A brief appreciation for the pathetic in literature

Today I finished reading a work I had been looking forward to for a few years already, namely the novel El anacronópete (1887) by Enrique Gaspar. Unfortunately, as I was unable to obtain a physical copy in the original language, and since I do not like to read on a screen and therefore preferred to use the file on Project Gutenberg mainly as a control text against the English, I had to rely on the excellent translation The Time Ship by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell from 2012. I first learned of this book thanks to the third season of one of my favourite TV series, El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time), which is an excellent way to become introduced to both major and minor aspects of Spain’s rich, layered, complicated and varied cultural history.       

There are many interesting things to say about the novel, more things than I as a neophyte in science fiction literature can embark on and still do them justice, at least within the confines of a blogpost. But one thing of which the novel did remind me was an aspect of the speculative literature of the nineteenth century that I greatly appreciate, namely the pathetic protagonist. And in this blogpost, I wish to provide a brief explanation of what I mean by this description, and why I appreciate it so much. 

As far as the novel goes, Gaspar does not hold back in his construction of pathetic figures when fashioning the two main male protagonists of the tale. Chief of these two is the scientist Don Sindulfo García, maker of the time ship or the anacronópete, who is a man in his forties. The second is Benjamín, a man in his thirties, a humanist polymath who has studied a vast array of languages, and who serves as Don Sindulfo’s assistant. Together with the two female protagonists – Clara, the fifteen-year-old ward and niece of Don Sindulfo and Juana her nineteen-year-old maid – they travel back in time. The two male protagonists, however, have very different key motives for doing so, and both these motives are in their way pathetic because they are founded on pettiness and selfishness. Benjamín is mainly concerned with obtaining the recipe for immortality rumoured to be found in Han China, while Don Sindulfo is in search for a less liberal age in which it will be legal for him to marry his own niece. The selfishness of these two individuals plays out in different ways that endanger both themselves and other characters, but to go into any detail on this here would spoil too much. The point is that in their efforts to indulge in this selfishness, the two scientists are displayed as the all-too-human, all-too-foibled individuals that they are.     

I appreciate such protagonists greatly, because they are the opposite of hero-worship, and their fallible nature gives a sheen of realism even to the wildest and most absurd stories (two categories to which El anacronópete definitely belongs). It is that kind of human realism that makes it much easier to suspend any disbelief concerning other aspects of the story, and that allows me to heartily enjoy all kinds of unrealistic coincidences or even the use of deus ex machina. As I generally abhor any kind of hero-worship and as I prefer to emphasise the human aspect of even those individuals whom I consider the greatest and the best among us, I like seeing the pathetic aspect of humanity written large on literary protagonists.            

It is this kind of pathetic humanity that has made me enjoy certain speculative novels – novels that explore ideas and that are not confined to neither fantasy nor science fiction but can easily be classified as both – from the nineteenth century. A few memorable cases can be listed here. In George Sand’s Laura, a Journey into the crystal (Laura, Voyage dans le cristal) from 1864, a poor geology student is dragged along on an unlikely expedition by his megalomaniac and demonic uncle. In Jules Verne’s masterpiece Journey to the centre of the earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre) from 1864/67 a similar uncle-nephew dynamic is notable, one which might be explained by Verne’s apparent inspiration drawn from George Sand’s novel, as noted by William Butcher in his 2008 translation. In Verne’s story, however, the uncle is not as theatrically demonic, but his obsession and stubbornness come very close and do give the scientist in question a very pathetic touch to his otherwise evident resilience. The nephew, who is also the novel’s first-person narrator, is more traditionally pathetic in that he is doubtful, scared, yet too much in his uncle’s thrall to rebel, and this is why is all-the-more relatable and, indeed, likable. (Note that I do not use pathetic as a pejorative but as a neutral, if not downright objective, description.) Two final examples here will be Henry Rider Haggard’s protagonist Allan Quatermain, of whom I have read in King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887), and Horace Holly from She (1887). Both these men are pathetic in different ways, but in each case they are pathetic by not conforming to the ideals of their society, one by being frail and emotional, one by being ugly and eremitic.          

Due to the pathetic nature of the protagonists of these novels, the reader, at least in my case, is drawn all the more vividly into the story-world because there is something very human and therefore relatable about them. In some cases this humanity makes them also likable, although that is not always a given. (I will state that I detest Horace Holly with a vengeance because of his misogyny.) The pathetic element of these figures gives both the characters and the novels they inhabit greater depth, and it is that kind of depth that in my mind is one of the many possible hallmarks of great literature.  

Or, perhaps I appreciate these pathetic literary figures because they remind me of myself, and we all, I suspect, appreciate seeing ourselves reflected and represented in the works of culture that we imbibe. 

