THE ROLE OF A N A C H R O N I S M IN THE PRI NCESS JA M E S H A R R IS O N University of Guelph T h e term “ anachronism," though strictly applicable to any historical anomaly in a literary work, is in practice reserved for the intrusion of some modern element into an older setting, which makes it the reverse of archaism. Unlike archaism, however, anachronism is seldom thought of as a conscious literary device; nor should it be, clearly, in those cases where the immediate readers or hearers would not have been aware of any incongruity. But, since the rise of historical literature in the nineteenth century, the public has come to look for a single, consistent viewpoint in time, rather as it came to expect a single spatial point of view in painting after the discovery of the laws of perspective. The result is that writers and painters alike are able, by defeating these expectations, to achieve certain deliberate effects. In neither case, however, do they recapture man's earlier innocence of the relativeness of things - a sort of naively simul taneous or absolute view of the world akin to that supposedly enjoyed by God. Indeed, they may well emphasize or call attention to our present fallen particu larity of viewpoint. The most common use of anachronism, largely in works of dubious literary standing, is for purely comic or bathetic juxtaposition. By definition, anach ronism of this kind depends on the reader's juggling with two viewpoints in time simultaneously. The pleasure often derives, in fact, from a sense of irreverent parody, as with jazz versions of music by Bach. Probably all overt anachronism is at least slightly comic in this way. And if the comedy is sustained and pointed enough, it can become satiric, as in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.1 The most important non-comic function of anachronism is to give a more timelessly contemporary relevance to the historical, and reciprocally a more timelessly enduring significance to the contemporary. Many if not most liter ary excursions into the past are covertly anachronistic in this way. Thus the antique protagonists of “ Cleon," "Empedocles on Etna," and “ Ulysses" suffer from nineteenth-century psychological and spiritual dilemmas, just as Coriolanus and The Crucible incorporate postures not inappropriate to the politics of the time when they were written. As when it is used for pure comedy, how ever, anachronism of the kind we all recognize as such openly acknowledges and exploits the differences at the same time as it affirms the similarities English Stud ies in Ca n ad a, i , 3 (fall 1975) 3°5 Anachronism in The Princess between past and present. Thus when Giradoux makes those about to fight the Trojan War discuss territorial waters and breaches of international law,2 or when Anouilh has the reprobate sons of Oedipus smoke cigarettes at an early age and drive fast sports cars,3 we are made sharply aware, at one and the same time, that ancient Greeks and Trojans did no such things, and that they must have done comparable things and been remarkably like ourselves in other respects. Used in this way, anachronism is a very self-avowing and openly manipulative device, involving something close to Brechtian alienation. Indeed, when the four knights in Murder in the Cathedral address their twentiethcentury audience directly, Eliot employs alienation and anachronism simul taneously, as do Thornton Wilder in The Skin of Our Teeth and even, in a sense, Tennyson in The Princess, so contrived is his narrative machinery. In turning to The Princess, one must acknowledge at the outset that there are major obstacles to surmount in persuading many readers to take the work at all seriously. The mere notion of a poem on women's rights is often strain enough on their credulity, without the narrative technique being that of a party game, or the characters having to wear what amount to historical fancy dress cos tumes. Tone and style range, not entirely consequentially, from those of comic opera, when the Prince and his companions disguise themselves as women, through some exquisitely lyrical...