8. ‘A disciple of Albertus Magnus [...] in the eighteenth century’: Anachronism and Anachrony in Frankestein

Résumé 0

Although Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is set in the late eighteenth century, its plot depends to a large extent on Victor’s alchemical pursuits, making him a living anachronism, a notion which the novel draws attention to at several points. It might more generally be argued that the novel’s writing and the effect it produces rest on the superimposition of two or more temporal lines and notably on the blurring of two supposedly antithetical conceptions of time, historical (or linear) time and mythical (or cyclical) time. This blurring and perhaps even co-existence of different timelines is what I explore in this essay by relying on the notion of anachrony, taken in its narratological sense, as a chronological disorder between diegesis and narrative, and in its poetical, creative sense, following Jacques Rancière’s definition of the term: “events, notions, significations that are contrary to time, that make meaning circulate in a way that escapes any contemporaneity, any identity of time with itself.” I here examine the temporal experience presented by the novel through its complex handling of time before focusing on the anachronistic protagonist, broadening the perspective thanks to other examples taken from Shelley’s fiction. Indeed, many of her protagonists are thrust into a time period they do not belong to, either literally, thanks to a process of reanimation, or metaphorically, as they cling to old-fashioned values for instance. From Frankenstein onwards, the impact of Shelley’s work can be accounted for at least partly by her poetical use of anachrony.