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 pasttense. Matters have changed, and tense is now a present subject, sincemany novels, at the present time, are written in the present tense. ‘Ascreaming comes across the sky’, writes Thomas Pynchon, beginningGravity’s Rainbow (1973), and the 760 pages that follow are written inthe present tense. The practice, or fashion, has become international,and among major texts which are written substantially or entirely in thepresent tense are Life A User’s Manual (La Vie mode d’emploi) byGeorges Perec (1978), The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin) by ElfriedeJelinek (1983), Ghosts by Paul Auster (1985), Independence Day by RichardFord (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, DavidStorey, 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 inaddition some very distinguished novelists have used the present tensefor 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 majortalents for major works in several languages. The practice is evidentlymore than a fashion – and, as noted, is distinctly new. In the pastalmost every narrative, whether in verse or in prose, was narrated in thepast tense. The Bible is in the past tense (‘In the beginning was theword. . .’), as is the epic of Gilgamesh (‘Gilgamesh grieved for the deathof Enkidu. . .’), and as are the epic poems by Homer, Virgil, Dante andMilton.3 True, drama and dramatic speech are necessarily in the presenttense, but narrative as such has normally used the past tense, whether inballad, folk-tale, fable, fabliau or gossip. Jesus told his parables in thepast tense. The norse sagas are in the past tense, as medieval romancesmostly are, and as every novel has been from Longus and Petronius

Textual Practice 20(1), 2006, 71–98

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2006 Taylor & Francis

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DOI: 10.1080/09502360600559795

through Cervantez to Defoe, Fielding and Laclos in the eighteenth century.In the nineteenth century also, and the early twentieth century, virtuallyevery 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 FrenchChanson de Roland is mainly in the present tense. And, among novels, onehalf of Bleak House is famously in the present tense – and third person –‘and solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding upon Chesney Wold’.4 Theother half is in the past tense, and first person, of Esther Summerson’snarrative. The older narratives also would visit the present tense – oftenbriefly, for dramatic effect. A Scottish border ballad begins:

The knight stands in the stable-doorAs 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 linethe knight ‘was’ for to ride, and the ballad continues in the past, orperfect, tenses.5

In novels too there have been several kinds of brief shift into thepresent tense, and not only for statements of general truth, or formoments of climactic drama. Within the typology developed by DorritCohn, ‘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 chequereach other that all shape is distorted . . . he sought an image. . .’), and‘quoted monologue’ may identify itself by the use of the present tensewhen the punctuation-marks of speech are dropped, as they often are inthe later James Joyce (‘Corny Kelleher and the boy followed theirwreaths. 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 inLincoln’s Inn Hall’. They may be imperative, as in Moby Dick’s ‘Call meIshmael’. They may be a present-tense snatch of dialogue, as in War andPeace and in many other novels. Or the narrator may introduce himselfin the present, and then speak in the future tense of the story he willtell, as Dostoevsky’s narrator does in The Devils. Very famously, FordMadox Ford begins Tbe Good Soldier by saying, ‘This is the saddeststory 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 haveheard’ – though the ensuing perfect tense (‘I have heard’) makes a bridgeto 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

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single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’ saysJane Austen, commencing Pride and Prejudice. Tolstoy begins AnnaKarenina by saying, ‘All happy families are alike but an unhappy familyis unhappy after its own fashion’. In all of these cases, however, the firstsentence or sentences make a kind of theshold on which the readerpauses for a moment, to be welcomed by the novelist as he or she entersthe fiction from their own present time. Immediately afterwards the nove-list ushers the reader into the narrative proper, which both novelist andreader know to be narrative because it is in the past tense. So Tolstoy con-tinues, in his second sentence, ‘Everything had gone wrong in theOblonsky household’, and he stays in the past tense thereafter.7

If we allow for these exceptions, moreover, it remains true that the firstsentences of most novels, like most of the sentences following, will be in thepast tense. ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for withouthaving done anything wrong he was arrested one find morning’, wroteKafka, commencing The Trial.8 ‘Dombey sat in the corner of the darkenedroom’, wrote Dickens, commencing Dombey and Son, as, earlier, Cervantezbegan a famous narrative, ‘In a certain corner of La Mancha . . . there latelylived one of those country gentlemen. . .’9 If we move from the beginningsof novels to the different genres in which they are written, we have to reportthat historical novels have naturally been told in the past tense throughout,but so also have novels about the author’s own contemporary world. Even inthe letters of epistolary novels, which necessarily use the present tense ofaddress, the bulk of the letters record events in the past tense. Books setin the future, from the Book of Revelations to science fiction, are almostinvariably narrated in the past tense.10

In short, the use of the past tense has been so general in fiction that it ishardly surprising to find literary theorists arguing that the past tense in anovel may not actually have anything to do with the past – that the‘past tense’ may be simply the tense of narrative. The German critic KateHamburger has written ‘the past tense does not indicate any past . . . [itis] the tense of fictional narration’; and Roland Barthes, in WritingDegree Zero, has said of the past tense in fiction, ‘Its function is nolonger that of a tense’.11 In a more qualified way, Paul Ricoeur in Timeand Narrative has said that the pastness of the past tense is not that ofpast time, rather it is the immediate past of the narrating voice – theseevents 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 todissociate the past tense from pastness – and indeed from time in anysense – in order to identify the past tense with narrative, because it isespecially in these years that we have seen something different occur inactual novels: that is, the move from the past to the present tense.In 1975, when he published his dissertation Tense Without Time,

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C. P. Casparis knew only of eight English or American novels written inthe present tense throughout, the best-known being Joyce Carey’s MisterJohnson (1939), Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964) andTheDriver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (1970).13 Since 1970 there have beenmany additions to the list, for example A Temporary Life by DavidStorey (1973), Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (1984), Ghost by PaulAuster (1986), Grace by Maggie Gee (1988), Cat’s Eye by MargaretAttwood (1989), Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis (1998). Indeed, since1960 many other novels have included substantial sections in the presenttense, for instance Dog Years by Gunter Grass (1963), This Sporting Lifeby 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), Underworldby Don DeLillo (1997). In A. S. Byatt’s novel, Babel Tower (1996) the‘novel within a novel’, ‘Babbletower’ is in the past tense, while the novelproper is in the present tense.14

It remains true that very many novels today, including many ofour best novels, are written in the past tense. Even so, the widespread –the international – turn towards the present represents a significantchange. In centuries or rather millennia of Western story-telling, it hasnever, on this scale, happened before. And among the innovationswith which the experimental twentieth century has experimented infiction, the present tense is the innovation that has thrived. A comparableinnovation, perhaps, was the practice of writing a novel in the secondperson singular, with a protagonist consistently addressed as ‘you’. Thistechnique was used, successfully and poetically, in Georges Perec’spresent-tense novel A Man Asleep (1967). In a more popular and lyricalway Oriana Fallaci’s A Man (1979) was also addressed throughout to‘you’. Perhaps understandably, however, this experiment has not beenmade often, while the use of the present tense has spread so widely thatit has ceased to be experimental.

