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 Routledge Research in Museum Studies

TIME AND THE MUSEUM

LITERATURE, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND
THE PRODUCTION OF RADICAL TEMPORALITY

Jen A. Walklate
Time and the Museum

Time and the Museum: Literature, Phenomenology, and the Production

of Radical Temporality, is the first explicit in-depth study of the nature of
museum temporality.
It argues as its departure point that the way in which museums have hith-
erto been understood as temporal in the scholarship – as spaces of death,
othering, memory, and history – is too simplistic, and has resulted in museum
temporality being reduced to a strange heterotopia (Foucault) – something
peculiar, and thus black boxed. However, to understand the ways in which
museum temporalities and timescapes are produced, and the consequences
that these have upon display and visitor response, is crucial, because time is
itself a political entity, with ethical consequence.
Time and the Museum highlights something we all experience in some
way – time – as a key ethical and political feature of the museum space.
Utilizing the fields of literature and phenomenology, the book examines
how time is experienced and performed in the public areas of three museum
spaces within Oxford – the Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, and Oxford University
Museum of Natural History. Using concepts such as shape, structure, form,
presence, absence, authenticity, and aura, the book argues for a reconsid-
eration of museum time as something with radical potential and political
weight. It will appeal to academics and postgraduate students, especially
those engaged in the study of museums, culture, literature, and design.

Jen A. Walklate (University of Aberdeen) is a museologist, historian, and

literary theorist, studying the intersections between museums and other cul-
tural media, including literature, drama, and comics. She utilizes novelis-
tic and poetic forms and concepts to open new ways of considering visitor
experience in museum contexts, and literature as an analytical framework for
understanding the construction and performance of museums. Drawing upon
this study, she is looking at new ways to create more representative, inclusive,
egalitarian, and intellectually open institutions.
Routledge Research in Museum Studies

This series presents the latest research from right across the field of museum
studies. It is not confined to any particular area, or school of thought, and
seeks to provide coverage of a broad range of topics, theories, and issues
from around the world.
The following list includes only the most-recent titles to publish within the
series. A list of the full catalogue of titles is available at: https://www.routledge.
com/Routledge-Research-in-Museum-Studies/book-series/RRIMS

Museums, International Exhibitions and China’s Cultural Diplomacy

Da Kong

Curating Lively Objects

Exhibitions Beyond Disciplines
Edited by Lizzie Muller and Caroline Seck Langill

Theorizing Equity in the Museum

Integrating Perspectives from Research and Practice
Edited by Bronwyn Bevan and Bahia Ramos

Revisiting the Past in Museums and at Historic Sites

Edited by Anca I. Lasc, Andrew McClellan and Änne Söll

Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value

Edited by Howard Morphy and Robyn McKenzie

Human Rights Museums

Critical Tensions Between Memory and Justice
Jennifer Carter

Time and the Museum

Literature, Phenomenology, and the Production of Radical Temporality
Jen A. Walklate
Time and the Museum
Literature, Phenomenology, and the
Production of Radical Temporality

Jen A. Walklate
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2023 Jen A. Walklate
The right of Jen A. Walklate to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-032-16406-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-16410-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-24844-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003248446

Typeset in Times New Roman

by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
This book is dedicated to my former supervisor,
and friend, Simon J. Knell, who wouldn’t let me
call it Tears in the Rain.

In Memory of T. G. Cresswell, who taught me

to never be good.
Contents

List of Figures ix
Acknowledgements x

PART I
Contextualizing 1

Introduction: Time 3
1 Frame 21

PART II
Temporal Shapes 47

Introduction: Contours in Time 49

2 Linearity 50
3 Non-Linearity 69

PART III
Temporal Atmospheres 89

Introduction: Time and Spirit 91

4 Presence 92
5 Absence 107
6 Authenticity 135
7 Auracity 149
viii Contents
PART IV
Consequences and Meanings 161

Conclusion: After-Words163
Coda: In Extremis178

Bibliography 181
Index 191
Figures

2.1 Star House Pole, Pitt Rivers Museum. Copyright, the Author 59
3.1 ‘The real Alice’, Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Copyright, the Author 75
3.2 The Pitt Rivers Staircase, Pitt Rivers Museum, Copyright
the Author 81
3.3 The mis-en-page of the Pitt Rivers Great Court, Pitt Rivers
Museum, Copyright the Author 83
4.1 Knossos Palace, Ashmolean Museum, Copyright, Ashmolean
Museum101
5.1 The Pickling Block, Oxford University Museum of Natural
History. Copyright, the Author 117
6.1 The Augustus of Primo Porto, the Ashmolean Museum.
Copyright, the Author 141
7.1 The Coromandel Screen, the Ashmolean Museum.
Copyright, the Author 150
Acknowledgements

On the problem of language in relation to time, O. K. Bouwsma writes:

‘What, in certain aspects, makes this a playground is also what makes it a
labyrinth.’ The same can be said to be true of gratitude. Words don’t convey
such an internal feeling, and I have never in any case been much good at
communicating such experiences, at least in part for fear of misattributing
a contribution, or entirely eliding the name of a significant person. If you are
not, therefore, mentioned here, do not for one moment think that I am not
grateful. You are implicit in all the pages of this book.
To Simon: for trusting me to find the way through to my thesis, and in
apology for the many times I put your eyebrows into your hair, this book is
dedicated to you. To Ross and Viv: thank you for tea, oranges, and uncon-
ditional confidence. To the Department of Anthropology at the University
of Aberdeen: I am honoured by the opportunity to complete this book in
the Silver City. To the Pitt Rivers, Oxford University Museum of Natural
History, and the Ashmolean: I appreciated the chance haunt your galleries.
To Gudrun: Þakka þér fyrir for being demanding. To Steph: I am indebted
to you for the ‘supersonic years.’ To Jen: to paraphrase a wise one, good tea,
nice office, dear friend. To Deckard and Batty: every day you remind me that
‘time with cats is never wasted.’ To Will: I am forever grateful for our entan-
glement, even at opposite ends of the universe. To my parents, Fran and Bob:
thank you for tolerating multiple degrees and a peculiar career path.
To my Grandad, T. G. Cresswell: thank you for the gift of contrarianism.
Sometimes, it lets you see things others miss. This book is in memory of you.
Part I

Contextualizing
Introduction
Time

Introduction
In Being and Time, Heidegger positions temporality as the central phenomena
which all other philosophical and ontological concerns orbit. ‘Time,’ he writes
‘must be brought to light and genuinely conceived as the horizon of all under-
standing of being and every interpretation of being’ (Heidegger 2010: 17).
Were we to suggest a concrete example of this argument, we could do worse
than offer the museum, in all its forms, up for examination. For museums are
indebted to time. They not only exist within it; they shape cultural perceptions
of it. They manipulate it and, in their turn, are manipulated by it. They multi-
ply the chronic capacities of objects, projecting their relevance across time and
space. They pull distant pasts – and other presents (other futures, indeed) –
into the Now of their buildings and their visitors. It could be argued that it is
the temporal quality of museums which makes them one of the most power-
ful invocations of the complexity which is human consciousness and experi-
ence. Indeed, it is a commonplace that the nature of museum time is somehow
unique – that the museum is situated in a heterochrony, a heterotopia – that
it is special. And yet, this deification of museal time allows it to be side-lined
as an investigative topic, for once something is deemed ‘strange’ it can more
easily be left aside and black boxed as something already dealt with.
The fundamental purpose of this book is to remove museum temporality
from the pedestal on which it has been positioned, to re-equip it with the
power it has always held, and to offer to readers – museum workers, design-
ers, and academics – a set of tools with which to investigate and understand
it. There are several key reasons for this, not the least of which being that
museum time, and indeed time in general, is fundamentally political: an
issue of power, and of ethics. The book will posit that various agents, liv-
ing, non-living, and dead, have a role in producing museum time, and will
argue that museums understood as sites of radical temporality have a polit-
ical, and ontological, weight. The rest of this introduction seeks to present
the author’s stance on time in general, then some reflections on the ways in
which museums and temporality have been entangled in the disciplinary
literature, and finally to discuss the shape of the remainder of the book.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003248446-2
4 Contextualizing
The Nature of Time
Before I start, I want to clarify one thing: this book does not, for the most
part, deal with what we might call ‘common sense’ or clock time. For one
thing, globalized clock time as it is contemporarily understood is compara-
tively recent, and for another, it has a structure and presumed universality
which does not admit temporal understandings outside of a highly indus-
trialized capitalist model. We should also distinguish between the measure
of a phenomena, and the phenomena itself. Greenwich style clock time is
only one of a manifold of ways in which temporality itself might be meas-
ured, and we are not, here, interested in the ways in which time is presented
through measure, but in temporality itself as a distinct, experiential thing.
That said, we need to define what we mean when we talk about the phenom-
ena of temporality in this book. Though time is such a fundamental part of
museological practice, its black boxed nature in the literature means that it is
vital to define terms before beginning the exploration of time in the museum.
There is plenty of literature, philosophical, anthropological, and scientific
regarding the nature of time and of temporality in broader human experi-
ence, and whilst we do not have time, here, to review all of it, it is necessary
to address in brief some of the fundamental questions which this literature
throws up in relation to the ontology of time itself. These questions regard
the objective reality of time, and how time is made manifest to consciousness.

The Objective Reality of Time

Substantivalism, or absolutism, argues that time has an objective reality
outside of the human mind (Le Poidevin 2003: 27). Relationists such as
Leibniz argued that time was only an ideal thing – that is, it only existed
in relation to things within it, which were constantly perishing and finding
themselves with a new duration:

It cannot be said that [a certain] duration is eternal but [it can be said]
that the things which continue always are eternal, [gaining always a
new duration.] Whatever exists of time and of duration, [being succes-
sive] perishes continually: and how can a thing exist eternally, which
(to speak exactly) does never exist at all? For, how can a thing exist,
whereof no part does ever exist? Nothing of time does ever exist, but
instances; and an instant is not even itself a part of time
(Alexander 1956: 72–3).

However, in this book, we are taking an approach that more closely aligns
with phenomenology, which itself takes a lead from the transcendental
idealism of Kant. Here, we argue that time is a form of perception: that
it neither arises from the subject (the perceiver) nor the object (the thing
being perceived), but instead is a subjective ‘condition of the possibility of
 Time 5
perception of the world’ (Kant 1998: 43). Whether it has an objective real-
ity outside this perception or otherwise is immaterial: in the case of the
museum, it is the human experience which matters. Crucially, this enables
the museum producer and the museum visitor to understand that socially
agreed measures and understandings of time, whilst of pragmatic use, are
to some degree a fiction: and consequentially that these fictions vary from
culture to culture, and across the broad scope of history.
Understanding time as a facet of human experience, we can more closely
examine the phenomenological approaches to temporality which form
a key basis of this book. Husserl, for example, who focused on the lived
experience of time in inner consciousness, argued for an egological notion
of temporality, which states that time is entirely subjective (West-Pavlov
2013: 43), and this attitude was visible throughout much of the philoso-
phy, psychology, and modernist literature of the early twentieth century.
Phenomenological approaches focus on private, not public, time, and how
it is experienced in consciousness and the body. Henri Bergson developed
this into the complex idea of durée: that is, lived duration as the ‘immediate
data of consciousness,’ where there is no simple juxtaposition of events and
thus no mechanical causation, a place in which free will is possible (Bergson
1959: 91). Durée, for Bergson, was a heterogeneous multiplicity, in which
‘several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another,
[and] gradually gain a richer content’ (Bergson 1959: 122). Heidegger’s argu-
ments regarding Dasein went further. Dasein means, literally, ‘there-being’
(da-sein) and can be used as a term to understand the conscious form of
Being that humans possess. Dasein’s mode of being, Heidegger argues, is
made possible by temporality, which is understood as exclusive from Time
(as measure). Temporality, in Heidegger’s terms, temporalizes possible ways
of itself (Heidegger 2010: 377). All processes of nature, living or not, take
place within this, and thus Heidegger argues that time is more than relative:
it is the ‘truth’ of space experienced by an individual (Heidegger 2010: 481).
West-Pavlov puts it succinctly: time is not a thing as much as it is ‘the fabric
of our existence, outside of which no knowledge is possible’ (West-Pavlov
2013: 70). West-Pavlov’s resolution to the problem of time’s reality is ‘imma-
nent time’: that is, time which does not exist as a separate category, as such,
but is process itself, multiple and auto-poetic, without stable beginnings and
endings, ideal and real (West-Pavlov 2013: 50–53).
This book argues that the only reality which really matters when talking
about museum temporality is that of design and experience, the intentions
with which museum temporal structures are created, and the ways in which
those constructions are encountered and interpreted by the museum’s con-
scious inhabitants who can be characterized as Dasein. Temporality in the
museum is real in certain ways – in that it is experienced – but that experi-
ence is perceptual, relative, and immanent. Interrogating the reality of time
in the context of museology is a political and ethical act, a step towards
unpicking Eurocentric, colonialist, capitalist, imperial, and historicist
6 Contextualizing
presumptions about past, present, future, linearity, and chronology, which
still underpin museum ontology and design today, and thus a fundamental
step towards a museum which is powerfully and radically temporalized.

