘gives and carries death’ and at the same time suspends it, postpones it, while it stays ‘in instance’. Those last words evoke Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death (1994), a record of someone being saved from a firing squad by injustice: it is a possibly autobiographical record of Blanchot in the French Resistance. Having been through the trauma of the death-sentence, without the execution, the narrator ends with ‘l’instant de ma mort toujours en instance’ – the instant of my death always in instance: hanging fire, indefinitely suspended, always in process, always in trial, postponed.42 ‘Living On: Border Lines’ quotes from ‘Death Sentence’ on the death of J. The narrator goes to see her, to find that though she was dead before, she has: returned to life at the narrator’s bidding, in response to his call. Having died once, she had already lived on. This double death is a triumph of life and of death’. (‘Living On’, 113)

The ‘I’ says her pulse in that moment ‘“scattered like sand”’ (114). The phrase appears in quotation marks, because it is how the nurse has described her previous death; death is here a matter of iteration. Derrida quotes the passage and the last lines:

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One thing must be understood: I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it. (115)

Derrida refers to the ‘arrhythmic pulsation of the title’ (heard in the ‘t’ sound of the word ‘arrêt’) before it scatters like sand. Breaking the rhythm gives the offbeat. The silence of the first bar followed by the offbeat gives that relation of death and life that is at the heart of Derrida’s reading of Blanchot and of Freud. That the woman’s pulse has scattered like sand, according to the nurse speaking to the narrator on the telephone, is a death sentence, in an instant as elusive as the last grain of sand in the time of hourglasses, death also as the result of the dissemination of the rhythm of life with no finishing stroke [coup d’arrêt], unbordered and unbounded arrhythmy on a beach that is a continuation of the sea. (121)

The woman’s death is followed by another récit when a woman appears named Nathalie, who seems, anachronistically, to bring back the other woman. The fascination with the anachronism of Derrida, and Blanchot, makes up Chapter 3 of this book, which speaks of ‘the trace’ as written about by them, and by Freud and Levinas. But we start, in Chapter 1, with Proust, who, with Shakespeare, is a referencepoint throughout. However different, if Shakespeare and Proust link, it is perhaps because, for both, love is an anachronic force, and their principal subject. In À la recherche du temps perdu (‘In Search of Lost Time’), anachronism undermines questions of historical inscription, memory, and fashion, and love and homosexuality and secrecy, trauma and obsessionalism; old age and being out of date. And of course, it is not merely a series of specific issues but Proust’s subject throughout. Proust’s destabilisings of presence and identity are emblematic for my project; if Proust searches for lost time, that, heterogeneous, out of time, there and not there, will be inherently anachronistic. I cannot map all Proust’s anachronisms on to Shakespeare, who is principal theme of Chapters 2 and 3, alongside others brought in for contrast with him: Michelangelo in Chapter 2, for his Sonnets, which I compare with Shakespeare’s; and García Marquez in Chapter 3, with Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Shakespeare works with other forms of anachronicity, and looks in all ways at the possibility of

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finding counter-times, in each generic mode touched. In Chapter 4, the post-Nietzschean philosophers discussed there find other forms of the anachronous: within memory, which as a structure of deferral is seen as always productive of the traumatic event. The sense of catastrophe which is outside chronology, and yet insisting within it, is Chapter 4’s thesis; and extends into the Last Words, on Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde: a song cycle informed by love, the traumatic, and the missed encounter: all anachronies. Nonetheless, the Proustian examples are suggestive keys for the rest of the book, whose procedure – Proust, Shakespeare, post-Nietzschean theory, modernist music – is, of course, intentionally anachronistic.

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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

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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 MediciRiccardi, by Benozzo Gozzoli (c.1420–1497). On the west wall is the oldest Magi, Melchior, on the south the black, middle-aged

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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

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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

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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 pleasurecraft, 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

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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

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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.

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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 have, fleetingly, the features, the expression, the smile of one, was a woman. (p.4.8) [je ne pus m’empêcher de penser combien M. de Charlus eût été fâché s’il avait pu se savoir regardé; car ce à quoi me faisait penser cet homme qui était si épris, qui se piquait si fort de virilité, à qui tout le monde semblait odieusement efféminé ce à quoi il me faisait penser tout d’un coup, tant il en avait passagèrement les traits, l’expression, le sourire, c’était à une femme’. (T.3.6)]

He is outside the conditions of male paranoia that Freud, when analysing the madness of Schreber in 1911, sees as constituted by homosexual fears. So strong being the ideology which imposes on males masculine models of behaviour, Charlus now appears feminine, as if suggesting that this is how men would be outside the conditions of paranoia.9 Men out of time, unaware of time around them (for time-keeping and surveillance are linked), allowing themselves to be anachronistic, are female. There seems an attraction in the narrator towards Charlus, as if men are attractive when they are women.

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Seen after his homosexual experience, the Narrator says that he has now understood: the Baron was indeed a woman (P.4.18, T.3.16), his attraction towards masculinity caused by his temperament being feminine, his public aversion towards femininity a paranoia guarding an image of anachronistic masculinity. The narrative now turns from being that into an essay on homosexuality, with a discussion of the ‘race’ to which Charlus belongs: all of them obliged to protect their own secret but sharing with the others a secret which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this life of anachronistic fiction [this fabulous, anachronistic life – P.4.21] the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain insolent aplomb born of his aristocratic breeding which the timorous bourgeoisie lacks, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the ruffian; a reprobate section of the human collectivity, but an important one, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and immune, where its existence is never guessed . . . (E.4.23) [tous obligés à protéger leur secret, mais avant leur part d’un secret des autres que le reste de l’humanité ne soupçonne pas et qui fait qu’à eux les romans d’aventure les plus invraisemblables semblent vrais; car dans cette vie romanesque, anachronique, l’ambassadeur est ami du forçat; le prince, avec une certaine liberté d’allures que donne l’éducation aristocratique et qu’un petit bourgeois tremblant n’aurait pas, en sortant de chez la duchesse s’en va conférer avec l’apache, partie réprouvée de la collectivitié humaine, mais partie importante, soupçonnée là où elle n’est pas, étalée, insolente, impunie là où elle n’est pas devinée . . . (T.3.19)]

Homosexuality is declared anachronistic. As with this encounter between Charlus and Jupien, the conditions of the existence of homosexuality are those of fiction, romance, and of living a double life, making signs – some unconscious – which are only interpretable by another homosexual. Conditions for homosexuality are those of secrecy; here, homosexuality appears where it is not expected. It adds to anachronism the anachoristic, having no place, showing up in unexpected places. It must be added, before taking this relationship of male homosexuality to chronology further, that what applies to Sodom fails to apply to Gomorrah; one Proust critic points out that lesbianism in the novel has ‘no lineage, no history’; while there is an archive of knowledge to draw on for male homosexuality, there is

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an aporia awaiting the study of lesbianism, where the only model is what happens at Montjouvain, the home of M. Vinteuil’s daughter, and her lesbian lover, as described in ‘Combray’. Whatever else of lesbianism happens, echoes that.10 Lesbianism evades chronology even more than male homosexuality. The idea of homosexuality as anachronistic may be taken in several other ways; I suggest four. The passage makes comparison with Shakespeare’s comedies, and to the inversions implicit when women fall in love with ‘a young girl in disguise, who passes herself off as an adolescent boy’ (‘une jeune fille déguisée qui se fit passer pour un adolescent’ (E.4.25, T.3.23)); this Twelfth Night-like plot, where the girl is, of course, a male actor, is developed when the boy says of himself ‘I am a woman’ and disregards women to ‘seek out the masculine organ with the obstinacy of a climbing plant’ (‘[avec] quelle obstination de plante grimpante, la femme inconsciente et visible cherche-t-elle l’organe masculin!’ (E.4.25, T.3.23)). Another recherche, and for that which is or is not the fetish. The Shakespearian fiction, set in that imaginary Illyria is literalised; and perhaps relates to the questionableness of the young man in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The first seventeen tell the young man to marry and to defeat the time’s changes by fathering children; then, something else happens to the normative chronology, for the sonnets turn to praise of the young man outside this demand. Homosexuality proposes a world outside the chronology that having children dictates, and so works against it, and the impulse in the Sonnets is to fictionalise, through praise. That relates to my second point: Charlus fictionalises his homosexuality. He tells Jupien that ‘Like the caliph who uses to roam Baghdad mistaken for a simple merchant, I sometimes indeed condescend to follow some curious young person whose silhouette has amused me’ (P.4.14) (‘Il m’arrive en effet, comme le calife qui parcourait Bagdad pris pour un simple marchand, de condescendre à suivre quelque curieuse petit personne dont la silhouette m’aura amusé – (T.3.12)). As he fantasises himself as the Caliph, he fantasises about ‘quelque petit personne’ he happens to see. And this continues. In the last book, the narrator is in darkened wartime Paris in 1916, and has the sense of being in an Oriental city, a Paris which is an Orient, but also the Carpaccio’s Easternised Venice: both minutely precise as to costumes and the colour of faces, and arbitrarily chimerical as to setting, in the same way that Carpaccio

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turned the town where he lived into a Jerusalem or a Constantinople. (P.6.71)

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[un Orient à la fois minutieusement exact en ce qui concernait les costumes et la couleur des visages, arbitrairement chimérique en ce qui concernait le décor, comme de la ville où il vivait Carpaccio fit une Jérusalem ou une Constantinople. (T.4.342)]

In this context, he sees two Zouaves walking (members of a French colonial regiment – originally Algerian – who wore Oriental uniforms). They are followed by Charlus. It seems that the unconscious imagination of the narrator that they are in the Orient is shared by Charlus: and at the end of a conversation between Charlus and the narrator, which is intersected with much moving in time back and forth, even including the narrative of an incident after the death of Charlus, they separate. The Baron notes a passing Senegalese soldier, and says that he embodies all the Orient of Decamps, Fromentin, Ingres and Delacroix. But as Charlus disappears, the narrator thinks not of that Orient of present-day theories of ‘Orientalism’ as a cultural imperialism but of ‘the Old Orient of the Arabian Nights which I had loved so much, and as I plunged deeper into the maze of these dark streets I thought of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid seeking for adventure in the hidden quarters of Baghdad’ (‘le vieil Orient de ces Mille et une Nuits que j’avais tant aimées, et me perdant peu à peu dans le lacis de ces rues noires, je pensais au calife Haroun Al Raschid en quête d’aventures dans les quartiers perdus de Bagdad’ (P.6.118, T.4.388, my emphasis)). Anachronistic fiction takes over the narrator, making him more likely to experience the erotic than Charlus, whose aestheticism, and the Orient of whose imagination, seems artificial, kitsch-like. Accordingly, a few moments later, the narrator sees Saint-Loup hurrying, under cover of darkness, into a male brothel. Entering this, he discovers that Jupien runs it, for the benefit of Charlus, and that it specialises in sadistic practices, part of the fictions that the Baron lives by (etymologically, the word ‘fetish’, so crucial for such practices, relates to the word ‘fiction’). Discovery of homosexuality is part of the life of anachronistic fiction; the narrator’s fascination towards it being his attraction towards such romance. Homosexuality sustains its existence only by such fictionalising and fetishistic practices, for homosexuality cannot be a complete and self-sufficient state, since, as Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality, homosexuality

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is a construct of modern discourse. Its existence in the network of discourses of power which construct sexuality names and creates a character-type where, according to Foucault, earlier same-sexual behaviour was all that had been noted: homosexuality is a fictional category by which people who are ‘homosexual’ must construct their lives, and present them confessionally in Romantic, autobiographical terms. But since such a construction misnames the subject it creates, ‘homosexual’ cannot be the name of a complete category; it suggests lack, or incompleteness, can be real only as a fetish is real. In The Prisoner, Baron Charlus, in a conversation on homosexuality with Brichot, who teaches at the Sorbonne, refers to ‘what the Germans call homosexuality’ (5.282, T.3.810). He is registering the word’s newness. Foucault dates it to 1870, one year before Proust’s birth, and to the German, Carl Westphal, in Archiv für Neurologie.11 The Proustian text agrees with the sense that the naming is inappropriate: referring to ‘what is sometimes, quite wrongly, called homosexuality’ (ce qu’on appelle parfois fort mal l’homosexualité’) (P.4.11, T.3.9). Brichot, unknowingly, supports Foucault’s argument about sexuality being constructed by discourse by concluding the conversation with a speculation on the possibility of the Sorbonne establishing a chair in homosexuality, and the appropriateness of the Baron to fill it, or – better still – an Institute of Psychopathology, or a chair at the Collège de France (P.5.284, T.3.811). The homosexual is simply to be allowed to talk, in an institution which, however, names him as marginal while paying a salary. Homosexuality as a discourse must be sustained by talk, by the continued production of knowledge about it, the latter being the University’s function. The meeting with Jupien in the courtyard of the Guermantes shows the possibility that homosexuality could qualify Marxist class analysis. Here is a third way in which homosexuality is anachronous, and it contrasts to the nineteenth century’s accentuation of classdivisions. The aristocrat’s association with the working-class male cuts across such a drive because the aristocrat, who is nonetheless not, officially, allowed to be homosexual, shares something with the working class (hence Charlus begins moving in a lower social class: that of the bourgeois M. and Mme Verdurin).12 This the bourgeois heterosexual cannot do. The presence of homosexuality becomes the detail that makes class analysis over-totalising, too prone to reduction, too heterosexual, unrelated to desire. But the Jupien incident points up a final anachronism: the men’s discrepancy in age.

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Proust’s text repeats the ground of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which latter belongs to what Foucault calls a ‘lyricisme homosexuel’, which he sees ending at the time when sodomites were no longer burned. Sodomy – for Foucault ‘that utterly confused category’ (History of Sexuality, 101) – associated the person who practised it with magic and heresy, hence public burnings: after its desacralisation, sodomy was condemned ‘only’ for ‘moral’ reasons. In the earlier Histoire de la folie (Madness and Civilization): ‘L’homosexualité à qui la Renaissance avait donné liberté d’expression va désormais entre en silence, et passer du côté de l’interdit, héritant des vieilles condamnations d’une sodomie maintenant désacrilisée’ (‘The homosexuality, to which the Renaissance had given freedom of expression will henceforth be silenced, become forbidden, attracting to itself the previous condemnations of a sodomy which is now brought out of the religious domain’).13 Sodomy – the forbidden, almost unnameable thing, and perhaps then to be defined legally in terms of nonconsensual sexual acts, specifically rape – had had the aura of demonism and magic: now that began to pass to acts of homosexuality, which thus acquired a new aura or lyricism. For Foucault in The History of Sexuality, with the new word ‘homosexual’, to which Charlus adverts, whereas ‘the sodomite had been a temporary aberration: the homosexual was now a species’. For Alan Bray, influenced by Foucault, ‘to talk of an individual in this period [the Renaissance] as being or not being a “homosexual” is an anachronism and ruinously misleading’.14 And something else – a fourth point – must be added to the idea of homosexuality being constituted as an anachronistic fiction – marginalising those who are made the subject of its fictional existence – permitting and necessitating rethinkings of chronology, since issues of old age and youth, and the requirement to think romantically, cross certain barriers less familiar in heterosexuality. The discourse about male homosexuality in the past is also bound to be anachronistic. This, if true, only illuminates something anachronistic about all history-writing. The discussion of homosexuality – called inversion, as an anachronism is an inversion of chronology – forming the rest of the First Part of Sodome et Gomorrhe begins by evoking Wilde, one moment popular and the next inspiring disgust: it continues as a defence of a tendency seen as innate and defended in terms which suggest that homosexuality shows the power of nature at work, making it profoundly ‘natural’. It is the task of the piece to show that what seemed

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strange – the meeting of Charlus and Jupien – was also natural, and beautiful: ‘The scene was not positively comical, however, it was imbued with a strangeness, or, if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which continued to grow’ (‘Cette scène n’était, du reste, pas positivement comique, elle était empreinte d’une étrangeté, ou si l’on veut d’un naturel, dont la beauté allait croissant’) (P.4.9, T.3.7). In such ways, the opposition between what is natural and what is strange – with the sense of the Freudian uncanny, even, to be heard in the word étrangeté – is deconstructed. The first part of Sodome et Gomorrhe, though it looks defensive, or confessional, is affirmatory comic drama. Nonetheless the new discourse of homosexuality, however wrongly so called, constrains and produces discourse. The passage originated from a newspaper article Proust contemplated writing about the Eulenburg scandal, which Charlus refers to later in Sodome et Gomorrhe.15 Philip, Prince Eulenburg (1847–1921), an intimate since 1886 of Kaiser William II, twelve years his junior, was accused of homosexuality in 1906, and the matter came to trial in 1908, being suspended, however, when Eulenburg collapsed at the trial. Discussion of Eulenburg and his friendships, which may have had homoerotic implications in the case of his relationships with the Kaiser, and which seem to have been linked with spiritism or spiritualism, and with seances, from which the Kaiser may have taken political advice, indicate people living different forms of lives of anachronistic fiction.16 And the attraction of such a scandal lies in its military overtones, combining discipline, loyalty and blind obedience. The old-fashioned and unrealistic aristocratic code of honour that runs through the affair is indicated a moment later after Charlus’s allusion, because the narrator adds that one of those implicated in the scandal was supposed to have said: ‘What confidence the Emperor must have had in our tact to have dared to permit such a trial. But he was not wrong to have put his trust in our discretion. We’d have kept our mouths shut even on the scaffold’ (‘Faut-il que l’empereur ait confiance en notre délicatesse pour avoir osé permettre un pareil procès! Mais d’ailleurs il ne s’est pas trompé en ayant eu foi dans notre discrétion. Jusque sur l’échafaud nous aurions fermé la bouche’) (P.4.343–344, T.3.338). Apparently, the Kaiser was agitated that the trial had been suspended, and thought that it should have gone on, even if, he said, ‘E. is consumed by the flames’ (quoted, Röhl, p. 63). His words, demanding that his friend should

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be sacrificed for German honour, indicate an odd absolutism, or feudal temperament, combined with incomprehension about himself, which has its implications for Charlus, talking about ‘inversion’ so incessantly, and dangerously, for his reputation. The anachronisms of the Eulenberg scandal, which broke a few years after the Dreyfus affair, ask to be compared with that case, which divided French opinion dramatically in the years 1894 to 1899. Dreyfus had been formally degraded in the name of the French people at a parade in the courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris at the beginning of 1895 – the same year as the Wilde case – his decorations pulled off his uniform and his sword broken over the knee of the commanding officer. This operatic spectacle seems anachronistic – associating with the inventions of tradition in the late nineteenth century – and the degradation of the Jewish officer has been mapped by historians on to a crisis of masculinity that, despite Dreyfus’ heterosexuality, associates with fears of homosexuality, both in the army and outside, fear of modernity being associated with femininity. In this way, the Dreyfus case, like Eulenberg’s, with all its differences, seems part of a production of the anachronistic, a narrative produced by the dominant culture which steps back, in terms of its public spectacles, to boost the fiction of how the pure nation and the masculine body align.17 The Penguin translation points out, in critical mode, the anachronism that Charlus refers to the Eulenberg scandal before it happened (P.4.543). But this as a general point is explicated by Gerard Génette in Narrative Discourse, which comments on how in Proust ‘the future has become present but does not resemble the idea of it that one had in the past’, so that the future is marked by difference from the way it could ever be conceived. Genette calls prolepsis ‘any narrative manoeuvre that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later’, and analepsis ‘any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier in the story from where we are at any given moment’. He adds that we reserve ‘the general term anachrony to designate all forms of discordance between the two temporal orders of story and narrative’. Prolepsis means ‘to take on something in advance’ and analepsis ‘to take on something after the event’. Genette gives examples of analepses in Proust whose conclusion cannot be localised (the spatial image will be noted) and he finds in À la recherche du temps perdu examples of ‘achronic structures’.18 Narrative Discourse works to show, through Proust – who Genette

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says offers a very full index of narrative methods – the impossibility of a realist narrative conveying a story. Whatever has happened cannot be narrated. The Penguin translation assumes that Charlus speaks at the chronological moment that the text assigns to him; this literalism assumes that there can be a representation of events, but the narrative of what Charlus said happens nowhere except in the narrative space that the text, which records no objective event except the impossibility of assigning memory to time and space, assigns him. For Genette, in Proust events happen in one order but are narrated in another order, or that narrative inevitably gives space to a momentary event but then jumps over years, or recounts repeatedly what happened once, or vice versa. Or there is the iterative case, when ‘a single narrative utterance takes upon itself several occurrences together of the same event’ (116). Or the pseudo-iterative: scenes presented, particularly by their wording in the imperfect, as iterative, whereas their richness and precision of detail ensure that no reader can seriously believe that they occur and reoccur in that manner, several times, without any variation. (121)

Genette discovers in Proust an ‘intoxication with the iterative’ (123); iter implying both ‘repetition’ and ‘the other’. Proust’s intoxication compares with Genette’s, with the palimpsest, on which he wrote a study (Palimpsests, 1982), showing how past texts impose themselves on other past texts. Repetition in Proust begins with repeating a story within a narrative, and continues by confusing the distinction between these two. The confusion illustrates the impossibility of narrative. Modern homosexuality, to follow Foucault, has had to narrativise itself (its causes, its practices), but no narrative of it can be given which does not falsify, because the nature of narrative is to be falsified by its necessity to be set within time. ‘The Intermittencies of the Heart’ Anachronism reappears in Sodome et Gomorrhe, in the section ‘The Intermittencies of the Heart’ (‘Les Intermittences du Coeur’), which ends Part Two chapter 1, as an ‘intermittence’ (a word associated with the second anachronism) before reaching chapter 2, and the love-episodes with Albertine. Here, the narrator, revisiting Balbec, this time without his grandmother who has died, bends down to take

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off his boots in the hotel at Balbec, but, as he does so, suddenly starts crying, filled with ‘a divine presence’, being saved from ‘barrenness of spirit’: I had just glimpsed in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concerned, disappointed face of my grandmother, not that of the one whom I had been surprised and self-reproachful at having missed so little, who had nothing of her but her name, but of my true grandmother, the living reality of whom, for the first time since the ChampsElysées, where she had suffered her stroke, I had rediscovered in a complete and involuntary memory. This reality does not exist for us until such time as it has been re-created in our minds (otherwise the men who have been involved in some titanic struggle would all be epic poets); thus, in a wild desire to hurl myself into her arms, it was only at this instant – more than a year after her funeral, on account of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from coinciding with that of our feelings – that I had just learned that she was dead. (P.4.158) [Je venais d’apercevoir, dans ma mémoire, penché sur ma fatigue, le visage tendre, préoccupé et deçu de ma grand-mère, telle qu’elle avait été ce premier soir d’arrivée; le visage de ma grand-mère, non pas de celle que je m’étais étonné et reproché de si peu regretter et qui n’avait d’elle que le nom, mais de ma grand-mère véritable dont, pour le première fois depuis les Champs-Elysées où elle avait eu son attaque, je retrouvais dans un souvenir involontaire et complet la réalité vivante. Cette réalité n’existe pas pour nous tant qu’elle n’a pas été recréée par notre pensée (sans cela les hommes qui ont étés mêlés à un combat gigantesque seraient tous les grands poets épiques); et ainsi, dans un désir fou de me précipiter dans ses bras, ce n’était qu’à l’instant – plus d’une année après son enterrement, à cause de cet anachronisme qui empêche si souvent le calendrier des faits de coïncider avec celui des sentiments – que je venais d’apprendre qu’elle etait morte. (T.3.153)]

From here to the section’s end, there is a sustained memory of the grandmother, and of the narrator’s mother’s loss of her mother. Anachronism is inherent within being because of a slippage which prevents the calendar of facts and of feelings from coinciding with each other. This slippage, which seems inherent, and comprises ‘the intermittencies of the heart’, involves two chronologies. The moment which will allow the two chronologies to relate to each other can come about only by ‘involuntary memory’. The anachronism is not something external to these two calendars, though it creates them. The grandmother has died, but the virtual repetition of her death

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takes place in the moment when the narrator knows it, which is not till a year later. With this delay before the narrator can feel, and with feeling produced not by anything willed but by an involuntary memory which convulses and annihilates his present being, the text makes time that which is other, and other to itself. The grandmother’s stroke in the Champs-Elysées concluded the first part of Le Côté de Guermantes; her death, a year before the present events, at the end of the first chapter of the second part (Le Côté de Guermantes, P.3.308, 343, T.2.608, 641). The passage where the grandmother came to the Narrator’s aid, when he had knocked on the wall of her room on the occasion of the first visit to Balbec, appeared in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (P.2.247, T.2.29). A further episode is recollected in ‘The Intermittencies of the Heart’, which is of the grandmother having had her photograph taken; the detail, recorded in the first visit to Balbec (P.2.366–368, T.2.144–145) is reiterated thrice in the second: first when the narrator recollects the apparent ‘childish coquettishness’ with which the grandmother had insisted on being photographed (P.4.161, T.3.155–156); then when Françoise tells him the painfully ill circumstances wherein the photograph was taken (P.4.178, T.3.173), third when the hotel manager recalls her illness (P.4.179–80, T.3.175). The story of the photograph makes it impossible for the narrator to see Albertine that day; but later he can look at it with pleasure because it succeeds in driving off death from the figure of the grandmother. And yet, her cheeks having, without her knowing it, an expression of their own, something leaden and haggard, like the look of an animal that feels itself already chosen and marked down, my grandmother wore the air of someone under a death sentence [un air de condamnée à mort], an involuntarily sombre, unconsciously tragic air that had eluded me but which stopped Mama from ever looking at this photograph, a photograph that seemed to her a photograph not so much of her mother as of the latter’s illness, of an insult delivered by that illness to Grandmother’s brutally abused face. (P. 4.181, T.3.176)

The ‘air involontairement sombre’ of the grandmother confirms the alliance of involuntary memory with the traumatic. The grandmother had her dying narrated, as though her life and death was something that the narrator could absorb, make part of himself. So mourning contains the danger that it enlarges the ego, while lamenting the loss of the other. Now, the grandmother’s reality cancels out the narrator, acts as a death to him, for her appearance no

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longer contains him; he can no longer appropriate her. Involuntary recollection, and awareness of anachrony, is death-giving. Further, the moment when she seems most real is ironic: ‘this resumption of a past life is poisoned by a cruel anachronism: the grandmother is dead’.19 Commentators call the opposite of involuntary memory, mentioned for the first time here, voluntary memory, but such schematicism is problematic.20 Voluntary memory appeared in Swann’s Way as ‘the memory of the intelligence’, ‘la mémoire de l’intelligence’ (P.1.46, T.1.43). The next moment: it is a waste of effort for us to try to summon [our past], all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside our intelligence and beyond its reach. (P.1.47) [C’est peine perdue que nous cherchions à l’évoquer, touts les effort de notre intelligence sons inutiles. Il est caché hors de son domaine et de sa portée. (T.1.44)]

The book’s title is echoed in ‘perdue’. What comes, comes not through the intelligence, nor through the will (Latin: voluntas). A moment later, an incident is related when memory emerges from the tea and the cake, the madeleine, and begins by taking possession of the body. But this is not called an involuntary memory. Neither is the second analogous incident, a sudden perception at the bend of a road, of the two steeples of the church at Martinville, which the narrator sees twice, and which leads to his writing about them, for ‘what was hidden behind the steeples of Martinville had to be something analogous to a pretty sentence, since it had appeared to me in the form of words that gave me pleasure’ (‘ce qui était caché derrière les clochers de Martinville devait être quelque chose d’analogue à une jolie phrase, puisque c’était sous la forme de mots qui me faisaient plaisir, que cela m’était apparu’), (P.1.181, T.1.179). ‘Phrase’ anticipates the ‘little phrase’ of music from Vinteuil’s sonata, which persists for a memory with Swann through ‘Un Amour de Swann’, but the prompting is not an involuntary memory; forms of memory that defeat the intelligence are infinitely plural, all being potentially anachronistic, in not letting situation and affect coincide. What permits the two forms of perception to come together is also anachronistic, putting one chronology into another. Involuntary memory is implied at the end of the first section of ‘Combray’, when arguing about ‘voluntary memory’, that ‘the information it gives

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about the past preserves nothing of it’ (‘les reseignements qu’elle donne sur le passé ne conservent rien de lui’, P.1.46, T.1.43). This is the age of information, as Benjamin argues in ‘The Story-teller’, of the absence of memory in story-telling, and its replacement by information, instantly forgotten, like yesterday’s news(paper).21 What can be recounted by the mind does not lead into the past; nor can the punctum in the photograph be preserved whenever the photograph is looked at.22 The past comes unbidden, or comes not at all. Proust speaks of ‘recollections abandoned so long outside my memory’ – ‘ces souvenirs abandonnés si longtemps hors de la mémoire’ (P.1.49, T.1.46). The place of forgetting, of abandoning memories is as much a place for their retention as the voluntary memory, which is a receptacle within a larger space, where what is forgotten is thereby not lost. We lose the difference between forgetting and remembering.23 Recollections come as an awareness of time, for in the last book the narrator speaks of ‘time in its pure state’ (‘temps à l’état pur’), and as that which is ‘real without being present, ideal without being abstract’ (‘reéls sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits’) (P.6.180, 181, T.4.451). If this could be captured, it would be an apprehension of time, and of the past as past. It comes as a sense of the past hidden beyond the intelligence, because that confines, gives memories acceptable to the will or ego. (P.1.47, 1.44.) For Beckett: the most successful evocative experiment can only project the echo of a past sensation, because, being an act of intellection, it is conditioned by the prejudices of the intelligence which abstracts from any given sensation, as being illogical and insignificant, a discordant and frivolous intruder, whatever word or gesture, sound or perfume, cannot be fitted into the puzzle of a concept. But the essence of any new experience is contained precisely in this mysterious element that the vigilant will rejects as an anachronism. (Beckett, Proust, 71–72)

Voluntary memory returns things as ‘concept’, the conceptualised being part of discourse, known, accepted. The anachronistic is outside such a public, discursive memory, and is inherent to that which slips past the ‘vigilant will’, which keeps a homogeneous, universal sense of time. So, for Deleuze: voluntary memory proceeds as if the past were constituted as such after it has been present. It would therefore have to wait for a new present so that the preceding one could pass by, or become past. But in this way the essence of time escapes us. For if the present was not past

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at the same time as present, if the same moment did not coexist with itself as present and past, it would never pass, a new present would never come to replace this one. The past as it is in itself coexists with, and does not succeed, the present as it has been.24

A perception of the past cannot come into being after a perception of the present, though this seems the commonsensical way of putting it, and serves the interests of ‘voluntary memory’. Rather, a perception of the past must subtend a perception of the present: the present could not be seen as the present without a sense of the past. The perception that comes into play is of being in time, which means that time is not lost. The other way for the past to construct a perception of the present is when it – the past – returns in an involuntary memory which is traumatic, as here. Yet the first perception is not trauma-free. In À l’ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs, the narrator drives from Balbec to Hudimesnil, and sees three trees, which stand out for him as soliciting his attention, features from an unattributable past, ghosts, risen shades, gesticulating with the ‘impotent regret of a loved one who, having lost the power of speech, knows that he will never be able to let us know what he wants, and that we can never deduce his meaning’. This sense of muteness, which proleptically evokes the death of the grandmother (she has not yet died), is succeeded by another: of the carriage taking the narrator away from the trees, ‘like my life itself, it was carrying me away from what seemed the only truth, from what would have made me truly happy’ (‘le regret impuissant d’un être aimé qui a perdu l’usage de la parole, sent qu’il ne pourra nous dire ce qu’il veut et que nous ne savons pas deviner . . . Elle m’entraînait loin de ce que je croyais seul vrai, de ce qui m’eût rendu vraiment heureux, elle ressemblait à ma vie’) (P.2.298, T.2.78–79, my emphasis). These trees, which seemed to belong, like all trees, to a past time, are recalled in an involuntary moment of stumbling much later in the last book of all, Le temps retrouvé, in a passage which leads into discussion of time in its pure state (P.6.174–175, T.6.446–447). In the bedroom at Balbec, involuntary memory implies passivity, as the narrator is held by a memory he is not responsibility for. If we take Emmanuel Levinas as a theorist of what Thomas Wall calls ‘radical passivity’, a topic for Chapter 4, the following passages from Otherwise than Being become a commentary on this Proustian

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moment. For Levinas, subjectivity comes into being not when the ego declares its power in a spirit of self-assertion, contrary to the Other, but when that ego is broken up, reduced to passivity:

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Vulnerability, exposure to outrage, to wounding, passivity more passive than all patience, passivity of the accusative form, trauma of accusation suffered by a hostage to the point of persecution, implicating the identity of the hostage who substitutes himself for the others, all this is the self, a defecting, or defeat of the ego’s identity.25

The reversal at Balbec shows the power of the other forcing itself on the self, and creating it; reversing the idea that the ego constitutes itself by separation from the other. The oneself cannot form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity . . . This passivity is that of an attachment that has already been made, as something irreversibly past, prior to all memory and all recall. It was made in an irrecuperable time which the present, represented in recall, does not equal, in a time of birth or creation, of which nature or creation retains a trace, unconvertible into a memory. Recurrence is more past than any rememberable past, any past convertible into a present. (Otherwise than Being 104–105)

Thomas Wall comments: ‘the self . . . “suffers” itself. It is a wound that does not heal. Before myself, prior to any desire to be, anterior to any objectivity, to any distance or any time . . . the self happens to me . . . the Other has access to me before I do’.26 That which annihilates the narrator in Proust has to do with something from outside, which may be thought of as anachronistic, and which by trauma (by wounding) creates the self as passive. Speaking of memory in terms of the voluntary and involuntary – but not assuming that this sums up the modes of memory – makes memory the other, invasive, and not a recollection of the past, as that which the self can assimilate to its formal requirements, so that it remembers without being overwhelmed. Memory is the heterogeneous to the self, neither personal nor the past, nor representing past incidents; indeed, for Genette’s Proust there can be representation neither of the past nor of the other. Representing the past in writing as a memory is a mode of injustice, making it subservient to my demand to place it in a non-obtrusive context. Writing, then, does not bring back the past; but writing is the act of involuntary memory which is an act leading into the future, in which the past will be able to appear. It is the ‘death sentence’ which allows for the

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other to come: the return of the grandmother is the result not of an involuntary memory which must be written but of writing which makes everything appear, in inverted form from the way it has been understood.

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Jealousy Before considering the last two references to the ‘anachronistic’, it will be useful to summarise. The first anachronism shows the Renaissance world to support itself on anachronistic foundations; this form of thinking persists, again anachronistically, within modernity; one age dreams another, or absorbs another. The second places anachronism within life, and prevents people living one single chronology: it creates a kind of madness within being. In the third, everything has the power of return; a historical past reasserts itself. For Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), the French Revolution failed because the revolutionaries mentally costumed themselves in the form of the Roman republic; in the first anachronism, the past is costumed as the present, and, in the third, fashion makes the past speak again; Proust’s first three anachronisms allow for a revolutionary possibility, not yet exploited, whereby it would not be that case that, as for Marx, ‘the tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living’.27 The fourth evokes homosexuality, which according to ‘queer theory’, is repressed within heterosexual relationships, involuntary memory associating with homosexuality as heterosexuality to voluntary memory. And it suggests that the conditions of homosexuality condemn the one who loves another of the same sex towards fictitious behaviour, or that the conditions of homosexuality are uniquely productive of fiction: this topic will be pursued through Chapter 2. The fifth implies an anachrony where facts and feelings split from one another, as the condition in which ‘normal’ life occurs, in a form of repression. The moment which associates fact and feeling comes from involuntary memory. But memory is not a restorer of life or of presence; though the grandmother is brought back, she is also dead. Why that anachrony should exist, to divide facts and feelings, is not evident from this passage, but it is relevant that what has been remembered, and what repressed, is a death. There seems to be in the act of repression, which creates the anachronism, a response to trauma, which returns involuntarily.

