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WORKSHOP:
Views, Ways of Thinking, Cultural Transmission and Cultural Processes
The Diary as a Place for Examining Time
Alessandra Schininà (Catania)
The formula "Contemporaneousness of the Uncontemporary" is often used in literary studies with reference to a pluralism of styles, as, for example, in the art of the fin de siècle, where antiquity and modernity coexist, or in Postmodernism, where the multiplicity of perspectives stands in the foreground. Contradictions have always enlivened art, however, the question is the consciousness of opposites. It is a political question, and not by chance does Bloch speak of the uncontemporary as a means of showing that there is no automatic agreement between objective socio-economic circumstances and ideologies of individuals. "Not all people are present in the same now," that is, the relationship between being and consciousness is not mechanically predetermined. In the 1930s the time consciousness of the proletariat was different than that of farmers and of the petit bourgeoisie, and, according to Bloch, National-Socialist propaganda exploited precisely this time differential in their homeland ideology.
The question is, therefore, the relationship of the single individual and of groups to time, not in an abstract, metaphysical sense, but for their own identity as a social being, as a citizen of a specific nation, as an heir of a specific culture. In the present epoch of globalization and of a renewed nationalism, in a mood of general uncertainty and crisis of traditional political and aesthetic categories of perception, many authors are dealing with their own biographical, linguistic and national present, past and future.
In literary terms the diary is one of so-to-speak primitive forms of confronting the disappearance of time and temporal events. In the diary authors question their own relationship to time even more directly than in other literary categories. To the attempt of the diary author to do justice to historical and biographical events is added variously the recovery of the past and a view into the future. Thus subjective, chronological and historical time flow together, by giving rise to more or less conscious phenomena of contemporaneousness of the uncontemporary. This contribution is intended to show by means of examples how authors through literary, genuine or invented diaries develop a critical relationship to time.
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