The turn to the present tense has occurred, moreover, in an intellec-tual context where some critics have argued that much is at stake in thetense of a narrative. In Writing Degree Zero Roland Barthes claimed notonly that the past tense was the tense of narrative, but also that it was,in an insidious way, reactionary. Possibly following Jean-Paul Sartre,Barthes noted that narratives in the past tense tend to place events in aneat order of a cause and effect, at too great a remove from the chaos ofthe present moment. He concluded:

The narrative past is therefore a part of a security system for Belles-Lettres. Being the image of an order, it is one of those numerous

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formal pacts made between the writer and society for the justificationof the former and the serenity of the latter.15

Barthes implicitly recommends the dangerous exposure of the presenttense, open to what he calls ‘exploded reality’, in preference to the comfor-table securities of the past tense. It was presumably because they had suchthoughts that some avant-garde novelists had already, before Barthes, fore-sworn the past tense and moved to the present. We may ask nowadays,does it make a great difference what tense a novel uses? Do we even remem-ber what tense the novels we have read were in? But if such questions seemeasy now, when the present tense is widely used, this was certainly not thecase 60 years ago, when the use of the present tense had distinct shockvalue. For the present tense first came in, in the twentieth century, innovels that were heroically different from the norm. One of the first wasJean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausee (1938), and it cannot be surprising that thepresent tense was heralded by a classic of Existentialism – Existentialismbeing a movement much concerned with the anarchic pivotal instantof ‘existence now’. Another early heroic text is Samuel Beckett’sL’Innommable – The Unnamable – first published in French in 1952.The narrating ‘I’ is progressively resumed to minimal existence, firstone-legged then limbless and stuck in a pot, then bodiless and past-lesswith nothing at last but a present moment in the dark:

I remember a second, for the space of a second, that is to say longenough to blurt it out . . . Not an instant I can call my own andthey want me to know where next to turn.16

It is not surprising that the remarkable technical departure of writingwhole narratives in the present tense was first introduced in works that wereartistically and philosophically demanding – in avant-garde novels writtenin Paris. Before the Parisian experiments there had been significant use ofthe present tense in other innovative fiction, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wakeby James Joyce (1922 and 1939) and in The Waves by Virginia Woolf(1931). There is again significant use of the present tense in The NakedLunch by William S. Burroughs (1959).

It remains true however that the narratives that introduce a new prac-tice will be a special case. When we move from the innovative present-tensenovels of the past to the very many novels that use the present tense moreregularly now, we may ask, has the present tense still a revolutionary char-acter? And if it cannot now be revolutionary in the way that it was, has itfound a secure base in artistic value? How well, in fictional practice, doesthe present tense work?

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Without doubt it can work spectacularly well, as it regularly does inthe novels of J. M. Coetzee. In, for instance, Waiting for the Barbarians:

Rolling down upon us over the snowy plain is a gigantic black wave.It is still miles away but visibly devouring the earth in its approach.Its crest is lost in the murky clouds. ‘A storm!’ I shout. I have neverseen anything so frightening . . . . Then at midday the wind drops assuddenly as if a gate has been closed somewhere.17

There before us, with the horror of a tidal wave sweeping overland, isthe storm, growing at us in the expanding space between the clouds andthe disappearing plain. Nothing is gained if this passage, by itself, isthrown into the past tense, and it would not be hard to find, in theworks of novelists cited already, many passages where the use of thepresent-tense is so felicitous and powerful that it is aesthetically self-justifying.

We may feel, even so, that the hopes which Roland Barthes, and theinnovative novelists themselves, had rested in the present tense have notbeen fully realized. The passage from Coetzee is elegant, and couldsuggest that the present tense also, like ‘the narrative past’ in Barthes’saccount, has joined a ‘formal pact made between the writer and society’such that it has ceased to be, in Barthes’s sense, ‘insecure’. One could ofcourse retort to Roland Barthes that his real quarry was not the pasttense, or any tense, but a tendency in narrative itself. For surely it is narra-tive as such which ‘reduces the exploded reality to a slim and pure logos’?18

We tend to value narratives on a double principle – in proportion both asthey keep the freshness and violence of ‘exploded reality’, and yet also asthey frame that explosion in the economy of the ‘logos’. Narratives mayfail by being too exploded, or too slim and pure, and they may fail orsucceed equally in the past tense, and in the present tense. Nor has allavant-garde writing emigrated to the present. On the contrary, writers con-tinue to innovate while using the past tense, for instance Salman Rushdieand Milan Kundera.

Roland Barthes has however raised the question: what is the characterof a tense in fiction? Is there a politics of tense? One could start such aninquiry by questioning the company which the different tenses keep. Thepresent tense, in particular, is gregarious. It has avant-garde friends, whomay use it with a pioneering and sophisticated artistry. And it has demoticfriends, who can make it seem an uncouth guest when tramping throughthe house of fiction. There is a sympathetic passage in Kingsley Amis’snovel Difficulties with Girls (1988), where we hear of the heroine’s ven-tures in novel-reading. She likes novels by women – ‘She had tried lotsof novels by men in her time . . . They never seemed to give you a feeling

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of what it was like to be a person . . . they just went round noticing things allthe time’.19 She picks on a saga of the American South, but ‘the Southernbelle saga, though by another woman, was a terrible let down, with pageafter page in the historic present. This was probably meant to be poetical,but what it did for Jenny was to keep reminding her of the style herfather’s less educated friends told their anecdotes in’.20 This was so inKingsley Amis’s time, and today too, in any coffee-bar, one can hearanecdotes told in the present – ‘He goes, “Yeah!” I’m like, “What!”’ Thepresent tense has a currency in oral narrative where it can seem far fromavant-garde or aesthetic. For Kingsley Amis, the demotic present shadesinto the historic present which may be used crudely by popular novelists,in an effort to give their fiction an easy immediacy, monotonous andwearing. When used by less distinguished writers the present tense has inthe past been an irritant to literary agents, publishers’ readers, bookreviewers and general readers, as a little consultation within ‘the trade’would confirm; and websites giving advice to writers tend to warnagainst it.21 The present tense, in other words, may have been used withoriginality and accomplishment, but even so it has a questionablereputation.

There are then distinctions to be made, as to the character of thepresent tense. There are, moreover, different kinds of present.22 I haveso far referred mainly to the present of immediately present actions andevents – the present tense of the present instant. At the other temporalextreme there is the present of permanence, the tense of statements thatare enduringly true, the tense perhaps of wisdom. Such statements mayrefer to constant conditions – ‘A safe stronghold our God is still’ – orto recurring events, like the contents of proverbs – ‘A stitch in timesaves nine’.23 The first sentences of novels may be in this permanent or pro-verbial present – a practice which allowed Vladimir Nabokov to begin hisanti-novel Ada with a sentence that reversed the first sentence of AnnaKarenina. ‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar’, writesNabokov, ‘all unhappy ones are more or less alike’ – a proposition notmarkedly less true than the original in Tolstoy, quoted earlier.24 Manypresent-tense sentences in novels will be in the present of continuing con-ditions: but still the signal use of the present tense in fiction, with whichthis essay is especially concerned, is the non-permanent present of theinstant, the ‘now’ of feeling and action.25 It is this form of the presenttense which is especially controversial. There is a ‘common mistake ofthinking that using a present-tense narration conveys immediacy’, PhilipPullman has written, ‘It doesn’t; it conveys arty self-consciousness . . . .There is far too much of it about’.26

Though the present tense can incur odium in fiction, it may not do soin other literary modes. In poetry, the present tense has excellent

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credentials. One might be tempted to say that the present tense is the tenseof poetry:

Sweetest love, I do not goe . . .

O Rose, thou art sick . . .

My heart is like a singing bird . . .

He is not here; but far awayThe noise of life begins again,And ghastly tho’ the drizzling rain

On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Most of the verse of T. S. Eliot is in the present tense: ‘Here I am, an oldman in a dry month . . .’. If much poetry is in what might be called TheLyric Present, this is partly because the present is the tense of address –of saying something to someone else. But also the present tense is thetense of emotion declaring itself – we use it so in letters and in text messa-ging, and the characters in novels use it so, both in their dialogue, and alsoin letters in epistolary novels.27

If the present tense is dominant in lyric poetry, however, the factremains that the overwhelmingly dominant tense of narrative poetry isthe past tense – as in Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Dante, Ariosto,Tasso, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Crabbe. Within the dominant pasttense, epic verse may jump briefly into the present tense, as novels in thepast tense have also done. Camoes for instance will use the present oreven the future tense in the visionary passages in The Lusiads, but thegreat voyage of Vasco da Gama is related in the past tense. The Germanpoet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller argued in his essay ‘On Naive andSentimental Poetry’ that it was important that poetry should achieve‘Vergegenwartigung ’, which might be translated ‘presentification’, andone means of doing this in narrative has always been by slipping vividlyand briefly into the present tense. This use of the contained or enfoldedtense – of the tense within a tense – can be simple and over-sensational,but it is not necessarily so. Milton makes such a jump successfully and notover-obtrusively in the passage in Paradise Lost where Sin unlocks the gateof hell.