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These examples suggests a différance actively deranging chronology, or sexuality, or ways in which the self attempts to relate punctually to events, which also means to put events into context, to finish with them, or, as with homosexuality, to repress them. The memory at Balbec suggests that, like homosexuality, love is anachronistic, keeping no relation with the calendar of facts. Being in love is being in love too late. The return of feeling emphasises not union but separation from the other. Hence, ‘bouleversement de toute ma personne’ – the convulsion of my entire being (P.4.158, T.3.152). As with the second case of anachrony, life deranges and maddens, surprising the self with new affects. Homosexuality is inversion: so is the ‘bouleversement’; the intrusion of otherness in both cases deranges identity and sexual difference. The fourth case placed deviance at the centre, as much as fiction, the fifth made otherness traumatic, as an inability to finish with memory. From the time of the second book, the narrator was attracted to Albertine, in a love affair whose essence is jealousy, out of his sense that Albertine – the ‘jeune fille en fleur’ was lesbian – a Baudelairean ‘fleur du mal’ – and, therefore, not satisfied with him. In The Prisoner, he attempts keeping her in confinement in his apartment in Paris, as an expression of jealousy, but she eventually leaves him, only to die soon after in an accident, where anachronism reappears, since Marcel receives a telegram from Mme Bontemps, Albertine’s aunt, saying that Albertine has died in an accident, and then gets two letters from Albertine, written just before her death, of which the second, while dated a day later, must have been written within a few moments of the first, which has been predated (P.5.443– 445, T.3.58–60). The second message proposes Albertine’s return to the narrator. Anachronism recurs in a passage describing the period after Albertine’s death, giving the narrator’s sense of how there could be no cessation of the jealous feelings he had, even after that severance: Since at any moment when I thought of her, I resuscitated her, her infidelities could never be those of a dead woman, for the moment when she had committed them became the present moment, not only for Albertine but also for whichever of my selves was suddenly enlisted to contemplate her. So that no anachronism could ever separate the indissoluble couple where each new guilty woman was immediately matched with a woeful, jealous, but always contemporaneous, lover. (P.5.457)

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[Puisque rien qu’en pensant à elle, je la ressuscitais, ses trahisons ne pouvaient jamais être celles d’une morte, l’instant où elle les avait commises devenant l’instant actuel, non pas seuelement pour Albertine mais pour celui de mes moi subitement évoqué qui la contemplait. De sorte qu’aucun anachronisme ne pouvait jamais séparer le couple indissoluble où à chaque coupable nouvelle s’appariait aussitot un jaloux lamentable et toujours contemporain. (T.4.72)]

Anachronism here is another name for death; the anachronistic severs connections, as does death. Thinking restores a particular Albertine, and a particular ‘moi’ who is thinking of her. But memory does not give one Albertine (as if she could be represented in one general form, as in a realist novel), but an infinite number: as Beckett says, ‘for any given Albertine there exists a correlative narrator, and no anachronism can put apart what Time has coupled’ (Proust 43). And that Albertine is dead does not end jealousy. An anachronism is usually thought of as something irrelevant, outside the course of events, but it seems that only an anachronism could have power to stop the course of jealousy. Here, however, not even death itself, which because it stops chronology could be regarded as anachronistic, can do that; jealousy survives the death of the person of whom one is jealous, death being, perhaps, only the last person with whom the partner betrays the jealous person, or that which denies the jealous person possession of the partner. Jealousy keeps to chronology, so much so that, whenever a fantasy takes place about the person who is loved and feared, that person, on account of whom jealousy holds sway, materialises punctually. And the appearance of the other person in the fantasy is immediately complemented by the appearance of an equal jealous ‘I’, one of a series who can be brought back. Since there is no such thing as single identity, ‘I’ can reappear in my own memory in any number of identities. But within that infinite series, the lover always appears in a way which corresponds immediately to the (wo)man. Such is the power of jealousy that, though it may be anachronistic itself, it is ‘toujours contemporain’: it can always be counted upon to be punctual. Jealousy takes no heed of anything anachronistic, because of the logic of its own time-keeping, yet the narrator also sees that it is anachronistic itself: our jealousy, digging in the past for clues, finds nothing; always turned towards the past, it is like a historian trying to write a history for which

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there are no documents; always late, it rushes like a mad bull into the place just vacated by the haughty, shining being who irritates it with his darts, and whom the crowd admires for his splendour and guile. (P.5.131) [notre jalousie fouillant le passé pour en tirer des inductions n’y trouve rien; toujours rétrospective, elle est comme un historien qui aurait à faire une histoire pour laquelle il n’est aucun document; toujours en retard, elle se précipite comme un taureau furieux là où ne se trouve pas l’être fier et brillant qui l’irrite de ses piqûres et dont la foule cruelle admire la magnificence et la ruse. (T.3.653)]

Always looking back, always belated, jealousy always attempts logicality. It is not possible to construct a history except on the basis of believing that everything is linked in a cause-and-effect sequence. While jealousy may be an anachronistic state, it cannot believe in anachronism as disordering days, and making situations appear which have the potential for jealousy, but which lack causation. Jealousy is always fated to anachronism; Derrida writes of it that it is ‘always excessive because it is busy with a past which will never have been present and so can never be presented nor allow any hope for presentation, the presently presenting’.28 (The past which never has been present comes from Levinas, and will be discussed in Chapter 4, as will the future anterior tense that Derrida uses (‘will never have been present’).) This sense of being too late for something never present maddens jealousy like a bull which is always destined to miss by a split second the toreador, whose agile punctuality means that he keeps the crowd on his side. Positioning jealousy as the bull means that paranoia becomes inseparable from jealousy: from the sense that jealousy’s fate is to be outsmarted and to be also the object of entertainment. Jealousy is made always punctual (chronological) in being out of time, and unable to free itself from that destiny of being anachronistic. There is a contrast with Romanticism. Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Surprised by joy’ makes joy an anachronistic state with power, suddenly, to cut across grief: Surprised by joy – impatient as the Wind I turn’d to share the transport – Oh! with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb That spot which no vicissitude can find?29

For Wordsworth, it is as though grief could suddenly be overcome by a ‘transport’ which moves – or metaphorises – or ‘turns’ the soul

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into another place. The word ‘vicissitudes’, from Latin vicus (turn) – a word remembered at the opening of Finnegans Wake – stands in apparent contrast with this, because the silent tomb is the undecipherable spot, like the navel of the dream which resists interpretation.30 No turns of feeling, which are also ‘turns’ (tropes) in writing, can do other than contrast with that spot. These four lines make all feelings anachronistic in relation to the primacy of that ‘spot’. No such freedom with anachronism is possible in Proust because even anachrony has become destined, part of chronology, not an escape from it. If anachronism supplemented chronology, that would be liberatory, but here the reverse takes place: because we are in time, therefore we are jealous, therefore we are out of time, and breaks in time, as with death, have no power to break the emotional tie between the living and the dead. Hence the necessity for involuntary memory, without which there is nothing but the continuance of trauma, save that involuntary memory is also traumatic. Though ‘anachronism’ does not appear in the next passage quoted, it may be understood, since it is almost defined. It implies that old age is also an anachronism, as when in Albertine disparue (The Fugitive), in a section set in Venice, the narrator sees M. Norpois, the retired ambassador, with memories of 1870, and the aged lover of Mme de Villeparisis. Old age, so much commented on with Charlus, is the subject again: For old age removes the ability to act, but not to desire. It is only in a third phase that those who live to a great age renounce desire, after being obliged to abandon action. They no longer stand for such petty elections as that of President of the Republic, where they so formerly strove to succeed. They are content merely to go out, to eat, and to read the newspapers. They have outlived themselves. (P.5.599–600) [Car la vieillesse nous rend d’abord incapables d’entreprendre mais non de désirer. C’est n’est que dans une troisieme période que ceux qui vivent très vieux ont renoncé au désir, comme ils ont dû abandoner l’action. Ils ne presentent même plus à des elections futiles où ils tentèrent si souvent de réussir, comme celle de président de la République. Ils se contentent de sortir, de manger, de lire les journaux, ils se survivent à eux-mêmes. (T.4.214)]

Old age has ‘survived’ itself: it has gone beyond death, if Derrida’s title ‘Living On’ (‘Survivre’) is recalled. The battle between power and desire has been settled, and so too has the question of status:

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there is no longer the desire to be recognised. If it has survived, old age contains within it something of trauma. Yet, in the following paragraph, M. de Norpois is giving advice to Prince Foggi, who is wondering about possible successors to the Prime Minister currently in office; Norpois mentions Giolitti, the Italian statesman, five times Prime Minister from 1892 to 1922, in words which are said to fuel conversation in ambassadorial circles for twenty years to come, and which are heard by Foggi as the sound of celestial voices – ‘un murmure céléste’ (4.215), and which are apparently taken as influencing the succession, so that three months later Giolitti takes office again. The passage is a study in irrelevance being taken as relevance; in showing, too, how words and people both outlive themselves. Matters of chronology The seventh anachronism comes in Le temps retrouvé (Finding Time Again). It is introduced by a sense of coming back to an historical chronology which has not been asserted quite so much up till now, though the Dreyfus affair, which concluded only with Dreyfus’s pardon (1899) and exoneration (1905), marks the novel’s earlier parts. But in this last book, the narrator returns to Paris at the beginning of 1916, having twice received treatment in a sanatorium, once before, once after August 1914. That time in 1916 is the occasion of his meeting Baron Charlus in the street, and observing what goes on in the male brothel. He returns to another sanatorium, but this treatment is no more successful than the first one, and says that ‘many years’ passed before he came away (E.238, P.6.162, T.4.433). Since Proust himself died in 1922, those ‘beaucoup d’années’ may imply going beyond the six years after 1916, as if the novel becomes anachronistic by ending after the novelist has died, finding time again being a posthumous, or anachronistic state, since it must come from an unknown future. Hence Le temps retrouvé has a sharp sense of chronology, as in the passage which follows, which is dated 1914. It is earlier in date than the one which shows Saint-Loup in the Paris streets, in an incident referred to earlier (P.6.119, T.4.389). While it does not mention anachronism, that is present. The context is SaintLoup about to join his regiment: Saint-Loup had recently returned from Balbec. Later, I learned, indirectly, that he had made unsuccessful advances towards the manager

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of the restaurant. The latter owed his position to his inheritance from M. Nissim Bernard. In fact he was none other than the young waiter whom Bloch’s uncle had once ‘taken under his wing’. But with wealth had come virtue. With the result that Saint-Loup attempted in vain to seduce him. Thus by some compensatory process, while virtuous young men abandon themselves, as they grow older, to the passions of which they have become conscious, promiscuous youths become men of principle, from which the Charluses of this world, turning up on the strength of the old stories, but too late, receive a disagreeable refusal. It is all a matter of chronology. (P.6.44) [Saint-Loup revenait de Balbec. J’appris plus tard indirectement qu’il avait fait des vaines tentatives auprès du directeur du restaurant. Ce dernier devait sa situation à ce qu’il avait hérité de M. Nissim Bernard. Il n’était autre en effet que ce ancien jeune servant que l’oncle de Bloch ‘protégeait’. Mais la richesse lui avait apporté la vertu. De sorte que c’est en vain que Saint-Loup avait essayé de le séduire. Ainsi par compensation, tandis que les jeunes gens vertueux s’abandonnent, l’âge venu, aux passions dont ils ont enfin pris conscience, des adolescents faciles deviennent des hommes à principes contre lesquels des Charlus, venus sur la foi d’anciens récits mais trop tard, se heurtent désagréablement. Tout est affaire de chronologie. (T.4.315–631)]

It is indeed a matter of chronology. Saint-Loup, attractive homosexual army-officer, has been rebuffed by the waiter, who had been, as an adolescent, the object of admiration of the rich great-uncle of Bloch, Nissim Bernard (P.4.242, T.3.236). This attention has made the waiter upwardly mobile, with the petit-bourgeois morality this implies. Virtuous young men, for whom sexuality should come easily, only become sexual later on; the form of sexuality they succumb to being same-sex, they add to the one anachronism another. Young men of easy virtue become moral, and a Charlus, old and appealing to them on the strength of old tales of their romances, part of the life of anachronistic fiction, finds himself rejected. A first anachronism is in the lack of relation between the young and old, a second in how people change their lives. There is an anachronism within the time that people make their advances. Since the paragraph contains the phrases ‘plus tard’ and ‘trop tard’, there are two anachronisms in the time that people learn anything, and in the time that it takes people to make their approaches. The ‘matter of chronology’ which makes anachrony part of chronology, having its own laws, which can be factored into chronology and generalised about, as in this

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paragraph, is a matter of observing anachrony at work. Chronology will take its course: the war will see Saint Loup killed, Gilberte remarried, their daughter, aged sixteen, presented to the narrator at the end; generations repeating. ‘Anachronism’ is last used in Le temps retrouvé. Marcel re-meets the Duchesse de Guermantes, at a party; she has outlived herself, while the Duc, her husband, has begun an affair with Odette (widowed from Swann and now remarried to Forcheville – of whom Swann was jealous before marrying Odette). Odette’s age makes an affair with her seem outdated: the narrator refers to ‘women whom one sees every decade in a new incarnation, having new love affairs, sometimes when one had thought they were dead, causing the despair of young wives who are abandoned by them for their husbands’ (P.6.324–325) (‘Et puis il y a des femmes qu’a chaque decade on retrouve en une nouvelle incarnation, ayant de nouvelles amours, parfois alors qu’on les croyait mortes, faisant le désespoir d’une jeune femme que pour elles abandonne son mari’, T.4.592, my emphasis). But before this virtual anachronism comes the real one. The meeting with the Duchesse, first seen in the church at Combray, and later at the Opera in Paris, and the object of Marcel’s attentions in his determination to know her, shows how memory makes impossible an agreed narrative of the past. She had thought M. de Bréauté, who is a forgotten man, but whose niece is present, the anthithesis of a snob; now she thinks of him – ‘a thing of the past’ – as a snob (P.3.449, 503, 6.316, T.2.743, 794, 4.584) and she associates Marcel with him, so that: she was not entirely clear at what period our friendship had begun and was unaware of the serious anachronism she was committing by making this friendship begin several years too soon. (P.6.317) [elle ne savait plus exactement à quelle époque notre intimité avait commencé et ne se rendait pas compte du formidable anachronisme qu’elle faisait en faisant commencer cette amitié quelques années trop tôt. (T.4.585)]

The collapse of chronology associated with the Duchesse, which, if allowed, could pull apart the structure of the novel, indicates how the obsessionalism of the young Marcel in getting to know her (through Mme de Villeparisis, and through Saint-Loup) failed, and never made its mark within time. This last reference acts as a parody of the others, collapsing all

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distinctions: including the ones that the ‘snob’ – that Thackerayan concept and word, appropriate for London, and so anachoristic in Paris but more vividly present there – must preserve. The forgetfulness of the Duchesse, unable to retain any narrative, includes a possible despair, ruining all chronologies, all memories, all sense of identities. She illustrates the idea that the dominant culture must work by being anachronistic, unintentionally or intentionally, so much so that it loses its sense of the distinction between these types of forgetfulness; yet she also illustrates a tendency towards anachronism, inseparable from snobbishness, which destroys that culture. And as such, the anachronistic is comic, but it threatens subjectivity with madness, derangement and trauma; it does not have the power, necessarily to act as a release.

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Fools of time: Michelangelo and Shakespeare

Michelangelo’s sonnets Following Proust’s fourth instance of anachronism, it seems that the conditions of love, especially where that is homoerotic, condemn the lover towards anachronous behaviour. That seems true of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), with the fifty-three-year-old Gustav von Aschenbach, but I shall take instances from Michelangelo’s, then from Shakespeare’s, sonnets. In the winter of 1532–1533, in Rome, Michelangelo, aged fifty-seven, met the nobleman Tommaso Cavalieri (1509–1587), to whom he would be linked with a profound affection for the rest of his life and to whom he writes with great humility. The difference in age between the poet/artist and Tommaso Cavalieri, which is also a difference of social standing, seems to be part of what is anachronistic here. Michelangelo begins writing to Cavalieri on New Year’s Day 1533, while, in the first of three surviving letters to Michelangelo from Cavalieri, the latter thanks him for sending him drawings. It has usually been assumed that these include drawings of Ganymede and of Tityos.1 Ganymede, a drawing of ‘Jove’s own page’, as Rosalind calls him in As You Like It (1.3.118), shows the nude youth, presented frontally, carried up to heaven by the eagle, who, behind him, clasps him with claws round his legs; Ganymede’s left arm holds the eagle’s wing, and his right is around the head of the eagle. It is Neoplatonic: the soul drawn upwards by the ecstasy of love, but also sexual.2 In contrast, Tityos, the giant who was bound to a rock in Hades for attempting the rape of the Titaness Latona, appears as the victim not of, as in the sources, a vulture tearing out his liver, the seat of the passions, but of an eagle. This is in symmetry with the Ganymede; the eagle dominates with his wings outspread over the youth’s prostrate body. The imagery of being bound and captured appears in Sonnet 98, which concludes

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‘resto prigion d’un cavalier armato’ (an armed cavalier’s prisoner I remain), punning on Cavalieri’s name. Being transported to heaven or down to Hades, but possessed in either case by the same eagle whose broad wings and beak are severely material, makes Ganymede’s rapture as sensually felt as Tityos’s punishment.3 It suggests two possibilities for the lover, to be in a state of ecstasy, caught up by Jupiter’s own bird, which acts as Jupiter himself, or to be torn apart by the same all-powerful figure, not as a lover but as an agent of judgement. No. 105 concludes: Voglia sfrenata el senso è, non amore, che l’alma uccide; e ’l nostro fa perfetti gli amici qui, ma più per morte in cielo. [Unbridled desire which kills the soul is the senses, not love, and our love makes us perfect friends here, but more, through death, in heaven.]

The imagery however, which thinks in terms of two together, creates a fiction which is also supported by Michelangelo’s preoccupation with classical myth, understood anachronistically by taking older narratives and Neoplatonising them. Michelangelo’s poems number, in complete and fragmentary forms, some 302, and contain several groups addressed to Cavalieri: according to the edition by Enzo Noè Girardi (1960), they are Nos 56–62, 72–84, 88–98, 101–108 and 259–260. At the same time, between 1534 and 1547, when she died, aged fifty-seven, Michelangelo wrote poems to Vittoria Colonna, the widow of the Marquis of Pescara.4 And nor were the poems to Cavalieri the only ones for a man: Nos 99 to 101 are for Febo di Poggio, a Florentine whom Michelangelo knew and wrote poems to before quitting Florence in 1534. The love sonnets show Petrarch’s influence. Adopting his stylisations, which make his work ‘mannerist’, Michelangelo opts for a anachronistic writing. An early sonnet to Cavalieri, No. 60, the first to address him directly as ‘my lord’, divides, as usual in Michelangelo, into two quatrains followed by a sestet: Tu sa’ ch’io so, signor mie, che tu sai ch’i’ vengo per goderti più da presso, e sai ch’i’ so che tu sa’ ch’i’ son desso: a che più indugio a salutarci omai? Se vera è la speranza che mi dai, se vero è ’l grand desio che m’è concesso,

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rompasi il mur fra l’uno e l’altra messo, ché doppia forza hann’ i celati guai. S’i’amo sol di te, signor mie caro, quel che di te più ami, non ti sdegni, ché l’un dell’altro spirto s’innamora. Quel che nel tuo bel volto bramo e ’mparo, e mal compre’ è dagli umani ingegni, chi ’l vuol saper convien che prima mora. [You know that I know, my lord, that you know that I come nearer to you to enjoy you, and know that I know that you know that I am indeed that one: why much hesitation to greet each other now? If the hope is true that you give me, if the great desire that is conceded to me is true, break the wall that is placed between us, for hidden griefs have a double force. If I love only in you, my dear lord, that which of you you most love, do not disdain it, that one spirit loves another. That which in your beautiful face I hunger for desiringly, is badly understood by human wits, so that it is necessary that he must first die who would know it.]5

In this sonnet (c.1532), appears a covert language, which rests on an insistent confusion within syntax.6 Variants on sapere (to know) appear three times in the first and third lines; there is an insistence on truth, vero in the second quatrain and a three times repeated insistence on love (amare) in the third tercet (the first three lines of the sestet). The apposition between speranza and gran desio in the second quatrain will be noted, as part of the symmetry within this sonnet which keeps itself to generalities, referring to i celati guai (secret griefs, or torments), which are unrevealed, but felt through the tortured repetitions. So the nature of the inhibitory wall which must be broken down between them is not specified. The image recurs in a sonnet addressed to God, in a line whose ‘tu’ makes it personal: ‘Squarcia ’l vel tu, Signor, rompi quel muro’ – ‘Tear you, Lord, the veil, break that wall’ (87.9), where the wall keeps out the light of God’s sun. The sestet includes an acknowledgement of love, but it seems that the only way that this can be acknowledged is through an appeal to the other’s narcissism and the claim in line 12 that this is Platonic love for a spirit. The fiction is maintained through the last lines, as is the idea that what is so beautiful in the face can hardly be understood by human minds, who must wait for eternal life to know the spiritual beauty that the lover already contemplates in the loved one. The idea

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of homosexual attraction is declared impossible to ordinary people under another fiction of the impossibility of such people understanding Platonism. In claiming such a different status from others there appears the anachronism; love for a man can be spoken of only using a theology which involves a disavowal of why the beautiful form is loved, while everything is expressed in a language of excess. So also in No. 106: Per ritornar là donde venne fora, l’immortal forma al tuo carcer terreno venne com’angel di pieta sì pieno, che sana ogn’ intelletto e ’l mondo onora. Questo sol m’arde e queto m’innamora, non pur di fuora il tuo volto sereno: c’amor non già di cosa che vien meno tien ferma speme, in cui virtù dimora. Né altro avvien di cose altere e nuove in cui si preme la natura, e ’l cielo è c’a’ lor parti largo s’apparecchia; né Dio, suo grazia, mi si mostra altrove più che ’n alcun leggiadro e mortal velo; e quell sol amo perch’in lui si specchia. [In order to return there, whence it came, the immortal form came to your earthly prison like an angel so full of pity that it heals every intellect and honours the world. This alone makes me warm with love, not only for your exterior serene face, but because that love, in which virtue dwells, does not hold firm hope in something destined to pass away. It does not otherwise happen with high and new things in which nature expresses itself, and heaven shows itself generous at their birth; nor does God in his grace, show me anything else other than in some lovely and mortal veil, and I love that only because he is reflected in it.]

The mortal body is the ‘veil’ of line 13, as it is the ‘earthly prison’ of line 2; in the first eight lines, the loved one’s bright face is honoured, but it is also subordinated to the ‘immortal form’ which is said to inflame the person speaking, the lover. Yet the immortal form does inflame, and that must be rationalised in the last two tercets, which argue from the particular example: there are excellent beings who are the product of both nature and heaven, and the most full demonstration or mirroring of God takes place within that veil. The last line disavows any other love.

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A last example, No. 72, which opens with the word that starts nearly one-sixth of the poems, se, ‘if’, and supplements the argument that the expression in his eyes shows his love by saying it, culminates in the only open expression of physical desire within the poems, though it is not the only poem where Michelangelo acknowledges a love as physical as well as spiritual (as with Nos 78, or 83): Se nel volto per li occhi il cor si vede, altro segno non ho più manifesto della mie fiamma; addunche basti or questo signor mie caro, a domandar mercede. Forse lo spirto tuo, con maggior fede chi’i’ non credo, che sguarda il foco onesto che m’arde, fie di me pietoso e presto, come grazia c’abbonda a chi ben chiede. O felice quell dì, se se questo è certo! Fermisi in un momento il tempo e l’ore, il giorno, e ’l sol nella su’ antica traccia; acciò ch’i’ abbi, e non già per mie merto, il desïato mi dolce signore per sempre nell’ indegne e pronte braccia. [If the heart is seen in the face through the eyes, I have no other more apparent sign to manifest my flame; therefore let this be enough, my lord, to ask for mercy. Perhaps your spirit, with greater faith that I can believe, that looks at the honest fire that burns me, will be piteous and quick to me, like grace that abounds to the person who truly asks for it. O happy that day when this is sure to happen! May the time and the hour stop the day in a moment, and the sun in its old path, so that I may have, and not for any merit of mine, my sweet lord for ever in my unworthy and ready arms.]

This implies that Tommaso Cavalieri favouring him will be the equivalent of divine ‘grace abounding’ (Romans 5.20). The text then alludes to the substance of Joshua’s prayer that the sun might stand still (Joshua 10.12), so asking for a break within chronology, or implying that a break within ordinary chronology will take place when he has his lord within his arms. Joshua’s demand that the sun stand still so that he can complete his victory concludes Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘Thus though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run’: this proposes that the sun will find itself anachronistic in contrast to the speed with which love-making will absorb all future days in one.

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Time and Shakespeare’s sonnets No, time, thou shalt not boast that I do change! Thy pyramids built up with newer might To me are nothing novel, nothing strange, They are but dressings of a former sight. Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire What thou dost foist upon us that is old, And rather make them born to our desire Than think that we before have heard them told. Thy registers and thee I both defy, Not wond’ring at the present, nor the past; For thy records and what we see doth lie, Made more or less by thy continual haste. This do I vow, and this shall ever be, I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.7

Stanley Wells, amongst others, points out that the appearance of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as late as 1609 made them old-fashioned. Paul Hammond concludes from the silence that attended their publication that they were regarded with embarrassment, as if their putative homoeroticism was also anachronistic; times had changed from the 1590s.8 Sonnet 123, quoted here, is obsessed by fear of anachrony, as are the three sonnets which follow. Sonnet 123 defends the self against Time, which changes; but the first line affirms that Time will not have that boast over him, while the last couplet makes ‘I will be true’, as a statement of love, the indicator that love is the opposite of change, defying fears of becoming anachronous, though its existence as outside changing Time threatens to make it inherently anachronistic. Time and its agents – ‘thy pyramids’ – signs of death and recurrent – ‘thy registers and thee’, ‘thy records’, ‘thy scythe and thee’ – are opposed by the ‘I’ who speaks in the first line and in the third quatrain and couplet. These ‘pyramids’ have been annotated as reminders of Egyptian obelisks erected in Rome by the new antiquarianism of Pope Sixtus V, or as recalling triumphal structures in London welcoming James the First. They are new structures recalling what is old, but, as Time’s pyramids, they are what Time produces, new mountains raised up in place of mountains which have been levelled.9 New pyramids are the opposite of the ‘sometime-lofty towers I see down-razed’ in Sonnet 64 line 3, but if they are Time’s, they belong to Time,

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though man-made; they will feed Time. And it is because of Time that they are built; monuments would need no existence were it not for a perception of the power of death which they ward off by their enclosing structure, as Hegel noted with the Egyptian pyramids, and which they warn about (Latin, moneo, to warn). The first monuments were tombs, according to Hegel in the Aesthetics, which already announces the replacement of art by philosophy, or the ‘prose of thought’, making art a thing of the past, anachronistic.10 Time’s pyramids, then, proclaim an irrelevancy, which implies that new civic buildings may be seen as anachronistic, the new as the ruin already, so anticipating Walter Benjamin on the nineteenth-century city that ‘we recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’.11 Each age dreams its next: a completed building is already obsolescent, the victim of the ‘developer’ who wants an even taller tall building, the expression in modernity of the idea of everything becoming anachronistic, intuited in Shakespeare’s expression ‘devouring time’ (Sonnet 19). In Sonnet 123, if Time changes, it repeats itself; what reappears are ‘dressings’ – reworkings, revisions – of what was done before. The generation, whose dates are brief, cannot see these revisions at work. But the turn to the ‘I’ in the third quatrain argues that the speaker can; that he does not think that what has been before has now been ‘born to our desire’. This quatrain refers to ‘registers’ and defies the testimony to change borne in them: others may ‘admire’ but he is not ‘wondering’. The registers say that there is a present and a past, but, nonetheless, time’s records lie. What ‘lies’ contrasts with what was built up; ruins lying on the ground now bear witness against Time’s completeness, its ability to renew things in the course of change. That ‘lie’, as a noun, contrasts with the affirmation ‘I will be true’, which makes the self and the poem once-for-all, a monument not repeated in time, singularly true. The sonnet’s subject is fear of being anachronous, or ‘outdated’, a word of 1599 (OED), or ‘out of date’ (OED, 1608), since everything is made ‘more or less’ by Time’s ‘continual haste’. The sonnet does not care if it is anachronous – ‘this shall ever be’; even if ‘our dates are brief’. Its desire is not to be another of those written ‘records’ that lie. Within this is the idea that everything has a date. ‘Data Romae’, ‘given at Rome’, initiates the idea of there being a time when a letter is written; the date is what is ‘given’ (Latin, datus, given). The date is also the limit, as in Sonnet 14 (line 14), ‘Thy end is truth’s and

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beauty’s doom and date’. The limitless is dateless, as in ‘death’s dateless night’ (Sonnet 30). What is given and what is ended share the same word: ‘date’. Ascribing dates – ‘our dates are brief’ – indicates the impossibility of people being anachronistic. But there is also the possibility of supplying a ‘postscript’ to a letter which has been dated, which would be out of time: OED gives 1551 for the first citation of ‘postscript’. Sonnet 123 recalls the third quatrain of Sonnet 116, which, opposing Love and Time, makes Love (not just his love) anachronistic: Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

Love has already been defined as not that which ‘alters when it alteration finds’ (line 3). Sonnet 124 would like to see love as outside time yet also legitimate, belonging to proper succession: If my dear love were but the child of state It might for fortune’s bastard be unfathered, As subject to time’s love, or to time’s hate, Weeds among weed, or flowers with flowers gathered. No, it was builded far from accident; It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls Under the blow of thrallèd discontent, Whereto th’inviting time our fashion calls. It fears not policy, that heretic Which works on leases of short-numbered hours, But all alone stands hugely politic, That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers. To this I witness call the fools of time, Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.12

There seems here a desire to disengage from politics; from being seen as a time-server (OED: 1584: ‘to serve the time’ is cited first in 1560, ‘temporizer’ in 1555, ‘to temporize’ (to delay, to put off the time), 1579). The second quatrain, ‘No, it was builded far from accident’ leaves nothing to chance. ‘No’ recalls the initial ‘No’ of Sonnet 123, as ‘builded’ recalls 123’s second line. ‘Smiling pomp’ may imply the pageant for James; ‘thrallèd discontent’, its opposite, James’s enemies. In the couplet, the ‘fools’ belong to what Helen Vendler (527–528) thinks of as a ‘shadow poem’ behind this one,

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containing children of state likely to be declared illegitimate; subject to time’s hate; likely to be thought of as weeds or as flowers; subject to accident; suffering from pomp; falling under the blow of discontent; fearing Policy; growing with heat, drowning with showers. But whoever would be outside this is outside life. Everyone, then, is the fool of time, not least the writer. The fools of time – those who discover that the self has been a fool, following time like a jester his master (‘You, sir, more knave than fool, after your master’ – King Lear 1.4.314), imitating it (so constantly changing), and yet duped by it – form a complete category. Those who ‘die for goodness, who have lived for crime’ sound like a sub-group, dying for their faith, like the Jesuits of the Gunpowder Plot, or those dying as a public example, to show the power of public morality, but the group may exclude no one, and the opposition of goodness and crime may mean nothing, since these terms are all in the gift of time, which names things as it will. The irony amongst this group, if that is what it is, inheres in them having lived for one thing but dying for another: becoming celebrated, perhaps, for what they have not done. They are not allowed the privilege of consistency in their deaths: another way in which they have been fooled. It is relevant that the witnesses are all out of time: all have died. The only witnesses to time’s tyranny are so anachronistic that they are excluded from it. And the person whose love is so ‘hugely politic’ is also out of time, as being dead. The following Sonnet, no. 125, uses the same language of politics: Were’t aught to me I bore the canopy, With my extern the outward honouring, Or laid great bases for eternity Which proves more short than waste or ruining? Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour Lose all and more by paying too much rent, For compound sweet forgoing simple savour, Pitiful thrivers in their gazing spent? No, let me be obsequious in thy heart, And take thou my oblation, poor but free, Which is not mixed with seconds, knows no art But mutual render, only me for thee. Hence, thou suborned informer! A true soul When most impeached stands least in thy control.

The canopy recalls ‘pomp’ in no. 124, as does perhaps the second line, ‘smiling’. ‘Laid great bases for eternity’, recalling the pyramid,

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might mean claiming that his love is eternal, though love could prove more ‘short’ than ‘waste’ or ‘ruining’: in that sense the poem revises the affirmation that closed Sonnet 123. The ‘true soul’ of the couplet recalls ‘I will be true’ (123.14). Sonnet 123 was addressed to Time, while 124 had no explicit addressee, but here the addressee is in the third quatrain, appealed to on the basis of truthful simplicity, and not the ‘outward’ but the ‘heart’ is honoured. This is a poem of experience, as is indicated by ‘have I not seen’ – watching the ‘gazing’ of those that only look on the outward form – and as noted in the line ‘lose all and more’. The first quatrain is self-defensive (Would it have been anything of consequence to me if I did bear the canopy?) but no adequate reply emerges to the apparent accusation that his love may be only for show. Equally, the second quatrain does not quite answer the accusation, giving only a statement that he has seen people be unlucky because they have invested too much in ‘form and favour’. The word ‘No’ at the beginning of the third quatrain, like the ‘No’ of 123, asserts, therefore, a position, without having refuted the position of which he is accused, whether implicitly or explicitly, or in his thoughts. Here, to ‘rent’-paying is opposed ‘mutual render’; ‘me for thee’. The ‘suborned informer’ claims that the speaker’s love is ultimately subject to time, or connected to outward honouring, and he has been implicitly present since the self-defence of the first line. Sonnets 123, 124 and 125 all conclude with an affirmation implying the law courts, and the permanence of legality: ‘This do I vow’ – ‘I witness call’, ‘Hence, thou suborned informer’. The witnesses of Sonnet 124 were inherently untrustworthy, split between their identity in life and death, while the witness here is unreliable in contrast to ‘a true soul’. But this tension between ‘suborned’ and ‘true’ is equivocal, just as the ‘informer’ identity may be ambiguous, if he is also the person addressed in the third quatrain. (Since the first twelve lines presuppose the addressee of line 8, it seems unnecessary to suppose that someone else is invoked in the couplet, in which case the poem is ambiguous about the nature of the addressee, whose character is split, like that of the previous sonnet’s ‘fools of time’.) On that basis, neither speaker nor addressee can maintain the pure simplicity spoken of before, which appears to be a desire which is impossible because of the nature of time. If the ‘suborned informer’ is Time, including Time within himself, Time has power over him to accuse him; no saying ‘hence’ will make him go away, a point which

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seems also recognised in the failure of the first eight lines to do other than not answer the implicit question whether he loves only for form and favour. The sequence closes with 126, a six-couplet poem, an envoi. After that, in Sonnets to the woman, there is no reference to time; time relates exclusively to the male anachronistically addressed. The first and fourth lines recall Sonnet 108’s ‘sweet boy’: O thou my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle-hour; Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow’st; If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure! She may detain, but not still keep her treasure. Her audit, though delayed, answered must be, And her quietus is to render thee.13

The second line evokes the hourglass, and the glass which shows that the boy has grown fairer by becoming older. The first eight lines present him grown older but still growing (see lines 3 and 4: ‘grown’, ‘grow’st’). Yet however older, his years waning in the hourglass, he appears a boy, as if he was an anachronism. He is younger at the end than when he started. Time, pictured as old, is disgraced by Nature presenting the ‘lovely boy’ as ever lovely, just as the ‘lover’ of line 4 seems to be withering in contrast to the boy. (This is to take the Quarto word ‘louers’, which looks like a plural, as, instead, ‘lover’s’, as Duncan-Jones’s edition does; the Cambridge Sonnets also finds this an ‘attractive’ reading.) Yet within the sense of the young man’s triumph there is something else. Nature, the mistress, does not do what she does for him, as the minion, but for her own triumph over time. The anachrony that allows him to appear younger as he grows older – so returning to the themes of the first seventeen sonnets, which express the desire that he should marry and have children in order that his beauty should be renewed – is permitted, not designed. She ‘keeps’ (7) but she does not ‘still keep’ (10). Hence the last lines reiterate the apostrophe ‘O thou’ as if saying there can be no anachrony, there is, instead, the future: the ‘minion’ will be handed back to time. There can be nothing else after Nature’s rendering of the

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young man. The last missing two lines which would complete the fourteen lines have only brackets, presumably left by the printer to mark the absence of the lines, so giving two opening and closing brackets, forming two oppositely running curves. They can be read as lunulae, emblems of fickleness, or of the sickle, marking out imminent silence. Nature’s work is to ‘pluck back’, to ‘detain’, to ‘delay’, but eventually to ‘render’. This pattern happens in the poem, which begins with the young man holding Time in his power, but ends with the poet, the withered lover, in that sense the avatar of Time and not his opposite as in previous sonnets, consigning, through verse, the lovely boy to Time, and in cutting short the poem, not allowing him the full measure of time. ‘Rarely has a speaker’s voice so altered towards its love-object in the course of twelve short lines’ (Vendler, 537). Perhaps that is why the poems to the male lover finish at this point. The forwards–backwards movement of Nature and the poem is a mode of yielding to loss, accepting that mourning can only be postponed. So the poem acknowledges the lovely boy but sees no future for him. Whereas the earlier poems, complementing the first seventeen, provided an alternative immortality for the young man’s beauty through the writing of sonnets, that has now been surrendered. The poem began with ‘my’ lovely boy, (though ‘my’ was always in question); the last line indicates that the boy is no one’s but time’s. The history plays: ‘Richard’s time’ The ‘lovely boy’ contains time within his presence, though at the end he is contained within time. Preoccupation with time accords with a sense that a crisis is marked here, as time becomes more and more that which is marked out objectively.14 Erwin Panofsky notes the change which goes from classical art which depicts Time as Opportunity (Kairos), a figure that merged with Fortuna, or creative Eternity (Aion) to the Renaissance Time the Destroyer, product of a fusion of Chronos with the Roman Saturn Kronos, father of the Gods. This makes Time the Father, armed with a sickle and eating his children, and, in post-Petrarchan representations, triumphing over everything.15 In the early modern moment, time, as created by the seasons, the length of the days and the perception of the moon’s changes, disappears. People might, on a short day of perhaps only seven hours’ daylight, have made one hour to be implicitly counted

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as two, so losing the division of twelve hours for daylight and twelve for nightime. This older time is replaced by mechanical clocks (beginning of the fourteenth century), especially when such clocks acquire not only bells but hour hands (Wells Cathedral, 1392), and dials, and, in the mid-seventeenth century, second hands. When Dante (1265–1321), writing in the early fourteenth century, describes meeting his ancestor, Cacciaguida (c.1090–c.1147), in the heaven of Mars, Cacciaguida says that, in his time, Florence, the entire city, within city walls whose layout went back to Roman times, functioned under the sound of one set of bells from the Abbey of Badia within it, which rang the canonical hours (Para. 15.97–99). Cacciaguida refers to terce (9 am) and nones (3 pm). But in the heaven of the Sun, more modern than twelfth-century Florence, the souls of the prudent move in a comparison which is derived from a clock: Indi, come orologio che ne chiami ne l’ora che la sposa di Dio surge a mattinar lo sposo perché l’ami, che l’una parte e l’altra tira e urge, tin tin sonando con sì dolce nota, che ’l ben diposto spirto d’amor turge; così vid’iö la gloriosa rota muoversi e render voce a voce in tempra e in dolcezza ch’esser non pò nota se non colà dove gioir s’insempra. (Paradiso 10. 139–148) [Then, like a clock which calls us at the hour [dawn, the hour of matins] when the Bride of God rises to sing matins to [or, to court] her Bridegroom, so that he may love her, in which one part draws or drives the other, sounding ‘tin tin’ with notes so sweet that the well disposed spirit swells [sexually] with love, so did I see that glorious wheel move and render voice to voice, with harmony and sweetness that cannot be known except where joy makes itself everlasting.]

