Trames 2008 3 264 275
Trames 2008 3 264 275
Trames 2008 3 264 275
Seppo Knuuttila
University of Joensuu
Abstract. This article examines examples of time travel in folklore and science fiction.
The aim is to emphasize that the subject of remembering could be both experienced and
fictional. Memory and imagination produce and affirm together the actual meanings about
the past. This kind of past and present articulation is one of the most relevant research
subjects in contemporary folklore studies. The combination of memory and narration is
always anachronistic in the sense that we are able to remember and tell how the future will
come true in the past. The so-called anachronism debate of recent decades has been
concerned with argumentation in academic texts. From the folkloristic point of view it
would provide space for new interpretations, the anachronisms were seen as a special
figure of speech and narrative.
DOI: 10.3176/tr.2008.3.02
1. Introduction
The first issue I am concerned with in this paper is how the articulation of
memory and imagination makes it possible to move in time. Initially, I describe
some rules and paradoxes of time-travel as they have been depicted in folklore and
science fiction. In this context anachronisms are like vehicles and channels to
timelessness or a place outside time, to a mythic history, mythscape. In folklore
studies myths are usually understood as both imagined and remembered texts, as
Barbara A. Misztal writes: “Memory is crucial to our ability to sustain a continuity
of experience, while our imaginative thinking is based on our ability to make the
world intelligible and meaningful” (2003:119).
The second issue concerns the prohibitions and regulations of anachronisms
related to historiological methodology, in the old and new historicism. In the
world of research simple anachronisms are of course errors and mistakes, but on
the other hand, what in one context is a mistake, can in another be the correct
Memory, anachronism, and articulation 265
interpretation if not a simple truth. It is said that logically taken the articulation
of the old historicism and the rules against anachronisms are a kind of science
fiction or time travelling as such. The anachronism debate has sometimes been a
touchstone of interdisciplinarity as well.
The third aspect of this presentation concerns the use of anachronism. Because
time-travel is so popular a theme in folklore, literature and popular culture, it
demands a more complicated interpretation than the faults hypothesis. It would be
productive to see anachronism and its family resemblance terms as a trope or on
the specific level, as a temporal speech figure, in which case it would be parallel to
such major tropes as metaphor, metonym and irony and also to other, more vague
figures of speech.
My academic background is in folkloristics, and has been for over thirty years,
so that I would like to make some folkloristic distinctions concerning the concept
of memory. Folklorists normally use the term memory in connection with some
other term. Briefly, for us, memory is always articulated through a text, even in the
contextual and performance-centred approaches. For folklorists the text has been
the most important research subject and object, full of meanings even without
context. This is quite far from the anthropological statement written by Gregory
Bateson (1980:24): “Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all.”
This broad interpretation of a text with complicated articulations stems – partly, at
least – from the cultural semiotic school, which has its roots in Tartu.
From the Estonian perspective, Tiiu Jaago, Ene Kõresaar and Aigi Rahi-Tamm
have written, that “oral history in Estonian folkloristics is primarily characterised
by the question of how folklore texts describe the mutual relations of the
continuity and the changing of Estonian society and culture” (Jaago et al., 2006:6).
They believe that one of the central research problems is why and how people
from the same region, or more generally, the people of Estonia, see and describe
the same events in a different way. Bernhard Giesen, a sociologist, claims that
“differences between collective memories are as normal as differences between
individual memories are” (Giesen 2004:32). For him the central problem is rather:
“Under which conditions does this division become a problem and – above all –
why do different individuals merge their memories to form a collective memory of
a generation?” So, the questions differ from time to time and from discipline to
discipline.
By definition folklore is traditional, a shared verbal representation, which
reflects and recreates worldviews and mentalities. For the earlier generations of
folklorists, memory, or shall we say remembrance, was not the central problem,
because according to their opinions and interpretations the folklore process
followed the so-called laws of cultural models (evolution/devolution, etc.). Those
law constructions included all kinds of sub-laws, for instance, laws of diffusion,
266 Seppo Knuuttila
transmission, epic, meter and memory. The purpose of the last-mentioned laws
was to explain, why and how folklore is changing from one generation to another.
The question of transmitting folklore was more important than remembering.
Nowadays it is more relevant to ask how memories and their expressions are
articulated in social, historical, physical and emotional contexts.
In the history of folkloristics, multidisciplinary activities have by nature
been quite practical. This means that in addition to folklorists, students of
literature, history, religion, anthropology, psychology, geography and so on, have
had a common research subject, for instance, myth, but each of them has sketched
out the subject from their own disciplinary perspective. Even in the area of
folklore studies, we can find many books written using this multidisciplinary
prescription.
