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

Abstract

In her acclaimed novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013, Tale hereafter), Japanese North American writer Ruth Ozeki expands her concerns for social and environmental justice. The novel interrogates a unified coordination of temporality by recuperating from history’s flotsam what is out of time and place. A barnacle encrusted plastic freezer bag containing a Japanese girl Nao’s diary is washed up by the currents of the Pacific Gyre onto the British Columbian coastline. It is picked up by a writer “Ruth” whose reading of the diary alters her own life trajectory and connects life stories and localities that are rarely acknowledged by conventional history. In one way or another, these repressed life stories reference broader events, including World War II, the dot-com bubble, 9/11, and the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami and Fukushima nuclear meltdown that, in Walter Benjamin's words, explode and “blast open the continuum of history” (396), troubling the notion of time being steady and progressive. While Nao’s diary is luckily saved by Ruth, other drifting relics depicted in the novel–tons of radioactive water released from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant and ever-expanding Great Garbage Patches in the world’s oceans–highlight traces of modernity and human impacts on the planet’s ecology that are irresolvable by historical reason. This article examines how Tale uses anachronism, or what appears untimely and asynchronous, to engage with the uneven temporalities of the Anthropocene. A key challenge the current ecological crises pose is a new temporal experience in which human historical time must now confront previously obscured temporalities such as deep time. Recent literary criticism addresses this challenge in expressing an anxiety that the novel–with its traditional focuses on realism and individual moral growth–might be limited to accommodate human agency at the enormous timescales of the current geological epoch called the Anthropocene (see Clark 2015; Ghosh 2016). With an eye to the temporal rhythms and scales needed to rethink the human, the conceptual tool of anachronism alludes to novelistic forms that attend to multiple temporalities and discontinuous histories. Tale is a novel that employs the idea of anachronism to illuminate the scale and nonanthropocentric focus of the Anthropocene. What appears untimely in the novel