The Once and Future: Tense in Narrative Forms – an essay by S. L. Wallach

Though writers tend to see verb tense as a major element of their craft, their choice may have less impact on the reader’s experience. A. A. Mendilow, in his essay “The Position of the Present in Fiction,” argues that, regardless of its verb tense, every work of fiction relies on a narrative present—the point in time at which the narrator perches. He is certain that whether the writer chooses present or past or future, the engaged reader will put himself in the subjective midst.

In the purely grammatical sense, use of past tense indicates that the actions are completed; use of the present tense indicates that they are in progress or continuous, depending on modal auxiliary. Narrative is more complex. The determination of present in the telling of a story, or diegesis, is one of the power tools in the writer’s craft box. By choosing to set all or part of a narrative in the past, the present, or the future, the writer signals to the reader the perspective of the narrator or of a particular part of the narrative: whether that of historian (I am telling you what happened) or that of observer (I am telling you what is happening) or that of prophet (I am telling you what will happen) and controls the reader’s temporal perception.

The issue for the writer is rooted in the practical: what relationship do I want to forge between reader and story? Will my story have more impact if I consciously place the reader in media res or hold the reader at a distance? How much perspective on and understanding of the events at hand do I want my characters to have? How do I want to frame the action of my narrative? These are questions that writers consider when deciding on point of view, but they are also a consideration when choosing between past and present tense.

It is often possible to pick out the stylistic reasons for placing a narrative in the present versus placing it in the past. Moreover, tense can signal the narrator’s position vis-à-vis the story: is the narrator an actor or an observer? And if the narrator is recalling things done or seen, does the writer want the reader to take such recollections at face value? Memory is inherently unreliable, as Akira Kurosawa showed in his film Rashomon to lasting and even literal effect.

In Matthew DelConte’s phrase, “the narrating-I is the experiencing-I.” Present tense can be tricky, giving the writer less room to maneuver. There are no variations of the present: the present is always now. The past can be a week ago, a year ago, sometime in the last millennium.

Two novels by Penelope Lively illustrate this point. The narrator of Moon Tiger is a historian on her deathbed, from which she announces her intention to write, or continue writing, a history of the world. But not just any history: “Let me contemplate myself within my context: everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence…” There are two contradictions here that signal the novel’s ultimate inconsistency: Claudia, a historian and ipso facto a connoisseur of the past, is (a) writing in the present tense and (b) ignoring the shibboleths of history (fact and evidence) by her intention to include fiction and myth.

In his essay “Why Now, Why Then?” Kazunari Miyahara sees Lively’s decision to have Claudia speak in the “defiant present tense” as a way to “express [Claudia’s] innovative view of history and of history writing.” Miyahara describes Claudia as a “heretical historian” who “tries to turn her back on the academic conventions of history study and, in the same gesture, on the conventional past-tense historiography.” But perhaps not. Perhaps the root of her defiance is that she knows she is near death and, like Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying (and, for that matter, like history), about to exist only in the past. By having Claudia speak in the present tense, Lively keeps her alive, her life synchronized to the reader’s. It is an uneasy match; Claudia appears to reject history on its most basic level: “Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.” A ruse: Claudia’s self-assessment is unreliable. There is a chronus ordering her memories, bringing what mattered most to her to the fore.

When Claudia discusses her past, she uses the past tense to discuss her impressions and feelings, as if setting herself apart from them, but switches back to present tense and close third person to relate vignettes from those years. She relives them, and in having her do so Lively plays with the reader’s perception of diegesis, just as age and senility are for Claudia making the past into perceived present, a parallel dimension, a collapsing of time into itself. It is as if her life is flashing before her (and the reader’s) eyes. “The voice of history, of course, is composite”, she says. Sometimes she abruptly reruns part of the vignette from another participant’s point of view:

Sylvia tries to get out a cigarette, drops the packet, grovels for it on the floor and feels her expensive hairdo falling to pieces. And the dress is not a success, too pink and pretty and girlish. Claudia is in black, very low-cut, with a turquoise belt. ‘How is the book going?’ she asks. And Claudia does not answer, so Sylvia must fill the gap lighting her cigarette, puffing, looking round the room as though she hadn’t expected a reply anyway.

It is as if her life were flashing before her eyes, and she was, along with the reader, an observer. Or perhaps it is her historian side, bowing to the unreliability of memory and so slipping back to report Things Exactly As They Were. “Our connection with reality is always tenuous,” she says. As the novel progresses, Claudia loses track of time, even of herself: “Sylvia came to see me last week. Or yesterday. I pretended I wasn’t here.” In one sense, she does not have to pretend: “Claudia,” the anima of Claudia, is gone.