Outdated materiality in the library

libros cuyas páginas, finalmente, aprendí a cortar, para no comprobar, meses después, que estaban intactos   

books whose pages I at last learned to cut [in advance] so as not to find them still intact months later

- Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph (my translation)



Even though I am not a book historian per se, I am frequently reminded of various ways in which the book as an object has been designed and made, ways that are no longer in use but which remain within our field of vision because we still make use of books belonging to a bygone era of book-craft. Today was such a day, as I was looking up a few sources in a 1938 volume of Diplomatarium Danicum, a series of edited letters and documents that pertain to medieval Denmark. One of the pages that I needed had evidently not been needed by anyone else at the University of Oslo, because the quire – the sheet folded into pages during the binding of the book – had not yet been cut. As can be seen in the photographs below, this book was a relatively cheap paper-bound volume where the quires were left for the buyer or the reader to cut themselves. It reminded me of the quoted passage in Jorge Luis Borges’ story ‘El Alepth’, in which the narrator recounts the painfulness of seeing the books gifted to the woman he loves lying uncut and therefore unreadable in her house. 

Today was not the first time I encountered such uncut quires, but I decided that the wisest thing to do would be to ask a librarian for help rather than taking the matter into my own hands. (First of all, I do not have a knife of any kind in my office, which I probably should rectify.) The librarian I encountered, a helpful man who has been very good at solving problems for me before, remarked that he was glad that I had not done the cutting myself, which in turn prompted me to suspect that there are those who do things their own way. He first produced a paper knife, but upon closer inspection, seeing that there were several quires that were uncut, he took the book with him to another part of the library to trim the edges of the book and open the quires by simply cutting away the outermost part of the edges where the folds were.

 

When the librarian returned, he expressed delight in the sensation of rubbing one’s finger along a freshly cut edge, so I decided to test it myself right away. And he was right: the smoothness of the trimmed paper – paper that is thicker than what we often encounter in books produced nowadays – was pleasant, both because of the feeling itself but also because this was an unexpected opportunity to come closer to a material aspect of the book that I had not reflected on. I felt that I had been exposed to a part of the practice of book-handling that has been lost to us, but which once was part and parcel of buying and reading books. The whole matter became like a micro-adventure, an object lesson in a historical reading practice. That brief moment of running the flat of my fingertip against the smooth edge of the book gave me a deeper understanding of the materiality of the book in this particular period, the period when books were still cut.           

The librarian made a joke about how this was a case of going into unknown territory, since those particular pages definitely had not been read by anyone at this university. This joke made me realise that on a very small level I did feel a kind of ownership to this book since it was on my prompting that these quires were now opened. The feeling is not serious, of course, but nonetheless a nice reminder that when we handle books the way we do in academia – daily and in many different formats and conditions – we come to appreciate them as more than mere tools of communication and conveying knowledge, but as historical relics in their own right. And if I leave no other mark on the University of Oslo, having made a few more pages of an old collection of edited sources is not a bad legacy. 

Learning to see a question in context

 
This autumn is my first full term of teaching at the University of Oslo since my employment there a year ago. During that past year, I have been involved in supervision of BA students and one seminar, but to oversee and participate in planning a course through an entire term is new to me, at least at this university. However, notwithstanding my previous experiences at other universities in other countries, each new start brings with it new experiences, and every time I settle in at a new institution it does feel a lot like learning how to teach from scratch. Partly this has to do with the different ways that higher education is conducted in different countries. Even at different universities within the same country there are practices and solutions that are particular to one specific institution. And moreover, returning to Norway after eight years abroad also means that several aspects in university education have changed since I myself was a part of that system.        

One of the fascinating and enjoyable things about teaching at a university is that you get constant reminders of how utterly complex and varied we are as individuals, and people come with such different frames of references and experiences that what we, the lecturers, communicate or what they encounter during a course can be received so very differently from person to person. While this variety is well known to anyone who has been at university, and while it is by no means unique to the university, I do forget from time to time just how tricky it can be to convey a message in such a precise way as to give no room for misunderstanding. Teaching is a constant reminder that the audience of your communications can read the key words of a message in very different ways, and so you must do your best to avoid any kind of misunderstanding. And even then there are glitches and cracks.   

These glitches and cracks, however, are part of the educational process, both for myself and for my students, as they provide ample opportunity for teachable moments. Recently, I was reminded of this when I came to realise that the historian’s dictum of learning to ask the right questions also has a counterpoint: learning to see the question in context. This realisation came about when I was organising the obligatory oral assignment for one of my courses, a half-term course that was to be concluded with that assignment. The course consisted of two groups of students, and for each group there were between twenty and twenty-six registered participants. In order to make each student participate in the seminar I formulated individual questions that the students were given one week to prepare for, and then they would answer that question in class. The questions were relatively simple in the sense that they did not demand long answers, but they did require that the students had paid attention during the seminars and read the syllabus. Those who could not attend the final seminar were allowed to submit their answers in writing. All in all, most of the students did a very fine job of it and showed great potential in their further studies. Indeed, some who had been quiet and withdrawn during the entire course were among the ones who showed most understanding of the topic. While it is neither surprising nor uncommon, it is always a bittersweet sensation when students show their competence at the end of a course, demonstrating that they could have contributed so well and so productively in the seminar discussions.            

