OUR COLUMNIST DISCUSSES USE OF
THE PRESENT TENSE IN FICTION. OR
SHOULD WE SAY HE DISGUSTED?
November 1989
The man, a purposeful air about him, slips into the bookstore through that establishment’s front door. Behind the counter, a salesclerk riffles the pages of a tabloid newspaper, pausing to acknowledge the new customer with a laconic nod.
The man proceeds to the rack where new hardcover fiction is displayed. His eyes scan the rows of brightly colored jackets. One book, no more arresting in appearance than its fellows, catches his eye. He takes it from the shelf, opens it at random. He scans a few paragraphs and his brow darkens in a scowl. He closes the book, reopens it again at random. He reads. Then, with a muffled curse, he slams it shut and returns it to the rack.
“Present tense!” he cries out—to the salesclerk, to the heavens, to the uncaring walls. “The whole damn thing’s written in the present tense!” Furious, livid, he turns on his heel and stalks out of the store.
Somewhere a dog is barking . . .
The foregoing, I should assure you, is fanciful. I have never yet shouted out my dismay at encountering a novel written in the present tense. Nor, for that matter, have I ever had a purposeful air about me.
Still, the attitude is my own. I am invariably disheartened when something I’d hoped to read turns out to have been written in the present tense, and more often than not that aspect alone is enough to dissuade me from reading it. Sometimes I’ll read such a book anyway, and sometimes I’ll enjoy it, but it’s always in spite of the tense the author has chosen to employ.
This has been true for years, and it never occurred to me to wonder why. I just accepted the fact that I was put off by present-tense fictional narration and let it go at that, writing it off as a personal quirk, and by no means the only one in my possession.
Then in September of 1988 The Atlantic ran a brief essay by Peter Davison in which he inveighs against the dominance of the present tense in contemporary poetry.
“Many casual readers of today’s poetry misunderstand their own discomfort and complain only of the absence of rhyme and meter,” Mr. Davison states. “What really underlies their dissatisfaction, I think, is that so many contemporary poets lack conviction. They have lost some degree of belief in the validity of poetic utterance.”
Nineteenth-century poets, he points out, were sure of what they were saying, and they wrote in the past tense, asserting their message as factual. “The present tense, in contrast, constrains us to hear only the voice of the watcher. The present indicative lets a poet stand a foot away from commitment, three or four feet away from identification, six feet away from declaration. . . . Contemporary poetry tends to cast the poet in the role of witness. Between the poet and the event falls a shadow: ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.’ Pound’s split figure implies externality, irony, remoteness, alienation, impotence. It omits relationship, intimacy, interaction, community, and the passage of time. Poems descended from it and composed in the present indicative encourage us to draw back lest we plunge in. . . . They enable us to avoid recommendation, passion, announcement. Speaking in the present tense says that everything is usual but nothing is special.”
I think Mr. Davison is on to something. I wouldn’t presume to say what’s right or wrong with modern poetry, but it seems to me that his observations apply as well to fiction. The present tense distances both the reader and the writer from the events. It takes away both engagement and certainty.
The past tense in fiction states unequivocally that a given thing happened, that it happened in a certain way. The present tense calls upon us to believe that the thing is happening now, as we read about it, that it is unfolding in some alternate universe.
Consider the following versions:
McGraw came through the door with a length of pipe in his hand. I picked up my chair and threw it at him. He ducked, and I came in low and knocked his feet out from under him. He got me a good one across the small of the back before we both careened into the wall. I was up first, and I kicked his wrist and the pipe went flying.
And:
McGraw comes through the door with a length of pipe in his hand. I pick up my chair and throw it at him. He ducks, and I come in low and knock his feet out from under him. He gets me a good one across the small of the back before we both careen into the wall. I am up first, and I kick his wrist and the pipe goes flying.
Here the present tense wouldn’t seem to afford the narrator an opportunity for disengagement. After all, how disengaged can you be when you’re in the middle of a barroom brawl? Even so, the second example strikes me as less real, less gripping, less involving than the first. When, we wonder, is all this happening? If it’s happening now, as we’re supposed to believe, how can the narrator be telling us about it even as he’s rolling around on the floor with McGraw? If it happened a while ago, why is it cast in the present tense?
Reading both examples, I find that the first, the past tense specimen, carries more conviction. I’m more apt to get caught up in something like this, more apt to care what happens next. But, interestingly enough, I find it a little easier to visualize what is taking place in the second example. Because it is in the present tense, it is not so much narrative—telling a story—as it is descriptive. I am not so much asked to believe that this has taken place as I am told to see it taking place. Thus I can see it more vividly in the present tense, even though I am less inclined to give a damn about it.
Much of the fiction being written these days in the present tense is the sort of minimalist work that’s very much in vogue now, with critics if not with great numbers of readers. These books, often called experimental for reasons I find elusive, probably work better in the present tense than they would in the past. For the most part they are not books that would greatly interest me whatever tense was employed for their narration, so I would be hard put to argue that they would be more effective in past tense.
What does unsettle me, though, is when an otherwise traditional novel is cast in the present tense for no discernible reason. A recent example of this was Presumed Innocent, the hugely successful courtroom novel by Scott Turow. Except for the fact that the book was recounted in first-person present tense, there was nothing experimental or unorthodox about its narrative structure.