Time Made Manifest

We perceive time through sensory engagement. Given that these senses are
largely engaged in perceiving the physical world, we perceive time through
the medium of space: through movement, or alterations in state. We also per-
ceive it cognitively, through memory and expectation. Fundamentally, how-
ever, both the physical and cognitive forms of time are experienced through
process and fluctuation: through change. Time has been understood as
change for several thousand years: Heraclitus watched time flow like a river
(Kahn 1979: 53) and Aristotle deemed ‘time,’ in terms of human calendrics,
to be an unreal measure of real natural movements (West-Pavlov 2013: 32).
In this book, we follow Robin LePoidevin in highlighting the need to dif-
ferentiate between the different types of change which one might encounter
when dealing with temporality: first-order change, which refers to events
that happen to objects, and second-order change, which refers to the inexo-
rable slippage of things from future to present and past (Le Poidevin 2003:
16–17). It is critical to understand both these forms of time-as-change when
exploring museum temporality, because they offer different granular levels
at which time is expressed within the material world, and in the cognitive
worlds of the visitor and the museum designer/interpreter.
It is also important to clearly state the ways in which, in this book, we shall
be interpreting the nature of past, present, and future. Following James, it is
argued here that the notion of a fixed present is specious – there is no such
solid thing as The Present, because it is constantly slipping into the past
before our minds have been able to grasp it – imagine the distance, if you
will, between hearing the thud of a cricket ball being hit, and actually seeing
it connect with the bat. A more useful way of understanding the nature of
‘present’ comes from Husserl. He conceptualized the present as a saddle-
back (West-Pavlov 2013: 43) in which ‘retentions’ (parts of the past remain-
ing on the horizon of experience) stretch out into a ‘comet’s tail’ behind the
‘now-apprehension’ and upon which the future is always falling in the form
of protentions (Kern 1983: 83). In a pattern such as this, LePoidevin argues,
the future and the past are not symmetrical, for whilst the past has ‘truths,’
the future does not. Whilst it is not illogical to argue about the distinction
between the past and the future (there must be some, after all), given the dif-
ficulties faced in attributing ‘truthfulness’ as such to the past, it seems more
suitable to follow a more Derridian model, and argue that the asymmetry
is a product of qualitative rather than quantitative difference: that the past
leaves a mark of différance upon the present – a ‘trace’ – which is experi-
ential and quantifiable; whereas, if the future leaves a trace in the form of
expectation and imagination, it is wholly speculative (Derrida 1997: 62).
 Time 7
This has two fundamental consequences for the museum experience: one,
the idea that the present is specious has implications for the way in which
museum practitioners and theorists understand and describe visitor experi-
ence within them; and two, distinguishing between the complexities of past
and future suggests that the relationship is something that museums cannot
afford to take for granted. The way in which temporality is being concep-
tualized here is akin to the nature of memory; overlapping and saturating
the now with what has been and what is yet to come. This suggests that we
cannot understand temporality as simply linear, but instead that we have to
comprehend it as something much more rhizomatic. The understanding of
history in such a way is not unprecedented: a key publication is DeLanda’s
A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, which draws upon both the con-
tingency outlined above, but also upon scientific, materialist approaches,
and Deleuze and Guattari to posit a history of overlapping, synchronous
‘phase transitions’ in which linearity is produced only by the people looking
back, and in which the future is a Borghesian splayed hand of potentials
(DeLanda 2000: 15). This approach stretches into all areas of the human
sciences, including not just history, but also social geography, in the global
complexity theory of John Urry (Urry 2003).
The following analogy is simplistic, and fails to account for the three-
dimensional nature of space, but it is a useful one for illustrating something
of the complexity which this book is attempting to express with regard to the
nature of time. Imagine a handkerchief, potentially infinite in extent: this is
space-time. Every point on every thread of this handkerchief is a saturated
temporal event. Laid flat, and depending upon your perspective, relations
can be drawn between each of the threads. But the handkerchief can also be
crumpled, such that all points are potentially entangled with each other in
the complex fabric of experience, which is sensory and cognitive, predicated
upon change, and can be brought into different relationships with each other
through the folding of temporality which occurs in memory and expectation.
What this book aims to posit, then, is that there are manifold possibilities
to be found in a complex, non-linear, radically temporalized museology.

Museums and Temporality

In order to achieve this, however, it is first critical to explore the ways in
which museums have historically been temporalized. In art curation schol-
arship, some focus has been placed on curatorial praxis as embedded in
temporality through themes such as presence and the contemporary (see
Schubert 2019, for example), and the relationship between museums and
the academy is often visible in shared disciplinary constructions of time,
such as deep time in geology, the ethnographic present in anthropology,
and the variety of temporalized narratives espoused by different schools of
historical thought. These have had distinctive consequences upon the ways
in which museums have presented ‘time’ – at least in a narrative sense. As
8 Contextualizing
constructions with cultural consequence, some of these ideas will appear
throughout this book, but as we noted previously, time as a specific form
of measure is less important here than the phenomenological experience of
temporality itself. Time, as we understand it here, is not generally directly
addressed in the museum literature, though this is beginning to change with
the publication of such volumes as Pels and Modest’s Museum Temporalities:
Time, History and the Future of the Ethnographic Museum (2021). Instead, it
is usually tackled through subsidiary subjects, and as a result, scholarship on
the issue has a long and fragmented history. Here, we shall explore it through
a number of those key themes into which it has been implicitly categorized:
death, othering, memory, and history. Each of these themes has a ring of the
extraordinary about them, whether through a process of distancing or the
suggestion of an intensity of affect. This sense of the peculiar runs through
the literature on museum time, as we have noted above, no matter whether
the attitude of the author is positive or negative about museums and heritage
sites in general. And so, the purpose of this section is not merely to review
and regurgitate this attitude, but to question it, and to question the validity
of the themes into which discussions of museum temporality have arranged
themselves. Insodoing, we can set up the rest of the book as a place in which
method, as much as attitude and appearance, is used to investigate and reveal
a picture of museum temporality which is both more quotidian, and more
bizarre; a temporality which is legible, adaptable, and expressive.
Why not begin at the end, with death?

Death
Death is perhaps the ultimate expression of the temporal nature of exist-
ence: during death, there is nothing but an embodied, excessively intense
present, after which there will be no more Now; and after it, there is nothing
but the abject transgression of the empty body – abject and transgressive,
because its mannequin complicity with nothingness reminds those around
it of their own tenuous mortality. Remarking upon Oedipus, the poet
Friedrich Holderlin writes that, ‘… at the most extreme edge of suffering,
nothing exists besides the conditions of time or space’ (2009).
Perhaps this – this excessively present quality, this mannequin abjection –
is why the museum has, since at least the time of Quatremere de Quincy,
been associated with death. This association has come in two forms: muse-
ums as active producers of death; and museums as places which hold the
relics of the dead. Murderers and cemeteries.

Museums as Murderers
Adorno once argued that the word museal suggests that the objects con-
tained within no longer have a vital relationship with their observer
(Adorno 1981: 175) – implying that museumification is an act of violence
 Time 9
which removes objects from the social sphere and into an idealistic space
maintaining hegemonic power. In this disruption, objects are brought into
an environment deemed divergent, ‘ahistorical’; a place of ritualistic per-
formance (Duncan and Wallach 1978: 29). In this light, a museum is a place
with a heavy, timeless aura – a void, implies Blanchot, which ‘lends itself
to being filled up with everything it isn’t’ (Blanchot 1982: 11). Museums are
murderers, then, inasmuch as they are seen to strip away the ‘true’ meaning
of material goods – that is, the purpose for which they were originally made.
The work of art, writes Blanchot, ‘does not take shelter in a museum’ – it is
an active agent in social life, impossible to remove without mortally wound-
ing it (Blanchot 1982: 204).
But such arguments imply two assumptions – one, that museums are
places entirely separate from and devoid of living sociality; and two, that
there is a true meaning of any object which is singular and inherent, locked
permanently into the thing itself. The first assumption – in the contempo-
rary world at least – is demonstrably untrue: there is a plethora of litera-
ture on museums as sites of interaction, and as agents of social justice. And
the second is very much reducible to an ontological debate regarding the
‘thingness of things’ (Heidegger 2001: 161–80); in other words, in where or
what the meaningfulness of the object lies. If the standpoint taken is that
objects only have meaning as a consequence of the ‘vigilance of mortals,’
(Heidegger 2001: 179) then objects are relational – their meaning produced
in their interaction with conscious minds. Such interactions can and do
occur in the space of museums, where objects are reconfigured – Huyssen
said, ‘resurrected’ (Huyssen 1995: 195) – and made meaningful anew. And if
a thing has and is able to have both presence and meaning – that is, possess
material and immaterial qualities – isn’t it illogical to call it ‘dead’?
One might argue that preserving something physically, preventing it from
its normal form of decay, is also a kind of murder: that preservation, which
lies at the heart of museum work, is in itself a form of crime against the
material truth of an object. Yet, again, that presumes that the meaning of
something lies simply in its physical embodiment. I would argue, instead,
that when objects which are designed to decay are taken and preserved
under a museum’s care, it is not a violence against the object, not the murder
of the object, but an act of callous inconsideration for the values of the peo-
ple from which the object comes. That callous act does not kill an object – it
does something far worse, which is to not simply change, but to fundamen-
tally destroy, its intended meaning, and thus drive a wedge of understanding
between a museum and a people, in the presumption that preservation of
the authentically physical, a very Western form of remembrance, is the ulti-
mate goal for any object or its maker.
Outside of such extreme cases, it could be argued that it is in the very
nature of museums not to cause death – which is terminal nothingness – but
merely to incite change, and cause the multiple potential meanings of appar-
ently singular things to blossom. Pearson and Shanks posit rupture – which
10 Contextualizing
allows things to perform the changes which they undergo – as ‘essential to
the authentic imagination’ (Pearson and Shankes 2001: 118). This is visible
in the multiplicity of meanings which museum objects possess – their ability
to represent more than they would have represented in their initial lives.

Museums as Cemeteries
According to Sherman, it was Quatremere de Quincy who first designated
museums as mausolea (Sherman 1994: 123). And the appellation as a place
of burial stuck, from the modernist avant garde and Adorno, to postmod-
ernism and beyond.
The nature of the words used when describing museums as tombs is inter-
esting: call them mausolea, as did de Quincy, and you evoke the lost royal
memorial at Halicarnassus, built for Mausolos, the king of Caria. Call them
sepulchres, as did Adorno (Adorno 1981), and immediately they are ren-
dered as something much more ritualistic and holy – sepulchre being used in
particular to designate the cave outside Jerusalem in which Christ was said
to be entombed, and related to the Sanskrit word for ‘honours’ – saparyati.
And the museum’s position as a burial ground is constantly shifting and
ambivalent. Witcomb notes how modernist and protomodernist figures,
including Nietzsche, Valery, Adorno, the Futurists, Surrealists, and the
Dadaists, conceptualized museums as tombs requiring oblivion (Witcomb
2003: 8) – in the Futurist Manifesto Marinetti wrote, ‘We want to destroy
museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, fem-
inism, and every kind of materialistic, self-serving cowardice’ (Marinetti
2011: 5). Yet, as was almost inevitable, the avant garde became a tradition,
canonized and codified and buried in the museum it so hated. The postmod-
ernists would come to see museums as ‘empirical relics of modernity,’ things
speaking of ‘modernity’s antiquity,’ things to be destroyed (Knell 2007: 2).
Here, there is a ruinous quality, recognized by Giebelhausen when she
speaks of the sense of suspension and void one encounters in a museum
(Giebelhausen 2012): a building where ruined objects – ruined physically, and
missing bits of their meaning – are placed on display. The museum is a cem-
etery in that it and its contents perform substitute remembrances of times,
events, and people which are no longer – the metonymic actions of stuff and
headstones. However, Andrea Witcomb argues that we need to move beyond
the association of museums with places of stasis and death, and indeed that
‘[t]here never was a moment when the museum conformed entirely to the cri-
tique’ (Witcomb 2003: 9). If what we discussed above regarding the relational
nature of objects is correct, then the association between museums and mau-
solea is lessened. If we conceptualize museums instead as spaces where mani-
fold interactions are had and multiple meanings made manifest, it seems that
they are places more ambivalent and fluctuating: places not where time has
ended or been arrested, but ‘where time seems to oscillate’ (Giebelhausen
2012: 236).
 Time 11
Othering
Death is a form of othering. Kristeva wrote of the corpse as the ‘most sick-
ening of wastes … a border that has encroached upon everything’ (Kristeva
1982: 3) – a place which reveals the abject nature of the body once con-
sciousness has departed; the not-I (Kristeva 1982: 1). But there are other
forms of othering which occur in relation to museums, and they too are
heavily temporal. Their temporality stems from their act of distancing, their
almost reification, which situates museums and their objects outside of the
everyday. There are two forms of othering to be discussed here in relation to
museums: the othering of and the othering within.

The Othering Of
By ‘othering of’ is meant the othering of museums themselves. This othering
is an action of language and attitude, committed both by those running the
museum, and from the outside by those (in positions of greater or lesser power)
looking in. Museums are othered through remoteness – the charge of elitism
which has been laid at their feet and enacted by them historically, their position
as ‘architectures of secular power’ (von Naredi-Rainer 2004: 9), the intimidat-
ing nature of their entrances (Heumann Gurian 2005), their ambivalent status
as places of the sacred, or the profane. Perhaps, too, we can see the othering
of museums in the expectation of their capacity to produce resonance and
wonder, (Greenblatt 1991) even, as Ekman suggests, as sites of antaeic magic
(Ekman 2012). Perhaps, the most obvious act of othering is that enacted by
the word heterotopia. It was Michel Foucault who designated the museum as
such, but many have taken on the concept and used it since then as shorthand
for the museum’s perceived alterity (Bennett 1995 and Lord 2006, for instance).
But what is the heterotopic museum, if we look closely? In his extensive
description of the heterotopia in ‘Of Other Places,’ Foucault assigns them
five characteristics – 1) that they belong to every society and fall roughly
into two forms – heterotopia of crisis, and heterotopia of deviation; 2) that
they are defined by the cultures in which they exist, and change in relation
to those same cultures; 3) that they bring together apparently incompati-
ble sites; 4) that they are linked to slices in time called heterochronies; and
5) that they are closed, or penetrable only by the possession of particular
means or qualities (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986: 24–27). In The Order of
Things, they are described as places which turn the commonplace inside
out and deny it validity: ‘they destroy syntax in advance, and not only the
syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax
which causes words and things (near to and also opposite one another) to
“hold together”’ (Foucault 2005: xviii).
The heterotopia of The Order of Things seem much more malevolent than
those in ‘Of Other Spaces.’ If museums are the heterotopias of The Order
of Things, they are ‘disturbing,’ disruptive to meaning and identity. Are
12 Contextualizing
museums truly like this? Yes, and no. Yes, because in abjection – in bodies
and ruined objects – they indicate the fragility of individual and cultural
consciousness, and therefore the fragility of meaning. No, because they are
used as mnemonics, as places to remember who and what the Earth and its
inhabitants have been and are.
But we can best designate the museum as a heterotopia (or not) through
an exploration of their characteristics as laid out in ‘Of Other Spaces.’
It seems obvious that museums align with the final four of Foucault’s five
characteristics. (2) Museums, their meaning and function, are continually
modified as societies change, and as the concept is transferred out of the
European milieu across geography and culture. (3) Museums juxtapose at
least the remnants of sites distant in space and time, including the visitor,
who is other than the objects, other than the museums, and who therefore,
on entering the space, takes part in a masquerade of ghosts. Lord’s argument
that it is banal to designate the museum as a heterotopia because it is a space
of the difference of objects (Lord 2006: 4) may go some way to accounting
for the diversity of contemporary museums whilst retaining their status as
heterotopia, but it fails to account for the divergent heteroclite which is the
visitor. (4) Museums are associated with heterochronies – moments when a
break is made with traditional time – as we have seen in our discussion of
them as cemeteries, and as can be observed in their capacity to pull multiple
histories and locales together. (5) Museums are also understood as closed –
one might cite the example of the contemporary art museum, the meaning of
which proves impenetrable unless one has the language to decode and read it.
It is more difficult to read them as places of crisis or deviation (1) – certainly,
if they are read as the bastions of cultural hegemony which they have histor-
ically been deemed. That said, if they are understood instead as places of
abjection, as places which, in their jigsawing of times and locations, force us
to reconsider those things we thought ordinary and inalienable as culturally
specific and mortal – then perhaps they are places of crisis after all.
But a comparison of museums with the features of heterotopia does noth-
ing to examine the validity of the concept itself. And because it is a concept
with such heft in the museological landscape, there is no doubt that we must
do so. Beth Lord uses the concept of heterotopia to undermine the reading of
Foucault’s conception of the museum as a negative thing, an ‘Enlightenment
institution that embodies state power’ (Lord 2006: 1). But her discussion does
not question the validity of the heterotopia as concept; indeed, she modifies
its designation into something simpler and more positive – a space of rep-
resentation (Lord 2006). This leaves behind the complexities – sinister and
otherwise – outlined above, and it fails to ask if such a concept has validity
or reality at all.
What needs to be questioned is the term itself. It is very easy to use ‘het-
erotopia’ to explain away in one word the peculiar, enchanted temporality
museums are seen to have. But heterotopia is a construct, one which collects
the diversity of sites which have the potential to be counter-hegemonic, and
 Time 13
packs them safely into a term which can be trotted out by those in power
over the representation of culture and of museums. Furthermore, the asso-
ciation implicitly drawn with the Utopia – the non-place – has the potential
to make any such site (already withdrawn from conventional reality) seem
less real, and thus render it toothless (I have published critiques of the het-
erotopia in this vein in Walklate 2018).
Instead, perhaps it is more appropriate to suggest that museums and the loca-
tions within which they are associated in the heterotopic schema – funhouses,
fairgrounds, and sites of spectacle – can be sites of antaeic magic; sites in which
place and environment intensify the experience of objects through their physi-
cal (and perhaps conceptual) context (Ekman 2012). Antaeic magic is a quality
places possess, rather than a type of place; as such, it recognizes the diversity of
places and affords them power; and, with that power, culpability. It means that
those sites are open to questioning, to critique; but it also means they have the
power to be radical and revolutionary.
Designations – temporal, physical, and locative – are powerful things. They
build representations of institutions and peoples into the cultural mindscape.
To opaquely enchant the museum, to make it a heterotopia, is therefore dan-
gerous, because the remoteness which is a consequence of this glamour both
removes the power of society to effect change upon museums, and prevents
museums themselves from enacting substantive social change. Firstly, this is
demonstrably untrue, as we may see later. And, secondly, given the museum’s
long history of othering within, this is a substantial ethical problem.