The questions all pertained to the course and its syllabus, and I had thought it obvious that when answering these questions the students should consider this framework. It turned out that yet again I had failed to learn the age-old lesson that nothing should be considered obvious when communicating with students, especially when they are first-year-students. One question that reminded me of this lesson ran as follows: “What does the term ‘universal history’ mean?”

The half-term course is on the cult of saints and identity-construction in twelfth-century Norway. Within the context of the course, universal history is the history of the known world beginning with Creation, ending with Judgement Day, and maintained, guided and planned by the omnipotent God. This is the Christian sense of universal history that underpinned the history-writing that began in twelfth-century Norway, and in this course we had read several primary sources that served to exemplify this approach to universal history. I had repeated time and again that the identity-construction of twelfth-century Norway was bound up with the concern of showing Norway’s place within this universal history. The question was, in other words easy – or so I thought.  

It turned out that the two students who got this question struggled to understand it on the terms that I had expected, and I realised that I should have added a few more details to anchor the question more firmly in the course itself. But when I gave feedback to one of those students, who submitted their answer in writing, I also came to realise that it was not solely a matter of how firmly it was anchored in the course, it also had to do with how these students had not learned to see a question in its context. When I gave my feedback, I remarked to the student that while the answer was in and of itself not wrong, the answer had also nothing to do with the course. I accepted the answer as a pass and not a fail – it was, after all, a very low-key assignment – and explained to them that in the future they needed to read the question in light of the context in which it was asked. The topic of the course should have given clear indications, and so should the syllabus and the many references to the key term of the question in the seminars. The student responded by thanking me for the feedback, and said outright that they had not thought about this issue because to them, a question was just a question.                    

The student’s response was intriguing to me, because it was the perfect diagnose for one of the main problems with communication in general, namely that to see a question in its proper context needs to be learned. In answering the question in a way that was unconnected to the course, the student was not stupid. They had just not been taught that very simple aspect of the nature of questions, namely that questions all depend on context. For a historian – as well as any other participant in society – learning to see a context in question is crucial, because the quality of our answers depend on it, and because our follow-up questions can only be relevant when understanding the context of the original question.

There really needs to be a course in its own right where we dig into the basics of abstract reading that is part and parcel of human daily life. Because learning such basic elements as seeing a question in context is important, but also too easy to not learn.     

Knowing that we do not know; knowing how we do not know

When working in the humanities, it is easy to develop a certain instinctive response to the various forms in which we encounter a widespread, deep-rooted and pernicious distrust and even dismissal of the values of the sundry fields that belong to the humanities umbrella. This antagonism has a long lineage, but its contemporary variants manifest in contemporary ways: defunding of academic institutions, inflation in grades, outright hostility against expertise, and, perhaps most subtly but also most commonly, a combination of enthusiasm about the topic but a rejection of those who have dedicated years of study and research to the topic in questions. This latter variant is perhaps especially relevant for the discipline of history, but it is by no means unique to it. Due to the near-omnipresent scepticism and the learned habit of taking a defensive stand at the sound of anything that can resemble anti-intellectual murmurings, we academics often tend to collect various responses, some more general and others more specific. The present blogpost is a general response about one of the needful things that the humanities teach us, namely our ability to know that we do in fact not know, and how we do not know it.   
           
Knowing that we do not know something might at first sound easy enough, as most of us will be forced to admit ignorance on a daily basis, even if that ignorance pertains to minute, ephemeral things such as the exact time of day or someone’s specific whereabouts. But not all forms of ignorance are as easily acknowledged or admitted, especially if we think that we do, indeed, know. To acknowledge certain forms of ignorance can be especially difficult in a society like that of the twenty-first century, where information surrounds us and overwhelms us at every minute, even in forms and ways we do not recognise because of how subtly we encounter it, or how inured we are to seeing it. But information is not the same as facts, truth or knowledge, especially because so much of the information we encounter is false – often deliberately so – or at best incomplete.    

Moreover, a lot of the information we encounter that is factual does not speak for itself, and does require types of literacy or methodological familiarity that most of us do not have – and I include myself in a number of such situations. One form of information that is particularly problematic in this regard is statistics, because even in the event that the statistical information can be said to be representative or accurate, it can only provide an incomplete picture.         

I was reminded of the need for statistical literacy earlier today thanks to a tweet by a friend and colleague, and it brought back a discussion I had had with another friend years and years ago. This discussion showcased very clearly and also quite hopelessly why it matters that we know that we do not know, and also that we know how we do not know.  

