Preposterous Chatterton

I.

This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

The Oxford English Dictionary records two principal usages of the word "preposterous" that circulated contemporaneously in the sixteenth century. By the late nineteenth century only one was still current, and that was the pejorative sense defined as "contrary to the order of nature, or to reason or common sense; monstrous; irrational, perverse, foolish, nonsensical; in later use, utterly absurd." The other usage—listed first but rendered secondary and eventually obsolete by modernity—foregrounds the etymology of the word to articulate a politics of reversal: "having or placing last that which should be first; inverted in position or order."¹ In 1624 tensions between these two usages provided Henry King with an occasion for funereal wit when he elegized his wife Anne, whose untimely death violated the natural principle that his seniority would guarantee him "præcedence in the Grave." By thinking about her constantly, however, he has reversed the forward movement of time so successfully that it now goes "backward and most præposterous."²

Orthographic sameness has erased this semantic difference, which can be made audio-visible by dissociating the absurdities of "preposterousness" from the inversions of "pre posterousness." For unlike "preposterous," which presents itself as a word without a history but with several synonyms, "pre posterous" preserves its etymology as a latinism which instantiates the phenomenon it describes, namely a "before" (præ ) "coming after" (posterus ). In 1854 a prescriptive lexicographer, Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench, advised "young Englishmen" to restore the "proper meaning" to this word, since the degeneration of preposterous into preposterous was symptomatic of "the final ruin of [our] language" and "the demoralization of those that speak it."³ A semiotician, on the other hand, might note that the supersession of the primary sense of preposterous by a secondary usage is itself a preposterous development. It is also iconic of the cultural process I hope to illuminate by arguing that, when Thomas Chatterton studied pre-Elizabethan poetry in order to compose in the 1760s the poems of an imaginary fifteenth-century monk called Thomas Rowley, he read anachronistically and in a way still widely practiced, despite being deeply at odds with the historicist assumptions embedded in the scholarship we all depend upon in our transactions with the literary past. The ubiquity of preposterous readings calls for a supplementary literary history, the nuclear model for which is a rhetorical figure known to the ancient Greeks as hysteron proteron ("the later first"). "We name it the Preposterous," George Puttenham explained in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) when classifying hysteron proteron as a "manner of disordered speech," exemplified in the "English prouerbe, the cart before the horse."⁴ It is therefore treated with suspicion in symbolic systems that conceive of time as an arrow moving always and only from past to present. In logic, for instance, hysteron proteron names a type of fallacy in which the conclusion is said to antecede the premises because one of them already assumes the proof for it.

As a subversive figure of disorder, hysteron proteron makes alternative literary histories possible by drawing attention to the preposterousness of various literary conventions at odds with commonsense notions of sequence. These include the preface, which, Jacques Derrida points out, "announce[s] in the future tense ('this is what you are going to read') . . . what will already have been written ."⁵ His translator, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, concludes that the preface "harbors a lie": for although the prae-fatio is etymologically "a saying before-hand," it is usually written after and reflects upon the chapters it precedes.⁶ By thus "recreat[ing] an intention-to-say after the fact," Derrida writes, every preface enacts that temporal paradox which Marjorie Garber labels "retrospective anticipation."⁷ An expert in these matters, Patricia Parker accordingly begins her book on Literary Fat Ladies (1987) with a "Retrospective Introduction," so-called because "it looks back over and offers some conclusions from what is about to follow."⁸ By normalizing the preface as a publishing practice we have occluded its preposterousness so successfully that any...