The Time is Out of Joint
All around us slippages are made between the past, present and future eroding the temporal border between them
The past appears to be invading the present. News bulletins and newspapers break with stories about the shaping force of events from centuries ago. In early November, the German president expressed shame and asked for forgiveness from Tanzania for crimes committed against its people during Berlin’s colonial rule in the age of the Kaisers. At the start of this year, the Church of England apologised for its historical links to slavery In both cases, the solemn mea culpas reverberated across the airwaves and news bulletins.
It’s not that colonial rule or slavery is unimportant. But for those of us who stumbled upon this news in the early morning hours, say, listening to the headlines of the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, the chronological dissonance was palpable. The reporting made it sound as if the crimes committed by Berlin rulers in the late 19th century and the slave trade were recent acts and the individuals apologising somehow responsible.
Elsewhere, the intrusion of the past permeates the fabric of cultural production. In literature, the trend gained prominence in the 1990s and has birthed exceptional work. Hilary Mantel's evocative Wolf Hall, for instance, delves into the rapid ascent of Thomas Cromwell within the court of Henry VIII, while Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet, is a fictionalised account of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, written, somewhat confusingly, in the present tense.
In other cases, as with the targeting and taking down of statues, or the American Ornithological Society changing the names of birds, there are many instances of treating the people of yesterday as if they are our contemporaries.
The prevailing temper of the time is that the past continuously unfolds in the moment and is never just history; it actively shapes the present. What happened long ago will catch up with everyone. We cannot move on. And it was always worse than you thought. There were no good old days.
So pervasive is the sense that the past dominates our present that it is difficult to imagine how it could be any other way, how our society once exhibited a marked indifference to history. But it did. It is relatively novel for leaders to draw attention to the ills committed by governments or institutions. When prime ministers used to talk about the past, it would be to commend it and draw upon it for legitimacy, to promote celebratory myths about the nation.
The eminent German scholar Andreas Huyssen, pinpoints the ascendancy of the West’s preoccupation with history to the 1980s, when, he observes, our collective gaze dramatically ‘shifted from present futures to present pasts.’ This was a turning point when the once bright concept of the future began to lose its luster, no longer serving as the canvas for boundless visions of what might be.
As Graham Swift puts it in his 1983 novel, Waterland: ‘Once upon a time, in the bright sixties, there was plenty of future on offer.’ By the time he was writing, that offer was narrowing. Subsequently, the ubiquitous prefix ‘post’ and ‘endism’ infiltrated our discourse: post-modern, post-industrial, post-national, the end of history, the death of the subject, the end of art, the end of grand meta-narratives, and the list goes on.
The sociologist John Torpey contends that the vogue for apologies and reparations, which came to a head in the 1990s and which has since intensified, served as a surrogate for the expansive visions of potential political programs that once defined both sides of the political spectrum. Societies turned away from arguing over what could be to fighting over the worse that has been done. Notably, he points out that the political left, once driven by the mantra ‘Don't mourn, organise,’ now finds itself subscribing to a new dictum: ‘We must organise to mourn.’
But at the same time, as the past appears to be everywhere it is the lens of the present that is imposed on most readings. Such as with the popular American series Bridgerton. Streaming on Netflix, the flirtatious and fun romance is set in Georgian England but is infused with modern-day preoccupations of race, and it is populated with the character of the feisty woman trying to break out of the stultifying confines of society.
Whether or not you have seen Bridgerton, you will recognise this character because she appears in most historical dramas. No matter if the TV show is set in the brutal life of Vikings living in Norheim in 790 or the industrial grime of Victorian Britain, the ‘feisty’ and protofeminist heroine, a modern woman of one dimension and one opinion, is always the same.
Take Elsa Dutton in 1883, which is set in the wild landscapes of Puritan America and settler society. At 18, Dutton vows not to marry, defys all gender conventions, and pairs up with a sexy Native American man who respects her independent spirit. She could be someone you know. She is a creation of the present imposed on the past.
Here is the feisty proto-feminist in Glasgow’s Burrell Collection.
Is this anachronistic approach the best way to understand the pious and ascetic St Catherine of Siena, who died from fasting? Does it elucidate the evolution of religious sculpture and the subtle manner in which over time craftsman gradually carved individuality and expression into wood? By imposing a presentist reading of history, that is, looking at the past through the eyes of today, understanding the past becomes more difficult. Imposing presentist categories also offers scant insight into the advocacy and attainment of women's rights by energetic social movements. Yet historians who once cautioned against it are now forcibly encouraging presentism.
Early novels such as those by Cervantes portrayed characters who were aware that they inhabited a changing the world. But it was with Walter Scott, who in the 19th century forged the historical novel, that you have historical characters that are never outside their time. This is no longer what culture presents. Characters like that of Dutton are historical only in so much as regards choice of theme and costume. Rather than 19th century America, her psychology and manners are those of today
As the future has a history, so too does the past. The idea of the past as not only before but different from the present developed at a particular time in a specific moment. It was with the Renaissance that a sense of differentiation emerged, as the Humanists distinguished between the immediate past— the medieval era, which they saw in a negative light—and the distant past of Antiquity, which they looked to for inspiration.
Modernity subsequently transformed most aspects of life including the experience of time. By the 19th century there was a quest for a linear narrative thread to unravel a collective past. Developments in science and politics, especially nationalism, contributed. Historians such as Leopold von Ranke and Thomas Macaulay, were engaged in this pursuit. So too was John Phillips FRS, the geologist who, in 1837, published the first global geologic time scale based on the fossils in rock strata. He argued:
‘For if no scale of time be known, the problem of the history of the successive conditions of the globe becomes most deplorable.’
It was in this context, that one of the central objectives of public museums came to be the organisation of time and place and they become enthusiasts for antiquity.
Until the 19th century most antiquity existed in a state state of negligence and dilapidation, covered in dirt, abandoned, exposed to the elements and robbed and plundered. The Acropolis for example, home to the Parthenon Marbles, was being used as a garrison for the Ottomans and locals were taking the blocks for their own buildings. The idea that it might be of artistic or intellectual interest or protected and displayed and venerated in museums was new.
Today, museums, once dedicated to the understanding the past, and understanding the development of objects in their historical and geographic context, are undergoing an active process of deperiodisation which deliberately blurs the different between the past and the present. Here, for example, is the Burrell Collection discovering transgenderism in 17th century China.
How can we make sense of this strange period in which the past is everywhere but simultaneously infused with present-day attitudes ? One way to think about it is that 'The time is out of joint.' That line, uttered by Hamlet after being visited by his father's ghost and learning that his uncle Claudius murdered his father, encapsulates how the sense of time has become disordered.
Past, present and future have collapsed into one another. The future is off the agenda, the past influences the present, but we can only view it through presentism. All of history blurs into one moment. This leaves us not only struggling to understand the past, but unable to get a handle on the times we live in. We are left stranded out of time.