The argument itself is not relevant here. What is relevant is that my friend used a piece of statistical information to defend his position. The information he presented was not evidence in his favour, and neither could it be used in my favour, because the statistics dealt with an entirely different question than the one we were arguing about. In short, our argument was about a qualitative question, whereas the piece of statistical information was about a quantitative question. Very soon I became aware that my friend would not listen to my protests, and would not understand why my protests were relevant, not because he is stupid or stubborn, but because he did not have statistical literacy and did not know the methodological impossibility of using quantitative evidence to back up an entirely qualitative claim.       

What I remember best from that discussion, unimportant as the question itself was, is that strong feeling of forcelessness that enveloped me once I realised that there was no way to persuade my friend that his piece of evidence was irrelevant. He felt it strengthened his position so he stuck to it. And because he did not have the requisite methodological familiarity to understand why it was irrelevant, there was no way for me to convince him that it was irrelevant.      

One of the many things that are widely applicable beyond academia that we learn in the humanities is this: that when we are wrong, we not only recognise why we are wrong but how we are wrong; not only that we do not know but how we do not know something. And the ability to identify the missing information we need, or to see that what appears to be a piece of the puzzle is the piece of an entirely different puzzle, is not as intuitive as it might sound. An important issue here is that people are not stupid for lack of methodological familiarity or lack of literacy in a particular topic. There are many reasons why we do not know something, be it lack of the relevant education, or be it the sheer force of habitual thinking or tradition.            

This is not to say that a humanities education will fix the problem automatically. The quality of a humanities education depends in part on those who impart it, and also on the one who receives it, and not everyone is wired in such a way as to take on board certain forms of teaching. For myself, I am quite convinced that were I to embark on an education requiring comprehension of complex mathematics, I should no doubt fail to internalise the basic knowledge needed. But even though there are some who might receive an education in the humanities and come out the other end without having learned any of the basic tenets of critical thinking, there are countless others who will have done just that. And in a world where not everyone can know, learn, understand or make use of the exact same information, it is vital to our society that there are some of us who know that we do not know, and how we do not know it. And for such people to exist, we need the humanities.       

Achronology as a cultural force, part 2

 

In my previous blogpost, I described how achronology’s ability to blur and obfuscate people’s understanding of the past could impact cultural, social and political decisions in the present. This ability to influence decisions and currents makes achronology a cultural force. Achronology in its purest form means the merging of the past into a single unit where periodisations do not matter. However, achronology rarely, if ever, operates in its purest form. Moreover, since achronology usually operates in conjunction with other forces, impulses and factors, achronology is also very malleable. And, in addition, achronology both creates and thrives on vagueness. For these reasons, it can sometimes be difficult to detect how achronology enacts its influence in current events. One of the most complicated, but also best, examples is how the past was used during the presidential campaign of the forty-fifth president of the United States from 2015 onwards. The infamous slogan “Make America Great Again” exemplifies precisely how achronology impacts current events. In this blogpost, I aim to make a case for how this campaign slogan should be understood as achronology.        

From the beginning, it must be emphasised that I absolutely loathe the entire campaign of the forty-fifth president, as indeed I loathe any Republican politician. I emphasise this because this present blogpost will also explain why the slogan “Make America Great Again” is a stroke of rhetorical genius. The genius of the slogan must be acknowledged, much as one must acknowledge the rhetorical genius of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willen, while at the same time one can, and should, detest both Fascism and Nazism.          

The core message of “Make America Great Again” has very deep roots. The message evokes the idea of a glorious past that is lost and must now be recovered, a golden age that has to be made anew. Several versions of this concept exist, most famously the story of Adam and Eve, and also in Greek mythology from which the concept of the golden age was mediated to the Romans and onwards to the medieval imagination. A modern version can be seen in various secularist movements that hold up the so-called Enlightenment era as the apex of historical progress, and argue that we need to return to this apex. In essence, the concept of a golden age is the sublimation of nostalgia, very often a false nostalgia, and it serves as a perpetual mirror where contemporary flaws are accentuated and magnified in seriousness.    

The concept of a golden age is, of course, not per definition achronological. Indeed, in several versions the vision of a lost golden past necessitates other historical periods, especially if we follow the traditional scheme of a degradation with the passing of time, where history moves from the golden to the silver to the bronze to the iron age. However, there is also a very common distillation of the idea of a golden age, namely the expression “things were better before”, something very familiar to Norwegian ears, for instance. This expression demonstrates how the idea of a golden age can take on achronological properties. “Before” is not a precise chronological unit, and its main point is that it is not here and now. When people state that things used to be better, they might very well have a clearly defined period in mind. But just as often it expresses a belief that things have become worse than they used to be. In either case, the golden age is somewhere in the past and when that past is not clearly defined it is up to whomever listens or utters this idea to imagine when that past was and how that past was. The ambiguity of the unstated timeframe of the past which was so much better is, in essence, a form of achronology, because it turns the past into a uniform canvas onto which people can paint and pinpoint the golden age wherever and however they wish.      