In Consequences, Lively uses the omniscient third-person past tense to very different effect. Whereas in Moon Tiger Lively has Claudia encapsulate her history in discrete third-person scenes, for the flashbacks in Consequences Lively uses summary to flesh out her main characters, Lorna and Matt, and establish her setting, England from the early 1940s on. These dozen or so pages convey to the reader the inevitability of Lorna sitting down on the same park bench in London where Matt at that moment is perched. Later, she seems to stress the randomness with which their daughter, Molly, takes the job that determines the rest of her life:

Molly went to work at the library because someone had left a copy of the Evening Standard in the tube. She picked it up, glanced through the pages, arrived at Situations Vacant, and learned that this library, which was in fact called the Literary and Philosophical Institute and hailed from the early nineteenth century, was in need of a library assistant. Why not? she thought.

There aren’t any roads diverging in yellow woods here. In Consequences, Lively’s characters don’t mull over choices.

But just as in Moon Tiger Lively moves into present tense to write the scenes for Claudia’s flashbacks, here she occasionally changes to present tense as if to signal that the characters are reliving, rather than remembering, what she earlier had summarized.

There are two keys to Lively’s choice of dominant tense in Consequences. The first is the title: something must first happen in order to effect a result, as in the truism that actions have consequences. Consequences is even the name of a parlor game and a board game, both of which center on how players’ choices affect outcome. The second key is Lorna’s weltanshauung: “…there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind”—i.e., the past. This all being so, the past tense becomes organic to the story, a consequence of the writer’s theme and her approach to her characters.

Lively’s shifts of tense are straightforward, illuminating her narrative. Haruki Murakami also uses a dual-tense structure, but less to illuminate than to further disorient. Kafka on the Shore is a novel of convolution, a literary funhouse in which tense is the tilting floor. The plot of the odd chapters—which follows the (obsessive-compulsive, possibly schizophrenic, definitely reality-challenged) runaway teen-ager who uses Kafka as his first name—takes place in the present tense. Murakami tells a parallel story—first of a group of school children who when picking mushrooms in the woods near their school suddenly fall into a trance or coma, then of the adult life of one, Nakata, the only who does not quite recover—in past tense. Nakata, who was the brightest boy among them, lost his memory and his intellectual gifts but gained the ability to converse with cats.

In contrast to Moon Tiger, here the connection between the narrative’s two plots is not readily apparent, but the reader is confident that one will emerge: this is a novel, after all, whose American publisher is more known for mass-market fiction than experimental post-realist literature. Both storylines have an innate tension; the reader understands that Murakami is hiding key elements. As in the Lively novels, the present-tense passages feel more constricted, perhaps because of their first-person point of view together with their murky realism—no inexplicable trances, no talking cats. The omniscient narrator of the even-numbered chapters already knows the conclusion of their narrative arc. But the present reveals itself to the reader and to Kafka simultaneously.

It also is the historical scope of both the Lively and Murakami works that makes the interweaving of past and present appropriate. Especially in Moon Tiger, there needs to be what Margolin, in the essay “Shifted (Displaced) Temporal Perspective in Narrative,” described as that “distinction between viewing time and speaking time . . . between when one sees (mentally) and when ones says. . . .” In the historical/memoir-ish sense, Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried wrote that “the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present.” So might have said the main characters in Moon Tiger and Consequences.

In As I Lay Dying Faulkner’s use of present tense gives the novel an immediacy that draws the reader into their confidences. These Yoknapatawpha County folks are coping with the death and burial of their matriarch: her, and their, transition from the “is” of living to the “was.” Without Addie to anchor them, they’re adrift in an ontological void. Her youngest son, Vardaman, expresses the family’s dislocation when he tries to understand Addie’s death in terms of the death of a fish he’s just caught:

It’s laying in the kitchen in the bleeding pan, waiting to be cooked and et. Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t. And tomorrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there wont be anything in the box and so she can breathe. It was laying right yonder on the ground. I can get Vernon. He was there and he seen it, and with both of us it will be and then it will not be.