There is a combination here of modernity and tradition which threatens anachronism: the aubade which the soul sings to God is prompted not by a bell rung by a monk but by a mechanical clock. By John Locke’s century, time has become ‘duration’, which the individual may or may not hold in mind: it is alienated time, abstract, the time of the day the priority, unrelated to sunrise, noon or sunset. In 1582, Gregory XIII’s Bull reformed the calendar and removed ten days from that October (eleven by 1752, when Britain changed).

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Time becomes a breaking down into separate parts of the succession of instants that make up a day, or a month, or a year (the turning of the earth on its axis, the phases of the moon, and the earth’s orbit round the sun). These are replaced by something else when these revolutions mean nothing; something abstract, like the measurement of a week, which has no external referent. How many monuments include clocks, enforcing the point that a ‘monument’ is a reminder of time? Churches, town halls, hospitals, all ‘institutions’ (a word the OED dates, in this sense, to 1707), install clocks. The historian Fritz Breithaupt, arguing that ‘the modern concept of history is a concept of institutions’, contends that institutions, which are visible monuments, are also mental constructs, so that ‘an institution is that which permits the repeatability of an act . . . the two features of an institution are that it structures the way in which an act occurs and that it makes its repetition possible’.16 Repeatability, the guarantor of identity, associates with clock-time. The seasons, which once dictated times, are now alien. Michelangelo, unlike Joshua, has now nothing to call on when thinking that the moment of love with Cavalieri will interrupt time, making the sun to stop; now, the sun’s motions are subordinated to an abstract scheme that the sun must also relate to. Benjamin, writing in 1940, joins to the desire to break time as onward-going, deterministic, the sense of how revolutions want to blast history out of its continuity, to arrest the day. He compares calendars, which mark time in terms of memorials, with clocks, which run onwards, emptily. Whereas traditional practices of writing history – what Benjamin calls historicism – make time and events flow on, in an irresistible progress, revolution begins with the arrest of events, the arrest of a thinking which values only progress. Arresting the day is an arrêt de mort: The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution produced a new calendar. [The French Revolution pronounced 1792 as Year 1.] The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are moments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution [1830] an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned

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On anachronism out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:

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Qui le croirait! on dit qu’irrités contre l’heure De nouveaux Josués au pied de chaque tour Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour. [who would have believed it! We are told that new Joshuas at the foot of every tower, as though irritated with time itself, fired at the dials in order to stop the day.]17

In Shakespeare, ‘we are time’s subjects and time bids be gone’ – 2 Henry IV 1.3.110.18 The end of 1 Henry IV contains a line recalled in the later Sonnet 124, spoken by a specific martyr, a hero whose death on the battlefield constitutes him a model witness: Hotspur, victim of pride and of his desire for honour ‘without corrival’ (1.3.207). Commenting on Time as he dies, he cannot complete his sentence, making him even more the fool of time: O Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth. I better brook the loss of brittle life Than those proud titles thou hast won of me. They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh; But thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time’s fool, And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy, But that the earthy and cold hand of death Lies on my tongue: no Percy, thou art dust, And food for – (1 Henry IV 5.4.76–85)19

If thoughts are the slaves of life, and life is time’s fool, being a slave and fool relate to each other, though both are seen to be contingent realities. Hotspur’s values have been his ‘titles’, not knowing that they are more brittle than life is, and their loss assails his thoughts, though he knows now that these are relative. His desire is to prophesy: to stand outside the time as he has not been able to do before, but he fooled in that, since his fate will be to have Falstaff wound him in the thigh and haul him around the stage as Falstaff’s fool; Falstaff having already mocked his pretensions to honour. What would Hotspur have prophesied, making himself a figure like ‘the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies’ (Part 1 3.3.144) whom he so dismissed in life? Henry V’s funeral, which opens 1 Henry VI? A play confirming

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that a like fate waits for Henry, ‘too famous to live long’, and a play which the audience to 1 Henry IV could have witnessed? In that case, the action of Part 2, which shows Hal maintaining control of himself and over time, defers that day. But the moment of insight in Hotspur (which makes him ‘die for goodness’) has been postponed too much; in his last words he is out of time. 2 Henry IV opens with ‘Enter Rumour, painted full of tongues’ saying that ‘I, from the Orient to the drooping West, / Making the winds my post-horse, still unfold / The acts commenced on this ball of earth’ (3–5).20 The play then is to be ‘unfolded’, i.e. presented, by a figure who announces the unreliability of the medium, just as rumours finish the play (rumours of going to fight in France: ‘I heard a bird so sing, / Whose music, to my thinking, pleas’d the King’ Part 2 5.5.101–102) and as a figure comes on to speak an Epilogue, which says that the author will continue the story ‘with Sir John [Falstaff] in it’, which of course will not be the case. Fame in classical literature is none other than Rumour, and as such presides in a house in an early dream-poem by Chaucer, The House of Fame, which Chaucer is allowed to visit. We could define modern literature in English as starting, virtually, with two houses, Fame and Rumour, which show the plurality of circulation of messages whose function witnesses to unreliability, the impossibility of any chronology establishing a single cause and effect; starting, indeed, as the information society.21 In the Induction to 2 Henry IV, Rumour gives a specific example of what he has done: he has arrived at the castle of the Earl of Northumberland, having run from the battle of Shrewsbury, where Northumberland’s son, Hotspur, was killed. But he has come to spread false news, that Hotspur survived and that Hal died. ‘The posts come tiring on, / And not a man of them brings other news / Than they have learnt of me. From Rumour’s tongues / They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs’ (37–40). The first scene follows with the old man, Northumberland, who Rumour says is ‘crafty sick’ – so is he sick or not? is there any way of telling? – being told by Lord Bardolph, who has got it from someone else, that Hotspur his son was the victor. The news is then contradicted by a second witness, Travers, who has had it from someone else. The bad news is confirmed by a third, Morton. The play, whose obsession is time, is inaugurated by the power of the false. If Rumour unfolds events, these are unreliable as to date and time; it seems that Rumour’s chief function is to create a sense of sickness. Falstaff tells

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the Lord Chief Justice that he had heard he was sick (1.2.93) and then says that he hears the King ‘is fallen into this same whoreson apoplexy’ (1.2.98). In Act 3 scene 1, the King, insomniac and indeed ill, eventually appears, his sickness proving rumour true, or demonstrating that rumour makes things true. He is passing round letters; he is depressed with the numbers of the rebels he has heard about: ‘They say [the classic phrase for rumour and for chatter alike] the Bishop and Northumberland / Are fifty thousand strong’ (95–96). Warwick tries to cheer him by saying ‘Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo / The numbers of the feared’ (97–98) before coming in with his own rumour: ‘To comfort you the more, I have received / A certain instance that Glendower [one of the rebels] is dead’ (102– 103). True or not true? Glendower probably died in 1415–16, after Henry’s death in 1413, but, for Holinshed, he died in the tenth year of Henry’s reign (i.e. 1409), yet in this very scene Henry has dated the events as taking place in 1407. Shakespeare disregards Holinshed who is in any case wrong. Are these the dramatist’s, or the characters’ anachronisms, or the work of allegorical Rumour which, setting actions to work without adequate prior causation, makes all actions anachronistic? Warwick’s speech leaves open the possibility that he says what he does only to get the King to get some sleep: the more certainty he claims, the more uncertainty. The association of rumour with news intended to depress (with the numbers of the rebels) and with death, means that there is here not just a plurality of messages generating actions independent of their truth but also the power of messages inherently to generate both speed and exhaustion, or sickness: the news comes ‘tiring on’, tearing on, with all the implications of that participle, exhausting itself in its speed. Here, the medium is the message since the subject of rumour is rumour; the subject of information in its plural forms is information: news arrives, willed or not, but always uncertain in quality. And news, or information, can always be always supplemented with more, as Warwick’s additional information about Glendower shows, threatening everyone with not knowing ‘the latest’. It makes everybody liable to be out of time, not ‘up to speed’, out of it, like Northumberland in the First and the king in the Third Acts. Though Rumour is used by all types of people, as Rumour himself implies, it is caused, it seems, by nothing else than the possibility of speed which creates the need for it, and the contradictoriness of messages this sets up. In this case, Rumour is part of an instability which

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is inherent in the passing on of news; in Phèdre (1677), Racine uses the false report of Theseus’ death to give to Phèdre the possibility that she might speak to Hippolyte of her love to him. In 2 Henry IV, rumour creates the anachrony by which the father thinks that his son has won the battle of Shrewsbury. In Phèdre, it makes the return of Theseus anachronistic, since events have gone on apace, Phèdre has tried seducing Hippolyte; the attempt that the patriarchal absolute ruler makes to recodify the political and familial situation appears as a belated attempt to reimpose order, in the face of the ‘deterritorialization’ that has taken place in the absence of this particular dieu caché. If the dominant form of anachronism in Shakespeare is dating something too early, (the future Richard the Third saying that he can set the murderous Machiavel – future to the historical Richard – to school), this does not, principally, serve the cause of nostalgia. This point should modify the argument of Phyllis Rackin, who approaches the subject of ‘anachronism and nostalgia’ in discussing Shakespeare’s history plays, and gives many examples of the former, while also seeing it as, often, metatheatre, theatre which draws attention to the impossibility of representing the past.22 Hotspur as anachronistic, as he is, is neither a figure to encourage nostalgia nor a return to a past era, the play actually making him much younger than he was. His anachronism is to perpetuate values which the time has let go by and which therefore seem outside its values; to think in terms of nostalgia accepts the pastness of values, but that is not what Hotspur does; not till the end does he realise he is the fool of time, that time is not where he thought it was. The Henry IV plays divide between those who know or realise that nothing is where or when it should be, and those who follow time sedulously, or those who deliberately challenge the time. But to ‘play the fools with the time’, in carnival spirit, is actually not to oppose it, for while it happens, ‘the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us’ (2 Henry IV 2.2.120–121). Yet Hotspur’s actions and commitment to honour are deeply anachronistic, like those positions that Richard II held with regards to his power, when he felt that, as the deputy anointed by the Lord, he could not be deposed. Such anachrony makes both Richard and Hotspur vulnerable to the political realism of Bolingbroke and his party. In the case of Hotspur, in addition to this and to the factionalism on his own side which exploits him, he is vulnerable also to the challenge of Hal, who knows that ‘Percy is but my factor, good

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my lord / To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf’ (1 Henry IV 3.2.147–148). Hal uses time to take over someone else’s time. Hence Hotspur’s realisation at the end that he has been fooled, from which he generalises, reinforces a conservatism of attitude at the end that is brought out all the more by Hal, who will adopt no carnival position, nor give way to any expression of desire, while seeming to imitate a carnival spirit. In Hotpsur, the conservatism is brought out in an over-assertion of masculinity, shown in his argumentativeness, his recoil from the lord on the battlefield ‘perfumed like a milliner’, talking ‘like a waiting gentlewoman’ (1.3.35, 54), and his contempt for the ‘mincing poetry’ (3.1.130) that he nonetheless, without knowing it, speaks so intensely. Such resistance to the feminine ensures that his last speech will be also repressed, speaking to himself (‘No, Harry’) as to another at the end. Richard, too, like a Proustian figure aware of waste, hears music, which keeps time: I wasted time, and now doth time waste me, For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock. My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point, Is pointing still in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sounds that tell what time it is Are clamourous groans that strike upon my heart, Which is the bell. So sighs and tears and groans Show minutes, hours and times. [F: minutes, times and hours.] But my time Runs posting on in Bolingbroke’s proud joy, While I stand fooling here, his jack of the clock. (Richard II 5.5.49–60)

To be wasted by time means that time shows its effects like a clock; time is that which the clock indicates, as does the wasted Richard. Here, thoughts have become minutes, which ‘hasten to their end’ (Sonnet 60) at the top of the hour; the ‘watches’ being the marks of the minutes on the dial. The eyes, the ‘outward watches’, pick up the perception of the clock going round as in a reflection, while the finger which reaches into them does so every minute, as the hand of a clock. Eyes as outward watches conduct a vigil. If the heart is the bell which sounds, the entire body shows the working of time, expressed in mourning; but there are two time-schemes here, for his time which

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moves on in slow minutes for him ‘posts’ on at speed in the time that Bolingbroke keeps, and on whose clock, as the ‘jack’ he keeps striking the quarter-hours, as if everything for Bolingbroke goes fifteen times as fast. Richard’s mood follows the opening of Sonnet 30, which is invoked in Scott Moncrieff’s title for his translation of Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.

Even in moments of sweetness, memory of waste invades the self. Old woes become new woes. The ‘he’ who speaks in this sonnet weeps for the time that has been wasted, but weeping wastes time further: Stephen Booth (p. 182) reads the fourth line: ‘and waste my precious opportunities in the new bewailing of old woes’. It is not enough that time has been wasted; its waste must be mourned, as with the narrator at Balbec. What is wailed is what the sonneteer’s time (‘lifetime’) has seen wasted. ‘Dear’ applies to the life, and what has been wasted, spent fruitlessly, what has gone to ruin. ‘Richard’s time’ is invoked by Hotspur (1 Henry IV 1.3.240) as if it was reclaimable, and Hotspur’s sense that it is, in his attempting to replace the Lancastrians with Mortimer, is one way in which the history plays not only write a chronology but, because they exist in a sequential form, show the consequences of that writing; they position events as open (the plays can be read or seen out of sequence) and as closed. To be able to say, like the rebels, we are ‘time’s subjects’, which means not just that they are not the King’s subjects but that they are held by something other, which ‘bids them be gone’ in the sense that it brings on their death, makes them anachronistic, is a perception possible only within a sequential historical form. The arguments about Time within the Sonnets, already discussed, come out of the same discourse as the history plays. The 1590s saw the creation of the history play, a genre almost unique to that decade; its newness was to adhere to chronicle narrative sources throughout.23 This sense, of being dominated by chronicled time, plays through the sonnets. The King’s submission to his insomnia (2 Henry IV 3.1.1–31) comes in a soliloquy which shows that his doom, to keep vigil, to keep watch (to be a clock, like Richard), while others sleep,

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affirms the authority of impersonal time. Ability to sleep would mean that the power of time was not felt. His soliloquy leads him into perceiving ‘the revolution of the times’, to a recall of the past in terms of numbers of years that have elapsed: ten years, two years after that, then eight years ago. The actual chronological time (six years altogether) is elongated in the speech, as it produces a recall of people in the past, one of whom, Richard, now dead, spoke about the then future which is the play’s present. Henry remembers Richard, ‘with weeping eyes’ – eyes that, as watches, measured time, and saying ‘the time shall come’ (compare Richard II 5.1.55ff). Chronicles of deaths foretold. There is an interesting forking of time too, since Henry notices that Richard and Northumberland were friends, then enemies, and now that he and Northumberland, once friends, are now enemies, while Hotspur, defying Richard, has also defied Henry. As Henry echoes Richard’s words, and the situations of Richard II, the reader or the audience to the play can test these memories for herself: the statements, the events are there, and not there, said and not said; no one’s memory is privileged, everyone remembers something slightly different, the reader or audience may compare their memory with that of the stage characters. No single origin can be found for what the King says, which lessens the determinism of his language. He remembers and repeats as illegitimate King what the previous (questionably) legitimate King had said, ‘The time shall come – thus did he follow it – “The time will come”, that foul sin, gathering head / Shall break into corruption’. His statements give him a sense that the ‘then’ of history has been fulfilled now, in ‘this same time’s condition’; he sees the present – as diseased – as the accumulation of the corruption from the past. Reading back to Richard’s half-recalled words, he constructs a teleology, making the present the production of death, while being amazed how fast the then present has disappeared irretrievably. This reading of time’s determinism permits no anachronism, yet it is nothing but anachronistic, in knowing that the past has not been done with. But for the King it means that life cannot be justified: anyone reading the book of fate, seeing what was in store, would do nothing else than ‘shut the book, and sit him down and die’ (lines in the Quarto, not the Folio). Henry’s speech leads into Warwick’s rationalisation, that ‘there is a history in all men’s lives / Figuring the natures of the times deceased’ which enables someone who has seen this, to prophesy

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of the main chance of things As not yet come to life, who in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasurèd. Such things become the hatch and brood of time . . . (2 Henry IV 3.1.82–85)

For Warwick, each person’s life has a history inscribed within it, which goes beyond a simple chronology, in so far as it shows dead times, times which are ‘deceased’. It is as if a human life shows the effect of the past, or reads the past. The ability to look back, then, is the ability to look forward, to see a repetition of dead times that will come to life as the new hatch and brood. The future is in the past as ‘seeds’, so that prophecy – as with Macbeth’s and Banquo’s witches who look into ‘the seeds of time’ (Macbeth 1.3.58) – comes from looking into the past. Yet these are also ‘the times diseased’ so that Warwick is also saying that the history in all men’s lives figures both their present and their future: the diseased times. Past and future are identical for Warwick: there can be no anachrony when what is looked back to is what is looked forward to. Unsurprisingly, the King reacts by talking the language of ‘necessity’, as though time could be equated with that, while the play itself meditates on the ‘history’ that leads to disease or decease, as if looking for that which will make that history other. Falstaff The history which mediates on itself as dominated by time contains Falstaff, a figure who will not be contained. He begins the second scene of 1 Henry IV: ‘Now Hal, what time of day is it lad?’ The last line of the same scene, Hal’s declaration that he is ‘Redeeming time when men think least I will’, ends a soliloquy which reveals him as ‘hugely politic’, and indicates a judgemental reaction to such carnivalesque carelessness. Hal wills to re-insert himself into history in a dominant role like the sun, the antithesis of anachronism, which this soliloquy announces that he imitates. Hal calculates on not being anachronistic; Falstaff’s existence defends anachrony, aligning it with comedy, being not only witty in himself but the cause that wit is in other men (2 Henry IV 1.2.8–9). There is no consistent history to be applied to the Eastcheap people, who persist through these two plays and from The Merry Wives of Windsor to Henry V: the comic mode disallows a single chronological pattern for them. Hal says that

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Falstaff has neglected paying attention to clock-time in replying to his first question: Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.

Yet Hal’s speech disconnects all the elements of time and, noticeably, leads inadvertently into a carnival mode itself, when the male sun (to which Hal will compare himself: maybe this ‘sun’ is the ‘son’ – i.e. Hal) has to turn into a woman. Harold Bloom argues that Falstaff is a man without a superego, which makes him wholly free, beyond good and evil, beyond the law of the father, certainly beyond the control of the Lord Chief Justice, whom, in complete contrast, Hal reveres as a substitute father (2 Henry IV 5.2.118) after the death of the King.24 Bloom also compares him with Socrates, only without his daimon, about which Nietzsche comments in The Birth of Tragedy. ‘The voice [of the daimon] only spoke to dissuade . . . Whereas in all truly productive men instinct is the strong, affirmative force and reason the dissuader and critic, in the case of Socrates, the roles are reversed: instinct is the critic, consciousness the creator.’25 The Nietzschean Socrates, despite his heterogeneity, becomes, under the power of his daimon, always reactive. This is despite of, and because of, his erotic fascination, which is inseparable from his ugliness. Alcibiades, the Athenian general, in the Symposium, bears witness to this when his eulogy of love becomes a eulogy of Socrates, emphasising what is inside Socrates, how much his fascination and his control go together, and how impossible it is to distinguish his erotic attraction to men from his irony.26 So, if we can take Falstaff as a non-self-repressed Socrates, an-anti Socrates who does not differentiate philosophy and the erotic, that gives point to Hal calling him ‘the tutor and the feeder of my riots’ (2 Henry IV 5.5.62). And Falstaff dies like Socrates, as Phaedo describes it in Plato’s dialogue: the man, this one who’d given him the poison, felt him, and after an interval examined his feet and legs; he then pinched his foot hard and

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asked if he could feel it, and Socrates said not. And then he felt his shins once more; and moving upwards in this way, he showed us that he was becoming cold and numb. He went on feeling him, and said that when the coldness reached his heart, he would be gone.27

This is an account given to others by an eyewitness: the Hostess finishes her account to Pistol, Bardolph and Nym and the boy with, ‘so a’ bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and so upward, and upward, and all was as cold as any stone’ (Henry V 2.3.23–27).28 Having neither sense of time nor superego are twin characteristics, but that these make Falstaff anachronistic is not explicit until Hal’s rejection, which links proper awareness of time to mortality and wakefulness: ‘I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers. / How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! / I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, /So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane; / But being awak’d I do despise my dream’ (2 Henry IV 5.5.45–49). Twice ‘old’ appears in Hal’s dismissal, and, just as the dying Hotspur calls himself a fool, so ‘fool’ is applied by Hal to Falstaff, and is repeated later, along with the re-use of the marginalising ‘jester’ in ‘Reply not to me with a fool-born jest’ (line 55). Jesting, as anachronistic, is born out of folly: madness is that which cannot be borne by those who fear anachrony, since it points to a past not established on any principle of reason. Falstaff’s exclusion from the second play parallels Hotspur’s violent exclusion from the first: Hotspur and Falstaff associate together as anachronisms. The rejection of the anachronistic in Hal’s speech, which has been coming throughout both plays, as much as the word ‘old’ is repeated throughout Part 2, nearly forty times, is also a rejection of the affective: of friendship, of otherness while Hal speaks with what Traversi called ‘a tight-lipped implication of disgust in his advice to “leave gormandizing”, [and has] the studied gesture to the gallery, so appropriate in one whose life is to be lived from now on as a public function’.29 Yet Traversi’s recoil is not quite the hegemonic mode of understanding the speech; the play is more often taken as showing the necessary if tragic choice that Hal must make. Royalist readings of this rejection still abound. As if bearing out Bloom’s analysis, in Part 1, Falstaff defies everything which, objectively, proclaims him anachronistic: his capacity for denial being demonstrated in narrating the Gadshill robbery.

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He asks, wonderfully, when messengers from the court arrive for Hal, ‘what doth gravity out of his bed at midnight?’ (2.4.270). His speeches to Hal in the jointly acted ‘play extempore’ (the pun should be noted) which follows, in mocking Hal’s interview with his father, overcome, triumphantly, any reality principle. As the power of the heterogeneous, Falstaff challenges the ability of the homogeneous to compass his character in words. He begins by playing the part of the King, and telling Hal, playing himself – but Hal is always an actor, and never ‘plays himself’ – to keep with Falstaff. The two reverse the situation, and Hal, speaking in the name of his father, calls Falstaff a ‘devil’ who haunts him ‘in the likeness of a man’. Falstaff is compared to a series of containers when Hal, acting his father, calls him that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that Vanity in years . . . that villainous, abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan. (1 Henry 1V 2.4.407–422)

The Vice, Iniquity, Ruffian and Vanity in the morality plays were young: the oxymorons constructed through the uses of terms of respect – ‘reverend’, ‘grey’ and ‘father’ – only emphasise the incongruity within Falstaff’s character: as all these things, he is a distortion of old age, or he is what old age is: vicious, iniquitous, ruffianly, anachronistic: vanity in years. Hal’s context for making these comments is that Falstaff should be banished, and it leads in to Falstaff’s brilliant self-defence, spoken as though he was playing Hal before his father. The issue thus comes back to what had been said by Falstaff (playing the King) in the earlier version of the scene: the King imagined as saying ‘There is virtue in that Falstaff. Him keep with, the rest banish.’ But ‘Banish plump Jack and banish all the world’ – the warning in Falstaff’s second speech of justification, when he acts the part of an imagined Hal – associates heterogeneity, and ‘all the world’, and misleading youth by loving it. What is banished is anachronism. In 2 Henry IV, however, the superego is at work: the fiction of youth cannot be maintained: Falstaff must remember ‘I am old, I am old’ (2.4.222). The Lord Chief Justice demands of Falstaff, ‘Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old, with all the characters of age?’ (1.2.163–165). Old age is made by the

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Lord Chief Justice into an image of disgust, of what is unrepresentable. Falstaff’s reply ‘I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon’, as Melchiori suggests, associates him, and so anachrony, with the theatre.30 But the sense of the unrepresentability of age that the Justice expresses parallels the rage for disorder that is expressed by the old man, Northumberland, on hearing of the news of Hotspur’s death. He prays for the abandonment of rule – ‘let order die’ – and for the spirit of Cain to reign, ‘that each heart being set / On bloody courses, the rude scene may end / And darkness be the burier of the dead’ (1.1.158–160). It is an image of horror that is summoned up, horror and disgust being associated, as in Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, where ‘horror’ is the unveiling of what the codes of order repress. Hal’s repression of what Falstaff represents fastens attention on the grossness of his body, for which ‘the grave doth gape / For thee thrice wider than for other men’. The demand that Falstaff keeps separate from him by a distance of ten miles suggests the violent re-imposition of order, of those codes being back into place which will keep Hal from a sense of disgust, or of horror. Perhaps the disgust that the gross body attracts, and the fear of the breakdown of order that it inspires, is also sexual. Bloom quotes William Empson and Wyndham Lewis on the love that Falstaff, the gentleman, the knight, and not the clown, shows towards young men, towards Poins and the Prince. Here, Empson’s text is Falstaff at Gadshill, 1 Henry IV 2.2.11–20, where he says that he is ‘bewitched’ by the ‘rogue’s company’. Similarly, there is his demand for love: here a relevant text is, perhaps, 1 Henry IV 3.3.125–126, where Falstaff says, ‘Thy love is worth a million; thou owest me thy love’. Wyndham Lewis compares Falstaff to Don Quixote, as two knights whose raison d’être is to contest the real world – with the point that Falstaff is also a Sancho Panza when it comes to his attitude to military ‘honour’. Lewis, who reads Shakespeare’s attitudes to the world as those of a woman, sees Falstaff as feminine: armed from head to foot with sly feminine inferiorities, lovable weaknesses and instinctively cultivated charm. He is a big helpless bag of guts, exposing himself boldly to every risk on the child’s, or the woman’s, terms. When he runs away or lies down he is more adorable than any hero ‘facing fearful odds’.31

Perhaps the point may recall the conclusion of the narrator, seeing Baron Charlus cruising: the reason he looked like a woman was that

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he was a woman. Is Falstaff one of the capons that Hal alluded to in his opening speech? To Falstaff’s possible femininity something else may be added: if it is a question of the older man needing love, that would make more significant the strange sense that Falstaff re writes the character of Socrates. Did Shakespeare read the Symposium? The end of that text, whether or no, evokes erotic energy which has emerged in Socrates, despite himself, in the Symposium: Socrates pressing on Agathon (the tragic poet) and Aristophanes (the comic) ‘that the same man should be capable of writing both comedy and tragedy, and that anyone who is an expert in writing tragedy must also be an expert in writing comedy’ (223d, p. 63). If Hal, rational, cool, ironic, unanachronous, is Socrates plus his daimon, but attractive because of that, and if Falstaff is Socrates minus the daimon, and grotesque like him, the interplay between them is both tragic and comic. Socrates described by Alcibiades may be the object of attraction to Alcibiades, but he is no figure of spontaneous eroticism. In that detail only he is like Hal, who perhaps sits for the figure of Sonnet 94: They that have pow’r to hurt, that will do none That do not do the thing they most do show, Who moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow– They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces, And husband nature’s riches from expense; They are the lords and owners of their faces, Others but stewards of their excellence. The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet Though to itself it only live and die; But if that flow’r with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

The description sounds precise. Is the target of Sonnet 94 someone akin to a younger, non-grotesque, Socrates, with the power to hurt others erotically, and sexually, economically self-conscious, husbanding ‘nature’s riches from expense’, anxious that there should be – as opposed to Sonnet 129 – no ‘waste of shame’, living ‘onely’ (the Quarto spelling in line 10), as a figure with no desire? Practising the husbandry of the first seventeen sonnets, though not here, as he is there, called a youth? 32 In relation to line 8, it will be remembered

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that Hal calls Hotspur his ‘factor’; unquestionably this figure of Sonnet 94, of whom Hal is an avatar, is the reverse of Falstaff, whose comedy and defiance of time is part of his act, part of his vulnerability, his fear of being banished, his fear of what will happen ‘when thou art King’ – a theme he returns to repeatedly in the first scene in which he appears with Hal. Or perhaps Falstaff is like Charlus, so that his life is one of anachronistic fiction, which fictionalising is made visible in the planning of the Gadshill robbery, and in the playacting scene already discussed. It is all meant as sport for Hal. If the person described, not addressed, in Sonnet 94 is like Hal, significantly the voice describing him does not name itself either; there is no ‘I’ here, nor any reference to love. Perhaps there is an element of self-protection coming from a voice which will not admit to being slighted. Empson’s fine analysis of this sonnet suggests that Falstaff’s voice, or his experience, ghosts the Sonnets, as here, as though Socrates without the daimon commented on Socrates with it. The same disillusion and sense of hurt appears in Sonnet 33, lamenting the loss of the friend and excusing him at the same time, ‘But out, alack, he was but one hour mine’ (line 11), or, as with Sonnet 49, ‘Against that time’, which anticipates the friend passing as a stranger, or, the other meaning of ‘strangely’, passing him by for no apparent reason (49.5–8): Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass, And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye, When love converted from the thing it was, Shall reasons find of settled gravity . . .

The image of the sun, which, placed before the ‘eye’ (not thine eye, that sun) gives it a strong affective sense, making the loss that of the sun, recalls Hal’s analysis of himself in his single soliloquy, in Part 1. And ‘converted’ speaks the language of what people say happens to Hal after his father’s death, after he joins gravity’s party. Hal bears it out when he says to Falstaff as the old man: ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was’. As Sonnet 94 says, he is the owner of his face. Hal has replaced himself. But what was the thing he was? Perhaps the sonnet contains most repressed, unexpressed anger, directed against someone as restrained as Hal, as homogeneous as he seems to be, though within a situation of complete heterogeneity. This sonnet does not speak about being subject to time, though it knows that the summer’s flower – which has associations with female

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virginity – lasts only for the summer, and is only for its benefit. The male subject of the poem has female aspects. If Hal is Socrates-like, plus possessing the daimon of chastity, something more appears of the strange attraction between the two, which their play extempore performed together so brings out. Sonnet 94 notes the fascination within such a figure and sees that their appeal as a ‘flower’ is inseparable from their ‘power’, which also becomes ‘sour’. Though they ‘will do none’, where it seems that what they will not do is ‘hurt’, yet the verb ‘do’ reappears as a noun in line 13, ‘turn sourest by their deeds’. If ‘base infection’ is a synomym for ‘the basest weed’, then the poem turns, possibly, to an ambiguous excuse of the restraint of the person of the sonnet, for ‘sweetest things grow sourest by their deeds’. This implies that these ‘deeds’ – which may be non-deeds, hoardings up of time, refusals of temptation, for they are ‘slow’ when it comes to that; not quick, not alive – risk anachrony in being slow, inherently corrupt, turning the flower to waste, and worse, to ‘lilies that fester’, decaying spontaneously with time. They are left to become anachronistic, unlike weeds, even weeds that fester. Empson argues that the exclusion of Falstaff from Henry V shows that Hal reaches the triumph of Agincourt over Falstaff’s broken heart.33 Jonathan Goldberg has drawn out some implications from Empson’s arguments that connect Falstaff and Hotspur as two images of Hal’s supposed revolt from the order of the court, and both homoerotic in character; Hotspur part of the alliance of love and martiality that marks out the rebellion of the battle of Shrewsbury, and Falstaff the embodiment of his riots.34 We have seen Hotspur and Falstaff as alternative figures of anachronism. The eroticism implicit within Hotspur/Hal duel is, however, so much more publicly acceptable – indeed it is essential – than is the relationship with Falstaff, where the issue of sexual attraction is inseparable from a quasiincestuousness, the father-figure wishing for a son. The theme finds expression in so many other figures of the older man homoerotically attracted to the younger: Balzac’s criminal Vautrin, established as a character in Le père Goriot, who, in his disguised existence as the Abbé Carlos Herrera, takes up the young Lucien de Rubempré in Illusions perdues and laments his suicide in Splendeurs et misères des courtizanes. Is not the same theme apparent, however unacknowledged, in Magwitch’s attraction to Pip, in Great Expectations? The violence and love Magwitch shows interrelate in the text’s feminising of Pip.

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The theme gets pushed harder in Gus Van Sant’s film My Own Private Idaho (1991), which credits ‘additional dialogue’ to Shakespeare: where the Henry IV plays are quoted, it is as a semiprivate language, with an anachronistic force. But then the film invests in other forms of anachrony, centring on the narcoleptic Mike (River Phoenix), who is looking for his mother, and whose father is also his brother. His moments of blanking out mean that he is moved physically from place to place while he is unconscious, while he also loses sense of time. Picked up from the road where he has fallen asleep, he is brought into association with Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) with whom he falls in love. Scott is son of the local mayor and in violent Oedipal opposition to his father, Jack Favor, from whom he knows he will have an inheritance when he is twentyone: he associates with a crowd of hustlers in the ‘Derelict Hotel’, with Bob Pigeon (William Richert), this film’s Falstaff, as their leader. However, by the end of the film, Scott, who denies that he is gay, and has gone to Rome with Mike, in the hunt for his mother (the presence of Rome makes for another moment of anachronism), has married an Italian girlfriend, discarded Mike, acquired his dead father’s fortune and is decently burying him and taking over his role, while simultaneously Bob Pigeon is being buried in the same cemetery. The film omits Hotspur but adds Mike, transferring the affective interest from Bob and Scott to Mike and Scott. Though the film makes no pretence to defend Scott (there is no sentimental attachment allowed to this Hal-figure, in contrast to the way the figure is produced in Shakespeare), and, though it does represent the older man who is homosexual, it cannot present this except in a subsidiary way, nor bring out the theme from Shakespeare; replacing it, rather, with a presentation of youth culture. The desire for love, which it seems possesses Falstaff, is inseparable from how age and the grotesque body are seen as disgusting, not least by Falstaff. Bloom’s characterisation of Falstaff is lacking, in seeing Falstaff as a static image, rather than moving through two plays where separation between him and Hal becomes more pronounced, and where he internalises a sense of age and disease, making it his own superego. Falstaff is an image of desire, which is conveyed in his ‘gormandising’; in this he differs from Hal. The desire takes him outside a sense of time, and is an aspect of his comic spirit. The men whose values put them outside time, Hotspur and Falstaff, however polarised, and however to be criticised, are more

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attractive than those who move with the time. But those who call Time ‘Necessity’ are driven by something outside themselves which condemns them to the useless vigil that Henry experiences, and which assures them of their lack of autonomy. The order and restraint that are upheld by the King’s party, outstandingly the cold figure of John of Lancaster in the second Part, who drinks no wine, certainly not sherris-sack, may be seen as the attempt to govern the powers of horror, to repress alterity. They find its embodiment within Falstaff, and whatever is transgressive within him. Falstaff has always been warned of his exclusion, whose implications are underwritten in the point that the King’s party will, ‘ere this year expire’ – so fast must time dictate actions – plan a military conquest abroad, which will repress everything at home that cannot be looked at for fear of the sickness it carries with it.