When people utter variations of the idea that things were better before, they tend to have a specific period in mind, usually the time of their childhood. However, because the past is mythologised in popular culture, in education, and in public discourse, it is also possible that people have other historical periods in mind. As mentioned, for certain so-called rationalists that period was the Enlightenment, notwithstanding the many horrors that unfolded in that period, horrors which were rationalised by thinkers or with recourse to intellectual discourse. For those who fetishise masculinity, it can be any time when “men were men”, be it the Viking Age, the Roman Empire, or the Stone Age. For pathological individualists, it might be the Wild West, or the age of European colonisation. Other candidates for the lost golden age also exist, and since the past is lost to us every part of it is up for grabs whenever someone wants to turn it into something more glorious than it actually was.            

Individual ideas of the golden age are usually time specific, in that people tend to select that part of the past which they know or have mythologised. It is not simply the past in all its vast irrecoverability, but a specific part of it. In this way, the golden age is not in and of itself achronological. However, because the golden age can be placed in so many different places on a timeline, the concept also carries in it something achronological. Because it can be placed at any point in time depending on who places it, the golden age depends on a vague understanding of the past and the chronological progression of time. In effect, the idea of the golden age carves out a space in time that is immutable, which is the very opposite of what history is. Because the golden age becomes preserved like a bug in amber, locked in one motion that makes it recognisable to those who seek it, the golden age is also achronological: it is then, not now, and this is its most important defining feature.          

The concept of the golden age thrives on, and indeed requires, a blurred understanding of history, of the passing of time, and of the complexity of humanity’s shared and entangled history. In this way, achronology – which simplifies and blurs the distinction between parts of history – is a key component in sustaining visions of any piece of the past as golden. Moreover, since the golden age is unfixed in time but shared by so many as a general idea, it can be talked about and agreed upon by several individuals who all have very different visions of that golden age, but who can communicate the idea through shared features and common reference points. The most important feature is that the golden age is in the past. Because people can agree about the existence of a golden age without agreeing, or even describing, when that golden age was, the rhetoric about the golden past is in effect achronological.           

Now that we have established, more or less, that the golden age has achronological properties, we return to the slogan “Make America Great Again”. This slogan has three important features that together make it a very successful tool of manipulation. First of all, it states that America, or the US, rather, once was great. Secondly, it implies that America is no longer great and that its greatness must be recovered. (Yes, these are two points but they work jointly and cannot be separated.) And thirdly, the greatness is to be found again in the future. The last point is important here, because the slogan does not suggest to move back in time, to retreat into the past. In so doing, the slogan avoids the connotations of degeneration that lies in a similar expression, “back to the Stone Age”. The past is lost, we are not moving back there, we are moving forward. The slogan, then, preys on the idea that we progress not only chronologically but also qualitatively, and the best is yet to come, as one Republican spokesperson once screamed at a national convention. Even though this slogan implies a return to the roots, it avoids the negative connotations of a return, or going back to something, and instead of retreating or deteriorating, things are moving up, forward, onward, upward. This distinction is enormously important to the imagination, especially in a country like the US, where the national mythology has trumpeted the idea of progression and improvement more or less since its beginning as an independent political unit. 

The first point of the slogan, that America was once great, is of course the key component, and this is where achronology is enacting its force. Because the question inevitably becomes. When was America great? The answer depends on whom you ask, and it is very likely that you will get a wide variety of answers, even though some of those will be more or less the same given the country’s very young age and therefore lack of periods to choose from. But the important thing is not when America was great, but that this greatness, this golden age, can be found whenever one seeks it, and whenever one wishes to find it. Also, the greatness is not here and now, as stated by the second point of the slogan. In this way, the slogan is on the one hand very precise: America was great before this point in time. But because it is completely open in its vagueness about when it was great, stating only that this greatness lies in the past, everyone can receive this message according to their own visions, fantasies and frames of reference. And in this quality, the slogan is achronological.        

When we consider the consequences of the 2016 presidential election in the US, it is clear that the slogan “Make America Great Again” was as successful as it is contemptible. It is also clear that the reason why it was successful is that it leaves an unspoken space that can be filled by whomever listens, and is therefore achronological: the greatness is in the past and not now, and this is a problem. Because achronology played such a key role in the presidential campaign, I argue that it serves as a clear example of how achronology – in conjunction with other factors – can work as a cultural force.        

           

Achronology as a cultural force, part 1

 

I can see through time           

- Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons S05E13        


As a historian, I am trained to divide history into periods, and I am also trained to deconstruct such periods and critique them. Periodisation is a tool for making sense of large amounts of information, and sorting various narratives and various blocks of information into more comprehensible units. But such tools as periodisation can easily become weapons, which is why so much of the historian’s task is taken up by explaining why terms such as “the Middle Ages”, “Antiquity”, “pre-modern” and “the Enlightenment” are deeply problematic and can be used to promoted racist, nationalist, supremacist agendas. Periodisation can, in such instances, become a cultural force in that it helps create sensations of history moving towards predestined or inherently natural endpoints, which can be used to interpret any major event in history. Such teleological views of history can function as rallying points for groups or organisations, and they also serve to establish an idea of any given group being at the centre of history, whereas all other groups are merely extras or collateral. However, periodisation is not the only understanding of history that can have an impact on how societies and groups approach the past. Another such understanding is what we can call “achronology”, and in this blogpost and the next I will explore some aspects of the achronological view of the past, and what how that view can shape current events.  