The Othering Within

By ‘othering within’ is meant the ways in which museums ‘other’ and exoti-
cize the cultures and objects put on display. It is easiest to level the accusa-
tion of othering at anthropological collections, many of which have their
origins in the colonial era and its fashion for ‘salvage anthropology.’ Here,
we can turn to Johannes Fabian and Time and the Other for some insight
into what occurs in museums with regard to their presentation of cultures.
When he speaks of the ‘schizogenic’ (Fabian 2014: 21) time of anthropology,
he is speaking of a process by means of which the people under scrutiny in
the study become othered through the politically temporal act of writing:

On the one hand we dogmatically insist that anthropology rests on eth-

nographic research involving personal, prolonged interaction with the
Other. But then we pronounce upon the knowledge gained from such
research a discourse which construes the Other in terms of distance,
spatial and temporal. The Other’s empirical presence turns into his the-
oretical absence, a conjuring trick which is worked with the help of an
array of devices that have the common intent and function to keep the
Other outside the Time of anthropology
(Fabian 2014: xxxix).
14 Contextualizing
In the museum, this conjuring trick is worked through many devices,
notably language and spatial design. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, for
instance, is often thought to perform such othering – and it uses the past
tense, occasionally, when referring to certain peoples, and has a very overt
Victorian aesthetic. Though – as we shall see – the situation with the Pitt
Rivers is more complicated than it at first appears, this kind of othering
remains a problematic act of distancing, which exoticizes people, placing
them out of the present time, and thereby strengthening cultural barriers and
presumptions. To prevent such barriers forming, and to increase integration,
museums must begin to pursue another politically temporal agenda – one of
‘radical contemporaneity’ (Fabian 2014: xxxix).
It is not just people, but objects (sometimes as surrogates for cultures)
which are othered in this way. The museum is a place of ‘schizogenic time’
inasmuch as material culture is preserved in order to provide a very present
tense experience of the past, but remains conceptually located elsewhen. It is
interesting to speculate how a ‘radical contemporaneity’ in regard to objects
might change how they are used, viewed, and valued in museums. Might it
allow us to decentre Western notions of the meaningfulness of things, and
provide another context for the telling of human lives?
The othering which occurs in museums is not limited to anthropological
collections. As ‘institutions of secular power’ (von Naredi-Rainer 2004:
9), museums have historically had the charge of elitism levied against
them – many have written of their exclusionary qualities. One of the most
well-known is Gurian’s concept of ‘threshold fear’ – that the nature of
museum facades (including both their entrances and their reputations)
is intimidating enough that it puts people off visiting (Heumann Gurian
2005). The museum is also capable of othering the visitor once they are
inside, if the display is such that visitors cannot translate the meaning of
the items and ideas on show.
These kinds of othering are all temporal, because they remove museums
from the everyday temporality of the visitor – the experience becomes an
‘extraordinary phenomenon’ (Higgins 2005: 215). And this is where the het-
erotopia creeps back in – in a less-than-positive fashion. But it should be
obvious that that heterotopic state is not inherent, but a form of perfor-
mance. If museums do seek radical contemporaneity, do seek to connect
with their visitors and originating communities, and to draw those two
together, then this negative heterotopia is something that requires disman-
tling. Because museums have not only been associated with sites outside
of the every day – in his discussion of world exhibitions, Walter Benjamin
brought museums and their kind into proximity with pleasure and consump-
tion (Benjamin 2002: 7–8) and they have been aligned with marketplaces,
bazaars (Klonk 2009: 28), department stores (Noordegraaf 2009: 173), and
fairgrounds (Bennett 1995). So perhaps they are less radically other than
they have been theorized to be; and, as such, regain the remarkable affective
power of the quotidian.
 Time 15
Memory
The connection between museums and memory is a commonplace. It
has appeared as the focal point of texts including Crane’s Museums and
Memory, Maleuvre’s Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art, Gaynor
Kavanagh’s Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum, and Arnold-de-
Simine’s Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia.
And for good reason – museums are places wherein artefacts of significance
are put in order that someone might be able to learn from them, and remem-
ber. As ever, though, the situation is more complex than that: for memory
is not inert or inalienable, and neither is its purpose necessarily simply to
remember the past. It isn’t the purpose of this section to repeat that which
has already been said with more clarity and detail than there is space for
here – but it is important, briefly, to situate the role of the museum as mem-
ory-complex within the contemporary temporal environment.
In The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, Horst Bredekamp
wrote that during the early modern period, the ‘Kunstkammer became a meta-
phor for the human brain gradually reacquiring Edenic wisdom’ (Bredekamp
1995: 40). This is not simply an attempt to retrieve individual memory, or to
memorialize a past event: instead, it is an attempt to recall an entire state
of cultural consciousness – and, at that, one which never really existed to
begin with. Yet fictional states have power; they provoke saudades for that
which cannot be, and which never was. Because collections are always par-
tial, because they can only ever show glimpses of what was, because museum
staff and the cultural climate manage the dialogues which museums espouse,
the memory generated will always be curtailed and tendentious – always a
phantasmagoria, always illusory in its wholeness.
The memorial phantasmagorias which museums build are significant in
the creation of imagined communities (Anderson 1991). They are provoca-
teurs for nostalgia and hiraeth – sites of longing and loss, which can become
dangerous if their complete veracity remains unquestioned; one might, for
example, consider the controversies surrounding Confederate monuments
in the United States, or the United Kingdom’s putative culture war sur-
rounding the colonial and slavery links of public heritage. Such dangers
are particularly acute if institutions and objects are lieux de memoire; sites
symbolic of community cultural heritage (Nora 1989). Lieux de memoire
tend to be partial survivals, synecdochic, and tend to indicate a loss of
continuity with the past – the past, as Nora put it, as ‘radically other’ (Nora
1989: 17). As a consequence of this loss, there is a disintegration of the his-
tory-memory divide; again, a potential danger with regard to the perceived
authenticity of memory.
What memory brings, ultimately, to a discussion of museum temporality
is a quality of fragmentation, of ruin. In ‘The Inhuman,’ Lyotard recalls the
previous discussion of museums as cemeteries when he described museum
objects as ‘traces’ of their past presence – in other words, the performative
16 Contextualizing
absence of what they were (Lyotard 1991: 145). As places of absence, as
lieux, museums are again positioned as peculiar – ambiguous, ‘hybrid,’ and
‘mutant,’ with the capacity to stop time (Nora 1989: 19).
But museums are not just about remembering the past – the acts of preser-
vation, museum construction, and display are inherently proleptic, because
they presume a future in which they will perform the past. Museums always
recall, through a glass darkly, what is yet to be.

History
The genealogy of museums is complex and contested – the connections
between the contemporary institutions and historical forms of object-
idea-performance are tangled, and range from ancient mouseia to medie-
val reliquaries (Smiraglia 2013) to wunder- and schatzkammer, to historic
houses, to gardens, to theatres. A discussion of this tangled ancestry would
encompass this entire chapter and prevent the inclusion of the topics which
are most vital in this instance. In any case, museum histories are manifold,
and far more detailed than I can be here.
What this section is not, then, is a potted history of the museum form.
Instead, it is a short exploration of the ways museums are seen to relate to
history as both the past and the discipline: through representation, reflec-
tion, and formation; through microhistories of people, places, and objects;
through broader histories of intellectual endeavour; and, though their indi-
vidual statuses as historical, changeable, and ephemeral objects in their
own right. Nonetheless, highlighting the tortuous family tree of museums
serves to frame the need, here, to be aware of our contingently contempo-
rary position, and that the performative qualities and activities of museums
are always themselves open to interpretation.
Museums are not, then, keepers of history; they are its storytellers.
This representative quality is reflected particularly well in contexts with
difficult histories, or which are undergoing political transition. Huzhalouski
expresses this in his survey of the changing state and experience of Belarusian
museums in Soviet and post-Soviet times, and articulates clearly the prob-
lem of the definite article: ‘The Soviet communist regime saw history as a
powerful tool for legitimizing its power and it sought to represent itself as
the rightful heir to progressive national historical traditions’ (Huzhalouski
2015: 213). Museums, as representatives of history, are political agents in the
manufacturing of that history, and can also be used by those with particular
agendas – agendas which might not be the museum’s own. Huzhalouski’s
article also indicates how changeable the story represented can be – what
can be hidden and what can be brought to light.
Museums make their representations through a variety of sources;
objects, diverse in form and purpose and meaning; the buildings in which
they are housed; the interpretive media which are placed around them.
Thus, they contain a manifold of histories, which may appear, intentionally
 Time 17
or otherwise, through the rearrangement of these sources. History in both
its forms, is manifold and heteroclitic, and so are the institutions that tell it.
But it is not just, of course, the institutions that tell history and make it
have meaning. As Pascal Geilen has noted:

… history and heritage do not simply appear in the consciousness of

museum visitors. What is perceived as relevant history or heritage, is
offered to the visitor as an artefact or as an event of some historical
importance. The mediator decides what is worth inheriting, so to speak
(Geilen 2004: 152).

Geilen also identifies three forms of relational spatio-temporality which

appear in museums when they present history/the past: local, global, and
glocal time. The first is a linear and pluperfect time – closed and untouch-
able, and often very dependent upon a particular place, hence local time.
The second type, global time, is a situation in which localization gives way
to universality, an emotional but generalized ‘pastness’ (Geilen 2004: 154).
According to Geilen, institutions which utilize these forms of time erase
their own role as mediators – denying either their own work in the construc-
tion of the past, or indeed that it is constructed at all.
However, glocal time, which recognizes the role of mediation, allows for a
complexity of locales; and, thus, of times, synchronized only by their connec-
tions to each other, through phone calls, Instant Messages, and Internet Relay
Chat. Understanding glocal time as it manifests in the present ‘generates a
new, polyphonous, view of days gone by and different heritage presentation
may continuously come up with ever different time loops’ (Geilen 2004: 155).
So, history is clearly mediated through museums. It is also, in the manip-
ulation and interaction with the contemporary moment, made by them.
Petkova-Campbell, writing about the complex histories of communist
museums in Bulgaria, quotes George Orwell:

Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present
controls the past
(Petkova-Campbell 2013: 224).

It’s a hackneyed statement – largely because it is, to most intents and pur-
poses, true. The past – heritage – is a product of the present, or, as Tunbridge
and Ashworth write, ‘a series of accepted judgements’ (Petkova-Campbell
2013: 223). Museums can be, and are, used to produce narratives of the past
to suit a particular present. The EuNaMus project found that ‘National his-
tory museums provide foundational narratives and a sense of continuity’
(Knell and Aronson 2012: 30). Museums such as this have a role in the devel-
opment of nations, but it is not a simple one. Aronson and Knell describe
two forms of display – the interpretive, which utilizes objects to produce
implicit, non-rational, understandings in people, and the narrative, which
18 Contextualizing
begins with ‘a coherent and developing discourse’ (Knell and Aronson
2012: 37). These narratives, they argue, come in three forms: international-
ist; based on the nation; and ideological. The first imposes its own view on
the artefacts of others, the second defines and builds an often essentialist
view of the nation, and the third is an extreme instrumentalization of the
past for the benefit of a particular governmental regime or a country under-
going post-totalitarian reformulation (Knell and Aronson 2012: 38–40).
As an example of the ways in which museums might be used in ideologi-
cal narratives, we might consider ministerial uses of heritage in the United
Kingdom in 2020 and 2021. On 22nd September 2020, Oliver Dowden, the
Culture Secretary, wrote to Arms Length Bodies (ALBs) across the United
Kingdom arguing for the retention of contested heritage and provoking sec-
tor-wide concern by implying that funding could be withdrawn if institu-
tions failed to consult ministers on decisions concerning such heritage. This
was followed in January 2021 by Robert Jenrick’s announcement of ‘new
laws to protect England’s cultural and historic heritage,’ also known as the
retain and explain policy, which has itself provoked controversy. Many have
accused ministers of trying to provoke a culture war, pitting conservative
leaning individuals against the ‘woke’ left. Who controls the present con-
trols the past, indeed.
Museums and their kin also manifest the fears, desires, and experiences
of their contemporary stakeholders – even if their subject matter or aim
is in theory a-political. Take science centres, for instance. Toon notes how
the growth of science centres in 1960s America was a product of fear –
the fear, after Sputnik, that the Eastern bloc were leaving the West far
behind in terms of technological achievement (Toon 2005: 106). Despite
the fact that a centre might have a-historically presented content – being
a place attempting to articulate eternal scientific truths – often, their
wider historical-contemporary context influences their motivations and
presentations. The same is true of museums. Ali Mozaffari discusses the
National Museum of Iran, which has gone from being a museum in a coun-
try identifying with a pre-Islamic Persian origin, to a museum in a highly
Islamized society (Mozaffari 2007). The displays have not changed hugely
with the regime – however, the way the objects are understood has. In the
Islamic context, the pre-Islamic objects have gone from being culturally,
ancestrally resonant items, to examples of the righteousness of faith – the
objects are no longer historical carriers of culture, but a-historical bearers
of transcendental truth (Mozaffari 2007: 100).
Museums are also entangled with smaller scale, local, histories –
microhistories, if you will. Object biographies detail the individual histories
of collections items; museums have histories of their founding and building
written (such as, for instance, Brown’s Ashmolean: Britain’s First Museum,
or Garnham’s Architecture in Detail: Oxford Museum). But museums also
are impacted by and impact upon individual lives. The Pitt Rivers, named
for the founding donor – a colonial general and weapons collector – could
 Time 19
be cited as a prime example. In fact, however, though it may appear, super-
ficially, to have changed very little, this museum is now the product of many
hands, and many professional lives, and is as a consequence a very different
institution than that founded in the time of the General.