Thus saying, from her side the fatal KeySad instrument of all our woe, she took;And towards the gate rolling her bestial train,Forthwith the huge portcullis high updrew . . .Which but herself not all the Stygian powers

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Could once have mov’d; then in the key-hole turnsTh’intricate wards, and every Bolt and BarOf massy Iron or solid Rock with easeUnfast’ns: on a sudden op’n flyWith impetuous recoil and jarring soundTh’infernal doors, and on their hinges grateHarsh Thunder, that the lowest bottom shookOf Erebus.28

It is worth pausing to ask what is the actual effect of making such ashift of tense. The same technique is used frequently by novelists – it isused by George Eliot at the climax of Adam Bede. Hetty Sorrell has beenbrought to the brink of execution – in the past tense – then:

It was a shout of sudden excitement at the appearance of a horsemancleaving the crowd at full gallop . . . . See, he has something in hishand . . . . The Sherriff knows him: it is Arthur Donnithorne, carry-ing in his hand a hard-won release from death.29

The author’s desire for the immediacy of present seeing naturallyenlists the present tense of direct or dramatic speech, as George Eliottells us directly, ‘See –’. In general, the use of the present tense in narrativemay have an increased feel of direct address, of the author speaking moreclosely and more urgently in our ear. Both in the Milton, and in theGeorge Eliot, the present tense is conjured by movement – the physicalmovement of a gate, a horse. The present tense concentrates attentionon this movement, but also, arguably, it pauses the movement, a littlelike a freeze-frame shot in a film, or like an action photograph of anathlete in motion. Though Milton says that Hell-gate opens ‘on asudden’ and ‘with impetuous recoil’ it seems to open in a monumentaland almost ponderous slow motion. In these cases, the effect of thepresent tense is to privilege a movement and to make it more visible,and in the process, maybe, to make it importantly slow. George Eliot’sstaccato or perhaps breathless short sentences have a comparable effect:they at once stop us short, and spring us forward. It may then be a ques-tion whether some of our very long present-tense novels – like ThomasPynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow – are highly charged but also slow. ‘Festinalente’ (‘Hurry Slowly’) may be the motto of the present tense.

To take a lighter example, again from verse, there is the moment inJohn Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes when Porphyro has arrived, all eyes, inMadeline’s chamber, travelling by the past tense. Then he watches as

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her vespers done,Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degreesHer rich attire creeps rustling to her knees . . .30

Again it is movement that attracts the present – the movement ofundressing – and this movement is both emphasized and slowed by therapt, lingering and in this case voyeuristic eye of the present tense. Therecan be a great deal of ‘eye’ – of seeing – in present-tense writing. For ifthe present is the tense of deep-felt emotion – and of emotion findingeloquent speech, as we see if we study this tense in poetry – it is aslikely to be, on other occasions, the tense of looking, the Tense of the Gaze.

Returning then from verse to fiction, one could note that a number ofpresent tense novels are carried by an energy that is primarily optical.Reading Alain Robbe-Grillet, we find ourselves forever outside his charac-ters, watching them in a suspense of mesmerised spying:

She sits down in front of the dressing-table and looks at herself in theoval mirror . . . . Not one of her features moves . . . . Petrified by herown gaze, attentive and serene, she seems not to feel time passing.31

The present tense of Robbe-Grillet is one form of the present tense ofModernism – there is no complicity in subjectivity, just the spectating ofan alien eye. Reading La Jalousie, the novel from which I have quoted (inEnglish titled Jealousy though it could also be called The Blind), we maywonder if we are seeing through the eye of a jealous husband – orthrough the eye of every intrusive author or novel-reader, keenly watchingwhere perhaps he should not. Robbe-Grillet wants that ambiguity. Thestyle is deliberately flat, and his novels are, and perhaps need to be,short. Longer novels set in the present – I cite again Pynchon’s Gravity’sRainbow – depend even more on a present-tense vivacity of seeing:

Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just sparked,very brightly. A new star, nothing less noticeable. He leans on theparapet to watch. The brilliant point has already become a short ver-tical white line. It must be somewhere out over the North Sea . . . atleast that far . . . icefields below and a cold smear of sun . . .32

So Pynchon’s Pirate Prentice sees clearly, from London where the V2rocket will land, its launching hundreds of miles away. We do not see arocket land till the last page of the novel, for this remote take-off, far offacross land and sea, is the launching also of a novel which incessantly

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sees surreal events at once in a close and – in several senses – a longperspective.

With these notes made on the present tense, one may look back atthe long-dominant past tense. To what extent should it be called thetense of narrative? What, in any case, is the character of the past tense?If we step away from fiction, we can say of the past tense that it is thetense of record. It is the tense in which crimes are described in news-papers. It is the tense of hard news. It is, necessarily, the tense of history.As Roland Barthes observed, in Writing Degree Zero, the past tenseimplies a continuity from event to event. It implies causality. We speaknaturally of a ‘chain of events’, and such chains are normally reportedin the past tense. This surely is why the past tense has worked so well innarrative? For it is not as easy as Roland Barthes and Kate Hamburgerimply to separate the past tense from past time. The past tense has conse-quentiality because consequentiality is what we see when we look backat past events: we see them selectively, and note especially that eventX led to event Y.

While recognizing the pastness of the past tense, it is important at thesame time to allow for its presentness. For clearly past tense verbs in a nar-rative are the narrative present in the instant when we read them. This isapparent from the way in which authors use the word ‘now’, when anarrow sense of tense might require them to say ‘then’. ‘All day she hadtormented herself’, Jean Rhys writes in Quartet (1928), ‘and now shewas on the brink of an abyss of sincerity’.33 Muriel Spark demonstratesmore deliberately the way in which the past tense speaks at once of pastand present when she writes, in The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie, of Sandy,‘who was now some years Sister Helena of the Transfiguration’.34

In his discussion of tense in A Poetics of Composition, Boris Uspenskycalls the present tense ‘synchronic’, because the time of the narrator and thetime in the narration are one and the same, and he calls the past tense‘retrospective’, because the past tense looks back.35 Undoubtedly thepast tense is retrospective, but also it is, in fiction, synchronic. In JaneAusten’s Emma we are told that when Emma has learned of the greatmistake she has made about herself, ‘it darted through her, with thespeed of an arrow, that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself!’36

‘Darted’ is the past tense of grammar, but the ‘now’ of the narrative.The word ‘darted’, moreover, is followed by a verb that is ambiguous asto tense. ‘It darted through her . . . that Mr Knightley must marry. . .’‘Must’ is the past of ‘must’, but it is also the present of ‘must’, in bothcases carrying a push of futurity. ‘Must’ is both retrospective and ‘synchro-nic’, as well as being prospective, and if Emma were a present-tense novel, itcould still say only: ‘It darts through her with the speed of an arrow, thatMr Knightley must marry no one but herself!’