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Archival anachrony When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, Then in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have expressed E’en such a beauty as you master now. So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring, And for they looked but with divining eyes, They had not skill [Quarto: still] enough your worth to sing: For we which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

For this chapter, Sonnet 106 leads, via García Márquez, into discussion of two plays, King Lear and All’s Well that Ends Well. In the sonnet, the singular ‘chronicle’ has only one subject, temps perdu, time consumed, wasted, its vitality lost (and the chronicler works, so Macbeth says (5.5.20), ‘to the last syllable of recorded time’). The first line contrasts with Sonnet 100 line 13: ‘time wastes life’. A chronicle is the record of time, as a person may be a chronicle: Nestor is ‘good old chronicle’ (Troilus and Cressida 4.7.86); old folk are ‘time’s doting chronicles’ (2 Henry IV 4.3.126). The chronicle witnesses in its writing to wasted time, for example with the oldfashioned, Spenserian word ‘wights’, and references to old rhyme and antique pens. While the chronicle shows that language then contemporary has gone out of date, it illustrates a profounder disparity: before, beauty made for beautiful old rhyme, or made old rhymes

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beautiful. ‘These present days’ are different; ‘present’ means ‘the time that now is’ as opposed to the past and the future. OED cites Sonnet 115 line 12, ‘crowning the present’, for the first use of the ‘present’ in this sense. But ‘these present days’ can no longer rely on the power of old rhyme, can no longer make it speak. If the past is wasted, the present is deficient, lacking the beauty to make beautiful new rhyme. Those in the past, with divining eyes, unable to see the presence of the present, could not sing the worth of the person now addressed. The present poet can do no better. Lines 9, 10 and 11 of the sonnet chronicle a beauty foretold: old writing in wasted time prefigures ‘our time’. The old chronicle’s theme was praise (4, 9), and not that of lovely ladies but of ‘lovely knights’, for the term associates the anachronistic (chivalric knights) with the homoerotic, and the masculinity (not merely the gender) of the addressee is confirmed by the word ‘master’, a word whose appearance stands in its appearance on the page in contrast to ‘wasted’, and contrasts with the ‘lack’ of the last line. Those who are of the present lack mastery. Those in the past wrote with an intuition of the then future: their writing was not of their present, but there cannot be a triumph now, because we in the ‘present’, while ‘we’ have ‘eyes to wonder’ – in contrast to ‘their divining eyes’ (11) – ‘lack tongues to praise’ (14). Tongues and pens go together; there is nothing left but the antique pen, and nothing for the present but to evoke it through the past; nothing but the chronicle. In Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Crónica de un muerte annunciada (1981) – Chronicle of a Death Foretold – what is anticipated is not a future that as it becomes present cannot be described, but death, which is the subject not only of the past but of the future. If ‘chronicle’ implies a national history, as for Shakespeare, that gives point to Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which re-writes a historical incident that happened in Sucre in 1951. It is another of those texts which, like Borges, shows the power of Cervantes, the chronicler of Don Quixote. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold a death, not a birth, is announced, as a warning of future waste. Since an annunciation should suggest Christ’s birth foretold (Luke 1.26–38), it is not surprising that the name of the man killed, an Arab in Columbia, suggests Christ: Santiago Nazar; since Nazar implies Nazareth, and Christ ‘shall be called a Nazarene’ (Matthew 2.23). If a death is announced rather than a birth, this gives the priority to death; it means that there is no news, nothing else except the state of death. Does the

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title suggest the death of Christ? But ‘chronicling’ something, as the narrator is trying to do (43, 87, 90) is impossible, first because he is telling the story some twenty-seven years later. He, who lived in the village with his parents and his sister, has come back to the ‘forgotten village, trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards’ (5), from the ruins of time. He must remember details ‘from the memory of others’ (43): part of his oblivion comes from the point that he spent the night before the murder at the village brothel (67). Second, because the village itself is an anachronism, since seagoing ships are no longer able to come to it and the warehouse is in disuse (9), it is called a ‘mislaid town’ (88), anachoristic. Third, because this is post-colonial Colombia, and the post colonial runs on several time-schemes, one which is of modernity, while another condemns people within it to be out-of-date in relation to the colonial culture, relying on colonial memories, which gives them a past which is not theirs. Fourth, because there is no possibility of completing a chronology when everything in the evidence proves that the central event should never have happened. A death pre-announced should not have happened: everyone in the town knew that Santiago Nasar was going to be killed, everyone managed through some chance, not to stop it. A chronicle by definition, tries to give a chronology. But a chronology is inadequate to explain the events, which are, therefore, anachronistic. The chronicle does not try to avoid anachrony. It gives the murder of Santiago Nasar, who falls dead, on the last page, killed by the butchers’ knives of the brothers Pedro and Pablo Vicario, who must avenge the lost honour of their sister, Angela. Since the murder takes place because Angela Vicario has said that Santiago Nasar has deflowered her, suppose the narrator was actually the seducer? The point is made not to argue that such definitely is the case but to show that no act of constructing a chronology is free; to put things into a chronology is to attempt to sew them up (a prevalent image within the book) into a unity they never possess. And sewing things up means unsewing too, for the act of murder here is a form of cutting, which is repeated in a grisly and pointless autopsy of the body, and re-perpetrated when the narrator, recovering the story, trying to put it back again, repeats, in the act of writing, which goes over every wound, the murder that has taken place. The first chapter shows how Santiago Nasar gets up at five-thirty on that Monday morning, and is dead by seven. He wants to wait

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for the boat that the local bishop is coming on, in the hope that he comes ashore: the bishop, however, gives the town a miss, as too anachronistic a place. The second chapter describes Bayardo San Román, who has arrived in the town six months beforehand, and has married Angela, and it gives the account of the wedding, and his discovery that his wife lacks her virginity, and his handing her back to the Vicario family, who demand who was responsible for its loss. She blames Santiago Nasar. The third chapter focuses on the brothers, who surrender to the Church immediately after the crime, and on their need, on the Monday after the wedding, to do something about avenging the insult. The narrator says that ‘there had never been a death more foretold’ (50), for the brothers keep announcing it as if hoping that they would find ‘someone who would do them the favour of stopping them’ (57), as if not wanting to be held by an anachronistic duty to kill in the maintenance of honour, but, ‘it’s as if it had already happened’ (62). The fourth chapter speaks about the autopsy performed on the dead man – unnecessary because there is no mystery as to how he has died – who has already been cut by knives: the autopsy is clumsily done and like a second death: the priest finishes not knowing what to do with the murdered man’s intestines (76), which are fed to dogs, as the opening of the novel described rabbits’ intestines being fed to dogs. The novel shows the death of Santiago Nasar being repeated in the autopsy, and repeated in the writing: his body is mutilated in contrast to Sonnet 106’s ‘blazon of sweet beauty’s best, / Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow’. The dead man, as fragmented, becomes an image for the irretrievable, which includes memories; the narrator says of Angela Vicario’s mother that she received him like a ‘difficult ghost’ and ‘refused to talk about the past, and for this chronicle I had to be satisfied with a few disconnected phrases from her conversations with my mother, and a few others rescued from my memories’ (90). It becomes clear that there is certainly no certainty that it was Santiago Nasar who took away the honour of Angela Vicario, whom the narrator describes meeting again, twenty-three years after the incident, in the ‘Indian death village’ ‘baked by Caribbean salt’ (89, 88), where her mother has tried burying her alive after her disgrace. She tells him much of her story. It includes, or his rationalisation of her story includes, how she desires her husband after he has forcibly returned her to her parents, with her mother beating her. Punishment leads to desire; she obsessively writes weekly letters to her husband, until

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he comes back to her, a scene which is described at the end of the chapter; her letters, almost two thousand, are kept by him in a suitcase all in chronological order and all unopened. The fifth and last chapter, whose finality gives to the piece the sense of a five-act tragedy, opens with: For years we couldn’t talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate. (97)

The town, then, becomes ‘an open wound’ – the site of trauma. It is this which the investigating magistrate, ‘a man burning with the fever of literature’ who has read Nietzsche, comes to visit, and the narrator describes, twenty years later, how he was looking for his name in the Palace of Justice in Riohacha. ‘There was no classification of files whatever and more than a century of cases were piled up on the floor of the decrepit colonial building that had been Sir Francis Drake’s headquarters for two days’ (99–100). Reading the files, half of whose ‘unbound volumes’ are missing, the narrator deduces that the magistrate ‘was so perplexed by the enigma that chance had touched him with, that many times he fell into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigour of his profession. Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many consequences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammelled fulfilment of a death so clearly foretold’ (100). He obviously cannot understand the anachronies, which offend the concept of ‘legitimacy’, what is proper, what is in proper time, what accords with law, even though he has read Nietzsche. To write any form of chronology necessitates going far beyond ‘literature’: history, to be written, must exceed literature, which makes so much use of chance. The conclusion of the investigation, however, seems to indicate Santiago Nasar’s innocence, and the book concludes with the details of the morning of Santiago Nasar’s death, and with the idea that, of the whole town, the only person who knew nothing of what was happening – who was most out of time – was the person completely involved as the town’s scapegoat, the fool of time, whose autopsy completes the sparagmos which the twins practise on him.

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King Lear: fortune’s bastards King Lear in the Quarto version (1608) is a ‘Chronicle’; its full title runs: Mr William Shakespeare: His True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters, with the Unfortunate Life of Edgar, Son and heir to the Earl of Gloucester, and his Sullen and Assumed Humour of Tom of Bedlam. It records a performance staged at Whitehall on 26 December 1606.1 The play divides people up into those who remain chronological, and those who are anachronistic, like the Fool, who ends anachronistically, with ‘I’ll go to bed at noon’. He gives a ‘prophecy’, the chronicle of confusion foretold, before following the mad Lear and the disguised Earl of Kent to the safety of a hovel; though this was apparently not said in 1606, since it appears only in the Folio of 1623. This is a brave night to cool a courtezan. I’ll speak a prophecy ere I go: When priests are more in word than matter; When brewers mar their malt with water, When nobles are their tailors’ tutors, No wenches burned, but wenches’ suitors; When every case in law is right, No squire in debt nor no poor knight; When slanders do not live in tongues, Nor cut-purses come not to throngs; When usurers tell their god i’th’field; And bawds and whores do churches build; Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion; Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, That going shall be used with feet. This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time.2

The Fool knows that living c. eighth century BCE, he is earlier than Merlin (imagined to be c. sixth century CE). He knows the play’s sources: prophecy defies chronology: Merlin, later, will be able to re-prophesy what the Fool has said, and, since one of the play’s editors, Jay L. Halio, calls the Fool’s prophecy a ‘medieval parody’ of Chaucerian language, which makes it anachronistic, so also will those speak who have been inspired by Chaucer. The Fool inverts chronology, making himself both a participant in and a commentator on the drama, knowing that he is in the theatre,

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that there is no rain falling, and that he acts not the contemporary of a seventeenth-century audience but a figure in the narrative of an antiquity much older than Merlin. Yet he makes that impossible, because he is aware of a chronology that will situate Merlin later than himself in terms of Albion’s history. Effectively, he says that he is nothing more than a figure of a play, that there is no earlier or later with him. Prophecy, as an art of the future, pays short dividends, for it seems there is nothing that the Fool can say. If the Utopian events should happen that part of his prophecy anticipates, there will be nothing but ‘confusion’, anarchy. But anarchy may be another form of the anachronic. This reading would accord with one view which says that the Fool in the Folio version has ‘a growing sense of his own irrelevance’.3 Has he, like a Proustian figure of old age, outlived himself? Several confusions are apparent in the speech, first in the dual nature of the satire, which reports upon the existing state of affairs, and on the new state (beginning with ‘When every case in law . . .’). An apocalypse, it seems, will deliver not a single Utopia but a Utopia which needs its further undoing. Hence, in whatever Utopia is projected, ‘going shall be used with feet’ – things will go on just the same as usual. The future, as represented by Merlin, will say just the same as the Fool could. Is there any prophecy at all? He says he will speak a prophecy, but at the end prophecy is deferred, still to come in Merlin’s time, in relation to which he is anachronistic (as Merlin is anachronistic in relation to the Fool’s time). But there is no chronological time in which a foretelling can appear.4 One source for the prophecy, the pseudo-Chaucerian verse, is quoted by the Elizabethan writer George Puttenham, in The Art of English Poesie (1589), as an instance of ‘merismus’. OED, citing Puttenham for the first instance of this rhetorical figure, says that ‘merismus’ means amplification. The prophecy may be a series of amplifications which could go on for ever, making it all no more than additional material supplementing a non-existent kernel. Not so much a technique for amplifying meaning, prophecy postpones prophesying, until Merlin’s time. Merlin coming, he will speak the prophecy which is only postponed till then. Sonnet 124, considered in the last chapter, evoked ‘fortune’s bastard’ and ‘fools of time’. A bastard is definitionally out of proper time, likely to be seen as a fool; and the fool’s marginal status makes him a fool of time. King Lear revolves round both these phrases.

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While including Lear’s children, and Gloucester’s legitimate son, it will be noticed that the Quarto title excluded Edmund, the bastard, so following the play, which begins with Gloucester saying of Edmund that ‘there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged’ (1.1.20–22). The bastardy is advertised via ‘whoreson’, but the one so ‘proper’, though improper is improperly acknowledged. Bastardy pluralises in King Lear, continuing with Lear disclaiming all parental care for his third daughter, as ‘a wretch whom nature is ashamed / Almost to acknowledge hers’ (1.1.212–213), making his son-in-law, France, go away in ‘choler’ (1.2.23), banishing Kent, who calls him father and master and patron (1.1.142–143), and eventually calling Goneril ‘degenerate bastard’. This de-legitimating seems part of Lear’s ‘darker purpose’, when changing from a twofold division of the kingdom between Albany and Cornwall to one threefold, dependent on his daughters, on their husbands’ behalf, competing in language to say they love him. De-legitimating divides. Lear’s purpose is dark in desiring to control the future: ‘that future strife may be prevented now’ (1.1.43–44); the only time ‘future’ appears in the play (as it appears only once in All’s Well that Ends Well). The future has happened. Lear’s statement ‘contains the ominous subliminal irony that strife is indeed to be ‘prevented’ – in a strong etymological sense of the word – by being brought on sooner that it might have come without the division and partial abdication’.5 Lear creates the future he wishes to avoid. In the ‘division of the kingdom’ (1.1.4), where the Quarto reads ‘kingdoms’, as if the kingdom was already divided, the ‘darker purpose’ seems to be to promote brother-in-law rivalry, as indeed happens (2.1.11–12, 3.1.19–21, 3.3.8–9). Desire for division shows itself in the calculation of Lear’s ‘Our son of Cornwall, / And you, our no less loving son of Albany’ (1.1.40–41), where Lear, though in the past preferring – rightly? – Albany (Kent says ‘I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall’ (1.1.1–2)) now gives Cornwall slight precedence. Actually, in his madness, Lear’s darker wishes include the death of both sons-in-law (4.6.182–183). Pushing things towards strife means that division produces further detailed subdivisions, which the play explores with increasing intensity, as when Gloucester is blinded in both eyes, and the audience must face the violence of watching that twice. Division between brothersin-law becomes division between brothers – Edmund and Edgar, who partly stand in for the two Dukes, though Edmund stands in for

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them both, sexually – and double division between sisters. Goneril is against Regan, but both work against Cordelia, and their father, which climaxes when each daughter subtracts further knights from Lear, as if reversing the pattern of merismus, adding on excessive terms of endearment in the first scene. Division between the Dukes ends with Cornwall’s death after blinding Gloucester. If the Quarto is followed at 3.7.96, where the wounded Cornwall exits by himself, not helped by his wife, whose assistance he had requested, that implies division between husband and wife, apparently over Edmund, to whom Cornwall wants to be a father (3.5.24–5), while his wife will want to marry him. Division between sons-in-law then becomes more primitive: the sisters’ division over Edmund, over whose body they fight as though it was the kingdom. Though love meant nothing to them when they praised their father, it now means everything, killing them both. They are linked by desire for Edmund, who has sworn love to both, as if parodying both sisters swearing to Lear in the beginning. Goneril poisoning her sister and the news that she has killed herself frame the last encounter of brothers, when Edgar commits fratricide. The antagonism of Edmund supplanting Edgar, accusing him of attempting parricide (2.1.46), expands to Edmund turning against his father, just as Gloucester knows that Lear’s daughters seek his death (3.4.159). Cornwall, pronouncing Edmund Earl of Gloucester – so that he has mentally killed Gloucester, with Edmund’s collusion (3.5.17–18) – plays to Edmund’s hatred, which, 4.5.12–14 indicates, would lead to the Bastard personally murdering his father if he could. Goneril would kill her husband via Edmund (4.6.258–262); her will to kill father, sister and husband means that ‘division’ entails attempts for the self to isolate itself though knowing that everyone is only the shadow of someone else, all selves divided from each other, being substitutes for each other. Goneril and Regan act identically. Edmund is like what he hates. He has Cordelia murdered, yet his words to his father – ‘Nothing, my lord’ (1.2.132) – shadow Cordelia’s; these two oppose the father alike. Lear feels he has become his own shadow (1.4.222, Quarto), but the Folio makes the Fool respond to Lear’s question, ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ by saying ‘Lear’s shadow’, meaning either that is what Lear has become or that the Fool, as his shadow, can answer the question. And what is a shadow? Edgar as his own, and as Lear’s, and Gloucester’s, shadow, Poor Tom, says the foul fiend makes him ‘course his own shadow for a traitor’ (3.4.56). The Bastard, shadowing Edgar, has

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made Edgar his own shadow and Edmund’s, making him so selfdivided that he cannot tell which is substance and true and which is shadow and false, while coursing a shadow is obsessional; looking for what cannot be seen, what is present and absent. The play’s first question, ‘Is not this your son, my Lord?’, suggests that Kent has mistaken shadow for substance: Edmund for Edgar. Edmund and Kent are introduced, as if beginning an association between the two, but in the play’s divisions they meet again only at 2.2.43–5, when Kent, the outsider, contests with Oswald. This latter, in relation to both Goneril and Regan, is a substitute Edmund. The similarity shows, since he is the only other ‘whoreson’ in the play, called so by Kent.6 When Kent, about to be shamed in the stocks, asking Fortune to turn her wheel, meets the present outsider Edmund, he will take him on, like Oswald, as someone not half his age, not yet initiated into fighting. Gloucester’s declaration of the ‘sport’ at Edmund’s making, so different from the sport of the Gods (4.1.39), comes as near to revealing as much of the primal scene as is possible, as well as shaming Edmund openly, as if stripping him naked (Edgar’s literal state). Gloucester’s declaration of having a son (Edgar) ‘who yet is no dearer in my account’ (1.1.19), because it can suggest that ‘he likes Edgar as little as Edmund’,7 creates a rivalry of brothers comparable to Albany and Cornwall. Gloucester’s attitude to Edgar, whom he suspects quite arbitrarily, and whose death he seeks (2.1.56–62), shows, like Lear bringing on future strife, a willingness within the present to de-legitimate, to destroy anything of the future. A future different from the present cannot emerge from the one created by the fathers in the way they treat their children, whom they make its agents. Rebellion comes not from the future but, anachronistically, from the past, from Gloucester and Lear. Gloucester’s return in memory to the past moment of Edmund’s conception – the primal scene for Edmund – is not an isolated return in the text.8 Lear recalls it when vindicating adultery: ‘Let copulation thrive, / For Gloucester’s bastard son was kinder to his father / Than were my daughters got ’tween the lawful sheets’ (4.6.112–114). Gloucester, on stage, makes no comment: after being blinded he never refers to Edmund. Regan’s curiosity about Edmund with Goneril, ‘But have you never found my brother’s way / To the forfended place?’ (5.1.10–11), while showing that Edmund repeats his father – though supplementing adultery by incest – shows the play’s fascination with the primal scene, while her words shadow the lovers

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she fantasises, desiring to see and know in a context of incest. The primal scene is that moment absolutely out of time and knowledge: the scene of the parents’ conception of the child. It is as if the desire to see, as in the primal scene, finds particular accentuation in relation to incestuous desire. Both – the desire to watch, and the incest, which can generate only bastards – are ‘forfended’. The point allows us to couple bastardy, as anachronic, and blindness, as the desire for the anachronous, and inseparable from its transgressiveness. The fantasy of witnessing the primal scene, generating incestuous fantasies in the one who looks, which, as contaminating, threatens to generate only bastards (like incest), is apparently dismissed by Edmund. Saying that ‘my father compounded with my mother’, he calls his conception his ‘bastardizing’ (Folio, 1.2.133; Quarto ‘bastardy’). The Folio’s word (only here in Shakespeare) makes this primal scene one that disorganises, destroying unity and all thought of a pure origin, creating bastards in character and law. But ultimately, Edmund cannot dismiss the idea of the power of his primal scene creating his present: EDGAR: EDMUND:

The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. Thou’st spoken right, ’tis true; The wheel is come full circle, I am here. (5.3.170–172)9

Edgar’s moralising interpretation of his father’s blinding because of his ‘pleasant vices’, and the misogyny within his language, has been widely criticised.10 But Edmund agrees with it. Working with his logic, the wheel turning half-way means the blinding of Gloucester, making his state ‘all dark and comfortless’ (3.7.84); repeating the non-visible condition of the primal scene. Blindness waits for eyes trying to ‘pierce’ (1.4.341) too much, or for people who are ‘threading dark-eyed night’ (2.1.121).11 The last is Regan’s phrase, and it combines ideas of the darkness looking penetratingly, and also blinding as with a needle, as if these two verbs – looking and blinding (blinding the self and blinding the other) – meant the same. It also invokes looking into the dark, which describes Regan’s own curiosity about looking and knowing with regard to Edmund with her sister. For both Edgar and Edmund, blinding punishes ‘bastardising’ by creating another form of that: as if Gloucester’s blinding made him a bastard, Edmund’s equivalent.12 The wheel’s full turn produces

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Edmund’s death, the ultimate fulfilment of being made a bastard, which, imaged spatially as the ‘dark and vicious place’, is equivalent to the ‘forfended place’ of conception. Saying ‘I am here’ Edmund identifies himself as at the site of everything dark and vicious, even suggesting that his state as a bastard is imaged in the feminine ‘place’ itself – which Regan had called ‘the precious square of sense’.13 Edmund’s agreement with his brother at his death shows how little difference there was between the bastard and the legitimate, while showing a masculine negativity towards the woman, the mother, and sexuality. In saying ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess, to thy laws / My services are bound’ (1.2.1–2), Edmund made bastardy, as a condition owning no law, absolute. He committed himself to being a bastard – ‘whoremaster man’ (1.2.127) – in a knowingly sexual way, as with the phallic swagger of ‘Now gods, stand up for bastards’ (1.2.22). But the end shows that he has underestimated the force of the feminine Nature to which he swears service; held by ‘the plague of custom’, he repeats a sense of having gone round in a ‘dark and vicious’ circle, held by his hated bastardy. Equally, Edgar’s language as Poor Tom is haunted by the sexual as dividing the self. He begins by committing himself to virtuous masculine singleness with: ‘Take heed o’ the foul fiend; obey thy parents, keep thy word justly, swear not, commit not with man’s sworn spouse, set not thy sweet-heart on proud array’ (3.4.78–80). These lines could be fragments from the Decalogue, such as a father might quote to a child, to Edgar, Edmund, Goneril and Regan. Perhaps Edgar recalls his father’s advice, prescribing him his duty but not fulfilling it himself. Yet the son who speaks has not followed that advice: he is a ‘servingman’, both an Edmund serving Nature and an Oswald – since Kent mocked Oswald as ‘super-serviceable’ (2.2.17, Folio). He is ‘proud in heart and mind, that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap, served the lust of my mistress’ heart and did the act of darkness with her’ (3.4.83–86). Plural ‘gloves’ imply plural affairs, plural services, like Edmund, but Poor Tom makes the woman dominant within sexuality: ‘Let not the creaking of shoes, nor the rustling of silks [sounds in the dark, when nothing can be seen], betray thy poor heart to woman’ (3.4.92–94). And the father, Gloucester, seems to be the shadow of the fiend as he suddenly appears, in the night, compared, virtually, by the Fool to an ‘old lecher’: EDGAR:

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This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin,

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squinies the eye and makes the harelip, mildews the white wheat and hurts the poor creature of earth. Swithold footed thrice the [w]old; He met the nightmare and her nine foal, Bid her alight and her troth plight, And aroint thee, witch, aroint thee! (3.4.112–120)

Edgar’s speech attacks the father as fiend, with the power of blinding, and mutilating nature, ‘the poor creature of earth’, which recalls the phrase the ‘poor heart’ which in its turn evokes the earlier ‘sweet heart’ (Quarto). The fiend as father ‘squinies the eye’, though that phrase turns against the father – blind to his son in this scene – when Lear says: ‘Dost thou squiny at me? No, do thy worst blind Cupid . . .’ (4.6.133–134). To squiny implies looking enviously: Goneril tells Regan: ‘The eye that told you so looked but asquint’ (5.3.73). But the image of the fiend as the father possessing the curse gives way to another, stranger and more unnarratable, and glossing the invisibility, or blindness, within the phrase ‘the act of darkness’. It implies obsession with the primal scene and the embitterment of ‘the dark and vicious place’. It is the fantasy of the old lecher, foul fiend, father, St Swithold – a defender against harms – who, repeating magic charms, wheeling in a circle three times (and a circle is evoked in ‘the repetition of Swithold’ and the Folio and Quarto’s ‘old’), encounters the ‘nightmare’ (only here in Shakespeare), a nondescribable female force with bastard offspring. Male and female magic shadow each other. Her destabilising powers make the rhyme end not with resolution but with the man cursing, like the woman cursing the witch in Macbeth (1.3.4–5). How has she affected or infected him? Blinded him? This encounter with the night, absolute heterogeneity, outside law, bastard, so anachronous, overthrows all sense of seeing as knowing. This feminine force appears in the first scene, destabilising Lear. The strife between the Dukes, or their wives, whose lands’ extent seems to have been decided on already, is less Lear’s interest than in securing a future by imposing himself upon Cordelia, ‘our joy / Although our last and least’ (1.1.82–83), of whom he says ‘I loved her most and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery’ (1.1.123– 124). Freud’s ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ compares the silent Cordelia with the leaden casket and identifies her with death and reads this moment by reversing its stated sense, so that Lear’s desire

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to maintain his autonomy over Cordelia and her destiny disguises his lack of freedom in the face of death: ‘Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In this way a man overcomes death, which he has recognised intellectually. A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a figure of terror [Death] but the fairest and most desirable of women.’14 This play makes identical the place of conception and of death. For Freud, Lear’s approach to Cordelia parallels an attempt to approach death, to make it come in a way which will not take away the self’s control. Her ‘Nothing’, with its potential uncanniness (playing with death) makes it impossible to think of controlling the future, including death. The reply annihilates the future, both Lear’s plans for it, and his attempt to control her, and his will to crawl towards death in his own way. It is as if the scene with the three daughters and sisters anticipates the meeting of Macbeth with the Weird Sisters. Macbeth, whose difference from Lear is that he has no present reason to doubt his power, so that he cannot hear the ambiguity within the witches, who set limits to it, is enticed by that encounter into a space beyond himself, and into a strange time outside ‘the coming on of time’ (Macbeth 1.5.8). In King Lear, where the man must accept death as the limits of his power, Cordelia indicates those limits, while Lear’s reaction, in demanding absolute power, turns him towards language evocative of Macbeth, summoning the dark ‘mysteries of Hecate and the night’ (1.1.111) to curse Cordelia. This may read in reverse: having lost control of the future, which he imagined he could possess, and which contained its ‘darker purpose’ within it, he can express such loss only by saying that he has put Cordelia beyond his desire to control her. Hecate and the night become alternatives to Cordelia, by which she is de-legitimated, but in invoking these figures Lear subjects himself to he knows not what. Cursing Cordelia is the wish to blight the future, when that cannot be made to serve the present; it associates him with the blasting power of Edgar’s fantasised ‘foul fiend’. Lear compares Cordelia to ‘the barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite’ (1.1.117–179). The Scythians eat their ancestors, ‘generation’ having the meaning of ‘parents’, which aligns Cordelia with the ‘pelican daughters’ of 3.4.73–74, where, as Muir indicates, ‘the young pelicans strike at the breasts of the old ones, to drain their life out’. However, the unconscious in Lear’s comparison in Act 1 aligns him with those that eat

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their children (‘generation’ meaning ‘offspring’). In the storm, Lear thinks of the gods exorcising their enemies, and he counsels ‘Hide thee, thou bloody hand, / Thou perjured, and thou simular [man, Q] of virtue / That art incestuous’ (3.2.53–55). The extremism of the comparison – that the hypocritical man could be incestuous – will be noticed, and, in the speech, the association between murder and incest is apparent, as incest and cannibalism have also been associated: incest, cannibalism and lust for killing being put together by Freud in ‘The Future of an Illusion’ as instinctual wishes which he calls ‘the kernel of hostility to civilization’,15 and never found singly, but rather as though murder is coloured by something else, more atavistic. Associating virtue with incest as if these two could coexist, however unrecognised, suggests Lear’s inability to read the darkness within his purpose. He cannot see how his speech to Cordelia comes close to identifying him with a cannibalism which, implicating his children, is incestuous, making him indeed the consuming ‘dragon’ (1.1.123). His tone continues when he evokes Nature – like Hecate and the night – to curse Goneril. He wills sterility upon her, as if he does not want grandchildren, or, as an alternative to sterility, he wants her to have a child of spleen, a ‘thankless child’ (1.4.267–281). It is another antagonism to the future becoming different from the past, so that the generation that rises against its parents comes from something further back in time, as if the ‘darker purpose’ of the parent was to create the child that would destroy it: as Freud identifies Cordelia with death. As with Edmund, who calls Nature his goddess, but in serving her makes her his mistress, Nature, like Hecate, severs all legitimacy. Despite Edmund’s reference to Nature’s ‘laws’, it has none, as Lear recognises when seeing it as unnatural, producing sterility or monstrosity equally easily. This antagonism generated by half-awareness of the limitations of power expresses itself by reversals. Destructiveness towards the child, incestuous or cannibalistic in its fantasies, becomes a fantasy of the child destroying the parent in a violence expressed cannibalistically, as when Lear attempts to bring out rivalry between the sisters, telling Goneril that Regan is ‘kind and comfortable’ and that ‘with her nails / She’ll flay thy wolfish visage’ (1.4.299–300). He wants to see one daughter as a wolf to make her destroy another wolf-like daughter. The violence towards the parent is seen as like the effect of ‘the serpent’s tooth’, or, as Lear says to Regan about Goneril, ‘she hath tied / Sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture, here’ (2.2.323–324), or she

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‘struck me with her tongue / Most serpent-like, upon the very heart’, lines leading to further cursing (2.2.349–357), including Goneril’s pregnancy, if that is implied in ‘young bones’ (2.2.352). Muir points out the resemblance of that language to Caliban’s: in King Lear, the authority figure, the Prospero, speaks as though he were Caliban. If the curse of ‘I will have such revenges’ (2.2.467) derives from Seneca’s Thyestes 269–270, where Atreus plans his banquet, Lear’s unconscious is cannibalistic.16 The speech threatening Goneril with the power of Nature is succeeded by another, showing his lack of recognition that his power has gone: Life and death, I am ashamed That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus, That these hot tears, which break from me perforce, Should make thee worth them. Blasts and fogs upon thee! Th’ untented woundings of a father’s curse Pierce every sense about thee. Old fond eyes, Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out, And cast you with the waters that you loose To temper clay. (1.4.288–296)

The Quarto is more violent, since the speech involves Lear’s selfinterruption: it makes the first sentence to break off, with ‘should make thee – worst blasts and fogs upon thee!’ (1.4.267). Lear’s hatred, which produces this lack of self-control, is fear of becoming a woman, and weeping in front of a woman. The word ‘fond’ which aligns madness or folly with love, associates both of these with the spirit that hates to be thought of in feminine terms, yet it is expressed in language of self-blinding which, considered in terms of Freud’s Oedipus, would imply castration.17 The threat to discard the eyes continues from his discarding Cordelia, as if casting her out was self-mutilation, like self-castration. Goneril says that Lear has ‘cast [Cordelia] off’ (1.1.293). Yet neither act of violence (with Cordelia, or with the eyes) is seen as an acceptance of loss of power, as the Oedipal reference would imply; they are seen as a way of preserving manhood. So it is possible to think of Lear as resisting tragedy: he will not enter into the awareness of what death means.18 The sparagmos – the tearing apart of the hero in Greek tragedy – that Lear threatens himself with entails not a loss of identity, but is a fantasy by which he strengthens himself. Such a refusal of tragedy necessitates further trauma, in the madness of the later acts, when lack of self-

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consciousness means that he will cease to feel ashamed, and offers Gloucester his eyes (4.6.172); madness seeming to involve a suspension of seeing, though in another way it is also a form of seeing. Lear’s earlier viciousness towards his eyes in 1.4.293–266 reveals that he does not acknowledge that eyes are for recognising something other to himself. He cannot do this because he makes his eyes the image of his dignity, and self. Eyes weeping imply a limitation of his power and identification with the other, as Lear realises in 4.6.191–193. Blindness necessitates loss of belief that the eyes’ function is to see what confirms the self’s power. Gloucester, blinded, thinks of the man ‘who will not see / Because he does not feel’ (4.1.71–73), because feeling, whether this means to experience emotion, or to touch, is to become aware of the otherness of other lives. Gloucester will have to add of himself that he sees feelingly (4.6.145). Though Lear has already asked of himself, ‘where are his eyes?’ (1.4.218), eyes for Lear associate not with seeing so much as with confirming his being, his self-possession. That is implied in his rejection of Cordelia, ‘Hence and avoid my sight’ (1.1.125), and, to Kent, ‘Out of my sight’. Both these show the desire not to see what it does not suit the self to acknowledge. Kent replies: ‘See better, Lear, and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye’ (1.1.159–160). The blank is ‘the white spot at the centre of a target’ (Foakes), but it is also a blank spot, what cannot be seen, suggesting the blank whites of eyes. The King needs to see, but is blind to what is before him. To be Kent, and a follower, requires such blindness, as when he is grateful of the night when he is in the stocks: ‘All weary and o’erwatched, / Take vantage, heavy eyes, not to behold / This shameful lodging’ (2.2.168–170). Derrida quotes a sentiment of Luther, that the blind man has no shame.19 The Fool notes of Edgar that he kept a blanket ‘else we had all been shamed’ (3.4.65), which means that, while Edgar accepts shame, the Fool does not, quite: he prefers modesty, which indicates how much further than the Fool Edgar goes in imaginative madness. Cornwall, who Robert Heilman says ‘repeatedly betrays a mad passion to cut off the seeing process’,20 as though he prefers blindness, because this cuts him off from seeing, or acknowledging, anything other, shows an anxiety to control the vision of others; wounded by his servant, he must stamp out the possibility of anyone seeing that shame, as the word ‘more’ indicates: SERVANT:

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O, I am slain. My lord, you have one eye left To see some mischief on him. O!

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CORNWALL:

On anachronism Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly, Where is thy lustre now? (3.7.80–83)

Cornwall blinds Gloucester because he does not want to be looked at; he fears the eye of the other because he needs to preserve a sense of self. In blinding Gloucester, however, he creates an encounter which goes beyond his control; when his servant challenges him with the words ‘Nay then, come on and take the chance of anger’ (3.7.77). Chance annihilates Cornwall’s control and more than blinds him. Even when dying he must avert the shame of anyone knowing: he wills to die offstage, unseen. In comparison, Gloucester who once ‘blushed’ but has learned to speak as ‘brazed’ about Edmund, now blinded literally, joins the company of those who as fools lack shame. But he still acts as if he was a man who sees, and for whom eyes give dignity; he must be brought into a lack of self-consciousness by those who are sighted, but who have accepted blindness, that is, by Edgar and Lear (‘thou must be patient. We came crying hither . . .’ (4.6.174)). When Edgar imagines seeing over Dover cliff (he is not, literally, using his eyes, but imagining what it means to use them), he meditates on the deficiencies of sight: Come on, sir, here’s the place. Stand still: how fearful And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low. The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half-way down Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade; Methinks he seems no bigger than his head. The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring barque Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge That on th’ unnumbered idle pebble chafes Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong. (4.6.11–24)

This imagines the scene, while cancelling out what is seen by saying that it is becoming less and less visible.21 Vision is associated with casting the eyes low, a phrase which echoes Lear’s casting out his eyes; to look is to go ‘down’ (a word repeated), to lose all footing,

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like the birds, like the man who ‘hangs’ (with the word hanging at the opening of the line) and to lose all sense of substance in what is seen, so that things appear smaller and smaller and less and less significant; the barque is no more than what the cock is, while the cock threatens to disappear altogether. The lines ‘Lest my brain turn’ indicates that madness threatens the person who looks, hence the dread is that ‘the deficient sight / Topple down headlong’. This combines the sense that sight is inherently inadequate with another, that sight can be maddened. A metonymy makes it not the body but the sight – which has already mentally gone over the edge – which would topple down. The power of sight is such that, however deficient, it would make the body follow it into deficiency, into emptiness, madness, the abyss, to where the materiality of things disappears. Edgar’s speech meditates on how to keep sane, which is not to give way to the senses, including eyesight; hence he keeps Gloucester unknowing whether they have walked up a hill or not, whether he has fallen or not, whether his voice has changed or not. When, a few lines later, ‘Enter Lear, mad’ (Quarto), Edgar must see something which shows how madness is the state where there is a suspension of all the senses, especially eyesight: ‘The safer sense will ne’er accommodate / His master thus’ (4.6.81–82). Hunter paraphrases: ‘sights like this cannot be accommodated inside a sane view of the world’, saying that ‘his master’ refers not to Lear but ‘to the possessor of such a safer sense’, which is the state of sanity. Perhaps the ‘master’ is reason itself, so that, following Hunter, sanity and the sane senses – including eyesight – cannot endure seeing reason in such a state; it is better to be mad, or blind, than to see that. Seeing insanity, which is an extreme form of ‘otherness’, and as much an abyss as the view downwards from the top of Dover cliff, is unendurable. Eyesight, called earlier ‘deficient sight’, is now part of ‘the safer sense’ which should be a shield from madness, but may not be, since, because it stays on the side of safety, it cannot endure madness: as the Fool disappears after seeing Lear and Poor Tom mad. Remembering the Quarto’s subtitle – ‘the unfortunate life of Edgar . . . and his sullen and assumed humour of Tom of Bedlam’ – it seems that life can keep itself from becoming death only by assuming a mad identity, with associations of loss of sight. OED derives ‘sullen’ from ‘solein’, sole, solitary, alone. Edgar moves towards solitude in a pathway which goes from being someone who was named by Lear (2.1.92), to becoming Poor Tom, then a fisherman who pronounces

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Poor Tom a fiend, as he earlier had identified his father with the fiend, changing again to fight Oswald, and in the last scene saying his name is lost, which it is, in relation both to Gloucester and Lear, the two fathers. The legitimate brother becomes more a bastard than the actual bastard, and kills him, making himself even more solitary. These brothers encircle each other, inseparable and divided, each bastardising the other’s qualities. Edgar’s assumption of madness has already been anticipated by Edmund, who represents Edgar to Gloucester as already mad, or as a witch, as standing ‘in the dark, his sharp sword out, / Mumbling [warbling, Quarto] of wicked charms, conjuring the moon / To stand’s auspicious mistress’ (2.1.38–40). This description is as if part of a self-parody, for it recalls Edmund’s conjuring of Nature at the beginning of the second scene. And Edmund has already shown fascination with madness when he acted in the manner which Edgar will adopt, as Tom o’ Bedlam (1.2.135– 6). Perhaps Edmund has internalised the Bedlam’s ‘outsider’ nature. If Edgar naked exteriorises Edmund’s internal shame, as if Edgar shadows, or lives in himself something of what his brother has gone through, Edgar’s experience of exile is of becoming more like something resembling what his brother, in structural terms, represented: delegitimation. The Poor Tom that Edmund is and acts, his brother becomes. Edmund compares his brother’s first appearance on stage with ‘the catastrophe of the old comedy’ (1.2.134); Edgar’s last appearance on stage (5.3.116) is indeed as the ‘catastrophe’ in a play which is both old tragedy, old comedy, the promised end, or the image of that horror.22 Edgar’s appearance in 1.2 is as if Edmund has conjured him up, as magician, or director of an comedy he is scripting; in 2.1 he speaks of his brother calling up spirits. The brothers do not exist separately, as one character stands in for another: Cordelia to Kent, and the Fool (all outsiders to family bonds); the Fool to Poor Tom and to Lear, fool to himself. Edgar as Poor Tom becomes the Oswald whom he does not know, but kills both Edmunds, the shadow (Oswald) and the bastard. Edmund’s conjuring of Nature shows adherence to a Machiavellian or Hobbesian politics,23 but Nature here offsets ‘custom’ and legitimacy. His speech aligns him with other bastards through the word ‘us’ (1.2.9).24 He imagines Edgar calling him ‘thou unpossessing bastard’ (2.1.67), and the adjective combines the thought of bastards not inheriting, and having no possession, no entitlement to property and therefore no identity, since the play occludes people’s names in

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favour of the places they inherit: not to inherit means both the loss of place and of a name. With ‘Edgar I nothing am’ (2.2.192), Edgar bastardises himself. In what he imagines Edgar calling him, and in his first soliloquy, Edmund shows only anger against bastardy. The Quarto reading includes: ‘Why “bastard”? Wherefore “base”? . . . Why brand they us / With “base, base bastardy”’ (1.2.6, 9–10), but the Folio adds (1.2.9–10): Why brand they us With base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base?