Conclusion
Museums, demonstrably, have specific connections to temporality, some of
which we have addressed here. The themes above were primarily chosen for
their visibility; there are, of course, other elements of the temporal museum
which we shall encounter later in this book. But for the moment, it is neces-
sary to acknowledge that the temporalization of museums in the literature
has been primarily focussed upon the ways in which the time of museums
is different than the mundane present – whether deathly, othered, memo-
rial, or historical. It is separated and made distinctive. We have also seen,
however, that temporality has a mutually creative relationship with museum
space – that they fundamentally shape each other, and that this shaping can
be turned to political ends. In the rest of the book, we shall address some of
these questions in more detail.

What Follows
The chapters which follow focus on developing the central argument of
this book: that museum time needs to be understood as something more
than simply ‘strange’ and that there are languages and methods in exist-
ence which can allow this to happen. In Chapter 1 ‘Frame,’ we explore
the ways in which literature – in terms of both production and theory –
possesses a temporalized language which museology can borrow in order
to address its queries regarding time; a language which it can use to both
analyse and manipulate temporal structures which have always been
present in museum space in a much more controlled and rational fash-
ion, utilizing phenomenological elements in the transference from page
to space. In Chapter 2 ‘Linearity,’ we tackle a major form of temporal
construction, and explore its museal forms and the implications, political
and social, that its presence in such spaces has. Chapter 3, ‘Non-Linearity,’
explores the manifold other forms of temporal ordering which have poten-
tial in museum spaces, and which demonstrate that there is more than
one way through time. With Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7, the book delves into
more abstract temporal territory, whilst retaining the pragmatic lan-
guage offered by literature. In Chapter 4 ‘Presence,’ the book explores
how things come into conscious apprehension in the museum – how they
make themselves present and apparent – and how this impacts existing
understandings of museum temporality. Chapter 5, ‘Absence,’ presents the
counter to that – how the missing and the void are articulated and felt in
the museum space, and what this might mean for the ontology of museum
20 Contextualizing
time. Chapter 6, ‘Authenticity,’ explores a well-known question of muse-
ology – that of authenticity – from a new angle. By exploring authenticity
as a temporal issue as much as an ontological one, it allows not only an
exploration of the way in which the nature of objects impacts upon the
perception of museum time, but furthermore an exploration of the ways in
which objects might be understood and valued differently. In the final chap-
ter ‘Auracity,’ the book again addresses a feature of museum practice and
theory from a very temporalized angle, examining how the idea of the aura,
and other associated concepts, have an impact upon the perception and
performance of museum time. In the conclusion, all these explorations are
drawn together, and we offer some implications for the time-bound crea-
ture which has been haunting the volume, in a Derridian sense, the whole
time: the museum of the yet to come.
1 Frame

Introduction
As we have discussed, the literature on temporality in museums is disjointed,
lacking a coherent framework for investigation. In order to explore tempo-
rality in the museum, it is necessary to establish both a language and a meth-
odology: to speak time, and to act within it.
We must begin with the form of time that we can sense: space. To encoun-
ter temporality is to engage in a conscious dialogue with the environment
and experience. Therefore, in the first part of this chapter, we turn to phe-
nomenology to provide a philosophical grounding for our method, and the
basis of the embodied investigative practice it requires. But phenomenol-
ogy alone does not enable the thorough articulation of temporality in terms
which are graspable, specific, and measurable. And so, in the second part
of this chapter, we turn to literature, a discipline which has both pragmatic
and poetic entanglements with temporality, and which has a full gamut of
terms and phrases with which to speak the many names of time. It is this
other field of performative culture, this other discipline which also lives and
dies on interpretation, which will provide us with the language we need to
articulate in greater clarity the true strangeness and mundanity of museum
time, beyond the heterotopia.

Case Studies
This book is centred specifically on three museums – the Ashmolean Museum
of Art and Archaeology, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
(OUMNH), and the Pitt Rivers Museum, all located in Oxford, UK. The
choice of specific case studies is a key element of the methodology applied,
which, as shall be seen, requires an in depth and focused approach to specific
places at specific times. Though the method overall might be employed in
almost any institution, Oxford was selected, not merely for its rich museum
population, but its own varied temporal layering, built up over centuries of
inhabitation and fame, and for its topical connections to fictional worlds,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003248446-3
22 Contextualizing
such as Wonderland and Middle Earth; for narrative and thematic cohe-
sion, as well as museological concerns.
All the case studies fall under the operational aegis of the University,
giving them an overall unity, as well as tying them into the life of the city
itself. Their institutional and collection histories are deeply entangled; and
to this day, they collaborate on research and loan parts of their collection
to each other. In the case of the Pitt Rivers and the OUMNH, the connec-
tion is literal and physical, with the buildings backing onto each other, and
the primary public access point to the Pitt Rivers being through the Great
Court of the OUMNH. One might argue that the singular location of these
buildings is a limitation on this study; that is as may be, but the coherence
that it offers, as well as the variety in terms of institution and collection
type offers a counter to such a concern. With that said, this section shall
introduce the case studies, presenting their value to the project whilst also
recognizing the scholarly literature which surrounds them.
The Ashmolean has a claim to being the world’s oldest extant public
museum, thus holding distinctive temporal and historical interest (Brown
2009: 9). It plays upon this history in certain parts of its display, referencing
its founding fathers including Elias Ashmole and the Johns Tradescant, and
the ‘Ark’ which was the founding collection’s original home. That collection
has seen much change over the institution’s four-hundred-year history, and
many of the original items have been dispersed. Some now reside in the
Pitt Rivers and the OUMNH. The porosity between all three institutions
heightens their relevance to this book’s temporal analysis.
The Ashmolean has also seen significant physical change to its buildings.
It was originally housed on Broad Street in the building now home to the
Museum of the History of Science, but is now situated on Beaumont Street
behind the iconic frontage designed by Charles Robert Cockerall and built
between 1839 and 1845. Later, under the Keepership of Arthur Evans, the
Fortnum bequest was used to build new display space behind the University
Galleries. The two institutions finally merged in 1908 to create the Ashmolean
Museum of Art and Archaeology as it exists today (Brown 2009: 17).
Of perhaps most immediate relevance here, however, is the redevelop-
ment undertaken by Rick Mather and Metaphor in 2009. The (relatively)
recent nature of this transformation and the high level of publicity it engen-
dered also make the Ashmolean a suitable case study. Now that the space
has had time to settle, and staff have been able to live with and accustom
themselves to the new building, it is a good time to question the displays and
design, both on their own terms, and in how they relate to the older parts
of the museum still accessible to the public. How could a museum with four
centuries behind it, visibly palimpsestual and evolutionary display spaces,
and a display strategy entitled Crossing Cultures Crossing Time fail to excite
intrigue as a temporal site?
Much of the scholarly literature around the Ashmolean has, of course,
focused upon its collections, rather than the museum itself (see, for
 Frame 23
example, the extensive works of Arthur MacGregor). Whilst this is per-
haps understandable, given the age and renown of the collections, it is not
our focus here. Given the nature of this book and its emphasis on experi-
ence in space and time, what I am concerned with here is primarily litera-
ture which deals with the architectural and sensory qualities of the space,
across history and the present, as well as discussion of the display strategies
employed in the renovation. In the case of the first, of particular relevance
here is Constance Classen’s paper, ‘Museum Manners: the Sensory Life of
the Early Museum’ (2007), in which she explores the ‘corporeal practices’
which visitors to early museums might have engaged in, particularly during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with her central case study being
the Ashmolean. Because of the transient nature of many of these encoun-
ters, Classen is, like most historians, forced to rely on the written word to
intimate and interpret the actions which would have been taken in rela-
tion to objects – holding them, smelling them, and breaking them apart.
Regardless, the paper is evidence of the value of an embodied encounter
with the Ashmolean – and provides an inspiration for my own reported
encounters here. In the case of the display strategies and responses to the
renovation, a number of reviews were written, including that by N. James,
of the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, which details
the Crossing Cultures Crossing Time theme, along with a comparison
of the new display and interpretation style with the ‘cool, lucid, dry typol-
ogies’ of the past (2010: 556). This book, then, seeks to contribute to the lit-
erature on the Ashmolean Museum in a relatively unique fashion, applying
its literary and phenomenological method to these galleries which are both
very old, and quite new.
The Pitt Rivers is significantly different from the Ashmolean. Far younger,
but now with a much older aesthetic feel, it provides an interesting stylistic
and architectural comparison. Its subjects of ethnography and anthropol-
ogy are distinctive enough from the art and archaeology of the Ashmolean
to provide a comparative temporal landscape for this project.
But it is, like the Ashmolean, a hugely historic and time-bound space; its
reputation, in fact, is based in part upon a hugely temporal notion – that
it is a fossil, a fly in amber, a Victorian Museum preserved for the present
(Gosden et al 2007: xvii). But this is not the case – its collections have been
updated throughout its history, added to and rearranged, and architectural
renovations are continually occurring; in 2010, the Upper Gallery was reo-
pened after a redesign (Pitt Rivers Museum n.d.a). Thus, the Pitt Rivers, a
museum of anthropology, is a complex nexus of temporalities, a visible pal-
impsest of display styles and curatorial hands from the handwritten labels
of the late nineteenth century to the work and interpretations of the current
artist in residence. The Pitt Rivers Museum is also hugely self-reflective and
has as a result a strange historical position in regard to itself. As Knowing
Things, the book born out of the Relational Museum project, shows, it is an
institution happy to perform the same anthropological acts upon itself as its
24 Contextualizing
users and makers have, and continue to, upon others (Gosden et al 2007: 7).
It is, therefore, an institution open to the kind of deep exploration for which
this book aims.
As with the Ashmolean, and as to be expected, much of the literature
on the Pitt Rivers deals with its extensive collections – some half a mil-
lion objects. Much of the literature also takes as its core theme the people
and relationships which have been central to the development of the col-
lection over the past 140 years, with the Relational Museum Project as a
key example. Alongside this, however, and more thematically relevant to
this book, is work done on the political and sensory-emotional impact of
the Museum. In the case of the former, we could cite the ongoing projects
which are done by the museum itself, such as the public engagement pro-
jects Beyond the Binary and Radical Hope, Critical Change, their exten-
sive research and restitution projects, such as Labelling Matters, African
Restitution Research and Maasai Living Cultures, as well as its involvement
with Matters of Care: Museum Futures in Times of Planetary Precarity. It is
a museum which grapples with its troubled past, alongside with an equally
complex present and future. In the case of the sensory and emotional role
of this museum, a key author is Sandra Dudley, whose paper ‘What’s in the
Drawer? Surprise and Proprioceptivity in the Pitt Rivers Museum’ explores
the power of the active discovery of objects through opening drawers and
moving bodies, alongside the impact of surprise and delight provoked by
such engagements (2014).
Often thought of as a-temporal, and yet in actuality deeply mutable and
self-aware, an institution famed in poetry, and in many ways just as iconic
as the Ashmolean, if for very different reasons, the Pitt Rivers cannot help
but be an attractive proposition for our literary readings and our temporal
excavations.
The final museum in which the book is set is also intensely iconic and
imbued with literary intricacies and scientific intrigue. Officially accepted
by University Convocation in 1853, the OUMNH had had support within
Oxford academia since the 1840s (Vernon 1909: 55). Its building, controver-
sially gothic and ecclesiastical, was completed in an area formerly belong-
ing to the University Parks in 1860 (Vernon 1909: 55). In its current name
and content, this museum speaks of history – but this is a history far longer
than that of human thought and culture. The subject of the OUMNH is a
history of the earth and all things which have existed upon it. It is a deeply
secular museum – it played host to the ‘Great Debate’ on Darwin’s Origin
of Species in the year of its founding – and yet its architecture is that of
a cathedral (Vernon 1909: 55). Neither does its temporal complexity end
there, for it is very visibly a scholarly institution, containing timescapes
outside the display area – its research rooms and use as an active teaching
space much more obvious that those of the Pitt Rivers or the Ashmolean.
This is a museum in which spaces of study and spaces of spectacle meet and
are confused.
 Frame 25
Once again, the collections dominate much of the scholarly discourse.
However, here, there is also an extensive focus on the architectural history
of the building, as well as its role as an institution of hands-on, powerful,
science education, especially for younger children. In the article ‘Iron and
Bone,’ Kelly Freeman focuses on the slippage between the ‘skeletal’ archi-
tecture of the museum and the fossilized bones it holds within (Freeman
2016). The paper, like Garnham (2010), considers the competition and
consequence of the construction of the ‘Nisi Dominus’ building, a literal
cathedral to nature, called ‘Unless the Lord built the house’ (Freeman
2016: 14), and offers many details about this unique, and largely unchanged,
piece of Victorian engineering. As you might imagine, this kind of space
is intensely evocative, and this intensity is also found in the literature on
learning and experience within the Museum. In her thesis ‘Crystal Teeth
and Skeleton Eggs’ (now published in edited form as Snapshots of Museum
Experience), Elee Kirk writes powerfully of the running, the touching, the
shouting, and the gasping of children in the Great Court of the OUMNH
(2014: 3–4). And whilst I did not myself run, or shout, I did touch things,
and I did gasp; so, in this book, I am not writing of the learning experience
of children, but the phenomenal experience of the adult, through a lens
framed by literature.
For, you see, the OUMNH is also a massively transtextual space. Not only
are the histories of its collections entangled with those of the Ashmolean and
the Pitt Rivers, it is physically connected to the latter. Of all the museums
under study here, it is arguably the one which holds the closest links to the
fictional worlds of Lewis Carroll. In a case entitled ‘The real Alice’ the back-
ground to Alice in Wonderland is illuminated with text and taxidermy, and,
in a neighbouring case, casts of the remains of the original Oxford Dodo
are on display. The Ashmolean and the Pitt Rivers use quotes, images, and
references to fictional worlds; the OUMNH has a physical, intrusive link to
that nonsensical timescape of Wonderland.

