John Harvey Fiction in the Present Tense the Tense in Which a Story Was Told Used to Be a Subject of Little Interest, Since

Textual Practice 20(1), 2006, 71–98 John Harvey Fiction in the present tense The tense in which a story was told used to be a subject of little interest, since one tense supplied most needs. In telling a story, one used the past tense. Matters have changed, and tense is now a present subject, since many novels, at the present time, are written in the present tense. ‘A screaming comes across the sky’, writes Thomas Pynchon, beginning Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and the 760 pages that follow are written in the present tense. The practice, or fashion, has become international, and among major texts which are written substantially or entirely in the present tense are Life A User’s Manual (La Vie mode d’emploi) by Georges Perec (1978), The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin) by Elfriede Jelinek (1983), Ghosts by Paul Auster (1985), Independence Day by Richard Ford (1995). Were one to confine one’s list solely to the English language, one would still have to add the names of Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Bret Easton Ellis, Maggie Gee, Alison Lurie, Muriel Spark, David Storey, all of whom have written one or more novels in the present- tense throughout.1 It would be easy to think of other names, and in addition some very distinguished novelists have used the present tense for all or virtually all their works – as have Alain Robbe-Grillet, Malcolm Bradbury and J. M. Coetzee.2 The present tense, in other words, has recommended itself to major talents for major works in several languages. The practice is evidently more than a fashion – and, as noted, is distinctly new. In the past almost every narrative, whether in verse or in prose, was narrated in the past tense. The Bible is in the past tense (‘In the beginning was the word...’), as is the epic of Gilgamesh (‘Gilgamesh grieved for the death of Enkidu...’), and as are the epic poems by Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton.3 True, drama and dramatic speech are necessarily in the present tense, but narrative as such has normally used the past tense, whether in ballad, folk-tale, fable, fabliau or gossip. Jesus told his parables in the past tense. The norse sagas are in the past tense, as medieval romances mostly are, and as every novel has been from Longus and Petronius Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2006 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502360600559795 Textual Practice through Cervantez to Defoe, Fielding and Laclos in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century also, and the early twentieth century, virtually every novel has used the past tense in the greater part of its narrative prose. There have been exceptions, of course. Of verse epics, the Old French Chanson de Roland is mainly in the present tense. And, among novels, one half of Bleak House is famously in the present tense – and third person – ‘and solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding upon Chesney Wold’.4 The other half is in the past tense, and first person, of Esther Summerson’s narrative. The older narratives also would visit the present tense – often briefly, for dramatic effect. A Scottish border ballad begins: The knight stands in the stable-door As he was for to ryde ... The present tense, with its distinctly visual immediacy, appears lit- erally and only for an instant – in the poem’s first line. In the next line the knight ‘was’ for to ride, and the ballad continues in the past, or perfect, tenses.5 In novels too there have been several kinds of brief shift into the present tense, and not only for statements of general truth, or for moments of climactic drama. Within the typology developed by Dorrit Cohn, ‘psycho-narration’ may use the present tense when it relies on elab- orate authorial metaphor, of the kind used frequently by Virginia Woolf (‘peering into the heart of that forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted ...he sought an image...’), and ‘quoted monologue’ may identify itself by the use of the present tense when the punctuation-marks of speech are dropped, as they often are in the later James Joyce (‘Corny Kelleher and the boy followed their wreaths. Who is that beside them?’).6 There is also the small but special case of the first sentences of novels. They may be verbless, and therefore tenseless, as in Dickens’s Bleak House, ‘London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall’. They may be imperative, as in Moby Dick’s ‘Call me Ishmael’. They may be a present-tense snatch of dialogue, as in War and Peace and in many other novels. Or the narrator may introduce himself in the present, and then speak in the future tense of the story he will tell, as Dostoevsky’s narrator does in The Devils. Very famously, Ford Madox Ford begins Tbe Good Soldier by saying, ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’. The present tense here has an implicit futurity – ‘The story I shall tell you now will/may be the saddest you will ever have heard’ – though the ensuing perfect tense (‘I have heard’) makes a bridge to the past tense of the narrative proper. Or the novelist may, in person, state a general axiom. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a 72 John Harvey Fiction in the present tense single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’ says Jane Austen, commencing Pride and Prejudice. Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina by saying, ‘All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion’. In all of these cases, however, the first sentence or sentences make a kind of theshold on which the reader pauses for a moment, to be welcomed by the novelist as he or she enters the fiction from their own present time. Immediately afterwards the novelist ushers the reader into the narrative proper, which both novelist and reader know to be narrative because it is in the past tense. So Tolstoy continues, in his second sentence, ‘Everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household’, and he stays in the past tense thereafter.7 If we allow for these exceptions, moreover, it remains true that the first sentences of most novels, like most of the sentences following, will be in the past tense. ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one find morning’, wrote Kafka, commencing The Trial.8 ‘Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room’, wrote Dickens, commencing Dombey and Son, as, earlier, Cervantez began a famous narrative,‘In a certain corner of La Mancha ...there lately lived one of those country gentlemen...’9 If we move from the beginnings of novels to the different genres in which they are written, we have to report that historical novels have naturally been told in the past tense throughout, but so also have novels about the author’s own contemporary world. Even in the letters of epistolary novels, which necessarily use the present tense of address, the bulk of the letters record events in the past tense. Books set in the future, from the Book of Revelations to science fiction, are almost invariably narrated in the past tense.10 In short, the use of the past tense has been so general in fiction that it is hardly surprising to find literary theorists arguing that the past tense in a novel may not actually have anything to do with the past – that the ‘past tense’ may be simply the tense of narrative. The German critic Ka¨te Hamburger has written ‘the past tense does not indicate any past ...[it is] the tense of fictional narration’; and Roland Barthes, in Writing Degree Zero, has said of the past tense in fiction, ‘Its function is no longer that of a tense’.11 In a more qualified way, Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative has said that the pastness of the past tense is not that of past time, rather it is the immediate past of the narrating voice – these events must have happened for the narrator to tell us about them.12 It is interesting that the theorists of the last 50 years have tended to dissociate the past tense from pastness – and indeed from time in any sense – in order to identify the past tense with narrative, because it is especially in these years that we have seen something different occur in actual novels: that is, the move from the past to the present tense. In 1975, when he published his dissertation Tense Without Time, 73 Textual Practice C. P. Casparis knew only of eight English or American novels written in the present tense throughout, the best-known being Joyce Carey’s Mister Johnson (1939), Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964) andThe Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (1970).13 Since 1970 there have been many additions to the list, for example A Temporary Life by David Storey (1973), Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (1984), Ghost by Paul Auster (1986), Grace by Maggie Gee (1988), Cat’s Eye by Margaret Attwood (1989), Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis (1998). Indeed, since 1960 many other novels have included substantial sections in the present tense, for instance Dog Years by Gu¨nter Grass (1963), This Sporting Life by David Storey (1960), Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Tra- veller by Italo Calvino (1972 and 1979), Waterland by Graham Swift (1983), Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd (1987), Nice Work by David Lodge (1988), The English Patient by Michaael Ondaatje (1992), Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997).

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