Achronology is in a way the opposite of periodisation, because while periodisation rigidly – often too rigidly – divide the past into temporally sequenced blocks, achronology undoes that sequence and puts every part of history into the same block. Since every part of history inhabits the same block, achronology opens up for encounters between historical individuals, phenomena, concepts or objects that could not possibly encounter one another. In this way, achronology is also different from anachronism. Anachronism means that something is in the wrong time period, and we typically see this in works of historical fiction, be it in novels, comics, films, etc. One of my favourite examples is when the eponymous protagonist of the comic strip series Prince Valiant meets Marino, the founder of the independent country San Marino, while also fighting the Huns of Attila. According to legend, Marino operated around 301, while Attila ruled the Huns from the 440s until his death in 455. There is, in other words, no way that Prince Valiant could have encountered both Marino and Attila. What makes Prince Valiant’s impossible encounters anachronistic rather than a case of creative achronology is that the adventures of Prince Valiant are firmly set in the fifth century. Consequently, when later concepts such as crusading ideology or later phenomena such as the Viking raids are brought into Prince Valiant’s world, the boundaries of time are broken and anachronisms are being committed. In achronology, on the other hand, such boundaries cannot be broken because they do not exist in the first place. While periodisation and anachronism predicate chronological differences, achronology obliterates those differences and puts everything into a temporal here-and-now. This also means that time travel stories are not achronological, because such stories depend on the ability to traverse those temporal divides that achronology refuses to acknowledge.        

Like creative anachronism, achronology is also a concept commonly employed in entertainment. Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, for instance, takes place in a London Below that effectively comprises all elements of London’s history in one and the same time-space. The events in Neverwhere are located in a fixed time period, the here-and-now, but that time period encompasses all other periods and can therefore not be considered a case of anachronism. Similarly, Robert Holdstock’s novel Mythago Wood employs achronology by constructing a complex woodland that contains within it corporeal manifestations of the myths of all peoples and cultures that have lived in that part of Britain since the Ice Age. While the novel does operate with the concept of chronological divides, and while this wood is sectioned according to a chronological scheme, those that enter the wood are not subject to the constraints of that chronology. Consequently, Robin Hood, Cú Chulainn and Saxon immigrants all inhabit the same here-and-now.         
       
Achronology is a very fruitful creative tool, just like anachronism, and can be used to very entertaining and also educational ends. I am myself very much in favour of achronology when used in such positive creative ways. But like everything in culture, achronology can also be used as a cultural force, namely something that shapes the culture that receives it. When I call achronology a cultural force I mean this: that the erasure of temporal divides can convey an understanding of the past as a single, unified block whose main defining feature is that it isn’t now, and this understanding can in turn shape how people go about in shaping the present and the future. How achronology impacts contemporary culture depends on where it is received, when it is received, and by whom it is received.   

In some cases, the impact of achronology can take the form of constructing folk-spirits where one feature of a people’s past becomes the defining essence of that people. This essence can then be imagined as a constant to be found in all of the past. Such an idea can lead in two main directions, both of which are sinister and deeply problematic. One direction is to see this spirit or essence is still with us, and that can be used to set a people apart from others and to insist on their primacy in world events, where all of the amorphous, unified past serves as a heavy legitimising weight behind such a claim. The second direction is to fuel fantasies of degradation, where this essence now is lost and must be recovered, which in turn is a way of alienating everyone that does not have a claim to this essence. In Norway, invocations of the Viking spirit – which appears from time to time – is a form of this achronological thinking.      

It is important to emphasise that what I have drawn up here is a scheme of the impact of achronology in its purest form. It is a model of an intellectual construct, and such models rarely map perfectly onto reality. There are very few cases – if any – of pure achronology at work in the cultural discourse, at least when that achronology is not employed for creative ends. But there are elements of achronological thinking at work in society, and these erase or hinder a nuanced understanding of chronological progress. Such achronological thinking might not completely remove any understanding of the past as divided into periods, but the length of those periods and the connection between those periods are obscured, and this obscurity simplifies the past. It is in this simplification that achronology strikes most forcefully.  