The Folio Edmund uses ‘base’ and its cognates five times, in a repetition punning on ‘bastard’ (three times in the speech), and which develops its meanings, ‘base’ as illegitimate (‘base-born’), as vile, and as inferior; as such, Kent applies the word twice to Oswald. Equally, the end of Edmund’s speech in the Folio intensifies references to the legitimate. After saying that ‘our father’s love’ is to the bastard Edmund as to the legitimate, the Folio adds ‘Fine word, “legitimate” (1.2.18). Edmund tries out the sound and sense of the word which excludes him, mocking it. The word may be in context noun, adjective or verb; and, if it is the last, then it implies how easily illegitimacy becomes legitimacy, by what OED calls ‘authoritative declaration or decree’. If bastardy can be legitimated, anyone can become a bastard, as anyone can be called a bastard (even in admiration) which means that the term ‘bastard’ lacks meaning, authority, origin, as a bastard does. The Quarto concludes: ‘Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed / And my invention thrive, Edmund the base / Shall tooth’ legitimate’ (1.2.19–21); if ‘top’ is accepted as an emendation for the Quarto and the Folio, the word is echoed in Edgar’s phrase ‘the deficient sight / Topple down headlong’. Bastardy topples: Edmund, the simular of virtue who is incestuous and brings about the death of all of Lear’s daughters, aspires towards the position of safety, the bastard identity wanting not further heterogeneity but to become legitimated, to be placed at the centre. Edgar – who finally topples his brother – knows that no identity is safe, that life can be maintained only by leaving an existence which puts identity at the centre. Bastardy delegitimates language from having a founding authority, anachronises it. Derrida, who said in an essay discussed in the Introduction that he wanted to discuss King Lear, following its ‘play of Nature and Fortune’, associates bastardy with apocryphal writings, so that he argues that letters are bastards, because they lack an

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adequate signature that would guarantee authority. In this context he shows how integral letters are to this play.25 The first is the letter supposedly thrown in at the casement of Edmund’s closet, signed Edgar but written by Edmund. This letter is a bastard, its parentage being apocryphal, and it expresses the relation between Edmund to Edgar, like him, but not him, his shadow. Effectively, it makes Edgar a bastard, for, when Edmund goes on telling lies about Edgar, Gloucester says: ‘strange and fastened villain, / Would he deny his letter? I never got him’ (2.1.77–78, Quarto). Gloucester associates Edgar denying parentage of the letter with a denial of his own parentage of Edgar. A second letter is a theme of 3.3.9–11, and 3.5.10–11 and 3.7.47–48: Gloucester reports having received it from someone unknown, so it too is unparented, though it is said to be by one that is of ‘a neutral heart’ (3.7.48). In the scene of Gloucester’s blinding, it is used illegitimately to make its recipient a traitor. The word ‘traitor’ is indeed used there four times of Gloucester. Remembering Edgar’s phrase, ‘to course his own shadow for a traitor’, and considering how ‘traitor’ if applied to Gloucester means that the word has lost all meaning, or legitimacy, then shadows, traitors and bastards may all seem to express a sense of the presence and potentiality of delegitimation, of which last Gloucester’s blinding is a symbol. A third letter is Goneril’s to Edmund, where she says she wants Albany killed: this Edgar intercepts when Oswald is killed; it is delivered by him to Albany, and Goneril tries to tear it up. The letter returns as if by blind chance to damn its writer, when her husband receives it; like a bastard, the letter destroys its parent who disowns it, walking from it to her death. And it arrives anachronically for the addressee, who now lies dying. The existence of a fourth letter is hinted at in 5.1.53 (Folio), when Edmund supplies Albany with information about the strength of the ‘enemy’ powers. At that point, Albany stands selfdivided in his loyalties, having two letters in his hand, one addressed to Edmund, one given him by Edmund.26 These letters dramatise the impossibility of certain knowledge, making everything subject to chance, fortune, the accidents of anachrony. Lack of legitimated meaning in language appears when Gloucester calls Edmund ‘Loyal and natural boy’ (2.1.84). Foakes says ‘natural’ means three things: ‘properly loving to his father . . . legitimate and illegitimate’. But a ‘natural’ is also a ‘fool’, which is a sense Gloucester cannot intend, though it is already hinted at in Edmund as a mock Tom o’ Bedlam, and by Edgar’s next appearance as a ‘real’

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Poor Tom, though more real than the usual beggar who taking on that role ‘fayneth hym selfe mad’, and who will ‘make you beleeue he is out of his wits’.27 Edgar assumes that mock identity as in a play, in an extension of what Edmund does, and he counterfeits, to save his life. Neither Edmund nor anyone else can control the meaning of the word ‘Nature’, which means the power that secures both legitimacy and illegitimacy; the power that secures folly, in fact; the folly of Edmund, and Edgar who moves from ‘foolish honesty’ (1.2.179) to becoming Poor Tom, and Gloucester, who tells the disguised Kent that he is almost mad himself (3.4.62), and who, after his blinding cries out ‘O my follies’ (3.7.90). Nature means the power of chance, for ‘Nature’s above art in that respect’ (4.6.86), able to outgo any human contrivance. It is that heterogeneous force – called, patriarchally, Hecate or the nightmare – which decides on the chronological or anachronological order, who will be either the legitimate or the illegitimate within culture, ‘who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out’ (5.3.15). Nature as feminine aligns with Fortune, called by the Fool that ‘arrant whore’ (2.2.242). Dependency on Fortune recalls Sonnet 124, which asserts the power of an intention that wants to stand by itself, outside all influences, and particularly the power of ‘state’. Those who rely on that will find themselves identified as bastards. Fortune is blind (see Henry V 3.6.25–33), but has bastard children. The sonnet closes its comparison between these, and those whose love is outside the sphere of Fortune, and ‘smiling pomp’, or ‘thralled discontent’ or ‘policy’, by evoking as witness ‘the fools of time, / Which die for goodness, which have lived for crime’. We can supplement to those anachronistic fools discussed in the previous chapter, Edmund, a ‘fool of time’ because ‘twelve or fourteen moonshines / Lag of a brother’, (1.2.5–6), whose dying repentance and the good he means to do then (5.3.241–242) contrast with living for crime. When killed he is ‘unfathered’, ‘fortune’s bastard’. But he is also ‘unfathered’ because, simultaneously, his father, ‘blind Cupid’, engenderer of a bastard (and ‘fortune’s bastard’ when and because blinded) dies offstage.28 ‘Fortune’s bastard’ and ‘fools of time’ from the sonnet, compare with Lear, thinking he is a prisoner, calling himself ‘the natural fool of fortune’ (4.6.186–187).29 His expression of how his life has reversed its fortunes emphasises in three different ways the idea that he is a bastard, and that bastards are fools, with all the plural meanings ‘fool’ has. He is (a) a natural; and (b) he is a fool of Fortune,

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which (c) makes him a fool of time. What is true of Edmund, the son Lear did not name, is true of Lear. The speaker in the sonnet thought that he could keep himself from being – or becoming – a bastard, but that privilege is universally denied in King Lear, but, in being so, may even become a liberty, as entitlement to anachronism. Poor Tom’s effect, as nearly identified with Nature as possible, and more than his brother could be, is to complete the work the Fool began: driving Lear mad. It shows when Lear’s response to Poor Tom is to think that he has given all to his daughters. ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold’ Edgar keeps repeating, while the Fool reacts: ‘This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen’ (3.4.76). Nature produces naturals. The King who began the play wanting control over his own death now does not even want his eyes. He is most mad in saying, three times over in his mad scene, that he is a king (4.6.82–83, 106, 196), just as earlier – too late, after he had virtually delegitimated himself – he had said that he wanted to maintain the title of king (1.1.137). The anachronous thing is a king who is a bastard and fool, outside time, and the order of the realm. Fearing anachronism: All’s Well that Ends Well The chronicle of a death foretold suggests fear of the future; with the sense that the future may give a delayed event, as a parachronism (= an event dated too late; or, in dramatic terms, an appearance made too late). Fear of being late is the subject of Shakespeare’s comedy All’s Well that Ends Well, where the young Bertram has been sent from his mother, the widowed Countess of Rossillion, to the court of the King of France. He is therefore lost to Helena, the poor daughter of the dead physician Gerard de Narbon: she lives with the Countess and is secretly in love with Bertram. The King of France is ill, and hopes for his own death, but he will be miraculously healed at the hands of Helena, whose skill derives from her dead father. His restoration to youth will make him an anachronistic figure, a combination of youth and age. Her reward is to be married to Bertram, who immediately deserts her. She allows him to go, in a sonnet which she sends to his mother, concluding with the disavowal common to the Sonnets, making Helena voice the Sonnets’ ‘I’, while Bertram becomes the young man (3.4.16, 17); He is too good and fair for death and me Whom I myself embrace to set him free.

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The last line implies (a) that she embraces death figuratively and (b) that she will embrace Bertram physically, in an act which will ‘set him free’. By the end of the play, through the ‘bed-trick’, she has become pregnant by Bertram, and taken a ring from him, both conditions he laid down as to be fulfilled before he would acknowledge her. The play’s opening, with characters in black, showing Bertram departing for the court, suggests that any action is fearful in leading towards death: there is no confidence in the future felt by the Countess. She, with the exception of Macbeth’s witches, is the only woman to start a Shakespeare play, speaking its first words: ‘In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband (1.1.1)’30 Birth – as delivery ‘from me’ – is as death: the son being the mother’s second husband, the repetition of the first. The delivery of the son from the mother as a baby implies the death of the actual husband, the late Count Rossillion, as if that birth – as the promise of the future – sentenced the husband. Further, Bertram’s delivery into the court world – which, as the act of deliverance implies, is a way to ‘set him free’ – is a repetition of the first birth and death. And the idea of Bertram, as a second husband to his mother being delivered from her, reads as though Bertram is dying, and ready for burial, as though this play was a chronicle of a death foretold. In the court, the King of France, old and sick, recalls to Bertram the character of his father, who was his contemporary in youth, ‘But on us both did haggish age steal on / And wore us out of act’ (1.2.28–29). The issues of the history plays and of Falstaff return in this consideration of old age, which either is female or makes its subjects so: the antifeminism is patent: time ‘stealing’ and ‘wearing out’ has the effect of turning two men into women, into hags. The King speaks of the old Count as though his presence in the present, if it could be repeated, would be a timely anachronism. He is comparing the youth and class of the old Count with what he sees of the present young courtiers, which of course, includes the Count’s son, Bertram: in his youth He had the wit which I can well observe Today in our young lords, but they may jest Till their own scorn return to them unnoted Ere they can hide their levity in honour. So like a courtier, contempt nor bitterness Were in his pride or sharpness; if they were His equal had awaked them, and his honour –

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Clock to itself – knew the true minute when Exception bid him speak, and at this time His tongue obeyed his hand. Who were below him He us’d as creatures of another place, And bowed his eminent top to their low ranks, Making them proud of his humility In their poor praise he humbled. Such a man Might be a copy to these younger times; Which, followed well, would demonstrate them now But goers backward. (1.2.31–48)

There appears here a description of absolute honour (a word dominant in the play, used here twice, and meaning having a sense of self and how the self should be). It is expressed in terms of punctuality, the Count’s honour being a clock whose hands point to the true minute when he should speak whatever words are fitting. (In this play, the villain is Parolles, and the mischances come from misapplied words.) Whatever aphorism came from the Count came on time; his tongue (as in the tongue of the bell of the striking clock) obeyed his hand; i.e. he said no more than his hand could back up by way of protecting his honour. The man was a perfect clock, but with this difference from a clock; it, as merely mechanical, does not know the time it keeps, but he knew it: he had a sense of time: it is this new awareness, based on the idea of time as machine-like, and consciousness responding, perforce, to the machine: it is this which allows for the thought that something may be anachronistic, out of its proper time. (OED gives Hamlet – and so, notionally, 1600 – for the first use of ‘machine’.) The word ‘anachronism’ thus follows on this newer sense of a consciousness which responds to the mechanistic. Arrival of ‘these younger times’ (1.2.46) is the moment when the Count knew he must die: but nonetheless, the King says, his being seemed more modern, in the sense of more developed, than present, younger times, which are ‘goers backward’, they, and the men who embody them, being, strangely, pursuers of the anachronistic, ‘followers of the past’ as the Cambridge edition notes. The King thinks that such a man – a true original – might be a copy to the younger times, which would be anachronistic indeed, since it suggests that younger times would have to go back in time; and then, since the man is dead, the ‘copy’ could come only from what is said about the Count in the present, in the way that present speeches create him.

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The man of the past can exist only in present writing, writing which, in the past, comes from the future which the old man did not want to see. Hence Bertram says that his father’s ‘good remembrance’ is richer in the King’s thoughts than on the father’s tomb: ‘So in approof lives not his epitaph / As in your royal speech’ (1.2.50–51). Only living speech delivers the Count from oblivion, not the epitaph. The King’s failure to reply to this compliment, in a continuance of his meditation, nonetheless keeps the dead man, the man who wanted to die, living. The King’s speech wishes for his own death, and recalls the words of the Count, which he repeats to Bertram – and also, curiously, repeats within the speech – while seeing his own being as already partaking of the anachronistic: Would I were with him! He would always say – Methinks I hear him now; his plausive words He scatter’d not in ears, but grafted them To grow there and to bear – ‘Let me not live’, (Thus his good melancholy oft began On the catastrophe and heel of pastime When it was out) ‘Let me not live’, quoth he, ‘After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses All but new things disdain, whose judgements are Mere fathers of their garments, whose constancies Expire before their fashions.’ This he wish’d. I, after him, do after him wish too, Since I nor wax nor honey can bring home, I quickly were dissolved from my hive To give some labourers room. (1.2.52–67)

The Count, as recalled by the King, also showed a death-drive – called a ‘good melancholy’ – at the end of ‘pastime’. The last word has rich ambiguities, in implying time past, and time spent in the pleasure of pastime, with the sense that pastimes must end. ‘Catastrophe’, ‘heel’ and ‘out’ all, synonymously, suggest that pastimes exhaust themselves, and the people that take part in them; to pass the time is to be left behind at the end, wasted. Within the Count’s desire not to be anachronistic, not to go on into the future, possessed by ‘haggish age’, lies a compliment and a criticism. His speech, while also praising ‘younger spirits’ who are like ‘younger times’ and desiring not to be their snuff, is also potentially full of resentment: first because it assumes his own

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lack of ability to give anything to the younger spirits, which as a fear of being anachronistic is a fear of time, and, second, because along with the praise for ‘apprehensive senses’ is a sense that younger spirits cannot replace him adequately. Rather, they are not like him, in that they all but new things disdain; their mental prowesses are capable only of creating new fashions in garments, and their loyalties die before the fashions. His clock-character and clock-watching, which makes him feel the danger of becoming anachronistic, as much as it makes him hate his age, has as corollary the sense that the young courtiers are equally terrified of becoming anachronistic, out of time, out of fashion. Yet, as was seen with Proust’s third anachronism, discussing Fortuny, fashion exploits anachronism. More agreement with the point of view of the Count would come from Roland Barthes, who calls fashion a fake newness, always expected and predictable, unlike the ‘new’: Fashion tames the new even before producing it and achieves that paradox of an unforseeable and yet legislated ‘new’; in short, we can say that Fashion domesticates the unforeseen without, however, stripping it of its unforeseen character: each Fashion is simultaneously inexplicable and regular . . . pure Fashion is never anything but an amnesiac substitution of the present for the past . . . In fact, Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present constantly ‘eaten up’ by the fashion being heralded.31

Fashion here plays to feelings of resentment about time. Fear of becoming anachronistic in the Count – refusal to let the time be out of joint – seems to have been the expression of his envy of life, which comes in the form of not believing that its new shapes and fashions can be meaningful, and, even within the King’s own image of words which grow and bear fruit, there is an unconscious sense of another time-frame, of processes not punctual to the minute they are performed, but waiting for another time. Time’s processes cannot be reduced, then, to the stated terms of the Count, while within the logic of the King’s speech there seems to be a crossover of points of view: the fear of anachronism is condemnation to a state where every change of life is resented, because it affirms that the subject is defined by existence in time. Those who discard their opinions like their fashions are the mirror of that, wanting not to let their time fork. The speech concludes with the King making himself more anachronistic since his statement comes after the Count’s words (‘I after him’) in saying what he does, that he wishes he could die; nonetheless, the

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rhythm of events, which means that the Count has said one thing and died, and now the King says it too, installs the sense of anachrony within chronology itself. Fear of anachrony, while feeling that the honour represented by the old Count is now out of date, asks whether this play invests in the past, the present or the future. Though Shakespeare studies nowadays are usually classed as ‘early modern’, the word ‘modern’, which comes from the Latin ‘modus’, meaning ‘just now’ – i.e. in fashion – appears rarely in Shakespeare, only ten times ever, and twice of these within this play. I will instance the second occurrence of these first. ‘Modern grace’ (5.3.215), is applied by Bertram to Diana, whom Bertram, after deserting Helena, has been courting. The plot of Acts 3 to 5 turns on Helena tracking Bertram to Italy, and swapping beds with Diana. Bertram has said that he will not consummate the marriage until she is with child by him: his reliance on the impossibility of her beating this situation, which implies a true going against the order of things within the order of time, is what Helena beats by the bed-trick. In the last scene, Diana appears at the French court, in a situation engineered by the offstage Helena, whom everyone supposes to have died. Bertram, alarmed at the loss of his credit with the King, wants to proclaim Diana as a whore. So we may note the association of being modern with being a woman, since G.K. Hunter annotates Diana’s ‘modern grace’ as ‘commonplace grace’. The other, first use of ‘modern’ in the play, appears after the King’s almost miraculous healing. The old courtier Lafeu (le feu – the late) appears with a ballad, which contains the details of what has happened to the King, saying: They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (2.3.1–5)

In this speech, the modern (commonplace) and familiar are posed against the supernatural and causeless. These last are two words rare in Shakespeare: ‘supernatural’ comes only again in Macbeth, (1.3.129), ‘causeless’ four times altogether. Lafeu says that ‘we’ ensconce ourselves (shelter ourselves) with ‘seeming knowledge’. This seeming knowledge is that which belongs to the ‘learned and authentic Fellows’ (2.3.12) – i.e. the accredited members of the

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College of Physicians, who had all given up the possibility of curing the King. Seeming knowledge is both a refusal of an unknown fear and a way of hiding from it. Lafeu, however, is more ready to say that a miracle has happened, and by miracle he means ‘a showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor’ (2.3.22–23), which would be a form of anachrony. Lafeu perhaps means that the anachronistic has happened: though the phrase ‘miracles are past’ opposes, virtually, the modern to the anachronistic, since the modern can think only in commonplace terms (i.e. in the terms of current discourse). Yet Lafeu’s aphorism also means the opposite. ‘They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familar things supernatural and causeless’ implies that, since miracles are past, to make out modern and familiar things to be supernatural and causeless means refusing to accept the modern and familiar. The tendency is to make trifles of terrors, sheltering in seeming knowledge, when we should submit to an unknown fear. The unknown fear is within the modern and familiar, and is connected with the point that a woman has healed the King, not a male doctor: ‘modern’, therefore, has the connection, as it will later have, with Diana’s ‘modern grace’, with the idea of the woman. The temptation to hide in seeming knowledge – which means to regard things as supernatural and causeless – is a disavowal of the new power associated with the woman, who has healed the King, against all expectations, using medicine derived from her father. The anachronistic then is not simply the past surviving in the present, which the Count had feared, and which made him wish to die, it is something in the present itself, or in ‘the modern’.32 Hence the tendency in younger times to be ‘goers backward’, becoming anachronistic in a fear of the anachronistic. Hence in contrast the emphasis placed upon Helena, and her initiatives to lose her virginity to Bertram by way of marrying him. If the anachronistic is identified with something in the present, this suggests that the moment is always split, always disjointed. The unknown fear is what the old Count of Rossillion did not want: preferring death rather to die than to be with the fashions of the young men, even if these fashions are predictable rather than new. Submitting the self to an unknown fear implies accepting a position of passivity, which is not the position preferred by powers of masculine authority. But such a passivity would be different from that which the King has when he refuses ‘labouring art’, and tells Helena, who says that she comes to cure him with her ‘dear father’s gift’:

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We thank you, maiden, But may not be so credulous of cure When our most learned doctors leave us, and The congregated college have concluded That labouring art can never ransom nature From her inaidible estate. I say we must not So stain our judgment or corrupt our hope, To prostitute our past-care malady To empirics, or to dissever so Our great self and our credit, to esteem A senseless help, when help past sense we deem. (2.1.113–123)

There is in this passivity to authority, which rejects what comes from the past, from the cure that the father of Helena possessed, a refusal of both past (the old cure) and future, i.e. what might come from the future. The King sounds as if he prefers that the system of patriarchal learned doctors should be right and he die rather than wrong and he live, which makes his sense of justice tainted already, and his word ‘hope’ seem misapplied. Since ‘empirics’ illustrates dislike of the new – the modern – as against established authority, his attitudes sanction anachronism, in being set against what comes from the future. An injustice in him towards Helena comes from inability to read the possibility of difference occurring in time; perhaps it existed too, with the Count. The play shows several incapacities, one of which, the ‘old’ King says, having just spoken of ‘the consumed time’ – time that is abolished – is to be aware of the ‘inaudible and noiseless foot of time’ which ‘steals’ on the ‘quickest decrees’ ‘ere we can effect them’ (5.3.40–42). The past may be consumed, but time is still at work. We cannot hear time passing, but nor could it be heard anyway. Nature is inaidible, time inaudible. Time’s effects are felt in the frustration of what is ‘quickest’ – where the word ‘quick’ also means ‘pregnant’, as in the riddle that Diana pronounces as she announces the takenfor-dead Helen’s appearance at the end: ‘one that’s dead is quick’ (5.3.297). The lines make anachronism – death, life – basic, as Helena enters, as the person who was present all along, but who now, as pregnant (‘quick’), embodies a future to be be taken on trust: unlike other plays of reconciliation, such as The Winter’s Tale, the agents for new life are not yet apparent. It is part of the irony of the play’s title: pregnancy is neither the ‘end’ nor yet the beginning; this sense

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of the possibility of the future in the present, and especially as identified with the woman, seems to be what is ‘anachronistic’ in the play. There is also the self’s incapacity to know itself in time – as the First Lord says of Parolles, ‘Is it possible that he should know what he is and be that he is?’ (4.1.44–45), which leads into the Lord’s comment, ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues’ (4.3.68–71). Proud virtues and despairing crimes means that both would reverse into the other; crimes especially despairing of themselves and so ceasing to be crimes; qualities that cannot describe themselves, that do not know themselves, as the mechanical clock does not know its time. It is like the comment that Helena offers on Bertram after the bed-trick has happened, when she, as hated, has, nonetheless been bedded by the unknowing Bertram. His enjoyment depends on non-knowledge, on ‘saucy trusting’ of ‘cozened thoughts’ – ‘wanton abandonment to deluded appetites’ (Cambridge), ‘lecherous acceptance of the fantasies of the fooled mind’ (Penguin). Helena comments (4.4.21–25): But, O strange men! That can such sweet use make of what they hate, When saucy trusting of the cozen’d thoughts Defiles the pitchy night; so lust doth play With what it loathes for that which is away.

Bertram has cozened Helena by – as he thinks – sleeping with Diana, but his thoughts have been ‘cozened’ by Diana’s deception of him, so much that Bertram has slept with one woman taking her as though she was another. Bertram has made sweet (pleasant, or good) use (in the sense of profiting, as with usury) of what he hates (Helena) in a situation whose implications make more pitch-black, or sticky, the ‘pitchy night’. Sweetness depends on sauce, ‘saucy’ also meaning ‘wanton, lascivious’ (OED ‘saucy’ adj. 2b). Lust plays (this is its strangeness) with what it loathes (without any sense of speaking of Helena, and of his reaction to her, Bertram calls his desires ‘sick’ (4.2.35); this playing is on the basis of not knowing that the ‘what’ is the loathed thing, thinking it is the desired ‘that’ which is far away). This slippage may be aligned with Bertram on Helena, thinking she is dead, ‘whom myself / Since I have lost, have loved’ (5.3.53, 54). The King’s reply to this confession by Bertram of how his love was out of time, anachronistic, reminds him of the power of non-

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coincidence, while his own sententiousness, moving into rhyming couplets, shows his tendency to imagine that an apt judgement may be stated in an exact and just time (5.3.57–66): love that comes too late, Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried, To the great sender turns a sour offence, Crying, ‘That’s good that’s gone’. Our rash faults Make trivial price of serious things we have, Not knowing them until we know their grave. Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust, Destroy our friends and after weep their dust; Our own love waking cries to see what’s done, While shameful hate sleeps out the afternoon.

Despite the King’s wish to see everything in punctual terms, his speech is full of interest, since, in the last two lines, what revives, after rash faults which rush to destroy, is love, which is anachronistic, in waking too late to see what shameful hate has done. Hatred is not anachronistic, its existence being punctual to an event, but ‘displeasures’, which have the power of destruction, turn into a love weeping and crying in regret. Love can be only that which knows itself later than the event, in the pattern which the First Lord commented on (4.3.68–71), thinking of the interchangeability of love and crimes. Hatred, however, has no possibility of being anachronistic, which makes it shameful, but its lack of shame (shame comes as a thinking on the event after it has happened) makes it enjoy untroubled sleep in a dangerous time. To be anachronistic leaves the self open to something new, as when Helena arrives on stage, but hatred on this basis remains that which cannot be changed, anti-anachronous, as it thinks. The last scene opens up matters when the King thinks he has brought them to a close, when it sees Diana asking for justice on Bertram (5.3.144), and Bertram dishonoured. The Count’s honour was what he guarded punctually; but Bertram has lost his, though he protests to the King that he did not ‘sink’ it in Diana (5.3.180), which phrase, taken literally, locates honour within the male’s sexual parts, his ‘will’ (4.3.15). Loss of Bertram’s ring Bertram equates with the loss of honour (4.2.40–53) and so loss of manhood, but perhaps loss of a ring feminises him, for with its loss he gets back nothing which he can call his own, for, though Diana gives him a ring, it is Helena’s. Preservation of honour (past, belonging to the patriarchy) is created by the woman’s initiative, in doing what has not been thought of, what could not be

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thought of by the powers of patriarchy – in this play, the bed-trick is a woman’s initiative, not patriarchal, as in Measure for Measure. Bertram’s injustice, to Helena – making him liable to ‘the wrath / Of greatest justice’ (3.4.28, 29) – and to Diana, whom he slanders in this scene after whatever else he has done or thinks he has done to her, is resolved by Helena, reappearing as from the dead with present proofs (the ring and the letter) and future promise (childbirth). She makes him just (he never slept with Diana, but with her; he has truly married Helena, though he thought he had not.) She relates to two time-scales, now between death and birth, and it is not forgotten that the future may be out of joint, since birth can mean death, a point made in the play’s first line. Helena asks Bertram ‘Will you be mine now you are doubly won’ – but doing something doubly, as in Macbeth, can never make anything sure. Bertram begins his next speech with an ‘If’, even if he packs two sets of doubles into the next line, and Helen follows with another ‘If’: BERTRAM: If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly. HELENA: If it appear not plain and prove untrue, Deadly divorce step between me and you! (5.3.309–12)

What will be known clearly will appear at the birth that will happen after the play has closed. If the child is not born, or is not Bertram’s, she will assent to death which will divorce them, or she will die in childbirth. Bertram cannot be fully justified, except on that basis of something proving ‘plain’ and ‘true’ in the future. There can be no pure justice in the play, which stops in the time-space it has occupied between birth (which is death) and birth. But the future birth may mean that she will not bury a husband: that is, that she may possess both the child and the husband, as the Countess could not. Perhaps the death to be averted is that of the Bertram who has lost his ring, and so all forms of entitlement, which can only be on the basis of a safe delivery which will ‘set him free’. The play then will not become a chronicle of a death foretold. But despite, or because of the title, with its possible equivocation – it is not certain that anything can end well – the play postpones ending, clinching issues in a punctual moment of time, as the King had wanted. It concludes in a state of postponement, of incompleteness. The future must be trusted.

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Future traces

Memory traces Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess, in December 1896 (Letter 52), that he was trying out the assumption that ‘our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription’. Hence, ‘memory is present not once but several times over . . . laid down in various kinds of indications’. And ‘consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive’. These layings down of memory traces are ‘registrations’ (Niederschrift); they correspond to ‘the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life. At the boundary between two such epochs a translation of the psychic material must take place.’ But: this translation has not taken place in the case of some of the material, which has certain consequences. For we hold firmly to a belief in a tendency towards quantitative adjustment. Every later transcription inhibits its predecessor and drains the excitatory process from it. If a later transcript is lacking, the excitation is dealt with in accordance with the psychological laws in force in the earlier psychic period and along the paths open at that time. Thus an anachronism persists: in a certain province, fueros are still in force, we are in the presence of ‘survivals’. A failure of translation – this is what is known clinically as ‘repression’.1

Letter 52 illuminates Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology, written, but not published, in 1895, and discussed by Lacan, and by Derrida. The Project discusses resistances to stimuli which impact on the psyche from without. The clue-words are ‘contact-barriers’ and Bahnung (‘facilitation’ in the Standard Edition: ‘frayage’ in French,

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‘pathbreaking’ in the translation of Derrida’s ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’). Lacan thinks of Bahnung as ‘the creation of a continuous way, a chain’ which he thinks may be linked to the ‘signifying chain’,2 so his translation would be ‘articulation’, and his argument that memory passes through a concatenation of signifiers which have the impulse to find what has been lost: das Ding, the thing, the lost object, beyond the pleasure principle (Ethics of Psychoanalysis 57, see also 50–52). But Derrida in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ goes further, in examining Freud’s discussion of neurones which as contact-barriers, are characterised by resistance to outside stimuli. They may, ‘after each excitation, be in a different state from before and they thus afford a possibility of representing memory’ (SE 1.299). These neurones are vehicles of memory, since ‘memory is the very essence of the psyche: resistance, and precisely, thereby, an opening to the effraction of the trace’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, 201). (‘Effraction’: ‘breaking open’: pathbreaking is an act of violence.) Memory is not passive, but characterised by resistance to what is to be remembered, as well as remembering it: this dual action creates a differential play of forces: We then must not say that breaching [Bahnung] without difference is insufficient for memory; it must be stipulated that there is no pure breaching without difference. Trace as memory is not a pure breaching that might be reappropriated at any time as simple presence; it is rather the ungraspable and invisible difference between breaches. We thus already know that psychic life is neither the transparency of meaning nor the opacity of force but the difference within the exertion of forces. (201)3

Derrida further quotes Freud on how excitations are necessarily marked by repetition. Memory from the beginning holds back excitations; memory both resists what comes from outside, and allows something to remain. The split between the contact barriers and breaching, whose presence makes repetition inherent in the way memory is laid down, makes for what Derrida calls ‘differences in the production of the trace’ (202); the resistance means that ‘life protects itself by deferring a dangerous cathexis’ (an investment of energy); by ‘constituting a reserve’ (201). Derrida reads Freud, beginning here, for ‘the concepts of Nachträglichkeit [deferred reaction: an after-event] and Verspätung [delaying]’ as ‘concepts which govern the whole of Freud’s thought and determine all his other concepts

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. . . the irreducibility of the “effect of deferral” – such, no doubt, is Freud’s discovery’.4 In Moses and Monotheism, it becomes a study of ‘latency’, as that which operates within trauma, bringing it on after the traumatic event, as an after-event. ‘Breaching’ for Derrida associates with writing, because it implies ‘a retention of permanent traces’ (204). Memory, then, is inscribed as a trace, but – the key point – Freud’s Letter 52 implies that the writing does not relate to an event, not being tied to consciousness of an event; hence memory is always potentially out of sequence, unrelated to experience. And an older form of memory applies to a newer experience, as when, in Proust’s first anachronism, newer faces can be given to older personages with whom they have no historical relation, and vice versa. Letter 52 suggests that an older memory, as a palimpsest, not retranslated into the forms which the psychic life inhabits at present, continues as repressed material. As such it remains an anachronism and a fuero, as if under a separate territorial law, spatially independent (as the anachronism, in temporal terms, implies independence of chronology). For Laplanche and Pontalis, the letter gives a theory of ‘fixation of ideas’, which, in psychoanalysis, accounts for the point that ‘any human subject is marked by childhood experiences and retains an attachment . . . to archaic modes of satisfaction, types of object and of relationship’. As well as fixation of ideas, which is a form of anachrony, there is a ‘fixation of excitation to these ideas’ for which they quote Freud on repression: We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct [i.e. the drive, Trieb] being denied entrance into the conscious. With this a fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it.5

Here, a delegate, or representative, of the drive exists as an indelibly inscribed memory-trace in the unconscious, and the drive remains fixated to it, whatever vicissitudes it undergoes. ‘Fixation’ is something anachronistic within the way that the drive relates to what is inscribed in the unconscious. The ‘memory-trace’ in Freud is writing unattributable to a knowable past event; the way is open to see memory as of that which has not taken place, inherent in the system independent of experience.

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Equally, present experience cannot be accorded an absolute privilege, as that which could draw memory after it. Derrida will not think of time as implying chronology, because ‘the concept of time, in all its aspects, belongs to metaphysics, and it names the domination of presence’.6 If the very concept of time is metaphysical, this feeds his critique of Husserl: discussing The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (lectures given between 1905 and 1910, published by Heidegger in 1928), Derrida says Husserl both confirms the dominance of the present, and rejects the ‘afterevent’ of the becoming conscious of an ‘unconscious content’ which is the structure of temporality implied throughout Freud’s texts.7

For Derrida, that there can be an ‘after-event’ is denied by an Husserlian investment in the present moment, which can admit no unconscious, since its subject is the Cartesian self present to itself, and which takes every moment as the exact repetition of a moment which has gone before. The contrast with Proust is obvious. The ‘after-event’ appears in Derrida’s ‘Différance’ (1968); here, ‘every possible mode of presence is marked by the irreducibility of the aftereffect, the delay’. Presence contains delay, a word associating with ‘differ’ and ‘deferral’, those words which comprise ‘différance’, which inhabits all ‘presence’; it does not inhabit its own time: The structure of delay (Nachträglichkeit) . . . forbids that one make of temporalization (temporization) a simple dialectical complication of the living present as an originary and unceasing synthesis . . . of retentional traces and protentional openings. The alterity of the ‘unconscious’ makes us concerned not with horizons of modified – past or future – presents, but with a past that has never been present, and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of presence. Therefore the concept of trace is incompatible with the concept of retention, of the becoming-past of what has been present. One cannot think the trace – and therefore différance – on the basis of the present, or the presence of the past.8

Derrida calls this ‘a past that has never been present’, linking the phrase to the idea of the Other in Levinas, who speaks of the ‘the trace of the Other’, along with ‘the face of the Other’, the face, which challenges my response, being that which is included within the trace. In Levinas, the trace is not a sign of something, nor is it to be discerned within a system of cause-and-effect (e.g. it is not the scratch-mark left by a stone because these things belong to the same

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homogeneous world). Rather, in the trace, ‘everything in things is exposed, even what is unknown in them. The traces that mark them are part of this plenitude of presence [i.e. the presence of the other]; their history is without a past. A trace qua trace does not simply lead to the past, but is the very passing toward a past more remote than any past and any future which still are set in my time – the past of the other’.9 Levinas returns to the phrase in Otherwise than Being, Or, Beyond Essence: ‘the trace of a past in a face is not the absence of a yet nonrevealed, but the anarchy of what has never been present’.10 His title asks what is ‘beyond’ essence: beyond what is, or has been, present. Here, the trace speaks not of what can be recalled from the past. It is the invisible indication of an absolute absence, and it is there in the ‘face’. The face that looks with the ‘trace’ of a past does not just imply something anachronistic, but gives the sense that my identity and subjectivity depend on a pre-existing relationship with that trace. The self cannot be established as an entity because it is inhabited by the trace of the Other, which is older than it. This priority of relationship over identity takes two forms: logical, and chronological. I am within a relationship, or a ‘proximity’, but it does not include a commitment made by me: Proximity is thus anarchically a relationship with singularity without the mediation of any principle, any ideality . . . it is an assignation of me by another, a responsibility with regard to men we do not even know. The relationship of proximity cannot be reduced to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity, nor to the simple ‘representation’ of a neighbour; it is already an assignation, an extremely urgent assignation – an obligation, anachronously prior to any commitment. This anteriority is older than the a priori. (Otherwise than Being, 100–101: ‘anachroniquement’ is italicised in French)11

Because of this prior proximity, the birth of the subject is ‘anachronous . . . prior to its own birth, a non-beginning, an anarchy’ (139), ‘pre-original, anarchic, older than every beginning’ (145). An-archy, of course, breaks with the origin, the beginning, and so with chronology (part of its anarchism in a political sense); the arche means ‘selfpossession, sovereignty’ (99), so that anarchy implies sovereignty in George Bataille’s sense of that: loss of identity. The anachronistic, in Otherwise than Being, aligns the thought of the anachronistic to the anarchic, as with ‘a pre-original past, anarchical past’ (10), which has the effect of an ‘anachronical overwhelming’ (13). This

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‘overwhelming’ recalls Proust’s fifth anachronism: the ‘overwhelming’ of the narrator’s whole being, in a time which is ‘anarchronistic’. Levinas expands on the temporality which is involved:

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the neighbour strikes me before striking me, as though I had heard before he spoke. This anachronism attests to a temporality different from that which scans consciousness. It takes apart the recuperable time of history and memory in which representation continues. (88)12

Another form of ‘anarchism’ may be considered here: the ‘anarchic passivity of obsession’ (110) which he sees as coming from the prior materiality of matter (matter seen as a cause, according to Levinas on Aristotle), and showing the subject not in control: sexual choice, as with the impulse of Charlus in Proust, or in the sexual impulse which is compared to a climbing plant in Sodom and Gomorrah, demonstrates it. That compulsions come from the outside, in a temporality which consciousness can take no account of, is what Levinas means by obsession; having no foundation, it ‘strips the ego of its pride and the dominating imperialism characteristic of it. The subject is in the accusative’ (110). Subjectivity as so created is ‘prior to all reflection, prior to every positing, an indebtedness before any loan, not assumed, anarchical’, definable in terms of ‘the passivity of a trauma’ which has taken hold already (111). It has no origin, being in this sense an-archic. Later, Levinas quotes Isaiah 65.24: to say ‘Before they call, I will answer’ (150). The slippage in time that both constitutes subjectivity and response to the other an-archically, and makes the other’s demand precede the subject, appears in the following, setting out Levinas’s sense of what the self is and who the other is: Between the one I am and the other for whom I am responsible there gapes open a difference, without a basis in community. The unity of the human race is in fact posterior to fraternity. Proximity is a difference, a non-coinciding, an arryhthmia in time, a diachrony refractory to thematization, refractory to the reminiscence that synchronises the phases of a past. The unnarratable other loses his face as a neighbour in narration. The relationship with him is indescribable in the literal sense of the term, unconvertible into a history, irreducible to the simultaneousness of writing, the eternal present of a writing that records or presents results.13

Proximity gives a ‘a pre-original reason that does not proceed from any initiative of the subject, an anarchic reason’ (166) for my responsibility to the other.

