Seppo Knuuttila (University of Joensuu, Finland)
Memory and Anachrony
In the philosophy of history anachronism is usually seen as an incorrect
argumentation, a logical error, a trivial mistake. Q. Skinner has formulated
(1969) the well known and also extensively discussed “rule” against
anachronism, or put in other way the constraint concerning historical
reconstructions: “No agent can eventually be said to have meant or done
something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description
of what he had meant or done.” If it seems that at least in the history of
sciences the fight against anachronism has been won, "it would be a grievous
error, indeed, to think that the order, which historians adopt for their inquiries
must necessarily correspond to the sequence of events" (M. Bloch).
We meet and use anachronisms continually in everyday life, the
representations of someone as existing or something as happening in other
than chronological or historical order, something that is out of its natural time
or appears to be. In the literary context anachronisms are according to G.
Genette “the various types of discordance” between the story (what happens)
and narration (how it is told). The temporal dimensions of anachronisms refer
to flashback (analepsis) or flashforward (prolepsis). In this sense it is
irrelevant to ask, if anachronisms are incorrect or not. During the course of
our lives we remember and describe even the same events differently.
Besides the former viewpoints anachronisms can also be seen as a
trope like metaphor, metonym (synechdoche), irony. It is said that figurative
language (figures of speech) does not directly mean what it says, but the
conventions of figurative language, the tropes show how ideas and things are
represented. When we understand and handle anachronisms as a trope of
memory, temporal trope, it enables us to see one thing in terms of another in
different time scales. In the light of anachronism “how it is told” leads us to
understand “what happens”, for example, in Magnolia, in Back to the Future,
in Hard to be a God.
Seppo Knuuttila is Professor of Folkloristics at the University of Joensuu (Finland).
He has participated in various research projects led by the Academy of
Finland, the Finnish Literature Society and the Universities of Helsinki and Joensuu
(on worldview, village culture, folksingers and public folklore, humour,
noncommunication, media culture). Since 2002 he has been appointed the Head of the
Graduate School of Cultural Interpretations. He has published articles on mythscape,
on everyday culture in folklore, on humour in Finnish contemporary art, on the topic
of everyday creativity and “outsider” art. His books, published by the Finnish
Literature Society, analyse the worldview relected in folk humour (Kansanhuumorin
mieli: kaskut maailmankuvan aineksena, The Mind of Folk Humour, 1992) and the
transitions in perspectives from past to present (Tyhmän kansan teoria: näkökulmia
menneestä tulevaan, A Theory of the Stupid Folk, 1994).