BY Stephen Jay Gould Morgan describes his despair as their captors string up King Arthur for a hanging: "They were blindfolding him! I was paralysed; I couldn't move, I was choking, my tongue was petrified ... They led him under the rope." But, in the best cliff-hanging traditions, and at the last conceivable instant, Sir Lancelot comes to the rescue with five hundred knights-all riding bicycles. "Lord, how the plumes streamed, how the sun flamed and flashed from the endless procession of webby wheels! I waved my right arm as Lancelot swept in. I tore away noose and bandage, and shouted: `On your knees, every rascal of you, and salute the king! Who fails shall sup in hell to-night!"' I am not citing either Monty Python or Saturday Night Live, and I didn't mix up my genders in the first sentence. The speaker is not Morgan le Fay (who, no doubt, would have devised a magical, rather than a technological, solution to the same predicament), but Hank Morgan, the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, and the hero in Mark Twain's satirical novel of the same name. Morgan, transported from nineteenthcentury Hartford, wreaks mayhem in sixth-century Camelot by introducing all manner of "modern" conveniences, including tobacco, telephones, baseball-and bicycles. As a literary or artistic device, anachronism exerts a powerful hold upon us, and has been a staple of all genres from the highest philosophy to the lowest comedy-as Jesus is crucified in a corporate boardroom by Dali, condemned at his Second Coming by Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, but only offered a half-price discount (as he changes to modern dress) by the Italian barber or the Jewish tailor of various ethnic jokes, now deemed tasteless and untellable. Anachronism works this eerie and potent effect, I suppose, because we use the known temporal sequence of our history as a primary device for imposing order upon a confusing world. And when "the time is out of joint. O cursed spite," we really do get discombobulated. We also know that correction of a perceived time warp cannot be achieved so easily in real life as in magical fiction (where Merlin can put Hank Morgan to sleep for 1,300 years, or Dracula can be dispatched with a wooden stake driven into the right spot). We regard Hamlet's blithe confidence as a mark of his madness when he completes his rhyming couplet with the Shakespearean equivalent of "no sweat" or "hakuna matata": ". . . That ever I was born to set it right!" Science, for reasons partly mythical, but also partly accurate and honorable, presents itself as the most linear and chronologically well ordered of all disciplines. If science, working by fruitful and largely unchanging methods of reason, observation, and experimentation, develops progressively more accurate accounts of the natural world, then history provides a time line defined by ever-expanding success. In such a simple linear ordering, mediated by a single principle of advancing knowledge, any pronounced anachronism must strike us as especially peculiar--and subject to diametrically opposite judgment depending upon the direction of warp. An ancient view maintained in the present strikes us as risible |
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