Museums, Phenomenology, and Temporality

To clarify: here, phenomenology is understood as the investigation of con-
scious experience directed towards an object, from a first-person point of
view (Smith 2018). In the vein of Heidegger, this book employs a herme-
neutical approach; that is, it focuses specifically on interpretation in con-
text. It uses Being and Time as ground for its understanding of temporality
as a conscious experience and the idea of the phenomenological walk, and
walking as arts practice, which has been documented by Pink et al (2010),
to provide the pragmatic precedent for the way in which the spaces detailed
here have been encountered and analysed.
In Being and Time, Heidegger asks the question of what it means to be
(Schmidt 2010: xvii). Its central figure is Dasein – that is, that which acknowl-
edges its own being, something conscious (Heidegger 2010: 11). He utilizes
26 Contextualizing
phenomenology – the action of interpreting phenomena – as the method by
means of which to understand this being, Dasein. Space and time are char-
acterized as phenomena. Crucially, Heidegger stresses not only the impor-
tance of a hermeneutic approach for this investigation, but also that the
horizon of all being, its fundamental meaning and purpose, is temporality
(Heidegger 2010: 17).
This investigation involves all these elements. Like Being and Time, it
emphasizes the importance of a being like Dasein (for instance, a visitor or
interpreter or this researcher might be figured in this role). The attempt to
understand museum temporality is a quest to understand the phenomena
which make it up – the articulations of space, of time, and the conscious
interlocutors which act within these realms. The approach is hermeneutic,
in that it interprets these phenomena and their own individual meaning in
context, in very particular times and places – the museums which act as
the case studies for this volume. It seeks a conscious praxis within museum
space: a form of interpretive inhabitation in which both mind and body
are engaged.
Phenomenological literature, such as The Poetics of Space, provided some
conceptual information – Bachelard’s text celebrates the sensorial qualities
of space, and the text itself is highly sensual (Bachelard 1994). But the focus
of The Poetics of Space is the imagination, and the spaces described are
very abstract. In the approach taken here, a much more concrete phenom-
enological method was needed – the phenomenological walk. This is a tool
increasingly applied in ethnography and social geography (Pink et al 2010)
and provides the embodiment which is so ‘integral to our perception of the
environment’ (Pink et al 2010: 3). The premise is that an individual takes an
attentive approach to a journey on foot, then records that journey, using the
sensory and intellectual impressions as the data set for analysis.
I also want to acknowledge, at this point, that the idea of embodiment,
which is so central to phenomenological explorations of the world, has
been utilized for powerful political statements, in particular by feminist
and critical race theorists. There is not space here to address fully and with
appropriate gratitude, all the literature produced by these thinkers. But the
power in these texts lies in their understanding of embodiment, specifically
that which is racialized and gendered, as politically active, and externally
observed. My method is framed more by an individual, experiential encoun-
ter with space, rather than a performed or observed identity, and is as much
influenced by the fact that I am small in stature as it is by the fact that I am
a white woman, though I recognize that this identity gives me certain priv-
ileges, and the capacity to feel welcomed in museum spaces. This exercise
is focused not on my external subjective appearance to others, but upon my
own, internalized, and individuated understanding of the museums I was
researching within.
Another factor which shaped this particular focus is that the purpose
of the project was not merely to record impressions of space, or to capture
 Frame 27
all details; there was a target subject – time. Therefore, in order to ensure
a focus on temporality, it was key to provide some sort of framework
through which museum spaces might be read during a phenomenological
walk. This initially proved difficult to establish, however, as I began to
reconsider my previous experience with narrative and poetry, I began to
build one. Literature is extremely valuable for a study of museums and
temporality, as a parallel form of cultural production which is blessed
with numerous diverse and very precise methods for understanding and
modifying the behaviour of time. In the studies throughout the rest of
the book, four sets of questions focusing on plot, perspective and rhythm
(key temporal qualities and themes of literary texts) were deployed to
frame the phenomenological walk. In the following section, some of the
background to these questions is briefly explored and some key concepts
introduced.

Museums, Literature, and Time

A language is needed with which to present the forms of time uncovered
during the phenomenological act of interpretation; a language which is
expressive and understandable and can be translated easily into the museum
context. That language does not exist in museum studies, as yet – but it does
in literature. The combination of museology and literature does not imme-
diately spring to mind: however, there are many ways in which they are alike
and, before introducing the concepts and terminology which permeate the
rest of this book, we need to explore why this is the case in order to justify
their alliance.
Literature and museums are both what Lessing called ‘temporal arts’ –
that is, they reveal their completeness over a period of time, rather than
all at once (Lessing 2005: 21). Both media manipulate objects, characters,
and events to tell stories. Whilst this book does not claim that museums
and literature are wholly analogous, it acknowledges that they are prod-
ucts of shared cultures, both subject to theoretical and political change, and
influenced by artistic and broader cultural movements. Literature, with its
longer history of both production and academic critique, has developed
concepts and terminologies that museology has not; this is why museology
might draw on it, as film studies has.
This is not to claim that this book is the first time that museum studies
and material culture studies have drawn on the concepts of language and
literature – far from it. Susan Pearce was informed by Saussure and Iser
in her study of the multiple discourses which might be constructed around
events and objects to create ‘the past’ (Pearce 1994: 19). Literary notions
have also long been applied to the analysis of space – Benjamin’s Arcades
Project and Blanchot’s Space of Literature are just two examples. Elizabeth
Weiser applies concepts directly from rhetoric to the way in which museums
perform politically, and, following Greg Clark, suggests that museums are
28 Contextualizing
‘rhetorical landscapes’ (Weiser 2009). There are those in museum and art
production discourses who apply literary concepts to space to this day –
Jane Rendall in Site Writing (Rendall 2010), for instance, who suggests that
a more site specific, creative form of art criticism is needed. In turn, she
cites Mieke Bal, who used narrative and semiotics to read museum spaces
in ‘Telling, Showing, Showing off,’ and ‘The Discourse of the Museum’
(Bal 1992; Bal 1996). Sophia Psarra uses narratology as an intellectual
framework to explore architecture and exhibition design (Psarra 2009). In
Museum Making: Architectures, Narratives, Exhibitions, the authors seek to
demonstrate the concept of ‘narrative space,’ and to reclaim narrative from
its negative museological associations, though the technicalities of narra-
tive and narratology are not readily apparent in most of the text (MacLeod
et al 2012). Paul Basu, in a more technically astute paper, highlights the
uncanny and disturbing effects which might be engendered when literary
constructs are deployed in museum space (Basu 2007). These provide prec-
edents for the activities undertaken in this book. What none of these texts
do, however, is apply a variety of literary devices to a singular concept: to
explore temporality in museum spaces.
Therefore, the rest of this chapter provides the overlay – the language
with which to express the experiences gathered using the focused kind of
phenomenology described above. It offers brief reflections on four broad
themes of literature which have temporality as their core feature: narra-
tology; perspective; grammar; prosody. This tour through literary time is
intended to prime the reader for the concepts and terminology which will
be deployed in the remainder of the book.

Narratology
Narratology is the study of narrative; that is, the manipulated structures
by means of which stories are told and events related. Jerome Bruner called
narratives ‘a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by conven-
tion and “narrative necessity” rather than by empirical verification and log-
ical requiredness …’ (Bruner 1991: 4): they are the means by which human
beings perpetuate their perceived reality.
Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that narrative has figured highly in the
literature of the New Museology and beyond – Bal, Psarra, and MacLeod
were cited above, and they are amongst others. Narrative is not an unprec-
edented term in the museum lexicon. Yet the ‘narrative’ that museum the-
orists and practitioners tend to use is more defined by its affective rather
than technical nature. The ‘narrative space’ of MacLeod et al is less about
using narratological strategies to create affect/effect than it is about those
narrative effects/affects themselves. The intention here is to explore a
variety of narratological strategies which might be used to unravel and
explore the construction of museum time, as much as understand its
 Frame 29
consequences. For those who wish to explore narrative in more detail, a
key text is The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, by H. Porter-Abbott
(Porter-Abbot 2002).
One of the central features of narrative construction is plot – the way in
which events and the absence of events (or elisions) are ordered and shaped.
Plots have both shapes and features – that is, overall structures, and spe-
cific kinds of interpretive phenomena that take place within them, respec-
tively. There are different narrative shapes (or structures) which exist all
over the world. In Western Europe, some of the most well-known are the
linear, the reversed, the cyclical, the ‘hopscotch’ and the framed, and any
single iteration of one of these might contain different causal relationships.
Beyond Europe, there are structures such as the Southeast Asian kishōten-
ketsu and Japanese jo-ha-kyū.
The linear narrative appears to be the simplest – it moves in the direction
of chronology and the presupposed natural order of events from earlier to
later. Aristotle, who favoured action above character in regard to the telling
of a story also favoured the linear causal plot, because such structures tend
to relate whole and complete actions, which he deemed beautiful (Aristotle
1968: 15–16). In the linear structure, relationships between time periods and
events can be established, and cause and effect move towards an end. Thus,
the narrative structure can be used to explain particular conditions and to
speculate upon possible futures. As Mendilow notes, these plot structures
can be used to provide an explanation for and purpose to existence in time
(Mendilow 1952: 58). They appear in museums in the form of timelines, or
chronologically ordered exhibitions, such as that in the Main Exhibition
space at the Imperial War Museum North, which chronicles global conflict
from the First World War to the present. Causal plots provide comfort –
they validate and explain actions and agents.
But they are not as simple as they appear. Chronological form can sug-
gest causality, and this can create the appearance of cause-effect rela-
tionships where there are none. This is known as the propter hoc fallacy
(Porter-Abbot 2002: 39). The linear plot is deceptive, for whilst it appears
to provide complete wholes, it is always naturally eliding events which do
not have importance in its message (Auerbach 1953: 8). Character becomes
secondary to the mechanical progression of the narrative; we will return
to this when we discuss temporal features such as anachronies. Classical
narratives and teleological, biblical narratives both reduce psychological
specificity for fate and universal applicability, respectively (Auerbach 1953:
319; 11–17); these are universes in which particular ends are inevitable, and
free will a forlorn imagining. This form of temporal construction is com-
monplace in museums, which, as institutions with a hold on the public
perception of history, and with a history of involvement in Western dom-
ination and colonialism, have a responsibility to deploy such narratives
with caution.
30 Contextualizing
Reversed narratives, such as Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (Amis 1991), might
be thought to disrupt some of this singularity. They can be disorienting and
even nauseating. However, certainly in the case of Time’s Arrow, the narrator,
in order to be intelligible to his audience, cannot run his language backwards.
And when this situation appears in Slaughterhouse 5, as the protagonist, Billy
Pilgrim, watches a war film backwards, it can be read as a tragic comment on
humanity’s inability to undo the catastrophic effects of its actions.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken
from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where
factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, sepa-
rating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly it was mainly
women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists
in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide
them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school
kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed
(Vonnegut 2003: 53).

Reversing the narrative merely underscores the reliance of human con-

sciousness on linearity, and meditates on our inability to withstand entropy
or undo our mistakes. And reversed narratives retain many of the same
selective qualities of standard linear forms – teleology, elision – and they
continue to mask them. Such narrative structures might provide a strange
experience for a museum visitor; but their infrequency means that their
value, pedagogic or political, is uncertain.
Many cyclical narratives take influences from either Giambattista Vico,
an Enlightenment political philosopher who wrote of a form of echoic, but
non-identical return in his book The First New Science (Vico 2002), or from
Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return,’ presented in Thus Spake Zarathustra
(Nietzsche 1967). The first is famously found in James Joyce’s Ulysses (Joyce
1992) and is rather less sinister than the eternal return. The eternal return
of the same can be used to completely retard progress and change. In The
Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes:

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are

nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terri-
fying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbear-
able responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why
Nietzsche called the idea of the eternal return the heaviest of burdens
(das schwerste Gewicht)
(Kundera 1984: 5).

Cyclical repetition can be a very effective plot device which is used to

frustrate readers and heighten particular emotional states. It can also be
 Frame 31
used as a character device – to retard or enhance their development. In
the case of Billy Pilgrim, the character becomes distant and impersonal,
impossible to engage with. But in the film Groundhog Day, the cyclicity sits
alongside the linear development of both the protagonist, Phil Connors,
and his burgeoning relationship with Rita Hanson. Connors, a weather-
man, is sent to a small town to report on its Groundhog Day celebra-
tions, and gets stuck repeating the same day over and over again, with
minor differences in a more Viconian tradition. Ultimately, after a certain
amount of hedonism and repeated suicide attempts (perhaps reflecting the
Nietzschen ‘heavy burden’) on the part of Phil, his successful conquest
of Rita breaks the cycle of repeated days, and the narrative resolves in a
fated linearity (Ramis 1993).
Are there ways of breaking linear narrativity? Yes, if we understand the
distinctions between the various elements involved in the telling of narra-
tive. Beyond the difference between the reader’s experience and the text,
which is clear, there is also a distinction between the temporality of the
world from which the story comes – the fabula – and the plot structure, or
the way time is selected and structured to present a narrative story – the
sjuzet (Porter-Abbot 2002: 18). The sjuzet is what shapes the storyworld –
it is the structure that contains the elisions and the oddities of movement.
This can be used to disrupt or highlight the singularity and elision which a
standard linearity can impose upon a fabula. It is seen with clarity in Julio
Cortezar’s Rayulea, also known as Hopscotch, which is made up of vignettes
which can be read linearly, but also using a ‘radically non-linear itinerary’
chosen by the reader (Heise 1997: 77). It asks for readerly participation and
choice, turning the narrative into something far more relational and ‘writ-
erly’ (Barthes 1990: 4). In the museum context, objects can be interpreted as
fragments of the fabula, and the way in which they are arranged and inter-
preted, through cases and text panels and other objects, can be identified
as the sjuzet. And it is not too great of a conceptual leap to see, in Barthes
‘writerly reader,’ the heteroclitic visitor identified in the New Museology,
and Hooper-Greenhill’s post-museum.
Understanding the different levels of temporality which are part of
narrative construction (reader, fabula, and sjuzet) allows us to separate
entropy, or shared chronological linearity, from the more personal expe-
rience of time which remains sequential, but not necessarily linear in a
Newtonian sense. The Bergsonian idea of durée, the fluctuating landscape
of the interior (Bergson 1959: 94), can be utilized to express the highly
subjective experience of sequential consciousness; built from connections
which are entirely personal, and entirely unique. This focus on conscious-
ness is found in Proust and Woolf – In Search of Lost Time and To the
Lighthouse are examples of the use of the interior landscape of the mind as
a vehicle for an articulation of temporality which is entirely distinct from
that which is measured by historical chronology, or by the clock (Proust
2005; Woolf 1996).
32 Contextualizing
As soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in
her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although
I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this
memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the
street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set …
(Proust 2005: 54)

It is indeed easy to see the museum visitor in this stream of consciousness.

