Fiction in the present tense

Textual Practice

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 71-98

  Harvey, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Avant garde; Double time; Linguistic environment; Lyric present; Present tense; The novel; Visuality

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347312373     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360600559795     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. See for instance Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973),
2. Cat's Eye (London: Bloomsbury, 1989),
3. The Blind Assassin (London: Blooms-bury, 2000);
4. Pat Barker, Another World (London: Viking, 1998);
5. Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama (London: Picador, 1998);
6. Maggie Gee, Grace (London: Heinemann, 1988);
7. Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs (London: Michael Joseph, 1984);
8. Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat (London: Macmillan, 1970);
9. David Storey, A Temporary Life (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
10. The novels cited earlier in this paragraph were Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Cape, 1973),
11. Georges Perec, Life A User's Manual (London: Collins Harvill, 1987),
12. first published as La Vie mode d'emploi (Paris: Hachette, 1978),
13. Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher (London: Serpent's Tail, 1989), first published as Die Klavierspielerin (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1983),
14. Paul Auster, Ghosts (the second novel in The New York Trilogy, London: Faber, 1987),
15. Richard Ford, Independence Day (London: Harvill, 1995). Details given here and in the following note are of first UK publication, which, in the case of novels first published in North America, followed within a year of North American publication.
16. See for instance Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers (London: Calder and Boyars 1966),
17. Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975),
18. Rates of Exchange (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983),
19. To the Hermitage (London: Picador, 2000);
20. J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1977),
21. Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1980),
22. The Master of Petersburg (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1995),
23. Disgrace (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1999).
24. Gilgamesh is quoted from the excellent poetic rendering by David Ferry (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1993), p. 88.
25. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), Chapter VII, first paragraph, p. 81.
26. The ballad 'Young Johnstone' is quoted from Francis J. Child (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York: The Folklore Press in association with the Pageant Book Company, 1957), I, p. 289.
27. Re-crossing the Channel, but setting aside the Chanson de Roland which is perhaps extreme in its recourse to the present, one could say that Old French narrative verse switches intermittently but very frequently from the past tense to the 'historic present'. In Tense and Narrativity (London: Routledge, 1990) Suzanne Fleischman discusses the use of the present tense, which she associates with 'visualized representation' dramatically interrupting rapid action, in, among other texts, Aucassin et Nicolette, Geoffroy de Villehardouin's La Conquête de Constantinople, the Razo of the troubadour Peire Vidal, and Chretien de Troyes' Le Chevalier au Lion (passim, but especially chapters 7 and 8, pp. 215-310).
28. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 44, 73; the examples she gives are from Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses.
29. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 13. For the first sentences of very well-known novels, I give the publication details only of foreign novels, where the translator needs to be named.
30. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 7.
31. Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Tobias Smollett (London: A Millar, 1775).
32. Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. M.J. Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 106-108.
33. The case Weinrich makes is summarised and debated in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume II, trans. K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), especially pp. 63-77,
34. and in C. P. Casparis, Tense Without Time: the Present Tense in Narration (Bern: Francke, 1975), passim.
35. Roland Barthes, 'Writing and the Novel', Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. A Lavers & C. Smith (London: Cape, 1967), p. 26. It is perhaps now more true of the French language than the English that the past tense has been sequestered as the tense reserved for narrative: see for instance
36. Emile Benveniste, 'The Correlations of Tense in the French Verbs', Problems in General Linguistics, trans. M.E. Meek (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1977), pp. 205-15.
37. Some languages, David Bellos has noted, have grammatical markers for narrative other than tense: 'The American Indian language Menomini, for example, possesses a narrative mood, and in the Peruvian Indian language Capanahua there is an extensive grammar of narrative', 'The Narrative Absolute Tense', Language and Style, XI, 4 (Fall, 1978), p. 235.
38. The other works discussed by C. P. Casparis in his two brief sections on present-tense novels (pp. 49-71) are Alas! by Rhoda Broughton (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1890), Night Watch by Stephen Koch (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970), and Out (1964) and Between (1968) by Christina Brooke-Rose, both now available in The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986). It is not clear to me which is the eighth novel.
39. Of the novels mentioned in this paragraph, and not cited earlier, David Storey's This Sporting Life was first published by Longmans in 1960, Paul Auster's Ghost by Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles, in 1986, Dog Years (Hundejahre) by Herman Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt, in 1963, Italo Cal-vino's Invisible Cities (Le citta invisibili) and If on a winter's night a traveler (Se una notte d'inverno un viaggatore) by Giulio Einaudi, Turin, in 1972 and 1979,.
40. Graham Swift's Waterland by William Heinemann, London, in 1983,
41. Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton by Hamish Hamilton, London, in 1987,
42. David Lodge's Nice Work by Seeker and Warburg, in 1988,
43. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient by Bloomsbury, London, in 1992,
44. Don DeLillo's Underworld by Scribner, New York, in 1997,
45. A, S. Byatt's Babel Tower by Chatto and Windus, London, in 1996.
46. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975), p. 85;
47. The Unnamable was first published as L'Innommable (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1952).
48. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 66-67.
49. Kingsley Amis, Difficulties with Girls (London: Hutchinson, 1988), pp. 63-64.
50. For example: 'Here's a 100% fact among all the books in my bestseller research chart - they are all written in the past tense', 'What's past is past (Secrets of Bestsellers No 5)', www.martingoodman.com/writing40602.htm.
51. 'But most readers of genre fiction don't enjoy the present tense, so editors are often reluctant to let their authors use it. I learned the hard way.' 'The Fiction Writer's Page', www.capcollege.bc.ca/dept/cmns/voice.html.
52. In her essay 'Tenses as Deictic Categories: an Analysis of English and German Tenses', in Essays on Deixis (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1983),
53. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969).
54. The 'now' of feeling and action in narrative does however involve different aspectual usages from the 'now' of feeling and action in life. The latter will often attract the imperfective present, as many linguists have noted. Carl Bache has discussed the likely difference in locution between a present-tense novel which would say 'Stephanie sleeps in the room next door' where in speech (or in, say, a letter) we would say 'Stephanie is sleeping in the room next door' in 'Tense and Aspect in Fiction', journal of Literary Semantics, XV, 2 (1986), pp. 90-92. It would on the other hand be odd if one said to Stephanie herself, 'I am loving you, Stephanie' rather than 'I love you'.
55. The Guardian, 1 June 2002; Philip Pullman is reviewing the present-tense novel Strange Boy by Paul Magrs (London: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
56. The snippets are from John Donne's 'Song' in Songs and Sonnets, William Blake's 'The Sick Rose' in Songs of Experience, Christina Rossetti's 'A Birthday', Tennyson's In Memoriam, section VII, T. S. Eliot's Gerontion. In his article 'The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English Poems' (PMLA, 89 (1974), pp. 563-79),
57. Paradise Lost, Christopher Ricks (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), Book II, lines 871-883, p. 51.
58. George Eliot, Adam Bede, Valentine Cunningham (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 47, p. 462.
59. John Keats, 'The Eve of St Agnes', stanza XXVI; Selected Poems, John Barnard (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 149.
60. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy, trans. Richard Howard (London: John Calder, 1965), p. 59.
61. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Picador, 1975), p. 6.
62. Jean Rhys, Quartet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 64.
63. Muriel Spark, The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 34.
64. Boris Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition, trans. V. Zavarin & S. Wittig, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 69-75.
65. Jane Austen, Emma, Robert Clark (ed.) (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), p. 325.
66. Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 74.
67. Muriel Spark's use of the pluperfect remains a special case: in most present-tense novels, reference to the extremely recent past is made in the perfect tense. The occasional use of the perfect, in a present-tense context, can be sensitive and telling. In his article 'On the Use of the Perfect in Present-Tense Narrative' {English Studies, 63 (1982), pp. 63-69),
68. N. E. Osselton discusses the intermittent use of the perfect tense in David Storey's present-tense novel A Temporary Life (London: Allen Lane, 1973) for those events which the protagonist registers in a switched-off way because his thoughts and worries are elsewhere.
69. Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (London: Virago, 1990), p. 14.
70. Daily Telegraph, 14 July 2005, pp. 13, 16, 18,
71. The Guardian, 14 July 2005, pp. 7, 14, 17.
72. A propos of newspaper headlines, and their use of the present tense for recent past events, Dwight L Bollinger has suggested (contrary to the case made by Bernard Comrie, mentioned above in note 23) that the present tense, far from being tied to the immediate present instant, is a 'Base Tense' because it is 'non-committal about time', while 'all other tenses are confined in some way'. The present signifies, he suggests, the 'Fact of Process': 'When we read Henry Ford Dies, we accept the occurrence as mere fact; if we were to read Henry Ford Died, we should ask "When?" or "Then what happened?" or some other question regarding a temporal connection' (Language, 23 (1947), p. 436).
73. The Observer Business and Media, 17 July 2005, p. 1 (advertisement for Vodafone);
74. The Times, 14 July 2005, p. 13.
75. The Guardian, Monday 18 July 2005, pp. 8, 9, 10.
76. 'E. P. ode pour Felection de son sepulcre', II, Selected Poems, T.S Eliot (ed.) (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 174.
77. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Calder and Boyars, 1965), pp. 23, 30.
78. Don DeLillo, Players (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 212.
79. Matthew Arnold, 'Count Leo Tolstoi', Essays in Criticism: Second Series, Essay VIII (London: Macmillan and Company, 1905), p. 257.
80. Georges Perec, A Man Asleep, trans. Andrew Leek, in Things A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep (London: Harvill, 1990), p. 197.
81. Don DeLillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1999), p. 366.
82. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. I. C. Wright (London: George Bell, 1907), p. 445.
83. Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 506.
84. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London: Virago, 1979), p. 192.
85. Ian McEwan, Atonement (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 372.
86. Gemini (London: Collins, 1981) was first published as Les Météores (Paris: Gallimard, 1975);
87. Kitchen (London: Faber, 1993) was first published in Tokyo by the Fuhutake Publishing company in 1988; The Human Stain was first published in London by Jonathan Cape in 2000 (and in Boston by Houghton Mifflin in 2000).
88. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 273.