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That Jane Austen’s narrative is not all ‘past’ is shown by the gathering inher prose, at times of high crisis, of sentences that are tenseless – tenselessespecially because they are verbless, since there cannot be tense without averb: ‘Mr Knightley and Harriet Smith! Such an elevation on her side!Such a debasement on his!’37 If the sentence does have a verb, the verbmay be in the timeless infinitive: ‘Poor Harriet! to be a second timethe dupe of her misconceptions and flattery’.38 Both the bare use of excla-matory nouns, and recourse to the infinitive, have the ‘zoom-lens’ effectwhich the present tense also has, of drawing us quickly closer to theaction of the narrative, and of drawing the narrator also closer to us. None-theless, to find a ‘presentness’ in a past-tense narrative is not to suggest,as some critics have done, that all of its ‘pastness’ has disappeared, forpast-tense narratives, however immediate, pretend to the authority ofattested events. Both plays and novels are sometimes described as ‘extendedmetaphors’, but the term which might most aptly be used to describethe relations between tense and narrative might be the ‘extended pun’ –a literary ambiguity. Events in narrative are simultaneously alleged tohave happened – that is how and why they can be told – and also theyhappen in front of our eyes within the narrative as we read. There isperhaps a contradiction in saying this – but then, fiction itself is a contra-diction. Emma and Mr Knightley both exist, and do not exist. And if,to invoke Dr Johnson, we can be simultaneously sitting in a theatre,and standing with Hamlet on the battlements of Elsinore, then certainlywe can be simultaneously in the present and in the past. We knowfrom experience that the human mind can live happily among contradic-tions – it is perhaps designed to do so, in order to survive in a worldof cross-purposes. Compelling narratives possess both a pastness and apresentness throughout the time in which we read them, whichever par-ticular tense they use. It is because narratives exist as it were in doubletime that it is in practice so easy for authors to move back and forthbetween tenses.

If moreover the past tense in narrative is always in some sense present,it is also true that present-tense narratives cannot easily escape from havinga ‘pastness’. Muriel Spark tells us, at one point in her present-tense novelThe Driver’s Seat (1970), that ‘Lisa fights her way to a dark corner . . . Shewrenches at the door . . . It opens so easily as to throw her backwards. . .’39

In spite of the present-tense verbs, we know that these events are not occur-ring now, that Lisa has been fighting her way to this dark corner ever sinceMuriel Spark wrote the novel. That is to say, we know we are in the pre-sence – and the present – of a literary convention, and that in the narrativepassages, as well as in the dialogue, the present tense is the tense of perform-ance. A novel is a kind of silent theatre, the narrative is a script which insome sense, imaginatively, we enact as we read it. We will perform the

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novel again, next time we read it, and each time our performance will beboth now and then.

With her precise attention to tense, Muriel Spark presently clarifiesthe times of tenses further. Just as in past-tense narratives, present-tensewords like ‘now’ will recur, so in present-tense narratives other tenseswill intrude which qualify, or give the lie to, the ‘presentness’ of thewriting. What Muriel Spark does – and she must do it knowinglybecause she does it consistently – is to combine the present tense notwith its natural companion, the perfect tense (‘she has done..’.), butrather with the plu-perfect – the had-done tense. When Lisa eats anice-cream in a cafe with Mrs Fiedke,

Mrs Fiedke says, ‘It matches with your outfit.’Lisa laughs at this, longer than Mrs Fiedke had evidently expected.40

If we were narrowly consistent, we would expect Muriel Spark to say,‘longer than Mrs Fiedke has evidently expected’. A little later we hearagain of ‘Mrs Fiedke, whose eager spirit is slowly returning from whereverit had been. . .’41 Strictly we would expect, ‘whose spirit is returning fromwherever it has been’. This is a small detail, which one may not notice inreading the novel – but that perhaps is the point. Discrepancies oftense often pass unnoticed because the reader knows instinctively thatthe narrative he is reading hovers in mid-time between past and present.The narrative, to put it another way, has a foot in both times – all narra-tives do.42

Once one is alerted to this issue, one may find such discrepancies inmany present-tense narratives. In Cat’s Eye (1988) Margaret Atwoodwrites, ‘I live in a house . . . in British Columbia, which is as far awayfrom Toronto as I could get without drowning’.43 Strictly one wouldexpect this narrator to say either that she lives in a house which is as faraway from Toronto as she can get, or that she lived in a house whichwas as far from Toronto as she could get. But an absolute consistency inthe use of the present tense might in fact be more disturbing than shiftssuch as these, since we know no narrative can truly exist in the absolutepresent. In the sentence from Margaret Atwood, the use of ‘could’signals the quiet absorption within the present sentence of another com-pressed or hidden small narrative of the recent past – that of the searchfor and discovery of the house in British Columbia.

It is because different times may be co-present within one tense thatnovelists can play opposite games with tense. Many novelists have usedantithesis of tense, as Charles Dickens does in his novel Bleak Housewhich, from chapter to chapter, alternates between the third personpresent of the Dickensian narrator, and the first person past tense of

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‘Esther’s Narrative’. A novelist may juxtapose two narratives, one of which,in the past, records earlier experiences, while the other, in the present tense,describes an immediate crisis. This procedure is used straightforwardly andskilfully by David Storey in This Sporting Life. But equally the alignment oftense and time may be reversed. Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton is set inthree time-zones: both the contemporary narrative, and the stretch of thenovel set in Victorian England, are in the past tense, while the experiencesof Chatterton himself, back in the 1760s, are told in the present tense.There is a nice play of antithesis in the Ackroyd, but both his practiceand David Storey’s are equally valid, since both the tenses used haveboth a presentness and a pastness.

The question remains, why is the use of the present tense in fictionmore widespread now than it has been before? One may point to adouble ancestry, on the one hand in the avant-garde novel and on theother in sensational fiction, but even a double origin does not explainthe popularity.

One may easily say that in our present-day world people live more inthe present tense, in an up-to-the-minute, pastless sort of way, and ourfiction reflects our sound-bite-long attention-span. Or one may remarkthat a present-tense narrative can easily have an undetermined, improvisa-tory feel to it, as if the universe were made up from moment to moment,and so again is in tune with contemporary life. But though there may besome truth in these propositions, they are impressionistic and hardlyverifiable. It may be more to the point to note that, whether or not welive in a more open-feeling ‘present tense’ way than in the past, our linguis-tic environment is demonstrably more dominated by the present tense thanit used to be.

We live for instance in a torrent of news updates. The television news,like the radio news, uses the present tense very frequently, often underpressure from the immediate future – as to whether the manager of acertain team will be replaced, who may win the Oscars, when orwhether the allied troops may leave Iraq. Newspaper headlines use thepresent tense to summarize the recent past – ‘Bush breaks silence overRove row’, ‘Law Lords hear hunting case’, ‘Bandits with bows andarrows kill 45 in feud over water’ – or again tend towards the future –‘European students to make up short-fall’, ‘Blunkett play to get legalscrutiny’, ‘French ready for a new revolution’.44 Though news storiesthemselves relate events in the past tense (‘President George W. Bushbroke his silence yesterday. . .’ ‘Bandits armed with AK47s, grenades,machetes and bows and arrows killed at least 45, mostly women andchildren, in Kenya’s worst outbreak of violence over water and pasture. . .’),they include present-tense comment and speculation about futuredevelopments.45

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In respect of tense, contemporary journalism differs substantiallyfrom past journalism. If one turns up the issue of The Observer for 4December 1791, one finds some reports cast in the present tense – ‘Thetown is not only thin of fashionables, but uncommonly dull . . . .’ Theheadlines themselves are bare categories, verbless and so tenseless – ‘EastIndia Intelligence’, ‘The Town’, ‘Fashionable Residence’, ‘Bishops’,‘Botany Bay’. The actual reporting in the paper makes more use of thepast tense, and is more past-directed, than contemporary reporting –naturally so, since both news, and newspapers, took longer to arrive.Even likely future developments may be reported in the past tense.Under ‘East India Intelligence’ the reader is told that ‘Lord Cornwallis,immediately after the rains, intended to pursue his first object, thecapture of Seringapatum’. A contemporary paper would say ‘intends’,the television would show Lord Cornwallis saying in the future tensethat he will take Seringapatum, but such expressions were not possiblein 1791 because of the weeks it took for news even of intentions totravel by sea from India to England.