The visitor becomes the focalisor for the creation of the museum experience,
which is made up of their fleeting impressions and thoughts. On the other
hand, one might engineer the presentation of such stream of consciousness
by a museum, through tangential connections and historical inconstancy.
Framing is not a narrative structure in the same way that these previous
examples are, but it is a form of narrative layering which has implications for
the way stories and their constructions are viewed and interpreted. The most
famous use of framing, or enveloping narratives, can be found in the Thousand
and One Arabian Nights, in which the focalisor for the overarching narrative,
Scherezade, acts as a narrator, telling stories within her own story to save
her life – stories are nested in stories (Mendilow 1952: 57). Other examples
include Boccaccio’s Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
(Boccaccio 1995; Chaucer 1987) – all foreground the distinction between the
sjuzet and the fabula. Nested – or at least, parallel – narratives can be found
in many museums. One might, for example, cite the Neues Museum, Berlin,
which envelopes the telling of European and Egyptian archaeology in the
context of a museum – and a Europe, indeed – ravaged by war.
In order to open the possibilities for museological narrative structure
beyond these western forms, it is important to look at narrative structures
from elsewhere in the world. The examples used here are kishōtenketsu and
jo-ha-kyū. Kishōtenketsu, which originates in Chinese four-line poetry,
follows this form – ki, or introduction, shouku, or development, tenku, or
twist, and kekku, the conclusion (Barrett 2014). The ki sets up a situation
which the shouku develops, the tenku adds another element, and the kekku
draws the shouku and tenku together, often with new information (Barrett
2014). This form can often be found in Japanese four-panel comics called
yonkoma (Barrett 2014). Jo-ha-kyū is a ‘tempo and an energy concept’
(Berberich 1984: 12) which appears across Japanese art. It can be roughly
translated to mean slow, quicker, quickest, and involves the building up of
pace throughout a poem or play, with the resolution coming quickly and
purposefully (Barrett 2014).
Not only do these forms structure narratives in ways different from
Western tradition, they impact upon the ways in which the stories they tell
and the arguments they make are both formed and understood. One reason
for briefly discussing these narrative forms here is that it is important for
both writers and museum practitioners to understand that narrative struc-
tures are culturally specific, and none of them are eternal, or more truthful
 Frame 33
than another. Narratives are always constructed. For museums, this means
that practitioners, designers and academics need to think about cultural
specificity of the narrative structures that they use, and their appropriate-
ness in context.
It is now time to turn to more internalized features of narrative struc-
ture. Here, we are going to focus on anachronies, transtextuality, and
chronotopes.
Gerard Genette defines an anachrony as something which disjoints the
relationship between the fabula and the sjuzet – though he, not working in the
tradition of Russian Formalism from which those terms come, called them
erzählte Zeit and Erzählzeit, respectively (Genette 1980: 36). Anachronies
might also be defined as perceivable oddities within the presentation of a
narrative that departs from linear logic. They come in a variety of standard
forms: in ‘prolepsis,’ the narrative moves forward before returning to the
departure; in ‘analepsis’ it moves backwards in the same fashion (Genette
1980: 40); in ‘ellipsis,’ chronology leaps forward and there is no return; and
in ‘paralipsis,’ an event or moment interpenetrates a coterminous narrative
(Genette 1980: 40). One could also argue that the in media res construction
which Auerbach discusses in relation to the Odyssey (Auerbach 1953: 4) –
which starts in the middle, then reverts to the start, then to the middle and
then beyond – is also a form of anachronic construction, though it might
be seen as a narrative structure in its own right. These anachronies have
a variety of consequences for the narrative structure and interpretation of
any given piece of text; we will discuss this in more detail in examples which
arise in the following chapters. In museums, anachronies have not only nar-
rative consequence, but political and socio-cultural implications.
Another phenomena which impacts upon narrative is the way in which
any given text relates to other texts around it. Genette calls these relation-
ships ‘transtextuality,’ and, tentatively, identifies five forms (Genette 1997: 1):
intertextuality; paratextuality; metatextuality; hypertextuality; and architex-
tuality. Intertextuality is the co-presence of two or more texts, with at least
one present in any of the others – quotations are the prime example (Genette
1997: 1), and these appear in museums, as we shall see below. The ‘paratext’ is
that which surrounds and extends the text, the ‘undefined zone’ between the
inside of the text and the outside world, which might include covers, prefaces,
and introductions or forewords (Genette 1997: 2); in a museum, this might
comprise marketing materials and internet sites. Metatextuality occurs when
one text refers to or speaks of another, without necessarily quoting directly
from it; this might take the form of a critique or a commentary (Genette 1997:
4); in the case of museums, this might be an exhibition review. ‘By hypertex-
tuality,’ writes Genette:

I mean any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext)
to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext) upon which it
is grafted in a manner which is not that of commentary (Genette 1997: 5).
34 Contextualizing
Genettian hypertexts, then, must not be confused with hyperlink-based
works of the same name; they are, instead, texts which derive from other
texts, unable to exist without them. From a certain angle, we might
understand the Victoria and Albert Museum as a hypertext to the South
Kensington Museum, and before that, to the 1851 Exhibition.
The final form of transtextuality is the architext; that is, the categories
which surround and form a literary work. This might include modes of dis-
course or indeed genres. In literature, this might be modernism, or science
fiction, respectively. In museums, the entire form of the museum – as under-
stood in its contemporary, Enlightenment derived form – can be consid-
ered to be an architext, but we might also understand the various genres of
museums – ethnographic, natural history, social history, and art galleries –
as architextual groupings in their own right.
This is where we link to the final feature of narrative forms which we
shall discuss here – the chronotope, which itself is closely connected to
genre forms. Again, this is a term which has already featured in museum
literature – Pascal Geilen used to it discuss the varied ways in which muse-
ums represent the past (Geilen 2004). However, Geilen’s use of the term
does not tackle the complexity which is to be found in the original literary
usage. The term first appeared in an essay called ‘Forms of Time and of
the Chronotope in the Novel,’ written by the Russian literary theorist, M.
M. Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1981: 84–258). The chronotope is more than genre –
though it is related to it. The chronotope of a text is the expression of the
‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin 1981: 84). That is, the ways in
which time and space are utilized, portrayed, and interact within litera-
ture produce particular forms – the chronotopes – which can be identified
and analysed. Bakhtin identifies a variety, including the adventure time of
Greek romances, the adventure of everyday life, and the biographical time
of ancient biography and autobiography (Bakhtin 1981: 84). He notes that
these are not all the forms one might find, and indeed that further inves-
tigation might render his ‘notes towards a historical poetics’ redundant
(Bakhtin 1981: 85). Whilst Geilen’s appropriation of the term is interesting
and, in many ways, appropriate, his tripartite definition of local, global,
and glocal time does not express the fullness of forms which the chrono-
tope can express: the purpose of this book is to enhance this exploration,
though perhaps not the definition, of the production of chronotopic spaces
in specifically located museum contexts.
It is clear, then, that there are many ways in which narratological form in
literature relates to time; and it should also be clear that these relationships
might translate to some degree into the museological realm. But litera-
ture is not limited only to plot and narrative – there are other, equally as
important elements in the construction of temporal experience in literature
which also have consequences for museums, and it is to them that we shall
now turn.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Sok fejtörés után, majdnem kétségbe esett, a mint egyszerre
visszaemlékezik mai reggeli megérkezésére, s hogy Varjas Andoriás
uram beszélt ilyesmit s kapott is érte szigorú rendreutasítást.
 VII.

(Odaviszik a fiatal embert, a hova nem várta. Hogy mi következik ily odavetett
kérdésből: ön erdélyi? az csak a könyv végén derül ki.)