While periodisation has its problems, it does help us to comprehend how incrementally history is meted out, and how much human activity and how many human lives go into a year, a decade, or a century. In other words, history is a long process where things can chronologically progress slowly or quickly depending on various factors. (I here use progress not in the qualitative, teleological sense, but just as a way of describing the passing of time from one year to the next.) It is this understanding of history as a complex chain of temporalities that contain numerous known and unknown lives and deeds that prevent us from seeing the past as something simple. Achronology, however, works to simplify the past by erasing or obscuring the temporal divides. One of the most dangerous consequences of that erasure is that people who lose or are prevented from accessing the complex understanding of history are more likely to be receptive to conspiracy theories that stretch back into the very distant past. Ideas about sinister global cabals – typically launched against Jews and still employed in contemporary anti-Semitic discourse to devastating effects – depend on a kind of achronology in which it is possible to maintain large-scale secret society that can pass down its work through generations. Because achronology facilitates a thinking about the past as a single block, it is easier to accept the ludicrous idea that such societies have been in operation across centuries.     

A similar version of such achronological thinking was launched in Norway a few years back, when a freemason suggested that the Freemasons had roots in the Vikings, and as evidence he used a figurine from a third-century burial mound that sported a cloth that the freemason interpreted as the apron that is part of Freemason insignia. What we see here is that the Viking Age – a purely historiographical construct – was extended back in time to the third century, connected to the mythical history of the Freemasons. Because Freemason mythology claims to have roots in the period of the reign of King Solomon, the Norwegian freemason effectively latched his extended Viking period onto the more extensive Freemason period, and managed to connect three dots – the reign of King Solomon, the Viking Age, and eighteenth century – into a unified history. While this kind of historical fantasy does operate with temporal divides, these divides are both closer to one another and more permeable than in reality, and this provides fertile ground for fantasies of continuity, whether those fantasies are used for embellishing one’s institutional identity or fomenting anti-Semitic hatred.          

There are numerous other examples of how achronology works as a cultural force, and this preliminary sketch is just a first attempt to put the fundamental idea into writing. I will emphasise that I don’t disapprove of creative anachronism, I relish it when it is done well, and I also do not think that achronological thinking exist in its purest form. But my point here is by simplifying the past and the slow chronological progress of that past, we can become receptive to fantasies that impact how we view or current time, and how we engage politically in the current time. Belief in the possibility of secret societies sustained across centuries or millennia, or belief in folk-spirits that remain unchanged across centuries or millennia, are both very dangerous because such belief makes the believer receptive to propaganda, manipulation and political programmes designed to alienate or ostracise individuals or entire peoples. Achronology plays a part in the willingness some people have to accept simplistic or conspiracy theory-oriented explanations of the past. And while there also are other factors at play, such as national mythologies or economic pressures, the misunderstanding of the past according to principles of achronology is one of the important factors to facilitate the weaponisation of the past to abuse people in the present.      

In my next blogpost, part 2, I will focus on one specific case which can be said to be fuelled by achronology.        

How I learned to love reading – the redux version

At its core, this blogpost is one I have been meaning to write for some time, and if I had not seen a particular video clip online today – more on which anon – I would have left this text to stew a bit longer in my brain, and I would have collected some photographs to illustrate it better. However, since I was reminded about some disgusting assumptions that people still entertain about class and reading, I’m publishing the redux version of a personal essay about how I learned to love reading.   

What prompted the writing of this redux version was a video clip where a judge for the Booker price expressed cheerful disbelief about a book club that included a dinner lady and a steel worker. I will not link to the clip, but it can easily be found with some basic searching. The relevant clip is very brief, and at first it might not seem a great offence, but it should be clear to anyone listening that to be mirthfully surprised about two working class individuals reading literature is to entertain a very misguided, erroneous and misguided view of whom literature is for, and how class should be used as a metric for judging individuals. Because class remains a dominant marker in contemporary society, to perpetuate such views is downright damaging, especially in an era when so many education systems and libraries are embattled by defunding and derisive treatment from – mostly right-wing – governments and other social forces. Precisely because arguments against the funding of libraries and public education play on notions about how access to books can be bought, there is also an implicit corollary that if you are too poor to buy books you don’t need or deserve books, or you are just not interested in books. Such arguments tie into many other strands of thinking, all of which tend to involve variants of the idea that people in certain classes do not need, or do not have any interest in, literature. Any such arguments and any such strands are rubbish, and the fact that they are rubbish is demonstrated by my own trajectory towards a love of reading.  



 Since this is the redux version, I’ll go easy on the autobiographical details, and I’ll skip some of the various milestones in my own history of reading. What matters for this text, however, is a general overview of my background. I was born on a farm in the Western Norwegian fjords. On both sides of my family people have been working as farmers, and been engaged in a variety of jobs that would classify as working class. To map the class-belonging of the past three generations is not easily done, however, because a typical aspect of working life in the Norwegian districts for the better part of the past hundred years or so is that one person would have many different jobs in the course of a lifetime, many of which were seasonal, and many served simply to strengthen the buffer against starvation.  

In the history of my love of reading, one important reference point is my paternal great-grandparents. They were sharecroppers, which in the social fabric of rural Norway meant that they did not own the land where they lived, but rented it from an independent, self-owning farm in exchange for services in the course of the agrarian year. Usually, sharecroppers were financially poor, and often had to add to their income by taking on other jobs. My great-grandmother worked as a seamstress, for instance, and my great-grandfather worked as a sexton. But above all else, they were agrarian labourers, and inhabited one of the lowest rungs on the social ladder of the Norwegian districts. In other words, my great-grandparents were the kind of people that certain judges would find implausible members of a book club.    

