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...

References to anachronism in Proust (1871–1922) spread over four of the seven books ofÀ 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 withDu 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...

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’sDeath 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...

For this chapter, Sonnet 106 leads, via García Márquez, into discussion of two plays,King LearandAll’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 Cressida4.7.86); old folk are ‘time’s doting chronicles’ (2 Henry IV4.3.126)....

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 arearrangementin accordance with fresh circumstances – to aretranscription’. 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...

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...