#chronologies

[ID: Q: Is it possible to experience anticipatory feelings toward the past? A: A whole, gaping, pulsing as I run toward it, though it's the running that pushes it away. In other words, the event is horizonal; an even horizon mothering itself. end ID]

[ID: The generic structure of Frankenstein can best be understood if we realize that the text marks the end (or at least obsolescence) of one genre even as it inaugurates another. Captain Walton, who initially appears to be the protagonist of the work, is in fact the hero of an old-fashioned travel narrative—a form with an ancient lineage that in Mary Shelley’s own lifetime had reached a brilliant culmination in Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” (1798), whose influence on the arctic sections of Frankenstein is of course pervasive. When Walton takes Victor Frankenstein aboard his ship and turns himself into the latter’s amanuensis—thus bringing to a close the prefatory letters from Walton to his sister and beginning chapter 1 of the main text—he in effect resigns the office of protagonist and hands it over to the new friend for whom he feels such a keen affinity. The affinity is real enough, for Walton and Frankenstein are both quasi-Faustian overreachers—but in crucially different ways. Walton is an explorer in an unproblematically spatial way, a discoverer of regions that may appear new and strange to the European observer but that in fact are assumed to have always existed in pretty much the condition that Walton finds. By contrast, Frankenstein—the properly science-fictional hero, whose emergence as protagonist transforms the narrative into a predominantly science- fictional one—is concerned with pushing back the frontiers not of space but of time.

This does not appear to be true in the most narrow grammatical sense; for grammatically, of course, the story of Frankenstein and his monstrous creation (like much of the best nineteenth-century science fiction, notably that of Poe and Verne) is set in an alternative present and recent past. In more substantive terms, however, the alternative time frame suggests that such an experiment as Frankenstein’s is a concrete possibility for the (near) future and thus turns the actual present—the empirical present of the reader—into a potential and historicized past. In other words, Frankenstein’s experiment and its consequences, introduced into an apparently otherwise mundane setting, constitute such a radical (or, as we shall discuss in the following section, Blochian) novelty as to reconfigure in time the surrounding world of the novel, to turn ap- parent present into potential future. Among the results, for example, is that the implicit future projected by the monster’s very existence serves (perhaps rather against the author’s conscious intentions) to estrange and undermine the almost suffocatingly bourgeois-romantic egoism of the title character. The classic travel narrative—like Walton’s—is an essentially ahistorical form that displays “timeless” wonders, often explicitly natural (the arctic seascape, for instance) though sometimes also in the form of naturalized “exotic” cultures inhabited by “people without history.” Science fiction, by contrast, engages the whole Hegelian and post-Hegelian problematic of historicity by projecting (even if implicitly, as in Frankenstein) a future significantly different from the empirical present while also in concrete continuity with it. end ID]

[ID: James and Prout argue further that "time in childhood -- children's daily life experiences --" has been "made secondary to the time of childhood, when children are seen as dependent upon and protected by the adult world" (1990: 219). The child has been theorized in terms of a past from which the child will soon develop into the adult; in terms of the projected time of future adulthood; or in a timeless mythical state of innocence, ignorance, and purity (221-30). By displacing children from the present, James and Prout suggest, the temporal constructions that have been applied to children in theory and practice have tended to thwart and obscure children's active participation in the world. In place of these constructions, James and Prout advocate theoretical and empirical practices that "can grasp childhood as a continually experienced and created social phenomenon which has significance for its present, as well as the past and future" (231) end ID]

[ID: A unit of money, like a word in language, never stands on its own or purely for itself. It is contaminated by association and exchange. Not so childhood. In Rousseau's tract, the Emile who compares, socialises, circulates amongst men, and has intercourse with women is, by definition, no longer a child. Childhood is always a moment before -- once it is contaminated, it is lost. end ID]

[ID 1: The future is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity.

ID 2: In these formulations of temporal life span, the capacity to inhabit futurity is already a privilege of ableism. This capacity is not simply affective or phenomenological but also structural, biopolitical, and ensnared in economies of risk, calculation, and survival. The future is already here, but it is unevenly distributed, in bits and pieces in time and space, as extremes and also as banalities.

ID 3: Screencap from episode 8 of Paper Girls where Mac says, "there's no future me" while KJ watches.

ID 4: Homestuck chatlog text in red indicated Hal is talking; it reads "tick tock, Jake. Time is dead kids." end ID]