(When Vardaman speaks next, he simply states, “My mother is a fish,” presumably because for him the realization of death comes with the blossoming stench of putrefaction.) Darl, the second son, gets stuck on the same conceit of “is” versus “was”:

And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

If Darl were familiar with Teilhard de Chardin’s The Future of Man, then he might understand “that everything is the sum of the past, and that nothing is comprehensible except through its history.” He would understand the dimensionality of time, and that the dead Addie is as much his mother as the live one was. But insight was not among the gifts that Faulkner conferred on the Bundrens and their neighbors. They explain themselves to the reader rather than to each other: when Cash decides to bevel the edges of his mother’s coffin, he doesn’t respond to another character’s objection that “It will take more time”, but three pages later he gives the reader a list of reasons that justify his efforts.

It is hard to tell whether Faulkner is treating the cast of As I Lay Dying with sympathy or cynicism or a mixture of the two. On the one hand is the ridiculousness of their situation, on the other is the humanness of their anguish and frustration. The reader watches Cash work so hard to bevel the edges of his mother’s coffin, even though she won’t be able to appreciate his effort and no one else understands it. Vardaman bores holes in the coffin lid so his mother can breathe, but he does it when she is already inside, and the drill goes through her face. Addie is laid in the coffin the wrong way around, so “it wouldn’t crush her dress.” It is as if she is a bride—she is wearing her wedding gown—on her way to the chapel, instead of a corpse on her way to the ground.

For the Bundrens, devoid of introspection, there is no time like the present, in all its permutations: Faulkner deftly shifts moods from present to present perfect to present progressive, adding modal auxiliaries to further refine impact. Faulkner’s choice of verb tense underscores the sense that the Bundrens are frozen in the time, unprepared for the existential angst of mourning. They struggle with it, Darl most of all: “I cannot love my mother because I have no mother”—a bizarre declaration for someone who probably never read Martin Buber and therefore cannot simplify Ich und Du into a metaphor for the parent-child relationship. Tellingly, Faulkner uses cannot instead of do not, so that the sentence is an adynaton, one of the rhetorical structures used to arouse empathy.

Faulkner does his best not to fog the reader in empathy. The reader does not identify with the Bundrens en masse or in particular. They are alien, living lives at the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum from Faulkner’s audience. As Vernon Tull explains it:

Now and then a fellow gets to thinking about it. Not too often, though. Which is a good thing. For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it’s like a piece of machinery: it won’t stand a whole lot of racking. It’s best when it all runs along the same, doing the day’s work and not no one part used no more than needful.

Yet that is as it should be: As I Lay Dying is about “was” and the reality it encompasses. Reality for Anse Bundren and his children requires a Mrs. Bundren because their reality always included one. And so within days of Addie Bundren’s death and harrowing funeral trip, Anse Bundren finds himself another.

Such was not the case for Miss Emily Grierson, the protagonist of Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Miss Emily.” There was only one man for her, and Miss Emily made sure that death did not part them. At least not his. In his first sentence, Faulkner lets the reader know this character was a Southern lady born to gentility gone shabby. He sits the reader on a wide front porch with a pitcher of sweet tea and his first-person collective narrator, whose tone is that of town gossip—the special Southern kind who can bless you and belittle you in the same breath and with the same words:

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.

Beyond the establishment of narrative voice and perspective, use of past tense gives Faulkner the chance to fill in historical detail that in present tense would be lost. For example, it is doubtful that Miss Emily (or anyone, for that matter) would describe herself as “a tradition, a duty, and a care”, “a small, fat woman” who looks “bloated, liked a body long submerged in water”, with eyes “lost in the fatty ridges of her face.” The narrator is more than an observer: her first-person collective point of view puts her in Miss Emily’s town (Jefferson, the county seat of Yoknapatawpha County, where the Bundrens were taking Addie for burial—Faulkner packs so many truths into so small a world). Her diction puts her within range of Miss Emily’s social circle.

In addition, past tense gives Faulkner a means to build the story’s suspense by use of foreshadowing, a technique that works best when there is a character who already knows the denouement. It allows him to play with the story’s chronology, letting the plot develop much as it would if recalled from memory—each memory calling to mind another, often out of sequence and somewhat digressive, as front-porch conversations tend to be. The story ricochets all over Miss Emily’s past, never touching down in the narrator’s present. Like the old men in Confederate uniform at Miss Emily’s funeral, the narrator seems to be:

. . . confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road, but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.

Faulkner takes it upon himself as a Southern gentleman to honor Miss Emily and the dwindling away of the Old South for which she serves as metaphor.

