Present Tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction

A Narratological Overview

Irmtraud Huber

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137562128
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137562135
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In this book, Irmtraud Huber considers a wide range of contemporary novels to explore the variety of possibilities and effects of the use of the present tense, as well as investigating  the reasons for its popularity. By illustrating the complexity and sophistication of four different types of contemporary usage, Huber's discussion goes some way towards refuting those critical voices which consider present-tense narration a passing fad and stylistic affectation. As a tense of narration, the present can serve to tell different stories than the past tense, or can tell them differently. By no means a passing fad, it is an important characteristic of contemporary literature.

© The Author(s) 2016

Irmtraud HuberPresent Tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction10.1057/978-1-137-56213-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Irmtraud Huber¹ 

(1)

English Department, Universität Bern, Berne, Switzerland

 

Abstract

A brief introduction remarks on the prevalence and contentiousness of present tense today and points to the need to recognise the heterogeneity of present-tense usage in contemporary fiction.

Keywords

present-tense narrationMan Booker Prizechapter overview

End Abstract

When the jury of the Man Booker Prize 2010 chose three novels for their short-list that were written in the present tense, they received harsh criticism. To some, like author Philipp Pullman , present-tense narration seemed to be no more than an annoying fad, ‘a silly affectation,’ which he criticised as a limitation to narrative possibility (Roberts). While not entirely recent, (the trend has been noticed as early as 1987 by William H. Gass , who is similarly dismissive in his article ‘A Failing Grade for the Present Tense’), the prevalence of present-tense narration in the literature of the new millennium is conspicuous. In his guidebook for aspiring writers, On Writing Fiction, published in 2011, David Jauss even predicts that ‘[w]hen the literary historians of 3000 write about the fiction of our time, I believe they will consider our use of the present tense to be its most distinctive—and, perhaps, problematic—feature’ (86). While Jauss lists advantages as well as disadvantages of present-tense narration, he, like Gass, seems to be hoping for an end to the trend: ‘If we’re lucky,’ he says, ‘those of us who are still boxed in the present tense, if not in the present , will discover ways out of it, and into a future full of the possibilities of the past ’ (119).

In spite of such critical voices, present-tense narration is spreading fast. If the Booker -Prize nominees are any indication, the trend continues unbroken, with a considerable number of present-tense novels on the long- and shortlist every year. Indeed, present-tense usage has become so common and so familiar that it hardly seems to draw much attention anymore. Only a few among the reviewers of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012), for instance, have so far found her use of present-tense narration worth much comment. This may be even more surprising in view of the fact that we are dealing here with historical novels , set in the time of the Tudors. Present-tense narration is thus used by Mantel to depict events which are emphatically past, and not in order to evoke the contemporary moment, which Jauss and Gass for their part seem to assume to be the main justification of the tense’s usage. As this book will serve to show, present-tense usage in contemporary fiction is much more heterogeneous in its rationale and effects.

In fact, Mantel’s use of the present tense thoroughly exemplifies the conditions and complexities of contemporary present-tense narration. While it has become so widespread that it hardly registers as a defamiliarising and experimental move any longer, it has also become highly diversified and has spread into numerous different genres and narrative styles, some of which, like the historical novel , may seem a surprising and even somewhat counterintuitive choice. In fact, present-tense narration has apparently become a narrative option almost on par with the more traditional choice of past-tense narration . At the same time, it still causes occasional umbrage with some readers, critics and authors, for whom it may ‘jar[…] on the reader’s nerves like a razorblade’ (Fludernik , Natural Narratology 249) and who lament its rise to literary respectability.

What could be the reasons for this rise? Where are the historical roots of present-tense narration and how does contemporary usage relate to former occurrences? And even more importantly: To what effect do contemporary authors employ the present tense? It is to these questions that this book is addressed.