Yet my great-grandparents did read, and it was part of their reading that formed a part of my own literary trajectory. I never met them, but I grew up on stories from my grandmother and my grandaunt, and a significant, if not large, part of my childhood was spent in their house where my grandaunt lived for most of her life. In this house was, and still is, a book case that contains the majority of my great-grandparents’ library. Much of it is religious literature, as was typical at the turn of the nineteenth century. But there is also a frayed and fragile copy of Snorri Sturlusson’s Heimskringla, a collection of sagas of the Norwegian kings. This copy is from the first printed edition of Gustav Storm’s translation, published in 1899 in two versions, one deluxe and one which was significantly cheaper called “folkeutgåva”, or the people’s edition. The copy in my great-grandparents’ library is the cheaper copy, but this is still a magnificent book with medievalesque woodcut illustrations executed by leading Norwegian artists, and printed in a Gothic type clearly meant to evoke a medieval aesthetic.  

The printing of this people’s edition was part of a multi-pronged nation building that dominated much of Norwegian cultural life in the years before Norway’s independence from Sweden in 1905. As a part of this nation building there was the idea that the Norwegian folk-spirit could be found among the farmers, and it was in the district that the true Norwegian essence had survived centuries of Danish overlordship, and a near-century of Swedish overlordship. While the ideas about the Norwegian folk spirit are deeply problematic and grounded in a dangerous romanticising of poverty and hardship, there was one aspect of this view of the rural communities that proved very valuable: Namely the notion that the people, also in the poor rural districts, would appreciate the great medieval literature as represented by Heimskringla. I do not know whether my great-grandparents received this copy as a gift or whether they bought it, but based on the frayed edges and the weak spine, it was clearly a much-read book. It was in this condition I first encountered it.  

I do not remember exactly when I first came to this book. I have a vague recollection of some party, probably around Christmas, when being in a strange middle ground between relatives who were toddlers and relatives who were adults, I gravitated towards the book case. By this time I must have been around six or seven. I had already learned to love reading, so in a sense the title of this blogpost is rather misleading, but I was still in this heroic age of reading, where new challenges appear frequently, and where the limits of comprehension are being explored and pushed. The grown-up-looking book with arrows on the cover and tantalising illustrations of men armed with swords and helmets drew me in, and I began to read portions of it, not necessarily understanding much of the antiquated text which was more Danish than Norwegian in its orthography, but at the very least I was able to read the captions to the illustrations, and I became engrossed in the book.        

Since I first discovered this copy of Heimskringla, I returned to my great-grandparents’ book case at every family gathering, and my parents eventually bought a more up-to-date edition, with modern orthography and translated into Nynorsk. I read this book frequently, and although I have to this date not yet read it in its entirety, my own copy shows more than enough wear and tear to indicate its heavy use.

As stated, by the time I began reading Heimskringla, I had already learned to love reading, because it was that love which drew me to my great-grandparents’ book case in the first place. That love was certainly strengthened by the books kept in that book case, but it was also developed through numerous other channels. Some of these channels will only be mentioned as a concluding summary here, although in a more comprehensive version of this essay I aim to go deeper into these as well. The point is that my childhood in the Norwegian district was filled with books, books that I read and books that enticed me into more heavy literature, and books that, although I never read them fully, remained reference points on the journey towards a grown-up reader. Just as important, there were also magazines and comics, many of which were no less educational than the grown-up books, and most of which I have returned to in adult life with perhaps even greater pleasure.        

These influences caused me to love reading. My maternal grandparents had a similar book case, filled with bound volumes of children’s magazines and Norwegian literary classics, where I also sought refuge during family gatherings on that side of the family. My paternal grandmother bought me a subscription for one of those children’s magazines that she herself had grown up reading during her sharecropper childhood. My maternal grandfather gifted me many old copies of such magazines, along with various books. My parents bought me comics and books that allowed me to have those first exhilarating moments of advancing through the various stages of reading comprehension. The details are for another time, but for the present it bears repeating that all these initial stages happened within, and were made possible by, a family of farmers and rural workers, where my parents’ generation was the first to have much formal education after the age of 15, and where reading was valued and appreciated.

It is thanks to my rural family that I am the person I am today, and a large part of who I am is an avid reader – of books, of magazines, of comics, of many types of literature. I have been allowed to pursue my love of reading in my professional life, and my reading has shaped me in ways that I hope will prove beneficial in the grand scheme of things. One of the most valuable lessons I have learned in the course of my reading life is exactly this: That people from lower social classes have no less appreciation for and love of reading than those who grow up in middle and upper classes, and are also no less deserving or capable of participating in a reading world. Unfortunately, this lesson still needs to be taught, even in 2022.