Verb tense can be a matter of the writer’s comfort zone or dictated by the approach the writer takes in telling the story and the story’s intended effect. Unless the writer is playing with time and tense, the reader should remain unaware that the writer has decided on one tense over another. It is the literary equivalent of the adage “no one leaves the theatre whistling the scenery.” Tense in a traditional narrative should be intrinsic, instinctive, supporting the author’s intention.

Past tense infers knowledge, at least of cause and effect if not of narrative arc. It adds dimension, in the sense that the narrative present is here and the narrative itself is way over there. In a present-tense story, the narrative present and the narrative jostle along together.

Even J. M. Coetzee, who favors the present tense (the notable exceptions being his memoirs), has equivocated on its use in the novel. In Elizabeth Costello, his protagonist gives a lecture called “The Future of the Novel,” in which she addresses tense. Coetzee wrote Elizabeth Costello in the present, but Elizabeth in a lecture she gives describes fiction as a means to “understand human fate” and make “the past coherent” by following how “some fellow being . . . having undergone [my emphasis] a series of experiences “ends up at point Z.” In other words, present tense is a contradiction in terms: the act of writing about something means that it has already happened. Thus Coetzee appears to endorse use of the verb tense (the past) that he himself does not much care for.

Murakami presents the same conundrum in Kafka on the Shore through his reference to Bergson in this dialogue between Nakata’s traveling companion, Hoshino, and a whore:

“Man alive, that was fantastic. I’ve never felt like that,” Hoshino said, languidly sinking back in the hot tub. “That’s just the beginning,” the girl said. “Wait till you see what’s next.” “Yeah, but man that was good.” “How good?” “Like there’s no past or future anymore.” “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Hoshino looked up, mouth half open, and gazed at her face. “What’s that?” “Henri Bergson,” she replied, licking the semen from the tip of his penis. “Mame mo memelay.” “I’m sorry?” “Matter and Memory. You ever read it?”

A narrative point of view that looks back on an event (in past tense) perceives it differently than one relating an event as it happens. The passage of time effects a change in perception: the love affair becomes a mistake, the necklace becomes a waste of money. This shift is for better or for worse. As if in counterpoint to Coetzee, John Banville’s mournful protagonist in Birchwood says, “We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past.”

Perhaps it is that a narrative point of view enmeshed in events as they unfold (in present tense) lacks perspective but adds immediacy and perhaps a stronger sense of truth. Perhaps, per Mendilow:

. . . someone may today be reading a novel written in the past tense about events that took place on a certain day in 1789, and feel as though they were happening now at his moment of reading, in his presence and his presentness. The relation of the tenses used in the novel to those felt by the reader, that is, of the chronological past of the action to the fictive present felt by the reader is that of oratio obliqua to oratio recte: the past of the narration—he went—is translated by the imagination into I am going or I go; the pluperfect—he had gone—into the present perfect—I have gone or the past—I went; and the conditional—he would go—into the future—I shall go.

References

Banville, John. 1973. Birchwood. London: Secker & Warburg.

Buber, Martin. 2010 reprint. Ich und Du (I and Thou). Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Coetzee, J. M. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker & Warburg.

DelConte, Matthew. 2008. “A Further Study of Present Tense Narration.” Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 37, No. 3. Ypsilanti, MI: Eastern Michigan University.

Faulkner, William. 2012. A Rose for Miss Emily and Other Stories. New York: Random House Publishing Group.

Faulkner, William. 1985. As I Lay Dying, Novels 1930–35. New York: Library of America

Kurosawa, Akira. 1950. Rashomon (film). Japan.

Lively, Penelope. 1987. Moon Tiger. London: André Deutsch.

Lively, Penelope. 2007. Consequences. London: Penguin Books.

Mendilow, A. A. 1967. “The Position of the Present in Fiction,” The Theory of the Novel. New York: Free Press.

Miyahara, Kazunari. 2009. “Why Now, Why Then?” Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 39, No. 2. Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan University.

Murakami, Haruki. 2005. Kafka on the Shore. Translated by Philip Gabriel. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Margolin, Uri. 2001. “Shifted (Displaced) Temporal Perspective in Narrative.” Contemporary Narratology, Vol. 9 No. 2. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

O’Brien, Tim. 1990. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. 1959. The Future of Man. Translated by Norman Denny. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row.

Work by S. L. Wallach appeared recently in Solstice, Kaleidoscope, Thimble, Making Waves, Seven Hills Review, and Rivanna and is forthcoming in Broad River Review and Ariel Chart. Her opera Elijah’s Violin was performed in San Francisco in 2018. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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