Returning to contemporary idiom, one must note that in newspapersas elsewhere advertisements use the present tense, again tending hopefullytowards the future. ‘If you work for you, this package will too’. ‘You canstop rubbing the lamp. Your wishes have been granted. The Peugeot206 Sport comes with alloy wheels, air-conditioning, front fog lightsand one year’s free insurance . . . the drive of your life.46 Most notably,the captions to photographs are in the present tense even when manifestly,and quite explicitly, they show the past. So, in an issue of The Guardian inJuly 2005, there is a photo-caption referring to the previous day, ‘JohnnyDepp, who plays Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,arrives for the film’s British premiere in Leicester Square, London, yester-day’, a caption referring to a date two days earlier, ‘J. K. Rowling reads toHarry Potter fans at Edinburgh Castle on Saturday’, and a caption refer-ring to a date 30 years earlier, ‘One of the Apollo 17 astronauts takes atour of the moon’s surface on a lunar roving vehicle on December 111972’.47 The association in earlier discourse between the present tenseand visuality has naturally expanded in the ‘age of the image’, and the com-mentaries attached to all our forms of printed and electronically replicatedimages are inevitably and relentlessly present-tense. Images, one might say,speak always in the present tense – even when they package a picturesquepast for nostalgia’s eye.

One would not necessarily argue that journalism, advertisements orthe commentaries to images have influenced the techniques of fiction deci-sively. But the media do reflect a broad contemporary culture in which dis-course as a whole is emphatically present-directed. Starting from thepresent and future tenses of advertisements, one could argue that

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consumerism in general will make more use of those tenses than of the pasttense (the tense, perhaps, of complaints departments). The discourse andlogic of capitalism is necessarily concerned with immediate values, pricesand prospects, and with the shifting values of ‘futures’ (though the pasttense is indispensible in estimating track records and tax bills). More atlarge, one could argue that the language of comprehensive prescriptivephilosophies, from Christianity to socialism, has always made substantialreference to both present and future. And if one believed that at thepresent time there was an increased political manipulation of fear – fearof epidemic, fear of terrorism, fear of ecological catastrophe – one couldargue that the rhetoric of fear is again articulated in terms of present andfuture.

These again are general considerations, however. Seeking a more con-crete influence, we might turn to film and television, and the undoubtedeffect of the main visual media. Photography itself has been discussed byRoland Barthes and by many others in terms of its perpetuation of anappearance that has gone – of its odd preservation of actual past instants,precious lost moments, dear or enigmatic faces, into the present of oursight. On these grounds one might argue that if photography belongs toany tense, it belongs simultaneously to the past and to the present. Ourgeneral verbal practice however is to treat photographs as a visual formof present-tense statement – hence the consistent use of the presenttense in captions. The moving image is in any case habitually describedin the present tense, as is any clip or frame from a film. The influence offilm on the novel has been arguable in a general way ever since Pound,in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, chose to mock the popular novel as ‘a prosekinema’.48 Mention has already been made of Alain Robbe-Grillet, anauthor greatly interested in film who collaborated in making L’Anneederriere a Marienbad. In his novels the filmic habit of seeing is constant.Not only in the passage quoted above, but constantly, we circle his char-acters endlessly and only ever see them, in an endless montage of trackingshots, zooms and still. Naturally his novels are written in the present tense,since the present tense is the tense of the camera. Even his short pieces,called ‘Snapshots’ (‘Instantanees’), are essentially short clips or loops offilm (‘Three children are moving along a beach . . . a wave . . . suddenlyrises and immediately breaks’ ‘a motionless group, that has only just goton the escalator, is ascending at the same slow and sure speed’).49 Fewnovelists show the influence of cinema as constantly and directly as doesRobbe-Grillet, but in many of the present-tense novelists I have citedquasi-cinematic visualizations are multiplied, as they are in the manyprose-pictures and flash images of Pynchon. The use of the present tenseis normally happy in any novel that depends greatly on describing whatis immediately seen, and also on describing pictures and images (as, for

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instance, does Life A User’s Manual). A number of notable present-tensenovels have as their protagonists artists, as do David Storey’s A TemporaryLife and Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. In Don DeLillo’s novel Players(1977) – a title which refers to actors both in events and in dramas –the first section is titled ‘The Movie’ and expands from the projection ofan in-flight film. At the end of the novel, rather wonderfully, the protago-nist flattens into an image progressively bleeding and bleaching towards anemptiness that is at once blank screen and blank page:

The angle of light is direct and severe, making the people on the bedappear to us in a special framework, their intrinsic form perceivableapart from the animal glue of physical properties and functions . . . .The whole room, the motel, is surrendered to this moment of lumi-nous cleansing . . . . The propped figure, for instance, is barely recog-nizable as male. Shedding capabilities and traits by the second, he canstill be described (but quickly) as well-formed, sentient and fair. Weknow nothing else about him.50

As the title Players reminds us, film is not an exclusively visual form. Itis also a contemporary form of theatre. From the start the novel has evolvedin regular communication with the theatre: to mention only the obviousnames, Cervantez, Fielding, Dickens, George Eliot, James, Tolstoy andJoyce all wrote plays. A number of twentieth century present-tense nove-lists have been distinctly successful playwrights, most famously Sartre,Beckett and David Storey. Even when the novel is not, what it often is,a form of virtual cinema, it still is very frequently a form of virtualtheatre: it matters very much that we ‘hear’ the dialogue, that it ‘sounds’alive and demonstrates a good ‘ear’. The theatre has always had a strongvisual impact – often including ‘spectacle’ – and perhaps the oldestregular use of the present tense in literature, outside dramatic speechitself, has been in the stage-direction: ‘Exeunt’.

With the theatrical consideration also in mind, one could feel that somany kinds of presentness have converged on the contemporary novel –the lyric present of deep emotion finding voice, the present tense ofdramatic speech and of the soliloquy, the present tense of the stage direc-tion, of the tableau vivant and of spectacle, and the present tense of themedia, of the camera and of all visual imagery, not to mention of the sur-rounding consumerist culture – that the wonder possibly is that the novelhas continued to use the past tense to the extent that it does.

Why in fact has the novel continued to make such a substantial – sucha dominant – use of the past tense? Since the fundamental vocation of thenovel has often been defined in terms akin to Matthew Arnold’s phrase for

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the Russian novel, ‘the representation of human life’, one must allow thatthe linguistic and visual environments of the novel are only aspects – even‘surface’ or superficial aspects – of the dense world of intimately personallife which the novel at once depicts and inhabits.51 If we attend especiallyto the closeness with which the novel involves us in individual conscious-ness – within the cockpit of awareness of a person in their crisis – then wemay feel the case both for present-tense and for past-tense narration. For anovel after all is not a play, we still are told of the crisis – we do not reallysee it acted out before us, however close we may feel to the agents in theirexcitement or their pain. And it may be that, for the reasons Paul Ricoeurhas suggested, the process of telling as such tends especially to use the pasttense – I am telling you this happened – though, as contemporary novelsshow, ‘telling’ can work in the present tense also. One must note here thatthough the novels of recent decades have seen a powerful swing back tofirst-person narration, the preponderance of these novels use the firstperson with the past tense.

The novel, like life, is social as well as personal, however. It is timeperhaps to ask whether there may be a relation between tense andsociety – or a relation between a changing balance of tenses and a changingsocial balance. In the nineteenth century for instance it was easy to say ofthe novel that it portrayed a society, or Society. ‘Society’ is even a characterin Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. The nineteenth century novel might rep-resent a town, like Jane Austen’s Highbury or George Eliot’s Middle-march. Or it might represent a country, like the fairground of vanitiesin Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, or like the ‘dedlocked’ England of Dickens’late novels, or the savage France of Zola, or the resilient Russia of Warand Peace. An author can satirize ‘Society’ in the present tense, as playsdo, and as Dickens does in Bleak House, but as a general rule large-scalesocial novels have tended to use the past tense just as epic poems have.Balzac favours the past tense for his Comedie Humaine. Nor is it surprisingto see the past tense dominate novels in which characters have to push theirway forward through a resistant texture of social practice. For the forcesthat press hard on social life come both from the close and the distantpast – the established expectations, the known habits, the massive inheri-tance that has fashioned a ‘class’. Novels about societies tend to show thepast of that society acting oppressively on the present – as George Eliotdoes so wonderfully in her rich pictures of squires, bankers, clericsand doctors, attended by their populous families, quietly cooperating tomaintain their comforts.