Chapter 2 will draw extensively on valuable prior work by German scholars Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig to offer a brief historical overview of the development of present-tense narration, identifying major trends and differences in its usage over time. Contemporary fiction takes up these prior usages and develops them further in very heterogeneous ways. In order to structure my subsequent observations about contemporary literature, I identify four main types of present-tense narration and employ a narratological framework, ordering novels according to similarities in their narrative structure. This approach allows me to highlight the ways in which the conditions for present-tense narration change depending on the narrative perspective taken in a novel (first-person present-tense narration faces different challenges and can be used to different effect as third-person or authorial narration), as well as to showcase the diversity of usages and effects to be found in contemporary present-tense narration.

Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 will provide ample examples of present-tense usage in contemporary novels, and discuss its respective functions in the texts. In the hope that the texts I discuss will be familiar to my readers, I have chosen my examples for the most part from the longlists of the Man Booker Prize since 2000. While this selection admittedly comes with a certain bias, arguably authors who have gained literary prestige in the media and academia also have a realistic chance to influence the present and future development of literary styles and trends. With present-tense narration being as widely used as it is today there could be no question of making this study comprehensive. Rather, my examples were chosen to illustrate the breadth of different usages, while suggesting some common aspects and themes. My conclusion offers a necessarily partial list of common usages and effects of present-tense narration in contemporary, mainly British and Commonwealth fiction and combines these findings with a critical discussion of various possible causes for the current popularity of the present tense.

© The Author(s) 2016

Irmtraud HuberPresent Tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction10.1057/978-1-137-56213-5_2

Begin Abstract

2. Past and Present of Present-tense Narration

Irmtraud Huber¹

(1)

English Department, Universität Bern, Berne, Switzerland

Abstract

This chapter provides a concise discussion of the historical development of present-tense narration against the background of which contemporary developments have to be understood. It goes on to identify four main types of contemporary present-tense narration, which will be discussed and illustrated by examples in the following chapters. They are narrative deictic, retrospective and simultaneous narration and interior monologue. The discussion in each of the following chapters in turn considers the use of these types of present-tense narration in the case of first-person, figural and authorial narratives, since each narrative situation entails different challenges and potentials for present-tense narration.

Keywords

present-tense narrationhistorical developmentnarrative situation

End Abstract

When Ian Watt wrote his highly influential study The Rise of the Novel, he chose to discuss three major early novelists who stand for three different solutions to the challenge of novelistic narration. Daniel Defoe favours the first-person autobiographical voice in which a protagonist looks back on his or her life. Henry Fielding develops an overt authorial narrator who does not hide his control over the story. Lastly, Samuel Richardson excels in what Gérard Genette calls ‘interpolated’ narration (217). Richardson chose the epistolary form, with its temporal proximity of event and narration, as a way of writing ‘to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided’ ( Grandison 4; original emphasis), and thus keeping the interest of his readers engaged by the illusion that they are witnessing the story as it unfolds. Nevertheless, and even though Richardson lets Lovelace commend his own ‘lively present-tense manner’ of narration in Clarissa (882), all of these three different approaches to novelistic narration predominantly employ the past tense .

This should not be a surprise. After all, for all their differences, a common element of these early novels was what Watt calls their ‘formal realism ’: ‘the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience’ using ‘a more largely referential language than is common in other literary forms’ (32). Such a mimetic bias favoured believable and realistic narrative situations and thus abetted the use of the past tense . After all, in real life, we cannot experience and narrate both at the same time. It is only ever possible to tell of events that happened to us in retrospect, since we need time and leisure to narrate them or write them down. Even Richardson ’s protagonists thus inevitably use the past tense for most of their relation, as they sit down to write a report of what has just recently happened to them. In fact, Richardson ’s attempt to approximate simultaneous narration gave his contemporaries cause for some ridicule. Fielding , for example, derives comic effect from the implausibility of simultaneous narration in Shamela , his parody of Richardson ’s Pamela . In a part of a letter dated ‘Thursday Night, Twelve o’Clock’, Shamela uses the present-tense to describe a near-rape: ‘Mrs. Jervis and I are just in Bed, and the Door unlocked; if my Master should come—Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the Door. You see I write in the present Tense, as Parson Williams says. Well, he is in Bed between us, we both shamming a Sleep’ (318: original italics). Even while Fielding is making fun of this style of writing, he nevertheless eventually recuperates the mimetic narrative situation by marking Shamela ’s usage of the present tense as a conscious rhetorical move, and the narrative soon returns to the more conventional past tense . Meanwhile, the additional difficulty that writing an account of an event may take much longer than the event itself is the famous central conundrum faced by Lawrence Sterne’s eponymous hero of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , whose autobiographical project becomes quixotic with his realisation that ‘at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write—It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write’ (234). In a mimetic framework which is based on the conditions of real-life communication, simultaneous first-person narration seems to be all but impossible.

