The Heterochronic Past and Sidewise Historicity: T. S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso and Murray Leinster

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, primitivism and paleomodernism appeared to reflect primarily those conditions out of which both modernism and SF have been shown to emerge: evolutionary and imperial conceptions of history. Modernism’s complex engagement with late-nineteenth-century time culture went beyond a simple turn toward the past and produced alternative conceptions of time and history. This chapter explores the idea of heterochrony derived from evolutionary biology’s knowledge of the body’s hodgepodge of disjunctive timings and times in order to reexamine two canonical orientations toward the past—Eliot’s tradition and Picasso’s primitivism. Drawing a connection with Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” (1934), which features a jumbled and patchwork geography comprising a “Post-Cambrian jungle left in eastern Tennessee,” a Russian Alaska and California, and preindustrial Chinese settlements around the Potomac, this chapter reconfigures modernist “pastism” against the notion of a single, progressive, evolutionary history justifying racist imperial schemes, as well as the shallowing of time by capitalist space-time compression.