Making Time

World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel

Carolin Gebauer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110708196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della critica letteraria

2023 Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative

ESSE Book Award for Junior Scholars for a book in the field of Literatures in the English Language Responding to the current surge in present-tense novels, Making Time is an innovative contribution to narratological research on present-tense usage in narrative fiction. Breaking with the tradition of conceptualizing the present tense purely as a deictic category denoting synchronicity between a narrative event and its presentation, the study redefines present-tense narration as a fully-fledged narrative strategy whose functional potential far exceeds temporal relations between story and discourse. The first part of the volume presents numerous analytical categories that systematically describe the formal, structural, functional, and syntactic dimensions of present-tense usage in narrative fiction. These categories are then deployed to investigate the uses and functions of present-tense narration in selected twenty-first century novels, including Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Ian McEwan's Nutshell, and Irvine Welsh's Skagboys. The seven case studies serve to illustrate the ubiquity of present-tense narration in contemporary fiction, ranging from the historical novel to the thriller, and to investigate the various ways in which the present tense contributes to narrative worldmaking.

1 Introduction

Since histories must be in the past, then the more past the better, it would seem, for them in their character as histories, and for him, the teller of them, rounding wizard of times gone by.

– Thomas Mann, “Foreword” to The Magic Mountain

1.1 Present-Tense Usage in Contemporary Narrative Fiction: A New Debate

Kazunari Miyahara opens his 2009 article “Why Now, Why Then?: Present-Tense Narration in Contemporary British and Commonwealth Novels” with a quiz: enumerating six novels by Anne Enright, DBC Pierre, J. M. Coetzee, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively, and Keri Hulme, he asks what they have in common. The answer he is looking for is not that these six narratives, published between 1984 and 2003, have all won the Booker Prize, but that they are all “narrated basically in the present tense” (Miyahara 2009, 241). After revealing this, Miyahara goes on to name further present-tense novels published within the same time span, each of which pertains to a different genre. These include a fictional autobiography by Margaret Atwood, a mystery novel by Deborah Moggach, a prose-poem by Jacqueline Wilson, a picture book for children by Paul McCartney and Philip Ardagh, and a techno-thriller by Paul J. McAuley.

In retrospect, one can say that Miyahara observed the beginning of a new aesthetic trend. Today, more than ten years later, one could easily substitute more recent narratives for those in his enumeration and propose the conundrum again. What do the following novels have in common: Margaret Atwood’s speculative narrative The Heart Goes Last (2016 [2015]), Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar (2020), a novel about dementia and the relationship between mother and daughter, Infinite Detail (2019), Tim Maughan’s debut novel which was declared The Guardian’s best science fiction and fantasy book of 2019 (cf. Roberts 2019, n.p.), E. L. James’s bestselling erotic romance trilogy – Fifty Shades of Grey (2012 [2011]b), Fifty Shades Darker (2012 [2011]a), and Fifty Shades Freed (2012); Christina Dalcher’s Vox (2018), a dystopian novel about the suppression of women’s right to speak and use language in a futuristic America; the internationally bestselling thriller Gone Girl (2012) by Gillian Flynn; Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020), Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet” dealing with current sociopolitical issues such as Brexit, the European refugee crisis, climate change activism, or the COVID-19 pandemic; Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It (2016 [2015]), an Irish narrative about rape; Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (2002 [2001]), a historical novel about the German nazi regime; The Light of Day (2018 [2003]), a mysterious detective novel by Graham Swift; Suzanne Collins’s young adult trilogy – The Hunger Games (2011 [2008]), Catching Fire (2011 [2009]), and Mockingjay (2011 [2010]); Joanne Ramos’s The Farm (2019), a novel about commercial surrogacy; Meredith Russo’s GLBTQ novel Birthday: A Love Story Eighteen Years in the Making (2019); and Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018), winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? In 2020, one could continue this list at length, while the answer to Miyahara’s question remains the same: all these contemporary novels share the aesthetic feature of being written, either entirely or at least largely, in the present tense. In other words, they all defy a notion of narrative which Thomas Mann still took for granted when he wrote the foreword to his modern classic Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain] in 1924 – namely that stories ought to be told with the benefit of hindsight and therefore in the past tense.¹

