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Historical Incongruity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Christopher Cherry
Christopher Cherry
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury
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Extract

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 62 , Issue 240 , April 1987 , pp. 195 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1987

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References

1 Eliot, George, Romola (Bungay: Penguin, 1974), 43–44.Google Scholar

2 From a review of the exhibition, The Vikings in England, at the Yorkshire Museum in York.Google ScholarPubMed

3 From an obituary on Sir Arthur Bryant, the popular historian.

4 ‘Discover’ is an odd word to use here. Anyone who ever needs persuading that the past is real will always need persuading of it. The idea of a oneoff, definitive conversion makes no sense. Reminders, reassurances, are constantly needed because none is effective for very long.

5 George Eliot, op. cit., 43; see also 50.

6 Bibby, Geoffrey, The Testimony of the Spade (London: Fontana, 1968), 159.Google Scholar

7 Jean Giraudoux.

8 Wittgenstein, , ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’, The Human World 3 (1971), 35.Google Scholar

9 S., Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919). Translated (1925) by Alix Strachey as ‘The “Uncanny”’.Google Scholar

10 Cherry, See C., ‘Knowing the Past’, Philosophical Investigations 7, No.4 (October 1984), 277–278.Google Scholar

11 See C., Cherry, op cit.; and ‘Explanation and Explanation by Hypothesis’, Synthese 33(1976), and ‘Meaning and the Idol of Origins’, Philosophical Quarterly 35, No. 138 (January 1985).Google Scholar

12 It may be said that those surprised and impressed by what they perceive as historical incongruities are so without rhyme or reason. I agree. But then, don't people regularly remark with real amazement upon the, likeness between, say, a mother and her baby even though all that theand everyone else—know about genetics must lead them to expect such likenesses. So all of us are often surprised without rhyme or reason—surprised that things should actually turn out in the way it is rational to expect them to.

13 F., Cioffi, ‘When Do Empirical Methods Bypass “the Problems Which Trouble Us”?’, Philosophy and Literature, A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 155–172.Google Scholar

14 Steiner, George, ‘Postscript to a Tragedy’, Encounter 28(February 1967), 33. The books are Chaim Kaplan's Warsaw Diary and J.F. Steiner's I Treblinka.Google Scholar

15 Op. cit., 160.

16 Collins, William Wilkie, The Woman in White, The World's Classics (Oxford University Press, 1984), 25.Google Scholar

17 Wittgenstein, : Lectures and Conversations, C. Barrett (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 53.Google Scholar

18 Spark, Muriel, The Only Problem (London: The Bodley Head, 1984),18.Google Scholar

19 Observer, , 17.8.85; my italics. For the fascination, born of bewilderment, with the Jekyll, and Hyde, incongruity see Karl Muller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

20 The examples I appeal to differ from Cioffi's (that is, Steiner's) in this respect: they offer, as they are intended to, incongruity in a more concen trated form. Steiner invokes only temporal coexistence, I spatio-temporal coexistence. In this example, two quite distinct sets of biographies are iy brought together, made to meet, only temporarily: there is no other connection between those who are sleeping or eating or worrying and those who are being murdered. In my examples, the antithetical items (or whatever) are united in one and the same biography and not distributed between two which just happen, at some point in time, to intersect. This, I think, enhances the incongruity.