Why the present tense? I’m damned if I know. It certainly didn’t fit the book, and if it added anything I can’t imagine what it might be. The author certainly did not have disengagement and distance as a goal. I can’t too effectively argue that Mr. Turow made a horrible mistake, that some editor should have persuaded him to rewrite the entire manuscript in the past tense; after all, the book was enormously successful, and even readers like myself who would have greatly preferred a past-tense narrative stayed with Mr. Turow right through to the end.
I can’t argue that the book would have sold a single extra copy in the past tense. But I don’t think it’d have sold any fewer, either, and I’d certainly have had a better time reading it.
Why the present tense?
I think it may be an effect of film and television. Have you ever had anybody tell you a movie? When I was young, some of the kids were particularly good at this. They could recount a film so that you got it almost as effectively as if you saw it for yourself. Sometimes it was better getting it secondhand from them, because they could skip the dull parts, and render comprehensible the parts that might have been confusing.
“Clark Gable’s a rancher, see, and he’s on a trip buying stock, and there’s an Indian raid and they come swooping down on his ranch and kill his wife and burn his cabin. Only when they ride off you see them take off their war paint and feathers, and they’re not really Indians! But he doesn’t know this, and he comes back, and he goes nuts, and right away he swears to get revenge. . . .”
Outlines are written in the present tense. So are film treatments. The present tense is useful when we want to enable the reader to visualize what a particular piece of fiction will be (if it is as yet unwritten) or what it already was (if we’re recounting a movie, or summarizing a novel in a review).
But the work itself is different. It does not exist to tell you about something you haven’t read, or something that has not yet been written. It is telling you about something that you are supposed to believe has occurred. You’re not just supposed to be able to visualize it. You’re supposed to be able to believe it, and it is rendered most believable by being presented in the tense one always uses to describe that which has happened—i.e., the past tense.
In an age that increasingly regards the entire past as something to be shrugged off or disposed of or rewritten, it is perhaps not surprising that we would tend to employ the present tense for fiction. The argument would seem to be that a story will become more immediate for being kept out of the past tense. If it already happened, like, it’s history. But if it’s happening, wow!
Except it doesn’t really work that way. Past-tense fiction doesn’t necessarily seem over and done with; all we know is that the action took place before the narrative voice told us about it. Most science fiction is written in the past tense, even though it may be set in the future. You wouldn’t write a novel set in the 25th century in the future tense—not if you expected anybody to read it. So why use the present tense for something contemporary?
If there are sound arguments against writing an entire work of fiction in the present tense, there are nevertheless times when the tense is useful in small doses. Prologues, and occasionally epilogues, lend themselves to this treatment. In Out on the Cutting Edge, I used a prologue in which my hero, Matthew Scudder, imagines a murder scene at which he was never present. He tells you that he is imagining the scene, and then renders it in the present: “They are walking in the woods, and he has his arm around her. She is laughing.” The whole tone here is conjectural, we are dealing not with what emphatically was but with what might have been, and the present tense, inviting the reader to picture something rather than stating it as fact, seemed called for.
Hamlin Garland does something similar in A Son of the Middle Border, not as prologue but intermittently throughout the text. The book is autobiography rather than fiction, but stylistically it might as well be a novel; Garland did in fact write several autobiographical novels before finding that he could deal more effectively with the same material by presenting it as straight autobiography.
The book is written in past tense, except when the author wants to show you a picture. Here’s an example:
To most of our harvest hands that year Saturday night meant a visit to town and a drunken spree. . . . After a hard week’s work we all felt that a trip to town was only a fair reward.
Saturday night in town! How it all comes back to me! I am a timid visitor in the little frontier village. It is sunset. A whiskey-crazed farmhand is walking barefooted up and down the middle of the road defying the world. From a corner of the street I watch with tense interest another lithe, pock-marked bully menacing with cat-like action a cowering young farmer in a long linen coat. . . .
And so on. Mr. Garland wants you to see it, he wants to see it himself in memory’s eye, and that recollection is what’s important, not exactly what happened or when. So he has written this section and others like it in the present tense.
It may be that you want to write an entire short story in the present, and it may work out well that way. As a reader, I find myself able to tolerate present-tense narration in short fiction more easily than in novels, and I doubt that I’m alone in this.
Finally, you may take all of this into consideration and find that your novel works in the present tense and just won’t work in the past. This happens, and ultimately all a writer can do is honor his intuition and do what seems most effective. Jay McInerney wrote Bright Lights, Big City not only in the present tense but also in the second person. He did so not because he figured that sort of unorthodox approach would give him a good shot at the bestseller list, but because he’d been getting nowhere with a story for a while, then started it over in the second person and present tense, and the damn thing flowed like water from a cleft rock. I think the book probably gains from Mr. McInerney’s narrative device—the first three fourths of it does anyway—and Lord knows he did well enough with it, but I wouldn’t be quick to advise you (or him either) try that sort of thing again.
Before someone else does it for me, let me cite Damon Runyon’s short fiction as a rule-proving exception. Runyon’s Broadway fables were all traditionally plotted narratives, and the reader was told what happened, not invited to picture it for himself. Yet every sentence was invariably in the present tense.
But not really. Runyon’s narrator is speaking what we might legitimately call dialect, and that’s all the present tense amounts to when it issues from his lips. You’ll note that every verb in a Runyon story, including the dialogue of the characters, is in the present tense. “A week ago Friday I am sitting in Mindy’s with Harry the Horse. . . .” That’s not present tense. That’s a kind of dialect, and it worked brilliantly, but it’s not what we’re talking about here.
Even so, it might be a trial at novel length.