The evident popularity of present-tense narration among contemporary novelists has given rise to a new debate about narrative aesthetics. Both authors and critics have recently been arguing as to whether narrative fiction should be written in the past or present tense, advocating their disparate positions across various channels of public discourse. In her short story “The Present Tense,” published in the London Review of Books in January 2016, Hilary Mantel, for example, has her first-person narrator, a female high school teacher, ask her students, “[W]hat makes a good story?” (19). Mantel’s narrative closely reproduces the classroom discussion, during which the teacher and her students jointly compile a list of features the teacher had in mind when asking the question: “Suspense. Characters we care about. A cracking pace. Not too much description. Touch of humour. Smart dialogue. A twist in the ending.” (“PT,” 19) What is interesting about this list is that far more of its items relate to the design than to the content of a narrative. According to Mantel’s high school teacher, a good story defines itself not so much by its plot as by the way it presents its plot to the reader.

But there is one central narrative strategy the high school teacher has forgotten to include in her list: the use of tense. Not only does the title of the story, “The Present Tense,” draw readers’ attention to the fact that the narrative is written in the present tense, but the narrator even stages this specific choice of tense as a means to render her story more interesting for the narratee. Thus, when she pauses the account of her classroom discussion in order to describe the interior of the school building (a former boarding school), she is almost apologetic about having to temporarily switch to the past tense: “Each classroom . . . and here I should be drifting towards the past tense, but stay with me, if you will . . .” (“PT,” 19) Taken together, the title of Mantel’s short story and the narrator’s metanarrative comment on tense usage imply a certain authorial predilection for the present tense. Indeed, readers who are familiar with Mantel’s fiction will know that she frequently employs present-tense narration. In her most recent award-nominated and award-winning novels Wolf Hall (2010 [2009]), Bring Up the Bodies (2013 [2012]), and The Mirror & the Light (2020), the present tense even features as the dominant tense of narration.

The present tense is, however, not everyone’s cup of tea. Dorte Hansen, the 21-year-old narrator of Helle Helle’s novel This Should Be Written in the Present Tense (2014 [2011]), goes so far as to report current events in the past tense, admitting to the reader that she “hated the narrative present” (57). Although this may sound exaggerated, many readers may well share Dorte’s strong aversion. When the Man Booker Prize jury announced the 2010 competition finalists, they received harsh criticism for shortlisting three novels written largely in the present tense: Tom McCarthy’s C (2010), Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010), and Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room (2010).² As the previous year’s winner of Britain’s most coveted literary prize, Mantel’s Wolf Hall, was also written entirely in the present tense, literary critics were evidently tired of this new trend. They did not hesitate to express their indignation publicly: The present tense suddenly became a topic of widespread discussion in the review pages of newspapers, with most articles lamenting rather than praising it.³

The leading voices in this debate were the British authors Philip Hensher and Philip Pullman. Their criticism of the increasing use of the present tense in contemporary narrative fiction is summarized in an article published in The Telegraph (cf. Roberts 2010): while Hensher is cited as saying the present tense sprawled across the English novel “like Japanese knotweed,”⁴ Pullman apparently called it “a silly affectation” that “does nothing but annoy” (Roberts 2010, n.p.).⁵ The dismissive stance of the two authors seems to reiterate a critique of present-tense narration from over 30 years ago. In the article “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense,” published in The New York Times in 1987, William H. Gass had already voiced his disapproval of the growing tendency among novelists to deploy the present as the dominant tense of narration, comparing it to a rampant literary disease:

What was once a rather rare disease has become an epidemic. In conjunction with the first person, in collusion with the declarative mode, in company with stammery elisions and verbal reticence – each often illnesses in their own right – it [i.e. the present tense] has become that major social and artistic malaise called minimalism, itself a misnomer. (Gass 1987, n.p.)⁶

All these examples suggest that, almost a century after Mann’s emphatic assertion that stories “must be in the past,” present-tense narration has become a major issue for contemporary authors and literary critics. Indeed, we face an unprecedented boom in narratives whose tense defies the conventions of traditional literary storytelling. After all, novelists long confined themselves to using the present tense merely as a rhetorical device that served to highlight specific narrative events within an otherwise past-tense context (this specific use of the present tense is traditionally referred to as the historical present), but they have now started to test the potential of that tense as a consistent and dominant tense of narration.⁷ While in the 1950s the present tense was still considered an unusual characteristic of the French nouveau roman, it qualifies today as a common narrative feature that is no longer restricted to experimental fiction. We encounter it in various genres, ranging from the historical novel to science fiction, from romance to thriller, from young adult fiction to children’s books. Bestsellers like Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series (2008–2010), Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (2015), or E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy (2010–2011) are written in the present tense; and present-tense narration can also be found in critically acclaimed literary fiction, as more and more novelists – J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, and Ian McEwan, to name only three – have started to deploy it in their work as well.