Third-person present-tense narration faces a different, but analogous problem. As Avanessian and Hennig point out: ‘[W]hile the first-person narrator of a present-tense text has no time in which she could report on her synchronous experiences, the third-person narrator has no place from which he could narrate the experiences of a character’ (Present Tense 40). Since, by definition, third-person narrators take no part in the story they relate, a present-tense narration turns the narrator into a disembodied entity who perceives the story as it unfolds without being present to the other characters. It has been pointed out by others that third-person and omniscient authorial narration is already to some extent ‘unnatural ’, that is, mimetically speaking impossible, since in such narration the narrator usually has an impossible insight into the characters’ thoughts (see Alber 88–102). The conventionalised use of the past tense , however, permits the maintenance of at least the semblance of a mimetic illusion by opting for a retrospective narration of events that have already happened and are subsequently faithfully reported by the narrator. The narrator thus follows the ideal of the historian (albeit one with an improbably detailed insight) who accurately portrays the past . ¹

However, the meaning of the present tense is not entirely restricted to contemporaneity. It is grammatically the most flexible of all tenses and can also be used to refer to the past , to the future , and to temporally unmarked or atemporal events (see Fleischman 34–5). Thus, even within the largely past-tense context of classical narrative fiction , the present tense is used in various ways. In the classical novel, the present tense mainly occurs in two forms, which Monika Fludernik has called ‘(a) the deictic use of the present tense to refer to the narrator’s and/or reader’s here-and-now’ and ‘(b) the intermittent use of the present tense in a past tense context’ (‘Chronology’ 124).

The deictic use refers to all such instances of present-tense narration in which a narrator evokes the act of narrating, directly addressing the reader or the audience . In such moments, the narrator ‘seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English’, as George Eliot once put it (137). One of many instances of such direct reader address to be found in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Gentleman serves as an illustration:

Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out,—bear with me,—and let me go on, and tell my story my own way:—or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road,—or should sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,—don’t fly off. (11)

Such a deictic use of the present tense occurs fairly frequently in first-person narrations. In such cases it is not unusual for the narrating I to discuss his or her own story, to provide the reader with some idea of the moment and circumstances of narration and to comment on the situation of the experiencing I . The present tense is thus set against the past tense in order to mark the temporal distance that separates the narrated time from the time of narration.

In the case of third-person narrations, deictic present tense is one of the characteristics of an overt authorial narrator, like the one of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair :

So that when the day of departure came, between her two customs of laughing and crying, Miss Sedley was greatly puzzled how to act. She was glad to go home, and yet most woefully sad at leaving school. […] All which details, I have no doubt, JONES, who reads this book at his Club, will pronounce to be excessively foolish, trivial, twaddling, and ultra-sentimental. Yes; I can see Jones at this minute (rather flushed with his joint of mutton and half pint of wine), taking out his pencil and scoring under the words ‘foolish, twaddling,’ &c., and adding to them his own remark of ‘QUITE TRUE.’ Well, he is a lofty man of genius, and admires the great and heroic in life and novels; and so had better take warning and go elsewhere. (8; original capitals)

As one can see from both this example and the passage from Tristram Shandy, Gentleman quoted above, the deictic use of present tense marks a pause in the course of narrative events, a metafictional moment in which the reader is reminded of the moment of reading, or in which the narrator muses about the writing process and/or the reception of his or her work. Thus, strictly speaking, it is wrong to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Past and Present of Present-tense Narration
• 3. Narrative Deictic Narration
• 4. Retrospective Narration
• 5. Interior Monologue
• 6. Simultaneous Narration
• 7. Mixed Cases
• Backmatter