Az ülésszak szokott lassúsággal megkezdődött. Még alakulva

sem volt a ház s Bogárdy Zoltán urat harmadszor rendreutasítá a
korelnök. Annyiba sem vette, mintha a czinege fütyült volna a
szomszéd múzeumkertben.
Gencsy Pál báró ezalatt lelkiismeretesen beleszokott mérsékelt
ellenzéki szerepébe. Kényelmes helyzet ez, melyben az ember a
rosszért másra hárítja a felelősséget, a jó eredmény hasznában és
dicsőségében pedig tele marokkal osztozik. Mint pártjának jelöltjét,
beválasztották a «jogi bizottmány»-ba, mely állásra a kolozsvári
egyetem itélete szerint épen «elégséges» képessége volt.
Október hava is elékerült a naptárból s miután ezen évben a
delegácziók Pesten üléseztek, semmi sem akadályozá a munka
folyamát. Már mit a képviselőházban szoktak munkának nevezni.
Egy hétfőn épen végére járt az ülés s a fiatal báró összeszedte a
kiosztott nyomtatványokat s tudja Isten miről gondolkodva, lehajtá
fejét s várá az elnök megszabadító szavát.
Egyszerre érzi, hogy valaki a háta mögé kerül, vállára teszi kezét
s Bogárdy Zoltán fintorított bajuszát pillantja meg.
 – Te vagy öreg?
– Öreg? No már az ilyen megszólítást szeretem; látszik, hogy
megérdemlett tiszteletben tartod barátodat.
– Parancsolsz velem?
– Valamire felszólítlak, ha kedved lesz rá. Jer velem ebédelni.
Onnan haza viszlek; öltözz fel s bizonyos helyen bemutatlak.
– Bizonyos helyen?
– Tanuld meg, hogy a bizonyos hely alatt néha igen correct jó
helyet szoktam érteni.
– Ah eltalálom; meglátogatjuk a zártszéki szomszédnőt.
– De már oda ilyen sárgaszájú bibiczfiókot nem viszek. Igaz,
kibékültem vele s most ismét «általam bővebben nem vizsgált
okokból» rám emlékezik.
– Vedd szerencsekivánatomat. Hova megyünk?
– Oda, a hol az eszed is járt, a midőn megszólítottalak. Nem
hallottad, hogy nagy toilette-t kell csinálnod? Bemutatlak
Dorozsmayné ő nagyságának, a kinek férje jó barátom volt s most is
elvetődöm néha az özvegy házához.
– Zoltán!
– Nos?
– Ki mondta nekem, hogy be nem lépnél oly házba, a hol pipád
füstjét az asszony szemébe nem fujhatod?
– Szokásom a tapasztalatlan fiatal emberből bolondot csinálni.
– Gonoszság kovácsa, az ifjúság megrontója: ki mondta nekem,
úgy kerüljem e házat, mint a mérges kigyó fészkét?
– Ezt igen bölcsen mondtam. Szerencsétlenségedre, nem
fogadod atyai intéseimet. Erővel a verembe akarsz veszni, tehát
veszsz. Különben pedig ismerőseim nem szokták minden szavamat
mérlegre vetni; mert én csak itt a képviselőházban beszélek egész
komolyan s mégis rendesen kinevetnek.
Úgy lett, mint tervezték. Elébb tisztességesen megebédeltek;
onnan átmentek a báró szállására s Bogárdy Zoltán két virginia-
szivarnak is felét-felét kiszívá, míg barátja tetőtől-talpig «a quatre
épingles» újra öltözött.
Ezalatt Varjas Andoriás a lehető legcsinosabb bérkocsit állítá a
kapu elé s midőn az urak felültek, ő is a kocsis mellé kapaszkodék.
– Mit akar kend ott?
– Semmit, csak ismerem kötelességemet; kár hogy nem kaptam
olyan kocsit, hogy hátul állhatnék rajta.
Az urak nevettek. Szép látvány lett volna estélybe menni
bérkocsin, hátul kipödrött bajuszú vén huszárral.
– Leszáll kend onnan?
– Igen is, ha úgy tetszik parancsolni. De meg ne tudja Zsuzsi
néni ő méltósága, hogy az én uram nagy parádéba csapta magát és
huszár nélkül indult el, mint valami éhes vándorló szabólegény.
Öt percz mulva a kocsi megállott a Nádor-utczának egyik
legpompásabb három emeletes háza előtt, mely különben nem volt
palota, miután földszinten boltok nyiltak, a felső emeletekben
szállásbérlők laktak, az első emeletet azonban kizárólag a gazdag
özvegy háztartása vette igénybe.
Bogárdy Zoltán kifizette a bérkocsit, a mi jelenté, hogy vagy
sokáig maradnak itt, vagy gyalog térnek vissza. Az ifjú bátorkodék
megjegyezni, hogy ez első látogatás levén, csak perczekig
időzhetnek, idősb társa azonban vállát vonogatá s mindketten
felmentek a lépcsőn.
Mintegy esti hat óra lehetett. Tehát e családnál már ebéd után. A
szobasorokban gázlámpák égtek, a sötétszürke bérruhába
öltöztetett cselédség ajtót nyitott s az érkezők bejelentés nélkül
léptek a belső szobák szentélyébe. Minden arra mutatott, hogy
gazdag urak a Dorozsmayak, de még mindig ragaszkodnak a
középosztály életmódjához.
A hova jutottak, nem volt terem, csak három ablakos nagy szoba
az épület közepén. Innen minden irányban kettős szárnyú ajtók
vezettek a szomszéd szobákba. Minden ajtó tárva-nyitva, mindenütt
fény, gazdagság, izlés és kényelem.
A háziasszony pamlagok és magas hátú karszékek
tömkelegében nehány igen feszes magatartású nővel társalkodott. A
szemközti ajtón túl zongoráztak; nehány kisasszony s több úr
képezé a társaságot.
Jól esett a fiatal bárónak, hogy megérkezésük semmi feltünést
sem okozott. Látszott, hogy olyan ház ez, a hol az elfogadási napon
jőnek-mennek a látogatók, és ott keresnek társaságot, a hol kedvük
tartja.
Bogárdy Zoltán még csak most bocsátotta szabadra eddig
karöltve vezetett barátját. Avval se törődött, hogy ő egyedül van itt
fekete sétaöltönyben, aztán közelebb lépve a háziasszonyhoz,
megtörtént a bemutatás igen polgári módon.
– Kedves húgom, kegyes engedelmeddel bemutatom neked
képviselőtársamat, Gencsy Pál bárót.
Dorozsmayné ő nagysága könnyedén meghajtá fejét, mondá,
hogy örül az ismeretségnek, s ezzel vége lett a szertartásnak.
Zoltán úr azonban nem elégedett meg azzal, hogy pártfogoltja
csak egy legyen az itten bejárók közül, hanem igyekezett őt az
előtérbe vonni.
– Pál barátom, – mondá, – nem tartozik az én pártom soraiba, de
mégis ellenzéki. Hatan esküdtünk össze, hogy megtérítjük, de
mindeddig sikertelenül. Ha pedig ide jött, a hol a kormánypárt hívei
vernek fészket, soha többé vele nem boldogulhatunk.
 – Akkor annál becsesebb rám nézve Zoltán bátyámnak ezen
feláldozó önzéstelensége, – felelé a ház asszonya. – De mi jut
eszembe? Tán épen báró úr azon utitárs, kivel ketten rohamra
indultak az egyház ellen? Ott tarokkozik kanonok bácsi a harmadik
szobában, és elpanaszolta nekem, mily eretnek játékot űztek vele.
Részemről megadom az amnesztiát, csak tanácslom, ne nagyon
törekedjenek házi papom szeme elé kerülni.
Ezzel Pál báró felé fordult.
– Remélem uram, legalább három remek beszédet tartott már a
képviselőházban?
– Bocsánat asszonyom, de bizony én még eddig egy kedvem
szerinti «éljen»-t sem kiáltottam.
– Még akkor sem, a midőn Zoltán bácsi beszélt és rendre
utasították?
– Akkor pártállásom tiltotta a helyeslést, de várva várom az
alkalmat, hogy valamely hazafias kifakadása fölött tapsolhassak.
Magától érthető, hogy az ily beszédek csak arra valók, hogy
mondjon az ember valamit. A jelenlevők hamar visszatértek
félbenhagyott társalgási tárgyukra s egy grófné (nevezzük meg,
özvegy Bendeffy Károlyné), a kinek fia a leányok körében mulatott,
kegyesen elismeré, hogy mai napon a nem czímes nemesség között
gyakrabban találkoznak oly családok, melyek a nemzeti királyok alatt
is virágoztak, míg a főrendűek csak az ausztriai ház kegyének
köszönhetik rangjukat. Oly vallomás, melyet a grófné saját köreiben
semmi áron ki nem bocsát ajkáról.
Pál báró mély tisztelettel látszék a grófné tudós megjegyzésére
hallgatni, de ezalatt másutt járt az esze. Miféle ember ez a Bogárdy
Zoltán? hogy ijesztgette őt e házzal s kiderül, hogy itthon van e
termekben, a háziasszonyt húgának nevezi és tegezi! Hát az a
kanonok bácsi mit keres e protestáns háznál? Ismerték egymást, s
még jó reggelt sem mondtak a találkozáskor!
 Oly helyen ült, hogy akadály nélkül beláthatott a szomszéd
szobába. A ház kisasszonyát már látta a színházban. Akkor,
messziről, nagyon szép leánynak találta: most közelről az égből
leszállt angyalnak.
És a mint így nézegeti, nehány sikertelen kisérlet után szemük
összetalálkozott; az ifjú tiszteletteljes fejhajtással fejezé ki hódolatát,
a leányka észrevette a figyelmet s lekötelező mosolylyal viszonzást
intett, de aztán megint a körötte álló urak beszédére hallgatott.
Pál úr csakhamar észrevette, hogy itt az asszonyok között nem a
maga helyén foglalt széket s készült átmenni a leányok társalgási
szobájába.
De nem könnyű feladat ez ott, a hol sok ismerős között egyedül
idegen az ember. Jól tudta, hogy ha ő oda lép, az urak egyszerre
elhallgatnak, s aztán kárörvendve mosolyognak, ha az új arcz
zavarba jő és beszédében akadozik.
Különösen pedig Bendeffy Arthur gróf szeméből látszott ki a
rosszakarat és ellenséges indulat. Ő méltósága kényelmesen
helyezkedett el egy karszéken, épen szemközt a házi
kisasszonynyal és igen érdekes történetkét beszélt el a város
legmagasabb köreiből. Fesztelen viseletével főleg azt kivánta a
jelenlevőkkel elhitetni, hogy ő e házban jobban érzi magát, mint más
jelenlevő, sőt esetleg több is eléadhatja magát. Az urak mind
tegezték egymást, a leánykák pedig nagyobbrészt gróf vagy báró
czímen szólíták őket.
De mi történik?
Esztike kisasszony egyszerre fölkel helyéből, társnői mint adott
jelre követik példáját s mindnyájan a nagy szobába gyülekeznek, a
hol a háziasszony elnökösködött. Ezen hadi mozdulatra a férfisereg
is «front»-ot változtat, a körben álló székek háta mögé sorakozik, s
mindenkinek azon leánykával kellett megelégednie, a hova épen
sorsa juttatta.
A gróf urak nem tudták elhatározni, mit jelentett e saloni
forradalom? De tény maradt, hogy az eddig elszigetelt új arcz nyert
legtöbb előnyt; mert a házi kisasszony oly helyet választott, hogy Pál
báró épen a háta mögé esett.
E pillanatban Bogárdy Zoltán bácsi, a ki ezalatt minden szobát
bejárt, büszke mosolylyal közelített a ház asszonya felé s mondá:
– Szépséges húgomasszony, jó hírrel jövök; megtaláltam
kanonok bácsit s békét kötöttem az egyedül idvezítő szent
eklezsiával. Nagy munkámba került, mert épen most fogták el a
pagátját s ezt úgy tekintette, mint jogtalan erőszakot az egyházi
tulajdon ellen. Megigértem neki, hogy én fogom indítványozni a
polgári házasság behozatalát, s minthogy ezen esetben előre meg
van bukva a kezdemény, tehát megbocsátotta a vasuton szenvedett
inzultácziót.
A gróf urak és grófné mamák igen «közönséges»-nek találák az
ilyen, klubba és kávéházba való tréfákat; de Zoltán bácsi
dicsőségének tartotta, ha mint «enfant terrible» szerepel, s aztán
visszavonulva, Esztike mellé állott és csendes hangon mondá:
– Végig hallgattuk a multkor a jövő zenéjét, s tökéletesen
egyetértettünk Pál barátommal, hogy ki volt a páholy hölgyei között a
legszebb?
Ezzel tovább állt s barátját és a ház kisasszonyát magukra
hagyá.
Pál báró folytatni akará a felvetett s igen háladatos társalgási
tárgyat, a midőn Esztike kisasszony egészen közönyösen, de mint a
következmény bebizonyította, valósággal végzetszerű véletlenből,
kérdé:
– Báró úr, erdélyi?
Pál báró ezen szó, Erdély, hallatára egyszerre tizenhat kötetre
terjedő regénytárgyat fedezett fel; csodálatos ékesszólással beszélt
a szelid domb alján fekvő Gencsről, az ódon, de esetlen alakú
szöglettornyokkal erősített udvarházról, a megholt anyának
művészietlenül faragott sírkövéről, a szigorú apának gazdasági
gondjairól, három leánytestvéreiről, végre ama köszörűletlen
gyémántról, Zsuzsi néniről, ennek ártatlan előitéleteiről, forró
szeretetéről, jóságáról, önzéstelen feláldozásáról, s maga is
csodálta, hogy Esztike kisasszony mindezt érdekkel hallgatta, sőt
néha fölvilágosítás okáért még kérdéseket is tett!
Képzelhetlen gyorsasággal telt ezalatt az idő, az öreg grófnék
fiatal kisérőikkel már eltávoztak; a harmadik szobában tarokkozók
bevégezték napi munkájukat, a vendég kisasszonykák után is kocsit
küldtek hazulról, úgy hogy végül csak Arthur gróf, Zoltán bácsi s a
fiatal báró maradtak és készültek búcsut venni.
Hogy valakinek eszébe juthatott volna, tüntetést keresni abban, ki
marad itt legutóljára? szó sem lehetett. Ily rossz izlés ezen
társaságban lehetetlen volt.

Esztike kisasszony mindezt érdekkel hallgatta.

 Tehát egyszerre indultak. A kapu előtt a grófot pompás fogat
várta s midőn felült kocsijára, nem tagadhatá meg ő méltósága
önmagától azon elégtételt, hogy lenéző tekintetet ne vessen azokra,
kik gyalog indultak hazafelé.
– Zoltán! te rejtély vagy előttem.
– És miért? ha szabad kérdenem?
– Minő mérgesen beszéltél a Dorozsmay-ház ellen s azalatt
kiderül, hogy egyike vagy a legszívesebben látott vendégeknek.
Félreérthetlen tekintélylyel lépsz fel a családban; tegezed, kedves
húgomnak nevezed a ház asszonyát, neked több szabad ott, mint
másnak. Vigyázz, mert ez az özvegy még nagyon szép; bele találsz
szeretni s akkor vége lesz államférfiúi szilárd hírednek.
– Öcsém, barátocskám, tanulj udvariasabb lenni az idősbek iránt.
Hátha magam is a leányért járnék oda?
– A leányért! – felelt a báró elképedve, habár tudta, hogy Zoltán
bácsinak soha sem szabad szavait betűértelemben venni.
– Nem lehetetlen! Azt hiszed, tied már a leány? Meghódítottad
első látásra? s most szeretnéd elkommendálni nyakadról az
alkalmatlan anyóst!
– Ugyan beszélj már életedben legalább egyszer komolyan.
Különben pedig fogadd forró köszönetemet szívességedért, hogy e
dicső házhoz bevezettél.
– Várjuk meg a regény végét; mert félek, hogy e napot velem
együtt elátkozod. Vetted észre, hogy Arthur gróf nagy kegyben áll a
hölgyek előtt?
– Úgy látszott, követelőleg lép fel ott.
– Követelőleg és nem remény nélkül. Az özvegynek tetszik a
nagynevű grófság. Egyéb nem kell hozzá, mint jól kiszámított roham
a leány ellen s kész az eljegyzés.
– Valószinű.
 – Részemről nem pártolom e tervet; de mit tehetek én? Van
ugyan fegyverem a gróf ellenében s tán használni is fogom. Csak
annyit mondok előre, hogy kézfogó is történhetik a háznál: de a
házasság csak akkor bizonyos, a midőn a párocska az esküvő után
visszajő a templomból.
Hallgatva folytatták útjokat.
Később Pál báró megjegyzé:
– Csak annyira óhajtanálak megismerni, hogy eltaláljam, mikor
beszélsz komolyan? mikor űzesz bolondot belőlem?
– Nincs ennél könnyebb. Soha se hallgasd, mit beszélek, hanem
nézd, mit teszek? Ha parlamenti férfiú akarsz lenni, mindig azt
kutasd, mit nem mondott az ellenség? Azonban az ily makrapipás
Demosthenes, mint én vagyok, csak akkor tudja meg, mit beszélt, a
midőn szavát a gyorsírók feljegyzették. Most pedig megérkeztünk
szállásod elé, adjon az Isten neked csendes és nyugodalmas jó
éjszakát.
Belépvén szállására a fiatal báró, a külső szobában találá Varjas
Andoriás uramat, a ki épen azon nehéz mesterséget gyakorlá,
miként csípheti le magát az ember, ha egyedül, társ nélkül iszik.
A jó kedv már megvolt s ha korábban, mint várta, nem
háborgatják, a többi is okvetlenül bekövetkezik. De karbunkulus
módjára csillámlott a szeme, a midőn urának őszi felső kabátját
leölteni segíté.
– Mi lelte kendet?
– Engem? semmi. Hanem mikor szégyenszemre leszállítottak a
bakról, utána iramodtam a rozsdás fiákerlónak s láttam, hogy az én
méltóságos uram a Nádor-utcza végén száll le egy gyönyörűséges
nagy ház kapuja előtt.
– Hogyan? huszár és kémkedik!
– Az ilyen ispionságért nem akasztják fel az embert. Akkor,
örömömben bort hoztam a korcsmából s arra ittam: adja Isten, hogy
farsangra idehagyjuk ezt a nagy bolond várost s mutassuk meg
Csikszéknek, milyen friss menyecskét szereztünk az országgyűlés
alatt!
A kivánat nem volt rossz, de ha a góbénak több is volt szabad,
mint más cselédnek, a bárót ezen hivatlan bizalmaskodás mégis
boszantotta.
– Bolond kend Varjas Andoriás és az is marad. Igya meg, a mi
palaczkjában még van és menjen feküdni.
 VIII.

(Aláirás egy tánczvigalomra, mely létre sem jő; a nagy világ hiú szédelgéseibe
merült uracsot megemlékeztetik a csendes, egyszerű s boldog otthonra.)

