'Why Are We Here?'

Spring 2017 (1:1) 14 ‘Why Are We Here?’: Parachronism as Multimodal Rhetorical Strategy in Grey’s Anatomy Shannon Howard | Auburn University at Montgomery In its twelfth season, Shonda Rhimes’s the viewer took her/his first tour of a long-running television drama Grey’s similar examining room when the original Anatomy opened its new year without the cast gathered as a group of interns under traditional cast. Main characters Derek the tutelage of Chief of Surgery Richard (Patrick Dempsey) and Christina (Sandra Webber (played by James Pickens Jr.). Oh), the two people most connected to Webber’s voice echoes lines from that the protagonist Meredith Grey (played by original pilot as we survey the empty Ellen Pompeo), had exited the show in room, in the present: “Each of you comes seasons eleven and ten, leaving most fans here today hopeful….” Crossfading over to wonder what would happen to the this statement, we hear former resident remaining cast in terms of storytelling. and now attending physician Miranda Entertainment Weekly reported that over Bailey (played by Chandra Wilson) say, “I 100,000 fans signed a petition to bring have five rules. Memorize them.” Other Dempsey’s Derek back to the show, with voices, more muffled, fade out. The many of these fans threatening to boycott camera then lands on the multiple future seasons. The season twelve projections of Meredith’s face on large premiere “Sledgehammer” (2016), written screens, overlooking the classroom, and by Stacy McKee and directed by Kevin she says, “You might be thinking…. I’ve McKidd (who also plays Dr. Owen Hunt), been here before. This is familiar. This is addressed this concern explicitly in the old hat. Maybe you’re wondering…why opening scene. are we here? But I promise…you’re about At the start Meredith’s voice over to find out that everything has changed.” accompanies multiple images of her face In this moment Meredith becomes our on flat screen televisions in an empty teacher rather than just our narrator: her exam room, looking directly at the camera direct address to the camera impels us to (us) and explaining why this year is change perspective despite lingering different. Before she speaks, however, doubts about the forthcoming events. voices from the show’s inaugural season However, while Meredith stresses that echo quietly through this space: in 2004, change is the motif of the new season, this 15 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics episode’s content suggests a different the “flipping” of a channel on our approach based on celebrating and television. In other words, as Shannon merging the past with the present. The says, a parachronism is “more of an oddity writers of Grey’s often engage in a than an error.” Furthermore, the winding seamless overlap of past and present and flipping suggest that parachronism is events, sometimes placing moments from most effective when stressing its use of the past directly inside the present material objects, some of which seem narrative. Unlike a flashback, the past and displaced in the present. In other words, present act as layers to each other rather parachronism often occurs as a thing or as than separate linear units in the history of a reference to a thing rather than as an the narrative. I argue that this abstract phenomenon. phenomenon prompts the resurrection of The examples of parachronism that an outdated word to describe how the follow serve not as evidence of a close writers manipulate time in rhetorical reading (read literary reading) of Grey’s as ways. much as they are a rhetorical study of how Rarely used today, the term Rhimes effectively managed viewer parachronism, originally defined as an expectations. Webber’s line, “Each of you “error in chronology,” is similar to the comes here today, hopeful,” has now been anachronism but works retroactively repurposed to speak to the present instead of forwardly. This is all to say that audience. In this sense the past and the if an anachronism is a clock of present become partners in making the standardized time in a Shakespeare play, a narrative engine run smoothly for a thing too futuristic to belong in a narrative skeptical group of fans. set in medieval Scotland (see Macbeth), parachronism works in the opposite direction, by using a dated reference to Conceptions of Narrative and amplify the present situation. Science Rhetorical Time fiction author Samantha Shannon (2013) No scholarship at this time exists on explains, “The key difference is possibility. parachronism, which creates a quandary in It is impossible for Marilyn Monroe to terms of situating this argument. The realistically turn up in 1984 - she died in closest relative to parachronism as a 1962. But it is possible for a man to be scholarly topic is the language associated wearing a ruff or using a quill in 2005 - with the rhetoric of narratives, both print just not very likely, given