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Blanchot and Derrida Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb, Is coming towards me . . . (Richard II 2.2.10–11)

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I feel now/The future in the instant

(Macbeth 1.5.57–58)

If we recall Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death, discussed in the Introduction, time is that which ‘insists’, which while it allows postponements, keeps things still in process, and is disordered. So Hamlet says: ‘the time is out of joint’ (Hamlet 1.5.196). Derrida quotes this in Spectres of Marx: ‘If adjoining in general, if the joining of the “joint” supposes first of all the adjoining, the correctness [justesse], or the justice of time, the being with oneself or the concord of time, what happens when time itself gets “out of joint”, disjointed, disadjusted, disharmonic, discorded, or unjust? Ana-chronique?’14 As always with what ‘insists’, as with The Trial, or Blanchot’s récits, the future event feared repeats itself, or is already recognisable because it has already repeated itself. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius kills himself on his birthday: ‘time has come round, / And where I did begin there shall I end, / My life is run his compass’ (5.3.232–235). The etymologies of the word ‘compass’ puzzle OED: Cassius has gone round in a circuit, for being born is a kind of death; further, he has completed his ‘measure’ – but is cutting short his measure – as in the phrase ‘to keep even compass’ – ‘to keep step (passus – step) in marching’. There is no pas au-delà, for him, no step beyond, no getting out of the circle. Cassius was interested in the dramatic or literal re-enactment of Caesar’s assassination: ‘How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown’ (Julius Caesar 3.1.112–114). He considers how many future times a Caesar must be assassinated: let world leaders take heed. Brutus reiterates Cassius’ question, but thinks only in terms of drama: ‘How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport’ (3.1.115). Brutus would like to make the death of Caesar caesural, an unrepeatable event; unlike Cassius, wanting to break out of the circle which nonetheless claims him, despite him saying, near his end: ‘I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time’ (5.3.103). Hamlet, whom Brutus anticipates, knows that ‘the time is out of joint’. Julius Caesar is structured on repetition: Caesar is dead literally by the middle of Act 3 scene 1, but subsequently, Cinna the poet, about to be torn to pieces – literally disjointed – can say that he dreamed

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that he feasted with Caesar (3.3.1). And then too, the ghost of Caesar appears to Brutus in Act 4 scene 3, and stalks the battlefield, so that he is invoked by both Cassius and Brutus as they die, as though he has avenged himself (5.3.45, 5.3.94, 5.5.17, 5.5.50). Neither Caesar nor Caesarism are dead; rather Caesarism repeats itself. Perhaps the actual Julius Caesar was no more than a placeholder for what ‘Caesar’ represents, that spirit being indestructible, always returning. So, in other instance of repetition, Brutus tells Cassius his wife, Portia, is dead, and then is given news of the same by Messala (4.3.145–195). Portia’s suicide succeeds her voluntary wound in the thigh, and both are followed by her husband’s suicide. The wound, which if a man did it to himself would have phallic, castrating implications (compare Falstaff’s wounding of Hotspur), implies that she is acting something out in her husband, which makes his wounding Caesar anticipative of his suicide, running on his sword. Indeed, he acknowledges that Caesar’s spirit ‘walks abroad and turns our swords / In our own proper entrails’; like Cassius, who dies on the sword used to kill Caesar, his last words recollect how he killed Caesar, but that this is Caesar’s victory. Nietzsche finds in Brutus something deeper than Cassius, saying that, for him, political freedom, and the impulsion to kill Caesar, might be only ‘a symbol for something inexpressible. Could it be that we confront some unknown dark event and adventure in the poet’s own soul of which we wants to speak only in signs? . . . Perhaps he, too, had his gloomy hour and his evil angel, like Brutus.’15 There seems to be a fear of the future, as that which will prove disastrous, as the Queen fears in Richard II. Perhaps the power of repetition, which Brutus fears, the scene that the future may be only repetition, produces the ‘gloomy hour’. On the battlefield, repetition as destiny is uncanny. Cassius kills himself despite his army being victorious: misreading the signs he acts precipitately. Brutus knows that his hour has come (5.5.20), and he feels the death drive: ‘Night hangs upon mine eyes, my bones would rest / That have but laboured to attain this hour’ (5.5.41–42). In Nietzsche, the ‘gloomy hour’ appears in Thus Spake Zarathustra: Book 3, ‘The Vision and the Riddle’. It follows hard on the end of the second Book, ‘The Stillest Hour’. This, like the end of the first book, quoted in the Introduction, considered, and postponed, Zarathustra’s departure from his friends. In ‘The Vision and the Riddle’, Zarathustra recounts climbing upward toward with the ‘half dwarf, half-mole’

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(Hamlet’s dead father, ‘old mole’ (Hamlet 1.5.170)) clogging his upward movement. At that moment he articulates belief in eternal recurrence. Whereas Christianity may impose a chronology which cannot be returned upon, in that it leads towards a last judgement, and while the dwarf/mole insists on the exact repetition of everything, that time goes round as a closed circle, a compass, these are not so different world-views in that both impose belief in identity, in the unchanging nature of the past, and its influence in the future. They make fixation a law, they argue that the future will follow the past. In contrast, eternal recurrence, as Zarathustra suddenly sees it – for ‘is not seeing always – seeing abysses?’ and such seeing is productive of an ‘abysmal thought’16 – shatters the thought of identity. Because the present moment is nothing, gone as it is spoken, and riven by difference, because ‘out of joint’, there is no possibility of return to a present. The present moment is not to be seen as presence. No moment is single; hence what Derrida calls ‘disjointure in the very presence of the present . . . noncontemporaneity of present time with itself . . . radical untimeliness or . . . anachrony’ within the moment, which it splits. Return is return of difference. If the moment is not presence, every moment shatters into différance. Time, as neither linear nor singular, destroys the idea of an origin, or even a Freudian ‘primal scene’. This has many implications: we will go first for what it means for justice. Heidegger, translating the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander, used the rare German word ‘Fug’ to translate dike, joining it with ‘Fuge’ (seam, joint), so that Die Fuge ist der Fug. The joint is what joins. He said that when the negative, adikia, rules, ‘all is not right with things. That means, something is out of joint.’17 This quotes Hamlet’s statement, already given, which is Hamlet’s repetition of what Claudius had said about what Denmark’s enemies were saying about Denmark: ‘Our state to be disjoint and out of frame’ (Hamlet 1.2.20). Hamlet’s Denmark is in a state of adikia. Hence a state of dike in Heidegger and Derrida in Spectres of Marx, means something like ‘the rightness that is when things are as they should be. It is a name for the rightness, the appropriateness, the joint, the lawful necessity.’18 Hence Derrida describes justice as that which is in time, as ‘beyond right, and still more beyond juridicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism’, adding: Does not justice as relation to the other suppose . . . the irreducible excess of a disjointure or an anachrony, some Un-Fuge, some ‘out

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of joint’ dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking the evil, expropriation and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice or to render justice to the other as other?19

Dike, justice, can exist only within a recognition of time as fractured, out of joint. Dike as an act of justice is outside the course of time, so disjointed from it, and adikia relates, because ‘out of jointness’ not only describes a state of injustice, but recognises that time – the moment – is always out of joint, and that the act of justice, which is always exceptional, outside time, also disjoins. Refusal to recognise this, to think of the moment as a time of single presence, is a form of injustice in itself. There is no final moment of justice, or last judgement; justice must be anachronous. Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ may be considered as a way to express the basic anachrony which is constructive of time and the moment, and which is smoothed out by the philosophy, which, as a discipline wants to evoke presence, identity, duration and self-sameness as qualities outside time, outside history, or which, in Hegelian form thinks these things can be established within history. The anachronous it seems, from Derrida, is that which allows for justice, not as a single, absolute state but as split, part of the ‘contretemps’ which is another name for eternal return, as well as for justice; the existence of the anachronous. Blanchot’s combination of theory and narrative, Le pas au-delà (1973), takes up the question of eternal return. Its English title, The Step Not Beyond, suggests that it may be pondering Beyond the Pleasure Principle – which asks whether anything is ‘beyond’, and teaches repetition as that which delays and defers but in the end conduces towards death – in the light of Nietzsche’s sense of the eternal return. The thought, as seen before, abolishes the idea of identity; there can be no return to a present. So, ‘What will come again?’ asks Blanchot’s text, answering: ‘Everything, save the present, the possibility of a presence.’20 There is an echo here of Proust’s third anachronism: everything returns. A moment later, this appears: Effaced before being written. If the word trace can be admitted, it is as the mark that would indicate as erased what was, however, never traced. All our writing – for everyone and if it were ever writing of everyone – would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to come. (17)

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The trace borrows from Freud, for whom it is the memory-trace, and from Levinas, and Derrida. Writing is not written in the present, because the time of its being read is future; if I write ‘I am writing to you’, as in a letter, that belongs to two times; the time of the past into which the letter is slipping, and the time of the future when it will be read (having been carried ‘post’). It will then not be read in the present of the reader; and it will point both to a past time, that of writing, and to a future, to which its substance points. The concept of a present, with its stress on truth, and presence, and the self-evidence of identity, is the opposite of writing which disseminates, and which is the equivalent then of what the eternal return gives: indeed, writing is the eternal return, in giving a future when the past returns, and a past which points to the future. Writing erases the present. If there is an allusion to Proust in the word ‘search’, it implies that all writing is looking for what is in process of inscription, which will not be seen now but may be readable in the future. Blanchot then contrasts Nietzsche, the philosopher whose ‘mad writing’, writing which allows for dissemination, gives eternal return, and so no identity, with Hegel, as the philosopher of presence, and therefore identity, and of totality. ‘Nietzsche, certainly can be born before Hegel, and when he is born, in fact, it is always before Hegel’ (21). Anachronistically, we may read Nietzsche before Hegel, giving a Nietzschean Hegel, and destroying historicising readings; but since Hegel as reason ‘explains’ madness, Nietzsche comes first in order to be ‘before the letter’, and ‘before the law’ (these are equivalents), the law of Hegel which will recuperate madness for reason; making madness that which is always in danger of being contained by reason. So Blanchot says ‘that is why there is not madness, but there will be madness’ (21–22), a madness which is not to be recuperated ‘before the law’, as Blanchot says, with Kafka’s The Trial in mind, and, anachronistically, Derrida, whose essay ‘Devant la loi’ (Before the Law) appeared in 1982, and which this writing brings on. There follows: The madness of the ‘everything comes again’: it has a first simple trait, carrying within it the extravagance of forms or of relations that exclude one another. It formulates in Hegelian language what can only destroy this language: this formulation is not, however, an accidental anachronism; the anachronism is its necessity: the ‘ideological delay’ is its just hour; just as it could destroy only what realises itself in it and completes itself in it and by the rigour of the completion that destroys

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it itself. ‘Everything comes again’: this is the logos of totality . . . And the present must be the unique temporal instance for the totality of presence and as presence to affirm itself. But ‘everything comes again’ . . .. determines that no return could affirm itself in the present . . . The thought of the everything comes again thinks time in destroying it, but, by this destruction . . . thinks it as infinite, infinity of rupture or interruption substituting an infinite absence for present eternity. (22–23)

‘Everything comes again’, repeated each time with minor typographical differences, is a philosophical statement of what Blanchot calls an anachronism. It destroys chronological time, which, with its subcurrent of ‘progress’, determines the idea that madness can one day, somehow, be recuperable by reason; that what is chronologically ‘before the law’ will not be outside it in terms of the capacity of chronology as the ideology of reason to absorb it, and with it all transgression, all stepping across limits, of which madness is a signal example. If everything comes again, non-identity precedes and follows the thought of identity; by framing it shows its impossibility; time becomes not a sequence of past, present and future but a series of moments, each infinite in containing different times and identities in it. Yet when are these ‘moments’ known? Not in the present moment, for there is no present. Blanchot speaks of the ‘delay’ being the ‘just hour’; if we return to Derrida on time, it is to an argument which puts delay at the origin: Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be ‘present’, appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element. This trace relates no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and it constitutes what is called the present by this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past or future considered as a modified present. In order for it to be, an interval must separate it from what it is not; but the interval that constitutes it in the present must also, and by the same token, divide the present in itself, thus [also] dividing . . . everything that can be conceived on its basis, that is, every being. (Speech and Phenomena 142–143)

If delay, deferral, différance, haunts the origin, every present moment is belated, containing a past, or post, within it that makes it not establish itself. This is the anachronicity Derrida describes. The ‘past element’ is no past that has been, but an impossible past inherent

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in every present, and recognised as such throughout Proust, whose ‘time lost’ and ‘time regained’ are not the times which can be held in memory, even involuntary memory. When Combray emerges out of the cup of tea that the narrator speaks of at the end of the Overture, it is no longer memory but textual creation; it points to a reality that is outside memory, and a series of times which always ‘divides the present in itself’ as they divide each being, each subject; hollowing out each moment of the text with the sense that there is no restoration of the past, since ‘the past’ is equally illusory, as it contained its own difference in itself. Anarchronoristics Plato’s Timaeus (48e–53c) speaks of the khora, as a space or a nonplace, a receptacle, into which the Demiurge, the creator of the sensible universe, introduces the images of the paradigms essential to creation.21 The khora persists etymologically in the ‘anachoristic’. The khora is neither the paradigm nor the copy (the sensible shapes of creation), but a third thing: [an] ever-existing Place [khora] which admits not of destruction, and provides room for all things that have birth, itself being apprehensible by a kind of bastard reasoning by the aid of non-sensation, barely an object of belief.22

Julia Kristeva thinks of this as a feminine space, as the matrix. She says that Freud thought that hysteria was linked to place, considered place and space as definitional for women, and contends that psychoanalysis converges on the problematic of space, which innumerable religions of matriarchal (re)appearance attribute to ‘woman’ and which Plato, recapitulating in his own system the atomists of antiquity, designated by the aporia of the khora, matrix space, nourishing, anterior to the One, to God, and consequently, defying metaphysics.23

Hence Kristeva’s interest in the khora in speaking of a space, a receptacle that Plato makes ‘unnameable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the One, to the father, and, consequently, maternally connoted to such an extent that it merits “not even the rank of syllable’’’.24 The khora is Kristeva’s indeterminate space of the maternal semiotic. Kristeva opposes it to the symbolic, which is the realm of

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language acquired under the authority of the father.25 It is a space which shows itself in poetic language which, since it is indeterminate, is between being and becoming, which means that it allows for the ‘subject in process’, and disallows the possibility of a ‘signified or signifying identity’, being ‘heterogeneous to meaning (to sign and predication)’ (Desire in Language 135, 145, 146). ‘Woman’s time’ allows for the idea of the feminine subject in process, who cannot be inscribed into the space of the patriarchal or thought which confirms identity. Woman’s space is neither that of a prior being nor a becoming, because being cannot precede becoming; timeless Forms which are Plato’s realm of being must become Paradigms. They are in process, or translation, not fixed in any signifying system. The khora, in less feminist and psychoanalytic mode, is a subject in Derrida. His essay on ‘negative theology’ called ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ (‘Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations’) (1987) argues that, when the Demiurge was putting the images of the paradigms into the khora, it must have already been there. Asking how this disproportion and heterogeneity could have been thought through by Plato, Derrida argues that, as meaning ‘place, spacing, receptacle’, the khora is ‘neither sensible nor intelligible’. Rather, it ‘seems to partake in the intelligible in an enigmatic way. As it is neither this nor that (neither intelligible nor sensible), one may speak as if it were a joint participant in both’ so that ‘neither/ nor . . . becomes both . . . and’. Derrida proceeds via Aristotle’s commentaries on place (topos) in Physics Book 4, saying that these have provided, in their turn, the matrix for commentaries on the Timaeus, and that since then the passage on the khora has been seen ‘as being at the interior of philosophy in a consistently anachronistic way, as if it prefigured, on the one hand, [Cartesian and Kantian] philosophies of space . . . or on the other hand . . . materialist philosophies of the substratum, or of substance’. After referring to these plural interpretations, he says that their basic anachronism is ‘structurally inevitable’. There seem to be two anachronisms here: first, the way in which the Platonic doctrine supports later ideas of space, as though there was no difference between them, and the other, the ‘pretemporal’ nature of the khora, which is anterior to any inscription, but which can only be named by a subsequent text, such as the Timaeus. The thought of the khora provokes the idea of the anachronistic: we are in the sphere of my neologism, ‘anarchronoristic’. However, Derrida

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moves from that to another reading of Plato, which he finds more interesting, where:

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the place belongs neither to the sensible nor to the intelligible, neither to becoming nor to non-being (the khora is never described as a void), nor to Being . . . all the aporias, which Plato makes no effort to hide, would signify that there is something that is neither a being nor a nothingness.26

Derrida emphasises that no metaphor can speak of this (a metaphor would try to bridge the sensible and the intelligible). He concludes that as ‘radically nonhuman and atheological, one cannot even say that it gives place, or that there is the khora’ (106). Derrida is recalling both Heidegger’s phrase es gibt – it gives – and Levinas’s il y a, the ‘there is’ whose anonymity, as the impossibility of nothingness, is ‘the being which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself’.27 The ‘there is’ seems to precede ‘Being’: It does not give place as one would give something, whatever it might be; it neither creates nor produces anything, not even an event insofar as it takes place. It gives no order and makes no promise. It is radically ahistorical, because nothing happens through it and nothing happens to it. Plato insists on its necessary indifference . . . the khora must remain without form and without proper determination. But if it is amorphous . . . this signifies neither lack nor privation. Khora is nothing positive or negative. It is impassive, but it is neither passive nor active. (107)

As such, the khora is the ‘trace’, and to think it is inseparable from considering what is anachronistic. That it is feminine in Greek is happily suggestive; it associates with ‘woman’s time’, anachronistic in relation to the symbolic order, like Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well. It is what gives, it is what is given, it has no proper name (it is reached only by ‘bastard’ reasoning, which makes it improper) which makes it like those other Derrida terms, such as the trace – différance, the supplement, the pharmakon, the hymen, life-death. It is there /not there, not a concept and questioning oppositions between concepts, part of a gift within language. The architectural critic Jeffrey Kipnis, editing a collaboration between Derrida and the architect Peter Eisenman, Choral Works (i.e. voices in chorus or voices associated with the khora, works of architecture which respond to the khora), comments that the khora ‘guarantees that no chronology is free of anachrony, and no logic

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free of analogy’ (and ‘analogy’, Kripnis comments, is usually treated as an ‘illegitimate, bastard, form of reasoning’). Further: The law of ana [the Greek prefix which means ‘up, in place or time, back, again, anew’] is not merely a law of impropriety; it is not merely a law of the contamination of the proper (logos, chronos) by the improper (ana-logos, ana-chronos), but a law anterior to the possibility of law, a law of laws. The law of ana- is the law of originary ana-, or originary anachrony, originary analogy.28

Khora, Kripnis continues, is ‘the meeting place in which things that are not together in time or space nevertheless participate in one another in time and space, the place in which others con-inside, it reflects a law of analogy, anachrony, and coincidence that is not only their possibility but their necessity’ (51). It produces what we might call an-architecture, and the space it permits. The word ‘anarchitecture’ reintroduces Levinas on anarchy, and recalls for contrast the decaying architecture of the archive in the Palace of Justice in Riohacha in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.29 The enclosing spaces of institutional architecture or the architecture of institutions, which record time as chronology, may be placed against the anachronistic structures of an architecture which thinks in terms of the khora, where nothing of identity is fixed. The archive tries to preserve official memory. If architecture may be thought of as a receptacle, which, as the khora does, contains the possibility of other things, it cannot side with official memory and identity, but must embrace, envelop and enable other possibilities, other, unconscious, memories restored only involuntarily. Architecture must respond to the anachronistic, and think of itself as an envelope for the trace. If the khora compares with the trace, it is that which is not there but which cannot be negated, for Derrida sees ‘denial’ (dénégation) – both denial and the denial of denial – as inherent in speaking, as being ‘essential and originary’, and he says that he wishes to read dénégation ‘prior even to its elaboration in the Freudian context’. A reminder of Freud should be given here: Verneinung (denial) is inseparable from repression (Verdrängung), but Verneinung is not quite ‘negation’, as it is translated in the Standard Edition, because there is an unavoidable duplicity in the word Verneinung, where ‘affirmation and negation are conjoined without being united or synthesised’.30 For Laplanche and Pontalis, Verneinung ‘denotes negation in the logical and grammatical sense . . . but it also means denial in the

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psychological sense of rejection of a statement which I have made or which has been imputed to me’. Verneinung may be allied with Verleugnen, ‘to disown, deny, disavow, refute’.31 (The word ‘denial’ which appears in the English translation of Derrida, is, with ‘disavowal’, used for Freud’s Verleugnung, in his essay ‘Fetishism’, to describe the way the male both knows and refuses to know that the woman has not been castrated.)32 Negation is, therefore, denegation, as disavowal is also avowal. These are different ways of urging the point that there is no possibility of getting to nothingness, that language summons up something even while saying nothing. Time and passivity For Derrida, relying on Levinas, to speak is to be held by something anterior, which makes the structure of language anachronistic: I will not speak of this or that promise, but of that which, as necessary as it is impossible, inscribes us by its trace in language – before language. From the moment I open my mouth, I have already promised; or rather, and sooner, the promise has seized the I which promises to speak to the other, to say something, at the extreme limit to affirm or to confirm by speech at least this: that it is necessary to be silent; and to be silent concerning that about which one cannot speak. One could have known as much beforehand. The promise is older than I am. Here is something that appears impossible . . . [for] like every genuine performative, a promise must be made in the present, in the first person singular . . . [But] the promise of which I shall speak will always have escaped this demand of presence. It is older than I am . . . in fact, it renders possible every present discourse on presence. Even if I decide to be silent, even if I decide to promise nothing, not to commit myself to saying something that would confirm once again the destination of speech and the destination toward speech, this silence yet remains a modality of speech, a memory of promise, and a promise of memory. (84–85)

So silence is included in what language is, being part of the trace: the trace is before language, and is revealed by language. Speaking contains a reserve within it, which it is impossible to speak of, but which is the trace, and which gives language a promissory character. As Levinas thinks of a past that was never present, so does Blanchot, whose ‘The Essential Solitude’ dwells on ‘the absence of time’ where loss of chronology means, as in Levinas, loss of identity, since:

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what is new does not renew anything; what is present is not contemporary; what is present presents nothing, represents itself, belongs now and henceforth and at all times to recurrence. This is not, but comes back, comes as already and always past, so that I do not know it, but I recognize it, and this recognition destroys the power in me to know, the right to grasp, makes what cannot be grasped into something that cannot be relinquished, the inaccessible that I cannot cease attaining, what I cannot take but can only take back – and never give up.33

In the absence of time, nothing could be perceived except as recurrence, the permanence of anachrony, for ‘what is present presents nothing’. But ‘nothing’ must not be read as nothingness. It must certainly be read as anachronistic. Being held by something which is already there in language makes the subject passive (existing ‘in the accusative’, as Levinas writes). To discuss this, we may return to Deleuze, whose Difference and Repetition, chapter 11, discusses three ways of thinking about time, each ending with passivity.34 The first, which may be compared with passages in Proust, has to do with a ‘passive synthesis’ by which he means that continuity within time is seen by us as the continuity of habit: ‘we have no other continuities apart from those of our thousands of component habits, which form within us so many superstititious and contemplative selves’. Deleuze says that ‘it is easy to multiply reasons which make habit independent of repetition’.35 In this section of Difference and Repetition, which quotes from two Samuels, Butler and Beckett, habit is taken as the foundation from which all other psychic phenomena derive, showing that these thousands of habits of which we are composed – these contractions, contemplations, pretensions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues, these various presents – thus form the domain of passive syntheses . . . selves are larval subjects; the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self, under conditions yet to be determined, but it is the system of a dissolved self . . . the self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification. (78–79)

If ‘habit is the foundation of time, the moving soil occupied by the passing present’ and if it is habit that forms modes of perception, it is also true that ‘the claim of the present is precisely that it passes’. The second way in which time is synthesised derives from Deleuze’s readings of Bergson, and may be compared with what was quoted before, in Chapter 2, in relation to Proust. If the present passes away,

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it is because the present is seen as already past, or as having a past element. Indeed, every present must contain a past aspect for it to pass away. This is because the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is. It insists with the former present, it consists with the new or present present. It is the in-itself of time, as the final ground of the passage of time. In this sense it forms a pure, general a priori of all time. In effect, when we say that it is contemporaneous with the past that it was, we necessarily speak of a past which never was present, since it was not formed ‘after’. Its manner of being contemporaneous with itself as present is that of being posed as already-there, presupposed by the passing present and causing it to pass . . . [E]ach past is contemporaneous with the present it was, the whole past coexists with the present in relation to which it is past, but the pure element of the past in general pre-exists the passing present.

Deleuze calls this a ‘passive synthesis’, because ‘the present designates the most contracted degree of an entire past, which is itself like a coexisting totality’ (82). Passivity here implies that a present cannot establish itself as separate from a past but that, instead, there is the passing of one present and the arrival of another, with a repetition in each which Deleuze calls destiny (83). The present, then, contains something impossible within it, since it is not free of the past: it is the past. To be anachronistic would be then be to be located, not in the past but in the present. In the third synthesis, time assumes the loss of a subject: a ‘fractured I and a passive self’ (86). Not just that time divides me (this me from the last me, this me in the act of saying me), but Deleuze quotes Hölderlin, that time ‘no longer “rhymed” because it was distributed unequally on both sides of a “caesura”, as a result of which beginning and end no longer coincided. We may define the order of time as this purely formal distribution of the unequal in the function of a caesura.’36 This caesura is ‘the fracture in the I’ (89). Here, ‘the caesura . . . must be determined by the image of a unique and tremendous event, an act which is equal to time as a whole’ – such an image is expressed in many ways, ‘to throw time out of joint, to make the sun explode, to throw oneself into the volcano, to kill God or the father’ (89). The reference to Empedocles will be noted. The event is the caesura; it comes from the future, but also out of the

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past, and it effaces the actor, depriving the self of ability to see itself in terms which imply chronology, moving from one moment to the next. Deleuze says of the event that it ‘is not what happens (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs’.37 Such passivity in Blanchot and Levinas means recurrence, or Deleuze’s repetition, which is not based on a single originating act in the past. Disappointments: 2046 Though cinema uses flash-backs, its sense of narrative is usually chronological, perhaps because film has no built-in way of indicating tense, though a favourite device is to start with a character narrating in the present and then to stage the action as a flashback, taking us up to the present moment, by the end of the film. In the Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004), Hong Kong is seen from 1966 to 1969, in a series of analepses, while the film looks forward to 2046 in a series of fantasy prolepses. The title refers to the date fifty years after the handover of sovereignty from Britain to China; the information coming too late in the film to be used: when the credits are rolling and most people have gone home. It is the voice of Margaret Thatcher announcing the ‘one country two systems’ plan for Hong Kong that was initiated for fifty years only, after the British colony reverted to Chinese rule in 1997. 2046 is 49 years after, 2047 being the name of a science-fiction story that the leading figure Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) has written. 2046 is the place, in this science-fiction, where people go who cannot cope with their memories. The soundtrack says that no one comes back from there, but, in the images seen at this point, trains are going in both directions. As a date, 2046 sets a limit from which one could only return. If calling the film 2046, not 2047, sets limits, denies excess, that suggests the denial of eroticism, seen in the ultimate refusal of Chow to sleep with Bai Ling (Zhang Zi-yi), with whom he has had a affair, on the night before she makes her first visit to Singapore.38 The chronological action begins in 1966 with Chow returning to Hong Kong from Singapore. He meets Lulu, who is also Mimi (Carina Lau). There is footage of the riots which took place in Hong Kong then. The first Christmas celebrated in Hong Kong is that of 24 December 1966. From then, the film moves to 24 December 1967, when Chow is with a new girlfriend, Bai Ling. On 24 December 1968, he helps Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong) contact her Japanese

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boyfriend, Tak (Takuya Kimura). On 24 December 1970, he is also with Bai. The film then returns to 24 December 1969, when Chow returns to Singapore. That move, and the film returning to 1969 from 1970, is an alternative to another move forward to a fantasy 2046. Memory comes not from the past (from the 1960s) but from the future of that past (1970). 1970 contains inconclusive memories of the 1960s: Lulu, in 1966, cannot recall if she saw Chow in Singapore in 1964. 1970 generates memories of Christmas 1969; this contains within it a remembered narrative of Chow having gone to Singapore in 1963. 2046 is also the number of a hotel bedroom seen in Wong Karwai’s previous film, In the Mood for Love. A hotel suggests an anomic life, which is of a piece with the way this film represents Hong Kong anarchitecturally, as no space (the film has virtually no outside shots at all), and 2046 is teasing, because, if you see it, you are outside the hotel door, outside the secret. The hotel door is analogous to the mud smoothed on top of the hole – of a tree, or a rock – into which, it is said in both In the Mood for Love and 2046, you must whisper your secrets, before smoothing the mud back over the hole. It is an image of the film as the outside of a secret. The fantasy place 2046 – where memories are held, an interior space which, it is said, people do not leave, retaining their memories – is the room 2046, which holds its secrets, creating spying. The place of secret memories is a space in time – as maps are records, not so much of places but rather of temporal spatialities. 2046 is the number of a room, which suggests the locked-up secret (which is in the past), and a date yet future. A future date keeps its own secret, but it sends messages back to the present as Chow in the film’s present (1960–1970) sends messages back to his past. Sending messages back seems definitional of the anachronistic. Not returning from 2046 may mean not coming back from the past, or not coming back from the future. Even getting back, in 1966, to the hotel room 2046 is to miss, because the woman in the room (Lulu) is not the woman about whom memory (in In the Mood for Love) collected. Movements backwards and forwards in time run parallel with the women. Each punctuating date has a woman, never the ‘right’ one. Returning to the period 1963 to 1966 means recalling an encounter with Su Li-zhen (Gong Li), but Su has the same name as a woman who was loved before (Maggie Cheung, who appears in colour, in an otherwise black and white sequence, for the briefest of moments).

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Returning to Su means failing to return to the other Su (of, it seems, 1960). The failed relationship with Bai, who in 1967 wishes to get to Singapore with her boyfriend, and who in 1970 will go there, takes on its meaning of failure after the flashback which shows Chow returning to Singapore to find Su and missing her. The failure of the woman (Bai) to hold him after 1967 is revealed in 1970: she stands in for the other substitute woman. All these games with time and numbers are images for the women who are at all times not there and are, in any case, other than the person they are wanted to be: images for disappointments as another form of the anachronistic. Chow’s escape to Singapore, from which he returns, twice, is inadequate because the woman that Su plays is associated with Phnom Penh. Escape to 2046 as a fantasy place is demonstrated as inadequate. Chow’s decision not to move into room 2046 once it has been decorated points to a strategy of unconscious postponement. To the desire stated throughout by the Leslie Cheung character (Ho Po-wing) in Happy Together, that he and his boyfriend should ‘start over’ again, this film replies by indicating what that film knew: that it is not possible, because these people, despite the sex together, never were together.39 Remembering one woman’s name (Su Li-zhen in The Mood for Love) because the next woman in 2046 has also that name, questions, as Freud would indicate, the reality of the first time: did memory construct the first time? It is not clear that each appearance of the earlier Su Li-zhen is of the ‘same’ woman as in the earlier film. Her last appearance, in black and white, in the taxi, not only looks forward, chronologically, to him later on (earlier in the film) in the taxi with Zhang Zi-yi, but back to a moment in Happy Together, when the gay lover, Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) goes off by taxi alone, leaving behind his boyfriend, Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung). The suggestion, of one memory from one film working in another, spoils all single narratives, makes identity and gender relationships anachronistic. It is not possible quite to work out the relation of 2046 with In the Mood for Love either. The earlier film becomes a trick which the subject is led to identify with. An originary split divides the name between two women: a pluralising which, whether it is supposed to be ‘true’ or not, testifies to male anxieties. The same doubling appears when identical hotel rooms are differently numbered, 2046, 2047. The compulsion to repeat in Chow (as with different girlfriends) is not his; it insists within him, rendering him passive, when he thinks he has found two different women of the same name. Serial seduction shows passive repetition.