The world has changed greatly, however, since the nineteenth century,and so maybe has the sense of tense that might reflect our social relations.We are more likely now to speak of fragmented communities, and of ato-mized individuals who, late or soon, are ‘alienated’ – either alienated from

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society, or, as it sometimes seems, who are alienated in a more absolutesense, as if there no longer were a society in which the individual couldbe at home. Such descriptions can be exaggerated, and if one looks at acontemporary novel of genuine social depth and range – like JonathanFrantzen’s The Corrections (2001) – one can conclude that provincialsociety, with all its nuances of snobbery, is as thickly and oppressivelyalive in the American mid-west today as ever it was in any gentrified vica-rage in the pages of Jane Austen. But Frantzen too reflects the mutation ofcommunity – his Chip and his Denise are more on their own than anycharacter in Jane Austen. The protagonists of contemporary novels areoften solitary and may be both friendless and parentless. And in thosenovels written wholly or substantially in the present tense, it often seemsthat ‘society’ – human society – has not so much an attenuated as azero presence. Such a description would fit Sartre’s La Nausee, Beckett’sUnnamable, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, all of Robbe-Grillet’s novels,Perec’s Man Asleep, the novels of J. M. Coetzee that I have mentioned,and of course Paul Auster’s Ghosts.

There are again exceptions. Gravity’s Rainbow ranges widely throughWorld War II Europe – but in an alienated caricature-style, so that Euro-pean society as such seems scarcely to figure in this nightmare pantomime.German society is thickly present in Gunter Grass’s Dog Years, and there isa richness of social detail to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. Even so, theremay be some concurrence between the use of the present tense and with-drawal from society. One might cite Georges Perec’s A Man Asleep, whichis both in the present tense throughout and also in the second person:‘You are alone and you know no-one . . . You see the others bunchtogether . . . hug and protect one another. But you, lifeless gaze . . . youare a silhouette . . . an occupied speech that no-one approaches’.52

Many protagonists in present-tense novels could be said to dramatizea pathology of isolation. The protagonist of Beckett’s Unnamable does sophysically as well as in psyche, progressively losing limbs, shape, history.The heroine of Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat is seeking the consumma-tion of isolation, in her search for a ‘Mr Right’ who will kill her. What mayseem curious in both these novels, and in other isolated present-tense texts,is that there is so little examination of how the protagonists came to bealone. Possibly we see a change in the nature of introspection. For the nine-teenth century novel was full not only of social detail, but also of innerintricacy. Even Charles Dickens, who was far from being the most intro-spective of novelists, fills his David Copperfield with pensive worryabout himself. And in George Eliot, Henry James, even more in MarcelProust, people ponder minutely the precipitation of experience. By ourstandards it may seem to be a leisured examination, a patient lookingback through well-recalled small crises; leisured or not, the searching is

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thorough and perhaps had been conditioned by a Christian culture ofconscience, of anxiety for each soul. At all events, introspection, in thepre-modern novel, is at the same time retrospection – what quirks ofmy nature, what things I have done, have shaped me so that I made thismistake? Such self-concern may express itself easily in a past-tense narra-tive, such as Esther’s self-aware ‘selfless’ narrative in Bleak House whichunfolds simultaneously towards her birth and towards her marriage.

By contrast the lone figures in present-tense novels could hardly becalled retrospective. In a way they are cut off from themselves – eventheir own past is already another country. Sartre’s Roquentin, Beckett’sUnnamable, Burrough’s protagonist, Perec’s ‘You’, can only gaze with akind of wonder at a charged ferment of impulse and sadness whichseems at once to lie inside them and to fill the bleak space round them.One would have to add that the protagonists of our present-tense novelshave undoubtedly been more daring than their nineteenth century prede-cessors were in facing the deeper darknesses – darknesses outside ourhouse, and darknesses within.

Not that the present tense of contemporary fiction is always and onlythe tense of bleakness. Though it could be hardly be said to predominate,there is also a communal and festive present, apparent at times in RichardFord’s Independence Day (1995) and even more in the interludes in DonDeLillo’s Underworld (1997):

He sees fires on the pavement, they’re building fires in fifty-five-gallon drums, and he is struck a little dumb by the masses ofpeople out to buy tickets at this time of night . . . . He paceshimself to the crowd, feeling pulled along, feeling frankly happy tobe among them . . . and they’re singing roaring warring songs,they’re back-and-forthing on the street with rough-and-tumblehumour, all these ball fans striding toward the ticket lines at twoor three in the morning or whatever the actual hour.53

It may be fair, in closing, to let the present tense have the last word, since,as many novels begin in the present tense, so also many novels end in thepresent tense, whether or not they have been using it earlier. It may be thatfirst sentences are often in the present tense because they are threshholds,which one crosses as one steps from one’s present into narrative. It wouldnot be surprising if this stepping-stone reformed as the narrative ended,and the novelist bade farewell to the reader. Also the present tense mitigatesclosure, and in allowing fictional protagonists to face an open future it mayhelp the whole narrative, just ended, to live openly in the reader’s memory.So, in the last paragraph of Bleak House, which has been narrated in twotenses, Esther Summerson, who has earlier, consistently, spoken in the

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past tense, joins the first person narrator in the present tense as she contem-plates a benign future, open in the sense that her spoiled looks may recover:‘I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty . . . and that my husbandis very handsome . . . and that they can very well do without much beautyin me – even supposing –’.

Older narratives also could close in the present tense. Dante closedThe Divine Comedy so:

But now my will and wish were swayed by Love –(As turns a wheel on every side the same)Love – at whose word the sun and planets move.54

Nor is it new for narratives to close, as it were, with a present smiletowards the future, as Ovid closes his Metamorphosis by adding to hisprophecy of the future glory of Augustus the true claim that his ownpoetry will always be remembered. Novels too, in their last paragraph,may jump into the future tense, as Mervyn Peake does, under thesudden inspiration of Dylan Thomas, at the close of Titus Groan(1946): ‘And there shall be a flame-green daybreak soon. And love itselfwill cry for insurrection!’55 Closing paragraphs are perhaps the onlyplace in narrative where the future tense may be used sustainedly – as itis in the last pages of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Amore common practice however, even in narratives gazing to the future,is to close with a last sentence, or sentences, in a quietly resonantpresent tense. ‘The lake is quiet, the trees surround me, asking andgiving nothing’, is the last paragraph of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing(1973), which has previously alternated between past and presenttenses.56 ‘But now I must sleep’, is the present but closing last paragraphof Ian McEwan’s past-tense novel Atonement (2001).57 Some othernovels, told in the past tense, which close in the present tense, areGemini by Michel Tournier (1975), Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke(1981), Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987), Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto(1988), The Human Stain by Philip Roth (2000) – but then many novelsclose in the prospective present.58

Even if the last sentences are in the past tense, the close of a novel maystill make a poignant play with tense. Maybe it is in the closing pages ofnovels that alternations of tense – jumps forward and back between pastand present tense – have their greatest power to move us. Pat Barker’sThe Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995, ends as the FirstWorld War is ending. We are present at one of the last battles of all,and see person after person, whom we have come to know well throughthe Regeneration trilogy, get killed. This battle, like the whole novel, is

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narrated in the past tense – but a past tense that is itself tense withpresentness:

He tried to turn to crawl back . . . but the gas was thick here and hecouldn’t reach his mask . . . . There was no pain, more a spreadingnumbness that left his brain clear. He saw Kirk die. He saw Owendie, his body lifted off the ground by bullets, describing a slow arcin the air as it fell . . . . He gazed at his reflection in the water . . . andthen . . . as the numbness spread, he ceased to see it.59

There then follows this paragraph:

On the edge of the canal the Manchesters lie, eyes still open, limbsnot yet decently arranged, for the stretcher-bearers have departedwith the last of the wounded, and the dead are left alone. Thebattle has withdrawn from them; the bridge they succeeded in build-ing was destroyed by a single shell. Further down the canal anotherand more successful crossing is being attempted, but the cries andshouts come faintly here.