how silly he’d and on screen. Meredith’s voice over look.” echoes Wayne Booth’s commentary in The A parachronism occurs with the Rhetoric of Fiction when he analyzes the “dialing” of a cell phone (language that “manipulation of mood” and how an invokes the use of an earlier landline author might be “commenting directly on model or rotary device), the “winding” of the work itself” in order to influence an a clock that now uses a digital interface, or audience (1983, pp. 201-09). While Spring 2017 (1:1) 16 novels may use written language, The X-Files as examples of shows that particularly the manipulation of verb “require attentive and sophisticated tenses, to suggest time’s fluidity or rhetorical work to interpret” (2002, p. disjoints, visual narrative continues to 58). David Lavery uses different terms experiment with this same concept than complex narrative to describe the through careful editing, spoken dialogue, cultural scene of television in the past two and the use of dissolves to indicate flashing decades; his article on “Lost and Long- back or forward. Seymour Chatman Term Television Narrative” includes explains that in film the “temporal norm” words like flexi-narrative, neo-baroque, is “scenic” because both story and and hybrid and Dickensian narrative to discourse operate jointly. However, he characterize today’s shows and their stresses that “the more a narrative deviates manipulation of time and structure (2009, from this norm, the more it highlights pp. 313-14). His focus on the show Lost time manipulation as a process or artifice, illustrates his belief in complex television and the more loudly a narrator’s voice being most common in the 2000s. Indeed, sounds in our ears” (1980, p. 223). In this Lost featured a rare form of time travel in sense, Meredith is both overtly the famous season six “flash sideways,” commenting on the show’s past, present, which suggested an alternate reality was at and future while also calling directly work even as the main plot advanced. attention to time’s progression and its Narrative acts as a frame for experience effect on the audience. and helps identify cause and effect Such overt manipulation of narrative in relationships in both fiction and in our favor of increasing dramatic effect has own lives; therefore, the frame become the norm more than the communicates a particular view of how exception. Television has been lauded in reality is shaped. In an older collection of recent years as entering a “golden age” of essays linking argument to narrative, content, one in which directors and Douglas Hesse (1989) helpfully explains, writers experiment with more “The reader’s perception of causal sophisticated structures of narrative, sequences is crucial to persuasion through editing, and point of view. Jason Mittell emplotment. To say ‘this’ happened as a (2012-13), in his study of what he calls result of ‘that’ is to supply a relationship “complex television,” dates the beginning between the two, to make a judgement. of experimentation in the 1970s, while We perceive a state of affairs and wish to Steven Johnson hails Hill Street Blues, explain how it has come to exist, which aired first in 1981, as the prime searching backwards, asking in ‘digressive’ ancestor of complexity (2005, p. 65). In essays, for example, ‘How did the writer his work uniting the fields of Rhetoric and get here?’” (p. 114). Such processes, he Composition and television studies, says, are not different from argumentative Bronwyn T. Williams mentions shows and rhetorical work. Still, the “why are we from the 1990s like ER, NYPD Blue, and here” question, which Meredith states in 17 Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics explicit terms during the introduction to before the time of their natural death. “Sledgehammer,” requires an expanded Therefore, the new season works toward vocabulary with which to analyze time, something that heals such matters, one that calls attention to how time may something beyond kairos that heals operate in unconventional ways as it ruptures rather than calling attention to frames narrative. them. As Rhimes told Hollywood Reporter, In terms of rhetoric, one way to she wanted season twelve to be “lighter” approach the use of time is to invoke the but also to “recapture the early season frequently cited term kairos, which banter and bring the fun back to the show” Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee (Goldberg, 2015). The idea of recapturing characterize as “a situational kind of time,” the past had to be done in ways that both one that acts as “a ‘window’ of time reinforced what was successful at the during which action is most advantageous” beginning and also helped fans feel (2009, p. 45). While kairos may explain comfortable with the present. The use of how Webber’s words are reinvented to parachronism makes that possible.

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