Further evidence for the continuing growth of the corpus of present-tense narrative can be found in the longlists and shortlists for literary awards. The 2019 Booker shortlist again contained two novels written largely in the present tense – Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) and Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019) – as well as two that combine past and present tenses: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019), which uses the present tense in an otherwise past-tense account whenever one of the three first-person narrators reflects upon her act of sharing her personal experiences with a potential future reader, and Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), which is mostly written in the past tense, but with almost all its twenty-six chapters opening in the present tense. A year later, present-tense narrative even dominated the Booker longlist. Consisting of 13 novels in total, the “Booker Dozen” of 2020 featured six present-tense novels – Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body (2018), Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar (2020), Gabriel Krauze’s Who They Was (2020), Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light (2020), Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019), and C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) – as well as Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (2020), which occasionally deploys the intermittent present tense in a predominantly past-tense discourse, and Anne Tyler’s Redhead By the Side of the Road (2020), in which the local use of the present-tense both at the beginning and the end of the novel frames an otherwise past-tense narrative.⁸ The phenomenon of present-tense narration thus features even more prominently among recent nominees for the Booker Prize than it did in the shortlist of 2010, which sparked the controversial debate among novelists and literary critics ten years ago. What is more, the fact that the 2019 jury decided to award the prize to two novels which make considerable use of the present tense – Atwood’s The Testaments and Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other – suggests that present-tense narration has also gained increasing popularity among literary critics.⁹

Needless to say, the new trend has not gone unnoticed by literary scholars. In her monograph Present-Tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction: A Narratological Overview (2016), Irmtraud Huber reviews more than 40 English novels published between 2000 and 2015 that make extensive use of the present tense.¹⁰ Interestingly enough, this development is not restricted to the Anglophone literary landscape. Jürgen H. Petersen (1992; 1993, 24) notices a similar phenomenon in contemporary German narrative fiction,¹¹ and Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig (2015 [2012]) discuss not only English and German, but also French and Russian examples in their book-length study of the subject.¹² In light of this, it is fair to say that the current increase in present-tense narration in narrative fiction constitutes a far-reaching literary trend affecting many national literatures of the Western world.

Furthermore, the examples of Mantel’s and Helle’s narratives as well as the Man Booker Prize debate show that the present tense seems to polarize both authors and readers. Some love it (e.g. Mantel), others hate it (e.g. Helle’s narrator, Hensher, Pullman, and Gass); and yet some readers simply ignore it, either because they do not care or because they fail to notice in which tense a narrative is written. “[T]he narrative present,” Monika Fludernik (1996, 256) accordingly holds, “is both a rather unknown oddity and a technique of unremarked-upon familiarity.” This paradoxical situation may also be the reason why, in comparison with other grammatical categories such as ‘person’ (e.g. first-person narrative vs. second- and third-person narrative) or ‘number’ (e.g. ‘I’-narration vs. ‘we’-narration), the present tense has not yet received widespread attention within narrative theory. Although narratologists have already dedicated several articles or book chapters to it,¹³ comprehensive studies of the phenomenon are still quite rare,¹⁴ with the result that little of the narrative potential of the present tense has yet been accounted for in a systematic manner.

However, the growing popularity of the present tense among contemporary authors, as well as the continuing discussion of this new tendency in various media,¹⁵ gives rise to the assumption that the phenomenon will continue to attract a wider interest in the field of literary studies, and especially in narrative studies.¹⁶ The present book takes a first step in this direction. As the controversial reactions toward present-tense narration demonstrates, the fictional present tense is an interesting phenomenon that deserves further investigation. Building upon the valuable work of its precursors, the study will seek, then, to provide a narrative theory of present-tense narration in fiction...