I have a number of books on my shelves of various eras, and I have noticed a thing about “the classics” as opposed to modern books. They have very great difficulty in proceeding in anything other than strict chronological order, and where part of the story really does need to take place in the past in order for the whole to make literary sense they can only do it by means of one character telling another character the backstory (often in multiple-chapter digressions), or clunky devices of letter-writing to random acquaintances brought into the story solely as a vehicle for having letters written to them.
Contrast this with, say, Ursula LeGuin’s The Disposessed. She begins in the middle of the story, then in the very next chapter without apology or more than the briefest hint to the reader of what she’s doing, shoots all the way back to the protagonist’s childhood, then proceeds, chapter by chapter, to flash backwards and forwards, progressing both story chains along simultaneously to the end.
Random flashbacks are quite a common device these days. Who was first? (for all I know it might indeed have been that book - it did make particular sense in the context of the plot)
Excellent OP and one I’m looking forward to seeing responses to!
I don’t have a definiteive answer but I recall Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) jumps around a bit, comprising diary entries, telegrams, wax cylinders and so on (It’s been a while since I’ve read it, though.)
I have read several Victorian adventure novels where events happening at other times are described in a letter or diary entry mid-story, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m contrasting with. The thing about those older stories is that they do seem to feel a need to introduce every new bit, to explain how it comes to be in the context of the story. So an old diary entry, for instance, would need to be found and read by someone in the “main storyline” - even if it doesn’t quite make sense for someone to discover it, a discovery will be shoehorned in, in some way.
The classic example of this is probably Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne, dating from the 1760s: ostensibly trying to report his life story, Shandy doesn’t even reach his birth until the third volume (of nine), all the while relating anecdotes both later and earlier in time than the supposed ‘action’.
EDIT: Pfft, that’s what I get for helpfully including a link…
Cervantes’ Don Quixote contains a long story-within-a-story, which to me gives the structure a surprisingly modern “feel,” but IIRC the main plot does proceed chronologically – so, not quite what the OP is looking fir, but close.
<nitpick>
The term is in medias res.
In Media Res is a MediaCommons project.
</nitpick>
Odyssey is an excellent example of an early non-chronologically ordered work.
Other classic examples are Virgil’s Aeneid and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.
The formal term for flashback is analepsis. Flashforward is prolepsis. Any narrative device with a formal term to describe it goes well back in time.
My first thought was Tristram Shandy, too. It’s the first modern novel. And the first postmodern novel. Anything you can think of - and stuff you can’t, like a page of asterisks - was done by him first.