Let’s take another perspective. In his article Multidisciplinarity, inter-
disciplinarity, and patterns of research collaboration in nanoscience and nano-
technology Joachim Shummer sees disciplinary relations in the following way:
“Thus, a research field can be highly multidisciplinary without being inter-
disciplinary, if many disciplines are participating without any interaction between
them. Similarly, strong interdisciplinary research between only two disciplines
does not mean a high degree of multidisciplinarity” (Shummer 2004:444).
3. Imagination in time
There is a riddle that asks, what is the quickest way from one place to another?
The correct answer is the imagination, and it applies well to the riddle of travelling
in time. Anachronism is one way of doing this. It functions excellently in the con-
texts of creative work and appears diversely in all art forms. Thus it is a funda-
mentally different matter how we want to express travel in time by using
anachronisms, and why they need to be avoided, especially in a historiological
conclusion.
In science fiction that depicts time travel to the past, there are many different
ways to express the rule that a person travelling in the past may do nothing to
affect it. Nor can anything be done that would change those beings, conditions
and events which exist and function in that time. This rule is, however, speculative
and has produced numerous paradoxes. Some of the versions resulting from this
are known as the ‘time paradox/causal loop’, ‘predestination paradox’, ‘grand-
father paradox’. For example, in the Motif-index of Folk-Literature by Stith
Thompson (1932, 1989) we can easily find numerous motifs around the time
paradox (‘Supernatural lapse of time in fairyland’, ‘A year seemed like a few
hours’, ‘Magic sleep extending over many years’, ‘Snow White’, ‘Sleeping
Beauty’, etc.).
In the Ray Bradbury story A Sound of Thunder (1952) a group of men travel six
million years back in time to hunt dinosaurs. The text has many logical, even
comic, ruptures, but stated briefly its message is this: since one of the travellers
Memory, anachronism, and articulation 267
broke the stated rule by accidentally stepping on a butterfly, upon their return to
the present they find that language has degenerated and the fascist candidate
Deutscher has won the presidential election.
The time-travel rule somewhat resembles the promises and prohibitions of
myths and fairy tales: everything is permitted but do not eat from this tree, do not
open this box, do not enter that room, do not interfere in the course of events
regardless of what you see or what might happen. On the other hand, these texts
would not exist if the rules were not broken.
Boris Kuznetsov, in turn, explains in his A Journey through the Ages (1980)
how the time machine was designed to specifically protect against changes “which
could have caused a chain reaction and led to unforeseen consequences”. The
novel’s narrator refers intertextually to this possibility as the ‘Bradbury effect’. In
the novel’s fictive discussions between philosophers and artists of different eras,
however, the narrator does not shrink from expressing questions about the future.
He asks Plato and Descartes what they think of his coming from the future in a
time machine. In this way, Kuznetsov in his fiction – clearly and intentionally –
breaks those rules of anachronism, which I will next discuss.
The above fragments are examples of imagination and texts you have perhaps
read or seen and can remember. For folklorists today the most important question
is not whether the stories are fiction or not. Much more interesting is how the
articulations of imagination and memory work, and asking why time travel has
been such a productive motif in the popular imagination for millennia.
How can we understand the ideas of people of the past without transforming
them into those similar to our own? These two issues (to understand and be
unchanged) have been central, for example in research concerning popular world-
views and mentalities. We cannot, without fateful consequences, divorce ourselves
from the narratives of the past, nor physically return to the past to better them.
The rules and prohibitions concerning the time perspective were present
throughout the entire 20th century in the broad discussion on representing history.
The central thread of historicism has been that the researcher should put their soul
into the period the research concerns. The demand is simply that the researcher
does not transfer anything from the present to the past but that they only ‘shut
down’ and let the ‘sources speak’. According to this doctrine the researcher
organizes events in the correct chronological order, thus establishing a cause-
effect relationship. Although this demand has often proven impossible, historicism
still has its defenders, especially in popular presentations. And when more and
more supporters appear, the demands to avoid anachronism also require new
interpretations.
Of the rigid voices to prohibit anachronism, perhaps the most fervent
discussion has been aroused by Quentin Skinner, who wrote that “the relevant
268 Seppo Knuuttila
logical consideration is that 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” (Skinner 1989:48).
Skinner wrote that we should not ‘find’ contemporary ideas in past ages, nor
express ideas in someone’s name which they perhaps “could have been conscious
of” (Ibid. 33). Skinner also rejects such conceptual history in which actors in
various periods are said to have employed the same concept – for instance, art –
although in different contexts. In all these and in other cases as well anachronism
is simply an error in drawing conclusions, which is fatal to any study. In the
Skinnerian vocabulary anachronism compares with myth, which historians should
also avoid.
According to Richard Rorty’s interpretation the constraint demanded by
Skinner specifically affects the method of historical reconstruction, which attempts
to analyse the authentic meaning of a text in its historical contexts. Rorty states
that the task of rational reconstruction and intellectual history is in contrast to
interpreting the philosophical (history of learning) significance of the text in
relation to our own times, and thus the reconstruction of the historical meaning is
dependent on the interpreter. Literally taken this means that the old historicism is
methodologically unthinkable: If we could turn off our present consciousness, then
we can no longer remember what we are going to do (Rorty 1984:54–55).