The sun has risen. The first shaft strikes the water and creepstowards them along the bank, discovering here the back of a hand,there the side of a neck, lending a rosy glow to skin from whichthe blood has fled, and then, finding nothing further here that canrespond to it, the shaft of light passes over them and begins toprobe the distant field.60

In context this passage is emotionally touching, and part of the movingnesscomes from the shift to the present tense. They died – they are dead, we seethem in front of us still in death (again the visual emphasis). But thoughthey are still the picture moves, as we follow the ray of sunlight whichseems almost sentient, which indeed carries our sentience, both acrossthe dead we know and across those we do not know. In death, the tenseof the present instant becomes also the grave tense of the permanentpresent. Stillness: slow movement: grief: a beauty – the passage demon-strates that a change of tense can speak not only from, but to, the heart.

University of Cambridge

Notes

1 See for instance Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973),Cat’s Eye (London: Bloomsbury, 1989), The Blind Assassin (London: Blooms-bury, 2000); Pat Barker, Another World (London: Viking, 1998); Bret Easton

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Ellis, Glamorama (London: Picador, 1998); Maggie Gee, Grace (London:Heinemann, 1988); Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs (London: Michael Joseph,1984); Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (London: Macmillan, 1970); DavidStorey, A Temporary Life (London: Allen Lane, 1973). The novels citedearlier in this paragraph were Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London:Cape, 1973), Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual (London: Collins Harvill,1987), first published as La Vie mode d’emploi (Paris: Hachette, 1978), ElfriedeJelinek, The Piano Teacher (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1989), first published asDie Klavierspielerin (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1983), Paul Auster, Ghosts(the second novel in The New York Trilogy, London: Faber, 1987), RichardFord, Independence Day (London: Harvill, 1995). Details given here and inthe following note are of first UK publication, which, in the case of novelsfirst published in North America, followed within a year of North Americanpublication.

2 See for instance Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers (London: Calder and Boyars1966), first published as Les Gommes (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1953),Jealousy (London: John Calder, 1965), first published as La Jalousie(Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1957); In the Labyrinth (London: Calderand Boyars, 1967), first published as Dans le labyrinthe (Paris: Les Editionsde Minuit, 1959); Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man (London: Seckerand Warburg, 1975), Rates of Exchange (London: Secker and Warburg,1983), To the Hermitage (London: Picador, 2000); J. M. Coetzee, In theHeart of the Country (London: Secker and Warburg, 1977), Waiting for theBarbarians (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), The Master of Petersburg(London: Secker and Warburg, 1995), Disgrace (London: Secker andWarburg, 1999).

3 Gilgamesh is quoted from the excellent poetic rendering by David Ferry(Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1993), p. 88.

4 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981),Chapter VII, first paragraph, p. 81.

5 The ballad ‘Young Johnstone’ is quoted from Francis J. Child (ed.), TheEnglish and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York: The Folklore Press in associ-ation with the Pageant Book Company, 1957), I, p. 289. Re-crossing theChannel, but setting aside the Chanson de Roland, which is perhaps extremein its recourse to the present, one could say that Old French narrative verseswitches intermittently but very frequently from the past tense to the ‘historicpresent’. In Tense and Narrativity (London: Routledge, 1990) SuzanneFleischman discusses the use of the present tense, which she associates with‘visualized representation’ dramatically interrupting rapid action, in, amongother texts, Aucassin et Nicolette, Geoffroy de Villehardouin’s La Conquete deConstantinople, the Razo of the troubadour Peire Vidal, and Chretien deTroyes’ Le Chevalier au Lion (passim, but especially chapters 7 and 8, pp.215–310).

6 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousnessin Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 44, 73; theexamples she gives are from Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses.

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7 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1954), p. 13. For the first sentences of very well-known novels, Igive the publication details only of foreign novels, where the translator needsto be named.

8 Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1953), p. 7.

9 Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans.Tobias Smollett (London: A Millar, 1775).

10 Almost invariably, but not absolutely invariably. Michael Frayn’s A VeryPrivate Life (London: Collins, 1968) begins ‘Once upon a time there willbe a little girl called Uncumber . . . ’. and continues mainly in the future forthe first five chapters, before moving predominantly to the present. Both theeffects, and the strain, of sustained use of the future are discussed in Tense inthe Novel: an Investigation of Some Potentialities of Linguistic Criticism byWilhelmus Josef Maria Bronzwaer (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1970),especially in pp. 70–80.

11 Kate Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. M.J. Rose (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 106–108. Probably the most extreme,but also most systematic, denial of a connection between past time and theuse of the past tense in narrative was in Harald Weinrich’s book, Tempus,Besprochene und erzahlte Welt (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964). Tempus hasnot been translated into English, though a French translation by MicheleLacoste was published in 1973 (Paris: Seuil). The case Weinrich makes is sum-marised 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, and in C. P. Casparis, Tense Without Time: thePresent Tense in Narration (Bern: Francke, 1975), passim. 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 nowmore true of the French language than the English that the past tense hasbeen sequestered as the tense reserved for narrative: see for instance EmileBenveniste, ‘The Correlations of Tense in the French Verbs’, Problems inGeneral Linguistics, trans. M.E. Meek (Gainesville: University of FloridaPress, 1977), pp. 205–15. Some languages, David Bellos has noted, havegrammatical markers for narrative other than tense: ‘The American Indianlanguage Menomini, for example, possesses a narrative mood, and in thePeruvian Indian language Capanahua there is an extensive grammar of narra-tive’, ‘The Narrative Absolute Tense’, Language and Style, XI, 4 (Fall, 1978),p. 235.

12 Ricoeur, pp. 61–77.13 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 ChristinaBrooke-Rose, both now available in The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (Manchester:Carcanet, 1986). It is not clear to me which is the eighth novel.

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14 Of the novels mentioned in this paragraph, and not cited earlier, DavidStorey’s This Sporting Life was first published by Longmans in 1960, PaulAuster’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 (Seuna notte d’inverno un viaggatore) by Giulio Einaudi, Turin, in 1972 and 1979,Graham Swift’s Waterland by William Heinemann, London, in 1983, PeterAckroyd’s Chatterton by Hamish Hamilton, London, in 1987, DavidLodge’s Nice Work by Secker and Warburg, in 1988, Michael Ondaatje’sThe English Patient by Bloomsbury, London, in 1992, Don DeLillo’s Under-world by Scribner, New York, in 1997, A. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower by Chattoand Windus, London, in 1996.

15 Barthes, p. 28. Sartre had written, of the early novel, that ‘the chief character-istic of the story which one gives to the public has been that of being alreadythought, that is, achieved, set in order, pruned, and clarified . . . that is why thetense of the novel is almost always the past. . .’ ‘For whom does one write?’What is Literature? (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 106, translated byBernard Frechtman from ‘Pour qui ecrit-on?’ in Qu’est-ce que c’est la Littera-ture? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).

16 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975), p. 85;The Unnamable was first published as L’Innommable (Paris: Les Editions deMinuit, 1952).