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The second Su woman in Singapore (Gong Li) seems to embody the power of return. She returns to Chow the money he has lost gambling, while keeping 10 per cent. That recalls the ten dollars Chow gave Bai whenever he made love to her. Each occasion brings out his dependence. Su plays cards with him twice, each time winning by playing the ace. The first time (second time in the film) it is ace to his 8, second time (first in the film) ace to his Jack – he is getting nearer, but of course, if she plays the ace, he loses. Her control shows her possible awareness of being herself and another woman of the same name: she is the woman who will neither accompany him to Hong Kong (the card game early in the film, but coming chronologically later, in 1969) nor tell him anything about herself (the card game late in the film, but chronologically earlier). She holds the secret, as her left hand remains a secret, covered by a black glove. The power-relationships here are strange. Holding the secret of herself, as she holds the secret of the spread-out cards, cards spread out like 52 years, Su seems an affirming woman, yet she is seen traumatised, weeping, at the beginning and at the end with her make-up smudged, and her hand possibly mutilated, which may evoke for comparison the earlier stabbing of Lulu. She evokes a sense that for the woman too there is no knowing which is not traumatised, and which is not as much passive as active. For the man to play cards with the woman who can always play the ace – her success at cards being her reputation – is indicative that he is not so naive. He need only gamble that she will not choose to tell him anything, nor choose to come. The rest can be left up to her. She plays the ace and wins, but loses: she loses him. He pulls out the lesser cards and loses, but wins, in keeping his autonomy, if that is winning. Does she deliberately help him by playing the ace? Does he know it or suspect it? The exchange is anachronistic: which is the ‘real’ order of playing the cards? (In card-playing, A plays first, then B, but A also plays ‘knowing’ what B will play, and B does the same; in this chiastic exchange, gambling on what the other ‘knows’, narrative order is upset: card-playing becomes anachronistic.) In the sequences, for the first time (the question of going to Hong Kong) the camera shot is from behind Su, so that we see the card Chow plays, then the back of the card he plays: we see his reaction, but not the card. His reaction, which confirms something to him, that she will not accompany him, is more important than the narrative, which is held up by the question of not knowing which card she

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plays. Either way it is the same, though not understood till we see the card. Whichever card he plays, she must trump it because that is what she does: she wins at cards. The passivity by which she ensures she wins (but loses each time) may seem to disappoint him, but plays into his masculine fantasy, which appears in the refusal to sleep with Bai. The male character cannot throw away the demand for a selfhurting self-identity, which is involved in the desire for memory as non-anachronistic, linear, like the film’s sense that despite all these loops in time, it is also linear and ongoing – 1963 to 2046: nearly one hundred years of male solitude. Trauma and the future anterior And on your finger in the night I’ll put Another ring, that what in time proceeds May token to the future our past deeds. (All’s Well that Ends Well 4.2.61–3)

So Diana tells Bertram what she will do in the future, so that a future beyond that will show what happened in the then past. And of course she will not do it; Helena will; so the future will reveal that the past was not what we thought it was. If history is recurrent, traumatic, marking the body, as Bertram’s is marked, though in his case with a gift, it is read not as such but teleologically, as though it moved towards greater clarification; as reading a text in pursuit of an ending aims to assure mastery over the text’s meaning. We assume a writer starting from a known endpoint where the self knows, and can see a concatenation of events reaching that point: what Chronicle of a Death Foretold parodies. This approach threatens to make whatever does not fit into narrative chronology anachronistic; it is the opposite of Death Sentence which concludes with looking towards something yet to come: what the ‘I’ calls a thought, ‘and to that thought I say eternally, “Come”, and eternally it is there’ (Death Sentence 186). Perhaps the ‘thought’ is eternal return; certainly it is the event which writing brings on, as the event brings on writing: the tale is a movement towards a point, a point which is not only unknown, obscure, foreign, but such that apart from this movement it does not seem to have any sort of real prior existence, and yet it is so imperious that the tale derives its power of attraction only from this point, so that it cannot even ‘begin’ before reaching it – and yet only

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the tale and the unpredictable movement of the tale create the space where the point becomes real, powerful and alluring.40

The event is of the future, but that future is related to the past, yet not in a way which may be seen in a series of causes and effects. The break is singular, a cut that, like all violence, disarticulates, dismembers. When Jocasta in Oedipus King runs offstage, aware that she has been married to her husband’s murderer, and that he is her son, the messenger says that she ran to her rooms: flinging herself across the bridal-bed, doors slamming behind her – once inside, she wailed for Laius, dead so long, remembering how she bore his child long ago, the life that rose up to destroy him, leaving its mother to mother living creatures with the very son she’d borne. Oh how she wept, mourning the marriage-bed where she let loose that double brood . . .41

The messenger who describes what he saw offstage speaks of what is offstage to him; he cannot know what happened in the room with closed doors, which means that there remains, always, even when the other scene has been opened up, a scene which is other to that, unknowable in an unmediated way. In this construction by the messenger of what took place inside the room, the marriage-bed is reconstituted as the bridal bed, and Jocasta lying on it for the third time is recalling the first time, when she was a bride, and then when she bore a child to Laius. The second time to be recalled is when Oedipus married her, and she conceived children by him. The three occasions, the third of which finds her sobbing on the same bed, contained within the same architectural space, may be seen as a concatenation of events, for this is how the prophecies given to Laius, Jocasta and Oedipus construct them; but prophecies are not the substance of history-writing, which creates a chain of events after what it thinks of as the last in the current series, a chain which justifies the sequence it chose to create. The idea of a concatenation neither does justice to the uncanny way events repeat each other (and Oedipus is just about to burst in on Jocasta again, in another repetition), nor to the point that Jocasta reads the events in reverse. The first occasion, and the second occasion, have become traumatic by the time of the third occasion. Jocasta sees herself in a third situation which had two

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other moments within them separated from each other in time. The first makes the second traumatic, the second makes the first so. The third moment shows Jocasta thinking back to her son’s primal scene, as though this was a subject of her own fantasy, in the same way that she has already said that ‘many a man before you, / in his dreams has shared his mother’s bed’ (p. 215): a statement which, of course, raises the question: how would she know? The second scene (Oedipus with Jocasta) may indicate that the son has had unconscious knowledge of the primal scene, but has not shown the primal scene to be originary, but a matter of repetition, since Oedipus is repeating the experience of his father: he is only as near to the primal scene as anyone can be who is fated to mediated knowledge. The two earlier moments were not then traumatic; they have been made so now by something which has come out of their future. The later event, coming out of the future and constructing the present, reinscribes the earlier in a way unguessable then. It is not a question of the earlier event being explained by the later, which is the teleological view of narrative which works from the end, but, rather, the earlier event has been constituted, so that, as with Marcel at Balbec, perhaps also sitting on the bed – perhaps a uniquely favoured place for trauma and involuntary memory – there is the sense that an event and its meaning do not correlate, nor do they increasingly unfold in importance, leading to a later understanding, but, rather, that trauma is suddenly created in the present by the power of the past, and so created as anachronistic. Discovery of anachrony seems traumatic. The woman thinks back some forty or so years to her first sexual encounter, with Laius, because of the unknown knowledge that has come out of the future, whose anachrony reverses everything that is past. That fear is at work in Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903); that something in the future will suddenly reverse the present. John Marcher can do nothing out of a sense that the future will suddenly spring on him, that there is something he will have ‘to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me’.42 The secret is nothing determinate, but the fear of trauma means that he can never start to live, and a narrative cannot be initiated because it will be threatened by the future. In King Oedipus, the chorus will say: ‘count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last’ (line 1530, p. 251), if, that is, the other knowledge, that of Oedipus at Colonus, will not work: ‘Not to be

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born is best / when all is reckoned in, but once a man has seen the light / the next best thing, by far, is to go back / back where he came from, quickly as he can’ (p. 358). Proust thought of those who had outlived themselves. In this note from Oedipus at Colonus there is another form of the anachronistic: those who die too early, who by doing so, cheat time, in anticipation of the traumatic. Trauma witnesses to what is unrepresentable. That, for Lyotard, solicits a new form of writing, which ‘puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself’, entailing abandonment of older categories of art: the artist and the writer . . . are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have the characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realisation (mise en oeuvre) always begins too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).43

The ‘event’ is what the work brings on, and the work. The future anterior tense, punned on as the ‘post modo’, making ‘modo’ mean ‘just now’, is needed to see what will have happened in the work; but there is no ultimate future; at any point when I can say ‘I will have been’, there is more future, and what I will have been is not complete, not a fixed identity. The future anterior, or future perfect, evokes Lacan: the psychoanalyst evokes in speech the response of the other: in order to be recognised by the other I utter what was only in view of what will be . . . I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.44

For Lacan, ‘the subject becomes at each stage what he was before, and announces himself – he will have been – only in the future perfect tense’ (‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, Écrits 306).45 The future will show what I will have been, on account of what is taking place now, or on account of the ‘first words spoken’ to the child, which stand ‘as a decree, a law, an aphorism, an oracle’ (306), giving an obscure authority to the ‘real other’ – here, the one who names. So the name

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‘Oedipus’ becomes aphoristic. In psychoanalysis, the ‘response of the other’ gives opportunity for breaking the determinism that is implied in the naming of the child as subject, and for a movement away from this determinism as being the ultimate limit. The future perfect suggests the possibility of having gone beyond: to speak the language of ‘I will have been’ (Bertram thinks he can say ‘I will have been in bed with Diana’/Helena) recognises the pull of the past in the future, and the future pulling. But the future anterior suggests a determinism to Roland Barthes, whose Camera Lucida considers the photograph of Lewis Payne, about to be hanged in the United States in 1865 for attempted assassination. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium [that which gives the sense of the picture]. But the punctum [that which pierces, that which is poignant] is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself, she is going to die: I shudder . . . over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.46

The photograph contains, Barthes adds, ‘this imperious sign of my future death’ (97), ‘flat death’ (92). It contains death within it, in freezing the subject within time; it is independent of time in being outside dating; it says that it will remain whether the person does or not, so replacing the person. In Lyotard, the question is how to escape such trauma-confirming determinism. A work ‘can become modern only if it is first postmodern’ (The Postmodern Condition 79): it must begin with this sense of a time which is ungrounded, not the contemporary, the now (‘modern’ meaning ‘now’: the ‘mode’ being the present fashion). The postmodern text constitutes the modern through that which of the past contains the future. What is ‘before’ is puzzling: ‘anterior’ (before) contrasts with ‘posterior’ (‘after’), but post and ante are reversible (what is before me came before me), and putting one event before another has problems: at the end of Paradise Lost, ‘the world was all before them’, the world may be Adam and Eve’s future, but it has already been described and its end prefigured, so it is also a past. ‘Posterior’ means ‘coming after in a series, or order’ (OED),

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but a person’s posterior is behind, while the afterwards, or an afterword, must be in the future, after an event (‘they lived happily ever after’). Hamlet’s God made us ‘with such large discourse / Looking before and after’ (Hamlet 4.4.36–37), but which is Janus’ before, and after, face? Since Janus is the god of openings, what is before and after both become the moment, hence Nietzsche’s celebration of the ‘fairest month of January’ in the opening of the fourth book of The Gay Science, written in January 1882: the book which ends with the ‘moment’ that must return, ‘before’ and ‘after’ being interchangeable. Lyotard discusses Nachträglickeit, delayed reaction to the traumatic event. His example is Auschwitz, that whose enormity is indescribable, and he sees a survivor’s ‘deferred reaction’ to it taking the form of a double shock. The trauma comes as a shock unaccompanied by affect, then, as an affect, but without shock, because this second time nothing has happened; there is only the affect of anxiety. Whatever is now happening, Lyotard says, to produce this affect does not come forth; it comes back from the first blow, from the shock, from the ‘initial’ excess that remained outside the scene, even unconscious, deposited outside representation. This is at least the Freudian (and Proustian) hypothesis.

Lyotard calls this division into two shocks the chronologisation of a time which is not chronological. To narrativise trauma is to make ‘a reappropriation of the improper, achronological affect’. Nachträglichkeit gives a time sequence that is outside a philosophy that centres on consciousness, because in this state ‘without diachrony, where the present is the past and where the past is always presence’, this time is ungraspable by consciousness. It exceeds it. Lyotard gives three senses of the word ‘exceed’, playing on three Latin verbs, excedere, ‘to pass beyond’, excidere, ‘falling outside of, being dispossessed of’, and excidere, ‘to detach, to excise’. Lyotard writes, ‘The soul is exceeded: dispossessed, passed beyond, excised through and by this something’ which is the traumatic event.47 Trauma, through Nachträglichkeit, threatens the future with an untranscendable past. Lyotard’s ‘postmodern work’, its utterance being performative, not representational, has the character of an event. Not representing what has been before, it creates something whose nature will be known in the future. Hence the future anterior: the future that comes

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before, saying ‘I shall have been’, or ‘it will have happened’, or ‘she will have arrived’. Only on the basis of what will have been said will it be possible to write history. The future event impels forward the writing of the past. Everything comes from the future. The event in the past (say the French Revolution) is reinscribed in a textual event changing the nature of that historical event.48 This, and the justification for it, may be expressed more powerfully, through Maurice Blanchot, who calls the ‘disaster’ ‘that which does not have the ultimate for a limit: it bears the ultimate away in the disaster’.49 Trauma is the removal of limits: just as, at Auschwitz, in the ‘final solution’, all forms of the ultimate were removed. Where there is neither ultimate nor limit, all thought of a chronology which moves from the before to the after, and which thinks in terms of cause and effect, disappears. For Blanchot, ‘to write is to know that death has already taken place even though it has not been experienced, and to recognise it in the forgetfulness it leaves’; this death being ‘this uncertain death, always anterior – this vestige of a past that never has been present’ (The Writing of the Disaster 66). But always ‘in instance’. ‘Always anterior’ means that the marker (the instance, the instantiating) of death is always before, always after, disconnecting experience from chronology, making experience – because not reducible to a moment of time – anachronous.

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Last words

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the vanquished, we might add that knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside – what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic [of victor and vanquished]. It is in the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory. What transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality it develops but also all that which did not fit properly into the laws of historical movement. Theory must needs deal with crossgrained, opaque, unassimilated material, which as such admittedly has from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic.1

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno consider the writing which never fits an onwards-moving chronology; that which, contesting ways of writing history, does not even enter the dialectic of victor and vanquished. ‘Waste products’ and ‘blind spots’, the material that Adorno calls anachronistic but not obsolete is a reminder of what Benjamin is fascinated by: ‘everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful’.2 If the anachronistic speaks of the ruin, that creates, in reaction, the logic which represses it as a reminder of death. Hence the ‘institution’, as discussed in Chapter 2, occludes it: institutions framed architecturally as classical or Gothic buildings make architecture the art concealing death. For Sylviane Agacinski: classical thought cannot consider the anachronism because it does not really believe in death (either what dies is nothing, or it becomes

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something else historically, and thus does not die). Rather, the relic is the figure of a return that evades or fools disappearance – without denying it. To survive is a way of going against death here below and not of continuing to be, in this world or in another, or even of dialectically preserving the dead in a new life.3

Perhaps the repressed is always silenced because of its associations with death: death in the system. It can be accessed only through a Foucault-like counter-memory, not a different memory, but one which explicitly contradicts another, saying: ‘You remember it this way, but I remember it differently because I remember what you have forgotten’. ‘Counter-memory opposes both a different construction of the past and a different construction of the present. It strives at keeping present in the world of today an image of yesterday that contradicts it.’4 Counter-memory, for Adorno the province of – and reason for – ‘theory’, says that the present is not how it is described; it reshapes present identity by replacing the memory by which it establishes itself. The relevance of Adorno on the fragment and the ruin, and for the idea that in the work of art, completeness and unity is a lie, comes in the last example I discuss, from Mahler (1860–1911). Mahler inspires anachronistic thoughts: the pianist Alfred Brendel says that Mahler is known to have played one of Schubert’s A minor Sonatas for his friends in Leipzig in 1887, and Brendel follows up this chronological point with another, that ‘the second idea in the last movement of Schubert’s D major Sonata, bars 30–32, strikes us as typically “Mahlerian”’.5 But more speculatively, Adorno’s Mahler, a Musical Physiognomy (1960), a study which has virtually dictated all other responses to Mahler, whether for or against it, argues that Mahler disintegrates musical forms into fragments, and marks their alienation from ‘the world’s course’ which these fragments, unresolved into a unity, plead against.6 The response has been controversial. 7 The cycle, for contralto and tenor and orchestra, Das Lied von der Erde: Eine Symphonie (‘The Song of the Earth: A Symphony’), was performed posthumously (21 November 1911): because of Mahler’s not numbering the Symphony, it has been taken out of chronology, before the Ninth and an unfinished Tenth Symphony. This Symphony sets Chinese texts in German translation, such as those of the T’ang poets Li Po and Wang Wei, and as Adorno suggests, its use of Chinese motifs articulates a Jewish element in Mahler’s music, one alienated foreignness articulating another (151). Its last movement,

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the ‘Abschied’ (farewell), nearly half an hour in performance, is often taken as Mahler’s farewell to life, but Adorno sees it, as with much Mahler, as ‘leave-taking music’, adding that it ‘has sympathised with the social outcasts who vainly stretch out their hands to the collective . . . All are last words’ (166). That the preferred singer is a contralto (through Mahler also licensed a tenor to sing it) may recall Nietzsche’s The Gay Science section 70, where he sees this voice as transcending the difference between the sexes: this may be suggestive for the ambiguous gender-identities in the ‘Abschied’.8 The choice of man or woman to sing the ‘Abschied’, of course, only intensifies this undecidability within gender. The first song, for tenor, ‘Das Trinkleid vom Jammer der Erde’ (‘The Drinking Song of the Misery of the Earth’, a title which implies tragedy and the outcast, postpones drinking: ‘erst sing’ ich euch ein Lied’ – drink not yet, first I sing you a song: one lied within another. The reason for delay is unveiled in the last stanza. Each section ends with these words, ‘Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod’ – dark is life, and so is death – set to a downwards movement. Sorrow is veiled by laughter, a point repeated in the impersonality of the last part of the ‘Abschied’ – ‘Er sprach, seine Stimme war umflort’ (He spoke, his voice was veiled). In ‘Das Trinklied: Das Lied von Kummer soll auflachend in die Seele euch klingen [the song of sorrow shall resound in gusts of laughter through your soul.]

There will be no ‘authentic’ feeling, but alienation; what is loved is spoken of in an increasingly alienated manner, so the last stanzas, after a middle section for orchestra, continue directing vision downwards, to a mad spectral figure seen in the moonlight on the graves. It is an ape, whose howling and yelling parodies dignified forms. It figures the singer, and his art, and perhaps his ambiguous state with regard to the earth. Das Firmament blaut ewig, und die Erde Wird lange fest steh’n und aufblüh’n im Lenz. Du, aber, Mensch, wie lang lebst denn du? Nicht hundert Jahre darfst du dich ergötzen An all dem morschen Tande dieser Erde! Seht dort hinab! Im Mondschein auf den Gräbern Hockt ene wild-gespenstische Gestalt!

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Ein Aff’ist’s! Hört ihr, wie sein Heulen Hinausgellt in den süssen Duft des Lebens!

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[The firmament is blue eternally, and the earth Will long stand fast and bloom in spring. But you, Man, how long then do you live? Not a hundred years can you delight In all the rotten trash of the earth! Look down there! In the moonlight, on the graves A wild ghostly figure is crouching! It’s an ape! Hear how his howling Screams out on the sweet fragrance of life.]

Drinking must be postponed, preceded by this knowledge, which reinvests the character of drinking with mourning. The contralto then sings ‘Die Eisname im Herbst’ (‘The Lonely One in Autumn’), which contains within it a temptation towards a different oblivion from that which drink provides: ‘Mein Herze ist müde’ – my heart is tired. It refers twice to autumn, while its desire for the ‘Sonne der Liebe’ (the sun of love) implies spring. In contrast, are the two middle songs, whose titles, ‘Von der Jugend’ (‘Of Youth’) and ‘Von der Schönheit’ (‘Of Beauty’) give spring memories. In the first, a short scherzo sung by the tenor, youth is defined spatially: by a pavilion in a little pond reached by an arched bridge where people sit drinking and chatting, everything being reflected in the water, and so enclosed, complete, in a way which is pulled apart by each of the following songs; first by the eroticism, lacking here, which is evoked by the contralto singing of female desire (‘Sehnsucht’) felt on the river-bank, excited by the march-music of those youths on horses who appear disruptively. Her song, like ‘Von der Jugend’, is in the present tense, but its postlude turns back, as if, Adorno says, it ‘rediscovers time as irrecoverable’, for which Adorno compares Mahler with Proust (145–146). ‘Of Beauty’ speaks of a past from which the subject is shut off. The fifth song, ‘Der Trunkene im Frühling’ (‘The Drunk in Springtime’), is for the tenor, and is personal: the drunkard speaks for himself, but hears, when he awakes, the bird singing (a song of the earth). It appears in the orchestra’s ‘song’, before the tenor can sing the bird’s words: the spring is here: ‘Der Lenz, der Lenz is da’. The drunkard sings too, but, the calendar of facts being different from the calendar of feelings, he falls asleep: what have I to do with spring (der Frühling)? He is not ready for the spring, which, though

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he desires, he repudiates. The first song postponed drinking, now the drunkard drinks as if for oblivion, and the resonant A major chord with which the song finishes may be ironic, not affirming. The first eighteen bars of ‘Der Abschied’ are a funeral-like orchestral introduction. The singer’s words are separated by an interlude, a funeral march (bars 288–374); before, it is ‘here’; after, it is ‘there’. The contralto begins with a recitative, with oboe accompaniment, which after three lines passes into describing the evening, including words that Mahler added, making this a song of the earth: Die Erde atmet voll von Ruh’ und Schlaf, All Sehnsucht will nun träumen [The earth breathes full of rest and sleep; All longing will now dream]

The earth blossoms forth at the song’s end. ‘Sehnsucht’ follows from the fourth poem; the following line, ‘die müden Menschen gehn heimwärts’ (the tired people go homewards) recollects the second song’s ‘Meine Herz ist müde’. Bar 158 returns to another three-line recitative which leads into another section, where the music which will be heard in the second part is anticipated. It culminates in another line of poetry supplemented by Mahler: Es wehet kühl im Schatten meiner Fichten, Iche stehe hier und harre meines Freundes; Ich harre sein zum letzten Lebewohl Ich sehne mich, o Freund, an deiner Seite Die Schönheit dieses Abends zu geniessen. Wo bleibst du? Du lässt mich lang allein! Ich wandle auf und nieder mit meiner Laute Auf Wegen, die vom weichem Grase schwellen. O Schönheit, O ewigen Liebens, Lebens trunk’ne Welt! [I stand here and wait for my friend. I wait for him to take a last farewell. I long, O my friend, to be by your side, To enjoy the beauty of this evening. Where are you? You leave me long alone! I wander to and fro with my lute On pathways which billow with soft grass. O beauty! O eternal-love-and-life-intoxicated world!]

There is the sense of an appointment for which the other is late, and eroticism felt within the last line, as if the world, as other, is

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drunk with love and with life, always in excess, Dionysian, exceeding the drunkenness of the characters in the first and fifth songs. The voice participates in this, experiences it as passive. The affirmation of this passivity which comes in this making its own farewell to the earth, includes the feeling that the soul may be anachronous in relation to it, as with Hölderlin’s intuition that ‘we have come too late’. The ‘I’ is here, waiting for that which will give validation, before a farewell.9 This is Blanchot’s ‘empty time when what he has to live is the double absence of the gods, who are no longer and are not yet’. Hence the pause – the ‘Abschied’ is full of pauses and postponements – and the hesitations which segue into a sensuous funeral march, the period of ‘now’. Only after this the second part follows: the voice returning, after the music of death when it fell silent, waiting passively: the return of the Friend cannot be predicted, but he must return, else he could take no last farewell. When the voice returns after the funeral march, it is in a different time which nonetheless is not separated from the other time, since it is the same music, a continuation of what has been heard already. Nonetheless, it begins in a past tense recitative, as though the experience was over, with only expectation and then the narrative of going; no present tense for the meeting. Er stieg vom Pferd und reichte ihm den Trunk des Abschieds dar. Er fragte ihn, wohin er führe Und auch warum es müsste sein. Er sprach, seine Stimme war umflort: Du, mein Freund, Mir war auf dieser Welt das Glück nicht hold! Wohin ich geh? Ich geh’, ich wand’re in die Berge. Iche suche Ruhe für mein einsam Herz! Ich wandle nach der Heimat, meiner Stätte! Ich werde niemals in die Ferne schweifen. Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde! Die liebe Erde allüberall Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen, Ewig . . . ewig . . . [He alighted from his horse, and handed him the drink of farewell. He asked him where he was going, And also why it had to be. He spoke, his voice was veiled:

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Ah, my friend, Fortune was not kind to me in this world! Where am I going? I am going to wander in the mountains, I seek rest for my lonely heart! I am journeying to the homeland, to my resting place; I shall never again go seeking the far distance. My heart is still and awaits its hour. The dear earth everywhere Blossoms in spring and grows green again! Everywhere and forever the distance shines bright and blue! Forever . . . forever. . .]

The narrative is now in the third person, and echoes other erotic moments of failed waitings, disappointments; making the erotic inherently anachronistic, running against time, since there is no punctual meeting within. Is the Friend death? Possibly, but he is not on a white horse (so Hefling), because that is too determinate, and the waiting for the Friend, however disappointed, is potentially erotic, however the two people involved are gendered; and though the funeral march implies death, its anachronism puts death before and recurrent within life; the last part of the poem being posthumous experience. The past tense means that commitment to future wandering by the ‘I’ who speaks, echoing the waiting-with-lute of the singer in the first half, is presented as in the past. The ‘Abschied’ begins with a present tense waiting; the second narrates a past moment, like a memory within the event of waiting. The second part narrates from beyond the time of the announcing of the intention to wander; if this is an image of dying, the second part seems to come from beyond the tomb. The ‘he’ sings of a desire to seek rest for his lonely heart, and in doing so, echoes the cycle’s second song. Who are these ‘he’s? Perhaps the absent friend arrives on horseback, and offers the drink of farewell, as a ritual, and is then, from ‘Er sprach’, addressed by the waiting friend who is parting. So the ‘I’ of the seventh line reverts to the ‘I’ of the song’s first half. Or, the waiting friend is on horseback, and offers the friend the drink of farewell: in either case, there is a pattern: waiting is for coming to go, in a chiastic structure which suggests that one identity becomes the other, making life a continual changing of identities. The appointment is a disappointment, because the one who says ‘mein Freund’ has already been disappointed, but his heart still awaits its hour – death, fulfilment – postponed beyond the cycle. The drink contrasts

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with the drinking of the first and fifth songs; drinking now lets the other go. In contrast to words about wandering, the last four lines return to the present, their sentiment recalling the beginning of the last strophe of the first song; the word ‘blauen’ is noticeable. It is as if it is impossible to leave the earth which has been so evocatively created at the end of the first half. Perhaps the ‘he’ who in the past tense sings how he will depart, at the end sings of a present offering a future, as spring returns, as a future becoming present. But he may be chronologically excluded from this, having no place within its joy, which leaves the work open, not the expression of union, the reverse of the cycle’s third song. The nine repetitions of ‘Ewig’, and the fading to nothing at the end, relinquish being, as far as any ‘I’ is concerned. The spring’s return was desired in the second song, as a fulfilment missed in the fifth. In ‘Das Trinklied’ the speaker recoiled from the ending of identity in death, hence his horror at the ape crouched over the graves, as if this was a parody of himself, and of being human. In the fifth poem, the persona is not sufficient for the thought of the spring’s potency. At the end of the ‘Abschied’, the voice comes from a future where there is no identity. That may imply renewal. So I have quoted Zarathustra saying that ‘you friends will love the earth all the more for my sake; and I want to become earth again, so that I find rest in her who bore me. . . . I linger a bit longer on earth: forgive my malingering’. And in ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, he says that to ‘remain faithful to the earth’ means ‘not to believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!’10 The earth is the Other, not a fantasised imaginary ideal Other: Wallace Stevens says that ‘the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, and the great poem of the earth remains to be written’.11 And so it does always, but also, Mahler has composed it. In the earth’s return is the return of the Other, and this the ‘Abschied’ celebrates, but knowing it comes out-of-time.12 Saying that Fortune was not kind in this world cannot be simplified nor sentimentalised; this is a song of an exile, whose experience and ‘farewell’ is part of that fragmented experience that Mahler gives; while the projection of wandering implies the absence of homeland. Perhaps the earth too has been exiled: the thought comes back now, in the moment when its devastation is becoming so apparent, though denied. The hope is the earth must come back in a time for which there is no time. If the song is the song of an exile, Mahler

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writing this in 1908 prepared unconsciously for that horrifying violence and trauma which overtook European Jews who found that henceforth, in the death-camps, they had, on earth, no place. Before such trauma, Mahler finds time and space for such music, which is not post-Auschwitz, but, written before, may be understood more, later, following that caesura. Adorno said that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz was impossible: and the atrocities have not at all abated, Gaza in 2009 being only a latest instance; but this lyric music written before Auschwitz breaks with Adorno’s chronology, in finding a place after it. Hearing it is as if it was out-of-time, written for a time which is not yet, but whose possibility this music projects, as meaningful beyond the event it has sensed, and, as Blanchot says of the récit, and as has already been quoted, a movement ‘towards a point, from which it derives its attraction’, and ‘creating the space where the point becomes real, powerful and alluring’.

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Introduction 1 Dickens, Bleak House chapter 12 ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), 173. See Susan Shatto, The Companion to Bleak House (London: Unwin Hyman 1988), 123. 2 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984). 3 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman ed. David Skilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1978) 1.5.83. 4 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure ed. Dennis Taylor (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1998), 6.2. 336–337. 5 For anachrony and madness see Silke-Maria Weineck, The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin and Nietzsche (Albany: SUNY 2002), 121. 6 Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments trans. Michael Hamburger, 3rd bilingual edition (London: Anvil Press Poetry 1994) 268–271. The dedicatee, and addressee (see penultimate line), was Wilhelm Heinse (1746–1803), Hellenist and mentor to Hölderlin. 7 Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems trans. David Constantine (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books 1996), 39. 8 ‘Madness par excellence’ in Michael Holland (ed.), The Blanchot Reader (Oxford: Blackwell 1995), 123. 9 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape 1970), 263. 10 Quoted Peter C. Lutze, Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1998), 28. 11 Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare and Ancient Manners, with Dissertations on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare, on the Collection of Popular Tales Entitled Gesta Romanorum and on the English Morris Dance (London: Thomas Tegg 1839), 494. 12 New Arden ed. David Daniell (London: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 209.

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13 James Joyce, Ulysses ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London: Bodley Head 1986), 174, 175. 14 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936, London: Vintage 1995), 220–221. 15 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, 4.314. All quotations from Freud are taken from the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press 1966–1974). 16 Peter Burke, ‘The Renaissance Sense of Anachronism’, Die Renaissance als erste Aufklärung III ed. Enno Rolph (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag 1998), 17–35. Also, Peter Burke, ‘The Sense of Historical Perspective in Renaissance Italy’, Journal of World History 11 (1968), 615–632; ‘The Renaissance Sense of the Past Revisited’, Culture and History 13 (1994), 42–56; these develop work in The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold 1969), see especially 138–141. 17 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press 1982), 19. 18 The historian Gabrielle Spiegel quotes Henri Lefebvre on medieval chroniclers: ‘The inferiority of [their] critique appeared in the absence of all idea of historical development. For them, the past was half-fiction, conventional fixed once for all, or, on the other hand, sometimes more frequently, something the same as the present. Never, perhaps, since primitive times, was anachronism cultivated to the same degree.’ Henri Lefebvre, La naissance de l’historiographie moderne (Paris: Flammarion, 1941), 44, quoted Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990), 141. 19 Quoted Edgar Wind, ‘The Revolution of History Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2 (1938–1939), 116–127 (p. 116). See the catalogue, Benjamin West: American Painter at the English Court (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art 1989), 52–54. 20 Charles Mitchell, ‘Benjamin West’s “Death of Nelson” in Essays in the History of Art: Presented to Rudolph Wittkower (London: Phaidon 1967). 21 Raymond J. Cormier, ‘The Problem of Anachronism: Recent Scholarship on the French Medieval Romances of Antiquity’, Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), 145–157, quotation 157. 22 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-century France (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993), 111–112. 23 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote trans. John Rutherford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 27. 24 José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986), 30–31, quotation 210.

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25 He rereads ‘the conflicts of the modern world in terms of the categorical oppositions between the noble and the base . . . he remembers the oncehistorical possibility of existence in a world of unambiguous values in the form of romances of chivalry’. Hence the novel form shows, according to Cascardi, a ‘coming to self-consciousness of the modern subject as precipitated by the loss of faith in the existence of a natural context of thought and desire’ – Anthony Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), 102. 26 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions trans. Andrew Hurley (Hamondsworth: Penguin 1998), 90–91. 27 Quoted Daniel Balderston, Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges (Durtham, NC: Duke University Press 1993), 21. 28 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor trans. Duncan Large (London: Athlone Press 1993), 115–116. 29 Trans. Nicholas Royle in Derek Attridge (ed.), Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature (London: Routledge 1992), 416. 30 On the process whereby writing becomes part of the postal system, see Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999). OED gives a quotation of 1617: ‘In England . . . Post-horses are established at every ten miles or thereabouts, which they ride a false gallop after some ten miles an hower.’ 31 John J. Steinbaum, ‘Adorno’s Mahler and the Timbral Outsider’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131 (2006), 3–82, 62, citing Richard Leppert. 32 Franz Kafka, The Trial trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1970), 169, 178. 33 See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press 1983), 67–81. 34 David Farrell Krell, Postponements: Woman, Sensuality and Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1986), 54. See also his Lunar Voices: Of Tragedy, Poetry, Fiction, and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995), this time emphasising that neither Hölderlin nor Nietzsche could write the drama of Empedocles which would bring together in an affirmative way time (for Krell, following Françoise Dastur, the very subject of tragedy, ‘which grants no final repose but continues its infinite process relentlessly in ever-new dissolutions and reconfigurations’ (quoted from Dastur’s Hölderlin: Tragédie et modernité, La Versanne: Encre marine 1992, p. 61)), downgoing and recurrence. 35 ‘Fortuitous’ comes from Latin, fors, chance. See Derrida’s ‘Fors’ in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word:

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A Cryptonymy trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986). See my ‘Fors Clavigera: Outside Chances, Posthumous Letters’, English 57 (2008), 213–232. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press 1893), 26. Derrida critiques the history-writing of Philippe Ariés on death, (see Derrida, Aporias trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1993), 48–49), for being able to think about anachronisms in history: the point about writing about death is that it is always anachronistic, the contre-temps; to write the history of death would be to write the history of anachronisms. Obviously this study attempts no such thing. Paul Virilio, Open Sky trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso 1997), 137. I discuss ‘coming to pass’ in ‘Late Style: Approaching Madness in Praeterita’, English 58 (2009), 1–20. Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987), 495. Alan Sheridan’s translation of Écrits: A Selection renders the title of Lacan’s lecture ‘agency’ but Bruce Fink’s translation (New York: W.W. Norton 2002), 138, renders it ‘instance’; his note saying that while ‘agency’ translates Freud’s Instanz, used for the id, ego and superego, it also implies a power or authority, and an insistent, urgent force, activity or intervention (314). Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence trans. Lydia Davis in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press 1978), 186. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, with Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998), 10–11. Chapter 1

1 For Savonarola’s portrait see Ronald M. Steinberg, Fra Girolamo Savonarola: Florentine Art and Renaissance Historiography (Athens: Ohio University Press 1977), 107. 2 Proust is quoted first through the edition of In Search of Lost Time trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright (1993); included there is the Terence Kilmartin A Guide to Proust (London: Hogarth, 1983) whose page-numbers have been adapted from Kilmartin’s 1981 revised translation of Enright’s six volumes. I quote Enright from the New York: Modern Library edition (1999), as E plus volume and page number. However, I generally use the new translation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), ed. Christopher Prendergast, referred to as P plus volume and page number: The Way by Swann’s trans. Lydia

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Notes Davis, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower trans. James Grieve, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne, Sodom and Gomorrah trans. John Sturrock, The Prisoner trans. Carol Clark and The Fugitive trans. Peter Collier (in one volume), Finding Time Again trans. Ian Patterson. Both translations appear where it is worth noting differences. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard 1988), quoted as T followed by volume and page number. For a critique of Tadié, and on translations, see Roger Shattuck, Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (New York: W.W. Norton 2000), 177–192. On these frescos, see Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven: Yale University Press 1996), 81–119, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat (ed.), The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi Florence (London: Thames and Hudson 1993). On Fortuny see Mary Lydon, ‘Pli selon pli: Proust and Fortuny’, Romanic Review 81 (1990), 438–453, and Peter Collier, Proust and Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989); for Carpaccio see Vittorio Sgarbi, Carpaccio trans. Jay Hymams (New York: Abbeville Press 1995), 94–99. On Proust and painting, and on Elstir, see Thomas W. Bussom, ‘Marcel Proust and Painting’, Romanic Review 34 (1943), 54–70 and Gabrielle Townsend, Proust’s Imaginary Museum: Reproductions and Reproduction in À la recherche du temps perdu (New York: Peter Lang 2008). Walter Benjanin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations trans. Harry Zohn (London: Cape 1970), 263. Carpaccio was first mentioned in relation to Mme de Guermantes (P.1.178, 1.176), in association with certain pages of Lohengrin and Baudelaire calling the sound of the trumpet ‘delicious’, and again, for his portrayals of San Giorgio dei Schiavoni, which the narrator feels he must see in Venice, in a punctual relationship of painting to place) (P.2.14–15, 1.432–3). In the visit to Venice (P.5.610, 4.225), he thinks of how he was accompanied by a woman who is like the mourning woman in the Carpaccio ‘Martydom of the Pilgrims and the Funeral of St Ursula’ (Sgarbi, 68–71); he says that ‘nothing can ever again remove this red-cheeked, sad-eyed woman, in her black veils, from the softly lit sanctuary of St Mark’s where I am certain to find her, because I have reserved a place there in perpetuity, alongside the mosaics, for her, for my mother’. The woman who watches the funeral procession and who is fixed in position, is analagous to the mother who is fixed in memory. The picture is one of Carpaccio’s ‘long’ paintings, and the narration is in a ‘proleptic’ sequence where two different incidents take place in the same space: the massacre of the pilgrims by the Huns, including Ursula, and her funeral. The same technique obtains with the ‘Meeting

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of the Bethrothed Couple and the Departure of the Pilgrims’: different times and places (England, Brittany) appear in a continuum, the unitary space reflecting, perhaps, theatrical representations. On Proust and Carpaccio see Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 83–93; see too Eric Karpeles, Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time (London: Thames and Hudson 2008). See Duncan Large, Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2001). Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on An Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, SE 12.62. ‘Theory on lesbianism never moves beyond the most basic of laws, never becomes a tool of recognition. That lesbianism eludes the narrator’s maxims, that it escapes typology and borders on bisexuality, aligns it with the apparent breakdown in social types and structures’. Nicola Luckhurst, Science and Structure in Proust’s A La recherche du temps perdu (Oxford: Clarendon 2000), 169, 189. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, An Introduction trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1979), 43. For class as a concept solidified by the 1830s see ‘class’: Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana 1983). Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’age classique (Paris, 1972), 102–3, quoted (and translated) in Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex Between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2002), 12, 13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 43; Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: GMP 1982), 16. Both statements are quoted in Cameron McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 1660–1750 (New York: Columbia University Press 1997), 10–11. For the implications of Foucault’s arguments about the modernity of the term ‘homosexual’ in contrast to earlier sexual typologies see David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2002), 26–44. For sexuality in Proust see Elisabeth Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999). See the discussion by J.E. Rivers, Proust and the Art of Love: The Aesthetics of Sexuality in the Life, Times, and Art of Marcel Proust (New York: Columbia University Press 1980), 144–153. See John C.G. Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany, trans. Terence F. Cole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), 28–69. On Dreyfus see Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Sidgwick and Jackson 1987);

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Notes for the crisis of masculinity see Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2004). The allusion to ‘the invention of tradition’ is to the book edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983); for the contemporary interest in ‘heritage’ in France as a way of avoiding national memories (such as the Occupation) see Nancy Wood, ‘Memorial Militancy in France: “Working-through” or the Politics of Anachronism’, Patterns of Prejudice 29 (1995), 89–103. On the anti-semitism in the Dreyfus case displacing attitudes to homosexuality see Maria Paganini, Reading Proust: In Search of the Wolf-Fish trans. Caren Litherland and Kathyrn Milun (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1994), 134; this reading, based on slidings between words in Proust, and word-associations, also argues for a homosexual tendency in Swann, partly based on the meaning of the cattleyas (orchids: testicles) (P.1.224, 235, T.1.218,228). Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1980), 37, 40, 83, 84. Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press 1970), 42. For this text see Ulrich Pothast, The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of It (New York: Peter Lang 2008), 95–139. Beckett, Proust, 36–7, lists the moments of involuntary memory, including the all-important recall of Venice in the Guermantes courtyard, 6.174–175, T.4.445. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Story-teller’, Illuminations, 90. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howard (London: Fontana 1982), 25–26, and see 73. Barthes’s work obviously belongs to the same interests as Proust’s. See James H. Reid, Proust, Beckett, and Narration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), 26–27, using Beckett, Proust, 17, 25–30, 43–46, 55. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000), 57–58. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, Or Beyond Essence trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1981), 15. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 41 (quoting the passage from Otherwise than Being). Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ in Surveys from Exile trans. Ben Fowkes, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973), 146. Jacques Derrida, Glas trans. John P. Leavey Jr and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1981), 134 (column b).