The New Historicism, especially active in literary studies at the end of the last
century, was not a method in the first place but rather a research programme or
agenda seeking to substitute the synchronic text of a cultural system for the
diachronic text of an autonomous literary history (Rée 1991:978–980). Such a
programme sounds like the history of mentalities concerning different eras
(mentality of the Middle Ages, mentality of the Renaissance, etc.).
If anachronisms are, however, understood in a broader sense than just incorrect
conclusions, then many of those participating in the debate today also believe that
the past in many ways goes with us into the present, and that the present can also
be understood in terms other than the period that limits our experience. Nick
Jardine ends his critical review of anachronism with the thought that the “use of
categories alien to the agents studied is often perfectly legitimate” (2000:265). It
has been said that historical events can clearly be understood from a latter-day
perspective, when the interpreter comprehends what they are doing. On the other
hand, there is also a desire to simplify Skinner’s thesis in the sense that the
researcher should not claim that some person (actor) in the past said (did) some-
thing, which they did not.
One of the ethical reasons for avoiding anachronisms in historical research is to
insure that people and things as the subject of interest are approached in a fair
way. According to the Finnish historian Jorma Kalela (2000) this ‘fair way’ thesis
contains two problems. The first concerns the historian’s own concept of reality
and language, which are not neutral in respect to depicting fairness. The second is
that the culture as the research subject is not transparent, although we generally so
Memory, anachronism, and articulation 269
assume. Kalela believes that satisfaction with avoiding anachronisms has actually
hidden the bulk of difficulties related to historical reconstruction.
Kalela writes of unintentional anachronisms which, when we think about time,
are commonly considered to be uncomplicated or linear. He presents this example:
“a structural feature of Gustaf Vasa’s (King of Sweden from 1523 until his death
in 1560) personality was that he was unable in his thoughts to separate his position
as ruler from his being a private individual”. The word ‘unable’ in this sentence,
Kalela remarks, is an unintentional anachronism since it is clearly a modern way
of portraying the personality trait in question: “For people living in the culture
of Gustaf Vasa the idea behind this expression separating the position of the ruler
and the private individual would probably have been alien” (Kalela, 2000:104).
On the other hand, we could also think that unintentional anachronisms are
not necessary to be taken literally, but rather as temporal tropes. Thus, the
expression “was unable” would mean precisely the contemporary viewpoint at the
time of its writing.
Let me briefly add that the way of reading can also be anachronistic, by design
or unintentionally. In this way, for example, Renato Rosaldo (1986) has read
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s (1975) book Montaillou (Cathars and Catholics in a
French Village 1294–1324,). Le Roy Ladurie, “a noted French social historian …
cloaks himself with the borrowed authority of ethnographic science” (Rosaldo,
1986:81). Rosaldo writes rigorously against Ladurie’s self-made ethnography,
which at least “tempts the historian into committing his discipline’s cardinal sin:
anachronism” (Ibid. 83). The examples are not in my opinion so upsettingly sinful,
and it now seems, twenty years later, that also Rosaldo’s reading strategy was
anachronistically oriented, although he has made many sharp and apt remarks.
The debate on anachronisms and their erroneousness in the philosophy of
history and science circles has primarily produced grounds for why the present
should not be projected onto the past, and what would occur if this rule was
broken. Perhaps more, however, has come from the debate that considers the
various manifestations of anachronisms and their recognition. This discussion has
specifically been useful in such cultural studies which are interested in the
intentional use of anachronisms, for example, for critical, humorous and didactic,
or life philosophical purposes. Anachronisms are particularly part of everyday
popular culture.
5. Anachronism as a trope
The way I use the term trope in this article has almost nothing to do with
the philosophical trope theories, in which the key concepts are universal,
particulars, properties and qualities. My interdisciplinary trope attitude is directed
towards literary studies and anthropological use, that is ‘the poetry of language
and speech’.
270 Seppo Knuuttila
6. Concluding remarks
I started the current article with some time-travel examples in folklore and
science fiction. The aim was to emphasize that the subject of remembering could
be both personally experienced and fictional. In any case, it is noteworthy that
memory and imagination, which are not the same thing, are articulated together
and produce or affirm the actual meanings about the past. This kind of past and
present articulation is one of the most important research subjects in contemporary
folklore studies.
Memory, anachronism, and articulation 273
Address:
Seppo Knuuttila
Finnish and Cultural Research / Folklore Studies
University of Joensuu
PL 11180101 Joensuu
Finland
Tel.: 358 13 251 4330
E-mail: seppo.knuuttila@joensuu.fi
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