17 J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982),pp. 66–67.

18 Barthes, p. 27.19 Kingsley Amis, Difficulties with Girls (London: Hutchinson, 1988), pp.

63–64.20 Ibid., p. 207.21 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 ofBestsellers No 5)’, www.martingoodman.com/writing40602.htm. ‘But mostreaders of genre fiction don’t enjoy the present tense, so editors are often reluc-tant to let their authors use it. I learned the hard way. . .’ ‘The Fiction Writer’sPage’, www.capcollege.bc.ca/dept/cmns/voice.html.

22 In her essay ‘Tenses as Deictic Categories: an Analysis of English and GermanTenses’, in Essays on Deixis (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1983), edited by herself,Gisa Rauh notes that earlier linguists (Kruisinga, Jespersen, Zandvoort) haddistinguished up to six functions of the present tense in English, and goeson herself to distinguish nine functions which she designates: (1) timeless,(2) unrestrictive, (3) instantaneous, (4) iterative (habitual), (5) present-perfect, (6) future, (7) historical, (8) directive (stage directions) and (9) sequen-cing (summaries), pp. 246–48. The present tense in German, she notes, hasbeen credited with 16 functions, pp. 251–52.

23 What might be called the Proverbial Present may illustrate the complexitiesentailed in defining, even chronologically, ‘the present time’ or ‘presentmoment’. In formulating fundamental principles in his authoritative linguistic

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discussion Tense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), BernardComrie observes that ‘our crucial claim is thus that the present tense refersonly to a situation holding at the present moment, even where that situationis part of a larger situation that occupies more than just the presentmoment’ (p. 38). Proverbs may in a general way be true for all or most oftime, but it is not clear that a claim such as ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ canever be tied to the exact present moment, since at any present moment noone may be saving time in that way, while the phrase itself ‘stitches’ togetherat least two other moments.

24 Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969).

25 The ‘now’ of feeling and action in narrative does however involve differentaspectual usages from the ‘now’ of feeling and action in life. The latter willoften attract the imperfective present, as many linguists have noted. CarlBache has discussed the likely difference in locution between a present-tensenovel which would say ‘Stephanie sleeps in the room next door’ where inspeech (or in, say, a letter) we would say ‘Stephanie is sleeping in the roomnext door’ in ‘Tense and Aspect in Fiction’, Journal of LiterarySemantics, XV, 2 (1986), pp. 90–92. It would on the other hand be odd ifone said to Stephanie herself, ‘I am loving you, Stephanie’ rather than‘I love you’.

26 The Guardian, 1 June 2002; Philip Pullman is reviewing the present-tensenovel Strange Boy by Paul Magrs (London: Simon and Schuster, 2002).

27 The snippets are from John Donne’s ‘Song’ in Songs and Sonnets, WilliamBlake’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), George T. Wright stresses more than I have done theartificiality of the use of the present tense in lyric verse. That stress perhapsfollows from his concentration on the combination of the present tense withthe first person, since many of these usages, especially at the beginnings ofpoems and lines, do seem theatrically far from everyday speech (Herrick:‘I sing of brooks. . .’ Shelley: ‘I fall upon the thorns of life. . .’ Swinburne:‘I reach my heart . . . I stretch my spirit . . . I lean my soul . . . I send mylove. . .’ Whitman: ‘I sound my barbaric yawp . . .’). George T. Wright’sessay is one of the great literary, as against linguistic, discussions of tense,and is richly illuminating on the subtly variable dimensions of present time.It still seems to me there is a larger overlap than he allows between the LyricPresent and common speech. The examples he gives of, as it were, the ArtificialPresent – the Present Tense of Literary Artifice – are notably examples of soli-tary speech, which is in any case artificial (as in his examples from Herrick,Shelley, Swinburne and Whitman just cited). And with the evocation of anadressee, a ‘thou’ or a ‘you’, it is in any case likely that lyric usage woulddraw closer to speech. This is surely the case in the many uses of the presenttense in Donne, a poet not often mentioned by George T. Wright. It is truethat we cannot be sure, after 400 years, how close or far from common

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speech Donne was when he began a poem ‘I wonder by my troth what thouand I/Did till we lov’d’ or, more tersely, ‘Shee is dead. . .’ But it does atleast seem to have been part of Donne’s purpose to catch at will the note ofcommon speech, especially when starting poems – often also with exclama-tions, commands, cajoleries and questions – however intricate and astonishinghis subsequent conceits might be.

28 Paradise Lost, Christopher Ricks (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968),Book II, lines 871–883, p. 51.

29 George Eliot, Adam Bede, Valentine Cunningham (ed.) (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996), chapter 47, p. 462.

30 John Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, stanza XXVI; Selected Poems, John Barnard(ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 149.

31 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy, trans. Richard Howard (London: John Calder,1965), p. 59.

32 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Picador, 1975), p. 6.33 Jean Rhys, Quartet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 64.34 Muriel Spark, The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961),

p. 34.35 Boris Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition, trans. V. Zavarin & S. Wittig,

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 69–75.36 Jane Austen, Emma, Robert Clark (ed.) (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), p. 325.37 Ibid., p. 329.38 Ibid., p. 320.39 Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 74.40 Ibid., p. 56.41 Ibid., p. 47.42 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 perfecttense. The occasional use of the perfect, in a present-tense context, can be sen-sitive and telling. In his article ‘On the Use of the Perfect in Present-TenseNarrative’ (English Studies, 63 (1982), pp. 63–69), N. E. Osselton discussesthe intermittent use of the perfect tense in David Storey’s present-tensenovel A Temporary Life (London: Allen Lane, 1973) for those events whichthe protagonist registers in a switched-off way because his thoughts andworries are elsewhere.

43 Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (London: Virago, 1990), p. 14.44 Daily Telegraph, 14 July 2005, pp. 13, 16, 18, The Guardian, 14 July 2005, pp.

7, 14, 17. A propos of newspaper headlines, and their use of the present tensefor recent past events, Dwight L Bollinger has suggested (contrary to the casemade 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 itis ‘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 HenryFord Dies, we accept the occurrence as mere fact; if we were to read HenryFord Died, we should ask “When?” or “Then what happened?” or some otherquestion regarding a temporal connection’ (Language, 23 (1947), p. 436).

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45 Daily Telegraph, 14 July 2005, pp. 16, 18.46 The Observer Business and Media, 17 July 2005, p. 1 (advertisement for

Vodafone); The Times, 14 July 2005, p. 13.47 The Guardian, Monday 18 July 2005, pp. 8, 9, 10.48 ‘E. P. ode pour l’election de son sepulcre’, II, Selected Poems, T.S Eliot (ed.)

(London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 174.49 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, trans. Barbara

Wright (London: Calder and Boyars, 1965), pp. 23, 30.50 Don DeLillo, Players (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 212.51 Matthew Arnold, ‘Count Leo Tolstoi’, Essays in Criticism: Second Series, Essay

VIII (London: Macmillan and Company, 1905), p. 257.52 Georges Perec, A Man Asleep, trans. Andrew Leek, in Things A Story of the

Sixties with A Man Asleep (London: Harvill, 1990), p. 197.53 Don DeLillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1999), p. 366.54 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. I. C. Wright (London: George

Bell, 1907), p. 445.55 Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 506.56 Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London: Virago, 1979), p. 192.57 Ian McEwan, Atonement (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 372.58 Gemini (London: Collins, 1981) was first published as Les Meteores (Paris:

Gallimard, 1975); ‘Child Story’, the final part of Slow Homecoming(London: Methuen, 1985), was first published as Kndergeschichte (Frankfurt:Suhokamp Verlag, 1981); Beloved was first published in London by Chattoand Windus in 1987 (and in New York by Knopf in 1987); Kitchen(London: Faber, 1993) was first published in Tokyo by the Fuhutake Publish-ing company in 1988; The Human Stain was first published in London byJonathan Cape in 2000 (and in Boston by Houghton Mifflin in 2000).

59 Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 273.60 Ibid., pp. 275–6.

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