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29 Wordsworth, Poetical Works ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press 193), 204. 30 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5.525.

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Chapter 2 1 See Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1978), 229–237. He reproduces the Tityos, 235, the Ganymede, 237. 2 On Ganymede in Shakespeare see Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996) specifically 53–82. 3 See James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press 1986), 17–62. 4 On the way that Michelangelo’s poetry masculinises Vittoria Colonna see James M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Heaven: Yale University Press 1991), 50–52. 5 Michelangelo, Rime ed. Matteo Residori (Milan: Mondadori 1998). Translation mine. On Michelangelo’s poetry see Christopher Ryan, The Poetry of Michelangelo (London: Athlone Press 1998), specifically 94–128. 6 Compare the line in Dante, ‘Cred’io ch’ei credette ch’io credesse’ – I believe that he believed that I believed: from Inferno 13.25), which as a circumlocution is followed by the evasiveness shown by the main speaker Pier delle Vigna, who is talking to Dante, and who both tells and does not tell his story – about his killing himself – ‘straight’. 7 For the Sonnets see editions by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press 1978), John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1986), G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), Katherine Duncan-Jones (Arden, London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press 1997), Colin Burrow (Oxford 2002). I follow the Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). On the sonnet form see Michael R.G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge 1992). 8 Stanley Wells, ‘The Originality of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ in Looking for Sex in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), 38–65; Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex Between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2002), 84–87. Hammond guesses that the sonnets of the 1590s were written to the Earl of Southampton (dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece) and that ‘Shakespeare may have failed to register a change in the climate by 1609’ (p. 86). See also Paul Hammond, Love Between Men in English Literature (New York: St Martin’s Press 1996), 76–97, on the Sonnets; Hammond’s

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Notes bibliography (pp. 235–247) is useful. Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985) treats the Sonnets as recording a consummated homosexual love affair; Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991), 26, sees his book, which contains a chapter on the Sonnets, as a complement to his. J.W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London: Methuen 1956), 255–256. See G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), 1.13: ‘But art, far removed, as we shall see more definitely later, from being the highest form of spirit, acquires its real ratification only in philosophy’, and 1.89: ‘Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realisation to external external sensuous material; instead it launches out exclusively in the inner space and inner time of ideas and feelings. Yet, precisely at this highest stage, art now transcends itself, in that it forsakes the element of a reconciled embodiment of the spirit in sensuous form and passes over from the poetry of the imagination to the prose of thought.’ Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso 1973), 176. Katherine Duncan-Jones’s edition, 358, glosses line 3 by a reminder that Henry VIII declared both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate in 1536. See also Marc Shell, The End of Kinship: ‘Measure for Measure,’ Incest and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1988), 110–114 for both Elizabeth (on account of her father’s incestuous relations) and James as bastards. J.B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Hutchinson 1967), 113, notes that ‘extern’ (No. 125) appears elsewhere in Shakespeare only in Othello 1.1.63, and notes ‘render’ (125) as elsewhere only in Timon of Athens and Cymbeline. This perhaps helps date some of the Sonnets as Jacobean. They appeared in 1609 in Quarto form; two (Nos 138 and 144) had appeared before in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). In 1598, the year of the publication of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Francis Meres referred to Shakespeare’s ‘sugred Sonnets among his private friends’. Leishman accepts the Sonnets’ dedication as to William Herbert (1586–), eldest son of the second Earl of Pembroke by his third wife, Mary Sidney, sister of Philip Sidney, and one of the two dedicatees of the Folio. Leishman sees in 124 references to Jesuit conspiracies against James, and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. See Rachel Doggett, Susan Jaskot and Robert Rand (eds), Time: The Greatest Innovator: Timekeeping and Time Consciousness in Early Modern Europe (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library 1986), with essays by

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Silvio A. Bedini and Ricardo Quinones. The title comes from Francis Bacon, who calls Time the great innovator in his essay ‘Of Innovations’. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Father Time’ in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1939), 69–93. Fritz Breithaupt, ‘Anonymous Forces of History: The Case of Infanticide in the Sturm und Drang’, New German Critique 79 (2000), 157–176, quotations 157, 158. Walter Benjamin, ‘Notes on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 263–264. For time in these plays, and a bibliography, see Tom McAlindon, Shakespeare’s Tudor History: A Study of Henry IV Parts I and 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate 2001), 53–92. Q1 reads ‘thoughts, the slaves of life’, the other Quartos and the Folio read ‘thought’s the slave of life’); see the Arden edition, ed. A.R. Humphreys (London: Methuen 1960). On rumour as that which governments feared, for its possibilities of carrying sedition and for the power of rumour in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries see for instance Adam Fox, ‘News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, The Historical Journal 40 (1997), 597–620. See B.G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1968), 13–45, 259–262. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1990), 86–145. Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 191–192. Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989), 79–87. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor 1956), 84. Plato, The Symposium, 214e–221c, trans. Christopher Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 53–62. Plato, Phaedo, 117d5–118, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), 72. Ed. J.H. Walter (Arden, London: Methuen 1954), 47. Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare: Vol 1: Henry VI to Twelfth Night (London: Hollis and Carter, 1968), 246. ‘Play performances began in the early afternoon: is this a metatheatrical hint, that Falstaff is merely a stage creation, born as he appears there?’ Giorgio Melchiori (ed.) The Second Part of King Henry IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 76.

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31 P. Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (London: Grant Richards, 1927), 215–227, and 153–158, quotation 227. 32 Fear of waste runs through the first group of sonnets urging the young man to marry and procreate. He, as a churl, ‘mak’st waste in niggarding’ (1.12): he is prodigal by being miserly, his hoarding of himself, which is an implicit theme throughout the sonnets, is an extravagance. In 9, ‘beauty’s waste’ – which means that the non-use of beauty is wasting it, as well as the idea that the condition of beauty’s existence is that it wastes – ‘hath in the world an end’ (9.11). In 12, ‘thou among the wastes of time must go’ (12.10), where ‘wastes’ means ruins; the young man will become a monument to how Time wastes things: he will be a waste of time. In 15, ‘wasteful Time debateth with Decay’ (15.11); it and decay strive, which will be more efficient. (Other uses: ‘wasteful war shall statues overturn’ (55.5) – the statues built up to memorialize a previous war will be destroyed by war, itself a waste of time. Sonnet 77, the dial will show ‘how thy precious minutes waste’, with the sense of ‘squandered’, which makes for the demand, ‘Look what thy memory cannot contain, / Commit to these waste blanks’ (77.2, 9–10): papers which yet vacant, are but waste, and pages which can only be waste until they contain something of him. What is blank is what is waste. 129: ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’). 33 William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare ed. David B. Pirie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986), 67, and Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral (1935, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1965), 41–44 and 87–91, which compares Falstaff and the speaker of the Sonnets, and Hal as the young man. Links between the Sonnets and 2 Henry IV are made by L.C. Knights, Some Shakespearian Themes and An Approach to Hamlet (1959, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1966) pp. 40–56. For a view tolerating no ambiguities in the Falstaff/Hal relationship see Heather Findlay, ‘Renaissance Pederasty and Pedagogy: The case of Shakespeare’s Falstaff’, Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (1989), 229–238. 34 Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1992), 145–175. The essay is developed in ‘Hal’s Desire: Shakespeare’s Idaho’ in Nigel Wood (ed.), Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press 1995), 35–64. Chapter 3 1 Quotations from King Lear from the Arden edition ed. R.A. Foakes (Walton on Thames: Nelson 1997). Other editions cited: the older Arden ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen 1985), the New Cambridge Folio,

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and Quarto, both edited by Jay Halio, and the older edition of J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992 and 1994 and 1960), the Oxford Quarto ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), G.K. Hunter for Penguin (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972), the New Variorum ed. Horace Howard Furness (1880; New York: Dover 1963); the parallel text edition of the Quarto and Folio ed. René Weiss (London: Longman 1993). The present chapter assumes the overriding authority of neither Quarto (1608) nor Folio by itself. For recent criticism see Kiernan Ryan, ‘King Lear: A Retrospect, 1980–2000’, Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002), 1–11. Shakespeare, King Lear 3.2.91–95 ed. Kenneth Muir, Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1985), 105. Muir notes, and Jay l. Halio, in his edition of The Tragedy of King Lear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), p. 179, follows, the suggestion of Warburton that the lines ‘Then shall the realm of Albion / Come to great confusion’ should be placed after the first four lines. Warburton considered the first four lines a satire of then contemporary England, and the rest a description of Utopia. But the danger in making this change is that the Fool’s prophecy then becomes highly organised, unambiguous. Both editors, and R.A. Foakes in his Arden edition of 1997, note the parody of pseudoChaucerian verse, first appearing in Thynne’s edition of Chaucer (1532) and quoted by Puttenham. John Kerrigan, ‘Revision, Adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear’ in Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, The Division of the Kingdom: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983), 223. Joseph Wittreich, Image of That Horror: History, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in King Lear (San Marino: The Huntington Library 1984), quotes, as part of a chapter-long discussion of the prophecy, the sermon of Lancelot Andrewes, on Christmas Day 1606, saying that prophecy uses the past to address the future, ‘“speaking of things to come as if they were already past”’ (57): prophecy’s mode is the anachronistic. Thomas Clayton, “‘Is this the promis’d end”? Revision in the Role of the King’ in Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (eds), The Division of the Kingdom: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983), 125. See Judy Kronenfeld, King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1998), 242–243. Harry Berger, Jr, Making Trifles out of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997), 57. For Edgar see Michael E. Mooney, “‘Edgar I Nothing Am”: “Figurenposition” in King Lear’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), 153–166.

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8 For the primal scene, the fantasy of the child witnessing his conception, which of course involves incestuous fantasies, see Freud’s analysis of the Wolfman (1918), SE 17, chapter 4. 9 The differences in the Quarto should be noted: this reads: ‘Thou hast spoken truth; / The wheel is come full circled, I am here.’ Wells paraphrases as ‘the wheel is become completely rounded.’ Weiss compares Romeo and Juliet 2.2.110: ‘the moon in her circled orb’; perhaps to the image of Fortune’s wheel may be added the moon, as that feminine force which, now full, destroys Edmund. 10 On this (though I dissent from the drift of the argument which drives the play – as opposed to individual characters – towards misogyny) see Peter L. Rudnytsky, ‘“The Darke and Vicious Place”: The Dread of the Vagina in King Lear’, Modern Philology 96 (1999), 291–311. On the power of the feminine see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, 1992), 103–129. 11 The Quarto in Halio and Wells reads differently: Regan interrupts Cornwall’s ‘You know not why we come to visit you’ with ‘This out-ofseason-threat’ning dark-eyed night’, amending ‘thus’ to ‘this’. 12 Gloucester’s torturing makes him see other things. Michael Neill compares this with The Revenger’s Tragedy, which R.V. Holdsworth argues is, like A Yorkshire Tragedy, influenced by King Lear (both by Middleton, and belonging to the end of 1605, or the early part of 1606). See R.V. Holdsworth (ed.), Three Jacobean Tragedies: A Casebook (London: Macmillan 1990) for these plays and King Lear. Neill writes in ‘“In Everything Illegitimate”: Imagining the Bastards in English Renaissance Drama’, in Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press 2000). 140: ‘Adultery begets its proper punishment – as Gloucester (like the dying duke in The Revenger’s Tragedy, his eyes forced open to witness himself made cuckold by his own bastard [Spurio]), painfully discovers’ – see The Revenger’s Tragedy 3.5.160–216 (in Thomas Middleton, Five Plays ed. Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1988), 124–126]. A duke being forced to watch his being cuckolded by his bastard son with his second duchess is as near to being bastardised as is possible. See also Michael Neill, ‘Bastardy, Countefeiting, and Misogyny in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 36 (1996), 397–416, for further work on bastardy and on Spurio, who seems a successor to Edmund; also Alison Findlay, Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1994). 13 Paul A. Jorgensen, Lear’s Self-Discovery (Berkeley: University of

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California Press 1967), glosses Regan’s lines to her father ‘I profess / Myself an enemy to all other joys / Which the most precious square of sense possesses’ (1.1.74) as alluding to ‘the most exquisite region of my senses’ so that she expresses a sexual devotion to Lear in her love: as if what is pleasing in her speech is ‘the daughter’s preference of his love for the pleasure a husband could give her’ (128). Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, SE 12.299. Freud, ‘The Future of an Illusion’, SE 21.10. On incest motifs in King Lear see Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare’, PMLA 97 (1982), 325–347, Mark J. Bleichner, ‘King Lear, King Leir, and Incest Wishes’, American Imago 45 (1988), 309–325; Richard A. McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), 171–179, Zenón Luis-Martinez, In Words and Deeds: The Spectacle of Incest in English Renaissance Tragedy (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2002), 98–168. John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1996), 138. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE, 5.398. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1993), 209, express this in Lacanian terms: ‘King Lear . . . is the tragedy of the foreclosure of tragedy: it unfolds in and as the refusal to enter into the Oedipal mythos of recognition and reversal . . . Lear, as Lacan suggests . . . is a “derisory” tragedy in which recognition itself . . . is insistently misrecognised’ (209). For Lacan on King Lear see The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7 trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge 1992), 305. See also Philip Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis and the Gaze (London: Palgrave 2000), 30–56. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993), 106. On avoiding shame see Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 39–124. Robert Bechtold Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (Seattle: University of Washington Press 1963), 48. On the speech in relation to Renaissance perspective see ‘Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation’ in Jonathan Goldberg, Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2003), 132–151. Marvin Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia

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Notes University Press 1958), 66–67, discusses the allegorical significance of Edgar coming on stage – as Edmund’s shadow – to challenge him. John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber 1948), 31–53. Edmund’s status is emphasised in the Quarto, which calls him Bastard until Act 5 scene 1, while in 1.2, the Folio writes ‘Enter Bastard’, calling him Edmund at 1.2.164. In addition to Neill’s survey of bastardy in Renaissance drama, see on bastardy in Shakespeare (e.g. King John, Much Ado About Nothing and Thersites in Troilus and Cressida) Anthony J. Lewis, The Love Story in Shakespearean Comedy (Louisville: University of Kentucky 1992), 73–103. Mark Taylor, Shakespeare’s Darker Purpose: A Question of Incest (New York: AMS Press 1982), compares Perdita (called a bastard) in The Winter’s Tale with Cordelia. Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987), 83–84, ‘My Chances / Mes Chances’, in Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (eds), Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1984), 29. For the use of these letters in the Folio, showing a strengthening of Albany’s character, see Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980), 80–128. Quotations from John Awdleley, The Fraternitye of Vacabondes (1561), and Thomas Dekker, The Belman of London (1608), in Furness, 136. See A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen 1985), 115–119, and William C. Carroll, ‘“The Base Shall Top Th’Legitimate”: The Bedlam Beggar and the Role of Edgar in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 426–441. Other fools of time: Oswald the servant dies with the word ‘untimely’ to describe his death, as Cornwall, slain by his servant, uses it, in the only other occurrence in the play (4.6.250, 3.7.98). The two are brought into strange symmetry. Leslie Thomson, ‘“Pray You Undo This Button”: Implications of “un-in King Lear”’, Shakespeare Survey 45 (1992), 77–98, discusses this, as also the word “unnatural” which appears six times (1.1.219, 1.2.78–79, 2.1.50, 2.4.278, 3.3.1, 7) but fades out midway as if no distinction between natural and unnatural can be further maintained. ‘One born to be the sport of fortune’ (Dover Wilson). Compare Romeo, Romeo and Juliet 3.1.138: ‘O, I am Fortune’s fool’. Edition by G.K. Hunter (Arden Shakespeare, London: Methuen, 1962). I have also used the Penguin (Barbara Everett, 1970), and the Cambridge, ed. Russell Fraser, introduction by Alexander Leggatt (2003). Dating this play is problematic; Susan Snyder’s Oxford edition (1993) (20) quotes Gary Taylor on Oras’s ‘pause-tests’ to put it between Macbeth

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and Antony and Cleopatra, i.e. after Lear; see also MacD.P. Jackson, ‘Spurio and the Date of All’s Well that Ends Well’, Notes and Queries 246 (September 2001), 298–299; on the play I have been influenced by James Smith, Shakespearian and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1974), 69–103, and R.B. Parker, ‘War and Sex in All’s Well that Ends Well’, Shakespeare Survey 37 (1994), 99–113. 31 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, 289 quoted, Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body (New York: Berg, 1998), 128–156. 32 For this see Berger, Making Trifles out of Terrors, 288–292. Chapter 4 1 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (ed.), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985), 207–208. (Cp. SE 1.233–239.). A ‘fuero’ is ‘an ancient Spanish law still in effect in some particular city or province guaranteeing that region’s immemorial privileges’ (215). 2 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge 1992), 39, 58. 3 For Heidegger, ‘the oblivion of Being is oblivion of the distinction between Being and beings’ – two forms of effacement; he further explains the first term: ‘although the two parties to the distinction, what is present and presencing, reveal themselves, they do not do so as distinguished. Rather, even the early trace [Spur] of the distinction is obliterated when presencing appears as something present and finds itself in the position of being the highest being present’. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row 1975), 50–51. Derrida comments on this in ‘Différance’, Margins of Philosophy trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press 1982), 23–24, indicating that what follows from this erasure of the trace, i.e. ‘the event of metaphysics’ (so Heidegger), must still be the trace, when ‘presencing appears as something present’: there is a slippage here which makes Heidegger’s trace exist as obliterated. The trace cannot appear as such. The word Spur suggests Derrida’s Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1979), which plays so much on Nietzsche’s writing as double, not as a discourse of truth, but as ‘what has been left behind, a mark, a signature which is retracted in that very thing from which it is withdrawn’ (39). 4 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge 1978), 203. Derrida finds both these terms in Freud’s Project (1895). Nachträglichkeit associates with the Wolfman analysis in

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Notes discussing deferral (SE 17.37–38, 44, 45, 47, 48, 58, 77, 107, 109), and Verspätung appears in The Interpretation of Dreams (SE 5.603–604): ‘It is true that, so far as we know, no psychical apparatus exists which possesses a primary process only and that such an apparatus is to that extent a theoretical fiction. But this much is a fact: the primary processes are present in the mental apparatus from the first, while it is only during the courser of life that the secondary processes unfold, and come to inhibit and overlay the primary ones; it may even be that their complete domination is not attained until the prime of life. In consequence of the belated appearance of the secondary processes, the core of our being, consisting of unconscious wishful impulses, remains inaccessible to the understanding and inhibition of the preconscious; the part played by the latter is restricted once and for all to directing along the most expedient paths the wishful impulses that arise from the unconscious. These unconscious wishes exercise a compelling force upon all later mental trends, a force which those trends are obliged to fall in with or which they may perhaps endeavour to divert and direct to higher aims. A further result of the belated appearance of the secondary process is that a wide sphere of mnemic material is inaccessible to preconscious cathexes.’ ‘Deferred reaction’ in Lacan is ‘après-coup’. Freud, SE 14.148; J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton 1973), 162–164, quotations 164. Jacques Derrida, ‘Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time’ in Margins of Philosophy, 63. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1973), 63. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 21. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Trace of the Other’ (1963) trans. A. Lingis, in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986), 358. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, Or Beyond Essence trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press 1998), 97. See Alain P. Toumayan, Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem of Difference in Blanchot and Levinas (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press 2004), 41: see also 32 and 188. Freud, discusses the ‘neighbour’, the Nebenmensch, in the Project for a Scientific Psychology (SE 1.331), saying that the recognition of the other, the neighbour, takes two forms, seeing in him both difference and that which can be known: Lacan translates: ‘the complex of the Nebenmensch is separated into two parts, one of which affirms itself through an unchanging apparatus, which remains together as a thing,

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als Ding’. There is something foreign, different, in the neighbour: which, as something lost, unrecognisable, is for Lacan das Ding, and the end of knowledge; it is beyond the pleasure principle, for Lacan; perhaps this is reconcilable with the ‘trace’ in Levinas. See Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 51. The passage on ‘the reminiscence which [fails to] synchronise the phases of a past’ suggests Levinas’s indebtedness to Proust: see ‘The Other in Proust’ (1947) in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell 1989), 160–165. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge 1994), 22. Nietzsche, The Gay Science Book 2 section 98, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books 1974), 151. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1968), 269. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 23. Heidegger is discussing Anaximander as the philosopher of eternal return; it is part of a passage where the Anaximander fragment is looked at: Nietzsche translated it as ‘whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time’ (Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, New York: Regnery Gateway, 1962, 45). Heidegger’s translation moves from an emphasis on justice (dike) and injustice to a sense of what is ‘out of joint’. Heidegger’s sense of Anaximander’s meaning is that the world worlds itself by putting itself out of joint. Here then is a sense of the anachronistic, as the out of joint, as basic to seeing time as the other. See Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking 13–58, quotation 41. Dennis J. Schmidt, ‘What We Didn’t See’ in David C. Jacobs (ed.), The Presocratics After Heidegger (Albany: SUNY Press 1999), 159–160. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 25, 27. For commentary see Ned Lukacher, Time Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1998), 1–33. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: SUNY 1992), 16. See Anne Freire Ashbaugh, Plato’s Theory of Explanation: A Study of the Cosmological Account in the Timaeus (Albany, SUNY Press 1988), 101–136. (For consistency, I use khora, changing from chora where necessary.) The distinction between khora and topos (place) is relevant: ‘spatiality is the limit, the common containment of all physical things taken as a whole; whereas place is the limit, the individual containment of each body taken as a part . . . the confusion between place and spatiality . . . is one of taking the part for the whole’ (133–134).

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22 Plato, Timaeus 52b trans. R.G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1966), 123. 23 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’ trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs of 7, 1 (Autumn 1981), 16. 24 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 133. 25 For the semiotic and the symbolic see Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press 1984), 21–106. Discussing Mallarmé’s prose-poem Igitur, Kristeva speaks of the ‘anachronistic ego’ (226) which must move from logic (its sphere) to madness to active chance, finding ‘madness’ necessary in this: a point which bears on King Lear. She quotes Mallarmé that Igitur is ‘an anachronism, a character, the supreme incarnation of this race’ in denying chance (229); denying chance in a pursuit of absolute consciousness being a feature of that ‘race’ of egos. For the Mallarmé quotation see Oeuvres completes ed. Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard 1998) 1.841; for translation of Igitur see Mary Ann Caws, Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: New Directions 1982), 100. 26 Jacques Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (eds), Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press 1992), 105. See also Mark Taylor’s comments in the same volume, ‘nO nOt nO’, 167–198. That year, 1987, Derrida produced a first version of the essay ‘Khora’, revised in On the Name ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr and Ian Mcleod (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1995). See Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003), 22–36. 27 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 52. See my ‘Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death’, Essays in Criticism 54 (2004), 351–372, for the il y a. 28 Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘/Twisting the Separatrix/’, Assemblage 14 (1991), 30–61, 51. The essay, together with a version of Derrida’s Khora and much else on the collaboration in 1985 for a project in the Parc de la Villette (Paris) is reprinted in Choral Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997). 29 On this see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996). 30 Mark Taylor, ‘nO nOt nO’ in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (eds), Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press 1992), 175.

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31 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 262. 32 Laplanche and Pontalis translate Verleugnung by déni, as a stronger word than dénégation, implying, too, the withholding of goods, and suggesting that the prohibition is illegitimate (120). The other word here is Verwerfung, translated ‘rejection’, Freud, 317, 323 – foreclosure, rejection of something as though it did not exist. 33 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Essential Solitude’ in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary essays ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press), 411. 34 See James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2003), 84–110. 35 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press 1994), 75. 36 In Hölderlin, the caesura in tragedy is ‘the pure word, the counterrhythmic rupture’ which breaks the rhythm at work within tragic representations, and which makes appear ‘the representation itself’. The actor is effaced, the caesura, the moment of the event, brings out something beyond the control of the actor. See Thomas Pfau, ed. and trans., Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 102. 37 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press 1990), 149. 38 ‘Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death’ – George Bataille, Eroticism trans. Mary Dalwood (London: Marion Boyars 1987). The ‘death’ here entails the loss of single-subject identity. 39 See my Wong Kar-wai: Happy Together (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003). 40 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Song of the Sirens’, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 447. 41 Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1984), 236. 42 Henry James, Complete Stories, 1898–1910 (New York: Library of America 1996), 503–504. 43 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984), 81. 44 Jacques Lacan, ‘Function and Field of Speech and Language’, Ecrits: A Selection trans. Alan Sheridan, 86; Bruce Fink’s translation (84) reads ‘given what I am in the process of becoming’. 45 Note Fink’s translation: ‘the subject, at each stage, becomes what he was (to be) [était] before that, and “he will have been” is only announced in

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Notes the future perfect tense’ (294). Malcolm Bowie calls the future perfect the tense which ‘allows us to envisage as already complete what has not yet been fully launched, and places us beyond the goal that we have yet to reach’ (Lacan (London: Fontana 1991), 185). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang 1981), 96. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the Jews trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1990), 15–17. See Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge 1991), 58–62. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1986), 28. Last words

1 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso 1974), 151. 2 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama trans. John Osborne (London: Verso 1977), 166. 3 Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press 2003), 108–109. 4 The point is made by Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1997), 12 and 220. Assmann also discusses ‘counterhistory’ in this context, using the work of Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewsh History (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993), 36–49, and David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1979), 189–205. 5 Alfred Brendel, On Music: Collected Essays (London: Robson Books 2001), 139. Mahler is quoted on Schubert’s ‘freedom below the surface of convention’ (165), which would liberate both composers for anachronism. See also his reference to Dieter Schnebel who finds in the finale of the B flat Sonata ‘strength that peters out – an ominous image of impending death . . . For the time being, cheerful music no longer seems to work – it may not ever again: the movement represents ‘a hidden diminuendo’ with ‘musical symbols which anticipate Mahler in the hammer strokes of his Sixth’ (202). 6 Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992), 7. 7 On Mahler see Peter Franklin, The Life of Mahler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), and his essay on Adorno ‘His fractures are the script of truth: Adorno’s Mahler’, Stephen E. Hefling (ed.),

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Notes

8 9

10 11 12

179

Mahler Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), 271–94. See Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death: Interpretations and Annotations (London: Faber, 1985; he gives the most detail on the pronouns in the last part of the ‘Abschied’ (427– 428, especially). See also: Stephen E. Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), 95; his chapter in Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson (eds), The Mahler Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), 438–490; Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies trans. Vernon Wicker (Cambridge: Scolar Press 1994), 243–269. For the poems see Arthur Wenk, ‘The Composer as Poet in “Das Lied von der Erde”‘, and Fusako Hamao, ‘The Source of the Texts in Mahler’s “Lied von der Erde”‘, both in Nineteenth-Century Music 1 (1977), 33–47, and 19 (1995), 83–95. Franklin’s works on Adorno’s Mahler is criticised by David Allenby, who argues that not only is Adorno’s sense of ‘art culture’ now dated (since art is now only ‘an exotic leisure activity’, but ‘the localised political context of the 1930s and 1940s in Germany retains little relevance to the world audience that today listens to Mahler’s music. If these two central planks supporting Adorno’s critical apparatus have collapsed, it becomes possible to regard his view of Mahler as at best historically interesting but now anachronistic, and at worst too specific even in its own time to have universal significance’ – Review, ‘Saint or Sinner’, Musical Times 139 (January 1998), 24–27, quotation 25–26. Such a recuperative reading is what anachronism as a concept must resist. See Derrida’s comment on this passage, Spurs:Nietzsche’s Style trans. Barbara Harlo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1979), 43. The relation of Mahler to Mann, who uses him in Death in Venice, a ‘farewell’ text, is interesting here: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 111 is read as a text saying ‘farewell’ in Doctor Faustus trans. H.T. LowePorter (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1968), 57. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972), 125. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York: Vintage Books 1951), 142. See Heidegger: ‘There remains the song that names the earth’ – quoted Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press 1993), 120.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor 149–152, 157 age 49, 51, 52–53, 54–84 passim, 90–118 passim allegory 17, 25, 69–71 anachorism 6, 29, 31, 53, 87, 131–135 aphorism 14–15, 20, 110, 145, 146 architecture 133–134, 139 Aristotle 132 Asmann Jan, 178 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626), 167 Balzac, Honoré de 82 Baroque culture 9 Barthes, Roland 42, 112, 146, 164, 173 Bartolomeo, Fra 24 Bataille, Georges 123, 177 Baudelaire, Charles 46, 162 Beckett, Samuel 42, 47, 164 Benjamin, Walter 4, 28, 42, 60, 67–68, 149 Blanchot, Maurice Death Sentence (L’Arret de mort) 19–21, 40, 44, 67, 142 ‘Essential Solitude, The’ 135–138 Instance of My Death, The (L’Instance de ma mort) 20, 125 ‘Madness par excellence’ 4, 154, 157 ‘Song of the Sirens, The’ 142–143

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Step Not Beyond, The (Le pas au-delà) 125, 128, 129–130 Writing of the Disaster, The 148 blindness 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 101, 102, 103, 106, 108, 171 Bloom, Harold 76, 77, 79, 83 Booth, Stephen 73 Borges, Jorge Luis 9–14, 86 Breithaupt, Fritz 67 Brendel, Alfred 150 Burke, Peter 6–8, 159 Carpaccio, Vittore 27, 28, 29, 32–33, 162–163 Cervantes, (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) Don Quixote 9–14, 79, 86, 160 chance 17–19, 89, 102, 106, 107 and fortune 17, 18, 61, 94, 156, 160, 170, 176 Chaucer, Geoffrey 69, 90 Dante Alighieri 6, 66, 165 Deleuze, Gilles 18, 42–43, 136–138 Derrida, Jacques 14–21, 48, 101, 119, 128, 129, 171, 176 Aporias 161 ‘Aphorisme Contretemps’ 14–21 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression 134, 176 ‘Before the Law’ 129, 130

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182 Derrida, Jacques (cont.) ‘Différance’ 173 ‘Fors’: introduction to The WolfMan’s Magic Word 160–161 ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ 120, 173–174 Glas 48 How to Avoid Speaking; Denials (Comment ne pas parler: Dénegations) 132–135 ‘Khora’ 176 Living On / Border Lines 19–20, 49 ‘My Chances’ /Mes Chances 18, 19, 105–106, 172 ‘Ousia and Gramme: A Note from Being and Time’ 174 Postcard, The: From Socrates to Freud 19, 161, 172 Spectres of Marx 125, 127, 175 Speech and Phenomena 130 Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles 173, 179 Dickens, Charles 1, 82 Douce, Francis 4 Dreyfus, Alfred 37, 50, 164 Empson, William 79, 81, 82, 168 Eulenburg, (Philipp Friedrich Alexander Fürst zu Eulenburg) 36–37, 163–164 fashion 27–28, 111–112 Faulkner William, 5 Findlay, Heather 168 folly, and fools 61–62, 63, 68, 77, 90–108, 172 Fortuny, Mariano 27–29, 112 Foucault, Michel 33–34, 35, 38, 150, 163 Franklin, Peter 178–179

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Index Freud, Sigmund 6, 19, 30, 36, 97–98, 99, 119–123, 127, 128, 129, 131, 134–135, 140, 147, 170, 171, 173–174, 177 future 92, 94, 98, 99, 108–118, 129 future anterior 142–148 prophecy 85–118, 143, 169 Genette, Gerard 37–38, 44 Goldberg, Jonathan 82, 168, 171 Gozzoli, Benozzo 24–25 Greene, Thomas 6 Hardy, Thomas 1–2 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm 60, 128, 129, 166 Heidegger, Martin 122, 127, 133, 173, 175, 179 history 5–9, 178 antiquarian 7, 59 archives 31, 85–89, 176 chronicles 7, 73, 74, 85–118, 159 dates 60–61, 66–67 historical painting 8, 159 historicism 67 history-plays 65–75 invention of tradition 164 the mother of truth 11–12 homosexuality 29–38, 51, 54–58, 59–65, 79–84, 86, 163, 164, 165, 166 Hölderlin, Friedrich 2–4, 137–138, 177 Brod und Wein 2–4, 19, 154, 158 Der Tod des Empedokles 17, 137, 160 Husserl, Edmund 122 instant, the 19, 20, 125, 148, 161 James, Henry 144 jealousy 45–50

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Joyce, James 5, 13, 49 justice 127–128 Kafka, Franz, 16, 19, 125, 129 Kipnis, Jeffrey 133–134, 176 Kluge, Alexander 4 Knights, Lionel Charles 168 Kofman, Sarah 14 Krell, David Farrell 16–17, 160 Kristeva, Julia 79, 131–132, 176 Lacan, Jacques 19, 119, 120, 145, 161, 171, 174–175, 177–178 legitimacy and bastardy 89, 90–108, 131, 133, 134, 166, 170, 172 lesbianism 30, 31–32, 46, 163 Levinas, Emmanuel 21, 43–44, 48, 122–124, 129, 133, 134, 138, 175, 176 Lewis, Percy Wyndham 79 Locke, John 66 love 21–22, 26–27, 45, 46, 54–84, 117 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 145–148 madness 103–108, 129–130, 158, 176 Mahler, Gustav 16, 22, 150–157, 178–179 Mallarmé, Stephane 18, 176 Mann, Thomas 54, 179 Marquez, Gabriel García 21, 85–89, 134, 142 Marvell, Andrew 58 Marx, Karl, and Marxism 34, 45 Melchiori, Giorgio 79, 167 memory 22, 28, 38–45, 119–148, 155, 164, 174 and mourning 40, 43, 72, 73, 109, 143–144, 151, 152, 153–155 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni 21, 54–58, 165

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183 Middleton, Thomas 170 Milton, John 147 modern, the 113–115, 145–148 music 15, 22, 41, 150–157 Neill, Michael 170, 172 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 14, 16, 22, 89, 128, 129, 160, 173, 175 The Birth of Tragedy 76 The Gay Science 29, 126, 147, 151 Thus Spake Zarathustra 14, 17, 29, 126–127, 156 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) 10 palimpsests 12, 38 Panofsky, Erwin 65 Petrarch, Francesco 7, 55, 65 photography 40, 42, 146, 164 Platonism and Neoplatonism 54–58 Symposium 76–77, 80 Timaeus 131–132, 175 Poe, Edgar Allan 19 post, postal systems 15–16, 69, 160, 167 posthumous, the 50, 155 postponement 16–17, 20, 29, 65, 120–121, 122, 125, 140, 147, 152, 154, 155, 174 primal scene 94, 95, 97, 127, 144, 170 Proust, Marcel 21, 22–53, 72, 73, 85, 91, 112, 121, 124, 129, 131, 137, 145, 147, 152, 175 Du coté de chez Swann 22, 41, 42 À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs 22–29, 40, 43 Le Côte de Guermantes 29, 40 Sodome et Gomorrhe 29, 29–43, 79–80, 124, 144 La Prisonnière 27, 34, 46

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Proust, Marcel (cont.) Albertine disparue 27, 28, 29, 46–47, 49–50 Le Temps retrouvé 22, 42, 43, 50–52 Puttenham, George 91 Racine, Jean 71 Rackin, Phyllis 71 Ruskin, John 161 Rhythm, arrhymicism 15, 21, 124 Sant, Gus Van 83 Seneca 100 Shakespeare, William 4–5, 21, 165 All’s Well that Ends Well 5, 85, 92, 108–118, 133, 142, 146, 172–173 As You Like It 54 Hamlet 110, 125, 127, 147 Henry IV part 1, 2, 4, 68–69, 71–73, 75, 77–78, 79, 81, 82, 126 Henry IV part 2, 2, 4, 68, 69–71, 73–75, 77, 78–79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85 Henry V 75, 77, 82 Henry VI part 1, 68–69 Henry VI part 3, 71 Julius Caesar 4–5, 125–126 King Lear 4, 18, 62, 85, 90–108, 168–169, 176 Macbeth 75, 85, 97, 98, 109, 113, 118, 125, 176 Measure for Measure 118, 166 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 75

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Index Richard the Second 5, 71, 72, 73, 74, 125, 126 Romeo and Juliet 14–21, 170, 172 Sonnets 5, 21, 32, 35, 59–65, 68, 73, 80–82, 85–86, 88, 91, 107, 108, 165–166, 168 Tempest, The 100 Troilus and Cressida 85, 172 Twelfth Night 32 Winter’s Tale, The 115, 172 Shelley, Percy Byssche 20 Socrates 76, 80, 81 Sophocles 143–145 Spenser, Sir Edmund 7, 85 Spiegel, Gabrielle 8–9, 159 Stevens, Wallace 156 technology 1, 16, 18, 69, 70 Thackeray, William Makepeace 53 trace, the 21, 28, 44, 119–148, 173–178 trauma 22, 44, 45, 46, 89, 100, 141, 142–148 Traversi, Derek 77 Vendler, Helen 61, 65 Virilio, Paul 18 Wall, Thomas 43, 44 Wells, Stanley 59 West, Benjamin 8 Wilde, Oscar 35, 37 Williams, Raymond 163 Wittreich, Joseph 169 Wong Kar-wai 138–142 Wordsworth William, 48

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