Anachronism in the Anthropocene: Plural Temporalities and the Art of Noticing in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

This article develops the concept of anachronism as a posthuman response to the crisis of linear time and human progress in the Anthropocene. It contends that anachronism can suspend a forward direction in the “post” of the posthuman by understanding history, and the human subject, as unfinished projects. The article analyzes Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013), which utilizes anachronism to dislodge both realist literary conventions and canonical time. With its metatextual discourse mixing life writing and fiction and embedding posthuman consciousness into literary form, Ozeki’s novel resists narrative closure in order to displace binaries between past and present, modern and nonmodern, and human and nature. The ethical and political potential of anachronism, as explored in the novel, recuperates temporalities, subject positions, and nonhuman materiality that have been obscured by dominant versions of modern history. Anachronism offers a productive analytic to decenter a liberal humanist subject from history to make space for other, anachronistic, and entangled understandings of time and subjectivity.