Három vagy négy hét mulva, hétfőn, Dorozsmayné rendes

nagyobb elfogadási napján, az urak szivarozó szobájában ketten
üldögéltek. Arthur gróf s egy másik, kit már láthattunk itt, de csak
most nevezzük meg először: Porczogh Viktor báró.
– Valóban hiszed, hogy ez az erdélyi mokány fiú veszedelmes?
– Úgy mutatkozik. Keresztapja, a ki itt bemutatta, erősen
pártfogolja. Az özvegy részeden van, de a leány könnyen
ingadozhatik. Meg kell buktatnunk e hivatlan tolakodót.
– Megbuktatni! – felelé Arthur gróf. – De hogy? mert én uri
emberhez méltólag csak két eszközt ismerek: pénz és párbaj.
– A párbajt vessük ki számításunkból. Mi nem verekszünk, hogy
pedig egy vívómestert béreljünk fel, a ki belekössön, ez rút, piszkos
dolog.
– Marad a pénz.
– Igen a pénz. Századunkban legkényelmesebb mód, pénz
dolgában tönkre tenni ellenségünket. Jelen esetben még sokat sem
kell koczkáztatnunk, mert a báró nevetségesen szegény.
Kérdezősködtem erdélyi ismerőseimtől, minő faj ez a Gencsy
báróság? Azt felelték: idősb Gencsy Pál télen báránybőr ködmönben
jár vadászni, de csak pecsenyére valót lő. Nyáron leveti kabátját és
ingujjban ebédel. Állítják, három fiú, kilencz leány van a háznál.
Végre ráadásul bizonyos Zsuzsi néni, a kinek kezében a kormány
rúdja fekszik.
– Pompás család. És valóban bárók?
– E tekintetben nincs kétség.
– Tehát pénzügyileg buktatjuk meg, – nevetett Arthur gróf. –
Parbleu! nem messze kell mennünk, ha példát akarunk keresni.
– Tervem van. Tisztességes és rangunkhoz méltó. Bele
másztatjuk, s egy pár hónap mulva biróilag lefoglalják képviselői
napidíját. Az ilyen ember aztán végkép lehetetlen minden lányos
háznál.
– Hogy viszed bele?
– Mindjárt meglátod. Menj a leánykák szobájába; szólítsd meg a
bárót s hívd ide egy bizalmas szóra.
E küldetés semmi nehézséggel sem járt s nehány percz mulva
Arthur gróf karöltve vezeti be a fiatal bárót.
– Ülj le, – mondá neki. – Ez itt Porczogh Viktor báró, legjobb
barátom, s beszédünk lesz veled.
Porczogh báró papirlapot nyitott ki, mely hasonlított azon aláirási
ívekhez, mikkel a pesti embert úton-útszélen üldözik.
Pál báró zavartan és bizalmatlanul nézett. Eddig Arthur gróf nem
tegezte őt. Ha találkozott vele a lefolyt héten a Nádor-utczai háznál
vagy nem szólott hozzá, vagy úgy beszélt, hogy az «ön» vagy «te»
megszólítást kikerülte. Tud így a magyar ember beszélni, ha akar.
– Ime, – kezdé Porczogh báró. – Aláirási ív olyan válogatott és
«comme il faut» tánczvigalomra, a milyen még nem volt. Húszan
vagyunk és 200 meghívójegynél többet ki nem adunk. Megmutatjuk
Pestnek, kik vagyunk? és hányan vagyunk? A ki ide bejut, az
szemen szedett crème, a ki kimarad, örökre a második osztályba
sülyed. Természetes, hogy Dorozsmayné ő nagyságát ki nem
hagyhatjuk. Benne lesz a főrendiház színe, holmi főispánság vagy
miniszterség ide nem elég ajánlólevél. Lásd 19-en már aláírtuk, a
20-dik hely számodra van hagyva.
– Értem, 19 egy hián 20.
– Vigyen el az ördög közmondásoddal. Lásd, mi ragad rád, ha
azzal a csizmadia-czéhmesterrel, Bogárdy Zoltánnal
kompanistáskodol. Itt a helyed, írd alá.
– Igen szívesen s köszönöm, hogy ki nem feledtetek.
Természetesen ismernem kell azon összeget, a mire kötelezem
magamat.
– Az összeg itt nem határoz. Párisból hozatunk szakácsot,
Nápolyból czukrászt, Londonból cselédséget. Minden költség
pontosan előre kiszámítva; egy részvény ára pedig potomság 1200
forint.
– Hogyan? 1200 forint? Sajnálom barátom, ez változtat a dolgon.
Ez oly összeg nekem, minőt én eddig egy lélegzetre soha ki nem
mondtam.
– Csak nem utasítod vissza e kitüntetést? Ki akarnád magadat
zárni a legfelsőbb osztályból?
– Oh a mi a megtiszteltetést illeti, nem vagyok érzéketlen iránta,
de ezen összeg fölülmulja erőmet.
– Soha ilyet, – kiálta föl Arthur gróf. – Van-e ára annak, hogy az
ország első gentleman-jei közé számíttassunk? Azt hiszed, nem
kapunk Pesten tízszer ennyi embert, a ki ha csak pénzről volna szó,
10,000 forintot is fizetne, csak velünk tánczolhasson?
– Legkevésbbé sem kétkedem. Én azonban képviselői díjamból
élek s csak rendkívüli kiadásaimra kaptam otthon 500 forintot.
 – Ha csak ez a baj, szerzünk mi neked embert, a ki annyit ad
kölcsön, mennyit parancsolsz.
– Becsületemre fogadtam fel, hogy adósságot nem csinálok.
– Oh özönvíz előtti ember, – nevetett Porczogh báró. – Ez még
nem tudja, hogy három dologban nincs becsületszó: primo: hogy
többé nem kártyázunk; secundo: bizonyos szoknya után nem
futkosunk; tertio: soha váltót alá nem irunk. Benne van ez minden
kifogástalan dandy codex-ében. Hanc veniam damus petimusque
vicissim.
– Ne kisértsetek; nincs pénzem.
– Ez nem mentség, – felelt Arthur gróf. – Holnap hozzád küldöm
udvari zsidómat, Kohn Fülöp urat, a kinek azon gyengéje van, hogy
mentől többet parancsolsz, annál készebb és alázatosabb.
– Nem kétkedem Kohn Fülöp úr előzékenységében; de majd
másként beszélne, ha a lejárati napon nem fizethetnék.
– Micsoda? más hangon? Látom, sejtelmed sincs róla, ki ez a
Kohn Fülöp? Olyan sajátszerű ficzkó, hogyha a lejárati napon fizetni
is akarnál, térden csúszva kér, hogy könyörülj rajta és prolongálj.
– Elhiszem, jó kamat fejében.
– Kamat? Barátom, ez oly aljas szó, melyet született úr soha
ajkára sem vesz. Jól gondold meg, mit teszesz: mert nem tudom,
minő figurát játszhatol aztán itt, a Dorozsmayné házánál, ha
elmondják rólad, hogy fösvénységből kizártad magad ez előkelők
társaságából. Ez a borzasztóan millionaire kisasszony nem értené,
hogy jár valaki a házhoz, s pénzkérdés miatt lemond azon élvezetről,
hogy tánczoljon vele.
Pál báró el volt határozva, hogy az ívet semmi áron alá nem írja s
csak arról gondolkodott, hogy illendő módot találjon a menekvésre.
Ekkor azonban megtoppan a háta mögött egy pár recsegős
csizma s Bogárdy Zoltánt látja közeledni, a ki téntába mártott tollat
hoz és mondja:
 – Patvarba az ilyen félénk gyerkőczczel; itt a toll, írd alá.
– Hogyan? te is kisértesz?
– Ird alá; a többit pedig bizd rám.
De mily csodálatos változás? Arthur gróf és barátja, egyszerre
mintha kicserélték volna őket, oly természetesnek találták, hogy a
kinek nincs pénze, nem kötelezheti magát. De Bogárdy Zoltán annál
kevésbbé tágított. Karon ragadta fiatal barátját, az asztalhoz vezeté
s az ívet aláiratá vele.
Szegény Pál báró most már egészen elveszté szeme fényét;
csak azt tudta: asztal mellett ül, perczeg valami a kezében s végre
ott feketéllett a fehéren: b. Gencsy Pál s. k.
– Amazok átvették az ívet; hideg köszönetet mormogtak, s
minden jó kedvüket elvesztve, visszatértek a társalkodási szobákba.
Ekkor felkelt székéről az ifjú s megragadva barátja kezét, mondá:
– Zoltán! el vagyok veszve!
– Ezerkétszáz forintért?
– Nagy összeg ez nekem.
– Igen, ha Kohn Fülöp adná. Holnap eljönne hozzád. Már tudná,
hogy aláírtad az ívet s diktálná a föltételeket. 1200 forintért 2000
forint egy hónapi határidőre! A második hónap végén 4000 forint, s
biróilag lefoglaltatná képviselői napidíjadat. De ne gondolj ezzel.
Nem láttad, mily hosszú orral kotródtak el innen? Mihelyt nem
sikerült téged Kohn Fülöp körmei közé játszani, nem gondolnak
többé tánczvigalmukkal sem. Száz ürügyet találnak a
visszavonulásra. Azt mondják, jókor van még s nincs együtt a
társaság. Egymásután kitörlik a neveket s a lapot széttépik.
– És ha nem tépnék?
– Akkor fizetsz; de nem Kohn Fülöp, hanem én leszek bankárod.
– Zsuzsi néni exkommunikál.
 – Gyerek! azt mondom neked, ne félj, míg engem látsz. Azonban
eltelt az idő, oszolnak a vendégek, menjünk szép csendesen mi is
haza.
Otthon az ifjú bárót kellemes meglepetés érte. Levél érkezett
hazulról s a vastag lúdtollal, jól ismert vonásokkal irott czímről látta,
hogy Zsuzsi néninek akadtak fontos közleni valói. Élénk
kiváncsisággal törte fel tehát a pecsétet és olvasni kezdett.
«Gencs, nov. 20.
Kedves fiam, Pál! Még nem kaptam leveledet s az csúnya volna
tőled, ha nem tudnám, mennyi dolgod van az országgyűlésen? Mi
pedig reggelinél, ebédnél, uzsoránál, vacsoránál mindig rólad
beszélünk, miként tüntetted ki magad az ülésekben s miként veszed
hasznát a sok iskolának, a mit kitanultál s a mi annyi költségünkbe
került.
A lányok egésségesek. Klárit a küküllői alispán megkérte.
Özvegy ember, nem nagyon sok gyermeke van s az idén erdejében
annyi makk termett, hogy 1500 forintot kapott a brassói hentesektől.
Képzelheted, hogy a fényes ajánlatot örömmel fogadtuk.
A dió s aszalt szilva, a mit holmid közé dugtam, úgy-e jól esett?
Csak ropogtasd Zsuzsi nénéd ajándékát, legalább van otthon
vacsorád s nem kényszerülsz a drága és utálatos vendéglőkbe
menni. Ha fehérruhád kilyukad, vagy elrongyolódik, küld haza,
kifoltozzuk. Lelkére kötöttem Varjas Andoriásnak, hogy ingeden
mindig gomb legyen. Van czérnája fehér és fekete. A fejős tehenek
most rosszul tejelnek, de szép agarad a Rabló visszakerült
kóborlásaiból s a lányok olyan jól tartják, mintha magad volnál. Jolán
húgod gyapot paplant köt számodra, de Pál napra nem lesz kész.
Még csak 16 koczka van, pedig 178 kell.
Most a szebeni kék virágos tányérokról eszünk; kiméljük az új
service-t, mert a cselédek nagyon törik. A len olyan vastag az idén,
hogy csak törölközőket szőhet belőle a takács, de a kertben annyi a
hernyótojás az almafán, hogy nem győzzük pusztítani.
 Tegnap itt voltak Marialakyék. Keresztlányom Zsuzsika megnőtt
mint a lödéczi lajtorja. Már nem jár sem rövid ruhában, sem fodros
nadrágban, de rossz kedve volt, mert szorította az új czipője. Igazán
szép leány s miután egyetlen gyermek és szép puszta néz rá, soha
se feledd, hogy őt néztem ki neked feleségül.
Apád szüretkor meghűtötte magát s nagyon köhögött. De főztem
neki árvacsalán, utilapú és cziczkafarkból czukros bonbonokat,
azóta jobban van. Csak ne színá mindig azt a borzasztó erős
bethlen-szentmiklósi dohányt!
Úgy-e nehéz munka a haza javára gyűléseket tartani? De ne
szavazz valami új adóra, mert a régiekben is fülig úszunk. Azt
azonban nem bánnám, ha vasutat indítványoznál Csikszeredától
Gencsig, mert igen nehéz innen külön kocsit küldeni, ha só, riskása,
sáfrány kell a házhoz. Küldök jó reczeptet, melylyel szennyes
kesztyűidet kimoshatod, de mielőtt hordanád, akaszd ki kötélre a
folyosón, mert eleinte förtelmes büdös szaga van.
A majorosné hat cziczája, mihelyt megnő, muffot csináltatunk
bőréből a két kis leánynak; de a szolgabiró, a kit tavaly választottak,
gyönyörű szép zongorát vett a feleségének. Bele is került neki a
hozatallal együtt 37 forintjába!
Hordatjuk a «Marosvásárhelyi közlöny»-t. Félre rakom a
számokat, hogy ha nyáron haza jösz, olvashasd. Borzasztó benne,
mint vágták le a tolvajok a gelenczei zsidónak a fülét, de mikor erre
járt a miniszter, a mi tiszteletesünk olyan szép köszöntő verset írt
hozzá, hogy az itteni iskolás gyerekeknek könyv nélkül meg kellett
tanulni.
Édes Pál fiam! ne nagyon nézegesd te azokat a pesti selyem
ruhás fehérnépeket. Lám innen egy fiatal Mikes addig sétálgatott a
promenádon egy selyem ruhás fekete fátyolos uri nővel, kiről azt
gondolta grófné, pedig a theatromban játszik amolyan nyelves
szobalányokat. Jobb lesz tehát, ha gyűlés után haza mégysz,
hozatsz Varjas Andoriással ebédet, este pedig fél kilenczkor
imádkozol és lefekszel, mert a hiábavaló csavargás minden
gonosznak kútforrása. Mihelyt fagy, küldök sonkát meg füstös
kolbászt. Most pedig bezárom soraimat és az én Istenem oltalmába
ajánlja Palikáját az őt kimondhatlanul szerető
Zsuzsi nénije.
U. I. Fel kell bontanom levelemet, mert elfeledtem megírni, el ne
hanyagold a flótázást, mert a mai világban követelik a fiatal
embertől, hogy muzsikális legyen. Aztán oly szép az, ha valaki az
udvarra szóló ablakban flótázik, oda lenn pedig könyhullatások
között hallgatják. Aztán meg ha francziául tudsz is, nem árt, ha néha
a német gramatikába bepillantasz.
Zs. n.»
Pál báró feszült figyelemmel olvasta ezen hosszú s az idegenre
nézve érdektelen levelet. Olyan világosan meg volt írva benne: ki ő
otthon? és hozzá gondolta, mi lett itten? Közepette a főváros
zajának, midőn már-már be volt sodorva a nagy világ
veszedelmeinek örvényébe, oly megnyugtatólag hatott rá a falusi
csend, boldogság és egyszerűség.
Tán unalmat és boszankodást érezve, félreveté a levelet? Tán
nevetett az elfogultság és korlátoltság ily kézzelfogható bizonyítéka
fölött? Nem. Még egyszer átolvasá, s miután minden semmiség
érdekelte őt, szemébe igaz könyek lopóztak. Bajos volt ugyan a
sorokban érzékeny s könyet facsaró ömlengéseket fölfedezni. Ő
azonban minden betűből csak azt olvasta, hogy a kiket otthon
hagyott, végtelenül szeretik őt, s meggyőződve vannak, hogy a mit
hazulról hall, hittel és szent érdekkel fogja olvasni, elkezdve a
majorosné hat cziczájától a szolgabiróné remek zongorájáig.
A naiv hit, ezen minden kétkedést kizáró bizalom és ártatlan
föltevés gyüleszté szemébe a könyeket. Egy egészen más csalárd
világból tekintett vissza az elhagyott atyai házra, az ott fölmerült
köznapiságokra, s mégis tapasztalnia kellett, hogy egyedül ama
távol otthon azon szent hajlék, melyhez tartozik, s a hova ezer
csalódások után is mindenkor mint biztos révbe vissza is térhet.
Eszébe sem jutott, hogy még ma nem is vacsorált, s hogy erejét
felülmuló pénzbeli kötelezettséget vállalt, hanem lefeküdt és aludt